Encyclopedia of

Global Environmental Change

e g e c
The volumes in this Encyclopedia are:
Volume One
The Earth system: physical and chemical dimensions of global environmental change
Volume Two
The Earth system: biological and ecological dimensions of global environmental change
Volume Three
Causes and consequences of global environmental change
Volume Four
Responding to global environmental change
Volume Five
Social and economic dimensions of global environmental change
Encyclopedia of
Global Environmental Change
e g e c
Editor-in-Chief
Ted Munn
Institute for Environmental Sciences, University of Toronto, Canada
5
Social and economic dimensions of global environmental change
Volume Editor
Peter Timmerman
IFIAS, Toronto, Canada
Copyright 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester
Bafns Lane, Chichester
West Sussex PO19 1UD, UK
National: 01243 779777
International: ( 44) 1243 779777
e-mail (for orders and customer service enquiries): cs-books@wiley.co.uk
Visit our Home Page on http://www.wiley.co.uk
or http://www.wiley.com
Copyright Acknowledgments
A number of articles in the Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change have been written by government employees in the United Kingdom, Canada
and the United States of America. Please contact the publisher for information on the copyright status of such works, if required. In general, Crown
copyright material has been reproduced with the permission of the Controller of Her Majestys Stationery Ofce. Works written by US government
employees and classied as US Government Works are in the public domain in the United States of America.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except under the terms of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms
of a license issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, W1P 0LP, UK, without the prior permission in writing of
the publisher.
Other Wiley Editorial Ofces
John Wiley & Sons Inc., 605 Third Avenue,
New York, NY 10158-0012, USA
Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH, Pappelallee 3,
D-69469 Weinheim, Germany
Jacaranda Wiley Ltd, 33 Park Road, Milton,
Queensland 4064, Australia
John Wiley & Sons (Asia) Pte Ltd, 2 Clementi Loop #02-01,
Jin Xing Distripark, Singapore 129809
John Wiley & Sons (Canada) Ltd, 22 Worcester Road,
Rexdale, Ontario M9W 1L1, Canada
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 0 471 97796 9
Typeset in 10pt Times by Laser Words Private Limited, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire
Editorial Board
Editor-in-Chief
Ted Munn
Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Toronto, Canada
Volume Editors
Volume One The Earth system: physical and chemical dimensions of global environmental change
Dr Michael C MacCracken, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA and
Dr John S Perry, formerly, National Research Council USA
Volume Two The Earth system: biological and ecological dimensions of global environmental change
Professor Harold A Mooney, Stanford University, Stanford, USA and
Dr Josep G Canadell, GCTE/IGBP, CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Canberra, Australia
Volume Three Causes and consequences of global environmental change
Professor Ian Douglas, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
Volume Four Responding to global environmental change
Dr Mostafa K Tolba, International Center for Environment and Development, Cairo, Egypt
Volume Five Social and economic dimensions of global environmental change
Mr Peter Timmerman, IFIAS, Toronto, Canada
International Advisory Board
Dr Joe T Baker
Commissioner for the Environment, ACT, Australia
Professor Francesco di Castri
CNRS, France
Professor Paul Crutzen
Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Germany
Professor Eckart Ehlers
IHDP/IGU Germany
Professor Jos e Goldemberg
Universida de S ao Paulo, Brazil
Dr Robert Goodland
World Bank, USA
Professor Hartmut Grassl
WCRP, Switzerland
Professor Ronald Hill
University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Dr Yu A Izrael
Institute of Global Climate & Technology, Russia
Professor Roger E Kasperson
Clark University, USA
Professor Peter Liss
University of East Anglia, UK
Professor Jane Lubchenco
Oregon State University, USA
Mr Jeffrey A McNeely
IUCN, Switzerland
Professor Thomas R Odhiambo
Hon. President, African Academy of Sciences and
Managing Trustee, RANDFORUM, Kenya
Sir Ghillean T Prance
University of Reading, UK
Professor Steve Rayner
Columbia University, USA
Contents
Preface to the Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change ix
Preface to Volume Five xv
The Human Dimensions of Global Change 1
The Changing Human Nature Relationships (HNR) in
the Context of Global Environmental Change 11
Economics and Global Environmental Change 25
Ecological Economics 37
Environmental Politics 49
Global Environmental Change and Environmental
Histor y 62
Globalization in Histor ical Per spective 73
Technological Society and its Relation to Global
Environmental Change 86
Relating to Nature: Spir ituality, Philosophy, and
Environmental Concer n 97
Social Science and Global Environmental Change 109
The Emer gence of Global Environment Change into
Politics 124
The Environment and Violent Conict 137
Development and Global Environmental Change 150
Anthropology and Global Environmental Change 163
Art and the Environment 167
Attenborough, David 175
Bahai Faith and the Environment 176
BAT (Best Available Technology) 183
Bateson, Gregory 183
Brent Spar 184
Brower, David 185
Buddhism and Ecology 185
Business-as-usual Scenarios 191
Carson, Rachel Louise 192
CBA (Cost Benet Analysis) 193
Chipko Movement 193
Christianity and the Environment 194
Circulating Freshwater: Crucial Link between Climate,
Land, Ecosystems, and Humanity 201
Commons, Tragedy of the 208
Cousteau, Jacques 209
Deep Ecology 211
Demographic transition 211
Discounting 214
Earth Charter 216
Earth Day 216
Earth First! 217
Ecocentric, Biocentric, Gaiacentric 217
Ecofeminism 218
Eco-socialism 224
Ecosystem Approach 225
Ecosystem Services 226
Emergy 228
Encyclopedias: Compendia of Global Knowledge 228
Enlightenment Project 229
Environmental Defense Fund 230
Environmental Economics 230
Environmental Ethics 231
Environmental Movement the Rise of Non-government
Organizations (NGOs) 243
Environmental Philosophy: Phenomenological
Ecology 253
Environmental Psychology/Perception 257
Environmental Security 269
Environmental Sociology 278
Equity 279
Exxon Valdez Oil Spill 283
Francis of Assisi 284
Friends of the Earth 285
Futures Research 285
Gaia Hypothesis 287
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand 290
Governance and International Management 292
Hazards in Global Environmental Change 297
Hinduism and the Environment 303
Homocentric 311
Human Body, Immediate Environment 312
Indigenous Knowledge, Peoples and Sustainable
Practice 314
International Environmental Law 324
ISEW (Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare) and GPI
(Genuine Progress Indicator) 331
viii CONTENTS
Islam and the Environment 332
ISSC (International Social Science Council) 339
Jains and the Environment 341
Judaism and the Environment 349
Kelly, Petra 355
Kondratyev, Nikolai Dmitrievich 356
Landscape, Urban Landscape, and the Human Shaping of
the Environment 357
Leopold, Aldo 367
Life Style, Private Choice, and Environmental
Governance 368
Literature and the Environment 370
Love Canal 382
Malthus, Thomas Robert 384
Man and Nature as a Single but Complex System 384
Modeling Human Dimensions of Global Environmental
Change 394
Modernity vs. Post-modern Environmentalism 408
Muir, John 411
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein 412
National Environmental Law 413
Nature 419
New Ageism 420
NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) 421
Noosphere 421
Phase Shifts or Flip-ops in Complex Systems 422
Political Movements/Ideologies and the
Environment 429
Political Systems and the Environment:
Utopianism 443
Post-normal Science 451
Precautionary Principle 455
Property Rights and Regimes 457
Religion and Ecology in the Abrahamic Faiths 461
Religion and Environment Among North American First
Nations 466
Roosevelt, Theodore 475
Scenarios 476
Seveso 482
Sierra Club 483
Small is Beautiful 483
Social Ecology 484
Social Impact Assessment (SIA) 484
Social Learning in the Management of Global
Atmospheric Risks 485
Soft Energy Paths 487
Sovereignty and Sovereign States 487
Sustainability: Human, Social, Economic and
Environmental 489
Theology 492
Theories of Health and Environment 492
Thoreau, Henry David 502
Three Mile Island 503
Torrey Canyon 503
UNU (United Nations University) 504
Virtual Environments 505
Waldsterben 508
WCC (World Council of Churches) 509
Alphabetical List of Articles 511
List of Contributors 523
Selected Abbreviations and Acronyms 553
Index 569
Preface to the Encyclopedia of Global
Environmental Change
THE ENVIRONMENT
The word environment, whose dictionary meaning is simply
that which surrounds, has in the last few decades become
a buzzword , encompassing an exceedingly diverse array
of elements and social issues. Taking the original meaning
as a point of departure, it is clear that we humans depend
totally on the environment provided by planet Earth for
the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we
breathe. Thus changes in this environment must be of
vital concern. Will Earth continue to sustain humans in
a way that also encourages the ourishing of the other
living things with whom we share the planet? This question
has loomed ever larger as it has become more evident
that human activities have been inducing major changes
in all of the compartments of the global environment. We
have converted forests and savannas to farms and cities;
we have exhumed ancient treasures of fuels and minerals;
we have used the rivers and winds as convenient sewers;
and we have released entirely new chemical compounds
and organisms into the environment. In the 1960s, the
scienti c community began to use the word environment
in this new non-specialist sense. Soon too, Departments
of the Environment were created by many governments,
and new scienti c journals began publication while others
were re-named. For example, the International Journal of
Air Pollution became Atmospheric Environment ! In the
ensuing decades, the world community has come to see
the environment in many different ways, as a life-support
system, as a fragile sphere hanging in space, as a problem,
a threat and a home.
GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
A broader and deeper understanding of the global aspects of
environmental concerns emerged in the 1970s and 1980s,
and a new phrase global environmental change acquired
popular currency. Paleoresearch had revealed that environ-
mental change was far from new, and by no means the
sole result of the actions of heedless humans. Since the
planet s formation, virtually every element of its environ-
ment has been undergoing massive changes on all space and
time scales. Oxygen waxed and carbon dioxide waned in
the atmosphere. Continents moved about the planet s sur-
face like scum on a soup kettle. Great ice sheets grew and
shrank. Above all, the force of life (the biosphere) emerged
as a dominant driver of planetary change.
However, another vital insight began to emerge about
1980: the inescapably interlinked nature of these many
environmental changes. On the very longest time scales,
continental drift moved lands into different climates but
also changed the climate of the globe itself. Photosyn-
thetic life changed the atmosphere but also made possible
more advanced life forms that could take advantage of the
new environment. On shorter time scales, atmosphere and
ocean often interact to produce the massive changes in
the Southern Paci c that we term El Ni no and La Ni na,
whose consequences extend across the planet, and pro-
foundly affect even our socioeconomic systems. Indeed,
we have come to realize that human-induced perturbations
in the environment are becoming increasingly large, and
are potentially coming to dominate the natural workings of
the complex and interdependent global system that sustains
life on Earth. Humans and their global environment are no
longer independent; they are ever-increasingly becoming
interdependent components of a single global system.
Thus, the term global environmental change has come to
encompass a full range of globally signi cant issues relat-
ing to both natural and human-induced changes in Earth s
environment, as well as their socioeconomic drivers. This
implicitly includes concerns for the capacity of the Earth to
sustain life that have motivated the development of stud-
ies of global change and sustainable development in the
last few decades. Analyses of global environmental change
therefore demand input from the social sciences as well as
the natural sciences (and indeed also from the engineering
and health sciences) necessitating an inescapably inter-
disciplinary approach.
Scientists from many disciplines have been attracted
to this growing eld of global environmental change.
This is particularly noticeable in the biological sciences
through the encouragement of IGBP (International Geo-
sphere Biosphere Programme), which invites ecologists to
expand their eld of vision from the plot and landscape
scales to the regional, continental and global ones, and to
interact with scientists from other disciplines in exploring
environmental change at these larger scales. Indeed this
trend has encouraged publishers and scienti c societies to
introduce new journal titles, and these publications from all
accounts appear to be ourishing.
At the same time, human social, economic, and cultural
systems are rapidly changing under the in uence of growing
globalization. In the economic sphere, for example, today s
discourse centers on multinational corporations, the Global
x PREFACE TO THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Economy, and the Globalization of Trade. Thus, the
agendas of most of the physical, life, and social sciences
increasingly focus on global-scale changes.
THE EVER-CHANGING ENVIRONMENT
Since the launching of Earth-viewing satellites, we have
been able to see a constantly updated moving picture of
our planet. Great weather systems sweep around the globe,
waves of green and brown ebb and ow over the continents
with the seasons, as do white waves of ice and snow.
Nevertheless, a remarkable feature of the Earth system
has been its relative stability. Since the dawn of life,
the planets environment has remained within a range of
conditions that has supported life. Moreover, with some
notable and perhaps cautionary exceptions, changes from
year to year, decade to decade, millennium to millennium,
have been modest, particularly during the last 10 000 years.
Many features of human society exhibit similar behavior.
Civilizations and cultures evolve slowly for the most part
in response to environmental, economic, and social driving
forces over their long lives. Great cities like Rome endure
through the ages. A citizen of ancient Babylon probably
would have little difculty understanding the politics of
modern Toronto.
But today we appear to be entering an era of change
unprecedented since Babylon was a cluster of mud huts.
There are many reasons to believe that changes greater than
humankind has experienced in its history are in progress
and are likely to accelerate.
Virtually every measure of human society numbers of
people and automobiles, airplanes, energy consumption,
generation of waste is increasing exponentially. While the
values of a few indicators are leveling off, the magnitudes
of annual increases of others remain immense.
Major changes are becoming evident in many critical ele-
ments of the environment increasing carbon dioxide con-
centrations, stratospheric ozone depletion (not to mention
the stratospheric Antarctic ozone hole and the possibility of
a similar Arctic event), rising sea level, declining produc-
tivity of soils, widespread collapses of sheries, dramatic
declines in biodiversity, destruction of tropical forests, etc.
Within living memory, the countryside around large cities
has been swallowed up by suburban developments and
highways. Humans are stepping on the gas pedal of the
planets environment, and perhaps recklessly breaking the
survivable speed limit of global change.
Paleoclimatological studies have shown that the sta-
ble environment that we take for granted has not always
prevailed. Indeed, the relatively brief period in which
human civilization has developed is somewhat unusual in
its equable stability. Neolithic hunters in Europe some
13 000 years ago saw their climate shift from temperate to
glacial in a single short lifetime. The evolution of human
society is punctuated by wars, pestilence, and technological
revolutions. Major perhaps even catastrophic change
could occur in the future, because we know it has occurred
in the past.
Rapidly advancing understanding of both natural and
human systems and above all the ability to translate that
understanding into quantitative models has enabled us to
explore the future of our global society and its global cli-
mate with unprecedented realism. Although prediction of
the single future path that we will follow is inherently
unpredictable, it is possible to map a broad range of future
environmental trajectories that we might take, each com-
pletely consistent with our understanding of how the system
works. Such scenario-building exercises amply conrm our
concerns that the changes of the 21st Century could be
far greater than experienced in the last several millennia.
Business-as-usual for human society appears to imply
business-as-highly-unusual for the global environment.
THE INTERLOCKING
BIOGEOPHYSICAL SOCIOECONOMIC
SYSTEMS
Recognition came in the 1970s that many of the environ-
mental issues are inter-connected through the biogeochem-
ical cycling of trace substances, especially carbon, sulfur,
nitrogen and phosphorus. In fact, in a prescient statement
on the main environmental research priority of the 1980s,
Mostafa Tolba (then Executive Director of the United
Nations Environment Programme) and Gilbert White (then
President of the Scientic Committee on Problems of the
Environment) drew the attention of both the scientic and
the science-policy communities to the need to understand
the major global biogeochemical cycles in order to main-
tain the global life support systems in a healthy state (Tolba
and White, 1979). Quoting from that statement,
We draw attention to the fundamental scientic importance of
understanding the biogeochemical cycles which link and unify
the major chemical and biological processes of the Earths sur-
face and atmosphere. The results will have practical signicance
for all of us who inhabit an Earth with limited resources and
who, by our actions, increasingly affect the quality of the human
environment.
So it is that many of the global environmental issues acid
rain, stratospheric ozone depletion, climate change, nitro-
gen over-fertilization are inter-related through the global
biogeochemical cycles.
One of the interesting results of the study of the Earths
history has been the discovery of the global teleconnec-
tions of the Earth system, with some major climatic shifts
occurring simultaneously in the two hemispheres. In an
analogous way, there has been recognition for a long time
that human social, economic, and cultural systems are glob-
ally inter-related. That these are connected in turn to the
PREFACE TO THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE xi
Earth system was implicitly recognized as early as the 1972
Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment.
To manage the human responses to this enormously var-
ied but at least moderately coupled world system in an
era of increasing global change through the diverse array
of local, national and international organizations is indeed a
daunting challenge. An essential rst step is to describe past
and present states, then to explain the various phenomena
observed, and nally to develop predictive models (or at
least a range of scenarios) describing the future behavior of
this total SocioeconomicCultural Environmental system.
In this process, environmental scientists must learn how
to assimilate better the new information constantly being
received, although uncertainties, often large, will continue
to exist. Within this mix, rational and effective policies must
be developed that will balance the risks and costs of global
environmental change in an adaptive way. Only then will
we be able to even formulate, much less start to implement,
rational and effective policies that cope effectively with
global change. The prospect of change tempts us to think
in terms of winners and losers. However, such analyses
often do not play out in simple ways. For example, a mod-
est increase in rainfall would cause farmers to rejoice while
vacationers would despair. However, greater farm produc-
tion can lead to lower commodity prices, thereby reducing
farm incomes while making vacation food purchases less
expensive. Human society is pretty well adapted to the
present environment, so change is necessarily a challenge.
In the longer-term, much depends on the ability of soci-
eties to respond, to adapt. Societies will differ in the
resources natural, human, and technological that are
available to them. They will also differ in terms of the
values and priorities they attach to physical, social, and
environmental goals, and in the social and political mech-
anisms that they employ to seek these goals. These dif-
ferences in the human world of generations yet unborn
may be as great and as signicant as the changes in
the global environment. A major challenge for our times is
to develop frameworks for understanding complex interdis-
ciplinary issues of this complexity.
No discussion of change and the future can be complete
without consideration of risk. Projections of the future,
however imaginative or soundly based, necessarily cen-
ter on plausible, surprise-free scenarios population will
increase, economies will advance, climate will change all
typically slowly and smoothly. However, such projections
made at the beginning of the 20th Century would have
missed two World Wars, the automobile, aviation, space
travel, television, and McDonalds in Beijing. By deni-
tion, genuine surprises cannot be predicted. However, an
understanding of the impacts of past surprises may help us
to make our society and our world somewhat more robust
in the face of the unknown surprises that await us.
THE HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL
ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
The human dimension of global change has been dened
as the ways in which individuals and societies contribute
to global environmental change, are inuenced by it, and
adapt to it. Many empirical studies have been undertaken
that describe human activities in physical terms, based on
various kinds of indicators. Rates of deforestation, urban-
ization, and changing levels of emissions of greenhouse
gases are only some measurable contributors to environ-
mental change. But the dynamics of human activities and
global change are much more complex, and they reect the
complexities of the humannature relationship.
While the sheer burden of human activity on the planet
is important, we know that the major forces at work are
human beings operating together through political systems,
corporations, interest groups, and beliefs that sway whole
peoples. These raise questions about the nature of choice,
about the hopes, dreams, and frustrations that impel people
forward, or block them. At the moment, for instance, the
dream of the good life which has been a critical element
of every religious tradition in the world is increasingly
being dened in terms of material possessions and powerful
images that are shown on global media. Can this particular
version of human happiness be sustained on a limited
planet? Some people say that it can; others say that it
cannot.
The central questions about the role of human beings
in global environmental change revolve around social, cul-
tural, economic, ethical, and even religious issues. These
are becoming more and more pressing, and more and more
foundational as human beings deliberately or inadvertently
modify more and more of the planet. It is also obvi-
ous that in this generation the modication of organisms
and ecosystems may well extend to the modication of
human beings themselves. Among the fundamental ques-
tions are: What motivates us towards saving or harming
the environment? How do we see ourselves with regard to
nature? What is our responsibility to this and future gen-
erations? Who do we think we are, and who would we
like to become? Appropriately enough, Volume Five of this
Encyclopedia wrestles, in many different voices, with these
ultimate questions that remain intimately linked with the
sweep of physical, chemical, biological, geographical, and
institutional changes documented and discussed throughout
the earlier four volumes.
The Brundtland philosophy urges us not to reduce options
for future generations. Implementation of this idea is, how-
ever, difcult. For example, it often seems more compelling
to alleviate current poverty than to protect the environment
and renewable resources for future generations. Many sci-
entists agree that new approaches are needed to meld the
social with the natural sciences in the policy arena. Some of
the new methodologies that go beyond the physical sciences
xii PREFACE TO THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
are described in Volumes Four and Five of this Encyclo-
pedia, e.g., post-normal science, integrated environmental
assessment, and the precautionary principle.
In a commentary in which he described the 21st Cen-
tury as the century of the environment, Edward O. Wilson
began by referring to the growing consilience (the inter-
locking of causal explanations across disciplines) so that the
interfaces between disciplines become as important as the
disciplines themselves. He then stated that this interlock-
ing amongst the natural sciences will in the 21st Century
also touch the borders of the social sciences and humani-
ties. In the environmental context, environmental scientists
in diverse specialities, including human ecology, are more
precisely dening the arena in which that species arose,
and those parts that must be sustained for human survival
(Wilson, 1998).
This is a major challenge for environmental scientists.
Already through DNA techniques, for example, it is possi-
ble to trace back connections amongst prehistoric peoples
through the last Ice Age to modern times.
THIS ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GLOBAL
ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
More than two million papers are published every year in
science and medicine, a twentyfold increase since 1940 that
taxes the resources of concerned citizens, scientists, uni-
versity departments, research institutes and libraries. At the
same time, many policy-motivated organizations nd it dif-
cult to draw together the necessary expertise for resolving
the newly emerging environmental issues. The scientic
literature relating to the environment is burgeoning. How-
ever, research syntheses are in general still scattered across
a broad spectrum of journals and books, and information
on global environmental change is not readily available in
an inter-related way. In particular, it is quite uncommon
for contributions from the natural sciences to appear in
the same journal or workshop proceedings as contributions
from the social sciences and the humanities.
This Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change is
a comprehensive and integrated reference in the broad
area of global environmental change that will be con-
veniently accessible and productively usable by students,
managers, administrators, legislators, and concerned citi-
zens. The Encyclopedia consists of ve volumes of inter-
related material:
Volume 1 The Earth system: physical and chemical
dimensions of global environmental change
(Michael C MacCracken and John S Perry,
editors)
Volume 2 The Earth system: biological and ecological
dimensions of global environmental change
(Harold A Mooney and Josep G Canadell,
editors)
Volume 3 Causes and consequences of global environ-
mental change (Ian Douglas, editor)
Volume 4 Responding to global environmental change
(Mostafa K Tolba, editor)
Volume 5 Social and economic dimensions of global env-
ironmental change (Peter Timmerman, editor)
The rst four volumes cover the broad issues of the sci-
ence and politics of global environmental change. Volume
Five adds an often understated but extremely important
aspect, linking as it does, global environmental change
to the socioeconomic, cultural and ethical dimensions of
human societies. Here will be found a rich panoply of writ-
ings by people who are not natural scientists but who have
thought deeply about the environment. It places global envi-
ronmental change in a refreshing historical, sociological and
cultural context. In many contributions, the time horizons
of most interest are the last hundred and the next hundred
years. However, some contributions dip backward millions
of years. Throughout, the emphasis is upon the dynam-
ics of the various processes discussed how and why did
they change? A second recurrent theme is the interconnec-
tion of processes and changes What produces change?
What is impacted by change? Finally, we attempt to deal
even-handedly with natural and human-induced change, and
with impacts on both the natural world and human society.
From the numerous diverse articles in the Encyclopedia,
we believe that the user can obtain a coherent picture of
this complex and dynamic system of which we all are
a part.
To assist in promoting this coherence, each volume
begins with a group of extended essays on major top-
ics that embrace the eld covered in that volume. These
are intended to provide an introduction to the topic, a
convenient road map through cross-references for explor-
ing the Encyclopedia. Then there follows, in alphabetical
order, shorter articles on a variety of scientic topics,
descriptions of scientic programs, denitions, acronyms,
and biographies of leading contributors to the eld from
Charles Darwin, through the Russian ecologist Vernad-
ski, to the three most recent environmental Nobel Laure-
ates Crutzen, Rowland and Molina. Indeed, these deni-
tions, biographies and acronym denitions are, we believe,
a uniquely valuable feature of the Encyclopedia. In the case
of acronyms of international organizations and programs, it
is no exaggeration to state that a young environmental sci-
entist requires not only a good understanding of science,
but also a good knowledge of acronyms, if they are to
follow the discussions taking place at many international
meetings! Also included in the alphabetic listings are abun-
dant cross-references to related topics in the same or other
volumes.
The substantive scientic articles that comprise the
meat of the Encyclopedia are original contributions
by active scientists from around the world, and thus
PREFACE TO THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE xiii
represent authoritative and up-to-date summaries of the
state of current knowledge, direct from the producers of
this knowledge. A number of these articles break new
ground in synthesizing and summarizing our understanding
from novel viewpoints and in unconventional ways. Thus,
readers will nd a wide variety of styles and approaches
within the articles, reecting in a unique way the rich
diversity of todays world science. The articles have also
had the benet of careful reviews, particularly by our Edi-
tors.
The scientic essays and some of the program descrip-
tions begin with a few italicized paragraphs written for
non-specialists. These are not intended to be abstracts of
the paper to follow, but rather are aimed at providing the
reader with an introduction into why the topic is impor-
tant and where it ts into the broader aspects of global
change a kind of encouragement to read on. Reading
on should not be too difcult a task, since most of the
scientic essays are written at the level of journals such
as Scienti c American and AMBIO that are intended for
the non-specialist. The Encyclopedia will be a valuable
source of information for everyone with a general interest
or a need-to-know in the various environmental elds (the
natural sciences, socio-economics, engineering, the health
sciences, and policy analyses) particularly as they relate to
global-scale environmental change, its drivers, and its con-
sequences. It is also expected that among the audiences for
each volume will be practitioners and researchers in the
elds covered by the other four volumes. We believe that
this rather unusual indeed unique Encyclopedia will be
used in a variety of ways.
1. Some people will employ it simply as a convenient
source of information on specic topics What has been
happening recently to the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean?
Who was Roger Revelle? What is soil mineralization?
What is ICSU or IGBP? What is the Kyoto Protocol?
What is deep ecology?
2. Serious students in the environmental sciences may
begin by reading one or all of the introductory essays,
which present highly compressed crash courses in a
range of central topics.
3. We believe that the substantive specialized articles that
constitute the bodies of the volumes are productively
and enjoyably readable in their own right.
4. Finally, a case has been made by one of the volume edi-
tors (Peter Timmerman) for encyclopedia browsing as
an enjoyable and productive pastime (see Encyclope-
dias: Compendia of Global Knowledge, Volume 5).
We believe that these ve volumes are in the tradition of the
human aspiration towards the compilation of global knowl-
edge that sparked the preparation of the rst encyclopedias
in the 18th Century.
Our Editors have had the benet of a marvellous post-
graduate education in the course of the Encyclopedias
evolution! We are immensely grateful to the many, many
authors in our virtual university who have contributed
their wisdom to this project.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Many helpful comments and draft paragraphs were received
from the Volume Editors during the preparation of this
Preface.
REFERENCES
Tolba, M K and White, Gilbert F (1979) Global Life Support
Systems, SCOPE Newsletter, No. 7, October. 2 pp.
Wilson, Edward O (1998) Integrated science and the coming
century of the environment, SCIENCE 279, 20482049.
Ted Munn
Editor-in-Chief
Preface to Volume Five
Volume Five is devoted to the social, political, economic,
and spiritual dimensions of global environmental change,
and as such represents a departure from the conventional
focus on the purely physical aspects of global change.
It highlights the profound shifts in human thinking and
awareness that are required to wrap our minds around the
advent of globalization, and our increasing ability to affect
natural systems, sometimes to our own benet, sometimes
not. This powerful role cannot simply be captured by
treating human beings as if they were another natural
force. Social, cultural, and economic ideas and institutions
shape the desires and hopes, the conicts and resolutions
of conict that are central to the human dimension of
global change. Yet, at the same time, human beings are
incontestably part of nature as other volumes in this
Encyclopedia demonstrate. Volume Five overlaps with, and
complements, these other volumes.
Because of the complex weave of interaction between
humanity and the environment, this volume contains many
essays and articles that are more in the realm of probes
than xed descriptions of their topics. Powerful words and
powerful ideas, metaphors, myths, beliefs, images and arte-
facts these are all vehicles for the creation and shaping
of meaning among human beings. Topics covered include
the great political and economic theories, the most inuen-
tial views of nature from Plato to Rachel Carson, and the
historic and literary seedbeds for the rise of environmental
thought and practice in our time.
Of particular importance in this volume are the introduc-
tory essays from leading gures in the eld, and special
efforts have been made throughout to give space to alterna-
tive voices and ideas. Dialogue and diversity are essential to
human development, and we hope that the reader is stim-
ulated by this volume towards his or her own thoughtful
response to the increasing responsibility for the future of
the Earth that has come upon us in our time.
Among the voices that we are privileged to present in
this volume, the Editors would like to single out that of
Ester Boserup, whose pathbreaking work as a student of
the social dynamics of technological change, and of the
role of women in economic development, make her an
exemplar of the kind of interdisciplinary thinker so often
proclaimed as necessary, and so seldom found. She died
before the Encyclopedia could go to press, but we would
like to dedicate this volume to her memory.
Peter Timmerman
Editor of Volume Five
The Human Dimensions of Global Change
PETER TIMMERMAN
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
The central icon of the environmental movement is the earth hanging in space, that mysterious and unexpected
cargo brought back from the voyages to the moon. See Figure 1 in The Earth System, Volume 1. It appears
on bedroom walls, refrigerators, and annual reports by multinational food companies. Blue-green and spherical
against the stark blackness of space, it speaks of all things natural, all things green, the vision of one earth,
one world.
Yet, part of its paradox is that this environmental symbol
was the result of the most advanced technological project
in human history (at that time), whose roots are easily
traceable to the challenge of the Cold War, the long-range
missile projects beginning in World War II, the atomic
bomb, the militarization of space, and even the elegant
camera technology that enabled the pictures to be taken.
But the image is even more iconic and mysterious than
that. At rst glance, it appears a lonely image the only
home we have devoid of human reference points, at least
at the distance of the moon. Yet a nagging question is:
where are we in this picture? The easy answer is that we
are in there somewhere, maybe waving, or drowning. The
more intriguing answer is that we are the picture: that it took
all of science and technology that is, all of the ability to
provide a temporary earth in a plastic suit in deep space
to keep a human alive and all of history, that is, not just
evolution, but all the social and cultural reasons that would
make a being turn around at a precise moment oating in
space, pick out the earth from the surrounding darkness
as something worth photographing, and then lift a camera
to his eyes, focus, and take a picture with some purpose
in mind.
The literary critic, Marshall McLuhan, made a typically
prophetic remark in 1970, in an obscure inaugural piece in
an early environmental magazine (since defunct):
whereas the planet had been the ground for the human popula-
tion as gure; since Sputnik, the planet has become gure and
the satellite surround has become the new ground . Once
it is contained within a human environment, Nature yields its
primacy to art.
McLuhan here invokes the familiar image of the gure-
ground reversal the faces that turn into vases, and back
again; or the duck that ips into a rabbit and ducks back
again to suggest that while up until the arrival of the
image from space, human beings saw themselves as gures
on a ground, the environment is now a mere gure on
human grounds.
The gure-ground reversal suggests that this is a sudden
perceptual shift; which may be the case, but its elements
have been arriving for some time.
One early element can be found in the idea that the
higher you go off the earth, the closer you approach the
realm of God. This is obviously exhilarating, but it is
also blasphemous and unsettling. An early source is the
temptation of Jesus, who, after being baptized by John,
goes into the wilderness where he is threatened by the devil.
Among the trials he undergoes is that of the potential for
total earthly power; and the devil takes him to the highest
point of the world and shows it all to him before Jesus
rejects it. Peaks are for falling off of, as well as for gaining
perspective.
In later medieval literature, airborne journeys of a more
lighthearted sort take to the skies, the hero drawn by geese
or lifted up by air currents, or in a dream. Yet when Dante
leaps off the earth and moves into the higher realms in The
Divine Comedy, it is clear that this is unsettling. A later
appearance of the earth from space, in Milton s Paradise
Lost is ominously seen from the perspective of Satan, newly
released from the prison of Hell, and ying around the
universe looking for a new home away from home.
This Godlike stance, epitomized by the image of the earth
from space, is, as literature suggests, powerful. The arrival
of global maps and globes in the 16th century was part of
the great surge of Western power that began with the age
of discovery and has only intensi ed its reach in the age
of the Internet. The ability to hold the world in our minds
is the forerunner of the ability to hold it in our hands, and
vice versa.
2 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Today we continue the same process. Again, it was
McLuhan who said that in the age of satellites there is
no more wilderness. There is hardly anywhere on the earth
where one can hide, for example, from cruise missiles that,
guided by satellite, can drop on a designated square meter
of ground. The Hubble telescope, of which we have heard
so much, has sister scopes whose magnifying powers are
turned in to gaze on the details of our lives. It is clear
that the American Armed Forces believe that the next high
ground for military superiority is the satellite surround.
Evidence of this could be found during the Gulf War in
1991, when the rst action of the Allied powers was to cut
off access to international satellite pictures for the Iraqis,
the result being that they were forced to ght essentially
blind.
Another related element, contributing to the gure-
ground reversal, is the gradual increase in humankinds
inuence over the physical systems of the planet. Other
volumes in this encyclopedia highlight this encroachment,
where human beings are creaming off and rearranging vast
parts of the earths primary production for our own pur-
poses. Certainly human beings have affected large chunks
of the earths natural terrain before, but the ability to affect
whole physical and chemical cycles of the planet surely
represents a watershed (airshed, earthshed) in earths his-
tory. Our ngers and ngerprints are now and will continue
to be all over the genetic future of a myriad species. The
ground plans in which they will gure are human inu-
enced, human inspired.
THE HUMAN DIMENSION OF GLOBAL
CHANGE
A volume of an encyclopedia on global environmental
change that deals with the human dimension of global
change is thus necessarily confronted with fundamental
issues, of which the most fundamental remains: what does
it mean to be human?
Tightly related questions, but more obviously tractable
(though one need not get too carried away with tractability)
are: what is the relationship between human meanings and
goals, and the tools, such as science and technology, that
we are using to make those meanings and meet those
goals? What does the humanizing of the planet mean? Is it
manageable, possible, agreeable, delightful, horrifying?
In 1996, the philosopher Thomas Nagel published a
book called The View From Nowhere (Nagel, 1996), which
describes in detail the stance which modern science wishes
to take. Another philosopher, Hilary Putnam, actually refers
to this stance as Gods Eye View (Putnam, 1995). The ear-
liest intimation of that stance may be Archimedes famous
remark, that if he were allowed to place his lever anywhere,
he could move the world. This hints at the later stance,
which is that the earth is not a privileged vantage point,
and in fact there is no privileged vantage point. Science
seeks (or sought) to eliminate all the effects and inuences
of special locations, investigators, etc., in favor of univer-
sal laws. This has been undermined at least at the popular
level somewhat by the paradoxes of the observer and the
observed at the quantum mechanical level of science; but
the ethos remains intact.
The social critics (Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno,
and others) of the Frankfurt School in the 1930s were
among the rst to worry about the possibility that the
search for this particular kind of enlightenment what we
might call the universe lying spreadeagled on the dissect-
ing table was not itself neutral. They suggested that the
rhetoric of expanding human knowledge was harnessed to
a very powerful unexamined Puritanical drive towards a
pure objective truth, in the face of which ordinary human
experience would wither and die. They also suggested that
there is a complex connection between what we could call
objectivity and the treating of the world as if it were an
object.
The experience of the Nazi years (which, among other
things, led to the eeing of the Frankfurt School to Amer-
ica), and the arrival of the atomic bomb and the Cold War,
substantially undermined the claims of what has been called
the Enlightenment Project or the Age of Modernity (see
Enlightenment Project, Volume 5). The claim that reason
and science could improve the lot of humankind became
juxtaposed against the claim that it could also destroy
humankind. It was not enough to say that evil is always
possible, and reason and science could be misused; critics
began to question if there was something unreasonable in
the very framework of modernity.
The famous (or notorious) outcome of this was the
arrival of postmodernism whose antagonism to modernity
was described succinctly by the French philosopher, Jean-
Francois Lyotard, as a suspicion of all grand narratives
(Lyotard, 1984). These grand narratives included the spread
of reason over the world, universal human rights, the
redescription of the natural world in scientic terms, the
increasing recasting of natural resources by technology, and
globalization.
It is worth pointing out in this context that virtually all
the international organizations and initiatives represented
in this encyclopedia subscribe to the grand narrative tra-
dition, simply because they were either generated in the
19th century explosion of scientic networks and soci-
eties; or in the post-World War II heyday of the United
Nations.
Postmodernist thought is aligned to what is sometimes
called postnormal science (see Post-nor mal Science, Vol-
ume 5), which is an expression of a similar form of skep-
ticism about the rhetoric of neutral science. Postnormal
science interrogates this rhetoric, but also examines the
work practices of scientists, their worldview assumptions,
THE HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL CHANGE 3
the agenda-setting devices (e.g., why are scientists looking
at this particular part of the world and not another?) and
their communities.
Rayner and Malone, in their overview essay for this vol-
ume, describe in detail a number of the tensions between the
universalizing tendencies in the physical sciences and the
less powerful (but often similarly universalizing) counter-
strategies in the social sciences and the humanities (see
Social Science and Global Environmental Change, Vol-
ume 5).
To report on some personal experience, it was while I
was involved with the project to establish the International
Human Dimensions of Global Change Programme in the
late 1980s that the project leaders found themselves prac-
tically, as well as theoretically, faced with the implications
of the split between the worldviews of the physical sciences
and those of the social sciences and humanities. Roughly
speaking, however, the main dividing line is not between
the sciences and the social sciences; in fact, the dividing
line is within the social sciences, between those social sci-
ences whose practitioners see themselves engaged in some
form of quasi-physical science enterprise, and those that see
themselves engaged in (what for want of a better phrase)
what could be called meanings and frameworks.
The practical implications of this were (and are) that
models of global change generated by physical science
institutions treat human beings as if they were another ele-
ment in a diagram of boxes with wires. The output of certain
social sciences parts of physical geography, anthropol-
ogy, demography, etc. can t reasonably congenially into
these wiring diagrams. Social behavior, communications,
politics, and so on, are marginalized or added on as rhetor-
ical ourishes in the form of feedback loops. On the other
side of the dividing line, other social scientists and human-
ists assault the whole enterprise, i.e., that it is a symptom of
the global situation we are in (the rationalized objectica-
tion of the world) and not a solution. This kind of standoff
has complicated efforts to create international research pro-
grams that could usefully integrate the natural and the social
sciences.
THE RISE OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL
MOVEMENT
Traditionally, histories of the environmental movement
(especially in North America) begin with conservation
efforts and egregious examples of early industrial pollu-
tion, and trace its evolution through the creation of national
parks, the upsurge of interest in the 1960s through Rachel
Carsons (1963) Silent Spring, and the arrival of environ-
mental legislation in the 1970s and 1980s. This ts in with a
progressive model of a set of problems, problems identied,
an orderly political response, and so on.
In light of the above, however, I believe that a more
powerful history links environmentalism to some central
concerns of the Romantic movement in the late 18th century
about the fundamental relationship between human beings
and Nature, in particular the nature of Human Nature in a
world increasingly subjected to human inuence. Moreover,
the most compelling parts of works like Rachel Carsons
are not about this or that pesticide, but about threats to what
could be called the fabric of life, i.e., threats.
As discussed more fully in Ar t and the Environment,
Volume 5 and Liter ature and the Environment, Vol-
ume 5, the Romantic movement was driven by a desire
to overturn and reconstruct what the artists, poets, and
advanced political thinkers of the time believed to be an
outmoded, and indeed repressively dead, cosmology. This
cosmology patriarchal, hierarchical, and rational (in the
sense of a machine-like logic) was increasingly being
used to cage and tie down new expressions of human well-
being. Because it was outmoded, it was like a snake skin
or an exoskeleton that was too small externally applied,
not internally generated.
Among the metaphors applied to this cosmology were the
mask and the machine. The mask ultimately derived from
the critique of civilization fomented by the French philoso-
pher Jean-Jacques Rousseau symbolized the hypocrisy
and public demeanor of ancient powers, as well as the
emerging urban populace alienated from those powers, and
from each other. The opposite of the mask was the Man
of transparent virtue, and part of the increasingly vicious
theatre of the French Revolution (17891795) was the
relentless stripping off of, rst, the masks of rank and sta-
tion, and then, the stripping off of the masks of personal
life down to the bone.
The machine came to symbolize both the newfound
energy that could stimulate a new world of wealth creation,
but also the turning of people into creatures of the machine.
The early Industrial Revolution appeared to be like the maw
of some great creature, driving rural people away from their
farms and villages, and into hideously polluted factories
where they worked inexorably, hour after hour, day after
day. The fact that incomes and life-expectancies began
their also inexorable rise upward, and the uncomfortable
fact that supposedly happy rural life before industrialization
would not bear close examination, had less impact than the
immediately obvious relationship between the dismantling
of a seemingly organic world and the interim chaos that
ensued. Capitalism turned everything into a resource for
exploitation.
To the Romantic writers and poets William Blake,
Henry David Thoreau, Friedrich Schiller Nature becomes
many things in the wake of the extraordinary eruption of
industrialization into the world. Most obviously, it becomes
a refuge from the ills of modernizing life, which is one of
the sources for the conservation and parks movement. Less
4 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
obviously, it becomes a kind of comrade, or surrogate-
like human beings, Nature is under threat. Some social
ecologists see this as a central thread in modern environ-
mental politics. Another aspect of Nature is its presence
in the world as an alternative system or structure to that
being raised by human ingenuity. The fact that it has a
creative autonomy of its own, and is supremely inventive
and complex in its own right, challenges the arrogance of
technological man.
For some people, Nature becomes an entry into a spiritual
realm, and interestingly enough, it is critics like John
Ruskin and poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins, who fasten
on the intricate details of Natures design as the entry way;
and not, as earlier, on Nature as a grand symbol. In this, one
can see the growing inuence of natural science, initially on
the Victorians, and later in the synthesis that would become
the environmental movement.
However important this history may be, the real history
of the modern environmental movement, to my mind,
begins with Hiroshima, and is followed very quickly by the
revelations about the Nazi death camps. It was these events
that concentrated a growing unease about the capacity of
human beings to destroy themselves, and perhaps the world
around them. We can begin to see a change of tone in
environmental writing (still nature writing) in the 1950s
(Rachel Carsons rst successes appeared then); and it is
little remembered that the writing of Silent Spring coincided
with the rst great international grassroots environmental
action to stop the above-ground testing of nuclear weapons.
Part of what fueled that successful political activity was the
unsettling prospect of having what had hitherto been seen
as a most benign metaphor, mothers milk, poisoned; and
poisoned at a distance. Carsons pesticide poisoning at a
distance amplied and echoed that other concern.
These threats to the fabric of life to the possibility
that rents in the fabric might be caused by human igno-
rance were (in my mind) the spiritual dynamic behind the
environmental movement. In the 1970s, it went somewhat
underground, as the nuts and bolts of environmental man-
agement took center stage. I say somewhat, because it could
always be found, for example, in the concern for the poten-
tial loss of endangered species. But at various points, it has
returned in full force to revitalize environmental activism.
In the late 1980s, the prospect of a rent in the fabric of the
sky the ozone hole regenerated a whole array of envi-
ronmental actors and institutions. Similarly, if more slowly,
the prospect of irreversible climate change has begun to
concentrate the minds of many activists.
The current activist environmental movement in part
because of the political dynamic associated with global
environmental issues (symbolized by the Rio Earth Sum-
mit in 1992) appears to be more inclined to return to
the question of the role of modern industrialization and its
technological imperatives. Globalization as a phenomenon
is becoming widely seen as the interim step towards the ulti-
mate transformation of the Earth into a human enterprise.
Since multinational corporations and the rhetoric of global
free trade are propelling much of this, environmentalists
have begun making more and more sophisticated critiques
of mainstream economics.
ECONOMICS AND GLOBAL CHANGE
A central fact about contemporary life is that globalization
is rooted in a range of theories and practices that derive
from economics. This is contested by those who would
prioritize political structures such as the nation state, or
strategies of imperialism, or even social or legal or philo-
sophical forces deriving from the spread of Western models
of individualism across the globe. Nevertheless, if one sees
in economics a complex web of all of these, ultimately
justied by an almost religious belief in the virtues of the
market system whose every whim needs to be tended, then
its strength as a belief system for at least the elites in the
West and their acolytes can be hardly disputed.
Looked at historically, one of the most important aspects
of modern economic theory and practice is that it represents
the rst and most successful form of systems theory as
applied to social systems. This is part of its power; and
as will be discussed shortly, is essential to its ethical
dimension.
Economics, like the modern social sciences generally,
originated in various attempts to do for the social world
what Newton had done for the physical world, that is,
nd a set of simple laws that would explain and under-
pin a complex set of phenomena. The Scottish and French
enlightenment thinkers were haunted by this possibility;
and among the rst, and among the most controversial, of
the attempts at fullling this vision, was the provocative
work by the British writer (actually born in the Nether-
lands) Bernard de Mandeville (1714), The Fable of the
Bees.
In the Fable, Mandeville breaks with the moral and
spiritual traditions of the world, and argues that private
vice should be encouraged, because spending on luxury
goods, prostitutes, race horses, etc., generates many public
benets through employment. Here in embryo is the central
pillar of neo-conservative thought in our own day. What
made Mandevilles work so inuential was the linking
of local phenomena to global phenomena with opposite
characteristics. The social thinker is either to trace the
impacts of the local phenomena to their global outcomes
from a neutral stance (the view from nowhere), or, even
more inuentially, realize that the local phenomena can
be described quite differently when seen from a higher
vantage point. Moreover, the allocation of goods and bads
can be dissociated from any notion that the Deity bestows
them.
THE HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL CHANGE 5
This powerful systems model sat in the armory of the
early economists, awaiting further renement. In the mean-
time, these economists, including the physiocrats in France
(mid-18th century), and the classical economists Smith,
Malthus, and Ricardo (1750s1830s) began the task of
tracing out the transformation of Nature, people, and invest-
ments/nance/invention/buildings into land, labor, and cap-
ital. With each tracing, the relationship between economic
activity and the physical world diminished, and was re-
placed by the intricate workings of the market.
Perhaps one of the hardest things for a non-economist
(actually, for most economists as well) to recognize is
that economics does not deal with the physical world.
This became particularly true after the rst neo-classical
revolution in the mid 19th century associated with J S Mill,
William Stanley Jevons, and others; and continued into
the 20th century (with variations). Instead, it deals with
the subjective desires of individuals, as expressed through
competing demands signaled by prices, and adjudicated by
a market whose other component is supplies, drawn to the
market by the price signals, which are re-determined by
the interaction of demand and supply. More modern theory
speaks of rational allocation of scarce resources, but again,
the real world only appears in the tenuous link supplied by
an assumption of scarcity.
As a result, in contemporary economic theory and prac-
tice, the natural world enters only as it inuences prices.
If there is no price on koala bears, i.e., no one wants or
values them, they do not exist. To deal with this prob-
lem (and others) is the domain of the emerging discipline
of environmental economics (see Economics and Global
Environmental Change, Volume 5; Environmental Eco-
nomics, Volume 5). Among the tasks of this discipline are:
to nd shadow values for environmental goods that do not
show up in market prices; to develop surrogate measures
for environmental value; subject environmental goods that
currently have no legal or proprietary owners to privatiza-
tion; and generally to internalize within the market what
are called externalities.
This environmental economics approach can be com-
pared to the approach of ecological economics (see Ecolog-
ical Economics, Volume 5). Ecological economics repudi-
ates the entire superstructure of modern economic thought
polemically described above; and rather proposes to return
to the kinds of approaches characteristic of the French
physiocrats, and others. Specically, ecological economists
focus on a variety of physical aspects of human use of the
resources of the earth to sustain life.
This approach considers, among other things, what are
the physical requirements to feed human beings, sustain
agriculture year by year, harness energy, process mineral
and chemical feed stocks for industrial production, and
assess the ability of the earth systems to handle the waste
products of our activities. There are a number of problems
with this alternative approach, of which perhaps the least
serious is that there is no consistent set of measuring tools
and common language among the variety of competing ver-
sions of ecological economists. Economists such as Daly
and Cobb (1993) have been working for some years on
alternative measures of gross national product and moni-
toring systems other than price mechanisms.
More serious is the difculty of internalizing the other
economic approach, which, whatever ones views, does
currently drive the international economic system. The
price mechanism is ingrained into the workings of virtually
all decision-making processes, and acts as a fundamental
purveyor of information in current society.
Most serious of all are the intangible benets of the
standard economic approach as a moral and ethical system.
A lot that could be said about this, but I would like to
discuss two issues on this topic briey.
The rst, returning to where this section began, with
Mandevilles vision, is that one benet of the standard
economic approach is it allows people to repudiate com-
passion; or to put it another way, to feel good about being
self-interested. Obviously, technical economists (welfare
economists and the like) would protest this kind of remark;
but I am speaking here about a general cultural inuence.
Part of the neo-conservative agenda that has been so pow-
erful in recent years is an argument that people who act
compassionately towards the poor are acting inefciently.
Indeed, they are, in fact, standing in the way of the improve-
ment in the lot of the poor that would be produced by
allowing the market to operate more efciently. Everything
that interferes with the market social safety nets, public
insurance, public health care is by denition inefcient,
and thus drags down the potential for the economy. It is the
hard-hearted economic realist who is really the benefactor
of the poor.
A related moral aspect of this system is that it is sup-
posedly morally neutral. Since it derives from individual
wants, whatever those wants may be, it says nothing about
whether some wants are better than others. This classic
attack on the amorality of utilitarians is, in fact, a source of
pride to economic liberals; though they tend, paradoxically,
to bemoan the loss of conservative values like family life
that their system is happily destroying.
The second (and related) issue is that not only are the ori-
gins of those wants now subjected to gross manipulation by
corporate advertising; but at the heart of the system for a
variety of obscure historical and sociological reasons one
can nd a powerful model of the human which is being pro-
pounded. In this view, contrary to virtually all ethical and
spiritual traditions in the world, human beings are funda-
mentally self-interested, and possessed of innite desires
which can never be fully satised; and that rather than
try and eliminate these desires, they should be encour-
aged. Similarly, consumption patterns are now fully seen
6 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
as expressions of one s personality. The rise of fashion, the
need for status differentiation in an increasingly homog-
enized world, and the transformation of the citizen into a
consumer rather than a producer, have all contributed to the
seemingly unlimited growth in consumption in developed
countries.
As has been stated by numerous writers, the spread of this
in nitely desiring consumer model to the developing world
is doubly troubling. Analysts of the so-called ecological
footprint the amount of extra resources needed to ser-
vice developed country growth already argue that we will
need three or four new earths to service a world population
carrying around in its heads the lifestyles of North America.
MANAGING THE EARTH?
In the meantime, if we look at actual production patterns on
the earth, designed to service this population, we can see
very important trends in the technical means being deployed
in the reordering of the planet for human ends.
Approximately 40% of land-based net primary produc-
tion (that is, plant-generated material), and over 25% of
marine net primary production is now being diverted or
rearranged for human use. Much of this is taken by the
domestication of livestock, the harvesting of higher animals
and sh, and agriculture. This is completely unprecedented.
What is happening around the world is essentially a
restructuring of ecosystems in order to maximize produc-
tion, primarily through creating systems according to at
least ve rules.
1. organize for harvesting of natural products at the peak
of productivity. The productive peak for many natural
ecosystems is at the end of the juvenile phase;
2. concentrate for easier planting/monitoring/harvesting;
3. replace/buffer/enhance ecosystem processes;
4. add value at, and beyond, the farm gate;
5. suppress extra-market externalities.
Here are two examples of some of these rules in
operation.
One example is sh farming. Worldwide natural sh
stocks are in deep trouble, with something like 34% of
sh species threatened with extinction. One solution is
intensi ed sh farming in captive tanks. It is calculated
that one in four sh that reaches market today comes from
a sh farm. The problem is that a sh farm is a monoculture,
and all the supporting services have to be brought in from
the outside sh farmers are now competing with poultry
and pork producers for grain and protein meal supplements,
such as soybeans. These farms also produce high levels of
waste, they suffer from outbreaks of disease, and forms of
chemical pollution.
This is exactly the same situation as in monocultural
agriculture. The problem with the average managed eld
is that it is trying to turn back into a meadow or a forest.
Today s agriculture requires immense inputs of pesticides,
herbicides, gasoline for tractors, etc., in order to create an
outdoor factory. The most recent types of high-yield corn
require that all the microorganisms in the surrounding soil
be killed off. This kind of agriculture is becoming more and
more expensive, in part because the weeds and the bugs,
i.e., the ecological precursors of a return to a meadow, are
being chemically and biologically selected for resistance to
whatever the latest crop strategy is.
A similar process has been underway for many years in
forestry.
Rule one means that crops, trees and sh must be
harvested in the juvenile phase and before they level off as
adults, at which point it is economically inef cient for them
to just be sitting around. This means that there are no older
age cohorts left, which also means that the regeneration
through decomposition disappears. If you have no old trees,
you have no carbon being returned to the soil, no place for
insects and other decomposers to nestle in, and so on.
Rule two, which is essential to agriculture and mining,
concentration and simpli cation means, in living systems,
that there is no diversity, and that makes the system vul-
nerable to catastrophic attack by virus, bug, plague, weed,
or genetic mutation or rapid climate change.
Rule three means that all the processes of energy cycling,
nutrient creation, removal of wastes, and so on, have to
be imported into the simpli ed ecosystem from outside. In
order to do that, energy is required, in addition to resources
from somewhere else, which means that some other high-
quality ecosystem (or stock of fossil fuels) is being tapped
into and degraded. It is based on the assumption that there
is always somewhere else left to go to get the supplies
needed to feed the arti cial ecosystem.
Rule four, which is well known to farmers, means that
the primary production of the ecosystem is virtually worth-
less it is essentially a host for what will happen next.
A potato is worth nothing compared to barbacue potato
chips. That is where the money is. A particularly ironic
example of this came recently during the collapse of the
East Coast Fisheries. One of the largest Canadian sh pro-
cessors, which was instrumental in destroying the sheries,
and has now moved on to the South China Sea, turned its
attention to sh species that it had never bothered to sh
for before, ground them up, and then rebuilt them as sh
ngers in the shapes of star sh and seahorses, and was sell-
ing them at great pro t to Colonel Sanders and other fast
food outlets in the US.
Rule ve, which is perhaps the most important, is an
attempt to eliminate the environment as a part of economic
costs of production and marketing. The best example of
this the one that is causing global warming is the sup-
pression of geography to enable the smooth running of free
trade. Free trade, or if you like, international free markets,
THE HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL CHANGE 7
depend upon the ability to ship goods to any place in the
world without friction or at very low friction. Distance from
one place to another is no longer to be a consideration. The
reason this can be done more or less is the low price
of fossil fuels. Cheap transportation means that California
produce can compete, for example, with Ontario produce
virtually year round.
The reason why fossil fuels are cheap is that the earth
subsidizes carbon dioxide and other emissions. The ecolog-
ical costs of these fuels are not internalized: if they were,
free trade would die tomorrow. As it is, we are awaiting
global warming.
POLITICS AND THE WANING OF TRUST
Global change presents us with a number of issues cli-
mate change, the extinction of species, and the disposal of
nuclear waste that require us to think in the very long
term, over hundreds and maybe thousands of years. One
reason why people have turned to ethicists and spiritual
leaders to articulate new environmental ethics, and others
to new environmental politics, is a sense that this kind of
task is beyond the normal reach of our current ways of
thinking, and requires something different. An important
recent set of discussions has revolved around the concept
of trust, what Niklas Luhmann (1979) referred to as one
of the ways in which we try personally or politically to
cope with uncertainty over time through vowing to be
trustworthy, trusting others, entrusting ourselves to them,
accepting trusteeships, etc.
It is a little known fact that one central element of
Western representative democracy grew out of a debate
(actually a war) about whom to trust, how to entrust, and for
how long, with decision-making power. The British Crown
sought (under Charles I in the 1630s) to retain the power
of taxation without representation (to use an anachronis-
tic phrase) by claiming emergency powers to deal with
supposed external threats to the nation. Charles wanted to
build ships and get some extra pocket money. The ensu-
ing Ship Money struggle and the Civil War that followed
led the next generation of politicians and philosophers to
work on the conditions for declaring emergency powers.
The political theory and practice that evolved further clar-
ied the nature of the entrusting relationship between
citizen and government as a whole, rst in Britain, and then
elsewhere. As outlined by John Locke (among others), the
contract between government and citizen became seen to
be in part based on the entrusting of decision-making
power to a representative body for a period of time subject
to eventual review by the electorate.
This historical interlude is important because it points up
the fact that pivotal to the entrusting of decision-making to
representatives was the idea of time: that the government
could not always refer back to citizens for every decision
and indeed it was important not to do so, when issues
were so complex or in need of such speedy resolution
that constant referral back through simple referenda, etc.,
was unlikely to produce a better outcome than focused
debates by representatives, who were free to be convinced
by their opponents of the wisdom or folly of their position.
Obviously, the legitimacy of this entire setup which is not
exactly an accurate description of how things turned out in
representative institutions around the world is now under
great stress. Not only are even democratic governments
currently more executive and less legislative, for a variety
of complex reasons, than the ideal supposes, but citizens
are now more educated and unwilling to defer to elected
representatives than they may have been; and there has also
been an evolution towards at least the rhetoric of more
active participation by unelected individuals in the decision-
making process. This has been aided and abetted by new
communications technologies like the Internet.
Representative democracies have not been able to come
up with appropriate ways to respond to this desire for
increased participation, and what is in place is somewhat
haphazard and awed; and this has affected the ability of
governments and institutions to respond to underlying pub-
lic anxiety about fundamental environmental questions, and
the whole range of longer term concerns in any other way
than by bureaucracy. On the one hand, there is an increasing
use of single issue referenda, which are subject to manipu-
lation and distortion, but give people a voice or at least
a gesture. On the other hand, there has arisen over the
past while, a whole array of quasi-participatory commit-
tees, NGOs, and investigative bodies like the Environmental
Assessment Review Panels and Royal Commissions. These
usually report to Cabinet or Parliament, and they are sup-
posed to engender trust that the pros and cons of the longer
term are being weighed and assessed properly by experts
as well as citizens in a deeper way.
These new approaches seem, however, to do little to
address some of the more fundamental distrusting going on
out there. This is tied to the phenomenon that this section
began with referring to: the increasing recognition that
decisions being made (or avoided) are extending over larger
and larger stretches of time and space, and having effects
that are not part of the original mandate of the political
institution making the decision. A classic example of this is
the repudiation by outraged citizens of agreements made by
town councils, and other local bodies, to site hazardous or
radioactive waste facilities and the casting about for an
appropriately legitimate level of government that can make
that kind of decision. We didnt elect you to make that kind
of decision , is the rallying cry. But democratic countries
have not yet found any way of legitimating decisions about
where to put high-level nuclear waste for a million years
or more, in spite of a multitude of commissions, reports,
inquiries, and so on.
8 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Associated with this is an easily awakened mistrust of
the elite and professional apparatus of rational manage-
ment. Part of the legitimacy of government in our time
is in its professed ability to manage any change rationally.
The rise of the modern bureaucratic state is based on the
premise that utilitarian calculations mixed with expert pro-
jection can cope rationally with most of the situations that
will arise. So powerful has this rationalization been that
on the occasions where symbols of managed rationality
have broken down Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Viet-
nam they have threatened the legitimacy of the entire
system of governance. Some philosophers suggest that the
special form of rational management associated with the
modern world was fatally crippled at Auschwitz. Others,
less radically and more hopefully, suggest that people are
now less prone to do things just because their government
tells them to like walking unprotected into atom bomb
test sites.
Certainly one of the interesting facts of our time is that
the citizenry and the environmental radical are often now
arrayed on the side of prudential behavior with regard to
proposed future risks; while governments, administrative
experts, and corporate elites are essentially risk-prone.
Their trust in their own capacities is undisturbed, in part
because they are so locked into short-term forecasting.
It is everyone else who nds themselves forced to inject
pessimism and uncertainty back into the process; and to
mandate the consideration of worst-cases and the very long
term.
It is usually said that politicians and the system are
unable to think past the next election, and that this is
somehow due to the greediness and short-sightedness of
their masters, the electorate. While there is something to
this, it is not everything. There are endless examples of the
short-sightedness of the expert and the forecaster, whose
models accentuate the present and discount the future.
The expert can miss the forest for the trees, and the
fact that there are no more trees may not show up as a
loss on the balance sheet, if the property values can be
cashed out elsewhere. Counter to these balance sheets and
snazzy models is often something much humbler, more
conservative (in the original sense) and simpler: the uneasy
sense among the ordinary person that something has gone
wrong, and that if we keep going the way we are going,
things can only get worse.
Common sense is not all that common, and I do not
want to exalt the common man or woman as the paragon
of all wisdom. Yet it was the philosopher Karl Popper who
made the case that one of the great virtues of democracies
was that sometimes the citizenry were the only people who
could break the stranglehold of some grand stupidity that
was mesmerizing the all-knowing powers-that-be.
In this category a feeling for the overall wisdom of
what is going on I would put the feel for the longer term.
Perhaps it is just living a life, or the fact of having children,
or being the latest in a long story line that stretches back
in time. Traditional cultures developed methods of thinking
ethically over the longer term, and this is one of the reasons
they were, in large part, sustainable.
One crucial element of thinking about the longer term,
facing the future, is facing towards the past. To develop
a sense of responsibility over time, traditional cultures
have relied upon ancestor worship and long-standing rituals.
Thinking like an ancestor is a familiar strategy: respect for
ones living elders, and ones long-dead ancestors provides
one with a compass for what one should do now and also
what one should do to keep faith with those people into the
distant future. If we continue to do what has worked well
in the past, then the future is secured.
This kind of approach to risks is, of course, threatened
when something new and unique comes along like nuclear
power or PCBs. It is also threatened across the board by
a society that, in cutting itself free from the cycles of the
seasons and of ecosystems, no longer values the wisdom
that comes from having been through the cycles many
times. We value the innovations of the young; the old we
discard and stuff away in old peoples homes, their wisdom
useless to us.
Another attempt to extend ethical or moral sentiments
across time is associated with those cultures that believe
in reincarnation. In Tibetan Buddhism, for example, people
are encouraged to treat animals properly because they were
ones mother in a previous lifetime (and there is always the
possibility that becoming an animal is ones own fate). All
beings are thereby linked across time by familial ties which
engender respectful treatment.
A third traditional approach, perhaps more familiar in
what derives from a Christian culture, is to see things sub
specie aeternitas, that is, under the gaze of eternity or God.
Ones own actions, or the actions of others, can then be seen
as part of a larger pattern or narrative. Related to this is the
idea of the moral absolute or imperative.
Moral absolutes are associated particularly with the work
of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who expanded
on a rich tradition going back at least to Plato. Moral
absolutes (such as thou shalt not kill ) are supposedly free
from historical or geographical specicity. This means that
they stretch throughout time: it will always be wrong to
do this, whatever the change in the situation. This kind
of absolute moral stance can also reect a belief that the
consequences of ones acts are not important that one
should do the right thing, whatever happens.
Long-term issues tend to foster absolutist positions,
partly because the sense of a problem stretching out for
a long time comes to equal forever.
A moral and ethical consideration which seems to be
new to our time is the idea of not doing anything to under-
mine the sustainability of life on earth we might say to
THE HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL CHANGE 9
fray fatally the fabric of things. This new consideration
derives from our considerably enhanced power to affect
earths biological and physical systems, which we have
always previously been able to take for granted. Seed-
time and harvest shall not fail was Gods pledge to Noah
after the ood. Hans Jonas (in his 1984 book, The Imper-
ative of Responsibility), referred to this as the ontological
imperative. Essentially, human beings are now subject to a
physical imperative which is simultaneously a moral imper-
ative: the basic rule is not to threaten the continuation of
life systems on the Earth.
Many people already subscribe to the most drastic ver-
sion of this imperative, which shows up as a revulsion
towards extinction of species. It is a widely shared belief
(supported by surveys) that since extinction is forever,
endangered species require special treatment. It is not clear
how old this sentiment is: that is, previous generations
likely lacked the ecological knowledge (as do we still in
many cases) to predict the ultimate consequences of the
wanton destruction of individual members of species to the
point where reproduction became impossible. A widespread
assumption was that there were always more Xs where X
came from.
So there are perhaps gestures towards some new moral
imperatives based on a new awareness of our capacities for
destruction; and the broadening of a new moral horizon,
based on our anxiety that there should continue to be dawns
over the old horizon for as far as we can envision the future.
THREATS TO THE INTIMATE
The concerns over the threats to the fabric of life implied by
certain facets of global environmental change have begun
to return as in Rachel Carsons day not just to the local
impacts and expressions of global change, but to what could
be called threats to the intimate.
An ordinary threat to the intimate is the issue of
endocrine disruptors the possible disruption of the human
endocrine system by some combination of the bath of chem-
icals within which people in modern societies operate. But
a more extraordinary threat is posed by the prospect of
genetic engineering, including ultimately the engineering
of human life.
Because genetic engineering obviously involves getting
down to the guts of things, it is obvious that it provokes
great fear and concern, some of which may well be techni-
cally unjustied. However, the underlying fear and concern
is connected to the themes I have been discussing. We
are on the verge of having human beings determine what
the nature of the human is going to be. This presents
us with a kind of moral vertigo, rather like sitting in
a barbers chair looking into an innite set of retreating
mirrors.
For environmentalists, the spread of uncontrolled bio-
engineering is certainly of concern; but it would be foolish
to deny that there is also a visceral reaction to the whole
enterprise, controlled or uncontrolled. This reaction is part
of the often-unnoticed, deeply conservative strain in envi-
ronmentalism; and it is in part a reaction to the often-
unnoticed, deeply radical strain in the modern economic
enterprise. The fact that critics of protestors against bioengi-
neering use a variety of economic and utilitarian arguments
reinforces the belief that the experiment with the natural
world is part and parcel of the growing push to experiment
on human beings, who are, after all, themselves part of the
natural world. So one is forced back onto some very old
and familiar debates: is there more to human beings than
their material parts, than their genetic makeup, etc? If there
is, what is its basis?
At the end, we return to the image of the earth from
space. The French existentialist philosopher, Gabriel Marcel
once made a distinction between what he called prob-
lems and mysteries. Problems from the Greek word pro-
blemata, to throw in front of are things that one can stand
back from and attempt to solve from the outside. They can
be cracked open, like nutshells. Mysteries, on the other
hand, are things or questions that cannot be handled in this
way: the more you try and solve a mystery, the more it pulls
you in, the more it involves you personally in its solution.
Murder mysteries are really problem novels there is a
problem to be solved, and the detective moves on to the
next one. True mysteries simply expand, deepen, the more
you probe into them; and usually bring into question your
own deepest beliefs and concerns.
The earth from space looks like a problem How
to manage planet Earth? is a familiar phrase, brought
into currency by a special issue of Scientic American in
1989 but it is in fact a mystery, since it encompasses
us, and calls into question the deepest wellsprings of our
current World Project the transformation of the ground
out of which we came into something more akin to our
own wishes and desires.
REFERENCES
Daly, H and Cobb, J (1993) For the Common Good, Beacon Press,
Boston, MA.
Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984) The Postmodern Condition, A
Report on Knowledge, Manchester University Press, Manch-
ester, xxiii xxv/311/3741.
Jonas, H (1984) The Imperative of Responsibility, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Luhmann, N (1979) Trust and Power, Wiley, Chichester, UK.
Nagel, T (1996) The View From Nowhere, Oxford University
Press, New York.
Putnam, H (1995) Comments and Replies, in Reading Putnam,
eds P Clark and B Hale, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
The Changing HumanNature Relationships
(HNR) in the Context of Global Environmental
Change
BERNHARD GLAESER
Social Science Research Center, Berlin, Germany
In his Metamorphoses or Transformations, completed in the year 8 AD, the great Roman poet, P Ovidius
Naso tells the story of changes in nature, mythology, and human history. In particular, the philosophy lecture
in Book 15 gives an amazing account of natural and social change that include such themes as global change
(GC), the Gaia hypothesis, environmental destruction, and human and political development. Ovids depiction
demonstrates the broad scope of natural and social change; it is the starting point for this attempt to discuss a
variety of perspectives concerning the changing relationship between humans and nature in the context of global
environmental change (GEC).
The overall objective of this introductory essay is to convey a broad view of social and cultural aspects of
GEC. It represents a Western, social science perspective, and re ects on todays discourses as in uenced or
characterized by the turn from the second to the third millennium. It is concluded that the international scienti c
community can and should play a vital role in nding solutions to sustain the environmental conditions for the
sake of global livelihood, including social justice.
12 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
NATURAL VERSUS SOCIAL CHANGE
Relationships between humankind and nature are rst of
all physical and material: they determine the very sub-
stance of and conditions for human survival. But, at
the same time, humans interpret and construct relation-
ships between themselves and nature. It is this complex
interplay that constitutes and complicates consideration of
the social and cultural aspects of GEC. Shifting percep-
tions relate to physical, economic, social, and cultural
changes over time. The changing relationship between
humans and nature is an open issue; the cultural and
social sciences attempt to interpret it in terms of the
following questions: What did the human nature relation-
ship (HNR) look like before and after the start of GEC?
What is the specic difference? When did GEC occur
and with what consequences for the HNR? We do not
really know the answers to these questions for several
reasons.
Natural as well as social systems are determined by
perpetual change . When change ceases, the system
stops functioning and perishes.
There is disagreement as to the novelty of GC, because
there is some dispute over the meaning of the term
globalization . One view is that globalization indi-
cates Western modernity; that it was initiated by
Columbus discovering and exploiting the New World,
followed, in turn, by the rise of capitalism and the
age of technology. This view is based upon the idea
that the Renaissance combined wisdom and the power
of Mediterranean antiquity with northern European
modernity, which really means globalization on a tem-
poral, historical scale. We may note that the dominant
view of globalization is entirely Eurocentric.
Opinions differ as to the values attached to nature
and the naturehuman relation. These values depend
on the degree of an individuals exposure to nature,
the needs he or she attaches to nature, the capacity
for self-reection contained in these various concepts
and the willingness to abstract from nature. Individu-
als, ethnic groups and cultural systems construct their
own concepts of nature on which they rely and to
which they relate. Stakeholders shape the respective
HNRs.
These reasons suggest the following point of departure
and focus. Since natural and social systems are character-
ized by perpetual, uninterrupted change, we shall focus on
what appears to be its present mode, at the turn of the
21st century, and its corresponding interpretations, con-
cepts and constructs. Humans and nature: which is cen-
tral, which is peripheral? The age-old question is again
raised. It has ethical and political consequences; these
are labeled respectively as the anthropocentric and, con-
versely, the bio-ecocentric approach. What is the dominant
concept of nature? Nature may mean cosmos, the origin
of life, an object for philosophical contemplation or artistic
production not to speak of its practical form as a natural
resource serving as a vital factor of economic production.
Are there different cultural outlooks, such as a typically
oriental or typically occidental perspective? Ex oriente lux,
enlightenment from the Orient, was the belief or romantic
fashion at different ages, including contemporary New Age
culture.
What is the importance attached to the relationship-to-
nature topic and who are the winners and the losers of GEC?
In Europe, during the 1990s, environmental issues lost a
lot of appeal to issues of job security and the labor mar-
ket; whereas in the rural developing world, environmental
degradation and loss of soil fertility are often synony-
mous in that they determine income, livelihood and sur-
vival chances those of rural women more than anybody
else (Kiely and Mareet, 1998; Klingebiel and Randeria,
1998).
Finally, how does the sustainability concept serve in
this context and at this point: What is its social dimen-
sion and its political outlook? Holistic, interdisciplinary or
transdisciplinary approaches have won recognition. Con-
sequences are felt by the research community who have
become stakeholders in this eld. The mode of knowl-
edge production will change and this implies yet another
relationship: that between the natural and the social sci-
ences as well as that between the sciences and the partic-
ipatory involvement of other (non-scientic) stakeholders
affected by GEC. In the political arena, global environmen-
tal politics is becoming a strategic issue as conicts over
water have already appeared; environmental security (Bren-
nan, 1999) follows military (Aspen Institute, 1999) and
food security (Schulz, 1999). Structural policy is needed
to give GC a proper shape (Schellnhuber and Pilardeaux,
1999).
NATURE: IS IT PERIPHERAL TO HUMANS?
As we use ever bigger telescopes to observe the universe,
such amplication technology also enables us to literally
view the past. We are not too far from witnessing the birth
of the universe: Empirical evidence will tell us which
hypotheses and theories are to be falsied. Light travels at
a velocity of approximately 300 000 kms
1
, which means,
for instance, that it takes sunlight a full eight minutes to
reach the earth. These simple and well-known physical
facts have theoretically interesting implications as scales
increase. Imagine that we can see and photograph a galaxy
at a distance of one billion light years away! Since the light
weve thus observed has been traveling for so long a time,
namely one billion years, we are, from a human standpoint,
literally looking into the remote past without even knowing
whether what we observe still exists.
THE CHANGING HUMANNATURE RELATIONSHIPS (HNR) IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 13
The Copernican revolution revealed the fact that the
Earth was not the center of the universe, or even the center
of the solar system. Our earth is simply a minute and by no
means unique particle somewhere at the periphery of our
galaxy, the Milky Way , and also of the presently known
universe. This revelation could not be publicized freely
at the time, because it hurt the interests of an important
16th century global player and stakeholder, namely, the
Catholic Church. Throughout most of Europe, the Church
held a monopoly on the interpretation of not only all meta-
physical matters, but also the view of the world and all
worldly matters. The Church of Rome represented God
the Almighty on Earth, so it claimed, as an institution-
alized human trustee. It intended to expand the domain
of its monopolistic trust around the globe, along with the
worldly powers that used re and sword to subdue the
rest of humanity. So this interpretative and explanatory
competence meant power, in a subtle way perhaps. The
promulgation of the new heliocentric theory by the Polish
astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (14731543) and the rise
of science as a whole thus challenged the authority of the
Church and its cultural imperialism.
Today, half a millennium later, we witness a second
Copernican Revolution (Schellnhuber, 1999) which calls
our attention back to planet Earth. The Earth System as
a whole is to be analyzed. Understanding it is the basis
on which to develop concepts of and for global environ-
mental management. Earth-System analysis (Schellnhuber
and Wenzel, 1998) is the holistic and transdisciplinary
attempt to model and simulate the ecosphere, i.e., the geo-
spherebiospheric complex, including its climatic history
as far back as half a million years ago. This is an endeavor
that takes the Gaia hypothesis seriously the paradigm that
interprets the Earth system as a cybernetic whole endowed
with a self-regulating capacity (Lovelock, 1979). The basis
of this theory is hardcore empirical data that demonstrate
that self-regulating biospheric mechanisms have kept the
Earths crust stable and its environment habitable. Bio-
spheric evolution eventually produced humankind.
After four and a half billion years of natural and eventu-
ally cultural evolution we have learned two things. First,
we are capable of continuously undermining the condi-
tions for our own survival. Global environmental change
in the destructive mode can be seen, for instance, in human
activities such as oil spills and toxic waste proliferation,
perforation of the stratospheric ozone layer (thus exposing
us to more UVB radiation), or nuclear warfare. Second,
we have developed perhaps to a lesser extent the ethi-
cal and managerial tools to protect and safeguard the global
environment against forces of destruction like those just
mentioned (Parry and Livermore, 1999; Pearce, 1999).
Again, interpretative and explanatory competence has
a signicant role. Unlike 500 years ago, when enlighten-
ment and the rationality of science freed humankind from
religious obedience to strive toward self-determination, it
may now be the interpretative dialectics of mythology that
reveal the destructive mode of science and technology:
Humankind has become simultaneously Shiva and Vishnu,
the Hindu gods who represent the concepts for Destruction
and Preservation, respectively.
THE MILLENNIAL SHIFT: GNOSTICISM AND
THE ENVIRONMENT
Today, at the beginning of the third millennium (AD in our
Christianity-centered temporal accounting) environmental
management has to cope with GEC. Fears of global destruc-
tion and extinction witnessed the earlier transition from the
rst to the second millennium. According to the doctrines
of Gnosticism, salvation could be attained only through
the pursuit of spiritual truth and the transcendence of
matter. Jesus Christ was considered by Gnostics to be non-
corporeal. In keeping with this doctrine was the belief that
the beginning of the second millennium would bring about
the spiritual age. Gnosticism incorporated an apocalyptic
and chiliastic vision of natures decline and Gods ulti-
mate reign over Earth, 1000 years after the birth of Christ.
Chiliasm is the doctrine stating that Christ will reign on
Earth for 1000 years; ancient gnostic knowledge and belief
originated in Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt, around the
Mediterranean, and were revived by Scotus Eriugena in the
9th century (Voegelin, 1952, 1959).
At present there seems to be a lack of interest in environ-
mental (including GEC) issues, specically among social
scientists. In the following I draw a parallel between the
lack of interest in the natural world on the part of many
social scientists and the lack of interest in the physical world
by Gnostics. My thesis is that some concept-oriented or
social-constructivist social scientists are, or behave as if
they were, Gnostics. As proof of this, I briey review some
current journals in the eld that devote special attention to
the recent millennial shift.
Independent of theories that explore such parallelism,
the review provides an insight into which topics aca-
demics and editors of prominent journals consider of
paramount importance during an historically important
period. Some historical dimensions and explanations con-
cerning the development of sociology and the motives of
its representatives are presented as these relate to the HNR.
Is GEC and/or the changing HNR of interest to social
scientists? A few international academic journals focused
their last issues in 1999 (or the rst issues in 2000) on mil-
lennial aspects: the transition from the second to the third
millennium, its meaning and relevance for the development
of social or interdisciplinary science. Let us look at four of
these journals and their topical issue: two interdisciplinary
publications and two specialized publications in sociol-
ogy. I begin with the interdisciplinary publications, The
14 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Ecologist (1/2000) and Universitas (12/1999), a German-
language journal whose readership is mainly among uni-
versity instructors and students. Both millennium issues
concentrate on gnostic themes.
The Ecologist (1/2000) deals with the cosmic cove-
nant re-embedding religion in society, nature and the
cosmos . Emphasized is the role that religion can and
must play in saving what remains of the natural world ,
as Edward Goldsmith puts it in his editorial. Knowledge
and values that attributed the utmost priority to the preser-
vation of the creation were once propagated by the various
religious groupings or cultures. The rediscovery and revival
of ecological themes and cosmic theologies appear to be an
environmental priority. The theological underpinnings of
most religions relate the individual to society, the natural
world, and the cosmos. Mainstream science committed the
ultimate blasphemy in that Homo scienti cus has dei ed
himself ; mainstream religion has lost its way and needs
to return to its roots. Noah s ood symbolizes the forces
of chaos. Historical storms and oods in Orissa (India)
or Vietnam may remind us of this archetype human fail-
ure to observe the cosmic covenant, that is, to ful ll our
contract to live in harmony with the laws of nature and
the cosmic order (Goldsmith, 2000). Religious inspiration
and perennial beliefs are to be found among the primal
creeds or religions because these derive from the cosmic
covenant the universal revelation given to humans (Grif-
th, 2000). Tribal stories maintain such wisdom and its
ecological message (Wilson, 2000). So did classical mythol-
ogy and the ecological worldviews of ancient societies such
as those of Greek, Chinese, Egyptian, Indian, or Persian
antiquity, by using the notion of the path that must be
taken to maintain the cosmic order on which human wel-
fare depends (Chaitanya, 2000; Goldsmith, 2000). Related
cosmic and ecological insights are quoted for the Islamic
and the Judeo Christian traditions, to some extent in u-
enced by the ancient civilizations (Barker, 2000; Echlin,
2000; Murray, 2000; Nasr, 2000; Rossi, 2000; Roth, 2000).
The cosmos was embedded in the Church until western
scienti c thought replaced the term creation with envi-
ronment , thus separating human from non-human nature.
The message of the special issue of The Ecologist is that
such desecration of the cosmos ought to be reversed in the
third millennium.
Universitas (December 1999) entitles its special millen-
nium issue Endzeiten, neue Zeiten? (Final age, new age?)
and focuses on topics of transition (Geissler, 1999) between
the two millennia. Western industrial societies have elimi-
nated many rites of passage and transition; the symbolism
of reworks, for instance, whose original intention was to
vanquish evil spirits , has been lost. Instead, the transition
from the second to the third millennium has been marked
by spectacular events not necessarily of universal impor-
tance or interest such as who (in somebody s town) gives
birth to the rst millennium baby (Hilgers, 1999). In a sim-
ilar way, the great issue of the apocalypse has changed.
Originally, St. John the Divine pictured the apocalypse in
The Book of Revelations as the vision of salvation coming
about after a transitory collapse. This transitory collapse
is itself frequently referred to as the apocalypse. The vision-
ary apocalypse represented the advent of the millennial
God s reign on Earth, the New Jerusalem as it was called.
In the 20th century, Hitler and Stalin were associated with
the advent of the apocalypse. The transitional period during
which both leaders were in power was an extremely violent
and bloody episode, characterized by massive internment
in concentration camps and gulags, and massive human
slaughter, in particular genocide. All of this was designed
to purify human blood or to convince people to adopt
the right doctrine , for the purpose of achieving some
perfect millennial Third Reich or ideal post-historic age
of communism. Yugoslavia has witnessed a sad revival of
apocalyptic nationalism. The cyberspace apocalypse, for-
tunately somewhat less deadly, has led us into the third
millennium. Virtual reality represents the New Jerusalem ;
the cybernaut, as the new human , exists independently of
bodily needs and achieves immortality as part of the perma-
nent memory of a computer network. St. John s millennial
Third Reich becomes the age of knowledge beyond the
ages of agriculture and industrialization (Vondung, 1999).
The fear of collapse was stirred up by the Y2K problem ,
the possibility of a global computer network breakdown.
This was originally a technology problem that was heav-
ily and massively mythologized perhaps because billions
of dollars were at stake (Csef, 1999). Among the many
predictions concerning the year 2000, the 1972 Club of
Rome report on the limits to growth was misunderstood as
a model to predict the real breakdown of the global econ-
omy due to resource depletion, environmental degradation,
and population explosion (Schmid, 1999). To summarize,
Gnosticism plays a vital role in the Universitas millennium
issue. Global environmental change and changing HNRs
are included but do not feature centrally.
Globalization is featured outside the main section of
that special journal issue in an interview (Reif, 1999) con-
ducted with Harold James, a Princeton University historian,
who speaks of globalization beginning in the 19th cen-
tury and suggests that while the process may be deplorable
for some, it is nevertheless irreversible. James cites earlier
historical events and occurrences as evidence for glob-
alization, such as the rst transatlantic cable in 1866,
the New York stock exchange crashes of 1906 and 1907
and their immediate repercussions on the European stock
markets, or unifying global trends in fashion, includ-
ing the Japanese adoption of Western dress and fashion,
and similar trends in the ne arts since the age of the
Renaissance. As one reaction, globalization has also pro-
voked some outcry such as the one referring to it as the
THE CHANGING HUMANNATURE RELATIONSHIPS (HNR) IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 15
globalization trap (Martin and Schumann, 1996) or critics
in the developing world who say, globalization equals
imperialism . Earlier (just as they are today) protective
tariffs were designed to bar international competition. Wel-
fare and social legislation was designed to strengthen the
nation state. Visionary third-ways , such as an attempted
balance between the market and planned economy, are
viewed by some as roads leading directly into Third World
underdevelopment. GEC and the HNR do not appear to
be connected with globalization in the sense it is used
here.
The sociologists world-view, similarly, seems in general
to be less environment related and nature minded. We
shall now turn to two sociology journals and consider their
millennium special issues.
The British Journal of Sociology (1/2000) and Current
Sociology (4/1999) take up the millennial problematique,
the latter focusing on the future of sociology and the
social sciences , the former on sociology facing the next
millennium . This could be an indicator of the impor-
tance attached to the issue of GC and the naturehuman
relationship by eminent mainstream sociologists. The lat-
ter journal invited its contributors to consider what the
Millennium might indicate about the history of human
societies and especially how sociology is facing up to
the challenges and opportunities posed , and to provide
analyses of such transformations (Urry, 2000). Manuel
Castells opens the volume by proposing a grounded the-
ory of the network society as the social structure of
the information age . The networks are empowered by
the new communication technologies and reshape the rela-
tions of production, consumption, power, experience and
culture. Ecologism is an example of an alternative net-
work in opposition to dominant networks (Castells, 2000).
Since the 1960s, globalization (along with complexity
analysis and cultural studies) has transformed the context
of sociology, according to Immanuel Wallerstein. He pro-
poses a unied or re-unied historical social science as a
truly global exercise (Wallerstein, 2000). Goran Therborn
documents the shift from a universal to a global sociology in
the second century after sociology became a discipline. He
forecasts a comparative and competitive focus among the
neighboring disciplines sociology, political science, and
economics rather than along the social-versus-natural-
sciences divide (Therborn, 2000). Cross-cultural, empirical
comparison of societies in transformation, without wor-
rying too much about theoretical concerns, is advocated
(Esping-Anderson, 2000). The conict between the patch-
work quilt of nation-states and the cosmopolitan order
of human rights may open the door to the second age of
modernity (Beck, 2000). Contributions on urban sociology
(Sassen, 2000), cultural diversity and the internet (Feather-
stone, 2000), and mobile sociology (Urry, 2000) conclude
the volume.
Dissenting from the social sociology orientation, a
natural tilt can be detected in subsequent contributions.
Science and technology studies and the social explanation
of natural scientic facts work towards a physical soci-
ology and its epistemology (Latour, 2000). The focus on
socioenvironmental theory and the case of genetic modi-
cation of food reveal that the social sciences relation-
ship to nature and environment matters (Adam, 2000).
Timescape is conceived as the temporal equivalent of
landscape. The timescape analysis of socio-environmental
matters brings contextualized temporal complexity to the
heart of social theory . Thus the time aspect is central to
understanding sustainability and its emphasis on natures
regenerative capacity. Intergenerational equity and cultural
equity are at stake the ownership of reproduction has been
transferred to transnational companies. A time-sensitive
scholarly enterprise is the task that confronts social the-
ory at the beginning of the new millennium (Adam, 2000).
Current Sociology (Volume 4, (4) October 1999) reports
the results of the symposium on The Future of the Social
Sciences in the 21st Century which was the concluding
session of the 14th World Congress of Sociology in Mon-
treal in August 1998. The whole journal issue dwells on
the pros and cons and various aspects of interdisciplinarity,
of opening up to and collaborating with neighboring dis-
ciplines. Disciplinary boundaries should be negotiated, not
simply closed down. To think in space-time and touch
geography and history is recommended (Massey, 1999;
similarly Allardt, 1999). An active interdisciplinarity is
needed, in particular with economics, and also a transdisci-
plinary or intercultural approach (although the latter terms
are not used explicitly, the idea they encompass is implied)
to link up with different regions or countries in the age
of globalization (Boyer, 1999). Finally, all fragmented per-
spectives, including those of singular, exclusive disciplinar-
ity, ought to be abandoned in favor of a theoretical unitary
reconstruction of the social sciences, if we wish to avoid
both the barbarism of economist reductionism and the
conservative nihilism of post-modernism (Boron, 1999).
Are the millennial issues representative of social science
and interdisciplinary thinking? Do they address the press-
ing environmental themes substantively and sufciently?
To take up the scope of interdisciplinarity is certainly laud-
able per se and represents present-day avant-garde scientic
development. The scientic base, though, appears a little
narrow as the natural sciences have been left out, by and
large. The HNR in the context of GEC was obviously not
considered to be of major concern in the wake of a millen-
nial shift. A few environmentally based and theoretically
challenging contributions were competently put forward in
the British Journal of Sociology. They do not, however,
constitute anything close to a social science mainstream
movement. To construct a concept of nature and the HNR
is hardly even attempted. What are the conclusions as to
16 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
the relevance of the HNR and GEC for the social science
mainstream? Has there been visible change?
Let us briey review some specic aspects of the envi-
ronmental sociology discourse as it began in the 1970s
(we set aside the Chicago School of sociology in the
1920s) along with the global environmental movement. We
argued earlier (Glaeser, 1996) that environmental sociology
became established as a sociological subdiscipline in the US
within the short time sequence from 19781980. The theo-
retically ambitious goal at that time was to acknowledge
physical and biological factors as independent variables
that inuence the dependent variables of social structure
and social behavior. This was intended to become a new
paradigm within the sociological knowledge canon to turn
the sociological mainstream towards an HNR concept.
The new disciplinary paradigm was dened through
transforming the human exemptionalism paradigm (ear-
lier called the exceptionalist paradigm ) into the new eco-
logical paradigm (Dunlap and Catton, 1979). Traditionally,
the dominant world-view had been to accept humans as the
one unique and superior creature on Earth, capable of quick
adaptation to environmental change for cultural rather than
genetic reasons. The new ecological paradigm also devi-
ated from a specic sociological tradition established by
the early French sociologist Emile Durkheim (18581917),
who postulated that social facts can only be explained by
other social facts. In a most authoritative assessment, Buttel
concluded in 1987 that environmental sociology had found
recognition as a speciality within sociology. It did not suc-
ceed, however, in redirecting mainstream sociology (Buttel,
1987). In our view, Buttels evaluation was still valid in the
1990s (Glaeser, 1996); it provides the historical background
and a broader base for the millennial focus discussed above.
There was one innovation, however, that gradually alte-
red the social science outlook. During the preparation phase
of the United Nations Environment Conference on Envi-
ronment and Development (UNCED) Rio summit in 1992,
GEC came up as a new political and scientic paradigm:
In 1987, the theme had not yet been included in Buttels
(1987) state-of-the-art review and agenda for environmen-
tal sociology. Once again sociology was slow in the uptake.
An early exception to this was a contribution by Buttel
and Taylor (1992) who advocated in favor of the society-
nature relation as a social construct; they argued as well that
the GEC topic was a social construct simultaneously serv-
ing as a scientic concept and as a way of mobilizing the
community of scholars. In short, environmental science and
environmental movements are complementary. To date, we
might interpret that proposal as an early attempt to integrate
environmental stakeholders in a transdisciplinary scientic
approach. Even at present, the HNR theme within the GEC
context is still not social science mainstream, but it has
gained momentum as will be demonstrated below. This is
especially the case for the sustainability discourse in the
context of the social situation in the early 21st century.
The remaining parts of this contribution will examine some-
what more closely the social dimension of sustainability and
present some consequences with respect to historical, theo-
retical, behavioral and political aspects of the HNR within
the GEC context.
SUSTAINABILITY: THE SOCIAL DIMENSION
What matters about GEC and sustainable development
is the human dimension . But obvious difculties arise
when operationalizing this idea (Rotmans, 1998; Rockwell,
1998). The concept of GC is broader than that of GEC.
GC refers to the totality of changes on the planet Earth,
including all human intentions and alterations (Rotmans,
1998). It involves both the biophysical and the human sys-
tem, whereas GEC refers to the human-induced biophysical
changes only. To disentangle the natural from the anthro-
pogenic changes within the GEC framework represents a
major exercise fraught with difculty.
The sustainability concept, according to Merle Jacob,
is ambiguous; its utility diminishes when one tries to
operationalize the concept (Jacob, 1996). The ambigu-
ity, oscillating between an anthropocentric orientation that
focuses on the needs of future generations, and an ecocen-
tric view that concentrates on living within the carrying
capacity of supporting ecosystems, owes much to the nor-
mative character of the sustainability concept, as Rotmans
argues, and depends on the cultural perspective of the actors
using it. Hence different cultural perspectives would have
to be elaborated and translated into different preferences
so as to arrive at an operational denition of sustainable
development that is linked to the notion of GC (Rot-
mans, 1998). The categorization of cultural perspectives
and biased preferences could be linked to Dunlaps and
Cattons (1979) paradigmatic shift and dichotomy between
the human exemptionalist (exceptionalist) and the new eco-
logical paradigm.
Sustainability emerged as a new development paradigm
out of the concept of ecodevelopment , its predecessor.
The term was popularized by the Brundtland Report, Our
Common Future , from 1987. The goal was to reconcile
environment and development, yet there was a strong bias
in favor of environmental sustainability, which, of course,
was necessary to counterbalance the strong emphasis on
economic growth.
What is social sustainability? When we discuss social, or
perhaps more appropriately societal, sustainability we can
build on a relative consensus by saying that we are search-
ing for the criteria to explain why and how societies are sus-
tained. It would then be possible to make some reasonable
predictions about the future. We use data from six to eight
thousand years of human civilization composed of, say,
200300 generations of people. Biologically speaking, this
THE CHANGING HUMANNATURE RELATIONSHIPS (HNR) IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 17
is minute even though we tend to think of it as a relatively
long period in historical, political and sociological terms.
What are the factors that maintain or help maintain a
social entity for a longer period of time, such as a social
group or society at large? Putting the question like this,
hints at a quick and simple answer. On closer investiga-
tion, however, we see that it might involve the totality of
social science theory including those parts that are yet to
be written. With all of these constraints in mind, Serbser
(2000) in a contribution to Gaia (see Gaia Hypothesis,
Volume 5) a SwissGerman, multidisciplinary journal
covering ecological perspectives in science, the humani-
ties, and economics suggested the following procedure.
Let us identify those or some of those necessary condi-
tions without which social (societal) survival would not
be feasible. We talk about formal requirements in a prag-
matic sense: they should be independent of each other,
yet in combination constitute the societal context in a
total bio-cultural sense. Six preconditions (three cultural
and three ecological) for a sustainable human society are
suggested. The cultural order contains social action, con-
stitution of social groupings, and their transformation in
the sense of social change. These conditions for societal
sustainability are contained in and derived from estab-
lished contributions to sociological theory. The ecolog-
ical order includes social space, social metabolism and
dominance.
Social action is intentional and linked to symbolic sys-
tems such as our language, which is sufciently imprecise
to enable us to deal with complex issues. Social groups or
social units as subsystems are constituted by the notion of
self-identity and, complementarily, by a sharp outline den-
ing other, competing social units. These groups undergo a
constant process of reorganization, that is, transformation
or social change. Social groups need a spatial environment
as a constituting frame. Social space denes the situation of
social action; it determines symbols and language. Social
metabolism refers to the activities and interactions of social
groups: they produce, they consume, and they reproduce
themselves, under a regulatory framework of legal and eth-
ical principles. Dominance, nally, refers to social control,
the power structure and governance (including the system
of checks and balances).
All six features social action, social groupings,
social change, social space, social metabolism, domi-
nance according to Serbser (2000), work in combination
and, as an interacting set, they determine the survivabil-
ity and sustainability of a society. But (as Serbser notes
with regret) these features and their interaction have hardly
been taken into account in the social sustainability dis-
course.
As these ideas are very recent, they are necessarily still
somewhat vague. The yardstick to measure the degree to
which they are analytically concrete and applicable could be
as follows: First, they could serve as a tool to facilitate the
determination, perhaps on a quantitative scale, of whether
or not any given social (or societal) situation is sustainable.
Second, in a more dynamic sense, they could produce
recommendations for the implementation of measures as
an incremental approach to societal sustainability.
The examples of integrated and sustainable coastal man-
agement or the deep sea commons, to take extreme and
topical examples for regulated social processes, show that
inequalities or simply competing interests need to be nego-
tiated in a process of mutual control and bargaining. Even
if some disagreement remains, consensus must be reached
on the degree of disagreement accepted. If this does not
happen, social exclusion will occur, either voluntarily or
as a result of external force. The state or process of social
exclusion is certainly not a sustainable one because there
will always be group members, be it individuals or states,
that will aim to reverse a dissatisfactory situation. It may
thus be concluded that consensus building by negotiation
indicates a state or process of social sustainability. We
may term the absence of such indicators negative social
sustainability .
Global inequality is a topic that was discussed exten-
sively in the 1970s on an international scale, as early as
1972, during the United Nations Conference on the Human
Environment (UNCHE I) in Stockholm (Glaeser, 1997).
The theme took on a new dimension during the GEC debate.
More explicitly than ever before are NorthSouth relations
and inequalities linked to environmental problems that have
been intimately connected with livelihood concerns. Fol-
lowing the two oil crises of 1973 and 1979, and the lost
decade of the 1980s which was characterised by huge pub-
lic debt and structural adjustments in the South, GEC is no
longer dened within a social or cultural context (Redclift
and Sage, 1998).
Environmental problems are viewed differently in the
South than they are in the North. Poverty ecology gives
priority to livelihood concerns (Agarwal and Narain, 1991);
the focus is on the impacts of trade liberalization, the
repayment of international debts, and structural adjustment.
These aspects of globalization differ markedly from the
lifestyle concerns characteristic of Northern wealth ecol-
ogy . Here the environmental problems associated with
GEC are climate change, acid rain, ozone depletion, loss
of biodiversity and the collapse of sheries in various parts
of the world. Two decades after the United Nations Gen-
eral Assembly had agreed in 1980 on a drinking water
decade (Glaeser and Phillips-Howard, 1983), the absence
of clean drinking water is still considered to be the major
environmental problem for millions in the South, causing
disease and epidemics as recently illustrated in Mozam-
bique in 2000. The International Monetary Fund (IMF)
policy and other adjustment policies may be responsible for
environmental degradation when resource needs increase or
18 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
additional pressures are exerted, for instance, on marginal
soils or common goods. Two striking examples of this
are forest depletion due to rewood extraction and sh
stock depletion in coastal waters due to over-shing and
eutrophication.
Equity conicts are social sustainability conicts. The
South cannot sustain itself in social terms if social inequal-
ities exist. To reduce inequalities means to come closer to
intragenerational equity which, on the other hand, could
contradict intergenerational equity, that is, the care for
future generations. Both equity issues could contradict the
policy of environmental efciency using energy tax incen-
tives or tradable pollution permits. The latter issue, equity
versus environmental efciency, is based on the value we
as a global society attach to nature, concretely to the service
functions of the global ecosystem, such as the environmen-
tal cleanup function natures own regenerative capacity.
Global commons, such as the oceans, are global sinks; they
absorb, in particular, many carbon-based pollutants. Forests,
too, act as global sinks in the sense of pollutant absorbers
but, unlike the oceans, they are nationally owned. Social
justice in the sense of intragenerational equity, for instance,
in the case of forests, would thus call for compensation
to be paid to the owners of common goods by the pol-
luters. According to Redclift and Sage (1998), a global
contract would mean that Southern development concerns
would have to be met before Northern global environ-
mental issues are contended with. So we have come full
circle back to where we started 1972 in Stockholm! Envi-
ronment versus development.
From the developing world point of view, poverty
reduction, redistribution of wealth and socioeconomic equa-
lity or at least equity may be the main issues of social
sustainability environmental sustainability being its pre-
requisite. Some term it participation , consensus build-
ing through negotiation and social competition , or the
absence of social exclusion . The overall theme is social
justice. In a useful synopsis, Goodland (1995) produced a
table in which social, economic, and environmental sustain-
ability are juxtaposed. Following a widely accepted deni-
tion, sustainability means maintenance of capital. Capital
embraces a social, a human and a natural form. Social (or
moral) capital is constituted, among other things, by toler-
ance, compassion, patience, cultural identity, community
cohesion, honesty standards, laws/institutions, and disci-
pline, and requires maintenance in terms of shared val-
ues, equal rights, community participation, and religious
and cultural interaction. The creation of social capital is
needed to achieve social sustainability. Conversely, there
can be no social sustainability without environmental sta-
bility the latter providing the basic conditions for the
former.
Environmental sustainability (as a pre-requisite for social
stability) means that natural capital must be maintained.
Human welfare is to be improved by protecting raw material
sources and by ensuring proper sinks for human wastes.
Renewables are to be kept within regeneration rates; the
depletion rate for non-renewables must be kept within the
renewable substitution rate. The amount of wastes produced
should not exceed the assimilative natural-environmental
capacity. Scale is thus added to efciency and allocation
as a third economic criterion. It constrains the throughput of
energy and material through the economic subsystem and
thus controls the use of natural capital from environmental
sources to sinks.
Economic sustainability means holding the scale of the
economic subsystem within the biophysical limits and
includes production and consumption. Economic sustain-
ability devolves on consuming interest, rather than capital
(Goodland, 1995). As economists value goods and services
in monetary terms, major problems arise when natural cap-
ital is to be valued. This is especially true for resources
of common access such as the oceans or air. The prob-
lem becomes all the more complicated, once we realize
that more than just economic values are attached to natu-
ral goods and services. Our understanding of individuals
values is limited; to understand and evaluate choices is
a cross-disciplinary exercise. Ideally, economic values are
represented by market transactions. If there is no market,
as in the case of common access resources, transactions
may be replaced by consumers willingness to spend time
or money to gain access, or by their willingness to reveal
a preference for a site or a style of recreation (Lock-
wood, 1999). The willingness-to-pay approach to elicit
environmental values may be complemented by participa-
tory social deliberation as a means to inform the environ-
mental decision-makers (Brouwer et al., 1999).
There are obvious limits to the economic valuation
of nature and the environment. Economics can certainly
not cope with what philosophers term intrinsic values of
ecosystems, non-human species or the inanimate nature.
Whether intrinsic values are justied and necessary for
an environmental ethic is still a matter of dispute. The
top value in a value hierarchy may be assigned to human
survival or human quality of life on the one side, or
to landscapes and the natural world on the other. These
values will eventually be incorporated into decision pro-
cesses and depend on (often conicting) positions held
and adopted by stakeholders (Lockwood, 1999). Values
and norms must be activated by cognitions specic to
the environmental context, for instance, by adverse con-
sequences anticipated for humans (anthropocentric value
orientation) or for natural ecosystems (biocentric value ori-
entation). Socio-psychological models are used to measure
environmental values and attitudes, and to research whether
these have been processed and transformed into corre-
sponding behavior (Dunlap and Van Liere, 1978; Stern
et al., 1993, 1995, among others). Held values reect
THE CHANGING HUMANNATURE RELATIONSHIPS (HNR) IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 19
social settings and norms and interact with policy issues.
To incorporate environmental values and behavior into
political decision-making would certainly enhance social
sustainability.
It appears that there has been a shift in the logical
hierarchy of sustainability whereby the need for social sus-
tainability is a motivating factor to pursue environmental
sustainability, which, in turn, depends upon economic sus-
tainability. In this sense, the approach followed appears
to be anthropocentric, notwithstanding the fact that the
notion of sustainability is inspired by the care for nature
and the preservation of the environment, which may be
termed enlightened anthropocentrism (Summerer, 1989).
Environmental care can be integrated into authentic human
development. Authors who agree with this somewhat nor-
mative statement will still disagree as to what is included in
human development. If it is a rather qualitative concept
in the sense of human well-being, measured in terms of
health, knowledge, social order or community, it may not
correlate closely with the quantitative concept of economic
growth and material afuence (Dower, 2000). The question
of values shows up again in the problem of alignment or
non-alignment of social and natural change, in the Western
world-view and enlightenment imperative to control and
use nature, and in the dilemma between development and
environment.
It is fairly obvious that social sustainability and nega-
tive social sustainability to a large extent depend on the
theory (or theories) involved. Sustainability and its con-
verse are theoretically constructed but this does not mean
that they are untrue or unreal: The notion of social con-
struction simply implies that social action relies on social
concepts, and that social concepts depend on perspectives,
some of which are scientic. Social constructs determine
not only the notion of social sustainability, they also deter-
mine the notion of environmental sustainability and, as a
consequence, the relationship between humans and their
social and natural environment between societies and
nature. These relationships change as the underlying con-
cepts change. The most recent of such transformations
occurred in the context of what is most commonly termed,
accepted, and constructed as GEC. The natural and the
social sciences frame their variegated perspectives to deal
with methodologically proper aspects of the HNR. Again,
these perspectives are constructed in terms of scientic
convention, and from the historical and methodological
standpoint represented by a given discipline. Dissidents in
different disciplines agreed on a dissenting perspective: that
is, a unifying approach. Their scope has been integrative
as opposed to analytical compartmentalized. The holis-
tic approach to dealing with HNRs of various kinds and
in a multitude of facets has been called human ecology .
Human ecology, enriching the synthetic and systems ori-
ented ecological outlook with the social and cultural human
actor approach, eventually became a new academic eld
and subject of its own.
CONCLUSION: GLOBALONEY OR WHAT?
What conclusions can we draw with respect to HNR and
their changes within the GEC context and at the historic
opening of the third millennium? We may sort and distin-
guish between aspects related to history, theory, ethics and
behavior, and policy.
History
The public in most countries seems to be poorly informed
about global risk issues. This is the outcome of an inter-
national survey of public awareness and concern about
environmental problems conducted in 1992 by the Gallup
International Institute in 24 nations, diverse in terms of
their geography, economics and social settings. Yet, even
if laypersons have a limited understanding of global warm-
ing in a more technical sense, the issue s appearance as
a visible social problem has surely heightened the pub-
lic s general sense that humans are having a detrimental
impact on the environment (Dunlap, 1998). These con-
cerns extend from the local to the global environment
and include the various aspects of the environmental prob-
lematique. Ecological awareness has evolved over decades,
beginning in the 1960s, and has developed into an ecologi-
cal worldview. Public attention may oscillate in accord with
uctuating media attention, but it is unlikely to disappear
altogether. Environmentally oriented social movements and
organizations have mushroomed in the North as well as
in the South. To what extent public awareness translates
into behavioral changes is a matter of dispute and ongoing
research.
The ndings on varying degrees of public awareness, on
a basically high level, are supported by a media survey
covering the American mass media in the ten-year period
from 1987 to 1996 (Mazur, 1998). Until the late 1980s,
environmental attention had focused either on biospheric
issues exclusively, such as the destruction of rainforest
or species extinction, or atmospheric hazards exclusively,
mainly global warming, acid rain, and ozone depletion.
Theses issues began to cluster during the 1987 1990
period, showing up as global problems. This was also a
period of rising media coverage resulting in widespread
public attention. Some of these hazards were connected;
for instance, the greenhouse effect, the ozone hole, and
the extinction of dinosaurs were interrelated in the pub-
lic consciousness. A drop in the coverage of GEC can be
observed for the period from 1992 to 1996, following the
Rio summit. There are several explanations for this decline,
none of which seems to be wholly satisfactory (Mazur,
1998). One plausible explanation, however, is that new
20 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
story lines such as the downfall of the Soviet Union and
the breakup of satellite countries in the early 1990s, or
the Gulf War in 1991 had greater appeal for journalists and
news agencies in an evolving age of news as entertainment:
infotainment .
Theory
GC issues and the HNR are polarized between epistemo-
logical idealism and epistemological realism. The distinc-
tion between the two positions appears clearer than before
despite the fact that there has been a certain tendency
to tackle conventional environmental problems subjec-
tively in the social sciences and objectively in the natural
sciences: environmental awareness and reexivity versus
hard facts and measured observation in environmental
reality . Philosophers today may recall a comparable sit-
uation in the late 18th and the early 19th century when the
German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, resolved a similar
academic conict.
Contemporary social science investigations have either
evolved along the path of social constructionism (or con-
structivism), representing neo-idealism, or they have fol-
lowed an orientation that pre-supposes a material world
independent of percipient human actors (Rosa and Dietz,
1998) neo-realism.
The neo-realism guides the social and scientic anal-
ysis of environmental changes as well as the polit-
ical economy interactions between environment and
society. A famous example is the still inuential
IPAT model which was proposed in the early 1970s
and assumed that environmental impact I is a func-
tion of population size P, afuence per capita A,
and technological development T (see DPSIR (Driv-
ing Forces Pressures State Impacts Responses), Vol-
ume 4). The systems approach in world modeling sim-
ulates similar relationships on the basis that there are
crucial driving forces that regulate the system and that
are probably inuenced by policy and politics. Social
scientists have often criticized such concepts for being
too simplistic. The approach, they argue, is too mech-
anistic and does not reect human agency to the
extent that it is actually present, that is, the com-
plexity and reexivity (reexiveness) of social action
and political response (Glaeser, 1995; Rosa and Dietz,
1998).
The neo-idealist orientation towards problems and re-
search on environmental change issues highlights two
aspects:
1. the uncertainties in the body of knowledge and the
scientic knowledge claims, and
2. the attempt to provide explanations for scientic
and public recognition of the environmental change
problem as inuenced and shaped by historical, social
and political forces (Rosa and Dietz, 1998).
In this approach, the emergence of scientic concern
and the rise of public awareness are scrutinized; these
issues eventually become more important than the envi-
ronmental problem under dispute. Environmental threats
to the global ecosystem or human health are perceived
only to the extent that they attract media attention and
are publicized accordingly. To a great extent, the social
constructivist approach is reexive, and it is applied as a
science of science meta-theory. Constructivist methodol-
ogy is useful in detecting critical shortcomings in realist
models, which may be based on or entail false (or at least
uncertain) assumptions. Social constructionism, on the other
hand, has been criticized for neglecting real world problems
and concerns in that humannature relations and environ-
mental change issues are constructed or conceptualized,
that is, produced or created rather than extracted or
mapped .
It seems wise, then, to re-adopt the Kantian position in
the sense that the strongholds of epistemological idealism
and realism are to be combined. The critical potential of
social constructionism should be retained without forgetting
that the survival or livelihood problems facing humankind
do not disappear when we turn our attention away from
them. We may cautiously suggest that the issue of GEC has
largely been adopted by natural scientists, who view them-
selves as realists. The underlying models and assumptions
ought to be scrutinized by reecting which construction
represents which stakeholders interests. The issue of HNR,
on the other hand, has been taken up through idealist social
science and theory of science. What is at stake here are
HNR changes over time, space, and culture; the social con-
struction of GEC themes is among the relationships under
consideration. Recent examples of this include the identi-
cation of driving socio-political forces behind GEC, closely
related to factors of modernity (Spaargaren and Mol, 1992;
Mol and Spaargaren, 1993; Wilenius, 1999); an heuristic
reading of classical sociology texts to provide theoretical
insights into GEC studies (Prades, 1999), or the sacral-
ization of nature and cosmocentric mythology (Giner and
Tabara, 1999).
Ethics and Behavior
We take a closer look at the mythology issue since it
takes up behavioral aspects and the ethical complex with
respect to ecological rationality. Religious responses to
GEC may inspire modications in how we treat the world
environment, this in turn having repercussions for how
we conceive human actions and what we deem to be a
rational social order. These conceptions have shaped for
certain ecology-minded groups in society, at least the
present cultural situation which interprets GEC as risky.
THE CHANGING HUMANNATURE RELATIONSHIPS (HNR) IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 21
It is argued that eco-religion is a necessary condition to
implant ecologically rational behavior. Environmental anx-
iety coincides with the chiliastic movement (see the section
on the millennial shift: gnosticism and the environment)
which views (eco)religious disobedience as cause for apoc-
alypse. GC and growing scarcity are seen as a consequence
of our environmental misconduct. Religious responses shift
from monotheism to pantheism, whereby nature as God
(deus sive natura) becomes the object of worship. Examples
like Lovelocks Gaia hypothesis or the deep ecology move-
ment illustrate well how this potential can grow into a rm
religious belief. Global ecological rationality will emerge as
a new form of rationality and induce new cultural contexts
of action affecting personal individual behavior and action
to mitigate environmental destruction. Whereas eco-religion
will eventually die, its behavioral aspects may still remain
with future generations. The ecological ethic will thus
survive the spirit of the corresponding religious beliefs that
inspired it (Giner and Tabara, 1999).
While the notion of ecological rationality considers the
intricate relationship between religion and science, the
mechanisms and processes for social change as a means
to achieve global ecological rationality are not revealed.
Still, it should be noted in our context of HNR that the
metaphysical and ethical components of transformation are
linked to social behavior and policy formation as they
relate to GEC (Giner and Tabara, 1999), and as they
are nally incorporated into everyday culture, manners and
lifestyles of the world population, forgetting their eco-
religious roots.
Policy
Environmental policy and management represent the human
action approach to GEC in the HNR. Globalization includes
global environmental policy and management. Global envi-
ronmental problems cannot be solved at the national level
but the national level will still retain its importance and
role in the development of environmental policy. The sub-
sidiarity principle is pursued by the European Union. It
means that a higher policy level replaces a lower policy
level only if the lower level cannot appropriately take care
of the problems under consideration. The subsidiarity prin-
ciple is expected to be adopted on a global scale: Local
environmental problems should be tackled locally; global
problems should be dealt with globally. The pre-requisite
that there be competent global scale actors to manage this,
has thus far not been fullled. There is no World Environ-
ment Organization that has the power and the standing of
the World Health Organization or the World Trade Organi-
zation. The global environment is regulated by Multilateral
Environmental Agreements, such as the 1997 Kyoto Proto-
col, which regulates the reduction of greenhouse gases. The
agreement acknowledges global commons to which open
access is denied. To date there are more than 170 multi-
lateral agreements to regulate environmental protection on
a global scale. National participation is voluntary; not all
countries sign or participate in such agreements. Whether
an agreement is supported or opposed depends very much
on the international epistemic communities that repre-
sent expert networks and act across national boundaries
(Petschow and Droge, 1999; Swanson and Johnston, 1999).
The international research community on the human
dimensions of GC includes natural and social science
scholars with common interests, working in universities,
research institutions and government laboratories. They
communicate with each other at conferences or work-
shops, through scientic journals, and via the Internet.
Major changes in academic development, as induced by
global environmental research, include the growing vol-
ume of inter- and transdisciplinary research to address
human and environmental problems, the commitment to
public policy and management, and the rapid diffusion of
information, via the electronic media, among the research
community and other stakeholders. This new structur-
ing and production of knowledge is sometimes addressed
and discussed as the electronic invisible college (Brunn
and OLear, 1999). The members of the GC community
have research interests in various overlapping areas within
the humanenvironment interface: human ecology. They
include cross-disciplinary clusters, working on specic top-
ics such as environmental and climate change, land use
and resource management, integrative coastal zone man-
agement and eco-tourism, sustainable agriculture, environ-
mental protection and food security. The electronic invisible
college promotes virtual conferences on specialized topics
of GC among leaders, students, and practitioners.
Scientic expertise provides important inputs into envi-
ronmental policy, planning, and the decision-making pro-
cess, from global level to local level. A major difculty,
apart from the implementation decits, which have been
widely discussed by political scientists, may be termed
here (adopting macro economics terminology) the magic
triangle of sustainability . Social (societal), environmen-
tal and economic sustainability represent conicting goals
that must be optimized. Optimization means not only a
participatory bargaining process between the stakeholders
involved; it also requires scientic information, hard or at
least fuzzy data with respect to changes in ecological carry-
ing or absorbing capacity for a given region, and resulting
social and economic impacts. Sustainability is very often
not accountable when it comes to concrete cases. We live
in a state of uncertainty regarding scientic data. The ethi-
cal and political consequence will then be to act cautiously,
in a value-conservative mode: If the precise limits to sus-
tainability are unknown, it is imperative that we not bar
the path to increasing or at least maintaining sustainability.
Just such a precautionary principle has, to some extent,
22 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
been adopted in environmental legislation (see Precaution-
ar y Pr inciple, Volume 4). Its implementation depends on
the HNR that we as the 21st century GEC society wish
to realize. Reviewing the politico-environmental agendas
since Stockholm 1972, we may state cautiously that eco-
logical modernization , which applies high-tech efciency
and ecological taxes within a growing market, has won
acceptance in many countries; whereas ecological struc-
tural change , which builds on the social reorganization of
society to achieve consumerist modesty and lifestyle self-
limitation, is far from becoming a political option.
In summarizing and concluding let me raise a nal ques-
tion: Is all talk of globalization just a lot of globaloney
as a number of journalists and critics seem to believe or
are there substantive issues that must and can only be
dealt with on a worldwide scale globally; and, if so, what
does dealing with them globally really mean (for Occi-
dent and Orient, North and South, women and men, rich
and poor)? The HNR has been a major theme in natural
philosophy for centuries, if not millennia. The aspect of
change was added more recently with respect to concepts
of nature. The global environment was hardly a human
concern before the 1970s a decade that has witnessed
the limits-to-growth discourse, the rst UN Conference
on the Human Environment, and two oil crises reminding
the global society of the simple fact that global natural
resources are nite. The avant-garde of the social sci-
ences dealt with all of the above issues; by interpreting
them as social constructs, to reveal some different percep-
tions. The scientic community realized that the search for
GEC solutions needs inter- and transdisciplinary (includ-
ing non-scientic stakeholder) synthesis and policy related
cooperation (among others: Brewer, 1986; Ravetz, 1986;
Committee On Research Opportunities and Priorities For
EPA, 1997).
GC is reected in regional and local development. Devel-
opment and change in different parts of the world or in
different segments of society create winners and losers .
Perceptions are usually considered to be a function of cul-
ture and development. The inverse tendency is also true:
Perceptions such as humans are the masters of the uni-
verse (dominium terrae) or exploitation of nature enables
us to upheave the social order (dominium hominis) induce
or determine new developments. Globaloney ? This is
pretty serious business. Let us work together to turn glob-
aloney into meaningful efforts to provide every citizen
of the globe with prosperity, security, and a healthy envi-
ronment in which to thrive. This is what is intended by
globally sustainable politics, policies, and livelihoods.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank Wolfgang van den Daele, Rainer Dobert,
Ted Munn, and Peter Timmerman for their helpful
comments and constructive criticisms of the manuscript in
its earlier stages.
I am also grateful to Mary Kelley-Bibra and Emma
Aulanko for technical assistance and other invaluable help
in the nal preparation of this article.
REFERENCES
Adam, B (2000) The Temporal Gaze: the Challenge for Social
Theory in the Context of GM Food, Br. J. Sociol., 51,
125142.
Agarwal, A and Narain, S (1991) Global Warming in an Unequal
World: a Case of Environmental Colonialism, Center for Sci-
ence and Environment, New Delhi.
Allardt, E (1999) The Future of the Social Sciences in the 21st
Century a Comment, Curr. Sociol., 47(4), 1317.
Aspen Institute (1999) A New Transatlantic Agenda for the Next
Century, Aspen Institute, Berlin.
Barker, M (2000) The Book of Enoch and Cosmic Sin, Ecologist,
30(1), 3034.
Beck, U (2000) The Cosmopolitan Perspective: Sociology of the
Second Age of Modernity, Br. J. Sociol., 51, 79105.
Boron, A A (1999) A Social Theory for the 21st Century?, Curr.
Sociol., 47(4), 4764.
Boyer, R (1999) Le Paradoxe des Sciences Sociales: Les
Vues dun Economiste Dissident, Curr. Sociol., 47(4),
1945.
Brennan, E M (1999) Population, Urbanization, and Security: a
Summary of the Issues, Environmental Change & Security
Project Report No. 5, 414.
Brewer, G D (1986) Methods for Synthesis: Policy Exercises,
in Sustainable Development of the Biosphere, eds W C Clark
and R E Munn, IIASA-Book, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 455473.
Brouwer, R, Powe, N, Turner, R K, Bateman, I J, and Lang-
ford, I H (1999) Public Attitudes to Contingent Valuation and
Public Consultation, Environ. Values, 8(3), 325347.
Brunn, S D and OLear, S R (1999) Research and Communica-
tion in the Invisible College of the Human Dimensions of
Global Change, Global Environ. Change, 9, 285301.
Buttel, F H (1987) New Directions in Environmental Sociology,
Am. Rev. Sociol., 13, 456488.
Buttel, F H and Taylor, P J (1992) Environmental Sociology and
Global Environmental Change: a Critical Assessment, Soc.
Nat. Res., 5, 211230.
Castells, M (2000) Materials for an Exploratory Theory of the
Network Society, Br. J. Sociol., 51, 524.
Chaitanya, K (2000) Man, Nature and Cosmos in Vedic India,
Ecologist, 30(1), 2124.
Committee on Research Opportunities and Priorities For EPA
(1997) Building a Foundation. For Sound Environmental Deci-
sions, National Research Council, National Academy Press,
Washington, DC.
Csef, H (1999) Die Millenniums-Panik, Zeittypische Angste an
der Schwelle zum neuen Jahrtausend, Universitas, 54(642),
11371149.
Dower, N (2000) Human Development Friend or Foe to Envi-
ronmental Ethics? Environ. Values, 9(1), 3954.
THE CHANGING HUMANNATURE RELATIONSHIPS (HNR) IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 23
Dunlap, R E (1998) Lay Perceptions of Global Risk: Public Views
of Global Warming in Cross-national Context, Int. Sociol., 13,
473398.
Dunlap, R E and Catton, W R (1979) Environmental Sociology,
Ann. Rev. Sociol., 5, 243273.
Dunlap, R E and Van Liere, K (1978) The New Environmental
Paradigm, J. Environ. Educ., 9, 1019.
Echlin, E (2000) An African Church Sets the Example, Ecologist,
30(1), 43.
Esping-Andersen, G (2000) Two Societies, One sociology and No
Theory, Br. J. Sociol., 51, 5977.
Featherstone, M (2000) Archiving Cultures, Br. J. Sociol., 51,
161184.
Geissler, K A (1999) Der Ubergang im Ubergang, Universitas,
54(642), 11621173.
Giner, S and Tabara, D (1999) Cosmic Piety and Ecological
Rationality, Int. Sociol., 14, 5982.
Glaeser, B (1995) Environment, Development, Agriculture, Inte-
grated Policy Through Human Ecology, UCL Press, London.
Glaeser, B (1996) Sociology of the Environment: a German-
American Comparison, Human Ecol. Rev., 3(1), 3242.
Glaeser, B (1997) Environment and Developing Countries, in
The International Handbook of Environmental Sociology, eds
M Redclift and G Woodgate, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham,
101118.
Glaeser, B and Phillips-Howard, K D, eds (1983) Clean Water for
Third World Development, Vierteljahresberichte: Problems of
International Cooperation 94, 317426, special issue.
Goldsmith, E (2000) Religion at the Millennium, Ecologist, 30(1),
48.
Goldsmith, E (2000) Archaic Societies and Cosmic Order a
Summary, Ecologist, 30(1), 1517.
Goodland, R (1995) The Concept of Environmental Sustainabil-
ity, Ann. Rev. Ecol. System., 26, 124.
Grifth, B (2000) Return to the Center, Ecologist, 30(1), 911.
Hilgers, M (1999) Zum Jahrtausendwechsel, Universitas, 54(642),
11251127.
Jacob, M L (1996) Sustainable Development: a Constructive Cri-
tique of the United Nations Debate, Department of Theory of
Science and Research, Goteborgs Universitet Goteborg.
Kiely, R and Mareet, P, eds (1998) Globalisation and the Third
World, Routledge, London.
Klingebiel, R and Randeria, S, eds (1998) Globalisierung aus
Frauensicht, Bilanzen und Visionen, Dietz, Bonn.
Latour, B (2000) When Things Strike Back: a Possible Contribu-
tion of Science Studies to the Social Studies, Br. Jr. Sociol.,
51, 107123.
Lockwood, M (1999) Humans Valuing Nature: Synthesizing In-
sights from Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Environ.
Values, 8(3), 381401.
Lovelock, J E (1979) Gaia: a New Look at Life on Earth, Oxford
University Press, Oxford.
Martin, H P and Schumann, H (1996) Die Globalisierungs-
falle. Der Angriff auf Demokratie und Wohlstand, Rowohlt,
Hamburg.
Massey, D (1999) Negotiating Disciplinary Boundaries, Curr.
Sociol., 47(4), 512.
Mazur, A (1998) Global Environmental Change in the News:
198790 vs. 19926, Int. Sociol., 13, 457472.
Mol, A P J and Spaargaren, G (1993) Environment, Modernity
and the Risk-Society: the Apocalyptic Horizon of Environ-
mental Reform, Int. Sociol., 8, 421459.
Murray, R (2000) The Cosmic Covenant, Ecologist, 30(1),
25 29.
Nasr, S H (2000) The Spiritual and Religious Background of the
Environmental Crisis, Ecologist, 30(1), 18 20.
Parry, M and Livermore, M, eds (1999) A New Assessment of the
Global Effects of Climate Change, Global Environ. Change, 9,
supplementary issue.
Pearce, D (1999) Economics and Environment. Essays on Ecolog-
ical Economics and Sustainable Development, Edward Elgar,
Cheltenham.
Petschow, U and Droge, S (1999) Globalisierung und Umwelt-
politik. Die Rolle des Nationalstaates, Aus Politik und Zeit-
geschichte, B23/99, 2331.
Prades, J A (1999) Global Environmental Change and Contem-
porary Society: Classical Sociological Analysis Revisited, Int.
Sociol., 14, 731.
Ravetz, J R (1986) Usable Knowledge, Usable Ignorance:
Incomplete Science with Policy Implications. In Sustainable
Development of the Biosphere, eds W C Clark and R E Munn,
IIASA-Book, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
415432.
Redclift, M and Sage, C (1998) Global Environmental Change
and Global Inequality: North/South Perspectives, Int. Sociol.,
13, 499516.
Reif, A (1999) Der Prozess der Globalisierung ist unumkehrbar,
Interview with H. James, Universitas, 54(642), 12121220.
Rockwell, R C (1998) From a Fictional Globe to Poetic Ecosys-
tems: Modeling Human Interactions with the Environment,
in Earth System Analysis. Integrating Science for Sustainabil-
ity, eds H J Schellnhuber and V Wenzel, Springer, Berlin,
461487.
Rosa, E A and Dietz, T (1998) Climate Change and Society:
Speculation, Construction and Scientic Investigation, Int.
Sociol., 13, 421455.
Rossi, V (2000) Sacred Cosmology in the Christian Tradition,
Ecologist, 30(1), 3539.
Roth, S (2000) The Cosmic Vision of Hildegard of Bingen,
Ecologist, 30(1), 4042.
Rotmans, J (1998) Global Change and Sustainable Develop-
ment: Towards an Integrated Conceptual Model, in Earth
System Analysis. Integrating Science for Sustainability, eds
H J Schellnhuber and V Wenzel, Springer, Berlin, 421453.
Sassen, S (2000) New Frontiers Facing Urban Sociology at the
Millennium, 51, 143159.
Schellnhuber, H J (1999) Earth system Analysis and the
Second Copernican Revolution, Nature, 402, supplement,
C19C23.
Schellnhuber, H J and Pilardeaux, B (1999) Den Globalen Wan-
del Durch Globale Strukturpolitik gestalten. Aus Politik Zeit-
geschichte, 5253(99), 311.
Schellnhuber, H J and Wenzel, V, eds (1998) Earth System
Analysis. Integrating Science for Sustainability, Springer,
Berlin.
Schmid, K P (1999) Wahrlich, Wahrlich, Ich Sage Euch Was Uns
Fur 2000 Alles Vorhergesagt Wurde und Warum Fast Nichts
Davon Eintraf, Universitas, 54(642), 11501161.
24 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Schulz, M and Kracht, U, eds (1999) Food Security and
Nutrition. The Global Challenge, St. Martin s Press,
Berlin.
Serbser, W (2000) Societale Nachhaltigkeit, Gaia, 9, 71 75.
Spaargaren, G and Mol, A P J (1992) Sociology, Environment,
and Modernity: Ecological Modernization as a Theory of
Social Change, Society Nat. Res., 5, 323 344.
Stern, P C, Dietz, T, and Guagnano, G A (1995) The New Eco-
logical Paradigm in Social-psychological Context, Environ.
Behav., 27, 723 743.
Stern, P C, Dietz, T, and Kalof, L (1993) Value Orientations,
Gender and Environmental Concern, Environ. Behav., 25,
322 348.
Summerer, S (1989) Vorsorge contra Nachsorge Ist Umwelt-
qualitat planbar? in Humano kologie. Grundlagen praventiver
Umweltpolitik, ed B Glaeser, Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen,
272 285.
Swanson, T and Johnston, S (1999) Global Environmental
Problems and International Environmental Agreements. The
Economics of International Institution Building, Edward Elgar,
Cheltenham.
Therborn, G (2000) At the Birth of Second Century Sociology:
Times of Re exivity, Spaces of Identity and Nodes of Knowl-
edge, Br. J. Sociol., 51, 37 57.
Urry, J (2000) Editor s Introduction: Sociology Facing the Mil-
lennium, Br. J. Sociol., 51, 1 3.
Urry, J (2000) Mobile Sociology, Br. J. Sociol., 51, 185 203.
Voegelin, E (1952) The New Science of Politics, The University
of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Voegelin, E (1959) Wissenschaft, Politik und Gnosis, Kosel,
Munich.
Vondung, K (1999) Die Apokalypse am Ende des zweiten Jahrtau-
sends, Universitas, 54(642), 1128 1136.
Wallerstein, I (2000) From Sociology to Historical Social Science:
Prospects and Obstacles, Br. J. Sociol., 51, 25 35.
Wilenius, M (1999) Sociology, Modernity and the Globalization
of Environmental Change, Int. Sociol., 14, 33 57.
Wilson, D (2000) Grandfather s Story, Ecologist, 30, 12 14.
Economics and Global Environmental Change
EBAN GOODSTEIN
Lewis and Clark College, Portland, OR, USA
Confronted with any environmental problem (whether toxic emissions from a local incinerator, or the vast
conundrum presented by global warming) the question how much is too much? necessarily forms the starting
point for an economic analysis. Since pollution and resource degradation are a by-product of material production,
and human welfare depends upon both material production and a livable environment, what is the right trade-
off? Of course, such a question is a normative one; as such it has no objectively right or wrong answer. Although
economists generally agree both on a common ethical framework, and a particular de nition of sustainability
as a desirable social goal, there is signi cant disagreement about how much pollution and resource degradation
society should tolerate if we are to achieve a sustainable economy. Some support the use of bene t cost (BC)
analysis to guide resource development and pollution decisions; others prefer a stricter precautionary principle.
As economists move to more positive analytical ground, however, broader agreement emerges, though on some
points signi cant debate remains. First, why do laissez faire market economies generate unsustainable outcomes?
Certainly because of negative externalities. These are dif cult to internalize through private negotiation owing
both to the predominance in the economy of open access common property resources, and the diffuse nature of
environmental harm. An additional argument is that markets encourage investments with rapid paybacks, at the
expense of longer-term investments.
Second, are there ways to reduce the costs of environmental regulation? Certainly by shifting away
from the current prescriptive forms of regulation, to more exible, incentive-based (IB) approaches. A
second approach supported by many environmental economists is to promote direct investment in clean
technology.
Finally, how can we promote environmental quality in poor countries? First, raising incomes for the poor
majority is a critical step; in the face of desperate poverty, the environment will become rapidly degraded.
Second, progress can be made in reducing population growth by recognizing the economic motives underlying
fertility decisions. Third, the complex links between rich country consumption, the movement towards free trade
and investment, and global environmental quality are important factors, if still poorly understood. Fourth,
effective global environmental agreements are hard (but not impossible) to achieve because they are public
goods, subject to free riding.
How much pollution is too much? How can we do better? And how can we resolve pressing global
environmental issues? Economic approaches to answering these questions share the goal of shedding light
on the trade-offs implicit in different environmental policy choices.
THE ETHICAL FRAMEWORK OF ECONOMICS:
UTILITARIANISM
Economists are in the contentious business of recommend-
ing what they perceive to be the mix of government
policies and private market institutions needed to maxi-
mize, in Adam Smiths words, The Wealth of Nations .
Wealth in the economists context should be interpreted
broadly to mean all those things that bring people a
high quality of life. Societies are poor, not wealthy, if
they have polluted air and water; if they lack wilderness
areas for recreation and solitude; and if they are unable
to satisfy a moral desire to protect other species from
extinction.
It is important to emphasize that economic analysts
are concerned with human welfare or happiness. To an
economist, saving the blue whale from extinction is valu-
able only insofar as doing so yields happiness (or pre-
vents tragedy) for present or future generations of people.
The existence of the whale independent of people is of
no importance. This human-centered (or anthropocentric)
moral foundation underlying economic analysis, which has
26 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
as its goal broad human happiness or utility, is rooted in
the 19th century ethical system known as Utilitarianism.
Some environmentalists are hostile to utilitarian argu-
ments for protecting the environment. Indeed, an eco-
nomic perspective on nature is often viewed as the primary
problem, rather than part of the solution. The philosopher
Mark Sagoff (1995, 618) puts it this way:
the destruction of biodiversity is the crime for which future
generations are the least likely to forgive us. The crime would
be as great or even greater if a computer could design or
store all the genetic data we might ever use or need from
the destroyed species. The reasons to protect nature are moral,
religious and cultural far more often than they are economic.
The focus on anthropocentric, utilitarian arguments by
economists is not meant to discount the importance of other
ethical views. Indeed, over the long run, non-utilitarian
moral considerations will largely determine the condition of
the planet which we pass on to our children and theirs. But
economic analysis is rmly wedded to this utilitarian ethi-
cal framework; moreover, arguments about human welfare
invariably crop up in debates over environmental protec-
tion, often playing dominant roles.
Within this utilitarian worldview, sustainability takes on
a particular meaning. Sustainable outcomes require that we
reduce pollution (or stop depleting resources) if doing so,
on balance, prevents the decline of living standards below
their current level for the typical (median) member of any
future generation (Pezzey, 1992).
MARKET SYSTEMS AND SUSTAINABILITY:
EXTERNALITIES
Economists largely agree that pure free market systems
are unlikely to generate sustainable outcomes (Goodstein,
1999a, Chapter 3). Laissez faire systems fail because of the
existence of negative externalities: costs generated in the
production or consumption of a good which are not borne
by the producer or consumer of the good. For example,
when I buy a liter of gasoline and burn it in my jet ski,
I impose a variety of costs on society as a whole, ranging
from the emission of local air and water pollutants, to global
warming. Many of these costs are not reected in the price
of gasoline. They are thus external to the buyer and seller.
If all resources in an economy were privately owned, and
environmental damages could be proved easily, then exter-
nalities would be internalized through private negotiation
or litigation. For example, if Bill Gates owned the Missis-
sippi River, and my jet ski was polluting it via emissions of
soluble hydrocarbons, then Bill could sue me and force me
to internalize the external costs imposed on his river. How-
ever, many important resources are not privately owned:
the air, rivers and streams, oceans, most forests, deserts
and other natural habitats. Moreover, environmental dam-
ages are often spread among many parties, and difcult to
prove in specic cases, creating high transactions costs for
private resolution of the externality problem. Given these
two features (the widespread presence of common property
resources, and the high transactions costs associated with
court claims for damages) economists agree that free market
systems will generate excessively high levels of pollution
and resource degradation.
The conventional solution to this problem is to force
companies and consumers to internalize externalities thro-
ugh government regulation. Regulation can be either pre-
scriptive (command-and-control, CAC), in which rms are
required to install particular types of clean up technolo-
gies, or it can be incentive based (IB). The latter approach
includes both pollution taxes, and marketable permit sys-
tems. These IB methods internalize externalities by forcing
rms to pay for pollution, but leave the specic method of
pollution reduction up to the companies themselves. (These
systems are discussed more fully below).
If government forces rms to pay for pollution through
regulation, how much should rms pay? The conventional
view is that businesses should pay an amount per unit of
pollution equal to the damage done by the last unit of pol-
lution emitted (the marginal unit of pollution). Thus, if the
last ton of sulfur dioxide coming out of a power plant stack
leads to economic damages of $200, than the plant should
pay $200 for every ton that it emits. In competitive markets,
setting pollution prices equal to marginal economic damage
in this way balances the costs of pollution control (higher
prices for products like electricity) against the benets (less
damage from pollution like acid rain), leading to maximum
total monetary benets to society.
Economists have developed a variety of techniques to
determine monetary values for pollution damages (Good-
stein, 1999a, Chapter 8). These range from the mundane
(fewer sick days for workers) to the highly controversial
(placing a dollar value on stroke deaths prevented, reduc-
tion in child IQ avoided, or biodiversity preserved). How
can these latter types of valuations be done?
As one example, the value of a life saved in benet cost
(BC) studies typically ranges from $210 million. These
numbers comes from studies that examine the wage pre-
mium for risky employment. Put overly simply, economists
have found that workers like police ofcers receive a wage
premium of around $500 for accepting a 1 in 10 000
increase in the risk of premature death on the job. 10 000
police ofcers thus exchange one of their lives for about
$5 million.
One can quarrel with this line of reasoning on many
grounds. And clearly, if considerations of this type dom-
inate, then uncertainty in dollar valuations of the benets
of environmental protection can loom large. Nevertheless,
economists have developed a number of tools for mone-
tizing important components of quality of life traditionally
left out of measures like gross domestic product (GDP).
ECONOMICS AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 27
This allows society to put a monetary value on pollution
prevention: for example, global warming damage estimates
from carbon dioxide emissions from coal red power plants
range from around half a penny per kWh to three cents per
kWh (Krupnick and Burtraw, 1996). And while numbers in
this range may ultimately turn out to be wrong, defenders
of this kind of estimation of the dollar benets of environ-
mental protection respond that even the wrong dollar value
is better than the default price of zero.
MARKET SYSTEMS AND SUSTAINABILITY:
SHORT TIME HORIZONS
While the problem of externalities can, in theory, be dealt
with via regulation, free market economies have another
feature which may lead to unsustainable outcomes. In mod-
ern market systems, rms expect prot rates of return
on the order of 15 to 20% in order to induce them to
either conserve resources or to invest in new technology.
With such high discount rates, projects with payoffs occur-
ring much more than ve years in the future seldom look
protable. Thus, from a business perspective, it seldom
makes sense to preserve rainforests on the grounds that
in 50 years the biodiversity it contains will be highly val-
ued; neither are energy companies much interested in solar
power as long as cheap oil and coal have at least ve year
lifetimes.
It is easy to show that these short time horizons cre-
ate a situation in which future generations are not as
well off as we could possibly make them. If we invested
more today in conservation of certain resources or in basic
research and development (R&D), then we could with a
high probability raise the welfare of our descendants. This
is the general rationale for government support of sci-
ence and technology. However, it is not clear whether
our short-term bias is unsustainable, that is, whether it
actually reduces the welfare of future generations below
the level that we enjoy today. Even with their short-
term biases, market systems are incredibly dynamic in
terms of the development of new technologies. It may
be that the ve-year time horizon (coupled with govern-
ment support for longer-term research) can still insure
that the well-being of future generations will not decline.
This depends in turn on the degree to which new tech-
nologies can substitute for depleted or degraded natural
resources and ecosystem services (Goodstein, 1999a, Chap-
ters 6 and 7).
SUSTAINABILITY: THE NEOCLASSICAL VIEW
The sustainability debate hinges on this issue of human-
created substitutes for natural capital: inputs (raw materials)
and waste sinks serving the economic system. On this point,
two camps have developed: neoclassical and ecological.
The neoclassical tradition in economics is based on a
vision of broad substitutability of inputs and outputs:
labor can substitute for capital in production; oranges
can substitute for apples in consumption. Neoclassical
economists acknowledge that the natural world supplies
important inputs and waste sinks for the economic system.
However, incremental degradation of this natural capital, it
is argued, seldom leads to the loss of unique services; all
have reasonable substitutes.
Recall that sustainability was dened earlier as non-
declining welfare for the typical member of a future gen-
eration. The neoclassical argument is that investment in
created, human-made capital can (and tends to) generate a
ow of services improving quality of life which at least
offsets the loss of services provided by degraded natural
capital. This concept has been dubbed weak sustainability.
Neoclassical economists often use the example of whale
oil or copper telephone wires. As these resources became
relatively scarce and their prices rose, petroleum and ber
optics emerged as substitutes. What about a harder case
like the loss of climate stability due to global warming?
Neoclassical economists respond, rst that as greenhouse
gas emissions are regulated, the externality is internal-
ized, and the price of carbon dioxide (CO
2
)-based ser-
vices (like gasoline-powered automobiles) rise, then new
low-CO
2
technologies will emerge. Moreover, advances in
agricultural techniques will insure adaptation to a changing
climate, and dikes can be built to hold back sea level rise.
Clearly there will be losers from climate change, but on
balance, the argument goes, living standards for the typical
person on the planet will continue to rise even in the face
of moderate climate change.
Neoclassical economists in this context are technological
optimists. This means that they believe that in well behaved
market economies (those in which negative externalities
have been internalized via IB regulations like pollution
taxes or marketable permit systems), substitutes will emerge
for scarce (and increasingly expensive) natural resources
and environmental waste sinks. System sustainability is thus
assured by assumption.
Technically, this means that the economy will display a
positive rate of growth of per capita net national welfare,
the familiar GDP measure of economic output adjusted
downwards to reect the costs of economic growth. If net
national welfare, which balances the benets of increased
material consumption against the attendant environmental
and social costs, is growing on a per capita basis, than by
denition, the well-being of future generations is also rising
(Goodstein, 1999a, Chapter 6).
While (weak) system sustainability is generally assumed
in the technologically optimistic neoclassical framework,
sustainable decisions at the micro level should be made
using BC analysis. For example, when considering whether
28 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
or not to build a coal plant, one should compare the
discounted stream of measurable monetary costs (material
and environmental) over the expected life of the plant,
against the discounted stream of measurable monetary
benets (cheaper power). If the benets exceed the costs,
than building the plant would be sustainable in the weak
sense, because doing so would, on net, raise the welfare of
the typical member of future generations.
Future costs and benets are discounted in BC analy-
sis to reect the opportunity cost of productive foregone
investment. For example, the value of $100 received in
10 years (ignoring ination) is a lot less than the value of
$100 received today. If the interest rate were 10%, I could
invest that $100 today and have $260 in 10 years. Con-
versely, to have $100 on hand in 10 years I would need
to bank only $39 today. This gure of $39 is called the
Present Discounted Value of $100 received in 10 years, if a
10% interest or discount rate is available. While discounting
makes sense for individual nancial decisions, at the social
level it can generate perverse outcomes (see Discounting,
Volume 5).
To illustrate, suppose we are considering installing a lter
on our coal plant that will generate a one-time-only benet
of $100 million 100 years from now. At a discount rate of
10%, a $100 million benet gained 100 years from now
is worth only $7200 today. The logic of BC analysis thus
suggests that we should not spend a measly seven thousand
dollars and change today to yield a benet of $100 million
to our great grandchildren. Why? Because if we put the
money in the bank, future generations would have more
than $100 million on hand.
The problem is that, for real world projects subject to
BC analysis, we do not intend to put net savings in a trust
fund; the alternative is instead to spend it elsewhere in the
economy (say, to reduce energy prices from the coal plant)
where it may or may not yield a 10% rate of return to
society as a whole. While discounting makes obvious sense
on a personal level for short time horizons, it breaks down
for actions yielding a stream of social benets far into the
future.
On the ip side, not discounting at all also generates
perverse outcomes. Consider a project that yields $1 worth
of benets every year, forever. Such a project has innite
value, and would thus seem to be worth sacricing the
entire planets output to nance. Given these two extremes,
there is a lot of debate over the proper approach to dis-
counting future benets and costs (Portney and Weyant,
1999).
If indeed the analysis is sensitive to the choice of a dis-
count rate, or else tries to weigh controversial benets such
as lives saved or biodiversity preserved, then uncertainties
can easily grow large enough to render determination of a
(weakly) sustainable outcome at the project level difcult,
if not impossible.
SUSTAINABILITY: THE ECOLOGICAL VIEW
In contrast to neoclassical economists, ecological econom-
ists are technological pessimists (see Ecological Eco-
nomics, Volume 5). Tracing their intellectual lineage
explicitly to Malthus, ecological economists have no
faith that technological substitutes for important natu-
ral resources, such as climate stability, will be forth-
coming from real-world market systems. Thus, ecological
economists would reject a coal plant following the logic that
CO
2
emissions are already destabilizing the global climate.
Essentially, ecological economists argue that for important
resources such as fresh water, ultraviolet protection, bio-
diversity and climate stability, the future consequences of
current resource degradation are too uncertain to counte-
nance the use of BC analysis.
Instead ecological economists argue for what they call
the Precautionary Principle (see Precautionar y Pr inciple,
Volume 4). To preserve the welfare of future generations,
therefore, unique forms of natural capital should be pro-
tected unless the costs of doing so are prohibitively high
(Ciriacy-Wantrup, 1968; Daly, 1996). This strategy of pro-
tecting natural capital has the advantage of not relying on
the development of uncertain substitutes to insure (weakly)
sustainable outcomes. Thus following the Precautionary
Principle promotes strong sustainability from an ecologi-
cal perspective, by insuring that future generations will not
be impoverished by the loss of natural capital. Moreover,
the argument is often simultaneously advanced that the cost
of protection will not be so high as is frequently claimed
(Laitner et al., 1998).
Along this line, ecological economists point to survey
evidence suggesting that, in developed countries, broad
growth in material consumption in fact buys very little
increases in societal happiness. This occurs, it is argued,
because beyond a basic level, utility from consumption
depends on relative rather than absolute levels of consump-
tion. To the extent that this is true, environmental quality is
being sacriced only to feed a rat race in which human
welfare does not rise with increased material consump-
tion, clearly an unsustainable state of affairs (Mishan, 1968;
Howarth, 1996).
Which view is correct? Neoclassical economists argue
that the ecological position is too extreme. They insist there
are trade-offs, and that we can pay too much for a pris-
tine environment. Resources and person-power invested in
reducing small cancer risks or preserving salmon streams,
for example, are resources and people that cannot be
invested in schools or health care, also of value to future
generations. BC analysis is needed to obtain the right bal-
ance of investment between environmental protection and
other goods and services. Moreover, in the sustainability
debate, neoclassical economists argue that history is on their
side: Malthusian predictions have been discredited time and
time again.
ECONOMICS AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 29
Indeed, in recent years, some scientists have made
stunningly bad forecasts regarding looming resource short-
ages. The problem with these predictions, as with Malthuss
original one, was that they dramatically underestimated the
impacts of changing technologies. Neoclassical economists
point to these failed predictions to support their basic
assumption that natural and created capital are indeed good
substitutes: we are not running out of natural resources or
waste sinks.
Ecological economists respond that history is not a good
guide for the future. One hundred and fty years after the
beginning of the industrial revolution, the argument is that
accumulating stresses have begun to fundamentally erode
the resilience of local and global ecosystems upon which the
economy ultimately depends. Indeed, ecological economists
have largely shifted their 1970s concerns about running
out of nonrenewable minerals and oil to concerns such as:
biodiversity, fresh water, environmental waste sinks, and
productive agricultural land. While ecological economists
stretching back to Malthus have indeed done their share of
crying wolf, this does not, of course, mean the wolf is not
now at our door.
The neoclassical and ecological perspectives differ dra-
matically in their assessment of the likelihood of sustainable
outcomes from real world market economies. Nevertheless,
both perspectives are economic: both accept the com-
mon denition of sustainability offered above; both are
grounded in broadly utilitarian philosophy, and both deal
in the currency of trade-offs. In addition, this is a debate
about ends, not means. Ecological economists prefer that
resource development or environmental degradation be reg-
ulated according to a precautionary principal; neoclassical
economists prefer a BC test. When it comes to means,
however, economists from both schools would prefer to
see greater reliance on incentive systems than is provided
by existing environmental and resource regulations (see
below).
THE CURRENT REGULATORY SYSTEM
Perhaps the most striking aspect of environmental regula-
tion at the national level is its brief history. As recently as
1970, for example, the US had no major federal legislation
controlling the discharge of pollutants into the air and water,
no national regulations covering the disposal of hazardous
waste onto land, no process for reviewing new chemicals,
only a limited procedure for registering new pesticides, and
no protection for endangered species.
Beginning in the early 1970s, countries around the world
began adopting national environmental protection legisla-
tion. Most of these laws required government agencies to
develop detailed prescriptive regulation for several differ-
ent types of industrial polluters. Economists have since
dubbed this approach CAC regulation. CAC involves two
parts. The rst is uniform emission standards. All similar
sources are commanded to meet identical emission levels.
The control part of the name refers to the technology-based
regulatory approach employed by much current regula-
tion. Regulators specify, at a high level of detail, pre-
cisely which technologies rms must employ to reduce
emissions.
While this initial effort to internalize externalities was
effective in many regards, CAC regulation is generally not
cost-effective, either in the short run or the long run. (By
cost-effective is meant achieving a given pollution reduc-
tion goal at the lowest possible cost.) Uniform emission
standards raise costs in the short run, since all plants must
meet the same reduction targets, regardless of differences
in the cost of doing so. Technology-based regulation raises
costs in the long run by sti ing incentives for innovation
in new pollution control technology. These factors have led
most economists to advocate a greater use of IB regulation
like emission charges or marketable permit systems.
More broadly, regulation has been criticized as ineffec-
tive on a variety of grounds:
regulatory design and enforcement is subject to signif-
icant political in uence;
regulation addresses symptoms in a piecemeal way,
rather than underlying causes in a comprehensive way;
regulations must be continually tightened or else they
will be overwhelmed by economic and population
growth;
regulation has already picked off the easy targets: large,
stationary pollution sources. Increasingly, pollution is
arising from mobile sources like cars, and non-point
sources like run-off from streets and farms.
These factors have led some economists to call for greater
government support for the development of technologies
which are much cleaner in the rst place.
Before discussing calls for reform, however, it is impor-
tant to note that CAC systems have signi cant achievements
to their credit (Goodstein, 1999a, Chapter 14). In the United
States for example, in spite of the fact that economic activ-
ity more than doubled from 1970 to 2000, the general urban
air pollution picture has actually improved, dramatically
for lead. In addition, large reductions in air toxins have
been recorded over the last decade. Industrial emissions
of some water borne pollutants have dropped dramatically
and, overall, water quality has improved a bit beyond 1970
levels. Regulation of hazardous waste is likely to prevent
the development of future Love Canals. And the rising cost
of disposal, along with the right-to-know regulations, and
the potential for Superfund liability is beginning to focus
corporate attention on reducing waste through pollution pre-
vention. Particularly nasty new pesticides are not likely to
make it through the EPA s initial screen, and under prod-
ding from Congress, the agency will restrict the use of the
30 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
worst of the existing pesticides in the rst few years of this
century. Finally, only a few listed species have slipped into
extinction. The fact that regulation has managed to hold
the line against economic growth is in itself an impressive
accomplishment.
DOING BETTER: INCENTIVE-BASED
REGULATION
It is straightforward to see how uniform standards and
government mandated technology requirements under CAC
raise the costs of regulation. In the case of uniform stan-
dards, consider two neighboring oil reneries. Renery A,
which has the ability to reduce emissions of say, nitro-
gen oxides, at very low-cost, is nevertheless expected to
meet the same standard as next door renery B, a rm
with very high costs of reduction. The reason this is not
cost-effective is simple: the same overall emission reduc-
tion (and local air quality) could be achieved at lower
cost by having the low-cost rm meet a tighter emission
standard, while relaxing the standard for the neighbor-
ing high-cost rm. Similarly, in the short run, a single
technological mandate is unlikely to provide the cheap-
est pollution control solution for different rms all over
the country. This lack of exibility inherent in centralized,
technology-based regulation raises costs (Goodstein, 1999a,
Chapter 16).
However, long-run cost effects are more important.
Technology-based regulation works against technological
improvement in several ways. First, once a rm has
installed the government-mandated technology it has no
incentive to do better. Second, the rm actually has a posi-
tive incentive not to do better. If, for example, it discovered
a better technique for pollution reduction, and the EPA then
decided to deem this new technology to be the standard,
the rm might legally be required to upgrade its pollu-
tion control technology at other new facilities. Firms have
a distinct incentive to keep the agency from upgrading the
state-of-the-art technological standard. Finally, if in spite of
these obstacles, rms do seek an innovative, non-approved
approach, they must rst obtain regulatory clearance to
do so.
IB regulation provides an alternative to CAC. There
are two kinds, closely related. The rst is a pollution tax
(also known as an efuent or emission charge or fee).
For example, to reduce power plant emissions of carbon
dioxide, which fuel the greenhouse effect, society could
institute a tax on emissions of, say, $25 per ton of CO
2
.
Alternatively, one might achieve a roll-back through a
marketable permit system (also known as a tradable permit
or cap-and-trade system). Here CO
2
permits would be
issued or auctioned to polluters only up to a certain target
level of overall emissions. These permits could then be
bought and sold by others, again putting a market price
tag on pollution (see Tradable Permits for Greenhouse
Gases, Volume 4).
The rst effect of IB systems is to eliminate uniform
emission levels at different sites. Plants facing high costs
of reducing pollution will cut back a little and either pay the
emission charge or buy additional permits. Plants with low
costs will cut back a lot, and either save on pollution taxes,
or make money by selling some permits. Overall pollution
levels can be set the same as under CAC regulation, but
the compliance costs will be less as rms are given greater
exibility, as well as incentives to make emission cuts at
the lowest cost sites.
The second benecial aspect of IB regulation is that it
provides a exible framework for innovation. Firms can
install any pollution control technology they desire. More-
over, IB regulation also establishes continuous incentives
for technological progress. CAC regulation does not penal-
ize rms for any pollutants they emit once they have
installed the technology mandated by the government; by
contrast under IB regulation rms pay for every pound of
pollution coming out of the stacks. They do this directly
under an emission charge system, but pollution bears a
similar price under a cap-and-trade system. By reducing
pollution towards zero, rms can make money by selling
their excess permits.
Textbook emission charge systems are not often found
in the real world, perhaps because, as new taxes they are
politically difcult to institute. By contrast, cap-and-trade
systems are increasingly popular. The biggest success to
date has been the acid rain program in the US. Initiated
in 1995 to control the emission of sulfur dioxide from
power plants, the program has functioned largely according
to plan. SO
2
emissions have been reduced by about half,
and the program has generated signicant cost savings
(Schmalensee et al., 1998).
A couple of caveats are in order regarding IB systems.
First, they only work well for pollutants that do their
damage regionally or globally. If pollutant damage is local,
than a simple IB system will generate hot spots: high
pollutant damages around high cost-of-reduction plants.
Second, the government must have good monitoring and
enforcement capabilities. Firms must either pay the efuent
charges due, or face stiff nes for any pollutants emitted
above their permitted levels. In some cases, CAC regulation
may be easier to monitor and enforce than an IB approach
(Goodstein, 1999a).
DOING BETTER: PROMOTING CLEAN
TECHNOLOGY
Regulation, whether CAC or IB, is designed to internalize
externalities, and force rms and consumers to bear the
social costs of pollution. Most economists agree that a shift
towards greater use of IB regulation would help reduce
ECONOMICS AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 31
the costs of environmental protection, and thus make it
politically easier to achieve. But is getting the prices right
through regulation (whether IB or CAC) enough to insure
a sustainable economy?
A second strategy is to directly promote the development
and diffusion of clean technology: fuel-cell vehicles, solar
and wind powered electricity, energy and water efciency
technologies, alternative agriculture, recycling (Goodstein,
1999a, Chapter 18). Rather than rely solely on controlling
pollutants at the end-of-the-pipe, advocates of this approach
argue that government should promote the use of tech-
nologies which reduce polluting inputs and processes in
the rst place. Technologies can be advanced through poli-
cies like R&D, consumer subsidies, and public procurement
contracts. So called technology-forcing regulations can also
promote new options; examples in the US include the Cor-
porate Average Fuel Efciency (CAFE) standards, energy
efciency standards for appliances, and the California zero
emission vehicle requirements.
From a theoretical point of view, government efforts to
inuence the direction of technological progress can be jus-
tied by what economists call path dependence (Arthur,
1991). This theory maintains that current production tech-
nologies (for example, US reliance on private automobiles
for urban transportation) represent only one possible path of
development. A potentially cost competitive alternative in
this case might be mass transit, dominant in many European
and Japanese cities.
The path a society chooses depends on a variety of
factors, including the relative political strength of the con-
icting interests, chance historical circumstance, and, of
course, consumer preferences and relative production costs.
In the auto example, the US governments decision to con-
struct the interstate highway system beginning after World
War II, which in turn promoted suburban development, pro-
vided the decisive advantage to private transport.
However, once a path has been chosen, other paths are
closed off. This happens for three reasons. First, infrastruc-
ture and R&D investments are increasingly directed towards
supporting the chosen technology, and diverted from the
competing path. Second, the chosen technology is able to
exploit economies of scale to consolidate its cost advan-
tage. Third, complementary technologies develop which
are tailored to the chosen path, further disadvantaging the
competing path. In the transportation example, this would
include the sprawling retail and housing patterns of US
cities, which now virtually require a private vehicle for
access.
Path-dependence theory suggests that once a path is
chosen, there is no easy way to switch tracks. How-
ever, in retrospect, we can see that technological choices
have social consequences: the adoption of private trans-
port, for example, has borne a substantial environmental
cost. Thus, the role of government is to try and inuence the
current market driven process of technological development
towards a path consistent with a sustainable future. Note
that this theory assumes that governments in modern cap-
italist societies already necessarily play a major role in
shaping technological change through infrastructure deci-
sions and subsidy policies; the key here is to insure that the
role is a positive one.
Under a clean technology strategy, promotional efforts
should be limited to technologies which are close to
commercial development, generate a quality of service
and have long-run production costs comparable to exist-
ing technologies, and are environmentally superior. Each
of these requirements must be met, otherwise, the technol-
ogy will not spread rapidly, and little environmental benet
will result. But given these conditions, why arent private
entrepreneurs developing them in the rst place?
The answer lies in the short-term bias of market actors
discussed above. Simply because clean technologies are
potentially cost competitive does not mean that they are
more protable than existing technologies. Entrepreneurs
tend to introduce products which ll a market niche and pro-
vide at least temporary monopoly prots (computers, VCRs,
cell phones). Clean technologies, by contrast, generally are
not offering a new product; rather they go head-to-head to
with an existing, well-established technology in a mature
industry: electricity or transportation, for example. Thus
they must enter an already competitive eld, where only
normal prots can be expected. The only clear-cut advan-
tage that clean technologies have is in their environmental
impact. While this may provide some marketing leverage,
it generally will not guarantee high protability.
Under normal market circumstances, new technologies
often take a substantial time to develop a widespread
following. This is due to consumers lack of knowledge
about the advantages of the new technology, as well as
differences in consumer needs. The transition to any new
technology requires a marketing commitment to overcome
this lack of information. Marketing expenses are sunk costs,
that is, costs that cannot be recovered if an investment fails.
The higher the sunk costs associated with an investment,
the riskier it becomes.
Clean technologies face particularly high sunk costs (and
thus high risk) because they do not market themselves by
offering a service that consumers do not already have.
Instead, clean technologies need to woo consumers from
the use of the existing technology. While clean technolo-
gies offer comparable services, they also tend to require
users to learn new consumption habits. This requires a big
investment in marketing, which cannot be recovered if the
business fails.
In summary, many clean technologies are unlikely to
be highly protable in the short to medium term; as a
consequence, private sector investors show little interest.
Government policy can change this equation by absorbing
32 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
some of the risk associated with the introduction of these
new technologies, nurturing infant industries.
There is disagreement among economists as to how far
government should move in this direction. Basic scientic
R&D generates positive externalities; not all of the benet
of innovation is captured by the inventor. For that rea-
son, most economists agree that support of basic science
is an important governmental role. Beyond that, however,
while some argue that government should support sig-
nicant investment in clean technologies, others maintain
that government should do nothing. In part this has to do
with disagreement over the extent to which the short-term
bias of market economies, discussed above, has on sus-
tainable outcomes. Those opposed to government support
for technology feel that, if the prices are right (that is, if
externalities have been internalized), then the private mar-
ket place will bring new technologies on line soon enough
to avoid unsustainable levels of environmental damage.
The disagreement also has to do with political economic
views on the efcacy of government intervention into
the economy. Opponents of clean technology promotion
argue that the government is likely to promote the wrong
technologies, and that these decisions are better left to a
decentralized market process.
THE ECONOMICS OF THE GLOBAL
ENVIRONMENT
This essay has so far outlined the theoretical relationship
between laissez faire markets and sustainability, and dis-
cussed policy options at the national level for promoting
sustainability. We now turn our attention to global environ-
mental challenges: the complex links between widespread
poverty in poor countries (working in part through high
population growth rates), high levels of consumption in rich
countries, and environmental degradation at both the global
level and in the less developed world. Finally, we end with a
look at the economics of global environmental agreements.
In rich countries, it is commonly assumed that environ-
mental quality can only be improved by sacricing material
consumption. In poor countries, by contrast, a broad-based
growth in income will, in many respects, tend to improve
the quality of the environment. There are four close connec-
tions between poverty and the environment (World Bank,
1992).
1. For poor people, many environmental problems are
problems of poverty. The biggest environmental health
threats facing most people in poor countries are unsafe
drinking water, compounded by inadequate sewage
facilities, and urban air pollution. Exposure to indoor
air pollution (smoke) from cooking and heating sources
ranks close to industrial and auto air pollution as a
concern.
2. Poor people cannot afford to conserve resources. Out
of economic necessity, poor people often put an unsus-
tainable burden on the natural capital in their immedi-
ate environment. Urban residents scour the immediate
countryside for fuel (rewood or animal dung) leading
to deforestation or the elimination of fertilizer sources.
Landless farmers are pushed into over farming small
plots, farming on steep mountain slopes that soon wash
out, or farming in clear-cut rain forests incapable of
sustaining agriculture.
3. Richer people demand more pollution control. As per
capita income rises in a country, people begin to
express a more effective demand for pollution control.
Partly this has to do with education. As income rises, so
do levels of awareness regarding environmental threats.
Partly, it has to do with expanding democracy. As
income rises, political participation tends to increase.
As a result, people are provided with the opportunity
to express a political demand for pollution control.
Partly, it has to do with a shift in industrial compo-
sition: wealthier countries rely more on services and
other relatively clean industries, while less developed
countries have more basic manufacturing and mining.
Finally, the relationship can be explained by relative
risk considerations: when life spans are short due to
inadequate nutrition or access to basic health care, con-
cerns about respiratory, neurological and reproductive
diseases, or cancer from pollution, are dampened.
4. Population growth slows with increased income. The
nal link between poverty and the environment lies
in income growth as a means of population control,
discussed later.
These four interconnections between poverty and the
environment reveal that, in poor countries, one need not
trade-off rising material living standards for improved envi-
ronmental quality. In fact, the only effective way to improve
environmental conditions is to alleviate the tremendous
poverty faced by many of the people in these nations.
POPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT
Higher incomes tend to be associated with lower popula-
tion growth rates. While the relationship is not hard and
fast, for example, welfare families in America are not sig-
nicantly larger than the average, it holds as a general rule,
both across countries, and within countries. Many factors go
into determining family size; religious and cultural norms
obviously play a prominent role. Yet the strength of the
povertyfertility relationship suggests that economic fac-
tors are quite important as well (Dasgupta, 1995).
In poor countries, children provide two important eco-
nomic functions: health and old age insurance, and after
early childhood, a potential supplement to family income.
ECONOMICS AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 33
Given limited resources, a family could potentially obtain
comparable economic benets following one of two appro-
aches: a high investment strategy with one or two children,
or a low investment strategy with many children.
The high investment strategy would involve focusing all
available resources on one or two children: insuring that
they survive infancy, are provided with a healthy diet, and
go on to attend school. Such a child might well land a
good job, and increase family income substantially. For
poor people with limited resources and restricted access to
public services, the high investment strategy is very difcult
to pursue. Moreover, it is tremendously risky. Suppose
that after ve years of intensive investment, a single child
dies. Yet, as income rises, the high investment strategy
begins to be more attractive. Resources for the long-term
(1518 year) investment are more readily available, and
access to better health care means that the chances of
premature death decline.
This BC model of family size is a very crude one, omit-
ting as it does very important issues of culture, kinship,
religion, love and affection. Yet it does a good job explain-
ing the strong relationship between poverty and fertility
observed in many places around the world. In particular,
because there are good economic reasons for poor people
to have large families, simple provision of low-cost birth
control is unlikely to solve the population problem (though
it would certainly help). Can we use this BC model to
suggest other effective policies for controlling population
growth?
Balanced Growth and Provision of Social Services
The povertyfertility relationship seems to provide a strai-
ghtforward way to control population: eliminate poverty!
Unfortunately, if nations were able to do this easily, they
would have done so already. It does remains true, however,
that balanced and rapid economic development which raises
the material welfare of the poor majority is one of the most
effective population control measures available. In addition
to balanced growth, another way to reduce poverty and thus
population growth rates is through the form of publicly
provided social services: education, health care, and public
pension plans.
Reduced Infant and Childhood Mortality
Improved public health is an important factor in reducing
long-run population growth rates. The BC approach to
family size suggest that improved health care would help
slow population growth for one principal reason: the risk
associated with investing in a childs health and education
would be reduced, encouraging families to substitute quality
for quantity.
Education
The economic model of family size tells us that population
growth will slow when parents follow a strategy of high
investment in their children. A key element making such
a strategy possible is access to education. This is true for
three reasons. First, the availability of education directly
lowers the cost of pursuing a high investment strategy to all
parents, educated and uneducated alike. Second, as parents
become educated themselves, a strategy of substituting
quality for quantity also becomes easier, since the parents
can provide guidance to the children.
Finally, as parents become educated, their wages tend
to rise. This increases the opportunity cost of parents
time, making a low-investment strategy less attractive.
This is true because a low investment, quantity strat-
egy requires a bigger commitment of time devoted to
child-rearing than does a high investment, quality strat-
egy. Another way to look at this is that, as the parents
wages rise, family income and economic insurance are
better served by parents working than by raising more
children.
For this reason, education is particularly important for
women, since they do most of the child rearing. One of the
best ways to control fertility is to have women participat-
ing in the modern sector of the economy. All poor women
work. However, employment in agricultural or household
labor does not appear to reduce fertility. As the opportunity
cost of the womans time rises, a quantity strategy becomes
less and less attractive for the family as a unit.
Education for women appears to have a strong impact
on fertility control for other reasons as well. To this point,
we have treated the family as a homogeneous unit, yet men
and women play different roles in the family, and may have
different ideas about the desirability of limiting family size.
In the developing world, as in rich countries, the responsi-
bility for taking birth control measures (whether abstinence,
prolonged breast feeding, or a technological approach) gen-
erally falls on the woman. Thus the direct consumers of
birth control devices and fertility control information are
generally women, providing another argument for improved
female education (see Ecofeminism, Volume 5).
More importantly, however, most of the worlds societies
are male dominated, patriarchal cultures. In such societies,
women often must obtain approval from their husbands in
order to control their fertility. This distinction is important,
because holding all things equal, it is probably true that
women prefer to have fewer children than do men. This
is likely for a number of reasons: women do the vast
majority of the hard work involved in child rearing; child
rearing interferes with womens other economic activities;
and child birth represents a signicant health risk for
many women. Thus, policies which strengthen womens
status and bargaining position within the family itself, for
example, better education or access to paid employment,
are likely to have important effects on fertility decisions,
independent of their impact on overall family income and
economic insurance.
34 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Family Planning
Having argued above that poor people may have good
reasons for having large families, it is also true that a
big obstacle to pursuing a high investment strategy is lack
of access to family planning services. There remains a
large unsatised demand for birth control worldwide (World
Bank, 1992).
GLOBAL CONSUMPTION AND TRADE
In discussions of population pressures on the environment,
it is important to recognize that the environmental damage
people do depends not only on absolute numbers, but also
on the natural capital depleted and waste products generated
by each person. As an upper middle class citizen of the US,
I consume more than 100 times the resources used by the
average individual from a poor country. The point here is
not to induce guilt about af uent lifestyles, but rather to
recognize that one needs to focus as much attention on
reducing the environmental impact of high consumption in
rich countries, as is paid to reducing population growth in
poor countries.
Moreover, although the population problem is concen-
trated in poor countries, through legal and illegal immi-
gration, poor-country population pressure spills over into
af uent countries. And while today the consumption prob-
lem is centered in rich countries, this too will begin to
change as a growing number of poor country residents
aspire to the consumption levels found in rich countries.
Because inhabitants of rich countries are responsible for
over two-thirds of global economic activity, at least two-
thirds of global pollution can be laid at our doorstep. The
western European countries, the US and Japan comprise
about 15% of the world s population, but they consume
71% of the world s output (World Bank, 1992, Table A.2).
As a result, rich-country consumption has to date been
responsible for most of the global atmospheric pollution:
global warming, ozone depletion, acid rain, and radioactive
contamination. Rich countries have had by far the biggest
impact on polluting and over- shing the oceans.
In addition to generating global pollution problems,
there is a second element to the consumption pollution
link. High levels of consumption demand in rich coun-
tries have been responsible for an unsustainable draw-down
in environmental quality and the stock of natural capital
in many poor countries. Many poor countries rely on the
export of primary resources or agricultural commodities
to earn money for imported fuel, food, consumer goods
and weapons. In principal, this trade is environmentally
sustainable. However, weak sustainability requires that any
draw down in the stock of natural capital (whether oil or
mineral reserves, rainforest resources, top soil, or air and
water quality) be compensated for by investment in created
capital.
The overwhelming demand for resources in rich countries
(ranging from gasoline, to steel, to bananas, to beef) has
in many cases depleted the natural capital stock in poor
countries, without commensurate investment in created cap-
ital. Why has this occurred? Historically, colonial gov-
ernments tended to drain resource-generated wealth from
their colonies, investing little in human capital or infras-
tructure. In the post-colonial period, falling relative prices
for primary resources, low taxes on politically powerful
resource-based industries, and high levels of spending on
military and imported consumption goods by the ruling elite
have constrained investment in created capital. Finally, the
burden of debt repayment has led to a ow of created wealth
from poor to rich countries over much of the last 20 years.
This is not to say that trade in agricultural commodities,
or any other goods, is on balance, bad for the environment.
Rather, to insure sustainability, the gains from trade must
be invested in created capital suf cient to offset the draw-
down in natural capital. If they are not, than rich-country
consumption leads to unsustainable development in poor
countries as surely as does rapid population growth.
What is the relationship between trade and the environ-
ment? The pro free trade argument is that trade leads to
economic growth, economic growth reduces poverty, and
as we saw above, a reduction in poverty is a critical pre-
condition for environmental protection in poor countries
(Bhagwati, 1993). Poor countries often support trade liber-
alization through multilateral agencies like the World Trade
Organization (WTO) in order to keep the rich countries
from unilaterally imposing tariffs or other trade restrictions.
International trade and investment can also facilitate the
transfer of cleaner technologies from rich to poor countries.
These positions clearly have merit. Yet critics respond,
rst, that trade does not always lead to growth because, as
argued above, suf cient pro ts from trade are not reinvested
in poor countries to compensate them for their loss of
natural resources. Second, even if economic growth occurs,
the environmental bene ts which accompany growth can
be overwhelmed by the increase in pollution from export
production, leading to a decline in environmental quality in
poor countries.
Finally, critics charge that environmental regulations in
rich countries will be weakened by liberalized trade and
investment, as business mobility increases, and legal chal-
lenges are lodged by international competitors (Daly, 1993).
On the former point, economists have found that in fact,
very few businesses have ed from developed to underde-
veloped countries to escape stringent environmental regula-
tions (Goodstein, 1999b). This appears true in part because
even for heavily regulated rms, environmental costs sel-
dom rise above 2% of total business costs. Moreover, much
pollution control technology is imbedded in modern plant
design. A new chemical plant built by a multinational in
Chile will in fact look a lot like one built in Texas. When
ECONOMICS AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 35
rms do head to the South, the reason is, overwhelmingly,
low wages.
On the second point, free trade agreements can indeed
bind the hands of environmental regulators, since they
give foreign governments the ability to challenge certain
regulations as trade barriers. In 1999, the US acting on
behalf of Ford and Daimler-Chrysler, challenged a Japanese
government initiative designed to reduce CO
2
emissions
from automobiles. The law required that new mid-sized cars
sold in Japan have engines as efcient as the most efcient
on the market, which were then produced by Mitsubishi.
Under the rules of the WTO, the US sought to have the
law overturned as a barrier to trade. If the WTO rules in
favor of the US, Japan will have to rescind the law or face
trade sanctions (Wallach and Sforza, 1999).
Is free trade good or bad for the environment? More lib-
eral trade is generally championed by economists because
it is believed to increase efciency, and in the long run,
raise material living standards across the board. However,
the process of globalization is crafting a new set of rules
that will benet some more than others, and it is also cer-
tain to generate many losers. The environmental challenge
is to harness the efciency gains generated by trade into
domestic investments in poor countries, thereby helping
create a sustainable future. From this perspective, agree-
ments promoting more trade should be viewed as a means
to an end (stabilizing population growth, enhancing food
security, transferring sustainable technology, and conserv-
ing resources) not as an end in itself. Yet at this point, trade
agreements have only just begun to acknowledge environ-
mental and sustainability concerns.
THE ECONOMICS OF GLOBAL AGREEMENTS
Beyond poverty, overpopulation, and the growth of envi-
ronmental impacts from global over-consumption, trans-
boundary pollution problems present serious threats to
sustainability. Global warming, ozone depletion, acid rain,
and exploitation of the oceans, Antarctica, and even outer
space, are all processes occurring outside the jurisdiction
of a single nation. There is no international environmental
protection agency with the authority to regulate exploitation
of the global commons.
To address these problems, nations have begun to nego-
tiate international agreements. However, economic theory
suggests that effective international agreements are hard to
develop. From an economic point of view, an international
pollution control agreement is a public good, which must
be provided voluntarily by the private nations of the world.
Public goods are goods which are enjoyed in common; a
classic example, if dated, is the warning service provided
by a lighthouse. Technically, economists describe public
goods as non-excludable. Once in operation, it is impossi-
ble to exclude any passing boat from utilizing the warning
beacon provided by the lighthouse. Public goods tend to be
under-supplied in a free market economy precisely because
many of those who benet can free ride if the good is pro-
vided at all. This than justies government in taxing the
beneciaries, and then subsidizing the provision of public
goods: for example, basic scientic research.
Reducing global warming is a public good, because there
is no way to exclude free riders from enjoying the climate
stabilization benets provided by a treaty. However, in this
case, there is no international government to insure that the
sustainable level of protection is provided.
The public-good nature of environmental treaties has two
implications. First, treaties will tend to be too weak from
a BC point of view, since signatory nations are reluctant
to reveal and commit their true willingness-to-pay in the
bargaining process. Second, once signed, nations will have
a strong incentive to cheat on the agreement. Unilateral
cheating is another way to free ride on the pollution
control efforts of others. Of course, if everyone cheats, the
agreement will collapse.
Beyond free riding, agreement on burden sharing is dif-
cult to achieve. In principle, each country might contribute
their true willingness-to-pay for a treaty. This willingness-
to-pay in turn would depend on both the benets received,
and ability to pay. Both of these might vary widely
between nations. For example, low-lying Bangladesh, has
a tremendous stake in slowing global warming, and pre-
venting a devastating sea-level rise. Yet the country is
poor, and would have a difcult time nancing strong
measures to reduce CO
2
emissions. On the other hand, a
land-locked, wealthy country like Switzerland has a high
ability to pay, but may have fewer immediate interests at
stake.
A poor countrys willingness-to-pay to join an agreement
will typically be much smaller than that of a rich country,
simply because it has a much lower national income. Yet
poor-country participation will often be vital. For example,
if China were to further industrialize using its vast coal
reserves, global warming would accelerate considerably.
Given Chinas low willingness to pay for a reduction
in global warming (as a result of its low income), a
compensation fund would have to be established for China
to sign a greenhouse treaty. Those with a high willingness-
to-pay (typically rich countries) would have to pay for
China to adopt less polluting and expensive energy sources.
Otherwise, it would not be in Chinas interests to sign the
treaty.
If each nation did contribute its true willingness-to-pay,
then the agreement process would generate an efcient
level of global pollution control. However, a countrys
underlying willingness-to-pay for an agreement is not a
well-dened thing in the rst place, and is certainly not
transparent to negotiators from other nations. Therefore,
each nations bargainers will have an incentive to understate
36 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
its true interest in a treaty in the hopes that others will
shoulder more of the burden. In the extreme, a country
might not sign a global warming or other environmental
treaty at all, but still benet from the efforts of other nations,
acting as a pure free rider.
While the theory of public goods predicts that interna-
tional environmental treaties will be both weak and suscep-
tible to enforcement problems, agreements nevertheless do
get signed and efforts are made to insure compliance. The
1986 Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer, in spite
of the theory sketched out above, has been a remarkable
success story. This was due to the perception on the part
of many countries of a clear and present danger; relatively
few pollutant sources; and the realization (after the treaty
was signed) of relatively low compliance costs (Goodstein,
1999a, Chapter 22).
By contrast, the struggle to implement the 1997 Kyoto
global warming accord reects much more of the difculty
in assigning burden sharing, and the free rider phenomenon.
This agreement was signed by all of the developed coun-
tries, including the US, and calls for a reduction in green-
house gas emissions to below 1990 levels. Following the
model of the Montreal Protocol, poor countries were not
required to participate at the outset. The rationale for this
was two-fold: developed countries had caused the prob-
lem, and they had the resources to develop the alternative
energy technologies needed for large-scale reduction in
carbon emissions. However, there has been strong opposi-
tion in the US Senate and from President Bush to treaty
ratication: not surprising, since the US is the biggest
greenhouse gas polluter. The US Senate argues that poor
countries should also be included in the treaty and required
to reduce emissions at the outset. This position, if it is main-
tained, threatens to scuttle the entire agreement (Goodstein,
1999b).
CONCLUSION
This essay has provided a brief introduction to the economic
analysis of global environmental change. For economists,
the goal of sustainability (an improved quality of life for
most people) is well dened, if hard to operationalize.
Within this utilitarian framework, an economist will ask
three questions. First, given that pollution and resource
degradation are a by-product of economic output, how
much pollution and resource degradation are consistent with
a sustainable future? Second, once the pollution reduction
or resource preservation target is set, how can we achieve
our goal at the lowest possible cost? And nally, how
can we address global environmental problems, including
the pressures placed on the environment by widespread
poverty; high population growth rates; unsustainable trade
patterns; and the need for more effective global agreements?
As indicated, there is often lively debate among economists
regarding the right answers. But what we do agree on is the
centrality of these three questions.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Portions of this essay were rst published in Economics
and the Environment (John Wiley and Sons) and are used
with permission.
REFERENCES
Arthur, B W (1991) Positive Feedbacks in the Economy, Sci. Am.,
February, 9299.
Bhagwati, J (1993) The Case for Free-Trade, Sci. Am., November,
4149.
Ciriacy-Wantrup (1968) Resource Conservation: Economics and
Policies, 3rd edition, University of California Press, Berkeley,
CA.
Daly, H (1993) The Perils of Free Trade, Sci. Am., November,
4149.
Daly, H (1996) Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable
Development, Beacon Press, Boston, MA.
Dasgupta, P (1995) The Population Problem: Theory and Evi-
dence, J. Econ. Literature, 33, 18791902.
Goodstein, E (1999a) Economics and the Environment, 2nd edi-
tion, John Wiley & Sons, New York.
Goodstein, E (1999b) The Trade-off Myth: Fact and Fiction about
Jobs and the Environment, Island Press, Washington, DC.
Howarth, R B (1996) Status Effects and Environmental External-
ities, Ecological Economics, 16(1), 2534.
Krupnick, A and Burtraw, D (1996) The Social Costs of Elec-
tricity: Do the Numbers Add Up? Resour. Energy Econ., 18,
423466.
Laitner, S, Bernow, S, and DeCicco, J (1998) Employment and
other Macroeconomic Benets of an Innovation-Led Climate
Strategy for the United States, Energy Policy, 26(5), 425432.
Mishan, E J (1968) The Costs of Economic Growth, Staples Press,
London.
Pezzey, J (1992) Sustainability: An Interdisciplinary Guide, Env-
iron. Values, 1(4), 321362.
Portney, P and Weyant, J (1999) Discounting and Intergenera-
tional Equity, Resources for the Future, Washington, DC.
Sagoff, M (1995) Carrying Capacity and Ecological Economics,
Bioscience, 45(9), 610619.
Schmalansee, R, Joskow, P, Ellerman, A D, Montero, J P, and
Bailey, E M (1998) An Interim Evaluation of the Sulfur Diox-
ide Trading Program, J. Econ. Perspect., 12(3), 5368.
Wallach, L and Sforza, M (1999) Whose Trade Organization?
Corporate Globalization and the Erosion of Democracy, Public
Citizen, Washington, DC.
World Bank (1992) World Development Report 1992: Develop-
ment and the Environment, Oxford University Press, New
York.
FURTHER READING
See various articles in Volumes 1 and 4 concerning climate
change.
37
Ecological Economics
RICHARD B NORGAARD
University of California at Berkley, CA, USA
Economists, ecologists, and scholars from a variety of other disciplines have organized an intellectual community known
as ecological economics. The International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE) was established in 1989, in
response to a concern that the dominant ways of economic thinking have fostered particular forms of global change with
detrimental social and environmental impacts. The constitution of the Society states:
The purpose of the Society is the advancement of our understanding of the relationships among ecological, social, and
economic systems and the application of this understanding to the mutual well-being of nature and people, especially
that of the most vulnerable, including future generations.
Note that ecological economists broadly stress the interaction of multiple systems and the "mutual well-being of nature
and people", putting the emphasis on the interaction, rather than people or nature alone. The concern, however, is also
focused on the "most vulnerable", again whether people or other species.
Expanding on this general statement, ecological economists share three general concerns that are neither adequately
recognized in dominant academic and professional economic circles, nor appropriately considered in political economic
discourse. These are: (1) that economies must be understood as operating within the larger biogeochemical Earth
System receiving energy from the sun; (2) that environmental sustainability depends on viable social systems; and (3)
that progress toward the mutual well-being of nature and people is being thwarted by excessive material consumption
on the one hand, and excessive material inequality on the other. Ecological economists are methodologically eclectic,
using ecological reasoning and both dominant and alternative economics in their search for better understanding of the
interrelations between people and their environment, for indicators of sustainability, and for ways of bringing individual
human behavior into conformity with collective human goals. While the concern with excessive consumption and equity
clearly makes ecological economics an alternative community for economists and ecologists in rich countries, these
same concerns make ecological economics a very comfortable community for scholars addressing sustainable
development in poor countries.
THE NATURE OF ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS
Many have tried to define ecological economics, few have reached the same explication (see, for example, Martinez-
Alier, 1987; Costanza, 1989; Costanza et al., 1997; Soderbaum, 2000). This difficulty, of some concern both within and
beyond the field, arises for a variety of reasons. First, many researchers who self-identify as ecological economists use
the models and methods of more conventional environmental economists. This has led some environmental economists
to argue that there is nothing new in ecological economics. Yet the difference is clear. Ecological economists, as a
whole, also use other models and methods, and actively discuss the strengths and weaknesses of environmental
economic models in the contexts of the others. Second, since its modern beginnings, ecological economists have been
searching for effective ways to understand and convey the importance of justice in the context of environmental
sustainability and human dignity. Third, ecological economists have been grappling with how environmental problems
require both new ways of understanding science and new ways of joining knowledge distributed among scientists,
practitioners, and lay people to effect collective action. These latter two broad facets of ecological economics perplex
both new entrants to the field and external observers who try to logically fashion ecological economics out of ecology
and economics as narrowly defined. Fourth, and stemming from the first three, there is mild disagreement over whether
(a) ecological economics should be striving for a new paradigm, a new set of integrative models, systems assumptions,
and empirical methods, or (b) it should, or must, remain a large umbrella under
38 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Box 1 Working Assumptions of Ecological Economics
economies and the global economy overall require
energy, materials and diverse genetic/species/eco-
system patterns and reproductive capacities pro-
vided by healthy natural systems;
current levels of energy use, material ows,
and genetic/species/ecosystem loss are both
unnecessary to a good life and a threat to the
health of natural systems;
economies and the global economy overall require
healthy social systems;
current levels of material inequity are immoral,
do not support human dignity, and are a threat
to healthy social systems;
current rates of economic change, especially
the drive for globalization, are outpacing our
abilities to adapt and maintain the health of
social systems.
which economists, ecologists, and others scholars compare
and contrast different models and learn together. These
issues are central to this description of the eld.
While the scope and direction of ecological economics
are actively discussed, there is considerable agreement
among ecological economists with respect to their working
assumptions. Ecological economic reasoning is not unique
in its dependence on working assumptions, general beliefs
about society and nature. Each research community focuses
on a portion of reality and makes assumptions about larger
systems, or takes a very broad view and makes assumptions
about the details. No discipline understands the whole of
reality, so assumptions about the relations between the parts
studied and the whole are a necessity. Economist Karl
Schumpeter referred to the combination of assumptions and
choice of model as a scholars preanalytic vision (Daly,
1996).
The following working assumptions (see Box 1) are
broad and highly generalized in nature. Relatively few
ecological economists work from all of them, yet most
ecological economists acknowledge the importance of each
of them and how they work together. This recognition and
respect demonstrate that ecological economists see the eld
as a collective effort.
Threats to natural and social systems are a threat to
people overall, but they are especially a threat to todays
poor and to future generations. Ecological economists put
social and natural systems at the center of their think-
ing, rather than individuals. The term social systems
encompasses all forms of economic and social organiza-
tion, the legal and informal institutions that set the rules,
and the knowledge and shared beliefs that allow people
to understand each other. The metaphor of health helps
elaborate the meaning of the mutual well-being of nature
and people . Yet desirable properties of these systems
remain vague. When empirical research is conducted, spe-
cic favorable qualities of social and environmental systems
are adopted. Some ecological economists argue that energy
use or material ows or biodiversity are sufcient indicators
of biogeochemical system health. These effectively serve as
their working assumptions when conducting specic anal-
yses. With respect to social systems, justice, participation,
shared-learning, human dignity, and other terms are often
invoked.
Ecologists and natural scientists largely hold the assump-
tion that the economy works within the larger biogeo-
chemical system generally, hence the appropriateness of
ecological as a modier to economics. The concern with
human communities, and how these are threatened by
inequity and the speed and character of current economic
change, however, are nurtured by ecological economists
broader roots in the social sciences and applied work in
developing countries. By identifying environmental and
social systems as central to their thinking, ecological
economists are explicitly arguing that they are important,
i.e., that they have value in themselves. The intertwining of
natural system and social system concerns into one prean-
alytic vision owes much to the rich mix of scholars, from
developed and developing countries, interacting through the
ISEE during its rst decade.
The sub-points in the working assumptions with respect
to materialism, growth, and inequity are even more clearly
value judgments. There are corresponding values integral to
the working assumptions of mainstream economists. How-
ever, the values remain implicit, rather than explicit. By
assuming, for example, that science allows us to rise above
nature, and that material progress helps us all to live a
better life, conventional economists are implicitly valuing
these approaches. Whether one a priori presents people,
as in nature or rising above nature, is not simply an issue
of fact but a statement of a preference or goal as well.
Similarly, ecological economists moral concern with the
distribution of happiness, and their strategic concern that
inequity threatens the health of social systems, are dif-
cult to separate. Such value judgments help ecological
economists select and frame their research and what sub-
sequently appears in the ecological economics literature,
just as surely as historic beliefs about progress and how it
helps all affect the research and literature of mainstream
economists.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
An appreciation for the historical path of economics is
essential to understanding the ways in which ecological
economists have parted from that path and what they seek
through exploring alternatives (Christensen, 1989; Costanza
et al., 1997, Chapter 2). The conclusions economists reach
ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS 39
are determined by the structure of their formal models,
the quality of their data on the state of the economy, and
very general assumptions about the relationships between
economies, society, and biogeochemical reality. The partic-
ular assumptions that economists have come to share over
their history differ from those acquired by ecologists, for
example, and set them apart as a separate academic tribe
and professional culture. Some assumptions are embedded
in the ways in which economic models simplify complex-
ity to a manageable form. Some are rooted in the social
issues and liberal political philosophy of the formative
years of economics in the 19th century. Additional premises
were embraced as economists assumed roles as technical
experts in national governments and international agen-
cies during the 20th century to evaluate public investments,
assure full employment, promote development, and, most
recently, facilitate trade and international capital mobility.
While there has always been diversity in formal models and
assumptions among economists, particular combinations of
models and assumptions have clearly dominated at differ-
ent points in time, complementing the problems at hand and
the political economy of power affecting economic change
within nations and internationally.
Classical Economic Origins of Ecological
Economics
Ecological economists have an af nity with the way many
classical economists, from the late 18th through most of
the 19th century, combined moral reasoning and systems
thinking to describe problems and point toward solutions.
Many of the most important economists in this period
also knew that environmental systems and resources were
central to human well-being. The following vignettes of
early economists provide critical background.
Francois Quesnay (1694 1774) and the Physiocrats
argued that economic activity should be governed in keep-
ing with the laws implanted in Nature by Providence .
Quesnay, an admirer of physics, named the school of
economic thought he established to re ect the scienti c
principles on which economic wealth was hypothesized
to depend. Quesnay and his disciples developed a sim-
ple input output table of the economy, categorized by
economic class, with all wealth owing from agricul-
tural labor. A disciple of Quesnay, Anne Robert Jacques
Turgot, rose to the position of comptroller general in
France in 1776, began to impose physiocratic reason-
ing to tax policy, and was soon relieved of of ce after
offending too many political interests. While the argu-
ments of Adam Smith soon surpassed those of the phys-
iocrats, they in uenced many 19th century economists
including Karl Marx. The input output table was a pre-
cursor to modern material ow models of economies.
The physiocrats were early ecological economists in the
sense that the laws of natural science, to the extent they
understood them, were integral to their understanding of
economics.
Adam Smith (1723 1790), widely recognized as the
founder of modern economics, was a moral philosopher
who argued that shared moral standards develop because
individuals empathize with each other. Concerned with
whether individual economic decisions summed to the com-
mon good, he reasoned that if two people choose to enter
into an exchange, it is because the exchange makes each
of them better off. So long as the individual decisions
made by parties to an exchange did not adversely affect
other people, society as a whole was better off through
the exchange. Appealing to Judeo-Christian images of God,
Smith invoked the metaphor of the market being guided as
if by an invisible hand. Smith was not simply arguing for
free markets in the abstract. Mercantilism, a system wherein
the state granted sole trading rights to particular compa-
nies, favored a few over the many. Smith argued that freer
markets would be better for people overall. Thus the rst
modern economist fought the socioeconomic power sys-
tem of the time with ethical and economic reasoning. His
plea for the market and against government intervention
was in opposition to the tight relations that had developed
between companies and the state, not against government
per se. The relations between corporations and government
have changed many times since mercantilism, and they are
again of some concern.
Thomas Malthus (1766 1834), a clergyman turned eco-
nomic philosopher, explained the prevalence of war and
disease as material phenomena rather than as acts of God.
He argued that human populations were capable of increas-
ing exponentially and would do so as long as suf cient
food and other essentials of life were available. He further
hypothesized that people could expand their food supply
only arithmetically through new technologies and expan-
sion into new habitats. Given the geometric potential of
population growth, and the arithmetic food constraint, pop-
ulation would periodically surpass food supply. At these
times, people would ravage the land, go to war over food,
and succumb to disease and starvation. Human numbers
would consequently drop to sustainable levels, but the pro-
cess would repeat itself again. Both Charles Darwin and
Alfred Wallace acknowledged that Malthus model of popu-
lation pressing against an environmental constraint was key
to their formulation of the theory of natural selection. Lim-
its to growth are also central to many ecological economic
models.
David Ricardo (1772 1823) introduced a second model
of how economic activity relates to the environment, not
because he was concerned with environmental degrada-
tion or human survival, but rather to justify why landlords
received a rent from their ownership of land. Ricardo
argued that people would initially farm the land that
40 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
produced the most food for the least work. As population
increased, farming would extend to less-fertile soils requir-
ing more labor. His model shows how increasing population
drives people to farm in previously undisturbed areas and
how higher food prices lead to intensied effort on land
already in production. His model of how humans extend
and intensify land use underlies many debates over devel-
opment and conservation.
John Stuart Mill (18061873), the son of social philoso-
pher James Mill (17731836), argued that competitive
markets complement individual liberty. Mill also wrote on
both the immorality and the waste of subjugating women
to men. He neither saw material prosperity as an end in
itself nor thought continuous growth in material well-being
was possible. Mill envisioned economies becoming mature
and reaching a steady state, in which people would be able
to enjoy the fruits of their earlier savings. The idea that
economies would reach a steady state was logical. Change
was common, unceasing growth was not, and relatively
steady states rather than random change were perceived
as natural. A century after Mill, Herman Daly, one of the
founders of modern ecological economics, elaborated on the
necessity and advantages of a steady-state economy (Daly,
1973).
Karl Marx (18181883) criticized capitalism on the
grounds that it left workers at a subsistence wage while cap-
italists thrived. Marx, an admirer of Darwin and biological
thinking, was concerned with how the introduction of fer-
tilizer inputs produced an agricultural revolution during
the 19th century that not only detrimentally transformed
social relations but irreversibly disturbed ecological rela-
tions as well (Foster, 1999). He had strong progressive
beliefs, arguing that capitalism was but a phase in a
larger inevitable history of progress toward socialism and
eventually communism. While his long-run predictions still
inspire resistance movements, the logic of his critiques,
his moral stance, and historical approach are an integral
part of many schools of social thought to this day. The
capitalist economic system was tamed during much of
the 20th century, partly in response to how Marx had
framed its problems. Capitalism keeps changing and has
become especially virulent again at the opening of the
21st century while inequity within and between nations has
increased.
Alfred Marshall (18421924) synthesized the work of
the classical economists, retained their philosophical voice,
and incorporated the ndings of the mathematicians who
formalized economics. Among Marshalls many theoretical
contributions to economic analysis can be found frequent
references to the beauty of nature, and the importance of
clean air and water to a decent city life. He argued that
markets, driven by the possibilities for individual gain,
would not provide sufcient public goods. Lastly, he argued
that while economists had drawn very successfully on the
mechanical models of physics, the future of economics was
in joining with biology.
Natural Science Origins of Ecological Economics
The classical economists were broadly read, aware of devel-
opments in the natural sciences, and thereby prone to
address questions of natural limits. They were not, however,
scientists themselves. Scientists, well aware of the rapidity
of economic change during the 19th century, periodically
asked how the laws being discovered in the natural sci-
ences might affect the possibilities for economic progress
(Martinez-Alier with Schlupmann, 1987). Serhii Podolin-
sky (18501891), writing on energy and economics during
the 1880s, explored the implications of the efciencies of
energy use as it ows from the sun, through agriculture, on
through human consumption and labor output, and hence
into the broader economy. Today, agricultural energetics
and the possibilities for greater dependence on renew-
able energy are central to ameliorating climate change.
Patrick Geddes (18541932) argued in the 1880s that
economists inappropriately blended the physical processes
of economies with monetary exchanges. Much like mod-
ern ecological economists, he argued that more could be
revealed if we modeled the physical and the monetary pro-
cesses separately. Leopold Pfaundler (18391920) argued
in 1902 that physical principles needed to be applied to cal-
culate the carrying capacity of the earth to derive realistic
expectations for the future. Frederick Soddy (18771956),
a Nobel laureate in chemistry, argued in the 1920s that
economists did not understand how our economies are
driven by current and stored energy from the sun, that
stored energy was the only real wealth, and that the
conception of monetary wealth implied that economists
believed people could eat their cake and have it too .
A J Lotka (18801949) borrowed from the mathematical
developments in economics to outline a theory of value
based on ecological tness (Kingsland, 1985). For reasons
partly elaborated in the next section, economists did not
respond to the early concerns expressed or alternatives pro-
vided by natural scientists. Today, many of these same
concerns and alternatives drive the biophysical approaches
of ecological economists.
The Rise of Modern Economic Culture
During the later decades of the 19th century, the market
model became formalized mathematically and key concepts
became much better understood. During roughly the same
period, economics and the other modes of social analysis
began to assert themselves as separate sciences, assuming
an objective stance while actively trying to shed their ethical
baggage. Economists turned increasingly inward, staying
less and less in touch with advances in the natural sciences
ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS 41
as well as with the other social sciences, while they pretty
much dropped out of philosophical discourse all together.
The less economists read beyond economics, the more
natural their own assumptions appeared to them. Later, dur-
ing the Great Depression, economists were brought into
national governments to help stabilize economies and to
undertake cost-benet analyses of alternative investments,
of water projects rst, and eventually almost everything.
Earlier arguments about achieving the greater good were
modied to justify ignoring equity issues as economists
concentrated on efciency in public policy analysis. Soon
after, economists became signicant players in the new mis-
sion of international development, advocating that the best
way to reduce poverty was through growth. As economics
turned inward academically, the shared assumptions of
economists narrowed and hardened even while economists
new professional roles required that assumptions change
with the problems and politics of the times.
It is important to understand that while the models of eco-
nomics have become better understood through their formal
development, the assumptions inherent to the models have
not changed. What changed during the 20th century was
how economists used their models. Early economists com-
pared the results of their economic reasoning with that of
other forms of reasoning, playing them off each other to
maximize understanding. As economists assumed greater
roles in public decision-making, they needed to justify that
the economic way of thinking was the best way of thinking.
During the last decades of the 20th century, academic
economists began exploring new approaches and broaden-
ing their thinking. Professional economists, however, still
have had to defend established ways and particular answers.
Environmental Economics
Environmental economics is a sub-discipline of economics.
Its strongest roots are in the US where Richard T Ely, the
founder of the American Economic Association at the end
of the 19th century, also founded a school of land eco-
nomics and utility regulation economics at the University of
Wisconsin. Early environmental economists Ely, George
Wehrwein, Marion Clawson, Maurice Kelso, and Siegfried
Ciriacy von Wantrup raised fundamental questions from
the 1920s into the 1960s about property, organization, envi-
ronmental degradation, and resource conservation when
much of the profession was engaged in mathematical
renement of perfectly functioning markets. Environmen-
tal economists in the 1950s and 1960s Karl William
Kapp, E J Mishan, John Krutilla, Allen Kneese, and Jack
Knetsch questioned growth and its effects on the envi-
ronment, when their colleagues were advocating greater
resource use in developed and developing countries in an
economic race with the former Soviet Union. With the
rise in popular environmental concern in the early 1970s
followed by the energy crisis, environmental economics
ourished, and the concept of market failure became central
to economic understanding. The Association of Environ-
mental and Resource Economists was founded in 1979.
Though their roots include fairly radical thinkers, envi-
ronmental economists have generally extended existing eco-
nomic patterns of thinking to environmental issues rather
than question whether economic thinking is a part of the
problem. The professional role of economists in envi-
ronmental agencies has reinforced the tendency to rally
behind dominant approaches rather than raise fundamen-
tal questions. The assumptions embedded in the culture
of economists, and largely assumed by environmental
economists, were well established before the rise of ecol-
ogy as a full-edged science in the second half of the 20th
century. Economists assumptions about nature and possi-
bilities for the future are rooted in an earlier time when
technological change seemed to only solve problems, not
create new ones as fast as it solved the old. In rich countries
where the sub-discipline started, environmental economists
tend to advocate modest corrections to the existing devel-
opment paths (see Environmental Economics, Volume 5).
The Rise of Modern Ecological Economics
In response to the narrowing of economic thought during
the 20th century, a few scholars more open to thinking
across natural and social science boundaries provided
the foundations for modern ecological economics. Ken-
neth Boulding (19101993) worked with philosophers
and natural scientists on a general systems theory in the
1950s, introduced the metaphor of spaceship earth to
stress how economies must work within limits (Bould-
ing, 1966) and subsequently wrote on ecodevelopment in a
broad evolutionary framework (Boulding, 1978). Kneese
et al. (1970) building on the rst law of thermodynam-
ics, constructed material balance economic models to better
understand the limits of markets. Odum (1971), an ecolo-
gist, developed an energetic systems view that he applied
across ecological and economic systems. Georgescu-Roe-
gen (19061994) argued that economic activity needed to
be understood as an entropic process (Georgescu-Roegen,
1971). Systems theorists Meadows et al. (1972) wrote Lim-
its to Growth, convincingly arguing that unlimited growth
was impossible. Daly (1973) reintroduced Mills steady-
state economy with arguments for limiting throughput
of energy and materials. Entomologist turned energeticist
David Pimentel documented the energy costs of alternative
forms of agriculture (Pimentel, 1974).
Karl-Goran Maler of Sweden explored some of the impli-
cations of materials balance to a general equilibrium eco-
nomic approach (Maler, 1974). Passet (1979) in France
began to combine economic and thermodynamic thinking,
while Pillet teamed up with Odum (1987) to write on energy
42 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
and economics. Many had already suggested corrections to
the system of national accounts (SNA) so that, for example,
expenditures correcting new environmental problems were
not treated as benets, Roee Hueting of the Netherlands
pushed the corrective process the furthest (Hueting, 1980).
In 1982, about 40 economists and ecologists met in Stock-
holm, hosted by ecologist Ann-Mari Jansson, to explore
how economics and ecology could be integrated (Jansson,
1984). At that meeting, Robert Costanza used the term eco-
logical economics in a paper suggesting how energy anal-
ysis and economic valuation might be merged (Costanza,
1984). The term gained further prominence as the title to a
book on how economists had resisted responding to chal-
lenges from natural scientists (Martinez-Alier, 1987).
While the Stockholm meeting emphasized natural con-
straints, ecologist William Murdoch argued that distri-
butional issues were absolutely central to understanding
economies and environments in developing countries (Mur-
doch, 1984). In 1987, Joan Martinez-Alier hosted a second
key meeting of ecologists and economists in Barcelona.
At this meeting, the nature of our understanding of com-
plex systems and what this meant for the policy process
was clearly added to the agenda of ecological economics
(Norgaard, 1989; Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1990). Following
discussions at Barcelona, the journal Ecological Economics
was started by Robert Costanza and Herman Daly who also
took the initiative to found the International Society for
Ecological Economics (ISEE) soon after.
THE METHODS AND ISSUES OF
ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS
Ecological economists are methodologically pluralistic
(Norgaard, 1989). The eld includes economists using
market, macro, institutional, Austrian, and Marxist forms
of analysis. There are ecologists who do energetic analyses,
population biology, evolutionary ecology, hierarchy theory,
food web modeling, landscape ecology, and global biogeo-
chemical modeling. Environmental historians, ecological
anthropologists, development sociologists, systems theo-
rists, and epistemologists and social philosophers, among
others, also participate in ecological economics. Such a
diversity of backgrounds is a strength, for each of the meth-
ods of the individual disciplines only spotlights a portion of
the problem. Where models in economics and ecology share
the same mathematical form, they can be combined into
a broader, brighter light. Population models from ecology
mesh nicely with production models from market eco-
nomics. Input output analysis is used in macro-economics
and in food web analysis and some energy accounting mod-
els, hence can be readily combined. To the extent that evo-
lutionary thinking has developed in economics, it combines
comfortably with the approach of evolutionary ecology.
Most of the models of ecology and economics, however, do
not t together. Thus ecological economists contend with
different, and often somewhat incongruent, ndings from
different patterns of thinking. When the understandings
gained from separate models can be aligned, condence
is gained. When separate understandings are in juxtaposi-
tion, conclusions are withheld and new questions are raised.
How methods are used can best be described by looking at
several particular issues ecological economists address.
Environmental Valuation
The relationship between market prices and value has long
been at the center of controversy. Economists put a very
specic meaning to the word value, defying the rich her-
itage of the term and constraining its meaning in discussions
of the future. The early critiques of economics by natu-
ral scientists were driven by a concern that economists
understanding of value was divorced from natural lim-
its and processes. The idea that values are inherent to
nature, an idea that fuels debates among environmental
ethicists today, were explored under the concept of nat-
ural value, for example, by Lotka. During the latter half
of the 20th century, economists colonized this realm of
value too by developing a variety of techniques for putting
monetary values on environmental goods and services, the
values they would have if they were traded in markets.
Ecological economists use these new techniques but inter-
pret the results with greater caution than environmental
economists for three major reasons.
The rst concern of ecological economists with environ-
mental valuation comes from within economic theory itself.
How much people are willing to pay (WTP) for clean air,
for example, assumes that people do not already have a
right to clean air. When asked how much they would be
willing to accept (WTA) to give up clean air, which assumes
people have the right to clean air, people give answers that
are two or three times WTP, and in some studies 10 times
or more. Environmental economists have generally adopted
the polluter pay principle, implying that people have the
rights to a healthy environment (see PPP (Polluter Pay
Pr inciple), Volume 4). Yet in the case of contingent valu-
ation research, environmental economists have adopted the
convention that WTP gives more appropriate answers than
WTA. Ecological economists have not adopted the same
convention. Rather, they see the difference between WTP
and WTA as a crucial example of an underlying problem
in environmental valuation.
The second concern is that market prices reect the
existing distribution of rights more generally, not simply
between polluters and pollutees, but between the rich and
the destitute, wealthy nations and poor, those who choose
traditional ways and those who embrace the market, and
present and future peoples. Existing techniques for simulat-
ing how an environmental market would work, implicitly
ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS 43
assume that the existing distribution of rights to resources
and environmental services is the correct one. Howarth and
Norgaard (1995) built an overlapping generations model of
a hypothetical economy and showed that with all markets
working perfectly, whether the economy was running at
all for future generations depended on their having rights.
With different assignments of rights across generations,
resources have different prices over time. And when non-
market environmental services were included in the model,
environmental services have different values depending on
the rights of future generations. Ironically, a motivating fac-
tor for doing environmental valuation has been to justify
changing the law so that a wilderness area or an endangered
species is saved for future generations. Yet neoclassical eco-
nomics itself indicates that economic reasoning depends on
the rights of future generations in the rst place. So, there
is a major problem of circularity in standard environmental
economic reasoning.
The only way out of this circularity is to accept that
questions about the distribution of rights must be addressed
through some method of moral reasoning beyond the sim-
ple individual utility calculus behind economic reasoning.
While such complications have long been recognized by
utilitarian philosophers and economic theorists, acknowl-
edging that economic reasoning alone does not result in
unique answers, with respect to the public good, defeats
the efforts of economists to provide simple answers to
policy questions. Practicing economists, and many aca-
demics today as well, will respond that questions about
the distribution of rights need to be addressed separately
by others in other arenas, and that economics is just one
input to the collective decision-making process. Yet the
appropriate response within the economic framework would
be to present policy makers with analyses indicating how
different assignments of rights would affect people and how
economic and non-economic activity would unfold over
time. This would entail a deeper approach to economic
analysis, more work for economists, and a new style of
interaction with policy makers. Ecological economists have
begun to take on this challenge.
Third, in the economic model, individuals have prede-
termined preferences and the problem of valuation is one
of aggregating them to a collective preference. Individuals,
however, are not born with preferences. They acquire them
interacting in society and through advertising and other
commercially funded media. Acknowledging that individ-
ual preferences are socially constructed opens up values
analysis to the processes of their construction, how they
have changed over time, which interests have inuenced
the changes, and whose ends are being served. It is well
known that people respond differently as individuals than
when as members of a group. This can be due to the social
pressure of being within a group. It can also be due to the
fact that many things, such as clean air and biological diver-
sity, are very difcult to obtain acting as an individual, and
so individuals, when choosing between alternatives, do not
think about these things as options.
Ecological economists see individuals and groups as
being able to draw on diverse multiple types of values
and ethics depending on the context. Individuals have
values and ethics rooted in their religion, sometimes more
than one. They have values and ethics rooted in their
particular cultural histories. And individuals and groups
learn from their particular experiences and thereby develop
values and ethics. Different values and ethical criteria
are called forth depending on the setting, whether one is
acting as an individual, a member of a family, within a
profession, as a church member, as a citizen, etc. Because
these categories are not exclusive and one is accountable
in multiple, and not always foreseen, settings, weighing
alternatives, individually and collectively, is considerably
more difcult than a simple utilitarian calculus. It is also
much more interesting (OConnor, 2000).
In opposition to the western fact value dichotomy, eco-
logical economists are a little more prone to see facts and
values as interlocked. There were no predened preferences
for biodiversity for example, before ecologists began to
study the importance of biodiversity, and new technolo-
gies allowed us to better understand genetics in the last
quarter of the 20th century. To be sure, we now recognize
particular species and genetic traits as being important, as
we have come to realize how something of prior value,
say a medicinal drug, is obtained and must be protected.
But such particulars are not biodiversity, though efforts to
value biodiversity have certainly been attempted through
aggregating particulars. Rather, we now value biodiversity
per se even though there are multiple denitions of the
term and we only know the number of species within an
order of magnitude. In effect, biodiversity is a term like
health, something that carries with it connotations of value
as vague as the term itself, but very important to people
nonetheless.
Ecological economists are interested in how social sys-
tems produce and reproduce some types of values and not
others at different times. They are interested in how new
mechanisms for making collective choice can be established
that take advantage of expert advice, economic calculations,
and group learning. Values juries seem like an interesting
possibility. When ecological economists do an analysis that
aggregates values in a single numeraire, they explore its
strengths and weaknesses from the perspective of values
having multiple realms.
Correcting the System of National Accounts
The primary creator of the SNA, Simon Kuznets, warned
that gross domestic product (GDP) simply measures mar-
ket and government activity, not well-being. Karl William
44 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Kapp, an early ecological economist, documented how the
accounts failed to consider natural resources appropriately
as well as household labor (Kapp, 1950). Various econo-
mists, in response to the environmental concerns of the
early 1970s, looked into the shortcomings of the SNA.
Ecological economists, including Herman Daly, Robert
Goodland, Rooe Hueting, Richard Norgaard, and Henry
Peskin, participated during the 1980s in efforts hosted by
the United Nations Environment Programme and the World
Bank to correct the SNA. The goal was to treat the deple-
tion of resource stocks like the depreciation of capital and
to treat expenditures to correct expanding environmental
problems as intermediate rather than nal products. These
were seen as simply better accounting practices. Some
also hoped, however, that sufcient corrections could be
made so that GDP, or some new aggregate measure, not
only made a serious effort to measure economic well-being
but also to account for whether that well-being could be
sustained.
Working with Herman Daly, Clifford Cobb devised and
undertook the empirical work to derive an Index of Sus-
tainable Economic Well-Being (ISEW) (Daly and Cobb,
1989). The ISEW shows sustainable well-being increasing
until around 1970, and then declining since. The ISEW,
in different stages of evolution, has been calculated for
many countries by non-governmental organizations (NGOs)
with similar results. The ISEW has evolved further in the
hands of Rede ning Progress, a US NGO, into the Genuine
Progress Indicator (Cobb et al., 1999). Even though rates
of growth increased dramatically during the 1990s, the GPI
declined because of increasing inequality, increased defen-
sive environmental expenditures, and growth that has been
at the expense of future generations (see ISEW (Index
of Sustainable Economic Welfare) and GPI (Genuine
Progress Indicator ), Volume 5).
Since the 1980s, governments around the world have
begun to incorporate some of the suggestions to correct
their SNA. They have consistently taken the approach,
however, of developing satellite accounts of environmental
expenditures and stock resource depletion, and not used
this information to adjust GDP or devise a new aggregate
indicator. The rationale for developing but not incorporating
environmental and resource accounts has been explicated
by a study of the US National Research Council (Nordhaus
and Kokkelenberg, 1999).
Whether one is devising a new aggregate indicator or
simply establishing environmental and resource satellite
accounts in monetary units, one must determine unique,
defensible values for non-market goods and services. Since
the 1980s, however, ecological economists have enriched
their ranks and acquired a more complex understanding of
values. This development makes it increasingly dif cult for
ecological economists to recommend and defend any partic-
ular formal method for deriving non-market environmental
values for standardized accounting purposes. Accounting
for resource depletion using values derived from current
resource prices, for example, may grossly under-represent
the value of that depletion, for new extraction technolo-
gies may be keeping current prices low while their value
to future generations remains high. There is also a concern
that no one indicator will ever be adequate. Herman Daly is
fond of saying that looking at GDP to plan for the future is
like driving forward looking into the rearview mirror. While
looking out the windshield is a major improvement, those
working on indicators of human well-being, environmen-
tal well-being, and sustainability are increasingly talking
about a dashboard of indicators. Nevertheless, most eco-
logical economists support environmental accounting as an
improvement over not accounting for the environment. Eco-
logical economists also hope that the process of deriving
and disseminating environmental accounting information
will help lead people to ask deeper questions.
Biophysical-Economic System Analysis
The efforts to link the natural sciences with economics
are numerous, with none being dominant. At best, a cur-
sory summary of the work of ecological economists can
be provided. First, as methodological pluralists, ecologi-
cal economists rely on the natural sciences in order to
understand the limits of particular economic models and
assumptions, and they accept the ndings of biophysical
analyses on their own terms, as additional information of
equal importance as that stemming from economic analy-
sis. Second, ecological economists have linked, and in some
cases integrated ecological and economic models. Third, the
concept of joint production from economics has been devel-
oped as a link between economics and the natural sciences.
Fourth, ecological economists have extended models from
the natural sciences to economics, dispensing with tradi-
tional models of economics altogether. Each of these needs
elaboration.
Ecological economists often compare the differences in
the insights derived from natural science and economics.
Gowdy (1994), for example, has explored the concept of
coevolution in biology, how it relates to cultural ecology in
anthropology, restated institutional economics in coevolu-
tionary terms, and compared all of this with conventional
market analyses. Malte Faber and others have further devel-
oped the ideas of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, arguing that,
as we rely less and less on current solar energy and more
and more on fossil hydrocarbon and other mined resources,
economic activity needs to be understood as moving toward
a closed system and subject to the second law of thermo-
dynamics (Faber et al., 1996). This means that we need to
understand economic activity as an entropic process, as tak-
ing high quality energy and materials and reducing them to
waste heat and dispersed minerals. Looking at new technol-
ogy from this perspective, we see that it allows economic
ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS 45
activity to accelerate, for entropy to increase faster, leaving
less for the future, not more. Thus, to the extent that we
rely on stock resources, especially of energy, progress is
not possible, indeed even sustainability is not possible. The
alternative, of course, is to return to relying on current solar
energy, in part by working with natural systems. This, how-
ever, raises further issues.
Humans are co-opting approximately 40% of the primary
energy captured by terrestrial ecosystems (Vitousek et al.,
1986). Ecological economists use this study as an indication
of how human activity has transformed the environment,
and as an indicator of the limits to further transformation.
For Herman Daly and other ecological economists, the
analysis of Vitousek stresses the urgency of moving to a
steady state while there is still some margin left (Daly,
1996).
Wackernagel and Rees (1996) have used biophysical
analysis to calculate the ecological footprint of a popu-
lation, the area of productive land and water needed to
produce the resources it consumes and assimilate the wastes
it produces. Ecological-footprints range from approximately
0.5 hectares per person for people in very poor countries
to 10 or more hectares for average Americans; the rich
use even more (see Ecological Footprint, Volume 3). Bio-
physical analyses provide critical insight into our use of
stock resources (Cleveland and Kaufman, 1991), into car-
rying capacity, and into the difculties of moving toward
life-styles consistent with carrying capacity (Folke, 1991;
Kaberger, 1991; Jannson, 1991). While biophysical indi-
cators create considerable controversy within ecological
economics when their supporters argue that they are suitable
for making policy directly, they contribute to how ecologi-
cal economists understand the relationships between people
and nature.
Second, Volterras logistic growth curve has long been
incorporated in the economics of forests and sheries.
Going beyond this, but still building on the heuristic
models of population biology, the eld of bioeconomics
arose with the mathematical models of Colin Clark (Clark,
1976; Conrad and Clark, 1987). Ecological economists have
pushed further in this direction. The relationship of biolog-
ical concepts to ecological economics have been explored:
ecological stability (Common and Perrings, 1992); eco-
logical resilience (Brown and Roughgarden, 1995), and
biological diversity (Norgaard, 1987; Perrings et al., 1995).
Empirical research has also linked ecological systems and
economic choices (Costanza et al., 1989).
Third, some ecological economists argue that the idea
of joint production from economics provides an adequate
bridge to the natural sciences. A petroleum renery, for
example, produces a range of products from jet fuel to tar,
jointly in the sense that it is difcult to get one without the
other. All production processes, however, jointly produce
good things and bad things. Economists have simplied
their models by only looking at the good things produced
rather than the total set of desired and undesired out-
puts that show consistency with the rst and second laws
of thermodynamics. While economists have downplayed
joint production as a relatively rare situation, from an
ecological economic perspective, the concept of joint pro-
duction provides a critical connection between economics
and understanding from the natural sciences (Baumgartner
et al., 2000).
Fourth, a few ecological economists have dispensed with
economic models altogether and used methods rooted in the
natural sciences to understand the human predicament. For
example, Howard Odum (1996) has argued that the concept
of emergy , dened as the energy used up in an ecological
or economic process, can be used to trace costs through eco-
logical and economic systems, providing better measures
of value and wealth. Odum argues that emergy analyses
provide a scientic basis for choosing between alterna-
tive technologies and development projects (see Emergy,
Volume 5). On the other hand, Richard Norgaard pursued
a coevolutionary explanation of change to a conclusion
that substantially changes how we treat expert knowledge.
He argued that social and environmental change can be
understood as a coevolutionary process between value,
knowledge, organizational, technological, and environmen-
tal systems. Characteristics within each system select upon
the tness of characteristics in the other systems such that
they coevolve together, reecting each other, and becoming
tightly interlocked. But change does occur through biologi-
cal mutations, cultural innovations, and introductions from
other ecosystems and cultures (Norgaard, 1994). Thus, col-
lective action can best be based on a process of shared
knowledge between scientists, those with traditional and
experiential knowledge, and those who will actually be
implementing the change.
THE FUTURE OF ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS
AND RELATED ALTERNATIVES
The future of ecological economics depends on three broad
issues. The rst is whether ecological economics will
evolve into a new overarching paradigm or whether it will
remain an umbrella under which multiple, contradictory
analyses are undertaken. This has important ramications
with respect to how ecological economics is put into prac-
tice. The second issue is whether ecological economics
will become a eld that is embraced by scholars in the
developing world as it has historically developed around
scholars in Europe and North America. The third issue is
how the scope of ecological economics will be affected by
the development of other transdisciplinary elds. Of par-
ticular importance are the developments in agroecology,
conservation biology, ecological engineering, and industrial
ecology starting from the natural sciences, and the study of
46 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
the commons and political ecology starting from the social
sciences. At the same time, the elds of economics and
ecology themselves continue to evolve and will also thereby
affect the future of ecological economics.
New Overarching Paradigm or Continued
Methodological Pluralism?
Among ecological economists, there is already consid-
erable agreement on underlying assumptions and on the
need to learn across models and disciplinary cultures. This
agreement itself indicates ecological economics is a new
overarching process, if not a paradigm. Many ecological
economists from its beginnings, however, have pleaded
for greater unity (Daly, 1984; Proops, 1989). To them, an
overarching model, or perhaps a small set of broad mod-
els, is needed to understand, not simply describe, the big
picture and to guide practitioners to appropriate particu-
lar models. Ecological economists need to establish a new
language. Simply incorporating the languages of multiple
disciplines, with the same words having different histor-
ical meanings, makes it difcult to communicate to the
public and policy makers. Taking ecological economics
to public and policy arenas has, thus far, entailed hiding
its richness and concentrating on correcting the SNA or
making arguments for reduced material and energy ows.
The US Environmental Protection Agency made a small
effort to understand how taking a broader approach to val-
uation might work (Bingham et al., 1995), but has not
implemented any of the recommendations. Conventional
economic thinking is well entrenched in political discourse
and agency decision-making in part because it is simple and
consistent. It is difcult to imagine how a eld as eclectic
as ecological economics can have an impact without having
comparable coherence.
On the other hand, continuing the methodological plu-
ralism of ecological economics is not a default position for
its advocates. Rather, the pluralists have compelling argu-
ments too. First, many scholars have sought unity within
the natural sciences and within the social sciences with-
out success, so the chances of unity across them are slim
indeed. Methodological pluralism is a reality. At least for
the foreseeable future, ecological economists should not
pin their hopes on accomplishing something so difcult
as unifying either the natural or the social sciences, let
alone the combination of the two. Second, agreeing on less
than a truly overarching model would entail reducing the
scope of inquiry of ecological economics. This would make
the eld more vulnerable to mistakes and surprise in the
future. Third, reducing ecological economics so that it ts
into the existing policy process is accepting defeat from
the beginning. The existing political discourse is domi-
nated from the top by those who have money. It needs
reinvigorating with a new paradigm that is more demo-
cratic. Ecological economists, as pluralists, are more open
to discussing a multiplicity of values and incorporating the
voices of those with traditional and experiential knowledge.
With respect to the policy process, the existing agencies
are set up to act on advice from experts speaking sepa-
rately. Inter-agency task forces, science juries, and other
interactive consensus-building innovations are opening up
this process, and it is through these and further evolutions
(Irwin, 1995; Stern and Fineberg, 1996), perhaps to full
discursive democracy (Dryzak, 1990; Fishkin, 1991), that
the richness of ecological economic understanding can be
effective. Fourth, different methods inherently stress dif-
ferent values. By focusing on different things, each model
says, this is important , and, by implication, that is not .
The multiple languages, especially of the social sciences,
also reproduce and transmit values from different historical
and cultural settings. In this sense, the plea for cohesion
in models and language is a plea for historical denial and
cultural extinction.
Ecological Economics as a Global Enterprise
Ecological economics is becoming the preferred base
for economists and other scholars working to implement
sustainable development in economically poor countries.
Scientists trained in western ways of thinking must
overcome strong cultural barriers as they work in poor
rural communities. From this perspective, disciplinary
boundaries are but a minor nuisance. And implementing
sustainable rural development clearly requires input from
multiple disciplines. Scholars from the economically poorer
countries are becoming stronger and more assertive as
their numbers increase and as the economic gap between
rich and many, though certainly not all, poor countries
increases. The shared vision of development, with each
nation developing a full complement of economic sectors
and public services, has collapsed to a northern vision of
globalization. NorthSouth tensions over the amelioration
of climate change and biodiversity loss have arisen within
the dominant conceptual and institutional frameworks.
Ecological economics, with its emphasis on equity and
respect for the diversity of ways of knowing, has
a tremendous opportunity. Ecological economics could
become a global network of scholars learning together,
building a global vision for the future that respects
diversity while demonstrating how that vision could be
achieved.
Other Alternatives to Economics
In addition to the work of ecological economists, there
are other efforts to affect how a narrow pattern of rea-
soning from economics has dominated modern policy and
politics. Like ecological economics, most of the other
alternatives also span multiple disciplines. Social scientists
have joined in the study of common property management
ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS 47
regimes. Economists and sociologists have joined to under-
stand socio-economic systems together. Political economy,
the study of power that has evolved across the social sci-
ences since Marx, is now complemented by the emerging
eld of political ecology. There are similar efforts cen-
tered in the natural sciences that are reaching across to
the social sciences. For example, biologists concerned with
the conservation of biological diversity are anxious to work
with economists. Academics and practitioners are organiz-
ing around the ideas of ecosystemhealth, industrial ecology,
and ecological engineering. Many ecological economists
also participate in these other interdisciplinary efforts. And
like ecological economics, most of these efforts are ques-
tioning the conventional assumptions of how science relates
to the policy process. While it is clear that ecological
economics is clearly focused on the interplay between
ecological and economic understanding, all of the emerg-
ing interdisciplinary efforts ask related questions to some
extent. Thus the future of ecological economics depends
on how numerous parallel and overlapping interdisciplinary
efforts evolve in the context of each other.
REFERENCES
Baumgartner, S, Dyckhoff, H, Faber, M, Proops, J, and Schiller, J
(2000) The Concept of Joint Production and Ecological Eco-
nomics, Discussion Paper Series No. 319 (June), Department
of Economics, Universitat Heidelberg.
Bingham, G, Bishop, R, Brody, M, Bromley, D, Clark, E, Coo-
per, W, Costanza, R, Hale, T, Hayden, G, Kellert, S, Nor-
gaard, R B, Norton, B, Payne, J, Russell, C, and Suter, G
(1995) Issues in Ecosystem Valuation: Improving Information
for Decision Making, Ecol. Econ., 14, 7390.
Boulding, K E (1966) The Economics of the Coming Spaceship
Earth, in Environmental Quality in a Growing Economy, ed
H Jarrett, Resources for the Future, Johns Hopkins University
Press, Baltimore, MD.
Boulding, K E (1978) Ecodynamics: A New Theory of Societal
Evolution, Sage Publications, Beverly Hills, CA.
Brown, G and Roughgarden, J (1995) An Ecological Economy:
Notes on Harvest and Growth, Chapter 5 in Biodiversity Loss:
Economic and Ecological Issues, eds C Perrings, K-G Maler,
and C Folke, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Christensen, P P (1989) Historical Roots for Ecological Eco-
nomics Biophysical Versus Allocative Approaches, Ecol.
Econ., 1(1), 1736.
Clark, C W (1976) Mathematical Bioeconomics: The Optimal
Management of Renewable Resources, Wiley-Interscience,
New York.
Cleveland, C J and Kaufman, R K (1991) Forecasting Ultimate
Oil Recovery and Its Rate of Production: Incorporating Eco-
nomic Forces into the Models of M. King Hubbert, Energy J.,
12(2), 1746.
Cobb, C, Goodman, G S, and Wackernagel, M (1999) Why Big-
ger is Not Better: The Genuine Progress Indicator 1999
Update, Redening Progress, San Francisco, CA.
Common, M and Perrings, C (1992) Towards an Ecological Eco-
nomics of Sustainability, Ecol. Econ., 6(1), 734.
Conrad, J M and Clark, C W (1987) Natural Resource Eco-
nomics: Notes and Problems, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
Costanza, R (1984) Natural Resource Valuation and Management:
Toward an Ecological Economics, in Integration of Economy
and Ecology: An Outlook for the Eighties, ed A M Jansson,
Proceedings from the Wallenberg Symposia, Stockholm.
Costanza, R (1989) What is Ecological Economics? Ecol. Econ.,
1(1), 17.
Costanza, R, Farber, S C, and Maxwell, J (1989) Valuation and
Management of Wetland Ecosystems, Ecol. Econ., 1, 335361.
Costanza, R, Cumberland, J, Daly, H, Goodland, R, and Nor-
gaard, R B (1997) An Introduction to Ecological Economics
(an Intermediate Level College Text), International Society for
Ecological Economics and St. Lucie Press, FL.
Costanza, R, Perrings, C, and Cleveland, C J (1997) The Devel-
opment of Ecological Economics, Edward Elgar, Chel-
tenham.
Daly, H E (1973) The Steady-State Economy: Toward a Political
Economy of Biophysical Equilibrium and Moral Growth, in
Toward a Steady-State Economy, eds H E Daly and W H Free-
man, San Francisco, CA.
Daly, H E (1984) Alternative Strategies for Integrating Eco-
nomics and Ecology, in Integration of Economy and Ecology:
An Outlook for the Eighties, ed A M Jansson, Proceedings
from the Wallenberg Symposia, Stockholm.
Daly, H E (1996) Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable
Development, Beacon Press, Boston, MA.
Daly, H E and Cobb, J B, with contributions by Cobb, C W
(1989) For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy
Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable
Future, Beacon Press, Boston, MA.
Dryzek, J S (1990) Discursive Democracy: Politics, Policy and
Political Science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Dryzek, J S (2000) Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liber-
als, Critics, Contestations, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Faber, M, Manstetten, R, and Proops, J (1996) Ecological Eco-
nomics: Concepts and Methods, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham.
Fishkin, J S (1991) Democracy and Deliberation: New Directions
for Democratic Reform, Yale University Press, New Haven.
Folke, C (1991) Socio-Economic Dependence on the Life-Suppor-
ting Environment, Chapter 5 in Linking the Natural Environ-
ment and the Economy: Essays from the Eco-Eco Group, eds
C Folke and T Kaberger, Kluwer, Dordrecht.
Foster, J B (1999) Marxs Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classi-
cal Foundations for Environmental Sociology, Am. J. Socio.,
105(2), 366405.
Funtowicz, S and Ravetz, J R (1991) A New Scientic Method-
ology for Global Environmental Issues, in Ecological Eco-
nomics: The Science and Management of Sustainability, ed
R Costanza, Columbia University Press, New York.
Georgescu-Roegen, N (1971) The Entropy Law and the Economic
Process, Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
Gowdy, J (1994) Coevolutionary Economics: The Economy, Soci-
ety and the Environment, Kluwer, Boston, MA.
Howarth, R B and Norgaard, R B (1995) Intergenerational Choi-
ces Under Global Environmental Change, Chapter 6 in The
48 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Handbook of Environmental Economics, ed D W Bromley,
Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
Hueting, R (1980) New Scarcity and Economic Growth: More
Welfare through Less Production? Amsterdam. North Holland.
Irwin, A (1995) Citizen Science: A Study of People, Expertise and
Sustainable Development, Routledge, London.
Jansson, A M, ed (1984) Integration of Economy and Ecology:
An Outlook for the Eighties, Proceedings from the Wallenberg
Symposia, Stockholm.
Jansson, A M (1991) Ecological Consequences of Long-Term
Landscape Transformations in Relation to Energy Use and
Economic Development, Chapter 6 in Linking the Natural
Environment and the Economy: Essays from the Eco-Eco
Group, eds C Folke and T Kaberger, Kluwer, Dordrecht.
Kaberger, T (1991) Measuring Instrumental Value in Energy
Terms, Chapter 4, in Linking the Natural Environment and the
Economy: Essays from the Eco-Eco Group, eds C Folke and
T Kaberger, Kluwer, Dordrecht.
Kingsland, S E (1985) Modeling Nature: Episodes in the History
of Population Ecology, University of Chicago Press, Chicago,
IL.
Kneese, A V, Ayres, R U, and dArge, R C (1970) Economics
and the Environment A Materials Balance Approach, Johns
Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD.
Maler, K G (1974) Environmental Economics: A Theoretical Inq-
uiry, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD.
Martinez, A J with Schlupmann, K (1987) Ecological Eco-
nomics: Energy, Environment, and Society, Basil Blackwell,
Oxford.
Meadows, D H, Meadows, D L, Randers, J, and Behrens, III,
W W (1972) The Limits to Growth, Universe Books,
New York.
Murdoch, W W (1984) Ecology and Economics: Integration and
a Common Theoretical Problem, in Integration of Economy
and Ecology: An Outlook for the Eighties, ed A M Jansson,
Proceedings from the Wallenberg Symposia, Stockholm.
Nordhaus, W D and Kokkelenberg, E C, eds (1999) Natures
Numbers: Expanding the National Economic Accounts to Inc-
lude the Environment, National Academy Press, Washington,
DC.
Norgaard, R B (1987) Economics as Mechanics and the Demise
of Biological Diversity, Ecol. Model., 38 (September),
107121.
Norgaard, R B (1989) The Case for Methodological Pluralism,
Ecol. Econ., 1(1), 3757.
Norgaard, R B (1994) Development Betrayed: The End of Progress
and a Coevolutionary Revisioning of the Future, Routledge,
London.
Norgaard, R B (1997) A Coevolutionary Environmental Sociol-
ogy, in The International Handbook of Sociology, eds M Red-
clift and G Woodgate, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK.
OConnor, M, ed (2000) Social Processes of Environmental Val-
uation, Special Issue, Ecol. Econ., 34(2).
Odum, H T (1971) Environment, Power, and Society, John Wiley
& Sons, New York.
Odum, H T (1996) Environmental Accounting: Emergy and Envi-
ronmental Decision Making, John Wiley & Sons, New York.
Passet, R (1979) Leconomique et le Vivant, 2nd edition 1996,
Economica, Paris.
Perrings, C, Maler, K-G, Folke, C, and Holling, C S (1995) Bio-
diversity Loss: Economic and Ecological Issues, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge.
Pillet, G and Odum, H T (1987) Energie, Ecologie, Economie,
Georg Editeur SA, Geneva.
Pimentel, D (1974) Energy Use in World Food Production, Envi-
ron. Biol. Rep., 741, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.
Proops, J L R (1989) Ecological Economics: Rationale and Prob-
lem Areas, Ecol. Econ., 1(1), 5976.
Soderbaum, P (2000) Ecological Economics: A Political Eco-
nomics Approach to Environment and Development, Earthscan,
London.
Stern, P C and Fineberg, H V, eds (1996) Understanding Risk:
Informing Decisions in a Democratic Society, National Aca-
demy Press, Washington, DC.
Vitousek, P M, Ehrlich, P R, Ehrlich, A H, and Matson, P (1986)
Human Appropriation of the Products of Photosynthesis, Bio-
Science, 36(6), 36873.
Wackernagel, M and Rees, W (1996) Our Ecological Footprint,
New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, British Columbia,
Canada.
49
Environmental Politics
ROBERT PAEHLKE
Trent University, Peterborough, Canada
Many analysts date contemporary environmental politics, especially in North America, from the 1992 publication Silent
Spring, or from the first Earth Day (April 22, 1970). The historic roots of environmental politics of course run deeper, but
it is first important to distinguish environmental politics from all other forms and aspects of politics. One way to do this is
to draw a distinction between environmental politics and distributive (also called redistributive) politics. Distributive
politics is about the involvement of government in the distribution and redistribution of economic and social benefits and
disbenefits among the individuals, groups, interests, and regions of any given polity. It is also about the social and
economic management inherent in the maximization of the total economic pie to be distributed. Environmental politics,
in contrast, primarily focuses on the unintended negative consequences of this latter pursuit, on the protection of human
health, on the well-being of other species and on the long-term future of human generations, or on such other non-
monetary values as wilderness.
Given this focus, which favors not so much capital or labor, or rich or poor, environmentalism is sometimes said to be
neither left, nor right (Paehlke, 1989). There is much truth to this claim despite the fact that many on the political right
see environmentalism as a variant of the left, notwithstanding that are environmentalisms of the left, right and center.
Left environmentalism looks to regulate corporate polluters and to democratize within the public sphere significant
segments of economic decision making. Right environmentalism rather favors what are called market-based policy
tools, worries a great deal about population (though it may simultaneously reject choice regarding abortion), and
believes that the market is the best means of protecting the environment (through green products and other means of
feedback to private economic decisions). Centrist environmentalism is inclined to some mix of these polar perspectives.
Environmental politics has, essentially, placed three distinct value sets into competition with other societal objectives
such as profit maximization or short-term economic growth. The three value sets are: (1) wilderness, biodiversity, habitat
and nature; (2) pollution reduction and the protection of human health from environmental hazards; and (3) sustainability
(Paehlke, 1997). Each of these has a deep history preceding the beginnings of contemporary environmental politics;
those beginnings in effect identify when environmental politics became more integrated and rose to a significant place
within the wider political agenda-setting process. After 1960 environmental issues came to have real resonance for
significant numbers of people, were regularly reported in the media, and soon thereafter led to a wide array of relevant
legislative initiatives and administrative points of contact. Long before that point, however, many of these values were
advanced by an earlier conservation movement or put forward by thoughtful individuals.
Arguably, broad-based environmental politics only became possible when and where a certain level of material
prosperity had been achieved. As Samuel Hays (1987), the US environmental historian, noted:
Evolving environmental values were closely associated with rising standards of living and education. But with rising
incomes something beyond necessities and conveniences now lay within the reach of many; they may be called
amenities.Environmental quality was an integral part of this new search for a higher standard of living.
(Hays, 1987)
Thus, from the 1950s onwards the amenities associated with prosperity came more and more to include outdoor
recreation, air and water quality, and the protection of the broader-than-economic well-being of future generations.
50 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
ENVIRONMENTAL VALUES: THE BASIS OF
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS
Concern for the rst of the three dimensions of environmen-
tal values, the preservation of wilderness and the conserva-
tion of nature, has deep roots, especially in North America,
the US in particular. Conservation moved from the realm
of ideas into the realm of environmental politics and policy
in the late 19th century with the campaigns for and the cre-
ation of national parks, in Yellowstone (1872) and Yosemite
National Parks in the US and Banff National Park in Canada
(1885). Indirectly related to those events were the important
writings of George Perkins Marsh, John James Audubon,
and, perhaps especially, Henry David Thoreau. John Muir,
a founder of the Sierra Club in 1892, contributed enor-
mously to the development of the idea of wilderness and
to the campaign to preserve it.
Marsh (1801 1882), a Vermont lawyer and politician
who traveled extensively, was one of the rst to sys-
tematically study the many ways in which humans have
disrupted nature (see Marsh, George Perkins, Volume 3).
Late in life, he produced a remarkable book that in many
ways foreshadowed by a century the modern environmen-
tal movement. The book, (Marsh, 1965) Man and Nature
in 1864, argued that humans had gained great power to
alter nature and were doing so to the detriment of both
nature and themselves. Marsh cited and documented the
effects of deforestation, erosion, loss of biodiversity (he
did not, of course, use that modern word), altered water
regimes, and general loss of biological productivity. He
cited examples from his native Vermont, from Europe and
Turkey (where he had served as Ambassador) and argued
that the destruction of wilderness in the pursuit of human
gain was imposing too many costs. Parallel, but less docu-
mented, expressions of concern were advanced at the time
by artist John James Audubon (1785 1851) and Henry
David Thoreau (1817 1862).
These early expressions of concern were heard, but the
time was not ripe for environmental politics in practice
which could lead to effective public action. At the time
most North Americans were doing all they could to sur-
vive through agricultural pursuits which in turn required
the clearing of forests, not their preservation. The writ-
ings of these authors are revered today as profound early
insights, providing historic depth and richness to the con-
temporary environmental movement. The works of all three,
from Audubon s paintings of birds to Thoreau s literary
masterpiece Walden, served to inspire those who followed.
Among those inspired by Thoreau s life and writings was
John Muir (1838 1914). Muir took things further politi-
cally than did Thoreau. Also a gifted writer about nature, the
Scottish born Muir, having explored vast tracts of America,
including Florida and California on foot, published widely-
read essays in the leading magazines of the day. In the
1880s Muir successfully campaigned for the establishment
of Yosemite National Park in California. Muir s Sierra Club
remains today one of the largest and most in uential of
North American environmental organizations. Earth Day is
celebrated on a date near to John Muir s birthday. In the
early part of the century, conservationist in uence in the
US reached even into the White House, especially during
the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt.
Leading European gures in the early history of envi-
ronmental thought include Gilbert White of Selbourne,
England who provided, in the mid-18th century, one of
the earliest detailed accounts of the complex associations
and interactions within nature, a precursor to the modern
science of ecology. Notable in the 19th century, as precur-
sors of conservationism and as promoters of a poetic and
aesthetic appreciation of nature, were Wordsworth, Ruskin,
and Morris. This sensibility informed the formation of Great
Britain s National Trust and the efforts to protect both the
built and the natural environment. Equally important to
the eventual development of environmental politics were
political philosophers including John Stuart Mill, who was
the rst to discuss steady state economics and Edmond
Burke, whose organic vision of community and tradition
even today lends support to political thinking regarding the
environment. Finally here one must mention Svante Arrhe-
nius, the Swedish chemist, who hypothesized in 1896 that
the carbon dioxide produced by burning coal could ulti-
mately contribute to warming the climate of the planet.
The growth in human numbers and the spreading and
sprawling of human settlement associated with industrial-
ization and motorized transportation throughout the 19th
and 20th centuries continuously and dramatically reduced
the quality of habitat for wild plant and animals. Humans
came to occupy and utilize a very high proportion of what
was once wild space. Much of North America (excluding
Canada s North), and virtually all of Europe and the rest of
the world, is now a human-controlled landscape. Telecom-
muting and other new communications-based technologies
may accelerate the dispersion of human habitation. As this
process has advanced through the centuries, many have
come to realize that only conscious conservation and care-
ful land use policies can keep any signi cant portion of the
planet open to wild non-human species and spaces. Two
additional developments in the idea of conservation came
with Aldo Leopold s land ethic and, later, the widely in u-
ential ideas of deep ecology, especially the thinking of the
Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess.
Leopold, an early forestry graduate from Yale Univer-
sity, worked as a forester and wildlife manager. As he grew
older he doubted more and more the utilitarian conservation
philosophy which he had been taught and had practiced.
Leopold developed a philosophy rooted in the science of
ecology, in the interconnections between animals, plants,
water and soil; he envisioned humankind as an ordinary
member, rather than a conqueror, of the community of the
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 51
land. Naess, and other deep ecologists writing in the 1970s,
continued the development of an ecologically based ethic.
They distinguished between a human-centered (anthro-
pocentric) approach to human-nature relationships from an
eco-centric (deep ecology) approach. Essentially, the latter
views ethical issues from non-human viewpoints and has
formed the basis for the animal rights movement, the radi-
cal defense of wilderness and the rejection of those forms of
conservation based in resourcism wherein all nature is val-
ued solely in terms of the needs of humans (see Leopold,
Aldo, Volume 5).
The ideas underlying the conservation movement prior to
the 1960s were primarily focused on the conservation and
preservation of resources, wilderness and natures diversity.
However, in the early days of the environmental movement
the primary emphasis within environmental politics shifted
to pollution and the effects of pollution and toxic chemicals
on human health. These new concerns had their own his-
tory, but prior to the 1960s did not often capture the public
imagination or a place on the wider political agenda. In
contrast, in the 1960s, many of what had come to be called
environmentalists saw traditional conservation and wildlife
protection organizations as too conservative, as not suf-
ciently aware of the more important dimensions of the
environmental crisis. The environmental movement looked
more to urban concerns and did thereby reach, politically,
a broader segment of the by then urbanized population than
had the conservation movement. In effect, only some peo-
ple care about nature and other species, but everyone can be
aroused by concern with the air humans breathe, the food
we eat, and the water we drink.
Historically, public, medical and political concern regard-
ing air or water pollution can be traced to the ancient
Persians and Romans and is even mentioned obliquely in
the Christian Bible at Deuteronomy 23: 1213. In 1273
restrictions were placed on coal burning in the city of Lon-
don and in 1661 the Englishman John Evelyn submitted
a tract entitled Fumifugium regarding air quality in that
city to Charles II. In 1713 the Italian physician Bernardino
Ramazzini published a compendium of diseases related to
toxic exposures and other hazards in the workplace and
in 1775 Percivall Pott discovered an epidemiological link
between coal tar exposure in British chimney sweeps and a
higher incidence of scrotal cancer. In the 19th century there
was limited legislative action regarding pollution in both
Great Britain and the US (in mid-19th century in Britain,
in 1876 in St. Louis and in 1881 in Chicago). Smokestacks
were required, though pollution abatement as we now know
it was not an available option. At the same time some water
pollution in rivers was the result of the removal of open
sewage from public streets and lanes.
Only in the 20th century did pollution abatement progress
signicantly, but that progress was in part the result of an
even greater need. Human population swelled, pesticides
were more widely utilized, industrial capacity swelled
enormously, and the array of toxic industrial chemicals
broadened (especially with the massive post-WWII expan-
sion of petroleum-based chemical industries). The envi-
ronmental politics of pollution rst took hold with large
numbers of people in the 1920s with regard to the risk
of acute poisoning from pesticides such as lead arsenate
and other arsenic-based agricultural chemicals. These con-
cerns ran high in Europe and in the US and grew larger
with the publication in the 1930s of two sensational best-
sellers: One Hundred Million Guinea Pigs and American
Chamber of Horrors. As a result, residues of arsenic-based
insecticides on foods were regulated in the US in 1932,
but those standards of protection were reduced later in the
decade as overt public fears subsided. Soon afterwards these
toxic pesticides were replaced with 1,1,1-trichloro-2,2-bis-
(p-chlorophenyl)ethane (DDT), hailed at rst as a miracle
chemical.
It was DDT and related pesticides that played a sig-
nicant role two decades later in the development of the
contemporary environmental movement. With DDT and
related compounds, the concern was less with direct toxicity
of residues for human health, but rather with bioaccu-
mulation within food chains and the resultant ecological
disruptions. Many organic chemicals are persistent in the
environment and accumulate in the bodies of virtually all
animal life, in ever higher concentrations the higher one
goes in the food chain (from insects to small sh to larger
sh to eagles, for example). As Rachel Carson pointed out
in Silent Spring anti-mosquito use of 1,1-dichloro-2,2-bis-
(p-chlorophenyl)ethane (DDD) at 0.02 parts per million
(ppm) resulted in lake plankton with 5 ppm, small sh
with 40300 ppm, and large sh with up to 2500 ppm.
At 1600 ppm the sh-eating birds around the lake died out,
at a time when the chemical was no longer detectable, even
in trace amounts, in the lake. Contemporary environmental
politics has been very much about the sciences of toxicol-
ogy, epidemiology and ecology.
What makes Rachel Carson a founding gure in envi-
ronmental politics is her ability to integrate diverse small
scientic ndings and to array that data and present it to a
wider public of non-experts in a careful and forceful way.
Carson was not afraid to draw conclusions and to do so in
a very public way. Despite massive attacks on her science
and her credibility by industry representatives, her views
held up and a wide range of policy initiatives ensued (and a
new dimension of politics was born) (see Car son, Rachel
Louise, Volume 5). Concern with pollution in the public
mind was also fueled by two acute air pollution disasters
(in Donora, Pennsylvania in 1948 and in London, England
in 1952), and perhaps as well by general fears related to
then, widespread above ground nuclear weapons testing.
Environmental politics arose out of these factors and soon
eclipsed conservation concerns in terms of public attention.
52 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
The third strand of environmental ideas and values,
sustainability concerns, has also had a long history. The
focus on sustainability values goes back at least to the
writings of Thomas Robert Malthus (17661834). Malthus
was a moralist who concluded that human population would
inevitably outstrip humankinds ability to produce sufcient
food; as he saw it, the former increased geometrically (or
exponentially), while the latter increased arithmetically (or
incrementally). Malthus was the ultimate naysayer to the
boundless optimism in the liberal intellectual circles of the
time wherein it was imagined that progress and increasing
bounty were natural characteristics of the human condition.
Where liberals believed in the perfectibility of humans,
education, science and democracy, Malthus was a pessimist
who only hoped that human depravity and overpopulation
could be checked sufciently to avoid the worst of resource
shortfalls and misery. Misery for the poor, however, was
seen as one of three necessary checks on excessive human
population growth; Malthus opposed the Poor Laws of the
time as overly generous.
Few contemporary sustainability advocates are eager to
embrace Malthus as an intellectual heir, neither are they
enthusiastic about W Stanley-Jevons, who published The
Coal Question in 1865. This book presented a calculation of
the rise in coal consumption in Great Britain between 1854
and 1864 (at 3.5% annually) and concluded, given known
domestic reserves, that the burgeoning nascent industrial
society was not likely to be long-lived. In his words:
we cannot long maintain our present rate of increase of con-
sumption we can never advance to the higher amounts
of consumption supposed the check on our progress must
become perceptible within a century the cost of fuel must
rise, perhaps within a lifetime, to a rate injurious to our com-
mercial and manufacturing supremacy; and the conclusion is
inevitable, that our present happy condition is a thing of limited
duration.
(Jevons, 1965, 271)
Jevons did not allow for the rise of an industrial economy
based on other fossil fuels, traded globally and extracted
even from under the sea.
As off the mark as both Malthus and Jevons were,
they were right that resources are available in only nite
amounts, that there is some limit to the human popu-
lation that can be supported by natures capacities, and
that resource limits can restrain economic development and
social well-being. Where they were wrong was in assum-
ing that, inevitably, limiting outcomes would follow from
shortages in one particular resource at one given level of
technological development. They were also too early to
appreciate the ecological and human health implications
associated with continuous and simultaneous growth in
human population, resource extraction and industrial pro-
duction. It is not so much that the human population and
total economic output cannot possibly grow, but that they
can and that the price paid is not always worthwhile it in
net terms; and without technological selectivity and care-
ful planning. That is a contemporary view of sustainability,
though there is far from unanimity, even among environ-
mentalists, regarding such matters.
Two other, more modern, precursors of the sustainability
debate are the American conservationists Faireld Osborn
and Samuel Ordway. Osborn spoke of the goal of humani-
tarianism being, not the quantity but the quality of living
(Osborn, 1953, 226). Population restraint and resource con-
servation in the name of a higher quality of life were central
objectives for both Osborn and Ordway. Ordway (1953,
31), feared that without careful use:
basic resources will come into such short supply that rising
costs will make their use in additional production unprotable,
industrial production will cease, and we shall have reached the
limit of growth. If this limit is reached unexpectedly, irreparable
injury will have been done to the social order.
The solution: restraint and perhaps redirection of human
material wants. In Osborns words, we must temper
(our) demands and use and conserve the natural living
resources of the earth (Osborn, 1948, 201). In Ordways
Our needs can be supplied if our wants are bridled The
false ideology which worships unlimited expansion must
go (Ordway, 1953, 39).
These views, penned and not widely inuential in the
hyperexpansionist 1950s, when each years new automo-
biles were larger and less fuel efcient, would have had very
great resonance within the environmentalist politics of the
1970s. Only then did these three strands of environmental
thought, ecology, health, and sustainability, come together
in an integrated way under a banner of environmental pol-
itics. Only perhaps from the late 1960s were these values
widely important for more than eeting periods of time.
Only after Earth Day (1970) could one speak of a signif-
icant environmental movement and environmental politics
as a important force within the whole of society in a number
of nations.
SINCE EARTH DAY: HIGHLIGHTS OF RECENT
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS
Following the publication of Silent Spring, public con-
cern with pesticides, pollution and environmental protection
continued to grow though these concerns were all but over-
whelmed at the time by concern regarding civil rights
(especially in the US) and opposition to the war in Viet-
nam (throughout the world). However, by the late 1960s
concerns such as the accelerating growth of the human pop-
ulation worldwide and incidents such as the massive oil
release from the Torrey Canyon off England in 1967 and
the Santa Barbara offshore oil blowout in 1969, opposition
to airport noise and the proposed Concorde and super-
sonic transport (SST) jetliners, threats to whale populations
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 53
from heavy hunting with advancing technologies, concerns
regarding nuclear power and nuclear testing, combined with
a number of conservation issues, especially the proposed
construction of a ski resort in Mineral King Canyon (in
California) by the Disney Corporation and the proposed
construction of a dam at Lake Pedder in the Australian state
of Tasmania, accelerated the development of environmental
politics. One important outcome of this new concern was
the passage in 1969 of the pioneering piece of legislation
in the US, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)
which introduced environmental impact assessment, a pro-
cedure soon widely adopted.
Another result of, and a further stimulus to, the growing
salience of environmental politics was the rst Earth Day
(April 22, 1970). US Senator Gaylord Nelson, a Democrat
from Wisconsin, proposed the application of the teach-in
techniques of the peace movement to rising environmental
concerns. The results were remarkable. Time Magazine esti-
mated that 20 million Americans took part, others that Earth
Day events involved individuals in 1500 universities and
10 000 schools. There were simultaneous demonstrations in
major cities and new organizations and publications arose
in the year leading up to Earth Day and the year follow-
ing. New, still signicant, activist organizations included
Pollution Probe in Canada, Environmental Action in Wash-
ington, DC, and the Natural Resources Defense Council in
Washington, DC. Also newly created within this two-year
period were the (US) Environmental Protection Agency and
Environment Canada. The early 1970s witnessed an array
of strong new legislation within many jurisdictions.
Following on NEPA and Earth Day, the US passed a
new Clean Air Act in 1970 and a Clean Water Act in 1972.
The Safe Drinking Water Act was passed in 1974 and the
Resource Conservation and Recovery Act in 1976. Canada
passed its Clean Water Act and Fisheries Act amendments
in 1970; its Clean Air Act in 1971, Ocean Dumping Control
Act in 1975 and Environmental Contaminants Act in 1976.
The European Council adopted its First Action Program
(on the environment) in 1973 and issued directives on
quality objectives for drinking water in 1975 and water
quality in 1976. Generally, Europe was slower off the mark
than North America in this period, but pioneering efforts
such as the establishment of the publication The Ecologist
and its 1972 publication of Blueprint for Survival are
particularly notable. In Australia, following some initiatives
at the state level, in 1974 the Whitlam Labor government
passed an Environmental Protection Act requiring advance
consideration of the potential environmental consequences
of proposed resource initiatives.
Whereas pollution was the focus of environmental poli-
tics on Earth Day, and in the ensuing period, sustainability
issues also came to the fore, beginning in 1972 with the
United Nations (UN) Stockholm Conference on the Human
Environment. The conference emphasized a wide range of
issues related to environment and development, as well
as trade in endangered species, the protection of cultural
and natural heritage and the prevention of marine pollu-
tion. Stockholm was crucial to the early establishment of
environmental politics on the global stage. That year also
saw the publication of the Club of Rome sponsored Limits
to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972), which gripped public
attention, in part because it was based on the then-new
notion of a computer simulation. This best-selling book
polarized public opinion between those who saw a need
for radical reform of industrial society to avoid resource
exhaustion, pollution and human overpopulation and those
who defended the status quo. The long-term projections
from trends put forward in the study were widely attacked,
and doubtless awed in the details and in a number of the
assumptions made. However, those aws were soon over-
run by immediate real world events. The Organization of
Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) slowed exports and
radically escalated oil prices in 1973 (and again in 1979)
and the world entered into the period of the energy crisis.
The energy crisis accelerated and altered the course
of development of environmental politics throughout the
world. Oil prices rose rapidly and the price of other energy
sources and most commodities, including food, rose with
them. Sustainability attained an intensity of public concern
easily equal to that of pollution and the protection of nature.
As well, for the rst time, large numbers of people reected
on the long-term viability of industrial society. Prior to
1973 few had, since the arrival of the age of oil, imagined
a world without readily available and inexpensive energy.
This new concern was particularly challenging to any who
doubted the viability, or desirability, of nuclear energy. The
energy crisis stimulated sales of fuel-efcient automobiles,
energy efcient appliances and home insulation, but it did
not straightforwardly advance support for all aspects of
environmental politics.
Through much of the 1970s, environmental concern
with the dangers associated with oil tankers, pipelines and
offshore oil exploration, opposition to nuclear power, and
calls for the regulation of air pollution from coal seemed
to some to stand in the way of energy independence
and continuing prosperity. Environmentalists and OPEC
alike seemed to challenge both the way of life and the
economic wellbeing of wealthy individuals and societies.
Environmentalists appeared to some to be saying no, or go
slow, to every viable alternative to OPECs political and
economic power. However, two factors soon lessened that
political tension: the notion of soft energy paths and the
reality of nuclear accidents (as well as the high and rising
costs of nuclear construction and the unknown cost of the
long-term management of nuclear wastes).
A young physicist/environmentalist named Amory Lov-
ins coined the concept of a soft energy path an
energy future that combined signicant increases in
54 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
energy efciency with the development of relatively
environmentally benign, and renewable, energy sources
(Lovins, 1977), solar power, wind power, geothermal
energy, biomass, and small-scale hydroelectric generation.
Detailed country-by-country studies were undertaken by
Friends of the Earth and other environmental organizations
to demonstrate the technical and economic feasibility of
these combined options to both fossil fuels and nuclear
power. Lovins himself was perhaps most concerned to
undermine the view that nuclear electricity was a reasonable
future alternative to fossil fuels; he emphasized the
variety of risks associated with nuclear-generated electricity
including the possible proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Opposition to nuclear electricity was strong throughout the
1970s, especially in Germany, Sweden, Austria and the US,
but notably not in France where Green politics had a much
slower start than elsewhere in Europe and where there was
also relatively wide nationalist-rooted support for a national
nuclear weapons capability.
The Nuclear industrys problems accelerated following
the accidents at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979
and the far more serious mishap at Chernobyl in 1986.
Nuclear energy also suffered from two other problems.
Especially punishing to nuclear power were high interest
rates put in place in the early 1980s to counter high ination
(resultant in turn in large part from high fossil fuel prices).
Construction of nuclear power plants is slow and thus high
interest rates resulted in an uneconomic level of costs before
many nuclear plants on order or under construction were
completed. New plant orders dried up almost everywhere
and the newly forming German Green Party concentrated
on issues related to nuclear power stations and nuclear
weapons. Improvements in the efciency of electricity use
(in electric drive motors, lighting xtures and appliances
of all kinds) also slowed the demand for electricity despite
a continuing increase in the number of uses. Economics,
technology and environmental politics seemed to collec-
tively conspire against nuclear energy for the remainder of
the 20th century.
The late 1970s and early 1980s continued to witness
shocking new environmental disasters, in the massive
release of dioxin in Seveso, Italy in 1976 and the 1978 reve-
lations regarding the massive burial in the 1940s and 1950s
of toxic waste in the Love Canal, New York. However,
this period also saw the rst signicant political back-
lash against environmental protection advocacy. Economic
interests hurt by conservation measures and anti-pollution
regulations became more aggressive in the defense of their
interests. Neo-conservatism (usually called neo-liberalism
in Europe) came to power in Great Britain, the US and
elsewhere and was often determined to deregulate and to
shrink government. Ronald Reagan opposed the protec-
tion of remaining remnant redwood forests and campaigned
openly against air quality regulations in Ohio and other
US coal mining regions. In ofce he appointed those who
would roll back regulatory enforcement and who favored
resource extraction interests. Environmental protection was
no longer an uncontested motherhood issue; it had, in effect,
come of age politically.
During the Reagan years pro-environmental opinion
waned somewhat, but the commitment of those concerned
grew as evidenced by an expansion of membership in US
environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club. At
the same time Australia saw a massive mobilization to
oppose the Franklin Dam in Tasmania and green parties
were created in many European countries. While environ-
mental politics could not quite maintain the surge of the late
1960s and early 1970s, environmental activism continued
throughout the period of low governmental responsiveness
during the early 1980s. By the mid- to late 1980s a series
of events, new concerns and new scientic ndings brought
a resurgence of wider public concern which led in turn to
a new set of legislative and policy initiatives in the early
1990s.
The most dramatic and visible events of the period
were: the catastrophic release of toxic chemicals in Bhopal,
India (1984), the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Ukraine
(1986) and the massive oil release from the Exxon Valdez
off the pristine Alaska coast (1989). New or growing
concerns included an array of problems associated with
the disposal of municipal solid waste and the siting of
landlls and incinerators, widespread concern with species
loss especially in relation to the rapid cutting of tropical
rainforests, and continuing concern with acid precipitation
and with the disposal of toxic and radioactive wastes.
New scientic ndings also accelerated the renewed wave
of environmental concern. Most notable of these were
stratospheric ozone-layer depletion and climate warming
resulting from the ongoing release of greenhouse gases.
Of particular concern in this regard were the possibility of
rising sea levels and possible threats to ocean phytoplankton
and other basic life forms. By the late 1980s environmental
matters were topping public opinion polls as issues of
greatest concern. A new wave of environmental politics had
begun and, as we will see below, both the environmental
movement, and the response to it, was more sophisticated
the second time around.
TWO WAVES IN CONTEMPORARY
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS
In many nations interest in environmental issues, and in
non-governmental organization (NGOs) and environmental
movement activity, was higher in the periods 19681975
and 19851992 than at any other time. When one com-
pares the two periods, both the most important issues and
certain characteristics of the movement were quite dif-
ferent. The rst wave saw the creation of some of the
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 55
leading environmental organizations and the environmental
movement was at the time motivated primarily by new
ndings, perspectives and concerns regarding pollution, the
potential for future resource shortages (especially energy),
nuclear power, and rapid human population growth. Polit-
ically, the rst wave was often highly confrontational and
many early environmental advocates stood well apart in
manner and viewpoint from mainstream society. The sec-
ond wave raised some challenging new issues, but was
generally more accepted by the wider population and in
some cases, accommodation was sought by economic and
political elite.
The early environmental movement in the rst wave
sometimes displayed a signi cant apocalyptic and apolit-
ical dimension. Modern industrial economies were seen by
some to be on the brink of collapse, in danger of being sud-
denly overwhelmed by the pollution, diminishing resources
(and the agrant waste of those resources), and out-of-
control population growth. Only some of the information
advanced in this period was carefully grounded in scienti c
ndings, but the assertions struck a public nerve nonethe-
less and provoked governments, universities, and scienti c
organizations to expand their environmental research capa-
bilities, to reorganize research priorities and even to develop
new interdisciplinary approaches.
As noted, it was in the early 1970s that many govern-
ments created environmental agencies and ministries. At
the same time many universities, sometimes in surprising
places, saw individual faculty and students direct research
and teaching attention to a wide range of environmental
issues. The locus for consideration of matters environmen-
tal could be as varied as departments of geography, political
science, chemistry, biology, history, economics, or urban
planning. Some interdisciplinary environmental studies pro-
grams grew very rapidly only to suffer enrollment declines
as public interest waned somewhat (between the waves) in
the late 1970s and early 1980s. Those declines con rmed
for many critics within the universities that these issues
and new approaches were but a ash in the pan and not, as
claimed, a new and yet enduring approach to scholarship.
Yet the declines were temporary and new sub- elds arose
in everything from environmental ethics and economics to
conservation biology and air pollution chemistry.
This altered intellectual and scienti c terrain in univer-
sities, and the wider learning within society as a whole,
signi cantly altered the environmental politics of the sec-
ond wave as compared to the rst. Throughout the 1970s
and 1980s, graduates in environmental sciences and pol-
icy studies moved into ever increasingly professionalized
environmental NGOs and policy consulting rms. Relevant
government departments, previously predominantly popu-
lated by planners and engineers, added ecologists and other
environmental scientists to their staffs and many engineer-
ing and law faculties, for example, added environmental
components to their degree programs. Individuals with
extensive NGO experience were hired by government min-
istries, or returned to graduate study and/or joined profes-
sional consulting rms or university faculties. By the time
of the second wave (1985 1992), both the issues and the
fundamental character of the environmental movement had
changed. The movement itself had become highly profes-
sionalized (a change that was not without its critics from
within and without the NGO community).
The second wave saw the re-emergence of preservationist
and biodiversity concerns central to the conservation move-
ment (dating back into the 19th century) and an increased
interest in global issues. This contrasted to the rst wave
where pollution and sustainability concerns dominated. The
second wave also saw a more professionalized environ-
mental movement provide ecological, economic, and legal
analysis to government and to society at large. Environ-
mentalism was much less on the fringe: environmental
ideas were widely acknowledged and seen to be accepted
by economic and political elite. A sophisticated array of
technical options and policy tools was advanced rather
than the vague notions of withdrawal from society and/or
advocacy of crude end-of-the-pipe pollution controls so
common in the rst wave. Environmental organizations
discussed the importance of various taxation regimes, envi-
ronmental user fees, governmental procurement patterns,
environmental audits of industries, state-of-the-environment
reporting, economy environment integration and sustain-
able development.
Society itself had become more environmentally sophis-
ticated through changes over the years in public school cur-
ricula, nature and conservation television programming, and
the sheer numbers of individual citizens directly affected
by environmental concerns from smog to the siting of
nuclear power plants, from the loss of a favorite wood-
land to the safety of drinking water or food. In the sec-
ond wave, in Canada for example, environment economy
round tables were established at all levels of government
bringing together environmental activists, industry leaders,
labor unions, and government of cials. Less well-known
were the long-established links between labor unions and
environmentalists in both the US and Canada dating back
into the late 1960s through the efforts of the United Auto
Workers Union and the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Work-
ers Union. In the 1990s the interactions, and sometimes,
shared agreements were wider. Policy advances were some-
times made through these cooperative processes, especially
at local level. More important perhaps, by the end of
the second wave few participants saw the differences and
distinctions between conservation and environmental orga-
nizations as important any longer.
More dramatic as a characteristic of the second wave
was the introduction by industries and retailers in Europe,
North America and elsewhere of a wide variety of so-called
56 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
green products. Many 1970s environmentalists would have
been appalled at the very notion (and more than a few
1990s environmentalists had their doubts as well). Nonethe-
less, suddenly products with environmental claims were
available from less polluting household cleaning products
to energy-efcient lighting devices to road asphalt made
from used tires to recycled paper and boxes. In Germany,
Greenpeace entered directly into the business of producing
energy-efcient refrigerators. Whatever the limits of green
product practices, the introduction and wide acceptance
of green products speaks to a considerable environmen-
tal capacity within both industry and society, and a very
different style of environmental politics than in the more
confrontational rst wave. Also typical of this shifting
approach were environmental audits and life cycle analysis,
both tools used directly by industry to assess the envi-
ronmental effects of their operations and products. Much
changed in terms of the way products were made, recycled,
and sold to environmentally sophisticated consumers, but
as well the centrality of government regulation of industry
had declined.
One way to understand these developments as a whole
(from the late 1960s through the mid-1990s) is to see
environmental capacity as having broadened and spread
from environmental advocacy groups and universities into
government agencies and the economy and society as
a whole. Another way to understand the change is to
see economic and political elite as becoming on the one
hand more accommodating of some change, but also
more sophisticated at delaying and at redirecting any calls
for radical change. That is, the elite have become will-
ing to shift products and processes where such changes
are relatively inexpensive (and perhaps even protable),
but seek to deect change from policies which would
impact severely on prot margins or access to resources.
Regardless of the overall accuracy of such interpreta-
tions, the second wave was different from the rst and
it too faded in the face of the economic difculties of
the 1990s. These recent challenges to environmental pol-
itics will be considered below, but rst it is important
to identify the principal institutional structures of envi-
ronmental politics: environmental organizations and Green
Parties.
ENVIRONMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS: GREEN
PARTIES VERSUS NGOs
In many locations the environmental movement has gone
from a political movement of individuals and NGOs to
one which also includes adherents to a Green Party. Most
European countries, as well as Australia and New Zealand
(which can boast the rst nationwide Green Party, the
Values Party founded in 1972), now have Green Parties
strong enough to have elected members of the legislature
at the provincial (state) or national level. In the Australian
state of Tasmania the Green vote has exceeded 30% of
the total on occasion. In Germany and elsewhere, Greens
have held the balance of power at the state level, entered
the government on the national level and governed out-
right in the city of Frankfurt. But in few other countries
have Green Parties been so successful; in North Amer-
ica the Greens are all but absent despite the long-standing
existence of a strong environmental movement. Why have
Green Parties not been more widely successful, one might
ask? Why in North America and elsewhere has voting
for Green Parties never approached the level of support
for environmentalism that exists in terms of public opin-
ion polls or in terms of membership in environmental
organizations?
One reason for this limited success within electoral pro-
cesses is that environmentalists have no consistent position
on many political issues of great importance to many peo-
ple. What is the Green position on gender or regional
issues? What is the position of environmentalists on ina-
tion, unemployment, drunk driving, abortion or appropri-
ate levels of taxation? Clearly there is none in most of
these cases. It could be said that environmentalism is a
truncated ideology: socialists, conservatives and liberals
have consistent views on most questions, environmental-
ists do not. Some environmentalists are quite conservative
on economic and social issues, others are quite progres-
sive. It is hard to hold a political party together when
its members simply do not agree, or even in some cases
care about, some of the leading issues of the day. Many
voters wonder how could a Green Party govern; in gov-
ernment a party must make decisions one way or the
other.
In addition, the road is difcult for any new political par-
ties; the advantages of incumbency or recent incumbency
are considerable. As well, Green Parties have succeeded
almost exclusively within multiparty political systems, usu-
ally where there is some form of proportional representation
(party voting, i.e., a percentage of the votes producing
a set number of seats on a national or regional basis).
In such a context Green Parties can more easily empha-
size some issues and ignore others (or trade support on
issues of lesser importance for gains on the environment).
Only the Minister of the Environment in the coalition gov-
ernment of France formed in the late 1990s has been a
Green. Green Parties work better in some systems than
others. Where there are single-member constituencies, as
in Canada, the US and Great Britain, Green Parties have
not gained much ground, even where many people like
green ideas. Usually, existing parties take up green ideas,
whether there are successful Green Parties or not, so long
as there is support for green ideas. These ideas have
played an important political role for more than 30 years
within widely varied institutional arrangements: clearly,
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 57
then, environmental politics does not always require stand-
alone Green Political Parties.
In broad terms, political movements seek to inuence
society and/or government; in contrast, political parties seek
to become the government themselves or to be directly
a part of it. Both Green Parties and NGOs inuence
the way society and government function, altering some
of the collective choices that are made and participat-
ing in a societal process called agenda setting. Agenda
setting determines which issues are priority ones, which
concerns get the most attention and resources, which are
dealt with rst and most frequently by decision mak-
ers. All interest groups including environmental organi-
zations, the media, business, political parties and many
other organizations are involved in the process of agenda
setting.
A movement is not so formally organized as a politi-
cal party or an interest group (NGO). Individuals in some
roles and activities may be part of a movement with-
out necessarily being members of NGOs or even seeing
themselves as members of that movement. For example, a
group of neighbors may oppose the siting of a landll or
some other facility with environmental dimensions, though
some are opposed to many objectives of the major envi-
ronmental organizations. Nonetheless, their opposition to
the particular project in question should be understood as
contributing to the wider environmental movement. That
movement includes, as well the larger, established envi-
ronmental organizations such as Greenpeace and the Sierra
Club, thousands of smaller organizations, as well as many
unafliated individuals. A formal organization has mem-
bers, regular meetings, likely a constitution of some sort,
a budget, and so forth. A movement does not, it is much
looser and more variable than that, but it certainly is iden-
tiable and visible.
The heart of the environmental movement and environ-
mental politics has, in most jurisdictions, been environmen-
tal organizations; environmental public interest groups or
NGOs. Some are single issue oriented and eeting others
are very large, even global in their scope of operations and
some have continuous organizational histories of a century
or more. It is not possible to present here anything like
a full nation-by-nation list. There are many thousands of
environmental organizations in North America alone. In
the nations of the European Union more than 10 million
individuals are members or active supporters of environ-
mental organizations. One of the earliest European groups
still in existence is Englands Commons, Open Spaces and
Footpaths Preservation Society founded in 1865. The orga-
nizations with the greatest global reach include Greenpeace
(founded by Canadians, but with at one point approach-
ing million members in, for example, the Netherlands), the
Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) with activities on every
continent, the International Union for the Conservation of
Nature (IUCN) based in Switzerland, and Friends of the
Earth International (FOEI).
Perhaps equally important are large conservation and
environmental organizations based primarily within one
nation: the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense
Council, the Wilderness Society, the Environmental
Defense Fund, the National Audubon Society, the Nature
Conservancy, and the National Wildlife Federation in
the US. In Canada, in addition to Greenpeace and
important parallel organizations of US or other origin,
are Pollution Probe, the Canadian Nature Federation, the
Toronto Environmental Alliance and the Western Canadian
Wilderness Committee. Other important environmental
organizations in the richer nations include: in Germany, the
Bund fur Umvelt und Naturschutz Deutschland (BUND);
in Denmark, the Danish Society for the Conservation of
Nature (founded in 1911); in Australia, the Australian
Conservation Foundation and the Tasmanian Wilderness
Society; and in Great Britain, (in addition to large branches
of Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace) a number of large,
long-established, conservation organizations such as the
National Trust and the Royal Society for the Protection
of Birds.
Finally here it is important to identify several radi-
cal challenges to established environmental organizations.
These challenges are ongoing and arise from many quarters,
they continually prod larger organizations that inevitably
become just somewhat more cautious as memberships and
the size of professional staffs increase (and the need to
raise funds and maintain membership size grows). Friends
of the Earth was originally a split-off from the Sierra Club.
The environmental justice movement, which emphasizes
racial bias in the siting of environmentally undesirable facil-
ities, has been very important in the US since the late
1980s. Numerous environmental justice grassroots orga-
nizations have been highly critical of the larger, more
established environmental organizations for under repre-
senting visible minorities and their concerns. Also highly
signicant since the 1970s has been ecofeminism, a move-
ment within a movement which focuses on environmental
issues which disproportionately affect women, especially
but by no means exclusively women within developing
nations (Warren, 1995). As well, the ideas of deep ecol-
ogy helped to encourage an animal rights movement,
and such radical wilderness protection organizations as
Earth First!, and in so doing restored something of a
confrontational style within second wave environmental
politics.
Also sometimes associated with a more radical strain of
environmental politics is the simultaneous consideration of
environmental concerns and the problems of poorer nations;
here the movement has been pushed by such international
groupings as the Rainforest Alliance.
58 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
THE COMBINED CHALLENGE OF
ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT
Combined environment and development concerns came
to prominent attention in the 1960s with a focus on rapid
human population growth, especially within poorer nations.
At the time this attention often had a neo-Malthusian tone
and frequently contained warnings regarding imminent and
widespread famine. Radical and direct interventions to slow
birth rates were seen by some as appropriate and necessary
initiatives. Paul Ehrlich (1975), in his widely read Popu-
lation Bomb (rst published 1968), called for taxes (in the
US) on cribs, diapers, and toys, followed by an aggressive
anti-natalist foreign policy abroad. External policies were
to include tying food aid to the adoption of strong pop-
ulation control initiatives by aid recipient nations. Ehrlich
supported proposals in India for compulsory sterilization of
males with three or more children. Garrett Hardin advocated
state-issued licenses to reproduce, licenses which could be
bought or sold on an open market. It is difcult to imagine
assertions of this sort being put forward now and, needless
to say, there were strong responses at the time as well.
Some decades later those anticipated-to-be-imminent
famines have thus far been avoided through improved food
production and non-coerced population restraint (especially
in Europe and North America, but in other nations as
well). Nonetheless, human population may well already
be well past the environmental optimum, but public atten-
tion has turned more to development than to population
considerations. Barry Commoner (1972), responding to
Ehrlich, argued that environmental damage was more a
function of technology choices than of human popula-
tion levels (or even of afuence). He further argued that
human population restraint would follow from advances
in economic wellbeing. Other analysts have noted strong
correlations between population restraint and social policy
advances such as equitable education and work oppor-
tunities for women, rising economic expectations, wider
availability of old age pensions, and access to health care
for infants. In other words, family size declines with social
and economic advance; people will have fewer children
when there is hope that those they do have will survive and
that they themselves will not, in old age, be dependent on
their children.
Thus, while 1990s environmental advocates would still
favor the universal availability of affordable birth control
opportunities, the discourse on environment and develop-
ment has changed very much since the 1960s. Population
remains a concern, but the emphasis has turned to devel-
opment, economic policy and equitable global access to
resources. Following Commoners response to Ehrlich were
a series of other studies, which further altered our sense
of these issues. In the 1970s one important shift in tone
was visible in the differences between Limits to Growth
(1972) and a follow-up Club of Rome study Mankind at
the Turning Point (1974). Where the former emphasized
the need to restrain human population, economic growth
and resource use to protect the future, the latter emphasized
the need to see growth as necessary within poor nations and
resource and economic restraint as more appropriate in rich
nations. Hungry people with few material possessions do
not readily embrace blanket calls for restraint; global envi-
ronmental politics required greater sophistication than that.
Malthusian approaches to environmental protection
waned further still with the insights of Amory Lovins
and advocates of appropriate technology, and especially
with the work of the World Commission on Environment
and Development (the Brundtland Commission). The 1970s
and 1980s saw many insights into more environmentally
benign housing, agricultural and energy technologies which
also promised economic advance, especially within low-
development contexts. Lovins promotion of solar, wind
and biomass energy production was an important part
of this changing focus. The Brundtland Report, Our
Common Future (World Commission on Environment
and Development, 1987), however, helped to further
shift the focus from a more or less exclusive focus
on the environmental costs of economic advance to a
more balanced approach which included as well the
environmental costs of failures to advance economically.
Our Common Future advocated a balanced consideration
of environmental protection and economic development
(sustainable development) and asserted that both were nec-
essary, more mutually supportive than mutually exclusive.
In the language of the report:
In most countries, environmental policies are directed at the
symptoms of harmful growth; these policies have brought
progress and rewards and must be continued and strengthened.
But that will not be enough. What is required is a new approach
in which all nations aim at a type of development that integrates
production with resource conservation and enhancement, and
that links both to the provision to all of an adequate livelihood
base and equitable access to resources (3940).
The goal of the Brundtland Commission was to help
to create a global environmental politics which was large
enough to contain development advocates (mostly from
poor nations), environmental protection advocates (mostly
from rich nations) and enlightened representatives of gov-
ernment and business.
It is not universally agreed that this attempt was success-
ful, or that sustainable development is not an oxymoron.
Nonetheless the discourse around the politics of environ-
ment and development has shifted a great deal. It is now
widely known that some of the gravest environmental dam-
age is linked to economic desperation. Few environmental
advocates would deny any longer that economic growth
restraint is equally appropriate everywhere or that there are
not some opportunities for simultaneous economic growth
and environmental protection, even in rich nations. Few
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 59
would any longer ignore the importance of economic and
social advance to the achievement of human population
restraint or suggest that birth rate coercion was either moral
or effective. The larger question remains however, as to
what economic activities need to be restrained where and
how and whether or not it is possible to simultaneously
give a free hand to the forces of global economic growth
and to achieve either environmental or social advance.
Concern regarding environment and development has now
largely merged into a larger debate surrounding economic
globalization.
GLOBALIZATION AND SUSTAINABILITY
In the wake of the Cold War, global trade expansion and
global trade regimes have rushed to ll the vacuum and to
make the entire world secure for mobile capital investment.
In this new context, global investors can bring enormous
pressures to bear on governments by even implicitly threat-
ening to withhold or transfer investment. This new reality
bears in turn on an important question in environmental pol-
itics; the centralization or decentralization of environmental
protection. In general, the smaller the unit of government
and the less economically diverse the political jurisdiction,
and the higher the local unemployment rate, the greater the
relative power of mobile corporations. Thus, in recent years
environmental protection rollbacks have been widespread
and at the same time much environmental politics and
decision-making has moved to the international, treaty-
based, level (see Environmental Movement the Rise of
Non-gover nment Or ganizations (NGOs), Volume 5).
Before discussing environmental initiatives at the inter-
national level a distinction needs to be drawn between the
fact of increasing global economic integration and the nego-
tiated trade regimes, such as the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) or the General Agreement on Tariffs
and Trade (GATT). When a rm can pay skilled manufac-
turing workers a dollar or two a day in Indonesia, China
or Mexico, it can easily afford to pay quite high tariffs to
sell into the US, Japan, or Europe. This is especially true
if, at the same time, rms avoid legal protection for trade
unions, workplace health and safety regimes, and enforced
environmental regulations. Trade treaties do not cause these
problems. They may help to speed the trading process, but
trade treaties also provide a potential opportunity to harmo-
nize (average) upwards, rather than downwards, on labor
and environmental standards. As with the NAFTA Side
Agreement on Labor and the Environment, there is no tech-
nical (as distinct from political) reason why trade treaties
could not contain progressive social and environmental pro-
visions. There is also nothing but a lack of political will
(obviously no small matter) which prevents common (and
enforced) environmental regulations, as is virtually now the
norm within the European Union.
An impressive array of multilateral and bilateral
environmental treaties have recently been signed; indeed,
since the late 1970s environmental politics seems to be
as often conducted at the diplomatic level as at the
national level. Major treaties include: the Convention on
International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora
and Fauna (1973, 1979, 1983); the Montreal Protocol on
Substances that Deplete the Ozone layer (1987); the Basal
Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements
of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal (1989); the UN
Biodiversity Convention (1992); and the UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change (1992, followed by the
additional agreement in Kyoto, Japan in 1998). Quite
clearly it is the case that many global environmental
problems can only be resolved with the active participation
of many, if not most, nations. The larger question, however,
is how effective is signing any number of international
environmental agreements when there is no effective
international enforcement?
Moreover, the new realities of global corporate mobility
and widespread employment vulnerability have enormous
implications for environmental politics. Even in the rich-
est nations, as well as in local government circles and
among employees everywhere, there is now a thorough-
going political timidity. Every government now fears losing
employment, investment, and tax revenues. Almost any
social behavior (even including child labor) is somewhere
justied in terms of global competitiveness and employees
and rms everywhere must compete with that new standard.
No level of prot, or level of executive or product endorse-
ment compensation, is seen any longer as unacceptable.
Further, what would be seen in Europe or North America
as environmentally intolerable, even outrageous, behavior,
is almost expected in Nigeria, Indonesia, or Guyana, even
when good corporate citizenship prevails on the environ-
mental front in the Netherlands, Canada and/or the US.
Interestingly, some of todays billionaires, not a re-
born political radicalism, are often the very people raising
questions about the need to nd ways to balance corporate
power in the age of globalization. George Soros (1997, 47)
argued:
Laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common good is best
served by the uninhibited pursuit of self interest. Unless it is
tempered by the recognition of a common interest that ought
to take precedence over particular interests, our present system
is liable to break down.
James Goldsmith (1994, 17), the perhaps eccentric
British/French billionaire is more direct:
47 Vietnamese or 47 Filipinos can be employed for the cost
of one person in a developed country, such as France. Until
recently, 4 billion people were separated from our economy
by their political systems, primarily communist or socialist, and
because of a lack of technology and of capital. Today all that
has changed. Their political systems have been transformed,
60 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
technology can be transferred instantaneously anywhere in
the world on a microchip, and capital is free to be invested
anywhere the anticipated yields are highest.
Many in the world of environmental advocacy would
conclude from such views that global economics requires
global environmental and social standards; that is, that an
economically integrated globe needs more political integra-
tion, not less. They conclude that if Southeast Asian forest
workers earned even half the wages of those in the Pacic
Northwest, the rate of destruction of tropical rain forests
might well slow considerably, and simultaneously develop-
ment would advance. Similarly, if Caribbean bauxite miners
were paid half what a miner would earn in Germany, there
would be less aluminum that was not recycled. There is
now broad agreement that the economic, the social and
the environmental are tied together in numerous ways; and
that environmental advocates must work towards a consis-
tent position regarding all three. Employment insecurity,
it is agreed, undermines environmental concern, in both
poor countries and rich. Environmental politics in the 1990s
and beyond may well be moving toward greater integration
within the broader political, and toward including in its
expanded purview many aspects of social and economic
policy.
Expanding the purview of environmental politics at the
intellectual level revolves around the rising importance of
sustainability. This shift within environmental thought is
especially pronounced in European environmental politics
which are increasingly in the 1990s leading the way world-
wide (and where wilderness issues have never had the
salience that they have had in North America). One new
approach to sustainability analysis is ecological footprint
analysis, which concludes that it would take three Earths
of resources to bring the whole of the human population
to present North American living standards (Wackernagel
and Rees, 1996) (see Ecological Capacity, Volume 3).
This analysis, however, assumes that the gains in the poor
nations will be based on the energy and materials con-
sumption patterns of today s richest nations. That need
not be true. One can envision a gross domestic product
(GDP)/energy and materials ratio three or four times what
is achieved at present, but this might still leave us several
planets short should human population indeed double again
as now seems all but inevitable.
In the end, if one prefers a world that is both more
equitable and environmentally sustainable, it is hard not
to be open to the idea that the rich nations are rich enough,
at least in terms of energy and material consumption. It
would seem, though, that the poor everywhere could hardly
use less of anything than they presently do without nd-
ing ways to gain in quality of life while holding their
ground in terms of energy and materials use. Environmen-
tal politics must stress such things as the introduction of
high quality, low cost public transportation, especially as
replacements for broken down, fuel inef cient automobiles.
Also hopeful are demand-side management (DSM) initia-
tives by energy utilities directed at the needs of low-income
customers. Nonetheless, it may well remain the case that
the rich in the rich countries cannot be easily and sus-
tainably supported even at present consumption levels and
patterns if the more numerous poor everywhere are to
advance signi cantly in the same terms. Politically, this
view would seem all but impossible in the present context,
but one might speculate that if there is to be a success-
ful third wave in environmental politics it will come at
the global scale and focus on sustainability and equity
issues.
Thus, two of the best prospects for future environmen-
tal politics in a globalized world are: (1) accelerating the
adoption of technologies such as those outlined by von
Weisacker et al. (1998) in Factor Four and (2) developing
a global politics which would promote the distribution of
fair shares of ecological space as outlined in Carley and
Spapens (1998). The rst of these works contends that we
must, through ef ciency gains and the de-materialization
of GDP double global wealth while simultaneously halv-
ing resource and energy use. The second work advocates
calculating resource use at the national level and compar-
ing that use level to a national fair share of sustainable
resources calculated on a global or regional basis. The edu-
cational power of such calculations could be considerable.
The political challenge then becomes to nd ways to accom-
modate development based on that fair share without a loss
in quality of life for those currently well off.
Environmental politics would seem to have come a very
long way in four decades: from local pollution issues to
global multidimensional concerns, from seeing environ-
mental issues as largely separate from distributional issues
to seeing the two as bound up together. A long road has
been traveled and progress has been made, but the chal-
lenges have not gotten smaller.
REFERENCES
Carley, M and Spapens, P (1998) Sharing the World, Earthscan,
London.
Carson, R (1962) Silent Spring, Houghton Mif in, Boston, MA.
Commoner, B (1972) The Closing Circle, Bantam, New York.
Ehrlich, P (1975) The Population Bomb, Rivercity Press, River-
city, MA.
Goldsmith, J (1994) The Trap, Macmillan, London.
Hays, S P (1987) Beauty, Health and Permanence: Environmental
Politics in the US, 1955 1985, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
Jevons, W S (1965) The Coal Question, Augustus M Kelley,
New York.
Lovins, A B (1977) Soft Energy Paths, Ballinger, Cambridge.
Marsh, G P (1965) Man and Nature: Physical Geography as Mod-
ied by Human Action, Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 61
Meadows, D H, Meadows, D L, Randers, J, and Behrens, III,
W W (1972) The Limits to Growth, Universe, New York.
Ordway, S H (1953) Resources and the American Dream, Ronald
Press, New York.
Osborne, F(1948) OurPlunderedPlanet, LittleBrown, Boston, MA.
Osborne, F (1953) The Limits of the Earth, Little Brown, Boston,
MA.
Paehlke, R C (1997) Environmental Values and Public Policy, in
Environmental Policy in the 1990s, eds N J Vig and M E Kraft,
Congressional Quarterly Press, Washington, DC.
Paehlke, R C (1989) Environmentalism and the Future of Progres-
sive Politics, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.
Soros, G (1997) The Capitalist Threat, Atlantic Monthly, 279,
458.
von Weisacker, E, Lovins, A B, and Lovins, L H (1998) Factor
Four: Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use, Earthscan,
London.
Wackernagel, M and Rees, W E (1996) Our Ecological Footprint,
New Society, Philadelphia, PA.
Warren, K J (1995) Ecofeminism, in Conservation and Envi-
ronmentalism: An Encyclopedia, ed R C Paehlke, Garland,
New York.
World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) Our
Common Future, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
FURTHER READING
Kallett, A and Schlink, F J (1976) One Hundred Million Guinea
Pigs, Ayer, Salem, NH.
Lamb, R D (1976) American Chamber of Horrors, Ayer, Salem,
NH.
Mesarovic, M and Pestel, E (1974) Mankind at the Turning Point,
Dutton, New York.
Global Environmental Change and
Environmental History
IAN G SIMMONS
University of Durham, Durham, UK
To try and extract some of the ideas which intertwine with the environmental changes wrought by humans in the
last 10 000 years, an agreed empirical historiography of change is needed. The article suggests that the major
world-wide periods of human history for the present purpose can be determined by the type of economy pursued.
In effect, these are periods which are characterised by access to energy sources and hence to the technologies
available: these properties allow a society to change its surroundings, providing it has occupancy of the land
and water for a suf cient time. Materialist historiography has always taken very seriously the notion that the
ways in which people made a living were central to their other values and that technology drove history. The
story of what has happened, where, and when, is well-documented at global, regional and local levels but less
well developed is: (a) the relationships of such metamorphoses to changes in human thinking; and (b) whether
all these alterations present history simply as one damn thing after another or whether there are emerging
narratives of process in which we can see patterns emerging with a 10 000 year relevance.
THE EMPIRICAL NARRATIVE
The rst item in Johann Sebastian Bachs will is his share
in a Thuringian coalmine. That fact can be seen as a
nexus between a local environmental change, a global shift
in economy, a family in its household and his searing
representations in music of order and faith which comprise
one of the high achievements of Western culture. But is
there any connection between these statements other than
that of being symbols on a piece of paper? How does the
economy of a family, a region or a country or the world
link to their ideas about the world or do all these aspects
oat free of each other, with only coincidence in time in
common?
To try and extract some of the ideas, which intertwine
with the environmental changes wrought by humans in the
last 10 000 years, an agreed empirical narrative of change
is needed. Much of this is provided in other sections of
this Encyclopaedia and only a summary is given here.
Table 1 suggests that the major world-wide periods of
human history for the present purpose are determined by the
type of economy pursued. In effect, these are periods which
are characterised by access to energy sources, and hence to
the technologies available: these properties allow a society
to change its surroundings, providing it has occupancy of
the land and water for a sufcient time. In this article
the emphasis will be on the relations of those observed
alterations: (a) to the metamorphoses of human thought
that accompanied them; and (b) to emerging narratives of
process which we can construct with hindsight. A coda
ponders whether there are lessons for today and tomorrow
in this kind of hybrid-knowledge fabrication.
Human history is reduced to economy in Table 1. This
provides a starting point in the sense that materialist histo-
riography has always taken very seriously the notion that
the ways in which people made a living were central to
their other values and that technology drove history. In
the other direction, it is obvious that the environmental
impact of a hunter-gatherer is likely to be less than that
of a bulldozer, except that the one economy has in fact
taken up about 90% of human evolutionary time and the
other is (even loosely interpreted as any industrial economy
based on hydrocarbons) only 200 years old; the bulldozer is
largely a post-1940 development. Thus although the access
to energy and technology of solar-powered agriculturists
was restricted, their tenure of the earth has been long,
and they have penetrated into some environments whose
resilience in the face of their impacts was limited. The
use of tabular format rather hides the fact, of course, that
not all hunter-gathers have disappeared, and that there are
some farmers who have little access to industrially pro-
duced materials. In both cases, a revival of the older ways is
being promoted in some regions of the world. Nevertheless,
the changes wrought by the industrial way of life and its
GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE AND ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 63
Table 1 Global environmental history: a periodization
a
Energy sources;
Dates: approximately Energy consumption Technology Impacts
Hunter-
gatherer
100008000 BCE Solar energy captured
recently as biomass
5000 kcal cap
1
day
1
Stone, bone, basket,
skins, wood
Localized but
signicant in
marginal
species and
habitats
Agriculturalist 8000 BCECE 1750 Solar energy captured
recently as biomass,
wind and water
26000 kcal
cap
1
day
1
Addition of metals
plus sophisticated
construction
methods,
specialised tools;
domesticated
biota
Global impact of
agriculture on
soils, water
and land-
forms: e.g.,
the terrace
transfer of
species on all
scales
Industrialist CE 17501950 As above Cstored solar
energy as fossil fuels
77000 kcal cap
1
day
1
Intensication of
material use in
cities, as
chemicals, as
efuents, as
machines
Intensication of
impact and
spatial
extension
Post-
industrialist
CE 1950 As above Cnuclear
energy and alternative
sources of solar-based
energy 230000kcal
cap
1
day
1
Electronics; genetic
manipulation
New chemicals
and new
genetics
create
uncertainties
on larger scale
a
All rows contain the inuences in the rows above them unless explicitly excluded; cap, per capita.
post-industrial successor (which has the ability to generate
large amounts of capital and spin it off into almost any part
of the globe) cannot be gainsaid. An electricity-powered
economy with a high proportion of services is sometimes
labelled post-industrial but although it may call in resources
from a low-energy, low-information periphery, it exerts
many strong inuences upon the worlds ecology. It is fun-
damentally responsible for much of the appropriation of
Net Primary Productivity by human societies, which now
amounts to about 40% of the global terrestrial total. If the
pre-agricultural terrestrial biomass was about 842 10
15
g
of carbon, the present gure is, according to Matthews
(1984), 737 10
15
g of carbon, a reduction of 12.4%. In
spatial terms, this means that although 51.2% of the terres-
trial surfaces can still be described as undisturbed, if rock,
ice and barren land is taken out of the total, then that cat-
egory totals only 27.0%. As calculated in economic terms,
ecosystem services are worth about $33 trillion per year,
which compares with the gross domestic product (GDP) of
all the worlds nations at $18 trillion. Employing energy
use as a surrogate for environmental impact, the current
level of impress is 13.1 terawatts (TW); a human popu-
lation of 12 billion people with a more evenly distributed
access to energy might produce a footprint equivalent to
90 TW.
The story of what has happened, where, and when, is
well documented at global, regional and local levels. What
is less well developed is: (a) the relationships of such
metamorphoses to changes in human thinking; (b) whether
there are emerging narratives of process in which we can
see patterns emerging with 10 000 year relevance. So this
essay will attempt to discuss both an ideational narrative
in which a history of ideas is interrogated for its relation
to what actually happened in the world and a narrative of
process in which longer-term processes are plucked out of
the multifariousness of history for further examination.
THE NARRATIVE OF IDEAS
Two avenues will be followed here. The rst is the dis-
cussion of ideas, which seem to be connected to economies
quite closely. If they are connected to economies: then they
are bound up in the webs which link ecology, human use on
the ground and what humans perceive in their minds. The
second is the opposite: those actions and attitudes, which
seem to oat free of the economies and ecologies of their
time.
Any reasonably accurate long-term perspective on
humanenvironment relations can only be made by the
historically well-informed. Those who relied on especially
64 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
partial stories are likely to have constructed different views
of the unfolding of society from those who had extensive
assemblages to consult. An early symbol of the desire for
inclusive compilations of knowledge is the model globe.
The signicance of early examples such as that made by
Martin Behaim in 1492 and annotated with the nature
of commodities and business opportunities throughout the
known world can scarcely be underestimated. Behaims
globe, for example, was used to sell Magellans projected
voyage to sponsors (Jardine, 1996). The gatherings of the
18th and 19th centuries take on a special signicance,
starting perhaps with the Encyclop edie of 175156. A
fundamental example is the ambitious aim of Alexander von
Humbolt (17691859) to depict in a single work the entire
material universe which led to his multi-volume Cosmos of
18451862. The detailed results of Charles Darwins global
voyage, and his later observations and experiments also
typify the desire to accumulate comprehensive bodies of
knowledge, though Darwin (18091882) lacked the cosmic
aspirations of Humboldt.
No study of material-ideational links can ignore the
centrality of Karl Marx (18181883). The environmen-
tal aspects of Marx are implicit rather than explicit and
urbanindustrial rather than global historical. Neverthe-
less, he viewed the integrated development of a political
economy as a humanising, socialising and indeed internal-
ising of natural substances and forces in the environment.
According to Marx, therefore,
The mode of production in material life determines the general
character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It
is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence
but, on the contrary, their social existence which determines
their consciousness.
So one environmentally-oriented interpreter, Parsons
(1977), is able to say that for Marx all human values,
whether economically-linked like food, or higher values
like music, have their ultimate origin in non-human nature.
Yet Marx does not attempt to dene the equivalent linkages
for pre-industrial economies in the detail that he applies
to the separating and alienating effects of industrialisation
in the context of the social relations of capitalism.
Followers and explainers of Marx have tried to work out
a deeper historical sequence. Ted Benton, for instance, has
asserted that the theory of naturesociety relations which is
developed in Capital is incapable of conceptualising todays
populationresourceenvironment interactions. Bentons
reconstruction (1996) of the intellectual resources of Marx
and Engels brings forward the notion that development
is not a unilinear quantitative expansion of production
but rather a range of qualitatively different ways of
realising human social possibilities. Marxian analysis of
pre-industrial societies may need to build upon Capital
rather than simply apply it.
Another attempt to interpret material history is espoused
by Karl Kautsky (18541938). He attempted to show
parallels between the processes of nature and those of
human history. The non-human environment was in fact
human-created or at least much modied in many aspects
and therefore its evolution was social. Nevertheless it had
material connections since for him every social innovation
originated in the last analysis from a new technology. Thus
technology is a predominant mediating inuence between
the natural environment and human societies (Kautsky,
1988).
A more recent re-statement of some of these notions has
come from Max Oelschlager (1991), from whom there are
assertions such as:
once the agricultural turn was made, philosophy and the-
ology sprung forth with a vengeance the crucial inter-
action between existential and conceptual materials lying
at the heart of cultural process and the ecological transi-
tion increased in both frequency and pervasiveness ide-
ological reconstruction was inevitable. And The idea of
nature as a machine was deeply rooted in the experience of the
Industrial Revolution and the pervasive inuence of machines
on life.
The rst of these statements traces its connections in part
at least to the surpluses created by irrigated agriculture:
philosophy may bake no bread, but an assured supply of
bread enables philosophers to live. The second reinforces
the Kautsky directive that technology is a key mediator
between humans and all else. The development of fossil
fuels has clearly allowed profound transformations of social
structures to take place. New work groupings and new
social groupings with specialised interests are examples.
Goldblatt (1996) argues that industrialism does not cause
capitalism (nor its environmentally degrading effects) but it
does unleash it. It would be generally agreed that access to
energy sources and to technology are principal factors but
not the principal factor; they must be considered in relation
to all other aspects of the social order.
In Smils (1994) collection of work on business cycles
in the West, there is a conuence of material change with
economic life. This can be interpreted to show a coinci-
dence between new energy sources and innovative prime
movers on the one hand, and accelerated investment on the
other. Innovation in energy technology and access falls in
the middle of a business down-cycle and its adoption then
coincides with the rise of the new upswing. The sequence
suggested comprises: (a) the upswing of 17871814 is
related to the development of coal and the stationary steam
engine; (b) that of 18431869 is connected to moving
steam engines in the forms of the steamship and the rail-
road, together with improvements in iron smelting; (c) that
of 18981924 with the introduction of commercial elec-
tricity in the form of electric motors in factories; (d) the
period around 1937 which coincides with the gas turbine,
uorescent light and the discoveries in nuclear physics;
GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE AND ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 65
and (e) the phase that was ended in 1973 by oil producing
countries (OPEC), which had cheap oil, and the extensive
and unquestioned use of the motor vehicle and nuclear s-
sion power.
The ideational effects of these surges are difcult to trace
directly, but there can be little doubt that each of them
helped to strengthen the Promethean aspects of the western
world-view. Grubler (1994) suggests parallel developments
in western agriculture: innovation up to the mid-19th cen-
tury, mercantilism from 18501935 and industrialization
from 1935 to the present. Each of these was a cluster
of biological, mechanical and social/organizational change,
with the social sometimes preceding the new crops and new
techniques. The idea of social structures founded upon the
dissipation of energy is a meta-narrative that takes off from
these abstractions and turns them into a general model.
The classic work on the long-term relations of the natural
environment and all facets of human societies is that of
the Annales school of historians, and in particular the
central gure of Fernand Braudel (19021985). He wished
to understand patterns of nature as well as history, so
that a radical inter-discipliniarity might be accomplished,
using the insights of other social and natural sciences.
If a long enough period of time was inspected, then not
only the history of events (histoire evenmentielle) might
be better linked to the world in which it was situated, but
the longue duree might the better include environmental
change, which was seen as proceeding along a much slower
time path than changes located solely in human actions.
Braudel (e.g., 1972) saw environmental transmutation as
the slowest vector in the whole society-nature complex, a
point on which later appreciations of the rapidity of e.g.,
a climatic change or the onset and progress of soil erosion
might well take a different view. In the end, though, the
Annales view is of a complex rhythmical web in which
environment has to be given a place but cannot crassly
determine the nature of a society. If environment is often
critical (in terms of the juxtaposition of mountain and sea
in the Mediterranean basin, for example), it is rarely as
direct as in the example of snow being brought down in
summer from the Alps to Italian cities being the origin of
the making of ice-cream. The tone is more of environmental
than economic determinism.
The French attempts to make long-term connections
between economy and society are also exempli ed in the
work of Georges Dumezil (1898 1986). He had the idea
that the diverse cultures of the Indo Europeans (from Iran
to Scandinavia) could be constituted in terms of the three
functions of sovereignty, war and production. This last
was, according to one commentator (Littleton, 1982), the
least important (comprising the herder cultivator stratum)
and so perhaps accounts for its lack of detailed treatment
compared with the other two, in his major outputs. In view
of the endpoint of Dumezil s analysis of the extent to which
a common linguistic ancestry is necessarily accompanied by
a common social and cultural heritage, this seems like an
opportunity missed. The same is true of Toynbee s great
compilations (1976) of historical change which are heavily
weighted in their treatment towards early civilisations. In
these the causation runs from environment to religion and
economy and the values do not stem in an obvious fashion
from economy; periods of breakdown relate to political and
social events, not rooted in an economy s structure. The
advances of Islam into Europe in the 16th century or the
Hellenic demise of 431 BC are little connected in any direct
fashion with the imbalances between population, resources
and environment in those regions at those times.
One of the most complete attempts at linking economy
and the non-material has come with the work of Thompson
(1989). He articulated a number of global phases of an
economic type, beginning with early agriculture along the
margins of the mountains of south west Asia and ending
with a Paci c Shift which corresponds largely with a post-
industrial society. For each of these, he posits a series of
intellectual and social characteristics, among which science
and religion are numbered. The sequence does not include
a speci c hunter-gatherer era but it is not dif cult to add
one. Nor is it dif cult to add some other environmental
linkages, such as dominant environmental pathologies and
rates of population growth. One implication is that these
are world-wide categories which transcend the varieties
of culture found in, say, Europe, Africa and Asia. The
descriptions given by Thompson, when translated to tabular
form, make it necessary to remember that the transition
from one category to another is regionally asynchronous.
However, the work is certainly suggestive: the tying-in
of a speci c type of religion to each economic phase
raises interesting questions and taken together, each row
might be said perhaps to constitute a worldview, if the
cells are verbally connected and scanned for their emergent
attributes.
The notion that each stage of social change corresponds
to its own types of law, government, religion (and other
characteristics) was a major achievement of Giambattista
da Vico (1668 1744) but who did not develop very far
the notion of economy as a propellant of such change. His
cycles of civilisation, in which divine, heroic and humanist
phases went round more than once, did not attach them-
selves to, e.g., hunter-gatherers, irrigation agriculture and
Mediterranean pastoralism. He did however suggest that
Latin was a language which had evolved in a forest envi-
ronment, making a case for the evolution of words like
lex, ilex, aquilex, legumen and legere from a sylvan envi-
ronment. But as Berlin (1992) points out, Vico s main
contribution to thought is his distinction between the natural
world as knowable but not intelligible, and the human world
as knowable and intelligible. Because we made it; the sug-
gestion, contra Descartes, that a reconstructive imagination
66 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
(fantasia) was a third kind of knowledge needed by students
of history, seems to have a great deal to commend it.
The summation of this type of material seems clear: that
in a few cases there seems to be a direct connection between
the economy and some at least of the non-material val-
ues of a society. The attachment seems to be closer in
solar-powered, pre-industrial economies, despite the asser-
tion of Marx that all values arose from economics and class
structure. In a sense this parallels the arguments for envi-
ronmental determinism, which has always held more appeal
in pre-industrial contexts, though it is clearly not absent in
a post-industrial world.
DISSOCIATED TRENDS
If the links between economy and environmental values
cannot be traced easily for the apparently obvious examples
by the well-known analysts discussed above, then it is not
surprising that a number of less obvious connections can be
aired. One result of ranging across 10 000 years of change
is the provision of examples to suit almost any taste in
narrative. Rather like the Bible, something can be found to
bolster any point of view. It is scarcely surprising then to be
able to nd examples of environmental thought which bear
no perceptible relationship to the material circumstances
of their origins and development. Culture, say Harvey and
Reed (1994), can take on the features of a chaotic cascade
of symbols and ideas that have a life of their own. Hence
humans appear to make themselves.
To take one example: if we accept the magnitude of the
Classical Greek achievements in both chronicling their own
past as well as in thought about humanity and nature, then
it is difcult to tie much of this to the particular agricultural
economies of the time. Those economies had been in largely
the same condition for centuries before the eforescence of
thought that we associate with the golden age of Greek
philosophy and history. There is one possible exception to
this: in the soil erosion of Attica, the Epicureans found
conrmation for their view that the earth was senile, over-
populated and generally on its way to perdition. If indeed
their outlook can be traced to the combination of re and
pastoralism prevalent on the mountains of Attica, there is
a powerful link (Hughes, 1994). Even so, the actual course
and intensity of the soil erosion has been disputed and its
general role may have been exaggerated. But a false report
is not necessarily any less inuential than a true one.
A parallel ambiguity can be seen for the Renaissance
period in Europe. Again, it is possible to interpret this
as a owering of a particular culture, which bears no
relation to major changes in production from the land.
It is true that nature is relevant, as can be seen in the
loving depictions of landscape which now become a part
of so many paintings. Initially of the background but in
the case of Piero di Cosimo and the school of Giorgione,
both around the turn into the 16th century, nature occupies
much more of the frame, yet once more, no obvious
connection with regional economic change is apparent.
The contextual factor to be considered, perhaps, is that of
increasing wealth, pride in ownership and in security made
possible by trade and technology. Medieval Europe may not
have been static technologically though less developed than
China in terms of inventions, it had acquired a quantitative
approach to matter, according to Crosby (1997). It is
possible to suggest that advances in technology during the
medieval centuries enabled societies to ourish in which the
developments of thought, art, and consumption which could
be later constituted as The Renaissance, were cultivated.
But the really revolutionary ideas of the period and its
aftermath, such as the new cosmologies of Copernicus
(14731543) and Galileo (15641642) where, as John
Donne (15721631) put it,
new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of re is quite put out;
The sun is lost, and thearth, and no mans wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
are certainly little related to energy efciency, climatic
change, or soil type.
Later centuries show some similarities. Keith Thomass
book (1983) on the re-valuation of nature in England in
the years 15001800 argues that in many ways the men
and women of those years developed a willingness to be
more tender towards the living but non-human components
of their world. But nowhere does he hold that these are
strongly related to material change. He associates a new
kindness to animals with the oncoming of industrialization
(both in Britain and elsewhere in Europe) but thinks that the
conditions for it were in place by 1700, rather before any
strong manifestations of the new order. Yet as he says, if the
prerequisites were latent in the JudaeoChristian tradition,
why did they emerge at a particular time and place, if it
were not for changes in social and economic conditions?
The point of nexus for him is the greater use of working
animals in the sight of well-to-do townsmen or the clergy,
though he embeds this in a wider context of cultural and
social practices, mostly of a pre-industrial type. Possibly
the growth of city living is more important than the primary
economic type; there appears to be no major technological
changes of a mediating kind.
In her account of western ideas from the hunter-gatherers
of the Americas through to sustainability, Merchant (1995)
constructs an inclusive history in which the story of Western
civilization since the 17th century can be conceptualized as
a grand narrative of fall and recovery. The story is car-
ried by the three subplots of religion, modern science, and
capitalism. None of these, we may notice, enforces a par-
ticular economy, though capitalism and industrialization
seem to be umbilically linked outside the former Com-
munist nations. Individual values therefore are attached
GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE AND ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 67
to this narrative as a whole rather than major changes in
material circumstances. The same might possibly apply to
other meta-narratives; in a different interpretation of West-
ern ideas, Arran Gare (1993) details the withdrawal of
philosophy from any attempt at totalizing of knowledge:
it no longer deals with the whole worlds interactions of
nature, history and society. In large measure, this is caused
by a drift down the centuries towards the dominance of
nihilism. Its current end-point is a highly individualistic
society, which involves an extreme detachment from, and
instrumentalization of, the world, whether that world be of
nature or of other people. People in particular are not par-
ticipants in the stream of life and in the becoming of the
world but transcendent consciousness in a world of things
which are only externally related to each other. The watch-
words are reason, foresight and efciency. The connections
to material conditions are at most secondary.
This last point seems to emerge from many studies of the
possibility of technological determinism, where a consider-
able body of opinion declares that technology constrains
but does not determine. Even highly-coupled technologi-
cal explanations of socio-economic change cannot account
for all the variance in the historical picture: Bimber (1994)
argues that even Marx was not really a technological deter-
minist. But there are hard versions of technological deter-
minism in which a sequence of technological development
prescribes an evolutionary path for societies irrespective of
their social and cultural practices. A softer version would
apply this to industrial capitalism but not previous periods
of history. Overall, technological determinism looks more
convincing over big sweeps of time and place, but the pic-
ture seems more contingent at smaller scales. At both, the
alternative to a kind of total freedom for technology is its
social production. It is becoming increasingly clear that the
gender relations of a society will be important in these kinds
of connections.
AGENCY AND STRUCTURE
In any summary of worldviews, therefore, the self-image
of the human being is intimately bound up with what
can be technologically achieved but which then feeds
back in a self-aware view of him/herself that must surely
affect humanenvironment relations but at a remove. These
images might include: (a) the economic man (sic) of the
post-Enlightenment period who is individualistic, material-
istic and utilitarian; (b) the competitive individual beloved
of the Social Darwinists; (c) the people who were success-
ful because they could deal with the base instincts revealed
by Freud; (d) the reductionist product beloved of psychol-
ogists who think that behaviour will someday be totally
explicable at the molecular level; and (e) the notion that
humans are essentially spirit in a contingent animal cas-
ing. None of these appears to be closely coupled to the
evolution of different types of economy. Yet neither are
they irrelevant to the construction of the Western world-
view, which is now so dominant in all its aspects, including
that of environmental thought. The bringing forward of the
fragment and of the instant moment seems not to have
diminished a belief in an ordered cosmos. Uncertainty
within limits seems to be the only reasonable judgement
upon the apparent free-oaters: like a kite in unskilled
hands, there is a lot of swooping about even if the strings
are nite in length.
FRAGMENTATION
Any world chronicle furnishes examples of social changes,
which can be interpreted as producing societies in which
the demands of the individual are addressed before those
of the polity as a whole. Some of these metamorphoses also
lead to instrumentalities where the non-human world comes
very low in any list of priorities.
In such an account of the Holocene, the starting point
can be taken as our reading of hunter-gatherer societies
which live within the compass of a unied mythology. The
worldview thus engendered may well encompass all aspects
of life: the relations between individual humans as well as
between the group and its food sources are all referable
to the same mythic structure as the social agglomeration
and its place in the cosmos. It seems unlikely that such
myths always provided for harmony among people or for
an unuctuating relationship with resources (and so should
not therefore be romanticised unduly) but nevertheless it
provided a coherent explanation of uncertainties at most
temporal and spatial scales.
Very similar mentalities may have pertained in the
earliest agricultural communities of the hill-lands of the
Levant but once successful irrigation agriculture was estab-
lished in the basins of great rivers (such as the Nile,
TigrisEuphrates, Indus and Huang He), then stratied
societies might emerge. They contained classes of people
who were devoted to e.g., government, religion, or artisan-
ship and so were no longer in daily physical contact with
soil, plants and animals in the way that is inevitable for
a hunter-gatherer. Such trends are obviously, intensied in
urban societies, though the small absolute size of the pre-
19th century city must not be forgotten. Thus both for the
townspeople and the farmers, the natural world is poten-
tially an instrument of a cultural set of ordinances and not
an intuitively perceived ow through the quotidian exis-
tence of all (Shepard, 1982). For some interpreters, this
can be seen as the beginning of the regarding of nature as
part of the Other. The relationships of this type of economy
become closer after the development of fossil fuel energy
in the 19th century. Modern technology has proved to be
a fragmenter of myths, economic systems and land cover
systems alike.
68 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Yet between say 5000 BCE and 1800 CE, the world was
dominated by economies which depended upon recently-
xed biomass for their existence (Simmons, 1996) and
within this pre-industrial world, some trends of social indi-
viduation can be discerned. For example, the communal
life of the manor in medieval Europe was altered by the
withdrawal of the lord and his lady to private apartments
behind the hall, a change which eventually resulted in
the 1718th century development of the corridor, allow-
ing genuinely private rooms, especially bedrooms. Stronger
movements towards social privatization from openness to
seclusion start in the later Middle Ages (in Europe at
least) and accelerate around 1800. Hence they partly coin-
cide with and partly precede the development of industrial-
isation, with its reliance upon technology and its subsidy of
current biomass by fossil fuels. Instances might include the
banishment of (normal) death in public from the middle of
the 18th century, death by execution in public disappears
(mostly) between 1770 and 1870, and around 1800 prisons
and madhouses cease to be public spectacles for the curious.
Further, ca. 1800, the private enclosed space of the nuclear
family begins to dominate in the west (Spierenburg, 1991).
It is not surprising, then, that further and different kinds
of drawing apart should come to pass in the 19th century,
given all the innovations of all kinds that the century
provided. Steiner (1989) proposes that the 1870s were the
critical time, with the poetry of Stephan Mallarme as the
emblematic event, since it rst explicitly dissociated word
from meaning (his words reached out in all directions
towards other words and images, being uid, ambiguous
and suggestive, according to one critic) clearing the path
for modern semiotics and eventually, an idealist view of
the world as being only language. Yet, Mallarme can be
seen to have written at a time when many connectivities
were being severed. Examples include the pointillisime
of Seurat, the making of moving lms as images per
second, the pictures without object of Kandinsky, the loss
of tonality in Schoenbergs music, the atomistic science of
Cajal and the invention in Cuba (then a Spanish colony)
of the concentration camp (Everdell, 1997). The shifts of
18701910 can perhaps be summed up in the transitions
of the paintings of Piet Mondrian in those years or given a
coda in the anxious splinters of T S Eliots The Waste Land
of 1922.
More recent developments include the individuation of
entertainment and communications via the Walkman, the
VCR (video cassette recorder) and the mobile telephone, the
display of the dissected innards and body parts of animals
as high art, the withdrawal of public broadcasting in favour
of owned channels and its parallel in transport. There has
also been a rise in the fragment rather than the prolonged:
concert promoters speak of the increased popularity of
shorter pieces (so performances of Dimitri Shostakovitchs
7th Symphony [80 min] are getting rare). TV programs
gravitate to the magazine format rather than any extended
treatment, with childrens programmes becoming a total
whirl of short spans and desperate camera angles. Most
signicant of all has been the replacement in more than
one national culture of the 5-day cricket game as the norm
by various shorter and more colourful versions.
Is there any reection of these long-term events in
environmental connectedness? To quote a set of parallel
examples is certainly not to establish a causal relationship.
But it is not very difcult to see the setting out of different
land cover and water use systems, which differentiate
between production, pleasure and nature. In the case of the
rst, common property resources have undergone constant
attrition through several thousand years: the open elds
of Europe have steadily become privately owned in the
name, largely, of more intensive production. Much open
and commonly held land was enclosed and reclaimed as
soon as legal and technological systems allowed, examples
can be found from the Fens of East Anglia to the American
West. The second category can be seen in the way special
places are set aside for recreational use in rural areas:
the right to roam of e.g., Sweden is a rare phenomenon.
Eventually there is the nature reserve and the wilderness
in which wild nature (even pristine ecosystems if these
can be proven) is set apart in a legal and often physical
sense from the rest of the region in which it is situated.
The UNCLOS (United Nations Conference on the Law
of the Sea) ndings attempted to apply the same trends
to the oceans. The end-point of this group is found in
the assertions of environmental conservatives that only
total private ownership of resources and environment will
prevent degradation.
COALESCENCE
For many discernible long-term trends in human affairs, a
counter-current can be found. If we look at 10 000 years
of human history and its relationship to natural history,
comings-together can be discerned as well as drawings-
apart.
One of the earliest was the formation of empires, which
covered large areas and facilitated within them certain uni-
formities. The Roman Empire, for example, imposed a
largely uniform legal system from the Levant to Wales.
Thus as early as the 15th century it would have been pos-
sible to trade a small and valuable item from Ireland to
Japan. Similar processes were carried further by later impe-
ria based on industry; the coalescence of these and earlier
world systems has been chronicled by Wallerstein and his
critics (Frank and Gills, 1993). The present-day equivalent
seems to be the globally instantaneous electronic telecom-
munications that spin a digital web round the earth rather
like candy-oss round a fairground stick. The difference
between the 15th century and today is perhaps the way
GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE AND ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 69
in which that system is, above all, devoted to processing
the symbols of capital and allowing gobs of them to spin
off and alight in one place or another to be the sweet-
eners of various developments. As well as the spinning
of money, there is now the transfer of verbal information
and image on an instantaneous basis via the Internet. It is
easy to over-estimate the inuence of such a device since
its distribution is rather limited and its driving forces, ini-
tially anarchic, seem to be coming under the control of big
players. But as an embodiment of Vernadskys conception
(1945) of the noosphere (a mind-sphere equivalent to the
biosphere and atmosphere; see Noosphere, Volume 5), it
comes closer than anything so far experienced, more so
even than cheap travel by jet aircraft. For capitalistic mod-
ernism, the metaphor of the machine for both humanity and
nature seems appropriate; the post-modernist world of vir-
tual money seems not yet to have developed a comparable
meta-metaphor.
The binding systems with environmental linkages are
often of a hybrid human-nature type like the oceans and
atmosphere. Not only were these globally interactive in
their natural state but the human impacts upon them have
the potential to be spread globally. Some inuences are coa-
lescent: that of the greenhouse gases is well documented
and there is a persistent worry that there could be an equiv-
alent in the oceans since they receive all the substances put
upon the land and among these are many compounds toxic
to life. The couplings revealed by intensive study of the
temperature regime of the Pacic Ocean carry the implicit
suggestion that any human-induced global warming may
affect the frequency and intensity of for instance El Nino
events. All these add up to a world in which the driving
force of a population growth, which arrived at 6 billion in
1999, cannot be ignored at any scale. Demographic change
can be seen as a non-reversible binding force which deter-
mines the size of the gyre which links humanity and nature,
as indeed does the degree to which societies have access to
commercial energy (Adams, 1988).
Can these trends bring about coalescence and bindings
within the organic and human spheres? Without doubt,
there are material changes consequent upon empires and
trade. The Roman Empire was the cause of the production
of wheat throughout much of its extent since it desired
that particular cereal for bread. It also affected nature in
the pursuit of the circus: North Africa and Asia Minor
for example were depleted almost entirely of their lion
populations in order to obtain animals for these spectacles;
Scotland contributed a bear to one such festive occasion.
Trade and discovery encouraged the transfer of species
from one continent to another, so that European weeds
became as familiar in the tropics as potatoes in industrial
cities of northern Europe. This process started as early as
the spread of Neolithic crops from the Levant to Western
Europe but received enormous impetus during the 16th
century conquests by European powers and again in the
19th centurys age of empire. The latter, for instance,
brought about great ecological similarities in the tropics
when different ecosystems were converted to the ubiquitous
plantation producing rubber or plant oil.
In todays environments, there are effects in the type
of food production encouraged by the Green Revolution
and its successor developments. Large amounts of fertiliz-
ers, biocides and water produce a uniformity of production
methods, which the more rmly installed by the conditions
of uniform produce demanded by industrial-nation super-
markets. The general uniformity of several kinds of tourist
destinations (is this fenced-off and guarded resort hotel in
Thailand, Kenya or the Caribbean?) is another outcome of
the globalizing forces. World-wide, the International Mon-
etary Fund (IMF) is the institution which most produces
this uniformity since it enforces the conception that every
region must do what it does best without regard to local
culture or the carbon-loadings brought about by export-
oriented economies.
The way in which the application of natural sciences
seem most likely to bind globally is via biotechnology, in
which genetic uniformity is the most strongly aligned to the
demands of world commerce. Such as dictated by global
trade organisations and development institutions with their
you must do a lot of what you do best [as we judge it]
policies, following the lead of international agencies. The
reduction in the genetic diversity of crop plants during the
20th century as a result of commercial pressures to home
in on one or two varieties or strains is well known. In that
light, the advent of cloning from a single cell, as happened
with a sheep in 1997, seems a logical development and full
of business potential. It seems unlikely that it will produce
a higher biodiversity in the world outside the laboratory,
unless by some chance its search for genetic resources allies
it to the conservationist movement.
IMPROVISATION AS A VIRTUE
The sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1989) points out that
humans cannot communicate directly with the non-human
world via speech. Though some New Age enthusiasts would
dispute the assertion, most people in the Western world
would, after a brief but regretful pause, agree. Luhmann
suggests that in fact we talk to each other about the envi-
ronment and since it is such a complex set of discourses,
the discussions are separated out into a set of specialized
channels in each of which there is resonance. Each of
these channels corresponds to some recognised organiza-
tional conduit through which a discussion can ow. Thus
we can have environmental economics, law, sociology, pol-
itics, religion, education, poetry, music, each containing
a set of resonances about what is essentially the same
thing but which has been represented in different ways.
70 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
One more important cultural facet can be added: in the
West there has long been a tendency to dualism. Thus
in each channel, the thrust is towards a 0/1 dichotomy:
legal/illegal, relative/absolute, scientic/nonscientic, eco-
nomic/uneconomic, and in the last analysis, good/evil.
Again relating to much earlier histories, there is the con-
comitant likelihood that the 1 state will be Us and the
0 state, the Other. Thus one outcome of attempts to rep-
resent the complexity of humanenvironment relations is
a series of separations of both fact (in the sense of the
facts of politics, economics and law, for example) and value
in the connotation of what is acceptable and what is not.
An appealing image for this analysis is that of the pipe-
organ. Looking at an organ case, we see a number of pipes
of different length which each sounds only one note but
which can be on or off: the correspondence to Luhmanns
idea of resonances is quite strong. In some organ cases, the
pipes are grouped rather as our approach to knowledge is
clustered: the sciences, the social sciences, humanities and
similar groups. Pursuing the analogy, we remember that the
instrument can be played to an exact score as laid down by
a composer, or the player may improvise.
Another image that could be helpful is that of the DNA
(Di-ribo Nucleic Acid) molecule. Models show a double
helix with the strands linked by base pairs. One strand
could represent the actual changes in the world and the
other our ideas about those transformations. The base pairs
then look like the ways in which information about the
one is transferred to the other. Some of the pairs will
embody the best possible information ow whereas others
will necessarily be fragmented or distorted. We can imagine
a state in which information about an environmental process
is not collected because it is too expensive or where known
data are concealed because of the effect they might have on
a companys share value. The model could be taken further
to suggest the increasing magnitude of the interactions
by widening the gyre of the helix and by colouring the
strands to show the historic sequence. One problem is that
it gives, as do tabular constructions, an air of inevitability:
the possibility of contingent change looks unlikely. On the
other hand, a creative piece of computer graphics might
encompass all these aspects in a way several thousand
words cannot.
TRENDS IN ENVIRONMENTAL
HISTORIOGRAPHY
The historian William Cronon (1992) has remarked that we
have had studies of ecology and economy, or studies of
nature, but too rarely have we had all three together. Apart
from the actual difculties of bringing into one focus the
different kinds of information provided in such approaches,
there is perhaps the point that environmental history has
tended to be directed towards certain ends. There are many
examples of histories, which are prophetic in the sense of
being warnings against a future, which is either inevitable
or avoidable by prompt action. In Classical Greece, for
instance, the Epicureans thought that the land was senile,
overpopulated and that generally both it and the population
had declined in their capabilities since an earlier Golden
Age when all was in an optimal condition. In the period
from 1965 onwards, roughly, there has been a plethora
of books on environment, which have traced trajectories
of the decline of nature and the rise of overpopulation
and pollution. Almost every period in recorded history
has been seen as the turning point towards perdition: the
Ancient Worlds eventual materialism, the desacralization
of Medieval Europe, the anthropocentrism of the Renais-
sance, the mechanical model of the world of Newtonian
physics as adopted enthusiastically by the industrial revo-
lution, the relativism thought to be made possible by the
discoveries of uncertainties of quantum mechanics in the
1920s, and the triumph of capitalism inherent in the fall of
the Berlin Wall, have all been seen as signal events and pro-
cesses on the way to hell. Some histories indeed suggest
that a short but pyrotechnic existence is the evolutionary
fate of the human species and that we might as well have
a hell of a good party even if we are sick in the bushes
afterwards.
Within such over-riding themes, shorter periods attract
more diverse agendas. In an era of the discovery of the ills
of colonialism, the adverse environmental effects of impe-
rial foresters, farmers and white hunters are bound to attract
attention though some counterbalance has been offered by
the role of colonial scientists in their prescient studies of the
relation of rainfall, land use and environmental stabilities.
Then again, reaction against some particular aspect of the
present is often seminal. In the United Kingdom, the urban
sprawl of the 1920s and 1930s reinforced myths about the
rural idyll of (especially) the English village and provoked
books, poetry and paintings that implanted the more accept-
able faces of the pre-1914 landscape in peoples minds as
the desirable piece of heritage that might have to be fought
for. It was not the images of industrial Halifax, or bun-
galoid Peacehaven that were supposed to inspire Tommy
in his trench in Flanders or his tank outside Tobruk, but
the combination of thatched cottage, medieval church and
friendly pub. In the race for the tourist dollar and yen, the
environment of Scotland is a powerful adjunct, no matter
that much of it results from centuries of over-exploitation
by rich landlords eager for prots from timber, sheep and
deer or that the tartan cult is a 19th century invention by an
English cloth maker with some spare capacity and an eye
for the purchasing power of the military.
Romanticism, on the other hand, was largely provoked by
the valuation of the individual over the mass. While it often
attracted environmental icing (such as Wordsworths anath-
ema to the coming of the railways to the Lake District), it
GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE AND ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 71
is linkable to changes in the natural world only indirectly:
by the growth of human population numbers, possibly. Yet
the break with previous attitudes was absolutely critical in
the revaluation of for example the mountain and other wild
landscapes of Europe and North America, with incalcu-
lable consequences for the founding and management of
national parks and for the rise of tourism. So the writing
of environment history is bound to look out for examples
of contingent turning points of an analogous character and
the present time of turmoil of thinking and opinion-forming
can thus be posited as a turning point from the pre-existing
era governed by the machine metaphor to another phase,
for which the appropriate language has not been born,
but which will share in the renewed valuation of emotion,
community and communication: a sort of environmental
post-Diana syndrome.
ABANDONING BALANCE
The death in 1997 of the historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin
recalls the relevance of some of his thought. He notes
that the attainment of Utopias is usually accompanied by
coercion on a large scale. The techno-centrics are accused
of many sins in their exploitation of primary resources
in developing countries, for example; the eco-centrics are
labelled eco-fascists and associated with unsavoury regimes
that were practitioners of some ecologically acceptable
ideas. So Berlin (1991) would not favour the provision
of a score with a de nite end in view; rather he is with
the improvisers. He also reminds us of the relevance of
the fragment of the Greek Archilochus, The fox knows
many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing , for it is
the Utopians that know one big thing and they are usually
prepared to convert everybody to their point of view, like
it or not. In our present context, then, Berlin s words seem
germane. He suggests that a
perfect solution is, not merely in practice, but in principle,
impossible in human affairs, and any determined attempt to
produce it is likely to lead to suffering, disillusionment and
failure.
Among other reasons, this is because there are incom-
mensurables to be dealt with, there are choices between
paths of equal good, and indeed some ultimate values may
be incompatible with one another, then,
the best that one can do is to try and promote some
kind of equilibrium, necessarily unstable, between the different
aspirations of differing groups of human beings [this]
is not a passionate battle-cry to inspire men to sacri ce and
martyrdom and heroic feats. Yet if it were adopted, it might yet
prevent mutual destruction, and, in the end, preserve the world.
The phrase crooked timber is from Immanuel Kant,
who observed that out of the crooked timber of humanity
no straight thing was ever made and in this context, no
straight thing has ever been made nor is it worth trying.
Fudge, muddle, crabwise-movement and indeed improvisa-
tion are the ways in which most attempts to construct a
modus vivendi are made and which produce the greatest
and most lasting successes.
This raises the dif cult issue of the relation between plu-
ralism and relativism. Many thinkers might agree that the
independence of the non-human world imposes in the end
some limits, as does the nite nature of the capabilities of
the human organism, as indeed do the empirical possibil-
ities of human organisation. Further, to echo Kierkegaard,
relativism is possible for history but is much more dif cult
in making decisions for the future (Lukes, 1998). There are,
naturally, notional confrontations which we may be asked
to consider, which are too far removed from the everyday
to matter to us as individuals, though they may matter a
great deal to others. Then there are real options, in which,
as Manuel Castells (1998) exhorts:
liberation is for people to free themselves from uncritical
adherence to theoretical or ideological schemes, to construct
their practice on the basis of their experience, while using
whatever information or analysis is available to them, from
a variety of sources.
In this we can recognise not only the need for pluralism
but also that analysis may include the best moral judgement
that a shared, locally felt, democracy can produce. No place
for Utopia, therefore; neither for existential hand-wringing.
So organists need to follow J S Bach all the way: they need
to be able to understand the scores and to leave some of
them behind as inspiration for those to follow but the real
genius is shown in the quality of the improvisations (see
Virtual Environments, Volume 5).
REFERENCES
Adams, R N (1988) The Eighth Day, Social Evolution as the Self-
Organisation of Energy, University of Texas Press, Austin, TX.
Benton, T (1996) Marxism and Natural Limits, in The Greening of
Marxism, ed T Benton, Guilford Press, New York, 157 183.
Berlin, I (1991) The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed H Hardy,
Fontana, London.
Berlin, I (1992) Vico and Herder, The Hogarth Press, London.
Bimber, B (1994) Three faces of Technological Determinism, in
Does Technology Drive History? eds M R Smith and L Marx,
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 79 100.
Braudel, F (1972) The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean
World in the Age of Phillip II, Harper Collins, London.
Castells, M (1988) End of Millennium. The Information Age,
Vol. 3, Blackwell, Malden, MA.
Cronon, W (1992) A Place for Stories: Nature, History and
Narrative, J. Am. Hist., 78, 1347 1476.
Crosby, A W (1997) The Measure of Reality. Quantication and
Western Society, 1250 1600, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
72 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Everdell, W R (1997) The First Moderns. Pro les in the Origins
of Twentieth-Century Thought, University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, IL.
Frank, A G and Gills, B K (1993) The World System. Five Hun-
dred Years or Five thousand? Routledge, London.
Gare, A (1993) Nihilism Incorporated. European Civilization and
Environmental Destruction, Ecological Press, Bungendore,
NSW.
Goldblatt, D (1996) Social Theory and the Environment, Polity
Press, Cambridge.
Grubler, A (1994) Technology, Changes in Land Use and Land
Cover: A Global Perspective, eds W B Meyer and B L Turner,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 287328.
Harvey, D L and Reed, M H (1994) The Evolution of Dissipative
Social Systems, J. Soc. Evol. System., 17, 371411.
Hughes, J D (1994) Pans Travail. Environmental Problems of the
Ancient Greeks and Romans, The Johns Hopkins University
Press, Baltimore, MD.
Jardine, L (1996) Worldly Goods. A New History of the Renais-
sance, Macmillan, London.
Kautsky, K (1988) The Materialist Conception of History, ed
J H Kautsky, Yale University Press, London.
Littleton, C S (1982) The New Comparative Mythology. An Anth-
ropological Assessment of the Theories of Georges Dum ezil,
3rd edition, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.
Luhmann, N (1989) Ecological Communication, Polity Press,
Cambridge.
Lukes, S (1998) Berlins Dilemma. The Distinction between Rela-
tivism and Pluralism, Times Literary Supplement, 4956, March
27, 810.
Matthews, E (1984) Global Inventory of Pre-Agricultural and
Present Biomass, Prog. Biomet., 3, 237246.
Merchant, C (1995) Reinventing Eden: Western Culture as a
Recovery Narrative, in Uncommon Ground. Toward Reinvent-
ing Nature, eds W Cronon and W W Norton, New York,
132159.
Oelschlager, M (1991) The Idea of Wilderness, Yale University
Press, New Haven, CT.
Parsons, H L (1977) Marx and Engels on Ecology, Greenwood
Press, Westport, CN.
Shepard, P (1982) Nature and Madness, Sierra Club, San Fran-
cisco, CA.
Simmons, I G (1996) Changing the Face of the Earth, 2nd edition,
Blackwell, Oxford.
Smil, V (1994) Energy in World History, Westview Press, Boul-
der, CO.
Spierenburg, P (1991) The Broken Spell. A Cultural and Anthro-
pological History of Preindustrial Europe, Rutgers University
Press, New Brunswick, NJ.
Steiner, G (1989) Real Presences, Faber and Faber, London.
Thomas, K (1983) Man and the Natural World. Changing Atti-
tudes in England 15001800, Allen Lane, London.
Thompson, W I (1989) Pacic Shift, in Nature in Asian
Traditions of Thought: Essays in Environmental Philosophy,
eds J B Callicott and R T Ames, SUNY Press, Albany, NY,
2536.
Toynbee, A (1976) Mankind and Mother Earth. A Narrative His-
tory of the World, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Vernadsky, V I (1945) The Biosphere and the Noosphere, Am.
Sci., 33(1), 112.
Globalization in Historical Perspective
JOHN H BODLEY
Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA
Globalization can be understood as a cultural process in which peoples, cultures, natural resources, and
ecosystems from throughout the world are drawn into a single, vast, elite-directed network of production and
consumption. Such a network was certainly in place by 1600, but its human and cultural roots lie much deeper.
From a broad historical perspective, globalization is a scale phenomenon in which growth occurs in great waves
up to the limits set by particular cultural organizational structures, in particular social and natural environments.
When a growth threshold is reached, either some form of perhaps cyclical equilibrium is established, or a
breakthrough beyond the limit is achieved to a larger scale. Another cultural transformation must take place
before another growth wave can occur, and so on. Globalization is simply the most recent phase of a humanly
driven cultural process designed to increase the scale of culture. The principal outcome of this growth process is
greater concentration of social power. This growth process is fundamentally different from biological evolution,
which is concerned with species-level survival, and may not be directed toward a goal of greater organizational
scale and complexity.
THEORETICAL PRELUDE
Globalization resembles earlier cultural transformations,
but it has produced a profoundly different cultural world
because of the absolute quantities of people, energy ow,
and materials involved, and the distinctive cultural insti-
tutions that globalization requires. The historical evidence
suggests that beyond a certain minimum scale, cultural
growth naturally becomes an elite-directed process that
disproportionately benets the elite and shifts costs to the
majority. This makes growth a difcult process to sustain,
because elite decision-makers who enjoy increased bene-
ts, but are relatively unaffected by increased costs, have
little incentive to accept natural or cultural limits. As used
here, scale refers to the absolute size of population, eco-
nomic values, or any quantitative variable related to human
well-being. Culture scale refers to specic order of mag-
nitude differences in the size of social systems, and the
corresponding cultural features that support them. The the-
ory is that scale-increases occur as an elite-directed process
designed to disproportionately concentrate social power
under elite control. In this respect, big may not be bet-
ter for everyone, but small economies may be beautiful
as Schumacher (1973) has observed.
Scale theory, by emphasizing the role of human decision-
making and decision-makers, addresses the theoretical
shortcomings of orthodox cultural evolutionary theory, and
offers a more useful way to understand globalization.
Evolutionary, historical, or sociological explanations of
cultural development that take society as the unit that
adapts itself under the inuence of natural selection
are theoretically unsatisfactory, because such explanations
make the growth process appear both natural and inevitable.
These approaches also tend to ignore, or obscure, the
role of human decision-making agents, and the differential
distribution of the costs and benets of growth. Scale
theory takes individuals and households as the active,
decision-making units, and treats socially expressed culture,
ideology, technology, and institutions as the means, or
survival vehicles used by particular human agents to
achieve their objectives and improve their life chances .
This assumes that humans are primarily driven to survive
and reproduce, and to ensure that their children will be
able to do the same. In support of this primary biological
objective, individuals may have an innate, although variable
disposition to dominate and exploit others whenever
possible, and they will seek to minimize their own effort
by getting others to work for them. However, the existing
institutional structure of culture sets limits on competitive
striving by individual decision-makers.
Scale theory is theoretically related to the evolution-
ary materialism approach outlined by sociologist Stephen
Sanderson (1990, 1999), and the concept of dynamic mate-
rialism developed by economic historian Graeme Snooks
(1996, 1997, 1998). The common assumption of these
approaches is that globalization was not pre-ordained, is not
74 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
inevitable, and is perhaps not even an adaptive, or benecial
process for humanity as a whole, in contrast to the claims of
orthodox evolutionary theory, and many current advocates
of globalization. Robert Wright (2000) for example, claims
that globalization is the product of natural cooperation, not
competitive struggle.
It is inappropriate to apply a purely biological model of
evolution to cultural development because culture and cul-
tural information are transmitted much more easily than
genes. Culture change is an intentionally-directed pro-
cess, that occurs through purposeful invention, diffusion,
and/or imitation, rather than through random mutation and
natural selection. However, because human genes and
culture affect each other, it is more accurate to acknowl-
edge that human development is a co-evolutionary process
involving both culture and biology (Boyd and Richer-
son, 1985). Furthermore, civilizations do not reproduce
and multiply, rather, they have historically grown larger
and fewer. Carneiro (1978) and Naroll (1967) graphically
demonstrate the long-run decline in the number of poli-
ties in the world, and Taagepera (1978a,b, 1997) shows
how they have increased in territorial size. Civilizations
may appear to compete with other civilizations as systems,
but their human leaders are the actual competing units.
When evolutionary success is measured by either adapt-
ability or reproductive success, civilizations fare poorly as
evolving organisms , because their diversity, numbers, and
longevity decline over time. Culture itself was the key to
human adaptive success, but the growth of human cultural
systems has been curiously maladaptive for humanity as
a whole because it has reduced cultural diversity, made
patently less-sustainable cultures dominant, and actually
increased the absolute number of people living under sub-
optimum physical conditions.
GLOBALIZATION AND SCALE THEORY
If globalization is fundamentally a scale phenomenon, it is
important to consider the physical signicance of size. The
scale of human society and culture is important theoretically
because it is related to four crucial variables:
1. the level and distribution of household well-being,
standard of living, or human costs and benets;
2. the distribution of decision-making power;
3. the institutional complexity and technological organi-
zation of society;
4. the trajectory of growth and the dynamics of change.
Scale-increase is a disruptive, increasingly expensive
process that changes all of these variables, and disturbs
pre-existing equilibria. It is difcult to imagine why nat-
ural selection would ever favor growth in the scale of
society and culture in general, or the development of a
global-scale culture in particular. Size is a crucial variable
in nature, where large things are understandably rare. Small
animals can survive on fewer resources than large animals.
They reproduce more rapidly, recover more quickly, and
can adapt to change more easily than larger animals. This
may be the reason why bacteria are the most successful
organisms on earth and perhaps in the universe, consider-
ing total number of individuals, diversity of species, total
biomass, and overall adaptability as the measure of suc-
cess. Likewise, people living in small cultures can respond
more quickly to environmental changes, and can make deci-
sions more democratically than people in larger societies.
Energy-intensive communications and transportation tech-
nology make it possible for global-scale societies to respond
quickly to environmental crises, but bureaucracy and power
inequalities bias such response. Because of their relative
social equality, people in smaller societies are more able to
share the benets of their success. Scale itself may be the
most important variable, because basic human nature can
be assumed to be a constant.
The physical laws of gravity, and geometry mean that
growth is an allometric process, in which internal rela-
tionships change disproportionately. For example, surface
area increases geometrically by the square of length, and
volume and mass increase by the cube of length. These
principles also apply to cultural growth and development,
and especially to globalization. The most critical dispro-
portion for human societies is in the distribution of social
power and decision-making abilities. Social power naturally
becomes disproportionately concentrated in the elite as soci-
eties grow larger, unless specic cultural countermeasures
are applied by the majority. This helps explain why cultural
growth occurs, and calls attention to who directs change,
and who most benets from it.
Like biological organisms, the size and form of
human societies occur within relatively narrow ranges
determined by thresholds set by physical laws and the
functional limits of culture. The population of autonomous
small-scale, domestically organized prehistoric societies
averaged only 500 people, and typically ranged within
magnitudes of under a threshold of 10
3
(19 thousands),
although there were much larger tribal world systems.
Pre-modern politically-organized city-states, and agrarian
empires did not normally exceed population magnitudes
of 10
7
(1099 millions), also organized into agrarian
world systems. Commercial organization produced a global
economic world system that is unlikely to ever exceed a
magnitude of 10
10
(1099 billions).
Human settlements also display remarkable, mathe-
matically-predictable scale regularities. For example Roland
Fletcher (1995, 7181) found that settlement size appears
to be limited by the increasing difculty of interper-
sonal communication and the stress of interaction that
can only be overcome by organizational, technological,
or design changes. The interactions amongst people in
GLOBALIZATION IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE 75
a settlement increase exponentially as population grows,
such that a 10-fold increase in population would theoreti-
cally produce a 100-fold increase in potential interaction.
Domestically organized villages typically remain below a
threshold of 200500 persons.
The urbanization process, or the transformation of vil-
lages into cities, was the rst crucial step toward globaliza-
tion. Cities have always been at the center of sociocultural
transformation and economic growth. Urbanization began
when power-seeking elites successfully developed new
political and economic institutions to overcome the limits to
societal growth that maintained domestic-scale villages in
equilibrium. Fletcher (1995, 8290) concludes that the total
area of urban settlements, and the rate of urban growth are
limited primarily by the technology of interpersonal com-
munication. As cities grew larger, commercial exchange
became a virtual necessity, because political power can
only effectively command tribute payment within relatively
narrow limits. The earliest cities became possible, some
6000 years ago, with the development of bureaucratic polit-
ical organization, supported by writing, or its functional
equivalent. These cultural changes permitted a 100-fold
increase in the area of the earliest cities, above the area
of pre-literate, domestically organized villages, and a 1000-
fold increase in areal growth rate.
Andre Gunder Frank (1990, 1991) and Gills and Frank
(1991) argue that globalization is the culmination of a
growth process that began with the world system some
5000 years ago based on the earliest Mesopotamian city-
states. The rst cities of 2545 000 people required lengthy
and expensive exchange networks, and imply the existence
of at least a regional world trade system for their mate-
rial support. Five thousand years of continuous growth
in this world system required massive transformations in
cultural organization and technology. Cities of 100 000 peo-
ple or more, which appeared by perhaps 500 BC, required
monetary systems, and the large-scale commercialization
of food systems which ultimately prepared the way for
the capitalism world system. During the 4000 years up to
1500 AD, the number of such large cities in the world
steadily increased from perhaps 8 in 2000 BC to 75 by
1500 AD. Their average population size increased from
30 000 to 100 000 people, with the largest over 500 000.
By 1500 AD the total number of people living in such
cities may have exceeded 7 million people (Chandler, 1987;
Sanderson, 1999, 112; Wilkinson, 1992, 1993), and would
have required the vast exchange system that became the
modern global-scale world system. This new world econ-
omy initially grew out of a European foundation between
1450 and 1640, and became a truly global-scale world
system by 1815 (Wallerstein, 1974). Globalization is an
urban-centered phenomenon. Since approximately 1850,
the development of fossil fuels, railroads, electronic com-
munication, mechanized printing, and the emergence of
large-scale corporate businesses permitted a 100-fold scale
increase in the size of cities beyond the previous threshold
of 100 km
2
and 10 million people, and a 1000-fold increase
in urban growth rates.
THE DYNAMICS OF CULTURE SCALE
During the past million years proto-humans and humans
have experienced eight great transformative waves of cul-
tural development (Table 1), each producing societies of
successively larger scale, and a larger global population.
In this development process, the dynamics of culture
change itself changed, becoming more rapid, and more
narrowly directed. Globalization is only the most recent
such transformation. The rst transformation may have
been completed 100 000 years ago. This coincided with
the appearance of physically modern humans, and fully
human culture based on shared, socially-transmitted, sym-
bolic information, and speech. The second transformation
beginning perhaps as early as 50 000 years ago saw the
development of highly efcient foraging technology which
allowed people to occupy virtually the entire globe. Growth
to the limits of efcient foraging produced an equilibrium
world of perhaps 10 million people, with leadership widely
dispersed. The third transformation was the change from
mobile to settled village life based on domesticated plants
and animals during the Neolithic, which began at the end of
the Pleistocene 1015 000 years ago. The Neolithic wave
produced a world of tribal villagers with perhaps 85 million
people.
Cultures can be grouped into three broad-scale types
according to whether social power is organized domesti-
cally, politically, or commercially. Social power is the way
individuals and households secure the material, social, and
cultural resources that they need to maintain themselves and
successfully reproduce. It is assumed that everyone is natu-
rally driven to seek social power, although the specic form
that power may take is an important cultural variable. When
social power was domestically organized, all households
Table 1 Great cultural transformations
Domestic scale cultures
Hominoids Humans, 100000 BP
Humans Forager cultures, 50000 BP (speech, art)
Foragers Village farmers, 10000 BP (domestication)
Political scale cultures
Villages Chiefdoms, 8000 BP
Chiefdoms Agrarian civilizations, 6000 BP
(urbanization)
Commercial scale cultures
Agrarian civilizations mercantile capitalism, 1450 AD
Mercantile capitalism industrial capitalism, 1800 AD
Industrial capitalism nancial capitalism, 1900 AD
76 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
had relatively equal access to crucial resources, and there
was no incentive for growth in either the scale of society or
economic productivity. Domestic cultures displayed demo-
graphic equilibria in general balances with their resources
that could be measured in millennia. However, they were
not totally static. It is a striking fact that most impor-
tant domestic technologies including weaving, ceramics,
and domestication were produced in domestically organized
societies, and the benets were universally distributed.
An important cultural organization and scale line was
crossed some 8000 years ago, when the rst aspiring power
elites succeeded in transforming the characteristically weak,
temporary, and informal village headman position into the
coercive political of ce of chief that could be transmitted
cross-generationally within a ranked descent line system.
In this politicization process, village chiefs were then able
to extend political power over more than a single village,
producing simple, and then larger, and more complex chief-
doms that encompassed thousands of people. As soon as it
became possible for individuals to consolidate their power
gains, and transmit them to their children, the move up
the scale to city-states, kingdoms, and agrarian empires
occurred relatively quickly. The key difference between
this kind of elite-directed transformation, and the previ-
ous domestically directed developments, is that the bene ts
and costs were not equally shared. In this respect the
politicization process is not fundamentally different from
the contemporary commercial globalization process. Under
politicization, elites assume life or death power over com-
moners, and extract surplus energy from them, treating
them much like domesticated animals. Elites enjoy superior
life chances, because they control vast material surpluses
and can insulate themselves from natural shortages. Elites
live in larger, more secure residences, and they surround
themselves with domestic servants, and multiple wives and
concubines. The scale of elite power corresponds directly
with the scale of society, thus producing a natural incen-
tive for elites to promote further growth. Commoners must
feed themselves, pay taxes, ght wars, suffer famines, and
become human sacri ces, either in temples, royal tombs, or
on battle elds. Elite-directed cultural developments such
as urbanization, intensive agriculture, monumental archi-
tecture, monotheism, writing, and military technology are
designed to support political power and exclude non-elites.
How this great political transformation occurred cannot
be fully explained, but power-seeking individuals had to
overcome the limits that the majority placed on their lead-
ers. It is likely that this occurred when the majority was
forced to choose among the lesser of evils under crisis
conditions. One of the paradoxes of large-scale, politically-
organized societies is that they are conspicuously unstable.
Social inequality and continuous expansion are dif cult
and costly to sustain using political power. Ancient agrar-
ian civilizations displayed a persistent pattern of growth
and collapse, with a long-term trend toward increasing
total area, population, and urbanization. Equilibrium was an
exception, and few civilizations lasted more than 130 years,
and only rarely did they exceed 300 years (Taagpera, 1997).
The threshold for politically-organized empires was proba-
bly reached by the British Empire which brie y controlled
one-quarter of the world s population and land area. Growth
beyond that level called for a different form of organization,
and this requirement was met by an expansion of commer-
cial enterprises.
THE CAPITALIST ROOTS OF GLOBALIZATION
Globalization is a cultural process in which economic
elites use commercial exchanges to create a supra-national,
global-scale social system, a world-economy , that oper-
ates without a single centralized political power. As Waller-
stein (1974) observes, an economically-based world system
makes possible a much larger, more ef cient, and appar-
ently more resilient system than could be integrated into a
world-empire by political power alone. Globalization was
created by the great cultural transformation that accom-
panied the rise of capitalism in Europe. Thus, capital-
ism itself is the key to understanding globalization. There
have been many formal de nitions of capitalism, but its
most critical feature is that it supports the rise to dom-
inant decision-making power of commercial elites, who
are able to concentrate social power by co-opting, and
at times even directing the politicization process in order
to promote their commercial projects. Capital is social
power, whether in the form of nance capital, xed capi-
tal in buildings, equipment, and inventory, or land. Capi-
tal accumulation, rather than consumption, is the primary
objective of a capitalist economy. Under capitalism, the
commercial elite is dominant, but political rulers may some-
times also take a direct entrepreneurial role. Rulers sup-
port and defend commercial activities, they supply crucial
infrastructure, and help to maintain and develop human
capital by supporting public education, health, and wel-
fare. The capitalist commercial elites are politically free
to develop new institutions and organizational forms that
allow them to accumulate capital by commercial business
enterprises.
The minimal formal elements of capitalism include
developed markets for land, labor, and money. In classical
Marxist terms, capitalism can be readily de ned as an eco-
nomic system in which money is primarily exchanged for
commodities, which are in turn exchanged for more money.
This is production for commercial exchange, rather than for
domestic consumption, or use value. The dominant purpose
of exchange is to obtain a monetary pro t. The social struc-
ture of capitalism is distinctly unequal. Adam Smith (1776)
described this inequality as specialization, or a division
of labor between landlords, manufacturers, and laborers,
GLOBALIZATION IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE 77
arguing that laborers naturally needed masters. When
viewed as a total economy (Snooks, 1994), a national
capitalist economy has three sectors, with a household econ-
omy at the center, which produces, maintains, and allocates
labor, and receives wages, salaries, interest, and goods and
services from the private commercial sector and from the
public, or political sector. The national economy is not a
closed system, but gives and receives economic ows to and
from other national economies. The basic organizational
elements of capitalism include a world-economy with a
geographic and hierarchical functional division of labor,
and with strong national states at the core. The global hier-
archy is expressed as an unequal international distribution
of costs and benets in which the holders of capital are
rewarded more generously than those who have only their
labor to exchange. Maldistribution of power thus seems
to be an intrinsic feature of this system, especially in the
absence of a strong world-empire government.
A long-running intellectual debate over the origins of
capitalism and globalization concerns the relative impor-
tance of ideological factors versus material conditions.
Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (1996) places capitalism
within a broader European cosmology that views people as
naturally evil and selsh. From this perspective, economic
scarcity is also a natural and perpetual human condition,
and it is a given that societies are controlled by hierar-
chical power structures and coercive governments. These
ideas are sustained by the salutary beliefs that everyone will
benet from economic growth driven by free market capi-
talism. These fundamental beliefs also explain the quest for
increased social power and technological progress, which
are thought to be natural and inevitable.
Many anthropologists are cultural materialists, arguing
that economic practices are primarily determined by mate-
rial conditions. However they acknowledge that cultural
ideas, or beliefs, are an important part of human motivation.
The beliefs underlying capitalism can be treated as the ideo-
logical causes of globalization, because they rationalize the
cultural transformations that produces globalization. From
a materialist and a scale perspective, elite power-seeking
is the primary motivation for globalization. However, the
opportunities for power-seeking are limited by both envi-
ronmental and cultural conditions as shaped by historical
circumstance. Diverse belief systems can be mobilized to
rationalize many different power-seeking strategies, and in
that respect must be considered secondary to the personal
motivation of power-seeking. To some extent, globalization
was a consumer-driven process, but consumer demand is
highly constrained by the cultural organization of power,
political economy, and political ecology. Globalization was
also not just a product of the market economy or moneti-
zation, because for millennia organized markets and money
have linked villages, towns, and cities in all the major
civilizations. However, local markets have primarily traded
in domestic staples, and beneted society as a whole. It
was long-distance trade in luxury goods for the elite that
made it possible for merchants to take advantage of prot-
producing price differentials and offered the initial step
toward globalization.
THE EUROPEAN ORIGINS OF
GLOBALIZATION
In order to explain the origins of the modern capitalist
world, social scientists at rst focused on European sci-
ence, exploration, and technology. Initially, they considered
the Industrial Revolution to be the principal architect of
material progress. However, 20th century historians demon-
strated that capitalism preceded industrialization by cen-
turies, and they argued that the long-term process of capital
accumulation gradually produced widespread improvement
in human welfare. For example, Snooks (1993, 4) ecstat-
ically proclaimed that industrial growth since 1750,
massively shifted the distribution of income in favor of the
lower socioeconomic classes . At the same time many post-
modern anthropologists argued that the commodities that
were at the heart of globalization could be understood by
their culturally unique symbolic meanings for individual
consumers, and their use in the construction of individ-
ual self-identity (McCracken, 1988; Miller, 1987). Some
even described commercialization as a democratic process
in which markets, commodities, consumption patterns, and
their cultural meanings came to be mutually constructed
by marketers and consumers. Like earlier theories of cul-
tural evolution, these postmodern interpretive approaches
make capitalism and globalization seem both natural and
inevitable, and avoid crucial issues of the distribution of
material benets and social power.
The capitalist global system was developed by merchants
and investors centered successively in Venice, Antwerp,
Genoa, Amsterdam, London, and New York. A growing
number of elites in these urban trade centers enjoyed ever-
higher living standards and consumption levels, whereas
wageworkers, serfs, or slaves gained little control over
the conditions of daily life. Many Europeans did experi-
ence some improvements over the depressed living con-
ditions and chronic insecurity they had experienced under
feudalism.
The economic elites who created the modern world
system were responding to a historically unique set of
circumstances. The crisis of feudalism from 12301400
that peaked in 1350 was the immediate precursor of the
push for European commercial expansion overseas. This
prolonged crisis was an unfortunate conjunction of bad
weather, and overpopulation produced by gross inequality
and over-consumption by the nobility. This situation cre-
ated a century of hyperination, peasant rebellions, wars
between the nobility, famine, and disease. The nobility
78 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
raised rents to stay ahead of ination, but the less fortunate
majority saw their absolute wages decline. The political
and economic turmoil made it advantageous for the mer-
chant and political elite, who were the only people capable
of strategic economic planning, to turn to more capital-
intensive technology, seek foreign resources, and invest
in mercantile capitalism. Furthermore, the existence of
autonomous market towns under the politically decentral-
ized European feudal system created an obvious opening
for enterprising merchants to expand their power (Sander-
son, 1999). Economic crises spurred the growth of nancial
capital because it forced governments to borrow from pri-
vate lenders. Another round of ination and turmoil from
14701610 corresponded with the beginnings of long-
distance overseas expansion, which was followed quickly
by the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694, and
the London stock exchange in 1697.
Historian Fernand Braudel (1977) argued that successful
commercial families were able to manipulate political and
economic power within very hierarchical, but not totally
closed European societies. A key element in their success
was that they managed to transmit and accumulate their
economic power across generations. Capital accumulation
by a few households in an intensely competitive cultural
environment confers a decisive advantage to the success-
ful, as Snooks (1998) has observed. Accumulation would
not be advantageous in a culture that distributed resources
equitably. The fact that the European population had recov-
ered from the 14th century devastation of plague and war
by 1650, and began a long upward curve of exponential
growth by 1800, suggests that most people were gaining
some material benets from capitalism and globalization.
Many ordinary households intensied their labor, produc-
ing more for the market, and engaging in wage labor as
opportunities arose in the expanding cities. In this respect
Europeans of all social strata participated in globalization,
and beneted from it to some degree. However, very few
were able to accumulate investment capital and secure eco-
nomic independence.
Some historians suggest that a consumer revolution or
a democratization of consumption began in England and
America as early the 18th century, and regard this as the
rst appearance of mass consumption (McKendrick et al.,
1982). Such an outcome would be evidence for a widely
shared benet of globalization. However, even long after
the beginning of globalization, living standards remained
extremely inequitably distributed, and the benets of higher
consumption levels spread very slowly. Consumption by
the relatively powerless poor in the vast lower class was
limited to the necessities of food and domestic durables.
The shopkeepers, merchants, and professionals in the small
middle class, could afford the comforts and decencies
of house, groceries, bedding and tableware. The costly
luxuries of the leisured lifestyle were reserved for the
handful of households in the upper gentry and aristocracy,
who engaged actively in competitive emulation. As the
global trade network of mercantile capitalism developed,
newly imported commodities were generally consumed rst
as luxuries by those in the highest social ranks, and were
then very gradually diffused to the lower classes. By the
1680s, English merchants were importing different colors
and qualities of cloth to appeal to specic social ranks,
and giving out free samples to the nobility, hoping to
both promote and prot from competitive emulation. The
earliest imported consumer goods to become objects of
mass consumption in England were pepper and dried fruit
by 1559, tobacco by 1650, sugar by 1690, and tea by
1730 (Shammas, 1990, 1993). Wills (1992) stresses that
new consumer markets did not just happen. They were
created by intense competition between rival international
trade monopolies.
Theodore Rabb (1967) provides an excellent picture of
the initiators and prime beneciaries of globalization who
were centered in London between 1575 and 1630. In a
given year, probably only 2500 individual investors owned
the 33 joint-stock companies that actually funded and
directed Englands mercantile-capitalism overseas expan-
sion and thereby transformed the world. These economic
elites represented no more than 0.25% of all households
in the kingdom of some 5 million people. Three quarters
of these investors were wealthy merchants who picked the
only route open to them for material advancement, given
their non-aristocratic social position. Only one quarter of
the investors were drawn from the hereditary landed aris-
tocracy, who represented the top 2% of the social hierarchy.
Historian Lawrence Stone (1965, 1973) shows that the
aristocrats were diversifying their investments in order to
maintain their privileged social status which was threatened
by the unsettled conditions accompanying the collapse of
feudalism.
European economic growth was certainly boosted by the
10-fold increase in the existing stock of gold and silver
represented by imports to Europe between 1500 and 1680.
The degree to which bullion was narrowly controlled is a
truly astounding reection of the elite domination of the
emerging global system as a whole. At this time, the Span-
ish hub of the New World silver trade was in Mexico city,
where in an average year a mere 44 large investors han-
dled more than 60% of total cargo value in trans-Atlantic
commerce (Hoberman, 1991). The largest English devel-
opment enterprise of the era, after privateering, was the
British East India Company, which was founded in 1600.
The East India Company proved to be an excellent invest-
ment. Seven of its trading expeditions conducted from
16011612 produced an average annual income of 132 for
each investor. In England at that time 98% of households
lived on less than 120 a year. Of course many of the larger
investors owned shares in several different companies, and
GLOBALIZATION IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE 79
also received rents and other income. According to Gregory
Kings (1936) careful estimates, by 1688 some 2000 large
merchant traders were earning 400 a year, putting them
economically almost equal with knights and esquires in the
gentry class (King, 1936). Exploitation of low wage work-
ers, slavery, trade monopolies, and privateering produced
very high rates of returns on investments, but the very high-
est returns were enjoyed by aristocrats at the highest level
of government who supplemented their investments with
royal favors, bribes, and abuse of public ofce (Stone, 1973,
315). A few very high incomes undoubtedly accounted for
much of the economic growth during this period, and not
all was invested in further growth. Between 1600 and 1688
the total wealth of England more than tripled, and much of
the new wealth nanced a frenzy of luxury building and
consumption by the elite.
AGRARIAN TRANSFORMATION AND
LONDON POVERTY, AD 15001700
The initial development of the modern world economic
system is mirrored in the transformation of the English
agrarian system between 1500 and 1700 AD This trans-
formation was carried out simultaneously with overseas
expansion, and was directed and nanced by many of the
same few individual investors. The commercialization of
grain removed a feudally-organized agrarian food system
in which a land-owning aristocracy extracted surplus grain
from a peasantry that was largely self-provisioning. At least
15 regional grain markets had emerged by 1500, and some
800 small towns grew up around local marketplaces. Sim-
ilar conditions and transport factors meant that grain could
be sold at the same price in each distinct market region
(Gras, 1915). Even though local farmers could sell in any
market town, the regional markets remained relatively iso-
lated. Few specialist merchants were able to take advantage
of price differentials in different markets. Local municipal
authorities imposed numerous regulations on grain han-
dling and marketing, all apparently designed to protect the
consumer from price manipulations, poor quality, or dis-
honest measures. Middlemen grain traders, or wholesalers
were regarded with suspicion, and widely assumed to be
disreputable.
The city of Londons population grew 10-fold between
1500 and 1700, as the city became the center of the expand-
ing global economy. This order of magnitude population
growth soon overwhelmed Britains medieval system of
local and regional grain distribution. In 1250 London drew
on a local grain market within a radius of 40 km, but by
1500 the city had grown to some 50 000 people, and the
local market proved totally inadequate. London needed a
much larger distribution system that could draw from all
over England. In response, the volume of coastal grain
shipments increased 10-fold between 1580 and 1680, and
a single national market emerged. After 1500 imported
grain became increasingly important in the London mar-
ket. Previously, the foreign grain trade was handled by
foreign merchants, and largely in response to famines.
The grain supply was so problematic that from 1514 to
1678 Londons municipal authorities bought and sold grain,
established public granaries, and urged the guilds to buy
and store grain for resale to consumers at reasonable prices
during shortages. By 1700, London grain merchants were
trading with Scandinavia, central Europe, Holland, Spain,
the Caribbean, New England, Virginia, and Canada. As
scale theory would predict, the new global food market dis-
proportionately beneted a few very large merchants. Just
four merchants handled half of Londons wheat export busi-
ness during three trading seasons between 1676 and 1683
(Gras, 1915, 197).
Londons population reached a phenomenal 700 000 peo-
ple in 1700, and the most devastating plagues and famines
seemed to be over. Most of the national population was no
longer in control of their food distribution system, and with
the large land-holders fencing off the open elds that the
peasants had used for subsistence, and converting them to
pastoral use, most rural households were also losing control
over food production. Most foodstuffs, including grains,
had become commodities that everyone had to purchase
with cash. Englands national grain market was absorbed
into a single global market. One could of course argue
that the subsistence-level peasants ultimately beneted from
these changes in the food system. However, no one should
be forced to choose between rural, subsistence-level servi-
tude, and urban poverty and wage-servitude. By the late
19th century conditions had clearly worsened for the major-
ity. The New Domesday Book shows that 75% of the
rural land in England and Wales in 1875 was held by just
14 000 large landholders, who represented a mere 0.28% of
all households in a population now grown to 25 million
people (Bateman, 1883). This was not an improvement
over feudalism. 95% of households were left with less than
0.5% of all privately owned land. At the same time Charles
Booth (18921903) found that 1.2 million people, more
than 30% of Londons population, were living in poverty
as dened by inadequate income and crowded housing con-
ditions. The 18 000 wealthy, upper class people represented
the top 0.5%. These data suggest that the previous four cen-
turies of economic progress increased the absolute number
of poor in England, and left most people with less control
over the conditions of their daily life.
INDUSTRIALIZATION AND URBANIZATION
IN AMERICA, 17902000
Between 1790 and 1990 the American population increased
65-fold, and national income expanded an incredible 1000-
fold. Even though America was widely perceived of as
80 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
a land of opportunity, the actual distribution of income
and wealth changed little and remained very inequitable
throughout this period. Vast areas of Native American
land were opened for settlement, but much of this land
was difcult and expensive to develop, or it was con-
trolled by land speculators. Economic growth did produce
a large middle class, but the absolute number of very
poor also increased, whereas the elite became inconceivably
powerful. The primary cultural changes from mercantile
capitalism to industrial and nancial capitalism that drove
Americas economic growth were reected in changes in
the agrarian system, much as in the earlier transition from
feudalism to mercantile capitalism. In 1790 America was
a rural nation in which 95% of the population lived on
small, self-provisioning farms that produced limited mar-
ketable surpluses. By 1990 America was 75% urban, and
agriculture was large-scale, capital-intensive, industrialized,
and fully commercialized. This elite-directed cultural trans-
formation was largely carried out within the space of four
decades between 1850 and 1890, and clearly disadvantaged
small-scale agricultural producers (Berry, 1977).
Americas transformation required a series of massive
changes in transportation, communication, production, dis-
tribution, and in the organization of business enterprise
itself, that collectively expanded the speed and scale of
commercial transactions (Chandler, 1977). The most impor-
tant change was the creation of bureaucratically-organized,
corporate businesses, that combined multi-unit enterprises
and could amass capital and grow to a scale never before
possible. Remarkably, few people actually nanced and
directed these changes. Historian Peter Hall (1973) argues
that Americas great national expansion was initiated in the
1850s by a tiny group of some 200 Boston families. These
families were each worth at least $100 000 in 1848, owned
37% of the personal property in the city, and were the
major shareholders in Bostons 50 largest banks and insur-
ance companies (Pessen, 1973). At that time, Boston was
a city of 137 000 people, much like London in 1580, and
was the banking center for the entire country. The Boston
elite accumulated trans-generational family fortunes from a
mercantile base by investing prudently, marrying carefully,
and forming dynastic trusts (Friedman, 1964; Marcus, 1992,
6070; Farrell, 1993). According to Hall, these wealthy
New Englanders nanced the rst great American business
corporations, and used their philanthropy to create the elite
private foundations and colleges, such as Harvard and Yale,
that trained the professionals who then built the institutional
and ideological infrastructure for a commercially focused,
elite-directed American nation.
As America grew, the number of millionaire investors
centered in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia expanded
from an estimated 40 in 1860, to 2500 in 1870, and
3800 in 1897 (Soltow, 1975, 112113; Beard and Beard,
1934, 383384). At the same time more than half of
the adult male population remained landless, in spite of
the Homestead Act of 1862 and the westward expansion
movement. By 1900 there were perhaps 1500 industrial
corporations with capital assets of $1 million or more,
directed by some 18 500 corporate board members and
major stockholders (Roy, 1983). Collectively these 22 000
nanciers and corporate directors formed an economic elite
that represented less than 0.15% of American households in
a nation of 76 million people. Their decisions to expand the
scale and scope of commerce had transformed the nation
and the world by the end of the 19th century.
After 1900 small farmers were steadily marginalized
by the technological changes promoted by the land grant
colleges, the Department of Agriculture, and the Exten-
sion Service which promoted the interests of the largest
agricultural producers, in response to corporate interests
(McConnell, 1953; Domhoff, 1996). These new institu-
tional structures in combination with the railroads, nan-
ciers, farm machinery manufacturers, the petroleum and
chemical industries, and mass-merchandisers account for
the rapid dominance of the large-scale factory farm system.
By 1987 the 100 largest corporate farms accounted for more
than 10% of all agricultural production (Krebs, 1992, 28)
and by 1992 14% of total farms accounted for 45% of all
farm product sales (US Department of Commerce, 1996).
This is the top-heavy agricultural model that was later pro-
moted overseas as the Green Revolution, where it had the
same marginalizing effect on small farmers.
By the 1920s New York City had become the center
of the evolving modern world system. Europes immi-
grant poor crowded into the slums of New York, where by
1900 some 2.3 million people, 70% of New Yorks pop-
ulation, were jammed into unsanitary tenements (DeFor-
est and Veiller, 1903). Americas commercial-elite had
already accumulated the worlds greatest concentration of
economic power under the control of a few wealthy fami-
lies, giant industrial corporations, and nancial institutions.
Many New York families, nanciers, and corporate direc-
tors and their descendants played a leading role in creating
the national and international institutional structures that
produced a vast increase in the scale of the global econ-
omy. For example, John D Rockefellers personal fortune
of $200 million gave him enormous inuence. However,
nancier J P Morgans effective power was much greater.
By 1912 Morgan exerted direct or indirect control over
every sector of the national economy, with directorships
or controlling interests in 34 large nancial institutions, 10
insurance companies, 32 transportation systems, 12 public
utilities, and 135 other corporations, with combined assets
of $45 billion (Brandeis, 1914). In 1994, one individual
directed ve giant corporations with combined capital assets
of $549 billion, and ten people directed 37 companies with
combined assets of $2 trillion, representing nearly 10% of
all corporate assets in the country (Bodley, 2000). In 1998
GLOBALIZATION IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE 81
there were three executives who each controlled nancial
assets of more than a trillion dollars in the three largest
Wall Street investment rms (Califano, 1998).
TRIBAL VICTIMS OF GLOBALIZATION,
14502000
The globalization process included several phases of colo-
nialism in which peripheral and external areas were
incorporated into the expanding world system. Millions
died during the initial mercantile-capitalist phase from
14501800 when many of the worlds great agrarian civi-
lizations were brought under European domination. During
the following industrial phase from 18001900, much of
the rest of the world was added to the periphery of the world
system. Europeans settled in the most favorable areas, and
turned other peripheral areas into sources of raw materials
and labor. However, dispersed colonies proved too costly
and difcult to administer, and external colonialism came
to a formal end in most of the world shortly after 1950.
Internal colonial conquest continued throughout the 20th
century until virtually all of the most isolated autonomous
domestic-scale peoples and cultures were incorporated in
the world system.
At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, Japan
had completed its independent transition to capitalism, but
ancient civilizations still existed in China and Africa, and
there were numerous traditional kingdoms and/or chiefdoms
in India, the Middle East, and the Pacic. The great Western
colonial powers claimed 55% of the worlds land area, but
exercised effective political control over only a third of
the world (Clark, 1936, 5). Perhaps 200 million indigenous
people, roughly 20% of the global population, still lived
in autonomous and largely self-sufcient domestic-scale,
tribal cultures, and still effectively controlled approximately
half the world. Over the 150 years between 1800 and
1950 virtually all of this territory was conquered and
incorporated into the world system in a process of internal
colonialism in which as many as 50 million indigenous
people may have died (Bodley, 1999a). Natural resources
and labor owed into the world system from these formerly
external indigenously controlled territories. This nal
conquest produced a fully global modern world system, but
at an enormous cost in ethnocide, genocide, and ecocide
suffered by the peoples and territories that were forcibly
incorporated.
The conquest and incorporation of indigenous people and
territory not only destroyed the economic autonomy and
political independence of millions of indigenous peoples, it
also had a devastating demographic impact. Demographic
disruption often initially took the form of drastic depopula-
tion, when people were enslaved and killed by invaders,
and when they died from newly introduced diseases to
which they had little immunity. Many cultural groups that
relied on fertility-limiting cultural practices to maintain
low population densities were quickly exterminated by sud-
den increases in mortality. Many indigenous peoples died
as a direct result of violence perpetrated by outsiders.
Many governments organized military campaigns against
tribes, and a few deliberately pursued genocidal policies
in an effort to totally exterminate certain tribal groups.
The largest loss of life probably resulted from the actions
of individual colonists who acted on their own before
governments established formal political control. Colonial
governments sometimes intentionally left certain regions as
uncontrolled frontiers, where their citizens were allowed to
systematically kill and exploit tribal peoples. In areas where
tribal people were not needed as labor, they were sometimes
classied as non-human , and were killed with impunity.
As early as 1837, under pressure from humanitarians, the
British government ofcially acknowledged the human cost
of colonialism in a lengthy Imperial Blue Book on aborig-
ines (House of Commons, 1837), but the imperialism went
unchallenged.
As soon as indigenous peoples lost control over their ter-
ritories and subsistence resources, it often became impossi-
ble for them to remain economically self-sufcient. Depop-
ulation also reduced the economic viability of tribal groups,
but competition with colonists over resources, especially
when the tribal land base was reduced by government
decree, was often the decisive factor compelling native
peoples to participate in the market economy, whether as
wage laborers or cash croppers. There was also a desire to
secure manufactured goods, such as metal tools and fac-
tory clothing. However, the desire for trade goods was
usually not sufcient to force tribals into full-time, per-
manent participation in the market economy. As long as
indigenous groups retained a viable subsistence economy,
they were often poorly motivated target workers, and colo-
nial administrators used special taxes and laws to force
them into the market economy. Involvement in the mar-
ket economy became a self-reinforcing cycle, because wage
labor disrupted traditional subsistence activities, and cash-
cropping depleted natural resources making self-sufciency
even more difcult. The problem for most indigenous peo-
ple was that they were forced into the global system at the
very lowest level, without the economic resources to oper-
ate effectively in a capitalist world, and without the political
power to protect their interests. Where reservations were
set up for conquered indigenous peoples, or treaties were
negotiated, as in the United States, lands that were origi-
nally communally held were often converted to individual
ownership and acquired by outsiders. Reserves were often
too small to support people, or valuable minerals rights
were controlled by the state. In the last quarter of the 20th
century, beginning in Australia, many indigenous groups
formed political organizations and successfully regained
more effective control over many of their territories. The
82 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
struggle for land rights and economic independence has
been the central issue for indigenous organizations.
RICH AND POOR IN THE GLOBAL SYSTEM,
19502000
The global-scale world system that was already in place by
the beginning of the 20th century has gone through a fur-
ther organizational transformation since the global crisis of
war and depression from 1929 1945. This transformation
involved the construction of an elite-designed framework
of international governmental institutions that included the
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development
(the World Bank) and the International Monetary Fund
(IMF), both products of the United Nations Monetary and
Financial Conference held at Bretton Woods, New Hamp-
shire in 1944, the United Nations (UN, 1945) organization
itself, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(GATT, 1947), and the GATT s successor, the World Trade
Organization (WTO, 1995) (see GATT (General Agree-
ment on Tariffs and Trade), Volume 4; WTO (World
Trade Organization), Volume 4). According to the pream-
ble of the UN Charter, these new institutions were utopian
visions designed to save succeeding generations from the
scourge of war and for the promotion of the economic
and social advancement of all peoples . The outcome of this
transformation was a world system dominated by nance
capital. By the end of the 20th century, money and the
exchange of nancial instruments became more important
than the movement and production of physical goods and
services (Barnet and Cavanagh, 1994).
The modern world system is not a self-organized system
operating under the invisible hand of a global free market;
it changes in response to pressures from speci c interest
groups with unequal power. Governments continue to exer-
cise sovereign rights over territories and are the primary
agents in international political society, but as we have seen,
a centralized global government would be too costly to be
effective. Various non-governmental organizations (NGOs)
have become new actors in an emerging transnational civil
society. New institutions are being designed by the interac-
tion of NGOs and governments to deal with a multitude of
speci c global issues (Young, 1997). The great transforma-
tion from industrial to nancial capital made commercial
elites more in uential than political rulers. Those who ben-
e ted the most from the global ow of nance capital at
the end of the 20th century were an estimated six mil-
lion individuals who each possessed investable assets of
more than a million dollars. In 1997 the world s multi-
millionaires collectively controlled $17.4 trillion (Gemini
Consulting 1998), which was more than half of global gross
domestic product (GDP), yet they constituted less than
0.1% of global population. The world is now directed by
economic decision-makers who are guided by the utopian
ideals of laissez-faire capitalism that call for aggressive
reductions in the regulatory power of governments, the
removal of all trade barriers, and global management by
negotiations among private, self-selected interest groups
with very unequal power. These changes are designed to
further accelerate global economic growth, on the assump-
tion that growth will bene t everyone (the trickle-down
theory). Unfortunately, in spite of the utopian objectives
of the UN, the problems of scale and power increased after
1945. Although wealth continued to accumulate in the core
of the world system, by the end of the 20th century much
of the world was more impoverished and the global system
was less sustainable than ever before.
Accurate assessment of human welfare during the post-
war period is impossible because there are no accurate
gures for worldwide wealth and income distribution. How-
ever, the World Bank estimated in 1990 that more than
1 billion people were living in absolute poverty with per
capita incomes of under $370 dollars. Three billion peo-
ple lived in the 45 low income countries, with per capita
incomes under $660. The average infant mortality rate in
these poor countries was 8-fold greater than in the 24 high
income countries where 812 million people lived. Rais-
ing the poverty line, and allowing for lognormal income
inequality within each country suggests that in 1965 there
were 2.8 billion (85%) poor and 50 million (1%) rich in
the world (Bodley, 1999b, 2000). By 1997 there were more
than 4 billion (70%) poor people, and 310 million (5%)
rich people. Thus, economic growth reduced the propor-
tion who were poor, and slightly increased the proportion
who were rich. However, the absolute number of poor
increased dramatically, far outpacing the absolute increase
in the rich. This suggests that if we accept this global
standard of economic well-being, growth since 1965 impov-
erished far more people than it enriched.
This ampli cation of poverty during the 20th century
duplicates the similar impoverishment process during the
earlier transition from feudalism to mercantile capitalism,
and again during the transition from mercantile to industrial
capitalism in Europe and America. Both of these great tran-
sitions did little to change the pre-existing base of social
inequality, but because of scale effects, they also produced
tremendous increases in wealth and power at the top of
the social hierarchy. At the same time, given high lev-
els of inequality, even small improvements in the material
level for people at the bottom of the hierarchy, in combina-
tion with new economic conditions, created new incentives
for people to produce larger families. These changes cre-
ated an unprecedented era of population growth. However,
inequality, not population growth, was the primary cause
of poverty. Amartya Sen (1981) pointed out that people
died in modern famines not because of food shortages, but
because inequality denied them access to income and pro-
ductive resources.
GLOBALIZATION IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE 83
One of the guiding justications for the globalization of
capital-intensive agriculture was that it was the only way
to feed the world. However, malnutrition has proven to be
an intractable social problem, rather than a technological
problem. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the
UN (FAO, 1999) concluded that there were more hun-
gry people in the world in 1997 (830 million) than the
entire population of the world (720 million) in 1750! Many
under-nourished people were marginalized by more com-
petitive capital-intensive enterprises, or by degraded envi-
ronments. The chaotic transition from state socialism to new
forms of capitalism in Eastern Europe produced 26 million
undernourished people by 1997. When the concept of mal-
nutrition was broadened to include vitamin and mineral
deciency, and over-consumption, as well as calorie and
protein deciency, it was estimated that three billion people,
half of the worlds population, were malnourished by the
year 2000 (Gardner and Halweil, 2000). This is equal to the
entire population of the world in 1960! Forty years of eco-
nomic growth may have actually magnied malnutrition.
The power-concentrating effects of economic growth can
be illustrated in Washington State, in the Pacic North-
west of the United States, where between 1960 and 1995
both population and per capita personal income doubled (in
constant dollars). Washington beneted enormously from
global trade in aircraft, information technology, and agri-
cultural commodities, but these benets were very narrowly
distributed and economic power became highly concen-
trated. A close look at the distribution of property own-
ership showed that as individual urban places grew larger,
home ownership rates declined, and the holdings of the
largest property owners steadily increased (Bodley, 1999b).
Villages with populations under 2500 people displayed the
most equitable distribution of property assets and busi-
ness revenues. Corporate business and remotely owned
businesses became increasingly important in larger urban
places, and larger businesses captured a progressively dis-
proportionate share of total sales volumes. In cities with
populations of 100 000 or more, the top 3% of businesses
received more than 80% of business revenues. As wealth
became more concentrated, the elite created exclusive urban
places, where ultra high property values formed barriers
against non-elites. By 1998 individual social power was
becoming grotesquely distorted by the phenomenal growth
in global information technology corporations. The collec-
tive net worth of Washingtons billionaires was already
nearly twice the value of all deposits in all the com-
mercial banks in the state. Measuring their income as
increase in net worth, in 1998 the income of Washing-
ton States 11 billionaires was already 28% of the total
personal income in the state, and was growing at 35% a
year. Greater Seattles economic elite occupied the same
power position in the world as Londons economic elite
in 1600, or Bostons elite in 1850, and they too were
personally transforming the world by their decision-making.
Disproportionate power of this magnitude is clearly the
product of scale, and it has profound implications for the
future development of humanity.
The global system seems to be approaching, and may
have already exceeded, a scale threshold at which elite-
directed, capital intensive commercial development be-
comes unsustainable, even assuming further technological
miracles. It would be reasonable to predict that the power-
concentrating potential of globalization under nancial cap-
italism will soon be restrained, and perhaps reversed as
new democratic political movements in the currently most
developed centers of the global system press an effective
argument for economic democratization. As more and more
people feel disempowered by global markets and giant,
monopolistic corporations, there will be strong incentives
for political and economic decentralization. This decentral-
ization of power may be accelerated by persistent polit-
ical and economic collapses in impoverished peripheral
areas that will force radical rethinking of the international
development process. Economic democracy will require a
restoration of economic power to households, small-scale
producers, local and regional markets. This change could
be supported by new local currency systems, and stronger
local governments, even as large businesses and national
governments give up power. Just as disenfranchised 17th
century Englishmen developed the rst modern political
party, the Levellers, that helped replace the powerful con-
cept of the divine right of kings with the radical new
concept that political power originated with the people,
today people can form new political parties and take back
the power they have granted to giant commercial corpora-
tions. It will become increasingly obvious that information
technologies make it feasible for the majority to use less
capital-intensive production and distribution systems. That
will strengthen local communities, and produce a very high
quality of life for most people. The economic efciencies
of small scale will be quickly realized as local production
and distribution systems replace the costly long-distance
movement of materials, so that overly rewarded corporate
elites and great private investors become unnecessary. The
idea of economic globalization driven by all-powerful com-
mercial corporations and great concentrations of nance
capital will be a quaint anachronism, like the idea of divine
kings.
REFERENCES
Algaze, G (1989) The Uruk expansion: cross-cultural exchange
in early Mesopotamian civilization, Curr. Anthropol., 30,
571608.
Barnet, R J and Cavanagh, J (1994) Global Dreams: Imperial
Corporations and the New World Order, Simon and Schuster,
New York.
84 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Bateman, J (1883) The Great Landowners of Great Britain and
Ireland, 4th edition, Harrison, London.
Beard, C A and Beard, M R (1934) The Rise of American Civi-
lization, Macmillan, New York.
Berry, C J (1994) The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Histor-
ical Investigation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Berry, W (1977) The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agricul-
ture, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, CA.
Bodley, J H (1999a) Victims of Progress, 4th edition, Mayeld,
Mountain View, CA.
Bodley, J H (1999b) Socioeconomic Growth, Culture Scale, and
Household Well-Being: A Test of the Power-Elite Hypothesis,
Curr. Anthropol., 40(5), 595620.
Bodley, J H (2000) Cultural Anthropology: Tribes, States, and
the Global System, 3rd edition, Mayeld, Mountain View,
CA.
Booth, C (18921903) Life and Labour of the People in London,
Macmillan, London.
Boyd, R and Richerson, P J (1985) Culture and the Evolutionary
Process, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Brandeis, L D (1914) Other Peoples Money and Howthe Bankers
Use It, Frederick A Stokes, New York.
Braudel, F (1977) Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Cap-
italism, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD.
Braudel, F (1982) The Wheels of Commerce. Civilization and
Capitalism 15th18th Century, Harper and Row, NY.
Braudel, F (1992) Civilisation Mat erielle,

Economie et Capital-
isme. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th18th century, Univer-
sity of California Press, Berkeley, CA.
Califano, D (1998) The Battle for Assets, Worth, 7(11), 106.
Carneiro, R L (1978) Political Expansion as an Expression of
the Principle of Competitive Exclusion, in Origins of the
State: the Anthropology of Political Evolution, eds R Cohen
and E R Service, Institute for the Study of Human Issues,
Philadelphia, PA, 205223.
Chandler, Jr, A D (1977) The Visible Hand: The Managerial Rev-
olution in American Business, The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Chandler, T (1987) Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth,
St. Davids University Press, Lewiston, New York.
Clark, G (1936) The Balance Sheets of Imperialism: Facts and
Figures on Colonies, Columbia University Press, New York.
DeForest, R W and Veiller, L, eds (1903) The Tenement House
Problem: Including the Report of the New York State Tenement
House Commission of 1900, Macmillan, New York.
Domhoff, G W (1996) State Autonomy or Class Dominance?
Case Studies on Policy Making in America, Aldine de Gruyter,
New York.
Farrell, B G (1993) Elite Families: Class and Power in Nine-
teenth Century Boston, State University of New York, Albany,
NY.
FAO, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
(1999), The State of Food Insecurity in the World, Rome.
Fletcher, R (1995) The Limits of Settlement Growth: A Theoretical
Outline, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Frank, A G (1990) A Theoretical Introduction to 5000 Years of
World History, Review, 2, 128.
Frank, A G (1991) A Plea for World System History, J. World
Hist., 2, 128.
Friedman, L M (1964) The Dynastic Trust, Yale Law J., 73,
547592.
Gardner, G and Halweil, B (2000) Nourishing the Underfed and
Overfed, in State of the World 2000: A Worldwatch Insti-
tute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society, eds
L R Brown, C Flavin, H French, and L Starke, W W Norton,
Worldwatch Institute, New York, 5978.
Gemini Consulting (1998) World Wealth Report 1998, Gemini
Consulting, New York.
Gills, B K and Frank, A G (1991) 5000 Years of World System
History: the Cumulation of Accumulation in Core/periphery
Relations in Precapitalist Worlds, eds C Chase-Dunn and
T D Hall, Westview Press, Boulder, CO.
Gras, N S B (1915) The Evolution of the English Corn Market:
Fromthe Twelfth to the Eighteenth Century, Harvard University
Press, Cambridge.
Hall, P D (1982) The Organization of American Culture, 1700
1900: Private Institutions, Elites, and the Origins of American
Nationality, New York University Press, New York.
Hoberman, L S (1991) Mexicos Merchant Elite, 15901660,
Duke University Press, Durham.
House of Commons (1837) Report from the Select Committee on
Aborigines (British Settlements) Imperial Blue Book, British
Parliamentary Papers, VII, 425.
King, G (1936) Two Tracts: (a) Natural and Political Observa-
tions and Conclusions upon the State and condition of England,
(b) Of the Naval Trade of England A

1688 and the National

Pro t then arising thereby, ed G E Barnett, The John Hopkins
Press, Baltimore, MD.
Krebs, A V (1992) The Corporate Reapers: The Book of Agribusi-
ness, Essential Books, Washington, DC.
Marcus, G E and Hall, P D (1992) Lives in Trust: The Fortunes
of Dynastic Families in Late Twentieth Century America, West-
view Press, Boulder, CO.
McConnell, G (1953) The Decline of Agrarian Democracy, Uni-
versity of California Press, Berkeley, CA.
McCracken, G (1988) Culture and Consumption: New Approaches
to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities,
Indiana University Press, IN.
McKendrick, N (1982) The Consumer Revolution of Eighteenth-
century England in The Birth of a Consumer Society: The
Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, eds N Mc-
Kendrick, J Brewer, and J H Plumb, Indiana University Press,
Bloomington, IN, 933.
McKendrick, N, Brewer, J, and Plumb, J H (1982) The Birth
of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-
Century England, Indiana University Press, Bloomington,
IN.
McMahon, T A and Bonner, J T (1983) On Size and Life, Scien-
tic American Library, New York.
Miller, D (1987) Material Culture and Mass Consumption, Basil
Blackwell, Oxford.
Naroll, R (1967) Imperial Cycles and World Order, Peace Res.
Soc., 7, 83105.
Pessen, E (1973) Riches, Class, and Power Before the Civil War,
Heath, Lexington, MA.
Rabb, T K (1967) Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry
Investment in the Expansion of England, 15751630, Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, MA.
GLOBALIZATION IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE 85
Roy, W G (1983) Interlocking Directorates and the Corporate
Revolution, Soc. Sci. Hist., 7(2), 143164.
Sanderson, S K (1990) Social Evolutionism: A Critical History,
Basic Blackwell, Oxford.
Sanderson, S K (1999) Social Transformations: A General Theory
of Historical Development, Rowan and Littleeld, Lanham,
MD.
Schumacher, E F (1973) Small is Beautiful: Economics as if Peo-
ple Mattered, Harper and Row, New York.
Sen, A (1981) Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and
Deprivation, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Shammas, C (1990) The Pre-industrial Consumer in England and
America, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Shammas, C (1993) Changes in English and Anglo-American
consumption from 1550 to 1800 in Consumption and the World
of Goods, eds J Brewer and R Porter, Routledge, London,
177205.
Smith, A (1776) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of
the Wealth of Nations, Vol. 1, Strahan and Cadell,
London.
Snooks, G D (1993) Economics Without Time: A Science Blind to
the Forces of Historical Change, Macmillan, London.
Snooks, G D (1994) New Perspectives on the Industrial Revolu-
tion in Was the Industrial Revolution Necessary? ed G Snooks,
Routledge, London, 126.
Snooks, G D (1994) Portrait of the Family within the Total Econ-
omy: A Study in Longrun Dynamics, Australia 17881990,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Snooks, G D (1996) The Dynamic Society: Exploring the Sources
of Global change, Routledge, London.
Snooks, G D (1997) The Ephemeral Civilization: Exploding the
Myth of Social Evolution, Routledge, London.
Snooks, G D (1998) The Laws of History, Routledge, London.
Soltow, L (1975) Men and Wealth in the United States 18501870,
Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 112113.
Stone, L (1965) The Crisis of the Aristocracy 15581641, Oxford
University Press, London.
Stone, L (1973) Family and Fortune: Studies in Aristocratic
Finance in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Oxford
University Press, Oxford.
Taagepera, R (1978a) Size and Duration of Empires: Systematics
of Size, Soc. Sci. Res., 7, 108127.
Taagepera, R (1978b) Size and Duration of Empires: Growth-
Decline Curves, 3000 to 600 B.C., Soc. Sci. Res., 7, 180196.
Taagepera, R (1997) Expansion and Contraction Patterns of Large
Polities: Context for Russia, Int. Stud Q., 41, 475504.
United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census
(1996) Statistical Abstract of the United States 19961997,
116th edition, Government Printing Ofce, Washington, DC.
Wallerstein, I (1974) The Modern World System: Capitalist Agri-
culture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the
Sixteenth Century, Academic Press, New York.
Weber, M (1930) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capital-
ism, George Allen and Unwin, London.
Wilkinson, D (1992) Cities, Civilizations, and Oikumenes: I,
Comp. Civ. Rev., 27, 5187.
Wilkinson, D (1993) Cities, Civilizations, and Oikumenes: II,
Comp. Civ. Rev., 28, 4172.
Wills, Jr, J E (1993) European Consumption and Asian Produc-
tion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, in Con-
sumption and the World of Goods, eds J Brewer and R Porter,
Routledge, London, 133147.
World Bank (1995) World Development Report, Oxford University
Press, New York.
Young, O R (1997) Global Governance: Drawing Insights from
the Environmental Experience, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
FURTHER READING
Durham and London, The Tudor Sumptuary Laws, Engl. Hist.
Rev., 30(119), 433449.
Robbins, R H (1999) Global Problems and the Culture of Capi-
talism, Allyn and Bacon, Boston, MA.
Technological Society and its Relation to Global
Environmental Change
ESTER BOSERUP (Deceased)

Independent Consultant
The in uence of technology on environment, and vice versa, is a relatively new subject in scienti c discussion,
but it has been crucial in human history. Historians divide human history in technological stages: the rst stage
when small human groups subsisted on wild food, then the invention of agriculture, then urbanization, industry,
and now an ongoing change from the industrial society to the electronic age. Since the industrial revolution
in Western Europe a couple of centuries ago, there have been more and more examples of negative effects of
technological change on the environment, fauna and ora, and also on human life.
ADAM SMITH AND MALTHUS
The basic relationship between technology and environment
is strongly inuenced by a third factor: population size, as
was pointed out two centuries ago, by the classical British
economists Adam Smith and Malthus. They agreed on the
crucial role of population change for human development,
but while Smith thought population growth was a posi-
tive factor, Malthus thought it had negative effects. Smiths
view was the generally accepted one: child mortality was
very high and the family wanted to have many children
to ensure that some would survive. Rulers also favored a
larger population. Many inhabitants meant many produc-
tive workers and many soldiers to win wars and conquer
additional territory. But because he observed the beginning
of the industrial revolution, Smith added that population
growth would not only increase the number of workers,
but also their production per head, because it would make
further specialization of labor possible.
Malthus essay was a great sensation. He applied an
ecological view, arguing that population growth reduces
average incomes, because he considered the globe with its
natural resources a constant, so population growth would
reduce natural resources per head and increase mortality
due to insufcient food production. The carrying capacity
of the globe could not be exceeded.
In retrospect, we can see that they both had a point. Pop-
ulation growth can have both positive and negative results,
depending partly on the relative strength of the positive and
negative factors, but also on the strength of a number of
other factors, which economists and others, who use simpli-
ed models, fail to take into account rst of all social and
cultural factors. Therefore, we have neo-Malthusians who
put great emphasis on the negative results of technologi-
cal changes, which pollute air, fresh water, and soil, and
threaten human life and health and the survival of fauna
and ora. And we have anti-Malthusians, including many
neoliberalists, who downplay the negative effects of mod-
ern technology on the environment, while focusing on the
positive effects on average incomes. What we lack is an
accepted theory of how all the relevant factors play together
in the complicated process of economic and human devel-
opment (Boserup, 1996).
Malthus overlooked that carrying capacity is not a con-
stant because there can be substitution between different
resources, be it labor or capital investment as replacement
for land or one metal for another, and the type of substi-
tution which is possible depends on the particular resource
endowment and other conditions for resource transfer or
invention in the region under investigation. In other words,
it is necessary to use a historical approach to answer the
question of effects of major population change on technol-
ogy and environment (technology is dened as including
both material and method).
Specialists from many disciplines have studied the rela-
tionship between changes in technology and in environment
in addition to ecologists and natural scientists. One broad
group consists of economic, medical, cultural, and gen-
eral historians, another of archaeologists, anthropologists,
and demographers. These groups have focused on histor-
ical changes in technology and environment in different
parts of the world at different periods. But the problem has
also been studied in a different way, concentrating on recent
changes in the developing countries. Such studies have been
TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY AND ITS RELATION TO GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 87
made by researchers from many disciplines in universities
and other institutions that focus on aid to developing coun-
tries. In this essay both methods have been combined, for
instance by comparing the process of ancient urbanization
in Asia and the Middle East and its relation to environmen-
tal change with the much later process of urbanization and
industrialization in Western Europe under different environ-
mental conditions.
THE DYNAMICS OF LAND USE
Ten thousand years ago, or earlier, some human groups
changed from hunting and food gathering in forested land
to shifting cultivation, felling the natural vegetation by re,
sowing or planting seeds or roots, and after a few years
when yields declined, repeating the operation in another
spot leaving the preceding one fallow for two decades or
more, until soil fertility had been fully regained. However,
as their population continued to increase, the cultivators had
to shorten the fallow and only bushes had time to invade
the eld. With further growth of population, recultivation
had to be made when only grasses had invaded the land.
Forest fallow, the rst step of shifting cultivation, is still in
use in thinly populated parts of many developing countries
in all continents, for instance in the Indian Himalayas and
in tropical Africa (see Shifting Cultivation and Land
Degradation, Volume 3).
If this type of gradual intensi cation of land use is
allowed to go on, without the cultivator family carrying
green manure or dung to the eld to preserve soil fertility,
shifting cultivation is unsustainable and the land becomes
sterile, but whether the process is renewable depends on
the climate. With too little rain the land may become
a desert, but with enough rain the original vegetation
may come back, and the whole process may be repeated.
However, if the cultivators have preserved soil fertility
by manuring the elds with green manure or dung, and
their populations continue to increase, they could go on
from bush fallow, to more and more intensive short fallow
systems, to annual cropping and, if the climate allowed
it, to multicropping. This was, in fact, the way most of
world agriculture developed before the industrial revolution
created substitutes for the natural manure, and the human
labor needed to apply it. In other words, the intensive
systems of agriculture, which are used today in densely
populated countries that still use traditional systems of
agriculture, are repetitions of systems applied millennia ago.
Land use is not static, but can be, and often was a dynamic
adaptation to changes in population size and environment,
and the process seems to have been similar in many parts
of the globe (Boserup, 1965).
The historical process replaced less land per head by
more labor for current operations and investment in land
improvement, including terracing of mountain slopes and
leveling of land, irrigation and draining. Gradually, over
centuries or millennia, the environment changed. The
landscape was transformed from a large forest with a few
hunter-gatherer families to one of villages surrounded by
arable elds, grassland for domestic animals and some for-
est for gathering of fertilizing matter, timber and fuel-wood.
These processes motivated the change of tools by transfer
of technology from more advanced neighbors or invention
by trial and error and speculation, from digging sticks to
hoes and to ploughs drawn by oxen or horses. Technologi-
cal change is seldom exogenous, i.e., accidental or made by
a so-called genius, but endogenous changes may be made if
the motivation becomes strong, due to population change, or
some other factor, often a lost war in the case of weapons. In
agriculture, increasing local population with need for addi-
tional food production promoted an endogenous process of
technological change, which augmented the carrying capac-
ity of the land by using the increased labor force for current
operations and labor investment.
With intensi cation of agriculture more use was made
of female and child labor. Already among hunter-gatherers,
women and children took part in food gathering, but with
shorter fallow the share of work performed by women and
children increased until the system required very hard labor
by the whole family all year round, as was documented by
Lossing Buck in his research on China in the 1930s (Buck,
1937).
The increasing use of family labor had, sometimes at
least, a profound in uence not only on family life, but
also on culture, and even religion. Forest people believe
in forest spirits and use sorcerers and sacri ces to ask
for protection. Sorcerers seem to be the rst professional
group in human history; and in the Indian caste system
the priests, the Brahmans, constitute the highest caste. But
many agriculturists, for instance in Southern India, sacri ce
to local female fertility goddesses to obtain a good harvest,
while pastoralists sacri ce to male gods to obtain good
results from their ocks of animals. The later disappearance
of goddesses in most of the world seems related to the
reduction of the role of women in the agricultural economy
when the plough came into use, and to her lower status
compared to that of men.
The patriarchal system, where the male head of house-
hold can dispose of the labor power of other family
members, led to intensi cation of food production through
labor-intensive technologies. The right of adult men to dis-
pose of the labor of other family members does even today
encourage a pro-natalist attitude, polygamy, and keeping
children away from school, even when there is free access
to schools in the neighborhood.
The increasing intensity of land use changed not only
the use of family labor, but also land tenure. As long as the
local population is small, there may be free access to forest,
grazing and cultivable land which has regained fertility by
88 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
fallow; with a larger population, only the local population
has full rights to land, while foreigners must pay crop-
shares or work as slaves, tenants, or wage workers, with
or without the right to graze animals in village grazing
areas, and gather fuel and food in the forests surrounding
the village.
Until the middle of the 20th century diseases, including
epidemics, to which the local population had not developed
resistance, had kept long-term rates of population growth
very low in developing countries, and similar to Europe
in earlier centuries there had been periodic large declines
of population, caused by epidemics and wars, often fol-
lowed by forced migration and hunger. But during and after
the Second World War a scientic effort was made to com-
bat disease by means of modern technology also in many
non-industrialized countries and colonies the result being
a population explosion , due not least to a large reduction
of child mortality.
Because of the general acceptance of Malthusian theory
in the industrialized countries, this acceleration of popula-
tion growth created widespread fear of future world famine.
So, similar to the transfer of Western medicine to develop-
ing countries, it was decided to start research aimed at trans-
ferring other modern Western technologies to densely pop-
ulated Asian countries, where the problem was expected to
become worst. Two types of research were started: one was
aimed at improving the technology of contraception, the
other was agricultural research aimed at raising crop yields
by use of Western techniques, such as the use of chemical
fertilizers and development of better seeds the so called
Green Revolution (see Green Revolution, Volume 3).
Green Revolution technologies can only be successfully
introduced in areas with a reasonably good infrastructure:
good transport facilities for both inputs and outputs, storage
facilities, access to agricultural advisers and other exten-
sion services, and perhaps local research stations. All this
is unavailable in regions of subsistence production and
is not likely to be provided in the least developed coun-
tries, or in subsistence regions of large countries with
much better prospects for agricultural development in more
advanced and more densely populated areas. Therefore,
the Green Revolution was promoted in densely populated
Asian countries, simultaneously with improvement of the
rural infrastructure in those areas, if necessary. The research
was highly successful in stimulating production. However,
both in the Asian areas for which it was designed, and
in the Western industrialized donor countries, production
increased so rapidly that the feared appearance of world
shortages became one of embarrassing food surpluses. It
also contributed to these unexpected surpluses, in that the
rapidly increasing rural labor force in areas that continued
to use traditional labor intensive technologies made it possi-
ble either to expand the area under cultivation or to increase
cropping frequency.
When food surpluses increased in the industrialized
western countries, their governments decided not to reduce
government support to agriculture, but instead to give food
aid to developing countries, and to lower export prices for
food in order to be more competitive. Food aid and sub-
sidies to food exports were granted not only to densely
populated, but also to sparsely populated developing coun-
tries. But in many cases, a small population is not due to
especially unfavorable natural conditions for food produc-
tion, but it is the small home market, and lack of access
to export markets, which force rural populations to remain
subsistence producers, or to migrate to mines, towns or
foreign owned plantations.
Many governments in developing countries welcomed
the chance to supply their increasingly populated towns
with cheap food, or to sell the food with a large prot.
In the rst case the effect was a discouragement to local
agriculture, and food exports from the industrialized to the
developing countries became very large.
In Asia, the Green Revolution technology, the increasing
rural labor force, and the large food imports, combined
to satisfy the effective demand for food without the need
for investments in expansion of the cultivated areas. But it
would be wrong to interpret this as a sign of lack of reserves
of uncultivated, but cultivable land. If it should become
impossible to increase crop yields much further, the Green
Revolution technology can be modied with more emphasis
on land improvement by investment in hitherto uncultivated
land and on further cropping intensity. The possibilities
for further multiplication of food production are often
overlooked because hunger and malnutrition among the
poor are wrongly interpreted as lack of the capacity of world
agriculture to produce sufcient food. Evans rightly talks
about well-intentioned scientists who seek technological
solutions to problems of social and economic inequity
(Evans, 1998).
Like other major technological changes, the Green Revo-
lution had profound social and cultural effects. The income
differences between areas with and without a Green Rev-
olution became very large, and in the former there were
important changes in family and fertility. When chemi-
cal fertilizer, pesticides, and mechanized inputs reduce the
demand for the type of operations that were hitherto per-
formed by women and children, the motivation for the male
head of the household to be polygamic, and have a large
number of children, is reduced or eliminated. Therefore,
modernization of agriculture is accompanied by reduction
of polygamy and fertility, except where strong religious
inner and outer resistance against birth control delays the
process, perhaps for a long time. Also, when children are
less needed for agricultural or other work, they are more
likely to be sent to school, but in many cases to schools,
which are hostile to cultural change. In all cases, how-
ever, the reduction of fertility and agricultural toil create
TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY AND ITS RELATION TO GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 89
a very large improvement in the health and position of
women.
These effects are visible by a comparison between
Asian areas with Green Revolution, and sparsely popu-
lated African countries. In the former, fertility is declining
not only in urban, but also in rural areas. By contrast,
there is much less fertility decline in the sparsely popu-
lated African countries, and it seems usually to be limited
to urban areas.
MOBILITY AND URBANIZATION
After food production, the creation of urban centers is usu-
ally considered the next important step in technological
development. Nearly all ruins of ancient towns are found
in Asia and the Near East, a region with a dry and warm
climate different from the cold and rainy climate of West-
ern Europe. Both their early towns and their large cities
antedate those of Western Europe by millennia, although
insufciency of rain only allowed agriculture at river sites,
where water was seeping in, or with irrigation. It seems
that we have here one of the many examples where a
handicap in this case shortage of water proved to be
an advantage, because it stimulated invention, in this case
of irrigation technology, both for food production and for
transport.
As long as their population was small, the cultivators
lived on the shores of the river, or farther away from it, if
there was natural seasonal overow of the river. When the
population increased, the people helped the natural overow
to spread more by digging small terraces on the mountain
slope beside the river; and leading the water along these,
they spread it by removing a few stones from the edge of
the terrace.
Another step in the development of irrigation was to
dig canals in the plain below the mountains or hills from
which the ood came, to spread the water more widely, thus
increasing the area under cultivation. This was followed by
a crucial technological change. Construction served to lift
the water either by gates or dams, or by water-powered
machines, i.e., shaduffs and waterwheels. In other words,
the use of water power had been invented, and it had the
additional advantage that it beneted both food production
and transport of products and people, which now could
move up-river even when unassisted by sails and wind
power. So, also in these natural conditions, the increase
of population motivated technological change.
Not only in recent technological development, but
throughout human history, changes in mobility and
communication have been of crucial importance. In early
times, many human groups depended solely upon human
legs and perhaps primitive boats for mobility, but many
pastoral peoples had large mountable animals (horses,
dromedars, camels) and were therefore much more mobile
than were the hunter-gatherers and cultivators discussed
above.
The climatically dry and semi-dry zones of Asia and
North Africa have for millennia been inhabited by pastoral
peoples, either because their habitats have always been dry
for climatic reasons, or perhaps have become so by human
maltreatment of fragile land. Pastoralists subsist mainly
by the products of their animals, supplemented by some
vegetable food. If the group increased in size, they might
make over-intensive use of the natural grazings and spoil
the land, but sometimes they would avoid it by spreading
more and more widely, and in large semi-dry areas they
might become nomads, moving with their animals and tents,
if possible by mounting the animals.
The diet of pastoralists is richer in proteins than that of
cultivators, and they are usually larger and stronger than
cultivators, who subsist mainly on vegetable food. This,
together with their much larger mobility, made them a
formidable enemy for the cultivators in the river valleys.
The nomads attacked their villages, enslaved their inhab-
itants, and made themselves rulers of the area, using the
villagers to provide themselves and their families with veg-
etable food and domestic, sexual and sometimes military
services. If a pastoral people came to rule a number of
villages, their descendants might become hereditary nobil-
ity between the ruler and the subservient population of
peasants.
The family system and other cultural patterns of pastoral-
ists are different from those of cultivators. Large animals
belong to men, and mounted animals are a status sym-
bol for male pastoralists. One may ask if a similar type
of stratication had emerged in Europe, where the horses
became a symbol of the high rank of the hereditary nobility
that went to war on horseback, held tournaments and horse
races and monopolized the right to hunt on horseback in
the forests.
Carneiro has suggested that it was a condition for early
urbanization that the population lived in circumscribed
areas, i.e., areas surrounded by deserts, steep mountains
or seashores, which forced the inhabitants to intensify food
production if they must feed an increasing population in that
type of environment (Carneiro, 1998). If the circumscribed
area was as large as in Mesopotamia and the large river-
valleys in India and China, a sufciently large and dense
population could produce and transport enough food for
creating large urban centers at an early date. Existence of
large towns and cities depends on transport networks for
food to the non-agricultural population living in the urban
centers. Road transport was inefcient over long distances
but a dense network of canals made supply to large towns
possible for instance in China. But later, in the railway
age, the Chinese canals proved to be a handicap because
of the many bridges that had to be built. Thus, from being
a technological leader until around 1500 AD, China, after
90 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
the industrial revolution in Western Europe, turned into a
non-industrialized developing country.
In river valleys of Asia and the Near East, nomadic
peoples from the Central Asian mountain range managed
to create huge empires by conquering many hundreds of
villages belonging to many different peoples, and using
the inhabitants as soldiers. Wars were the means to get
soldiers for further conquest, and construction workers for
fortications and embellishment of towns.
There were also productive infrastructural investments:
large canals for transport of supplies and persons, and
large dams for irrigation and expansion of the network of
canals. In old times, large dams were made by an army of
manual workers, and this technique continued to be used
in independent India. The Indian government wanted to
provide work for both local people and poor immigrants
from other parts of India. It was a striking contrast to the
simultaneous road building by the Americans in Vietnam,
who used ultra-modern American mechanized equipment
operated by American personnel.
At the time of the old empires, there were violent
uctuations in population, and the cruelty of the empires,
both in war and peace, has been assumed to be a major
explanation of these uctuations, but, as already mentioned,
it seems likely that a major cause of the uctuations was
epidemic diseases. Of course slaughter and famines among
the fugitives contributed to the catastrophe.
Today there are lorry transport routes all over India and
AIDS has followed them. In Southern and Central Africa
the epidemics threaten to be even worse than the old killers
from earlier centuries. World population was not stationary
before the demographic transition, as Malthus believed,
but was slowly increasing with intermittent sharp declines,
where epidemics are supposed to have been a larger killer
than warfare. The means to avoid an epidemic was to ee
to another area, thus spreading the epidemic further.
SUPPLY OF POWER FOR THE INDUSTRIAL
REVOLUTION
Western Europe had little urbanization before the indus-
trial revolution. Because of the abundant rain, irrigation
and water power never attained the importance it had in
Asia, but Western Europe imported the techniques of water-
wheels, on its small rivers, for milling of cereals and other
purposes. In the 11th century, England had more than 5000
watermills in operation.
By contrast, Western Europe with its long coastal lines
from the Mediterranean to the Baltic Sea made more use
of wind power for long-distance transport of products
and persons than did Asia. With strong motivation to
improve shipping technology, Western Europe succeeded in
dominating the whole world in the 19th century, by means
of its colonization policy in the other continents. This was
a big advantage for a region, which was relatively poor in
natural resources.
From an early age there were caravan routes inland
between China, the Black Sea and the Russian rivers and
lakes, and later trading routes along the Asian coast between
East Asia and Europe. At the European end the trading
routes became longer and longer, until European coastal set-
tlements on the Mediterranean, the Atlantic coast, the North
Sea, and the Baltic had become active participants in the
Asian trade, with large government-owned or government-
supported Asiatic Companies.
At the rst stage of this development, the boats and
small ships could only carry light goods, and the trade
consisted of luxuries (silk, ne textiles, spices, precious
stones and metals, processed or not) for the use of rulers
and rich merchants in the areas served by the trade. But
when improvements in shipbuilding made long distance
transport of bulky and heavy goods economical, the Euro-
peans expropriated deposits of ores, fertile agricultural land
and forests behind their trading stations in other continents,
and used them to produce raw materials or semi nished
products for exports to Europe. When improvements in
navigation made Atlantic crossing safer, the Europeans
established themselves in America, produced tobacco, cof-
fee, cotton and other crops in monoculture, partially with
use of slaves bought or caught in America and Africa. The
Atlantic crossing was followed by exploration of the coasts
of other continents, and many of the areas where the trading
stations were located ended by becoming formal colonies
of European countries.
Because most of the products exported from the colonies
were owned by European companies and produced by
cheap dependent non-European labor, colonial trade was
very unequal, with large imports to Western Europe, and
small exports of which a share was for consumption by
the European civil and military personnel and business-
men who lived in the colonies. By continuing for centuries
to deliver ores, timber and crops for a fraction of the
real costs, the colonies actually nanced a great part of
the Western European industrial revolution. Moreover, as
Needham has shown, a large share of what has been con-
sidered proof of Western European inventiveness, was in
fact technology transfer from China, either directly or via
the colonies (Needham, 1954). But technological change
promoted inventiveness, and the imports of new techniques
were followed by important inventions by European scien-
tists and businessmen, including the steam-engine and the
railway, which linked the European countries together phys-
ically and economically, while the steamship linked them
better to their colonies in the East, South and West.
Because Western Europe made less use of water power
than China, and only made use of coal much later, it
eradicated much of its forests and imported timber from
Sweden and Russia. Therefore, the Wooden Age lasted very
TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY AND ITS RELATION TO GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 91
long in Europe, but gradually more and more industries
shifted their fuel supplies from wood to coal or water
power, though the iron industry still used charcoal to melt
ore. As late as 1750, per head output of iron in Europe was
lower than in the least developed countries today, and the
military sector took most of the supplies. Iron production
in Western Europe is a classical example of a crucially
important demand-induced technological change, and for
a time Western and Central Europe became technological
leaders on a world scale, owing to their large deposits of
coal and ore in locations that were favorably positioned to
attract both raw materials and market-oriented industries
(Boserup, 1981).
The Coal-Railway Age became a period of extreme
centralization, both regionally and locally, with large
rural urban and east west migrations in Europe. The
industrial importance of Italy, which had neither coal nor
ore, was reduced until the 20th century, when its deposits
of gas were discovered and exploited.
Because of their access to raw materials produced by
cheap colonial labor and expropriated land and mines,
British and other Western European industrialists were very
efcient exporters of industrial products and solidly in favor
of free trade in the world market. But that did not prevent
them from protecting their local manufacturing industries
by means of high custom duties and later by quotas, because
they had to pay much higher European wages, when the
colonial products were processed in Europe. The result
became the well-known pattern of colonial trade where the
colonies delivered food and raw materials to the industrial
countries, while Britain and other colonial powers delivered
manufactured goods to the rest of the world.
The industrial revolution promoted investment in private
and government infrastructure: roads from railway stations
and harbors to customers and other ancillary urban or rural
services. Moreover, military technologies were improved
and new armament factories built. In the military sector, as
in the civilian, there was a beginning of the coming change
from reliance on large numbers of soldiers and unskilled
labor to more reliance on equipment and skilled specialists.
Labor shortage was no more a permanent feature from
now on it alternated with unemployment.
The industrial revolution did not only create the business
cycle, it also created the serious problem of pollution of
the environment. Although there were accidents, and some-
times salinity, the Asian type of reliance on water power
for industry and transport was a non-polluting technology,
but in Europe the change from wood to coal had serious
consequences because of the smoke. Though the burning
of wood also produced smoke, that of coal became much
worse and promoted tuberculosis, especially in mining and
industrial districts, and in urban areas where the house-
holds used coal for heating. Also the new railways produced
smoke in the densely populated areas, which they served.
Moreover, the rapid growth of both the mining and the
processing industries resulted in concentrations of popula-
tion in the most polluted areas, which were becoming both
unpleasant and unhealthy. Because of the rapid urbaniza-
tion the immigrants had to live either in old houses or in
self-built huts, and the towns became surrounded by huge
slums, which contributed to an increase in mortality and
made room for employment of further immigrants.
The natural landscape was transformed by the new ugly
construction of mines and factories. This gave birth to the
rst protest movement: the romanticist movement at the end
of the 18th century, which regretted the damage made to
landscape, fauna, and ora. The environmental movement
was born of the industrial revolution.
Like earlier structural changes in the economy, the indus-
trial revolution in Western Europe was accompanied and
followed by major political, demographic, occupational,
and cultural changes. Organized labor movements appeared,
due to the frequent periods of unemployment with down-
ward pressure on wages. The new industries helped to put
downward pressure on male wages by offering employ-
ment to young unmarried women with the result that the
marriage age increased, reducing the birth rate, but for the
poorest the increasing recruitment of child-labor in industry
provided an inducement to continue high fertility and the
decay of family life of industrial workers. Moreover, as a
result of the industrial revolution, a new middle class of
technicians and other specialists appeared, both in private
enterprise and in government, and became a more important
part of the labor force and of society in general. Following
the French Revolution, secularization spread among intel-
lectuals and the feminist movement was born, giving rise
to employment of middle class women.
In the 19th century, more and more industrializing coun-
tries introduced suffrage for men but, except in New
Zealand, where women had to wait until the next century.
The concept of human rights was until recently dened
more narrowly than today, and the declaration of human
rights by the French Revolution and the American Consti-
tution covered only men. Not only were women excluded
from the human race in the 19th century, but also colored
natives in the colonies. Not only most Europeans in the
colonies and at home, but also much of European science,
agreed with the racist theory of European superiority in
relation to other races, both blacks, reds, and yellows, and
tried to explain racial difference by hereditary differences
in, e.g., the shape of the skull. The embarrassing problem
of technology transfer from Asia was avoided by classify-
ing the ancient Greeks as Europeans and focusing higher
education on the writings of Plato and Aristotle, forgetting
about their oriental predecessors.
The attitudes of European missionaries in the colonies
were of course different, but usually they considered and
treated the natives as children. Many whites in the colonies
92 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
regarded only white people as real human beings, while
members of other races were either considered sub-standard
humans or not humans at all, a good excuse for killing
or enslaving them in spite of the attitude of the European
churches. In conformity with these racial theories, the Euro-
peans arriving in Canada and Australia expropriated the
whole territory declaring the land empty; these actions are
today occupying the courts and generating public debates
in both countries.
Before the 19th century the loyalty of European pop-
ulations had usually been to their ruler or to their local
region, whether independent or not, but from the 19th cen-
tury onwards, it changed in many cases to strong feelings
of attachment to the Nation, i.e., the area under the same
government, which had become strengthened by the appear-
ance of national railways, mining centers, large industries,
and increasing national government bureaucracies, civil
and military.
After the industrial revolution, Western European govern-
ments had made efforts to transform the European part of
their possessions into national states, partly by propaganda
and other support for what was labeled national culture,
and partly by propaganda against or suppression of minority
cultures. A strong means to obtain this was the increasing
school attendance by compelling both teachers and pupils
to use the national language only. The growth of arma-
ments and other national industries and establishments, and
the competition between the European countries in exports
and acquisition of additional colonies, also contributed to
a feeling of national unity. Not only were literature and
art strongly inuenced by the national movements, but
also science.
DECOLONIZATION AND NEOLIBERALISM
The industrial revolution had important long-term effects
on military technology and world politics. Having helped
France and England to win two world wars, the United
States became the uncontested technological world leader,
a change that was related to the environmental differ-
ences between these areas. Railways had been of central
importance in the European process of industrialization, as
already mentioned. On the North American Atlantic coast
they were built early, but not over the enormous stretches of
near-empty land, in the interior of the continent. Transconti-
nental railways were built with French and Russian capital,
using local wood instead of coal, but they were unprof-
itable, and the foreign investors lost their money before
the railways could make both ends meet under American
ownership.
Once more, however, a handicap became an advantage,
because the poor protability of many railways induced
American business and scientists to develop better means of
power and transport, that could serve thinly populated areas
over very long distances better than the railway. The result
became the American dominance in the automobile and
aircraft industries, which derive power from oil, a product
that was available within their own territory. Automobiles
offer more exible transport than the railway, and aircraft
contributes to globalization. For a time their inuence on
the environment was positive, because they replaced the
bulky and polluting coal by oil, but later both industries
became serious polluters.
After the Second World War, the United States used
its inuence as a superpower to broker the liberation of
the colonies of the European countries. The United States
wanted this liberation, not only because of their own past
history, but also because the colonial preferences in interna-
tional trade discriminated against US exports. England and
some other colonial powers accepted a peaceful liberation
of their colonies, because many had become public burdens
due to increasing expenditure on military and adminis-
tration, and because liberation did not imply any change
in ownership of private enterprises. To enable the former
colonies to take over the costs of military and civil admin-
istration and other public infrastructure, the United Nations
and some national governments created organizations of
international aid to developing countries, and the World
Bank provided long term nance for large scale investments
in infrastructure and other major projects.
An international boom followed the process of liberation
of the colonies. The colonial powers had wanted to keep
the colonies as suppliers of food and raw materials, and
as markets for industrial products, but after independence,
many former colonies wanted to industrialize, and change
their pattern of trade. Many obtained grants and loans from
donors to cover the expected decit. The American business
community used the improved access to direct trade with
former European colonies to create large multinational
companies, followed by an increasing number of other
countries.
Multinational companies apply the most advanced tech-
nologies in their production of goods and services for the
world market. Usually, they have their headquarters and
top managers in the United States, Europe or Japan, with
dozens or hundreds of enterprises spread over several con-
tinents. Unskilled labor is recruited where it is cheap, and
qualied labor, technicians and computer services where
wages are low, but qualications high for instance in
India.
The liberation of the colonies has allowed many devel-
oping countries to increase employment and incomes by
becoming seats for one or more of the enterprises belonging
to a multinational company or a sub-deliverer of materials
or services. The multinationals are efcient producers in
the world market, because they are cost-reducing for their
customers, but often they are even worse despoilers of the
environment than local industries, because they can choose
TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY AND ITS RELATION TO GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 93
to operate in the countries where they pay the least for
protection of land and people, as was the case in Bhopal in
India in 1984, where more than 5000 members of the local
community were killed by a chemical leakage.
Modern technology has saved millions of human beings,
but also destroyed millions. Many modern inventions
threaten human health or survival, while others contribute
to the deterioration of the physical and biological environ-
ment and some do both. More often than not, enterprises,
government bodies, and municipalities dispose of their
waste, polluted by dangerous metals and chemicals, into
rivers and lakes, or ugly mine tailings, reducing the access
to fresh water and making the Green Revolution poisonous.
Heavy agricultural machinery may despoil large areas
of fragile soil. The oceans are polluted by in ow from
poisoned rivers, cleaning of ships in open seas and many
other polluting practices. In large cities, air pollution by
motor traf c and domestic cooking and heating has become
as unpleasant and dangerous to health as burning of coal
was earlier. And nuclear energy, once considered a clean
replacement for coal, has proved to be so controversial
that calls for its abandonment are becoming strong and
widespread. However, now it seems that better alternatives
are on the way: more use of solar energy, perhaps combined
with liquid hydrogen.
Pollution of the water in rivers, lakes, and oceans can be
avoided or repaired, and municipalities and governments
often try to achieve this, by charging payments for use
of clean water and for misuse of fresh water, but these
payments are usually so low that it is cheaper for the
consumers to misuse the resources. Not only too low
penalties, but also too high premiums can cause disasters.
Because of the high premiums paid in the Soviet Union to
producers who exceeded their production plan, collective
farms in Uzbekistan neglected to fallow their irrigated
elds, bringing desalinization.
To avoid or limit the misuse of natural resources, the
producers should pay the costs of avoiding misuse, which is
in most cases a fraction of the costs of repair, if that is at all
possible. In many cases there are regulations which should
induce or force producers to delay using new technologies,
until suf cient scienti c investigations of the effects have
been made, either by the producer or by government, but
this is unlikely to be the case in countries that are eager to
house subsidiaries of multinational companies.
The problem of who should pay, the multinational or the
country where one or more of its enterprises are located,
concerns not only environmental costs, but also costs of
public infrastructure, for instance roads, harbors, airports,
and unemployment insurance. However, neoliberal theory
undervalues the importance of infrastructure in modern
economies.
We meet the problem who should pay? whether
we discuss environmental problems or the welfare state.
Many American economists have an easy answer: the
neoclassical school tacitly assumes that infrastructure costs
are negligible, so what is right for a business enterprise
is also right for the economy. The economists are right
in pointing out that, if the local, national or multinational
company is charged more than its indirect costs, the price
structure cannot be the correct guide for the market and
the investments, but they conveniently forget that this is
equally true if the company is charged less than the true
costs, including the replacement costs of necessary infras-
tructure, be it private or public. For the same reason, it
distorts the structure of world production, when virtually all
governments in the industrialized countries, whether they
are members of World Trade Organization (WTO) or not,
give subsidies to non-competitive national producers and
pose restrictions on imports from effective foreign produc-
ers of goods and services.
The colonies of European countries had been handi-
capped in industrialization by the colonial trade system, but
after they had become independent, many of them used the
large grants of foreign aid in the rst period of indepen-
dence to start ambitious programs of industrialization by
investment in the types of physical and human infrastruc-
ture, which are needed for industrialization. Large infras-
tructures may take decades to complete and even longer
before countries can begin paying back their loans; so many
of the new projects proved to be more costly and took much
longer to construct than foreseen, while in the meantime the
30 good years (1950 1980) were over. The neoliberal
governments in the United States and England had reduced
foreign aid, part of which was replaced by private loans
or credits from international organizations especially the
World Bank.
As a result, many of the former colonies became heav-
ily indebted and had to cut down on their investment
plans, sometimes by arresting half nished developments.
Some nanciers, getting nervous, tended to make the loans
shorter and shorter, until a crisis broke out in one devel-
oping country after another. Production and employment
were sharply reduced, and the large informal sector
broke down, because its customers lost their incomes.
The informal sector in developing countries consists of
small enterprises, often family industries that produce
traditionally-made goods and services for worker fami-
lies and the lower-middle class, who prefer the cheap
prices in this sector to better quality and design in the
modern industrial and service sector. Because it uses tra-
ditional technology, the informal sector provides a large
share of the employment and self-employment in develop-
ing countries.
When the sharply reduced activities in both the mod-
ern and the informal sector made it impossible for large
numbers of the urban population, and some of the rural
too, to subsist, many, for instance in Africa, chose to return
94 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
to subsistence production in the villages they had left for
the town, but this was not possible, or was less attractive,
for earlier rural-urban migrants from areas where the Green
Revolution had made access to land more difcult or impos-
sible. Many others chose to migrate to the United States,
Canada or Europe, many of them to larger towns and
cities, which more than ever became melting pots for peo-
ple of different races, nationalities, languages, beliefs, and
past experiences.
In many of the developed western countries, to which
not only economic, but also increasing numbers of polit-
ical refugees turned in desperation, immigrants from less
developed countries became more and more unwelcome,
or were refused access, because of increasing resistance
to immigration. This was so not only because the labor
market was deteriorating, but also because of increasing
resistance against having to live together with foreign-
ers , especially if they belonged to a different national or
religious group and had contradictory ideas on the role of
women in the family.
To adapt to the international crisis, which created over-
capacities in many national and multinational companies,
more and more of these have chosen to merge in order
to reduce their costs especially by large reductions of
personnel, both in developed and developing countries.
For example, oil companies that had competed by con-
structing service stations next to each other discovered
that the true costs of competition could be high. How-
ever, by cutting down on these expenses they added to the
unemployment crisis in many of the countries where they
operated.
The mergers were not a means to avoid or reduce com-
petition, but were aimed at sharpening the competition
between the remaining larger and stronger multinationals
and between them and national, private or government
owned companies. Instead of aiming at a strengthening
of the world economy, by cooperation both within the
private sectors and between these and the government
sectors, national and international, the neoliberalists con-
tinued to destabilize both the national economies and the
world economy by their continuing efforts to destroy their
competitors, be they national or international, instead of
focusing on the common interest in stable growth of the
world economy.
The present prolonged crisis in most of the world
markets is a repetition of the situation in the 1930s,
when both mass consumption and investments continued
to decline, until the new Keynesian policies increased
mass consumption and promoted protable investments.
But today, capital-exporting countries prolong the cri-
sis by their sharp cuts in development-aid in a period
where sharply increasing income inequalities also reduce
mass consumption, thus reducing the protability of many
investments.
GLOBALIZATION AND THE MODERN CASTE
SYSTEM
From ancient times, large technological changes have been
accompanied by and followed by fundamental changes
in the economic and political organization of society, in
religion, and secular culture. Adam Smith identied the
process as more and more specialization of labor, while
Marx interpreted it as a gradual change from an original
one-class society, which after a long period of war between
two classes, a rich and a poor one, ended with a lasting
victory for the lower class, that had become the industrial
working class.
But Marxs interpretation of human history was wrong.
Neither before nor after the time of Marx, was human his-
tory a war between two classes; it is much better interpreted
in terms of the Indian multicaste system, if this is modern-
ized by adding the scientic community with its increasing
claim to be accepted as the rst caste. The ancient Indian
system had three upper castes, the priest, the secular power
(army), and the trader, with the rest of the Hindu population
as sudhras , the fourth caste, and the adherents of other
religions as non-caste foreigners .
If we interpret this caste system as a stylized description
of world history, the rst caste: the priest, replaces the
sorcerer as the highest authority, after the shift from the
gatherer to the producer of food, as mentioned earlier.
The next step is a contest of power between the rst
and the second caste, the priest and the king with his
army, a ght for power that, for instance in Europe, lasted
many centuries. It became more complicated when the third
caste, the trader (later: nancier or capitalist) appeared, with
urbanization and monetization, visiting villages as foreign
tradesmen and lending money to the higher castes. The
trader was often himself a foreigner; in Asia, Chinese or
Indian; in Europe, Jewish. Sometimes he was massacred
by caste members. In this period of history the European
church was split into Protestants and Catholics, as explained
by Max Weber.
The next step in the contest between the castes was
democratization. The sudhras became the electorate, thus
becoming legal contestants for power, creating alliances
(nearly everywhere precarious) with one or two of the
higher castes. Finally, we have the struggle between the four
castes and the non-caste foreign group, be that a minority
or a subjugated majority, as was the case in the colonies,
where discriminatory treatment of castes and religions was
a means to retain power.
The distinction between the members of the four castes
and the non-caste group is even more divisive than the
distinction between caste-members, and it explains why
virtually all human societies have been more or less inces-
santly at war either with neighbors or in international or
intercontinental alliances. For a particular people, wars were
the means to become castes if they won, but non-castes
TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY AND ITS RELATION TO GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 95
deep below all others if they lost. The latter brought a
catastrophic decline of status and income, if not of life.
In addition to the three high-caste groups: the church;
the government with its army; and the business world,
modern societies have an additional caste, which like
other castes tends to be hereditary: the scientic commu-
nity distinguished by high-level education and employ-
ment in universities and other scientic or modern business
institutions and enterprises. When the new caste appeared
there was a struggle, as in Iran today, between the new
caste and the rst caste, but it ended most often with a
compromise.
Recently, the scientic caste has become much more
numerous and stronger as a result of the development of
computer technology. It is the beginning of the fundamen-
tal technological change from the industrial to the electronic
age, which has been supported and promoted by the multi-
national companies and by many governments and scientic
institutions.
The future change to the electronic age will bring mass-
communication with English becoming the world language.
This will make it possible for most of the future world pop-
ulation to be informed directly about conicting points of
view of different countries and castes, instead of receiving
only or mainly the propaganda of its own group.
Already today, the spread of knowledge benets from
information in the media from private and public inter-
national and regional organizations, including the ones
focusing on protection of the environment (see Global For -
est Watch, Volume 4). The explosive growth of electronic
information is of particular importance for schools in thinly
populated and in poor regions, where illiterate children (and
adults) can come in direct contact with the world by pic-
tograms (icons) and images instead of being cut off from
globalization by illiteracy.
Another group, which has beneted from the recent
technological changes, are women from the new caste
who have entered high positions by means of personal
achievements or helped by heredity and education.
By its achievements, especially in the natural sciences,
members of the scientic caste have become not only
respected, but also feared by the other castes, the reason
for the latter being that the scientic caste has obtained
spectacular results not only concerning nature, but also
relating to humans, their health and survival. A widely read
book speaks of the risk society, where both rich and poor
are threatened by the risks of modern scientic interference
with human health and food (Beck, 1992).
The temptation is great to reduce cost and time, cut-
ting short the time spent on research and development.
The scientists, the laboratory, the producer, and even the
government would like to be rst to come to market;
thus gaining in prot and honor. But in the past, there
have been disastrous results of insufcient research, like
the tragedy of the deformed Thalidomide-children, and,
more recently, the lack of control with AIDS-contaminated
blood. The damage is often discovered years later, and
is in most cases irreparable. So the general public is
roused to the risks of insufcient research, especially
within genetic technology for food production and medical
care.
The public case for strict control both with exist-
ing and new potentially life-threatening technologies is
strong, and it is imperative that concerned scientists, pro-
ducers, and governments combine their efforts to prevent
misuse and thoughtless behavior.
In the international business community reaction to
increasing globalization of the economy is positive, but that
is not the case with most national governments, which are
hamstrung by strong nationalism, which emerged in the
industrialized countries in the 19th century and in the liber-
ated colonies in the 20th century. With this background of
increasing nationalism, it is not surprising that the meetings
of the United Nations and other international organizations
are often used to voice conicting national interests, instead
of promoting international cooperation as a replacement for
wars.
Many adherents of economic globalization have a neg-
ative attitude to its cultural aspects. People with different
cultures, religions, and customs have come much closer
to one another, both because of immigration, and through
increasing use of computer technology. For many, the reac-
tion to this is negative. Because of nostalgia for the past
and fear of the future, they revive abandoned old beliefs
and customs, be they beliefs in spirits and fortune telling,
customary dress, the patriarchal family pattern, or funda-
mentalist religious practice.
The revival of many shadows of the past, which have
been sources of serious conict, contributes to making the
process of globalization more difcult. But it is not by
returning to old customs of family and co-village prefer-
ences, or of racial prejudices, that the inescapable process
of globalization can be carried out peacefully. In fact, we
live in a period where increasing income differences, both
within and between countries and continents, increase the
risk that desperate individuals or governments will use
the proliferating, more and more efcient, mass-killing
technologies, and that they might succeed in eradicat-
ing all or a large share of humanity, deliberately or by
error.
REFERENCES
Beck, U (1992) Risk Society, Towards a New Modernity, Sage
Publications, London.
Boserup, E (1965) The Conditions of Agricultural Growth. The
Economics of Agrarian Change Under Population Pressure,
Earthscan, London.
96 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Boserup, E (1981) Population and Technological Change. A Study
of Long-term Trends, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Boserup, E (1996) Development Theory: An Analytical Frame-
work and Selected Applications, Population and Development
Review, 22, 505515.
Buck, J L (1937) Land Utilization in China, University of Nanking
Press, Nanking.
Carneiro, R L (1998) Slash and Burn Cultivation Among the
Kuikuru, Anthropologia, Carracas.
Evans, L T (1998) Feeding the Ten Billion. Plants and Pop-
ulation Growth, Cambridge University Press, New York,
145.
Needham, J (1954) Science and Civilization in China, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge.
Relating to Nature: Spirituality, Philosophy, and
Environmental Concern
FREDERICK FERR

E
University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA
Classical Greek philosophy had its origin about 2600 years ago. Human spirituality is much older. No one knows
exactly when our early ancestors began to experience religious awe or fear or ecstasy, but paleontologists nd
evidence of spirituality along with the tools and implements of the earliest remnants of Homo neanderthalensis
as well as Homo sapiens. Burial rites and cave painting strongly suggest that with the rise of our species also
rose deep feelings and comprehensive beliefs, shaping our relations to nature.
The details of prehistoric spirituality must remain a subject for speculation, but it seems likely that tribal
adoption of totem animals in uenced hunting practices, and that religious taboos and fertility festivals were
involved in the invention and carrying on of agriculture. Because the great shift, about 10 000 years ago, from
the mobile hunting gathering life to the settled existence of agriculture, and eventually cities, represents the single
most signi cant change in the human relationship to nature in the entire history of our species; the spiritual
attitudes guiding these practices had enormous signi cance for the environment. Earth worship, Sun worship,
beliefs in spirits inhabiting elds, streams, and trees; ritual inhibitions on eating and mating; and the rise of
shamans and priests, guiding group practices and keeping calendars: all these laid the foundation for deeply
felt attitudes on what was permissible or impermissible in human dealings with the natural environment. Some
of these attitudes may continue to resonate in the present day, almost too deep for notice or discussion.
Vigorous discussion, however, of the alleged huge burden of guilt born by Christianity for sponsoring
damaging environmental attitudes was prompted by a 1967 article by Lynn White, Jr, an eminent historian,
in the magazine, Science. White accused Christian spirituality of undermining reverence for nature by isolating
the holy in a transcendent creator God alone, thus leading to a sharp divide between the sacred and the profane.
European attitudes based on such a spiritual dualism, applied from the middle ages to the present, White asserted,
reduce nature to a mere resource for human use and development. His prescription was to counter a dangerous
spirituality with an environmentally more benign one, also present in the Christian tradition, particularly that of
St. Francis, who saw the sacred in nature all around him and wrote hymns to Brother Sun. As can be imagined,
a variety of theological responses greeted this landmark critique. The debates continue to reverberate (see also
Christianity and the Environment, Volume 5; Ecofeminism, Volume 5; Religion and Ecology in the Abrahamic
Faiths, Volume 5).
Philosophical as well as theological worldviews deeply shape attitudes toward nature. Classical Greek
philosophy struggled with the de nition of the human position in nature, therefore in uencing the sorts of attitudes
deemed appropriate for humans to take toward the environment. These philosophical issues were intimately (and
interestingly) entangled with theological ones in the rst fteen centuries of the Christian era, separating again
in the modern era, during which they have continued to shape the norms of human relations with other creatures,
with matter in general, and with other persons in society. The dominant philosophical modern world picture was
dualistic, with humanity and all values on one side, and the rest of the world, valuable, if at all, only because
humans might value it, on the other. Alternative philosophical views have challenged this dominant picture, but
in the atmosphere generated by the alliance of philosophical dualism with the early modern science of Galileo
and Newton, these challenges have found it extremely dif cult to ourish.
The environmental realities of late 20th and early 21st century modern industrial societies have shown the
urgency of nding ways of relating to nature that will allow both human beings and the rest of nature to thrive.
98 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Hence there are calls for reexamination of the religious and philosophical grounds for the attitudes which
contemporary men and women express in their treatment of nature and each other. The alienation between
culture and nature, mind and matter, value and fact, sacred and profane, transcendent and immanent, needs to
be healed. Assuming that most of the resources for changing any culture from within need to be found among the
de ning achievements of that culture, resources from ancient Greek philosophy, biblical religion, and science will
be especially valuable in any step toward reforming western postmodern environmental attitudes and practices.
But since environmental changes and concerns are global, it will be important that foundations be laid for a
wider ecumenical dialogue with spiritualities and philosophies drawn from non-western cultures as well.
RELIGIOUS POLARITIES OF IMMANENCE
AND TRANSCENDENCE
Although the spiritual beliefs and practices of prehistoric
humans pose many unknowns, there are rich sources of
clues to be found in artifacts left by ancient peoples as
well as in the observed beliefs and practices of recent or
contemporary peoples living in preliterate (in this sense
prehistoric) societies. The latter societies often share much
in common with ancient practices of food production,
hunting, housing, and the like, and may be surmised to
have at least analogous worldviews and attitudes toward
nature.
The earliest religiously signicant artifacts left by ancient
humans and contemporary preliterate societies both indicate
strong attitudinal connections to nature. The sacred is felt
as pervasive through, dwelling fully within, the natural
environment. At one pole, spiritualities of this sort, in which
the sacred is perceived as inside rather than outside the
natural world, can be called spiritualities of immanence
(in-dwelling the opposite of transcendent). Animals are
revered. Hunting and agricultural tribes alike relate in
totemic identi cations with characteristic powers of familiar
species. Statuettes, the Venus gurines dating from the
Upper Paleolithic Period (approximately 25 000 BC), depict
women with exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics,
breasts and buttocks, and are taken to indicate widespread
fertility worship over a large geographical area, including
Europe and Russia. Thousands of gurines of animals, and
stone plaques of animals and people, show how important
nature loomed in prehistoric consciousness. Also from the
Upper Paleolithic (c. 15 000 BC) are cave paintings (e.g.,
at the Lascaux Grotto in South-central France) of animals,
mainly in France and Spain but also in the Urals, probably
created for ritual and magic involved with sustaining herd
populations and with preparations for hunting. These show
intense human interest in and close observation of the
natural environment.
After the rise of agriculture and civilization in the fer-
tile crescent, earlier Great Mother and Earth Mother myths,
preserved in writing by the earliest civilizations of Sumer
and Akkad, trace all natural gods to dei ed female generos-
ity. But male fertility gods were also of great importance
in ancient times. In many Middle Eastern societies the god
Baal played a central role in relating humans to the natural
order. In the mythology of Canaan, he is lord of storms,
thunder, lightning, springs, and moisture in general. One of
his tasks is to ght a major battle with Mot, the god of
death, every seven years. If he wins, humans are assured
seven years of plenty; if he loses, seven years of drought
and famine result. In addition, in an obvious seasonal cycle,
Baal must ght an annual battle with Mot toward harvest
time. Baal always loses this encounter and winter comes,
but his sister, Anath, annually revenges Baal by killing Mot,
thus allowing Baal, and a new growing season, to return to
life. Astarte, sister of Anath and Baal, represents another
important Middle Eastern deity of sex and fertility, as well
as of war. She was worshipped as the primary divinity of
Tyre, Sidon, and Elath but also had important followings
in Akkad, Egypt, and Europe. In Akkad she was known
as Ishtar; in Egypt her name became assimilated to Isis;
in Greece and Rome she was associated with Aphrodite
(Venus), Artemis (Diana), and Hera (Juno); all aspects of
the Great Mother. Aphrodite was patroness of human sex-
uality; Artemis was mistress of the animals, both wild
and domestic; and Hera was matron of all things female,
patroness of breast feeding, comforter of women.
The opposite pole in relating to nature is that of tran-
scendence, in which the sacred (envisioned as dwelling
outside or above the natural universe) is carefully defended
from contact with all this familiar landscape of crops, ani-
mals, war, and babies. In the cultural and religious melting
pot of the eastern Mediterranean region in the second and
rst millennia BC, nomadic Hebrew tribes partly assim-
ilated, partly held themselves apart, in the struggle for
supremacy between these two great attitudinal modes of
relating to nature. As strongly re ected in the Bible, some
of the Hebrews, on adopting agricultural and urban ways
of life, were tempted to add also the worship of Baal and
his fertility-oriented consorts to the worship of El or Yah-
weh, a deity associated with the more ascetic life of tents,
sheep herding, and desert storms. Much to the offense of the
stern supporters of tradition, many Hebrews tried to have
it both ways, seeing the sacred in natural processes and
indulging even in the ritual prostitution and sexual promis-
cuity accompanying agricultural festivals of planting and
harvest.
RELATING TO NATURE: SPIRITUALITY, PHILOSOPHY, AND ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERN 99
Hosea, an early Hebrew prophet during the reign of
King Jeroboam II (786746 BC), had a wife who may
herself have been a temple prostitute, to his great personal
anguish and moral displeasure. Israel, the northern kingdom
of the Hebrew tribes, is condemned by Hosea for likewise
prostituting herself in observing the feasts of Baal, sharing
her favors with paramours other than her true husband, Yah-
weh. Hosea foresees destruction of the northern kingdom,
as punishment for the spiritual promiscuity illustrated by the
fertility rituals he found disgusting. But in a striking oracle
which he acts out, he redeems (buys back) his adulterous
wife from prostitution to indicate that Yahweh, as faithful
husband, will ultimately take back at least a cleansed rem-
nant of the chosen people on whom he has established his
covenant love.
Other prophets, like Amos, Hoseas southern contempo-
rary, thundered against the dilution of religious commitment
to Yahweh represented by Baal-inspired attitudes toward the
immanence of the sacred, and drew primary attention back
to issues of transcendent principles of social justice instead.
Caring for the poor, the weak, the vulnerable, not sacricial
ritual or mere lip service, is where the sacred (what God
ultimately cares for) must be located. Hebrew contempt
for the fertility-related modes of spirituality showed itself
from the time of Hosea and Amos in language as well. Ear-
lier, Baal-terms had been accepted without discomfort. King
Saul (ruled c. 10211000 BC) had a son, Ishbaal. Still ear-
lier, Gideon, the judge, was known also as Jurubbaal. But
Queen Jezebel, a princess of Tyre and Sidon who married
King Ahab (ruled c. 874853 BC), campaigned vigorously
to make worship of Baal exclusive and mandatory, aiming
to replace the worship of Yahweh entirely. This polarized
the atmosphere and afterward led the very name Baal to
be replaced sometimes by the Hebrew word for shame,
boshet. Ishbaal became Ishboshet and Baals sister goddess,
Astarte, was renamed Ashtoreth, a compound of Astarte and
boshet through which the Hebrews expressed their stern dis-
approval for her followers excessive immersion in sacred
immanence.
The textual analysis of the Hebrew Bible is complex
and many layered. But eventually (by around 500 BC) the
priestly tradition, whose authors were responsible for the
creation story with which Genesis begins, absorbed and
afrmed in stirring imagery the prophetic insistence on the
transcendence of God, far above and beyond the realm of
nature, formed as it was out of the chaos of the waters over
which Gods spirit brooded. In later interpretation, this story
was taken to depict the creation of the material universe
out of nothing , so utterly distinct must the creation be
from its transcendent Creator. In parallel, in keeping with
the prophetic ideal, the opposition expressed in the Ten
Commandments against other gods and especially against
graven images , or any likeness of anything that is in
heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is
in the water under the earth , strongly reinforced in early
Hebrew spirituality the refusal to nd the sacred anywhere
in nature but only in the Lord your God, who brought
you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage
(Exodus, 20: 217).
This stern stress on history and justice made for striking
contrast with the morally easygoing emphasis, in competing
spiritualities, on nding the sacred immanent within nature,
whether in animals or in storms or in the Earths fertility.
If the sacred in any worldview is understood as whatever
is considered ultimately valuable, whatever is nally wor-
thy of worship, then Hebrew consciousness came, over
time, to locate the sacred exclusively in the transcendent
God, eternal source of righteousness, standard of justice
for human community, and paradigm of faithfulness to a
covenant made and sustained despite the vicissitudes of his-
tory. Nature was signicant not in itself but mainly as the
non-moral stage upon which the moral dramas of history
could play out.
Coming to this view of nature was a gradual process,
and not without alternatives in the development of Hebrew
spirituality. In Genesis itself stands an alternative cre-
ation story, older than the more familiar priestly story of
Genesis 1. This older story of Genesis 2 depicts a differ-
ent order of creation and a much closer relation between
human beings, animals, and the material order. God cre-
ates the rst man not out of nothing but, rather, out of
dust from the ground (Genesis, 2:7), and creates the
animals afterward as helpers for man, so that he would
not be alone (Genesis, 2:18). The animals all get their
names from their human fellow creature. The power to
give names does recognize the unique gift of language
enjoyed by humanity, but it does not by itself suggest
alienation or domination. Finally, to make a more tting
helper, God makes the rst woman from organic tissue
removed from the man. Differentiated mutuality (different
parts in positive relation) is the mood of this older creation
story.
The later, principal creation story of Genesis 1, in
contrast, does explicitly encourage domination. The rst
humans are commanded both to multiply their numbers and
to subdue all the rest of nature for human use and prot
(see Genesis, 1:28). The moral tone expressed in the verb
subdue by its Hebrew original is not gentle. The same verb,
kabash, is found in violent contexts such as conquering ene-
mies on the eld of battle, or even assaulting a woman by
force (see Esther, 7:8). In this context, the various animals
and plants are explicitly given to humans for rule and con-
sumption. Humans, uniquely made in the image of God
are intended to take dominion (Genesis, 1:26) by the Cre-
ator God himself, standard giver of justice and model of
righteousness. Nature, far from being a locus of immanent
sacred value, is seen instead as made up of things to be
controlled and used.
100 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Within the Judaism and Christianity that grew out of
early Hebrew spirituality, internal tensions can be found
between the attitudes of dominion and those of differen-
tiated mutuality. In Jewish law, animals were sacriced
with good conscience, but, in contrast, farmers were for-
bidden to muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain
(Deuteronomy, 25:4), suggesting attitudes of mutuality and
fair play with animals. In Christianity, Jesus is shown with-
ering a tree with a curse (see Mark, 11:226) and using
a herd of swine as vehicles to send evil spirits over a
cliff into the sea to perish (see Matthew, 8:3033), but
also, in a more tender picture, he is quoted as appreciating
the value of ravens and lilies, though differentiating their
value from that of human beings, which he holds to be far
greater.
Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have
neither storehouse nor barn, yet God feeds them. Of how much
more value are you than the birds!
Also,
Consider the lilies, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin;
yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed
like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass which is alive
in the eld today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how
much more will he clothe you, O men of little faith?
(Luke, 12:24, 2728)
The spiritual development of Western Europe over the
following millennia is complex, inuenced from many
sources, but Christian ambivalence about the natural envi-
ronment continued, with a gradual loss of the sense of
differentiated mutuality. Mystical world denial, inuenced
by strains of philosophical Platonism, drew attention away
from the world of the senses and toward radically tran-
scendent realms of the sacred. In this, Christianity took a
different trajectory from Judaism, which (despite neopla-
tonic subthemes of its own) remained more of the earth,
earthy, with less sharp distinctions between soul and body
than came to typify the medieval Christian worldview.
Even in Christendom, of course, practical work needed
to be done, whether on feudal estates or in monasteries.
But such secular interests were clearly distinct from what
was ultimately important. Practical inventions abounded
in the middle ages, released from restraints that might
have been imposed by religions of immanence. Chris-
tian opposition to the Druids, for example, released the
oak forests of Europe from the protection of Druidic
veneration, transforming sacred groves into sources of
lumber.
These developments, strengthening the dominion atti-
tudes of European Christians, have continued until recent
times, with important reinforcement from modern philos-
ophy and science (see the following section), and they
are still reverberating throughout the industrial civilization
(now worldwide) that traces its roots to Christian Europe.
In America, in the 1960s, some theologians embraced and
celebrated our cultures liberation from entangling spiri-
tualities of immanence, a liberation provided to modern
secular civilization by Biblical stress on the exclusive tran-
scendence of the sacred (Cox, 1966).
THE LYNN WHITE CONTROVERSY
One of the most important single challenges to Christian
self-congratulation on environmental attitudes came in 1967
from a seminal, wide-ranging article published by the
historian, Lynn White, Jr, in the journal, Science (White,
1967). White, a noted expert on the thought and technology
of medieval Europe, pressed a case leading squarely to the
need for deep religious reform as a necessary condition
for any long-term solution to the massive environmental
destruction that humankind, led by western civilization, is
wreaking on nature.
Whites argument begins by noting the enormous impact
the human race has had, and is increasingly having, on
the natural environment, from taming the banks of the
Nile six millennia ago, to the recent Aswan Dam. By
irrigating, overgrazing, deforesting, and the like, humans
have changed the face of the earth from time immemorial.
But now there is a qualitative change. Since the onset
of scientically-led technology, the impact of our race
upon the environment has so increased in force that it has
changed in essence (White, 1967, 1203).
Science and technology, having such explosive powers
when combined, need themselves to be understood if they
are to be controlled. The linkage between them is a strik-
ing historical phenomenon, since for most of human history
science was an elite, aristocratic activity and technology a
lower-class function. Their recent marriage is the extraor-
dinary outcome of the democratic revolutions of Western
Europe, which, by reducing social barriers, tended to assert
a functional unity of brain and hand (White, 1967, 1204).
White continues: Our ecologic crisis is the product of an
emerging, entirely novel, democratic culture. The issue is
whether a democratized world can survive its own implica-
tions. Presumably, we cannot unless we rethink our axioms
(White, 1967, 1204).
The rst step toward this necessary rethinking, for White,
is recognizing that science and technology as we know
them are distinctly occidental. Though science has inher-
ited much of value from other cultures, today, around
the globe, all signicant science is western in style and
method, whatever the pigmentation or language of the sci-
entists (White, 1967, 1204). Equally important, though
less often noticed, is the fact that this leadership (espe-
cially in technology) is not a new phenomenon. In West-
ern Europe, by 1000 AD, at the latest, water power was
used in a variety of industrial processes besides grind-
ing grain; within 200 years, wind power was harnessed
RELATING TO NATURE: SPIRITUALITY, PHILOSOPHY, AND ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERN 101
as well. The technologies of Europe did not excel those
of other civilizations in delicacy but in power. Science,
too, began to ourish in Western Europe much earlier than
the more visible scientic revolutions of Nicolaus Coperni-
cus (14731543) and Galileo Galilei (15641642). Eager
translation of scientic texts from Arabic and Greek into
Latin began in the late 11th century and gained momentum.
By the late 13th century, Europe had seized global scien-
tic leadership from the faltering hands of Islam (White,
1967, 1204).
How shall we account for this extraordinary (histori-
cally unprecedented) scientic and technological dynamism
in Western Christendom? White proposes that the answer
lies in the worldview of Christianity itself, particularly as
interpreted by the theologians and applied by the peas-
ants of Western and Northern Europe. In the terms of the
section on religious polarities of immanence and transcen-
dence, Christian exclusion of the sacred from immanence in
nature freed Europeans to exploit the earth in unprecedented
ways. White illustrates from the technology of plowing.
Early plows, developed in Near Eastern and Mediterranean
regions, where soil is light and dry, did not turn the sod but
merely scratched it. Cross plowing was necessary, but two
oxen were sufcient for such relatively gentle preparations
for planting. In northern Europe, however, where soils are
sticky and moist, another plow was invented as early as the
seventh century. It was
equipped with a vertical knife to cut the line of the furrow,
a horizontal share to slice under the sod, and a moldboard to
turn it over. The friction of this plow with the soil was so great
that it normally required not two but eight oxen. It attacked the
land with such violence that cross plowing was not needed, and
elds tended to be shaped in long strips.
(White, 1967, 1205)
This violence changed the relations between humanity and
the soil in a profound and ominous way.
Formerly, man had been part of nature; now he was the
exploiter of nature. Nowhere else in the world did farmers
develop any analogous agricultural implement. Is it coincidence
that modern technology, with its ruthlessness toward nature, has
so largely been produced by descendants of these peasants of
Northern Europe?
(White, 1967, 1205)
White rejects the idea of coincidence. What people do
about their ecology depends on what they think about
themselves in relation to things around them. Human ecol-
ogy is deeply conditioned by beliefs about our nature and
destiny that is, by religion (White, 1967, 1205). The atti-
tudes behind our current environmental crisis, encouraging
exploitation of nature with no regard to non-human values is
the residue of Christianity, White declares. Especially in its
western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric reli-
gion the world has seen (White, 1967, 1205). Victory over
Druidism and other pagan religions of immanence turns out
to have been double edged: By destroying pagan animism,
Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood
of indifference to the feelings of natural objects (White,
1967, 1205). Linking such attitudes to a passionate inter-
est in natural science, motivated by a desire, as was often
said, to think Gods thoughts after him, meant that modern
western science was cast in a matrix of Christian theology
(White, 1967, 1206). That theology was one of transcen-
dence, not immanence. Thus White draws the following
conclusions:
rst, that viewed historically, modern science is an extrapola-
tion of natural theology and, second, that modern technology
is at least partly to be explained as an occidental, voluntarist
realization of the Christian dogma of mans transcendence of,
and rightful mastery over, nature. But, as we now recognize,
somewhat over a century ago science and technology hitherto
quite separate activities, joined to give mankind powers which,
to judge by many of the ecologic effects, are out of control. If
so, Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt.
(White, 1967, 1206)
Assessing guilt is one thing, suggesting solutions is
something else. White does not believe that supercial
approaches to environmental concerns, mechanical or
cosmetic clean-up xes, will sufce, in view of the depth
of the origins of these problems. But even science and
technology, given their attitudinal and ideological makeup,
are weak reeds. More science and more technology are not
going to get us out of the present ecologic crisis until we
nd a new religion, or rethink our old one (White, 1967,
1206). To this end, White proposes that we ponder the
greatest radical in Christian history since Christ: St. Francis
of Assisi . St. Francis was a Christian who emphasized
immanence.
The key to an understanding of Francis is his belief in the
virtue of humility not merely for the individual but for man
as a species. Francis tried to depose man from his monarchy
over creation and set up a democracy of all Gods creatures.
(White, 1967, 1206)
He held a belief in animal souls: souls with intrinsic value
and worthy of religious salvation.
His view of nature and of man rested on a unique sort of pan-
psychism of all things animate and inanimate, designed for the
glorication of their transcendent Creator, who, in the ultimate
gesture of cosmic humility, assumed esh, lay helpless in a
manger, and hung dying on a scaffold.
(White, 1967, 1207)
With this in mind, and in the conviction that we shall
continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we
reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for
existence save to serve man (White, 1967, 1207), White
proposes that Francis of Assisi should be the patron saint
for ecologists.
Theological response to Whites critique was volumi-
nous, and at times sulphurous. There is no need here to
102 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
cover the blow-by-blow reaction of Christians to the ideas
outlined above, but various general positions can be iden-
tied. It is at least controversial, for example, whether St.
Francis is such a supporter of immanence as White claims.
Are entities in nature sacred in themselves or simply as pre-
cious as gifts from God? Often such arguments are not so
much direct refutations of White as meditations on Chris-
tian spirituality in relation to nature: meditations expressed
in the context of a new sensitivity to environmental con-
cerns stirred in the 1960s and focused by the Lynn White
controversy.
One position, taken by Cox (1966), preemptively cele-
brated all that White deplored. Cox embraced and welcomed
the secularization of nature represented by Judeo-Christian
desacralization of the sacred groves. In so doing, he rec-
ognized that the environment would lose a measure of
protection, at least for a time.
Yahweh, the Creator, whose being is centered outside the
natural process, who calls it into existence and names its
parts, allows man to perceive nature itself in a matter-of-fact
way. It is true, as some modern writers have pointed out,
that modern mans attitude toward disenchanted nature has
sometimes shown elements of vindictiveness.
(Cox, 1966, 20)
But this vindictiveness is a passing phase, Cox argues,
and should not be seen as a necessary part of mature
secularization.
Like a child suddenly released from parental constraints, he
[modern man] takes savage pride in smashing nature and
brutalizing it. This is perhaps a kind of revenge pressed by a
former prisoner against his captor, but it is essentially childish
and is unquestionably a passing phase.
The norm, rather, is quite different. The mature secular
man neither reverences nor ravages nature. His task is to
tend it and make use of it, to assume the responsibility
assigned to the man, Adam (Cox, 1966, 20).
Since this was written shortly before the publication of
Whites essay and cannot be taken as a direct answer to
it, Cox does not attempt to deal with the long, historical
time frame of domination alleged by White. On its defen-
sive side, his position is more focused on recent, obvious
violence done to nature, by the union between secularized
theory and practice that marks late modern western civ-
ilization. But, in addition, Cox launches an offensive, in
keeping with the ancient prophetic stress on social rather
than environmental concerns, against ancient and modern
terrors created by the illicit sacralization of anything natu-
ral. This means that:
we should oppose the romantic restoration of the sprites to the
forest. It may seem pleasant at rst to reinstate the tribal spirits,
but (as Hitler made all too clear) once the Valkyries return,
they will seek a bloodthirsty revenge on those who banished
them.
(Cox, 1966, 31)
Interpreting destructive environmental attitudes as simply
the passing product of human immaturity makes no use of
the Christian doctrine of sin, which could, if deployed here,
account both for the human tendency to ravage nature and
for the revenge of the Valkyries. An alternative position to
Coxs, making sin central, does just this. The French social
critic and theologian, Jacques Ellul, has long condemned
technology (Ellul, 1964). More recently, in the midst of the
Lynn White controversies, though not in direct reference
to it, Ellul returns to the theological fundamentals of the
human relation to nature (Ellul, 1984). The relation, he
argues, was intimate and free in paradise, but after the
primal fall of humanity into sin, the relation to nature is
in all respects distorted and under the rule of necessity.
Both concern for the earth and concern for social justice
are of equal importance to God.
The comparison reveals how much God loves creation with
all that it includes, its variety, its blossoming; and it means
that the ecological destruction is of the order of sin: as
considerable as war, genocide, the exploitation of man by
man, injustice. There is no scale of sin; there is only the
immensity of the love of God from which man claims to
escape, the love which still endures for this creation that we
ravage.
(Ellul, 1984, 152)
And ravage we must. For Ellul,
it is impossible to detach the relationship of man with the
world from his relationship with God. It is no accident that
from the moment when man challenged God (the 18th cen-
tury), the technique of exploiting the world has taken off.
It is no accident that the place where man decided that
there was no God and that nature was purely natural is the
place where the exploitation of the world developed (the
west).
(Ellul, 1984, 153)
Since God and scientic technology are mutually incom-
patible,
conversely, it is no accident that the rst great goal of the
science oriented toward technology was to shake off the restric-
tions of divine tutelage. The effort to afrm science by itself,
without limit, as judge of everything and carrying its own legit-
imization inevitably involved, as the other side of the coin, the
devastation of the world, the squandering of possibilities, the
frenzy of destruction.
(Ellul, 1984, 153)
The faithlessness of Jews and Christians, who were in a
position to understand this and respond with repentance
by setting limits to human aggressiveness, has sealed the
worlds fate. It means that they, and they alone, are
responsible before God, for the disaster in which we are
beginning to live (Ellul, 1984, 154).
Ecological disaster, an inevitability for Ellul, may indeed
be in store, say other theologians, but perhaps a middle way
averting disaster can be found: a way in which humanity can
RELATING TO NATURE: SPIRITUALITY, PHILOSOPHY, AND ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERN 103
play a more positive role tending the Earth with constructive
rather than destructive interventions. The stain of sin, no
matter how deep, must be balanced by the readiness of
God to redeem any situation, no matter how bleak. For
Egbert Schuurman, a Dutch theologian, only this additional
assurance makes the Christian message a Gospel, good
news . Gods grace holds the key to human repentance.
This means that the stubborn pride that currently distorts
human attitudes toward nature and society can at any
moment be melted and a new order instituted. Humans need
above all to pray for a widespread change of heart. Guided
by the right motive, man in his cultural activity can be
a blessing for nature (1 Kings, 4:3334) and at the same
time enter into an open way toward the future (Schuurman,
1984, 117).
Theologians of this middle way, regarding the proper
human attitudes and actions on Earth may not look to
St. Francis as the patron, as Lynn White suggests, but
may prefer another outstanding gure in Christian his-
tory, St. Benedict. St. Francis celebrates unity with nature,
but an ideal Franciscan democracy of all Gods crea-
tures allows little scope for the sort of human leader-
ship, manipulation, and control, that complex civilization
requires.
Compared with St. Franciss deep feeling and sense of union
with the natural world, St. Benedicts response was more prac-
tical, using nature with care and respect. The Benedictine
monasteries combined work and contemplation. They devel-
oped sound agricultural practices, such as crop rotation and
care for the soil, and they drained swamps and husbanded tim-
ber all over Europe. Benedictines were creative in practical
technologies related to nature.
(Barbour, 1980, 25)
PHILOSOPHICAL POLARITIES OF EXCLUSION
AND INCLUSION
It is all very well for theologians to debate whether the
natural environment should be regarded with respect, rev-
erence or brotherly love, but if there are no fundamental
categories available for general public understanding of
how natural objects can be thought to have value at all,
then the link between spiritual guidance and public policy
is severed. This has been the case for most of the mod-
ern period. The outstanding philosophers of the age have
tended to exclude values from any rm locus in nature, and
the civilization whose modern conscience and institutions
were shaped in the general worldview of its intellectual
leaders reects this exclusion in its practices.
Two feuding philosophers, both founding fathers of the
modern worldview, agreed on little else, but did close ranks
against the possibility of values subsisting, in any way,
in nature. Thomas Hobbes (15881679) was a monist, a
materialist who denied that the human soul is anything
more than the reverberations of ne atoms; Rene Descartes
(15961650), in contrast, was a dualist who held that the
soul is absolutely immaterial and free from contamination
by material categories. Both, however, accepted the dis-
tinction, propounded earlier by Galileo Galilei, between pri-
mary and secondary qualities. The former, primary qualities
are the properties of natural objects open to mathematical
description, such as size and shape, weight and momentum,
location and motion. These are held to be characteristics,
actually belonging to the thing in itself. Since they can
be quantied, they can be grasped with precision, under-
stood objectively. The latter, secondary qualities are the
colors, smells, tastes, sounds, and feels of things. They are
changeable, relative to the setting and the condition of the
perceiving organism. They cannot be quantied but can be
described only vaguely by eliciting subjective memories
not everyone shares. They are the source of countless illu-
sions, optical, auditory, and tactile. In extreme cases they
obviously do not belong to things but are merely in the
perceiver.
Galileo gives as an example the capacity of a feather to
tickle. For some people it may have great tickle-power,
but that is to say something about the people, not the
feather. Now this tickling is all in us, and not in the
feather, and if the animate and sensitive body be removed,
it is nothing more than a mere name (Galileo, 1954, 86).
But for Galileo, Hobbes, and Descartes, and through them
for most modern philosophy, this same dependence on the
presence of our animate and sensitive body is manifested
by all the sensory qualities. As Galileo put it, Of precisely
a similar and not greater existence do I believe these various
qualities to be possessed, which are attributed to natural
bodies, such as tastes, odors, colors, and others (Galileo,
1954, 86). From this comes the rst of the great cliches
that virtually every school child has learned from modern
philosophy: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there,
does it make a sound? The standard modern answer, of
course, is no . Physical vibrations in air and earth will
be caused, but without ears and minds to translate those
quantiable vibrations into qualitative crackles and thumps,
there is no sound, strictly speaking.
But if the hues of autumnal leaves are not really in
nature but only in animate and sensitive lookers, and
if the tones of birds are not really in nature but only
in animate and sensitive listeners, then how much more
obviously subjective must be the feelings of approval and
enjoyment that human beings experience while looking
and listening within their environment! From this comes
the second modern philosophical cliche: Beauty is in the
eye of the beholder . This saying can, and must (in this
philosophical framework) be generalized to all values. Just
as beauty is generated by human appreciators, so must
goodness be generated by human judges, and truth be
generated by human thinkers. Nature itself possesses no
such values. It is odorless, colorless, soundless and tasteless
104 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
in itself. The gardenias smell, the sunrises hues, the
brooks burble, and peachs avor are dependent on human
presence. Therefore, it makes no sense to preserve them
from human exploitation or even to respect them along
with humans. It is conceptually unthinkable for them to
have intrinsic value apart from humans; it would be sheer
philosophical confusion to imagine that they could have
standing against human interests, could be addressed with
reverence, or treated with brotherly love.
The immense prestige of the mechanical world picture
created by Isaac Newton (16431727), which incorporated
these key assumptions on the exclusion of qualities, values,
and experience from the basic stuff underlying the nat-
ural world, greatly reinforced earlier views on the inert,
intrinsically valueless character of nature in itself. This
exclusionary world picture was then brought to its logical
climax in the philosophical explosion lit by Immanuel Kant
(17241804), who gave powerful deductive arguments for
the absolute separation of the world we experience, the
world in which we live and in which science works, from
the world as it is in itself. Freedom, morality, knowledge,
God, our own true selves (everything that is genuinely valu-
able) resides in the latter realm, which Kant called the
Noumenal. Whatever can be experienced or even positively
thought belongs to the realm of appearance, which Kant
called the Phenomenal (Kant, 1966). Dignity is deserved
only by moral agents, in Kant s view, and such agents must
exclusively be rational, since morality itself consists in will-
ing actions out of respect for moral lawfulness, and moral
laws can only be recognized and obeyed by rational beings.
Nothing in nature, therefore, can have dignity or (on the
opposite side of the coin) rights. If we refrain from shoot-
ing an old, faithful dog which has served us well, it is not
because the dog has a right to a comfortable retirement,
for the dog cannot judge , but because we should culti-
vate tender feelings as part of our duty to humanity (Kant,
1963, 240).
Later, in the 20th century, philosophers convinced by
Kant (and the main thrust of modern philosophy) that
rights-language has no place in connection with natural
things, but unpersuaded that it is any more possible to
demonstrate by reason alone the foundations of morality
even among human beings, dismissed all values as mere
emotional expressions of preference and aversion (Ayer,
1946, Chapter 6). On this view, such sayings as nature is
intrinsically valuable or we should all respect the dignity
of nature are literal nonsense. There is no way to verify
or falsify such utterances if they are taken as attempting
to make claims about matters of fact that could possibly
be true or false. Any and all experienceable facts would
be equally compatible with them. But if taken instead
as expressions of a speaker s feelings of warmth toward
nature or a wish that others might share such attitudes, the
utterances can be seen to have a function. What they do
not do, however, is describe anything about nature itself,
which stands extralinguistically as a vast realm of actual
or possible appearances capable of con rming or confuting
our hypotheses, and nothing more.
Despite enormous differences in thought-worlds, inter-
esting similarities link this recent philosophical view of
nature to Plato s in the fourth century BC. Things and
the appearances of things are low on the hierarchy of val-
ues for Plato (c. 428 348 BC). When sense experiences
can be uni ed into formal concepts of things, and concepts
can be linked into theories (mathematical and otherwise)
of increasing inclusiveness, there is a corresponding rise
in worth, for Plato, both epistemological and metaphysical.
The natural world of constant change ranks only on the
lower order of mere becoming; the intelligible Forms that
give understanding, in contrast, qualify for the higher order
of true being: changeless, eternal, beautiful. Finally all are
ideally uni ed through the supreme form of the good. Finite
things are not valuable in themselves as changing particu-
lars bound to the cycles of generation and decay, but gain
value only to the degree that they exemplify the eternally
perfect forms that give them meaning.
Plato s rmly exclusionist position, locating all genuine
value outside nature in a higher, immaterial domain, was
an easy t for Christian doctrine in need of a philosophi-
cal framework. There are Platonic themes inside the New
Testament itself, especially in the Fourth Gospel, and dur-
ing the rst three centuries AD, the early Church Fathers
found the transcendence motifs of Judeo-Christian tradi-
tions hospitable to Platonic interpretations (Wolfson, 1970).
Here, as noted in section one, no immanent sacredness in
groves, neither Greek nor Druid, could nd legitimacy. The
interplay between Christian spirituality and Platonic phi-
losophy dominated European consciousness for more than
1000 years, encouraging other-worldly attitudes where ulti-
mate values were at issue, bifurcating nature into a picture
album lled with iconic reminders of eternal realities, on
one level, and a mere warehouse for human exploitation,
on the other.
The exclusion of value from nature is the lead story
of western philosophy, dovetailing nicely with the tran-
scendence of value in dominant western spirituality. Still,
there has all along been an undercurrent of dissent, not
only in religion (as in St. Francis), but also in philosophy.
Plato s most distinguished student, Aristotle (384 322 BC),
dissented at once. Instead of banishing value from the sub-
stances in nature to an independent realm of eternal forms,
Aristotle proposed that we understand natural things as the
inextricable combination of forms with individualizing, spa-
tially locating matter, a hylomorphic (matter form) way of
including all that Plato found valuable, but fully within
the burgeoning domain of change. Living things can then
be seen as working out their own internal Forms, their
natures or essential characters. Their intrinsic teleology
RELATING TO NATURE: SPIRITUALITY, PHILOSOPHY, AND ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERN 105
(explanation of something in terms of the purpose it serves
rather than in terms of its causes) can be fullled or frus-
trated. A tree can be chewed down before it has a chance
to bear fruit, but a beaver can use its trunk and branches
to build a dam in which to house and nurture precious off-
spring. Nature is a domain of competing and cooperating
cycles of individual subjects of lives with intrinsic ends,
norms of development, experiences, and satisfactions. All
living things, for Aristotle, have souls, understood as the
functioning of their innate characters, or forms. Plants have
the powers of nutrition and reproduction and thus have veg-
etative souls; animals have these powers with the additional
capacities of locomotion and sensation, giving them sensi-
tive souls. Human beings have all the previous functions
plus the conscious abilities to calculate and reect, which is
what is meant by rational souls. In every case it is the whole
organism that is functioning in the ways characteristic of its
essential nature: matter and form working together. Partic-
ular beings do not merely exemplify something higher, but
manifest and embody the values of their forms concretely.
Aristotles dissent from Plato was lost to Europe for the
rst millennium of Christian history, but it had been kept
alive in Muslim thinking, and during the 12th century it was
recovered by the West. This recovery, and its assimilation
in the 13th century through the work of great scholastics
like Albert the Great (12001280) and St. Thomas Aquinas
(12241274), severely shook Platonic orthodoxy, but Aris-
totelianism prevailed, overwhelming the universities of the
14th and 15th centuries with the power of its new synthesis.
Unfortunately for Aristotelian inclusionism, however, the
very success of its worldview lured it into triumphalism.
It became rigid and its science, scholastic in the familiar
pejorative sense, the epitome of what modern thinkers like
Galileo, Hobbes, and Descartes scorned as old-fashioned,
reactionary word play. The value-excluding counterattack
of modernity felt fresh and liberating in contrast.
Still, in modern philosophy, as a persistent undercurrent,
value including positions were voiced despite the inhos-
pitable climate. Baruch Spinoza (16321677), in lonely
isolation, worked out a brilliant counter to the dualism
of Descartes and the materialist reductionism of Hobbes.
His solution was to nd God in nature and nature in
God, a pantheism in which everything should be consid-
ered to have innite attributes, of which mind and matter
are only two; though two of great importance to human
beings. Nature, comprising all there is or could be, should
be seen both as determined and created, natura naturata
(nature natured), and as free and self-creating, natura natu-
rans (nature naturing). In both respects, every manifestation
of nature is a mode of manifestation of the underlying
divine substance, the innitely perfect one. Spinoza, hav-
ing been expelled from his synagogue and enjoying few
academic connections as a lens grinder, left no disciples,
though his thought gained popularity in the 18th and 19th
centuries among romantic and counter-cultural thinkers like
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (17491832) or Samuel Tay-
lor Coleridge (17721834).
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (16461716) also argued
against the grain of dominant western philosophy for an
inclusionist position that took a very different shape from
Spinozas. Leibniz, a universal genius who invented sym-
bolic logic and co-discovered the calculus with Isaac New-
ton, developed a highly pluralistic worldview in which
the elements of everything in nature are to be seen (as
in Spinozas universe as a whole) with dual aspects of
materiality and mentality. These ultimate monads (any ele-
mental unit, like a soul) have experience and value, even if
only dimly, for themselves. There are many different grades
of monad, including human consciousness but in principle
stretching high above and far below throughout the uni-
verse of things. Each manifests its own internal essence,
much as Aristotelian living substances do. On Leibnizs
theory of substance, there can be no direct relations among
the monads, but all are coordinated by the creator God,
whose perfection entails that only the best one of all the
possible worlds that might have been created was actually
realized. Leibniz in his time made few disciples. Excluded
from the intellectual establishment represented by the Royal
Society of London, he, too, had to await the 19th century
for rediscovery and appreciation.
Other philosophers, notably Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel (17701831) and Henri Bergson (18591941) labo-
red to develop conceptual frameworks, in which nature
could be thought to include its own rich palette of values,
and these philosophers and others developed strong fol-
lowings, especially outside the circles of thought in which
the methods and presumptions of modern science are taken
for granted as authoritative. But these have always been
views struggling to breathe in the atmosphere created by
modern western culture, whose dominant religion, science,
and mainstream philosophical tradition all work to smother
ways of thinking that would include values directly in
nature. The western industrial machine, if it is to be coun-
tered or transformed by modes of thought and spirit, has
not yet met its match.
BALANCING THE POLARITIES
Although machines are the embodiment of ideas and atti-
tudes, knowledge and goals, it is true that once they are
embodied, they are not easily stopped by ideas and atti-
tudes alone. So it is that the rapacious western industrial
machine, now worldwide, is likely to require a special con-
vergence of circumstances, both physical and mental, before
it can be tamed to the requirements of environmental good
citizenship. In part, this convergence actually began in the
latter part of the 20th century, when industrial civilization
began to choke on its own runaway excesses. Pollution of
106 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
air, soil, and water, depletion of nonrenewable resources,
desecration of precious beauty, distortion of social fairness
between haves and have-nots: all these can be seen as
plainly predictable outcomes of the modern system, not
ukes, and thus they urgently require rethinking of the
ideas, and adjusting the attitudes, that went into design-
ing the industrial machine in the rst place. In this spirit
Lynn White cast around for an alternative religious hero
for Christians, offering St. Francis as inspiration. Had there
been no environmental crisis, no pollution disasters, no
species extinctions, no fears of still greater horrors ahead,
there would have been no need to search for blame or to
seek new spiritualities. But practical exigencies have in fact
arisen, preventing reliance on the status quo. They call in
question even powerful orthodoxies, which in the absence
of crises might have remained unchallenged. The prestige
of science and technology, now recognized as contributing
to the problem, is not enough to quiet the challenge. Some-
thing profound has gone wrong. Perhaps the atmosphere of
the 21st century may be more hospitable to deep ideational
reforms offering more comprehensive thinking, ner spir-
ituality, and healthier ways of conducting practical life on
the Earth.
The practical cash value of the polar clash between reli-
gions of transcendence and those of immanence comes
down to the question whether the human race should con-
duct its business with nature as from above or from within
the environmental order. The spiritualities of transcendence
offer justications for the former; spiritualities of imma-
nence provide support for the latter. Each speaks with
power to shape attitudes and policies. Is there any hope of
nding a position of balance where the dynamics offered
by the two poles can both be incorporated? Such balance
has not often been sought. Even if this position were to
be found, actual religions would need to make potentially
painful internal adjustments to incorporate it. But perhaps
the urgencies of the present historical situation could make
the early 21st century an era of rare openness to just such
religious growth and change.
Doing justice to the deep intuitions supporting human
transcendence over nature without opening the door to
heedless species chauvinism should be possible if actual
human capacities are afrmed without indulging in the prej-
udicial snobbery that has too often distorted the afrmation.
Human beings actually are different in profoundly signi-
cant ways from anything else found in nature. Nothing else
in the known natural universe can approach human capac-
ities for conceptual freedom. Normal adult humans can
manipulate linguistic symbols to take account of possible or
actual states of affairs far remote from actual circumstances.
Language allows humans to consider distant places ( across
the mountains ) and remote times ( when Grandfather was
a little boy , or next spring, at planting season ) and weave
detailed tapestries of thought out of insubstantial ideas. This
capacity allows the development of long-term purposes and
the fashioning of implements designed to achieve them.
In this quite obvious way, human beings transcend the
here and now of nature. Even highly intelligent non-human
species do not come close to exhibiting human freedoms of
dealing thoughtfully with what is not real and may never be
real. In fact, one of the crucial ways in which humans use
their transcendence over natures here-and-now is to pre-
vent the actualization of unpleasant possibilities envisaged
in thought and therefore countered. An equally crucial way
of using transcendence is by long-range planning of com-
plex desired outcomes that could never have become real
without the steady application of purpose.
Dreaming of distant futures and choosing between them,
effectively harnessing present resources to achieve ideas
and actualize outcomes: these are the basis for another
sort of transcendence of nature, the transcendence of moral
responsibility. Rocks slide and cause damage but are not
responsible because they were only following the laws of
physics and could have done nothing else under the given
circumstances. Likewise predators kill but are not respon-
sible. What they do is not deliberately chosen. Instincts
rened by natural selection come into play as the ani-
mal responds, sometimes intelligently but always in ways
restricted to the here-and-now of environmental circum-
stances. Human beings, in contrast, free to consider alter-
native possibilities in some detail and to choose which one
to bring into actuality after (at least sometimes) extensive
thought and sustained effort, transcend the rest of nature by
carrying the burden of responsibility for outcomes deliber-
ately achieved. The rest of nature operates by caused causes
and cannot be blamed. Only human beings are inuenced
by norms and ideals (for better or worse) and can be held
to account for their actions. If humans did not transcend
nature in this way, there would be no point in appealing
for improved environmental policies. One does not appeal
to stratospheric ozone to reverse trends for the good of the
climate, or urge deer to stop reproducing for the good of
their habitat; but one may appeal to humans, on behalf of a
larger envisaged good, to sacrice some of their short-term
interests or even to curb their appetites. And sometimes
these appeals may be heeded, translated into action. Those
who say that humans are no different from the rest of nature
would in logic need to quiet their preachments. But of
course preachments and appeals to conscience and ideals
continue, appropriately, since humans do transcend nature
in being morally responsible agents.
In these special capacities, for ying conceptually above
the here and now, for taking account of the remote future
and considering which of various envisaged possibilities
should be realized, for implementing deliberate purposes,
for knowing the self as morally responsible agent and as
precious center of awareness destined to die, we discover
the special joys and pains of personhood. The spiritualities
RELATING TO NATURE: SPIRITUALITY, PHILOSOPHY, AND ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERN 107
of transcendence, it seems, give voice to the justied
awareness of the special value, the unique dignity, that
goes with being a human person. So understood, this is
far from a license to rape the rest of nature. It is, instead,
the acknowledgment of special burdens and an invitation
to unique satisfactions.
Though unique in these ways (the ways in which human
beings are persons) our human species is by no means
unique in the multitude of ways in which we are organ-
isms. The spiritualities of immanence, stressing the intense
and comprehensive values of immersion in nature, are obvi-
ously correct in stressing continuities and their profound
importance. Our bodies, like those of most living species,
both animals and plants, are sexually reproduced; and this is
good. The fertility festivals and orgiastic rites of early reli-
gions of immanence celebrated the sacredness of natures
creativity, the urge to multiply and swarm, fructifying and
lling every niche. Human bodies are made of meat and
need nourishment. Metabolism reigns in us, as in all other
forms of life. Food, water, air in adequate quantity and qual-
ity, are necessities for us as for all other living things in
nature. The harvest festivals and hunting rituals associated
with the spiritualities of immanence celebrate sacredness in
domains of undeniably vital signicance.
The Hebrew prophets, stressing the personalistic values
above all (moral faithfulness, purity, justice) were offended
by the organismic values they saw being venerated in
prosperous agricultural Canaan. There were cultural and
historical reasons for the revulsion of the prophets against
the city-dwelling Canaanites. But there seems no logi-
cal requirement that we adopt the either/or attitudes they
preached. Rejoicing in fertility need not be done unjustly, to
the detriment of widows and orphans or against the interest
of the powerless. On the contrary, acknowledging the conti-
nuities between our organic constitution and those of other
animals, afrming the networks of relations between all ani-
mals and plants and the inorganic environment that supports
the lives of all; these tributes to organicism are compatible
with recognizing the unique values of personhood.
Perhaps, if we were to speculate about the spiritual and
ecological needs of the future, we should try to work out
a new position, we could call it personalistic organicism, a
viable spirituality that could live creatively in the dynamic
tension between the poles of transcendence and immanence.
If we could establish such a point of balance, then ecologi-
cally sensitive moral agents, enabled to feel and appreciate
vital natural connections between humanity and all other
life forms (immanence) through uniquely powerful personal
norms (transcendence), might be liberated to seek social and
ecological justice without sacrice of either aspect to the
other.
This is not the place for the detailed working out of
this project, which has been undertaken elsewhere (Ferre,
1996, 1998, 2001). There is no reason in principle, however,
against hoping that the polar opposition between images
of transcendence and immanence can be balanced in some
yet more inclusive mode of spirituality. Can a synthesizing
worldview, such as personalistic organicism, also hope to
balance the theoretical tensions between the philosophies
of exclusion and inclusion?
The great strength of philosophies arguing for the exclu-
sion of values from nature has been the argument from
the necessary subject-dependence of value. Beauty is in
the eye of the beholder , or some variant of this modern
mantra, is hard to deny. What could beauty be, if entirely
divorced from the possibility of any appreciator? Just as
pain (or Galileos tickle) makes no sense apart from sub-
jective awareness, so beauty and like values cannot be
understood without ultimate reference to some center of
appreciation or valuation. No purpose without a purposer;
no love without a lover; no value without a valuer. Values
have to be valued by some valuer to be real. The case is
strong. Objective circumstances may be perfectly suited for
grounding a joyful experience of beauty, but if the expe-
rience never occurs, those unrequited circumstances alone
will not be enough to count as beauty itself.
This much can be agreed. Such agreement, however, does
not force the conclusion that nature has no values of its
own. The inclusion of values in nature can simultaneously
be afrmed by expanding the scope of subjectivity. Kant
was right in stressing the centrality of mind, but wrong
in dening mind too narrowly in terms of rationality, in
which human persons stand out from the rest of nature.
Modern philosophy in its main tradition has been deeply but
mistakenly anthropocentric in assuming that only human
beings are subjects in the relevant sense of the word. No
one present , in this constricted thought frame, tends to
mean no human at hand. If the old saw about the tree
falling in the forest were reframed, however, in terms
of sentient organisms, there would be a much richer and
more nuanced answer. Squirrels, bears, birds, rabbits, deer
(perhaps spiders and earthworms, too) would detect the
crash and react, each in its own way. Similarly, if subjects
(dened as at least dimly aware centers of experience)
were to be acknowledged throughout nature, there could be
no doubt that qualities too are rmly woven into natures
fabric. Hummingbirds and bulls distinguish and appreciate
the quality, red, in different ways. These appreciations,
positive and negative, are facts about nature but also facts
about how valuing is active in nature. Since butteries and
bees are drawn to attractive visual appearances and odors,
for example, natural selection among owers has run riot
in sponsoring competitive beauty contests. Throughout in
the air, on the land, deep in the sea the attractions
and repulsions of positive and negative valuations are an
obvious dynamic of nature.
Thus, since practical ethics nally rests on the felt obli-
gation to show appropriate respect to quality and value, of
108 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
whatever kind, wherever found, a worldview recognizing
subjective valuings beyond the human, will gain a rm basis
for thinking through and proclaiming human duties, owed
directly to entities in nature as well as to fellow human
centers of value. Broadening the scope of subjectivity can
balance the polarities between the truths of exclusion (only
subjects, not inert objects, can ground value) and the truths
of inclusion (subjects are everywhere). But this can happen
only if the great divide, mistakenly fostered by Kantian
anthropocentrism, is successfully challenged.
As one such challenger, personalistic organicism, stress-
ing the continuities beneath the differences between entities
in nature, will recognize alliances with other philosophies
of continuity. Aristotles stress on the innate teleologies of
things, that they seek goods of their own and have their
own fulllments, will be an important insight to retain.
Spinozas and Leibnizs view that all things have inter-
nality, a mind-like character, will be another. Also alert to
new data and theories, personalistic organicism will stress
a postmodern physical understanding of the energetic, self-
organizing universe that increasingly, through much of the
20th century, was revealed by science. Not the inert parti-
cles of Newton and Kant, but the dynamic wave-events of
21st century physics, interpreted as moments of extremely
simple experience, will offer personalistic organicism an
inspiring model for the basic elements of the vibratory uni-
verse (Whitehead, 1925). These, as they creatively wrestle
actuality out of potentiality, are natures minimum units
of value, both in themselves and for others (Whitehead,
1976).
On such a postmodern speculative vision, responsive
both to dynamic science and to balanced spirituality, a
postmodern ecumenical dialogue is conceivable between
religions and philosophies, East and West, on new ways
to cooperate in the quest for social justice among persons
and for moral consideration of the Earth.
REFERENCES
Ayer, A J (1946) Language, Truth and Logic, 2nd edition, Victor
Gollancz, London.
Barbour, I G (1980) Technology, Environment, and Human Val-
ues, Praeger, New York.
Cox, H (1966) The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization
in Theological Perspective, 2nd edition, Macmillan, New York.
Ellul, J (1964) The Technological Society, translated by John
Wilkinson, Vintage, NY, originally published as La Tech-
nique ou lEnjeu du Si` ecle, (1954), Librarie Armand Colin,
Paris.
Ellul, J (1984) The Relationship between Man and Creation in
the Bible, translated by W Deller and K Temple, in Theology
and Technology: Essays in Christian Analysis and Exegesis,
Vol. 73, eds C Mitcham and J Grote, University Press of
America, Lanham, originally published (1974) as Le Rapport
de lHomme a la Creation Selon la Bible, Foi et Vie, 137155.
Ferre, F (1996) Being and Value: Toward a Constructive Postmod-
ern Metaphysics, State University of New York Press, Albany,
NY.
Ferre, F (1998) Knowing and Value: Toward a Constructive Post-
modern Epistemology, State University of New York Press,
Albany, NY.
Ferre, F (2001) Living and Value: Toward a Constructive Post-
modern Ethics, State University of New York Press, Albany,
NY.
Galileo (1954) Opere, in Metaphysical Foundations of Modern
Physical Science, Vol. IV, ed E A Burtt, Doubleday, Garden
City, 333.
Kant, I (1963) Lectures on Ethics, translated by Lewis Ineld,
Hackett, Indianapolis, IN.
Kant, I (1966) Critique of Pure Reason, translated by M Muller.
Doubleday, Garden City, New York.
Schuurman, E (1984) A Christian Philosophical Perspective on
Technology, in Theology and Technology: Essays in Christian
Analysis and Exegesis, eds C Mitcham and J Grote, Univer-
sity Press of America, Lanham, originally published (1980) as
Technology in a Christian-Philosophical Perspective, Potchef-
stroom University, Potchefstroom, South Africa.
White, Jr, L (1967) The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,
Science, 155(3767), 12031207.
Whitehead, A N (1925) Science and the Modern World, Macmil-
lan, New York.
Whitehead, A N (1976) Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmol-
ogy, corrected edition, eds D R Grifn and D W Sherburne,
Free Press, New York.
Wolfson, H (1970) The Philosophy of the Church Fathers, 3rd
edition Harvard, Cambridge, MA.
Social Science and Global Environmental
Change
STEVE RAYNER
1
AND ELIZABETH L MALONE
2
1
Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
2
Pacic Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA
The descriptive tradition in the social sciences, which tends towards quantitative methods of tracing stocks and
ows of social data through time and space, has been seen as more useful in mainstream global environmental
research that relies on natural science methods and models. The interpretive tradition has been relegated largely
to the sidelines, with its concerns to understand motivations, ideas, and values, and its frequent analytic focus
on narrative and text.
The descriptive approach derives much of its strength from simplifying assumptions about complex behaviors
and tends to assume homogeneity of human responses to price signals. It therefore is often used for large-
scale analyses. In contrast, the interpretive approach emphasizes variation and complexity, sometimes to the
point of resisting simpli cation on principle. It therefore tends to produce local and disaggregated analyses.
Descriptive researchers tend to see themselves as outside observers and to make utilitarian assumptions;
interpretive researchers see themselves as participants in their studies and often assume individual rights-based
ethics.
These are differences in kind that are both essential to research in global environmental change. For example,
descriptive approaches have revealed much about what would happen under various scenarios of climate change,
but interpretive approaches can provide value-related parameters as a basis for choosing among candidate
policies.
Collaborative research that includes both descriptive and interpretive approaches has been carried out in
studies of actual decision-making, which is a social-political process, not a rational, utility-maximizing one; and
in mutual learning systems that incorporate models and negotiation. Further collaborations among researchers
from both traditions and policymakers can help to bridge the current gap between industrialized and less
industrialized countries, to expose assumptions that can improve decision making under uncertainty, and to
make policy decisions more implementable and effective (see Box 1).
TWO STYLES OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
Social science in general is characterized by a long-
standing gulf between two traditions or styles of anal-
ysis. One is the descriptive tradition, that identies and
traces stocks and ows of population, goods, services,
wealth, and information, through time and space. Statis-
tical modeling is an important tool in this approach. The
other is the interpretive tradition, that seeks to under-
stand the motivations, formation of ideas, sources of val-
ues, the creation and interpretation of information, and
the development of shared understanding as the basis for
the conduct of discourse and human actions in society.
Focus on text and narrative is a frequent focus of this
approach.
Because the two approaches are so different in kind, there
has traditionally been little cross-fertilization between them.
Models in both kinds of social science are simplications
intended to enable analysis of more complex cases. Simpli-
cations tend to be more accepted in quantitative models; in
qualitative models, they may be seen as mere stereotypes.
Descriptive models, which tend to be mathematical or quan-
titative, are incomplete in that they cannot account for the
full variety of behavioral variations among diverse human
populations. Interpretive models, which tend to be verbal
or qualitative, are also incomplete in that they are seldom
capable of powerful generalization from case studies.
Public policy makers and private sector decision-makers
tend to favor the descriptive style of analysis because
it usually provides quantitative information that can be
110 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Box 1 The Two Approaches to Social Science
Analyses of Global Environmental Change
The descriptive tradition:
Quantitative book-keeping of stocks and ows of
social data
Assumes homogeneity in human responses over
large areas
Models global change as a series of interconnected
big boxes
Research agendas usually set by natural scientists
The interpretive approach:
Emphasis on dening problems, rather than solv-
ing them
Seeks to understand motivations, sources of val-
ues, interpretation of information
Studies are most frequently undertaken at small
spatial scales and results are often disaggregated
Research agendas set by social scientists
represented as an objective basis for an organization s
decision making, independent of the judgment of any par-
ticular decision-maker.
In the social science of global environmental change,
the gulf between descriptive and interpretive approaches
is exacerbated by the heavy reliance of global environ-
mental science on models designed to represent the stocks
and ows of resources and pollutants in an environmen-
tal medium, such as land, the atmosphere, or the ocean.
These models can be made to interface with the models of
economic growth and resource use that are typical of social
science in the descriptive mode.
Opportunities for social science collaboration in major
international scienti c research programs addressing global
environmental change, such as the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC), have been largely focused on
extending the framework already established by the natural
sciences. For climate change, that framework consists of a
four-box conceptual model: quanti ed emissions of green-
house gases, atmospheric chemistry, climate and sea level,
and ecosystems. Within this framework (Figure 1), the
social sciences provide highly aggregated data on human
activities leading to greenhouse gas emissions. These data
can be used to drive natural science models of global atmo-
spheric chemistry and physics. In turn, the natural sciences
aim to model climatic impacts on managed and unman-
aged ecosystems upon which humans depend. At this point,
social scientists are invited to project the outcomes of these
changes for large-scale patterns of agricultural and indus-
trial activity, stimulating macroeconomic and technological
responses, which, in turn, may eventually alter anthro-
pogenic emissions estimates. The outputs of such research
are presented as data: grist to the decision-maker s mill. The
same framework shapes the bulk of research undertaken
within the international social science programs of climate
and other global environmental change research, such as the
Human Dimensions Programme of the International Social
Science Council, which emphasizes stocks, ows and driv-
ing forces of change, particularly in relation to land use and
the industrial metabolism of society.
Atmospheric
chemistry
Atmospheric composition Climate and sea level
Energy
system
Other human
systems
Agriculture,
livestock and
forestry
Coastal
system
Terrestrial
carbon cycle
Unmanaged
ecosystem
Crops and
forestry
Hydrology
Climate
Ecosystems Human activities
Ocean
carbon cycle
Ocean
temperature
sea level
Figure 1 Elements of the climate change problem (Source: Watson et al., 1996)
SOCIAL SCIENCE AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 111
Even though the style of social science emphasized in
these programs seems quite compatible with the cyclical
framework postulated by the natural sciences, there has
been signicant concern about the issue of bridging the
gap between natural and social sciences, a gap that is
invariably taken for granted and associated with much hand
wringing. Much is often made of the differences between
the two intellectual traditions, exemplied in the distinction
between the experimental tradition (including bench or
laboratory science) and the study of human nature and the
history of ideas.
The comparisons inevitably nd the social sciences want-
ing with respect to the characteristics of theoretical consen-
sus about fundamentals, measurability and phenomena and
computability of relationships among them, and precision
and accuracy of prediction. The explanations for these dif-
ferences range from the charitable observation that social
behavior is inherently more complex than the behavior of
natural systems to the less charitable assertion that the social
sciences are younger and, thus, less mature than natural
science.
Since Snows (1959) classic essay on the two cultures,
we have become accustomed to the idea that the intellec-
tual landscape bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment is
bisected by a major fault line. But, the most signicant
fault does not, in fact, fall between the natural and the
social sciences. Indeed the conceptual and methodological
approaches of modeling the behavior of demographic and
macroeconomic systems are essentially indistinguishable
from those employed to model changes in the atmosphere
or in ecosystems. The signicant intellectual rupture falls
right in the middle of the social sciences, one side of
which blends seamlessly with natural science while the
other side ultimately merges into the humanities. In debates
about global environmental change, this rupture means that
some social science research has been used while other
research, though relevant and potentially useful, has not
been employed in either formulating the issues or address-
ing them.
THE DESCRIPTIVE APPROACH
The descriptive approach primarily uses inventories and
accounting systems for the stocks and ows of people,
money, raw materials, commodities, and pollutants. For
example, Figure 2 depicts human driving forces, land use,
and land cover as discreet units that interact with each other
in much the same ways that software modules interact.
The descriptive tradition in social science derives from the
empirical philosophy underlying natural science descrip-
tions, specically Newtonian science. Newtonian science
is based on the belief that the mind learns everything from
what is evident to the senses. English empiricist philoso-
phers, following Locke (16231704), postulated that the
human mind is a tabula rasa (clean slate) upon which
the external world is accurately reected (Locke, 1690).
The radical empiricist David Hume (17111776) claimed
that all knowledge derives from sensory experience. It has
become almost a cliche to observe that Humes philosophy
is a Newtonian science of Man. Newtonian thermodynamic
determinism is the background of the descriptive tradition
in the social sciences.
This approach developed among scholars concerned with
wealth, trade, and population in the century following New-
tons (16421724) formulation of the laws of thermody-
namics and Harveys (15781657) description of the circu-
lation of the blood. Indeed, Francois Quesnay (16941774),
the key gure among the physiocratic economists of pre-
revolutionary France was also the royal physician. He
drew explicitly upon Harveys physiology in describing the
economy. His Tableau Economique, published in 1758, is
generally considered to be the rst schematic description of
an entire economy. The physiocratic models departed from
previous thinking about the economy in that they did not
invoke human choice, desire, and intention to explain the
behavior of the economic system. Instead, attention focused
on the characteristic operations of the system, i.e., what can
be observed and measured.
A generation later, Ricardos (17721823) model of the
economy also elides human intentions (Gudeman, 1986,
45). His concept of the individual is not explicitly elab-
orated, but the actors in his model, whether landowners,
capitalists or laborers, lack intentionality. Ricardos view
of the human is exemplied by his difference with Malthus
(17661834) over Says Law, according to which sup-
ply creates its own demand. For Malthus, demand is not
a mechanistic response to supply, because it is made up
of both the power and the will to purchase. But Ricardo
(1814, VI : 133), foreshadowing the declaration of the apoc-
ryphal Madison Avenue advertising executive, If we make
it, theyll buy it! maintained that the will is very seldom
wanting where the power exists . Variable tastes and chang-
ing desires were not part of Ricardos image of the human.
Ricardos model moved even further away from concern
with human intentions than those of the physiocrats by his
use of a mathematical schema, which emphasizes form at
the expense of content. After Ricardo, economic models
took on the mechanical characteristics of closed thermody-
namic systems or mass-balance equations.
Following in the steps of the physiocrats and Ricardo,
the descriptive approach relies heavily on the ability to
count, weigh, and measure things such as numbers of
people, industrial productivity, or degrees of wellbeing.
This aspect has led some commentators (e.g., Robinson and
Timmerman, 1993) to describe the descriptive method as a
physical ows approach. However, less tangible elements,
such as beliefs and values, can also be represented in the
descriptive method as counts of the number of people
112 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Studies of
social drivers
Decision systems
analysis
Biogeochemical
assessments
Population
Regional
climate/chemistry
Human aspirations Land assessments
Needs
and
wants
Culture
Soil Water
Vegetation Nutrients
Geography
and climate
Air
chem.
Pollution
transport
Regional
climate
Global cycles
G
l
o
b
a
l
R
e
g
i
o
n
a
l
L
o
c
a
l
Global political economy
Politics Economics
Macro decision system
Markets
Social/
cultural
structure
Public policy
Political
Consumption Production
Carbon
cycle
models
Climate
models
Emissions
models
Atmos.
chem.
models
Micro decision system
Figure 2 The stocks and ows approach of the descriptive paradigm (Source: Rayner et al., 1994)
professing them, e.g., mass survey research or analyses
of voting behavior. Knowledge and values converted to
quantities in this way can therefore be accounted for as
stocks and ows.
The descriptive approach has several advantages. The
results of descriptive social science investigations are able
to draw on the legitimacy of the natural sciences, by
mirroring the scientic method and the thermodynamic
paradigm. Counting and measuring can provide insight into
the scope and severity of a problem or locate probable
causes among many candidates. Descriptive analysis can
compare various pathways from the standpoint of economic
efciency. Its simplifying assumptions and equations can
lay out large problems and render them more tractable. And,
nally, because the descriptive approach deals primarily
with tangibles, it provides a basis for control; e.g., counting
tons of fossil fuel used can provide a basis for a tax scheme
that will limit the number of tons burned. This approach is
typical of economics and demography as well as much of
(American) quantitative sociology, behavioral psychology
and quantitative political science.
The descriptive approach in social science and its pre-
eminent place in policy analysis arose as part of the larger
intellectual effort to devise technologies that could enhance
the rational management of nature and society by the
emerging modern state. Headrick (1990, 59) points out
that, As early as the seventeenth century (governments)
encouraged the increase in knowledge of and power over
SOCIAL SCIENCE AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 113
nature . Headrick lists examples, such as the patent system
introduced in England in 1623 and the founding of sci-
entic societies throughout the 17th and 18th centuries.
This was the prelude to a massive increase in the rate of
global resource extraction. He continues, Insofar as tech-
nology is knowledge of nature and how to manipulate it for
human ends, it follows that countries with the most infor-
mation are also the most able to develop their economies
and transform the land (Headrick, 1990, 59). The social
science technologies of the same period included the new
eld of statistics, which emerged in the mid-18th century
as the practice of inventorying the resources of the state.
Merchant (1990, 682) eloquently describes the contribution
of the descriptive paradigm to the development of modern
political, commercial, and industrial power:
When mapped by explorers and cartographers, catalogued
and inventoried by militarists and computer scientists,
(nature) is controlled by an eye of power and subject to
unlimited surveillance. Foucaults model of the panopticon of
Jeremy Bentham, in which an entire prison can be surveyed
from a single central tower, translates to the concept of a
cultural overseer.
This stance has been variously described as the separation
of the subject from the object, Man/Nature dualism, and
instrumentalism. As Latour (1986, 29) observes:
we can work on paper with rulers and numbers, but still
manipulate three-dimensional objects out there . Distant or
foreign places and times can be gathered in one place in a form
that allows all the places and times to be presented at once.
Thus, the descriptive tradition in both natural and social
science separates us from nature and society while provid-
ing us with a signicant level of control over them. For
example, this power is highly concentrated in the computer
models that we currently use for tracking materials ows
and their consequences in both environmental science and
macroeconomics, for example, general circulation models
of climate and general computable equilibrium models of
the economy.
Like all sources of power, this one comes with a price
tag; separation of knowledge from the knower. The devel-
opment of the modern industrial state relied on strategies
of control, and modes of mapping, tabulation, recording,
classication, and demarcation. These increasing levels of
control over nature meant also increasing separation from
experiences that should be part of the decision-making pro-
cess. Faced with disembodied parcels of descriptive facts,
decision-makers may become more and more isolated from
experience of how myriad decisions transform production
and consumption at the level of the community, the rm,
and the family. For example, in debates about the cost
effectiveness of climate change mitigation measures, the
hardships of poor people in environmentally marginal areas
(deserts, coasts) may be hidden in world gross domestic
product (GDP) statistics. For climate change policies, this
has been a source of the disjoint between cost effective
strategies and effective implementation.
Furthermore, the descriptive method is epistemologically
realist. The meaning of belief and value structures and
the ways in which they are constituted, reproduced, trans-
formed, and translated into action in social life are treated as
unproblematic in this approach. Inquiry into these is rmly
located outside of the descriptive method within what we
refer to as the interpretive method.
THE INTERPRETIVE APPROACH
In contrast, the interpretive method focuses on understand-
ing the meaning that human agents create in the conduct
of social life, upon which they build their understanding of
their world, and through which they seek to act upon that
world. Thus the interpretive method focuses on the nature of
experience, the structure of perceptions, the recognition of
interests, and the development of frameworks for collective
action.
Because these factors often elude quantication, the
interpretive method has often been characterized as qualita-
tive social science, contrasted with quantitative approaches
that we describe as the descriptive method. However, we
eschew this particular distinction between the two traditions
for three reasons:
1. Interpretive social science need not be qualitative
(some practitioners having devised sophisticated meth-
ods to quantify phenomena that are not as obviously
susceptible to counting as heads or barrels).
2. The quantities in descriptive analyses are, in any case,
often a numerical representation of a qualitative judg-
ment on the part of the analyst rather than an empirical
quantity.
3. The distinction between quantitative and qualitative
measurement is actually rather fuzzy (for example,
dresses may be sold as small, medium, and large or
as sizes 216).
The distinctions between descriptive and interpretive
approaches can be rather fuzzy, as well. In fact, within
the interpretive approach a researcher can take data of
all kinds, quantitative and qualitative, and make coherent
meanings that can be used to devise workable arrangements,
to effectively address problems, and to set up usable pro-
cess frameworks. For example, anecdotal and case study
evidence can be used to supplement or supplant statisti-
cal data. And, of course, the descriptive approach usually
includes some interpretive analysis, e.g., in the discussion
following the presentation of results and in the conclusions
and recommendations of technical reports.
The interpretive tradition in social science emphasizes
the essentially social character of the operation of the
114 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
human mind. The interpretive method is strongest in
history, cultural anthropology, and (European) qualitative
sociology. Interpretive analyses of various kinds of global
environmental change have addressed the framing of the
problem as well as issues of stakeholder involvement,
sociocultural values, the nature and production of knowl-
edge, and policy implementation (research and development
investment, technology selection and diffusion, etc.).
The interpretive tradition derives from philosophical dis-
cussions about how human beings acquire knowledge and
form (or are formed into) social structures. Although the
interpretive tradition can be traced back to classical Greece,
the modern interpretive tradition derives from Immanuel
Kant s (1724 1804) disagreement with the English empiri-
cists. Kant speci cally rejected the radical empiricist claims
of Hume, that all knowledge derives from sensory experi-
ence, insisting instead that reason was itself a capacity of
the human mind that shaped experience. Thus, in contrast
with the descriptive approach, the interpretive tradition has
always distinguished itself by its emphasis on human choice
and intentionality. The mind s structuring of sensory expe-
rience derives from three sources: the physiology of the
human nervous system, the unique historical experience of
the individual, and the social and cultural categories and
rules that are provided by language and by membership in
a family and a larger community.
Kant introduces a new conception of knowledge. Knowledge
does indeed have as a source the Humean element of impres-
sions, the sensory element in which the mind is passive .
But Kant continues, there is another element in our knowledge,
which is derived not from sensory experience . The second
element comes from the mind itself. The human mind is not
a blank tablet or an empty cupboard as the empiricists Locke
and Hume claim. It is equipped with its own pure concepts by
means of which it organizes the ux of sensory impressions
into substances, qualities, and quantities, and into cause and
effects.
(Lavine, 1984, 193 194)
However, while seeking to avoid imposing a deter-
ministic framework on the study of human choice, the
interpretive social sciences, exempli ed by the philoso-
pher and historian Wilhelm Dilthey (1833 1911) retained
their commitment to provide systematic understanding of
its manifestations.
Dilthey wanted to uphold the humanist component of historical
science without compromising ideals of rigor and objectivity.
He thought of interpretation as a disciplined quest for orderly
connections in an observable world; a way of doing science,
not of escaping science. Yet he often expressed the difference
between the human and natural sciences by drawing a sharp
distinction between understanding and explanation: We explain
nature, we understand mind .
(Selznick, 1992, 76)
One of the primary foci of the interpretive method is the
understanding of how humans draw meanings out of the
data presented to them, emphasizing the sociocultural and
institutional (including political) processes involved. The
systematic study of such processes yields understanding
that can help us make critical choices, knowing what
assumptions and decision elements underlie those choices.
As Ryle (1949) suggested, thinking does not take place
in the head, but all around us. What we think with is not
a private metaphysical mind, but words, pictures, gestures,
actions, and both natural and manufactured objects. Indeed
we assign symbolic meaning so as to impose some sort of
order and coherence on the stream of events. In so doing,
we sift and lter our sensations of the world. Contemporary
studies on the physiology of the mind (Edelman, 1994;
Damasio, 1994) reinforce the physical basis for thinking
that can be conjoined with individualistic and social/cultural
theories of knowledge and action.
In the process of making the whole business comprehensible,
some perceptions are admitted, some rejected, and others com-
bined or broken down. If we did not lter experiences in this
way or make use of public symbols for organizing percep-
tions and communicating them to others, then we would be
likely overwhelmed by the variety of possible interpretations
that could be assigned to events. We would have to abandon
intellect and discourse and thereby be forced, like the lower ani-
mals, to rely on instinct. Mankind would be reduced, as Geertz
(1973) has observed, to mental basket cases .
(Gross and Rayner, 1985, 3 4)
Different people, of course, organize and assign mean-
ings to their experiences differently. Though we have the
same general brain structures and turn our eyes to the same
world, there are variations in what we see. As Kuhn (1970,
193) says:
research shows that very different stimuli can produce the
same sensations; that the same stimulus can produce very
different sensations; and, nally, that the route from stimulus to
sensation is in part conditioned by education. Individuals raised
in different societies behave on some occasions as though they
saw different things.
The interpretive method insists that no standpoint exists
outside of history or of society from which either can be
independently observed. All organized knowledge, by de -
nition, depends upon socially construed conventions for its
organization. In this sense, the interpretive method treats
knowledge as having no objective existence. However, most
interpretive social scientists use comparison of interpreta-
tions to generalize human behaviors.
STYLE AND SCALE
The descriptive approach derives much of its strength
from simplifying assumptions about complex behaviors.
It tends to assume homogeneity (or at least a tendency
to homogeneity) of human responses to price signals. It
SOCIAL SCIENCE AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 115
therefore is capable of high levels of aggregation in its
analyses.
In contrast, the interpretive approach emphasizes varia-
tion in human motivation. It explores complexity, some-
times to the point of resisting simplication on principle,
regardless of how useful or appropriate it might seem.
Indeed, attempts to simplify within interpretive models are
often criticized as stereotyping. The interpretive approach
therefore tends to produce highly disaggregated analyses.
As a result of their different approaches to aggregation,
the two kinds of social science tend to be comfortable at
different extremes of scale. The descriptive approach tends
towards large-scale analyses, with the nation state (which
grew up with the descriptive approach) often accepted
unquestioningly as the appropriate level for many descrip-
tive analyses. The descriptive approach may be more suited
to initial analysis of problems at the global scale; the stance
of the observer and tendency toward aggregation can facil-
itate analysis at that level.
The interpretive approach, on the other hand, tends to
focus on the local scale of face-to-face discourse. Here,
the human individual is often regarded as being the nat-
ural, self-evident unit of analysis. It is often difcult to
demonstrate the relevance of social science at this scale to
global-level research agendas.
However, the case is frequently made Not only that
the human activities that drive and mitigate environmental
change vary signicantly by region or place, but also that
historical or local contextual factors are so inuential that
understanding must be grounded in the specics of the case
(Turner et al., 1990, 18). In the last analysis, the activities
that drive land-use change or anthropogenic greenhouse gas
emissions are always local, and whatever the impacts of
global environmental change on human populations, they
will be experienced at the local level.
Macro, descriptive
research studies
Micro, interpretive
research studies
Meso-level
studies
Figure 3 Social science research concentrated at macro
and micro scales
The issue for the social sciences is not merely the
assertion of the importance of local level analysis. As a
result of the polarization of the descriptive and interpretive
methods, research areas in the social sciences are shaped
like an hourglass (Figure 3). That is, theories, methods, and
data are underdeveloped at the middle scales between the
individual and the nation state.
Furthermore, correspondence between the macro and
micro scales is often treated in a simplistic way. The
nation state or the rm is often treated as if it were one
large individual, with a unitary intelligence and decision-
making capacity. Or the resources of real individuals may
be represented merely by dividing total resource by the
number of people, resulting in the creation of a mere per
capita; the anonymous average person from whom per
capita statistics are derived.
The image is of a male person, sometimes a homunculus inside
each of us, sometimes a gigantic system incorporating the whole
of society or the world. Our pervasive microcosm to whose
outlines all our explanations are drawn to t is a quintessential
stranger; he has no family or friends, no personal history, his
emotions are not like ours, we dont understand his language,
still less his purposes.
(Douglas and Ney, 1998)
For example, in the eld of energy modeling, bottom-
up analysts project individual behavior onto the national
scale (one large individual) while top-down analysts assume
that the behavior of individuals reects that of the national
population in proportion to their numbers (per capita).
Although the names of the modeling approaches seem to
indicate macro and micro scales, in fact neither approach is
based on a theory of micromacro scale articulation; both
are descriptive approaches that assume undifferentiated
individuals.
Local-level analyses, on the other hand, often focus
on individuals and small, specialized institutions without
regard to their generalizability (more studies are needed to
determine whether similar results can be found in neighbor-
ing villages); or their generalizability is taken for granted,
i.e., village level solutions are recommended for settings
the world over.
Linking the local and the global is frequently cited as one
of the most challenging aspects of climate and other mani-
festations of global change. Few attempts have been made
to validate studies at one end of the scale with those at
the other, and the research studies are sparse at the middle
levels, especially those that articulate connections among
individuals, groups of various sizes and cultural back-
grounds, and global level players in global environmental
change issues. From the perspective of the social sciences,
meeting this imperative requires, as a rst step, linking
the interpretive and the descriptive approaches, using the
research approaches and strengths of each, and expand-
ing the reach of study, as appropriate, into various middle
116 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
scales, with appropriate integration of overlap. However,
as discussed in the next section, the viewpoints cannot and
should not be merged; each makes unique contributions to
scientic knowledge.
STYLE AND STANDPOINT
Throughout the social sciences, there is poor understanding
of the articulation of human behavior at the local level to
the behavior of the global social and economic system.
Furthermore, available knowledge of local behaviors has
not yet penetrated very deeply into the global environmental
change assessment and research agendas of the IPCC,
the IGBP and the Human Dimensions Programme of the
International Social Science Council.
Linking the local and the global cannot be achieved sim-
ply by increasing the scale and quantiability of interpretive
analysis to meet a more thickly textured descriptive analysis
as it attempts to accommodate lower levels of aggrega-
tion. The gap between the two approaches is not merely
spatial but raises fundamental issues of what kinds and
sources of knowledge we value as analysts. Contrasting
16th century iconography with contemporary satellite pho-
tographs, Ingold (1993) illustrates the situation by tracing
the change in the standpoint of human inquiry from the
Enlightenment to the present (Figure 4). In Maffeis Scala
Naturale of 1564, the scholar is shown at the center of
the environment consisting of 14 concentric spheres envis-
aged to form a giant stairway, the ascent of which, step by
step, affords more comprehensive knowledge of the world
through experience within it. In modern satellite imagery,
the scholar experiencing the world from within, is displaced
by an observer viewing the world from without.
This descriptive standpoint favors observation over expe-
rience. Local (interpretive) knowledge, originating in expe-
rience, is downgraded as partial, parochial, and ultimately
unreliable. Global knowledge is treated as universal, total,
and real.
Figure 4 Local and global standpoints. (Reproduced by
permission of Routledge in Ingold, 1993)
Against this view, Ingold argues that:
The difference between them (local and global perspectives) is
not one of hierarchical degree, in scale or comprehensiveness,
but one of kind. In other words, the local is not a more limited
or narrowly focused apprehension than the global, it is one
that rests on an altogether different mode of apprehension; one
based on an active perceptual engagement with components of
the dwelt-in world, in the practical business of life, rather than
on the detached, disinterested observation of a world apart.
(Ingold, 1993, 4041)
If the two standpoints are so different in kind, how can a
potential for complementarity be applied to a global envi-
ronmental change issue? The descriptive approach provides
an absolutely vital link between the social sciences and
natural science analyses of global environmental change.
Collaboration between natural science and the descriptive
approaches has revealed much about what would happen
under various scenarios, but it does not help in choosing
among the probable or feasible scenarios. To understand
these issues, we also require interpretive approaches that
can introduce qualitative and value-related parameters. For
example, both approaches are highly relevant to current
negotiations about how to implement the Framework Con-
vention on Climate Change (FCCC).
The FCCC states that The ultimate objective is
to achieve, in accordance with the relevant provisions of
the Convention, stabilization of greenhouse gas concen-
trations in the atmosphere that would prevent dangerous
anthropogenic interference with the climate system . Fur-
ther, policies and measures to deal with climate change
should be cost effective so as to ensure global benets at
the lowest possible cost . A particular ceiling for green-
house gas concentrations can be maintained in a variety
of ways. Some will be more costly than others. Economic
analysis in the descriptive tradition can show that it is more
expensive for all nations to stabilize emissions individually
than for the world to stabilize emissions jointly. But some
regions might be better off under an individual stabilization
scheme. Descriptive analysis can identify conditions under
which high population countries would have an incentive to
drop out of an international agreement to control fossil fuel
carbon emissions in the post-2000 period, even if emis-
sions rights were allocated on an equal per capita basis.
Descriptive analysis can also highlight the need to con-
struct dynamic international agreements, capable of being
modied as global changes occur and societies evolve. But
the descriptive approach cannot successfully explore social
and ethical dimensions of different political options and
has difculty dealing with tradeoffs between equity and
efciency.
Redressing the disconnection in style, scale, and stand-
point within the social sciences will at least require bringing
together the descriptive and interpretive methods. Using and
broadening established mechanisms, researchers can adopt
SOCIAL SCIENCE AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 117
either a multidisciplinary or an interdisciplinary approach.
In the former, scientists from various elds work together
on a problem that has been dened within the framework of
one particular discipline. A truly interdisciplinary approach
involves people from different elds working on a problem
that they have dened together in a way that it cannot be
dened from within any single discipline. Interdisciplinary
research often yields insights not otherwise attainable.
Perhaps the strongest reason for exploiting the comple-
mentarity between the two approaches is the nature of
global environmental issues. The dimensions of global envi-
ronmental change simply cannot be adequately addressed
without using both approaches. Furthermore, strong link-
ages between the two can provide a further bridge to rich
resources within the humanities that can also help to deal
with fundamental issues such as social justice.
For example, the development of eco-feminism (see
Ecofeminism, Volume 5) represents just one linkage bet-
ween research in the humanities and social sciences, cen-
tering on an environmental debate. Arguments about the
right relation between humans and non-human nature often
have their basis in spiritual and moral values which rely
on evidence from theology, moral philosophy, and liter-
ary imagery as much, if not more than, scientic data.
Eco-feminism, which has been linked with neo-paganism
(specically, goddess worship), draws its rationale from a
sociological critique of the twin oppressions of the domi-
nation of women and nature (Merchant, 1992, 185). Soci-
ological, political, and image-rich arguments are blended,
for example in Woman and Nature: The Roaring within Her
(Grifn, 1978). Drawing on such diverse notions as the
reconstitution of the subject and elemental divinity, Grifn
and others seek to demonstrate the importance of women
(and womens work) and non-human nature. Part of the pro-
feminist argument revolves around the idea that women, as
the carrier of children, are the rst environment and thus
have a special link with other nurturing systems in nature.
Another part of the argument relies heavily on statistics
about the type and value of womens work in agricultural
and other economic systems.
LINKING SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUES
At the human level, global environmental change is ulti-
mately an ethical issue. Just as technical analyses and
arguments prove insufcient to persuade communities to
use imported technologies, human decisions about the threat
of global environmental change are not merely technical.
They are decisions about equity, what is fair in our rela-
tionships with each other and about natural ethics, what is
right with respect to our relationships with nature.
While the analysis and description of ethical systems
as social phenomena belong in the social sciences, the
normative exercise of ethical reasoning is traditionally
the province of philosophy and theology. Thus, bridging
the gap between the descriptive and interpretive traditions
in social science (and even exploiting the commonalties
between interpretive approaches in the social sciences and
the humanities) is an imperative for effectively linking the
practice of scientic and moral reasoning in confronting
global environmental change.
A further practical imperative to integrate the descrip-
tive and interpretive methods is the need to understand
human choice in social change as well as aggregating mar-
ket behavior and mapping demographic change. Following
in Ricardos footsteps, the descriptive method assumes con-
tinuity of human preferences and consistency of human
behavior over time. The descriptive models do not seek to
explain the values that humans hold. They therefore cannot
anticipate sudden ruptures in social behavior resulting from
changes in values and the institutional arrangements that
embody those values, or to assess the potential for chang-
ing human motivations through political or other forms of
social intervention. Because a vast array of human behav-
ior involved is effectively compressed into drivers and
responses, the descriptive approach encourages the adop-
tion of behaviorist kinds of explanations for the actions of
social systems and the individuals within them. Hence, pol-
icy prescriptions based solely on the descriptive paradigm
are limited to instrumental tinkering with technology and
prices.
But, social systems involve human choice; unlike a
billiard ball shot across a table or an electron orbiting the
nucleus of an atom, a human being has the ability to make
conscious decisions about the directions in which he or she
is moving and at what speed. Although social decision-
makers are often constrained by their own paradigms and
the initial conditions of the problem they are attempting to
resolve, the existence of human choice means that their
actions cannot be accounted for in purely deterministic
terms.
VALUES IN SCIENCE
Human choice also raises a methodological problem for
the construction and operation of descriptive social science.
Science, whether natural or social, is conducted by humans
and is thus itself subject to human choice. Humans choose
what to study and what to ignore, what methods to use in
their analysis, and what criteria to apply in determining
the validity of the data gathered. For instance, do we
study energy conservation or geoengineering? Do we assess
quality of life or longevity? Must we have an untreated
control population or can we learn from studies that treat
all subjects?
In making these choices, researchers and decision-makers
inevitably make value judgments. However, when the
value-based assumptions embedded in the theory or model
118 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
disappear into the background, they come to be seen as
natural and are uncritically accepted, often without any
conscious thought about either their presence or their impli-
cations. Indeed, the more that scientists reduce human
choice within descriptive models, the more that they inter-
fere as agents. Excluding human agency from applied social
science research is itself a powerful and constraining asser-
tion of the researcher s own choice upon society. Since
we humans cannot stand outside of history and society to
observe and describe them, we must use the insights of
interpretive social science to make the underpinnings of
our analysis as explicit as we can.
Interpretive social science brings to the conduct of scien-
ti c inquiry an awareness of the impact of human choice,
by introducing re exivity into the research and policy mak-
ing processes. Re exivity is the self-conscious examination
of the implicit assumptions that are inevitably embedded
in any analytical approach. In the descriptive approach,
assumptions may be systematically laid out but are typ-
ically unquestioned within the research study. This is
consistent with the outside observer stance of the descrip-
tive researcher. If, however, these assumptions are made
explicit, the researcher has an opportunity to question them,
rather than taking them as given. The interpretive contri-
bution of keeping assumptions visible adds meaning to the
research results by providing clear boundaries and caveats.
Thus, if research in the two paradigms can be integrated, a
more complete analysis can be accomplished.
The descriptive approach only works effectively when
scientists take their assumptions for granted, so that they
can structure experiments that will have meaning within
those assumptions. Acting scienti cally means acting on
the assumption of a determinate nature waiting to be
described by a neutral observation language (Fish, 1994).
In the natural sciences, Kuhn (1970, 163 164) notes:
that once the reception of a common paradigm has freed the
scienti c community from the need constantly to re-examine
its rst principles, the members of that community can con-
centrate exclusively upon the subtlest and most esoteric of the
phenomena that concern it. Inevitably, that does increase both
the effectiveness and the ef ciency with which the group as a
whole solves new problems.
Humans must reproduce and extend cultural conventions
that are unquestioned in everyday life. As Alfred Whitehead
has said in another connection,
it is a profoundly erroneous truism that we should cultivate
the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite
is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of
important operations, which we can perform without thinking
about them. This is of profound signi cance . We have
developed these practices and institutions by building upon
habits and institutions which have proven successful in their
own sphere and which in turn become the foundation of the
civilization we have built up.
(Hayek, quoted in Koford and Miller, 1991, 22)
However, while in daily life the ability to do more things
with less deliberation may be a sign of technical and social
development, it also increases the danger of unwelcome
surprise. The interpretive social sciences have the capability
to make the implicit explicit, to provide society with the
tools of re exivity and to enhance society s resilience to
shocks.
Combining the re exivity of the interpretive with the
instrumental knowledge of the descriptive method seems
an obvious course for improving our understanding of the
human dimensions of global environmental change and
use in policy making. A re exive social science drawing
effectively on both the descriptive and interpretive methods
could help identify the multiplicity of characteristics needed
to achieve successful solutions, both immediate and longer
term, associated with varying alternative global environ-
mental management strategies.
SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH AREAS IN
GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Global environmental change may not be the deciding fac-
tor in whether humanity as a whole ourishes or declines.
The resilience of human institutions and their ability to
monitor and adapt to changing conditions seems to be
more important. Therefore, the social sciences have much
to contribute towards illuminating issues such as pollution,
climate change, and biodiversity. This section provides a
brief discussion of issues taken up by social scientists in
climate change research (Rayner and Malone, 1998) to indi-
cate the breadth of social science contributions to global
environmental change research.
Insight into how scientists choose to study global envi-
ronmental change and how they form a scienti c consensus
demonstrates the basis on which issues are taken up: and
on what basis they could be taken off the agenda. To
avoid promoting unrealistic public and policy-maker expec-
tations of scienti c prediction and control over nature, the
scienti c community thus must work for acceptance and
public authority through patiently constructing communities
of belief that provide legitimacy through inclusion, partic-
ipation, and transparency.
Similarly, knowing why and how people decide that
global environmental change is worthy of attention reveals
the variety and roots of human values and concerns. Forms
of social solidarity appear to be a crucial variable in shaping
people s sensitivities to risk in general and threats to envi-
ronmental and climate change in particular. Furthermore,
equity is a crucially important issue, but at least three equity
principles can be applied: proportionality, priority, and par-
ity (Thompson and Rayner, 1998). Recognizing the broader
debates inherent in environmental change issues (develop-
ment is another) may allow policy makers to address a
number of important problems concurrently.
SOCIAL SCIENCE AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 119
Sorting out causal explanations and prescriptions for
change puts the debates about environmental change in
a new light and provides new ways of nding common
concerns and areas of agreement. For example, in climate
change debates different groups cite population, consump-
tion, or the market as the villain; since all of these diagnoses
are partial explanations, debates among groups can lead
to stalemate. When confronted by such a dilemma, social
scientists can examine alternative framings of the prob-
lem and solution that will be helpful in resolving the
issues.
The rational-choice model of decision-making is an
inadequate guide in global environmental change issues.
Social science research can identify and delineate alterna-
tive decision-making frameworks that include quality and
meaning issues. A broadly based framework may help to
reveal win-wins that have been overlooked.
Resource management practices (for land, water, energy,
etc.) are the immediate cause of environmental degradation.
Social science research can describe the human activities
that give rise to environmental concerns, identify possible
mitigation actions, indicate where adaptations will be neces-
sary, and illuminate how institutional and cultural structures
and abilities to change will both constrain and open up pos-
sibilities to make and implement policy.
Social science research demonstrates that the process
through which choices articulate across scales is not a lin-
ear mechanism that consistently produces the most rational
alternative at the next highest scale. Rather, it is a social as
well as a knowledge process that requires a high level of
trust and agreement (including standardization of methods
and results) to gain recognition at another scale. Research
that describes choice processes is important; equally impor-
tant is research that describes processes by which indi-
viduals can be persuaded to conform with new normative
requirements of corporations and governments, as imple-
mented by the decision-makers who are their ofcials.
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: UTILITY- AND
RIGHTS-BASED APPROACHES
The descriptive and interpretive approaches embody quite
different normative imperatives for decision-makers. The
tendency of the descriptive paradigm towards high levels
of aggregation gives rise to a top-down decision-making
rationality. The quantitative aspect of the paradigm leads
to an essentially utilitarian perspective on decision-making.
That is, the practice of inventorying the stocks and ows of
goods and bads creates the conditions for a decision frame-
work based on a technique for calculating societal happiness
measured by their distribution (Bentham, 17481832). The
rise of utilitarianism as an explicit decision-making prin-
ciple in the 18th and 19th centuries paralleled the devel-
opment of systems of national accounting and statistics
designed to assess and facilitate the development of indus-
trial capitalism but which also held out the prospect of
civil or corporate leaders being able to rationally assess
the impact of decisions on the wellbeing of the statistical
population.
It is but a short step to turn the possibility of such a
means for calculating what would contribute to the greatest
happiness of the greatest number into the imperative that
one should pursue that goal. The solution that provides the
greatest happiness of the greatest number also must be an
efcient solution, since any departure from efciency, also
by denition, reduces the amount of good available for dis-
tribution. A bias toward the value of efciency is inherent
in the methods of policy analysis and utilitarianism has
been the ideological position most forthrightly incorporat-
ing this standard as a central value (Heineman et al., 1990,
38). However, it can be seen that efciency is not merely a
technical issue or an indication of rational behavior within
utilitarianism, but is also an intrinsically moral imperative
that arises from the descriptive paradigm itself.
Thus, the utility principle domesticated moral diversity
for decision-making authorities by offering the capability to
measure and monitor the stocks and ows of societal good,
the usual proxy for good being wealth in some form. By
the same process, decision-maker awareness of alternative
ethical considerations was systematically attenuated. The
imperative to provide for societal good at the highest
level of aggregation provides no guidance for securing
the happiness of minorities and individuals, even of those
individuals in the happy majority.
The guiding criterion for policy is the greatest good for society,
quantitatively dened. But contemporary utilitarians, primarily
economists and theorists of public choice, like Bentham, still
have no principle for distributing this social good according to
manifest principles of equity.
(Heineman et al., 1990, 40)
In contrast, the tendency of the interpretive tradition
to focus on the individual rather than the nation state
directs the attention of scholars working in that paradigm
to the particular circumstances of decision-making rather
than to the aggregate outcome. Attention to disaggregated
particulars, combined with the dominance of methodologi-
cal individualism, articulates smoothly with an orientation
towards bottom-up, rather than top-down decision-making.
The insights of the interpretive paradigm are more likely
to be of interest to those who espouse libertarian or egal-
itarian ethics, emphasizing the rights of the individual or
the minority in the face of majority preferences, as, for
example, in Kantian ethics and the Jeffersonian political tra-
dition in the US. Hence, the interpretive paradigm is often
associated with a critical stance towards the status quo, and
is often equated with and labeled as the critical tradition
in social science, which marginalizes its signicance by
denition.
120 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Increasing insight into the diversity of motives, values,
and preferences of individuals, however, actually tends to
frustrate utilitarian social accountancy, which depends on
blending out such distinctions in the process of aggregation.
It is hardly surprising therefore, that the insights of the inter-
pretive paradigm are not merely considered irrelevant to,
but actually have to be excluded from utilitarian decision-
making in order to preserve the rationality and legitimacy
of the utility principle.
Hence, the distinction between two social science para-
digms is not merely an artifact for the history of ideas or a
scholarly distinction of mere academic interest. It actually
lies at the heart of the crisis of governance that pervades
the local, national, and global communities at the start of
the 21st century. That is, the tension is very real between
interdependence and independence, between pursuit of the
greatest happiness of the greatest number, and the assertion
of individual, local, or ethnic rights that ought not to be vio-
lated even at the expense of the aggregate good. Whereas
Kants principle that every person is to be regarded as an
end in him or herself is generally recognized as a form of
the doctrine of human rights, Bentham dismissed the con-
cept of rights as plain nonsense and the imprescriptible
rights of man as nonsense on stilts (Russell, 1946, 742).
He denounced the articles of the Declaration des droits de
lhomme as falling into three classes: (1) Those that are
unintelligible; (2) those that are false; and (3) those that
are both (Russell, 1946, 742).
Similar vituperation for the social inefciency of rights-
based ethics is not unheard of among contemporary utilitar-
ians. For example, in response to proposals by sociologist
Robert Bullard that current inequities in the distribution of
environmental burdens on minorities and the poor should
be addressed on an environmental rights basis, rather
than according to risk-based criteria, economist Albert L.
Nichols responded:
This framework has considerable popular appeal, but it ulti-
mately is counterproductive from the perspectives of both soci-
ety as a whole and even the specic groups it tries to champion.
Moreover, it provides little practical guidance to environmental
decision-makers trying to set priorities. Bullards proposed
environmental justice framework makes continued inequities in
protection more likely .
(Nichols, 1994, 267)
Bullard replied that his proposals
are no more regressive than the initiatives taken in the 19th
century in eliminating slavery and Jim Crow measures in the
US. This argument was a sound one in the 1860s when the 13th
Amendment of the Constitution was passed despite the oppo-
sition of proslavery advocates, who posited that the new law
would create unemployment (slaves had a zero unemployment
rate), drive up wages (slaves worked for free), and inict undue
hardship on the plantation economy (loss of absolute control of
privately owned human property).
(Bullard, 1994, 260)
Clearly these are not merely technical arguments about
the best way to clean up the environment. Similar clashes
between the utilitarian- and rights-based views arise over
the projected costs of climate change. In response to dam-
age estimates that climate change will result in a decline of
global productivity of less than 1% over the course of this
century, utilitarians have expressed the view that only low-
cost mitigation measures can be justied. On the other hand,
those who espouse a rights-based approach point out that
even less than 1% of global productivity over 100 years
may translate into considerable suffering and premature
death for millions of poor people in vulnerable regions of
the less industrialized world.
The issues of risk and justice provide good loci for prob-
ing inextricable links between analytic methodologies and
underlying social commitments to the Kantian individual
in him or herself or the Benthamite aggregate good. Often
such issues seem to be intractable when descriptive research
and analysis provide the only framework for addressing
them.
Typically, policy makers do approach risk characteriza-
tion as a technical issue: exposure pathways, dose, response,
etc. However, the technical information is unlikely to inu-
ence citizens living in an area where environmental risk is
present. If the sciencepolicy relationship remains squarely
in the descriptive mindset, the response to citizen objec-
tions is likely to be collecting more technical data; the
inclusion of values and worldviews will not be an option.
However, if the sciencepolicy relationship is collabora-
tive and includes interpretive data, science will be more
integrated into the policy context, more contextual and
openly value laden, less oriented to mastery over natural
and social processes, and more accessible to the public at
large (Robinson, 1992b, 249). To the extent that scientists,
policy makers, and the public can learn about each others
positions and preferences, the solution space for a prob-
lem of risk analysis becomes larger and a solution more
possible.
USE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH
In the same way that collaboration is needed between
researchers who use descriptive and interpretive approaches,
researchers and policy makers need to forge more collab-
orative relationships. An important element of this collab-
oration must be the use of both approaches and multiple
tools to illuminate many facets of the issues at hand.
Current arrangements and policy discourses tend to favor
the descriptive approach, although this was not always the
case. The policy analysts of the Reformation were the
hermeneutic (interpretive) religious scholars who advised
both Catholic and Protestant kings and princes about all
aspects of policy based on the interpretation of holy texts
and secular precedents.
SOCIAL SCIENCE AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 121
The descriptive approach to policy making is usually
considered to be more appealing to policy makers because
of its immediate potential for instrumental use. Quantitative
analyses of responsiveness to tax rates or the effectiveness
of regulation can, in principle, be directly translated into a
set of policy choices about whether to implement a carbon
tax or appliance efciency standards, and even at what level
taxes or standards should be set. In other words, descriptive
research usually manages to come up with a bottom line.
Generally, interpretive social science tends to be dismissed
by policy makers and their social science advisors as
lacking this potential to provide practical guidance. How
can social scientists provide powerful, practical research
ndings sufciently mindful of research limitations? Can
we replace or redene the model of scientic truth being
directly used by policy makers? And what would such a
researchpolicy relationship look like?
First, we can recognize that our model does not actually
mirror reality, i.e., policy makers do not frequently make
direct use of descriptive researchs bottom lines. Empiri-
cal research in the US (where the instrumentalist emphasis
on the bottom line is probably most strongly emphasized)
shows that, despite a generally positive attitude to such
analysis, it is seldom acted upon in any directly identiable
fashion (Rich, 1977; Weiss and Bucuvalas, 1980; White-
man, 1985; House and Shull, 1988).
These studies indicate that the actual impact of descrip-
tive policy analysis is much more diffuse. Indeed, Weiss
(1982) suggests that the real usefulness of policy analysis
may lie in enlightenment rather than instrumental purposes,
less as a tool for solving specic problems than as a way of
orientating people towards issues. And much of this is not
deliberate, direct, and targeted, but a result of long-term per-
colation of social science concepts, theories, and ndings
into the climate of informed opinion (Weiss, 1982, 534).
The apparent concreteness of descriptive social science
information in practice seldom makes it any more usable
by decision-makers for obtaining enlightenment than the
results of interpretive studies. Both may contribute equally.
However, once a course of action is chosen, descriptive
data may be more frequently invoked for the purposes
of rationalization and persuasion (Patton, 1978; Whiteman,
1985).
Speaking (scientic) truth to (policy making) power is
thus revealed as a coercive illusion worthy of Frank Baums
Wizard of Oz. The answer to what will we do if we
abandon speaking truth to power? is that we will do what
we have always done but with greater awareness of what we
are doing . Abandoning illusions is the rst step on the path
to authentic empowerment of individuals and communities.
Once that step is taken, we nd that paradigms do
exist for the relationship of science researchers and pol-
icy makers. For example, Robinson, in a series of articles
(Robinson, 1982, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1992a) has argued that
the Dragnet view of science (named for the US television
series whose no-nonsense detective hero would prompt wit-
nesses to deliver Just the facts maam ) is at the root of
perhaps the most fundamental misconception underlying
standard views of the science/policy relationship: that it
is a one way ow of objective information from science
to policy (Robinson, 1982). He proposes instead a model
relationship in which researchers, policy makers, and the
public form mutual learning systems (Robinson, 1992a) that
use modeling tools to explore alternative futures (backcast-
ing) rather than trying to predict the future (forecasting).
Elements of this model include the explicit recognition that
policy questions are not essentially questions of fact but of
value, and that both a physical ows perspective and an
actor-system perspective are needed to provide a usefully
integrated approach to policy questions (Robinson, 1991).
Such a collaboration would also help researchers and
policy makers cope with both uncertainty and ignorance
about how the social and biogeophysical systems interact.
Indeed, uncertainty about these interactions is of such
magnitude as to be better characterized as indeterminacy.
Furthermore, this indeterminacy is likely to persist well
beyond the timeframe in which actions would need to be
taken to prevent, mitigate, or manage potential undesirable
aspects of the human nature interactions.
Making assumptions explicit is essential to make natu-
ral and social science more relevant and more effective in
policy making. When applying a model or theory to a par-
ticular situation, the reexive researcher considers carefully
whether or not the assumptions embedded in the approach
actually match the policy context in which the knowledge
is being used. If they do not, then the information obtained
will not be valid for that context; knowledge is thus condi-
tional. Policy decisions that ignore this conditional aspect
often meet with strong opposition from people who do not
feel that the assumptions are valid for the case at hand.
For example, in democratic societies, if political institutions
base their policy decisions on assumptions about human
behavior that seem irrelevant to the publics experiences of
itself and the world around it, they risk eroding the very
legitimacy they rely upon to implement their policies.
An important effect of a collaboration between (both
kinds of) science and policy would be the inclusion of social
science analyses from the industrializing world. The South-
ern sensibility has emerged from an experience with weak
institutions of governance (Banuri, 1993). Consequently,
Southern critics have challenged the modern descriptivist
features of instrumentalism, impersonality, and legitimiza-
tion of impersonal violence. Further, the Southern sen-
sibility sees environmentalism as based in an integrated
perception of humans and nature, placing emphasis on
issues of justice, equity, institutions of governance, and
property rights. Including these perspectives as data in
the global environmental change debate acknowledges the
122 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
genuine interdependence of rich and poor nations and
broadens the solution space for global policy making.
Re-forming the relationship between environmental sci-
ence research and environmental policy making would
make space for the useful research that exists within inter-
pretive science, for the alternative world views of less
industrialized peoples, and for policy making strategies that
account for uncertainty and indeterminacy. The environ-
mental science and policy community would then include
needs, wants, and beliefs in its data sets alongside mea-
surements and statistics. Policy decisions and agreements
would explicitly include social organization data and cul-
tural assumptions as well as market and consumption data in
global environmental policy decisions to make them more
implementable and effective.
REFERENCES
Banuri, T (1993) The Landscape of Diplomatic Conicts, in
Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Con ict, ed
W Sachs, Zed Books, London.
Bullard, R D (1994) Unequal Environmental Protection: Incor-
porating Environmental Justice in Decision-making, in Worst
Things First: The Debate Over Risk-based National Environ-
mental Priorities, eds A D Finkel and D Golding, Resources
for the Future, Washington, DC.
Damasio, A R (1994) Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the
Human Brain, G P Putnams Sons, New York.
Douglas, M and Ney, S (1998) Missing Persons: Personhood in
the Social Sciences, University of California Press, Berkeley,
CA.
Edelman, G M (1994) Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of
the Mind, Basic Books, New York.
Fish, S (1994) Theres No Such Thing as Free Speech (and Its a
Good Thing, Too), Oxford University Press, New York.
Geertz, C (1973) The Interpretation of Culture, Basic Books, New
York.
Grifn, S (1978) Woman and Nature, the Roaring Inside Her,
Harper and Row, San Francisco, CA.
Gross, J and Rayner, S (1985) Measuring Culture: A Paradigm
for the Analysis of Social Organization, Columbia University
Press, New York.
Gudeman, S (1986) Economics as Culture: Models and Metaphors
of Livelihood, Routledge, London.
Headrick, D R (1990) Technological Change, in The Earth Trans-
formed by Human Action: Global and Regional Changes
in the Biosphere over the Past 300 Years, eds B L Turner,
W C Clark, R W Kates, J F Richards, J T Mathews, and W B
Meyer, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Heineman, R A, Bluhm, W T, Peterson, S A, and Kearny, E N
(1990) The World of the Policy Analyst: Rationality, Values,
and Politics, Chatham House Publishers, Chatham, NJ.
House, P W and Shull, R D (1988) Rush to Policy, Transaction,
NB.
Ingold, T (1993) Globes and Spheres: The Topology of Envi-
ronmentalism, in The View from Anthropology, ed K Milton,
Routledge, London.
Koford, K J and Miller, J B (1991) Habit, Customs, and Norms
in Economics, in Social Norms and Economic Institutions, eds
K J Koford and J B Miller, University of Michigan Press, Ann
Arbor, MI.
Kuhn, T S (1970) The Structure of Scienti c Revolutions, 2nd edi-
tion, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Latour, B (1986) Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes
and Hands, Knowledge Soc., 6, 140.
Lavine, T Z (1984) From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophical
Quest, Bantam Books, New York.
Locke, J (1690) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
T Basset, London, reprinted in 1990 by Scolar Press,
Aldershot.
Merchant, C (1990) The Realm of Social Relations: Production,
Reproduction, and Gender in Environmental Transformations,
in The Earth Transformed by Human Action: Global and
Regional Changes in the Biosphere over the Past 300 Years,
eds B L Turner, W C Clark, R W Kates, J F Richards,
J T Mathews, and W B Meyer, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
Merchant, C (1992) Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable
World, Routledge, New York.
Nichols, A L (1994) Risk-based Priorities and Environmental
Justice, in Worst Things First: The Debate over Risk-
based National Environmental Priorities, eds A D Finkel
and D Golding, Resources for the Future, Washington,
DC.
Patton, M Q (1978) Utilization Focused Evaluation, Sage Publi-
cations, Beverly Hills, CA.
Rayner, S and Malone, E L (1998) Human Choice and Climate
Change, Volume 4: What Have We Learned? Battelle Press,
Columbus, OH.
Rayner, S, Bretherton, F, Buol, S, Fosberg, M, Grossman, W,
Houghton, R, Lal, R, Lee, J, Lonergan, S, Olson, J, Rock-
well, R, Sage, C, and van Inhoff, E (1994) A Wiring Diagram
for the Study of Land-use/Cover Change: Report of Working
Group A, in Land-Use and Land Cover: A Global Perspective,
eds W B Meyer and B L Turner, II, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge.
Ricardo, D (1814) The works and correspondence of David
Ricardo, ed P Sraffa (1952), Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
Rich, R F (1977) Uses of Social Science Information by Fed-
eral Bureaucracies, in Using Social Research in Public Policy
Making, ed C H Weiss, Lexington Press, Lexington, KY.
Robinson, J B (1982) Apples and Horned Toads: On the Frame-
work-Determined Nature of the Energy Debate, Policy Sci.,
15, 2345.
Robinson, J B (1988) Unlearning and Backcasting: Rethinking
Some of the Questions We Ask about the Future, Technol.
Forecast. Soc. Change, 33, 325338.
Robinson, J B (1990) Futures under Glass: a Recipe for People
Who Hate to Predict, Futures, 22(9), 82043.
Robinson, J B (1991) Modelling the Interactions between Human
and Natural Systems, Global Environ. Change, 1, 629647.
Robinson, J B (1992a) Of Maps and Territories: the Use and
Abuse of Socioeconomic Modeling in Support of Decision
Making, Technol. Forecast. Soc. Change, 42, 147164.
SOCIAL SCIENCE AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 123
Robinson, J B (1992b) Risks, Predictions, and Other Optical
Illusions: Rethinking the use of Science in Social Decision-
making, Policy Sci., 25, 237 254.
Robinson, J and Timmerman, P (1993) Myths, Rules, Artifacts,
and Ecosystems: Framing the Human Dimensions of Global
Change, in Human Ecology, Crossing the Boundaries, eds
S D Wright, T Dietz, R Borden, G Young, and G Guagnano,
Society for Human Ecology, Fort Collins, CO.
Russell, B (1946) History of Western Philosophy, George Allen
and Unwin, London.
Ryle, G (1949) The Concept of Mind, Hutchinson, London.
Selznick, P (1992) The Moral Commonwealth: Social Theory and
the Promise of Continuity, University of California Press,
Berkeley, CA.
Snow, C P (1959) The Two Cultures, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
Turner, B L, Clark, W C, Kates, R W, Richards, J F, Math-
ews, J T, and Meyer, W B (1990) The Earth Transformed
by Human Action: Global and Regional Changes in the Bio-
sphere over the Past 300 Years, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
Watson, R T, Zinyowera, M C, and Moss, R H, eds (1996)
Climate Change 1995: Impacts Adaptations, and Mitigation,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Weiss, C H (1982) Policy Research in the Context of Dif-
fuse Decision-Making, in Social Science Research and Pub-
lic Policy-Making, ed D B P Kallen, NFER-Nelson, Wind-
sor.
Weiss, C H and Bucuvalas, M J (1980) Truth Tests and Utility
Tests, Am. Soc. Rev., 45, 302 313.
Whiteman, D (1985) The Fate of Policy Analysis in Congressional
Decision-Making, West. Political Q., 38, 294 311.
The Emergence of Global Environment Change
into Politics
JOHN DUNN
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Unlike most major elements of contemporary politics, global environmental change entered the political eld, not
under the peremptory impress of immediate political incentives, but through a slow, vague, diffuse and uneven
shift in belief. The beliefs in question, moreover, were not about the properties or potential conduct of fellow
human beings, but about the residually non-human setting of human life in its entirety. Local environmental
change, apparent or real, has been seen as politically signi cant throughout the history of our species, in myth
since Noahs ood, and in recorded reality since at least ancient Egypt. Even today most environmental changes
which are seen as politically important are relatively local in incidence or highly differentiated in their spatial
signi cance (Elliott, 1998; Held et al., 1999). Global warming has very different medium-term implications for
the inhabitants of the Maldives or the Sahel than it does for those of Berkshire. The holes in the ozone layer, when
they appear, cover some bits of the humanly inhabited map and not others. To see global environmental change
as a factor and focus within contemporary politics is not to ignore (still less to deny) this drastic variation in
impact and signi cance. It is simply to register the cumulative effect, and the awesome prospective signi cance,
of a novel practical preoccupation and a fresh way of seeing the setting and destiny of human political life as
a whole. It is easier, naturally, to plot the cumulative effect thus far than to assess the prospective signi cance
(Dunn, 1998). But since the impact so far in practice is relatively modest, and the prospective signi cance at
the limit genuinely eschatological (the termination of human life through the consequences of human action), it
would be an error of judgement to concentrate principally on the more tractable topic.
Since global environmental change emerged into politics in
the rst place through a hesitant change in belief and not
an abrupt alteration in the matrix of political incentives in
any denite political location, it can only be understood
adequately by identifying where that shift came from. At
present we do not really know. We still have no compelling
and thorough intellectual history of the interactive dynam-
ics of the large range of natural sciences whose combined
cognitive resources give us our best assessment, either of
how much damage the natural setting of human existence
has already undergone, or of how rapidly we can expect it to
continue to deteriorate, or even of what could, in principle,
be done effectively to retard, halt or reverse some of these
processes of deterioration. We have no coherent synthetic
study of the often very idiosyncratic and obsessive personal
odysseys of individual scientists or publicists who picked
out major sources of continuing damage to habitat, and con-
veyed them eloquently to mass audiences in countries which
permitted such communication. Either of these would be an
exacting technical exercise in the contextual history of ideas
(Dunn, 1996). Each, if it was done convincingly, would
carry important implications. Because the major capitalist
countries today still make the primary contribution to global
environmental deterioration through the continuing momen-
tum of their productive systems, and since they also, at
present, continue to provide much the best access to public
media and the least obstructed channels for mass commu-
nication, some of the main political ambiguities of their
emerging preoccupation are already writ large in both of
these two histories. As yet, however, none of us can do
much more than guess intelligently at the contours of the
histories themselves. It is extraordinarily difcult in prin-
ciple to explain why any important passage of intellectual
history should have gone as it did, not least because these
passages necessarily contain episodes of real intellectual
creativity (Quinton, 1999). Intellectual creativity, for rea-
sons made familiar by Karl Poppers supposed proof of the
impossibility of predicting the future of any natural sci-
ence (Popper, 1957), may just in detail be beyond human
explanation.
What certainly is important in this sporadic and
amorphous shift in belief, however, is its timing, its
THE EMERGENCE OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT CHANGE INTO POLITICS 125
location, and its dependence on rapid diffusion of images
and judgements, on the relative independence of such dif-
fusion from the immediate purposes of holders of political
authority, and perhaps, too, on a certain dedicated obstinacy
and crankiness on the part of some of its main carriers. For
major shifts in belief to be practicable at all, it is necessary
for their protagonists to be able to endure loneliness and
unpopularity, and to be willing to seem and go on seeming
damagingly eccentric.
Many very different things happen as global environmen-
tal change emerges into politics, but one disconcerting and
inevitably elusive thing which does so is that quite bizarre
and apparently personal obsessions of the far periphery
move insistently towards the centers of power, responsibil-
ity, judgement and eventual choice in world politics. This
is not a process which anyones personal or professional
experience of politics can equip him or her to chronicle
with much ease or assurance. It is a standing temptation
to condent misjudgements from virtually any angle. But
it is every bit as important for the human future to learn
to see it more accurately as it is to learn to judge more
accurately just how deeply and in what ways we are still
damaging our habitat, and what we can do to improve our
judgement adroitly and at some speed. If we are to do so,
we must improve our collective assessment of whom or
what to trust (or distrust) to instruct us on the risks which
we are running, on how these risks can be minimized, and
against which of them we can, to any signicant degree,
insure ourselves by other courses of conduct which remain
open to us. All of these are political tasks as much as cog-
nitive puzzles. None of them is a matter about which any
individual human or group of humans can yet be said to
know exactly what is the case (let alone what could become
the case). Some of them are matters about which the very
idea of exact knowledge is probably confused in the rst
place.
When social scientists or politicians now speak of the
emergence of global environmental change into politics,
what they have in mind is not merely this morass of polit-
ical suspicion and bemusement. It is also the appearance,
in a readily speciable set of institutional sites, of a rela-
tively determinate agenda of novel concerns (Hurrell and
Kingsbury, 1992). The concerns themselves may have come
originally from quite personal and historically contingent
acts of judgement on the part of particular individuals, but
they have become an agenda through an increasingly def-
inite and insistent political process. They have imposed
themselves rst on the attention, and then on the purposes,
of those in authority (insofar as they have any) by at least
threatening to limit or were remove the power of those
who were previously unaware of them or were more than
prepared to ignore them. By this stage, plainly, they had
indeed altered the matrix of political threats and rewards
faced by professional politicians in and out of ofce, and
made their inroads precisely by doing so. In this process
personal change of belief broadens out into the modulation
of public opinion, and public opinion, in turn, in due course
condenses into an effective political force pressing political
leaders in novel directions.
To map this diffusion accurately it would be necessary
to relate together very variegated sorts of changes, from
the creation and development of political parties, non-
governmental organizations (NGOs) or pressure groups,
through the impact of each of these on the dynamics
of party competition in different nation states, and on to
the impact of all of them together on state bureaucracies,
inter-state negotiations, treaties and their enforcement, and
the creation or modication of international organizations,
initiated by state decision but exerting, for some purposes,
at least a persuasive or normative authority over the states
which have created them. As global environmental change
emerges into politics, it does not merely create a new
agenda and a novel political eld centered on that agenda. It
also forges a multiplicity of fresh institutions and practices
which take that agenda for their own and press different
elements of it to what they take to be their own (and the
globes) advantage: this provides both a milieu of existence
and an endless series of actual or potential teams of action,
usually competing more or less acrimoniously for attention,
nancial resources, inuence, and even power.
While the agenda and many of the participants are novel
enough, many of the constituents of this new eld are alto-
gether more familiar. They were there before; and they
depend neither for their power nor for their raison d etre on
this novel eld. This is uncontroversial in the case of nation
states and much of their public bureaucracies. It is uncon-
troversial for the main legal and organizational frameworks
of the national economies, from whose interactive global
dynamics the environmental changes largely emanate. It is
even uncontroversial in the case of the principal interna-
tional sites of political or legal authority above all the
United Nations (UN) itself.
The new institutional sites are at most subordinate agen-
cies of older institutional sites which still clearly hold
greater authority, or (in the case of Green parties in a num-
ber of countries as yet principally in Western Europe) com-
petitors of limited efcacy with older and better entrenched
institutions in the same settings. Only in the eld of pressure
groups or NGOs (Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth) has the
novelty of the agenda yet bred correspondingly novel types
of agent with the vitality and innovative capacity to press
it home in essentially unprecedented ways.
All of these sites offer an opportunity for careers open
to talent, energy and luck, and redirect political initiatives
accordingly. There is no a priori reason why some of them
should be more important, more dependably benign, or
more irredeemably corrupt than others. Some analysts or
participants put such trust as they can muster in NGOs
126 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
or in the conceptually still more diffuse substance of civil
society, global or national. Others not merely focus on,
but presume the essential practical rationality of, at least
some existing states or institutional processes of inter-state
cooperation. Others still place altogether greater condence
in the heuristic delicacy and epistemic reliability of market
processes, conning their political attention to the question
of how to minimize impediments to the latters functioning
by designing an optimal regulatory regime.
None of these viewpoints is simply inane. But none offers
a privileged perspective on the bewilderingly complex and
still largely opaque eld which the agenda of global envi-
ronmental change is attempting to address. This is not as
yet a eld which can be surveyed as a whole with any
assurance from any given human vantage point. There is
no strong reason to believe that it will ever become such.
To improve our understanding of it, we must divide it up
into more manageable components, and postpone asking
how these components in the end bear upon one another
until we have mustered a reasonably complete and accurate
inventory of each of them.
It is best to begin with the immediate sources of the most
drastic global environmental changes, which plainly fall in
the realm of economics. Some important, and often environ-
mentally highly destructive, forms of economic production
are closely tied to the logic of military competition today
(Held et al., 1999), as they have been for several centuries
in the past (McNeill, 1983; Kennedy, 1988). But the princi-
pal dynamic source of environmental degradation is still a
process of acutely competitive expansion in the production
and exchange of goods and the diffusion of services, driven
on the supply side by the quest to accumulate capital and on
the demand side by the quest for greater and more reward-
ing consumption. There is little agreement, unsurprisingly,
on whether the global economy forms in any real sense a
unity, or whether it is governed by a single overarching
logic (Brenner, 1998; Wallerstein, 1995; Little, 1982; Lal
and Myint, 1994). There is still less agreement as to whether
the process of economic development itself implies a pre-
destined direction for the future evolution of economies
and polities across the world, or even on where that direc-
tion is most likely to lie. Is the world trading system likely
to be more liberal or less so in 25 years time? Are there
likely to be many more, or far fewer, or roughly the same
number of clearly consequential sites for major political
or economic choice in the world in several decades time?
But while there is sharp dispute over the degree, scope and
signicance of present globalization, and the inevitability
or otherwise of future globalization, and some variation in
optimism about the possibility of generating more sustain-
able patterns of development within the next generation or
two, virtually no coherent analysis of the politics of global
environmental change assumes marked and protracted retar-
dation of growth in the production and consumption of
goods and services, the velocity of economic transactions,
or the ow of international trade. This may be more an
index of cowardice or failure of imagination than of ratio-
nally secured belief. But the continuity of assumption across
sharply contrasted personal dispositions and political tastes
is an important political factor in itself, and has done much
to shape the sequence of international diplomatic negoti-
ations on response to global environmental change which
have centered on the new agenda and provided its most
prominent and potentially consequential entree into politics.
To focus in this way on global economic dynamics is
not to presume that all political action is prompted in
the last instance by a narrowly economic causality. But it
certainly is to accept the decisive role of economic struggle
and effort in setting the limits to political possibility in
this domain, as it does throughout modern politics (Dunn,
1990b). Politics sets its own limits, in return, on how
economic activity can be and is organized (Dunn, 1999).
But in a human world so comprehensively reshaped by the
history of capitalism, it does so throughout on terms which
are obtrusively set by the requirements for competitive
success on markets which, however doctored they may be,
can never be fully controlled by political choice. One very
important practical question which is already being tested in
the domain of global environmental change is whether (and
how far) collective political intelligence and can hope to re-
establish control over the blind, convulsive, irresponsible
dynamics of competitive economic effort. This has been
under spirited dispute for several hundred years; and the
answer remains disconcertingly open, not least because a
less discerning review of political will, examined over time,
makes it all too clear how much easier it is to disrupt
or obstruct large-scale economic activity than to bring it
under rm control. This is as much a truth about economic
organizations themselves as it is about the interaction of
formally political with formally economic institutions. But
its political signicance is every bit as momentous as its
signicance within narrowly economic activities.
What made it politically impossible to ignore global
environmental change any longer was the transformation
brought about by the great economic boom after the Sec-
ond World War which came to an end in 1973 (Brenner,
1998). The next quarter of a century may have seen less
rapid growth in the more advanced capitalist economies,
and some degree of regression for extended periods of
time in state socialist economies and their uncomfortable
successors (Brenner, 1998). But, virtually throughout, it
also saw a continuation of net global economic growth,
and growth from an initial level so high that the pace
and scale of global environmental degradation became at
least blearily apparent to the most myopic and irrespon-
sible holders of state authority. (See Held et al., 1999,
390396 for an account of the progress of global environ-
mental degradation and its economic embedding.) As it did
THE EMERGENCE OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT CHANGE INTO POLITICS 127
so, it set up and intensied a steadily more obtrusive and
extensive network of diplomatic interactions, institutional
invention, and attempts to modify economic and political
practices to diminish the harm which they were so con-
spicuously inicting. At stake throughout this political and
economic adjustment were both the urgency and relative
priority of minimizing particular threats, the range of expe-
dients through which the diminution might most effectively
be undertaken, and the necessarily vexed question of who
precisely was to pay for it and at whose expense. The rel-
ative urgency of minimizing particular threats was initially
the preoccupation, principally of political amateurs, with
a high degree of sensitivity to environmental vulnerabil-
ity. But even it penetrated the world of professional high
politics with some rapidity from the early 1980s, reaching
as unlikely targets as Britains Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher. The assessment of how best to meet these threats
clearly required diplomatic and economic expertise but she
soon convinced career politicians and public ofcials of the
importance of addressing it. The allocation of responsibil-
ity for meeting the bill, still more clearly, was the stuff
of high politics and intense interstate diplomatic activity
throughout.
The core of this process of recognition and incipient
political response was a series of major international con-
ferences, running from the UN Conference on the Human
Environment in Stockholm in 1972, to the UN Confer-
ence on Environment and Development in Rio in 1992
(Elliott, 1998, Chapter 1). Before 1972, international agree-
ments which bore directly and explicitly on the protection
of the environment, focused principally on the preservation
of wildlife, the law of the sea (alongside the law of war, the
rst major focus of efforts to develop a truly international
law), and from the 1970s onward the attempt to contain
the obvious and acute threat of nuclear armaments, like the
menace of nuclear winter (Elliott, 1998, 811).
The danger posed by nuclear weapons, for obvious rea-
sons, was a focus of very high and distinctly arcane politics
from the point at which the scale of their potential for
destruction rst became clear to anyone but nuclear physi-
cists in effect from the Manhattan Project onwards. An
intensely controversial issue throughout this history has
been just what did in fact determine the political and mil-
itary choices made by state powers, not merely over the
deployment or use of nuclear or thermonuclear weapons,
but even over the development of civil nuclear power as a
basis for national electricity supply (Alperovitz, 1995; Clark
and Wheeler, 1989; Freedman, 1981; Gowing and Arnold,
1974; MccGwire, 1987). Because it has been so intensely
politicized and so evidently consequential throughout its
history, both within particular states and still more so in
the more conictual relations between them, this has been
the last area of global environmental degradation in which
public opinion has made a clear political impact. Even in
countries like Sweden, where popular attitudes have been
deeply affected by Green awareness for decades, the poli-
tics of transforming a domestic electricity industry, largely
based on nuclear power, have been as slow as they have
proved painful. Not even the disastrous explosion in the
Chernobyl nuclear reactor in 1986, the pollution which this
scattered so rapidly over such immense distances, and the
dramatic impact of this on European, and indeed, world
public opinion, proved sufcient to accelerate the shift from
nuclear to other energy sources for electricity production.
What it may well have done in retrospect, however, is to
halt the formidable momentum of the nuclear industry up
to that point.
The concern for the preservation of wildlife had a pro-
tracted imaginative past in the slow modulation of European
conceptions of the proper relations between human beings
and other living creatures (Thomas, 1983; Dunn, 1969;
Passmore, 1974). But it had, of course, a very different
imaginative past in other areas of the world, whose religious
traditions had long taken a less anthropocentric view of the
relative signicance of humans and other creatures (Gom-
brich, 1971; Carrithers et al., 1985). In European colonial
or imperial territories, and above all in British India, the
practices of preservation were often more closely linked to
the preservation or extension of elements in the lifestyle of
a land-owning aristocracy or gentry than they were linked to
the systematic commercial exploitation of natural resources,
or the attempt to contain the damage which this was always
likely to inict.
In the peculiarly ecologically vulnerable continent of
Africa, interstate agreements between the European powers
to preserve wildlife were signed as early as 1900, virtu-
ally as soon as the scramble for Africa was completed, and
well in advance of the more far-reaching Convention on
Nature Protection and Wildlife Preservation of 1940 which
covered the western hemisphere as a whole. In the African
case, it seems clear, the 1900 agreement was not a response
to extensive damage already plainly done, but rather a
conscious prophylactic exercise in stewardship, reecting
a deliberate acknowledgement and assumption of human
responsibility for non-human nature (cf. Passmore, 1974).
This may have had very limited effect on the dynamics
of subsequent ecological degradation. But it certainly con-
rms that concern for such degradation is neither a recent
prerogative nor necessarily an index of deep political disaf-
fection in the face of existing political or economic power
or privilege.
A purer case of eventual cultural revulsion at the envi-
ronmental destructiveness and brutality of the exploitation
of land resources over a far longer period in fact sev-
eral centuries is given by the territorial subjugation and
ethnic displacement which marked Europes impact on the
North American continent (Cronon, 1983, 1992). In the
United States, popular organizations for the preservation
128 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
of wilderness areas and bird and animal species (the Sierra
Club, the National Audubon Society) helped both to prompt
and also to respond the opportunities provided by the
National Parks network (Runte, 1997), and furnished a
potent basis of organization and experience for the very
much larger numbers of private citizens who began to sense
the ecological crisis which faced their country in the 1960s
and 1970s.
One way of seeing what has happened in the emergence
into politics of global environmental change is to see
this as the rapid and disconcerting conuence of two
startlingly different sorts of political setting and two starkly
contrasted types of human meaning. One setting is the
exercise of statecraft from the summits of highly organized
and always prospectively coercive pyramids of power and
authority. The interpretation of the goals of statecraft and
the constraints upon it is always open to erce dispute;
but over time it strongly favors a focus on the distinctive
rationality and the often singularly perturbing mores of
states as such: on raison d etat (Meinecke, 1957). The other
setting is the movement of the individual soul or sensibility,
increasingly importuned within the cultural history of the
West, to respond with Romantic excitement and veneration
to the wonder of the rest of nature, the non-human setting
of human life, and to measure itself by the depth and energy
of its response (Taylor, 1989, 1992; Unger, 1999).
A third setting and type of meaning, the economic ratio-
nalization of production and exchange under an increasingly
globally pervasive capitalism, has penetrated both ruling
elites and popular sensibilities quite deeply, but in very
different ways. It has moved the imperative of economic
efciency ever closer to the center of raison d etat (Dunn,
1990b; Baldwin, 1992; Keohane, 1984; Gilpin, 1987). But
it has also inamed the post-Romantic sense of spiritual
self-regard in the face of the dizzy commodity fetishism
of modern mass consumption, and has intensied revulsion
at the cumulative damage which this inicts. In the earlier
stages of these twin developments, it was easy to doubt
that their simultaneous occurrence could be of any enduring
political importance. How could the personal, the aesthetic,
and the often self-consciously unworldly, converge effec-
tively with the carefully self-protected and heavily armed
sites of ultimate coercive authority and organizational con-
trol in collective human life (in their own vision, largely
impersonal, deeply inured to ugliness, at least at a safe
distance, and worldly to the last degree)? This was an
encounter for which neither element could genuinely and
clear-headedly wish, especially in its earlier stages: at best a
collision which was bound to deform many of the purposes
which came together in it, at worst a nightmare chaos which
threatened all that each held dearest. For state elites, even
in a representative democracy, this perspective cannot read-
ily change. For them, the shifting preoccupations of their
fellow citizens are always more likely to prove an irritation
or inconvenience than a steady source of gratication. But
the citizens, consumers and producers, who give these elites
their power as well as their legitimacy, have their own lives
to live and naturally prefer their own wills and sentiments
to bear on the ways in which they are governed. In repre-
sentative democracies, moreover, they are assured that this
is both a right and a genuinely available opportunity (Dunn,
1992).
The increasingly hazardous and alarming momentum of
global environmental change was thus a brusque threat
to the format of existing politics and to the imaginative
habits and practical routines fostered and reinforced by
that format. Above all, it was a challenge to the implicit
assumption that these were in good working order and
could be condently trusted to take effective care of the
ongoing destinies of modern human populations on the
latters behalf, and without too close invigilation from
outside the ranks of their habitues. It was also thus a
challenge to the existing institutional division of political,
social and economic labor, and to the professionalization
of political and public bureaucratic life. What it suggested,
above all, was not that the existing incumbents of high
political and bureaucratic roles should be cashiered and
promptly replaced with human alternatives with different
tastes, dispositions or purposes, in the manner suggested by
the development of the routine organizational apparatus of
modern representative and administrative politics since the
French Revolution (Finer, 1997; Manin, 1997; Dunn, 1992,
2000). Instead, it was that these roles, as a whole, should
somehow be deinsulated, and opened up to far more diffuse,
and often instrumentally pretty unreasonable, movements of
taste and surges of anxiety, dispersed across the population
at large. This was a prospect calculated to dismay any self-
respecting political class or professional stratum; and it was
obvious enough that it could readily and rapidly do far more
harm than good (as it may already have done in a number
of prominent instances, like the Brent Spar oil platform
disposal decision). What was not obvious was how it could
well be avoided, or what more promising model of overall
political and institutional transformation was in principle
available.
As it emerged into politics, the hazards of global environ-
mental change underlined, above all, a need for rapid
large-scale transformation of many prominent human prac-
tices. A case can be made for seeing the key site for this
change in three distinct ways as lying in the realm of cul-
ture (in the conceptions of the goals of human life and the
consequent living priorities of given human populations);
as lying in the main organizing logic of economic activity;
or as lying in the genesis and strengthening of new institu-
tions of coordination and control, which can determine how
every human population will in fact respond to the newly
recognized, and ever less comfortably parochial, context
of its physical existence. These different locations of the
THE EMERGENCE OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT CHANGE INTO POLITICS 129
need for change clearly imply very different strategies for
fomenting change. Judging their current plasticity or poten-
tial responsiveness is not merely largely the prerogative of
different academic disciplines. It also requires, at least in
the rst instance, a hypothetical presumption of relative
stability in each of the other two.
A world of generalized and indeterminate ux cannot
be assessed coherently from any particular angle, and pre-
cludes rm judgement, even in principle, on how best to
respond to it. Such a world is no more tractable in prac-
tice; but at least it does not rule out comprehension in
principle. Seen over time, moreover, it is distinctly less dis-
couraging even in practice. Thirty years ago, very little of
our present scienti c basis for assessing the more salient
elements in global environmental change was yet avail-
able. Much of what we can now determine with relative
accuracy was a matter for the purest (and most projec-
tive) speculation. Today many of the most consequential
judgements of the degree and imminence of the peril in
which we stand remain alarmingly unclear, and hence con-
tinue to be ercely contested even by the ablest scientists
directly concerned. Some of the most devastating potential
scenarios are likely to remain effectively imponderable in
any foreseeable future. But we have no reason whatever
for seeing our world (as a whole) as a domain of general-
ized and indeterminate ux, and every reason to hope that
we may succeed in determining what, within it, is mod-
ifying what, and in what ways, far more accurately and
sensitively, even in the next few decades. To do this, we
need above all to learn to take the formats of our existing
elds of academic or cognitive specialization more lightly
and less literally to see these formats more as precar-
ious and politically driven artefacts, and less as cultural
treasures or dependable deliverances of the obvious. When
and if we learn to do this, the hypothetical bracketing of
adjacent cognitive domains will become both easier and
more natural, and we can begin to learn how to judge how
each given domain bears on the others. In place of a cat-
egorical assumption of external xity grounded mainly in
intellectual habit, or an epistemically gratuitous presump-
tion of in nite social and political plasticity grounded solely
in personal temperament, we can hope to develop a con-
trolled heuristic strategy of open inquiry. Such a strategy
could (and would need to) interrogate all elements of the
motivation, interactive dynamics and institutional context
of human behavior, in face of a still rapidly deteriorating
habitat, and address throughout the question of how that
deterioration can be arrested or reversed.
If we think of these three potentially decisive sites for
adjustment, and see the adjustment itself as a single col-
lective task for our species over time, it is clear at once
how hard it is to judge how much of the task can sanely
be assigned to each site. If the crucial site proves to be
the domain of culture, the task is one for the human spirit:
this is because the fundamental, but endless choice of all
human beings is what sort of persons we wish to be and
what sort of lives we wish to live. Assessing grounds
for hope (or despair) in this domain is an ancient human
preoccupation: a task in the rst place for religious practi-
tioners or moralists, and then perhaps, more academically,
for theologians and philosophers, historians, sociologists or
psychologists, especially, in the end, perhaps for psychol-
ogists. The inductive record here is certainly discouraging.
Grounds for despair come at least as readily as grounds for
hope. And hope itself, when it does come, seems often to
come less from grounds of any speci able kind than from
sheer biological vitality. Can psychologists learn to judge
the fundamental properties of the human spirit? Can they in
principle ever tell us, even over a very long span, whether or
not a human being is a kind of creature which could learn,
morally, to live far more responsibly, temperately and deli-
cately than ever before in any numbers? Can a person learn
a very different level of patience, tolerance and generosity
towards immense numbers of fellow humans quite far away,
of whom very little is known? Modern capitalist civilization
is founded on the focusing and intensi cation of the effort
to get what we want and to live, within its ever shifting
contours, as happens to please us: on the pursuit of modern
liberty (Constant, 1988, 313 328). Can this, in principle,
be transposed into a tissue of tasteful and dependable self-
inhibition in the service of a threatened global ecology? On
balance the historical odds seem clearly against it. Perhaps
no psychologist (perhaps not even psychologists as a pro-
fession in their entirety) can be said to know this to be a
task beyond the unmediated resources of the human psy-
che. But insofar as it is cumulative at all, the intellectual
history of psychology as a would-be science leads us to
expect it to prove so. And however limited their present
contribution to telling us whether we collectively possess
the spiritual resources to preserve our global habitat, it is at
least less paltry than the advice which they can yet offer on
the question of how best to mobilize the resources which
we do have for the purpose.
If the crucial site is the organizing logic of economic
activity, the task is principally for economists, for those
who design and implement governmental economic pol-
icy, and above all for those who lead and manage very
large economic enterprises. The key problem here is how
to modify structures of incentives so that at least as much
continues to be produced and exchanged inde nitely, but
with altogether less attendant damage. The task is to alter
the grounds for action of economic agents, to limit negative
externalities, and to do so without impairing the dynamism,
or exibility of adjustment, of the overall economic activ-
ity off which, through which, and within which, human
populations all now live. There has been very extensive
study of the economics of global environmental problems
over the last three decades, and some de nite intellectual
130 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
headway in analyzing both their sources and the range of
means through which it might be possible to handle them
effectively (Dasgupta and Maler, 1997; Mabey et al., 1997;
Swanson, 1996; Haugland et al., 1998).
What is already clear from this study is that, whilst there
are no rigid economic obstacles to lessening the pace and
scale of environmental damage, the costs of halting or
reversing such damage, even where it could in principle
be reversed, are vast enough to preclude its reversal in
many elds in the imaginable future. Equally clearly, the
allocation of these costs between different groups of human
beings over time is a matter of politics through and through,
and certain to remain just as bitterly contentious for the
imaginable future as it has already proved over the last
quarter of a century.
If the crucial site of decision is neither in culture nor in
the technical design of economies, but in the devising and
implementation of novel institutions of coordination and
control through which to recapture some degree of control
over our cumulative damage to our habitat, the challenge
in the end is to our capacities for reexive prudence and
political cooperation (Dunn, 1990a, conclusion). The task
is, above all, one of political understanding and political
action.
A pessimistic view would see all three of these tasks as
already unmistakably beyond us. The spiritual assignment
of chastening greed, enhancing temperance and composure,
and guiding us back into a more serene harmony with the
rest of the world which we have so deformed and deled,
suggests familiar Platonic remedies for spiritual corruption:
a harsh censorship, a formidable closure of experience, a
rigid structure of authority, made politically credible only
by uninhibited cultivation of dubiously noble lies. This
dees the logic of modern politics and modern economics
more or less in their entirety. There is no reason whatever
to believe that the power could still be mustered to impose
it, and every reason to fear that the harm which it would
certainly do would massively outweigh any possible good
that might also ow from it.
The economic assignment of internalizing the negative
externalities suggests an endless battery of technocratic
expedients, of which the only aspects about which we can
yet be reasonably condent is that most of them will not
work in practice, and that, in their entirety, they will largely
reproduce the drastic inequalities in life chances every-
where embodied in existing economies, and reinforce the
acute resentment which these already arouse. The political
assignment of judging together what our predicament really
is, choosing together how to respond to it, and cooperating
with one another to ensure that these choices are imple-
mented, suggests familiar oscillations between the invention
and parading of international institutions for cooperation,
and sustained haggling and mutual intimidation within these
(along with other older sites) to impose the costs even for
the outcomes which we do, on balance, favor on others
who are even worse placed to afford them: an unrelenting
struggle in which the strongest members of society will still
take what they can and the weak still yield what they must
(Thucydides, 1921, 158).
Neither the spiritual, the economic nor the political task,
however, can safely be written off. In all three, some
degree of contribution is almost certain to prove indis-
pensable, if any secure headway is to be made in such
a devastatingly complicated, slow, unobvious and sequen-
tially uninviting endeavor. The least rewarding to focused
thought in the short run is the direct assault on the psyche,
not least because the focus in question is so extraordinar-
ily hard to maintain. Much more promising is a careful
reconsideration of the relative elasticity of technocratic eco-
nomic expedients and more overtly open-textured political
conceptions and practices. The economic expedients (above
all the design of regulatory regimes and tax systems) can
articulate with some precision with the still more plainly
technical appraisal of the dimensions and rectiability of
environmental degradation, to make up a joint agenda of
what most imperatively needs to be modied, and how it
can best be modied. This would certainly not show that we
can so modify it in practice. But it would make it as clear
as it can be made that we must possess some good reasons
for wishing to modify it. The agenda of global environmen-
tal change over the last quarter of a century has been an
attempt to capture such a joint assignment (Brenton, 1994;
Vogler and Imber, 1996; Tolba and Rummel-Bulska, 1999;
McCormick, 1995). The diffuse but sometimes very vigor-
ous political processes which came to bear on the major
international environmental meetings from the Stockholm
summit of 1972 to the Rio Summit of 1992 and since
(Thomas, 1994), and which now permanently surround all
governmental and intergovernmental environmental policy-
making, have been a sustained attempt to interpret and
implement that agenda in practice as their participants
judged best.
The UN Conference on the Human Environment, held in
Stockholm in June 1972 (Elliott, 1998, 12) in the presence
of the Prime Ministers of Sweden and India, set the pat-
tern for subsequent diplomatic and organizational initiatives
in limiting environmental damage by issuing a declaration,
adopting an Action Plan, and spawning the new UN Envi-
ronment Programme (UNEP), founded in 1973, with its
headquarters in Nairobi, under the leadership rst of the
Canadian Maurice Strong and then of the Egyptian Mostafa
Tolba (Tolba and Rummel-Bulska, 1999). From its founda-
tion, this organization represented a precarious (and very
poorly funded) compromise between the competing anx-
ieties of the wealthier and poorer countries, and a clear
concession to the fears and jealousies of existing UN agen-
cies. But its subsequent impact on a string of inuential
meetings to assess and respond to global environmental
THE EMERGENCE OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT CHANGE INTO POLITICS 131
change in many different elds (Elliott, 1998, 109) was
not merely a testimony to the skills and determination of
its own leadership, but also an index of the increasingly evi-
dent urgency of the issues at stake, and the diplomatic and
political advantages of approaching these, not through the
political apparatuses of individual sovereign states, or the
cumbersome machinery of the UN General Assembly, but
through a specialized institution fully devoted to the pur-
pose. In the two decades between the Stockholm meeting
and the much larger and more ambitious UN Conference
on Environment and Development held at Rio de Janeiro in
June 1992, the agenda of global environmental deteriora-
tion became much more dense and more differentiated and
acquired a quite new political momentum. It also generated
a wide range of new institutions, practices and agreements
to monitor or respond to the many different dimensions of
environmental degradation. By the time of the Rio meet-
ing, the national delegations accredited to the conference
were larger and more numerous, and in many cases led by
their respective Presidents or Prime Ministers. In addition
they were ofcially supplemented by over 1400 accredited
NGOs; and the conference itself was paralleled by a Global
Forum with more than 30 000 participants, held under NGO
auspices and organization (Elliott, 1998, 19). Both the con-
ference itself, and the activities surrounding it, were the
focus of unprecedented media attention. By its close, the
conference had adopted three wide-ranging formal agree-
ments and drawn up two major new conventions, one on
climate change and the other on biodiversity.
Even in retrospect it is hard to distinguish the ultimate
effect of this urry of diplomatic activity from the rhetorical
vigor and invention lavished upon it, and the individual and
institutional careers advanced by it. A skeptical assessment
would see the main clear gains as lying in the strength-
ening and extension of the global apparatus of scientic
monitoring, and the political afrmation of the urgency and
priority of the goal of limiting further ecological degrada-
tion, rather than in the relatively modest and still largely
unimplemented provisions for forest protection embodied
in the Rio Statement of Forest Principles (Elliott, 1998,
8589), the precariously coherent Framework Convention
on Climate Change, the practical impact of which remains
very much in contention (Elliott, 1998, 6873), or the Con-
vention on Biological Diversity, which has little immediate
prospect of slowing the rate of species loss in marine or
forest environments (Elliott, 1998, 7389). In all of these
domains, what does decide the ultimate outcome of such
initiatives is not the personal political taste of a small range
of powerful political leaders in wealthy countries (let alone
of a much larger range of leaders of much poorer ones). It
is the balance of political and economic force in intensely
fought distributive struggles across the economies and soci-
eties of the world. It is never, in principle, possible to
see what that balance is at any point in time, although it
sometimes becomes quite easy to judge in retrospect what
it must have been, with several decades of hindsight.
In interpreting the pace and vigor of political response
to perceptions of environmental deterioration, it is most
illuminating to consider separately the relative technical
tractability of the project of arresting or reversing the dam-
age, and the structures of interest involved both in suffering
the damage itself and in bearing the cost of averting it.
Where great concentrations of wealth or economic power
have a large stake in things as they are (the eating habits
of Japanese consumers at the height of the bubble econ-
omy, the energy industries of western powers, or indeed
of the former Union of Soviet Socialist RepublicsUnion
Of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and its successor
states), the political assignment of altering them rapidly
is virtually impossible. Where the great majority of the
worlds present population have a large (and in the short
term an inextricable) stake in things as they are, it is also
normatively uninviting. Assigning the costs for arresting
global warming with any rapidity is not merely a matter
of balancing the power of very powerful interests against
the human needs of very large and poor populations; it is
also a matter of balancing huge short-term costs against
potentially even vaster long-term gains, in a political con-
text in which the losses are devastating and impossible to
overlook, while the gains cannot in principle be guaran-
teed to accrue at all, and will accrue, if they eventually
do, only to persons who are in many cases quite different
from those who now bear the costs (Part, 1984). Ecolog-
ical degradation harms the interests, and arguably violates
the rights and threatens the needs, of future generations of
human beings. But any allocation of the costs of seeking
to forestall it is bound to entrench on the interests of some
present or future human beings, and quite likely in prac-
tice to impair the rights, or even encroach on the needs, of
many groups of human beings who have no idea of what
is at stake and no means of defending themselves against
the measures in question. The politics of global environ-
mental change cannot therefore be validly understood as
a struggle between virtuous, clairvoyant and deft NGOs,
consciously devoted to world salvation, and vicious, obtuse
and clumsy states or corporations, more or less inadver-
tently committed to world destruction. Nor, self-evidently,
can it be validly understood as the mirror image of such
a struggle, with the normative signs reversed. What it is
above all is a very maladroit and confused exploration
of just how dangerous and destructive global environmen-
tal change really is, and an understandably acrimonious
range of quarrels about who is to blame for its grimmest
aspects, and who has either the responsibility or the power
to begin to cope with them. Anyone who nds this sur-
prising would simply show that they do not understand
what politics is really like or why it is as it is (Dunn,
2000).
132 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
The speed and clarity with which environmental damage
is identied and challenged in the rst place has depended,
throughout human history, both on the freedom, condence
and political effectiveness of its immediate victims, and on
the salience of the damage itself. The pace at which that
damage is arrested and reversed depends at least as much
on the technical tractability of the process to intentional
human intervention. When the Iraqi occupying forces set
re to the oil wells of Kuwait, their political master fully
intended the scale of destruction which he unleashed. But
most important environmental damage is an unintended side
effect of activities pursued for quite other reasons; and a
very large proportion of it is still as unwelcome as it is
unanticipated.
If we consider six of the major dimensions of global
ecological degradation in relation to one another cross-
border acid rain, stratospheric ozone-depletion, deforest-
ation, loss of biological diversity, and global warming (with
its attendant threat of massive climate change), it should by
now be possible to explain much of the pattern of political
response by relating together their relative salience, the
political strength or weakness of their immediate victims,
the power of those with a major stake in the activities
which principally cause them, and the costs and technical
tractability of beginning to remedy them. Unsurprisingly,
no one has yet attempted an overall interpretation of this
ambition. (For a thoughtful and well-informed synoptic
view see Held et al., 1999). But it is not difcult to suggest
its main outlines.
Marine pollution has been one of the earliest foci of
interstate environmental concern, both because of the obtru-
siveness of some of its aspects, and because it is so plainly,
in most cases, beyond the authority or power of any par-
ticular state to control or rectify. In the case of more
vulnerable seas in areas with relatively wealthy popula-
tions (the Mediterranean, for example), the dangers were
identied relatively early, and attempts made to remedy
them. But the main threat of marine pollution has come
from the vast expansion in world water-borne trade since
1945 and the hectic development of the world oil industry,
especially from off-shore elds in the last quarter of a cen-
tury. The starkest destruction thus far has come in the case
of huge inland water bodies in the former Soviet Union
(Lake Baikal, the Aral Sea), where the immediate victims
were effectively politically impotent, and from major oil
spills. Particularly vulnerable major sites at present include
the Arctic and Antarctic regions (where the international
attempt at environmental protection has been especially
strong, not least because initial territorial appropriation was
still minimal), and the Caspian Sea, which is both a fully
enclosed water body and the site of vast oil and gas reserves
in a populous and still relatively impoverished region.
Marine pollution remains extraordinarily difcult to
police, with the relation between those who inict and incur
its costs in most instances impossible as yet to turn into
structures of clear mutual accountability. But it is reason-
able to expect much further effort to make them more so,
because the interests in marine pollution cannot in princi-
ple, over time and under accurate interpretation, outweigh
the interests in preventing it. Since the interests in its con-
tinuance for the most part also lack tight and rm links
to major state powers, and the technical possibilities for
enhanced surveillance must be virtually limitless, in the
end this effort is likely to win some success. Only in the
case of the oil industry is it hard to imagine rapid progress
in arresting marine damage; and here the explanation is less
the sinister political linkages of major oil producers than the
virtually worldwide mass interest in continued access to low
cost energy supplies, especially for transport, cooking, and
over much of the world, heating. It is not an accident that
the most prominent and entrepreneurially dynamic execu-
tive of a major oil company over the last few years, Sir John
Browne of BPAmoco, should also be the most prominent
exponent of the imperative for the industry to respond effec-
tively to the cumulative threat of its environmental damage.
In Western Europe cross-border acid rain was the rst
major political focus for environmental concern and resent-
ment in the post-war epoch, with the forests and lakes of
Scandinavia as the most evocative site of harm, and the
principal perpetrators seen as the cars, trucks and power sta-
tions of the UK and Germany (Held et al., 1999, 404405).
Due to the relative diplomatic and economic intimacy of
Western Europe, some degree of accountability for these
harms was established with comparative ease, and sustained
effort has been made for at least a decade to modify the
technologies of power stations and road transport to cut
levels of nitrogen and sulfur dioxide emissions. A more
recent and alarming example of cross-border atmospheric
pollution was the month-long smog which engulfed much
of the Malay peninsula and Northern Indonesia in the sum-
mer of 1997 as a result of Indonesian forest res. Here,
the prospect of rapid adjustment to avert further damage
seems poor, since the level of cooperation and mutual
condence embodied in the SouthEast Asian Nations
(ASEAN) is still distinctly lower than in the case of the
European Union, the immediate economic circumstances of
the majority of the populations in question already strait-
ened, the dynamics of economic growth severely disrupted,
and the political coherence and efcacy of the Indonesian
state still far below those of any Organization for Eco-
nomic Cooperation and Development member. An even less
promising site for prompt recticatory action is the atmo-
spheric pollution induced by trafc, power stations, and
in many instances wood-burning, in the vast metropolitan
urban agglomerations of the worlds poorer countries, from
Delhi to Mexico City.
Paradoxically, the most encouraging instance of polit-
ical response to global environmental damage has come
THE EMERGENCE OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT CHANGE INTO POLITICS 133
from one of the more recently identied and unnerving
examples the damage to the ozone layer, with its sharp
prospective increase in harmful radiation. The source of
that damage has been the use over the last half century
of chlorouorocarbons (CFCs), principally in refrigeration
(Held et al., 1999, 396397). The decisive evidence for the
scale and immediacy of this threat came from scientists of
the British Antarctic Survey (Rajan, 1997, 4445), gathered
between 1982 and 1984 and published in 1985. The com-
plex process of initial international political response to this
evidence, commercial haggling over, and subsequent enter-
preneurial adaptation to, its implications by major producers
of CFCs, and political bargaining between wealthier and
poorer countries over distributing the costs of adjustment,
was bound to take some years (Rajan, 1997, Chapters 3
and 4). But in retrospect, the time-span between the pub-
lication of the British Antarctic Survey teams article in
Nature in May 1985, the signature of the Montreal Protocol
restricting CFC use in September 1987 (Rajan, 1997, 54),
and its coming into effect in an amended version late in
the summer of 1992, in a form which took better account
of the interests of the poorer countries, was remarkably
brief. We do not know quite why the response was this
speedy. The startlingly grim implications of the Antarctic
data? The unambiguous source of the damage? The rela-
tively small number of major producers of CFCs and the
clear (if expensive) availability of means to replace them
with a far less damaging alternative? But the combination
of shock and available remedy does offer some insight into
how we might hope to alleviate other equally clear but less
imminent menaces at a less hectic pace, where the costs of
doing so are not too forbidding.
Deforestation, and loss of biodiversity through this and
many other means, have proved far harder to arrest. Assess-
ing responsibility for each, and allocating the costs of even
attempting to bring them to an end, have been bitterly polit-
ically contentious, both within many individual states, and
between groupings of wealthier and poorer states across the
world. The complexities of perception and ambivalences of
sentiment evoked by each reach back as far as civilization
itself, and are inextricable from the history of class or ethnic
conict in most human societies (Thompson, 1975; Cronon,
1983). With the massive human population growth of the
last half century and its prospective extension into the next
few decades, levels of deforestation, to which the English
or Italians became accustomed several centuries ago, and
which the subcontinent of South Asia has undergone over
the last century, now prospectively threaten the great rain
forests of West and Central Africa, and even in the end the
Amazonian basin itself. The extension of agriculture and
stock-raising at the expense of forest cover, so long seen as
the least equivocal index of human advance, now appears
not as a single unambiguous good, but a potentially ever
less coherent sequence of increasingly wanton actions. The
political impetus to persist with each remains extremely
powerful; but the overall practical rationality of doing so
is steadily harder to defend. No area of world trade today
is as dominated by the political power of sinister and con-
sequentially damaging interests as the agricultural exports
of North America and the European Union, with their mas-
sive internal subsidization. The relation between markets
and food supplies has been morally fraught throughout
modern history; and even the most compelling case for
laissez-faire in the eld of food is hard to reconcile with
the levels of market distortion locked into the routine poli-
tics of most long-established capitalist democracies. This is
not an aspect of human social existence in the world today
which any extant ideology articulates clearly and evaluates
compellingly, though there is, of course, widespread and
sometimes sophisticated understanding of the harms and
benets that ow from the bewildering variety of individual
practices.
The most effective arguments for the imperative of pre-
venting further deforestation are prudential, and center on
its prospective impact on global warming, and hence on
climate change. The gap between recognizing the force of
the arguments and halting (or even reversing) deforestation
is immense, and certain to remain for a long time as eco-
nomically perturbing as it is politically challenging. But at
least deforestation is a relatively salient phenomenon, some-
thing which could, in principle, in due course be tracked
accurately by satellite camera (see Global Forest Watch,
Volume 4). The loss of biodiversity is inherently more neb-
ulous, and far harder to measure until it is already too
late. The prudential arguments for the urgency of arrest-
ing it involve far more speculative judgements, many of
them about future scientic advances, while the normative
arguments for the same conclusion, stressing the enormity
of eliminating natural differentiation itself, have little solid
foundation in the great majority of extant human cultures,
and receive scant tendential support from the spread of
the industrialized economies and ever more commoditized
forms of life. It is hard to be condent, in the case of
plant, marine or animal life, that net loss of biodiversity
will slow in the near future, and just as hard to believe that
the domestic political judgement and diplomatic nesse of
states today equip them to focus effectively on this issue and
cooperate rmly and deftly with one another in responding
to it (Rajan, 1997, Chapters 7 and 8).
The most politically interesting and potentially con-
sequential dimension of ecological degradation so far
identied is the process of global warming through the
combustion of fossil fuels, and its prospective impact on
climate across different human habitats. Whilst the scale
and timing of disruption are thus far impossible to esti-
mate accurately, it is striking how rapidly the levels of
risk ultimately at stake, have come to be accepted, even
by those with the clearest immediate stake in continuing
134 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
to deny them (Houlder, 1999a). In marked contrast with
British governmental vacillation over the hazards presented
by genetically modied food crops (Houlder and Wigton,
1999), and the collapse of the UN Cartagena meeting in
February 1999 on the biosafety protocol in the face of
US insistence on pressing its entitlement to export genet-
ically modied crops under the rules of the World Trade
Organization (1999), there now appears to be little coher-
ent governmental opposition in international negotiations
to the need to lower emissions of greenhouse gases and
enhance the efcacy of energy use with some rapidity. This
is certainly not an index of the limited scale or political
importance of the interests which will suffer directly and
immediately from any such adjustment. In each case, these
could hardly be more extensive. What it reects, above all,
is the universality of the interest in having a viable habi-
tat, the imponderability of the scale of risk in question,
and the relative simplicity and obtrusiveness of the mecha-
nism which will initiate the harm (however complicated its
subsequent mediation proves to be).
Unlike older and starker preoccupations like deserti-
cation (where there has been extensive international coor-
dination to limit the threat, under the auspices of the
UNEP (Elliott 1998, 9094), or shrinking or degenerat-
ing water resources (Houlder, 1999b), what drives home
the signicance of global warming is not its immedi-
acy or concreteness, but the potential limitlessness of its
incidence and the comprehensiveness of its scope. It is
these two together which explain the density and tenac-
ity of the diplomatic negotiations which led up to the UN
Framework Convention on Climate Change of May 1992
and its signature at Rio, and which overrode the very
limited practical gains of the Convention itself (Elliott,
1998, 6869) and the sharp divisions of interest which
had ensured these, to establish a far more denite (and
perhaps even prospectively effective) set of mechanisms
for addressing the issue a mere ve years later in the
December 1997 meeting which drew up the Kyoto Proto-
col (Grubb et al., 1999). A core provision of the Kyoto
Protocol is the system for trading permits for the pro-
vision of greenhouse gases, which is intended to redis-
tribute the physical burden of limitation in such a way
as to meet the agreed limits, rapidly and at the lowest
net cost in individual welfare or economic growth fore-
gone. Any process of bargaining and coordination which
involves parties with highly unequal assets is likely to
generate results which are disquieting on grounds of jus-
tice (Barry, 1989). But no large-scale political process of
this kind can be conducted behind a veil of ignorance.
To produce any measure of concrete agreement, and still
more to secure agreements which stand any real chance
of being implemented in practice, it is essential to identify
outcomes which reect a clear common interest, which is
evidently more important than the necessarily even clearer
conicts of interest over how the costs of securing it are
distributed between the parties. Only extended experience
of trading emissions permits, in the context of an evolving
international trading regime and a world economy whose
dynamics are certain to remain highly erratic for the fore-
seeable future, will show whether the Kyoto Protocol has
established a formula for adjusting global production over
time to the need to lower fossil fuel consumption in the
longer run.
What is already clear is that the Kyoto Protocol, even
if observed, will at most slow the accumulation of green-
house gases for many decades to come, and that the process
of coordination is certain to remain arduous across the
different forms through which it must be pursued from
individual national industries or nation states, through eco-
nomic blocs like the European Union, the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or ASEAN, to the global
panoply of UN organizations. The unintended effects of
policy instruments like national energy taxes on the inter-
national competitivity of high energy use industries such
as steel show the indispensability of coordinating widely.
The laborious and often opaque activity of diplomatic hag-
gling throughout the global negotiations on climate change
of the last two decades, shows the proliferating costs in
time, patience and analytic effort in every further attempt
to coordinate policies. Strong a priori grounds for doubting
whether coordination in face of sufciently discrepant struc-
tures of interest can be either possible or rational (Olson,
1965; Hardin, 1982, 1995; but cf Axelrod, 1997) must be
offset by weaker inductive grounds for recognizing that a
great deal of coordination does in fact sometimes occur. In
the end, what does and will decide the degree of coordin-
ation is the internal process of political judgement itself, a
process led by active cognitive interest, but also distorted
throughout by personal folly and sometimes far from benign
passions (Dunn, 2000).
What has emerged into politics with the agenda of
global environmental change is an overwhelming new polit-
ical challenge. The most myopic of us can readily see
that this challenge is bound to intensify many old polit-
ical problems, and not unlikely to impair some of our
existing resources of organization and mutual condence
for dealing with many components of our familiar polit-
ical predicaments. What is less easy to see is whether
the challenge itself might, or could not, generate fresh
resources, whether of organization or of mutual con-
dence, with which to try to confront it. Hardest of all is
to judge how the balance between sharpening challenge,
faltering institutions and weakening mutual condence,
and tentative genesis of new institutional structures and
changed sensibilities and dispositions, is likely to come
out over time. But even this is best seen in the end, less
as a question about how to interpret the human world,
than about how to change it for the better. It is not
THE EMERGENCE OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT CHANGE INTO POLITICS 135
a scientic question with an, as yet unknown, scientic
answer, but a practical question which can be answered
only in practice.
It will, of course, be answered by what we and our
descendants prove to do, and fail to do. There is every
reason to fear that it may be answered very badly, as,
in a sense, it now turns out, it has been answered for
most of recorded human history. Since, for the rst time
in that history, we now have good reason to believe that
we hold the fate of our own species fully in our own
hands, there is clear urgency to learn to answer it far better.
This is a challenge not just to our moral imaginations and
limited self-control, but to the very core of our practical
good sense: our will and capacity to preserve ourselves
individually and collectively over time. Above all, today
and for the imaginable future, it is a challenge to our
political judgement (Dunn, 1998).
REFERENCES
Alperovitz, G (1995) Atomic Diplomacy, 2nd edition, Pluto Press,
London.
Axelrod, R (1997) The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-based
Models of Competition and Collaboration, Princeton Univer-
sity Press, Princeton, NJ.
Baldwin, D A (1992) Economic Statecraft, Princeton University
Press, Princeton, NJ.
Barry, B (1989) Theories of Justice, Harvester Wheatsheaf,
London.
Brenner, R (1998) The Economics of Global Turbulence: a Spe-
cial report on the World Economy 1950 1998, New Left Rev.,
229, May June.
Brenton, T (1994) The Greening of Machiavelli, Earthscan,
London.
Carrithers, M, Collins, S, and Lukes, S, eds (1985) The Catgeory
of the Person, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Clark, I and Wheeler, N (1989) The Origins of British Nuclear
Strategy, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Constant, B (1988) Political Writings, ed B Fontana, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge.
Cronon, W (1983) Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and
the Ecology of New England, Hill and Wang, New York.
Cronon, W (1992) Nature s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great
West, Norton, New York.
Dasgupta, P and Maler, K G, eds (1997) The Environment and
Emerging Development Issues, 2 Volumes, Clarendon Press,
Oxford.
Dunn, J (1969) The Political Thought of John Locke, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge.
Dunn, J (1990a) Interpreting Political Responsibility, Polity Press,
Cambridge.
Dunn, J, ed (1990b) The Economic Limits to Modern Politics,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Dunn, J, ed (1992) Democracy: The Unnished Journey, Oxford
University Press, Oxford.
Dunn, J (1996) The History of Political Theory, Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, Cambridge.
Dunn, J (1998) Democracy, Globalization and Human Interests,
Il Politico, 43, 353 374.
Dunn, J (1999) How Politics Limits Markets: Power, Legitimacy,
Choice, in The Politics and Economics of Power, eds S Bowles,
M Franzini, and U Pagano, Routledge, London, 85 100.
Dunn, J (2000) The Cunning of Unreason: Making Sense of Poli-
tics, Harper Collins, London.
Elliott, L (1998) The Global Politics of the Environment, Macmil-
lan, Basingstoke.
Finer, S E (1997) The History of Government, 3 Volumes, Oxford
University Press, Oxford.
Freedman, L (1981) The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, Macmil-
lan, London.
Gilpin, R (1987) The Political Economy of International Rela-
tions, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Gombrich, R (1971) Precept and Practice: Traditional Buddhism
in the Rural Highlands of Ceylon, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Gowing, M and Arnold, L (1974) Independence and Deterrence:
Britain and Atomic Energy 1945 1952, 2 Volumes, Macmillan,
London.
Grubb, M, Vrolijk, C, and Brack, D (1999) The Kyoto Protocol:
a Guide and Assessment, Earthscan, London.
Hardin, R (1982) Collective Action, Johns Hopkins University
Press, Baltimore, MD.
Hardin, R (1995) One for All: the Logic of Group Con ict, Prince-
ton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Haugland, T, Bergesen, H O, and Roland, K (1998) Energy Struc-
tures and Environmental Futures, Oxford University Press,
Oxford.
Held, D, McGrew, A, Goldblatt, D, and Perraton, J (1999) Global
Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture, Polity Press,
Cambridge.
Houlder, V (1999a) BPAmoco Chief Sets Out Case for Energy
Taxes, Financial Times, 13th January, 6.
Houlder, V (1999b) UN Warns of Water Wars Next Century,
Financial Times, 19th March, 4.
Houlder, V and Wigton, D (1999) UK Moratorium on Modi ed
Crop would Break EU Law, Financial Times, 19th February,
20.
Hurrell, A and Kingsbury, B, eds (1992) The International Poli-
tics of the Environment, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Kennedy, P (1988) The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Unwin
Hyman, London.
Keohane, R (1984) After Hegemony, Princeton University Press,
Princeton, NJ.
Lal, D and Myint, H (1994) The Political Economy of Poverty,
Equity and Growth: a Comparative Study, Clarendon Press,
Oxford.
Little, I M D (1982) Economic Development: Theory, Policy, and
International Relations, Basic Books, New York.
Mabey, N, Hall, S, Smith, C, and Gupta, S (1997) Argument in
the Greenhouse: the International Economics of Controlling
Global Warming, Routledge, London.
MccGwire, M (1987) Military Objectives in Soviet Foreign Policy,
Brookings Institution, Washington, DC.
McNeill, W (1983) The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed
Force and Society since AD 1000, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
Manin, B (1997) The Principles of Representative Government,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
136 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Meinecke, F (1957) Machiavellism, translated from the German
by D Scott, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.
Olson, M (1965) The Logic of Collective Action, Harvard Univer-
sity Press, Cambridge, MA.
Part, D (1984) Reasons and Persons, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Passmore, J (1974) Mans Responsibility for Nature, Duckworth,
London.
Popper, K R (1957) The Poverty of Historicism, Routledge and
Kegan Paul, London.
Quinton, A (1999) My Son the Philosopher (review of Randall
Collins, the Sociology of Philosophies), New York Review of
Books, 46, 8/4/99.
Rajan, M G (1997) Global Environmental Politics: India and the
NorthSouth Politics of Global Environmental Issues, Oxford
University Press, Delhi.
Runte, A (1997) National Parks: the American Experience, Uni-
versity of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE.
Swanson, T M, ed (1996) The Economics of Environmental Degra-
dation: Tragedy for the Commons? Edward Elgar, Cheltenham.
Taylor, C (1989) Sources of the Self, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, MA.
Taylor, C (1992) The Ethics of Authenticity, Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, MA.
Thomas, C (1994) Rio: Unraveling the Consequences, Frank Cass,
London.
Thomas, K (1983) Man and the Natural World: Changing Atti-
tudes in England 15001800, Allen Lane, London.
Thompson, E P (1975) Whigs and Hunters, Allen Lane, London.
Thucydides, V (1921) History of the Peloponnesian War, trans-
lated by C F Smith, Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
MA.
Tolba, M and Rummel-Bulska, I (1999) Global Environmental
Diplomacy: Negotiating Environmental Agreements for the
World, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Unger, R B (1999) Democracy Realized, Verso, London.
Vogler, J and Imber, M (1996) The Environment and International
Relations, Routledge, London.
Wallerstein, I (1995) After Liberalism, The New Press, New
York.
World Trade Organization (1999) Financial Times, 26th February.
FURTHER READING
McCormick, J (1995) The Global Environmental Movement, 2nd
edition, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester.
The Environment and Violent Conict
DANIEL M SCHWARTZ
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Increasingly, violent con ict and the potential for such con ict is being linked to environmental problems
such as water pollution, over- shing, deforestation, and global warming. Research suggests that it is developing
nations that are most vulnerable to this environmentally induced con ict.
Environmental stress is rarely considered to be the sole factor in precipitating con ict, which can take the
form of both con ict between and within nations. In many cases environmental stress is a relatively distant
factor, acting in combination with other economic and social factors such as poverty and weak governments.
In other cases, con ict breaks out when rival nations, or rival groups within a nation, battle for diminishing
supplies of environmental resources. Although environmental stress is usually only one cause of con ict among
many, the evidence suggests that it can play an important role, and that violence may be avoided by addressing
environmental problems.
Interest in the linkages between environmental stress and violent con ict has grown rapidly in the last two
decades. In part, this is because the end of the Cold War has shifted discourse on the issue of security in
both academia and policy circles. Although traditional threats to security such as conventional and nuclear
war still exist, there has been an increasing recognition that security is also tied to less apparent dangers such
as chronic poverty, infectious disease, and the depletion and degradation of environmental resources.
INTRODUCTION: THE CHANGING NATURE
OF SECURITY
In 1977, Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute pub-
lished Rede ning National Security, a pioneering work,
which argued that the most signicant security dilemma fac-
ing humankind was an ever-widening gap between the sup-
ply of, and demand for, environmental resources (Brown,
1977). This idea challenged mainstream conceptions of
security and launched a debate on the topic of redening
security that has grown increasingly sophisticated over the
last two decades.
In the mainstream schools of thought that focus on the
issue, security is (and always has been) largely synonymous
with state security. In a world comprised of self-interested
and calculating individuals, the state is seen as the pur-
veyor of authority and security. Without the state, individ-
uals would live in what 17th century philosopher Thomas
Hobbes termed a state of nature, and life would be soli-
tary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Moreover, mainstream
security analysts believe that the greatest challenge to state
security comes from outside the state in the form of mili-
tary force or organized violence. The most effective means
for a state to repel an outside threat of force is to engage
the enemy with military force of its own.
Academics and policymakers who agitate for a re-
denition of security, contest these assumptions made by
mainstream analysts. Some proponents of redening secu-
rity argue that the focus of security should be shifted
away from the state, and nearly all contend that threats to
security should include non-military ones especially envi-
ronmental stress. These proponents champion the concept
of environmental security to challenge the near monopoly
that mainstream security analysts have held in the past.
Environmental security analysts that encourage a move
away from state security, favor either a shift upwards to
the global level, or downwards to the individual level. A
shift upwards to the global level is encouraged by those
who contend that environmental problems such as global
warming and ozone depletion transcend national boundaries
and highlight the oneness of a world divided along arbitrary
and increasingly meaningless political boundaries. Those
who favor a shift downward to the individual (or human)
level, assert that environmental problems such as urban
pollution often affect human wellbeing more than they
affect an abstraction such as the state. Other environmental
security analysts, however, do not favor a shift away from
state security. They insist that as long as the state continues
to be the central organizing principle in global politics, state
security should continue to be the focus.
138 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Although some environmental security analysts do not
agitate for a movement away from state security, most
maintain that non-military threats to security are at least as
important as military threats. They point out, for instance,
that the annual toll of individuals suffering from infectious
diseases, such as the Ebola virus and AIDS, far outnumbers
the global number of battleeld casualties in the last decade
(Pirages, 1996, 13). In short, these analysts contend that
security must not be measured only in terms of military
might, but also in terms of economic wellbeing, social
stability, and environmental health.
Environmental security analysts have made some tangi-
ble headway in their attempt to redene security. At the
national level, for instance, the US Department of Defense,
in 1993, created the position of Deputy Under Secretary
for Environmental Security. At the international level, the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United Nations
Environment Programme have explicitly recognized the
issue of environmental security (Schwartz and Singh, 1999;
Gleditsch, 1997).
But efforts to redene security have also been met with
suspicion and outright scorn. Skeptics argue that proponents
of environmental security are mere opportunists, dressing
up environmental concerns in security garb, with the inten-
tion of shifting resources away from military budgets to
environmental budgets. Moreover, critics contend that too
broad a denition of security renders the concept meaning-
less for all intents and purposes.
But there is yet another way in which environmen-
tal stress and security may be inextricably linked. Recent
research has discovered various ways in which environ-
mental stress can lead to the outbreak of violent conict.
Environmental stress can contribute to resource shortages,
which can provoke conict between nations and induce con-
ict within nations. Environmental stress can also engender
and interact with economic and social phenomena such as
poverty and weak governments to create conict between
and within nations. These linkages are discussed in detail
below. For our immediate purposes, however, it is impor-
tant to note that even if we hold to a mainstream con-
ception of security in which military threats prevail the
environment-conict nexus suggests that the environment
can be an important component of security. If environmen-
tal stress can in fact contribute to violent conict within
and between nations, then even the staunchest of main-
stream security analysts must recognize the importance of
environmental issues.
ENVIRONMENT AND VIOLENT CONFLICT
The notion that disputes and violent conict can erupt over
access to environmental resources appears commonplace:
international wars and civil conicts have been fought
over access to land and resources since time immemorial.
Three factors, however, make modern-day analyses on
environment and conict novel. First, there has been a
shift in focus from non-renewable resources such as oil
and minerals, to renewable resources such as water, crop-
land, forests, and species. Most experts concur that conicts
over non-renewable resources will continue to erupt. The
Gulf War, for instance, was fought, at least in part, over
access to oil. But for the rst time, renewable resources are
being considered as systematic factors in the explosion of
hostilities.
Second, modern-day analyses on environment and con-
ict emphasize the role of population growth in fostering
environmental stress. Throughout this essay, I use the term
environmental stress (or environmental problems) to indi-
cate the degradation and depletion of renewable resources.
Although I will not make explicit reference to it on every
occasion, I consider population growth to be intimately con-
nected to environmental stress. As a population grows, the
demand on environmental resources increases; and as the
demand on environmental resources increases, the abun-
dance of the resource itself shrinks while the existing
supply is often over-taxed. Although some demographers
have recently predicted that population growth will actually
begin to decline worldwide in approximately 50 years, there
is also an overwhelming consensus that the global popula-
tion will hit between 7.5 and 10.5 billion in the year 2050.
With such large increases predicted for the near future, pop-
ulation growth will continue to be intimately connected to
environmental stress.
Finally, as will be discussed in detail below, modern-
day analyses on environment and conict often focus on
the manner in which environmental stress can combine
with other economic and social factors to produce conict.
Whereas past analyses focussed solely on conict over
environmental resources, modern-day analyses also assess
how the degradation and depletion of renewable resources
can act in conjunction with social and economic conditions
to produce conict between and within nations.
In what follows, I examine the various ways in which
environmental stress can precipitate violence. Before exam-
ining these linkages, however, I distinguish between wide-
ranging environmental stress and localized environmental
stress. By wide-ranging, I refer to environmental problems
that are affecting the entire globe or large areas of the world
simultaneously. Two prominent examples are global warm-
ing and depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer. By local-
ized environmental stress, I refer to environmental problems
that are affecting small areas of the globe at different times.
Examples include deforestation and water pollution.
This distinction notwithstanding, it is important to em-
phasize the global nature of all environmental stress. The
interconnectedness of the environment makes it likely
that even the effects of localized environmental prob-
lems will spread beyond their initial boundaries. Water
THE ENVIRONMENT AND VIOLENT CONFLICT 139
pollution, for instance, can easily spread beyond the imme-
diate boundaries of its inception through groundwater and
tributaries. Moreover, global economic and social forces
make it likely that the roots of localized environmental
problems can be traced back to forces outside of the area
immediately affected. Deforestation in many developing
nations, for instance, is partly the result of growing demand
for lumber and wood by-products in developed nations.
INDIRECT INTERNAL CONFLICT
Evidence to date indicates that environmental stress is most
likely to result in conict when it engenders and interacts
with social and economic factors to produce conict within
a nation. Because the evidence for this type of conict is
abundant, and because the processes identied here will
shed light on all of the various conict types discussed
below, I will spend a good deal of time explicating indirect
internal conict.
I consider this type of conict to be indirect, because con-
ict does not arise over a particular environmental resource.
Rather, the conicts are often typical ones, including ethnic
conicts, class conicts, revolutions, insurgencies, etc. But
the cause of these conicts can often be traced back, in
part, to environmental stress.
Conict is internal when environmental stress produces
violence within the boundaries of a nation. The process that
leads to conict can often have cross-border dimensions,
such as when cross-border migrations that are induced by
environmental stress play a role in creating conict. And,
as noted above, local environmental stress itself is often
the result of global environmental change and economic
forces. Nevertheless, if the conict itself is conned to
within the perimeters of a particular nation, we can consider
the conict to be an internal one.
There are at least ve pathways to indirect internal con-
ict that involve environmental stress: economic decline,
migrations, social segmentation, erosion of civil society,
and curtailment of the state. These pathways rarely work
in isolation from one another. In most cases, the various
roads to conict are very complex and involve elements
from a number of pathways working in synergy. To bet-
ter understand the role that environmental stress plays in
engendering conict, however, it is useful to parcel out
these pathways and examine each one individually before
considering the ways in which they criss-cross one another
to form the broader roads to conict.
Economic Decline
Perhaps one of the most evident and widely cited social
effects of environmental stress is economic decline. There
are many types of environmental stress that can contribute
to economic decline, including wide-ranging environmental
problems such as global warming and stratospheric ozone
depletion, as well as more localized environmental problems
such as deforestation, water pollution, and over-shing.
Although environmentally induced economic decline can
lead to general economic malaise in society, it is more likely
to affect the poorer segments of society and thus widen
the differential between rich and poor. This is because it
is the poorer segments of society that are more likely to
be highly dependent on environmental resources, and less
able to buffer themselves from the effects of environmental
stress (Homer-Dixon, 1999, 88).
It is essential to keep in mind that environmental stress
is only one cause among many contributing to economic
decline and widening income gaps. Nevertheless, it appears
that it can be an important factor. Global warming, for
instance, could lead to a rise in sea level and produce more
frequent extreme weather events such as hurricanes and
tornadoes. These events, in turn, could cause major prop-
erty damage to coastal regions and result in the injury to,
and/or loss of, human life. Global warming may also lower
precipitation in some regions and yield pest infestations.
These effects would strain the economic resources of local
regions and nations. Myers (1993, 174), for instance, con-
tends that global warming could cause the United States
grain belt to become unbuckled, with as much as half of the
farmlands in the Southeast failing, California running out
of water to irrigate its huge areas of cropland, and many of
the countrys woodlands and forests fading from the scene.
Most analysts, however, including Myers, note that it is
developing nations that will likely bear the brunt of global
warming. For example, regions that are already plagued
with fragile environments, such as the Sahel and the Indian
subcontinent, could face severe droughts that signicantly
undermine their agricultural productivity.
Stratospheric ozone depletion can also induce condi-
tions that lead to economic decline. For instance, by
depressing immune systems, stratospheric ozone deple-
tion can increase disease rates in humans and animals.
Some experts suggest that recent increases in the occur-
rence of skin cancers and eye cataracts in the Southern
Hemisphere are already attributable to depletion of the
stratospheric ozone layer. Stratospheric ozone depletion
can also adversely affect agricultural productivity. Stud-
ies suggest, for instance, that stratospheric ozone depletion
could reduce crop yields by anywhere from 5% for wheat
to 90% for squash. Finally, and perhaps most ominously
of all, stratospheric ozone depletion can wreak havoc on
entire ecosystems. Phytoplankton-based food chains in the
sea, for instance, could be disrupted. If phytoplankton are
affected, higher levels in the food chain such as zooplank-
ton and sh would likely be affected as well (Myers,
1993, 166167).
If these impacts from stratospheric ozone depletion
materialize increased disease rates in humans, declining
140 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
agricultural productivity, and ecosystem damage govern-
ment coffers would inexorably feel the pinch between
increasing demand on national and regional health care sys-
tems, and decreasing revenues from agricultural and sh-
ing sectors. Although developed nations would hardly be
immune to the impact of stratospheric ozone depletion, it is
again developing nations that would likely suffer the direst
economic consequences because they often lack the infras-
tructure and economic exibility to mitigate the impacts.
If the potential ramications from global warming and
stratospheric ozone depletion are sound in theory, there
is little documented evidence to date that would support
the connection between these wide-ranging environmental
problems and economic decline. The socio economic effects
of global warming and stratospheric ozone depletion, quite
simply, have not yet begun to play themselves out in any
systematic way, although there are indications that this is
beginning to happen.
The link between more localized environmental stress
and economic decline, conversely, has been evident for
years. Many regions, especially in the developing world,
are already feeling the nancial sting of localized environ-
mental stress.
Deforestation, for instance, has had particularly perni-
cious consequences for regional and national economies.
Large-scale unsustainable logging practices may reap short-
term rewards for a nation, but these logging practices can
also sow the seeds of long-term economic decline once
initial supplies are exhausted. Barber (1997, 5354), for
example, argues that Indonesias unsustainable deforesta-
tion practices over the last three decades created huge
amounts of wealth, but also sacriced future prots that are
now sorely missed by the nations economy. Deforestation
can also reduce the available supply of fuel wood the
wood that many people in developing nations are highly
dependent upon for their daily energy requirements. As the
supply of wood dwindles, prices rise, forcing poor fami-
lies to spend an increasing portion of their budget on this
resource. In Chiapas, Mexico, for instance, rapid deforesta-
tion of the Lacandon rainforest over the last two decades has
deprived local citizens of much needed wood. The lack of
fuel wood, in turn, has contributed to widespread poverty
in the region (Homer-Dixon and Percival, 1996, 1720).
Finally, deforestation can foster silting, soil erosion, and
desertication; change regional hydrological cycles and pre-
cipitation patterns; and decrease the lands ability to retain
water during rainy periods. All of these effects limit agri-
cultural productivity, cause damage to pivotal infrastructure
such as roads and bridges, and reduce the hydroelectric
capacity of rivers. Homer-Dixon (1999, 8193) notes that
in China, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East,
much cropland has been lost or degraded by erosion. And
on the Filipino Island of Palawan, only half of the potential
farmland is irrigable because of the hydrological effects of
decreases in forest cover.
Water pollution has also created economic decline by
limiting agricultural activity and fostering disease. These
effects have been particularly acute in the Middle East.
Homer-Dixon (1999, 9092), for instance, contends that
in Gaza, water aquifers have been salanized from over-
pumping and severely polluted from agricultural run-off.
The result has been damaged soil, declining crop yields, and
severe reductions in potable water. Routine consumption
of polluted water has led to widespread health problems in
Gazas Palestinian population, straining health care budgets
and retarding economic development.
Finally, over-shing has induced economic decline.
Some developed nations have seen their economies eroded
by the collapse of sheries. Canada, for instance, has at
various times imposed moratoriums on commercial cod
shing on the East Coast and severely restricted com-
mercial salmon shing on the West Coast. But once
again, it is developing nations especially regions that are
highly dependent on their sheries which have been most
affected by the depletion in sh stocks. For example, Lang
(1995) traces regional and national economic decline in
Kenya back to a combination of water pollution and over-
shing in Lake Victoria a key body of water for the nation
and a pivotal source of revenue for many citizens.
Migration
A second pathway from environmental stress to conict
is through migration. Wide-ranging and localized environ-
mental stress, in conjunction with other social and economic
factors, can induce movements of people within national
borders as well as between nations. Sometimes large and
spontaneous migrations are caused by environmental fac-
tors, such as oods, droughts, and locusts. Flooding in
Mozambique and Madagascar during February and March,
2000, for instance, caused large and rapid movements of
people in these African nations. The degradation and deple-
tion of renewable resources, however, is often a distant
cause of migration. It may, for instance, contribute to eco-
nomic decline, which subsequently contributes to migration.
Further, this type of environmentally induced migration
rarely involves large and spontaneous upheavals of people.
Rather, the migration occurs slowly over long periods of
time. These two caveats notwithstanding, migration induced
by the depletion and degradation of renewable resources
can be an important pathway to conict, especially in
developing nations where peoples livelihood is often tied
intimately to these resources.
The availability of arable land is likely one of the
most important factors contributing to migration. This is
especially evident in developing nations where agriculture
can constitute a sizeable portion of local economies. Of
THE ENVIRONMENT AND VIOLENT CONFLICT 141
course, it is not the availability of arable land per se that
induces migration, but rather the economic prospects that
correspond to this availability. A scarcity of arable land will
create economic decline, which acts as a push factor and
decreases the quality of life, thereby inducing migration.
Moreover, the prospect of migrating to verdant regions,
where land is not scarce, can create a pull factor by offering
migrants an enhanced quality of life. Large in uxes of
people can often lead to a host of new environmental
problems in the migrants destinations, thereby perpetuating
a cycle of environmental stress and migration.
A scarcity of arable land is often caused, in part, by envi-
ronmental stress. Deforestation, in particular, can induce
ooding, soil erosion, and deserti cation, which can then
degrade the nutrient base needed for agriculture. Hazarika
(1993) identi es just such a process in Bangladesh during
the 1980s. By deforesting upstream areas in the Himalayas,
downstream soil was exposed to rain and winds. Conse-
quently, the ooding which naturally occurs in this area
was signi cantly exacerbated, and land degradation ensued.
Combined with rapid population growth, land degradation
forced farmers to divide the remaining arable land into
ever-smaller portions. As the prospects for farming became
increasingly grim, Bengalis began to look across the bor-
der to the relatively plush lands in Northeast India. The
result was a gradual movement of over 10 million Ben-
galis to Northeast India. Similarly, Renner (1996, 106)
contends that massive deforestation and soil erosion played
an important role in decreasing the agricultural productiv-
ity of peasants farming the highland areas in Ethiopia. As
a result, large numbers of peasant farmers migrated to the
Ogaden area in southeastern Ethiopia where the prospects
for farming were perceived to be substantially better.
Environmentally induced land scarcity is not the only
factor that can lead to economic decline and migration.
Smil (1992, 17 19) posits that water and air pollution
have engendered migrations from the interior provinces
of China to the country s eastern and southern coastal
regions especially coastal cities where prospects for earn-
ing a decent wage are widely considered to be far superior
to those in the interior provinces. Similarly, Wegemund
(1996, 307 311) points to a shortage of fuel wood (caused
primarily by rapid deforestation) as well as a scarcity of
water (caused in part by water pollution and in part by
increasing demand on the resources) as two key environ-
mental problems that have yielded signi cant migrations in
Africa s Senegambian region.
Social Segmentation and Erosion of Civil Society
While studies on the linkages between environmental stress,
economic decline, and migrations are quite common, the
impact of environmental stress on social segmentation
and civil society has yet to receive widespread attention.
Homer-Dixon (1999, 96 98) demonstrates, however, that
environmental scarcity can produce social segmentation by
deepening divisions among ethnic, religious, and linguistic
groups. Homer-Dixon also shows how environmental stress
can fray the web of networks in society made up of non-
governmental organizations, unions, and community service
organizations. These societal networks form the core of
civil society, and are key to mediating the relationship
between individuals and the state. Just as migrations can
occur as a result of both environmental stress and economic
decline, social segmentation and the erosion of civil society
can occur as a result of a complex interaction between envi-
ronmental stress, economic decline, and migrations. Again,
environmental stress in these cases is a distant but poten-
tially important cause.
Homer-Dixon argues that environmental stress can con-
tribute to a scarcity of resources, which can then deepen
the fault lines between those who pro t from those scarce
resources and those who are impaired by the scarcity.
Environmental stress, he argues, encourages competition
among groups for control of resources critical to sur-
vival and prosperity, and it encourages resource-dependent
groups to turn inward and to focus on narrow survival
strategies. This competition over resources often takes
place against a backdrop of economic decline, which is
also, in part, the result of environmental stress. Moreover,
the vicious cycle between poverty and migration, discussed
above, can also play a role by increasing competition for
ever-scarcer resources in recipient nations.
Critical to his analysis of social segmentation, is what
Homer-Dixon has called resource capture. Resource capture
occurs when environmental stress and population growth
combine to encourage powerful groups within a society to
shift resource distribution in their favor. By shifting the
resource distribution in their favor, these powerful groups
capture the resource and prosper from speculation and
monopolistic pro ts. Although this process increases the
wealth of powerful groups in society, it also produces a
signi cant scarcity of environmental resources for weaker
and poorer groups in society. As competition for resources
increases, tensions between rival groups within the poorer
segment of society are heightened. Moreover, tensions are
often in amed by powerful group leaders, who use divide
and conquer tactics to solidify their clout.
Social segmentation is intimately tied to the erosion of
civil society. When a society segments and the various
factions turn inward, the myriad societal networks that are
crucial to the functioning of a society can quickly disappear.
Researchers have argued convincingly that these networks
are crucial to the functioning of a society because they help
to build bonds of trust between people of differing ethnic,
religious, and linguistic backgrounds. Moreover, as these
networks erode, civil society quickly weakens, thereby
142 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
reducing the ability of marginalized people to articulate
their demands on the state.
These processes of social segmentation and erosion of
civil society are illustrated by Homer-Dixons analysis
of events in South Africa from the mid 1980s to mid
1990s. With the collapse of Apartheid, large numbers of
blacks began to migrate from their homelands which
often suffered from severe environmental deterioration and
poverty to the countrys urban centers. The migrants set-
tled in peripheral and ecologically sensitive lands in the
urban centers, such as hillsides and river valleys. The
huge inux of people onto these lands induced further
environmental problems such as water pollution and defor-
estation. These environmental problems, in turn, promoted
economic hardship and provided a window of opportu-
nity for powerful warlords local leaders who control
their own paramilitary to seize control of the remain-
ing resources. With scarce resources rmly in their hands,
warlords were able to illicit the support of their local
groups, which were often divided along ethnic lines (e.g.,
the Zulu and Xhosa) and family-based lines. The warlords
exploited these societal divisions in order to promote their
own interests. Consequently, competition between local
groups increased, social segmentation solidied, and the
societal networks that form the core of civil society were
severed.
Curtailment of the State
The fth and nal pathway from environmental stress to
conict is through curtailment of the state. Environmental
stress, in conjunction with other social and economic vari-
ables including economic decline, migration, and social
segmentation can curtail key institutions of the state. The
state generally consists of the group of institutions in society
that wield authority and make binding rules for the nation,
or regions within a nation.
Homer-Dixon (1999, 98102) identies at least two
ways in which environmental stress can curtail key state
institutions. First, environmental stress may increase the
nancial burden on the state. Environmentally induced
economic decline, for instance, may compel the state to
increase the size of subsidies; and environmentally induced
migrations into urban centers can greatly augment infras-
tructure requirements such as sewers and water piping. For
instance, Homer-Dixon argues that to deal with acute water
scarcity in China induced by a combination of pollution
and population growth the state must spend huge sums
on new infrastructure such as wells, dams, canals, pipelines,
and irrigation systems; and it must build large facilities to
control industrial and municipal pollution.
Second, environmental stress can affect state elites, such
as high-ranking ofcials and business people with close
connections to the upper echelons of decision-making in
the state. In particular, environmental stress can threaten
the incomes of elites that depend on the extraction of an
ever-degrading and depleted resource base. Consequently,
these elites may turn to the state for compensation, or
they may act to block institutional reforms that would dis-
tribute more fairly the costs of rising scarcity. Alternatively,
environmental stress can increase the scarcity and value
of resources, thereby generating opportunities for power-
ful coalitions of elites to gain control of these resources
in a process similar to that of resource capture, described
above. As these elites become increasingly powerful, they
can challenge the authority of the state. Increasing land
scarcity in the southern Chinese province of Guandong, for
instance, has created huge prots from land sales, inducing
developers and corrupt ofcials to illegally control these
revenues and ignore dictates from the state in Beijing.
The Roads to Conict
The ve pathways from environmental stress to con-
ict economic decline, migrations, social segmentation,
erosion of civil society and curtailment of the state rarely
work in isolation from one another. The pathways are
often complex, and involve shared elements. For example,
social segmentation can involve both economic decline and
migrations, both of which can be induced by environmental
stress.
But how do these pathways actually interact to produce
conict? Here the complexity gets ratcheted up another
level. There simply are no necessary or sufcient causes of
conict, and there is no single pathway to conict that one
can consistently discern. Nevertheless, by mapping out the
criss-crossing pathways and their complex interactions, one
can begin to make out some broader roads to conict. These
roads can be traversed along many different combinations
of pathways. Figure 1 illustrates the various combinations.
Below I discuss a number of these possible combinations
and provide some examples to illustrate the processes.
One possible road to conict involves both economic
decline and curtailment of the state. As noted above,
environmentally induced economic decline rarely affects
an entire society or nation uniformly. Rather, it usually
widens the gap between rich and poor, which then fosters
grievances among the poorer segments of society. If this
element of society perceives the state to be the over-arching
cause of the economic injustice they are experiencing, they
might initiate conict with the state in an attempt to reverse
their plight. These challenges to the state can assume var-
ious forms, including armed rebellion, guerrilla warfare,
terrorism, and coups d etat.
But challenges to the state are likely to occur only if chal-
lengers perceive the state to be vulnerable. Conict with the
state, then, is most likely to take place when a segment of
society is aggrieved and when the opportunity for reversing
THE ENVIRONMENT AND VIOLENT CONFLICT 143
Wide-ranging
environmental
problems
Global warming
Ozone depletion
Acid rain
Localized
environmental
problems
Deforestation
Soil erosion
Loss of arable land
Flooding
Drought
Water pollution
Water salinization
Declinine fish stocks
Economic
decline
Social
segmentation
and
Erosion of
civil
society
Migrations
Curtailment
of the
state
Insurgencies against
the state
Armed rebellion
Guerilla warfare
Terrorism
Coups d tat
Identity - based
conflicts
Ethnic conflict
Religious conflict
Racial conflict
Clan conflict
Urban violence
Crime
Wanton destruction
Environmental stress Violent conflict
Social, economic, and political
ramifications of
environmental stress
Figure 1 The roads to conict
their status is present. Environmental stress, as discussed
above, can inuence both of these factors by contributing
to economic decline and curtailment of the state.
Suliman (1992) contends that the road to conict in
Sudan has followed these pathways. Since 1983, violent
attacks by the Sudan Peoples Liberation Army have been
taking place against Sudanese state institutions, as well
as businesses associated with the state. A majority of
analysts trace the roots of this conict to development
projects conducted by the state controlled largely by
elites in Northern Sudan in which resources are extracted
from the South. Many Southern Sudanese consider these
development projects to be a form of economic exploitation
that would enrich only the state and its cronies.
Suliman, however, traces the roots of this conict back
further than most analysts. He contends that state-led devel-
opment projects in Southern Sudan were initiated, in part,
because deforestation and an increase in large-scale mech-
anized farming had induced desertication and land degra-
dation in the northern regions of the country. Economic
decline in Northern Sudan not only compelled the state to
look south, but also strained their nancial resources. Given
the grievances of Southern Sudanese, and the compromised
power of the state, many Sudanese have supported and par-
ticipated in violent attacks against state institutions.
Another possible road to conict involves economic
decline, migration, and social segmentation. As discussed
above, environmental stress can contribute to economic
decline which, in turn, can engender small-scale but persis-
tent migration. When migrants enter a new territory, they
often upset the existing political balance and consequently
deepen divisions in society. The result can be a society
consumed by conict.
The type of violence that this combination of events can
trigger is often different from the conicts discussed above,
which featured attacks directed against the state. When
social segmentation sets in, conicts between identity-based
groups are more likely to result. The identities upon which
these groups are based include race, language, religion, and
lineage.
Events in Northeast India during the 1980s illustrate
this process. As discussed above, Northeast India received
millions of Bengali migrants during the 1980s. These Ben-
gali migrants were driven to the Indian states of Assam
and Tripura, in part by environmental stress and economic
decline. In Assam, Bengali migrants were perceived as
economic competitors and religious outsiders. Moreover,
Bengali migrants shifted the balance of political power by
developing signicant inuence in local institutions. As
a result of these processes, social segmentation hardened
between the predominantly Hindu Assamese and the pri-
marily Muslim Bengalis. More than 4000 lives were lost
in ensuing violence between 1979 and 1985. In Tripura, a
similar series of events created small-scale but persistent
144 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
violence between identity-based groups that continues to
the present (Homer-Dixon, 1999, 141142).
A nal example of a possible road to conict involves
all of the pathways identied above economic decline,
migration, social segmentation, erosion of civil society, and
curtailment of the state. This combination of processes can
be especially pernicious when the migration involves large
movements of people from rural areas to urban centers.
Violence in these cases may not only take the form of
insurgencies against that state and identity-based conict; it
can also take the form of urban violence that includes crime
and wanton destruction. Because rapid urbanization is a
characteristic common to many developing nations today,
this process is especially salient.
Events in South Africa during the 1980s and 1990s
illustrate this process. As described above, environmen-
tal stress in South Africa induced rural urban migration,
which combined with further environmental stress and
economic decline to engender social segmentation. As a
result of this social segmentation in South Africas urban
centers, societal networks were eroded or simply unable
to take hold in the rst place. Compounded by increas-
ing demands on the state and a decreasing ability of the
state to meet these demands, a number of urban centers
in South Africa most notable in the Johannesburg and
KwaZuluNatal regions began to experience widespread
political and criminal violence that persists today.
Homer-Dixon (1999, 164166) contends that Pakistan
has traveled a similar road to conict. In Pakistan, water
pollution, deforestation, and soil erosion have engendered
economic decline and large movements of rural urban
migration. In Karachi, Pakistans largest urban center, the
massive inux of people has created urban slums that suffer
a chronic shortage of basic urban amenities such as potable
water, garbage disposal, and electricity.
This squalor and shortage of basic amenities, has induced
resource capture the process identied above whereby
local group leaders gain control of a resource and prosper
from speculation and monopolistic prots. In Karachi, this
process has manifested itself in local maas that obtain
water from illegal hydrants or from poorer districts in
the city and then sell it for exorbitant prot often to
the very people from whom the water was pilfered. This
process of resource capture has not only furthered economic
decline, but has also hardened social segmentation between
Karachis many competing ethnic groups, and eroded many
of the societal networks that make up the citys civil society.
Underpinning all of these factors are crippled state
institutions that cannot meet the increasing demands of
the urban populations. Environmental stress has not only
reduced Pakistans state revenues but has spurred rural
urban migration that has simultaneously increased nan-
cial demands on local and national governments. Moreover,
corruption and cronyism plague both national and local
governments. With institutionalized channels of protest and
action stymied, Pakistani loyalties and allegiances have
become increasingly localized and social segmentation has
further solidied.
The result of the interaction of all these pathways to
conict has been increasing urban violence. This violence
has taken the form of all three types of conict described
above, including urban violence (e.g., rising crime rates),
ethnic-based violence (e.g., conict between the Punjabis,
Pathans, and Sindhi ethnic groups), and violence directed
at the state (e.g., attacks on the Karachi Electricity Supply
Corporation).
INDIRECT INTERNATIONAL CONFLICT
Just as environmental stress can engender and interact
with social, economic, and political factors to produce
conict within nations, a similar process can lead to conict
between nations. I call these conicts indirect international
conicts.
International conict between El Salvador and Honduras
in 1969 involved some of the processes identied above.
On July 14th, 1969, El Salvador launched an invasion of
Honduras, commencing a battle that has been coined the
Soccer War, because hostilities were launched immediately
following a series of hotly contested World Cup matches.
The conict lasted only 100 days, but claimed the lives of
several thousand individuals, turned 100 000 into homeless
and jobless refugees, and inicted severe economic losses
on both nations.
Although many pundits have blamed the outbreak of con-
ict on a bitter rivalry cultivated during the World Cup
soccer matches, Durham (1979) shows that environmental
stress was one of the key underlying factors contributing to
this international war. Deforestation and soil degradation,
in conjunction with rapid population growth, forced land-
less peasants in El Salvador to migrate to Honduras, where
many poor Hondurans were already struggling with their
own scarcity of arable land. Large landowners in Honduras,
who had previously been held responsible by poor Hon-
durans for their economic plight, successfully redirected
blame onto the newly arrived El Salvadoran migrants. Hon-
durans reacted by expelling the El Salvadorans, which then
prompted the government of El Salvador to ofcially close
its borders to Honduran refugees and eventually declare war
on its neighbor.
Molvoer (1991) contends that a similar process of
environmental stress and migration combined to produce
conict between Somalia and Ethiopia in 19771978.
Overgrazing induced widespread deforestation and deser-
tication in Somalia, which prompted large migrations of
Somali pastoralists into Ethiopian territory. The migrations
brought the Somali pastoralists into increasing competi-
tion with Ethiopian groups dependent on local resources.
THE ENVIRONMENT AND VIOLENT CONFLICT 145
The bitter competition between these groups fuelled ten-
sions between Ethiopia and Somalia that eventually found
its outlet in armed conict between the nations.
These two cases suggest that environmental stress es-
pecially localized environmental problems such as defor-
estation and soil degradation can contribute to conict
between nations in much the same way that environmental
stress can contribute to internal conicts. Just as with the
internal conicts described above, it is developing nations
that are most at risk of succumbing to these forces, because
these nations are often highly dependent on environmen-
tal resources and lack the ability to mitigate the effects of
environmental stress.
Developing nations, however, may not be the only
nations at risk of environmentally induced international
conict. With the onset of wide-ranging environmental
problems such as global warming, acid rain, and strato-
spheric ozone depletion, the spectre of international conict
that involves developed nations are portrayed as increas-
ingly likely scenarios.
Lipschutz and Holdren (1990, 126129) argue that, to
date, the connection between environmental stress and
international conict has been weak, because localized
environmental stress tends to affect the offending country
more than any other nation. The damage incurred from this
localized environmental stress has only rarely been suf-
cient to evoke a signicant shift in a nations conduct in
the international arena. With the onset of environmental
problems such as global warming, however, these dynam-
ics may shift. Wide-ranging environmental stress threatens
to produce unprecedented magnitudes of change: change
that could foment large social and economic upheavals that
inexorably drag developed nations into the fray. For the
time being, of course, the potential for indirect interna-
tional conict that involves developed nations is based on
reasoned conjecture rather than empirical evidence. Never-
theless, the scenarios conceived by some analysts are not
beyond reason.
Perhaps the most apocalyptic scenario sees hemispheric
conict between developing nations in the South and devel-
oped nations in the North. The most common underlying
environmental cause in this scenario is global warming.
Although the impact of global warming may be gradual,
the possibility of non-linear effects remains. If global tem-
peratures pass a certain unknown threshold, for instance,
changes in the planets physical systems may be rapid and
advance at a greatly increased magnitude. The grave scenar-
ios involving hemispheric conict sometimes draw on the
potential for these non-linear effects of global warming.
Gleick (1989, 338) notes that global warming could
affect key goods and services such as freshwater availabil-
ity and food productivity. The societal impacts of these
climatic changes, he writes, will be widely distributed,
but they are likely to be felt far more severely by poorer
nations, posing important and still unresolved questions
about equity, fairness, and international environmental
ethics. Similarly, Lunde (1991) contends that diplomatic
disputes over responsibility for the generation of green-
house gas emissions, as well as disputes over the potential
ramications of global climatic change, are likely to play
into already-existing tensions between southern and north-
ern nations. And Renner (1996) asserts that the politics of
global warming is quickly shaping up as a dispute between
the industrialized North, accounting for the bulk of emis-
sions, and the South, which perceives itself to be a victim
of global warming. While all three aforementioned analysts
reject the notion of an all-out international conict between
North and South, they caution that global warming is an
issue that can cause tensions between these hemispheric
counterparts to rise steeply, increasing the likelihood of
such violence.
Another route to conict between northern and southern
nations is through large-scale migrations and dislocations
of people. Localized environmental problems, such as soil
degradation and over-shing, can cause small-scale but per-
sistent migrations in developing nations. Some analysts
contend that wide-ranging environmental problems such as
global warming, coupled with rapid population growth and
increasing disparities in wealth, could induce large-scale
migrations from the developing to the developed world.
Although small-scale migrations from the developing to
the developed world already exist migrations from North
Africa to Europe, for instance, are common wide-ranging
environmental problems could exacerbate this process.
Large-scale migrations could increase tensions between
northern and southern citizens, and eventually induce hemi-
spheric violence.
Renner (1996, 109112) notes that citizens in many
developed nations have become fearful that they are now
being invaded, not by armies and tanks, but by migrants
who speak other languages, worship other gods, belong
to other cultures, steal their jobs, and threaten their way
of life. Many industrialized nations, including the United
States, Germany, and France, have witnessed signicant
domestic movements to curb the growing tide of refugees
pounding at their borders on a daily basis. The spectre of
massive inuxes of people from the developing nations to
developed nations elevates the possibility of the rest of the
world against the West.
Other scenarios for international war envisage regional
wars between developing nations and developed nations,
as well as between developing nations. Again, wide-ranging
environmental stress is predicted to be the catalyst of such
wars, especially given the potential for non-linear effects.
Myers (1993, 118121), for instance, forecasts a poten-
tial downside scenario for the Indian Subcontinent, where
global warming produces chronic shortages of food and
water. These conditions aggravate tensions between India
146 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
and Pakistan, and eventually escalate into nuclear threats
and hostilities. Similarly, Myers (1993, 146 148) down-
side scenario for the Americas sees huge numbers of Mexi-
cans illegally migrating into the United States because of
resource shortages, disease, and chronic poverty caused by
global warming. The massive in ux of illegal migrants then
compels the United States to invade its southern neighbor
in an effort to cut off the routes traveled by the migrants.
DIRECT INTERNATIONAL CONFLICT
If environmental stress may contribute indirectly to inter-
national con ict, it is the potential for direct international
con ict that has garnered the most attention from schol-
ars, government of cials, pundits, and the general public
alike. By direct con ict, I refer to violent hostilities that
arise when two or more parties vie for control and/or
access to environmental resources. In these instances, two
or more nations engage in con ict over particular renewable
resources in the same way that nations have fought wars
in the past over non-renewable resources such as minerals
and oil.
There are a number of renewable resources that could
potentially elicit international con ict, such as cropland,
sheries, and forests. Indeed, international incidents over
sheries have already taken place. In 1995, for instance, a
Canadian warship red shots across the bow of a Spanish
trawler, in a feud between the two nations over shing
rights along Canada s east coast.
It is the increasing competition over access to water
resources, however, that constitutes the greatest threat of
direct international con ict. Access to freshwater resour-
ces lakes, rivers, and groundwater aquifers is perceived
by many to become the most important casus belli of
the 21st century. Government of cials have long made
portentous claims about the advancing threat of water wars.
In 1979, for instance, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat
declared, The only matter that could take Egypt to war
again is water. In 1990, Jordan s King Hussein made
similar declarations. Academics studying the issue have
made equally portentous claims about the potential for
con ict over water. Cooley (1984, 3), for example, contends
that Long after oil runs out, water is likely to cause wars,
cement peace, and make and break empires. And Star
(1991, 19) argues that Water security will soon rank with
military security in the war rooms of defense ministries.
Water attracts such widespread attention as a potential
casus belli, because this resource is a mainstay of life.
Gleick (1998, 3) notes that freshwater is integral to all
ecological and societal activities, including the production
of food and energy, transportation, waste disposal, indus-
trial development, and human health. Yet the availability
of freshwater resources is declining signi cantly in many
regions in the world. As population growth heightens the
demand on water resources, water pollution and climatic
change are combining to simultaneously decrease the sup-
ply. If annual water availability drops below 1700 m
3
per
person, domestic self-suf ciency becomes almost impossi-
ble. Gleick estimates that there are already over two dozen
nations that fall below this threshold, including nations in
Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Caribbean.
Moreover, freshwater resources do not respect the politi-
cal boundaries created by humankind. Gleick estimates that
more than half the land area of the world, and perhaps 70%
of inhabitable land areas, is in an international watershed
where river ows or lakes are shared. And he notes that over
220 river basins are shared by two or more nations. Fur-
thermore, these water resources are neither distributed nor
shared equally. In the Nile river basin, for instance, Egypt is
endowed with a renewable supply of just 1.8 km
3
year
1
,
but extracts as much as 55.1 km
3
year
1
far more than
their renewable supply. In the same river basin, Ethiopia is
endowed with a renewable supply of 110 km
3
year
1
, but
extracts only 2.2 km
3
year
1
.
Con icts over water resources have already been doc-
umented. Indeed, Gleick notes that water wars are noth-
ing new to human history. Forty- ve hundred years ago,
the control of irrigation canals was the source of con ict
between the states of Umma and Lagash in the ancient
Middle East. Twenty-seven hundred years ago, Assyria and
Arabia clashed over the control of water wells. In the
modern era, Israel and Syria have engaged in international
con ict over water resources on at least two occasions. In
1965 1966, Syria tried to divert headwaters of the Jor-
dan away from Israel, prompting Israel to attack the Syrian
diversion facilities. And the 1967 Yom Kippur War in the
Middle East was initiated, in part, because of disputes
between Israel and Syria over the Jordan River.
With increasing environmental stress, there is a fear that
con ict over water will become much more frequent in the
near future. There are already many disputes over water
resources that threaten to boil over into con ict. In the
Middle East, the issue of water scarcity remains largely
unresolved. An agreement between Israel and Syria over
access to the waters of the Banias River, for instance, is still
on the bargaining table. Jordanian concerns about Syrian
dams on the Yarmouk River also remain unresolved.
But the spectre of con ict over water is not unique to
the Middle East. In Europe, Czechoslovakia and Hungary
nearly came to blows in 1992, because of a dispute over the
construction of a dam and the diversion of waters on the
Danube River. In Africa, Bostwana, Nambia, and Angola
have disputed access to the shared waters of the Chobe
River since the 1980s. In Asia, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand,
Vietnam, and China have all engaged in disputes over the
waters of the Mekong River. In South America, Ecuador
and Peru engaged in small-scale armed skirmishes in 1995,
in part because of disagreement over the control of the
THE ENVIRONMENT AND VIOLENT CONFLICT 147
headwaters of the Cenepa River. And in North America,
Mexico and the United States continue to vie for control
over the waters of the Rio Grande.
Despite growing fears that environmental stress could
exacerbate water resource conicts, some experts on envi-
ronment and conict maintain that these scenarios are based
more on hyperbole than theoretical and empirical strength.
Homer-Dixon (1999, 139), for instance, contends that inter-
national wars over river water are likely only when a
narrow set of conditions hold: The downstream nation must
be highly dependent on the water for its well-being; the
upstream nation must be able to restrict the rivers ow;
there must be a history of antagonism between the two
nations; and the downstream nation must be militarily much
stronger than the upstream nation. He argues that these
restrictions explain why international disputes over river
water have only rarely escalated to international armed
conict.
Others argue that social and economic forces mitigate the
threat of water wars. The potential for international conict
over water resources is eased, for instance, by global aware-
ness of the interconnectedness of environmental issues, the
expansion of economic interdependence, the involvement
of international organizations, the evolution of international
law in the eld of transboundary water resources, and the
potential for new technologies that relieve environmental
stress.
DIRECT INTERNAL CONFLICT
Just as nations may clash over renewable resources, pop-
ulations within nations may likewise come into conict.
Although direct internal conict may occur over water,
other renewable resources such as sheries and arable land
may also be sources of tension.
Compared to international conicts over water, the threat
of direct internal conict has received very little attention
in academic and policy circles. This is not entirely sur-
prising, given that nations often contain relatively robust
legal/institutionalized mechanisms for resolving disputes
that occur within national boundaries, whereas these mech-
anisms are often relatively impotent in the international
system.
Nevertheless, conict over resources can occur (and has
occurred) within national boundaries. The mechanism that
ignites these conicts is much the same as that for direct
international conict. When a resource becomes increas-
ingly scarce within a nation, tensions may rise between
groups that are competing for these resources. Environ-
mental stress can contribute to the scarcity of resources.
Population increase, for example, may increase the pres-
sure on available arable land, while deforestation and
soil degradation may decrease the supply of this arable
land.
Groups that compete for these resources may be divided
in a familiar way along ethnic, religious, or linguistic
lines. Alternatively, these groups may be divided along
vocational or professional lines. Loggers, for instance, may
come into conict with naturalists over the preservation of
forests. Conict can also occur between competing groups
within a given vocation. Indigenous loggers, for example,
could clash with non-indigenous loggers vying for the same
forestry resources.
Developing nations are once again the most vulner-
able to direct internal conict. This is because these
nations are often characterized by deep fault lines between
competing groups, and because they often lack sufcient
legal/institutionalized mechanisms for dealing with disputes
between competing groups. Gleick (1998, 56) notes, for
example, that for much of the 1970s and 1980s, Indias
Karnataka and Tamil Nadu peoples clashed over irrigation
rights to the Cauvery River. A 1991 Interim Order handed
down by the Cauvery Waters Tribunal an institution set
up by the state of India to resolve the ongoing dis-
pute only exacerbated tensions between these two groups,
resulting in the deaths of over 50 people.
Although developing nations are the most susceptible
to these types of internal conicts, developed nations are
not entirely immune. In the United States, for instance,
the Los Angeles Valley aqueduct was repeatedly bombed
in 1924 by a group of farmers perturbed that water was
being diverted from their communities to urban centers
in Southern California. The same region almost witnessed
conict in 1935, when the state of Arizona came to the
brink of conict with the state of California over plans for
construction of the Parker Dam and subsequent diversion
of water from the Colorado River (Gleick, 1998, 5). More
recently, in 1999, native and non-native shers on the East
Coast of Canada clashed on several occasions, after the
Supreme Court of Canada granted natives the right to sh
year round for lobsters.
CONCLUSIONS: RESEARCH DEBATES AND
POLICY IMPLICATIONS
The evidence presented above appears to highlight a dis-
turbing trend in the international system. Increasingly,
violent conicts are being linked to the depletion and
degradation of renewable resources. These conicts may
take the form of violent clashes between and within
nations over particular renewable resources such as fresh-
water and sh stocks. Or the degradation and deple-
tion of renewable resources may engender and interact
with other economic and social factors such as poverty
and weak states to foster conict between and within
nations. Environmental stress is almost never the only
factor leading to conict. Nevertheless, it can be an impor-
tant one.
148 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Although copious evidence exists to support the environ-
ment-conict linkages, a number of theoretical and method-
ological criticisms have been leveled at the research, calling
into question the validity of existing evidence on the
environment-conict nexus. I will not offer a comprehen-
sive review of the controversies here. Rather, I will briey
highlight a few criticisms that my colleagues and I have
dealt with in detail (Schwartz et al., in press). These crit-
icisms deal with issues that I consider the more pertinent
ones under contention.
One of the most important theoretical criticisms of
environment-conict research is that linkages between
environmental stress and violence are overstated, because
humanity shows astonishing capacity to adapt to envi-
ronmental problems. Markets stimulate human inventive-
ness and commerce that open up new sources of scarce
resources, encourage conservation, and create technolo-
gies that allow substitution of relatively abundant resources
for scarce ones. Critics contend that environment-conict
researchers have failed to consider these adaptive processes
in their theoretical models.
Although adaptive processes certainly operate in many
cases, societies often fail to adequately adjust to environ-
mental stress. This is especially true for many developing
nations, where institutions and markets can be weak and
inexible. Moreover, environmental stress itself can have
debilitating effects on some economies, societies, and social
groups. It is for these reasons that developing nations are
more susceptible than developed nations to the social man-
ifestations of environmental stress.
Environment-conict research is also criticized on theo-
retical grounds for neglecting to consider the role that social
phenomena play in the creation of environmental stress.
Critics contend that the causal arrow that traces a route from
environmental stress (e.g., soil degradation) to social and
economic phenomena (e.g., migration and poverty) through
to conict (e.g., ethnic strife) is misleading, because envi-
ronmental stress itself is caused in large part by social and
economic factors. They argue, therefore, that the causal
arrow should begin with social and economic phenomena.
There are at least three reasons why the causal arrow can
begin with environmental stress. First, environmental stress
is not only inuenced by social variables like institutions
and policies; it can itself affect these institutions and poli-
cies in harmful ways. This is the case when shortages of a
renewable resource, such as cropland or forests, motivate
elites to seize control of the resources remaining stocks
(the process of resource capture, explained above). In other
words, we should not assume that social variables are com-
pletely independent and external starting points in the causal
chain; it turns out that they can be affected by environ-
mental scarcity, sometimes negatively. Second, the degree
of environmental stress a society experiences is partly a
function of the particular physical characteristics of the
societys surrounding environment. These characteristics
are, in some respects, independent of human activities.
For instance, the vulnerability of coastal aquifers to salt
intrusion from the sea and the depth of upland soils in
tropical regions are physical givens of these environmental
resources. Third, once environmental stress becomes irre-
versible as when most of a countrys vital topsoil washes
into the sea then the stress is, almost by denition, an
external inuence on society. Even if enlightened reform
of institutions and policies removes the underlying social
causes of the stress, it will remain a continuing burden
on society because the environmental stress itself is irre-
versible.
Aside from these important theoretical criticisms, en-
vironment-conict researchers have also faced methodolog-
ical criticisms. At issue in these methodological critiques
are key issues pertaining to causation i.e., the notion that
one or more factors can cause an outcome to occur. The
concept of causation has been debated in philosophical cir-
cles for hundreds of years. Although some consensus has
emerged on how social scientists can show causation, the
issue has hardly been resolved with any nality.
In order to show causation, mainstream social scientists
favor quasi-experimental methods, in which potentially
confounding variables are controlled and cases are selected
in a random manner. The single case-study method neither
controls for confounding variables nor selects cases in a
random manner. Consequently it is widely perceived to
be awed by mainstream social scientists. Critics contend
that because environment-conict researchers have used the
single case-study method rather than the quasi-experimental
method to gather evidence, they are not able to make
legitimate claims about causation.
My colleagues and I argue that the single case-study
method in fact plays an important role in complementing
the quasi-experimental methods preferred by mainstream
social scientists. In order to demonstrate this, we draw on a
distinction between causal effect (i.e., the impact that one
variable has on another variable) and causal mechanism
(i.e., the linkage between two or more variables). We argued
that both causal effect and causal mechanism are essential to
showing causation. Although quasi-experimental methods
can estimate causal effect, they say little about causal
mechanism. The single case-study method, on the other
hand, can trace casual mechanisms but can not estimate
causal effect.
We argue that research to date on environment and
conict has demonstrated the causal linkages between envi-
ronmental stress and conict (i.e., causal mechanism), but
has not yet determined the degree to which environmental
stress plays a role relative to other factors in the generation
of conict (i.e., causal effect). We conclude that a next cru-
cial step in environment-conict research is to estimate the
causal effect of environmental stress.
THE ENVIRONMENT AND VIOLENT CONFLICT 149
While theoretical and methodological debates surround-
ing environment-conict research continue in academic
circles, at least some policymakers in foreign policy circles
have begun to incorporate the research into their agenda.
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), for instance,
has conducted a State Failure Task Force Report on the
relationship between environmental stress and the outbreak
of violent conict such as revolutions, ethnic strife, and
genocides (Esty et al., 1999). And the Canadian counter-
part to the CIA, the Canadian Security Intelligence Services
(CSIS) has also recognized the linkages between environ-
mental stress and violence (Gizewski, 1997).
For some, interest by the CIA and CSIS in environment-
conict research has only conrmed their worst fears:
that by including environmental issues in debates over
security, actions pertaining to the environment may become
increasingly militarized. Although these fears may have
some basis, environment-conict research does suggest that
if policymakers want to mitigate conicts and enhance
security in the future, they must pay attention to the state
of the environment.
REFERENCES
Barber, V (1997) Environmental Scarcities, State Capacity, and
Civil Violence: the Case of Indonesia, University of Toronto
Press, Toronto.
Brown, L R (1977) Rede ning National Security, Worldwatch
Institute, Washington, DC.
Cooley, J K (1984) The War Over Water, Foreign Policy, 54,
326.
Durham, W H (1979) Scarcity and Survival in Central America:
Ecological Origins of the Soccer War, Stanford University
Press, Stanford, CA.
Esty, D C, Goldstone, J A, Gurr, T R, Harff, B, Levy, M, Da-
belko, G D, Surko, P T, and Unger, A N (1999) State Fail-
ure Task Force Report: Phase II Findings, in Environmental
Change Security Project Report, Woodrow Wilson Interna-
tional Center for Scholars, Washington, DC, 5, 4868.
Gizewski, P (1997) Environmental Scarcity and Conict, Com-
mentary: a Canadian Security Intelligence Service Publication,
71, Spring 1997.
Gleditsch, N P (1997) Conict and the Environment, Proceedings
of the NATO advanced research workshop, Kluwer Academic
Publishers, Dordrecht.
Gleick, P H (1989) Climate Change and International Politics:
Problems Facing Developing Countries, Ambio, 18, 333339.
Gleick, P H (1998) The Worlds Water: 19981999, (Advanced
Copy), Island Press, Washington, DC.
Hazarika, S (1993) Bangladesh and Assam: Land Pressures,
Migration and Ethnic Conict, Occas. Pap. Ser. Proj. Environ.
Change Acute Con ict, 3, 4563.
Homer-Dixon, T F (1999) Environment, Scarcity, and Violence,
Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Homer-Dixon, T F and Percival, V (1996) Environmental Scar-
city and Violent Con ict: Brie ng Book, University of Toronto,
Toronto.
Lang, C (1995) Environmental Degradation as a Cause of Political
Conict, Social Stress, and Ethnic Tensions, Occasional Paper
No. 12, Environ. Con icts Proj., Swiss Peace Foundation,
Berne.
Lipschutz, R D and Holdren, J P (1990) Crossing Borders: Re-
source Flows, the Global Environment, and International Secu-
rity, Bull. Peace Proposals, 21, 12133.
Lunde, L (1991) North/South and Global Warming Conict or
Cooperation? Bull. Peace Proposals, 22, 199210.
Molvoer, R K (1991) Environmentally Induced Conicts? Bull.
Peace Proposals, 22, 17588.
Myers, N (1993) Ultimate Security, W W Norton, New York.
Pirages, D (1996) Microsecuirty: Diseases, Organisms, and Hu-
man Well-Being, Environ. Change Secur. Project Rep., 2,
917.
Renner, M (1996) Fighting for Survival: Environmental Decline,
Social Con ict, and the New Age of Insecurity, W W Norton,
New York.
Schwartz, D M and Ashbindu, S (1999) Environmental Condi-
tions, Resources, and Con icts, United Nations Environment
Program, Nairobi.
Schwartz, D M, Deligiannis, T, and Homer-Dixon, T F (in press)
Environmental Scarcity and Violent Conict: A Response
to Gleditsch, in Environmental Con ict, eds P F Diehl and
N P Gleditsch, Westview Press, New York.
Smil, V (1992) Environmental Change as a Source of Conict and
Economic Losses in China, Occas. Pap. Ser. Proj. Environ.
Change Acute Con ict, 2, 539.
Starr, J R (1991) Water Wars, Foreign Policy, 82, 1736.
Suliman, M (1992) Civil War in Sudan, Occasional Paper No. 4,
Environ. Con icts Proj., Swiss Peace Foundation, Berne.
Wegenmund, R (1996) Ethnic Transborder Conicts in the Sene-
gambian Region Caused by Environmental Degradation, in
Environmental Degradation as a Cause of War, eds G Bachler
and K Spillman, Verlag-Ruegger, Zurich.
Development and Global Environmental Change
WOLFGANG SACHS
Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Energy, Environment, Wuppertal, Germany
The notion of development, offering language to the desire of many nations for justice and dignity, has been a
powerful idea forcing global environmental change. The article traces the rise and decline of the development
idea over the past 50 years. It attempts to uncover the concepts many layers of meaning as they built up during
post-war history; it exposes the bitter legacies socially, culturally, environmentally which have been left
behind by this period; and it points to the recent transition from development to globalization. Finally, some
prospects are sketched out for achieving more equity outside the framework of conventional development.
HISTORY
The rise of epochs often go unnoticed, but the dawning
of the development age occurred at a precise date and
time. On 20 January 1949, President Harry S. Truman,
in his Inaugural Address to Congress, dubbed the home
of more than half the worlds people underdeveloped
areas. This was the rst time that the word underde-
velopment (OED, 1989, XVIII, 960), which was later
to become a key category ordering global relations, was
used by a prominent political gure. Truman, after draw-
ing a sharp line between democracy and communism in
the rst part of his speech, directed the attention of his
audience to the Southern Hemisphere with the following
words:
Fourth, we must embark on a bold new program for making
the benets of our scientic advances and industrial progress
available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped
areas. More than half the people of the world are living in
conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate. They
are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and
stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them
and to more prosperous areas. For the rst time in history,
humanity possesses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the
suffering of these people.
(Truman, 1949)
With these high-ying words of the Point Four Program,
the development age, the particular period in world history
following the colonial era, was opened (to be superseded
some forty years later by the globalization age). In this
period, the relationship between Europe/America and the
rest of the world was being shaped by specic assump-
tions about time, geographical space, and relevant social
actors. These assumptions came to frame the develop-
ment discourse; they stand in continuity and contrast with
the assumptions of both the earlier colonial and the later
globalization periods.
Linear Global Time and the Rule of Gross National
Product (GNP)
In the light of the concept development , all peoples on
the globe appear to move along one single road. The lead
runners show the way; they are at the forefront of social
evolution, indicating a common destination even for coun-
tries which had highly diverse trajectories in the past. Many
different histories merge into one master history, many dif-
ferent time scales merge into one master time scale. The
imagined time is linear, only allowing for progressing or
regressing; and it is global, drawing all communities world-
wide into its purview. In contrast to cultures which may
embrace a cyclical view of time or which live out stories
enshrined in myths, the linear view of time privileges the
future over the present, and the present over the past. As
the concept of linear global time spreads, indigenous peo-
ples like the Rajasthani in India or the Aymara in Peru, for
instance, are compelled to put aside their particular chrono-
graphs. They are inevitably pulled into the perspective of
progress.
Of course, the belief in progress predates the devel-
opment age by almost two hundred years. The European
Enlightenment was already able to interpret the multiplic-
ity of cultures in space as a succession of stages in time,
viewing history as a never-ending process of improve-
ment. Taken from biology, the metaphor development
constructed history as a process of maturation; society
is likened to, say, a ower which develops according
to inner laws, in a continuous and irreversible fashion,
towards a nal stage of bloom. However, since about 1800,
DEVELOPMENT AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 151
development has only been used as an intransitive concept
(Wieland, 1979); authors such as Hegel, Marx, and Schum-
peter conceived it as a process of historys own making, but
not yet as a project to be carried out under the direction of
human will and reason (Lummis, 1996). This changed with
the advent of the development age. Development took on
an active meaning; it turned into a project of planners and
engineers who set out to systematically remodel societies
to accelerate maturation; a project to be completed within
several decades, if not years.
Such optimism was facilitated by the fact that economic
performance had become the all-encompassing measure of a
countrys excellence only after 1945. Sir Frederick Lugard,
the inspirer of British colonial theory in the 1920s, had still
conceived the task of a colonial power as a dual mandate;
as both the economic development of colonial territories for
the benet of industrial countries and as moral concern for
the native populations (Lugard, 1922). Economic progress
and the welfare of the natives had been considered as two
distinct duties; the civilizing mission had comprised both
developing resources such as land, minerals and timber,
and elevating the natives to a higher level of civilization.
It was only at the time of Truman that the double mandate
collapsed into one: development. The former distinction
between an economic and a moral realm vanished, a sign
of a conceptual shift. From then on, not only resources
gured into the development formula, but people as well.
Inversely, the moral concern for people was eclipsed by
the economic concern for growth. This shift indicated that
a new worldview had come to the fore: the degree of
civilization of a country can be measured by its economic
performance.
As it happened, this measure of excellence has been
available only since 1939, when Colin Clark for the rst
time compiled national income gures for a series of
countries, revealing the gulf in living standards between
rich and poor (Arndt, 1987, 35). GNP per capita provided a
ready-made indicator for assessing the position of countries
moving along the road of development. Informed by an
economic worldview and aided by a statistical toolkit,
experts for decades to come de ned development as growth
in output and income per head. A developing country is
one with real per capita income that is low relative to that in
advanced countries like the United States, Japan, and those
in Western Europe (Samuelson and Nordhaus, 1985, 812).
Hierarchic Global Space and the Imperative of
Catching-up
As already indicated, the chrono-politics of development
was, and is, accompanied by a particular geo-politics (Di
Meglio, 1997). Through the prism of development, the
confusing diversity of nations across the globe appears
as a clear ranking order shaping the orientation of both
the powerful and the less powerful. After all, the very
metaphor of development implies predominance. Just as
immature fruit can be only recognized by comparing it
to a mature fruit, the stages of underdevelopment can
only be recognized by displaying particular societies as
examples of maturity. Development without predominance
is therefore like a race without direction; assigning the
positions of leaders and followers is part and parcel of a
developmentalist construction of history.
While inequality between nations in colonial times was
understood within an authoritarian framework, which can
be likened to a father-child relationship; in the develop-
ment age it was seen in an economic framework, which can
be likened to a race between differently endowed runners.
Indeed, staying with that image, it can be said that devel-
opment policy basically had two objectives: rst, bringing
countries onto the racetrack, i.e., into the orbit of the world
market; and secondly, turning them into competent runners,
i.e., putting them on a path of sustained growth. However,
it was only after the diversity of living conditions had been
reduced to a hierarchy of aggregate national income gures
that the enormous distance separating rich and poor coun-
tries leaped into view. No matter what ways of life the
Kikuyus in East Africa or the Gujaratis in India cherished,
no matter what ideals they aspired to, in the development
mindset their diversity is crammed into one single category;
they are underdeveloped. Thus, entire peoples found them-
selves locked into being de cient, de ned not according to
what they are and want to be, but according to what they
lack and are expected to become.
As is so often the case, the de nition of the problem
already implied the solution. When low income is con-
sidered the salient problem, raising incomes is the key
solution. Any desire for change in Southern countries was
thus reinterpreted as demand for economic development,
casting aside other possible interpretations: for example,
that oppression or dependency might be the problem which
would call for liberation or autonomy as a solution. Nor
was there a notion that cultures might in the rst place aim
for non-economic ideals, be it the integrity of the clan or
the celebration of religious rituals. On the contrary, the race
in the economic world arena, like any race, was seen to be
dominated by the imperative of catching up. Indeed, the
chrono-politics and geo-politics particular to the develop-
ment idea engendered a monumental historical promise: the
promise that, at the end of the day, all societies would be
capable of bridging the gap to the rich and sharing in the
fruits of industrial civilization. It may be in this promise
that the foundation of the development creed in Christian
thought becomes most palpable (Rist, 1997). Development
can be understood as a secular salvation story, constitut-
ing an ecumenical community, which places its trust in the
good works of providence and faithfully follows the path
of predestination (Tenbruck, 1989).
152 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Rising Nation States and the Social Contract
After World War II it was incumbent upon the United States
to project a New World Order. Germany and Japan had
been defeated; France and Britain seriously wounded. As
the colonial powers lost their grip on the world, inde-
pendence movements sprang up in the South and claimed
the right to nation states. A power vacuum opened which
threatened to be lled either by violence or communist
takeovers. In this situation, the US launched (following its
own self-image) self determination, free trade, democracy,
and international cooperation as the core values of a future
order. A world was presented which is held together by
economic interdependence and not any longer by politi-
cal dominion. Economic strength had taken the place of
military power. As colonialism had occupied overseas ter-
ritories, the doors to political freedom would be thrust open:
provided, at least, that trade could ow freely. The US, hav-
ing itself emerged as a nation from an anti-colonial struggle,
readily backed the process of de-colonization, proclaiming
at the same time economic development as an overarching
goal. Development was thus a conceptual vehicle for Amer-
ican dominance with a liberal face; it allowed for heralding
national independence while expanding predominance. A
new model of power appeared on the horizon: anti-colonial
imperialism.
Decolonization implied the building of numerous nation
states in Asia and Africa. As in 19th century Latin Amer-
ica, the nationalist leaders aspired to that model of political
organization, which had been forged into a European norm
through centuries-long struggles against the Pope, local
lords, and foreign intruders. The nation, after all, is an imag-
ined community, residing within the connes of a particular
territory and governed by a sovereign state (Anderson,
1983). Establishing the nation as the relevant community
(as opposed to family clans or religious afliations), carving
out governable territorial units, and imposing the author-
ity of a bureaucratic state, was an arduous task which
called for a mobilizing narrative. The development idea
provided legitimation; it became the raison d etre for the
emerging states. The new governments largely internalized
the image thrust upon them by the countries perceived as
advanced; they saw in the ght against underdevelopment
the mission of their nations. In a certain sense, the right to
self-determination had thus been acquired in exchange for
the right to self-denition (Rist, 1997, 79).
Moreover, the perspective in which one would eventu-
ally catch up with the rich countries restored self-respect
and pride to countries, which had been humiliated by colo-
nialism. Such a perspective promised the new countries an
equal standing among nations; the demand for develop-
ment expressed the desire for recognition and justice. What
fuelled the determination to catch up was a double asymme-
try in power between the South and the North. Culturally,
the West had become the intimate enemy (Nandy, 1983)
of the indigenous elite, giving shape to their imagination of
success; and politically, the might of the North had become
so formidable that pure survival instinct forced the South
to seek similar economic and technological means. As this
asymmetry widened during the decades which followed, the
demand for development grew stronger and more desperate
up to the point of codifying a right to development in
the United Nations General Assembly of 1986. Then and
before, the emerging countries reinterpreted the power gap
as a development gap. Apart from some exceptions, they
saw no other choice than to join the race.
However, the rich nations also had a stake in making
development a global project, in whose name a social
contract of cooperation could be forged between North and
South. After the horrors of war, it was commonly held belief
in the UN that peace could only be preserved by launching
economic development on a worldwide scale. Virtually all
countries rejected at that time the supremacy of the market
and believed in the active management and planning of the
economy by the state (Hobsbawm, 1994). In particular the
US, attributing the outbreak of war in Europe to economic
disorder, remembered their own successful management of
the crisis during the New Deal, when J M Keynes had
recommended state action to counter unemployment and
underproduction. Freedom from fear and want had been
already held out by President Roosevelt in the Atlantic
Charter of 1941; it is from this point that development
became a cornerstone of the mission of the UN. For
the sake of stability and peace, the need for economic
growth (steered along through public intervention) was
projected upon the world. In this sense, development can
be seen as an exercise in global Keynesianism to keep
disorder at bay. Both the hegemonial needs of the North
and the emancipatory needs of the South converged upon
the prospect of development.
The Poor as Target and the Dethronement of GNP
The situation was rather straightforward in the two post-war
decades. Despite differences in approach, development had
been identied with economic growth, if not plainly with
industrialization. No matter if shortage of physical capital
or shortage of human capital was seen as the major decit,
both answers (capital formation or schooling) had aimed
at increasing the ow of goods and services. However, the
concept of development began to be contested in the 1970s
when attention shifted to the poor, exposing the failure
of growth to benet the large majority of people. Robert
McNamara, incoming President of the World Bank, put a
nger into the wound:
Growth is not equitably reaching the poor Rapid growth
has been accompanied by greater maldistribution of income
in many developing countries We should strive to eradicate
absolute poverty by the end of the century. That means in prac-
tice the elimination of malnutrition and illiteracy, the reduction
DEVELOPMENT AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 153
of infant mortality and the rising of life expectancy standards
to those of the developed nations.
(McNamara, 1973)
Merely watching the rate of income growth was not
enough anymore, the social content of development now
mattered. For whose benet? emerged as the bench-
mark question. As a consequence, the scope of attention
expanded; not only the middle classes boosting market out-
put, but also the populations left out by growth, and even
the victims of growth, all became targets for specically
designed interventions. Development was thus redened as
something transcending growth, as economic growth plus
redistribution, plus participation, or plus human develop-
ment. In this vein, throughout the years that followed in
quick succession, areas like employment, equality, poverty
eradication, basic needs, informal sector, and women were
established as elds of development action, each of them
bringing a new set of tools and a new tribe of experts to
the fore.
With these extensions, a conceptual ination set in. Soon,
development meant everything and nothing, the concept
ceased to denote anything in particular, it just connoted
good intentions. It had no content, but retained a function: it
justied any action in the name of some higher evolutionary
goal. However, what the concept lost in semantic precision,
it gained in political versatility. Opposing camps both
claimed to promote development; the struggle over meaning
reected from now on the struggle over policy. In particular,
the controversies turned again and again on the role of
economic growth, with a focus on GNP growth lined up
against a focus on social or (later) environmental quality.
While the rst focus cherished the positivism of growth,
the latter centered on non-economic wealth. While the rst
pushed output, the latter cured the consequences. It thus
follows that development can be both the injury as well as
the therapy.
At any rate, this dichotomy continued to shape the devel-
opment debate for subsequent decades (Nederveen Pieterse,
1998). A straight line runs from the International Labour
Organization (ILOs) world employment strategy in 1970 to
the basic needs approach and nally the Human Develop-
ment Reports of United Nations Development Programme
(UNDP) in the 1990s. Similarly, a line can be drawn
from the export promotion of the Asian Development Bank
in the 1970s to structural adjustment in the 1980s and
nally the bailing-out policies of the International Mon-
etary Fund (IMF) in the 1990s. Some growth skeptics have
subsequently redened development as enlarging peoples
choices and capabilities, a formula which provided the
foundation for the Human Development concept with its
emphasis on literacy, health and participation. Its essence is
to place development at the service of peoples well being
rather than people at the service of development (Banuri
et al., 1994, 16). Even this view, however, (along with more
recent creations like the social capital approach) cannot
escape the shadow of the development creed; the Human
Development Index is, much like the GNP, a decit index;
it ranks countries hierarchically, assuming that there is only
one best way of social evolution.
A New International Order and the Rise of Third
Worldism
The states, which had emerged out of the crumbling colo-
nial empires, did not stay long without a voice in interna-
tional affairs. After the Nonaligned Movement had formed
at Bandung in 1955 so as to put some clout behind the
de-colonization process, the G 77, set up in 1963 at the
eve of the rst United Nations Conference on Trade and
Development (UNCTAD) Conference, aimed at articulat-
ing collective bargaining power in the world economic
arena. Development ceased to be seen as an objective to be
achieved in individual countries, but was thought to require
a less hostile international economic structure. Obstacles to
development are not just to be found in domestic habits and
institutions, as suggested by the modernization discourse;
they now present themselves as well in the detrimental
terms of international trade. This framing of the devel-
opment problem was intellectually prepared and further
elaborated by the so-called dependency theory , which
identied structures of unequal exchange and in general
the gradient of economic power as the source of continuing
underdevelopment. Responding to their structurally periph-
eral position, Southern countries, perceiving themselves as
sharing the same destiny, formed a coalition demanding
a new international economic order. The South opposed
itself to the North: a constellation which reached its high-
point in the 1970s as the oil exporting countries successfully
displayed their collective market power with regard to the
afuent economies.
Although the demand for redened rules in the world
economy weakened as the oil cartel collapsed and the debt
crisis exploded in the 1980s, the G 77 continued to be a
major player in UN politics, in particular after the rise of
East-Asian countries as serious competitors. In 1991 the
South Commission restated the call for a fair world order
(South Commission, 1991). More specically, the moment
the North began to call upon the South for cooperation
in environmental matters, the Southern coalition, all inter-
nal differences notwithstanding, renewed their grievances
about the asymmetry of power. Since then, in environmen-
tal negotiations, the claims to greater economic space are
bargained against demands for a wiser use of the biosphere.
Until today, however, this quest for equal power and recog-
nition remains focussed on relations between states, leaving
the question of inequality within countries in the dark.
Just as the Declaration on the New International Economic
Order of 1974 had failed to mention domestic inequal-
ity even once, the calls for greater justice still sounded
154 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
hollow in the nineties because the ongoing marginalization
of social majorities remained hidden behind the veil of
national sovereignty.
Disrupted Nature and the Conservation of
Development in Time
In the 1980s, the promise of development received a sec-
ond blow. While a decade earlier the persistence of poverty
had begun to undermine the concepts social viability, now
the emerging natural limits to growth cast doubts on its
long-term viability. Combustion based on fossil energy,
the core of industrial metabolism, threatened to overburden
the atmosphere and the growing world economys vorac-
ity for living resources threatened to destabilize forests,
water quality and soils across the globe. Against the back-
drop of emerging biophysical limits to economic growth,
the development idea underwent yet another round of con-
ceptual ination. Following the logic of turning victims
into clients, development had to be reworked to allow for
both innite growth and preservation of nature. Again, a
qualier was attached, dening sustainable development as
development that meets the needs of the present with-
out compromising the ability of future generations to meet
their own needs (World Commission on Environment and
Development (WCED), 1987, 8). The formula pointed to
the future, but to a bleak future of scarcities rather than a
bright future of progress. It called for development choices
that would not drastically restrict the environmental space
available for future generations.
Although highlighting justice in time, the canonical for-
mula underemphasized justice in social space. Constraints
imposed by the present generation on future generations
were given prominence over constraints imposed by pow-
erful groups on less powerful groups within one generation.
Needs and generations , after all, are socially neutral
terms; they do not allow for vertical distinctions. Yet such
distinctions are crucial when it comes to intra-generational
equity. Whose needs and what needs are supposed to be
met? Is sustainable development supposed to meet the needs
for water, land and economic security or the needs for
air travel and bank deposits? Is it concerned with survival
needs or with luxury needs? Leaving these questions up in
the air, the acceptance of sustainable development in cir-
cles of privilege and power was facilitated, obfuscating the
point that there may be no sustainability without restraint
on wealth.
Furthermore, by linking sustainable to development, a
terrain of semantic ambivalence was created. The new
concept subtlely shifted the locus of sustainability from
nature to development; while sustainable previously had
referred to renewable resources, it now referred to develop-
ment. With that shift, the perceptual paradigm changed. The
meaning of sustainability slid from conservation of nature
to conservation of development. Given that development
had conceptually become an empty shell, which may cover
anything from the rate of capital accumulation to the num-
ber of latrines, exactly what should be kept sustainable was
unclear and contentious. Hence all sorts of political players,
even fervent protagonists of economic growth, have in sub-
sequent years been able to couch their intentions in terms of
sustainable development. The term had soon become self-
referential, as a denition offered by the World Bank neatly
conrms: What is sustainable? Sustainable development is
development that lasts (World Bank, 1992, 34).
LEGACY
For fty years, development has been much more than
just a socio-economic endeavor; it has been a perception
which models reality, a myth which comforts societies, and
a fantasy which unleashes passions. However, perceptions,
myths, and fantasies rise and fall independent of empirical
results and rational conclusions. They rise when they are
pregnant with promises, and they fade when they turn into
sterile commonplaces. Achievements such as the average
rise of per capita GNP in Southern countries from 1960
to 1997 at a rate of 2.1% per year, the success story of a
number of East-Asian economies, or the declining rates of
infant mortality even in the group of low-income countries,
are not indicative enough to fortify the faith in development.
In the same way, the enumeration of failures, such as
the rising absolute number of poor people (living on less
than $1 per day) worldwide, and their slowly increasing
relative number in Sub-Saharan Africa as well as in Latin
America, is not necessarily forceful enough to undo that
faith. Instead, a world-view, like development, loses appeal
when the implicit promises cease to command credibility.
This is what has happened in the last 1015 years; the three
founding promises: that economic development will spread
across global space, improve human destiny, and continue
for ever in time, have turned stale.
Social Polarization
After fty years of development, the promise of greater
justice in the world has largely evaporated. In the interna-
tional arena, the notorious gap in income between North and
South has not been bridged; on the contrary it has widened
to an extent that it is now unimaginable that it could ever
be closed. In 1996, the 20% of the world population liv-
ing in afuent countries had an income at their disposal
82 times higher than the poorest 20% of the world popu-
lation; in 1960, it was just 30 times higher (UNDP, 1998,
29). Upon closer inspection, to be sure, the picture is far
from homogeneous because these relative gures hide, for
instance, that per capita income in oil-exporting and in East
Asian countries has sharply risen during the last 20 years.
DEVELOPMENT AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 155
But absolute impoverishment proceeds at the same time;
per capita income in more than 80 countries is today lower
than it was 10 or more years ago (UNDP, 1999, 3). Social
polarization among countries advances, while the size and
the composition of the poles may change. The world might
have developed, indeed: but in two opposite directions.
Looking at the over-all picture, it is probably no exaggera-
tion to say that the aspiration of catching up with the rich
has ended in a blunder of planetary proportions.
This is even more true if one considers the destiny of
large majorities of people within most countries; the polar-
ization between nations (often, but notably not in India
and a number of East Asian countries) repeats itself within
each country. In Brazil, for example, the share of the poor-
est 50% of the population in national income amounted
to 18% in 1960, while it fell to 11.6% by 1995 (UNDP,
1998, 29). Economic growth, it turns out, has often failed
to reach its most heroic objective; to alleviate the burden
of the poor. Investments in ports, roads, steel mills and fer-
tilizer plants might have fuelled national income, but they
have rarely trickled down to the poor. In fact, it has taken
decades of misplaced development assistance to discover
that there is only a loose relationship between levels of
economic growth and levels of poverty. Growth, it turns
out, is certainly not sufcient for mitigating poverty; land
rights, community coherence, and self-organization have
been shown to be at least as important. Yet, precisely these
conditions of livelihood have often been undermined in the
pursuit of growth. Dams displace people, machines sub-
stitute rural workers, cash crops replace subsistence crops,
urban migration follows the loss of self-afrmation. More
often than not, the natural and social base of livelihood
economies have thus been exploited for building the base
of a market economy. Against this backdrop, it is not aston-
ishing that the spread of misery has often accompanied
economic growth.
The development perception, having for a long time seen
poverty as simply a lack in income, failed to appreciate
life-enhancing, non-market resources for the poor, such as
rights, social capital, and natural resources. As a conse-
quence, the application of growth recipes had a polarizing
effect; it turned frugality into misery, making a minor-
ity better off in the process. Moreover, in staying true
to its bias that only income growth matters, the develop-
ment perception remained blind to the effect of unequal
power relations. However, as access to money and non-
money resources is determined by power, growth without
redistribution of power enabled the urban middle classes,
manufacturers, and big farmers to corner the gains of pros-
perity, shifting the cost to small farmers, indigenous people,
and the urban proletariat. And still today, a totally dispro-
portionate share of economic gains in Southern countries
goes to the rich and politically well connected (Ayres,
1998, 126). Through development, furthermore, countless
people have been drawn into the money economy, a tran-
sition which modernized both poverty and wealth (Illich,
1971). Where the gradient of power and prestige is cali-
brated according to purchasing power, expectations tend to
explode while opportunities remain limited. Given that sat-
isfaction is relative to expectations, fuller integration into
the money economy may therefore even increase the feeling
of poverty. Television sets in shacks have become symbols
for the unbridgeable gulf between means and expectations.
Unsettling of Cultures
The most dramatic and far-reaching social change of the
second half of the 20th century, the one which separates
the modern world forever from the past, is the death of the
peasantry (Hobsbawm, 1994, 289). This marked the end
of several thousand years of cultural evolution when the
overwhelming majority of the human race lived by agri-
culture, raising livestock or harvesting the sea as shers.
After the peasants of rural Europe and Japan had more
or less stopped tilling the land by the 1960s, Latin Amer-
ica, large tracts of Asia, and North Africa followed suit
in the last decades of that century. Only three regions of
the globe remained essentially dominated by their villages
and elds: Sub-Saharan Africa, South and continental South
East Asia, and China. However, while in the Northern
countries the population of the shrinking agrarian world
was largely absorbed by the expanding industrial world,
in the Southern countries only a minority in this transi-
tion found a dignied living in towns and cities. Never-
theless, urbanization has continued to change the human
condition on an ever more massive scale. Just during the
last 25 years, the share of the world population which is
living in urban areas went from slightly more than one
third to one half, a gure which is expected to rise to
two thirds by 2025 (World Bank, 2000, 46). Development
policy, indeed, had set out to propel agrarian societies
into the urban-industrial age. It sought to replace tradi-
tional Man by modern Man, an endeavor which, however,
ended in fatal success; while traditional Man has van-
ished, modern Man has by no means arrived. Living in
a no-mans land, exiled from tradition and excluded from
modernity, has become the destiny of most of the worlds
people.
Nothing less than turning entire societies upside down
has been the intent of development planners right from the
start. For example, the 14-person mission to Colombia, the
rst of its kind sent out by the Bank for Reconstruction and
Development (later the World Bank) in 1949 arrived at the
following conclusion:
Piecemeal and sporadic efforts are apt to make little impression
on the general picture. Only through a generalized attack
throughout the whole economy on education, health, housing,
food, and productivity can the vicious circle of poverty be
156 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
decisively broken. But once the break is made, the process of
economic development can become self-generating.
(Escobar, 1995, 24)
In this engineering spirit, experts set out to remake soci-
eties from a host of locally based subsistence communities
into nationally integrated economies. They aimed at reor-
ganizing social ties in functional terms, as called for by
the ambition to set up machinery geared towards produc-
ing growing amounts of material wealth. Under the expert s
gaze, time-honored ways of living and knowing faded into
oblivion, reduced to obstacles to development . Instead,
decontextualized production models, depicting people and
nature as abstract objects to be changed, were projected
upon in nitely diverse human realities. People rarely g-
ured as agents in the framework of rationalist planning
(Hobart, 1993); their interests, passions, and knowledge
hardly mattered against the backdrop of grand schemes
for resource mobilization. Small wonder that development
strategies based on such models failed time and again;
they were too much in dissonance with the dynamics of
a given community. It is for this reason that development
has always produced both order and chaos.
At any rate, development has often failed to grasp the rich
complexity of non-economized societies. It could not appre-
ciate, for instance, that such settings can be regarded as
symbolic sites (Zaoual in Rahnema, 1997; Apffel and Mar-
glin, 1998) where communities live out narratives that link
them to their divinities or where social energy is primarily
invested in the upkeep of a network of friends, relatives or
clan members. In such circumstances, any modernization
will run quickly into communitarian constraints, as rela-
tions to divinities or to fellow citizens are likely to collide
with the requirements of functional performance. To put it
in more general terms, development has aimed at achieving
that decisive shift which distinguishes modern civilization
from all others: primacy is not given any longer to the
relations between people, but to the relations between peo-
ple and things (Dumont, 1977). In the rst case, events
are evaluated in the light of their signi cance with regard
to neighbors, relatives, ancestors, and gods: whereas in the
second, they are judged according to what they contribute to
the acquisition and ownership of things. This impersonality
postulate (Banuri in Apffel and Marglin, 1990) according to
which impersonal relations are inherently superior to per-
sonal relations can well be regarded as speci cally Western;
to make it prevail is what development as modernization
was all about.
It is probably true that this shift has been a mixed bless-
ing for large majorities of the world s people. On the one
hand, it moved many regions and classes into the modern
world with its liberties and conveniences; on the other, it
disembedded countless persons from their cultures, send-
ing them to join the global majority of underconsumers. As
long as cultures (both large and small ones) are con ned
to themselves, people everywhere have tended to view the
corner of the world they inhabit as particularly favored
and their own ways of life as good: that is, quintessen-
tially human (Tuan, 1986, 1). However, as all cultures are
drawn into the maelstrom of global interaction and assim-
ilation, reinforced by the transborder ow of images, this
self-con dence can hardly be maintained. As borders lim-
ited the space of comparison, they facilitated limited, but
attainable satisfaction, while a borderless world, making the
space of comparison explode, offers unlimited, but often
unattainable satisfaction. This goes a long way in explain-
ing why both excitement and dissatisfaction grow along
with globalization.
Natures Predicament
After the Second World War, the US, along with other
industrialized nations, could still feel it was at the forefront
of social evolution. After 50 years this premise of superior-
ity has been fully shaken (if not shattered) by the ecological
predicament. Using the racetrack metaphor, development
may have been a race, which was conducted unfairly, and
which has driven the majority of runners to exhaustion,
but its demise is imminent before the tribunal of history
because the horses appear to be running in the wrong direc-
tion. From the local to the global level, many experiences
have shown that the sources (water, timber, oil, minerals
etc.), sites (land for mines, settlements, infrastructure), and
sinks (soils, oceans, atmosphere) for the natural inputs of
economic growth have become scarce or have been thrown
into turbulence. As a consequence, the promise that devel-
opment will continue for ever has collapsed. For instance,
if all countries followed the industrial example of emit-
ting per capita on average 11.4 tones of CO
2
annually, the
emissions of six billion people would amount to roughly
68.4 billion tones; more than ve times the 13 billion tones
the earth is capable of absorbing. In other words, to bring
all countries up to the present standard of living in af uent
countries, ve planets would be needed to serve as source
for the inputs and sinks of economic progress. Against this
backdrop, development has moved into an impasse. With
biophysical limits to economic expansion (hard to pin down
and ever contestable, but nevertheless real) emerging in the
last quarter of the 20th century, the North cannot be held
up as a model any longer; the trail-blazers are without a
compass. The recognition of the niteness of the earth has
been a fatal blow to the idea of development as envisaged
by Truman.
In fact, ecological constraints represent only half the
story; they are compounded by the fact that approxi-
mately 20% of the world population consume 80% of the
world s resources. The majority of the global consumer
class roughly those that have a bank account, some career
prospects, and access to a car can be found in the North.
DEVELOPMENT AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 157
It is those 20% who eat 45% of all meat and sh, con-
sume 68% of all electricity, 84% of all paper, and own
87% of all cars (UNDP, 1998, 2). They can be called
the omnivores (Gadgil and Guha, 1995), namely those
who are capable of cornering environmental resources to
their benet at the cost of other groups. In the global con-
text, the industrialized countries tap into the patrimony of
nature to an excessive extent; they draw on the environ-
ment far beyond their national boundaries. The ecological
footprint (Wackernagel and Rees, 1996) (see Ecological
Footprint, Volume 3) that they produce is larger (and in
some cases much larger) than their own territories; a great
deal of the resources and sinks they utilize are not avail-
able for other countries anymore. In fact, the Organisation
for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) coun-
tries surpass the (in terms of ecology and equity) admissible
average size of such a footprint by a magnitude of about
7585%; as matters stand today, the wealthy 25% of
humanity occupy a footprint as large as the entire bio-
logically productive surface area of the earth. In a closed
environmental space, the question of how much is tolerable
therefore becomes intermingled with the question, who is
getting how much?
But also within countries, in particular Southern nations,
the consumer classes often succeed in sequestering them-
selves against environmental burdens, leaving the noise,
the dirt, and the ugliness of the industrial hinterland at the
doorsteps of less advantaged groups. In 1994 13% of South-
ern urban citizens lacked access to clean drinking water, and
almost twice as many did not even have the simplest latrines
(World Bank, 2000, 140). Contrary to the fata morgana of
development, health conditions for the poor in cities are
today worse than in rural areas. Moreover, just as in the
case of the citizens of the industrial world, the Southern
middle classes live off the resource base which supports
the ecosystem people (Gadgil and Guha, 1995), that third
of the world population (UNDP, 1998, 80) which derives
their livelihood directly from free access to land, water,
and forests. Building large dams and extracting ore, drilling
groundwater wells and capitalizing agriculture for the ben-
et of the urban classes often degrades the ecosystems on
which they depend. As the appropriation of resources can
often only proceed after the rights of inhabitants have been
denied, human rights violations frequently go hand in hand
with resource conicts (Johnstone, 1994). Such kinds of
pressures, adding to others like unequal landholdings or a
growing population, may turn ecosystem people into land-
less and rootless squatters who have no other choice than
exhausting fragile lands and woods. It is only a slight exag-
geration to say that development in these cases deprives
the poor of their resources in order that the rich may live
beyond their means.
In sum, environmental degradation arises from two con-
tradictory settings: one of success and domination, the other
of marginality and powerlessness. In the rst instance,
corporations and consumers of the afuent world dispose
of the economic power to mobilize, if necessary over long
distances, huge amounts of resources, producing pollution,
devastation, and turbulence in the process. In the second
instance, poor people without purchasing power degrade
their habitats, after having lost their traditional rights or
any other kind of entitlement to secure sufcient sources
of livelihood. Both the degradation by the afuent and
the degradation by the poor can be largely considered the
outcome of one and the same process of economic devel-
opment. Resource voracity on the part of the powerful, and
resource scarcity on the part of the powerless, combine in
pushing the planet to the brink.
TRANSITION
It is not just its own fading promises, but also shifts in
the world economy that have contributed to the decline
of the development age. Since the mid-1980s the accel-
erated rise of globalized markets along with the arrival
of an information-based economy has profoundly changed
the post-war international order, a transformation which
played itself out fully the moment that the East West
division of the world collapsed in 1990. In essence, stud-
ies on development had concentrated on the transition of
nation states from agrarian to industrial. With globaliza-
tion, the coordinates of modernization have changed; the
agenda is now dominated by the shift of power from nation
states to transnational markets and from industrial struc-
tures to informational structures. Deterritorialization and
dematerialization (see Dematerialization of the Economy,
Volume 4) have emerged as powerful trends, which escape
the categories of development, without however, canceling
the aspirations behind it. For the hopes which nourished the
development creed are more alive than ever the hope of
the poor for a life in dignity as well as the hope on the part
of Southern elite to be nally on an equal footing with the
afuent North.
Globalization Instead of Development
In the course of globalization, what can be called the
Westphalian constellation (Menzel, 1998) is reaching its
end. For it was after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648,
which established the principle of territorially bounded
sovereignty that a particular form of polity, the European
nation-state, came into existence. In its idealized version,
the nation-state circumscribed a territory upon which a
polity, an economy, a nation, and a culture rose. Like a con-
tainer, it was supposed to hold society in all its layers within
a demarcated space, creating a self-enclosed entity which
in turn engaged with other such entities on the international
level (Beck, 1997). Though reality never conformed to this
158 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
conception entirely, these containers nally burst open with
globalization. Goods, money, information, images, people
ow across borders, giving rise to a transnational social
space where interactions occur over long distances, some-
times even in real time. As a consequence, the former
(though always partial) integration of economy, polity, and
culture within a territory breaks apart, turning states into
just one player amidst transnational networks of exchanges
in many spheres of life.
Against the background of these changes, development
loses both its object and its agent. As a matter of course, the
development discourse had focussed on the transformation
of territorially bounded societies; they were thought to be
the units by which social evolution proceeds. States were
thus the privileged sites of development. However, as soci-
eties are perforated by transborder ows (be it through for-
eign capital, satellite television or migrants), the objective
of development planning begins to dissolve. Attention no
longer focuses on developing national economies, but either
on inserting certain players successfully into the world mar-
ket or on securing livelihoods for local communities. Like-
wise, the agents of development change. While previously
the state was expected to be the engine of development,
several new agents, all of them moving largely irrespective
of borders, now diminish the role of the state. In this vein,
private foreign investment has overtaken public assistance,
television imagery has superseded national narratives, and
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have shouldered
many development projects. At the present time, the devel-
opment concept looks strangely out of place in the era of
globalization.
Furthermore, the development creed had been embedded
in a conception of linear worldwide progress, which fails
to resonate with a globalist mindset. During the heyday
of industrial modernity, history had been conceived as
a movement with a direction, a universal process whose
pointer was called rationalization or liberation (Bauman,
1992). This predominance of time over space in ordering
worldviews, however, has been turned around by the shift
in consciousness, which is connected with globalization.
For what captures the attention of the post-modern mind
is not a clear universal sequence of social change, but the
simultaneous presence of a plurality of differences across
geographical or virtual space. In perception, space gradually
gains the upper hand over time; it is not the sequence of
things that matters, but their possible combinations. The
present change in guiding metaphors can be taken as an
illustration; the road of progress is being replaced by the
connectivity of networks . While the former saw societies
as progressing along a time scale, the latter sees shifting
patterns of ows between non-contiguous locations. In the
transnational and digital world where success depends on
being inserted into relevant, ever shifting circuits and not
primarily on the position of ones country on the racetrack,
the development idea ceases to express the excitement of
the day.
The New Divide
Among other things, globalization tends to undercut social
solidarity, both nationally and internationally. As societies
are less and less contained within nation states, the recipro-
cal links between social classes, which constitute a polity,
become weakened. After all, the nation state, in particular
as long as social Keynesianism had been on the agenda, was
capable of rebalancing the relations between the rich and the
poor, be it as welfare state in the North or as developmen-
talist state in the South. Under the pull of the transnational
economy, however, the social contract which lay at the
core of the redistributive state has begun to unravel. As the
elites aspire to catch up with the vanguards of the interna-
tional consumer class, their old-style sense of responsibility
for the disadvantaged sections of their own society withers
away, because they themselves, instead of feeling superior
with respect to their countrymen, feel now to be inferior
with respect to their global reference groups. Following this
drift, governments are inclined to ally themselves with the
globalizing forces and increasingly show disregard for the
majority of their citizens who live outside the global cir-
cuit (Kothari, 1993). Committed to promoting the insertion
of their industries and middle classes into global markets,
they consider the non-competitive social majority a liabil-
ity rather than a boon. As a result, in many societies a split
opens up between the globally oriented middle class on
the one side and (in terms of the world market) superu-
ous populations on the other. While globalization removes
barriers between nations, it thus erects new barriers within
nations.
Equally, the social contract between rich and poor
nations, which, all counter forces notwithstanding, had laid
the base for international development policy after the
Second World War, did not survive the onslaught of transna-
tional competition. Neither within nor between states is
there much concern any longer for redistribution. Already
in the 1980s the politics of structural adjustment largely
replaced the development consensus, giving priority to
macroeconomic stability in favor of an unhampered trans-
border mobility of capital. Deregulation and liberalization
were supposed to bring indebted countries up to the stan-
dard of a free-trade player: yet in many cases the less
advantaged sections were just brought to their knees. Disre-
garding social and environmental costs, currency stability
became the entrance ticket to the circuit of transnational
capital ows, and thus became the overriding objective of
the IMF and the World Bank. This implied a shift of focus;
the concern of dominating development agencies was now
creating a stable playing eld for transnational corporations
and was no longer interested in improving the welfare of
DEVELOPMENT AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 159
the people. However, the process by which development
institutions could become agents of the world market rather
than agents of societal welfare was facilitated by the suc-
cess of about ten emerging markets in export-led growth.
Along with the former rise of oil producing economies and
the dissolution of the Eastern Block, this success nally
split the Third World as a somewhat homogenous group of
nations. South Korea, for example, which in 1960 had still
been on a par with Bangladesh, produced in 1996 as much
output as the entire Sub-Saharan African region. Globaliza-
tion, in other words, made a number of Southern economies
(or regions therein) into players on the world market, at the
price, however, of driving a deeper wedge between them
and the large majority of countries in the South.
The more that shifting transnational space encompasses
not entire countries, but only larger or smaller sections
of a country, the more obsolete the NorthSouth divi-
sion becomes. Indeed, the dividing line, if there is any, in
the world of globalization does not primarily run between
Northern and Southern countries, but the line separates
the global middle class on the one side and the excluded
social majority on the other. The global middle class is
made up of the majority in the North and a smaller
elite in the South; its size equals roughly that 20% of
the world population which has access to an automobile.
Globalization accelerates and intensies the integration of
this class into the worldwide circuit of goods, commu-
nication and travel. But an invisible border separates in
all nations, in the North as well as in the South, the
rich from the poor. Entire categories of people in the
North, like the unemployed, the elderly and the compet-
itively weak, just as entire regions in the South, like rural
areas, tribal zones and urban settlements, nd themselves
excluded from the circuits of the world economy. Even
information-based capitalism, by linking valuable players
and places in a non-contiguous pattern, turns people and
territories across countries into black holes of informa-
tionalism (Castells 1998, 161). At any rate, the major rift
today appears to be between the globalized rich and the
localized poor; the NorthSouth divide, instead of separat-
ing nations, runs through each society, albeit in different
congurations.
Security Instead of Development
As the development consensus faded away, two themes
have emerged in its wake. The rst is globalization and
is concerned with the stability of the transnational econ-
omy. Its aim is the expansion of global markets leading
to greater welfare. The so-called Washington Consensus of
1986, which declared structural adjustment to be the high-
est form of development, can be considered its take-off
point, and the IMF its guardian. The second theme cher-
ishes security and is concerned with protection against risks.
Its aim is the need for prevention in the face of threats
to human survival and dignity. UNDPs Human Develop-
ment Report, which annually explores the state of human
security, may exemplify this current, although the debate
on environmental security (Mathews, 1989) is part of this
mode of thought as well. To some extent, the two themes are
merely a reincarnation of the 1970s conict between top-
down, pro-growth on the one side, and bottom-up, pro-poor
approaches on the other.
The concern for security crystallized in the 1990s after
the promises of development had lost credibility. With the
high-ying optimism that once powered development with-
ering away, the perceptions changed; the South ceased to
be seen as young and full of potential, as in the time of
Truman, but as the breeding ground of social and envi-
ronmental turbulence. In particular, no one still clung to
the ideal of a radiant future for the social majority, which
has become superuous in terms of the global economy.
The best that could be achieved is survival in decency.
Moreover, as globalization not only provides comforts, but
many woes as well, the North felt increasingly threatened
by immigration, civil wars, and environmental competition.
As a consequence, the South is no longer considered with
hope, but with suspicion; developing countries turn into
risk zones, and their less advantaged citizens are primarily
perceived as risk factors. Development policy shed its skin
again. It has now largely adopted a security agenda where
prevention replaces progress as the objective of develop-
ment. Catching up is out of the question, assistance now
aims at preventing the worst scenario from happening.
Securing peoples livelihood is the noble concern, projects
for clean water, market access, woodless stoves, or com-
munity organization, are typical examples: a far cry indeed
from reaching a modern paradise. But also the notion of
security is a contested terrain; the question looms large:
whose security that of vulnerable people or the secu-
rity of the OECD-dominated economy? While, for instance,
many NGOs work to enable the less advantaged to pro-
tect themselves, on the diplomatic level the stakes are often
different. International negotiations (in particular environ-
mental negotiations), in a world risk society, deal implicitly
with the defense of the stronger against the risk presented
by the weaker. The redistribution of risks and not any longer
the redistribution of economic opportunities is their hidden
agenda. For both grassroots movements and governments,
security has thus become a key concern because this is
all that is left of the development idea after the belief in
progress has vanished (see Environmental Secur ity, Vol-
ume 5).
PROSPECTS
The development age might have withered away, but its
core agenda is still unnished. For decades, development
160 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
had provided language for voicing the desire for justice.
Yet justice in both its basic forms, as redistribution of
opportunities and as recognition of otherness, fails to have
made much progress, at least beyond the connes of the
global middle class. However, the agenda is not only unn-
ished, it also faces new constraints. For the meaning of
justice is bound to change in an era of biophysical lim-
its. As long as limits were not on the horizon, justice
could be identied with growth. The famous metaphor of
the growing cake which eventually offers larger pieces for
everyone without imposing smaller pieces on anybody illus-
trates how the idea of open-ended growth could nicely
sidestep hard questions on equity. But in a closed envi-
ronmental space, the claim for justice cannot be reconciled
any longer with the promise of material intensive growth,
at least not for the worlds majority. For this reason, the
quest for justice will need to be decoupled from the pursuit
of development with a capital D.
Contraction and Convergence
Under conditions of nitude, there is only a limited part
of the global environmental space available for each coun-
try. Therefore, the concept of development as a racetrack
without a nishing line is historically outdated. In order to
envisage sustainability scenarios for this century, in par-
ticular in the context of climate change, it is helpful to
distinguish two distinct trajectories beginning from two
opposite poles and spanning a variety of initial conditions.
Northern countries start their trajectory towards a low-risk
and equitable level of fossil energy ows from high con-
sumption levels, reducing them over time until they reach
levels sustainable in terms of both ecology and equity. This
may be called the trajectory of contraction. Southern coun-
tries, on the other hand, start from relatively low levels
of fossil energy ows, increasing them over time until they
approach the trajectory of industrial countries at sustainable
levels of resource throughput. This may be called the tra-
jectory of convergence. Both trajectories pose related, but
different, challenges. For industrial countries, the challenge
consists in bringing down resource ows without a decline
in human well-being and in social justice. For Southern
countries, however, the challenge consists in raising lev-
els of resource consumption at a much smaller gradient
than industrial countries did historically; increasing human
well-being concurrently with equity.
A similar logic applies to inequalities within countries.
Given that the omnivores are not conned to the North,
retreating from excessively occupied environmental space
will be expected from Southern middle classes as well.
After all, the elite in countries like Mexico, China, and
Brazil rival the population of many OECD countries in
numbers. Therefore, the trajectories of contraction and con-
vergence also apply to the development paths of different
social classes.
Towards Resource-light Economies
The models of wealth brought about by the spectacular
growth in the OECD countries in the last fty years are
structurally oligarchic; they cannot be generalised across the
world without putting everyones life chances in jeopardy.
Chemical agriculture, the automobile society or meat-based
nutrition are all cases in point. For this reason, the move
towards models of frugal use of wealth among the afuent
is a matter of equity not just of ecology. However, con-
ventional development thinking implicitly denes equity
as a problem of the poor. But designing strategies for the
poor, developmentalists worked towards lifting the bottom,
rather than lowering the top (Goodland and Daly, 1993).
The wealthy and their way of producing and consuming
werent under scrutiny, and the burden of change was solely
heaped upon the poor. In future, however, justice will be
much more about changing the lifestyles of the rich than
about changing those of the poor.
In order to move towards resource-light economies, two
broad strategies can be distinguished. The rst is the attempt
to gradually decouple economic output from resource ows.
For instance, enhancing the ecological efciency of tech-
nologies and organisational structures, aims at reducing the
volume of resource input per unit of economic output. In
all likelihood, the efciency of resource use can be enor-
mously increased; examples for eco-intelligent production
and services abound (see Demater ialization and Sustain-
able Development, Volume 4). The second strategy is the
attempt to decouple quality of life from economic output.
Indeed, quality of life has many sources beyond purchasing
power; it derives from non-monetary assets as well, such as
access to nature, participation in community, or the wealth
in public goods. What is at stake here is not the efciency,
but the sufciency in resource use. Such an orientation aims
at the art of sustaining higher qualities of life out of a given
set of material inputs; it ponders how much is needed for
attaining welfare, value, beauty, and meaning. In brief, the
transition to resource-light economies is likely to require a
dual-track strategy: a reinvention of means (efciency) as
well as a prudent moderation of ends (sufciency). In other
words, it is about doing things right and about doing the
right things.
Leapfrogging into the Post-fossil Age
For Southern economies the challenge is to embark upon
growth patterns that are both pro-environment and pro-poor,
without going through all the stages of industrial evolution
as Northern countries did. At the present moment when the
fossil-fuel age is on the decline, economies that once were
said to be lagging nd themselves in a favourable posi-
tion. Not yet being locked into old-style industrialisation,
they have the prospect of leapfrogging into a post-fossil
DEVELOPMENT AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 161
age, skipping the resource intensive styles of production
and consumption of the industrial world (see Leapfrogging
Technology, Volume 4). For instance, Southern countries
face important decisions about introducing and design-
ing infrastructures such as energy, transport, sewage, and
communication systems, the introduction and maintenance
of which in industrial countries have caused the earth s
resources to dwindle. Today, many Southern countries are
still in a position to avoid this unsustainable course, opt-
ing without further detours for infrastructures which would
allow them to embark upon a low emission and resource-
light trajectory. Investment in infrastructure such as ef -
cient rail systems, decentralized energy production, public
transport, grey-water sewage, surface irrigation, regional-
ized food systems, dense urban settlement clusters etc.,
could set a country on the road towards cleaner, less costly,
more equitable, and less emission intensive development
patterns. It goes without saying, however, that such a choice
is in the rst place not a technical, but a cultural one; it
requires envisaging models of wealth different from those
in the North.
DEMOCRACY AND ECOLOGY
Environmental resources are valued as a source of liveli-
hood, by groups as diverse as the shermen of Kerala, the
forest dwellers of the Amazon, the herders of Tanzania,
and the peasants of Mexico. Over the centuries many of
these communities had developed complex and ingenious
systems of institutions and rules regulating ownership and
use of natural resources in such a way that an equilib-
rium between resource extraction and resource preservation
could be achieved (see Indigenous Knowledge, Peoples
and Sustainable Practice, Volume 5). However, particu-
larly under the pressure of the resource needs brought forth
by the omnivores, their basis of livelihood has been under-
mined, degrading their dignity and sending many of them
into misery. In such a context, sustainability in the rst
place means ensuring the rights of communities both to
their resources and to their culture.
Democratic rights and resource productivity are partic-
ularly intertwined when it comes to ecosystem people.
For their livelihood such communities need to undertake
efforts to increase the productivity of all components of the
village ecosystem; from grazing and forest lands to crop-
lands, water systems and animals (Agarwal and Narain,
1989). After all, they often suffer from a shortage of
biomass rather than from a shortage of cash. However,
only conferring a substantial degree of control over their
resource base to communities will ensure the degree of
power and participation necessary for cultivating forests,
elds and waters according to local rules and customs.
Democratic rights and entitlement to resources are thus
prerequisites for building a biomass-based, non-carbon
economy. Ensuring sustainable livelihoods (the ability of
an individual or a family to meet their basic needs in a
manner that is digni ed, but does not undermine the natural
resource base on a large scale) will therefore largely require
policies which put democracy, equity, and environmen-
tal care before the quixotic pursuit of monetary economic
growth.
See also: Sustainable Development, Volume 4; Sustain-
ability: Human, Social, Economic and Environmental,
Volume 5.
REFERENCES
Agarwal, A and Narain, S (1989) Towards Green Villages, CSE,
New Delhi.
Anderson, B (1983) Imagined Communities, Verso, London.
Apffel-Marglin, F and Marglin, S A (1990) Dominating Knowl-
edge. Development, Culture, and Resistance, Clarendon,
Oxford.
Apffel-Marglin, F (1998) The Spirit of Regeneration. Andean
Culture Confronting Western Notions of Development, Zed,
London.
Arndt, H W (1981) Economic Development: A Semantic History,
Econ. Dev. Cult. Change, 26, 463 484.
Arndt, H W (1987) Economic Development. The History of an
Idea, Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL.
Ayres, R U (1998) Turning Point. An End to the Growth Paradigm,
Earthscan, London.
Banuri, T, Hyden, G, Juman, C, and Rivera, M (1994) Sustain-
able Human Development, UNDP, New York.
Bauman, Z (1992) Intimations of Postmodernity, Routledge,
London.
Beck, U (1997) Was ist Globalisierung? Suhrkamp, Frankfurt.
Castells, M (1998) End of Millenium, Blackwell, Oxford.
Dumont, L (1977) From Mandeville to Marx, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Di Meglio, M (1997) Lo sviluppo senza fondamenti, Asterios,
Trieste.
Escobar, A (1995) Encountering Development. The Making and
the Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton University Press,
Princeton, NJ.
Gadgil, M and Guha, R (1995) Ecology and Equity, Routledge,
London.
Goodland, R and Daly, H (1993) Why Northern Income Growth
is not the Solution to Southern Poverty, Ecol. Econ., 8,
85 101.
Hobart, M (1993) An Anthropological Critique of Development,
Routledge, London.
Hobsbawm, E (1994) The Age of Extremes. A History of the World,
1914 1991, Pantheon, New York.
Illich, I (1971) Celebration of Awareness, Boyars, London.
Johnston, B R (1994) Who Pays the Price? The Sociocultural
Context of Environmental Crisis, Island Press, Washington.
Kothari, R (1993) Growing Amnesia. An Essay on Poverty and
Human Consciousness, Penguin, Delhi.
Lugard, F (1922) The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa,
Blackwood, Edinburgh.
162 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Lummis, C D (1996) Radical Democracy, Cornell University
Press, Ithaca, NY.
Mathews, J T (1989) Redening Security, Foreign Affairs, 68,
16277.
Menzel, U (1998) Globalisierung versus Fragmentierun, Suhrk-
amp, Frankfurt.
McNamara, R (1973) Address to the Board of Governors, Nairobi.
Nandy, A (1983) The Intimate Enemy. Loss and Recovery of Self
under Colonialism, Oxford University Press, Delhi.
Nederveen Pieterse, J (1998) My Paradigm or Yours? Alterna-
tive Development, Post-Development, Reexive Development,
Dev. Change, 29, 343373.
OED (1989) The Oxford English Dictionary 1989, entry under-
developed , Vol. XVIII, 960.
Rahnema, M and Bawtree, V (1997) The Post-development Rea-
der, Zed, London.
Rist, G (1997) The History of Development, Zed, London.
Samuelson, P and Nordhaus, W (1985) Economics, McGraw Hill,
NY.
South Commission (1990) The Challenge to the South, Oxford
University Press, Oxford.
Tenbruck, F H (1989) Der Traum der Sakularen Okumene. Sinn
und Grenze der Entwicklungsvision, in Die kulturellen Grund-
lagen der Gesellschaft: der Fall der Moderne, Westdeutscher
Verlag, Opladen, 291307.
Truman, H (1949) Public Papers of the President of the United
States: Harry S. Truman, US Government Printing Ofce,
Washington, DC.
Tuan, Y F (1986) The Good Life, University of Wisconsin Press,
Madison.
UNDP (1998) Human Development Report 1998.
UNDP (1999) Human Development Report 1999.
Wackernagel, M and Rees, W (1996) Our Ecological Footprint,
New Society, Gabriola Island.
Wieland, W (1979) Entwicklung, in Geschichtliche Grundbe-
griffe, eds O Brunner, W Conze, and R Koselleck, Klett-Cotta
Stuttgart, 199228, Vol. II,.
World Bank (1992) World Development Report 1992, Oxford
University Press, New York.
World Bank (2000) World Development Report 1999/2000, Oxford
University Press, New York.
World Commission on Environment and Development (WECD)
(1987) Our Common Future, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
FURTHER READING
Sachs, W (1992) The Development Dictionary, Zed London.
Sachs, W (1999) Planet Dialectics. Explorations in Environment
and Development, Zed London.
A
Adaptation
see Adaptation Strategies (Opening essay,
Volume 4)
Animal Liberation
see Environmental Ethics (Volume 5)
Animal Rights
see Environmental Ethics (Volume 5)
Anthropocene
see Anthropocene (Volume 1)
Anthropocentrism
see Environmental Ethics (Volume 5)
Anthropology and Global
Environmental Change
John H Bodley
Washington State University, Pullman College, WA, USA
The most striking general conclusion to be drawn from the
cultural ecological data in the anthropological record is
that the speed and scale of resource depletion and envi-
ronmental degradation accelerates with increases in the
scale of culture and the concentration of social power
(Bodley, 1994; 2000; 2001). It is signi cant that people
living in small-scale cultures were better able to main-
tain long-term, relatively resilient relationships with the
natural environment than peoples living in larger scale
cultures. Cultural resiliency is a key feature of successful
long-term human adaptability. It is the cultural ability to
minimize human-caused detrimental impacts to the envi-
ronment, while smoothing out the human impact of natural
environmental uctuations. Cultural resiliency also means
minimizing destabilizing uctuations in human population
and human demands on the natural environment. The con-
cept of resiliency is more than that of balance or equilib-
rium, because it emphasizes the dynamic aspects of human
and natural system. These conclusions are contrary to long
established beliefs about evolutionary progress, and they
challenge the popular ideology that unlimited growth, espe-
cially economic growth, is a natural process, and the best
way to improve human well-being.
Anthropologists have always been concerned with the rela-
tionship between the people they studied and the natural
environment. Since the late nineteenth century, the rst
professional anthropologists focused their research on tribal
peoples who were directly dependent on natural resources
for their survival. The environment was obviously too
important to be ignored. Initially, anthropologists studied
how people exploited the environment, then they asked
how culture might in turn be shaped by the environment,
or by the nature of the humanenvironment relationship.
Nineteenth century anthropologists were often natural his-
torians, and it was common then, and still today, for
them to be very broadly interdisciplinary, with interest,
and sometimes formal training, in geography, geology,
zoology, and botany. During the rst half of the twenti-
eth century the anthropological interest in environmental
issues led to the identication of cultural ecology as a
distinctive sub-discipline. Contemporary prehistoric archae-
ologists often maintain a focus on environmental issues.
Most early academic anthropologists rejected any simple
environmental determinism, but they grouped similar cul-
tures into large culture areas that often reected underlying
164 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
common cultural adaptations to generalized natural areas.
Before 1950, pioneer cultural ecologist Julian Steward, cau-
tiously observed that over time people tended to organize
themselves in similar ways to exploit similar environments,
thus producing broadly similar cultural types in widely
separate areas of the world. By the late 1960s, cultural
ecologists began to apply equilibrium models to small-
scale cultures, treating them as human systems in balanced,
adaptive relations with natural ecosystems. These function-
alist approaches were largely abandoned because they could
not explain how systems developed and changed, and they
often treated cultures as articially closed systems. Since
the 1980s, cultural ecologists have increasingly situated the
peoples they study within the national and international
political economy, and interest has shifted to approaches
that will help local peoples defend their resources and sub-
sistence economies. Many contemporary anthropologists
continue an environmental focus, but it has broadened to
include contemporary commercially organized, and global
scale cultures, as well as existing indigenous peoples with
small-scale societies.
CULTURAL EVOLUTION AND HUMAN
ADAPTABILITY
One of the longest-running theoretical debates in anthropol-
ogy concerns the nature of cultural evolution. The orthodox
view as originally developed by Morgan (1877), and rened
by White (1949, 1959) and others (Sahlins and Service,
1960), was that general cultural evolutionary progress was
an inevitable and benecial process of growth and devel-
opment leading stage by stage to more complex societies,
using more energy more efciently, and with greater adapt-
ability and security. Cultural evolutionists thought that evo-
lutionary progress was such a self-evident human benet
that they did not demonstrate it. White (1949) emphati-
cally declared that culture evolved as the amount of energy
harnessed per capita per year increased. The assumption
was that cultural evolution gave people greater control
over nature, and this was good for people. However, it is
signicant that the most enthusiastic anthropological expo-
nents of these measures of cultural progress wrote before
the energy shortages of the 1970s, and before the United
Nations Brundtland Commission (WCED, 1987) report on
sustainable development. Thoughtful reconsideration of all
the standard measures of cultural evolutionary progress sug-
gests that it must be a maladaptive process.
Leslie White attributed the most recent step in cultural
development to the switch to fossil fuels and nuclear
energy, but it is now obvious that the advantages of this
may prove illusory. Cultures can be arranged in a pro-
gressive general evolutionary sequence of increased energy
use running from 5000 to 12 000 kcal per capita per
day in small-scale band and village societies, 26 000 kcal
in pre-capitalist agrarian civilizations, and 230 000 kcal
consumed by Americans in the 1970s (Cook, 1971). How-
ever, critics pointed out that this sequence does not account
for the eventual depletion of fossil fuels, the serious decits
in using non-renewable energy to produce food energy, or
the costs of the waste by-products of energy production and
consumption. Hubert (1969) predicted that global petroleum
production would peak in 1995, and that the supply would
be virtually exhausted by 2075. The most telling criticism
was the calculation that if energy consumption increased at
5% a year for 200 years, the waste heat produced would
equal the heat of incoming solar radiation and the earth
would burn up. Fortunately, before such a Sun Day the
polar ice caps would melt and rising sea levels would ood
out most of the power plants (Luten, 1974). Human repro-
ductive success would also be an unattractive measure of
human evolutionary progress. If the production of larger,
more complex cultural systems is the measure of evolu-
tionary success, then the process still seems maladaptive
for long-term human survival, because fewer, larger, more
homogenous, and less durable cultures have replaced more
numerous, more diverse, and more durable small cultures.
Greater cultural complexity creates a human survival prob-
lem in part because larger, more complex cultural systems
incorporate and subordinate smaller systems.
Some of the evolutionary theorists recognized that small-
scale cultures might actually be better adapted to particular
local ecosystems than large-scale cultures. White (1949)
observed that foragers, with the simplest cultures, may
have had the most satisfying kind of social environment
that man has ever lived in. Sahlins (1968) noted that for-
agers were successful because they limited their wants to
the consumption levels that their environment and tech-
nology could support and they lived satisfying and afu-
ent lives. As the contemporary environmental crisis began
to unfold, many anthropologists commented on the con-
nections between self-sufcient small-scale societies and
greater social equality, and relative equilibrium with the
environment (Bodley, 1975). This suggested the possibility
that increased social scale caused inequality, poverty, and
global environmental change.
More recent biocultural evolutionary theory shows how
cultural evolution could become a maladaptive process
that would undermine the resiliency of both natural and
human systems. From the biocultural perspective, cultural
evolution is produced by changes in culture, which is
conceived from the ideas that human behavior is directed
in the same way that genes create biological organisms.
Cultures change as shared symbolic information changes.
The important difference between genes and culture is that
individuals intentionally produce and transmit culture, and
they can borrow from many sources (Boyd and Richerson,
1987). However, the scale of culture inuences how it is
created and transmitted. Cultural transmission is frequently
ANTHROPOLOGY AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 165
biased, because people emulate the beliefs and behavior
that appear to be most successful. Cultural emulation is
easy and efcient, but it can lead to maladaptive runaway
economic growth and power aggrandizement, which in turn
cause global environmental change.
In small, domestically organized societies the members
of each household are daily making cultural decisions about
technology, production, and consumption. In larger scale,
politically organized societies, cultural evolution becomes
a political process in which a single ruler can direct the
actions of thousands, or even millions of people (Durham,
1991). Household-level decision making is inherently more
responsive to local social and environmental conditions,
but it can be over-ridden by political rulers who may be
far removed from the environmental consequences of their
decisions (Rappaport, 1977a,b). Thus, it is not surprising
that large scale agrarian civilizations directed by political
elites, frequently collapse because they exhaust the resource
base, generate social conict, or become too costly to
maintain.
THE UNIQUENESS OF THE CONTEMPORARY
ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS
Bennett (1976) describes a seemingly inevitable ecolog-
ical transition from environmental equilibrium to dise-
quilibrium. From this viewpoint there is nothing particu-
larly unique about global environmental change. Bennett
placed small-scale, tribal societies at the equilibrium end
of the continuum, but argued that all people had the same
behavioral propensities that would lead to drastic environ-
mental change. However, this mixes human means, ends,
and secondary consequences. Biocultural theory maintains
that all people are driven by a human nature that seeks
domestic security and the future welfare of ones children.
Small-scale societies achieve these human ends coopera-
tively by remaining small, consuming resources sustainably,
and resisting aggrandizing individuals who would promote
security-reducing growth in consumption. Some people in
commercially organized cultures competitively elevate their
consumption levels in order to obtain these same ends
for themselves. Bennett argues that equilibrium cultures
are only pauses in the overall historical tendency toward
exponential increases in environmental use and impact.
However, historical tendencies are not inevitable; they are
the outcome of particular events and individual decision-
making.
By the 1980s, as global economic growth and environ-
mental problems intensied, some anthropologists began to
argue that people have never been in equilibrium with the
environment. For example, Rambo (1985) called Malaysian
shifting cultivators primitive polluters, because they put
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and lived in smoke-
lled houses. He declared that primitive and civilized
societies interacted with the environment in essentially
the same way. In a similar vein, Krech (1999) maintains
that Native Americans were not always conservationists,
and were in the process of exterminating the bison before
Europeans arrived. These revisionist anthropologists, and
many others (Headland, 1997) were reacting against the
widespread tendency of some environmentalists and deep
ecologists to attribute a mystical oneness with nature and an
ecological nobility to tribal peoples. The mistaken implica-
tion of such romanticism of the human past, would be that
our only salvation is a return to the Stone Age. This is
a misleading issue because anthropologists have abundant
evidence that tribal peoples were pragmatic materialists
who burned on a large scale, sometimes killed more animals
than they needed, felled trees to harvest fruit, and were not
always guided by the spiritual sanctity of nature. There is
also evidence that prehistoric humans hunted some animals
to extinction, and may have contributed to the extinction of
the Pleistocene megafauna, such as New World elephants,
although there is much controversy on the details (Martin,
1984).
These facts need to be viewed in a larger perspective.
The reality is that until 8000 years ago, when the world was
still domestically organized and inhabited by only 8 million
people living mostly in mobile bands at extremely low den-
sities, there was no need for deliberate conservation prac-
tices. Likewise, optimal foraging theory suggests that inten-
tional over-hunting would have quickly proven unproduc-
tive, because as prey species become scarce, hunting them
becomes inefcient (Smith, 1983). Archaeological evidence
that Australian aborigines successfully lived as hunters and
foragers for at least 60 000 years (Roberts et al., 1990),
and that aboriginals in Southern Africa successfully sur-
vived as a people for 130 000 years (Klein, 1979) leaves
little doubt that people living in very small-scale soci-
eties produce resilient cultural systems able to maintain
very long-term balances with their natural resources. The
archaeological record needs to be compared with the esti-
mates at the end of the twentieth century showing a high
proportion of plants and animals threatened with extinc-
tion, or nearing threatened status (Baillie and Groombridge,
1996; Tuxill, 1999). Nothing in human prehistory or his-
tory compares with the present rate of global environmental
change.
It is remarkable that the scale of global change corre-
sponds directly with increases in the scale of culture. This
was dramatically conrmed by the ARCHAEOMEDES
project, an interdisciplinary investigation of 30 000 years of
environmental change in the Mediterranean region initiated
by the European Union in 1992. Researchers found that
the measurable rate at which land degradation could be
observed from land clearing, erosion, and dessication incr-
eased progressively by orders of magnitude from tens of
millennia during the Paleolithic, to millennia during the
166 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Neolithic, to centuries during the Roman era, and to decades
under industrial capitalism since 1850. In one region of
Spain, researchers found that half of all the erosion over
the past 10 000 years had occurred in the past 500 years,
and it had accelerated over the past 150 years (Leeuw,
1997).
THE DRIVING FORCES BEHIND GLOBAL
ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
The most widely accepted anthropological explanation for
the rise of cultural complexity and intensi ed environ-
mental problems has been population pressure on carrying
capacity. Carrying capacity must be de ned in relation
to particular environments and technologies, and is not
a constant (see Carrying Capacity, Volume 4). Popu-
lation pressure is also a variable that can be different
under different consumption demands and distribution pat-
terns. Nevertheless, population pressure remains a powerful
explanatory model. It is a variation on Malthus (1895)
observation that population has the potential to grow at
a faster rate than food production. Population pressure
and subsistence intensi cation have been used to explain
the Mesolithic to Upper Paleolithic transition (Hayden,
1981), the domestication of plants and animals leading to
the transition from the Upper Paleolithic to the Neolithic
(Cohen, 1977), increased energy input and technological
innovation in agriculture (Boserup, 1965), and the ori-
gin of the state and civilization (Carneiro, 1970; Steward,
1949). All of these changed the environment. Population
pressure has also been explicitly linked to contempo-
rary environmental problems (Ehrlich, 1968; Homer-Dixon,
1991).
The problem with all of these population pressure expla-
nations is that often they do not explain population pressure
itself, and they do not deal with the social inequality that
also produces scarcity. The archaeological record demon-
strates that for most of human prehistory population growth
was minimal, not because of high mortality, but because
fertility was culturally limited (Hassan, 1981). In domestic-
scale cultures in the absence of political pressures women
opted for small families, because extra children were a
disadvantage. Only in politically organized and commer-
cial societies are there strong externally imposed incen-
tives for population growth. When anthropologists have
looked at extreme examples of supposed population pres-
sure producing environmental stress and human misery,
whether in Bangladesh (Hartmann and Boyce, 1982), Brazil
(Scheper-Hughes, 1992) or El Salvador (Durham, 1979,
1995), they have found that social inequality, not popu-
lation, was the problem.
Viewed from a culture scale and biocultural evolutionary
perspective, the driving force behind global environmen-
tal change is the natural human desire of individuals to
improve the material security of their households under
cultural conditions of economic scarcity produced by social
inequality and competitive striving. The important point
is that economic scarcity and environmental problems are
produced culturally by social inequality, they are not natural
conditions.
ANTHROPOLOGISTS, INDIGENOUS
PEOPLES, AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Cultural ecological researchers have often helped indige-
nous people defend their ecosystems and natural resources
against deterioration caused by the uninvited intrusion of
outside commercial interests. The most important anthro-
pological support, from both archaeologists and cultural
anthropologists, has been in helping indigenous commu-
nities document their long-term use of particular places
and resources, in order that extensive, traditionally owned
and used territories can be legally titled to communities and
protected. In some cases it has been useful to document
that traditional uses were sustainable. Anthropologists have
also helped demonstrate that indigenous communities have
highly developed knowledge of their ecosystems, includ-
ing the names and natural histories of plants and animals.
Some indigenous communities have asked researchers to
help them with the dif cult problem of managing natural
resources for both subsistence and commercial uses. Other
communities have sought to protect portions of their territo-
ries for eco-tourism (see Indigenous Knowledge, Peoples
and Sustainable Practice, Volume 5).
REFERENCES
Baillie, J and Groombridge, B, eds (1996) 1996 IUCN Red List
of Threatened Animals, World Conservation Union (IUCN),
Gland, Switzerland.
Bennett, J W (1976) The Ecological Transition: Cultural Anthro-
pology and Human Adaptation, Pergamon Press, New York.
Bodley, J H (1975) Victims of Progress, 1st edition, Cummings,
Menlo Park, CA.
Bodley, J H (1994) A Cultural Scale Perspective on Human
Ecology and Development, in Advances in Human Ecology,
Vol. 3, ed L Freese, JAI Press, Greenwich, CT, 93 112.
Bodley, J H (2000) Cultural Anthropology: Tribes, States, and the
Global System, 3rd edition, May eld, Mountain View, CA.
Bodley, J H (2001) Anthropology and Contemporary Human Pro-
blems, May eld, Mountain View, CA.
Boserup, E (1965) The Conditions of Economic Growth, Aldine,
Chicago, IL.
Boyd, R and Richerson, P J (1985) Culture and the Evolutionary
Process, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Carneiro, R L (1970) A Theory of the Origin of the State, Science,
169, 733 738.
Cohen, M N (1977) The Food Crisis in Prehistory: Overpopula-
tion and the Origins of Agriculture, Yale University Press, New
Haven, CT.
ART AND THE ENVIRONMENT 167
Cook, E (1971) The Flow of Energy in an Industrial Society, Sci.
Am., 224(3), 134144.
Durham, W H (1979) Scarcity and Survival in Central America:
Ecological Origins of the Soccer War, Stanford University
Press, Stanford, CA.
Durham, W H (1991) Coevolution: Genes, Culture, and Human
Diversity, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.
Durham, W H (1995) Political Ecology and Environmental De-
struction in Latin America, in The Social Causes of Envi-
ronmental Destruction in Latin America, eds M Painter and
W H Durham, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI,
249264.
Ehrlich, P (1968) The Population Bomb, Ballantine, New York.
Hartmann, B and Boyce, J (1982) Needless Hunger: Voices from
a Bangladesh Village, Institute for Food and Development
Policy, San Francisco, CA.
Hassan, F A (1981) Demographic Archaeology, Academic Press,
New York.
Hayden, B (1981) Research and Development in the Stone Age:
Technological Transitions Among Hunter-Gatherers, Curr.
Anthropol., 22(5), 519548.
Headland, T N (1997) Revisionism in Ecological Anthropology,
Curr. Anthropol., 38(4), 605630.
Homer-Dixon, T F (1991) On the Threshold: Environmental Cha-
nges as Causes of Acute Conict, Int. Secur., 16(2), 76116.
Hubert, M K (1969) Energy Resources, in Resources and Man,
National Academy of Sciences, ed W H Freeman, San Fran-
cisco, CA, 157242.
Klein, R G (1979) Stone Age Exploitation of Animals in Southern
Africa, Am. Sci., 67(2), 151160.
Krech, III, S (1999) The Ecological Indian: Myth and History,
W W Norton, New York.
Leeuw van der, S E (1997) ARCHAEOMEDES: a DG-XII Re-
search Programme to understand the Natural and Anthro-
pogenic Causes of Land Degradation and Deserti cation in
the Mediterranean Basin, University of Paris, Paris.
Luten, D B (1974) United States Requirements, in Energy, the
Environment, and Human Health, ed A Finkel, Publishing
Sciences Group, Acton, MA, 1733.
Malthus, T R (1895) An Essay on the Principle of Population
(Parallel Chapters from the [1st] and [2nd] Editions), Macmil-
lan, New York.
Martin, P S (1984) Prehistoric Overkill: The Global Model, in
Quaternary Extinctions: a Prehistoric Revolution, eds P S Mar-
tin and R G Klein, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ,
553573.
Morgan, L H (1877) Ancient Society, Holt, New York.
Rambo, A T (1985) Primitive Polluters: Semang Impact on the
Malaysian Tropical Rain Forest Ecosystem, Anthropological
Papers no. 76, Museum of Anthropology, University of Michi-
gan, MI.
Rappaport, R A (1977a) Maladaptation in Social Systems, in
The Evolution of Social Systems, eds J Friedman and M J
Rowlands, Duckworth, London, 4971.
Rappaport, R A (1977b) Normative Models of Adaptive Pro-
cesses: a Response to Anne Whyte, in The Evolution of Social
Systems, eds J Friedman and M J Rowlands, Duckworth, Lon-
don, 7987.
Roberts, R G, Jones, R, and Smith, M A (1990) Thermolumines-
cence Dating of a 50 000-year-old Human Occupation Site in
Northern Australia, Nature, 345, 153156.
Sahlins, M and Service E R, eds (1960) Evolution and Culture,
University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI.
Sahlins, M (1968) Notes on the Original afuent Society, in Man
the Hunter, eds R B Lee and I DeVore, Aldine, Chicago, IL,
8589.
Scheper-Hughes, N (1992) Death Without Weeping: the Violence
of Everyday Life in Brazil, University of California Press,
Berkeley, CA.
Smith, E A (1983) Anthropological Applications of Optimal
Foraging Theory: a Critical Review, Curr. Anthropol., 24,
625651.
Steward, J H (1949) Cultural Causality and Law: a Trial Formula-
tion of the Development of Early Civilization, Am. Anthropol.,
51, 127.
Steward, J H (1955) Theory of Culture Change, University of
Illinois Press, Urbana, IL.
Tuxill, J (1999) Appreciating the Benets of Plant Biodiversity,
in State of the World 1999: a Worldwatch Institute Report
on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society, eds L R Brown,
C Flavin, H French, and L Starke, W W Norton, New York,
96114.
WCED (World Commission on Environment and Development)
(1987) Our Common Future, Oxford University Press, Oxford,
New York.
White, L A(1949) The Science of Culture, Grove Press, New York.
White, L(1959) The Evolutionof Culture, McGraw-Hill, NewYork.
FURTHER READING
Politis, G G, Prado, J L, and Beukens, R P (1995) The Human
Impact in Pleistocene-Holocene Extinctions in South America:
the Pampean Case, in Ancient People and Landscapes, ed
E Johnson, Museum of Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX,
187205.
Archimedes
see Anthropology and Global Environmental
Change (Volume 5)
Art and the Environment
Peter Timmerman
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
This artistic dimension of global environmental change is
complex and underexplored. It ranges from the roots of the
168 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
artistic impulse in human beings that impels them to explore,
shape, and make their mark on the world; to the artefacts
in art, music, architecture, gardens, etc., that result from
this impulse. If art is often what human beings make when
they are at their freest and most creative, it also thrives
on the transformation of the real, the material, the tightly
constrained into works of art that capture some otherwise
inexpressable element of the nature of being in the world.
We can see that the artistic expression of the environment
is always happening; but it seldom expresses itself directly.
The dynamic pressures of global environmental change are
similarly nding their way into the arts of todays world.
Todays artist is a direct inheritor of the Romantic idea
that the great artist (or the great work of art from the great
artist) is some kind of antenna of the race: and apart from
the elemental human delight in art, we can also explore
art for its extraordinary capacity to intimate the deeper
undercurrents within what has happened, is happening, and
is to come in the world around us.
The following article deals primarily with the artistic
impulse in general (primarily in painting). See Landscape,
Urban Landscape, and the Human Shaping of the Envi-
ronment, Volume 5 for more details on a related topic.
ELEMENTS OF ART AND THE ENVIRONMENT
The earliest artworks we have are symbolic of many aspects
of the arts and the environment, including global envi-
ronmental change. The cave paintings in Altamira, Spain,
Lascaux, France, and elsewhere, which date from roughly
35 00015 000 years ago, depict on their walls large herds
of animals that were soon to be extinct; and the movements
of those herds can be linked to the progress and retreat of
the ice sheets of the last ice age. Perhaps of even more rel-
evance is the fact that we cannot say what these exquisite
works of art were for. We can call them art, but there are
various theories of their purpose; charms to increase the
herds, sympathetic magic to give the hunter some control
over the beasts, an expression of spiritual kinship with the
animal world, or simple delight in being able to represent
them.
This mysterious entrance into the relationship between
the arts and the environment persists. The most obvious
aspect of this relationship is representation, the picture of
a tree or an animal that impresses us because it looks like,
or at least reminds us, of that which is being represented.
There seems to be a basic human delight in the power or
playfulness of drawing or painting an image of something
else on a different medium. But there are other aspects of
the impulse towards art that are at least as important; and,
given that many people are now familiar with abstract act,
it is clear that art is not all about lifelike pictures. Among
the main aspects of the artistic impulse worth considering
are:
the medium, that is, what is the basic material in which
the artist is working, its characteristics, its limitations,
its possibilities.
The content, that is, the subjects, themes, or ideas that
the artist is using the medium to express.
The role played by the work of art, that is, is it a
picture for sale, a building for living in, a ritual mask
for a dance, or whatever.
The audience, who the work is for, if anyone; and,
lastly,
the artistic impulse and expression, the capacity to
create.
THE ARTIST AND THE ENVIRONMENT
In considering the arts and the environment, we can look
at the last of these aspects rst, since it will give us
a perspective on the tensions and dynamics of artistic
expression. In his pathbreaking book, Playing and Reality,
the child psychoanalyst D W Winnicott (1963) argued that
when infants begin to deal with the world, they are initially
immersed in an non-separate environment, since they have
not yet created a sense of themselves as individuals. The
separation into selves (primarily mothers and children)
takes a long time, and the fears and tensions involved are
often handled through play. Play is the crossing backwards
and forwards across boundaries that are in part created
and discovered through play. A child learns how to move,
what things break and what things dont, and what actions
will get punished (or rewarded) and by whom. Play is
the process whereby this can happen without too much
danger.
For Winnicott, the ability to play is central to the creative
process. He sees that, among the problems children (and
artists) face are the times when their play is somehow
constrained, or becomes truly dangerous, or the transition
to reality is somehow thwarted. In many ways, the artist
is someone who seems to be able to keep the impulse
to play with the materials, boundaries, and environment
around him or her into adulthood. It is this which helps
to explain their ability to make connections that have not
been made by others; to be humorous about or threatening
to the status quo; and occasionally to provide insights into
worlds that some believe to be beyond human boundaries.
At the same time, this ability has often been seen as unholy
or dangerous; and there is a consistent thread running
through the history of artistry as being to madness near
allied.
EARLY ENVIRONMENTAL ART
This initial focus on the artist is somewhat misleading,
since not only do we have no records of individual artists
for many centuries; but the whole idea of the artist is a
ART AND THE ENVIRONMENT 169
somewhat modern or romantic casting of the topic towards
the individual. Nevertheless, the idea that the creative
impulse is associated with the playing with or negotiation of
boundaries in ones surrounding environment can be very
fruitful.
Many of the cave animal paintings can be seen to
respond to the cracks and crevasses of the walls, humps
of animals being painted on outcroppings of walls, etc. In
other animal and spirit paintings from around the world,
we can also see that there is a kind of intimacy with
the physical material supplied by the environment. For
instance, in the Peruvian desert south of Lima, there are vast
geoglyphs (earthmarks) believed to be about 4000 years
old including animal and geometric patterns, hundreds of
meters in size. Many aboriginal communities engaged in
making petroglyphs (stone marks) and other paintings both
above and below ground.
This earth art (which has recently been resurrected by
contemporary artists seeking to express concerns about the
environment) is, as already mentioned, possibly linked to
various kinds of spiritual ritual or magic. Anthropological
research in the last 200 years has shown that in many
kinds of spiritual ritual or magic, a symbolic structure
is established linking the patterns created by the tribe or
priesthood or shaman on the earth with the spiritual realm.
It is very important to recognize that the strong boundaries
between the human, the animal, and the spiritual worlds
that are characteristic of contemporary Western life would
be seen as bizarre to virtually all other peoples in the
history of the world. Rather, the boundaries between these
worlds or realms were seen as permeable and changeable
and transitory.
The sacred spaces and sacred times set up by rituals
were often designed to mimic the underlying order of the
cosmos, and the artistic artifacts (masks, images, music,
dancing) as aspects of that order; or as a part of the
continuing conversation with the spiritual world. This role
of the art object persists, not only in the familiar paintings
of the Madonna and Child over the altars of many Christian
churches around the world, but also in the residual feelings
of people when they look at a Cezanne painting and
somehow sense that they are in touch with some deeper
aspect of reality as portrayed by a dish of apples.
When we look at the origins of architecture, we can see
that the megaliths of ancient Europe (like Stonehenge), the
great temples of the Mayans, and the vast Pyramids, all
have connections and orientations towards the sacred and
the spiritual. Even in domestic architecture, the elementary
forms of building (walls, roofs, spaces for entrances, exits,
etc.) mingle the utilitarian with the orientation towards
meaning; the hearth, the shrine, the basic axis of the village
or town.
Much of the ofcial art that survives, associated with
the large kingdoms of Egypt, Sumer, Assyria, etc., of the
ancient world, depicts the natural world in accordance with
some aspect of the ritual needs of the societies involved,
though there is obviously some delight in the excellence of
the craftsmanship and artistry involved in these depictions.
For example, in Egyptian art, such as the palette of King
Narmer, circa 3000 before the Christian era (BCE), or
mural panoramas of voyages down the Nile (or the river of
Death), one nds a sensitivity to the lush river world, and
to the dignity of animals (many of which were worshipped
as gods). Assyrian art, depicting the hunting and killing
of lions and other animals, glories the powers of the all-
conquering king, but also depicts the throes of the animal
as well.
ART AND THE ENVIRONMENT IN THE
CLASSICAL AND MEDIEVAL PERIODS
Art historians are confronted with some severe difculties
in dealing with representations of the environment in the
classical arts of Greece and Rome, because so little painting
remains apart from mosaics and some paneled rooms. These
tend to favor the decorative and the pastoral (the pastoral
being an art form that evokes the rural retreat of the
wealthy from the increasingly dirty town). Much of the
rest of landscape representation is symbolic or serves as a
backdrop to human endeavors.
In Greek culture (epitomized by the ourishing of Athens
from 600300 BCE), landscape as a theme is practically
non-existent, except in two areas: the continuing presence
of the pagan gods of nature in certain forms of nature (e.g.,
the home of the gods on Mount Olympus) including the
local gods of place; and the appearance in the Hellenistic
period (after 300 BCE) of the beginnings of proto-sciences
such as geography and epidemiology that obliquely made
reference to natural forms and processes. From later Roman
paintings (often copies of earlier Greek artworks), we can
recover a variety of versions of pastoral, the rural scene, and
make-believe landscapes illustrating mythological scenes
from Homer or other legends.
Through the period of the Roman Empire, there continues
this somewhat haphazard interest in nature. The arrival of
Christianity had a twofold effect: rst of all, as Christianity
became more powerful, it systematically destroyed as much
of the previous pagan tradition (including pagan shrines and
holy groves) as possible; and second, it emphasized even
more strongly the peripheral role of the natural world. What
was now central was the spiritual struggle of Man towards
God, and the natural environment was replaced by the
spiritual environment. Images of animals or plants (when
they did not appear as marginal decorations to manuscripts)
were saturated with symbolic reference, exemplied by the
sheep and the shepherd that can be found portrayed around
the cupolas of Byzantine churches.
170 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
While there were breaks in this artistic tradition (most
notably with the reevaluation of the natural world associated
with the gure of St. Francis of Assisi circa 1200 AD), it
is not really until the arrival of the Renaissance in the 15th
century that the natural world by itself is seen as anything
other than a space of symbols with no inherent interest
of its own, though it was occasionally connected to the
power and splendor of an all creating Deity. Indeed, in the
evolving tradition, Nature became more and more seen as a
wild space, symbolic of the spiritual dangers of wilderness
and irrationality.
If we look brie y at the neighboring world of Islam,
which ourished in the Middle East from the 7th century,
and provided a strong challenge to the medieval West,
we nd that while images of nature were banned from
representation, the whole tenor of Islam in this period led
to extraordinary advances in science, geography, history,
astronomy and chemistry. Islam was much more favorable
to the exploration of nature as an expression of the signs
and symbols of Allah than Christianity in this period.
Unfortunately this does not appear overtly in the artifacts
that survive from that time, which are almost completely
made up of abstract decoration (derived, in part, from the
example of beautiful cursive patterns of Arabic writing
of passages from the Koran). Later developments (in the
14th century and after) in, for example, Persian miniature
paintings that do contain landscapes were in uenced by
Chinese paintings (Islam connecting with China down the
long trade routes).
ART AND THE ENVIRONMENT IN THE
ORIENT
Some reference should be made to artistic expression and
Nature in the Oriental world, speci cally China (Chinese
principles in uenced the arts of Korea and Japan, and make
it an appropriate single example of a vast topic). There are
two main ideas at work in those Chinese arts associated with
environment, which include such arts as geomancy (known
as feng-shui or the appropriate placing of buildings and
parks), poetry, and landscape painting.
The rst idea, which eventually becomes associated with
the spiritual tradition of Taoism, but which goes back
to the dawn of Chinese civilization, is that there is no
separation between the order of the natural world and the
order of the moral or social worlds. There is a kind of
natural moral order in the world, called the Way, the Tao.
Human dif culties come from straying away from that
order. Similarly, proper balance of natural forces will help
to improve the moral world. For instance, mountains and
water are like interacting opposites (what the Chinese refer
to as yin and yang) (see Land Transformation in China:
3000 Years of Human Ecological History, Volume 3);
the height of the mountain balances off the depth of the
water; the movement of water contrasts with the stillness
of the mountain. The placement of dwellings, and the
contemplative isolation of the scholar or monk, all rely on
the balancing energy of natural elements.
The second idea, associated with the philosopher Confu-
cius (circa 600 BCE) and his in uential descendents, is that
the natural, moral, social, and political orders should all be
in harmony, and that the central pivot of this harmony is
not necessarily the natural order, but rather the cultivated
order of the nobleman (or ruler). Confucius occasionally
uses natural imagery, one of his sayings is that The wise
delight in water; the good delight in mountains , referring
to the balance between appropriate action and the stability
of the ancient state and rules of justice, but his emphasis
is on the cultured order. This approach was particularly
in uential in the extremely elite cultures of the T ang
(618 907 AD) and later Chinese dynasties saturated with
Confucian thought.
The artistic expression of these ideas is most familiar
in the Chinese landscape scrolls, which unfold vast misty
landscapes expressing Taoist environmentalism; in which
tiny meditative gures or rustic shermen can occasion-
ally be picked out. Many landscapes (and later gardens
associated with this artistic impulse) also gesture in the
direction of the Taoist Lands of the Blessed: the future Par-
adise within which all will dwell. The tiny gardens that
can be found around Chinese and Japanese Buddhist (and
Taoist) monasteries and temples attempt to reproduce in
stones, mosses, sand, and miniature trees, the vision of these
lands.
In painting, the poetic and the theoretical meet in artists
like Wang Wei (699 761 AD) whose long poetic sequences
unfold along with extensive landscapes that the viewer wan-
ders through. Further, the very materials and acts of painting
are resonant with orientations toward aspects of the natu-
ral order whose penetration is essential to the greatest art.
Often the artist is exhorted, through disciplined exercise, to
submerge or eradicate the self, allowing the larger natural
order to speak through the brush. This contrasts with the
very different stance taken by the Western artist (at least
until the modern period).
ART AND THE ENVIRONMENT IN THE
RENAISSANCE
The Renaissance period (1450 1600) in Western culture
saw the beginnings of a reevaluation of the natural world,
in part due to a series of struggles over the legacy of
Aristotelian science which began reappearing in the West in
the 12th and 13th centuries (many of the scienti c writings
of Aristotle and other Greek philosophers with an interest in
the workings of nature had in fact been preserved by Islamic
scientists). The ferment and cross-fertilization between this
Aristotelian science and the already existing Christian
ART AND THE ENVIRONMENT 171
tradition (based in large part on a neo-Platonic base) would
eventually lead to the growth of an experimental tradition
that overturned the whole medieval world view.
Curiously enough, the artistic signal for this ferment
came about in part as a glorication of the perspective of the
individual observer, thanks to the invention of perspective
in the 1400s. Previous to this, the presentation of space
in paintings was shaped by meaning (for instance, more
important people would be higher in the paintings) and
not by any desire for accurate representation. Perspective
introduced the eye view of the spectator as a standard
from which, by simple geometric rules, a consistent space
could be generated within which landscapes, buildings,
cities, etc., could be organized. The irony is that this space,
which provided a methodology for representing nature in
such a convincing way that it has become totally natural
to us, is in fact an abstracting of space. Every space
is treated the same: special or sacred places no longer
inuence the world of representation within which they are
portrayed.
We can link this development of a framework of abstrac-
ted space to the similar and simultaneous development of
abstracted time with the arrival of the mechanical clock. In
the architecture and painting of the Renaissance, we see the
twin drives of clarifying and ordering of spatial represen-
tation. This new power provided artists with the capacity
to explore, almost as if they were early scientists, the phe-
nomena of light and shade, as well as the dynamic portrayal
of weather, water, and the atmospherics of distance percep-
tion (for instance, the bluing of color as a landscape retreats
away from the viewer). Leonardo da Vinci is of course the
most famous representative of this, and in his paintings
as well as his manuscripts, we can see the probing mind
of the artist who uses his art as an exploratory tool into
different elds, like anatomy, mechanical engineering, and
ballistics.
For environmentalists, this new power can be seen as a
double-edged sword. For it is in this period that the new
methods of representation become allied to the emerging
forces working towards the control and reshaping of the
natural environment. This was part of the restructuring of
what could now be called the early modern world, which
wrested control from the Church and vested it in nation
states. These states embarked on a quest for power, which
has not ended yet.
The most obvious of the ways in which the arts were
associated with this quest included the arts of mapmaking
(essential to the management of the new lands associated
with the voyages of discovery; see e.g., Delano-Smith,
2001), theatrical and painterly spectacle (ranging from
the glorications of the church in the various projects in
the Vatican to the various historical allegories by Rubens
for the French and English kings), and the architectural
grandeurs of St. Peters Basilica in Rome.
Less obviously, the art of the period increasingly focuses
on the autonomous individual who walks through a world
of his own creation; or at least his own substantial manip-
ulation. Even that seemingly most natural of all painting
genres, the landscape, which originates in the Netherlands
(a new state of the era), and which is characterized by the
absence of human beings in a central role in the depictions,
cannot get away from the fact that the picture is designed to
be seen according to the rules of perspective, which require
the observer to hold the whole scene together.
Towards the end of the 17th century and into the
18thusually known as the Age of Reason or the Enlight-
enment a further tension was added to the depiction of
nature with the arrival of the powerful abstract notions of
Newtonian time and space, and the emerging image of a
physical world subjected to absolute laws of physics. This
coincided with the rise of the absolutist state, whose most
familiar artifact was the formal garden at Versailles, home
to the Sun King, Louis XIV of France.
The great landscape artists of the period, such as Claude
Lorrain (16001682) and Nicholas Poussin (15941665),
depicted landscapes derived from classical history and
mythology, which provided the viewer with images from an
idealized memory of a Roman or Greek past that might be
reproducible again. As the Age of Enlightenment continued,
the ideal emotions (of virtue, duty, obedience, reverence
to noble ancestors) symbolized by these paintings began
to be superseded by less restrained emotions and senti-
ments. In hindsight, we can see that these emotions, like a
breeze uttering through the leaves of pastoral scenes, were
the forerunners of the greater storms that would usher in
Romanticism (17501850).
In the run up to Romanticism (which is the seedbed for
modern environmentalism) the role of nature as depicted
in paintings and articulated in poetry and literature, oscil-
lates between the emerging picture of a universe structured
like a vast clockwork operated by an increasingly dis-
tant maker; and a related, but different picture of human
beings connected to each other and to nature by sym-
pathetic and empathic emotions or sentiments; captured
in poems like James Thomsons (17001748) The Sea-
sons, where each season inuences the sensitive soul.
With hindsight, we can see that this oscillation is an
uneasy solution to the deeper problems associated with the
imaginative consequences of the nal breakup of the old
world view that had buttressed the old world for so many
centuries.
ART AND THE ROMANTIC ENVIRONMENT
This previous world view, which had supported the social
and political order of things through an ascending pyramid
of order and control which was felt to reect a divine order
of increasing rationality and access to higher truths, came
172 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
to be seen increasingly as bogus or at least out of date when
confronted with newly restless (and increasing) populations,
the redrawing of the maps of the world and the cosmos, and
the surging potential for scientic enlightenment. Artists
found themselves not only profoundly inuenced positively
by the vast increase in human capacities to harness energy
through science, technology, and industrial organization;
but also profoundly worried about the consequences of
aspects of that harnessing in the disruptions of the Indus-
trial Revolution. The Romantic Revolution was, for artists,
simultaneously an exultation of what was now possible for
the individual or the awakened community, throwing off
its ancient fetters; and a dark warning about the repressive
possibilities of new powers in new hands.
Politically, this helped propel the revolutionary struggles
of the French Revolution (1789), an essential moment in the
rise of modernity. Artistically, the Romantic artist fastened
onto the idea of the artist himself (and now for the rst
time practically, herself) as the embodiment of the alienated
human being in a world being transformed by factories and
machines. The creative artist was that special form of the
alienated human being whose antennae or capacities were
capable of bridging (after creative or political struggle) the
emerging gap between the self and the outside world, being
given over increasingly to industrialization. The allies of the
alienated human being in his or her struggle could most
obviously be found in the similarly struggling realm of
nature, since nature was herself becoming more and more
subjected to forces of mechanization and alienation. At the
same time, however, natural places could provide a refuge
from the increasing power of human technology.
The continuing landscape tradition in art was obvi-
ously an important vehicle for these emerging themes. In
1757, the English philosopher Edmund Burke wrote his
immensely inuential treatise on aesthetics, A Philosoph-
ical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime
and the Beautiful, in which he crystallized an emerging
theme of the period, which was that the natural world was,
among other things, potentially a place of emotional (sub-
lime) power; for example, the sense of overpowering awe
at the sight of Niagara Falls. This was, as it were, the most
powerful way to overcome the split between human and
nature: by the shock of brute natural experience.
Landscape as a symbol or a carrier of emotion was central
to the 18th and 19th century paintings of Gainsborough,
Constable, and Turner in England, Caspar David Friedrich
in Germany, the Barbizon School in France, and others.
Some of the themes of these paintings include:
vast mountains, waterfalls, landslides, or immense
forests within which the human presence is dwarfed
or muted into meditative silence (Turner; Friedrich);
nostalgic scenes of ordered country life, before the
onslaught of industrialization (Constable);
Oriental, historical, or classical landscapes that are far
from contemporary life (Corot; Bonington; Delacroix);
the simple rustic life of peasants and farming (Millet;
the Barbizon school).
The whole range of Romantic nature portrayal in art was
simultaneously reinforced by similar themes in Romantic
poetry, music, novels, etc. The sensitivity towards nature
was a barometer of ones personal sensitivity; and often of
ones politics.
The most important English writer on art and the environ-
ment in the 19th century was unquestionably John Ruskin.
Ruskin was a central inuence on a number of continu-
ing themes, such as the return of Gothic style architecture
to public buildings, the emphasis on handicraft work (that
would be picked up by William Morris later), and vari-
ous campaigns to save monuments (such as St. Marks in
Venice). His greatest claim is probably that he taught a
couple of generations of artists and writers to engage in the
intense study of natural forms and details. Ruskin believed
that in the details of natural forms could be found spiritual
patterns and truths, and that they were portals of self (and
social) awakening.
The descendants of Ruskin include not only the Pre-
Raphaelite painters of his own day, some of them who
were committed to Ruskinian detailing in their work, but
much later photographers like Ansel Adams who spe-
cialised in intensely grained portraits of natural objects
like rocks, trees, and waterfalls. The mention of photog-
raphy also reminds us that in Ruskins day artists were
being challenged by the new phenomenon of the photo-
graph that could capture details of the world in an instant,
details that might take days or weeks to obtain on a can-
vas.
The French Impressionists, though in many ways quite
different than photographers in their aims, nevertheless
found themselves often engaged in kinds of work allied
to at least some of the tendencies that could be found
emerging (over time) in photographic aesthetics. Among
these were the emphasis on the immediate response to a
scene; the organizing of a scene by light, shade, and color
rather than by underlying physical structures or the rules
of classical perspective; and the increasing use (particu-
larly by Degas) of seemingly accidental frames around
scenes so that pictures began to look as if they were
sudden glimpses into reality rather than long-meditated arti-
facts.
In a sense, the Impressionists were the culmination of the
Perspective Project, except that their observer was acutely
sensitive to the immediate atmospheric environment, so
that form begins to dissolve into light, color, and season-
ality, as in Monets late studies of Rouen cathedral and
haystacks at different times of year. Almost immediately,
this dissolution was countered by returns to certain kinds
of classical formalism (as in the paintings of Cezanne),
ART AND THE ENVIRONMENT 173
and the deploying of forms and visual elements generated,
not by the physical world, but by symbolic or emotional
expressiveness. The most famous examples of these are
the late works of Vincent Van Gogh, whose Sunow-
ers are simultaneously visionary piercings into the pri-
mal energy of the natural world, and also expressions of
the artists own emotional vocabulary of line and color.
Cezanne, too, in his intense study of the modeling of
natural objects, nds himself pressed into creating a paint-
ing language remote from the previous conventions of
representation.
ART AND THE MODERN ENVIRONMENT
It is a truism of art history that the late 19th century
pressed the traditional norms of representing the natural
environment to their limits; and that Picasso (drawing
on the work of Cezanne and others) broke those norms
completely. Modernism in art, literature, and other areas,
was exemplied by the collapse of a primary logic of
correspondence. In a logic of correspondence, x and y
in the artwork correspond to X and Y in the world, and
that is how representation works. This is replaced by
a logic of coherence, where the internal coherence of
the elements of the artwork is more important than their
potential correspondence to an outside world. A novel like
James Joyces Ulysses (1922) gets much of its power from
its one-to-one correspondence to a day in Dublin, it is
the last gasp of the traditional novel. Joyces last novel
(modernist or postmodernist), Finnegans Wake (1941) has
only the vaguest external reference: its structure is internal
(and in fact, the novel, if it is a novel, has no beginning or
end, but is circular).
Similarly, the most avant-garde artistic expression moves
away from simple representations of the natural world, just
at the moment when photography makes such representa-
tions normal, and in fact begins to provide representations
of parts of the natural world unrepresented before, thanks
to time lapse photography, microphotography, satellite pho-
tography, etc. Typically, a modernist painter like Marcel
Duchamp, in his Nude Descending A Staircase No. 2 (1912)
will use images derived from the work of Eadward Muy-
bridges photosequences of movement. But he will use them
to pattern the movement of descent of a gure so that it
breaks up what would (in traditional art) have been a frozen
moment on a stair.
There may be some relationship (though this is extremely
controversial) between the coherence model of modern
art and the virtual disappearance of landscape from the
artists repertoire for about 50 years following the arrival
of Picasso on the scene. It survives overtly in the warped
or dreamlike images of the Surrealist painters, and the
cool urban spaces of the American painter Edward Hopper.
Nevertheless, the art historian is aware that abstraction;
which appears to be the most unrepresentative art of all;
abstraction (associated with Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mon-
driaan, and others), originated in a complex desire by these
artists to abstract from the real world deeper spiritual and
emotional forms than could be captured simply by repre-
sentational pictures. The abstract painting often can be seen
as a formal or emotionally expressive landscape (an inte-
rior landscape of the mind, or simply of the possibilities
of the basic elements of paint itself) canvas, color, light,
frame, etc. Certainly, throughout the modern period there
have been artists engaged in representative art, but until
recently, they were completely marginalized. Interestingly
enough, it is in marginal forms like watercolor that many
artists of nature (Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargeant,
Andrew Wyeth) and many nature artists (that is, wildlife
artists) worked.
One critical fact about the modern artist is his or her
sophistication with regard to all previous forms of represen-
tation. The way in which artists will subvert photographic
realism, for instance, or tease the viewer with false hopes
that x will indeed represent X, all serve to highlight, or
undermine the norms of visual representation. This kind of
approach, pioneered by the Dada artists during the First
World War as an attack on the kind of normalcy that
could have generated a world war, xed on photomon-
tage and collage as possible subversive forms. Pop art,
in the 1960s, worked variations on this. Today, on many
fronts, artists are engaged in a kind of guerilla warfare
against the juggernaut of stale or compromised images that
are constantly regurgitated through the marketing machines
of the economic system. A kind of anti-art can be seen
wherever environmental activists are to be found; posters,
parodies of advertising campaigns, cartoons, expressive col-
lages, etc.
THE RETURN OF EARTH ART
The advent of Earth Art or Eco-Art was in many ways a
reaction to certain aspects of modernism (particularly those
parts of modern art that seemed to be complicit in those
parts of modernity that are threatening to the natural world),
but are also rooted in an artistic sensitivity to the increasing
burden of global environmental change.
One distinct element of modern art has been a devotion to
abstract or formal structures whose relationship to an exter-
nal world are not necessarily immediate or conventional.
Among the results of this in the buildings associated with
the International Style (from the late 1920s) e.g., was a kind
of unrooted geometricization of form and structure; i.e., you
could build a perfectly formal skyscraper anywhere in the
world. The best architects would, of course, relate their
efforts in subtle ways to their surroundings; but the vast
burgeoning of big box buildings, and the complacent hubris
of post World War 2 urban planning generated (at least
174 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
among certain artists and architects) a revulsion towards the
whole ethos associated with what was increasingly referred
to as The Modernist Project . This Project was seen as
deeply rooted in a kind of unstoppable juggernaut of capi-
talist development, mingling engineering, planning, market
economics, and the rhetoric of democracy together into a
completely seductive paradigm.
The revulsion against this has taken many forms, from
the guerilla art forms already mentioned, to attempts to
resuscitate a local dimension to art, architecture, and sculp-
ture; to recover a sense of place, as well as space. This
has been embodied in different forms in different arts. For
example, in sculpture, some people have taken their cue
from Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, who worked
in organic forms, and were very sensitive to the relation-
ships of human beings in the environment; while others
have explored the long tradition of the monument in the
landscape, the obelisk, temple, pillar. The mutual trans-
formation of monument, landscape, and human observer
has been explored in Environmental Sculpture (sculptures
that are large enough to create an environment within
which the observer moves) and in the very inuential
Earth Art.
Earth Art is in many ways a return to the glyphic
projects of early humankind, exemplied by the earthworks
in deserts, on mountain tablelands, and in caverns. Robert
Smithsons great earthworks (like Spiral Jetty on the Great
Salt Lake in Utah) and Christos wrapping of landscapes
and buildings, are different ways of highlighting the ten-
sions created by our contemporary abilities to reshape the
earth for our own purposes.
As Lee (see Landscape, Ur ban Landscape, and the
Human Shaping of the Environment, Volume 5) further
discusses, there are numerous variations in what contem-
porary artists have seized upon in our situation. To give
only one example of something that might contrast with
the grand scale of a Smithson or a Christo, an artist like
the Chilean Cecilia Vicuna collects shells, wood, pieces of
wool and vicuna (!) in what she has called precarious art;
tiny pieces of nature rescued for a moment (Merewether,
1992).
It is worth also pointing out in this context that there is a
widespread greening going on, most notably in architecture.
With new interests in: local or vernacular buildings that
were always sensitive to its environment out of necessity;
in new technologies for building, heating, cooling, and oth-
erwise improving the efciency of buildings; and in living
buildings with roof gardens, greenhouses, and other nat-
ural process devices (see Greening of Cities, Volume 3).
There are also basic concerns with recycling, the use of
chemicals in painting, and so on, that are now part of the
consciousness of most artists.
CONCLUSIONS
This review of the vast array of artistic responses to
environmental change has focussed on the main line of
artistic endeavor. An equally brief, but completely dif-
ferent review, might focus instead on the art of what
Westerners would consider to be marginal peoples (tra-
ditional crafts, indigenous arts, and unofcial art of all
kinds) whose arts both speak of different relations to
their environments, but are also more and more subject to
the complexities of living in a world becoming saturated
with the visual and aural products of Western commercial
culture.
A third review would ignore the past almost completely,
and report from the artistic trenches of today, exploring
the experiences and expressiveness of artists, still acting,
as the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley once described them, as
the unacknowledged legislators of the race. Their ability
to capture and portray aspects of reality that we have not
seen before, is one reason why they are so important to us.
But it is also easy to overplay that, as well; as if artists
have to be spokespeople for anything. It is not clear (if it
ever was) what the role of the artist is (or what art is for,
if anything) but, as an artist friend of mine once said: You
know that canary in the mine? Everyone always says that
it was there as a warning for the miners. I think they had
it there for that purpose; but Ill bet they liked hearing it
sing, too.
REFERENCES
Delano-Smith, C (2001) The Hidden Meanings of Maps, Nature,
411, 133134.
Merewether, C (1992) Walking on the Wild Side: Savage Para-
digms, in Eco-Art: Elaboration, Coordination and Execution
of the ECOART Project, Spala Editora, Rio de Janiero.
Winnicott, D W (1963) Playing and Reality, Penguin Books, Har-
mondsworth.
FURTHER READING
Appleton, J (1996) The Experience of Landscape, John Wiley,
Chichester.
Beardsley, J (1989) Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art
in the Landscape, Abbeville, New York.
Janson, H W and Janson, A F (1995) History of Art, 5th edition,
Harry N Abrams, New York.
Treagar, M (1980) Chinese Art, Oxford University Press, New
York.
Warnke, M (1994) Political Landscape: Art History of Nature,
translated by D McLintock, Reaktion Books, London.
ATTENBOROUGH, DAVID 175
Attenborough, David
(1926 )
David Frederick Attenborough, British naturalist, author
and broadcaster, has done more than any other person to
popularize and create an interest in natural history in the
UK and in many parts of the world through his many
television programs and series produced by BBC televi-
sion. After serving in the Royal Navy from 1947 1949,
he joined the staff of an educational publishing house. In
1952 he moved to the BBC as a trainee producer and soon
established his reputation through his famous Zoo Quest
series, aired from 1954 1964, which took the viewers to
many remote places Sierra Leone (1954), Guyana (1955),
Indonesia (1956), Papua New Guinea (1957), Argentina and
Paraguay (1958), the Southwest Paci c (1959), Madagas-
car (1960), northern Australia (1962) and down the Zambesi
from source to mouth in (1964). His next series was East-
wards with Attenborough set in Southeast Asia followed
by The Tribal Eye which examined sculpture (one of his
hobbies), weaving, metal casting and other tribal activi-
ties around the world. He received worldwide acclaim and
the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Desmond
Davis Award for his 1979 13-part series Life on Earth,
then the most ambitious series ever produced by the BBC
Natural History Unit. This was followed by The Living
Planet series in 1984, and The Trials of Life in 1990, which
dealt with animal behavior. His series The First Eden was
a survey of the impact of humankind on the lands around
the Mediterranean, which was followed by Lost Worlds,
Vanished Lives, a series on fossils. A popular series was
Life in the Freezer, about wildlife in the Antarctic (1990).
He treated plant life in The Private Life of Plants, which
was aired in 1995. His most recent series in 1998 was on
birds of the world. In this long record of natural history
broadcasting, Sir David has treated many aspects of bio-
diversity and has drawn attention to the fragile nature of
natural ecosystems, which has stimulated interest amongst
many different audiences. Sir David was knighted in 1985
for his services to broadcasting, was made a commander
of the Royal Victorian Order in 1991, and a companion
of honor in 1996. He has received honorary degrees from
many universities including Cambridge, where he studied
for his rst degree in natural sciences from 1945 to 1947.
He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1985, the
year in which he also received the Founders Medal of the
Royal Geographical Society. He is the recipient of the Inter-
national Cosmos Prize 2000. He has received many other
awards and medals including an International Emmy Award
in 1985. He has served as a trustee of the British Museum,
the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the Worldwide Fund
for Nature and a President of the British Association for
the Advancement of Science. Sir David s hobbies include
music, tribal art and, of course, natural history.
His books include: The Private Life of Plants, BBC
(1994), and The Life of Birds, BBC (1998).
GHILLEAN T PRANCE UK
B
Bahai Faith and the
Environment
Richard M Landau
Georgetown, Ontario, Canada
This article explores the basic principles and beliefs of
the members of the Bahai Faith and then examines how
these can and are being applied to environmental and
development challenges worldwide. Starting with a brief
exploration of the basic spiritual tenets enunciated by
Bahaullah, the prophet-founder of the Bahai Faith, this
article examines the Bahai prescription for resolving the
dif cult challenges before humanity. The Bahai Faith began
in the nineteenth century in Persia and today numbers over
six million adherents worldwide. Bahais believe that all
world religions originate from a common divine source and
that Bahaullah was the messenger from God for this era.
Contained in his teachings are speci c measures to usher in
a new world order based on spiritual principles.
The article concludes with an exploration of the par-
ticipation of the Bahai International Community (BIC) in
the United Nations (UN)-sponsored initiatives as well as
a range of development and environmental projects under-
taken by national and local Bahai communities.
The author has been a member of the Bahai Faith in
Canada since 1973 and is a graduate of Carleton University
and the University of Ottawa. A leader in interfaith dia-
logue, Mr Landau is author of The Willing Suspension of
Belief: How the Worlds Religions Can Work Together.
The Bahai Faith, which was founded in 1863, is the worlds
second most geographically widespread religion with more
than six million adherents living throughout the worlds
nations, territories, islands and outposts. Following the
example and teachings of their prophet-founder Bahaullah
(AD 18171892), the worlds Bahais consider themselves
to be the citizens of one country. Bahais regard the world
as one organic unity.
The Bahai Faith considers the monotheistic world reli-
gions part of an ever-advancing continuum that has a
design. Each religion, they assert, has its origins in a
common source or Godhead. A covenant exists between
God and humanity whereby God reveals his plan gradually
through his messengers. This is the fountainhead of human
progress. Thus, from time to time, God sends forth prophets
with revelations appropriate for a specic people at a spe-
cic period of human development. In keeping with the
idea of this progressive revelation, often the laws and cus-
toms of preceding revelations are abrogated with the advent
of each succeeding religion. For Bahais, Bahaullah has
revealed Gods message to humanity for the current age;
an age which will be characterized by world unity.
Bahaullah (translated as The Glory of God), who was
born in Persia, revealed numerous volumes of scriptures and
laws upon which the Bahai Faith is founded. He lays claim
to being the most recent in a line of chosen messengers
from God that includes his immediate precursor known
as The Bab (translated as The Gate), Mohammed, Jesus,
Moses and Abraham as well as Zoroaster, Buddha and
Krishna. The Bab (18191850) who was born in Shiraz,
Persia revealed in 1844 that he was the gate for one greater
than himself who would begin his mission to humanity in
1863. Ecclesiastical and civil authorities in Persia, alarmed
by the rapid growth of the Babi movement and The Babs
claim to a revelation from God, persecuted his adherents
and martyred The Bab on July 9, 1850. Likewise, because
of his teachings, Bahaullah spent his adult life in prison
and exile in various outposts of the Ottoman Empire, nally
living out his last days under house arrest in the port city
of Akka, near Haifa, Israel.
While the Bahai Faith has its origins in Islamic Persia, it
is a discrete and independent faith that claims to represent
the fulllment of prophecies in the sacred texts of the pre-
ceding world religions. Bahais hold all revealed scriptures
in highest regard as the word of God, believing that the
teachings of Bahaullah, by virtue of the fact that they are
the most recent revelation from God, are the most relevant
for today.
The many teachings revealed by Bahaullah cover every
aspect of life and relations between humanity and creation.
Among the most basic tenets is a belief in the unity and
BAHAI FAITH AND THE ENVIRONMENT 177
interconnectedness of all things: the singularity of God; the
equality of the races, sexes and all humanity; and that the
chief task facing humanity is the construction of a just and
merciful world-embracing civilization.
The pursuit of unity is reected in the Faiths administra-
tive order which includes elected local, regional, national
and international administrative bodies. The worldwide
headquarters of the Faith is located on Mount Carmel in
Haifa, Israel the nal resting place of the remains of The
Bab.
Bahais believe unity should also characterize the rela-
tionship between humanity and the natural environment
created by an all-powerful God. In the words of Bahaullah
(1976: section CXXXII, 288), Ye are all the fruits of one
tree, the leaves of one branch. From the Bahai perspec-
tive, humanity is both physically and metaphorically linked
to the world. In a letter, Shoghi Effendi (1933), a direct
descendant of Bahaullah and known as the Guardian of
the Bahai Faith, wrote:
We cannot segregate the human heart from the environment
outside us and say that once one of these is reformed everything
will be improved. Man is organic with the world. His inner life
moulds the environment and is itself also deeply affected by it.
The one acts upon the other and every abiding change in the
life of man is the result of these mutual reactions.
Bahais recognize that the world is undergoing rapid
socio-economic transitions that make the protection of the
environment and sustainable development both critical and
challenging. Bahais believe that only an integrated, bal-
anced and comprehensive world view with a belief in a
divine creator and unity of purpose will resolve environ-
mental and development challenges. For example, when
science and technology dont serve a divinely ordained pur-
pose, they will actually contribute to the erosion of the
planets biodiversity. Materialistic civilization that replaces
the idea of citizen with consumer cannot concern itself
with the long-term viability of life on Earth.
THE INTERCONNECTEDNESS OF HUMANITY
AND THE EARTH
The Bahai view on environmental conservation and sus-
tainable development holds that: (a) because the natural uni-
verse is a reection of the majestic qualities and attributes
of the Supreme Being, it inspires and should be accorded
the utmost respect; (b) all of creation is interconnected, and
(c) that the unity of humanity is the essential truth and com-
pelling force in this age. Of this, Bahaullah (1976: section
CXVII, 250) wrote: The Earth is but one county, and
mankind its citizens. The concepts of world citizenship,
prudent stewardship of the Earth, and the interconnected-
ness of all things is the essence of the Bahai Faith.
Abdul Baha (1982) (translated as Servant of the Glory),
the son of Bahaullah amplied this point:
For every part of the universe is connected with every other
part by ties that are very powerful and admit of no imbalance,
nor any slackening whatever
In another reference, he remarked:
Cooperation and reciprocity are essential properties which are
inherent in the unied system of the world of existence,
and without which the entire creation would be reduced to
nothingness.
(Abdul Baha, from a hitherto untranslated tablet)
At the very heart of the Bahai view of the relationship
between humanity and the natural universe is the belief
that all of creation is an expression of the many names and
attributes of an all-powerful God. Like the many different
attributes of God, the natural realm has diverse causes or
ideal environments in which it ourishes and expresses
itself. Life is tenacious and can adapt itself to such diverse
climates as polar, temperate, tropical and desert.
Nature in its essence is the embodiment of my name, the maker,
the creator. Its manifestations are diversied by varying causes,
and in this diversity there are signs for men of discernment.
Nature is Gods will and is its expression in and through the
contingent world.
(Bahaullah, 1982)
Every man of discernment, while walking upon the earth,
feeleth indeed abashed, in as much as he is fully aware that
the thing which is the source of his prosperity, his wealth, his
might, his exaltation, his advancement and power is, as ordained
by God, the very earth which is trodden beneath the feet of all
men. There can be no doubt that whoever is cognizant of this
truth, is cleansed and sanctied from all pride, arrogance, and
vainglory.
(Bahaullah, 1979)
Yet, while nature is seen as the repository of the many
attributes of God, Bahais are not pantheists, i.e., they do
not worship nature or hold it in high esteem for its own
sake. The natural realm exists to serve a humanity that has
as its task the carrying forward of an ever-evolving divinely
ordained world order that will usher in universal peace and
harmony. As such, Bahais believe that humanity must act
as a wise steward of the natural realm, though neither nature
nor humanity is at the core of the universal design. Rather,
it is God.
THE ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGE AND
SOLUTIONS
Just as humanity, the environment and spirituality are all
interconnected, so too are the factors that have led to
the environmental challenges. Speaking on behalf of the
worldwide community of Bahais, the BIC ofce at the
UN issued a statement making the point:
None of these problems the debilitating inequities of devel-
opment, the apocalyptic threats of atmospheric warming and
178 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
ozone depletion, the oppression of women, the neglect of
children and marginalized peoples, to name but a few can
be realistically addressed without considering all the others.
None can be fully addressed without a magnitude of coopera-
tion and coordination at all levels that far surpasses anything
in humanitys collective experience.
(Bahai International Community, 1998a)
According to the BIC, the unfettered exploitation of plan-
etary natural resources is one symptom of a sickness of the
human spirit. Thus, any lasting solution to the environmen-
tal and developmental challenges will need to recognize
the spiritual nature of each human, the interdependency of
all humans, and their relationship with the environment. In
other words, development will need to be more than simply
for short-term economic advantage; it must also further and
benet the minds and spirits of all humanity.
Clearly, cooperation between all peoples, governments
and agencies will be required to effect lasting solutions to
the environmental challenges. However, the BIC points to
certain trends in the world which tend to undermine the very
foundations of collaboration. Among these it includes:
the widespread lack of moral discipline, the glorication
of greed and material accumulation, the increasing breakdown
of family and community, the rise of lawlessness and disorder,
the ascendancy of racism and bigotry, and the priority given to
national interests over the welfare of humanity all of which
destroy condence and trust, the foundations of collaboration.
(Bahai International Community, 1997a)
It is the Bahai position that only the abandonment of
these destructive trends will create the necessary setting in
which the spiritualization of humanity can be realized and
the consequent unity and cooperation between humans can
develop solutions to meet the environmental challenges.
Such qualities include love, compassion, forbearance, trust-
worthiness, courage, humility, cooperation and willingness to
sacrice for the common good qualities of an enlightened
citizenry, able to construct a unied world civilization.
(Bahai International Community, 1997a)
THE NATURE OF SUSTAINABLE
DEVELOPMENT
Development, in the Bahai view, is an organic process
in which the spiritual is expressed and carried out in the
material (Abdul-Baha, 1995). As with the environmental
challenge, the Bahai view calls for broad-based organic
answers that are consistent with the development of the
spirituality of all people.
For example, community growth and development will
need to respond to the genuine need of all people to have
close contact with the natural world. This will inuence all
aspects of development from design and engineering to
community and land-use planning. Primary among these
will be the need for carefully planned maintenance of
agricultural lands.
Bahais believe that science and technology can only
provide answers to sustainable development when they take
into account the needs of the human soul. For example,
there is little value in building high-efciency vast networks
of concrete urban roads if the style of architecture blocks
sunlight, prevents people from walking and generally leaves
the human being dwarfed.
The vast forces of science and technology must be harnessed
to serve the material, intellectual, emotional and spiritual needs
of the entire human family. This will require that all peoples
be involved in generating scientic knowledge and determining
its applications. As participation increases, technologies which
have tended to desensitize and alienate, to make satisfying work
and crafts redundant, to destroy the environment, and to cause
sickness, inrmity or death, will, no doubt, be reconsidered,
redesigned or abandoned.
(Bahai International Community, 1997b)
Stewardship, from a Bahai point of view means that the
value of nature and its preservation cannot be expressed
in sheer economic terms. A more balanced approach to
sustainable development can only result when planners have
a deep understanding of the signicance of the natural realm
in the material and spiritual development of all humanity.
Consequently, good stewardship and prudent manage-
ment of the Earths resources is not merely an add-on that
is developed in response to a paucity of the resources, but
rather an essential and fundamental responsibility that must
be given fullest consideration at all times. Good steward-
ship doesnt involve rescuing nature from environmental
disasters. It involves long-term planning that minimizes any
possibilities of such emergencies occurring.
Material development which serves solely an economic
master is not a model favored by the Bahais. They believe
that the diverse peoples of the world will be more inclined
to support development policies and programs if they are
based on spiritual principles and the inherent dignity of the
human being. As such, Bahais have proposed that spiritual
indicators be applied to measure the value of development
in terms of its impact on the spiritual, cultural and social
advancement of humanity.
These indicators are drawn from the essential teachings
of Bahaullah. For example, one of the main tenets of the
Bahai Faith is that men and women are equal. Bahais
believe that just and sustainable development will only be
possible when women worldwide are welcomed as equal
co-partners in every eld of endeavor.
For Bahais, the commitment to the emancipation of women is
not a recent development nor is equality of the sexes a vague
ideal. It is our conviction that the unication of the human
race depends on the establishment of the equality of men and
women.
(Bahai International Community, 1998b)
BAHAI FAITH AND THE ENVIRONMENT 179
Another of the Bahai development indicators concerns
the equitable distribution of wealth. One of the basic tenets
of the Bahai Faith is the need to redress the extremes of
wealth and poverty whereby absolute impoverishment and
lavish luxury are virtually side by side. Experts tells us that
there are enough resources in the world to meet the needs
of all humanity. Therefore, to eliminate poverty, we will
need to nd more equitable methods of distribution and we
will need to moderate excessive and sometimes wasteful
consumption and the accumulation of wealth for its own
sake. At the same time, nations will need to develop fair
and equitable trade relations built on the principle that the
trading partners are true equals.
If development is to be sustainable, the Bahais suggest
the following:
Wealth is most commendable, provided the entire population
is wealthy. If, however, a few have inordinate riches while the
rest are impoverished, and no fruit or benet accrues from that
wealth, then it is only a liability to its possessor. If, on the
other hand, it is expended for the promotion of knowledge, the
founding of elementary and other schools, the encouragement
of art and industry, the training of orphans and the poor in
brief, if it is dedicated to the welfare of society its possessor
will stand out before God and man as the most excellent of all
who live on Earth and will be accounted as one of the people
of paradise.
(Abdul Baha, 1990)
Universal education is one of the requirements that will
speed the advent of a world united to promote com-
mon cause. Education that promotes a world consciousness
and the understanding that there is an integral connection
between every human being will create the conditions in
which humanity is united to meet environmental and devel-
opmental challenges.
Unity is a prerequisite for any effort to safeguard the
Earths habitat. The type of unity envisioned by the Bahais
encompasses much more than just geography, climatology
or biology. Rather, it is the outgrowth of an undying
belief that humanity is a one world community. In such a
community, it seems only logical that matters of economic
relations and sustainable development must be addressed
with a balanced universal perspective that takes into account
the worlds many cultures and resources.
PROPOSED COURSES OF ACTION
Calling on principles enunciated in the revelation of Baha-
ullah, whom Bahais regard as the messenger and prophet
from God for this age of humanity, the Bahais of the world
have proposed specic courses of action that will protect
the environment and dene the parameters of sustainable
development. Over 100 years ago, Bahaullah called for an
international legal system, sharing of the worlds resources,
a realignment of the worlds economic and governmental
relations, and reform in the behavior and patterns of human
consumption.
Drawing on these teachings, the BIC prepared a state-
ment for the proposed Earth Charter for the United Nations
Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED)
in 1992. In the document, the Bahais outlined the process
for achieving universally acceptable standards:
It is our conviction that any call to global action for environ-
ment and development must be rooted in universally accepted
values and principles. Similarly, the search for solutions to
the worlds grave environmental and developmental problems
must go beyond technical utilitarian proposals and address the
underlying causes of the crisis. Genuine solutions, in the Bahai
view, will require a globally accepted vision for the future,
based on unity and willing cooperation among the nations,
races, creeds, and classes of the human family. Commitment
to a higher moral standard, equality between the sexes, and the
development of consultative skills for the effective functioning
of groups at all levels of society will be essential.
(Bahai International Community, 1997c)
The document proposed that representatives of the
worlds religions be assembled, possibly under the auspices
of the World Bank or the UN Development Programme,
to consult about spiritual principles and their impact on
both the individual and the progress of society (Bahai
International Community, 1998a). Such an assemblage, the
Bahais believe, could reach common agreement on a lim-
ited number of spiritual principles and how these would
provide a basis for developing policy priorities. Based on
this agreement, goals and benchmarks for progress would
be established and monitored by the organization under
whose auspices the assemblage is convened.
The Bahais believe that the world religions can take the
initiative and collaborate because of the common thread
that unites all of the worlds major religious traditions.
The changes required to reorient the world toward a sustain-
able future imply degrees of sacrice, social integration, seless
action, and unity of purpose rarely achieved in human history.
These qualities have reached their highest degree of develop-
ment through the power of religion. Therefore, the worlds
religious communities have a major role to play in inspiring
these qualities in their members, releasing latent capacities of
the human spirit and empowering individuals to act on behalf
of the planet, its peoples, and future generations.
(Bahai International Community, 1997c)
Furthermore, the cooperation of an international deve-
lopment agency would signal their recognition of the signif-
icance of the spiritual dimension of human nature. Already
the internationally accepted Agenda 21 and The Habitat
Agenda have acknowledged that the spiritual needs of the
individual and of society are signicant factors in human
progress and are inseparable from ecological, economic,
social, and cultural development.
The next step would involve the development of
consultative processes on both the national and local
180 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
levels whereby communities would be encouraged to utilize
and develop their own independent spiritual measures
for action, derived from the larger plan. Such plans and
policies would likely have the backing of many and would
receive the formalized support of religious authorities and
institutions.
In a reection of the Bahai administrative order, which
has no clergy but devolves responsibility on each individual
right down to the local community, the Faith stresses the
importance of local action in any initiatives.
Development must be decentralized in order to involve com-
munities in formulating and implementing the decisions and
programs that affect their lives. Such a decentralization need
not conict with a global system and strategy, but would in
fact ensure that developmental processes are adapted to the
planets rich cultural, geographic, and ecological diversity.
(Bahai International Community, 1997c)
Bahais believe that the individual has a key role in the
unfolding of a planetary system of sustainable develop-
ment. Therefore, acknowledging the spiritual dimension of
humanity and providing for the moral, emotional, physical
and intellectual development and education of each person
will be a building block toward a new vision of planetary
society.
To meet the environmental and development challenges,
Bahais afrm that the top-down model of community
development will need to give way to a more participatory,
knowledge-based and values-driven process of governance.
When people view the decision-making process as some-
thing they own not as a remote and Byzantine system of
laws they will accept their responsibility for shaping a
new world.
At the very core of the environmental and developmental
crises facing humanity, Bahais believe, there is a lack of
moral leadership that pervades every level of decision mak-
ing from the highest levels of government to the family
unit itself. This is evidenced by the constant discovery of
political scandals that reveal a bankruptcy of ethical lead-
ership. Humanity may have even lost its ability to dene
and identify morality in leadership because of the barrage
of messages that obfuscate and confuse the issue.
While the worlds religions, development organizations,
governments and individuals are all called upon to play a
role in sustainable development, long-term solutions will
require a new and integrated vision of global society. This
vision will have as its underpinnings and its charter, a new
set of values based on the belief that all of humanity is one.
For Bahais, the very bedrock and hope for a sustainable
new world order is the acceptance of the oneness of
humanity. This principle will cause the restructuring of the
worlds administration to reect the fact that the world
is one nation. This does not mean that any culture or
nation must abandon its distinctive identity. In fact, the
entire principle of unity in diversity, which the Bahai Faith
champions, supports and actively encourages each peoples
right to maintain, protect and uphold its distinctiveness in
the face of the homogenizing inuences of international
capital.
In the Bahai view, world unity is not mutually exclusive
of cultural diversity and national autonomy. Each person
can legitimately have a balanced sense of pride in his or
her culture and national identity. However, every person
is called to a broader notion of loyalty: the uplifting and
progress of the human soul, of every human being and the
entire world civilization. The Bahai approach emphasizes
that the world is one nation and it calls for a universal
auxiliary language, which may in the future prove to be
English. The yet to be determined auxiliary language will
facilitate inter-cultural communication and will not replace
peoples own mother tongues. Each individual maintains
the right to preserve his or her cultural identity and mother
tongue.
In the view of the BIC, acceptance of the oneness of humanity
is the rst fundamental prerequisite for this reorganization
and administration of the world as one country, the home
of humankind. Recognition of this principle does not imply
abandonment of legitimate loyalties, the suppression of cultural
diversity, or the abolition of national autonomy. It calls for
a wider loyalty, for a far higher aspiration than has so far
animated human efforts. It clearly requires the subordination
of national impulses and interests to the imperative claims of
a unied world. It is inconsistent not only with any attempt to
impose uniformity, but with any tendency towards excessive
centralization. Its goal is well captured in the concept of unity
in diversity.
(Bahai International Community, 1997d)
The BIC believes that the change in consciousness that
would be represented by the adoption of the term world
citizenship is a prerequisite before the peoples of the
planet can accept and promote a coordinated and reasonable
approach to global sustainable development. The entire
idea of world citizenship can only take hold when one
accepts the inter-relatedness of all human beings, of the
impact of their actions upon each other. It means that the
world is no longer constituted of billions of discrete beings
and scores of disconnected governments and trans-national
corporations. With the advent of world citizenship, each
accepts that his or her actions in any part of the globe is
likely to have impacts well beyond the local or regional
spheres of inuence.
The Bahai understanding of the implications of world
citizenship extends beyond simply a new passport or slogan:
World citizenship encompasses the principles of social and eco-
nomic justice, both within and between nations; non-adversarial
decision making at all levels of society; equality of the sexes;
racial, ethnic, national and religious harmony; and the willing-
ness to sacrice for the common good.
(Bahai International Community, 1997e)
BAHAI FAITH AND THE ENVIRONMENT 181
The BIC believes that the most effective method for
promoting sustainable development is logically through
adoption of world citizenship. The full meaning and import
of world citizenship will have an impact on the way nations
conduct themselves with each other. When humanity and
its economic, social, and political orders are preoccu-
pied with disunity, antagonism and rigid provincialism, the
Bahais submit that there is no room for a concerted world-
wide strategy on sustainable development. In other words,
any effort to realize sustainable development can only be
marginally successful without the animating principles of
world citizenship and one-world homeland. The prerequi-
sites clearly call for harmony and unity amongst all peoples
and nations of the world.
In a paper entitled World Citizenship: a Global Ethic for
Sustainable Development, presented to the rst session of
the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, 14 25
June 1993, the BIC re ected at length on the necessary rst
step of establishing the concept of world citizenship. They
went so far as to lay out a plan for its introduction and the
requisite actions of the world leaders.
They should foster an ethic of service to the common good and
convey an understanding of both the rights and the responsibil-
ities of world citizenship.
Using the concept of world citizenship as an integrating
theme, the UN should publicize its ideals, activities and goals,
so that people come to understand the unique and vital role
the UN plays in the world and, therefore, in their lives.
Similarly, the UN should promote world citizenship in all
its public activities, including celebrations of its historical
milestones and tours of UN headquarters. Every UN document
that deals with sustainable development should also include
this principle beginning with the preamble of the proposed
Earth Charter. World citizenship must become the single most
important point of ethical reference in all UN activities.
The services of the advertising industry should be enlisted
to promote world citizenship.
(Baha i International Community, 1997e)
THE PROMISE OF A BETTER FUTURE
The Baha is believe that there are dual processes at work
in the world: the one best characterized as spiritualizing,
embryonic, and bene cial to humanity; the other is the
decaying and destruction of institutions and ways of think-
ing that no longer serve an evolving worldwide civilization.
The Baha is are optimistic that humanity will survive
the serious environment challenges and development issues
facing it. They believe that the covenant God made with
Abraham and Noah and has renewed with every Messenger
sent to humanity is evidence of the long-term viability
of humanity. This does not, however, allow humanity
to abdicate its stewardship responsibilities nor the huge
commitment to persevere and make sacri ces and changes
that will transform the world. Shoghi Effendi (1980) looked
forward to this renewal of civilization:
In such a world society [t]he economic resources of the
world will be organized, its sources of raw materials will be
tapped and fully utilized, its markets will be coordinated and
developed, and the distribution of its products will be equitably
regulated The enormous energy dissipated and wasted on
war, whether economic or political, will be consecrated to
such ends as will extend the range of human inventions and
technical development, to the increase of the productivity of
mankind, to the extermination of disease, to the extension of
scienti c research, to the raising of the standard of physical
health, to the sharpening and re nement of the human brain, to
the exploitation of the unused and unsuspected resources of the
planet, to the prolongation of human life and to the furtherance
of any other agency that can stimulate the intellectual, the moral
and spiritual life of the entire human race.
According to the BIC, it is the actions of governments,
non-governmental organizations, the forces of capital, soci-
ety in general, and signi cant individuals that will deter-
mine how quickly humanity arrives at a universal consensus
for sustainable development. The onus is on every party to
consciously and deliberately give a thorough evaluation to
the meaning of the goals toward which they are working.
This will ensure that all parties can be effective partners in
progress. The BIC says that clear goals, meaningful poli-
cies and standards, identi ed programs, and agreed upon
indicators of progress are necessary if advancement toward
humanity s common future is to be charted and regular cor-
rections to that course determined and carried out (Baha i
International Community, 1998a).
BAHAI ACTION ON SUSTAINABLE
DEVELOPMENT
Representing the world s Baha is, the BIC of ce at the UN
has played a prominent role in the various UN-sponsored
summits on the environment and sustainable development.
Exemplary among these, was the participation of the BIC
in the Earth Summit the Rio de Janeiro Conference in
June 1992.
The Baha is focused on the Earth Charter (see Earth
Charter, Volume 5) which they felt was potentially the
most signi cant document under consideration at Rio de
Janeiro. In numerous languages they circulated nearly one
million copies of the environmental and development state-
ments of the BIC. In the opening paragraph of its presen-
tation to a preparatory working group of the UNCED, the
BIC wrote of the Charter:
It could offer a unifying vision for the future and articulate
the values upon which a peaceful, prosperous and harmonious
world society could practically be constructed. In so doing,
the Earth Charter could lift the context of deliberations on
humanity s future to a new level to the level of principle.
Only discourse at the level of principle has the power to
invoke a moral commitment, which will, in turn, make possible
the discovery of enduring solutions to the many challenges
confronting a rapidly integrating human society the Earth
182 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Charter can tap a powerful source of individual and collective
motivation, which will be essential for the reorientation of the
world toward a sustainable future.
(Bahai International Community, 1997f)
The Bahai presentation to UNCED urged that the idea
of the oneness of humanity should be proclaimed in
the preamble to the Charter, which should then be taught
in the worlds schools and communicated worldwide in
preparation for the organic change in the structure of
society which it implies (Bahai International Community,
1997f).
In fact, the landmark Peace Monument unveiled at the
conclusion of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro
was an initiative of the BIC. At the Summits closing
ceremony, soil from some 40 nations was deposited by
children into the 5-m high monument. Each year since
the Summit, World Environment Day in Rio includes a
ceremony at the monument during which soil from other
nations is added. The inscription on the monument is the
words of Bahaullah: The Earth is but one country, and
mankind its citizens.
Both Bahai communities and individual Bahais are in
the forefront of activities aimed at furthering conservation
and sustainable development. The following list is a small
sample of projects Bahais are involved with worldwide:
1. The establishment of a Bahai ofce of the environ-
ment as an adjunct of the BIC ofce at the UN.
2. Issuing a 1989 compilation of Bahai writings Con-
servation of the Earths Resources. The text has been
studied by Bahai communities worldwide.
3. Numerous national and local Bahai communities
have established their own environmental ofces and
committees, often in cooperation with like-minded
organizations. In Japan, Canada, Brazil, Taiwan, Co-
lombia, the Philippines and other nations, Bahai
communities have established curricula for education
about the environment.
4. Nur University in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, an institution
of higher learning, established on Bahai principles,
offers a Masters degree in Development.
5. A range of publications dealing with environmen-
tal and developmental issues is now published by
Bahais. This includes: One Country, a quarterly
newsletter of the BIC; Ecologia Y Unidad Mundial,
an Argentine Bahai newspaper; and others.
6. The Bahai Vocational Institute for Rural Women,
located in India and the Clean and Beautiful Swazi-
land campaign founded by a Bahai Dr Irma
Allen have both received Global 500 Awards from
the UN Environment Programme.
7. An organic farming project by the Bahai community
of Japan teaches how to grow food without articial
fertilizers or pesticides.
8. In rural Kenya, a Bahai-sponsored development pro-
ject encourages and empowers village women to de-
velop their own entrepreneurial weaving businesses.
9. In Bolivia and Malaysia, Bahai communities have
launched sh farming projects.
10. Bahais in the UK, the Philippines, Singapore and
Taiwan have all organized and/or sponsored arts and
educational activities geared to creating awareness of
the fragile environment and conservation.
11. Local Bahai communities in the UK have become
active proponents of Local Agenda 21, working with
partner groups and with local authorities.
12. Working in collaboration with other organizations, the
BIC hosted two World Forestry Charter Gatherings in
1989 and 1994.
13. The BIC made a formal presentation to the World
Faiths and Development Dialogue hosted by the
President of the World Bank and the Archbishop of
Canterbury at Lambeth Palace during the Lambeth
Conference, February 1998.
Finally, as if to address directly the very issue of environ-
mental biodiversity and sustainable growth, the architecture
and landscaping of each of the Bahai Holy Sites around the
world is a model of the blending of natural and architectural
beauty, efciency and diversity. Each of these sites features
a diverse range of ora to reect the Faiths teachings about
diversity and the buildings are designed to complement and
augment their surroundings.
For more information, visit:
www.bahai.org the ofcial website of the worldwide
Bahai community;
www.bic-un.bahai.org/i-e-env.htm a page of the web-
site of the BIC ofce at the UN, which lists and links
to environmental papers released by the BIC.
REFERENCES
Abdul Baha (1982) Selections from the Writings of Abdul Baha,
Bahai World Centre, Haifa, Section 137, 157.
Abdul Baha (1990) The Secret of Divine Civilization, Bahai
Publishing Trust, Wilmette, 2425.
Abdul Baha (1995) Paris Talks, 12th edition, Bahai Publishing
Trust, London, 9.
Bahai International Community (1997a) Sustainable Develop-
ment and the Human Spirit, UN.
Bahai International Community (1997b) Sustainable Communi-
ties in an Integrating World, UN.
Bahai International Community (1997c) Earth Charter, UN.
Bahai International Community (1997d) International Legislation
for Environment and Development, UN.
Bahai International Community (1997e) World Citizenship: a
Global Ethic for Sustainable Development, UN.
Bahai International Community (1997f) The Earth Charter/Rio
De Janeiro Declaration and the Oneness of Humanity, UN.
BATESON, GREGORY 183
Bahai International Community (1998a) Valuing Spirituality in
Development, UN.
Bahai International Community (1998b) Women and Men: Part-
nership for a Healthy Planet, UN.
Bahaullah (1976) Gleanings from the Writings of Bahaullah,
Bahai Publishing Trust, Wilmette, IL.
Bahaullah (1979) Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, Bahai Publish-
ing Trust, Wilmette, 44.
Bahaullah (1982) Tablets of Bahaullah, Bahai World Centre,
Haifa, 142.
Shoghi Effendi (1933) Letter to an Individual Bahai, Through his
Secretary, 17 February.
Shoghi Effendi (1980) The World Order of Bahaullah, Bahai
Publishing Trust, Wilmette, 203204.
BAT (Best Available
Technology)
The term BAT has undergone a signicant change in mean-
ing since its introduction into environmental policy debates
in the early 1970s. Initially, BAT meant regulation through
a technological standard, under which the relevant gov-
ernment agency requires rms to employ the pollution
control or abatement technology that yields the lowest level
of pollution. The US Clean Air and Clear Water Acts
also instructed regulators to consider feasibility and cost
factors; BAT was interpreted to mean designating of the
most effective currently demonstrated and cost-effective
technology. These trade-offs were highlighted in various
elaborations, including BAT economically achievable, BAT
not entailing excessive costs, best available demonstrated
technology, and best practicable technology. The actual
practice of regulation by technological standard was soon
criticized on two grounds. By the mid-1970s, it was widely
viewed as having the effect of stalling or even freezing the
introduction of new technology; though requiring use of
particular technology created a stable base level of envi-
ronmental protection, it also inhibited further progress by
discouraging innovation. In the 1980s, critics contended
that actual technological standards were emphasizing end-
of-pipe treatment rather than pollution prevention. Greater
acceptance of economists arguments that market incentives
would yield more pollution control at less overall cost,
and environmentalists arguments for preventing or mini-
mizing pollution through redesign of goods and industrial
processes produced a very different policy debate in the
early 1990s. BAT came to mean the production technology
yielding the greatest reduction in pollution rather than a
regulatory approach.
M J PETERSON USA
Bateson, Gregory
(19041980)
Gregory Bateson was a British anthropologist, trained at
St. Johns College, who built his career in the US, and
who also made signicant and innovative contributions in
the elds of communication, cybernetics, information, psy-
chiatry and learning theory. He was the son of geneticist
William Bateson who is regarded as the founder of the
eld of genetics, and grandson of William Henry Bate-
son, who had been a master at St. Johns College where he
brought about signicant reforms. Gregory was rst mar-
ried to Margaret Mead with whom he pioneered the use of
visual methods in ethnographic research in Bali (Lipset,
1980). They were parents of Mary Catherine Bateson,
an anthropologist and contemporary author who collabo-
rated with him and who carries on some elements of his
work.
Beginning with the publication of the ethnography Naven
in 1936 (Bateson, 1958), a consistent underlying theme
in all of Batesons work was a concern with science
as a process of knowing rather than an accumulation of
facts, and with the social implications of errors in sci-
entic thought that occur as a result of what Whitehead
referred to as the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, or
that of regarding scientic explanation as a description of
external and concrete phenomena, rather than as a prod-
uct of interaction between the observer and that which
is observed. A second fallacy he observed was that of
seeking to control an interactive system of which one
is a part, through quantitative measurement. An example
of these types of errors is found in the characterization
of ecosystems at a single level of analysis, as composed
of discrete entities that respond mechanically to inputs
and outputs of energy. According to Bateson, reliance
on this type of analysis would only increase the likeli-
hood of runaway ecological degradation, because the false
sense of an ability to predict and control the factors of
interest would only make a pathological system more ef-
ciently pathological. This would lead to more rapid self-
destruction, since it does not address the false premises
upon which the model is based. Organizing society and
technology around this false sense of control would also
reduce exibility and thus the capacity to respond to eco-
logical degradation (Bateson, 1979; Harries-Jones, 1995).
The most famous example of this in Batesons work is
the alcoholic who attempts to assert his mastery over his
drinking problem by resorting to a stiff drink to bolster
himself.
Instead, Bateson stressed the importance of relationships
that provide the basis for organization, and that are a
greater limiting factor than energy. Relationships, which
are sustained through communication of information rather
184 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
than by energy ows, are also important as a source of
information about context and meaning. Recursive relation-
ships in turn lead to pattern, which cannot be characterized
through linear logic and quantitative analysis, which are
therefore inadequate for characterizing living systems. An
example of this error is found in Darwinian theories of
evolution, in which evolution is characterized as a linear
process and a force of progress, which fails to account for
organization and denies interdependent relationships among
organisms and their environment (Bateson, 1979; Harries-
Jones, 1995).
Another important contribution was his concept of the
double-bind, a paradoxical and incoherent situation in
which contradictory rules appear simultaneously relevant,
such as when a child receives conicting cues from a par-
ent, or in which a playful situation is understood literally.
In other words, given that meaning changes with context,
behavior is constrained by a perceived context or denition
of a relationship that is no longer relevant, which leads to
nonsensical beliefs. Context is taken to include relationships
as well as fundamental premises and habitual behaviors that
are seldom questioned, all of which constrain action, and
that are normally taken as a given. In clusters, such beliefs
have been linked to schizophrenia as well as to forms of
common madness (Bateson, 1979; Jaeger, 1994). Associ-
ated with this is the concept of deutero- or double-loop
learning, which refers to learning about context which, in
contrast with rote-learning, provides a frame of reference
and meaning to a given situation. Papers addressing these
and related concepts were brought together and published in
his best-known book, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Bateson,
1972).
Bateson alluded a number of times to a new unnamed
science, for which, in his nal book, Mind and Nature
(Bateson, 1979) he offered a set of epistemological prin-
ciples. In sum, he is widely regarded as having provided
a new perspective on the ecological predicament. In ret-
rospect, many of his ideas can be found embedded in the
concepts of post-normal science and adaptive management
of ecosystems (Tognetti, 1999).
REFERENCES
Bateson, G (1958) Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested
by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe
Drawn from Three Points of View, 2nd edition, Stanford Uni-
versity Press, Stanford, CA.
Bateson, G (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Chandler, San
Francisco, CA.
Bateson, G (1979) Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, Bantam
Books, New York.
Harries-Jones, P (1995) A Recursive Vision: Ecological Under-
standing and Gregory Bateson, University of Toronto Press,
Toronto.
Jaeger, C C (1994) Taming the Dragon Transforming Economic
Institutions in the Face of Global Change, Gordon and Breach,
Yverdon.
Lipset, D (1980) Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist,
Beacon Press, Boston, MA.
Tognetti, S S (1999) Science in a Double-bind: Gregory Bateson
and the Origins of Post-Normal Science, Futures, 31, 689704.
SYLVIA S TOGNETTI USA
Best Available Technology (BAT)
see BAT (Best Available Technology)
(Volume 5)
Biocentrism
see Environmental Ethics (Volume 5)
Brent Spar
The public protest against the dumping of an oil-contamina-
ted derelict off-shore petroleum platform was a watershed
in the clout of non-government organizations. Transnational
giant, Royal Dutch Shell, backed down in the face of
massive public outrage organized by Greenpeace.
The Brent Spar, a 4000-tonne oil installation, was to
be towed from the North Sea and dumped in the North
Atlantic, pursuant to a permit issued by the government
of the UK on February 16th, 1995. Greenpeace launched
protests in May, 1995 including the occupation of the rig
off-shore by scientists and others. Greenpeace argued that
dumping a rig at sea would set a dangerous precedent and
would undo the progress against ocean dumping. North Sea
environment ministers were to meet in June in Denmark
on the issue of ocean discharges of hazardous substances
within the Oslo and Paris Commission (OSPARCOM). The
Brent Spar issue caught re in a dramatic way as Green-
peace catalyzed a massive public outcry against Shell. Shell,
its reputation already severely damaged by allegations of
environmental and human rights abuses in the Niger Delta,
initially rejected its critics complaints. It had never backed
down in the face of public protest, even in the high-prole
and international controversy that followed the death of
author and Shell critic Ken Saro-Wiwa at the hands of
Nigerian dictator General Abacha.
BUDDHISM AND ECOLOGY 185
But the growing momentum in the movement opposed to
dumping the Brent Spar increased. By June, Shell reversed
itself and, although the towing of the installation was
already underway, announced it would not dump the Brent
Spar at sea but would tow it into a Norwegian fjord,
where it remains today. Subsequently, the controversy is
remembered as one of exaggerated claims about the degree
of contamination of the oil installation by Greenpeace,
which has admitted its estimates subsequently proved false.
Greenpeace, however, maintains that despite its errors, the
precedent against ocean dumping of oil installations was
important and one which was subsequently endorsed by 11
of the 13 North Sea nations within OSPARCOM.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada
Brower, David
(19122000)
David Brower was one of North Americas leading envi-
ronmentalists. Over his extremely active life, he founded
and steered some of the worlds most inuential environ-
mental organizations. In all things, he was supported by
Anne Brower, his equally ecologically aware wife.
An accomplished climber and ski mountaineer enthusiast,
David Brower joined the Sierra Club in 1933, and was
elected to its national board in 1941 (see Sier r a Club,
Volume 5). He became the organizations rst executive
director in 1952, a position he held until 1969. Under
his leadership the organization grew from 2000 to 77 000
members. In 1969, he left the club staff on request. Despite
a number of policy differences, Brower continued to be
perennially elected to the Sierra Club Board (in 1983, 1986,
1995 and 1998), resigning in 2000 complaining that the
organization lacked a sense of urgency in its campaigns.
He died 6 months later.
In 1969, Brower turned his attention to the creation of a
grassroots, activist organization, Friends of the Earth (FoE)
(see Fr iends of the Ear th, Volume 5). Brower realized his
vision of a truly global organization with member groups in
63 countries. But, once again, as executive director of FoE
(US), he experienced conict with the board of directors.
Brower believed FoE should pursue nuclear disarmament.
The culminating issue was the board directive to relocate
national headquarters from San Francisco to Washington,
DC. Browers intransigence led to his termination in 1982.
When Brower went to court to challenge the FoE Boards
action, the news made the front page of the New York Times.
In 1982, Brower founded Earth Island Institute as well
as the biennial Fate and Hope of the Earth Conferences,
working to integrate peace, environmental, human rights
and social justice groups. His biography, Encounters with
the Archdruid by John McPhee, is in its 27th printing.
Brower is best remembered for his successful campaigns
to keep dams out of Dinosaur National Monument, the
Yukon and the Grand Canyon. He also played a signicant
role in the creation of national parks and seashores in Kings
Canyon, the Redwoods, the North Cascades, Alaska and
Cape Cod, among many others.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada
Buddhism and Ecology
Stephanie Kaza
University of Vermont, Burlington, USA
During its 2500 year history, Buddhism has evolved across
a wide range of physical and cultural geographies. From
the Theravada traditions in tropical South and Southeast
Asia, to the Mahayana schools in temperate and climati-
cally diverse China and Japan, to the Vajrayana lineages
in mountainous Tibet, the Buddhist teachings have been
received, modi ed, and elaborated in many ecological con-
texts. Across this history, Buddhist understandings about
nature and human-nature relations have been based on dif-
ferent teachings, texts, and cultural views. These have not
been consistent by any means; in fact, some views directly
contradict each other.
Scholars debate whether or not Buddhist philosophies of
nature led to any recognizable ecological awareness among
early Buddhists. Most members of early Buddhist societies,
including many monks, preferred the comforts of village
life over the threats of the wild. Only forest ascetics chose
the hermitage path with its immersion in wild nature. The
word (nature) itself has many different meanings in vari-
ous Asian languages. Concepts and attitudes towards nature
vary across time and place as well. Indian Buddhist liter-
ature, for example, shows relatively little respect for wild
nature, preferring tamed nature instead; Japanese Bud-
dhism reveres the wild but engages it symbolically through
highly developed art forms.
Even with these distinctions, Buddhist texts do contain
many references to the natural world, both as inspira-
tion for teachings and as a source for ethical behavior.
For those exploring Buddhist teachings in the context of
the environmental crisis, Buddhist traditions are potential
sources for philosophical and behavioral guidelines towards
nature. From the earliest guidelines for forest monks to
186 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
the hermitage songs of Milarepa, from the Jataka tales of
compassion to Zen teachings on mountains and rivers, the
inheritance is rich and diverse.
EARLY BUDDHIST VIEWS OF NATURE
Buddhism developed as a major world religion in the 5th
century before the common era (BCE) in north India,
where the historical Buddha lived and taught. At the time,
the region was undergoing ecological upheaval through
the growth of urban centers and political centralization.
Previously uninhabited forests were cleared for agricultural
expansion and town development. Wild areas that were
home to rhinos, elephants, tigers, and large snakes, were
seen as lled with threat but also available as marginal land.
The Buddha and his followers took advantage of some of
these lands but adapted their teaching and retreat times to
accommodate the farming seasons and to draw on local
community support.
In the canonical story of the Buddha, there are many
references to nature, especially trees. The Buddha to be,
Siddharta, was born the son of a king of the Shakya tribe
in the foothills of the Himalayas. His birth took place
under a tree, and as a young man, Siddharta spent many
years wandering in the forests and mountains of India
in pursuit of spiritual understanding. At the time of his
enlightenment, he had been sitting at the foot of a large
bodhi tree (Ficus religiosa) for seven days. According to
the story, the Buddha vowed not to move from the tree
until he gained some understanding of the source of human
suffering. For many years after, he taught in shaded groves
to large gatherings of monks and lay people.
After six days and nights of sitting in meditation, in a
state of great concentration, he perceived all his previous
lives in a continuous cycle of birth and death, and then saw
the vast universe of birth and death for all beings. From
this he came to understand the law of cause and effect
or karma and the universal existence of suffering due to
impermanence. This was the First Noble Truth. Then he
realized the driving force behind birth and death, craving
or attachment to existence: the Second Noble Truth. As the
Buddha saw that all phenomena, i.e., all of nature, arise
from complex sets of causes and conditions, he realized
that liberation from suffering lay in this very insight:
the law of mutual causality or dependent origination (in
Sanskrit pratityasamutpada, in Pali paticca samuppada).
This was the Third Noble Truth: the path to release from
suffering. He further laid out a prescription for practice in
the Fourth Noble Truth of the Eight-fold Path. He named
right livelihood, right practice, and right speech, among
others, as methods for achieving release from suffering.
The Buddha s profound appreciation for the universal
existence of suffering engendered in him a lifetime com-
passionate response, expressed in the form of sharing his
teachings with others. He saw that compassion (karuna)
and loving kindness (metta) for all beings arises directly
from this understanding of the nature of suffering. Early
Buddhism was strongly in uenced by the Hindu and Jain
principle of ahimsa or non-harming. Buddhist teachings
urged monks not to harm any living thing; killing animals
for food was against the monastic code. The classic Jataka
Tales of India recount the many former lives of the Bud-
dha as an animal or tree when he showed great compassion
to others who were suffering. Over 500 tales have been
handed down from the oral tradition, ranging from simple
animal fables to fragments of heroic epics. It is said that
the verses and stories were told by the Buddha himself as
a way of commenting on particular life situations challeng-
ing his students. In each of the tales, the Buddha-to-be sets
a strong moral example of compassion for plants and ani-
mals in his many lifetimes before his rebirth as the Buddha
(Beswick, 1956).
The Agganna Sutta from the Pali Canon collection of
early Buddhist texts relates the Buddhist counterpart of
a creation story in which human activities clearly affect
their environment. The original beings are described as self-
luminous, subsisting on bliss and freely traveling through
space. At that time it is said that the earth was covered with
a avorful substance much like butter from which greed
originated. The more butter that the beings ate, the more
solid their bodies became. Difference of form appeared
and the more beautiful ones developed conceit and looked
down on the others. Self-growing rice appeared on the
earth to replace the butter and before long, people began
hoarding and then stealing food. As people erred in their
ways, the richness of the earth declined. The point of the
sutta is to show that environmental health is bound up with
human morality (Ryan, 1998). Other suttas also spell out
the environmental impacts of greed, hate, and ignorance,
showing how these three poisons produce both internal and
external pollution. In contrast, the practice of generosity,
compassion, and wisdom can reverse such environmental
decline and produce health and purity.
The early monastic code, the Vinaya, contained a number
of guidelines for caring for the environment (De Silva,
2000). Monks were not to travel during the rainy season
for fear of killing the worms and insects that come to the
surface in wet weather. Similarly, monks were not to dig
in the ground or drink unstrained water. Even wild animals
were to be treated with kindness. Plants too were not to be
injured carelessly but respected for all they give to people.
Buddhists adopted a reverential attitude toward large trees,
carrying on the Indian tradition regarding vanaspati or lords
of the forest. Some of these huge trees were thought to be
former Buddhas; protecting trees and preserving open lands
were considered meritorious deeds. The Buddha constantly
urged his followers to choose natural habitats to engage
BUDDHISM AND ECOLOGY 187
in meditation, free from the inuence of everyday human
activity.
NORTHERN VIEWS
As Indian Buddhism developed into many strands of phi-
losophy and practice, teachings were carried north to China.
Each sect emphasized particular texts, principles, and prac-
tices, each with varying degrees of application to environ-
mental concerns. The Hua Yen school of Buddhism, which
arose in 7th century in China, placed particular emphasis
on the law of interdependence or mutual causality. Ecolog-
ical understanding of natural systems ts very well within
the Buddhist description of interdependence (Cook, 1989).
Throughout many cultural forms of Buddhism, nature is
perceived as relational, each phenomenon dependent on a
multitude of causes and conditions. These causes include
not only physical and biological factors but also historical
and cultural factors, i.e., human thought forms and values.
The Hua Yen Avatamsaka or Flower Ornament Sutra
used a teaching metaphor, the Jewel Net of Indra, to
communicate the innite complexity of the multi-causal
universe. This cosmic net contains a multifaceted jewel
at each of its nodes, with each jewel reecting all the
others. If any of the jewels becomes cloudy (toxic or
polluted), the less clearly it reects the others. To extend
the metaphor, stresses on any of the net lines, e.g., through
loss of species or habitat, affect all the other lines. Likewise,
if clouded jewels are cleared up (rivers cleaned, wetlands
restored), life across the net is enhanced. Because the net of
interdependence includes not only the actions of all beings
but also their thoughts, the intention of the actor becomes
a critical factor in determining what happens. This, then,
provides both a principle of explanation for the way things
are, and a path for positive action.
The law of interdependence suggests a powerful corol-
lary, sometimes noted as emptiness of separate self. If
all phenomena are dependent on interacting causes and
conditions, nothing exists by itself, autonomous and self-
supporting. This Buddhist understanding (and experience)
of self directly contradicts the traditional Western sense
of self as a discrete individual. Philosopher Alan Watts
called this assumption of separateness the skin encap-
sulated ego, the very delusion that Buddhist practices
seek to cut through. Interpreting the Hua Yen metaphor,
modern American poet Gary Snyder suggests the empty
nature of self provides a link to the wild mind, or access
to the forces that determine the nature of life (Snyder,
1995). These forces act outside of human inuence, setting
the historical, ecological, and even cosmological context
for life.
Tien-tai monks in 8th century China believed in a
universal Buddha nature that dwelled in all forms of
life. Sentient (animal) and non-sentient (plant) beings and
even the earth itself were seen as capable of achieving
enlightenment. This concept of Buddha nature is closely
related to Chinese views of chi or moving energy that is
ever changing, always taking on new forms. Thus their
views of nature reect a dynamic sense of ow and inter-
connection between all beings, with Buddha nature arising
and transforming constantly.
Northern or Mahayana schools also came to emphasize
the path of the bodhisattva, one who vows to serve others
until all the worlds suffering is extinguished. Where ear-
lier Theravada schools emphasized achieving enlightenment
and leaving the world of suffering, the northern schools
inuenced by Confucian social codes, placed great value
on service to others. Tibetan schools reinforced this vow
by encouraging people to treat all sentient beings as possi-
bly having been their mother in a former life. Bodhisattva
acts of service are thus personally motivated, creating a
foundation for a kind of virtue ethic. This directly applies to
relations with plants and animals as well as people, encour-
aging environmental protection and kindness as important
to enlightenment.
As Zen Buddhism became established in Japan, monastic
temples were often built in mountainous or forested places.
The strong tradition of haiku and other classic verse forms
cultivated a sense of oneness with nature, from insects to
landforms. Dogen (12001253), founder of the Soto sect of
Zen, spoke of mountains and waters as sutras themselves,
the very evidence of the Dharma arising (Dogen, 1986). He
taught a method of direct knowing, experiencing the dharma
of nature with no separation. The goal of meditation was
non-dualistic understanding, complete communion or trans-
mission between two beings. Dogen showed how much of
human suffering described in the First Noble Truth gener-
ates from egoistic views based in dualistic understanding.
Enlightenment is then the breakthrough or liberation from
these views to experience the self and myriad beings as one
interpenetrating whole.
MODERN BUDDHIST ECOLOGICAL VIEWS
Buddhist environmental teachers and writers at the begin-
ning of the 21st century emphasize ve primary arenas
of practice and philosophy which support an environmen-
tal view: interdependence, compassion, mindfulness, non-
dualistic views, and detachment from self (Kaza and Kraft,
2000). At the heart of the Buddhas path is reective inquiry
into the nature of reality. Some people experience interde-
pendence in its more ecstatic forms of communion with
plants and animals or sacred places. But engaging inter-
dependence in todays environmental context also means
undertaking rigorous examination of conditioned beliefs
and thought patterns regarding the natural world. This
would include such challenges as objectication of plants
and animals, stereotyping of environmentalists, dualistic
188 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
thinking of enemyism, the impacts of materialism, and
environmental racism.
The law of interdependence is based on an understanding
of the nature of the many relations at play in a situa-
tion. This could mean, for example, assessing whos who
in an environmental conict from a context of historical
and geographical causes and conditions. Such investigation
includes learning about ecological relationships under siege
as well as observing the distribution of power across human
political relationships.
The practice of ahimsa or non-harming arises from
a true experience of compassion. Buddhist precepts or
ethical guidelines are based fundamentally on reducing the
suffering of others. The rst precept, not killing, has been
applied to environmental dilemmas related to food, land
use, pesticides, pollution, and cultural economic invasion.
The second precept, not stealing, suggests examining the
implications of global trade and corporate exploitation of
resources. Not lying brings up issues in advertising and
consumerism. Not engaging in abusive relations covers a
broad realm of cruelty and disrespect for non-human others.
Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh interprets the
precept prohibiting drugs and alcohol to include the toxic
addictions of television, video games, and junk magazines.
Non-harming extends to all beings, not merely to those who
are useful or irritating to humans. It has also been applied to
environmental oppression of plants, animals, rivers, rocks,
and mountains as well as to human oppression based on
race, class, or gender discrimination. This Green Buddhist
teaching is congruent with many schools of ecophilosophy,
which respect the intrinsic value and capacity for experience
of each being.
Mindfulness practice, a natural support to Buddhist envi-
ronmentalism, is being taught in a range of contexts. The
basic teachings of the Satipatthana Sutta or the mindful-
ness text, cultivate awareness of breath, body, feelings, and
mind. Walking and sitting meditation are used to generate
a sense of centered presence and alertness. Such mindful-
ness generates appreciation and respect toward the natural
world, with practices related to food and eating, time and
place, and personal wellbeing. Those practicing mindful-
ness are encouraged to slow down, consider their actions
carefully, and make every effort not to cause suffering to
others, including plants and animals.
Most political battles play out as confrontations between
apparent enemies: loggers verses spotted owl defenders,
housewives verses toxic polluters, bird lovers verses pes-
ticide producers. From a Buddhist perspective, this kind
of dualistic hatred destroys spiritual equanimity. Thus it is
much better to work from an inclusive perspective, offer-
ing kindness to all parties involved, even while setting
rm moral boundaries against harmful actions. A Bud-
dhist orientation to non-dualism can help to stabilize a
volatile situation and establish new grounds for negotiation.
Buddhist texts emphasize a strong relationship between
intention, action, and karmic (actions in a previous exis-
tence) effects of an action. If an environmental campaign
is undertaken out of spite, revenge, or rage, that emotional
tone will carry forth into all the ripening of the fruits of
that action (and likely cause a similar reaction in response).
However, if an action is based in understanding that the
other party is also part of Indras Jewel Net, then things
unfold with less antagonism.
Perhaps the most signicant teaching of the Dharma rel-
evant to Buddhist activism is the practice of detachment
from the ego-generating self. Thus, a Buddhist approach to
environmental activism would be non-heroic, i.e., not moti-
vated primarily by the need for ego identity or satisfaction.
Strong intention with less orientation to the self relieves
the activist from focusing so strongly on results. One does
what is necessary in the situation, not bound by the need
to reinforce ones ideas or to have it turn out a certain
way. Small b Buddhists have been able to act as bridge
builders in hostile or reactive situations by toning down
the need for personal recognition. Cautioning against the
self-serving ego, Buddhist teachers emphasize the power
of kalyana mitta, or spiritual friendship: acting together in
mutual support to help others practice the Dharma and take
care of this world.
The Buddhist path of liberation includes the practice of
physical, emotional, and mental awareness. Such practice
can increase appreciation for the natural world; it can also
reveal cultural assumptions about privilege, comfort, con-
sumption, and the abuse of nature. Scholar Alan Sponberg
suggests that a Buddhist environmental ethic is a virtue
ethic, based fundamentally on development of conscious-
ness and a sense of responsibility to act compassionately
for the benet of all forms of life. Through the practice
of Green virtue ethics, modern teachers encourage students
to be environmentally accountable for their actions, from
eating food, to using a car, to buying new clothes. Through
following the fundamental precepts, environmentally ori-
ented Buddhists can practice moderation and restraint, sim-
plifying needs and desires in order to reduce suffering of
others.
RECENT HISTORY OF BUDDHISM AND
ECOLOGY
In the last few decades, Buddhists around the world have
responded creatively to environmental problems, draw-
ing on principles of Buddhist philosophy and practice.
Forest monks in Thailand lead meditation walks around
polluted areas; Tibetans collaborate with western non-
governmental organizations (NGOs) to expose recent envi-
ronmental destruction in Tibet. American Buddhists have
worked on issues of consumerism, wilderness protection,
and animal rights. One of the earliest voices for Buddhist
BUDDHISM AND ECOLOGY 189
environmentalism was Gary Snyder, North American Zen
student and poet, who illuminated connections between
Buddhist training and ecological activism. In the 1950s
and 1960s, members of the Beat generation and the 1960s
counterculture explored these links further, saying that spir-
itual leadership was necessary to halt planet-wide ecological
destruction.
In the 1970s the environmental movement swelled, and
Buddhist centers became well established in the West. Some
retreat centers confronted ecological issues head on. The
Zen Mountain Monastery in New York faced off with the
Department of Environmental Conservation over a beaver
dam and forestry issues. The Green Gulch Zen Center in
Northern California worked out water use agreements with
its farming neighbors and with the Golden Gate National
Recreation Area. At a time when vegetarianism was not a
popular choice, most American Buddhist centers refrained
from meat eating, often with awareness of the associated
environmental problems. Several Buddhist centers made
some effort to grow their own organic food.
By the 1980s Buddhist leaders were explicitly addressing
the eco-crisis and incorporating ecological awareness in
their teaching. In his 1989 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance
speech, His Holiness the Dalai Lama proposed making
Tibet an international ecological reserve. Vietnamese peace
activist and Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh spoke of interbeing
using ecological examples. Zen teachers Robert Aitken
in Hawaii and Daido Loori in New York examined the
Buddhist precepts from an environmental perspective. The
US-based Buddhist Peace Fellowship, founded in 1978,
gave prominence to environmental concerns on its activist
agenda.
In Thailand, village priests took the initiative to perform
ritual ordination of signicant trees as a symbolic gesture
of solidarity with threatened forests. Other monks engaged
in efforts to question economic development and its envi-
ronmental impacts. Plastic bags, toxic lakes, and nuclear
reactors were targeted by Buddhist leaders as detrimental
inuences on peoples physical and spiritual health. Simi-
larly, in Tibet and Burma, Buddhist environmentalists drew
attention to oil pipelines, hunting of endangered species,
and threats to unique habitats.
In the Western world, the topic of Buddhism and ecol-
ogy was picked up by Buddhist publications, conferences,
and retreat centers. The Buddhist Peace Fellowship pro-
duced a substantial packet and poster for Earth Day 1990.
The rst popular anthology of Buddhism and ecology writ-
ings, Dharma Gaia, was published by Parallax Press that
same year, following the more scholarly collection, Nature
in Asian Traditions of Thought. World Wide Fund for Nature
brought out a series of books on ve world religions, includ-
ing Buddhism and Ecology. Buddhist magazines such as
Tricycle, Shambhala Sun, Inquiring Mind, Turning Wheel,
and Mountain Record devoted whole issues to the question
of environmental practice.
In 1990 Middlebury College in Vermont hosted a con-
ference on spirit and nature where the Dalai Lama stressed
his commitment to protection of the environment. At the
1993 Parliament of the Worlds Religions in Chicago, when
Buddhists gathered with Hindus, Muslims, pagans, Jews,
Jains, and Christians from all over the world, a top agenda
item was the role of religion in responding to the environ-
mental crisis. Parallel interest in the academic community
culminated in ten major conferences at Harvard University,
dening a new eld of religion and ecology. The rst of
these conferences, convened by Mary Evelyn Tucker and
John Grimm in 1996, focused on Buddhism and Ecology
(Tucker and Williams, 1997).
The academic community, however, did not address the
practice of Buddhist environmentalism. This was explored
by socially engaged Buddhist teachers such as the Dalai
Lama, Sulak Sivaraksa, John Daido Loori, Philip Kapleau,
Bernie Glassman, Christopher Titmuss and Thich Nhat
Hanh. Joanna Macy developed a transformative model of
experiential teaching designed to cultivate motivation, pres-
ence, and authenticity. Her methods were strongly based
in Buddhist meditation techniques and the Buddhist law
of codependent arising. Working with John Seed, Buddhist
Australian rainforest activist, she developed a ritual Council
of All Beings to engage peoples attention and imagination
on behalf of all beings (Seed et al., 1988). Thousands of
councils have now taken place in Australia, New Zealand,
the US, Germany, Russia, and other parts of the Western
world.
BUDDHIST ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISM
Examples of Green Buddhism on the front lines are still
relatively rare. They reect three major types of activism,
which characterize environmentalism today: (1) holding
actions of resistance; (2) structural analysis and alterna-
tives; and (3) cultural transformation. Holding actions aim
to stop or reduce destructive activity, buying time for more
effective long-term strategies. In Northern California, a
small group named the Ecosattvas has been protesting the
logging of old-growth redwood groves. For one demon-
stration, they created a large prayer ag covered with
human handprints to serve as a testimony of solidarity for
those participating in the resistance actions. Later, several
Ecosattvas made a pilgrimage into the heart of the Head-
waters Forest, carrying a Tibetan treasure vase with gifts
and prayers on behalf of the redwoods.
Moved by the suffering of animals in research cages,
factory farms, and export trade stores, two Zen students
in the San Francisco area formed a Buddhist animal rights
group. Drawing on principles of non-harming, they edu-
cated Buddhists about the plight of monkeys, beef cattle,
190 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
and endangered parrots. One of them has continued this
work in Europe, focusing on the cruelty of large-scale
pig farming. Addressing the dangers of nuclear waste, a
Berkeley-based study group protested the storage of nuclear
waste below ground. As an alternative they developed a
vision of nuclear guardianship for storage containers above
ground that was based in Buddhist spiritual practice. In a
parallel action, Zen student and artist Mayumi Oda helped
to organize Plutonium Free Future and the Rainbow Ser-
pents to stop shipments of deadly plutonium to Japan.
The second type of activism, structural analysis and
the creation of alternative visions, has also engaged mod-
ern Buddhists. In 1997 the Soka Gakkai afliated group,
the Boston Research Center for the 21st Century, held a
series of workshops addressing the peoples Earth Char-
ter, an internationally negotiated set of ethical guidelines
for humanEarth relations. The center published a booklet
of Buddhist views on the charters principles to stimulate
discussion before adoption by the United Nations (Mor-
gante, 1997) (see Ear th Char ter , Volume 5). Members of
the International Network of Engaged Buddhists and Bud-
dhist Peace Fellowship started a Think Sangha to undertake
structural analysis of global consumerism. Collaborating
between the US and Southeast Asia, they held conferences
in Thailand on Alternatives to Consumerism, pressing for
moderation and lifestyle simplication.
The third type of activism, transforming culture, is barely
underway and is sometimes met with resistance. Buddhist
centers in rural Northern California, the Green Gulch Zen
Center and Spirit Rock, and the Zen Mountain Monastery
in New York already demonstrate a serious commitment to
the environment through vegetarian food practices, land and
water stewardship efforts, and ceremonies which include
the natural world. In the Sierra foothills of California,
Gary Snyder has been a leader in establishing the Yuba
River Institute, a bioregional watershed organization work-
ing in cooperation with the Bureau of Land Management.
Members have undertaken survey work, controlled burns,
and creek restoration projects with the local community.
Planning ahead, Snyder estimates the level of commit-
ment necessary to reinhabit a place and build a community
that might eventually span generations. The Zen Mountain
Center in Southern California is beginning similar work,
carrying out resource management practices such as thin-
ning for re breaks, restoring degraded forest, and limiting
human access to preserve areas. Applying Buddhist princi-
ples in an urban setting, Zen teacher Bernard Glassman has
developed environmentally oriented small businesses which
employ local street people, selling products to socially
responsible companies such as Ben and Jerrys.
Several Buddhist centers have developed lecture series,
classes, and retreats based on environmental themes. The
Zen Mountain Monastery offers Mountains and Rivers
retreats based on the centers commitment to environmental
conservation. These feature backpacking, canoeing, nature
photography, and haiku (poems), as gateways to Bud-
dhist insight. The Ring of Bone Zendo offers backpacking
sesshins in the Sierra Mountains. The Green Gulch Zen
Center co-hosts the Voice of the Watershed, a series of
talks and walks across the landscape of the two valleys.
The Manzanita Village in Southern California includes deep
ecology practices, gardening, and nature observation as part
of their mindfulness retreats.
Most of these examples represent social change agents
working within Buddhist or non-Buddhist institutions to
promote environmental interests. In addition to these orga-
nizational initiatives, individual Buddhists are taking small
steps to align their actions with their Buddhist practice.
Many people, Buddhists included, are turning to vege-
tarianism and veganism (not eating animal products) as
more compassionate eating choices for animals and ecosys-
tems. Others are committed to eating only organically
grown food, as a way to support pesticide-free soil and
healthy farming. Sulak Sivaraksa in Thailand insists that the
Western standard of consumption is untenable if extended
throughout the world. Some Buddhists have joined support
groups for reducing credit card debt, giving up car depen-
dence, and creating work cooperatives. For many students,
environmental awareness and personal change ow natu-
rally from a Buddhist practice commitment.
CONCLUSION
How might Buddhism and ecology affect the larger envi-
ronmental movement and how might it inuence Western
Buddhism in general? Will Buddhist environmentalism turn
out to be more environmental than Buddhist? The answers
to these questions must be largely speculative at this time,
since Green Buddhism is just gaining a footing. It is pos-
sible that this edgling voice will be drowned out in the
brownlash against environmentalists, or in Western resis-
tance to engaged Buddhism. Environmental disasters of
survival proportions may overwhelm anyones capacity to
act effectively. The synergistic combination of millennial-
ism and economic collapse may atten Green Buddhism as
well as many other constructive initiatives.
But if one takes a more hopeful view, it seems possible
to imagine that Green Buddhism will grow and take hold
in the minds and hearts of young people who are creating
the future. Perhaps some day there will be Ecosattva chap-
ters across the world afliated with various practice centers.
Perhaps Buddhist eco-activists will be sought out for their
spiritual stability and compassion in the face of extremely
destructive forces. Buddhist centers might become models
of ecological sustainability, showing other religious institu-
tions ways to encourage ecological culture. More Buddhist
teachers may become informed about environmental issues
BUSINESS-AS-USUAL SCENARIOS 191
and raise these concerns in their teachings, calling for
moderation and restraint.
That being said, Buddhism is not the only or necessar-
ily the best path for dealing with the environmental crisis.
Moral leadership and community organizing from all reli-
gious traditions are needed to stop the downward spiral of
planetary ecological devastation. Committed practitioners
of non-harming can inspire others who are trying to resist
destructive practices. Ecologically articulate Buddhists can
advance inter-religious dialogue to meet the challenges of
global warming, over-consumption, and other systemic ills.
Drawing on a Buddhist perspective, academics, policy ana-
lysts, and poets can bring fresh insights to once intractable
problems.
What happens next lies in the hands of those who are
nurturing this wave of enthusiasm for Green Buddhism.
Religious leaders, teachers, and scholars as well as younger
generations, full of energy and passion for protecting the
home they love, will determine the shape of Buddhism and
ecology in the future. As the rate of environmental destruc-
tion continues to accelerate, many forms of dialogue and
activism are sorely needed. Buddhism and its environmen-
tally supportive teachings have much to offer. Like other
world religions, this ancient tradition is being called once
again to offer its wisdom and teachings in yet another
context.
REFERENCES
Beswick, E (1956) Jataka Tales: Birth Stories of the Buddha, John
Murray, London.
Cook, F (1989) The Jewel Net of Indra, in Nature in Asian
Traditions of Thought, eds B J Callicott and R T Ames, State
University of New York Press, Albany, NY, 213 229.
De Silva, L (2000) Early Buddhist Attitudes toward Nature,
in Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism, eds
S Kaza and K Kraft, Shambhala Publications, Boston, MA,
91 103.
Dogen, E (1986) Shobogenzo: Zen Essays by Dogen, translated
by T Cleary, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, HI.
Kaza, S and Kraft, K (2000) Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist
Environmentalism, Shambhala Publications, Boston, MA.
Morgante, A (1997) Buddhist Perspectives on the Earth Charter,
Boston Research Center for the 21st century, Cambridge, MA.
Ryan, P D (1998) Buddhism and the Natural World: Toward a
Meaningful Myth, Windhorse Publications, Birmingham.
Seed, J, Macy, J, Fleming, P, and Naess, A (1988) Thinking like
a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings, New Society
Publishers, Philadelphia, PA.
Snyder, G (1990) The Practice of the Wild, North Point Press, San
Francisco, CA.
Tucker, M E and Duncan, R W (1997) Buddhism and Ecology:
the Interconnectedness of Dharma and Deeds, Harvard Uni-
versity Press, Cambridge, MA.
FURTHER READING
Batchelor, M and Brown, K (1992) Buddhism and Ecology, Cas-
sell, London.
Callicott, J B and Ames, R T (1989) Nature in Asian Traditions
of Thought, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY.
Chapple, C K (1993) Nonviolence to Animals, Earth, and Self in
Asian Traditions, State University of New York Press, Albany,
NY.
Habito, R L F (1993) Healing Breath: Zen Spirituality for a
Wounded Earth, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY.
Hunt-Badiner, A (1990) Dharma Gaia, Parallax Press, Berkeley,
CA.
Kapleau, P (1982) To Cherish All Life: a Buddhist Case for
Becoming Vegetarian, Harper and Row, San Francisco, CA.
Macy, J (1991) Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Sys-
tems Theory: the Dharma of Natural Systems, State University
of New York Press, Albany, NY.
Macy, J and Molly, Y B (1998) Coming Back to Life: Practices
to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World, New Society Publishers,
Gabriola Island, British Columbia.
Nhat Hanh, T (1993) Love in Action, Parallax Press, Berkeley,
CA.
Queen, C (2000) Engaged Buddhism in the West, Wisdom Publi-
cations, Cambridge, MA.
Schmidthausen, L (1997) The Early Buddhist Tradition and Eco-
logical Ethics, J. Buddhist Ethics, 4, 1 42.
Sivaraksa, S (1992) Seeds of Peace, Parallax Press, Berkeley, CA.
Sivaraksa, S (1999) Socially-engaged Buddhism for the New Mil-
lennium, Suksit Siam, Bangkok.
Snyder, G (1995) A Place in Space, Counterpoint Press, Wash-
ington, DC.
Business-as-usual Scenarios
A business-as-usual scenario is also called a surprise-free
scenario. The expression was invented by Herman Kahn to
describe a baseline scenario from which alternative scenar-
ios can be created. It is based on current trend data assuming
that no unusual events change the direction of the trends.
Kahn also said that the biggest surprise would be if the
surprise-free scenario actually occurred. Contrary to popu-
lar belief, the business-as-usual scenario does not imply that
current conditions will remain unchanged; instead, these
conditions change in the forseeable future based on current
dynamics.
JEROME C GLENN USA
C
Capitalism
see Globalization in Historical Perspective
(Opening essay, Volume 5)
Carson, Rachel Louise
(19071964)
Rachel Louise Carson, scientist, author, and heroine to mil-
lions, launched the modern day environmental movement
with warnings that humanity was poisoning itself and the
biosphere. Her best selling book Silent Spring is her lasting
legacy.
Rachel Carson was born in 1907 in Pennsylvania, US.
From her landlocked childhood, her afnity for the oceans
began with graduate work in biology at Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore, MD. Financial constraints pre-
vented Rachel Carsons pursuit of a doctorate, and she
assumed a teaching position at the University of Maryland.
She continued her marine eld research, teaching in the
summer sessions at Johns Hopkins for 7 years. Her post-
graduate research included studying at Woods Hole, MA.
She became a government marine biologist and in the 1930s
began her popular writing career with a series of articles in
the Baltimore Sunday Sun. One expanded article was pub-
lished in The Atlantic Monthly. That article ultimately was
expanded into her rst book, Under the Sea Wind (Carson,
1941). The publication 10 years later of The Sea Around Us
(Carson, 1951) gave Rachel Carson commercial success and
fame. She resigned her job as a government marine biol-
ogist to more fully dedicate herself to writing about the
growing threats to the natural world she loved. Carson next
published in 1955, The Edge of the Sea (Carson, 1955), her
third book described as a poetic biography of the ocean.
It was quickly followed by The Sense of Wonder (Carson,
1956).
The next phase of her lifes work was to collect and
research the evidence of the damage caused by chemical
pesticides, unleashed as a new arsenal of synthetic toxic
substances at the end of the Second World War. Her work
on the subject was originally published in The New Yorker
magazine and then in book form as Silent Spring in 1962
(Carson, 1962).
Silent Spring caused a storm of controversy. It became
a best-seller, catalyzing environmental groups calling for
the banning of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) and
other chemicals linked in Carsons work with widespread
damage to wildlife and to human health. The chemical
industry lobby was well prepared for Silent Spring and
launched a merciless attack on Carson. Although she had
expected denials and debate over her claims, she was unpre-
pared for the highly personal nature of the charges. As her
obituary in The Baltimore Sun noted, industry spokesmen
tried to depict her as a neurotic, frustrated, hysterical per-
sonality of no scientic standing, a mere popularizer and
hobbyist. Unmarried and childless, the industry argued
that such a woman could not legitimately claim concern
for future generations. Rachel Carson defended her well
researched work with appearances before Congressional
committees. What the public did not know was that even
as Silent Spring was published, Carson was already ght-
ing breast cancer, the disease that would ultimately take
her life just 18 months after publication of her most criti-
cal work. Before her death, she fullled a lifelong dream,
to see the California Redwoods with Sierra Club exec-
utive director, David Brower (see Brower , David, Vol-
ume 5). David Brower attributed her success by telling
her publisher, Paul Brooks, she did her homework, she
minded her English and she cared. (Brooks, The House of
Life.)
Silent Spring remains a vitally important book 40 years
after its publication. Far from stale, the book accurately
anticipated many of the more subtle health risks of chem-
ical pesticides, including endocrine disruption and xeno-
oestrogenic effects. In Rachel Carsons own words, As
crude a weapon as the cave mans club, the chemical bar-
rage has been hurled against the fabric of life, Silent
Spring (Carson, 1962). Despite her efforts and the move-
ment she sparked, pesticide sales continue to soar and are
now valued at tens of billions of dollars annually around
the world.
CHIPKO MOVEMENT 193
REFERENCES
Carson, R L (1941) Under the Sea Wind, Oxford University Press,
New York.
Carson, R L (1951) The Sea Around Us, Oxford University Press,
New York.
Carson, R L (1955) The Edge of the Sea, Houghton Mifin,
Boston, MA.
Carson, R L (1956) The Sense of Wonder, Harper and Rowe,
New York.
Carson, R L (1962) Silent Spring, Houghton Mifin, Boston, MA.
FURTHER READING
Lear, L (1997) Rachel Carson: Witness to Nature, Holt, New York,
1634 (see also Zuk, M (1997) Science, 298: 1897 for a book
review).
ELIZABETH MAY Canada
CBA (Cost Benet Analysis)
CBA is a method for evaluating public sector investments.
It ideally considers all benets (gain in utility) and costs
(loss in utility) due to a project regardless of to whom
they might accrue. CBA is also ideally timeless, in that
all costs or benets are considered, irrespective of when
they may occur. The method simply weighs, in monetary
terms, benets versus costs. If benets are greater than
costs, then the project is potentially acceptable. There
are three main challenges associated with the approach:
measurement, valuation, and discounting.
The measurement of intangible costs and benets may
be difcult or inappropriate in some contexts. Aesthetic,
cultural, ecological, or social utility may not be easily
amenable to quantication. Beyond the problem of mea-
suring a utility, the assignment of a monetary valuation can
also be difcult. The use of shadow prices (imputed value
for an item that has no clear market value) or surrogate
markets (where a shadow price can be developed from a
marginal rate of substitution or transformation) are some-
times used to address valuation problems. An important
problem in valuation is the accuracy or representativeness
of the value assigned to a benet or cost, especially those
that are inherently intrinsic.
Discounting (see Discounting, Volume 5) is the process
of nding the value today of future benets and costs. A rate
of interest is applied to a sum (discounting is the reverse of
compounding) to calculate present or future value. Future
benets and costs are discounted because of the belief in
time preference (people prefer benets today rather than
in the future, thus a dollar today is worth more to an
individual than a dollar receivable in one year), and because
of the existence of a positive interest rate in the market.
Discounting has the effect of reducing the scale of benets
and costs that accrue far into the future. A social discount
rate is often used. It does not reect a market rate, but is
instead based on a social time preference rate or the social
opportunity cost of capital. Discounting is criticized on the
basis that it treats future generations unfairly. Depending on
the choice of a discount rate, CBA may favor immediate
consumption or diminish the value of environmental costs
incurred far into the future.
KEVIN S HANNA Canada
Changing HumanNature
Relationships (HNR) in the
Context of Global Environmental
Change
see The Changing HumanNature
Relationships (HNR) in the Context of Global
Environmental Change (Opening essay,
Volume 5)
Chipko Movement
The Chipko Movement is celebrated globally by the envi-
ronmental movement, heralded as a glorious example of
eco-feminism, forest preservation, and local control over
natural resources. The movement began spontaneously from
a single incident in the Himalayan region of Uttar Pradesh,
India in April 1973. Forested slopes around a village had
been sold to logging concessions. Village women, fearing a
loss of fresh water and destabilized slopes once the forests
were gone, literally hugged the trees to prevent contractors
from felling them. The word chipko means to embrace. Vil-
lage women, Dhoom Singh Negi and Bachni Devi, among
many others, spread the word with the Chipko slogan What
do the forests bear? soil, water and pure air.
The movement has its roots in Gandhian theory and many
prominent writers and philosophers became its leaders. The
movement was embraced as a spiritual one, tting the
context of ancient Sanskrit scriptures, as well as other
religions invocation of the unity and oneness of life,
by prominent philosopher and Chipko adherent, Dr Indu
194 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Tikekar. The movement spread through many parts of
the Himalayan region of Uttar Pradesh. In 1980, Indias
Prime Minister, the late Indira Gandhi, responded to public
appeals with a 15-year moratorium on logging in the
Himalayan forests of Uttar Pradesh.
The movement also included prominent men as leaders.
Sunderlal Bahuguna, a Gandhian activist, whose appeal to
Mrs Gandhi had proved successful, subsequently embarked
on a two year, 5000 km trek by foot thorough the Himalayan
regions, spreading the Chipko message beyond Uttar Pra-
desh. Bahuguna expressed his message as Ecology is
permanent economy .
The expanded movement succeeded in stopping clear-
cut logging in the Western Ghats and the Vindhyas. The
Chipko movement continues to lobby for a new natural
resources policy, more sensitive to local peoples needs and
ecosystem sustainability.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada
Christianity and the
Environment
David G Hallman
World Council of Churches, Toronto, Canada
Western Christianity is a relative latecomer in recognizing
and expressing concern about contemporary human assaults
on ecosystems. The path of awakening for Christians has
included not only growing awareness of the seriousness
of the ecological crises but also the role that their own
tradition has played in the relationship between human
societies and their environments.
Some of the major tenets of western Christian thought and
practice contributed to a perception of an exalted place of
the human within the broader natural world which provided
some of the legitimacy for scienti c, economic and techno-
logical exploitation of nature. But throughout the history of
Christianity, there are also inspiring examples of individu-
als and schools of thought which championed a concern for
the well-being of all creatures.
In recent times, Christians have become conscious of that
checkered history and have become convinced that caring
for creation needs to be a fundamental part of how they
live out their faith in the world. In addition to the work
of theologians reconceptualizing Christianity to respond to
the ecological challenge, individual Christians, community
parishes, and national and international ecumenical institu-
tions have become active in addressing many of the threats
to creation. However, the degree of Christian engagement in
environmental concerns should not be exaggerated. It still
represents a minority concern within the broader framework
of theological, spiritual and social justice preoccupations.
Several communities of experience, often from the mar-
gins of the Christian mainstream, have had a particularly
important impact on theological understandings of the rela-
tionship of humans to the broader natural world. In par-
ticular, eco-feminist theologians, indigenous peoples, and
activists and ethicists from developing nations of the Eco-
nomic South have challenged the dominant approaches and
have contributed insights that have deepened and, in some
cases, redirected the focus of Christian involvement in envi-
ronmental issues (see Note on Terminology, at the end of
this article).
Out of the plethora of environmental challenges facing the
world, a number have become priorities for the engagement
of the wider Christian ecumenical community and will likely
grow as major challenges for the future. These include
climate change, the exploitation of both humans and non-
humans by the forces of the global economy and trade, and
the spiritual values that can underpin a more sustainable
relationship between human societies and the rest of the
natural world.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Christianity played a role in the development of the western
industrialized economic model that is at the root of many of
our current ecological problems. Hallman (1992) gives an
analysis of the interconnections among science, religion and
economics in the genesis of todays ecological crises and
an identication of new models from the disciplines for liv-
ing more sustainably. Through various sources, Christianity
provided support for the scientic and industrial revolu-
tions. From early in the Middle Ages, monasteries preserved
and encouraged scholarship in classical Greek and Roman
culture. Without this data base, modern intellectual develop-
ment and scientic progress would have been immeasurably
slowed. When Protestantism emerged, it emphasized the
distinction between the Creator and the creature. In effect,
the reformers desacralized the natural world and focused
attention on humanitys standing and condition before God.
This contributed to the study and manipulation of nature
by the budding sciences. Francis Bacon contended that all
Creation had meaning only in relation to humanity.
Man, if we look to nal causes, may be regarded as the center
of the world insomuch that if man were taken away from the
world, the rest would seem to be all astray, without aim or
purpose.
(Thomas, 1983)
Ian Barbour notes that: The desacralization of nature
encouraged scientic study, though it also (along with other
CHRISTIANITY AND THE ENVIRONMENT 195
economic and cultural forces) contributed to subsequent
environmental destruction and the exploitation of nature
(Barbour, 1990).
The industrial revolutions that followed the scientic
revolution also beneted from religious attitudes of the day.
Early Protestants believed in industrious, disciplined work
as they shifted the religious focus from otherworldly to
innerworldly asceticism. The blessing of economic success
could be seen as an outer sign of inner faith and assurance of
salvation. The virtues of frugality and simplicity, coupled
with hard work and saving, converged with the needs of
early capitalism. People worked hard and saved, but didnt
spend on material indulgence: that was just the ethic needed
to establish a capital base.
There was a sense of religious fervor among those
involved in the early scientic and economic pursuits: God
was beckoning humanity to use all of its intelligence to
usher in a new day of enlightenment and prosperity. The
natural world was seen as yielding its long-held secrets to
the rigor of scientic experimentation. Economic theories
were formulated to describe the unseen laws that governed
supply and demand. There was a genuine conviction among
the theologians, scientists and economists that Gods will
was being realized in their efforts.
Theological attitudes which viewed the natural world
primarily as a God-given resource whose utility related
to exploitation for human purposes continued as a domi-
nant perspective until relatively recently. A document from
the 1961 Assembly of the World Council of Churches
(WCC) states that the Christian should welcome scientic
discoveries as new steps in mans domination of nature
(Granberg-Michaelson, 1994).
The pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes of the Second
Vatican Council expressed a general expectation that:
(human beings), created in Gods image, received a mandate
to subject (to themselves) the earth and all that it contains
thus, by the subjugation of all things to (humanity), the name
of God would be wonderful in all the earth.
Though these broad streams of religious intellectual
thought have contributed over the past several hundred
years to a perception of the natural world as exploitable
without consequence, there have been Christian spiritual
voices offering a different perspective. Mystics such as
Hildegaard of Bingen and St. Francis of Assisi articulated
a reverence and valuing of all life for its own sake that
contrasts with the more utilitarian approach of later Chris-
tianity. There have also been communities of religiously
motivated persons over the centuries such as monastic
orders, which practiced a conservation ethic in relation to
nature around them. These earlier religious voices and prac-
tices concerned about the wellbeing of all creation have
found new relevance during the past several decades as
Western Christians have come to see the seriousness of the
ecological problems facing the Earth.
THEOLOGICAL CHALLENGES
An American historian, Lynn White Jr, was one voice that
did much to stimulate public awareness of the critique
of Christianity in relation to environmental problems. In
a famous 1967 article in the journal Science entitled The
Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis, White maintained
that Judeo-Christian scriptures, theology and traditions must
accept some responsibility for societal attitudes that allowed
for exploitation of the environment (White, 1967).
The environmental criticisms leveled at Christianity by
White and others shook theologians and lay Christians. For-
tunately the response was not in the main defensiveness but
rather the launching of an extended period of reection,
reanalysis of scripture and theology, and reconceptualiza-
tion of models for the interrelationship of God as creator,
the human species, and the rest of creation.
There are three main areas that have been identied
in Christian theology and scripture as being particularly
problematic. The most frequently cited is the concept of
God giving humans authority over all creation:
Let us make the human in our image, after our likeness; and
let them have dominion over the sh of the seas, and over the
birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and
over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.
(Genesis 1:26)
Theologians and biblical scholars have helped to place
this seeming blanket mandate for domination into a context
which highlights a range of conditionalities tied to this
authority. In Genesis, the story of creation precedes the
arrival of evil or the fall. Thus, the giving by God of this
authority over other creatures occurred at a point where
humans were without sin and hence would be expected to
exercise that dominion in ways pleasing to God who created
and loves the world. Secondly, there is another creation
story in Genesis 2, which uses very different imagery for
the human relationship to the rest of nature. The human
is to till and keep the garden. This dominion theology
perspective challenges an unrestricted exploitive authority
that could be read into the rst creation story.
Canadian theologian, Douglas John Hall, was an early
exponent of stewardship theology, which sought to trans-
form Christian approaches away from the unfettered domin-
ion model toward one of responsible caring for the Earth.
Hall (1982) argues that stewardship means that humans are
given responsibility to care for the world as Gods stew-
ards. That is, humans do not own the Earth but are Gods
surrogate caretakers: The Earth is the Lords and the fulness
therof; the world and all that dwell therein (Psalm 21:1). To
care for the Earth as God would care for it points to a much
more responsible attitude since we believe that God loves
the Earth. Further, as stewards, humans will be held respon-
sible by the Master, for the care which they have exercised,
or failed to exercise, on that which belongs to the Master.
196 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
A second theme in Christian theology which has been
seen as posing problems for our relationship to the envi-
ronment is the dichotomy which is identi ed between the
spiritual and the physical. In the New Testament Epistles,
we hear a number of references that would seem to counsel
rejection of this physical world including the following:
Do not love the world or the things of this world. If anyone
loves the world, love for the Father is not in him.
(I John 2:15)
Do you not know that friendship with this world is enmity with
God? Therefore, whoever wished to be a friend of the world,
makes himself an enemy of God.
(James 4:4)
However, biblical scholarship that gained added rele-
vance as environmental awareness grew, has helped to place
these letters to communities of early Christians into histor-
ical context. At a time when the general expectation was
that the end of the world was at hand and that Christ would
be returning soon, the writers were encouraging their read-
ers not to place their faith in material wealth. While there
has been a persistent thread over the centuries stressing the
religious af rmation of creation s goodness, there have also
been interpretations of these passages strongly emphasizing
otherworldliness and rejection of this world. Environmen-
talists have worried that such theology could undermine a
social attitude of concern for the wellbeing of the Earth.
A third concept that has been identi ed in the critique of
Christian theology is the emphasis on personal moral will
as the ultimate de ning characteristic of the human. While
there are philosophical traditions that have also focused
on moral agency, Christian theology has given it a par-
ticular priority. Though an emphasis on moral will does
not of necessity lead to a negation of the value of the
natural world, some of its implications seem to point in
that direction. Since only humans exercise moral choice
and judgement via rational processes, it was believed that
higher value was attributed to the human than to the crea-
tures lacking these capacities. The elevation of the rational
capacities also implied the denigration of other attributes
such as emotions, intuition, and sense perception itself.
NEW THEOLOGICAL DIRECTIONS
The critiques of Christianity by Lynn White Jr and others
helped to unleash a robust period of theological recon-
ceptualization regarding the relationship of humans to the
rest of creation. In addition to these challenges from out-
side the religious community, there were also those within
the faith who were shaking traditional approaches. The
creation-centered work of Thomas Berry and Matthew Fox
from within the Roman Catholic tradition provided a radi-
cal reorientation to understandings of the interrelationship
of God, humanity and the rest of creation. Their writings
would prove quite unsettling to the church hierarchy. Stew-
ardship theology referred to above was another of the initial
responses and did much to af rm that biblically sound and
intellectually rigorous alternate understandings to dominion
theology were possible.
Process theology has been a further approach that has
widely in uenced the evolving Christian thinking about
the ecological crisis. Based on the work of philosopher
Alfred North Whitehead, process theologians such as Cobb
and Grif n (1977) developed a systematic application of
Whitehead s ideas with the emphasis on God s loving inter-
relatedness with creation. Cobb in particular has played
a signi cant role through his writings in articulating the
ecological implications of process theology (Cobb, 1972;
Cobb and Birch, 1981; Cobb and Daly, 1989). One of
his principal arguments has been the inherent intercon-
nection between God, humanity and the natural world.
for process theology, as an ecological theology, human
beings are part of nature Humanity is seen within an
interconnected nature (Cobb, 1972) .
German theologian Jurgen Moltmann comes to similar
conclusions within the framework of his own theological
analysis. In a book based on his Gifford Lecture series,
Moltmann emphasizes the relationship of God to all cre-
ation as the starting point.
An ecological doctrine of creation implies a new kind of
thinking about God. The center of this thinking is no longer
the distinction between God and the world. The center is
the recognition of the presence of God in the world and the
presence of the world in God.
(Moltmann, 1985)
Through biblical analysis and systematic theological
argumentation, Moltmann describes various manifestations
and implications of the presence of the Spirit of God within
creation. A consistent theme is the centrality of relationship
as the most fundamental de ning characteristic of exis-
tence. Theological understandings such as Moltmann s and
those of process theology echo and in some ways enhance
scienti c discoveries and reconceptualizations of the 20th
century which have also moved in the direction of an
emphasis on the primacy of relationships within matter and
the natural world.
Eco-feminist theologians have articulated perceptive ana-
lytic critiques of traditional Christian theology in terms
of its destructive contribution to the ecological crisis and
have posited new models for understanding the relation-
ship between humanity and the rest of creation. While
recognizing and recovering much rich insight in the Bib-
lical scriptures that can help ground a new environmental
ethic, eco-feminist theologians are nonetheless more pre-
pared than some other theologians to acknowledge the
ambiguity of the Bible. This stems in part from the broader
feminist analysis that recognizes the cultural conditioning
CHRISTIANITY AND THE ENVIRONMENT 197
of many of the scriptural writers working as they were in
very patriarchal societies.
Eco-feminist approaches to reection on ecological theol-
ogy and ethics draw on a broad range of human capacities.
Their methodology and the content of their analysis are
interconnected in the recognition that our ecological prob-
lems are due in part to a hierarchical valuing of creatures
and the attributes associated with them. Men have been
seen as the most valued and the traditional male-oriented
emphasis on rationality, control and exploitation has domi-
nated both in human relationships and in terms of the Earth.
Eco-feminists insist that intuition and emotion are indis-
pensable as elements in the repertoire of human response if
we are to make signicant progress in solving our environ-
mental problems. They argue that a reorientation toward the
Earth will require a foundation of love and caring for life in
its fullness not just rationalistic analyses and technological
xes (see Ecofeminism, Volume 5).
There are creative options proposed by eco-feminist
theologians for new theological approaches to our rela-
tionship with creation. The web of life is one image that
eco-feminists use to emphasize the interrelatedness and
interdependence of the various elements of creation.
Sallie McFague has suggested reimaging God not only
as father but also as mother (the nurturer of all life), as
lover (the most intimate of relationships), and as friend (a
constant and supportive presence) (McFague, 1993). Such
models of God provide a deeper appreciation of the role
of God as creator and sustainer of life and can contribute
to values that would be more environmentally sensitive:
e.g., as protection of life, joy and love in our relating to
the Earth, and solidarity with the oppressed members of
creation.
Chung Hyun Kyung (1994) has done much to popu-
larize eastern religious and cultural appreciations for the
unity of all life and the sacredness of creation. Bringing
such insights into dialogue with more traditional Chris-
tian approaches has provoked considerable controversy. It
is nonetheless an essential contribution if Western Chris-
tianity is to honestly acknowledge its cultural role in the
economic development model which has come to dominate
the global economy and to seek partnership with other faith
traditions in building a value base for an Earth ethic.
Equally threatening to some Christians have been the
insights being offered by indigenous peoples around the
world. Struggling back after several centuries of cultural
oppression by colonizing powers, many indigenous peo-
ples are recapturing their traditions that include important
understandings of ways in which to relate sustainably to
the natural world around them. Western societies seeking to
reconceptualise their relationship to the Earth could benet
from the rich contributions of indigenous creation stories,
the understanding of nature as being members of ones
family, rituals used to relate to the various seasons and
creatures in the natural world, and concepts of community
organization for long-term sustainability (Rajotte, 1998).
Particularly helpful have been the writings of people of
indigenous heritage who have connected native spiritual-
ity and Christian theology such as the American Indian
George Tinker, Stan MacKay (a Canadian of Cree origin)
and Rob Cooper (a Maori from Aotearoa, New Zealand)
(Tinker et al., 1994).
There has been a risk in the rejuvenation of native spir-
itual ecological insights that Christians and others might
appropriate those concepts and rituals into their own prac-
tices in a romanticized manner without recognizing the
historical context out of which those indigenous understand-
ings emerged. In part to respond to this risk, indigenous
peoples have raised tough political and economic issues
related to the ongoing oppression of their cultures and
societies in addition to sharing elements of their native
spirituality. Christian communities have been challenged
to acknowledge and repent of their role over the past
centuries as agents of cultural genocide. Some churches
and ecumenical organizations have acted in solidarity with
indigenous peoples in their struggles in local, national and
international forums.
Theologians, ethicists and activists involved in environ-
ment and development issues in countries of the economic
South have been another source of critical social, economic
and political critique of the western development model
and its links to Christian traditional understandings of the
relationship of humans to the rest of creation.
Theological contributions from the economic south on
issues of ecotheology have been relatively recent. Theolo-
gians and ethicists from these countries have understand-
ably been more preoccupied with the economic struggles of
their countries which have suffered 500 years of exploita-
tion by imperialistic nations, colonializing powers and now
global nancial institutions. Countries in Latin America
produced a vibrant movement of liberation theology that
played a pivotal role in articulating the ethical basis for
a systemic social, economic and political critique of the
western economic model and its historical exploitation of
the south. However, many of the liberation theologians were
as anthropocentric and utilitarian in their orientation toward
the non-human elements of the natural world as were the
tradition Christian theologians of the North.
However, as the depth of the ecological crises became
more apparent as well as their interlinkages with the west-
ern economic development model, theologians and ethicists
from countries of the Economic South began to make
important connections between the historical struggles of
their countries and environmental problems. Moreover, jus-
tice for the poor had always been the primary focus of
liberation theologians and it was becoming clear that the
poor were also the most vulnerable to the health and social
effects of environmental problems.
198 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Leonardo Boff from Brazil is among the more prolic
and insightful theologians who has sought to develop an
integrated approach to socio-economic issues and environ-
mental concerns. While recognizing the contributions of
various critical responses to the prevalent social model such
as liberation movements, pacist and non-violence groups,
and ecological movements, Boff argues for the need for a
more integrated approach.
It is important today to articulate these different critiques of the
dominant system. However, we must urgently seek to develop
a new paradigm for society that does not repeat the mistakes
of the old but integrates all human beings in a more humane
way and establishes more benevolent relationships with the
environment.
(Boff, 1994, 1997)
The insights and analyses of theologians, ethicists and
activists from countries of the Economic South have had a
signicant impact on the work on environment and develop-
ment issues by churches and ecumenical organizations such
as the WCC (see WCC (Wor ld Council of Churches),
Volume 5). Theologian Jesse Mugambi from Kenya has
enriched ecumenical understandings of the social, economic
and environmental impacts of colonialization in Africa and
has articulated nuanced analyses of so called globaliza-
tion and the homogenization processes where a few power
centers dictate the rules for the rest of the world. Aruna
Gnanadason from India who is working currently as a
staff member of the WCC has provided leadership in the
integration of gender justice with ecology and economic
development.
It is impossible to note all of the inuential theologians
and ethicists who are contributing today to deepening Chris-
tian reection on the implications of the ecological crisis
and what the faith has to offer as constructive responses.
Mary Evelyn Tucker, John Grim, Dieter Hessel and Rose-
mary Ruether, all of whom have done writing in their own
right, have made a very important contribution through the
organizing of the April 1998 Conference on Christianity
and Ecology on behalf of the Harvard University Center for
the Study of World Religions. The resulting book includes
contemporary reections by many of the most important
theologians and ethicists concerned today about the eco-
logical crisis.
Larry Rasmussen and Dieter Hessel have produced a
book that looks at implications for the church of engage-
ment in ecological issues after bringing together a wide
range of theologians, ethicists, and practitioners for a 1998
Conference on Ecumenical Earth, at Union Seminary in
New York. Rasmussen (1996) has also written an ambitious
integrative book Earth Community, Earth Ethics which
combines analyses of the interrelated crises of environ-
mental degradation and global economic injustice with the
articulation of new visions that integrate biblical reection,
theological rigor, and inspiring spirituality.
I would also add some of my own writing to this
list of attempts to take the richness of the theological
and ethical debates and make it more popularly avail-
able to a wider Christian audience, for instance, A Place
in Creation Ecological Visions in Science, Religion and
Economics (Hallman, 1992) and Ecotheology Voices from
South and North (Hallman, 1994).
CHURCH ENVIRONMENTAL RESPONSES AT
LOCAL, NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL
LEVELS
To write about Christianity and the environment is not
just to discuss the theological and ethical reections that
have propelled the faith into serious confrontation with
the ecological crisis. That rejuvenated faith, having had its
eyes opened to the seriousness of the problems, its own
historical complicity, and most importantly, new models of
engaging theology and spirituality in relevant responses, is
being expressed in action.
Church denominations in many parts of the world have
prepared educational and action resources to assist their
members learn more about environmental problems within
an ethical and spiritual context and to offer opportunities
for activities to make a constructive difference:
US churches circulated information packets and lob-
bying suggestions to congregations at Earth Day to
encourage them to press for effective endangered
species legislation.
German churches did a study of energy use in churches
as a prelude to a campaign to become more energy
efcient.
Philippine churches ran educational programs on for-
estry and collaborated with other social groups in a
campaign for a moratorium on wide scale logging.
Tanzanian environmental workshops were held for
church and community leaders and included work on
specic projects such as dam building to preserve badly
needed water for irrigation.
Dutch churches encouraged members to reduce their
carbon dioxide emissions from transportation 3% per
year.
Zimbabwean churches have integrated tree planting
into their liturgies.
Japanese Christians collaborated with Buddhists, Shin-
tos and members of New Religions to host an interfaith
gathering and march during the 1997 session of the UN
negotiations on climate change in Kyoto.
Argentinean Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, and Epis-
copal churches worked together to host an ecumenical
service during the 1998 session of the UN negotiations
on climate change in Buenos Aires.
Swedish churches bought parcels of forestland to
ensure that they are harvested in a sustainable manner.
CHRISTIANITY AND THE ENVIRONMENT 199
Canadian churches advocated against plans for the
premature and potentially dangerous disposal of high
level nuclear wastes.
The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople has spon-
sored environmental education programs for youth and
a special seminar focused on environmental problems
around the Black Sea.
The list could include many more examples of efforts
by churches at national and local levels to translate their
faith into practice in caring for the well being of creation.
Persons involved in organizing such efforts will be the rst
to acknowledge that, though progress is being made, it
remains an ongoing struggle to convince the churches as
institutions and the individual members of the importance
of engagement in environmental issues.
At the international level, several ecumenical organi-
zations, especially the WCC, have played a role in both
fostering theological and ethical reection on ecological
concerns as well as facilitating the active engagement of
their member churches in specic issues. An important con-
sultation was organized by the WCC in 1974 in Bucharest
and brought together scientists, economists and theologians
to discuss implications of the recently published study of the
Club of Rome Limits to Growth. One of the important con-
tributions of this event was the articulation of the concept
of sustainability, the idea that the worlds future requires a
vision of development that can be sustained for the long-
term, both economically and environmentally. During the
1970s, the WCC had a program on the just, participatory
and sustainable society (JPSS), which included the Energy
for My Neighbor project which was intended to sensitize
churches about energy problems faced by developing coun-
tries and to activate practical steps to ameliorate the energy
situation of those in need, and the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT) Conference in 1979 on Faith, Sci-
ence and Technology, which became known primarily for
its controversial position on nuclear power.
In 1983, the WCC Assembly in Vancouver adopted a
process-focused action plan on justice, peace and integrity
of creation (JPIC) through which churches were encour-
aged to work together on these interrelated themes. Many
churches became increasingly attentive to environmental
concerns during this period, adopting policy statements
and initiating education and advocacy activities on specic
issues. The JPIC process culminated in a World Convoca-
tion on Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation in Seoul,
Korea in 1990, at which a series of ten theological afrma-
tions and specic covenants for action were approved. They
provide a description of the interrelatedness of economic
inequity, militarism, ecological destruction, and racial injus-
tice and the theological, ethical and spiritual basis for
afrming and sustaining life in its fullness.
There have also been a number of occasions of interaction
between Christian theologians and leaders of other living
faiths, focused on rediscovering the important contributions
from within the traditions and sacred writings of each of
the faith systems, which could help move human societies
toward greater respect for the natural world. One of these
events was an interfaith consultation hosted by the WCC in
August 1991 to develop proposals for inclusion in an Earth
Charter.
The 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment
and Development in Rio de Janeiro provided an opportunity
for witnessing to the spiritual dimensions of the ecological
crisis. Many faiths were represented at the Rio Earth Sum-
mit and held joint vigils, ceremonies and workshops. The
WCC sponsored a major ecumenical gathering bringing to
Rio 150 representatives of churches from over 100 countries
for two weeks of prayer, worship, study and involve-
ment in the Earth Summit. Particularly important were the
connections made with many other non-governmental orga-
nizations representing environmental groups, development
bodies, and womens networks.
During the 1990s, the WCC work on environment-related
issues focused primarily on global climate change, mon-
itoring the work of the UN Commission on Sustainable
Development, and beginning a more signicant engagement
in ethical issues raised by the growth in the biotechnology
industry.
CHALLENGES FOR THE FUTURE
Climate change has become one of the major foci for
international ecumenical activity on ecological issues and
is likely to continue to be so as the threat increases.
Not only does climate change represent a threat to the
well-being of Gods Earth but it is also a profoundly
ethical issue since it is being precipitated largely by the
rich industrialized countries while the consequences will
be suffered disproportionately by the poorer developing
countries and by future generations.
The ecumenical community through the WCC has par-
ticipated in the UN negotiations on climate change treaties
since 1989. In 19961997, the WCC sponsored an interna-
tional petition campaign to build greater public pressure on
the governments of industrialized countries to take action
to reduce their emissions as a lead up to the Kyoto Sum-
mit in December 1997. The WCC made a major statement
on climate change as an issue of justice at the Kyoto
Summit (World Council of Churches, 1997). Churches
in many countries have organized educational and advo-
cacy activities and have sponsored ethical reections on
climate change within the context of models for sustain-
able societies. These programs have been accompanied
with resources to assist individual members take practi-
cal steps in their own homes, lives and communities to
reduce energy use and contribute to limiting the emission
greenhouse gases.
200 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
A second major challenge which will likely increase in
importance for the Christian community in the future is
the interconnection of the environment and the global eco-
nomic system. These are well illustrated in the climate
change issue but they also go beyond and encompass global
trade, the role of multinational corporations and interna-
tional nancial institutions, and the scandalous economic
inequities between peoples of the world. The ecumeni-
cal community has a long history in advocacy and action
for economic justice and a more recent history with envi-
ronmental issues. These two become interconnected when
dealing with the implications of increasing economic glob-
alization. Addressing globalization will pose a challenge to
the churches in terms of their capacity for analysis of com-
plex systems, resources to be engaged from local to global
levels and the strength to persevere despite intense pres-
sure that can be mounted by the vested power structures
being critiqued.
A third challenge for the future is the reconceptualizing
of the churches important environmental activity in a
spirituality that can both inspire the work and sustain
those involved. Throughout western culture generally, there
is a widely perceived thirst for spiritual nourishment to
counter the bareness of contemporary consumerism and
materialism. Institutional religion is aware that many people
nd its forms of worship and engagement do not adequately
satisfy their spiritual needs. Thus, both Christians active in
social and environmental issues within churches and non-
Christians outside the church, feel the need for greater
spiritual nourishment. Concern for the well being of the
Earth is one area where a nurturing of spiritual values can
be linked intrinsically with a justice agenda.
NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY
Terminology is very complex when trying to describe dif-
ferent regions of the world today. In United Nations (UN)
parlance, reference is made to developed and develop-
ing countries to distinguish between the richer primarily
northern and western industrialized nations and the poorer
primarily southern nations. However, many people object
to that vocabulary because it implies a higher level of
technological and social sophistication for the developed
countries. Third World was another term that was current
for some time but that has also fallen out of favor because
again it suggests an ordering of value or worth in compar-
ison with the First World. A distinction between the North
and the South has become more utilized because most of
the poorer nations are south of the equator and south does
not carry any particular value connotation. Not all of the
poorer countries are in the geographic south and there are
some industrialized nations in that region. Hence, for my
purposes in this paper and in my other recent writings, I
have come to use the phrase countries of the Economic
South to denote the poorer nations. While I recognize the
clumsiness of the phrase and the increasing difculties in
making generalizations between the North and the South in
our increasingly complex world, this is the designation that
I nd most satisfactory to date.
REFERENCES
Barbour, I (1990) Religion in an Age of Science, Harper & Row,
San Francisco, CA.
Boff, L (1994) Social Ecology: Poverty and Misery, in Ecothe-
ology Voices from South and North, ed D G Hallman, WCC
Books, Geneva, and Orbis Press, New York.
Boff, L (1997) Cry of the Poor, Cry of the Land, Maryknoll, Orbis
Press, New York, 114.
Cobb, Jr, J (1972) Is it too Late? A Theology of Ecology, Bruce
Publications, Beverley Hills, CA.
Cobb, Jr, J and Birch, C (1981) Liberation of Life, Cambridge
University Press, New York.
Cobb, Jr, J and Daly, H (1989) For the Common Good: Redi-
recting Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a
Sustainable Future, Beacon Press, Boston, MA.
Cobb, Jr, J and Grifn, D (1977) Process Theology: An Introduc-
tory Exposition, Christian Journals, Belfast.
Granberg-Michaelson, W (1994) Creation in Ecumenical The-
ology, in Ecotheology Voices from South and North, ed
D G Hallman, WCC Books, Geneva, and Orbis Press, New
York.
Hall, D J (1982) The Steward: A Biblical Symbol Come of Age,
Friendship Press, New York.
Hall, D J (1986) Imaging God: Dominion as Stewardship, Erd-
mans/Friendship Press, Grand Rapids, MI.
Hallman, D G (1992) A Place in Creation Ecological Visions in
Science, Religion and Economics, United Church Publishing
House, Toronto.
Hallman, D G (1994) Ecotheology Voices fromSouth and North,
WCC Books, Geneva, and Orbis Press, New York.
Kyung, C H (1994) Ecology, Feminism and African and Asian
Spirituality, in Ecotheology Voices from South and North, ed
D G Hallman, WCC Books, Geneva, and Orbis Press, New
York.
McFague, S (1987) Models of God: Theology for an Ecological,
Nuclear Age, Fotress Press, Philadelphia, PA.
McFague, S (1993) The Body of God: an Ecological Theology,
Fortress Press, Minneapolis, MN.
Moltmann, J (1985) God in Creation: an Ecological Doctrine of
Creation, SCM Press, London.
Rajotte, F, ed (1998) First Nations, Faith and Ecology, United
Church Publishing House, Toronto and Cassell, London.
Rasmussen, L (1996) Earth Community, Earth Ethics, Orbis
Books, Maryknoll, NY.
Thomas, K (1983) Man and the Natural World: Changing Atti-
tudes in England 15001800, Allen Lane, London.
Tinker, G, MacKay, S, and Cooper, R (1994) Ecotheology
Voices from South and North, ed D G Hallman, WCC Books,
Geneva, and Orbis Press, New York.
White, Jr, L (1967) The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis,
Science, 155, 12031207.
CIRCULATING FRESHWATER 201
World Council of Churches (WCC) Statement to the High Level
Segment of the Third Session of the Conference of the Parties
(COP3) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
(1997) Kyoto, Japan, available from the author (c/o The United
Church of Canada, 3250 Bloor St. W. Toronto, M8X 2Y4, fax
1-416-232-6005 e-mail: dhallman@uccan.org).
Circulating Freshwater:
Crucial Link between
Climate, Land, Ecosystems,
and Humanity
Malin Falkenmark
Natural Science Research Council and Stockholm
International Water Institute (SIWI), Stockholm, Sweden
A simplied holistic view is presented of humanity s present
environmental predicament as seen from a freshwater per-
spective. Like the doctor who bases much of his diagnosis
of a patient on his blood system, its circulation and qual-
ity characteristics, the author bases her diagnosis of the
world ecosystem of which Man is a part on the blood-
stream of the biosphere, i.e., the water cycle. The aim is to
identify the most crucial actions in future-oriented decision-
making. In contrast to a widespread but false belief that
water is very simple and can be handled within the water
sector, many parallel functions and manifold appearances
have to be taken into account when addressing the inter-
action between human society and the physical landscape
hosting its life-support system. Fundamental regional differ-
ences in terms of both vapor ow of green water involved
in biomass production, and liquid ow of blue water avail-
able for societal use in aquifers and rivers are highlighted.
It is shown that the developing world at present expe-
riences a threefold escalation: of water stress, of water
dispute proneness, and of water pollution load. Analysis
suggests that water accessibility constraints will increas-
ingly disturb global food security. Escalating food needs
make it particularly important to nd ways of reconcil-
ing upstream/downstream con icts of interest especially
as intensied upstream biomass production (agriculture,
forestry) easily leads to downstream river depletion. Such
depletion will generate increasingly severe problems for
water-dependent societal activities and aquatic ecological
services downstream.
TIME TO LOOK AT THE BLOOD SYSTEM OF
THE BIOSPHERE
One thing characterizing our time is the predicament in
which environmental decision makers nd themselves:
squeezed between two shields. On the one hand, the public
expects them to repair the environmental damage that has
already materialized; on the other, the public expects them
to be forward-looking and ensure that growing demands on
socio-economic development will not make the problems
even worse.
A necessary basis for future-oriented decision-making is
a minimum of basic understanding of fundamental relation-
ships between humans and the natural landscape hosting
their life-support system (freshwater, biomass production,
presence of minerals and energy sources, etc.). Past studies
on environmental effects of human activities have not pro-
duced such an understanding but often got caught up in the
considerable complexity of ecosystem behavior. Moreover,
one fundamental component the water cycle acting as the
bloodstream of the biosphere tends to be absent in many
such studies (Falkenmark, 1997). Equally remarkable is the
lasting land/water dichotomy and the considerable concep-
tual barriers to realizing the water dependence of land use
and biomass production. In the water community, the alert-
ness to water scarcity problems (CFWA, 1997) tends to
be concentrated to allocation problems within the so-called
water sector (water supply for household, industry, and
irrigation). This attention is, however, quite recent. Most
countries have probably not started to deal with it but pur-
sue supply strategies, as in the past. Not much attention is
being paid to upstream/downstream con icts of interest.
It is getting increasingly clear that humanity s gen-
uinely water-dependent future cannot be discussed without
attention to water s deep involvement in many different
functions in both nature and society. For example, poten-
tial water-related constraints to global food production are
starting to send serious concerns through the scienti c com-
munity (Falkenmark, 1997b; Falkenmark et al., 1998 and
references therein). The nite character of the freshwater
circulating on the planet has made it essential that the water
requirements for food production be properly entered into
global water resources assessments.
This situation has made it necessary to expand our atten-
tion from the conventional water sector focused on societal
use of the liquid ow of blue water in aquifers and rivers to
include also the vapor ow of green water involved in rain-
fed biomass production in agriculture, forestry and natural
vegetation systems (Figure 1) (Falkenmark and Rockstrom,
1993).
Evidently the plants do not mind if the water available
to the roots is naturally in ltrated rainwater or external
irrigation water that has been added from groundwater or
surface water. Since the land cover is instrumental in the
rainwater partitioning process at the ground surface, land
202 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Rainfall
Infiltration
Plant
uptake
Transpiration
Flood flow
River flow
Evaporation
loss
Groundwater
recharge
Groundwater
seepage
Figure 1 The rainfall partitioning into the vertical green
water branch, encompassing productive and non-product-
ive components, and the semi-horizontal blue water
branch, encompassing the water in groundwater aquifers
and rivers
use changes tend to alter the partitioning of the incoming
rainfall between these two water ows, and therefore inu-
ence the blue water that is available for allocation within
the water sector.
The water cycle sets a large-scale exterior constraint to
both human and natural life. The aim of this article is to
tie together a whole set of water-related phenomena within
a joint conceptual framework. This framework starts from
the basic interactions between human society and the life-
supporting landscape in which we live. It demonstrates the
enormous management problems that population growth
generates due to waters deep involvement in these inter-
actions, and identies a set of urgent actions.
TECHNOSPHERE AND BIOSPHERE SHARE
THE SAME BLOOD SYSTEM
It is probably not much of an exaggeration to state that
water is the most misunderstood component of life. It
is mistakenly taken as quite simple, since it is part of
everybodys daily life. In reality it is extremely complex
with many parallel functions in both nature and soci-
ety: health function, habitat function, psychological and
religious functions, carrier functions (solutes, silt), and
production functions (green-water dependent biomass pro-
duction, blue-water dependent socio-economic production).
Successful environmental management therefore critically
depends on our ability to address such complexity.
Water lls all living beings, it has vital functions on all
scales from the planetary scale down to the cell scale. It is
a universal solvent, carrying nutrients to the cells and waste
products away from the cells. In the life-support system, it
acts as a carrier of dissolved matter, as a key food substance
for both humans and fauna, as a key raw material in plant
production, and as a habitat for aquatic ora and fauna.
In society it functions almost as a lubricant of industrial
development through all its key functions in industrial
production (carrier, solvent, washer, cooler). At the same
time, water is a key operator in different collapse-driving
processes: as carrier of microbiological disease agents to
humans, in its tendency to form oods and inundations, as
eroding agent, and as contaminant carrier in general.
Since all ecosystems are water-dependent, water is fun-
damental as a silent messenger in generating ecosystem
degradation and biodiversity disturbances from human
manipulations of the landscape.
To facilitate communication on these complex issues,
the following simple metaphor may be helpful (Falken-
mark, 1997a). Human activities in the landscape can be
illustrated as involving interaction between a social sphere
and a landscape sphere. The imperative in the social sphere
is to satisfy the basic needs of the population of water,
food, energy, etc. and meet their aspirations in terms of
goods and services. Performing this involves manipulations
of land and water in the landscape for harvesting the natural
resources there (water, biomass, energy, minerals). These
manipulations are physical (clearing, tilling, drainage, well
drilling, pipes and canals) and chemical (agricultural chem-
icals, waste produced in the social sphere and disposed of in
the landscape: to the air, to the land, or directly to the water
bodies). Since the natural laws operate in the landscape,
side effects are produced, building up into air pollution,
land degradation, water degradation and as higher order
effects, i.e., ecological degradation. If the needs and aspi-
rations of the inhabitants are not satised or as a response
to frustration raised by the exacerbating environmental side
effects, reactive responses occur in the social sphere: pas-
sive ones like famine, poverty, diseases, disputes, suffering,
or active ones like riots, environmental migration, policy
changes, etc.
Waters multifunctional involvement in the interaction
between human society and the physical landscape is
reected in its manifold appearances in terms of:
the provision of water supply for various societal
activities;
water as a resource manifested as availability in rivers
and aquifers, water involved in the production of
plant substance from carbon dioxide from the air and
water from the soil; streaming water as a source
of energy; and water bodies as habitats for aquatic
biota;
side effects of human landscape manipulations mani-
fested as water quality degradation; altered seasonality
in the rivers; escalating oods, river depletion; and
aquatic ecosystem degradation;
water-related diseases, societal damage by inundations,
etc.
The sectorial organization of society implies that also
the political driving forces on demands on the water that
CIRCULATING FRESHWATER 203
ows through the landscape are sectored and unconnected
although they are all dealing with the same water (Falken-
mark, 1997a):
the health authorities are interested in water supply and
sanitation to protect against water-related diseases, high
morbidity and mortality;
the agricultural authorities are responsible for crop
production to keep famines away, generating raised
water requirements, often also land degradation;
the environmental authority is responsible for habitat
protection to avoid ecosystem degradation and prob-
lems with protein nutrition;
the economic development authority is responsible
for industrial production, thereby generating increasing
water requirements, often also pollution loads.
The tunnel view tendency in each of these sectorial
bodies introduces an incoherence in decision-making that
explains much of the past difculties in coping with emerg-
ing environmental problems.
A CLOSER LOOK INTO THE UNDERLYING
WATER PROCESSES
Landscape manipulations, that are necessary to harvest the
natural resources, generate side effects through:
1. the water partitioning of incoming precipitation in its
interaction with soil and vegetation;
2. waters function as a universal solvent continually
moving down the landscape in the river basin;
3. the integrity of the water cycle circulation, trans-
ferring impacts of human manipulations along the
chain from atmosphere to land and terrestrial ecosys-
tems to groundwater and rivers to water bodies/lakes
and aquatic ecosystems to coastal waters and marine
ecosystems (Figure 2).
The rst of these links can be further claried by referring
to the distinction earlier indicated between two complemen-
tary types of water ows (cf. Figure 1):
the invisible vapor ow back to the atmosphere refer-
red to as green water ow which is part of the plant
production process;
the liquid ow passing above and below the land
surface referred to as blue water ow and consist-
ing of the surplus or non-evaporated precipitation.
Food, fodder, ber, fuelwood and timber are all pro-
duced by green water, and thereby involve a consumptive
use (Lvovich and White, 1990) which is of the order of
6006000 m
3
of water per ton biomass produced, depend-
ing on the hydroclimate. Human societies (municipalities,
industries, irrigation schemes, etc.) are run by blue water
withdrawn from rivers and groundwater. Such uses tend to
add a pollutant load to the water when returned to the river.
In its contact with the land surface, incoming precipita-
tion passes two partitioning points (Falkenmark, 1986):
Waste gases
Atmosphere
Water
supply
Flood flow
River flow
a
b
c
d
e
f
g
Water bodies
Ocean
Man
i
Precipitation
h
Evaporation
Waste water
flow
Ground-
water flow
Manipulation of
soil and
vegetation
Sea
evaporation
Landscape
Figure 2 Mental continuity-based image of the water cycle, linking the net sea evaporation, the wetting of continental
landscapes, the recharge of aquifers, the ood ows in rivers, and the river discharge back to the sea. Mans interactions
are indicated by the four horizontal arrows to the left: (1) waste gas output to the atmosphere; (2) manipulation of
soil/vegetation physically and chemically; (3) water withdrawals from aquifers and rivers; (4) wastewater output to
water bodies. When the population grows, these arrows will grow in size, whereas the water-ow arrows in the system
will change only when climate changes
204 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
at the soil surface, dividing the precipitation between
ood ow and inltration;
in the root zone, dividing the inltrated water between
plant uptake and groundwater recharge.
Since land use activities modify soil and vegetation,
they also inuence this partitioning and therefore both
the amount of river ow and its seasonality (uctuations
between low ow and high ow). Land conversions that
involve major vegetation changes tend to impact this water
partitioning, and result in green/blue water redirections,
traditionally spoken of as water balance changes.
Deforestation typically reduces the green water return
ow to the atmosphere and therefore increases the ow in
the blue water branch (a typical result is water logging (see
Waterlogging, Volume 3), as happened on the Hungarian
Plain, increased river ow, or ood ows). In South Africa,
a major campaign is now employing over 42 000 people
to eradicate invasive alien plants, that are more water
consumptive than the natural vegetation. The campaign has
double objectives: on the one hand to increase the blue
water ow that is available to support society s water needs,
on the other to restore degraded biodiversity.
Reforestation works the opposite way, easily producing
river depletion. In South Africa afforestation and reforesta-
tion after more than 5 years is allowed only with issued
permits (van der Sel, 1997). Due to the importance of this
land/water linkage, in the South African government water
issues are handled by a joint Ministry of Water Affairs and
Forestry. The frequent recommendation of forest planta-
tions to protect vulnerable soils from crusting and erosion
easily neglects the lower partitioning point in Figure 1
while concentrating all its interest on the upper one. This
neglect may lead to surprising river depletions developing
as unexpected side effects of the plantations.
The second link is related to the combined effect of
water both as a solvent and as a substance involved in
key chemical interactions between the in ltrating water and
the geological surroundings taking place in the root zone
(Falkenmark and Allard, 1991). It is widely known that
the water-divides formed by the hilltops in the landscape
de ne the water ow modules, i.e., the drainage basins,
each enclosed by its own water divide. Therefore, the
precipitation that does not return to the atmosphere as green
water, forms blue water and either feeds the river with rapid
ood ow or passes underground as groundwater ow,
seeping back to the surface in springs, local hollows and
valley bottoms.
A slope in the landscape is typically divided into uphill
recharge areas where the rainwater moves downwards
through the root zone, recharging the groundwater and
downhill discharge areas where groundwater returns back to
the land surface. In the recharge areas, bogs may develop,
fed by precipitation. In the local hollows, groundwater-
dependent wetlands develop; and in the valley bottoms the
groundwater seeps back to the surface and either evapo-
rates, feeds riparian forests or recharges the water courses
with a time-stable ow. In the riparian zone, groundwater
and ood dependent riparian wetlands may develop.
The chemical composition of the natural water develops
as the in ltrating water passes from recharge to discharge
areas (Falkenmark and Allard, 1991). It rst interacts with
two systems: the organic root zone system which adds car-
bon dioxide and humates, making the water aggressive,
and the soil system from where available minerals are
picked up. As the water arrives down into the ground-
water zone it has acquired two cardinal characteristics:
alkalinity/acidity and redox potential (see Redox Potential,
Volume 2). These two in combination determine what the
water picks up along its continued underground pathways
through deep soil and bedrock. The resulting chemical com-
position in the seepage zone, where the rising water meets
oxygen again, characterizes the biodiversity there.
The third link relates to the continental part of the water
cycle as such. The global water cycle links the ocean,
the atmosphere, the land and its terrestrial ecosystems, the
water bodies and their aquatic ecosystems, and the marine
water and coastal and marine ecosystems. The water cycle
is the mega-desalinization plant of the planet on which life
here depends. It is energized by the energy from the sun.
On the continents water is moving above and below the
ground surface under the law of gravitation.
The third link is illustrated in Figure 2 where man s
interventions with the cycling water has been distributed
among the different compartments as indicated by the four
arrows to the left:
waste gas output to the atmosphere;
manipulation of the soil/vegetation physically and
chemically;
water withdrawals from aquifers and water bodies;
waste water output to water bodies.
When population grows these arrows grow in size,
whereas the circulating water ow will change only when
climate changes.
FUNDAMENTAL REGIONAL DIFFERENCES IN
CHALLENGES
Now that this basic mental image of the interaction between
society and the physical landscape hosting the life-support
system has been explained and discussed, the next step is
to explore fundamental regional differences in the principal
system: on the one hand those related to the hydroclimate
in uencing the green water ow, on the other the differ-
ences in the blue water ows.
It is thought-provoking to note that most industrialized
countries are located in the temperate zone. There, water
blindness is widespread and people tend to take water for
CIRCULATING FRESHWATER 205
granted. Unfortunately, it seems that water blindness is
widespread also, however, in the South. The poorest coun-
tries are in the dry climate tropics and subtropics where the
everyday question number one is where to nd the water
and food needed to survive. The fact that many colonial
powers in the tropical and subtropical countries based their
understanding on natural conditions in temperate climates
invites the question whether their decisions were environ-
mentally deleterious and introduced rather than eliminated
environmental problems.
Turning next to fundamental blue water differences
(renewable water only), Figure 3 gives a global level
overview of the water resources situation in the world
today. The present level of water withdrawal (use to avail-
ability ratio or technical scarcity) is shown against the
population pressure on water (number of individuals shar-
ing each ow unit of water or demographic water scarcity)
(Falkenmark and Lundqvist, 1998). In this diagram, dif-
ferent levels of per capita water use (in cubic meters per
person and year) show up as a diagonal line.
Moving up the vertical scale is costly and means more
reservoirs, canals and pipelines but also more administra-
tion. Experience suggests that when withdrawals exceed
20% of the availability, investments for reservoirs, trans-
fers, irrigation schemes, etc. start to be costly as seen in the
national economy. Moreover, in dry climates it is difcult
to mobilize more than 50% due to evaporation losses from
reservoirs. One hundred percent is only possible to reach by
large scale waste water reuse, by underground storage, or
where a large river passes right through a country so that
the water is easy to access. Moving along the horizontal
scale, on the other hand, means more water competition
and disputes, and increased pollution load since there are
more people polluting each ow unit of water.
In this diagram, the world regions form ve rather
distinct clusters with radically different water resources
predicaments:
truly water-scarce regions with high population pres-
sures on water resources, technically close to the hydro-
logical ceiling altogether 1.6 billion inhabitants in
1995 and rapid population expansion;
the water spenders, i.e., regions with a moderate to
high water mobilization level, moderate population
pressure, and very high per capita water use due
to large scale, low-efciency irrigation altogether a
rather stable population of 0.3 billion;
an average-level set of regions, moderate in all three
senses mobilization levels, population pressure and
per capita use altogether 2.5 billion and some of
them with ongoing population expansion;
a group of water rich regions with low mobiliza-
tion level, low population pressure, and moderate per
capita use altogether a rather stable population of
0.8 billion;
an outlier group with low mobilization level and per
capita use a rapidly growing population currently
0.4 billion people.
The diagram suggests that population growth is pushing
large parts of the world towards the right, i.e., a situation
T
e
c
h
n
i
c
a
l

s
c
a
r
c
i
t
y
w
i
t
h
d
r
a
w
-
t
o
-
a
v
a
i
l
.

r
a
t
i
o
NAfr
MAs/Kaz
WAs
SAs
Cauc
USA
SEur
S/FSU
CEur
SEAs
CAm
Austr
SAfr
EAfr
100 200 500 1000 2000 5
10
20
40
60
100
%
p/flow unit
Demographic scarcity
1000m
3
person year
1
N Chi/Mong
Figure 3 Fundamental regional differences in the water scarcity predicament. The gure shows characteristics in terms
of demographic and technical water scarcity, respectively, for Shiklomanovs 26 global regions. The diagonal line
shows per capita water withdrawal of 1000m
3
person
1
year
1
, needed for food self-sufciency in semiarid tropics and
subtropics. (Data from Shiklomanov, 1996)
206 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
of growing dispute proneness and pollution loading. Ulti-
mately, a growing proportion of available water will no
longer be usable due to too much pollution (Lundqvist,
1998). This is evidently a real danger to socio-economic
development in the developing world since it may lead
to societal stagnation wherever industries employing large
groups of the population are closed down by court orders,
due to excessive water pollution, or where pollution-driven
frustration generates riots and social unrest. There are sev-
eral cases, for example in India where this process is
starting to develop.
Figure 3 can also be used to see the implications of pop-
ulation growth for food production (Falkenmark, 1997b).
Most critical is the extra blue water needed to secure
food supply in dry climate regions, where yields are low
due to water shortages and plant damage from dry spells.
The situation was recently explained in a Round Table
on water scarcity and global food insecurity in Ambio
(Falkenmark et al., 1998). It was assumed that, in semi-arid
climates (where most of the rapidly growing populations
are), maybe 50% of crop water requirements may be pro-
vided from inltrated precipitation, while irrigation has to
contribute the remaining 50%. This adds up to a blue water
need of 800 m
3
year
1
. Adding another 200 m
3
year
1
for
households and industry leaves us with a water need of
1000 m
3
year
1
altogether. Many regions are moving to
under the food self-sufciency line, and will increasingly
become dependent on food imports.
This analysis suggests that water will increasingly limit
food self-sufciency possibilities in dry climate regions
with rapid population growth. Countries that will not be
able to stay self-sufcient, due to lack of accessible water,
should study their comparative advantages in order to nd
out what to export in exchange for food imports.
FROM HYDROEGOISM TO
HYDROSOLIDARITY
What are then the key challenges of the near future when
it comes to nding out what some of the crucial actions
would be? The overriding task is to successfully cope
with environmental preconditions while satisfying societal
needs. Evidently, waters ow through the river basin links
human activities upstream with opportunities and problems
downstream. Therefore, downstream societies are in a sense
the prisoners of the upstreamers (Figure 4).
Human interactions with the water can be divided
in two categories: water-dependent activities and water-
impacting ones. Mans water-impacting activities are basi-
cally of three kinds: land use conversions (inuencing
blue/green water partitioning, as already indicated in the
above discussion of deforestation and reforestation); water
withdrawals/ow management (inuencing river ow and
low/high ow seasonality); and the addition of pollution
loads.
It has in particular to be realized that water use may
involve consumptive water use (Lvovich & White, 1990);
most of the water withdrawn for irrigation is evaporated into
the atmosphere. The result is downstream river depletion
(e.g., Aral Sea basin, Yellow River in China). After non-
consumptive use, on the other hand, where water is used in a
through-ow based manner, the water used goes as a return
ow either to groundwater or to the river, generally carrying
a pollution load of agricultural chemicals, industrial and/or
municipal pollutants.
Downstream water users and ecosystems will suffer from
these changes in water quantity and quality. Protection
of downstream water interests for wetland protection and
conservation of biodiversity will demand conservation of
a certain minimum ow. Some experts say that at least
25 percent of the river ow has to remain for down-
stream ecosystems, others that 75 percent has to remain.
Such criteria are evidently equivalent to posing constraints
on acceptable upstream consumptive use and pollution
load respectively, i.e., upstream food production. The con-
icts of interest here, in other words, involve existentional
issues for humanity that will now have to be honestly
faced.
It is extremely important that these upstream/downstream
conicts of interest be adequately realized. True negotiating
Household
Industry
Irrigation
Navigation
Hydropower
Riparian wetlands
Aquatic ecosystems
Coastal ecosystems
River
Land conversion
Flow modification
Pollution load
Water flow
seasonality
water quality
Upstream
manipulation
Downstream stakeholders
Direct water use Ecological services
Figure 4 Conicting stakeholder interests in terms of water-impacting activities and water-dependent activities,
respectively, for which reconciliation methods will have to be developed
CIRCULATING FRESHWATER 207
arenas will have to be developed so that the unavoidable
side effects of manipulations, required for the satisfaction of
societal needs, can be analyzed and discussed in an inten-
tional way rather than arriving as unintentional surprises
as has often been the case in the past (Rockstrom et al.,
1999).
THREE CRUCIAL TASKS FOR THE NEXT 30
YEARS
It is clear from the above that the present predicament,
particularly of the developing world, includes three phe-
nomena:
escalating water competition;
escalating dispute proneness;
escalating pollution load.
On the regional scale, the upstream/downstream depen-
dencies within river basins involve major challenges related
to evident con icts of interest, whether the river basins are
national or transnational, shared amongst several countries.
Fortunately, there is probably also a proneness to create
institutions that facilitate cooperation.
A set of fundamental regional differences have to be kept
in mind (all regions suffer from recurrent oods):
In western countries the key problem is water pollution
(basically chemical) reducing water usability, threaten-
ing human health and aquatic ecosystems downstream.
In newly industrialized countries (post-communist
countries and monsoon-climate countries in the humid
tropics) the key problem may be water shortage
during the dry season (lack of dilution water)
and/or a combination of microbiological and chemical
pollution.
In the lowest income countries the key problem is
dif culties in making water accessible for use (small
rivers go dry most of the year, large rivers are inter-
national), water competition is escalating, and dispute
proneness and pollution loads are rapidly growing
as water demands for socio-economic development
increase.
This overview suggests that three key challenges have to
be urgently addressed:
1. Supplying food in water-short countries, unable to
feed their rapidly growing populations. This may be
foreseen to involve expectations of a six-fold export
from temperate zone countries (the breadbasket of the
world) to help feed these water-short countries unless
continued forest clearance for rainfed agriculture be
accepted as a vital weapon in a global strategy to feed
humanity.
2. Ensuring that water remains usable for all the societal
sectors depending on it. This points to the critical need
to go from today s willful neglect of water pollution to
a situation where both industry and agriculture take
water pollution seriously, and try to minimize their
contributions (Lundqvist, 1998).
3. Developing mechanisms for con ict reconciliation bet-
ween upstream land and water use, and downstream
water use and ecosystem services (Falkenmark, 1998).
This points to the crucial need to develop a water
ethic, which has to be up to date and based on
an understanding of how the life-support systems
function.
If society has to manipulate land and water and those
manipulations inevitably produce side effects, then the
creation of a sustainable development policy which does
not undermine its own resource base must be an issue of
balancing the manipulations needed against the side effects
produced (Falkenmark and Suprapto, 1993). Criteria are
needed for this balancing: both human-ecological (ground-
water must remain drinkable, land must remain productive,
crops and sh must remain edible); ecological (biodiver-
sity and crucial ecological services must be preserved) and
socio-economic (poverty and hunger must be eradicated,
and income generated).
HUMAN RIGHTS AND HUMAN
OBLIGATIONS: BROADENING THE
PERSPECTIVE
As already indicated the general belief that the water issue
is very simple and can be handled within a water sector is
altogether false. In reality it is as complex as the ow of
blood in the human body. A doctor would never make his
diagnosis of a sick patient without considerable attention to
his blood system.
The past neglect in environmental sciences of water s
many different roles in the interaction between development
and environment has seriously delayed a proper understand-
ing of so-called environmental problems and led to much lip
service and redundancy in statements at international meet-
ings. The price paid in terms of human suffering cannot be
quanti ed but it can be noted that since the Stockholm Con-
ference on the Human Environment, the world population
has expanded by some 2500 million, mainly in the develop-
ing countries where the environmental problems have only
gotten larger.
Much stress is presently being put on human rights to
water; an example of our careless language. What is tac-
itly being referred to is not water as such but the provision
of safe household water. The fundamental importance for
humanity s future of nding ways for peaceful sharing of
the precipitation falling over a joint river basin between
208 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
those living upstream and those living downstream, how-
ever, suggests that there is an even larger need for human
water solidarity. In the future, human water obligations have
to be given equal weight to the right to safe household
water. Given a situation where upstream and downstream
countries tend to have tremendous problems in agreeing
on issues on the sharing of transboundary water systems,
this indicates the need for seeking support from reli-
gious and philosophical circles in the search for a water
ethics.
See also: GEWEX (Global Energy and Water Cycle
Experiment), Volume 1; Hydrologic Cycle, Volume 1;
Hydrology, Volume 1; Limnology, Volume 1; Soil Mois-
ture, Volume 1; Buffering Capacity, Volume 2; Eutroph-
ication, Volume 2; Hydrology, Volume 2; PET (Potential
Evapotranspiration), Volume 2; Salinization, Volume 2;
Fisheries: Pollution and Habitat Degradation in Tropi-
cal Asian Rivers, Volume 3; Groundwater Withdrawal
and the Development of the Great Man-made River
Project, Libya, Volume 3; Indus Basin: a Case Study
in Water Management, Volume 3; Inter-basin Trans-
fer (IBT) for Water Supplies, Volume 3; Irrigation:
Environmental Impacts, Volume 3; Irrigation: Induced
Demise of Wetlands, Volume 3; Marshes, Anthropogenic
Changes, Volume 3; River Regulation, Volume 3; Salin-
ity and Agriculture, Volume 3; Water Resources: Baltic,
Volume 3; Water Resources: Great Lakes Case Study,
Volume 3; Water Use: Future Trends, and Environmen-
tal and Social Impacts, Volume 3; Waterlogging, Vol-
ume 3; Yellow River, China: a Case Study in Water
Resources, Volume 3; Aral Sea, Volume 4; Great Lakes
Region of North America, Volume 4; Lake Victoria, Vol-
ume 4; Nile River, Volume 4.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This paper is a revised version of my Volvo Environment
Prize lecture, published in Ambio, Vol. 28, No. 4, June
1999.
REFERENCES
CFWA (1997) Comprehensive Assessment of the Freshwater
Resources of the World, UN and SEI, World Meteorological
Organization, Geneva.
Falkenmark, M (1986) Freshwater Time for a Modied Appro-
ach, Ambio, 15(4), 192200.
Falkenmark, M (1997) Societys Interaction with the Water Cycle:
a Conceptual Framework for a More Holistic Approach,
Hydrol. Sci., 42(4), 451466.
Falkenmark, M (1997) Meeting Water Requirements of an Expan-
ding World Population, Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Biol. Sci., 352,
929936.
Falkenmark, M (1998) Dilemma when Entering 21st Century
Rapid Change but Lack of Sense of Urgency, Water Policy, 1,
421436.
Falkenmark, M and Allard, B (1991) Water Quality Genesis
and Disturbances of Natural Freshwaters, The Handbook of
Environmental Chemistry, Vol. 5, Part A, ed O Hutzinger,
Springer-Verlag, 4578.
Falkenmark, M, Klohn, W, Lundqvist, J, Postel, S, Rockstrom, J,
Seckler, D, Shuval, H, and Wallace, J (1998) Water Scarcity
as a Key Factor Behind Global Food Insecurity Round Table
Discussion, Ambio, 27(2), 148154.
Falkenmark, M and Lundqvist, J (1998) Towards Water Security:
Political Determination and Human Adaptation Crucial, Nat.
Resour. Forum, 21(1), 3751.
Falkenmark, M and Rockstrom, J (1993) Curbing Rural Exodus
from Tropical Drylands, Ambio, 22(7), 427437.
Falkenmark, M and Suprapto, R (1993) Population-landscape
Interactions in Development. A Water Perspective to Environ-
mental Sustainability, Ambio, 21(1), 3136.
Lundqvist, J (1998) Avert Looming Hydrocide, Ambio, 27(6),
428433.
Lvovich, M M and White, G F (1990) Use and Transformation
of Terrestrial Water Systems, in The Earth as Transformed
by Human Action, eds B L Turner, II, W C Clark, R W Kates,
J Richards, J T Mathews, and W Meyer, Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, Cambridge, 235252.
Rockstrom, J, Gordon, L, Falkenmark, M, Folke, C, and Eng-
vall, M (1999) Linkages among water vapor ows, food pro-
duction and terrestrial ecosystem, Conserv. Ecol., 3(2), 5.
Shiklomanov, I A (1997) Assessment of Water Resources and
Water Availability of the World, Background Report to the
Comprehensive Assessment of the Freshwater Resources of
the World, Stockholm Environment Institute and World Mete-
orological Organization.
van der Sel, D W (1997) Sustainable Industrial Afforestation in
South Africa under Water and Other Environmental Pressures,
in Sustainability of Water Resources under Increasing Uncer-
tainty, Vol. 240, IAHS Publication, 211216.
Civic Science
see Precautionary Principle (Volume 4)
Commons, Tragedy of the
Tragedy of the commons is used to refer to a situation in
which people who share in the use and benets of a resource
are inclined to damage or over-use it. Examples include
COUSTEAU, JACQUES 209
public lands, sheries, waterways and public byways, the
airwaves, and the atmosphere. Those who use this phrase
typically assume that the word commons means that access
is open to all; from that premise the argument is that
the rational user of a common resource has no incen-
tives for self-restraint (Hardin, 1968). There is no way
to assure that other users will not take advantage and
that the one who tries to conserve will be able to reap
the benets in the future. This idea is often used as an
explanation for local, regional, and global environmen-
tal degradation and as a rationale for either government
intervention in or privatization of resources used in com-
mon. However, it is important to recognize that in many
cases access to resources held in common is not open
access; and that they are managed through rules agreed
upon by the users, as well as user-generated systems for
monitoring and enforcement (McCay and Acheson, 1987;
Ostrom, 1990). This is true for many local-level communi-
ties using forests, grasslands, sheries, and other common
resources, and it is also true for many international envi-
ronmental regimes. Consequently, a second meaning of
tragedy of the commons is the situation in which govern-
ment intervention, privatization, and other factors dimin-
ish the effectiveness of local and user-based institutions
for common resource management, creating environmen-
tal problems. Related are situations in which resettlement
schemes, violence, or privatization programs result in the
displacement of people dependent on commonly held access
rights, intensifying their poverty and, in many cases, forc-
ing them to intensify their use of marginal and vulnera-
ble natural systems or to become part of urban-industrial
systems.
See also: Proper ty Rights and Regimes, Volume 5.
REFERENCES
Hardin, G (1968) The Tragedy of the Commons, Science, 162,
124348.
McCay, B J and Acheson, J M, eds (1987) The Question of the
Commons, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ.
Ostrom, E (1990) Governing the Commons, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge.
BONNIE J MCCAY USA
Cost Benet Analysis (CBA)
see CBA (Cost Benet Analysis) (Volume 5)
Cousteau,
Jacques
(19101997)
Jacques-Yves Cousteau was a French oceanographic explo-
rer and lmmaker who was best known for his prime time
television series in the 1960s and 1970s, his role in the
development of the rst self-contained underwater breath-
ing apparatus (SCUBA) equipment, and his advocacy for
conservation of the marine environment.
Cousteau had no formal education in science or engi-
neering. However, later in his career he was awarded
honorary degrees (DSc) from California, Harvard, and
Ghent. He entered the French Naval Academy in 1930, and
eventually reached the rank of captain. His initial inten-
tion was to be a navy pilot but he seriously injured one
of his arms in a car accident, ending his ying career.
He started swimming to strengthen his arm and devel-
oped his love for swimming in the sea. Cousteau sub-
sequently experimented with goggles, snorkels and other
diving equipment. Cousteau and Emile Gagnan, an engi-
neer from Paris, developed the Aqua-Lung (i.e., the rst
SCUBA gear) in 1943. This revolutionized diving since
it freed divers from heavy diving suits requiring cum-
bersome air hoses and lifelines. The invention allowed
free swimming and facilitated greater exploration of the
ocean.
During World War II, Captain Cousteau conducted espi-
onage for the French Resistance. He received decorations
(e.g., Croix de Guerre) and was made Knight of the
Legion of Honour for his efforts. After the war and with
money from a British philanthropist (Thomas Loel Guin-
ness), he acquired a decommissioned American-constructed
minesweeper that had served in the British navy. He used
this ship, the Calypso, for ocean exploration until it sank in
Singapore Harbor in 1996. Cousteau and Jean Mollard, an
engineer, developed a miniature submarine known as the
Diving Saucer (1959) that allowed deep sea observation.
He also developed other underwater equipment, conducted
studies on underwater living and heliumoxygen diving
techniques, and improved color photography by perfecting
the underwater camera.
Cousteau greatly raised public awareness of ocean
issues as a prodigious author and lmmaker. His book,
The Silent World, published in 1953, was enormously
210 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
successful. It sold ve million copies and was translated
into 22 languages. His subsequent extensive number
of highly successful books included The Living Sea,
The Whale Mighty Monarch of the Sea, and Jacques
Cousteaus Calypso. His 1956 lm, The Silent World,
won the Academy Award for best documentary. He also
won Academy Awards for The Golden Fish (1959) and
World Without Sun (1964). Cousteaus series of television
documentaries, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau
(19681976), popularized marine issues and educated the
public. By the end of his career he had written or
contributed to more than 50 books and at least 150 lms.
Jacques Cousteau earned numerous honors during his
70 year career. He was the director of the Musse Oceano-
graphique of Monaco for 31 years (despite lacking a science
degree), a member of the United States National Academy
of Sciences and a member of the Academie Francais. Other
honors include the Special Gold Medal of the National Geo-
graphic Society (1961), placement on the United Nations
Environment Programmes Global 500 Roll of Honour for
Environmental Achievement (1988), and the James Smith-
son Bicentennial Medal from the Smithsonian Institute
(1996). Despite these honors, he has stated that he felt his
success in increasing public awareness and concern for the
ocean was his greatest achievement. The efforts of Jacques
Cousteau for advocacy and promotion of ocean conserva-
tion are continued by the Cousteau Society Inc., which he
founded in 1973.
Photo: from Columbia and The Silent World.
FURTHER READING
Earle, S (1997) Cousteau Remembered, Popul. Sci., 251(4), 80.
Glasgow, E (1997) Jacques Cousteau and the Discovery of the
Sea, Contemp. Rev., 271(1580), 135138.
Madsen, A (1986) Cousteau: An Unauthorized Biography, Beau-
fort, New York, 1270.
Marden, L (1998) Master of the Deep, Natl. Geogr., 193(2),
7079.
Schick, E A, ed (1997) Obituary of Jacques-Yves Cousteau from
New York Times A p. 1 (June 26, 1997). Current Biography
Yearbook, H W Wilson, New York, 1699.
The Cousteau Society, Accessed May 3 (2000) Jacques-Yves
Cousteau: Sailor and Explorer, http://www.cousteausociety.
org/aboutjycc.html.
GLYNN GOMES Canada
D
Deep Ecology
Deep Ecology is the most fundamental form of ecocentrism.
Its holistic view considers that humans are not separate
from nature and that the earth, Gaia, is one organism,
whose every (interdependent) part has intrinsic value. Cur-
rent abuse of nature ultimately stems from inappropriate
belief systems, most particularly Christianity, and the clas-
sical scientic worldview developed in the West during the
Enlightenment. These are held to encourage anthropocen-
trism and attitudes of separation from and superiority to
nature. Such attitudes are termed shallow, whereas Deep
Ecology (the distinction was made in 1972 by the philoso-
pher Arne Naess) is considered so because it fundamentally
challenges such Enlightenment Project assumptions. See
Enlightenment Project, Volume 5.
Deep Ecology celebrates richness, diversity and equality
among all Earths creatures, holding that humans have no
right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy
vital needs. The lifestyles and practices stemming from such
a principle emphasize simplicity, frugality, self-reliance,
steady-state economics and limiting human population size.
Invoking Aldo Leopolds land ethic, Deep Ecology regards
human intervention in nature as inherently destructive. It
seeks instead to preserve and expand wilderness areas.
Deep Ecology criticizes classical sciences contempo-
rary monopolization of respectable approaches to knowing
the world and nature, seeing the predominance of rational
thought as endemic tothe anthropocentrismthat has produced
ecological crisis. By contrast, deep ecologists advance intu-
ition as an equal or even superior formof cognition. Through
intuition, they argue, the continuity between the human self
and the rest of the cosmos may be properly apprehended and
appreciated. Hence, drawing on diverse inuences such as
Heidegger, Buddhism, native American insights and West-
ern romanticism, Deep Ecology calls upon people to develop
a quasi-mystical ecological consciousness by which they will
feel themselves part of the natural world, as a self-in-self.
Social Ecology and Eco-socialism roundly criticize
Deep Ecology for displaying reactionary and anti-humanist
tendencies.
DAVID PEPPER UK
Defense Fund, Environmental
see Environmental Defense Fund (Volume 5)
Demographic transition
Wolfgang Lutz and Anne Goujon
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
(IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria
The global demographic transition was the salient feature of
world population changes throughout the 20th century. It is
the reason underlying the population explosion that brought
world population size from 2.5 billion in 1950 to six billion
in 2000. But it is also the explanation why birth rates have
been declining around the world and are expected to further
decline where they are still high. As a consequence, pop-
ulation growth has already leveled off in many developed
parts of the world and is expected to level off in all parts
over the course of the 21st century. A decline in birth rates
does not immediately result in the stabilization of popula-
tion size, due to the fact that a very young population a
consequence of past high fertility results in an increas-
ing number of potential parents over several decades.
This phenomenon is called the momentum of population
growth.
In 1945, Frank Notestein developed the paradigm that all
populations undergo a process of demographic transition
at some point in their history. The demographic transition
theory has evolved as a generalization of the sequence of
events observed in what are now developed countries. The
model distinguishes four phases in the evolution of popula-
tions. In the initial phase of the transition, the combination
of high birth and death rates produces a slow or no growth
equilibrium. That happened throughout most of human his-
tory: The world population grew slowly because birth and
212 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
death rates uctuations cancelled each other (see Figure 1).
In the second phase, death rates begin to fall because of
exogenous factors such as rise in living standards (better
nutrition, hygiene) and improvements in health. This phase
is a period of rapid population growth. The demographic
transition theory asserts that in the third phase, and after
some delay, the decreases in mortality will be followed by
a decrease of fertility rates. During this phase, the popu-
lation growth rate will decrease. The latter phase is when
there is a quasi equilibrium between low birth and death
rates.
Different societies have experienced transition in dif-
ferent ways, and today various regions of the world are
following distinctive paths (Tabah, 1989). Many developed
countries are in the last, fourth stage, or even beyond that,
as many European countries have reached below replace-
ment fertility levels and seem to stay at those levels. All
world countries have gone through the second stage of the
transition (mortality decline) and most are in the third stage
of fertility decline or at a post-transition stage.
The demographic transition began in more developed
countries (MDCs) in the 18th century and spread to less
developed countries (LDCs) in the last half of the 20th
century (Notestein, 1945; Davis, 1954, 1991; Coale, 1973).
In MDCs, mortality rates declined comparatively gradually
beginning in the late 1700s and then more rapidly in the
late 1800s; fertility rates declined, as well, after a lag of
75 100 years. The demographic transition started much
later in LDCs. The rst sign of a decline in mortality rates
only appeared during the period between the two world
wars. Average annual population growth rates doubled to
reach 1% year
1
. Nevertheless, it was only in the 1950s
and 1960s that the diffusion of medical techniques and
progress in public health allowed the global population
growth rate to increase dramatically. It reached 2.4% during
the 1960 1970 period for the developing world.
The broad result has been a gradual transition from a
small, slowly growing population with high mortality and
high fertility, to a large, slowly growing population with
low mortality and low fertility. On the theoretical level there
are two different ways to explain demographic transition.
In one view, the fertility decline is a direct response to
the mortality decline. This so-called homeostasis argument
claims that societies tend to nd an equilibrium between
births and deaths. When death rates decline due to progress
in medicine and better living conditions, the equilibrium
is disturbed and the population grows unless birth rates
decline in response to the new mortality conditions. The fact
that fertility tends to decline many years after a decline in
mortality may be explained by a perception lag. The equi-
librium is supposed to be attained by a country when it
reaches replacement-level fertility; that is an equilibrium in
which each generation exactly replaces itself. The replace-
ment fertility level depends on the sex ratio at birth, as well
as on the mortality between birth and the end of reproduc-
tive life. In countries that are through the stage of mortality
decline (all MDCs and some LDCs), the level of replace-
ment fertility is about 2.1 children.
The alternative to the homeostasis argument assumes
that modernization of society acts as a driving force of
both declining mortality and declining fertility. Fertility
decline lags behind mortality decline, according to this
view, because fertility is embedded in the system of cultural
norms more strongly than mortality, and therefore changes
more slowly. The historical record of Europe where fer-
tility sometimes declined simultaneously with mortality
and population growth was generally much lower than in
today s high fertility countries tends to support the sec-
ond explanation. But the two arguments are not necessarily
mutually exclusive.
Figure 2 illustrates the example of demographic tran-
sition in two countries: Austria, a developed country in
0
1000
2000
3000
4000
5000
6000
7000
1
0
0
2
0
0
3
0
0
4
0
0
5
0
0
6
0
0
7
0
0
8
0
0
9
0
0
1
0
0
0
1
1
0
0
1
2
0
0
1
3
0
0
1
4
0
0
1
5
0
0
1
6
0
0
1
7
0
0
1
8
0
0
1
9
0
0
2
0
0
0
Beginning of demographic
transition in MDCs
Beginning of demographic
transition in LDCs
Figure 1 World population, 1 AD to 2000 AD
DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION 213
1819 1829 1839 1849 1859 1869 1879 1889 1899 1909 1919 1929 1939 1949 1959 1989 1969 1979
70
60
40
50
30
10
0
20
CBR Austria CDR Austria CBR Mauritius CDR Mauritius
Figure 2 The demographic transition in Austria and Mauritius, crude birth (CBR) and death (CDR) rates
Central Europe and Mauritius, a developing country in the
Indian Ocean. Both nations have good records for birth and
death rates going back more than a century. Until about
1880 in Austria, annual birth and death rates uctuated
widely. These uctuations can also be observed in Mauri-
tius until 1945, due to epidemics, the changing severity of
endemic diseases (notably malaria), and changing weather
conditions (cyclones). Whenever birth rates are consistently
above death rates, as was the case in Mauritius during the
late 19th century, the population grows.
After 1880 in Austria, death rates started to decline until
they had reached approximately their present level after
World War II. The decrease in mortality rates started 70
years later in Mauritius but the decline was much more
abrupt than in Austria. Death rates in Mauritius declined
precipitously due to malaria eradication and the introduc-
tion of modern medical technology. Although the speed
of the mortality decline and original levels of mortality
were different in the two countries, the two developments
were of the same nature. However, in the Austrian case,
birth rates started a slow decline soon after the death
rates, which is somehow typical of European countries,
thus supporting the validity of the modernization argument
mentioned above.
On the contrary, in Mauritius, birth rates remained high
or even increased somewhat due to the better health sta-
tus of women (a typical phenomenon in the early phase
of demographic transition). By 1950 this had resulted in
a population growth rate of more than 3% year
1
, one
of the highest in the world at that time. Birth rates sub-
sequently declined, with the bulk of the transition occur-
ring during the late 1960s and early 1970s when the
total fertility rate declined from more than six children
per woman to less than three within only seven years,
probably the worlds most rapid national fertility decline.
This decline occurred on a strictly voluntary basis and
resulted from the combination of high female educational
status and well-implemented family planning programs
(Lutz, 1994). Because of the still very young age struc-
ture of the Mauritian population, current birth rates are
still higher than death rates and the population is growing
by about 1% year
1
despite fertility at around replacement
level.
Empirically observed trends in all parts of the world
have overwhelmingly conrmed the relevance of the con-
cept of demographic transition to LDCs. With the exception
of pockets where religious or cultural beliefs are strongly
pronatalist, fertility decline is well advanced in all regions
except sub-Saharan Africa, and even in that region many
signs of a fertility transition can be perceived. In South-
east Asia and many countries in Latin America, fertility
rates are on par with rates seen in MDCs only several
decades ago, and in several countries, such as China, Tai-
wan, and Korea, fertility is at sub-replacement levels. In
Southern Asia and North Africa, the demographic transi-
tion has not followed the pattern of a clear lag between the
214 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
decrease in death rates preceding a decrease in birth rates.
The two rates declined almost simultaneously, somehow
resembling the historical European pattern over the last
40 years.
The biggest difference between the demographic transi-
tion processes in what are now the MDCs and LDCs has
been the speed of mortality decline. Mortality decline in
Europe, North America, and Japan came about over the
course of two centuries as a result of reduced variability in
the food supply, better housing, improved sanitation, and,
nally, progress in preventive and curative medicine. Mor-
tality decline in LDCs, in contrast, occurred very quickly
after World War II as a result of the application of Western
medical and public health technology to infectious, par-
asitic, and diarrheal diseases. Life expectancy in Europe
rose gradually from about 35 years in 1800 to about 50
in 1900, 66.5 at the end of World War II, and 74.4 in
1995. In LDCs, it shot up from 40.9 at the end of World
War II to 62.1 in 1995. The increase was particularly
impressive in Eastern Asia, where life expectancy at birth
increased from around 40 to more than 70 years over that
period. In Africa it only increased to slightly above 50
years, with life expectancy now falling in several coun-
tries due to AIDS. The increase that took MDCs about one
and a half centuries to achieve came to pass in LDCs in
less than half a century. As a result of the speed of the
mortality decline, populations in LDCs are growing three
times faster today than did the populations of present-day
MDCs at the comparable stage of their own demographic
transition.
Major social and economic changes, often summarized
by the notion of modernization, are at the heart of the
demographic transition theory. The changes in fertility
trends are only one aspect of the radical social changes
that many developing societies are experiencing. Cultural
change, urbanization, and mass education have spread the
image of the smaller nuclear family. It is to be expected
that within the rst decades of the 21st century, the nal
stages of demographic transition will be reached in all parts
of the world.
See also: Demogr aphic Change: Indonesian Tr ansmi-
gr ation, Volume 3; Demogr aphic Change: Peopling of
the Paci c Islands, Volume 3; Demogr aphic Change: the
Aging Population, Volume 3; Global Population Trends,
Volume 3.
REFERENCES
Coale, A J (1973) The Demographic Transition, in Proceedings
of the International Population Conference, Vol. 1, Interna-
tional Union for the Scientic Study of Population, Li` ege,
Belgium.
Davis, K (1954) The World Demographic Transition, Ann. Am.
Acad. Polit. Soc. Sci., 237, 111.
Davis, K (1991) Population and Resources: Fact and Interpre-
tation, in Resources, Environment and Population: Present
Knowledge, eds K Davis and M S Bernstam, Oxford Univer-
sity Press, Oxford, 121.
Lutz, W, ed (1994) Population Development Environment: Un-
derstanding their Interactions in Mauritius, Springer-Verlag,
Berlin.
Notestein, F W (1945) Population the Long View, in Food
For the World, ed T W Schultz, University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, IL, 3657.
Tabah, L (1989) From One Demographic Transition to Another,
Popul. Bull. UN, 28, 124.
Development
see Development and Global Environmental
Change (Opening essay, Volume 5)
Discounting
Discounting is a method of weighing monetary values
that occur in different time periods (Portney and Weyant,
1999). The construction of a dam, for example, entails large
expenditures on labor and materials while the dam is being
constructed; revenues from hydropower accrue over the
next 100 years, say, with relatively minor operating costs.
Will the value of electricity over the next 100 years pay
for the construction costs and provide investors a market
return? Investors convert values at different time periods
to a present value equivalent by discounting to the present.
One dollar put in the bank at 10% interest is worth $1.10 in
a year, thus $1.10 (a year from now) has a present value of
$1. If the $1 were left in the bank for two years, it would be
worth $1.21 (11 11), or $1 (two years from now) has a
present value of 1 121 D 0826. More generally, investors
are interested in the net present value (NPV), i.e., whether
the present value of the benets is greater than the present
value of the costs.
NPV D
n

t
0
B
t
C
t
1 Cr
n
1
where B
t
is the benet or revenue in year t , C
t
is the costs
in year t , and r is the rate of interest.
Economists justify discounting future benets and costs
in public decisions because both investors and consumers
appear to discount future returns and costs. Furthermore,
future harms can be offset by investing pennies today.
DISCOUNTING 215
For example, suppose one tonne of carbon dioxide (CO
2
)
emissions in the year 2000 imposes $1000 of costs on indi-
viduals living in the year 2100. With investments earning
8%, those generating the emissions could offset the $1000
loss by investing a mere $0.45 today.
A very important caveat is in order. Discounting is
inappropriate when society determines on ethical grounds
that future generations should have the right to particular
environmental or other conditions. Howarth and Norgaard
(1995) have shown that when rights are assigned to future
generations, the economy can still operate efciently. For
example, people may determine today that it is unethical to
subject future generations to the unknown risks of global
warming. Climate change would be averted on ethical
grounds. The economy can still function efciently given
the new understanding of the rights of future generations,
but those in the present generation who benet from the
prior distribution of rights would be worse off.
REFERENCES
Howarth, R B and Norgaard, R B (1995) Intergenerational Cho-
ice Under Global Environmental Change, Chapter 6, in The
Handbook of Environmental Economics, ed D W Bromley,
Blackwell, Cambridge, MA.
Portney, P R and Weyant, J P, eds (1999) Discounting and Inter-
generational Equity, Resources for the Future, Washington,
DC.
RICHARD B NORGAARD USA
Dominion Theology
see Christianity and the Environment
(Volume 5); Theology (Volume 5)
E
Earth Art
see Art and the Environment (Volume 5);
Landscape, Urban Landscape, and the Human
Shaping of the Environment (Volume 5)
Earth Charter
The success of such global efforts as the International
Declaration on Human Rights led planners of the UNCED
to initiate negotiations for an Earth Charter. Beginning
in August 1990, the Road to Rio process of preparatory
meetings aspired to draft an inspiring, meaningful and
relevant call to a new relationship between humanity and
the biosphere. The effort engaged many non-governmental
organizations (NGOs), particularly those within the faith
community. Various drafts were circulated by the Society of
Friends, the Buddhists and the Franciscan Institute (devoted
to the life of Saint Francis of Assisi).
But negotiations fell apart before the 1992 Earth Sum-
mit. In an exchange that captured the differing visions of
delegations, north and south, Canadian Ambassador Arthur
Campeau urged that the statement be free of United Nations
(UN) bureaucrat language; that it be simple, clear and
inspiring, the sort of document you could hang on a childs
bedroom wall. To which a delegate from a developing
country responded, Our children dont have bedrooms.
The failure to achieve an Earth Charter saddened a num-
ber of its promoters, notably secretary general of UNCED,
Maurice Strong. It was Strong who subsequently ensured
that the fth anniversary of Rio (Rio Plus 5, March 1997)
launched a renewed effort to draft an Earth Charter. Strong
co-chaired an Earth Charter Commission, with former Pre-
sident of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbechev, and included an
impressive roster of past and current heads of government,
celebrities, indigenous people, parliamentarians, religious
leaders, youth and activists. The Commission released a
benchmark draft in March 1997 and held a three year pro-
cess of public outreach and debate. The chief drafter, Steven
Rockefeller of Middlebury College, Vermont, traveled the
world collecting thousands of interventions. Difcult bal-
ancing and negotiation took place to develop a document
that could be acceptable across various and very diverse
cultures, religions and social norms. In March 2000, the
group met to nalize and approve the document. It will be
presented to the UN at the special session marking 10 years
since the Earth Summit in 2002.
The Earth Charter attempts to set out a framework of
ethics and values to re-dene the way humanity inter-
acts with the natural world. Unlike previous environmental
statements, such as the Stockholm and Rio Declarations, the
Earth Charter has a profoundly spiritual basis. It acknowl-
edges the concern for individuals within a species to be
protected from cruelty. It enunciates the need for the prac-
tice of non-violence and not merely the absence of conict.
The Earth Charters fundamental commitments are to:
respect the Earth in all its diversity; care for the community of
life with love, understanding and compassion; build democratic
societies that are just, sustainable and peaceful; secure Earths
bounty and beauty for future generations.
The intent is to secure a place for the Earth Charter as
soft law through seeking widespread public support from
around the world.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada
Earth Day
The rst Earth Day, April 22nd, 1970, was nearly exclu-
sively an event observed only within the US, but by its
13th anniversary, April 22nd, 2000, the event was global
and involved half a billion people in over 100 countries.
Earth Days humble beginnings grew out of the anti-
Vietnam War movements effective use of teach-ins on
college campuses in the 1960s. US Senator Gaylord Nel-
son and Denis Hayes organized the rst Earth Day as
a consciousness-raising and educational event. The US
ECOCENTRIC, BIOCENTRIC, GAIACENTRIC 217
was reeling from news that Lake Erie was dead due to
eutrophication, as proclaimed on the cover of Life maga-
zine, and the chilling warnings of Rachel Carsons Silent
Spring, less than a decade before. Earth Day gained rapid
acceptance and was marked by a Presidential Proclamation
signed by the then US President Richard Nixon. Large US
corporations, such as General Motors and Coca Cola, joined
in declarations of corporate environmentalism.
The success of the 1970 event can be tied to the passage
of key environmental protection legislation in the US,
such as the Clean Air Act, as well as the creation of
governmental environment departments, a trend that was
solidied by the rst United Nations Conference on the
Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972.
Earth Days founders had initially not intended the day
to be celebrated annually. Subsequent Earth Days have
reected the ebb and ow of public environmental support.
Earth Day 1971 was a much smaller affair than that in 1970;
while Earth Day 1990 was huge, Earth Day 1991 was nearly
invisible. Denis Hayes was once again the chief organizer
of Earth Day 2000, which focused on climate change. As
a millennial bash it succeeded in gaining media attention,
with a full special edition of Time magazine devoted to it.
April 22nd has emerged after three decades as having a
rm hold on the name Earth Day.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada
Earth First!
Earth First! (EF!) is the brainchild of an angry environ-
mentalist and self described redneck, Vietnam veteran Dave
Foreman. Al Gore, in Earth in the Balance (published in
1991), quotes Foreman as saying, Its time for a warrior
society to rise up out of the earth and throw itself in front of
the juggernaut of destruction, to be antibodies against the
human pox thats ravaging this precious beautiful planet.
Seeing so much destruction of vanishing wilderness in
the US, Foreman established a group under the banner
No compromise in defense of the earth. Unlike other
environmental groups working within the system to achieve
change, EF! adopted tactics outside the law, espousing
monkey wrenching and direct action. EF!, which has since
disavowed the practice, spiked trees to discourage logging
(a spiked tree can cause serious injury to a logger whose
chain saw meets with unexpected metal).
In 1989, Foreman and three other EF! members were
arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on
charges of conspiracy to blow up a dam. The FBI had
inltrated the group and all discussions of explosives had
originated with the FBI agent. The EF! members were
acquitted.
Other EF! activists have experienced similar suspicious
acts and violent sabotage. Pacic Northwest anti-logging
activist Judy Barry was blown up in her car. She survived,
but was seriously disabled. She maintained until her death
years later that she had not been transporting the explosives
as claimed by the authorities.
EF! continues to attract primarily young eco-activists.
EF! is currently active in 13 countries. The group disavows
hierarchies and conventional organizational structure. Its
UK web page proclaims, EF! has no central ofce, no
paid workers, no decision-making bodies, and is not even
an organization in the normal sense of the word.
Its approach has led to a number of similar direct action
groups, such as the Ruckus Society.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada
Ecocentric, Biocentric,
Gaiacentric
Ecocentrism is an ideology or worldview that centers on
and prioritizes the whole planetary ecosystem as the prime
source of value and the proper focus of our attention.
The term is virtually synonymous with biocentric (center-
ing on the whole biosphere) and Gaiacentric (centring on
Gaia the earth, whose systems form one living organism).
Such foci distinguish this worldview from anthropocen-
trism, whose humanistic priorities regard human percep-
tions and interests as the source of all value in nature.
Ecocentric/biocentric/Gaiacentric ideology underlies
deep ecology environmentalism. Its central ethic assigns
intrinsic value to all animate and inanimate elements in
the cosmos value, that is, which would reside in these
elements even if human beings were not there to attribute
their own values (for instance, economic utility) to nature.
Intrinsic value implies that the role of humans is simply
that of equal members of the ecological community, with
no preemptory rights over other species or other parts of the
system. Ecocentrism also emphasizes the importance of bal-
ance and interconnectedness in nature and of retaining the
unity, stability, diversity, and harmony of all ecosystems.
Ecocentrism reects the inuences of early 12th cen-
tury organicist philosophy, 19th century Romanticism and
anarchism, and of an arcadian tradition in ecological science
and in literature. This last is manifest in Aldo Leopolds
Land Ethic (1949, A Sand County Almanack), which holds
that A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity,
218 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
beauty, and stability of the biotic community. It is wrong
when it tends otherwise. Some other ecocentric principles
derived from Leopolds land ethic include: everything is
connected to everything else; the whole is greater than the
sum of the parts (synergy); human and non-human nature
are a unity (see Leopold, Aldo, Volume 5).
From these principles, and from the notion of a whole
ecological community of which animals, plants and humans
are all equal members and interdependent parts, it is sug-
gested that the environment has direct rights, that it qualies
for moral personhood and that it is deserving of a direct
duty. Ecocentrism then clearly places the environment on a
moral par with humans, giving it a biotic right. If applied in
practice, such a right would foster environmental protection
and preservation over the approach of conservation the
latter implying managed change in accordance with con-
siderations of economic utility. It would also confer legal
standing on wildlife and other elements in nature, enabling
environmentalists to defend them in court against the dam-
aging effects of potential development, as has happened in
the US.
DAVID PEPPER UK
Ecocentrism
see Environmental Ethics (Volume 5)
Ecofeminism
Karen J Warren
Macalester College, St Paul, MN, USA
The term ecofeminism was coined in 1974 by Francoise
dEaubonne to call attention to womens potential to bring
about an ecological revolution (dEaubonne, 1974). Unlike
earlier feminisms, which focused on sex-roles, equal rights,
equity in the workplace, educational opportunities for
women (e.g., liberal feminism), socioeconomic conditions
of women as workers (e.g., Marxist feminism), ecofeminism
understands feminism to be a movement to end all sys-
tems of domination, including the domination of non-human
animals and nature. Since 1974, ecofeminism has surfaced
throughout the globe in the form of both women-initiated,
grassroots environmental actions and interdisciplinary per-
spectives on the inextricable interconnections among human
systems of unjusti ed domination both of humans and
earth others. The distinctiveness of ecofeminism, then, is
that it is a feminist environmentalism and an environmen-
tal feminism. Just as there is not one feminism, there is not
one ecofeminism. There is no one, uni ed ecofeminist per-
spective on environmental issues. What ecofeminists have in
common is a commitment to the historical interconnections
among human systems of domination (including the unjus-
ti ed domination of non-human nature), and to replacing
oppressive practices, policies, and philosophies with ones
that are not. What makes ecofeminism feminist is its start-
ing point: It begins with women and sex/gender analysis to
call attention to the interconnected exploitations and lib-
erations of women, other human others (e.g., people of
color, poor people, children, colonized peoples) and earth
others. What makes ecofeminism ecological is that non-
human animals and nature are integral to the practice and
theory of ecofeminism. Ecofeminism not only makes visi-
ble the ways in which the well-being of the natural envi-
ronment is linked to the well-being of diverse groups of
humans; it also expands on the notion of a human self as an
ecological self. Using insights from both the environmen-
tal movement and ecology in the framing of ecologically
responsible and sustainable policies, practices and philoso-
phies, ecofeminism has emerged as a political movement
among all racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, gendered, and geo-
graphical locations.
Ecofeminism is represented by a variety of feminist
perspectives and practices. It nds expression in a wide
range of (mostly) women-initiated, community activist
initiatives around such issues as air and water pollution,
biodiversity and cultural diversity, deserti cation and
deforestation, indigenous agriculture and food production,
toxins and hazardous waste disposal, global warming and
acid rain, human overpopulation and habitat destruction,
species preservation, development and biotechnology.
The slogan of ecofeminism might well be: nature is
a feminist issue. At the heart of ecofeminist practice
and theory are the various interconnections historical,
causal, empirical, economic, political, scienti c, symbolic
and literary, linguistic, conceptual, ethical, religious
and philosophical between systems and practices of
domination. As a movement of global environmental
change, the main project of ecofeminism is two-fold: to
make visible the ways in which the exploitation and
destruction of the non-human environment is tied to
the exploitation of women, people of color, children,
and the poor; and to develop policies, practices, and
philosophies which undo and overcome these interconnected
dominations. There is literally no area of environmental
concern that falls outside the interest of ecofeminist
activism and theory. This is not surprising, considering
the intimate connections between the health, status, and
well-being of the non-human environment and the health,
ECOFEMINISM 219
status, and well-being of women and other human
others cross-culturally now and in the foreseeable
future. According to ecofeminists, any plausible, workable,
responsible agenda for the 21st century will include
ecofeminist insights into and solutions to the globally
interlocking systems of exploitation and domination.
EMPIRICAL WOMENNATURE
INTERCONNECTIONS
Since the starting point of ecofeminism is women, at the
outset ecofeminism focuses on womennature interconnec-
tions. But since all women are of some race/ethnicity, socio-
economic status, geographic location, sexual orientation,
and marital status, ecofeminism is also about racenature,
classnature, geographic locationnature, sexual orienta-
tionnature, and marital statusnature interconnections.
For simplicity, this essay subsumes these varieties of inter-
connections under the generic rubric womennature inter-
connections.
One way to reveal the sorts of concerns that
characterize ecofeminism is to consider empirical data on
womennature interconnections. Such data help to clarify
why nature is a feminist issue.
Trees
Tree shortages are a problem in many parts of
India. Historically, rst-world development policies that
replaced indigenous, multispecies forests with monoculture
eucalyptus and teak plantations solved the problem of too
few trees, but in a way that disproportionately affected the
livelihoods of local women. Traditionally, women in rural
India have gendered responsibilities to maintain domestic
economies, which are highly dependent on trees and tree
products for food, fodder, fuel, herbs, dyes, medicines,
household utensils and building materials, and income-
generating activities. Monoculture eucalyptus is unpopular
among local women because it provides no food, fodder,
herbs, dyes, and medicines and is a problematic fuel.
Replacement of indigenous forests with eucalyptus thereby
affects womens abilities to maintain household economies,
especially when these women also must take on the labor
tasks of the local men who move to city areas to work in
the eucalyptus plantations.
Food
Women farmers globally grow at least 59% of the
worlds food; in parts of Africa, women grow 8090%
of the food. Women farmers tend to work longer
hours, have fewer assets and lower incomes than men
farmers, primarily because their access to credit is
limited. Agricultural policies and practices exported from
the Northern Hemisphere (the North) to the Southern
Hemisphere (the South) often do not recognize the
full extent of womens contributions to all aspects of
agricultural work (e.g., in plowing, planting, harvesting,
weeding, processing and storing crops, and caring for
livestock), involve technological improvements which are
not aimed at training women or which develop products
inappropriate from the standpoint of local women (e.g.,
solar stoves for women in Africa who cook before dawn and
after dusk, or maize shellers that are more time-consuming
to use than when women shell by hand).
Water
Less that 50% of the population of the South has a source
of potable water or facilities for sewage disposal. Since
women and children in the South perform most of the
water collection and distribution work, it is women and
children who are disproportionately harmed by the presence
of unsanitary water. Also, the time spent by women and
children in water collection in Africa and Asia (from
517 h each week) is time unavailable for other activities
(e.g., attending school). Droughts and oods exacerbate the
situation. Droughts and oods are among the most serious
natural disasters in the South, contributing to desertication,
deforestation, and soil erosion on a large scale. But it is
poor people, especially women and children, who are most
seriously affected by these natural disasters, since they
constitute the largest group who live in those areas.
The North also has water-related problems that
disproportionately affect women, communities of color, and
the poor. The presence of lead and leaking chemicals,
as well as the improper disposal of hazardous wastes,
has contributed to groundwater contamination of municipal
water supplies in all parts of the US. Ground water,
the drinking water source for nearly half of the US
population, disproportionately affects inner city poor,
especially pregnant women, women of color, children, and
the elderly, more than other groups.
Toxins
The United Church of Christs Commission on Racial
Justice published an already classic report in 1987 entitled
Toxic Waste and Race in the United States. The commission
found that race is the most important determinant in the
location of hazardous waste in the US. Three out of
every ve African and Hispanic Americans, and more
than half of all Asian Pacic Islanders and American
Indians live in communities with uncontrolled toxic waste
sites. Emelle, Alabama, which is almost 80% African
American, houses the nations largest hazardous waste
landll, receiving toxins from 45 states. Probably the
greatest concentration of hazardous waste sites in the US
220 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
is on the predominantly African American and Hispanic
south side of Chicago. Navajo Indians are the primary
workforce in the mining of uranium in the US. However,
the dumping of uranium tailings on Navajo (and other
American Indian) lands has resulted in higher percentages
of health risks (e.g., miscarriages for pregnant women,
gynecological cancers, cleft palate and other birth defects)
than non-Indian populations.
According to ecofeminism, awareness of these empiri-
cal interconnections between the status and treatment of
women and other human sub-dominant groups, and the
status and treatment of non-human nature, must be part
of any informed environmental practice, policy, or philos-
ophy. But ecofeminism doesnt stop there. Awareness of
other sorts of womennature interconnections must also be
made visible, addressed, and, where unjustied domination
is involved, replaced by life-afrming practices, policies,
and philosophies.
ADDITIONAL WOMENNATURE
INTERCONNECTIONS
These examples provide concrete illustrations of ways in
which the exploitation of women is intimately connected
to the destruction of the earth. They also make visible
why sensitivity to the plights and expertise of women and
other human sub-dominants is important to any informed
feminism, environmental activism, and environmental
policy. But these empirical connections are just one sort of
womennature interconnection of interest to ecofeminists.
Consider some of the other ones.
Some ecofeminists have focused on historical intercon-
nections between the domination of women (and other
humans others) and the domination of Earth. Ecofeminist
philosophers, for example, have been among those who
trace patterns of domination to the Western philosophical
tradition of rationalism, according to which the mental
trait of reason or rationality is both the essence (or hall-
mark) of humanness and that which elevates (at least some)
humans above the inferior, physical, bodily, corporeal realm
of nature (Plumwood, 1993). Drawing on the dualisms of
mind/body, reason/emotion, culture/nature, that which is
associated with mind, reason and culture is claimed to be
superior to that which is associated with body, emotion, and
nature. In systems of domination, the subordinated others
(e.g., women, slaves, children) have historically been iden-
tied with the inferior physical world of nature; the justied
domination of these other human others is based on their
alleged association with what is biological, natural, bodily,
or physical.
Ecofeminist historian Carolyn Merchant provides a dif-
ferent account. Merchant argues that the death of nature
occurred between 15001700, when an older world order
was replaced by a reductionist, mechanistic world view
of modern science, which sanctioned the exploitation of
nature, unchecked commercial and industrial expansion,
and the subordination of women. According to Merchant
(1980, 2)
The metaphor of the earth as a nurturing mother was gradually
to vanish as a dominant image as the Scientic Revolution
proceeded to mechanize and to rationalize the world view. The
second image, nature as disorder, called forth an important
modern idea, that of power over nature. Two new ideas, those
of mechanism and of the domination and mastery of nature,
became core concepts of the modern world.
This change in controlling imagery was directly related
to changes in human attitudes and behavior toward the
earth. Whereas the nurturing Earth image can be viewed
as a cultural constraint restricting the types of socially and
morally sanctioned human actions allowable with respect
to Earth, the new images of mastery and domination
functioned as cultural sanctions for the denudation of
nature. According to Merchant, the change in dominant
nature imagery from organism to machine permitted the
removal of classical moral constraints on how one treats
mother nature, a living organism. The mechanistic metaphor
thereby helped sanction the exploitation of inert, passive
nature as object of study.
These historical interconnections raise important concep-
tual issues about social systems of oppression and dom-
ination, conceptions of the human self, and the nature
of human responsibilities to the non-human world. For
example, ecofeminist philosophers have provided analyses
of fundamental features of oppressive conceptual frame-
works that underlie systems of domination (Warren, 1990).
A conceptual framework is a set of basic beliefs, values,
attitudes, and assumptions about oneself and ones world.
It is a historically located, socially constructed thought
world a lens through which one sees and interprets the
world. When a conceptual framework is oppressive (e.g., a
sexist, racist, or classist conceptual framework), the beliefs
function to justify the unjustied domination of the other
(e.g., women, people of color, the underclass).
There are ve noteworthy features of an oppressive
conceptual framework: (a) value-hierarchical, updown,
thinking; (b) oppositional and mutually exclusive value-
dualisms (eitheror thinking); (c) conceptions of power
which advantage the power of ups over downs; (d) concep-
tions of privilege which systematically advantage the ups
over downs; and (e) a logic of domination: a moral premise
which justi es the subordination of downs by ups on the
grounds that the ups have a morally relevant trait which the
downs, as downs, lack. Whether the conceptual framework
is sexist, racist, classist, heterosexist, colonialist, or ethno-
centric, insofar as they are oppressive conceptual frame-
works, these ve features seem to be shared in common
(Warren, 2000).
ECOFEMINISM 221
These basic conceptual interconnections among social
systems of domination are important to ecofeminist
philosophy. Oppressive conceptual schemes justify relation-
ships of domination and subordination through a logic of
domination, which asserts that whatever is up deserves to be
up and is morally justied in treating as inferior whatever
is down. When women, people of color, the poor or chil-
dren are downs in up down relationships of domination
and subordination, their justied subordination often has
rested historically on their alleged association with the infe-
rior, non-mental realm of animals and nature. In this way,
sexism is conceptually tied to naturism, i.e., the unjustied
domination of animals and non-human nature.
There are two basic ways this conceptual link occurs.
First, sexism and naturism are linked through an
oppressive conceptual framework characterized by a logic
of domination. Since all feminists must oppose the logic of
domination (required by patriarchal arguments for sexism),
and since the arguments for the domination of non-
human nature presuppose the same logic of domination, all
feminists must oppose the arguments for the domination
of non-human nature. The logic of traditional feminism
thereby requires extending feminism beyond a concern
with sexism, or even a concern with all forms of human
subordination, to a concern with naturism; naturism must
also be included about the systems of domination that
feminism opposes (Warren, 1990).
The second conceptual reason sexism and naturism
are linked has to do with the concepts of gender and
nature. The concept of gender is socially, historically, and
materially constructed. Both the concept women, and the
identities of particular women, are constructed from and
reect such factors as race/ethnicity, class, age, affectional
orientation, ability, geographic location, and religion; to be
a woman is to be a woman of a certain race/ethnic, class,
age, affectional orientation, ability, geographic location,
and religion. This means that there is no pure gender;
gender always occurs in conjunction with race, class, age,
affectional orientation, geographic location.
Similarly, the concept of nature is socially and humanly
constructed; it is not a xed, static, self-evident, given or
absolute concept. What is meant by nature, and even what
counts as a natural object for humans, is constructed from
and reect such factors as the race/ethnicity, class, age,
affectional orientation, geographic location, and religion of
humans who name, describe, judge, understand, and interact
with nature. The meanings of nature are constructed out of
human values, beliefs, attitudes and assumptions different
and differing human conceptual frameworks.
Obviously, the claim that women and nature are social
constructions does not deny that there are actual humans
and actual non-human natural entities. One can hug a
human, climb a tree, swim a river, cultivate a plant, destroy
an ecosystem, or enjoy being in nature. These entities (e.g.,
humans, trees, nature) are physical realities. But what is
meant by human, tree, or nature, and what constitute the
identities of humans, non-human natural entities, and nature
are social realities as well. These social realities are social
constructions. What constitutes country for Australian
aboriginal peoples is not what Europeans mean by country,
land, landscape, property, or wilderness. In the words of
anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose, the closest European
and American-derived expression is nourishing terrain, a
place that gives and receives life. Not just imagined or
represented, it is lived in and lived with. Country is sacred,
alive, conscious, the law, place, managed, owned, land.
Country knows, hears, smells, takes notice, takes care, is
quiet, dangerous, lonely, sorry or happy or sad, is healthy,
sick, or not so good. Country is criss-crossed with song
lines and the tracks of the Dreamings: walking, slithering,
crawling, ying, chasing, hunting, weeping, dying, giving
birth (Rose, 1996, 35). The relationships between people
and their country is a a kinship relationship, and like
relations among kin, there are obligations of nurturence.
People and country take care of each other (Rose, 1996,
49).
Such linguistic differences about what something is
called are important to ecofeminism. As many philosophers
(e.g., Wittgenstein) have argued, the language one uses
is deeply embedded in conceptions of oneself and ones
world ones conceptual framework. When that language
is sexist or naturist, it reects and reinforces conceptions
of women and non-human nature as inferior to, having less
status, value, or prestige than, that which is identied as
male, masculine, or human (i.e., male).
Such is the case with the language used historically in
Western societies to describe women and nature. Women
are described in animal (nature) terms as pets, dogs, cats,
pigs, cows, sows, foxes, chicks, serpents, bitches, beavers,
mares, old mares, old bats, old hens, mother hens, pussies,
pussycats, cheetahs, bird-brains, hare-brains, elephants, and
whales. Language that animalizes or naturalizes women in
a patriarchal culture where animals are seen as inferior to
humans (men) thereby reinforces and authorizes womens
inferior status. Similarly, language that feminizes nature in
a patriarchal culture where women are seen as subordinate
or inferior reinforces and authorizes the domination of
nature. Mother nature is raped, mastered, conquered, mined,
controlled, poked, prodded, and pried into; her secrets are
penetrated and her womb is put into service by the man
of science. Virgin timber is felled, cut down; fertile (not
virile) soil is tilled and land that lies fallow is barren (not
impotent) and useless, like a woman who cannot conceive a
child. The exploitation of nature and animals is justied by
language which feminizes them; the exploitation of women
is justied by language which naturalizes women.
Just as the justication for the dominations of women and
non-human nature is reinforced by sexist naturist language,
222 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
so too the justication for the domination of people of color
is reinforced by racist-naturist language. For example, in
the US, the justication for dominating African American
men was bolstered by language and images of sub-dominant
children, animals, and nature. Slaves were mere brutes,
animals, dogs, coons, apes. African American men were
denied the rights of citizenship as a subordinate and
inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the
dominant race (Stone, 1974; n 19). The legal status of
slaves as things, mere property or chattel was accepted law
in the 1850s.
Languages of domination are crucial to effective
implementations of the logic of domination by colonizers.
Standard European and Anglo-American land-use attitudes
and descriptions of wilderness involve the peculiar notion
that if one cannot see traces of ones own culture in the
land, then the land must be natural or empty of culture
(Rose, 1996). Terra nullius (land that was not owned) was
the ofcial doctrine of (white) Australia until overturned
by the High Courts Mabo Decision in 1995. That decision
marks the rst time Aboriginal and Islander peoples
occupation and ownership of country was formally and
publicly acknowledged.
The view that land with no ownership is uninhabited
wilderness is familiar in the US as well. Wilderness is often
conceived as wild, idle, worthless frontier until tamed and
cultivated through the white settlers agriculture. Land that
just lies there, barren, useless, uncultivated, for example,
untouched virgin prairie, has no value until domesticated
by the white mans plow. White racism is not just a
social construct around skin color and ethnicity; it is also
an ecological construct, one that reects and reinforces
ecological as well as social factors.
Many ecofeminists argue that cultural transformation
must occur if these interlocking systems of domina-
tion are to be eliminated. Since historically there are
important symbolic interconnections between the dom-
ination of women (and other human others) and the
domination of non-human nature, one must examine
a cultures images, rituals, rites, ceremonies, stories,
myths, songs, literature, theologies, religions and spiritual
practices.
Some ecofeminists have examined the religious and
theological symbols that affect our cultural views about
humans and nature. For example, ecofeminist theologian
Elizabeth Dodson Gray argues that the Christian biblical
tradition is a hierarchical order of creation, a pyramid of
dominance and status, where woman comes after and below
man, children come after women, and pets, animals, plants
and nature itself follow, in descending order of status and
worth. Gray argues that we need to think ourselves out of
such a patriarchal conceptual trap by revisioning a theology
of creation that is not a hierarchical pyramid of dominance
and subordination (Gray, 1979).
Other ecofeminists (spiritual ecofeminists) agree with
Gray. Despite their very vocal critics, including ecofeminist
critics, spiritual ecofeminists (e.g., Spretnak, 1982) argue
that non-patriarchal, earth-based spiritualities are not only
necessary to any healing relationship between humans and
the earth, but to any liberatory ecofeminist politics. The
politics of womens spirituality must be a Green politics.
Some ecofeminists turn to literature, particularly
womens nature writing, to affect a cultural transformation.
Paula Gunn Allen, Margaret Atwood, Rachel Bagby,
Annie Dillard, China Galland, Sally Gearhart, Susan
Grifn, Linda Hogan, Winona LaDuke, Ursala Le Guinn,
Marge Piercy, Leslie Marmon Silko, Alice Walker, and
Terry Tempest Williams are just a few of the women
who have explored these interconnections through their
stories, poems, novels, and essays. Ecofeminist literature
is important because cultural images reect not only who
we are but help shape who we become. Attitudes toward
animals, plants, mountains, rivers what Leopold (1949)
refers collectively to as the land reect deeply seated
values about culture, nature, wilderness and the wild,
and human nature. Some nature writers romanticize and
uncritically idealize wilderness. Others imagine a wild
landscape inhabited by humans who occupy a unique place
as co-members of the ecological community. Still others
challenge the very concepts of nature and wilderness,
and the historical construction of a nature/culture dualism,
which puts (some) humans in oppositional superiority over
nature. The emerging eld of ecofeminist literary criticism
examines the political dimensions and ramications of these
concepts within ideologies of domination, while seeking to
develop literature and criticism that emphasizes appropriate
and edifying human relationships within the ecological
community.
When one challenges cultural sources of systems of dom-
ination, epistemological claims also get challenged. Whose
knowledge? and Knowledge according to whom?
become important questions, since ecofeminist theory and
practice always examines the social context in which
epistemological claims are generated. Women in the so-
called developing world who have gender responsibilities
for managing forests, for example, may have invaluable
technical knowledge about multiple uses of trees, based
on their hands-on, daily, lived experience as forest man-
agers. Their experiential ways of knowing their episte-
mology may challenge mainstream, Western conceptions
of the objectivity, value-neutrality, and impartiality of gen-
uinely scientic knowledge claims.
Epistemological worries often interact with psychologi-
cal ones. Ecofeminist sociologist Ariel Salleh, for example,
challenges ethical and epistemological positions that em-
body a distinctly masculine sensibility, which desires to
transcend nature and culture. Salleh argues that since
ecofeminism reveals the patriarchal conceptual foundation
ECOFEMINISM 223
of the continued destruction of the natural environment,
what is needed is that the unconscious, psychological con-
nection between women and nature needs to be made
conscious, and the hierarchical fallacies of the great chain of
being acknowledged, in order for any real growth towards
a sane, humane, ecological future (Salleh, 1984).
Given the nature of some of these interconnections
between the treatment of women and the treatment of non-
human nature, it is not surprising that perhaps the most visi-
ble ecofeminist theory and activism has been in the political
arena. Conferences, workshops, direct actions, and grass-
roots organizing around environmental issues have been ini-
tiated globally by a new radical core of low-income women
environmentalists. These women are motivated by the irra-
tionalities of capital-intensive growth and the destruction of
their domestic economies. Whether it is the Chipko move-
ment in India, the Womens Pentagon Actions in the US, the
Seminar on Ecofeminism at the United Nations Conference
on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro (1992),
or the varieties of global women-initiated actions for bet-
ter health care, reproductive rights, and environmentally
safe neighborhoods, ecofeminist activism has an interna-
tional presence as a distinctly feminist and environmental
movement.
Lastly, much of the scholarly literature of ecofeminism
has focused on environmental ethics. Minimally, the goal
of ecofeminist ethics is to develop theories and practices
concerning humans and the natural environment that are
not male-biased and which provide a guide to action in
the pre-feminist present. This has involved the develop-
ment of a variety of ecofeminist ethical positions and
practices, where notions of care, loving perception, friend-
ship, sharing, appropriate reciprocity, and kinship emerge
as morally relevant and important values. One needs only
to look at the range of ecofeminist positions regarding such
practices as factory farming, vivisection, worldwide traf-
c in wild animals, violence toward women, health care,
reproductive technologies, the location of hazardous waste,
and environmental conservation and preservation to see the
impact of ecofeminist moral theory in moral practice.
Since its inception as a distinct feminism, environmen-
talism, and form of feminist practice in 1974, ecofeminism
has emerged as an important, timely, powerful move-
ment at local, national, international, and global levels.
As a social and political movement, ecofeminists have
taken the lead in exploring the roles of science, develop-
ment and technology in the development of environmental
policies (e.g., on biodiversity, global warming), practices
(e.g., the development of biotechnologies), and decision-
making structures (e.g., for implementing Agenda 21),
which make the expertise of women and indigenous peoples
central to both the analysis and resolution of pressing envi-
ronmental problems. Ecofeminist activism has produced
change through numerous kinds of action, including direct
action, civil disobedience, strikes, boycotts, demonstrations,
lobbying, and other more traditionally recognized forms of
political action (Sturgeon, 1997). Ecofeminist activists have
engaged in coalition building among and across different
constituencies (e.g., peace, environmental, womens, anti-
racism, anti-colonialism, animal rights movements). And
ecofeminist activists have raised awareness about the inter-
connections among all political and economic structures of
domination and exploitation.
As a theoretical position, ecofeminist scholarship has
broadened and deepened Western and non-Western views
in such different arenas as the arts, economics, ethics,
geography, history, literature, philosophy, politics, religion,
sociology, and science. It has helped shape a new sense
of our human selves as ecological, relational selves who
are both similar to and different from non-human nature in
distinct and important ways. It has been a leader in the envi-
ronmental justice movement, and has helped white Western
feminism to expand its self-conception to recognize not
only the interconnections among forms of human domina-
tion and liberation based on gender, race, class, affectional
orientation, age, and geographic location, but among these
and the domination and liberation of non-human animals
and nature.
Perhaps the most important theoretical contribution of
ecofeminism is simply the starting point of its environmen-
tal analysis: using concrete empirical data and womens felt,
lived experiences to show the very real interconnections
between the plight of women, other human others, and the
domination of non-human nature. This starting point makes
any adequate theory or practice of feminism, environmen-
talism, or human liberationism intimately and inextricably
interconnected.
The remarkable cross-cultural ourishing of ecofeminism
internationally since dEaubonne (1974) coined the term
is testimony to its power and promise. Ecofeminism is
visible in the practical, policy, and theoretical spheres. It
is grassroots, multiracial/multiethnic, local and global. It
is action-oriented, giving voice to local women-initiated
environmental practices. It is forward-looking and transfor-
mative in focus, moving us beyond harmful social systems
of domination, which endanger all life on earth. Accord-
ing to ecofeminism, any feminism, environmentalism, or
environmental policy which fails to include ecofeminist
insights into the unjustied and interconnected dominations
of women, other human others, and non-human nature will
simply be inadequate for the needs of the 21st century.
REFERENCES
dEaubonne, F (1974) Le Feminisme ou La Mort, Pierre Horay,
Paris.
Gray, E D (1979) Green Paradise Lost, Roundtable Press, Welles-
ley, MA.
224 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Leopold, A (1949) The Land Ethic, in A Sand County Almanac
and Sketches Here and There, Oxford University Press, New
York.
Merchant, C (1980) The Death of Nature, Harper and Row, San
Francisco, CA.
Plumwood, V (1993) Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Rout-
ledge, London.
Rose, D B (1996) Nourishing Terrains, Australian Heritage Com-
mission, Canberra.
Salleh, A K (1984) Deeper than Deep Ecology: The Eco-feminist
Connection, Environ. Ethics, 6, 339345.
Spretnak, C, ed (1982) The Politics of Womens Spirituality, Dou-
bleday, Garden City, NY.
Stone, C (1974) Should Trees Have Standing? William Kaufmann,
Los Altos, CA.
Sturgeon, N (1997) Ecofeminist Natures, Routledge, London.
Warren, K J (2000) Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspec-
tive on What it is and Why it Matters, Rowman and Littleeld,
Lanham, MD.
Warren, K J, ed (1997) Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature,
Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN.
FURTHER READING
Adams, C, ed (1993) Ecofeminism and the Sacred, Continuum,
New York.
Anderson, L, ed (1991) Sisters of the Earth, Vintage Press, New
York.
Cuomo, C J (1998) Feminism and Ecological Communities, Rout-
ledge, London.
Gaard, G, ed (1993) Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature, Tem-
ple University Press, PA.
Kolodny, A (1984) The Land Before Her, University of North
Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC.
Mellor, M (1997) Feminism and Ecology, New York University
Press, New York.
Mies, M and Shiva, V (1993) Ecofeminism, Zed Books, Atlantic
Highlands, NJ.
Murphy, P D (1995) Literature, Nature, and Other, State Univer-
sity of New York, Albany, NY.
Ruether, R R (1974) New Woman, New Earth, The Seabury Press,
New York.
Shiva, V (1988) Staying Alive, Zed Books, London.
Warren, K J, ed (1996) Ecological Feminist Philosophies, Indiana
University Press, Bloomington, IN.
Warren, K J (1990) The Power and the Promise of Ecological
Feminism, Environ. Ethics, 12, 125146.
Zahava, I, ed (1988) Through Other Eyes, The Crossing Press,
Freedom, CA.
Ecological Economics
see Ecological Economics (Opening essay,
Volume 5)
Economics and Global
Environmental Change
see Economics and Global Environmental
Change (Opening essay, Volume 5)
Economics, Environmental
see Environmental Economics (Volume 5)
Eco-socialism
Eco-socialism is a radical homocentric application of
socialist analysis and prescriptions to environmentalism.
It also modies traditional socialism to take account of
environmental issues and perspectives. Its critical analysis
of history, social change and economics draws particu-
larly on Marxs (early) writings, especially as interpreted
by William Morris. Its prescriptions often revive utopian
socialist traditions of decentralization, direct economic
democracy, communal ownership of the means of pro-
duction, etc. Hence the brand of socialism represented is
close to anarchist-communism, although there are some
major differences between eco-anarchists and eco-socialists
concerning analysis and strategies. Eco-socialisms histori-
cal materialist analysis locates the causes of contemporary
environmental abuse in the workings of the economic mode
of production of capitalism, and the institutions and world
view necessary to its functioning. Eco-socialism argues that
environmentally unsustainable development is inherent to
capitalism, therefore to end the former, the latter must be
abolished and replaced by socialism. In socialism, it is
argued, people can end the alienation from nature and from
each other that causes environmental degradation, yet pro-
duction and industry in pursuit of Enlightenment Project
ideals could continue. Such production, with distribution,
would be rationally planned perhaps by an enabling state,
or, in more anarchistic visions, by bodies representing fed-
eration of local communities and regions.
Eco-socialist society would rediscover and express our
real relationship to nature neither separation and superi-
ority, as contemporary capitalism presupposes, nor of mere
equality, as ecocentrism believes. Rather, society and nature
are dialectically related, so that each is a manifestation of
the other. Nature is socially produced, and what humans do
is natural. Socialist communities would recognize that they
are not intrinsically determined by natures limits, as deep
ecology believes. But they are likely to want to steward,
ECOSYSTEM APPROACH 225
protect and wisely manage relationships with nature, for
the benet of all community members.
DAVID PEPPER UK
Ecosystem Approach
What constitutes valid science and a valid scienti c me-
thod? That question has never been fully resolved to the
satisfaction of every informed scientist who has employed
a scienti c method that had been duly legitimated within
some network of expert and responsible peers. There have
always been critics to challenge any claim that some partic-
ular kind of science was the correct or the best one. Perhaps
a view shared most widely among scientists is that honest
and modest skepticism is a necessary ingredient within sci-
ence. An opposing view might be termed fundamentalist.
The concept that species including humans have emerged
historically within evolution, in which natural selection
plays a strong role, was presented scienti cally by Charles
Darwin and others in the mid-19th century. Some Chris-
tian scholars took exception to the whole notion of nat-
ural evolution. Skeptical scientists and theologians may
enjoy debating but fundamentalistic scientists and theolo-
gians clash.
The con ict within science concerning evolution is not
as well known as that between some scientists and some
theologians. In the mid-19th century the physicists and
chemists were using experimental methods in laboratories
to discover many laws of nature. These scientists preferred
to view the world and cosmos as a kind of clockworks in
which every phenomenon had a prior cause; cause effect
linkages could be described and explained fully in linear
deterministic terms. In principle, a fully informed scien-
tist could draw diagrams, de ne terms, write formulae and
insert numbers that altogether explained something com-
pletely. Such a scientist could achieve conceptual closure,
which presupposed that nature itself was closed to seminally
new happenings.
But the concept of evolution implied that nature was
open to the emergence of new species, say. So some
aspects of nature must remain open even though linear
laws like those of Isaac Newton, which appear to be
deterministic, may also play a role. Are universal laws only
partially successful in constraining the contextual processes
apparent in evolution? Or may there be ways of perceiving
contextual phenomena that are consistent with universal
laws, or vice versa? Generally, should a scientist start with
accepted linear universal laws and then study apparent
non-linear exceptions in particular contexts, option A. Or
should he/she start with non-linear contextual speci cs and
try to infer quasi-linear universal generalities, option B?
Perhaps a dialectical approach can be taken in an attempt
to be fair to both options. Eventually some scientist may
nd or has found a way to synthesize and transcend such
a debate.
The concepts of ecology, ecological systems and ecosys-
tems arose within geological, biological and geographic
studies that addressed the tension between these two mind-
sets, or what Magoroh Maruyama calls mindscapes. Thus
Ernst Haeckel, a contemporary of Darwin, worked at the
interface of evolution through natural selection and an
approach that has come to be called environmental deter-
minism. Later ecologists such as Arthur Tansley deliberately
chose option A, more or less. Other ecologists such as
Frederick Clements chose option B. An early stage of a
synthesis may now be emerging with a focus on complexity
as in the innovations of Lynn Margulis, James Lovelock and
many others, option C. Each approach continues to have its
protagonists entering the 21st century, though the ranks of
option C appear to be swelling at the expense of options A
and B.
According to this simplistic classi cation, three some-
what different versions of ecosystem approach can now
be encountered in the scienti c and popular literatures
that focus on biological phenomena. Within much of con-
temporary biology there may still be an underlying pre-
supposition that the disciplined, disinterested scientist can
make objective observations, conduct logically correct anal-
yses and infer valid generalities about some features of
reality. Such a presupposition may be termed determinis-
tic or positivistic. Thomas Kuhn apparently intended his
notion of a paradigm to relate to a properly justi ed infer-
ence obtained by using an approach based on such a
presupposition.
On the other hand, these terms, and especially ecosystem
approach, are coming to be used with perceived phenom-
ena that include what is formally biological and much
more. Some include global atmospheric and hydrological
processes, the current manifestations of which are strongly
dependent on historical biological events. Or cultural eco-
nomic and governance processes may be included. An
ecosystem approach may even be invoked with respect to
cosmogenesis, or the evolution of the cosmos during the
past 10C billion years. With some of these wider appli-
cations of the term, positivistic presuppositions may be
replaced by a set of constructivist presuppositions that relate
primarily to the working hypotheses within a network of
scienti c peers and not to some prior notion of external
reality. Within such a mindscape, a particular version of
an ecosystem approach may be perceived as a dynamic
movement rather than a Kuhnian paradigm.
Within current governance processes related to environ-
mental issues, a linear deterministic version, as in option
226 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
A, may still be found in some research and management,
related to utilitarian interests in natural resources, say.
Option B may dominate with preservationist interests as
in biodiversity. Option C may dominate in studies and
practices concerning natural/cultural systems in which the
residents are committed to a policy of responsible reci-
procity or caring sharing among all the kinds of creatures,
as with the role of Aboriginals in environmental matters.
Innovators with an option C kind of ecosystem approach
may nd useful roles for contributions by option A and
B kinds, so long as the latter do not act to prevent their
transcendence as in option C.
FURTHER READING
Caley, M T and Sawada, D, eds (1994) Mindscapes: the Episte-
mology of Magoroh Maruyama, Gordon and Breach, London.
Fuller, S (2000) Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our
Times, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Kay, J, Regier, H, Boyle, M, and Francis, G (1999) An Ecosys-
tem Approach for Sustainability: Addressing the Challenge of
Complexity, Futures, 31, 721742.
Keller, D R and Golley, F B (2000) The Philosophy of Ecol-
ogy: from Science to Synthesis, University of Georgia Press,
Athens, GA.
Lovelock, J E (1979) Gaia: a New Look at Life on Earth, Oxford
University Press, Oxford.
Margulis, L (1998) Symbiotic Planet: a New Look at Evolution,
Basic Books, New York.
HENRY A REGIER Canada
Ecosystem Integrity
see Ecosystem Integrity (Volume 4)
Ecosystem Services
Ecosystem services are the goods and life support functions
provided by natural ecosystems and their species that sustain
and fulll human life. Ecosystem services are the prot that
we as humans reap from the Earths natural capital.
Table 1 Ecosystem services and functions adapted from Costanza et al. (1997) with permission from Nature
(http: //www.nature.com/)
Ecosystem services Examples
Regulation of atmospheric chemical composition Carbon dioxide (CO
2
)/oxygen (O
2
) balance, O
3
for
UVB protection and SO
x
levels
Regulation of global temperature, precipitation, and
other biologically mediated climatic processes at
global or local levels
Greenhouse gas regulation, DMS production
affecting cloud formation
Capacitance, damping and integrity of ecosystem
response to environmental uctuations
Storm protection, ood control, drought recovery
and other aspects of habitat response to
environmental variability mainly controlled by
vegetation structure
Regulation of hydrological ows Provisioning of water for agricultural (such as
irrigation) or industrial (such as milling) processes
or transportation
Storage and retention of water Provisioning of water by watersheds, reservoirs and
aquifers
Erosion control and soil retention within an
ecosystem
Prevention of loss of soil by wind, runoff, or other
removal processes, storage of stilt in lakes and
wetlands
Soil formation processes Weathering of rock and the accumulation of organic
material
Storage, internal cycling, processing and acquisition
of nutrients
Nitrogen xation, nitrogen, phosphorous and other
elemental or nutrient cycles
Recovery of mobile nutrients and removal or
breakdown of excess or xenic nutrients and
compounds
Waste treatment, pollution control, detoxication
Pollination and movement of oral gametes Provisioning of pollinators for the reproduction of
plant populations
Biological control (trophic dynamic regulations of
populations)
Keystone predator control of prey species, reduction
of herbivory by top predators
(continued overleaf )
ECOSYSTEM SERVICES 227
Table 1 (continued)
Ecosystem services Examples
Refugia; suitable habitats for resident and transient
populations
Nurseries, habitat for migratory species, regional
habitats for locally harvested species, or
overwintering species
That portion of gross primary production extractable
as food
Production of sh, game, crops, nuts, fruits by
hunting, gathering, subsistence farming or shing
That portion of gross primary production extractable
as raw materials
The production of lumber, fuel or fodder
Sources of unique biological materials and products Medicine, products for material science, genes for
resistance to plant pathogens and crop pests,
ornamental species (pets and horticultural
varieties of plants)
Providing opportunities for recreational activities Eco-tourism, sport shing and other outdoor
recreational activities
Providing opportunities for cultural and other
non-commercial uses
Aesthetic, artistic, educational, spiritual and/or
scientic values of ecosystems
Ecosystem services range from regulation of the chemical
composition of the atmosphere, to water supply to polli-
nation to recreation. Prugh (1995) categorizes these ser-
vices into four main areas, regulation, carrier, production,
and information services. Regulation services are provided,
for example by the atmosphere in protecting the Earths
inhabitants from meteorites, and ltering UVB radiation.
Ecosystem processes such as atmospheric chemical com-
position, climate, water, nutrient cycling, soil and wastes
are also regulated by nature for life to exist on Earth. Car-
rier services from nature provide the space and a suitable
substrate for humans to live and play, and as a habitat
for all of the Earths plants and animals. Nature provides
production services by supplying the oxygen, water, food,
medicines, raw materials and other resources to humans
and other living creatures. And information services pro-
vided by nature include aesthetics, artistic inspiration and
scientic education and information.
Table 1 adapted from Costanza et al. (1997) lists a
variety of ecosystem services.
See also: Ecosystem Ser vices and Costing, Volume 2;
Natur al Capital, Volume 2.
REFERENCES
Costanza, R, dArge, R, de Groot, R, Farber, S, Grasso, M, Han-
non, B, Naeem, S, Limburg, K, Paruelo, J, ONeill, R V, Ras-
kin, R, Sutton, P, and van den Belt, M (1997) The Value of
the Worlds Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital, Nature,
387, 253260.
Prugh, T (1995) Natural Capital and Human Economic Survival,
ISEE Press, White River Junction, VT.
FURTHER READING
Baskin, Y (1997) The Work of Nature, Island Press, Washington,
DC, 1263.
Daily, G C (1997) Natures Services: Societal Dependence
on Natural Ecosystems, Island Press, Washington, DC,
1392.
ADAM FENECH AND ROGER HANSELL Canada
Ecosystem Value
see Ecosystem Services and Costing
(Volume 2)
Ecotheology
see Christianity and the Environment
(Volume 5); Theology (Volume 5)
El Ni no and La Ni na:
Socio-econimic Impacts
see El Ni no and La Ni na: Causes and Global
Consequences (Volume 1)
Emergence of Global Environment
Change into Politics
see The Emergence of Global Environment
Change into Politics (Opening essay, Volume 5)
228 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Emergy
Emergy is a term developed by Howard T Odum (Odum,
1986, 1996) for use in environmental and economic accoun-
ting. Odum has been an important contributor to energetic
analysis of ecosystems and has a long history of applying
energy analysis to questions of environmental and human
well-being (Odum, 1971). Emergy measures both the work
of nature and of humans previously required, directly and
indirectly, to generate a product or service. While natural
ecosystems run on current ows of solar energy moderated
by storage systems with fairly rapid turnover, the human
economy also draws heavily on very long-term solar stor-
age in the form of fossil hydrocarbons and has begun to
tap nuclear energy. Odum does not ask how much energy
it took to produce the fossil fuels or nuclear energy, but
he does argue that the net energy, the difference between
the energy in the resource and the energy required to mine,
transport, and process the resource into a usable form, is
the important measure. Odum argues that all energy should
be converted to solar equivalents, or solar emergy, for
accounting consistency and because of the dominant role
of the sun.
Odum (1971) believes that there is a fourth law of
thermodynamics which he has labeled the maximum power
principle, or more recently the maximum empower princi-
ple. In the competition among self-organizing processes,
network designs that maximize empower will prevail
(Odum, 1996). Thus, he argues that by selecting choices
that maximize emergy production and use, policies and
judgments can favor those environmental alternatives that
maximize real wealth, the whole economy, and the public
benet (Odum, 1996). Odum and his co-researchers have
used emergy analysis to explore specic issues such as
the relative desirability of different fuels, to broad ques-
tions such as the sustainability of alternative modes of
development.
Howard Odum has established a school of energy anal-
ysis with a sizeable number of followers, largely trained
with Odum, who advocate that emergy analysis should
replace, or at least complement, other forms of analy-
sis, especially economic analysis as currently practiced.
Critics argue that energy ows do not fully characterize
all of the critical aspects of environmental systems, that
human values cannot be reduced to energy determinism,
and that it is highly unlikely that society will eliminate the
diverse institutions through which decisions are currently
made, and reduce the power of those interests support-
ing current institutions, and replace them with institutions
for emergy analysis. At the same time, the insights from
emergy analysis may prove sufcient to extend existing
institutions so as to incorporate yet another approach and
reduce somewhat the dominance of economic interests and
reasoning.
REFERENCES
Odum, H T (1971) Environment, Power, and Society, Wiley,
New York.
Odum, H T (1986) Emergy in Ecosystems. Ecosystem Theory and
Application, ed N Polunin, Wiley, New York.
Odum, H T (1996) Environmental Accounting: Emergy and
Environmental Decision Making, Chapters 1 and 16, Wiley,
New York.
RICHARD B NORGAARD USA
Encyclopedias: Compendia
of Global Knowledge
Peter Timmerman
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
to collect all the knowledge scattered over the face of
the earth, to present its general outlines and structure to
the men with whom we live, was Diderots description of
his purpose in the Encylopedie ou Dictionnaire Raisonne
des Sciences, des Arts et des Metiers (17511772). This
encyclopedia was the symbol (and a central driving force)
in the French Age of Enlightenment, and had at least two
purposes: to wrestle knowledge free from the hierarchical
institutions that held onto it as a source of their power
and prestige; and to promote the idea that reason could
penetrate into every aspect of human activity. Among the
most famous articles in the encyclopedia were those on the
arts and crafts, including du Quesnays path-breaking work
on the systematic analysis of land as the basis of economic
development.
The growth of encyclopedias in the 18th century (including
the earlier Chambers Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary
of Arts and Sciences (1728), the immediate forerunner of the
Encyclopedie, and the later British (Scottish) Encyclopedia
Britannica (17681771) fostered by Andrew Bell, can be
seen as the expression of a number of different forces at
work. First, there was a powerful sense that the emerging
sciences of the previous 100 years were beginning to gen-
erate substantial amounts of new knowledge that needed
to be synthesized for a general reading audience. Sec-
ond, there was an emerging new middle class in Europe
who had or could be persuaded to have a need for
enlightenment. Third, both Britain and France were now
extensively involved in exploration and colonial develop-
ments that were beginning to encompass the entire globe.
ENLIGHTENMENT PROJECT 229
When Germany became a colonial power, and an aspirant
to global power, it too generated its lexicons and the classic
Lobel-Brockhaus encyclopedias.
The vast Soviet Encyclopedia (19261947 and later edi-
tions) is a famous example of the symbolic power of
encyclopedias, since the creation of the Encyclopedia unfor-
tunately coincided with a whole sequence of ups and downs
in ofcial versions of everything, and caused innumerable
headaches (and not a few dangers) for compilers and revis-
ers through the years. This was in the grand tradition of
Diderots earlier work, in which a number of entries had to
be penned anonymously.
Behind these specic creations, there also lurks the
perennial dream of having all knowledge at ones n-
gertips (and possibly the whole world under ones com-
mand). As Collison (1966) notes, it was Francis Bacon
(15611626) who wanted to re-organize all human knowl-
edge into a 130-part hierarchical study divided into main
areas (external nature, Man, and Mans actions upon
nature), below which would be sub-areas, and so on. The
impulse behind this was, in a sense, to discern or bring
order into a world whose previous structural meaning
(the medieval Christian world view) had been profoundly
shaken.
The potential structure, topics, and outlay of encyclope-
dias have (since Bacon) been the subject of many tenden-
tious discussions (McArthur, 1986), ranging from whether
alphabetizing entries (neutral, handy, but unimaginative) is
best, to the potentially innite possibilities being envisaged
(and beginning to be created) by online storage and retrieval
systems.
The explosion of knowledge has not been matched, but
has certainly been accompanied, by an explosion of spe-
cialized encyclopedias in music (Grove), the social sciences
(Seligman), and innumerable science encyclopedias, dictio-
naries, lexicons, etc. Virtually all of them wrestle with the
same issues: comprehensiveness versus selectivity; organi-
zational structure; issues of balance; timeliness, accuracy,
appropriate assessment.
Global environmental change represents a signicant
challenge to the encyclopedist, for all the reasons cited
above. The impulse to assess that change has perhaps been
best captured in the series of books spanning over a century
inspired by George Perkins Marsh The Earth As Modi ed
by Human Action (1885, rst published as Man and Nature,
1864), most recently The Earth As Transformed By Human
Action (Turner, 1990), which, if not absolutely encyclope-
dic, are at least inspired by the possibility of a great global
perspective on our situation. Similarly, there are extensive
international scientic and social scientic projects whose
products could be seen as informal encyclopedias of global
environmental knowledge.
There are post-modern voices that consider encyclope-
dias and similar projects to be signicant examples of the
total globalizing mentality of the continuing enlightenment
project, that is, the use of homogenized and rationalized
information as a tool for power. Others of whom this
author is one rather remember days as a child sitting in a
deep armchair with a huge volume of some encyclopedia,
diving into distant worlds I might never visit. Encyclope-
dias are probably still big enough to serve both purposes,
and others.
REFERENCES
Collison, R (1966) Encyclopedias: Their History Throughout the
Ages, Hafner, New York.
McArthur, T (1986) Worlds of Reference, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge.
Turner, B L (1990) The Earth as Transformed by Human Action,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
FURTHER READING
Diderot, D (1967) The Encyclopedia: Selections, ed and translator
S J Gendzier, Harper and Row, New York.
Enlightenment Project
The Enlightenment was an 18th century European
philosophy emphasizing reason and individualism rather
than tradition. The attempt to apply scientic rationalism
throughout human knowledge is sometimes termed the
Enlightenment Project. This term has come to represent all
the ideals associated with the modern period of the 18th to
20th centuries. These ideals form a grand narrative which is
optimistic about human history, seeing in it the working out
of progress particularly in terms of increasing material
welfare and universal justice in which all of humanity
can share.
This is to be achieved partly through scientic and tech-
nological advancement, following Francis Bacons creed
that scientic knowledge equals power over nature, and
that this power is to be used for the benet of Mans
estate, freeing all humanity from scarcity and protecting
it from natures caprices. Additionally, the Enlightenment
Project would emancipate societies from the irrational yolk
of myth, religion and superstition, by deriving moral and
legal principles from rational thought alone. Such prin-
ciples e.g., the universal declaration of human rights,
social justice, sanctity of human life, freedom of speech,
equality of opportunity and/or outcome should be applied
everywhere.
230 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
This thinking has formed the basis for the spread of
Western-style values, including democracy and capitalism,
in global modernization. Ostensibly, it champions rational
enquiry as the basis for all knowledge, together with the
beliefs that only intellectual progress could bring world
order and happiness, and that objective science and uni-
versal morality and law are attainable as David Harvey
says in his 1989 book, The Condition of Postmodernity,
the Enlightenment Project s axiom was that there was
only one possible answer to any question. Postmodernists
now challenge this on empirical grounds that the pursuit
of grand narratives made the 20th century in particular
one of massive and widespread human oppression and
suffering.
DAVID PEPPER UK
Environment and Violent Conict
see The Environment and Violent Conict
(Opening essay, Volume 5)
Environmental Defense
Fund
One of the United States rst and most respected
environmental groups, Environmental Defense Fund (EDF)
was founded in 1967 by residents of Long Island,
NY, who were pressing for a ban on the pesticide
dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT). In 1972, EDF
members felt that their efforts, and those of others, were
rewarded by the decision by the US government to ban
DDT. From EDF s small origins, it grew quickly within
the United States. (It has no international branches). By
2000, it had over 300 000 members and 170 professional
staff members, including more than 75 full time scientists,
lawyers and economists. EDF headquarters are in New York
City, but it has substantial of ces in Washington, DC, and
seven other US cities. Its 1998 budget was $27.8 million.
The organization s hallmark is professionalism. Its mem-
bers provide nancial support, but are not engaged in
governance nor are they active participants in election cam-
paigns. In terms of its organizational niche, EDF represents
policy research and the extolling of market mechanisms to
nd environmental solutions. As a caricature of organiza-
tional culture, if Greenpeace hangs banners from smoke
stacks, Earth First! spikes trees, and Sierra Club lobbies
congress, EDF is in the boardroom. EDF s Alliance for
Environmental Innovation, in collaboration with Pew Char-
itable Trusts, represents one of the only environmental
organizational efforts at direct engagement with private
corporations to facilitate higher environmental corporate
performance.
EDF has actively promoted such solutions as emis-
sions trading, both to address local air pollution prob-
lems as well as a global approach to reduce greenhouse
gases. EDF continues to be active on issues of chem-
ical releases and recently targeted the pollution prob-
lems created by expanding intensive livestock factory
farms.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada
Environmental Economics
Environmental economics addresses how environmental
problems arise, how market mechanisms can be used to
improve environmental quality, and the level of quality
that most ef ciently balances preferences for material goods
and for environmental services (see Ecological Economics,
Volume 5).
From the perspective of neoclassical economic theory,
environmental problems exist because markets for environ-
mental quality are incomplete or totally absent. Markets fail
because rights to the services of the environment are unclear
or cannot be assigned to individuals and must be held in
common. One person cannot obtain cleaner air without
everybody obtaining cleaner air, so clean air cannot be sold
to individuals and must be obtained collectively. Govern-
ment action is justi ed by market failure, and environmental
economics addresses what governments should do.
Economists argue that markets maximize the difference
between the bene ts and costs of providing a good. Envi-
ronmental economists thus argue that the level of environ-
mental quality should be determined so as to also maximize
the differences between the bene ts and the costs. The costs
of obtaining environmental quality are typically relatively
easy to measure for they are the value of the market goods
forgone to install pollution control equipment or take other
steps. Environmental valuation is the art and science of
estimating the bene ts that do not have market equiva-
lents. Valuation techniques include looking at defensive and
corrective expenditures that could be avoided if environ-
mental quality were improved, analyzing how differences
in environmental quality affect land values, deducing from
individual behavior what people would be willing to pay,
ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS 231
and simply asking people what they would be willing to pay
for improved environmental quality. The efcient level of
pollution is achieved when the additional costs of clean-up
just equal the additional benets.
The dominant approach is to regulate the level of pollu-
tion allowed by each polluter, adjusted for size or output of
the production unit. Environmental economists, however,
argue that it is more efcient to determine the appropriate
level of total pollution, distribute this right among pol-
luters, and then allow polluters to trade pollution rights.
With tradable permits, polluters who can reduce pollution
more cheaply do so and sell their permits to those whose
costs of pollution reduction are high (see Tr adable Per mits
for Sulfur Emission Reductions, Volume 4). This results
in an efcient reduction of pollution in that the level of
environmental quality sought is achieved at the least cost.
Alternatively, this same efcient result could be achieved
by taxing pollution or subsidizing pollution reduction.
Environmental economics also addresses the harvesting
of biological and other renewable resources and the mining
of minerals, or non-renewable resources, over time. The
rate of interest plays a central role in the efcient rate of
use, along with the rate of reproduction or replenishment
for renewable resources, and the expected future demand
for the resource. For both renewable and non-renewable
resources, the pattern of use over time that maximizes net
present value is the economically efcient rate of use (see
Discounting, Volume 5).
FURTHER READING
Chapman, D (2000) Environmental Economics: Theory, Applica-
tion, and Policy, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.
RICHARD B NORGAARD USA
Environmental Ethics
J Baird Callicott
University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA
An environmental ethic is a set of behavioral rules, or a
set of principles or precepts for governing human behav-
ior toward the natural environment. Environmental ethics
may mean more than one such ethic that is, simply the
plural of environmental ethic. More usually it refers to
the philosophical subdiscipline devoted to constructing and
justifying an environmental ethic. This article is about envi-
ronmental ethics in both senses. It reviews a number of the
most notable environmental ethics that philosophers have
recently constructed and tried to justify and thus it sur-
veys the new philosophical subdiscipline devoted to that
enterprise.
In response to a popular perception of an environmen-
tal crisis in the late 1960s, the two words in the title of this
article were rst put together early in the next decade. Envi-
ronmental ethics (the philosophical subdiscipline) made its
debut as a formal area of study with a college course in
the subject at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point
in 1971. It gradually developed and solidi ed in 1979
with the advent of Environmental Ethics, the journal which
has been continuously published ever since. During the
1980s, anthologies, monographs and textbooks in environ-
mental ethics began to appear. During the 1990s, several
more journals devoted to environmental ethics began pub-
lication and the literature in the eld continues to grow
exponentially.
In retrospect, an earlier informal environmental ethics lit-
erature can be identi ed. Doing so is to some extent a matter
of philosophical bias and taste but the following authors
would probably be recognized as seminal by all authori-
ties: White (1789); Thoreau (1854); Marsh (1864); Muir
(1916); Leopold (1949) and Carson (1962). The concept of
an environmental crisis was probably seeded in the Zeitgeist
by a popular book, The Quiet Crisis, by Udall (1963), US
Secretary of the Interior in the John F Kennedy administra-
tion. (The loud crisis was presumably the Cold War threat of
nuclear holocaust). Also in uential was The Closing Circle
by Commoner (1971).
What happened to precipitate a quiet environmental crisis
seems to have been this. In the spirit of beating swords
into plowshares, technologies developed for warfare dur-
ing the 1940s were adapted for peaceful use in the age-old
human war against nature. The high combustion air pol-
luting engines developed to power bombers, ghters and
tanks powered postwar bulldozers, tractors and harvesters.
Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT), made infamous
by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring, was rst developed to
delouse allied soldiers and then applied as an agricultural
pesticide. Most spectacularly, atomic ssion developed for
the war-ending superweapon, was harnessed to produce
electricity. Through the 1950s no downsides to such tech-
nologies were widely noticed or publicized. After a decades
time lag, however, their detrimental effects began to be
evident to the naked eye, nose and ear. Air over major
cities became dirty and smelly and pulsed with the ubiq-
uitous noisy throb of gasoline and diesel motors. Rivers
became open sewers, murky with municipal and industrial
waste. A whole North American Great Lake appeared to be
dying. Soil erosion accelerated. Spilled oil fouled beaches.
Mankind was poised to realize the long held dream of
conquering nature, only to nd that to the victor belong
the spoils was in the case of this triumph an ironic
232 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
proverb. The cartoon character Pogos malapropism was
often quoted: we have met the enemy and he is us.
This great awakening to an environmental crisis occurred
in the most hyper-energetic and hyper-critical decade of the
century in which the rhetoric of revolution was so common-
place that it began to be exploited commercially. (Adver-
tisers, for example, urged Americans to join the Dodge
Revolution). To address the monumental environmental cri-
sis, nothing short of a revolution in ethics seemed adequate.
Historically in the West, ethics appeared to be not just inci-
dentally but militantly anthropocentric. A major pastime of
Western philosophers had been to ruminate on what it was
about human beings that made us unique, superior to all
other creatures and exclusively worthy of moral treatment.
In the Judeo Christian tradition of thought, it was our being
created in the image of God; in the Greco Roman, it was
our innate rationality. By whatever device, Western philos-
ophy had with virtually one voice insisted upon a great gulf
separating human nature from that of the lower animals,
to say nothing of plants and the abiotic aspects of the envi-
ronment. A revolutionary environmental ethic would have to
de ate human pretensions and rehabilitate a philosophically
denigrated nature.
ANTHROPOCENTRISM
Scarcely before the call by Richard Sylvan (Routley, 1973)
for a new, environmental ethic had been heard, there
appeared a staunch defense of the resources of anthro-
pocentrism and the Western tradition of ethics to address
the environmental crisis. Passmore (1974) argued that
anthropocentric Western ethics would adequately protect
the environment but only if actually implemented, if prac-
ticed as well as preached. He saw, furthermore, a dire threat
to the achievements of Western civilization its traditions
of rationalism and humanism in the call to develop a
wholly new non-anthropocentric ethic and supporting meta-
physics or to borrow one from Asian traditions of thought,
as some had suggested (White, 1967).
Strong Anthropocentrism
The anthropocentric strain of environmental ethics has
remained vigorous and persistent. A kind of unapologetic,
uncritical anthropocentrism sometimes characterized as
strong anthropocentrism still dominates environmental
economics and most of public environmental policy. The
environment represents a pool of natural resources or envi-
ronmental goods, and a sink for wastes or environmental
harms. The best allocation of environmental goods and
harms is measured in units of human utility, quantied in
units of currency such as dollars or pounds sterling and
determined by conventional economic calculations (Krutilla
and Fisher, 1985). Ethics enters the equation only when
goods extracted from the environment by one person or
group of persons results in harm suffered by another person
or group. For example, if logging steep slopes results in sil-
tation of streams which prevents salmon from successfully
reproducing, a strongly anthropocentric environmental ethic
might censure the loggers or the timber barons for whom
they work, only if commercial salmon sherman are mate-
rially injured. And then the moral matter might be settled
by a transfer of funds from the injuring to the injured par-
ties. In their own right, the soil, the salmon and the stream
have no moral standing whatever.
The contribution of specialists in environmental ethics to
strongly anthropocentric environmental policy is minimal
in comparison with that of environmental scientists and
economists. Most of the expertise informing such debates is
hydrological, geological, biological and economic, etc. The
specic contribution of environmental ethicists, under such
strongly anthropocentric circumstances is to apply off the
rack, as it were familiar, well-established ethical theories
to the novel environmental situation (Pojman, 1999). The
strongly anthropocentric environmental ethicist will, for
example, come to an issue prepared to apply the latest
model of Kantian ethics, utilitarianism, virtue ethics or
rational choice theory generated in the ivory tower by the
most celebrated philosophical pooh-bahs of the moment.
Environmental Justice
Because economics is more sensitive to considerations of
efciency than of justice, some strong anthropocentrists
argue that environmental economics needs to be augmented
by considerations of environmental justice (Wenz, 1988).
For example, in the United States a greater percentage of
black people than their percentage in the total population
live uncomfortably close to a toxic waste dump or inciner-
ator. Although the use of DDT has long been banned in the
United States, it is still manufactured there, and exported for
use in less developed countries. These and similar unequal
distributions of environmental goods and especially harms
appear prima facie to be unjust. Strongly anthropocentric
theories of environmental justice are designed to critique
and mitigate instances of environmental injustice.
Sometimes included within the purview of environmen-
tal justice is consideration of the welfare or rights of future
human generations (if any there be) to natural resources
and environmental amenities (Partridge, 1981; Sikora and
Barry, 1978). Morally enfranchising future generations
requires less application than creative modication of stan-
dard Western moral philosophy because new and challeng-
ing philosophical conundrums arise. How, for example, can
non-existent persons have rights? Contemporary utilitari-
ans dene happiness not in terms of pleasure and pain as
did classical utilitarians but in terms of preference satisfac-
tion. How, thus, can we know what sort of environment
ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS 233
future human generations may prefer? They may prefer
Disney-like simulations to real nature and virtual to actual
reality. Furthermore, shifts in environmental policy to take
into account the welfare and rights of future human gener-
ations might alter the actual composition of future genera-
tions. Imposing, say, a stiff energy tax on the present gener-
ation as a means to ensure that future generations can have
their fair share of fossil fuels might, as one consequence,
induce more people of the present generation to stay home
at night, turn off the lights and go to bed early. That in turn
might change the timing or frequency of the sexual activity
of the present generation thus changing which gametes unite
to form the embryos of future people. If so, a policy that was
designed to benet the people who would exist in the future,
before the policy was adopted, would not benet them
at all indeed it would have cost them their lives and
would benet other future people instead. I do not suggest
that these problems are fatal to the moral enfranchisement
of future generations; I only suggest that they pose a dis-
tinctly philosophical challenge to a strongly anthropocentric
environmental ethic that includes future human generations.
Where future generations are concerned, therefore, environ-
mental policy makers may feel as great a need to consult
philosophers as to consult economists.
Weak Anthropocentrism
Weak anthropocentrism typically also morally enfranchises
future human generations (Norton, 1984). In addition, it
considerably broadens the notion of what counts as a
human interest in the environment. People value nature,
weak anthropocentrists point out, not only as a pool of
material resources (food, ber, fuel, and so on) but as a
pool of psycho-spiritual resources as well. People recreate
in unspoiled nature; take aesthetic pleasure and spiritual
solace in it; they even take comfort in just knowing that
bits of unspoiled nature exist, although they may never
directly experience them. Indeed, some weak anthropocen-
trists suggest that nature might be a moral resource for
people (Partridge, 1984).
Resource economists work diligently at the contingent
valuation or shadow pricing of these natural amenities,
because they rarely have an actual market price. People
are asked what they would be willing to pay for a clean
river in which to canoe or for a view of a mountain range
unobscured by smog (Cummings et al., 1986). Also among
popular economic methods of calculating the monetary
value of such is the travel-cost method in which the money
people spend (on gasoline, food, lodging, outdoor gear
and so on) to visit unspoiled natural areas is calculated to
value (in the economic sense) a national park or designated
wilderness area (Peterson and Sorg, 1989).
Unfortunately, an old growth stand of cathedral red-
woods, say, will usually be worth far more money as a
timber resource than as a psycho-spiritual resource, despite
the best efforts of environmental economists to maximize
the shadow monetary value of the latter. Weak anthropocen-
trists, therefore, typically insist that some human values
should not be expressed in monetary terms (Norton, 1988).
As Kant (1785) once remarked, some things have a price,
others a dignity. People are not entirely unanimous in their
opinion about what things have a dignity, any more than
about what things are worth spending money on. The appro-
priate place for things with a price to compete is the market;
the appropriate place for things with an alleged dignity to
compete is the political arena (Sagoff, 1988). People vote
with their money in the marketplace for Rovers, say,
but not for Yugos. For those things for which a price is
inappropriate, people vote with their choices at the ballot
box, albeit usually indirectly. They vote for representa-
tives at various levels of government who, among other
things, stand for certain values for a community free of
pornography shops, or for environmental quality: clean air
and water, protection of wilderness areas and endangered
species, reduction of greenhouse gases, and so on. Fur-
ther, values settled politically should, ideally, trump market
values. For example, in most industrialized societies, the
political process has strongly afrmed the value of human
emancipation: human beings should not be sold for slaves
at any price, no matter what the market will bear. Sim-
ilarly, weak anthropocentrists insist that humanly valued
aspects of nature designated wilderness areas, national
parks, endangered species should not be for sale at any
price (Sagoff, 1988).
In addition to environmental goods and harms, attention
has increasingly been directed to free ecological services
performed by unspoiled nature, such as soil building and
stabilization, water retention and purication, nitrogen xa-
tion, and crop pollination. These too have been valued mon-
etarily by economists (Costanza et al., 1997). The monetary
valuation of ecological services has also been criticized
from a weak anthropocentric point of view (Sagoff, 1997).
Mention of the Kantian dictum that some things have
a price, others a dignity, reminds us that Kant grounded
the dignity of persons in their intrinsic value. By parity
of reasoning, if some aspects of nature also have dignity,
must they have it because they also have intrinsic value?
However, anthropocentrism, by denition, weak as well
as strong, restricts intrinsic value to human beings and
acknowledges only the instrumental value of nature. The
difference between strong and weak anthropocentrism may
be summed up then as follows. Strong anthropocentrists
recognize only the commodity, amenity and service value
of nature and express all such values in monetary terms.
The economic reduction of all environmental values, also
severely short-changes future generations because a Euro
presently in hand is worth more than a future Euro, the dis-
count rate roughly corresponding to the current interest rate.
234 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Thus, if an environmental economist were to compare the
present monetary value of undeveloped potential commer-
cial real estate in a metropolitan area, on the one hand, to its
green-belt amenity value expressed in Euros for people liv-
ing 100 years hence (estimated by contingent valuation and
travel cost), on the other, the future environmental amenity
value would be discounted at say 6% per year. Weak anthro-
pocentrists recognize the commodity and service values of
nature, but are reluctant to lump the wide range of psycho
spiritual resources into the amorphous category of ameni-
ties. Most important, weak anthropocentrists oppose the
expression of the psycho-spiritual values of nature in mon-
etary terms. Although anthropocentric, all environmental
values, in other words, are not preferences. One may pre-
fer chocolate ice cream to strawberry and sh and chips to
steak and kidney pie but the way one values Lake Winde-
mere is not of the same order. Therefore, the most basic
difference between strong and weak anthropocentrism is
that the former treats all values as preferences, which are
expressible in monetary terms. The latter treats preferences
as a subset of human values and recognizes in addition a
suite of environmental values aesthetic, moral, religious,
demeaned by strong anthropocentrists as mere amenities
that transcend preferences and that are not appropriately
expressed in monetary terms.
NON-ANTHROPOCENTRISM
Non-anthropocentrists seek to provide intrinsic value for
non-human natural entities and/or nature as a whole.
Animal liberation and animal rights are not the same as
environmental ethics. Indeed, in practice, concern for ani-
mal welfare and environmental concerns are often opposed.
People for the ethical treatment of animals (PETA), for
example, are often in the front lines of resistance to plans
to protect endangered species of native plants by extermi-
nating the bloated populations of feral goats, pigs, burros
or what have you threatening them. Nevertheless, one
approach to non-anthropocentric environmental ethics is
based on the theoretical foundations of animal liberation
and animal rights.
Contemporary anthropocentric environmental ethicists,
strong and weak, typically take anthropocentrism for gran-
ted and do not bother to defend the intrinsic (or non-
instrumental) value of human beings. Classically, however,
anthropocentrists defended the intrinsic value of human
beings by positing an intrinsic value conferring property,
alleged to be possessed by human beings alone. One
such candidate property is the image of God alleged to
characterize all and only human beings. Such a property,
however, is philosophically maladroit because it is non-
empirical. Not on argument, but on faith, one must accept
that human beings are in fact created in the image of God,
for that image cannot be found by autopsy or inference. For
those outside the specic communities of faith in which the
image of God is a tenet the Judaic, Christian and Muslim
communities such a proposition is either meaningless or
dubious. Moreover, defending anrthropocentrism by appeal
to a non-empirical intrinsic value conferring property, such
as the image of God, would dangerously open up a Pan-
doras box of other, more noxious non-empirical properties
that might even more narrowly restrict the class of beings
possessing intrinsic value. Racists, for example, might nd
in the same religious sources a non-empirical property that
morally disenfranchises people of color who allegedly bear
the mark of Cain. Sexists, similarly, might nd in the same
religious sources a non-empirical property that morally dis-
enfranchises women, who were created from Adams rib
and who are, thereby, made subservient to men. Thus,
modern anthropocentric philosophers have overwhelmingly
preferred to follow Kant (1785) and claim that reason is
the intrinsic value conferring property possessed by all and
only human beings.
The theoretical fulcrum leveraging the intrinsic value of
non-human animals is the argument from marginal cases
(Regan, 1979). If reason is not to serve as a mere sanitized
and secularized substitute for the image of God, it must
be an empirically detectable property. A minimally rational
being must be able to do certain things pass certain tests
that evidence the possession of this property, such as to
perform simple arithmetic calculations, solve simple prac-
tical problems, or use language meaningfully. Most human
beings can do all such things, but some cannot. These are
the marginal cases from which the argument takes its name.
They are usually identied as infants, the severely mentally
impaired and the abjectly senile. Because they are not ratio-
nal, they do not have intrinsic value; and because they do
not have intrinsic value, they fall beyond the moral pale and
may be treated as we treat non-human animals. And how
is that? We use animals as subjects for harmful medical
experiments and tests, raise them in miserable conditions
and slaughter them for food, hunt them for sport, display
them in zoos and so on. The tails side (pun intended) of
the argument is that many animals that conventional West-
ern ethical theory and practice morally disenfranchise are
minimally rational, according to these objective measures.
Non-human primates have been observed to make and use
tools in order to solve simple problems, have learned to
use American sign language (to say nothing of the com-
plex, but so far undeciphered social vocalizations of whales,
dolphins, and elephants), to scheme and plan, and so on.
Animal Liberation
But back to the heads side of the argument from marginal
cases coin. If we are to morally enfranchise the marginal
cases, we must identify a capacity that the marginal cases
possess as the intrinsic value conferring property. Bentham
ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS 235
(1789), a contemporary of Kant, argued that the capacity
to experience pleasure and pain, called sentience, ought to
be that property. Also, sentience is arguably more relevant
to the bene t that it confers than reason. For why are we
concerned how others treat us except that we can suffer?
But many kinds of animals are also sentient. They too,
therefore, possess intrinsic value and should thus be morally
enfranchised equally.
Animal Rights
As Bentham knew full well, however, it is perfectly possible
to raise animals comfortably and slaughter them painlessly.
If we also hide their fate from them, so that they do not
dread it, we can have our moral cake (or meat), so to speak,
and eat it too. For that reason, Regan (1983) has proffered
an alternative intrinsic value-conferring property being
the subject of a life, that is, being a self with a capacity to
enjoy a rich subjectivity shared by us and those animals
that people most care about (mammals) as the conceptual
foundation of animal rights. To be a subject of a life, accord-
ing to Regan, implies, among other things, having desires,
preferences, beliefs, memory of the past, anticipation of
the future, and a sense of personal identity through time.
In Regan s opinion all mammals one year old or more are
subjects of a life, so understood, and thus should also enjoy
the basic rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Subjects of a life represent only a tiny fraction of the nat-
ural environment. Many more animals are sentient than are
subjects of a life. But even if we stipulate that sentience
is the proper intrinsic value conferring property and that
all animals are sentient including those without a cen-
tral nervous system animals, nevertheless, still represent
only a small part of the environment. Hence, even if all
animals were granted full moral standing, only a small
part of the environment would be morally enfranchised.
Therefore, some environmental philosophers, concerned not
exclusively or even primarily about animals, but about the
environment more generally, have tried to build a more
inclusive non-anthropocentric ethic on the theoretical plat-
form of animal liberation and animal rights theory.
I shall turn to that construction project in a moment.
Before leaving the present matter, I should note that
some partisans of animal liberation/animal rights argue that
animal-oriented ethics, per se, may double dip as environ-
mental ethics. At rock bottom, the argument runs parallel
to the argument that strong anthropocentrism may serve as
an environmental ethic (Jamieson, 1998). Wild animals can
survive and ourish only in appropriate habitat. To ensure
the welfare or protect the rights of animals would, there-
fore it seems, require us to preserve their habitat. We could
call this a strong zoocentric environmental ethic. Undevel-
oped, the environment is instrumentally valuable to a wide
variety of animals, as well as to us human beings as a
pool of natural resources. The fatal problem with strong
zoocentrism, as it seems to me, emerges when we con-
sider that different kinds of animals have different habitat
requirements. Thus preserving the habitat of one kind of
animal will evict another kind. And if, as Singer (1977)
reasons, all animals are equal, we have no theoretical jus-
ti cation for being biased in favor of one kind of animal
instead of another. How thus can we say that habitat for
endemic, native salmon spawning is to be preserved at the
cost of displacing habitat for cosmopolitan, exotic carp;
or that woody habitat for white tailed deer is to be pre-
served at the cost of displacing grassy habitat for domestic
cattle?
BIOCENTRISM
Just as animal liberation and rights theorists challenge rea-
son as the intrinsic value conferring property, so biocentric
environmental ethicists challenge sentience or being a sub-
ject of a life as the intrinsic value conferring properties.
The capacity to experience pleasure and pain, to say noth-
ing of the suite of capacities comprehended by the phrase
subject of a life, did not come into existence gratuitously
or for their own sakes. Rather, sentience and most other
capacities of consciousness evolved to foster the preser-
vation of the organisms that possess them (Goodpaster,
1978). What is of ultimate value to organisms is to live and
ourish. Pain and pleasure are powerful motivators toward
that end, rewarding life-fostering behaviors and punish-
ing life-threatening ones. The ability to remember the past
and imagine the future enables organisms to learn from
experience and to anticipate eventualities, which enhance
their ability to survive and ourish. But if life itself is the
be all and end all of organic existence, then maybe we
should think that all living beings have intrinsic value.
The rst biocentrist seems to have been Schweitzer
(1923) who insisted upon a reverence for life. He was a
professional physician and musician, but only an amateur
philosopher. A close study of Schweitzer s rhetoric reveals
that he was primarily in uenced by Schopenhauer (1818),
a neo Kantian philosopher who argued that the unknowable
Ding an sich (thing in itself), which Kant believed to lurk
in all phenomena, was the will to live. The will to live
is one and the same in all things, inanimate as well as
animate, according to Schopenhauer. Schweitzer, however,
seems not to have appreciated the full sweep and grandeur
of Schopenhauer s philosophical vision and himself thought
the will to live inhabited only living beings. Therefore, just
as we human beings experience it vividly and poignantly
when our lives are threatened, so too do all other kinds
of living beings. A biocentric ethic, Schweitzer believed,
could be based on the capacity that we cognitively advanced
living beings have for empathy and compassion with all
236 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
the others, who are, in essence, identically the same as
ourselves.
Such a frankly metaphysical grounding of intrinsic value
in nature is now quite out of philosophical fashion, though
Schweitzer remains popular. Independently of Schweitzer,
Feinberg (1974) suggested that having interests is what enti-
tles a being to basic moral rights and that interests are
compounded of conations, which consist of drives, aims,
goals, latent tendencies, directions of growth and natural
fulllments whether conscious or not. Conative plants
and other living beings, although lacking consciousness of
any kind, may nevertheless have interests, in this sense, and
thus intrinsic value, and moral rights. Feinbergs suggestion
was rst taken up by Goodpaster (1978), then developed by
Taylor (1986) into a full edged biocentric theory of envi-
ronmental ethics. Although Taylor carefully distinguishes
between inherent worth and intrinsic value, this and other
such conceptual niceties are too ne grained for presenta-
tion here. The following must sufce. Parallel to Regans
notion of a subject of a life, Taylor argues that all organisms
are teleological centers of life. The operative term, here,
teleological has long been in the philosophical lexicon and
is formed from the Greek telos, meaning end, goal, or pur-
pose. All organisms have innate drives, aims, goals teloi
in a word which can be realized or frustrated. The most
basic ones are to grow, to ourish, and to reproduce. There-
fore, all organisms have inherent worth (intrinsic value) and
all have it equally. Taylor avoids going so far as to claim
that all teleological centers of life have rights, but he does
argue that they are owed respect. A moral agent should
respect all organisms and leave them alone to realize their
own ends.
How then can a moral agent realize his or her own teloi ?
One must eat, be clothed, sheltered, educated, cured, all
at the expense of other teleological centers of life. Taylor
(1986) attempts to resolve morally the inevitable conicts
of interest arising between equally valuable teleological
centers of life. He begins with the right of each person
to self-defense. Taylor argues that when, for example,
a disease-causing bacterium invades ones body, one is
entitled to defend oneself with lethal antibiotics. Then to
this unambiguous paradigm of self defense he assimilates
the more problematic cases taking the life of another
organism to feed oneself, to clothe and shelter oneself, and
so on.
ECOCENTRISM
Taylors arguments justifying human exploitation of other
teleological centers of life seem inconsistent with the severe
constraints of his biocentric theory of environmental ethics,
and are therefore not very convincing. But even if they
were, biocentrism is beside the point. Environmentalists
are simply not concerned about the welfare of individual
shrubs, bugs and grubs. The medicinal eradication of
millions of disease-causing bacteria in the intestines of a
human being is not an environmental concern except if
the improvident use of antibiotics breeds resistant strains
of bacteria; and then the concern would be less distinctly
environmental than one of public health. Nor are envi-
ronmentalists morally concerned about killing trees in a
forest for the purpose of improving the overall health of
the forest, or about culling excess deer on an overpop-
ulated range. Environmental concerns typically focus on
levels of biological organization beyond individual plants
and animals populations, species, communities, ecosys-
tems, biomes, the biosphere and on non-organic aspects
of the environment, such as rivers, lakes, bays, gulfs,
seas, oceans, soils and the atmosphere. Environmentalists
are morally concerned about the extirpation of popula-
tions of certain species, such as the Bengal tiger from the
Indian sub continent, about the threatened global extinc-
tion of species, such as the blue whale, about the integrity
of biotic communities, especially temperate prairies and
tropical rainforests that are so rich in variety of species,
about the health of ecosystems, such as the Oostvaarder-
splassen or Chesapeake Bay, about anthropogenic acid
deposition, atmospheric pollution, global warming and
such.
To develop a relevant environmental ethic, one that
directly addresses actual environmental concerns, we must
step outside what may be called the modern classical
paradigm of ethics. Goodpaster (1979) identied the com-
mon argument form of the two dominant schools of thought
in modern ethics one going back to Bentham (1789),
the other to Kant (1785) as a generalization of egoism.
I (ego) demand that you consider my welfare or respect
my interests when your actions affect me. I justify that
demand by appeal to some capacity I possess rationality,
sentience, having a rich inner life or consciousness, having
interests which makes me intrinsically valuable and there-
fore entitles me to moral considerability. By the same token,
however, I am obliged to consider the welfare or respect
the rights of all those who possess the same capacity. This
argument form underlies anthropocentrism, animal libera-
tion/animal rights, and biocentrism. They differ only in the
choice of the intrinsic value-conferring capacity and thus in
the set of morally considerable entities they recognize. In
the case of anthropocentrism, the intrinsic value-conferring
property is reason; in that of animal liberation, it is capac-
ity to suffer; in animal rights, experiencing a rich subjective
life; in biocentrism, having interests. At the end of the day,
however, the modern classical paradigm leaves us with only
individuals individual human beings, individual animals,
individual organisms being morally considerable. Environ-
mental concerns, however, are almost always holistic. Thus,
we must go back to the theoretical drawing board and start
afresh.
ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS 237
THE LAND ETHIC
Of all the environmental ethics so far devised, the land
ethic, rst sketched by Leopold (1949), is most popular
among environmentalists. In his essay, The Land Ethic,
Leopold begins by alluding to Darwins account of the
origin and development of ethics in the Descent of Man. The
Leopold land ethic is thus grounded in evolutionary biology
therefore making it more consonant than any alternative
so far devised with the sciences that inform contemporary
environmental concern (Callicott, 1989).
The existence of ethics presents a problem for Darwins
attempt to show how all things human can be understood as
having gradually evolved by natural (and sexual) selection,
from traits possessed by closely related species, his project
in The Descent of Man. An ethic demands that moral agents
selessly consider the interests of others in addition to
their own. The theory of evolution would seem to predict,
however, that the selsh would out-compete the seless in
the struggle for existence, and thus survive and reproduce in
greater numbers. Therefore, greater and greater selshness,
not selessness, would seem to be selected for in any
population of organisms, including those ancestral to Homo
sapiens. But history indicates the opposite: that our remote
human ancestors were more callous, brutal, and ruthless
than we are. At least so it seemed to a rened English
gentleman who while serving as naturalist on the round
the world voyage of the HMS Beagle had observed rst
hand what he and his contemporaries regarded as states
of savagery and barbarism similar to those from which
European and Asian civilizations were believed to have
emerged. Without a convincing evolutionary explanation of
its existence and progressive development, Darwins pious
opponents might point to ethics among human beings as
a clear signature by the hand of providence on the human
soul.
To the conundrum presented by the existence and alle-
gedly progressive development of ethics, Darwins reso-
lution is straightforward and elegant. For many kinds of
animals and especially for Homo sapiens, lifes struggle is
more efciently prosecuted collectively and cooperatively
than singly and competitively. Poorly armed by nature, as
solitaries, hominids would fall easy prey to their natural
enemies or starve for lack of the wherewithal to obtain food.
Together our primate ancestors might stand some chance of
fending off predators and attacking prey larger than them-
selves. Like many other similarly situated species, evolving
human beings thus formed primitive societies; or put more
precisely, those hominids that formed primitive societies
evolved. But without some rudimentary ethics, human soci-
eties cannot stay integrated. As Darwin (1871) puts it,
No tribe could hold together if murder, robbery, treachery,
& c., were common; consequently such crimes within the limits
of the same tribe are branded with everlasting infamy; but
excite no such sentiment beyond these limits.
Darwins speculative reconstruction of the evolutionary
pathway to ethics begins with altruistic parental and lial
affections which motivate parents (perhaps only the female
parent in many species) to care for their offspring and
their offspring to desire the company of their parents.
Such affectionally bonded nuclear families are small and
often ephemeral societies, lasting, as in the case of bears,
only until the next reproductive cycle. But the survival
advantage to the young of being reared in such social
units is obvious. Should the parental and lial affections
chance to spill beyond the parental-lial relationship to
that between siblings, cousins and other close kin, such
plurally bonded animals might stick together in more stable
and permanent groups and defend themselves and forage
communally and cooperatively. In which case there might
also accrue additional advantages to the members of such
groups in the struggle for life. Thus do mammalian societies
originate in Darwins account.
By themselves, the social impulses and sentiments are
not ethics. An ethic is a set of behavioral rules, or a set of
principles or precepts for governing behavior. The moral
sentiments are, rather, the foundations of ethics, as Hume
(1751) and Smith (1759) argued, a century or so before
Darwin considered the matter. In addition to the social
sentiments and instincts, Homo sapiens evolved to a high
degree of intelligence and imagination and uniquely pos-
sessed a symbolic language. Hence, we human beings are
capable of generally representing those kinds of behavior
which are destructive of society (murder, robbery, treach-
ery, & c.) and articulating prohibitions of them in emotion-
ally colored formulae thou shalt not kill, steal, bear false
witness, etc. which formerly we called commandments
and today call moral rules.
So much then for the origin of ethics. Darwin goes
on to account for the development of ethics. As human
social groups competed with one another for resources,
the larger and better organized out-competed the smaller
and less well organized. Hence clans, rstly, merged into
tribes; tribes, next, into nations; and nations, eventually, into
republics. The emergence of each of these levels of social
organization was attended by a corresponding expansion of
ethics. Darwin (1871) sums up this parallel growth of ethics
and society as follows: As man advances in civilization,
and small tribes are united into larger communities, the
simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought
to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the
members of the same nation, though personally unknown to
him. This point being once reached there is only an articial
barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of
all nations and races. Further, with the emergence of each
new level in the social hierarchy the clan, the tribe, the
nation, the republic, the global village the content of the
moral code changed or was supplemented to reect and
facilitate the novel structure of each newly emerged level.
238 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
During Darwins lifetime, a universal ethic of human
rights was only dimly visible on the horizon. By the mid-
twentieth century, when Leopold was gestating the land
ethic, a universal human rights ethic may have seemed
more nearly attainable. In any case, Leopold, often called
a prophet, looked farther ahead than did Darwin himself,
indeed farther ahead than Darwin could have looked in
the absence of a well developed ecological world view.
Leopold (1949) summarizes Darwins natural history of
ethics with characteristic compression: All ethics so far
evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is
a member of a community of interdependent parts. Then
he adds an ecological element, the community model of
the biota espoused most notably by Elton (1927). Ecol-
ogy simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to
include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively:
the land (Leopold, 1949). When we all learn to see land
as a community to which we belong not as a commodity
belonging to us (Leopold, 1949) that same simplest rea-
son, of which Darwin speaks, might kick in. And when it
does, what results will be a land ethic that changes the role
of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community to
plain member and citizen of it (Leopold, 1949).
Basically, what Leopold did to cook up the land ethic was
to take over Darwins recipe for the origin and development
of ethics, and add an ecological ingredient, the Eltonian
community concept. According to Leopold (1949), a land
ethic implies respect for fellow members and also for the
community as such. The land ethic, in other words, has
a holistic dimension to it that is completely foreign to the
mainstream modern moral theories going back to Bentham
and Kant. The holistic dimension of the land ethic respect
for the community as such, in addition to respect for its
members severally is, however, not in the least foreign to
the Darwinian and Humean theories of ethics upon which
it is built. Darwin (1871) could hardly be more specic or
emphatic on this point. Actions are regarded by savages
and were probably so regarded by primeval man, as good
or bad, solely as they obviously affect the welfare of the
tribe, not that of the species, nor that of an individual
member of the tribe. This conclusion agrees well with
the belief that the so called moral sense is aboriginally
derived from the social instincts, for both relate at rst
exclusively to the community. Hume (1751) insists that
we must renounce the theory which accounts for every
moral sentiment by the principle of self love. We must
adopt a more public affection and allow that the interests
of society are not, even on their own account, entirely
indifferent to us.
That is not to say that Hume, certainly, and even Darwin
make no theoretical provision for a lively concern for the
individual members of society as well as for society per se.
Darwin (1871) writes of the all important emotion of sym-
pathy. Sympathy means with feeling and so can extend
only to feeling that is, sentient individuals. It cannot
extend to levels of social organization beyond the individ-
ual, which have no feelings per se. Hume and Darwin,
however, recognized other moral sentiments than sym-
pathy, some of which patriotism, for example relate
as exclusively and specically to societies as sympathy
does to sentient individuals. In the Leopold land ethic,
in any event, the holistic aspect eventually eclipses the
individualistic aspect. Toward the beginning of The Land
Ethic, Leopold (1949), as noted, declares that a land ethic
implies respect for fellow members of the biotic com-
munity, as well as for the community as such. Toward
the middle of The Land Ethic, Leopold (1949) speaks of
a biotic right to continue but such a right accrues, as
the context indicates, to species, not to individual speci-
mens. Toward the end of the essay, Leopold (1949) writes
a summary moral maxim, a golden rule, for the land
ethic: A thing is right when it tends to preserve the
integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community.
It is wrong when it tends otherwise. In it, there is no
reference at all to fellow members. They have gradually
dropped out of account as the The Land Ethic proceeds
to its climax. Because of its focus on the biotic com-
munity as such, the Leopold land ethic may be called
ecocentric.
Ultimately traceable, as it is, to the theory of moral senti-
ments developed in the eighteenth century by David Hume
and Adam Smith, the several objects of moral respect rec-
ognized in the ecocentric land ethic, do not so much have
intrinsic value as they are valued intrinsically. The differ-
ence is not merely semantic. Intrinsic value, as conceived
by Kant and his contemporary intellectual descendants, is
what philosophers now call a supervenient property that
is, an objective property that piggybacks on another objec-
tive property. For Kant, as noted, that latter property is
reason, for Singer it is sentience, for Regan it is being the
subject of a life, and for Taylor, being a teleological cen-
ter of a life. For the contemporary intellectual descendants
of Hume and Smith, however, value is rst and foremost
a verb, not a noun that designates an objective (albeit
supervenient) property. Something is, in other words, valu-
able only if it is valued by some valuing subject. And we
human valuing subjects value things in at least two differ-
ent ways: instrumentally and intrinsically. One values ones
house, automobile and other useful artifacts instrumentally.
One values ones self, spouse, children, other relatives,
friends, neighbors, fellow citizens, fellow man intrinsically.
One also values intrinsically ones family, municipality,
country and the human race, per se that is, as collective
wholes. One may value intrinsically a wide array of other
things as well. Indeed, one can value anything under the
sun intrinsically the Eiffel Tower, for example, or even
a worn-out old shoe. But we usually do not value any and
everything intrinsically; we usually do so for a reason. A
ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS 239
fundamental reason is a sense of belonging to a community
of interdependent parts.
The Problem of Ecofascism and the Land Ethic
Holism is the land ethics principal strength, because actual
environmental concerns are holistic, but also its principal
liability. According to Leopold (1949), we Homo sapiens
are but plain members and citizens of the biotic commu-
nity. Then it would seem that the summary moral maxim
of the ecocentric land ethic applies to Homo sapiens no
less than to the other members and citizens of the biotic
community. A human population of more than six bil-
lion individuals is a dire threat to the integrity, stability,
and beauty of the biotic community. Thus the existence
of such a large human population is ethically wrong. To
right that wrong should we not do what we do when
a population of white tailed deer or some other species
irrupts into and threatens the integrity, stability, and beauty
of the biotic community? We immediately and summarily
reduce it, by whatever means necessary, usually by ran-
domly and indiscriminately culling the members of such a
population respectfully, of course until its numbers are
optimized.
It did not take its critics long to draw out the appar-
ently vitiating implication of the ecocentric land ethic.
According to them, the land ethic is a case of environmen-
tal fascism because the good of ecological wholes takes
precedence over the good of the component individuals,
including human individuals, according to Aiken (1984),
Regan (1983), Ferre (1996), and Shrader-Frechette (1996).
If so, it must be rejected as monstrous. Happily, it does
not. To think that it does, one must assume that Leopold
proffered the land ethic as a substitute for, not an addition
to, our venerable and familiar human ethics. But he did
not. Leopold refers to the various stages of ethical devel-
opment from tribal mores to universal human rights and
nally, to the land ethic as accretions. Accretion means
an increase by external addition or accumulation. The eco-
centric land ethic is an addition to our several accumulated
social ethics now more than ever, strongly individualis-
tic not something that is supposed to replace them. With
the advent of each new stage in the accreting development
of ethics, the older stages are not erased or replaced. I, for
example, am a citizen of a republic, but I also remain a
member of an extended family, and a resident of a munic-
ipality. And it is quite evident to us all, from our own
moral experience, that the duties attendant on citizenship
in a republic (to pay taxes, to serve in the armed forces or
in the Peace Corps, for example) do not cancel or replace
the duties attendant on membership in a family (to honor
parents, to love and educate children, for example) or resi-
dence in a municipality (to support public schools, to attend
town meetings). Similarly, the duties attendant upon citi-
zenship in the biotic community (to preserve its integrity,
stability, and beauty) do not cancel or replace the duties
attendant on membership in the human global village (to
respect human rights).
As members of multiple communities, each generating
ethical obligations, how do we prioritize when duties to one
community or its members conict with duties to another?
Naess (1989) suggested two complementary priority prin-
ciples for resolving such conicts. The rst we might call
the inverse scale principle (ISP). One should give priority to
obligations to ones nearest and dearest community mem-
bers and ones nearest and dearest community as such to
ones family, municipality, etc., in that order. Hence, if in a
time of general scarcity, one faced a choice between shar-
ing ones severely limited resources with family members
or with unrelated neighbors, the right thing to do would
be to share with family members and refuse neighbors.
The second we might call the degree-of-interest principle
(DIP), which counters the ISP. If the interests at stake are
of unequal strength, the lesser interest should give way to
the greater. For example, in circumstances not of general
scarcity but of unequal distribution of plentiful resources,
some are needier than others. If one is relatively wealthy
and ones neighbor is desperately poor, then the strong
interest in having the wherewithal for survival of ones
neighbor should take priority over the weaker interest of
satisfying the superuous consumer preferences of oneself
and ones family members.
Applying these priority principles to moral conicts aris-
ing between obligations relative to a biotic community and
those relative to a municipality, we might conclude that if
our choice were between the destruction of a regional biotic
community (and the extinction of its endemic species), on
the one hand, and the starvation of the citizens of local
human communities, on the other, then priority should be
given to our obligations relative to the municipality, in
accordance with the ISP. However, in the famous case
of the conict between the endangered spotted owl and
the threatened old growth forest in the Pacic Northwest
of the United States, on the one hand, and the regions
logging/milling communities, on the other, that is not the
conundrum we face. Other employment alternatives are
available to loggers and mill workers. The biotic commu-
nity interests at stake are much greater the destruction of
a unique biome and the extinction of its endemic species.
Hence in this case, the DIP countermands the ISP. Unfor-
tunately, in some parts of the world, the ethical dilemma
does involve the very livelihood, not just the lifestyles of
local peoples. For example, some people face the choice
of feeding themselves and their families and by doing so
contributing to the destruction of tropical forests and a
global mass extinction event, on the one hand, or starving,
on the other. For them the choice is clear and unambigu-
ous. They must slash and burn. Because they are not my
neighbors or fellow nationals, however, it is not entirely
240 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
clear what national and international policies, with respect
to such practices, I should support.
Change and the Land Ethic
Leopold penned the land ethic at mid century. Ecology then
represented nature as tending toward a static equilibrium,
and portrayed disturbance and perturbation, especially those
caused by Homo sapiens, to be abnormal and destructive.
In view of the shift in contemporary ecology to a more
dynamic paradigm (Botkin, 1990), and in recognition of the
incorporation of natural disturbance to patch and landscape
scale ecological dynamics (Pickett and Ostfeld, 1995), we
might wonder whether the land ethic has become obsolete.
Has the paradigm shift from the balance of nature to the ux
of nature in ecology invalidated the land ethic? I think not,
but recent developments in ecology may require revising the
land ethic. From Leopold s original summary moral maxim
or golden rule of the land ethic, we may be left now with
only the preservation of a biotic community s beauty as a
criterion of a thing s land-ethical rightness or wrongness.
Despite all the idle talk about beauty being in the eye
of the beholder, ecological beauty might not be an alto-
gether inadequate or relativistic criterion by means of which
to judge a thing s environmental rightness or wrongness.
Hume (1751) notes that broad shoulders, a lank belly,
rm joints, a taper leg; all these are beautiful in our species,
because signs of force and vigor. Natural beauty is far less
relative and ckle a judgment of taste than we are wont lat-
terly to acknowledge; it is, as it were, an aesthetic registry
of robust good health. And indeed Leopold (1999) linked
ecological beauty to land health. Land was healthy and
therefore beautiful to those with a re ned taste in natural
objects in Leopold s estimation, when its ecological pro-
cesses were being carried out normally. Such ecological
processes include photosynthesis; energy transfer through
lengthy food chains and tangled food webs, capped by
long lived, large bodied carnivores; the recruitment, reten-
tion, and recycling of nutrients; the stabilization of soils;
the modulation of water ows; and the resistance to and
rapid recovery from perturbation by wind, re, ood, pest,
pathogen, and other disturbances.
Leopold was, moreover, aware of and sensitive to nat-
ural change. He knew that conservation must aim at a
moving target. How can we conserve a biota that is
dynamic, ever changing, when the very words conserve
and preserve especially when linked to integrity and sta-
bility connote arresting change? The key to solving that
conundrum is the concept of scale. Scale is a general
ecological concept that includes rate as well as scope;
that is, the concept of scale is both temporal and spatial.
And a review of Leopold s The Land Ethic reveals that
he had the key, though he may not have been aware of
just how multiscalar is change in nature. There, Leopold
(1949) writes, Evolutionary changes are usually slow
and local. Man s invention of tools has enabled him to make
changes of unprecedented violence, rapidity, and scope.
Leopold was keenly aware that nature is dynamic, but,
under the sway of mid-century equilibrium ecology, he con-
ceived of natural change primarily in evolutionary, not in
ecological terms. Nevertheless, scale is equally normative
when ecological change is added to evolutionary change,
that is, when normal climatic oscillations and patch dynam-
ics are added to normal rates of extinction, hybridization,
and speciation.
As noted, Homo sapiens is, in Leopold s opinion, a
part of nature, a plain member and citizen of the land
community. Hence, anthropogenic changes imposed on
nature are no less natural than any other. Nevertheless,
because Homo sapiens is a moral species, capable of ethical
deliberation and conscientious choice, and evolutionary
kinship and biotic community membership add a land ethic
to our familiar social ethics, anthropogenic changes may be
land-ethically evaluated. But by what norm? The norm of
appropriate scale.
Let me rst recount Leopold s use of the temporal scale
of evolutionary change as a norm for evaluating anthro-
pogenic change. Consider the current episode of abrupt,
anthropogenic, mass species extinction which many envi-
ronmentalists intuitively regard as the most morally repre-
hensible environmental thing going on today. Episodes of
mass extinction have occurred in the past, though none of
those has been attributed to a biological agent. Such events
are, however, abnormal. Normally, speciation outpaces
extinction which is the reason why biological diversity
has increased over time. So, what is land-ethically wrong
with current anthropogenic species extinction? Species
extinction is not unnatural. On the contrary, species extinc-
tion anthropogenic or otherwise is perfectly natural.
But the current rate of extinction is wildly abnormal. Does
being the rst biological agent of a geologically signi -
cant mass extinction event in the 3.5 billion years tenure
of life on Planet Earth morally atter us Homo sapiens?
Doesn t that make a mockery of the self-congratulatory
species epithet: the sapient, the wise species of the genus
Homo?
Now let s apply this model to a quandry that Leopold
himself never considered. Earth s climate has warmed up
and cooled off in the past. So, what s land-ethically wrong
with the present episode of anthropogenic global warming?
We are a part of nature, so our recent habit of recycling
sequestered carbon may be biologically unique, but it is not
unnatural. A land-ethical evaluation of the current episode
of anthropogenic climate change can, however, be made
on the basis of temporal scale and magnitude. We may be
causing a big increase of temperature at an unprecedented
rate. That s what s land-ethically wrong with anthropogenic
global warming.
ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS 241
Temporal and spatial scale in combination are key to
the evaluation of direct human ecological impact. Long
before Homo sapiens evolved, violent disturbances regu-
larly occurred in nature. And they still occur, quite inde-
pendently of human agency. Volcanoes bury the biota of
whole mountains with lava and ash. Tornadoes rip through
the countryside, leveling houses and trees. Hurricanes erode
beaches. Lightning sets res that sweep through forests
and savannas. Rivers drown oodplains. Droughts dry up
lakes and streams. Why, therefore, are analogous anthro-
pogenic disturbances clear cuts, beach developments,
hydroelectric impoundments, and the like environmen-
tally unethical? As such, they are not. Once again, its
a question of scale. In general, frequent, intense distur-
bances, such as tornadoes, occur at small, widely distributed
spatial scales, while spatially more extensive disturbances,
such as droughts, occur less frequently. And most dis-
turbances at whatever level of intensity and scale are,
mathematically speaking, stochastic (random) and chaotic
(unpredictable). The problem with anthropogenic distur-
bances such as industrial forestry and agriculture, sub-
urban development, drift net shing is that they are far
more frequent, widespread, and regularly occurring than are
non-anthropogenic disturbances. They are well out of the
spatial and temporal range of disturbances experienced by
ecosystems over evolutionary time.
Proponents of the new ux of nature paradigm in ecology
agree that appropriate scale is the operative norm for
ethically appraising anthropogenic ecological perturbations.
For example, Pickett and Ostfeld (1995) note that the
ux of nature is a dangerous metaphor. The metaphor and
the underlying ecological paradigm may suggest to the
thoughtless and greedy that since ux is a fundamental part
of the natural world, any human caused ux is justiable.
Such an inference is wrong because the ux in the natural
world has severe limits two characteristics of human-
induced ux would suggest that it would be excessive: fast
rate and large spatial extent.
Among the abnormally frequent and widespread anthro-
pogenic perturbations that Leopold (1949) himself censures
in The Land Ethic are the continent-wide elimination of
large predators from biotic communities in Europe and
North America; the ubiquitous substitution of domestic
species for wild ones; the ecological homogenization of the
planet resulting from the anthropogenic worldwide pooling
of faunas and oras; the ubiquitous polluting of waters or
obstructing them with dams.
The summary moral maxim of the land ethic, however,
must be rendered more dynamic in light of developments
in ecology over the past quarter century. Leopold
acknowledges the existence and land-ethical signicance
of natural environmental change, but seems to have thought
of it primarily on a very slow evolutionary temporal scale.
Even so, he thereby incorporates the concept of inherent
environmental change and the crucial norm of scale into
the land ethic. In light of more recent developments in
ecology, we can add norms of scale to the land ethic
for both climatic and ecological dynamics in land-ethically
evaluating anthropogenic changes in nature. One hesitates
to edit Leopolds elegant prose, but as a stab at formulating
a dynamized summary moral maxim for the land ethic, I
will hazard the following: A thing is right when it tends
to disturb the biotic community only at normal spatial and
temporal scales, so as not to mar its beauty (or health). It
is wrong when it tends otherwise.
SUMMARY
In conclusion, then, there are two fundamental genera
of environmental ethics, anthropocentrism and non-anthro-
pocentrism. Of the former there are two species, strong
and weak. Strong anthropocentrism reduces all environmen-
tal values to preferences capable of economic expression
and valuation in monetary terms. All environmental deci-
sions can be made by weighing benets against costs,
tempered by considerations of environmental justice. Weak
anthropocentrism agrees that all environmental values are
instrumental, but insists that some are not preferences.
Human environmental values that conict with preferences
are more properly institutionalized politically than made to
compete economically.
There are several species of non-anthropocentrism. Two,
animal liberation and animal rights, are not, properly, envi-
ronmental ethics; and indeed, are often at odds with envi-
ronmental concerns and values. A third, biocentrism the
proposition that all living beings possess intrinsic value
and merit respect builds upon the theory of animal rights.
Though proffered as an environmental ethic, biocentrism is
hardly relevant because it morally enfranchises only indi-
viduals, while actual environmental concerns are almost
always holistic.
Ecocentrism, a fourth species of non-anthropocentrism,
is holistic in focus. In its original articulation by Aldo
Leopold, the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic
community is the standard of right environmental conduct.
Allegations to the contrary notwithstanding, ecocentrism
does not entail environmental fascism. For, as Leopold con-
ceives it, a land ethic is an addition to, not a substitute for,
our more individualistically inclined social ethics and all
other things being equal, our more venerable social ethics
take precedence over the land ethic when they conict.
Contemporary ecology, however, posits a more dynamic
than stable nature and more loosely associated than tightly
integrated biotic communities, existing at multiple scales,
subject to a wide variety of periodic disturbances. A more
dynamic ecocentrism would morally limit anthropogenic
change and disturbance to normal temporal and spatial
scales, thus to preserve the lands health and beauty.
242 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
REFERENCES
Aiken, W (1984) Ethical Issues in Agriculture, in Earthbound:
New Introductory Essays in Environmental Ethics, ed T Regan,
Random House, New York, 274288.
Bentham, J (1789) An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Botkin, D (1990) Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the
Twenty First Century, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Callicott, J B (1989) In Defense of the Land Ethic, State Univer-
sity of New York Press, Albany, NY.
Carson, R (1962) Silent Spring, Houghton Mifin, Boston, MA.
Commoner, B (1971) The Closing Circle, Knopf, New York.
Costanza, R, dArge, R, de Groot, R, Farber, S, Grasso, M, Han-
non, B, Naeem, S, Limburg, K, Paruelo, J, ONeill, R V,
Raskin, R, Sutton, P, and van den Belt, M (1997) The Value
of the Worlds Ecosystem Services, Nature, 387, 253260.
Cummings, R, Broockshire, D, and Schultz, W (1986) Valuing
Environmental Goods: a State of the Art Assessment of the Con-
tingent Valuation Method, Rowman and Allenheld, Totowa, NJ.
Darwin, C R (1871) The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation
to Sex, J Murray, London.
Elton, C (1927) Animal Ecology, Sidgwick and Jackson, London.
Feinberg, J (1974) The Rights of Animals and Unborn Genera-
tions, in Philosophy and Environmental Crisis, ed W Black-
stone, University of Georgia Press, Athens, 4368.
Ferre, F (1996) Persons in Nature: Toward an Applicable and
Unied Environmental Ethics, Ethics and the Environment,
Vol. 1, 1525.
Goodpaster, K E (1978) On Being Morally Considerable, J. Phi-
los., 75, 308325.
Goodpaster, K E (1979) From Egoismto Environmentalism. Ethics
and Problems of the Twenty- rst century, eds K E Goodpaster
and K E Sayre, University of Notre Dame Press, IN, 2135.
Hume, D (1751) An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals,
Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Jamieson, D (1998) Animal Liberation is an Environmental Ethic,
Environ. Values, 7, 4157.
Kant, I (1785) Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Johann
Friedrich Hartknoch, Riga.
Krutilla, J and Fisher, A (1985) The Economics of Natural Envi-
ronments. Studies in the Valuation of Commodity and Amenity
Resources, Resources for the Future, Washington, DC.
Leopold, A (1949) A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here
and There, Oxford University Press, New York.
Leopold, A (1999) For the Health of the Land. Previously Unpub-
lished Essays and Other Writings, eds J B Callicott and E T
Freyfogle, Island Press, Washington, DC.
Marsh, G P (1864) Man and Nature, Charles Scribner, New York.
Muir, J (1916) A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, Houghton
Mifin, Boston, MA.
Naess, A (1989) Ecology, Community, Life Style, translated by
D Rothenberg, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Norton, B G (1984) Environmental Ethics and Weak Anthro-
pocentrism, Environm. Ethics, 6, 131148.
Norton, B G (1988) Commodity, Amenity, and Morality: The
Limits of Quantication in Valuing Biodiversity, in Biodiver-
sity, ed E O Wilson, National Academy Press, Washington,
DC, 200205.
Norton, B G (1996) Environmental Ethics and Weak Anthro-
pocentrism, Environ. Ethics, 6, 131148.
Partridge, E P (1981) Responsibilities to Future Generations,
Prometheus, Buffalo, NY.
Partridge, E P (1984) Nature as a Moral Resource, Environ.
Ethics, 6, 101130.
Passmore, J (1974) Mans Responsibility for Nature, Charles
Scribners Sons, New York.
Peterson, G and Sorg, C, eds (1989) Toward a Measurement of
Total Value, USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Forest
and Range Experiment Station General Technical Report, Fort
Collins, CO.
Pickett, S T A and Ostfeld, R S (1995) The Shifting Paradigm in
Ecology, in The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and Patch
Dynamics, eds R L Knight and S F Bates, Academic Press,
Orlando, FL, 261278.
Pojman, L P (1999) Global Environmental Ethics, Mayeld,
Mountain View, CA.
Regan, T (1979) An Examination and Defense of One Argument
Concerning Animal Rights, Inquiry, 22, 189219.
Regan, T (1983) The Case for Animal Rights, Berkeley University
of California Press, CA.
Routley, R (1973) Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental
Ethic, in Proceedings of the 15th World Congress of Philos-
ophy, Vol. 1, Bulgarian Organizing Committee, Sophia Press,
Varna, 205210.
Sagoff, M (1988) The Economy of the Earth, Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, Cambridge.
Sagoff, M (1997) Can We Put a Price on Natures Services, Report
fromthe Institute of Philosophy and Public Policy, 17(3), 712.
Schopenhauer, A (1818) Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Hesse
and Becker, Leipzig.
Schweitzer, A (1923) Civilization and Ethics, translated by
A Naish, Black, London.
Shrader-Frechette, K S (1996) Individualism, Holism, and
Environmental ethics, Ethics Environ., 1, 5569.
Singer, P (1977) Animal Liberation: A New Ethic for Our Treat-
ment of Animals, Avon, New York.
Sikora, R I and Barry, B (1978) Obligations to Future Genera-
tions, Temple University Press, PA.
Smith, A (1759) Theory of the Moral Sentiments, eds A Millar,
A Kinkaid, and J Bell, Edinburgh.
Taylor, P W (1986) The Ethics of Respect for Nature, Princeton
University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Thoreau, H D (1854) Walden, Tichnor and Fields, Boston, MA.
Udall, S (1963) The Quiet Crisis, Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
New York.
Wenz, P (1988) Environmental Justice, State University of New
York, Press, Albany, NY.
White, G (1789) The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne
in the County of Southhampton, reprinted by Macmillan (1900),
London.
White, L (1967) The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,
Science, 155, 12031207.
FURTHER READING
Callicott, J B (1999) Beyond the Land Ethic, State University of
New York Press, Albany, NY.
ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT THE RISE OF NON-GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATIONS (NGOs) 243
Environmental
Movement the Rise of
Non-government
Organizations (NGOs)
Elizabeth May
Sierra Club of Canada, Ottawa, Canada
Although active in promoting environmental policies since
the 19th century, environmental NGOs became a more pro-
found force in the latter decades of the 20th century.
Environmental groups operate at local, community, pro-
vincial/state, national and international levels. Generally,
they exist based on public nancial support and involve
millions of citizens around the world. Typically and cul-
turally, NGOs are more robust in democratic societies, but
emerge as countries transit from totalitarian to democratic
governance.
The rise of NGOs has corresponded to a declining role
of the nation state in an era of increased global corpo-
rate rule. In response, environmental NGOs are themselves
increasingly globalized and acting in signi cant ways on
international issues, from United Nations (UN) fora to the
World Trade Organization (WTO).
The role of NGOs has been accepted by the UN orga-
nizations with increasing openness through the preparatory
process for the United Nations Conference on Environment
and Development (UNCED), and the June, 1992 Rio Earth
Summit. Resistance to NGO participation in other institu-
tions, such as the World Bank and the WTO, has spilled over
into the streets of Washington, DC for a number of years and
in Seattle in November 1999 at the third ministerial meeting
of the WTO.
NGOs, as a signi cant force within civil society, will
likely continue to occupy an increasing area of political
space as the challenges of global environmental change
weaken existing institutions.
Reformers of all kinds have long organized themselves into
groups and associations to press for change. Successful
movements put themselves out of business, such as the
slavery abolitionists and the womens suffrage movement.
The rst successful mass mobilization campaign can be
traced back to the UK abolitionists campaign in the 18th
century. NGOs became an accepted part of society dating
from the FrancoPrussian war and the creation of the Red
Cross.
Although the term environment did not come into com-
mon usage until the 1960s, concern for nature, clean air and
water and protection of animals led to the establishment of
the earliest environmental groups toward the end of the 19th
century.
A case can be made for the inclusion of public health
activists as early environmentalists. Florence Nightingale,
for example, bemoaned that the Thames was used as an
open sewer and worked to improve standards of public
health through improved sanitation:
It did strike me as odd sometimes, that we should pray to
be delivered from plague, pestilence, and famine, when all
the common sewers ran into the Thames and fevers haunted
undrained land, and the districts which cholera would visit
could be pointed out. I thought that before cholera came that
we might remove these causes, not pray God would remove the
cholera.
Suggestions for Thought (1860)
The killing fogs of Londons smoke choked air also led
to public protest and movements for change focused on the
deleterious effects on public health. Such concerns had been
voiced for hundreds of years, but most notably grabbed
attention in 1952 when 4000 people died in an acute air
pollution event in London. Similarly, the development of
British common law remedies for nuisance and riparian
rights were intimately tied to protection of ones right to
clean air and clean water. Still, the existence of organized
environmental groups is seen as a more recent phenomena.
THE NATURE LOVERS
In North America, early environmental groups were orga-
nized as hiking clubs, such as the Williamstown Club
(1863), the White Mountain Club (1873) and the Appala-
chian Mountain Club (1876). In 1875, people concerned
with the state of the nations forests organized the Ameri-
can Forestry Association. Unlike its current incarnation, it
initially championed forest protection, urged tree planting,
lobbied for parks and successfully established Arbor Day.
As the industrial revolution and expanding populations in
the Eastern United States pressed against shrinking wilder-
ness, these societies expressed the romantic longing for
wildness, inuenced by Henry David Thoreau and his 1854
book Walden (see Thoreau, Henr y David, Volume 5).
In this period, both the Audubon Society and the Sierra
Club were formed. The Audubon Society and the Ameri-
can Ornithological Society were formed in the 1880s, with
a primary mission of the study and protection of wild birds.
The Sierra Club (see Sier r a Club, Volume 5) was founded
in 1892 with the broader goal of protecting large tracts
of wilderness in the western US. Although the word envi-
ronment was not used at the time, protection of wildness
and the urgent imperative to protect nature from ruthless
exploitation were common themes in the groups early lit-
erature. Founder John Muir (see Muir , John, Volume 5)
wrote of government attitudes to American forests:
244 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
(the government) is like a rich and foolish spendthrift who has
inherited a magnicent estate in perfect order, and then has
left his elds and meadows, forests and parks, to be sold and
plundered and wasted at will, depending on their inexhaustible
abundance.
(Turner, 1985)
The Sierra Club was founded with the goal of intro-
ducing urban dwellers to the magnicence of the Sierra
Nevada. Muir believed that by experiencing and enjoying
the natural world, people would, through transformative and
transcendental experience, become converts to the cause of
preserving it. This formula proved very successful. Prior to
the establishment of the Sierra Club, Muir himself helped
persuade outdoorsman, adventurer and hunter US President
Teddy Roosevelt to protect critical wilderness (see Roo-
sevelt, Theodore, Volume 5). The rst national park had
been Yellowstone in 1872, but public reactions had been
adverse.
In a strategy that foreshadowed Sierra Clubs tactics for
the next century, Muir plotted a campaign to make Yosemite
a national park. The plan included an insider Washington
strategy with a Yosemite bill the locus of lobbying, a
media strategy with articles in popular magazines extolling
the virtues of Yosemite and the urgency of protecting it
from development, penned by the now famous Muir, and
mobilizing individuals by taking concerned people into
the Yosemite wilderness. The Washington and New York
lobbying was primarily the work of Muirs friend and
collaborator Robert Underwood Johnson, whose role as
associate editor of the nations leading literary monthly,
The Century, proved crucial in mobilizing public support.
The Yosemite bill passed into law in 1890.
But the wilderness of Yosemite was incompletely pro-
tected with key areas, particularly the Hetch Hetchy Valley,
remaining in state, rather than federal, control. Moreover,
the magnicent sequoia forests north of the park were
unprotected. These and other wilderness campaigns became
the focus for the Sierra Club.
In the spring of 1903 Muir accomplished the ultimate in
lobbying coups; a camping trip into Yosemite with Pres-
ident Teddy Roosevelt. By the end of the trip, Teddy
Roosevelt declared it would be a shame to our civi-
lization to let them (sequoias) disappear. They are mon-
uments unto themselves , (Turner, 1985, 826). It took
several years more effort to get the bill expanding pro-
tection of Yosemite to include the Hetch Hetchy Valley
through the California legislature, but ultimately, Muir and
the Sierra Club prevailed. But the victory was not to be
permanent.
THE CONSERVATION MOVEMENT
Across North America another species of environmental-
ism was on the rise. If Muir and Sierra Club could be
described as preservationist, the movement for scientic
forestry and wise use of natural resources was christened
conservationist. The leading practitioners and advocates for
conservation were Gifford Pinchot and Bernard Fernow.
Pinchot was the son of a wealthy Connecticut family, who
studied forestry in Germany and became the rst dean of
the Yale School of Forestry, created through a large Pin-
chot family donation. German born and trained, Fernow
was already established as a forester when Pinchot came
on the scene. Pinchot replaced Fernow as the director of
the Division of Forestry within the Department of Agricul-
ture and Fernow became the rst dean of forestry at the
University of Toronto.
Both believed in the efcient use of forests and favored
human use and benets over the love of and protection of
wilderness in its own right. Pinchot and Fernow established
forestry principles that persist to this day, favoring even-
aged forest stands and the elimination of old growth. They
championed sustained yield forest management.
Initially, Muir and Pinchot were in league. In 1895, Muir
even wrote:
The forests must be, and will be, not only preserved, but used;
and like perennial fountains be made to yield a sure
harvest of timber, while at the same time all their far reaching
(aesthetic and spiritual) uses may be maintained unimpaired.
But the unity of preservationists and conservationists
was not to last. Two bitter disputes permanently split
the American conservation movement. The rst was the
question of the purpose and level of protection for National
Forests. Pinchot and his followers believed that scientic
forestry and logging should take place in these forests,
while Muir and the Sierra Club had succeeded in having
21 million acres (eight million hectares) of forest set aside
in 1897 as forest reserves with no mention of a commercial
purpose.
Although Muir originally tried to keep both forces unied
in order to ensure the success of the cause of forest reserves,
the tension between preservation and wise use ultimately
snapped coalition efforts. Pinchots forces succeeded in
having Congress pass a Forest Management Act (1897)
which stated that the central purpose of reserves was to
furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and
necessities of citizens of the United States . The Act also
included mining and grazing as acceptable activities within
the forest reserve system.
Pinchots colleague Bernard Fernow summed up the
conservationist view, the main service, the principal object
of the forest has nothing to do with beauty or pleasure. It is
not except incidentally an object of aesthetics, but an object
of economics .
The conversion of national forest reserves to logging
concessions was a blow to Muir, but it was nothing com-
pared to the heart-breaking loss in the ght for the Hetch
Hetchy.
ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT THE RISE OF NON-GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATIONS (NGOs) 245
Muir and the Sierra Club had succeeded in having
the dramatic Hetch Hetchy Valley added to the Yosemite
National Park. One hundred and fty miles from the
growing urban center of San Francisco, the Yosemite
wilderness was seen through two very different lenses. To
Muir, in wildness lay spiritual salvation:
thousands of tired, nerve shaken, over civilized people are
beginning to nd out that going to the mountains is going
home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks
and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and
irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.
(Nash, 1967)
For others, the Hetch Hetchy Valley held another form
of salvation, an abundant source of water for a parched
city. The proposed damming of the Hetch Hetchy was
sacrilege to Muir, but sensible to the wise-use conservation
movement. As Pinchot wrote:
As to my attitude regarding the proposed use of the Hetch
Hetchy by the city of San Francisco I am fully per-
suaded that the injury by substituting a lake for the
present swampy oor of the valley is altogether unimpor-
tant compared with the bene ts to be derived from its use as a
reservoir.
San Francisco s engineers had proposed damming the
Hetch Hetchy in 1882, long before its inclusion in the
Yosemite National Park. In 1890, even after its status as
a protected area within a national park was established, the
Mayor of the day requested permission to dam the river
and use the water. The Secretary of the Interior, Ethan A
Hitchcock refused, noting that a dam was inconsistent with
the national park designation.
But in 1906, San Francisco suffered the double blow
of a devastating earthquake and re. The city s need
for water aroused public sympathy far more than the
preservationists love of wilderness. In 1908, Hitchcock s
successor, James R Gar eld, approved the plan. The after-
math was an historic point in the growth of environmental
groups as Muir, Johnson and the Sierra Club launched the
rst nationwide environmental protest campaign in US his-
tory. The Hetch Hetchy became a national issue.
The ght was bitter and the rhetoric brutal. Muir, who
had long written of wilderness in terms of religious rev-
erence, now wrote of its despoilers as Satanic. Johnson
also took up the cause of protection of beauty and nature
against the materialistic followers of Mammon in the con-
text of a larger morality play. While Muir and Johnson
urged that other sources be found for the city s water
needs, even sympathetic President Teddy Roosevelt was
convinced that there was no other suitable source for
water.
In 1912, Muir called those promoting the dam scheme:
temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism
having a perfect contempt for nature instead of lifting their
eyes to the God of the Mountains, lift them to the Almighty
Dollar. Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well, dam for water tanks
the people s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has
ever been consecrated in the heart of man.
In what may have been most painful for Muir, dam sup-
porters included friends and residents of San Francisco
within the Sierra Club. Warren Olney, one of the Club s
founders, led a Club faction in support of the dam. Muir and
Johnson acted through the California Branch of the Society
for the Preservation of National Parks, to avoid the inter-
nal con ict. In 1910, through a referendum within the
Sierra Club, Muir established that the Club also favored
preservation over damming the Hetch Hetchy, by a vote
of 589 161. Still, having to ght within the organiza-
tion he had founded was a bitter pill. The San Francisco
media lampooned Muir as a cranky old fanatic who cared
more for trees than people. And there was no doubt his
rhetoric had become more fanatical. But nationally, Muir
and the preservationists had widespread support, with arti-
cles in the New York Times and many popular magazines.
The rift within the conservation movement was profound.
In 1913, the head of the National Conservation Associa-
tion, Harry Slatterly, wrote to the Secretary of the Interior,
Unfortunately, our good friends the nature lovers are still
unreasonable in their attitude. There is grave danger they
will again be able to block this most necessary legislation
(Hays, 1972).
Muir and the Sierra Club organized a broader coalition,
pulling away groups, such as women s clubs, traditionally
supportive of Gifford Pinchot and the utilitarian conserva-
tionists to the cause of Hetch Hetchy. The Hetch Hetchy
issue galvanized a new wilderness preservation movement,
with effective support from the women s clubs, hunter
and sportsmen s groups, outing clubs, scienti c societies
and academic institutions. One Senator noted that he had
received 5000 letters urging him to save the Hetch Hetchy.
National support was strong and Muir and his support-
ers felt the protests would succeed in thwarting the bill to
dam the valley. In November 1913, Muir wrote to Johnson,
we re bound to win, enemy badly frightened, Up and smite
em!
But the quiet and effective lobbying of in uential San
Franciscans had done wonders for the city that wanted
water. On December 6, 1913 the Senate vote favored
damming the Hetch Hetchy, and despite best efforts, no
presidential veto followed.
Muir and the preservationists accepted their defeat on the
Hetch Hetchy, nding solace, as Muir wrote, in the fact that
the conscience of a whole country has been aroused from
sleep . It was no exaggeration to say that the Hetch Hetchy
controversy had awakened the nation.
The wilderness movement in the United States contin-
ued after Muir s death in December 1914. The appreciation
for the spiritual aspect of wilderness was most notably
246 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
continued by Aldo Leopold (see Leopold, Aldo, Vol-
ume 5). In 1908 Leopold graduated from Yale School of
Forestry, pursuing Gifford Pinchots philosophy, only to
reject his utilitarian view of nature. In summarizing the
American approach to nature, he wrote a stump was
our symbol of progress . Although Leopold became pres-
ident of the Ecological Society of America (founded in
1915), his largest contribution to the environmental move-
ment was through his writing. His most inuential legacy,
A Sand County Almanac and Sketches from Here and There
was published in 1949.
WILDLIFE PROTECTION MOVEMENT
While the environmental movement took root in North
America through wilderness campaigns, the movement also
expanded in Europe through the latter part of the 19th cen-
tury. Lacking vast tracts of wilderness, the focus of nature
lovers was the protection of animals. As early as 1824,
the rst organization concerned with non-human life was
established in England by philosopher Jeremy Bentham.
The British Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Ani-
mals championed the protection of domesticated animals.
It was not until 1903 that the fate of wild species found an
organizational champion, the Society for the Preservation
of the Wild Fauna of the Empire.
In 1900, a treaty was negotiated by the foreign ministers
of colonial powers controlling the continent of Africa and
signed in London the Convention for the Preservation of
Animals, Birds and Fish in Africa. The Times of Londons
coverage of the conference included a decidedly environ-
mental message
The advance of civilization, with its noise and agitation, is
fatally disturbing to the primitive forms of life. Commerce,
moreover, discovers continually some new demand for the
trophies of the chase. The horns, the skins, and the plumage
of the beasts and the birds have an increasing market value. It
is not surprising, therefore, that men of science have become
alarmed at the prospect of the extinction of the most interesting
and characteristic types of zoological development.
(Bonner, 1993)
But it was not only scientists who worried about the
perilous fate of Africas wildlife. The colonial dukes and
lords and princes had come to regard the hunting of African
game as their private domain. In 1903, the colonial big
game hunters founded the Society for the Preservation of
the Wild Fauna of the Empire. In the media, they were
dubbed penitent butchers. These conservationists were not
discouraged from killing lions under the terms of the 1900
treaty. The treaty actually called for protection only of those
species which are either useful to man or are harmless .
Hunting lions, leopards, hyaenas and wild dogs was con-
sistent with the treaty. Conservationist US President Teddy
Roosevelt was one of the big game hunters hosted by
British residents of East Africa. In a remark that highlights
the different strands of the fabric of the environmental
movement, when hiking through Yosemite, Muir had chas-
tised Roosevelt for his love of hunting: Mr Roosevelt,
when are you going to get beyond the boyishness of killing
things are you not getting far enough along to leave that
off?
The hunter conservationist remains an important part
of the modern environmental movement, found in groups
such as the National Wildlife Federation in the US, its
related Canadian Wildlife Federation, and Ducks Unlim-
ited. Although now quite removed from hunting, the origi-
nal founders of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which
came into being in the 1960s, had come from similar
origins.
After the devastation of European human environments,
Briton E M Max Nicholson worked to establish the rst
international conservation organization with goals beyond
Africa. The International Union for the Conservation of
Nature (IUCN) came into existence in 1948, through the
work of Nicholson and others (see IUCN (The World
Conservation Union), Volume 4). Staffed by scientists,
it established a reputation for credible and authoritative
conservation research. Working with government and non-
government members, IUCN (now known as the World
Conservation Union) had a unique ability to inuence
government policy. Still, it lacked the wherewithal to raise
funds for its program. To meet this need, the WWF was
founded.
Public sentiment had been moved through the inuen-
tial writings of Sir Julian Huxley, scientist and rst head
of the United Nations Educational, Scientic and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO). Huxley wrote a three-piece series
in The Observer in 1960 describing his travels though
Africa, the magnicent wild creatures and inexorable push
toward their destruction. It moved Nicholson and other
committed entrepreneurs to organize a fund-raising and
campaigning arm for IUCN. IUCN and WWF were in part-
nership until WWF broke away to do its own work in
the mid-1980s. (In the 1990s, the WWF ofcially changed
its name to the Worldwide Fund for Nature.) The early
connections between wildlife appreciation and royalty are
maintained by WWF through the active roles of Their
Royal Highnesses, Prince Philip and Prince Bernhard of
the Netherlands.
Key elements of an international environmental move-
ment were in place by the middle of the 20th century, with
factions concerned with wilderness preservation, conserva-
tion of natural resources, including wildlife for sustained
use, and wildlife protection, ghting to keep species from
going the way of the dodo. The movement had extended
itself through much of the globe, although headquarters and
impetus for action largely came from the source of the dam-
age; the industrialized world.
ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT THE RISE OF NON-GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATIONS (NGOs) 247
THE MODERN ENVIRONMENTAL
MOVEMENT
Most writers date the modern environmental movements
birth as 1963 when Rachel Carsons classic Silent Spring
was published (see next section and Car son, Rachel
Louise, Volume 5). It is no doubt true that a new type of
organization was required to tackle a new host of environ-
mental threats.
The by-products of warfare were changing the very
nature of the environment. World War I gave the world
chlorine compounds; World War II yielded chlorinated
hydrocarbons, organophosphates, and increased radiation
from the new technological ability to split the atom, for
armaments and electricity. Pollution from industrial enter-
prises was compromising regional air quality and killing
life in aquatic systems. The new chemicals brought new
health risks. While the chlorine compounds and other
toxic chemicals found commercial application as pesti-
cides, the arms race led to global contamination with fallout
from atmospheric testing and increased radiation from the
nuclear power industry. It is clear that a prime motivation
for widespread public protests against atmospheric nuclear
weapons testing was the impact on public health, particu-
larly on childrens health, around the world.
A new type of international organization was born out
of the movement to stop atmospheric testing. Although
the campaign is usually characterized as part of the peace
movement, it had all the hallmarks of environmental
concerns. Nuclear testing was distributing tons of toxic
radionuclides, including strontium-90, all around the world.
Strontium-90s pathways mimic those of calcium. Taken up
in grasses, consumed by dairy cows, the radiation made its
way to milk. Once consumed, it was stored in bones and
teeth, increasing the risk of childhood leukemias and later
adult cancers.
In response, the world saw its rst truly global grass-
roots movement in the late 1950s. Many of the groups were
established by mothers concerned about nuclear weapons
testing and the threat to their children. Although national
groups of many different names were established, the
largest umbrella, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
(CND) organized the key global events. The organization
was aided by the prominence of one of its founders, Lord
Bertrand Russell. The ubiquitous nature of its incorporation
into popular culture can be seen to this day in the use of
its symbol as the peace sign. The circle with a semaphore
was the symbol for the letters CND.
In the US, the campaign against atmospheric nuclear
testing was organized through the Committee for a Sane
Nuclear Policy, generally abbreviated to SANE. Key board
members included the leading liberal thinkers of the day:
editor of the Saturday Review Norman Cousins, repeat
candidate for president, Norman Thomas, and the author of
the best-selling book, Baby and Child Care, Dr Benjamin
Spock.
The Ban-the-Bomb movement held large marches,
launched petition drives, and enlisted celebrities and Nobel
laureates in its campaign. In the UK, an annual Easter-
time march built public support and momentum. The march
started in 1956 when a single Quaker walked from London
to a military research facility at Aldermaston, a distance of
54 miles (87 km). The following year, 100 people marched.
By 1959, there were 3000 marchers. But, the most cel-
ebrated and successful march was in 1960 when over
100 000 marchers made the journey towards London from
Aldermaston, culminating with a giant rally at Trafalgar
Square. Marchers came from national groups from around
the world, with committees from Ghana, South Africa,
Greece, Israel, Cyprus, the US, Canada, Ireland and France.
The line of the march stretched a distance of ten miles
(16 km), Marchers were applauded by supporters along the
sidelines, and Musicians played along the route. An enor-
mous volunteer effort orchestrated lodging en route, mostly
on school and church oors, and canteen wagons served
three meals a day. The youngest marcher, Martin Dowl-
ing, was seven weeks old. The eldest, in a wheel chair, was
nearly 100. The march was led by Canon Collins, the canon
of St. Pauls Cathedral and by Jacquetta Hawks, historian,
wife of J B Priestley. Many Labour members of parliament
marched as well. The Aldermaston March of 1960 was a
major media event, covered by television and radio news
around the world. If Woodstock had happened rst, it would
have been dubbed the Woodstock of the Ban the Bomb
movement.
The grassroots political movement was rewarded when
in September 1963, the governments of the United States,
the Soviet Union and the UK entered into the Nuclear Test
Ban Treaty. The treaty banned the testing by detonation
of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. While the treaty is
often characterized as part of the developing movement for
non-proliferation and peace, it spoke most immediately to
ending the widespread dispersion of nuclear contamination
through the atmosphere.
The Test Ban Treaty was not the rst multilateral agree-
ment to deal with an environmental concern. The early
part of the 20th century also saw a number of bina-
tional treaties between Canada and the United States; rst
the 1909 Boundary Waters Convention, which created the
International Joint Commission, and the Migratory Birds
Convention. But the Test Ban Treaty was arguably the rst
created in global fashion and resulting from the efforts of
NGOs.
SILENT SPRING
The modern environmental movement is usually traced to
the publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (Carson,
248 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
1963) (see Car son, Rachel Louise, Volume 5). Silent
Spring chronicled the health and environmental threats
of the escalating and widespread use of chemical syn-
thetic pesticides. The book was both well written and well
researched and became a bestseller. Despite the vociferous
efforts of the chemical lobby to attack the credibility of
Rachel Carson, she became a hero to many Americans. Her
warnings led to the creation of new citizen groups working
to have certain pesticides banned. Efforts in Long Island,
NY to ban dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) led to
the creation of the Environmental Defence Fund (see Envi-
ronmental Defense Fund, Volume 5). Traditional groups,
such as the Sierra Club, now under the leadership of its
rst executive director, David Brower (see Brower , David,
Volume 5), broadened the organizations mandate to tackle
pollution and pesticides.
Through the late 1960s, a huge increase in environmental
awareness burgeoned in the US. In some ways, it could
have been seen as an extension of the movement against
the war in Vietnam. But within the political debate taking
place in the US, the new environmental movement was
often accused by the anti-war movement of being safe,
white, and middle class, detracting from the tougher issue
of predominantly black US soldiers drafted to ght an
unpopular war in Southeast Asia. Still, both movements
grew in strength.
In the fall of 1969, the US government planned to
conduct an underground nuclear test in Amchitka, Alaska,
and suddenly a new protest movement was sweeping the
US to stop the test. Scientists feared that the blast might
actually destabilize an area with signicant fault lines,
with the potential for a catastrophic earthquake. The US
Secretary of Defense took his whole family to Alaska
to demonstrate his faith in the safety of the nuclear test,
but opposition mounted. US President Richard Nixon was
besieged with telegrams and letters urging that the test be
cancelled. The grassroots opposition also came from north
of the border, where a small group in Vancouver organized
themselves as Greenpeace to oppose the tests. The test
proceeded, but the movement for environmental protection
was growing.
In 1970, Life magazine ran a cover story, Lake Erie
is Dead. The Cuyahoga River in Ohio had caught re
from the chemicals that had been dumped there by local
industries. The emblem of the US crest, the mighty bald
eagle, was near extinction due to the pernicious effects of
DDT as it moved through the food chain. The reproductive
success of the bald eagle, as top predator, was dangerously
compromised.
The growing movement was harnessed by Denis Hayes
and US Senator Gaylord Nelson in a national teach-in
called Earth Day (see Ear th Day, Volume 5). April 22nd,
1970 galvanized a new and modern movement for envi-
ronmental protection. Earth Day was ofcially recognized
by Presidential Proclamation from US President Richard
Nixon. Large corporations seeking public favor, from Coca
Cola to Proctor and Gamble, endorsed the event. Tens of
thousands of people participated from coast to coast, with
limited activities in Canada as well.
Meanwhile, the environment movement was increasing
in Europe as well. In the UK, the International Institute
for Environment and Development (IIED) was formed and
championed by the visionary Barbara Ward (see War d,
Bar bar a, Volume 4). David Brower, having left Sierra
Club, founded Friends of the Earth (FoE) in 1969 (see
Fr iends of the Ear th, Volume 5) and afliate FoE groups
were formed in Europe and elsewhere. Greenpeace, also,
was forming national groups around the world. As well,
local grassroots efforts for environmental protection were
being organized in many countries.
STOCKHOLM
The gathering strength of public concern for the
environment was recognized by the UN in the rst
Conference on the Human Environment, in 1972 in
Stockholm. The UN conference is remembered for its
adoption of the Stockholm Principles for Environment
as well as for the NorthSouth split. Brazil boycotted
the conference, believing that the industrialized worlds
environmental agenda was code for stalling development
in the developing world. Yet, the conference was, by any
measure, a success.
Secretary general for the conference, Canadian Maurice
Strong, immediately sensed the need to include the environ-
mental movement. Under UN terminology, such citizens
groups were called NGOs. The organizing of a parallel
NGO conference for Stockholm was a rst of its kind.
Maurice Strong also commissioned a popular non-ofcial
book for the conference. Only One Earth: The Care and
Maintenance of a Small Planet, by Ward and Dubos (1972),
contributed to a growing global environmental conscious-
ness. Surprisingly, it became a bestseller and was printed
in twelve languages. Speaking to the NGO conference
at Stockholm, US anthropologist Margaret Mead, in what
would become a motto for environmental groups for gen-
erations to come, said Never doubt that a small group of
committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the
only thing that ever has .
The years leading to the UN Summit in Stockholm
and those immediately following saw the mainstreaming
of environmental concerns. Governments at all levels cre-
ated departments of the environment. New pollution control
legislation was brought forward in countries around the
world. In the US, legislation included the National Envi-
ronmental Protection Act which established environmental
assessment, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the
Endangered Species Act.
ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT THE RISE OF NON-GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATIONS (NGOs) 249
The rst major wave of environmental activism receded
in response to the apparent acceptance by government
and corporations of the demands of NGOs. Alternatively,
the oil shock of the early 1970s has been credited with
dampening demands for environmental protection. Still,
the oil crisis instilled an ethic of energy conservation,
if briey, in the psyche of Americans and Canadians.
Major auto manufacturers moved to produce more energy
efcient cars. Amory Lovins promoted soft energy paths
and demand-side energy management. The energy con-
servation movement led to the creation of a new type
of environmental NGO, one concerned with technolog-
ical innovation for conservation and renewable energy
sources.
Environmental groups grew around the world in response
to increased pressure on natural spaces and growing pol-
lution. In Australia, the Conservation Society and other
groups arose to stop the ooding of Lake Pedder, protect
the Great Barrier Reef, the forests of Tazmania as well as
to oppose uranium mining. Penan and Dayak indigenous
people in Borneo organized with Malaysian environmen-
tal groups to call for protection of the rainforest, while in
Brazil, rubber tappers, known as seringueiros, organized
for economic rights as well as protection of the Ama-
zonian rain forest. In December 1988, seringueiro leader,
Chico Mendes, was murdered just outside his Xapuri home,
despite the presence of state-provided bodyguards. In India,
women organized to protect forests through the Chipko
movement (see Chipko Movement, Volume 5), while in
Kenya, Wangaari Mathai organized the planting of trees
through the Greenbelt Movement. Even within the totalitar-
ian system of the USSR, voices of environmental activists
were heard.
New environmental threats through the next few decades
created focused campaigns for change. In the mid-1970s,
the thinning of the ozone layer led rst to consumer
campaigns to avoid those cosmetic products using ozone-
depleting clorouorocarbons (CFCs). As consumers, pri-
marily in the US and Canada, stopped buying products
containing CFCs, the manufacturers stopped using them,
hailing their commitment to environmental protection. It
was not for another decade that citizens realized CFC
use had continued and expanded through use in other
products, from air conditioning to blown foam insulation.
Governments responded to powerful environmental NGO
campaigns in global negotiations leading to the Montreal
Protocol in 1989. Friends of the Earth International (FoEI)
was particularly associated with this campaign as was the
Washington, DC, based Ozone Action. By that time, the
role of NGOs within high level negotiations had grown.
NGO representatives were included within the delegations
of many industrialized country governments. NGOs spoke
from the oor in plenary, as well as dominating the streets
in demands for change.
BRUNDTLAND TO RIO
In the last years of the 1980s, the second major wave of
public environmental activism was cresting. It happened to
coincide with the hearings of the UN sponsored the World
Commission for Environment and Development (WCED or
more commonly known as the Brundtland Commission).
The WCED was chaired by the leader of the Norwegian
parliamentary opposition, Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland. But,
when the government in power fell, newly anointed Prime
Minister Brundtland did the unexpected: she remained chair
of the commission. Other commission members included
the former secretary general of the Stockholm Conference
Maurice Strong, Ambassador Mohamed Sahnoun of Alge-
ria, Guyanas Shridath Ramphal, the secretary general of
the Commonwealth of Nations and the Deputy Prime Min-
ister Mansour Khalid of the Sudan, to name a few of the
22 members.
Unlike other groupings of prestigious and powerful per-
sonages pulled together in major commissions, the Brundt-
land Commission held public hearings around the world. In
Indonesia, Brazil, Norway, Zimbabwe, Kenya, the USSR,
Canada, Japan, they sought out the views of indigenous
peoples, peasant farmers, and NGOs of all shapes and
sizes. Hundreds of individuals and groups presented their
views on environment and development to the Commis-
sioners. In the process, the role of NGOs and the political
space they occupied was expanded. The WCED report,
Our Common Future, was released in 1987, many of
its pages reect a recognition of the role of NGOs as
important catalyst for the emerging concept of sustainable
development.
One of the key recommendations of the Brundtland Com-
mission was for a major global conference on the linked
problems of environment, development and militarism. The
WCED recommended that a UN Summit be convened in
1992, marking 20 years since Stockholm. That advice led
to acceptance by the UN General Assembly of a global
conference focusing on environment and development. Mil-
itarism was dropped from what the Brundtland Commission
termed a three-legged stool. The UNCED was held in June
1992 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; thus improving prospects
for bridging the NorthSouth divide that led to Brazils
1972 Stockholm boycott.
The Rio process expanded the role of NGOs in multi-
national issues. The negotiations at the rst Preparatory
Committee (Prep Com) meeting, held in Nairobi, Kenya
in August 1990 were delayed for several days until the
issue of the scope of NGO participation rights could be
resolved. Hard-line opposition to opening the process of
negotiations nearly stymied the effort for greater trans-
parency. But, in the end, the issue was resolved in favor
of previously unknown opportunities for NGO contribu-
tion to global policy development. NGOs, whether those
traditionally accepted within the UN Economic and Social
250 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Council (ECOSOC) bureaucracy or not, would be permitted
to speak in plenary at the discretion of the chair and
attend most working group negotiations. The advent of
electronic communication, via the internet, engaged many
more NGOs around the world. Experimental efforts at
early Prep Coms evolved by the time of the Earth Sum-
mit into a well respected daily bulletin of the progress
of negotiations, distributed in paper form, but simultane-
ously, around the world. Earth Negotiations Bulletin was a
agship project of Canadas International Institute for Sus-
tainable Development.
NGO engagement in the Rio process led to a new level
of policy awareness as well as international networking
between and among NGOs. Targeted effort was made by
northern NGOs to ensure that voices from the developing
world were heard. Prominent and respected southern anal-
ysis from activists like Indias Vandana Shiva, Malaysias
Martin Khor and Walden Bello of the Philippines group,
Global South, reached a larger and wider audience. Mar-
tin Khor of the Third World Network in Penang had long
worked under the spectre of potential political harassment
and arrest. Through the course of the Rio preparatory pro-
cess, his keen political analysis came to be appreciated
by the Malaysian government. In time, even Malaysia
welcomed NGO participation on its delegation.
By the time the Earth Summit was held in Rio in
June 1992, thousands of NGOs from around the world
had become engaged in the process. The NGOs, with the
assistance of Maurice Strong who was once again secretary
general of the conference, occupied substantial political
space at the conference as well as holding a global forum,
or peoples response to the governmental process, parallel
to UNCED. Strong also recruited Ecuadorian NGO leader,
Yolanda Kakabadze, who went on to head the IUCN (now
known as the World Conservation Union), to coordinate
NGO relations for UNCED.
The womens movement became prominently involved in
the Rio process through the efforts of the Womens Envi-
ronment and Development Organization (WEDO), led by
the indefatigable feminist and former US Congresswoman,
Bella Abzug. Youth organizations became involved, as did
aboriginal peoples.
Within the non-binding agreements for future action,
known as Agenda 21, there was explicit recognition of the
role of major groups. These were identied as environmen-
tal groups, development organizations, womens groups,
youth and indigenous peoples.
RIO TO SEATTLE
Progress made in identifying NGOs, increasingly with
other sectors labeled civil society, as legitimate agents
of change deserving of political space in governmental
affairs, was solidi ed in the ongoing work of the UN.
The follow-up to the Earth Summit commitments: the
Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention
for the Protection of Biological Diversity, the Rio Decla-
ration and the voluminous, 40 chapter, Agenda 21 all of
these important documents were relegated to a new institu-
tional body, set up within the UN backwater, the ECOSOC.
The Commission for Sustainable Development (CSD) held
annual reviews of progress in the spring of every year.
NGOs continued to have substantial rights of participa-
tion. But little progress was being made in meeting the
Rio targets.
The Rio Earth Summit produced a weak set of goals,
and still weaker political will to achieve them. Annual CSD
meetings offered ministers of environment the opportunity
to share their frustration over their expulsion to the political
wilderness. Every government had identi ed competing
priorities that left the Earth Summit goals in the vast heap
of the marginal and unloved. The reality was that Rio had
emerged as the environmental wave of public awareness
was already receding. Heads of government issued their
Rio promises, went home and, for the most part, forgot
them.
Other global summits continued to include signi cant
NGO participation. In 1994, the International Conference
on Population and Development (ICPD) met in Cairo.
Issues of population and reproductive rights that had been
pushed to the back burner in Rio were nally dealt with in
Cairo. Large numbers of NGOs, many veterans of the Rio
process, brought forward environmental concerns within the
context of the political mine eld of population pressures.
The Cairo Programme of Action explicitly embraced the
work of the Earth Summit, two years before. It spoke to
issues of unsustainable production and consumption, the
need to ensure sustainable levels of consumption as well as
the need to balance population numbers.
The year after Cairo, world leaders met in Copenhagen
in March 1995 to negotiate commitments to improve the
human condition. The World Summit on Social Develop-
ment (WSSD) also recognized extensive rights of participa-
tion for NGOs. Within months, the UN was again hosting
a conference (Beijing, September, 1996) the UN Fourth
World Conference on the Rights of Women. This brought
thousands of NGOs both to the of cial and, a now expected,
parallel NGO conference. The documents from the Bei-
jing Conference, the Beijing Declaration and the Beijing
Platform for Action, were heavily in uenced by the lively
North South debate of NGOs, from environmental, devel-
opment, human rights and women s groups from around
the world.
It can be argued that the seriousness of purpose of gov-
ernmental enterprise is directly, and inversely, proportional
to the extent of NGO participation. While NGOs received
credentials and became accepted players in the Rio process,
the real confrontation was in negotiations under the General
ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT THE RISE OF NON-GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATIONS (NGOs) 251
Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) within the decade
long Uruguay Round. Aggressive trade liberalization was
supported by abundant political will. By 1996, the Uruguay
Round had succeeded in establishing a powerful, central-
ized enforcement and governance body, the WTO.
In retrospect, it is interesting how the two sets of global
agreements, one to protect the planets life support systems
from the ravages of human activity, the other to ensure that
human activity would not be impeded by any barriers such
as troublesome environmental measures, could proceed side
by side. With the same governments negotiating, there were
no discussion within either process of the other. But there
is no question which global vision had the upper hand.
The WTO had teeth, the Rio agreements an impressive set
of gums. Moreover, there were scattered references to the
path to sustainable development through trade liberalization
and the free ow of foreign direct investment throughout
Agenda 21. In addition to targeting new areas for trade
liberalization (the removal of trade barriers designed to
protect domestic production from cheaper imports) the
Uruguay Round set out to create an institutional home for
the GATT, a global umpire of trade rules with extremely
effective sanctions for any country violating the GATT.
Into this arena, there was no room for NGO engagement.
The rst ministerial gathering of the WTO, in Singapore in
December 1996, offered NGOs observer status to the open-
ing plenary of speech making. But the actual negotiations,
in the WTOs own decision-making culture, left out not
only NGOs, but most governments. Key agreement was
reached on issues within small informal talks between the
Europeans, the United States, Canada and Japan. Devel-
oping country diplomats could be found wandering the
corridors and asking Martin Khor of the Third World Net-
work if he had heard what was taking place behind the
closed doors.
The Singapore meeting can be noted for one important
decision. Developing countries managed en masse to block
the introduction of an investment treaty into the WTOs
deliberations. The efforts to accomplish a multi-lateral
treaty to protect investors rights intensied within the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD). The treaty under negotiation was dubbed the Mul-
tilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI). Unexpectedly,
opposition to what seemed an obscure bit of business in a
little known international agency spawned a new and pow-
erful international force, the anti-globalization movement.
In January of 1997, the text of the draft MAI was
obtained by NGOs and placed on the internet. Public Citi-
zen, a Ralph Nader founded organization in Washington,
DC, played a prominent role in spreading information
about the MAI from its web site. The text made it clear
that, going beyond the position of dominance that trade
had achieved through the GATT, the MAI would pro-
vide corporations with potential compensation for reduced
expectations of prot. Word spread through the internet
and through global gatherings, such as the corridors of the
CSD meeting at the UN, that something new was afoot to
further undermine environmental protection and domestic
regulation. The OECD, which had promised a deadline of
completed negotiations for spring 1997, moved the deadline
to spring 1998.
Within governments, it appeared that little consensus had
been reached between trade ministries and less powerful
departments. In particular, ministries of culture expressed
doubts about the MAI. The French Minister of Culture,
in particular, openly criticized the homogenizing terms of
treating culture like a product. The many aspects of society
perceiving threats in the draft MAI text banded together
in a new and broader coalition of environment groups,
labor unions, development organizations, health advocacy
groups, cultural organizations, educators, womens groups,
and aboriginals. Opposition to the MAI spread globally
in an unprecedented and grassroots fashion, aided by the
internet.
OECD governments increasingly found themselves on
the defensive domestically over support for a treaty to
decrease nation state powers of regulation and increase
private corporate rights. By spring, 1998, the announced
deadline for completing the MAI, the negotiations col-
lapsed. A new global movement experienced the power of
democratic protest.
Parallel efforts had been under way for years to reform
or shut down international nancial institutions, such as the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Through
the late 1990s the spectre of Third World Debt was also
subject to a global campaign. Jubilee 2000 was initiated by
church groups in the UK, but spread globally as well. Its call
for reduction and removal of debt loads on heavily indebted,
poor nations, led to improvements in debt cancellation by
governments.
Into the simmering and now well-organized network of
NGOs from around the world came the news in 1998 that
the third ministerial meeting of the WTO would be held
in the US, in Seattle, Washington. The news was a gift to
a movement aware of its gathering momentum. Previous
WTO ministerial sessions had been in Singapore and
Geneva. Neither location is conducive to attracting large
numbers of protesters. Seattle was an ideal location and
groups around the world began to organize. Within the US,
the key to fullling promises of massive demonstrations in
Seattle was the support of the trade union movement, the
American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Orga-
nizations (AFL-CIO). Environmental groups, from Sierra
Club to Greenpeace, animal welfare groups such as the
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, pro-
democracy and trade groups, such as Ralph Naders Public
Citizen, began working with the labor movement, churches
and a growing coalition of interests concerned about the
252 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
impact of economic globalization. Voices from the South
also prepared for Seattle, and key thinkers and visionaries,
like Martin Khor and Vandana Shiva, as well as hun-
dreds of organizations began planning for Seattle. European
activists, as well, made Seattle a focal point. Canadian
anti-free trade campaigner Maude Barlow of the Council
of Canadians, played a key role. By November 1999, over
50 000 people lled the streets of Seattle.
The reality is that the WTO was in trouble well before
Seattle. The extent to which its rulings exceeded valid trade
concerns led directly to a process of political delegitimiza-
tion of the institution. There was a high level of public
distrust as the WTO struck down environmental and health
regulations. The trade ministers could no longer count on
negotiating under a shroud of secrecy. Unlike the Uruguay
Round, the political interest in the WTO process had now
expanded beyond trade negotiators. The defeat of the MAI
awakened ministers of other portfolios to the reality that
trade negotiations were too important to be left to trade
ministers. Globally, environment and culture ministers, in
particular, were paying attention. They had to pay attention
because the public and the news media no longer viewed
trade matters as arcane. And because, after the defeat of
the MAI, it was clear to a growing citizens movement that
global trade ghts were winnable.
The negotiations in advance of the third ministerial
meeting had not gone well. No progress had been made on a
draft declaration for the ministers in over a year. Two weeks
before the Seattle meetings, the preparatory talks in Geneva
ended in failure. Intractable issues included agricultural
subsidies, with the EU in violent disagreement with US
plans to target its subsidies, as well as implementation
issues, dealing with complaints mostly against developing
countries that they were too slow in implementing the
Uruguay Round. On these and other complex issues, there
would be no prepared declaration. Everything would have
to be negotiated on the ground in Seattle.
Two weeks before Seattle, invitations to world leaders
and heads of government were quietly withdrawn. Of heads
of governments, only US President Bill Clinton would
attend. And, as it turned out, he embraced the protesters
demands for core labor standards. It was the coup de
grace that ensured no agreements would take place in
Seattle.
The street demonstrations and police over-reaction will
be the lasting images of Seattle. But as an exercise in
citizen political strength, Seattle is much more signicant
for the growing strength of NGOs. The NGOs involved
had developed a strong critique of the current threats of
increased corporate rule. They coordinated across huge dis-
tances and raised awareness within their own countries. The
culminating days of teach-ins and protests in Seattle further
increased media coverage and global public identication
of a new and previously obscure institution, the WTO.
CONCLUSION
For more than a century, environmental groups have
played a major role in evolving governmental and soci-
etal responses to the human-caused degradation of our
natural world. NGOs have scored many signicant vic-
tories: from national parks and protection for endangered
species, to global treaties to protect the ozone layer, and
end nuclear testing. Individual toxic substances have been
banned through NGO campaigning and new technologies
with reduced environmental impacts have been embraced
more quickly.
In the process, many environmental groups have become
themselves bureaucratized and seen as part of the main-
stream. Despite victories in individual cases, ecological
integrity is everywhere threatened. Global environmental
health is signicantly worse now than at any time in human
history.
NGOs have, however, continued to provide an essential
watchdog and public education function in every nation
on earth. It can be argued that as the role of governments
and the nation state itself is shrinking, the role of NGOs
is expanding. Civil society, at a global level, is organizing
in new ways. Democratic expression as a counter balance
too, increasingly powerful, private sector interests is a
different role for NGOs than lobbying parliaments for
governmental action. NGOs will likely continue to occupy
an increasing area of political space as the challenges of
global environmental change weaken existing institutions.
REFERENCES
Bonner, R (1993) At the Hand of Man, Alfred A Knopf, New
York.
Carson, R (1963) Silent Spring, Fawcett World Library, New
York.
Hays, S (1972) Conservation and the Gospel of Efciency, Athen-
aeum, New York.
Nash, R (1967) Wilderness and the American Mind, Yale Univer-
sity Press, New Haven, CT.
Turner, F (1985) Rediscovering America: John Muir in his Time
and Ours, Viking Penguin, New York.
Ward, B and Dubos, R (1972) Only One Earth: The Care and
Maintenance of a Small Planet, W W Norton, New York.
WCED (1987) Our Common Future, Oxford University Press,
Oxford, New York.
Environmental Politics
see Environmental Politics (Opening essay,
Volume 5)
ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY: PHENOMENOLOGICAL ECOLOGY 253
Environmental Philosophy:
Phenomenological Ecology
Ingrid Leman Stefanovic
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
In many respects, industrialized society perceives problems
of ecology and human dwelling to be technical matters
of environmental and architectural management. No less
important, however, are assumptions that shape the way that
we frame environmental research, policies and programs.
How we perceive and implicitly evaluate our built and
natural environments in uence the questions we ask as well
as the solutions we propose in matters of ecology and human
settlement planning.
Environmental philosophy explores precisely such issues
of how we understand and value our built and natural
worlds. Within this eld, phenomenology the investiga-
tion of hidden structures of experience has a distinctive
role. Rather than construct abstract, speculative ethical the-
ories, the phenomenological method aims to illumine tacit
paradigms and worldviews that underlie our relationship
with the environment. For example, studies of the impact
of the automobile on the environment typically investigate
technical matters such as frequency of car use or degree
of degradation of agricultural lands. The phenomenolo-
gists contribution to the discussion arises from a concern
to uncover tacit elements of human experience that subtly
but effectively inspire our strong emotional ties to the car.
In the absence of an understanding of peoples values, loves
and modes of behavior, technical solutions may be dif cult
to implement. To explore implicit patterns of meanings that
condition our everyday behavior becomes a central concern
of environmental phenomenology or, as some have coined
the eld, phenomenological ecology.
PHENOMENOLOGY IN A CALCULATIVE ERA
Of pivotal and major importance to the eld has been the
work of German phenomenologist Martin Heidegger, who
distinguished between two kinds of thinking in the Western,
metaphysical tradition: calculative and originative (Heideg-
ger, 1966). Calculative thinking is linear, goal-directed and
essentially quantitative, seeking maximum efciency in its
control and mastery of discrete, empirically dened entities.
Originative thinking examines the foundations of calcula-
tion, by investigating not just things but relations between
things. Such thinking requires openness to the deeper mys-
teries of existence that are more than mere logical puzzles
to be calculatively ordered.
We have become particularly expert in calculative think-
ing and, in most cases, we equate calculation with genuine
thinking per se. Such thinking computes ever new, ever
more promising and at the same time more economical
possibilities, racing from one prospect to the next (Hei-
degger, 1966, 46). Specically result-oriented, calculation
seeks to organize individual facts and entities with a goal of
maximum efciency, dexterity and control. In such a sce-
nario, the world appears as a collection of discrete objects
subject to human command. Nature becomes a gigantic
gasoline station that we envision is ours to tame and
direct (Heidegger, 1966, 5051).
Such a reductionist interpretation of the meaning of
thinking arises from within a historical tradition that pri-
marily concerns itself with empirical, quantiable realities,
rather than some foundational, qualitative issues that exceed
such quantitative measures. An atomistic analysis of beings
(referred to by phenomenologists as ontic analysis) takes
precedence over any inquiry into the mystery of Being itself
(that is, ontological inquiry). Calculative thinking assumes
that which is subject to measurement and quantication is
real and actual. Material entities, as well as ideas and con-
cepts that can be categorized and delineated in the clear and
distinct fashion of bounded entities, are implicitly valued
above all else. At the same time, positivism the theory
that knowledge is based on natural objects and properties
that can be veried by the empirical sciences gains promi-
nence in a calculative era that assumes that only clearly
bounded, materially evident entities are real.
When positively existing entities acquire such prece-
dence, nebulous phenomena such as relationships or nega-
tions that cannot be seen as fully present consequently
are not subject to serious management. In its fascination
with things, our era becomes oblivious to the signi-
cance of any phenomena that cannot be secured through
measurement, or categorical control. Favoring calculative
parameters, originative thinking is obscured and forgotten
as a genuine possibility of reection.
Why is this forgetfulness of relations, negations and
voids at all important to environmentalists? Consider rst
how the modern, positivist worldview interprets a particular
negative phenomenon of absence, in a case of blindness or
not seeing. St. Thomas Aquinas articulated an interpreta-
tion of this privation that is symptomatic of the calculative
paradigm (Barrett, 1958). Aquinas appropriated an Aris-
totelian perspective that distinguished between ens reale
(real Being) and ens rationis (conceptual Being). On this
understanding, the cataract on the eye is real, because it
can be empirically measured and it is an actual, positive
entity. On the other hand, while blindness can be said in
some sense to exist, as the absence of sight, it is only
conceptually.
The problem with this interpretation, however, is that it
downplays the experiential signicance of the phenomenon
of blindness. The philosopher William Barrett points out
that for the man whose life has suddenly been thrown into
254 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
complete darkness, non-seeing, a privation, has descended
on him with more crushing effect than brick from a rooftop
(Barrett, 1958, 288). To reduce the depth of this experien-
tial signicance to the status of mere conceptual Being
denigrates the human cost of such loss of sight and, to this
extent, has to be philosophically misplaced as well. Never-
theless, strange as it may seem, in a tradition that assigns
reality only to positively existing entities, the absence of
sight can only be dened in terms of a conceptual truth. The
alternative is to subject the phenomenon of blindness to a
reductionist paradigm whereby it is circumscribed wholly
within the presence of a material object a cataract.
Analogously, one might imagine how the calculative
worldview assigns value to a clear-cut forest. What matters
is the timber resource, extracted and manufactured into
positively existing entities for human use. Proceeding
within a management scenario driven by economic utility,
of far less value are the nebulous and too-complex-to-
measure impacts on ecosystem functions, processes and
relationships. The original forest matters only to the extent
that it is a positively existing resource, or else that it exists
conceptually in the mind as a fond but overly romanticized
image or memory.
The philosophical paucity of the calculative paradigm
arises once again when one considers the human impact
of involuntary displacement. My home is expropriated and
I am required to move to another location. Technically
speaking, as my house is bulldozed, it is no longer. Is
its signicance merely to be relegated to the level of a
eeting memory or conceptual reality?
The trauma of involuntary displacement clearly can indi-
cate more than the physical destruction of a house. Instead,
it may mean the end of a whole way of life and a radical
de-centering of my very being. The fact that Western soci-
ety no longer engages in the large-scale displacements of
the 1960s urban renewal programs indicates that, implic-
itly, we know that the absence of home means signicantly
more than the destruction of a material object. Rather, the
loss affects us deeply in terms of our very sense of place.
In fact, we are beginning to sense that we interpret our built
and natural environments, not merely in terms of reduction-
ist categories but, more primordially, from a more complex,
holistic perspective.
POSSIBILITIES OF ORIGINATIVE THINKING
It may appear that the obvious alternative to reductionist,
calculative thinking would be a form of holism. Environ-
mentalists themselves increasingly advocate precisely such
an alternative. For instance, the Brundtland Commission
emphasizes the need to integrate economic, socio-cultural
and environmental concerns, building on the ecologists
widely accepted recognition that the whole is greater than
the sum of its parts .
While these appeals can be quite compelling, ecoholism
is hardly unproblematic. It may well be true that everything
is ultimately connected in some way to everything else.
Philosopher David Cooper has a point, however, when he
notes that it is without interest and moral implication that a
falling tree in Australia has some connection with the birth
rate of ies in Alaska; and it is false if it is meant that such
connectionsmust bedetectable, let alonesignicant (Cooper,
1992, 166). How broadly is the holistic net to be legitimately
thrown if it is to be practically and morally relevant?
Other problems with the holistic alternative also arise.
If the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, does that
conclusion relegate the individual parts to a lower status
on the moral hierarchy? Environmental philosopher Tom
Regan les this charge of eco-fascism against holistic think-
ing. Holistic philosophers who argue that one is justied in
sacricing individuals in order to preserve other species or
the integrity of ecosystems are subject to this charge of
fascistic rule of whole over parts.
Another major difculty with advocating holistic think-
ing as an alternative to calculation relates to the problem
of denition. Amidst the growing sentiment that environ-
mental problems require holistic, interdisciplinary solutions,
there are calls for the development of more comprehen-
sive indicators of sustainability. The World Bank proposes
an Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) (see
ISEW (Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare) and
GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator ), Volume 5) to measure
gross domestic product but to include natural and social
parameters as well. President Clintons Council on Sus-
tainable Development called for the creation of a number
of new economic, social and environmental quality indi-
cators. Again, however, the question arises: does holism
mean simply throwing a wider net around discrete entities
to accumulate an ever-larger inventory of indicators?
From a phenomenological viewpoint, these efforts to
describe a holistic alternative to positivism remain philo-
sophically problematic because they remain immersed with-
in the calculative paradigm. To say that everything is
connected to everything else remains focussed on individ-
ual, discrete entities that may (or as Cooper points out, may
not) be meaningfully interconnected in some way. These
efforts do not call for a genuinely different kind of think-
ing than the calculative that simply seeks to amass a great
many individual things in a broader web of signicance.
The same problem occurs with accumulating a larger
array of indicators, under the guise of interdisciplinary
thinking. Genuinely holistic approaches must do more than
simply collect an ever-increasing number of entities, if the
phenomenologists call for an alternative to calculation is
to be heeded. Finally, in deference to Regans criticisms,
holistic thinking must accomplish more than a grand syn-
thesis or construction of a Super-Part, bigger and better than
the individual parts beneath it.
ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY: PHENOMENOLOGICAL ECOLOGY 255
How do we genuinely move beyond calculation, once
we recognize that reductionist versions of positivism fail to
capture the increasing complexity of environmental prob-
lems? Phenomenology offers an alternate vision. The orig-
inative, ontological thinking that Heidegger proposes is
grounded in hermeneutics, the art of interpretation of texts.
If we try to read as a word a conglomeration of letters, e.g.,
rgonaci and then rearrange the letters as organic, the sec-
ond reading generates more than a mere re-conguration of
individual letters. On the contrary, in the latter case, an
implicit order now recognized among the letters allows for
a shift in the act of interpretation that reveals the meaning
of the word as a whole.
In fact, when we read a text, the understanding con-
sistently interprets holistically, although we may not be
explicitly aware of this fact. Consider how reading requires
something different than the accumulation of individual
words on a page. The experience of reading is more than
merely additive, in that I do not simply store up a lin-
ear series of individual words so that, at the end of the
sentence, I compute the series into a meaningful totality.
Rather, the hermeneutic experience reveals an interplay
between the signicance of the text as a whole, and its
progressive illumination through its parts words, sen-
tences and paragraphs. Because reading is other than merely
summative or sequential, it offers a particularly revealing,
everyday example of how understanding is holistic, where
the whole means something intrinsically other than a super-
part (Bortoft in Seamon and Mugerauer, 2000).
In this respect, Heidegger distinguishes between the
totality that we analytically or sequentially construct and the
wholeness of the world that is more subtly, tacitly revealed
to the understanding. The world itself is much more than
something subsequent that we calculate as a result from
the sum of all beings. The world comes not afterward but
beforehand, in the strict sense of the word Instead, it
is so self-evident, so much a matter of course, that we are
completely oblivious to it (Heidegger, 1982, 165).
The task for ontological thinking, then, becomes one
of illumining how we are in-the-world immediately, pre-
thematically meaning prior to the reductionist move of
dening and segregating discreet entities from the referen-
tial context within which they nd their place. Originative
thinking will aim to uncover the underlying conditions
of the possibility of calculation and the scientic analy-
sis of discreet entities. In that case, the question to ask
is: how might such a phenomenological undertaking affect
our inquiries into the meaning of our built and natural
environments?
RETHINKING SENSE OF PLACE
When Heidegger urges us to re-evaluate the calcula-
tive paradigm, he invites us to think meditatively or
originatively, which is to say to raise anew the question of
the meaning of Being. Rather than investigating individual
entities in isolationeither the human subjectivity or objec-
tive environmental conditions he urges us to reect upon
the relation between human beings and the places wherein
they dwell. We are more than simply isolated subjectivities
but are in-the-world, the hyphenation emphasizing an essen-
tial belonging of human beings to their environments. To
inquire about how we are in-the-world, prior to articially
separating and reifying subjective and objective entities,
entails a different kind of ontological thinking that is less
concerned with beings than Being itself.
How might we ontologically and phenomenologically
describe the way in which we are in the world? Hei-
degger believes that, fundamentally, the way in which
you are and I am, the manner in which we humans
are on the earth, is dwelling. To be a human being
means to dwell (Heidegger, 1971, 147). When we build
our settlements, we do not simply erect physical con-
structions of particular proportions. Nor is it enough to
say that buildings can be more meaningfully described
as cultural symbols or that they possess social, eco-
nomic or technological signicance on top of their material
substantiality.
Phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard points out that the
lived experience of our environment is of more than
mere physical artifacts. A house that has been experi-
enced, he writes, is not an inert box. Inhabited space
transcends geometrical space (Bachelard, 1964, 47). Sim-
ilarly, in describing human beings as dwellers, Heidegger
wants to say that built spaces are neither mere external
objects nor social constructs but rather, spaces open up
by the fact that they are let into the dwelling of man
Dwelling is the basic character of Being in keep-
ing with which mortals exist (Heidegger, 1971, 157,
160). Noel Arnauds simple but pointed remark cap-
tures these insights succinctly: I am not merely contained
within space, but on the contrary, Je suis lespace o` u
je suis. (I am the space where I am) (Bachelard, 1964,
137).
Ones fundamental comportment in-the-world is dened
by Heidegger in terms of a spatializing and temporalizing
activity of understanding and a primordial engagement with
a world that is itself more than a static entity. Why, then, is
the relationship between humans and their world not simply
one that can be dened as a correspondence between two
static, present-at-hand entities? Heidegger asks his readers
to consider a common example of how we relate to our
environment. As I head toward the door of a lecture hall,
I am already there and I could not go to it at all if I were
not such that I am there. I am never here only, he argues,
as this encapsulated body; rather, I am there, that is, I
already pervade the room and only thus can I go through
it (Heidegger, 1971, 156157).
256 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Poet Pierre-Jean Jouve reiterates this thought when he
writes: Car nous sommes o` u nous ne sommes pas. (For we
are where we are not) (Bachelard, 1963, 211). Certainly,
we exist among positively existing entities but our way of
being among those entities includes a holistic engagement
with a broader, referential context that, as nothing particu-
lar, nonetheless opens up the condition of the possibility of
entities appearing as entities. This relation of human beings
in-the-world moves beyond an engagement with speci c
things to include the more mysterious, incalculable onto-
logical phenomenon of dwelling and what others beyond
Heidegger have come to refer to in terms of a sense of
place (Mugerauer and Relph in Seamon and Mugerauer,
2000).
Philosopher Edward S. Casey maintains that to exist
at all as an event is to have a place to be implaced
The point is that place, by virtue of its unencompassability
by anything other than itself, is at once the limit and the
condition of all that exists (Casey, 1993, 13, 15). How
we are in the world, in the most primordial sense, is as
emplaced. Architect Christian Norberg-Schulz suggests that
spirit of place is a qualitative, total phenomenon that cannot
be reduced to any single property without losing its concrete
signi cance.
On such an interpretation, natural and built places are
more than mere geographical locations along geometri-
cally de ned parameters. Phenomenologically understood,
the experience of dwelling is much more rich, diverse and
engaging than can be captured in any reductionist catalogue
of entities. A key element of phenomenological inquiry
relates to how entities belong together in place as well as
how we might better encourage that sense of place through
more sensitive design and policy-making. Heidegger main-
tained that the Western, metaphysical tradition has slipped
into a forgetting of the question of the meaning of Being
and, at the same time of necessity, this forgetfulness has
compromised our understanding of the meaning of dwelling
and being-at-home in our natural and built worlds. The task
remains to see how we might further investigate this for-
getfulness and seek a more balanced relationship with the
places that we inhabit.
PHENOMENOLOGICAL METHODS OF
INVESTIGATING NATURAL AND BUILT
PLACES
Within a calculative frame of reference, one interprets
the notion of method as a logical, linear process of rea-
soning that demands that speci c steps be followed, in
order that de nitive results are achieved. In marked con-
trast to the calculations of positivist science, Heidegger
tells us that the phenomenological, scienti c method is
never technique. As soon as it becomes one, it has fallen
away from its own proper nature (Heidegger, 1982, 21).
Originative, phenomenological interpretations will involve
something other than a how-to manual or a transparent,
technical delineation of discrete rules. What announces
itself within a phenomenological notion of method is a
more iterative, process-oriented approach to investigating
entities and the underlying ontological conditions of their
appearance.
Yet Heidegger does concede that there are three basic
components to the phenomenological method: reduction,
construction and destruction (Heidegger, 1982, 19). For
us, phenomenological reduction means leading phenomeno-
logical vision back from the apprehension of a being
to the understanding of the Being of this being (Heideg-
ger, 1982, 21). Since ontology is de ned as an inquiry
into the meaning of Being, phenomenology is ontology.
Methodologically, a key concern will be to nd ways to illu-
mine a holistic, ontological vision of the phenomenon under
investigation, rather than to merely catalogue individual,
discrete moments.
At the same time, phenomenologists know that Being
does not become accessible like a being. We do not sim-
ply nd it in front of us (Heidegger, 1982, 21). More
than a merely negative methodological measure that
opposes beings, phenomenology requires that we should
bring ourselves forward positively toward Being itself
in a free projection and in engaged, phenomenolog-
ical construction . That such a move is more than a
merely arbitrary, subjective projection is ensured by a
methodology that includes a destruction , that is, a crit-
ical process in which the traditional concepts are decon-
structed down to the sources from which they were drawn
(Heidegger, 1982, 23). Underlying traditions and taken
for granted patterns of understanding are thereby laid
bare.
In short, it seems that the phenomenological method will
seek to move from an investigation of beings, to a reduc-
tion to ontological grounds. Such a move will do more
than relinquish individual entities altogether, but instead
will require a special comportment and constructive engage-
ment with the world an engagement that demands a free
projection that is both creative and originative at the same
time. Finally, as a destruction or dismantling of those
arti ces that conceal originary meanings, the phenomeno-
logical method will seek to uncover the tacit sources of the
traditions that sustain our ways of thinking and the holis-
tic context wherein our questioning is grounded in the rst
place.
Accepting such an understanding of phenomenology, one
is still drawn to ask: how do these components trans-
late into actual investigative procedures for the study
of built and natural environments? How do we study
concretely and holistically the manner in which we are
emplaced in-the-world, without compromising the ontolog-
ical endeavor?
ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY/PERCEPTION 257
One strategy for illumining ontological presuppositions
of dwelling consists of a deconstruction of place-based
narratives. While common methods of investigating per-
ceptions and values include such tools as standardized
questionnaires, the phenomenologist believes that such the-
matic approaches by denition cannot accommodate the
complexity of prethematic presuppositions that are taken
for granted before we conceptualize specic responses.
Rather than reify peoples perceptions within preconceived
frameworks and parameters constructed in advance by
researchers, phenomenological interview techniques lean
toward less structured approaches to uncovering percep-
tions of place. In the words of philosopher Jim Cheney,
the deconstruction of spontaneous narratives encourages us
to avoid totalizing discourse and the top-down imposition
of universal, preconceived theories as we collectively
seek to tell the best stories we can to uncover our
communities storied residence and local, bioregional
truths. The phenomenological task is to illumine from the
ground up, so to speak, holistic visions of place that emerge
from spontaneous, unstructured narratives of peoples lived
experiences.
Other phenomenological strategies seek to describe more
holistically our modes of dwelling in natural and built
environments. From phenomenological readings of actual
places to interpretations of artistic and literary accounts,
to thoughtful, rst-hand observation of particular settings,
the primordial concern is to illumine taken-for-granted
paradigms that condition environmental perceptions and
interpretations of place (Stefanovic, 2000).
At times, the way of phenomenology can be frustrat-
ing, to the extent that methods challenge traditional atti-
tudes and require a new way of seeing and of asking
questions. Nevertheless, properly employed, the methods
are rigorous and high standards of qualitative research
are demanded. Whether engaged in a phenomenologi-
cal reading of place or in-depth interviews, the task is
to illumine taken-for-granted attitudes and investigate the
ontological grounds of judgments that, in every case,
inevitably frame the process of environmental decision-
making by scientists, public policy makers and layper-
sons. It is for this reason that phenomenology is described
by some philosophers as nothing less than foundational
ecology.
REFERENCES
Bachelard, G (1964) The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas,
Beacon Press, Boston, MA.
Barrett, W (1958) Irrational Man, Doubleday, New York.
Casey, E S (1993) Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed
Understanding of the Place-World, Indiana University Press,
Bloomington, IN.
Cooper, D (1992) The Idea of Environment, in The Environment
in Question: Ethics and Global Issues, eds D E Cooper and
J A Palmer, Routledge, London.
Heidegger, M (1966) Discourse on Thinking, Harper and Row,
New York.
Heidegger, M (1971) Building Dwelling Thinking in Poetry,
Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, Harper and Row,
New York.
Heidegger, M (1982) Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Indiana
University Press, Bloomington, IN.
Seamon, D and Mugerauer, R, eds (2000) Dwelling, Place and
Environment: Towards a Phenomenology of Person and World,
Krieger, Melbourne, FL.
Stefanovic, I L (2000) Safeguarding Our Common Future: Re-
thinking Sustainable Development, State University of New
York Press, Albany, NY.
Environmental
Psychology/Perception
Charles Vlek
University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands
Global environmental problems have socio-behavioral cau-
ses for which technology offers only one (partial) solution
strategy. Focusing on fundamental mechanisms of environ-
mental degradation, this entry is about models and methods
for social behavior change to reduce collective environ-
mental risks. The exposition develops around an analysis
of societal driving forces, economic system characteristics,
and individual determinants human needs, opportunities
and abilities underlying stressful behavior patterns. The
common-resource (or: commons) dilemma paradigm is uti-
lized as a general model for understanding and managing
con icts between (short-term) individual and (long-term)
collective interests. Following this model, any collective
environmental problem and its behavioral causes rst need
to be diagnosed. Secondly, an evaluation and weighting of
individual benets versus collective risks is required. And
thirdly, well-tuned policy interventions must be consistently
planned, executed and evaluated. Various behavioral sci-
ence ingredients are introduced for a sources and causes
analysis of collective environmental problems and for spec-
ifying effective ways to limit environmental risks within
sustainable levels.
Particular attention is devoted to human needs and val-
ues, and the relative importance of material wealth for
people s overall quality of life. It is hoped that, hereby, phys-
ical and economic scientists as well as policy makers may be
258 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
inspired to conduct more fundamental problem analyses and
to design more effective policies than is customarily done.
MACRO-LEVEL DRIVING FORCES OF
UNSUSTAINABILITY
More than 20 years ago Ehrlich and Holdren (1971) intro-
duced a simple formula to estimate the total environmen-
tal impact of a particular society, country or region. The
present popular version of this equation is: I D P A T,
or: environmental impact (I ) equals the product of pop-
ulation size (P), the degree of afuence (A) per person,
and the quality of the technology (T) used to produce
one unit of afuence. The formula implies that there are
three different fronts at which the battle for sustainable
development is to be fought, viz. population, afuence
(production and consumption) and technology. The for-
mula also reveals the substitutability of one component
by another. To illustrate, total environmental impact might
remain constant under considerable population growth, as
long as average personal afuence and/or the resourceful-
ness per unit of afuence is/are proportionally reduced.
Also, while total environmental impact stays constant,
the degree of afuence per person may well increase
signicantly, provided that the number of people and/or
the resourcefulness per unit afuence is/are proportionally
reduced.
Under an IPAT-perspective, for example, several Orga-
nizations for Economic Co-operation and Development
countries (like the Netherlands) have little reason to feel
comfortable about their sustainability: their population
keeps growing partly through immigration their afu-
ence is increasing they are set on economic growth,
and the resource needs of their production and consump-
tion technology is hardly decreasing. Also from an IPAT-
perspective, (Winter, 1996, 23) even nominates the US for
the worlds most overpopulated country, not per km
2
but
given its citizens afuence and the resource demands of
its technology.
The IPAT formula enables one to explain, predict
and eventually manage the size and seriousness of
environmental impact, for different geographic regions or
countries of the world, to determine the most important
impact growth factor(s) and to draw conclusions on
optimal environmental management policies. Goodland
et al. (1994) have systematically examined the potential for
change in the three areas covered by the IPAT formula:
(1) limiting population growth; (2) limiting afuence and
consumption growth; and (3) reducing the resource needs
of production and consumption technology. Like Corson
(1994), these authors generally focus on a number of policy
priorities, which are different in character for high-income
and low-income nations of the world. For example, high-
income nations are advised to work on:
transforming the culture of consumerism into an
ethics of sufciency and environmental sustainability;
internalizing environmental costs in energy prices and
accelerating the transition to renewable energy sources
(Goodland et al., 1994, 153).
In contrast, the authors advise low-income nations to
give priority to: accelerating the transition towards pop-
ulation stability , supporting technologies which pro-
vide increased employment opportunities for unemployed
and underemployed individuals , and improving efforts
towards poverty alleviation (p. 154).
Goodland et al. (1994, 154) generally conclude: techno-
logical change and population stabilization cannot sufce
to move the world towards an environmentally sustain-
able future. Instead, a reduction in per capita consumption
in high-income nations and a decrease in environmental
throughput are required .
In a mid-term report of a multidisciplinary project about
sustainable household metabolism, Noorman and Schoot
Uiterkamp (1998, 252) conclude:
the challenges posed by climate change and the desire for equity
are formidable. It is clear that to achieve the reduction goals
indicated above will require major changes in the metabolism
of households and of production. Specic redesign rather than
evolutionary change is essential, although this may appear to
be at odds with the actual trend of ever-growing development,
production, consumption, and disposal of products and services.
This is especially true in areas where the fastest growth in
consumption is in high energy intensive items (such as cars).
If we search for the socio-behavioral causes of population
growth, increasing afuence and an ever more resource-
hungry technology, we hit upon other driving forces of
unsustainable development, viz. institutions as vehicles for
governing human societies, and culture as the conglomerate
of socially shared beliefs, values and attitudes. Embedding
and shaping the latter two forces are historical develop-
ments such as industrialization, division of labor, urban-
ization and market competition; see Ro pke (1999) who
indicates two fundamental pre-conditions for the histori-
cal generation of wealth in the North, viz. the availability
of cheap fossil fuels and the immense transfer of resources
from the South to the North (Martinez-Alier, 1995). This is
in line with Dietz and Rosas (1997) argument that the tech-
nology component in the IPAT-formula encompasses much
more than was originally suggested. Actually T incorpo-
rates cultural, social, technical and infrastructural factors,
which together determine how much environmental impact
an activity is producing. Adding culture and institutions to
the IPAT-formula might yield a CIPAT-equation. After re-
wording just two factors we obtain TEDIC, to indicate a
complex of technological, economic, demographic, institu-
tional and cultural developments in industrial society, which
did and do stimulate societal (global, or regional) unsustain-
ability. In Dutch, te dik, pronounced similarly as TEDIC,
ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY/PERCEPTION 259
means too big or too fat. In a different wording and order,
the ve driving forces have also been distinguished by Stern
(1992); see also Vlek (2000).
The several driving forces of unsustainable development
are schematized and claried in Figure 1, which also indi-
cates that (un)sustainability involves economic security and
social well-being as well as environmental quality. What
Dietz and Rosa (1997) noted about technology (see previ-
ous paragraph) may be similarly argued about population
as well as afuence: P and A, too, incorporate cultural,
social, technical, infrastructural and other factors driving
their (geographically different) growth, particularly during
the last 50 years. For population, Hilderink (2000) has
computer-simulated the effects of various relevant factors
such as fertility, diseases, birth-control and health policies,
environmental conditions and economic growth. His con-
clusions are that in most regions population growth will
come to a standstill, that world population in 2055 will stay
below 9 billion after which it will decrease to 7.6 billion
in 2100, and that United Nations population projections
tend to be exaggerated. For afuence, to be further dis-
cussed herein, basic behavior determinants are peoples
History
Culture
Institutions
Population Affluence Technology
Number of
producers
consumers
Volume of
production
and
consumption
- needs
- opportunities
- abilities
(Resourcefulness of)
Means to
produce and
consume
Economic wealth
Social well-being
Environmental quality
(Sustainability)
Figure 1 Schematic representation of driving factors
underlying economic, social and environmental sustain-
ability dimensions, as embedded in history, culture and
institutions
needs, opportunities and abilities (NOA) to produce and/or
consume, as also indicated in Figure 1.
In terms of Figure 1 one may conclude that the battle for
sustainable development pertains not only directly to
population, afuence (production/consumption) and tech-
nology, but also indirectly to institutions and culture.
Thus, on the basis of an intense series of experts and
stakeholders meetings, Vellinga et al. (1995) distinguish
ve strategic policy options for reducing the societal risks
of climate change. These are, respectively:
1. no regrets: the climate problem is too uncertain, prior-
ities will be given to policy instruments serving other
(socio-economic and environmental) objectives;
2. least regrets: a serious climate risk problem is acknowl-
edged, but policies will be aimed at a balancing of the
risks of intervention and non-intervention;
3. acceleration: climate change is addressed along with
other, shorter-term environmental problems, making
use of synergies and positive feedbacks in society;
4. technological innovation: technology is the only way
to meet growing demands and provide environmental
security;
5. institutional and cultural change: technology being
insufcient, major cultural and institutional changes are
required to create a sustainable society.
Somewhat to their surprise, the authors noted that among
project participants there was less agreement about the
ve strategic policy options above than about various
elds of action that might be addressed (more or less
strongly) under all ve directions, e.g., introduction of eco-
taxes, a low-carbon transport system, renewable energy
sources, and the stimulation of technological and cultural
innovations.
MESO-LEVEL PRODUCTIONCONSUMPTION
CYCLES
The driving forces represented in Figure 1 are characteristic
of a complex socio-economic system in which capital, labor
and environmental resources are being used for the produc-
tion of goods and services to meet the needs and desires
of numerous consuming individuals, groups and organiza-
tions. To understand this complex metabolism of society vis
` a vis the natural environment, it is necessary to appreciate
the interwovenness of household consumption and indus-
trial production. Figure 2 represents what may be called
the production-consumption cycle, as institutionalized in
a social, i.e., government-regulated market economy. A
more elaborate version of Figure 2, also containing an
inner consumer self-production cycle, is presented in Vlek
et al. (2000).
Figure 2 reects the simple truth that consumers and
producers need each other for different reasons, and
260 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
I
n
c
o
m
e
T
a
x
e
s
l
a
b
o
u
r
Energy
Land
Mobility
Waste
Energy
Land
Waste
Transport
Raw materials
Housing
Feeding
Clothing
Education
Recreation
Utilities
Industry
Agriculture
Transport
Commerce/Services
Government
Producer Consumer
Income
Labour
Products
Turnover
T
a
x
e
s
S
u
b
s
i
d
i
e
s
Figure 2 Model of the production-consumption cycle in a government-regulated market economy
that both parties need some government regulation, for
which government in turn needs consumers and producers,
again for different reasons. The relationships among the
three groups are expressed in ows of money, products,
labor, taxes and subsidies. The main system functions
for consumers are feeding, clothing, housing, education
and recreation. The major functions for producers are
energy provision, industrial production, agriculture and
stock-breeding, product distribution and services. Inputs
from outside the socio-economic system come from various
environmental resources such as energy, raw materials and
land area. External outputs or derivatives occur in the form
of various kinds of waste, mobility and noise.
A second observation about Figure 2 is that the whole
(Western) production-consumption system is steadily accel-
erating. This is because it operates under the economic
goal of ef ciency, because ef ciency breeds ef ciency
and because most people involved cherish ef ciency for
reasons of social comparison, competition and status. If
ef ciency were less dominant and if material wealth were
de-emphasized as one quality of life variable (see further
herein), social market economies could decelerate as well
as dematerialize (see Dematerialization and Sustainable
Development, Volume 4), to the bene t of other impor-
tant qualities of life, including social justice, environmental
security and natural biodiversity.
Figure 2 can also illustrate a third, not so obvious
point. This is the mutual interdependence of producers
eco-ef ciency and consumers suf ciency. Eco-ef ciency
is the producer s strategy of reducing the overall resource-
fulness per unit of production goods or services (see
Eco-ef ciency, Volume 4). However, the bene cial effects
of eco-ef ciency may be undone by (further) consumption
growth and rebound (or take-back) effects. Hence, eco-
ef ciency on the producer s side needs a counterpart on
the consumer s side. The latter must necessarily be a
strategy of suf cient consumption or suf ciency (Durn-
ing, 1992, Chapter 10; Goodland et al., 1994; Reisch and
Scherhorn, 1999). This stands in contrast to the cur-
rent (highly-industrialized) norm of ever-growing, continu-
ally maximizing consumption patterns (never enough, says
homo oeconomicus).
MICRO-LEVEL DETERMINANTS OF
RESOURCEFUL BEHAVIORS
For understanding individual producer and consumer behav-
iors, and as a prelude to the planning of needed social
behavior change, some well-established theories and mod-
els of human behavior must now be considered.
Following the NOA-model as presented in Figure 3
(translated from Vlek et al., 1997; inspired by Olander and
Tho gerson, 1995), individual consumer behavior is consid-
ered as dependent upon the needs (Ns), the opportunities
(Os) and the abilities (As) to undertake a particular activ-
ity. Needs and opportunities interact to shape people s
motivation to perform an activity, while opportunities and
abilities together determine subjects behavioral control.
Hence, changing resourceful consumer behavior (or pro-
ducer behavior, for that matter) would involve changing
people s (or organizations ) needs, their physical, techni-
cal or social opportunities and/or their physical, mental
or nancial ability or capacity to engage in the relevant
behavior. The NOA-model may be linked to the model of
ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY/PERCEPTION 261
M
a
c
r
o
-
l
e
v
e
l






d
e
v
e
l
o
p
m
e
n
t
s
a
c
t
i
n
g

o
n
Needs
Opportunities
Abilities
Motivation
to consume
Behavioral
control
Behavioral
processing
Figure 3 The NOA model of individual consumer behav-
ior. The implicit and explicit forces. at the left are taken
to be cultural, institutional, economic and other types of
inuential societal developments
the social market economy as represented in Figure 2, in
order to identify the various actors and factors underlying
any partys NOA to undertake resourceful behaviors.
Geller (1989) has proposed an integration of applied
behavior analysis (ABA) involving immediate rewards
or punishments, following instrumental and social learning
theory (see Geller et al., 1982) and a pragmatic social
marketing approach (Kotler and Zaltman, 1971). Gellers
(1989) four-stage ABA-marketing model sequentially
comprises: (1) market analysis; (2) market segmentation
and selection of target behaviors; (3) design of market
strategy and ABA; and (4) evaluation via self-reports and
behavior observations. Documentation and dissemination of
results plays a key role in the models practical application.
Stern et al. (1999) have proposed and tested a valuebe-
lief norm (VBN) theory for understanding environmental-
ism in peoples actions and behaviors. Their VBN theory
links conceptions of moral norms, personal values and
environmental attitudes into a coherent set of practical mea-
surements. Their empirical study was aimed at explaining
peoples degree of environmental citizenship, their private-
sphere behaviors, and their willingness to sacrice for the
support of government policies. Stern et al.s study revealed
that VBN theory is a far better predictor of environmental
behavior indicators than other, less coherent conceptions of
peoples environmental motivation. This demonstrates that
social and personal norms and values play crucial roles in
changing behaviors.
The three models just discussed may each be consid-
ered as a general matrix for approaching human behavior
change. Their consistent message is that effective policies
should be aimed at changing fundamental determinants of
unsustainable behaviors. In working with such models it
is useful to distinguish four basically different types of
behaviors. These may be categorized following two major
dimensions under which specic behavior determinants can
be specied. The rst dimension ranges from deliberately
planned or reasoned behavior on the one hand, to auto-
matic behavior involving well-established habits, on the
other. The second dimension ranges from private to public
behavior determinants. The resulting two by two scheme is
depicted in Table 1, whose quadrants may be conveniently
labeled as deliberation, social comparison, repetition and
imitation, respectively. For each behavior type two relevant,
well-established behavior theories are indicated.
This simple psychological taxonomy may help us nd
an appropriate behavior theory or model and methods to
understand and possibly inuence environmentally impact-
ful behaviors. The message here is that the four behavior
types should each be addressed in a specic well-tuned way,
in order for behavior change to come about. For example,
repetitive (habitual) behaviors may best be approached via
changes in a persons physical technical environment. In
contrast, deliberation may be inuenced via argumenta-
tive information about optimal choices. Likewise, imitative
behaviors may best be changed via social example setting
and the pressure of social norms. Alternatively, social com-
parison is rather sensitive to argumentative information
about other peoples behavior. Disregarding the behavioral
distinctions in Table 1 may yield perhaps well intended (and
costly), but possibly ineffective policy strategies.
Exploiting the taxonomy of Table 1, Jager et al. (2000)
have computer-simulated consumer behaviors to clarify
which individual and social behavior mechanisms would
lead to a earlier or later depletion of a common resource. In
several simulation experiments contrasting Homo psycho-
logicus and Homo oeconomicus, Jager et al. demonstrated
that resource depletion was accelerated by an optimism
effect, an imitation effect and an adaptation effect, which
all ourished under uncertainty about the current size of the
common resource.
SHORT-SIGHTEDNESS: COGNITIVE
LIMITATIONS AND BIASES
Whatever behavior theory applies, there always is the
human condition of psychological limitation, which makes
environmental risk management rather difcult. Modern
societies are confronted by huge discrepancies between
the complexity, the uncertainty and the temporal extension
of major environmental costs on the one hand, and the
relative simplicity, certainty and immediacy of social and
economic benets on the other. By their very nature,
the short-term, concentrated benets are cognitively more
available and can be better appreciated than the long-
term, widespread costs. Bjorkman (1984) uses the term
proximal cognition to explain this unevenness, which tends
to make large parts of modern society to be the prisoner
of an us, here and now trap (Vlek and Keren, 1992).
This precludes prudent long-term planning and decision
making about developments involving major environmental
impacts. Historically, such a psychological imprisonment is
fairly unique, since earlier societies did not (yet) have the
knowledge and the technical means for such large-scale
262 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Table 1 Four different behavior types in two dimensions (translated from Vlek et al., 1997)
Private determination Public determination
Deliberation: Social comparison:
Reasoned behavior Decision and choice theory
a
Social comparison theory
c
Theory of planned behavior
b
Relative deprivation theory
d
Repetition: Imitation:
Automatic behavior Classical conditioning theory
e
Social learning theory
g
Instrumental learning theory
f
Theory of normative conduct
h
The theory of planned behavior
b
(Ajzen, 1991) also incorporates a social component, the subjective
(social) norm; hence it partly ts also under public determination. References for the other seven
theories are:
a
Hogarth (1987),
cd
Masters and Smith (1987),
e
Pavlov (1927),
f
Skinner (1953),
g
Bandura
(1977), and
h
Cialdini et al. (1991).
and multidimensional environmental exploitation as has
occurred particularly during the past 50 years.
Pawlik (1991) has indicated ve fundamental reasons
for most peoples lack of appreciation of large-scale envi-
ronmental risks such as global climate change. First, the
signals of climate change, as exemplied by atmospheric
temperature changes, are relatively weak compared to the
background noise of normal temperature variations. Sec-
ond, causeeffect gradients of global environmental change
are strongly masked and extended in time; it is very dif-
cult to tell which effects are the (indirect, long-term) result
of which causes. Third, low-probability (extreme weather)
events tend to be seen as impossible and their occurrence as
accidental; this hinders the design of effective risk manage-
ment strategies. Fourth, there is a large social distance sep-
arating actors and victims of global environmental change;
this naturally suppresses actors feelings of responsibility.
Fifth, there is a low perceived cost-effectiveness of conser-
vation behavior; often wasteful behavior is more protable
here and now. In an international review of studies about
human responses to environmental stress, Jager and Vlek
(1993) conclude that people are inclined to deny and remain
passive about those kinds of environmental nuisance and
risk that they believe to be uncontrollable.
In a critical psychocultural analysis Gladwin et al.
(1997) wonder: why is the northern elite mind
biased against community, the environment and a
sustainable future? These authors identify four principal
and interrelated origins (pp. 238240): (1) a cognitively
bounded biological mind; (2) an obsolete worldview mind;
(3) an addicted contemporary mind; and (4) a delusional
psychodynamic mind. They then formulate four sets
of hypotheses about the different minds and provide
a research agenda for investigating the conditions for
developing a sustainable mind. For example, hypothesis
two (p. 241) reads: the biomind is adapted for proximity
rather than distance . Hypothesis 10 (p. 248): the
viewmind conceives reality according to individualism
rather than communitarianism . Hypothesis 11 (p. 250):
the contempmind is programmed to favor market
efciency rather than social justice . Their hypothesis 19
reads: the psychomind protects the self from anxiety via
rationalisation rather than accurateness .
COMMONS DILEMMAS IN
PRODUCTIONCONSUMPTION ACTIVITIES
The cognitivemotivational factors and tendencies just
described are at the basis of what nowadays is known as the
common-resource (or commons) dilemma (Hardin, 1968;
Platt, 1973; Dawes, 1980; Vlek, 1996). In such social situ-
ations a collective (environmental) cost or risk is incurred
or generated via the combined negative externalities of
numerous individual benet-seekers who act independently
from one another. Vivid examples are the exploitation of
shing grounds by various companies, metropolitan air
pollution through massive use of motor vehicles, and large-
scale damage to natural ecosystems by expanding road
infrastructure. Note that societal meso-level processes in
productionconsumption cycles (cf. Figure 2) operate as
revolving doors for collective risk generation and manage-
ment, as they are rooted in often powerful organizations of
resourceful activities.
In our times, the classical conict between individual
and collective rationalities has acquired frightening propor-
tions. Regarding highly industrialized society the Belgian
philosopher Vermeersch (1988, 29) dramatically formulates
this conict as follows (translated from the Dutch):
the whole forms a system which rushes on autonomously, and
nobody can guarantee that somewhere at the end of the route
there is a goal waiting which is still meaningful for people.
The aimlessness, the irrationality of the total system is
being obfuscated by the utter rationality of the systems separate
components.
The situation Vermeersch refers to represents a class of
market failures that Kahn (1966) has called the tyranny
of small decisions. The environmental and social conse-
quences of such social traps (Platt, 1973) are also discussed
by Hirsch (1976).
ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY/PERCEPTION 263
The examples above also indicate that many commons
dilemmas have a layered structure comprising various con-
tributing actors and risk managers, who may be identied
at the micro-, meso- and macro-levels of society. Individ-
uals may be embedded in groups, which are embedded in
organizations, which are embedded in countries. This may
go up to the international level where diplomats are facing
complicated dilemmas concerning, e.g., the abatement of
global atmospheric warming. Due to their layered structure,
such commons dilemmas are hard to manage, since there
is ample room for external cost-shifting behaviors as well
as great difculty to reach workable control agreements.
For social policy makers, a common-resource dilemma
if recognized as such constitutes a permanent (dynamic)
contrast between a collective risk and an often large
collection of individual benets; minimization of the risk
and maximization of the benets are incompatible social
goals between which a trade-off is to be made. Thus, the
solution of any commons dilemma consists of a sustainable
balance between numerous individuals (and/or groups,
organizations, countries) benets and the collective costs
and risks for all.
What happens in a commons dilemma usually exceeds
the physical, cognitive and motivational scope of indi-
vidual actors. Therefore, the basic question is how the
collective cost or risk can be validly assessed, effectively
evaluated and acceptably managed so as to stay within sus-
tainable limits (not easy to assess in advance). Collective
risk management is a matter of decision-making about risk
acceptance and the selection of practical strategies for risk
control via social behavior change. Such risk management
Table 2 Nine policy tasks for managing common-
resource dilemmas (after Vlek, 1996)
I. Problem diagnosis
1. Analysis and assessment of the collective-risk and
risk generation process
2. Promoting social risk perception and
communication
3. Analysis and assessment of (numerous)
individual benets
II. Decision making
4. Weighing of collective risk against total individual
benets (need for change?)
5. If risk unacceptable: specication of safer
behavior alternatives
6. Setting risk reduction objectives and translation
into behavior goals
III. Risk control
7. Design and selection of policy instruments for
behavior change
8. Programmatic application of various strategies for
behavior change
9. Monitoring, evaluation and feedback of effects of
risk reduction policies
may be most effective if it links up with the problem
diagnosis concerning the behavioral processes whereby the
risk is being generated or enhanced. Each major risk man-
agement step may be unfolded into three different policy
tasks. Thus, understanding commons dilemmas and man-
aging collective risks revolves around nine distinct policy
tasks, as listed in Table 2.
The three divisions of Table 2 indicate the key prob-
lems in understanding and managing collective risks in
commons dilemma situations: raising awareness and appre-
ciation of the collective risk, weighing the risk against
(total) individual bene ts, and promoting social behav-
ior change (or restraint). This partly overlaps with three
well-known keys to resolving social dilemmas (Dawes,
1980) knowledge, morality and trust. In a thorough
analysis of commons dilemma problems Edney (1980)
emphasized territorialization (or regionalization, to increase
users responsibility) and trust (to reduce competition) as
essential solution strategies.
STRATEGIES FOR SUSTAINABLE BEHAVIOR
CHANGE
Commons dilemmas re ect persistent con icts between
many individual (producer and consumer) interests on the
one hand, and a small number of (large-scale) collective
interests on the other. As dilemmas, they may be resolved
only by the achievement of a safer, sustainable balance
of individual and collective bene ts and risks. The nature
and the effectiveness of various solution approaches have
been investigated in a great number of laboratory and some
eld experiments (e.g., Dawes, 1980; Messick and Brewer,
1983). Most of these approaches may be categorized under
seven general strategies for social behavior change (Vlek,
1996; see also Cook and Berrenberg, 1981; De Young,
1993; Gardner and Stern, 1996, Chapter 7), as given in
Table 3 along with exemplary speci cations.
Strategies 1 (PhAA) and 3 (FES), and certain (physical)
forms of strategy 6 (OCh) would initiate so-called structural
(or: hard) solutions to a commons dilemma, whose basic
nature or type would thereby be altered. Strategies 2 (RaE),
4 (IEC), 5 (SMS), certain other (mental) forms of strategy
6 (OCh), and strategy 7 (CVM) would imply cognitive-
motivational (or: soft) solutions (Wilke, 1989). Through
the latter, individual actors would be induced to behave in
a cooperative (i.e., collectively rational) manner, while the
basic nature and payoff structure of the commons dilemma
would be maintained. Structural solution strategies are
generally more effective, but they are often not available
or not easily implemented. Speci c cognitive motivational
solution-strategies (RaE, IEC, SMS and some OCh) are
more easy to design and apply, but their effectiveness is
generally lower; in many cases, however, they are the only
thing one can rely on. CVM stands relatively by itself as
264 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Table 3 Strategies for collective risk management in
commons dilemmas (Vlek, 1996)
1. Provision of physical
alternatives,
(re)arrangements
(PhAA)
Adding/deleting/changing
behavior options,
enhancing efcacy
2. Regulation and
enforcement (RaE)
Enacting laws, rules;
setting/enforcing
standards, norms
3. Financial economic
stimulation (FES)
Rewards/nes, taxes,
subsidies, posting
bonds
4. Provision of
information, education,
communication (IEC)
About risk generation,
types and levels of risk,
others perceptions and
intentions, risk
reduction strategies
5. Social modeling and
support (SMS)
Demonstrating
cooperative behavior,
others efcacy
6. Organizational change
(OCh)
Resource privatization,
sanctioning system,
leadership institution,
organization for
self-regulation
7. Changing values and
morality (CVM)
Appeal to conscience,
enhancing altruism
towards others and
future generations,
reducing here and now
selshness
By default: 8. Wait and See
(WaS):
Do nothing, the quay will
turn the ship
a cultural solution (cf. Section 2) on which much behavior
change might come to rest.
The (rst) seven strategies listed in Table 3 may be
applied in different variants and they may be directed at
different target behaviors. Because each strategy has its
own strengths and weaknesses which may be summar-
ily expressed in its behavioral elasticity (a doseeffect
relationship) it is generally wise to apply well worked-
out combinations of strategies. Obviously, any strategy for
social behavior change should be carefully tuned towards
the intended target individual, group or organization. The
latter should be studied to some extent beforehand, so as
to obtain basic information necessary to design an effective
approach.
One solution by default to a collective environmental
risk problem is nicely expressed in a Dutch saying trans-
lated as the quay will turn the ship. That is, number eight
in Table 3: WaS will automatically elicit behavioral (catas-
trophe) responses from causal agents, but these behavior
changes then cannot be but inappropriate, too little and
too late. Making such unsustainability scenarios palpa-
ble e.g., via scenario studies would mean that individ-
ual actors are (better) enabled to live under the shadow
of the (common) future and duly undertake preventive
action. Disaster scenarios may thus initiate self-destroying
prophecies, as society tries to steer away from them.
The barriers to sustainable behavior change are manifold.
In fact, like solutions, barriers may also be listed under
the (rst) seven rubrics of Table 3. Some examples are:
absence of physical or technical alternatives (PhAA), insuf-
cient and/or ineffective law enforcement (RaE), inconsis-
tency of nancial incentive systems (FES), unawareness
of ones own causal role and possible contribution to
solutions (IEC), absence or invisibility of model behav-
iors by opinion leaders (SMS), organizational goals biased
towards short-term survival (OCh), and importance of
social status in spending capacity (CVM). Specic variants
of the seven strategies may be used to overcome such
difculties.
TRADABLE EXPLOITATION RIGHTS
One special combination of strategies RaE (as govern-
ment regulation), FES (as payment according to use), IEC
(as information provision) and OCh (as privatization) may
prove to be an effective as well as efcient approach
towards managing common goods. This is the management
system known as tradable emission permits, more generally
to be labeled as tradable exploitation rights (see Trad-
able Permits for Greenhouse Gases, Volume 4; Tradable
Permits for Limiting Stratospheric Ozone Depletion,
Volume 4; Tradable Permits for Sulfur Emission Reduc-
tions, Volume 4; Transferable Fisheries Quotas (TFQs),
Volume 4).
The idea here is that, for the collective as a whole,
some central authority determines the maximum sustainable
exploitation of some social or environmental resource (to
be consumed, enjoyed or polluted), and then distributes
(equally, shall we say) among its constituents a collection of
tickets each representing a xed limited exploitation right.
Tickets are tradable, so that they may be purchased by
those who need a greater than average resource use, from
those whose demand is less than average. Ticket prices
are established under free-market laws of demand and
supply, but the total resource exploitation, corresponding
to the ownership of a certain number of tickets, may
not be exceeded. If necessary, the central authority may
reduce the extent of exploitation per ticket. Alternatively, it
may allow for increased exploitation, if the total resource
regenerates more quickly than was originally estimated.
See Koutstaal and Nentjes (1995) for an economic and
legal analysis of the possibilities and limitations of tradable
emission permits. The system contains several elements of
the alternative commons dilemma games as discussed by
Ostrom (1990, Chapter 1).
Tradable exploitation rights as a political economic risk
management system raises a number of fundamental ques-
tions. These are mainly concerned with the assessment
ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY/PERCEPTION 265
of the maximum tolerable overall exploitation of a given
resource, the initial distribution (or perhaps: auctioning out)
of exploitation tickets, and the central authoritys moni-
toring and control over actual resource exploitation and
possible violations of individual purchased rights. Effective
functioning of such a system obviously requires collective
rules and a sanctioning system. It also necessitates efcient
operation of demand and supply pricing mechanisms. It also
demands adequate provision of information and communi-
cation about exploitation rights, their availability and the
monitoring and control of their actual utilization.
If appropriately implemented, tradable exploitation rights
would prohibit free riding, whilst the unfairness of a xed
exploitation charge to both small and large exploiters would
be avoided (see the discussion of demand revelation by
Yamagishi, 1995, 313). How tradable exploitation rights as
a system actually works under variations in certain basic
characteristics, is a matter of controlled experimentation
and creative eld study. Practical examples are the distri-
bution of tradable quota-rights for sea-shing, dairy milk
production and animal manure production, respectively, in
the countries of the European Union. A promising applica-
tion would involve transportation kilometers, to limit total
environmental impacts from motorized transport.
In view of the common-resource dilemma model of
collective environmental problems, tradable exploitation
rights is an almost ideal risk management system, because
it is aimed at the necessary balance between individual and
collective interests, between government and market and
(thus) between individual freedom and social equality.
A related risk management system, also involving a
combination of various Table 3 strategies, is bond pledging
or hostage posting for ensuring collectively responsible
behavior. The basic idea is that individual actors promise
to be cooperative, and that they commit themselves by
pledging a bond (which serves as a hostage). The bond or
hostage is lost when they defect and behave against the
collective interest. Raub and Keren (1993) and Keren and
Raub (1993) discuss the theoretical nature and implications
of such a system, and they offer empirical evidence for
its effectiveness. An interesting practical example from
environmental policy is couched in a Swiss proposal to
drastically increase fuel prices for motorcars, and then at
the end of each year pay a bonus out of a national fuel fund
to those who would prove to have driven less than a certain
number of car-kilometers (VCS, 1990).
CONDITIONS FOR SOCIAL BEHAVIOR
CHANGE
Global environmental problems offer good reasons for
social behavior change. Common-resource dilemmas con-
front subjects with necessary riskbenet trade-offs and
the prompting of direction of needed change. The risk
management strategies and systems discussed above can
be instrumental in bringing about social change. From
such policy foundations as well as from various empirical
research (e.g., De Young, 1993; Oskamp, 1995; Gard-
ner and Stern, 1996; Steg and Vlek, 1997) we may dis-
till the following essential conditions for social behavior
change, considered from the subjects point of view; see
Table 4.
Fullling these conditions is like answering obvious
questions by subjects of policy intervention campaigns,
such as: what is the problem? What is my own responsibil-
ity? What (else) could I actually do? Will others cooperate
as well? Can we trust risk experts and managers? Where
would this all lead to? The latter question in particular is
rarely addressed in environmental policy debates. Sustain-
able futures have much to do with meeting basic human
needs and values (cf. WCED, 1987), to be discussed herein,
in the section on human needs and values.
HUMAN NEEDS AND VALUES
Individuals, groups and organizations consume raw materi-
als, energy, products and services because they are driven
by basic needs and wants, because they cherish cultural
beliefs and values, and because they are guided by social
and economic institutions. Together, need satisfactions and
value manifestations make up peoples quality of life. The
latter is a multidimensional concept comprising variables
such as health, family relations, work, income, housing
accommodation, safety and environmental quality (see, e.g.,
Ormel et al., 1997; Gatersleben and Vlek, 1998; Diener,
2000). Quality of life is not necessarily affected by addi-
tional commodities that consumers are urged to desire
through clever advertising. The reason is that material
goods can be associated with the promise to fulll needs
they are not suited to fulll.
Human needs and values are numerous and have been
the subject of various taxonomies (McDougall, 1932;
Maslow, 1954; Max-Neef, 1992; Schwarz and Bilsky,
Table 4 Essential subject-conditions for social behav-
ior change
1. Sufcient awareness of and insight into the
collective environmental problem
2. Appreciation of ones own contribution to the
problem and ones co-responsibility for solutions
3. Visibility and consistency of strategic policy goals
4. Availability of feasible behavior alternatives
5. Personal (extrinsic and/or intrinsic) incentives for
behavior change
6. Basic trust in cooperation of fellow subjects
7. Basic trust in relevant management agencies and
authorities
8. An acceptable image of the future resulting from
social behavior change
266 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
1987). Maslows well-known needs hierarchy relates
physiological, safety, belongingness, esteem and self-
actualization needs. Maslow holds that the lower needs are
more elemental, and hence override the higher needs in case
of deprivation.
Max-Neef (1992) has proposed a taxonomy of nine
human needs, which successively involves subsistence, pro-
tection, affection, understanding, participation, leisure, cre-
ation, identity and freedom. The author separates these gen-
eral needs from the various specic ways in which they may
be satised. Four existential categories of needs satisfac-
tion are distinguished: being, having, doing and interacting,
respectively. For example, a persons need for identity may
be satised by being outspoken, having a German shepherd
dog, regularly doing hard work, and interacting (meeting)
with friends in the local cafe.
Being, having, doing and interacting to satisfy certain
needs or to manifest certain values often involve raw mate-
rials, energy, products and services. A general question,
therefore, is: to what extent may valid (general) human
needs be fullled in a far less energy- and material-intensive
way so as to better t into societys sustainable develop-
ment? Another question is: to what extent and in what
way might resourceful need-satisfying states (being), pos-
sessions (having), actions (doing) or interactions be re-
interpreted such that they are going to be seen as actually
far less need-satisfying than they originally were consid-
ered to be? The latter question touches upon the possible
illusory nature of culturally normal and socially accepted
ways of needs satisfaction, and it would entail a discussion
about more authentic and meaningful ways of satisfying
our real needs.
After surveying various theories and taxonomies of
human needs and values, Vlek et al. (1998) used a shortlist
of 22 different quality of life variables to explain peo-
ples feelings and judgments about prospective changes
in their countrys environmental and economic condi-
tions. It appeared that (Dutch) questionnaire respondents
expected more positive changes from environmental qual-
ity improvement along with economic recession, than from
(further) environmental deterioration along with contin-
ued economic growth. In a household scenario evaluation
study, Poortinga et al. (2000) requested 450 respondents to
rate each of the 22 variables for its importance to their
overall quality of life. After factor analysis it appeared
that, with one exception (social justice), the 22 variables
could be compactly summarized into seven factors, together
explaining 60% of the variance in peoples importance
judgments. These factors, together with the variables that
they include, are given in Table 5, in topbottom order
of averaged importance. Note that maturity, openness to
change and material wealth were judged to be less impor-
tant than family, health and safety, personal freedom and
achievement.
Jackson and Marks (1999) scrutinize the question:
to what extent does economic growth actually deliver
increasing welfare, as is being supposed in neo-classical
economics? They refer to Max-Neefs (1995) threshold
hypothesis which holds that, in Western-industrial growth
patterns, the many economic goods are increasingly
being counterbalanced by three basic economic bads, viz.
depletion of natural resources, degradation of the natural
environment, and various costs to the quality of human
life. After considering various data on increased consumer
spending on material as well as nonmaterial needs (such
as leisure), Jackson and Marks (1999, p. 439) appear
to nd it difcult to infer increased needs satisfaction
from increased expenditure. They also state that material
consumption might well provide pseudo-satisfaction of
nonmaterial needs or even inhibit or violate those needs.
Ever since Adam Smith (1776), economists have argued
that human welfare depends on material wealth, and even
today they neglect the contrary experience suggesting that
their assumption is valid only when people live in material
scarcity. In an afuent society, welfare loses its correlation
with wealth.
The reason why economic growth no longer brings a sense
of greater well-being, why the pleasures our new possessions
bring melt into thin air, is that at the level of afuence of
the American middle class what really matters is not ones
material possessions but ones psychological economy, ones
richness of human relations and freedom from the conicts
and constrictions that prevent us from enjoying what we
have.
In debates about quality of life dimensions such as
health, family relations, work and leisure time we often
underestimate the fundamental human need for variety and
change (not so important following Table 5): we gener-
ally dont want to be, have, do and interact with the same
(person, goods, jobs or other people, respectively) every
day or week of the year. Most people (want to) vary
Table 5 Seven quality-of-life (QoL) factors summarizing
21 out of 22 specic QoL-variables (given in brackets)
a
6. Family health and safety (health, partner and family
safety)
3. Personal freedom (freedom, privacy, leisure time)
7. Achievement (education, work)
2. Environmental quality (environmental quality,
nature/biodiversity, aesthetic beauty)
5. Maturity (identity/self-respect, security,
spirituality/religion)
4. Openness-to-change (social relations,
change/variation, challenge/excitement)
1. Material wealth (money/income, comfort,
status/recognition, material beauty)
a
From top to bottom factors bundle from (roughly) more to
less important QoL variables. Factor numbers indicate the order
of eigenvalues, i.e., the percentage of total variance explained
by that factor.
ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY/PERCEPTION 267
in their behaviors between: rationality and emotionality,
security and challenge, stability and change, uniformity
and variety, tradition and innovation, comfort and hard-
ship, inconspicuousness and social distinction, communal-
ity and individuality, and between norm-adherence and
norm-transgression. Any kind of consumption (or produc-
tion) pattern sustainable or not should therefore incor-
porate reasonable variations along the existential polarities
indicated above. If sustainable behavior would (only) be
rational, secure, stable, uniform, traditional, comfortable,
inconspicuous, communal and norm-adherent, it would fun-
damentally deter most people for literally all too human
reasons. Scitovsky (1976) might summarize this by saying:
such a life would provide much comfort all right, but it
would not give enough pleasure .
CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS
Environmental damage and risks local, regional and glo-
bal result from a complex whole of diverse behavior
patterns making up a lively society. Harmful effects, in
the short and/or the long term, can only be prevented
if one addresses the causal mechanisms and the sources
of environmental over-exploitation. Therefore, collective
environmental problems are socio-behavioral problems for
which technology offers only one (partial) solution strategy.
Other strategies should be focused on population, economic
processes, societal institutions and cultural beliefs, norms
and values (cf. Figure 1).
In several respects, global environmental problems may
be too far away for us, here and now, to appreciate
and care about them. The psychological trick for man-
aging them nevertheless would be to coordinate global
policy measures with more proximate regional and local
policies. This can only be accomplished via causes-and-
sources oriented policy approach. Taking again the example
of mass motorization, policies could be aimed at reduc-
ing global carbon dioxide emissions, regional air pollution
and land use, and local noise and safety problems simul-
taneously, if they acted comprehensively on the private
motorcar system as underlying a spectrum of environmental
pollutants.
In democratic countries, effective environmental policies
tend to be politically controversial, if not unacceptable.
This can be understood in terms of the common-resource
dilemma, where individual freedom stands in permanent
opposition to social equality. In their tragic choice the-
ory, Calabresi and Bobbitt (1978) even hold that free-
dom and equality are incompatible social goals, whilst a
democratic system by nature cannot warrant equal allo-
cation of opportunities and wealth. However, the ideal
solution nding a sustainable balance between freedom
and equality requires powerful statesmanship, which may
be based on the principle that individual liberties should be
subordinate to collective social and environmental qualities
essential for all.
Finally, global environmental policy makers are facing
huge differences in sustainability pro les between different
regions of the world. The United Nations Human Devel-
opment Report 1998 (UNDP, 1998, 1) states: the 20th
century growth in consumption, unprecedented in its scale
and diversity, has been badly distributed, leaving a backlog
of shortfalls and gaping inequalities .
Shortly after the appearance of Our Common Future
(WCED, 1987), William Ruckelshaus (1989), a former
director of the US Environmental Protection Agency, wrote
that sustainable development should mean: (a) economic
development within ecological limits; and (b) worldwide
equitable economic development (Ruckelshaus, 1989).
From a psychological point of view, these two international
problems rest upon very similar foundations. Both global
environmental degradation and widespread human poverty
challenge human intelligence, international trust and
worldwide morality, so that we can be aware of the
problems, design creative solutions and work towards a
common future of economic security, social well-being and
environmental quality. If we can y around the world within
48 hours, shouldn t we be able to understand and manage
the global problems that modern life entails?
REFERENCES
Ajzen, I (1991) The Theory of Planned Behavior, Organ. Behav-
ior Human Decision Processes, 50, 179 211.
Bandura, A (1977) Social Learning Theory, Prentice-Hall, Engle-
wood Cliffs, NJ.
Bjandorkman, M (1984) Decision Making, Risk Taking and Psy-
chological Time: Review of Empirical Findings and Psycho-
logical Theory, Scand. J. Psychol., 25, 31 49.
Calabresi, G and Bobbitt, P (1978) Tragic Choices, Norton, New
York.
Cialdini, R B, Kallgren, C A, and Reno, R R (1991) A Focus
Theory of Normative Conduct, in Advances in Experimental
Social Psychology, ed L Berkowitz, 24, 201 234.
Cook, S W and Berrenberg, J L (1981) Approaches to Encourag-
ing Conservation Behavior: A Review and Conceptual Frame-
work, J. Soc. Iss., 37, 73 107.
Corson, W (1994) Changing Course: An Outline of Strategies for
a Sustainable Future, Futures, 26, 206 223.
Dawes, R M (1980) Social Dilemmas, Ann. Rev. Psychol., 31,
169 193.
De Young, R (1993) Changing Behavior and Making it Stick. The
Conceptualization and Management of Conservation Behavior,
Environ. Behav., 25, 485 505.
Diener, E (2000) Subjective Well-being: The Science of Happi-
ness and a Proposal for a National Index, Am. Psychol., 55(1),
34 43.
Dietz, T and Rosa, E A (1997) Environmental Impacts of Popu-
lation and Consumption, in Environmentally Signicant Con-
sumption; Research Directions, eds P C Stern, V W Ruttan,
268 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
J L Sweeney, and R H Socolow, National Academy Press,
Washington, DC, 9299.
Durning, A T (1992) How Much is Enough? The Consumer Soci-
ety and the Future of the Earth, WW Norton and Earthscan,
New York.
Edney, J J (1980) The Commons Problem; Alternative Perspec-
tives, Am. Psychol., 35, 131150.
Ehrlich, P R and Holdren, J P (1971) Impact of Population
Growth, Science, 171, 12121217.
Gardner, G T and Stern, P C (1996) Environmental Problems and
Human Behavior, Allyn and Bacon, Boston, MA.
Gatersleben, B and Vlek, C (1998) Household Consumption,
Quality-of-Life and Environmental Impacts: A Psychologi-
cal Perspective and Empirical Study, in Green Households?
Domestic Consumers, Environment and Sustainability, eds
K J Noorman and T Schoot Uiterkamp, Earthscan, London,
141183.
Geller, E S (1989) Applied Behavior Analysis and Social Mar-
keting: an Integration for Environmental Preservation, J. Soc.
Iss., 45, 1736.
Geller, E S, Winett, R A, and Everett, P B (1982) Preserving the
Environment: New Strategies for Behavior Change, Pergamon,
Elmsford, NY.
Gladwin, T N, Newburry, W E, and Reiskin, E D (1997) Why
is the Northern Elite Mind Biased Against Community, the
Environment and a Sustainable Future? in Environment, Ethics
and Behavior. The Psychology of Environmental Valuation and
Degradation, eds M H Bazerman, D M Messick, A E Tenbr-
unsel, and K A Wade-Benzioni, The New Lexington Press,
San Francisco, CA, 234274.
Goodland, R, Daly, H, and Kellenberg, J (1994) Burden Sharing
in the Transition to Environmental Sustainability, Futures, 26,
146155.
Hardin, G (1968) The Tragedy of the Commons, Science, 162,
12431248.
Hilderink, H (2000) World Population in Transition, Doctoral
Dissertation, Department of Spatial Sciences, University of
Groningen, Netherlands, 1213.
Hirsch, F (1976) The Social Limits to Growth, Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, MA.
Hogarth, R M (1987) Judgment and Choice; The Psychology of
Decision, 2nd edition, Chichester, UK and New York.
Inglehart, R (1996) The Diminishing Utility of Economic Growth:
From Maximizing Security Toward Maximizing Subjective
Well-being, Crit. Rev., 10, 509531.
Jackson, T and Marks, N (1999) Consumption, Sustainable Wel-
fare and Human Needs with Reference to UK Expenditure
Patterns Between 1954 and 1994, Ecol. Econ., 28, 421441.
Jager, W, Janssen, M A, De Vries, H J M, De Greef, J, and
Vlek, C A J (2000) Behavior in Commons Dilemmas: Homo
Economicus and Homo Psychologicus in an Ecological Eco-
nomic Model, Ecol. Econ., 35, 357380.
Jager, W and Vlek, C (1992) Hinder, Stress en Gedrag als
Reactie op Milieuverontreiniging, Gedrag en Gezondheid, 20,
113127.
Kahn, A E (1966) The Tyranny of Small Decisions. Market Fail-
ures, Imperfections, and the Limits of Economics, Kyklos, 19,
2347.
Keren, G B and Raub, W (1993) Resolving Social Conict
Through Hostage Posting: Theoretical and Empirical Consid-
erations, J. Exp. Psychol.: General, 122(4), 429448.
Kotler, P and Zaltman, G (1971) Social Marketing: an Approach
to Planned Social Change, J. Market., 35, 312.
Koutstaal, P R and Nentjes, A (1995) Tradable Carbon Permits in
Europe; Feasibility and Comparison with Taxes, J. Common
Market Stud., 33(2), 219233.
Martinez-Alier, J (1995) Political Ecology, Distributional Con-
icts and Economic Incommensurability, New Left Rev., 211,
7088.
Maslow, A H (1954) Motivation and Personality, Harper and
Row, New York.
Masters, J C and Smith, W P, eds (1987) Social Comparison,
Social Justice and Relative Deprivation: Theoretical and Policy
Perspectives, Volume 4, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ.
Max-Neef, M (1992) Development and Human Needs, in Real-life
Economics: Understanding Wealth Creation, eds P Ekins and
M Max-Neef, Routledge, New York, 91108.
Max-Neef, M (1995) Economic Growth and Quality of Life a
Threshold Hypothesis, Ecol. Econ., 15, 115118.
McDougall, W (1932) The Energies of Men, Methuen, London.
Messick, D M and Brewer, M B (1983) Solving Social Dilem-
mas: a Review, in Review of Personality and Social Psychol-
ogy, Volume 4, eds L Wheeler and P Shaver, Sage, Beverly
Hills, CA.
Noorman, K J and Schoot Uiterkamp, T, eds (1998) Green House-
holds? Domestic Consumers, Environment and Sustainability,
Earthscan, London.
Olander, F and Tho gerson, J (1995) Understanding of Consumer
Behavior as a Prerequisite for Environmental Protection, J.
Consumer Pol., 18, 345385.
Ormel, J, Lindenberg, S, Steverink, N, and Vonkorff, M (1997)
Quality of Life and Social Production Functions: A Frame-
work for Understanding Health Effects, Soc. Sci. Med., 45,
10511063.
Oskamp, S (1995) Resource Conservation and Recycling: Behav-
ior and Policy, J. Soc. Iss., 51, 157178.
Ostrom, E (1990) Governing the Commons: The Evolution of
Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge University Press,
New York.
Pavlov, I P (1927) Conditioned Re exes, Oxford University Press,
New York.
Pawlik, K (1991) The Psychology of Global Environmental
Change: Some Basic Data and an Agenda for Cooperative
International Research, Int. J. Psychol., 26, 547563.
Platt, I (1973) Social Traps, Am. Psychol., 28, 641651.
Poortinga, W, Wiersma, G, Steg, L, Vlek, C, Noorman, K J,
Moll, H, and Schoot Uiterkamp, T (2000) Expected Quality
of Life Impacts of Experimental Scenarios for Sustainable
Household Energy Use, Departments of Psychology and
Environmental Science, University of Groningen, Netherlands,
report (in press).
Raub, W and Keren, G B (1993) Hostages as a Commitment
Device: A Game-theoretic Model and an Empirical Test of
Some Scenarios, J. Econ. Behavior Organ., 21, 4368.
Reisch, L A and Scherhorn, G (1999) Sustainable Consumption,
in The Current State of Economic Science, ed S B Dahiya,
Spellbound, London and India.
ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY 269
Ro pke, I (1999) The Dynamics of Willingness to Consume, Ecol.
Econ., 28, 399420.
Ruckelshaus, W D (1989) Toward a Sustainable World, Sci. Am.,
September, 114120B.
Schwartz, S H and Bilsky, W (1987) Toward a Universal Struc-
ture of Human Values, J. Person. Soc. Psychol., 53(3).
Scitovski, T (1976) The Joyless Economy: An Inquiry Into Human
Satisfaction and Consumer Dissatisfaction, Oxford University
Press, New York and London (2nd edition 1992).
Skinner, B F (1953) Science and Human Behavior, Macmillan,
New York.
Smith, A (1776) The Wealth of Nations, Penguin Books, Har-
mondsworth, UK, reprinted 1981.
Steg, L and Vlek, C (1997) The Role of Problem Awareness in
Willingness to Change Car Use and in Evaluating Relevant
Policy Measures, in Traf c and Transport Psychology, eds
T Rothengatter and E Carbonell Vaya, Pergamon, London,
465475.
Stern, P C (1992) Psychological Dimensions of Global Environ-
mental Change, Ann. Rev. Psychol., 43, 269302.
Stern, P C, Dietz, T, Abel, T, Guagnano, G A, and Kalof, L
(1999) A ValueBelief Norm Theory of Support for Social
Movements: the Case of Environmentalism, Human Ecol. Rev.,
6, 8197.
UNDP: United Nations Development Programme (1998) Human
Development Report 1998, Oxford University Press, New
York (see also UNDP: Human Development Report 1999
(idem)).
VCS: Verkehrs-Club der Schweiz (1990) Oekobonus: ein Durch-
f uhrbarer Weg zur Reduktion des Strassenverkehrs (Ecobonus:
a Feasible Way Toward the Reduction of Road Trafc), Post-
fach, CH-3360 Herzogenbuchsee, Switzerland.
Vellinga, P, Hisschemoller, M, Klabbers, J, Berk, M, Swart, R,
and Van Ulden, A (1995) Climate Change, Policy Options and
Research Implications, in Climate Change Research: Evalu-
ation and Policy Options, eds S Zwerver, R van Rompaey,
M Kok, and M Berk, Elsevier Science, Amsterdam, Vol-
ume A, 199132.
Vermeersch, E (1988) De Ogen van de Panda; een Milieu-
loso sch Essay, Marc van de Wiele, Brugge.
Vlek, C A J (1996) Collective Risk Generation and Risk Man-
agement; the Unexploited Potential of the Social Dilemmas
Paradigm, in Frontiers in Social Dilemmas Research, eds
W B G Liebrand and D M Messick, Springer-Verlag, New
York, 1138.
Vlek, C (2000) Essential Psychology for Environmental Policy
Making, Int. J. Psychol., 35, 153167.
Vlek, C, Jager, W, and Steg, L (1997) Modellen en Strategieen
voor Gedragsverandering ter Beheersing van Collectieve
Risicos, Ned. Tijdschr. Psychol., 52, 174191.
Vlek, C and Keren, G B (1992) Behavioral Decision Theory and
Environmental Risk Management: Assessment and Resolution
of Four Survival Dilemmas, Acta Psychol., 80, 249278.
Vlek, C, Skolnik, M, and Gatersleben, B (1998) Sustainable Dev-
elopment and Quality of Life: Expected Effects of Prospec-
tive Changes in Economic and Environmental Conditions,
Zeitschrift f ur experimentelle Psychologie, 45(4), 319333
(with German summary).
Vlek, C, Reisch, L A, and Scherhorn, G (2000) Transformation
of Unsustainable Consumer Behaviors and Consumer Policies,
A Research-programming Report for the International Human
Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change
(Industrial Transformation), Department of Psychology Report
no COV 0004, 152, University of Groningen, Netherlands,
(also in IHDP Industrial Transformation: Research Directions,
ed P Vellinga, Bonn (G), IHDP, in press).
Wachtel, P (1989) The Poverty of Af uence. A Psychological
Portrait of the American Way of Life, New Society Publishers,
Philadelphia, PA.
WECD: World Commission on Environment and Development
(1987) Our Common Future, Oxford University Press, New
York.
Wilke, H (1989) Promoting Personal Decisions Supporting the
Achievement of Risky Public Goods, in Social Decision
Methodology for Technological Projects, eds C Vlek and
G Cvetkovich, Kluwer, Dordrecht and Boston, 3959.
Winter, D (1996) Ecological Psychology: Healing the Split
between Planet and Self, Harper Collins, New York.
Yamagishi, T (1995) Social Dilemmas, in Sociological Perspec-
tives on Social Psychology, eds K S Cook, G A Fine, and
J S House, Allyn and Bacon, Boston, MA.
Environmental Refugees
see Environmental Refugees (Volume 4)
Environmental Security
Steve Lonergan
University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada
With the demise of the Cold War, there has been a rethink-
ing of our traditional perspectives on security. Numerous
authors have posited that our concentration on military
security may be out of date, and that factors such as dis-
ease, human rights, and environmental degradation may
pose equal, or even greater, threats to national security.
At the same time, there is an increasing sense that states
may not be able to guarantee the security of communi-
ties and individuals, particularly in reference to these new
threats. Global environmental change poses a threat not
only to the natural systems on which life depends, but may
pose risks to the security of individuals directly. The pur-
pose of this article is to present these views, and provide a
new way of thinking about the human dimensions of global
change.
270 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
THE EVOLUTION OF ENVIRONMENT AND
SECURITY RESEARCH
National security has focused traditionally on protecting
the territorial integrity and political sovereignty of the state
from military aggression from other states. This generally
has involved forming alliances and investing in military
assets in order to deter potential adversaries and use force
effectively when required. In recent years, there has been
increased emphasis placed on expanding the traditional con-
ception of security to include so-called non-conventional
threats such as resource scarcity, human rights abuses,
outbreaks of infectious disease, and environmental degrada-
tion caused by toxic contamination, ozone depletion, global
warming, water pollution, soil degradation and the loss of
biodiversity (Ullman, 1983; Renner, 1989; Westing, 1989).
These discussions, in turn, have stimulated research on
examining the specic relationship between environment
and security.
The literature on environment and security emerged in
the 1970s. However, prior to this, as early as the 1950s,
discussions on the issue of environmental change and secu-
rity occurred without explicit use of the term environmental
security (Osborn, 1953; Brown, 1954; Ophuls, 1977). Fol-
lowing from these discussions, in 1977, the US Central
Intelligence Agency established an environmental center to
assess the relationships between environment and security.
The US militarys use of defoliants in Southeast Asia during
the Vietnam War focused international attention on both the
intentional and unintentional environmental damage caused
by war. The Additional Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva
Convention on the Protection of Victims of International
Armed Conicts (1977) was the rst of two treaties with
major environmental importance that stemmed from inter-
national concern over excessive environmental degradation
in Vietnam (Diederich, 1992). This primarily humanitar-
ian agreement has to date not been ratied by a number
of major powers, including the US, France and the UK,
although most objections do not center on the environmen-
tal issues contained in the agreement.
Efforts to develop more stringent denitions for the pro-
hibition of widespread, long-term and severe damage to
the natural environment continued with the 1977 Conven-
tion on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use
of Environmental Modication Techniques (the ENMOD
Convention), the second of the post-Vietnam treaties.
By the early 1980s, various institutions and writers
began addressing security beyond strictly military concerns
that affect the state. The United Nations (UN) Commis-
sion on Disarmament and Security chaired by Olaf Palme
of Sweden, made a distinction between collective secu-
rity and common security. The former implied the more
traditional interstate military security issues, while the lat-
ter reected the growing array of non-military threats,
including economic change, resource scarcity, population
growth and environmental degradation. This was followed
by the new political thinking of Russian President Mikhail
Gorbachev that promoted the concept of comprehensive
security as a cornerstone of international politics. Compre-
hensive security included various threats, including nuclear
war, poverty, and global environmental issues.
Coincidentally, numerous writers addressed the issue of
expanding the denition of security to include non-military
threats. Richard Ullman, for example, offered the following
denition of threats to security:
A threat to national security is an action or sequence of events
that; 1) threatens drastically and over a relatively brief span
of time to degrade the quality of life for the inhabitants of a
state, or 2) threatens signicantly to narrow the range of policy
choices available to the government of a state or to private,
non-governmental entities (person, groups, corporations) within
the state.
(Ullman, 1983, 133)
While still circumscribing security within state boundaries,
Ullman sought to expand the range of threats to security
beyond the traditional military concerns.
The suggestion to broaden the denition of security
to include environmental threats was by no means lim-
ited to American sources. Although the report of the
World Commission on Environment and Development,
Our Common Future, is best known for its denition of
sustainable development, the commission also called for
recognition that security was partly a function of envi-
ronmental sustainability. The Commission highlighted the
causal role environmental stress can play in contributing to
conict while also stating that a comprehensive approach
to international and national security must transcend the
traditional emphasis on military power and armed com-
petition (World Commission on Environment and Devel-
opment, 1987, 290). Westing (1989) elaborated on this
statement by noting that comprehensive security has two
intertwined components: political security, with its mil-
itary, economic and humanitarian sub-components, and
environmental security, including protecting and utilizing
the environment.
The 1986 nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl and its atten-
dant devastation for neighboring human populations and
ecosystems placed health considerations squarely within
a security framework for many people. The next year,
President Gorbachev proposed ecological security as a top
priority that de facto would serve as a forum for interna-
tional condence building.
The initial phase of environment and security research
concluded at almost the same time as the end of the Cold
War. Articles by Matthews (1989) and Myers (1989) sum-
marised much of the debate on broadening conceptions of
security. Like earlier contributions, these efforts addressed
two key issues. First, there was a need to redene security
to include a new range of threats. Such threats included
ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY 271
population growth, resource scarcity, and environmental
degradation. Second, there was an acceptance that the object
of security was no longer simply the state, but ranged to
levels above and below the level of the state. Myers (1993),
for example, equated security with
Human wellbeing: not only protection from harm and injury but
access to water, food, shelter, health, employment, and other
basic requisites that are due of every person on Earth. It is the
collectivity of these citizen needs, overall safety and quality
of life, that should gure prominently in the nation s view of
security.
(Myers, 1993, 20)
Similar to the arguments made by the World Commis-
sion on Environment and Development, Myers argues for
moving from security as a freedom from various threats to
security as a freedom to access environmental services.
Today, critiques of this early literature often emphasize
its ahistorical and alarmist character. Some historical analy-
ses suggest that environmental change has been a key deter-
minant of the rise and fall of civilizations: and, ultimately,
of progress in many areas of endeavor. In short, there is
nothing new about this relationship. Moreover, some critics
argue, the claim that human activity is hastening a catastro-
phe becomes less in uential as the years and decades pass.
In spite of its aws, however, the early literature initiated
an important debate and laid the foundations for the more
rigorous research programs of the 1990s.
ENVIRONMENT AND CONFLICT
Assessing the nature of linkages between environment and
security has proven dif cult. The complexity of multiple
interactions and feedback poses tremendous empirical and
methodological hurdles. The ambiguous and contested
nature of the term security also complicates research and
policy in the area of environment and security (Dokken
and Gr ger, 1995; Lipschutz, 1995; Deudney and Matthew,
1999). As noted previously, the meanings attached to the
term range from a narrow state-based de nition of safety
from armed con ict, to a much broader conception of secu-
rity as synonymous with human well-being. In the 1990s
a number of researchers have tried to circumvent this
discussion by ignoring the word security and concentrat-
ing speci cally on the role of environmental change and
resource depletion as potential causes of violent con ict
(Homer-Dixon, 1991, 1994; Libiszewski, 1992). Such con-
ict, in turn, could pose a serious threat to the security of
individuals, regions and nation states. The general discus-
sions on the nature of security and the role of environmental
degradation as a contributor to insecurity and con ict are
labeled by Levy (1995a) as the rst wave of environment
and con ict research. The empirical research that attempted
to prove a link between environment and con ict has been
labeled by Levy (1995b) as the second wave of environment
and con ict studies.
Work at the Peace and Con icts Studies Program at
the University of Toronto (Homer-Dixon, 1991, 1994;
Homer-Dixon et al., 1993), the Environment and Con icts
Project (ENCOP) in Zurich and Bern (e.g., Libiszewski,
1992; Spillman and Bachler, 1995), and the International
Peace Research Institute, Oslo (e.g., Molv r, 1991; Gled-
itsch, 1992; Lodgaard and Hjort af Ornas, 1992; Gr ger
and Smith, 1994; Dokken and Gr ger, 1995; Hauge and
Ellingsen, 1997), among others, all contributed towards
this effort (see also, Durham, 1979; Westing, 1986; Gleick,
1989, 1991; National Academy of Science, 1991; Loner-
gan and Kavanagh, 1991). These empirical studies have
been crucial, not only in terms of advancing the scholarly
discussion of the links between environmental change and
violent con ict, but also in publicizing the potential role
environmental degradation may play as a contributor to vio-
lent con ict. Although many studies focused on the some-
what muddled concept of environmental scarcity rather
than on environmental degradation per se, the conclusion
by Homer-Dixon et al. (1993) was clear: scarcities of
renewable resources are already contributing to violent con-
icts in many parts of the developing world . Subsequent
work by Bachler (1998) demonstrated that environmental
degradation and resource depletion may play a number of
different, and sometimes subtle, roles in affecting security
and contributing to con ict. These include environment as
background to the tensions, as a channel leading to tension,
as a trigger, as a catalyst or as a target.
Some scholars have been critical of this deterministic
perspective on environment and con ict (e.g., Deudney,
1991; Dalby, 1992; Conca, 1994; Levy, 1995a,b; Hartman,
1998). Despite the range of case studies undertaken, the
evidence for a direct causal link between environmental
degradation and violent con ict (implied by Homer-Dixon s
statement above) remains speculative and anecdotal.
CLARIFYING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN
ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE AND CONFLICT
The environment and con ict literature posits that several
types of environmental threats may have the capacity to
contribute to insecurity and to produce con ict as well.
Constraints on resources are a crucial factor that is often
discussed in the literature (Choucri, 1991). Rapid indus-
trialization and population growth in many regions have
resulted in an increased demand for both renewable and
non-renewable natural resources, and as Ullman (1983) and
others have noted, competition for resources has histori-
cally been a major cause of con ict. This simple statement
seems intuitively reasonable; however, there are some who
feel it overstates the importance of resources and the envi-
ronment as contributors to con ict (Lipschutz, 1995). At
272 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
rst glance, the availability of water in the Middle East;
the depletion of sh stocks off the east coast of Canada;
and deforestation in Brazil, Thailand and elsewhere have
all been, or have the potential to be, the source of conict.
It has further been suggested that atmospheric change (both
global warming and stratospheric ozone depletion) has the
potential to cause signicant societal disruption, accord-
ing to the US National Academy of Science (1991) and
Myers (1993). In addition, land degradation (or land use
change in general) may directly affect societys ability to
provide food resources for a growing population, or may
indirectly affect other changes, such as global warming.
Homer-Dixon (1994) provides some evidence of these rela-
tionships and concludes that environmental scarcity (which
includes environmental change, population growth, and an
unequal distribution of resources) causes violent conict.
While this contention remains open to debate, it is increas-
ingly accepted that environmental degradation is at least a
contributor to conict and insecurity.
Several other authors have attempted to clarify the pos-
sible relationships between the environment and conict or
security as well. Wallensteen (1992), for example, proposes
a seven-point classication of the connection between
environmental destruction and conict and/or security.
1. Environmental destruction leading to reduced resources
available to society and thus resulting in more con-
tention in society at large.
2. Environmental destruction leading to a shift in power
between already existing parties.
3. Environmental destruction leading to the formation of
new parties, as part of a reaction to environmental
destruction.
4. Environmental destruction leading to environmental
issues becoming important for established parties.
5. Environmental destruction leading to environmental
issues becoming more central in political affairs than
other issues in society.
6. Environmental destruction leading to conict behaviour
involving environmentally based groups.
7. Environmental destruction leading to environmentally
based conict behaviour involving environmentally
based groups.
It is clear that the environmental variable is perceived
to play a number of different roles in its links to violent
conict. This is reected in Dokken and Gr gers (1995,
38) denition of environmental conict as a conict that
involves environmental stress or degradation, whether as
cause, consequence or intervening variable; perhaps in
combination with social, ethnical or political elements .
Libiszewski provides the following operative denition of
an environmental conict:
Environmental conicts manifest themselves as political, social,
economic, ethnic, religious or territorial conicts, or conicts
over resources or national interests, or any other type of
conict. They are traditional conicts induced by environmental
degradation. Environmental conicts are characterised by the
principal importance of degradation in one or more of the
following elds: overuse of renewable resources, overstrain of
the environments sink capacity (pollution); or impoverishment
of the space of living (1992 : 13).
The types of environmental issues examined as poten-
tial contributors to conict are highly varied in terms of;
(1) where they occur geographically (2) at what level they
occur (local, national, regional, global) (3) the speed with
which they occur and (4) the sources for their occurrence.
The types of social, political and economic problems
produced or exacerbated by environmental scarcity are
equally diverse.
A number of researchers prefer the term environmentally
induced con ict to environmental con ict to describe the
environments causal roles. Environmentally induced con-
ict leaves more latitude for incorporating the multiple
causes that are characteristic to all conicts. Initial evi-
dence points to the environment as an underlying, distant,
or background variable that inuences or intensies the con-
ict (Dokken and Gr ger, 1995). The term environmentally
induced con ict also assists in the necessary distinction
between the causes of conict and the issues that are
being fought over. Unlike conicts over non-renewable
resources or resource wars where the resources them-
selves are the alleged object of contention, environmentally
induced conicts often are not viewed as a unique kind
of conict. Instead environmental variables contribute to
social effects that are the more traditional grievances pre-
cipitating conict (ethnic differences, relative deprivation)
(Gurr, 1993; Homer-Dixon, 1994). The environmental vari-
ables do not directly cause the conict per se but instead
make more salient the variables that can precipitate conict
(Libiszewski, 1992).
Many researchers do expect environmentally induced
conict from renewable resource scarcity to become
increasingly frequent. Unlike non-renewable resources,
technological innovation and the market have only achieved
limited success in developing substitutes for renewable
resources (clean air, fertile top soil) according to this line of
argument. Therefore, history may not be a good indicator
of future potential for conict. Increasing environmental
degradation and resource depletion, the result of increased
population, higher use of natural resources per capita, and
a constant or decreasing supply of environmental amenities,
are pushing ecosystems into a highly uncertain and
complex ecological future. This expectation of increasing
environmental scarcity encourages many observers to
predict an accompanying increase in environmentally
induced conict (Homer-Dixon, 1994; Winnefeld and
Morris, 1994; Bachler and Spillmann, 1996; Kahl, 1997;
Bachler, 1998).
ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY 273
WHAT TYPES OF ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
AFFECT SECURITY?
The environmental forces that have been presented as con-
tributing to insecurity are many. Environmental calamities
such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, oods and drought
have always presented a threat to human existence, and their
human impact has increased considerably in scale as people
have moved into disaster-prone areas. The pace of other,
human-induced forms of environmental degradation and
resource depletion (e.g., deforestation, desertication, land
degradation, erosion, salinization, siltation, climate change),
while often more gradual, has been growing rapidly in
recent decades owing to a combination of increasing
demand, improving technological means of exploitation,
and the lagging pace of conservation and control. Mean-
while the ability and perhaps also the inclination of people
to adapt to environmental stress is increasingly challenged,
particularly where resources and environment provide the
principal basis of their livelihood, as is the case in much of
the developing world.
Types of environmental change/degradation, which may
affect security, include the following:
Natural Disasters
Natural disasters include oods, volcanoes and earthquakes.
They are usually characterized by a rapid onset, and their
impact (destructiveness) is a function of the number of vul-
nerable people in the region rather than the severity of the
disaster, per se. Poor people in developing countries are
the most affected because they are the most vulnerable.
(Droughts, despite a slower onset, are also included in this
category.) Recent earthquakes in Pakistan, and ooding in
many regions of the world indicate not only the destructive-
ness of disasters, but their ability to affect large numbers
of people.
Cumulative Changes or Slow Onset Changes
Cumulative changes are generally natural processes,
occurring at a slower rate, which interact with, and are
advanced by, human activities. The processes include
deforestation, land degradation, erosion, salinity, siltation,
waterlogging, desertication and climate warming. Human-
induced soil degradation is one factor that directly affects
economic sufciency in rural areas. Water shortages also
may affect security, and Table 1 notes countries which are
experiencing (or will soon experience) conditions of water
scarcity, where water scarcity is generally considered to
be less than 1000 m
3
per capita per year (this is a rough
estimate only; many countries are able to supplement their
water supply through expensive alternatives such as desali-
nation (e.g., Kuwait) or importing water (e.g., Singapore)).
Table 1 Annual water availability,
1995 (selected countries)
Annual water
availability, 1995
(cubic meters
Country per capita)
Algeria 528
Burundi 563
Egypt 923
Israel 362
Jordan 314
Kuwait 103
Libya 111
Rwanda 792
Saudi Arabia 254
Singapore 211
Tunisia 443
Yemen 359
a
Source: World Resources, 19961997
(1996) Oxford University Press, NY.
Do factors such as water scarcity and human-induced soil
degradation in and of themselves affect security? The link-
age is much more indirect; in most cases, one or more
of the following conditions are also present: rapid popu-
lation growth, economic decline, inequitable distribution
of resources, lack of institutional support and political
repression.
Accidental Disruptions or Industrial Accidents
This category includes chemical manufacture and trans-
port and nuclear reactor accidents. The two most obvious
examples are the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986,
and the Union Carbide accident in Bhopal, India, in 1987.
Between 1986 and 1992, there were over 75 major chemi-
cal accidents which killed almost 4000 people worldwide,
injured another 62 000, and displaced over two million.
Most of these displacements, however, were temporary.
Development Projects
Development projects such as dams and irrigation sys-
tems often involve forced resettlement and affect many
aspects of human security. In India, for example, it has been
estimated that over 20 million people have been uprooted
by development projects in the past three decades. The
Three Gorges Dam project in China, expected to dis-
place 1 million people and the Sardar Sarovar Dam project
in India are the most notable present examples. Rapid
urbanization in some regions of the world is also forc-
ing people from their land; conversion of agricultural
land to urban uses has long been a phenomenon in the
north, and increasingly this is the case in the South as
well.
274 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Conict and Warfare
Environmental degradation is considered by many to be
both a cause and an effect of armed conict. Although
the evidence of wars being fought over the environment
is weak (except, of course, over the ownership of land),
there is an increasing use of the environment as a weapon
of war or, as Gleick (1990) notes, as a strategic tool. One
obvious example in this category is the threat by Turkey
to restrict the ow of the Euphrates to Syria and Iraq
in order to pressure Syria to discontinue its support of
Kurdish separatists in Turkey. Other examples include the
purposeful discharge of oil into the Persian Gulf during
the Gulf War and the destruction of irrigation systems
during conicts in Somalia. Such activities have similar
and, indeed, more immediate consequences as do the slow
onset changes noted above. But in these cases, it seems
clear that the environment is merely a symptom of a larger
conict, and the root cause of any insecurity is the conict
itself, and the reasons behind it.
CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON
ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY
Throughout the environment and security debate, many
writers have been critical of linking the two terms. Resear-
chers and analysts from a traditional security perspective
tend to discount the role that environmental degradation
or resource depletion plays in precipitating violent con-
ict. They further argue that broadening the denition of
security to include a laundry list of modiers (environ-
mental, ecological, economic, food, human, comprehensive,
common) undercuts the terms utility by making it mean
something different to each of multiple constituencies. Mil-
itary critics of tying environment and security together also
claim that performing environmental missions takes time
and resources away from preparations for the traditional
war ghting mission and therefore undermines prepared-
ness and effectiveness in battle.
Environmental critics also claim that there is little evi-
dence to support the argument that environmental degrada-
tion or resource depletion has a signicant role in causing
violent conict, and especially interstate conict. Further-
more, the methodological shortcomings of much of the
research undermine the ndings that do support a case
for linking environment and violent conict. Critics also
fear that propagating the term environmental security could
lead to the militarization of the environment rather than
the greening of security. Military institutions, instead of
undergoing fundamental change to re ect new security pri-
orities, are more likely to co-opt and weaken the non-statist,
non-threat based, cooperative ethic of environmental rescue.
This criticism is reinforced by the perception that security
institutions are searching for new missions to justify their
high Cold War funding levels. Environmental critics also
decry the conception of environmental security that has
developed as an uniquely Northern and Western term; it
is viewed as unacceptable to the South as a paradigm for
environmental problems.
CRITICISMS OF REDEFINING SECURITY IN
ENVIRONMENTAL TERMS
Critics commonly point out the greater likelihood of the
militarization of the environment than the greening of
security as northern security institutions search for new mis-
sions in the post Cold War period. The term as it is used in
this context is Wand ver s (1995). Others share the con-
cern expressed by the term with their own distinct critiques
(Deudney, 1990, 1991; Dalby, 1992, 1994; Finger, 1991,
1994; Conca, 1994; Lipschutz, 1995; Gleditsch, 1997).
With environmental security being used as a political slo-
gan to gain attention for the environment, the risk is that
the historically powerful military institutions will co-opt the
green rhetoric rather than willingly giving up resources to
more effectively address the new threats to environmental
security. Some observers suspect that security may be rede-
ned to include environmental considerations merely at a
rhetorical level (i.e., national security strategies) but would
fail to produce a simultaneous reorientation or dismantling
of security institutions and mindsets (Conca, 1994; Finger,
1994; Kakonen, 1994).
More broadly, some critics charge that environmen-
tal security encompasses too many problems and threats;
for example, problems associated with infectious dis-
ease, global warming, environmental damage during war,
deforestation, water scarcity, and nuclear waste. With such
diverse problems included as the focus of environmental
security, the term loses meaning and utility as an analytical
tool because there is no delineation of what is included
and what is not (Deudney, 1991; Dokken and Gr ger,
1995; W ver, 1995). Instead, linking environment and
security merely represents a normative slogan conveying
the urgency of addressing global problems in determining
the priority of political battles (Levy, 1995a,b).
This criticism illustrates how environmental security is
held to different standards for different purposes. Those
in academia criticising environmental security as a nor-
mative political slogan are asking that the term per-
form as a sharpened theoretical tool. They discount the
early calls for rede ning security, sometimes termed the
rst wave of environmental security literature, as unde-
veloped, a conceptual trick or minimally useful (Levy,
1995; Gleditsch, 1997). From a policy perspective, the
rhetorical use of the term is less troubling than the
failure by its adherents to suggest speci c policy pri-
orities and interventions which would accompany any
rede nition.
ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY 275
The above criticisms arise from authors who assign a
high priority to the importance of coming to grips with
global problems. However, others continue to nd consid-
erable utility in the purely statist and militaristic security
assumptions and therefore oppose widening the purview of
security to new and different threats (Walt, 1991). They
argue that while the Cold War has ended and the dan-
gers of a bilateral stand off have abated, emerging mil-
itary threats demand a traditional denition of security
with continued priority support for the military. Nuclear,
chemical and biological weapons proliferation, terrorism,
and ethnic conict remain reasons enough not to dilute
the denition of security with peripheral, non-military
concerns.
There are also criticisms of environmental security,
which are based on the perspective of the South. Egyptian
diplomat Saad (1991), for example, argues that invoking
the term environmental security represents a new Northern
justication for continuing the inequitable power relation-
ship between North and South. She worries that wealthy
countries of the North can afford to care about the envi-
ronment and will undermine the international legal prin-
ciple of sovereignty in the name of a higher goal called
environmental security. The principle of sovereignty, from
the perspective of the South, provides some defense against
exploitation by recognizing each state, no matter how weak
in capabilities, as the legitimate authority for control over
the resources within its borders.
By this reasoning, Northern states may be tempted,
in the name of environmental security, to try to dictate
the patterns of natural resource usage, development pri-
orities and population policies to developing countries.
The stability and welfare of some states rest on sets of
social power relationships surrounding the utilization of
natural resources (large, politically empowered landown-
ers in Brazil, for example). The elite in certain coun-
tries may therefore nd an alteration of past social bar-
gains, for the sake of environmental conservation, to be
a larger threat to state security than the environmental
destruction itself (Conca et al., 1995). Such perspectives
raise barriers to obtaining the cooperation of the South
with respect to addressing global environmental problems
under the guise of environmental security. This argu-
ment implicitly recognizes the importance of national or
regional perspectives in dening or operationalising envi-
ronmental security. The content and meaning of environ-
mental security varies across nations and regions. These
differences present difculties when trying to mobilize
action on a global scale under the label of environmental
security.
Twenty years ago, the emphasis was on ending the pollution
that the industrialized North had been inicting on the nations
of the South. The goals were clean air and water and arable
land, the requisites of a decent life; and the modality was
international cooperation. Today, however, the North has seized
hold of environmental issues by using them to cloak its own
security concerns.
(Saad, 1995, 273)
The prominent focus on environmental stress and vio-
lent conict in the environmental security literature also
presents an additional cause for Southern suspicion of the
term. The Norths concern with environmentally induced
conict can easily be viewed as a convenient means
to distract attention from Northern environmental prob-
lems. High rates of consumption in the North or the his-
torical depletion of resources do not gure prominently
in causal models, yet they are integral elements in the
larger environmental picture. Global issues such as cli-
mate change and stratospheric ozone depletion are not often
recognised as salient issues in environmentally induced
conict because their long time lines guarantee marginal
relationships to violent conict. The sources for these
global problems tend to emanate disproportionately from
the North. Furthermore, Northern interest in environment
and conict linkages often extends only to a concern for
regime stability and international security implications. The
operationalization of environmental security within the tra-
ditional security institutions may stop short of fundamen-
tal interest in Southern problems of resource degradation
and depletion, poverty, and the inequitable distribution of
wealth.
ENVIRONMENT, HUMAN SECURITY AND
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
The World Commission on Environment and Develop-
ment (WCED, 1987) and the United Nations Conference
on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio
de Janeiro in 1992, have reinforced the notion that eco-
nomic development is necessary to improve quality of
life and well being. However, to be sustainable, this
development must incorporate environmental, social, polit-
ical and economic considerations consistent with a strong
commitment to equity and a concern for resource limita-
tions and the viability of ecosystems. Indeed, it is well
accepted that environmental, social, political, and eco-
nomic systems are interlinked; any actions involving one
of these necessarily affects the others. Even our perspec-
tive on environmental change is constrained by social,
economic, political and cultural factors; for example no
universal denitions of degradation, scarcity or even pol-
lution exist. These terms are dened by context and value
systems.
This multi-dimensional characteristic implies that the
question of whether environmental degradation is a cause of
conict is misguided. What we should be asking is whether
environmental change (linked to a range of other factors)
contributes to social tensions, and whether these tensions
276 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
may result in instabilities (and, quite possibly, conict). The
past decade of discussions on sustainability have further
taught us that any assessment of how environment and
security are related must take into account how these other
factors inuence sustainable development and, in particular,
how growth must acquire both environmental and social
meaning.
A particularly relevant criticism of the existing lit-
erature is that the debate on environment and security
has largely ignored a discussion of how environmen-
tal security ts into the broader context of international
development, social welfare and sustainable development.
Although there have been calls for attention to comprehen-
sive security (Westing, 1986) and a multilevel approach
to security (Gr ger, 1996), most authors fail to recog-
nize the one overwhelming argument in favor of link-
ing environment and security: environmental problems
must always be presented from within a broader perspec-
tive that encompasses various forms of equity, includ-
ing world poverty . This is because poverty and inequity
are two of the key factors contributing both to envi-
ronmental change and to tension and insecurity through-
out the world. For research on environment and security
to gain social legitimacy, it must incorporate elements
of social justice. In turn, for development to be sus-
tainable, it must include the protection of human rights.
These concerns are embodied in the broader concept of
environment and human security. What is human secu-
rity?
A further issue that has received little attention in the
literature is that space matters. Some authors have recently
called for a reshaping of our spatial perspective on linking
environment and security. There has been a strong plea
for regionalism (sub-national and supra-national) which
should be decided on the basis of eco-geography (Dokken
and Gr ger, 1995). Here eco-geography implies that the
region of concern is dened by ecological boundaries
(e.g., watershed or eco-region) and not simply political
boundaries. Regionalism need not be conned to ecolog-
ical regions; it may incorporate ethnic or other factors as
well. Perelet (1994) also argues that environmental secu-
rity problems must focus on the ecosystem level. It has
also been suggested that research must focus on the local
level or at least at the lowest possible spatial scale for the
insecurity/conict being studied. This has been termed the
subsidiarity principle (Mische, 1989; Dokken and Gr ger,
1995). For example, the relationship between environment
and poverty must be viewed locally and in the context of
broader human security dimensions. This is absolutely cru-
cial if we desire to incorporate local knowledge and make
the process of development a truly participatory one. These
two trends have stimulated further questions on the rela-
tionship between environmental security and the goal of a
sustainable society.
ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE AND HUMAN
SECURITY
So where does this leave the link between environment and
security? Coincidental with the claim that environmental
degradation may be a threat to conict/security has been
the move to interpret security more broadly to encompass
notions of human welfare, where there is no immediate
prospect of armed conict. A better way of framing the
issue might be in terms of insecurities (Gr ger, 1996; Lon-
ergan, 1997). As noted above, the appeal of a broader
notion of security, framed in terms of insecurities, is obvi-
ous. It allows one to include the key issues of equity and
impoverishment, along with other non-conventional threats
to security. It also is multi-dimensional (and multi-level
according to Gr ger, 1996); this allows us to introduce into
the debate issues of human, environmental and social rights,
acting at all spatial levels, from the individual to the global.
However, as noted above, many authors have expressed
signicant concerns with using a broader denition of the
term security.
But even accounting for these concerns, it is clear that
there remains a need to reassess our traditional perspectives
of security and focus more on the insecurities posed by non-
conventional threats. We must also recognize that society
is in a profound period of rapid social, economic and
environmental change. While continued growth in gross
world product may imply improvement in social welfare,
there are many disturbing indications that this is not the
case for much of the worlds population. The number of
wars has increased dramatically over the past three decades.
However, since 1960, these have primarily been intrastate
conicts, where inequity is a key feature.
This leads to the inescapable conclusion that while
environmental degradation and even resource depletion as
causes of conict may be overstated, it is undeniable that
increasing inequities in society are likely a major source
of these (and other) non-conventional threats to individual
security. At the same time, there is recognition that tra-
ditional approaches to national security may not, in turn,
ensure the security of individuals and communities. This
applies to global efforts aimed at curbing global warming
and ozone depletion to local sustainable development initia-
tives. Again, this calls for a broader notion of security, one
that focuses on the human element, despite the ambiguities
and difculties this may cause.
See also: Environmental Changes Dr iven by Civil
Conict and War , Volume 3; The Environment and Vio-
lent Conict, Volume 5.
REFERENCES
Bachler, G (1998) Why Environmental Transformation Causes
Violence, in Environmental Change and Security Project
Report 4, Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, DC, 2444.
ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY 277
Bachler, G and Spillman, K R (1996) Environmental Degradation
as a Cause of War Vol. 23, Ruegger Verlag, Zurich.
Brown, H (1954) The Challenge of Mans Future, Viking, New
York.
Choucri, N (1991) Resource Constraints as Causes of Conict,
Ecodecision, 2, 5255.
Conca, K (1994) In the Name of Sustainability: Peace Studies and
Environmental Discourse, Peace Change, 19, 91113.
Conca, K, Alberty, M, and Dabelko, G (1995) From Ecological
Conict to Environmental Security? in Green Planet Blues:
Environmental Politics from Stockholm to Rio, eds K Conca,
M Alberty, and G Dabelko, Westview Press, Boulder, CO,
239244.
Dalby, S (1992) Security, Modernity, Ecology: The Dilemmas of
Post Cold War Security Discourse, Alternatives, 17, 95134.
Dalby, S (1994) The Politics of Environmental Security, in Green
Security or Militarized Environment, ed Jyrki Kakonen, Dart-
mouth Publishing, Brookeld, 2554.
Deudney, D (1990) The Case Against Linking Environmental
Degradation and National Security, Millennium: J. Int. Stud.,
19(3), 461476.
Deudney, D (1991) Environment and Security: Muddled Think-
ing, Bull. At. Sci., (April), 2228.
Deudney, D and Matthew, R A (1999) Contested Ground:
Security and Con ict in the New Environmental Politics, SUNY
Press, Albany, NY.
Diederich, Jr, M D (1992) Law of War and Ecology a Pro-
posal for a Workable Approach to Protecting the Environment
Through the Law of War, Military Law Rev., 136, 138160.
Dokken, K and Gr ger, N (1995) The Concept of Environmental
Security Political Slogan or Analytical Tool? International
Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), Report 2.
Durham, W H (1979) Scarcity and Survival in Central America:
Ecological Origins of the Soccer War, Stanford University
Press, Palo Alto, CA.
Finger, M (1991) The Military, the Nation State and the Environ-
ment, Ecologist, 21(5), 220225.
Finger, M (1994) Global Environmental Degradation and the
Military, in Green Security or Militarized Environment, ed
Jyrki Kakonen, Dartmouth Publishing, Brookeld, 169192.
Gleditsch, N P (1992) Conversion and the Environment, Proceed-
ings of a Seminar in Perm, Russia, November 1991, PRIO
Report No. 2, International Peace Research Institute, Oslo.
Gleditsch, N P (1997) Con ict and the Environment, NATO ASI
Series Vol. 33, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The
Netherlands.
Gleick, P (1989) The Implications of Global Climate Changes for
International Security, Climate Change, 15, 303325.
Gleick, P (1990) Environment, Resources and International Secu-
rity and Politics, in Science and International Security: Re-
sponding to a Changing World, ed E H Arnett, American
Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, DC,
501523.
Gleick, P (1991) Environment and Security: The Clear Connec-
tions, Bull. At. Sci., (April), 1721.
Gr ger, N and Smith, D (1994) Environment Poverty and Con-
ict, International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO),
Report 2.
Gr ger, N (1996) Environmental Security? J. Peace Res., 33(1),
109116.
Gurr, T R (1993) Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopo-
litical Con icts, US Institute of Peace, Washington, DC.
Hartman, B (1998) Population, Environment and Security: A New
Trinity, Environ. Urban., 10(2), 113127.
Hauge, W and Ellingsen, T (1998) Beyond Environmental Scar-
city: Causal Pathways to Conict, J. Peace Res., 35(3),
299317.
Homer-Dixon, T F (1991) On the Threshold: Environmental
Changes as Causes of Acute Conict, Int. Secur., 19(1), 540.
Homer-Dixon, T F (1994) Environmental Scarcities and Violent
Conict: Evidence from Cases, Int. Secur., 16(2), 76116.
Homer-Dixon, T F, Boutwell, J, and Rathjens, G W (1993) Envi-
ronmental Change and Violent Conict, Sci. Am., 268(2),
3845.
Kandakandonen, J (1994) Green Security or Militarized Environ-
ment, Dartmouth Publishing, Brookeld.
Kahl, C H (1997) States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the
Developing World, IWPS Environment and Security Project,
September, 160.
Levy, M A (1995a) Is the Environment a National Security Issue?
Int. Secur., 20(2), 3562.
Levy, M A (1995b) Time for a Third Wave of Environment and
Security Scholarship? The Environmental Change and Security
Project Report, 1, 4446.
Libiszewski, S (1992) What is an Environmental Con ict? Envi-
ronment and Conicts Project (ENCOP), Occasional Paper
No. 6, Center for Security Studies and Conict Research,
Zurich.
Lipschutz, R D (1995) On Security, Columbia University Press,
New York.
Lodgaard, S and Hjort af Ornas, A (1992) The Environment and
International Security, International Peace Research Institute,
Oslo (PRIO), Report 3.
Lonergan, S (1997) Water Resources and Conict: Examples
from the Middle East, in Con ict and the Environment, ed
N P Gleditsch, NATO ASI Series Vol. 33, Kluwer Academic
Publishers, Dordrecht, 375384.
Lonergan, S C and Kavanagh, B (1991) Climate Change, Water
Resources and Security in the Middle East, Global Environ.
Change, (September), 272290.
Mathews, J T (1989) Redening Security, Foreign Affairs, 68,
162177.
Mische, P M (1989) Ecological Security and the Need to Recon-
ceptualize Sovereignty, Alternatives, 14(4), 389428.
Molv r, R K (1991) Environmentally Induced Conicts? A Dis-
cussion Based on Studies from the Horn of Africa, Bull. Peace
Proposals, 22, 175188.
Myers, N (1989) Environment and Security, Foreign Policy,
74(Spring), 2341.
Myers, N (1993) Ultimate Security: The Environmental basis of
Political Stability, WW Norton, New York.
National Academy of Sciences (US) (1991) Policy Implications of
Global Warming, National Academy of Sciences, Washington,
DC.
Ophuls, W (1977) Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity: Prologue
to a Political Theory of the Steady State, W H Freeman, San
Francisco, CA.
278 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Osborn, F (1953) Our Plundered Planet, Little Brown, Boston,
MA.
Perelet, R (1994) The Environment as a Security Issue, in The
Environment: Towards a Sustainable Future, Dutch Commit-
tee for Long-term Environmental Policy, Kluwer Academic
Publishers, Boston, MA.
Renner, M (1989) National Security: The Economic and Environ-
mental Dimensions, Worldwatch Paper 89, Worldwatch Insti-
tute, Washington, DC.
Saad, S (1995) For Whose Bene t? Rede ning Security in Green
Planet Blues: Environmental Politics from Stockholm to Rio,
eds K Conca, M Alberty, and G D Dabelko, Westview Press,
Boulder, CO, 273 275.
Spillman, K R and Bachler, G (1995) Environmental Crisis: Re-
gional Con icts and Ways of Cooperation, Environment and
Con icts Project Occasional Paper No. 14, Center for Security
Studies and Con ict Research, Zurich.
Ullman, R H (1983) Rede ning Security, Int. Secur., 8(1),
129 153.
Wallensteen, P (1992) Environmental Destruction and Serious
Social Con ict: Developing a Research Design, in The
Environment and International Security, eds S Lodgaard
and A Hjort af Ornandas, (PRIO Report No. 3, 47 54),
International Peace Research Institute (PRIO), Oslo.
Walt, S M (1991) The Renaissance of Security Studies, Int. Stud.
Q., 35(2), 211 239.
Wand ver, O (1995) Securitization and Desecuritization, in On
Security, ed R Lipscutz, Columbia University Press, New
York, 46 86.
Westing, A H (1986) Global Resources and International Con ict:
Environmental Factors in Strategic Policy and Action, Oxford
University Press, Oxford.
Westing, A H (1989) The Environmental Component of Compre-
hensive Security, Bull. Peace Proposals, 20(2), 129 134.
Winnefeld, J A and Morris, M E (1994) Where Environmental
Concerns and Security Strategies Meet, Rand, Santa Monica,
CA.
World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED)
(1987) Our Common Future, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Environmental Sociology
Amar Wahab
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Environmental sociology is the study of reciprocal interac-
tions between the physical environment, social organization
and social behavior (Sydenstricker-Neto, 1997). Unlike a
sociology of environment perspective, which applies tradi-
tional social theory to the study of environmental issues,
it focuses on the interaction between social and environ-
mental systems. According to Hannigan (1995), the eld
of environmental sociology still lacks a seminal work
which could lift it into the mainstream of debate in the
broader eld of sociology. Sociologists therefore engage in
environmental issues with the aim of enriching mainstream
sociological theory, rather than attempting to ambitiously
transform the discipline. A dening feature is the work of
Dunlap and Catton to replace an anthropocentric approach
(Human Exemptionalism Paradigm) with their ecocentric,
New Ecological Paradigm. Although this approach has been
viewed as over-ambitious, it has stimulated and catalyzed a
diversity of paradigms and theoretical approaches to the
study of environmental sociology.
Buttel (1987) has cited ve key areas of environmental
scholarship:
1. Dunlap and Catton s new human ecology;
2. environmental attitudes, values and behaviors;
3. the environmental movement;
4. technological risk and risk assessment;
5. the political economy of the environment and
environmental politics.
Alternatively, Hannigan (1995) has identi ed two dis-
tinct problems as central to the existing literature on
environmental sociology: (1) the causes of environmental
destruction; and (2) the rise of environmental consciousness
and movements.
The new ecological paradigm explanation of environ-
mental destruction focuses on the competing functions of
environment as supply depot, living space and waste depos-
itory within an assumed global carrying capacity (Dun-
lap and Catton, 1979). This model is concerned with the
increasing globalization of environmental problems and the
increasing production of waste, but is criticized for its
limited incorporation of social de nition. An in uential
alternative explanation, deriving from political economy,
emerges out of Marxist ideology which identi es industrial
capitalism, in which the corporation and the state can be
seen as being in opposition to its own citizenry, as the major
cause of environmental degradation (Hannigan, 1995). In
this explanation, capitalism is said to generate the treadmill
of production (Schnaiberg, 1980), which operates regardless
of the carrying capacity of the ecosystem.
The second problem currently tackled by environmen-
tal sociology, looking at environmental consciousness and
movements works with an array of hypotheses. Perhaps
one of the more in uential of these is the new middle-
class thesis which has focused on the conceptualization
and constitution of new social movements (NSMs), i.e.,
activism by individuals and groups who are deemed to pos-
sess post-materialist values. According to Hannigan (1995),
there have been environmental sociologists such as Stenin-
metz (1994) who have contested the class basis of NSMs
EQUITY 279
activism and others such as Habermas (1987) and Beck
(1992) who have suggested that NSMs have emerged in
marginal spaces, in a culture of political closure organized
by the corporate state (which may help to explain their rel-
ative ineffectiveness). Hannigan has also employed a social
constructionist perspective, which focuses on the social,
political and cultural processes by which environmental
conditions are dened as risky and actionable. He views
the construction of environmental problems and conicts
as hinged on the processes of assembling, presenting and
contesting claims.
It is important to note though, that the discourse on
environmental sociology has been primarily focused on envi-
ronmental problems in the economic North, with very little
reconceptualization based on the works of third world schol-
ars and integration of development discourses in the South.
Criticism surrounding some of the silences regarding inter-
locking systems of race, space, gender, sexuality, class and
other social axes of power that are embedded in the rubric
of alternative discourses is less than forthcoming. Some of
the themes which have been popularized by environmental
sociology involve environmental problems related to agricul-
ture, energy and fuels, hazards and risks, leisure/recreation,
natural resources, social impact assessment, and sustainable
development. Some central works in the eld of environmen-
tal sociology include Dunlap and Canton (1979), Hannigan
(1995) and Schnaiberg and Gould (1994).
REFERENCES
Beck, U (1992) The Risk Society, Sage, London.
Buttel, F (1987) New Directions in Environmental Sociology,
Annu. Rev. Sociol., 13, 465488.
Dunlap, R E and Catton, Jr, W R (1979) Environmental Sociol-
ogy, Annu. Rev. Sociol., 5, 243273.
Habermas, J (1987) The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2,
Polity Press, Cambridge.
Hannigan, J (1995) Environmental Sociology: A Social Construc-
tionist Perspective, Routledge, New York.
Schnaiberg, A and Gould, K A (1994) Environment and Society,
St. Martins Press, New York.
Steinmetz, G (1994) Regulation Theory, Post-Marxism, and
the New Social Movements, Comp. Stud. Soc. Hist., 36(1),
176212.
Sydenstricker-Neto, J (1997) Environmental Sociology: a Resou-
rce Page, http://trochim.human.cornell.edu/gallery/Neto/Env-
soc1.html.
Environmentalism
see Art and the Environment (Volume 5);
Literature and the Environment (Volume 5)
Equity
Henry Shue
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Intense debates about the requirements of equity have been
at the very heart of the international negotiations about
what to do about rapid climate change, ever since those
negotiations began in the 1980s. In this context, equity,
distributive justice, and fairness are alternative terms for
the same set of requirements. Economists and lawyers tend
to use the term equity, and philosophers normally discuss
distributive justice, but these disciplinary preferences in
terminology have no systematic signi cance. In both cases,
the professionals are talking about what ordinary people
call fairness.
Equity, or fairness the terms are employed interchange-
ably in this article is a feature that the division of an
aggregate or total among multiple parties often ought to
have. Fairness is an ethical requirement to be met by
speci c, concrete allocations, divisions, or distributions of
bene ts and burdens. The fundamental point about fair-
ness is that what matters is not the average per capita
distribution of some aggregate, which tends to be the
focus of economic analysis and which, after all, is a
merely theoretical distribution, but the relative sizes of the
actual shares of the aggregate that various parties each
have.
Multiple questions usually arise about fairness. What is
a fair result (substantive fairness)? What is a fair pro-
cess (procedural fairness)? What connection, if any, is there
between substantive and procedural? In the case of climate
change, the multiple tasks required can each be performed
by means of fair or unfair processes, and with fair or unfair
results; these tasks include the allocation of the costs of
adaptation to actual climate change, the allocation of the
costs of the mitigation of potential climate change, and the
allocation of the limited total of emissions of greenhouse
gases compatible with mitigating climate change. Winners
and losers will be spread both across the geographical
dimension, including the international, and along the tem-
poral dimension, including the intergenerational. How they
will be spread is uncertain but will be deeply affected by
the political decisions made under the Framework Con-
vention on Climate Change. Many of those decisions can
consequently be assessed as fair or unfair. Since the maxi-
mum severity of climate change will depend upon the date
of the technological transition away from the energy tech-
nologies that worsen the problem, the fundamental question
of intergenerational fairness is whether policy options, like
the exibility mechanisms in the Kyoto Protocol, advance
or delay this date of transition.
280 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
MULTIPLE QUESTIONS
Fairness can be a feature of an outcome: the question is then
whether the various parties among whom some total is to
be divided each receives a fair share. That is the question
of substantive fairness. On the other hand, the question of
fairness sometimes applies to the process that produces the
outcome: this question is whether the manner by which
the total is divided among the various parties is fair. This
is the question of procedural fairness.
Complex and important questions arise about the rela-
tion, if any, between procedural fairness and substantive
fairness. Sometimes, in one kind of case, the basis for
judgments of substantive fairness and the standards for
judgments of procedural fairness are independent of each
other. Substantive fairness and procedural fairness can each
be specied separately. For example, if a murder has been
committed and someone is to be punished, the only sub-
stantively fair outcome is for the punishment to be inicted
upon the murderer, the guilty person. Most societies have
elaborate standards for the procedural fairness of murder
trials standards like a presumption of innocence for the
accused, and adequate opportunity for the accused to make
a defense. Yet, tragically, it is entirely possible for a per-
fectly fair trial a trial satisfying all the standards of pro-
cedural fairness to lead to the conviction of an innocent
person, which is a substantively unfair outcome: the punish-
ment of the innocent. Even the procedurally fairest systems
of criminal law are fallible and sometimes reach substan-
tively unfair outcomes by convicting innocent persons. Here
procedural fairness does not guarantee substantive fairness.
By contrast, in other kinds of cases there is no basis
for judging the fairness of outcomes that is independent of
the fairness of the procedure that produces the outcome.
A lottery is the clearest example. Suppose a prize is to be
awarded by having everyone who wants the prize place a
piece of paper with his/her name on it in a hat and having
someone who is blindfolded pick one name. It makes no
sense for someone whose name was not selected to say
after the drawing that the outcome is unfair because the
wrong person won the prize. There is no wrong person if the
lottery was conducted fairly, as there is when an innocent
person is convicted. The only standard of fairness in the
case of a lottery is procedural fairness: the right outcome is
whatever outcome results if the process is conducted fairly.
Here fairness is randomness. In the case of a lottery, by
contrast with a criminal trial, there is no such thing as a
person who, in advance of the drawing, somehow ought to
be selected for the prize, analogous to the person who, in
advance of the criminal trial, ought to be chosen for the
punishment.
Sometimes, of course, when the prize in a lottery goes to
someone who does not need it, and other participants in the
lottery do need it, objectors say too bad, the prize should
have gone to someone who needed it . If this is to have
any solid basis, it must be construed as an objection to this
use of a lottery process. If the prize genuinely ought to
have gone to someone needy, then no lottery should have
been conducted at all (or participation in the lottery should
have been restricted by the rules for the lottery to people
who needed the prize). The objectors, then, are contending
that what had been treated as a prize in a lottery ought not
to have been made a lottery prize because, in fact, a rel-
evant basis for judgments of substantive fairness, namely
need, was available; therefore, instead of having held a lot-
tery that awarded the prize randomly, a completely different
kind of process should have been used to allocate the prize
to someone who needed it. Defenders of the lottery might
be able to reply that although some things sometimes ought
to be allocated according to need, this lottery prize is not
one of them, and nothing is wrong with using a fair lottery
to award it. This is now a debate about a choice among
processes and about the relevance, if any, of a particu-
lar substantive basis (need) to that choice of process (see
Box 1).
MULTIPLE TASKS
The global effort to deal with climate change simultane-
ously faces several challenges that can be distinguished
from each other in theory but must all be handled in practice
by means that are at least complementary, if not mutu-
ally supportive. Each of these tasks raises all three kinds
of questions about equity. Since climate change is already
occurring, and since current concentrations of greenhouse
gases in the atmosphere constitute a commitment to addi-
tional climate change, one task will obviously be adaptation
to climate change. Adaptation will require expensive adjust-
ments, and one cluster of questions about equity concerns
the division of the costs, and the benets, of adaptation (see
Box 2).
MULTIPLE DIMENSIONS
The negotiations about whether to take effective action
concerning climate change are conducted by national gov-
ernments; and measurement and reporting of sources, sinks,
and net emissions are all categorized in national terms. Con-
sequently, it is difcult to overlook the fact that equity
issues have dimensions that are spatial: the international
distributions of costs and of emissions. Many debates about
the international division of the benets and burdens have
been pure conicts of national interest, even when some-
times clothed in the rhetoric of equity. International equity
will be attained only if powerful national states aim explic-
itly at it; nothing supports any hope that the pure clash of
national interest will somehow lead to international equity.
Nevertheless, even the nations that are too weak to defend
EQUITY 281
Box 1 Multiple questions
Substance
Procedure
Relation between rst two
In the case of climate change, some of the fundamen-
tal issues about equity concern disputes of the kinds
illustrated in the text. Many economists assume that the
use of efcient markets is analogous to the use of a fair
lottery, in that whatever distribution results is unques-
tionably acceptable; this is equivalent to assuming that
there are no well-grounded principles of substantive
fairness by which market outcomes can be assessed.
Much of the support for the exibility mechanisms in the
Kyoto Protocol (Clean Development Mechanism [Arti-
cle 12], Joint Implementation [Article 6], and Trading in
Allowed Amounts of Emissions [Article 17]) appears to
rest on such an unargued assumption that whatever con-
sequences for the allocations of costs and of emissions
are generated by fair processes are unchallengeable on
grounds of substantive fairness. This ies in the face
of the solidly grounded view that, for as long as the
generation of greenhouse gas emissions is essential
to human subsistence, every person needs to benet
from at least a minimal level of emissions. If the global
ceiling on total emissions is sufciently low, the only
distribution that could possibly guarantee everyone the
necessary minimum would be an equal distribution. To
guarantee that minimum, market processes need to be
restrained by universal inalienable rights to benet from
a minimum level of emissions.
One needs to determine for each situation not only:
(a) whether grounds for judging substantive fairness are
available and if so, what they are; and (b) whether
standards for procedural fairness are available and if
so, what they are; but also (c) in which cases internally
fair processes are adequate, meaning that whatever
outcome they produce is therefore acceptable, and in
which cases substantive fairness should be the basis
for adopting one kind of process rather than another,
meaning that a process, even if internally fair, is fully
adequate only if it is the best means to fair outcomes.
themselves successfully against unfair treatment at least
have ofcial representatives (see Box 3).
INTERGENERATIONAL EQUITY AND
INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGY
A deeper point about technology is buried in the second
tendency. The basic decisions concerning climate change
are choices about energy technology. Choices about which
nations are to bear the current costs of technological
transitions obviously implicate international equity; and
choices about the rate of technological innovation deeply
affect intergenerational equity in a less obvious way. The
second tendency ingrained in current approaches to climate
change is not to abandon fossil-fuel technologies until their
continued retention becomes too expensive for the cur-
rent generation, and meanwhile to avoid investing very
large amounts in research or development of alternative
energy technologies. This clearly favors the current gen-
eration strongly, although the issue of fairness is whether
this favoritism is unreasonably strong. This tendency and
the rst tendency (to select lowest-cost-rst solutions) are
related; the rst supports the second it is believed to
be cheaper to continue to spread into the less-developed
states the current form of industrialization that depends on
fossil-fuel than to introduce alternatives. However, many
other factors, including entrenched political and economic
interests and lack of imagination, also underwrite reten-
tion of the familiar fossil-fuel technology that is the most
important contributor to climate change. The primary issue
of intergenerational equity here is not, however, merely the
obvious one of deferring costs so that they fall upon gen-
erations later than ones own, although that is an issue too.
Sooner or later, human societies will make a transition
from reliance dominantly upon fossil-fuel-driven technolo-
gies to reliance on one or more alternative energy technolo-
gies. The issues are: at what point in history should this
transition be made (substantive intergenerational equity)?
how should this date be determined (procedural intergener-
ational equity)? The current tendency is to allow the date
to be determined by relative prices in energy markets. The
general idea, according to abstract assumptions in economic
theory, is that at some time the prices of fossil fuels will
have risen high enough, and the price of some alternative
energy will have dropped low enough, that rational con-
sumers will switch to the alternative energy source. The
price of alternative energy will have dropped, relative to
fossil fuel, because at some point entrepreneurs will have
realized that investments in this kind of technological inno-
vation could then be protable in the relatively short-term.
The date of the transition, according to most economists,
ought to be determined by the prices prices are the right
basis given the moral assumptions underlying economic
theory.
Consideration of intergenerational equity, on the other
hand, might suggest that, depending upon many complexi-
ties that cannot be explored here, political action ought to be
taken to advance the transition to an earlier date. One crit-
ical issue is whether human societies can continue to rely
predominantly upon fossil fuels for a signicantly longer
time without making the severity of climate change greater
than it otherwise would have needed to be. In other words,
282 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Box 2 Multiple tasks
Costs of adaptation
Costs of mitigation
Allowed emissions
Relation among rst three
One means toward controlling the costs of adaptation
is abatement, or mitigation, of climate change. Adap-
tation tackles the effects of climate change; mitigation
attempts to slow the rate of climate change itself. Obvi-
ously mitigation and adaptation are not separate matters;
for example, the less mitigation accomplished, the more
adaptation required, other things being equal. Never-
theless, the allocation of the costs and the benets of
mitigation need to be considered independently fromthe
costs and the benets of adaptation because, to mention
only one consideration, any reasonable basis for divid-
ing the costs of mitigation might be different from any
reasonable basis for dividing the costs of adaptation. At
least in theory it is possible that the parties who ought
to bear most of the costs of adaptation are different from
those who ought to bear most of the costs of mitigation.
These rst two tasks fundamentally concern the
fair sharing of nancial burdens and benets. The
substantive question, in both cases (adaptation and
mitigation), is: who pays? The procedural question in
both is: how is it to be determined who pays? The third
profoundly important allocative task is the distribution
of greenhouse-gas emissions themselves, and, thus,
of the activities that produce the emissions. Who is
allowed to emit what portion of the global total of
allowable emissions? If rapid climate change is to be
avoided, an enforceable ceiling must be imposed by
the international community on the global aggregate of
emissions. That total must, in turn, be divided somehow
among the people of the world. For as long as economic
activity depends upon the burning of the fossil fuels
that emit greenhouse gases, the fair distribution of this
limited total has unsurpassed importance. One crucial
consideration is that powerful states are unlikely to
restrict themselves tothe shares they are allocatedunless
their allocation seems reasonably fair. The simplest way
for the distribution to seemfair is for it transparently to be
fair. Equity may be politically essential to effectiveness.
A second crucial consideration is that, with the overall
total severely limited, those who exceed their own
fair share will, in fact, be depriving others of their
minimum entitlement, unless those others make up for
the encroachment by exceeding the mandated total and
thereby frustrate the ultimate purpose of the entire effort.
Finally, just as the realization that questions of equity
must be analyzed into substantive and procedural leads
to the further question about how the two are to be
related, the realization that the tasks of equity need to
be distinguished into fair allocation of adaptation costs,
fair allocation of mitigation costs, and fair allocation of
the emissions themselves leads to the further question:
how, and/or on what basis, are these three tasks to be
related? Is there a fair, coordinated solution to all three
problems?
Box 3 Multiple dimensions
Spatial (International)
Temporal (Intergenerational)
Relation between rst two: date of technological
transition
The temporal dimension of equity is more easily
forgotten, but nothing affects more human beings
than the intergenerational distributions of costs and of
emissions. Indeed, future generations are usually the
unrepresented, and, therefore, most vulnerable parties
of all, in spite of the fact that the unnoticed other side
of the coin in most of the decisions made about how
much burden the current generation will handle, is how
much is consequently left for succeeding generations
to bear. For example, every decision about the relative
emphasis to be placed on (present) mitigation efforts
as opposed to (future) adaptation efforts is also a
decision about the intergenerational allocation of effort
and resources. Two tendencies deeply engrained in the
current approaches to climate change shift the burdens
toward our grandchildren, and their grandchildren,
especially strongly.
The rst tendency is the largely unquestioned assump-
tion that it is only rational always to pursue least-cost-rst
solutions to mitigation. While this may often be rational
if no interests are given full weight except the inter-
ests of the current generation, it is far from evident that
such solutions are rational in light of the interests of
future generations or are equitable to them. The dan-
ger to the future has two aspects. First, if the level of
expenditures were xed independently, then the choice
of a least-cost-rst approach would at least mean that,
for the given expenditure, the most would be accom-
plished. In reality, however, nothing keeps expenditures
xed, and consequently, many parties will choose to
accomplish the same amount of mitigation for a lower
expenditure rather than accomplishing more mitigation
for the same expenditure. The result is not that more is
accomplished to slow climate change but only that less
is spent now. Second, least-cost-rst can mean higher-
cost-later, unless technological advances that reduce the
costs of the currently more expensive tasks at least keep
pace with the passage of time. Spontaneous technolog-
ical advances might occur in time to contain costs for
future generations, but simply to assume net technolog-
ical progress would be a largely groundless gamble for
which future generations will pay if it turns out badly.
EXXON VALDEZ OIL SPILL 283
is it the case that the more distant the date of the transition
away from fossil fuels, the more severe climate change will
become before it stops worsening (because of the greater
maximum atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases)?
This depends upon whether, during the period of the contin-
ued predominant reliance on fossil fuels, society is willing
and able to cap its greenhouse gas emissions at a level that
does not make climate change progressively worse by con-
tinuing to expand the atmospheric concentration. This is an
open question, the answer to which will be determined by
decisions yet to be made.
However, those decisions could make matters much
worse for future generations than they would be if a
political initiative was taken to move the date of transition
to an earlier time. If: (1) the choice is made to take
no political action to advance the date even though the
price of alternative technologies becomes competitive with
the price of fossil-fuel technology; and (2) the choice is
made, meanwhile, to allow the annual rate of emissions
to remain high enough to continue to increase atmospheric
concentration, then in order to avoid mitigation costs for
the current generation, much higher mitigation costs will
have been imposed upon future generations. This appears
to be a compound injustice toward our descendants.
FURTHER READING
Agarwal, A, Narain, S, and Sharma, A, eds (1999) Green Politics,
Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi.
Att eld, R (1999) The Ethics of the Global Environment, Edin-
burgh University Press, Edinburgh.
Brown, P G (2000) Ethics, Economics and International Rela-
tions, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.
de-Shalit, A (1995) Why Posterity Matters, Routledge, London.
Franck, T M (1995) Fairness in International Law and Institu-
tions, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Grubb, M (1995) Seeking Fair Weather: Ethics and the Interna-
tional Debate on Climate Change, Int. Affairs, 71, 463 496.
Grubb, M, Chapuis, T, and Duong, M H (1995) The Economics
of Changing Course, Energy Policy, 23, 417 431.
Grubb, M, Vrolijk, C, and Brack, D ( 1999) The Kyoto Proto-
col: A Guide and Assessment, Royal Institute of International
Affairs, London.
Jones, C (1999) Global Justice, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Paterson, M (1996) International Justice and Global Warming,
in The Ethical Dimensions of Global Change, ed B Holden,
Macmillan, London, 181 201.
Pogge, T W (1998) A Global Resources Dividend, in Ethics of
Consumption, eds D Crocker and T Linden, Rowman and
Little eld, Lanham, MD, 501 536.
Shue, H (1999) Global Environment and International Inequality,
Int. Affairs, 75, 531 545.
Ethics, Environmental
see Environmental Ethics (Volume 5)
Ethnoscience
see Indigenous Knowledge, Peoples and
Sustainable Practice (Volume 5)
Exxon Valdez Oil Spill
The spill of crude oil from the Exxon Valdez is probably the
world s most infamous tanker disaster, although it was not
the world s largest oil spill. In the minutes after midnight of
March 24th, 1989, the Exxon Valdez, its captain intoxicated,
ran its single hull onto a shoal in the northeastern portion
of Prince William Sound, off Alaska. The tanker was
carrying nearly 1.3 million barrels of North Slope crude
oil. Fully one- fth of that cargo spilled into the sound:
11.2 million gallons of crude (42 million liters). Initially,
there were hopes the crude could be contained due to
the relatively calm seas. But three days after the Exxon
Valdez ran aground, strong northeasterly winds blew up and
dispersed the oil hundreds of kilometers from the accident
site. The mixing of oil and water, agitated by wind and
wave action, created a substance known as mousse which
was carried 750 km (470 miles) from the grounding site.
The oily mixture washed ashore along a huge expanse of
Alaskan coastline, from Prince William Sound to southern
Kodiak Archipelago and the Alaska Peninsula. Thousands
of sea birds and mammals were killed by the oil. Hundreds
of volunteers attempted the rescue and recovery of oiled
birds.
Exxon spent tens of millions of dollars in attempted
remediation, including sand blasting of beaches. The cost
of clean-up had a positive economic effect on the state s
gross national product (GNP), generating more economic
activity than if the cargo had safely reached its destina-
tion. Within Prince William Sound, 790 miles (1271 km)
of shoreline were oiled, as well as another 2400 miles
(3862 km) of shoreline in the Kenai Peninsula Kodiak
Archipelago region. Long-term studies continue about the
impact of the spill.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada
F
Factor-four Scenario (Double the
Output with Half the Resources)
see Ecological Economics (Opening essay,
Volume 5)
Fernow, Bernard
see Environmental Movement the Rise of
Non-government Organizations (NGOs)
(Volume 5)
Flip-op of a Complex System
see Phase Shifts or Flip-ops in Complex
Systems (Volume 5)
Focus Group
see ULYSSES (Urban Lifestyles, Sustainability,
and Integrated Environmental Assessment)
(Volume 4)
Francis of Assisi
(11811226)
Francis of Assisi, Saint, mystic, cleric, was born at Assisi
(Italy) to a wealthy merchant family. It was assumed that
he would enter the family business, although apparently for
a time he was a troubadour and soldier. In 1201 he took
part in an attack on Perugia where he was taken hostage
and held for a year. It was during this period that he began
to turn to religion, although after his release he enlisted in
another military venture. It was at this time that he had
a dream in which God called him to do His works. He
returned to Assisi and began to care for the sick. In 1206,
he had a vision in which Christ called on him to repair his
church, which Francis interpreted as being the Church of
San Damiano, near Assisi.
He devoted himself to repairing the church. Francis gave
up his rights and possessions, and then began to preach.
He was joined by others and his group soon numbered
eleven, it was then that he gave them the short Rule (a set
of rules of conduct for his new order). Pope Innocent III
granted approval for a brotherhood, called the Friars Minor.
Although based at Assisi, they preached across central
Italy calling for the return to a life of Christ, one that
emphasized simplicity, poverty, and a faith in Gods care,
rather than possessions. In 1212 Clara Scif, inspired by
his devotion, joined Francis and formed the Poor Clares
sisterhood. In 1219 Francis journeyed with crusaders to the
Near East.
The brotherhood grew into an order, and larger numbers
were attracted to Francis message of simplicity in life,
poverty, piety, and humility before God. He wrote a more
detailed Rule, which in time was further revised by new
leaders of the Franciscans. In this time he also became
known for his walks in the woods and hills, and his sermons
to birds and animals. What is more likely is that he preached
about nature rather than to it. In nature Francis saw the
work of God, and to abuse or dele Gods creatures was
an affront to God and an act of debasement. Francis saw
nature as an extension of God. Understanding the beauty
and spirituality of nature was for Francis an integral part
of his devotion and piety. His vision of Gods world was
based on a trust in Gods love and he believed that poverty
(taking no thought in tomorrow) would enable him to
experience that love most fully. This linked him to the poor
and disadvantaged and remains a strong part of his appeal
today.
Later, he gave up leadership of the Order and went to
the mountains to live a life of secluded prayer. For Francis,
his life in the hills and forests brought him closer to the
essence and presence of God. It was in the wilderness
FUTURES RESEARCH 285
that he received the stigmata (wounds of Christ). He did
return to visit the Franciscans, and also had a small group
of followers. In the fall of 1226 he died at Porziuncula,
near Assisi.
Regardless of Francis original beliefs, he is today con-
sidered by many to be the Patron Saint of ecology. For
example, his name served as the rallying point for efforts
such as the Assisi Declaration from the World Wildlife
Funds anniversary gathering at Assisi (in September 1986).
KEVIN HANNA Canada
Friends of the Earth
Friends of the Earth (FoE) was founded in 1969 in the
United States by former Sierra Club Executive Director,
David Brower (see Brower , David, Volume 5). Although
the organization and Brower ultimately had a well-publici-
zed and acrimonious parting, it lived up to its founders
vision of an effective family of national groups within an
international organization.
By 1988, the organization had established relatively
autonomous member organizations in 61 countries, all
within an international federation; FoE-International (FoEI).
One of FoEs clearest successes has been the spread of the
network to countries in the developing world, and a rel-
atively democratic decision-making structure between and
among national FoEs. Expansion to the south took off after
the 1986 annual general meeting, which was hosted by the
Malaysian FoE, Sahabat Alam Malaysia. FoEI was also one
of the rst international environmental groups to recognize
the need to support developing civil society in the former
USSR. Although founded in the US, FoEs international
headquarters is in Amsterdam. Combined global member-
ship in 1988 was close to one million, and the combined
annual budget of FoEI was nearly $200 million (US), with
700 full time staff members.
FoE, like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, is prepared to
tackle a wide range of concerns, from forests to pesticides,
climate change and ozone depletion to nuclear energy, and
the damming of rivers. FoEs US head ofce in Washing-
ton, DC has developed a global leadership role in non-
governmental organization (NGO) campaigns to reform the
environmental policies of Export Credit Agencies and inter-
national nancial institutions. Its US Executive Director,
Brent Blackwelder, was arrested in the Washington protests
against the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund in the spring of 2000. FoE (UK) has been in the
lead in protesting genetically modied foods. FoEs style
is campaign driven, not corporate. It aspires to grassroots
activism buttressed by effective national and international
campaigning.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada
Futures Research
Allen Tough
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Futures research is a small but vibrant eld of inquiry,
theory, and practice. It does not predict or promote one par-
ticular future. Instead, it studies a wide range of potential
or alternative futures. Sometimes these are spelled out in
the form of stories about the future, usually called future
scenarios or images of the future. Often one or two of these
will be very positive, one or two very negative, and the rest
somewhere in between. Some of these scenarios are more
likely than others, of course, but often these are the neg-
ative ones. This exercise can help us choose our preferred
futures and work toward making them actually happen.
Long-term global environmental change plays a key role
in almost every future we can imagine. Climate patterns,
water, food, species and oil affect almost every scenario.
Similarly, various possible socio-economic and political
scenarios will have major effects on the global environment.
Various futures for science and technology, too, could
greatly affect the environment. If nanotechnology succeeds
in building things atom by atom, molecule by molecule, it
may enable us to transform toxic wastes and improve the
environment cheaply and easily a scenario that sharply
differs from the usual long-range forecast.
For understanding global environmental change, futures
research is most useful when it focuses on a horizon
between 30 and 100 years from now. Shorter term scenarios
can more easily pretend that the environment is not an
important factor. At the other extreme, one can be fairly
sure that global environmental change will not be high on
the agenda for public policy 1000 years from now: either it
will have been solved much earlier or we simply will not
be here.
The eld of futures research arose from the need for
post-war planning in the late 1940s. In its early decades, it
dealt largely with positive images of the future. The largest
conference of futures researchers in history was held in
Toronto in 1980; about 5000 attended. Even at that stage,
very few of the papers mentioned war, environment, or
population growth as major problems.
286 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Now the eld has matured, although it is still remarkably
small in light of humanitys needs for thoughtful long-
term planning. The major international organization for
futures researchers is the World Futures Studies Federation.
The Future Generations Program at the University of
Malta holds regular conferences and in 1997 encouraged
the United Nations Educational, Scientic and Cultural
Organization General Conference to adopt a declaration
on the responsibilities of the present generations towards
future generations. The Foundation For the Future studies
the major factors affecting society over the next 1000 years.
Although various university departments offer single
courses on futures research, under a variety of titles, only
a few graduate programs in the world focus on futures
research.
Because it focuses on humanitys long-term future, or on
future generations, futures research can provide a crucially
important perspective to our understanding of global envi-
ronmental change. By forcing us to look far ahead, futures
research makes us realize the crucial need for achieving a
sustainable society (and an appropriate size of population)
that does not exceed the long-term carrying capacity of our
environment and resources. In this way, we can give future
generations an opportunity equal to ours instead of a dev-
astated planet crowded far beyond that of today. Ideally
we would like to see human well-being and the quality of
life improve around the world over the next few decades,
but at least we can try to ensure that they do not markedly
decline. If we fail to make the needed changes if massive
permanent deterioration of our physical environment and
resources occurs then future generations could be much
worse off than we are.
At times, individuals and societies make certain choices
because of immediate benets. At other times people look
ahead and wisely give up some immediate benets because
of greater long-term benets. Futures research encour-
ages this longer-term or future generations perspective.
Within such a perspective, longer-term decisions make
excellent sense, both at the individual and the societal
levels.
Futures research employs a variety of approaches. Three
of the most common are extrapolation, scenario-building,
and the Delphi method. Computer simulation is not so com-
mon, partly because of its complexity, but it is particularly
relevant for forecasting global environmental change.
Extrapolation involves simply continuing a series of
trends into the future. The variables could be tempera-
ture, population, stock prices, or yield per hectare. In the
short run, extrapolation can be very successful because
the recent track record of a variable is often the best
indicator of the next few months. But in the long run
extrapolation becomes risky since many trends eventually
reverse.
Scenario construction is a more creative futures
methodology than extrapolation. At one extreme, creating
a set of scenarios is quite similar to writing science ction
or future fantasy. It can be a deeply personal effort to
build richly detailed stories of how things might unfold
between the present and some future date. Alternatively,
scenarios can be constructed by a group of managers or
citizens in order to reect on various possible futures for
their company or region. They can be asked to construct the
most likely futures, their preferred futures, the worst and
best possible futures, or some combination. A global think-
tank called the Millennium Project of the American Council
for the United Nations University uses questionnaires,
interviews, and scenario contributors from around the world
to build its scenarios, presented in their annual State of the
Future report (Glenn and Gordon, 2000). Many scenarios
elicit strong emotions, ranging from Lets do everything
we can to avoid that horrible possibility through to Id
like to devote my life to achieving that beautifully positive
image of the future (see Scenar ios, Volume 5).
The Delphi method involves repeated surveys of a panel
of experts on likely future events and achievements, some-
times even on the most likely date that each will occur.
Because the results of each round are fed back to the respon-
dents in their next round, the expert opinions often move
toward a consensus position. In order to take into account
the ways in which variables and contingencies may inu-
ence the outcome, a Delphi study may add cross-impact
analysis by constructing a matrix to show their interdepen-
dencies (Bell, 1997).
Computer simulation can be used to develop and manipu-
late models of the atmosphere, the biosphere, the economy,
or a mix of all three. This approach usefully forces the
futures researcher to explicitly and precisely state many
assumptions. The resulting model can be used to answer
questions about the likely outcome if certain changes occur
in key variables or policies. What will happen to world
resources and population, for instance, if we continue with
the status quo, often called the business-as-usual scenario?
(see Business-as-usual Scenar ios, Volume 5) What if we
truly shift to a policy of sustainability (Meadows et al.,
1992)?
REFERENCES
Bell, W (1997) Foundations of Futures Studies, Transaction, New
Brunswick, NJ.
Glenn, J C and Gordon, T J (2000) State of the Future at the Mil-
lennium, American Council for the United Nations University,
Washington, DC.
Meadows, D H, Meadows, D L, and Randers, J (1992) Beyond
the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sus-
tainable Future, Chelsea Green, Post Mills, VT.
G
Gaia Hypothesis
G R Williams
Guelph, Canada
Gaia was the name given in Greek mythology to Mother
Earth. Thus, it is etymologically related to all our words
pre xed with geo-, such as geography and geology. In 1972
James Lovelock appropriated the name Gaia for his concept
that the total ensemble of living organisms which consti-
tute the biosphere (and) can act as an active adaptive
control system able to maintain the Earth in homeostasis
(Lovelock and Margulis, 1974a). This imaginative sugges-
tion has gained considerable popular support but has been
the subject of trenchant scienti c criticism.
The concept of Gaia arises as an attempt to answer two
questions. First, how is one to account for the anoma-
lous composition of Earths atmosphere? The atmosphere of
Planet Earth is anomalous in two respects. The mixture of
gases in our atmosphere is far from chemical equilibrium.
For example, over geological time, nitrogen and oxygen
would be expected to react to form oxides of nitrogen. The
coexistence of methane and oxygen in the atmosphere is
an even more convincing example, departing from thermo-
dynamic equilibrium by a factor of 10
30
. The atmosphere
of Earth is also anomalous in comparison with that of the
other terrestrial planets, Venus and Mars. On these plan-
ets the composition of the atmosphere is close to chemical
equilibrium. There is little free molecular oxygen (O
2
) and
the predominant gaseous species is carbon dioxide (CO
2
).
Lovelock suggested that the aberrances on Earth are caused
by the activities of the global biota and that, more generally,
the detection of such anomalies could be used as a criterion
for the presence of life on a planet (Lovelock, 1975). The
spectroscopic detection of thermodynamic anomalies in the
atmospheres of planets orbiting other stars is now becoming
a possibility. Such evidence would be a remarkable vindica-
tion of Lovelocks suggestion. The control experiment has
already been performed: a y-by of Earth by the spacecraft
Galileo found profound departures from chemical equilib-
rium indicative of the presence of life (Sagan et al., 1993)!
The second question to which the Gaia concept seeks
to provide an answer is, how has life been able to persist
on Earth for a period of at least 3.5 billion years? For this
length of time the environmental conditions of the planetary
surface must have remained within limits that life in its
various forms could tolerate. As Lovelock and Margulis
(1974b) noted:
Stable temperature, pH and element cycling requirements for
life must have been met on this planet for the entire recorded
history of the Earth. Organisms found in extreme environments
are highly specialized. If the Earth had frozen for even a few
tens of thousands of years, or if hot acid springs had been
widely distributed for even a single epoch, these occurrences
would have been discerned from the fossil record.
This stability suggests a control system similar, for
example, to those that maintain constancy in such charac-
teristics as body temperature and the concentration of such
blood constituents as hydrogen ions and glucose. This con-
stancy of the internal environment, homeostasis, forms the
model for the Gaian idea that the conditions of the external
environment have been held within limits favourable to life
since its origin 3.53.8 billion years ago.
The key point to Lovelocks use of the word Gaia is
that it brings together two ideas. First is the idea of an
adaptive control system analogous to the thermostatic con-
trol of room temperature, involving a sensor (thermostat)
and effector (furnace or air conditioner). Such a system is
inferred from the persistence of life through the geological
record. Second is the idea that this control is exercised
through the collective activities of the biota. Such con-
trol may be inferred, he suggested, from the anomalous
chemical composition of the atmosphere. The two ideas are
connected (for instance global temperature is profoundly
affected by atmospheric composition) but it is essential to
the Gaian notion that both be present. In Lovelocks view
Gaia is not just a global control system (inorganic control
mechanisms can be postulated) nor is it just the global biota.
Rather, Lovelock suggests that the global biota, are respon-
sible for maintaining the steady state (but non-equilibrium)
properties of the surface of the Earth (Williams, 1996).
288 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
The idea of a living Earth, given a name that has religious
overtones, has acquired considerable popular appeal. How-
ever, some concern has been expressed that an undue
emphasis on the adaptability and resilience of the environ-
ment (and even its ability to heal itself) might encourage
insouciance with respect to the deleterious effects of human
activities. That Lovelock s concept is not consonant with
those who would interpret Gaia as allowing unfettered
human disruption of the environment is clear. However,
within the Gaian scheme of things, the species Homo
sapiens has no privileged position and a degree of stabil-
ity consonant with the persistence of many forms of life
might permit a range of environmental conditions incom-
patible with human existence. Environmental activists have
focused attention on the central role ascribed to the global
biota and on the name Gaia, which conjures up a sense
of reverence for life. For instance, there is a Missa Gaia
commissioned by and performed annually in New York
City s Cathedral of St. John the Divine. A search of the
World Wide Web for Gaia alone displayed 36 339 pages,
and 1453 pages for the association of Gaia and Lovelock.
Within the scienti c community, the analysis of the
Gaian hypothesis by geochemists and biologists has focused
on a number of issues. The notion that a biota can play a cat-
alytic role in determining planetary processes has become
more fully appreciated. It has been recognized for many
years that the oxygen of the atmosphere is derived from
water through the biological process of photosynthesis.
More recently, the seasonal uctuations in atmospheric car-
bon dioxide, that are such a conspicuous feature of the
Mauna Loa record, have been recognized as testimony to
the ability of the biota to in uence atmospheric composi-
tion. But scientists studying the important inorganic cycles
of the planet have been reluctant to assign a signi cant
role to the biota (Holland, 1984). More recently, as geo-
chemists have started to analyze planetary issues from a
systems analysis point of view (Kump et al., 1998) focusing
on biogeochemical cycles, Lovelock (1986) has suggested
the term geophysiology, to bring together those focusing on
such cycles with those searching for biotic control systems
but the word lacks the mythological resonance that gives
the earlier Gaian idea its impact.
It is this latter notion (of a global biotic control system)
that has led to the strongest criticism of the idea of Gaia
(Williams, 1996, Chapter 5). In early formulations of the
idea, Lovelock did not hesitate to write both of control of
the global environment by the biosphere (which might be
uncontroversial) and of control for the biosphere . Insofar
as the latter has teleological implications, i.e., it implies that
the Gaian system exhibits purposiveness, this runs counter
to mainstream contemporary biological thinking.
Indeed, if one wished to speak of a living Earth or Earth
as an organism, it would be almost mandatory to present
evidence of such purposiveness. Thus the real problem lies
not with the implication of a purposeful Gaia, but with
the absence of any account as to how purpose would be
built into the Gaian organism. For those entities that biol-
ogists recognize as organisms, apparent purposiveness is
accounted for by natural selection. Recently, evolutionary
accounts have even provided an explanation for cases of
cooperative activities of organisms in communities. In addi-
tion, cooperation among biotic components is seen in all
multi-cellular organisms, which depend upon cooperation
between the genes expressed differentially in the differen-
tiated tissues. More relevantly, a similar cooperation can
exist between genes in different organisms. However, such
cooperation has been demonstrated only within commu-
nities of closely related individuals. A global organism
would require intergenomic interactions among organisms
of many very different species separated by long distances.
To most biologists the possibility of such large-scale sym-
bioses seems improbable to impossible.
The problem may be expressed in another way. Apparent
purposiveness arises in living systems because the random
mutation of genes throws up occasional variants that can
survive and reproduce better than the original strain or can
survive and reproduce in ecological niches inaccessible to
the original strain. Such an evolutionary scenario for the
Origin of Species has two prerequisites, time and genetic
potential variation. There has been plenty of time, four
billion years, over which action could take place. What the
Gaian concept appeared to lack was a means of explaining
the source of genetic potential variation (Ehrlich, 1991)
(the grounds for selective success are not important if a
means can be identi ed). Symbiotic cooperation may be as
important as interspeci c competition, but there must be a
vast reservoir of variation, and it must be heritable variation,
on which cumulative selection can operate. (Note that the
idea of interplanetary selection has never been proposed
other than as a reductio ad absurdum (Dawkins, 1982)).
Watson and Lovelock (1983) attempted to meet the
objections of biologists by constructing a model of a plan-
etary world that was receiving radiation from a star, the
output radiation of which was increasing monotonically. In
their formulation, the temperature of the planet was set by
the balance between incoming and outgoing radation; the
latter comprising both re ected and re-radiated energy. If
the planetary albedo was held constant, the surface tem-
perature of the planet would rise as the radiative output
of the star increased. The expected increase in temperature
could be readily calculated using the Stefan Boltzmann
relationship between radiation and temperature. Lovelock
and Watson then seeded their imaginary planet with daisies
of two types: black and white. At lower stellar output
the black daisies ourished and decreased the planetary
albedo, thus increasing the surface temperature; as the
stellar output increased, the white daisies competed success-
fully. This increased the planetary albedo and the surface
GAIA HYPOTHESIS 289
temperature was modulated below the value expected for
a lifeless planet. Thus, the presence of these two variants
(black or white) of a single species on Daisyworld pro-
duced a remarkable stabilization of a global environmental
parameter (see Daisyworld, Volume 2).
Like the original concept of Gaia, the Daisyworld model
has produced both interest and controversy. It has been
elaborated to accommodate multi-species interactions and
it has been demonstrated that some variations of the model
are destabilizing. Nonetheless, the original model can be
said to have fullled its original purpose. It provides an
existence theorem that shows that competition between
the populations of black and white daisies can produce
global environmental stabilization without any teleological
presuppositions being built into the model. The problem
with Daisyworld is not that the model did not work but
that it was so remote from the real world to make its
applicability uncertain. The daisies have no physiology or
biochemistry, they are simple geometrical black or white
discs. And they are introduced into Daisyworld at the will
of the modeller. Once again, the problem of evolution
appeared to have been evaded. If stability depends upon
the daisies having some particular optimum temperature
for growth, how is that value achieved? In the model it
is inserted by the modeller; whereas in the real world
temperature optima are phenotypic characters arrived at by
Darwinian selection.
While the specic example had shortcomings, it did
prompt scientists to search for similar feedback in the real
world. The regulation of the temperature of the real planet
Earth, as opposed to the imaginary planet Daisyworld, does
in fact provide some possible areas in which to look for
supportive evidence for the Gaian idea. One focus of effort
was to try to understand the relationship of global biological
activity to the well documented ice ages of the past million
years (the Pleistocene). Analyses of air bubbles entrapped
in ice cores from the Arctic and Antarctic provide important
information about the chemistry of the atmosphere during
the more recent glacial interglacial cycles (Lorius et al.,
1990). These records indicate that the concentration of the
most important greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, varied in
approximate synchrony with the temperature record. From
the Gaian perspective, in its most direct sense, it might
be suggested that a biotic thermostat should be evident in
which the onset of an interglacial glacial transition (global
cooling) would be accompanied by an increased level of
carbon dioxide that would offset or ameliorate the fall
in temperature. In fact the opposite is evident from the
observations; global cooling occurs concomitantly with a
decrease of carbon dioxide and, correspondingly, there is an
association between global warming and increased carbon
dioxide. The precise causes of the changes in carbon diox-
ide are not understood but such effects appear to suggest
a positive feedback rather than the negative feedback that
one might expect as a characteristic of Gaia. That is, if the
changes in carbon dioxide are driven by biological activity,
then the biota are acting to destabilise global temperature
such that a relatively minor response to cyclic changes in
insulation is thus amplied rather than attenuated. Propo-
nents of the Gaia concept might point to the fact that life
persisted through the ice ages (e.g., through the mecha-
nism eventually acting to offset the cooling) or even that
the range of temperature variation allowed might have con-
tributed in some way to later sustaining more abundant life
(e.g., by usable soil).
Another suggestion of a Gaian connection to the reg-
ulation of the surface temperature of Earth is provided
by an intriguing relationship between the production of
dimethylsulphide (DMS), (CH
3
)
2
S, by marine algae and
cloud formation over the open ocean (Charlson et al., 1987)
(see Dimethylsul de (DMS), Volume 1). Cloud formation
is limited by the availability of cloud condensation nuclei.
In a marine environment, remote from land, one of the
principal sources of such particles arises from the atmo-
spheric oxidation of DMS. DMS is an end product of
algal metabolism, predominantly formed when the algae
are ingested by zooplankton. Atmospheric oxidation of the
DMS occurs principally by reaction with the OH radi-
cal (see OH Radical: is the Cleansing Capacity of the
Atmosphere Changing?, Volume 2). The oxidation prod-
ucts, CH
3
SO

3
and SO
2
4
can act as cloud condensation
nuclei. The particles formed in this manner appear to be
of more signicance in cloud formation than those formed
from sea salt. Cloud formation, in turn, can increase global
albedo and affect the global radiation budget. Thus, the
metabolic activity of marine algae can modulate global sur-
face temperature. Lovelock regards this as an important
instantiation (representation by on example) of the kind of
processes that one would expect to encounter when looking
at Earth from a Gaian perspective. However, to qualify as
conrmatory evidence, such processes should be involved
in a negative feedback loop. Further, to meet the Darwinian
argument, the benecial effects of such a loop have to
outweigh the metabolic costs to the organisms responsi-
ble for DMS production. Since Lovelock drew attention
to this important climate/biota relationship in 1987, much
effort and ingenuity have gone into suggesting how such
a feedback might occur but no model has been gener-
ally accepted. At the observational level, measurements
of CH
3
SO

3
in ice cores associate the low temperatures
of the last ice age with high CH
3
SO

3
and therefore with
increased cloud formation. As in the case of carbon dioxide,
the activity of the biota appears to have been destabilizing.
The decrease in temperature would be more pronounced
as the result of both a drawdown of atmospheric carbon
dioxide, leading to a reduced greenhouse effect, and an
increase in DMS production, leading to an increase in
global albedo.
290 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
The concept and notion of Gaia is intriguing, it has
provoked interesting areas of scientic inquiry and it con-
tinues to provoke much debate. As analysis of the Earth
as a system continues, the Gaian contribution has been an
enhanced recognition of the role of the biosphere. Two
effects on biology are likely to persist: a new interest in
very large-scale symbioses and a new consciousness of the
importance of microbial processes in global ecology. Thus,
some acceptance has been given to that part of the Gaian
view which sees the functioning of the planetary biosphere
as being dominated, today as it has been for 3.5 billion
years, by microorganisms (see Microbial Diver sity, Vol-
ume 2).
Is Gaia merely a description (fanciful, useful, or both)
of the state of affairs on one particular planet, Earth? Or is
Gaianness, to use computer jargon, platform-independent?
If Lovelocks suggestion that habitation of a planet will
always result in an anomalous planetary surface were ever
to be substantiated, then Gaia theory would take its place
among the major imaginative leaps of scientic thought.
One might particularly liken it to the 19th century formu-
lation of the Laws of Thermodynamics, rules that apply to
assemblages of matter, independent of structure or location.
While further investigation of the Earth will be fruitful in
expanding understanding, the search for life elsewhere in
the Universe, which was Lovelocks original impetus for
development of the concept, will provide its most stringent
test.
REFERENCES
Charlson, R J, Lovelock, J E, Andreae, M O, and Warren, S G
(1987) Oceanic Phytoplankton, Atmospheric Sulfur, Cloud
Albedo, and Climate, Nature, 326, 655661.
Dawkins, R (1982) The Extended Phenotype, Oxford University
Press, Oxford.
Ehrlich, P (1991) Coevolution and its Applicability to the Gaia
Hypothesis, in Scientists on Gaia, eds S H Schneider and
P J Boston, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Holland, H D (1984) The Chemical Evolution of the Atmosphere
and Oceans, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Kump, L R, Kasting, J F, and Crane, R G (1998) The Earth Sys-
tem: An Introduction to Earth Systems Science, Prentice Hall,
New York.
Lorius, C, Jouzel, J, Raynaud, D, Hansen, J, and Letreut, H
(1990) The Ice-core Record: Climate Sensitivity and Future
Greenhouse Warming, Nature, 347, 139145.
Lovelock, J E (1975) Thermodynamics and the Recognition of
Alien Biospheres, Proc. R. Soc. London B, 189, 167181.
Lovelock, J E (1986) Geophysiology: A New Look at Earth
Science, Bull. Am. Met. Soc., 67, 392397.
Lovelock, J E and Margulis, L (1974a) Atmospheric Homeostasis
By and For the Biosphere: The Gaia Hypothesis, Tellus, 26,
110.
Lovelock, J E and Margulis, L (1974b) Homeostatic Endencies of
the Earths Atmosphere, Origins of Life, 5, 93103.
Sagan, C, Thompson, W R, Carlson, R, Gurnett, D, and Hord, C
(1993) A Search for Life on Earth from the Galileo Spacecraft,
Nature, 365, 589593.
Watson, A J and Lovelock, J E (1983) Biological Homeostasis of
the Global Environment: The Parable of Daisyworld, Tellus,
35(B), 284289.
Williams, G R (1996) The Molecular Biology of Gaia, Columbia
University Press, New York.
Gandhi, Mohandas
Karamchand
(18691948)
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, also known as The
Mahatma (The Great Souled One), is most famous as the
non-violent force behind the independence of India from
British rule in 1947. His spiritual stance on the struggle
for truth (satyagraha) also led him into developing his
inuential teachings and practices on economics and what
would now be called alternative living. The idea of small
is beautiful, based on the book of the same name by Ernest
Schumacher, derives ultimately from Gandhis example.
Gandhi was born in 1869 in Western India, and as a
young man traveled to London to study law. This gave
him insights into British culture that were invaluable in
later life; for example, well placed letters to The Times, or
appeals to the British sense of fair play. While in London
in the late 1880s, he became caught up in various alterna-
tive groups, made up of spiritualists and vegetarians, who
were interested in Eastern thought. Ironically, it was these
Westerners who awoke Gandhi to the strengths of his own
Indian traditions. Gandhi also absorbed the writings of Leo
Tolstoy on non-violence, and was particularly inuenced
by John Ruskins book, Unto This Last, which attacked the
classical economists views of human nature as selsh and
competitive. This became hybridized with his own Indian
traditions, a mixture of Hinduism and the non-violent reli-
gion of Jainism.
As a result, beginning with his career in South Africa
as a barrister, Gandhi evolved a sophisticated strategy for
pressuring governments and companies to change their poli-
cies. This combined exhaustive legal work on the issues
at stake with a general mobilization of the affected par-
ties in non-violent protest. Gandhi believed, quite early on,
that the main reason for the maltreatment of the Indian
communities (and others later on) was that these communi-
ties had themselves internalized the vision of their current
masters. By non-violent protest, these communities were
GANDHI, MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND 291
empowered, and were morally strengthened by their very
refusal to resort to violence. This gave them superiority
over their supposed superiors, who inevitably resorted to
violence, violence that would in the long run undermine
the ofcial claims to legitimacy.
Accompanying this non-violent approach to political
conict, Gandhi further explored the personal and social
aspects of the pure in heart, through experiments in simple
living in ashrams, that is, small communities of believers.
These experiments in weaving ones own cloth, cleaning
out latrines (seriously threatening in a caste-ridden society
where only untouchables were supposed to do this), milk-
ing goats, etc., were eventually made part and parcel of
Gandhis politics. He argued that before one could rule the
nation (the raj ) one had to be able to rule oneself (swaraj )
and that this entailed, among other things, making ones
own products, like clothing (swadeshi ). This was a direct
attack on the vast British import/export businesses centered
in India.
In the 1930s, as the struggle for Indian independence
heated up, Gandhi became world famous, both in prison
and out on the march. His contests against the British gov-
ernment mobilized millions of followers in extraordinary
scenes of non-violent resistance. Simultaneously, Gandhis
constant effort to understand and develop the implications
of the search for spiritual truth, in the personal as well
as political spheres made him a beacon for some, and
a headache for others. An escalating series of fasts and
non-violent protests brought the British government to the
reluctant admission that they would have to grant some
form of independence to India: a process that was delayed
by the onset of World War II. Throughout this period, the
political party associated with Gandhi (the Congress Party,
headed by a disciple of Gandhis, Nehru) continued to advo-
cate independence. This was further complicated by the
gradual dissolution of a Hindu-Muslim partnership, which
would eventually lead to the bitter partition of India into
India and Pakistan.
Throughout the run up to Independence (in August 1947)
and the rioting and ghting that accompanied it, Gandhi
struggled against the tide of violence. He was himself shot
by a Hindu militant on January 30, 1948. Near universal
mourning ensued.
Gandhis economic and environmental teachings were
immediately repudiated by the new Indian government,
which embarked on widespread industrialization and quasi-
social central planning. Some of Gandhis disciples contin-
ued to press his teachings and practices subsequently, to
marginal effect.
Nevertheless, it can be seen that Gandhian non-violence
as a concept and a practice has been one of the most
inuential weapons in the struggle for justice over the last
50 years. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr was only
one of those for whom Gandhis model was central. The
peaceful revolutions in Eastern Europe, the Philippines, and
most recently in Yugoslavia owe much of their inspira-
tion and tactics to Gandhis spiritual pressure. The core
idea, that both sides in any struggle are seeking a truth,
which the seemingly weaker side can impress upon the
seemingly stronger through its commitment to the justness
of its cause in the face of violence, has become widely
practiced. Martin Luther Kings idea that segregation is
a degradation of whites as much as, if not more than,
blacks, also derives its moral suasion from a Gandhian
vision.
In recent years, Gandhism has maintained its immedi-
ate political inuence among environmentalists, notably
in the mobilization against the Narmada dam, and the
Chipko womens movement in Northern India. His writ-
ings on self-rule at the village level remain central to
participatory models of development. Finally, over the
longer term, it is his attempt to lead a spiritually holis-
tic life, where non-violence includes non-violence against
the things of the Earth that makes Gandhi a continuing
gure to be reckoned with in the environmental movement
worldwide.
REFERENCES
Gandhi, M K (1927) An Autobiography: or, The Story of My
Experiments with Truth, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth.
Iyer, R (1986) The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma
Gandhi, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
PETER TIMMERMAN Canada
Garden, Landscape
see Landscape, Urban Landscape, and the
Human Shaping of the Environment
(Volume 5)
Global Environmental Change and
Environmental History
see Global Environmental Change and
Environmental History (Opening essay,
Volume 5)
Global Forests: Citizen Monitoring
see Global Forest Watch (Volume 4)
292 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Globalization
see Development and Global Environmental
Change (Opening essay, Volume 5)
Globalization in Historical
Perspective
see Globalization in Historical Perspective
(Opening essay, Volume 5)
Governance and
International Management
Nazli Choucri
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA,
USA
In the absence of world government, the matter of global
governance assumes particularly important proportions.
This is especially true in the environmental domain as
human activities generate signi cant problems of global
scale and scope. At issue are formalizing modes of mod-
erating con icts and enhancing prospects for cooperation
among nations in a context where the proverbial anarchy
prevails, modulated by rapid change and increased com-
plexity. Signi cant among these complexities is the variety
of actors and agents whose interactions are subject to inter-
national management; nation-states, international corpora-
tions, non-governmental groups, local actors, and regional
agencies are among the most salient of these actors. And,
as international rules for collaboration and management
consolidate, new actors appear to be emerging with new
demands and new propensities for con ict or cooperation
as the case might be.
GLOBAL REALITIES
The reality of global politics, and its legal underpinnings
or lack thereof, is that only states are enfranchised to act
on behalf of individuals. Only states represent populations;
only governments represent constituencies with legal stand-
ing. Individuals per se have, as of yet, no formal mechanism
of representation other than the state. While there is evi-
dence of some movement toward recognition of alternative
voices in international forums, only the state is recognized
as voter.
Therein lies the heart of the dilemma of international
management: The state represents a range of demographic
constituencies that organize around territorial conglomer-
ations but international problems transcend territoriality
and even their mere denition (let alone solutions) can-
not be readily mapped over the global arrays of national
sovereignty. Moreover, the state is notorious for its porous-
ness (just about everything leaks across national borders)
thereby compounding the dual tasks of discharging respon-
sibility and the effective execution of authority.
Challenges to Governance
The essence of the management challenge worldwide is
how to reduce the critical disconnects between the demands
for coordination and governance, on the one hand, and
the supply of legitimate or legitimized mechanisms, on the
other given current realities and evolving complexities.
Modes of Collaboration
Few international realities are as readily discernable and
ephemeral, at the same time, than the diversity of collabo-
ration potentials. These range from issue-specic bilateral
agreements (formal or informal) to broad ranging, com-
prehensive global accords (again, formal or informal). In
general terms, the logic of international management rests
on three key questions, generally known as the why, when
and how of global accord:
1. Why collaborate?
2. When to collaborate?
3. How to collaborate?
Of the many conditions that necessitate global accords,
two are particularly apt in reecting the cluster of reasons
driving the quest for accord. Countries collaborate (a) in
the pursuit of common interests, or (b) in the management
of common aversions. In the rst instance, states seek
collaboration in order to jointly pursue some objective that
they might not be able attain individually. In the second, the
quest for collaboration is driven by the awareness that they
face common adverse conditions that require coordinated
action for effective management.
This general logic presumes that countries can identify
their specic preferences and objectives, as well as vul-
nerabilities and sensitivities, and that countries are able
to identify the conditions under which unilateral action
is not appropriate or bilateral operations will not be
effective.
By denition, collaboration involves self-imposed inter-
nal or external constraints on national sovereignty. Internal
constraints mean refraining from taking actions that have
GOVERNANCE AND INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT 293
national consequences. External constraints mean refraining
from generating adverse effects outside territorial bound-
aries. In the environmental domain, broadly dened, as well
as in the domain of sustainable development, global accords
involve both sets of constraints.
IMPERATIVES OF INTERNATIONAL
MANAGEMENT
Underlying the development of modes of international man-
agement is the evolution of shared understandings, common
formulation of problems at hand, and a joint search for
modes of coordinated action. In those terms, the accords
themselves are the end product of one type of process;
namely that of reaching an agreement. The follow-up
requirements involve an entirely new and often complex
set of processes at both national and international levels.
The duality, framed in terms of joint pursuit versus
common aversion, begs the question of contents, i.e., what
is it that is being pursued or needs to be avoided? Who is
it that is engaged in avoidance or in pursuit of aversions?
What would be the impacts of success or failure (assuming
clarity on criteria for each)? How would any of this make
a difference? When might this matter most?
Collaboration Imperative
Collaboration becomes an imperative when the problem is
recognized, when it is pervasive, and when it eludes unilat-
eral solution and, above all, when no action inevitably
means a worsening outcome. These properties are well
illustrated in the environment domain characterized by
uncertainty, irreversibility, and complexity.
Collaboration becomes a global imperative when:
Nature is a player. This means that environmental
effects of human action may take on unanticipated
forms, whose uncertainties are suf ciently great as to
insert a random element of strong proportions that
cannot be contained by human action.
Damage is due to legitimate action. Far from re ect-
ing pathology and deviance, environmental damage is
often due to the most normal, routine, and legitimate
behavior, whose very nature may be condoned if not
lauded worldwide.
Force cannot work. In such contingencies, the deploy-
ment of troops, the most conventional instrument of
force, is a singularly ineffective, if not a remarkably
useless course of action, in that the response is irrele-
vant to the nature of the challenge.
Compliance is imperative. The pervasiveness of envi-
ronmental dislocation means that no one can be immune
from attack so to speak and that everyone s security is
contingent on compliance by everyone else.
Doing damage by doing nothing. Simply by choosing
not to take a stand, nations can accentuate prevailing
environmental problems; thus, the costs of not par-
ticipating in evolving environmental accords will be
equivalent to overt opposition.
Once collaboration takes place in an institutionalized
context, one might ask: why does institutionalization
happen?
Institutional Necessity
To simplify, the conventional understanding is that insti-
tutionalization at the global level takes place in order to:
(a) consolidate and pursue new norms; and (b) coerce states
that resist the new norms, and pressure states breaking
norms into conformity with the collective understanding;
(c) reduce uncertainty in process, outcomes, and informa-
tion; and in some cases (d) generate and maintain shared
modes of communication, understandings, and explana-
tions. Finally, institutionalization is believed to (e) facilitate
mediation among con icting actors, and (f) enhance overall
prospects for problem solving. All of the above is contin-
gent on some minimum degree of shared understanding of
the challenges at issue, in combination with the dual prin-
ciples of participation and representation in a world based
on the principle of national sovereignty.
Key Trends
In this connection, three trends have contributed to the
increasing importance of international environmental man-
agement. The rst pertains to the increasing role of sci-
entists in shaping the policy agenda. By drawing attention
to environmental dislocations due to human activity, by
voicing views expressed by a critical mass of scientists
playing an important catalytic role by pressing for political
recognition of the problems at hand, they exert pressure at
national and international levels for policy response. The
second trend relates to matters of trial and error, precedent,
and renewed efforts in the domain of environmental policy
formulation and coordination. The international community
has gradually developed a set of principles that reinforce
the fabric of international environmental agreements. These
include the precautionary principle and the polluter pays
principle, among others. The third trend is the increasing
attention at the national and international levels to mat-
ters of capacity building for environmental management
as well as increased investments in national environmental
reporting.
MODES OF INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT
In the domain of environmental management and
sustainable development, the spectrum of management
294 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
modes ranges from formal agreements with legally binding
commitments (i.e., the conventions) to informal agreements
and soft law (like Agenda 21), on the one hand, and a
set of varied instrumentalities and modalities, on the other.
These patterns (framed in Table 1 below) are incorporated
in the knowledge-based global networking system entitled,
the Global System for Sustainable Development (GSSD).
Used for examining the implications of global accords at
local, national, and international levels, GSSD is currently
operating in multiple languages and in different parts of the
world.
While items (1) and (2) in Table 1 are those most com-
monly mentioned when referring to global accords, it is
often useful to consider that these modalities are often sup-
ported by a combination of modes (3) (14) as relevant.
Conceived as legally binding international commitments,
the Conventions represent the strongest form of accord
and require the most intrusive forms of institutional sup-
ports. This latter consideration is due to the fact that
formal commitment entails a corollary commitment to put
in place enabling mechanisms: nationally or internationally,
as the case may be. This corollary is in the nature of an
insurance policy.
To reduce potentials for non-compliance due to capac-
ity constraints (i.e., countries may be unable as opposed
to being unwilling to comply) a range of capacity build-
ing measures increasingly accompanies formal commit-
ments. This is especially the case in the domain of
environment and sustainable development. Many of these
measures are in the nature of institutional innovations,
which can often impinge on traditional conceptions of
sovereignty.
INTERNATIONAL RESPONSES AND
INSTITUTIONAL INNOVATIONS
When environmental issues are rooted at the local level
and travel to the global commons, when individual actions
generate global dysfunctionalities, and when states are
unable to manage their own environmental agenda, then
national governments and their instruments are placed in
a precarious position. On the one hand is the situation
discussed below (within state borders) that often eludes
governmental management. On the other hand are cases
where competing sovereignties (each subject to similar
elusiveness) seek common principles and modalities of
convergence.
Evolving Modalities
Given that states remain the only voters in global forums,
nonetheless, there has been a discernable move toward
expanded forms of international management involving
both participation and representation of non-state actors.
Table 1 Modes of governance and international manage-
ment as represented in the Global System for Sustainable
Development (GSSD)
(1) Agenda 21
(2) Formal conventions, spanning a range of general
and comprehensive issues, as:
Atmospheric
Hazardous wastes
Marine environment
Terrestrial resources
Freshwater resources
Nuclear, safety, and related technology
Others
(3) New development and investment mechanisms
Cleaner development mechanism (CDM)
Joint implementation
Activities implemented jointly
Innovative investment system
(4) Technology agreements, such as:
Technology transfer
Training and implementation
(5) Monitoring performance
Limits on hazardous activities
Benchmarking systems
Compliance records
(6) Codes of conduct and voluntary agreements
(7) Financial and investment codes
Environmental conduct
Voluntary agreements
Human rights issues
Other
(8) Conict management and peace strategies
Dispute resolution
Peace keeping
Conict prevention
Other
(9) Population management
Population policies
International migration strategies
Resettlement initiatives
Other
(10) Economic adjustments and agreements
(11) Trade regimes and agreements
(12) Environment agreements
(13) Corporate responses
Organizations
Agreements
Private-public partnerships
Social responsibility
(14) Strategies of international institutions
Source: http://gssd.mit.edu.
This move is driven by the realization that environment and
sustainability are characterized by rather novel properties
distinguishing this realm of evolving international law from
other domains of international interaction. For example,
the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change (UNFCCC), the Kyoto Protocol and the follow-up
GOVERNANCE AND INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT 295
measures, all targeted specically to environmental factors,
serve to illustrate the institutional innovations as well as
the attendant disconnects (see United Nations Fr amewor k
Convention on Climate Change and Kyoto Protocol,
Volume 4).
Among the distinctive features is the framework strat-
egy, rather than precise commitments; process orientation
coupled with target specications; provision for internal as
well as international institutional supports; and commitment
to long-term adjustment processes based on expectations of
innovations in policy instruments.
Less formal than the UNFCCC process, but no less per-
vasive, is the Agenda 21 process; including the formulation
of the contents of Agenda 21, and institutionalization of
the follow-up mechanisms via the United Nations Commis-
sion on Sustainable Development. Central to these novelties
is the tendency for various interests and interest groups
to organize networks of communication that eventually
become networks of inuence. As a result, the increased
use of observer status in international forums, combined
with the provision of space and the allocation of time for
various non-governmental groups to convene during the for-
mal negotiation processes has given non-state actors new
venues for voicing their concerns, if not their demands.
While none of these innovations alters the fundamental
constitution of global politics and none of this transforms
the basic sovereignty of the state, it does render the state
more transparent and its formal actions subject to greater
scrutiny.
These processes are designed to accommodate non-state
actors and interests only to the extent that these can be
incorporated within the formal structures of deliberation
among sovereign entities. But the consolidation of these
new institutional processes invariably serves as conduits
through which the demands of local constituencies can be
reected in global forums. Invariably, also, they point to
the fundamental disconnect, for example, that the may-
ors of mega cities are not (and cannot be) at the nego-
tiation table nor is there any legal provision for their
presence. However, they now have access to transmis-
sion mechanisms that may ensure that their views may
make their way through the global policy formulation
process.
Transcending or Incorporating the State?
What happens next if the views do make their way through
the formulation process? In essence the same challenges of
disconnect remain. If, and only if, the national government
is willing (or agrees) to engage in a dialogue with the
mega city institutions (or mayors), can authority devolve
from the state to sub-national units and to extra-territorial
institutions? Both instances reshape the responsibilities of
the state and the scope of its leverages.
In the absence of any serious potential for redesign-
ing the global state system, the most plausible approach
might involve rendering more robust some of the existing
instrumentalities. Among these are: (a) international pres-
sures on national government to formally account for urban
representation in global forums (as part of the national dele-
gation or in nongovernmental contexts); (b) formal arrange-
ments among sub-national governments (such as mayors
or functional equivalents) to represent their own interests
directly in global forums (as nongovernmental agencies);
(c) organized interest articulation of sub-state (or trans-
state) representatives to obtain new incentives from national
institutions or international institutions, (d) potentials for
direct negotiation on projects that arise in the context of
CDM (cleaner development mechanism) discussions, and
other.
As an example, much of the deliberations and report-
ing of outcomes for UNFCCC 5th Conference of Par-
ties (COP/5), has stressed two major venues of delibera-
tion the state centered forums and the non-governmental
organization (NGO) based deliberations. However, even
when diversity of interests is evoked, it is almost always
with reference to diversity of interests across states. The
disconnects at hand pertain to the global implications of
sub-national interests and of their potential disjunction with
national interests. The data requirements (within the con-
text of national reporting as well as the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)) are nationally dened,
sectorally formatted, and activity framed (as observations
permit).
In addition, we can discern the foundations for four new
venues, any one of which might have some merit, but alto-
gether, they may create signicant next steps in the ques-
tion for viable modes of international management. These
can be characterized as: (a) consolidation of cross-national
political networks supporting collaboration; (b) combining
resources for generating and marshalling needed knowledge
buttressing the demands for collaboration; (c) maintaining
a sustained presence in international forums to inuence
the evolution of accommodation to non-state actors; and
(d) exerting organized and mounting pressures on national
representatives toward greater international management.
Many of these developments are converging around the
notions of civil international society and of civic global
responsibility, where both qualier c terms reect a
new recognition of non-state agencies, and the potential
legitimization of the international civil (in contrast to state
centered) society.
Finally, it is important that such venues may contribute
signicantly to the consolidation of the two critical con-
ditions for effective management, at any level, local or
global. These are: (a) viable and relevant modes of repre-
sentation; and (b) effective and standardized mechanisms
for participation. The international community is in the
296 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
midst of a grand experiment, namely developing modes of
international governance and global management in a still
largely sovereign centered world, without imposing formal
government and institutions of governance that mirror those
of the state system.
See also: Inter national Environmental Law, Volume 5.
FURTHER READING
Brown-Weiss, E and Jacobson, H K, eds (1998) Engaging
Countries: Strengthening Compliance with International
Environmental Accords, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA,
http://gssd.mit.edu.
Choucri, N, ed (1993) Global Accord: Environmental Challenges
and International Response, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
The Fridtjof Nansen Institute (1999) Yearbook of International
Co-operation on Environmental and Development, Earthscan
Publications, London.
Green Parties
see Political Movements/Ideologies and the
Environment (Volume 5)
H
Hazards in Global
Environmental Change
Kenneth Hewitt
Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada
The prospect of disasters related to, or magni ed by, global
environmental change is increasingly debated. The problem
arises in at least four ways: (i) Dangerous trends: envi-
ronmental damage or transformations themselves threaten
extreme harm; for example, ozone-layer depletion, biocon-
centration of toxic contaminants or the emergence of drug-
resistant epidemic diseases. (ii) Magni ed risks: there may
be increases in the incidence and scale of disasters associ-
ated with age-old threats such as droughts, re or pests.
Examples include the role of deforestation in oods and
wild res, and of climate change in weather hazards or
an expanded range of insect-borne epidemic disease (see
Natural Hazards, Volume 3). (iii) Novel threats: new or
magni ed disasters may arise from the development and
deployment of technological innovations, or from deliber-
ate environmental modi cations and megaprojects. Some
identify such risks with, for example, the introduction or
escape of genetically engineered organisms into the bio-
sphere, very large water and power schemes, or ocean oor
mining.
(iv) Increasing social vulnerability and adaptive capac-
ities. This class of problem is related to the fact: that
the occurrence and form of a disaster always depends
both upon dangerous conditions and the state of human
communities exposed to them: increasing social vulnera-
bility and adaptive capacities. The likelihood and impacts
of disasters are transformed by demographic, organiza-
tional, work and life style changes even in relation to
environmental hazards that do not themselves change in
severity or incidence. Endangerment arises with urban-
ization, transformations in industry, agriculture, trans-
portation, and leisure activities worldwide. Only where
public safety measures keep pace, will dangers be kept in
check.
Modern innovations and organized responses also coun-
teract such dangers. Research, forecasting, standards, pro-
tections, insurance and other safety nets, have dramatically
improved public security or the ability to survive dam-
aging events in some places. Societal vulnerability and
adaptability apply, of course, in all four of these disaster
contexts. And they involve another issue of global change:
changing approaches to disasters. In addition to new disas-
ters and changing risks, there are emerging constituencies,
technologies, agencies and agendas relating to disasters.
They demand or promote re nements in understanding,
or a recasting of the problem. A strong impetus comes
from changing expectations of, and dif culties for, national
or international emergency preparedness, for humanitarian
assistance and activism by, or on behalf of, disaster victims
(IFRCRCS, 1998).
Most disaster-related investigations still focus upon envi-
ronmental and technological agents that may cause harm,
whether oods and earthquakes, oil spills, or viral diseases.
There is a continual ow of new ndings and renements
regarding these hazards. Few will question the importance
of such knowledge for risk assessments in a changing
world. Nevertheless, the importance of social or cultural
understanding, and the dangers of neglecting it, are increas-
ingly recognized (Hewitt, 1983; Blaikie et al., 1994; Quar-
antelli, 1998; Enarson and Morrow, 1998; Oliver-Smith and
Hoffman, 1999).
To grasp the meaning and impetus of these concerns,
we must consider their relation to entrenched and contested
views of the disaster problem. Most of us may feel we know
a disaster when we see one. Yet, like any other general
problem development, poverty, war, ruined habitats it
is much harder to nd a widely agreed characterization of
disaster, adequate for scientic and humanitarian purposes.
Approaches tend to split, rstly, between those preoccupied
with what is unique about disasters, and those that link them
to broader conditions of environment and society.
298 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
DISASTER IN AND OF ITSELF
Disaster or calamity identi es a primary form of experience;
a condition of great fear, life-threatening harm and loss.
There is also a sense of something untoward, violent, tragic.
Everyone dies, but mass deaths by re or ood, in a plane
crash, an avalanche, a famine or terrorist attack, seem
specially terrible misfortunes. There is not just untimely
death and thwarted life. The capacities a person might
otherwise have to escape or survive are overwhelmed as
in a nightmare. There is the agony of abandonment by, or
being unable to protect, loved ones. Also conveyed is the
sense of singular occasions or historic(al) turning points
(Elliot, 1972; Scarry, 1985).
At their worst, there is little to distinguish the disas-
ters of war, famine, natural and technological catastrophe
or pandemic disease. People have always lumped them, or
their imageries, together: ruined homes, uprooted families,
hungry, exhausted and desperate folk eeing the devas-
tation or huddled in makeshift shelters, the injured and
the heaped up dead. Most disasters share this common
and dreadful content (Sorokin, 1942). Hence, it is argued
they are, above all, humanitarian problems demanding
all reasonable efforts to prevent or mitigate them, espe-
cially where human-induced changes threaten to make them
worse.
Some technical or of cial de nitions also accept and
characterize disasters as distinctive and special problems,
though they distance themselves from victims feelings
and startling imagery. A recent, clear example de nes
disasters as:
non-routine events in societies or their larger subsystems
(e.g., regions, communities) that involve social disruption and
physical harm. Among the key de ning properties of such
events are (1) length of forewarning, (2) magnitude of impact,
(3) scope of impact, and (4) duration of impact.
(Kreps, 1995)
Establishing dimensions that seem to bracket disasters
as extreme events, and separate them from other times and
places, has been a concern of contributing disciplines. There
is a preference for impersonal dimensions or mechanisms,
in contrast to the experiential or vernacular views, described
earlier:
a state/condition destabilizing the social system that man-
ifests itself in a malfunctioning or disruption of connections
and communications between its elements or social units; par-
tial or total destruction/demolition; physical and psychological
overloads suffered by some of these elements
(Por riev, 1998)
Modern ideas de ne disasters, especially, in relation to,
and as the opposite of, predictable, normal, and stable
conditions. However, there are other professionals who
reject or strongly qualify the idea of disaster as a unique or
separate problem. Rather, they see disasters as endemic to,
or symptomatic of, the social systems in which they occur
(Morren, 1983).
DISASTER MYTHS AND THE PRINCIPLE OF
CONTINUITY
Extraordinary terror, trauma, destruction and death surely
occur in disasters. Few can argue against paying special
attention to them and the worst hit areas. However, com-
parative and general studies reveal a very different balance
of conditions. In most events, most property and persons
within a designated disaster areas, are only slightly harmed,
or unscathed physically. Even where they are in small num-
bers, survivors who are not completely disabled, usually
carry out most or all of the primary life-saving and harm-
reducing activity. In the crucial hours or days before outside
help arrives, if it arrives, they rescue those who would,
otherwise, be lost. Much, or most emergency relief, food
and shelter, is provided by households within or near the
devastated areas.
However, popular or media images not only focus on
the more or less heroic rescue efforts of outside agencies,
the armed forces, international relief and modern technolo-
gies. They also portray the disaster in terms of wall to wall
devastation, chaos and panic; or concentrate on the more
pathetic and prostrate victims, anti-social behavior such
as looting, and lucky or miraculous survivals (Ploughman,
1995). Disaster research has shown that these are usually
exceptional cases, or re ect mistaken assumptions, stereo-
types and selective reportage. Instead, most survivors act,
as far as is humanly possible, in terms of the concerns and
responsibilities they had before, whether in families and
the community, their institutional position or professional
skills. This suggests the need for what Quarantelli and
Dynes (1977) call a principle of continuity with, rather than
a radical separation of disaster from, preexisting societal
conditions and normal human responses.
If so, how and how far preexisting conditions and
resources in uence peoples responses to disaster are impor-
tant questions. These, no less than the severity of ood or
re, decide the capacities of those at risk to survive and
cope. In turn, this suggests that the key questions of global
change are how it alters people s vulnerability; and how it
erodes or bolsters their adaptive capacities.
INTERPRETATIONS OF CALAMITY
In the broadest terms, explanations of disaster involve four
sets of factors:
1. Dangerous agents or hazards, such as earthquake or
re, viruses or toxic chemicals, equipment failure or
collisions, that initiate the destructive event, or cause
most of the damage.
HAZARDS IN GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 299
2. Vulnerability of exposed persons, property or activities
to dangerous conditions, (discussed in detail below).
3. Risk-reducing and disaster-mitigating measures, which
may be directed at particular hazards, or vulnerabilities,
and include organized emergency preparedness.
4. Contexts and intervening conditions, factors that indi-
rectly, but sometimes decisively, inuence the above
three. For example, changes in vegetation cover by
forest industries or clearance for agriculture affect
ood-generating runoff. Population density, health and
well-being which will change due to economic devel-
opment or urbanization, alter risks of epidemic dis-
ease. Technological innovations increase risks though
directed at, say, productivity or consumer demand.
Such conditions intervene between dangerous forces
and vulnerable people to modify their interactions,
whether for good or ill, but arise or vary independently.
Global change is as likely to affect risk through a range
of societal and habitat transformations, as in directly
altering ood hazards, safety equipment or high risk
technologies.
Actual disasters involve all four sets of factors, but most
disaster studies and related activities focus on just one
of them. An agent-specic or hazards perspective remains
the prevailing perspective. Moreover, this encourages a
view of disasters as originating outside, or beyond social
control:
Disaster means the impinging upon a structured community
of an external force capable of destroying human life or its
resources for survival, on a scale dire enough to excite public
alarm, to disrupt normal patterns of behavior
(Lemons, 1957)
With respect to technological and social hazards, this idea
of disaster converges with that of the accident (Green, 1997)
in which danger is not merely identied with unforeseen
and unwanted occurrences, or human error, but a domain
of uncertainty:
were there perfectly accurate predictions of what would
occur and when it would occur in the intricate web of atmo-
spheric, hydrological and biological systems, there would be no
hazard
(White, 1974)
This view of disasters as uncertain, unscheduled or acci-
dental events, serves to detach them from preexisting con-
ditions, and the control of on-going social life, and place
them in a realm of extreme and rare natural or tech-
nological processes. The only possible social responses
are then seen as specialized technical efforts to model
and counteract such extreme forces and events (Hewitt,
1983).
There is a radical contrast, once again, with interpreta-
tions in terms of conditions of everyday life:
Disaster is the actualization of social vulnerability we
interpret the notion of social vulnerability as an independent
factor (predictor) of risk
(Carlo Pelanda, 1981)
Here, danger is seen to arise from styles of settlement and
land use, occupations, technological innovations, wealth
and political inuence. To accept this means that disaster
reduction and emergency preparedness would have to focus
much more on the risks embedded in existing social sys-
tems, and on global changes that alter peoples exposure,
capacities and everyday developments.
SOCIALLY DISCRIMINATE OR
INDISCRIMINATE EVENTS?
The external force/extreme event view also tends to accept
that death and loss in disasters are a function of the
type, intensity and distribution of the damaging agent, but
socially indiscriminate affecting old and young, rich and
poor, men and women at random and, in effect, equally. The
opposing view emphasizes the evidence that who lives and
dies, the scale and severity of losses, are strongly pregured
in the social order. They clearly identify certain persons
or groups, places or activities, as much more vulnerable.
Again, this directs us to conditions and developments in
society. Social vulnerability, and adaptive capacities must
be examined, and the roles of cultural and environmental
contexts. The result is a view of the origins of disas-
ter that departs more or less strongly from mainstream,
agent-specic investigations that emphasize exceptional or
disaster-specic responses.
VULNERABILITY OR THE HUMAN ECOLOGY
OF ENDANGERMENT
A vulnerability perspective considers especially how com-
munities are exposed to dangers, the ways in which they
are readily harmed, and the protections that they lack. When
disasters do occur, it directs attention to peoples capacities
to withstand, cope with, mitigate and recover from dam-
ages. It examines whether, or how well, they are served by
organized relief and rehabilitation measures (Table 1).
Here, the problem of disaster is seen to depend primar-
ily upon on-going societal conditions or developments. It
depends upon many aspects of society that, by design or
default, can decrease or exaggerate the impact of damag-
ing agents. However, if particular forms of vulnerability
relate to particular hazards, peoples vulnerability can arise
more or less independently of where ood, storm, epidemic
disease or explosion may occur, and their severity. Vulner-
ability is largely created within, distributed or offset by,
the social order. It depends upon how society treats people
according to their age, class, or religion; on gender and
300 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Table 1 The main forms and conditions of vulnerability
(after Hewitt, 1997, 144)
1. Exposure to dangerous agents or conditions through
occupation, location near a dangerous facility,
lifestyle
2. Physical weakness or susceptibility through
predisposition, age, disability, impairment of
persons, poor design of buildings, insecure practices
3. Disadvantage, or structural weakness involving lack
of resources, capabilities or access to facilities, often
identied with poverty, dependency, exploitation and
social injustice
4. Defenselessness or lack of protection to counter
weaknesses, to prevent or avoid dangerous
situations, emphasizing protection otherwise
available in the society concerned
5. Lack of resilience or capacities, where the means and
ability to respond are limited and impaired, options
are not recognized, and readiness for creative
responses missing
6. Powerlessness, an inability to gain access to, or
inuence safety arrangements; exclusion from and
inability to get the attention of the relevant and
inuential social agencies
other divisions of labor; on cultural values and legal rights
(ORiordan, 1986; Enarson and Morrow, 1998).
Of course, everyone is vulnerable, at least in an absolute
or worst case sense. Some persons, activities or places may
be vulnerable because neither they nor anyone else has
the means to make them safer. Moreover, people in all
situations can, and usually do, accept some risks.
Yet, a majority of those who actually suffer harm and
loss in most disasters are found to be vulnerable in ways
that some, if not most, members of their own, or other
societies, are not. The homes which collapse in earthquake
are not merely structurally unsafe and badly sited, but usu-
ally house people disadvantaged in cultural and economic
ways (Blaikie et al., 1994). In almost all famines, it is the
already hungry or malnourished, who suffer starvation and
death (Sen, 1981). Many if not most refugees have been
displaced after long-term struggles with livelihood insecu-
rity or coercive treatment (Zwi and Ugalde, 1991). Some
people seem driven into, or trapped by, vulnerability syn-
drome. Rather than a single weakness or category, they are
victimized by a whole social context (Wisner, 1993). How-
ever, even in less severe cases, vulnerability is a relative
condition, and can only be dened and assessed in relation
to the safety which others actually enjoy.
HUMAN ADAPTABILITY
Although vulnerability mainly suggests weakness and
absent protections, studies of it nd that peoples active
capabilities or resilience in relation to dangers, are at least
as important. Only the most impaired or injured are not, in
some measure, active agents in their own survival, if not in
larger community needs.
There is no form of vulnerability which some or all soci-
eties do not deliberately work to reduce and offset. Social
safety nets, defenses, insurance, and emergency prepared-
ness can and do mitigate harm. They reduce and offset
weakness, or offer protections for the specially vulnerable,
for children, the elderly or disabled.
Direct and longer-term involvement with communities
at risk, shows how survival turns upon community values
and arrangements (Watts, 1983; Vaughan, 1996). Adap-
tive and coping capacities are also embedded in on-going
activity. Patterns of everyday living pregure and constrain
the readiness, capacities, resources and values that will
apply in a crisis. Resourcefulness and creative responses
may be seriously undermined where social conditions pro-
mote submissiveness and dependency, or where individuals,
groups and communities nd their autonomy constantly
opposed and suppressed by the interests of powerful oth-
ers. Indeed, people who are relatively more endangered,
less well-provided with protections and lacking in adap-
tive capacities, are typically found to be politically weak
as well. Defenselessness most often reects powerlessness
(ORiordan, 1986; Watts and Bohle, 1993). The victims
of natural and technological disasters have often, already,
been victimized by an unjust, exploitative or coercive social
order (Corradi et al., 1992; Kroll-Smith, 1995).
In these views too, the forms of vulnerability and adap-
tive behavior are not taken as peculiar to what happens
during an earthquake or re. Rather, they direct us to
domestic and local spaces of risk, and everyday behavior
and conditions. However, as global change studies show,
everyday life is nowadays subject to unprecedented changes
and risks.
SOCIAL RISK AND DISASTERS IN A
TECHNOCRATIC AGE
Today, vulnerability and its changing forms relate, increas-
ingly, to the emergence and reach of late modern society
and its institutions. The geographies and contexts of risk
relate mainly to whether people live within or outside such
societies, and the degree of their access to, or exclusion
from, modern safety and security measures.
In the wealthier, late modern countries and enclaves,
permanent arrangements, infrastructures and organizations
play an overwhelming role in vulnerability, and in the
origins of, as well as responses to, disaster. This applies,
in particular, to routine public safety and everyday, widely
dispersed or chronic dangers. They include institutionalized
arrangements to deal with trafc accidents, household res,
illnesses of childhood or the elderly, crime or product
safety. These have become the special responsibility of
HAZARDS IN GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 301
government, private or non-governmental organizations,
oversight agencies or service industries. They involve the
largest expenditures on public safety.
Vast sums of private and public money are allocated to
insurance and welfare; to health, policing and the courts; to
re ghting, transportation or product safety; to the armed
forces, factory or mines inspections, and so on. Whole
disciplines and professions have developed to research and
carry out these functions, or to train staff for the relevant
organizations.
Although, by denition, disasters overwhelm routine
arrangements, in modern societies responses are largely
dependent upon large, complex organizations, albeit from
outside the disaster zone. Such organizations, as Perrow
(1995) expresses it, have in effect absorbed society .
Moreover, the permanent large organizations dealing with
chronic dangers, play decisive roles both in limiting and
in responding to disasters. In most countries this applies,
especially, to the role of the armed forces. Meanwhile, large
organizations, their policies, priorities and performance sub-
stantially determine each persons safety or vulnerability.
Nearly all jobs are in large public and private organi-
zations, and a persons job and status in them, is the
main determinant of exposure to, and protection from,
risks.
On the other hand, to a growing extent, disasters arise
from the fallibility, excesses, or deliberate actions, of these
organizations. This is so for many of the graver dan-
gers identied with global change: accidents that arise
within or from complex, high-risk organizations. Examples
include the Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl nuclear dis-
asters, Bhopal, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill (Sagan,
1993).
The German sociologist Beck (1992) has identied such
predicaments with what he calls the risk society. He
believes we now confront a new modernity in which the
manufacture of risks, or technoscientic accidents, increas-
ingly overshadows productive and progressive forces. He
sees peoples risk positions, essentially another way of
describing vulnerability, as related not just to hazardous
processes but to work, food, a place to live, even their
leisure choices. Yet, these positions are embedded in, and
change with, the more or less extensive risk-producing,
risk-averting and risk-redistributing strategies of modern
institutions. In relation to global change, he describes the
epochal problem of the risk society in this way:
As nature becomes permeated by industrialization and
as tradition is dissolved, new types of incalculability emerge
[specically] the production of risks is the consequence of
scientic and political efforts to control or minimize them.
(Beck, 1998)
Meanwhile, social risk positions and the geography of
disasters have been transformed according to access to, or
exclusion from, the benets of modern safety arrangements
and large organizations. There can be sharp variations
in vulnerability within cities and countries, even between
members of the same family or neighborhood (Enarson
and Morrow, 1998). Disasters, or possible responses, in
different regions of the earth, depend upon developments
and connections involving those same large organizations.
At least, they are involved in massive humanitarian relief
efforts in areas remote from cities and industrial develop-
ment. Meanwhile, the world social space of vulnerability
is increasingly a direct or indirect consequence of condi-
tions related to national or global economic, technological,
environmental and political inuences (Blaikie et al., 1994;
Oliver-Smith and Hoffman, 1999).
KNOWLEDGE WORKERS
This condition also places the problem of knowledge cen-
ter stage. Mainly through the role of large organizations,
computerized and centralized controls, thought and action
are increasingly in the hands of, or dependent upon, knowl-
edge workers most of whom are not teachers, academics
or intellectuals! They are persons in public and private
organizations who work with and through formal systems
of information gathering, assessment and communication.
They rely upon training in, and facility with, standard tech-
nical practices. Even those called practitioners ambulance
dispatchers, trafc policemen, volunteers in public char-
ities spend much of their time writing things down,
exchanging and reading what (ofcial or non-ofcial) oth-
ers communicate, developing or reading other peoples web
pages, analyzing and assessing data or undergoing train-
ing in such matters. Knowledge workers include virtually
all the people who help to generate plans, consultants and
inspectors reports, write eld manuals, sit in committees
or dispense orders.
To be sure, there are still huge numbers of people, world-
wide, whose work is largely manual, whether producing
food or raising children, who do not, or cannot partici-
pate in the textual and computer literate world of modern
knowledge. But ever fewer of them act independent of some
technology, procedures and goals, designed and monitored
by the knowledge workers. All of this is also part of large
organizations and extends their roles.
However, disaster is one of those problems others
are violence, madness, poverty in a world of plenty,
crime, addiction, abuse or dropping out that are spe-
cially intractable for, and uniquely threatening to, the
rationalized, systematized social order of large institutions
(Hewitt, 1983; Burchell et al., 1991). Indeed, part of the
current debate concerns how far our approaches to disas-
ter, and their failings, reect the preoccupations of tech-
nocratic organization more than the objective dangers or
the predicaments of those at risk (Ericson and Haggerty,
1997).
302 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
WHOSE DISASTERS? THE REVERSAL OF
EXPERTISE
The contrast between the experience or witnessing of dis-
aster, and technical knowledge work, is not merely one of
time and place, but of differing concerns and perspectives.
If this seems obvious, it is often ignored in technical disas-
ter work. This not only tends to treat issues from a distance,
abstractly and in terms of governmental or other centrally
organized responses. It is well known that large organiza-
tions can be quite insensitive to, or unaware of, the concerns
not merely of vulnerable communities and those trying to
cope with and recover from catastrophe, but of other organi-
zations (Turner, 1978). Part of the problem for responsible
agencies and professionals, is the extent to which knowl-
edge and understanding of vulnerability and disaster involve
a rethink of their normal ideas.
It is not only that suffering and witnessing extraordi-
nary violence justify the oft-quoted feeling of survivors
that anyone who was not there could not possibly know or
understand. In addition, to the extent that disaster depends
upon personal and societal vulnerability or resilience, then
it becomes a matter of grasping the circumstances, needs
and concerns of those at risk. Vulnerability is always closely
bound up with where people live, their work and specic
relations to habitat and the larger society, their values and
expectations. The idea that someone from outside, however
sophisticated in, say, ood hydrology, engineering safety or
radiation ecology, can recognize and give a balanced assess-
ment of risks and needs, is socially absurd especially
when there is also an inability to speak the language of
those at risk, or being new to the culture, group, and habi-
tat involved. Such is often the plight of the visiting expert;
an urbanite speaking to rural peasants, a well-off person
trying to understand those living in abject poverty, a sur-
vey team of men where women are the most vulnerable, or
play a decisive role in family safety.
Without doubt there are things the expert is uniquely
able to say and do. The impacts of modern technolo-
gies, practices and organizations reach into every corner
of the earth, if they do not aggravate or cause the dis-
asters that occur. Experts have privileged opportunities to
represent the vulnerable to the powers that be, and vice
versa. Since large organizations control important resources
and actions, it matters how the professionals state the
case.
But social understanding requires listening to and recog-
nizing the cultural and psychosocial condition of those at
risk. Again, a vulnerability perspective directs us to their sit-
uation and predicaments, rather than just impersonal dimen-
sions, processes and organizational procedures. Or rather, it
confronts us with the problem of translating between tech-
nical understanding into what are variously termed local,
gendered, vernacular and indigenous languages or knowl-
edge (Becker, 1991).
CONCLUDING REMARKS
To summarize, social vulnerability and adaptability depend,
in large measure, upon on-going material and social life
or their transformations. For that reason, they are surely of
decisive importance for the growing concern over sustain-
able human communities and habitat relations. To adapt to
global changes in a sustainable way is, above all, to avoid
disastrous collapses. It requires that developments should
not put people and property on a collision course with great
hazards, or make them less able to withstand or cope with
existing risks. It suggests that technological innovations or
projects, even consumer goods, that may carry high risks
should be subject to exceptional constraints.
REFERENCES
Beck, U (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity Trans-
lated, ed M Ritter, Sage Publications, London.
Beck, U (1998) Politics of Risk Society, in The Politics of Risk
Society, ed J Franklin, Polity Press/Blackwell, Oxford.
Becker, A (1991) A Short Essay on Languaging, in Research and
Re exivity Sage, ed F Steier, London, 228235.
Blaikie, P, Cannon, T, Davis, I, and Wisner, B (1994) At Risk:
Natural Hazards, Peoples Vulnerability and Disasters, Rout-
ledge, London.
Burchell, G, Gordon, C, and Miller, P, eds (1991) The Foucault
Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Harvester-Wheatsheaf,
London.
Corradi, J E, Fagen, P W, and Garretc n, M A, eds (1992) Fear
at the Edge: State Terror and Resistance in Latin America,
University of California Press, Berkeley.
Elliot, G (1972) Twentieth Century Book of the Dead, Penguin,
Harmondsworth.
Enarson, E and Morrow, B H, eds (1998) The Gendered Terrain
of Disaster: Through Womens Eyes, Praeger, Westport, CT.
Ericson, R V and Haggerty, K D (1997) Policing the Risk Society,
University of Toronto Press, Toronto.
Hewitt, K (1983) The Idea of Calamity in a Technocratic Age,
in Interpretations of Calamity from the Perspective of Human
Ecology, eds Hewitt, K, Allen, and Unwin, London, 332.
Hewitt, K (1997) Regions of Risk: a Geographical Introduction to
Disaster, Addison Wesley Longman, London.
IFRCRCS (1998) World Disasters Report, International Feder-
ation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Martinus
Nijhoff, Dordrecht.
Kreps, G (1995) Disaster as systemic event and social catalyst: a
clarication of subject matter, Int. J. Mass Emerg. Disasters,
13, 255284.
Kroll-Smith, S (1995) Toxic Contamination and the Loss of
Civility: 1994 MSSA Plenary Address, Sociolog. Spect., 15,
377396.
Lemons, H (1957) Physical Characteristics of Disasters: Histor-
ical and Statistical Review, in Disasters and Disaster Relief,
ed De Witt Smith, Ann. Am. Acad. Political Soc. Sci., 309(Jan-
uary), 114.
Morren, Jr, G E B (1983) A General Approach to the Identica-
tion of Hazards and Response, in Interpretations of Calamity
HINDUISM AND THE ENVIRONMENT 303
from the Perspective of Human Ecology, ed K Hewitt, Allen
and Unwin, London, 284297.
Oliver-Smith, A R and Hoffman, S M (1999) The Angry Earth,
Routledge, New York.
O Riordan, T (1986) Coping with Environmental Hazards, in
Geography, Resources and Environment: Theses from the Work
of Gilbert F. White, II, eds R W Kates and I Burton, Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, Chicago, 212 309.
Pelanda, C (1981) Disasters and sociosystemic vulnerability, Pre-
liminary Paper #68, Disaster Research Center, University of
Delaware, Newark, DE.
Perrow, C B (1995) Society at Risk in a Society of Organiza-
tions, in Populations at Risk in America: Vulnerable Groups
at the End of the Twentieth Century, eds G J Demko and
M C Jackson, Westview Press, New York, 19 35.
Ploughman, P (1995) The American Print News Media Construc-
tion of Five Natural Disasters, Disasters, 19(4), 308 326.
Por riev, B N (1998) Issues in the De nition and Delineation of
Disasters, in What is a Disaster? ed E H Quarantelli, Rout-
ledge, London, 56 72.
Quarantelli, E H, ed (1998) What is a Disaster? Routledge,
London.
Quarantelli, E L and Dynes, R (1977) Responses to Social Crisis
and Disaster, Annu. Rev. Sociol., 3, 23 49.
Sagan, S D (1993) The Limits of Safety: Organizations,
Accidents and Nuclear Weapons, Princeton University Press,
Princeton, NJ.
Scarry, E (1985) The Body in Pain, Oxford University Press,
New York.
Sen, A (1981) Poverty and Famines: an Essay on an Entitlement
and Deprivation, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Sorokin, P (1942) Man and Society in Calamity, E P Dutton,
New York.
Turner, B A (1978) Man-made Disasters, Wykeham Publications,
London.
Vaughan, D (1996) The Story of an African Famine: Gender and
Famine in Twentieth Century Malawi, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge.
Watts, M J (1983) Silent Violence: Food, Famine and Peasantry
in Northern Nigeria, University of California Press, Berkeley,
CA.
Watts, M J and Bohle, H G (1993) Hunger, Famine and the Space
of Vulnerability, GeoJournal, 30(2), 117 125.
White, G F, ed (1974) Natural Hazards: Local, Regional, Global,
Oxford University Press, New York.
Wisner, B (1993) Disaster vulnerability, geographical scale and
existential reality, in Worlds of Pain and Hunger: Geographi-
cal Perspectives on Disaster Vulnerability and Food Security,
ed H Bohle, Freiburg Studies in Development Geography, Uni-
versity of Freiburg, Freiburg-im-Briesgau.
Zwi, A and Ugalde, A (1991) Political Violence in the Third
World: a Public Health Issue, Health Policy and Planning, 6(3),
203 217.
FURTHER READING
Green, J (1997) Risk and Misfortune: the Social Construction of
Accidents, University College London Press, London.
Kreps, G R (1998) Disaster as Systemic Event and Social Cat-
alyst, in What is a Disaster? ed E H Quarantelli, Routledge,
London, 31 55.
Pelanda, C (1982) Disaster and Socioeconomic Vulnerability, in
Social and Economic Aspects of Earthquakes: Proceedings,
Third International Conference, Bled, Yugoslavia, 1981, eds
B G Jones and M Tomazevic, Cornell University, New York,
67 91.
Perrow, C B (1984) Normal Accidents: Living with High-risk
Technologies, Basic Books, New York.
Waterstone, M, ed (1992) Risk and Society: the Interaction of
Science, Technology and Public Policy, Kluwer, Boston, MA.
Health and the Environment:
Theoretical Approaches
see Theories of Health and Environment
(Volume 5)
Hetch Hetchy Valley
see Environmental Movement the Rise of
Non-government Organizations (NGOs)
(Volume 5)
Hinduism and the
Environment
O P Dwivedi
University of Guelph, Guelph, Canada
The Hindu religion offers a challenging perspective on the
subjects of respect for nature (including the principle of
the sanctity of all life on this planet and elsewhere) and
environmental conservation. In Hinduism, human beings are
not given any absolute dominion over their own lives or
over the life of any non-human being; only the Supreme
God has absolute sovereignty over all creatures, including
humanity s life and death. The sacredness of God s creation
requires that no damage be in icted on other species without
adequate justication. People are not supposed to act as
viceroys of God over the earth; nor should they assign
degrees of relative worth to other species. All life forms
(human and non-human alike) are of equal value and all
304 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
have the same right to existence, but only humans have
special obligations to care for the environment. In addition,
only humans, unlike any other species, are obliged to live
in harmony with nature by exercising control over their
cravings and obsessions, mainly because they have the God-
given capability of free will.
THE VEDIC HERITAGE
Hinduism is the name given to the most widespread religion
on the Indian subcontinent. It has had a long history,
extending back at least to the arrival of what are now
thought to be IndoIranian tribes in northern India about
2000 before the common era (BCE) considered the Vedic
period whose beliefs were mingled with, or layered over,
the original indigenous religions in the region. Concerning
the dates of the Vedic period, there remain differences
of opinion among some Western Indologists and Indian
scholars. For example, Grifth (1889) mentions that the
Vedic period occurred between 1500 and 1400 BCE, while
Indian scholars such as Tilak (1936) and Kane (1966)
suggest about 50004000 BCE. Perhaps a more realistic
date could be about 2000 BCE, see Kak (1994). After
the literature associated with the Vedic period (known as the
Vedas), there appeared the later Upanishads (addenda to the
Vedas, and considered to be datable around 600 BCE, (see
Hume, 1977, 6 and Deussen, 1980), and an array of stories
and epic poems like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata,
that together generated the vast diversity of greater and
lesser gods, personal and public rituals, and all the elements
that populate todays Hinduism.
The ancient Hindu literature is divided into the Shrutis
and Smritis. Shrutis denote the entire body of sacred
Vedic Scriptures, which are considered to include the four
Vedas, the Upanishads, and some other related texts. Smri-
tis are a number of other Hindu sacred Scriptures created
after the Shrutis, including the Ramayana and the Mahab-
harata, the Dharma-shastras (religious books on Hindu
law and behavior), and the Puranas (18 books on Hindu
mythologies).
The relationship between human beings and nature
attracted the seers of the early Vedic period who contem-
plated the mysteries of the Creation, the place of heaven and
earth, and even beyond. Those Vedic seers would not accept
as nal what they saw around themselves; instead they
asked many penetrating questions, not only about life but
also about death and destruction. They were equally inter-
ested in the mystery of Creation and the establishment of
this universe. Through their deep thinking, guesses, conjec-
tures and postulations, they came to acknowledge that the
material causes of this creation happened to be the Panch
Mahabhutas (Five Great Elements): earth/Prithivi, air/vayu,
space/akash, waters/Apah, light re/Agni (Aitareya Upan-
ishad, Chapter III, Verse 3).
These ve Mahabhutas are cosmic elements that cre-
ate, nurture, and sustain all forms of life, and after death
or decay, they absorb what was created earlier; thus they
play an important role in preserving and sustaining the
environment (Dwivedi, 1997a). It should be noted that
these Mahabhutas have been deied in the Vedic, and also
later in the Puranic literature (starting from 300 BCE to
900 CE). Further, they, all together, are regarded as all-
pervasive and omnipresent elements having great creative
potency; in addition, they together constitute Brahman (the
Almighty God, the all-pervading One, the Supreme God-
head) who manifested the universe and whose manifesta-
tion goes on forever. As mentioned in the Shvetashvatara
Upanishad:
The Brahman by whom this entire universe is engulfed. this
creation is governed by Him as well as the ve great elements:
earth, air, space, water, and light.
(Shvetashvatara Upanishad, Chapter 6, Verse 2)
Prithivi (Earth)
The Rig Veda describes Prithivi as a divinity as well as one
of the Mahabhuta elements. She is the mother and upholder
of all (Rig Veda, Book X, Hymn 18, Verse 10; and Book 1,
Hymn 155, Verse 2). Prithivi is also identied with the god-
dess Aditi: a mother and protector of the holy cosmic law;
she is also regarded as a divine ship, full of life-sustaining
harvest. She, along with the four other Mahabhutas, sustains
our universe. This relationship between earth and humans is
superbly depicted by Rishi Atharva (a rishi is a priest/seer),
in the Prithivi Sukta (Hymn to Mother Earth) of the early
Atharva Veda. (A Sukta is a short composition of verses
which relate to a specic subject under discussion. Each
Veda consists of several Suktas). This hymn exemplies
the relevance of environmental sustenance and biodiversity
to human beings (Satvalekar, 1958). It consists of several
prayers including one that promotes the concept of Vasud-
haiv Kutumbkam, or the family of Mother Earth (Dwivedi,
1998).
Vayu (Air)
Vayu is the bond and the thread that keeps the universe
together. Vayu is also praised like Prana (the life-sustaining
breath) it is the germ of the world and a transformer of
seed; without Prana, nothing survives.
Akash (Space)
The term Akash denotes space rather than sky or ether
as mentioned in some translated Vedic literature. It is
not a material or physical element. In Chhandogya Upan-
ishad, a discussion takes place among Rishis; they nally
agree that it is the Akash (space) out of which all beings
HINDUISM AND THE ENVIRONMENT 305
(their souls) come, and it is where they go back after
their death; thus, the Akash is the nal resting place
of all beings (Chhandogya Upanishad, Book I, 9th Part,
Verse 1).
Apah (Water)
According to the Vedas, water was the rst of the cosmic
elements. The Rig Veda says that in the beginning, all
was water, and there was darkness which engulfed it (Rig
Veda, Book X, Hymn 129, Verse 3). Further, the Rig Vedic
Hymn 23 (Book I, Verses 1621) considers water to be the
reservoir of all curative medicines and of nectar. Waters
are the mothers of all beings, and they are the foundations
of all in the universe (Lal, 1995, 9). The genesis of the
Universe takes place in the primeval water. The following
verse from the Atharva Veda (Book IXX, Hymn II, Verses 1
and 2) illustrates the place of water in our lives:
may the waters from the snowy mountains bring health and
peace to all people. May the spring waters bring calm to you.
May the swift current be pleasing to you; and may the rains
be a source of tranquility to all. May the waters of the oasis in
the desert be sweet to you; and so be the waters of ponds and
lakes. May the waters from wells dug by humans be good to
them, and may the healing powers of water be available to all
beings.
Hindus consider water to be a powerful medium for
purication and also a source of energy. Sometimes, just
by the sprinkling of pure water in religious ceremonies, it
is believed that purity is achieved. That is why, in the Rig
Veda, prayer is offered to the deity of water:
the waters in the sky, the waters of rivers, and water in the well
whose source is the ocean, may all these sacred waters protect
me.
(Rig Veda, Book VII, Hymn 49, Verse 2)
Agni (Light/Fire)
Agni is considered in the Vedas as the spring of our
life because it creates life on earth. Agni, in later Vedic
description, is known as the sun and light. In the form
of the sun, Agni is regarded as the soul, and also as the
ruler and preserver of the world (Maitrayana Upanishad,
Chapter 6, Verse 35).
These ve Great Elements, taken together, denote the
deep bond between human beings and creation; as such,
Hindus are urged to show proper respect and due care for
these essential elements.
RESPECT FOR FAUNA IN HINDUISM
The most important aspect of the Hindu religion pertaining
to the treatment of animal life is the belief that the Supreme
Being was himself incarnated in the form of various species.
This Lord says, in one Purana:
this form is the source and indestructible seed of multifarious
incarnations within the universe, and from the particle and
portion of this form, different living entities, like demi-gods,
animals, human beings and others, are created.
(Srimad-Bhagavata Mahapurana, Book I, Discourse III:5)
This is further demonstrated by a famous series of divine
incarnations, as pertinently enunciated by Dr Karan Singh
(1986) in the Assisi Declaration. (These were declarations
on religion and nature made by religious leaders represent-
ing Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism and Islam
at the Basilica di S Francesco, Assisi, Italy, 29 September
1986 at the time of the 25th Anniversary of the World Wide
Fund for Nature):
the evolution of life on this planet is symbolized by a series
of divine incarnations beginning with sh, moving through
amphibious forms and mammals, and then on into human
incarnations. This view clearly holds that man did not spring
fully formed to dominate the lesser lifeforms, but rather evolved
out of these forms itself, and is therefore integrally linked to
the whole of creation.
Among the series of incarnations of Vishnu (Vishnu
is one of the Hindu Trinity who incarnates on earth to
protect righteousness and good), was his rst appearance
in the form of Matsya (a giant sh), when due to the
continuous rain, the entire earth was going to be submerged
in water. This giant sh appeared with a mysterious boat
into which a human pair went along with samples of all
herbs, seeds, and all kinds of living creatures. After the
rains stopped, a new creation began. The second incarnation
was in the form of Kurma (a tortoise), when because
of the churning of the Ksheer Sagar (Milky Ocean), a
tortoise was needed to hold Mount Mandarachal, which
was being used as a churning pestle. Without churning
the sea, the demi-gods would not obtain the nectar to
make them invincible when ghting with demons. The
third incarnation was in the form of Varaha (a boar):
when a demon king Hiranyaksha captured the earth, the
boar hid it under massive garbage with unendurable stench
and lth; and thus the earth was rescued. The fourth
incarnation was in the form of Narasingha (half-man half-
lion) to ght the demon king Hiranyakashyap, who after
defeating all demi-gods had declared himself to be the
God of universe. Since the demon King was indestructible
by man or animal, the god Vishnu had to be incarnated
in the form of a manlion. The fth incarnation was in
the form of Vamana (a dwarf) when another demon-king
Bali became so powerful that he defeated all demi-gods
and conquered the entire universe. So Vishnu appeared
in the form of a dwarf brahman, visited the court of
Bali, and retrieved the entire universe, and restored demi-
gods to their place in heaven. The sixth, seventh, eighth
306 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
and ninth incarnations were in the form of humans to
protect the earth from oppressors and tyrants. But as Rama
(the seventh incarnation), he was closely associated with
monkeys, and as Krishna (the eighth incarnation as a
cowherd) he was surrounded by cows, peacocks, deer, etc.
The ninth incarnation was in the form of the Buddha who
preached non-violence towards all creatures. So, since Lord
Vishnu was incarnated into various living forms, Hindus
accord reverence to species.
The Srimad Bhagavatam Mahapurana further states:
one should look upon deer, camels, monkeys, donkeys, rats,
reptiles, birds, and ies as though they were their own children.
(Book 7, Discourse XIV:9)
In addition to this, many animals and birds are revered
by Hindus as these are consort of various gods, goddesses,
and incarnations, as illustrated in Table 1.
Almost all the Hindu scriptures place a strong emphasis
on the notion that Gods grace cannot be received by killing
animals or harming other creatures. That is why not eating
meat is considered both appropriate conduct and ones
Dharma (Dharma is considered as the Cosmic order, duties
and obligations based on social and religious laws handed
down by tradition and practices).
Further, in the Manusmriti, a warning is given that:
a person who kills an animal for meat will die of a violent
death as many times as there are hairs of that killed animal.
(Manusmriti, Chapter 5, Verse 38)
Table 1 Animals and Wildlife Associ-
ated with Gods/Goddesses
a
Associated with
Animals/Birds Gods and Goddesses
Lion Durga
Wild goose Brahma
Elephant Indra, Ganesha
Bull Shiva
Rat Ganesha
Swan Saraswati
Eagle Vishnu
Serpent Shiva, Sun
Fish Kama
Monkey Rama
Horse Sun
Peacock Kartikeya, Saraswati
Parrot Kama
Owl Lakshmi
Vulture Shani
Crocodile Ganga River
Tortoise Yamuna River
Tiger Katyayani
Dog Bhairava, Dattatreya
Deer Vayu
Donkey Shitla
Makar Kama, Varuna
a
Source: Dwivedi and Tiwari (1987).
Similarly, the Yajnavalkya Smriti warns of hell-re
(Ghora Naraka) to those who are killers of domesticated
and protected animals:
the wicked person who kills animals which are protected has
to live in hell-re for the days equal to the number of hairs on
the body of that animal.
(Yajnavalkya Smriti, Acaradhyayah, Verse 180)
Further, in the Narsingha Purana, it is mentioned that a
person who roasts a bird for eating will surely be a sinner.
In Mahabharata, there is a story concerning Rishis and
God debating the merits of offering grain or the sacricial
lamb (goat) at the end of Yajna; the Rishis insisted that
according to the Vedas, the sacricial material ought to be
grain only. It seems that the practice of grain sacrice might
have started from that time. In summary, Hindu scriptures
enjoin its followers from hurting animals.
RESPECT FOR FLORA IN THE HINDU
RELIGION
As early as in the time of the Rig Veda, tree worship was
quite popular and universal in India. The tree symbolized
the various attributes of God to the Vedic seers. The Rig
Veda regarded plants as having divine powers, with one
entire hymn devoted to their praise, chiey with reference
to their healing properties (Rig Veda, 10.97). During the
period of the great epics and Puranas, the Hindu respect
for ora expanded further. Trees were considered as being
animate, feeling happiness and sorrow. Green trees were
likened to a living person, as illustrated by the following
verse from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (3.9.28):
just like a tree, the prince of the forest, so the man is, in truth;
His hairs are the leaves, his skin resembles the external bark.
Out of his skin streams forth the blood, like the juice or the
sap out of the tree.
It ows out from the wounded man, like the sap of the
tree, when it is cut.
The esh is comparable to the wood (of the tree), the
sinews are like the inner bark;
The strong bones are like the inner core of the wood, the
marrow resembles the marrow (pith) of the tree.
The Hindu worship of trees and plants has been based
partly on utility, but mostly because of the divinity assigned
to them. Ancient Hindus considered it their duty to save
trees, and in order to do so they attached to every tree a
religious sanctity. The following deities, for example, are
considered to have made their abode in these trees/plants:
Lakshmi in Tulasi (Ocinlum sanctum), Shitala in Neem,
Vishnu in Pipal/Bodhi (Ficus religiosa), Buddha in Ashoka,
Shiva in Bilva/Bela (Aegle marmelos), Brahma and Vishnu
in Vata (Ficus indica), Van Durga (tree deity) in Asvathha
(Tropbis aspera). Table 2 further illustrates the names of
HINDUISM AND THE ENVIRONMENT 307
Table 2 Trees and Plants Associated with Gods/God-
desses and Spirits
a
Trees/plants Associated with Gods/Goddesses
Asvathha Vishnu, Lakshmi, Ancestors
Vata Brahma, Vishnu, Hari, Kuber
Tulasi Lakshmi, Vishnu, Ancestors
Soma Moon
Bela Maheshwar (Shiva)
Ashoka Buddha, Indra
Amalaki Lakshmi, Kartikeya
Tala Buddha, Spirits
Mango Lakshmi, Govardhan
Kadamba Krishna
Neem Shitala, Mansa
Palasa Brahma, Gandharva
Pipal Vishnu, Krishna, Ancestors
Fig Vishnu, Rudra
Narikel (coconut) Moon
Sheora Van-Durga, Lakshmi
Sij Shitala
Tamal Krishna
a
Source: Dwivedi and Tiwari (1987).
certain trees and plants that are closely associated with
various deities.
In India, Nepal and Bhutan, there are many sacred forests
and groves where green trees and plants are protected. Also,
for Hindus, the planting of a tree is still a religious duty.
Thus, sanctity has been attached to many trees and plants.
Through such exhortations and various writings, the Hindu
religion has provided a system of moral guidelines towards
environmental preservation and conservation.
Perhaps this rationale impelled the Hindu law-giver Rishi
Manu when he declared that people should not fell green
trees even for fuel (Manusmriti, Chapter 11, Verse 64). The
cutting of trees and destruction of ora was considered a
sinful act. Later, Kautilyas Arthasastra prescribed various
punishments for destroying trees and plants (Kautilyas
Arthasastra III 19:197):
for cutting off the tender sprouts of fruit trees, or shady trees in
the parks near a city, a ne of six panas shall be imposed; for
cutting of the minor branches of the same trees, twelve panas,
and for cutting off the big branches, twenty four panas shall
be levied. Cutting off the trunks of the same, shall be punished
with the rst amercement; and felling shall be punished with
the middlemost amercement.
Even in modern times, it is popularly believed by Hin-
dus that many trees have their own deity, Vriksha-devata
or Van-devi, who is worshipped with prayers and offer-
ings of water, owers, sweets, and encircled by sacred
threads (Dwivedi and Tiwari, 1987). That is why for Hin-
dus, forests were never seen as places of darkness and
unknown dangers (akin to what Europeans thought), instead
these were places of worship, meditation and intimate
harmony.
POLLUTION AND ITS PREVENTION IN HINDU
SCRIPTURES
Hindu scriptures reveal a clear conception of what can
be called an eco-care system. On this basis, a discipline
of environmental ethics developed that formulated codes
of conduct (Dharma) and dened humanitys relationship
to nature. An important part of conduct is maintaining
proper sanitation. In the past, this was considered to be
the duty of everyone and any default was a punishable
offence. As Kautilya wrote (Kautilyas Arthasastra, Book
II, Chapter 36, Verse 145):
the punishment of one-eighth of a pana should be awarded to
those who throw dirt on the roads. For muddy water one-fourth
pana, if both are thrown the punishment should be double. If
latrine is thrown or caused near a temple, well, or pond, sacred
place, or government building, then the punishment should
increase gradually by one pana in each case. For urine the
punishment should be only half.
Hindus considered the cremation of dead bodies and the
sanitary maintenance of the human habitat to be essential
acts. When, in about 200 BCE, Charaka wrote about Vikriti
(pollution) and diseases, caused by pollution of air and
waters, specically about air pollution (Charaka Samhita,
Book Vimanastanam, Chapter III, Verse 6.1), he said:
the polluted air is mixed with unhealthy elements. The air is
uncharacteristic of the season, full of moisture, stormy, hard to
breath, icy cool, hot and dry, harmful, roaring, coming at the
same time from all directions, bad smelling, oily, full of dirt,
sand, steam, creating diseases in the body and is considered
polluted.
And about water pollution, he wrote (Charaka Samhita,
Book Vimanastanam, Chapter III, Verse 6.2):
water is considered polluted when it is excessively smelly,
unnatural in colour, taste and touch, slimy, not frequented by
aquatic birds, aquatic life is reduced, and the appearance is
unpleasing.
The healing properties and medicinal value of water have
been universally accepted provided it is pure and free
from all pollution. Ancient Indian thinkers were aware of
the reasons for polluted water. That is why Manu advised:
One should not cause urine, stool, cough in the water. Anything
which is mixed with these un-pious objects, blood and poison,
should not be thrown into water.
(Manusmriti, Book IV, Verse 56)
Today, many rivers are still considered sacred. Among
these, the river Ganga is considered by Hindus as the most
sacred body of water. In Pravascitta Tatva (1.535), disposal
of human waste or other pollutants there has been prohibited
since time immemorial (Dwivedi and Tiwari, 1987, 84):
one should not perform these 14 acts near the holy waters of
the river Ganga: i.e., putting excrement, brushing and gargling,
308 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
removing cerumen from body, throwing hairs, dry garlands,
playing in water, taking donations, performing sex, having
attachment with other sacred places, praising other holy places,
washing clothes, throwing dirty clothes, thumping water and
swimming.
Needless to say, this prohibition has been more honored
in the breach than the observance nowadays.
On pollution in general, the great epic, Mahabharata
mentions that:
from pollution, two types of diseases occur in human beings.
The rst, which is related with body and the other with mind,
and both are inter-connected. One follows the other and none
exists without the other.
(Mahabharata, Rajdharmanusasanparva, Chapter 16, Verses 8 9)
The above-listed examples show that during ancient times,
eco-care was proclaimed, and probably practiced where
possible. Through these injunctions and religious duties,
a mechanism was developed to create a proper respect
for nature a mechanism based on cosmic ordinance and
divine law which provided a base for eco-spirituality.
KARMA, THE CYCLE OF BIRTH AND REBIRTH
AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Karma means all deeds/actions performed and their con-
sequences, which govern a person s life, and which may
continue in the next life because of the philosophy of the
migration of soul from one birth to another. People often
confuse the Law of Karma with the Law of destiny. The
Law of Karma may be said to mean that each act, will-
fully performed, leaves a consequence in its wake. These
consequences, also called Karma-Phala (fruits or effects of
action) remain always with us, although their impact may
not be felt immediately. It also means that every action per-
formed creates its own chain of reactions and events, some
of which are immediately visible, while others take time
to surface. Environmental pollution is but one example of
the Karma of those people who thought that they could
continue polluting the environment without realizing the
consequences of their actions for future generations. As a
matter of fact, there is a boomerang effect of our Karma;
or to put it another way, whatever action we do on oth-
ers recoils, although not always by a direct reaction and
not immediately but often by unconnected ways, on our
lives, and sometimes in its own exact measure (Dwivedi,
1994).
Once the cycle of Karma starts, it continues without a
break; and although a person may be dead, yet Karma
survives in the form of a memory on to the next life of
a departed soul. As it is mentioned in Mahabharata:
an action which has been committed by a human being in this
life, follows him again and again (whether he wishes it or not).
(Shanti Parva, 139:22)
It is dif cult to say when a human being rst got involved
in the cycle of Karma, but once a person is in it, he/she
cannot escape, even if incarnated in new and different forms
in this world. The main reason for its continuation is the
indestructible nature of the energy of Karma; it is this
energy that may appear today under one name and form,
but will reappear under another name and form when the
former has died. In this way, Karma is related to the Hindu
concept of re-birth (Punarjanma) because the reappearance
in various forms is the cycle of birth and death. That is
why, in Hindu scriptures, the Atman (soul) never dies, it
is eternal, but at the same time it is involved in the cycle
of Karma. It is for this reason that Hindus believe that one
must suffer tomorrow for what one does today; and the day
after tomorrow, for what one does tomorrow; and nally,
one suffers in the next life for what one does in this life;
and in this way the cycle of Punarjanma continues. This is
what was also said by Bhisma to King Yudhisthira after the
Great War of Mahabharata:
O King, although a particular person may not be seen suffering
the results of his evil actions, yet his children and grandchildren
as well as great grandchildren will have to suffer the results of
those actions.
(Mahabharata, Shanti Parva, 129:21)
The environmental crisis facing humanity today relates
to the concept of Karma, which becomes even more signif-
icant. For in Hindu scripture, the rewards or punishment of
Karma are described as events that will happen in the future,
and sacri ce is described as Apurva (futuristic) Karma-
Phala, the results of which have not yet been seen. We
need to realize that the destruction that we are in icting
on our natural surroundings will have future repercussions,
which will be felt not only by our children, but also by our-
selves due to the Law of Karma, which causes us to return
to earth in a subsequent birth.
If we recognize and act on this philosophy of life, then
and only then will people start paying due respect to nature
as well as taking a stake in the care for the environment.
Finally, the concept of Karma envisions an interrelatedness
between what we do in this world and what may result now
and/or in the future. This appreciation is the key to the point
being made here. All of our actions are interrelated with and
interconnected to what eventually happens in this world.
Although we may not face the consequences individually,
nevertheless, someone else will be burdened with or bene t
from our actions. It is in this context that the concept
of Karma as a guiding force to protect the environment
becomes meaningful.
The Hindu belief in the cycle of birth and rebirth, wherein
a person may come back as an animal or a bird, gives these
species not only respect, but also reverence. This provides a
solid foundation for the doctrine of Ahimsa non-violence
(or non-injury) against animals and human beings alike.
Hindus have a deep faith in the doctrine of non-violence. It
HINDUISM AND THE ENVIRONMENT 309
should be noted that the doctrine of Ahimsa presupposes the
doctrine of Karma and the doctrine of rebirth (punarjanma).
The soul is continually reborn in different life forms such as
birds, sh, animals, and humans. Based on this belief, there
is a profound opposition in the Hindu religion (as well as in
Buddhist and Jain religions) to the institutionalized killing
of animals, birds and sh for human consumption. Not
only, as mentioned, do almost all of the Hindu scriptures
place strong emphasis on the notion that Gods grace can
be received by not killing his creatures or harming his
creation (Dwivedi, 1997a); but further, the pain a human
being causes to other living creatures will eventually return
to that person later, either in this life or in a later rebirth.
It is through the transmigration of the soul that a link is
provided between the lowliest forms of life with human
beings.
HINDU ECO-SPIRITUALITY TODAY?
Hindu eco-spirituality, in ancient and medieval times, has
provided a system of moral guidelines towards environmen-
tal preservation and conservation. Environmental ethics, as
propounded by ancient Hindu scriptures and seers, were
practiced not only by common persons, but even by rulers
and kings. They observed these fundamentals, sometimes
as religious duties, often as rules of administration or obli-
gations for law and order, but always as principles properly
knitted into the Hindu way of life. That way of life enabled
Hindus, as well as other religious groups residing in India,
to carefully use natural resources, but not to have any
divine power of control and dominion over nature and its
elements.
If such has been the tradition, philosophy, and ideology
of Hindu religion, what then are the reasons behind the
present state of environmental crisis facing India; and more
specically, the seeming indifference about environmental
protection and conservation among the masses? As we
have seen, ethical beliefs and religious values inuence
peoples behavior towards others, including our relationship
with all creatures and plant life. If, for some reason, those
noble values become displaced by other beliefs, that are
either thrust upon the society or transplanted from another
culture through invasion (as happened later in India), then
the faith of the masses in its earlier spiritual tradition is
shaken.
Given about nine centuries of foreign religious and cul-
tural domination by Islamic and Christian cultures, which
penetrated all levels of Hindu society, appropriate answers
and leadership did not come from its religious leaders and
priests; consequently, the masses became ritualistic and
inward looking. Added to this are the forces of materialism,
consumerism, individual and corporate greed, and the capri-
ciousness and corruption among politicians, bureaucrats and
business people. Under such circumstances, religious values
that acted as sanctions against environmental destruction
have been sidelined as those insidious forces inhibit the
religion from continuing to transmit the ancient values
which encouraged respect and due regard for Gods Cre-
ation (Dwivedi, 2000b).
How can the original ancient values and wisdom be
transmitted into practice? Can there be an approach for
a Dharmic ecology? Can there be a practical Dharmic
ecology? And can it be practiced in India?
Many people wrongly believe that India is a Hindu coun-
try, not realizing that it is a secular state where secularism,
as practiced nowadays, means a disregard for all religions,
especially the mainstream Hindu religion and culture. As
such, it will take time for any Dharmic ecology to be oper-
ationalized in India. Besides, it is not sufcient to examine
and extol the ancient wisdom of Hindu seers, to dwell on
the Vedic and Puranic heritage, and then simply hope that
a self-correcting process and automatic implementation of
those noble ideas will take place to remedy those environ-
mental problems.
What is more important is how to put into practice
an ecological vision and to make it relevant to modern
times. A common strategy for environmental stewardship
needs to be developed so that, in the end, people will
subscribe to an environmentally caring world. That strategy
requires that people show their commitment and care, both
individually and collectively, for Mother Earth, and for her
natural gifts, which sustain our life-system. Because unless
people are able to inculcate eco-care vision, there will be
no sustainable future.
It is worth pointing out in this context that we can
draw on the powerful concept of satyagraha, which lit-
erally means persistence and endurance for the truth. This
concept excludes the use of violence, because it is believed
that, since humans are not capable of knowing absolute
truth, we are not competent to punish. The word satya-
graha was initially coined in South Africa by the most
famous modern Indian, Mahatma Gandhi (see Gandhi,
Mohandas Karamchand, Volume 5) to distinguish the
non-violent resistance of the Indians of South Africa from
the contemporary passive resistance of suffragettes and oth-
ers. Non-violent resistance embodies ve basic elements
that ought to be followed by those who wish to use this
technique. These ve elements are purity of: (a) motive;
(b) means to be used; (c) suitability of place; (d) time;
and (e) the mental status of the doer/agent. An action is a
vishuddha dharmic ashtra (a righteous and proper weapon)
if it meets those ve conditions. Thus, satyagraha is not
conceived as a weapon for the weak only; furthermore, it
is different from civil disobedience, passive resistance, and
non-cooperation.
Satyagraha differs from passive resistance in that the
latter has been regarded as a weapon of the feeble.
While it avoids violence, passive resistance does not
310 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
exclude the use of violence if, in the opinion of the
passive resister, the occasion demands it. However, it
has always been distinguished from armed resistance,
and its use was at one time conned to the Christian
martyrs.
Civil disobedience, although being a branch of Satya-
graha, is still different to non-violent resistance. Civil
disobedience is a response to immoral statutory enact-
ments, and signies a persons displeasure with some
statutory law (it was rst used to show displeasure at
paying taxes). Civil disobedience presupposes the habit
of willing obedience to laws without fear of sanctions;
therefore, it can be practiced only as a last resort and
by a select few in the rst instance at any rate (Gandhi,
1961, 325). Furthermore, it should be noted that non-
cooperation predominantly consists of the individual with-
drawing cooperation from the state that has become corrupt
or immoral, but excludes the use of civil disobedience
which results in state-inicted punishment. Civil disobe-
dience is a branch of Satyagraha, for it can be prac-
ticed by children and the masses, but it does differ in
fundamentals.
Carried to its utmost limit, Satyagraha is independent
of monetary or other material assistance, and denitely
independent of physical force or violence. As Gandhi
said:
Indeed, violence is the negation of this great spiritual force,
which can only be cultivated or wielded by those who will
entirely eschew violence.
(Gandhi, 1961, p. 34)
It is a force that may be used by individuals and com-
munities, and which may be used in domestic as well
as political affairs. This universal applicability is thus
an example of its permanence and invincibility. It can
be used by men, women and children, as long as they
are not capable of meeting violence by violence. There-
fore, Gandhi believed satyagraha to be an effective tool
in the ght for truth and a basis for non-violent resis-
tance.
In relation to the environmental crisis, this Gandhian phi-
losophy has been effectively used in India. The example
of the Chipko movement is an illustration that non-
violent resistance can work toward environmental protec-
tion (Dwivedi, 1997b) (see Chipko Movement, Volume 5).
Another example is the Narmada Bachao Andolan (the
movement to save Narmada River from damming), which
has forced the World Bank to reconsider its loan to India
for that massive hydroelectricity project.
We therefore need to consider a satyagraha for the
environment saturated with the concepts of eco-care and
Dharmic ecology; and we need to become effective
advocates and practitioners of this approach, rather than
staying on the sidelines. Hindu religious leaders should:
take initiative and help secular institutions by providing
timely and appropriate advice to encourage greater
integration of eco-care approaches into the educational
curricula;
strengthen the capability of secular institutions to meet
their goals of sustainable development and environ-
mental conservation;
promote the important concept of Sarva bhoot hitey
ratah (serving all beings equally);
take the lead in promoting the concept of Vasudhaiv
Kutumbakam, i.e., the family of Mother Earth, and the
obligation of humanity to accept a world of material
limits;
protect and restore places of ecological, cultural, aes-
thetic and spiritual signicance; and
build partnerships across social, economic, political
and environmental sectors, including dialogue with
other religions and spiritual traditions (Dwivedi,
2000a).
The choice before the Hindu religion (as well as before
all other religions) is either to care for the environment
or be a silent participant in the destruction of planetary
resources. Partnership with secular institutions must be
forged and cooperation fostered at local, regional, national
and international levels. An environmental and sustain-
able development strategy, based on the lines suggested
above, could offer a way of bridging the gap and making
the essential link between secular, scientic and spiritual
forces.
NOTES
Verses quoted in English from various Upanishads are from
Deussen (1980); verses in Sanskrit for Isavasya Upanishad,
Aitareya Upanishad and Shvetashvatara Upanishad are from
Upanishad Anka of Kalyan (1949).
REFERENCES
Deussen, P (1980) Sixty Upanisads of the Veda, translated from
German by V M Bedekar and G B Palsule, Motilal Banarsi-
dass, Delhi, 2 Volumes.
Dwivedi, O P (1994) Our Karma and Dharma to the Environment,
in Environmental Stewardship: History, Theory and Practice,
ed M A Beavis, Institute of Urban Studies, University of
Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Canada, 5974.
Dwivedi, O P (1997a) Vedic Heritage for Environmental Steward-
ship, Worldviews: Environ., Cult. Religion, 1(1), April, 2536.
HOMOCENTRIC 311
Dwivedi, O P (1997b) Indias Environmental Policies, Program-
mes and Stewardship, Macmillan Press, London.
Dwivedi, O P (1998) Vasudhaiv Kutumbakam: A Commentary
on Atharvediya Prithivi Sukta, 2nd edition, Institute for
Research and Advanced Studies, Jaipur, 1st edition published
in 1995.
Dwivedi, O P (2000a) Dharmic Ecology, in Hinduism and Ecol-
ogy: the Interaction of Earth, Sky and Water, eds C K Chapple
and M E Tucker, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA,
422.
Dwivedi, O P (2000b) Classical India, A Companion to Environ-
mental Philosophy, Blackwell, New York, 3750.
Dwivedi, O P and Tiwari, B N (1987) Environmental Crisis and
Hindu Religion, Gitanjali Publishing House, New Delhi.
Dwivedi, O P and Tiwari, B N (1999) Environmental Protec-
tion in Hindu Religion, in Ethical Perspectives on Environ-
mental Issues in India, ed G A James, APH, New Delhi,
172173.
Gandhi, M K (1961) Non-violent Resistance, Schocken Books,
New York.
Grifth, R T H (1889) The Hymns of the Rig Veda, ed J L Shastri,
1973, Motilal Banarasidass, Delhi.
Hume, R E (1977) The Thirteen Principal Upanishads, Oxford
University Press, New York.
James, G A (1998) Ethical Perspectives on Environmental Issues
in India, APH Publishing Co, New Delhi.
Kak, S (1994) The Evolution of Writing in India, Indian J. History
Sci., 28, 375388.
Kane, P V (1963) Dharmashastra Ka Itihas (in Hindi and San-
skrit languages), Uttar Pradesh Hindi Sansthan, Lucknow,
India.
Kautilyas Arthasastra (1967) ed R Shamasastry, Mysore Pub-
lishers, Mysore.
Lal, S K (1995) Pancamahabhutas: Origin and Myths in Vedic
Literature, in Prakrti: An Integral Vision, ed S Narayanan,
Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi,
521.
Satvalekar, P S D (1958) Prithivi Sukta: Atharvaveda, Book 12,
Swadhyay Mandal, Surat.
Singh, K (1986) The Hindu Declaration on Nature, The Assisi
Declarations (Messages on Man and Nature) made at Assisi,
Italy, 29 September.
Srimad Bhagavata Mahapurana (1982) Translated by C L Gos-
wami and M A Shastri, Gita Press, Gorakhpur.
Tilak, B G (1936) Gita Rahasya, Tilak Brothers, Poona.
Upanishad Anka of Kalyan (1949) Gita Press, Gorakhpur, 23(1).
FURTHER READING
Atharva Veda (1982) Translated by Devi Chand, Munsiram Mano-
harlal Publishers, New Delhi.
Charaka-Samhita (1983) Translated by Priyavrat Sharma,
Varanasi, Chaukhambha Orientalia.
Mahabharata (1988) Translated by M N Dutta, Parimal, Delhi.
Mahabharata (1994) Gita Press, Gorakhpur, Gorakhpur, India in
Sanskrit with Hindi translation.
Manusmriti (The Laws of Manu) (1975) Translated by G Buhler,
Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi.
Rigveda (1974) Commentary by M D Saraswati, 12 volumes,
Sarvadeshik Arya Pratinidhi Sabha, New Delhi.
Holon
see Phase Shifts or Flip-ops in Complex
Systems (Volume 5)
Homocentric
Carolyn Merchant (1992, Radical Ecology) applies the term
homocentric to an anthropocentric position that fosters
care and stewardship for nature for humanistic as dis-
tinct from ecocentric reasons. Since the environment is
crucial to human well-being and survival, then we have
an indirect duty towards it one derived from commu-
nal human interests. This means assuring that the Earth
remains environmentally hospitable to human life, and that
its beauty and resources are preserved so human life may
continue to be pleasant. As such, homocentrism is to be
further distinguished from egocentrism, where the latter
is an anthropocentrism based on prioritizing the desires
of individuals rather than the communal good. Egocen-
trism underpins laissez-faire capitalism, with its inherent
tendencies to exploit the environment, whereas homocen-
trism would, at the very least, regulate the market for the
sake of wider social and environmental goals or even
replace capitalism by socialism. Both utilitarianism and
Marxism espouse a homocentric ethic, hence eco-socialism
is a homocentric variety of radical environmentalism, as is,
according to Merchant, social ecology.
Homocentric ethics focus on society, therefore empha-
sizing the social good and social justice owing from the
(Christian) ethic of environmental stewardship. Unlike eco-
centrism, which would protect nature for its intrinsic value,
homocentrisms utilitarianism would allow managed trans-
formation of nature where the resulting sum of human
welfare was to be increased over that accruing by leaving
it alone.
As Merchant describes it, homocentrisms ethics com-
bine the mechanistic approach of egocentrism with the
organicism of ecocentrism. Effectively this means that
312 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
homocentrism would apply science and technology derived
from analytical and reductionist thinking in the cause
of furthering what is seen as an intimate, organic and
dialectical relationship between society and nature (see
Ecocentr ic, Biocentr ic, Gaiacentr ic, Volume 5).
DAVID PEPPER UK
Human Body, Immediate
Environment
Catriona Sandilands
York University, Toronto, Canada
The human body is a site of environmental change at a
variety of levels. Perhaps most obviously, the impacts of
many environmental problems are tangibly experienced by
human beings as bodily symptoms; from sunburns to can-
cers, environmental degradation becomes part of everyday
knowledge for many people through questions of bodily
harm and danger. In this view, the body is a site for research
concerning the consequences of particular environmental
changes on human life; it is also a powerful trope for forms
of political mobilization that link human health and environ-
mental protection, including breast cancer and anti-nuclear
activism.
Broadly speaking, the human body is the site of our pri-
mary physical experience and knowledge of environments;
we interact with our environments through (at least) the
bodily processes of touch, taste, smell, sight and hear-
ing. These sensory sources of knowledge are inuenced
by our species physiology (e.g., human beings have differ-
ently organized senses than bees), but also by our specic
cultures and activities (e.g., automobile travel, horseback
riding and walking lead to very different views of a
landscape). Viewed as sites where culture and physiology
interact, bodies are important for understanding both onto-
logical and epistemological dimensions of environmental
change.
According to geographer Neil Smith, the body is a
socially and physiologically constituted scale of place in
which varied changes occur and interact, including bio-
logical maturation and decay, social identication and
differentiation, and daily and intergenerational reproduc-
tion (Smith, 1991). In this sense, the human body is an
environment, a site in and over which multiple conicts
and struggles take place: access, control, pleasure and
pain, health, meaning, interpretation, mobility. The phys-
ical/social constitution of the body can thus be seen as a
site of environmental change. Larger-scale environmental
processes can also be understood as having specic mani-
festations in the environment of the body; the human body
is understood not just as an effect of other scales of change
but as a unique site where changes occur in particular ways,
at least in part because of particular social and cultural
relations of that scale. The prevalence and distribution of
breast cancers in industrialized nations, for example, cannot
be understood without reference both to the physiological
impact of environmental hazards on womens bodies (e.g.,
the presence of organochlorines in water and consumer
products) and to the complex social relations in and through
which womens bodies have different histories (e.g., of
such risk factors as exposure to toxins, access to health
care and experiences of childbearing, variously affected by
class, race, ability and sexual orientation). Altogether, these
factors highlight the complexity of body/environment pol-
itics and the importance of an approach to environmental
change that includes social and cultural elements; we are
not, in fact, all in the same boat.
In a related vein, Elizabeth Grosz argues that bodies
and environments are mutually dening (Grosz, 1995).
Environments including both their biological and cultural
elements orient and organize bodily senses and perceptual
(spatial) information; they also leave traces on and in the
body in the form of symptoms but also memories and
desires. These impacts inspire particular forms of bodily
action, in which the body becomes a site or agent of
intervention into that environment. For example, a hot and
humid day may inspire some people to use air conditioning
and others to enjoy the heat; the more people that choose the
former, the more energy use and air pollution, thus having
an impact on the atmosphere, etc. Far from there being a
single, natural reaction to an environmental change, bodies
are encultured (e.g., ones preference for cooler or warmer
temperatures is, at least in part, a question of memory and
desire); they are also active participants in the environments
that shape them.
Although this understanding of mutual inuence between
bodies and environments may seem commonsensical, it is
important to note its implications. First, as Grosz (1995,
109) writes, if bodies are not pregiven, environ-
ments cannot alienate the very bodies they produce . In
other words, there is no single ideal environment for the
body, and the appropriateness of any given one has a great
deal to do with social and cultural factors (this is not to
say that there are no limits to possibility, only that there
is certainly more than one). Second, if bodies and environ-
ments are involved in a dialectical relationship, and if there
HUMAN BODY, IMMEDIATE ENVIRONMENT 313
is no single and biologically a priori template for the ideal
form of this relationship, then it becomes of paramount
importance for environmentalists to investigate a variety of
different axes of in uence. Speci cally, as is suggested in
much contemporary environmental thought, forms of social,
political, and economic power have an enormous effect not
only on bodies and environments individually, but on their
modes of interaction.
In these respects, the ontological question of mutual
body/environment in uence is also an epistemological
question; bodies shape knowledge of environments, and
vice versa. Although sensory experience is clearly part of
the creation of this knowledge, it is also the case that more
socially and culturally sedimented in uences are at work.
Bodies and environments can, in the terms of social theory,
thus be understood as sites of inscription (meaning that they
are partly de ned by culture) and as elements of discourse
(meaning that they circulate as signs within the realm of
language, artifact and culture). Such understandings are
signi cant because they point to the fact that representations
of the human body as environment are, in fact, themselves
an important part of the process of environmental change.
For example, the metaphorical understanding of the earth as
a human body, often (as in the case of some Gaia imagery)
a female one, has led historically (and may continue to lead)
to particular, often damaging assumptions about the nature
of each.
REFERENCES
Grosz, E (1995) Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Poli-
tics of Bodies, Routledge, London.
Smith, N (1991) Homeless/Global: Scaling Places, in Mapping the
Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, eds J Bird, B Curtis,
T Putnam, G Robertson, and L Tickner, Routledge, London.
Human Dimensions of Global
Change
see Scientic Responses in an Era of Global
Environmental Change (Opening essay,
Volume 4); The Human Dimensions of Global
Change (Introductory essay, Volume 5)
Human Ecology
see The Changing HumanNature
Relationships (HNR) in the Context of Global
Environmental Change (Opening essay,
Volume 5)
I
I PAT Equation
see Modeling Human Dimensions of Global
Environmental Change (Opening essay,
Volume 5)
Index of Sustainable Economic
Welfare (ISEW) and Genuine
Progress Indicator (GPI)
see ISEW (Index of Sustainable Economic
Welfare) and GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator)
(Volume 5)
Indigenous Knowledge,
Peoples and Sustainable
Practice
Douglas Nakashima
1
and Marie Rou e
2
1
UNESCO, Paris, France
2
Centre National de la Recherche Scientique, Paris,
France
Indigenous knowledge is entering into the mainstream of
sustainable development and biodiversity conservation dis-
course. Article 8(j) of the Convention of Biological Diversity
(Rio, 1992) has contributed to this process by requiring
signatories to: respect, preserve and maintain knowledge,
innovations and practices of indigenous and local com-
munities embodying traditional life-styles relevant for the
conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity.
As the potential contribution of indigenous knowledge to
key items on the global agenda gains widening recognition,
an increasing number of scientists and policy-makers are
calling for the integration of indigenous and science-based
knowledge.
While indigenous peoples who have been lobbying for
such recognition have reason to be satis ed, there are also
reasons for concern. Are scientists serious enough about this
emerging issue to go so far as to question the construction
of their own knowledge? Or at the end of the day, will they
do little more than add a veneer of traditional ecological
knowledge (TEK) and then carry on business as usual? For
the time being, the scienti c and the development commu-
nities views indigenous knowledge rst and foremost as a
resource to be appropriated and exploited. Integration with
(or more accurately into) science implies the application of
a validation process based on scienti c criteria that purport-
edly separates the useful from the useless, objective from
subjective, indigenous science from indigenous beliefs.
Through this process, knowledge corresponding with the
paradigm of Western science is extracted, and the rest is
rejected. While this cognitive mining may be pro table to
science, it threatens indigenous knowledge systems with dis-
memberment and dispossession.
INDIGENOUS, LOCAL OR TRADITIONAL
ECOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE (TEK)?
The challenge of understanding indigenous knowledge be-
gins with the perplexing task of deciding how it should be
named. On this matter, few persons agree. Or to be more
precise, everyone recognizes that existing terms are for
one reason or another unsatisfactory. Should one speak of
TEK, the term coined when the eld emerged in the public
arena in the 1980s? Or abandon this designation in favor
of the term indigenous knowledge? TEK has the advan-
tage of immediately evoking the temporal depth of these
sets of knowledge and of clearly agging their domain,
that of nature, while at the same time raising the question
of their relationship to the ecological sciences. Associat-
ing the term traditional, however, with societies that, in the
not so distant past, were dismissed as primitive or sav-
age raises the phantom of social Darwinism. The term
is all the more inappropriate, if our penchant for con-
structing binary oppositions leads us to conceive traditional
INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLES AND SUSTAINABLE PRACTICE 315
as a counterpoint to modern, and to think of traditional
knowledge as xed in the past and not susceptible to
change. Finally, it may be misleading to apply the term
ecological to sets of knowledge whose content and nature
extend well beyond the connes of one scientic discipline
to include such knowledge as the movements of constel-
lations, the strength of ocean currents or the elasticity of
sea ice, and to encompass not only empirical knowledge,
but also practices and know-how, value systems, ways of
life and worldviews. The fact is that indigenous peoples
do not share the dichotomous occidental worldview that
separates the material from the spiritual, nature from cul-
ture, and humankind from all other life forms, and as
a result they do not do science in isolation from other
pursuits.
While the label indigenous knowledge has the advan-
tage of explicitly designating one of the groups of peo-
ples most concerned those who designate themselves as
indigenous peoples, it raises other concerns. Who is indige-
nous and who is not? What peoples wish to be designated
by this term and which do not? Indeed, this label is
poorly adapted to the realities of Asia and Africa, where
all peoples are native and any attempt to designate one
group as indigenous but not another, provokes confusion.
In these regions, unlike in the Americas or Australia, his-
tories of human occupation have not followed a pattern
whereby a wave of colonizers coming from abroad has sup-
planted or dominated a population that, due to its earlier
and lengthy presence, is clearly identiable as aboriginal
or indigenous. Furthermore, in several African countries,
particularly former colonies of francophone nations, the
label indigenous has retained a strongly negative conno-
tation due to its past history of use by colonial oppressors.
For this reason, the expression farmers knowledge and
local knowledge are sometimes preferred. The term local
knowledge has the additional advantage of not excluding
non-indigenous farmers, shers, health practitioners and
others whose extensive knowledge of the natural milieu
is also a product of resource-based livelihoods extend-
ing across many generations. Its major weakness is a
lack of specicity, as most knowledge can be labeled
local.
Faced with the complexities of dening indigenous, spe-
cial rapporteur J R Martinez Cobo provided a report in
1983 to the United Nations (UN) Sub-Commission on
Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities,
in which he stressed the right of indigenous peoples them-
selves to dene what and who is indigenous. Further to
this principle of self-identication, criteria retained to dene
the quality of being indigenous include common ancestry
with original occupants, a distinct ethnic identity and shared
patterns of vulnerability. These denitions are clearly of
a political nature. They offer peoples encapsulated within
states that may be reluctant to recognize territorial rights or
the right to pursue a distinctive way of life, an opportunity
to assert their difference and their collective identity. The
debate on who and what to dene as indigenous is far from
closed, and it is unlikely that any single denition will
satisfy all parties. Today, the UN Working Group of Indige-
nous Peoples estimates the world population of indigenous
peoples as some 300 million, belonging to some 5000
groups in more than 70 countries, the largest population
residing in Asia.
WHAT IS INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE?
Indigenous knowledge systems are the complex arrays of
knowledge, know-how, practices and representations that
guide human societies in their innumerable interactions
with the natural milieu: agriculture and animal husbandry;
hunting, shing and gathering; struggles against disease
and injury; naming and explaining natural phenomena;
and strategies for coping with changing environments.
It is through this ne-grained interplay between soci-
ety and environment that indigenous knowledge systems
have developed diverse structures and content; complex-
ity, versatility and pragmatism; and distinctive patterns of
interpretation anchored in specic worldviews. Whereas
knowledge is conceived in Western culture as an abstract
entity independent from practice (e.g., science as opposed
to technology), such a compartmentalized view is alien
to indigenous societies. It would be self-defeating to con-
sider farmers knowledge of rain patterns, soil types and
crop varieties apart from the ways in which this informa-
tion is put into practice in their elds. In other words,
indigenous knowledge includes not only knowledge but
also know-how. Transmission is not only oral, but also
in the context of doing (Figure 1). Finally, unlike sci-
ence, indigenous knowledge does not oppose the secu-
lar to the spiritual, and therefore does not separate the
empirical and objective from the sacred and intuitive. In
indigenous societies, such boundaries are permeable. On
the one hand, much knowledge of nature falls within
the empirical realm. Hunters have detailed knowledge
of the habitat, behavior, diet and migration patterns of
their prey. Farmers know how crops should be rotated
to maintain soil fertility and which plant products have
insecticidal or medicinal properties. This science of the
concrete, however, blends imperceptibly into the meta-
physical realm. For the hunter, the success of the hunt
is as much due to assistance from spirit helpers, as it
is to skillful tracking and steady shooting. The contin-
ued ow of water for the farmers eld is attributed as
much to their respect for the deity of the sacred headwa-
ter forests, as to the water-drawing properties of the trees
themselves. The concrete and the spiritual co-exist side by
side, complementing and enriching rather then competing
and contradicting.
316 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Figure 1 Knowledge transmission through observation and practice: young Inuk boy helping his father skin and butcher
a caribou (Rangifer tarrandus) on the banks of the Kuujjuaq River (Arctic Quebec, Canada). (Photo by D Nakashima)
ON THE NATURE OF THE SCIENCE OF THE
CONCRETE
While the current wave of interest in indigenous knowledge
dates back no more than a few decades, the knowledge
systems themselves have accompanied humankind through
countless millennia of environmental change and cultural
adaptation. The societies that developed them did not wait
for ofcial recognition before forging cultural landscapes
and domesticating plants and animals that continue to play
a major role in todays global economy. In 1962, Claude
Levi-Strauss, a philosopher and renowned anthropologist,
published his seminal work on The Savage Mind. In his
opening chapter entitled the The Science of the Concrete,
he reects on the nature and character of indigenous know-
ledge, which he also qualies as mythical thought (Levi-
Strauss, 1962). More recently, Berkes (1999), a human
ecologist, has dedicated a book to indigenous knowledge
entitled Sacred Ecology. Between the early work of Levi-
Strauss and Berkes recent overview, numerous observers
have pondered over these knowledge systems. While some
accord them great value and others dismiss them as non-
sense, their dual nature, combining the material and the
spiritual, has been evident to all.
The rst scientist to dedicate himself to the contempo-
rary study of indigenous knowledge was Harold Conklin,
who completed his thesis at Yale University in 1954 on
The Relations of Hanunoo Culture to the Plant World (Con-
klin, 1954) (the Hanunoo are indigenous peoples of the
Philippines). Pioneering a new discipline, ethnoscience,
which would later come to be called the new ethnography,
he dedicated himself to the study of a societys knowl-
edge of its natural environment, through the examination
of indigenous semantic categories. It is true that studies
of human relations with plants and animals existed well
before the 1950s, and that this intellectual tradition con-
tinues to this day under various labels composed of the
prex ethno-, followed by a qualifying term: ethnob-
otany, ethnozoology, ethnominerology. Ethnoscience, how-
ever, introduced a radically different approach that focused
upon the knowledge of nature possessed by local peo-
ples themselves. Unlike ethnobotany or colonial economic
botany, which are basically applied Occidental sciences
carried out in exotic locations and among exotic peo-
ples, ethnoscience strives to understand the view from
within (an indigenous worldview). As a branch of cogni-
tive anthropology, it focuses upon elucidating a cultural
grammar, structures of thought built into the local lan-
guage. For the rst time, the recording of indigenous
taxonomies was to reveal not only the breadth of a peo-
ples knowledge, but also insights into its very nature
(cf. Friedeburg, 1979; Bulmer, 1979; Berlin, 1992; Ellen,
1993).
The classicatory prowess of indigenous peoples is on
a par with that of scientists. As Levi-Strauss has amply
demonstrated, the breadth of indigenous taxonomic know-
ledge is impressive: a single Seminole informant can iden-
tify 250 plant varieties and species, Hopi Indians recognize
350 plants, the Navajo more than 500. The Subanun of
the Philippines use more than 1000 botanical terms and
the Hanunoo, close to 2000. The diversity and sophistica-
tion of plant and animal use also attests to the subtlety
of indigenous observations and the capacity to system-
atize knowledge and know-how. The Buriyat of Siberia,
for example, derive from a single species, the bear, no less
than 52 therapeutic applications: seven distinct uses for the
INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLES AND SUSTAINABLE PRACTICE 317
meat, ve for the blood, nine for the fat, 12 for the brain,
17 for the bile, and two for the fur, etc.
As impressive as these gures may be, for the Hanunoo,
plants are not the stuff of lists, but rather objects of pas-
sionate and prolonged debate. Having rigorously recorded
Hanunoo discussions during and after the evening meal,
Conklin concluded that plants, especially cultivated vari-
eties, were the focus of a majority of exchanges. Combining
the expertise and interests of systematic and economic
botanists, Hanunoo conversations centered upon the hun-
dreds of characteristics which differentiate plant types and
often indicate signicant features of medicinal or nutri-
tional value (Conklin, 1954, 97). This knowledge is
acquired very young and expanded throughout an entire
lifetime. One morning, a seven-year-old Hanunoo girl
surprised Conklin by suggesting that he show her the
pictures of Browns three-volume guide to useful plants
of the Philippines. On her own initiative, she began to
comment on the text, assigning each plant a hanunoo
name, or solemnly declaring that she had not seen that
plant before. At the end of her remarkable performance,
she had identied 51 out of 75 plants with only two
errors!
While a science of the concrete might be expected
to have practical applications as its sole preoccupation,
Levi-Strauss argues that indigenous knowledge is motivated
by considerations other than utility. He cites Speck, for
example, who has documented for the Indians of northeast-
ern US and eastern Canada, an extensive herpetological
taxonomy that is comprised of distinct terms not only for
each genus, but also for species and certain varieties. Yet
this knowledge is not practical, as reptiles and amphib-
ians have no economic utility for these groups. Similarly,
not only do the Pygmies distinguish between a phenomenal
number of plants and animals, but they have also developed
detailed knowledge of the habits and behavior of several
species, including bats, that cannot be considered to be
useful to them. These and other examples, drawn from
numerous observers in diverse societies, have led Levi-
Strauss to conclude that it is not, as one might expect, use
that leads to knowledge. Of the endless trials conducted for
the sake of knowing, only a few end up providing useful
results:
animals and plants are not known because they are useful,
they are found to be useful or interesting because they are rst
known .
(Levi-Strauss, 1966, 9)
THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF SCIENCE AND OF
INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE
The image of the Other held by the West shifts from
one extreme to another. Since the time of the rst
encounter, indigenous peoples have always been a source of
fascination. For many Occidentals they embody the ultimate
otherness and, as such, they have been the object of both
admiration and scorn. Are the savages the embodiment
of our unattainable dreams of freedom, courage, purity,
simplicity and social equality? Or are they, as we imagine
we were before becoming civilized cunning, cruel,
ignorant, without faith or order, heeding only the law of
the jungle? Until the development of cultural ecology in
the 1960s (Lee and Devore, 1968), hunters and gatherers
were portrayed as our poor backward cousins, struggling
through great efforts and pains to maintain themselves just
at the brink of survival. Subsequently, they became the
distinguished representatives of what Sahlins (1972) has
termed the original afuent society, rich not in material
wealth, but luxuriating in time freed by the efcacy of
their adaptation to the natural milieu and the adoption of
a non-consumptive (Zen) lifestyle. Given these enduring
disparities between our views of indigenous peoples,
the deep ambivalence of our contemporary discourse on
indigenous knowledge should come as no surprise. It is
through pronouncements about the Other that Western
society plays out its own doubts and fears. In this period
of global change, have advances in science and technology
brought well-being or alienation to our societies?
Whenever the issue of indigenous knowledge is dis-
cussed, sooner or later the recurrent question of validity
is raised. Is it scientic? Or, being composed of odds and
ends, does it combine the best with the worst, juxtapos-
ing without distinction empirical observations and obscure
superstitions?
As a rst response, we must understand the persons
behind the question. Science is a social construction of
our own society, which being modern and Occidental is
determined both historically and geographically. It pre-
supposes a separation of the spiritual from the mate-
rial, of religion from knowledge, and of culture from
nature. Such a dissected worldview is not shared by
indigenous cultures whose philosophy is better charac-
terized as a cosmovision or as holistic. For this reason,
qualifying the knowledge of indigenous people as sci-
ence is both misrepresentation and reductionism. Nev-
ertheless, this fallacious and futile approach of seeking
ourselves in the Other has provided the basis for an
entire critique of indigenous knowledge. It is formulated
in most cases as negative denitions, i.e., what indige-
nous knowledge is not. For example, science denes
itself as experimental (deductions from hypotheses are
tested), systematic (results can be replicated) and uni-
versal (results are independent from context, as vari-
ables are isolated and controlled). In contrast, indigenous
knowledge is often said to be practical (determined by
immediate need and utility), local (only applicable in the
setting in which it was developed) and contingent (context
dependent).
318 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Some even speculate whether this knowledge might lie
somewhere between perception and conception, and bet-
ter be considered as much skill, as concept (Sillitoe,
1998, 229). How do New Guinea highlanders assess the
quality of their soil? Even if the results of their analysis
do not differ from that of the agronomist, they are rep-
rimanded for not being able to offer up on a platter the
analytical discourse that the scientist requires. When asked
to explain why or how, they reply: If one is a farmer,
one just knows . But in this dialogue between the deaf,
where are the barriers and to whose limits are they due?
Scientists conclude that indigenous people lack the analyt-
ical capacity to raise their skills from the plane of the local
and pragmatic to that of the systematized and universal
(Sillitoe, 1998). But as Sillitoes comments suggest, high-
lander farmers are undoubtedly equally frustrated by the
difculty of communicating their knowledge to scientists,
and bewildered by the constraints that the latter impose
on how knowledge must be packaged. Instead of opening
all intellectual and sensorial pathways (touch, smell, taste,
sight, sound) and accepting the farmers invitation to feel
the texture of the soil, smell its composition or taste its acid-
ity, scientists narrow-mindedly insist that explanations pass
by the single limited channel of an intellectual discourse
compatible with the Occidental literate tradition. For the
scientist, if a farmers knowledge cannot be reduced to the
written word, then it is not knowledge, but remains merely
skills.
All of these criticisms (or more politely, denitions of
what indigenous knowledge is not) arise from our own
ethnocentrism and an inability to extricate ourselves from
our own culturally-embedded point of view.
KNOWLEDGE AS A BASIS FOR
SUSTAINABLE PRACTICE
Overshadowed by the pomp and promise of modern sci-
ence and technology, indigenous knowledge systems have
been disregarded until recently. While scientists and devel-
opment agencies are only beginning to acknowledge their
signicance, their enduring role as the mainstay of local
food production and health care in the developing world
cannot be questioned. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example,
local knowledge guides the decisions and practices of
small-scale farmers who represent 7090% of agricultural
producers and more than 60% of the population. Artisanal
shers, who represent more than 90% of the sheries work
force world-wide, rely on their own knowledge and skills to
locate sh, navigate safely at sea and bring home the catch.
Similarly, it is estimated that some 80% of the worlds pop-
ulation fullls their primary health needs through the use
of traditional medicines. Even in industrialized countries,
local knowledge accumulated across generations continues
to play a fundamental role in sustaining localized resource
use practices whether they be small-scale farming, shing,
trapping or the gathering of wild produce.
Since the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and
Development, and in particular the coming into force of
the Convention on Biological Diversity, increasing atten-
tion has been drawn to the contributions that indigenous
knowledge can make to global biodiversity conservation
objectives. This emerging role for indigenous knowledge
holders has owed quite naturally from the recognition that
most remaining regions of the world that are biodiversity
rich are also homelands for traditional and indigenous peo-
ples. This is no simple coincidence, as in sharp contrast
with the biodiversity impoverishment that accompanies the
processes of modernization and industrialization, the persis-
tence of traditional ways of life has gone hand in hand with
the maintenance of local ecological systems and the con-
servation, and even enhancement, of biodiversity. In these
areas represented as wilderness or virgin in the Western
mind, indigenous knowledge participates in the transfor-
mation of nature to create cultural landscapes, the products
of social systemecosystem interaction. One dramatic, but
by no means unique, example of this process is the use of
re by Aboriginal peoples in Australia to create landscapes
that are ecological mosaics (cf. Case Study 1 below). This
sustainable practice, which is vital for maintaining biolog-
ical diversity, has now been integrated into National Park
policy in certain parts of Australia through directives that
explicitly call for the reinstatement of traditional Aboriginal
burning regimes.
Inventories of local biodiversity can also benet from
knowledge encoded in local languages in the form of
indigenous categories of natural objects. Finally, as indige-
nous peoples retain within their knowledge systems an
inter-generational memory of uctuations, trends and exc-
eptional events in relation to the local environment, they
can contribute importantly to understanding processes of
change, whether these might be long-term, global trans-
formation processes or circumscribed local events. The
invaluable contribution of indigenous knowledge to envi-
ronmental and social impact assessment processes, for
example, has been convincingly demonstrated.
Modernization and uniformization of agricultural prac-
tices has also triggered a severe loss of biological diversity
of domestic plant and animal stocks. Here again, pastoral
and peasant communities that have maintained traditional
modes of production have today become the major cus-
todians of the worlds crop and domestic animal diver-
sity. In tropical agroecosystems in Thailand and Indonesia,
for example, peasants commonly maintain more than 100
domestic plant species, as well as harboring in their paddies,
rice varieties adapted to a range of environmental conditions
(Altieri, 1999). Slash and burn agriculture as practiced by
the Karen of northern Thailand offers one example of a sus-
tainable farming system based upon indigenous knowledge
INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLES AND SUSTAINABLE PRACTICE 319
and practice, that enhances biological diversity (cf. Case
Study 2 herein).
CASE STUDY 1: ABORIGINAL FIRE REGIMES
AND THE CREATION OF CULTURAL
LANDSCAPES
Gagadju, indigenous hunter gathers of Australia s
Northern Territory, focus their subsistence activities on a
coastal fringe penetrating no more than a few kilometers
inland (Lewis, 1989; Nakashima, 1998). Two habitat
types dominate this area of atlands: tall-open eucalyptus
forest and eucalypt woodlands. Interspersed between these
habitats are freshwater oodplains, paperbark swamps and
rain forest stands. A steep sandstone escarpment dominated
by Spinifex and other grasses as well as by shrubs, marks
the inland boundary of the coastal atlands. This tropical
savannah ecosystem has been and continues to be shaped
by the Gagadju through the judicious application of re.
Burning practices are carefully orchestrated, paying close
attention to season, habitat, wind direction, state of vege-
tative growth, moisture levels, previous burn locations and
accumulation of debris. The Aboriginal calendar is divided
into six seasons. Three of these constitute the wet period of
the year: rst, a season of pre-monsoon storms; followed by
the monsoon season; and nally the period of knock em
down storms. The dry period follows, also divided into
three seasons, beginning with a cool, humid season, then a
cold weather season and nally a period of hot, dry weather.
The Gagadju begin their annual cycle of burning towards
the end of the wet period and conduct most burning activi-
ties during the ensuing cool and cold weather seasons of the
dry period. During the hot, dry season when vegetation is
extremely ammable and res are dif cult to control, burns
are only conducted under very limited circumstances.
Burning Patterns on the Floodplains
With the end of the monsoon season, water levels on
the oodplain begin to recede. Sedges and grasses, which
spring up on the exposed ats, quickly mature and are dry
before the coming of the knock em down storms. The
Gagadju set their rst res in these dry grasses, knowing
that the burn will die out along the edges of the rain forests
and paperbark swamps (much too moist at this season
to burn) and will continue outwards into the oodplains
no more than some 2 10 m. These habitat types differ
markedly in their sensitivity to re. When dry, the grasses
of the oodplains, as those on the escarpment, burn easily
and recover quickly. In contrast, the vegetation of rain
forests and paperbark swamps is re-sensitive, recovering
from a burn only with considerable dif culty. At intervals
of a few weeks, the Gagadju ignite and burn successive
strips of grasses as they mature and dry, proceeding in this
fashion farther and farther out onto the oodplain. On each
occasion, previous burn areas and fresh vegetative growths
on moister soils serve to contain the re.
This burning of the oodplains serves several purposes.
First, the early res around the perimeters of rain forests
and paperbark swamps create re barriers that shelter these
fragile habitats from res occurring later in the season. Sec-
ond, the razing of mature, dry stands of grasses triggers a
regrowth, whose tender leaves lure kangaroos and wallabies
out from adjacent rain forest stands in the early morning
and late evening, thus offering the Gagadju hunting oppor-
tunities. Finally, the Gagadju note that res also favorably
alter the oodplain habitat for the nesting of waterfowl,
particularly magpie geese.
Creating Fire Mosaics
Beginning during the cool season and at the start of the
cold season, the Gagadju set res in the tall-open forest
and eucalypt woodland habitats that dominate the coastal
atlands. These habitats are highly susceptible to burn-
ing and at the same time, well adapted to re. In the
understory, leaf litter accumulates quickly and has high
oil content, while sorghum grasses provide a dense cover.
While these burn easily when dry, the vegetation is nev-
ertheless quick to recover. Thick bark shelters eucalyptus
trees from understory res, and high canopies reduce the
likelihood of res spreading into the forest crown. Wind
intensity and direction are important allies. The Gagadju
use strong midday winds to aim the re towards areas of
moister vegetation or previous burn sites to limit the extent
of the burn. Furthermore, strong winds prevent heat and
ames from licking up into the forest canopy, thus protect-
ing trees in ower that will subsequently provide humans
and animals with edible fruit. Early in the cold season the
res go out after a few hours and burn relatively small
areas. As the season progresses, the vegetation becomes
successively drier, and res burn longer and cover larger
areas.
Fires in these wooded habitats serve a number of func-
tions. Circles of re are used as a hunting technique, driving
animal prey to waiting hunters. By removing surface vege-
tation and debris, burning facilitates the gathering of yams
and roots and the hunting of goannas (Figure 2). Burn sites
attract kangaroos and wallabies that come to graze the fresh
re-growth of grasses. Furthermore, these serial burnings
create an ecological mosaic composed of sites at different
stages of recovery from burning. This heightens biological
diversity and provides the Gagadju with a choice of sub-
sistence opportunities. Finally, regular bouts of controlled
burning impede the growth of thick tangles of underbrush
and prevent the dangerous build-up of leaf litter and debris
that can result in uncontrollable wild res.
The central role of traditional Aboriginal burning prac-
tices in maintaining biological diversity, and in creating
320 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Figure 2 Shaping landscapes with re: Aboriginal peoples use controlled burning to maintain a habitat mosaic that
offers a variety of foraging opportunities. Here a woman sets off to hunt goannas on a newly burned site (Northern
Territory, Australia). (Photo by B Glowczewski)
and maintaining the cultural landscapes of Australia, has
gained ofcial recognition by National Park authorities in
certain parts of the country. In Kakadu and Uluru National
Parks the re-establishment of traditional Aboriginal burning
regimes has become an explicit Park management goal.
CASE STUDY 2: SWIDDEN CULTIVATION AS
SUSTAINABLE PRACTICE THE KAREN OF
NORTHERN THAILAND
Slash-and-burn (swidden) agriculture continues to be an
important mode of agricultural production in many parts
of Africa, Asia, South and Central America and the Pacic
(see Shifting Cultivation and Land Degradation, Vol-
ume 3; Swidden, Volume 3). It has also been at the heart of
one of the most prolonged and vociferous debates over the
sustainability of this traditional practice. While the debate
is far from closed, there is growing awareness today that
swidden agriculture as practiced by many indigenous peo-
ples is not only sustainable, but also contributes to other
pressing global concerns including conservation of domes-
tic and wild biodiversity, as well as carbon storage.
Land Use Strategies of the Karen
The Karen land use strategy is based upon the maintenance
of several major categories of land that can be distinguished
by their use, location and the pattern of ownership: rice
paddy elds, areas of swidden cultivation, community forest
and watershed forest (Figure 3) (Rerkasem and Rerkasem,
1994; Nakashima, 1998). Rice paddies are owned by indi-
vidual families and tend to be established close to the
village, often at the base of slopes where sediment fans
have been created by the erosion of soils from swidden
elds above. Lands used for rotational swidden agriculture
are much more extensive, lying in a broad band surrounding
the village. Families divide their holdings into plots among
which cultivation is rotated on a 710 year basis. Fields are
cultivated for only one or two seasons before being returned
to fallow. The different types of forested areas, unlike rice
paddies and swidden elds, are held as common property.
The extensive community forests provide the Karen with
wood and other forest products, as well as serving to graze
livestock. Watershed forests harbor the headwaters of major
water sources and are denoted as sacred.
Creating and Maintaining a Biologically Diverse
Landscape
Through a judicious mixture of tradition, adaptation and
innovation, the Karen people shape the landscape to cre-
ate and maintain a high level of heterogeneity. From the
resultant rich biological diversity, they extract a multitude
of materials and products that fulll nutritional, socio-
economic, aesthetic and spiritual needs. Within swidden
elds under cultivation, major crops of upland rice, maize
and, increasingly today, cash crops such as cabbage, are
intercropped with an astounding variety of traditional swid-
den products such as beans, eggplants, cucurbits, sesame,
chilies, yams, gourds, pumpkins, various greens, and spices.
Fruit trees, cotton and medicinal herbs are also planted in
these elds (Rerkasem and Rerkasem, 1994).
Further to this diversity of cultivated species, Karen
farmers also foster the rapid recovery of secondary growth
in the fallows, not only to maintain soil fertility and limit
INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLES AND SUSTAINABLE PRACTICE 321
B
B
A
C
B
A
A
P
P
P
N
Watershed
forest
Watershed
forest
Sacred
forest
R
o
a
d
R
iv
e
r
O
B C
P
P
C
O
A B
P
O
B
C
A
O
P
O
B
P
C
A
O
B
C O
O
C
A
B
Village
Community
forest
B
Figure 3 Organization of land use by the Karen of Nong Taw (Chiang Mai Province, Thailand) showing paddy elds
(P), swidden elds (O under cultivation; A rst year fallow; B 34 year fallow; C 57 year fallow), community
forest, watershed forest and sacred forest for rituals associated with birth. (Map by J Odochao and C Vaddhanaphuti.
Reproduced by permission of Chayan Vaddhanaphuti)
erosion, but also to re-establish a botanical community of
which they make full use. When clearing a eld for cul-
tivation, branches and brush are left on the ground and
burned, providing the soil with nitrogen and carbon-rich
ash. Trees are cut well above ground level, leaving roots
intact and stumps rising some tens of centimeters above the
ground (Figure 4). These stumps sprout quickly, speeding
recovery of the forest after cultivation and thus maintaining
soil fertility.
Furthermore, plots are distributed so as to ensure that
recently used elds juxtapose old fallow plots whose
advanced secondary growth speeds the recovery of culti-
vated lands by providing an abundant supply of seeds. From
the rst year onwards, the fallow elds provide important
supplies of medicinal plants, food in the form of mush-
rooms, tubers and shoots, as well as areas for the grazing of
livestock. After several years, the number of plant species
re-established on these sites numbers in the 100s, approach-
ing the biological diversity found in adjacent uncut forest
areas, such as the community and watershed forests. The
Karen agro-ecosystem also encompasses the use and man-
agement of permanently forested lands. Community forests
provide wild food products such as mangoes, jackfruit,
bamboo shoots, mushrooms, greens and edible herbs, as
well as medicinal herbs, rewood, and timber and bamboo
for construction. Watershed forests, as vital sources of water
for swidden and rice paddy elds, are maintained in a state
close to forest climax and strictly protected.
Today the loss of traditional lands to logging interests or
commercial plantations and state policies encouraging per-
manent and intensive agriculture are posing major threats
to many swidden cultivators. Less land means shortened
fallows and depleted soils, jeopardizing the sustainability
of traditional practices. Moving from shifting cultivation
to permanent agriculture entails major losses in both bio-
logical and cultural diversity, and raises the specter of the
millions of hectares of Southeast Asia covered by species-
poor Imperata cylindrica grasslands, a direct result of the
failure of permanent agriculture on phosphorus-poor tropi-
cal soils. Rather than import traditional Occidental models
of resource exploitation, such as permanent cash monocrop-
ping or large-scale non-selective logging, the sustainable
practices of small-scale swidden farmers like the Karen
should be recognized and supported. They offer numerous
benets including long-term sustainability of local envi-
ronments and lifestyles, as well as the conservation of
domestic crop varieties for many species, and wild plant
and animal communities whose biodiversity approaches
that of unexploited forest areas and remains far superior
to that of permanently cultivated elds. Finally, recent
322 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Figure 4 Karen swidden elds showing various stages of
regeneration. When clearing elds for cultivation, swidden
farmers encourage re-growth by cutting certain trees well
above ground level and leaving others intact (Chiang Mai
Province, Thailand). (Photo by D Nakashima)
research suggests that agroforests in general, and shifting
cultivation in particular, can contribute signicantly to car-
bon sequestration, by replacing conventional monocropping
or Imperata grasslands with cyclical systems that include
forest production.
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS AND
INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE: THE THREAT OF
COMMODIFICATION
While biodiversity managers or development practitioners
are only beginning to dene a role for indigenous knowl-
edge, its utility in another domain has been fully recog-
nized and is being vigorously acted upon. Bio-prospecting,
the quest for natural products to be exploited for com-
mercial gain, is explicitly targeting traditional knowledge
holders. In this arena, the pharmaceutical, agricultural and
biotechnological industries have been particularly active.
They recognize that the accumulated knowledge and tradi-
tional practices of indigenous communities are a powerful
resource that can greatly facilitate the task of identifying
useful new varieties of domestic plants or animals, isolat-
ing novel biological components, or developing innovative
technologies and techniques. Recognition, however, has not
automatically led to acknowledgement and the need to share
benets with the community is regularly overlooked.
The patenting of domestic plant varieties, traditional
medical products and other biological resources whose
identication and use are embedded in traditional know-
ledge has been a source of grave concern for developing
countries and indigenous communities. By conferring upon
foreign companies or individuals the exclusive right to
exploit for commercial benet certain inventions that are
in fact based upon indigenous knowledge, the patenting pro-
cess transforms persons who do what they have always done
into patent infringers. In one infamous case, the wound-
healing capacity of turmeric, known and used in India for
centuries, became a patented invention in the US. As a
result, it became illegal for Indians residing in the US to
use turmeric for this purpose. Similarly, a European patent
on the fungicidal properties of the neem plant privatizes
the botanical knowledge of Indian farmers who, for gener-
ations, have used this natural pesticide in their elds. In the
end, both of these patents were revoked, but only after long
and costly challenges mounted by the government of India
(Duteld, 1999). Similarly, the Bolivian National Associa-
tion of Quinoa Producers has mounted a challenge against
a US patent relating to a unique male sterile variety of the
quinoa plant, a characteristic long known to Andean peas-
ants and used by them to control the development of new
hybrids. As Gari (1999, 6) astutely points out this patent
does much more than just hijack indigenous knowledge
for the eventual material benet of a developed country.
It also strengthens and spreads the Western paradigm of
nature and science , by presenting knowledge pillaged from
Bolivian peasants as the cutting edge of biotechnology.
Patents are only one of several legal instruments that
constitute the current regime of intellectual property rights
(IPRs). Others include trademark, copyright, geographical
indication and plant variety rights. For indigenous knowl-
edge holders, IPRs have been more often a source of
problems, rather than solutions. Certainly they serve to pro-
tect the interests of companies that engage in bio-piracy,
the unauthorized exploitation of biological resources and
indigenous knowledge. A key debate today is whether con-
temporary IPR regimes can be adapted to also defend
the interests of those who are custodians of indigenous
knowledge.
To counter the granting of patents prejudicial to
indigenous peoples, actions have been taken before the
World Trade Organization under the agreement on trade-
related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPS).
INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLES AND SUSTAINABLE PRACTICE 323
While providing a forum for overturning inappropri-
ate patents, nothing in the TRIPS Agreement has been
expressly designed for the protection of indigenous knowl-
edge. Nevertheless, existing IPR arrangements may offer
some viable options, and efforts are being made to explore
these possibilities, including the development of sui generis
(of its own kind) systems. The World Intellectual Prop-
erty Rights Organization, for example, has recently created
a commission on genetic resources, traditional knowledge
and folklore, whose mandate includes the investigation of
innovative measures to accommodate the exceptional char-
acteristics of indigenous knowledge systems.
The challenge is a sizable one. IPRs have evolved within
narrow socio-economic and political contexts. Designed to
protect individuals whose inventions require safeguarding
in view of their potential commercial value, they remain
largely incompatible with indigenous knowledge, which is
collectively owned; whose invention extends across gener-
ations; and whose raison d etre is not pro t, but ecological
understanding and social meaning. Due to this incompatible
nature, legal rights may have impacts quite other than those
intended. By protecting select elements in isolation from
the larger cultural context, they encourage the fragmenta-
tion of cultural systems. By designating knowledge owners,
they may trigger social dissension between those recog-
nized as proprietors and others who are excluded. Finally,
as IPRs protect knowledge by setting rules for their com-
mercial exploitation, ironically they may in the end merely
facilitate the appropriation of traditional knowledge by the
global marketplace.
RELATIONS OF POWER: KNOWLEDGE
APPROPRIATION OR INDIGENOUS
EMPOWERMENT?
The scienti c and development community views indige-
nous knowledge rst and foremost as a resource to be
appropriated and exploited. Even scientists with the best
of intentions may accelerate the demise of other know-
ledge systems by valorizing components resembling sci-
ence and implicitly (or explicitly) casting dispersions on
other elements that in science s view are mere supersti-
tion and belief. Such a process captures and instrumen-
talizes indigenous knowledge, strengthening the hand of
those in positions of power at the expense of indigenous
peoples.
This is not to argue against the exchange and shar-
ing of knowledge between scienti c and indigenous sys-
tems. However, as Agrawal (1999) underlines, it would
be irresponsible and a disservice to indigenous peoples to
ignore the power relations that de ne such processes, and
in particular, to fail to appreciate the implications of the
severe power asymmetry between indigenous peoples and
proponents of science.
To seek a way forward, it is important to come back
to the questions of culture and worldview. For scientists,
culture is a foreign element whose consideration falls out-
side the bounds of their profession (though they would
probably agree to associate the cultural factor with the
indigenous component of the equation). They are quite
reluctant to admit that the culture of science is, in itself,
a valid object of study. Cultural constructions such as the
opposition of Nature (environment) and Culture (society),
and the differentiation of rationality from spirituality, the
empirical (science) versus the symbolic (religion), have pro-
vided science with its very foundations, and remain today
an everyday reality of scienti c thought and practice. These
tenets are such an integral part of the scienti c worldview
that natural scientists are not aware of them as speci c cul-
tural interpretations of the world. For them, they simply
represent reality. Scienti c reality, however, differs from
that lived by indigenous knowledge holders, whose con-
ceptions of the world include pathways between natural
and societal realms and whose spirituality infuses everyday
objects and everyday acts.
In other words, there is no sound basis for deciding that
one worldview offers a superior reference point for real-
ity than another. We can of course arbitrarily choose and
given science s institutional power, it is not surprising that
the objective and rational scienti c method is repeatedly
called upon to judge other knowledge systems. But it is
important to recognize that this is a societal choice, not
one defensible from any neutral or extra-cultural perspec-
tive. Consequently, the encounter between scienti c and
indigenous knowledge must be understood as a meeting of
cultures, with the cultural component as prominent in one
camp as the other.
Full appreciation of this perspective alters our approach
to articulating (a better term than integrating) scienti c and
indigenous knowledge. Emphasis must be placed on level-
ing the playing eld and appreciating indigenous knowledge
not as static sets of information to be conserved ex situ and
integrated into science, but as dynamic components of con-
temporary indigenous societies and cultures. Accordingly,
the protection of indigenous knowledge may better pass
through pathways such as conserving indigenous language
(as knowledge is encoded in language), ensuring knowledge
transmission within the societies themselves, empowering
indigenous societies so as to increase their control over
processes of change, and ensuring continued access to the
environments upon which their ways of life depend (see
Development and Global Environmental Change, Vol-
ume 5).
REFERENCES
Agrawal, A (1999) Ethnoscience, TEK and Conservation: on
Power and Indigenous Knowledge, in Cultural and Spiritual
324 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Values of Biodiversity, ed D A Posey, UNEP, Nairobi, Kenya,
177180.
Altieri, M A (1999) The Agroecological Dimensions of Biodiver-
sity in Traditional Farming Systems, in Cultural and Spiritual
Values of Biodiversity, ed D A Posey, UNEP, Nairobi, Kenya,
291297.
Berkes, F (1999) Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowl-
edge and Resource Management, Taylor and Francis, Philadel-
phia, PA.
Berlin, B (1992) Ethnobiological Classi cation: Principles of
Categorization of Plants and Animals in Traditional Societies,
Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Brush, S B and Stabinsky, D, eds (1996) Valuing Local Knowl-
edge: Indigenous People and Intellectual Property Rights,
Island Press, Washington, DC.
Bulmer, R N H (1979) Mundane and Mystical in Kalam Clas-
sication of Birds, in Classi cations in their Social Con-
text, eds R Ellen and D Reason, Academic Press, London,
5780.
Conklin, H C (1954) The Relation of Hanunoo Culture to The
Plant World, Yale University, University Microlms Inc., Ann
Arbor, MI.
Duteld, G (1999) Rights, Resources and Responses, in Cultural
and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity, ed D A Posey, UNEP,
Nairobi, Kenya, 503515.
Ellen, R (1993) The Cultural Relations of Classi cation: an Anal-
ysis of Nuaulu Animal Categories from Central Seram, Cam-
bridge University Press, Cambridge.
Feit, H (1973) Ethno-ecology of the Waswanipi Cree; or How
Hunters Can Manage Their Resources, in Cultural Ecology,
ed B Cox, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 115125.
Friedberg, C (1979) Socially Signicant Plant Species and Their
Taxonomic Position Among the Bunaq of Central Timor,
in Classi cations in their Social Context, eds R Ellen and
D Reason, Academic Press, London, 81101.
Gari, J A (1999) Biodiversity Conservation and Use: Local and
Global Considerations, Science, Technology and Development
Discussion Paper No. 7, Center for International Development
and Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Har-
vard University, Cambridge, MA.
Johannes, R E (1978) Traditional Marine Conservation Meth-
ods in Oceania and Their Demise, Ann. Rev. Ecol. Syst., 9,
349364.
Lee, R B and De Vore, I, eds (1968) Man the Hunter, Aldine,
Chicago, IL.
Levi-Strauss, C (1962) La pens ee sauvage. Librairie Plon, Paris
[English translation (1966) The Savage Mind, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago, IL].
Lewis, H T (1989) Ecological and Technical Knowledge of Fire:
Aborigines Versus Park Rangers in Northern Australia, Am.
Anthropol., 91, 94061.
Nakashima, D (1998) Conceptualizing Nature: the Cultural
Context of Resource Management, Nat. Resour., 34(2),
822.
Rerkasem, K and Rerkasem, B (1994) Shifting Cultivation in
Thailand: Its Current Situation and Dynamics in the Con-
text of Highland Development, Forestry and Land Use Series
No. 4, International Institute for Environment and Develop-
ment (IIED), London.
Roue, M and Nakashima, D (1999) The Discourse of Ecological
Correctness: of Dam Builders Rescuing Biodiversity for
the Cree, in Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity, ed
D A Posey, UNEP, Nairobi, Kenya, 406412.
Ruddle, K and Johannes, R E, eds (1985) The Traditional Knowl-
edge and Management of Coastal Systems in Asia and the
Paci c, UNESCO, Jakarta, Indonesia.
Sahlins, M (1972) Stone Age Economics, Aldine, Chicago, IL.
Sillitoe, P (1998) The Development of Indigenous Knowledge: a
New Applied Anthropology, Curr. Anthropol., 39, 223252.
Indigenous Peoples
see Globalization in Historical Perspective
(Opening essay, Volume 5)
Interdisciplinary vs
Multidisciplinary
see Social Science and Global Environmental
Change (Opening essay, Volume 5)
Internalization of Damage Costs
see Internalization (Volume 4)
International Council of Scientic
Unions (ICSU)
see ICSU (International Council for Science)
(Volume 4)
International Environmental
Law
M J Peterson
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA
International environmental law is the branch of inter-
national law addressing human interactions with nature,
INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL LAW 325
with particular focus on protecting the biosphere, includ-
ing its subsystems, natural processes, and species diversity
from serious harm caused by human activities and regu-
lating the human use of natural resources. Its substantive
and procedural principles, norms and rules are expressed
in a growing number of global, regional, and bilateral
treaties, declarations and action programs issued by inter-
national conferences and intergovernmental organizations,
and emerging rules of customary international law. These
specify goals towards which governments should strive,
environmental standards they should incorporate into their
cooperative and individual efforts to protect the environ-
ment, and certain procedures they should follow in cooper-
ative and individual efforts to protect the environment from
signi cant harm.
Because international environmental law only addresses
states (acting through their governments), it forms only one
part of the legal structure designed to promote greater envi-
ronmental protection. The activities of individuals, house-
holds, groups, and private rms remain subject to the
national legal system of the state where they act or of which
they are a national. Thus, effective protection of the environ-
ment requires that international and national environmental
law be aligned. This process has been promoted by the
extensive borrowings of principles and norms between both
levels, international programs that spread regulatory exper-
tise and increase the administrative capacity of developing
states, and the efforts of a highly active transnational envi-
ronmental movement.
One institutional difference between national and interna-
tional law makes developing, revising, and enforcing inter-
national law more complex: the international system lacks
the central legislative, executive, and judicial bodies that
maintain national legal systems. Development and imple-
mentation of international rules depend on a more complex
process of bargaining and mutual in uencing between states
equal in legal status as sovereigns but unequal in terms
of size, wealth, and level of industrialization. This process
is increasingly affected by popular pressures within states
and the transnational activities of interest groups and social
movements.
Both the general international law applying to all states
and particular treaties negotiated between two or more
states have long re ected concern about aspects of nature.
Perceptions of the abundance of sh stocks in uenced
positions in the 17th century debates between proponents
and opponents of the principle of freedom of the seas.
Sharing navigational and other uses of rivers and lakes
straddling the territory of more than one state promoted
development of a distinct law on international watercourses.
Disease control, protection of plants, migratory birds, and
animal species, distribution of shing rights and preven-
tion of over shing on the high seas became the subjects of
multilateral and bilateral treaties in the late 19th and early
20th centuries. Pollution at sea, particularly from oil tanker
operations and waste dumping, transport of hazardous sub-
stances, radiological hazards from military and civilian uses
of nuclear energy, and transboundary water and air pollu-
tion umes were added to the subjects of treaty making after
World War II (Ruster et al., 1983; UNEP, 1990).
Concerns about protecting nature or natural resources
were gathered under the common heading of international
environmental law, only after ecological worldviews high-
lighting the interconnection of natural systems and the dele-
terious consequences of their alteration by human conduct
were diffused widely among governments during the prepa-
rations for and discussions at the 1972 United Nations
(UN) Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm
Conference) (Schachter, 1991; Caldwell, 1998). The 1992
UN Conference on Environment and Development (Rio
Conference), with its emphasis on the strong interconnec-
tions among environmental protection, economic develop-
ment, and participatory governance at both national and
international levels ensured that the integration of inter-
national environmental law with other branches of inter-
national law would be taken as seriously as its further
development.
The process of developing international environmental
law has been shaped by several particular characteristics
of environmental issues. It also involves development or
wider use of several procedural innovations in negotiating,
revising, and implementing international agreements meant
to speed those processes and adapt them more fully to
contemporary needs. So far it has yielded considerable,
though not complete, consensus on a set of overarching
principles and policy norms to guide the handling of speci c
environmental problems as well as an ever increasing set of
global, regional, and bilateral agreements regarding a wide
range of environmental problems.
THE SPECIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF
ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES
International environmental law is distinct from other
branches of international law not because it is relatively
new, but because international environmental issues have
several distinct features that give international law-making
and law application in that eld a distinct character.
Relatively large and persistent uncertainty about im-
pacts of human action or inaction on the biosphere
is the most important of these characteristics. This
uncertainty is a compound of changing scientic under-
standing of natural biosystems, changing natural sys-
tem responses to human-induced stresses, and chang-
ing degrees of human-induced stress as technology
alters, global human population increases, and con-
sumption patterns shift. Uncertainty is not unique to
326 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
environmental issues, but it has more sources and
appears to operate within wider bounds than for other
issues.
Heavy reliance on expert advice, not just from sci-
entists but also from engineers, resource managers,
and economists, marks the formulation and implemen-
tation of regulatory decisions because of the breadth
and pervasiveness of uncertainty. Many environmental
problems are very subtle in their early stages, and their
identication depends on the enhancement of human
perceptual abilities provided by scientic instruments.
Assessing alternate solutions generally involves fairly
complex assessments of causal relations among multi-
ple factors as well as comparative cost-benet analyses.
Lawmakers must consider impacts over a relatively
long time horizon because of the timelags between
introductions of new technology or other changes in
human activity and alteration of natural systems in
response.
Ensuring national compliance with environmental com-
mitments imposes heavy administrative burdens on
governments since most of the activity creating the
need for explicit environmental protection is under-
taken by individuals, households, business rms, and
other private entities rather than by government agen-
cies or ofcials. In many respects, international envi-
ronmental law is a set of mutually agreed mandates
directing governments to develop and use their admin-
istrative capacities in particular ways.
The activities regulated are characterized by widespread
externalities: both the bad effects of neglecting the
environment and the good effects of improving envi-
ronmental protection extend beyond the property of the
private entity involved and often beyond the territory
of the state where the activity occurs. This means that
the full costs or benets are not borne or enjoyed by
the private entity or even the country creating harms
or providing benets to others, with the result that law
must often include incentive schemes or other mecha-
nisms for inducing actors to take the full range of costs
and benets into account.
At the same time, international environmental law shares
two signicant characteristics with other branches of inter-
national law.
Necessity for integration or coordination of
rules with other branches of international law.
Integration will be particularly strong with those
other branches of international law regulating
use of physical spaces (law of the sea, law of
international watercourses) or the exploitation of
resources (much of international economic law).
The less extensive overlaps with human rights
law and the law of warfare are also sufcient
to pose coordination problems, requiring similar
processes of balancing the values promoted by
the different branches of international law and
ensuring that their rules are compatible with each
other.
Entanglement in wider debates about the future
structuring of international, national, and local
governance. International law will be affected by
the results of current debate concerning whether
the world will remain divided into some 200
states claiming sovereignty over their individ-
ual territories and populations. On the one side
are governments and publics resistant to giving
up sovereignty, whether by making promises to
other states or by transferring signicant governing
authority to an intergovernmental organization like
the UN Environmental Programme or a suprana-
tional organization like the European Union. These
fears are particularly strong in developing states,
where any signicant centralization of authority is
seen as an effort by the industrial states to maintain
dominance of the global economy. The fears have
been shared by segments of public opinion on both
populist or nationalist right and socialist left in
many of the industrial states, who see the process
as one of yielding to distant and unaccountable
elites. On the other side are two strong currents
of opinion within the environmentalist movement
regarding national sovereignty as an anachronism:
one because it stands in the way of the greater
global centralization needed to ensure a sustain-
able world, and the other because it stands in the
way of shifting governance to a smaller scale pro-
moting more sustainable lifestyles through appli-
cation of local knowledge and face-to-face mutual
accountability. Similar debates have raged in the
elds of international human rights and interna-
tional trade. All three have intensied as critics
have demanded that the World Trade Organiza-
tion pay more attention to environmental and labor
issues. These critics see the interrelated debates
as amounting to a choice between globalization
on terms decided by a multinational corporation-
dominated elite, and participatory political institu-
tions seeking creation of a just world by regulating
markets.
PROCEDURAL INNOVATIONS
The widespread and growing sense of urgency in addressing
environmental problems has encouraged government of-
cials, legal advisers, and diplomats involved in developing
international environmental law to adopt a number of proce-
dural innovations. These are aimed at speeding up the tradi-
tionally slow processes of negotiating multilateral treaties
INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL LAW 327
or developing new rules of customary international law,
accommodating the need for a wide range of information in
decision-making, and providing greater mutual pressure for
implementing agreed policy measures than has traditionally
existed at the international level (see, e.g., Brown-Weiss
et al., 1998; Kiss and Shelton, 1999; Victor et al., 1998 for
greater detail.)
Framework Treaty Protocol Form
The older practice of distinguishing between the main
portion of a treaty and annexes, protocols, or schedules
containing detailed rules that can be modied as needed
through an expedited amendment process, has been devel-
oped more fully in the framework treaty-protocol form
used in many of the major global environmental treaties
negotiated since 1985 (Kiss, 1993). The framework treaty
identies the environmental problem to be addressed and
species procedures for the meetings of the parties that
determine the regulatory measures to be adopted, monitor
their implementation by participating national governments,
and assess the state of the natural systems involved and the
efcacy of the regulatory measures with an eye to their
revision. The protocols stipulate the particular regulatory
measures selected and may also elaborate on the proce-
dures for joint decision, implementation review, and results
assessment. Most protocols are developed later as govern-
ments gain better understanding of the problem, develop
clearer conceptions of possible solutions, and work out the
political deals necessary to assure participation by enough
governments to provide good chances of success. By mak-
ing the protocols relatively easy to add to, delete, or amend
(whether by delegating that task to the meeting of the par-
ties or by using rules specifying a deadline for opting out),
they can be revised as new information or new understand-
ing of policy options develops. Governments thus take an
incremental approach to regulation, rather than attempt-
ing to work out all the details in a single negotiation, as
attempted at the Third UN Conference on the Law of the
Sea in 19731982 (see Ozone Layer : Vienna Convention
and the Montreal Protocol, Volume 4; United Nations
Fr amewor k Convention on Climate Change and Kyoto
Protocol, Volume 4).
Periodic Situation Assessment
All law-making and law revision rests on assessments sug-
gesting that a problem is sufciently important to warrant
attention, can be solved or abated through consciously
directed human action, and will likely be solved or abated
by adopting a particular set of regulatory measures. Interna-
tional environmental law has formalized situation-specic
assessments to an unusual degree because of the need for
scientic investigation to demonstrate the existence and
causes of an environmental problem and the complexi-
ties of coping with uncertainty as regulatory responses
are formulated. Scientic assessments of the dimensions
of the environmental issue at hand often precede or form
an important part of the initial negotiation of an envi-
ronmental treaty. The major environmental treaties also
provide for periodic assessment of both the state of the nat-
ural environment and of relevant technology or regulatory
measures through parallel scientic and technical advisory
committees. These periodic assessments create what Sand
(1996, 792) calls a pre-ordained learning process in which
governments are kept informed of changes in or newly
developed knowledge about natural systems, technology,
and the efcacy of regulatory responses.
Ongoing Implementation Review
Since the perceived successes of the effort to protect the
ozone layer, environmental treaties have included: provi-
sions for reporting policy actions and relevant statistics
regarding production or emission of pollutants, joint review
of efforts in a multilateral implementation committee sep-
arate from but reporting to the Conference of the Parties
(COP) (see Conference of Par ties, Volume 4), and dis-
pute resolution. The considerable success of non-adversarial
approaches to encouraging better implementation relying
on consultation, persuasion, and provision of assistance
for administrative capacity building have inspired debate
among international lawyers and political scientists regard-
ing the relative importance of compliance promotion and
a more traditional enforcement approach in promoting com-
pliance with treaty commitments (Chayes and Chayes, 1995
and Downs et al., 1996 provide clear statements of the con-
trasting views.)
Extensive Use of Soft Law
Building on the traditional international law distinction
between the legally non-binding voeux or recommenda-
tions of international conferences and the legally binding
obligations of written or oral promises made to other
governments, international lawyers have developed a new
concept, soft law. It covers statements of desired goals
and agreed policy directions forming a political or moral
commitment stronger than summarized in the traditional
understanding of recommendations but still falling short
of legal obligation (Dupuy, 1992). Most soft law, like
the Stockholm Declaration (1972) and Rio Declarations
(1992) and Agenda 21 (1992), is the product of agreed
statements adopted at international conferences, but some
treaty provisions may also express soft law commitments.
The use of soft law is particularly extensive in inter-
national environmental law because of the widespread
belief that environmental problems must be addressed more
328 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
rapidly than the traditional forms of treaty-making allow.
Advocates of soft law approaches claim that they help over-
come the hesitations induced by uncertainty by allowing
governments to make preliminary commitments that can be
adjusted later and permit negotiations to get beyond least
common-denominator policy choices. Critics worry that
heavy reliance on soft law encourages papering over dis-
agreements and creates confusion about what governments
have or have not committed themselves to do, making it
harder for others to call them to account for lagging in
implementation.
Explicit Opening of the International Law-Making
Process to Participation by Non-state Entities
Domestic democratization in many parts of the world and
the vast increase in transnational activism by organized
social movements have combined to increase demands
for broader participation in the formulation and revision
of international environmental law and the monitoring of
governments compliance with it. Environmental groups
have had considerable success lobbying international con-
ferences, inspiring similar activity by other groups while
the scienti c and technological assessment panels generally
consist of persons drawn from the scienti c, industry, labor,
and environmental communities as well as government
bureaucracies (see Integrated Assessment, De nition of,
Volume 4; ULYSSES (Urban Lifestyles, Sustainability,
and Integrated Environmental Assessment), Volume 4;
Post-normal Science, Volume 5).
EMERGING PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL
ENVIRONMENTAL LAW
Each branch of international law contains certain broad
principles that express a reason to prefer or avoid a particu-
lar result or behavior. These principles do not specify how
to act in particular situations; rather, they orient action by
indicating the goals and other considerations to be empha-
sized when deciding how to act. The struggle to de ne these
principles has been intense because reorienting international
law to take environmental protection more seriously has
required rede ning the central international legal principle
of state sovereignty to highlight responsibilities to pro-
tect the natural environment. Some of this rede nition was
accomplished by expanding traditional doctrines of good
neighborliness and abuse of rights, and reinterpreting the
traditional legal maxim sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas
(use what is yours in a manner that does not harm others).
While successfully expanding state responsibilities towards
other states, these adaptations of traditional doctrine fell
short from an ecological point of view because they failed
to provide a basis for obligation to protect nature, natu-
ral processes, or natural resources when the environmental
impact of human activity is con ned within the territory,
airspace, or maritime jurisdiction of a single state. Efforts
to establish that broader obligation have been troubled by
two persistent disagreements. The rst involves different
emphases on the balance to be drawn between the gen-
erally accepted principle of permanent sovereignty over
natural resources and wealth, highlighting the right of each
state to adopt its own program of economic organization
and regulation, with the emerging rules of environmental
protection. The second stems from disagreements between
those who believe that the basic purpose of international
environmental law is to enhance human existence by pro-
moting living within the limits of nature and those believing
that its basic purpose is to protect the intrinsic value of the
biosphere. These have occasionally inspired strong contro-
versy on particular policy questions, but have played out
more generally in the reluctance of many governments to
accept the notion of an environmental right. Governments
of developing states in particular have worried that accept-
ing such a right might erode the also controversial right
to development that they have been advocating for many
years.
Recent intergovernmental declarations, multilateral trea-
ties, and controversies regarding their application in partic-
ular situations have yielded considerable convergence on a
set of principles of international environmental law estab-
lishing obligations to weigh protection of the environment
heavily in decision-making and action. Though the exact
legal status of some principles remains in doubt, and their
generality often leads to controversy about their applica-
tion in speci c situations, these broad principles provide
the basic orienting statements of current international envi-
ronmental law.
The principle that states must ensure that activities
within their jurisdiction or control do not harm the
environment in other states or global common areas.
This principle has the strongest connection with tradi-
tional international law principles concerning the rights
and duties of sovereign states, as well as the clearest
expression in international environmental declarations
and treaties.
The principle of sustainable development. This is
sometimes treated as part of international environ-
mental law and sometimes as a principle mandating
the closer integration of international environmental
and international economic law (e.g., Sands, 1996). It
was rst formulated in its current terms by the UN
World Commission on Environment and Development
(1987) (Bruntland Commission), which de ned it as
development that meets the needs of the present with-
out compromising the ability of future generations to
meet their own needs . The International Court of Jus-
tice stopped short of calling sustainable development
a legal principle in the Gabcikovo-Nagymaros Case
INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL LAW 329
(1998), but did characterize it as an objective that
states are legally obligated to take into account in deci-
sions on economic policy and particular projects. Third
World governments have been particularly insistent
that the principle means that economic development
will not be subordinated to environmental concerns;
environmentalists have been equally insistent that it
means environmental protection cannot be subordi-
nated to economic development. Yet this mandate to
balance and serve both concerns provides little guid-
ance for striking that balance in particular situations. It
is clearest on questions of time horizon, strongly favor-
ing adoption of longer-term perspectives in decision-
making.
The principle of intergenerational equity. This is closely
linked with that of sustainable development through
reciprocal reference. Sustainability suggests maintain-
ing natural systems over time spans longer than a single
generation, while intergenerational equity is dened
in terms of acting in such a way that future genera-
tions have as many alternatives in use of ecosystems
and resources as are available to the current genera-
tion. The notion that future generations have legally
enforceable rights has inspired considerable contro-
versy, but there is no serious dissent from the under-
lying claim that governments and other actors must
shift away from a xation on the immediate future
(whether this be the next prot or loss statement for
businesses or the next election for governments) if they
are to provide adequate environmental protection. The
controversy about how to do so is considerable, and
fuelled by the way longer-term thinking rubs against
well entrenched economic (the discounting of future
returns) and political (constituencies are those persons
alive today) thinking.
The principle of common concern. This articulates
the belief that environmental problems are the con-
cern of all states and is an effort to institutional-
ize two standards of conduct. The rst is that envi-
ronmental protection, like more traditional duties to
provide effective administration of territory or newer
duties to respect human rights, is one of the stan-
dard obligations of sovereigns, one of the duties
that, paired with a set of rights to political inde-
pendence, territorial integrity, and nonintervention by
other states, are integral to the status of sovereign.
Applied strictly, the principle means that failure to
adopt adequate domestic environmental law is itself
a violation of international obligations, a reading that
governments have been reluctant to take very far.
The second is that obligations deriving from custom-
ary or treaty-based international environmental law
are owed to the international community as a whole,
not simply to the state or states directly harmed
by failures to protect the environment. Ambitious
efforts to establish all failures to comply with an
environmental agreement as violations erga omnes
(matters about which any state may complain) still
inspire controversy, but the principle has supported
the institutionalization of the right to point out imple-
mentation failures by other states on a problem-by-
problem basis in the new system of ongoing imple-
mentation review. This principle is reinforced by the
traditional principles of good neighborliness and coop-
eration among states, which are not unique to inter-
national environmental law though they have environ-
mental expressions.
The related principle of common but differentiated
responsibility. This expresses the general terms of
ongoing bargaining between developing states and
industrial states regarding who will provide what part
of the effort and nancial resources needed for inter-
national environmental cooperation. It rests on moral
claims that the industrial states greater role in causing
environmental problems (by industrializing without the
burden of environmental protection measures and con-
tinuing patterns of proigate resource consumption and
waste generation) plus their greater ability to redress
them (through possession of more advanced technology
and greater nancial resources) mean that they should
bear most of the burden of environmental protection. In
some respects the principle can be seen as a generalized
interstate expression of the polluter pays principal (see
PPP (Polluter Pay Pr inciple), Volume 4). Though
triggering intense bargaining whenever invoked in a
particular environmental negotiation, the principle has
promoted use of several methods of differentiating obli-
gations in recent environmental treaties. These include:
allowing grace periods that give developing countries
more time to meet emission standards; dening dif-
ferent baselines that allow developing countries to
increase pollution levels to accommodate a measure of
economic growth; providing nancial assistance; and
even accepting that developing country implementa-
tion is contingent on provision of nancial assistance.
However, the current emphasis on a binary categori-
cal distinction between industrial and developing states
will need modication in coming years, partly because
at least some developing countries are or soon will
be signicant contributors to pollution problems and
partly because the distinction ignores the highly varied
situations and economic performances of developing
states. Shifting from the current focus on differential
norms and rules distinguishing amongst named groups
of states to a focus on contextual norms and rules
based on differences in situation (Magraw, 1990) would
permit better accommodation to the environmental
implications of differences in size, geography, climate,
330 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
and economic circumstances of different countries (see
Common but Differentiated Responsibility Pr inciple
(Stockholm/Rio), Volume 4).
POLICY NORMS (PRINCIPLES) OF
INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL LAW
International environmental law also includes a number of
policy norms that provide guidance regarding the forms
or objectives of regulatory measures to be adopted at
the international and national levels. Most of these pol-
icy norms (frequently called principles to emphasize their
importance, a reection of the lack of standardized ter-
minology for the various types of legal prescription in
international law) originated in the national law of a par-
ticular state, but were adopted more widely as their useful-
ness in promoting more effective environmental protection
was perceived. The policy norms of international environ-
mental law thus serve as a summary of and mandate to
adopt what governments agree are the best national reg-
ulatory practices. More specic guidance regarding the
precise sort of regulatory measure to adopt (direct con-
trol, emissions standards, ambient standards, product stan-
dards, process standards, recycling or return rules) and
the sort of related economic incentive schemes to adopt
is specied on a problem-by-problem basis in the grow-
ing body of multilateral, regional, and bilateral treaties
and codes of conduct developed through intergovernmental
organizations.
The polluter pays principle (norm) which asserts that
the costs of protecting the environment should be
borne by those whose activities pose dangers to it. It
developed primarily in national discussions of how to
pay for cleaning up or avoiding pollution, and rests
on rational choice assumptions that changing incen-
tives by altering the costs of activity or inactivity
will trigger changes in behavior. It was developed
in the national environmental law of several indus-
trial states to justify imposition of pollution taxes,
direct regulations requiring polluters to install speci-
ed pollution abatement equipment, and to signal that
the days of free use of the environment as a sink
for all manner and quantities of waste were at an
end. It serves similar functions at the international
level.
The precautionary principle, initially elaborated pri-
marily in West Germany, endorsed in Principle 15
of the Rio Declaration, and incorporated into several
later multilateral treaties, mandates that action be taken
to avoid long-term consequences of some present-day
activity when there is signicant uncertainty about the
extent or material causes of damage from an activity.
Traditionally such uncertainty was used as an argument
for deferring the imposition of limits on an activity. The
precautionary principle shifts the terms of argument by
placing the burden of proof that an activity is safe on
those who would undertake an activity rather than on
those who would impose regulations. In the strictest
readings, precaution would require regulators to allow
only those activities posing no danger of harm to
the environment. Implementing the precautionary norm
raises three interrelated controversies: 1) what standard
of proof should guide assessments of anticipated envi-
ronmental effects, 2) what constitutes a harm, 3) what
constitutes a danger of harm. Dening danger requires
answering two questions: how much harm could result
from an activity and what is the probability of that
harm occurring. Disagreement on all these matters has
made the norm controversial among those who regard
it as requiring elaboration of a generally applicable
standard. The level of disagreement declines when the
norm is understood as mandating an approach to policy
that favors erring on the side of caution in authorizing
or regulating an activity (see Precautionar y Pr inciple,
Volume 4).
The norm that governments should promote use of
environmentally benign technologies. It rst developed
in Western Europe but has won wide endorsement. Any
controversy it inspired is focused on how far technol-
ogy choices may be based on the comparative costs
of adopting different technologies, leading to a range
of formulations ranging from best available technol-
ogy (BAT) to best available technology not entailing
excessive costs (BATNEEC). Developing county gov-
ernments have invoked the norm to support their claims
that they should enjoy access to technologies on more
favorable terms than currently prevail in international
commerce.
The norm of prior assessment of environmental impacts
of proposed activities, rst developed in the USA and
later adopted in other parts of the world. It supple-
ments the precautionary principle by requiring seri-
ous efforts to understand environmental consequences
before major activities proceed, and has been linked
to efforts to develop more transparent and account-
able government through arguments that it should
include opportunities for comment from the general
public.
The prior notication norm, which is both a continua-
tion and an extension of international rules with a long
history. Multilateral treaties regarding particularly haz-
ardous activities, such as maritime transport of nuclear
materials, operation of nuclear power plants, trans-
port of toxic or hazardous substances, and incidents
of oil pollution at sea, have long included obligations
of notication. Most of these obligations involve noti-
cation of accidents likely to have effects abroad; a few
ISEW (INDEX OF SUSTAINABLE ECONOMIC WELFARE) AND GPI (GENUINE PROGRESS INDICATOR) 331
also mandate the sharing of data regarding hazardous
or toxic chemicals or the securing of prior consent
from the government of another state before shipments
of certain substances to addressees on its territory
occur.
The public information norm, which is well developed
in the domestic legal systems of western industrial
states, but only beginning to be dened in interna-
tional law. It is given particularly strong emphasis by
those seeking to increase the direct participation of non-
governmental organizations and other non-state entities
in environmental governance, but arriving at a consen-
sus international denition is difcult because of the
variety of national practices on the subject (see Gov-
er nance and Inter national Management, Volume 5).
For treaty texts, see the Fletcher School of Law and
Diplomacy Multilateral Treaty Database, www.tufts.edu/
etcher/multilaterals.html and CIESIN List of Multilateral
Treaties relating to the Environment, www.sedac.ciesin.org/
entri/texts-home.html web sites; for current developments
see the Yearbook of International Environmental Law and
the Yearbook of International Cooperation on Environment
and Development.
REFERENCES
Agenda 21 (1992) Agenda 21: Program of Action for Sustainable
Development, United Nations, New York.
Brown-Weiss, E, McCaffrey, C, Magraw, D B, Szasz, P, and
Lutz, R E (1998) International Environmental Law and Policy,
Aspen Law and Business, Gaithersburg, NY.
Caldwell, L K (1998) International Environmental Policy, 3rd
edition, Duke University Press, Durham, NC.
Chayes, A and Chayes, A H (1995) The New Sovereignty, Har-
vard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Downs, G W, Rocke, D M, and Barsoom, P N (1996) Is the
Good News about Compliance Good News about Cooperation?
Int. Organ., 50, 379407.
Dupuy, P-M (1992) Soft Law and the International Law of the
Environment, Michigan J. Int. Law, 12, 420435.
Gabcikovo-Nagymaros (1998) Case (Hungary v. Slovakia) (1997),
Int. Leg. Mater., 37, 162.
Kiss, A (1993) Les Traites-cadres: Une Technique Juridique Char-
acteristique du Droit International de lEnvironnement, Annu-
aire Francaise de Droit International, 39, 792797.
Kiss, A and Shelton, D (1999) International Environmental Law,
3rd edition, Transnational Publishers, Ardsley, NY.
Magraw, D (1990) Legal Treatment of developing Countries:
Differential, Contextual, and Absolute Norms, Colorado J. Int.
Environ. Law Policy, 1, 6999.
Rio Declaration (1992) Rio Declaration on Environment and
Development, United Nations, New York, also in Int. Leg.
Mater., 31, 874880.
Ruster, B, Simma, B, and Bock, M (1983) International Pro-
tection of the Environment: Treaties and Related Documents,
Oceana Publishers, Dobbs Ferry, NY.
Sand, P H (1996) Institution-building to Assist Compliance with
International Environmental Law, Zeitschrift f ur auslandisches
offentliches Recht und V olkerrect, 56, 773793.
Sands, P (1996) Principles of International Environmental Law I:
Institutions, Standards, and Implementation, Manchester Uni-
versity Press, Manchester.
Schachter, O (1991) The Emergence of International Environmen-
tal Law, J. Int. Aff., 44, 457493.
Stockholm Declaration (1972) Int. Leg. Mater., 11, 14161421.
UNEP (1990) International Register of Environmental Treaties,
United Nations Environment Program, Nairobi.
UN World Commission on Environment and Development (1987)
Our Common Future, Oxford University Press, New York.
Victor, D, Raustiala, K, and Skolnikoff, E B (1998) The Imple-
mentation and Effectiveness of International Environmental
Agreements, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
International Social Science
Council (ISSC)
see ISSC (International Social Science Council)
(Volume 5)
ISEW (Index of Sustainable
Economic Welfare) and GPI
(Genuine Progress Indicator)
Aggregate economic indicators, such as gross domestic
product (GDP), are derived from the system of national
accounts (SNAs) that are now standardized across nations.
The indicators measure the rate of market and govern-
ment activity of an economy and are used for comparisons
over time and between nations. Economic goods and ser-
vices produced in households, in subsistence economies,
and through the contribution of non-market environmental
services are not included in the SNAs and hence are not
included in the aggregate indicators. The missing informa-
tion also results in misrepresentations and misinterpreta-
tions of the market data that are included (see Ecological
Economics, Volume 5). These concerns have led to the
development of expanded accounting systems and alterna-
tive indicators, the most famous of which are the ISEW and
its evolutionary offshoot, the GPI.
Economists frequently argue that it is inappropriate to
represent GDP per capita, or other indices derived from
the SNA, as measures of well-being, or even economic
332 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
well-being. Nonetheless, economists and others frequently
use these terms in exactly this way. In light of this, many
have argued that reasonable aggregate measures of well-
being need to be developed. The ISEW was conceived
by Herman Daly and John Cobb and developed by Clif-
ford Cobb (Daly et al., 1989) to be a superior indicator
of economic well-being. They also hoped that the index
would indicate what the sustainable level of well-being was.
The ISEW corrects, at least partially, for the absence of
the household and environmental sectors in the SNA. It
also takes the additional step of addressing equity, argu-
ing that adding $1000 to the annual consumption of a
rich person does not improve welfare nearly as much
as it would for a poor person. Further, the ISEW does
not include government expenditures on national defense,
health care, prisons, etc., because they are largely par-
tial corrections for problems that have grown worse over
time. An ISEW has been calculated for many European
countries.
The GPI in the US evolved from the ISEW and is being
promoted by a non-governmental organization, Rede ning
Progress. GDP per capita in the US nearly tripled dur-
ing the second half of the 20th century. The GPI shows
well-being increasing more modestly from 1950 into the
early 1970s and then drifting downward. GDP and ISEW
show similar patterns in Europe. The ISEW, GPI, and
other alternative indicators have played a modest role in
environmental debates about economic growth in devel-
oped countries and have prodded the World Bank (Lutz,
1993) and national governments (Nordhaus and Kokke-
lenberg, 1999) to consider amending the SNAs. However,
alternative indicators have yet to be incorporated in the
debate over NorthSouth equity and global environmental
change.
REFERENCES
Daly, H E, Cobb, Jr, J B, and Cobb, C W (1989) Appendix for the
Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community,
the Environment, and a Sustainable Future, Beacon Press,
Boston, MA.
Lutz, E, ed (1993) Toward Improved Accounting for the Environ-
ment, an UNSTAT-World Bank Symposium, The World Bank,
Washington, DC.
Nordhaus, W D and Kokkelenberg, E C, eds (1999) Natures
Numbers: Expanding the National Economic Accounts
to Include the Environment, National Research Council,
Washington, DC.
FURTHER READING
Uno, K and Bartelmus, P, eds (1998) Environmental Accounting
in Theory and Practice, Kluwer, Dordrecht.
RICHARD B NORGAARD USA
Islam and the Environment
Fazlun M Khalid
Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental
Sciences, Birmingham, UK
It has often been observed that Islam cannot ordinarily
be described as a religion and that it prescribes a way
of life that goes beyond the performance of rituals. The
word for religion (d n) is found in the Quran (anglicized
spelling: Koran; this is Islams sacred text on which much
of this essay is based). The word d n, which appears in 90
different places, often in contexts that place it outside the
purely ritual. D n in essence describes an integrated code
of behavior which deals with personal hygiene, at one end
of the spectrum, to our relationships with the natural order
at the other. It provides a holistic approach to existence, it
does not differentiate between the sacred and the secular
and neither does it place a distinction between the world of
mankind and the world of nature.
However, this Islamic mode of expression is now severely
attenuated, having been swept aside by the forces of history,
like the other older traditions, into a domain which treats
the natural world exclusively as an exploitable resource. As
what we now understand by modernity advanced, as the sec-
ular ethic progressively seeped into the Muslim psyche and
as industrial development, economic indicators and con-
sumerism became the governing parameters of society, there
has been a corresponding erosion of the Muslim perception
of the holistic and a withering of its understanding of the
sacred nexus between the human community and the rest
of the natural order: The creation of the heavens and the
earth is far greater than the creation of mankind. But most
of mankind do not know it (Qur an 40:56).
For these and other reasons, Muslims in various parts
of the world have in recent times sought the reversal of
these trends through the re-establishment of Islamic gov-
ernance based on the Islamic code known as the Shar ah.
Deeply embedded in its matrix are detailed and sometimes
complex rules, which lay down the basis for Islamic environ-
mental practice. Islamic jurisprudence contains regulations
concerning the conservation and allocation of scarce water
resources; it has rules for the conservation of land with
special zones of graded use; it has special rules for the
establishment of rangelands, wetlands, green belts and also
wildlife protection and conservation. Much of the traditional
institutions and laws associated with sound environmental
practice in Islam have now fallen into disuse.
Although the re-establishment of Islamic governance is an
aspiration held by an increasing number of Muslims, there
is now a growing movement amongst them, led by thinkers
like Seyyed Hossein Nasr (see Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, Vol-
ume 5), who place an immediate priority in dealing with
ISLAM AND THE ENVIRONMENT 333
the intractable problems that the human race is creating
for itself by overexploiting and degrading the planet beyond
repair. Credit is due to Seyyed Hossein Nasr for almost
single handedly rekindling the consciousness of not only
Muslims, but of adherents of other traditions, to the dimen-
sion we have come to describe as faith and nature. His
rst exposition on this subject was a series of lectures in
May 1966, delivered at the invitation of the University of
Chicago, which was eventually published (Hossein, 1968).
He has written voluminously on this theme since then; see,
for example, Hossein, 1996. For Muslims this crisis calls for
a fresh evaluation of the teachings of Islam and its practice
in the present globalized order.
A GLANCE AT THE BASICS
Islam is the name of the religion discussed in this contribu-
tion. A Muslim (called a Musselman in the 18th century) is
a follower of Islam. The word Islam literally means submis-
sion or surrender, and a Muslim is one who surrenders his
will to the will of God. A Muslim country is one in which
the majority of people are Muslims there are about 60
such countries in the world.
The roots of Islamic environmental practice are to be
found in the Quran and the guidance (sunnah) of Prophet
Muhammad. Prophet Muhammad is the Prophet of Islam
and is usually referred to by Muslims as the Messenger
of God (Rasulullah). He was born in 570 AD in Mecca
and died in 632 in Medina, in what is now Saudi Arabia.
Over the centuries, Islamic practice has been elaborated by
a succession of scholars and jurists responding to real prob-
lems experienced by the growing community of Muslims
in various parts of the world.
The Islamic worldview is based on the belief in the
existence of an all powerful creator who is the same God
(Allah in Arabic) of the other monotheistic faiths, Judaism
and Christianity. Muslims learn from the Quran that God
created the universe and every single atom and molecule it
contains and that the laws of creation include the elements
of order, balance and proportion: He created everything
and determined it most exactly (25:2) and It is He Who
appointed the sun to give radiance and the moon to give
light, assigning it in phases Allah did not create these
things except with truth. We make the signs clear for people
who know (10:5).
What may be described as the Islamic creed has three
aspects. The rst is the core value system that Islam
establishes, which is islam itself and in this context is taken
to mean submission. The second is faith (iman) and the third
is good personal conduct (ihsan) traditionally described as
righteousness or piety.
Islam, in its verb context, is elaborated in what is com-
monly described as the ve pillars. The rst of these is
a two-part declaration (shahada) bearing witness that there
is no God but God and that Muhammad is the Messenger
of God; the second is the performance of the ve daily
prayers (salat); the third is the annual payment of a spe-
cic tax (zakat); the fourth is to fast during the month of
Ramadhan (sawm); the fth is to make the pilgrimage (haj)
to Mecca at least once in a lifetime for those who have the
means to do it.
Iman was described by the Prophet Muhammad as know-
ing with the heart, voicing with the tongue and expressing
with the body. This requires the profession of faith in God,
His angels, His books, His messengers, the nal day and
acceptance that life in all its expressions emanates from the
divine source.
Ihsan is described as the act of worshipping Allah as if
you see Him, knowing that even if you do not see Him, He
sees you. This goes much beyond the ritual prayers; and
every good action performed by a believer is seen as an
act of worship. This is commonly expressed by Muslims as
doing what is pleasing to Allah, who is ever present, ever
watchful.
Taken as a whole as it is intended to be, caring for planet
Earth, our only home, is integrated within the framework
of this value system. This is then an everyday concern for
the Muslim, which the Quran reminds him by saying, We
have not omitted anything from the Book (6:39) and He
said Our Lord is He Who gives each thing its created form
and then guides it (20:49). We will now look at how this
is reected in daily life.
THE ETHICAL DIMENSION
One of the stories often told by Muslims concerning the
environment is the instruction by Abu Bakr, the rst Caliph
(Khalif) of Islam to his armies. In addition to telling them
not to harm women, children and the inrm, he ordered
them not to harm animals, destroy crops or cut down trees.
There were two elements present in this decree: the rst,
to establish justice even as the Muslim armies fought, and
the second, to recognize the value of nature. It should also
be noted that the environment was not an issue or subject
for separate treatment in life as it owed onwards in both
war and peace. The human condition was never separated
from the natural order. It was a matter to be reckoned with
at every moment of existence like the very air we take into
our lungs.
Abu Bakr was the rst of four rightly guided caliphs
who succeeded the Prophet after his death. They were
known as such because of the lengths to which they
went to incorporate the instructions in the Quran and the
Prophets example into their rule. The rule of the rightly
guided caliphs lasted from 632 to 661 (AD) and became
the time, including the time of the Prophet, which all
Muslims to this day seek to emulate. In attempting to
reproduce the Prophetic model what the rightly guided
334 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
caliphs did was to set a pattern that would evolve into
the matrix that formed the basis of the Islamic legal sys-
tem known as the Shar ah and which very soon came to
circumscribe Muslim life. The word Shar ah has an inter-
esting etymology with strong environmental connotations.
It means a way or path in Arabic and its derivation
refers to the beaten track by which wild animals come to
drink at their watering places. It is the road that leads to
where the waters of life ow inexhaustibly (Eaton, 1994;
180).
As Muslim populations grew and expanded territori-
ally, their requirements in government became increasingly
complex and the Shar ah accordingly became more sophis-
ticated. To the Quran and Sunnah were added two other
elements: the consensus (ijma) of scholar jurists and the
process of reasoning by analogy (qiyas). Islamic law (qh)
evolved out of this process and there are two other tradi-
tional instruments which were incorporated into this system
and which could usefully serve the purpose of formulating
environmental law in the Muslim world today. The rst of
these is interpretation in context (ijtihad) and the second is
custom and practice ( urf wa adat).
The Shar ah expanded and evolved within this frame-
work to set dening standards for Muslim behavior within
the divine decrees of the Quran, including inter alia
family law, civil law, commercial law and environmen-
tal law. From the time of the Prophet, law has taken
precedence over theology; this is stated to be the case
because Islams concern is about humankind and its rela-
tionship with the rest of creation, beginning, of course,
with itself. The law is about dening these relationships
and the following are examples of how the Quran sees it
(4:134).
You who have iman (faith); be upholders of justice, bearing
witness for Allah alone, even against yourselves or your parents
and relatives. Whether they are rich or poor, Allah is able to
look after them. Do not follow your own desires and deviate
from the truth. If you twist and turn away, Allah is aware of
what you do
Truth takes precedence over love, even love for ones
parents, and love is known habitually to conceal the truth.
There is no compromise with truth and justice,
so call and go straight as you have been ordered to. Do not
follow their whims and desires but say, I have iman (faith), in
a book sent down by Allah and I am ordered to be just between
you (42:13)
The Quran also asks us to be just to our natural
surroundings, We did not create the heavens and earth
and everything between them, except with truth (15:85).
Like the Muslims who had succeeded the Prophet and
had attempted to give expression to the divine decree, the
scholar jurists approached this matter with great diligence
and formulated an ethical base derived from the imperatives
laid down in the Quran. These imperatives come under
numerous headings but they could be distilled into just three
categories for our purposes, bearing in mind that public
good (al masalih al mursalah) is the ultimate objective
(Doi, 1984). Muslims are to do what is right, forbid what
is wrong and act with moderation at all times: let there be
a community among you who call to the good, and enjoin
the right and forbid wrong. They are the ones who have
success (3:104). The Quran again uses an environmental
theme in exhorting humankind to be moderate; (6:142):
it is He who produces gardens, both cultivated and wild,
and palm trees and crops of diverse kinds and olives and
pomegranates both similar and dissimilar. Eat of their fruits
when they bear fruit and pay their dues on the day of their har-
vest, and do not be proigate. He does not love the proigate.
The Shar ah also evolved within the guidelines set by
three principles agreed upon by scholar jurists over the
centuries. They are:
1. the interest of the community takes precedence over
the interests of the individual;
2. relieving hardship takes precedence over promoting
benet;
3. a bigger loss cannot be prescribed to alleviate a smaller
loss and a bigger benet takes precedence over a
smaller one. Conversely a smaller harm can be pre-
scribed to avoid a bigger harm and a smaller benet
can be dispensed with in preference to a bigger one.
THE NATURAL ORDER IN ISLAM
As the Islamic tapestry unfolded in its expression over
the centuries, we discover that there are no references to
the environment, as we understand it today. The word
nature, which is an abstraction, cannot be found in the
Quran and the closest modern Arabic usage is the word
b a which connotes a habitat or a surrounding. The word
nature will continue to be used in this essay for linguistic
convenience. For a further explanation on terminology, see
Khalid (1999). The Quran speaks of creation (khalq) and it
contains two hundred and sixty one verses where this word
is used in its various grammatical forms derived from the
root kh l q. These verses contain references to the human
world; to the natural world of the Earth, from trees to turtles,
from sh to fowl; and to the sun, stars and skies. The very
rst revelation of the Quran to the Messenger used this
word in its verb form to dramatic effect, Recite in the
name of your Lord who created, created man from clots of
blood (96:1). Creation is the fabric into which the tapestry
of life is worked.
Creation or nature is referred to as the signs (ayat) of
Allah and this is also the name given to the verses of the
Quran. Ayat means signs, symbols or proof of the divine.
ISLAM AND THE ENVIRONMENT 335
As the Quran is proof of Allah so likewise is His creation.
The Quran also speaks of signs within the self and as Nasr
(1993) explains,
Muslim sages referred to the cosmic or ontological Quran
they saw upon the face of every creature letters and words
from the cosmic Quran they remained fully aware of the
fact that the Quran refers to phenomena of nature and events
within the soul of man as ayat for them forms of nature
were literally ayat Allah.
As the Quran says, there are certainly signs in the earth
for people with certainty; and in yourselves. Do you not
then see? (51:20, 21).
Writing from another perspective, Faruqi and Faruqi
(1986) say:
Its (natures) goodness is derived from that of the divine
purpose. For the Muslim, nature is nimah, a blessed gift of
Allahs bounty to transform in any way with the aim of
achieving ethical value Since nature is Allahs work, His
ayat or signs, and the instrument of His purpose which is
absolute good, nature enjoys in the Muslims eye a tremendous
dignity.
The Quran says about these matters (16:6569):
Allah sends down water from the sky and by it brings the
dead earth back to life. There is cer tainly a Sign in that for
people who hear . There is instruction for you in cattle. From
the contents of their bellies, from between dung and blood, We
give you pure milk to drink, easy for drinkers to swallow. And
from the fruit of the date palm and the grapevine you derive
both intoxicants and wholesome provision. There is cer tainly
a Sign in that for people who use their intellect. Your Lord
revealed to the bees: Build dwellings in the mountains and
the trees, and also in the structures which men erect. Then eat
from every kind of fruit and travel the paths of your Lord,
which have been made easy for you to follow. From inside
them comes a drink of varying colours, containing healing for
mankind. There is cer tainly a Sign in that for people who
reect.
The universe we inhabit is a sign of Gods creation
as is the environment of our innermost selves. They both
emanate from the One Source and are bonded by only one
purpose, which is to serve the divine will. This bonding of
the cosmic to the subatomic is the deep ecology of Islam
but it is not a relationship of equals as we can see in the
hierarchy of the food chain dominated by Man. Whilst
the primary relationship is that between the Creator and
the rest of His creation, the Creator Himself determined
a subsidiary one, that between Man and the rest of His
creation which the Quran denes as follows: It is He Who
created everything on the earth for you (2:28); We did
not create heaven and earth and everything between them
as a game (21:16); We did not create heaven and earth
and everything between them to no purpose (38:26);
He wanted to test you regarding what has come to you
(5:48).
The Quranic view holds that everything on the earth was
created for humankind. It was Gods gift (nimah) to us, but
a gift with conditions nevertheless and it is decidedly not
something that one runs and plays with. The earth then
is a testing ground of the human species. The tests are a
measure of our acts of worship (ihsan) in its broadest sense.
That is living in a way that is pleasing to Allah, striving
in everything we do to maintain the harmony of our inner
and outer environments.
As our interaction with the environment evolved, it
manifested itself in a range of rules and institutions. As
the Muslim community expanded out of its sparse desert
environment, it was confronted by many challenges, one
of which was relative abundance. This brought about other
problems like over exploitation and waste. Muslims applied
themselves to these problems assiduously and it would be
salutary to look at this legacy. For more information on
this subject see Bagader et al. (1994); Llewellyn (1992);
Dien (2000). The following is a brief summary of how the
Shariah developed in this area over the past 1400 years.
Legislative Principles
1. Allah is the sole owner of the earth and everything in
it. People hold land on usufruct that is, for its utility
value only. There is a restricted right to public property.
2. Abuse of rights is prohibited and penalized.
3. There are rights to the bene ts derived from natural
resources held in common.
4. Scarce resource utilization is controlled.
5. The common welfare is protected.
6. Bene ts are protected and detriments are either reduced
or eliminated.
Institutions
1. People who reclaim or revive land (ihya al mawat)
have a right to its ownership.
2. Land grants (iqta ) may be made by the state for
reclamation and development.
3. Land may be leased (ijara) for its usufruct by the state
for its reclamation and development.
4. Special reserves (h ma) may be established by the state
for use as conservation zones.
5. The state may establish inviolable zones (al-har m)
where use is prohibited or restricted. Every settlement
has a right to create such zones managed by the people
and where use is severely restricted. Additionally, it is
permitted to establish these zones adjacent to sources
of water and other utilities like roads and places of
public resort.
6. Makkah and Mad nah are known as the two inviolable
sanctuaries (al-haramain) where trees cannot be cut
down and animals are protected from harm within their
boundaries. They serve as examples of best practice.
336 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
7. Charitable endowments (awqaf) may be established
with specic conservation objectives.
Enforcement
The primary duty of the Islamic state is to promote the
good and forbid wrong doing. As part of these functions,
it has the mandate to protect land and natural resources
from abuse and misuse. From its earliest years the Islamic
state established an agency known as the hisba whose
specic task was to protect the people through promoting
the establishment of good and forbidding wrong-doing. This
agency was headed by a learned jurist (muhtasib) who
functioned like a chief inspector of weights and measures
and chief public health ofcer rolled into one. He was
also responsible, among other similar duties, for the proper
functioning of the h ma and al har m zones and he acted as
what one might describe as an environmental inspectorate.
The development and application of these principles and
institutions have seen a decline over the past two centuries,
as another worldview based on the exploitation of natural
resources for prot gradually overtook this model. We are
experiencing the consequences of this now. However, there
are clear indications as to how this Islamic heritage has
been and could again be put to good use in the modern
context.
AN EMERGING RESPONSE
The Muslim world was gradually co-opted into the new
world order by force of arms and by force of economics.
The rst is history and the second present day reality and
what the Muslims lost in between these twin processes was
the sap of Islam and their unique way of perceiving the
universe. For Muslims, their d n is a whole, an organic
reality, where every element has a function as a part of
this whole. For example, Islam law does not make sense
without the ethical dimension of the divine revelation.
Law in the West is amoral. It deals with human ends for
human purposes. The Muslim idea of the highest form
of civilization is that it is the one that is pleasing to
Allah. In todays Western-dominated global order of which
Muslims are a part, conspicuous consumption has become
the highest imperative. Muslim nation states of which there
are now about 60, are willing co-optees to this consumer
ethic.
These are however, supercial considerations; and deep
in the interface between Islam and the West are two irrec-
oncilable factors that call for some examination. The rst
is the matter of existence itself and how it is to be dened
and the second is the matter concerning money and how it
is to be used.
The traditional worldview, which includes that of the
West, was challenged by what we have come to know
as the Enlightenment (see Enlightenment Project, Vol-
ume 5), having its origins in 16th century Europe. These
events are usually seen as a time in which science began its
ascendancy over religion. Tarnas (1996) observes that this
movement achieved its maturity in the 19th century, nally
resulting in a radical shift of psychological alliance from
the divine to humankind. Descartes (the French philoso-
pher, mathematician) nally breached the oodgates of the
old order by splitting mind from body and proclaiming a
dualistic worldview in his well known statement I think,
therefore I am (cogito ergo sum). One result of the Enlight-
enment was science, including the scientic capacity for
rendering intelligible certain aspects of the material world
and for making mankind (in Descartes own words) Master
and possessor of Nature .
This view is on a collision course with how Islam teaches
the Muslim to view the world. There is only one master
and possessor of nature and that is the One Who created
it, Allah. This is unequivocally expressed in the very rst
line of the Quran Praise be to Allah, the Lord of all the
worlds (1:1) and the last verse in the Quran Say: I seek
refuge with the Lord of mankind, the King of mankind, the
God of mankind (114:13) and repeatedly in between.
After Descartes, Isaac Newtons world view led to the well
known mechanistic conception of the universe and totally
away from the holistic and organic interpretation of things.
The result was after the 17th century science and religion
became totally divorced (Nasr, 1990).
People would nd it impossible to live in todays world
without money, but one increasingly comes across interest-
ing appraisals of it like the following for example: in
spite of all its fervid activity, money remains a naked sym-
bol with no intrinsic value of its own and no direct linkage
to anything specic (Kurtzman, 1993). Money has come
to be recognized as mere tokens and:
there is something quite magical about the way money is
created. No other commodity works quite the same way. The
money supply grows through use; it expands through debt. The
more we lend, the more we have. The more debt there is, the
more there is.
(Kurtzman, 1993)
These tokens of value that we create from nothing and
use everyday grow exponentially ad innitum. But we know
that the natural world, which is subject to drastic resource
depletion, has limits and is nite. This equation is lopsided
and the question is for how long can we continue to create
this innite amount of token nance to exploit the real and
tangible resources of a nite world. Looked at from this
perspective, money, as the modern world has contrived it,
assumes the characteristics of a virus that eats into the fabric
of the planet. The consequences of this become visible as
global environmental degradation.
This magical system underwent a metamorphosis in 1971
when President Nixon of the US unilaterally abandoned
ISLAM AND THE ENVIRONMENT 337
the gold standard. This is not the place to go into the
background of this event, sufce it to say that, by aban-
doning the gold standard he also moved the world into a
new standard: the interest standard . (Kurtzman, 1993). It is
generally known that Islam prohibits usury or the taking of
interest and the term used in the Quran for this is riba. (For
an appraisal on interest see Diwaney, 1997) This term has
wide connotations and simply put, it means one cannot have
something out of nothing. Thus, riba is also seen as pro-
hibiting the free creation of credit. The Quran denounces
these practices vehemently and we can see why from the
foregoing discussion: those who practise riba will not rise
from the grave except as someone driven mad by shaytans
(satans) touch (2:274); also, you who have iman (faith)!
have taqwa (awe) of Allah and forgo any remaining riba
if you are muminun (believers). If you do not, know that
it means war from Allah and his Messenger (2:277, 278).
No other proclamation in the Quran matches this degree
of trenchancy.
The Muslim world today is comprised of nation states
(not an Islamic concept) that are wholly or mostly Muslim
and Muslim minorities, from the very large to the very
small, living in non-Muslim countries. Muslim countries
may be divided into two categories. The rst, into those
that describe themselves as Islamic states but who will
freely admit that the way they run their affairs is a far
cry from the example laid down by the Prophet, the Right
Guided Caliphs and the paradigm of the Quran. The second
group consists of secular Muslim states where Islam plays
a ritualistic role in varying degrees of intensity. However,
both these groups, as willing or unwilling co-optees to the
new world order, resort to the methods and institutions
that are part of it, in order to trade for instance. One such
institution is the banking system, and every Muslim state,
Islamic or secular has banks with or without the approval
of the scholar jurists who did much to build the Shar ah
over the centuries into a potent force for just government.
It should be obvious from this that it becomes almost
impossible for Muslims whether individuals or nation
states, to give expression to a normative Islam under the
present globalized system. A system that is in direct conict
with two fundamentals that are part of the Islamic world-
view. There now prevails a schizoid tendency in Muslim
society whereby it strives to maintain its deep attachment
to Islam while it persists in tasting the fruits of the current
order.
However, people are increasingly taking a serious look
at the current model of endless growth that supplies a con-
trived demand for consumer goods, which appears to be
insatiable and which is, in the end, impacting on the bio-
sphere with drastic consequences. This concern is reected
in the West by the growth of activism and protest organi-
zations. These same trends (differently expressed) appear
in the Muslim world. The form this usually takes is the
demand for the establishment of the just order under the
Shar ah to replace the socialist and capitalist models, which
are now seen as failures. It is difcult to see where these
demands for change will take Muslims but it is increasingly
felt that the current order is untenable in terms of keeping
the planet in good repair.
Muslim minorities, particularly those living in the West,
have an important role to play. Living in the belly of
the beast gives them the advantage of perspective and
their understanding of events could lead to an unique
contribution to the melting pot of ideas that could lead
us out of this impasse. For example, Muslim groups in
the West are re-examining alternative currencies and ways
of trading that are based on the qh of Islam and not on
falsehood (Douthwaite, 1996). Corruption has appeared in
both land and sea because of what peoples own hands have
brought about so that they may taste something of what they
have done, so that hopefully they will turn back (30:40).
In other words learn from your mistakes.
One could say with a reasonable degree of certainty that
the environmental problems we see today would not have
happened in a society ordered in accord with Islamic prin-
ciples because its world view dened limits to human
behaviour and contained excess (Khalid, 2000). We have
seen how this was done in the realm of environmental pro-
tection although its stated aim was not precisely that. Rather
it came about in the course of establishing public good, one
of the basic principles of the Shar ah. Safeguarding against
human excess had the effect of protecting the natural world.
The Shar ah evolved holistically and new situations were
dealt with through the processes we have discussed above.
However, there is nothing to stop this from continuing.
However there are important impediments to its proper
application today:
1. The Shar ah is no longer supreme even in Islamic
states because of the dominance of the global system
now in place. The inuence of international trade and
nance is a case in point.
2. The Hisbah which was once the environmental enforce-
ment agency is now virtually non existent.
3. Increasingly civil administration is separating itself
from the body of the people who are coming to be
known as the religious authorities, i.e., a clergy, which
is not recognized in Islam. This is the case in the Sunni
tradition of Islam, which accounts for about 85% of the
worlds Muslim population. The Shia tradition has an
established clergy. The concept of d n is wearing thin
and as a consequence the holistic approach suffers.
4. Following the Western model, Muslim states increas-
ingly function in watertight compartments. As a mirror
of what is happening in the West, Muslim economists
and environmentalists are two separate species with
opposing perspectives.
338 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
5. The nation state model, which all Muslim countries
have adopted, has economic development as its highest
priority. Coping with environmental change is much
lower on the scale.
The following is a crystallization of what we consider to
be the essentials which will bring into focus the dimensions
of change that are needed today from an Islamic perspec-
tive. These ideas have been developed by us over the
past decade and discussed at various international forums.
However, we are at a disadvantage because the principles
we are discussing have been plucked out of the Islamic
tapestry so assiduously woven over the past 14 centuries.
They work best as part of the whole, but how they t
together in todays context and how the whole can be
improved, applied and made sense of are matters for open
discussion.
The planetary system, the earth and its ecosystems,
all work within their own limits and tolerances. Islamic
teaching likewise sets limits to human behavior as a control
against excess and it could be said that the limits to
the human condition are set within four principles. They
are the unity principle (Tawh d); the creation principle
(Fitra); the balance principle (Mizan); and the responsibility
principle (Khal fa).
The Unity Principle
Tawh d is the foundation of Islamic monotheism and its
essence is contained in the declaration (Shahada) which
every Muslim makes and is a constant reminder of faith.
It is there is no God but God (lailaha illa-llah) and
is the foundational statement of the Unity of the Creator
from which everything else ows. The second half of this
declaration is Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah
(Muhammadur Rasulullah). He is Allah, Absolute oneness,
Allah the Everlasting Sustainer of all (112:1, 2). It is the
testimony to the unity of all creation and to the fabric
of the natural order of which humankind is an intrinsic
part: what is in the heavens and the earth belong to
Allah. Allah encompasses everything (4:125). This is the
bedrock of the holistic approach in Islam as this afrms the
interconnectedness of the natural order.
The Creation Principle
The Fitra principle describes the primordial nature of cre-
ation: Allahs natural pattern on which He made mankind
(30:29). Mankind was created within the natural pattern of
nature and being of it, its role is dened by this pattern-
ing itself. For a discussion on Fitra, see Yasien Mohammed
(1996). Fitra is the pure state, a state of intrinsic goodness
and points to the possibility that everything in creation has
a potential for goodness and the conscious expression of
this rests with humankind.
The Balance Principle
In one of its more popular passages, the Quran describes
creation thus (55:15):
The All-Merciful taught the Quran, He created man and
taught him clear expression. The sun and moon both run with
precision. The stars and the trees all bow down in prostration.
He erected heaven and established the balance
Allah has singled out humankind and taught it clear
expression the capacity to reason. All creation has an
order and a purpose and is in a state of dynamic balance.
If the sun, the moon, the stars did not bow themselves, i.e.,
serve the purpose of their design, it would be impossible
for life to function on earth. This is another way of saying
that the natural order works because it is in submission to
the Creator. It is Muslim in the original, primordial sense.
The Responsibility Principle
This principle establishes the tripartite relationship between
the Creator, humankind and creation. God created every-
thing for humankind and appointed it the vice-regent
(Khalif) on this earth: it is He Who appointed you Khal-
ifs on this earth (6:167). This role was one of trustee-
ship (amanah) which imposed a moral responsibility, We
offered the Trust to the heavens, the earth and the moun-
tains but they refused to take it on and shrank from it. But
man took it on. (33:72). This assumption of responsibility
made humankind accountable for their actions, Will the
reward for doing good be anything but good? (55:59).
We can deduce in outline from these four principles that
creation that is both complex and nite is yet exact. It
emerged from one source and was designed to function as a
whole. Humankind, like the rest of the natural world, was,
as part of the natural patterning of creation, in a state of
goodness with potential for good actions. It is inextricably
part of this pattern, but is the only element of it with choice,
that can choose to act against the divine Will using the
very gift of reasoning bestowed upon it by the Creator.
Submission to the divine will, the natural law that holds in
check the instincts of the predator, is the way to uphold our
responsibilities as the Creators Khalif. Humankind are the
guardians of the natural order.
CONCLUSION
The position set out in this essay is that of Islam and as we
have observed earlier, there is a clear issue of conicting
paradigms. The question is how to implement the teachings
and practices of one worldview into an institutional frame-
work devised by another that has a diametrically opposite
outlook. Although it may be possible to incorporate the
principles of Islamic environmental law into the legislative
ISSC (INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE COUNCIL) 339
programs of Muslim countries, the problem will remain one
of implementation unless appropriate institutional arrange-
ments are made to replace the old and now virtually defunct
ones. It is also interesting that efforts to meet the challenge
of environmental change in Muslim countries are made
by secular agencies; this is only to be expected, as this
is generally not seen as a Muslim problem. The role of the
Muslim scholar jurists has been redened into a religious
one as the nature of the Muslim state has changed in its
attempt to cope with modernity. The Muslim scholar jurists
were unwilling partners to this change and were replaced
by a secularized administration, which gradually weakened
the scholar jurists inuence as it began to take charge.
However, there is an awakening amongst Muslims to the
realities of environmental change and therein lies a para-
dox. There is just an off chance that this may lead Muslims
to the discovery that they may be on the wrong side of the
tracks.
Note
The translation of the Quran used is that by Bewley and
Bewley (1999). In subsequent references to the Quran in
this essay, a quotation is followed by the chapter and verse
numbers in parentheses. The actual names of the chapters
have been left out for convenience.
Transliteration of Arabic vowels
a pronounced as a in cattle, a pronounced as a in father,
i pronounced as i as in n, pronounced as ee as in
sheep, u pronounced as oo in foot, u pronounced as oo
in soon.
REFERENCES
Bagader, A A, El-Chirazi El-Sabbagh, A, As-Sayyid Al-Glay-
and, M, Samarrai, M U I, and Llewellyn, O A (1994) Envi-
ronmental Protection in Islam, IUCN Environmental Policy and
Law Paper, 20, second revised edition, Gland, Switzerland.
Bewley, A and Bewley, A (1999) The Noble Qur an, Bookwork,
Norwich.
Dien, M I (2000) The Environmental Dimensions of Islam, Lut-
terworth, Cambridge.
Doi, A R I (1984) Shariah: The Islamic Law, Taha, London.
Douthwaite, R (1996) Short Circuit, Green Books, Totnes Devon.
Eaton, G (1994) Islam and the Destiny of Man, Islamic Texts
Society, Cambridge.
El Diwaney, T E (1997) The Problem With Interest, Ta Ha,
London.
Faruqi, I R al and Faruqi, L L al (1986) The Cultural Atlas of
Islam, MacMillan, New York.
Hossein, N (1968) Man and Nature The Spiritual Crisis in Mod-
ern Man, Allen and Unwin, London.
Hossein, N (1996) Religion and the Order of Nature, Oxford
University Press, New York.
Khalid, F M (1999) Qur an, Creation and Conservation, Islamic
Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences,
Birmingham.
Khalid, F M (2000) Islamic Pathways to Ecological Sanity An
Evaluation for the New Millennium, Ecology and Develop-
ment, J. Inst. Ecol., 3, Bandung, Indonesia.
Kurtzman, J (1993) The Death of Money, Little, Brown & Co,
Boston, MA.
Llewellyn, O (1992) National Legal Strategies for Protected Areas
Conservation and Management, Paper delivered at IVth World
Congress on National Parks and Protected Areas, Caracas,
Venezuela.
Nasr, S H (1990) Man and Nature, The Spiritual Crisis in Modern
Man, Unwin Hyman, London.
Nasr, S H (1993) The Need for a Sacred Science, Curzon Press,
Surrey.
Tarnas, R (1996) The Passion of the Western Mind, Pimlico,
London.
Yasien, M (1996) Fitra, Ta-Ha, London.
ISSC (International Social
Science Council)
ISSC (Conseil International des Sciences Sociales) was
founded in October 1952 on the basis of a resolution
adopted by the 6th United Nations Educational, Scienti c
and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) General Conference
in 1951, with its secretariat located in UNESCO s head-
quarter in Paris, the ISSC is an international non-pro t
scienti c organization. It has as it aims and objectives the
interdisciplinary coordination of research and the promotion
of the understanding of human society in its environ-
ment. As such, and in line with its primarily organizing
functions, ISSC concentrates on the promotion and coor-
dination of social sciences on a global scale. The ISSC,
at present is comprised of 14 scienti c international asso-
ciations/organizations (member associations), six national
academies and research councils (member organizations)
and a number of associate members, most of them social
science associations.
ISSC s ultimate goal is to encourage social scientists
and social science organizations to engage themselves in
scienti c research of global-scale problems with a special
focus on social, cultural and economic issues. In line with
this mission statement, ISSC describes its main tasks and
functions as follows:
1. to encourage and promote research in the social and
behavioral sciences for the bene t and well-being of
humanity and its environment, including global issues
of concern to the world community;
340 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
2. to encourage and pursue global, international and
inter-organizational collaborative scientic activities in
the social sciences at a multi-disciplinary and inter-
disciplinary level among the members of the ISSC;
3. to stimulate, develop, coordinate, enhance and pro-
mote inter-disciplinary social scientic programs across
institutional, national and regional contexts;
4. to collaborate with the United Nations and its
agencies, and particularly with other governmental
and non-governmental organizations to further these
aims;
5. to provide, through suitable channels, information about
its activities and the worlds social science community
to the public and to other interested parties within the
public at large.
In pursuit of these aims and goals, ISSC maintains, at
present, a limited number of both interdisciplinary and
international research programs. These include the Com-
parative Research Program on Poverty, and the Conict
Early Warning System Research Program. Together with the
International Council for Science, ISSC also co-sponsors
the International Human Dimensions Program on Global
Environmental Change, a program of special importance
for the cooperation between natural and social sciences.
More information on ISSC can be obtained from www.
unesco.org/ngo/issc, ISSC/CISS, UNESCO-1, rue Miollis,
75732 Paris Cedex 15, France. Tel.: 33 (0)1 4568 2558;
Fax: 33 (0)1 4566-7603.
ECKART EHLERS Germany
J
Jains and the Environment
Kerry Brown
12
1
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
2
Oakland, CA, USA
The Jain Declaration on Nature:
All the Venerable Ones of the past, present and future discourse,
counsel, proclaim, propound and prescribe in unison: Do not
injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture or kill
any creature or living being (Acharanga Sutra 1.4.1.1-2).
translated by Singhvi (1990)
For nearly three millennia, the Jain people have inhabited
a universe that is both inter-galactic and microscopic in
its proportions, and bustling to bursting with souls, all of
whom are to be treated non-violently (while not proposing
harm to microscopic one-sensed beings, Jainism does allow
that the practical limit of ahimsa (universal non-violence)
is life-forms with two or more senses).
Ahimsa is the rst principle of Jainism, and it is a tall order,
as the Jains well know. What do you eat? Where do you sit?
The Green consciousness now trespassing on global con-
sumer culture presents a critical challenge and opportunity
for a faith that, of all the so-called world faiths, is most
obviously and self-consciously saddled with being environ-
mental. If these people cant set an example, who can?
Jainism is of course an indigenous religion, indigenous to
India, and most of the seven million Jains still live there
with concentrations in Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Gujarat,
Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka (Jain, 1986) and perhaps
200 000 Jains in East Africa, the United Kingdom (UK),
North America and lightly scattered around the Pacic Rim.
More precisely, it is indigenous in the sense that, as well
as its 2500 year old philosophical and socio-political roots
shared with Buddhism that provide the ascetic, atheistic
avor, and the metaphysical credentials of world religion,
there is an older root that is distinctly animist. Together they
generate in Jainism one of those invaluable irresolvables
that keep a religion alive and tussling with itself. While at
one level the Jains are or should be, according to their scrip-
tures, working as hard as they can to get out of the material
bondage and heading for eternal salvation, this is a religion
that has busied itself with mind-boggling catalogues of the
universes geography, mathematics, biology and physics in
which time, space, matter, motion, rest, and souls are all
wrapped up together. It is a religion that believes in an
innity of souls that have never existed separately from
matter, nor have they created it. Each soul has its own
beginningless, endless autonomy, is beleaguered by karma
(spiritual guilt) that exists as physical particles, and, even
after eternal release, will maintain shape and size. It is a
religion that has its feet dug rmly, and rather comfortably,
in a very real earth while advocating some of the most
severe physical hardships imaginable to unearth oneself.
So this is the grain of sand rubbing on the religious order
(like the middle-eastern religions problem of good and evil
with an omniscient and benecent God or Buddhisms com-
passion for an ultimate emptiness), that either produces a
pearl of great value or a very sore oyster. The inner ten-
sion has probably contributed to Jainisms long-standing
durability and dynamism at both the cutting edge of Indian
society and in its courts of power. It is hard to be swept
away when the ground you stake is wide, when youve
got the skinniest monks and the most well padded mag-
nates. At the most obvious level, the rise of vegetarianism
and the demise of animal sacrice in the sub-continent owe
much to the Jains. Mahatma Gandhis non-violent revolu-
tion had Jain ngerprints on it and he acknowledged his
Jain friend and mentor Rajchandra Mehta, along with Tol-
stoy and Ruskin, as the three people who had most deeply
inuenced him. (Gandhi, 1958). But the modern demands
on environmental sensibility and practice are more exten-
sive than even the Jain ascetics whisk-broom, sweeping
tiny creatures out of danger of their tread. And while over
7000 Jain monks and nuns are probably causing less harm
than any one on the planet, what about the rest of the Jains?
At a practical level, many Jains are almost outfaced by
their faiths complex cosmology and demanding ethics. It is
not surprising that they rest on personal vegetarianism, the
base-camp of Jainism, and up the ante by removing gs,
garlic and onions (thought to have a density of microcosmic
life on them), resort to only fruits and leaves of plants, or
342 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
just go on a fast. Supplementary actions include sponsorship
of one of the Jain animal sanctuaries in India, tree planting,
public promotion of vegetarianism and protest on matters
such as the killing of millions of cattle with mad cow dis-
ease in Britain, culling of kangaroos by Australian farmers,
and veal production in Europe. And in the meantime the
modern lifestyle of a successful and afuent community
has developed which begs all sorts of questions. Nowadays
Jain businessmen are part of the industrial complex, jet-
ting the world in planes that dispense more pollutants in
one ight than their Mercedes manages in a year, but they
would probably still hesitate to burden a horse and ride
to London (in Jainism, animal transport is considered an
infringement of the animals autonomy and ease).
Taking the letter of the law expressed a 2000 years ago,
identifying its spirit, and creating updated guides for living
that are commensurate with where we are now, is a work
in progress. This work by one of the oldest guards of the
environmental movement has some interesting indicators
for us all.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Like most latter-day world religions (with the exception of
the body of traditions we call Hinduism), Jainism began as
a challenge to assumed spiritual values and, by implication,
the socio-economic order.
The rst Jains were nirgrantha (the unattached ones).
Vardhamana (599527 BCE) who became Lord Mahavira
(great hero), divested himself of the princely trappings of
his kshatriya caste, right down to stripping off his clothes
and pulling out his hair. He was the 24th and last Jain
Tirthankara (ford-builder) in the most recent of the endless
cycles of Tirthankaras or Jinas (spiritual victors).
Mahavira was an historical contemporary of Gautama
Buddha in the Magadha region, near modern Patna, in
northern India. Both men were leaders of anti-brahmanical
(and rival) sects in the region, teaching a theory and praxis
that had universal law rather than god at the helm, applied
itself without caste privilege or the need for brahmanical
mediation, and herded souls through the material plane of
suffering toward something innitely more desirable and
everlasting. These reform movements were part of the late
Vedic period (circa 1000500 BCE) in which meditation
and ascetism became paths to a oneness beyond the hurly
burly of Indian gods and goddesses. They were also rattling
the caste systems cage. Buddhism and Jainism are the
only two reform sects from this period to have survived
and become religions in their own right, albeit with very
different histories, the former fading from India to become
one of the largest religions in the world, the latter nding a
minority niche in India which it has frequented to this day.
From the start, Jainism, even more than Buddhism, or
indeed any other religion, has seen each beings spiritual
progress as their personal business, but their physical safety
in the meantime as a matter of shared concern. Everybody,
however small and simple their consciousness, has a right
to be here for their own sake, no one elses, and stay as
long as they can, without harm from others. It appears that
Mahavira or his followers in some way absorbed a strand
in the elaborate braiding of Indian traditions that had a
closer eye on the physical here and now. It may have come
from previous teachers of the nirgranthas: Pashva, the 23rd
Jain Tirthankara (circa 850 in Varanasi), or Nemi, the 22nd
Tirthankara, thought to have ourished in Saurashtra and
been contemporary with Krishna (see Renou, 1953, 114;
Jacobi, 1884, 276279). But from wherever this commit-
ment to understanding the nature and unshakeable physi-
cality of the world came, it has stuck.
First knowledge of the world, then compassion for it (Dashavai-
kalika 4.10).
translated by (Dundas, 1992, 138)
By the third century BCE, Jainism had divided into two
sects, following the sojourn of a group of Jains during
famine in the region of modern-day Karnataka. When
they returned 12 years later, they were naked and their
co-religionists were not. The Jains who had gone south,
the Digambaras (sky-clad) sect maintained that complete
nakedness was a prerequisite of moksha (eternal release)
which also meant that you had to be a man since the
female nuns did not take up this practice. This matter
and some difference in the details of omniscience have at
times led to bitter acrimony between the Digambaras and
the Svetambaras (cotton or whiteclad). For the social and
doctrinal implications of the controversy, see Jaini (1991).
The Svetambaras are much larger in number and include
two reform sects. The Sthanakavasis (hall-dwellers) began
in the 15th century and, like protestant movements in
Europe and India, decried their religious hierarchys laxity
of practice and trappings of worldly power. The icons of
the Jinas and the Jain temples that had become such a
spectacular and expensive aspect of Jainism were declared
inimical to the process of salvation. Building temples was
also reviled for the destruction it wreaked on small life
forms in the soil. Sthanakavasi monks and nuns wear a
cloth over their mouths, similar to a surgical mask, to
prevent themselves inadvertently swallowing small airborne
beings.
A further Svetambara split in the eighteenth century gen-
erated the Terapanthas (path of the thirteen) who advocated
ahimsa (non-violence) as total non-interference, to the good
or bad, in the lives of other beings, with the exception of
giving alms to ascetics. Both reform sects remain small
but are well respected and provide a benchmark of good
practice that has inuenced the wider community. Despite
the Terapanthas non-interference, they are today the most
socio-politically active Jain sect.
JAINS AND THE ENVIRONMENT 343
The other noteworthy matter in Jain history is their
survival. What with Hinduisms absorptive powers and the
waves of Mughal religious intolerance, it is little short of a
miracle to still be there with a distinct identity some three
millennia later. The reasons for this as identied by Jaini
(1979, 1994), boil down to four general principles which
in many ways hold true for Jains socio-political activity
today, environmental and otherwise:
1. Encourage community participation: Jain leaders
quickly developed a spiritual path and texts for a laity
who did not want to renounce everything and take up
the life of an ascetic. This laity unobtrusively held their
ground when the holy people were under re from
Mughal or Brahman militancy.
2. Build contacts with the establishment : Jains had con-
siderable success at converting local maharajahs or
establishing an inuential presence in their courts. They
were seldom completely out of fashion or favor. A Jain
monk even managed to persuade Akbar, the Mughal
emperor (who reigned 15561605) to release pris-
oners and caged birds and to prohibit the killing of
animals on certain days Akbar renounced his much
loved hunting and restricted the practice of shing.
However, his enthusiasm took a more predictable turn
the following year when those orders were extended
and disobedience to them was made a capital offence.
(Smith, 1917)
3. Pick your battles: in times of strong Hindu resurgence
that could have swept them away, the Jaina acharyas
(spiritual leaders) kept up their philosophical scrapping
with the Brahmans but did not do battle with social
and cultural mores. They pegged Jainism tightly to a
somewhat raried spiritual practice. This did of course
also weaken their role in social change, as for instance
in the acceptance of the caste system as the cultural
(but not cosmic) order.
4. Co-opt popular culture for your own message: Jain
acharyas took the hugely popular arts and literature
around Rama and Krishna and produced their own
revalued Jain versions. Hindu deities were not so much
dismissed from the Jain cosmos as demoted.
The Jain philosophy of anekanta (many pointedness) was
no doubt a contributing factor in this diplomatic virtuosity
and has remained as an ability to look at an issue and nd
another way of coming at it.
COSMOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY
For Jains the physical world is not dismissible either as
maya (illusion) or the temptations of Satan, nor is it immi-
nently lovable as the creation of a Creator god. It never
started, it will never end and it did not require an eter-
nal spirit to think it up. It just is. Emotions such as love
and/or fear of nature that many other religions and the envi-
ronmental movement bring to it are not appropriate. Maitri,
friendliness, with its connotations of detached well-wishing;
samyaktva, equanimity; abhaya, fearlessness; kshama, for-
giveness for harm done; and daya, empathy, are the key
words in the recommended relationship with the rest of the
living and non-living world. There is in Jainism a strong
tone of pragmatism and a wariness of anything that has a
whiff of emotion, of losing ones independence in passion
over another, animate or inanimate.
Living and Non-living Entities: Jiva and Ajiva
The second century CE Jain scripture, the Tattvartha Sutra
( Manual of That Which Is, the only scripture accepted
by Digambara and Svetambara sects, translated by Tatia,
1994), explores seven categories of truth. The rst category
is the existence of souls (jiva), the second is the existence
of non-sentient entities (ajiva), namely, matter, time, space,
the media of movement and of rest. Both categories are
equally real and have been mixed together forever with the
aid of subtle karmic matter. The Jain word for a living
thing jiva is the same word as for soul. To save souls,
you save life. And this is not the NeoPlatonic world
soul but that of a real person. Every living thing has
its own insoluble and unique soul, the knower. It is a
horizontal rather than vertical ordering, that recognizes the
rst principle of ecology, the singularity of each being. It
reminds us perhaps not to get so tied up in species salvation
that we forget that species is a human taxonomy (using
procreative compatibility as the primary criterion) to make
order out of a world which in fact never repeats itself. Every
individual life is a one-off and has value because it matters
to the one who has it. It is not a resource. For this reason
an environmental program that included selective culling of
species would struggle for Jain support.
Whatever beings there are, whether moving or non-moving you
shall not hurt, whether knowingly or unknowingly. All beings
desire to live, no one wants to die. Therefore, a nirgrantha
refrains from all acts of injury (Dasavaikalika Sutra, 4, 11).
translated by (Jaini, 1979, 66)
The Tattvartha Sutra offers the most detailed description
of the Jain universe, including mathematical calculations
and enumeration of the smallest units of time and space
and matter, the qualities and cohesion of atoms, the rings
of oceans and islands of galactic proportions and quantity
that make up the earthly plane, the categories of life forms
according to sensory development, the various classes of
karmic particles, the plunging and ascending layers of hell
and heaven and their denizens, and even descriptions of
black gaps in the sky that are described as dense masses of
matter which will suck in a passing god and his spaceship
should he veer too near. There is to be sure the ultimate
goal of spiritual liberation, but liberation is not so very
344 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
distant. It is a state of permanent, disembodied omniscient
bliss, still within the cosmos and still within a measurable
space. Furthermore, for Jains who are not ascetics, such a
vaulted ambition is not to do with this lifetime. They will
be reborn.
Like the other eastern religions, Jainism sees material
reality as a never ending cycle of creation and destruction,
so Jains cannot be so easily mobilized by apocalyptic
visions of environmental disaster, as can minds marinaded
in the judgement day of the middle-eastern religions. They
are mobilized by individual suffering.
Non-violence: Ahimsa (The Philosophy)
There is nothing so small and subtle as the atom nor any
element so vast as space. Similarly, there is no quality of soul
more subtle than non-violence and no virtue of spirit greater
than reverence for life (Bhagawati Sutra).
quoted and translated by (Singhvi, 1990, 6)
Ahimsa is the headline and the subtext of Jain philosophy
and practice. It is an intention, a state of mind in which one
restrains and ultimately eradicates one s passions, namely
anger, pride, deceit and greed thereby restraining the violent
acts that arise from these passions. Unintentional harm,
even if it kills someone, is not violent. This does leave
open the possibility of deciding what is harmful. But
the scriptural rider to ahimsa is the proscription against
laxity.
Although there are beautiful prayers such as the Kshama-
pana (prayer of forgiveness) from the Jain scriptures that
speak of universal friendship and of deep regret for harm
to other beings, the sense of Jain ahimsa is more of non-
interference than fussing after. We are not here to protect
and coddle other beings or mismanage their affairs, but to
let them be. In the business of existence, beings are going
to get hurt. So action must be taken with this awareness in
mind. Non-action may be preferable. In a hyperactive global
society, that thought is almost unthinkable. And of course
non-action has its own problems when others are taking
actions that are harmful. The live and let live approach,
which is often the corollary by which Jains explain ahimsa
can be laissez-faire.
Independence: Parasparopagraho Jivanam
Parasparopagraho Jivanam
The popular sutra parasparopagraho jivanam (Tattvartha
Sutra 5.21) is often translated as all life is interdependent,
but it does not have the same meaning as in Buddhism,
where the idea of an individual self has only a nominal
reality. The individual self is very real for the Jains and
one is stuck with it for eternity, so interdependence is
interdependence. It is not oneness dressed up as twoness.
True,
One who neglects or disregards the existence of earth, air, re,
water and vegetation disregards his own existence which is
entwined with them.
quoted and translated by (Singhvi, 1990, p 7)
But ultimately we are all alone.
Man it is you who are your only friend, why do you want
a friend other than yourself? (Acharanga Sutra 1.1.3.4. A
Svetambara scripture).
translated by (Dundas, 1992, 37)
Action and Reaction: Karma
The principle of action and reaction is native to most reli-
gions, and to physical science, and the very basis of our
environmental troubles, but astonishingly absent from polit-
ical and economic policy. For Jains, it is fundamental that
your actions will have results that will affect you as well
as others. The mechanism of karma is a major preoccu-
pation in the Tattvartha Sutra. Following the categories of
sentient and non-sentient beings, the next four categories of
truth take up the mechanism of karmic particles, their in ux,
binding, cessation of in ux, and falling away, respectively.
There is communality about the results, although not to the
point that we can quietly unload the results of our misdeeds
on someone else and slink off unharmed. Independence
is at least as important a tenet as interdependence. The
instinctively scienti c mind of Jains is also apparent here.
Retribution is not a matter of interference from another
dimension. Karmic particles of different varieties exist as
subtle matter which ow and stick to us according to our
thoughts, words and deeds. They are a missing link between
what are usually considered two dimensions, spiritual and
physical.
Finally, we must note the seventh category of truth, lib-
eration from worldly bondage that the cessation of karmic
in ux makes possible. Much of Jain practice is promoted in
the scriptures on the basis of personal bene t on the path
to spiritual enlightenment (and tolerable reincarnations in
the meantime) rather than for ecological or social bene t.
But as we shall see, in the socio-political climate of today,
a shift in perspective is evident.
Anekantavada: The Doctrine of Many-sidedness
The Jain doctrine of anekanta, literally, not-onesided, states
that all knowledge, except the omniscience of a liberated
soul, is only partial truth from a particular point of view.
Every individual, not just human, has his or her own unique
worldview. All are incomplete but valid views of real-
ity with a personal mix of truth and delusion (courtesy
of deluding karmas). Anekanta sweeps away anthropocen-
trism and dogma. To deny the validity of other s views
or to see one as total truth leads to the blindness of
dogma.
JAINS AND THE ENVIRONMENT 345
In Jainism, empirical science is one of ve types of
incomplete and until there is wisdom distorted knowl-
edge. Although there is not the space to explore them here,
the Varieties of Knowledge, Gateways of Investigation,
Philosophical Standpoints and the Sevenfold Predication
of Reality (as both permanent and changing) provide the
intellectual grist of anekantavada, and are mechanisms for
clearing or at least seeing a few blind spots before trying to
nd solutions (Tatia, 1994, 927, 135140). It produces an
instinctive non-exclusivity in the mind that has done much
for Jain survival and which Jains bring to any situation,
including environmental problems.
Wisdom, Knowledge, Action:
Samyag-darsana-jnana-caritra
The doctrine of anekantavada is downstream from the Three
Jewels of Jainism in which wisdom comes before knowl-
edge which comes before action and together they take us
to enlightenment. Truth or wisdom is not about the number
of practical facts that we have under our belt but the val-
ues which inform our selection and the use of these facts
in our actions. It seems so obvious (and the Jains are not
alone in pointing it out) yet more than 2000 years later
information technology is tipped to save the world. And
knowing for instance that fossil fuels are harmful, has not
changed the fact that our homes and businesses are emitting
greenhouse gases as if there were no tomorrow. Modern
society is living proof of the Jain philosophy that there
are many views, much knowledge, but they do not equal
wisdom.
PRACTICE
Ahimsa and the Five Vows
Non-violence in Jainism is essentially restraint. Restraint is
related to scarcity of resources but the opposite, the seething
abundance of the world and the damage that can be done
when you start crashing around in a crowded place.
The Jain laity have been given identity and direction by
a set of anuvrats, little vows, that are the same principles
but with less strict practices than those of the mahavratas,
great vows, of the monks and nuns.
Abstinence from violence, falsehood, stealing, carnality and
greed, these are the vows (Tattvartha Sutra 7.1).
translated by (Tatia, 1994)
Ahimsa, non-violence, the rst of the ve Jains vows is
described in the scriptures as the fence of the other vows.
All are based on restraint. They are a quintessentially pas-
sive position, and therefore deeply antithetical, horrifying
even, to globalizing Western culture, yet an increasingly
necessary component of effective environmental preserva-
tion. How far do you go?
Vegetarianism is the start and sometimes the nish of
ahimsa for Jains. No esh or eggs, and there are many other
reductions of diet beyond this; all the way to fasting, which
tends to occur in the Jain calendar when other people have
feasts. Food and sex are the rst ports of call, but restraint in
movement of oneself and ones goods, in the accumulation
of possessions are all prescribed. Stealing is dened as
taking anything that is not given, which, in a world where
there is no creator god handing out pastoral rights, puts a
very tight reign on our use of natural resources.
Ahimsa and the supporting vows challenging the idea
that we should express ourselves as widely and noisily as
possible. Just because you can do something doesnt mean
you should or that it is worth doing. Self-restraint sits next
to the Jain injunction for self-reliance.
JAINS AND THE ENVIRONMENT TODAY
There is among many Jains today, especially the youth, the
feeling that saving the environment is their call. Contempo-
rary Jain identity is increasingly identied with nature con-
servation as a social responsibility rather than primarily a
path to personal liberation. Our Environment, Our Respon-
sibility (front page of Ahimsa JuneDecember, 1997).
Despite the unmatched extremes of their ascetics, per
capita, the Jains would number among the richest religious
communities. Their indomitable interest in materiality has
generated fabulous arts and crafts, as well as an econom-
ically and politically successful community. Their worldly
muscle is beyond their numbers. Professionally, they are
concentrated in disciplines and arenas which have direct
sway on the post-industrial juggernaut. The mechanism
that drove Jains into businesses and professions which
these days include the motor industry, agricultural com-
modities, textiles and their associated chemical industries,
information and communications technology, pharmaceuti-
cals, diamond cutting, accountancy, politics and publishing,
was the ancient prohibition on professions recognized to be
harmful to other life such as animal husbandry and its by-
products, forestry, hunting, shing, quarrying, mining, and
the military. Even crop farming is a moral mineeld for
a good Jain. Its not easy to grow things without killing
other things. Once upon a time, business was a relatively
harmless undertaking. Now the Jains nd themselves in an
environmental quagmire. Modern business practice and its
growth into sustainable environmental practice is where,
potentially, they can contribute most.
The articulation of modern Jain identity is exemplied
in two publications of the early 1990s, and in the activity
they spawned. The publications reveal developments in Jain
thought and social organization as well as some of the
processes by which environmental activism is taking hold.
346 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
The Right Literature
The Jain Declaration on Nature is a small booklet. The
Jains were the eighth faith community to produce such
a declaration when they joined the World Wide Fund for
Nature (WWF) Network on Conservation and Religion in
1990. (The work of that network has since been taken over
by the Alliance for Religion and Conservation (ARC)).
The scale of international input from members of all Jain
sects including businessmen, religious leaders, scholars and
political gures was unmatched by any other faith. This
tiny faith community also produced a declaration that had
the biggest circulation. The rst print run was 5000 and
it has been reprinted twice in English and translated and
printed in Gujarati and Hindi. It has operated almost as
The Jain Declaration, appearing as basic information at
non-environmental events such as the exhibition of Jain
art at the V&A Museum in London and the 1993 World
Parliament of Religions. It provided text and set a tone for
other publications.
The presentation of the Declaration and Jain entry into
WWFs Network was, for the Jains, an historic event
marked by, among other things, the inaugural souvenir edi-
tion of the quarterly Ahimsa with articles on conservation
from Jains all over the world. Ahimsa has continued to
produce news for the international Jain community with a
strong environmental emphasis. The existing Jain press in
India, including one of its largest media groups, the Times
of India, owned by Jains, also picked up the event and
recognized its historic importance.
Refocusing
It is by looking at The Declaration on Nature and a
contemporaneous translation of the almost 2000 year old
Tattvartha Sutra and its classical commentaries that we see
the dynamism of Jainism in response to its environmental
grain of sand. Both works were produced under the auspices
of the London-based Institute of Jainology with the col-
laboration of the India-based Bhagwan Mahavir Memorial
Samiti. At one level, there is nothing in the lucid ten pages
of The Jain Declaration of Nature that is not somewhere
in the dense 370 pages of That Which Is: Tattvartha Sutra.
But although nothing has changed, everything has changed.
In Tattvartha Sutra, the principles exist in a dizzying cos-
mological order through which the reader is marched for
the purpose of understanding how to free oneself from the
tenacious grip of diverse karmic particles that block ones
spiritual liberation. In The Jain Declaration on Nature these
principles and practices are stripped down to the core and
described not in terms of the individuals spiritual gains but
in terms of the good of the whole natural world. The two
are not, of course, mutually exclusive, that is the Jain point,
but it is a matter of emphasis.
To take an even more specic example, the all important
sutra 5.21 of Tattvartha Sutra, parasparopagraho jivanam,
which was quoted and elaborated upon in the Declaration,
and also appears on its dedication page. The literal transla-
tion is most closely expressed as Souls impact one another
through their will. In That Which Is: Tattvartha Sutra, the
translation is Souls render service to one another (these
services are then identied as both benecial and harmful).
The Declaration translates it as All life is bound together
by mutual support and interdependence. It is a subtle shift
of language, a slight change of anekanta, but it is a move
from accepting the interference of others whether you like
it or not, to actually needing them. Again, as anyone who
has family knows, these things are not mutually exclusive.
The variants in translation of this maxim provide an
example of how environmental issues are realigning and
refreshing humanitys various orthodoxies, not just across
what had been a growing scienticreligious divide, but
between spiritual traditions. To return to our particular
example, the shift in emphasis from independence to
interdependence by Jains and by the modern zeitgeist
owes at least as much to Buddhism as to the ecological
sciences.
Intra-faith and Inter-faith
There is nothing like a shared crisis to bring people
together. Like most religions the Jains have managed to
ght more vehemently among themselves than with anyone
else; the 2300 year old dispute between the Digambaras and
the Svetambaras over the requisites for spiritual enlight-
enment is probably one of the longest running domestic
quarrels in history. The Jain Declaration of Nature and
the translation of Tattvartha Sutra marked an historic col-
laboration across all Jain sects whose only precedent had
been the celebration of the 2500 anniversary of Mahavirs
nirvana. Jains from all over the world and all sects came
to present the Declaration in London and in the process
discovered that amongst them they were doing, and could
do, more than they realized for conservation. It opened up
channels of individual and organizational communication,
which continue to function.
For Jains, joining the WWF also offered the possibil-
ity of collaborating with other religious communities on
environmental programs. As we have seen, tolerance and
collaboration with other faiths is Jain, both philosophically
and historically. The journal Ahimsa has included positive
ecological attitudes of other faiths to highlight the shared
ground (Ahimsa, vol. 7 no. 4, JuneDec. 1997, 8). This
touches on one of the time-bombs of our escalating envi-
ronmental troubles, the scramble for diminishing resources
that will breakdown along community lines, which in the
rst instance is usually religious. Interfaith work becomes
part of a preventive program.
JAINS AND THE ENVIRONMENT 347
The Establishment and Social Change
The Jain Declaration was the entry document into the Net-
work of the largest environmental non-governmental orga-
nization in the world whose president, His Royal Highness
(HRH) the Duke of Edinburgh, has championed collabora-
tion with religions. The Institute of Jainology (IOJ) was the
driving force behind the Jain Declaration. The IOJs board
of trustees, primarily businessmen, called in Jain political
gures in India and abroad, the acharyas of the four Jain
sects, the only other all-sect Jain organization (based in
Bombay and again dominated by businessmen) and interna-
tional Jain scholars. The main author of the Jain Declaration
was Indias High Commissioner to Britain through much of
the 1990s.
The Jain Declaration was presented to HRH Prince Philip
at Buckingham Palace. Prominent Jains from India, Africa,
America and the UK came to present it. The event was
surrounded by community celebrations and prayers and
spun into the rst Jain Environment Day organized by
Jain youth in London. It was taken very seriously as a
commitment to work with WWF. The Declaration was
subsequently presented to the Prime Minister of India.
The environmental outreach to Jains and other religions
by WWF and more recently by the World Banks Vice
Presidency for Environmentally and Socially Sustainable
Development, taps naturally into that hybrid phenomenon
of religion as a world institution. The World Bank heard
very clearly from the Jains that agricultural practices such
as the feeding of vegetarian animals with the pulped offal
of their own species and then the animals slaughter by
the millions in Britain when they subsequently developed
mad-cows disease is not only totally unacceptable but
deeply distressing to Jains.
Jain Environmental Action
What does this mean in practical terms?
Vegetarianism
Vegetarianism is, for Jains, the rst vow of any true envi-
ronmentalist. They continue to be tireless proponents of it
throughout India. In the UK where 10% of the population
are now vegetarian, the Young Indian Vegetarian Associa-
tion is Jain dominated and they also have an active role in
the national Vegetarian Society. In the process of validating
and promoting their practice through public campaigning,
young Jains are also being educated ecologically; they are
learning about the macro-economic choices for agriculture
that raise questions not only about what you produce but
how and where you produce and distribute it.
From Animal Sanctuaries to Nature Reserve
Jain animal sanctuaries and hospitals for old and sick
animals are a feature of India. In a land where human
habitats are under threat by overpopulation, it has been
hard to think of, let alone, protect the habitats of other
beings. So the rst Jain nature reserve was in the UK and
was one of the earliest endeavors after the presentation
of the Declaration. With the advice of the local councils
environmental department, it was established at the largest
UK Jain center on the outskirts of London with 32 ha
of oak trees, some 300 years old, valuable wetland, and
many species including the endangered badger. The reserve
was opened on the rst Jain Environment Day in 1992
organized by the Jain youth and attended by 1000 local
Jains. Local schools as well as the Jain community are
actively encouraged to visit it. Every summer the youth
association works to ensure its vitality. It provides a small
example of a shift in Jain understanding of their ahimsa for
other beings habitat matters.
Reforestation
In India and abroad, tree planting is a popular Jain environ-
mental activity both as a sponsorship by the adult commu-
nity and as something that children do. Schoolchildren at
Bahubali Vidyapith in Karnataka have reforested the hill-
side behind their school.
Holy places are now also part of this activity. The
distinctively designed and superbly engineered Jain temples
are among the most beautiful and beautifully maintained
in India. And they continue to be built on a scale that
has not been seen in the West since the days of the
great European Cathedrals. They are important centers
of community life. With the exception of the Sthankvasi
and Terapanths sects, funding a temple is recognized as
a karmically meritorious act as well as one which affords
status in the community. Palitana in Saurashtra is the site
of the largest Jain (Svetambara) temple complex, more a
small town, a stunning cluster of white pinnacles which,
until not so long ago wandered over the brown hills of
Saurashtra with only one tree left. It is said to be where
the rst Tirthankara of this epoch, Rushabhdeva, gave his
rst sermon. Reforestation of these hills with native trees
was a direct response to joining WWF. For some years, the
IOJ has been working with local Jain trusts, the Gujarat
government and their foresters, the local community and
ARC. Water systems are in place and planting is being
done in batches of 1000 trees. The project has included a
9-day environment camp for 200 students and 10 professors
who, along with instruction, planted 2000 trees.
Greening of Palitana is a model and an attempt to direct
some devotional energies and resources swirling around
temples toward the natural world.
Jain Youth in Rural India
Over several decades, Veer Seva Dal ( Brave Service
League) in the states of Karnataka and Maharashtra has
had youth participation numbering in the hundreds of thou-
sands. The activities have been traditionally Jain, including
348 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
strong campaigns for vegetarianism among the rural vil-
lages and also native tree planting, much needed in a land
where basic human needs for fuel are still tied to wood.
Over 100 000 trees have been planted. Hillsides and road-
sides to Jina shrines have done particularly well.
This pool of committed young villagers is a potential
resource that can be tapped into for a number of tasks,
including helping to make the transition to solar energy
from wood fuel, eliminating the use of pesticides, and other
environmentally sustainable village-level projects.
Western Jain Youth Working the Five Vows
Giving up all possessions, most forms of food, curtailing
your movements and, when the time comes, fasting to
death, is not the sort of stuff that attracts people in droves
any more than telling people they have to give up their
fossil fuelled, agri-business lifestyle. As the Jains have
discovered, there is a ne line between moderating ones
extremes and faking it.
The Jain laity have traditionally used their ve vows as
a basis for evolutions in their lifestyle, not as a great leap
into goodness that never happens. The Young Jains group
in the UK took up this approach in their dealings with the
environment identifying modern causes of harm to nature
that could become part of ones vows of restraint against
violence, those tricky negotiations with the self we all face
around the use of cars, levels of consumerism, etc. The
principle is basic, but you have to build the habit, and start
to create a new normality.
Business: The Hardest Nut to Crack
Given that business was the practice that once took Jains
away from acts of ahimsa, its role in generating environ-
mental harm is not an easy thing for Jains to face and
goes straight to the heart of their current life in the world.
As noted earlier, Jains have avoided any professions or
businesses where there is use, or traditionally recognized
destruction, of the bodies of living beings, but knowledge
about how we destroy other life is growing daily. The
fact that some fertilizers sold to the third world are bone
meal (often banned in the West), has recently come to the
attention of Jain business people who are buying agricul-
tural products such as sugar cane and groundnuts for their
factories. If it is conrmed that their suppliers are using
these fertilizers, then alternative sources or fertilizers will
be found. Yet Jains are the diamond merchants of India,
they will cut diamonds for jewelry but they will not mine
them because of the damage to earth-dwelling life forms
caused by mining. Someone else does that. The importance
of highlighting interdependence in Jain thinking becomes
clearer. In modern business it is possible to destroy other
life without direct contact with their bodies. You just have
to destroy their habitat.
The Ahimsa Environment Award was launched under
the auspices of the IOJ at the Indian High Commission
in London in 1993 and promoted and judged with the
assistance of WWF. The Award took the ve Jain vows
as the basic questions for competitors to answer:
Non-violence: How has your organization/group redu-
ced its production of harmful waste?
Truth: How open is your organization/group about the
impact of its practices on the environment?
Non-theft : How much use does your organization/group
make of sustainable and non-depleting resources?
Restraint : How much has your organization/group
reduced its use of natural resources?
Non-possession: How does your organization/group
implement sharing of the Earths resources?
The winner in the business category, announced at a
dinner attended by three hundred UK Jains, was a recycling
paper manufacturer and the runner-up was the creator
of ecological balanced plant macrocosms for ofces. The
Award has not continued but, like so much of the work,
it opened a door. Especially for the younger generations,
business practice is now linked to environmental practice
and to the Jain vows. How far the Jains go with that is still
to be seen.
The business and political wherewithal of the Jains and
their religious teachings that do not need to have envi-
ronmental principles wrested from an anthropocentric grip,
offer this ancient religion an extraordinary opportunity to be
a leader in one of the most important challenges of modern
life.
The Jain tradition enthroned the philosophy of ecological
harmony and non-violence as its lodestar .
(Jain Declaration on Nature)
Jains should be leading examples of environmentally-friendly
citizens.
(Ahimsa Environment Award promotional leaet)
REFERENCES
Dundas, P (1992) The Jains, Routledge, London.
Gandhi, M K (1958) Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (62
vols), 195876. Government of India Publication Division,
Delhi, 32.4, 32.4.
Jaini, P S (1979) The Jaina Path of Puri cation, University of
California Press, Berkeley, CA.
Jaini, P S (1991) Gender and Salvation: Jaina Debates on the
Spiritual Liberation of Women, University of California Press,
CA.
Jaini, P S (1994) The Jaina Faith and its History, in Umasvati,
That Which Is: Tattvartha Sutra, translated by Tatia, Harper
Collins, San Francisco, CA.
Jain, M K (1986) A Demographic Analysis on Jains in India,
India J., 21.2, 3350.
JUDAISM AND THE ENVIRONMENT 349
Renou, L (1953) Religions of Ancient India, Schochen Books,
New York.
Singhvi, L M (1990) The Jain Declaration on Nature, Institute of
Jainology, London.
Smith, V A (1917) The Jain Teachers of Akbar, in Essays Pre-
sented to Sir R. G. Bhandarkar, Poona.
Tatia, N (translator) (1994) Tattvartha Sutra: That Which Is,
Harper Collins, New York.
FURTHER READING
Jacobi, H (1884) Jaina Sutras, Oxford (Sacred Books of the East,
22), Reprinted by Dover Publications, New York, 1984.
Umasvati (1994) That Which Is: Tattvartha Sutra, translated by
Tatia, Nathmal, Harper Collins (& ISLT), San Francisco, CA.
Judaism and the
Environment
Aubrey Rose CBE
Barnet, Hertfordshire, UK
Judaism is the religion of the Jews. It has a continuous
history of almost 4000 years and, like Hinduism, is not only
one of the oldest of faiths, but one which has been the source
of other major religions.
Although particularistic in being linked to one people, it
is universal in its concepts and beliefs. Its uniqueness is that
it has survived whether its adherents dwelt in their natural
home, the land of Israel, or whether scattered over the face
of the earth.
Due to the history and the multi-millennial experience
of the Jewish people, Judaism has relevant teachings that
are global, that relate to the environment, as well as to the
process of change. In fact because it emphasizes learning
and action rather than dogma and theology, it has not
been in con ict with developing scientic ideas, such as
evolution.
Thus, it has been possible for a leading modern ecologist,
Professor David Bellamy, to state:
It is indeed a sobering thought that the early writings of the
Jewish people encompass all the basic recommendations of the
World Conservation Strategy.
It is likewise no coincidence that individual Jews have
played a notable role in the advance of knowledge and of
science through the ages, and especially in the last two
centuries when Jews were gradually freed from institutional
discrimination and persecution that had affected them in the
past.
The earth is the Lord s and the fullness thereof The world, and
they that dwell therein.
(Psalm 24)
These words encapsulate the Jewish approach to the
environment.
The sense of wonder at the world around us pervades the
history and the writings of the Jews. Not only in the biblical
creation story of the Garden of Eden, through the founding
fathers of the tribe, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (circa 1800
before current era (BCE)), on to the development of the
nation in the time of Moses and Joshua (circa 1200 BCE),
but throughout the thousands of years of Jewish history.
This amazement at the manifold expressions of nature
went hand in hand with a realization that there was an eter-
nal force moving through all things, whom the Hebrews
called God, and other names, but, unlike all other peoples,
insisted that divine force or being could not be reproduced
in any physical form. Thus was the purest form of monothe-
ism born.
With such a basic belief, and a relationship of thanks-
giving to the Eternal, it is not surprising that the people
developed many teachings as to the preservation of man s
home, planet Earth, and all that it contained.
Nor is it surprising that, once centuries of clerical and
legal oppression were thrown off, and the modern age of
scienti c discovery began, Jews, unhindered by theological
dogma, played a notable role in the advance of science, the
ever-widening systematic discovery of the nature of God.
There was no con ict.
Thus, what follows will endeavor to describe in more
detail Jewish teachings and practice which, in relation to the
environment, were most advanced. Those teachings were
based on a belief that we are the recipients of God s bounty,
and that the moral law, as to the sanctity of life and living
things, is the inevitable corollary of such basic faith.
Judaism is based on both faith and reason, on the soar-
ing idealism of the biblical prophets and on the practical
application of basic teachings by the rabbis, over millen-
nia, adapting to changing circumstances. The expression
rabbi bears no comparison to priest. It simply means one
acknowledged to have a degree of knowledge and learning
and, hopefully, wisdom, that enables him (or now her) to
carry out teaching, and judicial and pastoral duties.
Whilst there is belief in a future life, Judaism is very
much a this-world faith, seeking, through a sense of balance
and moderation, justice and reason, to advance mankind s
physical and spiritual condition, and thus to become closer
to the eternal spirit, in fact as the Hebrew Tikkun Olam
indicates, to repair the world.
350 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
It is a remarkable story, which, despite emanating from
a tiny people, has been a major inuence on world his-
tory. Hence its approach to the environment is worthy of
consideration.
The future of our planet and all in it depends largely
on Mans own actions. If those actions are guided by a
moral law balancing needs, then the planet can survive. If,
however, there is no guiding law, and material exploitation
proceeds apace, regardless of consequences, then environ-
mental change will be so drastic that we may well destroy
the globe, the environment, and ourselves. Judaism is one
of the world faiths that try to bring the moral law into our
treatment of our home, our planet.
A brief word, therefore, about Jewish history is necessary
to indicate the background to environmental teachings.
Whilst there are various theories as to the origins of
the Hebrews, the general view is that they emanated
from a tribe based at the conuence of the rivers Tigris
and Euphrates (now in southern Iraq), their leader being
Abraham, born in Ur of the Chaldees. His wanderings took
him eventually to the land of Canaan, a land promised to
him and his descendants.
Among those descendants were his son Isaac and grand-
son Jacob, the latter producing a progeny later identied
as the 12 tribes of Israel. The group prospered agricultur-
ally, especially when Jacobs son Joseph held a position of
authority in Egypt, where most of the Hebrews dwelt for
over 400 years.
Persecution and slavery led to the exodus from Egypt
of what had now become a nation in about 1220 BCE
under the inspired leadership of Moses and thence to the
conquest of the promised land under Moses successor
Joshua. Subsequent government by Judges was followed by
the appointment of monarchs, the most notable being David
who established a centralized authority in Jerusalem.
By 930 BCE on the death of Davids son Solomon, the
kingdom split in two, the northern half, Israel, succumb-
ing to the Assyrians in 721 BCE, whilst the southern part,
Judea, ourished until 586 BCE, when most of its popula-
tion were carried off to Babylon.
Before the century was out, however, Jews began to
return to Judea, to reestablish the Temple as their national
shrine, and to continue their religious life. Greek inuence
later pervaded the land, although sovereignty was regained
after the revolt of the Maccabees in about 140 BCE, though
Roman control was established in 63 BCE.
Efforts to restore national freedom continued for decades,
exploding in the Jewish revolt of 6670 Current Era (CE),
brutally suppressed by Rome, though ickering again in
132 CE, another vain uprising against the dominant Roman
power. Jewish sovereignty in the land was not restored until
1948 with the establishment of the modern state.
Perhaps almost as remarkable as the story in the land
itself is the Jewish Diaspora (dispersion of the Jews). The
Babylonian community ourished for over 2500 years until
1960, whilst, at the time of the birth of Christianity, Jews
were settled throughout Mediterranean lands. In fact those
communities enabled the Christian message Christianity
being then a sect of Judaism to bear fruit amongst pagan
peoples.
There was also a Jewish Diaspora in Arabia, as indi-
cated in the story of the Prophet Mohammed, as well as
in India. The main Diaspora developed in western Europe
in the rst millennium, developing extensively from about
1500 in eastern Europe. Similar communities arose in parts
of the British and Dutch empires, where religious toler-
ance reigned, extending to South America, the Caribbean,
Australia and parts of Africa.
However, the bulk of world Jewry in 1850 lived in
eastern Europe. Russian persecution and pogroms led to
a massive movement of Jews, from 1880 to 1914 west-
wards, resulting in the present communities of western
Europe and, especially, the United States. Also, from about
1880 began the Jewish return to the land of Israel, though
Jews had always lived there throughout the centuries.
This movement accelerated with the advent of Nazism
in the 1930s, as well as the movement from Arab lands
after 1948.
This continued existence of a people largely separated
from its native land for such periods of time has continually
perplexed historians, as it appears to have no parallel.
Yet the sources of this survival are clear, and have a
distinct bearing on the Jewish approach to ecology. Most
of Jewish history for the rst 2000 years of the peoples
existence derives from the Bible, conrmed frequently by
archaeological discoveries, as well as some writings by non-
Jewish sources.
But the last 2000 years has seen an immense burst of
Jewish creativity, particularly rabbinic Judaism. The rst
ve books of the Bible, known as the Torah, and the
teachings of the Prophets, set out, not only beliefs as to
God and morality, but also highly detailed instructions as to
treatment of the land, animals, trees, an ecological blueprint
as David Bellamy recognized.
For example the destruction of fruit trees was forbidden,
even in time of war, according to the book of Deuteronomy.
This was enlarged upon by rabbinical teachings, rst in
the Mishnah, a codifying operation completed in about
200 CE as well as in the Talmud, compiled during the
subsequent 300 years in Jerusalem and Babylon, containing
over 3 000 000 words in 63 books.
From the simple admonition not to cut down fruit trees
the rabbis and teachers developed the doctrine of bal tash-
chit thou shalt not destroy enlarged on by subsequent
teachers to prevent people committing waste, the basis of
modern recycling processes. The great Jewish philosopher
and teacher, Maimonides (11351204), in turn enlarged on
this basic principle as follows:
JUDAISM AND THE ENVIRONMENT 351
It is not only forbidden to destroy fruit-bearing trees but
whoever breaks vessels, tears clothes, demolishes a building,
stops up a fountain or wastes food, in a destructive way, offends
against the law of thou shalt not destroy. Judaism afrms
without reservation that the world is Gods creation and that
whoever helps to preserve it is doing Gods work.
Clearly most, if not all, major religions developed in pre-
industrial times, when populations were small, and when
the land, its ownership and use, dominated society. It could
be argued therefore that these religions are not relevant to
our present problems. But that would be shortsighted and
supercial. What religions did, and certainly what Judaism
did, was to lay down certain essential principles, often based
on moral values, which could be adapted as society evolved.
It is worth looking at a few fundamental beliefs and
values of Judaism to see how they affect environmental
practice. The creation story in Genesis is instructive. Our
environment, our world, all creation, was the work of God.
This labor took six days. On each day God looked at what
he had achieved and saw that it was good . After the
creation of man in his own image , God saw that it was
very good .
This story, be it accepted literally or metaphorically,
reects Jewish optimism that life is good, but also that the
unity of God is reected in the unity of all creation. Hear,
O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, is the famous
statement of Jewish belief.
Albert Einstein, in pursuit of that unity, refers to the
manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most
radiant beauty. Enough for me, the mystery of eternity of
life and the inkling of the marvelous structure of reality.
He reects the glowing words of Isaiah and the Psalmist as
to the wonders of creation, when he refers to a rapturous
amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals
an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it,
all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is
an utterly insignicant reection .
Evolution presents no problem. As a modern commenta-
tor, Chief Rabbi Dr Hertz, states, there is nothing inher-
ently un-Jewish in the evolutionary conception of the origin
and growth of forms of existence from the simple to the
complex, and from the lowest to the highest .
Judaism regards man, made in Gods image, as being at
the apex of this structure, enjoined not merely to subdue
nature, but also, as stewards or trustees, to till it and to
preserve it (Genesis).
Out of this creation story two important environmental
teachings emerge. First the institution of the Sabbath day,
a uniquely Jewish idea. On each seventh day not only must
human beings rest, but also the land, and all the animals,
perhaps the rst animal right in history. This idea of rest
for the land is in complete accord with modern agricultural
theory. It extends also to every seventh year (Shemittah),
and to the 50th or Jubilee year. Thus, in a way, Jews
recognized that man had a duty to respect the rights of
the land and of animals, all part of creation.
The second teaching relates to biodiversity. Again and
again in the creation story reference is made to of its own
kind grass, seeds, fruit, trees, sea and land creatures,
birds, each after its kind. This acknowledgement of biodi-
versity is reected also in the story of Noah and his ark,
into which went many species, with a view to procreation
and replenishing the earth.
This respect for the existence of species, their right to
exist, is the basis of the Jewish view of conservation. There
is also reected concern for the individuality of the species.
The Bible sets out in great detail which species may or may
not be eaten, which species may not be yoked together,
e.g., the ox and the ass, as the stronger will harm the
weaker.
Indeed concern for animals is reected throughout bibli-
cal and rabbinical literature. A righteous man has regard
for the life of his animal (Proverbs) led on to the Talmudic
injunction that a man should feed his animals before him-
self. The Biblical book of Exodus enjoins one to take care
of stray animals; even animals of ones enemy, and espe-
cially of injured animals. There is a like prohibition against
killing an animal together with its young, to prevent one
witnessing the death of the other. Maimonides again:
The panic of animals under such circumstances is very great.
There is no difference in this case between the pain of humans
and the pain of other living beings, since the love and tenderness
of the mother for her young is not produced by reasoning but
by feeling and this faculty exists not only in humans but in
most living things.
The Talmud, with its diverse opinions from 2000 con-
tributors, is agreed, however, that unnecessary pain should
never be caused to animals or living creatures (tsaar
baalei chayim). Thus, Judaism is opposed to fox or big
game hunting, bullghting, any use of animals for sport
which causes pain. Also abhorrent is the trapping of ani-
mals for luxury furs, the mowing down of elephants for
ivory or merciless hunting of whales.
For self-defense or for food, animals may be killed, and
shechita, the process of ritual slaughter, is an attempt to
lessen pain caused to the animal. In fact the ideal diet
was intended to be vegetarian (Genesis 1.29), but meat-
eating was permitted after the time of Noah, provided the
blood, the life of the animal, was excluded before eating.
This contrasted vividly with the practices of surrounding
peoples.
These few points illustrate the extraordinary respect
Judaism has for life, in Hebrew, chayim. There is sanctity
to life, which must be respected. Thus, in Talmudic times
capital punishment was rarely carried out. In modern Israel,
the death penalty was abolished except for Nazi crimi-
nals. Only one person has been executed in 50 years, the
Holocaust murderer Eichmann. Even the strict injunction to
352 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
desist from work or other acts on the Sabbath is overruled
in the interests of preserving life (pikuach nefesh).
Modern Israel has become an ornithologists delight.
There is a mass annual migration of birds, of many varieties,
northwards and southwards. These birds are cherished and
sanctuaries are built for them. Five hundred species of
birds have been observed. In almost all Mediterranean
countries, there is a mass slaughter and shooting of these
migrating birds. Not so in Israel, the birds are living
beings. Whilst culling may at times be necessary, to kill
birds as a sport is not part of Judaism or the Jewish
tradition.
Perhaps Judaisms view of the environment is best illus-
trated by its attitude to trees. The tree is a thing in itself
as well as a symbol. It appears in the rst chapter of Gen-
esis. By the second chapter it has become an allegory, the
tree of life. The tree in Genesis is instructive. In 1901 Jews
established as one of the oldest environmental bodies, the
Jewish National Fund, primarily to plant trees in the arid
Holy Land. Every Jewish household worldwide has, since
then, had a little box in which pennies, cents and centimes
were deposited to raise money for trees.
Since 1945 over 200 000 000 trees have been planted in
Israel, to prevent soil erosion, create shade, preserve the
water level, each tree, of its kind, planted according to the
nature of the soil and climate, pines near Jerusalem, cypress
on coastal plains, and eucalyptus and acacia in saline soil
in the southern Negev and Arava.
In what in early Talmudic times was a well-wooded
country, restoration in the 20th century has resulted in
40 000 ha of natural forest, 40 recreation areas and parks,
700 picnic and recreation sites, while scientic planting in
the desert-like Negev, savannahization, is creating a new
and hopeful situation that could be of benet to all desert
areas in the world.
Whilst Judaism celebrates both a secular and religious
New Year, it also has a special New Year for Trees (Tu
BShevat ). As winter departs and spring approaches, this
festival is celebrated worldwide by a burst of tree-planting,
especially by children.
The extraction of oil from land and seabed was a major
environmental feature of the 20th century, with prominent
political and economic consequences. There is a view that,
in the 21st century, water will replace oil as a dominant
issue. Seas and rivers, lakes and streams, have suffered
from chemical pollution, a signicant global change. World
health authorities estimate that 80% of disease arises from
impure, affected water.
As with trees, Judaism has a similar view as to water. Its
purity is vital. It is also a symbol. The Bible, and the rabbis,
constantly refer to living waters (mayim chayim). But in
actual terms, the same principles apply. Water should not be
wasted but conserved. Hence, innovative procedures were
developed such as trickle drip system of watering plants,
desalinization, irrigation procedures, transportation of water
by a water carrier, use of solar energy for heating and
hot water, accumulating and diverting ood water through
dams, creating a marine nature reserve on the Red Sea coast,
as well as a process for recycling water and funding steps
to prevent marine pollution.
It is instructive to cite an example of, how with the best of
intentions, mistakes can be made. The Huleh lake wetland
in Galilee was drained, as other wetlands have been drained.
The result was not what was expected. The wetland had
operated as a natural lter and cleansing mechanism for the
Sea of Galilee, slowing down water movement, allowing
nutrients to be used by the wetland species. The drainage
resulted in problems, causing silting and algae blooms, as
well as a loss of species.
So the whole process had to be reversed, and now the
Huleh wetland is again a source of joy, for species, birds
and people. Another vital Jewish teaching is thereby illus-
trated, the interdependence of all phenomena in creation,
which we disturb at our peril. There is a typical Talmudic
story, or Midrash, of God taking Adam by the hand in the
Garden of Eden and saying, Look around you. See what I
have given you. Look after it well, because if you destroy it,
there will be no one to put it right. This illustrates another
Jewish belief that we have free will to choose between good
and bad, and, environmentally, between positive change and
negative change, between sensible conservation and ruth-
less destruction.
It is possible that just as the plague of human immunode-
ciency virus (HIV)/acquired immunodeciency syndrome
(AIDS) burst on mankind in the second half of the 20th cen-
tury, multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome (MCS) may
become the 21st century afiction. It is estimated that one in
one hundred people, especially in industrialized countries,
suffer from this disease. It aficts those who are sensitive
to all the impurities poured into the air; petrochemicals,
pesticides, air fresheners, sprays for home and farm, disin-
fectants, fungicides, toxic substances, and other seemingly
benign substances that actually add to the greenhouse effect
and stratospheric ozone depletion. For an increasing num-
ber of people air pollution represents a potent, ever-present
threat to their health, if not to life itself. Many are prisoners
in their own homes. Researchers have now also discov-
ered an alarming increase in bronchial illness, especially
asthma. What we are doing is simply poisoning the air, and
ourselves.
The problem, even in pre-industrial times, was consid-
ered in the Bible and by the rabbis of old. Deuteronomy
enjoined the efcient clearance of excreta. The Talmud even
stated that one should not live in a place that has no privy
(or even no vegetable garden or owers). How surprising to
nd in the book of Leviticus advocacy of substantial green
belts (migrash) around certain cities, a principle developed
by later rabbis to apply to all cities.
JUDAISM AND THE ENVIRONMENT 353
Maimonides description of polluted air over eight hun-
dred years ago, cannot be bettered:
The quality of urban air compared to the air in the deserts
and forests is like thick and turbulent water compared to pure
and light water. And this is because in the cities, with their
tall buildings and narrow roads, the pollution that comes from
the residents, their waste, cadavers, and offal from their cattle,
and the stench of their adulterated food, makes the entire air
malodorous, turbulent, reeking and thick, and the winds become
accordingly so, although no one is aware of it.
Maimonides might almost have had some modern cities in
mind.
He continues with advice as to where to live so as to
avoid the polluted air. All these biblical and rabbinical
provisions emanate from the view that the people should
be holy, for which purpose cleanliness of mind, body
and environment, was essential. One rabbi commented,
physical cleanliness leads to spiritual purity . Hands had
to be washed before eating, on rising from bed, and after
going to the privy. To emphasize the signicance or the
soul of each act or sight, a blessing (Berachah) was to
be intoned. Hence, Judaism is full of blessings, for every
possible occasion, the gift of food, the gift of beauty, the
gift of wisdom, and the gift of life.
The rabbis of Mishnah times, 1800 years ago, even set
out views on limitation of noise pollution. Incidentally,
` a propos the population explosion, a major factor in envi-
ronmental change, the rabbis stated the biblical injunction
(mitzvah), be fruitful and multiply was satised if parents
had at least two children.
It is not surprising that the Bible and the Talmud were so
concerned with environmental matters. Land and livestock
were the chief forms of wealth. Jews were the people of
the land as much as of the Book. Their main festivals,
New Year (Rosh Hashanah), Passover (Pesach), Pentecost
(Shavuot ) and Tabernacles (Succot ), although overlaid with
religious signicance, were all basically harvest festivals
which encouraged men and women to appreciate the cycle
and produce of the natural year.
Also, what Judaism did was to bring moral teachings
into each festival so that, for example, the harvester is
enjoined to leave part of the lands produce for the poor,
the widowed and the orphan. This is a biblical injunction,
one of the many commandments (mitzvot ) of the faith. The
Bible, apart from its historical and religious content, is also,
in effect, a textbook of the environment.
It contains the most wonderful and detailed descrip-
tions of landscapes, animals, and owers. The Psalms,
Song of Songs, Isaiah, Ruth, are full of environmen-
tal allusions, decked out in the most vivid and beautiful
language.
The Bible has been an immense help to those administer-
ing the 280 Nature Reserves in Israel, guiding them in the
restoration of animals to the land such as the oryx, which
had long disappeared. By chance, Israel, and Jerusalem
itself, are at the meeting point of three climatic zones. In
the northern half of the country, with its Mediterranean
climate, as Professor Safriel, formerly Chief Scientist of
the Nature Reserves Authority points out, not less than
25 species of wild progenitors of food plants live in natu-
ral habitats. They constitute an unprecedented rich genetic
source; a bank of genes for resistance for use by farmers
the world over.
He points out that seeds are normally stored in gene
banks, whereas the wild plants in their natural habitats are
continually exposed to the changing environment and their
general constitution is constantly molded by the forces of
natural selection . An echo perhaps of the words of Genesis
each of its own kind .
Yet another echo relates to Professor Safriels description
of the vital thin layer of microscopic, unicellular algae
that carpets the desert surface of the Negev, the southern
half of the land. Professor Safriel compares this to the
surface in Sinai where the desert is overstocked with goats
and camels who tear off the delicate algal mesh and the
deserts soil crust breaks and disappears. Interestingly, it
was the rabbis of Talmudic times who warned against the
damage done by allowing sheep and goats to feed without
control.
Professor Safriel adds that Israel as a whole, being at
a global climatic transition zone, has major world sig-
nicance in monitoring environmental change, particularly
global warming due to the greenhouse effect. Who would
have thought that, when medieval cartographers placed
Jerusalem at the center of the world, they may have had
a point!
One benet from being so sited is that the Hebrew
University Botanical Gardens in Jerusalem, in its 24 ha,
is able to grow plants, bushes and trees native to the ve
world continents, a treasure of botanic diversity.
Thus, love of land and its produce has been a golden
thread running through Judaism and Jewish life from
the earliest times. In this century, Jews have developed
arboreta, herb gardens, experimental botanic centers for
plants and trees, worldwide, from Exbury Gardens in
Britain to a plant resource station in Hong Kong, from
remote farms in Nova Scotia, Canada, to the hillsides of
Brittany, France, and of course, Biblical gardens in Israel
and elsewhere.
The following illustrates this attachment to nature. In
the eighteenth century in Eastern Europe, there arose an
exciting, exuberant, religious grouping called Hasidism.
They believed not only in study and learning, but in
joyful prayer and song. Their founder was to be seen
invariably in elds and forests. In 1760, one of the foremost
gures of that group, Rabbi Shneour Zalman, married. He
received a substantial dowry. With his wifes agreement,
the whole of that dowry was placed in a fund to help
354 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Jews develop agricultural settlements and to learn the arts
and crafts connected with farming and the land. Thus,
though urbanized, largely through external pressures, Jews
have never lost their attachment to nature and the land,
rediscovering in recent years, particularly with the impact
of the return to Israel, the basis in nature for much of their
Jewish heritage.
The land of Israel is today beset with numerous and
serious environmental problems. These are largely the result
of the sudden inux of people from many lands in the last
half century, but there are dedicated people imbued with
the spirit of the past who actively pursue the causes of
conservation and balance between the needs of nature and
of society. For example, the high aims and clear philosophy
of the Nature Reserves Authority reect well the principles
enunciated by both Bible and Talmudic rabbis, adapted to
the modern scientic world. Those aims are summarized by
the Authority as follows:
All living organisms and natural phenomena have a right
to exist nature is beauty and a fundamental component
of our physical and cultural existence nature is quality of
life nature is the main resource for scientic progress which
improved the wellbeing of humanity human progress depends
upon a positive relationship with nature we must practice
the wisest use of natures richness without diminishing its
reserves protection of genetic diversity of wild species found
in Israel could be critical for the future of human agriculture
and animal husbandry we are obligated to preserve this life-
support heritage for future generations.
Neither Bible nor rabbis could have expressed the Jewish
view better.
There are many examples of Jewish teachings on the
environment. Only the main points can be touched on in
this review. Much of value, especially detail, is necessarily
omitted. There is an understandable and perennial problem
for scientists, who deal in provable facts, experimenta-
tion and observation, in recognizing the religious impulses
enshrined in many faiths. Yet modern quantum physics may
be moving closer to the insights expressed or hinted at in
the teachings of world religions.
Certainly Judaism is not opposed to science, as witness
the disproportionate number of Jewish scientists, provided
the essence of humanity, of individuality, is not thereby
abused. Reverence for life and creation is essential, as also
is humility.
When Job rails against fate, God says to him,
Where were you when I laid the earths foundations? Do you
know the laws of heaven? Or impose its authority on earth?
(Ch. 38)
The Jewish view of the world is God-centered, not man-
created. In Abraham Joshua Heschels words, the world is
not a gigantic tool-box for the satisfaction of mans needs .
Rather does Judaism say, in humility,
How manifold are Thy works, O Lord. In wisdom has Thou
made them all.
(Psalm 104)
These words were echoed thousands of years later by
Albert Einstein when, pursuing the idea of a unied eld
force, he continued to be amazed at the mystery of life,
the marvelous structure of reality, and the search to com-
prehend a portion, be it never so tiny, of the reason that
manifests itself in nature .
Another ethical value in the Jewish outlook is mod-
eration. Judaism, from Genesis and the Ten Command-
ments onwards, through rabbinical law (Halacha), has
always imposed behavioral limits on individuals. Moder-
ation implies a self-limitation on consumption and accu-
mulation of wealth or as Isaiah described it adding house
to house, eld to eld .
On the contrary, the rabbis of old taught Who is rich?
He who is happy with his portion .
Hence the ruthless pursuit of wealth, development that
takes no account of ecological cost, of the assault on nature,
on forests, seas, land, atmosphere, witnessed in the 20th
century, is contrary to the spirit and teachings of Judaism
as developed over millennia as society itself evolved.
As the pace of scienti c discovery increases, and may
perhaps develop in ways we cannot as yet foresee, so
the challenge to Judaism, and all other religious faiths,
will grow. There will be evolution, adaptation, advance,
yet the basic principles enunciated so long ago by the
Hebrew prophets and developed, century after century, by
the rabbis, will continue to be the guiding light of Judaism
and of the Jewish people.
K
Kelly, Petra
(1947 1992)
Petra Kelly was a founder of the German Green Party and
a forceful leader of environmental and eco-feminist causes.
Petra Karin Kelly was born in Guenzburg, Bavaria, in what
was then West Germany. In 1960, she moved to the United
States with her mother and stepfather, US Army Colonel
John E Kelly, her biological father having left the family
in 1954.
Living in Columbus, Georgia, young Petra became invo-
lved in the civil rights movement. She went on to study
at American University (BA 1970), and won a Woodrow
Wilson National Fellowship, serving as a teaching assistant
for one year. Kelly was active in the student movements
against the Vietnam War, nuclear energy, and for civil
rights, social justice and womens rights. She worked as
a volunteer in the presidential campaign of the late Senator
Robert F Kennedy.
In 1970, her 10 year old sister, Grace, died of eye
cancer. Petra responded by founding, with her grand-
mother a cancer research support foundation in her sis-
ters name. In 1971, she received an MA in political
science from the University of Amsterdam. She worked
as a civil servant within the European Community head-
quarters in Brussels. In 1973, she formally adopted an
orphaned Tibetan foster daughter, Nima. In 1979, she
helped found the Green Party, committed to principles
of non-violence and environmental protection. When in
1980 she became party leader, she was the rst woman
in German history to head a political party. She held the
post of chairperson and speaker for the Greens executive
board until 1982. On March 6, 1983, Kelly was among
27 Green Party members elected to the German parlia-
ment, the Bundestag. She served in the Bundestag until
the election of December 1990, failing to win the requi-
site percentage of the votes, 5%, to ensure parliamentary
representation.
Kelly was honored with the Swedish Parliaments Right
Livelihood Award in 1982, and the Peace Prize of the
US group Women s Strike for Peace in 1983. She was on
the international board of the World Womens Congress in
19901991, within the Womens Environment and Devel-
opment Organization.
In the early 1980s, she became involved with a fel-
low Green Party MP, retired Major General Gert Bastien,
25 years her senior. They were inseparable and a power-
ful force, jointly calling for accountability for superpow-
ers possession of nuclear and other weapons of mass
destruction, opposing German economic ties with South
Africa, organizing tribunals to examine human rights
in Tibet, and Chinas treatment of dissidents. She and
Bastien were arrested in 1983 for blockading US military
bases.
In October 19, 1992, Kelly and Gert Bastien were found
in their home dead, both of gunshot wounds. The Bonn
police concluded that Bastien had killed Kelly and then
himself. No suicide note was left, and Bastien appeared
to have been interrupted, stopping in mid-word in a
mundane letter, his electric typewriter still on. This and
the unlocked upstairs door have left some to suspect
an unknown assailant was responsible. Regardless of the
theory, two things are clear. Kelly did not die by her
own hand, and the world lost an inspiring and powerful
voice.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada
Kondratyev Cycles
see Kondratyev, Nikolai Dmitrievich (Volume 5)
356 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Kondratyev,
Nikolai
Dmitrievich
(18921938)
Nikolai Dmitrievich Kondratyev was an outstanding Rus-
sian economist of the 20th century. His work is widely
recognized internationally, and the term Kondratyev Long
Wave is named after him. (In the US, for example, he
became a member of the American Academy of Social
Sciences, the American Economic Association, The Amer-
ican Statistical Society, and the American Association on
Agricultural Economic Problems.)
Nikolai Kondratyev conducted fundamental investiga-
tions into the theory of long-wave economic dynamics;
he is the author of works on predicting and long-term
planning of economic development and on mathematical
statistics and agrarian sector development. The idea of
economic long-wave cycles was based on Kondratyevs
analysis of a large body of statistical data on the dynamics
of the average level of commodity prices, capital inter-
est, wages, foreign trade turnover, and the extraction of
cast iron and lead, covering a 140-year period. Kon-
dratyev not only predicted the great world depression of
the late 1920searly 1930s but he also believed in its
inevitability.
Orthodox Marxists attacked Kondratyevs concepts and
he was persecuted for his beliefs. He died in one of Stalins
prison camps but he was nally rehabilitated posthumously
in the Russian restructuring period.
LIUDMILA ROMANIUK Russia
L
Land Ethic
see Environmental Ethics (Volume 5)
Landscape Garden
see Landscape, Urban Landscape, and the
Human Shaping of the Environment
(Volume 5)
Landscape, Urban
Landscape, and the Human
Shaping of the Environment
Brenda Lee
Montr eal, Quebec, Canada
For ve centuries, landscape has been used to describe
domesticated nature (historically, the British sense), the
apparently untouched wild (the American sense) and the
pictoral representation of both. It is a complex concept
within which the natural and cultural, visual and functional,
real and reproduced, interpretive and descriptive, bounded
and boundless have been very tightly interwoven. As a
technical term, landscape is believed to have been rst used
to relate natural and cultural elements in landform by Carl
Sauer Morphology of Landscape (Sauer, 1925). In the last
two decades its capacity to connect has been exploited by an
increasingly wide range of historical, cultural and feminist
geographers, and by researchers outside the geographic
eld.
Sympathetic branches of archeology, cultural anthropol-
ogy, culture studies, literary criticism, sociology, philoso-
phy and art history, to link cultural perception of place
within society and nature, to the forms that comprise the
physical world. Next to place, landscape has become the
most important medium for exploring culture nature inter-
actions. Metaphorically, landscape has replaced context
to portray the sweep of signi cant features that meets a
focused gaze. Landmarks of its modern use might begin with
J B Jacksons founding of Landscape Magazine in 1951,
and include Hoskins (1958); Nairn (1965); Lynch (1972);
Williams (1973); Meinig (1979); Watkins (1982); and Cos-
grove and Daniels (1988).
In the natural sciences, landscape ecology developed
from the recognition that the proper study of ecology must
include Humankinds very signi cant interventions. Applied
ecology, although de ned much earlier in the German scien-
ti c literature, was given form in Europe and North America
in the early 1930s; it wasnt until the early 1980s, how-
ever, that the term landscape was widely accepted as a
functionally bounded unit of those patchy ecosystems that
Humankinds activities produce (e.g., see Tjallingii and de
Veer, 1982, and for an overview of the consolidating dis-
ciplines, Schreiber, 1990 and Forman, 1990). The Interna-
tional Association for Landscape Ecology was founded in
1982 to unite the increasingly proli c European and North
American work in the biological, geological and geographic
sciences. This work has selective links to, but is not inte-
grated with, related activities elsewhere in the humanities
and social sciences.
LAND INTO LANDSCAPE: THE MEANING OF
THE TERM
The meaning of landscape has therefore never been more
complex. Its ambiguity was marked by Meinig (1979)
through an identication of 10 of the scenes that it was
possible for the scanning eye to behold: nature (the skin
of mother earth); habitat (mans domesticated home on
earth); artifact (evidence of mans intention); system (of
interconnected elements, hydrological to highway); prob-
lem (condition of deterioration demanding remedial action);
wealth (via a nancial appraisal of its worth, existing and
value-added); ideology (symbol of the values, the govern-
ing ideas, the underlying philosophies of a culture); history
(the complex cumulative record of the work of nature and
358 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
man in this particular place); place (the unique constella-
tion of characteristics and experiences of each locale); and
aesthetic (function subordinated to the painterly laws of
intention, form, light and balance).
Two versions of its original and essential meaning exist.
The rst reaches back beyond the rst English usage of
the Dutch painters technical term landschap (landskip
recorded in 1598; the correct land-scape in 1603) to the
Old English landscipe, interpreted as the district or region
inhabited and worked by a particular society of people.
J B Jackson anchors the old English term in the original
neolithic relation of land and its rst farming populations.
The Northern European Germanic word land referred to a
clearing and scape to a collection of like objects. Similarly,
in the southern regions, the Latin pagus or pact, established
the essential socio-political nature of the derivative in
modern Romance languages. Landscape was the worked
territory of farming peoples. Perceptual denitions are,
importantly, derivative.
The second account places more signicance on the break
in usage (no record exists of the term in middle English)
and the cultural development of self that accompanied the
exploration of nature as a signicant subject of art. Since
antiquity, nature had played important decorative, icono-
graphic and supportive roles for the mind, keyed to various
symbolic associations; and to medieval and early Renais-
sance minds, nature was a key medium of Christian symbol-
ism and allegory. It was painters from Switzerland (Konrad
Witz 14001447 AD being the rst fully to embed
his gures within a topographically identiable country-
side), the Low Countries (Joachim Patinir, Hubert and Jan
Van Eyck, Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1400s1600s), Italy
(Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione Brunelleschi having earlier
worked out scientic perspective 1460s1500s) and Ger-
many (Albrecht Durer, Albrecht Altdorfer (1500s) who
constructed the bases in spatial form and light for the rst
landscapes that were painted for the value that they had
themselves: the 17th century Dutch explorations of nature-
based reality that gave interpretive primacy to the individual
experiencing subject. This was a time when the new per-
spective allowed a more realistic and enigmatic nature to
emerge on paper, and when the new Renaissance fasci-
nation with things-in-themselves began to enliven nature,
human and wild. This new nature had a life of its own,
and the tension between emblematic projection and expres-
sive interpretation characterizes all early landscape art. The
transition from emblem to expression i.e., from a land-
scape mirroring cultural associations to that evocative of
the personal experience of nature, has been often explored
in theatre (Zimbardo, 1986), poetry (Wasserman, 1968),
literature (Abrams, 1958) and landscape design (Hunt,
1992). Landscape here has become, in Malcom Andrews
words, worldscape (1999): the myriad of compositions
that can be formed from interacting natural and cultural
lives-in-themselves. From political to scientic, each picks
out its eld of signicant objects and relationships.
While it is difcult not to use the term landscape for
all historical treatments of humanized nature, this second
understanding is founded in the belief that the concepts
modern English formulation accompanies, and depends
upon, the individuation and internalization of the analytic
Western self. Landscape is, in this sense, essentially a per-
ceived composition of meaningful objects. It is landscape
that most accurately represents Coopers (1992) deni-
tion of environment as a eld of signicance. Landscape,
which encompasses the changing patterns of sky, land use
and seasonal weather and vegetation, is thus a momentary
individual phenomenon, which, like the connoted word,
is generalized to a series of widely accepted denotations.
This second understanding is sometimes portrayed as purely
visual or pictorial; but the aesthetics of land is argued to
be much more active, supporting bodily orientation and
the related phenomenological experience of being expressly
here; doing expressly this (Berleant, 1997; Cooney, 1999)
in some space.
The meaning of landscape to those professions dedicated
to its design and management has a particularity of its own.
For practitioners of landscape architecture, landscape is
narrative: a historically produced composition of biogeo-
chemical forces and the artifacts of human use, which
cannot properly be a site of possible intervention until it
is understood (see Spirn, 1998). In practice, since conicts
must be resolved and indeterminancies settled in making
a design or management plan, only the most practicable
outputs of the natural and social landscape sciences can be
drawn upon.
For environmental managers, the historical narrative
exists, but is normally superseded by the structural detail,
which is so difcult to integrate into landscape design: i.e.,
the characteristics and interactions of its composite units.
These units are typically the bounded areas of interest that
form patterns within a landscape. Landscape to an environ-
mental or ecological manager is thus the largest functional
unit within which smaller sub-units operate, both horizon-
tally and vertically: i.e., an ecosystem. Its study as an (open)
system has, since the early 1950s and more actively,
since the early 1980s gathered together the disciplines
previously isolated in specialized studies of ecosystem com-
ponents (air/weather, surface/subsurface, rock, soil, plants,
animals, etc.) so as to assess comprehensively their reac-
tions to, and effects on, human action (see for example,
Williams, 1993). See also Landscape Ecology, Volume 2.
CHANGING HUMAN PATTERNS ON THE
LAND: THE EARLIEST CULTURES
If we move to the earths landscape itself, the earliest
human effects can be traced to the African Old World
LANDSCAPE, URBAN LANDSCAPE, AND THE HUMAN SHAPING OF THE ENVIRONMENT 359
tropical forest, whose primates are thought to have given
rise to the hominids that rst moved out into the grass-
land and savanna. Through three major glacial periods
(500 0008000 BC) Paleolithic hunting societies survived
in small encampments, of which evidence has been found in
the north African coastal countries, the east Mediterranean,
Italy, France and the British Isles. With the recession of
the Wisconsin glaciation, these societies advanced out into
the temperate forests of every continent. Their general pat-
terns of movement and settlement (population at that time
of around ve million) are interpretable through pollen
analysis and the relative locations of settlement remains.
Those unearthed are small, temporary shelters, the oldest
of which lie within the French Terra Amata beach camp
(400 000 BC): a grouping of oval huts, sized to hold about
15 people, formed of branches or small trees supported
by exterior rings of stones. Palaeolithic sites in general
show evidence of hearths (re is thought to predate the
period), wooden spears, hand axes and the separation of
living and ritual quarters. It is the paintings in the ritual
caves of France and northern Spain that appear to medi-
ate the powerful spiritual relationship between the earliest
human societies and their world, where nature appears as a
force rather than a place itself.
The agricultural revolution producing the Neolithic land-
scape (80004000 BC) introduced the dynamic force of
the human reorientation of natural purpose. Not only were
wild grains cultivated (wheat and barley); but both plants
and animals (dogs, goats, sheep and pigs) were domes-
ticated i.e., they were genetically selected wittingly or
unwittingly, and thus induced to develop in ways that
depended upon human care and will. Control of nature
was here being taken into human hands. Originating in
the area of the Mesopotamian river valleys, cultivation
and domestication were extended west along the shore-
lines of Mediterranean and Atlantic Europe, changing forest
coverage patterns through clearing, exhausting soils and
simplifying ecosystems through substitution of the myriad
forest and grassland species. Irrigation, which may have
started in Egypt about 3050 BC, or perhaps earlier in Iraq,
allowed intensication of both agriculture and settlement
(development of the hydraulic civilizations of the Tigris,
Euphrates and Indus valleys) and brought further changes
in the form of salinization, a primary contributing factor
in the Sumerian abandonment of land and settlements that
peaked about 1700 BC.
In terms of built form, the oldest known Neolithic set-
tlement is Jericho (7500 BC); the largest and most com-
plex, Turkeys Catalhoyuk (6000 BC), which was fed by
the new urban function of trade. These are both highly
compacted sites, of mud-lled timber frame construc-
tion, which turn their backs on the landscape, opening
inward and upward. The most haunting remnants how-
ever are the Neolithic ritual structures sacred monuments,
temples and tombs the best known of which is Stone-
henge (c. 2000 BC). Built and rebuilt over a millennium,
its purpose may have been to understand and celebrate the
astronomical geometry of the sky (but this remains under
active debate).
Another expression of landscape was perfected in the
Egyptian civilization (4000100 BC) taking its cue from
the forms and rhythms of the Nile: 800 km of fertile
plain bisected by the river and bounded by desertied
grassland. Memorial structures paralleled the river course,
the pyramids in Upper Egypt and the temples, incised
into the Lower Egypt mountains themselves, to the north.
Settlements, although similarly orthogonally disposed, were
clearly subsidiary to the monumental landscape, constructed
to memorialize what became after the unication of Upper
and Lower Egypt (about 3000 BC) the absolute ruler: in
the Old Kingdom he was the son of Re, the Sun God; in
the Middle Kingdom, he became God himself (Re and the
transcendent Amon).
ANTIQUITY
When we turn to Greek culture (a primary root of Western
culture), we nd the relation between attitudes to nature
and patterns of settlement and exploitation to be less clear.
Aristotelian ontology, or the study of the nature of exis-
tence, places Man and his endeavours rmly within the
natural realm. On the one hand, Nature was, in general,
the theatre of the Gods; and the notion of a pastoral retreat,
although immortalized in the Roman poet Virgils Eclogues
and Georgics, actually originated with the Greek school
founded in Alexandria by Theocritus (c. 300260 BC).
On the other hand, the various understandings of civilized
human advancement were each tied in some way to the
control of natural forces. Greek cities had no treatment
of waste; and its agriculture goats and sheep, vineyards,
olive groves and cereal crops was notoriously hard on
the soil cover, particularly on the more ecologically frag-
ile mountain slopes. Coates (1998) remarks on Platos
(unheeded) account of the environmental effects of clear-
ing and overgrazing in his dialogue Critias, likening the
bared Attic mountainsides to the emaciated form of a once
ourishing man.
Coates also points out that, in any case, perception of
the natural world for the Greeks was not as a place or
locale but a constellation of forces, albeit with human
personalities. It was these forces and their biogeological
effects that supplied some of the most important design
determinants for Greek buildings. City design began as an
intuitive response to distinct land formations, the practi-
cal art of city building not formally constituted until the
Roman technical writings of Pliny, Frontinus, Varus and
Vitruvius. In contrast to the static sculptural forms of Egypt,
early Greek city building was organic, asymmetrical and
360 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
sensitive to the perceptual rhythms of sequential colonnaded
space.
The late or Hellenistic Greek city-states formed a foun-
dation for Roman reconstruction in the second century BC.
In contrast to the Greeks, the Romans were engineers and
administrators, intent on extending Roman law over the
colonizable world. This was accomplished through con-
struction of the renowned roads, bridges, aqueducts and
lines of fortication, the orthogonal division of land into
farming units and the founding of settlements also along
orthogonal grids tied most often to shoreline geometry.
By the third century AD, Rome had stretched its imperial
infrastructure completely around the Mediterranean Sea,
north to Scotland, and east to Trabzon on the southeast
coast of the Black Sea, founding, apart from most of the
important Italian cities Paris, Nimes, Trier, Lyons, Lon-
don, Vienna and Cologne.
Roman law made manifest the divine will. The mon-
umental impulse was, as a result, foundational to Impe-
rial construction, which extended the reach of its built
form through development of the arch. From the enormous
cadenced aqueducts to the massive amphitheatres, stadiums
and baths, Roman city design compressed its components
into axial routes, moving large quantities of earth to do so.
As Coates (1998) again notes, it was a resource-intensive
civilization: the Roman baths alone must have consumed
enormous tracts of forest. At its most extensive, the Empire
reduced the Mediterranean temperate forest to the upper
slopes of much of the Middle East and North Africa, strip-
ping the soil of its fertility and ood control capacity as
well. Agricultural land was further reclaimed through large-
scale drainage of marshlands in central Italy and the Tiber
estuary. With an AD 250 population of 1.2 million, Rome
itself was a signicant source of human and animal waste.
The environmental contribution to the Empires disinte-
gration, although not traditionally recognized, was argued
as early as 1864 by George Perkins Marsh to be signif-
icant (Marsh, 1970). See also Marsh, George Perkins,
Volume 3.
Although Imperial structures were designed to dominate
the land completely, the Jellico and Jellico (1975) point
out that design of the smaller places such as the delicately
poised Temple of Vesta at Tivoli (205 AD) demonstrated
a capacity to balance sensitively the natural and human
orders. This capacity was exploited in the Roman gardens,
which expanded in importance with the size and luxury
of the Roman villa, and the public parks that lined the
Tiber.
MEDIEVAL LANDSCAPES, THE ENGLISH
EXAMPLE
The disintegration of the Roman Empire into Germanic
states in the West and the various components of the
Byzantine Empire in the East was accompanied by a decay
of its vast urbanized network and of the cities it had fed.
Apart from the few that remained as active trading centers,
such as London and Milan, and the founding of Rome s
Christianized capital, Constantinople (330 AD), most cities
disappeared as vital centres. This occurred through losses
in population (famine, disease, lowered birth rates) and
desertion to the rural areas, where increasingly autocratic
estates could provide the protection and livelihood that the
Empire under siege could not. In contrast to the classical,
the medieval landscape was therefore essentially a working
countryside.
Its pre- and post-Roman plant composition and cover-
age, previously thought to be substantially native, is now
argued to have been impacted by intense competition for
all land types woodland, peat, forage pasture amongst
the peasantry, and between these and the hunting landed
gentry. By 1086, 85% of England s native woodland and
wood pasture was gone, and many of its large indigenous
mammals. Population density then varied by county but,
for example, it averaged 13.5 per 100 hectares in the ve
east midland counties assessed by the Medieval Settlement
Research Group (Lewis et al., 1997). Expansion of cul-
tivation onto the poorer soils subsequently speeded land
conversion to the unwooded pasture associated later with
England s rolling hills.
The earliest and structurally most important forti cations
were the monastic colonies. It was here that the ordered
life now tted to the tasks of the new spirituality was
maintained until it passed to the urbanizing settlements,
complete with clock, account book and structured day
(Mumford, 1961).
The later forti ed estates and towns were organized
to support the structures and routines of feudal privilege
(defense, industry, trade and capital accumulation); at the
same time, the unforti ed towns, villages, hamlets, farm
clusters and individual farmsteads were organized to meet
the needs of the agricultural sector. The commonly imag-
ined medieval town was walled off, having fractured and
in lled the Roman grid to create a tight maze of narrow
lanes bounded by unbroken building walls, relieved by
irregular green spaces, dominated by town and/or guild hall,
gothic cathedral, church or chapel, and perhaps a palace or
castle. New towns and additions to old ones were normally
built along a exible grid, however, and unwalled settle-
ments were often arranged around a broad delineated eld
system, communal grazing area or cattle route to upland
pasture. Settlement, in general, expanded with the 12th
century feudal revolution and died back in the 14th cen-
tury following the plague (1348 1349) and its recurrences,
associated labour shortages, the deterioration of particular
soil types that forced a switch from grain cultivation to pas-
ture, and the conversion of whole villages and their eld
systems to enclosed pasture (Lewis et al., 1997).
LANDSCAPE, URBAN LANDSCAPE, AND THE HUMAN SHAPING OF THE ENVIRONMENT 361
RENAISSANCE LANDSCAPES: ITALIAN AND
FRENCH CLASSICISM
A central aspect of modernity is the secularization of many
of the elements of the medieval religious framework. The
forces that led to this include:
the spread of a proto-market economy in the 15th
century, its move to the outer edges of towns, special-
ization and increasing trade across Europe, Asia and
the Americas;
the development of the new science, particularly the
16th century challenges to the Scholastics hold on
truth;
the relocation of divine spirit within the laws and
manifest reality of the natural world itself;
the insight that the inner core of the individual was
a realm that was not xed, but was worthy of being
explored;
the challenge presented by Copernicus and the discov-
ery of the New World putting all previous knowledge
in doubt, and fostering a stance of scepticism.
Before the widespread use of the efcient manufacturing
technologies that this new philosophy unleashed, the great
releases and achievements of the Renaissance remained
within its arts. Among the most important of these was
the secular garden, the product of a revival of the classical
appreciation of nature, classical building form (principally
via Alberti) and the increasing attractiveness to the Floren-
tine and Roman aristocracy of the rural retreat. This retreat
was enclosed, as was its medieval predecessor, but, since
it was set into the Italian hillside, it necessarily offered
spectacular views into the countryside beyond.
Of the most accomplished, Albertis Villa Quaraccchi,
Tribolos Villa Medici and Boboli Gardens, Raphaels Villa
Madama, Ligorios Villa dEste, Vignolas Villa Lante, the
Villa Bernadini, Santi di Titos Villa Bombicci, and the
Villa Gamberaia, the most complicated might be the 1652
Baroque Villa Garzioni, in Collodi, Tuscany. Its seven
levels connect a small open-air theatre in the rear, down a
sloped parterre, through a series of stair-connected landings,
to a central heraldic tapestry of boxed hedge and reecting
pools. What was newly valued here was the relevance of
the Roman pastoral ideal: the belief that exposure to the
countryside could be a powerful urban antidote, a source
of spiritual and aesthetic renewal. And of course from here,
the commodication of landscape was just a short step
away.
In France, Andre le Notre (16131700) (amongst many
others) brought the villa garden to its ultimate expression
for Louis XIV in Versailles, by wrapping it around the res-
idence and extending its constellations of grand avenues
out through the forest to form a great imperial landscape.
Views within this extraordinarily complex composition are
directed innitely outward through the use of the long
penetrating allee and the recapitulation of sky in its numer-
ous reecting pools. As Eisenberg (1998) reminds us, this
was a landscape in which power was expressed not ver-
tically as with medieval castles and cathedrals but hori-
zontally, outward with the expansive aspirations of its Sun
King. Its astronomical cost, in materials, water provision for
its pools, canals and baroque fountains (a full display con-
sumed more water daily than the 600 000 residents of Paris),
potted plants, trees, hedges and the labour for installation
and upkeep, not to mention in human lives lost in con-
struction, aggravated publicly that of upkeep of the court.
It contributed to the subsequent shift in emphasis to those
landscapes which nature could (largely) maintain herself.
THE ENGLISH LANDSCAPE GARDEN
The deepening and extension of the pastoral ideal was
accomplished in Britain. The plea for nature as the well-
spring of human freedom was rst made at the turn of the
18th century by Addison, Shaftesbury, Pope and Switzer,
although a garden that would follow natures irregular-
ity was described as early as 1685 (Sir William Temples
Garden of Epicurus). Characterizing the transition from
Renaissance formalism to the point at which the English
country house was unmoored from its axial attachments
and set aloft in a sea of grass, amid archipelagos of wood
(Eisenberg, 1998) is Sir John Vanbrughs Castle Howard
(1701). Himself a set designer, Vanbrughs achievement
was to work out the spatial arrangement of the Palladian
redesigned medieval castle and its 16th and 17th century
grounds to incorporate the principles and literary refer-
ences just retrieved from the classical tradition. He alluded
as well to his own Gothic past. What he produced was
a carefully choreographed blend of ancient, medieval and
new: a rolling English meadow partitioned with lake and
woodland marked by Gothic references (gates, walls) that
recontextualized a series of classically referenced architec-
tural forms (temple, bridge, obelisk, pyramid). In 1770,
Thomas Whately wrote that it must be examined, com-
pared, perhaps explained, before the whole design is
well understood (Hunt, 1992).
This was in fact Hunts comment on the landscape
at Stowe, the naturalization of which by William Kent
(c. 1735) produced one of the most inuential (and best
maintained) examples of emblematic landscape. Kents
Temple of Ancient Virtue literally engages in dialogue with
the Temple of British Worthies across the dip of a lagoon
bisecting his Elysian Fields, the grounds overall containing
over 30 such referential structures.
Hunt places the transition to a garden that evokes an
interior personal, rather than an exterior social, reaction in
Kents Grecian Valley at Rousham (1738). He notes: the
subtle varieties of the valley afford a landscape that seems
362 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
to answer our moods, that allows a unique and individual
response by each visitor to its unobtrusive character (Hunt,
1992). We are here at the genesis of modern landscape. Its
arrangement of visual elements and evocative depths are
traditionally believed to have been drawn from the paintings
of Claude, Gaspard and Salvator Rosa; these may have
been more inuential in the literary picturesque, however.
For spatial structure, argument is made for Renaissance
stage design, particularly the court masque scenery of Inigo
Jones. The elements of Kents expressive landscapes were
codied by Lancelot (Capability) Brown, whose popularity
gave him a tremendous amount of English land to clear,
carve, plant and irrigate in his characteristic pastoral mould.
Studies over the past two decades in English art/architec-
tural history and historical geography have pointed to the
impacts of the enclosure movement that privatized these
grand estates. By transforming the working countryside into
genteel recreational grounds, blocking views of distracting
functions and aestheticizing the poverty of those remain-
ing on or visible within its frame, those contributing to
the picturesque movement not only appropriated land for
landscape, but created a universe that eliminated and/or
instrumentalized its rightful historic users and use. The shift
in ownership also created increasingly concentrated and
intensied farms, feeding a growing population and send-
ing increasing numbers of the formerly landed peasantry,
into the cities. The pastoral ideal contributes independently
of these very real effects, however, and it is possible also to
say that an eminently debatable Romantic, expressive view
of nature was here taking hold. As Hunt (1992) points out,
the picturesque tradition of these designers gave each a
frame for admitting a particular amount and form of edu-
cated wilderness into the domestic country scene. It is this
tradition that has structured landscape design ever since.
(See later section on Parks Movement.)
THE EUROPEANIZATION OF NORTH
AMERICA
It is now understood that just as the Neolithic agricultural
landscape was more domestic than wild, that of the
pre-Columbian New World contained complex cultures
interacting in equally complex ways with their own native
environments. North American ecologists are moving tow-
ard their Scandinavian counterparts in the rejection of wild
or primitive ecosystems altogether and their substitution
by the concept of gradients of human impact (Williams,
1993). Estimates of Amerindian densities in the early 17th
century have been raised from sparse to those approach-
ing Western Europe in the American east coast forests.
Each Amerindian Nation developed its own means of con-
trolling and exploiting resources: cereal crops and corn
were extensively cultivated, sh and game harvested; lines
of communication and trade established; territory (and its
patterns of use) taken, lost and recovered. Human use is
suggested to have produced a landscape mosaic prior to
European settlement. The re used to produce the clearings
and shoots that attracted game, and to keep open culti-
vated land, for example, may have produced much of the
midwestern prairie; the sh and game harvested may have
reduced species diversity, and certainly limited populations
of large game such as elk and buffalo. Relations with nature
have been described as a matter of contractual agreement
based on pragmatism, fear, and respect born of self-interest
(Coates, 1998); but it is clear that they were also tuned to
a life within nature for which the West had no appropriate
theoretical model.
European conquest replaced indigenous common prop-
erty conventions with a system of privatization and exploita-
tion geared to commodity production and trade. It famously
brought disease, a change in religious orientation, dispos-
session, and relocation; and environmentally, much more
timber clearing, more intensive and destructive patterns of
cultivation, much larger permanent settlements and a sig-
nicant upgrading of resource use. It was depletion that
pushed the fur trade originating along Quebecs Sague-
nay and St Lawrence routes through the Great Lakes, for
example west to the Rockies. Replacement of fur in the
early to mid 19th century with the timber and charcoal
industries stripped the US of half its forest cover by the
1920s. Fire further introduced large populations of aspen
and jack pine into the then simplied native forests, par-
ticularly around the Great Lakes and areas of the Rocky
Mountains.
Urbanization began in port towns along the Atlantic and
St Lawrence coastlines and remained a port phenomenon
until its westward expansion in the 19th century. Until then,
people actually moved away from the urban centres to small
resource-based communities and farms. Urban society was
limited to the few large port/administrative cities in both
Canada and the US; if rural, it remained a thin elite layer
over discrete areas of countryside. Into the second third
of the 19th century, just 8% of Americans and 3% of
Canadians lived in towns over 5000. It was not until the
colonial economy was superseded by factory production in
the last half of the century that signicant movement from
country to city began, and its specialization at the turn of
the century, that the cities began to explode. By 1930 in the
US and 1960 in Canada, the urbanrural ratio was 5050;
by 1990 in both countries it was just over 70%.
That life took place within a rural landscape for most
North Americans until some time in the mid-20th century
did not prevent the shaping of both cultures by views of
nature that were strongly idealized. In fact, both nations
were deeply split. On the one hand, there was the pastoral-
ism identied with nation in Britain and the US, and the
wilderness that turned much of the early Canadian culture
inward. The ideal of nature as a cleansing source, as a
LANDSCAPE, URBAN LANDSCAPE, AND THE HUMAN SHAPING OF THE ENVIRONMENT 363
retreat from urban ills, is, in all Western cultures, itself
deeply ambiguous: it is at once a source of personal/national
moral strength and of the elite exclusionism discussed in
the previous section (see Buell, 1995 for its American
implications).
Practically speaking, its rejuvenative potential was the
source of the early Parks Movement (see later section on
Parks/Garden Cities Movements); its economic potential
was mined unabashedly by the railway industry on both
sides of the border in the last quarter of the 19th century,
to promote the touristic picturesque. On the other hand,
there was another Nature, the Nature that (literally) fed
colonial mercantile exploitation and the vigorous industrial
capitalism that was established when mercantile structures
nally gave way. Here, the dignity of humankind lay in
its capacity for control; and John Lockes interpretation of
Nature provided the (God) given resources with which to
begin.
19TH CENTURY INDUSTRIALIZATION
Industrialization transformed agriculturally based econo-
mies and landscapes to economies and landscapes devoted
predominantly to resource extraction, rening and manu-
facture: a development with massive global consequences,
both rural and urban. In Britain (the rst nation to undergo
industrialization), as across Europe, the textile industry,
coal mining, and pig iron production, were intensied
through introduction of the mechanized loom, the replace-
ment of water with steam power and large-scale iron
foundries, thereby tripling growth in industrial towns in the
rst half of the 19th century.
Factories, coexisting with home manufacture, took over
in the last half of the century as the available technology
upgraded expectations of what kinds of output could be
forthcoming in an increasingly dynamic capitalism. Fac-
tories were redesigned to transmit power and reduce the
ever-present hazard of re; they were iron-framed, ini-
tially to support the heavy machinery used to spin ax;
and made vastly larger and more complex as the scale of
operations increased and processes became more diverse
and dangerous. Concrete was introduced toward the sec-
ond half of the century, rst in ports and then, as it was
cheaper than iron-frame, into construction of the factory
buildings themselves. Factory complexes walled in vast
courtyards around their central power source(s) creating
environments of noise, heat, dust, smoke, refuse and nox-
ious by-products.
Power production depended on, and tended to concen-
trate around, the coal mines (themselves centres of human
and environmental devastation). All this was integrated and
increasingly concentrated, rst by the systems of engineered
canals and then by the new networks of railroads. While
there clearly existed many industrial landscapes, those prior
to the 1830s stimulated more fascination and awe than dis-
gust; while those during and after the 1830s could, for
the vast majority of residents, be characterized by Mum-
fords phrase, factory, railroad and slum . The pattern of
New World industrialization tended to be led by resource
extraction, but the industrial cities on all continents were
increasingly tooled to produce and distribute the products
intended to increase quality of life: the urban environ-
ment of production, now severed from that of consumption,
was thus unserviced, unrelieved, bleak, lthy and crowded
beyond description.
THE PARKS/GARDEN CITIES MOVEMENTS
The appalling condition of 19th century western industrial
cities fed the view that urban life, if productive of a nations
nest culture, was in principle bad for the soul and destruc-
tive to ones health. Reform was pushed from the bottom
up, by womens societies, church groups, physicians, archi-
tects, landscape architects, engineers and town planners,
particularly in Germany, Britain and the US. Following the
1893 Chicago Worlds Fair, impetus from North American
sources committed to design and civic improvement coa-
lesced into a city beautiful movement, producing European
inspired designs to ennoble the citys core. These featured
the classically designed, monumentally scaled institutions
and urban components that industrial cities lacked: grand
treed avenues, plazas and parks, parliamentary buildings
and city halls, colleges, museums, libraries, etc. What was
sought was coherence, visual variety and civic grandeur
(Van Noos, 1977). However, the state of the citys basic
sanitary, service and transportation infrastructure, fragmen-
tary, often privately (and terribly) run or missing alto-
gether and of its housing stock was a concern as early
as in the 1860s.
A key component that predated the beautication move-
ment and survived its destruction was the redemptive inser-
tion of Nature into the city as parkland. Its most powerful
North American advocate, landscape architect Frederick
Law Olmstead, was concerned primarily with integrating
the park fully into the large-scale town plans then being ini-
tiated and he developed many of the techniques by which
this could be done. His designs (along with his partner
Calvert Vaux), among them New Yorks Central Park (his
rst, in 1858), Brooklyns Prospect Park, Washingtons
Capitol grounds, the park systems of Buffalo and Boston,
and Montreals mountain park, drew explicitly on Eng-
lands pastoral garden design: landform and planting were
arranged to isolate the park from the city and to create
experiences both of enclosure and of the vastness of nature
itself.
Water was wound through meadow and forest; texture
was increased through insertion of rocky outcrops and
planting variety; experiential variety and surprise were,
364 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
overall, inserted into a serpentine formation designed to
maximize tranquility. Facilitating this was the separation of
vehicular from pedestrian trafc, the roads crossing the park
sunk below, thus protected from, the level traversed on foot.
Olmsteads strenuous attempts to keep out other reform
activities (political as well as recreational) were consonant
with his belief that the park must remain an antidote to
city life and that political conict would dissipate within
a commonwealth of free and diverse people, contained in
an orderly public environment, governed by a benign and
sanitary administrative state (Blodgett, 1996).
The obvious problems with this kind of politics in an
increasingly structured, and multiethnic, population, com-
bined with increasing pressure for the infrastructure sup-
porting active recreation and team sports, pushed parks
design into an interactive, urban phase by the 1920s. Partic-
ularly during the post-war boom of the 1950s, parks were
created to house the modern recreation facilities: pools,
courts, gymnasia, community centres, playing elds and
tracks. The new park was a community hub. Further rounds
of evaluation were brought about by the city planning exer-
cises of the 1960s and again in the early 1980s, when
smaller neighbourhood parks and childrens playgrounds
were added to increasingly integrated networks, and play
equipment was introduced, standardized, or rejected for
adventure playgrounds and nally reintroduced.
The redemptive ideal of Nature survives, however, not
only in the large open parkland that remains in most
Western cities, but equally importantly in the now con-
troversial villa in the countryside concept resident in the
winding, spacious suburb. What only kings could demand
once, was now the prerogative of every commoner who
could get hold of the land itself (Mumford, 1961). The
standards for urban living laid down in such suburban
communities as Olmsteads Riverside (near Chicago, 1869)
had been codied particularly by Ebenezer Howard and
Clarence Perry into requirements for residential living.
Howards Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1902), outlining a
cooperative joint-ownership alternative to capitalist land
development, placed a network of new urban settlements of
xed population size (32 000) into rather than over a natu-
ral landscape, protecting residential areas from industrial
encroachment and both from growth by an encompass-
ing greenspace and the agricultural land beyond. Howard
and the members of his 1899 Garden City Association
were responsible for Englands rst new towns, Letchworth
(designed by Unwin and Parker, 1902) and Welwyn garden
cities (1917); and suburbs (Unwin and Parkers Hampstead
Garden, north-west London, 19051909). Garden city con-
cepts underlay 13 other British new towns, those in the
Union of the Soviet Socialists Republic, Holland, Swe-
den, Italy, Australia and later variants across both the old
and new worlds. They have remained at the core of low-
density residential construction (see for example, Hall and
Ward, 1998). Clarence Perrys The Neighbourhood Unit:
a Scheme of Arrangement for the Family-Life Community
(1929) systematized conditions he had enjoyed in the Long
Island suburb of Forest Hills Gardens. Residential units
called neighbourhoods were laid out around community
centres and elementary schools, the walk to which would
not exceed 15 minutes. In both concepts, all homes were
furnished with their own tiny remnant of estate life: the
grassed yard.
In this way, the urban fringe that had previously been
home both to the rural estates and the dispossessed became
accessible to the middle class. The tight walking/horsecar
city of the 1850s1880s, expanded by the radiating corri-
dors of the electric streetcar (to the 1920s) and the local
road networks of the 1930s and 1940s nally consumed
the vast suburbanizing areas on its periphery, with the con-
struction of the freeway networks of the late 1940s, 1950s
and 1960s.
The most memorable and difcult legacy of early 20th
century civic design may be that of the wholesale cre-
ation of new national capitals: Edwin Lutyens monumental
Edwardian New Delhi (19121913) for example; the gar-
den city/City Beautiful-inspired Canberra, work of Ameri-
can architect and associate of Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter
Burley Grifth (1913); Brasilia (1960s), the astonishing
work of modern art by artist/landscape architect Roberto
Burle Marx and a team of architects originally associated
with Le Corbusier.
WHERE WE ARE: THE MODERN/
POSTMODERN LANDSCAPE
Modern urban landscapes are clearly identied by post-war
efforts to disentangle and systematize land uses (sepa-
rating home, commerce and industry; street from major
artery or freeway); to upgrade use-intensity (achieving a
higher capital return, particularly on the new commer-
cially integrated ofce towers and the interior commercial
malls themselves); to highlight the structural monuments
to commerce (downtowns ever taller and more distinctive
corporate buildings/symbols); and to transform the post-
industrial city into a site of consumption and entertainment.
All of these developments have been highly controver-
sial, and attempts have been made since the early 1960s to
counteract the separation of city components, the reduction
and privatization of public space (streets, squares, parks),
the intense commercialization of downtown areas and func-
tions, and the ever-expanding use of adjacent farm and
wetland (perhaps started by Jane Jacobs groundbreaking
1961 work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities).
There has existed, from this time, a movement that itself
is scattered, internally diverse and conictual to re-instill
the best of the pre-industrial city. The new urbanism, in
its many manifestations, seeks to reintegrate home and
LANDSCAPE, URBAN LANDSCAPE, AND THE HUMAN SHAPING OF THE ENVIRONMENT 365
commerce, restore people and function to public space,
compact and diversify the spread-out, single-use areas now
comprising modern cities.
To move forward, to the earths millennial landscape,
we might pick up Keekok Lees distinction between the
natural and the artifactual. The natural is that which
directs itself, which contains its own teleology or goal-
oriented mechanisms; the artifactual is that which has been
willfully produced by Man, the material embodiment of
human intentionality (Lee, 1999). Today, the frontiers of
human control extend far and run deep. Human-induced
change is now, in most of the signi cant realms of the
environment affected, of unprecedented size. Many forms
of human alteration have either become signi cant frac-
tions of natural change or surpassed it altogether (Meyer,
1996).
It is clear that rates of change, their impact, recoverability
and bene ts vary signi cantly across the globe, and that
it is no longer possible to label all change to the natural
landscape bad. It is, in fact, no longer possible in most
areas to distinguish a natural landscape from another kind.
A globalizing economy has brought more of the earth s
land surface under a capital maximization regime; at the
same time, an increasingly sophisticated microtechnology
has allowed human penetration into the smallest of organic
processes, taking over genetic control of an increasing array
of organisms hoped to provide economic bene t in some
way. Some of these organisms have wide-ranging impacts
when released into natural environments, willfully or by
mistake. The effects of introduced species are controversial,
but past experience with known cases has shown that the
temporary species enrichment often spells impoverishment
in the long term (Meyer, 1996).
Furthermore, technologies of the rising future, such as molecu-
lar nanotechnology, in synergistic combination with biotech-
nology and microcomputer technology, could intensify this
tendency to eliminate natural kinds, both biotic and abiotic as
well as their natural processes of evolution or change.
(Lee, 1999)
In sum,
it can at least be asserted that an overall picture is apparent of
unsettlingly rapid, sizable, and escalating change in the global
environment. If regions differ in their immediate vulnerability
to it, their increasing interdependence in a world economy more
tightly knit than ever before may make them unprecedently
vulnerable in the long term.
(Meyer, 1996)
We have moved from the inscription of our gods onto
the landscape to the inscription of the landscape itself.
The number of texts dealing with our understanding and
treatment of nature has exploded in the last ve years. They
deal with the questions: what can we now call Nature?
landscape? and what now, can we experience as our gods?
These have become not simply timely, but fundamental
questions to a growing number of people.
THE REHABILITATION OF EARTH
THROUGH ART
Questions about land, power, form and meaning have been
asked and answered most directly in the realm of land
art (the term land art itself is more common in Europe;
Earthworks and Earth Art tend to be used in the US).
Thrust into the ow of American art genres in 1968 by a
few American gallery renegades, its antecedents explicitly
reach back to the earliest human landmarks. The rst of
these were clearly spirit-related. In the most extensive
and celebrated of the neolithic painted caves, the Lascaux
Caves in the Dordogne (25 000 10 000 BC), the placing of
animal and human images upon the rock surface seems to
have meant to bring into being the forces surrounding the
progress of life. The reality of the images literally animates
the cave enclosures and structures the experience of its
progressively powerful rooms. Neolithic megaliths later
made these forces manifest on the land s surface, the tombs
and monuments transforming select sites and landscapes
into sacred places of ancestral respect. The apogee of
these monumental forms however, the later Stonehenge in
Wiltshire (2000 BC), seems to have been constructed for
the Gods themselves, as were the pre-Roman land scrapings
(e.g., Berkshire s White Horse of Uf ngton). These produce
images that can only be fully appreciated from above, by a
transcendent, celestial eye.
The making of land into monument, paradise,
arcadia, temple, tapestry, stage, emblem, canvas and
sculpture from Babylon s elaborate hydraulic gardens to
the small perfect residential creations of contemporary
landscape architects Garrett Eckbo and Michael Hough is
land art. The movement that brought the earth s surface
back as an explicit medium in the 20th century, however,
grew out of the minimalist sculpture of the 1960s, itself
created as a series of stark environmental statements. In
moves designed to break free of the commodi cation of art,
its modernist gallery commercialism, artists sought more
democratic, spiritually valid media and viewing sites. Once
a small number of sculptors in the US, Germany, Japan
and England had discarded the pedestal and the gallery,
they began to produce works which formed their own sites.
The use of land had been pre gured by Isamu Noguchi s
(unbuilt) World War II designs for forms that spoke the
unspeakable: Tortured Earth (1943) reproduces the bodily
ravages of war in large slashed earth mounds; Sculpture To
Be Seen From Mars (1947) would have mounded the face
of a desert into the blank, shocked geometric features of
post-atomic Man.
Practitioners were drawn to land art not only by the state
of art, but also by the earth, and the practice of landscape
366 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
architecture. Michael Heizer sought to found a uniquely
American art on the excavation and emplacement of a
human geometry on the landforms of southwest desert sites.
I think the earth is the material with the most potential
because it is the original source material (Bourdon, 1995).
Walter de Maria began in Germany, but produced his
most memorable work in the American southwestern as
well. His 19741977 Lightning Field near Quemado, New
Mexico planted 400 stainless steel poles in a grid aligned
for height (averaging just over 6 meters) on the desert oor.
The work tends to disappear in the glinting sun of the
day and, in the occasional storm, grounds the spectacular
play of lightning it is designed to attract. The Bulgarian-
born Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude then outdid the
others for spectacle (and socio-economic organization) by
(among other similar projects) covering a bay of Australian
coastline (Wrapped Coast, Little Bay, One Million Square
Feet, Sydney 1969), joining two Colorado mountain peaks
with 381 m of orange ame and fold (Valley Curtain,
Grand Hogback, Rie 19701972) and most famously,
bringing 5.5 m of gleaming white sail down 40 km of
California countryside into the Pacic for two weeks in
1976 (Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties). It
is Robert Smithson, however, who produced the prose to
articulate the movements soul. Smithson was attracted to
the expressive and rehabilitative potential of industrial sites.
He is best known for his spiral of limestone and black basalt
curving off the shore of Utahs Great Salt Lake (1970).
This site was a rotary that enclosed itself in an immense
roundness. From that gyrating space emerged the possibility
of the Spiral Jetty (in Beardsley, 1998).
British land art has tended to the more subtle and
ephemeral. For Richard Long (Walking a Line in Peru 1972,
1975 Line in the Himalayas of White on Grey Stone, 1981
A Line in Scotland) the walks themselves, the arrange-
ment of stones and artifacts of the actions photographed
are his works of art. Hamish Fulton photographs his walks
through environments visibly unmoved by human intention.
Andy Goldsworthys Cracked/Broken Pebbles (Lancashire
1978) and his gold-leaf wrapped rock (Yellow Elm Leaves
over a Rock, Low Water Oct. 15 1991 Dumfriesshire, Scot-
land) set up small beautiful acts of Man in nature. David
Nashs Wooden Waterway 1978, and Running Oak Table
1978 lay odd and distinctly human arrangements of nat-
ural materials into a forest clearing. Ian Hamilton Finlay
has created a small, densely allegorical neo-classical turf
and cut-stone inlay landscape, Little Sparta in the Pent-
land Hills, Scotland. Finlays return to socially reveren-
tial emblems is explicit and changes with his intervention
through time.
Land art has also produced the environments more com-
monly associated with landscape architects. Robert Morris,
Herbert Bayer and Andy Goldsworthy have worked with
reclaimed industrial and urban waste sites. Michael Heizer
used the material and topography of a reclaimed strip
mine overlooking the Illinois River to create the massive
mounded forms of ve indigenous water creatures (Ef gy
Tumuli 19831988, Ottawa Illinois, for the Ottawa Silica
Company Foundation). The newest urban land art, how-
ever, is the garden, particularly in the hands of designers
such as Peter Walker (e.g., Tanner Fountain on the Har-
vard Campus, Cambridge, Mass. 1984, where a sphere of
mist is projected over concentric circles of stones placed
within a shallow grassy bowl) and Martha Schwartz, whose
1979 Bagel Garden turned the front of her Boston ter-
race house into a tapestry of delicately planted black soil,
purple aquarium gravel overlain with shellacked bagels
and framing box hedge. Schwartz typically uses uncon-
ventional materials and a combination of formal histori-
cal and minimal/pop art forms to turn landscape into its
own particular art (see Art and the Environment, Vol-
ume 5).
CONCLUSIONS
The very fruitful integration of the natural and social sci-
ences, and the arts, in the study of landscape and cityscape,
has paralleled the globalization of human-induced change.
This change is an extremely complex, locally distinct phe-
nomenon, sensitive not only to culture and population
growth and decline, but also to policy initiatives at every
level and the powerful programs of international nance,
development and aid.
The compelling attraction of nonhuman nature and of the
landscape that reects its formative forces has, in part, been
that of the essential other: of the powers and beings beyond
our control that surround and contextualize our human life.
The modern humanization of the planet itself threatens to
recontextualize human life with the products of its own
making, that is, to make perfectly narcissistic an existence
once shared with its originating forces and beings. What this
would do to the conditions of life that have inspired fear,
awe, love and creative dialogue since Man has been able
to contemplate his own small size is yet to be understood.
REFERENCES
Abrams, M H (1958) The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory
and the Critical Tradition, Norton, NY.
Andrews, M (1999) Landscape and Western Art, Oxford Univer-
sity Press, New York.
Beardsley, J (1989) Earthworks and Beyond, Abbeville, NY.
Berleant, A (1997) Living in the Landscape: Toward an Aesthetics
of Environment, University of Kansas Press, KS.
Bourden, D (1995) Designing the Earth: the Human Impulse to
Shape Nature, Harry N Abrams, New York.
Buell, L (1995) The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature
Writing and the Formation of American Culture, Harvard Uni-
versity Press, Cambridge, MA.
LEOPOLD, ALDO 367
Coates, P (1998) Nature: Western Attitudes Since Ancient Times,
University of California Press, CA.
Cooney (1999) Social Landscapes in Irish Prehistory, in The
Archeology and Anthropology of Landscape, eds P J Ucko and
R Layton, Routledge, New York, 4664.
Cooper, D E (1992) The Idea of Environment, in The Environ-
ment in Question, eds D E Cooper and J A Palmer, Routledge,
London, 163180.
Cosgrove, D and Daniels, S (1988) The Iconography of Land-
scape, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Davis, K (1965) The Urbanization of the Human Population, Sci.
Am., September, 213(3).
Eisenberg, E (1998) The Ecology of Eden, Alfred A Knopf,
New York.
Forman, R T T (1990) The Beginnings of Landscape Ecology in
America, in Changing Landscapes: an Ecological Perspective,
eds I S Zonneveld and R T T Forman, Springer-Verlag, New
York, 3541.
Hall, P and Ward, C (1998) Socialable Cities: The legacy of
Ebenezer Howard, John Wiley and Sons, Chichester.
Hunt, J D (1992) Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the
History of Landscape Architecture, MIT Press, Cambridge,
MA.
Hoskins, W G (1958) The Making of the English Countryside,
Hodder and Stoughton, London.
Jellico, G and Jellico, S (1975) The Landscape of Man: Shaping
the Environment from Prehistory to the Present Day, Thames
and Hudson, London.
Kostof, S (1995) A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals,
Oxford University Press, New York.
Lee, K (1999) The Natural and the Artifactual: The Implications
of Deep Science and Deep Technology for Environmental Phi-
losophy, Lexington Books, New York.
Lewis, C, Mitchell-Fox, P, and Dyer, C (1997) Village, Hamlet
and Field: Changing Medieval Settlements in Central England,
Manchester University Press, Manchester.
Lynch, K (1972) What Time is This Place? MIT Press, Cambridge,
MA.
Marsh, G P (1970) The Earth as Modi ed by Human Action, Arno,
New York (rst published in 1874 under the title: Man and
Nature).
Meinig, D W, ed (1979) The Interpretation of Ordinary Land-
scapes, Oxford University Press, New York.
Meyer, W B (1996) Human Impact on the Earth, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge.
Mumford, L (1961) The City in History: Its Origins, Its Trans-
formations, and Its Prospects, Harcourt, Brace and World,
New York.
Nairn, I (1965) The American Landscape: A Critical View, Ran-
dom House, New York.
Schreiber, K F (1990) The History of Landscape Ecology in
Europe, in Changing Landscapes: An Ecological Perspective,
eds I S Zonneveld and R T T Forman, Springer-Verlag, New
York, 2134.
Spirn, A W (1998) The Language of Landscape, Yale University
Press, New Haven, CT.
Tjallingii, S P and de Veer, A A, eds (1982) Perspectives in Land-
scape Ecology, Proc. Int. Cong. Netherlands Soc. Landscape
Ecol., PUDOC, Wageningen, The Netherlands.
Van Noos, W (1977) The Fate of City Beautiful Thought in
Canada, 18931930, in The Canadian City, eds G A Stelter
and A F Artibise, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 162185.
Wasserman, E R (1968) The Subtler Language, The Johns Hop-
kins Press, Baltimore, MD.
Watkins, D (1982) The English Vision: The Picturesque in Archi-
tecture, Landscape Architecture and Garden Design, Harper
and Row, New York.
Williams, M (1993) An Exceptionally Powerful Biotic Factor, in
Humans as Components of Ecosystems: The Ecology of Subtle
Human Effects and Populated Areas, eds M J McDonnell and
S T A Pickett, Springer-Verlag, New York, 2439.
Williams, R (1973) The Country and the City, Oxford University
Press, New York.
Zimbardo, R A (1986) A Mirror to Nature: Transformations in
Drama and Aesthetics, The University Press of Kentucky, KT.
Leapfrogging Technology
see Leapfrogging Technology (Volume 4)
Leopold, Aldo
(18871948)
The name Aldo Leopold has become something of a mantra
among environmentalists. The use of this mans name
evokes, from his writings and his personal example, a
sensing of the scientic complexity of the biological world,
combined with a sensing of the elegant beauty which can
be discerned in natural science. It is associated with a code
of ethics: a code that offers a moral baseline by which our
social system could exist constructively within the limits of
biological productivity.
At his birth in 1887 in Burlington, Iowa, there seemed
to be no reason to anticipate the intellectual impact that
this person would have. At the time of his boarding school
at Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, he was noted
as a bright and somewhat reclusive lad, who had devel-
oped a remarkable ability to see and to interpret nature,
with an insight that others could not see. At the time of
his graduation from Forestry School at Yale University
368 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
(1909), his biographers note evidences that he may have
appeared to his contemporaries as quite self-assured: a
feature, which might have contributed to some initial man-
agement problems during his employment with the United
States Forest Service (19091924). But during this time, his
extraordinary perceptive skills with nature led this young
forester to discern two impending catastrophes that oth-
ers could not see: the destructive effects of runaway deer
populations, and the impending debacle of soil erosion.
At this early age, he was able to foresee the need for
preservation of wilderness, and he originated the estab-
lishment of the Gila Wilderness area in the state of Ari-
zona.
When Aldo Leopold published his book on Game Man-
agement (1932), and became of Professor of Wildlife Ecol-
ogy at the University of Wisconsin (1933 until his death in
1948), he had earned a reputation as a ne scholar, a writer
of impressive power, and an intellectual leader (albeit in
a non-classical academic subject). Yet in his lifetime, his
perceptiveness and his grasp of ecological issues was not
always appreciated. While Aldo Leopold was recognized
as the leader of the profession of wildlife management,
his efforts to provide scientic leadership in resource man-
agement in the State of Wisconsin were voted down. His
authorship of some of the most perceptive ecological and
philosophical essays focused on the beauty that can be per-
ceived in nature, and led to ethical generalities that were
recognized as stunning pieces of writing. Yet four major
publishing houses rejected his manuscripts that later led to
the book, A Sand County Almanac. At the time of his death,
in 1948, the power of the mantra of Aldo Leopold was only
making its rst emergence.
But then, A Sand County Almanac was accepted by a pub-
lisher just days before he died: note the powerful metaphor
of a major leader of ecological and ethical thinking who
died while ghting a grass re on a neighbors farm. It is
probable that his blend of scientic knowledge about natu-
ral history, ecology, and management, with the essentials of
ethical behavior that can serve as the baseline for sensible
ecology, was the powerful pulpit from which he could speak
about mankinds relationship to the natural world. I person-
ally doubt that he felt that his writings and teachings would
have a very widespread impact. But then the full tenor of
his post-mortem voice began to rise in the last half of the
20th century. The readership of A Sand County Almanac
rose continually during the 50 years after its publication
(1949, Oxford University Press, New York), breaking the
usual performance of literary/scientic books which ordi-
narily have a half-life of about six years. Instead of fading,
this book has been reprinted more than thirty times, and sold
more than two million copies in the last 50 years. It has
been translated into nine foreign languages. The demand
has been sufciently great that a second book of his essays
was published in 1953 (Round River, Oxford University
Press, New York). Several other collections of his early
writings have appeared (Aldo Leopolds Wilderness, edited
by D E Brown and N B Carmony, Stackpole Books, Har-
risburg PA, 1990; The River of the Mother of God and
other essays by Aldo Leopold, edited by S L Flader and
J B Caldicott, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI,
1991; For the Health of the Land, edited by J B Callicott
and R E T Freyfogle, Island Press, Washington, DC, 1999;
and The Essential Aldo Leopold, edited by C Meine and
R L Knight, University of Wisconsin Press Madison, WI,
1999). And, most important, a denitive and sensitive biog-
raphy, Aldo Leopold, his life and work, has been written by
Curt Meine (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI,
1988).
Today, the mantra of Aldo Leopold has become a byword
for environmentalists around the world; this man is consid-
ered to be the father of the science of restoration ecology.
His central role in terms of ethical life-styles has stimu-
lated the formation of a new branch of ethics and morality
centered on the health of the Earth. One example of his
concise denitions of a land ethic: A thing is right when
it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of
the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends other-
wise. People come regularly to visit his farm in Wiscon-
sin as a site of inspiration and intellectual renewal. Aldo
Leopold has become a powerful mantra for ethical life-
styles.
Being introduced at meetings of environmentalist groups,
I have had lovely youngsters shriek, Oh, you must be the
son of Aldo Leopold followed by embraces and kisses.
At another meeting recently, the chairwoman suggested a
standing ovation for the son of Aldo Leopold. It is difcult
to dene the magnitude of the stimulus that this man has
left to the world of environmentalism.
Photo: courtesy of the Aldo Leopold Foundation
Archives.
A CARL LEOPOLD USA
Life Style, Private Choice,
and Environmental
Governance
Peter Timmerman
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
One of the great emerging issues that society faces is the
relationship between lifestyle choices and environmental
LIFE STYLE, PRIVATE CHOICE, AND ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE 369
burdens. The most obvious way of describing this
governance problem is the shift from point-source problems,
which characterized many jurisdictional responses in the
1970s1990s, to current non-point source problems. But it
is much more complicated than that, and poses signi cant
social, political, and economic concerns for the 21st
century.
DEFINING ENVIRONMENTALISM
A central issue in contemporary environmentalism is how
to deal with life-styles and private choices. The environ-
mental movement has until now not been able to convince
people that many looming environmental problems are
rooted in the larger production and consumption patterns
of modern society. There is a lot of lip service given to
life-style changes, but the underlying patterns are tenacious.
To deal with this many environmentalists believe will
require a transformation of the economic/industrial produc-
tion system, on the one hand; and on the other, a lifestyle
transformation amoung individuals and families. There has
obviously been some movement on both these fronts. Indus-
tries have been altered; and individuals and households
have blue boxes; schools have green curricula; the envi-
ronment is everywhere. But the environmental agenda is
persistently driven by a purity model and not a sustainabil-
ity model.
The purity model emphasizes clean air, pure water, and
the elimination of waste products. It ts in very well with
the residual Puritanism of many Anglo Saxon countries,
and the whole range of related middle class values. It is
naturally associated with personal health, and the general
fears about pollution and toxic chemicals. For Ministries
of the Environment, this has meant a strong focus on
environmental health, on toxin abatement, on end-of-pipe
elimination of pollutants, and so on. The environment
enters as a carrier or pathway for the delivery of toxic
chemicals.
Of course, the other aspect of the environmental agenda
is present. People have a broad concern about endangered
species and some endangered spaces. There is also broad
support for doing something, as long as it is not too oner-
ous (e.g., blue boxes). There are also fears about global
climate change and other global issues. But it is clear
that after 30 years of the environmental movement that a
broad reconsideration of lifestyles by the vast majority of
the population in developed countries (let alone developing
countries) has not happened.
If it is assumed that consumption of goods and services,
especially with the advent of consumerist lifestyles in
the developing world, will drastically increase, there are
usually two safety valves proposed. The rst safety
valve is that the greening of industrial production and
materials and energy use is rapidly improving, and
that will mean that we will be able to continue our
consumptive lifestyle without increasing the ecological
burden. The second safety valve (related to the rst) is
that a knowledge and service economy will gradually
virtualize a substantial range of current commodity
ows.
Neither of these assumptions is completely plausible.
While there have been substantial savings made in the
elimination of many metals, materials, and energy, the
economic growth patterns seem to have simply begun ll-
ing the new space available. There is also little evidence
that virtualization is going to replace the need for phys-
ical resources any time soon. For example, teleworking
seems to be a factor in increased car use in suburban
belts.
FUNDAMENTAL DRIVERS OF THIS
EMERGING ISSUE
Perhaps the fundamental driver of this issue is the model
of human well being encapsulated in middle-class ways of
life. This is now being promulgated through the media, a
model which was embryonic in Southern California and in
early suburban New York in the late 1940s, but which has
now spread around the world. This lifestyle carries with it a
set of intrinsically woven choices about urban and suburban
housing, garden structures, transportation biases, and so on.
These seem to be only marginally separable, though some
separation has been made for example, smoking and hard
liquor consumption patterns have changed drastically over
time.
Behind this model is a second driver, namely the power-
ful assumption of choice as the core element in freedom
and freedom of expression. This assumption is histori-
cally rooted in a set of religious practices and ideals
(concerning free will and sin in Christianity), but has
more recently become incorporated within economic the-
ory. In the 19th century, economics was transformed away
from a classical model of analyzing supply and demand
curves based on resource, labor, and land use, into a
neo-classical model which developed the notion of the
rational allocation of scarce resources by individuals seek-
ing to maximize their personal utility. This model dove-
tailed effectively with the rise of consumer society. We
now have a cultural model of self-fulllment encapsu-
lated in the phrase: shopping is freedom. The objects
that we buy are now the carriers of self-expression and
creativity.
This consumerist ethos is most overtly widespread in
children and teenagers, who are acutely conscious of
label, product, and status. The school system is cur-
rently under assault by corporate marketers and others
370 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
attempting to break down the barriers between the cul-
tural space of school and the cultural space of com-
mercialism. At the heart of this struggle is the struggle
over who will control the myths, stories, and images of
society.
HOW WILL THIS ISSUE FURTHER EVOLVE?
The place of government in this situation is very dif -
cult, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is a
long history of misguided government intrusion into try-
ing to reshape human behavior. Nevertheless, the women s
movement and other activities prove that governments
do have a clear role in fostering and enabling change
through legislation, advice, and leadership roles. A sim-
ple example of this in the case of consumerism has
been government support for alternative automobile eets,
recycling, and using pilot activities as examples of best
practices.
The big problem, as already mentioned, is the disjunct
between personal choice, personal lifestyle and the recog-
nition of those choices and the burden on the environ-
ment. I suspect that this is about to alter, in part because
the environmental movement is undergoing a signi cant
shift in its areas of concern (see Editor s Introduction and
Environmental Politics, Volume 5). It will become ever
clearer that the relationship between personal well-being
and environmental well-being is much subtler and more
powerful than has been credited hitherto. The best example
is the extraordinary case of the stratospheric ozone hole,
where people suddenly found themselves threatened with
the violation of a basic right that they did not even know
they had before the right to walk outside on a sunny
day.
It will be clearer as the 21st century continues that
these kinds of threats threats to the fundamental fabric of
life through species loss, climate change, biotechnology,
and the rest, will threaten the very de nition of the human.
This is already unsettling, but it will become even more
unsettling as violations of immune systems, private genetic
information, and global deterioration in certain ecosystems
accelerate. One can predict that the relationship between
these issues and fundamental issues of human well-being
will force a recasting of what constitutes the environment
and environmental well-being, and that personal sustain-
ability and environmental sustainability will be more tightly
drawn together.
This development will allow governments, citizens, non-
governmental organizations (NGOs), and industries to
renegotiate the boundaries of choice, freedom, and the
burdens that current patterns of choice are placing on
the environment. This will be very dangerous, but very
necessary.
Literature and the
Environment
Peter Timmerman
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
The relationship between the arts, in general, and environ-
mental change is complex, and certainly not restricted to the
presence of images or descriptions of nature as content. Lit-
erature poetry, plays, novels, non-ction is, in part, an
alternative environment where the powerful tools of literary
form can work within a set of internally generated imagina-
tive rules to explore communicable experience. Literature
may be said to have its own ecologies, and has certainly
generated worlds of its own.
This article focuses, through the examination of selected
pieces of literature, on the Western literary tradition; and
for a variety of reasons, including space restrictions, deals
with the mainstream tradition, particularly in works of the
Romantic period (1750 1850). One of the other reasons is
that Romanticism is a pivotal moment in modern literature,
as well as culture more broadly; and it is a direct in uence
on the rise of modern environmental thought and prac-
tice. To elucidate the importance of Romanticism, I draw
upon the myth-critical school, associated with the work of
the Canadian literary critic, Northrop Frye (1947, 1968),
which, whatever its limitations in other areas, provides a
very powerful apparatus for entering into some of the more
revolutionary aspects of literary practice as it applies to
cosmologies and mythologies.
In particular, this article argues that a central role of
literature in the context of environmental change is to be
an expression and sometimes a fomenter of changes in
world views. This is one powerful way in which litera-
ture interacts with environmental change: that is, not just
recording people s feelings about changes in the natural
environment, but challenging and restructuring their men-
tal maps of the world by means of story, character, style,
language.
INTRODUCTION
In the summer of 1816, a group of English hippies inclu-
ding Lord Byron and his friend Percy Shelley went to
Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Coming after the battle of
Waterloo, 1816 was the rst time that anyone from Eng-
land had been allowed to travel in Continental Europe
for a decade, and tourists ocked across the Channel.
Lake Geneva was special because it had been the site
of a famous romantic novel by the French philosopher
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie: or The New Heloise, and
LITERATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT 371
the little party of travelers was looking forward to a
summer of wandering around the shores, soaking up the
atmosphere.
Unfortunately, the summer of 1816 was the year without
a summer thanks to the explosion of Mount Tambora in
the Southeast Pacic, which cast a pall over the skies of
the world, and cooled off or deranged weather patterns
everywhere. Lord Byron and his party were forced to stay
inside their rented house and watch the rain, day after day.
On one such day, they all decided to make up ghost stories.
Shelleys wife, Mary, had a dark dream, which she turned
into what everyone agreed was the best of the ghost stories,
about a scientist who decides to create a human being. Thus,
Frankenstein (Shelley, 1818) was born.
This is an interesting example of the relationship between
the environment and literature, and highlights one way in
which much of the creative interplay between the con-
structed world of human culture, and the natural world
within which that culture is created, works. It is almost a par-
ody of the not very creative idea that the environment might
be a cause of literature, the way people used to argue that
geography causes culture. It is only marginally less creative
than the conventional notion that the environment appears
in literature as the content of the novel, poem, or play.
A more useful way of thinking about literature and
the environment derives from the Romantic movement
of the 18th and 19th centuries though not completely
beholden to it which focused on seeing literature as in
part an expression of human exploration of the relationship
between the self (consciousness, mind, imagination) and
the outside world (nature, environment, materiality); but
that the nature of this expression was not just the content,
but the quality of style, the voice of the author or narrator,
the shape of the stories being told, and so on.
One critical element in this exploration is provided by
metaphor the imaginative leap between two different
realms or categories as seen by the creative mind. This
mind need not be a literary mind the Gaia Hypothesis
(see Gaia Hypothesis, Volume 5), that the Earth might be
seen as a single, living organism is a creative metaphor;
though many scientists would opt for its milder cousin, the
simile; that is, the Earth may be treated for the moment as
if it were akin to an organism, or a self-organizing system
of sorts. Another example is provided by the 19th century
chemist, Kekule, who could not solve a problem in the
arrangement of chemical bonds, and had a dream about a
snake biting its own tale, which gave him the idea of the
potential for the circular bonding pattern: another creative
metaphor.
METAPHORIC AND RATIONAL LOGIC
The anthropologist Gregory Bateson, just before his death,
wrote a pathbreaking comparison between metaphoric and
rational logic through comparison of two syllogistic patterns
(Men are Grass, Bateson, 1987). The rst, very familiar,
syllogistic pattern is:
Men die.
Socrates is a man.
Socrates will die.
This Aristotelian syllogism is (in part) a deductive
machine with a hypothesis (Men die), a fact in the world
potentially subsumable under that class (Socrates is a man),
and then a new relation when the fact is put into that class
(Socrates will die).
A second pattern, which looks like the rst, but is in fact
a logical fallacy is:
Grass dies. Men die. Men are grass.
This is the fallacy of afrming the consequent, and
its fallaciousness (and dangerousness) can be seen in the
following further example:
White is pure.
There are white people.
White people are pure.
The grass syllogism, however, is familiar to readers
of the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible, as a powerful
linking together of two different categories (men, grass)
by means of metaphor. This kind of categorization and
making of connections can be as systematic and powerful
as the rational logic associated with scientic hypothesis
generation; but the two solitudes (to use C P Snows term)
can be antagonistic to each other. Indeed, it has been one
of the complaints of the modern poet that the scientist
is draining all the poetic mystery out of the world, by
challenging the traditional web of metaphoric connection;
while, on the other hand, the scientist complains that writers
dont know any science.
What makes the writers world work is the making of
connections that may not be overtly rational, but may make
meaningful sense as metaphor. For example, there is no
scientic reason why blue should be associated in Western
culture with the musical blues, but most writers will be able
to play on those associations when necessary. Similarly, the
idea that a weeping willow is actually weeping is obviously
absurd to a botanist or forester; but as a symbol, it may well
be a powerful carrier of an emotion in a story.
One thing that separates modern literature from ear-
lier literatures (and non-Western literatures) is that earlier
literatures can depend on the expectation that the entire
culture within which the literature operates also subscribes
to metaphoric logic. It is only in modern Western culture
that the idea that nature and human experience have no
metaphoric connection to each other has ourished.
Among the reasons why Shakespeare continues to have
such an inuential role in modern culture is the fact that
372 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
he lived at a pivotal moment in the shift away from a
universe of mutually resonant meaning (the end of the 16th
century), and is sensitive to the shift, very often giving us
some characters who still respond to traditional signs and
symbols of the environment, and others, more modern, who
dismiss them merely as old wives tales.
As an example of the former, the night before Julius
Caesar is stabbed in Shakespeares play Julius Caesar
(1597), Cicero and Casca speak. Casca reports on what
he is seeing:
Casca: Are you not moved, when all the sway of earth
Sways like a thing unrm? O Cicero!
never till tonight, never till now,
Did I go through a tempest dropping re.
Either there is civil strife in heaven,
Or else the world, too saucy with the gods,
Incenses them to send destruction.
Cicero: Why, saw you anything more wonderful?
Casca: A common slave you know him well by sight
Held up his left hand, which did ame and burn
Like twenty torches joined; and yet his hand
Not sensible of re, remained unscorched
Men all in re walk up and down the streets,
And yesterday the bird of night did sit
Even at noonday, upon the market-place
Hooting and shrieking. When these prodigies
Do so conjointly meet, let not men say
These are their reasons, they are natural ;
For I believe they are portentous things
Unto the climate that they point upon.
Cicero: Indeed, it is a strange disposed time;
But men may construe things after their fashion
Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.
(I, III, 435)
Here Casca represents the world of symbols, portents,
signs from the gods, that are warning of impending civil
war; while Cicero represents the newly rational Man, scep-
tical, aware of how signs may be false, mere rumor,
hysteria, and connected only by projection from human
desire.
NATURE AND MYTH IN PRE-MODERN
COSMOLOGY
We can think of cosmologies proposed descriptions of
the universe and mythologies stories that inhabit and
illuminate the universe as forms of metaphor writ large.
They are large-scale structures of meaning, many of whose
elements and characters appear in literary works, while
the works themselves inuence the overall feel of how
it is to live in such a universe. For example, Dantes
Divine Comedy (1330) is an imaginative journey through
the cosmology of medieval Western Europe; but the power
of Dantes vision of his journey had incalculable effects
on the birth of the sense of what it means to be a modern
Western individual in such a universe.
In this section I want to sketch out two rough cosmolo-
gies, the rst from the beginning of literature, in Sumeria;
and the second, the evolving medieval Christian synthesis
cosmology that broke down at the beginning of the modern
era. These are not the only cosmologies available. They are
simply two of the most important, particularly for the ways
in which they think about, and structure, in myth and story,
the cultural map of Nature.
In most cultures, the cosmology is woven into stories
that are told orally, and have been handed down by word of
mouth for many centuries. The Western tradition is special
(which does not mean specially good), in that much of its
tradition was very quickly written down, and the mainline
tradition has been a strongly literary one from very early on;
though the origins of the stories that make up the tradition
are almost certainly long oral traditions that have been
lost or rewritten. Western traditions begin the story of the
creation of the Earth and sky usually with some kind of a
Creator God, and often with a story about how the sky and
the Earth came together and mated (the sky being male, and
the Earth being female). A number of other cultures start
things off completely differently. For some, the universe
comes out of its own insides, like a spider spinning a web
out of its own guts. For others, everything comes up to
the surface of the sea; and that is how things got going. In
some cultures, things are even sung into existence.
It should also be stressed that what is being sketched out
here is the mainline Western tradition, against which other
oral traditions and contrary stories struggled, and often lost.
Of particular importance is the continual appearance and
disappearance of dangerous story fragments about women
and other strange beings whose role in the mythology is
troubling and often suppressed or twisted. Scholars have
only recently become interested in these marginalized sto-
ries, in part because of the light they shed on mythologies
that refused to t into the big story.
The Origins of Earth and Sky
The rst myths in the Western tradition of which we can
read begin in the Near East, and are associated with the
hydraulic civilizations of Sumer (Southern Iraq), Egypt,
and later, Babylon, and Assyria. These cultures grew out
of the surpluses generated by the ecological richness of
alluvial soils in the big river basins of the Nile, Tigris,
and Euphrates rivers. Through extensive irrigation and
complex management works, these cultures were able to
feed large numbers of people, and also build the worlds
rst big cities (the same process was going on in India
and China). Essential to the survival of these cities was the
organization that kept the irrigation systems going, and
the predictability of changes in river ow according to
the seasons. Furthermore, as these cities grew richer, they
became subject to attack by enemies, which necessitated the
LITERATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT 373
growth of armies. All this complexity led to the creation of
writing, accounting, and monumental architecture.
In the earliest Western stories drawn from the Middle
East, the Earth is seen as a piece of land (often a hill)
surrounded by, or oating on, the waters of Chaos, waters
that will drown the world unless they are countered by
creative power. However, these waters are also life giving,
especially in an area with so little rain: in some myths the
great waters are the source of all beings. By analogy with
a room or a temple, the Earth is often seen as holding the
sky up by four pillars on each corner, representing the four
directions, and we still use this image in talking about going
to the four corners of the Earth.
The Earth has its natural rhythms associated with sea-
sonal change, the rising and lowering of rivers, seedtimes
and harvests. The Sky has an intimate relation to this pro-
cess, but it seems to be much more abstractly orderly, more
designed, less subject to human inuence. Unless you are
an astronomer, the sky at night presents the following pic-
ture: there are xed stars, that do not seem to move relative
to each other, though they move as a whole through the
night sky through the year. They have strange patterns,
called constellations, which look as if they might mean
something, especially those associated with seasonal shifts.
Every once in a while, certain stars seem to move, called
planets, which is a Greek word meaning wanderer, because
they seem to be wandering among the stars. These appear
at different times of the year, which can be predicted, but
they move in a puzzling fashion. Also in the night sky in
the Northern Hemisphere, there is a swatch of white stars
called the Milky Way, which many myths see as some sort
of gateway to heaven.
Obviously, the moon is the largest body in the night sky,
and it has a monthly rhythm which is predictable, and which
was very early on associated with the highs and the lows
of the tides of the rivers and sea. Because of its similarities
with female rhythm (the word menstruation derives from a
word for month), the moon was constantly associated with
the female, and with tidal waters. This is not universally
true, but became more and more accepted in Western myth.
Most important of all was the sun, which very quickly
became associated with ruling power. Some cultures, such
as the Egyptian, toyed for a while with having a Sky God-
dess (Nut) separate from the Sun God, but this rapidly
disappeared. The sun was all-powerful, and ruled the day.
Most of the gods and heroes of the Near East were asso-
ciated with the Sun God, who was invariably male, and
kingly. Crowns had rays of the sun attached to them; kings
carried orbs (the sun symbol) and the chariot of the King
moved over the world the way the chariot of the sun moved
across the sky.
To reinforce this, the earliest agricultural myths explained
the creation of the world as the sexual intercourse of the
Earth (female) with the Sky God or sun (male), and this
would be symbolized by the plow (male sexual organ)
entering the furrow of the female (female sex organ), and
seeding the soil with semen. Other versions of this would
connect the Sky God with the rain, again, male potency
being rained down on the waiting female Earth. These
myths strongly reinforced the idea that the male was active
and creative, while the female was passive. This helped
set up a whole pattern of male-oriented myths of power,
that reinforced the social organization of the period, which
was becoming increasingly dominated by priests, kings, and
hierarchical organizations. This was essentially patriarchal,
i.e., dominated by a male-structured mythology.
There are indications, though the evidence is extremely
controversial, that there was at least a strong counter
mythology, especially in other regions of the Near East such
as Crete, that focused on the power of women, particularly
associated with their dominant role in early agricultural
practice and in their role as childbearers. This matriarchal
culture is very often characterized (in the surviving male
cultural mythology) by a myth of a powerful Queen choos-
ing her temporary male partners, who are perhaps sacriced
when they lose their usefulness as defenders.
In the earlier period there were several different sto-
ries, and competing gods. For instance, another impor-
tant piece of the cosmological structure was the God
of Storms, who sometimes competes with the Sky God
for supremacy; as do other gods associated with primal
forces, like re. These cosmologies altered signicantly
with changing social structures, though the main lines began
to harden. By about 1000 BCE in the Babylonian epics
and stories, a mythical structure was in place which was
picked up and modied in part by the Israelites, a wander-
ing tribe of shepherding peoples who seem to have traveled
throughout the Near East, settling in Palestine following
experiences in Egypt, captured in the oldest parts of the
Bible.
It was this adoption of the reigning Near Eastern mythol-
ogy as a backdrop or set of assumptions in the early books
of the Bible that was so important for the rest of the Western
tradition.
The Rise of the Hero
One last element of this mythology needs to be put into
place, which is the idea of the hero (and occasionally
the heroine) who usually represents the human race in its
struggle to survive in a strange world. This hero is almost
always seen as more than human, a superman, or Hercules,
who is related to the Gods in some way. This hero has a
series of adventures, which carry him through the world,
and help to make sense of it.
This hero structure often mirrors the activities of the
Gods in sustaining the world. For instance, one of the great
myths of the world is the sun going into the darkness every
374 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
night, and being reborn every morning. The darkness is like
chaos: a place of confusion and death. The hero, following
the track of the sun, goes down into the place of darkness
at the end of the world, or the bottom of the world, and
there wrestles with various evil forces, and then resurfaces
to begin the cycle of the world all over again. The hero
travels through various levels of the world, from the highest
to the lowest and back again.
Let me summarize all the above in Figure 1. It represents
a composite of the Western worldview, about 700 BCE,
which would be found with variations all over the Near
East and the Mediterranean.
The most important single fact about this myth structure
is that the higher up you go the more ordered it becomes.
This is because God or the Creator is also the embodiment
of order, and the human beings who are closest to him, the
kings and the priests who rule human society, also embody
order. Notice also that the highest order is more and more
removed from most natural processes. This suggests that
the higher order is rational, and associated with the powers
of the human mind separated from the turbulence of the
lower world.
A second important fact for mythological purposes is that
the imposition of order from the top down is a central part
of any story that ts within this structure. In general, the
king, Sky God, God as Creator, is visualized as coming
down into the disordered world and imposing order on
it according to a rational plan. The resistance to that is
seen to be irrational, and associated with the demonic. The
farther down one goes, the more ungodly Nature is, the
more dangerous, and the more associated with darkness,
uncontrolled swirling water, and chaos.
The process of myth creations takes these levels, and
the images and symbols associated with these levels,
and weaves them into powerful stories. We have already
referred to the story of the hero who descends into the realm
of darkness and wrestles with the darkness. The darkness
is associated symbolically in geographical terms with caves
Heaven: Rational order = God, Cosmos, Stars, Sky, Father, Male
Lower heaven: Serving order = Gods, Angels, Priests, Kings, Cities
Higher earth: Highest human
order = Paradise, Utopia,
Community
Lower earth: Lowest human
order/Animal world (world
of confused daily life)
Hell: Demonic order: Chaos,
Counter-order, Devils, Death
Figure 1 Ancient western cosmology [after Frye and
others]
and labyrinths; bodily with the lower bowels (the bowels
of the Earth); meteorologically with wild chaotic oceans
(as in storms and tempests); and animalistically with huge
devouring serpents, gigantic whales, beasts that are half-
human and so on. The archetypes are very long-lasting in
the Western tradition, and show up in other traditions as
well: for example, the image of being swallowed by a whale
as a symbol of hell appears in the biblical book of Jonah,
in the novel, Moby Dick, in the childrens story, Pinocchio,
and in the second Star Wars lm.
In other words, each mythological level clusters a range
of images and symbols around itself, and one of the ways
of identifying the kind of story one is in is checking out
the symbols, images, and metaphors that pop up. It is not
as simple as that, of course, because some of the images
have changed over time, and have become used as parodies
and ironies of themselves. But an initial grasp of how these
clusters of images works is of interest, particularly as we
continue to explore shifts in the images and ideas of Nature
over time.
In the great Sumerian and Babylonian stories and epics,
the hero journeys through the realms of darkness and of
the gods, for a variety of reasons, including the need to
tame the turbulent world to the purposes of humankind.
Here is an excerpt from Inannas Journey To Hell (from
approximately 1500 BCE). Inanna was a powerful goddess
in Mesopotamia. Inanna descends into hell during the dry
season of the year, ostensibly to rescue her husband from
death, but mythically to restore the natural cycle of life to
the kingdom. Here is a brief scene of her return, with devils
attached to her like leaches:
Over the corpse hanging on a spike,
They scattered the bread of life,
They sprinkled the living water,
And Inanna stood up alive.
She will come up from the pit, but the Anunnaki
(demons) seized her,
The Judges said,
Who has ever returned out of hell unharmed?
She is coming, Inanna is coming
from the pit! Devils are fastened
to her thighs, devils walk beside her,
meagre like reeds, thin as pikestaves.
There goes in front of her a thing
With a sceptre, but he is no minister
She is coming, Inanna is coming
From the pit!
(trans Sandars, 1971)
The mythical quest of the female to restore health to an
ailing kingdom is a widespread complementary story to the
questing male battling more obvious threats to the kingdom
(like monstrous beasts). In Egyptian myth, for example,
the queen/goddess Isis has a King/husband Osiris, who is
murdered by his brother Seth, and his body scattered around
the world. The world loses coherence, and the kingdom
withers. Isis travels the world, discovering and piecing the
LITERATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT 375
fragments of Osiris back together again, and when he is
fully restored, order and fertility returns to the land.
These myths of Inanna and Isis began to surface in the
rst millennium BC, and following the conquering of Egypt
by Alexander the Great in the 300 BCE period, the myth of
Isis in particular spread around the Mediterranean. A Greek
equivalent was the myth of Demeter and Persephone. In
this myth, Demeter, who was the goddess of fertility, has
a daughter Persephone who is captured by the chief God
of the underworld, Pluto. Demeter goes down into Hell to
rescue her daughter, but discovers that her daughter has
eaten six pomegranate seeds while being captured, which
requires her to stay in Hell for six months of the year forever
after. It is during those months that the world loses its
fertility.
The Arrival of the Christian Story
These myths of Demeter, or of Isis the Eyptian, or of any
number of other Gods, spirits, etc., were widespread in the
ancient world until after the arrival of Christianity. The
whole array of beliefs and stories is usually referred to as
paganism, and what paganism means, generally speaking,
is the worship of multiple gods, particularly in sacred nat-
ural places, like woods, forests and caves, and these gods
often are the spirits of animals or powers in the world. As a
reection of the multiple cultures and multiple inuences in
the region, the stories and myths are themselves multiple,
and often reect a belief that the natural world is subject to
constant surprise and transformation. Ovids Metamorpho-
sis (late 1st century, BCE) is a classical Roman expression
of this widespread set of beliefs.
Somewhere around 1500 BC, a tribe of nomadic peoples,
the Hebrews, were wandering around northern Mesopo-
tamia. It is probably important that they were nomads,
that is, that they werent part of a rigid city culture, and
didnt carry around with them statues or big pictures. They
were saturated in the mythological culture of the region,
but they developed a signicantly different worldview over
the next 700 years. The story of this evolution is told in the
Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible (see Chr istianity and the
Environment, Volume 5; Judaism and the Environment,
Volume 5).
At the heart of this story is the idea of monotheism, which
is more than just the idea that there is one God. Essentially,
the Hebrews came to believe that they had a special God
who had created the whole world and everything else in it,
but was not Himself any part of that world. A central part
of the idea is a radical questioning of what it means for
something to have power spiritual power. The Hebrews
said, you people worship all kinds of Gods, animal gods,
female gods, male gods, gods of fertility, etc. But what is
the power that all these gods share? What is the power that
gives them power?
There were other cultures that had a King of the Gods,
Zeus, or Jupiter, but they were just more powerful versions
of the other gods. What was the sacred power itself, which
all these gods supposedly had? These were ultimately
screens for the One True God, and could be done away
with.
The second thing the Hebrews pointed out was that life
with a lot of gods was confusing. You never knew which
gods were on your side, and which were against you. You
had to spend your whole day sacricing to this god, and
not forgetting that one, and so on. The Hebrews argued that
it was ridiculous for people to be worshipping trees and
animals: they should be worshipping the one true holiness
that created the trees and the animals and gave them life.
This radical attack on the multiple natural gods of the
ancient world was also part of the Hebrews tribal strategy.
When they entered what is now Israel/Palestine, which was
then called Canaan, they proceeded to ght against all the
local tribes, and part of their ght was against all the local
gods, including the local versions of Ishtar, Baal, and other
spirits.
The early books of the Bible capture the massive rethink-
ing of Nature that went on in the creation of such a
worldview. The upshot of the rethinking is that, in the
end, though Nature can, and should, be seen as a glori-
ous creation of God through which we might be able to
get a glimpse of Gods great wisdom and knowledge, it
no longer has any intrinsic spirituality of its own. It is a
vehicle for the greatness of God.
In the Hebrew Bible, we still get glimpses of the old
tradition, some snippets about the old Canaanite religion,
and a lot of complaining that pagan worship refuses to die;
but by and large the Canaanite religion disappears from
view as time passes.
It so happens that the Jewish people were only a minor
player in the Ancient Greek and Roman world, so they were
tolerated as being a bit eccentric. The God of the Hebrews
joined the rest of the diverse array of gods and goddesses
that peopled the Mediterranean.
All this changed with the arrival of Christianity.
When Jesus was crucied around 35 AD, He was origi-
nally thought of as just one more Jewish radical, but thanks
to the efforts of, among others, a man who would later be
called St Paul, who was both a Roman citizen and a Jew,
Christianity began to spread around the Mediterranean. It
took root because of its promise of individual salvation
from death, and its intolerance for other religions. It was a
bit like Microsoft: you can have no other operating system
but mine.
Thanks to a series of events, culminating in the conver-
sion of one of the later Roman emperors, Constantine to
Christianity, Christianity became the most powerful reli-
gion in the Roman Empire, but unlike the other religions
whose adherents were happy to let other religions ourish,
376 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Realm of God the
Father: God moves
all Universe moves
up towards God
J esus redeems all
Lower cosmos: Stars and
planets in their pure
spheres
Higher earth: Highest human
order =Paradise, J erusalem,
The almost redeemed world
of second nature
Lower earth: Lowest human
order/animal world (world
of confused daily life)
The fallen world of sin,
unredeemed nature
Hell: Demonic order: Chaos,
Counter-order, Devils, Death
Fire
Air
Water
Earth
GOD/angel realm
primum mobile
Fixed stars
Saturn
J upiter
Mars
SUN
Venus
Mercury
Moon
Hell
Continual descent of
J esus, Mary, Angels,
Saints, to assist humans
in ascending to God
Nature is redeemed in
the Body of Christ.

Figure 2 Medieval western cosmology. Primum mobile, the sphere that moves all other spheres [after Frye and others]
the Christians went on a 300-year rampage, destroying all
the Roman cults, burning down the Great Library at Alexan-
dria (associated with Isis), and hacking down all the sacred
forests and groves associated with the pagan gods. Having
done this in the Mediterranean, they then proceeded to do
the same throughout Western Europe, culminating in driv-
ing underground the Celtic Gods of Ireland and the Norse
Gods in Scandinavia.
This extraordinary story ended, in about the year 1000,
with virtually the entire Western world being subject to
Christianity. The central mythological and cosmological
structure that had been extant before was now subjected to
a strong narrative based on a single salvationary drive; i.e.,
the entire cosmos was part of a redemptive process whereby
a fallen world intensied by fallen human beings was,
at the end of time, to be re-perfected. The ideal Hero was
Jesus, whose story became the template for the journey of
Everyman through the world.
The early Christian literature, based on this very powerful
vision of the spiritualization of the world, saw Nature as
either irrelevant, or as a realm of symbols whose meaning
was connected to the larger spiritual journey of the soul.
In fact, Nature was seen as the realm of wilderness and
danger, far removed from the realm of God. As this world
view developed, it dovetailed with leftover astronomical
and physical assumptions of the ancient GraecoRoman
world, which (for instance) argued that the Earth was
the lowest realm, made up of the element Earth, and
that the higher one went away from the Earth, the more
one approached perfection. For example, the planets and
stars in the heavens moved in concentric circles (actually,
transparent spheres) around the earth, and so on. Again, as
in the earlier cosmology (Figure 1), the higher you went,
the more rational the world became, until you reached order
and truth, God.
A map of this cosmology (Figure 2) shows the dimen-
sions of the Medieval/Renaissance universe, and also the
cluster of literary images that held together views of nature
throughout that period. Our lower nature is subject to temp-
tation; and the wild of the uncultivated natural world is a
symbol of that temptation. This wilderness should be turned
into a garden, or a farm, or ultimately a city, just as the soul
should be cultivated.
In Dantes Divine Comedy, the hero (guided by Virgil,
the ghost of the dead Roman poet), descends into hell,
at the center of the earth, and reascends in the Southern
Hemisphere, where he climbs the mountain of Purgatory, at
the top of which he nds himself in a kind of paradise, like
the original lost Garden of Eden. After this, he leaps up into
space (guided by his long lost love, Beatrice) and rockets
through space towards the ultimate place of God beyond
the stars. This literary journey maps the whole natural and
spiritual world of his time.
SECOND NATURE AND THE WINTERS TALE
As already mentioned, one of the most important aspects
of Shakespeares work is that it appears just at the
moment when the late medieval world view is being
superseded by the early modernist world view. To repeat,
Shakespearean literature (and that of his contemporaries and
some successors) often operates according to metaphoric
logic categorization based on resemblance or co-inc-
idence. A mandrake root was shaped like a human being,
and therefore had inuence over human beings. The
LITERATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT 377
conguration of stars at ones birth was not an accident:
the planets had different inuences, as did different plants,
animals, etc.
The importance of this is that the metaphoric view allows
for a certain amount of positive valorization of natural
nature, even in the medieval Christian period. An impor-
tant medieval distinction was between natura naturata and
natura naturans nature more or less as a noun, and nature
as a living verb, naturing. Shakespeare is fascinated by the
power of nature naturing. Among the most interesting char-
acters in his plays are bastards, who are always standing up
and proclaiming their devotion to the raw powers of nature.
In the late Shakespeare plays, like The Winters Tale
(1613), nature (in one role) becomes something much more
benign, and becomes tied to certain ambiguous functions
of nature in literary art. The most obvious of these is
the pastoral world of rustic shepherds and shepherdesses.
Another was the garden. A third, and hardest of all to
articulate, was the great benignness of Natures rhythms in
the world. In Shakespeares late plays, there are tempests,
bears, shipwrecks, etc., but one is constantly led to believe
that it will all work out, that something is going on deeply
in the world to reconcile everything. This is one reason why
they all feel like fairy stories.
As the title suggests, there is a storylike quality to The
Winters Tale, and it is obviously haunted by winter (a
season and a mood). In the scene excerpted below, a shep-
herdess greets two lords, who are searching for Prince
Florizel, the heir to the kingdom, who has fallen in love with
her. Unbeknownst to these lords, the shepherdess, Perdita,
is herself a princess; they believe her to be a mere rural
peasant. As with Ophelia in Hamlet, Perdita is uent in the
metaphoric language and etiquette of owers. The scene
opens with her gracefully giving rosemary and rue (and
explaining their symbolism) to the two gentlemen. When
they suggest that she is giving them winter owers, she
points out that she has avoided giving them natures bas-
tards carnations and gillyvors. Because these plants were
known for their genetic sports their streaking and changes
in patterns (piedness) suggested waywardness they are
symbols of natures indiscriminate sexuality. Perdita is stak-
ing out civilized ground.
The next paragraphs provide a central discussion of the
Renaissance view of nature and natures art what was
called second nature. Second nature is what cultivation
does: it takes the waywardness of nature and harnesses
it to nobler ends. Perdita opens the discussion by using
the term art for the process of creating nature (Natura
naturans), and is naturally wary of it. Polixenes who is
about to denounce his son for fooling around with a mere
shepherdess brings in a different metaphor: the metaphor
of grafting. In grafting, a branch of a growing tree is
cut off and grafted onto another. The force of nature that
continues the growth process eventually produces a next
generation stronger and healthier than the earlier one. So
Polixenes argues that human art can use natures powers to
improve nature. Thus, Shakespeare gracefully intertwines
the theme of human cultivation and nature, with the irony
that the supposedly rural shepherdess is herself a gure of
the highest hidden art.
Perdita: For you theres rosemary and rue; these keep
Seeming and savour all the winter long:
Grace and remembrance be to you both,
And welcome to our shearing!
Polixenes: Shepherdess a fair one are you
Well you t our ages with owers of winter.
Perdita: Sir, the year growing ancient
The fairest owers of the season
Are our carnations and streakd gillyfovers,
Which some call natures bastards; and I
care not to get slips of them For I have heard it said
There is an art which in their piedness shares
With great creating nature.
Polixenes: Say there be;
Yet nature is made better by no mean,
But nature makes that mean; so, over that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race; this is an art
Which does mend nature; change it rather, but
The art itself is nature.
(IV, III, 7296)
ROMANTICISM AND AFTER
Beginning about the time of the Industrial Revolution, due
to a variety of forces, the synthesized ChristianPtolemaic
cosmology began to collapse, and there arose a new
cosmology, which we can call the creative, romantic,
or revolutionary cosmology. This has remained with us
ever since, and lives in uneasy relationship with the
fragments of the earlier imaginative cosmology that still
operate.
What happened was that the previous worldview, which
was hierarchical kings, priests, male centered, rule-orien-
ted and rational was no longer able to use the cosmology
to support the existing power structure. The new emerging
world of astronomical discoveries, the discovery of the
new world, the new physics, etc., all confused the world
picture; and during that period of confusion, there was also
a widespread assault on hierarchical forms of government
throughout Europe.
As a result, the world order of the people on top (let us
now call it that ofcially) began to be attacked and parodied
by means of a counter-cosmology. It is the persistence
of both cosmologies the ofcial line, and the romantic
line that is essential to understanding how the myths and
images of the modern Western world work, and especially
modern environmentalism.
378 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Mechanical,
Abstract rationality,
God as absent, Tyrant
king, Priest Universe
as absurd prison
Heaven (Hell):
[Earth as minor planet around
a minor sun]
Civilization (Hell on earth):
Nature (Potential source of healing)
Inner world (Potential heaven or hell):
Symbols: False marriage, Bad government;
Mask, Blank street, Machine.
Symbols: Mountains, Oceans, Lakes, far
from Civilization; True love;
Huts; small communities.
Symbols: Satan as Hero, isolated poet
searching for forbidden truth, branded/lightning,
dabbles in the occult , forbidden love , incest,
madness, anti machine science alchemy not chemistry.
Political energy now derives from the bottom:
proletarian, revolution, mob energy.
Alienating city, industrialization
hypocrisy, subject/object split,
loss of harmony with nature and
community
Inner journey down into chaos
to dissolve split between
self, other, nature through
creativity, intuition
Wilderness as non-human source,
model for non-alienated
noble savage
Figure 3 Modern cosmology/mythology/romantic parodic, countermyth
The Romantic countermodel broke through in a number
of different places it shows up in the American and
French Revolutions, and has since been central for artists,
musicians, environmentalists and others.
Let me describe a third cosmology (Figure 3), this time
from the top to the bottom. It is somewhat less clear than
the previous two. The reason is that one of the powerful
things going on in the new cosmology is an attempt to
parody and satirize the old cosmology. Remember that this
is a cosmology, and a mythology, so the energy of it is
carried through symbols, images, and metaphors.
To begin, the earlier world view was organized hierar-
chically, the higher you went, the more rational, ordered,
and powerful you became, because you were getting closer
to God.
The new worldview inverts and parodies this approach,
because it no longer believes explicitly in the natural right
of rulers to rule. This was one of the causes and outcomes
of the American (1776) and French (1789) Revolutions.
The whole idea of the top becomes not the place you
want to go to reach heaven. It is now the place of innite
space, the strange empty abstract cosmos ruled over by the
laws of Isaac Newton. It is blank, inhuman, full of stars that
no longer have any relevance to our lives. God has disap-
peared, turned into a puppet master or a watchmaker. This
connects to a very powerful image of kings and gods not
as reasonable beings, but as repressive rulers. The forces of
authority are now thought of, not as spreading truth and rea-
son from high places, but as being in charge of a repressive
machine, designed to stie human expression. Elements of
this machine are increasingly seen as arbitrary creations of
the repressive mind, and among the arbitrarinesses is the
association of the masculine with the rational.
The next level down is the city of darkness, which is
no longer the city of light, the holy organized rational city
of Jerusalem. Rather it is the place of alienation, where
faceless people work for the machine. This was particularly
true in the rst years of the industrial era, where the
LITERATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT 379
whole structure of society was disrupted. Previously rural
farm communities and family groups were uprooted and
turned into workers. Workers, by denition, are gears in the
machine. They have lost their humanity, and have become
human resources.
The city is also associated with alienation, which shows
up in the emerging idea of the lonely gure in the crowd.
This becomes a powerful image in the new Romantic poetry
of the 19th century. In William Blakes poem, London of
1794 we get some idea of this (William Blake, 17571827).
Here are a couple of verses:
I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames doth ow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every infants cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear.
How the Chimney sweepers cry
Every blackening church appalls,
And the hapless soldiers sigh,
Runs in blood down palace walls.
And so on. The streets and the river are chartered map-
ped, sold and the human mind is now manacled, chained
and shackled. The crisscross of square streets in the new
modern city contrasts with the organic wandering streets of
the medieval town. The city begins to grow, and to engulf
its surroundings.
Similarly, just as human beings are being eaten up by the
machine, so also is Nature being eaten up by the machine,
and being transformed into objects. Power is the power
over, the control over human beings and nature, which is
created by having control over the wealth created by the
machine, and this in turn is a creature of civilization.
Here is Blake again, in one of his late poems Jerusalem.
A revolutionary poet is speaking:
O Divine Spirit, sustain me on thy wings,
That I may awaken Albion (Britain) from his long and cold
repose;
For Bacon and Newton, sheathd in dismal steel, their terrors
hang
Like iron scourges over Albion: reasonings like vast serpents
Infold around my limbs
I turn my eyes to the schools and universities of Europe
And there behold the Loom of Locke, whose Woof rages dire
Washed by the Water wheels of Newton: black the cloth
In heavy wreaths folds over every nation: cruel works
Of many wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs
tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other, not those in Eden, which,
Wheel within wheel, in freedom revolve in harmony and peace.
Here Blake summarizes his attack on the whole Industrial
Revolution. He sees wheels without wheels (without here
means outside of) as a mixture of clockwork, waterwheels,
mechanisms imposed from the outside; as opposed to the
organic development of wheels within wheels he sees in
some future Paradise or Eden. The whole civilization has
become poisoned.
For Romantic writers, it may be that progress was mak-
ing people healthier and wealthier, but they were also
being progressively pulled apart from each other, and from
nature. Among the powerful Romantic themes was the
idea of the noble savage, the very powerful idea that
would haunt Romanticism from then on, which was that
peoples, races, that were closer to nature were somehow
better and wiser than people who belonged to civiliza-
tion in general, and Western civilization in particular. The
noble savage identied with the increasingly marginal-
ized indigenous peoples who were being chewed up by the
new Western machine was not alienated from his (or her)
community, and had a special relationship with the natural
world.
In contrast to them, civilized Man was split up the
middle. Socially, naturally, and even in conict with his
own mind for we begin to see that the mind-forged
manacles may reect the larger world view a rational
conscious mind/identity, alienated from ones own physical
world.
If we go back to the cosmological chart, we can see this
great split, which is rampant in the industrialized mind. For
the Romantic writers and critics, this was the equivalent of
a new fall of man, a tragic moment in human history against
which they rebelled.
How is this split, these alienations to be overcome, or
healed?
In the early Romantic era, there were two main answers,
one political, and the other artistic, or creative. The political
answer was revolution. Essentially what was required was
for the mass of those being turned into machines to revolt
and overthrow the masters on top.
Here we enter the next realm of the new cosmology: the
idea that the bottom is the source of creative energy. It may
look like the old hell, but it is where the next revolution
would come from. Throughout the 19th century, and even
in our own century, there is this image of the crowd, the
mob, the mass of workers on general strike, like some
dark force from a volcano, nally breaking through the
stiing authoritarian machine towards some wider liberation
which would nally sweep aside the old institutions. It
was these images that were at the heart of the French and
Russian Revolutions. The revolution from below was the
force that would lead to the new heaven of Utopia. One
of the starkest images that operated throughout the next
hundred years was that of the blacksmith (and later the
steelworker) working in the industrial equivalent of hellre,
with a hammer, striking blows for freedom in the midst of
the dark factory.
This was the political answer. The split which was caused
by repression would be overcome by the workers on the day
380 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
when they realized that the forces of repression were not
just imsy, but were being kept in power by their ability to
keep the workers in ignorance of their true capacity to rule
themselves without masters.
THE ARTIST AS RADICAL
A related answer, which moves us back into the details of
our cosmology, was that Nature might become a source for
a new regenerative force. If part of the symptoms of our
problems could be seen in the destruction of Nature, and in
the separation of the human from the natural, overcoming
that split might also be relevant. Nature was naturally not
human, so while it might be polluted, at its heart might
be something different, which could regenerate the lost
original human nature again, sort of like repairing the
original fall of man in the Christian tradition. Not only was
nature not human, at least some parts of it could be seen
to have an organic structure, one that naturally developed,
rather than being imposed from the outside, by machine.
Again, notice that one of the important inversions of
the previous cosmology is going on here. In the previous
cosmology, wilderness was a place of chaos, of entangle-
ment in irrational natural forces, leading one on to hell. In
the new cosmology, wilderness, simply because it is not
part of the machine, is a potential entry point into heaven,
or at least paradise. The very fact that it is uncultivated
makes it a starting point for the rebirth of a non-infected
culture.
Also notice that it is the uncultivated, the non-rational,
the pre-split in all its forms that becomes a source of new
strength, of the divine energy of revolt. It is not a coinci-
dence that we nd in this period a new respect emerging
for children, who come to be seen as unspoiled gures,
not as adults in training (and modern educational the-
ory dates from this early romantic period) for aboriginal
peoples the noble savages I spoke of (we begin to get
romantic stories like the Last of the Mohicans) and the
initial upgrading of womens voices that takes place in the
opening of the 19th century with women like Mary Wolle-
stonecraft.
Of equal importance is the rise of the artist, the creative
person, the musician and poet, who represent the overcom-
ing of the split between the mind and the world through
their imaginations or their works. How does the artist, the
musician, the creative person, overcome the split between
the human and the natural?
There are two approaches that have become well known.
One is associated with the image of the lamp. In this
image, the idea is that the artist, through his or her creative
mind illuminates and reaches out into the natural world,
and overcomes the split through the power of new artistic
power. We can hear this, for example, in the music of
Beethoven, like his 5th Symphony, where the composer
seems to hammer away (like a blacksmith) at the elements
and forces of the world around him. This is an active
approach (to say the least).
A second approach is for the artist or the poet to become
more humble in the face of Nature to become sensitive
to the details and the rhythms of the natural world, to learn
Natures lessons. Over time, this cleansing of perception
will reveal deeper truths of the universe to the artist. We
can see this approach in the work of John Ruskin, who
combined an environmental concern with a call for detailed
analyses of Natures designs in owers, rocks, trees, and
atmospheric phenomena.
These two approaches are often mingled together in
different artists. When we look at a painting, like The
Sun owers from the quintessential Romantic artist, Vincent
Van Gogh, we cannot say whether Van Gogh was imposing
his vision on the sunowers, or saw them in themselves
more deeply than we can.
In earlier cosmologies, the way you learned was by
going up to high places, going to the city, nding a wise
male leader. There were exceptions to this, but only part-
exceptions: for example, in Dantes Inferno, the hero goes
down into hell, but that is only the beginning of the journey
up to the highest stars.
In the Romantic movement, we nd that the idea of
the journey down into the underworld in the previous
cosmology, becomes the journey of discovery itself. This is
because the new hell is caused by the repressive actions of
the forces of order. The Romantic artist (and later versions
of that, like the rock musician) goes out to the marginal
peoples, down into the slums, away from the center of
power. It is only there that the truth of repression is really
to be seen for what it is. The people who live in the new
hell are more liberated, because (in a parody of the earlier
cosmology where the closer you got to God, the more
rational everything became) the new cosmology argues that
the farther you get away from authority, the more truth
can be found. Since rationality is being imposed from the
outside, irrationality may be more truthful than rationality.
The madman may be saner than the doctor.
Lastly, the descent into a liberating new hell may be a
descent into the personal hell, the unconscious mind. The
poet, the musician, repelled by the repressive nature of
modernity, descends into a variety of personal and social
hells, and supposedly returns from that with new messages
that will transform the world. The mythology of drug-
ridden visionary rock musicians comes directly from this
cosmology.
This descent into the mind may be echoed by the descent
into the wilderness. The artist may go into the heart of
darkness, go on a vision quest, seek out the truths that can
only be found far from civilization. Inner nature and the
natural world become linked, because both are on the run
from the forces of human technological control. This helps
LITERATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT 381
explain some of the attractiveness of the ight away from
civilization into nature.
MODERNITY AND THE CONTEMPORARY
ARTIST
These Romantic themes, and the dark cosmology that
goes with it, have remained central tools in the hands
of writers and artists. Much of the literature of the 20th
century explored the themes of the alienating environment
of the city, the potentially liberating, but also potentially
dangerous, voyage into the natural environment, and the
journey of the hero and heroine into inner nature. A novel
like George Orwell s 1984 paints the environment of the
city as alienating, repressive, and one without any hope.
The only time that the characters nd any liberation is
when they escape to Nature, temporarily. The same is
true in Aldous Huxley s Brave New World and many other
powerful indictments of contemporary life.
A new theme that has emerged in literature since World
War II, and is paralleled by the rise of the environmental
movement, is the possibility raised by nuclear war of the
elimination of all life on earth. For writers, this has been
inescapably linked to the experience of the death camps
of Auschwitz and Birkenau, where the whole question
of civilization came under question. The German critic,
Theodor Adorno, famously said that one could no longer
write poetry after the Holocaust. The dark hole of that
experience sucked the life out of the pretense of words.
Since then, writers have been constantly haunted by threats
to the fabric of life; and this has shown up in the themes
and characters they write about.
Nevile Shute s On The Beach (1959), which portrayed
the consequences of the global spread of nuclear fallout,
has a good claim on being the rst modern environmental
novel, saturated with the themes just outlined. Of increasing
interest in recent years has been the strength of non-
ction writing about the environment, re ecting in part
the presence of large amounts of scienti c or naturalistic
fact in contemporary life. Writers like Gary Snyder (Earth
House Hold) and Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek),
anthropologists like Richard K Nelson (Make Prayers to the
Raven), biologists like Sandra Steingraber (Living Down-
stream), and farmers like Wendell Berry (Home Economics)
grounded their environmental writings in exemplary detail,
and often used them as springboards for moments of per-
sonal discovery.
CONCLUSION: AND DEATH, TOO, IS IN
ARCADIA
In searching for a piece of recent writing about the environ-
ment to conclude this essay, I decided to use the example of
a poem, written by myself, and published in the mid-1980s.
I choose it, not because it is a great poem, but because as
the author, I can speak to it somewhat freely as to the inten-
tions and sources of its creation, and how it was intended
to relate literary forms to environmental changes. This may
give some insight into the literary process (or at least one
writer s process).
The poem was part of a suite of poems called The Fate
of the Earth and Other Poems published in the Canadian
environmental magazine Probe Post (Timmerman, 1988).
This particular poem draws on the literary tradition called
pastoral, which was used in The Winter s Tale. It was a
sophisticated Greek and Latin form of verse (and sometimes
prose) about simple shepherds in rustic landscapes, either
singing about the joys of the rural life, or complaining about
a shepherdess who would not love them, or the troubles
of farmers in an uncertain world. Many writers Virgil,
Horace, Pope, Shakespeare, Sidney used this form, often
disguising criticism of mainstream urban society under
the guise of simple unlearned folk. There was also a
kind of utopian dream associated with this simplicity,
which was classically located in a place called Arcadia in
Greece.
Accompanying the poem was a photograph of a famous
painting by Nicholas Poussin (see Art and the Environ-
ment, Volume 5) called Et in Arcadia Ego. The painting
shows a group of shepherds in Arcadia huddled around a
large tomb upon which are carved the words Et in Arca-
dia Ego, which is a reference to death. That is translating
from the Latin I Too Am In Arcadia. Naturally, this means
that there is no escaping from death, not even in the beau-
tiful natural simplicity of Arcadia.
With this introduction, here is the poem:
And Death, Too, is in Arcadia
The house of Nature sags against the rain.
The sap fails in the sugar maples, and the
cry of the waterbirds fades like mist
over morning by grey, secret inlets.
The rustle of wind is the whisper of weeping.
There is Death in the woods, lling the air,
down along the marshlands, dropping
out of the once benevolent skies, shedding
hot tears of helpless pain.
The webbing of life tears and drifts apart:
poison pulses from the snow, and
the land soils itself into the stream, and
the lake slowly wearies of all its children.
Against its own, its deepest rhythm dying,
Nature screams and warps against the grain.
And look, here, look
here in the depths of faltering Arcady,
even the gravestones dissolve in grief
at things never seen or heard before
in any version of pastoral.
The poem was written in the speci c context of acid rain,
but also more generally in relation to a world in which
382 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
things that naturally symbolize goodness, like rain and
mothers milk, are turned into poisons. There is a strange
situation where the natural processes are turned against
themselves, and the deep rhythms of nature are warped by
the inuence of human chemical poisoning.
One important aspect of the poem is that, like the distant
lakes and waters affected by acid rain, Arcadia is far away,
and yet affected by long-distance transport of pollutants. I
carefully used images and ideas from the scientic literature
on the loss of leaf cover, stresses on trees, loss of water
birds, early snowmelt at the beginning of the year that
pulses acid into lakes just at prime birth time for sh, and
so on. However, there is an even stronger connection to
one powerful theme in the pastoral poetry tradition: the
mourning for the lost shepherd.
In the English poetry tradition, the most famous example
of this theme is John Miltons poem Lycidas (1642). In this
poem, which mourns the loss of a young poet who was
drowned at sea, the whole of nature is bidden to mourn as
well for the loss of one who loved nature:
With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,
And every ower that sad embroidery wears.
Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,
And daffadillies ll their cups and tears,
To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.
This is a classic example of what was discussed earlier
with reference to Julius Caesar where the sympathies of
nature for human beings are assumed.
In my poem, I was trying to evoke the images of the
dying poet, but with a modern twist, to evoke the dying
of nature, and also to suggest that this was something
new in the history of the world (never seen in Arcadia
or anywhere) the possibility of the dying of nature. An
oblique reference is made to a famous book on pastoral
by the literary critic William Empson, Some Versions of
Pastoral (Empson, 1935).
Also, among the guiding images of the nal lines of the
poem is that of sculptures and tombstones that I had seen
in city graveyards that had been worn down by air pollu-
tion over the years, and were themselves symbols of the
destructiveness of contemporary environmental problems.
A brief technical point, which may highlight the way in
which, in a poem, everything matters, including the form
as well as the content, is that I used a number of what
are called weak endings where the rhythm of the word
is such that there is a strong beat on the rst half of the
word, and a weak, falling off rhythm at the end words
like weeping, dropping, lling, shedding so as to evoke
sadness and loss. There are also lines like the rustle of
wind is the whisper of weeping that are meant to give the
reader the sound of the wind in the threatened woods.
These kinds of considerations and many others go
into the response of those who write literature today in the
face of the environmental crisis.
REFERENCES
Bateson, G (1987) Men are Grass, in Gaia: A Way of Knowing,
ed W I Thompson, Lindisfarne Press, Great Barrington, MA.
Buell, L (1995) The Environmental Imagination, The Belknap
Press, Cambridge, MA.
Empson, W (1935) Some Versions of Pastoral, Chatto and Win-
dus, London.
Sandars, N K (1971) Poems of Heaven and Hell From Ancient
Mesopotamia, Penguin Books Ltd., Harmondsworth, Middle-
sex, UK.
Shelley, M W (1818) Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus,
Broadview Press, Peterborough, Ontario.
Timmerman, P (1988) The Fate of the Earth and Other Poems,
Probe Post, Summer 1988, Pollution Probe Foundation,
Toronto.
FURTHER READING
Abrams, M H (1953) The Mirror and the Lamp, Oxford Univer-
sity Press, Oxford.
Bate, J (2000) The Song of the Earth, Macmillan Press/Picador,
London.
Berry, W (1987) Home Economics, North Point Press, San Fran-
cisco, CA.
Dillard, A (1974) Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Random House/Vint-
age, New York.
Frye, N (1947) Fearful Symmetry, University Press, Princeton,
NJ.
Frye, N (1968) A Study of English Romanticism, Random House,
New York.
Nelson, R K (1983) Make Prayers to the Raven, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Snyder, G (1969) Earth House Hold, New Directions, New York.
Steingraber, S (1998) Living Downstream, Random House/Vint-
age, New York.
Long-wave Economic Cycles
(Kondratyev Cycles)
see Kondratyev, Nikolai Dmitrievich (Volume 5)
Love Canal
Love Canal was the name given to a suburban subdivi-
sion in Niagara Falls, NY. Residents rst became aware of
their proximity to toxic waste through a Niagara Gazette
newspaper article by Michael Brown in April 1978. Local
LOVE CANAL 383
housewife, Lois Gibbs, quickly emerged as the key orga-
nizer of a community riddled with fears for their health.
She initially began a petition campaign to close the 99th
Street School, built in the virtual center of what had been
the dumpsite, abandoned by a subsidiary of Occidental
Petroleum.
By August 1978, the New York Commissioner of Health
declared a state of emergency and ordered the closing
of the school. Within days, US President Jimmy Carter
declared an emergency and provided funds to permanently
relocate 239 families living within the rst two rows of
homes closest to the former waste dump. The community
campaigned for the relocation of all 900 families.
In May 1980, the US Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) released results from blood tests of residents showing
chromosome damage. Love Canal activists took two EPA
ofcials hostage. On May 19th, Lois Gibbs issued an ulti-
matum: commit to relocating all Love Canal residents
by noon May 21, or What weve done here today will
look like a Sesame Street picnic to what well do then.
The White House agreed to permanent relocation by the
deadline.
Occidental Petroleum has paid nearly $250 million (US$)
to compensate residents and reimburse state and federal
government clean-up costs. In 1990, the EPA announced
that sections of the area were safe for resettlement.
The controversy is credited with sparking the EPAs
Superfund Programme.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada
M
Malthus, Thomas Robert
(17661834)
Thomas Robert Malthus, clergyman, professor, political
economist, was born in Great Britain to a well-to-do country
family. He studied mathematics at Cambridge, and was
ordained a minister at the age of 22. Malthus served as a
clergyman and as professor of modern history and political
economy at Haileybury College. His ideas and eventual
economic philosophy were molded in part by the debates
he had with his father, who held optimistic views of human
progress. Malthus himself saw social problems growing in
exponential terms.
Malthus views of the economic and social implications
of population growth were contrary to the common eco-
nomic assumptions of the day. Most viewed population
growth as being a positive by-product of economic growth
and social advancement. In 1798, Malthus published his
Essay on the Principle of Population (there were seven
editions in all). In the essay, Malthus held that while pop-
ulation grows exponentially, the availability of food and
other resources grows arithmetically. But population would
be held in check by periods of plague or war. Technologi-
cal advances would provide periods of social stability, until
the power of exponential population growth again resulted
in too many people for available resources. Social discord
would inevitably return.
An essential point in Malthus argument is that in the long-
run, population would always tend to remain above the level
that resources could adequately support. Malthus wrote in
his essay that population is constantly acting upon man as
a powerful stimulus urging him to the further cultivation of
the earth, and to enable it to consequently support a more
extended population. In addition to the pervasive impact
of population on human cultural conditions, his theory also
alludes to the existence of a static stock index. This index
holds that there are absolute limits to resource availability
and limits to the positive affects of human innovation. It was
in this realmof thought that he maintained an ongoing debate
with his friend David Ricardo. Though Ricardo agreed with
the Malthusian notion of population growth, he disagreed
with the implications. Ricardo argued that technological
innovation, substitution, and the discovery of new resources
would be the inevitable cultural responses in essence the
stock index was neither static nor binding.
The Malthusian notion of scarcity and population also
contributed to a theory of wages (iron law of wages, or
Malthus law of wages). This proposed that an increase in
the wage rate results in an increase in population, this in
turn depresses wages, and thus wages remain mostly at a
subsistence level. His theological background was reected
in his economic and social thought. Famine and poverty
were certainly seen as natural, and hence, divine out-
comes. He also believed that moral constraints (abstention
from sex) were an essential part of addressing popula-
tion, though he had doubts about the practicality of this
solution.
The ideas of Malthus were rened within the neo-
Malthusian tradition. In this realm, the idea of absolute
scarcity and the exponential impact of population growth
have been quite attractive to ecologists, and to many in
environmental movements. Such perspectives see a strong
relationship between the geometric impact of economic
and social consumption, and absolute limits inherent in
nature.
KEVIN HANNA Canada
Man and Nature as a Single
but Complex System
Michael Thompson
The Musgrave Institute, London, UK and The University
of Bergen, Norway
No matter how lightly we tread on the Earth, we cannot
avoid altering it. And, as it alters, so the way we tread on
MAN AND NATURE AS A SINGLE BUT COMPLEX SYSTEM 385
it our ecological footprint, as it is sometimes called is,
in turn, altered. On and on. Natural scientists tend to look
at this interaction of the human and the natural from the
Earths perspective, The Earth as Transformed by Human
Action (Turner et al., 1990) being the classic text. Social
scientists tend to look at the interaction from the socio-
cultural end: Living with Nature (Fischer and Hajer, 1999),
with its subtitle Environmental Politics as Cultural Dis-
course, is a recent example. But can we go further? Can
we push each of these approaches (the natural scientists
and the social scientists) to the point where they actually
meet and give a single, uni ed theory of our relationship
with nature?
Yes we can, chorus two schools of thought: one sociolog-
ical, the other ecological. The rst has its roots in social
anthropology and is, properly speaking, a theory of socio-
cultural viability (but, since that is too much of a mouthful,
it has been shortened to Cultural Theory, with the capital
letters serving to distinguish it from other theorizing about
culture). The second has emerged from natural resource
ecology, where those whose interest is in grasslands, sh-
eries, forests and so on encounter the institutions that are
doing the exploiting and the managing, not as organized
arrangements of people and their various convictions as
to how the world is, but as patterned interventions in the
ecosystems they are studying.
In this article, we describe a uni ed theory, and some of
its implications for policy.
A ROAD WITHOUT END
The classic assumption, in both ecology and social sci-
ence, is that there is a one-way transition from state A to
state B. In ecology, the process of succession (Clements,
1916; Odum, 1969) ensures that an initially unstructured
state of affairs (one huge niche lled with anarchic, oppor-
tunistic and competitive organisms (the r-strategists)) is
steadily transformed into a climax community: a struc-
tured and stratied arrangement of diversied niches,
with clearly dened interrelationships between the species
(the K-strategists) that occupy them (see r K Str ate-
gies, Volume 2). In social science, this predictable, linear
and equilibrium-seeking model of change is paralleled by
a number of grand theories in which some inexorable
logic moves us all from mechanical to organic solidarity
(Durkheim, 1893); from community to society (Gemein-
schaft to Gesellschaft, Tonnies, 1887); from traditional to
modern (Weber, 1922); from status to contract (Maine,
1861); from capitalism to communism (Marx, 1859); or,
as modern theorists of institutions put it, from markets
to hierarchies (Lindblom, 1977; Williamson, 1975). Differ-
ent masters may dene their As and their Bs differently,
but all subscribe to a two-fold scheme and to some driv-
ing force (such as rationalization, internal contradiction, or
spiraling transaction costs) that carries the totality from A
to B.
These transitions, whether ecological or socio-cultural,
are all in the direction of more orderliness, more dif-
ferentiation, more connectedness, and more consistency
and, once they have gone as far as they can go in
that direction, that is that. In other words, these mod-
els of change end up making change impossible. Of
course, something on the outside may intervene and mess
things up, thereby setting the whole thing in motion once
more but, left to themselves, these models get ecosys-
tems and socio-cultural systems from A to B and then
stop. Change, these models tell us, is a temporary phe-
nomenon.
These models are beginning to be seen as less than satis-
factory. They explain change by getting rid of it, and they
are increasingly incapable of making sense of what is actu-
ally going on. They have now been challenged by models
that are indeterministic (i.e., more than two-fold) and make
change a permanent and essential feature of existence: the
four-fold institutional scheme proposed by Cultural The-
ory (Thompson et al., 1990) and the four-fold ecocycle
advanced by Holling (1986). If social and ecological sys-
tems are as these models say they are, their interaction
will inevitably result in complex and non-linear dynam-
ics, giving an unpredictable, always out of equilibrium,
and never ending sequence of transitions between multi-
ple states. And none of these will ever be the end of the
road.
In the classic social science formulation, two kinds of
solidarity interact. Markets are the competing players, all
merrily bidding and bargaining with one another; hierar-
chies are the benign authorities who ensure that the various
conditions for playing of this trading game (a level playing
eld, for instance) are in place. Cultural Theory does not
reject this foundational distinction. Rather, it argues that
there is more to life than just markets and hierarchies and
that you will lay yourself open to all sorts of unwelcome
surprises if you go on assuming that hierarchies and mar-
kets explain it all. Take, for instance, the Brent Spar oil
storage structure.
If there were only markets and hierarchies, then the
solution that was agreed between Shell (the market actor)
and the British Government (the hierarchical actor) would
have come to pass, and the Brent Spar would now be
mouldering in its watery grave (see Brent Spar , Volume 5).
It is not; it is sitting bolt upright in a Norwegian fjord.
Greenpeace, an actor from a third kind of solidarity (we call
it egalitarianism), winged its way in, literally, and totally
transformed the outcome. Since this was written, a nal
decision (negotiated between Shell and Greenpeace) has
been reached, and the structure is now being cut up into
cylindrical sections to a roll-on/roll-off ferry terminal in
Norway.
386 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Nor is it just Brent Spars that cause trouble for the
simple markets and hierarchies approach. A recent anal-
ysis of how things are actually done in Himalayan and
Alpine villages (Price and Thompson, 1997; this article
is based, in large part, on this 1997 paper, which has a
more extensive set of references than is included here)
strongly suggests (as we will see in a moment) that, if
these mountain farmers relied on just markets and hier-
archies, neither they nor their environments would be the
way they are. Nor is this inadequacy of the markets and
hierarchies framework conned to economically marginal
mountainsides.
The ills of the American city have recently been
blamed on the public-private partnerships that were seen
as the solution (Brion, 1992). Hierarchies and markets,
in coming together in this cozy and unseemly way, have
totally excluded community (the egalitarian solidarity) and
forced the citizenry into a state of atomized, alienated
subordination and systematic exploitation (fatalism: the
fourth and rather passive, solidarity that completes the
typology).
At the global level, the three active solidarities (mar-
kets, hierarchies and egalitarianism), altogether with the
markedly different problem de nitions and solution de -
nitions that each of them generates, are clearly discernible
in the climate change debate. Indeed, they are what make
that debate possible, each voice all the time de ning
itself in contradistinction to the other two. Hierarchists
pin the blame on population. Individualists (the supporters
of market solidarity, which Cultural Theorists call indi-
vidualism) see it as stemming from people being able to
treat the environment as a free good. Egalitarians insist
that it is pro igacy (excessive consumption, especially
in the richest nations of the world) that is the root of
it all.
Their solutions essentially, reduce population (hierar-
chy), get the prices right (individualism) and frugality
(egalitarianism) are so divergent that each constitutes part
of the other two s problems. Frugality, it turns out, requires
the abdication of capitalism: the driving force of the indi-
vidualist s solution. The population diagnosis, as far as the
egalitarians are concerned, blames the victim (the South,
which is where all the population growth is), and lets
the guilty party, the North, off the hook. And the sorts
of market interventions that both the hierarchists and the
egalitarians, in their different ways, are intent on will, the
individualists insist, get the prices even more wrong than
they are at present! (See Chapter 4, Vol. 1 of Rayner and
Malone, 1998, where the self-organization of these three
voices is set out by means of a painstaking discourse
analysis).
This means that human interactions with the environment
cannot be effectively analyzed using theoretical frameworks
that allow just one or two positions. Such frameworks are
insuf ciently variegated.
This is the main practical message from Cultural The-
ory, and it is a highly discomforting message for policy
makers generally and, in particular, for those who build
the computer-based models that underlie most policy mak-
ing within the broad area that is now labeled sustainable
development.
In most of these models, the representation of the micro-
level, the household (in energy modeling) and the farmer
(in land-use modeling), is singular: an economically rational
utility maximizer. Such a representation recognizes just one
voice (that of individualist solidarity) and silences the other
two.
More recently, modelers have progressed to the clas-
sic formulation and recognized two of the voices. The
International Geosphere Biosphere Programme Land-Use
and Land-Cover Change (IGBP LUCC) project (see IGBP
Core Projects, Volume 2), for instance, notes that land-use
and land-cover change is taking place increasingly under the
in uence of the market, and that this justi es a model based
on economic theory: a decentralized setup in which all
agents individually solve their inter-temporal maximization
problems, consumers maximizing utility, rms maximizing
pro ts and so on. If the markets are competitive, so the
argument runs, these agents can take prices as given, but
in those instances where markets are not competitive, the
optimization has to be done by government or some other
higher level authority. But the third voice (that of egalitarian
solidarity) is still excluded, leaving the policies that such
models underpin wide open to the sorts of nasty surprises
that have overtaken Shell and the government in Britain
and the public private urban regeneration partnerships in
the United States.
Two-voice modeling, though an improvement, is still
insuf ciently variegated. Like one-voice modeling, it is
still wedded to optimization and managerial control, when
what is needed is constructive negotiation between all
the voices: the democratization, in other words, of deci-
sion processes that have been depoliticized and treated as
merely technical. This is a topic that, since the debacles
over mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopa-
thy) and genetically modi ed crops in Britain, the dis-
mantling of the Millau MacDonald s by the French sheep
farmer Jose Bove, the Battles of Seattle and Prague (vehe-
ment demonstrations against the World Trade Organiza-
tion), and a host of similar events around the world, is
increasingly on national and international agendas. But,
to actually do that democratizing, we have to avoid
silencing any of the voices, and that is something that
current approaches, being insuf ciently variegated, can-
not do.
To help clarify what sort of differences a suf ciently var-
iegated framework makes, and to gain a more re exive
MAN AND NATURE AS A SINGLE BUT COMPLEX SYSTEM 387
(personal) understanding of what is going on in our own
social systems and environments, we can take a close look
at the surprisingly complex lives of the seemingly simple
folk who live in the Himalayas and the Alps. These peo-
ple, Cultural Theorists would point out, know something
that the single problem-single solution merchants who tend
to dominate policy-making in advanced industrialized soci-
eties have managed to forget.
Solidarities in Action
Himalayan villagers parcel out their transactions with their
physical environment into four distinct solidarities, each
of which is characterized by a distinct management style.
Agricultural land, for instance, is privately owned whilst
grazing land and forests are communally owned. But graz-
ing land and forests do not suffer the tragedy of the
commons (see Commons, Tr agedy of the, Volume 5;
Proper ty Rights and Regimes, Volume 5) because transac-
tions in their products are under the control of a commons
managing institution. Villagers appoint forest guardians,
erect a social fence (a declared boundary, not a physical
construction) and institute a system of nes for those who
allow their animals into the forest when access is forbidden,
or take structural timber without rst obtaining permis-
sion. If the offender is also a forest guardian, the ne is
doubled; if children break the rules, their parents have to
pay up.
Informal though they may seem, and lacking any formal
legal status, these arrangements work well in the face-to-
face setting of a village and its physical resources. Drawing
on their home-made conceptions of the natural processes
that are at work (their ethnoecology), the forest guardians
regulate the use of these common property resources by
assessing their state of health, year by year or season by sea-
son. In other words these transactions are regulated within
a framework that assumes, rst, that you can take only so
much from the commons and, second, that you can assess
where the line between so much and too much should
be drawn. The social construction inherent to this trans-
actional realm is that nature is bountiful within knowable
limits. This, to make a link with the ecological theories
of Holling (1986), is the myth of nature perverse/tolerant
(Figure 1).
With agricultural land, however, decisions are entirely
in the hands of individual owners, and elds (unlike com-
munally owned resources) can quite easily end up belong-
ing to the moneylenders. In recent years, when forests
and grazing lands have suffered degradation (for a vari-
ety of reasons, not the tragedy of the commons), vil-
lagers have responded by shifting some of their trans-
actions from one realm to the other. For instance, they
have allowed trees to grow on the banks between their
terraced elds (thereby reducing the pressure on the vil-
lage forest) and they have switched to stall feeding their
animals (thereby making more efcient use of the forest
and grazing land and receiving copious amounts of manure
which they can then carry to their elds). In other words,
transactions are parceled out to the management styles
that seem appropriate and, if circumstances change, some
of those transactions can be switched from one style to
another.
Since they are subsistence farmers, whose aim is to
remain viable over generations (rather than to make a
Fatalist
Nature capricious
Unfettered competition
Individualist
Asymmetrical transactions
Hierarchist
Nature perverse/
Tolerant
Fettered competition
Egalitarian
Nature ephemeral
Symmetrical transactions
Nature benign
Figure 1 The Solidarities, their myths of nature and their transactional realms
388 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
killing in any one year) their transactions within their local
environment can be characterized as low risk, low reward.
However, during those times of the year when there is
little farm work to be done, many villagers engage in
trading expeditions, or in migrant labor in India. Trading
expeditions are family based, family nanced and highly
speculative: high risk, high reward. So a farmers indi-
vidualized transactions, when added together over a full
year, constitute a nicely spread risk portfolio. The attitude
here (and particularly at the high risk end of the portfo-
lio) is that Fortune favors the brave, Who dares, wins,
Theres plenty more sh in the sea . Opportunities, in
other words, are there for the taking. The idea of nature here
is optimistic, expansive and non-punitive: nature benign
(Figure 1).
Social scientists in general, and institutional economists
in particular, would see these two realms as correspond-
ing to their classic distinction between hierarchies and
markets, and would have no difculty in explaining the
processes by which some transactions are switched this
way or that (though they would be surprised to nd
that the hierarchy was a village-level commons man-
aging institution, not the state). But (and this is the
essence of the Cultural Theory argument) hierarchies and
markets do not exhaust the transactional repertoire of
the Himalayan villager. Some collectivized transactions
do not involve formal status distinctions (such as those
between forest guardians and ordinary villagers) and some
individualized transactions are marked by the absence
of bidding and bargaining (an essential characteristic of
the markets that are generated by the individualist sol-
idarity). The plurality, in other words, is four-fold, not
two-fold.
In many parts of the Himalayas (especially the Indian
Himalayas), village autonomy is always under threat, be-
cause powerful outside actors are also laying claim to
the forest resources that are so vital to Himalayan farm-
ing systems. One very effective response to this exter-
nal threat has been the Chipko Movement (see Chipko
Movement, Volume 5). This is a grassroots and highly
egalitarian social movement, in which women (who are
largely responsible both for fodder gathering and fuelwood
collection) predominate. Chipko means to stick, and the
Gandhian strategy is to physically hug the trees, thereby
preventing them from being appropriated. Those villagers
of a slightly less non-violent disposition actually chase
the logging contractors (and the government forestry of-
cers who have been corrupted by the contractors) out of
the forest with their kukris (long curved knives). In the
Narmada Valley, farther to the south (where a vast devel-
opment project is under way), they have now done the
same to the representatives of the World Bank: a South
Asian counterpart to the Brent Spar surprise. (Indeed, the
World Bank pulled out in 1993 but the project is still
being promoted by Indian State Government and market
borrowings.)
So far as these threatening external transactions are con-
cerned, it is certainly not a case of plenty more sh
in the sea , nor is there even a safe limit, within which
the commercial extraction of timber would be sustainable.
All external predation is seen as catastrophic in its conse-
quences. Hence the spectacularly uncompromising collec-
tivist response of the tree huggers, whose idea of nature
is one in which any perturbation of the present low-key
regime is likely to result in irreversible and dramatic col-
lapse: nature ephemeral (Figure 1).
Finally, in every village, we may be sure, there will
always be some people who sneak wood from the for-
est when no one is looking, who can never quite get
together the capital, the contacts and the oomph to go
off on trading expeditions, and who manage somehow
not to be around when its all hands to the tree hugging.
These are the fatalists: people whose transactions are some-
how dictated by the organizational efforts of those who
are not themselves fatalists. Theirs is a life in which the
world is always doing things to them (sometimes pleas-
ant, sometimes unpleasant) and in which nothing that they
do seems to make much difference. Why bother? is the
not unreasonable response of the fatalist. If that is how
the world is, then learning is not possible and, even if
it were, there would be no way of beneting from it.
The idea of nature here is one in which things oper-
ate without rhyme or reason: a atland in which every-
where is the same as everywhere else: nature capricious
(Figure 1).
From Simple to Complex
Completing the typology with these two solidarities (egali-
tarianism and fatalism) makes some important differences.
For instance, once we understand egalitarian solidarity, we
can avoid the sorts of surprises that have been visited upon
the Brent Spar and the Narmada River Project. And we
can see that, only if all the transactions are in the fatalis-
tic realm (the one realm where learning is not possible),
would the prevalent assumption (evident, for instance, in
the hierarchists diagnosis of the climate change problem)
and the IPAT equation (see Modeling Human Dimensions
of Global Environmental Change, Volume 5) that there is
a direct relationship between population increase and envi-
ronmental degradation hold true. But there is much more
to it than this.
Change, in the conventional theory, is deterministic. If
youre knocked out of hierarchy, youll end up in the
market, and vice versa. But, in Cultural Theory, change
is indeterministic: leave A and you can end up at B, C
or D, and when you leave whichever one of these you
have arrived at, there are three possibilities, on and on.
MAN AND NATURE AS A SINGLE BUT COMPLEX SYSTEM 389
Conventional theory treats human systems as simple (linear,
deterministic, insensitive to initial conditions, equilibrium
seeking, and predictable); Cultural Theory treats them as
complex (non-linear, indeterministic, sensitive to initial
conditions, far from equilibrium, and unpredictable).
Simple systems are manageable in the sense that, once
we understand enough about them, we can dene some
desirable state of affairs (sustainable development is the
current favorite) and then steer the totality towards it. But
this, as our next example makes clear, is not possible if the
system is complex.
A Swiss Example
Moving from the Himalayas to the Alps, we nd much the
same four-fold allocation of transactions, with agricultural
land being privately owned and grazing land (and some-
times the forests) being communally owned. But the Swiss
forests, unlike those of the Himalayan villagers, are phys-
ically sandwiched between the high pastures (communally
owned) and the valley oor (privately owned elds, houses
and hotels). Over the centuries that the Davos valley has
been settled, to take a speci c locality, both the elds and
the grazing land have expanded at the expense of the for-
est. The trees on the steeper slopes have stayed in place,
acting both as a source of timber and as a barrier against
avalanches. However, it is dif cult to achieve both these
functions simultaneously. The Davosers have often set in
train changes in the forest s age structure which, decades
later, have resulted in exceptional avalanches reaching the
valley oor and threatening the destruction of the entire
community.
Every time this unpleasant surprise has befallen them,
the Davosers have responded by switching their forest
management onto the all in the same boat egalitarian
style. Later, it has sometimes shifted to the hierarchist style,
often to the individualist style (with farmers owning long
thin strips of forest running all the way from valley oor
to alpine pasture), and sometimes to the fatalist style (as
happened, for instance, when the avalanche danger was
clearly perceived yet extraction continued in response to
the demands of various mining booms and, in more recent
years, the demand for ski-runs).
Surely, you might think, they would have got it right
by now. To think that is to assume that there is one right
way; but as Cultural Theory shows us, that is not the
case. There is no way of ever getting it right, because
managing one way inevitably changes the forest, eventually
to the point where that way of managing is no longer
appropriate. This would happen even if there were no
exogenous changes (like the mining and tourist booms)
which, of course, there always are (even in seemingly
remote places like the Himalayas). Viability can only be
achieved, therefore, by covering all the bases: by the
villagers ensuring that they have the full four-fold repertoire
of management styles, and by their being prepared to
try a different one whenever the one they are relying on
shows signs of no longer being appropriate. The Davosers,
like their Himalayan counterparts, have now been in their
valley for more than 700 years, without destroying either
themselves or their valley in the process. This achievement
would not have been possible if they had opted for just one
management style, or even for the two that the prevalent
orthodoxy allows!
Multi-vocality
Himalayan and Alpine villages, with their transactions
parceled out in these four very different ways, are impres-
sively multi-vocal. More than that, as is evident from the
examples of stall feeding and trees on private land (in the
Himalayas) and of alternative forest management styles (in
the Alps), they have the ability to switch transactions from
one way to another whenever it seems likely that this might
be more appropriate. Since the behavior of the villagers
is continually altering the resource base on which they
depend, their villages would not be viable if they did not
have this in-built (messy, noisy and argumentative) mech-
anism. Schapiro (1988) has dubbed this sort of setup (in
which each conviction as to how the world is, each myth
of nature, is given some recognition) a clumsy institution.
This is in contrast to those more elegant, and more familiar,
arrangements (tidy, quiet and suavely consensual) in which
just one conviction holds sway. The terminology is delib-
erately counter-intuitive, clumsy institutions having some
remarkable properties that are not shared by their unclumsy
alternatives.
To understand just how remarkable clumsy institutions
are, imagine for a moment that you are some God-like
experimenter, able to reach out and change this is or that
variable in a Himalayan village s environment, or to move
it bodily east or west, north or south, across the convoluted
landscape. As you bring in the logging contractors, or take
it 100 km eastwards or 1000 m higher, the village will shift
its transactions this way or that between its four options
until it has adapted itself to its changed circumstances. In
other words, it will maintain its viability thanks to the very
practical learning system that is part and parcel of its four-
fold plurality. If the village did not have this plurality, and
was an elegant and unclumsy institution, like many national
forestry services, including Britain s Forestry Commission
(Tomkins, 1989) and the United States Forest Service (Hirt,
1994), it would not be able to do this. Something along
these imaginary lines, it turns out, is what has actually
happened, and continues to do so.
As we go from one Himalayan village to another, the
relative strengths of the four ways of organizing vary. Egal-
itarianism, for instance, is strongest in those parts of the
390 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Himalayas that are most prone to commercial logging. As
one moves eastwards, from India (with its powerful center
and its colonial heritage of Reserved Forests) into Nepal
and Bhutan, so the Chipko Movement and its counter-
parts become less of a force to be reckoned with. If the
inequitable external threat is absent then so too, it appears,
is the communitarian response to it. However, the most
dramatic of these variations is northsouth: between the
strongly individualized Buddhist villages and the strongly
collectivized Hindu villages a day or twos walk down-
stream. These are Furer-Haimendorfs (1975) adventurous
traders and cautious cultivators, respectively: apt charac-
terizations which readily map onto two of the four social
beings (individualists and hierarchists, respectively) that we
have described above.
Cultural Theorists, we should explain, use the term social
being to describe the behavior to which an individual
must conform, and the convictions that he or she must
espouse, to help maintain the form of social solidarity
to which he or she belongs. The prime mover, therefore,
is not the individual (the psycho-physiological entity) but
the form of social solidarity. Thus, the terms hierarchist,
individualist, egalitarian, and fatalist denote available roles
(or management strategies) that individuals step into, or out
Fatalism
Individualism
Hierarchy
Egalitarianism
Figure 2 Transitions between solidarities and their asso-
ciated transactional realms (individuals are able to move
without causing change. It is when some transactions are
shifted from one realm to another that we get change)
of, as their daily lives, or the changing seasons, take them
from one transactional realm to another (Figure 2). (See
also Box 1: A Swiss villagers day). Though all four roles
are present in both the Buddhist and the Hindu villages,
more transactions are in the individualist quadrant in the
former, and in the hierarchist quadrant in the latter.
Furer-Haimendorf (1975) shows how the small agri-
cultural surpluses of the cautious cultivators become the
payloads of the adventurous traders yaks as they set off
on their journey into Tibet, and how the salt they bring
back eventually nds its way to the cautious cultivators
Box 1 A Swiss villagers day
During the growing season an individual may on one
day milk his cows, cut hay, thin saplings, maintain
an avalanche control structure and wash dishes in a
restaurant. The cows though privately owned are grazed
on pasture owned by a specic set of long-established
families. The hay is on his own private eld; the
saplings are part of a forest owned by another set of
families; the avalanche control structure is on private
land but maintained by agreement by the village; and
the restaurant is owned by a multinational hotel chain.
This framework is fairly stable from season to season
but the individual has a very different pattern of activity
in the winter when the cows live in his private byre
and much of the land is snow covered and barely used
unless the valley includes a ski resort. If it does, then
he has opportunities for work without leaving the valley.
If not then he may leave to work elsewhere, thereby
reducing the use of scarce resources at home. Thus in
winter the human ecosystem centered on the valley is
concurrently simpler and wider.
So our Swiss villager has a portfolio of transactions
and management styles that uctuates with the seasons
and also with the longer-term dynamics (such as those
that in altering the age-structure of the forests can
eventually shift a whole category of transactions from
one style to another).
Like his Himalayan counterpart, he owns his hay-
elds and cows. These are private property; he can
buy or sell them acting as an individualist, subscrib-
ing to the myth of nature benign.
Coming froman old-established family, he is a mem-
ber of a forest cooperative (Waldgenossenschaft)
that gives himspecic rights to cut trees and imposes
a duty to maintain the forest. He is also a mem-
ber of a pasture cooperative (Alpgenossenschaft)
which annually decides the grazing season and
the number of animals he may graze and requires
him to contribute to the cowherds upkeep. These
are small-scale hierarchical institutions which have
developed over the generations (in between the peri-
ods when the forests are privatized and their associ-
ated transactions transferredtothe more exploitative
individualist management style) in response to the
limitations as well as the opportunities imposed by
the natural environment: nature perverse/tolerant.
As a voting member of the commune, he also has
a duty to maintain resources that contribute to its
survival such as the avalanche control structures
that protect houses, elds and roads from damage.
This tends to be an egalitarian involvement which
recognizes that when it comes to these sorts of
hazards, all the members of the community are in
the same boat and that each should contribute his
equal share: nature ephemeral.
Lastly as a dishwasher in a multinationally owned
restaurant, he is effectively a replaceable fatalist. His
involvement is necessary if the enterprise is to con-
tinue but he has no interest in its future nor it in his
and he can be paid off at any time (he will almost
certainly lose his job at the end of the summer
season).
MAN AND NATURE AS A SINGLE BUT COMPLEX SYSTEM 391
who cannot produce this vital commodity. The distinctive
strategy of each thus makes viable the others, and we begin
to see how it is that each village, in adjusting to its circum-
stances (which include the other villages), creates and takes
its place in a social and cultural ecosystem, in which the
marked divergence of the parts sustains the whole. Nor is
this a fanciful analogy. As we show below, the adventurous
traders strategy matches that of the omnivorous and oppor-
tunistic r-selected species; the cautious cultivators strat-
egy matches that of the specialized and niche-dependent
K-selected species (see r K Str ategies, Volume 2). The
fatalists do for social systems what compost does for nat-
ural systems (provides a generalized resource for renewal).
The egalitarians, through their small-scale communal fer-
vor, are creating enclaves of low-level energy (what Marx,
1967, called primitive capital) in places where neither the
r-selected nor the K-selected species can make any impres-
sion (Holling, 1986; Thompson et al., 1990; Holling et al.,
1993).
So the ambitious hypothesis that is being sketched here
is very different from the way people usually think about
the interactions of social and natural systems. There is, on
this view, no way of ever getting it right: of bringing the
social into long-term harmony with the natural (which, of
course, is the whole idea behind sustainable development).
Instead, each is a four-fold and plurally responsive system,
and their time-lagged interactions ensure that there can be
no steady-state outcome. The whole system is in a perpet-
ual unsteady state: changes at each level (the social and the
natural) adapting to the other and changing it in the pro-
cess, thereby setting in motion another set of changes. On
and on. Nor are these changes predictable, as they would be
if each level had only two possible states: hierarchies and
markets, for instance, or, as is discussed below, their eco-
logical analogues. Order without predictability (as opposed
to transition from A to B, or oscillation between A and
B, that the two-fold hypotheses give us) is the crucial idea
behind this Himalayan story.
THEORIES OF CHANGE THAT MAKE CHANGE
PERMANENT
Change, Cultural Theory argues, occurs because the four
forms of social solidarity are not impervious to the real
world. Just because people insist that the world is as their
myth of nature tells them it is, it does not follow that the
world really is so. If it is, that is ne, but if it is not,
they have an uphill struggle. Surprise (the outcome of the
ever widening discrepancy between the expected and the
actual) is of central importance in dislodging people (and
their transactions) from their form of social solidarity. And
it is these various mismatches between what a way of life
promises and what it delivers that continually tip people
(and transactions) out of one form of social solidarity and
into another. Of course, this hypothesis does require that
the world, at times and in places, be each of these possible
ways: otherwise we would all eventually end up surprised
into the single true way. And it would help the surprises to
continue indenitely if the world itself kept changing.
Neither of these suggestions, some ecologists would
argue, is particularly far-fetched. Holling (1986) and
Holling et al. (1993) for instance, have elaborated the
notion of requisite variety into a powerful critique of the
conventional idea that the climax community, the ecosystem
in which each specialized species has its stable and ordered
niche, is the end of the organizational road. This critique
exactly parallels Cultural Theorys dissatisfaction with the
conventional hierarchies and markets account of things,
in that it argues that there must be four, rather than
just two destinations. Hollings critique is that the climax
community eventually complexies itself to the point where
it undermines its own stability: an inevitable collapse,
which has been proved mathematically by May (1982).
This does not mean that an entire climax community (the
Amazon rain forest, for instance) will suddenly disappear,
but it does require any climax community to be patchy:
to always include some localized areas in collapse as, for
instance, happens when a mature tree crashes to the ground.
At this catastrophic moment, all the energy that is tied
up in all the niches and interdependencies of the climax
community is released. Holling, well aware of the paral-
lel with Schumpeters (1950) theory of economic maturity,
collapse and renewal, refers to the transition from the cli-
max community to compost, as creative destruction. Nor,
he argues, is this the end of the road. With the whole
place suddenly awash with capital (loose energy), the chal-
lenge is to x it before it all disappears, by soil leaching,
for instance. This, of course, is where the unspecialized
and cooperative fence builders (microorganisms mostly)
come into their own, gathering up the loose energy into
small bundles that, as yet, have no connections with one
another. But even this is not the end of the road, because
the stage is now set for the appearance of yet different
ecological players. These are the unspecialized but oppor-
tunistic, fast breeding and highly competitive r-selected
species. These generalized exploiters (weeds, rodents and
so on) are able to harness all the energy gradients that
are now in place between all these unconnected bundles
of energy. But these r-selected species, as they exploit
and colonize this environment, inevitably begin to push
it into a rather more patterned and interconnected state,
thereby making it less conducive to their way of doing
things and more suited to the sort of energy-conserving
strategies that characterize the K-selected species: those
specialized, slower breeding and often symbiotic, plants
and creatures, which are the vanguard of the complex
and increasingly ordered whole that constitutes the climax
community.
392 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Creative destructio
n
Enclaves of
low level
energy
Climax
community
Compost
Pioneer
community
Exploitation
R
e
n
ewal
C
o
n
s
e
r
v
a
t
i
o
n
Figure 3 The complex critique of the conventional
assumptions about natural systems (redrawn fromHolling,
1986 to be homologous with Figures 1 and 2)
In other words, once you bump up the number of ecolog-
ical strategies from two to four, there is no end to the road.
Instead, there is a never ending set of transitions (twelve in
all) that exactly parallels (in terms of dynamics, not sub-
stance) the social transitions of Cultural Theory. Holling
goes on to argue that, while all twelve of these transitions
do happen, there is a tendency for some to predominate at
certain stages, thereby creating a fairly regular sequence of
transitions: from specialized interdependence (the climax
community) to unstructured fragmentation (compost) to
unspecialized cooperation (energy xing) to unspecialized
competition (the pioneer community) to specialized interde-
pendence (the climax community, again) and so on. He calls
this sequence an ecocycle, and its description (which can
be supplemented with descriptions of all the other cycles
that are possible but, Holling believes, less pronounced)
helps us to see the gulf (some might use the expression
paradigm shift ) that separates this model of change from
the conventional one (Figure 3).
Is there, then, a socio-cultural equivalent of Holling s
ecocycle? Yes, there is, and it can be most easily set out by
reference to the theory of surprise: the theory that provides
the bridge between the institutional and the natural: between
us and the rest of nature.
ALWAYS LEARNING, NEVER GETTING IT
RIGHT
A myth of nature provides its holder with a way of seeing
the world and with a way of not seeing it. This means
that, if the world happens not to be the way the myth
holder is convinced it is, he or she will not notice this dis-
crepancy straight away. Enlightenment, therefore, is always
time lagged and, since it results in the enlightened one being
tipped out of one quadrant of the Cultural Theory scheme
and into one of the other three, it comes as something of a
shock: a surprise. Surprise, in other words is always rela-
tive, which explains why, whenever something unexpected
befalls us, there is always someone who saw it coming! The
theory of surprise (Thompson and Tayler, 1986; Thompson
et al., 1990) is built on this relativistic, but far from uncon-
strained, foundation:
an event is never surprising in itself;
it is potentially surprising only in relation to a particular
set of convictions about how the world is;
it is actually surprising only if it is noticed by the holder
of that particular set of convictions.
For instance, an individualist, whose myth assures him that
an ecosystem is so robust that it will recover from any
perturbation, will be surprised when it collapses catastroph-
ically. Similarly, a hierarchist who is convinced that all
ecosystems can be managed, with predictable results, will
be surprised when this turns out to be untrue. Conversely,
an egalitarian, who believes that nature is precarious, will
be surprised when those who have disregarded precautions
do not reap the expected disaster. And a fatalist will be
surprised if bene ts, which he expects to be randomly dis-
tributed, continue to arrive.
Thus, surprises may be either pleasant or unpleasant,
and a never ending sequence from one myth of nature to
another may be proposed. Though all twelve transitions
(see Figure 2) are possible, and we cannot say for sure
what their order will be, we can spin a story to help us
understand what is going on by privileging one particular
sequence of possible changes so as to generate the socio-
cultural analogue of Holling s ecocycle.
Let us start with nature benign. In this state of the
world, there is an excess of opportunity over exist-
ing investment, and this state, when interrogated by
the myriad actions of individual agents, results in
a positive-sum game in which a hidden hand keeps
adding to the welfare of the totality. As long as the
excess continues (that is, as long as there is no rim to
the deep basin that contains the ball), and learning by
experimentation continues, we have the state of affairs
assumed by neoclassical economics.
But, as they say in show business, Nothing recedes
like success and eventually exploitative behavior
causes the upper edge of the basin to turn downwards:
nature perverse/tolerant. The excess, for some actors,
has now vanished. Transaction costs rise steeply,
innovation brings losses more often than pro ts, and
markets fail. This is the transition from markets
to hierarchies described by the new institutional
economics (Williamson, 1975).
Hierarchically sustained transactions, in their turn,
transform the environment that ushered them in and
MAN AND NATURE AS A SINGLE BUT COMPLEX SYSTEM 393
eventually the pocket of stability implodes: nature
capricious. Both hierarchy and individualism (which
has, of course, survived in the pocket) now start to
lose their transactional grip and the world becomes
a confusing, contradictory and unpredictable place: a
place of which the fatalists attitude; Why bother?
makes perfect sense.
This atland, however, is less hostile to those small,
egalitarian and self-disciplined groups that strive to
bring their needs down within what they perceive to
be Mother Natures frugal limits, and these groups are
therefore well placed to take advantage (though that is
not quite the right word) of the recessive realities that
are about to overwhelm the conventional institutional
arrangements: the hierarchies and the markets.
In this next stage, nature ephemeral, all increases
in scale bring punitive diseconomies, and the econ-
omy (like the universe that contains it) winds down
and down. The entropy principle (Georgescu-Roegen,
1971) and the dictum small is beautiful (Schumacher,
1973) make economic sense (see Small is Beautiful,
Volume 5). Yet, no matter how lightly everyone treads
on the Earth, the ball eventually rolls down the slope,
coming to rest in some other basin (nature benign)
and we are back where we began: in a positive sum
world that rewards the bold and skilful and that brings
increasing returns to those who are prepared to act
expansively.
Throughout this process, changes in the environment
result from the actions of those whose strategy happens
to be best suited to making the most of the environment
in which they nd themselves. As more and more of
these strategists act, these endogenous changes accumulate,
and the environment passes over a threshold into a state
better suited to one of the other strategies, ad in nitum.
Though this complex model may start at the same place
as the simple one and have the same dynamics, its paths
are innitely more surprising and unpredictable. In this
inherently complex system, in which ecological and socio-
cultural components interact, each myth of nature captures
some aspects of the world at some time. No one of them is
ever right all the time and everywhere, and this means that
each has its vital part to play. Clumsy institutions nurture
that vitality; elegant ones destroy it.
REFERENCES
Brion, D J (1992) The Meaning of the City: Urban Redevelop-
ment and the Loss of Community, Indiana Law Rev., 25(3),
685740.
Clements, F E (1916) Plant Succession, an Analysis of the Devel-
opment of Vegetation, Carnegie Inst. Wash. Publ., 242, 1512.
Durkheim, E (1893) De la Division du Travail Sociale: etude sur
lOrganisation de Soci et es Sup erieurs, Alcan, Paris.
Fischer, F and Hajer, M A (1999) Living with Nature: Environ-
mental Politics as Cultural Discourse, Oxford University Press,
Oxford.
Georgescu-Roegen, N (1971) The Entropy Law and the Economic
Process, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Hirt, P W (1994) A Conspiracy of Optimism, Nebraska University
Press, Lincoln, NE.
Holling, C S (1986) The Resilience of Terrestrial Ecosystem:
Local Surprise and Global Change, in Sustainable Develop-
ment of the Biosphere, eds W C Clark and R E Munn, Cam-
bridge University Press, Cambridge, 292320.
Holling, C S, Gunderson, L, and Peterson, G (1993) Comparing
Ecological and Social Systems, Beijer Discussion Paper Series
No. 36, Stockholm Beijer International Institute of Ecological
Economics.
Lindblom, C (1977) Politics and Markets: The Worlds Political-
Economic System, Basic Books, New York.
Maine, H S (1861) Ancient Law, John Murray, London.
Marx, K (1859/1967) Capital, Basic Books, New York.
May, R (1972) Will a Large Complex System be Stable? Nature,
238, 41314.
Odum, E P (1969) The Strategy of Ecosystem Development,
Science, 164, 262270.
Price, M F and Thompson, M (1997) The Complex Life: Human
Land uses in Mountain Ecosystems, Global Ecol. Biogeogr.
Lett., 6, 7790.
Rayner, S and Malone, E L (1998) Human Choice and Climate
Change, Battelle Press, Columbus, OH.
Schapiro, M (1988) Judicial Selection and the Design of Clumsy
Institutions, South. Calif. Law Rev., 61, 15551569.
Schumacher, E F (1973) Small is Beautiful: a Study of Economics
as if People Mattered, Blond and Briggs, London.
Schumpeter, J A (1950) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy,
Harper and Row, New York.
Thompson, M, Ellis, R, and Wildavsky, A (1990) Cultural The-
ory, Westview, Boulder, CO.
Thompson, M and Tayler, P (1986) The Surprise Game: an Explo-
ration of Constrained Relativism, Warwick Papers in Man-
agement, No. 1, School of Industrial and Business Studies,
University of Warwick, Coventry.
Tompkins, S (1989) Forestry in Crisis, Christopher Helm, London.
Tonnies, F (1887) Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Wissenschaft-
lich, Darmstadt, translated by C P Loomis (1957) as Com-
munity and Society, Michigan State University Press, East
Lansing, MI.
Turner, II, B L, Clark, W C, Kates, R W, Richards, J F, Mat-
thews, J T, Meyer, W B et al. (1990) The Earth as Trans-
formed by Human Action, Cambridge University Press, New
York.
von Furer-Haimendorf, C (1975) Himalayan Traders: Life in
Highland Nepal, John Murray, London.
Weber, M (1922) Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Mohr, Tubingen,
translated by E Bischoff et al. (1978) Economy and Society:
an Outline of Interpretive Sociology, University of California
Press, Berkeley.
Williamson, O (1975) Markets and Hierarchies, Analysis and
Anti-Trust Implications: a Study in the Economics of Internal
Organization, Free Press, New York.
394 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Management of Nuclear Wastes
see Nuclear Waste: Geological Issues
(Volume 3)
Mitigation
see Adaptation Strategies (Opening essay,
Volume 4)
Modeling Human
Dimensions of Global
Environmental Change
Marco A Janssen
Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands
The history of humankind is a continuing record of interac-
tions between peoples efforts to improve their well being
and the environments ability to sustain these endeavors.
Environmental constraints have led to innovations and
social development, as well as social stagnation and human
suffering. While the interactions throughout most of history
were on a local scale, during the last decades awareness
has grown so that the complexity and increasing scale of
the interactions are demanding new forms of environmen-
tal management. New threats to mankind emerge, such as
climate change, acid rain, ozone depletion, resource exhaus-
tion, reduction of biodiversity, and limits to the availability
of food and unpolluted fresh water. In fact, the globe is
changing rapidly due to human activities, and humankind
is, and will increasingly be, suffering from global environ-
mental change.
One response from the scienti c community to understand
the relations between human activities and the environ-
ment is the use of modeling, that is, constructing formal
descriptions of natural and societal change and their mutual
interactions. Although making accurate predictions for long
term future developments is inherently impossible, models
can help us to show the interdependence of various activities
and consequences in time and space. In that way, models
can be used to communicate information and insights from
the scienti c community to policy makers and other stake-
holders.
A number of fundamental issues in modeling the
human dimensions of global environmental change are
discussed. These dimensions relate to the interactions
between humankind and the global ecosystem. How do
human activities change our environment, how are humans
affected by changes in our environment, and how does
humankind respond to these changes? This contribution
focuses on the behavior of humans in relation to their
environment. Moreover, two fundamental related issues are
discussed:
Given our limited knowledge of reality, we have to
make all kinds of subjective assumptions about the
functioning of human and natural systems in order
to make decisions. How can models be of help for
decision-making when subjectivity is unavoidable in
developing models?
On the macro-scale, phenomena are observed which are
the result of actions of agents on lower levels such as of
households, rms, organizations and nations. How can
we explore future developments of these macro-scale
phenomena?
Although there is an increased use of modeling human
dimensions of global environmental change, these issues are
not well captured in current mainstream modeling practices.
These issues are discussed in the context of developments in
modeling human dimensions during the last 30 years and
address promising developments for the future.
There are many kinds of models. A general classication
is the distinction between formal mathematical models and
non-formal models such as stories and cartoons. Sometimes
people are role models of how one might live, such as Nel-
son Mandela or Claudia Schiffer. Only the formal models
are dealt with here. The advantage of these formal models
is that they are explicit and many of them are computer
models that can be used to do repeated experiments.
Formal models are used in science very frequently,
especially since the seminal work of Isaac Newton, more
than 300 years ago. Formal models were mainly used to
describe natural systems, such as calculating the trajectories
of cannon balls or celestial bodies. Due to the success of
these models, mathematical models were increasingly used
in social science, especially in economics. However, human
beings are not similar to cannon balls. Human beings can
decide to obey trafc laws, but cannon balls cannot decide
to obey the law of gravity.
The application of models from physics to social phe-
nomena is problematic, but is still widely used. This
article addresses new ways of modeling social phenom-
ena by using multi-agent modeling to simulate interactions
between agents, which are behavioral entities such as per-
sons, households and rms. But rst the eld of model-
ing human dimensions of global environmental change is
discussed.
MODELING HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 395
Currently, models are widely used to describe the
relations between human activities and the environment.
Moreover, these models have often played a central role in
setting environmental problems on the policy agenda, by
exploring the consequences of alternative scenarios and by
designing acceptable solutions for managing environmental
problems. An example of an environmental problem for
which the use of models is central is climate change. The
possibility of human induced climate change is actually a
policy problem that was put on the agenda after alarming
model-based studies. Svante Arrhenius estimated at the end
of the 19th century the consequences of a doubling of
atmospheric carbon dioxide on the global mean temperature
to be about 3

C. Since the late 1950s, atmospheric

carbon dioxide has been measured systematically, and
currently the level is about 30% higher than pre-industrial
levels. During the last 30 years, more detailed climate
system models have been developed, and the results are
compared with the increasing amount of (satellite) data.
Still, these models are not able to describe observed climate
accurately on a detailed spatial level. Besides increased
efforts in modeling the climate systems, models of the
human dimensions of climate change have been developed.
These models were used to speculate on the possible
consequences of climate change on economic growth,
agricultural production and human health. Furthermore,
models were developed to estimate the costs of mitigating
so-called greenhouse gases. The impacts of climate change
on various social and ecological factors are based on
laboratory experiments, extrapolations from eld studies,
historical (regional) climate-change analogues and expert
judgements. The increased insights into potential impacts
of human induced climate change led to the current high
position of the climate change issue on the policy agenda.
Policy decisions related to climate change are mainly
determined by model outcomes. Many uncertainties, spec-
ulative assumptions and lack of information surround these
outcomes. Thus, because the potential consequences of cli-
mate change as estimated by models are so severe, the pre-
cautionary principle is often advocated to reduce potential
risks. Nevertheless, it is clear that the many uncertainties
that surround the model outcomes have generated an inten-
sive debate. Some scholars highlight the potential benets
of climate change on, for example, agricultural production,
due to higher levels of atmospheric CO
2
and more suit-
able temperatures in Canada and Russia. Others argue that
human induced climate change will not occur due to damp-
ing feedbacks of the biogeochemical cycles. Various schol-
ars warn of positive feedbacks that may amplify climate
change to catastrophic levels. The mainstream opinion on
the size and impacts of climate change is represented by the
reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), an international scientic organization established
in 1988 to assess scientic research on climate change. In
1995, the IPCC concluded that the balance of evidence
suggests a discernible human inuence on the climate.
Although science is not a democratic process, the assess-
ments of the IPCC try to synthesize a mainstream picture
of the climate change issue which can be used in the
international policy process to formulate policies to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions. Such an authorized synthesized
picture on the problem is desired by policy makers, since
they have difculty in handling the many uncertainties and
complexities of the climate change problem. The model-
based analysis of the IPCC suggests objective assessment.
The idea that models can create objective predictions of
the future is widespread among stakeholders who deal with
global environmental change. Some stakeholders who doubt
this objectivity do not want to use any model analysis at
all. However, the traditional view that models guarantee or
suggest objectivity is outdated. Model analyses, especially
related to human dimensions, are highly inuenced by sub-
jective assumptions and interpretations. The challenge is to
design ways to use models in such a way that they improve
our understanding of reality. Improved mental models can
improve decision-making. Therefore, the model-projections
itself are not the most important element of model; rather
it is the modeling process and the end use of models. This
debate mirrors the discussion on world models during the
early 1970s.
WORLD MODELS
Integrated models addressing the human dimensions of
global environmental change elaborate a tradition that was
founded in the early 1970s by the Club of Rome (see Club
of Rome, Volume 4). Over the past 30 years many models
have been built in the tradition of system dynamics, as
well as other modeling techniques. In the early days the
models of the Club of Rome were criticized as being based
on too few empirical data, too high an aggregation level,
and too many subjective assumptions. The criticism of the
earlier models still holds for many of the current modeling
activities.
The models of the Club of Rome were the so-called
World models. Jay Forrester developed the World 2 model
during the summer of 1970 based on his system dynamics
approach. According to this approach, the world can be
described through a conglomeration of interacting feedback
loops. The World 2 model can be considered as a rst sketch
of a world model, without empirically based estimation of
suggested causal relations.
A larger project, led by Dennis Meadows, resulted in the
World 3 model, and the inuential book Limits to Growth
(Meadows et al., 1972). The World 3 model contains the
resource sectors, population, pollution, capital and agricul-
ture on an aggregated global level. The standard run of
the World models is one of growth followed by collapse
396 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
1900 2000 2100
Population
Food
Industrial production
Pollution
Resources
Figure 1 Standard Run of World 3. (Adapted from Mead-
ows et al., 1972)
(Figure 1). The collapse occurs because of non-renewable
depletion. The industrial capital stock grows to a level that
requires enormous input of resources, more and more cap-
ital must be used to obtain those resources, leading to less
re-investment, and nally the collapse of the industrial base.
Population decreases when the death rate is driven upward
by a lack of food and health services. If the resource base
is assumed to be much larger, collapse happens only a
few years later due to food shortages and/or high pol-
lution levels. Although it was recognized that there are
various shortcomings in the models, Meadows and his col-
leagues argued that the model behavior was fundamental
and general, and sufciently developed to be of some use
to decision-makers.
Managing Uncertainty, Complexity and
Incomplete Information
Numerous scholars have criticized the World-model stud-
ies. Economist WD Nordhaus classied the World 2 study
as misleading since it was not empirically tested enough
and ignored mainstream economic insights. Other scholars
concluded that due to the scarcity of relevant empirical
information, relationships in the world models are subjec-
tive. Given the uncertainties, other sets of equally plausible
assumptions can lead to a completely different picture. In
fact, the outcomes of the models are largely the mental
models of the model builders.
Some of the criticism was misplaced. The model outputs
were interpreted as predictions, not merely as scenarios,
i.e., what if futures. So, when the predictions did not
come true, scientists were blamed for inaccurate doomsday
forecasts. Actually, the Limits to Growth scenarios had a
profound effect on the public and government.
Scientic criticism on the World models of 30 years ago
mainly concentrate on two topics. First, subjective assump-
tions had to be made about model relations and parameters
due to incomplete knowledge or even ignorance. This was
especially important for the linkages between subsystems.
Examples were the effects of pollution on health, the inter-
action between demographic and economic dynamics, the
role of technological innovations in resource availability,
and the relations between material and energy inputs and
economic output. Second, the complexity of the underlying
subsystems and the linkages made it questionable whether a
high aggregation level can lead to meaningful and relevant
interpretations and results.
These problems of subjectivity and aggregated relations
are still relevant for the current use of models. Although
the use of models has increased, we still have no satisfac-
tory solutions of how to manage incomplete information
and insights, large uncertainties and different scales. This
is illustrated here by the characteristics of the current gen-
eration of global models.
Integrated Assessment Models of Global Change
Global modeling re-emerged during the early 1990s as
integrated assessment modeling, mainly because of the
importance of the global climate change problem (Janssen,
1998). Integrated assessment models try to describe quan-
titatively as much as possible of the causeeffect relation-
ships and the cross-linkages and interactions between the
elements of the world system. Integrated assessment models
are usually composed from meta-models of various subsys-
tems. A meta-model is a simplied, condensed version of
a more complicated and detailed model, which provides
approximately the same behavior as the expert model from
which it is extracted.
Integrated assessment models are one of the tools in the
toolkit of integrated assessment. Other tools are policy exer-
cises, dialogues between science and policy people, data
analysis, scenario analysis and expert models. Integrated
assessment is therefore a broader approach aimed at helping
prioritize policy-making and research activities and giving
insights into uncertainties and missing links of knowledge.
It is used in a process whereby knowledge from a vari-
ety of scientic disciplines is combined, interpreted and
communicated, with various stakeholders such as scientists,
policy makers and non-government organizations involved.
The integrated models that are used describe the whole
causeeffect chain from economics, energy production,
emissions, land use changes, to changes in the biogeo-
chemical cycles, the climate system, and impacts of climate
change on human activities and the environment. There
is no single approach to capturing the complexity of the
system as a whole. In general, two types of approaches
can be considered. The rst approach, process-oriented
modeling, is rooted in natural science and simulates the
consequences of economic development on energy pro-
duction, land use changes, biogeochemical cycles, climate
system and impacts of climate change. The models are
MODELING HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 397
often detailed at the spatial and temporal level. The other
approach, cost bene t modeling, is rooted in economics
and maximizes discounted long-term welfare. Models using
this second approach describe the physical consequences in
less detail, but express the impacts of climate change and
the efforts to reduce emissions in monetary units in order to
derive an optimal response by balancing costs and benets.
Both approaches are confronted with the same dilemmas
as the World models of the early 1970s. Although much
more empirical information is available, many components
in models are surrounded by large uncertainties. Therefore,
subjective assumptions have to be made. Also the complex-
ity of scales remains an unsolved issue.
Besides these problems, most integrated assessment mod-
els have limited abilities to capture the broad human
dimensions of climate change. The models are suitable for
generating projections of economic output and the costs
of climate change, but they are limited in many ways.
Simple macro relations are assumed between economic
activities and physical processes, but empirical insights
are conicting. Current (economic) models focus on utility
of consumption as the driving force of human behavior,
although it is questionable how this is related to the quality
of life. There is limited insight into the physical dimen-
sion of satisfying human needs, but this understanding is
needed before something plausible can be said about decou-
pling economic development and environmental pressure.
Current integrated models include only the free market as
an institution, although there are many other forms of eco-
nomic organization and institutions.
One of the reasons for the limitations of the current gen-
eration of integrated models is the use of a rather mechanis-
tic modeling paradigm, which is not able to include novelty,
evolution and surprise. The role of modeling paradigms is
now discussed in more detail.
MODELING PARADIGMS
A lot of controversies among modeling studies are caused
by the difference in modeling approach that is adopted
by the various scientists. Each modeling approach, or in
a broader context, each modeling paradigm, involves its
own set of theories, concepts, mathematical techniques, and
accepted procedures for constructing and testing models.
We can distinguish between deterministic and stochastic
models, simulation and optimization models, reductionis-
tic and integrated models, linear and non-linear models,
one-agent and multi-agent models, and so on. Instead of
discussing all kinds of possible paradigms, the difference
between the reductionistic Newtonian approach and the
complex adaptive systems approach is examined. This illus-
trates the transition in science that is currently occurring and
explains fundamental differences on how to use models for
assessing the future.
Mathematical modeling has long been inuenced by
physical science, which has developed a mechanistic,
reversible, reductionistic and equilibrium-based explanation
of the world. This proved to be very successful in calcu-
lating trajectories of moving objects (e.g., cannon balls)
and predicting the positions of celestial bodies. The work
of Isaac Newton, culminating in the Principia Mathemat-
ica Philophiae Naturalis in the late 17th century, was,
and still is, very inuential. The associated rational and
mathematical way of describing the world around us was
also applied in the social sciences, economics and biol-
ogy. Despite the fact that later developments in the natural
sciences seriously constrained the applicability of the mech-
anistic paradigm, its relative simplicity had a great appeal
to scientists from various disciplines working with mod-
els. However, despite the widespread use of this approach,
the mechanistic paradigm is increasingly criticized. The
foundations of the mechanistic view: reversibility, reduc-
tionistic, equilibrium-based and controllable experiments,
have faded away in the light of a number of new scientic
insights.
First, the discovery of the Second Law of Thermodynam-
ics brought down the notion of reversibility. The Second
Law states that the entropy of a closed system is increas-
ing. This means that heat ows from hot to cold, so that
less useful energy remains. One of the consequences of
the Second Law is the irreversibility of system behavior
and the single direction of time. Changes within systems
cannot reverse back just like that (irreversible). This is in
contrast to many mechanistic models, in which time can
easily be reversed to calculate previous conditions.
Second, the equilibrium view of species was brought
down by Charles Darwins book on the origin of species
during the middle of the 19th century. The static concept
of unchanging species was replaced by a dynamic concept
of evolution by natural selection and adaptation of species,
thereby fundamentally changing our view of nature. Natural
systems are in continuous disequilibrium, being interdepen-
dent and constantly adapting to changing circumstances.
Third, the theories of quantum mechanics have con-
fronted us with a fundamental uncertainty regarding knowl-
edge about systems, especially on the level of atoms and
particles. The uncertainty principle of Heisenberg is well
known, stating that it is impossible to simultaneously mea-
sure the position in space and momentum (mass times
velocity) of any particle. The statement by Laplace in the
early 19th century that if every position of every atom was
known, the future might be predicted exactly, became there-
fore a lost illusion. Moreover, the notion of fundamental
uncertainty implied that fully controlled experiments are
strictly speaking not possible.
Notwithstanding the fact that these developments in
the natural sciences changed our perception of the
world, (mathematical) models are still mainly based on
398 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
a mechanistic view of systems. For example, current
mainstream economics is based on its success during
the period after the Second World War, which was
characterized by stable economic growth. Technology could
seemingly handle any difculty that came along. Afuence
was seen as growing and permanent, and the standard
of living, it was believed, would continue to improve
for individuals and generations. The world economy
was a place of simple equilibria and linear responses.
Cost benet analysis, optimization and econometric
models seemed to be quite appropriate.
Since the 1970s, various events have made us aware
of the non-linearity of economic systems. The oil crisis
ended unlimited economic growth, the Berlin wall col-
lapsed in 1989, the Asian nancial crisis at the end of the
1990s, the various crises on the stock markets, and so on.
The economic system seems to be characterized by unsta-
ble states, non-linear responses and unpredictability. Still,
mainstream economics uses its successful tools of the early
days, probably because of their analytical power; certainly
not because of their ability to explain reality. Increasing
numbers of economists are trying new tools to explain the
observed behavior of economic systems. This has led to the
study of non-linear dynamics and evolutionary processes as
emerging elds in economics although not always accepted
by mainstream economists. This new type of economics
studies the formation of patterns, evolution of economic
systems, endogenous technologies, and so on. Furthermore,
next to analytical tools, this new eld of economics uses
computers as a kind of laboratory to test hypotheses.
The emergence of new ways of studying the world
around us has also emerged in other disciplines where
studies are made of the origins of order, self-organization,
emergence of structures, adaptation of agents in a changing
environment, and many more new ideas. The general focus
of this new modeling paradigm is to study how systems
change and organize their components to adapt themselves
to the problems posed by their surroundings. Examples
of these systems are economies, ecosystems, immune and
nervous systems, organisms and societies.
Although various scholars long ago discussed the impor-
tance of studying the evolution of systems, the rapid devel-
opments of the computer have provided scientists with a
new tool in recent decades, which can be used to investigate
evolution, self-organization, interactions between agents
and emergence of structures on a macro scale by simple
local rules. These systems can be grouped under the com-
mon name complex adaptive systems. They are studied by a
number of new computation-based modeling tools, includ-
ing genetic algorithms, cellular automata, neural networks,
and articial life forms.
The characteristics of these new types of tools are illus-
trated using one of these tools: genetic algorithms. Genetic
algorithms have been developed to simulate the process
of natural selection by considering a population of agents
producing offspring who are similar, but not identical, to
their parents. This process depends on three genetic oper-
ators: selection, crossover, and mutation. Selection means
that the genetic algorithm selects n copies of the strings
(genetic code) in the population by a random process that
favors the most t. Subsequently, these copies are proba-
bilistically paired in a mating process whereby each pair
produces two offspring by means of crossover and muta-
tion. Crossover means that two offspring are created with
a certain probability that the genetic information is crossed
over; otherwise, the offspring are identical to the parents.
In the case of crossover, the parent strings of genetic infor-
mation are split randomly and are swapped to shape two
new strings. Each element of the genetic information has
a small probability of being altered. This mutation is inde-
pendent of what happens with the other genetic information.
Due to their adaptive characteristics, genetic algorithms are
powerful tools for improving and nding good solutions
even in complex changing environments. Moreover, genetic
algorithms are based on irreversible changes, stochastic pro-
cesses and evolution (see Resilience, Volume 2).
Genetic algorithms are one of the computational tools
used for developing models to study complex adaptive sys-
tems, which emerged as a new eld in science. Since the
late 1980s, the Santa Fe Institute has provided a prime focus
for exploring and deepening the insights from complex
adaptive system studies and provided new opportunities
for transdisciplinary studies (Waldrop, 1992). It is expected
that the study of complex adaptive systems will become
an important eld in transdisciplinary environmental sci-
ence. The Resilience Alliance is one of the rst international
communities to study environmental science from this new
perspective. An overview of their work is given in Gunder-
son and Holling (2001).
Validity of Models
An important difference between the two modeling para-
digms is how to use models, and how to validate models.
From the viewpoint of mechanistic explanations of reality
models are valid when predictions generated by the model
are not rejected. An example of this Popperian type of val-
idation is the development of an econometric model. The
timeseries of data is split into two. One part is used to
estimate the model and to generate predictions, and the sec-
ond part to test the predictions of the constructed model.
This empirical validation leads to problems according to
the complex adaptive systems paradigm, which focuses
on evolving structures and is often based on qualitative
insights. Since small differences in initial values can lead
to large output differences, models of complex adaptive
systems are not suitable to generate predictions. In fact,
this problem goes back to the classical three-body prob-
lem (e.g., the system involving EarthMoonSun), which
MODELING HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 399
has been studied extensively with a variety of methods
beginning with Newton. Despite the large number of stud-
ies, no complete analytic solution in closed form has been
found. Furthermore, for some initial conditions this system
is found to produce chaotic unpredictable behavior. This
example shows that when interactions among agents are
taken into account, the Newtonian approach does not work.
Therefore, validation in this line of modeling is based on
expert judgements and relations with theoretical insights.
This type of validation can be called conceptual validation.
In fact, validation is not a test, but a subjective process.
The difference between opinions on how to measure the
quality of models leads also to differences in how to use
models. According to the Newtonian modeling paradigm,
a model that is tested empirically and is validated can be
used to make accurate and objective predictions. However,
according to the complex adaptive system perspective,
models can only be used to study qualitative structures, and
should be used interactively to be able to exchange insights
and stimulate discussion on uncertainties. In the physical
sciences, one no longer refers to model validation, but rather
to model performance, which is provided by statistical
measures such as the root-mean-square differences between
model predictions and observed values.
If one wants to describe the orbits of planets, a mecha-
nistic model is a perfect tool. Mechanistic models are even
suitable tools when one wants to send men to the Moon.
But in situations of many uncertainties and surprises, such
tools will not work. In the case of living beings, mechanis-
tic approaches are of limited explanatory power. In the rest
of this article modeling human dimensions of global envi-
ronmental change from the perspective of complex adaptive
systems is discussed. From this new perspective, we look
at how to design and use models for exploring the future.
But rst, one of the main seeds of uncertainty and sub-
jective assumptions is discussed: stability characteristics of
systems.
MYTHS OF SYSTEMS
Different perceptions of reality can be visualized by differ-
ent myths of stability, that is the perception of how systems
function. According to the equilibrium myth, systems are
in equilibrium. External effects can push the system briey
out of equilibrium, but it automatically returns back to the
previous equilibrium situation. This myth corresponds very
well with the Newtonian-modeling paradigm. Not only the
natural system is considered to be in a natural equilibrium,
but also the economic system of supply and demand is
in equilibrium due to control of the invisible hand. This
metaphor from economist Adam Smith, proposed at the
end of the 18th century, was a powerful explanation of
micro-behavior in order to describe an elegant mechanical
description of the macro-level of economic behavior.
The myth of stability can be represented graphically as
a ball at the bottom of a valley (Figure 2a). Perturbations
only temporarily knock the ball away from the bottom of the
valley. An implicit assumption of this myth is that systems
have the capacity to damp all kind of disturbances.
An alternative myth is the obverse, namely the myth of
instability. Systems are assumed to be very sensitive to
disturbances. Every disturbance can lead to a catastrophe.
Applied to environmental issues, the myth of instability
explains why some people argue that human activities
should not be allowed to disturb the natural system. Any
degree of pollution or degradation of extraction can lead to
a collapse of the system. This myth can be visualized by a
ball on a peak (Figure 2b). Any perturbation can lead the
ball to roll down the slope.
A third myth is in between the myths of stability and
instability, namely a system is assumed to be stable within
limits. When the system is managed well, the system can
absorb small perturbations. This myth can be visualized as
a ball in the valley between two peaks (Figure 2c).
A more advanced framework is to consider multiple
stable states. As depicted in Figure 2(d), this myth can be
represented as a number of peaks and valleys. The ball is
resting in a valley and is able to absorb a certain degree
of disturbance. However, an extreme disturbance can push
the ball over a peak such that it will rest in another valley,
an alternative equilibrium state. Examples of these multiple
states are lakes, which can ip from an oligotrophic to a
eutrophic state due to inputs of phosphates, and rangelands
that ip from a productive cattle-grazing system into a
less productive rangeland dominated by woody vegetation,
triggered by variability in rainfall.
A myth of systems that is more advanced, and lies in
line with the complex adaptive system modeling paradigm,
is the myth of resilience.
(a) (b) (c)
(d)
Figure 2 Myths of nature: (a) nature is stable; (b) nature
is unstable; (c) nature is stable within limits; (d) nature has
different stability domains
400 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Myth of Resilience
The myth of resilience does not only consider the balls mov-
ing up and down the peaks and valleys, but also considers
possible movements of the peaks and valleys themselves. In
this evolutionary picture stability domains can shrink, and
disturbances that previously could be absorbed no longer
can be. This view has important implications for manag-
ing systems. From the perspective of the previous myth of
systems, systems could be known perfectly. Surprises may
lead to changes of management, because the balls moved
in another valley, but in principle, management was simply
a matter of controlling the system. From the perspective of
an evolving landscape, one has to manage a system in the
face of fundamental uncertainties over the functioning of
the system. One continually observes the system in order to
respond adequately. Moreover, small human-induced per-
turbations are supported in order to learn from the system.
This type of management is called adaptive management
(see Adaptive Environmental Management, Volume 4).
Holling (1986) has proposed a framework for resilience
to explain the transitions in behavior of the system. He
distinguishes four basic functions common to all complex
systems, and a spiraling evolutionary path through them
(Figure 3). This evolutionary cycle can be used to explain
transitions in social systems, as well as in ecosystems.
The central idea is that the four-phase adaptive cycle
emphasizes a loop from conservation to two phases of
destruction and reorganization in which innovation and

r
K

S
t
o
r
e
d

c
a
p
i
t
a
l
E
xplo
it
a
t
i
o
n
C
o
n
s
erva
tio
n
R
e
l
e
a
s
e
x
Connectedness
R
e
o
rgan
iz
a
t
i
o
n
Figure 3 The dynamics of a system as it is dominated by
each of four processes: rapid growth (r), conservation (K),
release ( ), and reorganization (a). The arrows indicate
the speed of the cycle. The short, closely spaced arrows
indicate a slow change, while the long arrows indicate
rapid change. The cycle reects systemic change in
the amount of accumulated capital (nutrients, resources)
stored by the dominant structuring process in each phase,
and the degree of connectedness within the system. The
exit from the cycle at the left of the gure indicates the
time at which a systemic reorganization into a less or more
productive and organized system is most likely to occur.
(Adapted from Gunderson and Holling, 2001)
chance assume dominant roles. The reorganization phase
occurs when a rare and unexpected intervention or event
shapes a new future. In this state, the system is most
likely to be transformed by innovation, and agents have
the greatest potential to inuence the future of the system.
When the agents do not react properly to changes in the
system, it can ip into a new kind of system.
As mentioned before, the landscape is changing. This has
much to do with different speeds of change in the various
scales of systems. For example, due to phosphorus accu-
mulation in sediments of lakes, recycling of phosphorus
from these sediments can lead to surprises. The slow vari-
able, the sediment, can reduce the capability of the lake to
absorb an external disturbance. The equilibrium levels of
concentration of phosphorus in the water, the fast variable,
can therefore change due to changes in the slow variable
(Gunderson and Holling, 2001).
According to the myth of resilience, problems could be
caused by local human inuences that slowly accumulate
to trigger sudden abrupt changes that may affect the vital-
ity of societies. There are counteractive forces that give
ecological systems the resilience and adaptability to deal
with considerable change, and that provide people with the
capability to innovate and create. However, nature, people,
and economies are suddenly now coevolved on a plane-
tary scale, each affecting the others in such novel ways,
and on such a large scale, that large surprises may over-
whelm the adaptive and innovative capabilities of people.
One challenge of sustainable development is, therefore, how
to stimulate coevolution of human activities and environ-
mental change.
Different Perspectives on the Problem of Climate
Change
The discussion of myths shows various possible subjec-
tive interpretations of reality. The importance of different
perspectives for modeling the human dimensions of global
environmental change is now illustrated. There are various
concepts designed to classify different worldviews. Like
the case of modeling paradigms, there is no true classica-
tion of worldviews. A contribution, which gives a general
description of perspectives on natural and human systems
and social relations, has been made by Michael Thomp-
son and his colleagues in their cultural theory (Thompson
et al., 1990). This theory has been used to classify different
types of institutional designs in relation to global environ-
mental change. The cultural theory has been an inspiration
for implementing worldviews in formal models, because it
includes perspectives on human as well as natural systems,
it claims generality, and its explanation of perspectives
rationalities is deterministic. The cultural theory combines
anthropological insights with ecological insights, resulting
in different cultural types.
MODELING HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 401
The three main worldviews in the Cultural Theory are
the following types:
1. Individualists assume that nature provides an abun-
dance of resources, and remains stable under human
interventions. A responsive management style is
advocated.
2. Egalitarians assume that nature is highly unstable, and
a small human intervention may lead to complete
collapse. A preventive management style is preferred.
3. Hierarchists assume that nature is stable in most cir-
cumstances but can collapse if it crosses the limits of
its capacity. Therefore, control is advocated as a man-
agement style.
As discussed earlier, human induced climate change is
a topic surrounded with many uncertainties. It is, there-
fore, an excellent example to illustrate how worldviews
can be quantied to simulate alternative futures based
on different perceptions of reality. Such an analysis has
been made by Janssen and de Vries (1998) who devel-
oped a simple integrated ecological economic model for
which they implemented three versions based on alter-
native assumptions on climate sensitivity, technological
change, mitigation costs, and damage costs due to climate
change. Egalitarians, for example, assume high climate
sensitivity, high damage costs, low technological develop-
ment, and low mitigation costs. For management styles,
they assume different strategies for investments and reduc-
tions of emissions of carbon dioxide. By contrast, the
individualist, for example, assumes a strategy that maxi-
mizes economic growth, and emissions are reduced only
if a certain threshold of economic damage is exceeded.
The hierarchist tries to balance economic growth and cli-
mate change by assuming the IPCC estimate of climate
sensitivity.
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
18
2000 2010 2020 2030 2040 2050 2060 2070 2080 2090 2100
Time in years
2000 2010 2020 2030 2040 2050 2060 2070 2080 2090 2100
Time in years
F
o
s
s
i
l

C
O
2

e
m
i
s
s
i
o
n
s

(
G
t

C
)
Utopia
Dystopia
0.0
(b)
(a)
0.5
1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
3.0
3.5
4.0
4.5
T
e
m
p
e
r
a
t
u
r
e

c
h
a
n
g
e

(
d
e
g
r
e
e
s

C
e
l
s
i
u
s
)
Utopia
Dystopia
Figure 4 Expected carbon dioxide emissions (a) and temperature increase according to the egalitarian utopia and a
possible dystopia (b) (individualistic management style in an unstable global system)
402 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Suppose that all of the agents in a model world share
one of the three extreme worldviews. If agents are assumed
to have perfect knowledge of their world, their utopia can
be simulated. If their worldview is incorrect and they still
apply their preferred management style, their dystopia can
be simulated. An example is presented in Figure 4. In
the egalitarian utopia, emissions of carbon dioxide will be
reduced to zero within a few decades, leading to a modest
temperature change. However, if the individualistic world-
view manages a world that actually operates according to
the egalitarian worldview, emissions increase until climate
change causes such an economic disaster that emissions are
reduced by the collapse of the economy.
By introducing a population of agents with heterogeneous
worldviews, a complex adaptive system is produced. It is
assumed that the better an agent worldview explains the
worlds observed behavior, the greater is the chance that
an agent will not change its worldview. On aggregate, there
is a trend towards changing to the worldview that explains
the observations in the most likely way. Suppose that reality
is one of the three possible worlds, and an agent obtains
information over time that causes him to change (or not) his
perspective on the climate change problem. Three sets of
projections are derived in which agents adapt to climate
change (Figure 5). Prior to the year 2040, the observed
climate change does not lead to domination of one of the
worldviews. After 2040, the climate signal becomes clear
enough that one of the worldviews begins to dominate.
In the event of the world functioning according to the
egalitarian worldview, the emissions growth stabilizes on
average in the coming decades and decreases to a level
below half the present amount of emissions. However, this
reduction cannot avoid a global mean temperature increase
of about 2.5

C in the 21st century.

0.0
0.5
1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
3.0
3.5
4.0
4.5
2000 2010 2020 2030 2040 2050 2060 2070 2080 2090 2100
Time in years
T
e
m
p
e
r
a
t
u
r
e

c
h
a
n
g
e

(
d
e
g
r
e
e
s

C
e
l
s
i
u
s
)
Egalitarian
Hierarchist
Individualist
0
(a)
(b)
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
18
2000 2010 2020 2030 2040 2050 2060 2070 2080 2090 2100
Time in years
F
o
s
s
i
l

C
O
2

e
m
i
s
s
i
o
n
s

(
G
t

C
)
Egalitarian
Hierarchist
Individualist
Figure 5 (a) Expected carbon dioxide emissions and (b) temperature increase according to different views on the
functioning of the global system, and where the worldviews of agents change in time
MODELING HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 403
The explicit inclusion of subjective perceptions of reality
has led to a rich variety of possible futures. This will
not simplify decision-making, but can improve decision-
making since a large set of plausible scenarios is presented.
This type of modeling is currently applied in different areas
of global and regional environmental change. Each system
in which it is not certain that it will remain stable under
all kinds of disturbances, can in principle be studied by
explicitly assuming different perceptions of reality. It is
the expected that this type of modeling will be especially
interesting for simulation of institutional dynamics.
MACRO-LEVEL DYNAMICS
Although there are often uncertainties about the relations,
global models simulate macro-level dynamics. Here, we
focus on the most important macro-level drivers of global
environmental change, which are population size, economic
development and technological change. In the early 1970s,
Paul Ehrlich and John Holden described the environmental
impact of society by the well-known IPAT equation: I D
P A T. Here environmental impact equals the product
of population size, the degree of afuence per person and
the environmental impact from the technology used to
produce one unit of afuence.
The coming sections discuss three factors that are closely
related to the IPAT equation: population growth, mate-
rial and energy consumption of economies, and technology
development. For each factor, empirical information on
the macro-scale provides information on possible develop-
ments in the long term. However, extrapolating historically
derived macro-level relations involves subjective assump-
tions. Therefore, it is important to explore the conse-
quences of these subjective aggregated relations and to
improve understanding of the empirically derived macro-
level information.
Demographics and Human Health
Population growth is one of the main causes of global
environmental change. The continuing population growth
can be explained by changes in demographics and health.
The so-called demographic and health transition describes
how populations can go through typical demographic and
health stages when they change from living in pre-industrial
conditions to having a mortality pattern that is found in
the post-modern societies (see Demogr aphic tr ansition,
Volume 5).
The shapes of the demographic transition curves are well
known, but are in fact a hypothesis based on cross-national
and longitudinal studies. In developed countries the demo-
graphic transition has reached the nal stage. But how will
this development of fertility and mortality gures continue
in the future? Will the developing countries follow the same
transition, and at what rate? Most population projections are
based on the assumption that all countries will go through
the demographic transition leading to a leveling off of pop-
ulation growth during the 21st century. Observed transitions
in demographics are the result of changes in individual
behavior, technology and norms, improvement of health
care, use of contraceptives, age of marriage, literacy, posi-
tion of woman, regulation of abortion, etc. It is expected
that due to all these variables involved, the demographic
transition will not occur everywhere to the same degree
and at the same speed. Therefore, subjective assumptions
have to be made in order to develop projections for the
coming centuries.
Assumptions about the health transition in various regi-
ons of the world are even more difcult since various
diseases are related to global environmental change (skin
cancer due to stratospheric ozone depletion), behavior (lung
cancer from smoking), emerging new diseases (acquired
immune deciency syndrome AIDS) and even some re-
emerging old diseases due to the development of new
resistances (malaria). It is therefore difcult and subjective
to project health conditions of our descendants.
The Material and Energy Consumption of
Economies
An economic system can be viewed as a living system, con-
suming material and energy inputs, processing them into
usable forms, and eliminating the wastes. The metabolism
of economies has changed signicantly during the last two
centuries. A world economy has emerged that produces
agricultural, and industrial products and services in large
volumes, and transports them all over the globe. Agri-
cultural production has increased due to more and more
intensive use of land. Productivity has improved due to
biological innovations in the form of new crops, new agri-
cultural practices, mechanization, and increasing synthetic
inputs. The same holds true for industrial production, which
is increased due to the increasing consumption of energy
and materials. Currently, the service sector is becoming
increasingly important, stimulated by increased personal
mobility and more individualistic lifestyles.
These economic developments have led to an increase
of material and energy use in absolute gures, but also in
per capita gures, and have led to all kinds of disturbances
of biogeochemical cycles. These disturbances have led to
environmental change on various scales.
The debate whether the environment is able to sustain
economic development goes back to Thomas Malthus at the
end of the 18th century, who argued that food production
could not be increased quickly enough to keep pace with
the growing population. But due to a faster increase of
agricultural productivity than expected, a decrease in birth
rates, and the growing import of food, Malthus homeland
404 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
(Great Britain) did not collapse. Since the early 1970s,
stimulated by the Limits to Growth report of the Club of
Rome, the debate on economic growth and the environment
has emerged again.
In the last 30 years, there have been attempts to improve
the physical reality of economic models by including mass
balance conditions, and laws from thermodynamics. How-
ever, there is still no clear theory on the relation between
economic development and the environment. In the 1990s a
lot of empirically based studies were published on the rela-
tion of environmental pressure of an economic system and
the average income. This so-called Environmental Kuznets
curve (see, for example, de Bruyn, 2000) (Figure 6) consists
of three phases:
1. initially income growth parallels progressively increas-
ing environmental pressure;
2. next, further income growth leads to increasing envi-
ronmental pressure until it reaches a maximum;
3. further income growth leads to a reduction of environ-
mental pressure.
An explanation for this pattern is that at higher income
levels, individuals will attach more value to environmental
quality; this means more income spent on less damaging
consumption, as well as more democratic support for strin-
gent environmental policies. An important implication of
the environmental Kuznets curve is that growth by itself
would be able to solve environmental problems. However,
the empirical support for this hypothesis is weak and mainly
based on cross-sectional analysis. It is not clear whether the
curve differ for different types of environmental pressures,
what is the inuence of policy measures and technological
change, and whether observed trends in the past will con-
tinue in the future. Some studies suggest that delinking of
environmental pressure and economic output has only been
a temporary phenomenon caused by efciency and tech-
nology improvements after the oil crises of the 1970s (de
Bruyn, 2000). The cheap energy prices of the 1990s led to
a relinking of environmental pressure and economic out-
put. Despite the many uncertainties, relationships between
Income per capita
E
n
v
i
r
o
n
m
e
n
t
a
l

p
r
e
s
s
u
r
e
Figure 6 Environmental Kuznets curve
physical and nancial dimensions of economic systems like
the environmental Kuznets curve are used to explore future
material and energy consumption.
Technological Change
Technology development is the source and remedy of envi-
ronmental change. This is called the paradox of technology
and the environment. It is the source, because it creates the
ability of societies to mobilize more materials and energy,
and because it creates new materials and substances with
direct environmental impacts. On the other hand, technol-
ogy can also be the remedy because it increases productivity
and efciency of economic activities and invents specic
technologies to prevent pollution.
It is therefore important to understand the dynamics of
technological change. Arnulf Grubler (1998), in his book
on technology and global change, discusses general mech-
anisms on the diffusion of technology. The question is
how a new technology is adopted at a large social and
spatial scale. This can be visualized by the stylized tech-
nology life cycle (Figure 7a). In the beginning, a new
technology is imperfect, and various possible designs are
Time (a)
I
n
d
i
c
a
t
o
r

o
f

p
e
r
f
o
r
m
a
n
c
e
(
e
.
g
.
,

t
o
t
a
l

m
a
r
k
e
t
,

m
a
r
k
e
t

s
h
a
r
e
,
t
e
c
h
n
i
c
a
l

p
e
r
f
o
r
m
a
n
c
e
)
Saturation
Growth
Embryonic phase
Basic R&D
Applied R&D
Investment
Cumulative experience (b)
U
n
i
t

c
o
s
t
s
Figure 7 (a) a stylized technology life cycle; (b) a stylized
learning curve, where axes scales are logarithmic. In the
beginning costs decrease due to basic R&D. When the
potential of the technology is demonstrated, applied R&D
investments reduce the costs further until a level is reached
for which costs are competitive. (Adapted from Gr ubler,
1998)
MODELING HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 405
explored. The market effect is small, but the increase
that occurs during the growth phase is characterized by
increasing standardization and falling costs. Finally, the
growth rate slows down as the market becomes satu-
rated. In this phase the market is in the hands of a few
suppliers.
Technology life cycle is related to the developments
of costs. There is a lot of empirical evidence that the
decrease of a technology investment cost is related to the
accumulated investments in the particular technology. This
learning-by-doing can be formulated by the technology
learning curve (Figure 7b). The costs (on a logarithmic
scale) decrease linearly with an increase in cumulative
experience (on a logarithmic scale). The main uncertainty
of technology in the early phase of development is the slope
at which the costs decrease.
In mainstream economic models, technology is often
included as an exogenous variable. Such an assumption
leads to wait-and-see policies because investments are
delayed until clean technology has become available at
suitable cost levels. Such a policy differs from insights
derived from the learning curve, which suggest stimula-
tion of investments in clean technology allowing costs to
decrease.
Insights into technology dynamics show stylized facts
derived from empirical studies. This provides tools for
modeling technology development. The main question is
how does an individual technology penetrate the market,
and how can governmental policy stimulate the diffusion of
green technology? Many decisions of individuals inuence
this evolution. Therefore, we need to have more insights
into models of human behavior.
UNDERSTANDING THE EMERGENCE OF
STYLIZED FACTS
The observed stylized facts, the observed macro relations,
are the result of decisions of many agents. They are emer-
gent properties of a complex adaptive system. To improve
our understanding of these observed stylized facts, we
should develop tools to understand them. One way is to use
models that are able to simulate these emergent properties
from the bottom up. Like the cartoon (Figure 8), under-
standing of macro level phenomena can only be derived by
studying the behavior of micro level agents. In the case of a
school of sh, multi-agent studies have shown that ocking
behaviour can be simulated by using three simple rules for
each agent:
separation: steer to avoid crowding local ockmates;
alignment: steer towards the average heading of local
ockmates;
cohesion: steer to move toward the average position of
local ockmates.
Figure 8 Macro level phenomena emerge from behavior
of agents on the micro level
Behavior of human agents is much more difcult to
capture by simple rules. Two types of human behavior
can be distinguished: individual behavior, and behavior of
groups and institutions.
Individual Behavior
Since theory development in social science is rather frag-
mented, various models of human behavior exist. In fact,
different disciplines study only particular aspects of human
behavior. One central element, or better, one stylized prob-
lem, is found in most models of individual behavior.
Humans are assumed to maximize their well being given
budget constraints. These budget constraints mainly relate
to income and time. Within economics and psychology,
different variations exist on this stylized problem. In the for-
mal approach of conventional economic theory, this means
that the rational actor, the Homo economicus, maximizes
its own well being. This Homo economicus is assumed to
have perfect knowledge of the system in order to nd the
global optimum. In the case of uncertainties, the probability
distributions are perfectly known. These assumptions make
it possible to formalize human behavior in an unequivo-
cal way. A drawback is the existence of much empirical
evidence that real humans do not behave in this way. For
example, experiments show that humans discount the near
future at a higher rate than the distant future, experience
well-being with relative changes instead of absolute levels,
and are about twice as averse to taking losses as to enjoying
an equal level of gains (e.g., Thaler, 1992).
Some economists, like Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon,
argue that humans are rationality bounded. First, no per-
son can ever assemble all the information required for
an optimal decision. Second, even if one could, decisions
are usually so complex that no simple algorithm exists
406 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
for evaluating all possible options. Third, a persons own
decisions depend on the decisions of other persons. Simon
argues therefore that humans satisce instead of maximize
their well being. A consequence of relaxing the assumption
of maximizing behavior is the large set of possible rules
that describe behavior. The formalization is not unequivo-
cal anymore. Thanks to the development of new simulation
techniques such as cellular automata, genetic algorithms
and neural networks, and the widespread availability of per-
sonal computers, social scientists are exploring new ways
of modeling human behavior (e.g., Gilbert and Troitzsch,
1999).
Psychologists and other social scientists include different
indicators than are usually used in economics. Psycholo-
gists focus on satisfaction of various types of needs such as
understanding, freedom, identity and leisure. Furthermore,
all humans are different. They differ in their abilities, men-
tal models, preferences and opportunities. In contrast with
Homo Economicus, decisions depend on social interactions,
as well as on individual considerations. In fact, humans are
assumed to perform different cognitive decision processes
in different situations.
The mental models of humans are important elements in
cognitive processing. Differences in perceptions of reality
can result in different behavioral patterns. Although humans
can learn, they will never have the perfect knowledge that
is needed to maximize well being as performed by Homo
Economicus. This picture of human behavior is in line with
the complex adaptive system-modeling paradigm. Since
humans cannot perfectly control their own situation, they
design institutions to regulate human interactions, as well
as interactions between society and the environment.
Institutions and Collective Actions
Institutions contain formal constraints (rules, laws, consti-
tutions), informal constraints (norms of behavior), and their
enforcement characteristics. They shape human interactions
and the way societies evolve through time, and can also be
important to regulate human activities in relation to ecolog-
ical conditions. A stylized problem that is generally used to
study institutions is the so-called commons dilemma, widely
discussed as a result of the well-known analysis of Garrett
Hardin on the Tragedy of the Commons (see Commons,
Tr agedy of the, Volume 5). According to this analysis, the
commons tend to be overharvested since each agent har-
vests to the point where private costs equal the benets,
whereas harvesting imposes additional social costs on the
rest of the community. However, historical analyses of com-
mon resource properties have found many examples where
the tragedy did not happen (Ostrom et al., 1999). Commu-
nities often had ways of self-organizing to prevent overex-
ploitation of the commons, also known as closed commons.
Success of self-organization depends heavily on the char-
acteristics of property-right systems. The tragedy of the
commons is an example of open access, where everybody
can harvest without individual punishment. However, other
types of property regimes to regulate common resources are
related to group, individual and governmental property.
The success of self-organization of effective institutions
to control common resources depends on property regimes,
as well as evolution of norms and design of rules. Again,
this is an excellent example of complex adaptive systems.
DIFFERENT WAYS OF USING MODELS
It should be clear by now that models are not of use to accu-
rately predict future developments of human dimensions of
global environmental change. Although models are often
used for this purpose, there are more suitable purposes for
which they are of importance. In fact, they can be used
to overcome the problems raised during the analysis of the
current generation of integrated assessment models. Instead
of focusing on a single model used for prediction, a com-
bination of different types of models should be used to
explore hypotheses and uncertainties. Models can be used in
different ways. Here, three different goals of use are distin-
guished: to understand observed stylized facts, to improve
decision-making of complex problems due to interactive
use of models, and to explore possible futures by scenario
developments.
Understanding Stylized Facts
In the descriptions of the various sectors a number of styl-
ized facts were identied, such as the demographic and
health transition, diffusion of technology, and environmen-
tal Kuznets curves. These macro-level observations are the
result of behavior of agents at smaller scales. To under-
stand stylized facts, and to explore possible changes in
macro-level relations, we need to study the behavior of the
underlying components. Can we explain the diffusion of
technology by using simple rules for agents? Under which
assumptions can an environmental Kuznets curve be simu-
lated by micro-level decisions of economic agents?
This type of question relates to current work in evolu-
tionary economics. Various studies analyze what are the
important characteristics of rms and technology develop-
ment to explain structures emerging in specic markets.
Examples are the size distribution of rms, and the large
number of rms during the beginning of a new market. Such
analyses are also frequently performed by various other dis-
ciplines, and are assumed to be valuable to understand the
underlying dynamics of the observed stylized facts.
Interactive Use of Models
Models are not prediction machines, and should not be
used in this way. Moreover, for policy analysis, models
MODELING HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE 407
should be made available in such a way that they can be
used in an interactive fashion. The recent developments
in graphical user interfaces, PC availability and Internet,
should make it possible to use simple transparent models
by a large community of stakeholders. Models can be used
in this way as learning tools. Using models in this way is
exactly what we can learn from the work of Dorner (1996).
Dietrich Dorner and his colleagues study decision-
making in complex situations. Their research design is
to develop micro-worlds, which are computer simulation
models of a management problem, and to ask real persons
to manage the system. These management problems vary
from a simple climate-control system to regulation of a
virtual society. Because the participants in the game have
an incomplete picture of reality, their attempts to manage
the system can lead to catastrophes. Dorner concludes that
managing complex situations requires experience, and this
experience can be built up by playing management games,
like training pilots in ight-simulators.
Scenario Development and Alternative World
Views
Traditionally, scenario analysis starts with an initial fore-
cast which is called the base case or reference scenario.
Then alternative assumptions are made of initial conditions,
equations and parameter values. The resulting projections
are called scenarios. Differences between the scenarios and
the references are used to evaluate uncertainties and possi-
bilities of policy to inuence the future. However, due to
the implicit assumptions within every model, one reference
scenario will not be enough to assess policy options. In
fact, a set of reference cases should be used, which capture
the main variety in alternative assumptions (Rotmans and
de Vries, 1997).
Scenario analysis should be seen as computer-aided
storytelling, where different stories can serve as a starting
point for analysis. Analyzing policy options for different
types of futures, can give insights into the robustness of
these policies. Explicitly using different starting points can
reduce the illusion that model-based analyses are objective
predictions. In such a way, models can serve as a medium
for discussion instead of an electronic oracle.
CHALLENGES FOR THE FUTURE
Important weaknesses of current modeling activities, related
to human dimensions of global environmental change, are
the inherent subjective assumptions of parameter values and
relationships, and the fact that macro-relations are used of
phenomena which emerge from local interactions between
agents.
The challenge in the coming decades will be to use new
developments in modeling tools and the use of models
to overcome current problems. A promising start can be
made when models are used in a more explorative way.
Current models are often used as truth-machines. But the
predictions, the glimpses of the future derived from elec-
tronic oracles, should not be our main interest. Since the
future is inherently unpredictable, models should be used
to enrich our insights into the behavior of complex reality.
Improvements of our mental models can help us to improve
our decision-making.
The concept of complex adaptive systems can be a
promising starting point to think about new ways to develop
and use models concerning human dimensions. Systems
evolve, and therefore models assessing the future should
focus on evolution and change. This requires the inclusion
of disciplines nowadays not highly involved in model-
ing, such as psychology, institutional science, history and
anthropology. Modeling human dimensions of global envi-
ronmental change is a way of managing uncertainty and
complexity. The tools discussed in this article can help us
to experience and learn this art.
REFERENCES
Ayres, R U and Simonis, U E, eds (1994) Industrial Metabo-
lism Restructuring for Sustainable Development, United
Nations University Press, Tokyo, Japan.
Clark, W C and Munn, R E, eds (1986) Sustainable Development
of the Biosphere, Cambridge University Press, London.
de Bruyn, S M (2000) Economic Growth and the Environment: an
Empirical Analysis, Kluwer, Dordrecht.
Diamond, J (1997) Guns, Germs and Steel A Short History of
Everybody for the Last 13 000 years, Vintage, London.
Dorner, D (1996) The Logic of Failure Recognizing and Avoid-
ing Error in Complex Situations, Perseus Books, Reading, MA.
Gilbert, N and Troitzsch, K G (1999) Simulation for the Social
Scientist, Open University Press, London.
Grubler, A (1998) Technology and Global Change, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge.
Gunderson, L H and Holling, C S, eds (2001) Panarchy: Under-
standing Transformations in Human and Natural Systems,
Island Press, Washington, DC.
Holling, C S (1986) The Resilience of Terrestrial Ecosystems:
Local Surprise and Global Change, in Sustainable Develop-
ment of the Biosphere, eds W C Clark and R E Munn, Cam-
bridge University Press, London.
Hughes, B B (1999) International Futures: Choices in the Face
of Uncertainty, Westview, Boulder, CO.
Janssen, M A (1998) Modelling Global Change The Art of Inte-
grated Assessment Modelling, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham.
Janssen, M A and de Vries, B (1998) The Battle of Perspectives:
A Multi-agent Model with Adaptive Responses to Climate
Change, Ecol. Econ., 26, 4365.
Meadows, D H, Meadows, D L, Randers, J, and Behrens, W W
(1972) The Limits to Growth, Universe Books, New York.
Meadows, D H and Robinson, J M (1985) The Electronic Oracle:
Computer Models and Social Decisions, John Wiley & Sons,
Chichester.
408 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Ostrom, E, Burger, J, Field, C B, Norgaard, R B, and Polican-
sky, D (1999) Revisiting the Commons: Local Lessons, Global
Challenges, Science, 284, 278282.
Rayner, S and Malone, E L, eds (1998) Human Choice and Cli-
mate Change, Battelle Press, Columbus, OH.
Rotmans, J and de Vries, B, eds (1997) Perspectives on Global
Change, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Thaler, R H (1992) The Winners Curse: Paradoxes and Anoma-
lies of Economic Life, Princeton University Press, Princeton,
NJ.
Thompson, M, Ellis, R, and Wildawsky, A (1990) Cultural The-
ory, Westview, Boulder, CO.
Waldrop, M (1992) Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge
of Order and Chaos, Simon and Schuster, Toronto.
Modernism
see Art and the Environment (Volume 5)
Modernity vs. Post-modern
Environmentalism
Daniel R White
Honors College, Florida Atlantic University, Jupiter, FL,
USA
Postmodern environmentalism provides a critique of, and
a set of alternatives to, modern industrial society. It criti-
cizes the separation of science from ethics and aesthetics,
its separation of nature from culture and self from other, its
Eurocentrism, and its sexism. As alternatives, it offers inter-
disciplinarity, reconciliation, multiculturalism, and ecolog-
ical feminism. In place of modernist logical hierarchies and
categorization of the world into things, postmodern environ-
mentalism provides a communicative paradigm emphasizing
metaphoric comparisons and interchanges among diverse
inhabitants of the human-ecological community. Finally,
this new outlook combines technology and nature in the
creation of an emerging form of human-ecological identity,
called the cyborg.
Postmodern environmentalism is related to post-normal
science (see Post-normal Science, Volume 5) in the follow-
ing ways: (1) both are concerned with complex systems;
(2) both offer a critique of the specialization and dogmatism
of normal science; (3) both reintroduce value judgements
(as in ethics and aesthetics) and environmentalist politics
into policy decisions involving the natural sciences.
Both environmentalism and postmodernism mark
fundamental changes in the status and viability of
modernity. The two movements converge insofar as they
focus on those features of modernism that have contributed
to the ecological crisis. Ecology originally meant the
science of the household, and as such should be concerned
with the rich variety of activities that create and sustain
our daily lives: everything from the construction and
maintenance of the human habitat to the plurality of
biotic processes intrinsic to life on Earth. According to
the environmental and postmodern critiques, modernity has
increasingly undermined this human-ecological variety to
create a world industrial order and a global monoculture.
Under the sway of this simplifying modernism, the
diversity that has made up the human household and the
planetary biotic community has been externalized, devalued
and oftentimes destroyed. Environmental and postmodern
thinkers have therefore sought to revitalize ecological and
human diversity.
The problematic aspects of modernism that are the focus
of both environmental and postmodern critiques include:
1. the specialization of thought into separate realms of
science, ethics and aesthetics;
2. the separation of culture from nature;
3. the binary demarcation of human from non-human;
4. the denition of self or mind as a subject having
dominion over an objectied natural world;
5. the identication of that subject with Western culture
and the masculine gender.
The combination of these modernist ideas has, accord-
ing to environmental and postmodern thinkers, contributed
largely to the ecological crisis.
The replacement of these problematic features of mod-
ernism with viable alternatives has become, therefore, a
principal aim of environmentalist and postmodern thought.
Both movements, accordingly, emphasize interdisciplinary
thinking that re-links science, ethics and aesthetics. Both
argue that cultural concerns like knowledge, value and
beauty are in part derived from and have consequences for
the natural world. Both make clear that the human and the
non-human are inseparable aspects of ecological commu-
nities. Furthermore, both attempt to provide new forms of
communication for the interdisciplinary study of ecological
and human identities and relations. Finally, both emphasize
the value of cultural and gender diversity, particularly the
contributions of non-Western peoples and of women, to the
creation and maintenance of the ecological household.
Postmodernism often invokes metaphor rather than logic
to express its ideas. So it is appropriate to say that environ-
mentalist and postmodern ideas have become interwoven
in a new tapestry entitled postmodern environmentalism
on whose fabric new forms of thought and action are
appearing.
MODERNITY VS. POST-MODERN ENVIRONMENTALISM 409
Box 1 Some denitions
modernity: The broad cultural movement from the 16th
through the 20th centuries, focused on the idea of
progress, and particularly on the betterment of human
life through science and technology. In standard Western
philosophy (epitomized by the work of Immanuel Kant) it
includes the partitioning of knowledge into three spheres
of inquiry: science, ethics, and aesthetics.
postmodernity: A cultural movement of the late 20th
and early 21st centuries, based on the perceived failure
of modernity to achieve its goal of human progress.
It focuses on the ideas of cultural, social, and bio-
logical diversity, the rights of women and minorities,
multiculturalism, and environmentalism. In philosophy
it emphasizes interdisciplinary connections among the
spheres of modernity (science, ethics, and aesthetics).
environmentalism: A contemporary philosophical move-
ment advocating the legislative, political, ethical, and
aesthetic defence of ecosystems as well as the preser-
vation of a sustainable human ecology. Its outlook
implies an environmentalist critique of modern indus-
trial technologies insofar as they reduce biodiversity and
undermine the viability of ecosystems to support life.
cyborg: A cybernetic organism of bionic human
(Merriam-Webster). A new postindustrial form of
technology based on the communication sciences. Still
in its initial stages of development, the cyborg is
increasingly capable of autonomous behavior simulating
human conduct. It is therefore an innovative hybrid of
nature and culture. Cloned organisms, including the
biologically engineered human beings on the horizon,
are examples of cyborgs.
teleological: an adjective based on the Greek words telos
(purpose) and logos (word, or explanation). Teleological
means purposive or designed or explained in terms
of purpose or design. In the information sciences it has
largely been replaced by the adjective teleonomic,
based on telos and nomos (usage, convention). Teleo-
nomic means simulating purpose, or the quality of
apparent purposefulness in living organisms that derives
from their evolutionary adaptation (Merriam-Webster).
Teleological explanation was rejected by modern sci-
ence because it was associated with premodern ideas of
design embraced by theology. Postmodern and post-
normal science (see Post-normal Science, Volume 5)
employ teleological or teleonomic explanation, as part of
their reintroduction of ethical and aesthetic ideas (includ-
ing those of purpose and design) into environmental
discourse.
In standard modern philosophy, natural science requires
the empirical description of nature without ethical or aes-
thetic considerations. Standard ethical thought, in turn,
deals with what ought to be while science deals with what
is. Aesthetics, similarly, deals with questions of beauty and
sublimity (awe) that are neither factual nor ethical but,
instead, are matters of taste. It further considers teleologi-
cal (or teleonomic) questions about the apparent design of
living things. See denition of teleological in Box 1.
Environmentalist and postmodern thinkers, in response,
have argued that the description of nature or any object
involves ethical and aesthetic dimensions. To select an
object for description, e.g., requires that it be differentiated
in value from some other object or as a gure against a
background. That differentiation in value may be either
ethical, in that the selected gure is chosen because it
ought to be studied, or it may be aesthetic, because it is
pleasing to study. In either case, the choice is teleological,
in that it selects an object in terms of the purposes of the
researcher. The observer of the natural world may also
attribute some intrinsic purpose to it. Yet, these ethical,
aesthetic and teleological dimensions are excluded by the
modernist description of nature. They are relegated to
specialists in disciplines outside of science.
The demarcation of culture as separate from nature, as
well as human from non-human, is also typical of the
modernist description of a natural object, say a tree. Tree,
after all, is a word. In the terminology of linguistics it is a
signi er, which denotes a signied concept which in turn
denotes a perceived object such as the familiar conguration
of trunk and branches. In postmodern terms the cultural
activity of naming is part of the nature described by the
word. The tree cannot be referred to as a natural object
without the cultural activity of naming, i.e., it belongs to
the whole system of what we mean by nature.
The description of a tree therefore implies a linguistic
system. According to linguistic theory, the selection of
the signier tree and its associated concept displaces all
of the others that might be chosen. Hence the tree and
the not-tree are two aspects of the same binary system of
language, the same code. To demarcate the tree from all
that is not-tree, thereby saying that it must be treated as
a separate entity, is an initial arbitrary act by scientic
modernists, yet it involves the very ethical or aesthetic
judgments that modernism would exclude from science. To
treat the tree as a separate entity cut off from its linguistic
system, furthermore, is analogous to cutting it out of the
ecosystem an act that has not only biological but also
ethical and aesthetic consequences.
From the perspective of postmodern environmentalism,
this amounts to separating the tree from the forest and its
inhabitants. The cutting is done by a self considered to be
separate from nature. The separation of the self from nature
is typical of the Western cultural tradition. That this kind
of subject is built into the descriptions of science indicates
that modern science, at least, is an artifact of the same tra-
dition science is cultural. The scientic self is typically
male and, in the view of postmodern environmentalism,
objecties the feminine body of nature based upon mas-
culinist preferences: power, prot and control. Postmodern
environmental science, therefore, promises to be feminist
and multicultural, as well as communicative.
410 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
To learn how to see the forest and the trees
simultaneously, postmodern environmental science has
invoked the theory of communication. This theory focuses
on the forms of connection and exchange between
living things, e.g., on the interchange of words between
speakers, or signals between computers on the Internet.
It, furthermore, models organisms as artifacts or cyborgs
emergent from the communicative processes of evolution.
A cyborg is an arti cial organism, a creature that is a
hybrid of biology and technology. It is therefore, in the
broadest sense, a work of ction: it has been made up
from the elements of nature and culture. Cybernetics is the
science underlying the construction of cyborgs. It is based
on a broad analogy between the behavior of organisms and
machines. Its central question is, What must we assume
is going on inside an animal or a robot that allows it to
act in an apparently purposive manner? The answer is that
both must be in communication with their environments.
Communication, in turn, is de ned in terms of negative
feedback: a technical way of saying that an organism or a
machine selects a particular course of action by excluding
alternatives. In terms of communication theory, e.g., in
order to catch a y, a frog must rst exclude all of the
alternate courses of action the insect might take. By so
doing, it selects the course the y is on. The frog then lashes
out its tongue to the point along the course where the y will
be when the tongue arrives. A guided-missile frigate would
use the same negative logic to shoot down an incoming
aircraft, and presumably so would you or I as we reach
to catch a ball arcing toward us over a baseball eld. The
frog, frigate or ball player might be organism or machine or
human: the requirements for selecting a course of behavior
based on negative feedback are basically the same. This
selection is, in turn, teleological, ethical and aesthetic: the
purpose, choice, and preference of the organism or machine
or human being are intrinsically bound up with its selection
of a course of action.
The cyborg is a de nitively postmodern construction
because it breaks down the boundaries between culture
and nature: it is a hybrid of cultural and natural processes
understood in terms of communication. As the design
science underlying the cyborg, cybernetics would view
the forest and the trees simultaneously by providing a
recursive vision of nature and culture. Negative feedback,
paradoxically, includes a description of courses of action
it must exclude in order to select its object. Because
the process of feedback takes place in time and space,
it must continuously update the position of the subject
(frog, frigate, human) in relation to the object ( y, aircraft,
baseball). You and I must keep our eye on the ball if we
want to catch it, constantly adjusting our position relative
to the incoming y (so to speak). The full description of
subject and object at any time must also include, as we
have seen, the relative positions of and alternative actions
excluded by both. If the ball were alive and capable of
adjusting its own actions by negative feedback, like the
hedgehogs that serve as croquet balls in the Queen s famous
match in Lewis Carroll s Alice in Wonderland, then our
game would be all the more complex (as it is, indeed, for
the frog or frigate).
Think of the subject s position as being on one side of
a circuit and the object s as being on the other. Consider
the subject s descriptions of the object to be messages in
that circuit. Now the messages in the circuit will re ect a
spiral of differences between a series of subject and object
positions. In this spiral, the description of the object must
include a description of the subject (because they are always
relative to one another) so that the overall system becomes
self-referential. A self-referential system is recursive insofar
as it refers back to itself, constantly revising its self-image.
Your description of the incoming baseball must include
a description of your position relative to the ball, and
that description is constantly shifting as you and the ball
approach one another on the eld.
This constantly self-correcting ensemble of subject and
object is a good de nition both of the cyborg and the
postmodern self. Both are hybrid artifacts generated by
recursive communication in which subject and object are
constructed within a spiral of differences. The spiral ulti-
mately includes subject and object, self and other, culture
and nature, trees and forest, in a postmodern-ecological
design. That design has utility for survival because it yields
a coadaptive evolutionary relationship between each of the
aforementioned dichotomies. This relationship is precisely
what the modern idea of nature lacks and the postmodern
idea provides.
FURTHER READING
Bateson, G (1987) Steps to an Ecology of Mind, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Haraway, D (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinven-
tion of Nature, Routledge, New York.
Hayles, K N (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bod-
ies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Ihde, D (1990) Technology and Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth,
Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN.
Merchant, C (1980) The Death of Nature: Woman, Ecology and
the Scientic Revolution, Harper, New York.
McCulloch, W and Pitts, W (1965) The Embodiments of Mind,
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Trinh, T M (1989) Woman, Native, Other, Indiana University
Press, Bloomington, IN.
White, D R (1998) Postmodern Ecology: Communication, Evolu-
tion and Play, State University of New York Press, Albany,
NY.
MUIR, JOHN 411
Muir, John
(18381914)
John Muir, naturalist, explorer, writer, and conservationist,
was born in Scotland. The Muir family emigrated to the US
in 1849, settling in Wisconsin. His childhood was harsh and
work-lled, but at an early age he became a keen observer
of the natural world and an accomplished craftsman.
In 1860, Muir entered the University of Wisconsin, and
in 1863 he traveled across the largely untouched northern
US and Canada. In 1867 he suffered an eye injury while
working. While he soon regained his sight, the event was to
change Muirs life. He turned to nature. Muir walked from
Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico; sailed to Cuba and
Panama, and then in 1868, up to San Francisco. California
became his home.
In 1868, he journeyed on foot through meadows, wild-
ower elds, and into the high country of the San Joaquin
Valley. Later he wrote: it seemed to me the Sierra should
be called not the Nevada, or Snowy Range, but the Range
of Light the most divinely beautiful of all the mountain
chains I have seen. In 1874, he began a series of writings
titled Studies in the Sierra. Fame ensued and his works were
soon known throughout the US. In 1880, he met his future
wife Louise and later they had two daughters. He entered
the farming business with her father, and prospered.
Muir continued to visit the Sierra Nevadas, and traveled
extensively abroad, eventually seeing all the corners of the
globe. He also returned to writing, publishing articles and
books about his travels and naturalist philosophy. Muirs
writings assumed a spiritual quality that inspired his readers
with his love for nature. In 1890, due in large part to
the inspiration of Muirs works, Yosemite National Park
was created. Muir was also the catalyst for the creation of
Grand Canyon, Sequoia, and Mount Rainier parks. In 1892,
Muir and friends founded the Sierra Club, as Muir stated to
do something for wildness and make the mountains glad
(Muir remained Club president until his death in 1914).
In 1901, Muir published Our National Parks, a work that
was to become quite inuential. He also formed a friendship
with Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, a connection
that was to have an important impact on the development
of American conservation policy. Muir and the Sierra Club
worked to protect the Sierra Nevadas. In 1913, a dramatic
battle was fought; a campaign to prevent the damming of
the Hetch Hetchy Valley, which was then within Yosemite,
but the battle was lost. The valley was dammed to supply
water and electricity to San Francisco, and to break the
Citys reliance on a private utility monopoly. However, the
event had a galvanizing effect on supporters of the National
Parks. The incident also ended his friendship with Pinchot,
who had supported the project. Muir died the following
year.
John Muir has been called the father of the American
National Parks system. He was certainly one of the most
inuential and powerful of the early conservationists. John
Muirs ideas and writings have had a lasting impact and
legacy on the environmental movement. The Sierra Club
is now among the most inuential global environmental
organizations (see Sierra Club, Volume 5).
KEVIN HANNA Canada
N
Nasr, Seyyed
Hossein
(1933)
Hossein Nasr (Seyyed is an honoric title designating a
descendant of the Prophet Muhammad) has long been the
most visible proponent of environmental values from an
Islamic perspective, and is one of the most signicant
contemporary Iranian philosophers. His approach follows
the perennial philosophy associated with Frithjof Schuon,
Titus Burckhardt and Rene Guenon, in which timeless truths
are seen as being expressed in a variety of historical cultural
and philosophical traditions.
Nasr was born in Tehran, Iran into a family of scholars,
physicians and Sus (Muslim mystics). From secondary
school onward he was educated in the US, rst at the
Peddie School in New Jersey where he was class vale-
dictorian, then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) where he received an honors degree in mathemat-
ics and physics in 1954. He went on to study at Harvard,
where he completed a doctorate in the history of science
in 1958. He then returned to Iran where he taught phi-
losophy and the history of science until the revolution of
1979. In 1963, at the age of 33, Nasr became the youngest
full Professor of the university. He served as Dean of the
Faculty of Letters from 19681972 and briey as Vice
Chancellor. In 1972, the Shah appointed him Chancellor
of Aryamehr University, a new technical institution mod-
eled on MIT. The following year, under the patronage of
the Queen, Nasr established the Imperial Iranian Academy
of Philosophy, which hosted the eminent scholars Henri
Corbin and Toshihiko Izutsu, among others. Following the
1979 revolution, he returned to the US, where he taught
rst at the University of Utah, then Temple University, and
nally at the George Washington University, where he has
been University Professor of Islamic Studies since 1984. He
has also held visiting positions at Harvard, Princeton, and
the American University of Beirut. In 1981, he became the
rst Muslim to deliver the Gifford lectures at Edinburgh.
One of Nasrs major contributions to the eld of educa-
tion, especially during his years in Iran, was his emphasis
on approaching the study of Islamic philosophy and sci-
ence from the perspective of his students own Islamic
and Iranian traditions, in contrast to the external approach
of Western Orientalists. He thus strove to bring about a
synthesis drawing on the strengths of both Western and
non-Western intellectual traditions.
Alongside his academic pursuits, Nasr has also sought
knowledge through traditional means, such as the largely
oral transmission of learning from master to disciple charac-
teristic of Susm. In this context he studied Islamic philoso-
phy and other disciplines under the tutelage of Mohammad
Hossein Tabatabai, Abol-Hassan Qazvini, and Moham-
mad Kazem Assar.
Anticipating the well-known 1966 critique of his fellow
historian of science Lynn White, Jr, in his Rockefeller
lectures at the University of Chicago earlier the same year
(subsequently published as Man and Nature: the Spiritual
Crisis in Modern Man), Nasr argued that the emerging
environmental crisis was rooted in a spiritual crisis. He
has taken up this theme in many of his later writings,
including his Cadbury lectures at Birmingham in 1994,
which were published as Religion and the Order of Nature
in 1996.
FURTHER READING
Nasr, S H (1968) Science and Civilization in Islam, Harvard Uni-
versity Press, Cambridge, MA.
Nasr, S H (1978) An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doc-
trines, revised edition, Shambala Publications, Boulder, CO.
Nasr, S H (1996) Religion and the Order of Nature, Oxford Uni-
versity Press, New York.
Nasr, S H (1997) Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern
Man, revised edition (1967), Kazi Publishers, Chicago, IL.
RICHARD FOLTZ USA
NATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL LAW 413
National Environmental Law
M J Peterson
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA
National environmental law comprises those branches of
the national law of each state addressing human inter-
actions with nature, focusing primarily on protecting the
biosphere including its subsystems, processes, and species
diversity from avoidable signi cant harms arising from
human activity. National-level environment law-making,
like the counterpart process at the international level, is
affected by the special characteristics of environmental
problems: high uncertainty about the effects of human activ-
ity on the biosphere, heavy reliance on scienti c, engi-
neering, and economic expertise in the formulation and
enforcement of legal rules, necessity of considering long
time horizons, and complexities of ensuring compliance
among a wide range of private, quasi-public, and public
actors.
National legal systems have long addressed land and
water use, resource management, public and private con-
struction, health and sanitation, food safety, and waste treat-
ment, but environmental law did not emerge as a separate
branch of national law with its own statutory basis, admin-
istrative organs, and jurisprudence until the late 1960s
and early 1970s. Environmental laws adopted in the 1970s
focused primarily on control and reduction of pollution,
wastes, and hazardous or toxic substances. Their scope has
broadened in subsequent decades as societies have realized
that many human activities have signi cant effect on the
natural environment. Thus, by the mid 1990s it was possi-
ble to de ne environmental law in very broad terms as the
body of law intended to minimize the impact of activity by
individuals, households, business rms, other private and
public legal entities, and government agencies on natural
ecosystems and resources (e.g., McGregor 1994). However,
the de nitions that guide actual legal practice continue to
focus primarily on the broad subject areas of air quality,
water quality and use, biodiversity and wildlife manage-
ment, environmental impact and risk assessment, control of
hazardous and toxic substances, remediation of hazardous
substance contamination, and liability for pollution damage
(e.g., Rosencranz, 1991; Baker, 1997; Findley and Farber,
1999).
CHARACTERISTICS AND DEVELOPMENT OF
NATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL LAW
National environmental law shares the main features of
other branches of national law. First, it operates within
a centralized political system based on a hierarchical
relationship between government and governed. The
government holds rights to prescribe, apply, and enforce
the law to all individuals, other private legal entities, and
subordinate public entities that are its nationals and to
those private individuals and entities of foreign nationality
operating within the states land, maritime, and aerial
domain. In turn, those entities have an obligation to obey.
Individual states political systems vary considerably in the
extent to which they provide effective governance, allocate
governmental authority among different levels (e.g., federal,
provincial, and local), maintain mechanisms for holding
government ofcials accountable to the citizenry, and
incorporate bottom up initiatives in policy-making, but
all ultimately rest on a hierarchical organizing principle.
Second, national legal systems contain several types of
rules, each with a distinctive function in the overall
legal system. Rules of recognition, some pertaining to
the national legal system as a whole, and others to
environmental matters in particular, stipulate how laws,
regulations, and customs are adopted, amended, or repealed.
Substantive rules perform any or all of three functions:
constitutive rules dene types of actor, conduct, or
situation;
regulatory rules stipulate the forms of conduct to be
adopted or avoided in particular situations;
consequential rules specify what can happen to actors
as they conform or fail to conform to substantive rules.
In addressing air pollution, for example, any national
legal system must contain constitutive rules dening what
types and levels of emission constitute pollution, regula-
tory rules outlining how actors producing emissions should
act to control those emissions, and consequential rules
establishing rewards for compliance or (more commonly)
punishments for non-compliance with the regulatory rules.
Finally, environmental laws actual impact on actor behav-
ior depends on varying combinations of willing support
for the particular legal rules, more diffuse law habits that
incline actors to respect the law in place even when they dis-
agree with certain of its stipulations, material inducements
to comply and material punishments for non-compliance.
The chronology of efforts to develop national environ-
mental law is very similar around the world, a reection
of the strength and success of transnational and intergov-
ernmental efforts to increase the salience of environmental
concerns among governments and private actors alike. Con-
cern about the impact of industry, agriculture, and urban life
on the general condition of the air, lakes, rivers, and streams
and waterways, and strong public demands for reducing air
and water pollution, emerged in North America, Western
Europe, and Japan at about the same time in the mid to
late 1960s, as a product of changed beliefs about the ori-
gins and desirability of pollution. Though concern about air
and water quality inspired national legal regulations in the
414 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
19th century (e.g., the British Alkali Inspectorate Act), even
in 1950 the urban fogs, composed of smoke and particu-
lates emitted by electricity generators, building heating or
cooling systems, and factories, were viewed as unavoidable
by-products of industrial prosperity despite awareness that
urban dwellers experienced higher incidence of respira-
tory diseases. Within 15 years, governmental and popular
attitudes had been transformed: greater concern about the
human health effects of poor air quality, plus the diffu-
sion of ecological worldviews conceiving of the biosphere
as an interrelated whole in which change in one part had
signicant ramications through all other parts, had trans-
formed perceptions of pollution. Smoky emissions were no
longer perceived as a sign of industrial might and prosper-
ity, as a quasi-natural phenomenon beyond control, but as
a bad that could be reduced or avoided through concerted
human action. Incorporation of these changed perceptions
into national policy was signaled by the US Clean Air
Act of 1970, the rst Japanese pollution laws of 1970,
the German Federal Environmental Program of 1971, and
the rst European Community Environmental Program in
1973. Though some Leninist leaders continued to maintain
that environmental degradation was a by-product of a pri-
vate enterprise economy, the Union of the Soviet Socialist
Republics (USSR) and its Eastern European allies had also
begun adopting environmental laws.
Though the characteristic environmental problems facing
Third World countries were different stemming far more
often from inadequate access to safe water, fuel, and sanita-
tion than from industrial emissions perceptions of a need
for national environmental law were diffused rapidly to
Third World governments through the preparations for and
holding of the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environ-
ment in Stockholm. While insisting at the Stockholm Con-
ference and later multilateral negotiations that international
environmental law must not become a vehicle for frustrating
their own development efforts, Third World governments
did accept the need to begin incorporating environmental
concerns into their own national laws. India adopted its
rst explicitly environmental statutes in the early 1970s,
though it developed a comprehensive framework statute
only in 1986 after the Bhopal chemical leak revealed signif-
icant weaknesses in Indias environmental law, and created
strong public pressure for strengthening it. The Chinese
government appeared unimpressed with concerns about the
environment at the Stockholm conference, but some of its
leaders were paying attention to pollution problems and
other environmental concerns even before the political and
economic reforms of the 1980s. Statutory changes were
paralleled by administrative reorganization. The increased
importance attached to environmental concerns was insti-
tutionalized by the establishment of an umbrella environ-
mental body to coordinate governmental and private action.
These bodies, often cabinet-level agencies or ministries,
were established in the major Western industrial countries
during the early 1970s and in most other countries dur-
ing the 1970s and 1980s (Baker et al., 1985; Janicke and
Weidner, 1997).
The extent of change in substantive legal rules inspired
by new concern with the environment, and the process by
which it was accomplished, have varied from country to
country, depending partly on governmental and public per-
ceptions of the nature of environmental problems and the
means available for their management, and partly on the
national legal rules specifying how revision of substan-
tive law should be accomplished. Because each national
legal system has its own balance among statutes, judicial
decisions, and customary practices as sources of law, the
process of accommodating contemporary ecological aware-
ness into law has thus differed sharply. In the UK and the
civil law states of Europe, the primary emphasis has been
on legislative amendment of the law codes. In the common
law systems of Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, and
the USA, the process has involved a combination of leg-
islative action and active judicial renement of common
law doctrines. In most Third World countries, the process
has also involved legislation, but to varying degrees has
also featured reinterpretation of traditional customary rules
still used in the mix of indigenous and European-inspired
law that forms the contemporary legal system. The global
spread of problem denitions, relevant scientic knowl-
edge, information about possible regulatory approaches, and
model laws, encouraged by non-governmental environmen-
tal organizations like the World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace
International, quasi intergovernmental ones like the World
Conservation Union, the United Nations Environment Pro-
gramme, and other global or regional intergovernmental
organizations, has not erased national differences, but has
meant that there is considerable common ground in environ-
mental discussions. International environmental agreements
have also created a body of common goals for those states
that have become parties, and on some occasions provided
developing states with nancial and other resources needed
for effective monitoring and enforcement.
BASIC PRESUPPOSITIONS OF NATIONAL
ENVIRONMENTAL LAW
Though some environmentalists have argued for treating
nature generally or other species of life as having distinct
legal rights apart from those of humans, national environ-
mental law systems are generally based on constitutive rules
that classify humans individually and in their various col-
lective groupings as the subjects of law-holding rights
and duties and responsible for their actions in complying
or not complying with the law. Natural places and resources
are classied as objects of law that the subjects of law may
or may not use in particular ways as they go about their
NATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL LAW 415
activity. Individuals (natural persons) and collective entities
(legal persons) are most often connected to natural places
and resources through property rights regimes, which dene
who may have access to what places on what terms and
may put any resources found in those places to use, either
in situ or by removal for purposes of providing fuel for
human activities requiring energy inputs of heat, light or
power or for working, into tools and other usable objects.
Property rights regimes vary on several dimensions, but
the most important involves the basis of de ning access
rights. Four possibilities have been most prominent in
human history: open access, community property, individ-
ual property, and controlled access. Under an open access
regime, a particular natural place is open to anyone who
can reach it, and any resources within it are open to
use in situ or after being carried away on a rst-come
rst-served basis. Little law is needed, other than prohi-
bitions against attempts to close off the area. In community
property regimes, which are historically far more usual
than open access ones and formed the subject of Hardin s
famous tragedy of the commons (see Commons, Tragedy
of the, Volume 5), access is limited to members of a par-
ticular community most often de ned by geographical
proximity or traditions of seasonal use who may use
resources in situ or take them away according to community
norms about shares. Local customary law most often gov-
erns membership in the community and members resource
use; under modern conditions, the national legal system
is needed to provide protection by af rming community
property, and protecting it from intrusions by outsiders. In
individual property rights regimes, an individual, house-
hold, or legal person enjoys exclusive access to the place
that is its property and controls all resource use. In most
national legal systems that property-holder (typically called
the owner) may use the place or resources directly, rent
or sell the place or resource rights to others, or leave the
place and resources unused. Under controlled access prop-
erty regimes, places and resources are governed by a central
authority, which determines who may enter on what condi-
tions and use resources in situ or take them away. Much of
the debate regarding environmental law focuses on the rela-
tive advantages and disadvantages of each type of property
rights regime for promoting environmental protection and
sustainable uses. Most national legal systems assume that
open access regimes are not viable for contemporary levels
of population and intensity of resource use; they institu-
tionalize varying degrees of reliance on community prop-
erty, individual property, and controlled access regimes.
Western legal systems, common law and civil law alike,
rely most heavily on individual property rights regimes,
though certain forms of community property and of con-
trolled access through government licenses exist as well.
Community property regimes are more common in non-
Western systems, though they vary considerably from place
to place. They coexisted with individual property rights
even before colonial era impositions of individual prop-
erty rights regimes by European powers, and are enjoying
some revival today as scholars demonstrate their viability
as modes of regulating resource use (e.g., Berkes, 1989;
Ostrom, 1990). Bad experiences with Leninist central plan-
ning have discouraged primary reliance on controlled access
through central licensing, but such systems remain in place
for particular areas or activities in most countries.
Property rights regimes establish who is responsible for
the use of a particular area and its resources, but do not
guarantee environmentally sustainable patterns of activ-
ity. Most national environmental law is built on the basic
assumption that environmental degradation occurs because
individuals, households, rms, and other entities have no
incentive to pay attention to the environmental burden of
their activity, as long as they can pass all or part of the costs
of coping with that burden to others. Thus, the primary
task of national environmental law is to limit or even pre-
vent such transfers. Successful prevention requires a variety
of legal instruments because such transfers can occur geo-
graphically, economically, or temporally, and each type is
best addressed through somewhat different rules. Geograph-
ical transfer occurs when wastes or pollution are allowed
to spread beyond the edges of an actor s own property,
and are inhibited through substantive legal rules prescrib-
ing that ownership or other property rights do not include
a right to cause harm to others or their property, and
through procedural norms requiring property holders to
control harm equally stringently, regardless of whether it
occurs on or off the property. Economic transfers occur
when one actor s activity degrades a common resource like
water or the atmosphere, leaving others to pay for cop-
ing with the degradation. Economic transfers are inhibited
through the polluter pays principle and emissions charges,
water or land use fees, charging cleanup costs or nes for
excessive emissions that reinforce nancial incentives to
avoid across-actor transfers. Transfers across time occur
when actors handle a problem with a quick x, such as
underground storage of highly radioactive wastes, which
leaves the basic environmental problem to be solved later
at considerable expense. These transfers are inhibited by
legal norms lengthening time horizons, such as intergener-
ational equity, the precautionary principle, and mandatory
prior environmental impact assessment. Since most national
legal systems have permitted such transfers in the past, and
actors came to view such transfers as part of life, regula-
tion to limit or end such transfers strains previously held
beliefs and will remain a source of resistance to environ-
mental law until ecological awareness, social mores, and
habit make avoidance of such transfers the basic pattern of
social behavior.
Environmental law has been a particularly dynamic
branch of national law in all countries, marked by a high
416 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
rate of legislative, administrative, and judicial activity for
several reasons. Public concern about the environment has
expanded to encompass more problems, creating demands
for more regulations. Improved scientic understanding of
ecosystem dynamics, and the impact of human activity
on those dynamics, has been a source of demands for
additional regulations or reformulations of existing ones
to take advantage of current knowledge. Technological
change in particular sectors of the economy, together with
the broader shifts in patterns of production and distribu-
tion of goods and services resulting from the increasing
volume of cross-border transactions, and the transition
from the mass production-mass consumption pattern of the
1950s to the current information-intensive and exible pro-
duction pattern, have also required adjustments of legal
rules.
The most widespread change in the national legal con-
text has been a shift in the general approach to limiting
inter-actor transfers of environmental costs. Most of the
pollution control legislation adopted in the 1970s relied on
a command and control regulatory regime, under which
designated government agencies were given authority to
determine environmental standards and to dene the means
by which other actors would meet those standards (see
Demand Management, Volume 4). Thus, the US Clean Air
and Clean Water Acts authorized the Environmental Pro-
tection Agency to determine national air and water quality
standards and then to stipulate the technological means by
which users or air or water would control their emissions
so that the standard would be met. Command and control
operated more exibly in countries like Japan and the UK,
where statutes establish broad guidelines which government
agencies apply exibly through discussions with industry,
and there is a strong emphasis on abating pollution through
use of specied pollution control or cleanup technology. In
India, it took the form of attaching conditions to permits for
business activity, an environmental extension of the well-
established license raj approach to regulating private rms
general business activity.
A command and control regulatory regime has the advan-
tages of ensuring uniform standards throughout the territory
of the state, assuring that all actors accomplish some min-
imum degree of environmental protection, and placing all
rms under similar cost burdens. Yet it also has the dis-
advantages of cumbersomeness, since a central agency has
to make far-reaching and highly detailed decisions and, at
least as applied in many countries, an inexibility inhibit-
ing adjustments to local conditions. While a command and
control approach can, in principle, promote technological
innovation through adoption of progressively tighter emis-
sion limitations and other technology-forcing devices, in
practice it often inhibits innovation because rms and others
have no incentive to do anything but adopt the government-
mandated pollution abatement technology.
By the mid 1980s, the problems with command and
control regulatory regimes were being criticized from two
distinct standpoints. One, generally identied with the
political right and neoliberal economic theory, argued for
replacing command and control with market-based mea-
sures altering actors propensity to create environmental
harm either by increasing the cost of causing harm or
subsidizing harm avoidance. Advocates argued that mea-
sures like emissions taxes, tradable emissions or resource
extraction permits, and rules permitting rms to choose how
they will meet government-determined emissions or ambi-
ent quality standards, would yield greater environmental
improvement at lower cost than the command and con-
trol approach. The other, generally identied with Green
parties and other elements of the political left, argued that
central regulation should be replaced by a radical decentral-
ization of authority, transformation of production and con-
sumption patterns away from energy and resource-intensive
consumerism towards localized self-sufciency, and a pop-
ulist emphasis on local knowledge and local justice. Both
views share a skepticism of centralized government: the
rst prefers heavier reliance on private ordering through
contract while the second prefers local self-organizing as
a way to resist capture of the law-making process by cor-
porations and experts. Though most forcefully expressed in
the USA, market-based approaches grew more inuential in
many countries during the 1990s. This shift reected some
experience with particular command and control regula-
tory regimes, but even more the problems of centralization,
opacity, and non-accountability encountered in countries
where state-owned enterprises operate all or most major
industries. These were most obvious in the USSR and other
Leninist states.
As reliance on market-based measures increased in the
1990s, criticisms of such reliance continued. Advocates
of local self-sufciency continued to make their case for
a complete turning away from industrial ways of life. A
broader coalition, ranging from the socialist left to the
center, continued to support government regulation though
seeking greater transparency and accountability in corpo-
rate and governmental activity. Demands for greater pub-
lic participation in environmental decision-making were
reected in support for prior environmental impact assess-
ment, right-to-know laws regarding hazardous substances
and workplace safety, access to government-held infor-
mation (freedom of information laws) and opportunities
for public comment before major public projects began.
National environmental law in most countries thus remains
the subject of considerable contention as actors pursue both
their immediate concerns and their visions of how society
as a whole should function.
National environmental law has also been affected by the
ongoing debate about how to specify the desired environ-
mental conditions. Law-making in the 1960s and 1970s was
NATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL LAW 417
marked by strong debate between advocates of regulating
by emissions standards, which would specify the maximum
amount of pollution that could be released by any single
pollution source (such as a power plant, factory, or vehi-
cle), and by ambient standards, which would specify the
maximum acceptable level of each particular form of pollu-
tion (such as sulfur dioxide, nitrate, or lead) in the water or
air. The debate about the relative merits of focusing on the
individual sources of pollution, or the aggregate effects of
pollution-generation, was eventually resolved in a both/and
fashion, in which ambient standards provide the baseline
from which regulators determine whether and how to reg-
ulate individual emitters. More recently, the connections
between particular emissions of pollution and the ambient
air or water quality have been drawn more precisely by
using the critical loads methodology to determine accept-
able pollution rates by reference to the absorptive capacity
of the air, water, land, or vegetation of an area, as well as
ambient air or water quality (see Cr itical Load, Volume 3).
Almost all national legal systems must also address
problems that arise from fragmentation of governmental
authority. This is most obvious in federal states where
lower-level government units (states, lander, provinces,
etc.) have constitutionally-protected powers, but also occurs
in unitary states if actual management of certain activities
is delegated from the national government to more local-
ized authorities. In the Netherlands, for instance, 125 water
boards, each responsible for a particular part of the coun-
try, administer many aspects of water use policy. The same
dilemmas that plague development of international envi-
ronmental law whether standards should be uniform or
respond to differences in local conditions, whether envi-
ronmental measures in one area, such as recycling require-
ments, serve also or primarily as ways to favor local over
outside rms, whether differences in standards trigger races
to the bottom as rms seek to relocate activity to places with
less stringent rules, or races to the top as rms conform to
the generally stricter standards prevailing in the industrial
states so they can sell in those markets mark the devel-
opment of national environmental law. This is particularly
noticeable in large federal states like India or the USA,
and is also prominent in efforts to develop European Union
(EU) environmental law.
ENSURING COMPLIANCE WITH NATIONAL
ENVIRONMENTAL LAW
At rst glance, political centralization and organization of
states along hierarchical principles appear to make the
problem of securing compliance with national environ-
mental law one of effective application of the admin-
istrative and coercive apparatus of the government. Yet
even tight hierarchies founder if too many citizens react to
law with inaction, grudging partial compliance, or outright
violation. National legal systems typically seek to draw
on all motivations for compliance present among the pri-
vate and other actors whose conducts are addressed; advo-
cates of different regulatory regimes simply place different
degrees of emphasis on different motives. Advocates of
command and control rely, in the last instance, on a strong
administrative state capable of monitoring actors behav-
ior, identifying non-compliers, and imposing sanctions that
will induce non-compliers to change their behavior. Advo-
cates of market-based regulation rely more on aligning
legal rules with actors current self-interests or using law to
change conduct by shifting actors incentives to the point
that compliance becomes more highly valued than non-
compliance. Advocates of local sustainability rely primarily
on persuasion to accept new values and beliefs, socializa-
tion into new norms of conduct and psychological desire
to remain in good standing with others in the community.
Yet when considering possible environmental law, advo-
cates of all three share certain appreciations. All treat actors
as responsible agents who are capable of thinking about
their situation and making conscious choices. All assume
the legal system will provide sufciently clear rules that
compliance can be distinguished from non-compliance. All
assume that actor behavior and the legal process are both
transparent enough that particular non-compliers can be
identied and called to account, and that the legal sys-
tem will afford opportunities for determining whether a
particular instance of non-compliance is the result of con-
scious action, ignorance of rules (though most national
legal systems do not accept ignorance as an excuse for
non-compliance), accident, or intervening circumstance that
made compliance impossible, before deciding whether a
particular violation is best addressed through provision of
information (about the environmental problem or about the
laws requirements), assistance in overcoming inability to
comply, incentive to comply, or punishment of failure to
comply.
The national environmental law of particular coun-
tries use several mechanisms for securing compliance,
with the mix actually used reecting national legal tra-
ditions on the broad problem of promoting obedience to
the law. National systems tend to place great emphasis
on administrative elaboration of standards, monitoring of
actor compliance, and imposition of penalties for non-
compliance. The more heavily a national legal system
relies on administrative elaboration and enforcement, the
greater the burden on government agencies to recruit and
retain technically qualied personnel capable of formu-
lating rules that will produce the desired changes, and
taking action when pollution or other environmental dam-
age results from human activity. At the same time, no
government relies solely on government personnel in envi-
ronmental rule-making and enforcement. Administrative
rule-making typically involves a degree of prior discussion
418 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
with the private and public actors likely to be covered by
the rules. Though posing dangers of regulatory capture,
in which the least enthusiastic of the regulated determine
the pace and content of rules, prior discussion affords
opportunities to exchange views, explain the rationale for
particular rules, and secure target actors perspectives on
the feasibility or unfeasibility of different possible rules.
Many national legal systems attempt to limit the danger
of regulatory capture through provision for public com-
ment on proposed regulations before they go into effect,
or for prior discussions that include other groups likely
to be affected by target actors conduct (e.g., the govern-
ment labor business consultations in the European corpo-
ratist systems).
Use of administrative rules requires establishment of sys-
tems for monitoring behavior. Many of these are mechani-
cal; scientic instruments located at or movable to particular
sites for direct observation of emissions or ambient air or
water quality. Satellite-based remote sensing systems offer
possibilities of monitoring changes in land use, vegetation
patterns, and habitats as well as identifying sources of sig-
nicant pollution plumes. Complaints from nearby residents
or environmental groups, who do their own monitoring,
often supplement administrative agency efforts.
Involvement of national courts in applying environmental
rules varies considerably. In many common law countries,
much environmental law was created as private persons
or organizations, able to show they suffered direct damage
to themselves or their economic activity from pollution,
invoked common law notions of nuisance, negligence, and
trespass against those responsible for the pollution. Dealing
with pollution did require reinterpretation of these tradi-
tional concepts, but many judges shared the rising public
concern and were willing to innovate. The owering of pub-
lic interest litigation, most notable in the USA and India,
also required some changes in the rules dening who has
a right to sue whom over what, to allow suits by envi-
ronmental and other organizations rather than individuals
or rms and to permit class action suits in which some
of those harmed sue on behalf of all. The very high level
of court involvement in formulation and enforcement of
environmental law in the USA reects that countrys condi-
tions, and has three main sources. First, the general common
law emphasis on judicial interpretation has been much
enhanced through the principle of judicial review, which
allows individual citizens and other private entities to chal-
lenge the consistency of statutes or particular administrative
actions with basic constitutional provisions including the
Bill of Rights. Second, the national governments admin-
istrative apparatus is relatively weak compared to those of
other industrial states, and many federal statutes compen-
sate for that weakness by allowing individuals or rms to
sue other entities for non-compliance or to sue govern-
ment agencies over non-enforcement. This practice dates
back at least to the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, and
has been incorporated into the major US environmental
statutes, even though the US Supreme Court has reined
in the practice since the mid 1990s by narrowing the crite-
ria for determining who is eligible to sue over what matter.
Whereas environmental organizations le most of the cit-
izen suits seeking better enforcement, business rms and
other targets of environmental regulations are the source
of most challenges to the constitutionality of some statu-
tory provision or administrative act. Third, the separation
of powers into three coordinate executive, legislative, and
judicial branches of government often promotes judicial
activism by emphasizing the courts status as a coequal
branch of government. Though sharing the common law
tradition, the UK and many of the Commonwealth countries
have parliamentary political systems where executive and
legislative powers are fused, and courts defer more to par-
liamentary sovereignty in matters regulated by statute than
do their US counterparts. In civil law states, the courts role
is even more constrained; there, administrative agencies and
review panels are the primary mechanism for applying envi-
ronmental rules and determining whether non-compliance
has occurred; citizen suits are not institutionalized in the
legal process and judicial review is limited to constitutional
courts or courts of cassation (annulment) with authority
to vacate (to make void) administrative actions. For states
who are members of the EU, the provision for European
Court review of national compliance with EU directives
and regulations has created possibilities of regional judicial
review.
Yet judicial activism can occur even where there is no
formal separation of powers and no common law sys-
tem. Japanese courts played a signicant role in the initial
development of environmental law in Japan, through judg-
ments requiring businesses responsible for major pollution
damage to provide extensive compensation to victims and
pay punitive damages. Judicial activism has been more
constant in India (a parliamentary common law state),
despite a notoriously slow court system, where advocates
of the poor and marginalized have taken up environ-
mental cases as one part of a broader program of pub-
lic interest litigation encouraged by the Indian Supreme
Courts liberal interpretation of standing to sue, citizen
suit provisions in Indian environmental statutes, and the
distinctive Indian legal customs regarding writs of man-
damus (which order a government agency to exercise its
legal authority), prohibition (which enjoin a government
agency from acting in a way contrary to statute), and
certiorari (which remove a case from a lower court or
an administrative agency to a higher one) allowing pri-
vate citizens to sue government agencies for actions or
inactions.
National environmental law thus exists at the conuence
of well-established national legal traditions and increasingly
NATURE 419
widespread knowledge about ecosystems and the impact
of human activity on them. Differences in ecosystems,
patterns of human activity, cultures, and legal traditions
mean there will always be considerable variation in national
environmental law. All national environmental law sys-
tems face the challenge of helping move societies from
environmentally-oblivious to environmentally-aware modes
of human conduct. Each will nd its own way to ensure
that national law and property rights regimes incorporate
environmental values and that actors are discouraged from
persisting in patterns of activity that shift the environmen-
tal burdens of their activity to others through geograph-
ical, economic, or temporal transfer. For an interesting
comparison, see Inter national Environmental Law, Vol-
ume 5.
REFERENCES
Baker, R, ed (1997) Environmental Law and Policy in the Euro-
pean Union and the United States, Praeger, Westport, CT.
Baker, M, Bassett, L, and Ellington, A (1985) The World Envi-
ronment Handbook, World Environment Center, New York.
Berkes, F (1989) Common Property Resources: Ecology and
Community-based Sustainable Development, Bellhaven Press,
London.
Findley, F W and Farber, D A (1999) Cases and Materials on
Environmental Law, 5th edition, West Group, St Paul, MN.
Janicke, M and Weidner, H, eds (1997) National Environmental
Policies, Springer, Berlin.
McGregor, G (1994) Environmental Law and Enforcement, Lewis,
Boca Raton, FL.
Ostrom, E (1990) Governing the Commons: The Evolution of
Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
Rosencranz, A, Divan, S, and Noble, M L (1991) Environmental
Law and Policy in India, Tripathi, Bombay.
FURTHER READING
Berry, J F and Dennison, M S (2000) The Environmental Law and
Compliance Handbook, McGraw-Hill, New York.
Koeman, N S J (1999) Environmental Law in Europe, Kluwer
Law International, The Hague.
Pardy, B (1996) Environmental Law: A Guide to Concepts, But-
terworths, Toronto.
Shea, E E (2001) Environmental Law and Compliance Methods,
Oceana, New York.
Natural Law
see Nature (Volume 5)
Nature
Nature is notoriously difcult to dene. In his touch-
stone denition in his anthology Keywords, the social critic
Williams (1983) says that it is both perhaps the most com-
plex word in the language and that any full history of the
uses of nature would be a history of a large part of human
thought.
In light of these sobering judgments, a short denition
should simply point out the major distinctions in the use
of the word, and some of the words with which it is often
paired or compared.
The word derives ultimately from a cluster of terms
around the past participle of the Latin verb, nascor, to
be born; terms that include the use of natura as a noun
indicating blood-relationship, physical afnity, etc., and
that are generally associated with the idea of something
having a nature or a quality of its own. This becomes
linked with a second cluster of terms and meanings that
suggest that there is a larger nature of things (perhaps
with a capital N for Nature). Roman philosophers like
Cicero and other Stoics intimated that natura rerum the
nature of things might be an elemental god or physical
force underlying all things. A third set of associations
set the forces of nature (even the personied goddess
Nature or the great god Pan) in opposition to the forces
of civilization.
The rst set of associations something having a nature
of its own has a long subsequent history, ranging from
the idea that to be natural is to be true to oneself, to
todays claims that something is 100% natural. Natural
here is being given the connotation of truth, purity and
integrity. A different, but comparable idea is the Chinese
concept of the Tao (the way), which suggests that the
right path for human living is to match ones self to the
moral structure (the Tao) inherently part of the natural
world.
In the West, a related idea (traceable back to Cicero) is
that of natural law a law that does not need to be legis-
lated because it is so obviously part of human experience,
and allegiance to which aids human ourishing. This would
have a long history, culminating (a) in the idea of human
rights as inalienable because they are (if you subscribe to a
doctrine of rights) part of the denition of what it is to be
human; and (b) in various controversial claims about natu-
ral law by conservative institutions, e.g., slavery is natural,
woman are naturally nurturing, homosexuality is unnatural,
and so on.
In the Middle Ages, and into the Modern Era, the dom-
inance of Christianity cast a suspicious shadow over all
versions of being natural, that allied human nature with
the natural world, when that world was seen as the pagan
world of unredeemed physical nature. It was considered
420 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
to be tempting and dangerous, because it was disordered
and distant from God. The ultimate Paradise of Christian
mythology was either a redeemed garden (of Eden) or a
city, Jerusalem. Wilderness was the place of demons and
temptation, as it had been for the Israelites and Jesus both,
as they wandered in the wild desert. For the medieval Chris-
tian, the important task was not to align oneself with the
forces of wild nature, but with humankinds true nature
which was in alignment with the ordering power of God.
Human beings were exhorted to redeem their wild, corrupt
nature by moving towards their second nature a cultivated
nature that had to be worked upon, and transcended. In sev-
eral places in the Bible, Heaven is described as the city
of light.
In the Romantic era (17501850), this third set of
associations nature versus cultivation was turned on its
head. Given the pressures of the Industrial Revolution,
and the widespread repudiation of hierarchical political
and social structures based on outmoded versions of order,
romantic writers claimed a primal afnity with nature,
because nature was now a place of refuge, and posi-
tively comparable as a complex, organic whole, to an
increasingly alienated atomized machine culture. Nature
was once again the original home from which human
beings had fallen into civilization. The destruction of
nature began to be seen as analogous to the increasing
destruction of elements of human nature by the forces of
industrialization.
This recasting of nature as positive has had a number
of effects, not all of which are themselves positive. For
example, the image of a pure primal energy force asso-
ciated with nature the life or death force inuenced
the rise of Nazi blood politics. Other effects, which have
still not been fully worked through, include the raising
of fundamental questions about whether there is such a
thing as human nature, whether human beings are lying
to themselves when they consider themselves to be inde-
pendent moral agents capable of rising above nature, and
so on. On the other hand, environmentalism owes its
very existence to the positive reevaluation of the need
for unhumanized nature, and the protection of natural pro-
cesses (which we do not fully understand) in the modern
world.
Finally, it is worth noting that the second set of asso-
ciations with which we began Nature as a catch-all
term for everything in the material world is certainly
widespread today in the sciences, where nature is synony-
mous with the natural world, that is, the physical world.
Because of the complex web of historic and philosoph-
ical meanings attached to the term, however, it often
causes confusion wherever different disciplines meet, espe-
cially across the physical sciences, social sciences, and
humanities.
REFERENCE
Williams, R (1983) Nature in Keywords, Fontana, London.
PETER TIMMERMAN Canada
Naturism
see Ecofeminism (Volume 5)
New Ageism
New Ageism is a diffuse, piecemeal movement of groups
and individuals both inside and outside environmental-
ism. They share a conviction that the world is undergoing
a major transformation, involving a shift in conscious-
ness, towards a new mode of being. Contemporary New
Agers follow the astrologers contention that a new age is
entered about every 2000 years, maintaining that the Age
of Aquarius is displacing the current Age of Pisces. Pisces
has been dominated by polarization and con ict between
cultures, civilizations, religions and races. Western con-
sciousness has particularly been driven, through mistaken
conceptions of reality as composed of irreconcilable dual-
ities like mind and body, male and female, society and
nature.
By contrast the Aquarian Age will be one of har-
mony, holism, balance and heightened moral and spiritual
awareness. Society and nature will no longer be separated.
Transition to the New Age will follow changes in the
consciousness of some individuals. They will form dis-
parate, scattered groups promoting such things as ecology,
feminism, spirituality, etc., and will eventually coalesce to
form a critical mass, catalyzing all peoples into the new
thinking, thus creating a global consciousness. This process
will be facilitated by advanced communications technology,
such as the internet.
New Ageism draws on an eclectic mix of spiritual
and other traditions, such as Eastern mysticism, West-
ern religions (the ideas of the Catholic priest, Teilhard
de Chardin, are seminal), alternative medicine, ecological
science and new physics. Its idealistic analysis and pre-
scriptions focus on changed attitudes as the spur to changed
behavior. It rejects the materialist analyses of old-style pol-
itics, which analyze behavior in relation to economic class
interests. Paradoxically, perhaps, New Ageism often revives
NOOSPHERE 421
pre-modern beliefs, such as paganism, pantheism, animism
and vitalism.
DAVID PEPPER UK
NIMBY (Not In My Backyard)
NIMBY is an acronym indicating that people living
near a proposed development (e.g., waste dump, highway
bypass, nuclear power station) strongly object to having
the development situated near them, although they would
not necessarily oppose the development if it were located
elsewhere. A related expression used in parts of the USA
is locally unacceptable land use (LULU).
R E MUNN Canada
Non-anthropocentrism
see Environmental Ethics (Volume 5)
Noosphere
The noosphere is a sphere of interaction between humans
and nature where conscious human actions become a major
determining factor of its evolution. The denition of noo-
sphere has evolved from a spiritual notion to a more
scientic one. Two French philosophers, Edouard Le Roy
and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin introduced the term in the
early 1920s. Teilhard de Chardin described the noosphere
as the conscious and thinking membrane enveloping the
globe, whose emergence was caused by the appearance of
humans on the Earth and by the development of human
intelligence. Vladimir Vernadsky, the Russian natural sci-
entist and philosopher, gave a more scientic connotation
to the word noosphere. He envisioned the noosphere as an
inevitable evolutionary stage of the biosphere where human
thought and activities become major forces in the evolution
of the Earth. Given that humans can change the chemical
composition of air and water, create articial minerals,
reroute rivers, and breed new types of animals and plants,
their power to transform the environment is now compa-
rable to the transforming forces of nature. Vernadsky saw
anthropogenic environmental changes as inevitable, mani-
festing the beginning of a new evolutionary stage of the
biosphere.
See also: Vernadsky, Vladimir, Volume 2.
REFERENCES
Le Roy, E (1927) Lexigence Idealiste et le Fait dEvolution,
Boivin, Paris.
Teilhard de Chardin, P (1980) The Phenomenon of Man, English
translation, Harper Collins, London.
Vernadsky, V (1944) A Few Words About Noosphere (in Rus-
sian), Adv. Mod. Biol., 18(2), 118120.
GALINA CHURKINA Germany
Not In My Backyard (NIMBY)
see NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) (Volume 5)
422
Phase Shifts or Flip-flops in Complex Systems
Henry A Regier
1
and
James J Kay
2
1
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
2
University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Living things self-organize into systems that must be partly closed to maintain identity and integrity, but must also stay
partly open in order to accumulate high quality resources in categories such as mass, energy and information and to
void wastes also belonging to these categories. A living thing must also stay partly open in order to interact, often
reciprocally, with other living systems and with features of its non-living environment. Non-living things may also self-
organize systemically, but in less complex ways. Living things in general have evolved capabilities to self-organize into a
number of different complex phases, states or stages and to shift from one of these to another in response to changes
in internal and external phenomena. Many living systems, especially organisms, have evolved capabilities to proceed
autonomously through cycles of such stages. The life history of an insect, for example, exhibits a progression from
fertilization to egg to larva to pupa to adult to dead body. Such a one-way or ontogenetic development with
transformations between stages may be perceived as a special case of the kind of organizational changes that we focus
on here; we do not include such specialized one-way cases in the present discussion. Instead, we focus on systemic
reorganizations that occur between different relatively stable states of a living complex system and are reversible, more
or less. (Of course, strict reversibility is not possible because living systems are subject to the second law of
thermodynamics.) The kind of shifts on which we focus may occur abruptly and haphazardly in response to a particular
kind of stimulus that is relatively unexpected and catastrophic in its context; or it may occur in a more orderly way for
some stimulus that is always expected with significant probability in its context.
We emphasize that, for this essay, the concept of shift between phases has a similar meaning to flip between stable
states, and a two-stage flip-flop between alternate states. We do not include a concept of ontogenetic, one way changes
through a genetically pre-ordained series of stages; to do so would increase the scope of our essay beyond our present
purposes.
We include as natural, some features of living things that some people would refer to as cultural. Some species such as
humans may exhibit strong cultural features as well as the necessary natural features, while other species such as
bacteria may exhibit few if any cultural features. We do not presume to understand fully any natural and natural/cultural
features of reality that we address. Some people may perceive some features of humans and human societies to be
both cultural and unnatural; our intent is not to include consideration of such unnatural features in the present essay.
The natural base of strongly cultural living systems must remain open to mass, energy, and information flows, as is the
case with all living things. Cultural manifestations are also open culturally in that they thrive on such resources as
beauty, ethical goodness, respect and caring and try to divest themselves of the opposite of these qualities; ugliness,
evil, disrespect and hate.
ECO-STUDIES
Academically, numerous overlapping kinds of eco-studies may be perceived; we refer explicitly to five kinds here. The
prefix eco-(from the Greek oikos, home as an edifice with its inhabitants) relates to a generic home-like phenomenon in
which a living entity interacts with its living and non-living environment, which may include an artificial dwelling place.
This approach parallels the combined
PHASE SHIFTS OR FLIP-FLOPS IN COMPLEX SYSTEMS 423
consideration of text and context by some scholars with a
focus on information.
A living entity may have living sub-entities within
it. It follows from this basic perception that study of
an eco-phenomenon transcends any conceptual dichotomy
between analytical reductionism and observational or intu-
itive holism. Neither the reductionistic nor the holis-
tic approach is wrong; instead each is just half-baked.
Sometimes the eco-approach is termed holonistic, with
the hol referring to whole, and the on, referring to
part and this makes explicit the transcendence of the
reductionismholism debate.
The versions of eco-studies include:
1. Eciatrics (from eco and iatros as pertaining to physi-
cian or medicine) includes public health studies of
humans and domestic animals with respect to effects
of pathogens on organisms and populations, as in epi-
demiology, and risk assessment studies of effects of
toxins and contaminants on the organismal and popu-
lation health of humans and other species.
2. Ecology or ecologics (from eco and logos as pertain-
ing to reasoned knowledge) here narrowly dened and
including interactive aspects of meteorology, hydrol-
ogy, geology as well as conventional biology, and
relating to the contemporary real time processes of bio-
logical evolution.
3. Economics (from eco and nomos as pertaining to law
or laws) in which the practices of benet cost account-
ing and monetary risk assessment may be of minor
signicance overall compared, say, to an understand-
ing of the self-organizing features of local sharing of
ecosystemic goods/bads and services/disservices in a
communitarian regime, and/or to global trade within a
constrained free enterprise regime.
4. Ekistics (from oikizo meaning the establishment of a
settlement) relating to the self-organizational develop-
ment of human urban and rural settlements, physical
infrastructures, industrial complexes, the information
highway, etc.
5. Ecumenics (from oikoumenos meaning all beings in
community) here with a focus on participatory gov-
ernance within an extended community of interest
groups or stakeholders, and including informal, extra-
constitutional decision-making structures and processes
that transcend boundaries between people of differ-
ent nations and jurisdictions and thus complement the
formal, constitutional laws, treaties and agreements of
autonomous nations, as those were once perceived.
To study living systems, the psychologist and game
theorist Rapoport (1986) has emphasized identity, orga-
nization and goal directedness. In a compatible way, the
writer Koestler (1969) focused on self-organization, hierar-
chy and openness. Koestler excluded some connotations of
hierarchy, e.g., the control hierarchy within a large military
unit. Instead he referred to reciprocal nested interactions
among holons, i.e., things that act as wholes but also as parts
of larger wholes, within a form of organization that may be
termed a holonarchy. A well-known example of a loose
holonarchy is the interactive complex of nested formal and
informal organizations within a multi-tiered form of liberal
democratic governance, as may be described in ecumenics.
The conceptual domain that includes the ve nested ver-
sions of eco-studies sketched above, plus some others, may
be termed an ecogeny. The sufx refers to genesis, which
refers here to emergent self-creation guided in part by a pri-
ori genetic hardware as well as by learned software, both
augmented by new autonomous programming. Cooperative
study by colleagues and ourselves in the North American
Great Lakes Basin, for example, makes use of all those ver-
sions of eco-studies within an ecosystem approach that may
be perceived as a special case of integrated ecogenic stud-
ies. Haas (1999) might refer to our self-organizing study
group as a kind of epistemic community and we might
refer to ourselves more specically as an eco-epistemic
community.
Here epistemic relates to a compendium of shared per-
spective and knowledge that is offered as having particular
relevance to a major cultural challenge or opportunity.
Some scholars may relate this epistemic concept to that of
an expanded version of what Thomas Kuhn referred to as a
scientic paradigm (see Fuller, 2000). Incidentally, we have
chosen not to include an explicit notion of paradigm shift,
but note that our version of that notion is implicit through-
out. In other words, what we here dene as ecogeny has
ipped from being a suppressed theme within modernism
to become a key theme within post-modernism.
Many non-living as well as ecogenic systems can exist in
more than one phase, state or topological domain of attrac-
tion as the ecologist C S Holling has long emphasized.
After being harangued by Holling for many years to provide
him with Great Lakes data that would demonstrate ecolog-
ical phase shifts, one of us, Regier, nally asked himself
the question: If phase shifts have occurred, where and how
could we look for evidence of such events? He decided to
search for limits to the adaptive self-organization of a sh
association (considered as a holon) to an array of intensify-
ing stresses by humans in the larger environmental holon,
and then examine whether another phase self-organized
beyond a limit or threshold. Sure enough, the evidence
was there, though it may not have been fully consistent
with Hollings expectations. (See section titled Benthic and
Pelagic Attractors in Ecosystems for more information on
this issue.)
Researchers on natural and cultural systems once used
single phase, deterministic, cybernetic systems as models.
Any phase shift was then perceived as a catastrophic failure
of pre-programmed cybernetic adaptiveness. Researchers
424 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
now perceive natural/cultural systems to be self-organizing
and morphogenetic, and some phase shifts are just part of
the adaptive, emergent capability of the evolving system.
(Here morphogenetic implies that the forms or structures
as morphs as well as the related processes of living things
emerge through self-organizational genesis.) The death of
a living system is an ultimate kind of phase shift when all
adaptive capabilities are over-ridden, because the stresses
either are too intense or act too rapidly.
When ecogenic realities are changing rapidly, as is now
the case in many parts of the biosphere, one might expect
adaptive and emergent phase shifts to be common, and
catastrophic shifts all the way to systemic death to occur
as well.
Selected examples are sketched below to demonstrate
that phase shift events now occur ubiquitously. We note
again that phase shifts may be referred to as ip-ops
between organizational states as in discussion of major
back and forth changes in the earths climate that have
seemingly occurred suddenly in the past. We start with non-
living systems, then turn to living systems in which cultural
features are not emphasized, and then to living systems
in which cultural features are emphasized. But we do not
address unnatural things like any divine acts of deities or
things for which no empirical data are conceivable.
EXAMPLES OF PHASES AND PHASE SHIFTS
IN BIOPHYSICAL SYSTEMS
Different Phases of Water
Everyone knows that water can occur in different phases,
e.g., liquid, solid and gas. When some research physicists
focused on phase shift phenomena with water, their model
implied the existence of a fourth phase, under special
circumstances. They called it the gaquid phase and found
that it materialized under the expected articial combination
of temperature and pressure.
When a liquid water system cools through 0

C it freezes
to become a solid water system. The detailed features of the
freezing process are anything but deterministic in a simple
way, when viewed at a molecular scale. In nature, it is
generally not possible to predict either precisely how and
when liquid water will freeze during a cooling regime or
the crystalline form of ice that results.
The freezing phenomenon itself is of major importance
to those aquatic living things which have to nd some
way to adapt anatomically and/or physiologically and/or
behaviorally to freezing. Such adaptations in turn may
be perceived to involve phase shifts in anatomy and/or
physiology and/or behavior.
At a more macroscopic level, the kind of ice that forms in
a stream is important ecologically. Anchor ice, frazzle ice
and surface ice have quite different implications for brook
trout, for example. From an ecological perspective, each of
these involves a different kind of phase shift from liquid to
solid.
Different Phases of Flow Dynamics
When water ows at low velocities across a smooth surface,
it may move as a sheet with laminar ow; at higher veloci-
ties it may ow in complex turbulent swirls. Turbulent ow
in turn may occur as a number of different sub-phases.
Researchers in uid dynamics have focused much scien-
tic attention on: what determines which phase of ow
regime will occur in a particular context; the macroscopic
features of the threshold between the phases; and the more
microscopic details of the phase shift process itself. Their
understanding, condensed in the form of a Reynolds Num-
ber, allows them to predict quite accurately a phase shift
between turbulent and laminar ow within a pure liquid.
The more particles or lumps in the system, the less accu-
rate any forecast based on such a pure system Reynolds
Number will be.
The issue of phases and phase shifts in the ow regime is
of key importance to aquatic organisms. While migrating,
for example, salmon may use a standing wave in turbulent
ow to catapult themselves over an obstruction in a river.
To rest, a sh may select a site of laminar ow downstream
from an obstruction and adjust its ns so that it rests lightly
on the bottom.
One dramatic example of such phase shifts in uids is
the well-dened transition from conductive to convective
heat transfer. If a uid is contained between a hot and a
cold boundary, heat transfer will occur through the uid.
Consider thin soup in a pot on a stove as an example.
For small temperature differences between the surfaces, the
heat transfer is by random molecular motion, conduction.
However as the temperature increases, a critical point
is reached at which a new phase emerges, convection.
With convection the uid molecules self-organize to move
together in rolls or Benard cells as coherent wholes. As the
temperature difference between hot and cold boundaries
increases, the original conguration of Benard cells may
self-organize into a more complex conguration. With each
phase shift, more heat is transferred, per unit time, than in
the previous phase.
At a human scale, avoiding the phase shift from conduc-
tion to convection is at the heart of the design of double
pane and triple pane windows. These windows are designed
so that convective heat transfer cannot emerge, thus limiting
the heat loss through the window to that of conduction.
At a regional scale, on clear summer days with a partic-
ular kind of atmospheric stratication, the Suns warming
of the land surface leads to warming of the overlying air.
Bubbles of such warm air of decreased density may then
form spontaneously and episodically to rise and erupt into
PHASE SHIFTS OR FLIP-FLOPS IN COMPLEX SYSTEMS 425
an overlying cooler layer; these bubbles of warm clear air
may transform into cumulus clouds within the cooler layer.
In particular locales, successive uffy clouds that emerge
may be evenly spaced in the drifting upper layer.
At the global scale, the emergence of large convection
cells in the atmosphere, called Hadley cells (see Hadley
Circulation, Volume 1), helps to transfer heat from the
equator to the pole, thus reducing north-south temperature
differences between the equator and the poles.
Many kinds of phase shifts may occur within the hydro-
sphere and the atmosphere, since these spheres consist of
uid components with different properties acting and inter-
acting across boundary layers under the in uence of solar
radiation.
Flows in Water Courses and Flood Plains
Rivers carve water courses or channels out of the substrate
to accommodate their ows during most days of a year,
but not during high ow rates when ooding occurs. It is
important to note that the course that a river cuts through
a landscape is usually not large enough to include the
ows of normal annual oods. The area known as the
oodplain and its valley in turn have also been created,
at least in part, by the continually shifting meandering
river course, and especially by its oods. Hydrologists
do not fully understand why a river self-organizes as a
biphasal phenomenon, with one phase for small to moderate
ows, and another phase for large ows. But hydrologists
have inferred generalizations about the channels and ood
plains of particular aquatic systems that have adapted over
long periods of time to the underlying geology, under the
in uence of climatic regimes that have operated in quite
predictable ways.
A river channel, ood plain and the larger valley are
always dynamic; they may approach a steady state under
conditions like those sketched above, but they are never
in equilibrium with their surroundings. For example, a
river never stops dissolving and eroding its substrates and
walls. Living organisms, especially large plants and animals
that eat the plants that live within and beside a river,
strongly in uence the self-organizing hydrological activities
and usually have a taming in uence on the waters, to the
advantage of the organisms.
Cultural practices in a watershed strongly modify the
temporal and spatial features of the natural ooding regime,
e.g., by putting a river into an engineered channel, or by
cutting down forests farther upstream. In effect a ooding
phase shift occurs more frequently during a year if the
watershed becomes ecologically degraded or is developed
inappropriately, and the river has not had enough decades
to adapt to those changes. Thus conventional unsustainable
development has led to more frequent and more rapid phase
shifts of the ow regime, and thus to more frequent and
intense periods of turbulent stress for the living system of
a river. Such a river may be perceived to be angry and may
not approximate benign steady-state conditions at any time
of year.
Phenology and Seasonal Phase Shifts
In temperate regions as in the Great Lakes Basin, the annual
cycle involves a spring and summer phase that is dominated
trophically by composers that use the sunlight s energy for
photosynthesis, e.g., plants, and a fall and winter phase
dominated by decomposers that use the energy of organic
matter derived from photosynthesis and stored in summer,
e.g., animals and fungi. Each of these phases and their
transitions are intricately choreographed in what could be
called a pristine, old growth state of the Basin ecosystem.
The term is extended here beyond its familiar use as in
old growth forest, to mean any ecosystem that has evolved
its own complexity under benign conditions over extensive
periods of time. Unsustainable development disrupts the
natural self-organizing processes, so that the sequential
features within phases and particularly during the phase
shifts become less predictable, from the perspective of the
extant species.
In warmer regions, the climate may include a wet season
and a dry season. Cyclical changes, somewhat similar to
those sketched above occur here, too.
Benthic and Pelagic Attractors in Ecosystems
Moderately deep natural aquatic ecosystems that are not
much in uenced by technologically careless humans usu-
ally have clear waters and a biotic association or benthos
that is linked strongly to the bottom of the waters. In effect
a benthic attractor or self-organizing system then emerges
to serve its own ends, for example by preying on the open
water association or pelagos to keep the water above it
transparent and by hoarding phosphates and other nutrients
that deprive pelagic organisms of these resources. Ecolog-
ically, the benthic association has similarities to the old
growth state of primeval forests or grasslands. There are
long-lived, large, sessile or sedentary plants, invertebrates
and vertebrates with some of the latter migrating annually in
stereotyped patterns. The dominant species of the benthos
may be termed K-selected (see Box 1).
Unfortunately it happens that nearly all the cultural
stresses imposed by humans act to impair and incapacitate
such a benthic attractor. Near the surface in moderately
deep waters, a pelagic attractor, mostly with r-selected
species (see Box 1), may then self-organize because ample
nutrients then occur in those waters. A burgeoning pelagic
association may then act so as to further suppress the
benthic attractor already harmed by unsustainable cultural
practices. This is a case of positive feedback, which occurs
426 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Box 1 The meanings of the r and K terms
The r and K symbols originated in a particular formula
for the physical growth of an organism, but have taken
on a metaphorical life of their own in discussions of
species successions as related to phase shifts. In an
early successional stage, as in a cultivated eld that is
reverting to nature or with the herbaceous vegetation
in a temperate forest in spring, r species that are small,
short-lived, fast growing, early maturing and tolerant of
uctuating environmental conditions generally thrive
and reproduce rst. These are gradually replaced in
late spring by activation of K species that are large,
long-lived, slow growing, late maturing and intolerant
of uctuating environmental conditions. Within phase
changes, the switch from dominance by one type to
dominance by another is generally not complete (see
rK Strategies, Volume 2).
commonly in an early stage of the self-organization of a
phase of a living system. With further organization, neg-
ative feedbacks are generated within the evolving new
phase to counter-balance the positive feedbacks, or even
to exceed the positive feedbacks, as in some over-mature
senile, or old growth manifestation of a phase in an
ecosystem.
The terms oligotrophic (few food items) and eutrophic
(many food items) are commonly used to denote aquatic
systems in which benthic and pelagic attractors, respec-
tively, are dominant. These may be taken to be code words,
since much more than trophic status is involved in olig-
otrophic type and eutrophic type systems.
In Regier and Kay (1996) and Kay and Regier (1999),
we have focused attention on the kind of phase shifts
between states that are dominated by the benthic and the
pelagic attractors in the three basins of Lake Erie. Other
researchers are taking a comparable approach to shallow or
lentic waters of coastal wetlands and deeper or lotic waters
as in rift lakes.
With respect to the whole gamut of aquatic ecosys-
tems, there may be more kinds of attractors, and related
phase shifts. One such state, that of a saprobien system,
is particularly objectionable to humans in warmer parts of
the world. European researchers who studied the effects
of sewage outfalls on rivers starting a century ago rst
described a saprobien system. Just downstream from an
outfall, sewage decomposes aerobically and this process
may quickly exhaust the oxygen in the water. With far-
ther movement downstream, the aerobic organisms die and
anaerobic organisms become dominant. Ecological produc-
tion by anaerobes may generate foul smelling gases based
on reduced forms of sulfur, carbon and nitrogen, as also
is the case with poorly managed cesspools. Farther down-
stream, the demand for oxygen by the biota can be met
by the slow diffusion of oxygen from the atmosphere into
the water, and this marks the downstream boundary of the
saprobien system.
The saprobien system bears some resemblance to the
decomposer association that forms on the bottom of strongly
eutrophic lake waters of moderate depth.
Excessive enrichment of waters with plant nutrients may
cause more severe eutrophication as hypertrophy. In rela-
tively quiescent waters there may then emerge a surface
association with oating and decomposing mats of algae,
fungus, slimes and bacteria together with blooms of toxic
algae where the matting is not continuous.
Caddy (1993) has observed ecological phenomena in
enclosed and semi-enclosed seas subjected to unsustainable
development that are similar to the phase shifts that we and
others have inferred for freshwaters.
FROM GREYBROWN TO GREENBLUE
TECHNOLOGY
In the past, hydrological engineers were expected to correct
the destructive behavior of streams that were excessively
turbulent because of abuse upon abuse to which these
streams and their watersheds had been subjected. Though
the ecological causes of the destructiveness of an abused
stream were understood in the mid-19th century by George
Perkins Marsh (see Mar sh, Geor ge Per kins, Volume 3)
and others, there was not then an adequate planning or reg-
ulatory capability (see following section) to correct enough
of these abuses at their sources to permit the stream to
recover its gentler features. So the engineers resorted to
dealing with local effects where some crisis had erupted,
often by creating an ugly new water course with concrete
and steel and enclosing it with tall fencing because people
who fell into raging waters in such a channel were likely
to drown. This concrete and steel greybrown technol-
ogy exacerbated the turbulent adverse effects downstream,
which then called for more concrete and steel with more
muddy water, etc. This is an example of positive feedback
within anti-ecological technology.
A phase shift in planning and management of such
human-altered streams occurred when the governance pro-
cesses switched so that a watershed ecosystem approach
came to use natures way; greenblue technology. This
phase shift involves compatible phase changes in the disci-
plines of engineering, of planning and in the expectations
of affected residents. Such a comprehensive phase shift
might be resisted by a government administration com-
mitted to encouraging the production and sale of concrete
and steel, say, and to providing remunerative contracts for
conventional engineering and construction rms. Govern-
ment patronage, with the help of greybrown bureaucrats,
has long funded ecosystemically abusive engineering works
related to harbors and streams. The institutional connections
between a government agency, an industry and the relevant
profession or interactive set of professions that led to such
PHASE SHIFTS OR FLIP-FLOPS IN COMPLEX SYSTEMS 427
autocatalysis or positive feedback has been referred to as
an iron triangle in the US.
With streams of the Great Lakes Basin, we appear
to be in the throes of a phase shift toward an ecosys-
tem/watershed/landscape approach, i.e., to greenblue
technology.
A CRUCIAL CULTURAL PHASE SHIFT AT A
GLOBAL LEVEL
As has become increasingly obvious in many United
Nations (UN) conferences since 1970, a crucial policy ini-
tiative on food, environment, population and development
anywhere in the world has been to facilitate the self-
empowerment of women (see Ecofeminism, Volume 5).
Eco-feminists can explain much better than we can the
necessity for a cultural phase shift toward a status for
women that they prefer and must have. This involves a
systemic change in the status of men, or at least of some
men. According to women leaders of this movement, such
a phase shift should not be a zero-sum game, in that few
women want to compete directly with men to the disadvan-
tage of men. Instead the shift should move from a culturally
impoverished state of male dominance to a richer and better
state of cross gender partnership.
At the UN Conference on Population and Development
in Cairo in 1994, for example, strong resistance to such a
phase shift came from male clergy who propounded narrow,
fundamentalistic versions of the JudeoChristianMuslim
family of religions. Though they may raise important ethical
issues, such clerics and their male followers may not be
disinterested personally since they may lose status and
power with such a shift. Many men who are not constrained
by these fundamentalisms are making common cause with
self-empowering women.
What are some of the implications of a gender-related
phase shift for Great Lakes Basin ecosystems, say? The
phase shift from the greybrown to greenblue technology
sketched above may well be due in part to the increased
participation in recent decades by women in all aspects
of research, planning and management related to those
streams.
Twenty years ago one of us, Regier, supervised the the-
sis research on the sh of the Credit River (near Toronto)
by Deborah Martin, now Deborah Martin-Downs (Martin,
1984). She had learned to identify all sh in all life stages so
that it would seldom be necessary to kill and preserve spec-
imens. So she had data but few specimens, and sometimes
could not respond in the usual way to a query whether she
really had seen a specimen of a particular species at a par-
ticular locale. Though there were raised eyebrows and some
testy queries during her oral examination, nobody consid-
ered the absence of dead specimens as a serious weakness
of her method, and all respected her ethics. Such ethics may
require that high expertise in recognizing sh species in the
eld be demonstrated for skeptical colleagues.
In the Great Lakes Basin since the 1950s, some, and
perhaps most of the key environmental victories have been
won with leadership by women. Many of the women were
unpaid volunteers or underpaid activists. Mostly it has been
well paid men who then led with the implementation.
Men should participate in correcting the degradation now
so obvious in ecosystems everywhere. Of course, there were
always individual men who were not part of the degrading
culture. Similarly there were women who were willingly
part of it, and may occasionally have been leaders of the
degrading progressive modernism (see also Ecofeminism,
Volume 5).
INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND CORRECTION
OF AN EARLIER PHASE SHIFT
In the UN conferences of the 1970s (on food in 1970, on
the environment in 1972 and on population in 1974), some
attention was focused on the injustices directed toward
indigenous peoples as a consequence of invasions of their
lands and waters by modern progressives. This theme
became much more pronounced in the 1990s UN confer-
ences on the environment and development, population and
women. Agenda 21, issued by the 1992 UN Conference on
Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, has a
strong section on indigenous peoples.
With respect to Great Lakes Basin waters, aboriginals
non-ceded rights are coming to be recognized again, very
belatedly. Since many aboriginals, both women and men,
are re-committing themselves and their people to nature
stewardship, this process of re-empowerment should be
welcomed.
As with empowerment of women, re-empowerment of
indigenous peoples should enrich our impoverished culture.
Tolerance of diverse cultures may be as desirable as biodi-
versity. The phase shift toward fair status for indigenous or
native peoples is not yet assured in the Great Lakes Basin
generally, or elsewhere in the world. Non-native guardians
of these waters are committed to partnerships with the
native guardians (see also Indigenous Knowledge, Peo-
ples and Sustainable Pr actice, Volume 5; Religion and
Environment Among Nor th Amer ican Fir st Nations,
Volume 5).
FROM MODERNISM THROUGH
POST-MODERNISM TO WHAT?
Some thirty years ago the Western World apparently passed
beyond the centuries-long era of modern progress, in a
massive cultural phase shift that is still underway. The
management guru, Drucker (1989) has sketched this shift in
428 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
ways that many would consider brash, but after publishing
widely acknowledged seminal works for over 50 years;
some continuing brashness from Drucker may be tolerable.
Druckers ecological perspective on all of this emerged
out of the new discipline of business administration, and
is similar to what we refer to here as ecogenic.
One of us, Regier (1995), has listed some 15 transitional
phenomena that occurred in or about 1968, at about the time
inferred by Drucker to be the height of land between the
conceptual basin of the modern era and the conceptual basin
of the new era. The latter era is still apparently nameless;
though some people refer to it as post-industrial or post-
modern.
Stronger commitments to deontological ethics (ethics
based on a deep shared sense of what is right and
what is wrong with respect to duty) may increasingly
be trumping modernist commitments to utilitarian ethics;
ethics based on the greatest good for the greatest num-
ber. Integrity may be a code word for such a deon-
tological commitment. In the 1960s social integration,
toward a new and desirable cultural integrity, was directed
toward correcting racial and gender inequities in West-
ern countries. Since then, integration of many indigenous
peoples into emerging political systems has been lead-
ing toward a mosaic landscape integrity that is apparent
politically, culturally and ecologically, from an ecogenic
perspective.
Agenda 21, that outcome of the 1992 UN Conference on
Environment and Development in Rio, includes deontologi-
cal as well as utilitarian commitments to global programs of
several kinds, e.g., to preserve biodiversity. Thus a deonto-
logical commitment to biodiversity concerning Great Lakes
Basin waters links to a compatible global commitment.
Such connections should be recognized and be supported
by strong institutional links, as has been attempted at the
federal Canadian level. Local stream stewards, say, could
draw encouragement from the sense that they are neces-
sary parts of a global ethical commitment to ecological
integrity.
CONCLUSIONS
Nine kinds of systemic phase shifts have been sketched
above, all in a conceptual context of dynamic self-organi-
zing ecogenic systems. We hope that this evidence sufces
to make the point that such phase shifts are now ubiquitous
in all the ve versions of eco-studies to which we have
referred here. If so, our educational, research, practice
and governance initiatives should more clearly reect that
awareness.
Practically, a precautionary principle invoked in the con-
text of a commitment to sustainable and responsible use
implies that informed judgement be exercised to avert phase
shifts to undesirable states. Once a phase shift has occurred,
efforts to reverse the shift may be very costly and take
much time because of the effects of systemic inertia or
hysteresis.
There is, as yet, no strong empirical evidence to support
optimism about the 21st Century. The new era, following
the cultural phase shift sketched above, may play out
worse than the progressive modern era that is now behind
us. For example, it may turn out that our environmental
and cultural reforms will have been too little and too
late; and we humans may trigger ips into a succession
of less desirable states of kinds that we have not yet
encountered. Ecogenically there may then be no way back
to something resembling an earlier manifestation of our
biospheric home.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
An earlier version of this essay appeared in: Stream Cor-
ridors: Adaptive Management and Design, Proceedings of
the Second International Conference on Natural Channel
Systems, March 14, 1999, Niagara Falls, ON. Credit Val-
ley Conservation Authority, Georgetown, ON. Patti Young,
coordinator of that 1999 CD publication, has granted per-
mission to publish the present revised version.
REFERENCES
Caddy, J F (1993) Towards a Comparative Evaluation of Human
Impacts on Fishery Ecosystems of Enclosed and Semi-enclosed
Seas, Rev. Fish. Sci., 1(1), 5795.
Drucker, P F (1989) The New Realities, Harper and Row, New
York.
Fuller, S (2000) Thomas Kuhn: a Philosophical History for Our
Times, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Haas, P M (1999) Social Constructivism and the Evolution of
Multilateral Environmental Governance, in Globalization and
Governance, eds A Prakash and J A Hart, Routledge, London.
Kay, J J and Regier, H A (1999) An Ecosystemic Two-phase
Attractor Approach to Lake Eries Ecology, in State of Lake
Erie (SOLE) Past, Present and Future, eds M Munawar,
T Edsall, and I F Munawar, Ecovision World Monograph Ser-
ies, Backhuys Publications, Leiden.
Koestler, A and Smithies, J R (1969) Beyond Reductionism, Hut-
chinson, London.
Martin, D K (1984) The Fishes of the Credit River: Cultural
Effects in Recent Decades, M.Sc. Thesis, Department of Zool-
ogy, University of Toronto.
Rapoport, A (1986) General System Theory: Essential Concepts
and Applications, Abacus Books, Cambridge, MA.
Regier, H A (1995) Ecosystem Integrity in a Context of Ecos-
tudies as Related to the Great Lakes Region, in Perspectives
on Ecological Integrity, eds L Westra and J Lemons, Kluwer
Academic Publications, Dordrecht.
Regier, H A and Kay, J J (1996) An Heuristic Model of Trans-
formations of the Aquatic Ecosystems of the Great Lake St.
Lawrence River Basin, J. Aquat. Ecosyst. Health, 5, 321.
POLITICAL MOVEMENTS/IDEOLOGIES AND THE ENVIRONMENT 429
FURTHER READING
Caley, M T and Sawada, D (1994) Mindscapes: the Epistemology
of Magoroh Maruyama, Gordon and Breach, London.
Kay, J J (1984) Self-Organization in Living Systems, Ph.D. The-
sis, Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo,
Waterloo.
Rapport, D J and Regier, H A (1995) Disturbance and Stress
Effects on Ecological Systems, in Complex Ecology: The Part-
Whole Relations in Ecosystems, eds B C Patten and S E Jorg-
ensen, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
Regier, H A, Jones, M L, Addis, J, and Donahue, M (1999) Great
Lakes St. Lawrence River Basin Assessments, in Biore-
gional Assessments: Science at the Crossroads of Management
and Policy, eds K N Johnson, F Swanson, M Herring, and
S Greene, Island Press, Washington, DC.
Regier, H A, Welcomme, R L, Steedman, R J, and Henderson,
H F (1989) Rehabilitation of Degraded River Ecosystems,
Can. Special Publication Fish Aquat. Sci., 106, 8697.
Steedman, R J and Regier, H A (1987) Ecosystem Science for
the Great Lakes: Perspectives on Degradative Transformations,
Can. J. Fish Aquat. Sci., 44(Supplement 2), 95130.
Philosophy, Environmental
see Environmental Philosophy:
Phenomenological Ecology (Volume 5)
Pinchot, Gifford
see Environmental Movement the Rise of
Non-government Organizations (NGOs)
(Volume 5)
Political Movements/
Ideologies and the
Environment
David Pepper
Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK
There is no one, politically uniform, environmental move-
ment in the West, but a series of movements and groups.
They represent a massive growth in popular concern about
the negative ecological consequences of economic and
technological development since the 1960s. Initial worries,
like those over the impact of agricultural chemicals on the
environment, soon broadened to include all pollution caused
by economic and technological development, and the issue
of population growth, consumerism and resource use. This
developed into a challenge to the whole notion of progress
implied in Western development since the Enlightenment,
and to industrial society and its view of social justice.
After some early impact on policy in the 1970s, there
was a period of retrenchment from environmental legis-
lation in the 1980s by Western governments. They were
in uenced by the arguments of business and industry, which
in a climate of increasing global competitiveness saw envi-
ronmental and social spending as brakes on ef ciency and
pro ts. While this climate still prevails, the of cial stance of
governments since the 1992 Rio Conference has been that
the interests of pro table business and environmental pro-
tection are compatible. Hence environmental sustainability
principles are supposed to be incorporated into all main pol-
icy areas under the development model known as ecological
modernization.
Environmental movements have reacted to these trends
by developing political parties, pressure groups and other
approaches. These have sought to in uence government
from the outside via public opinion, and also to become part
of policy formulation from the inside. In the 1990s there has
also been a revival of direct action, which sometimes breaks
the law, by environmentalist factions who are disillusioned
with the democratic processes.
Two approaches to environmental politics have devel-
oped. Reformism seeks to change society substantially to
achieve environmentally sustainable development, but not
to the extent of abandoning capitalism and the modern sci-
enti c, technological and managerial expertise on which
mainstream development is based. Radical environmental-
ism, however, does ultimately wish to radically change
or remove capitalism, replacing it with forms of localized
development that prioritize social need, direct grass-roots
democracy, and environmental protection rather than eco-
nomic and technological growth.
Mainstream environmentalist political ideology, there-
fore, re ects these currents, drawing on radical and re-
formist political traditions going back at least as far as the
18th century. Reformism re ects conservative, liberal and
democratic socialist traditions. Environmental radicalism is
especially in uenced by anarchist and revolutionary social-
ist traditions, mingled in with some conservative think-
ing. The result is a very mixed and sometimes incoherent
ideology, whose underlying current re ects either an eco-
centric approach which prioritizes the needs of natural eco-
systems, or a human-centered (anthropocentric) approach
which prioritizes human social, economic and cultural con-
siderations. The fact that mainstream environmentalism
430 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
re ects all these in uences and cross-currents could be seen
strategically as both a strength and a weakness.
THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENTS
ORIGINS AND CONCERNS
Everyday political discourse now frequently refers to the
environmental movement, a late twentieth-century man-
ifestation of widespread concern in the West about the
negative ecological consequences of economic and techno-
logical development. Strictly speaking such references are
only partly accurate. First, there is no one, coherent envi-
ronmental movement, as much of the rest of this entry will
con rm. Rather, there is a whole complex of movements
and ideologies, within and outside conventional politics,
expressing environmental concern and proposing social and
political solutions for it.
Secondly, environmental movements did not originate in
the late 20th century; they are rooted in earlier movements.
In America, the 19th century wilderness preservation move-
ment, inspired by John Muir, Henry David Thoreau and
Ralph Waldo Emerson, gave rise to the Sierra Club, from
which in 1969 a group of more radical conservationists
splintered to produce Friends of the Earth. In Europe, the
National Trust, one of the UK s major contemporary envi-
ronmental preservation groups, was founded in 1895. The
founding group was inspired by challenging, questioning
attitudes towards industrialism and progress posed by peo-
ple such as John Ruskin and William Morris: it also drew on
feelings for natural landscape inspired by Romantic gures
such as William Wordsworth. Other direct in uences on
today s environmentalism include the development of the
science of ecology, whose leading gures included 18th
and 19th century naturalists such as Gilbert White, Charles
Lyell, Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel. The work done on
population by Thomas Malthus is also directly re ected in
the modern movement, as is the in uence of 19th and early
20th century anarchists and utopian socialists (see Political
Systems and the Environment: Utopianism, Volume 5).
Furthermore, in between the World Wars there were vig-
orous movements in the West showing concern for nature
and for healthy lifestyles, including vegetarianism. These
were intertwined with both left and right-wing (including
fascist) political movements, among both the masses and
intellectuals (for a description of the roots of the environ-
mental movement, see Pepper, 1996).
However, it is true to say that environmental movements,
which started to emerge in the 1960s, have shown greater
scope, range and connectivity than any previous environ-
mental movement. This was inevitable, given: (a) the global
advance of modernizing societies and economies: (b) the
development of instantaneous and ubiquitous global com-
munications networks: and (c) the unprecedented power
of post-war technologies to create alarming environmental
changes. As sociologists Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens
emphasize, today s society is exposed to unprecedented
risks and uncertainties, whose origins it is often dif -
cult to unravel, determine and control (Beck, 1992, 1995).
These include environmental risks of (particularly Western)
society s own making.
The rst of these to trigger widespread alarm, marking
the dawn of modern environmentalism, was that caused
by the chemical substances used in agriculture. They were
identi ed in Rachel Carson s iconoclastic work, Silent
Spring (1962) (see Carson, Rachel Louise, Volume 5).
Before this book, American and European conventional
wisdom held that chemical pesticides and herbicides were
an unalloyed blessing: helping developed countries under
capitalism to repel Malthusian spectres of famine and want,
and build that steadily-advancing material prosperity on
which the American Dream and post-war European recov-
ery were based. The questioning, sparked by Carson s book,
of this conventional wisdom, and the subsequent wave of
popular skepticism about scienti c advances, technological
experts and the motives of big corporations, fed into what
is now described as a condition of post-modernity , which
some see as the prevailing mode in Western thought.
In it, all those things enshrined in the notion of progress
adopted since the Enlightenment have been questioned and
often denounced. Of course, there always was a critical,
counter-cultural minority current in the West accompanying
industrial and democratic revolutions, and its 1960s expres-
sions in the hippie, civil rights, anti-nuclear and feminist
movements fed directly into the environmental movement.
Many sociologists see all these together as a coherent wave
of new social movements forming the basis of post-
modern politics. New social movements are inspired by
single issues, but they also express the unease, disillusion-
ment and aspirations of the newly emerged (professional,
especially) middle-classes. Some commentators think that
as such, they have supplanted the old basis of political
discourse, in worker-capitalist relations and struggles over
distributing material wealth.
The concern with pesticides soon widened to embrace
all environmental pollution caused by modern technologies,
including nuclear power and weapons, and then in the
1980s and 1990s, the internal combustion engine, gene
modi cation, factory farming and the like. In the late
1960s and 1970s, too, there was growing questioning of
mass production and mass consumption, combined with
a wave of near-hysteria about human population growth,
particularly growth in the third world. Thus emerged the
neo-Malthusian limits to growth school (Meadows et al.,
1972, 1992; Hardin, 1968, 1974; Ehrlich, 1969; Ehrlich
and Ehrlich, 1990). This contradicted the widely held views
that materially based economic growth could continue ad
innitum, and that levels of af uence enjoyed in the West
could be attained by all the world s population (which
POLITICAL MOVEMENTS/IDEOLOGIES AND THE ENVIRONMENT 431
appeared to be increasing exponentially). Limits to such
growth were imposed by earths carrying capacity by
constraints such as the inability of eco-systems to provide
enough resources to feed growth or to soak up the pollution
associated with it.
Based on such arguments, early environmental move-
ments successfully prevailed on American and European
governments to legislate tighter environmental standards in
the 1970s, and to set up agencies and procedures designed
to protect the environment. In America, particularly, groups
mounted successful legal challenges to development likely
to endanger animal and plant species survival, grounding
them in an eco-centric philosophy which said that nature
has intrinsic value: value beyond its usefulness to humans.
This was all done in a prevailing political-economic climate
where the legitimacy of state spending and market interven-
tion to mitigate the worst social effects of the free market
was upheld by a signicant majority of politicians. Hence,
if business and industry now had to spend some potential
prots on procedures, processes and technologies to protect
the environment, this was regarded as proper and necessary.
However in the 1980s and 1990s, in the face of intensify-
ing global competition and pressures on prot margins, the
philosophy of economic laissez-faire took on new polit-
ical vitality. Neo-liberal governments in North America,
Australia and Europe began anew to prioritize economic
growth and to side with industry in regarding regulations
and tax-funded public spending on high levels of social and
environmental protection as undesirable business overhead
costs which must be reduced. Consequently a retrenchment
phase began, with relaxation of regulation, and downward
pressures on environmental protection spending. Although
ofcially such attitudes have now changed, their momen-
tum persists in anti-environmentalism, where, for instance,
some business corporations form unofcial coalitions (e.g.,
the European Round Table or the Global Climate Coalition)
specically to lobby against pressures from environmental
lobbies. They challenge, for instance, the validity of sci-
entic research which suggests that human-induced global
warming is signicantly increasing.
At the same time, the 1990s saw a new phase where envi-
ronmentalist concerns seem to have been taken on board by
mainstream politics. Nearly all of the worlds governments
were ofcially represented at the 1992 United Nations Con-
ference on Environment and Development; the Rio Con-
ference. And very many of them signed that conferences
declarations, amounting to broad and unspecied commit-
ment to the notion that environmental protection must be
integrated into the mission of universalizing material pros-
perity a mission still to be achieved, however, through
global marketization and the search for economic growth.
Hence the idea of materially-led universal development was
not abandoned, but the caveat was added that it must be sus-
tainable, meaning that the resources needed for it should not
be destroyed, and the options open to future generations
to live at least as well as the present one should not be
foreclosed. The development model, which is supposed to
enable this is that of ecological modernization (see Political
Systems and the Environment: Utopianism, Volume 5).
During this phase of environmental concern, sustainabil-
ity objectives have been written into mainstream policy
programs of the leading industrial nations, intending that
they should be integrated within economic and social objec-
tives. This clearly means that the limits to growth schools
major premise, of incompatibility between growth and envi-
ronmental protection, has been rejected in favor of its
obverse the idea that the two are necessary to each other.
As these phases of environmental concern have pro-
gressed, the emphases in the mainstream of environmental
movements have altered. The initial focus was on sin-
gle issues, but quickly this developed into the skeptical
questioning, mentioned above, of industrialism and moder-
nity. This put environmental pressure groups generally at
odds with the establishment and the political mainstream.
Through the 1980s, however, they began to acquire more
inuence, augmented by electoral success in some Euro-
pean countries. During and after the Rio Conference, some
groups (e.g., Friends of the Earth) gained semi-ofcial sta-
tus as non-government organizations (NGO). As such, they
make formal presentations to the UN Commission for Sus-
tainable Development, and in some cases are incorporated
onto the panels of local Agenda 21 organizations set up in
towns and cities in the wake of Rio.
At the same time as environmental groups have devel-
oped their expertise and mainstream inuence, their under-
lying analyses of causes and effects of environmental
problems have often become more sophisticated. They are
more likely to highlight problems like the internal growth
dynamic of capitalism and its inherent tendency to take only
partial and short-term perspectives on problems, the appar-
ently unavoidably uneven nature of development as global
modernization, the inextricable connection between envi-
ronmental problems and social inequity and injustice and
the way in which Western afuent lifestyles leave substan-
tial ecological footprints in third-world countries (e.g., toxic
waste produced in the West being shipped to the third world
for dumping or processing). The overall political direction
of such a critique may point towards radical social change,
beyond that envisaged in even strong approaches to eco-
logical modernization. This has uncomfortable implications
for Western mainstream politics.
Hence, late-1990s environmental movements followed
two paths. Some groups, or factions within groups, per-
sisted along the channels of conventional political action,
such as running for ofce, lobbying and advising govern-
ment and other bodies. Other groups and factions began
a new wave of direct action (both peaceful and violent)
and civil disobedience, intending to block developments
432 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
such as the growth of road trafc into residential areas,
the building of new roads, nuclear waste dumping, trials of
genetically-modied crops, or foxhunting and other animal
abuse. In some of these protests, notably over major road
development at Twyford Down and Newbury in the UK,
such eco-anarchist protestors have been supported by many
middle-class citizens living conventional lifestyles. The for-
mer have been concerned about general environmental and
social principles, while the latter have been representing
their own limited, local interests (the NIMBY not-in-
my-back-yard syndrome). What unites these unlikely bed-
fellows is (a) shared concern about quality-of-life issues,
including environmental quality (b) deepening conviction
that commitment to protable, efcient, competitive busi-
ness should not be prioritized above all other social-
economic policy considerations (c) increasing skepticism
and frustration with Western democracy, on the grounds
that it is more responsive to the needs of international busi-
ness lobbies than to those of the ordinary citizen. This last
concern is responded to in some areas of EU policy, for
instance rural development, where resources are being put
into developing bottom up, community-led initiatives. It is
also reected in the growing number of academic texts con-
cerned with environmental democracy (e.g., Mason, 1999).
TYPES OF ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT
Environmental movements includes green parties, pressure
groups within mainstream political parties, non-party pres-
sure groups, direct action groups, local community groups,
communes and individuals exercising lifestyle
choices. Connelly and Smith (1999) stress how the eth-
ical underpinnings of these groups are extremely diverse
and difcult to reconcile as one movement. They iden-
tify New Zealand as the location of the rst green party,
founded in 1972. The second was started in the UK in
1973, but the most prominent in electoral terms has been
Die Gr unen. This began from community groups in West
Germany in 1980 and achieved government in coalition
with social democrats in 1998. Electoral success appears
to depend very much on the voting system adopted, hence
UK Greens had 15% of the vote in the 1989 European
Parliament elections but took no seats on the basis of a
rst-past-the-post system. In 1999 however, when propor-
tional representation was adopted, the Greens took two seats
from a much lower percentage vote.
However, the constant problems, which beset mainstream
politicians of principle, have also dogged Green parties.
In attaining and widening electoral support, or in actual
government, principles have usually had to be compromised
and this has opened internal splits between pragmatists, or
realists, and fundamentalists. Such splits have been very
public in Germany, leading to the resignation of leading
Grunen members and the vilication of many who stayed,
but they have been mirrored elsewhere. Ongoing internal
debates and squabbles have occurred on such issues as the
importance of obtaining ofce as opposed to the virtue
of remaining a principled opposition, organization versus
spontaneity, and the desirability or otherwise of playing the
mainstream game involving party hierarchies, charismatic
leaders, professionalism, media manipulation and public
image. The UK Green Party suffered considerably in the
early 1990s from such conicts, and has not completely
recovered. Meanwhile, in less than two years of government
Die Grunen have compromised principles to the extent that
internal critics fear that the most that has been achieved
has been to help create a more viable capitalism; i.e., one
which has been alerted to the dangers to itself arising from
environmental problems.
These kinds of tensions mirror the dichotomy discussed
below, between radical and reformist approaches to, and
inuences on, the environmental movement. Such tensions
occur within groups and also within individuals. They result
in what Dobson (1995) has identied as public and more
private faces of radical environmentalism, where the desire
for fundamental social change and the overturning of the
economic order become deliberately muted themes in public
debate for fear of frightening off ordinary members of the
public.
Despite the limited electoral impact of Green parties,
what seems an inexorable rise in public concern about
environmental issues is illustrated through data cited by
Connelly and Smith (1999) on eight UK environmental
pressure groups. Their total membership rose from 1.5 m
in 1980 to 4.3 m in 1995. Some of them, like the National
Trust and Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, are
long established and indisputably conservative and safe
from the point of view of conventional political parties.
Nonetheless, their growing strength has contributed to the
greening of these parties. In the UK, Conservative, Liberal
Democrat and Labour parties all have their own internal
environmental pressure groups, and the amount of mani-
festo space devoted to environmental policy has steadily
increased since the mid-1980s. But British politicians have
been slow and recalcitrant in many environmental policy
areas by comparison with politicians in Scandinavia, Ger-
many and the Netherlands.
These latter countries have been at the forefront of pro-
jecting environmental policy within the EU, and as a result
of some success here, Britain, once known as the dirty
man of Europe, has been drawn into a more enlightened
approach. This raises an interesting geopolitical dilemma
for the British environmental movement, since both radical
and reformist wings tend to champion the idea of gov-
ernment decentralization and more inclusive local democ-
racies. Large-scale economic, social or political structures
are resisted in favor of localism and decision taking at
the lowest possible level. But when this last principle, of
POLITICAL MOVEMENTS/IDEOLOGIES AND THE ENVIRONMENT 433
subsidiarity, has been applied by the European Union
(UN) in relation to environmental matters it has sometimes
enabled British governments to claim powers over their
own development decisions, which have been unpopular
with environmentalists. The latter have been driven to look
to the supranational bureaucracy of the EU for protection
from their own government.
Pressure groups do not seek electoral ofce, but, rather,
hope to inuence public policy. They act in support of a
cause, rather than the narrower sectional interests of their
members. Indeed there is an ongoing debate within Green-
peace about whether to have members at all, rather than
just supporters. Pressure groups seek inuence from inside
government, through petitioning, lobbying and eventually
being accepted as consultants during the stage of policy
formulation. As a result, they attempt to make themselves
credible by acquiring a reputation for painstaking scientic
research of integrity, and for reasonableness, profession-
alism and a willingness to dialogue and compromise with
opposition groups. One such example in the UK is Trans-
port 2000, a coalition of environmental groups concerned
about transport issues, which have won government and
public over to its view that private car use must be curbed
in favor of public transport investment.
Pressure groups also seek to apply outside pressure on
governments via public opinion. This requires a higher-
prole approach, staging media events, demonstrations,
petitions and consumer boycotts. Flamboyant media-
grabbing tactics are often at the edges of the law, or involve
breaking it before backing down in the glare of publicity, to
disrupt, for instance, whale shing, nuclear tests or public
enquiries into development projects.
Hence pressure groups have to achieve a balance between
two approaches, and this may be a source of ongoing inter-
nal disputes. Whether this balance swings towards or away
from more conventional, respectable and patient methods
may well depend on the perception, which the group has
about the nature of the democracy within which it works.
If the belief is that this follows a pluralist model, in which
many different interest groups have more or less equal
opportunities to inuence policy direction, then the group
may concentrate on methods appropriate to this. If, how-
ever, the view is towards an elitist model, where some inter-
ests are seen as unfairly dominating the political process by
virtue of their economic and political strength often exer-
cised in corridors of power then less legal methods may
be followed.
Direct action groups are of the latter persuasion. They
include the likes of American Earth First! (Wall, 1999), with
its monkeywrench tactics of civil disobedience and eco-
tage committed on the physical infrastructure of big devel-
opment projects, such as dams. Then there are tree dwellers
and tunnel diggers who have gained huge publicity in anti-
road and anti-airport protest in Europe, North America
and Japan. There are squatters, like those in The Land is
Ours group, who invaded derelict land owned by the Guin-
ness Corporation and scheduled for major development in
Wandsworth, London they set up a model sustainable vil-
lage for ve months in 1996 before being evicted. And there
are arsonists who set re to agricultural developments and
scientic establishments in the name of animal liberation.
When challenged about why they do not use legal chan-
nels of protest and persuasion, they will reply that these
channels are merely token, giving a veneer of democracy
to what is in fact a corporate state run by a coalition of
bureaucrats, business leaders and, perhaps, union bosses.
Partly in response to this kind of critique, and partly as
a result of budgetary cuts in local government spending,
there has been a growth in the 1990s of local voluntary
community-based groups. These seek, legally and often
supported by government grants, to improve the economic
prospects and social and environmental quality of life of
their local community. They include such environmentally
oriented groups as housing cooperatives, conservation and
recycling projects, urban agriculture, box schemes (where
the produce of nearby organic farms is sold direct to house-
holds) and local employment and trading schemes (LETS,
where goods and services are exchanged by means of local
currencies). A skeptical view of such developments is that
they help to exonerate the state-supported public sector
from its duties to provide social, health and environmental
care for all, which is why states generally have a favor-
able view of them. A more positive perspective is that they
represent a process whereby people take their lives and
destinies into their own hands, therefore reclaiming some
political power.
This constitutes a major theme voiced with increas-
ing urgency by environmentalists since the 1960s. They
argue that if people regain control over their lives, and
are re-embedded into their communities and localities,
it is axiomatic that they will behave in more environ-
mentally sustainable ways. Through living more rounded
and satisfying lifestyles, it is reckoned, people will not
want to seek fulllment in an endless round of mate-
rial consumption. This is the basis on which ecologically
based communes operate. The heyday of such alterna-
tive communities was in the 1970s, when (especially) rural
property and land were cheap to acquire. Back-to-the-land
groups often resolved to achieve a large measure of self-
sufciency, in food if not energy, and to do it in ecologically
benign ways. Although they usually failed in this objective
for any sustained period, and although they encountered
many problems in trying to create alternatives to the nuclear
family and non-oppressive social relations, many of these
communities have lasted into the 1990s. However, they
have not remained immune to social trends in the main-
stream society to which they form a counterculture, but
have fallen prey to increasing materialism, privatization and
434 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
preoccupation with maintaining nancial viability (Pepper,
1991). Notwithstanding this, they have contended with a set
of problems which they prefer to the problems and insecu-
rities of living in conventional society.
A further manifestation of environmentalism has been in
the application of its personal-is-political motif to con-
sumerism itself. The green consumer movement peaked
in the 1980s, but survived into the 1990s particularly as
the ethical consumer and investor movements (see Green
Investment, Volume 4). It is now part of the ecological
modernization approach to development, and is based on
the idea, championed by neo-liberal political economists
like von Hayek in the 1950s, that in spending our personal
money we are casting votes. These votes indicate desire for
and satisfaction with the products we buy, and the processes
and organizations through which they are produced. Hence,
it is argued, if we buy ecologically sound products and
services, with environmentally sound ingredients produced
in environmentally friendly ways, and if we shun products
which do not meet this description, producers will have
to change their ways accordingly or go out of business.
Through this kind of consumer movement, chlorouoro-
carbons (CFCs) have been eliminated from aerosols and
refrigerators, real animal furs have been largely replaced by
articial ones, and, possibly, the development of foods con-
taining genetically modied organisms has been arrested.
Additionally there has been a big boost for organic food
producers, tea and coffee producing cooperatives, and so
forth.
However, the green consumer movement has not pro-
duced the widespread changes which were once claimed
for it, and it has not defeated the skepticism of radical
environmentalists. For one thing, its success depends on
the presumptions that consumers have access to reliable
and honest information about the products they buy, and
are prepared to spend time and money acquiring and acting
on such information. None of this has been proved accu-
rate. Furthermore, the idea that money is a vote also carries
the corollary that a large part of the potential electorate
is disbarred from voting by virtue of poverty, especially in
times of recession. And in any case, the proposition that
consumption of material goods is a remedy for environ-
mental problems rather than being their major cause is still
impossible to swallow for radical environmentalists.
POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES AND
ENVIRONMENTALISM
Figure 1 shows different forms of environmentalism when
considered particularly from the standpoint of political ide-
ologies. It differentiates principally between radical and
reformist approaches. The latter embrace mainstream cul-
tures political ideologies of liberalism and democratic (as
practiced by labor and social democrat parties) socialism. It
would reform capitalism and market economics to a greater
or lesser degree, but would not replace them by another
economic system. One of the main arguments within it is
about how much to intervene in the market economy (see
below). It reacts to environmental problems from a per-
spective which some call techno-centric. Techno-centrism
manifests faith in science, technology and rational man-
agement of ecosystems to solve environmental problems.
Elements of conservative thinking also may mingle with
this reformist approach of the cultural mainstream. Ecolog-
ical modernization is the sustainable development model,
which has evolved from reformist environmentalism.
By contrast, radical environmentalist approaches seek
to eliminate environmental problems at their root, rather
than simply reacting to the damage caused by the normal
operations of global capitalism. This would entail funda-
mental social change, either by eliminating or completely
reconstructing capitalism. Hence the environmental debate
is shifted out of the cultural/economic mainstream and
becomes counter-cultural: often drawing on older counter-
cultural traditions such as anarchism or utopian socialism.
It includes:
social ecology, based largely on anarchist principles
as interpreted particularly in the work of Murray
Bookchin (e.g., 1990), which is also informed by Marx-
ist analysis (see Social Ecology, Volume 5).
eco-socialism, based on revolutionary rather than
reformist (e.g., social democrat) socialism, and also
informed by Marxist analysis. Libertarian, decentralist
and communalist in principle, it is ultimately opposed
to the state (see Eco-socialism, Volume 5).
deep ecology, which focuses on fundamental changes
in attitudes and values towards nature starting with
the individual (Devall and Sessions, 1985). Its social
prescriptions are anarchistic but also informed by ele-
ments of conservative thinking (see Deep Ecology,
Volume 5).
ecofeminism, which insists on the elimination of patri-
archy as a prerequisite to founding a sustainable
society. It is also informed by anarchist and socialist
analyses of material processes in society, but empha-
sizes as well the importance of changes at the cultural
level (see Ecofeminism, Volume 5).
Deep ecologys approach is eco- or bio-centric: that is,
focused on non-human nature and the whole biosphere.
Eco-centrism claims that nature has intrinsic value above
and beyond the value merely conferred by humans. Eco-
socialism, by contrast, shares an anthropocentric stance
with reformist environmentalism. This regards humans as
the ultimate source of all value and is prepared, if it
comes to a crunch, to elevate human interest above that
of animals and plants. Social ecology claims to transcend
both anthropocentrism and biocentrism.
POLITICAL MOVEMENTS/IDEOLOGIES AND THE ENVIRONMENT 435
Radical, Counter-cultural
[mainly anti-capitalism]
Deep ecology: Based on ecocentrism,
intrinsic value in nature,
and anarchism.
Social ecology: Looks to both humanism
and ecocentrism, based
on anarchist and feminist
principles.
Eco-socialism: Humanistic and revolutionary
socialist politics (libertarian,
decentralist, utopian socialism).
Eco-feminism: Elevating womens culture and
feminine values to counter repressive
male ethos. Changing relations of
reproduction.
Reformist, Mainstream cultural
[Pro-capitalism]
Conservatism: Preservationism,
NIMBY-ism,
Stewardship of nature.
Free market Market mechanisms
liberalism: and privatization of
the commons.
Social reformism: Market intervention, e.g.,
[Welfare liberal/ environmental taxes,
democratic socialist] tradeable pollution rights
plus voluntary agreements
plus regulation.
Mainstream:
[Ambiguous about capitalism, but
demanding considerable reform]
Incorporates and reflects both sides.
Some radical long-term aims, but
reformist methods pragmatic Green
parties, pressure groups and lobbies
Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace,
World Wide Fund for Nature,
New Economics Foundation, and other
non-government organizations.

Figure 1 Environmentalisms and their political ideologies and approaches

Mainstream environmentalism, as represented by the
movements and groups discussed above, tends to be a
hybrid a m elange of both radical and reformist appro-
aches. As also suggested, the mainstream environmentalist
movements proponents and actors often hold radical views
(including eco-centrism and opposition to capitalism), but
they may show pragmatism, believing that to make some
environmental headway by reform is better than to make
none at all. The works of some of mainstream environmen-
talisms most inuential gures (e.g., Schumacher, 1973;
Porritt, 1984; McKibben, 1990) contain currents of social-
ism, anarchism, conservatism and social reformism.
The following discussion will illustrate how elements
of traditional political ideologies inform both radical and
reformist wings of the environmental movement, before
going on to consider what aspects of green political ide-
ologies might be considered as unique.
Before commencing it should be stressed that assessing
green thinking against more traditional political ideolo-
gies is fraught with difculties. Political philosophies are
mainly diffuse rather than tightly coherent, changing and
evolving with time. They also contain inconsistencies, they
overlap, the terminology is confusing, and there may be
considerable differences between what is popularly thought
of as, say, liberal or socialist and what in theory they
are. Popular views of political ideologies are colored by
the utterances of party politicians, but there are few cor-
respondences between political parties and the political
philosophies they might claim to represent. And because
party politics is political there may be deliberate or unin-
tentional attempts in debate to misrepresent them: because
they are dened and evaluated subjectively, different peo-
ple will make different interpretations of what they are.
Additionally, political ideologies tend to differ in their inter-
pretation between different countries. The view of them
given below is written from a Euro-centric perspective,
based on the British experience.
Finally, it should be acknowledged that it is one thing to
note similarities between, say, anarchist and green ideolo-
gies, but this does not necessarily signify historical links
between them in the way of common threads of thinkers,
writers or activists. Anarchy, like other political philoso-
phies, comes specically from political activism and social
theories. By contrast, the green movement over the past
436 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
half-century originated from the concerns of scientists (like
the Ehrlichs, Hardin, Fraser-Darling or Capra) who began
to make political statements about society stemming from
the results of their scientic work. They were not founded
in any way on what the likes of Edmund Burke, Karl Marx
or Peter Kropotkin wrote about such gures were invoked
afterwards. Hence the early statements from environmental
movements were often politically naive and ideologically
incoherent.
TRADITIONAL CONSERVATISM
The words conservation and conservatism both have the
same root. And the ideas of tradition, continuity, stability,
and dislike of sudden change but an acceptance of slow
organic change (i.e., which is not planned or blueprinted or
revolutionary) all feature in conservative thinking and all
are compatible with at least some environmentalist thought.
In conservatism the analogy between society and nature is
strong: just as ecosystems need to be changing organically,
not precipitously, so does society. As with nature, variety
and structure in society are essential to achieve the all
important goal of stability. Social revolutions (and new
technology) upset the natural social order. Conservatism
perceives this order to be hierarchical, though this does not
mean that respect is not due to those lowest in the chain of
being. Hence relationships between higher and lower orders
might be oppressive and economically exploitative but they
nevertheless involve mutual obligations: they are not just
one-way. However, those lower in the social order should
accept the naturalness and inevitability of their position.
Such beliefs foster a romantic view of traditional soci-
eties. So also is there a liking for traditional pastoral
landscapes and grand architecture, expressed in reformist
environmentalism in Britain in the work of long-established
nature and conservation groups like the National Trust,
Councils for the Protection of Rural England and Wales,
County Landowners Association and the Civic Trust. Con-
servative environmentalism involves a conception of stew-
ardship on the part of landowners holding the land in
trust for a future generation (again there is the idea that
social obligations attach to power). This draws on Edmund
Burkes injunctions about wise stewardship, and proposes
that long-cherished virtues of efciency, order, thrift, self-
help, tradition, patriotism and nationalism should be the
basis of environmental politics.
Faced with the dilemma posed by Garrett Hardins (1968)
commons parable, in which individuals tend to use the
resources of Earths commons proigately because the costs
of so doing accrue to society as a whole rather than to them
specically, conservatives would usually argue for enlight-
ened private ownership of the commons as the best way to
value and conserve them. They might also accept Hardins
(1974) arguments for coercion to curb population growth,
and to promote the social and environmental consciousness
appropriate for population control.
Edward Goldsmith (see, for instance Mander and Gold-
smith, 1996) is a prominent radical environmentalist who
seems to argue for conservative values. He wants to see
Western societies re-embedded in strongly held belief sys-
tems, such as those enshrined in religion, for he thinks that
strong religions are stabilizing forces making for social
unity. Goldsmith has held up the caste system in India
as the kind of social organization, which is compatible
with an ecologically and socially sound society sound
because it is stable, and in balance with the natural environ-
ment. The way of life, like the structure and mechanisms
of an ecosystem, is designed to maintain order. A sus-
tainable societys common values must, above all, involve
respect for ecosystems this respect must be absolute and
not negotiable. In common with many environmentalists
(such as the more liberal Fritz Schumacher), Goldsmith
argues for small-scale organization as the geographical
basis for achieving the other desirable things. His radi-
cal environmental conservatism starts from the assumption
of the family as the essential unit of social organization:
what preserves this (such as the traditional stereotyped role
for women) is to be encouraged. And it rejects industrial
society as aberrant. The desire to recapture small-scale
traditional society leads Goldsmith constantly to idealize
primitive peoples and tribes in Africa, Australasia, etc.
Deep ecologists seem particularly inclined towards such
idealization of pre-modern societies. They often hold up
the North American Indian, for instance, as a paragon of
ecological virtue, citing religious beliefs which apparently
regard nature as part of the tribal community and require
it to be treated with much respect (see for instance Cal-
lenbach, 1981). Archaeological evidence, however, often
suggests something rather different; that notwithstanding
beliefs, native American actions towards nature may have
been frequently exploitative (see Religion and Environ-
ment Among Nor th Amer ican Fir st Nations, Volume 5).
Economically, contemporary conservatism partly emb-
races neo-liberalism, as expressed in the doctrines of Adam
Smith, since this revives the free market tradition which
marked the beginnings of industrial capitalism. This seems
particularly true in North America, for although many
Thatcher conservatives in Britain did follow Smith, other
more traditional conservatives expressed misgivings at
their lack of wider social responsibility to those low down
in the socio-economic hierarchy.
Traditional conservatism may grade into fascism, also
known as right-wing irrationalism, or extreme romanti-
cism. Some consider that Hitler spoke about the homeland
almost in an ecological sense, using biological analogies of
race, soil, homeland, folk and blood to describe the state as
a living organism in developing his imperialistic theories.
Bramwell (1989) describes how European Nazis showed
POLITICAL MOVEMENTS/IDEOLOGIES AND THE ENVIRONMENT 437
a liking for vegetarianism, the back-to-the-land movement
and bio-dynamic farming. She observes that neo-fascist
organizations in Europe have all taken onto their platform a
green perspective. Fascisms key elements include the use
of biological metaphors, the stress on the organic commu-
nity and the individuals need to merge with it, the elevation
of ritual, intuition, and the mystical, and the distrust of
the rational. These elements may be found in some eco-
logical writings, especially those promoting deep ecology
activism.
However it is unlikely that environmental movements as
a whole would become fascistic because of their fundamen-
tal globalist inclusivism. That said, there have in the past
been calls for a marrying of some of the elements identied
above with a centralized authoritarian state (see Heilbroner,
1975; Ophuls, 1977), though without the crusading rejection
of rationality necessary for fascism to exist. Heilbroner and
Ophuls reached their authoritarian prescriptions reluctantly:
but they were very pessimistic about the global condition,
and thought that the nature of the required remedial action
was so radical and electorally unpopular that no other insti-
tutional arrangement could possibly deliver.
FREE MARKET LIBERALISM
A strong ideology in the nineteenth-century, free market
liberalism, was revived in the late twentieth century in
the neo-liberalism which tends to support global marketi-
sation. It is advanced by techno-centric environmentalists
like Anderson and Leal (1991), following the example of
Simon and Kahn (1984). They are aggressively optimistic
about the free markets potential, allied to technology, to
solve environmental problems. The invisible hand of mar-
ket forces under which individuals pursue self-interest, they
argue, gives society more environmental protection than
will any kind of intervention or regulation, which is a con-
straint on liberty. Thus if a natural resource is running
out, its increased scarcity will push up the price of the
goods or services that come through that resource. This
will encourage entrepreneurs, with scientists and technolo-
gists, to devise some substitute for the resource, or more
ingenious ways of providing the same goods and services.
Similarly, there is money to be made from clean tech-
nologies like non-harmful aerosols, biodegradable plastics,
catalytic converters and the like, so, as ecological mod-
ernizers say, there is no practical dichotomy between the
interests of capitalism and environmental quality.
This ideology also underlies calls for privatization of
the natural resources of the earths commons. Its basic
argument is that property held in common tends to be
neglected, whereas individuals look after what they own. If
private owners were to abuse or run down their resources,
they themselves would suffer. And if others polluted their
resource (their land or the waters within it), they could
have recourse to law, which would defend their property
rights. Groups of citizens might also sue the originators
of pollution which lowered the quality of the air or the
seas in their neighborhood. (This philosophy thrives par-
ticularly in the United States, where ordinary citizens have
frequent recourse to law.) In response to objections that the
originators of pollution may be hard to identify, the free-
marketers might suggest technological solutions, such as the
possibility of tagging all emissions with trace amounts of
identifying chemicals.
The free-market ideology also underlies systems of trade-
able pollution rights, initiated in the US in the 1990s (see
Tr adable Per mits for Sulfur Emission Reductions, Vol-
ume 4). The Federal Government sells to industry the rights
to emit, for instance, sulphur dioxide. The total amount of
rights issued conforms to a ceiling determined by Govern-
ment as appropriate to an area: this ceiling can be raised
or lowered as thought t. If a rms productive processes
exceed the amounts of pollution that it has rights to emit, it
can either pay to install cleaner technology or buy further
rights from other rms who have less need for them. So
far, this approach has met with limited success.
SOCIAL REFORMISM (ALSO KNOWN AS
WELFARE LIBERALISM, DEMOCRATIC
SOCIALISM)
Social reformists also believe in capitalism, but not with-
out restraints and controls to limit its harmful effects on
some people (the economic losers) and the environment.
They emphasize the role and supreme importance of the
individual and his/her enlightened self-interest in protect-
ing the environment. In Western pluralist democracies, the
parliament or congress constitutes the main forum through
which environmental views and interests will be heard and
protected. Rationality, the rule of law, technology and envi-
ronmental and economic management (cost-benet analy-
sis, reform of taxation) will all help to secure the goals of
environmentalism.
Following the father of English liberalism, John Stuart
Mill, social reformists are ambivalent about how desirable
unselective economic growth is, appreciating also the need
for diversity in society and nature (compatible with their
belief in pluralism). Support, is still strong for private
ownership of resources, and the notion of the invisible
hand by which individuals seeking to maximize their
personal benet allegedly bring greatest aggregate benet,
to society. But they are also aware of the wider society
and communal good, and that what is good is what brings
most benet and happiness to most people (Benthams
utilitarianism). By this measure, environmental protection
is rational and desirable. Hence planning laws, taxes on
non-recycling industries or pollution, and welfare provision
to enhance urban environmental quality and environmental
438 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
education, are all legitimate ways for the state to intervene,
but only as much as is strictly necessary, in the free
market.
Social reformists are generally techno-centric, and many
of their approaches underlie ecological modernization. They
are predicated on signicant government intervention in
the free market, manipulating it in favor of environmental
measures. Hence they advocate tax incentives and disincen-
tives, permits and other moderately coercive management
devices to control pollution and the use of environmental
resources in the earths commons. The rationale behind
the eco-consumerist movement owes much to welfare liber-
alisms belief in enlightened self-interest (i.e., that educated,
informed and rational people are aware of the benets to
themselves of not behaving totally selshly and without
thought for wider social and environmental interests).
In Europe, social reformists are found in all main-
stream groupings, including Conservative, Liberal, Social
Democrat/Democratic Socialist and Green parties. As social
reformists, democratic socialists emphasize their belief in
the need for pluralist democracy and the power of parlia-
ment as the major way to achieve social change. Many
now believe that capitalism can be reformed to take on
board traditional socialist aims if it is guided and occasion-
ally coerced by a moderately strong central and local state.
Few inuential members would advocate the necessity of
abolishing capitalism or the global market as the answer to
contemporary social or environmental problems. However,
this form of socialism would like production to meet social
and environmental needs alongside the exigencies of prot
creation, hence it can be quite strongly interventionist in
the free market. It may, too, favor decentralization of many
of the states functions.
The approach to sustainable development advocated by
the UKs Real World Coalition of environmental and
social welfare groups (Jacobs, 1996) is essentially social
reformist. It might be argued that in todays climate of
neo-liberal global marketisation, based on extending and
derestricting free trade and competition, their aspiration to
elevate social inclusion and environmental sustainability
considerations to a level of importance equal with prof-
itability is somewhat utopian (see Political Systems and
the Environment: Utopianism, Volume 5).
REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM
For years, many environmentalists have dismissed social-
ism as being equally culpable with capitalism in creating
environmental crisis. They have regarded it as part of
mainstream culture because of its unashamed anthropocen-
trism, and would therefore baulk at seeing it categorized in
Figure 1 as engendering a form of radical environmental-
ism. But socialism itself is more complex than they seem to
believe. And eco-socialism derives from particular socialist
traditions that in fact have nothing to do with the kind of
materialism and disregard for nature traditionally associ-
ated with the state centralist, self-styled socialist regimes
behind the old iron-curtain. Eco-socialisms roots lie in
utopian socialism and the Marxism of William Morris (see
Political Systems and the Environment: Utopianism,
Volume 5, and Wall, 1994), rather than Stalin. As such,
it is clearly counter-cultural, radical and opposed to main-
stream values. Though eco-socialists and social ecologists
criticize each other, they also have much in common.
Revolutionary socialism is a minority political current,
unlike reformist socialism. However, together with anar-
chism it has strongly inuenced all radical environmen-
talism. It fundamentally rejects capitalism and advocates
production for social need but not prot, and common own-
ership of the means of production and distribution; thus it
would deal with the commons problem by having these
areas under genuine common ownership and control. It con-
tains different schools of thought about the role and impor-
tance of the state in revolutionary and post-revolutionary
society. Though the state has no place in the ultimate com-
munist society, a more democratic and decentralized form
of state than exists in most contemporary Western society
may be seen as important in helping to create a transition
towards that society. Revolutionary socialisms analysis of
the societynature relationship generally follows Marxist
lines, seeing nature and environment as socially produced,
and environmental problems as inherent in the nature of
capitalism. Again, opinions differ on how much they may
be solely located here. The analysis of how to get to an
ecological society which equates with a (perhaps mon-
eyless) communist one, is based on the mechanism of class
struggle. Neo- and orthodox Marxists, however, may differ
amongst themselves on who might be the principal agents
and actors in creating this society faith in the potential
effectiveness, or even existence, of a working class pro-
letariat is not universal amongst eco-socialists (see Gorz,
1982).
Marxists tend to see the rise of environmentalism
itself in class terms, sometimes regarding it as bourgeois
and counter-revolutionary. This may mean open hostility
towards environmental groups and campaigns, though more
often than not there is an uneasy alliance between reds and
greens based on agreement on ends but not necessarily on
means or analysis of causes.
Marxists by and large believe that environmental, femi-
nist, peace and third-world campaigns are, or should be,
all part of the ultimate struggle against global capital-
ism itself. From Marxisms materialist perspective, the ills
which these campaigns highlight are all outgrowths of capi-
talist relations of production. Such campaigns, furthermore,
should focus less on the reform of the individuals attitudes
and values and more on the collective political struggle of
the world proletariat.
POLITICAL MOVEMENTS/IDEOLOGIES AND THE ENVIRONMENT 439
Major inuences on European environmentalism, like
Andre Gorz and Rudolph Bahro, have tended towards the
revolutionary socialist view in the past, but no longer do
so. The Socialist Party of Great Britain, Socialist Workers
Party and Militant (who spell out the eco-socialist case
eloquently and simply in Cock and Hopwood, 1996) are
all British political groups who incorporate green issues
into orthodox Marxist analysis.
GREEN ANARCHISM
Anarchism suffuses all varieties of radical environmen-
talism, including deep and social ecology, eco-socialism
and eco-feminism. Anarchistic groups within environmen-
talism share fundamental beliefs about the need for organic
societies but some are anti-urban and anti-industrial, so
displaying afnities with conservative thought. American
eco-anarchists may incline towards radical, libertarian lib-
eralism. Indeed, in espousing the individual as the basic
social unit, anarchism is sometimes thought to embrace the
cornerstone of liberalism although anarchists might dene
concepts like individual and freedom in ways different
from that of a mainstream liberal.
But then much anarchism has major afnities with social-
ism, and it is probably true that eco-anarchists are mainly
anarcho-communists, looking particularly to Kropotkin for
inspiration (see Political Systems and the Environment:
Utopianism, Volume 5), or possibly anarcho-syndicalists
(based on trade unions as major revolutionary agents).
There is the rejection of capitalism, desire for common
ownership of the means of production (resources), and, in
resource and income sharing communes, with distribution
according to need. But, unlike socialism, there is strong
rejection of any possible role for the state, intermediate
or not.
Eco-anarchism informs the rural communes movement,
but may also inspire urban communes, the urban Reclaim
the Streets movement, the squatter movement ( property
is theft) and self-help urban community groups. The urban
movement is particularly strong in North America, while
in Australasia, anarcho-syndicalism which is uncompro-
misingly urban-centered has been a powerful force in
green/trade union activism. Anarchists are prominent in
what is becoming a world-wide militant movement against
global capitalism in the early twenty-rst century.
Notwithstanding the common roots and many corre-
spondences which exist between eco-anarchism and eco-
socialism, there are also some major divergences between
the two (see Pepper, 1993). For instance eco-anarchists
often reject the old class politics, seeing social change as
consequent on the action of individuals in forming sponta-
neous, mutualist, non-hierarchical groups to live out their
politics, thus setting an example for others to follow. The
personal is political, and person equals planet are maxims
from more liberal American anarchism (i.e., Roszak, 1979),
which appear to have great inuence. Anarchism consid-
ers that social hierarchies and not class constitute the key
to oppression: hence eliminating hierarchy is the prerequi-
site for eliminating oppression. Socialists argue the reverse,
insisting on the need for revolutionary political class strug-
gle to change the relations between people, which are
contingent on the material, economic, organization of pro-
duction. Anarchists with an emphasis on practical lifestyle
politics believe that only by people sidestepping (living out-
side) the economic and social structures of conventional
society can those structures be overthrown.
FEMINISM
The notion that we must eliminate social oppression and
hierarchy if we are to form an ecological society is but one
of many ideas, which are held in common between fem-
inism and anarchism as applied to radical environmental-
ism. Eco-feminists often propose an essential convergence
between women and nature. This is rstly because their
biological makeup inevitably associates women, more than
men, with the natural functions of reproduction and nur-
turing. Secondly, women and nature have in common that
they are exploited by men, both economically and in being
objectied and politically marginalized. During and since
the 1970s, debates within eco-feminism have focused on
several schools of thought, including cultural eco-feminism
and social ( socialist/anarchist) eco-feminism (see also
Ecofeminism, Volume 5).
Cultural eco-feminism considers that the root problems
of how Western cultures treat nature could be solved by
a womens culture, providing practical and philosophi-
cal guidelines to sustainable development. Since menstrual
cycles follow phases of the moon, and fertility follows the
rhythm of the seasons, then women might be regarded
as inherently close to nature. Hence eco-feminist cul-
ture would draw on ancient myths combining women and
nature, mother and earth, in cooperative relationships: car-
ing, nurturing, mutually giving and receiving.
This eco-feminism says, further, that female culture is
concerned with the body, the esh, the material; with natu-
ral processes, emotions and subjective feelings and private
life. By contrast, male culture emphasizes the mind, intel-
lect, reason, culture, objectivity, economics and public life.
Male culture always seeks to transcend natural constraints
on what humans can do: men constantly ght to conquer,
exploit and mould nature to leave their mark behind and
achieve immortality and transcendence. Merchant (1982)
describes how, during the period of the scientic revolution,
Francis Bacon and the Royal Society pledged to reveal the
secrets still locked in her [natures] bosom and to con-
quer and subdue her. Most high technologies, including
new female reproductive technology, are developed by men
440 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
and are said by this school to constitute a continuation of
mens dual domination of women and nature.
Cultural eco-feminism, then, means liberating nature
from the repressive male ethos so that it will be respected
as a sustainer of life. Capra (1982) urges the necessity for
a return to a balance of yin and yang characteristics in
people and society as the foundation for a new, ecologi-
cally benign society (see Land Tr ansfor mation in China:
3000 Year s of Human Ecological Histor y, Volume 3).
This might be achieved through women, individually and in
groups, discovering their authentic natures and celebrating
and afrming them. Such consciousness-raising may need
to exclude men, on the grounds that they could have a neg-
ative impact on it while it is still nascent and before it is
strong enough to resist male domination. Then there can
also be celebration of pagan myths and rituals, and associ-
ated pastimes like tarot cards and astrology, which afrm
respect for Mother Nature and the essential interconnected-
ness of humans and nature.
This latter leans towards New Age thinking, and some
greens and feminists (particularly of the social variety)
reject it. As Plumwood (1993) argues, the whole idea of
connecting with nature could be regressive and insult-
ing, portraying women as passive reproductive animals
immersed in the body and in unthinking experience of life.
Materialist social eco-feminism draws on traditions in
non-mainstream European socialism, including utopian
socialism, classical anarchism, early Marx and William
Morris work. They all insist that exploitation of nature
relates to exploitation in society, emphasizing social and
political rather than personal aspects of the domination of
women and nature. Hence womens oppression is seen as
interwoven with class, race and species oppression. But
social eco-feminism also rejects the crude economic class
reductionism of some Marxism; so it does not accept that
womens oppression is merely a special case of exploitation
of the proletariat, or that to establish socialism would
mean automatically ending womens or natures oppression.
Mellor (1997) wants to modify or reconstruct Marxist
theory, to make a socialist eco-feminism. If, she argues, the
way societies organize themselves to get material subsis-
tence (economic relations of production) plays a key role in
shaping society, so also must the way we organize ourselves
to materially continue as a species (i.e., the relations of
reproduction). Hence the material world of motherhood, not
merely the (still largely male) material world of industrial
production, should provide ideas and values for shaping an
alternative (socialist) society. These ideas and values are
altruistic: they include taking immediate responsibility for
meeting the needs of others. But as things stand, the domi-
nance of capitalist relations in Western society ensures that
the stereotypically male standpoint mediates all knowl-
edge. Its view of nature as a commodity will prevail over
the female view of unity with nature.
Other calls to construct a social eco-feminism often
emphasize the importance of ideas and attitudes, calling
on women to unite with the environmental movement to
reshape the underlying values of a conventional society
based on hierarchical organization and domination of some
people by others. According to Plumwood, one of the major
wrong ideas in our culture is the tendency towards dualistic
thinking. For, as Eckersley (1992) suggests, patriarchy is a
subset of such thinking the philosophical dualism that
has pervaded Western thought. So, for instance, imagining
that there is a fundamental distinction between society
and nature suggests that they are separated, making it
easier for the former to exploit the latter. And strongly
identifying women with nature, as in cultural eco-feminism,
implicitly or explicitly links men with exploitation of both.
All this reinforcement of dualistic thinking feeds that very
patriarchal culture to which feminism is opposed.
Eco-feminism shares with socialism an internationalist
mentality; opposing womens oppression worldwide. It rec-
ognizes that in the third world, women, not men, constitute
the backbone of production as well as reproduction.
Eco-feminism in this context has therefore meant push-
ing for women to be involved in decisions about land
use and control. Eco-feminists have resisted land appro-
priation by government and (Western) commercial rms,
while, however, the men who own the land have often
given in to the seductions behind the modernization model
of development.
While some third-world women have been co-opted by
modernization, helping to provide the cheap labor for inap-
propriate development such as dams and nuclear power
stations, others in the 1980s have instead adopted the by-
pass strategy. They have set up enterprises and movements
that attempt to exclude the involvement of international
capital (e.g. Chipko in India, South African cooperatives,
green zones in Mozambique). They have supported, there-
fore, a localized development model rather than global
modernization.
MAINSTREAM GREEN IDEOLOGY: OLD OR
NEW POLITICS?
Bearing the mark of all these inuences, mainstream green
political ideology, or ecologism (Dobson, 1995) is an
eclectic, pragmatic and shifting mix of ideas, but with some
recurring themes. Green activists often hold it as a point of
principle that they are neither left or right, but forward,
or above the old politics: The basic political choice
today is not between Right, Left or Center, but between
conventional gray politicians and the Green Party, said
that partys 1992 UK manifesto. But of course, when they
start to talk about what we should do about the eco-crisis,
environmentalists must become involved in old politics.
Hence the ideology of ecologism contains tensions between:
POLITICAL MOVEMENTS/IDEOLOGIES AND THE ENVIRONMENT 441
1. Ecology-based politics, emphasizing the pre-eminence
of sustaining natural systems as the universal basis
for social organization. Such eco-centrism constitutes
ecologisms main claim to be a new politics.
2. Socially-based politics, seeing ecological problems as
outgrowths of social problems, and seeking to solve
the former by, rst and foremost, solving the latter.
These constitute the old politics, raising questions,
which have been the concern of traditional ideologies
for several hundred years.
Environmentalists who concentrate on the second cate-
gory often seem to follow a relatively coherent and iden-
tiable analysis of the problems and sets of prescriptions
to remedy them i.e., they align with one or other of the
more traditional political ideological camps. Most of those
in the rst category, who prioritize eco-centric concerns,
present a more diffuse image, spreading themselves across
the political spectrum and accumulating bits of traditional
liberal and socialist ideology, spiced with dashes of con-
servatism. In the terminology of the old politics, perhaps
a majority of these eco-centrics gravitate towards social
reformism (especially in their public utterances), while a
vocal minority embrace, especially, eco-anarchism, in the
context of one or more of the radical camps outlined in
Figure 1. But for all those in this rst category, politics start
from the perspective of ecology and the need to maintain
eco-system integrity. For those in the second, social matters
are as important (or more so) than ecological ones: they are
fundamentally anthropocentric.
An overall predisposition towards social reformism
emerges in common mainstream green positions, which
say that social change must proceed from individuals, but
that change is also needed in the economic structures of
society. They often do not totally reject capitalism indeed
are enthusiastic for at least small-scale versions of it, but
see social need and environmental quality as criteria to
be elevated above the prot motive. They see a crucial
but benign role for the state, in both facilitating the
development of individual responsibility and laying down
regulatory and legal frameworks governing group behavior
in particular. This (grudging) acceptance of the state (and
of parliamentary politics by Green Party supporters) wanes
where eco-anarchism acquires more inuence.
Nature is the ultimate legitimation for and the source of
social laws in the mainstream green canon. But, as noted
above, matters of social justice are increasingly impor-
tant to most environmentalists. Technology is not rejected,
but it must be appropriate and democratically accessible
to all, as well as soft on nature. Scientic knowledge
and rationalism are regarded as useful, but many environ-
mentalists insist that these must be balanced by elevating
emotional and intuitional knowledge to a more inuential
position in environmental decision-making than that cur-
rently accorded. Democracy and individual freedom are
cornerstones of mainstream green ideology. Democracy is
to be extended to all natures creatures (animal rights, vege-
tarianism, veganism). But the importance of the community
is also stressed. However the collective, e.g., trade unions in
the production processes, is not seen to be as important as
in traditional politics. Emphasis in mainstream green ideol-
ogy, as in social reformism generally, has swung from our
collective power as producers to our individual power as
consumers.
The disdain for the industrial way of life, and the old
politics which was noted above in connection with early
environmentalism, still persists as a current in mainstream
environmentalism. It may be coupled with a tendency
towards irrationalism and mysticism which becomes
more strident in deep ecology and New Age approaches.
Whether they publicly own or disown this spiritual wing
of the radical ecology movement, it is apparent that
most mainstream greens do have deep ecology/New Age
tendencies. This shows in their support for a bio-ethic, for
nature mystication (Gaianism), and their belief in spiritual
paths and self-discovery, self-realisation and consciousness
raising through therapy techniques as routes to political
change. The innate conservatism in idealizing nature, and
in the denial of a politics of social change in favor of one
of individual change, is often uncomfortable to those more
on the left of the green movement.
STRATEGY
If mainstream green thinkers and activists do show an
eclectic mix of pragmatic politics, taken partly from old
reformist and radical political ideologies, and putting an
ecological emphasis onto the whole, this could be seen in
positive or negative terms.
On the positive side, it could be argued that mixing
elements of older ideologies will produce something more
appropriate to the modern world which is not the world
in which these ideologies were formulated. Thus a politics
can be reached which is compatible with the needs of
an ecologically sound society: these needs might best be
seen not in the old terms of class war or material wealth
distribution alone. An ecological crisis like holes in the
ozone layer threatens us all, and in any case so-called
socialist societies have not had a better relationship with
nature than capitalist societies. Such a common sense
approach to politics might also appeal to a wide range of
people, not being seen as extremist.
More negatively, the result of doing this could be
merely an ideological mish-mash. It might sound theoret-
ically appealing but is destined to break down in prac-
tice, because it contains some irreconcilable contradictions.
(Such as the idea proposed by some environmentalists that
green consumerism and other pressures will create multi-
national corporations that are environmentally sustainable
442 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
and will put environmental and social goals before that of
prot.)
Ideological inconsistency could lead to some strange
conceptions of a sustainable society, as conveyed by
some libertarian environmentalists. They demand signi-
cant increases in personal freedom, and an end of state
domination of society. But at the same time they cam-
paign for potentially repressive universal laws embracing
the interests of natural eco-systems. This could lead to
a society where communities which sanctioned the dump-
ing of toxic wastes could be heavily punished, but those
who allowed child abuse or racism to ourish might be
excused on the principle that local communities should
have an absolute right to self-determination in the social
sphere.
For one of environmentalisms recurrent themes
is respect for a diversity of cultures, i.e., respect
for otherness. Part of the contemporary debate
about environmental politics concerns such post-modern
sentiments, along with the tendency discussed above to
reject progress and modernity. While some greens like
Atkinson (1991) are content to see environmentalism as
essentially a form of post-modern politics, others are
anxious to rescue the Enlightenment Project and the gains
from the Industrial Revolution for environmentalism. John
Barry (1999), for instance considers ideological green
politics in relation to the French and industrial revolutions.
He thinks that they want to accept and radicalize the
democracy begun by the former, but to reject the industrial
revolution. This latter would be mistaken, he believes.
He says, probably correctly, that green politics should
be an immanent critique of modernity which however
does not want to reject progress: rather, to redene
what is meant by the word, making it apposite to strong
sustainability principles, including social justice and eco-
systems integrity. With this approach, the promise of
modernity, which has hitherto eluded the majority of the
worlds people, will not be forgotten, but can perhaps be
realized for this majority.
See also: Precautionar y Pr inciple, Volume 4.
REFERENCES
Anderson, T and Leal, D (1991) Free Market Environmentalism,
Pacic Research Institute for Public Policy, San Francisco, CA.
Atkinson, A (1991) Principles of Political Economy, Behaven,
London.
Barry, J (1999) Rethinking Green Politics: Nature, Virtue and
Progress, Sage, London.
Beck, U (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, Sage,
London.
Beck, U (1995) Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk, Polity,
Cambridge.
Bookchin, M (1990) The Philosophy of Social Ecology, Black
Rose Books, Montreal.
Bramwell, A (1989) Ecology in the Twentieth Century: a History,
Yale University Press, London.
Callenbach, E (1981) Ecotopia Emerging, Banyan Tree Books,
Berkley, CA.
Capra, F (1982) The Turning Point, Wildwood House, London.
Carson, R (1962) Silent Spring, Houghton Miin, Boston, MA.
Cock, M and Hopwood, W (1996) Global Warning: Socialismand
the Environment, Militant Publications, London.
Connelly, J and Smith, G (1999) Politics and the Environment:
from Theory to Practice, Routledge, London.
Devall, W and Sessions, G (1985) Deep Ecology: Living as if
Nature Mattered, Gibbs M Smith, UT.
Dobson, A (1995) Green Political Thought, 2nd edition Unwin
Hyman, London.
Eckersley, R (1992) Environmentalism and Political Theory:
Towards an Ecocentric Approach, University College Press,
London.
Ehrlich, P (1969) Eco-catastrophe, Ramparts, 8(3), 2428.
Ehrlich, P and Ehrlich, P (1990) The Population Explosion, Simon
and Schuster, New York.
Gorz, A (1982) Farewell to the Working Classes: an Essay on
Post-Industrial Socialism, Pluto, London.
Hardin, G (1968) The tragedy of the commons, Science, 162,
12431248.
Hardin, G (1974) Living on a lifeboat, BioScience, 24, 10.
Heilbroner, R (1975) An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, Calder
and Boyars, London.
Jacobs, M (1996) The Politics of the Real World, Earthscan,
London.
Mander, J and Goldsmith, E, eds (1996) The Case Against the
Global Economy: and for a Turn Toward the Local, Sierra Club
Books, San Francisco, CA.
Mason, M (1999) Environmental Democracy, Earthscan, London.
McKibben, W (1990) The End of Nature, Penguin, London.
Meadows, D H, Meadows, D L, Randers, J, and Behrens, W
(1972) Limits to Growth, Earth Island, London.
Meadows, D H, Meadows, D L, and Randers, J (1992) Beyond
the Limits: Global Collapse or a Sustainable Future, Earthscan,
London.
Mellor, M (1997) Feminism and Ecology, Polity, Cambridge.
Merchant, C (1982) The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and
the Scienti c Revolution, Wildwood House, London.
Ophuls (1977) Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity: Prologue
to a Political Theory of the Steady State, W H Freeman, San
Francisco, CA.
Pepper, D M (1991) Communes and the Green Vision: Counter-
culture, Lifestyle and the New Age, Green Print, Basingstoke.
Pepper, D M (1993) Eco-socialism: from Deep Ecology to Social
Justice, Routledge, London.
Pepper, D (1996) Modern Environmentalism: an introduction,
Routledge, London.
Plumwood, V (1993) Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Rout-
ledge, London.
Porritt, J (1984) Seeing Green, Blackwell, Oxford.
Roszak, T (1979) Person/Planet, Gollancz, London.
Schumacher, E F (1973) Small is Beautiful: Economics as if Peo-
ple Really Mattered, Abacus, London.
Simon, J and Kahn, H (1984) The Resourceful Earth, Blackwell,
Oxford.
POLITICAL SYSTEMS AND THE ENVIRONMENT: UTOPIANISM 443
Wall, D (1994) Green History, Routledge, London.
Wall, D (1999) Earth First! and the Anti-Roads Movement, Rout-
ledge, London.
Political Systems and the
Environment: Utopianism
David Pepper
Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK
Utopias are imaginary locations with perfect social and
political systems. Utopianism is strong in environmental
thought, where political and economic commentators often
spell out the principles of an ecologically sound society,
and writers of ction create ecotopias: ecologically ideal
societies of the future. Additionally, environmental activists
may set up small, would-be ecotopian communes, where they
try to practice self-suf ciency within non-hierarchical social
relationships.
The ecologically ideal society is usually envisaged as
small-scale and decentralized, with local communities form-
ing the basic social, economic and political unit, but larger
units are also formed through confederation. Environmental
and social quality of life is high, and consumption of mate-
rial goods is low in these local economies where production
is for social need, not pro t. There is direct democracy,
and nation states and international trade via multinational
corporations play a subordinate role, or are non-existent.
Nature is respected and stewarded, and biodiversity is high.
Ecotopianism draws on utopian activists and thinkers of
the past, including the 17th century Diggers and the utopian
schemes and experiments of anarchists and utopian social-
ists such as Charles Fourier and Robert Owen in the early
19th century. The late 19th century writers, William Mor-
ris and Peter Kropotkin, have perhaps been the greatest
historical in uences. Their socialist and anarchist visions
are apparent in todays social ecology schemes for an eco-
logical economy and society, while Teilhard de Chardins
mid-twentieth century ideas about the evolutionary progress
of humankind have particularly in uenced deep ecologys
view of a future perfect society.
Utopianism is also a term sometimes applied to those who
seem to have unrealistic, impractical and ill thought out
ideas about societys future direction. It is not only the ide-
alistic schemes of radical environmentalists which are prone
to this somewhat derogatory charge. The vision of the future
proffered in the mainstream model of development known as
ecological modernization (EM) could also be guilty of utopi-
anism. For it imagines a future highly competitive capitalist,
free market global economy where matters of social justice
and environmental quality are given equal or greater pri-
ority than the pro t motive; a somewhat unlikely scenario
perhaps.
INTRODUCTION: MEANINGS OF
UTOPIANISM
The Oxford English Dictionary denes utopia (no-place)
as an imaginary location with a perfect social and politi-
cal system. Most contemporary thought and action about
the environment could be described as utopian in some
way. Environmentalists, be they radical or reformist (see
Political Movements/Ideologies and the Environment,
Volume 5), wish to see signicant change towards a much
improved society where development will be sustainable,
that is, where the old antipathy between the exigencies of
human progress and the integrity and diversity of natural
ecosystems is resolved in some kind of harmony.
Kumar (1988) describes utopianism as a form of think-
ing, invented by Thomas More (Utopia, 1516), which
became a social movement in the West in the 19th century.
From then on, some people, including environmentalists,
have striven to realize utopia here on earth. Whereas earlier
utopias, including those of the Renaissance and Enlight-
enment, were Christian-based (Manuel and Manuel, 1979,
referred to hereafter as the Manuels), Europe and America
were swept in the 19th century by a wave of secular mes-
sianism, of which socialism was the dominant expression.
Kumar identies three locations of utopian expression:
1. in practical experiments, for instance of Robert Owen
and many New World communities;
2. in ctional societies, like Etienne Cabets Icaria;
3. in social philosophies, such as those of Saint-Simon,
Fourier, Comte and Marx.
These examples were all socialist-leaning, and a related
ideological movement, that of anarchism, has been much
connected with socialist utopianism. Both are extremely
germane to contemporary environmentalist utopias, heav-
ily inuencing classic ecotopias; such as those of Reich
(1970), Schumacher (1973), Le Guin (1974), Goldsmith
et al. (1972), van der Weyer (1986) and, notably, Callen-
bachs Ecotopia and its prequel Ecotopia Emerging (1978,
1981). But there are also other inuences, such as Pierre
Teilhard de Chardins Phenomenon of Man (1965), which
feeds strands of idealism and technological optimism into,
particularly, deep ecology/new age utopianism: this also
sometimes reects the utopianism of capitalist free market
ideology.
Authorities on the utopian subject, such as the Manuels,
regard Marxism as a secular resurgence of millenarian
(believing in a period of good government, great happiness
444 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
and prosperity ; Oxford English Dictionary), paradisaical,
apocalyptic thinking. Marxism is an unchristian euchronia
(looking forward to an ideal time rather than place) in as
much as it sees a future society of inde nite progress and
growing freedom. In it, Men make their own history in full
consciousness of their power, collectively, to shape their
own society, and not subject to forces, economic, histori-
cal or mystical, beyond their control. (Socialists, however,
often deny that Marxism is utopian, since Marx speci cally
rejected the notion that members of a future communist,
free society should be shackled by visions and blueprints
inherited from previous generations.) Many environmen-
talists today, whether they call themselves Marxist or not,
assert similarly that the key to an ecologically benign soci-
ety is an inclusive democracy where the will of the majority
prevails over economic and social decision-making. Armed
with such freedom and with reason, they argue people will
avoid living inharmoniously with nature, since this would
undermine majority interests.
As the Manuels point out, utopianism is popularly associ-
ated with a literary genre: a dramatic narrative portrayal of a
way of life which is essentially good, embracing the under-
lying principles of an optimum society and embodying a set
of implicit (usually optimistic) assumptions about human
nature. But additionally, utopianism is a state of mind which
often appears in the constitutions of a restructured polity
and in the plans, outlines or blueprints of a universal repub-
lic. The line between such idealized blueprints and political
and social theory is often blurred.
The Manuels also show how utopianism is tied to spe-
ci c social con icts, and utopians, in rejecting the existing
society, take political sides. Much late 20th century utopi-
anism (including ecotopianism) re ects the condition of
post-modernity, in its skepticism about modernity and the
Enlightenment Project (the mission expressed strongly in
the 18th century, and founded on scienti c, technological
and industrial development in pursuit of universal mate-
rial and social progress). Progress, as expressed through
material af uence and the achievements of science and
technology are often eschewed. The nuclear family, Fordist
production, global modernization: all may be conspicuous
in contemporary utopianism by their absence.
The Manuels refer, almost disparagingly, to specialist
utopias (including environmentalism and feminism) iden-
tifying with 1960s and 1970s counterculture, which arose
in response to post-industrial apocalyptic visions of over-
population, nuclear disaster, or Frankensteinian experiments
gone wrong. (Two ecological dystopias which incorporate
such visions are by Harrison (1966) and Wright (1997)).
These, in true post-modern fashion, often entirely rejected
theory. They had, the Manuels say, no identi able character
beyond being usually virulently anti-urban. A bit of tran-
scendence, body mysticism, sexual freedom, the abolition
of work, the end of alienation, they wryly add (p. 808),
noting that this countercultural utopianism appealed to
young people who found conventional society wanting, but
it was, unlike earlier utopianism, not oriented to the long
idealized future. Rather, it related to immediate existence
and to the miniature rather than the large-scale model. This
seems only partly true of ecotopianism at the end of the
20th century, which tends to bear out the Manuels view
(p. 803) that however much it appears to change, the
utopian bazaar is cluttered with old fashioned wares that
are all too familiar.
The picture is complicated by the fact that, of course, not
all contemporary utopianism is countercultural. As will be
argued below, the neo-liberal utopianism of the free market
suffuses today s mainstream ideology and practice of global
modernization, and its mainstream environmental compo-
nent, known as ecological modernization EM. The case for
identifying this as utopian rests on a normative interpre-
tation of the word which is particular to Marxist thought.
Essentially, this holds that while it may be valid to envis-
age and facilitate social change (i.e., towards socialism), it
is utopian, i.e., unrealistic and impractical, to do so in a
way that underplays the importance of factors (especially
economic) militating against such change. The charge of
utopianism, in a derogatory sense, was leveled by Marx
and Engels against the utopian socialists such as Robert
Owen, and the anarchists:
What was designated utopian according to this approach, was
the imagination of the possibility of total social transformation
involving the elimination of individualism, competition and the
sway of private property, without a recognition of the necessity
of class struggle and the revolutionary role of the proletariat in
accomplishing the transition.
(Jones, 1983, 505, emphases added)
By extension, this means that the approach of some eco-
anarchistic alternative communities, who think it possible to
create in the midst of capitalist society a coexisting micro-
cosm of a non-capitalist utopia, which it is hoped might
spread by example, is utopian, naive, and doomed to fail-
ure. It also implies that social democratic attempts to reform
capitalism, rather than replace it by radically changing its
economic character and relations of production, (the EM
approach) are similarly unrealistic and destined to remain
in that place called nowhere.
RADICAL ENVIRONMENTALISMS ECOTOPIA
SUMMARIZED: THE IDEAL MODEL OF
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
Modern environmentalism bears the imprint of both radi-
cal and reformist political ideologies (see Political Move-
ments/Ideologies and the Environment, Volume 5). There
are four main strands of radical environmentalism: deep
ecology (which often fuses into new ageism), social ecol-
ogy, eco-feminism and eco-socialism. These strands are
POLITICAL SYSTEMS AND THE ENVIRONMENT: UTOPIANISM 445
politically diverse and often incompatible; yet they also
share strong unifying features, in their intent, rst, to
replace current society by some form of radical alterna-
tive and, secondly, to ensure that this radical alternative
should be intrinsically socially and environmentally sus-
tainable and just.
A third source of unity is the very considerable common-
ality in their detailed visions of ecotopia/ecochronia. The
lineaments and features of their economic, political and
social life, and their geographies, have more in common
than of difference. In terms of the contemporary jargon of
models of sustainable development, ranging from weak to
strong, the radical environmentalists ecotopias may be seen
as ultra-strong, or as Baker et al. (1997) term it, they con-
stitute an ideal model (IM). One criterion by which this IM
of sustainability differs from other approaches is that it does
not countenance a role for conventional economic growth
in its denition of development: rather it seeks development
in other aspects of wealth, such as quality of life.
The account here draws on ecotopian works referred
to previously, and also in Sale (1985), Devall and Ses-
sions (1985), Kemp (1992), Milbrath et al. (1994), Mander
and Goldsmith (1996), Douthwaite (1996) and Fotopoulos
(1997); a fairly representative and diverse set of radical
environmentalists. However, notwithstanding their diver-
gences, they share most if not all of the principles outlined
in Table 1, amounting to development aims of cultural iden-
tity, self-reliance, economic and social democracy, social
justice and ecological balance. Working from such princi-
ples, some important elements of the economy, society and
geography of the sustainable society corresponding to this
IM can be pictured.
Economy
Stability, self-reliance and cooperation are key IM concepts
underlying production, work and distribution. Self-reliance
would root communities back into their locality, decreas-
ing dependency on the global economy. It implies as much
self-sufciency as possible, locally meeting basic needs
for food, housing, welfare, and energy. Communities could
generate their energy from multiple combined local sources;
watermills, photovoltaics, windmills, and biomass such as
straw, dung, woodchips from coppicing and forest waste.
Contributions to and withdrawals from a grid would coor-
dinate production, while conservation, and savings from
reduced transport, would greatly reduce energy needs.
The principle of common ownership of the means of pro-
duction in action would be seen in farms and horticultural
enterprises owned by community land trusts and/or sup-
ported by subscribers paying for food in advance of or after
distribution. Such enterprises exist today, and are usually
small and substantially organic, utilizing low energy inputs
and local plant and animal strains. Industries, services and
Table 1 Major principles underlying the ideal model IM
of sustainable development
Economy
Economys purpose is to satisfy need, not to create
prot. Needs include satisfying, creative work, good
health, spiritual and cultural fulllment, social
interaction and high environmental quality, as well as
food, shelter, etc.
Communities/individuals dene their own needs and
satisers
Local production to meet local basic needs
Economic confederation and inter-regional exchanges
to meet extra local needs, e.g., energy, transport,
cultural, and non-basic needs
Mutual aid rather than strict reciprocity is the basis for
any exchanges
Economic wealth should not be concentrated or taken
out of communities
Total or partial common ownership and control of
means of production and distribution
From each according to ability: to each according to
need, within limits, or unconditionally
Holistic accounting
Sustainability and self-reliance imply living within limits:
limits to economic growth and consumption
Stable human population levels
Community/regionally planned economy; markets have
minimal or no role
Society and politics
Local community is the basic social unit
Confederation and inter-regional interchange (e.g., via
information technology) to avoid parochialism,
bigotry, conservatism, deviancy
Cultural diversity giving social strength
Participatory, bottom-up democracy, informed by
subsidiarity
Individuals/communities take responsibility for their
own lives
These last two imply economic democracy, direct
political democracy, egalitarianism and
non-hierarchical relationships, i.e., dispersal of power
Emphasized values include cooperation, non-hierarchy,
non-patriarchy, equity, justice, social cohesion,
compassion, love, peace, respect for nature
Holistic thinking
Science/technology controlled by and serves the whole
community
Education a key resource, and tool for social change
State has an enabling role, or none at all
Nature
Valued for its own sake and/or for humanistic goals
Biodiversity fostered and preserved
It is axiomatic that the community focus of society
fosters sustainable relationships with nature
Permacultural principles apply to interaction with the
land
Each system/production cycle can continue indenitely
without ecological deterioration
shops would also be community supported. In Fotopou-
los eco-socialist/anarchist utopian economic democracy,
446 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
citizens assemblies would make all the macroeconomic
decisions. Micro decisions, on how individual factories
and businesses operationalized citizens targets, would be
controlled by workplace assemblies delegating powers to
supervisory boards.
Eco-socialist and deep ecology visions often dwell on
the virtue of creative artisanship (rather than the current
alienating division of labor) to full the social aims of work.
They may also emphasize team production, and the need for
individuals not to over-specialize. However, this does not
amount to rejecting specialist roles, including management.
But possessing and exercising expertise must not create
power hierarchies: there should be distinction without rank.
While some, like Sale, envisage labor without wage,
looking perhaps to distribution via free shops, Fotopou-
los dismisses this as being based on a socialistic fantasy of
inherent abundance. He shares most green and neo-classical
presumptions of inherent scarcity, and would distribute
work, goods and services in his hypothetical non-money
economy through a complicated scheme involving basic and
non-basic vouchers. Everyone would receive the former for
lifes essentials, with a strong expectation that all able bod-
ied people will work. Most would also do extra-voluntary
work, for non-basic vouchers to exchange for community-
designated luxuries (perhaps obtained through exchanges
with other regions and communities). But whether vouch-
ers or money were used, they would be only locally valid,
after the manner of existing local employment and trading
systems (LETS) schemes, and could not be accumulated or
removed from communities by individuals.
In the transition towards the ultimate non-money econ-
omy, Fotopoulos envisages that peoples savings and invest-
ments would be effected through local banking, credit
union and provident schemes, which would all be amenable
to confederation. In very many ecotopian visions, the
anarchists conferral principle would be vital in equaliz-
ing resources between communities, in investing in and
organizing infrastructure, and in overall production plan-
ning. For Fotopoulos, outcomes, in individual incomes and
wealth, might well be unequal, but inequality would result
from individuals voluntary decisions, e.g., to do less work,
or perhaps to do the most sought-after jobs, which therefore
might attract less remuneration than undesirable tasks.
Society and Politics
All ecotopias rest on the argument that more inclusive
styles of government, oriented towards generalizable inter-
ests, are better suited to addressing environmental degra-
dation than existing less inclusive styles. Inclusive styles
are predicated on decentralized decision-making, includ-
ing economic decisions. Hence, IM visions all revolve
around communitarian values, reviving, says Douthwaite,
the spirit of the Irish Meitheal, which was and is a work-
ing party system based on mutual support and trust within
and between local communities. Such visions tend, Kemp
et al. (1992) believe, towards true communism; where pro-
ducers and communities join together to regulate rationally
and for themselves their exchanges with nature; a situa-
tion increasingly rare within capitalism. This context fosters
individuals fulllment, but not at the expense of others.
Most radical visions emphasize libertarian, anti-statist
principles, but their society is also highly organized, need-
ing strong civil institutions. The spatial division of power
is intended to promote equality, efciency, welfare and
security. The fact that this may be utopian in the sense
of unrealistic, is recognized by Le Guin, whose anarchist
planet, Anarres, is by no means perfect. She sees that
because of the principles of diversity and self determina-
tion, not every community or region would be likely to
heed democratic, just and ecologically sound values. (Le
Guins quasi-utopia, incidentally, is more believable and
palatable by virtue of its presentation, warts and all, as an
imperfect society; often dour, austere and a place of daily
struggle to maintain cherished principles. It is, paradoxi-
cally, more inspiring than the incredible worlds of William
Morris, Huxley or Callenbach, where people seem perpet-
ually wreathed in sanctimonious smiles of happiness). In
detail, therefore, the search is for a system that works even
if people in it are not good, with structures, or devices like
peer disapproval, to minimize errant behavior undermining
majority interests.
Fotopoulos supplies considerable structural detail of his
future inclusive democracy. Its citizens assemblies, tak-
ing local decisions, would be augmented through rotating,
mandated, recallable delegates, on appointed bodies like
community courts or militia. They would also send similar
delegates to regional and confederal councils, where dif-
ferent community aims would have to be composited and
operationalized via majority voting or consensus.
Geography and Understanding of Place
It is here, perhaps, that different versions of IM have
most in common; all reasserting localism to countervail
capitalisms inherent globalism. Global modernizations
geography is one of dependency, whereby the lives of com-
munities are shaped by events and decisions originating at
considerable distances. By contrast the IMs decentralized
geography would create protective space for communities
and regions. In its communitarian cultures and collective
economies, families and communities would own their
means of livelihood. Its mainly small enterprises would
minimize returns to capital and maximize returns to labor,
and much investment would be in local rather than spatially
distant regions.
To radical environmentalists, one key benet of decreas-
ing the scale of living would lie in enabling people to
understand readily the effects of their actions on their com-
munity and its ecosystems. Communal ownership of the
POLITICAL SYSTEMS AND THE ENVIRONMENT: UTOPIANISM 447
means of production would preclude externalizing social
and environmental costs, because there would be no exter-
nal places. For where value systems fostered mutual aid
rather than economic competition, it may be reasonably
supposed that other parts of the world would be regarded
as extensions of ones own community and region. The con-
federal principle, allied to information technology, should
help such changes in geographical perception. Parochialism
and spatial inequity could thus be avoided. Outside relation-
ships and exchanges, not being based on strict market reci-
procity, would likely foster non-dependent, non-injurious
interaction and cultural tolerance, in what would be a
global economy. Localism, by providing economic security,
should create a climate where racism and authoritarian-
ism would wither away. Nation states might also wither,
giving way to continental and sub-continental confederal
alliances. The European Union (EU) might become a series
of autonomous regions within a unied European frame-
work.
Bioregionalists, such as Sale, and many deep ecologists,
seek to dene regions by recognizing natural boundaries
within which clear carrying capacity limits are acknowl-
edged. Knowing about regional cultures, folklore, history
and natural cycles would constitute a major element in
bioregional citizenship, involving walking the territory and
attuning consciousness to nature. A bioregion is any
part of the earths surface whose rough boundaries are
determined by natural characteristics rather than human
dictates, (Sale, 1985, 55). It is distinguished from other
bioregions by particular attributes of ora, fauna, water,
climate, soils and landforms, and by the human settlements
and cultures these attributes have given rise to.
There is much variation in views about the maximum
viable size of the primary political unit, the local com-
munity. Estimates may range from one to 10 000 people.
This would clearly necessitate politically reconstructing
most cities into relatively autonomous neighborhood units,
confederated into city regions: perhaps, as Sale envis-
ages, by breaking bigger cities down into smaller ones of
250 000 maximum size, generating their own energy. In
this way, 150 new USA cities would be created. Addi-
tionally, cityscapes are much changed, as in Callenbachs
Ecotopia, where gardens, rooftops, community allotments
and city farms burst forth with the fruits and owers of
intensive cultivation. Douthwaite envisages that increased
rural self-reliance would give city-based service providers
less to do, encouraging countryward migration. This anar-
chistic scattering of the city into its local region would
re-establish city/country reciprocity: what remained of the
former would provide rural services and be fed by its rural
hinterland through box schemes (regular supplies of boxes
of produce direct from farm to consumer), farmers markets
and the like.
PRINCIPAL INFLUENCES ON RADICAL
ECOTOPIANISM
As suggested above, radical ecotopia reects inuences
from the 19th century and before, deriving particularly but
not exclusively from socialist and anarchist utopianism. To
environmentalists who see common ownership of land as
a key issue (reected in groups like Reclaim the Streets
or The Land is Ours or the alternative communities move-
ment), Gerrard Winstanley is a seminal gure. In The Law
of Freedom in a Platform, or True Magistracy Restored
(1652) Winstanley outlined a vision where land would be
set free for the commoners. Environmentalists celebrate him
particularly for his actions in assembling a community of
commoners, the Diggers, who dug and planted the com-
mons on George Hill, Walton, Surrey, in 1649. In their
reluctance to envisage violent seizure of landowners pri-
vate property, and their hope that instead the landowners
would voluntarily give up their lands and join them, these
diggers foreshadowed an important aspect of green anar-
chist/social ecology strategy: that of preguring the desired
society. This means that no strategy or approach (like vio-
lence, or social hierarchies) which would not feature in the
utopia itself should be contemplated as part of the transi-
tional struggle; this point became central to 19th century
arguments between anarchists and Marxists.
A more paternalistic form of preguring might be seen
in Robert Owens utopian experiments. A businessman and
mill owner between 1800 and 1812, thereafter he began to
criticize contemporary society and economy. He reformed
the conditions for his own mill workers at New Lanark,
Scotland, then proposed and initiated self-sustaining com-
munities of about 5003000 people each, without private
property, organized in rectangular units close to manu-
facturing plants and surrounded by intensive agriculture.
Such exemplary communities were to lead to a cooperative
socialism embracing the earth, formed by a new generation
of rational beings.
Another utopian socialist, Charles Fourier (17721837),
also strongly inuences anarchist-feminist, communalist
radical environmentalism. He envisaged phalansteries, com-
munities of about 1700 people, as basic social units,
with no overarching state regulation. In them, creative
talents were expanded, meals and child-care were com-
munal, and industrial armies carried out environmental
projects. Traditional family relationships were dissolved
and replaced by a wide spectrum of sexual relation-
ships. The phalansteries reected Fouriers view that all
humans are born with their own innate instinctual drives,
and utopia would be a place where each personality
would be allowed to come out. Although capital, private
property and wealth disparities remained, all were emo-
tionally satised and spiritually rich. This suggests an
essentially liberal utopia: the creation of an environment
where all individuals could satisfy themselves. Fouriers
448 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
theme of enhanced life quality, perhaps compensating for
lower material standards, features strongly in the seminal
ecotopian visions of Schumacher (1973) and Goldsmith
et al. (1972).
The 20th centurys commune and back-to-the-land rad-
ical environmentalism (Pepper, 1991) has many links and
resonances with similar 19th century alternative communi-
ties (Hardy, 1979, and Gould, 1988). Two of the strongest
inuences on them have been Peter Kropotkin and William
Morris. OSullivan (1990) considers that Morris applied
Marxism to provide radical environmentalists with a
document setting out many of their basic ideas in plain
English. This includes voluntary simplicity; rejecting the
false material wants and sprawling, ugly, polluting devel-
opments engendered by capitalism in favor of the
simple joys of the lovely earth (Morris, 1887), and
fellowship. He demonstrated his eco-socialist credentials
by identifying commercialism and commodication under
capitalism as the source of natures impoverishment. Unlike
deep ecologists, he did not oppose the fruits of industry
per se, particularly organized in small workshops as craft
production, nor did he abhor any change made to nature by
humans. He saw a place for machines, in doing any unplea-
surable work: again a theme in much modern ecotopianism,
as seen, for instance, in the post-industrial utopia of Andre
Gorz (Frankel, 1987). Morris also inveighed against pol-
lution, urbanization of the countryside by mass housing
and alienation of the laborer from his/her creativity, and
consumerism. In News from Nowhere, there is no private
property as a right, hence no hierarchy based on it, and little
crime, except for that based on sexual passions. Nowhere,
say the Manuels, goes alongside Edward Bellamys Fouri-
erist Looking Backward 20001887 (1888) in a tradition
of nostalgic socialist utopias which bypass the dynamism
of industrial-scientic modern civilization. Their visions
represent genteel socialism; non-threatening to Victorian
capitalism (although Morris savagely attacked capitalism)
and therefore open to the charge of utopianism in the Marx-
ist sense.
Morris vision is close to anarchism, and for Kropotkin
(1892, 1899) anarchism would lead to true communeism:
the free association of producers without class division,
wage slavery or even money. He initially conceived of his
ideal communes as a specic spatial form (based on the
Russian mir), but later, like Marx, he saw them less specif-
ically as groupings of individuals with mutual interests in
thousands of towns and villages. His picture of an ideal
communist landscape is close in detail to that of the IM, and
his principle of mutual aid as a key evolutionary law heavily
infuses both social ecology and (paradoxically) deep ecol-
ogy and new ageism. Fotopouloss (1997) inclusive democ-
racy echoes Kropotkin in many respects, although Fotopou-
los, a disciple of Murray Bookchins social ecology, does
not, like many eco-anarchists, fall prey to utopianism in
underestimating the immense power of capital to resist
challenges to its self-perpetuating exigencies.
Much radical ecotopianism (bioregionalism, deep ecol-
ogy and the new ageism into which this can merge) shows
anarchistic leanings in its visions, but nonetheless lacks
anarchisms materialist, socialist perspective as the basis
of such visions. Rather, it is idealistic, and here two 20th
century utopians seem particularly inuential, Teilhard de
Chardin and Aldous Huxley. Callenbachs Ecotopia (1978)
closely resembles Huxleys Island (1962). The latter was a
curtain raiser to 1960s and 1970s idealism and its rejec-
tion of consumer materialism, conformity, alienation and
the perceived dangers of globalization and science allied
to capitalism, such as large-scale development, nuclear
war/power, pollution and waste and overpopulation (Hux-
ley gured on the sleeve of the Beatles Sergeant Pepper
album).
Huxleys remedies for these evils, and the basis of his
utopia, draw particularly on traditions associated with East-
ern mysticism and the passive and pragmatic praxis they
foster, and on the imagined liberating power of drugs and
sexual freedom. His utopians achieve nirvana on an island
paradise surrounded by global threats like oil exploration or
the terrifying increase in Chinas population, by a combi-
nation of tantrik yoga, coitus suspendus, meditation, trance,
autosuggestion and awareness-enhancing drugs, all mixed
in with scientic enlightenment, particularly in the appli-
cation of biological and ecological principles. His utopians
avoid the pitfalls of wider society by virtue of the right
people being intelligent at the right moment and they feel
no need for things bad and thin and boring, such as speed-
boats or television, wars, revolutions, revivals or political
slogans. This all resonates with that strain in environmen-
talism and other new social movements that emphasizes the
power of reason and right thinking, answering perhaps to
the angst of middle-class Western intellectuals, but being
highly utopian in the sense of eschewing the realities of
class politics based on the economic nature of capitalist
society.
Teilhard de Chardins Phenomenon of Man (originally
written in 1947) is one of a complex of inuences on ide-
alistic radical ecotopianism; a perspective suffusing deep
ecology and new age tendencies that see evolution towards
a higher state of consciousness as the key to ecological
salvation. These inuences include Eastern and Western
mysticism, and certain interpretations of 20th century sci-
ence by such writers as Capra, Sheldrake, Bohm, etc. They
are competently synthesized in Peter Russells Awaken-
ing Earth (1991). The starting point is with the evolution
of Gaia (the earth as a living being) which is consid-
ered to be guided by design rather than Darwinian chance
into new orders of complexity, diversity and connectivity
(see Gaia Hypothesis, Volume 5). This holistic, organic,
monist and optimistic evolutionary perspective embraces
POLITICAL SYSTEMS AND THE ENVIRONMENT: UTOPIANISM 449
de Chardin s theology, envisioning Earth s becoming a
social super-organism. It would comprise diverse but inter-
dependent individuals and societies, coalescing in their
thoughts and ideas through the power of love and the
growing density of global communications. Eventually bil-
lions of individuals form a single inter-thinking group or
noosphere (see Noosphere, Volume 5). This is a realm of
consciousness which has evolved from material living mat-
ter (biosphere), that in turn evolved from non-living matter
(geosphere). Eventually all three spheres are to become
an organic unity. This euchronia will be point Omega,
when Gaia will have become one supermind. Beyond
this, Gaia might merge into a Gaia eld: a galactic super-
organism.
Such a conceptual scheme loosely follows Hegel s view
of history as a process of emerging world spirit. The
noosphere is a universal belt of psycho-social forces that has
evolved, not smoothly, but in a series of leaps in response to
environmental crises at different stages of earth s history.
The Manuels note that for all the science (anthropology,
biology) buttressing this schema, it can only be looked on
as a dream of reason. The speci cally Christian element
in de Chardin has not, on the whole, impacted on modern
ecotopianism, although van der Weyer s Wickwyn (1986) is
a rare exception.
However, feminist utopianism has been more in uential.
The society of Ecotopia, for instance, is almost ruthlessly
feminist, while Capra s New Ageist Turning Point (1982)
makes feminine values the key to impending ecotopia.
Marge Piercey s Woman on the Edge of Time (1979) was
much-loved by 1970s radical environmentalists. In it, the
heroine jumps from contemporary society to an androgy-
nous one where relationships and child care are rede ned,
lifestyles are simple and natural, and there is, again, free
love. The latter theme is recurrent in ecotopian IMs, because
of its supposed contribution to heightened quality of life,
and mitigation of the overpopulation problem. A more dis-
tant feminist utopia, Charlotte Perkins Gilman s Herland
(1915), is usually ignored, though in it most things which
environmentalists deplore (war, greed, money, stupidity)
have been banished.
EM: REFORMIST ECOTOPIANISM?
Both left- and right-wing critics of free market liberalism
have long detected a form of utopianism (in the deroga-
tory sense) in the belief that the free market can bring a
world of social justice, ecological sustainability and uni-
versal freedom (Gray, 1999). However, in the past two
decades a new environmental discourse has emerged, which
seems to give new impetus to this utopianism. Rejecting
the pessimistic 1970s Limits to Growth perspective, this
discourse embraces modernity, rationalization and interna-
tionalism, and is posited on continuing global marketization
under capitalism. EM has become the mainstream, reformist
organizing basis for new institutional procedures and per-
spectives to manage environmental problems.
As an approach to sustainable development, EM is
seen by its most enthusiastic adherents as not merely a
technocratic project to modify global modernization envi-
ronmentally, but also as a form of institutional learning and
cultural politics that heralds new ways of seeing and new
opportunities for an emerging global civil society in the face
of global economic forces and environmental problems.
EM discourse is complex, but its core features, which
have become the basis of the environmental policies of
Western states, are outlined in Table 2. Essentially, EM
theory holds that a new phase of development is possible,
and is happening, where capitalism (involving constant eco-
nomic growth, technological development and the spread of
consumerism through global marketization) and the goals of
environmental conservation are reconcilable. Indeed, it sees
environmental protection not as an impediment to capital
accumulation but as a potential source of further accumu-
lation; economic bene ts and competitive advantage being
said to accrue from preserving genetic diversity and from
anticipatory environmental protection, rather than paying
out to clean up a mess. In this positive-sum game, tech-
nological and managerial experts, business and industry all
become key actors in ful lling the environmental agenda,
rather than its enemy, as environmentalists often suspect.
As an approach to sustainable development, EM clearly
ts well with capitalist ideology and could be regarded
as a form of social democracy without the big stick; for
while the state legislates for EM s policy principles, in
the contemporary ideological climate of laissez-faire, its
role becomes contextual and steering, rather than dirigiste
as in post-war Europe. For left-leaning environmentalists,
particularly, however, EM represents a form of environmen-
tal utopianism in the Marxist sense, essentially because it
envisages widespread new behaviors that would in reality
serve as a brake or impediment on the operation of capitalist
economic forces. Therefore, its principles and assumptions
are bound to be unrealistic.
For instance, EM proposes that conventional economic
growth and environmental protection are compatible; yet
in reality economic growth leads today to global warm-
ing, rapid loss of species diversity and other undesirable
effects. It assumes that rms will embrace anticipatory
environmental technology because of its long-term prof-
itability, but in fact most Western rms still opt for the
quicker pro ts offered by end-of-pipe technologies (or by
simply evading environmental standards). In any case it
is unrealistic to assume that anticipatory technology can
signi cantly lower environmental degradation in a growth
economy, since gains from such technologies (e.g., catalytic
converters) are more than offset by growing consumption
(e.g., more cars and road-kilometers).
450 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Table 2 Features of EM Ecological Modernization
a
EMs Realms (Hajer)
(1) New policy-making principles: e.g., from react and
cure to anticipate and prevent; integrated pollution
abatement; integrating environmental concerns into
all ministries; techniques allowing rms to integrate
environment into cost-risk calculations, such as
polluter pays, cost-benet analysis, risk analysis,
precautionary principle, tradable pollution rights,
pollution charges and taxes
(2) A new role for science in policy-making, especially
ecological systems science. Experts take a central
role
(3) Environment protection seen as a source of growth:
low- and non-wasteful anticipatory technologies
generate prots
(4) Nature reconceptualized: a public rather than a free
good, so efciency involves internalizing
environmental costs
(5) Burden of proof reassigned: to the suspected
polluter, not the damaged party
(6) Policy-making opened up: new participation and
partnerships, e.g., between business and
non-government organizations. Voluntary
agreements rather than command and control
regulation are encouraged
Weak EM Discourse Includes (Dryzek)
Anticipating unwanted outcomes of
production/consumption, through systems
approaches
Instrumental view of nature as provider of resources
and services
Continued existence of capitalist political economy
Reassurances about continuing modernization, growth,
progress
Weak EM Discourse Excludes (Dryzek)
Consideration of: limits to growth; Third World
development paths; international environmental
footprints of industrial development; a
non-instrumental view of nature; alternatives to
capitalist political economy
Preoccupation with equity and environmental justice
Unfettered free market economics
Unrestrainedly optimistic view of growth and
development.
Strong EM Discourse May Include (Christoff)
An international dimension
Non-western development approaches
Deeper changes in beliefs and morality
Elevating equity, futurity, ecological imperatives by
comparison with narrow economic goals
Re-embedding society in community, region,
ecosystems: limits to modernization
a
Sources: Hajer (1995), Dryzek (1997), Christoff (1996).
Attitudinal change underpins EM theory, which envisages
that rms will embrace the more holistic accounting and
planning for longer time horizons which are necessary for
sustainability. However, such changes are not at present
widespread among, for instance, US and EU businesses,
because they take most decisions from short-term, sector-
specic perspectives, as must happen in the increasingly
competitive global marketplace.
Hence the hope that capitalist institutions can or will
signicantly reform, to take on environmental sustainabil-
ity, is pious. For this would require giving equal weight
to economic and to environmental and social justice goals,
so that economic and civil spheres would become com-
patible as in the social democratic agenda. But in the
real world Western civil and social democratic politics are
increasingly subordinated to global marketizations eco-
nomic agenda. For to re-establish prot levels after the
1950s1970s round of Keynesian welfare spending, cap-
ital has often resisted social justice and environmental
goals. These goals usually represent unacceptable costs.
Whereas the sustainability agenda requires evening up
wealth distribution, and substantial social spending, capital-
isms inevitable dynamic is to concentrate wealth (Fotopou-
los, 1997). And EM contains other utopian, idealistic
assumptions which would not bear close scrutiny, for
instance that Western afuence could be universalized in
an environmentally sustainable way, that trickle down eco-
nomics work, or even that economic growth is a universal
good.
On this account, then, it is not only young and starry-
eyed idealists or iconoclastic intellectuals who indulge
in environmental utopianism: establishment pillars do the
same, though in a different way. This raises the question
of whether utopianism is a good or bad thing. If everyone
does it yet no environmental resolution is reached, perhaps
the habit should be discouraged. However, the notion of
futurity is a cornerstone of the sustainability debate, hence
it would be utopian to envisage that utopianism could ever
be avoided in that debate.
REFERENCES
Baker, S, Kousis, M, Richardson, D, and Young, S (1997) The
Politics of Sustainable Development: Theory and Practice
within the European Union, Routledge, London, 140.
Callenbach, E (1978) Ecotopia, Pluto Press, London.
Callenbach, E (1981) Ecotopia Emerging, Banyan Tree Books,
Berkley.
Capra, F (1982) The Turning Point, Wildwood House, London.
Christoff, P (1996) Ecological Modernisation: Ecological Moder-
nities, Environ. Politics, 5(3), 476500.
de Chardin, P T (1965) The Phenomenon of Man, Harper and
Row, New York.
Devall, B and Sessions, G (1985) Deep Ecology: Living as if
Nature Mattered, Gibbs M Smith, Salt Lake City, UT.
Douthwaite, R (1996) Short Circuit: Strengthening Local Econo-
mies for Security in an Unstable World, Green Books, Totnes.
Dryzek, J (1997) The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Dis-
courses, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
POST-NORMAL SCIENCE 451
Fotopoulos, T (1997) Towards an Inclusive Democracy: the Crisis
of the Growth Economy and the Need for a New Liberatory
Project, Cassell, London.
Frankel, B (1987) The Post Industrial Utopians, Polity Press,
Cambridge.
Gilman, C P (1915) Herland, 1979 edition, Womans Press, Lon-
don.
Goldsmith, E, Allan, R, Allaby, M, Davoll, J, and Lawrence, S
(1972) Blueprint for Survival, Ecologist, 2(1), 143.
Gould, P (1988) Early Green Politics: Back to Nature, Back to the
Land and Socialism in Britain, Harvester Press, Brighton.
Gray, J (1999) False Dawn: the Delusions of Global Capitalism,
Granta, London.
Hajer, M (1995) The Politics of Environmental Discourse, Ecolog-
ical Modernisation and the Policy Process, Clarendon Press,
Oxford.
Hardy, D (1979) Alternative Communities in Nineteenth Century
England, Longman, London.
Harrison, H (1966) Make Room! Make Room! (lmed as Soylent
Green), 2nd edition (1992), Penguin, Harmondsworth.
Huxley, A (1962) Island, Harper Collins, London.
Jones, G S (1983) Utopian Socialism, in A Dictionary of Marxist
Thought, ed T Bottomore, Blackwell, Oxford, 504506.
Kemp, P et al. (1992) Europes Green Alternative: a Manifesto
for a New World, Green Print, Basingstoke.
Kropotkin, P (1892) The Conquest of Bread, Freedom Press,
London.
Kropotkin, P (1899) Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow,
Freedom Press, London.
Kumar K (1988) Utopianism, in The Fontana Dictionary of Mod-
ern Thought, eds A Bullock, O Stallybrass, and S Trombley,
Fontana, London, 888889.
Le Guin, U (1974) The Dispossessed, Victor Gollancz, London.
Mander, J and Goldsmith, E (1996) The Case Against the Global
Economy and for a Turn Toward the Local, Sierra Club Books,
San Francisco, CA.
Manuel, F E and Manuel, F P (1979) Utopian Thought in the
Western World, Blackwell, Oxford.
Milbrath, L, Downes, Y, and Miller, K (1994) Sustainable Living:
Framework of an Ecosystemically Grounded Political Theory,
Environ. Politics, 3(3), 42144.
Morris, W (1887) The Society of the Future, in The Political
Writings of William Morris, ed A L Morton (1979), Lawrence
and Wishart, London, 188203.
OSullivan, P (1990) The Ending of the Journey: Wm Morris,
News from Nowhere and Ecology, in Wm Morris and News
from Nowhere: a Vision for Our Time, eds S Coleman and
P OSullivan, Green Books, Bideford, 169181.
Pepper, D M (1991) Communes and the Green Vision: Counter-
culture, Lifestyle and the New Age, Green Print, Basingstoke.
Piercey, M (1979) Woman on the Edge of Time, The Womens
Press, London.
Reich, C (1970) The Greening of America, Random House, New
York.
Russell, P (1991) The Awakening Earth: the Global Brain, Arkana,
London.
Sale, K (1985) Dwellers in the Land: the Bioregional Vision,
Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, CA.
Schumacher, E F (1973) Small is Beautiful: Economics as if Peo-
ple Really Mattered, Abacus, London.
van der Weyer, R (1986) Wickwyn: a Vision of the Future, Society
for the Propogation of Christian Knowledge, London.
Wright, R (1997) A Scienti c Romance, Anchor, London.
Politics, Environmental
see Environmental Politics (Opening essay,
Volume 5)
Positivism
see Environmental Philosophy:
Phenomenological Ecology (Volume 5)
Post-modern
see Political Movements/Ideologies and the
Environment (Volume 5)
Post-normal Science
Jerome R Ravetz
Research Methods Consultancy Ltd., London, UK
Post-normal science is a new conception of the management
of complex science-related issues (Funtowicz and Ravetz,
1992, 1993, 1994, 1999; Ravetz, 1999). It focuses on aspects
of problem solving that tend to be neglected in traditional
accounts of scienti c practice: uncertainty, value loading,
and a plurality of legitimate perspectives. It provides a
coherent explanation of the need for greater participation in
science-policy processes, based on the new tasks of quality
assurance in these problem areas.
It is a means of illuminating, explaining and then
guiding innovative decision processes that are happening
spontaneously all over the world. The management of
complex natural systems as if they were simple scienti c
exercises has brought us to our present mixture of triumph
and peril. We are now witnessing the emergence of a new
approach to problem-solving strategies in which the role of
science, still essential, is now appreciated in its full context
452 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
of the complexity and uncertainty of natural systems and the
relevance of human commitments and values.
INTRODUCTION
In the sorts of issue-driven science relating to global cli-
mate change, typically facts are uncertain, values in dis-
pute, stakes high, and decisions urgent. The sound science
that is frequently invoked as the requirement for rational
policy decisions may be an unaffordable luxury. The tra-
ditional distinction between hard, objective scientic facts
and soft, subjective value judgments is now inverted. All
too often, we must make hard policy decisions where our
only scientic inputs are irremediably soft. In these new
circumstances, invoking truth as the goal of science is a
diversion. A more relevant and robust guiding principle is
quality, understood as a contextual property of scientic
information.
Appropriate intellectual tools are required for these new
tasks. A scientic methodology designed for controlled
experimentation and abstract theory building can make
effective use of a picture of reality that reduces complex
phenomena to their simple, atomic elements. However, that
is not best suited for the tasks of science-related policy
today. The traditional normal scientic mind-set fosters
expectations of regularity, simplicity and certainty in the
phenomena and in our interventions. However, these can
inhibit the growth of our understanding of the new problems
and of appropriate methods for their solution.
These new problems are characteristic of complex sys-
tems. These are not merely complicated; they involve
interrelated subsystems at a variety of scale levels and at
a variety of sorts. Thus, we now know that every tech-
nology is embedded in its societal and natural contexts,
and that nature itself is shaped by its interactions with
humanity. In such complex systems, there can be no single
privileged point of view for measurement, analysis and
evaluation. Moreover, in these systems there is generally
no hidden hand whereby selsh individual actions automat-
ically benet the wider societal and natural communities;
hence there is no substitute for morality in the good con-
duct of our affairs. The phenomena of life, society, and
now the environment, cannot be captured, nor their prob-
lems managed, by sciences which assume that the relevant
systems are simple. In terms of such paradigms, they will
always present anomalies and surprises. Post-normal sci-
ence has been developed as the appropriate methodology
for complex natural and social systems.
The term post-normal provides a contrast to two sorts
of normality. One is the picture of research science as
normally consisting of puzzle solving within the framework
of an unquestioned and unquestionable paradigm, in the
theory of Kuhn (1962). Another is the assumption that the
policy context is still normal, in that such routine puzzle
solving by experts provides an adequate knowledge base
for decision making. The great lesson of recent years is
that this assumption no longer holds. We may call it a
post-modern rejection of grand narratives, or a green, not-
in-my-back-yard (NIMBY) politics. Whatever its causes,
we can no longer assume the presence of this sort of
normality of the policy process, particularly in relation to
global climate change. The frequent, almost ritualized calls
for debate on major policy questions of risks and the
environment are an implicit recognition of their post-normal
character.
In such novel contexts, there is a new role for natural sci-
ence. The facts that are taught from the textbooks used in
institutions are still necessary, but they are no longer suf-
cient. Contrary to the impression that the textbooks convey,
in practice most problems have more than one plausible
answer, and many have no well-dened scientic answer at
all. Further, in the articial world studied in academic sci-
ence courses, it is strictly inconceivable that science-related
problems could be tackled and solved except by deploying
the accredited expertise. Practical techniques, which cannot
be explained in principle by accepted science, are com-
monly dismissed as the products of blind tradition or of
chance. When persons with no formal qualications attempt
to participate in the processes of innovation, evaluation or
decision-making, their efforts have tended to be viewed
with suspicion or scorn. Post-normal science provides a
means for correcting this sort of mind-set.
POST-NORMAL SCIENCE
As a theory, post-normal science links epistemology (study
of the grounds for knowledge) and policy, for its origins
lie in the relations between those two domains. Its authors
were concerned that the sciences devoted to solving risk
and environmental problems (such as those in ecology and
toxicology) are radically different from those that are instru-
mental in creating them (such as the applications of physics
and molecular biology). In comparison to those traditional
sciences, the policy-relevant sciences have enjoyed less
prestige and funding, are less mature scientically, and are
more subject to external inuences and constraints. By the
criteria of the traditional philosophy of science, their results
frequently fail to attain the status of sound science. It has
been argued that they should, therefore, be rejected as evi-
dence in policy debates; but a more appropriate conclusion
would be that the philosophy of science needs recasting.
Post-normal science provides a response to these crises of
science and philosophy, by bringing facts and values into
a unied conception of problem solving in these areas, and
by replacing truth by quality as its core evaluative concept.
Its principle of the plurality of legitimate perspectives on
any problem leads to a focus on dialogue, and on mutual
respect and learning, wherever possible.
POST-NORMAL SCIENCE 453
Post-normal science comprises those inquiries that occur
at the interfaces of science and policy where uncertain-
ties and value-loadings are critical. It can be analyzed
as a policy cycle including: policies, persons, procedures,
products, and post-normal assessment; it also extends to
the downstream phases of implementation and monitor-
ing (Funtowicz et al., 2000). Depending on the partic-
ular context, the task may be more like policy-related
research, or science-related decision making, or creative
technical-social innovation. In the case of global cli-
mate change, all three sorts are in play; the distinctions
are never absolute, as the whole endeavor is a complex
system.
Post-normal science can be located in relation to the
more traditional problem-solving strategies by means of a
diagram (see Figure 1). On it, we see two axes systems
uncertainties and decision stakes. When both aspects are
small, we are in the realm of normal, safe applied science,
where expertise is fully effective. When either is medium,
then the application of routine techniques is not enough;
skill, judgement, sometimes even courage are required. This
is professional consultancy, with the examples of the sur-
geon or the senior engineer in mind. In such cases, the
creative element in the problem is more an exercise in
design than the discovery of facts. Our modern society
depends on armies of applied scientists pushing forward
the frontiers of knowledge and technique, with the pro-
fessionals performing leading roles in technical and policy
matters. In recent years we have learned that even the skills
of professionals are not always adequate for the solution of
science-related policy issues. When risks cannot be quan-
tied, or when possible damage is irreversible, then we
are out of the range of competence of traditional sorts
of expertise and traditional problem-solving methodolo-
gies. This situation is represented on the diagram as the
High
Decision
stakes
Low High
Applied
science
Systems uncertainties
Post-normal
science
Professional
consultancy
Figure 1 Post-normal science
outer band, that of post-normal science. We notice that
the band extends through the whole quadrant, right up to
the region where systems uncertainties vanish. This feature
re ects the fact that, if in some policy process the decision
stakes are very high (as when an institution is seriously
threatened by a proposed policy), then a defensive strategy
will involve challenging every step of a scienti c argu-
ment, even if the systems uncertainties are actually quite
small.
The management of systems uncertainties through the
involvement of decision stakes occurs even in routine sci-
ence. Whatever the statistical test, there will always be
errors: some true correlations will be rejected (Type I) and
false ones will be accepted (Type II). A balance must, there-
fore, be struck between the error-costs of excess speci city
and those of excess sensitivity, respectively; and that bal-
ance depends on the policy framework of the test. For
example, if the problem is detecting possible harm from
contaminants, it is better to err on the side of precaution
and be more inclusive; a test designed around avoiding
false positives could exclude potentially important informa-
tion (Type I error), which could then remain permanently
unknown. The well-known con dence level expresses this
value-driven choice. Researchers do normally not assign it;
rather they automatically apply the level that is standard for
their eld.
When a problem is recognized as post-normal, even the
routine research exercises take on a new character. For
the value-loadings and uncertainties are no longer managed
automatically or unself-consciously. As they may be critical
to the quality of the product in the policy context, they are
the objects of critical scrutiny by researchers themselves
as well as by their peers. Thus, normal science itself
becomes post-normal, and is liberated from its traditional
unre ective, dogmatic character.
The awareness of global climate change is well on the
way to transforming all our conceptions of policy problems
in the post-normal direction. For example, passenger trans-
port had traditionally been seen as an essentially straightfor-
ward engineering problem of maximizing mobility, subject
to the constraints of cost and safety. Now transport tech-
nologies and policies are strongly in uenced by environ-
mental considerations of many sorts. Moreover, the need to
control the increase in private passenger transport depends
directly on lifestyles. Together with the systematic uncer-
tainties of global climate change, there are crucial decision
stakes in conceptions of the good life, along with consid-
erations of equity between peoples and generations. The
entire population of passenger transport users effectively
becomes an extended peer community; for the success of
sustainable transport technologies will depend on the effec-
tiveness of users commitment to the values of the global
environment.
454 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
EXTENSIONS OF THE PEER COMMUNITIES
There are now many initiatives, increasing in number and
signicance all the time, for involving wider circles of
people in decision-making and implementation on envi-
ronmental issues. The contribution of all the stakeholders
in cases of post-normal science is not merely a matter of
broader democratic participation. For these new problems
are in many ways different from those of research science,
professional practice, or industrial development. Each of
those has its established means for quality-assurance of the
products of the work, be they peer review, professional
associations, or the market. However, for these new prob-
lems, the maintenance of quality depends on open dialogue
amongst all those affected. This we call an extended peer
community, consisting not merely of persons with some
form or other of institutional accreditation, but rather of all
those with a desire to participate in the resolution of the
issue. Since this context of science is one involving policy,
we might see this extension of peer communities as anal-
ogous to earlier extensions of the franchise in other elds,
such as womens suffrage and trade union rights. This is not
merely a matter of extensions of liberty; with post-normal
science we can guide the extension of the accountability of
governments (the foundation of modern democratic soci-
ety) to include the institutions involved in the governance
of science and technology.
Extended peer communities are already being created, in
increasing numbers, either when the authorities cannot see
a way forward, or when they know that without a broad
base of consensus, no policy can succeed. They are called
citizens juries, focus groups, consensus conferences, or any
one of a great variety of other names; and their forms and
powers are correspondingly varied. Nonetheless, they all
have one important element in common: they assess the
quality of policy proposals, including a scientic element,
on the basis of their level of scientic comprehension
combined with their knowledge of the ways of the world.
Their verdicts all have some degree of moral force and
hence political inuence.
These extended peer communities will not necessarily
be passive recipients of the materials provided by experts.
They will also possess, or create, their own extended facts.
These may include craft wisdom and community knowl-
edge of places and their histories, as well as anecdotal
evidence, neighborhood surveys, investigative journalism
and leaked documents. Such extended peer communities
have achieved enormous new scope and power through
the Internet. Activists scattered among large cities or rain-
forests can engage in mutual education and coordinated
activity, providing themselves with the means of engage-
ment with global vested interests on less unequal terms than
previously.
Along with the regulatory, evaluative function of
extended peer communities, another function, even more
intimately involved in the policy process, is springing up.
The discovery is being made, again and again, particularly
at the local level, that people not only care about their
own environment but can also become quite ingenious and
creative in nding practical, mixed social and technological
means for its improvement. For local people can imagine
solutions and reformulate problems in ways that the
accredited experts, with the best will in the world, do not
nd normal. This is most important in the phases of policy-
formation, and also in the implementation and monitoring
of policies. Thus, in addition to extending the traditional
processes of quality assessment, participants can enhance
the quality of the problem-solving processes themselves.
Even more than in environmental issues, numerous groups
of patients and activists in the medical eld have been
demonstrating post-normal science at work.
Post-normal science belongs to a growing family of
approaches to the understanding of the new predicaments
of science and society. Beck (1992) has described the risk
society and the development of sub-politics, effectively the
extended peer communities. Wynne (1996) has contributed
on extended facts and the need for extended peer review.
Irwin (1995) has stressed the importance of the contribution
of local communities and activists. Jasanoff (1998) has
analyzed the effectively post-normal situation of science
in the courtroom, and showed how citizens can exercise
effective quality control there.
What we call science has undergone many changes over
the centuries in its objects, methods and social functions.
The previous century saw science rise to unimaginable
achievements in knowledge, power and then destructive-
ness. With post-normal science we are characterizing the
changes that will be necessary for our civilization to become
sustainable, and thereby to survive.
REFERENCES
Beck, U (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, Sage,
London.
Funtowicz, S and Ravetz, J R (1992) Three Types of Risk Assess-
ment and the Emergence of Post-normal Science, in Social
Theories of Risk, eds S Krimsky and D Golding, Greenwood,
Westport, CT, 251273.
Funtowicz, S and Ravetz, J R (1993) Science for the Post-normal
Age, Futures, 25, 735755.
Funtowicz, S and Ravetz, J R (1994) Uncertainty, Complex-
ity and Post-normal Science, Environ. Toxicol. Chem., 13,
18811885.
Funtowicz, S and Ravetz, J R (1999) Post-normal Science an
Insight Now Maturing, Futures, 31, 641646.
Funtowicz, S, Shepherd, I, Wilkinson, D, and Ravetz, J (2000)
Science and Governance in the European Union: a Contribu-
tion to the Debate, Sci. Public Policy, 27(3), 327336.
Irwin, A (1995) Citizen Science, Routledge, London.
Jasanoff, S (1998) The Eye of Everyman, Soc. Stud. Sci., 28,
713740.
PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE 455
Kuhn, T S (1962) The Structure of Scienti c Revolutions, Chicago
University Press, Chicago, IL.
Ravetz, J (1999) What is Post-normal Science? Futures, 31,
647654.
Wynne, B (1996) Misunderstood Misunderstandings: Social Iden-
tities and Public Uptake of Science, in Misunderstanding Sci-
ence? eds A Irwin and B Wynne, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1946.
Poverty
see Development and Global Environmental
Change (Opening essay, Volume 5)
Poverty and the Environment
see Economics and Global Environmental
Change (Opening essay, Volume 5)
Precautionary Principle
Tim ORiordan
University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
The precautionary principle emerged in Germany in the
1970s and has become a central plank in European Union
environmental policy since the early 1980s. The precaution-
ary principle as applied to environmental management is
based on the idea of acting prudently in advance of full
scienti c certainty, leaving room for ignorance in the use
of resources, and placing the onus of proof on those who
propose to change, to show that there will be no harm as
a result of their proposed actions. In recent years the pre-
cautionary principle has moved from the realms of science
and environmental management to the politics of risk, social
responsibility, trade and protecting the well-being of the
innocent and vulnerable.
The attraction of precaution lies in the aphorisms a stitch in
time saves nine, and better safe than sorry. Its signicance
as a guiding principle in environmental science lies in
its challenge to conventional science, its preference for
the victim of potential environmental abuse, and its shift
in the nature of valuation techniques in favor of a more
communitarian democracy. The precautionary principle will
prevail because the political mood of environmentalism is
moving towards sustainability, because a more inclusive
stakeholder involvement in environmental decision taking
is becoming the vogue, because scenarios about possible
future environmental states are much more readily available
due to huge computing power and the internet, and because
an anxious citizenry is beginning to take the management
of environmental risk into its own hands.
The precautionary principle emerged from German law
in the late 1970s as the vorsorgeprinzip. This was taken
to mean acting with care and with anticipation, in order
to prevent avoidable harmful effects to humans and the
environment. The vorsorgeprinzip was promoted by the
Brandt Government as a justication for state interven-
tion in the economy, for forward planning, and for the
encouragement of clean technology. It was thus a justi-
cation for the aggressive intervention of the state in land
use management and in the direction of investment into
export-earning technological advance, pushed by tough and
pro-active environmental regulation.
The basic principles of the precautionary principle are:
Thoughtful action in advance of scienti c proof : most
environmental future states cannot be forecast with any
certainty. There are neither the data nor the modeling
accuracy to do the job. Where the burden of evidence
falls on the side of possible harm, the precautionary
principle is invoked, even though taking action will
cost money.
Leaving ecological space: because we cannot be sure
how tolerant ecosystems are to human intervention, it is
necessary to leave ecological space as a buffer against
our ignorance. Sometimes this practice is placed into
law, as, for example, is the case in South Africa.
There, the 1998 National Water Act provides for an
entitlement of water for nature as an act of precaution.
Human users, beyond allocation for essential needs,
have to come second. This general principle, notably
as regards water, will become more widespread.
Care in management : because it is not possible to
predict all possible consequences of any environmen-
tal management decision, it is necessary to focus on
the vulnerable and the most likely losers of a possi-
ble course of action. This max-min strategy of risk
management is a feature of empowerment in a modern
democracy, transferring an element of trust and respect
to the politically most marginal.
Shifting the burden of proof : possibly the most dramatic
outcome is the legal and political shift of the burden of
proof away from those likely to be harmed by a possi-
ble course of action, towards those who plan to change
the status quo. In the past, all that a developer had to do
was to show that no likelihood of unreasonable harm
would ensue for a particular course of action. With the
456 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
precautionary principle, the balance of proof falls on
the developer to show that particular interests will not
be harmed at all.
The precautionary principle is brought into environmen-
tal management for seven reasons:
There is an active civic science: citizens want to be
directly involved in providing the valuation and valida-
tion of scientic data and ndings. The future of genet-
ically modied organisms in foodstuff, for instance, is
no longer a purely scientic matter. The more citizens
groups are involved, the more the precautionary prin-
ciple will be applied.
The scope for collapse of vulnerable ecosystems is real :
the scare stories over the losses of biodiversity, of
tropical forest removal and of coral reef bleaching have
caused many active citizens to believe that we simply
cannot know enough about the precursors to ecological
collapse. Indeed, it is difcult for ecologists to come
up with indicator conditions in species that provide a
satisfactory basis for predetermining system collapse.
This is why a more participatory ecological science is
required.
Dislocation at a local level accumulates to seriously
adverse global consequences: precaution is necessary
to stop the global commons from being degraded
by millions or even billions of micro-level individ-
ual actions; no one individual has any incentive, other
than altruism, to control his/her consumer behavior. In
this sense, precaution is both proactively regulatory,
and also personally educative, for it creates a wish in
both the producer of products and services, and in the
consumer, for a sense of responsibility for planetary
stewardship.
Vulnerable groups are championed by citizens justice
organizations: the rise of the eco-justice movement
has been stimulated by civil rights groups, and by the
growing evidence that environmental harm is dispro-
portionately directed towards the poor, the vulnerable
and the politically marginalized. The act of precaution
is now being used to create a citizens right to a healthy
environment. Again, this procedure places a political
bias on disadvantaged groups to be empowered. How
far this can effectively be implemented remains to be
seen.
Business is worrying about corporate reputation: the
scares over genetically modied organisms in food,
or infectious salmon anaemia in sh-farmed salmon
have seriously damaged public trust in corporations
promoting such practices. This, in turn, has led to a
popular resistance to eat food from elds or sh farms
experiencing these modications: in various recent
polls, over 54% of British consumers will consciously
avoid such foodstuffs. Therefore, businesses embarking
on environmental audits and social responsibility
programs also expose themselves to applying the
precautionary principle in a more aggressive manner.
Regulation is more transparent : the role of the regula-
tor has been made more difcult due to the rise of the
Internet, and to the scrutiny of intervener consumer and
environmental organizations. No longer is regulation a
secretive and private matter. Increasingly, all regulatory
actions have to be open and accountable to an active
citizenry that is looking to the precautionary principle
to guide the levels of environmental safeguards being
set for all classes of social groupings. Like science, reg-
ulation is a more participatory activity, and hence val-
ues and aspirations of various interested parties are now
a legitimate part of standard setting and permitting.
Direct action is more ubiquitous: direct action, involv-
ing illegal protest, over administrative and commercial
acts that no longer are tolerated by angry citizens orga-
nizations, is not new. But these days it has adopted
a greater potency due to the variety of opportunities
available, the inquisitiveness of the media, the tolerance
of the politicians, and the intolerances of the police. An
additional factor is the general feeling that playing by
the rules will not result in adequate political response.
Direct action is a recognition that formal democracy
is ineffective. Informal democracy is seen as a lever
of citizen power. In these days of precaution and civic
activism, direct action becomes increasingly attractive
and innovative (see Public-dr iven Response to Global
Environmental Change, Volume 4).
For precaution to work properly, however, there needs to
be a change in both science and law beyond what is occur-
ring today. The incorporation of soft values relating to being
more in tune with nature and more sensitive to the legiti-
mate aspirations of all others is a matter that separates inter-
disciplinary science as currently practiced from post-normal
science (see Post-nor mal Science, Volume 5). The science
of including feelings, of introducing trust, and of nurturing
sensitivity for the interests of others is not quite born.
Nor are the joint property rights of stewardship fully
developed. This is the extension of property rights to
include the well-being of ecosystem functioning and social
connectedness in all aspects of managing land, natural
resources, and the commons. There is a part-way stage
in this legal revolution in the application of the public
trust doctrine. This states that any avoidable damage to the
interests of others must be recognized and compensated,
and also that the ability of those likely to be adversely
affected, should be enhanced by training and mediation for
empowerment.
This is the widening context of the application of the pre-
cautionary principle in contemporary environmental man-
agement. It is opening windows on science, law, politics,
PROPERTY RIGHTS AND REGIMES 457
regulation and moral norms. Precaution continues to be a
truly transformationist concept.
See also: Environmental Movement the Rise of Non-
government Organizations (NGOs), Volume 5; Political
Movements/Ideologies and the Environment, Volume 5.
FURTHER READING
Cable, S and Cable, C (1995) Environmental Problems, Grass-
roots Solutions: The Politics of Grassroots Environmental Con-
ict, St Martin s Press, New York.
O Riordan, T and Cameron, J, eds (1994) Interpreting the Pre-
cautionary Principle, Earthscan Publications, London.
O Riordan, T and Jordan, A (1995) The Precautionary Principle
in Contemporary Environmental Management, Environ. Vals.,
4(2), 191 212.
O Riordan, T (1999) Environmental Science on the Move, in
Environmental Science for Environmental Management, 2nd
edition, ed T O Riordan, Longman, Harlow, 1 27.
O Riordan, T, Cameron, T, and Jordan, A, eds (2001) Reinter-
preting the Precautionary Principle, Cameron May, London.
Rawcliffe, P (1992) Environmental Groups in Transition, Manch-
ester University Press, Manchester.
Tickner, J and Raffersperger, C, eds (1999) Putting the Precau-
tionary Principle into Practice, Island Press, New York.
Process Theology
see Christianity and the Environment
(Volume 5); Theology (Volume 5)
Property Rights and
Regimes
Bonnie McCay
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New
Brunswick, NJ, USA
Property rights are fundamental institutions of all societies.
They are the formal and informal rules about how people
relate to things and places they value. Property rights may
be dened in terms of who holds rights whether persons
(individuals, business rms and other units with the legal
identity of persons), organizations, governments, or loosely
dened latent groups (Olson, 1965) such as the public or all
humankind. Thus, we talk of individual property, communal
property, government property, and public property (as for
example in the Swedish allmennsretten). Property may also
be understood in terms of the kinds of rights people hold,
including degrees of exclusivity and inclusivity. Private
property is at the exclusive end of this continuum, and public
property, implying the right not to be excluded (Macpher-
son, 1978), is at the inclusive end.
The language of property regimes is often used in dis-
cussions of environmental problems. Property regimes are
systems of governance or regulation that differ from each
other in terms of which property rights are most prevalent or
controlling. Many writers use terms similar to open access,
common property, state property, and private property
when talking about different systems of resource manage-
ment (e.g., Bromley and Cernea, 1989; Feeny et al., 1990).
Although there are problems with this scheme (McCay,
1996) and other ways to label the systems (e.g., Ostrom
et al., 1999), it provides a useful framework for discussing
property regimes and the environment.
In trying to understand how property rights affect the ways
people relate to their environments, we specify just what
kinds of rights are held and by whom, and examine how
particular property rights are nested within larger systems
of rights and duties as well as their embeddedness in
cultural and political traditions. In the Anglo American
legal tradition, property is often described in terms of
bundles of rights, i.e., distinct though interrelated rights
(Rose, 1994). For example, exclusive rights of access or
use, rights to income from the property, rights to change
attributes of the property, the right to gift or will it to
one s heirs, and the right to sell or lease it may or may not
be part of a particular bundle of rights or ownership. The
owner may have some sticks in the bundle of rights but not
all, and ownership can be overlapping and complementary.
For example, in a housing condominium, the owner of an
apartment or townhouse holds exclusive rights to live in
and decorate the interior but has ownership in common
with others of the exterior of the building and perhaps the
grounds. He/she may hold the right to vote on decisions
about management of the common property but is required
to abide by the decision rules. His/her right to transfer
ownership to someone else may or may not be subject to
approval of an association of co-owners. The condominium
is in a larger community, which subjects it to taxation and
to zoning and other regulations, and so forth.
An open access system is one where there are few if any
barriers to entry or use and no regulation of the activities of
resource users; this is the condition meant by commons in
the well-known essay The Tragedy of the Commons (Hardin,
1968) (see Commons, Tragedy of the, Volume 5). It is
also one of the powerful assumptions of the formal models
used in economics to depict the tendency for resource
users to over-exploit resources (Gordon, 1954; Scott, 1979).
458 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
As long as access is open, there are no incentives for
resource users to take care of the resource because of the
temptation to free-ride on the efforts of others. An open
access system is also one where present users cannot really
control the behavior of others, who can come and go as
they please, reducing the benets of individuals efforts
to conserve. Open access is accompanied by other special
assumptions, such as the self-interested, prot-maximizing
individual and the paradoxical assumptions of complete
information on the one hand and lack of communication
on the other (McCay and Acheson, 1987; Feeny et al.,
1996). Recognition of the limitations of these and other
assumptions lies behind skepticism about the universal
appropriateness of prescriptions that follow from the open
access model: convert the system to either a private property
or a state property (governance) regime.
Private property and state property are the regimes usu-
ally identied as solutions to the tragedy of the open access
commons. Here, state property does not refer to the things
and places owned exclusively by a government (like a
defense departments munitions depot) but rather to gov-
ernments ownership of the right and means of regulating
or governing the use and distribution of common or pub-
lic resources as well as ownership of lands in trust for the
public. It is better to refer to it as state governance (Berkes
and Feeny, 1990; McCay, 1996). According to economic
property rights theory, over-exploitation and economic dif-
culties created by open access regimes require the strong
arm of state governance because users of shared property
cannot be counted upon to regulate themselves. Among the
problems with this conclusion is over-reliance on the state
as a homogeneous, benevolent, all-knowing entity inter-
ested in and capable of acting on behalf of long-term as
well as short-term interests. This view of the state or its reg-
ulatory authorities is implicit in economic property rights
theory, but it rarely ts the evidence of historical and con-
temporary reality (Feeny et al., 1996).
Even better, according to the theory, is reliance on pri-
vate property (especially in the liberal notion of exclusive
ownership of most or all of the sticks in the bundle of
rights). The idea is that private owners will have the incen-
tives that public users lack to properly manage resources.
However, the argument that private property is superior
policy is faulty on logical as well as empirical grounds
(Ellickson, 1993; Christman, 1994). It also rings false in
theoretical circles. Under conditions of high rates of dis-
counting the future and low rates of reproduction of the
resource, a private owner is no less likely than a common
user to over-exploit the resource (Clark, 1973). Moreover,
some resources cannot easily be treated as private property:
their physical features may be such that it is difcult to
exclude others from them, and even if one did exclude oth-
ers from part of them, what one does may affect the benets
that another realizes. They are common pool resources; any
property rights asserted over them are necessarily imperfect,
and the result is market failure. Hence, there must be
alternatives.
The metaphor of an open access tragedy and the pre-
scriptions of privatization and government intervention are
often used in discussing environmental problems. They are
linked to policy debates between command and control and
market-based environmental control measures. Command
and control refers to state governance (borrowing from criti-
cisms of the socialist and communist governance systems).
Market-based environmental protection refers to the cre-
ation of quasi-private property rights within the framework
of state governance in order to improve compliance and
efciency while achieving social goals. Examples include
air pollution systems that use tradable emission permits
and sheries management systems using transferable indi-
vidual quotas. Tradable emissions permits were used to
phase out lead in gasoline and reduce sulfur emissions in
the US, providing greater exibility and thereby economiz-
ing (Hahn and Hester, 1989). Similar programs have been
used to eliminate ozone-depleting gases and to control acid
rain and tropospheric ozone in the US. Canada, Chile, and
Germany are other countries using tradable permits (Tieten-
berg, 1995, 1998) (see Tr adable Per mits for Greenhouse
Gases, Volume 4; Tr adable Per mits for Limiting Str ato-
spher ic Ozone Depletion, Volume 4; Tr adable Per mits
for Sulfur Emission Reductions, Volume 4; Tr ansfer able
Fisher ies Quotas (TFQs), Volume 4; Quotas in Inter na-
tional Environmental Negotiations, Volume 4).
In marine sheries, annual quotas for how much may
be caught without jeopardizing the sustainability of a sh
stock may be allocated to individual participants, just as
pollution emission rights are allocated to individual pollut-
ing rms after a permissible level is established in relation
to legal and scientic criteria (National Research Council,
1999). A recent review of these individual shery quota
(IFQ) systems in the US, Canada, Iceland, and New Zealand
highlights the many issues, costs, and benets of priva-
tizing rights to shares of a quota. Reviews such as this
have led to consideration of how to balance the benets of
market-based allocations with the concerns of individuals,
communities, and industries for the future of their jobs and
investments, as well as the broader societal concern with
sustainable development. This effort includes attempts to
develop market-based instruments that increase the con-
servation incentives for holders of exclusive rights while
dealing with problems of equity, stewardship, and resilience
(ability to adapt to changes in the environment) (Young and
McCay, 1995).
Largely neglected thus far in the policy deliberations of
major countries is the role of common property governance.
Property rights scholars now object to the use of the term
commons as equivalent to open access because it ignores
the historic and contemporary importance of institutions in
PROPERTY RIGHTS AND REGIMES 459
which people share rights of access and use and have some
degree of regulation of their activities on the commons
(Ciriacy-Wantrup and Bishop, 1975; Cox, 1985; McCay
and Acheson, 1987; Hanna, 1990; Bromley, 1992). Experi-
mental and comparative case studies have helped create an
understanding of the internal and external conditions under
which common property institutions develop and are sus-
tainable as well as those under which they falter (Ostrom,
1990; McKean, 1992).
Examples of external and internal conditions that pro-
mote community success in commons management include
the ability to clearly dene and regulate entry to mem-
bership in the community. It is also important to have
autonomy from outside governance, to enable local experi-
mentation and adaptation to local conditions, but to obtain
enough legitimization and other assistance from the outside
to help members of a community monitor the conditions
of the resources or environments about which they care,
so that they have reliable and accurate knowledge about
those conditions. Local communities may also need exter-
nal help to deal with spillover effects among communities.
Critical internal factors include the ability to achieve broad
participation in decision-making and implementation even
where there are signicant differences among participants;
to create consensus about the fairness and rightness of the
regulations; and the ability to monitor behavior and out-
comes and to enforce and appropriately modify rules and
regulations. Some factors pertain to the features of the envi-
ronment, such as whether the ow of resources or risks from
it is predictable or unpredictable and how abundant those
resources or dangerous those risks are (cf. Ostrom et al.,
1999). Ironically, external conditions that promote commu-
nity failure in these and other regards include the perverse
effects of the very forces promoted as solutions to com-
mons problems: intervention of the state and the workings
of markets (McCay and Jentoft, 1998).
An emphasis on common property governance leads to
three questions for broader understanding of global envi-
ronmental change. The rst is how to develop effective
community-based systems for environmental protection and
management. Community-based management has become
a priority for international lending agencies and, even
more so, non-governmental organizations in many indus-
trialized and less-developed countries. However, it is not
easy to implement, particularly where communities and the
environmental resources with which they interact have been
disrupted by warfare, migration, and disease, as well as
long histories of subjugation and control by colonial pow-
ers, corrupt or unreliable political regimes, and economic
restructuring due to international debt burdens. As much to
the point is the poorly dened status of community property
rights in most nations.
Second is the question of what can be learned from
community-level studies that can inform efforts to improve
international-level environmental regimes, the scaling up
challenge. Important work is being done in this regard by
students of international environmental regimes (Young,
1999, 1997; Haas et al., 1993). Beyond the borders and
boundaries of national jurisdiction, one might presuppose
open access, which is supported by the international legal
and political framework accepting the nationstate as the
top level of sovereignty. Consequently, by law it is up to
the nationstate to regulate uses of natural resources and
their environments even in international realms, including
the oceans (beyond 200 nautical miles from coastal borders)
and the atmosphere and true frontiers (i.e., Antarctica). The
international regimes that have arisen have some of the
features of community-based common property regimes,
such as reliance on trust which is built upon prior expe-
rience and interaction. Boundaries are necessarily more
porous and enforcement a signicant problem, as is shown
in Canadas actions in the mid-1990s to protect straddling
stocks of sh which migrate between Canadian and interna-
tional waters. But communities do develop, based on shared
knowledge about scientic ndings as well as commitments
to international solutions to environmental problems. More
work needs to be done on whether or not the commu-
nities which evolve in these international diplomacy and
scientic settings, so-called epistemic communities (Young,
1994), are appropriate structures for the development of
common property regimes, or whether they will remain
weakened versions of separate but equal state gover-
nance regimes.
The third question is how the interests and concerns
of communities can be better incorporated into the poli-
cies and actions of governments and of private persons
and rms. This refers to old but still relevant questions
concerning social impacts and participatory management
(also known as democracy in action). These are questions
about the role of civic society in shaping the world, the
earth, and the globe for tomorrow. All property regimes for
dealing with environmental problems require viable civic
institutions.
REFERENCES
Berkes, F and Feeny, D (1990) Paradigms Lost; Changing Views
on the Use of Common Property Resources, Alternatives,
17(2), 4855.
Bromley, D W, ed (1992) Making the Commons Work: Theory,
Practice and Policy, Institute for Contemporary Studies, San
Francisco, CA.
Bromley, D W and Cernea, M M (1989) The Management of
Common Property Natural Resources: Some Conceptual and
Operational Fallacies, World Bank Discussion Paper 57, The
World Bank, Washington, DC.
Christman, J (1994) The Myth of Property: Toward an Egalitarian
Theory of Ownership, Oxford University Press, New York.
460 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Ciriacy-Wantrup, S and Bishop, R (1975) Common Property as
a Concept in Natural Resources Policy, Nat. Resour. J., 15,
713727.
Clark, C W (1973) The Economics of Over-exploitation, Science,
181, 630634.
Cox, S B J (1985) No Tragedy on the Common, Environ. Ethics,
7, 4961.
Ellickson, R C (1993) Property in Land, Yale Law J., 102(April),
13151400.
Feeny, D, Berkes, F, McCay, B J, and Acheson, J M (1990) The
Tragedy of the Commons: Twenty-Two Years Later, Hum.
Ecol., 18(1), 119.
Feeny, D, Hanna, S, and McEvoy, A F (1996) Questioning the
Assumptions of the Tragedy of the Commons Model of
Fisheries, Land Econ., 72(2), 187205.
Gordon, H S (1954) The Economic Theory of a Common Prop-
erty Resource: The Fishery, J. Political Econ., 62, 124142.
Haas, P, Keohane, R, and Levy, M (1993) Institutions for the
Earth: Sources of Effective Environmental Protection, MIT
Press, Cambridge, MA.
Hahn, R W and Hester, G L (1989) Where Did All the Markets
Go? An Analysis of EPAs Emission Trading Program, Yale J.
Regul., 6(1), 109153.
Hanna, S (1990) The Eighteenth Century English Commons: a
Model for Ocean Management, Ocean Shoreline Manage., 14,
155172.
Hardin, G (1968) The Tragedy of the Commons, Science, 162,
12431248.
Macpherson, C B (1978) Property: Mainstream and Critical Posi-
tions, University of Toronto Press, Toronto.
McCay, B J (1996) Common and Private Concerns, in Rights to
Nature: Ecological, Economic, Cultural and Political Princi-
ples of Institutions for the Environment, eds S Hanna, C Folke,
and K-G Maler, Island Press, Washington, DC, 111126.
McCay, B J and Acheson, J M, eds (1987) The Question of the
Commons: The Culture and Ecology of Communal Resources,
University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ.
McCay, B J and Jentoft, S (1998) Market or Community Failure?
Critical Perspectives on Common Property Research, Hum.
Organ., 57(1), 2129.
McKean, M A (1992) Success on the Commons: a Comparative
Examination of Institutions for Common Property Resource
Management, J. Theor. Politics, 4(3), 247281.
National Research Council (1999) Sharing the Fish: Toward
a National Policy on Individual Fishing Quotas. Committee
to Review Individual Fishing Quotas, Ocean Studies Board,
National Academy Press, Washington, DC.
Olson, M (1965) The Logic of Collective Action, Harvard Univer-
sity Press, Cambridge, MA.
Ostrom, E (1990) Governing the Commons: The Evolution of
Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge University Press,
New York.
Ostrom, E, Burger, J, Field, C B, Norgaard, R B, and Polican-
sky, D (1999) Revisiting the Commons: Local Lessons, Global
Challenges, Science, 284(April 9), 278282.
Rose, C M (1994) Property & Persuasion; Essays on the History,
Theory and Rhetoric of Ownership, Westview Press, Boulder,
CO.
Scott, A (1979) Development of the Economic Theory on Fish-
eries Regulation, J. Fish. Res. Board Can., 36, 725741.
Tietenberg, T H (1995) Design Lessons from Existing Air Pollu-
tion Control Systems: The United States, in Property Rights
in a Social and Ecological Context: Case Studies and Design
Applications, eds S Hanna and M Munasinghe, The World
Bank, Washington, DC, 1532.
Tietenberg, T H (1998) Ethical Inuences on the Evolution of the
US Tradable Permit Approach to Air Pollution Control, Ecol.
Econ., 24(2,3), 241257.
Young, M D and McCay, B J (1995) Building Equity, Steward-
ship and Resilience into Market-Based Property-Rights Sys-
tems, in Property Rights and the Environment: Social and
Ecological Issues, eds S Hanna and M Munashinghe, The Bei-
jer Institute of Ecological Economics and The World Bank
Washington, DC, 87102.
Young, O R (1994) International Governance; Protecting the
Environment in a Stateless Society, Cornell University Press,
Ithaca, NY.
Young, O (1997) Global Governance: Drawing Insights from the
Environmental Experience, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Young, O, ed (1999) Science Plan for Institutional Dimensions of
Global Environmental Change, International Human Dimen-
sions Programme on Global Environmental Change, Bonn,
Germany.
Psychology/Perception,
Environmental
see Environmental Psychology/Perception
(Volume 5)
R
Reexivity
see Social Science and Global Environmental
Change (Opening essay, Volume 5)
Refugees, Environmental
see Environmental Refugees (Volume 4)
Relating to Nature: Spirituality,
Philosophy, and Environmental
Concern
see Relating to Nature: Spirituality, Philosophy,
and Environmental Concern (Opening essay,
Volume 5)
Religion and Ecology in the
Abrahamic Faiths
Rosemary Ruether
Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston,
IL, USA
All the major world religions have been responding to the
ecological crisis in recent decades by examining their tra-
ditions for resources to promote a more sustainable rela-
tionship between humanity and nature. In 1998 1999 the
Center for World Religions at Harvard University assembled
ten global conferences on the relationship of ecology and
ten different world religions. Major gatherings of scholars
examined the resources for ecological spirituality and ethics
in Buddhism, Confucianism, Shinto, Hinduism, Judaism,
Christianity and Islam, Jainism and Taoism, and indigenous
traditions. Papers from these conferences are being pub-
lished as books. This series will provide a major library on
the issues of ecology and world religion.
This article focuses on the three Abrahamic faiths, Ju-
daism, Christianity and Islam. These faiths differ from Asian
or indigenous religions in being not only monotheistic, but
also imaging God solely as male. They are also marked by
a strong separation between God as Creator and Nature
as Creation. These faiths were challenged some years ago
when the historian of science, Lynn White, wrote a widely
read article in which he charged that the biblical mandate in
Genesis 1:28, giving humanity absolute dominion over the
earth, was the major religious root of the ecological crisis
(White, 1967). In this text God is represented as saying to
the newly created humans, ll the earth and subdue it, and
have dominion over the sh of the sea and over the birds
of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the
earth . The language used in this verse suggests a power
relationship of military conquest and forcible subjugation
by humans of the rest of nature.
Both Jewish and Christian scriptural and theological schol-
ars have been engaged in refuting White s claims that the
Bible as a whole mandates such an unlimited and exploita-
tive relationship to nature as is suggested in Genesis. A
number of Muslim writers have also taken up this issue of
the view of human power over nature as re ected in the
Qur an, itself rooted in Hebrew Scripture.
Jewish scholar Eric Katz has pointed out that Genesis
1:28 can hardly mean absolute and unlimited power over
nature since the very next verse, Genesis 1:29, mandates a
vegetarian diet for humans and animals. It is only after the
corruption of society and God s punishment of humanity by
the ood, that humans are allowed to kill and eat animals.
But this is clearly seen as a fall from an original ideal of a
more peaceful world (Genesis 9:2 4), but even then there
are limits to human use of animals. Animals are to be killed
in such a way as not to eat the blood.
Ismar Schorsch, writing on the Jewish view of ecology,
suggests that the picture of humanity in relation to nature
found in Genesis 2 3 is more the normative one for the
462 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Bible. Here humans are seen as created from the topsoil of
the earth, and as having afnity with the land from which
they are made. They are not allowed to eat anything they
wish in the garden. When they violate this commandment
and seek to seize the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good
and evil, human status degenerates. They are made to till the
earth by the sweat of their brow. Hard struggle to survive,
not lordly dominion, is the actual lot of humans in history.
For both writers the basic view of humans and nature in
the Hebrew Bible is rooted in a theocratic understanding
of creation. God is the creator of nature, and God alone
has sovereignty over it. In the words of Psalm 24: The
earth is the Lords and the fullness thereof, the world and
those who dwell therein . The laws of Jubilee clearly state
that God remains the owner of the earth: The land shall
not be sold in perpetuity, for all the land is Mine, because
you are strangers and sojourners before Me (Lev. 25:23).
Humans have only delegated authority over the earth, as
representatives or stewards of God who remains its owner.
This role of stewardship mandates both responsible care
and limited use of the earth.
This view of the Godhumannature relationship is
reected throughout Hebrew law, both in the Bible and
in its talmudic development. The Hebrew Bible reects an
agricultural people, and many of the divine commandments
express a basic concern to limit human use of the land, its
plants and animals, and to prevent abuse. The raising of
goats and sheep is limited because of their excessive impact
on the land. Grape vines and live trees are not to be used
in sacrice, because they are needed for food. Open land
is to be preserved around towns. Trees are not to be cut
down in war. Nothing is to be wantonly destroyed. Places
of human habitation are to be separated from places of work
that create smoke, dust and smells. Human sewage should
be buried.
Perhaps the central Jewish ethic of ecological sustainabil-
ity is found in the sabbatical legislation. This legislation
proscribes a series of periodic cycles, seven days, seven
years and seven times seven years, the ultimate cycle of
the Jubilee.
Work is limited to a six-day period, following the
example of God in creating the world. On the seventh day,
not only the farmer, but his human and animal work force
are to rest: On the seventh day you shall rest, so that your
ox and your donkey may have relief, and your home born
slave and resident alien may be refreshed (Ex. 23:12).
In the 7-year cycle, care is given to the poor, the wild
animals and the renewal of the land:
For six years you shall sow your land and gather its yield; but
the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, so that the
poor of your people shall eat and what they leave, the wild
animals may eat. You shall do the same with the vineyard and
your olive orchard.
(Ex. 23:1011)
Hebrew slaves are to be set free without debt in the
seventh year (Ex. 21.2). Levitical laws mention slaves,
hired laborers and animals allowed to rest during the
sabbatical year, living off the untilled land along with the
farmer (Lev. 25:67).
The Jubilee year, that occurs every fty years, is to
see a yet more profound restoration of the rights of all
humans with respect to the land and animals. Those who
have fallen into slavery are to be released. The debts that
have accumulated during the past forty-nine years are to
be liquidated. The earth is to lie fallow, human workers,
animals and land given rest. Land conscated due to debts
is to be restored. The vision here is a general righting
of relations in order not to endlessly extend a system
in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, a
society of a few wealthy, slave-owning landlords and many
slaves or indebted workers. Justice and sustainability are
to be periodically restored through a cyclical permanent
revolution .
Hebrew Scripture also makes clear that humans are not
the mediators of all relations between God and nature.
God has many direct relations with other creatures, animals
and planetary spheres, which humans know not of. The
smallness and limits of the human arena of knowledge and
control is emphasized in texts such as the book of Job. God
rebukes human arrogance with such words as:
Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth, when
the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings
shouted for joy? Can you hunt the prey for the lion or satisfy
the appetite of the young lions? Is it by your wisdom that
the hawk soars is it at your command that the eagle mounts
up and makes its nest on high.
(Job. 3839)
In Hebrew Scripture the non-human world is not dead
matter . It is animate and has its own lively relationship
with God, independent of humans. God is present through-
out the natural world. Both natural blessings and disasters
reect Gods presence, both in blessing and in judgment.
The non-human world understands this, better than humans.
But ask the animals and they will teach you; the birds of the
air and they will tell you; ask the plants of the earth, and they
will teach you, the sh of the sea will declare to you. Who
among all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has
done this? In his hand is the life of every living thing, and the
breath of every human being.
(Job. 12:710)
The Hebrew worldview neither sacralizes nature as
divine in itself, nor secularizes it. Humans have an impor-
tant, but limited role. Reality is theocentric, in a way that
relativizes and limits human power and places all things
under divine sovereignty, as its ultimate owner and con-
tinuing source of life. Gods relation to each creature is
personal and direct, and each creature responds to its cre-
ator with praise and joy.
RELIGION AND ECOLOGY IN THE ABRAHAMIC FAITHS 463
The Islamic view of the Godnaturehuman relation has
some differences from that of Hebrew Scripture, but it is
rooted in the same basic understanding. Muslim tradition is
concerned to emphasize Gods absolute unity (against the
Christian Trinity) and sovereignty over all creation. Islam
rejected the Jewish tradition that God rested on the seventh
day, after creating the world, since that seemed to suggest
that God was nite, becoming weary and needing rest.
Creation is not something that happened in a primordial
moment and then was completed. Rather God continually
creates. All creation, and everything in it, is dependent on
God for its existence from moment to moment.
There is less emphasis on the limits of human rule,
although the ban on pork and wine suggests that humans do
not just have all of nature at hand for their consumption.
Humans are exalted as the vice-regents of God. As such
they are superior not only to the animals, but even the spir-
itual beings. The angels bow before the wonder of Gods
supreme creation, the Human. Yet the Quran (Koran) also
sees all creation, and not just humans, as praising and giv-
ing thanks to God. All natural things are to be respected as
fellow creatures.
The idea of human vice-regency itself implies that
humans are not the ultimate owners of the Earth. The
Islamic view, like the Hebrew, is theocratic. God alone is
sovereign; humans hold a delegated power over the Earth
and are accountable to God for their tenure. They will
be ultimately judged as to how well or badly they exer-
cised this stewardship. Thus the eschatological (end of time)
emphasis in Islam on the coming judgment is not under-
stood as an escape from the earth that allows humans to
ignore its wellbeing. Rather it is the ultimate accounting
before God, by which they will be held responsible for
their stewardship.
The idea that God creates the world from moment to
moment, that all things lie directly in the hand of God,
also lends itself, particularly in the poetic and sapiential
(wisdom) traditions of Islam, to a mystical sense of all
created things as the signs of Gods presence. Nature lies
within Gods surrounding presence. In that sense it is
God who is the ultimate environment that surrounds and
encompasses humanity, as in the Quranic verse: But to
God belongs all things in the heavens and the earth, and
he it is who encompasses (muhit) all things (IV:126).
Although nature is not sacred in itself, it is sacred, or one
might say sacramental, as signs and pointers to God, who
is present in every moment as its sustaining creator.
As Islamic writer, Seyyed Hossein Nasr (see Nasr ,
Seyyed Hossein, Volume 5) puts it:
In reality, humans are immersed in the Divine Muhit (encom-
passing environment) and are only unaware of it because of
their own forgetfulness and negligence. To remember God
is to see Him everywhere and to experience His reality as al-
Muhit. The environmental crisis may in fact be said to have
been caused by the human refusal to see God as the real
environment which surrounds and nourishes our life.
The Islamic tradition of sacred art forbids the human
image lest this be confused with the representation of God.
In this sense the human face and gure, even if Gods
vice-regent, is never to be used to image God. But Islamic
art makes exuberant use of nature, particularly owers and
vines, and the Arabic letters of the Quran, as pointers to
Gods presence.
Nasr sees the Muslim world as having failed to cultivate
an ecological spirituality and ethic in modern times, rooted
in this Islamic vision of God as the ultimate environment
of life, because of its poverty and colonization by the West.
This colonization of Muslim lands, as in other regions,
such as Asia and Africa, has resulted in a conictual
relation to Western power and technology, which is the
main source of ecological devastation in the modern world.
For Nasr, Christians too are part of a revelatory tradition
in which God is present as the ultimate environment of
human life. But they have replaced this faith with a view
of Promethean (autonomous) man who has absolute and
unlimited power over the earth, unrestrained by obligations
to either God, fellow humanity or the rest of creation.
It is this view of human autonomy that Nasr sees as an
apostasy (renunciation) from God and as the root of the
environmental crisis in the West that has infected the rest
of the world through Western colonizing power.
Muslims have been torn between modernists, who have
sought to emulate this power and technology of the West,
without any critique of its effects in impoverishing the earth
and the majority of human beings, and fundamentalists
who have been resisting this Western inuence, but have
interpreted this resistance primarily in terms of restoring
certain legal customs, such as female dress. The sapiential
(wise) traditions of Islam have been ignored, and this
has prevented the development of a deeper resistance to
such devastation of the earth based on the vision of the
relationship to God that is present in nature.
For Nasr the solution to the ecological crisis is, for
Muslims and also other peoples, to recover those spiritual
traditions that direct them to a proper relationship to God.
Humanity cannot save the natural environment except by redis-
covering the nexus between Spirit and nature and becoming
once again aware of the sacred quality of the works of the
Supreme Artisan the solution to the environmental crisis can
come about only when the modern spiritual malaise is cured
and there is a rediscovery of the world of the Spirit, which,
being compassionate, always gives of itself to those open and
receptive to its vivifying rays. The bounty of nature and its gen-
erosity to the human race are proof of this reality, for despite
all that we have done to destroy nature, she is still alive and
reects on her own level of being the love and compassion, the
wisdom and the power, which belongs ultimately to the realm
of the Spirit. In this crisis of unprecedented proportions, it is
nature as Gods primordial creation that will have the nal say.
464 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Nasrs words provide a profound challenge to Western
Christians. What are the roots of an ecological spirituality
and ethic in Christianity, and how have these been denied
in the development of western technological society and
its colonialist exportation? What is the connection between
Christianity and this development of secularity, industri-
alism and colonialism? Are these developments simply a
denial of the true Christian view of the naturehuman rela-
tionship? It was common a generation ago to see secularity,
industrialism and technology as the products of the Chris-
tian genius. But now that these are seen to have negative
rather than positive impacts, many Christians have been
questioning the association between Christianity and these
western patterns of life.
Christianity is rooted in the Jewish tradition and shares
with it the Hebrew Scripture. But the dening of this
scripture as Old Testament also implies a reinterpretation
of it as partially superceded. The parts of the Hebrew Bible
that the Christian tradition has seen as superceded and
no longer in force are particularly the legal codes which
enshrine limitations on human use of nature; laws of kosher
foods, sabbatical rest and avoidance of pollution.
After the rst generation of Galilean Christianity, the
early Christians were urban people without roots in rural
life. Hence the Jewish legislation related to the renewal
of the land made no sense to them. Christians became a
people gathered from many ethnic groups and no longer
related to a particular land and ethnic community. They
dened the church as a new spiritual people of God who
anticipated a heavenly kingdom beyond this earth, rather
than as a renewed people and land within history of Jewish
redemptive hopes.
Christianity also based itself in a realized messianism
that understood Jesus of Nazareth as the incarnation of God.
This violated the separation of God and humans central to
Judaism. Both Judaism and Islam have strongly rejected
this idea as idolatrous, as the divinizing of a human being.
Christian redemptive hope in the early centuries spoke of
God having become human so that humans could become
God. But this did not lead, in classical or medieval Chris-
tianity, to a Promethean idea of the human as replacing
God. This was because Christianity rooted itself in a con-
cept of human fall and redemption that emphasized human
sin and weakness and dependency on divine grace. Also,
human redemptive hope did not focus on power over this
present creation, but a transformation of creation into the
Kingdom of God or the replacement of creation with a new
spiritual creation beyond the present nite world.
These elements of denial of the body and the world
in anticipation of a transcendent redemption outside of
history have sometimes been seen as a major source of
Christianitys negative relation to creation. Despising the
body and the material world has been seen as leading
Christians to neglect and abuse of nature. But there is not a
clear relation between otherworldliness and the ecological
crisis. The Christian view of nature was more complicated
than is suggested by an anti-material stance.
Christianity in the second to third centuries contended
with and rejected the most extreme forms of body-spirit
dualism in the form of Gnosticism. The cosmological Chris-
tology that was developed by its leading anti-gnostic theolo-
gians, such as Irenaeus of Lyon, rooted redemption in the
restoration and completion of creation, as body and spirit
together.
Humans were made in the image of God and mandated
to grow into the likeness of God by increasing union of
the human with the divine will. But humans created a
break between Gods will and their own willfulness. God
sent a series of revelations to return humans to the right
path, culminating in the incarnation of Christ. Christ is the
incarnation in human form of the divine Logos through
which the world was created in the beginning. This is
understood as renewing the ontological (the nature of)
grounding of the whole creation, not just of humans.
In the incarnation of Christ, divine creative power perme-
ates Nature in a deeper way so that the bodily becomes the
sacramental bearer of the divine and the divine transforms
the bodily into ever more spiritual and immortal form. This
is seen as taking place in three stages. There is the era of the
Church when Christians grow ever more unied with God
through Christ in the sacraments. Next comes a millennial
era when the whole of creation experiences peace and har-
mony in God. Finally there is the ultimate transformation
of creation into an immortalized union with God.
In Irenaeus words:
For there is one Son who accomplished his Fathers will
and one human race also in whom the mysteries of God
are wrought the wisdom of God, by means of which
his handiwork, conrmed and incorporated with his Son, is
brought to perfection; that is, His offspring, the First-Begotten
Word should descend to the creature and that it should
be contained in Him, and on the other hand that the creature
should contain the Word, and ascend to Him, passing beyond
the angels, and be made after the image and likeness of God.
(Adv Haer.V.36.3)
Classical Christianity through the middle ages situated
itself in a profound tension between a demonic and a
sacramental view of creation. As cut off from and alienated
from God, not only humanity, but the whole creation is
distorted and becomes an instrument of evil. But as renewed
in Christ, it is reunited with the divine Word, the creator,
sustainer and redeemer of the universe. Seen through the
eyes of Christ, the whole universe is sacramental; all things
become signs that testify to the presence of God, its creator,
and lead the seeker to contemplative union with God.
Christian monastic life is a good example of this tension
between world denial and world renewal in Christianity. As
a way of life that ees sexuality, the body and the world,
it may seem to be the epitome of a Christian negation
RELIGION AND ECOLOGY IN THE ABRAHAMIC FAITHS 465
of the goodness of creation. Yet in its main expressions,
particularly in the Benedictine tradition, asceticism is not a
rejection of the body and the earth, but rather a rejection
of exploitation and excess, a return to simple living in
harmony with other humans and creation. Even fasting and
the vegetarian diet are seen as creating harmony of body and
spirit, restoring the paradisiacal age before the fall into sin.
Monastic life is seen as representing the beginning of a
restoration of the original harmony and justice. Commu-
nal property overcomes the exploitative division of Gods
creation into private property that sets up unjust divisions
between poor and rich, destroying Gods original inten-
tion that the earth be shared by all equally. The monk
befriends animals who minister to him, overcoming the
enmity between humans and animals that came about after
the ood (Gen. 9:23). Monastic communities returned to
a simple, subsistence form of life that pioneered sustainable
agriculture at a time when the unsustainable system of mili-
tary and slave-driven urban organization of late Roman life
was toppling. Monastic communities were centers of liter-
acy and education, as well as sources of service to society
and to the poor.
Not surprisingly, the creation of new forms of Chris-
tian ecological community today that seek to withdraw
from consumerism, create sustainable societies and wit-
ness against injustice in society often model themselves on
new forms of monastic life. One of the Christian ecologi-
cal movements in the United States seeking to create such
ecological communities is Sisters for Earth, a network of
Roman Catholic religious women who seek to reshape their
lands, buildings and community life to make them centers
of ecological living and learning.
The Calvinist Reformation and the Scientic Revolution
in the 16th and 17th centuries represent key turning points
in the Western concept of its relation to nature. In these
two movements the medieval struggle between sacramen-
tal and demonic views of nature were recast. Calvinism
dismembered the medieval sacramental view of nature.
For Calvinism, nature was totally depraved. There was no
residue in it of divine presence that could sustain natural
knowledge or any relationship to God. Redemptive knowl-
edge descends from beyond nature, in the form of the
revealed word available only through scripture, as preached
by the Reformers.
While Calvinism dismembered the sacramental view of
nature, it reinforced its demonic universe. The fallen world,
the physical universe, as human groups outside of the
Calvinist Church, lay in the grip of the Devil. Even within
the Calvinist Church, the threat of the Devil lurked. Women
particularly were the gateway of the Devil. Among Protes-
tants, Calvinists in Scotland and New England were the
primary witch hunters.
The Scientic Revolution appeared to move in the oppo-
site direction. It sought to exorcise the demonic from nature,
reclaiming the universe as an icon of divine reason manifest
in the laws of nature, knowable through empirical obser-
vation and mathematics. In the 17th and 18th centuries the
more animist forms of natural science that sought to unify
spirit and matter lost out to a strict dualism of transcen-
dent intellect and dead matter, of Newtonian Physics and
Cartesian Reason.
Nature was secularized. It was no longer seen as the
theatre for a cosmic struggle between God and the Devil.
Both demonic and angelic spirits were driven out of it. God
was excluded from any active presence in nature to become
the distant rst cause and nally disappeared altogether
as a scientic premise. Nature becomes dead matter in
motion, moving obediently according to mathematical laws
knowable to a new priesthood of scientists.
According to Roger Bacon (Novum Organum and The
Masculine Birth of Time), due to Eves disobedience humans
lost their original dominion over nature. Through science,
this dominion over nature will be restored to human hands.
As the presupposition of divine ownership of nature dis-
appears, humans, specically the male elite of scientists
and entrepreneurs, are understood as having unlimited,
sovereign power over nature to do with it what they will. It
is here that we nd the birth of the Promethean man decried
by Seyyed Hossein Nasr.
In Western society, the application of science to techno-
logical power and use of nature marched side by side with
colonialism. From the 16th to the 20th centuries Western
Europeans would appropriate the lands of the Americas,
Asia, Africa and the Middle East and reduce their popula-
tions to slavery or low paid labor. The wealth accrued from
this vast appropriation of land, its resources, and human
labor would fuel ever new levels of technological devel-
opment, transforming material resources into new forms of
energy and mechanical work, control of disease, increasing
speed of communication and travel.
With this expanding wealth and power, the western elite
grew increasingly optimistic, imagining that this expanding
technology would gradually conquer all problems of mate-
rial scarcity and push back the limits of human mortality.
Christian hope for millennial blessedness in the culminat-
ing era of history was translated into scientic technological
terms as the ideology of endless progress.
However in a short three-quarters of a century this
dream of innite progress has turned into a nightmare.
The medical conquest of disease, lessening infant mortality
and doubling the life span of the afuent, insufciently
matched by birth limitation, especially among the poorest,
has created a population explosion that is outrunning the
food supply. The gap between poor and rich, between
a wealthy, industrialized section of the world and the
impoverished masses has grown ever wider in the last
25 years. Increasingly global society is being split between
two worlds, those who enjoy the benets of ever expanding
466 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
forms of technology, and those who have fallen out of the
bottom of the modernized world into desperate poverty:
reverting to pre-industrial means of subsistence or surviving
on the garbage of the afuent world.
The western scientic and industrial revolutions have
been built on injustice from the beginning. It has been based
on a vast takeover of land, agricultural, forest and mineral
wealth, appropriated through the exploitation of indigenous
peoples. This wealth has owed back to enrich the West,
together with local elite, while impoverishing the land and
the exploited people. This system of global afuence, with
its high consumption of energy and its waste, cannot be
expanded to include the poor without destroying the basis
of life on the planet itself. We are literally destroying the air,
water and soil on which human and planetary life depends.
Can this global system be changed to avert disaster, and
do the worlds religions have something to contribute to
this conversion? I believe that religious traditions have both
wisdom and motivational power to contribute. The three
Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, have
important insights that can guide such a transformation. A
key change in self-understanding is found in the belief that
humans do not have absolute power of nature. Rather they
have a delegated role for which they must be responsible
to the ultimate source of life. Religious laws that mandate
limited use of nature, and that understood humans, God and
nature as standing in a covenantal relationship, calling for
periodic restoration of justice and sustainable balances, can
inspire us today.
Global movements, such as the Jubilee 2000 project
to cancel the global debt of the poorest countries, and
international covenants to limit toxic wastes, draw on this
Biblical tradition. Efforts to create a global ethic accepted
by all world religions, such as the one crafted by the
meeting of the Parliament of the Worlds Religions in
Chicago in 1994, seek to draw on religious traditions for
ecological guidance. The development of a World Charter
for Nature, that would parallel the International Declaration
of Human Rights, is a similar effort to create a global
ecological ethic based on all the worlds moral traditions.
Religious traditions are critical to providing the vision,
and the spiritual commitment, to make such a change.
But these traditions are only beginning to overcome their
ancient animosities toward each other and to translate
their insights into practical guidelines to guide human
development toward more just and sustainable ways of
living.
FURTHER READING
Hessel, D and Ruether, R (2000) Christianity and Ecology, in
Religions of the World and Ecology, eds M E Tucker and
J Grim, Harvard University Center for the Study of World
Religions, Cambridge, MA.
Katz, E (1994) Judaism and Ecological Crisis, in World Views
and Ecology, eds M E Tucker and J Grim, Orbis Books, Mary-
knoll, NY, 5570.
Nanji, A, Denny, F, and Baharuddin, A (2001) Islam and Ecol-
ogy, in Religions of the World and Ecology, eds M E Tucker
and J Grim, Harvard University Center for the Study of World
Religions, Cambridge, MA, in press.
Nasr, S H (1992) Islam and Environmental Crisis, in Spirit and
Nature: Why the Environmental Crisis is a Religious Issue, eds
S C Rockefeller and J C Elder, Beacon, Boston, MA, 83108.
Ruether, R R (1992) Gaia and God: an Ecofeminist Theology of
Earth Healing, Harper, San Francisco, CA.
Schorsch, I (1992) Learning to Live with Less: a Jewish Perspec-
tive, in Spirit and Nature: Why the Environmental Crisis is a
Religious Issue, eds S C Rockefeller and J C Elder, Beacon,
Boston, MA, 2538.
Sokol, M (2001) Judaism and Ecology, in Religions of the World
and Ecology, eds M E Tucker and J Grim, Harvard University
Center for the Study of World Religions, Cambridge, MA, in
press.
Timm, R (1994) The Ecological Fallout of Islamic Creation The-
ology, in World Views and Ecology, eds M E Tucker and
J Grim, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY, 8395.
White, L (1967) The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis,
Science, 155, 12031207.
Religion and Environment
Among North American
First Nations
Freda Rajotte
Canadian Coalition for Ecology, Dauphin, Canada
The First Nations peoples of North America consist of
several hundred distinct ethnic groups, each of which had
a unique language and culture, and which, at the time
of European colonization, had adapted differently to the
particular physical environment in which they lived. The last
500 years have seen vast changes to both the physical and
cultural (economic, social and political) environment. The
adaptation of each tribal or ethnic group of First Nations
peoples to these changes has been in uenced by many
factors, including: the degree of persecution, suppression,
assimilation and forced migration, size of reservation lands,
their isolation or degree of proximity to urban centers and
markets, the presence of minerals, timber, arable soils and
other resources, and above all to the degree that they have
been able to retain or reconstitute their own religious belief
systems and values as distinct from the North American
mainstream.
RELIGION AND ENVIRONMENT AMONG NORTH AMERICAN FIRST NATIONS 467
INTRODUCTION
At the time when European settlement in North America
began in the 16th century the land was already occupied
by a great variety of different ethnic and cultural groups
that have been referred to collectively as Natives, Aborig-
inals, Indians, or the preferred term, which will be used
here First Nations. Each group developed its own culture,
language, life style and traditions, and each is the subject
of numerous anthropological, social and economic stud-
ies. At least 300 different languages were spoken. Despite
this diversity, it is possible to make some generalizations
concerning life style and relationship with the physical
environment.
Settlement of the North American continent began some-
where between 40 000 and 30 000 years ago, and scholars
generally agree that it consisted of numerous groups migrat-
ing from Northern China and Northeastern Asia over a long
period of time. They came via the Aleutian Islands, which
formed a land bridge across the Bering Sea during the last
Ice Age, between approximately 30 000 and 14 000 years
BP (before the present), when moisture was locked up in
glaciers and vast continental ice caps, and sea levels were
lower.
Through thousands of years of migration and cultural
evolution, every part of North America became settled.
(While this article considers only the Canada and US main-
land, migration lled Mexico, Central and South America as
well.) As the continental glaciers withdrew, people hunted
and settled on the land progressively revealed by the retreat-
ing ice. And everywhere, the people adapted their life styles
and culture to the vastly different environmental conditions.
From the arid lands bordering Mexico to the rain forests
of the Paci c Northwest coast, to the Arctic Circle, tribal
groups developed methods of hunting, shing, cultivation,
house construction and social organization that uniquely
suited the resources and the land.
In each area the life style and economy became adapted
to the local environment. Major factors included the abun-
dance of animals and sh; the type and density of vegeta-
tion, the fertility of the soil and ease with which it could
be cultivated; the length of the growing season, and the
abundance of materials (wood, adobe, hides, etc.) for the
construction of housing. Above all the climate was a major
factor in uencing clothing styles, housing types, and the
seasonality of activities such as hunting local wildlife and
migratory herds, and cultivation of crops.
This lengthy period of settlement by First Nations
peoples certainly had an impact on the North American
environment. However, the extent of this impact varied con-
siderably according to the environmental region and cultural
life style of the people and was very minimal compared to
the impact of human activities during the 20th century. For
example, it seems certain that the systematic use of re kept
the grassland plains of the continental interior relatively free
from forest encroachment, and undoubtedly increased the
extent of these lands. In the arid Southwestern US, there
is evidence of some pueblo settlements having been aban-
doned before the arrival of Europeans. It appears that the
removal of trees from the surrounding hills had increased
the aridity of the land used for cultivation and speeded its
deterioration.
The environmental impact of people was restricted by
the simple fact that if the people did not adapt to the
cycles of the seasons, or if they depleted the animal or plant
resources, they would die. The knowledge and skills needed
for hunting, shing, farming, gathering medicinal herbs,
storing food, raising children, building and carving, con-
structing houses and making clothing, boats and weapons,
were passed on from generation to generation. Winter was
generally regarded as the season for story telling and pass-
ing on myths of origin, tribal histories and knowledge
concerning social roles and expectations. Stories, mytholo-
gies, rites, dances, ceremonies and rituals all served to keep
the cultures alive and vital. Thus, over thousands of years,
the First Nations peoples developed unique ways of living
in relative harmony both within their social groups and with
the natural world around them.
Traditionally northern groups in the taiga forests, Arctic
tundra and barren lands, have followed a seasonal migration
pattern, shing and sealing in the Arctic waters, and fol-
lowing the caribou herds in their annual migration across
the Arctic plains. While some still follow this same pat-
tern, almost all carry with them modern, high-powered,
hunting ri es and steel traps. Many travel to hunt or sh
by snowmobile, and depend to varying extent on supplies
own in from the South. The use of traditional dog sleds or
of kayaks is increasingly becoming a pleasure and tourist
activity. Military activities and oil exploitation in the Arctic
pose a serious danger to the continued existence and health
of the remaining caribou herds.
In the heavily forested Northwest coastal regions, marine
resources were abundant. Hunting and berry picking sup-
plemented shing. Here, many communities had winter
villages with substantial community and family lodges,
and also temporary summer quarters where families moved
at the time of the salmon migration up river to harvest
and dry sh. With forests of giant trees at hand, and
an abundance of food easily available, there was time
and energy to build huge timber lodges, and giant ocean-
going canoes. Even the decorative arts such as wood
carving had reached an amazingly advanced and stylistic
form.
In North America s vast interior plains, the buffalo herds
once provided the basic support for the life of the people,
supplying them not only with food, but also with materials
for clothing, shelter and weapons. The buffalo was so
important that it also became central to their mythology
and rituals.
468 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
In the forested regions of Eastern America, the basic
activity of hunting was supplemented by harvesting natural
products, such as wild rice, maple sugar and berries and by
cultivating gardens of squash, corn and tobacco.
In the dry southwest of America, in the semi-desert and
high plateau regions, corn has traditionally been the basic
staple. It is generally grown together with beans, squash,
potatoes and a mixture of many other indigenous crops
such as peppers and tobacco. Here, people are particularly
dependent upon the rainfall, and many of the religious rites
and ceremonies are related to rain and the successful harvest
of the corn crop.
During this long period in pre-contact America, there was
not only an extraordinary diversity of tribal cultures and
languages, but also an equally diverse range of mythologies
and religious ceremonies and rituals. From the seasonal
chants and ceremonial dances of the Pueblo peoples of the
southwestern deserts, to the shamanistic practices of the
nomadic Inuit of the Arctic, from the totemic peoples of
the Pacic Northwest coast to the buffalo hunters of the
plains, or the lodge societies of the eastern woodlands, it
was hardly possible to speak in general terms of a single
Native or First Nations religion.
However, as noted by Clarkson et al. (1992) The life
of people became a reection of the life of the earth and
our ancestors became intimately connected and inseparable
from these realities. Through many years of experience,
trial and error, hunger and hardship, our ancestors learned
that the depletion of plant and animal life in their immediate
environment meant starvation and death .
IMPACT OF IMMIGRATION
When Columbus landed in the Americas just over 500 years
ago it has been estimated that there were at least 100 million
people, or approximately one-fth of the human race living
there. Almost immediately on contact this population began
to decline. This was partly due to warfare and to the
superior weapons of the settlers; but, far more seriously,
during the rst hundred years or more it was due to
exposure to European diseases.
The ships that followed Columbus in ever increasing
numbers, brought not only explorers, soldiers, gold seekers,
and missionaries, but also off-loaded domestic animals and
plants, and even unwanted pests such as rats and eas.
Perhaps the most destructive of all the new arrivals were the
European viruses for which the Native American people had
no immunity. Wave after wave of epidemics of inuenza,
diphtheria, smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, chicken pox
and cholera swept through the Americas, until;
less than a tenth of the original population remained. Perhaps
90 million had died It was the greatest mortality in history.
(Wright, 1993)
When the rst European settlers began to arrive on the
east coast, it was the First Nation peoples who introduced
them to many new things essential for their survival. These
included canoes and snowshoes, unfamiliar wildlife such as
the moose, beaver and wild turkey, and domestic crops such
as tobacco, pumpkins, beans and corn. However, soon the
tide of land-hungry immigrants grew in number and surged
westwards across the continent, surveying and dividing up
the land into private farms and townships.
The very different belief systems, and opposing views
on the relationship between people and the land, under-
lay much of the tragedy of mutual misunderstanding and
conict between First Nation and immigrant peoples.
During the past 500 years, not only were the First
Nations populations decimated and dispossessed of almost
all of their lands, but European immigrants brought with
them their own politico-economic views (predominantly
capitalism, private ownership and prot) and their own
religious systems (predominantly various Christian denom-
inations). Clearly each could have learned much from the
other, but sadly a relationship of great potential turned into
a tragedy of mutual incomprehension. European settlers had
no concept of hierophantic Nature, i.e., of Nature being an
embodiment of the spirit world. Native Americans did not
think in terms of personal ownership of sections of land,
nor of hunting and killing for sport.
It is a mark of particularly obtuse religious blindness, that
governments, which established religious freedom clauses
in their constitutions, suppressed Native religious practices,
while giving free reign to Christian missions and residen-
tial schools. Not only were Native traditional belief systems
eroded or obliterated, but also their religious ceremonies,
such as the sun dance, potlatch, and sweat lodge were made
illegal. Sacred objects were stolen to be sold as curios
or art objects, many nding their way into museums of
anthropology around the world. Even graves were plun-
dered and ancestral bones exhumed and taken for study or
display.
The new arrivals saw the land as virgin and empty: free
for the taking. It only awaited civilization and development
for its forests, soils and minerals to yield vast riches. In the
way, however, stood mountain ranges, impenetrable forests,
vast plains with an unbelievably harsh climate, and the last
remnants of the indigenous population. All were seen as
challenges to be overcome, as obstacles to be conquered,
or as hindrances to be swept away.
Throughout the 19th century, armed confrontation fre-
quently took place between First Nations peoples and set-
tlers. Armed with superior weapons, and often supported by
military forces, the settlers inicted heavy casualties, and
pushed the remnant indigenous peoples onto small areas
of reservation land. Treaties were made between vari-
ous First Nations and Britain (in the case of Canada) and
the American government, and were as quickly ignored
RELIGION AND ENVIRONMENT AMONG NORTH AMERICAN FIRST NATIONS 469
and broken by the settlers. Systematically, encroachment or
annexation reduced or eliminated these reservation lands.
On several occasions, cart loads of blankets infested with
diseases, such as smallpox, were used to wipe out entire
Tribal groups. Some groups, such as the Beothuk peoples
of Newfoundland, were eliminated by genocide. Other
groups were so depleted that the few remaining families
moved away, died out, or intermarried and merged into the
larger population. Sometimes entire peoples were illegally
relocated to poorer and more remote locations. In 1830,
US President Jackson signed into law a bill that required all
Indians living in the east (predominately Cherokee) to leave
their homes and be relocated west of the Mississippi River.
During the long trek, called the Trail of Tears, guarded by
federal soldiers, and attacked by bandits and thieves, many
died of exhaustion, sickness and starvation.
Only in the more remote areas of the Northern taiga
forests, in the Arctic regions, and among the Pueblo peoples
of the arid Southwestern US, were the people never con-
quered nor forcibly removed, and so were able to maintain
their traditional way of life.
IMPACT OF 500 YEARS OF EUROPEAN
SETTLEMENT
First Nation peoples had always seen the land as sacred,
as given by the Great Spirit or Creator. Those peoples
belonged to the land, were part of the sacred circle of
life, and were charged with protecting and preserving it.
The European settlers and colonists perceived the land in
a totally different way: for them land was a commodity, it
was property, wealth, and security, to be measured out and
owned. The land belonged to them; they did not belong
to the land! The land became a resource to be bought and
sold, but above all to be developed, controlled, mastered
and made to produce.
While the First Nation peoples were trying desperately
to retain their identity and their unity with the land, the
inexorable westward migration of settlers across the Amer-
icas was focused upon something very different upon
the acquisition of free land and resources (timber, miner-
als and fertile soils). All were migrants, uprooted peoples,
and most were poor. Many of them had been evicted from
their homes (e.g., during the Scottish Highland Clearance),
or had been displaced by war. The dreams and efforts of
such immigrants and pioneers were focussed upon secu-
rity, ownership and wealth. Their interests lay in claim-
ing and fencing-in their personal property, in establishing
homes and farms, towns and transportation routes. They
brought with them familiar domestic animals and crops
from Europe, and set about establishing a civilization simi-
lar to, but they hoped better than, that of Europe. They saw
North America as a vast unoccupied space, as a place of
limitless opportunity and freedom.
So, throughout the last 500 years, the ecology of North
America has been vastly changed. The economy has been
transformed from subsistence to commercial. The sparse
population and small settlements have been replaced by
a large and growing population centered in urban and
industrial agglomerations.
The vast herds of buffalo of the continental interior have
been eliminated, often wantonly, and the way of life of
the Plains First Nations peoples wiped out. The prolic
seas of both the east and west coasts, with their vast,
seemingly inexhaustible shoals of sh, and beaches teaming
with marine mammals, have been sadly depleted. Also,
the great salmon runs of the rivers of both the Pacic
Northwest and of the Atlantic Northeast coasts have been
either destroyed entirely by damming or greatly depleted
by over-shing, pollution, or water diversion for urban,
agricultural or industrial use.
And while settlers cleared vast areas of forestland for
cultivation, most of the remaining forested areas have been
clear cut. In some areas they have been cut two or three
times, to provide both lumber and raw material for the pulp
and paper industry. Many species of animals and plants,
once plentiful, are either extinct, like the passenger pigeon,
or endangered as their habitat is destroyed or as they are
relentlessly hunted and trapped.
In a mad rush after gold, the land could be ripped apart,
and slag heaps left to mar and poison the landscape for
generations. However, the early gold rushes in California
and the Yukon were as nothing compared to the open
cast coal, copper and iron ore mines, and the oil and gas
exploitation, that were to follow.
A TIME OF RENEWAL AND HOPE
In the 19th century, government policies in both Canada
and the US favoured forced assimilation. In the US, the
Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887 resulted in another
86 million acres (35 million ha) of reservation land being
lost and at least 90 000 indigenous people being left
homeless. A battered and demoralized remnant population
seemed to have little will or ability to oppose two of the
most powerful governments of modern industrial states.
Even in the 1950s discussions were still underway to con-
sider the termination of federal government responsibility
for reservation lands in the US, and the extinguishment of
treaty rights and status in Canada.
Amazingly, in the early 1960s, a series of Native con-
ferences and growing protest movements gathered public
attention and increasing general support to rectify and
make amends for such a vast injustice. Several startling
military confrontation Wounded Knee (1973, in North
Dakota, US), and Kanehsatake (1990, in Oka, Quebec,
Canada) were widely covered by media and seen on TV
screens around the world, underlining the urgency of the
470 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
situation. These events and numerous others, such as the
highly publicized reoccupation of Alcatraz Island (off the
California coast, formerly used as a prison), acted as a cat-
alyst to First Nations peoples.
Miraculously, since the 1960s, there has also been a
remarkable renaissance of traditional religious beliefs and
practices. This renaissance underlies and sustains a huge
surge in cultural pride that is reected in everything from
art and clothing, to restoring tribal languages, economic
development, and ling land claims. Scholars have begun
to take a more open view of Native religious traditions.
Disillusioned by the destructiveness of western culture,
some people have begun to look to First Nations elders
for a spiritual understanding that is more respectful of
nature and of community values. This religious revival has
created a widespread interest and even a following among
the general population, a surprisingly large and growing
number of whom may attend powwows, are eager to study
traditional Native spirituality, and participate in some of the
ceremonies.
RESPONDING TO THE MODERN
ENVIRONMENTAL SITUATION
The adaptation of First Nations peoples to environmental
change can only be understood in the context of the history
of the last 500 years of European contact. For First Nations
peoples, it has been 500 years of occupation, epidemics,
and disinheritance, of broken treaties, stolen land, racism
and increasing impoverishment. All too often this resulted
in a legacy of despair, poverty, high unemployment, and
the alcoholism and violence that are generated by these
conditions. Today, approximately half of all those claiming
First Nation or part First Nation ancestry are living in urban
areas, have intermarried, or have been assimilated into the
general population.
Because of racism and discriminatory government poli-
cies, very few Native people not on the reservation lands
are independent farmers.
On the reservations, a different and detailed answer
would have to be given in each case, according to factors
such as: the size of the land base, size of the population,
degree of forced relocation, traditional skills, proximity to
urban areas and markets, resource base and climate zone,
degree of political autonomy, and educational level of the
population.
In 1975 the crucial Self-determination Act was passed
in the US and 150 groups immediately led for ofcial
tribal status. Many more applications are currently being
led. Each recognized tribe enjoys a direct government-to-
government relationship with the US, and can establish its
own government, tribal court, police and educational sys-
tem. Freed from federal and state regulations, the tribal gov-
ernments can and do turn reserve lands into anything from
nuclear waste dumps, to casinos and resort developments.
In Connecticut, the Mashantucket-Pequot now own one of
the largest casinos in the world employing over 9000 peo-
ple. By the late 1990s, more than 160 US tribes and several
reserves in Canada (e.g., Rama, Ontario) were operating
casinos.
In Canada almost every reserve has established its tribal
land claim ofce, and is preparing for, or has already
led, a land claim before the relevant government (provin-
cial, territorial or federal). Some of the rst substantial
land claims to have been heard have been upheld by the
courts.
RESTORING ANCIENT TEACHINGS IN A
MODERN CONTEXT
After nearly 500 years of cultural suppression, many First
Nations people care very little about spirituality or nature,
or about traditional ceremonies. In many communities the
majority may be adherents of some Christian denomination,
or of the Native American Church (the most widespread
religion among US Native peoples), which combines some
fundamentalist Christian beliefs with Native teachings. Its
most important sacrament involves the eating of the buttons
of the peyote, a hallucinogenic cactus (still classed as an
illegal act in the US).
Among the First Nations of Southwestern America, the
Ute, Apache, Navajo and other Pueblo nations who were
never conquered or displaced, many of the traditional teach-
ings and rituals, healing chants and sand paintings, as
well as the seasonal dances with katchina masks, remain
virtually unchanged and intact. Similarly the Iroquois cere-
monies conducted in longhouses in northeastern US, and
closely tied to the agricultural seasons, appear to have
changed very little.
Where fundamental rituals and ceremonies were banned
and made illegal, many tribal societies are now carefully
researching and reestablishing them. For example, the Pot-
latch feast, with its masked dancers and lavish give-away
ceremonies of the Pacic Northwest coast, associated with
the Kwakiutl, Nootka, Haida, Tsimshian, Tlingit and Sal-
ish societies, was declared illegal from 1884 until 1951.
It has now been reinstated, with an associated revival of
master carvers preparing spectacular dance masks, totem
carvings, and large sea-going canoes. Today many young
people learn to dance and act the ancient stories and legends
of their ancestral heritage. This is paralleled on the central
plains, by the reestablishment of the annual sun-dance cer-
emony on many reserves, and the almost ubiquitous sweat
lodges, which are constructed at almost all powwows, cer-
emonies and local celebrations. Its use has become popular
with non-Native peoples as has smudging, which involves
carrying a braid of smoldering sweetgrass around the circle
RELIGION AND ENVIRONMENT AMONG NORTH AMERICAN FIRST NATIONS 471
and offering it to each person so that they may cleanse
themselves in its smoke.
A sweat lodge (or impi ) is a small circular dome of
willow branches, half sunk into the earth, and always
directionally oriented, into which the shaman or elder brings
heated rocks. In the dark interior of the lodge, water
is poured onto the rocks producing steam. Participants
experience a primordial microcosm of creation, similar to
reentering the womb, constituted of earth, air, re and
water. It is a ceremony of cleansing and rebirth. The
Iroquois Mide peoples and the Kivas of the Pueblo peoples
use a similar symbolism.
At the other extreme are numerous communities where
ancient beliefs and traditions are irrecoverably lost, where
remnant populations were displaced from their lands and
forcibly moved, some many times over, to make way for
European settlers. While much has been lost, an aston-
ishing amount remains or has been reconstituted. Today
native people travel widely and many join in the pow-
wow circuit, traveling from one community powwow to the
next. Research and information are communicated rapidly
by email, fax and phone, so that similar customs and
teachings spread easily over a wide area. Native Spiri-
tuality is a recognized university course in many Native
Studies departments, and many elders give seminars or
otherwise make their teachings available to the general pub-
lic. Today, it even seems possible, while acknowledging
the diversity of ceremonies and rituals, to make cer-
tain generalizations about First Nations faith and belief
systems.
FAITH AND BELIEF SYSTEMS AMONG FIRST
NATIONS
All First Nations traditions recognize the interconnected-
ness of the human, natural, and spirit worlds. The inclu-
siveness of the circle or Sacred Hoop has become the
almost universal symbol for Native spirituality. It encom-
passes all the directions (east, north, south and west), all
four seasons (Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter), and
all stages of life (infant, youth, adult and elder). It can
be used as a basis of prayer and thanksgiving to offer
thanks to all four directions, all kinds of weather, and
all aspects of life for all times of day: dawn, daylight,
sunset and night. It can be used as a guide to the cor-
rect building and sighting of a pueblo, lodge or teepee.
It is the symbol for completeness and inclusiveness of
the whole community, and the whole of the interrelated
creation:
You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle,
and that is because the power of the world always works in
circles, and everything tries to be round.
In the old days when we were a strong and happy people,
all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation,
and as long as the hoop was unbroken, the people ourished.
The owering tree was at the center of the hoop, and the circle
of the four quarters nourished it. The east gave peace and light,
the south gave warmth, the west gave rain, and the north with
its cold and mighty wind gave us strength and endurance. This
knowledge came to us from the outer world with our religion.
Everything the power of the world does is done in a circle. The
sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball,
and so are all the stars Even the seasons form a great circle
in their changing, and always come back again to where they
were. Our teepees were round like the nests of birds, and
these were always set in a circle, the nations hoop, and nest of
many nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our
children.
(Black Elk Speaks, 1988)
In contrast, European settlers superimposed straight lines
and grid patterns upon the land. Railways and roads cross
the plains in straight lines for hundreds of km; property is
divided up into rectangular parcels.
There is a common awareness that life is spiritual:
everything that exists has within it an element of sacredness.
Nature, in its entirety, is hierophantic that is, a source
of spiritual revelation. Everything the land, water and
sky, sun, moon and stars, plants, animals, birds, sh and
people all manifest some aspect of the spiritual reality
that infuses the whole of creation. This basic view of the
world means that Mother Earth (the major source of all life)
must be treated with respect, not viewed as a commodity to
be owned, or bought and sold. The physical environment
should only be used with care and reverence. A successful
hunt or a good harvest was accepted with thanksgiving and
the food was shared among the community so that no one
was in want. Neither does Nature exist solely for human
use. All life has access rights to the use of land, water
and air.
Ceremonies among First Nation North Americans gen-
erally center around the drum. The drum may be referred
to as the heartbeat of Mother Earth, and forms a connec-
tion to the spirit world. Around the drum with its circle of
drummers and singers, the dancers move in a large circle,
feet close to the earth, and moving to the rhythmic beat and
chants.
First Nations peoples respect animals as sacred. Tradi-
tionally, prayer and ritual accompanied hunting, which was
seen as a sacred activity, only undertaken when food was
needed. Care was taken to give thanksgiving following a
successful hunt, and to respect the animal that had been
killed to provide food and materials for clothing, etc. Great
care was taken not to over-hunt or endanger a species
existence.
However, from the earliest days of contact with Euro-
peans, Natives were encouraged to hunt and trap for furs
and pelts for trading. Today, many, especially in the north-
ern taiga forests, still earn a signicant income from running
trap lines or hunting, but snowmobiles are generally used
to reach trap lines, and high-powered ries for hunting.
472 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
This has caused controversy over the relationship between
traditional practices and hunting rights claims.
For each clan and people, certain creatures have a greater
spiritual signicance. Individuals may undertake a vision
quest (several days of solitary fasting and prayer in a
wilderness area) during which time they may receive a
revelation from the spirit world through a specic creature,
which will then become their guardian spirit. People enter
a special relationship with their guardian animal, never
hunting or harming it in any way, but seeking its presence,
assistance and wisdom. Through their sacred animal (eagle,
buffalo, bear, snake, raven or other creature), the spirit-
being manifests itself as a personal or as a clan protector.
Some claim that they receive warnings or guidance or even
that their lives have been saved during a crisis such as
sickness, re or a car crash, by their guardian animal.
The totem carvings of the Northwest Pacic coast are like
heraldic crests. Each pole recounts a specic clan history
and mythology, recounting the stories of the relationship of
clan elders with guardian and sacred animal spirits (actual
animals like the raven or whale) or mythological ones (like
the thunderbird). That creatures embody the invisible spiri-
tual realm is the profound meaning underlying sacred mask
dances, e.g., the seasonal cycles of katchina dances of the
Southwestern Pueblo peoples. In these dances, the spir-
itual reality becomes embodied in and takes possession
of the physical form of the mask and the dancer so that
the dancer becomes temporarily the actual manifestation of
the ancestral or animal spirit. (This is similar to claim-
ing the actual presence of Christ in the elements of the
Christian mass.)
Shamans or medicine men or women are central to
the traditional belief systems and rituals of First Nations
peoples throughout North America. They are highly respec-
ted as intermediaries between the spiritual and material
worlds, and can also effect healing. Through solitude, com-
muning with nature, fasting, prayer, purication and self-
discipline, shamans undertake journeys into the spiritual
realm, where they seek help and assistance, wisdom and
healing power. Revered shamans and elders are recognized
and honored by becoming pipe bearers. Smoking the sacred
pipe is undertaken to bring the smoker into close contact
with the spirit world.
While some Shamans may be trained in western medicine
or nursing, all have a profound knowledge of the medicinal
properties of local herbs. They are concerned not only with
physical healing, for which many patients may go rst to a
local clinic or hospital, but also with holistic healing of
body, mind and spirit. They can be effective both with
individuals and with communities that are experiencing
high levels of unemployment, poverty, despair, addiction,
violence and soaring youth suicide rates.
Native existence itself is deeply and inseparably rooted
in the land in Mother Earth. The land belongs to all
creatures that live upon it. A peoples traditional economy,
culture and self-image are based upon the continuous habi-
tation of place . Myths of origin, cultural histories, and
self-perception, as well as rituals and sacred sites are
located in and around a tribes traditional lands. It is alone,
in nature, that one goes on a vision quest to seek wis-
dom. Mother Earth nurtures us, feeds us, inspires us, and it
is back into the land that our bodies are returned at death.
The earth is sacred. People and place together form a sacred
cultural unity. While all of nature is the theatre for spiritual
revelation, these specic sacred sites are incorporated into
tribal mythologies and rituals. Each site is afliated with a
specic local mythology and tribal history. Thus, the relo-
cation of a tribal group or destruction of the site means that
essential links to the spirit world are lost. To understand this
is to understand why the conquest and removal of people
from their traditional lands was cultural genocide.
Throughout North America specic landforms, such as
springs, mountains or high bluffs are regarded as especially
sacred. Here spiritual elders and shamans commune with
the mystery of the spirit realm and receive visions, reve-
lations and healing power. Sacred sites may be enhanced
with petroglyphs, medicine wheels (marked out in rocks), or
earth mounds (such as the Great Serpent Mound of Ohio).
For pueblo peoples, kivas subterranean rock-built cham-
bers mark the site where the original peoples emerged
from the underworld. While most sites have been defaced or
even completely destroyed over the last 500 years, attempts
are now being made by many First Nation peoples to protect
some of the remaining sites under constitutional freedom of
religious practice clauses.
George Tinker, a First Nation author from Colorado
explains that:
Native American spirituality and values, social and political
structures, and even ethics are rooted not in some temporal
notion of history but in spatiality. This is perhaps the most
dramatic (and largely unnoticed) cultural difference between
Native American thought and western intellectual tradition.
The question is not whether time or space is missing in one
culture of the other, but which is dominant. Of course, Native
Americans have a temporal awareness, but it is subordinate to
our sense of place. Likewise the western tradition has a spatial
awareness, but it lacks the priority of the temporal. Hence,
progress, history, development, evolution and process become
key notions that invade all academic discourse in the West.
(Tinker, 1992)
The inner, spiritual forces that exist within all creatures,
continue their never ending journey after the death of the
outer physical form, and they may continue for a while
to have a relationship with living beings, and inuence
events. Many ceremonies fulll the function of mediation
between the spirit world, the human world and the world
of nature, for a continued and reciprocal relationship is per-
ceived between the living and the dead. These ceremonies
may show respect, offer thanksgiving for good fortune or
RELIGION AND ENVIRONMENT AMONG NORTH AMERICAN FIRST NATIONS 473
seek blessing upon future endeavors, e.g., successful hunts,
abundant rainfall or healing.
Care must be taken that we do not harm nature. Many of
the decisions made today by proprietors, corporations and
governments take a very short-term view, and seek imme-
diate prots. This shortsighted approach means that as gov-
ernments change, and corporations merge or move, there is
no accountability when the negative effects of industrializa-
tion policies become apparent many years or even decades
later. In comparison, traditionally, when Native bands con-
sider development options, they consider what the likely
impact will be, not only for the immediate future, but also
upon their children and childrens children to the seventh
generation.
TODAY AND TOMORROW
Throughout the 1990s and into the 21st century a resurgence
of epic proportions has swept through the First Nation
societies of North America, as they seek to free themselves
from control and domination by colonial powers.
The recent resurgence of Native spirituality, while caus-
ing some social con ict, is generally leading to increased
cultural pride. Many reservations now organize annual cel-
ebrations of traditional dancing and hold powwows, Indian
days, Treaty days, or enact ceremonies, to which the general
public is invited. Tourism is an increasingly important sec-
tor. There is also a recovery and development of traditional
arts, from weaving carpets, making pottery or designing
jewelry among the southern Pueblo peoples, to the carv-
ing of dance masks, boats, and traditional totem and house
poles along the Northwest coast. In the far north, the Inuit
produce stone carvings and prints that are in high demand
in national and international art galleries. In the eastern
forests and on the central plains, there has been a resur-
gence in the making of elaborate dance costumes, beaded
foot wear, powwow costumes, canoes, snow shoes, and in
the construction of traditional lodges.
First Nations peoples have held with amazing tenacity to
their own understanding of people-land relationships which
is radically different than that of the dominant majority.
They continue to confront governmental, industrial and
church agencies with their alternative world-view. Most
elders today would see themselves as guardians of Mother
Earth.
This has led them into increasingly frequent con ict
with corporations and governments that plan to develop
local resources by destructive means. Thus, there have been
many demonstrations, marches, petitions, and road block-
ades trying to stop clear cut logging, open cast mining,
dam construction, and military weapons testing on reser-
vation lands, or on lands whose status is currently being
claimed or disputed in the courts. The following examples
may give some idea of the scale of the problem.
Although some 112 000 square km of the New Sogobia
reservation was designated as the property of the Western
Shoshone nation in 1863, and this was later con rmed in
1869, the US military has conducted some 670 weapon test
explosions there since 1963, usurping 90% of their land.
By 1980, 42 operating uranium mines, 10 uranium mills, ve
coal power plants and four coal strip mines were in the vicinity
of the Navajo reservation. Approximately 15 new uranium-
mining operations were under construction on the reserve itself.
Although 85% of Navajo households had no electricity, each
year the Navajo nation exported enough energy resources to
fuel the needs of the state of New Mexico for 32 years.
(La Duke, 1992)
Despite continuing protest of the Innu People of Labrador
and Northeast Quebec, their traditional life style has been
rendered nearly impossible. In the 1950s, many were
forcibly resettled into villages, when the Churchill River
dam ooded ancient burial grounds and important areas
of their hunting territory. In the early 1980s, the military
base of Goose Bay was established, and used as a North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) training base for low-
level ight, which disturbs the caribou herds and makes
sustained hunting impossible. Now mining companies have
led over 13 000 claims in the area around Voisey Bay,
Labrador.
Coal strip mining is a particular problem to the Cheyenne
and Navajo-Hopi peoples. The Cheyenne reservation is
virtually surrounded by coal strip mines, railroads, electric
generating plants and transmission lines. Adjoining the
reserve lies the largest federal coal sale in the history of
the US the Powder River Coal lease, which follows the
major water source the Tongue River.
Several coal- red power plants lie on or adjacent to
the Navajo-Hopi lands, and the vast Black Mesa mine
supplying coal to the Four Corners Power plant was the
only man-made object seen by the Gemini Two astronauts
from outer space. It caused not only pollution and falling
water tables but also the relocation of some 10 000 people.
Across Canada, from the Queen Charlotte Islands of
British Columbia, to Temagami, Ontario, to the Maritimes,
First Nation peoples have been among the rst to organize
protests against the huge timber leases sold to corpora-
tions for clear-cut logging. They have often been joined
by the public in mass demonstrations, but have had only
very limited success in changing government policies. For
native people, the destruction of the forests together with
their wildlife, and the deterioration of streams and rivers,
and consequently of shing, has generally been disas-
trous. Although clear-cutting may generate a few short-term
unskilled jobs for local First Nations people, trap lines
are lost, hunting and traditional ways of life become more
dif cult, and in the long-term it leads to increasing impov-
erishment of the community as a whole.
474 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Similarly, almost all the major rivers in Canada have
been dammed for hydroelectric developments. Some of
these, like the Churchill Dam (Labrador), or the W A
C Bennett Dam (British Columbia), or the vast James Bay
Project of Northern Quebec, are among the largest engi-
neering works of the 20th Century. Not only have the huge
reservoirs behind the dams destroyed the most productive
areas of lowland for vegetation, wildlife, and migratory
birds, but sometimes the ow of rivers has been diverted or
even reversed, resulting in the disruption of water tables,
and resettlement of communities. Generally, if compensa-
tion is paid, it is only in cash, not in equivalent land and
resources. This leaves the problem of increasing unemploy-
ment, cultural destruction, and despair in its wake.
In conclusion, one can only say that the response of
First Nations peoples to 500 years of change in both the
physical and social environment is in a state of very rapid
transition. At one extreme are the isolated reservations
where traditional reliance upon hunting and shing (albeit
using ries, outboard motors, and snowmobiles) is still
possible, although it may be seriously threatened by both
the impact of pollution, and by the increasing corporate
demand for resource exploitation. At the other extreme are
examples like the Cherokee nation who have developed
a large manufacturing center (including component parts
for IBM, General Dynamics, and the US Army, among
others), as well as retail and hotel sectors. The political
and administrative center of Tahlequah handles an annual
budget in excess of $75 million.
In two areas in particular, traditional ways of life have
continued relatively undisturbed. One of these is on the
vast semi-desert reservations of the Pueblo peoples of
the Southwestern US. The other area is in the Canadian
North and Alaska. The territory of Nunavut, established
in 1999, covers approximately one-fth of the land area
of Canada. With a population of approximately 27 700
people, who are 90% aboriginal, it has the same autonomy
as other territories and provinces. Even in both of these
regions, modern transportation, education, medical services,
expanding commercial sectors, resource exploitation and
western forms of government and policing, create a large,
and ever-increasing impact.
Unfortunately, in many of the smaller and more isolated
reservations, where the land area is too small to support
traditional hunting, and too poor to farm, as much as 90%
of the population may still depend upon some form of
government payments.
A few Native bands whose reservation land lies in large
and growing urban centers have been able to develop their
property and lease or rent it at considerable prot.
On many other reservations new commercial develop-
ments are appearing continuously: from casinos, shopping
malls and tourist hotels to a resurgence of handcrafts,
from toxic waste storage facilities to fashion designing.
On independent band reservation land, mining and oil and
gas exploitation is now generally under the management
of Native corporations. On larger reservations, sustainable
logging operations, modern farming and industrial devel-
opments are being established.
For the future, it seems safe to say that the only thing
that is certain is continuing change. It would seem that the
general movement towards increased autonomy will almost
certainly continue in both the US and Canada. Eventually,
the vast number of land claims will wend their way through
the court systems, and be settled. However, the very size,
number and complexity of claims (e.g., almost the entire
land area of the province of British Columbia is currently
being claimed by various Native bands) means that the nal
determination of land will inevitably disappoint many.
Will future developments on reservation lands be more
environmentally sustainable than in North America as a
whole? For the immediate future, the most urgent con-
sideration for many band councils and governments is
to improve the employment opportunities and raise the
standard of living for people who have traditionally been
impoverished and demoralized. Yet access to land is central
to long-term indigenous health and cultural identity. Land
and people are inseparably bound. The Native community
can only be healthy in body, mind and spirit when the land
is also healthy. The land is the promise of a healthy future
for generations yet to come, it is where the bones of the
ancestors lie, it links the past and the future, and it is sacred.
Thus, while some indigenous people are among the poorest
of the poor they are also holders of the key to the future
survival of humanity.
See also: Indigenous Knowledge, Peoples and Sustain-
able Practice, Volume 5.
REFERENCES
Black Elk Speaks (1988) Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the
Oglala Sioux, as told through John G Neihardt (rst published
1932), University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE.
Clarkson, L, Morrissette, V, and Regallet, G (1992) Our Respon-
sibility to the 7th Generation: Indigenous Peoples and Sus-
tainable Development, International Institute for Sustainable
Development, Winnipeg, 10.
LaDuke, W (1992) Indigenous Environmental Perspectives, A
North American Primer, Akwe:kon J., 5270.
Tinker, G (1992) The Full Circle of Liberation, Sojourners, Octo-
ber, Box 29272, Sojourners Resource Center, Washington, DC,
1217.
Wright, R (1993) Stolen Continents: The New World through
Indian Eyes, Penguin Books, London.
FURTHER READING
Bordewich, F M (1996) Killing the White Man s Indian: Reinvent-
ing Native Americans at the End of the 20th Century, Anchor
Books, Doubleday, New York.
ROOSEVELT, THEODORE 475
Government of Canada (1996) Report of the Royal Commission
on Aboriginal Peoples, ve volumes, Ottawa.
Indian Claims Commission Proceedings, a Publication of the
Indian Claims Commission (Canada). A Continuing Series of
Ofcial Reports, www.indianclaims.ca.
Versluis, A (1994) Native American Traditions, Element Books,
Rockport, MA.
Romanticism
see Art and the Environment (Volume 5);
Literature and the Environment (Volume 5)
Roosevelt,
Theodore
(18581919)
Theodore Roosevelt, US president (19011909), led one of
the most dynamic lives of any US president. He was born
into a wealthy and privileged New York family. Roosevelts
childhood was one of constant illness, but he overcame
his inrmities through a self-imposed regimen of strenuous
exercise. Strong will became a hallmark of his personality.
He attended Harvard and studied law at Columbia.
In 1884, his wife Alice and his mother died on the
same day Alice from complications of childbirth, and his
mother from a long illness. Roosevelt went to his ranch in
the Dakota Territory where he slowly overcame his loss by
living a tough physical life far from the world he knew in
New York. In 1886, he married again, to Edith Carow.
During the SpanishAmerican War, Roosevelt was Lieu-
tenant Colonel in the Rough Rider Regiment, and he led
a famous charge at the battle of San Juan. This war hero
status added to his celebrity image, and shortly after he was
elected New York State Governor (1898).
Later, he served as vice president to William McKinley.
McKinley was assassinated in 1901, and at the age of 43,
Roosevelt became the youngest president in US history. He
brought a new vigor to the presidency, a change from the
staid and conservative McKinley. Roosevelt held the ideal
that the government should be an arbiter and promoter of
social and economic equity. Roosevelt embraced anti-trust
legislation that soon dissolved monopolies in the railways
and oil industry. The extensive use of executive power was
a dening characteristic of his administration. He wrote I
did not usurp power, but I did greatly broaden the use of
executive power . Roosevelt believed that as steward of the
people he must act forcefully to enhance the public good.
Roosevelt pushed the US toward a more discernable
global role. Speak softly and carry a big stick was
an adage he popularized. He backed construction of the
Panama Canal, and won the Nobel Peace Prize for medi-
ating an end to the RussoJapanese War. However, he
also had an important and lasting impact on conservation
thought.
The time Roosevelt spent in the Dakotas had an impact
on his tenure as president. He developed a love of the
wilderness early in his life, and later saw the closing of
the frontier and the settlement of the western landscape as
the symbolic loss of what dened America. His friendships
with John Muir and Gifford Pinchot provided kindred spirits
for his romantic view of the American landscape, and
they in turn greatly inuenced his conservation program.
Roosevelts executive power gave him an opportunity to
add vast areas of the west to the national forests, and
to preserve places of special beauty such as the Grand
Canyon. Despite this, he was a man of environmental
contradictions while being a keen observer of nature,
he was also an avid hunter. Roosevelts conservation was
based on a utilitarian ideal it was not about the absolute
preservation of nature, but instead it was about the wise
use of public lands and resources. His administration saw
the creation of the rst large resource bureaucracies. By
the close of his presidency, Roosevelt had insured that the
public would be the dominant landowner in the American
West, and that the conservation ideal would long serve to
guide the culture of American resource management.
Photo: Pach Brothers.
KEVIN HANNA Canada
S
Salinity, Waterlogging and
Agriculture Socioeconomic
Perspectives
see Salinity and Agriculture (Volume 3)
Scenarios
Jerome C Glenn
American Council for the United Nations University,
Washington, DC, USA
A scenario is a story that connects a description of a
speci c future to present realities in a series of causal links
that illustrate decisions and consequences. A speci c year
should be stated, such as 2025, and subject focus like a
country, an industry, peace and con ict, etc. A scenario is
not a single prediction or forecast, but a way of organizing
many statements about the future.
Herman Kahn was the father of scenario construction.
He de ned scenarios as narrative descriptions of the future
that focus attention on causal processes and decision points
(Kahn, 1967).
The purpose of scenarios is to systematically explore, cre-
ate, and test both possible and desirable future conditions.
Scenarios can help generate long-term policies, strategies,
and plans, which help bring desired and likely future cir-
cumstances in closer alignment. They can also expose igno-
rance; show that we do not know how to get to a speci c
future or that it is impossible.
Exploratory or descriptive scenarios describe events and
trends as they could evolve, based on alternative assump-
tions on how these events and trends may in uence the
future. Normative scenarios describe how a desirable future
can emerge from the present.
Although it is not possible to know the future, it is possible
to in uence elements of it. The forces of nature, social and
political dynamics, scienti c discovery, and technological
innovation largely determine the future. However, human
choice increasingly shapes the future. This in uence makes
the effort to consider the balance between what we want and
what is possible worthwhile.
Scenarios should be judged by their ability to help deci-
sion makers make policy now, rather than whether they turn
out to be right or wrong. Good scenarios are those are:
(1) plausible (a rational route from here to there that make
causal processes and decisions explicit); (2) internally con-
sistent (alternative scenarios should address similar issues
so that they can be compared); (3) suf ciently interesting
and exciting to make the future real enough to affect deci-
sion making.
A scenario could be constructed to show how continuing
war, Acquired Immune De ciency Syndrome, and environ-
mental destruction could lead to increased African migra-
tion to Europe, which triggers racial con icts. The purpose
of this scenario would be to alert decision makers about
strategic interventions to make the scenario wrong. Con-
versely, The Millennium Project (Glenn and Gordon, 2000)
constructed a global normative scenario to the year 2050 to
illustrate how policy could dramatically improve the human
condition. Here the purpose was to organize hundreds of
previously collected positive developments and strategies
into one whole picture that showed how policies, technolo-
gies, and changing human behaviors could have synergistic
effect, and might become self-ful lling to some degree.
Herman Kahn introduced the term and concept of scenar-
ios into planning in connection with military and strategic
studies conducted by the Rand Corporation in the 1950s.
He further popularized the concept in the 1960s as direc-
tor of the Hudson Institute, a private nonpro t research
center devoted to issues related to US public policy, interna-
tional development, and defense. In 1967, Kahn along with
Anthony Weiner examined the future possibilities of world
order, describing potential power alignments and interna-
tional challenges to American security in a book entitled
Toward The Year 2000 (Kahn and Weiner, 1967). One of
their worlds depicted an arms control agreement between
the US and the former Soviet Union; another assumed
the former Soviet Union would lose control of the Com-
munist movement; a third projected construction of new
SCENARIOS 477
alliances among countries. In the book, Kahn and Weiner
also described the technology hardware of the future, which
included centralized computer banks with extensive infor-
mation on individuals as well as parents able to select
the gender and personal characteristics of their children
through genetic engineering. This work was done under the
Commission on the Year 2000 sponsored by the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Since the future can never be accurately or completely
known, most planners and futurists today reject the idea that
planning should be conducted against a single most likely
image of the future. Rather, sets of scenarios should be used
in planning; if the sets encompass a broad span of futures
and plans are generated to cope with their eventualities,
then the plans will be robust and the future can be met with
some degree of con dence.
The Millennium Project has produced the largest anno-
tated scenario bibliography with over 400 scenario sets,
available at http://www.acunu.org/millennium/information.
html, which are organized in the Futures Matrix in the
following domains: demographics and human resources;
environmental change and biodiversity; technological capa-
city; governance and con ict; international economics and
wealth; integration or whole futures.
DESCRIPTIONS OF SCENARIOS
The term scenario comes originally from the dramatic arts.
In the theater, a scenario refers to an outline of the plot;
in movies, a scenario is a summary or set of directions for
the sequence of action. Peter Schwartz of Global Business
Network, a think tank in Emeryville, CA, often compares
the initial process of creating a scenario with writing a
movie script (Schwartz, 1992). Often in creating a scenario,
a team of people considers such questions as: what are
the driving forces? What is uncertain? What is inevitable?
Similarly, scriptwriters formulate an idea and develop char-
acters. Schwartz describes characters as the building blocks
of scenarios.
In general, the term scenario has been used in two
different ways: rst, to describe a snapshot in time, or the
conditions of important variables at some particular time
in the future; second, to describe a future history, i.e., the
evolution from present conditions to one of several futures.
The latter approach is generally preferred because it can
lay out the causal chain of decisions and circumstances that
lead from the present. The most useful scenarios are those
that display the conditions of important variables over time.
In this approach, the quantitative underpinning enriches
the narrative evolution of conditions or of the variables;
narratives describe the important events and developments
that shape the variables.
When scenarios are used in futures research and pol-
icy analysis, the nature of evolutionary paths is often
important since policies can deect those paths. In policy
studies, families of scenarios are often used to illustrate
the consequences of different initial assumptions, differ-
ent evolutionary conditions, or both. For example, a study
of transportation policy might involve constructing several
scenarios that differ in their assumptions about birth rates,
population, migration, and economic conditions, as well
as the costs and availability of various forms of energy.
When a set of scenarios is prepared, each scenario usually
treats the same or similar parameters, but the evolution and
actual value of the parameters described in each scenario
are different.
The goal of generating scenarios is to understand the
mix of strategic decisions that are of maximum benet in
the face of various uncertainties and challenges posed by
the external environment. Scenario building, in conjunction
with a careful analysis of the driving forces, fosters system-
atic study of potential future possibilities both good and
bad. This forecasting approach enables decision makers and
planners to grasp the long-term requirements for sustained
advantage, growth, and avoidance of problems.
HOW TO CONSTRUCT ALTERNATIVE
SCENARIOS
Numerous methods have been developed to create sce-
narios, ranging from simplistic to complex, qualitative to
quantitative. Some are created by one author acting alone,
some by teams; and others through global participatory
processes as in the Millennium Project (Glenn and Gor-
don, 2000). Many methods have similarities, although they
may have unique features and use different terminology.
Most approaches recognize the need to understand the sys-
tem under study and identify the trends, issues, and events
that are critical to this system. While each is not feasible
to explain in detail, a brief description of several and a
lengthier description of one are worthwhile.
Coates & Jarratt of Washington, DC, US, uses the fol-
lowing process to develop scenarios for a variety of clients,
including countries and businesses. Coates & Jarratt begin
by dening the universe of the area of interest. Key vari-
ables shaping the future are identied using a wide range of
sources. Usually some 630 variables affecting the future
situation are nominated. This list is then winnowed down by
eliminating redundancies, a process that usually results in
620 variables. In the next step, the scenarios to be created
are dened. One scenario usually presents a continuation
of the present forces at play. Other scenarios may include
an optimistic or positive scenario, which may be based on
one or two of the particularly prominent variables. These
scenarios may involve such occurrences as a technological
breakthrough or change in government policy. Other sce-
narios can be framed around important futures, such as busi-
ness booms, collapses, or other important occurrences. In
478 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
general, 36 scenarios are usually sufcient. The variables
are then reviewed to determine what is a plausible quali-
tative and quantitative range of the value for that scenario.
The scenarios can then be assigned to individuals for cre-
ation. Once completed, the scenarios should be reviewed
for comprehensiveness and completeness, and then edited
to ensure consistency in approach, layout, style, and format.
Coates & Jarratt emphasize that scenarios can be used
to achieve different goals. Whereas some are designed
to present a completed future, others may be used as
points of departure for future discussions, such as policy
implications. On some occasions, transition scenarios may
be appropriate to development that describes the process of
getting to certain end states. These transition scenarios can
be either a separate set of scenarios or part of the primary
scenarios themselves.
Peter Schwartz, a former member of the Royal
Dutch/Shell scenario team, describes several steps in the
scenario development process in his work The Art of
the Long View. These steps include: identify the focal
issue or decision; identify the key forces and trends in
the environment; rank the driving forces and trends by
importance and uncertainty; select the scenario logics; ll
out the scenarios; assess the implications; and select the
leading indicators and signposts for monitoring purposes
(Schwartz, 1991; 226234).
Thomas Mandel and Ian Wilson of SRI International
wrote an excellent description of scenarios in a report
entitled How Companies Use Scenarios: Practices and Pre-
scriptions (Mandel and Wilson, 1993). In this SRI report,
the authors explain the scenario development process. In the
rst two steps, management decides what it needs to know
in order to make business decisions, and a scenario team
describes the events, trends, and uncertainties that could
impact the decision-making process. The team then ana-
lyzes forces that will shape the future business environment,
both from within its own industry (competition) and outside
of it (social, political, economic, etc.). The team then devel-
ops scenario theories or logics, which are differing views
of the way the world might work in the future. Each theory
takes into account critical drivers and uncertainties. Using
the theories already developed as a guide, the scenarios
are then described in sufcient detail to identify implica-
tions of decisions and to help develop and assess strategy
options.
Michel Godet, from the Laboratory for Investigation in
Prospective Studies in Paris (Godet, 1993), begins the sce-
nario development process by constructing a base image
of the present state of a system. This image is broad in
scope, detailed, and comprehensive, dynamic, and descrip-
tive of forces for change. The base image is constructed by
delineating the system being studied, including a complete
listing of the variables that should be taken into considera-
tion as well as subdivisions of these variables (i.e., internal
and external, as descriptive of the general explanatory
environment). This step is followed by a search for the
principal determinants of the system and their parame-
ters, often using structural analysis. The scenario process
involves examining the current situation and identifying the
mechanisms and the leading actors (inuencers of the sys-
tem through variables) that have controlled or altered the
system in the past. This process continues with develop-
ment of actors strategies. Construction of the database is
followed by construction of the scenarios.
Godet combines various futures research techniques in
scenario development. For example, he nds that mor-
phological analysis can be used in scenario construction
since scenarios are, in essence, a conguration of identied
components. Godet cites the large number of possible com-
binations as a drawback in this application of morphological
analysis, but offers a solution in the form of computer soft-
ware that helps limit the eld.
Ute Von Reibnitz of Strategische Unternehmensberatung
makes the case that the ability to create different futures
situations allows planners to deal with scenarios that fall
between two extremes. In his book Scenario Techniques
(Von Reibnitz, 1988), Von Reibnitz describes the process
of constructing scenarios. Step one entails an analysis of
an organizations structure, strengths and weaknesses, and
goals and strategies. Step two involves an examination
of areas and factors of external inuences with attention
to their interrelationship and dynamics. Step three is an
analysis of the development of the future of inuencing
factors. Step four clusters different alternatives to form
logical and plausible structures for scenarios. Step ve
incorporates these structures into scenarios that describe
system dynamics and changes. The process concludes in
Step six with an analysis of opportunities and risks.
In Business Futures, the Institute for Futures Research
(1992) has presented yet another approach that begins with
the identication of key issues. This step is subdivided into
denition of mission, objectives and aims, and description
of strategies and key decision-making parameters, followed
by identication of key environmental forces, composed of
environmental scanning, spotlighting of crucial issues, and
listing predetermined events and forces for change. In the
next step, the scenario logic is dened, the actors identied,
and their likely behavior examined. Multiple scenarios are
then created, and the implications of each are tested. The
concluding step involves presentation of these scenarios to
planning forums in order to evaluate their implications for
action programs.
The Millennium Project of the American Council for the
United Nations University (Glenn and Gordon, 2000) uses
large-scale participatory processes. To construct a global
normative scenario, hundreds of futurists, scholars, busi-
ness planners, scientists, and policy makers who work
for international organizations, governments, corporations,
SCENARIOS 479
non-government organizations, and universities identi ed
and rated norms that formed the core of the normative
scenario. In order of preference, the participants selected
the following top four norms around which to form the
scenario: environmental sustainability, plenty, global ethics
(the identi ed and accepted ones), and peace. The oth-
ers in order of preference were health, freedom, access
to universal education, equity, preservation of the human
species, enlightenment, exciting and meaningful life, self-
actualization, longevity, everyone has everything they want,
and security.
The body of the normative scenario was composed of
the actions that would be required to address the 15 global
challenges that had been identi ed through several rounds
of global questionnaires to the Millennium Project partic-
ipants. These actions connected the present world to the
normative future of 2050. A scenario review panel was
formed of long-term normative-oriented participants of the
project to review and improve the draft of the scenario.
The Millennium Project global exploratory scenarios to
the year 2025 also used a participatory process of ques-
tionnaires and interviews to collect information, but used
a computer model with quanti able outputs to assure self
consistency. The developments and policies found to be
important by the participants provided fodder for the sce-
narios; these developments and policies were incorporated
in each of the projected worlds. The method of incorporat-
ing the global model was also novel. Rather than having
the model drive the scenario, the scenario drove the model.
As usual, the drafting of exploratory scenarios began
with the choice of the principal independent dimensions
(axes) that seemed to force the worlds under examination
to differ. Future worlds were formed around these choices
using techniques described below.
In the next step, these explicit scenarios were used to
provide the backdrop for the choice of the values of the
exogenous variables in the selected model. Therefore, when
the model was run, it s output was consistent with the sce-
nario on which the exogenous variables were based and the
model provided quantitative estimates of the value of vari-
ables that were then incorporated within the scenario. While
several different global models were considered, Interna-
tional Futures by Barry Hughes, University of Denver, was
selected. It was well documented, relatively easy to use,
and was made freely available to the project.
For a more complete description of this approach see
http://www.acunu.org/millennium/scenarios/index.html.
The development of scenarios can range from a lengthy
and intricate process to an abbreviated workshop. Peter
Bishop, for example, has used the SRI/Shell/GBN scenario
technique in introductory futures workshops. These work-
shops, in a four- to six-hour period, can complete a full
development sequence of a scenario. The primary purpose
of these workshops is to experience the process, not to
utilize the actual results of the scenario. During this process,
Bishop takes the group through the setting up of scenarios,
developing scenario logic, and drawing out scenario impli-
cations. By asking focused questions, e.g., what is the most
important issue concerning human resources for health care
over the next 10 years , what will stay the same about this
issue that will limit its alternative futures , and what is
changing about this issue that will alter its future , Bishop
sets up the scenarios and develops the scenario logic. Dur-
ing the process workshop, participants come to appreciate a
wide range of variables that affect the future, as well as the
interrelationships among those variables and the existence
of alternative, plausible scenarios for the future.
Finally, it is worthwhile to explore one process in depth.
This particular methodology is the one developed by The
Futures Group.
Preparation
Dene the scenario space: a scenario study begins by de n-
ing the domain of interest. Given a clear statement of the
domain, analysts list key driving forces thought to be impor-
tant to the future of the domain. In a study performed by
The Futures Group for MITRE Corporation about the social
environment of crime, driving forces of law enforcement
funding and social attitudes toward crime were de ned as
ultimately important. To the degree possible, these driv-
ing forces should be independent axes in a scenario space.
If three such forces were de ned, the space would be
three-dimensional. With two forces, scenario space is two-
dimensional. In the law enforcement case, these axes helped
de ne four scenarios of interest:
1. high funding, permissive attitudes toward crime;
2. high funding, repressive attitudes toward crime;
3. low funding, permissive attitudes toward crime;
4. low funding, repressive attitudes toward crime.
De ning a large number of alternative worlds is often
neither necessary nor desirable. A smaller set of choices
that encompass the range of major challenges and oppor-
tunities usually suf ces. A few possibilities may need to
be excluded as illogical or insuf ciently plausible over the
planning horizon. The nal selection of worlds should be
suf cient to present a range of opportunities and challenges,
but should be small enough in number to handle. Four to
ve worlds seems ideal to capture a range of future chal-
lenges and opportunities.
Development
Dene the key measures: within each scenario, certain key
measures are described. These measures might include
forces such as economic growth, legislative environment,
technology diffusion and proliferation, or competitive
480 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
capability, among others. The key measures need to be
selected with care. They should have the potential for great
impact on the outcome of the scenario; a factor is largely
irrelevant if it could develop over a wide spectrum of future
values but have little impact on the issue at hand. Every
scenario in the set will include projections of the same
measures.
De ne the events: this list of events will also appear in
each scenario. These events shape the scenarios in several
different ways: they can impact the key measures, change
the chains of causality that lead from the present to the
future, and/or make certain policies more or less likely
to work. The probabilities of the events are different in
each scenario and depend on their position in the scenario
space.
Project the key measures: trend impact analysis is a use-
ful technique for projecting the key measures. Briey, the
historical data for each of the measures is projected using
time-series methods. The events, expressed probabilisti-
cally, are combined with the extrapolation using Monte
Carlo methods to produce a new median forecast and a
range of uncertainty. Since events within a scenario impact
several measures wherever they are used, they have the
same probability; thus, internal consistency is promoted.
Prepare descriptions: given the quantitative forecasts
of the measures based on the probabilistic description of
the impacting events, many chains of causality become
apparent, and cohesive narratives describing the future
histories can be prepared.
Reporting and Utilization
Document: in most cases, the best documentation is a sim-
ple series of charts and narratives describing the future
history represented by each scenario. As thinking surround-
ing the scenarios is driven farther down in the organization,
several levels of documentation for each of the scenarios
is often useful. A top-line summary gives readers a quick,
intuitive feel for the characteristics of a world from the
perspective of a selected future time (say, 2010) how it
developed, and what the decisive events were that caused
the world to develop as it did.
Contrast the implications of the alternative worlds: how
different are the business decisions and planning goals you
would pursue considering each alternative world? What
actions and commitments offer your organization the most
resilience in the face of these uncertainties?
Testing policies: the range of scenarios can be used to
test policies. In any study, a list of alternative actions is
prepared. This list may come from the decision makers
after reading the scenarios. Each is dened as precisely as
possible. Then, using quantitative techniques if possible,
the policies are tested in each of the scenarios. When a
particular policy produces desirable results in all cases, it
is clearly a good policy to pursue. The other scenarios may
give rise to contingent policies that can be called on if the
circumstances develop that the scenarios depict.
SOME GENERAL GUIDELINES IN SCENARIO
CONSTRUCTION
The most useful scenarios are sharply focused. They focus
on critical issues facing the organization. The number
of issues for consideration and the number of possi-
ble scenarios are almost endless. Without a clear direc-
tion, the discussion of drivers is difcult to limit. The
number of alternative worlds expands exponentially, and
the list of variables can become unworkably long. The
best defense is to dene the focus from the outset. Ask
yourself: What planning questions need to be addressed?
What variables are most needed in order to address these
concerns?
Emphasize qualitative analysis at the start. While num-
bers and formal models are often valuable sources for
understanding future prospects, they can be distracting at
the early stages of scenario development. Quantication can
be valuable in later stages. Formal models also can provide
an effective way of separating the many parts of a complex
system for close consideration.
Some argue that trying to select the most likely scenario
is inappropriate. The best scenarios reect many variables
and possible turns of events that shape the dynamics of the
system under study. Any single scenario that purports to
dene the most likely particular path through this maze is
unlikely to materialize over the years to come. Fortunately,
the scenario-building process does not focus on uncovering
the most likely forecast but, rather, on identifying the range
of feasible outcomes.
See also: Policy Exercises: a Tool for Solving Environ-
mental Policy Dilemmas, Volume 4; Futures Research,
Volume 5.
SOURCES OF FURTHER INFORMATION
Futures, Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann, Linacre
House, Jordan Hill, Oxford, OX2 8DP UK. Tel.: C44 865
310166; Fax: C44 865 310898.
Futures Research (Zukunftsforschung), Publisher: Swiss
Society for Futures Research, SZF, Haldenweg 10 A,
Muri, Ch-3074, Switzerland. Tel.: C41-031-952-66-55;
Fax: C41-031-952-68-00.
Futures Research Quarterly, Publisher: World Future
Society, 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450, Bethesda, MD
20814 USA. Tel.: C1 (301) 656-8274; Fax: C1 (301) 951-
0394.
Futurescope, Publisher: Decision Resources, Inc., 17
New England Executive Park, Burlington, MA 01803 USA.
Tel.: C1 (617) 270-1200; Fax: C1 (617) 273-3048.
SCENARIOS 481
Futuribles, Publisher: Futuribles International, SSR rue
de Varenne, 75007 Paris. Tel.: C33-331 42-22-63-10;
Fax: C33-331 42-22-65-54.
Planning Review, Publisher: The Planning Forum, 5500
College Corner Pike, Oxford, OH 45056 USA. Tel.: C1
(513) 523-4185.
The Futurist, Publisher: World Future Society, 7910
Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450, Bethesda, MD 20814 USA.
Tel.: C1 (301) 656-8274; Fax: C1 (301) 951-0394.
Long-Range Planning, Publisher: Pergamon Press,
Headington Hill Hall, Oxford OX3 OBW UK. Tel.: C44
(865) 79141; Fax: C44 (865) 60285.
Social Indicators Network News (SINET), Publisher: PO
Box 24064, Emory University Station, Atlanta, GA 30322
USA. Tel.: C1 (404) 373-4756; Fax: C1 (404) 727-7532.
Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Publisher:
Elsevier Science, Publishing Co., Inc., 655 Avenue of the
Americas, New York, NY 10010 USA. Tel.: C1 (212) 633-
3941; Fax: C1 (212) 633-3990.
Technology Forecasts and Technology Surveys, Publisher:
Technology Forecasts, 205 S Beverly Drive, Suite 208,
Beverly Hills, CA 90212 USA. Tel.: C1 (213) 273-3486.
ENDNOTE
Much of this material was drawn from the chapter on Sce-
narios in Futures Research Methodology by the Millennium
Project, American Council for the United Nations Uni-
versity, http://acunu.org, edited by Jerome C Glenn with
support from United Nations Development Programmes
African Futures Project. This methodology series includes:
(1) introduction & overview; (2) environmental scanning:
(3) participatory methods; (4) structural analysis; (5) the
Delphi technique; (6) systems and modeling; (7) decision
modeling; (8) scenario construction; (9) trend impact analy-
sis; (10) cross-impact analysis; (11) technological sequence
analysis; (12) relevance trees and morphological anal-
ysis; (13) statistical modeling; (14) simulation-gaming;
(15) futures wheel; (16) normative forecasting; (17) genius
forecasting, vision, and intuition; and (18) methodological
frontiers and integration.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to The Futures Group and reviewers
who made many important suggestions and contributions:
Dr Fabrice Roubelat, Electricite de France; Dr Joseph
Coates of Coates and Jarratt; Dr William M Brown, retired
from the Hudson Institute; Dr Peter Bishop, University
of Houston; Dr Pavel Novacek, Palacky University,
Czech Republic; Dr Stanislaw Orzeszyna, World Health
Organization; Mr Larry Hills, US Agency for International
Development; Dr Eleonora Masini, Pontical Gregorian
University, Rome, Italy; and Dr Terry ODonnell of the
University of Massachusetts.
REFERENCES
African Futures (1993) A Methodological Guide to the NLTPS
Process, UNDP, Abidjan, Cote DIvoire.
African Futures (1993) Issue Identi cation: Phase I of the NLTPS
Process, UNDP, Abidjan, Cote DIvoire.
African Futures (in press) Probing the Future: Techniques, Tools
and Methods, UNDP, Abidjan, Cote DIvoire.
Becker, H S (1982) Constructing and Using Scenarios: an Aid to
Strategic Planning and Decision Making, World Future Soc.
Bull., September/October, 13.
Becker, H S (1983) Scenarios: a Tool of Growing Importance
to Policy Analysts in Government and Industry, Technol.
Forecast. Soc. Change, 23, 95120.
Becker, H S (1989) Developing and Using Scenarios Assisting
Business Decisions, J. Bus. Indus. Marketing, 4(1), 6170.
Bell, D, ed (1968) Toward the Year 2000, Houghton Mifin, New
York.
Boroush, M A and Thomas, C W (1992) Case Study: Alternative
Scenarios for the Defense Industry After 1995, Planning
Forum, 20(3), May/June.
Boroush, M A and Thomas, C W (1992) Case Study: Defense
Markets in an Era of Geopolitical Change, Planning Rev.,
May/June 1992.
Boucher, W I (1985) Scenarios and Scenario Writing, in
Nonextrapolative Methods in Business Forecasting, ed
J S Mendell, Quorum Books, Westport, CT.
Coates, J F (1985) Scenarios Part One: the Future Will Be
Different from the Present. What Do I Have to Do to Persuade
You? in Nonextrapolative Methods in Business Forecasting, ed
J S Mendell, Quorum Books, Westport, CT.
Coates, J F (1985) Scenarios Part Two: Alternative Futures,
in Nonextrapolative Methods in Business Forecasting, ed
J S Mendell, Quorum Books, Westport, CT.
Esterhuyse, W (1992) Scenarios for South Africa: Instability and
Violence or Negotiated Transition? Long Range Planning,
25(3), 2126.
Federal Energy Administration (1974) Project Independence
Report, US Government Printing Ofce, Washington, DC.
Freeman, S D, ed (1974) A Time to Choose, Final Report by
the Energy Policy Project of the Ford Foundation, Ballinger,
Philadelphia.
Glenn, J C, ed (1999) Futures Research Methodology, American
Council for the United Nations University, Washington, DC.
Glenn, J C and Gordon, T J (2000) State of the Future at the
Millennium, CD-ROM section Appendix, American Council
for the United Nations University, Washington, DC.
Godet, M (1993) The Scenario Method, From Anticipation to
Action, in A Handbook of Strategic Prospective, 5378,
UNESCO, Paris.
Godet, M, Bourse, F, Chaupy, P, and Menant, I (1991) Futures
Studies: a Tool-Box for Problem Solving, UNESCO, Paris.
Godet, M (1990) Integration of Scenarios and Strategic Man-
agement: Using Relevant, Consistent, and Likely Scenarios,
Futures, 22(7), 730739.
482 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Heydinger, R B and Zentner, R D (1983) Multiple Scenario Anal-
ysis: Introducing Uncertainty into the Planning Process, in
Applying Methods and Techniques of Futures Research, eds
J Morrison, W L Renfro, and W I Boucher, Jossey-Bass, San
Francisco, CA.
Institute for Futures Research (1992) Business Futures 1992,
ed P H Spies, University of Stellenbosch, Bellville, South
Africa.
Kahane, A (1992) Scenarios for Energy: Sustainable World vs.
Global Mercantilism, Long Range Planning, 25(4), August.
Kahn, H and Weiner, A J (1967) The Year 2000: a Framework for
Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years, Macmillan, New
York.
Klein, H E and Linneman, R E (1981) The Use of Scenarios
in Corporate Planning Eight Case Histories, Long Range
Planning, 14(5), 6977.
Mandel, T F and Wilson, I (1993) How Companies Use Scenar-
ios: Practices and Prescriptions, SRI International, Report
No. 822, Spring.
Martino, J (1972) Technological Forecasting for Decision Making,
Elsevier, New York.
Meadows, D, Meadows, D, and Randers, J (1972) The Limits to
Growth, Universe Books, New York.
Millett, S M (1992) Case Study: Battelles Scenario Analysis
of a European High-Tech Market, Planning Forum, 20(2),
March/April.
Millett, S M (1992) Case Study: Los Angeles 2007, Planning
Forum, 20(3), May/June.
Saxena, J, Sushil, P, and Vrat, P (1992) Scenario Build-
ing: a Critical Study of Energy Conservation in the Indian
Cement Industry, Technol. Forecasting Soc. Change, 41,
121146.
Schoemaker, P J and van der Heijden, C A (1992) Case Study:
Integrating Scenarios into Strategic Planning at Royal
Dutch/Shell, Planning Forum, 20(3), May/June.
Schwartz, P (1991) The Art of the Long View: Planning for the
Future in an Uncertain World, Doubleday, New York.
Schwartz, P (1992) Composing a Plot for Your Scenario, Planning
Forum, 20(3), May/June.
Simpson, D G (1992) Key Lessons for Adopting Scenario
Planning in Diversied Companies, Planning Forum, 20(3),
May/June.
Stokke, R, Boyce, T A, Ralston, W K, and Wilson, I H (1991)
Visioning (and Preparing for) the Future: the Introduction of
Scenarios-Based Planning into Statoil, Technol. Forecasting
Soc. Change, 40, 7386.
Taylor, C W (1990) Alternative World Scenarios for Strategic
Planning, US Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute,
Carlisle Barracks, PA.
Taylor, C W (1992) A World 2010: a New Order of Nations,
US Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, Carlisle
Barracks, PA.
Taylor, C W (1993) Eliminate Future Shock, Chemtech., July,
1215.
Tenaglia, M and Noonan, P (1992) Scenario-Based Strategic Plan-
ning: a Process for Building Top Management Consensus,
Planning Forum, 20(2), March/April.
Von Reibnitz, U (1988) Scenario Techniques, McGraw-Hill,
Germany.
Wack, P (1985) Uncharted Waters Ahead, Harv. Bus. Rev.,
September/October.
Wack, P (1985) Scenarios: Shooting the Rapids, Harv. Bus. Rev.,
November/December.
Werner, M (1990) Planning for Uncertain Futures: Building
Commitment Through Scenario Planning, Bus. Horiz., 33(3),
5558.
Whipple, III, W (1989) Evaluating Alternative Strategies Using
Scenarios, Long Range Planning, 22(3), 8286.
Wilson, I (1978) Scenarios, in Handbook of Futures Research, ed
J Fowles, Greenwood Press, Westport, CT.
Wilson, I (1992) Teaching Decision Makers to Learn from Scenar-
ios: a Blueprint for Implementation, Planning Forum, 20(3),
May/June.
Yergin, D and Gustafson, T (1993) Russia 2010: and What it
Means for the World, Random House, London.
Zentner, R D and Gelb, B D (1991) Scenarios: a Planning Tool
for Health Care Organizations, Hosp. Health Services Admin.,
36(2), 211222.
Ziemer, D R (1992) A Decision Support System to Aid Scenario
Construction for Sizing and Timing of Marketplaces, Technol.
Forecasting Soc. Change, 42, 223249.
Seattle WTO Third Ministerial
Meeting
see Environmental Movement the Rise of
Non-government Organizations (NGOs)
(Volume 5)
Security, Environmental
see Environmental Security (Volume 5)
Seveso
The Seveso incident focused attention on the risks of
chemical manufacture and of the health hazards of
tetrachlorodibenzo para-dioxin (TCDD). On July 10th,
1976, the town of Seveso, Italy, near Milan, was
the victim of extensive contamination by the most
toxic of synthetic chemicals, TCDD. A chemical plant
manufacturing trichlorophenol exploded as a result of a
safety valve rupture. The explosion sent a cloud of TCDD
material over an area of several square kilometers. Although
the total amount of TCDD was very small, estimated at
SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL 483
about one kilogram, the chemical is so acutely toxic that
the event was catastrophic for the community.
Birds fell from the sky and the towns livestock were
slaughtered. Many pregnant women sought abortions rather
than risk birth defects associated with TCDD. Many of
the towns residents were evacuated. Some 200 residents
developed a skin disorder called chloracne, noted as
associated with TCDD and observed in US soldiers
in Vietnam who handled the herbicidal mixture, Agent
Orange, which was contaminated with TCDD.
Health studies monitored the residents following the
explosion. Increased rates of leukemia, lymphoma, and
sarcoma, as well as gall bladder and biliary tract cancer,
were observed in the exposed population. There was
thorough documentation of TCDD levels in blood and
clinical follow-up of the exposed residents. Thus the
explosion contributed to medical understanding of the
impact of TCDD exposure. The Seveso incident also
led to governmental action in the European Community,
particularly in relation to hazardous waste sites.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada
Shallow Ecology
see Deep Ecology (Volume 5)
Sierra Club
The Sierra Club is North Americas oldest environmental
organization. Founded in 1892, it has grown to be the
largest membership-based environmental group in the
United States with over 550 000 members. Its founder, John
Muir, was a Scottish naturalist and writer. Muir championed
the protection of the Sierra Nevada with colleague Robert
Underwood Johnson, editor of Century magazine. Their
efforts led to the creation of the Yosemite National Park
in 1890.
When the park continued to be threatened by local
ranchers seeking grazing rights within the park, Muir
founded the Sierra Club, in his words to do something
for wildness. He believed that if he could take primarily
urban dwellers into the wilds to experience the Sierra
Nevada rst hand, they would become converts to the
cause of wilderness. In its earliest days, the Sierra Club
was essentially a hiking club. But it developed a huge
inuence. Around a legendary campre at Mariposa Big
Tree Grove in Yosemite, Muir persuaded US President
Theodore Roosevelt to build a national park system. The
Sierra Club has been instrumental in protecting national
parks and monuments including the Grand Canyon, Mount
Ranier, Kings Canyon, Glacier, Sequoia, Olympic, Death
Valley, and Rocky Mountain. In the 1960s, the Sierra
Club emerged from its strong California base to build a
national organization. It expanded to deal with modern
environmental threats such as air and water pollution, as
well as it traditional campaigns such as protecting wild
rivers from hydroelectric dams. Strong leaders such as
Michael McCloskey and David Brower led the Sierra Club
to new prominence in the conservation movement. The
organization is different from other environmental groups in
having an engaged membership. The grassroots, volunteer-
based operating style of the Sierra Club has made it a
powerful lobbying force in the US. It is subject to the
criticism from more radical environmental groups that it
is too conservative. Currently, the Sierra Club has chapters
across the US, as well as inuence through the related, but
relatively independent, Sierra Club of Canada.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada
Small is Beautiful
Small is Beautiful Economics as if People Mattered was
written by E F (Fritz) Schumacher in 1973. The book sold
over one million copies in the US alone and contributed
substantially to critical analysis of the role of technology,
economies of scale as well as the environmental impacts of
mega-projects. Schumacher went on to publish A Guide for
the Perplexed, and a third book, Good Work, was published
posthumously based on his lectures. E F Schumacher died
on September 4th, 1977.
The essence of Schumachers creative thinking emerged
through his work for a report to the government of
India in 1962. He advanced the concept of intermediate
technology, and later founded the Intermediate Technology
Development Group in London, UK. Schumacher rened
the argument that simpler, people-scaled technologies were
more appropriate for the poor in developing countries. He
furthered these theories through his work through the 1950s
and 1960s as economic advisor to the British coal industry.
He also advanced the cause of organic farming through the
British Soil Association.
Small is Beautiful in many ways anticipated the
doctrine of sustainable development (Brundtland, 1987) as
Schumacher did not oppose growth, per se, but argued
cogently for a kind of growth that did not degrade
484 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
living systems, locally or globally, but which, rst and
foremost met human needs. Smaller mills, mini-plants,
operations at human scale provided the template for a
radical and profound challenge to prevailing economics and
an unquestioned embrace of technology.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada
Social Ecology
Social ecology is a small but important environmental
movement that integrates the study of human and
natural ecosystems through the attempt to understand
the relationships between culture and nature. It is
often contrasted with deep ecology (see Deep Ecology,
Volume 5), of which it is highly critical. Social ecology s
starting point is that environmental problems result from
social attitudes and practices, therefore the former must
be solved by focusing on and changing the latter. An
alternative socially and ecologically benign future can be
constructed by reharmonizing people s relationship to the
natural world, and this will be achieved by reharmonizing
their relationship with each other.
The latter may be done through maximizing individual
autonomy, eliminating hierarchical relationships (particu-
larly humans over nature and vice versa, but also within
human societies, such as patriarchy and class oppres-
sion) and creating in their stead simple social relation-
ships, including direct, inclusive, economic democracies.
The state, capitalism, and giantism are all considered
inimical to social ecology s vision of harmonious soci-
ety, which marries anarchism and ecology drawing par-
ticularly on the anarcho-communist legacy of Peter
Kropotkin.
Social ecology s most in uential theorist is Murray
Bookchin. His critical, holistic worldview places human
behavior and institutions within an ecological context
that represents social relations as a web of dynamic
interrelated systems. But unlike (some interpretations
of) deep ecology, Bookchin s approach would not
prioritize nature over human society, nor would it dismiss
the social aspirations of the Enlightenment Project. It
would seek to be neither ecocentric nor anthropocentric,
but again unlike deep ecology it sees humankind as
evolution s highest expression, i.e., nature s consciousness,
so human transformation of nature is natural and
desirable.
Social ecologists present speci c utopian visions of a
rational, ecological society, where labor is organized into
small, human-scale communities without power hierarchies,
and where exploitation of nature is minimal and production
is environmentally friendly.
DAVID PEPPER UK
Social Impact Assessment
(SIA)
Social impact assessment (SIA) is the process of analyzing
(predicting, evaluating and re ecting) and managing the
intended and unintended consequences on the human
environment of planned interventions (policies, programs,
plans, and projects) so as to create a more sustainable
biophysical and human environment. A short form of
this de nition is: SIA is the process of analyzing and
managing the intended and unintended consequences of
planned interventions on people.
SIA is more than a technique or tool; it is a philosophy
about development and democracy, which considers
pathologies of development (i.e., harmful impacts), goals of
development (such as poverty alleviation or gender equity),
and processes of development (e.g., participation, capacity
building).
SIA is an overarching framework that considers all poten-
tial impacts on humans and their communities including:
(1) changes to people s way of life, i.e., how they live,
work, play and interact with one another on a day to day
basis; (2) changes to their culture, community, neighbor-
hood and local biophysical environment; (3) demands on
their political systems, social institutions and community
infrastructure; (4) effects on their health and well-being, on
their personal and property rights; and on their fears and
aspirations for themselves and their families.
The objective of SIA is to ensure that development
that does occur maximizes the bene ts and minimizes the
costs of development, especially those costs borne by the
community and often not adequately taken into account
by international development agencies decision-makers,
regulatory authorities and developers. By identifying
impacts in advance: (1) better decisions can be made
about which projects should proceed and how they should
proceed; and (2) mitigation measures can be implemented
to minimize the harm from a speci c project or project-
related activity.
SIA has three different levels of meaning: (1) as a
paradigm or eld of research and practice; (2) as a
methodology or environmental management instrument;
and (3) as a discrete step (or speci c task) within a
methodology. SIA is used at these different levels often
SOCIAL LEARNING IN THE MANAGEMENT OF GLOBAL ATMOSPHERIC RISKS 485
with some people failing to appreciate that different
meanings or levels exist.
As a paradigm, SIA consists of a body of knowledge,
techniques, and values. Various people identify themselves
as SIA professionals, or list SIA as a discipline
or specialty area. There is a community of scholars
engaged in research and practice of SIA. These are
people who practice the methodology of SIA and who
undertake associated social and environmental research
to inform the practice of SIA. As a methodology or
instrument, SIA is the process (series of steps) that
SIA professionals follow in order to assess and manage
social impacts. That process requires substantial interaction
with interested and affected peoples. At its narrowest
meaning, SIA refers to the task of assessing likely social
impacts of a proposed project within an environmental
assessment framework (see Social Impact Assessment,
Volume 4).
FRANK VANCLAY Australia
Social Learning in the
Management of Global
Atmospheric Risks
Adam Fenech
Meteorological Service of Canada, Downsview, Canada
Social learning is how humans, as individuals and groups,
adopt and spread new concepts, knowledge and skills.
It has recently begun to be applied to the process by
which societies respond to environmental issues. There
was a clear recognition during the late 1980s of the
need for a better understanding of how human societies
perceive and respond to global environmental change
over time, i.e., social learning. Most of the previous
understanding of how societies learned re ected the
perspectives of a very narrow range of countries and
groups, and was focused on key scienti c discoveries and
decisions, with little attention to the historic connections
between them. There was little critical discussion of what
might be appropriately learned from the experience of
dealing with other environmental problems, and from
the experience of dealing with them in other places
or countries. For a general reference, see Rose (1993).
This publication is a critical collection of studies on the
various kinds of social learning encountered in policy
making.
When applying a social learning framework, researchers
ask questions such as: Who (individual, organization,
country) learned? Was the learning from within the social
group, among social groups or from another country?
Who was the teacher? Who was the learner? What
was learned? What knowledge, experience, or norm was
learned? How did this knowledge, experience or norm
t or rede ne existing practices, models and decision-
making processes? How did the learning occur? Who
brought new information to bear on the existing issue?
Where did the new information come from? How long
did the new information take to formulate into an
issue?
A major study applying a social learning framework to the
environment has recently been completed under the leader-
ship of William C Clark, Harvard University (Clark et al.,
2001). It provides a better understanding of how human
societies learned from earlier responses and other countries
and organizations in the management of global atmo-
spheric risks. The study applies the social learning frame-
work to global atmospheric risks namely acid rain, global
climate change and stratospheric ozone depletion from
the International Geophysical Year of 1957 to the United
Nations Conference on Environment and Development of
1992.
In the context of environmental issues, Clarks book
provides a major entry point into the eld of social
learning. From this project, we present a couple of
Canadian examples namely stratospheric ozone depletion
and climate change to illustrate the concept.
SCIENTISTS-TO-SCIENTISTS LEARNING
One form of social learning is a scientist obviously
learning from other scientists. What is not so obvious
is that, for example, the cadre of Canadian scientists
from Environment Canada, who inform and advise the
Canadian government, often learn from scientists from
other countries about issues, even if other scientists
from Canada are already teaching the same message.
For example, John Hampson, working at the Canadian
Armament Research and Development Establishment
(CARDE) in Val Cartier, Quebec in the early 1960s,
provided the rst statement of concern that human activities
could harm the stratospheric ozone layer. Hampson was
looking for radiative early-warning signals of incoming
missiles, focusing on water vapor from both high-ying
aircraft and rockets, arguing that hydrogen species arising
from the photochemical dissociation of water could
lead to ozone destruction. His work appeared only in
CARDE technical reports, which, though widely circulated
among both Canadian and American atmospheric and
defense research communities, were never taken seriously.
Hampson also raised the concern of ozone depletion from
486 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
increased air trafc in the atmosphere; yet the Canadian
government did not take action until the issue was raised
in response to an American research program in the
mid 1970s investigating the issue of supersonic transport
emissions.
This avenue of learning from scientists-to-scientists
illustrates the importance of the teachings being presented
in person, either by sending a Canadian scientist to an
international gathering to bring the teachings back to
Canada, or by bringing the teacher directly to Canada.
For example, Sherry Rowland attended a 1975 seminar at
York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, presenting
his theories that developed the mechanism for chlorine
catalysis of ozone, and identied chlorouorocarbons as
the largest potential source of stratospheric chlorine. This
gave the issue visibility and some initial credibility in
Canada.
However, the teaching is not blindly accepted by
the learners, since in this case Canada required its
own monitoring, modeling and science to conrm the
implications and necessity for response.
MEDIA-TO-PUBLIC LEARNING
Another obvious learning channel is from media-to-public.
The media acts as a teacher of the Canadian public,
creating controversies that spark scientic investigation
and government action. The surprise here is that in
many instances, the media attention comes from American
sources, thus making the US media a teacher and the
Canadian public and Canadian media learners. For example,
US media coverage of the US Senate Committee hearings
of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
scientist Hansens concern about the climate change issue
sparked Canadas own media to report on the consensus of
scientists that climate change was a real concern.
This Canadian experience is repeated in many other
countries.
OTHER ASPECTS OF SOCIAL LEARNING
There are many other forms of social learning, ranging
from top-down trickle-down arrival of issues, to peer-to-
peer exchanges (as exemplied in the scientist-to-scientist
model), to bottom-up experiential learning, i.e., the experts
are bafed by the kinds of things that ordinary people learn
by living every day.
For example, one form of bottom-up learning has
garnered increasing interest over the years as the value of
traditional or community knowledge has been appreciated
and sought out by researchers. Traditional knowledge
refers to the understanding of the natural environment
that indigenous peoples possess. Traditional knowledge
stems from the inherent closeness to the environment
that indigenous peoples display by the mere fact of
their livelihood and existence being tied to the land,
and to what the wilderness offers in terms of food
and medicines. Traditional knowledge is linked as well
to the passing of knowledge from one generation to
another, allowing events in the far past to be passed
on through storytelling. Community knowledge refers to
the knowledge of a natural resource such as sh or
trees by people who live in villages and hamlets. These
communities also have knowledge about the changing
environment because they are close to the land and
wilderness, relying on it for their existence. The value
of traditional or community-based knowledge has not
been fully realized as there have been no attempts
to merge this informal, non-scientic understanding
with the rigorous scientic method of current experts.
Other approaches are required to fully appreciate the
value that traditional and community-based knowledge
can provide to understanding our changing environment
(see Indigenous Knowledge, Peoples and Sustainable
Pr actice, Volume 5).
This new eld opens up a myriad questions. Where do
people get their information? Who are the champions of
new ideas? What gives an idea prominence or acceptability
among experts and in the public domain? Is there an
optimal model for social learning that we could use to
speed up the social learning curve for environmental
issues?
REFERENCES
Clark, W C, Jager, J, van Eijndhoven, J, and Dickson, N M, eds
(2001) Learning to Manage Global Environmental Risks: a
Comparative History of Social Responses to Climate Change,
Ozone Depletion and Acid Rain, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA,
in press.
Rose, R (1993) Lesson-Drawing in Public Policy, Chatham House
Publishers, Chatham, NJ.
FURTHER READING
Environment Canada (1988) The Changing Atmosphere: Implica-
tions for Global Security Conference Statement, Report from
the Conference on The Changing Atmosphere: Implications for
Global Security, June 2730, 1988, Toronto, WMO, Geneva.
Social Science and Global
Environmental Change
see Social Science and Global Environmental
Change (Opening essay, Volume 5)
SOVEREIGNTY AND SOVEREIGN STATES 487
Social Sustainability
see The Changing HumanNature
Relationships (HNR) in the Context of Global
Environmental Change (Opening essay,
Volume 5)
Sociology, Environmental
see Environmental Sociology (Volume 5)
Soft Energy Paths
The term soft energy paths, was coined by environmental
theorist and energy critic Amory Lovins in Soft Energy
Paths (Lovins, 1977). It can be understood as a reversal of
dominant thinking at the time; shifting the focus of energy
planning from meeting anticipated demands with increasing
energy supplies, to reducing demand through efciency.
Lovins arguments to leave the hard path of energy
planning, a path of brittle, inexible systems dominated by
energy mega-projects, long-transmission lines and bleeding
energy losses, were based on the demand side management
approach. The key to soft path energy planning is to
match energy source to energy demand. A barrel of energy
saved has the same value to the economy as a barrel of
energy found. Thus, energy efciency and conservation
create energy along the soft path. Lovins called such energy
negawatts.
According to Lovins:
The energy problem, according to conventional wisdom, is how
to increase energy supplies to meet projected demands.
The solution ever more remote and fragile places are to
be ransacked, at ever greater risk and cost, for increasingly
elusive fuels, which are then to be converted to premium forms
(electricity and uids) in ever more costly, complex centralized
and gigantic plants.
To illustrate the inappropriate nature of focusing on
supply as opposed to demand, Lovins wrote:
to ask which is the greenest supply of electricity is somewhat
like shopping for the best buy of brandy to burn in your car, or
the best buy in antique furniture to burn in your stove. From
the end use point of view it is to ask the wrong question.
Lovins inuential work has continued, in partnership
with Hunter Lovins, from their base at the Rocky Mountain
Institute. Their most recent book, co-authored with Paul
Hawken, is Natural Capitalism.
REFERENCE
Lovins, A B (1977) Soft Energy Paths: Towards a Durable Peace,
Penguin Books, Harmondsworth.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada
Soft Law
see International Environmental Law
(Volume 5)
Sovereignty and Sovereign
States
Karen T Litn
University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
The modern international system is comprised of sovereign
states, meaning that each state is in principle legally and
constitutionally independent. In practice, however, sover-
eignty is generally conceived more broadly in terms of some
combination of control, autonomy, and authority (Lit n,
1997).
Control, like power, is the ability to produce an effect.
Autonomy, or independence, is related to control since the
ability to make and implement decisions on ones own
requires some degree of power. Authority refers to the
recognized right to make rules.
The tension between environmental protection and state
sovereignty is evident in the famous Principle 21 of
the 1972 Stockholm Declaration, which articulates the
states sovereign right to exploit its own resources and
its responsibility not to harm the environment beyond its
borders. While sovereignty is most commonly interpreted
as a states right to exercise control and authority within
its own territory, the history of international environmental
treaty making may be read as an effort by states to strike a
balance between rights and responsibilities.
Many international relations scholars believe that sove-
reignty is being eroded, or at least recongured, in the
face of growing interdependence, including efforts to
address global and transboundary environmental change.
The apparent mismatch between nature and the structure
488 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
of politics has been expressed in the famous dictum:
The Earth is one, but the world is not (World
Commission on Environment and Development, 1987). As
environmental issues emerged on the international agenda
in the early 1970s, some analysts predicted that global
ecological interdependence would help bring about the
demise of the sovereign state system and its eventual
replacement by some far-reaching supranationalism or
even world government (Falk, 1971; Ophuls, 1977). More
recently, with the proliferation of local and transnational
environmental non-governmental organizations in the
1980s, some observers have predicted the erosion of
sovereignty from below, with power and authority
devolving from sovereign states to the grassroots (Ekins,
1992).
Although the erosion of sovereignty thesis is appealing,
a counter argument can be advanced that ecological
integrity and state sovereignty, are not necessarily
in opposition. One might claim that only the state
possesses sufcient authority, resources, and territorial
control to enforce environmental regulations (Litn, 1993).
Two important developments since 1970 support this
position: the establishment of national environmental
agencies throughout the world and the negotiation and
implementation of a host of environmental treaties.
Moreover, since some challenges to state sovereignty,
such as efforts to promote free trade by eliminating
environmental restrictions, may be harmful, some would
claim that sovereign states are key defenders of the
environment (Esty, 1994).
Neither the erosion of sovereignty thesis nor the sove-
reignty as bulwark thesis, however, does justice to global
environmental trends. Both positions conceptualize sove-
reignty as monolithic rather than multidimensional. Rather,
sovereignty should be understood as a historically variable
set of aggregated practices. The scope of state autonomy
may be narrowed by international and domestic pressures,
as the erosion of sovereignty thesis claims, even as
the problem solving capacity of states increases, as the
second view suggests. Because international environmental
responses typically involve trade-offs among autonomy,
control, and authority, it is more accurate to say that states
engage in sovereignty bargains (Byers, 1991) instead of
ceding some monolithic principle of sovereignty. States
may voluntarily accept limitations on their decision-
making autonomy, for instance, in exchange for a greater
ability to protect natural resources either within or
beyond their own territorial jurisdiction. Thus, sovereignty
appears to be recongured, rather than simply eroded, by
efforts to address transnational and global environmental
change.
Developing countries are particularly sensitive to the
possibility that their sovereignty will be compromised by
international efforts to address environmental problems.
The principle of sovereignty over natural resources, which
has engaged the United Nations since 1952, is often
cited by developing countries opposed to what they
perceive as environmental colonialism. For instance, efforts
by industrialized countries to internationalize the issue
of tropical deforestation in the 1980s and 1990s met
with opposition from developing countries, which claimed
sovereign jurisdiction over their natural resources.
The principle of nonintervention, which is key to state
sovereignty, is taking on new meanings in light of envi-
ronmental change. In the past, it was primarily understood
in terms of a sovereign states expectation that foreign
powers would not intervene politically and militarily in
its own affairs. As we enter the 21st century, the mean-
ing of nonintervention is being renegotiated in the context
of global ecological interdependence. When chlorouoro-
carbons released in Seattle deplete New Zealands ozone
layer and nuclear fallout from the Chernobyl reactor dec-
imates Scandinavias reindeer, new norms of noninterven-
tion are required.
As environmental concerns insert themselves increas-
ingly into world politics, and as the political and economic
effects of such developments as massive species extinction,
climate change, and the globalization of western modes of
consumption become increasingly inescapable, sovereignty
will be recongured in ways that cannot be fully anticipated
today.
REFERENCES
Byers, B (1991) Ecoregions, State Sovereignty, and Conict, Bull.
Peace Proposals, 22(1), 68 72.
Ekins, P (1992) A New World Order, Routledge, London.
Esty, D (1994) Greening the GATT, Institute for International
Economics, Washington, DC.
Falk, R (1971) This Endangered Planet: Prospects and Proposals
for Human Survival, Vintage Books, New York.
Lit n, K (1993) Ecoregimes: Playing Tug-of-War with the Nation-
State, in The State and Social Power in Global Environmental
Politics, eds R Lipschutz and K Conca, Columbia University
Press, New York.
Lit n, K (1997) Sovereignty in World Ecopolitics, Mershon Int.
Stud. Rev., 41(2), 167 204.
Ophuls, W (1977) Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, W H Free-
man, San Francisco, CA.
World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) Our
Common Future, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Stewardship Theology
see Christianity and the Environment
(Volume 5); Theology (Volume 5)
SUSTAINABILITY: HUMAN, SOCIAL, ECONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL 489
Strong Anthropocentrism
see Environmental Ethics (Volume 5)
Subsidiarity Principle
see The Changing HumanNature
Relationships (HNR) in the Context of Global
Environmental Change (Opening essay,
Volume 5)
Sustainability:
Human, Social, Economic
and Environmental
Robert Goodland
World Bank, Washington, DC, USA
The four main types of sustainability are human, social, eco-
nomic and environmental. These are de ned and contrasted
in Tables 14. It is important to specify which type of
sustainability one is dealing with as they are all so different
and should not be fused together, although some overlap to
a certain extent. Specialists in each eld best deal with these
four types of sustainability. For example, social scientists
have a lot to say about social sustainability; economists deal
with economic sustainability and biophysical specialists
deal with environmental sustainability.
A denition of environmental sustainability (ES) has been
given by Daly (1973, 1974, 1992, 1996, 1999) and Daly
and Cobb (1989):
1. Output rule: Waste emissions from a project or
action being considered should be kept within the
assimilative capacity of the local environment, without
unacceptable degradation of its future waste absorptive
capacity or other important services.
2. Input rule:
Renewable resources: (e.g., forest, sh) harvest
rates of renewable resource inputs must be kept
within regenerative capacities of the natural system
that generates them.
Non-renewables: depletion rates of non-renew-
able resource inputs should be set below the
historical rate at which renewable substitutes were
developed by human invention and investment
according to the Seraan quasi-sustainability rule
(see below). An easily calculable portion of the
proceeds from liquidating non-renewables should
be allocated to the attainment of sustainable
substitutes.
SERAFIAN QUASI-SUSTAINABILITY RULE OF
NON-RENEWABLES
The Seraan rule pertains to non-renewable resources,
such as fossil fuels and other minerals, but also to
renewables to the extent they are being mined. It states
that their owners may enjoy part of the proceeds from
their liquidation as income, which they can devote
to consumption. The remainder, a user cost, should
be reinvested to produce income that would continue
after the resource has been exhausted. This method
essentially estimates income from sales of an exhaustible
resource. It has been used as a normative rule for
quasi-sustainability, whereby the user cost should be
reinvested, not in any asset that would produce future
income, but specically to produce renewable substitutes
for the asset being depleted. The user cost from
depletable resources has to be invested specically in
Table 1 Comparison of Human, Social, Economic and Environmental Sustainability: Human Sustainability
Human sustainability means maintaining human capital. Human capital is a private good of individuals, rather
than between individuals or societies. The health, education, skills, knowledge, leadership and access to services
constitute human capital. Investments in education, health, and nutrition of individuals have become accepted as
part of economic development
As human life-span is relatively short and nite (unlike institutions) human sustainability needs continual mainte-
nance by investments throughout ones lifetime
Promoting maternal health and nutrition, safe birthing and infant and early childhood care fosters the start of
human sustainability. Human sustainability needs 23 decades of investment in education and apprenticeship to
realize some of the potential that each individual contains. Adult education and skills acquisition, preventive and
curative health care may equal or exceed formal education costs
Human capital is not being maintained. Overpopulation is intensifying and is the main dissipative structure worse-
ning per capita indices. That is far graver than overcapitalizing education so that laborers have PhDs
490 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Table 2 Comparison of Human, Social, Economic and Environmental Sustainability: Social Sustainability
Social sustainability means maintaining social capital. Social capital is investments and services that create the
basic framework for society. It lowers the cost of working together and facilitates cooperation: trust lowers
transaction costs. Only systematic community participation and strong civil society, including government can
achieve this. Cohesion of community for mutual benet, connectedness between groups of people, reciprocity,
tolerance, compassion, patience, forbearance, fellowship, love, commonly accepted standards of honesty,
discipline and ethics. Commonly shared rules, laws, and information (libraries, lm, and diskettes) promote
social sustainability
Shared values constitute the part of social capital least subject to rigorous measurement, but essential for
social sustainability. Social capital is undercapitalized, hence the high levels of violence and mistrust
Social (sometimes called moral) capital requires maintenance and replenishment by shared values and equal
rights, and by community, religious and cultural interactions. Without such care it depreciates as surely as
does physical capital. The creation and maintenance of social capital, as needed for social sustainability, is not
yet adequately recognized. Western-style capitalism can weaken social capital to the extent it promotes
competition and individualism over cooperation and community
Violence is a massive social cost incurred in some societies because of inadequate investment in social capital.
Violence and social breakdown can be the most severe constraint to sustainability
Table 3 Comparison of Human, Social, Economic and Environmental Sustainability: Economic Sustainability
Economic capital should be maintained. The widely accepted denition of economic sustainability is
maintenance of capital, or keeping capital intact. Thus Hickss denition of incomethe amount one can
consume during a period and still be as well off at the end of the periodcan dene economic sustainability, as
it devolves on consuming value-added (interest), rather than capital
Economic and manufactured capital is substitutable. There is much overcapitalization of manufactured capital,
such as too many shing boats and sawmills chasing declining sh stocks and forests
Historically, economics has rarely been concerned with natural capital (NC) (e.g., intact forests, healthy air). To
the traditional economic criteria of allocation and efciency must now be added a third, that of scale (Daly,
1992). The scale criterion would constrain throughput growththe ow of material and energy (NC) from
environmental sources to sinks
Economics approaches value things in money terms, and have major problems valuing NC, intangible,
intergenerational, and especially common-access resources, such as air. Because people and irreversibles are
at stake, economic policy needs to use anticipation and the precautionary principle routinely, and should err on
the side of caution in the face of uncertainty and risk
Table 4 Comparison of Human, Social, Economic and Environmental Sustainability: Environmental Sustainability
(ES)
Although ES is needed by humans and originated because of social concerns, ES itself seeks to improve
human welfare by protecting NC. As contrasted with economic capital, NC consists of water, land, air, minerals
and ecosystem services, hence much is converted to manufactured or economic capital. Environment includes
the sources of raw materials used for human needs, and ensuring that sink capacities recycling human wastes
are not exceeded, in order to prevent harm to humans
Humanity must learn to live within the limitations of the biophysical environment. ES means NC must be
maintained, both as a provider of inputs (sources), and as a sink for wastes. This means holding the scale of
the human economic subsystem (D population consumption, at any given level of technology) to within the
biophysical limits of the overall ecosystem on which it depends. ES needs sustainable consumption by a stable
population
On the sink side, this translates into holding waste emissions within the assimilative capacity of the
environment without impairing it
On the source side, harvest rates of renewables must be kept within regeneration rates
Technology can promote or demote ES. Non-renewables cannot be made sustainable, but quasi-ES can be
approached for non-renewables by holding their depletion rates equal to the rate at which renewable
substitutes are created. There are no substitutes for most environmental services, and there is much
irreversibility if they are damaged
SUSTAINABILITY: HUMAN, SOCIAL, ECONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL 491
replacements for what is being depleted in order to reach
sustainability, and must not be invested in any other
venture no matter how protable. For non-renewable
energy, a future acceptable rate of extraction of the non-
renewable resource can be based on the historic rate at
which improved efciency, substitution and re-use became
available. These calculations show the folly of relying on
technological optimism, rather than on some historic track
record.
CAUSES OF UNSUSTAINABILITY
When the human economic subsystem was small, the
regenerative and assimilative capacities of the environment
appeared innite. We are now painfully learning that
environmental sources and sinks are nite. Originally,
these capacities were very large, but the scale of the
human economy has exceeded them. Source and sink
capacities have now become limited. As economics deals
only with scarcities, in the past source and sink capacities
of the environment did not have to be taken into account.
Conventional economists still hope or claim that economic
growth can be innite or at least that we are not yet reaching
limits to growth.
REFERENCES
Daly, H E, ed (1973) Toward a Steady State Economy, Freeman,
San Francisco, CA.
Daly, H E (1974) The Economics of the Steady State, Am. Econ.
Rev. March, 1521.
Daly, H E (1992) Allocation, Distribution and Scale: Towards
an Economics which is Efcient, Just and Sustainable, Ecol.
Econ., 6(3), 185193.
Daly, H E (1996) Beyond Growth: the Economics of Sustainable
Development, Beacon Press, Boston, MA.
Daly, H E (1999) Ecological Economics and the Ecology of
Economics, E Elgar Publications, Cheltenham.
Daly, H E and Cobb, J B (1989) For the Common Good, Beacon
Press, Boston, MA.
FURTHER READING
El Serafy, S (1989) The Proper Calculation of Income from
Depletable Natural Resources, in Environmental Accounting
for Sustainable Development, eds Y J Ahmad, S El Serafy, and
E Lutz, The World Bank, Washington, DC.
Hueting, R, Bosch, P, and de Boer, B (1995) The Calculation
of Sustainable National Income, Organization for International
Cooperation, Den Haag, Netherlands [and] Indian Council of
Social Science Research, New Delhi, 195.
T
Technological Society and its
Relation to Global Environmental
Change
see Technological Society and its Relation to
Global Environmental Change (Opening essay,
Volume 5)
Theology
In the context of humanenvironment relations, there are
four kinds of theology:
Ecotheology is theological reection focused on the
relationship of faith to ecological wellbeing and social
justice.
Dominion theology refers to theological worldviews that
perceive humans as being placed by God at the top of a
pyramid of value with all other creation made expressly for
the use of humanity and over which humans could exercise
dominion or control.
Stewardship theology is a challenge to traditional domin-
ion theology that argues that humanitys place within
creation is not one of authority but one of responsi-
bility to care and nurture the Earth on behalf of the
creator.
Process theology is a school of theology that emphasizes
the inextricable linkages of humans within the entirety of
the creation.
DAVID G HALLMAN Canada
Theories of Health and
Environment
Trevor Hancock
Trevor Hancock Inc., Kleinburg, Canada
Early theories of health still commonly found in many
cultures throughout the world understood health as the
result of the characteristics and behavior of the individual
and his or her relationship with the community, nature and
the spirits or gods. The role of healers was to re-establish
balance and to drive out evil spirits. Three great healing
traditions (Greco-Arabic, Indian [Ayurvedic] and Chinese)
share common ideas about maintaining equilibrium among
the humors, taking into account environmental factors, and
addressing personal factors and the spiritual dimension.
In Europe, from the 2nd century AD until the 19th cen-
tury, the miasmic theory that atmospheric and environ-
mental conditions were responsible for the transmission
of epidemic diseases competed with the contagion theory,
which suggested that transmission was via minute infective
agents or spores, and the theory of individual predispo-
sition. While passive acceptance of environmental condi-
tions marked much of this period, activist Boards of Health
rst appeared in Northern Italy in the 15th century. Later,
the social hygiene movement of the 18th century laid the
groundwork for the emergence of the public health move-
ment in the early 19th century.
The public health approach addressed environmental
sanitation and living and working conditions that had
been worsened by the industrialization and urbanization
of the 19th century. At the same time, improved nutri-
tion, education and other social and economic development
factors in turn, based upon exploitation of the earths
resources contributed to a signi cant increase in life
THEORIES OF HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT 493
expectancy and health in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
But with the identi cation of bacteria in the 1870s and the
development of effective vaccines and, in the 1930s, antibi-
otics, the pendulum swung toward a medical model of health
focused on the individual and the treatment of speci c dis-
eases. This has been the dominant paradigm for most of the
past 100 years.
Beginning in the 1970s, however, there has been a grow-
ing awareness that healing and caring for the individual is
much more than just xing the body, and that the determi-
nants of health are much broader than simply the provision
of medical care. In addition to recognizing that much of
the improvement in health in the 19th and 20th centuries
has been due to social and economic development, the view
from space has helped us to understand that we all share a
small and fragile planet and that our health is inextricably
linked to the health of its ecosystems.
Three powerful new, and complementary, models that
are emerging in the western world in many ways repre-
sent a return to the public health model of the 19th century
and to even earlier theories of health as balance within
the person, balance between the individual and other peo-
ple and balance between humans and nature. These three
models holistic medicine, population health and ecosys-
tem health represent a new synthesis, a new theory of
health with roots that are thousands of years old.
INTRODUCTION
It seems that every culture and every period in his-
tory has a theory of health what it is, what determines
health and how to achieve it. The by-now classical World
Health Organisation (WHO) denition of health (see WHO
(World Health Organization), Volume 4) as a state of
complete physical, mental and social well-being and not
merely the absence of disease or in rmity is revealing
both for what it says and for what it does not say. First,
perfect health, i.e., a state of complete physical, mental and
social well-being, may be a goal to be striven for, but it
is probably unattainable. Second, if health is more than the
absence of disease, then the prevention and treatment of
disease alone will never be enough to achieve this. This
suggests that the health care system, with its focus on the
treatment and, to a lesser extent, the prevention of disease,
is a necessary but not suf cient determinant of health.
Third, and perhaps most revealing in the context of this
encyclopedia, is that the focus of the WHO de nition is
on the individual (physical and mental well-being) and
their social context (social well-being) but there is no
reference to the environmental or ecological context. This
probably re ects the tenor of the time, when there was
little or no awareness of global change and what we
now think of as ecosystem health (see Ecosystem Health,
Volume 4). But today we recognize the importance of
health not only as a human attribute but as an attribute
of living systems as a whole, from local ecosystems to
the global ecosystem that some call Gaia (Lovelock, 1979)
(see Gaia, Volume 2). Such systems need to be balanced
and in harmony, just as our own internal systems do, a
process known as homeostasis. When our human systems
are in such a state of balance, we are said to be healthy;
health has become a useful metaphor for such a condition in
ecosystems as well. Perhaps today, then, we would extend
the WHO de nition somewhat to state that health is a
state of complete physical, mental, social and ecological
wellbeing . In doing so, we would be returning to some
much older theories of health.
HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES
The concept that humans are somehow separate from, and
superior to, the environment is a relatively recent one.
It is primarily a product of Western thought in the past
few hundred years, and has been particularly apparent in
the last hundred. But for much of human history, humans
have understood themselves to be a part of, and subject
to the whims of, nature, often personi ed as some form
of spirit or god. Good health resulted from living a good
life in harmony with nature which included appeasing
the gods and ill health was seen as the result of a
loss of that harmony, a loss of balance, or a punishment
from the gods. Healing then became a matter of restoring
harmony and balance, in one s self, with the community,
with nature and with the gods. Healers or shamans used a
wide array of naturally occurring healing substances, and as
well communicated with the spirits or gods in an attempt to
restore balance and harmony and to drive out evil spirits.
Such beliefs and cultural practices can still be found in
many parts of the world, and in our multi-cultural societies
can also be found in many Western societies.
Three great ancient healing traditions have been impor-
tant in the evolution of modern understanding of health
and healing, and the relationship between health and the
environment. Shahi et al. (1997) argue that the fundamen-
tal beliefs and practices of those three traditions Greco-
Arabic, Indian (Ayurvedic) and Chinese share much in
common and that Evidence exists of signi cant cross-
fertilization between these three great humoral traditions of
medicine, with the exchange of ideas and products . Com-
monalities include:
health is dependent on maintaining equilibrium among
the humors (earth, water, re and, depending on the
tradition, air, ether, wood and metal);
this equilibrium is affected by such personal factors
as age, sex, temperament, food consumption and nutri-
tional status;
all three systems took into account environmental fac-
tors such as the seasons, the cardinal directions (north,
494 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
south, east and west), the cycle of birth, growth and
death and the condition of places, as well as emana-
tions (miasmas) from decaying organic materials, from
swamps and from the earth (miasma is a Greek word
for pollution);
there is an all embracing order of things which aligns
the organization of human and other life, society
and the universe, balancing polar opposites such as
light/dark, moist/dry, heat/cold, etc.;
many of the therapeutic interventions focused on mod-
ifying the patients diet and surroundings, as well as
using a wide range of medications (Shahi et al., 1997).
The Greeks, for example, fully understood the need to
balance both healthy living and healing, or treatment. Thus
the Greek god of medicine, Asclepius, son of Apollo,
had two daughters: Panakeia, the goddess of treatment
(from whom we get the word panacea) and Hygeia, the
goddess of healthy living, from whom we get the word
hygiene.
A key gure is that of Hippocrates (460377 BC), the
Greek Father of Medicine, whose school was founded on
the island of Kos. (Many physicians today still take the
Hippocratic Oath on graduating.) Among the many works
attributed to Hippocrates is one entitled Airs, Waters,
Places , in which the relationship between health and the
environment is discussed. It was felt important to pay
attention to the quality of the air, the direction and qualities
of the winds, the quality of the water, the local topography
and climate and other factors, in choosing a place to live
that would be healthy. Here we have a clear example of
the way in which human health and human settlements
were seen to be related to each other and to the quality of
their environment. Indeed, by their commitment to natural
law and to observation, the Greek physicians laid the
groundwork for the science of medicine.
The last great physician in this tradition was Galen, who
lived in the 2nd century AD. Writing about Galen, noting
that three major factors were then believed to contribute
to ill health atmospheric corruption (miasma), individual
predisposition and contagion Winslow (1943) observed
that:
Here in the 2nd century AD were the three factors which
were to dominate scientic thinking up to the age of Pasteur.
For more than 1600 years the history of epidemiology is a story
of a shifting emphasis on these three basic conceptions.
The Romans were also well aware of the relationship
between the environment and health, undertaking massive
public works projects to provide clean water and to remove
human wastes in their towns and cities. But with the coming
of the Dark Ages in Europe, much of this knowledge of
hygiene and healing was lost, although kept alive in the
Islamic world, from where this knowledge was gradually
re-acquired in the Middle Ages.
THE PUBLIC HEALTH APPROACH
The Renaissance, which owered in northern Italy and
spread across Europe in the 15th century, brought with it a
renaissance of public health as well. Boards of Health were
established in most of the major city-states of Northern Italy
in the 15th century, primarily in response to epidemics of
plague, a bacterial disease with a high mortality rate that is
spread by the bite of infected eas from rats to humans, as
well as directly from humans to each other. Unhygienic and
over-crowded living conditions undoubtedly hastened the
spread of this dreadful disease. (For an excellent review of
the broad historical sweep of this and other major diseases,
their environmental and social roots and their impact on
historical events such as the conquest of the Americas, see
McNeill, 1976).
By the 16th century, the Boards responsibilities included
such diverse areas as hygiene, sanitation, food quality, buri-
als, the regulation of hospitals, physicians and apothecaries
and the control of prostitutes and vagrants. They had broad
powers to regulate public gatherings, enforce quarantine
laws, issue health passes and carry out inspections (Cipolla,
1976).
The public health approach of these times was still based
primarily on the miasmic theory the belief in the role
played by atmospheric and environmental conditions in
the transmission of epidemic diseases. Its rival, the con-
tagion theory, was championed by Jirolamo Fracastoro
(14841553). He suggested an alternative hypothesis, that
epidemic spread of disease occurred as a result of the trans-
mission of minute infective agents or spores from person
to person either directly, via intermediaries, or through the
air (Shahi et al., 1997), although these agents were thought
to be chemical, not biological in nature bacteria had yet
to be discovered.
Over time, these two theories became synthesized. But
throughout this period from the Dark Ages to the 18th cen-
tury, with some notable exceptions such as the activist
Boards of Health in Renaissance Italy, the general atti-
tude seems to have been passive the environment was
a given, and little could be done to change its impact on
health.
However, with the beginnings of the scientic revolu-
tion in the 17th century and the Age of Enlightenment in
Europe in the 18th century came a more critical, rationalist
and activist ideology. This new activism, when applied to
public health, became known as social hygiene. Its lead-
ing proponent was the Abbe Claude Fleury (16401723).
This movement was the precursor to, and provided the
foundation for, the public health movement of the 19th
century.
Perhaps the greatest exponent of public health in the
18th century was Johann Peter Frank, Director-General
of Public Health in Austrian Lombardy (Northern Italy)
from 1786. This pioneer of social medicine established
THEORIES OF HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT 495
hygiene as a systematic science and advocated the creation
of state medicine. Frank taught that the greatest wealth
of a state lies in its subjects, who should be as numerous,
healthy and productive as possible (Frank, 1976). Frank
was concerned with the harmful impact of Man upon his
environment. He had a healthy scepticism about the ability
of physicians and hospitals to inuence the health of a
population, and he was concerned with the deleterious
effect upon health that a poor life style had, whether that
lifestyle was chosen or imposed. He saw the role of public
health as helping to maintain the security and stability of
the state, which he viewed as a benign and paternalistic
protector of its people.
The need to maintain the security and stability of the
state was also of great concern to Edwin Chadwick, the
English lawyer and public servant who is seen as the father
of modern public health. In an article written in 1828,
Chadwick contended that the environment must inuence
health and wellbeing, which in turn are the pillars of social
stability, and that the best means to ensure social stability
was for the state to promote health and wellbeing by
improving the environment (Ringen, 1979).
Chadwick was one of the chief architects of the new
Poor Law of 1834, which helped make industrialization
possible by establishing the mobility of labor. But within
a few years Chadwick became concerned that the poor
social and health conditions of the laboring class might
result in unrest, even revolution. Thus the famous Sanitary
Report of 1842, which examined the health conditions
of the laboring class, while undoubtedly sparked by an
humanitarian concern, was also concerned with improving
conditions enough to avert serious social unrest. Frederick
Engels powerfully portrayed those conditions in 1845, when
he described Manchesters River Irk as:
a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream in dry weather,
a long string of the most disgusting, blackish-green slime pools
are left standing from the depths of which bubbles of mias-
matic gas constantly arise and give forth a stench unendurable
even on the bridge 40 or 50 feet above the surface of the
stream.
(quoted in Girouard, 1985)
while Hippolyte Taine wrote of his visit to Manchester in
1859:
Earth and air seem impregnated with fog and soot. The factories
extend their anks of foul brick one after another, bare, with
shutterless windows, like economical and colossal prisons
through half-open windows we could see wretched rooms at
ground level, or often below the damp earths surface. Masses
of livid children, dirty and abby of esh, crowd each threshold
and breathe the vile air of the street, less vile than that
within .
(quoted in Girouard, 1985)
It was environmental conditions such as these that led to
the British government establishing the Health of Towns
Commission in 1843. Again led by Chadwick, the Com-
missions work led to the adoption of the sanitary idea
and to the establishment of public health measures such as
housing standards, sewer systems, hygiene regulations and
proper public water supplies. A Health of Towns Associ-
ation, established in 1844, with branches all over Britain,
supported the Commissions work.
The work of the Health of Towns Association in pressing for
the application of the sanitary idea and its insertion into policy
making had a dramatic effect on public health in Britain in a
comparatively short space of time.
(Ashton, 1992)
Thus by the middle of the 19th century, the contribution of
lthy environments and appalling living and working con-
ditions to the health of the population was well established,
along with a strong and active public movement to support
social and political intervention to modify the environment.
Its apogee, perhaps, came in the 1870s when Sir Benjamin
Ward Richardson, a disciple of Chadwick, marked the pas-
sage of the great Public Health Act of 1875 by describing
his vision of a city of health:
a community so circumstanced and so maintained by the
exercise of its own free will, guided by scientic knowledge,
that in it the perfection of sanitary results will be approached,
if not actually realized, in the co-existence of the lowest
possible general mortality with the highest possible individual
longevity.
(Richardson, 1875)
But through one of those ironic twists of fate, the 1870s
were not only the time of the Great Public Health Act and
of Benjamin Ward Richardsons vision of a healthier city,
but were also the time at which the bacteriologists were
announcing many of their most exciting discoveries about
bacteria, insect vectors, animal reservoirs of disease and
human carriers and were developing effective vaccines and
anti-toxins. These discoveries ushered in a very different
theory of health, one that was to become the dominant
model in much of the world over the next century.
THE MEDICAL MODEL OF HEALTH
Throughout history, the Hygeian or public health and
Panakeian or medical/therapeutic models have co-existed
and contended. For much of the 19th century, the Hygeian
model was dominant. But with the identication of bacte-
ria and the renement of biological and clinical research,
the emphasis shifted towards the Panakeian model, with its
emphasis on nding the specic cause of disease in bacte-
ria, in nutritional and metabolic disorders, in biochemical
and molecular changes. In this medical model, health is
seen primarily as the absence of disease.
The medical model has become powerful because it has
been allied to the scientic method and the dominance
496 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
of Western culture and civilization in the past couple of
hundred years. This analytic model has focused its increas-
ingly narrow attention on organs, on cells, on microorgan-
isms, on genes, and on molecules as causes of disease. But
this focus has also tended to exclude the broader environ-
mental, social and economic factors at play. In essence, the
medical model is a reactive model, looking for disease and
then seeking a treatment for it (a pathogenic model ) rather
than seeking to understand what determines good health
and how to maintain and improve it (a salutogenic model,
as Antonovsky (1978) termed it).
At its simplest, the medical model sees a single
cause the measles virus, for example and a single
effect the disease of measles. This simple cause and effect
model lies behind the search for specic treatments for
specic diseases, a search that has had some remarkable
successes. But it also quickly became apparent that
simple exposure to a pathogenic organism such as
the measles virus, while necessary for the disease to
occur, was not sufcient. The epidemiological triangle of
agent, host and environment, sought to explain this by
identifying differences in the environment (which might
affect transmissibility, for example), in the host (who
might be resistant) or in the agent (which might differ
in terms of dose, virulence, etc.). Further complicating
matters is that some causes (smoking, for example)
might have multiple effects (several forms of cancer,
heart disease, stroke, respiratory disease, low birth
weight and many other diseases) while some diseases
(heart disease, for example) might have multiple causes
(inherited susceptibility, high blood pressure, smoking, high
cholesterol levels, infection, lack of exercise and other
factors).
The medical model of health has had some spectacular
successes, particularly in the development of antitoxins and
vaccines to protect against infectious disease (the eradica-
tion of the scourge of smallpox is a high point), antibiotics
to treat bacterial (but not viral) disease, medications to con-
trol high blood pressure and many other diseases, and some
forms of cancer therapy. In recent years a vast array of
chemotherapeutic agents has been developed for all man-
ner of minor and major, chronic and acute, physical and
mental health problems, as well as surgical treatments for
both major and minor health problems. In addition, West-
ern medicine has shown itself to be remarkably effective at
dealing with traumatic injuries that in the past would have
been fatal. Indeed, so widespread and pervasive has this
model become that the concept of medicalization has been
developed to describe the extent to which medicine inl-
trates and even distorts our lives and our societies. Illich
(1976) has famously discussed iatrogenesis (doctor-caused
disease) as not simply clinical disease resulting from errors,
unanticipated side effects and the over-use of diagnostic and
therapeutic techniques, but also has described social and
cultural iatrogenesis the medicalization of many normal
parts of life such as feelings of dis-ease, validation of dis-
ability or work and school absenteeism, or the processes of
birth and death.
This growth in modern Western medicine has also
occurred at the same time as a massive increase in life
expectancy, which for all its faults remains the most com-
monly used overall index of health. Life expectancy at
birth for women in Canada, for example, increased from
43.8 years in 1871 to 76.4 years in 1971 (Bourbeau and
Legare, 1982), while in Chile male life expectancy at
birth increased from 29 years around 1910 to 72 years
in 1998 and female life expectancy at birth in Japan in
that same period increased from 43 to 83 years (WHO,
1999). Globally, life expectancy at birth has increased from
48 years in 1955 to more than 65 years in 1995, and is
projected to increase to 73 years by 2025 (WHO, 1998).
On a regional basis, average life expectancy at birth in
1997 ranged from 53 in the African Region of WHO
to 72 in the European region and 73 in the American
region. The largest increases in life expectancy at birth
between 1975 and 1997 were found in the Eastern Mediter-
ranean region (12 years) and the Southeast Asian region
(11 years), with more modest but still substantial gains of
67 years in the African, American and Western Pacic
regions, while the European region posted a gain of 2 years
(WHO, 1998).
As a result, there has been a widespread belief that
our long lives and better health are attributable to modern
Western medicine, which has only served to strengthen the
dominance of the medical model. However, since the 1970s
new theories of health have been emerging, rooted in a
questioning of the efcacy of the medical model and in a
more salutogenic orientation.
NEW PERSPECTIVES
One aspect of the questioning of the medical model
comes from the psychological and social sciences. For
while the medical model of health focuses mainly on the
bio-physiological dimension, there is also a psycho-social
dimension to disease, a perception that we call illness.
Moreover, people may feel ill without there being any evi-
dence of bio-physical disease. Norman White, a Canadian
psychiatrist, has suggested a bi-axial model, one axis repre-
senting the biophysical spectrum from disease to physiolog-
ical health, the second axis representing the psycho-social
spectrum from illness to a sense of well-being. In such a
model, people may be physiologically healthy but psycho-
socially ill, or they may have physiological disease but feel
well (undiagnosed high blood pressure would be a good
example of this). We are not simply biological systems, we
are also psycho-social beings, and theories of health must
recognize this fact.
THEORIES OF HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT 497
A second powerful response to the power of the medical
model and its failings has been the (re)-emergence of
a more holistic model of health that pays greater attention
to the relationship between body, mind and spirit, an area
generally neglected by modern Western medicine. This has
involved a dramatic growth in the desire of knowledgeable
and empowered consumers to be much more involved in
their own health care, both through self-care and mutual
support and through an increased emphasis on healthy liv-
ing and the personal use of natural therapies. At the same
time practitioners of holistic, alternative or complemen-
tary medicine in the West have been rediscovering and
re-applying insights and wisdom from traditional healing
practices rooted primarily in Eastern philosophies. Naturo-
pathic, homeopathic and ayurvedic methods, acupuncture,
shiatsu, massage, meditation and many other healing modal-
ities have been growing rapidly in the West in the past
few decades, in response to the growing public disillusion
with the hard science values and practice of modern West-
ern medicine. Their emphasis on healthy living, on caring,
on re-establishing balance and harmony and on the use of
natural remedies links them not only to the ancient heal-
ing traditions discussed earlier, but to modern concepts of
wellness and ecosystem health.
While holistic medicine was and is a critique of the
clinical aspects of the medical model, a critique of the role
of medicine in improving health was also developing in
the 1960s and early 1970s. Thomas McKeown Professor
of Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of
Birmingham in England began to inquire into the factors
that led to improved health in England and Wales in the
19th century. His answers were somewhat surprising; he
showed that the major factors leading to improved health
had been improved nutrition, improved hygiene, limitations
in family size (all of these rooted in economic and social
development) and the development of vaccines in the late
19th and early 20th century and of antibiotics in the
1930s (McKeown, 1979). In short, McKeown found that
improvements in health had not been primarily due to
improvements in medical care, but to the combination of
social and economic development.
McKeowns work formed the basis of a seminal Cana-
dian report in 1974 that, for the rst time, suggested
that a national, and for that matter world-wide, policy
focus on provision of health care was insufcient. The
Lalonde Report A New Perspective on the Health of
Canadians proposed the health eld concept in which
four factors environment (physical and social), lifestyle,
health care organization and human biology were the key
determinants of health (Lalonde, 1974). Importantly, the
Lalonde Report proposed that major improvements in the
health of Canadians will result primarily from changing
lifestyles, improving our environments, and advances in
our understanding of human biology . The Lalonde Report
was inuential not only in Canada but also in the US and
in Europe, where it spawned similar reports in the years
that followed. Over the past 25 years, the analysis has been
rened.
The initial emphasis and still a strong focus
today was on lifestyle. One estimate suggested that up to
50% of preventable mortality was attributable to lifestyle
diseases, which were sometimes called diseases of choice.
The implication was that if only people would make
healthy and wise choices, much ill-health and premature
death could be avoided. The wellness movement that
emerged in the 1970s focused on the individuals personal
responsibility to avoid smoking and excessive drinking, to
improve tness and nutrition, to learn stress management
and to develop environmental awareness and a sense of
spiritual and emotional well-being (Ardell, 1977). However,
critics of this approach, while acknowledging that healthy
choices are important, pointed out that environmental,
social, economic and cultural circumstances and our living
and working conditions shape and sometimes constrain
those choices. Over time, this led to the emergence of the
concept of population health.
Taking their cue from the work of McKeown, advo-
cates of population health (e.g., Evans et al., 1994) have
pointed to the signicance of the economic and social
determinants of health, drawing attention in particular to
the importance of poverty and inequality and the inuence
of social status on health. This in turn has been linked
to factors such as self-esteem and sense of self-worth, to
the inuence of the social hierarchy and of the degree of
control over working conditions, and to the relationship
between the mind and the bodys immune system, a eld
of study known as psycho-neuro-immunology. The research
ndings suggest that such factors may be as important as
conventional risk factors such as smoking, diet and exer-
cise in the development of heart disease. For example,
the 1999 World Health Report cites evidence that suggests
that the most important factors that have led to the reduc-
tion in mortality between 1960 and 1990, based on data
from 115 low and middle income countries, were ascrib-
able to the generation and utilization of new knowledge
(which includes but is much more than medical knowledge
and technology), improvements in the educational level of
women and improved income, in that order (Wang et al.,
1999, cited in WHO, 1999). However, while strong on the
social and socio-economic factors, the population health
approach is curiously silent on the inuence of the built
and natural physical environments on population health
status.
The neglect of the built environment within which the
social processes of population health occur is particularly
unfortunate because the most signicant human environ-
ment today is the built environment. Globally, half of
humanity now lives in urban settlements, while in the
498 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
developed world some 80% of the population is urbanized.
Moreover, humans spend most of their time indoors, espe-
cially in the developed world. In North America, people
are indoors almost 90% of the time and in their cars
5% of the time, leaving only 5% when they are outdoors
(Leech et al., 1996). The built environment is a human
artifact comprising both a physical and a social environ-
ment, and it constitutes the human ecosystem. Understand-
ing human health increasingly means understanding the
effects of complex urban physical and social environments
and processes upon the health of urban residents. It also
means understanding how the urban way of life affects the
health of the wider natural ecosystems of which they are a
part.
The ecological perspective on health has emerged from
the growing importance of ecology, and from the growing
awareness of global change and its health implications;
human health is inextricably linked to ecosystem health.
The view of earth from space has made it apparent, as
never before, that we are bound to and part of a fragile and
beautiful place, a living planet that some call Gaia. At the
same time, this global perspective and the modern science
of ecology has enabled us to understand how potent is our
power to affect the global life support systems on which
we depend.
For while the increase in life expectancy and other
measures of health that we have experienced may seem
to be due primarily to the dramatic social and economic
development we have undergone, this development has in
turn been based upon industrialism s exploitation of the
earth s resources notably energy, forests, soils, minerals
and the oceans and the accompanying widespread pollu-
tion of our environment, indeed of the planet as a whole.
Thus, in a very real sense, our current high level of health
and long lives have been purchased at the expense of the
environment.
But global change is not without cost (see McMichael,
1993, or Chivian et al., 1993, for good overviews of the
health implications of global change) (see Environmen-
tal Change and Human Health: Extending the Sus-
tainability Agenda, Volume 3). Global warming, ozone
depletion, acid rain and other climate and atmospheric
changes threaten our health; global warming in particu-
lar will increase the range of the mosquitoes that spread
malaria, dengue fever and other diseases, as well as the
distribution of other disease vectors. More severe storms,
oods and droughts will also add to the burden of infec-
tious diseases as well as causing hunger, malnutrition and
trauma. The depletion of such renewable resources as sh-
eries, forests, topsoil and fresh water aquifers threatens
our food supplies and may cause both malnutrition and
mass migration, with all its attendant misery, diseases
and deaths. Environmental pollution and ecotoxicity the
widespread contamination of entire ecosystems and food
chains with persistent organic pollutants (POPs) has made
it apparent, as the North American Indian Chief, Seat-
tle, is reputed to have remarked more than 100 years ago,
that we are all part of the web of life, and whatever
we do to the web of life, we do to ourselves . We sim-
ply cannot tell what a lifelong exposure to low levels of
multiple POPs will mean for the health and well-being of
today s infants, nor for the health of other species that are
equally exposed. This applies also to the loss of habitat
that we are causing and the accompanying loss of biodi-
versity as a result of a human-created mass extinction; we
do not know how many strands of the web of life we dare
sever. And the massive increase in trade and travel that has
accompanied globalization has meant that exotic diseases
(such as West Nile fever, spread by birds and mosquitoes)
or exotic vectors (such as the Asian Tiger mosquito, a
hardy mosquito that has been introduced into the USA and
that spreads dengue and yellow fever) will become more
widespread.
There is thus a growing awareness that human health is
dependent upon ecosystem health, and even a concern that
human health can no longer be sustained if the industrial
and economic growth that has been the basis of improved
health undermines the ultimate determinants of health the
Earth s life support systems and natural resources (World
Resources Institute, 2000).
A NEW SYNTHESIS
Any modern theory of health thus has to take into
account and integrate the bio-medical model (including
its complementary or alternative versions), the wellness
and lifestyle approach, and the social, economic, built and
natural environmental determinants of health.
In his depiction of a sane, humane and ecological soci-
ety, the British futurist Robertson (1978) described sanity as
balance within the individual, humanity as balance between
the individual and other people in their communities and
around the world, and ecology as balance between humans
and nature. These three concepts in many ways represent
the three broad themes in the re-conceptualization of health
described above that have emerged in the late 20th cen-
tury: holistic medicine and wellness, with its focus on the
individual s balance and harmony; population health, with
its focus on social conditions and processes; and ecosystem
health, with its focus on the relationship between human
health and the health of the planet. They all have roots in
much earlier models of health.
A focus on holistic medicine and wellness harkens back
to much older views of the importance of diet and
nutrition, of maintaining balance in leading a healthy
life, and in forms of treatment which address the body,
mind and spirit together. It might perhaps be considered
part of the Panakeian tradition.
THEORIES OF HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT 499
Improved living and working conditions were a major
factor in improving health in the 19th century, and
population health reminds us that social and eco-
nomic development remains important today, while the
modern-day Healthy Cities and Communities move-
ment takes its inspiration directly from its Victorian
predecessors. As in Hippocrates time, we still have
to be concerned with airs, waters and places, with the
quality of our human settlements and our buildings.
Maintaining and improving urban and suburban envi-
ronments and the social and physical quality of the
homes, schools, workplaces, institutions and other set-
tings where we spend most of our time remains an
important task for those concerned with public health.
This is the Hygeian tradition.
We are rediscovering that in order to be healthy we
have to be in tune with nature, both at a local level
and globally. As with the re-emergence of holistic
medicine, this is in some respects a return to our
roots, to an awareness of our place within, rather than
apart from and superior to, nature. Healthy people
can only exist within healthy communities and on a
healthy planet. This might be considered the Gaian
tradition.
A synthesis of these three concepts may lead to a new
understanding of health. What follows is a model of the
human ecosystem that provides such a synthesis, a theory
of health for the 21st century that seeks to integrate these
new theories of health.
AN ECOLOGICAL MODEL OF HEALTH
All models reect the contemporary intellectual and cultural
context in which they are created, and, of course, all models
are wrong, in the sense that they are only a model of reality,
not reality itself, and that they reect the personal context
of those who create the model, which in turn reects the
cultural, social and intellectual context of their times. That
having been said, a modern theory of health has to incorpo-
rate the biomedical, holistic medicine, wellness, population
health, and ecosystem health perspectives. The Mandala
of Health (Hancock and Perkins, 1985; Hancock, 1985)
is one such model (see Figure 1), reecting our current
understanding of the elements of the human ecosystem that
determine health. Developed in the early 1980s to explain
the new public health approach in the City of Toronto in
Canada, it builds upon and expands the four health elds
of the Lalonde Report.
Body Mind
Family
Human-made environment
Biosphere
Community
Culture
Spirit
Human
biology
Physical
environment
Personal
behavior
Psycho-socio-
economic
environment
Sick
care
system
Work
Lifestyle
Figure 1 The Mandala of health. A model of the human ecosystem
500 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Mandala is the Buddhist word for an intricate circular
design used as a focus for meditation. It has also been
dened as a circular symbol of the universe: it is in
this latter sense that the term is used; the Mandala is a
circular symbol of the universe of health. At the center of
the Mandala, the focus for our concern, is the individual
human being. That individuals health is a function of their
body/mind/spirit integration and well-being, the central
concept of holistic medicine and wellness.
That individual is shown as existing within a family. For
most of us, for most of our lives and in particular in those
important but vulnerable parts of our lives encompassed by
infancy, childhood, adolescence, parenthood and old age,
the family is our most immediate social environment, just as
our home is our most immediate physical environment. The
family constitutes one of the great mediating structures of
our society: it buffers and protects the individual members
from the impacts of community and society; it establishes
our values, attitudes, standards and behaviors; it supports
us and protects us. (Of course, it must be admitted, families
can also have a negative effect, causing stress, even mental
and physical damage, the latter through violence.)
The individual and his/her family are in turn affected
by four key factors human biology, personal behavior,
psycho-socio-economic environment and physical environ-
ment. These four are in fact variants of three of the four
Lalonde health elds, namely lifestyle, environment and
human biology.
Human biology affects personal and family health
through such things as the genetic transmittal of muta-
tions and inborn errors of metabolism, through physi-
ological and biochemical functioning, the competence
of the immune system (and the links between the psy-
che and the immune system), and through the aging
process, to name but a few.
Personal behavior is obviously a determinant of health,
although constrained and modied by many other fac-
tors. The behaviors we are concerned with can be
loosely grouped into health promotive or protective
behaviors such as proper eating habits, taking regu-
lar exercise, managing stress effectively, using seat-
belts and crash helmets, and using preventive and
other health care services appropriately; and health risk
behaviors which include smoking, drug and alcohol
abuse, driving dangerously or while drunk and so on.
The term psycho-socio-economic environment addres-
ses two related areas of great importance. The rst is
concerned with our psychosocial environment, includ-
ing pressure from our peers at school, at work and in
other situations, the inuence of media and advertising
and related factors. By socioeconomic environment, we
are referring primarily to the inuence of social sta-
tus, class or income, which have profound inuences
on peoples knowledge, skills, resources and opportu-
nities, and on their living and working conditions, as
they attempt to lead healthy lives.
By physical environment, in this particular section of
the model, we are referring primarily to the immediate
indoor environment of home, school, workplace and
other indoor settings where most people, especially
in industrialized countries, spend so much of their
lives. The design of our buildings, their air quality
and the hazards (physical, chemical, mechanical and
biological) they contain have important effects upon
health.
The next level of the Mandala shows three particular con-
nections between these four factors that are of importance
to health. The rst of these is called the sick care system.
This term is used specically to indicate that what we usu-
ally refer to as the health care system is in reality primarily
concerned with sickness rather than with health. This is
not to belittle the system, or those who work within it, far
from it. The role they perform is indeed a vital one and
when we become sick we would all like to have an effec-
tive and efcient sick care system to care for us. But those
working within that system have primarily been trained in
the recognition, diagnosis and treatment of disease, and are
often less knowledgeable about the maintenance and pro-
motion of health, skills in which they have not usually been
trained.
A second important point is that the sick care system
is primarily concerned with human biology and personal
behavior (in the sense of physical and mental health) and
is not very involved with and often not very concerned
about the other elements of the Mandala. This is why the
sick care system is only a relatively minor determinant of
health.
Work forms a very important function in our lives, at
least in the Western industrialized culture. Not only is the
physical environment of the workplace frequently a hazard
to health, so too is the mental and social environment of
the workplace, which can be a source of stress, alienation,
boredom or frustration. On the other hand, work is an
important part of our social identity, can often be an
important source of meaning and purpose in our lives and
provides one of our key social networks.
The term lifestyle is here shown to be the consequence of
the interaction of personal behavior with the psycho-socio-
economic environment, within the context of community
and culture. Lifestyle is a complex phenomenon, not sim-
ply a matter of personal behavior and personal choice. As
an example, imagine trying to lead the lifestyle of a Bud-
dhist forest monk in downtown Toronto in the middle of
winter. While such a lifestyle choice is clearly possible,
it is also clearly a difcult one to make and to sustain,
given our social and cultural environment and our phys-
ical environment. On the other hand, it would clearly be
THEORIES OF HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT 501
quite easy to choose such a life in a country like Burma.
The point of this example is not to deny the existence of
free choice, merely to indicate that choice is constrained
and limited by broader social, cultural and environmental
factors.
All of these factors function within a third level of the
Mandala, namely that of the community and the human-
made environment. As already indicated, the community
has its own set of values and standards, and its own social
and cultural characteristics that inuence our health. Human
services are organized at the community level in the areas
of health, education, social services, recreation and other
areas by the public, private/for-prot and voluntary/non-
prot sectors. In addition, the community has a broad range
of organizations, groups and networks which provide what
McKnight (1995) has termed associational life or what
Putnam (1993), among others, refers to as social capi-
tal churches, self-help networks, neighborhood associa-
tions, service clubs, unions, school and home associations,
and so on. They play a vital role in our health by providing
the social networks and social support necessary for healthy
social functioning.
The human-made environment encompasses the built
environment of neighborhoods and urban settlements. But
the notion of the human-made environment also encom-
passes the human-modied environment massive agricul-
tural, energy, transportation and other systems which have
left virtually no segment of the world untouched or unmod-
ied by human hands. All of these systems, and all of
this human modication have enormous implications for
health.
The nal level of the Mandala encompasses culture
and the biosphere. These are the overarching contexts
within which we lead our lives. Culture refers to cultural
norms and values that underlie how we think about health,
how we believe health and illness are determined and
what steps we take as a society and as individuals to
improve health or treat illness. In countries as culturally
diverse as Canada and the United States now are, there are
many different cultural norms and values at work, from
those of the aboriginal people to the cultural beliefs of
recent immigrants from Asia, Africa, Latin America and
the Caribbean. Nonetheless, the basic cultural values and
beliefs are rooted in the JudaeoChristian heritage, Western
ideologies of liberty and democracy, scientic rationality,
technological civilization and domination of nature. These
all greatly affect our understandings of and approach to
health.
The biosphere is the ultimate determinant of health. The
biosphere is the term used to describe that thin shell of
the planet that contains plant and animal life. It is this thin
skein of the web of life that keeps us alive, providing our
life support systems and a range of other eco-services. The
rediscovery in recent years of the ecological principles that
our ancestors and aboriginal people understood so well has
led us to accept that we are a part of and within nature,
rather than separate from and dominant over nature. Only
through such an understanding will we come to accept, as
the 1990 World Health Day slogan puts it, that we really
should think of our planet, our health.
The Mandala of Health has proved to be a useful con-
ceptual model for understanding health, and an impor-
tant teaching tool. As with all such models, it will no
doubt be superseded with time. But for the moment,
it is a useful representation of our modern theory of
health.
See also: Infectious Diseases, Volume 2; Environmen-
tal Change and Human Health: Extending the Sus-
tainability Agenda, Volume 3; Urban Climate and Res-
piratory Disease, Volume 3; Urban Poverty and Envi-
ronmental Health, Volume 3; Policy Responses to Pub-
lic Health Issues Relating to Global Environmental
Change, Volume 4; WHO (World Health Organization),
Volume 4.
REFERENCES
Antonovsky, A (1978) Health, Stress and Coping, Jossey Bass,
New York.
Ardell, D (1977) High Level Wellness: an Alternative to Doctors,
Drugs, and Disease, Rodale Press, Emmaus, PA.
Ashton, J (1992) The Origins of Healthy Cities, in Healthy Cities,
ed J Ashton, Open University Press, Milton Keynes.
Bourbeau, R and Legare, J (1982) Evolution de la Mortalite au
Canada et au Quebec, 1831 1931, Les Presses de l Universite
de Montreal, Montreal.
Chivian, E, McCally, M, Hu, H, and Haines, A (1993) Critical
Condition: Human Health and the Environment, MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA.
Cipolla, C (1976) Public Health and the Medical Profession in the
Renaissance, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Evans, R, Barer, M, and Marmor, T, eds (1994) Why Are Some
People Healthy and Others Not? The Determinants of the
Health of Populations, Adeline de Gruyter, New York.
Frank, J P (1976) A Complete System of Medical Policy, ed and
translated by Lesky, originally published 1786 1810, Johns
Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD.
Girouard, M (1985) Cities and People: a Social and Architectural
History, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.
Hancock, T (1985) The Mandala of Health: a Model of the Human
Ecosystem, Fam. Community Health, 8(3), 1 10.
Hancock, T and Perkins, F (1985) The Mandala of Health a
Conceptual Model and Teaching Tool, Health Educ., 24(1),
8 10.
Illich, I (1976) Medical Nemesis, Pantheon Books, New York.
Lalonde, M (1974) A New Perspective on the Health of Canadi-
ans, Of ce of the Canadian Minister of National Health and
Welfare, Ottawa.
Leech, J A, Wilby, K, McMullen, E, and Laporte, K (1996) Cana-
dian Human Time-Activity Pattern Survey Report and Popu-
lation Surveyed, Chronic Dis. Can., 17, 118 123.
502 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
Lovelock, J E (1979) Gaia: a New Look at Life on Earth, Oxford
University Press, Oxford.
McKeown, T (1979) The Role of Medicine: Dream, Mirage or
Nemesis, Blackwell, Oxford.
McMichael, A (1993) Planetary Overload, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge.
McNeill, W (1976) Plagues and Peoples, Anchor Press, Garden
City, New York.
McKnight, J (1995) The Careless Society: Community and its
Counterfeits, Basic Books, New York.
Putnam, R (1993) Making Democracy Work, Princeton University
Press, Princeton, NJ.
Richardson, B (1875) Hygeia: a City of Health, MacMillan,
London.
Ringen, K (1979) Edwin Chadwick, the Market Ideology and
Sanitary Reform, Int. J. Health Serv., 9(1), 107120.
Robertson, J (1978) The Sane Alternative, James Robertson,
London.
Shahi, G S et al. (1997) A Historical Perspective, in Interna-
tional Perspectives on Environment, Development and Health:
Toward a Sustainable World, eds G S Shahi et al., Springer,
New York.
WHO (1999) World Health Report, WHO, Geneva.
WHO (1998) World Health Report, WHO, Geneva.
Winslow, C E A (1943) The Conquest of Epidemic Diseases: a
Chapter in the History of Ideas, Princeton University Press,
NJ.
World Resources Institute (2000) World Resources 20002001:
People and Ecosystems The Fraying Web of Life, Oxford
University Press, New York.
Thoreau, Henry
David
(18171862)
Henry David Thoreau, US writer, poet and philosopher, is
considered to be the godfather of American environmental-
ism, due to his authorship of Walden, his ascetic lifestyle as
illuminated by Walden, and his later contributions to natural
history.
Thoreau was born in Concord, MA, in 1817, and was
inuenced early on by a powerful intellectual and spiritual
movement in New England called the transcendentalists, of
which the most famous gure was Ralph Waldo Emerson
(18031882). This movement sought to apply the teachings
of German Romanticism in an American context. These
teachings sought spiritual understanding in generating pow-
erful connections between the newly emerging individual in
modern society, and the unspoiled natural world. Thoreau,
and others more loosely associated with the transcenden-
talists, were open to many inuences, including the earliest
translations in the west of Buddhist and Hindu writings.
Upon graduation from Harvard in 1837, Thoreau began
a haphazard career as a writer, land surveyor, worker in
his fathers pencil factory, and occasional lecturer. His
rst book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
(1849) which described a boat journey Thoreau and his
brother took (embellished with natural history, stories, and
embedded short essays on a variety of subjects), was
a complete failure. Thoreau continued to publish natural
history essays and travel essays in American magazines
throughout the rest of his life, of which the most famous are
probably Ktaadn and the Maine Woods (1848), Cape Cod
(1855) both later turned into books and Walking (1862).
His essay Civil Disobedience (1849), written in opposition
to the war with Mexico, has been widely inuential in
setting out the citizens responsibilities in the face of what
can be considered immoral acts by ones own government.
His most famous book Walden is a composite diary of
the years 18451847, during which Thoreau chose, as
an experiment, to build a hut and live a marginal life
beside Walden Pond, approximately 3 km away from his
native Concord. The book deliberately challenges many
of the working assumptions of the culture of his time,
particularly the obsessions with work, property, and getting
on. In chapters such as Economy, Thoreau parodies these
obsessions, and simultaneously promotes a range of other
values: voluntary simplicity, humility, and simply watching
the world pass by. Walden weaves together in beautiful,
clear prose, these social and political themes, together
with details of the natural history of the pond and its
environs. Since its publication in 1854, Walden has become
a touchstone of the environmental movement: evidence
of this can be seen in the very public, and ultimately
successful struggle in the 1990s to protect Walden Pond
from encroaching development.
In recent years, more attention has been paid to Thoreaus
Journal, his daily record of natural history that he kept
intermittently from 1838, and then rigorously from the mid-
1840s on. There are indications that he intended turning this
into a larger natural science book, but died before this could
be carried out. Scholars currently see this later more intense
focus on the details of natural processes as symptomatic
of a continuing dynamic tension between the demands of
literary art and the rigors of science in Thoreaus late work.
The Succession of Forest Trees (1859) is generally regar-
ded as Thoreaus main contribution to natural history, in
which he sets out the rst scheme of ecological succession.
In this period, he also became widely known for his support
for anti-slavery, and his lectures, including The Last Days of
TORREY CANYON 503
John Brown (1860), brought him to the attention of a wider
audience. Thoreau died of tuberculosis in 1862. The elegy
at his funeral by his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson was
also inuential in bringing Thoreau to public attention. By
the turn of the 20th century he was rmly in the pantheon
of great American writers; and his well-wrought phrases,
such as In Wildness is the Preservation of the World have
entered the environmentalist armory.
Photo: G F Parlow.
FURTHER READING
Bode, C (1975) The Portable Thoreau, revised edition, Viking
Penguin, Harmondsworth, Middlesex.
Buell, L (1995) The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature
Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, The Belknap
Press, Harvard, Cambridge, MA.
Harding, W (1982) The Days of Henry Thoreau, Alfred A Knopf,
New York.
PETER TIMMERMAN Canada
Three Mile Island
Three Mile Island (TMI), a commercial nuclear reactor
16 km southeast of Harrisburg, PA, was the site of the most
serious reactor accident in North America.
On March 28, 1979, at approximately 4 a.m., Unit 2
at TMI moved to an automated shutdown. The reactor
technicians on duty inadvertently uncovered the core of the
reactor creating conditions that could lead to a meltdown.
A valve in the reactor, forced open by the sudden and
violent shutdown, had stuck open, allowing cooling water
to pour from the reactor. The auxiliary pumps came on, as
programmed to ensure adequate water to cover the core.
Unaware of the stuck valve, the technician on duty, Craig
Faust, believed the core to be receiving too much water and
shut off the pumps. Operators also opened another drain line
to remove what was interpreted as dangerously high water
levels. Remaining water turned to steam, the uranium rods
overheated and ruptured. Radioactive water was discharged
outside the reactor, and radioactive gases, were vented.
Not until the morning of March 30, 1979 did the gover-
nor suggest that pregnant women and families with small
children might want to leave the area. Over the weekend,
an estimated 140 000 people evacuated.
Estimates by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)
study group were that TMI had come within thirty to sixty
minutes of meltdown. Previous NRC worst case analyses
had estimated that a major nuclear reactor meltdown could
create an area of disaster that might be equal to the
State of Pennsylvania. Coincidentally, as TMI occurred,
a major Hollywood movie about a nuclear plant accident,
The China Syndrome, was playing. A scientist character in
the lm quoted the NRC area the size of Pennsylvania
destruction estimate.
Estimates of deaths due to the accident vary from several
hundred excess cancers to several thousand. There has not
been a single new nuclear reactor built in the United States
or Canada since the TMI accident.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada
Torrey Canyon
Torrey Canyon, an oil tanker which ran aground in the
English Channel in 1967 was the worlds rst major oil
spill. Torrey Canyon became a spark for the growing
environmental movement in the late 1960s. It remains one
of the most devastating oil spills in history.
The Torrey Canyon spilled 31 million gallons (117 million
liters) of oil into the English Channel, resulting in the death
of between 40 000 and 100 000 seabirds. Later well-known
oil spills released a fraction of the cargo of the Torrey
Canyon. The Amoco Cadiz spill in March 1978 off the
coast of Brittany coated an estimated 100 km of coastline,
but spilled far less oil, 1.5 million barrels of crude oil. In
July 1983, the Alrenus wrecked on the coast of Louisiana
spilling 2.27 million gallons (eight million liters) of oil. The
Exxon Valdez spill (see Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, Vol-
ume 5) lost about one-fth of its cargo, 11.2 million gallons
(42 million liters) with devastating environmental effects.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada
UVWY
Underdevelopment
see Development and Global Environmental
Change (Opening essay, Volume 5)
UNEP Chemicals
see IRPTC (International Register of Potentially
Toxic Chemicals) (Volume 4)
United Nations University (UNU)
see UNU (United Nations University)
(Volume 5)
UNU (United Nations
University)
The UNU is the principal academic research institution of
the United Nations (UN). It is an organ of the UN similar to
the UN Development Programme or the UN International
Childrens Emergency Fund, and reports to the General
Assembly and the UN Economic and Social Council. Its
role is to focus intellectual resources from many nations on
world problems of interest to the UN system. It organized
the rst conference on the Human Dynamics of Global
Environmental Change in 1988, pioneered intergenerational
environmental law, led the Mountain Agenda at the UN
Conference on Environment and Development, and other
environmental efforts.
This post-graduate research and training institution does
not have professors or students. Instead, the UNU is a
worldwide network of networks of scholars whose pur-
pose is to develop options for the solution of problems
that require truly international collaboration. It is the UNs
think tank and has published hundreds of books, facilitated
thousands of research fellows, and conducted hundreds of
conferences and workshops to further knowledge of human
security and development. See http://unu.edu.
UNU has scholars instead of countries on its govern-
ing council and funds about half of its research though
an endowment. These approaches helps ensure academic
autonomy.
Although headquartered in Tokyo since it opened in
1975, UNU has research and training centers and pro-
grams around the world with their own governing coun-
cils and funds in areas such as: development economics
in Finland, new technologies in the Netherlands, soft-
ware technology in Macau, advanced studies in Japan,
natural resources in Ghana, biotechnology in Venezuela,
leadership in Jordan, regional governance in Belgium, envi-
ronmental health in Canada, food and nutrition in the
US, sheries in Iceland, and conict resolution in the
UK.
UNU headquarters has two primary programs: (1) peace
and governance; and (2) environment and sustainable devel-
opment. The second of these focuses on humanenviron-
ment dynamics including environmental governance, pol-
icy, and advanced training especially in developing coun-
tries. Its research contributes to the work of the UN
system and seeks partnerships with others involved in sus-
tainable development research and training. It publishes
the journal Global Environmental Governance and has
established the Global Environment Information Center
to reach out to the larger community on environmental
issues.
For a description of one of the UNU programs, see Sce-
nar ios, Volume 5.
JEROME C GLENN USA
VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS 505
Utilitarianism
see Economics and Global Environmental
Change (Opening essay, Volume 5); Social
Science and Global Environmental Change
(Opening essay, Volume 5)
Utopianism
see Political Systems and the Environment:
Utopianism (Volume 5)
Value of an Ecosystem
see Ecosystem Services and Costing
(Volume 2)
Virtual Environments
Gale Moore
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
The term virtual environment is used very broadly to
describe a variety of computer-generated spaces. Virtual
environments have been made possible by developments
in information and communication technologies (ICTs)
and their convergence with a broad range of electronic
media, Internet and virtual reality (VR) technologies, both
synchronous (same time) and asynchronous (different time).
These technologies constitute what Kitchin (1998) has
called cyberspatial technologies, referring to the term
Cyberspace, rst used by William Gibson in his science
ction novel, Neuromancer (1984) to describe electronic
space. We experience these environments as real, when they
are in fact, representations of reality that do not exist in
the material world, except in the technical components that
comprise them. This broad de nition draws attention to
the variety and diversity of digital media that characterize
these environments, and provides a continuum along which
readers outside this eld of research can move if they wish
to explore further.
We live in an era characterized by the intensica-
tion of the symbolic: information and knowledge are
the resources of the 21st century and the source of
economic growth and wealth creation. Environmental-
ists understand the power of symbols, and the meanings
that come with new forms of representation. Consider
the profound shift in human thinking brought about by
globalization, a shift symbolized by the image of the
earth as seen from space. How has this structured the
way we think about the natural world? Environmental-
ists have also engaged in the exploration of a complex
boundary the interface between nature and culture. What
insights and perspectives might they bring to the explo-
ration of the boundary between the physical and virtual
worlds brought on by our engagement in virtual environ-
ments?
Virtual environments have been made possible by devel-
opments over the past 40 years in ICTs, interactive com-
puter graphics, and VR. These environments vary in their
representational richness, i.e., in the nature of the media,
and the specic forms of symbolic representation that com-
prise them, e.g., text, graphics, audio, video, etc. But it is
the ways in which this class of technologies is capable of
extending our senses and our intelligence that has the poten-
tial to change not only the way we work, live and learn,
but also the way in which we think. As Postman (1992),
reminds us:
New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things
we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the
things we think with. And they alter the nature of community:
the arena in which thoughts develop.
The experiences of users in these emerging representational
worlds, and the signicance of these environments in both
shaping and being shaped by these experiences, is a topic of
considerable research and debate and one that demands
an interdisciplinary response.
Todays virtual environments are the current end product
of a long movement across the spectrum of technologies
that have changed our relation to time and space the
train, for example, in the 19th century, and in the 20th
century the telephone. However, as we move toward the
virtual reality (VR) end of the continuum, they are also
more than this.
The familiar experience of the telephone may be used
to illustrate the concept of virtuality. Today, the tele-
phone is so embedded in the activities of everyday life
that we forget that the voice we hear at the other end
of the line a voice instantly recognizable if that of a
friend or family member is not actually a voice, but a
representation of that voice. With todays digital packet
switching networks, the voice is not only digitized, or
broken down into a string of ones and zeros, but the
packets created travel by various routes to their nal
destinations. The receiver perceives a continuous conver-
sation and a familiar voice. In reality, this is simply a
representation of the voice, and if the technology breaks
506 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
down, the voice will neither be recognized nor under-
stood. We do not stop to think of the telephone as a
type of virtual environment, but the communication space
or environment supported by the technology of telephony
is, in essence, virtual. The immersion in a virtual three-
dimensional (3D) world is only an extension along this
continuum.
At the VR end of the human machine continuum, we are
dealing with technologies that are more postmodern than
modernist in their application, i.e., a world of symbols and
representation in which multiple realities can be simulated.
As our senses are extended, the boundaries between the real
and virtual world are blurred. Increasingly, it will be dif -
cult to discern what is real when increasingly large parts of
our reality are, in fact, virtual or more accurately, a virtual-
ity. Rheingold (1992) suggests these environments are not
real in the sense that we understand the physical world, nor
are they virtual, the opposite of real. The system s virtual-
ity is a structure of seeming the conceptual feel of what
is created. The physical body recedes; the mind and senses
are at the forefront. Identity becomes labile, symbols are
real and we immerse and navigate in an electronic world.
It is this vision of a disembodied future, a blurring of the
boundary between the human with the machine. There is
an increasingly symbiotic relationship between the physical
and virtual worlds. Virtual environments are like this; this
is part of their power and our fascination with them.
TYPES OF VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS
The rst type of virtual environment information envi-
ronments will be the most familiar. These are primarily
text-based, and a number have emerged around the power
of computer technology to store large quantities of data.
Information environments have helped solve two of the
great problems of the human mind: limitations on the
amount of information that can be stored, and the problem
of retrieval. These environments augment human intelli-
gence by freeing the human mind to carry out activities
for which it is uniquely suited pattern recognition, eval-
uation and contextualization. We navigate through vast
data spaces and digital libraries of information, manipu-
late textual and numeric symbols, and give them repre-
sentational form that conveys the underlying pattern and
relationships uncovered by the human mind. Information
management, or more fashionably, knowledge manage-
ment, are current expressions of the potential of infor-
mation environments. Initially, these environments could
support only one user at a time, but their power multi-
plied when machines could be networked. A fascinating
example is the exponential growth of the World Wide
Web, a global collection of hypertext documents that allows
users with a browsing program such as Internet Explorer
or Netscape Navigator, to access what, in a few years,
has begun to approximate an electronic global Alexandrian
Library.
Closely related are the communication environments;
spaces in which people interact, not only with data
and its representation, but also with other people what
researchers call human human computer-mediated commu-
nication. Media such as email, listservs, bulletin boards, and
chat, make it possible for people across the globe, who are
connected to the Internet, to interact in new ways that chal-
lenge our understanding of time and space. Many of these
are text-based environments, and individual media may be
either synchronous, i.e., they require that users be present at
the same time, or asynchronous, as is the case with email,
where messages can be sent and received at different times.
Chat services, such as Instant Messenger

recently
entered the public domain. In a typical chat environment,
the user has a series of icons representing people who are
willing to chat. These people may be local or distributed
around the world. At a glance they can observe who in
the group are currently online (the icon changes color) and,
hence, are accessible. Even if a chat is not initiated, this
awareness of friends and colleagues affords an opportunity
for interaction that is, at a minimum, comparable to aware-
ness of the presence or absence of others in a physical of ce
environment.
While the potential for interaction may appear limited in
these environments, the increased availability of computers
and access to the Internet since the mid 1990s has, in fact,
resulted in an explosion of online communities groups
of people sharing a common interest who meet regularly
using a variety of mediated communication tools and envi-
ronments. These communities and their members have been
an important subject in recent years, drawing attention to
the potential of even these limited environments to support
rich and complex forms of social interaction.
Collaborative environments or collaborative virtual envi-
ronments (CVEs) are applications that allow multiple users
to meet and to communicate, and depending on the repre-
sentation richness of the environment, to collaborate and to
share a variety of documents and artifacts.
The rst examples of this type of environment are MUDs
(multiple user domains). There are a number of other
environments such as MOOs (multiple object-oriented), or
MUSEs (multiple user social environments), which, while
differing in technical functionality, provide a similar oppor-
tunity for social interaction. Initially, MUDs were text-
based, and used a variety of textual conventions such as
emoticons (e.g., ;-) is a smile) to enrich their real-time
conversations, and to compensate, in part, for the lack of
gesture, eye contact, voice tone and in ection normally
available in face-to-face communication. A rich visual
vocabulary of emoticons now exists. MUDs have tradition-
ally been developed within the context of speci c groups
of users, and the ways in which these spaces are socially
VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS 507
constructed is of particular interest. Research has found that
these virtual spaces often became places, i.e., settings with
their own culture and behavioral norms. While these spaces
do not realistically represent a specic place in the mate-
rial world, they do represent a type of place, for example,
a classroom or a cafe. Behavioral norms and community
standards emerge out of the interactions of the members of
the group involved in the CVEs, and deviant behaviors are
punished.
The power of these environments is further increased
when a variety of media and forms of representation
are supported. Today, there are a number of commercial
CVEs available, which can be accessed using a standard
Web browser. Examples include: Placeware www.place-
ware.com , Teamwave www.teamwave.com or eRoom
www.eroom.com . The majority support standard com-
munication activities, both synchronous and asynchronous,
such as email, document sharing, and chat. The more
sophisticated environments also provide tools to support
interaction and negotiation voting and document version-
ing, for example. A number offer both public and private
spaces and storage areas for les and work in progress.
Access to, and use of these environments no longer require
the acquisition of a new set of skills. However, while the
potential of these environments for community building, as
well as supporting collaboration in the workplace, is real,
the sociology of these spaces is still not well understood,
and they are often underutilized. More recently, CVEs have
appeared that incorporate a visual component, more specif-
ically, a 23D visual representation of the space in which
participants can interact with each other and with objects.
Before moving to these VR environments, mention
should be made of another type of virtual environment:
media space. Media spaces are audiovideo computer-
mediated communication environments. Unlike the CVEs
discussed above, media spaces connect two or more sites
in real time and like the telephone, or a videoconference,
allow users to see the physical reality at the remote end
and to hear what is taking place. In the Ontario Telepres-
ence Project (Moore, 1997), a variety of types of spaces,
for example, ofces, meeting rooms, etc., were connected
across two geographically separate locations. In the media
space, it was possible to meet colleagues in their ofces
even though they were not in the same city. It was also pos-
sible to check the parking lot at the remote location to see if
a colleagues car or bicycle was there, or to wander the cor-
ridors at the remote location, glancing around looking for
someone. Multiple monitors were used at each end to keep
the person space and the task space separate. While infor-
mation on computer screens was being shared, individuals
could both see and talk with each other as they might if co-
located. Pauses and silences could be interpreted, as could
interruptions at either end. Media spaces were designed in
the context of real world practices and one of the challenges
of this research was to support presence i.e., to represent
over distance the richness and experience of face-to-face
interaction such as gesture, tone, and gaze awareness.
From the 1960s on, advances were being made in dis-
tinct areas such as interactive computer graphics and VR,
but these advances would not converge until the 1990s.
Rheingold (1992, p 46) traces VRs roots back to the 1930s
and early experiments with immersion, such as Cinerama,
but he argues that VR progressed slowly in the 1970s as
it waited for enabling technologies to mature. While media
space researchers had been concerned about one type of
presence, researchers in robotics had a different view of
telepresence, namely, how to support human intelligence
when it is necessary to carry out activities remotely; e.g.,
to defuse a bomb or carry out a surgical procedure. Some
of these experiments relied on head-mounted displays, or
data gloves, and other research came from the entertain-
ment and games environment. By the 1990s, however, these
areas were converging to create a powerful new reality a
reality in which a number of human senses were extended
or augmented. It is at this end of the continuum that the
boundary between the material world and virtual world is
softening, shifting, and blurring. In the future, the virtual
environments will be as familiar or perhaps more familiar
than the physical environments we experience today.
The most accessible of the newer CVEs are the virtual
reality environments, which use modeling languages such
as virtual reality modeling language (VRML), and allow
for participation using a web browser and the Internet.
Virtual worlds are a popular form of these environments.
These surreal multi-user 23D worlds generally do not
represent actual places in the world, but are imaginary
landscapes that provide spaces or opportunity for human
interaction. These are real-time or synchronous environ-
ments in which people are represented by graphical icons
known as avatars. There is a strange out-of-body sensation
as you navigate through these worlds, sometimes ying,
meeting and interacting with others. You may nd yourself
in conversation with familiar characters such as Alice in
Wonderland or Wanda the Fish; two popular avatars that
people select to represent themselves. These worlds are, in
general, themed, and provide fascinating insights into the
nature of identity in a postmodern culture. The coherence
of a single physically embodied identity slips away if one
desires, and multiple persona are not unusual. The technol-
ogy makes it possible, but the motivation of the participants
and the nature of the communities that evolve continue to
raise questions about the nature of human experience. A
number of these environments can be visited. The Con-
tact Consortium web site maintains a useful set of links
www.ccon.org .
Other CVEs are grounded in real-world practices, but
most continue to be based on spatial metaphors. While the
environments may not be realistic in terms of a specic
508 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
location in the physical world, many, like MUDs, are
realistic in terms of the type of place they represent. For
example, you recognize that you are in an ofce or a
store and individuals behave in ways that are coherent with
the repertoire of socially appropriate behaviors understood
in the physical world. Extensive social and behavioral
research is increasingly part of the development of these
environments, underlining the desire to understand how
these shared visualizations and environments can be used
to support new forms of collaboration among people.
John Robinson and his colleagues at the Sustainability
Research Institute at the University of British Columbia
www.sdri.ubc.ca have created a space of particular
interest to environmentalists. They have created 2D models
(accessible from a Web browser) to increase the under-
standing of sustainability issues. Through the development
of thought-provoking technology-aided experiences, which
solicit user input and provide a visual representation of out-
comes based on this input, users deepen their understanding
of highly complex issues.
The most technically complex of the virtual environments
are in the realm of VR. As Mitchell (1995) articulates: vir-
tual reality technologies partially or totally immerse users in
an interactive visual, articial, computer-generated environ-
ment; instead of the users being spectators of a static screen,
they are participants in an environment that responds . The
key differentiator of these environments is that the users
are immersed and interact with the environment in realistic
ways. No longer the stuff of science ction, these environ-
ments are at the interface between the real and the virtual
world. Surgeons, for example, can now rehearse a difcult
operation using a 3D representation of an actual patient.
Airplane manufacturers can design and engineer an entire
aircraft in a 3D environment. There is no physical scale
model; the rst plane that is built, ies. The design team
may be distributed across the globe and work together in
real time. The range of activities that VR supports, and the
nature of the collaborations that are possible, suggest it will
be applicable to many of the activities and interactions of
daily life. How will our societies change as material reality
and social interactions are augmented and mediated in the
ways VR makes possible?
The cyberspatial technologies that comprise virtual envi-
ronments extend and augment human intelligence and are
changing not only what we think about, but also what we
think with. If we directly apply this theme of virtual envi-
ronments to the prospects for global environmental change,
one pervasive notion is that as the natural or social envi-
ronment deteriorates, people will increasingly move into
virtual environments. The dystopians give us images of a
retreat from public space into new worlds supported by
technology. The utopians see the potential for human good.
However, like the technologies that have gone before and
those that are ahead, virtual environments are neither good
nor bad, nor are they neutral. They emerge out of a specic
socio-historical context and out of a specic set of social
relations. They are shaping and being shaped by those who
design, build and use them. Cyberspace may be a consen-
sual hallucination, but when the electricity goes out the
illusion cannot be sustained. We are forever embodied its
the human condition, and in the end it is nature that holds
sway.
REFERENCES
Gibson, W (1984) Neuromancer, Gollanz, London.
Kitchin, R (1998) Cyberspace: The World in the Wires, Wiley,
Chichester.
Mitchell, W J (1995) City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn,
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Moore, G (1997) Sharing faces, places and spaces: The Ontario
Telepresence Project Field Studies, in Video-Mediated Com-
munication, eds K Finn, A J Sellen, and S Wilbur, Lawrence
Erlbaum Association, Mahwah, NJ, 301321.
Postman, N (1992) Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Tech-
nology, Vintage Books, New York.
Rheingold, H (1992) Virtual Reality, Simon and Schuster,
New York.
Vulnerability
see Precautionary Principle (Volume 4)
Waldsterben
Waldsterben is a term widely used in Europe to denote
forest decline in the late 1970s and early 1980s when it
became a public issue. In mountainous regions particularly
in the vicinity of the Poland, Germany and Slovakia tri-
angle, thousands of hectares of forest died in a few years.
The causes of waldsterben are complex, and may include
direct damage to needles and leaves from industrial sulfur
emissions, long-range acidic deposition, drought and mobi-
lization of heavy metals in acidifying soils. Waldsterben
is very photogenic and therefore it caught the attention of
Green Parties, and other environmental non-governmental
organizations. It is interesting to note, however, that the
overall trend in forest growth in Europe over recent decades
has been increased productivity.
See also: Nitrogen Deposition on Forests, Volume 2.
R E MUNN Canada
WCC (WORLD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES) 509
WCC (World Council of
Churches)
The WCC is a fellowship of about 350 denominations
worldwide with a combined membership of approximately
400 million persons. The participating churches in the
WCC cooperate on programs of world development and
relief, theological reection and education, and advocacy
on issues of justice, peace and creation.
Environmental concerns have been a dimension of the
WCCs activity for over 30 years. Since 1988, climate
change has been the main focus for the environmental work.
The WCC Climate Change Programme includes preparation
of resources on theological and ethical dimensions of the
problem, support for environmental activities of churches in
the South, and coordination of advocacy at the international
level and among industrialized countries whose societies are
responsible for the majority of emissions leading to climate
change.
For further information, contact The World Council
of Churches (Justice, Peace and Creation Cluster),
150 route de Ferney, PO Box 2100, 1211 Geneva
2, Switzerland. Tel.: 41-22-791-6111; Fax: 41-22-791-
0361, Email: mpt@wcc-coe.org, Web site: www.wcc-
coe.org.
DAVID HALLMAN Canada
Weak Anthropocentrism
see Environmental Ethics (Volume 5)
Weak Sustainability
see Economics and Global Environmental
Change (Opening essay, Volume 5)
Weed
see Weed (Volume 2)
World Council of Churches (WCC)
see WCC (World Council of Churches)
(Volume 5)
YinYang Principles
see Land Transformation in China: 3000 Years
of Human Ecological History (Volume 3)
Alphabetical List of Articles
Acid Sulfate Soils 3:151
Acoustic Thermometry 1:161
ACSYS (Arctic Climate System Study) 1:161
Adaptation Str ategies 4:80
Adaptive Environmental Management 4:139
Aerosols, Effects on the Climate 1:162
Aerosols, Polar Stratospheric Cloud 1:167
Aerosols, Stratosphere 1:169
Aerosols, Troposphere 1:172
Afforestation: Environmental Impacts 3:156
Agarwal, Anil 4:140
Agassiz, Louis 1:175
Agenda 21 4:140
Agricultural Intensication in Java 3:159
Agricultural Intensication in Western Europe 3:162
Agricultural Subsidies and Environmental Change 3:168
Agroforestry 3:172
Aircraft Emissions 3:178
Air Pressure 1:176
Air Quality, Global 1:177
Albedo 1:182
Allometric 2:135
AMIP (Atmospheric Model Intercomparison
Project) 1:183
Andersen, Stephen O 4:143
Angiosperm/Gymnosperm 2:135
Animal Physiology and Global Environmental
Change 2:136
Animal Production, Feedlots, and Manure Problems in the
US (Agriculture, Intensive) 3:186
Antarctica 1:184
Anthropocene 1:189
Anthropogenic 3:190
Anthropogenic Impacts on Atmospheric Oxygen 2:140
Anthropogenic Metabolism and Environmental
Legacies 3:54
Anthropology and Global Environmental Change 5:163
Anticyclone 1:191
APN (AsiaPacic Network) 4:143
Aquaculture and Environment: Global View from the
Tropics to High Latitudes 3:190
Aquaculture in Asia 3:196
Aquaculture: Salmon Farming 3:200
Aral Sea 4:534
Arctic Air Quality 1:191
Arctic Climate 1:193
Arctic Ocean 1:199
Arctic Oscillation 1:201
ARM (Atmospheric Radiation Measurement)
Program 1:203
Arrhenius, Svante 1:204
Art and the Environment 5:167
Asteroids and Comets, Effects on Earth 1:204
Atlantic Ocean 1:211
Atmospheric Angular Momentum and Earth
Rotation 1:211
Atmospheric Composition, Past 1:213
Atmospheric Composition, Present 1:216
Atmospheric Electricity 1:218
Atmospheric Motions 1:221
Atmospheric Structure 1:243
Attenborough, David 5:175
Autotroph/Heterotroph 2:143
Bahai Faith and the Environment 5:176
Baltic Sea 4:517
Basel Convention 4:146
BAT (Best Available Technology) 5:183
Bateson, Gregory 5:183
Benedick, Richard Elliot 4:148
Benthic/Pelagic 2:145
Biocenosis 2:145
Biocomplexity 2:145
Biodiversity in Freshwaters 2:146
Biodiversity in Soils and Sediments: Potential Effects of
Global Change 2:152
Biodiversity: The UNEP Denition 2:159
Biogeochemical Cycle 2:159
Bioindicators 2:160
Biological and Ecological Dimensions of Global
Environmental Change 2:1
Biological Invasions 2:11
Biomass Burning 3:205
Biomass Burning in Rural Homes in Tropical
Areas 3:214
Biomass Fuel Power Development 3:216
Biomass Use for Urban Fuels in Developing
Countries 3:217
Biome 2:166
Biome Models 2:166
BiomeBGC Ecosystem Model 2:171
Bioremediation 3:218
Biosphere 2:174
Biosphere Enhancement Ratio (BER) 2:175
Biosphere Reserves 2:175
Bjerknes, Jacob 1:245
512 ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ARTICLES
Black Sea 4:521
Blue Plan 4:148
Bolin, Bert 1:245
Boreal EcosystemAtmosphere Study (BOREAS) 2:177
Boreal Forest 2:179
Boreal Forest Carbon Flux and its Role in the
Implementation of the Kyoto Protocol Under a
Warming Climate 4:149
Bourdeau, Philippe F J 4:152
Brent Spar 5:184
Brinkhorst, Laurens Jan 4:153
Broecker, Wallace S 1:246
Brower, David 5:185
Bruce, James 4:153
Brundtland, Gro Harlem 4:154
Buddhism and Ecology 5:185
Budyko, Mikhail Ivanovich 1:248
Buffering Capacity 2:184
Business-as-usual Scenarios 5:191
C
3
and C
4
Photosynthesis 2:186
Capacity Building 4:156
Capacity, Assimilative 3:220
Carbon and Energy: Terrestrial Stores and Fluxes 2:190
Carbon Cycle 2:198
Carbon Dioxide Concentration and Climate Over
Geological Times 1:249
Carbon Dioxide, Recent Atmospheric Trends 1:254
Carbon Monoxide 1:261
CarnegieAmesStanford Approach (CASA) 2:202
Carrying Capacity 4:156
Carson, Rachel Louise 5:192
Caspian Sea 4:524
Cattle Grazing: Impacts on Land Cover and Methane
Emissions 3:221
CBA (Cost Benet Analysis) 5:193
CENTURY Ecosystem Model 2:206
CEOS (Committee on Earth Observation
Satellites) 1:261
Cereal Cultivation (Agriculture, Extensive) 3:228
Chandler Wobble 1:262
Changes in World Marine Fish Stocks 3:238
Chaos and Cycles 2:209
Chaos and Predictability 1:263
Charney, Jule Gregory 1:266
Chernobyl 3:241
Chipko Movement 5:193
Chlorouorocarbons (CFCs) 1:267
Christianity and the Environment 5:194
Circulating Freshwater: Crucial Link between Climate,
Land, Ecosystems, and Humanity 5:201
CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered
Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) 4:157
Clean Development Mechanism 4:158
Cleaner Production 4:158
CLIC (Climate and Cryosphere) 1:269
CLIMAP (Climate: Long-range Investigation, Mapping,
and Prediction) 1:269
Climate 1:270
Climate Agenda 1:270
Climate Analogues 1:271
Climate Change 1:271
Climate Change Assessment, United States 4:544
Climate Change, Abrupt 1:272
Climate Change, Detection and Attribution 1:278
Climate Change: an Emerging Issue in the Global
Agenda 4:163
Climate Feedbacks 1:283
Climate Model Simulations of the Geological Past 1:296
Climate Sensitivity 1:301
Climatic Extremes 3:243
Climatology 1:308
Climax Vegetation 2:215
CLIVAR (CLImate VARiability and Predictability) 1:311
CloudRadiation Interactions 1:312
Clouds 1:316
Club of Rome 4:166
CO
2
Enrichment: Effects on Ecosystems 2:215
Coastal Zone Management 4:166
Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) 3:247
Common but Differentiated Responsibility Principle
(Stockholm/Rio) 4:168
Commons, Tragedy of the 5:208
Community Richness 2:224
Conference of Parties 4:168
Conservation Biology 2:228
Consumption Patterns: Economic and Demographic
Change 3:249
Contaminated Lands and Sediments: Chemical Time
Bombs? 3:98
Continental Drift 1:321
Controlled Environment Facilities in Global Change
Research 2:228
Convection 1:325
Convention on Biological Diversity 4:169
Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution
(LRTAP) 4:173
Coral Bleaching (19971998) 2:231
Coral Reefs: an Ecosystem Subject to Multiple
Environmental Threats 2:232
Coriolis Effect 1:326
Cousteau, Jacques 5:209
Cretaceous 1:329
Critical Load 3:252
Crop Models 2:241
Crutzen, Paul J 1:330
Cryosphere 1:330
CSD (Commission on Sustainable Development) 4:178
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ARTICLES 513
Cumulative Environmental Assessment 4:178
Curi, Kriton 3:253
Daisyworld 2:247
Dansgaard Oescheger Cycles 1:332
Darwin, Charles Robert 2:247
Data Banks: Archiving Ecological Data and
Information 2:248
De Wit, C T 2:259
Deep Ecology 5:211
Deforestation and Habitat Fragmentation in the Amazon
Basin 3:255
Deforestation in Historic Times 3:259
Deforestation, Tropical: Global Impacts 3:265
Demand Management 4:181
Dematerialization and Sustainable Development 4:96
Dematerialization of the Economy 4:183
Demographic Change: Indonesian Transmigration 3:272
Demographic Change: Peopling of the Paci c
Islands 3:273
Demographic Change: the Aging Population 3:277
Demographic transition 5:211
Depletion of Stratospheric Ozone 1:140
Deposition, Dry 2:260
Deposition, Wet 2:261
Deserti cation 3:282
Deserti cation Convention 4:183
Deserti cation, De nition of 3:282
Deserts 1:332
Development and Global Environmental
Change 5:150
Dimethylsul de (DMS) 1:343
Discounting 5:214
Distance Learning and Environment 4:186
Disturbance 2:261
DIVERSITAS 2:268
Dobr s European Environment Assessment Process 4:547
Dooge, James 4:191
Dowdeswell, Elizabeth 4:192
Downscaling 1:346
DPSIR (Driving Forces Pressures State
Impacts Responses) 4:193
Dust 1:347
DVI (Dust Veil Index) 3:290
EA (Environmental Assessment) 4:194
Earth Charter 5:216
Earth Day 5:216
Earth First! 5:217
Earth Observing Systems 1:61
Earth System History 1:31
Earth System Processes 1:13
Earthquake Intensity and Magnitude Scales 3:293
Earthquakes Triggered by Human Activities 3:294
ECA (Economic Commission for Africa) 4:194
ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and
the Caribbean) 4:195
Eco Taxes 4:195
Ecocentric, Biocentric, Gaiacentric 5:217
Eco-ef ciency 4:106
Eco-engineering to Promote Ecological Sustainability
in China in an Era of Global Environmental
Change 4:548
Ecofeminism 5:218
Ecological Capacity 3:296
Ecological Dumping 4:198
Ecological Economics 5:37
Ecological Footprint 3:302
Economics and Global Environmental Change 5:25
Eco-socialism 5:224
Ecosystem Approach 2:225
Ecosystem Health 4:199
Ecosystem Integrity 4:199
Ecosystem Services 2:226
Ecosystem Services and Costing 2:272
Ecosystem Stability 2:281
Ecosystem Structure and Function 2:282
Ecotones 2:283
Ecotoxicology 3:302
EEA (European Environment Agency) 4:200
Eemian 1:352
Ehrlich, Paul 2:288
EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) 4:201
El Ni no 1:353
El Ni no and La Ni na: Causes and Global
Consequences 1:353
El Ni no/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) 1:370
El Viejo 1:370
Elton, C S 2:289
Emerging Environmental Issues 4:72
Emergy 3:303
Emergy 5:228
Emissions Trading 4:201
Encyclopedias: Compendia of Global Knowledge 5:228
Endangered Species 4:201
Energy Balance and Climate 1:371
Energy Balance Climate Models 1:376
Enlightenment Project 5:229
Environment 2:290
Environmental (Eco) Labeling 4:210
Environmental Assessment of Major Development
Projects 4:203
Environmental Cadmium in the Food Chain 3:303
Environmental Change and Human Health: Extending
the Sustainability Agenda 3:130
Environmental Changes Driven by Civil Con ict and
War 3:146
514 ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ARTICLES
Environmental Data Report 4:204
Environmental Defense Fund 5:230
Environmental Economics 5:230
Environmental Education 4:206
Environmental Ethics 5:231
Environmental Movement the Rise of Non-government
Organizations (NGOs) 5:243
Environmental Philosophy: Phenomenological
Ecology 5:253
Environmental Policies for the World Oceans 4:212
Environmental Politics 5:49
Environmental Psychology/Perception 5:257
Environmental Refugees 4:214
Environmental Responses: an Over view 4:1
Environmental Security 5:269
Environmental Sociology 5:278
EOS (Earth Observing System) 1:382
Equilibrium Response 1:382
Equity 5:279
ESCAP (Economic and Social Commission for Asia and
the Pacic) 4:218
EU (European Union) 4:218
European Network for Research in Global Change
(ENRICH) 2:290
Eutrophication 2:292
Evolutionary Processes in Ecosystems 2:292
Extinctions (Contemporary and Future) 2:301
Extinctions and Biodiversity in the Fossil Record 2:297
Exxon Valdez Oil Spill 5:283
FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) 4:219
Feedbacks, Chemistry Climate Interactions 1:384
Fingerprinting 1:388
Fisheries: Effects of Climate Change on the Life Cycles
of Salmon 3:309
Fisheries: Minamata Disease 3:312
Fisheries: Pacic Coast Salmon 3:314
Fisheries: Pollution and Habitat Degradation in Tropical
Asian Rivers 3:316
Fixed Nitrogen 2:308
Food Consumption Patterns and their Inuence on
Greenhouse Gas Emissions 3:323
Food Webs 2:308
Forest Gap Models 2:316
Forest Logging Systems in Tropical Countries:
Differential Impacts 3:328
Forest Stand 2:323
Forest: the FAO Denition 2:324
Fragmentation and Corridors 2:324
Francis of Assisi 5:284
Franklin, Benjamin 1:390
Freshwater Fisheries 2:327
Friends of the Earth 5:285
Fronts 1:391
Fugacity 3:335
Functional Biodiver sity 2:20
Futures Research 5:285
Gaia 2:332
Gaia Hypothesis 5:287
GAIM (Global Analysis, Interpretation and Modeling)
Program 1:392
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand 5:290
GARP (Global Atmospheric Research Program) 1:392
GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) 4:221
GAW (Global Atmosphere Watch) 1:393
GCDIS (Global Change Data and Information
System) 1:393
GCOS (Global Climate Observing System) 1:394
General Circulation Models (GCMs) 1:394
Generic Decomposition and Yield (GDAY): A Model of
Global Change Impacts on Plant and Soil 2:332
GEO (Global Environment Outlook) 4:221
Geoengineering: a Way to Stabilize Global
Climate? 3:336
Geographic(al) Information Systems (GIS) 4:222
Geography 3:337
Geological Cycling 1:397
Geomorphological Change for Urbanization and
Industry 3:338
Geomorphological Change: Landscape Modication for
Recreation 3:345
Geomorphology 1:402
Geothermal Heat 1:402
GESAMP (Joint Group of Experts on the Scientic
Aspects of Marine Environmental Protection) 4:226
GEWEX (Global Energy and Water Cycle
Experiment) 1:402
Glaciers 1:404
Global Environmental Change and Environmental
Histor y 5:62
Global Environmental Change and Natural
Disasters 4:227
Global Forest Watch 4:231
Global land cover and land use trends and
changes 3:13
Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) 2:336
Global Plate Tectonics 1:410
Global Population Trends 3:16
Global Terrestrial Observing System (GTOS) 2:337
Global Warming Potential (GWP) 1:411
Globalization in Histor ical Per spective 5:73
GOALS (Global OceanAtmosphereLand
System) 1:411
Goldemberg, Jose 4:233
Goodman, Gordon 4:234
Governance and International Management 5:292
Great Lakes Region of North America 4:536
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ARTICLES 515
Green Investment 4:235
Green Revolution 3:347
Greenhouse Effect 1:413
Greenhouse Food Production (Agriculture
Intensive) 3:352
Greening of Cities 3:356
Greenland 1:413
Greenland Ice Sheet 1:419
GRID (Global Resource Information Database, of the
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
Division of Early Warning and Assessment) 4:237
Ground Temperature 1:422
Groundwater Withdrawal and the Development of the
Great Man-made River Project, Libya 3:362
Habitat 2:339
Hadley Circulation 1:427
Halocarbons 1:427
Halophyte/Halophobe 2:339
Hare, Kenneth 1:428
Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) 3:371
Hazards in Global Environmental Change 5:297
Heinrich (H-) Events 1:429
Hinduism and the Environment 5:303
Holdgate, Martin 4:239
Holdridge Life Zone Classication 2:339
Holling, C S 2:340
Holocene 1:431
Holocene: Climate Changes and Society 3:372
Homocentric 5:311
Houghton, John Theodore 1:432
Human Body, Immediate Environment 5:312
Human Distur bance of the Ear th System: Dynamics
and Complexities 3:1
Humidity 1:432
Hurricanes, Typhoons and other Tropical
Storms Descriptive Overview 1:433
Hurricanes, Typhoons and other Tropical
Storms Dynamics and Intensity 1:439
Hutchinson, G Evelyn 2:341
Hydrouorocarbons 1:447
Hydrogen Peroxide Trends in Greenland Glaciers 1:447
Hydrologic Cycle 1:450
Hydrology 1:464
Hydrology 2:343
IAHS (International Association of Hydrological
Sciences) 1:466
IAI (Inter-American Institute for Global Change
Research) 4:241
IAMAS (International Association of Meteorology and
Atmospheric Sciences) 1:466
IAPSO (International Association for the Physical
Sciences of the Oceans) 1:467
Icebergs 1:467
ICREA (International Commodity-related Environmental
Agreements) 4:242
ICSU (International Council for Science) 4:242
IDNDR (The International Decade for Natural Disaster
Reduction) 4:242
IDWSSD (International Drinking Water Supply and
Sanitation Decade) 4:244
IFIAS (International Federation of Institutes for Advanced
Study) 4:244
IGAC (International Global Atmospheric
Chemistry) 1:467
IGBP (International GeosphereBiosphere
Programme) 2:350
IGBP Core Projects 2:37
IGBP Terrestrial Transects 2:351
IGBP-DIS (International GeosphereBiosphere Program
Data and Information System) 2:351
IGY (International Geophysical Year) 1:468
IHDP (International Human Dimensions Programme on
Global Change) 4:245
IHP (International Hydrological Program) 1:468
IIASA (International Institute for Applied Systems
Analysis) 4:246
Imbrie, John 1:469
IMO (International Maritime Organization) 4:246
Impacts of Global Environmental Change on
Animals 2:56
Indicators on Environmental Quality and Sustainable
Development 4:247
Indigenous Knowledge, Peoples and Sustainable
Practice 5:314
Indus Basin: a Case Study in Water Management 3:377
Industr ial and Anthroposystem Metabolism 3:73
Industrial Ecology 4:248
Industr ial Responses to Str atospher ic Ozone Depletion
and Lessons for Global Climate Change 4:65
Infectious Diseases 2:357
Infrared Radiation 1:470
Insect Pests and Global Environmental Change 3:381
Integrated Assessment 4:250
Integrated Assessment Models of Global Change 4:253
Integrated Assessment, Denition of 4:249
Integrated Pest Management (IPM) in an Era of Global
Environmental Change 4:261
Inter American Institute for Global Change
(IAIGC) 2:363
Inter-basin Transfer (IBT) for Water Supplies 3:387
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): an
Historical Review 4:265
Internalization 4:278
516 ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ARTICLES
International Biosphere Program (IBP) a Foundation for
Global Studies 2:364
International Environmental Law 5:324
International Environmental Prizes 4:279
International Environmental Standards 4:281
Inter national Or ganizations in the Ear th
Sciences 1:156
International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) 3:391
Intertidal Zones 2:365
Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) 1:476
IOC (Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission)
4:287
Ionosphere 1:476
IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change) 1:477
IPCS (International Program on Chemical Safety) 4:288
IRI (International Research Institute for Climate
Prediction) 1:477
Iron Cycle 2:369
IRPTC (International Register of Potentially Toxic
Chemicals) 4:289
Irrigation: Environmental Impacts 3:392
Irrigation: Induced Demise of Wetlands 3:399
ISCCP (International Satellite Cloud Climatology
Project) 1:478
ISEW (Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare) and GPI
(Genuine Progress Indicator) 5:331
Islam and the Environment 5:332
ISLSCP (International Satellite Land Surface Climatology
Project) 1:478
ISO (International Organization for Standardization)
4:290
Isostasy 1:479
ISSC (International Social Science Council) 5:339
IUCN (The World Conservation Union) 4:290
IUGG (International Union of Geodesy and
Geophysics) 1:479
Izrael, Yuri A 4:291
Jains and the Environment 5:341
Jet Stream 1:481
JGOFS (Joint Global Ocean Flux Study) 1:483
Joint Implementation 4:292
Judaism and the Environment 5:349
Junge Layer 1:483
Karst 3:411
Kassas, Mohamed 4:292
Keeling, Charles David 1:484
Kelly, Petra 5:355
Keystone Species 2:375
Kondratyev, Kirill Yakovlevich 1:485
Kondratyev, Nikolai Dmitrievich 5:356
Kovda, V A 3:411
La Nina 1:487
Lahars 3:413
Lake Baikal 3:413
Lake Victoria 4:539
Lakes and Rivers 2:375
Lamb, Hubert H 1:487
Land Cover and Climate 1:488
Land Degradation in the Mediterranean 3:417
Land Reclamation from Seas 3:424
Land Subsidence 3:430
Land Surface 1:493
Land Transformation in China: 3000 Years of Human
Ecological History 3:430
Landscape Ecology 2:383
Landscape, Urban Landscape, and the Human Shaping of
the Environment 5:357
Lang, Winfred 4:294
Lapse Rate 1:499
Large Scale BiosphereAtmosphere Experiment in
Amazonia (LBA) 2:383
Last Glacial Maximum 1:500
Latent Heat 1:500
LEAD (Leadership for Environment and
Development) 4:294
Leapfrogging Technology 4:295
Leopold, Aldo 5:367
Life Cycles 2:385
Life Style, Private Choice, and Environmental
Governance 5:368
Lifetime (of a Gas) 1:501
Lightning 1:501
Lightning and Atmospheric Electricity 1:502
Limnology 1:503
Literature and the Environment 5:370
Lithosphere 1:503
Little Ice Age 1:504
LOICZ (LandOcean Interactions in the Coastal
Zone) 2:389
London Dumping Convention 4:297
Long-term Ecological Research (LTER) System 2:390
Lorenz, Edward N 1:509
Love Canal 5:382
Lovelock, James 1:510
Low Concentration Methane Bearing Gases 3:435
LRTAP (Convention on Long Range Trans-boundary Air
Pollution) 4:297
MacNeill, Jim 4:299
MaddenJulian Oscillation 1:511
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ARTICLES 517
Malnutrition, Infectious Diseases and Global
Environmental Change 3:440
Malone, Thomas F 1:511
Malthus, Thomas Robert 5:384
Man and Nature as a Single but Complex System 5:384
Manabe, Syukuro 1:512
Mangrove Ecosystems 2:395
Margalef, Ramon 2:401
Marine Mammal Exploitation: Whales and
Whaling 3:446
Marsh, George Perkins 3:450
Marshes, Anthropogenic Changes 3:451
Materials Flow Accounting 4:300
Materials Flows for Mining and Quarrying 3:454
Maunder Minimum 1:514
Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) 4:307
May, Robert M 2:401
Medieval Climatic Optimum 1:514
Mediterranean Sea 4:528
MEPC (Marine Environment Protection Committee)
4:308
Mercury in the Environment 2:402
Mesosphere 1:516
Mesozoic 1:516
Metadata 2:409
Metapopulations 2:411
Meteorology 1:517
Methane Clathrates 1:518
Methane: Industrial Sources 3:461
Methane 1:517
Methyl Bromide 1:520
Microbial Diversity 2:421
Migrations: The Environmental Challenge of Population
Movements 3:465
Milankovitch, Milutin 1:522
MINK (Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas) Study 4:550
Model Simulations of Present and Histor ical
Climates 1:114
Modeling Human Dimensions of Global
Environmental Change 5:394
Modeling Regional Climate Change 1:523
Models of the Ear th System 1:99
Modernity vs. Post-modern Environmentalism 5:408
Molina, Mario J 1:533
Monitor ing in Suppor t of Policy: an Adaptive
Ecosystem Approach 4:116
Monitoring Systems, Global Geophysical 1:534
Monsi, Masami 2:426
Monsoons 1:539
Montreal Protocol, Multilateral Fund for the
Implementation of 4:309
Mooney, Harold A 2:426
Mountain Climates 1:540
MSU (Microwave Sounding Unit) 1:541
Muir, John 5:411
Multi-issue Assessments 4:316
Munk, Walter 1:541
Munn, Robert Edward (Ted) 1:542
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein 5:412
National and Local Responses to Desertication 4:319
National Environmental Law 5:413
National Responsibilities for Greenhouse Gas
Emissions 3:472
National Self-interest: a Major Factor in International
Environmental Policy Formulation 4:323
Natural Capital 2:428
Natural Climate Variability 1:544
Natural Hazards 3:479
Natural Hazards: Social and Policy Responses 4:328
Natural Records of Climate Change 1:550
Natur al Systems: Impacts of Climate Change 2:67
Nature 5:419
New Ageism 5:420
Niche 2:429
Nile River 4:542
NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) 5:421
Nitrate Leaching 3:493
Nitrate Protection Zones in Europe 3:493
Nitrogen Cycle 2:429
Nitrogen Deposition on Forests 2:435
Nitrogen Fixers 2:442
Nitrogen Mineralization 2:446
Nitrogen: Agricultural Uses and their Impacts 3:499
Nitrous Oxide 1:554
No Regrets Principle 4:334
Non-equilibrium Ecology 2:446
Non-linear Systems 2:450
Noosphere 5:421
North Atlantic Oscillation 1:555
Nuclear Waste: Geological Issues 3:506
Nuclear Winter 3:515
Obasi, G O P 4:335
Ocean Circulation 1:557
Ocean Conveyor Belt 1:579
Ocean Drilling Program 1:581
Ocean Observing Techniques 1:581
Oceanography 1:584
Odum, Eugene P 2:456
OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development) 4:335
Oeschger, Hans A 1:585
OHRadical: is the Cleansing Capacity of the
Atmosphere Changing? 2:457
Oil and the Arctic Environment 3:517
Oil Fires: Kuwait 3:523
518 ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ARTICLES
Oil Industry: Cultural Impacts and Environmental Risk
Tolerance 3:525
Oil Shales and Tar Sands 3:528
Oligotrophic/Heterotrophic/Eutrophic 2:458
Orbital Variations 1:586
Organic Farming and the Environment 3:532
Ozone Depletion Potential (ODP) 1:590
Ozone Hole 1:590
Ozone Layer: Vienna Convention and the Montreal
Protocol 4:337
PacicDecadal Oscillation 1:592
PacicNorth American (PNA) Teleconnection 1:594
PAGES (Past Global Changes) 1:596
Paleoclimatology 1:596
Paleozoic 1:597
PAR (Photosynthetically Active Radiation) 2:460
Parameterization 1:598
Passerine 2:460
Peruorocarbons (PFCs) 1:598
Permafrost 1:598
PET (Potential Evapotranspiration) 2:461
Phase Shifts or Flip-ops in Complex Systems 5:422
Phenology 2:461
Phenotype/Genotype 2:465
Phosphorus Cycle 2:466
Phosphorus Water Quality Objectives 3:542
Phosphorus: Global Transfers 3:536
Photochemical Reactions 1:601
Photosynthesis 2:470
Phytophagy 2:471
Planetary Boundary Layer 1:603
Plant Competition in an Elevated CO
2
World 2:471
Plant Disper sal and Migr ation 2:81
Plant Functional Types 2:481
Plant Growth at Elevated CO
2
2:489
Plant Ontogeny 2:496
Plants Carbon Balance and Growth 2:497
Plants from Cells to Ecosystems: Impacts of Global
Environmental Change 2:94
Plate Tectonics 1:605
Pleistocene 1:607
Policies for Sustainable and Responsible Fisheries 4:343
Policies for Sustainable Forests: Examples from
Canada 4:351
Policies that Promote Sustainable Energy Futures 4:356
Policies to Achieve Sustainable Agriculture 4:358
Policies to Achieve Sustainable Tourism 4:362
Policy Exercises: a Tool for Solving Environmental
Policy Dilemmas 4:366
Policy Responses to Public Health Issues Relating to
Global Environmental Change 4:47
Political Movements/Ideologies and the Environment
5:429
Political Systems and the Environment: Utopianism
5:443
Polynyas 1:607
Population Sizes, Changes 2:504
Post-normal Science 5:451
PPP (Polluter Pay Principle) 4:368
Precautionary Principle 4:369
Precautionary Principle 5:455
Prediction in the Earth Sciences 1:607
Prehistoric People and Forest Soils 3:546
Productivity 2:515
Productivity of Terrestrial Ecosystems 2:516
Projection of Future Changes in Climate 1:126
Property Rights and Regimes 5:457
Public-dr iven Response to Global Environmental
Change 4:21
Quasi Biennial Oscillation (QBO) 1:611
Quasi Decadal Oscillation 1:613
Quaternary 1:615
Quotas in International Environmental Negotiations
4:371
r K Strategies 2:540
Radiative Forcing 1:616
Radionuclides, Cosmogenic 1:618
Radiosondes 1:619
Rain 1:622
RAINS (Regional Air Pollution Information and
Simulation) 4:552
Raven, Peter 2:522
Red Tide 3:548
Redeld Ratio 2:522
Redox Potential 2:523
Refugees and Human Conict 3:548
Regional Responses to Global Environmental
Change 4:515
Relating to Nature: Spir ituality, Philosophy, and
Environmental Concer n 5:97
Religion and Ecology in the Abrahamic Faiths 5:461
Religion and Environment Among North American First
Nations 5:466
Remote Sensing 2:524
Remote Sensing, Terrestrial Systems 2:528
Residence Time (of an Atom, Molecule or
Particle) 1:622
Resilience 2:530
Respiration 2:531
Restoration, Ecosystem 2:532
Revelle, Roger Randall Dougan 1:623
Rhizosphere 2:539
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ARTICLES 519
Rice and its Spread: Double Cropping; New
Varieties Environmental Consequences and
Methane Gas, Sustainability 3:116
Richardson, Lewis Fry 1:624
Risk Management in an Era of Global Environmental
Change 4:375
River Regulation 3:551
Roberts, Walter Orr 1:625
Rodin, Leonid E 2:540
Roosevelt, Theodore 5:475
Rossby Waves 1:626
Rossby, Carl-Gustaf 1:626
Rosswall, Per Thomas 2:541
Rowland, F Sherwood 1:627
Runoff 1:628
Salinity 1:629
Salinity and Agriculture 3:559
Salinity Patterns in the Ocean 1:629
Salinization 2:543
Scenarios 5:476
SCEP (Study of Critical Environmental Problems) 4:382
Scienti c Responses in an Er a of Global
Environmental Change 4:36
SCOPE (Scientic Committee on Problems of the
Environment) 4:383
SCOR (Scientic Committee on Oceanic
Research) 1:640
Sea Ice 1:640
Sea Level 1:645
Sea Surface Temperature 1:650
Sedimentar y Recor ds of Long-ter m Ecological
Change 2:112
Seismic Risk (and Risk Assessment) 4:383
Sensible Heat 1:656
Seveso 5:482
Shifting Cultivation and Land Degradation 3:565
Shipping: Harbors and Ports 3:572
Sierra Club 5:483
Small is Beautiful 5:483
SMIC (Study of Mans Impact on Climate) 4:385
Snow 1:656
Social Assessment 4:386
Social Ecology 5:484
Social Impact Assessment 4:387
Social Impact Assessment (SIA) 5:484
Social Learning in the Management of Global
Atmospheric Risks 5:485
Social Science and Global Environmental
Change 5:109
Socially Responsible Investment 4:393
Soft Energy Path 3:583
Soft Energy Paths 5:487
Soil Amelioration 3:583
Soil Deterioration and Loss of Topsoil 3:587
Soil Erosion 4:395
Soil Mineralization 2:543
Soil Moisture 1:658
Solar Irradiance and Climate 1:659
Solar Variability, Long-term 1:666
Southern Ocean 1:668
Southern Oscillation 1:672
Sovereignty and Sovereign States 5:487
SPARC (Stratospheric Processes and their Role in
Climate) 1:672
Speth, James Gustave 4:397
Stable Isotopes 2:544
START (Global Change System for Analysis Research
and Training) 4:398
Stockholm and Beyond 4:398
Storm Surge 1:673
Strategic Environmental Assessment 4:403
Stratosphere 1:674
Stratosphere, Chemistry 1:675
Stratosphere, Ozone Trends 1:682
Stratosphere, Temperature and Circulation 1:697
Strong, Maurice 4:406
Sub-grid Processes 1:704
Succession 2:551
Succession, Denition of 2:550
Suess Effect 2:557
Sunspots 1:704
Suomi, Verner Edward 1:707
Sustainability: Human, Social, Economic and
Environmental 5:489
Sustainable Cities Policies 4:406
Sustainable Development 4:411
Sustainable Development of Energy Resources in Small
Island Developing States (SIDS) 4:412
Sustainable Development Policies in Small Island
Developing States 4:416
Sustainable Development Policy 4:422
Sustainable Ener gy Policies 4:86
Sustainable Transportation 4:426
Sverdrup, Harald Ulrik 1:708
Swidden 3:594
Symbiosis 2:557
Tamm, Carl Olof 2:559
Taxon 2:560
Taxonomy/Systematics 2:560
Technological Society and its Relation to Global
Environmental Change 5:86
Temperate Coniferous Forests 2:560
Temperate Deciduous Forests 2:565
Temperate Grasslands 2:569
Temperature 1:709
520 ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ARTICLES
Temperature Increase: Effects on Terrestrial
Ecosystems 2:575
Ter restr ial and Freshwater Ecosystems: Impacts of
Global Change 2:122
The Changing Human Nature Relationships
(HNR) in the Context of Global Environmental
Change 5:11
The Ear th System 1:1
The Emer gence of Global Environment Change into
Politics 5:124
The Environment and Violent Conict 5:137
The Global Temper ature Recor d 1:82
The Human Dimensions of Global Change 5:1
Theology 5:492
Theories of Health and Environment 5:492
Thermohaline Circulation 1:710
Thoreau, Henry David 5:502
Thornthwaite, Charles Warren 2:581
Three Mile Island 5:503
Tickell, Crispin 4:436
Tidal Power Development 3:596
Tides, Atmospheric 1:710
Tides, Oceanic 1:710
Toepfer, Klaus 4:436
TOGA (Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere) 1:713
Tolba, Mostafa 4:437
Tornadoes 1:713
Torrey Canyon 5:503
Tourism and Ecosystems 3:597
Tourism as a Global Driving Force for Environmental
Change 3:609
Tourism: Climate Change and Tourist Resorts 3:623
Toxic Wastes: Generation and Disposal: a Case Study of
UK Practice and Legislation 3:628
Tradable Permits for Greenhouse Gases 4:438
Tradable Permits for Limiting Stratospheric Ozone
Depletion 4:446
Tradable Permits for Sulfur Emission Reductions 4:450
Trade Winds 1:715
Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes 3:631
Transboundary Water Resource Management: The
Example of the Canada/US IJC (International Joint
Commission) 4:553
Transferable Fisheries Quotas (TFQs) 4:455
Transient Response 1:715
Transport and Species Dispersal 3:632
Transport Infrastructure 3:643
Transport: Global Freight and Passenger Flows 3:633
Trends in Environmental Management in the Last 40
Year s 4:15
Trends in Global Emissions: Car bon, Sulfur , and
Nitrogen 3:35
TRMM (Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission) 1:716
Tropical Forests 2:582
Tropical Savannas 2:586
Tropopause 1:717
Troposphere 1:717
Troposphere, Ozone Chemistry 1:718
Tropospheric Temperature 1:720
Tsunamis, Causes and Consequences 1:725
Tucker, Jim 2:592
Tundra 2:593
Tunguska Phenomenon 1:730
UARS (Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite) 1:732
Ultraviolet Radiation 1:732
ULYSSES (Urban Lifestyles, Sustainability, and
Integrated Environmental Assessment) 4:460
UNCED (United Nations Conference on Environment and
Development) 4:460
UNCHS (United Nations Centre for Human
Settlements) 4:461
UNCLOS (United Nations Convention on the Law of the
Sea) 4:462
UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and
Development) 4:463
UNDP (United Nations Development Program) 4:464
UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) 4:464
UNESCO (United Nations Educational Scientic and
Cultural Organization) and the Environment 4:465
UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) 4:466
UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development
Organization) 4:468
United Nations Conferences on the Environment 4:469
United Nations Convention to Combat Desertication
(UNCCD) 4:474
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
Regional Seas Programme (RSP) 4:476
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
Saskawa Environment Prize 4:477
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change and Kyoto Protocol 4:478
UNSCEAR (United Nations Scientic Committee on the
Effects of Atomic Radiation) 4:485
UNU (United Nations University) 5:504
Urban Climate and Respiratory Disease 3:649
Urban Ecosystems 3:655
Urban Heat Island 3:660
Urban Population Change 3:666
Urban Poverty and Environmental Health 3:672
Urban Sulfurous and Photochemical Smog 3:678
Urban Wastes 3:684
Use of Epidemiological Data to Develop Air
Quality Standards for Short-term and Long-term
Environmental Health Benets 4:485
Valued Ecosystem Component 4:493
Vavrousek, Josef 4:493
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ARTICLES 521
Vegetation Ecosystem Model and Analysis Project
(VEMAP) 2:603
VEI (Volcanic Explosivity Index) 3:689
Vernadsky, Vladimir 2:604
Villach Conferences 4:494
Viral Diseases and the In uence of Climate
Change 3:690
Virtual Environments 5:505
Volatile Organic Compounds, Biogenic (VOCs) 2:605
Volcanic Eruption, El Chichon 1:736
Volcanic Eruption, Krakatau 1:736
Volcanic Eruption, Mt. Pinatubo 1:737
Volcanic Eruption, Tambora 1:737
Volcanic Eruptions 1:738
Volcanic Eruptions: Mt Merapi, Indonesia 3:694
Volcanoes and Cities 3:696
Volcanoes and the Environment 3:699
Volvo Environment Prize 4:495
von Humboldt, Alexander 2:609
Vostok, Subglacial Lake 1:744
Wadi 3:707
Waldsterben 5:508
Walker Circulation 1:749
Ward, Barbara 4:497
Waste Dumps in Megacities: Case Study of
Istanbul 3:707
Waste: the Global Mass and its Management 3:709
Wastes: Land ll and Land Raising 3:713
Water Resources: Baltic 3:720
Water Resources: Great Lakes Case Study 3:721
Water Resources: R o de la Plata 3:723
Water Use: Future Trends, and Environmental and
Social Impacts 3:84
Water Vapor: Distribution and Trends 1:750
Waterlogging 3:726
Watson, Robert T 4:498
Wave Power Development 3:726
WBCSD (World Business Council for Sustainable
Development) 4:498
WCC (World Climate Conferences 1979 and
1990) 1:752
WCC (World Council of Churches) 5:509
WCED (World Commission on Environment and
Development) 4:499
WCP (World Climate Programme) 1:752
WCRP (World Climate Research Programme) 1:753
Weather 1:754
Weather Extremes and Climate Impacts: a Case Study for
the United States 3:728
Weathering 1:755
Weed 2:611
Wegener, Alfred 1:755
WFC (World Food Council) 4:500
WGNE (Working Group on Numerical Experimentation)
1:756
White, Gilbert 4:500
Whittaker, Robert H 2:611
WHO (World Health Organization) 4:501
Wilson, Edward Osborne 2:612
Wind Chill 1:756
Wind Power Development 3:733
WMO (World Meteorological Organization) 1:757
WOCE (World Ocean Circulation
Experiment) 1:759
Woodwell, George Masters 2:613
World Commission on Environment and Development
(WCED) 4:503
World Conservation Union (IUCN) Red List of
Threatened Species 4:508
World Energy Consumption Trends 3:734
World Energy Council 3:738
Worldwatch Institute 4:509
WRI (World Resources Institute) 4:510
WTO (World Trade Organization) 4:510
WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) 4:511
Yellow River, China: a Case Study in Water
Resources 3:740
Younger Dryas 1:761
Contributors
Hussein Abaza
UNEP, Geneva, Switzerland
GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) UNC-
TAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Develop-
ment)
Waleed Abdalati
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA
Greenland Ice Sheet
Gina A Adams
Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA
Biodiversity in Soils and Sediments: Potential Effects of
Global Change
Nazeer Ahmad
The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad
and Tobago
Acid Sulfate Soils
Br yant Allen
The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
Shifting Cultivation and Land Degradation Swidden
Myles R Allen
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Didcot, UK
Climate Change, Detection and Attribution
Keith Alver son
PAGES (Past Global Changes) International Project Ofce,
Bern, Switzerland
Climate Change, Abrupt
Stephen O Ander sen
US Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC,
USA
Industrial Responses to Stratospheric Ozone Depletion and
Lessons for Global Climate Change
Meinr at O Andreae
Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Mainz, Germany
Dimethylsulde (DMS)
John T Andrews
University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA
Heinrich (H-) Events
Natalia G Andronova
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL,
USA
Budyko, Mikhail Ivanovich Climate Sensitivity
Karen L Aplin
University of Reading, Reading, UK
Atmospheric Electricity
Chr istof Appenzeller
Swiss Federal Ofce of Meteorology and Climatology,
Zurich, Switzerland
North Atlantic Oscillation
John W Ashe
Permanent Mission of Antigua and Barbuda to the United
Nations, New York, NY, USA
ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the
Caribbean) Sustainable Development Policies in Small
Island Developing States
Cynthia S Ather ton
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA,
USA
Carbon Monoxide Troposphere, Ozone Chemistry
Rober t U Ayres
Center for the Management of Environmental Resources,
Fontainebleau, France
Dematerialization of the Economy Eco-efciency Indus-
trial Ecology Internalization
C Scott Baker
Auckland University, Auckland, New Zealand
Marine Mammal Exploitation: Whales and Whaling
James A Baker
Ministry of Natural Resources, Sault Ste. Marie, Canada
Adaptive Environmental Management
524 CONTRIBUTORS
Marcia B Baker
University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
Clouds
Dennis Baldocchi
University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
Carbon and Energy: Terrestrial Stores and Fluxes
Geor ges Balmino
Centre National dEtudes, Toulouse, France
IUGG (International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics)
Tapas Kumar Bandyopadhyay
Ministry of Environment and Forests, New Delhi, India
Cattle Grazing: Impacts on Land Cover and Methane Emis-
sions
Kaj Bar lund
UN Economic Commission for Europe, Geneva, Switzerland
LRTAP (Convention on Long Range Trans-boundary Air
Pollution)
Guy B Bar nett
CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Canberra, Australia
Natural Systems: Impacts of Climate Change
Leonar d A Bar r ie
Paci c Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA
Arctic Air Quality
Roger G Bar r y
University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA
Cryosphere Mountain Climates
Br ad Bass
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Downscaling Greening of Cities
Michel Batisse
Centre Dactivitees Regionales du Plan Bleu, Sophia Antipo-
lis, France
Blue Plan Mediterranean Sea UNESCO (United Nations
Educational Scientic and Cultural Organization) and the
Environment
F A Bazzaz
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Plant Competition in an Elevated CO
2
World
Plants from Cells to Ecosystems: Impacts of Global
Environmental Change
Lee Beck
United States Environmental Protection Agency, Research
Triangle Park, NC, USA
Methane: Industrial Sources
B Beckage
Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
Plant Dispersal and Migration
Juer g Beer
Swiss Federal Institute of Environmental Science and Tech-
nology (EAWAG), Duebendorf, Switzerland
Solar Variability, Long-term
Bur ton Bennett
New York, NY, USA
Chernobyl UNSCEAR (United Nations Scientic Com-
mittee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation)
Char les Bentley
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA
Antarctica Icebergs Polynyas
Andr e Ber ger
Institut dAstronomie et de G eophysique G. Lematre,
Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
Climate Model Simulations of the Geological Past
Milankovitch, Milutin Orbital Variations
Elizabeth K Ber ner
Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
Carbon Dioxide Concentration and Climate Over Geologi-
cal Times
Rober t A Ber ner
Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
Carbon Dioxide Concentration and Climate Over Geologi-
cal Times
Malcolm C M Bever idge
University of Stirling, Stirling, UK
Aquaculture and Environment: Global View from the Trop-
ics to High Latitudes Aquaculture: Salmon Farming
CONTRIBUTORS 525
R G S Bidwell
Queens University, Kingston, Canada
Allometric Angiosperm/Gymnosperm Autotroph/Hete-
rotroph Benthic/Pelagic Biogeochemical Cycle Biore-
mediation Conservation Biology Fixed Nitrogen
Habitat Halophyte/Halophobe Niche Nitrogen Min-
eralization Oligotrophic/Heterotrophic/Eutrophic PAR
(Photosynthetically Active Radiation) Passerine Phe-
notype/Genotype Photosynthesis Phytophagy Plant
Ontogeny Respiration Rhizosphere Soil Mineraliza-
tion Symbiosis Taxon Taxonomy/Systematics
Ambassador Lar s Bjor kbom
Stockholm, Sweden
Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution
(LRTAP)
Howar d B Bluestein
University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA
Tornadoes
Stephen Bocking
Trent University, Peterborough, Canada
Marsh, George Perkins
John H Bodley
Washington State University, Pullman College, WA, USA
Anthropology and Global Environmental Change Glob-
alization in Historical Perspective
Rumen D Bojkov
World Meteorological Organization, Geneva, Switzerland
Stratosphere, Ozone Trends
Ester Boser up (Deceased)
Independent Consultant
Technological Society and its Relation to Global Environ-
mental Change
Philippe Bour deau
Universit e Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium
DPSIR (Driving ForcesPressuresStateImpacts
Responses) Ecotoxicology EU (European Union)
IPCS (International Program on Chemical Safety) IRPTC
(International Register of Potentially Toxic Chemicals)
Scientic Responses in an Era of Global Environmental
Change
Ian Bowler
University of Leicester, Leicester, UK
Agricultural Intensication in Western Europe Common
Agricultural Policy (CAP)
Michelle Boyle
University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada
Monitoring in Support of Policy: an Adaptive Ecosystem
Approach
Guy Br asseur
Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany
Crutzen, Paul J OHRadical: is the Cleansing Capacity
of the Atmosphere Changing?
Peter Br imblecombe
University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
Aerosols, Troposphere Atmospheric Composition, Present
Atmospheric Structure
Jeffrey R Brook
Meteorological Service of Canada, Toronto, Canada
Use of Epidemiological Data to Develop Air Quality Stan-
dards for Short-term and Long-term Environmental Health
Benets
Thomas M Brooks
Center for Applied Biodiversity Science, Conservation Inter-
national, Washington, DC, USA
Extinctions (Contemporary and Future)
Bar bar a E Brown
University of Newcastle, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK
Coral Bleaching (19971998)
Ker r y Brown
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Jains and the Environment
Janet Browne
Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London, UK
Darwin, Charles Robert
Jim Br uce
Ottawa, Canada
Global Environmental Change and Natural Disasters
Villach Conferences IDNDR (The International Decade
for Natural Disaster Reduction) Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC): an Historical Review
526 CONTRIBUTORS
Paul H Br unner
Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria
Anthropogenic Metabolism and Environmental Legacies
Dir k Br yant
World Resource Institute, Washington, DC, USA
Global Forest Watch
Reid Br yson
University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA
Jet Stream
Rober t W Buddemeier
Kansas Geological Survey, Lawrence, KS, USA
Coral Reefs: an Ecosystem Subject to Multiple Environ-
mental Threats
Keith Bull
Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, Monks Wood, UK
Critical Load
Joanna Bur ger
Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, USA
Tourism and Ecosystems
Kevin Bur ke
University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA
Lithosphere
Vir ginia Bur kett
US Geological Survey, Lafayette, LA, USA
Intertidal Zones
Richar d T Bur nett
Health Canada, Ottawa, Canada
Use of Epidemiological Data to Develop Air Quality Stan-
dards for Short-term and Long-term Environmental Health
Benets
Ian Bur ton
Meteorological Service of Canada, Downsview, Canada
Adaptation Strategies International Environmental Prizes
White, Gilbert
David M Bush
State University of West Georgia, GA, USA
Storm Surge
Elizabeth Bush
Meteorological Service of Canada, Downsview, Canada
Air Quality, Global
James H Butler
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Boul-
der, CO, USA
Methyl Bromide
John Caddy
Imperial College, London, UK and CINVESTAV, Merida,
Mexico
Policies for Sustainable and Responsible Fisheries
J Bair d Callicott
University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA
Environmental Ethics
Josep G Canadell
CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Canberra, Australia
Biological and Ecological Dimensions of Global Environ-
mental Change Mooney, Harold A
Mar k Cane
Lamont-Dohety Earth Observatory, Palisades, NY, USA
Bjerknes, Jacob
Annika Car lsson-Kanyama
Environmental Strategies Research Group, Stockholm, Swe-
den
Food Consumption Patterns and their Inuence on Green-
house Gas Emissions
William J Car lyle
University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Canada
Cereal Cultivation (Agriculture, Extensive)
Henr i Car salade
FAO, Rome, Italy
FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) WFC (World
Food Council)
David Car twr ight
Peters eld, Hampshire, UK
Tides, Atmospheric Tides, Oceanic
CONTRIBUTORS 527
S Catovsky
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Plant Competition in an Elevated CO
2
World
Plants from Cells to Ecosystems: Impacts of Global
Environmental Change
Thure E Cerling
University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
C
3
and C
4
Photosynthesis Stable Isotopes
Marie-Lise Chanin
CNRS/SA, Verrieres le Buisson, France
SPARC (Stratospheric Processes and their Role in Climate)
Piers Chapman
Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA
WOCE (World Ocean Circulation Experiment)
Leslie Charles
NASA, Washington, DC, USA
CEOS (Committee on Earth Observation Satellites)
Marion Cheatle
UNEP, Nairobi, Kenya
GEO (Global Environment Outlook)
Anilla Cherian
American Foundation for the University of West Indies, New
York, NY, USA
Sustainable Development of Energy Resources in Small
Island Developing States (SIDS)
Walter Chomentowski
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA
Deforestation and Habitat Fragmentation in the Amazon
Basin
Nazli Choucri
Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge, MA,
USA
Governance and International Management
John R Christy
University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, AL, USA
MSU (Microwave Sounding Unit) Tropospheric Temper-
ature
John A Church
Antarctic CRC and CSIRO Marine Research, Tasmania,
Australia
Southern Ocean
Galina Churkina
Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena, Germany
Biocenosis Noosphere Vernadsky, Vladimir
Ralph J Cicerone
University of California, Irvine, CA, USA
Rowland, F Sherwood
Phillip J Clapham
Northeast Fisheries Science Center, Woods Hole, MA, USA
Marine Mammal Exploitation: Whales and Whaling
Jennifer Clapp
Trent University, Peterborough, Canada
Basel Convention
J S Clark
Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
Plant Dispersal and Migration
Kenneth E Cockshull
Horticulture Research International, Warwick, UK
Greenhouse Food Production (Agriculture Intensive)
Rita R Colwell
National Science Foundation, Arlington, VA, USA
Biocomplexity
Arthur Conacher
University of Western Australia, Crawley, Australia
Salinity and Agriculture
Hadrian F Cook
Imperial College at Wye, Ashford, UK
Nitrate Protection Zones in Europe
Claudia Copeland
US Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA
Animal Production, Feedlots, and Manure Problems in the
US (Agriculture, Intensive)
528 CONTRIBUTORS
Steven Cor k
CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Canberra, Australia
Ecosystem Services and Costing
Michael Coughlan
World Meteorological Organization, Geneva, Switzerland
Climate Agenda WCP (World Climate Programme)
Cur t Covey
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA,
USA
Asteroids and Comets, Effects on Earth Climate Ana-
logues Model Simulations of Present and Historical Cli-
mates
Peter Cr abb
Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
Irrigation: Environmental Impacts Salinization Water-
logging
Wolfgang Cr amer
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam,
Germany
Biome Models
Paul Cr utzen
Max-Planck Institute for Chemistry, Mainz, Germany
Anthropocene Nuclear Winter
Char les Cur tis
University of Manchester Environment Center, Manchester,
UK
Nuclear Waste: Geological Issues
Walter F Dabber dt
National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO,
USA
Radiosondes
Kenneth A Dahlber g
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, USA
Green Revolution
Gretchen C Daily
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
Ehrlich, Paul
Vir ginia Dale
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA
Disturbance Succession
Trevor D Davies
University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
Lamb, Hubert H
John Dear ing
University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
Sedimentary Records of Long-term Ecological Change
R L Desjar dins
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Ottawa, Canada
Boreal EcosystemAtmosphere Study (BOREAS)
Hama Ar ba Diallo
Secretariat of the Convention to Combat Deserti cation,
Bonn, Germany
United Nations Convention to Combat Desertication
(UNCCD)
Ricar do Diez-Hochleitner
The Club of Rome, Madrid, Spain
Club of Rome
Susan L Donoghue
University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Volcanoes and the Environment
Bo R Doos
Vienna, Austria
Lorenz, Edward N
Jane Dougan
Nova Scotia Southeastern University Oceanographic Cen-
ter, Dania Beach, FL, USA
Distance Learning and Environment
Ian Douglas
University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
Changes in World Marine Fish Stocks Earthquake Inten-
sity and Magnitude Scales Earthquakes Triggered by
Human Activities Emergy Environmental Changes
Driven by Civil Conict and War Geomorphological
Change for Urbanization and Industry Global land cover
and land use trends and changes Human Disturbance
of the Earth System: Dynamics and Complexities Indus
Basin: a Case Study in Water Management Karst Land
Subsidence Materials Flows for Mining and Quarrying
National Responsibilities for Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Red Tide Urban Ecosystems World Energy Consump-
tion Trends World Energy Council
CONTRIBUTORS 529
Cher yl A Doyle
ENVIRON Corporation, Princeton, NJ, USA
Urban Wastes
Harold E Dregne
Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA
National and Local Responses to Desertication Soil
Erosion
Les Ducker s
Coventry University, UK
Wave Power Development
David Dudgeon
The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Fisheries: Pollution and Habitat Degradation in Tropical
Asian Rivers
Peter N Duinker
Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada
Policies for Sustainable Forests: Examples from Canada
Sustainable Development Valued Ecosystem Component
Henr i J Dumont
Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
Black Sea Caspian Sea
John Dunn
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
The Emergence of Global Environment Change into Politics
John A Dutton
Pennsylvania State University, PA, USA
Suomi, Verner Edward
O P Dwivedi
University of Guelph, Guelph, Canada
Hinduism and the Environment
James R Ehler inger
University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
C
3
and C
4
Photosynthesis Stable Isotopes
Eckar t Ehler s
University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany
von Humboldt, Alexander ISSC (International Social
Science Council)
Paul R Ehr lich
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
Raven, Peter
Omar E El-Ar ini
Multilateral Fund Secretariat, Montreal, Canada
Montreal Protocol, Multilateral Fund for the Implementa-
tion of
Aleya El Bindar i Hammad
The Robert S Wagner School of Public Health Services, New
York, NY, USA
Policy Responses to Public Health Issues Relating to Global
Environmental Change WHO (World Health Organiza-
tion)
Rasha El Diwany
The Robert S Wagner School of Public Health Services, New
York, NY, USA
Policy Responses to Public Health Issues Relating to Global
Environmental Change
Essam El-Hinnawi
National Research Center, Cairo, Egypt
WCED (World Commission on Environment and Develop-
ment)
Osama A El-Kholy
Arabian Gulf University, Manama, Bahrain
Cleaner Production Environmental (Eco) Labeling
Regional Responses to Global Environmental Change
Tolba, Mostafa Trends in Environmental Management in
the Last 40 Years
Mahmoud Kh El-Sayed
University of Alexandria, Alexandria, Egypt
Coastal Zone Management
David Elliott
The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
Tidal Power Development
J Cynan Ellis-Evans
British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge, UK
Vostok, Subglacial Lake
Derek M Elsom
Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK
Urban Sulfurous and Photochemical Smog
530 CONTRIBUTORS
Jeremy Eppel
Environment Directorate, Paris, France
OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development)
Paul R Epstein
Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
Infectious Diseases
Jenni L Evans
The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA,
USA
Hurricanes, Typhoons and other Tropical Storms Dyna-
mics and Intensity
Rober t Evans
Anglia Polytechnic University, Cambridge, UK
Soil Deterioration and Loss of Topsoil
Malin Falkenmar k
Natural Science Research Council and Stockholm Interna-
tional Water Institute (SIWI), Stockholm, Sweden
Circulating Freshwater: Crucial Link between Climate,
Land, Ecosystems, and Humanity
Benjamin S Felzer
NOAA/Of ce of Global Programs, Silver Spring, MD, USA
Agassiz, Louis CLIMAP (Climate: Long-range Investi-
gation, Mapping, and Prediction) Cretaceous Dans-
gaardOescheger Cycles Eemian Holocene Last
Glacial Maximum Mesozoic Paleozoic Pleistocene
Quaternary
Adam Fenech
Meteorological Service of Canada, Downsview, Canada
Social Learning in the Management of Global Atmospheric
Risks Ecosystem Services Natural Capital
Freder ick Fer r e
University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA
Relating to Nature: Spirituality, Philosophy, and Environ-
mental Concern
Rober t Finkel
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore,
CA, USA
Radionuclides, Cosmogenic
John Firor
National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO,
USA
Roberts, Walter Orr
Ian A Fleming
Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, Trondheim, Nor-
way and Coastal Oregon Marine Experiment Station, Ore-
gon State University, Newport, OR, USA
Fisheries: Effects of Climate Change on the Life Cycles of
Salmon Life Cycles
Richar d A Fleming
Great Lakes Forest Research Centre, Sault Ste. Marie,
Canada
Biome Biosphere Climax Vegetation Ecosystem
Stability Environment Forest Stand Holling, C S
Integrated Pest Management (IPM) in an Era of Global
Environmental Change Keystone Species Landscape
Ecology Life Cycles Productivity r K Strategies
Succession, Denition of Weed
Rober t L Fleming
Great Lakes Forest Research Centre, Sault Ste. Marie,
Canada
Life Cycles
Richar d Foltz
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein
Lee Frelich
University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN, USA
Temperate Deciduous Forests
Bur khar d Frenzel
Universit at Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany
Holocene: Climate Changes and Society
Elber t W (Joe) Fr iday, Jr
National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC, USA
Public-driven Response to Global Environmental Change
Weather
Roland Fuchs
International START Secretariat, Washington, DC, USA
START (Global Change System for Analysis Research and
Training)
CONTRIBUTORS 531
Jed Fuhr man
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Microbial Diversity
Inez Fung
University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
Tucker, Jim
W S Fyfe
University of Western Ontario, London, Canada
Waste: the Global Mass and its Management
Bor is K Gannibal
St Petersburg, Russian Federation
Rodin, Leonid E
John H C Gash
Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Wallingford, UK
Deforestation, Tropical: Global Impacts
F Gassmann
Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), Villigen, Switzerland
Public-driven Response to Global Environmental Change
W Lawrence Gates
University of California, Livermore, CA, USA
AMIP (Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project) Cli-
mate Climate Change WGNE (Working Group on
Numerical Experimentation)
Jean-Pier re Gattuso
Laboratoire dOc eanographie de Villefranche, Villefranche-
sur-mer, France
Coral Reefs: an Ecosystem Subject to Multiple Environ-
mental Threats
Michael Ghil
University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Natural Climate Variability
Richar d Gilber t
Centre for Sustainable Transport, Toronto, Canada
Sustainable Transportation
Filippo Gior gi
Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics,
Trieste, Italy
Modeling Regional Climate Change
Ber nhar d Glaeser
Social Science Research Center, Berlin, Germany
The Changing HumanNature Relationships (HNR) in the
Context of Global Environmental Change
Michael Glantz
National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO,
USA
Aral Sea
Jerome C Glenn
American Council for the United Nations University, Wash-
ington, DC, USA
Business-as-usual Scenarios Scenarios UNU (United
Nations University)
Michael Goch eld
Rutgers University, NJ, USA
Environmental Cadmium in the Food Chain
Jose Goldember g
University of S ao Paulo, S ao Paulo, Brazil
Leapfrogging Technology Policies that Promote Sustain-
able Energy Futures
Fr ank B Golley
University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA
International Biosphere Program (IBP) a Foundation for
Global Studies
Spr ing Gombe
The Robert S Wagner School of Public Health Services, New
York, NY, USA
Policy Responses to Public Health Issues Relating to Global
Environmental Change
Glynn Gomes
Gomes Consulting Enterprises, Oakville, Canada
Cousteau, Jacques
M Gomez-Er ache
Facultad de Ciencias, Montevideo, Uruguay
Water Resources: R o de la Plata
Rober t Goodland
World Bank, Washington, DC, USA
Environmental Assessment of Major Development Projects
Social Assessment Strategic Environmental Assessment
Sustainability: Human, Social, Economic and Environ-
mental
532 CONTRIBUTORS
Eban Goodstein
Lewis and Clark College, Portland, OR, US
Economics and Global Environmental Change
James R Gosz
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA
Global Terrestrial Observing System (GTOS) Long-term
Ecological Research (LTER) System
Andrew Goudie
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Geomorphology
J Goudriaan
Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands
Crop Models
Anne Goujon
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA),
Laxenburg, Austria
Demographic transition Global Population Trends
Stith T Gower
University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA
Productivity of Terrestrial Ecosystems
Thomas E Graedel
Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, New
Haven, CT, USA
Industrial and Anthroposystem Metabolism
David J Griggs
Meteorological Ofce, Bracknell, UK
Houghton, John Theodore
A P Lino Grima
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Demand Management Transboundary Water Resource
Management: The Example of the Canada/US IJC (Inter-
national Joint Commission)
Richard S Gross
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, USA
Chandler Wobble
Michael Grubb
The Royal Institute of International Affairs, London, UK
Tradable Permits for Greenhouse Gases
Arnulf Grubler
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA),
Laxenburg, Austria
Trends in Global Emissions: Carbon, Sulfur, and Nitrogen
Charles Guest
Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
Viral Diseases and the In uence of Climate Change
Lance Gunderson
Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
Resilience
Peter M Haas
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA
United Nations Conferences on the Environment
Tahar Hadj-Sadok
UNFCCC, Bonn, Germany
Clean Development Mechanism
J Michael Hall
NOAA, Silver Spring, MD, USA
IRI (International Research Institute for Climate Prediction)
David Hallman
World Council of Churches, Toronto, Canada
Christianity and the Environment Theology WCC
(World Council of Churches)
Kevin Hamilton
University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI, USA
Quasi Biennial Oscillation (QBO)
Allen L Hammond
World Resources Institute, Washington, DC, USA
Indicators on Environmental Quality and Sustainable Devel-
opment
Trevor Hancock
Trevor Hancock Inc., Kleinburg, Canada
Theories of Health and Environment
Kevin Hanna
Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada
CBA (Cost Bene t Analysis) Common but Differentiated
Responsibility Principle (Stockholm/Rio) Eco Taxes
Francis of Assisi Malthus, Thomas Robert Muir, John
PPP (Polluter Pay Principle) Roosevelt, Theodore
UNCED (United Nations Conference on Environment and
Development)
CONTRIBUTORS 533
Roger Hansell
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Ecosystem Services Natural Capital
Joan Har djono
Padjadjaran State University, Bandung, Indonesia
Agricultural Intensication in Java Demographic Change:
Indonesian Transmigration
F Kenneth Hare
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Climatology
Richar d Har r ington
IACR, Rothamsted, UK
Insect Pests and Global Environmental Change
R Giles Har r ison
University of Reading, Berkshire, UK
Atmospheric Electricity
L D Danny Har vey
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Carbon Cycle Climate Feedbacks Energy Balance
Climate Models Greenhouse Effect Parameterization
Radiative Forcing Sub-grid Processes
Paul H Har vey
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Community Richness
A L Heathwaite
University of Shef eld, Shef eld, UK
Nitrate Leaching Nitrogen: Agricultural Uses and their
Impacts
Gr ant Heiken
Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, USA
Volcanoes and Cities
Ann Hender son-Seller s
Lucas Heights Science and Technology Centre, New South
Wales, Australia
ISLSCP (International Satellite Land Surface Climatology
Project) Land Surface Soil Moisture
Dudley Her schbach
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Franklin, Benjamin
Kenneth Hewitt
Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada
Hazards in Global Environmental Change Natural
Hazards
Kaz Higuchi
Meteorological Service of Canada, Toronto, Canada
Boreal Forest Carbon Flux and its Role in the Implemen-
tation of the Kyoto Protocol Under a Warming Climate
Carbon Dioxide, Recent Atmospheric Trends
David W Hilber t
Tropical Forest Research Center, Atherton, Australia
Non-linear Systems
R D Hill
The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) Rice and its
Spread: Double Cropping; New Varieties Environmental
Consequences and Methane Gas, Sustainability
J HilleRisLamber s
Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
Plant Dispersal and Migration
Tadaki Hirose
Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan
Monsi, Masami
Annette Hladik
Eco-Anthropologie, CNRS and Mus eum National dHistoire
Naturelle, Brunoy, France
Agroforestry
Richar d J Hobbs
Murdoch University, Murdoch, Australia
Fragmentation and Corridors
I J Hodgkiss
The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs)
Peter Hogber g
Department of Forest Ecology, Umea, Sweden
Nitrogen Deposition on Forests Tamm, Carl Olof
E H (Ted) Hogg
Canadian Forest Service, Edmonton, Canada
Boreal Forest
534 CONTRIBUTORS
C S Holling
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA
Resilience
Lon L Hood
University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
Quasi Decadal Oscillation
Leen Hor dijk
Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands
RAINS (Regional Air Pollution Information and Simula-
tion)
Pier re Hor witz
Edith Cowan University, Joondalup, Australia
Limnology
David Houghton
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA
Latent Heat Sensible Heat Temperature
John Houghton
IPCC, Geneva, Switzerland
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): an
Historical Review
R A Houghton
Woods Hole Research Center, Woods Hole, MA, USA
Woodwell, George Masters
Rober t W Howar th
Environmental Defense, Boston, MA, USA
Nitrogen Cycle
S Mar k Howden
CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Canberra, Australia
Natural Systems: Impacts of Climate Change
Br ian Hoyle
University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
Shipping: Harbors and Ports
Shaopeng Huang
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Ground Temperature
Lesley Hughes
Macquarie University, New South Wales, Australia
Bioindicators
Br uce A Hungate
Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ, USA
Terrestrial and Freshwater Ecosystems: Impacts of Global
Change
Keith A Hunter
University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
Iron Cycle
Tahir Husain
Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. Johns, Canada
Oil Fires: Kuwait
Pat Hutchings
The Australian Museum, Sydney, Australia
Marshes, Anthropogenic Changes
Gar y R Huxel
University of California, Davis, CA, USA
Food Webs
I Ibanez
Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
Plant Dispersal and Migration
C C Jaeger
Potsdam-Institute for Climate Impacts Research (PIK),
Potsdam, Germany
Public-driven Response to Global Environmental Change
Anthony C Janetos
World Resources Institute, Washington, DC, USA
Remote Sensing, Terrestrial Systems
Marco A Janssen
Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Modeling Human Dimensions of Global Environmental
Change
Bengt-Owe Jansson
Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
Baltic Sea
CONTRIBUTORS 535
Ar ne J Jensen
Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, Trondheim, Nor-
way
Fisheries: Effects of Climate Change on the Life Cycles of
Salmon
Ar ne Jer nelov
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA),
Laxenburg, Austria
IIASA (International Institute for Applied Systems Analy-
sis) Mercury in the Environment
Thomas B Johansson
United Nations Development Programme, New York, NY,
USA
Sustainable Energy Policies
Peter Jones
Biffa Waste Services Ltd., Buckinghamshire, UK
Wastes: Landll and Land Raising
Philip D Jones
University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
The Global Temperature Record
Pavel Kabat
Wageningen University and Research Centre, The Nether-
lands
Large Scale BiosphereAtmosphere Experiment in Ama-
zonia (LBA)
Veijo Kaitala
University of Jyv askyl a, Jyv askyl a, Finland
Population Sizes, Changes
Paul Kancir uk
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA
Metadata
B Kasemir
Swiss Federal Institute for Environmental Science and Tech-
nology (EAWAG) Duebendorf, Switzerland
Public-driven Response to Global Environmental Change
Mohamed Kassas
Cairo University, Giza, Egypt
Environmental Education Holdgate, Martin Nile River
Reah Janise Kauffman
Worldwatch Institute, Washington, DC, USA
Worldwatch Institute
James J Kay
University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Monitoring in Support of Policy: an Adaptive Ecosystem
Approach Phase Shifts or Flip-ops in Complex Systems
Stephanie Kaza
University of Vermont, Burlington, USA
Buddhism and Ecology
Mar y Kear ney
Toronto, Canada
DVI (Dust Veil Index) Lahars VEI (Volcanic Explosiv-
ity Index)
Stjepan Keckes
Borik, Rovinj, Croatia
GESAMP (Joint Group of Experts on the Scientic
Aspects of Marine Environmental Protection) United
Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Regional Seas
Programme (RSP)
Michael Keller
United States Forest Service, USA
Large Scale BiosphereAtmosphere Experiment in Ama-
zonia (LBA)
William W Kellogg
Boulder, CO, USA
SCEP (Study of Critical Environmental Problems) SMIC
(Study of Mans Impact on Climate)
Br uce E Kendall
University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
Chaos and Cycles
Mansour Khalid
African Centre for Research & Environment (ACRE),
Nairobi, Kenya
Brundtland, Gro Harlem
Fazlun M Khalid
Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sci-
ences, Birmingham, UK
Islam and the Environment
536 CONTRIBUTORS
Joel G Kingsolver
University of North Carolina, NC, USA
Impacts of Global Environmental Change on Animals
Douglas Kinnison
National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO,
USA
Photochemical Reactions Stratosphere, Chemistry
John Kir kby
University of Northumbria at Newcastle, Newcastle-upon-
Tyne, UK
Refugees and Human Conict
Rober t J Klee
Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, New
Haven, CT, USA
Industrial and Anthroposystem Metabolism
Peter Klopfer
Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
Hutchinson, G Evelyn
Gunay Kocasoy
Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey
Curi, Kriton Waste Dumps in Megacities: Case Study of
Istanbul
Ch Kor ner
University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland
CO
2
Enrichment: Effects on Ecosystems
Akir a Kudo
Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan
Fisheries: Minamata Disease
Gunnar Kullenber g
International Ocean Institute, Gzira, Malta
Environmental Policies for the World Oceans IOC (Inter-
governmental Oceanographic Commission)
Howar d Kunreuther
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
Risk Management in an Era of Global Environmental
Change
Yochanan Kushnir
Columbia University, Pailsades, NY, USA
PacicNorth American (PNA) Teleconnection Sea Sur-
face Temperature
Kar in Labitzke
Meteorologisches Institut der FU-Berlin, Germany
Stratosphere, Temperature and Circulation
S LaDeau
Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
Plant Dispersal and Migration
Richar d M Landau
Georgetown, Ontario, Canada
Bahai Faith and the Environment
Ray Langenfelds
CSIRO Atmospheric Research, Aspendale, Australia
Anthropogenic Impacts on Atmospheric Oxygen
Sandr a Lavorel
Centre dEcologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive CNRS, Mont-
pellier, France
Plant Functional Types
Nigel Lawson
University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
Materials Flows for Mining and Quarrying
Judith Lean
Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC, USA
Solar Irradiance and Climate Sunspots
Mar tin J Lechowicz
McGill University, Montr eal, Canada
Phenology
Brenda Lee
Montr eal, Quebec, Canada
Landscape, Urban Landscape, and the Human Shaping of
the Environment
Rik Leemans
National Institute of Public Health and the Environment,
Bilthoven, The Netherlands
Biomass Fuel Power Development
Cecil E Leith
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA,
USA
Chaos and Predictability
CONTRIBUTORS 537
A Dennis Lemly
Virginia Tech University, Blacksburg, VA, USA
Irrigation: Induced Demise of Wetlands
A Carl Leopold
Boyce Thompson Institute of Plant Research, Ithaca, NY,
USA
Leopold, Aldo
Erkki Leppakoski
Abo Akademi University, Turku, Finland
Water Resources: Baltic
Manuel Lerdau
State University of New York, Stony Brook, NY, USA
Volatile Organic Compounds, Biogenic (VOCs)
Christian L eveque
CNRS-Programme Environment, Meudon, France
Biodiversity in Freshwaters
Joel S Levine
NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA, USA
Biomass Burning
Simon A Levin
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
Whittaker, Robert H
S F Lienin
Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), Villigen, Switzerland
Public-driven Response to Global Environmental Change
John Lingard
University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Newcastle-upon-Tyne,
UK
Agricultural Subsidies and Environmental Change Poli-
cies to Achieve Sustainable Agriculture
Karen T Lit n
University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
Sovereignty and Sovereign States
Changming Liu
Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
Yellow River, China: a Case Study in Water Resources
Diana Liverman
University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
Inter American Institute for Global Change (IAIGC)
Steve Lonergan
University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada
Environmental Security
Paul Longley
University College London, London, UK
Geographic(al) Information Systems (GIS)
W M Lonsdale
CSIRO Entomology, Canberra, Australia
Biological Invasions
Michel Loreau
Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, France
Evolutionary Processes in Ecosystems
Wolfgang Lutz
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA),
Laxenburg, Austria
Demographic transition Global Population Trends
Robyn Lyons
UNCHS, Nairobi, Kenya
UNCHS (United Nations Centre for Human Settlements)
Michael C MacCracken
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA,
USA
ARM (Atmospheric Radiation Measurement) Program
Broecker, Wallace S Climate Change Assessment, United
States Equilibrium Response Fingerprinting Gen-
eral Circulation Models (GCMs) IAMAS (International
Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences)
IAPSO (International Association for the Physical Sciences
of the Oceans) Junge Layer Madden Julian Oscillation
Methane Models of the Earth System Molina, Mario J
Nitrous Oxide Prediction in the Earth Sciences Sea
Level The Earth System Transient Response UARS
(Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite)
Gordon MacDonald
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA),
Laxenburg, Austria
IIASA (International Institute for Applied Systems Analy-
sis)
538 CONTRIBUTORS
Tom Mace
USEPA/OEI, Research Triangle Park, NC, USA
GCDIS (Global Change Data and Information System)
Anson W Mackay
University College London, London, UK
Lake Baikal
Donald Mackay
Trent University, Peterborough, Canada
Fugacity
Pier s Maclaren
Piers Maclaren and Associates, Rangiora, New Zealand
Afforestation: Environmental Impacts
Jim MacNeill
Ottawa, Canada
World Commission on Environment and Development
(WCED)
Joe Macquaker
University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
Oil Shales and Tar Sands Weathering
Char les L Mader
Mader Consulting Co, Honolulu, HI, USA
Tsunamis, Causes and Consequences
John J Magnuson
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA
Lakes and Rivers
Jer r y D Mahlman
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
Manabe, Syukuro Projection of Future Changes in Cli-
mate
Paola Malanotte-Rizzoli
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA,
USA
Munk, Walter
Elizabeth L Malone
Paci c Northwest National Laboratory, USA
Social Science and Global Environmental Change
Michael E Mann
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA
Little Ice Age Medieval Climatic Optimum
Nathan J Mantua
University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
PacicDecadal Oscillation
Jane C Mar ks
Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ, USA
Terrestrial and Freshwater Ecosystems: Impacts of Global
Change
Gregg Mar land
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA
Geoengineering: a Way to Stabilize Global Climate?
Pablo A Marquet
P. Universidad Cat olica de Chile, Santiago, Chile
Metapopulations
Karen Mar tin
Pepperdine University, Malibu, CA, USA
Animal Physiology and Global Environmental Change
Douglas G Mar tinson
Columbia University, Palisades, NY, USA
Sea Ice
Julia Mar ton Lefevre
LEAD International Inc., New York, NY, USA
Dooge, James LEAD (Leadership for Environment and
Development)
Pier re Matar asso
Centre International de Recherche sur lEnvironnement
et le D eveloppement, CNRS-EHESS, Nogent sur Marne,
France
Integrated Assessment Models of Global Change
Pier re Mathy
European Commission, Brussels, Belgium
European Network for Research in Global Change
(ENRICH)
CONTRIBUTORS 539
Elizabeth May
Sierra Club of Canada, Ottawa, Canada
Brent Spar Brower, David Carson, Rachel Louise
Chipko Movement Earth Charter Earth Day Earth
First! Environmental Defense Fund Environmental
Movement the Rise of Non-government Organizations
(NGOs) Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Friends of the Earth
Kelly, Petra Love Canal Seveso Sierra Club Small is
Beautiful Soft Energy Paths Three Mile Island Torrey
Canyon
James McCar thy
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
IGBP (International GeosphereBiosphere Programme)
Rosswall, Per Thomas
John P McCar ty
Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, USA
Restoration, Ecosystem
Bonnie McCay
Rutgers The State University of NewJersey, NewBrunswick,
NJ, USA
Commons, Tragedy of the Property Rights and Regimes
Raymond A McCor d
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA
Data Banks: Archiving Ecological Data and Information
Metadata
Mack McFar land
DuPont Fluoroproducts, Wilmington, DE, USA
Chlorouorocarbons (CFCs) Halocarbons Hydrouoro-
carbons Peruorocarbons (PFCs)
Kendal McGuf e
University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
Hurricanes, Typhoons and other Tropical Storms Descrip-
tive Overview
J McLachlan
Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
Plant Dispersal and Migration
A J McMichael
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London,
UK
Environmental Change and Human Health: Extending the
Sustainability Agenda
Ross E McMur tr ie
University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Generic Decomposition and Yield (GDAY): A Model of
Global Change Impacts on Plant and Soil
Jeffrey A McNeely
The World Conservation Union, Gland, Switzerland
Biosphere Reserves CITES (Convention on International
Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora)
Convention on Biological Diversity Endangered Species
IUCN (The World Conservation Union) World Con-
servation Union (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species
WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature)
Michael J McPhaden
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Seattle,
WA, USA
El Nino El Nino and La Nina: Causes and Global
Consequences El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO)
El Viejo La Nina Southern Oscillation
Er nesto Medina
Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Cient cas, Cara-
cas, Venezuela
Tropical Savannas
Mar k F Meier
University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA
Glaciers
Thomas A Mensah
London, UK
IMO (International Maritime Organization) London
Dumping Convention MEPC (Marine Environment
Protection Committee) UNCLOS (United Nations
Convention on the Law of the Sea)
William K Michener
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA
Data Banks: Archiving Ecological Data and Information
Metadata
John Middleton
Brock University, St. Catharines, Canada
Sustainable Development Policy
Dennis S Mileti
University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA
Natural Hazards: Social and Policy Responses
540 CONTRIBUTORS
Br uce Mitchell
University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada
IDWSSD (International Drinking Water Supply and Sani-
tation Decade) Water Use: Future Trends, and Environ-
mental and Social Impacts
J Mohan
Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
Plant Dispersal and Migration
Detlev Moller
Brandenburg Technical University, Cottbus, Germany
Hydrogen Peroxide Trends in Greenland Glaciers
Ir is Moller
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Land Reclamation from Seas
Chr istopher N K Mooer s
University of Miami, Miami, FL, USA
Monitoring Systems, Global Geophysical
H A Mooney
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
Biological and Ecological Dimensions of Global Environ-
mental Change
Gale Moore
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Virtual Environments
Hedley Moor wood
Brown and Root NA Limited, Kingston, UK
Groundwater Withdrawal and the Development of the Great
Man-made River Project, Libya
Pier re Morel
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA
EOS (Earth Observing System)
Carol Mor r is
Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education,
Cheltenham, UK
Organic Farming and the Environment
Linda D Mor tsch
Waterloo, Canada
Great Lakes Region of North America
Richar d Moss
IPCC, Geneva, Switzerland
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): an
Historical Review
Walter Munk
University of California, La Jolla, CA, USA
Acoustic Thermometry Sverdrup, Harald Ulrik
R E Munn
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Anthropogenic Biodiversity: The UNEP Denition Bio-
sphere Enhancement Ratio (BER) Bourdeau, Philippe F J
Cumulative Environmental Assessment EA (Environ-
mental Assessment) Ecological Dumping EIS (Envi-
ronmental Impact Statement) Emerging Environmental
Issues Forest: the FAO Denition Holdridge Life Zone
Classication ICREA (International Commodity-related
Environmental Agreements) ICSU (International Coun-
cil for Science) Izrael, Yuri A Joint Implementation
Kondratyev, Kirill Yakovlevich Multi-issue Assessments
NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) No Regrets Princi-
ple SCOPE (Scientic Committee on Problems of the
Environment) Wadi Waldsterben
Mar y Fr an Myer s
University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA
Natural Hazards: Social and Policy Responses
Nor man Myer s
Oxford University, Oxford, UK
Environmental Refugees
Shahid Naeem
University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
Functional Biodiversity May, Robert M
G J Nagy
Facultad de Ciencias, Montevideo, Uruguay
Water Resources: R o de la Plata
Ken Nagy
University of California, Los Angles, CA, USA
Animal Physiology and Global Environmental Change
Douglas Nakashima
UNESCO, Paris, France
Indigenous Knowledge, Peoples and Sustainable Practice
CONTRIBUTORS 541
Takakiyo Nakazawa
Tohoku University, Tohoku, Japan
Carbon Dioxide, Recent Atmospheric Trends
Choucr i Nazli
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA,
USA
Governance and International Management
Mar k Newman
Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, USA
Extinctions and Biodiversity in the Fossil Record
Abdul Rahim Nik
Forest Research Institute Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia
Forest Logging Systems in Tropical Countries: Differential
Impacts
Car los Nobre
Brazilian Space Research Institute, Brazil
Large Scale BiosphereAtmosphere Experiment in Ama-
zonia (LBA)
Richar d J Nor by
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA
Temperature Increase: Effects on Terrestrial Ecosystems
Richar d B Nor gaar d
University of California, Berkley, CA, USA
Discounting Ecological Economics Emergy Environ-
mental Economics ISEW (Index of Sustainable Economic
Welfare) and GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator)
Ger ald R Nor th
Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA
Energy Balance and Climate
Patr ick D Nunn
The University of the South Paci c, Suva, Fiji
Demographic Change: Peopling of the Pacic Islands
Ror y O Br ien
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Green Investment Socially Responsible Investment
Tradable Permits for Limiting Stratospheric Ozone Deple-
tion
Phil O Keefe
University of Northumbria at Newcastle, Newcastle-upon-
Tyne, UK
Biomass Burning in Rural Homes in Tropical Areas
Biomass Use for Urban Fuels in Developing Countries
Refugees and Human Conict
Tim O Rior dan
University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
Precautionary Principle
Thor aya Obaid
UNFPA, New York, NY, USA
UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund)
G O Obasi
World Meteorological Organization, Geneva, Switzerland
Lake Victoria
Dennis S Ojima
Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA
Vegetation Ecosystem Model and Analysis Project
(VEMAP)
Fr ank Old eld
PAGES (Past Global Changes) International Project Of ce,
Bern, Switzerland
Climate Change, Abrupt PAGES (Past Global Changes)
Reuben J Olembo
National Committee on the Implementation of the National
Environment and Coordination Act, Nairobi, Kenya
Dowdeswell, Elizabeth
Richar d J Olson
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA
Data Banks: Archiving Ecological Data and Information
Metadata
Naomi Oreskes
University of California, San Diego, CA, USA
Continental Drift Global Plate Tectonics
Richar d E Or ville
Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA
Lightning
Rober t Paehlke
Trent University, Peterborough, Canada
Environmental Politics Soft Energy Path
542 CONTRIBUTORS
Thomas Pagano
University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
Hydrologic Cycle
Tim Palmer
European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts
(ECMWF), Reading, UK
Rossby Waves
Garth W Paltridge
University of Tasmania, Tasmania, Australia
Albedo
Jyoti Parikh
Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai,
India
Consumption Patterns: Economic and Demographic Change
Claire L Parkinson
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA
Arctic Ocean
William Parton
Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA
CENTURY Ecosystem Model Vegetation Ecosystem
Model and Analysis Project (VEMAP)
Jos e M Paruelo
Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Temperate Grasslands
Jonathan A Patz
Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD,
USA
Urban Climate and Respiratory Disease
Robert W Pearcy
University of California, Davis, CA, USA
Plants Carbon Balance and Growth
W Richard Peltier
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Earth System History Isostasy
Joyce E Penner
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Aerosols, Effects on the Climate Feedbacks, Chem-
istry Climate Interactions
Frits Penning de Vries
IBSRAM, Jatujak, Bangkok, Thailand
De Wit, C T
David Pepper
Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK
Deep Ecology Ecocentric, Biocentric, Gaiacentric Eco-
socialism Enlightenment Project Homocentric New
Ageism Political Movements/Ideologies and the Environ-
ment Political Systems and the Environment: Utopianism
Social Ecology
A C Perdomo
SOHMA, Montevideo, Uruguay
Water Resources: R o de la Plata
Marta P erez-Soba
Plant Research International, Wageningen, The Netherlands
Plant Growth at Elevated CO
2
John S Perry
Alexandria, VA, USA
ACSYS (Arctic Climate System Study) Air Pressure
CLIC (Climate and Cryosphere) CLIVAR (CLImate
VARiability and Predictability) GAIM (Global Analy-
sis, Interpretation and Modeling) Program GARP (Global
Atmospheric Research Program) GAW (Global Atmo-
sphere Watch) Humidity IAHS (International Asso-
ciation of Hydrological Sciences) IGBP-DIS (Interna-
tional Geosphere Biosphere Program Data and Information
System) IGY (International Geophysical Year) IHP
(International Hydrological Program) International Orga-
nizations in the Earth Sciences JGOFS (Joint Global
Ocean Flux Study) Lapse Rate LOICZ (Land Ocean
Interactions in the Coastal Zone) Maunder Minimum
Monsoons Natural Records of Climate Change Ocean
Conveyor Belt Ocean Drilling Program Oceanography
Revelle, Roger Randall Dougan Richardson, Lewis Fry
SCOR (Scienti c Committee on Oceanic Research) The
Earth System WCC (World Climate Conferences 1979
and 1990) WCRP (World Climate Research Programme)
WMO (World Meteorological Organization) WOCE
(World Ocean Circulation Experiment)
Anders Persson
European Center for Medium-range Weather Forecasts
(ECMWF), Reading, UK
Atmospheric Motions Coriolis Effect Rossby, Carl-
Gustaf
CONTRIBUTORS 543
Dorothy Peteet
Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, Palisades, NY, USA
and NASA/GISS, New York, NY, USA
Younger Dryas
G D Peter son
University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA
Resilience
M J Peter son
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA
BAT (Best Available Technology) International Environ-
mental Law National Environmental Law
Geoff Petts
The University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, UK
Inter-basin Transfer (IBT) for Water Supplies River Reg-
ulation
Roger A Pielke, Jr
National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO,
USA
Weather Extremes and Climate Impacts: a Case Study for
the United States
Roger A Pielke, Sr
Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA
Convection Land Cover and Climate Planetary Bound-
ary Layer
Lar s Pierce
California State University, Monterey Bay, CA, USA
BiomeBGC Ecosystem Model
Or r in H Pilkey
Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
Storm Surge
David Pimentel
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Malnutrition, Infectious Diseases and Global Environmen-
tal Change
Giovanni Pitar i
Universit` a LAquila, LAquila, Italy
Aerosols, Polar Stratospheric Cloud Aerosols, Strato-
sphere
Cather ine Plume
World Resource Institute, Washington, DC, USA
Global Forest Watch
Gar y A Polis (Deceased)
University of California, Davis, CA, USA
Food Webs
Henr y N Pollack
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Geothermal Heat Ground Temperature
Br uce Pond
Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, Peterborough,
Canada
Monitoring in Support of Policy: an Adaptive Ecosystem
Approach
Hendr ik Poor ter
Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Plant Growth at Elevated CO
2
Naomi Poulton
UNEP, Nairobi, Kenya
UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme)
Edan Pr abhu
FlexEnergy Inc., Mission Viejo, CA, USA
Low Concentration Methane Bearing Gases
Ghillean T Pr ance
University of Reading, Reading, UK
Attenborough, David DIVERSITAS Tropical Forests
Colin Pr ice
Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Israel
Lightning and Atmospheric Electricity
Ger da K Pr iestley
Universitat Aut` onoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
Geomorphological Change: Landscape Modication for
Recreation
Ron Pr inn
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA,
USA
OHRadical: is the Cleansing Capacity of the Atmosphere
Changing?
544 CONTRIBUTORS
L Pr itchar d
Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
Resilience
Alex Pszenny
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA,
USA
IGAC (International Global Atmospheric Chemistry)
Ron Pulliam
University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA
Odum, Eugene P
Ar mando Rabuffetti
Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI),
Sao Jose dos Campos, Brazil
IAI (Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research)
Rober t Raiswell
University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
Geological Cycling
Freda Rajotte
Canadian Coalition for Ecology, Dauphin, Canada
Religion and Environment Among North American First
Nations
V Ramaswamy
Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Princeton, NJ,
USA
Infrared Radiation
James T Rander son
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA
CarnegieAmesStanford Approach (CASA)
Esa Ranta
University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
Population Sizes, Changes
David J Rappor t
University of Guelph, Guelph, Canada
Ecosystem Health
Peter Raven
Director, Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, MO, USA
Wilson, Edward Osborne
Jerome R Ravetz
Research Methods Consultancy Ltd., London, UK
Post-normal Science
Steve Rayner
Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
Social Science and Global Environmental Change
Helmut Rechber ger
Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria
Anthropogenic Metabolism and Environmental Legacies
William E Rees
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Ecological Capacity Ecological Footprint
Henr y Regier
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Capacity, Assimilative Carrying Capacity Ecosystem
Approach Ecosystem Integrity Ecosystem Structure
and Function Freshwater Fisheries Great Lakes Region
of North America Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY)
Phase Shifts or Flip-ops in Complex Systems Poli-
cies for Sustainable and Responsible Fisheries Water
Resources: Great Lakes Case Study
Peter B Reich
University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN, USA
Temperate Deciduous Forests
James F Reynolds
Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
Controlled Environment Facilities in Global Change
Research Non-equilibrium Ecology
Peter Rimmer
The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
Transport: Global Freight and Passenger Flows
Paul G Risser
Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA
Ecotones
John Rober ts
Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Wallingford, UK
Hydrology
CONTRIBUTORS 545
David A Robinson
Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, USA
Snow
Alan Robock
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA
Volcanic Eruption, El Chichon Volcanic Eruption, Mt.
Pinatubo Volcanic Eruptions Volcanic Eruption, Tamb-
ora
M Rocca
Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
Plant Dispersal and Migration
John Rodda
Wallingford, Oxfordshire, UK
Hydrology Runoff
Henning Rodhe
University of Stockholm, Stockholm, Sweden
Arrhenius, Svante Bolin, Bert
Liudmila Romaniuk
St. Petersburg, Russia
Kondratyev, Nikolai Dmitrievich
Aubrey Rose CBE
Barnet, Hertfordshire, UK
Judaism and the Environment
Richar d D Rosen
Atmospheric and Environmental Research, Inc., Lexington,
MA, USA
Atmospheric Angular Momentum and Earth Rotation
Nor man J Rosenber g
Paci c Northwest National Laboratory, Washington, DC,
USA
MINK (Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas) Study
William B Rossow
NASA/Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, NY,
USA
ISCCP (International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project)
Mar ie Roue
Centre National de la Recherche Scienti que, Paris, France
Indigenous Knowledge, Peoples and Sustainable Practice
Donald T Rowland
The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
Demographic Change: the Aging Population
Rosemar y Ruether
Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston, IL,
USA
Religion and Ecology in the Abrahamic Faiths
Iwona Rummel-Bulska
United Nations Environment Programme, Geneva, Switzer-
land
Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes
Lindsey E Rustad
USDA Forest Service, Durham, NH, USA
Temperature Increase: Effects on Terrestrial Ecosystems
Wolfgang Sachs
Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Energy, Environment, Wup-
pertal, Germany
Development and Global Environmental Change
Na s Sadik
United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), New York, NY,
USA
UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund)
Mar ie Sander son
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
PET (Potential Evapotranspiration) Thornthwaite, Charles
Warren
Catr iona Sandilands
York University, Toronto, Canada
Human Body, Immediate Environment
Edwar d Sar achik
University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
TOGA (Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere)
David Satter thwaite
International Institute for Environment and Development,
London, UK
Urban Population Change Urban Poverty and Environ-
mental Health Ward, Barbara
546 CONTRIBUTORS
Rober t A Schiffer
Columbia, MD, USA
Earth Observing Systems
Michael E Schlesinger
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL,
USA
Climate Sensitivity
Edwin K Schneider
Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies, Calverton,
MD, USA
Hadley Circulation Intertropical Convergence Zone
(ITCZ) Trade Winds Walker Circulation
Ann Schr am
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
Mooney, Harold A
Wilfr ied Schr oder
Bremen-Roennebeck, Germany
Wegener, Alfred
Ulr ich Schumann
Institut f ur Physik der Atmosph are, Oberpfaffenhofen, Ger-
many
Aircraft Emissions
Daniel M Schwar tz
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
The Environment and Violent Conict
Jonathan M O Scur lock
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA
Data Banks: Archiving Ecological Data and Information
Metadata
Dian J Seidel
NOAA Air Resources Laboratory, Silver Spring, MD, USA
Water Vapor: Distribution and Trends
Keith L Seitter
American Meteorological Society, Boston, MA, USA
Anticyclone Fronts Ionosphere Mesosphere Meteo-
rology Rain Stratosphere Tropopause Troposphere
Roder ick W Shaw
Rodshaw Environmental Consulting Inc., Nova Scotia,
Canada
Emissions Trading Tradable Permits for Sulfur Emission
Reductions
Ramine V Shaw
International Human Dimensions Programme on Global
Environmental Change (IHDP), Bonn, Germany
IHDP (International Human Dimensions Programme on
Global Change)
Mar jor ie Shepher d
Meteorological Service of Canada, Toronto, Canada
Use of Epidemiological Data to Develop Air Quality Stan-
dards for Short-term and Long-term Environmental Health
Benets
Drew Shindell
Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
Arctic Oscillation
Ross Shotton
Food and Agriculture Organization, Rome, Italy
Transferable Fisheries Quotas (TFQs)
Henr y Shue
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Equity
Her man H Shugar t
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA
Forest Gap Models
Jagadish Shukla
Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies, Calverton,
MD, USA
Charney, Jule Gregory Monsoons
W Br ian Simison
University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
Plate Tectonics
Ian Simmons
University of Durham, Durham, UK
Global Environmental Change and Environmental History
Prehistoric People and Forest Soils
CONTRIBUTORS 547
Joanne Simpson
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA
TRMM (Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission)
Ashbindu Singh
UNEP, Sioux Falls, SD, USA
GRID (Global Resource Information Database, of the
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Division
of Early Warning and Assessment)
Ronald Skeldon
University of Sussex, Falmer, UK
Migrations: The Environmental Challenge of Population
Movements
David Skole
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA
Deforestation and Habitat Fragmentation in the Amazon
Basin
Vaclav Smil
Winnipeg, Canada
Eutrophication Phosphorus: Global Transfers
Irina N Sokolik
University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA
Dust
Ricard V Sol e
Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, USA
Extinctions and Biodiversity in the Fossil Record
Richard C J Somerville
University of California, San Diego, CA, USA
Cloud Radiation Interactions Keeling, Charles David
Soroosh Sorooshian
University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
Hydrologic Cycle
Jean-Francois Soussana
INRA, Clermont-Ferrand, France
Nitrogen Fixers
Richard Southwood
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Elton, C S
Ian F Spellerberg
Lincoln University, Aotearoa, New Zealand
Transport and Species Dispersal
Kelly Sponberg
NOAA, Silver Spring, MD, USA
Climatic Extremes
Detlef F Sprinz
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam,
Germany
National Self-interest: a Major Factor in International Envi-
ronmental Policy Formulation
Jorg Stadelbauer
Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat, Universitat Freiburg im Breis-
gau, Germany
Tourism: Climate Change and Tourist Resorts
James T Staley
University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
Microbial Diversity
Anna Mia Stampe
Danish Space Research Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark
Greenland
William R Stanley
University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA
Oil Industry: Cultural Impacts and Environmental Risk
Tolerance
David Stanners
European Environment Agency, Copenhagen, Denmark
Dobr s European Environment Assessment Process EEA
(European Environment Agency) Vavrousek, Josef
Ingrid Leman Stefanovic
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Environmental Philosophy: Phenomenological Ecology
Will Steffen
IGBP Secretariat Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences,
Stockholm, Sweden
IGBP Core Projects IGBP Terrestrial Transects
548 CONTRIBUTORS
Marc K Steininger
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA
Deforestation and Habitat Fragmentation in the Amazon
Basin
Amy Stever mer
University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA
Ultraviolet Radiation
John W B Stewar t
University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada
Phosphorus Cycle
William M Stigliani
Center for Energy and Environmental Education, University
of Northern Iowa Cedar Fall, IA, USA
Buffering Capacity Contaminated Lands and Sediments:
Chemical Time Bombs? Materials Flow Accounting
Policy Exercises: a Tool for Solving Environmental Policy
Dilemmas Redox Potential
Bjor n Stigson
World Business Council for Sustainable Development
(WBCSD), Conches-Geneva, Switzerland
WBCSD (World Business Council for Sustainable
Development)
Ronald J Stouffer
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
Projection of Future Changes in Climate
Colin Summer hayes
UNESCO, Paris, France
Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS)
N Sundar ar aman
WMO, Geneva, Switzerland
IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)
Nick Sundt
Of ce of the US Global Change Research Program, Wash-
ington, DC, USA
Methane Clathrates
Sutikno
Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia
Volcanic Eruptions: Mt Merapi, Indonesia
J Keith Syer s
Naresuan University, Phitsanulok, Thailand
Environmental Cadmium in the Food Chain Soil Ame-
lioration
Hiroaki Takagi
APN Secretariat, Kobe, Japan
APN (AsiaPacic Network)
Fumio Takashima
Tokyo University Fisheries, Tokyo, Japan
Aquaculture in Asia
Lynne D Talley
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of Califor-
nia, La Jolla, CA, USA
Atlantic Ocean Ocean Circulation Salinity Salinity
Patterns in the Ocean Thermohaline Circulation
Derek Taylor
Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
Wind Power Development
Trevor C Telfer
Institute of Aquaculture, Stirling, UK
Aquaculture: Salmon Farming
Jaume Ter r adas
Universitat Autonoma de Bellaterra, Bellaterra, Spain
Margalef, Ramon
Hans Teunissen
World Meteorological Organization, Geneva, Switzerland
GCOS (Global Climate Observing System)
David J Thomas
Axys Analytical Services Ltd., Sidney, Canada
Oil and the Arctic Environment
Mor ley Thomas
Environment Canada, Downsview, Canada
Bruce, James Hare, Kenneth
Michael Thompson
The Musgrave Institute, London, UK and The University of
Bergen, Norway
Man and Nature as a Single but Complex System
CONTRIBUTORS 549
John B Thor nes
Kings College, London, UK
Land Degradation in the Mediterranean
H Tiessen
University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada
Phosphorus Cycle
Peter Timmer man
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Art and the Environment Emerging Environmental Issues
Encyclopedias: Compendia of Global Knowledge
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand IFIAS (International
Federation of Institutes for Advanced Study) Life Style,
Private Choice, and Environmental Governance Literature
and the Environment Nature The Human Dimensions
of Global Change Thoreau, Henry David
Sar a F Tjossem
University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
May, Robert M
Sylvia S Tognetti
Takhoma Park, MD, USA
Bateson, Gregory
Mostafa K Tolba
International Center for Environment and Development,
Cairo, Egypt
Agarwal, Anil Andersen, Stephen O Benedick, Richard
Elliot Brinkhorst, Laurens Jan Conference of Parties
CSD (Commission on Sustainable Development) Demate-
rialization and Sustainable Development ECA (Economic
Commission for Africa) Environmental Data Report
Environmental Responses: an Overview ESCAP (Eco-
nomic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacic)
Goldemberg, Jose Goodman, Gordon Kassas, Mohamed
Lang, Winfred MacNeill, Jim Obasi, G O P
Ozone Layer: Vienna Convention and the Montreal Pro-
tocol Speth, James Gustave Stockholm and Beyond
Strong, Maurice Tickell, Crispin Toepfer, Klaus
UNDP (United Nations Development Program) UNIDO
(United Nations Industrial Development Organization)
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Saskawa
Environment Prize Volvo Environment Prize Watson,
Robert T
Allen Tough
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Futures Research
John R G Townshend
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA
Deforestation and Habitat Fragmentation in the Amazon
Basin
Kevin Trenber th
National Center for Atmospheric Research/Climate Analysis
Section, Boulder, CO, USA
Earth System Processes GOALS (Global Ocean
AtmosphereLand System)
Paul Tr y
International GEWEX Project Of ce, Silver Spring, MD,
USA
GEWEX (Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment)
Compton J Tucker
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA
Deforestation and Habitat Fragmentation in the Amazon
Basin
Rober t R Twilley
University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, LA, USA
Mangrove Ecosystems
Sushel Unninayar
Columbia, MD, USA
Earth Observing Systems
Susan Ustin
University of California, Davis, CA, USA
Remote Sensing
Tapani Vaahtor anta
Geneva Centre for Security Policy, Geneva, Switzerland
National Self-interest: a Major Factor in International Envi-
ronmental Policy Formulation
Jeroen P van der Sluijs
Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Integrated Assessment Integrated Assessment, Denition
of ULYSSES (Urban Lifestyles, Sustainability, and Inte-
grated Environmental Assessment)
Her man van Keulen
IBSRAM, Bangkok, Thailand
De Wit, C T
550 CONTRIBUTORS
Fr ank Vanclay
Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, Australia
Social Impact Assessment Social Impact Assessment
(SIA)
Ver a Vasll evskaya
M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Rus-
sian Federation
Kovda, V A
Scott Vaughan
North American Commission for Environmental Coopera-
tion, Montreal, Canada
International Environmental Standards ISO (International
Organization for Standardization) WTO (World Trade
Organization)
Char les Vlek
University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands
Environmental Psychology/Perception
James A Voogt
University of Western Ontario, London, Canada
Urban Heat Island
Chr istiaan Vrolijk
The Royal Institute of International Affairs,
London, UK
Tradable Permits for Greenhouse Gases
Ilija Vukadin
Institute for Oceanography and Fisheries, Split, Croatia
Phosphorus Water Quality Objectives
Amar Wahab
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Environmental Sociology
James C G Walker
The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Atmospheric Composition, Past
Diana H Wall
Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA
Biodiversity in Soils and Sediments: Potential Effects of
Global Change
Rusong Wang
Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
Eco-engineering to Promote Ecological Sustainability in
China in an Era of Global Environmental Change Land
Transformation in China: 3000 Years of Human Ecological
History
Richar d H War ing
Oregon State University, OR, USA
Temperate Coniferous Forests
Karen J War ren
Macalester College, St. Paul, MN, USA
Ecofeminism
Stephen T Washbur n
ENVIRON Corporation, Princeton, NJ, USA
Urban Wastes
E C Weather head
University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA
Ultraviolet Radiation
Thompson Webb, III
Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
Imbrie, John Natural Records of Climate Change
Paleoclimatology
David Welch
Paci c Biological Station, Nanaimo, Canada
Fisheries: Pacic Coast Salmon
Robin L Welcomme
Imperial College, London, UK
Freshwater Fisheries
Rober t A Weller
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA,
USA
Ocean Observing Techniques
Gunter Weller
University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK, USA
Arctic Climate Permafrost
Douglas Whelpdale
Meteorological Service of Canada, Downsview, Canada
Air Quality, Global Deposition, Dry Deposition, Wet
Munn, Robert Edward (Ted)
CONTRIBUTORS 551
Daniel R White
Honors College, Florida Atlantic University, Jupiter, FL,
USA
Modernity vs. Post-modern Environmentalism
Gilber t White
University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA
Geography Malone, Thomas F
Rodney R White
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Sustainable Cities Policies
Rober t Whittaker
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Volcanic Eruption, Krakatau
Anne Whyte
Mestor Associates, Russell, Canada
Capacity Building
Diane E Wickland
NASA, Washington, DC, USA
Large Scale BiosphereAtmosphere Experiment in Ama-
zonia (LBA)
Stephen L Willetts
The Willetts Partnership, Atherstone, UK
Toxic Wastes: Generation and Disposal: a Case Study of
UK Practice and Legislation
G R Williams
Guelph, Canada
Daisyworld Gaia Gaia Hypothesis Lovelock, James
Redeld Ratio Suess Effect
Mar tin Williams
Adelaide University, Adelaide, Australia
Desertication Desertication Convention Desertica-
tion, Denition of Deserts
Michael Williams
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Deforestation in Historic Times
Mar y P Williams Silveir a
United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, Geneva,
Switzerland
Agenda 21
Michael Winter
Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education,
Cheltenham, UK
Organic Farming and the Environment
Donna Wise
World Resources Institute (WRI), Washington, DC, USA
WRI (World Resources Institute)
A Wokaun
Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), Villigen, Switzerland
Public-driven Response to Global Environmental Change
Amanda Wolf
Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
Quotas in International Environmental Negotiations
Poh Poh Wong
National University of Singapore, Singapore
Tourism as a Global Driving Force for Environmental
Change
Philip A Wookey
Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
Tundra
Donald J Wuebbles
University of Illinois at Urban-Champaign, Urbana, IL,
USA
Depletion of Stratospheric Ozone Global Warming Poten-
tial (GWP) Lifetime (of a Gas) Ozone Depletion
Potential (ODP) Ozone Hole Residence Time (of an
Atom, Molecule or Particle)
Jih C Yang
International Center for Environment and Development,
Cairo, Egypt
Dematerialization and Sustainable Development
Ser gey Yazev
Astronomical Observatory of Irkutsk State University,
Irkutsk, Russia
Tunguska Phenomenon
Chen Yong
China Seismological Bureau, Beijing, China
Seismic Risk (and Risk Assessment)
William Young
Monash University, Victoria, Australia
Transport Infrastructure
552 CONTRIBUTORS
Eugenio Yunis
World Tourism Organization, Madrid, Spain
Policies to Achieve Sustainable Tourism
Michael Zammit Cutajar
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change,
Bonn, Germany
Climate Change: an Emerging Issue in the Global Agenda
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
and Kyoto Protocol
Joy B Zedler
University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA
Restoration, Ecosystem
Herman Zimmerman
Division of Earth Sciences, National Science Foundation,
Arlington, VA, USA
Oeschger, Hans A
Selected Abbreviations and Acronyms
AAAS American Association for the
Advancement of Science
AABW Antarctic Bottom Water
AAIW Antarctic Intermediate Water
AAM Atmospheres Angular
Momentum
AAO Antarctic Oscillation
ABA Abscisic Acid
ABA Applied Behavior Analysis
ACC Administrative Committee on
Coordination
ACC Antarctic Circumpolar Current
ACE Aerosol Characterization
Experiment
ACRIM Active Cavity Radiometer
Irradiance Monitor
ACSDE American Center for the Study
of Distance Education
ACSYS Arctic Climate System Study
ADB African Development Bank
ADCP Acoustic Doppler Current
Prolers
ADP Adenosine Diphosphate
AEM Adaptive Environmental
Management
AEP Agri-Environmental Programs
AERONET Aerosol Robotic Network
AES Atmospheric Environment
Service
AFL-CIO American Federation of Labor-
Congress of Industrial
Organizations
AFRO Regional Ofce for Africa
AGAGE Advanced Global Atmos-
pheric Gases Experiment
AGBM Ad Hoc Group on the Berlin
Mandate
AGCM Atmospheric General Circu-
lation Model
AGGG Advisory Group on Green-
house Gases
AIJ Activities-Implemented-Jointly
AIRS Atmospheric Infrared Sounder
AJDE American Journal of Distance
Education
ALE Atmospheric Lifetime
Experiment
ALE/GAGE/AGAGE Atmospheric Lifetime Experi-
ment/Global Atmospheric Gases
Experiment/Advanced Global
Atmospheric Gases Experiment
ALNs Asynchronous Learning
Networks
AM Amplitude Modulation
AMAP Arctic Monitoring and
Assessment Programme
AMIP Atmospheric Model Inter-
comparison Project
AMS Accelerator Mass Spectrometry
AMS American Meteorological
Society
AMSR-E Advanced Scanning Microwave
Radiometer
ANEN African Non-government
Organization Environment
Network
ANPP Above-ground Net Primary
Production
AO Arctic Oscillation
AOC Areas of Concern
AOGCM AtmosphereOcean General
Circulation Model
AOPC Atmospheric Observation Panel
for Climate
AOSIS Alliance of Small Island States
APAR Absorbed Photosynthetically
Active Radiation
APC Association for Progressive
Communications
APN AsiaPacic Network
ARC Alliance for Religion and
Conservation
ARGO Array for Real-time Geostrophic
Oceanography
ARM Atmospheric Radiation
Measurement
ASCEND 21 Agenda of Science for Environ-
ment and Development into the
21st Century
ASEAN South-East Asian Nations
ASPSO International Association for the
Physical Sciences of the Ocean
ASTER Advance Spaceborne Thermal
Emission and Reection
Radiometer
ATOC Acoustic Thermometer of
Ocean Climate
ATP Adenosine Tri-phosphate
ATSR Along-Track Scanning
Radiometer
AVHRR Advanced Very High-Resolution
Radiometer
554 SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS
AVU African Virtual University
AWS Automatic Weather Station
BAHC Biospheric Aspects of the
Hydrological Cycle
BALTEX Baltic Sea Experiment
BaPMON Background Air Pollution
Monitoring Network
BAS British Antarctic Survey
BAT Best Available Technology
BATNEEC Best Available Technology
not Entailing Excessive Costs
BATS BiosphereAtmosphere
Transfer Scheme
BBS Breeding Bird Survey
BC Benet Cost
BCE Before the Common Era
BDT Telecommunication Develop-
ment Bureau
BER Biosphere Enhancement Ratio
BES British Ecological Society
BFTCS Boreal Forest Transect Case
Study
BGC Biogeochemical Cycling
BIBEX Biomass Burning Experiment
BIC Bahai International Community
Biome-BGC Biome-biogeochemical Cycles
BLB Boundary-Layer Budget
BMRC Bureau of Meteorology
Research Centre
BOD Biochemical Oxygen Demand
BOREAS Boreal EcosystemAtmosphere
Study
BP Before the Present
BPOA Barbados Program Of Action
BS Black Smoke
BSAP Black Sea Action Plan
BSE Bovine Spongiform
Encephalopothy
BUND Bund fur Umvelt und
Naturschutz Deutschland
BWRs Boiling Water Reactors
BYDV Barley Yellow Dwarf Virus
CABO Centre for Agrobiological
Research
CAC Command-and-Control
CACGP Commission on Atmospheric
Chemistry and Global Pollution
CAER Community Awareness
and Emergency Response
CAG Citizen Advisory Groups
CAP Common Agricultural Policy
CARDE Canadian Armament Research
and Development Establishment
CARs Central Asian Republics
CART Cloud and Radiation Test-bed
CAS Commission for Atmospheric
Sciences
CASA CarnegieAmesStanford
Approach
CBA Cost Benet Analysis
CBD Convention on Biological
Diversity
CCAMLR Convention on the Conser-
vation of Antarctic Marine
Living Resources
CCC Canadian Climate Centre
CCC Chemical Coordinating Center
CCCO Committee on Climatic Change
and the Ocean
CCD Convention to Combat
Desertication
CCE Coordinating Center of Effects
CCFM Canadian Council of Forest
Ministers
CCN Cloud Condensation Nuclei
CCOL Co-ordination Committee on the
Ozone Layer
CCPs Capacity Controlling Parameters
CDIAC Carbon Dioxide Information
Analysis Center
CDM Clean Development Mechanism
CDS Catalogue of Data Sources
CDT Canyon Diablo Triolite
CDU Christian Democratic Union
CDW Circumpolar Deep Water
CEA Cost Effectiveness Analysis
CEA Cumulative Environmental
Assessment
CEC Cation Exchange Capacity
CEC Commission of the European
Communities
CECSD Comprehensive Experimental
Communities for Sustainable
Development
CEEC Central and Eastern European
Countries
CEF Controlled Environment
Facilitie
CEFFIC European Council of Chemical
Manufacturers Federations
CEI Central European Initiative
CEOS Committee on Earth
Observation Satellites
CEQ Council on Environment
Quality
SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS 555
CERES Cloud and Earth Radiant
Energy System
CERES Coalition for Environmentally
Responsible Economies
CERs Certied Emission Reductions
CET Central England Temperatures
CFC Chlorouorocarbon
CFS Canadian Forest Service
CGCM1 Canadian Global Coupled
Model
CGIAR Consultative Group on
International Agricultural
Research
CIA Central Intelligence Agency
CIAP Climatic Impact Assessment
Program
CIESIN Center for International Earth
Science Information Network
CIMMYT International Maize and Wheat
Improvement Center
CIS Commonwealth of Independent
States
CITES Convention on International
Trade in Endangered Species
of Wild Fauna and Flora
CIV Community Importance Value
CLAES Cryogen Limb Array Etalon
Spectrometer
CLAW Charlson, Lovelock, Andreae
and Warren
CLIC Climate and Cryosphere
Initiative
CLIMAP Climate: Long-range Investi-
gation, Mapping and Prediction
CLIVAR CLImate VARiability and
Predictability
CLRTAP Convention on Long-range
Transboundary Air Pollution
CMA Chemical Manufacturers
Association
CMEAL CO
2
Model-experiment
Activity for Improved Links
CMG Committee on Mathematical
Geophysics
CMIP Coupled Model Inter-
comparison Project
CND Campaign For Nuclear
Disarmament
CNES Centre National dEtudes
Spatiales
CNG Compressed Natural Gas
CODATA National Committee for
Committee on Data for
Science and Technology
COL Commonwealth of Learning
COMESA Community of Eastern and
Southern Africa
COP Conference of the Parties
COSPAR Committee on Space Research
CPEs Core Programmes
CR Critically Endangered
CREAD Inter-American Distance
Education Consortium
CRF Concentration Response
Function
CSA Canadian Standards Association
CSD Commission on Sustainable
Development
CSIC Consejo Superior De
Investigaciones Cient cas
CSIRO Commonwealth Scientic and
Industrial Research
Organization
CSIS Canadian Security Intelligence
Services
CSM Climate System Model
CSR Competition Stress Disturbance
CSR Corporate Social Responsibility
CST Committee on Science and
Technology
CTB Chemical Time Bomb
CTD Conductivity, Temperature, and
Depth
CTE Committee on Trade and
Environment
CVEs Collaborative Virtual
Environments
CVM Changing Values and Morality
CZCS Coastal Zone Color Scanner
CZM Coastal Zone Management
C&D Construction and Demolition
D-O Dansgaard-Oescheger
DAAC Distributed Active Archive
Center
DART Dynamics of the Arctic Treeline
DCA Detrended Correspondence
Analysis
DEC Digital Equipment Corporation
DEM Digital Elevation Model
DEOS Distance Education Online
Symposium
DFE Design-for-Environment
DGVM Dynamic Global Vegetation
Model
DIC Dissolved Inorganic Carbon
DIN Dissolved Inorganic Nitrogen
DIP Degree of Interest Principle
556 SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS
DIP Dissolved Inorganic Phase
DIS Data and Information System
DistEdNet Distance Education Net
DIWPA Diversitas Western Pacic
and Asia
DJGI Dow Jones Global Index
DJSGI Dow Jones Sustainability
Group Index
DLDC Distance Learning and
Developing Countries
DMSP Defense Meteorological
Satellite Program
DOE Department of Energy
DOLY Dynamic Global Phyto-
geography Model
DPSIR Driving ForcesPressures
StateImpactsResponses
DSM Demand Side Management
DTR Diurnal Temperature Range
DU Dobson Units
DVDs Digital Versatile Disks
DVI Dust Veil Index
DWBC Deep Western Boundary
Currents
E/MSY Extinctions Per Million Species
Years
EA Environment Agency
EAC Eco-Agricultural Counties
EAGGF European Agricultural
Guidance and Guarantee Fund
EBCM Energy Balance Climate Model
EC Electrical Conductivity
EC European Commission
ECA Economic Commission for
Africa
ECE Economic Commission for
Europe
ECLA Economic Commission for
Latin America
ECLAC Economic Commission for
Latin America and the
Caribbean
ECOSOC Economic and Social Council
ECOSOC United Nations Economic and
Social Council
ECOWAS Economic Community of West
African States
EDD Ecological Demonstration
Districts
EDF Environmental Defense Fund
EdNA Education Network Australia
EEA European Environment Agency
EETINA Environmental Education and
Training Institute of North
America
EEZ Exclusive Economic Zone
EFA Education for All
EFTA European Free Trade
Association
EIA Environmental Impact
Assessment
EIP EcoIndustrial Parks
EIRIS Ethical Investment Research
Service
EIS Environmental Impact
Statement
EITs Economies in Transition
EM Ecological Modernization
EMAN Ecological Monitoring and
Assessment Network
EMAS Environmental Management
Systems
EMEP European Monitoring and
Evaluation Programme
EMRO Regional Ofce for the
Eastern Mediterranean
EMS Environmental Management
Systems
Emwis Euro-Mediterranean Informa-
tion System
ENCOP Environment and Conicts
Project
ENMOD Environmental Modication
Techniques
ENRICH European Network for
Research in Global Change
ENSO El Nino Southern Oscillation
EOF Empirical Orthogonal Function
EOS Earth Observing System
EOSDIS Earth Observing System Data
and Information System
Component
EPA Environmental Protection
Agency
EPIC Erosion-productivity Impact
Calculator
EPOC Environment Policy Committee
ERBE Earth Radiation Budget
Experiment
ERC Emission Reduction Credit
ERS Earth Resources Satellite
ERS European Remote Sensing
Satellite
ERSC Environmental Remote Sensing
Center
ES Environmental Sustainability
SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS 557
ESA Environmentally Sensitive Area
ESA European Space Agency
ESAMI Eastern and Southern African
Management Institute
ESCAP Economic and Social
Commission for Asia and
the Pacic
ESE Earth Science Enterprise
ESM Earth System Model
EST Environmentally Sustainable
Transport
ET Emissions Trading
ETH Eidgenoessische Techni-
sche Hochschule
EU European Union
EWEs Extreme Weather Events
EXPRESSO Experiment for Regional
Sources and Sinks of Oxidants
FACE Free Air CO
2
Enrichment
FAD Feed Attractant Devices
FAGS Federation of Astronomical and
Geophysical Data Analysis
Services
FAO Food and Agricultural
Organization
FAR First Assessment Report
FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation
FCCC Framework Convention on
Climate Change
FDI Foreign Direct Investment
FEMA Federal Emergency
Management Agency
FES Financial Economic
Stimulation
FIA Forest Inventory and Analysis
FIDIC Federation Internationale
des Ingenieurs-Conseils
FIFE First ISLSCP Field Experiment
FII Federated Information
Infrastructure
FM Frequency Modulation
FoE Friends of the Earth
FPAR Fraction of Photosynthetically
Active Radiation
FRC Food Conversion Ratio
FRN Swedish Counsel for Planning
and Coordination of Research
FSC Forest Stewardship Council
FTE Foundation of Economic
Teaching
FTP File Transfer Protocol
FTPP/FAO Forests, Trees and People
Newsletter
FWCC First World Climate Conference
FWCW Fourth World Conference on
Women
GDAY Generic Decomposition and
Yield
GAAP Generally Acceptable
Accreditation Principles
GAIM Global Analysis, Interpretation
and Modeling
GAME GEWEX Asian Monsoon
Experiment
GARP Global Atmospheric Research
Program
GATS General Agreement for Trade
in Services
GATT General Agreement of Tariffs
and Trade
GAW Global Atmosphere Watch
GCDIS Global Change Data and
Information System
GCIP Continental-scale Inter-
national Project
GCM General Circulation Model
GCMD Global Change Master
Directory
GCOS Global Climate Observing
System
GCR Galactic Cosmic Ray
GCSS GEWEX Cloud System Study
GCTE Global Change and Terre-
strial Ecosystems
GCTE-NEWS Global Change in Terrestrial
Ecosystems Network of
Ecosystem Warming Study Sites
GCTE/IGBP Global Change of Terrestrial
Ecosystems/International
GeosphereBiosphere
Programme
GDP Gross Domestic Product
GDPS Global Data Processing System
GEC Global Environmental Change
GECHS Global Environmental Change
and Human Security
GEF Global Environment Facility
GEIA Global Emissions Inventory
Activity
GEMS Global Environment Monitoring
System
GEN Global Environmental-labeling
Network
GEO Global Environment Outlook
GEOSECS Geochemical Ocean Sections
558 SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS
GESAMP Joint Group of Experts on the
Scientic Aspects of Marine
Environmental Protection
GEWEX Global Energy and Water
Cycle Experiment
GFDL Geophysical Fluid Dynamics
Laboratory
GIA Glacial Isostatic Adjustment
GIN Greenland, Iceland and
Norwegian
GIS Geographic(al) Information
Systems
GISP Global Invasive Strategies
Program
GISS Goddard Institute for Space
Studies
GIWA Global International Waters
Assessment
GKD Global Knowledge for
Development
GLA Goddard Laboratory for
Atmospheres
GLASOD Global Assessment of Soil
Degradation
GLOBE Global Learning and Obser-
vations to Benet the
Environment
GLOBEC Global Ocean Ecosystem
Dynamics
GLOSS Global Ocean Sea Level
Observing System
GLWQA Great Lakes Water Quality
Agreement
GMOs Genetically Modied
Organisms
GMT Greenwich Mean Time
GNP Gross National Product
GO
3
OS Global Ozone Observing
System
GOALS Global Ocean Atmosphere
Land System
GODAE Global Ocean Data Assimi-
lation Experiment
GOES Geostationary Operational
Environmental Satellite
GOOS Global Ocean Observing
System
GOS Global Observing System
GPCC Global Precipitation Climato-
logy Center
GPCP Global Precipitation Climato-
logy Project
GPI Genuine Progress Indicator
GPP Gross Primary Productivity
GPS Global Positioning System
GRDC Global Runoff Data Center
GRI Global Reporting Initiative
GRID Global Resource Information
Database
GRIP Greenland Ice Core Project
GSSD Global System for Sustainable
Development
GTOS Global Terrestrial Observing
System
GTS Global Telecommunication
System
GTU/GTTI Global Telecommunication
University/Global Telecomm-
unication Training Institute
GUO Global Urban Observatory
GVaP Global Water Vapor Project
GWP Global Warming Potential
GWP Gross World Productivity
HABs Harmful Algal Blooms
HACCP Hazard Analysis Critical
Control Point
HadCM2 Hadley Center for Climate
Research and Prediction
HadRT Hadley Center, United
Kingdom Meteorological Ofce
HALOE Halogen Occultation
Experiment
HAO High Altitude Observatory
HAPEX Hydrologic Atmospheric
Pilot Experiment
HCFC Hydrochlorouorocarbon
HDF Hierarchical Data Format
HDGCP Human Dimensions of
Global Change Programme
HDPE High Density Polyethylene
HELCOM Helsinki Commission
HFC Hydrouorocarbon
HIRS High Resolution Infrared
Sounder
HLW High Level Waste
HMs Heavy Metals
HNC Hoy No Circula
HNR HumanNature Relationship
HPS Hantavirus Pulmonary
Syndrome
HRDI High Resolution Doppler
Imager
HRDLS High Resolution Dynamic Limb
Sounder
HRV High Resolution Visible
HSB A Humidity Sounder for Brazil
SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS 559
HWRP Hydrology and Water
Resources Programme
IA Integrated Assessment
IAEA International Atomic
Energy Agency
IAG International Association
of Geodesy
IAGA International Association
of Geomagnetism and
Aeronomy
IAHS International Association
of Hydrological Sciences
IAI Inter-American Institute for
Global Change Research
IAM Integrated Assessment Model
IAMAS International Association of
Meteorology and Atmos-
pheric Science
IAPSO International Association for the
Physical Sciences of the Oceans
IASPEI International Association of
Seismology and Physics of
the Earths Interior
IAVCEI International Association of
Volcanology and Chemistry
of the Earths Interior
IBOY International Biodiversity
Observation Year
IBP International Biological
Programme
IBS Institute for Biological and
Chemical Research on
Field Crops and Herbage
ICACGP International Commission of
Atmospheric Chemistry and
Global Pollution
ICAE International Commission
for Atmospheric Electricity
ICAO International Civil Aviation
Organization
ICC International Chamber of
Commerce
ICCD International Convention on
Combating Desertication
and Drought
ICCl International Commission of
Climate
ICCP International Commission for
Clouds and Precipitation
ICDM International Commission for
Dynamic Meteorology
ICED International Center for
Environment and Development
ICEE Independent Commission on
Environmental Education
ICES International Council for the
Exploration of the Sea
ICESat Ice Sheet Altimetry Mission
ICLEI International Council for
Local Environmental Initiatives
ICMMA International Commission of
Meteorology for the Middle
Atmosphere
ICOLP International Cooperative for
Ozone Layer Protection
ICPAE International Commission for
Planetary Atmospheres and
their Evolution
ICPD International Conference on
Population and Development
ICPM International Commission for
Polar Meteorology
ICPs International Coordinating
Programmes
ICRAF International Council for
Research in Agroforestry
ICRC International Committee of the
Red Cross
ICREA International Commodity-rela-
ted Environmental Agreements
ICRP International Commission on
Radiation Protection
ICSU International Council for
Science
ICT Information and Communi-
cation Technologies
ICZM Integrated Coastal Zone
Management
IDEP Institute for Economic
Development and Planning
IDGEC Institutional Dimensions of
Global Environmental Change
IDNDR The International Decade for
Natural Disaster Reduction
IDRC International Development
Research Center
IDWSSD International Drinking Water
Supply and Sanitation Decade
IEA Integrated Environmental
Assessment
IEA International Energy Agency
IEC Information, Education,
Communication
IEEA Integrated Environmental
and Economic Accounting
IEEP International Environmental
Education Program
560 SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS
IFCS International Forum on
Chemical Safety
IFF Intergovernmental Forum
on Forests
IFIAS International Federation of
Institutes for Advanced Study
IFRC International Federation of the
Red Cross and Red Crescent
IFS Integrated Farming Systems
IGAC International Global
Atmospheric Chemistry
IGBP International Geosphere-Bio-
sphere Programme
IGBP DIS International Geosphere Bio-
sphere Programme Data and
Information System
IGBP LUCC International Geosphere Bio-
sphere Programme Land-Use
and Land-Cover Change
IGEMS Integrated Global Earth
Monitoring Systems
IGFA International Group of
Funding Agencies
IGIDR Indira Gandhi Institute of
Development Research
IGO International Governmental
Organization
IGOS Integrated Global Observing
Strategy
IGY International Geophysical Year
IHD International Hydrological
Decade
IHDP International Human Dimen-
sions Programme on Global
Environmental Change
IHP International Hydrological
Program
IIASA International Institute for
Applied Systems Analysis
IIED International Institute for
Environment and Development
IIP Instituto De Investigaciones
Pesqueras
IISD International Institute for
Sustainable Development
IJC International Joint Commission
ILEC International Lake Environment
Committee Foundation
ILO International Labor
Organization
ILTER International LTER
ILW Intermediate Level Wastes
IMAGE Integrated Model to Assess the
Greenhouse Effect
IMAR Inner Mongolia Autonomous
Region
IMF International Monetary Fund
IMI International Meteorological
Institute
IMO International Maritime
Organization
IMO International Meteorological
Organization
IMS Information Management
System
INC Intergovernmental Negotiating
Committee
IOC Intergovernmental Oceano-
graphic Commission
IOC International Ozone
Commission
IOI International Ocean Institute
IOJ The Institute of Jainology
IOMC Inter-organization Program for
the Sound Management of
Chemicals
ION International Ocean Network
IPAT I is a Function of Population
Size P, Af uence Per Capita
A, and Technological
Development T
IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change
IPCS International Program
on Chemical Safety
IPF Intergovernmental Panel
on Forests
IPM Integrated Pest Management
IPO International Project Of ce
IPPC International Plant
Protection Convention
IPPs Independent Power Producers
IPR Intellectual Property Right
IPS Investment Promotion Service
IR Infrared
IRC International Radiation
Commission
IRI International Research Institute
for Climate Prediction
IRPTC International Register of Poten-
tially Toxic Chemicals
IRRC Investor Responsibility
Research Center
IRRI International Rice Research
Institute
ISAAA International Service for
the Acquisition of Agri-
Biotech Applications
SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS 561
ISAMS Improved Stratospheric and
Mesospheric Sounder
ISCCP International Satellite Cloud
Climatology Project
ISEE International Society for
Ecological Economics
ISEW Index of Sustainable
Economic Welfare
ISLSCP International Satellite Land
Surface Climatology Project
ISO International Organization
For Standardization
ISRIC International Soil Reference
and Information Center
ISSC International Social Science
Council
ITCZ Inter-Tropical Convergence
Zone
ITEX International Tundra
Experiment
ITQ Individual Transferable
Quota
ITU International Telecomm-
unication Union
IUBS International Union of
Biological Sciences
IUCN World Conservation Union
IUGG International Union of
Geodesy and Geophysics
IUMS International Union of
Microbiological Societies
IVI Ice-Core Volcanic Index
IWC International Whaling
Commission
IWRB International Waterfowl and
Wetlands
JEMA Japan Electrical Manufac-
turers Association
JERS Japanese Earth Resources
Satellite
JGOFS Joint Global Ocean Flux Study
JOC Joint Organizing Committee
JPIC Justice, Peace and Integrity
of Creation
JPSS Just, Participatory and
Sustainable Society
JSC Joint Scientic Committee
KLD Kinder Lydenburg and Domini
KRIP Kano River Irrigation Project
LAI Leaf Area Index
LANDSAT Land Satellite
LAR Leaf Area Ratio
LBA Large Scale Biosphere
Atmosphere Experiment in
Amazonia
LCA Life Cycle Assessment
LCDW Lower Circumpolar Deep
Water
LDCs Less Developed Countries
LDEO Lamont Doherty Earth
Observatory
LEAD Leadership for Environment
and Development
LETS Local Employment and
Trading Schemes
LGM Last Glacial Maximum
LHS Leaf Height Seed
LI Low Intensity
LIA Little Ice Age
LIFDC Low Income Food Decit
Countries
LIS Laurentide Ice Sheet
LLN Louvain-La-Neuve
LLW Low Level Wastes
LMD Laboratoire De Meteorologie
Dynamique
LMF Leaf Mass Fraction
LMOs Living Modied Organisms
LNWT Low and Non-waste
Technologies
LOAEL Lowest Observable Adverse
Effect Level
LOICZ LandOcean Interactions in
the Coastal Zone
LOS Law of the Sea
LPG Liquid Petroleum Gas
LPHC Low ProbabilityHigh
Consequence
LRTAP Convention on Long-Range
Transboundary Air Pollution
LTER Long-term Ecological
Research
LUCC Land Use and Land Cover
Change Project
LUCF Land-use Change and Forestry
LULU Locally Unacceptable Land Use
LWF Learning Without Frontiers
MAAs Mycosporine-like Amino Acids
MAAT Mean Annual Air Temperatures
MAB Man and the Biosphere
MAC Maximum Admissible
Concentration
562 SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS
MACS Mobile Air Conditioning
Society
MAFF Ministry of Agriculture,
Fisheries and Food
MAI Multilateral Agreement on
Investment
MAP Mediterranean Action Plan
MARC Monitoring and Assessment
Research Center
MARPOL Marine Pollution Convention
MARPOL/73 International Convention for
the Prevention of Pollution
from Ships, 1973
MASTER Method for the Analysis
of the Substance Concentrations
of Treatment End-products
and Recycling Goods
MBL Marine Biological Laboratory
MBLA Multi-beam Laser Altimeter
MCS Monitoring, Control and
Surveillance
MCS Multiple Chemical Sensitivity
Syndrome
MCSD Mediterranean Commission
on Sustainable Development
MEAs Multilateral Environmental
Agreements
MEDPOL Mediterranean Pollution
Program
MEPC Marine Environment Protection
Committee
METAP Mediterranean Environment
Technical Assistance Program
MFA Materials Flow Accounting
MGO Main Geophysical Observatory
MIDAS Minimal Impact Dairy Systems
MINK Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska,
Kansas
MIPS Material Input Per Service Unit
MIS Marine Isotope Stage
MISRs Multi-angle Imaging
Spectrometers
MISSR Multi-angle Imaging
Spectroradiometer
MIT Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
MITI Ministry of International Trade
and Industry
MJO Madden-Julian Oscillation
MJRA Michael Jantzi Research
Associates
MlDAs Maritime Industrial
Development Areas
MLS Microwave Limb Sounder
MODIS Moderate Resolution
Imaging Spectrometer
MOO Multiple Object-oriented
MOP Meeting of the Parties
MOPITT Measurement of Pollution in
the Troposphere
MPC Maximum Permissible
Concentration
MRT Mean Residence Time
MSC Meteorological Service of
Canada
MSCE&W Meteorological Synthesizing
Center East & West
MSEY Maximum Sustainable
Economic Yield
MSS Multi-Spectral Scanner
MSU Microwave Sounding Unit
MSW Municipal Solid Waste
MSY Maximum Sustainable Yield
MTOs Multimodal Transport Operators
MUDs Multiple User Domains
MUSE Multiple User Social
Environments
MWP Medieval Warm Period
NAAQS National Ambient Air Quality
Standards
NADW North Atlantic Deep Water
NAFO Northwest Atlantic Fisheries
Organization
NAFTA North American Free Trade
Agreement
NAM Northern Hemisphere
Annular Mode
NAO North Atlantic Oscillation
NAPAP National Acid Precipitation
Assessment Program
NAR Net Assimilation Rate
NAS National Academy of Sciences
NASA National Aeronautics and Space
Administration
NASDA National Space Development
Agency
NAST National Assessment Synthesis
Team
NATO North Atlantic Treaty
Organization
NATT Northern Australia Tropical
Transect
NBII National Biological Information
Infrastructure
NBP Net Biome Production
NCAR National Center For
Atmospheric Research
SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS 563
NCDC National Climatic Data
Center
NCEP National Center for Environ-
mental Prediction
NCPC National Cleaner Production
Center
NCSA National Center for Super-
computing Applications
NDIR Non-dispersive Infrared
NDVI Normalized Difference
Vegetation Index
NECC North Equatorial Countercurrent
NECT North East China Transect
NEDI National Environmental Data
Index
NEP Net Ecosystem Production
NEPA National Environment Policy
Act
NERC Natural Environment Research
Council
NESDIS National Environmental
Satellite, Data, and Information
Service
NetCDF Network Common Data Form
NEUC North Equatorial Undercurrent
NFIP National Flood Insurance
Program
NGDC National Geophysical Data
Center
NGO Non-Governmental
Organization
NHANES II National Health and Nutrition
Examination Survey
NHC National Hurricane Center
NHMSs National Hydrometeorological
Services
NIEO New International Economic
Order
NIMBY Not In My Backyard
NIR Near-infrared
NIS Network Information System
NMAT Nighttime Marine Air
Temperature
NMHSs National Meteorological and
Hydrological Services
NMVOCs Non-methane Volatile Organic
Compounds
NOA Needs, Opportunities and
Abilities
NOAA National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration
NOAA/AVHRR Advanced Very High
Resolution Radiometer
National Oceanographic
and Atmospheric Agency
NOAA/CMDL National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration/
Climate Monitoring and
Diagnostics Laboratory
NOAEL No-Observable Adverse Effect
Level
NODC National Ocean Data Center
NPF Northern Prawn Fishery
NPOESS National POESS
NPP Net Primary Production
NPPs Nuclear Power Plants
NPV Net Present Value
NRC Nuclear Regulatory
Commission
NRCS Natural Resources Conservation
Service
NSA Nitrate Sensitive Area
NSDAF National Soils Data Access
Facility
NSF National Science Foundation
NSM New Social Movement
NSOW Nordic Sea Overow Water
NSR Northern Sea Route
NVZ Nitrate Vulnerable Zone
NWIS National Water Information
System
NWT Northwestern Territories
OALOS Ocean Affairs and Law
of the Sea
OCh Organizational Change
OCM Ocean Color Monitor
OCS Photolysis of Carbonyl Sulde
ODA Ofcial Development
Assistance
ODP Ocean Drilling Program
ODP Ozone Depletion Potential
ODS Ozone Depleting Substances
OECD Organisation for Economic
Co-Operation and Development
OFIA Ontario Forest Industries
Association
OGCM Oceanic General Circulation
Model
OLS Operational Linescan System
OOPC Ocean Observation Panel for
Climate
OPEC Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries
ORNL Oak Ridge National Laboratory
564 SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS
ORNL DAAC Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Distributed Active Archive
Center
OSPARCOM Oslo and Paris Commission
OSY Optimum Sustainable Yield
OTAG Ozone Transport Assessment
Group
OTEC Ocean Thermal Energy
Conversion
OWC Oscillating Water Column
PAC Public Advisory Committees
PAGES Past Global Changes
PAHO Pan American Sanitary Bureau
PARN Pacic and Arctic Railway and
Navigation Company
PBL Planetary Boundary Layer
PCAST Presidents Council of Advisors
on Science and Technology
PCBS Programme on Capacity
Building in Science
PCC Program Coordinating Center
PDO Pacic Decadal Oscillation
PEM Particle Environment Monitor
PEPC Phosphoenol Pyruvate
Carboxylase
PERSIANN Precipitation Estimation from
Remotely Sensed Information
using Articial Neural
Networks
PET Potential Evapotranspiration
PETA People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals
PFC Peruorocarbons
PFRA Prairie Farm Rehabilitation
Administration
PFT Plant Functional Type
PGF Pressure Gradient Force
PGRFA Plant Genetic Resources for
Food and Agriculture
PhAA Provision of Physical
Alternatives, (Re)arrangements
PIA Participatory Integrated
Assessment
PIC Prior Informed Consent
PMIP Paleoclimate Modeling
Intercomparison Project
PNA Pacic North American
Teleconnection Pattern
PNA PacicNorth American
POES Polar Orbiting Environmental
Satellites
POP Persistent Organic Pollutant
PPP Polluter Pay Principle
PR Precipitation Radar
PREPARE Preventive Environmental
Protection Approaches in
Europe
PRISMA Project on Industrial Successes
with Waste Prevention
PSE Producer Subsidy Equivalent
PSI PressureStateImpact
PSMSL Permanent Service for Mean
Sea Level
PTA Preferential Trade Area for
Eastern and Southern Africa
PTWI Provisional Tolerable Weekly
Intake
PWMA Provincial Wildlife Management
Area
QBO Quasi-Biennial Oscillation
RAINS Regional Air Pollution
Information and Simulation
RCM Regional Climate Model
RCMs RadiativeConvective Models
RE Reduction In Exposure
RETs Renewable Energy
Technologies
RGR Relative Growth Rate
RIHMI Russian Research Institute
for Hydrometeorological
Information
RIOD International NGO Network
on Desertication and
Drought
RIS Reservoir-induced Seismicity
RLA Red List Authorities
RMMs Risk Mitigation Measures
RSAS Royal Swedish Academy
of Sciences
RSP Regional Seas Programme
RTD Research, Technological
Development and
Demonstration
RWMAC Government Radioactive Waste
Management Advisory
Committee
SA Social Assessment
SAD Surface Area Density
SAE Society of Automobile
Engineers
SAFARI South African Fire-Atmosphere
Research Initiative
SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS 565
SAGE Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas
Experiment
SAIDE South African Institute for
Distance Education
SAL Structural Adjustment Loans
SALT Savannas in the Long-term
SAMW Sub-Antarctic Mode Water
SAR Synthetic Aperture Radar
SAS Statistical Analysis Software
SBI Subsidiary Body for
Implementation
SBSTA Subsidiary Body for Scientic
and Technological Advice
SC-IDNDR Special Committee for the
International Decade for Natural
Disaster Reduction
SCANTRAN Scandinavian Transect
SCAR Scientic Committee on
Antarctic Research
SCEP Study of Critical Environmental
Problems
SCOPE Scientic Committee on
Problems of the Environment
SCOR Scientic Committee on
Oceanic Research
SCOSTEP Science Committee on
Solar Terrestrial Physics
SCOWAR Scientic Committee on Water
Research
SCUBA Self-contained Underwater
Breathing Apparatus
SCIGBP Scientic Committee for the
International Geosphere
Biosphere Programme
SEA Strategic Environmental
Assessment
SEARO Regional Ofce for South-east
Asia
SEDI Committee on the Study of the
Earths Deep Interior
SEP Swiss Eco-Points
SFA Substance Flow Analysis
SFM Sustainable Forest Management
SGOMSEC Scientic Group on
Methodologies for the Safety
Evaluation of Chemicals
SIA Social Impact Assessment
SIDS Small Island Developing States
SIO Scripps Institution of
Oceanography
SLOSH Sea, Lake and Overland Surges
from Hurricanes
SLP Sea Level Pressure
SMAP Short and Medium Term
Priority Environment Action
Program
SMIC Study of Mans Impact on
Climate
SMM Solar Maximum Mission
SMOW Standard Mean Ocean Water
SMS Social Modeling and Support
SNA System of National Account
SOE State of the Environment
Reports
SOI Southern Oscillation Index
SOIREE Southern Ocean Iron Release
Experiment
SOLAS Safety of Life at Sea
SOLSTICE Solar/Stellar Irradiance
Comparison Experiment
SOM Soil Organic Matter
SOYGRO SOYbean GROwth Simulation
Model
SPARC Stratospheric Processes and
their Role in Climate
SPI Sustainable Process Index
SPOT Syst` eme Pour lObservation
de la Terre
SPS Application of Sanitary and
Phytosanitary Measures
SPSS Statistical Package for Social
Sciences
SRES Special Report on Emission
Scenarios
SSA Stratospheric Sulfate Aerosol
SSM Soft Systems Methodology
SSS Sea Surface Salinity
SST Sea Surface Temperature
STAP Scientic and Technical
Advisory Panel
STARs Special Target Areas of
Research
START Global Change System for
Analysis, Research and Training
STC Scientic and Technical
Committee
STF Subtropical Front
STP Standard Temperature and
Pressure
SUBSTA Subsidiary Body for Science
and Technological Advice
SUCROS Simple and Universal CROp
Growth Simulator
SUSIM Solar Ultraviolet Spectral
Irradiance Monitor
SWCC Second World Climate
Conference
566 SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS
SWIR Short-Wave Infrared
SWMA National Wildlife Refuge
TDE Throughfall Displacement
Experiment
TEAP Technology and Economic
Assessment Panel
TEK Traditional Ecological
Knowledge
TEM Terrestrial Ecosystem Model
TFIAM Task Force on Integrated
Assessment Modeling
TFQ Transferable Fisheries Quota
TFR Total Fertility Rate
THC Thermohaline Circulation
TIR Thermal Infrared
TIROS-I Television and Infrared
Observation Satellite
TNCs Transnational corporations
TOC Technical Options Committee
TOGA Tropical Ocean Global
Atmosphere
TOMS Total Ozone Mapping
Spectrometer
TRACE-A Transport and Atmospheric
Chemistry Near the
Equator-Atlantic
TRIPS Trade-Related Aspects of
Intellectual Property Rights
TRMM Tropical Rainfall Measuring
Mission
TVA Tennessee Valley Authority
TVE Township and Village
Enterprises
TWAS Third World Academy
of Sciences
UARS Upper Atmosphere Research
Satellite
UCAR University Corporation for
Atmospheric Research
UCDW Upper Circumpolar Deep Water
UCL Urban Canopy Layer
UCLA University of Los Angeles
UCT Coordinated Universal Time
UHI Urban Heat Island
UKMO United Kingdom Meteorological
Ofce
ULYSSES Urban Lifestyles, Sustainability
and Integrated Environmental
Assessment
UN United Nations
UNILO United Nations International
Labor Organization
UNCCD United Nations Convention
to Combat Desertication
UNCED United Nations Conference
on Environment and
Development
UNCHE United Nations Conference
on the Human Environment
UNCHS United Nations Centre for
Human Settlements
UNCLOS United Nations Conference
on the Law of the Sea
UNCSD United Nations Commission
on Sustainable Development
UNCTAD United Nations Conference
on Trade and Development
UNDP United Nations Development
Program
UNECE United Nations Economic
Commission for Europe
UNEP United Nations Environment
Programme
UNEP-WMO United Nations Environment
Program-World Meteorological
Organization
UNESCO United Nations Educational
Scientic and Cultural
Organization
UNFCC United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate
Change
UNFPA United Nations Population Fund
UNGA United Nations General
Assembly
UNGASS Special Session of the United
Nations General Assembly
UNHCR United Nations High
Commission for Refugees
UNICEF United Nations Childrens Fund
UNIDO United Nations Industrial
Development Organization
UNITAR United Nations Institute
for Training and Research
UNSCEAR United Nations Scientic
Committee on the Effects of
Atomic Radiation
UNU United Nations University
UNU ZERI United Nations University Zero
Emissions Research Initiative
URL Unique Resource Locator
USDA United States Department
of Agriculture
SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS 567
USEPA United States Environmental
Protection Agency
USFS US Forest Service
USGCRP US Global Change Research
Program
USGS US Geological Survey
USLE Universal Soil Loss Equation
USSR Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics
VEC Valued Ecosystem Component
VEI Volcanic Explosivity Index
VEMAP Vegetation Ecosystem Model
and Analysis Project
VIRS Visible and Infrared Scanner
VLBI Very Long Baseline (Radio)
Interferometry
VLCCs Very Large Crude Carriers
VNIR Visible and Near-Infrared
VOICES Vision of International Charter
on the Environment by Students
VOS Voluntary Observing Ship
VRML Virtual Reality Modeling
Language
WAIS West Antarctic Ice Sheet
WBCSD World Business Council for
Sustainable Development
WCASP World Climate Applications
and Services Programme
WCC World Council of Churches
WCDMP World Climate Data and
Monitoring Programme
WCED World Commission on
Environment and Development
WCIRP World Climate Impact
Assessment and Response
Strategies Programme
WCP World Climate Programme
WCRP World Climate Research
Programme
WDC World Data Center
WEC World Energy Council
WEDO Womens Environment and
Development Organization
WEPP Water Erosion Point Predictor
WFC World Food Council
WGMS World Glacier Monitoring
Service
WHA World Health Assembly
WHO World Health Organization
WICEMII World Industry Conference
on Environmental Management
WINDII Wind Imaging Interferometer
WMO World Meteorological
Oganization
WMO/IMO World Meteorological
Organization/International
Meteorological Organization
WOC World Ocean Circulation
WOCE World Ocean Circulation
Experiment
WorLD World Links for Development
WPRO Regional Ofce for the
Western Pacic
WQB Water Quality Board
WRI World Resources Institute
WSSD World Summit on Social
Development
WTO World Tourism Organization
WTO World Trade Organization
WWF World Wildlife Fund
WWW World Weather Watch
YD Younger Dryas
Index
Abidjan, Cote dIvoire 3:578
Aboriginal re regimes 5:319
Above-ground net primary production (ANPP) 2:570
Abrahamic faiths 5:461
Absolute humidity 1:432
Absorbed photosynthetically active radiation (APAR) 2:202
Abutilon theophrasti 2:214
Abyssocottus 3:414
Accidental disruptions 5:273
Acer rubrum 2:83
Achaean eon 2:297
Acid rain 1:318, 4:74, 5:498
Acid sulfate soils 3:151
Acidic deposition 4:450
Acidi cation 2:127
Acoustic thermometry 1:161
ACRIM-III 1:75
Active Cavity Radiometer Irradiance Monitor (ACRIM) 1:732
Adalia bipunctata 2:161
Adaptation
applications 4:83
context 4:80
de nitions 4:80
determination of need 4:82
history 4:80
insect pests 3:384
private sector corporations and businesses 4:83
reasons for assessment 4:81
socio-economic systems 4:83
species 2:160, 4:83
strategies 2:79, 4:80
Adaptive ecosystem, monitoring 4:120
Adaptive environmental management (AEM) 4:139
Adaptive management 5:400
strategies 4:179
Adaptive strategies 2:482
ADCP 1:70
Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) 2:191, 194
ADEOS satellite series 1:80
Advanced very high pressure radiometer (AVHRR) 2:572
Advanced very high resolution radiometer (AVARR) 2:528
Aedes aegypti 2:163
Aeronautical Meteorology Programme 1:758
Aerosol Characterization Experiment (ACE) 2:43
Aerosols 1:26, 387
anthropogenic 1:164
atmospheric 1:317
concentrations 1:180
effects on climate 1:162
effects on clouds 1:165
effects on stratospheric chemistry 1:680
future effects 1:166
gas phase precursors 1:164
mineral 1:347
secondary sources 1:163
sources 1:163
stratospheric sulfate (SSA) 1:483
sulfate 3:182
Afar Depression 1:335
Afar Desert 1:339
Afforestation 3:7
environmental impacts 3:156
Africa
tourism 3:626
wetlands 3:399
Agarwal, Anil 4:140
AGCMs 1:203, 287, 291, 292
Agenda 21 4:140, 178, 205, 363, 473, 5:427, 431
contents 4:141
further program 4:142
implementation 4:142
programme 4:461
review 4:142
Agenda setting 5:57
Aggregate extraction 3:342
Aging population
demographics 3:277
dependency 3:281
future alternatives 3:282
regional variations 3:279
rejuvenation 3:279
Agni 5:305
Agrarian transformation 5:79
Agricultural Meteorology Programme 1:758
Agricultural policy 4:358
pricing policy examples 4:359
schematic presentation 4:359
Agricultural production 2:241
Agriculture
and environment, global views 3:190
Chinese 3:431
climate change 3:236
credit policy 4:361
environmental and public health concerns 3:189
environmental policies 4:361
extensive cereal cultivation 3:228
geography of intensi cation 3:164
intensi cation 3:164, 166
Java 3:159
western Europe 3:162
intensive 3:10, 186, 352
nitrogen cycle 3:500
nitrogen uses 3:499
property rights policy 4:361
research and technology policy 4:360
Rhine Basin 3:106
salinity 3:559
subsidies 3:168
sustainable development 4:358
water resources 3:363
water use 3:89
see also Organic farming
Agroforestry 3:172
damar 3:176
global climate change 3:177
history 3:173
literature 3:173
new systems 3:174
research 3:173
system analysis 3:174
temperate systems 3:177
traditional knowledge 3:173
Agrosystem, complex man-made 3:175
AIDS 5:214
Air
afforestation impacts 3:158
chemical composition 1:319
composition changes 3:181
Air monitoring programs 1:177
A r Mountains 1:338
570 INDEX
Air pollution 1:177, 2:118, 3:148, 678, 4:74, 486
acidifying 4:450
and climate change 3:650
emissions 4:485
fossil fuels 3:649
historical perspective 3:649
potential impacts on climate change 3:652
regional responses 4:515
temperate coniferous forests 2:563
tourism contribution 3:614
urban 3:683
see also LRTAP; RAINS
Air pressure and wind 1:224, 225
Air quality 3:653
global 1:177
standards 3:680, 4:485
urban 3:681
Air temperatures, past 2:547
Air trafc 3:178
scheduled ights 3:640
Air travel 3:644
Airborne sensors 2:524
Aircraft emissions 3:178
Akash 5:304
Alaska, oil industry 3:527
Albedo 1:27, 182, 342, 2:247
denition 1:182
ground-level measurements 1:182
low solar zenith angle 1:183
spectral 1:182
surface 1:183
Algae, harmful 3:380
Algae-elds 4:522
Algal bloom 3:548
Allergens 3:653
Allometric coefcient 2:135
Allometric growth 2:135
Alpine areas 2:75
Alpine plants 2:162
Aluminum oxide 1:155
Amazon Basin
chemical time bomb 3:111
deforestation 3:255
habitat fragmentation 3:255
mercury cycle 3:111
Amazonia, LBA 2:383
American Chamber of Horrors 5:51
American Federation of Labor Congress of Industrial Organizations
(AFL-CIO) 5:251
AMIP (Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project) 1:756
Ammonia 1:163, 2:433, 443
anthropogenic emissions 3:46
Anarchism 5:439
Ancient teachings 5:470
Andersen, Stephen O 4:143
Anekantavada 5:344
Angiosperms 2:135
Angular momentum 1:211
Animal liberation 5:234
Animal physiology 2:136
Animal production 3:186
environmental impacts 3:189
Animal rights 5:235
Animal sanctuaries 5:347
Animal sources, methane emissions 3:222
Animal wastes 3:188
disposal problems 3:188
methane emissions 3:222
Animals
abundance 2:60
climate change impacts 2:60
distribution 2:60
distributional shifts 2:62
ecology 2:289
endangered species 4:201
extinction 2:57
impact of global environmental change 2:56
migration routes 2:549
physiology 2:136
phytophagous 2:471
plant migration by 2:84
predicting responses to global changes 2:65
Annual average temperature 1:371
Anoxia in coastal waters 3:109
Antarctic 2:74
Antarctic Bottom Water 1:189
Antarctic ice cores 1:188
Antarctic ice sheet 1:186
Antarctic Oscillation (AAO) 1:202
Antarctic ozone hole 1:148
Antarctic upper atmosphere 1:186
Antarctica 1:21, 184, 648
atmosphere 1:188
climate 1:185
geography 1:184
geology 1:184
ice loss 1:467
international research 1:189
ocean 1:188
paleoclimate 1:188
physical characteristics 1:185
sea ice 1:188
weather 1:185
Anthropocene 1:189
Anthropocentrism 5:232
strong 5:232
weak 5:233
see also Non-anthropocentrism
Anthropogenic, use of term 3:190
Anthropogenic emissions
ammonia 3:46
carbon 3:35
consumption vs. production 3:58
global trends 3:58
nitrogen 3:45
nitrogen oxides (NO
x
) 3:45
Anthropogenic ows vs. natural ows 3:57
Anthropogenic impacts 2:140
Anthropogenic metabolism
cities 3:67
environmental legacies 3:54
future strategies 3:69
legacies derived from 3:67
limits at back end and not at front side 3:68
phenomenology 3:55
sinks 3:68
Anthropogeomorphology 1:402
Anthropology and global environmental change 5:163
Anthroposphere, metabolism 3:55
Anthroposystem, metabolism 3:77
Anticyclone 1:191
Anti-personnel mines 3:146
Ants, leaf-cutting 2:590
AOGCMs 1:288, 290, 524
Apah 5:305
APN (AsiaPacic Network) 4:143
Appalachian Mountain Club 5:243
Applications of Meteorology Programme 1:758
Applied geomorphology 1:402
Aquaculture 3:9
Asia 3:196
environmental issues 3:200
INDEX 571
overview 3:190
salmon farming 3:200
Aquaducts 3:644
Aquatic ecosystems
aging 2:458
redox potentials 3:108
Aquatic organisms 2:378
Aquifer recharge 1:341
Arable cultivation 3:501
Aral Sea 3:562, 4:533
attempts to save 4:535
demise of 4:533
prole 4:534
protection 4:535
Arboviral diseases 3:692
Arctic 2:74
Arctic Climate System Study (ACSYS) 1:269
Arctic environment, climate change 3:522
Arctic Ocean 1:199
Arctic Oscillation (AO) 1:201
Arctic Oscillation (AO) index 1:202
Arctic ozone hole 1:150
Arctic plants 2:162
Arctic tundra 2:594
Argentiere glacier 1:505
Argentina, terrestrial transects 2:355
Aridity
causes of present-day 1:333
evidence of previous 1:335
Aristotle 5:105
ARM (Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program) 1:203
Array for Real-time Geostrophic Oceanography (ARGO) 1:69, 537
Arrhenius empirical relationship 2:282
Arrhenius, Svante 1:204
Art
and environment 5:167
classical 5:169
early environmental 5:168
Earth 5:173, 365
medieval period 5:169
modern environment 5:173
Oriental 5:170
Renaissance period 5:170
Romantic period 5:171
Artist and the environment 5:168
Ascend 21 4:43
Asia
aquaculture 3:196
tourism 3:626
Assimilative capacity 3:220
Association of Small Island States (AOSIS) 4:424
Asteroid tsunamis 1:729
Asteroids 1:205
global consequences of impacts 1:208
impact hazard today 1:210
impacts over Earth history 1:205
populations 1:206
Asthenosphere 1:410
Atmosphere
energy budget 1:240
water storage 1:450
zonal and annual mean radiation budget 1:374
see also GAW (Global Atmosphere Watch); Lower atmosphere;
Upper atmosphere
AtmosphereOcean General Circulation Models. See AOGCMs
Atmosphereocean interaction 1:22
Atmosphereocean mixed layer deep ocean exchange processes
2:199
Atmospheric angular momentum (AAM) 1:211
Atmospheric chemistry 1:284, 2:567
models 1:105
stratosphere. See Stratosphere, chemistry
Atmospheric circulation, summary 1:239
Atmospheric component of global climate models. See AGCMs
Atmospheric electricity 1:218
Atmospheric ow 1:242
Atmospheric gases 1:146
affecting ozone 1:144
longwave radiation 1:470
Atmospheric general circulation models (AGCMs) 1:285
Atmospheric hazards 3:480
Atmospheric lapse rate. See Lapse rate
Atmospheric Lifetime Experiment/Global Atmospheric Gases Experi-
ment/Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment
(ALE/GAGE/AGAGE) 2:458
Atmospheric modeling 1:756
Atmospheric motion 1:221
computer models 1:222
driving and retarding forces 1:223
friction in 1:224
observing 1:222
without friction 1:223
Atmospheric particles 1:473
Atmospheric Research and Environment Programme 1:758
Atmospheric structure 1:243
Atmospheric temperature structure 1:284
Atmospheric transport model intercomparison 2:50
Atomic radiation. See UNSCEAR
Attenborough, David 5:175
Attractors, complex systems 4:116, 118
Australia
tourism 3:626
wetlands 3:404
Australian Bureau of Meteorology 1:434
Austria, demographic transition 5:213
Automobiles 3:643
Autotrophy 2:26, 143
Autotropic respiration 2:191
AVHRR 1:72
Avicennia marina 2:400
Awash River 1:339
Azotobacter 2:443
Bacteria 3:218
Bahai Faith 5:176
proposed courses of action 5:179
BAHC Earth System Modeling 2:51
Bakers Table 2:99
Balance principle 5:338
Baleen whales 3:446
Baltic, water resources 3:720
Baltic Sea 4:516
Declaration 4:518
sheries 4:518
geology 4:516
map 4:517, 519
natural capital 4:518
oceanographic data 4:518
organism assembly 4:516
Bamako Convention 4:285
Barbados Program of Action (BPOA) 4:416
Barcelona Convention 4:527
Barrow, Alaska 2:594
Basel Convention 3:632, 4:146
amendment 4:147
control system 4:147
principal objectives 4:146
protocol on liability and compensation 4:147
Basel Declaration on Environmentally Sound Management
4:147
BAT (Best Available Technology) 5:183, 330
572 INDEX
Bateman, Gregory 5:183
BATNEEC 4:177, 5:330
Bay of Fundy 1:712
Beaked whales 3:446
Benedick, Richard Elliot 4:148
Beneciary fees 4:197
Benthic attractors 5:425
Benthic organisms 2:145
Bergson, Henri 5:105
Best available technology (BAT) 5:183, 330
Best available technology not entailing excessive costs (BATNEEC)
4:177, 5:330
Betula papyrifera 2:103, 104
Bhopal, India 5:54
Bidirectional reection distribution function 1:183
Bifurcation diagram 2:455
Big Moose Lake, acidication 3:103
Bilateral environmental standards 4:285
Biocenosis 2:145
Biocentricism 5:217
Biocentrism 5:235
Bioclimatic indices 2:168
Biocomplexity 2:145
Biocontrol methods 2:17
Biodiversity 2:297
and CO
2
2:221, 223
and ecosystem functioning 2:24
and microbial life 2:421
and organic farming 3:533
denition 2:159
freshwater 2:146
functional 2:20
functioning 2:22
empirical approaches 2:22
experimental tests 2:22
inland waters 2:381
lakes 2:381
rivers 2:381
sediments 2:152
soils 2:152
tundra 2:600
Biodiversity loss 3:137
tourism contribution 3:615
Biogeochemical cycling (BGC) 2:20, 159, 171, 172, 379, 423, 532,
3:3, 9
Biogeochemical feedbacks 2:102
Biogeochemical uxes 2:168
Biogeochemical models 2:168
Biogeochemistry 2:20
Bioindicators 2:160
Biological diversity, see also Convention on Biological Diversity
(CBD)
Biological hazards 3:484
Biological invasions. See Invasions
Biological pump 2:370
Biology, global environmental change 2:1
Biomass 3:653, 680
use for urban fuels 3:217
Biomass burning 3:205
and desertication 3:287
eld experiments 3:207
gaseous and particulate emissions 3:206, 209
geographical distribution 3:208
global estimates 3:209
nitrogen 3:207
nitrogen oxides 3:207
oxygen 3:207
tropical areas 3:214
Biomass enhancement ratio (BER) 2:491, 493
Biomass res 3:490
Biomass fuel power development 3:216
Biomass plantations 3:217
BIOME3 model 2:568
Biomebiogeochemical cycling (BGC) ecosystem model 2:171
Biome distributions 2:167
Biome models 2:166
Biomes 2:166
carbon and energy uxes 2:196
Biophages 2:315
Biophysical feedbacks 3:10
Bioremediation 3:218
Biosphere 2:174, 604
and health 5:500
carbon metabolism 2:1
detoxication 3:98
freshwater perspective 5:201
future 2:223
hazards 3:484
human impact 2:174
metabolism 2:3
retoxication 3:98
structure 2:3
Biosphere enhancement ratio (BER) 2:175
Biosphere reserves 2:175
Biospheric Aspects of the Hydrological Cycle (BAHC) 2:37
Biota 2:21
Caspian Sea 4:523
functional classication 2:29
functional divisions 2:30
lakes 2:378
rivers 2:378
taxonomic versus functional classications 2:35
Biotic hazards 3:483
Biphenols 3:631
Birds 2:460
experimental studies 3:603
extinctions 2:306
Pacic Islands 2:57
investigator effects 3:602
observational studies 3:603
Bjerknes, Jacob 1:245
Black Sea 4:520
biological diversity 4:521
decline of biota after 1950 4:522
dissolved oxygen 4:523
environmental degradation 4:522
geological history 4:520
hydrogen sulphide 4:522
map 4:521
Bleaching 2:231
see also Coral bleaching
Blocking highs 1:238
Blood lead levels 3:632
Blue Plan 4:148
Blue Planet prize 4:280
Boiling water reactors (BWRs) 3:509
Bolin, Bert 1:245
BollingAllerod interstadial 1:275, 418
Bombs 3:146
Boreal ecosystematmosphere study (BOREAS) 2:177, 183
Boreal forest 2:73, 179
average monthly climate 2:181
burning 3:208
carbon ux 4:149
global distribution 2:180
Boreal forest transect case study (BFTCS) 2:353
BOREAS 2:177, 183
Borrasus abellifera 3:148
Bosnia 3:548
Boundary-layer budget (BLB) 4:150
INDEX 573
Bourdeau, Philippe F J 4:152
Brent Spar 5:184, 385, 388
Brick clay extraction 3:341
Brinkhorst, Laurens Jan 4:153
Broecker, Wallace Smith 1:246
Brogger Peninsula 2:601
Bromine 1:153
Bromine oxide (BrO
x
) 1:680
Bromocarbons 1:680
Brower, David 5:185, 285
Browneld sites 3:343
Bruce, James 4:153
Brundtland, Gro Harlem 4:154
Brundtland Report 5:249
Buddhism 5:185
early views of nature 5:186
environmental activism 5:189
modern ecological views 5:187
northern views 5:187
recent ecological history 5:187
Thailand 5:188
Budyko, Mikhail Ivanovich 1:248
Buenos Aires conference 4:445
Buenos Aires Plan of Action 4:441
Buffering capacity 2:184
Buffers 2:184
Building codes 4:379
promulgation and effective enforcement 3:732
Burning, biomass. See Biomass burning
Business-as-usual scenario 5:191
Butteries 2:61, 162, 452, 548
C
3
photosynthesis 2:69, 186, 194, 470, 573
C
4
photosynthesis 2:69, 186, 194, 470, 573
Cadmium
anthropogenic emissions 3:58
anthropogenic vs. natural ows 3:57
atmospheric 3:304
deposition to air, water and soil 4:303
ecological effects 3:306
economic issues 3:306
effect on human health 3:305
exposure, risk assessment 3:305
in food chain 3:303
Provisional Tolerable Weekly Intake (PTWI) 3:306
Rhine Basin 4:302
risk management 3:306
sources 3:304
urinary 3:305
Calcium, in soil 3:585
Cambrian 2:297
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) 5:247
Canada
emission trading 4:454
sustainable forest policies 4:351
Canada Geographic Information System 4:225
CanadaUS Bilateral Air Quality Agreement 4:285
Canada/US IJC (International Joint Commission) 4:552
Cancer 3:305
Chernobyl accident 3:242
CAP 3:247
costs and benets 3:248
objectives 3:247
principal measures 3:247
reforms 3:248
Capacity, assimilative 3:220
Capacity building
denition 4:156
international efforts 4:156
Carbon
anthropogenic emissions 3:35
isotope ratios 2:546
partitioning 2:102
sequestration 2:444
source 2:26
stores 2:196, 197
terrestrial stores and uxes 2:190
see also CENTURY generalized ecosystem model; Redeld ratio
Carbon-10 2:544
Carbon-11 2:544
Carbon-12 2:544
Carbon-13 2:544
Carbon-14 2:544, 557
Carbon-15 2:544
Carbon-16 2:544
Carbon-9 2:544
Carbon balance
and plant growth 2:497
deforestation 3:269
Carbon cycle 1:284, 2:95, 191, 198, 549, 4:151
long-term 1:252
whole-plant feedbacks 2:102
Carbon dioxide (CO
2
) 1:178, 183, 190, 204, 2:572, 3:178
absorption bands 1:473
and biodiversity 2:221, 223
and plant tissue quality 2:221
and water relations 2:220
and water vapor exchange 2:194
anthropogenic emissions 2:201
atmospheric 1:26, 189, 249, 254, 291, 338, 411, 468, 501, 517,
2:69, 94, 95, 140, 161, 173, 188, 193, 201, 216, 249, 450,
487, 549, 3:181, 216, 4:149, 229
trends 1:254
changes during the industrial era 1:250
climate change 1:411
concentration 2:175, 191, 3:181, 315, 355, 4:38, 430
concentrations 1:518
cycle 2:159
direct GWPs relative to 1:411
elated concentrations 2:489
elevated 2:46, 62, 94, 125, 442, 471, 608
emissions 1:166, 3:216, 476, 477, 4:325, 428, 5:401, 402
energy related 3:47
gas aring 3:473
per capita 3:8
enrichment 2:5, 215
factors affecting 1:252
fertilization 4:150, 151
xation 2:422
xing 3:353
from 550 million to 500 000 1:251
global cycle 3:182
global observing network 4:150
Greenland 1:416
ice cores 1:260
increasing atmospheric 2:563
interaction with other global change factors 2:494
interactive effects 2:488
inter-annual variation in ux from natural sources 1:258
isotropic signatures 1:258
measurements
Mauna Loa record 1:484
since 1958 1:249
measuring atmospheric concentrations 1:260
Model-Experiment Activity for Improved Links (CMEAL) 2:173
Precambrian 1:252
pre-industrial changes during last millennium 1:249
production 2:532
sampling stations 1:257
574 INDEX
Carbon dioxide (CO
2
) (continued)
sources 1:368
tropical rainforests 3:269
tundra 2:596
Carbon uxes
Boreal Forest 4:149
tundra 2:596
Carbon isotope ratio 2:188, 189, 549
fossil fuels 2:549
Carbon isotopes in fossils 2:547
Carbon metabolism, biosphere 2:7
Carbon monoxide (CO) 1:179, 261, 384, 3:680, 4:486
concentrations 1:261
levels of 2:608
Carbon/nitrogen ratio 2:102, 436
Carbon tetrachloride 1:153
Carbonate sediments 2:200
Carbonyl sul de (COS) 1:483, 681
Cardiac hospitalization rates 4:488
Cargo ballast water 3:633
Carnegie-Ames-Stanford Approach (CASA) terrestrial biogeo-
chemical model 2:202
Carrying capacity 4:156
maximum human load 3:298
Cars. See Automobiles
Carson, Rachel Louise 5:51, 192, 247, 430
Caspian basin, map 4:525
Caspian Lake 4:521
Caspian Sea 4:523
biota 4:524
geological history 4:523
impacts 4:524
rehabilitation 4:526
water level uctuations 4:524
Caste system 5:94
Catalytic cycle 1:677
Catastrophic events. See Natural disasters
Catastrophic risks, impact 4:375
Catchment 2:345
Cattle grazing
and land cover 3:221
and pastoral change 3:224
CBA (cost bene t analysis) 5:193
Cenozoic cooling 1:338
Cenozoic desiccation 1:337
Cenozoic tectonism 1:337
Centrifugal force 1:328
CENTURY Ecosystem Model 2:206, 333
major structural components 2:206
use and testing 2:208
CEOS (Committee on Earth Observation Satellites) 1:71, 261
Cercopithecus patas 1:339
Cereal cultivation 3:228
Chamaenerion (Epilobium) angustifolium 2:559
Change, permanent 5:391
Change theories 5:391
Chaos 1:16, 263, 2:209, 4:31
in ecological dynamics 2:213
mathematical background 2:210
Chaotic systems 2:452
Chapman mechanism 1:676, 677, 680
Charney, Jule Gregory 1:266
Chemoautotrophs 2:143
Chemical potential, surrogate 3:335
Chemical sinks, wetlands as 3:109
Chemical substitutes, case study 4:387
Chemical time bomb (CTB)
and climate change 3:112
concept 3:99
Chemical weathering 1:755
Chemoheterotroph 2:26
Chemosynthesis 2:422
Chernobyl nuclear disaster 3:241, 5:54, 301
Childhood mortality 5:33
China
agriculture 3:431
eco-development 3:433
human ecology 3:430
land transformation 3:430
loess sequence 1:341
sustainability 4:547
see also Yellow river
Chipko Movement 5:193, 249, 388
Chlorine 1:153
Chlorine nitrate (ClONO
2
) 1:154, 681
Chlorine oxides (ClO
x
) 1:679
Chlorocarbons 1:427
Chloro uorocarbons (CFCs) 1:144, 146, 150, 153, 178, 267, 384,
411, 427, 474, 501, 520, 533, 679, 4:65, 74, 283, 309, 314, 387,
428, 446, 5:434
commonly used 1:267
concentrations 1:145
estimated global consumption 1:268
ows and stocks 3:66
phase-out case study 4:386
Christianity 5:104, 194, 211, 461
arrival of 5:375
challenges for the future 5:199
environmental responses at local, national and international levels
5:198
historical background 5:194
new theological directions 5:196
theological challenges 5:195
Chromium, anthropogenic emissions 3:58
Cirrus clouds 3:184
CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of
Wild Fauna and Flora) 4:157, 283
Cities
and volcanic eruptions 3:696
linear metabolism 3:59
parks/gardens movements 5:363
Safer Cities Programme 4:462
structural changes affecting 3:670
sustainable policies 4:406
world s largest 3:669
world s most rapidly growing 3:670
see also Urban
Civil con ict 3:146
and forest resources 3:148
Clausius Clapeyron relation 1:384
Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) 4:158, 165, 357
Clean energy 3:710
Clean technology 5:30
Cleaner production 4:99, 158
Clear air ice precipitation 1:320
Clear-sky feedbacks 1:285
CLIC (Climate and Cryosphere) 1:269
CLIMAP (Climate Long-range Investigation, Mapping, and Predic-
tion) 1:269, 469
Climate
analogues 1:271
and energy balance 1:371
and weather 1:15
chemistry interactions with 1:384
components 1:308
de nition 1:270
driving forces 1:18
effects of aerosols 1:162
equilibrium states 1:115
land surface interactions 1:494
INDEX 575
model simulations 1:114
mountain 1:540
natural climate variability 1:120
pre-industrial period 1:123
predictability 1:265
projection of future changes 1:126
sensitivity 1:375
spatial structure 1:24
20th century 1:121
see also CLIC; CLIMAP
Climate Agenda 1:270
Climate change 4:74
abrupt 1:272
and cloud characteristics 1:287
and hydrologic cycle 1:459
and tropical storms 1:438
and variations representation 1:111
and viral diseases 3:690
anthropogenic impacts 2:105
anthropogenic inuences 1:25
attribution 1:28
CO
2
1:411
correlations between modeled and observed changes 1:278
crop models 2:244
decision-making to combat 4:254
denition 1:271
desert regions 1:341
detection and attribution 5:1-5
new developments 1:279
disease 2:64
downscaling 1:346
elements of 5:110
factors contributing to 1:389
future implications 1:277
global agenda 4:163
Holocene 3:372
impacts on atmospheric chemistry 1:387
impacts on natural systems 2:201
key recent studies 1:280
millennial scale 1:273
observed 1:23
over past 550 million years 1:252
pests 2:64
problem of 5:400
projections 1:29, 461
regional. See Regional climate change
sediments 2:156
soils 2:156
spatial structure 1:24
time-history of recent changes 1:279
United States 4:543
see also Fingerprinting
Climate cycle 4:84
Climate extremes 3:1, 243, 4:230
and natural disasters 4:229
conjunctive 3:246
denition 3:243
examples 3:244
importance of 3:243
trends versus truisms 3:244
Climate feedbacks 1:283, 382
Climate models
fast feedback processes 1:285
simulations
geological past 1:296
reliability 1:114
transient simulations 1:299
Climate policy, international 4:252
Climate predictability. See CLIVAR
Climate protection 4:388
Climate sensitivity 1:284, 382
Climate simulation 1:114, 756
Climate stabilization, geoengineering for 3:336
Climate system 1:13
Climate variability 3:653
see also CLIVAR
Climate variations and glacier uctuations 1:404
Climate warming 4:149
and water use 3:238
potential effects 3:382
Climatic geomorphology 1:402
Climatic Impact Assessment Program (CIAP) 1:678
Climatic response, feedbacks 1:27
Climatology 1:308
denition 1:308
key approaches 1:309
Climax community 5:391
Climax vegetation 2:215
CLIVAR (CLImate VARiability and Predictability) 1:311
Cloud albedo 1:317
Cloud amount 1:288
Cloud and Radiation Test-bed (CART) 1:203
Cloud changes 1:284
Cloud characteristics and climate changes 1:287
Cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) 1:317
Cloud feedbacks 1:287
Cloud height 1:288
Cloud properties and processes 1:285
Clouds 1:19, 27, 316
agricultural regions 1:318
and longwave radiation 1:318
and precipitation 1:316
and shortwave radiation 1:317
effects of aerosols 1:165
lightning 1:501
polar regions 1:319
schematic view 1:317
urban regions 1:318
Club of Rome 4:166, 400, 5:395, 404
Coal, transport movements 3:636
Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies (CERES)
Principles 4:236
Coastal degradation due to tourism 3:618
Coastal superquarries 3:342
Coastal waters
anoxia in 3:109
eutrophication 3:503
Coastal zones 2:77
environmental change by tourism 3:620
management 4:166
Cocoyoc Symposium on Patterns of Resource Use, Environment and
Development Strategies 4:400
Coke manufacture, methane emissions 3:463
Collaboration, global imperative 5:293
Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) 5:506
Colobanthus quitensis 2:162
Colonizing stage 2:550
Combined environment and development 5:58
Combustion gas disposal 3:710
Comephorous 3:414
Comets 1:205
global consequences of impacts 1:208
impact hazard today 1:210
impacts over earth history 1:205
populations 1:206
Shoemaker-Levy 9 1:205
Command and control (CAC) 5:26
regulation 4:446
Commodication, threat of 5:322
Common Agricultural Policy. See CAP
576 INDEX
Common but differentiated responsibility 5:329
Common but differentiated responsibility principle (Stockholm/Rio)
4:168
Common concern 5:329
Common property management 5:46
Commons, tragedy of the 5:208, 415
Communications
developments 3:6
infrastructure 3:644
Community Development Programme 4:462
Community forest 3:173
Community importance value (CIV) 2:25
Community richness 2:224
Competition 2:485
Competition stress disturbance (CSR) 2:482, 485
Complex dynamics 4:31
Complex hazards 3:483
Complex systems 5:422
man and nature 5:384
monitoring 4:116
properties 4:118
Composting 2:544, 3:686
Compound hazards 3:483
Computer simulation models 1:114, 2:241, 4:251
Concentration response functions (CRFs) 4:487
Conceptual model
hierarchical structure 4:127
monitoring 4:130
Conference of Parties (COP) 4:168, 172, 439, 441, 480
Conict
and environment 5:271
and environmental change 5:271
and warfare 5:274
see also Environmental stress; Violent conict
Confucianism 3:431
Conifers
ecological distribution 2:561
evolution 2:561
geographic distribution 2:561
physiological and morphological adaptations 2:561
Connectivity 2:325
Consequential rules 5:413
Conservation, incentives 4:102
Conservation biology 2:228
Conservation movement 5:244
Conservatism 5:436
Constellations 5:373
Constitutive rules 5:413
Construction 3:7
Construction materials, US 3:57
Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)
4:361
Consumer-driven dynamics 2:380
Consumption, environmental impact 5:34
Consumption patterns 4:164
economic and demographic change 3:249
Consumptionpollution link 5:34
Contaminated lands. See Land contamination; Soils
Contemporary invasions 2:87
Continental drift 1:321, 647
historical background 1:321
lessons from 1:324
rejection 1:323
Continentality 1:334
Continuity, principle 5:298
Contraction, trajectory of 5:160
Contraction theory 1:321
alternative 1:322
Contrails 3:182
Controlled environment facilities (CEFs) 2:228
Convection 1:325
Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) 4:169
contents 4:169
ex situ conservation 4:170
nancial resources 4:171
impacts 4:171
in situ conservation 4:170
incentives 4:170
knowledge base 4:169
research 4:170
sustainable use 4:170
Convergence, trajectory of 5:160
Convergent boundaries 1:410
Coral bleaching 2:231, 232
Coral reefs 1:363, 2:163
degradation due to tourism 3:617
Coregonus autumalis migratorius 3:415, 417
Coriolis effect 1:191, 326
Coriolis force 1:225, 326
history 1:326
rotating planet 1:328
turntable 1:327
variation 1:329
Coriolis parameter 1:327
Corn industrial engineering 4:548
Corporate Average Fuel Efciency (CAFE) standards 5:31
Corporate environmental behavior and nancial performance 4:235
Corporate environmental leadership 4:66
Corporate environmental reporting 4:236
Corridors 2:324
Cosmic rays 1:476
Cosmology
ChristianPtolemaic 5:377
medieval western 5:376
pre-modern 5:372
Cost benet analysis (CBA) 5:193
Cost benet modeling 5:397
Costing, ecosystem services 2:272
Costs, internalization 4:278
Cousteau, Jaques 5:209
CQUESTN 2:445
Crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM) 2:186, 471
Creation principle 5:338
Creative destruction 5:391
Cretaceous 1:207, 329, 516, 2:297
climate modeling 1:297
Critical loads 3:252, 4:175, 5:417
Crop farming 3:228
Crop models 2:241
applications 2:245
climate response 2:243
comparison exercises 2:244
history 2:241
input-output models 2:245
limitations 2:242
Crops
environmental effects 2:243
see also Plants
Crossover 5:398
Crude oil, transport movements 3:636
Crude petroleum, Arctic environment 3:517
Crust 1:503
Crutzen, Paul J 1:330, 677
Cryogen Limb Array Etalon Spectrometer (CLAES) 1:732
Cryosphere 1:330
and hydrologic cycle 1:450
see also CLIC
CSD (Commission on Sustainable Development) 4:43, 178
Cultural attitudes 3:6
Cultural eco-feminism 5:439
INDEX 577
Cultural eutrophication 4:349
Cultural evolution 5:164
Cultural landscapes 5:319
Cultural oligotrophication 4:349
Cultural theory 5:391, 401
Culture scale 5:73
dynamics 5:75
Cultures, development 5:155
Cumulative changes 5:273
Cumulative environmental assessment (CEA) 4:178
methodologies 4:179
Cumuliform clouds 1:326
Cumulus clouds 1:326
Cumulus congestus clouds 1:326
Cumulus convection 1:325
Cumulus humulus clouds 1:326
Curi, Kriton 3:253
Current carbon budget 2:201
Cut-off lows 1:238
Cybernetics 5:410
Cyberspace 5:505
Cyborg 5:410
Cystoseira 4:522
Daisyworld model 2:247
Damar agroforest 3:176
Dams
environmental impacts 3:553
worlds largest 3:553
Danger, exposure to 5:299
DansgaardOescheger (DO) cycles 1:272, 273, 332
DansgaardOescheger (DO) events 1:430
DART (dynamics of the Arctic treeline) 2:354
Darwin, Charles Robert 2:247
Darwins theory of evolution 2:560
Data and Information System (DIS) 2:40
Data archive 2:257, 258
functions 2:252
Data banks 2:248
examples 2:249
future directions 2:257
historic examples 2:248
overview 2:249
present-day 2:249
subsetting 2:255
user interface 2:255
Data collection and storage 4:134
Data delivery 2:255
Data entropy 2:410
Data formats 2:254
Data preservation 2:250
Data rescue 2:257
Data sharing 2:256, 258, 410
Data storage and distribution 2:251
DDD 5:51
DDT 2:379, 3:98, 302, 416, 417, 4:76, 262, 519, 5:51, 248
environmental incidents 4:518
Dead Sea Rift 1:335
Death, statistics 4:62
Decadal variations 1:367
Decision-making
macro 3:7
to combat climate change 4:254
Decision processes, risk management 4:377
Decision systems 3:6
Declaration des droits de lhomme 5:120
Decolonization 5:92, 152
Deep ecology 5:211, 217, 434, 444, 448
Deforestation 1:497, 2:325, 3:7, 158, 732, 4:74
Amazon Basin 3:255
and desertication 3:287
and development 3:270
carbon balance 3:269
classical era 3:260
early modern times 3:262
global impacts 3:265
history 3:259
Middle Ages 3:261
pre-historic 3:259
20th century 3:263
Demand management 4:181
Dematerialization 4:18, 183, 249, 5:157, 160
and cleaner production 41:100
and information age 4:100
and sustainable development 4:96
corporate environmental action 4:99
technologies 4:99
understanding 4:98
Democracy and ecology 5:161
Democratic socialism 5:437
Demographic entrapment 3:142
Demographic transition 5:211
Demographics
aging population 3:277
and health 5:403
consumption patterns 3:249
Pacic Islands 3:273
world trends 3:16
Dengue fever 3:692
Denitrication 2:287, 423, 432, 445
Dental amalgam 2:407
Denudation rates and mining activities 3:458
Deontological ethics 5:428
Deposition
dry 2:260
wet 2:261
Derelict land, re-use 3:343
Descent of Man, The 5:237
Deschampsia antarctica 2:162
Deschampsia exuosa 2:437, 438
Desert Margins Initiative (Nairobi) 4:185
Desertication 3:10, 282
and drought 3:285
and overgrazing 3:285
causes and consequences 3:284
convention 4:183
denition 3:282, 283
extent and severity 3:283
impediments to combating 4:184
lessons learned 3:289
modern myths 1:342
national and local responses 4:319
overview 4:184
see also UNCCD
Deserts 1:332, 2:70
denition 1:332
dust 1:342
encroachment 1:342
environmental change 1:343
evidence of formerly wetter climates 1:335
groundwater 1:341
landforms antiquity 1:337
past climatic events 1:339
prehistoric peoples 1:339
tropical anticyclonic 1:334
world distribution 1:333
Detergents, phosphates in 3:544
Deterritorialization 5:157
578 INDEX
Detoxication, biosphere 3:98
Detritus 2:314
Developing countries 4:165, 183, 5:200
fertility levels 3:20
life expectancies 3:24
national trends 4:8
population trends 3:16
sustainable transportation 4:433
technological innovation and leadership 4:94
Development 5:150
and environment 5:58
and population 5:32
and security 5:159
chrono-politics 5:151
conservation in time 5:154
cultures 5:155
decline 5:157
geo-politics 5:151
history 5:150
legacy of 5:154
projects 5:273
prospects 5:159
social polarization 5:154
Third World 5:153
Development projects, environmental assessment (EA) 4:203
Dew point 1:433
De Wit, C T 2:259
1,1-Dichloro-2,2-bis-(p-chlorophenyl)ethane. See DDD
Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane. See DDT
2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid 4:262
Diesel engines 3:678
Digital formats 2:254
Dimethylsulde (DMS) 1:163, 284, 343, 348, 384, 2:373, 425
Dinitrogen 3:494
Dinitrogen pentoxide (N
2
O
5
) 1:681
Diome distribution/biogeochemistry models 2:169
Dioxin 5:54
DIS Land Cover Classication 2:52
Disasters 5:54
experience 5:298
explanations 5:298
myths 5:298
reversal of expertise 5:302
socially discriminate or indiscriminate events 5:299
technocratic 5:300
see also Natural disasters
Discounting 5:28, 214
ecosystem services 2:279
Discrete logistic model 2:454
Diseases
and pests 2:64
vector-borne 3:691
Dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) 22;64
Distance learning 1:468, 4:186
digital divide 4:188
electronic mailing lists 4:190
history and evolution 4:187
international organizations 4:190
newsgroups 4:190
Distichlis 3:451
Distributions 2:160
Disturbance response groups, identication 2:486
Disturbances 2:261, 550
anthropogenic causes 2:262
global change 2:264
management implications 2:264
natural causes 2:262
recovery process 2:266
Divergent boundaries 1:410
DIVERSITAS 2:268, 4:42
DMAPP 2:607
Dobr s Assessment 4:547
Dobson spectrophotometer 1:146
Dobson units (DU) 1:141, 676
Dominion theology 5:196, 492
Dooge, James 4:191
Dow Jones global index (DJGI) 4:235
Dow Jones sustainability group index (DJSGI) 4:235
Dowdeswell, Elizabeth 4:192
Downburst 1:325
Downscaling, climate change 1:346
Downstream development 1:238
Downward convection 1:325
DPSIR (Driving Forces Pressures StateImpactsResponses)
4:44, 193
Drainage basin 2:345
Dreissena polymorpha 2:534, 4:524
Drinking water 3:85
see also IDWSSD
Drosophila 2:62
Drosophila subobscura 2:161
Drought 1:477, 2:347, 3:244, 487
and desertication 3:285
Dry convection 1:325
Dry deposition 2:260
Dry microburst 1:325
Dumping, ecological 4:198
Dumping of wastes. See London Dumping Convention
Dust 1:347
deserts 1:342
emission 1:349
impacts 1:348
measurements and modeling of properties 1:350
particles 1:348
properties during atmospheric transport 1:349
Dust veil index. See DVI
DVI 3:290, 689
applications 3:292
calculation 3:291
problems with 3:291
Dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) 2:169, 481
Early warning indicators 4:79
Early warning systems 3:550
Earth
art 5:173, 355
managing 5:6
origins 5:372
radiation balance 1:18
Earth Charter 5:216
Earth Day 5:49, 52, 53, 216, 248
Earth First! (EF!) 5:217
Earth observing system 1:61, 2:250
current requirements and issues 1:63
in situ systems, networks and programs 1:68
satellites 1:80
see also EOS
Earth resources mapping and surface characterization satellites 1:73
Earth Science Enterprise (ESE) 2:250
Earth sciences, international organizations 1:156
Earth Summit 1:539
Earth System 1:538
and social system 3:5
forcing and feedback variables 1:67
human disturbance of 3:1
key parameters and variables 1:61
state variables and parameters 1:66
INDEX 579
Earth system models 1:99, 109, 682
applications
diagnosis of prevailing conditions and empirical (experiment-
based) prediction 1:99
explanation of causal connections 1:99
Earth system history 1:101
general approaches to creating 1:100
horizontal-dimension models 1:105
interannual uctuations representation 1:111
laboratory models and eld experiments 1:100
management and policy analysis 1:100
mathematical analysis 1:102
numerical modeling approaches 1:103
other celestial bodies as 1:102
prediction and projection of future conditions 1:100
recent past as model for the future 1:102
regional models 1:109
representations of individual processes 1:110
testing performance 1:110
vertical-dimension models 1:104
zero-dimension models 1:104
zonal models 1:106
see also speci c models
Earth system processes 1:13
Earthquake-generated tsunamis 1:726
Earthquakes 3:8, 488, 513
intensity and magnitude 3:293
losses 4:383
prediction 1:537
reservoir-induced 3:294
triggered by human activities 3:294
see also Seismic risk
Earth s rotation 1:225
Earth s surface 1:310, 503, 538
ow patterns forced by 1:238
longwave radiation 1:474
East Timor 3:549
EBCMs 1:373, 376
climate modeling hierarchy 1:376
general applications 1:379
single latitude zone 1:378
speci c examples 1:380
structure 1:377
ECA (Economic Commission for Africa) 4:194
Eciatrics 5:423
ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the
Caribbean) 4:195
Eco-agriculture 4:547
Eco-Art 5:173
Eco-building 4:548
Eco-development, China 3:433
Eco-ef ciency 4:18, 44, 106
economic/organizational perspective 4:109
engineering perspective 4:111
historical background 4:106
increasing 4:111
organizational perspective 4:113
stages 4:111
strategy 4:108
Eco-engineering 4:547
rural 4:547
Eco-farming 4:547
Eco industrial parks (EIP) 3:76
Eco-industry 4:548
Eco-labeling 4:210, 211
Eco-labels, types 4:210
Eco-service, urban-rural 4:549
Eco-settlement 4:548
Eco-socialism 5:47, 434, 444
Eco-spirituality 5:309
Eco-studies, versions 5:422
Eco-taxes 4:195
instruments 4:196
Eco-toxicology 4:39
Eco-village 4:547
development 3:434
Ecocentrism 5:217, 236, 311
Ecocycle 5:392
Ecofascism and land ethic 5:239
Ecofeminism 5:33, 196, 218, 434, 439, 444
cross-cultural ourishing 5:223
scholarship 5:223
Ecogeny 54
Ecological capacity 51, 3:296
lightening the load 3:300
overshoot in 3:298
see also Human carrying capacity
Ecological city 4:409
Ecological dumping 4:198
Ecological economic systems 4:118
narratives 4:119
Ecological economics 5:5, 37
biophysical-economic system analysis 5:44
classical economic origins 5:39
future 5:45
global enterprise 5:46
historical background 5:38
methods and issues 5:42
natural science origins 5:40
rise of modern 5:41
working assumptions 5:38
Ecological engineering 5:47
Ecological footprints 5:45, 157
analysis 3:302
urban 3:141
Ecological measurements, issues still to be addressed 2:276
Ecological model of health 5:499
Ecological modernization 5:431, 443, 449
Ecological resilience 2:530
Ecology 5:408, 423
and democracy 5:161
global 2:5
global environmental change 2:1
industrial. See Industrial ecology
see also Social ecology
Economic developments 3:138
Economic growth 4:183
Economic instruments 4:7
Economic sustainability 5:489
Economic systems, nonlinearity 5:398
Economics 5:41, 230, 423
and current regulatory system 5:29
and global environmental change 5:4, 25
ecological. See Ecological economics
global agreements 5:35
rainforests 3:270
rise of modern economic culture 5:40
Economies 5:445
consumption patterns 3:249
Ecopolis 4:547
Ecosystem
and natural selection 2:293
costing 2:272
function 2:282
functional groups 2:28
large-scale manipulation experiments and observations 2:6
redundant species 2:28
services 2:272
stability 2:281
stable states 2:277
structure 2:282
580 INDEX
Ecosystem approach 3:221, 5:225
Ecosystem functioning 2:24
relative importance of species in 2:24
Ecosystem health 4:199, 5:47, 493
Ecosystem services 2:20, 5:226
and global change 2:274
assessing 2:274
classication 2:273
concept 2:272
delivery 2:276
discounting 2:279
economic valuation 2:277
examples 2:273
key social issues to be addressed 2:277
private vs. public ownership 2:279
understanding 2:274
Ecosystems 2:22, 292
common structure 2:28
effects of global change 2:122
functional groups 2:27
fundamental structure 2:24
human impact 2:116
indirect interactions 2:294
integrity 4:199
monitoring 4:116
species redundancy 2:27
valued component 4:493
Ecotheology 5:492
Ecotones 2:283
climate change 2:285
concept 2:284
hierarchy 2:286
Ecotourism
case study 3:600
statistics 3:598
Ecotoxicology 3:302
Ecumenics 5:423
Edge effects 2:326
Education
and population growth 5:33
and Training Programme 1:758
see also Environmental education
EEA (European Environment Agency) 4:200
Eemian 1:270, 353
Eemian interglacial, climate modeling 1:297
Egalitarianism 5:385, 389
Egocentrism 5:311
Ehrlich, Paul 2:288
Eichhornia crassipes 2:81
EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) 4:201
Ekistics 5:423
El Chichon volcanic eruption 1:736
El Nino 1:28, 230, 279, 353, 457, 476, 487, 645
causes and consequences 1:353
ecosystems impacts 1:362
historical background 1:354
oscillation 1:292
physics 1:358
socio-economic impacts 1:365
temperature and precipitation anomalies associated with 1:361
weather impacts 1:360
see also El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO)
El NinoLa Nina events 1:309
El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) 1:22, 64, 69, 120, 212, 245,
343, 353, 370, 457, 487, 2:63, 70, 138, 163, 549, 3:723, 4:230
cycle 1:358
development of observing and forecasting systems 1:363
El Viejo. See La Nina
Electric currents 1:502
Electric elds 1:502
Electricity, atmospheric 1:218, 502
Electromagnetic energy 1:371
Electromagnetic radiation 1:371
Electroplating 3:59
Elodea canadensis 3:415
Elton, C S 2:289
Emergencies, human impact 3:549
Emergent groups 2:482
Emerging environmental issues 4:72
action phase 4:78
characteristics 4:73
concern phase/issues of concern 4:78
denition 4:72
early warning indicators 4:79
future 4:72
horizon phase/horizon issues 4:78
management 4:77
new perspectives 4:74
overview 4:75
role of science 4:75
taxonomies 4:73
unforeseen issues 4:74
unlikely events 4:74
Emergy 5:224
concept 3:4, 303
use of term 3:303
Emission limits 3:63
Emission reduction credit (ERC) 4:453
Emission standards 3:63
Emission trading 4:165, 201, 357, 440, 451
Canada 4:454
Europe 4:454
merits and problems 4:440
nitrogen 4:453
questions and answers 4:453
sulfur 4:453
United States 4:453
Emissions
aircraft 3:178
global trends 3:35
road transport 4:429
transport 3:646
see also specic types
Emissivity 1:371
Encephalitis 3:692
Encyclopedias 5:228
Endangered species 4:201
Endotherms 2:136
Energy
environmental impacts 3:736
terrestrial stores and uxes 2:190
transport 3:645
see also Sustainable energy
Energy balance 2:192
and climate 1:371
Energy balance climate models. See EBCMs
Energy balance models 1:106
two-dimensional 1:106
Energy budget
atmosphere 1:240
latitudinal distribution 1:373
Energy consumption 5:403
world trends 3:734
Energy efciency
improvement 4:98
SIDs 4:414
Energy end-use efciencies 4:91
Energy uxes 3:4
Energy innovation value chain 4:92
research and development (R&D) 4:93
INDEX 581
Energy intensity of industrialized countries 4:295
Energy ladder 3:217
Energy paths, soft 3:583, 5:487
Energy policies and sustainable futures 4:356
Energy production 3:709
Energy related carbon dioxide emissions 3:47
Energy resources, Small Island Developing States (SIDS) 4:412
Energy sources 1:234, 2:26
non-renewable 3:355
see also Biomass
Energy types 3:734
Energy use
future 3:736
present 3:736
Engineering feasibility study 4:204
Engineering resilience 2:530
Enlightenment Project 5:2, 229, 336
ENSO. See El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO)
Entrainment 1:325
Entropy-based evaluation (MASTER) 3:63
Environment
and development 5:58
constituents 2:290
denition 2:290
human interference 2:290
Environmental agenda, social dimension 4:16
Environmental assessment 4:194
best practice or guidelines standards 4:286
development projects 4:203
Dobr s 4:546
national budgets 4:405
Environmental Cadmium in the Food Chain: Sources, Pathways and
Risks 3:307
Environmental challenge and solutions 5:177
Environmental change
and conict 5:271
and evolutionary processes 2:292
interactions between 2:104
seismic events 3:296
Environmental crisis 5:165
Environmental damage 5:34
Environmental Data Report 4:204
Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) 5:230, 248
Environmental disasters. See Disasters
Environmental education 4:206
communication and media 4:209
denitions 4:206
ethics 4:207
guidelines 4:207
objectives 4:207
schools 4:208
tertiary 4:209
Environmental ethics 5:231
Environmental governance 5:368
Environmental groups 5:243
Environmental health
and urban poverty 3:661
problems 3:675
Environmental historiograph 5:70
Environmental history and global environmental change 5:62
Environmental impact assessment 2:407, 3:3, 4:194
Environmental indicators 4:247
Environmental justice 5:232
rights-based approach 5:119
utility-based approach 5:119
Environmental law 4:7, 11
international 5:324
Environmental management
command and control management 4:16
trends over 40 years 4:15
Environmental movement 5:243
histories 5:3
origins and concerns 5:430
types 5:432
Environmental organizations 5:56
Environmental philosophy 5:253
Environmental policy 4:11
dilemmas 4:367
industrialized countries 4:5
international 4:323
world oceans 4:279
Environmental politics 5:49
contemporary 5:54
recent highlights 5:52
Environmental problems
critical 4:382
man-made 4:38
national level 4:2
Environmental programs, UN agencies 4:11
Environmental protection, investment 4:6
Environmental psychology/perception 5:257
Environmental refugees 4:214, 215
Environmental regulation 5:29
Environmental research development, government expenditure 4:6
Environmental responses
international 4:9
overview 4:1
Environmental risk assessment, best practice or guidelines standards
4:286
Environmental security 5:269
critical perspectives 5:273
research 5:270
Environmental sociology 5:278
Environmental standards
bilateral 4:285
regional 4:285
Environmental sustainability (ES) 5:489
Environmental systems
feedbacks 3:9
maintaining 3:82
Environmental valuations 5:42
Environmental values 5:49
Environmentalism, dening 5:369
Environmentally sensitive area (ESA) 4:361
ENVISAT 1:80
EOS 1:23, 382
EOSAqua 1:78
EOSAqua/AIRS 1:79
EOSAqua/AMSR-ENASDA 1:79
EOSAura 1:79
EOSICESat 1:80
EOS satellite series 1:76
EOSTerra 1:76
EOSTerra/ASTER 1:78
EOSTerra/CERES 1:77
EOSTerra/MISSR 1:78
EOSTerra/MODIS 1:77
EOSTerra/MOPITT 1:78
Eotros effect 1:329
Epidemiology and air quality standards 4:485
Equatorial waves 1:359
Equilibrium response 1:382
Equity 5:279
and innovative technology 5:281
multiple dimensions 5:280
multiple questions 5:280
multiple tasks 5:280
Eradication, species 2:17
Erosion, soil. See Soil erosion
ERS (Earth Resources Satellite) Series (ESA) 1:73
582 INDEX
ESCAP (Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacic)
4:218
Estuaries, impacts of aggregate extraction 3:342
Ethics
environmental 5:231
see also Land ethic
Euphorbia candelabra 1:334
Euphydryas editha 2:162
Europe
emission trading 4:454
nitrate protection zones (NPZs) 3:493
tourism 3:626
European Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund (EADDF)
3:248
European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts 1:454
European Network for Research in Global Change (ENRICH) 2:290
European Union (EU) 3:247, 549, 4:218
Eutrophic systems 2:458, 5:426
Eutrophication 2:128, 458, 3:720, 724
marine and coastal waters 3:503
Evaporation 1:452, 2:344, 346, 347
rainforests 3:265, 267
yearly average 1:456
Evapotranspiration 1:452, 2:380, 461
Evolution 2:560
Evolutionary processes
and environmental changes 2:292
ecosystems 2:292
Exclusion, philosophical polarities 5:103
Exosphere 1:244
Exotic invasions 2:489
Externalities 5:26
Extinctions 2:297
birds 2:306
contemporary and future 2:301
estimates 2:303
hotspots 2:305
metapopulations 2:416
Extraction of minerals 3:295
Extraction processes 3:711
Extra-tropical storms 1:236
Exxon Valdez oil spill 5:283, 301
Eye, exposure to UVR 3:136
Fagus gradifolia 2:86
Fair weather electrication 1:220
Fairness 5:279
Family planning 5:34
FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) 2:324, 3:238, 4:41, 219
Farming, organic 3:532
Fast feedback processes 1:290
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) 4:377
Feedbacks 1:382
chemistryclimate interactions with climate 1:384
climatic response 1:27
environment system 3:9
mechanisms 1:375
Feminism 5:439
see also Ecofeminism
FengShui theory 3:431
Fertility levels and population growth 3:20
Fertilizers 3:9
inorganic 3:539
inorganic phosphatic 3:539
policy 4:360
FGD waste 4:111
Fingerprinting 1:388
applications 1:279
Fire
grasslands 2:572
mosaics 5:319
species tolerance 2:487
suppression 2:566
see also Forest res; Oil res
First International Polar Year 1:156
First Nations peoples 5:466
Fish
direct use 2:330
freshwater 2:327
habitat 2:328
indirect abuse 2:330
K-selected species 2:330, 331
r-selected species 2:330
Fish stocks, analysis 3:238
Fisheries 3:9, 136
Baltic Sea 4:518
ecosystems perspective 4:348
effects of climate change 3:309
El Nino effects 1:363
governance conventions 2:330
habitat degradation 3:316
management 4:346
ownership regimes 4:347
Pacic coast 3:314
policies 4:343
pollution 3:316
reforms of the 1990s 4:350
responsible 4:343
sustainable 4:343
transferable quotas 4:455
types 2:330
see also Aquaculture; Freshwater sheries; Minamata; Transferable
sheries quotas
Fixed nitrogen 2:308
Flip-ops 5:422
Floodplains 2:378
burning patterns 5:319
ows 5:425
forests 2:287
Floods and ooding 1:726, 2:347, 3:245, 486, 707, 730
Flow dynamics, phases 5:424
Flue-gas desulfurization (FGD) technology 4:107
Fluid injection, earth tremors induced by 3:295
Fluid removal, earthquakes induced by 3:295
Fluid withdrawal, subsidence due to 3:339
FLUXNET 2:45
Food, and ecofeminism 5:219
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) 2:324, 3:238, 4:41, 219
Food chains 2:405
cadmium in 3:303
Food consumption
and climate change 3:323
and greenhouse gas emissions 3:323
Food production 3:134, 712, 5:88
and malnutrition 3:441
greenhouse 3:352
Food webs 2:308
age structure effects 2:315
as open systems 2:314
connectivity 2:310
current topics/trends 2:313
energetic 2:310
functional 2:312
interactive 2:312
omnivory 2:313
roles of nutrients and stoichiometry 2:315
structure 2:313
types 2:309
INDEX 583
Food yields 3:136
Forest decline 5:508.17
Forest res 3:210, 653
Forest Gap Models 2:316
Forest logging. See Logging systems
Forest resources and conict 3:148
Forest soils 3:546
Forest stand 2:323
Forest webs
even aged 2:324
uneven aged 2:324
Forests 2:324
decline 2:439
denition 2:324
ecosystems 2:536
gap models 2:316
nitrogen deposition 2:435
sustainable policies 4:351
temperate coniferous 2:560
temperate deciduous 2:565
urban 3:356
see also Afforestation; Agroforestry; Deforestation; Global Forest
Watch; Temperate coniferous forests; Temperate deciduous
forests; Tropical forests
Fossil fuel burning emissions 3:473
Fossil fuel combustion 3:9
Fossil fuel use 3:8
Fossil fuels 4:183, 356
greenhouse gases 3:649
pollutants from 3:302
Fossil groundwater 1:341
Fossil Record 2:297
Fossils 2:547
Founex 1971 4:399
Fouriers Law for heat conduction 3:335
Fragmentation 2:324
Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) 4:292, 5:116
Framework treaty protocol form 5:327
Francis of Assisi, Saint 5:284
Franklin, Benjamin 1:390
Free air carbon dioxide enrichment (FACE) 2:5, 204
Free market liberalism 5:437
Freight. See Transport
Freshwater
biodiversity 2:146
circulation 5:201
global warming 3:310
Freshwater ecosystems 2:78, 458, 533
impacts of global change 2:122
Freshwater environment, petroleum hydrocarbons 3:521
Freshwater sheries 2:327
current status 2:331
degradation 2:331
Freshwater lakes 2:377
Friction in atmospheric motions 1:224
Friends of the Earth (FOE) 5:248, 285
Friends of the Earth International (FOEI) 5:57
Fronts 1:235, 391
Fuel consumption, aircraft 3:179
Fuel use for transport 4:434
Fuels
biomass power development 3:216
reformulated 3:679
urban, biomass 3:217
Fugacity 3:335
Functional Groups 2:483
Fundamental niche 2:429
Futures research 5:285
Gaia 5:211, 217, 287, 448, 493
dening characteristics 2:332
Gaia Hypothesis 1:510, 2:247, 446
Gaiacentrism 5:217
GAIM (Global Analysis, Interpretation and Modeling Program)
1:392
GAIM Model Intercomparisons 2:50
Galactic cosmic ray (GCR) 1:678
Galileo 5:103
Gandhi, M K 5:290
Gap models 2:316
tests and applications 2:320
Gaquid phase 5:424
GARP (Global Atmospheric Research Program) 1:157, 392, 756,
757
Gas exploration, development and production, Arctic 3:518
Gas aring, carbon dioxide emissions 3:473
Gas-phase stratospheric chemistry 1:675
Gases
lifetime 1:501
low concentration methane bearing 3:435
GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) 3:633, 4:221
GAW (Global Atmosphere Watch) 1:393
GCDIS (Global Change Data and Information System) 1:393
GCOS (Global Climate Observing System) 1:394
GCTE Elevated CO
2
Network 2:46
GCTE soil erosion network 2:44
GCTE Terrestrial Carbon Cycle Synthesis 2:49
GCTE-NEWS synthesis of global warming 2:579
GDAY 2:332
daily version 2:333
mathematical analysis 2:335
GEH tree 2:342
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. See GATT
General Circulation Models (GCMs) 1:108, 114, 288, 296, 309, 346,
374, 394, 4:82, 253
Generic Decomposition and Yield. See GDAY
Genetic algorithms 5:398
Genetic resources, access 4:171
Genetically modied organisms (GMOs) 4:45
Genotype, denition 2:466
Genyornis 2:59
GEO (Global Environment Outlook) 4:221
Geochemical cycles
gaseous 2:159
sedimentary 2:159
Geodesy 1:538
Geoengineering
applications 3:337
climate stabilization 3:336
use of term 3:336
Geographical Information Systems (GIS) 4:222
component parts 4:223, 225
composite maps 4:224
denitions 4:224
locational problems 4:222
questions relating to 4:226
Geography
applications 3:337
denition 3:337
investigations 3:337
Geological cycling 1:397
Geological hazards 3:482
Geomagnetism 1:538
Geomorphological hazards 3:482
Geomorphology 1:402
change for urbanization and industry 3:338
sports 3:345
Geophysical data 1:535
Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) 1:512
584 INDEX
Geophysical monitoring systems. See Monitoring systems
GEOSECS programme 3:183
Geostationary environmental satellites (GOES) 1:72
Geothermal heat 1:402
Geotropism 2:558
Geranyl pyrophosphate (GPP) 2:607
GESAMP (Joint Group of Experts on the Scienti c Aspects of Marine
Environmental Protection) 4:226
GEWEX 1:310, 402, 463
objectives 1:403
research foci 1:403
Glacial aridity 1:340
Glacial cycling simulation 1:111
Glacial-eroded sediment 1:429
Glacial/Holocene boundary 1:275
Glacial pluvial 1:340
Glacial terminations 1:272
Glaciers 1:19, 404, 500
annual average values of net balances 1:406
changes in area and volume 1:407
changes in size 1:407
dimensions 1:405
dynamics problem 1:407
environmental effects of changes 1:408
uctuations and climate variations 1:404
Greenland 1:447
ice cores 1:407
mass balances 1:405
total areas 1:405
winter and summer balances 1:406
Gliricidia sepium 2:443
Global 500 Roll of Honour 4:280
Global agreements, economics 5:35
Global air quality 1:177
Global Analysis, Interpretation and Modeling (GAIM) 2:41
Global Atmosphere Watch (GAW) 1:177, 758
Global atmospheric electric circuit 1:502
Global average temperature 1:371
Global carbon balance 2:197
future biosphere 2:223
Global carbon cycle 1:368
Global change, de nition 2:291
Global Change and Terrestrial Ecology (GCTE) 2:38
Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystems (GCTE) program 2:481
Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) 2:253
Global change system for analysis, research and training (START)
2:41
Global chemical models 1:109
Global climate change, lightning 1:221
Global climate models 1:109
Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) 1:753, 4:42
Global cooling 1:337
Global Data Processing System (GDPS) 1:68
Global Eco-labeling Network (GEN) 4:211
Global energy balance 1:18
Global environment facility (GEF) 4:481
Global environment monitoring system (GEMS) 4:39
Global environment outlooks (GEOs) 4:39
Global environmental change (GEC)
airborne sensors 2:524
and environmental history 5:62
and social science 5:109
anthropology and 5:163
assessing effects of 2:124
biological and ecological dimensions 2:1
causes and consequences 3:7
citizens responses 4:33
current challenges and priorities for science 4:44
driving forces 5:166
European perspectives 4:25
hazards 5:297
human dimensions of 5:1
human drivers of 3:5
impact on animals 2:56
impact on plants 2:94
impact on terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems 2:122
integration 2:132
politics 5:124
public-driven response 4:21
regional assessments 2:525
regional responses to 4:514
risk management 4:375
satellite sensors 2:524
scienti c responses 4:36
social science and 5:3
Global Environmental Facility (GEF) 4:43
Global Environmental Monitoring System (GEMS) 1:70
Global Forest Watch 4:231
Global governance 5:292
Global land cover 3:13
Global mean temperature 1:281
Global models, three-dimensional 1:107
Global multi-issues 4:317
Global net primary productivity (NPP) 2:50
Global observing programs 4:42
Global Observing Systems 1:63, 68
Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment (GODAE) 1:537
Global Ocean Ecosystem Dynamics (GLOBEC) 2:39
Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) 1:537, 2:336, 4:42
Global plate tectonics 1:410
Global population trends 3:16
Global Precipitation Climatology Center (GPCC) 1:454
Global reporting initiative (GRI) 4:236
Global Runoff Data Center (GRDC) 1:454
Global technology cooperation
Mexico, case studies 4:385
Thailand 4:386
Global Telecommunications System (GTS) 1:68
Global Terrestrial Observing System (GTOS) 1:538, 2:337, 4:42
Global Urban Observatory (GUO) 4:462
Global warming 1:27, 367, 712, 2:64, 85, 88, 331, 373, 579, 580,
3:315, 5:498
and rice 3:127
and skiing 3:346
and UHI 3:665
direct effects 2:575
ecosystem response evaluation 2:575
effects on freshwater ecosystems 2:129
effects on terrestrial ecosystems 2:129
evidence of response 2:579
freshwater 3:310
indirect effects 2:576
initial conditions 2:578
interactions with other elements 2:578
scenarios for 21st century 2:575
tourism contribution 3:614
variable time scale and direction of response 2:577
Global warming potentials (GWPs) 1:267, 411, 447
Global water cycle 2:132
Global Weather Experiment 1:392
Globalization 5:59
and development 5:157
capitalist roots 5:76
caste system 5:94
European origins 5:77
historical perspective 5:73
GOALS 1:411
Gold mining, mercury in 2:406
Goldemberg, Jose 4:233
Goldman prize 4:280
INDEX 585
Golf, impacts 3:345
Goodman, Gordon 4:234
Gopherus agassizii 2:137
Governance and international management 5:292
GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator) 5:331
Grasslands 2:68, 569
clearing 3:228
ecosystems 2:535
nitrogen applications 3:502
see also Temperate grasslands
Gravitational force 1:329
Gravity 1:224
Great Depression 5:41
Great Lakes 4:535
case study 3:721
climate change 4:538
contaminants 4:536
diverting and exporting fresh water 4:537
responses to global change 4:536
Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (GLWQA) 4:552
Great Man-made River Project, Libya 3:362
Green anarchism 5:439
GreenBlue technology 5:426
Green ideology 5:440
Green investment 4:235
Green Parties 5:56
Green Revolution 3:347, 5:88, 93
Green screens 42, 97
Greenhouse
food production 3:352
heating 3:355
open-roof 3:354
Greenhouse effect 1:19, 26, 27, 223, 248, 249, 413, 2:161
Greenhouse gases 1:27, 140, 190, 204, 273, 384, 411, 468, 675,
2:424, 457, 608, 3:178, 436, 4:165
and food consumption 3:323
anthropogenic 1:279, 281
emissions 4:164, 254, 410, 486
fossil fuels 3:649
highest emitters per km
2
land area 3:475
highest per capita emitters 3:473
highest per unit GDP emitters 3:474
lowest emitters per km
2
land area 3:475
lowest per capita emitters 3:473
lowest per unit GDP emitters 3:474
national responsibilities for emissions 3:472
reduction projects 4:292
total emissions per capita 3:475
tradable permits for 4:438
Greenhouse trapping (GHT) 1:291
Greenhouse warming 2:160
Greening of cities 3:356
Greenland 1:19, 21, 413, 647
carbon dioxide 1:416
climate 1:414
climate research 1:415, 416
geography 1:414
glaciers 1:447
Ice Core Project (GRIP) 1:417
ice cores 1:272, 273, 418, 447
ice loss 1:467
ice sheet 1:419
elevation change 1:421
map 1:414
Greenpeace 5:57
GreyBrown technology 5:426
GRID (Global Resource Information Database) 4:237
Gross domestic product (GDP) 4:295, 385, 5:43
Gross national product (GNP) 5:150, 152
Gross primary productivity (GPP) 2:191, 515
Ground temperature 1:21
Groundwater 1:451, 755
assessment 23;10
deserts 1:341
Groundwater contamination 3:495
Groundwater exploitation and subsidence 3:340
Groundwater quality, nitrate in 3:503
Groundwater systems 3:366
Growing season net ux (GSNF) 2:205
Growlers 1:467
Growth 2:161
Growth cycle 4:111
GTOS (Global Terrestrial Observing System) 1:70
Guanghan, China 4:549
Gulf of Alaska 3:315
Gulf War 3:146, 523, 548
Gymnosperms 2:135
Habitat destruction, tourism contribution 3:615
Habitat fragmentation, Amazon Basin 3:255
Habitats 2:339
lakes 2:378
rivers 2:378
urban ecosystems 3:656
Hadley circulation 1:227, 12:1198, 1:427, 476, 715
Hadley, George 1:427
Haiti, environmental refugees 4:215
Halocarbons 1:178, 427
growth in concentrations 1:144
Halogen Occultation Experiment (HALOE) 1:732
Halon-1301 1:146
Halons 1:153, 384, 680
Halophobes 2:339
Halophytes 2:339
Hantavirus 3:693
Harbors 3:572
Hare, Kenneth 1:428
Harmful algal blooms (HABs) 3:380, 548
Hazardous wastes 3:710
transboundary movements 3:631
Hazards, natural. See Natural hazards
Health 3:732, 5:497
and biosphere 5:500
and environment 5:492
and environmental change 3:130
as sustainable state 3:142
awareness 4:48
ecological model of 5:499
medical model 5:495
nitrogen impacts 3:503
public 3:547, 5:494
see also Ecosystem health
Health-based standards 4:487
Health benets of air quality standard 4:491
Health concerns, water use 3:90
Health effects, ozone 3:652
Health hazards
due to global climate change 3:132
nuclear waste 3:507
Health issues
lifestyles 4:61
policy responses 4:47
population dynamics 4:55
water supplies 4:51
see also WHO
Health of the Planet 4:23
Health outcomes and value systems 4:54
Health protection 4:50
586 INDEX
Heat
geothermal 1:402
latent 1:500
Heat storage, role of 1:21
Heatwaves 3:140
Heavy metals
methylation 3:110
persistent organic pollutants 4:286
soil contaminated with 3:105
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 5:105
Heinrich (H-) events 1:429
mechanisms 1:430
outstanding problems 1:430
Helsinki Commission (HELCOM) 4:518
Herbaceous-dominated vegetation 2:486
Heroics in mythology 5:373
Heterosphere 1:244
Heterotrophic systems 2:458
Heterotrophy 2:26, 143
HFC-134a 4:388
Hierarchical structure, conceptual model 4:130
Hierarchy
community based 4:118
theory 4:117
High Resolution Doppler Imager (HRDI) 1:732
High-nitrate low chlorophyll (HNLC) 3:183
Highway construction 3:711
Hilo, Hawaii 1:726
Hinduism 5:303
eco-spirituality 5:309
pollution and its prevention 5:307
treatment of animal life 5:305
Holdgate, Martin 4:239
Holdridge life zone classication 2:167, 201, 339, 487
Holism
and human ecology 3:2
understanding 4:408
Holling, C S 2:340
Holocene 1:249, 275, 340, 431, 2:86, 286, 5:57
climate changes and society in Europe 3:372
Holon 2:283, 5:423
Holonarchy 5:423
Homeostasis 5:493
Homocentrism 5:311
Homosphere 1:243
Household energy problem 3:218
Housing and basic services 3:673
Hsinfengkiang, China 3:295
Human adaptability 5:164, 300
Human carrying capacity 3:296
Human conict 3:548
Human dimensions of global environmental change 5:1
Human disturbance of Earth System, dynamics and complexities 3:1
Human disturbance regimes 2:88
Human drivers of global environmental change 3:5
Human ecology
and holism 3:2
China 3:430
Human ecosystem model 5:499
Humanenvironment relations 5:67
Human health. See Health
human impacts, cumulative effects 3:4
Human nature relationships (HNR) 5:12
Human needs and wants 3:2
Human obligations 5:207
Human rights 5:207
Human security 5:275, 276
Human shaping of the environment 5:357
Human sustainability 5:489
Human systems
maintaining 3:81
redesigning 3:82
Human values and science 5:117
Humanitarian aid 3:549
Humanitarian assistance, institutional trends 3:550
Humanitarian issues 3:550
Humanity and Earth 5:177
Humidity 1:432
Hurricanes 1:439
categorization 1:434
overview 1:433
Hutchinson, G Evelyn 2:341
Hydrochloric acid (HCl) 1:154, 681
Hydrochlorouorocarbons (HCFCs) 1:145, 153, 178, 268, 384, 411,
427, 4:313, 428
Hydroegoism 5:206
Hydrouorocarbons (HFCs) 1:145, 178, 268, 384, 411, 427, 447
Hydrogen isotope ratios 2:546, 547, 548, 549
Hydrogen oxide (HO
x
) family 1:677
Hydrogen peroxide (H
2
O
2
) 1:447, 2:457
Hydrogen sulde (H
2
S) in photosynthesis 2:423
Hydrologic cycle 1:19, 450, 2:343
and climate change 1:459
biospheric controls 2:37
conceptual diagram 1:452
data 1:453
uxes 1:451
human impacts 1:458
mathematical models 1:452
observed climatology 1:454
observed trends 1:462
quality measurements of individual components 1:454
reservoirs within 1:450
towards improved understanding 1:462
20th century observed changes 1:462
variations 1:457
Hydrological alterations 2:132
Hydrological hazards 3:481
Hydrological stores 2:344
Hydrology 1:464, 468, 2:343, 345
denitions 1:464
extremes 2:347
global 2:344
observing systems 1:536
rainforests 3:268
Hydrology and Water Resources Programme 1:758
Hydrometeorology 1:464
Hydrosolidarity 5:206
Hydroxyl radical (OH) 1:517, 677, 2:457
Hyperspatial imaging systems 2:527
Hyperspectral imaging systems 2:526
IAHS (International Association of Hydrological Sciences) 1:464
IAI (Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research) 4:241
IAMAS (International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric
Sciences) 1:466
IAMs
general structure 4:256
in science 4:259
mathematical structure 4:256
solving procedures 4:256
top-down versus bottom-up debate 4:257
uses 4:257
when and where exibility debate 4:258
IAPSO 1:467
Ice
areal extent 1:284
role of 1:21
Ice-core volcanic index (IVI) 3:690
INDEX 587
Ice caps 1:19
Ice cores 1:518
atmospheric CO
2
1:256
glaciers 1:407
Greenland 1:273, 274, 447
Ice dynamics, simulations 1:290
Ice sheets 1:21
Ice storms 3:486
Iceberg-rafted debris (IRD) 1:430
Icebergs 1:409, 467
ICREAs (International Commodity-related Environmental Agree-
ments) 4:242
ICSU (International Council for Science) 1:158, 4:39, 242
ICSU(World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) 1:70
IDNDR (International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction) 4:242
IDWSSD (International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation
Decade) 4:244
IFIAS (International Federation of Institutes for Advanced Study)
4:244
IGAC (International Global Atmospheric Chemistry) 1:467
IGBP 1:392, 2:38, 350, 351, 469, 4:41
core projects 1:310, 2:37, 48
framework activities 2:40
implementation strategies 2:41
science trends 2:53
Terrestrial Carbon Working Group 2:51
IGBPLUCC 5:386
Igneous rocks 1:397
IGOS 1:71
IGY (International Geophysical Year) 1:156, 189, 355, 468, 538,
4:40
IHDP (International Human Dimensions Program on Global Environ-
mental Change) 4:42, 245
IHP (International Hydrological Program) 1:468
IIASA (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis 4:44,
246, 452
Imaging technologies 2:528
Imbrie, John 1:469
Immanence 5:98
Immigration. See Migration
Immune system, effect of UVR 3:136
IMO (International Maritime Organization) 4:246
Imperata cylindrica 3:273
Improved Stratospheric and Mesospheric Sounder (ISAMS) 1:732
Incentive-based regulation 5:30
Incineration, urban wastes 3:687
Inclusion, philosophical polarities 5:103
Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) 5:44, 331
Index system, data banks 2:254
Indicators
calculating 4:135
categories 4:134
development 4:132, 134
environmental quality 4:247
generation 4:133
selection criteria 4:134
sustainable development 4:247
Indigenous empowerment 5:323
Indigenous knowledge 5:314
epistemology 5:317
Indigenous peoples 5:314
and environmental change 5:166
and phase shifts 5:427
Individual behavior 5:405
Indonesia
aquaculture 3:197
transmigration 3:272
wild res (1997) 3:491
Indus Basin, water management 3:377
Indus River, freshwater diversion 2:400
Industrial accidents 5:273
Industrial ecology 3:4, 4:112, 248, 5:47
Industrial emissions 3:679
Industrial metabolism 3:4, 5, 6, 73
Industrial revolution, power supplies 5:90
Industrialization, 19th century 5:363
Industrialized countries, environmental policy 4:5
Industry leadership 4:65
Infant mortality 5:33
Infectious diseases 2:163, 357, 3:138
and malnutrition 3:442
person-to-person 3:134
vector-borne 3:133
Information age and dematerialization 4:100
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) 3:6, 4:187,
5:505
Information exchange 4:171
Information management 2:392
Infrared radiation 1:371, 470
concepts 1:470
physical effects 1:474
process 1:473
spectra 1:472
Inland waters
ecosystems 2:380
science 2:376
Innovation 4:31, 5:294
Insect pests 3:381
active season 3:382
adaptation 3:381
extension of range 3:383
long-term datasets 3:384
response options 3:386
winter mortality 3:383
Insects, phytophagous 2:471
Institutional innovations 5:294
Institutionalization, global level 5:293
Institutions, environmental responsibility 4:7
Integrated assessment (IA) 4:249, 250
goals 4:250
Integrated assessment models. See IAMs
Integrated Coastal Area Management 4:346
Integrated coastal zone management (ICZM) 4:167
Integrated environmental and economic accounting (IEEA) 4:39
Integrated Global Earth Monitoring Systems (IGEMS) 1:538
Integrated models 5:395, 396
Integrated pest management (IPM) 4:261
and global change 4:263
Intellectual property rights 5:322
Inter American Institute for Global Change (IAI) 2:363
Inter-basin transfer (IBTs)
ecological impacts 3:390
global examples 3:388
history 3:387
North America 3:389
Siberia-Central Asia 3:389
UK 3:387
water supplies 3:387
Intergenerational equity 5:349
Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission 1:394, 753, 4:465
Intergovernmental organizations 1:157
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 1:28, 157, 278,
392, 409, 411, 3:7, 4:76, 163, 265
Internalization of damage costs 4:278
International agreements 4:3, 5:35
International Biological Program (IBP) 2:168
International Biosphere Program (IBP) 2:5, 364
International climate policy 4:252
International Council for Science (ICSU) 1:394, 538, 752, 4:156
International Environmental Education Program (IEEP) 4:206
588 INDEX
International environmental institutions 4:10
International environmental law 5:324
International environmental policy 4:323
International Environmental Prizes 4:279
International environmental responses 4:9
International environmental standards 4:281
non-binding negotiations 4:284
voluntary 4:286
International Geophysical Year (IGY) 1:156, 189, 355, 468, 538,
4:40
International Geosphere Biosphere ProgramLand-Use and Land-
Cover Change. See IGBPLUCC
International GeosphereBiosphere Program. See IGBP
International Global Atmospheric Chemistry Project (IGAC) 2:39
International Human Dimensions Programme (IHDP) 2:350
International Hydrological Decade (IHD) 1:469, 4:465
International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED)
5:248
International LTER (ILTER) network 2:393
International management 5:292
modes 5:293
International Maritime Organization (IMO) 4:308
International Meteorological Organization (IMO) 1:68
International Monetary Fund (IMF) 5:69
International organizations
accomplishments 1:159
earth sciences 1:156
International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) 3:391
International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE) 5:37
International transfers of emission 4:441
International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) 5:57
International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) 1:538
Interstadials 1:332
Intertidal zones 2:365
classications 2:365
littorinid 2:365
lower 2:366
middle 2:365
upper 2:365
Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) 1:228, 476
Introduction to Hydrometeorology 4:154
Invasability 2:13
Invasions 2:87, 132, 567, 4:74
consequences of 2:14
control methods 2:16
denitions 2:11
interactions with other agents of global change 2:14
lag phases 2:12
meltdown 2:14
process 2:11
rates of conversion to pest status 2:13
rates of incursion 2:12
rates of spread 2:12
success factors 2:13
Invasive species 3:137
Inversion conditions 1:243
Invertebrates 2:162
Investment
environmental protection 4:6
sustainable energy 4:90
see also Socially responsible investment (SRI)
IOC (Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission) 4:287
IOCGlobal Ocean Sea Level Observing System (GLOSS) 1:70
IOC/WMO GOOS 1:69
Ionizing radiation 3:507
Ionosphere 1:244, 476, 502, 516
IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) 1:477, 3:7, 42,
4:252, 481, 5:395
IPCS (International Program on Chemical Safety) 4:284, 288
IRI (International Research Institute for Climate Prediction) 1:477
Iron 2:425
chemistry 2:372
fertilization experiments 2:372
missing ingredient 2:371
update by 2:372
Iron cycle 3:181
Iron ore, transport movements 3:636
Iron triangle 5:427
IRPTC 4:289
Irrigation 3:8
and desertication 3:288
and disease 3:93
and wetlands demise 3:399
benets 3:393
costs 3:395
environmental impacts 3:392
growth and global extent 3:392
Libya 3:364
sustainable 3:396
IRS (Indian Remote Sensing Satellite) 1:74
ISCCP (International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project) 1:159,
478
ISEW (Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare) 5:44, 331
Islam 5:332, 461
basics 5:333
ethical dimension 5:333
natural order 5:334
Islands, tourism 3:626
ISLSCP (International Satellite Land Surface Climatology Project)
1:478
ISO (International Organization for Standardization) 4:290
Isoprene 2:606
Isostasy 1:103, 479
ISSC (International Social Science Council) 5:339
Istanbul, waste dumps 3:707
ITEX synthesis of global warming 2:580
IUCN (World Conservation Union) 4:40, 290
Red List of Threatened Species 4:201, 508
IUGG (International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics) 1:479
Ixodes 2:64
Ixodes ricinus 2:163
Izrael, Yuri A 4:291
Jainism 5:341
and the environment today 5:345
business 5:348
cosmology 5:343
environmental action 5:347
historical background 5:342
philosophy 5:343
practice 5:345
Jakarta, transmigration 3:273
Japan, aquaculture 3:198
Java
agricultural intensication 3:159
transmigration 3:272
Jebel Kassala 1:337, 338
Jet aircraft 1:155
Jet stream 1:481
denition 1:481
history 1:482
origin and description 1:481
signicance 1:481
JGOFS (Joint Ocean Flux Study) 1:483
Jinghua, China 4:548
Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS) 2:39, 43
Joint implementation 4:165, 292, 293, 357, 441
Judaism 5:349, 461
Junge, C E 1:483
Junge layer 1:483
INDEX 589
Jupiter 1:729
Jurassic 1:516
Kalahari transect 2:355
Kalimantan, biomass burning 3:209
Kalundborg, Denmark 3:77
Kant, Immanuel 5:104
Karen land use strategy 5:320
Karma 5:344
Law of 5:308
Karst 3:411
Karstic landscapes 3:411
Kassas, Mohamed 4:292
Keeling, Charles David 1:484
Keeling curve 1:484
Kelly, Petra 5:355
Kerosene 3:218
Keystone species 2:375
Klosterhede, Denmark 2:441
Knowledge
appropriation 5:323
community-based 5:486
traditional 5:486
Knowledge workers 5:301
Kondratyev, Kirill Yakovlevich 1:485
Kondratyev, Nikolai Dmitrievich 5:356
Koppen classi cation 2:487
Korea, aquaculture 3:198
Kosovo 3:148, 549
Kovda, Viktor Abramovich 3:411
Koyna earthquake 3:295
Krakatau volcanic eruption 1:736
Kremesta reservoir 3:295
K-selected species 5:391, 426
K-strategies. See r-K strategies
K strategists 5:385
KT event 2:297, 299
K T boundary 1:207
Kudzu 2:81
Kuwait, oil res 3:146, 523
Kyoto Protocol 1:427, 3:650, 4:149, 158, 163, 252, 284, 357, 388,
410, 424, 438, 441, 478
credibility mechanisms 4:484
emission targets 4:482
implementation mechanisms 4:483
un nished business 4:484
La Ni na 1:230, 366, 487, 645
bene cial effects 1:366
causes and consequences 1:353
effects on global weather variability 1:366
socio-economic impacts 1:366
weather impacts 1:366
see also El Ni no/Southern Oscillation (ENSO)
Labor force, aging 3:280
Labrador Sea 1:419
Ladoga camilla 2:61
Lago de Nicaragua 2:376
Lahars 3:413, 706
Lake Baikal 3:413
Lake Erie 3:721
Lake Huron 3:721
Lake Kariba 3:295
Lake levels, Holocene 1:276
Lake Michigan 3:721
Lake Naivasha, Kenya 1:276
Lake Ontario 3:721, 4:538
Lake Peipus Project 4:519
Lake Superior 3:721
Lake Victoria 4:538
hydrology and climate 4:538
sustainability 4:540
water quality 4:539
Lakes 2:375, 378
climate change responses 2:380
eutrophic 2:377
mesotrophic 2:377
oligotrophic 2:377
productivity 2:379
structure and function 2:379
threats 2:382
typologies 2:376
Lamb, Hubert H 1:487, 515
Land, role of 1:20
Land air water system 1:400
Land contamination 3:98
Land cover 1:488, 3:5, 6, 10
cattle grazing and 3:221
global 3:13
IGBP/DIS Classi cation 2:52
urban 3:656
Land cover change 3:1
Land cover conversion 3:7
Land degradation 3:136, 5:87
and climate change 3:421
and disease 3:443
and vegetation 3:419
human impact 3:421
Iberian Peninsula 3:421
Mediterranean 3:417
mitigation 3:422
tourism contribution 3:614
Land disposal 3:686
Land ethic 5:237
and change 5:240
ecofascism and 5:239
Land ice 1:331
Land management 2:566
Land mines 3:146
Land Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone (LOICZ) 2:39
Land pollution, regional responses 4:515
Land reclamation 3:424
dumping and in lling 3:343
global context 3:424
history 3:425
methods 3:426
regional and global environmental impact 3:427
Southampton, UK 3:578
Land resources consumption, tourism contribution 3:614
Land re-use, brown eld sites 3:343
Land surface 1:493
bucket scheme 1:496
climate interactions 1:494
effects of changes 1:495
models 1:106
representations 1:495
water storage 1:451
Land transformation 2:325
China 3:430
Land travel 3:643
Land use 3:1, 6, 10
after deep mine-induced subsidence 3:339
and water resources 2:347
and weather extremes 3:732
change effects 2:155
dynamics 5:87
grasslands 2:572
history 2:566
trends 2:13
590 INDEX
Land use change 2:131, 488, 3:2, 5, 7
and natural disasters 4:228
and nitrogen in soil 3:501
estimated (1700-1996) 1:491
impacts 1:460
regional 1:490
Land Use/Cover Change (LUCC) 2:40
Land use patterns 3:139
Land use/transport/environment interaction 3:645
Landlls 3:713
methane emissions 3:463
Landform change in steeplands 3:338
Landsat 1:73
Landsat thematic mapper (TM) 2:528
Landscape modication 3:345
by aggregate and brick clay extraction 3:341
Landscape quality and organic farming 3:533
Landscapes 5:357
anthropogenic changes 1:489
antiquity 5:359
artifactual 5:365
biologically diverse 5:320
connectivity 2:326
ecology 2:383
English garden 5:361
environmental change 1:488
fragmented 2:325
global scale changes 1:492
industrialization 5:363
local scale changes 1:489
meaning 5:357
medieval 5:360
modern/postmodern 5:364
natural 5:365
North America 5:362
parks/garden cities movements 5:363
processes 2:326
regional scale changes 1:489
Renaissance 5:361
unfragmented 2:326
Landslide tsunamis 1:727
Landslides 3:489
Lang, Winfred 4:294
Lapita colonization 3:274
Lapse rate 1:325, 371, 499
feedbacks 1:285, 286
Large Scale BiosphereAtmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA)
2:355, 383
Laser scatterometers 1:71
Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) 1:270, 342, 500, 647, 2:85
Last Glacier Maximum (LGM), climate modeling 1:298
Late Glacial, climatic changes 1:298
Latent heat 1:500
Law 5:413
international 5:324
soft law 5:327
see also Environmental law; National environmental law
LBA. See Large-scale biosphereatmosphere experiments in
Amazonia
Leaching 2:439, 446, 3:493
Lead
anthropogenic emissions 3:58
emission 3:711
ows 3:81
global production 3:56
levels 3:632
re-smelting facility 3:632
LEAD (Leadership for Environment and Development) 4:188, 294
Leaf
diffusion of CO
2
into 2:195
transpiration of water vapor from 2:195
Leaf-level processes 2:95
Leapfrogging technology 4:94, 295, 5:160
Learning
media-to-public 5:486
scientists-to-scientists 5:485
social 5:485
Legislative measures in pest control 4:263
Legumes, population dynamics 2:444
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von 5:105
Leisure, see also Recreation; Tourism
Length of the day 2:339
Leopold, Aldo 5:51, 367
Leopold matrix 3:3
Less developed countries (LDCs) 4:358, 5:212
ports 3:578
Libya
Great Man-made River Project 3:362
irrigation 3:364
water use and resources 3:362
Life cycle 2:385
analysis 3:4, 4:249
assessment 3:64, 4:210
salmon 3:309
technology 5:404
Lifestyles 5:368, 500
changes 4:31
health issues 4:61
Lifetime, gas 1:501
Lightning 1:219, 501
and atmospheric electricity 1:502
annual global ashes 1:221
cloud-to-ground 1:219, 501
global climate change 1:221
intercloud 1:219
intracloud 1:219
Limnology 1:503, 2:376
Linear global time 5:150
Liriodendron tulipifera 2:103
Literature
and environment 5:370
arrival of Christianity 5:375
modernity and contemporary 5:381
pre-modern 5:372
radicalism 5:380
romanticism 5:377
Lithosphere 1:410, 503
Lithospheric mantle 1:504
Little Climatic Optimum 1:514
Little Ice Age 1:24, 407, 504, 514, 515
explanation for 1:508
regional variability 1:508
temperature variations 1:507
Lituya Bay, Alaska 1:728
Lituya glacier 1:728
Livestock, methane emissions 3:225
Local and invasions, species effects 2:567
Local Leadership and Management Training Programme 4:462
Lochmaea suturalis 2:437
Loess sequence, China 1:341
Logging systems
damage to residual trees 3:328
effects on ow regimes and ooding 3:329
effects on water yield 3:329
level of forest disturbance 3:328
tropical countries 3:328
LOICZ Biogeochemical Model Project 2:46
LOICZ (LandOcean Interactions in the Coastal Zone) 2:39, 389
London, poverty 5:79
London Dumping Convention 4:297
Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution. See LRTAP
INDEX 591
Long-term Ecological Research Network. See LTER
Lorenz, Edward N 1:509
Lotka-Volterra model 2:213
Love Canal, Niagara Falls, NY 5:382
Lovelock, James 1:146, 510, 2:247
Lovins, A B 5:487
Lower atmosphere
stability 1:319
structure 1:320
LPG 3:218
LRTAP 4:173, 297
organization 4:175
Protocols 4:174
LTER 2:390
general details 2:390
information management 2:392
international networking 2:393
management 2:392
site names and locations (US) 2:391
US partnerships/collaboration among networks 2:393
LUCC Science Plan 2:41
Lyapunov exponents 2:213
MacNeill, Jim 4:299
Macro-level dynamics 5:403
Maculina arion 2:300
Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) 1:511
Madeira river 3:112
Mader, C L 1:727, 729
Mader ooding technique 1:726
Magnesium in soil 3:585
Magnitude of effects 2:566
Magnoliophyta 2:135
Malnutrition 3:134
and global environmental change 3:440
worldwide 3:440
Malone, Thomas F 1:511
Malthus, Thomas Robert 5:51, 86, 384
Malthusian theory 5:88
Mammatus clouds 1:326
Man and nature, complex system 5:384
Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modi ed by Human
Action 3:450
Man and the Biosphere (MAB) 2:175, 4:40, 466
Manabe, Syukuro 1:512
Mandala of health 5:500
Mangroves
ecosystems 2:395
leaf litter 2:398
socioeconomic properties 2:397
spatial distribution 2:396
Mansholt Plan (1968) 3:247
Manure as agricultural asset 3:188
Marasmiellus troyanus 3:218
Margalef, Ramon 2:401
Marine ecosystems 3:9
Marine environment, petroleum hydrocarbons 3:520
Marine isotope stage (MIS) 1:430
Marine mammals, exploitation 3:446
Marine Meteorology 1:758
Marine Meteorology and Associated Oceanographic Activities Pro-
gramme 1:758
Marine organisms 2:163
Marine pollution
Mediterranean Sea 4:527
see also GESAMP; London Dumping Convention
Marine species 2:163
Marine systems 2:137
Marine waters, eutrophication 3:503
Maritime transport 3:572
Market-based instruments 4:446
Market systems and sustainability 5:26, 27
Marsh, George Perkins 3:450, 5:50, 426
Marshes, anthropogenic changes 3:451
Mass ow analysis (MFA) 4:249
MASTER method 3:63
Material consumption 5:403
Material ows 3:4, 7, 80
assessment 3:61
comparison of prehistoric and modern Man 3:55
extractive industry 3:457
growth rates 3:55
natural 3:457
Vienna 3:59
Material input per service unit (MIPS) 3:64
Material turnover, prehistoric and modern Man 3:55
Materials
mining 3:454
quarrying 3:454
recovery 3:686
utilization 3:711
Materials cycle 4:111
Materials ow accounting (MFA) 4:300
methodology 4:301
Rhine River 4:301
risk reduction policies 4:304
Materials intensivity 4:183
Mature stage 2:550
Mauna Loa record of CO
2
measurements 1:484
Maunder, E W 1:514
Maunder Minimum 1:514
Mauritius, demographic transition 5:213
Maximum sustainable economic yield (MSEY) 4:307
Maximum sustainable yield (MSY) 4:307, 344
May, Robert M 2:401
Mean annual air temperatures (MAAT) 1:331
Mean annual precipitation (MAP) 2:570
Mean annual temperature 2:570
Mechanisms of impact 2:566
MEDA project 4:148
Media spaces 5:507
Media-to-public learning 5:486
Medical model of health 5:495
new perspectives 5:496
Medieval Climatic Optimum 1:514
Medieval Warm Epoch 1:514
Medieval Warm Period 1:408, 514
Mediterranean
desertication 3:418
land degradation 3:417
Mediterranean Action Plan 4:148, 527
Mediterranean Basin, environmental degradation 4:148
Mediterranean Sea 4:527
changing the scenario 4:530
marine pollution 4:527
Mega-tsunamis 1:728
MEPC (Marine Environment Protection Committee) 4:308
Mercalli scale 3:293
Mercuric chloride 2:403, 404
Mercury
and global climate change 2:408
(bio)chemical transformations 2:404
current scientic controversies 2:407
cycling 2:408
Amazon Basin 3:111
environmental 2:402
environmental cycling 2:404
general occurrence 2:403
in food chains 2:405
in small-scale gold mining 2:406
592 INDEX
Mercury (continued)
physical properties 2:403
poisoning catastrophe in Iraq 2:407
resident time in atmosphere 2:407
toxicity risks 2:407
toxicology 2:404
toxication 3:111
turnover 2:408
usage from Roman days to current practice 2:403
see also Minamata
Meridional circulation 1:239
Mesopause 1:243
Mesosphere 1:243, 516
Mesozoic 1:516, 2:297
Metabolism
anthroposystem 3:77
global 3:79
industrial 3:4, 5, 6, 73
national scale 31, 79
organism-centered 3:73
substance-centered 3:73
urban 3:78
utility of studies 3:80
Metadata 2:409
denition 2:409
description and standards available online 2:410
directories 2:252
global change science 2:410
Metal emissions 3:711
Metamorphic rocks 1:397
Metapopulations 2:411
extinctions 2:416
key concepts 2:414
models and theory 2:412
METEOR 1:72
Meteorology 1:517
monitoring strategies 1:536
Methane 1:178, 190, 384, 385, 468, 517, 2:424, 572, 3:178, 182,
4:428
abundance 2:605
atmospheric concentration 3:436
benets of low concentration recovery 3:438
collection and local consumption of low concentration gas 3:438
concentration increases 3:436
energy-producing technologies 3:437
generation 3:222
industrial sources 3:461
low concentration bearing gases 3:435
photooxidation 1:243
production and consumption in natural ecosystems 2:599
sources 2:605
tundra release 2:598
Methane clathrates 1:518, 647
Methane emissions 3:478
and cattle grazing 3:221
animal sources 3:222
animal wastes 3:222
anthropogenic sources 3:437
coke manufacture 3:463
current sources 3:223
future prospects 3:464
industrial combustion sources 3:462
industrial processes 3:464
industrial sector 3:461
landlls 3:463
livestock 3:225
methods for reducing 3:227
peat mining 3:463
wastewater treatment lagoons 3:463
Methanogenesis, rice 3:124
Methanotrophs 2:424
Methyl bromide 1:520
Methyl chloroform 1:145, 153, 2:458
Methyl mercury 2:404, 407
Mexico, global technology cooperation, case studies 4:385
Micro-evolutionary change 2:160
Microbes and global environmental change 2:424
Microbial diversity 2:421
Microbial life and biodiversity 2:421
Microcosm experiments 2:23
Microorganisms
evolution 2:421
functional diversity of 2:422
global environmental change 2:424
in bioremediation 3:218
roles in biogeochemical cycling 2:424
symbiotic 2:423
Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) 1:732
Microwave radar 1:71
Mid-Holocene, climate modeling 1:298
Mid-latitude westerlies 1:234
Migration 5:468
and climate change 3:374
environmental challenge 3:465
future international 3:26
see also Plant migration
Milankovitch changes 1:24
Milankovitch, Milutin 1:522
Milankovitch theory 1:522
Military intervention 3:549
Minamata 3:111, 256
Mineralization 2:544
Minerals
extraction 3:295
production and associated earth materials movement 3:459
production statistics 3:455
Mining 3:7
hidden ows 3:455
informal and unrecorded activity 3:455
materials 3:454
operations 3:711
overburden 3:455
subsidence due to 3:339
MINK study 4:549
Miombo Network Plan 2:42
Mississippi River 2:432
Mnemiopsis 4:522, 524
Mnemiopsis leidyi 4:524
Mobility 5:89
Model simulations, climate 1:114
Modeling
climate 1:28
future challenges 5:407
human dimensions of global environmental change 5:394
mathematical 5:397
paradigms 5:397
Models
Earth system. See Earth system models
using 5:406
validity 5:398
Modern environmental movement 5:247
Modernism 5:427
Modernity 5:408
MODIS 1:76
Moist adiabatic rate 1:325
Moist convection 1:325
Molina, Mario J 1:533
Molinia caerulea 2:437
Mombassa, Kenya 3:579
INDEX 593
Monitoring
conceptual models 4:126, 130
ecosystems 4:116
enterprise 4:122
process 4:122
program attributes 4:124
program elements 4:125
Monitoring systems 4:79
ad hoc, de facto 1:537
general concepts 1:534
global geophysical 1:534
status 1:536
see also specic applications
Monotheism 5:375
Monsi, Masami 2:426
Monsoons 1:228, 539
Montreal Protocol 1:144, 427, 447, 3:66, 4:65, 283, 339, 446
lessons learned 4:341
multilateral fund 4:309
Mooney, Harold A 2:426
More developed countries (MDCs) 5:212
Morphogenetics 5:424
Mortality
future 3:25
gap models 2:319
Motorized transport 4:426
Mount Merapi, volcanic eruptions 3:694
Mount Pinatubo 1:148, 3:700
Mountain climates 1:540
Mountains, origin 1:321
MSU (Microwave Sounding Unit) 1:541
Muir, John 5:411
Multi-issue assessment 4:316
examples 4:316
guidelines 4:317
Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) 4:282
Multiple scenario construction 4:179
Multispectral remote sensing systems 2:525
Multispectral scanner (MSS) 1:73
Municipal solid wastes, see also Urban wastes
Municipal solid wastes (MSW), recycling 4:549
Muslims. See Islam
Mutation 5:398
Myriophyllum 3:415
Mythology and cosmology 5:372
Myxomatosis 2:300
NADPH 2:191, 194
Narmada River Project 5:388
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein 5:412
Nation States 5:152
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) 1:73, 220,
732, 2:250
National Assessment 4:543
National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) 1:454
National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) 1:454
National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) 1:454
National environmental law 5:413
basic presuppositions 5:414
characteristics 5:413
compliance 5:417
development 5:413
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) 1:512
tide gauge 1:727
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Climate Monitor-
ing and Diagnostics Laboratory (NOAA/CMDL) 1:257
National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) 2:572
National overview 4:544
National policies for sustainable development 4:417
National self-interest 4:323
explanatory variables 4:325
interest-based explanation 4:323
NATT (northern Australia tropical transect) 2:355
Natural analogs 3:507
Natural capital 2:428
Baltic Sea 4:518
Natural disasters 3:479, 5:273
and land use changes 4:228
future research 4:380
impact 4:375
losses from 4:228
mitigation 4:378, 380
policy implications 4:379
protection against 4:379
publicprivate partnership 4:379
types 4:228
see also IDNDR
Natural disturbances, succession 2:555
Natural ecosystems 4:249
climate change impacts 2:67
Natural hazards 3:479, 5:297
cyclical nature 4:329
new approach 4:331
recommended actions 4:332
social and policy responses 4:328
traditional approaches 4:330
see also specic hazards
Natural selection and ecosystem 2:293
Natural succession 2:446
Natural systems 5:392
Nature 5:419
benign 5:388, 392
capricious 5:388, 392
ephemeral 5:388, 393
perverse/tolerant 5:392
relating to 5:97
Nature reserve 5:347
NCAR Community Climate Model 1:491
NECT (north east China transect) 2:354
Negative externalities 4:89
Negative feedback 1:382
Nekton 2:145
Neoliberalism 5:92
Nested holons 4:118
Net biome production (NBP) 2:168, 516
Net ecosystem production (NEP) 2:192, 334, 575
Net primary production (NPP) 2:168, 192, 202, 248, 334, 515, 568,
575
New Ageism 5:420, 440, 448
New Zealand, tourism 3:626
Newton, Isaac 51, 104
Niche 2:339, 429, 471
Nigeria, oil industry 3:526
Nile River 4:541
Nimbus 1:73
NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) 5:421, 452
Nitrate 1:179, 2:433
EC Directive 3:505
in surface waters 3:182
leaching 2:428, 3:493
Nitrate protection zones (NPZs), Europe 3:493
Nitrate sensitive areas (NSAs) 3:493, 505
Nitric acid (HNO
3
) 1:163, 180, 677, 678, 681
Nitric oxide (NO) 1:179
Nitrication 2:423, 433, 446, 3:493
Nitrogen 2:429, 442, 3:9
agricultural management 3:504
agricultural uses and their impacts 3:499
anthropogenic emissions 3:45
594 INDEX
Nitrogen (continued)
atmospheric loading and emissions 3:502
dose-ecosystem response relations 2:436
emission trading 4:453
ux from landscape to coastal waters 2:432
increased ecosystem demand 2:444
inputs to ecosystems 2:435
isotope ratios 2:546
leaching 2:439
mineralization 2:446
overfertilization 2:348
see also CENTURY generalized ecosystem model; Red eld ratio
Nitrogen addition fertilizer 2:437
Nitrogen compounds 2:599
human activity causing 3:500
Nitrogen cycle 1:678, 2:379, 423, 429, 3:494, 500
Nitrogen cycling organisms, functional groups 2:29
Nitrogen deposition 2:104, 488, 608
forests 2:435, 567
initial effects 2:437
Nitrogen dioxide (NO
2
) 1:179, 3:680, 4:486
Nitrogen emissions, remedies 2:440
Nitrogen fertilization 3:502
Nitrogen fertilizer 2:431, 3:46
Nitrogen xation 2:308, 423, 430, 442, 558
effects of elevated CO
2
xx
symbiotic 2:443
Nitrogen imbalance, consequences of 3:503
Nitrogen Limited Forests 2:436
Nitrogen losses, agricultural 3:504
Nitrogen mineralization 2:579, 598
Nitrogen oxides (NO
x
) 1:163, 179, 384, 677, 678, 2:433, 3:650,
678
anthropogenic emissions 3:45
atmospheric 2:433
emissions 2:457
Protocol 4:174
Nitrogen partitioning 2:102
Nitrogen pollution 3:504
Nitrogen saturation 2:439
Nitrogen trioxide free radical (NO
3
) 2:457
Nitrous oxide (N
2
O) 1:178, 384, 386, 468, 2:424, 433, 572, 3:478,
494, 4:428
No-regrets principle 4:334
NOAA 1:72
Non-anthropocentrism 5:234
Non-dispersive infrared (NDIR) analyzer 1:260
Non-equilibrium ecology 2:446
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 1:158, 3:548, 4:8, 460,
472, 5:54, 243, 431
forest policies 4:354
Nonlinear dynamics 2:210
and environmental variability 2:211
Nonlinear systems 2:450
dynamics 2:452
Noosphere 2:604, 5:69, 421
Normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) 2:202
North America
europeanization 5:362
tourism 3:625
wetlands 3:405
North American First Nations 5:466
North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) 1:274, 277
North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) 1:419, 457
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 3:549
North-South divide 4:103, 5:159, 200
Northern Annular Mode 1:201
Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO) 4:285
Norway spruce 2:437
Not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) politics 5:421, 452
NPP 2:204
Nuclear accidents 3:241, 4:74, 5:54, 301, 503
Nuclear explosions 1:155
Nuclear ssion 3:506
waste management 3:509
Nuclear power 3:506
generation 3:509
see also Chernobyl
Nuclear reactors 3:509
Nuclear testing 5:247
Nuclear war, potential impact 3:516
Nuclear waste
conditioning, reprocessing and once through cycle 3:510
forms and categories 3:510
geological issues 3:506
health hazards 3:507
management 3:710
management principles and practice 3:513
management solutions 3:511
Nuclear weapons 5:247
Nuclear winter 1:330, 3:149, 515
Nutrient depletion 3:584
Nutrient loss
soil 3:589
tropical rainforests 3:332
Nutrients
biogeochemical cycling 2:379
mineralization/demineralization 2:543
Obasi, G O P 4:335
Ocean
observing systems 1:537
salinity patterns 1:20
Ocean carbon cycle model intercomparison 2:50
Ocean circulation 1:20, 557
Ocean currents 1:20
Ocean models, mixed layer-only 1:290
Ocean temperature measurement 1:161
Oceanic tides 1:710
Oceanography 1:537
Oceans 1:450, 645, 2:76
anomalous regions 2:371
climate chemistry 3:181
environmental policy 4:279
iron fertilization 2:425
role of 1:20
tourism 3:626
Odum, Eugene P 2:456
OECD 3:549, 4:6, 43, 295, 336, 5:160
Off-shore petroleum industry 5:184
Oil, Arctic environment 3:517
Oil consumption trends and predictions 3:736
Oil crisis 5:398
Oil res
effect on weather and the marine environment 3:524
effects on terrestrial environment 3:523
Kuwait 3:146, 523
Oil industry
Arctic 3:525
cultural impacts and environmental risk tolerance 3:525
tropics 3:525
Oil shales 3:528
composition 3:529
extraction 3:530
origin 3:529
reserves 3:531
Oil spills 4:74
biological effects 3:521
Oligotrophic lakes 2:458
Oligotrophic systems 2:458, 5:426
INDEX 595
Oncorhynchus. See Salmon
One Hundred Million Guinea Pigs 5:51
Ongoing implementation review 5:327
Ontogeny 2:497
Open burning, urban wastes 3:687
Operational Hydrology ProgrammeApplications 1:758
Operational Hydrology ProgrammeBasic Systems 1:758
Optimal ltering 1:388
Optimal weighting 1:388
Optimum sustainable yield (OSY) 4:307
Opuntia stricta 2:81
Orconectes rusticus 2:534
Organic carbon (CH
2
O) 2:523
Organic farming 3:532
and biodiversity 3:533
and landscape quality 3:533
and natural resources 3:533
background 3:532
characteristics 3:533
denition 3:532
disbenets 3:534
principal features 3:532
soils 3:533
Organic matter loss from topsoil 3:589
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. See
OECD
Origin of Species 2:247
Ostrinia nubilalis 2:64
Our Common Future 4:154
Overcrowded dwellings 3:674
Overgrazing and desertication 3:285
Overshoot in ecological capacity 3:298
Oxidants 2:523
Oxidation processes 2:457
Oxidationreduction reaction 2:523
Oxygen
anthropogenic impacts 2:140
atmospheric 2:140
photolysis 1:676
Oxygen-16 2:544
Oxygen-17 2:544
Oxygen-18 2:544
Oxygen isotope ratio 2:546, 547, 549
Oxygen isotope record 1:273
Oxygenated compounds 2:607
Ozone 1:180, 386, 468, 3:178, 181
absorption bands 1:473
and UV radiation 1:151
atmospheric gases affecting 1:144
chemical and physical processes affecting 1:146
concentration 1:675
decreasing 1:148
destruction 1:143
effects on climate 1:152
health effects 3:652
human-related effects 1:146
integrated column amount 1:143
monitoring network 1:676
photodissociation 1:143
potential for new impacts 1:154
stratospheric. See Stratospheric ozone
total ozone column 1:143
tropospheric 1:281, 384, 2:608
variation in temperature and concentration with altitude 1:142
Ozone depleting substances (ODS) 4:65, 314, 446
Ozone depletion 1:520, 2:457, 4:74, 5:498
consequences 1:151
see also Stratospheric ozone
Ozone depletion potential (ODP) 1:520
Ozone distribution 1:680
Ozone formation 3:678
and weather 3:650
Ozone hole 1:681
Arctic 1:150
Ozone layer 1:14, 4:148, 337
Ozone layer depletion 1:427, 447, 510
Ozone loss 1:676
Ozone observations 4:337
Ozone protection, policy considerations 1:153
Ozone vertical prole 1:680
Pacic and Arctic Railway and Navigation Company (PARN) 1:727
Pacic Decadal Oscillation (PDO) 1:367, 457
Pacic Islands
bird extinctions 2:57
chronology of colonization 3:275
demographics 3:273
early humanenvironmental relations 3:276
settlement-pattern changes 3:276
Pacic North American Teleconnection Pattern (PNA) 1:360
Pacic Ocean 3:315
Pacic Tsunami Warning Center 1:727
Paleoclimate modeling intercomparison project (PMIP) 1:298
Paleoecological research, sediments 2:112
Paleozoic 2:297
Pangaea 1:517
Papua, New Guinea 1:727
PAR (photosynthetically active radiation) 2:461, 524, 3:353
Paradigm shift 5:392
Parallel climate model 1:116
Parasitism 2:557
Parasparapagraho Jivanam 5:344
Pareto-optimality 4:278
Parks/garden cities movements 5:363
Participatory IA (PIA) 4:253
Particle Environment Monitor (PEM) 1:732
Particulate matter (PM) 4:486
standards 4:489
Particulates 3:678
primary sources 1:163
Parus major 2:62
Passerine 2:460
Past global changes (PAGES) 2:40, 48
Pastures
and methane emissions 3:224
conservation 3:225
global status 3:224
Patch dynamics 2:419
Pattaya, tourism 3:620
Pattern analysis 1:388
Peacekeeping 3:549
Peat res 3:210
Peat mining, methane emissions 3:463
Peat wastage 3:588
Pelagic attractors 5:426
Pelagic organisms 2:145
People for the ethical treatment (PETA) of animals 5:234
PEPC (phosphoenol-pyruvate carboxylase) 2:443
Peruorocarbons (PFCs) 1:384, 427
Periodic situation assessment 5:327
Perkinsus marinus 2:163
Permafrost 1:648
Permian 2:297
Peroxyacetylnitrate (PAN) 1:180
Persistent organic pollutants (POPs) 1:427, 3:138, 416, 5:498
heavy metals 4:286
Protocol 4:187
Pest control
biological methods 4:262
chemical methods 4:261
596 INDEX
Pest control (continued)
cultivation methods 4:261
legislative measures in 4:263
physical methods 4:261
Pest management, global change impacts 4:264
Pesticides 2:16, 5:51, 430
policy 4:360
Pests
and disease 2:64
global change impacts 4:263
PET (potential evapotranspiration) 2:207, 461, 570
Petrol engines 3:678
Petroleum hydrocarbons
Arctic concentrations 3:520
Arctic environment 3:517
Petroleum industry
cultural impacts and environmental risk tolerance 3:525
off-shore 5:184
Petroleum seeps, Arctic 3:517
Petunia hybrida 2:101
pH
regulation 2:159
soils 3:101
Phase shifts 5:422
and indigenous peoples 5:427
examples 5:424
global level 5:427
phenology 5:425
seasonal 5:425
Phases, examples 5:424
Phenology 2:62, 101, 160, 461
factors affecting 2:462
history 2:462
predicting effects of change 2:464
predicting long-term responses to climate change 2:464
recent shifts associated with changing climate 2:464
variations within communities 2:463
Phenotype
denition 2:465
plasticity 2:466
Philippines, aquaculture 3:198
Philosophy 5:97
Phosphates
in detergents 3:544
in surface waters 3:183
Phosphoglyceric acid 2:194
Phosphorus 2:466
anthropogenic environmental change effects on transformations
and transfers 2:469
anthropogenic mobilization 3:538
biospheric reservoirs and uxes 3:538
global transfers 3:536
human impact 3:541
importance 3:536
in agricultural soils 3:540
in soil 3:585
in waters 3:541
natural stores and ows 3:536
water quality 3:542
see also CENTURY generalized ecosystem model; Redeld ratio
Phosphorus cycle 2:466, 3:537
human intensication 3:538
soil 3:540
Photoautotroph 2:26
Photochemical reactions 1:677
Photochemical smog 3:678
Photoheterotroph 2:26
Photorespiration 2:194
Photosynthesis 2:28, 95, 192, 422, 470, 557, 3:181
C
3
2:69, 186, 194, 470, 573
C
4
2:69, 186, 194, 470, 573
down-regulation 2:97
respiration/decomposition 2:159
stimulation 2:490
Photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) 2:202
Phyllophora 4:522
Physical weathering 1:755
Physics and Chemistry of Clouds and Weather Modication Research
Programme 1:758
Physiology 2:160, 161
Phytophagy 2:471
Phytoplankton 2:371, 378
Phytoplankton bloom dynamics 3:380
Pigovian tax 4:195
Pinus radiata 2:333
Pipelines 3:644
PIRATA 1:69
Place
geography 5:446
understanding 5:446
Planetary boundary layer 1:489
Planetary electrication 1:218
Planets 5:373
Plankton 2:145, 523
Plant allocation patterns 2:101
Plant canopy 2:195
feedbacks between energy, carbon, water and nutrient uxes
2:193
Plant competition 2:471
Plant dispersal 2:81
Plant functional types (PFTs) 2:167, 481, 570
classication 2:481, 483
climate change response 2:487
construction 2:485
dentions 2:483
global change 2:487
resource gradients 2:485
Plant growth 2:471
and carbon balance 2:497
and primary production 2:220
dependence on environmental conditions and species identity
2:98
Plant migration 2:81
elements of 2:82
Plant ontogeny 2:496
Plant response 2:484
Plant soil feedback processes 2:102
Plant soil interactions 2:103
Plant tissue quality and CO
2
2:221
Plantations, environmental impacts 3:156
Plants
and global carbon cycle 2:95
architecture 2:101
carbon balance and growth 2:489
CO
2
enrichment 2:216
CO
2
uptake/water vapour-loss ratio 2:220
competition in elevated CO
2
2:471
cycle of carbon and energy 2:191
developmental patterns 2:101
endangered species 4:202
feedbacks between energy, carbon, water and nutrient uxes
2:193
functional groups 2:28
global change impacts 2:332
growth at elevated CO
2
2:489
impact of global environmental change 2:94
inter-generational population dynamics 2:475
interspecic interactions 2:475
intraspecic interactions 2:473
physiology 2:98
population genetic structure 2:474
INDEX 597
respiration/decomposition 2:159
role of competition 2:472
stand size and structure 2:473
urban ecosystem habitats 3:656
whole-plant feedbacks 2:102
see also Crops; Photosynthesis
Plasmodium falciparum 2:163
Plastic materials, ow and stocks 3:64
Plate tectonics 1:324, 503, 647
theory 3:699
Plato 5:104
Pleistocene 1:249, 341, 2:58
Pliocene 1:338, 339
climate modeling 1:297
Poisonings 4:74
Polar Fronts 1:235
Polar orbiting environmental satellites (POES) 1:72
Polar regions 1:234, 2:74
tourism 3:625
Polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs) 1:680
Policy dilemmas 4:367
environment issues 4:367
Policy exercises 4:367
Policy responses, health issues 4:47
Political economy 3:7
Political movements/ideologies 5:429
Political systems 5:443
Politics
and society 5:446
global environment change (GEC) 5:124
Pollutants
fossil fuels 3:302
organic 3:218
removal 3:218
sources 3:678
types 3:678
Polluter Pay Principle (PPP) 4:108, 196, 368, 5:42, 195, 293, 329,
330, 445
Pollution 4:74, 5:430
abatement 4:16, 17
prevention 4:17, 18
Polychlorinated biphenols (PCBs) 35.36sp
Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) 2:379, 3:98, 416, 417, 4:518, 519
Population
afforestation impacts 3:158
aging See Aging population
and development 5:32
global trends 3:16
projections 3:20, 27
see also Migration; Urban population
Population change, urban 3:666
Population density 2:209
Population dynamics, health issues 4:55
Population expansion 1:190
Population uctuation effects of global environmental change 2:214
Population growth 5:384, 403
and education 5:33
and water resources 5:205
and water use 3:87
Population health 5:497
Population size changes 2:504
Population status, species 2:12
Population vulnerability to climate change 3:141
Ports 3:572
city/port interface 3:573, 580
development in advanced countries 3:574
less-developed countries 3:578
Positive feedback 1:382
Post-modern environmentalism 5:408
Post-modernism 5:427
Post-modernity 5:430
Post-normal science 4:45, 5:2, 451
Potential evapotranspiration (PET) 2:207, 461, 570
Potomogeton 33.47ch
Poverty 3:732
and environment 4:58
and urban vulnerability 4:408
environmental problems 5:32
London 5:79
see also Urban poverty
Povertyfertility relationship 5:33
Power supplies, industrial revolution 5:90
Precambrian 1:252
Precautionary principle 3:306, 4:164, 5:28, 293, 330, 455
and environmental management 4:369
overview 4:369
Precipitation 1:452, 455, 2:344, 345, 380
average annual 1:456
chemistry 1:318
cold season 1:529, 530
formation 1:317
Predator-prey cycles 2:213
Predictability 1:263
Prehistoric peoples and forest soils 3:546
Present Discounted Value 5:28
Preservationist 5:244
Pressure gradient force (PGF) 1:224
Pressurized water reactors (PWRs) 3:509
Price elasticity of demand 4:110
Primary succession 2:550
Primordial heat 1:402
Principia Mathematica Philophiae Naturalis 5:397
Prithivi 5:304
Private choice 5:368
Prizes 4:279
Procedural fairness 5:280
Procedural innovations 5:326
Process-oriented modeling 5:396
Process theology 5:196, 492
Productivity 2:161, 515
Property rights 5:457
Proterozoic eon 2:297
Protists 2:422
Pseudomonas 2:26
Public-driven response to global environmental change 4:21
Public health. See Health
Public Weather Services Programme 1:758
Pueraria lobata 2:81
Pyroclastic ows 3:706
Pyroclasts 3:705
Quality-assurance and quality-checking (QA/QC) review of data and
metadata 2:254
Quantum mechanics 5:397
Quarrying 3:7
and landform change 3:340
coastal superquarries 3:342
hidden ows 3:455
materials 3:454
overburden 3:455
Quasi-equilibrium analysis 2:335
Quaternary ice age, climate modeling 1:297
Quotas 4:371
Radar remote sensing systems 2:525
RADARSAT 1:74
Radiation, types 3:508
Radiation balance
Earths 1:18
rainforests 3:266
598 INDEX
Radiation inversion 1:717
Radiation transport models 1:104
Radiativeconvective models (RCMs) 1:105
Radiative damping 1:283
Radiative forcing 1:284, 388, 3:186
Radical ecotopianism, principal inuences on 5:447
Radical environmentalism 5:444
Radio communication 1:476
Radioactive forcing 1:163, 166
Radioactive isotopes 2:544
Radioactivity 3:507
fundamental protection strategies 3:508
health-dose-risk 3:507
regulation 3:509
sources, types and damage caused 3:507
Radiogenic heat 1:402
Radionuclides 3:221, 241
natural environment 3:511
Rail infrastructure 3:644
Rail transport 4:426
Rain-shadow 1:334
Rainfall 2:346
intensities 4:229
partitioning 5:202
potential effects of changes 3:383
Rainforests. See Tropical rainforests
RAINS (Regional Air Pollution Information and Simulation) 4:452,
551
Raven, Peter 2:522
Realized niche 2:429
Reclamation projects 2:532
Recompensating duties 4:242
Recompensating tariffs 4:242
Recreation 3:345
see also Tourism
Recycling 3:686, 4:249
municipal solid wastes (MSW) 4:549
Red list of threatened species 4:201, 508
Red Sea, effects of tourism on coral reefs 3:618
Red tide 3:548
Redeld ratio 2:315, 522
Redox potential 1:755, 2:523
aquatic ecosystems 3:108
sediments 3:108
Reforestation 5:347
Refrigerant recycling, case study 4:387
Refugees 3:548
environmental 4:214, 215
Regional Acidication INformation and Simulation. See RAINS
Regional analyses 4:544
Regional assessments, global environmental change 2:525
Regional climate change
future perspectives in RCM research 1:531
modeling 1:523
processes of 1:523
simulations 1:528
Regional climate models (RCM) 1:347
Regional differences in water challenges 5:204
Regional ecology 2:380
Regional environmental standards 4:285
Regional institutions and actions 4:12
Regional models 1:109
Regional multi-issues 4:318
Regional Programme 1:758
Regional responses to Global Environmental Change (GEC) 4:514
Regional Seas Programme (RSP) 4:476
Regulatory rules 5:413
Rehabilitation projects 2:532
Relative growth rate (RGR) 2:490
Relative humidity 1:432
Religion 5:97, 461, 466
and environment 5:436
Remanufacturing 4:249
Remedial action plans (RAPs) 4:553
Remote sensing 2:524, 528, 4:225
information handling and calibration 2:529
Renewable energy technologies (RETs) 4:412
applications in SIDs 4:414
cost-effective 4:415
Repatriation 3:549
Reservoir-induced seismicity (RIS) 3:294
Reservoirs 2:347
environmental impacts 3:553
worlds largest 3:553
Resettlement schemes 3:272
Residence time 1:398
Residential emissions 3:680
Resilience 2:281, 530
denitions 2:530
myth 5:400
Resistance 2:281
Resource extraction 5:161
Resource gradient response 2:485
Resource preservation 5:161
Respiration 2:96, 433, 531, 3:182
Respiration reaction 2:523
Respiratory disease 3:649
hospitalization rates 4:488
Response groups to disturbance 2:485
Responsibility principle 5:338
Restoration, ecosystem 2:532
Restoration of degraded ecosystems
climate change buffer 2:536
potential applications to climate change 2:533
status of science 2:537
Retoxication, biosphere 3:98
Revolutionary socialism 5:438
Reynolds Number 5:424
Rhine Basin
agriculture 3:106
cadmium 4:302
Rhine River, materials ow accounting (MFA) 4:301
Rhizobium 2:308
Rhizoplane 2:539
Rhizosphere 2:539, 557
Ribulose bisphosphate (RuBP) 2:194
Rice 3:116
area and production in Java 3:160
average yields 3:121
breeding 3:122
ecology 3:124
environmental impacts 3:122
global warming 3:127
harvested area 3:121
high yielding varieties 3:122, 392
methanogenesis 3:124
origins 3:117
production systems 3:122
selection 3:122
spread 3:118
sustainability 3:128
Rice crop yields 3:391
Rice-eld ecology 3:392
Richter scale 3:293
Rift Valley fever 3:693
Rio Conference. See UN Conference on Environment and
Development
R o de la Plata
case study 3:723
global change perspectives 3:725
hydroclimatic variability and change 3:724
INDEX 599
Riparian zone 2:378
Risk assessment, cadmium exposure 3:305
Risk assessment methodologies 4:179
Risk estimates, improving 4:378
Risk management
and Global Environmental Change (GEC) 4:375
decision processes 4:377
social 5:300
Risk reduction policies, materials ow accounting (MFA) 4:304
River basin, hydrology 2:345
Rivers 2:375, 378
biodiversity 3:316
climate change responses 2:380
rainforests 3:269
regulation 3:551
structure and function 2:379
tropical Asian 3:316
typologies 2:376
r K strategies 2:482, 540, 5:385, 391
r K symbols 5:426
Road transport 4:426
emissions 4:429
Roads, infrastructure 3:643
Rock cycle 1:397
Rock debris 3:413
Rock particles 1:409
Rockets 1:155
Rocks 1:397, 504, 2:159, 200, 3:711
disintegration 1:755
sedimentary 1:397
Rodin, Leonid E 2:540
Rooftop gardens 3:357
Roosevelt, Theodore 5:475
Roots, rainforest 3:265
Ross River virus disease 3:690
Rosswall, Per Thomas 2:541
Rothamsted Insect Survey 3:384
Ruminants, methane emissions 3:222
Runoff 1:452, 2:345, 346
glacier-fed 1:408
Rural eco-engineering 4:547
Rwanda 3:549
Safer Cities Programme 4:462
Saf r/Simpson scale 1:434
Sahara Desert 1:336
St Francis prize 4:280
St Lawrence River Basin 3:721
Salinity
agriculture 3:559
and deserti cation 3:288
and irrigation 3:559
dryland agriculture 3:561
failure to implement solutions 3:562
human-induced 3:561
implications of climate change 3:563
Montevideo 3:724
ocean patterns 1:20
reversing salinization 3:585
soil 3:234
speci c situations 3:562
Salinization 2:543, 3:589
Salmon
anadromous 3:310
as indicator 3:309
biology 3:201
distribution of species 3:201
life cycles 3:309
Paci c species 3:315
responses to climate change 3:310
sockeye 3:315
Salmon farming 3:9, 200
environmental issues 3:202
regulation 3:203
SALT (savannas in the long-term) 2:355
Sampling effect 2:24
Sampling sensors 1:535
Samyag-darsana-jnana-caritra 5:345
Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) 5:247
Sanitation 3:85
coverage by region 4:51
developing countries 4:52
see also IDWSSD
Saprobien system 5:426
Saprophages 2:315
SAR 1:73
Satellite observations 2:592
Satellite sensors 2:524
Satellites 1:71, 535, 2:202, 4:225
long term imagery 2:528
meterological 2:572
new series of imagery 2:529
see also CEOS
Savannas 2:68
terrestrial transects 2:355
see also Tropical savannas
Saxifraga oppositifolia 2:600
Scale theory 5:73, 74
Scenarios 5:476
alternative 5:477
construction 5:480
descriptions 5:477
development 5:407, 479
preparation 5:479
reporting 5:480
utilization 5:480
SCEP (Study of Critical Environmental Problems) 4:382, 385
Science
and human values 5:117
epistemology 5:317
IAMs in 4:259
post-normal 5:451
role in environmental policy 4:37
values 5:117
Science of the concrete 5:316
Scienti c and Technical Advisory Panel (STAP) 4:43
Scienti c Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) 1:189
Scienti c Committee on Problems of the Environment. See SCOPE
Scientists-to-scientists learning 5:485
SCOPE (Scienti c Committee on Problems of the Environment)
4:39, 40, 45, 152, 383
SCOR 1:640
Screening 4:204
Sea ice 1:21
feedbacks 1:290
Sea level 1:645
factors causing change 1:647
observations 1:645
projected changes 1:649
rise 1:409, 3:135, 582, 4:230
variations 1:646
Sea surface temperature (SST) 1:22, 65, 212, 229, 245, 270, 289,
355, 2:231
Seasonal change, carbon isotope ratio 2:549
Seasonal cycle simulation 1:118
Seasonal timing 2:461
Seasonal variations 2:213
simulation 1:111
subtropical jet stream 1:233
600 INDEX
SeaWifs (Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor) 1:75
SeaWinds 1:80
Second Law of Thermodynamics 5:397
Secondary succession 2:550
Sectoral analyses 4:544
Security
and development 5:159
see also Environmental security; Human security
Sedimentary rocks 1:397
Sediments 2:152, 200
accretion of organic and inorganic 2:367
activities in ecosystems 2:153
and contaminated land 3:98
anoxic 2:379
atmospheric change 2:155
climate change 2:156
freshwater 2:153
global change 2:154
interactive effects 2:158
invasive species 2:157
land use effects 2:155
paleoecological research 2:112
records of long-term ecological change 2:112
redox potential 3:108
suspended yield 3:592
Seismic hazard 4:383
Seismic risk (and risk assessment) 4:383
Seismicity 3:294
Seismology 1:537
Selectin 5:398
Self-organization 4:31, 118
conceptual model 4:126
Self-organizing Holarchic Open (SOHO) Systems 4:120
Self-organizing phenomena 4:116
Semi-deserts 1:333
Senecio harveyanus 2:284
Senecio squalidus L. 3:632
Sensible heat ux, rainforests 3:267
Serial dependence 2:26
Seveso incident 5:54, 482
Sewage disposal 3:687
Sewage infrastructure 3:221
Shareholder activism 4:236
Shelterbelts 3:235
Shifting cultivation 3:565, 5:87
and environmental change 3:568, 570
Europe 3:567
negatively stereotyped 3:566
Shipping 3:572
bulk 3:635
container movements 3:639
deep-sea 3:635
liner 3:637
petroleum hydrocarbon inputs due to 3:518
substandard 3:638
Shoemaker-Levy-9 asteroid impact 1:729
Siberia, terrestrial transects 2:354
Sierra Club 5:243, 483
Silent Spring 5:50, 247, 430
Single large or several small (SLOSS) debate 2:325
Skagway tsunami 1:727
Skiing, impacts 3:346
Skin cancer 3:136
Sky, origins 5:372
Slow feedback processes 1:293
Slow onset changes 5:273
Small is beautiful 5:393, 483
Small Island Developing States (SIDS)
administrative capacity building 4:421
areas requiring further action 4:421
energy resources 4:412
institutional strengthening 4:421
production, trade and consumption of commercial energy 4:412
sustainable development 4:412, 416
Small islands 2:77
degradation due to tourism 3:618
SMIC (Study of Mans Impact on Climate) 4:385
Smith, Adam 5:86
Smog 3:678, 680, 4:74, 486
alert systems 3:681
measures to tackle 3:682
restrictions 3:682
Snow, areal extent 1:284
Snow cover feedbacks 1:289
Snow storms 3:486
Social appraisal (SAp) 4:386
Social assessment 4:386
Social change processes 4:390
Social Contract 5:152, 158
Social ecology 5:434, 444, 448, 484
Social impact assessment (SIA) 4:387, 5:484
focus 4:388
methodology 4:392
principal features 4:388
Social impacts 4:389
pathways 4:389
potential 4:391
Social learning 5:485
Social processes, categories 4:390
Social reformism 5:437
Social risk 5:300
Social science
and global environmental change (GEC) 5:3, 109
descriptive approach 5:110, 111
descriptive tradition 5:109
interpretive approach 5:110, 113
interpretive tradition 5:109
research applications 5:120
research areas 5:118
research style and scale 5:114
style and standpoint 5:109, 117
Social services, provision of 5:33
Social sustainability 5:489
Socially responsible investment (SRI) 4:393
Society and politics 5:446
Society for Ecological Restoration 2:532
Socio-economic systems 5:47
Sociology See Environmental sociology
Sodium triphosphate (STP) 3:544
Soft energy path 3:583, 5:487
Soft law 5:327
Soil acidity, correction 3:585
Soil amelioration 3:583
historical context 3:583
present situation 3:584
Soil compaction 3:590
Soil degradation
factors causing 3:591
human-induced 3:590
in susceptible drylands 3:284
types 3:591
Soil deterioration 3:587
evidence for 3:590
future outlook 3:593
mechanisms 3:590
processes 3:587
Soil erosion 3:232, 587, 712, 4:395
and logging systems 3:331
control 4:397
equations 4:396
INDEX 601
extent and severity 4:396
on-site and off-site impacts 4:396
rainforests 3:268
Soil evaporation 2:346
Soil mineralization 2:544
Soil moisture 1:21, 2:333
Soil organic matter 2:206, 3:230
Soil pollution 3:590
Soil properties, rainforests 3:268
Soils 2:152, 570
acid buffering domains 3:101
acid sulfate 3:151
activities in ecosystems 2:153
afforestation impacts 3:156
atmospheric change 2:155
bioremediation 3:586
climate change 2:156
contaminated 3:586
with heavy metals 3:105
forest 3:546
global change 2:154
global change impacts 2:332
human impact 2:117
interactive effects 2:158
invasive species 2:157
land use effects 2:155
magnesium in 3:585
nutrient-poor 2:589
organic farming 3:533
pH 3:101
phosphorus cycle 2:467
phosphorus in 3:540
preventing crust formation 3:586
rainforest 3:265
see also Salinity; Topsoil
Solar activity 1:514
Solar Backscatter UV instrument 1:146
Solar cycle 1:514
Solar energy 1:183, 3:710
Solar irradiance 1:514, 522
Solar radiation 1:16, 152, 223, 333, 371, 456, 2:600
Solar/Stellar Irradiance Comparison Experiment (SOLSTICE) 1:732
Solar Ultraviolet Spectral Irradiance Monitor (SUSIM) 1:732
Somalia 3:548
Soot aerosols 3:182
South Cascade Glacier 1:408
South Geomagnetic Pole 1:186
South Pole 1:184
Southampton, UK 3:578
Southern Annular Mode 1:202
Southern Oscillation 1:230, 353, 354, 355, 356, 487
see also El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO)
Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) 1:357
Sovereign states 5:487
Sovereignty 2:279, 5:487
Soviet Union, former 3:413
Space-based observing systems and programs 1:71
Space/time resolutions 1:64
Spain, land degradation 3:421
Spartina 3:451
Special sales and service taxes 4:197
Species 2:560
adaptation 2:160, 4:83
complementarity 2:24
dispersal and transport 3:632
distribution 2:162
eradication 2:17
evenness 2:224
functional groups and functional classication 2:27
functional roles 2:25
local effects 2:567
population density 2:209
population status 2:12
redundancy 2:27
relative importance in ecosystem functioning 2:24
richness 2:224
ecological time scale 2:227
evolutionary time scale 2:225
tolerance ranking 2:99
see also Threatened species
Specic response groups 2:483
SPECMAP 1:470
Spectral analysis 2:213
Sperm whale 3:446
Spermatophytes 2:135
Speth, James Gustave 4:397
Sphagnum fuscum 2:438
Spirituality 5:97
Spitsberben 2:601
SPOTImage (France-CNES)[Centre National dEtudes Spatiales])
1:73
Stable isotopes 2:544
abundances 2:545
natural variation 2:545
use in research 2:547
Stadials 1:332
Standards, international environmental 4:281
START (Global Change System for Analysis Research and Training)
4:398
State of the Environment Reports (SOE) 4:205
State Space, concept 2:451
Statistical analysis
plant response 2:484
trait response 2:484
Steeplands, landform change in 3:338
StefanBoltzmann Law 1:371
STEMP 2:206
Stewardship theology 5:196, 492
Stockholm Conference. See UN Conference on the Human Environ-
ment
Stockholm Declaration 4:16, 469, 5:487
Stomata 2:195, 221
Stomatal conductance 2:96
Storms 3:486
assessment 3:728
names 1:433, 435
tropical. See Tropical storms
Strategic Environmental Assessments (SEAs) 4:403
international treaties 4:405
privatization 4:405
sectorial 4:403
structural adjustment 4:404
Strategies 2:482
Stratopause 1:243
Stratosphere 1:14, 241, 243, 520, 717
chemistry 1:675
Stratospheric chemistry
effects of aerosols 1:680
gas-phase 1:675
prospects for 21st century 1:681
Stratospheric ozone 1:281, 675, 2:156
advances in understanding 4:341
amount and distribution 1:143
depletion 1:140, 3:135, 4:65, 428, 446
formation and destruction 1:141
future trends 1:153
increases 1:152
production 1:141
scientic assessment 4:339
trends 1:147
602 INDEX
Stratospheric water vapor 1:384, 385
Stream hydrograph 2:347
Streamow, impacts of human activities 1:459
Streams
productivity 2:379
threats 2:382
Stress tolerance 2:485
Strobilus (or cone) 2:135
Strong, Maurice 4:406
Stylized facts, emergence 5:405, 406
Subsidence 3:430
and groundwater exploitation 3:340
due to coal mining 3:339
due to mining and withdrawal of uids 3:339
Subsidies, agricultural 3:168
Subspecies 2:560
Substance ow analysis (SFA) 4:249
Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer 1:447
Substantive fairness 5:280
Subtropical jet stream 1:230
seasonal variations 1:233
Succession
aquatic habitats 2:554
characteristics 2:552
concept 2:551
cycle 2:553
denition 2:550
endpoints 2:554
natural disturbances 2:555
process 2:551
Suess effect 2:557
Sulfate 1:163, 179, 279
acid soils 3:151
aerosols 1:281, 3:182
Sulfur
anthropogenic emissions 3:42
emission reductions, tradable permits 4:450
emission trading 4:453
Protocol 4:174
see also CENTURY generalized ecosystem model
Sulfur compounds 1:468
Sulfur cycle 1:284
Sulfur dioxide (SO
2
) 1:163, 166, 179, 2:439, 3:678, 680
Sulfur hexauoride 1:384
Sulfurous smog 3:678
Sumatra, biomass burning 3:209
Sumbawa, Indonesia 1:737
Sun 1:514
Sunspots 1:514
Supercells 1:714
Supersonic transports (SSTs) 1:675, 678, 3:186
Surcharges 4:197
Surface albedo 1:319, 320
Surface energy exchange, tundra 2:599
Surface moisture 1:319
Surface roughness 1:319, 497
Surface temperature 1:209, 319
trends 1:279
Surface water disposal 3:687
Surface water quality 3:503
Surface winds 1:715
Surtaxes 4:197
Sustainability 4:460, 5:59
and market systems 5:26, 27
China 4:547
Lake Victoria 4:540
neoclassical view 5:27
technologys role 4:98
threats to 4:97
types 5:489
water use 3:94
see also Unsustainability
Sustainability Agenda 3:130
Sustainable Cities Programme 4:461
Sustainable development 4:18, 154, 400, 411, 460, 531, 5:160, 275,
328
and climate change 4:84
and dematerialization 4:96
Bahai view 5:178
concept 4:17
development in 4:99
dynamics 4:97
ecology, economy, society 4:423
elements 4:56
environment in 4:99
global negotiations 4:423
indicators 4:248
major principles 5:445
national policies for 4:417
objective 4:96
policy 4:422
reactive, anticipatory, radical responses 4:424
refocusing 4:96
scale 4:423
scenario 4:104
shared natural resources 4:515
Small Island Developing States (SIDS) 4:412, 416
strategic imperatives 4:506
values, ideology, strategy 4:424
WCED 4:506
Sustainable energy
investments 4:90
policies 4:86
pricing and regulatory approaches 4:89
technologies 4:41
Sustainable practice 5:314
knowledge as basis for 5:318
Sustainable process index (SPI) 3:64
Sustainable transportation 4:426
developing countries 4:433
Sustainable use 4:170
SWAN code for modeling shallow water waves 1:726, 727
Swanson observations 1:729
Swidden 3:594
agriculture 3:566
cultivation 5:320
Swirl ratio 1:714
Swiss Eco-Points (SEP) 3:64
Symbiosis 2:557
faculative 2:557
obligate 2:557
Syngas 3:216
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) 1:71
System analysis, agroforestry 3:174
System of National Accounts (SNA) 5:43
Systematics 2:560
Systems 2:450
myths of 5:399
Taiwan, aquaculture 3:199
Tambora volcanic eruption 1:737
Tamm, Carl Olof 2:559
Taoism 3:431
Tapajos river 3:112
Tar sands 3:528
composition 3:531
extraction 3:531
origin 3:531
reserves 3:531
Taraxacum of cinale 2:101
INDEX 603
Taxon 2:560
Taxonomy 2:560
Technical Cooperation Programme 1:758
Technological change 4:26, 5:404
Technological innovation and leadership in developing countries
4:94
Technological opportunities 4:26
Technological society and global environmental change (GEC) 5:86
Technology
and water use 3:87
development 5:404
lifecycle 5:404
Technology and Economic Assessment Panel (TEAP) 4:65
Technology transfer 4:171
Technosphere 5:202
Temperate coniferous forests
air pollution 2:563
climatic change 2:563
ecosystem responses 2:562
management options 2:564
Temperate deciduous forests 2:565
climate 2:568
impacts due to change in atmospheric chemistry 2:567
major global change elements 2:566
nature and extent 2:565
potential responses to global change 2:568
Temperate forests 2:72
Temperate grasslands 2:569
atmospheric composition 2:573
biogeochemistry 2:572
biotic characteristics 2:570
climate 2:570, 573
environmental controls 2:570
general characteristics 2:570
impact of global change 2:572
soils 2:570
Temperature
annual average 1:371
global average 1:371
Temperature change 1:283
since 1850 compared to changes over the past millennium 1:250
Temperature estimation, planetary 1:373
Temperature increase 2:575, 5:401, 402
effects of terrestrial ecosystems 2:575
see also Global warming
Temperature proles 1:21
Temperature record, global 1:311, 388
Temperature variations during past millennium 1:515
Tenere desert dunes 1:337
Tephra 3:705
Tephra-fall deposits 3:701
Termites, mound-building 2:590
Terpenes 2:607
Terrestrial ecosystems 2:172
carbon/nutrient interactions 2:598
impacts of global change 2:122
linkages among functional groups 2:26
Terrestrial environment, Arctic 3:521
Terrestrial systems 2:136
Terrestrial transects, IGBP 2:351
Terrestrial vertebrates 2:164
Tertiary 1:207, 338, 2:297
Tetrachlorodibenzo para-dioxin (TCDD) 5:482
Thailand
aquaculture 3:199
global technology cooperation 4:386
Theology 5:492
Thermal energy 3:711
Thermal homeostasis 2:247
Thermal radiation 1:371, 372
Thermohaline circulation 1:20
Thermometry, acoustic 1:161
Thermosphere 1:243
Third World 5:200
Thoreau, Henry David 5:502
Thornthwaite, Charles Warren 2:581
Threatened species 4:201
red list 4:201, 508
Threats of the intimate 5:9
Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear accident 5:301, 503
Thunderstorms 1:219, 502
Thyroid cancer 3:242
Tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) 2:64
Tickell, Crispin 4:436
Tidal barrages 3:596
Tidal currents 1:710
Tidal elevations 1:710
Tidal marshes 3:451
Tidal power development 3:596
Tidal streams 1:710
Tides
lunar 1:711
oceanic 1:710
see also Intertidal zones
Time series analysis 2:213
TIROS 1:73
TIROS-I 1:72
TIROS-II 1:72
Toepfer, Klaus 4:436
TOGA (Tropical OceanGlobal Atmosphere) 1:64, 70, 159, 363,
364
Tolba, Mostafa 4:437
Topsoil
acidication 3:590
loss 3:587
Tornado 1:713, 3:485
vortex 1:714
wind speeds 1:713
Toronto, Canada 4:537
Torrey Canyon, oil tanker 5:503
Total biomass enhancement ratio 2:99
Total column ozone 1:146, 154
Total least squares (TLS) estimation procedure 1:280
Total ozone mapping spectrometer (TOMS) satellite 1:143, 146,
148, 149
Total solar irradiance (TSI) 1:75
Tourism 3:623
and climate 3:624
and effects on functioning ecosystems 3:607
and environment 4:363
and environmental planning 3:606
and global change 3:624
areas of high environmental change by 3:619
economic signicance 3:623
ecosystems impacts 3:597
effects on animals and marine species 3:605
environmental and societal impacts 3:609
environmental changes due to 3:613
global 3:610
growth 4:362
guidelines 4:364
Mediterranean 4:530
possible effects on ecosystems 3:601
public sector 4:366
regional aspects 3:625
scenarios for environment change 3:622
SIDs 4:417
stakeholders 4:365
statistics 3:598
sustainable 4:362
sustainable development 3:619
604 INDEX
Toxic chemicals 4:74, 5:54
environmental effects 3:98
regulations 4:289
Toxic Waste and Race in the United States 5:219
Toxic wastes 3:710
and ecofeminism 5:219
disposal 3:628
generation 3:628
legislation 3:628
Toxicology. See Ecotoxicology
Tradable consumption quotas 4:109
Tradable permits 4:446, 5:231, 458
emissions 4:109, 451
greenhouse gases 4:438
sulfur emission reductions 4:450
Tradable pollution rights 5:437
Trade liberalization 3:633
Trade Winds 1:229, 715
Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) 5:314
Traf c management measures 3:679
Tragedy of the Commons, The 5:208, 415
Trait correlation analyses 2:482
Trait response 2:484
Trait selection 2:484
Trajectory of contraction 5:160
Trajectory of convergence 5:160
Transaction charges 4:197
Transboundary water resource management 4:552
Transcendence 5:98
Transferable sheries quotas (TFQs) 4:455
concerns regarding 4:458
implementation 4:458
principal features 4:456
prospects 4:459
uses 4:457
Transform boundaries 1:411
Transmigration, Jakarta 3:273
Transpiration 1:21, 452, 2:346
Transport
and environment 3:572
and species dispersal 3:632
emissions 3:646, 678
environmental impacts 3:645, 4:428
feeder systems 3:639, 641
freight ows 3:633
fuel use for 4:434
infrastructure 3:643
bene ts and costs 3:647
costs 3:645
instruments for change 4:432
interaction with land use 3:645
passengers 3:640
resource use 4:426
trends 4:432
urban 3:140
Transport system 3:218
Treadmill of production 5:278
Tree of Life 2:422
Trees
and ecofeminism 5:219
and water cycle 3:157
damage in logging systems 3:328
gap models 2:319
Triassic 1:516
Triturus vulgaris 2:137
TRMM (Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission) 1:75
Trophic levels, change in interactions 3:384
Trophic relationships 2:309
Tropical cyclones 1:229, 3:245, 484, 4:230
averaged annual total numbers 1:437
development 1:435
meteosat image 1:437
overview 1:433
regions of occurrence 1:436
Tropical forests 2:71, 582
Amazon Basin 3:255
Tropical Meteorology Research Programme 1:758
Tropical ocean-global atmosphere study. See TOGA
Tropical rainforests 3:265
Tropical savannas 2:586
biodiversity resource utilization 2:588
oristic diversity 2:587
life forms and their functional signi cance 2:588
mutualistic symbiosis 2:590
nutrient availability 2:590
Rhizospheric Associations 2:590
vegetation 2:587
Tropical storms
characteristics 1:437
climate change implications 1:438
development and movement 1:437
overview 1:433
see also Hurricanes; Tropical cyclones; Typhoons
Tropics, terrestrial transects 2:355
Tropopause 1:243, 717, 718
Troposphere 1:14, 243, 473, 499, 675, 717
Tropospheric hydroxyl (OH) 1:385
Tropospheric ozone. See Ozone
Tsunamis 1:729, 3:489, 513
causes and consequences 1:725
earthquake-generated 1:726
Tucker, Jim 2:592
Tundra 2:593, 596, 599, 600
and global biogeochemistry 2:596
and global environmental change 2:595
background 2:593
carbon uxes 2:596
experiments with ecosystems 2:595
links with global radiation budget 2:599
Tunguska Phenomenon 1:208
Turbidity front image 3:725
Turbopause 1:243
Two-timing technique 2:335
Tyler prize 4:280
Typhoons
overview 1:433, 439
structure 1:435
UARS (Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite) 1:74, 146, 732
Ultraviolet radiation 3:135, 185
ULYSSES project 4:25, 253, 460
UN agencies, environment programs 4:11
UN Commission on the Environment and Development (UNCED)
1:539
UN Conference on Environment and Development (Rio de Janeiro
1992). See UNCED
UN Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm 1972). See
UNCHE
UN Conference on Trade and Development. See UNCTAD
UN Conferences 4:469
UN Development Program (UNDP) 4:156
UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) 5:249
UN Economic Commission for Europe (UN ECE) 4:452
UN Economic Commission for Europe (UN-ECE), Convention on
Long-range transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP) 3:252
UN Educational Scienti c and Cultural Organization
UN Educational, Scienti c and Cultural Organization International
Hydrological Program 3:707
UN Educational Scienti c and Cultural Organization. See UNESCO
UN Environment Programme. See UNEP
UN Framework Convention on Climate Change 4:163, 478
INDEX 605
UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) 3:549
UN International Marine Organization (IMO) 3:633
UN Scientic Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation
(UNSCEAR) 3:241
UN Special Assembly 4:402
UN (UN) 1:68, 3:548
UN University Zero Emissions Research Initiative (UNU ZERI)
4:113
UNCCD (UN Convention to Combat Desertication) 4:474
UNCED 1:477, 4:11, 12, 140, 183, 184, 205, 401, 460, 470, 473,
5:249, 275, 431
Rio Declaration 4:168
Uncertainty 2:67
IAMs 4:258
managing 5:396
UNCHE 4:10, 398, 469, 5:53, 248
UNCHS (UN Centre for Human Settlements), programs 4:461
UNCLOS (UN Convention on the Law of the Sea) 4:462
UNCTAD 4:463, 5:153
Underground explosions 3:295
UNDP 5:153
UNECE 4:44
UNEP 1:394, 538, 752, 757, 4:11, 39, 65, 184, 206, 237, 464
biodiversity 2:159
Environmental Data Report 4:204
Regional Seas Program (RSP) 4:476
Sasakawa Environment Prize 4:281, 477
UNESCO 1:394, 469, 753, 2:175, 4:206, 465
Unexploded bombs (UXOs) 3:146
UNFCCC 4:81
UNFPA (UN Population Fund) 4:466
UNIDO (UN Industrial Development Organization) 4:468
United States Arctic system science study 2:353
United States of America (USA)
air pollution 3:652
climate change 4:543
emission trading 4:453
industrialization 5:79
prairies transect 2:354
residents views on global climate change 4:24
tradable permit system 4:448
urbanization 5:79
Unity principle 5:338
UNDP (UN Development Programme) 4:464
UNSCEAR (UN Scientic Committee on the Effects of Atomic
Radiation) 4:44, 485
Unsustainability 5:87
causes 5:491
UNU (UN University) 5:504
Upper atmosphere research satellite (UARS) 1:74, 146, 732
Upwelling 1:334, 358, 362
Upwelling diffusion model 1:379
Urban air pollution 3:683
Urban air quality 3:681
Urban climate and respiratory disease 3:649
Urban conglomerations, worlds largest 3:669
Urban ecosystems 3:655
habitats for plants and wildlife 3:656
human habitats 3:658
metabolism 3:658
schemes for characterizing 3:657
Urban forests 3:356
Urban growth rates 4:54
Urban heat island (UHI) 3:660
and global warming 3:665
atmospheric controls 3:663
characteristics 3:662
effect of global environmental change 3:665
formation 3:662
formative factors 3:662
impacts 3:664
intensity 3:664
mitigation 3:665
surface controls 3:663
temporal development 3:662
types of 3:660
Urban infrastructure 3:81
Urban land cover 3:656
Urban landscape 5:357
Urban Management Programme 4:461
Urban metabolism 3:4, 78
Urban population
basic statistics 3:668
change 3:666
regional distribution 3:667
Urban poverty
and environmental health 3:661
susceptibility 3:675
vulnerability 3:675
Urbanrural eco-service 4:549
Urban vulnerability
and mortality 3:140
and poverty 4:408
Urban wastes 3:684
components 3:685
incineration 3:687
open burning 3:687
Urbanization 5:89
and environmental change 3:9
and health 3:139
and water use 3:87
future 3:671
geomorpholological change 3:338
levels 4:54
US 5:79
US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) 4:543
US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) 1:382
US National Assessment 4:544
US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Climate Mon-
itoring and Diagnostics Laboratory (NOAA/CMDL) 1:177
User fees 4:197
Utilitarianism, ethical framework 5:25
Utopianism 5:438, 443
meanings 5:443
UV radiation and ozone 1:151
UV-B radiation 2:156
enhanced 2:130
Vaccinium myrtillus 2:449
Value systems, health outcomes 4:54
Valued ecosystem component (VEC) 4:493
Values Party 5:56
Vavrousek, Josef 4:493
Vayu 5:304
VCL 1:80
Vector-borne diseases 3:691
Vedic heritage 5:304
Vegetarianism 5:347
Vegetation 2:215, 486
and land degradation 3:419
distribution 1:284
sampling 2:486
Vegetation Ecosystem Model and Analysis Project (VEMAP) 2:603
Vehicle emissions 3:678
Venice, Italy 3:575
Venice lagoon, Italy 3:576
Vernadsky, Vladimir 2:604
Vertical gardens 3:359
Vienna, material ows 3:59
Vienna Convention (March 1985) 4:338, 447
606 INDEX
Vietnam, chemical defoliants 3:146
Villach Conferences 4:494
Vinyl chloride monomers (VCMs) 3:148
Violence as health issue 4:59
Violent conict 5:137
Viral diseases and climate change 3:690
Virtual environments 5:505
types 5:506
Virtual reality (VR) 5:505
Viruses 2:422, 424
Vitality fertilization 2:440
Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) 1:180, 384, 2:605, 3:650, 653,
678, 683, 4:174, 430
effect of global change 2:608
major categories 2:605
oxygenated 2:607
phytogenic 2:606
Protocol 4:174
Volcanic Eruption Index (VEI) 3:292
Volcanic eruptions 1:736, 3:413, 488, 513, 694
and cities 3:696
crucibles of creation 3:704
DVI 3:291
effects 3:700
El Chichon 1:736
explosiveness 3:689
hazards 3:697
Krakatau 1:736
Mount Merapi 3:694
Mount Pinatubo 1:148, 3:700
risks to life and property 3:697
urban proximities 3:698
Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) 3:689
Volcanism
detrimental effects 3:702
monitoring 1:538
Volcanoes 3:699
location 3:699
Volvo Environment Prize 4:280, 495
von Humboldt, Alexander 2:609
Vostok core 2:372
Vulnerability 4:369
Vulnerability assessment 1:347
Vulnerability perspective 5:299
Wadi hydrology network 3:707
Waldsterben 5:508
Walker Circulation 1:23, 229, 476, 749
War 3:146
Ward, Barbara 4:497, 5:248
Warfare, and conict 5:273
Waste composition, solid 3:708
Waste disposal
methods 3:686
see also Animal waste
Waste dumps, Istanbul 3:707
Waste management 3:709
urban systems 3:711
Waste prevention 3:711
Waste production, solid 3:708
Waste water, treatment and disposal 3:712
Wastes
dumping of, see also London Dumping Convention
landll and land raising 3:713
urban 3:684
see also Hazardous wastes
Wastewater treatment lagoons, methane emissions 3:463
Water 1:468
afforestation impacts 3:157
and ecofeminism 5:219
dispersal by 2:84
distribution on Earth 1:454
freshwater sheries 2:327
multifunctional investment 5:202
phases 1:224, 5:424
see also Freshwater; Groundwater; Hydrologic cycle
Water balance 2:347
mathematical schematic 1:453
Water Code, MAFF 3:505
Water courses, ows 5:425
Water cycle 2:344
and trees 3:157
continuity-based image 5:203
Water-dependent activities 5:206
Water exploitation, major problems 3:740
Water Framework Directive 3:7
Water-impacting activities 5:206
Water impoundment 2:132
Water level uctuations, Caspian Sea 4:524
Water management, Indus Basin 3:377
Water planning and management 2:347
Water policy, agriculture 4:360
Water pollution 2:118, 3:148, 5:93
Pattaya 3:620
regional responses 4:515
Water processes 5:203
Water protection, agricultural practice 3:505
Water quality 2:348
changing scale over time 3:500
effects of logging systems 3:331
nutrient enrichment 3:503
phosphorus 3:542
Water resources 2:347
agriculture 3:363
and population growth 5:205
Baltic 3:720
case study 3:740
development in a vulnerable environment 1:469
Great Lakes 3:721
R o de la Plata 3:723
transboundary management 4:552
use 3:8
Water scarcity predicament 5:205
Water stress 3:84
Water supplies
health issues 4:51
inter-basin transfer for (IBTs) 3:387
Water travel 3:644
Water treatment 3:712
Water use 3:84
agriculture 3:89
bathing 3:86
biophysical ecosystems 3:86
climate warming 3:8
denition 3:84
efciency 2:96
environmental impacts 3:92
food preparation 3:86
health concerns 3:90
health issues 3:93
implications 3:94
key drivers 3:86
nature of economy 3:87
patterns and trends 3:86
policies 3:88
population growth 3:87
regional instability 3:93
regional patterns and trends 3:91
sectoral uses 3:89
social impacts 3:93
INDEX 607
social values and tastes 3:88
supply and demand management 3:94
sustainability 3:94
technology 3:87
temporal patterns of demand 3:91
urbanization 3:87
Water vapor 1:384, 433, 3:178
amount 1:284
and CO
2
exchange 2:194
distribution 1:284, 750
feedback 1:291
increase 1:286
interannual variation 1:291
transport 1:452
upper troposphere 1:292
variations 1:291
Waterfront development 3:580
Waterlogging 3:584, 590, 726
Waters, phosphorus in 3:541
Watershed 2:345
Waterspout 1:713
Watson, Robert T 4:498
Wave power
development 3:726
offshore technologies 3:727
point absorber technologies 3:727
predicted energy costs 3:728
shore-mounted technologies 3:727
world exploitable resource 3:726
WBCSD (World Business Council for Sustainable Development)
4:498
WCC (World Council of Churches) 5:195, 198, 509
WCED (World Commission on Environment and Development
4:411, 499, 503, 5:275
WCP (World Climate Programme) 1:752
WCRP 4:41
Weather
and climate 1:15
and ozone formation 3:650
and ozone transport 3:652
predictability 1:263
Weather extremes 3:732
aggregation 3:729
and land use 3:732
assessment 3:728
attribution 3:729
climate impacts 3:728
comparison 3:730
contingency 3:729
costs 3:730
impacts trend data 3:730
multiple-order impacts 3:729
quantication 3:729
vulnerability mapping 3:731
Weather forecasts 1:263
improved 3:732
Weather prediction 1:756
Weather Prediction Research Programme 1:758
Weather simulation 1:111
Weathering 1:755, 2:200
Weed 2:611
Wegener, Alfred 1:755
Welfare liberalism 5:437
West Antarctic Ice Sheets (WAISs) 1:21, 188
Western Alliance 3:548
Western Canada Sedimentary Basin 3:295
Wet deposition 2:261
Wet microburst 1:325
Wetland ecosystems 2:534
Wetland systems 2:78
Wetlands
as chemical sinks 3:109
future outlook 3:407
global examples 3:399
irrigation impacts 3:399
WFC (World Food Council) 4:500
WGNE (Working Group on Numerical Experimentation) 1:756
WHO, major accomplishments 4:502
Whales (and whaling) 3:446
commercial 3:447
ecological impacts 3:449
hunting 3:446
moratorium and status of stocks 3:448
opportunistic encounters and subsistence hunting 3:447
White, Gilbert 4:500
White, Lynn Jr. 5:100
White Mountain Club 5:243
Whittaker, Robert H 2:611
WHO (World Health Organization) 4:44, 502
Wild res 3:490
Wildlife
afforestation impacts 3:158
protection movement 5:246
urban ecosystem habitats 3:656
Williamstown Club 5:243
Wilson, Edward Osborne 2:612
Wind, dispersal by 2:83
Wind and air pressure 1:224, 225
Wind energy 3:711
Wind farms 3:733
Wind Imaging Interferometer (WINDII) 1:732
Wind power, development 3:733
Wind speeds, tornadoes 1:713
Wind stress 1:714
Wind turbines 3:733
Winter sports, impacts 3:346
Wisconsin River 2:377
WMO (World Meteorological Organization) 1:157, 757
WMOGAW (Global Atmosphere Watch) 1:70
WMOGlobal Climate Observing System (GCOS) 1:69
WOCE (World Ocean Circulation Experiment) 1:64, 759
Women and Habitat Programme 4:462
Women and poverty 4:59
Womennature interconnections 5:219, 220
Woodfuel 3:218
Woodwell, George Masters 2:613
World 3 model 5:395
World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD)
4:18
World Climate Applications and Services Programme (WCASP)
1:752, 758
World Climate Data and Monitoring Programme (WCDMP) 1:752,
758
World Climate Impact Assessment and Response Strategies Pro-
gramme (WCIRP) 1:753, 758
World Climate Programme (WCP) 1:758
World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) 1:158, 392, 478, 753,
758
World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED)
4:154, 401, 503, 5:275
World Conservation Union. See IUCN
World Council of Churches (WCC) 5:195, 198, 509
World dynamics 4:259
World economy 4:183
World Energy Council (WEC) 3:738
World Glacier Monitoring Service 1:406
World Habitat Day 4:462
World Health Assembly (WHA) 4:501
World Health Organization (WHO) 3:306, 5:493
World Heritage Site 4:535
608 INDEX
World Industry Conference on Environmental Management
(WICEMII) 4:18
World Meteorological Convention 1:68
World Meteorological Organization (WMO) 1:68, 177, 393, 394,
433, 681, 752, 4:41, 154, 539
World models 5:395
World Ocean Circulation (WOC) 1:759
World population (1 AD to 2000 AD) 5:212
World Tour Organization (WTO) 3:610
World Tourism Organization (WTO OMT) 4:362
World Trade Organization (WTO) 3:7, 247, 4:221, 510, 5:93, 251
World War I 5:247
World War II 4:9, 5:1, 92, 152, 156, 158, 247
World Weather Watch (WWW) 1:68, 758
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) 2:410
Worldwatch Institute 4:509
Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) 5:57
WRAP (Waste Reduction Always Pays) 4:108
WRI (World Resources Institute) 4:510
WTO See World Trade Organization
Wuxing theory 3:431
WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) 4:511
WWWSurface-Synoptic 1:69
WWWU/A-Synoptic 1:68
Yangtze River 3:432
Yellow fever 3:693
Yellow River 3:432, 740
drying up courses 3:740
Younger Dryas 1:247, 273, 274, 275, 418
Yugoslavia 3:148
Zayed International Prize 4:281
Zhaodong, China 4:548
Zhong Yong 3:431
Zinc ow 3:59
Zonal climate models 1:107
Zooplankton 3:182