Chapter 1: Human Beings and Nature

In 1972, a Norwegian philosopher named Arne Naess stood before a conference in Bucharest and said something that sounded, at first, like a quarrel over words. The world, he argued, now had two environmental movements living inside one name.

One of them fought smoke, dirty rivers and vanishing forests because these things harmed people — because polluted air shortens human lives and a felled forest costs a country its timber and its rainfall. The other movement asked a stranger question: does a river matter only when someone needs it? Naess called the first way of thinking shallow ecology and the second deep ecology, and the labels stuck.

He was not accusing anyone of laziness. He was pointing out that two people can stand at the same riverbank, want the same law passed, and still disagree completely about why the river should be saved — and that this disagreement decides what they will do when saving the river becomes expensive.

In the decades that followed, that single distinction opened out into a whole family of positions. Some located the root of ecological damage in hierarchy and class. Some located it in the way societies treat women. Some entered parliaments. Some began with a farmer’s duty to a field.

Diagram

Fig. 1.0-1 – a single riverbank seen by two observers standing side by side; thought-bubble on the left showing a tap, a fishing net and a timber stack (nature valued for human use), thought-bubble on the right showing the river, its fish, birds and bankside trees valued in themselves; label the left “value for us” and the right “value in itself”

Curiosity Corner

Q1. If two people both want to protect the same forest, can they still belong to two different schools of ecological thought? Q2. What does it mean to say that a river has a value of its own, apart from what it gives us? Q3. Why do some thinkers argue that an ecological problem is really a social problem in disguise? Q4. Why did some writers begin linking the way a society treats women with the way it treats land? Q5. Can a country’s economy keep growing and still be called sustainable?

You will not be able to answer these questions yet. By the end of this chapter, you will be able to answer all five.

1.1 Modern Schools of Ecological Thought

Environmental concern is not a single opinion. It is a large, untidy family of opinions that happen to overlap on one point: that the way human societies use the natural world has consequences worth thinking about. Beyond that point, the family argues.

The environmental movement, also called the ecological movement, is the broad social movement concerned with the conservation of nature and natural resources and with green policies — that is, policies that treat environmental protection as a governing aim rather than an afterthought. It is scientific, social and political at once, and it looks different in every country.

Definition

(The environmental movement is a diverse scientific, social and political movement concerned with the conservation of nature and natural resources and with the adoption of green policies.)

Notice how mixed its membership is. Private citizens, scientists, professionals, religious groups, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), forest departments and even industries that depend on natural resources are all part of it. A non-governmental organisation (NGO) is a body that is neither a government department nor a business, and works on a public purpose. With a membership that wide, and beliefs that strong, the movement has never been united in its goals. Some parts of it concentrate on one issue, such as climate; others want a wholesale change in how societies are organised.

How the movement grew

Through the twentieth century, environmental ideas moved steadily from the edge of public life towards its centre. In 1916 the National Park Service was founded in the United States under President Woodrow Wilson, giving a government a permanent duty towards land it had decided not to develop. That was a new kind of promise for a state to make.

The pace quickened after the middle of the century. The first Earth Day was observed on 22 April 1970, founded by Gaylord Nelson, a senator from the American state of Wisconsin, who had been moved to act after a large oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara the previous year. Two years later, in 1972, the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment met at Stockholm — the first time representatives of many governments sat together to discuss the state of the global environment. It led to the creation of national environment agencies in several countries and of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

By 1973 the distinction between two whole styles of environmental thinking had been named, and the modern schools of ecological thought began to take shape as separate positions. As Fig. 1.1-1 shows, the sequence matters: public alarm came first, institutions second, and the philosophical sorting-out last.

Diagram

Fig. 1.1-1 – horizontal timeline of four milestones, left to right: 1916 National Park Service founded (United States) → 1970 first Earth Day, 22 April → 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, Stockholm; United Nations Environment Programme follows → 1973 the deep/shallow distinction is published and the modern schools begin to separate; label the band below the arrow “from public concern, to institutions, to distinct schools of thought”

What makes a “school of thought”

A school of ecological thought is a named position that offers its own account of why environmental damage happens and what would count as putting it right. Each one can be examined under four heads: its definition, its origin, its basic principles, and its environmental orientation — where it locates value in the natural world.

That last head is the one that does most of the work, and it turns on a single question. Does nature matter because of what it does for human beings, or does it matter in itself? A position is anthropocentric (human-centred) if it treats the natural world as valuable chiefly because human beings need it. It is ecocentric (nature-centred) if it holds that living things and natural systems have intrinsic value — worth of their own, independent of any use to us.

Keep in mind that the two orientations often recommend the same action. Both arguments save the wetland. They part company only when protection becomes costly, or when the human benefit disappears — and that is exactly when a philosophy is tested.

Curiosity Corner

Q1. If two people both want to protect the same forest, can they still belong to two different schools of ecological thought?

A. Yes. A school of ecological thought is defined by its account of why the forest matters and what causes its loss, not by the action it recommends. One person may want the forest kept because it holds the soil, feeds the streams and supports a livelihood — an anthropocentric, human-centred reason. Another may hold that the forest’s trees and animals have a value of their own that no human calculation can cancel — an ecocentric reason. Both plant themselves in front of the bulldozer; they are answering different questions when they do it.

The schools covered in this chapter

The rest of the chapter takes up seven positions in turn. Table 1.1 is a map to keep beside you, not a substitute for the sections that follow: each entry is compressed to the point of unfairness here, and is treated properly later.

Compare Table

Two cautions before you go on. First, these positions are not neatly separated; a green party may borrow from social ecology, and an eco-feminist may also be an ecocentrist. Second, they are arguments, not verdicts. Each is held by serious people, each is criticised by other serious people, and your task in this chapter is to be able to state each one fairly and then weigh it.

Try Yourself

Pick one green space near you that is used by many people — a park, a pond, a canal bank, a stretch of roadside trees. Over a week, note down the reasons different users would give for keeping it: shade, cricket, water, walking, birds, cooler air, or simply that it has always been there. Sort your list into human-centred reasons and reasons that treat the place as valuable in itself. Which kind of reason is more common, and which do you think would survive a proposal to build on the land?

1.2 Deep Ecology

Of all the schools in this chapter, deep ecology asks the most uncomfortable question. It does not ask how to clean a river. It asks why a society ended up treating rivers as things that could be dirtied in the first place.

1.2.1 What Deep Ecology Means

Deep ecology is a contemporary ecological and environmental philosophy which holds that the living world has value in itself, and which therefore calls for a radical restructuring of modern human societies in line with that belief. “Radical” here has its literal sense — going to the root.

Its starting point is a claim about how nature works. The natural world is a subtle balance of complex interrelationships, in which the existence of any one organism depends on the existence of others within the ecosystem. Pull out one thread and you do not get the same cloth with a gap in it; you get a different cloth. From this it follows that human interference in the natural world — whether or not it sets out to destroy anything — is a threat not only to human beings but to every organism that makes up the natural order.

Definition

(Deep ecology is an environmental philosophy which holds that all living beings and natural systems have intrinsic value independent of their usefulness to human beings, and which calls for a fundamental restructuring of modern human societies in accordance with that view.)

The word “deep” was chosen deliberately. Ordinary environmental argument stops at the level of symptoms: the air is bad, so fit filters. Deep ecology asks a further set of questions — why is this activity being carried on at all, whose way of life requires it, and what picture of nature makes it seem reasonable? Each answer leads to another question, and the chain runs down until it reaches a world-view. Fig. 1.2-1 sets out this ladder of questioning.

Diagram

Fig. 1.2-1 – three concentric rings, or three stacked bands, showing levels of questioning; outermost/top band “Symptom: the air over the city is unfit to breathe”; middle band “Cause: vehicle numbers, fuel quality, industrial siting, distances people must travel”; innermost/bottom band “World-view: nature treated as a resource and a dumping ground”; a downward arrow along the side labelled “asking deeper questions”; a small note beside the outer band “shallow ecology stops here” and beside the inner band “deep ecology reaches here”

Deep ecology also refuses the idea that ecology is simply a branch of biology, useful for managing stocks of fish or timber. On this view, the world does not exist as a stock of resources to be freely exploited by human beings, and a philosophy that begins by assuming it does can never reach the root of the problem.

Curiosity Corner

Q2. What does it mean to say that a river has a value of its own, apart from what it gives us?

A. It means the river’s worth is not calculated from the human benefits it happens to supply. Suppose a river’s water is no longer needed for irrigation, its fish are no longer eaten, and no tourist wants to see it. On a human-centred account, the case for protecting it has now collapsed, because every reason for protection was a human use. Deep ecology holds that the river, its fish and the life along its banks still have intrinsic value — worth of their own — and that this worth does not rise and fall with our needs. The practical difference shows up exactly when the human benefit disappears.

Theory Snapshot

Deep ecology Proposed by: The principles of deep ecology are associated with Gary Snyder (born 8 May 1930), an American poet, essayist and environmentalist often described as the poet laureate of deep ecology. He took a dual degree in anthropology and literature from Reed College in 1951, went on to study East Asian languages, and spent years in Japan practising Zen Buddhism — a background that shows in his insistence that human beings belong to a place rather than own it. His first book of poetry, Riprap, appeared in 1959, and his collection Turtle Island won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1975. The term “deep ecology” itself was coined by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. Core idea: All life has intrinsic value; human beings are one part of an interdependent natural order, not its owners; correcting environmental damage therefore requires changing the world-view and the structure of modern society, not only its technology. Key terms: intrinsic value, interdependence, radical restructuring, environmental ethics. Evidence: The persistence of environmental damage despite decades of technical fixes — cleaner engines followed by more vehicles, higher yields followed by heavier resource use — supports the claim that treating symptoms alone does not stop the process. Limitation: Critics argue the philosophy is strong on diagnosis and weak on policy: it names a world-view to be changed but offers little guidance on how a society of a billion people is to be reorganised, and by whom. Its call for a reduced human population (principle 4 below) has drawn particularly sharp criticism.

1.2.2 The Principles of Deep Ecology

Deep ecology is usually set out as a short platform of principles, meant to be a common ground that people of very different backgrounds could accept even if they disagreed about everything else. There are eight.

Value. The well-being and flourishing of both human and non-human life on Earth have value. This value is inherent, and does not depend on the usefulness of the non-human world for human purposes.
Diversity. Richness and diversity of life forms are themselves values, and help realise these values.
Vital needs. Human beings have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs — the needs of survival, not of accumulation.
Population. The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population, and the flourishing of non-human life requires such a decrease.
Human interference. Present human interference with the non-human world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening.
Policy change. Policies must therefore be changed, since they affect basic economic, technological and ideological structures.
Quality of life. The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating quality of life — dwelling in situations of inherent value — rather than adhering to an ever-higher standard of living. There is a profound difference between what is big and what is great.
Obligation of action. Those who accept the foregoing points have an obligation, directly or indirectly, to try to bring about the necessary changes. The Earth is not a planet for human beings alone; every species has a claim to live, propagate and flourish.

Read principles 3 and 7 together and you have the practical core of the philosophy. The distinction between a vital need and a want is what allows deep ecology to say that a society can be prosperous without being large in its appetites. Read principle 4 honestly, however, and you meet the position’s most contested claim.

Side Note

Principle 4 is the point at which deep ecology is most often challenged, and the challenge deserves stating. Critics — social ecologists among them — argue that the harm done to the natural world tracks levels of consumption far more closely than numbers of people, so that a call for fewer human beings can end up pointing at the poorest populations while leaving the highest-consuming ones untouched. Supporters reply that the principle concerns the long-run scale of human activity as a whole, not any particular region or community. Both arguments are live, and neither is settled by the platform itself.

Exam Corner

Q. A factory installs a tall chimney so that its smoke disperses far from the town. Would a deep ecologist call this a solution?

A. No — at best a relocation of the problem. The emissions still enter the atmosphere and still fall somewhere. A deep ecologist would ask what the factory produces, whether that output meets a vital need, and why a society organised in this way generates the smoke at all. Notice that this is a question about purpose, not about chimney height.

1.2.3 The Environmental Ethics of Deep Ecology

Out of these principles, deep ecology has fostered a distinct system of environmental ethics — the branch of ethics that asks what human beings owe to the non-human world and to future generations. Three commitments run through it.

The first is wilderness preservation: keeping some areas free from development and management, not as parks for visitors but as places where natural processes continue on their own terms. The second is human population control, treated as a long-term question of scale, in the sense of principle 4 above. The third is simple living — a voluntary reduction of material consumption, on the ground that a life can be rich without being resource-heavy.

Notice how these three follow from the argument rather than being added to it. If non-human life has value in itself, some of the world must be left to it. If interference is already excessive, its scale must fall. And if quality of life is not the same as standard of living, then consuming less need not mean living worse. Whether most people can be persuaded of that last point is the philosophy’s standing difficulty, and its supporters do not pretend otherwise.

1.3 Shallow Ecology

The term shallow ecology was coined by Arne Naess in 1973, as the counterpart against which deep ecology defined itself. The label is unfortunate in one way: it sounds like an insult, and it is worth setting that tone aside, because the position it names is the one that most environmental law, most pollution control and most conservation planning in the world actually rests on.

Shallow ecology is the view that the environment should be saved, conserved and protected because human beings need it. Ecologists working in this tradition are not indifferent to nature; they are concerned with it for what it does. Forests should be kept because trees release oxygen, improve rainfall, hold soil on hillsides and draw visitors whose spending supports a local economy. Rivers should be kept clean because people drink from them. The reasoning is entirely about consequences for human welfare.

Definition

(Shallow ecology is an environmental position which seeks to conserve and protect the natural world because of its usefulness to human beings, rather than because of any value the natural world possesses in itself.)

This is what philosophers call instrumental value — the worth a thing has as a means to something else. A bus has instrumental value; nobody boards it for its own sake. Shallow ecology assigns nature the same kind of worth, which is precisely the point on which deep ecology parts company from it.

Putting a price on what nature does

If nature’s worth lies in what it does for us, then in principle that worth can be measured. The economist Robert Costanza and his colleagues took this idea seriously and attempted to value the world’s ecosystem services — the benefits that functioning natural systems provide free of charge, such as nutrient cycling, climate regulation, purification of air and water, pollination and opportunities for recreation. Their estimate ran to tens of trillions of United States dollars a year, larger than the combined output of all the world’s economies at the time.

Diagram

Fig. 1.3-1 – a single roadside tree at the centre with arrows radiating outward to the services it supplies: shade and lower surface temperature, oxygen, dust capture, fruit, timber, soil held by roots, nesting birds; enclose the first six arrows in a shaded band labelled “reasons a shallow ecologist would give for keeping the tree”; leave the seventh arrow outside the band, labelled “the birds’ own claim — a reason only an ecocentric argument can give”

Scale Check

The value of the world’s ecosystem services Costanza’s estimate was deliberately larger than global economic output, and the point of that comparison is not the number itself. It says that the services nature performs without charge are not a small addition to the economy but larger than the economy that ignores them.

That exercise shows both the strength and the weakness of the shallow position. Its strength is that it speaks the language in which decisions are actually taken. A finance ministry that will not act on the intrinsic worth of a mangrove may well act when told what rebuilding a storm-damaged coastline costs. Its weakness is that a price is a hostage. If a cheaper substitute for the mangrove appears, the argument for the mangrove disappears with it.

Theory Snapshot

Shallow ecology Proposed by: Named by Arne Naess in 1973, as the contrast to deep ecology. It describes the mainstream of practical environmental management rather than a movement founded by any one person. Core idea: The natural world should be conserved and protected because human beings depend on it; environmental problems are practical problems of pollution, depletion and resource shortage, to be solved by technology, regulation and better management. Key terms: instrumental value, ecosystem services, resource management, pollution control. Evidence: Most working environmental policy is built on this reasoning — emission standards, protected catchments, fisheries quotas — and it has produced measurable results, including cleaner urban air and recovered fish stocks in several countries. Limitation: Protection lasts only as long as the usefulness does. A species, habitat or landscape that performs no measurable service, or whose service can be replaced more cheaply by engineering, has no defence within this framework.

Exam Corner

Q. A hill is protected because it holds the city’s water catchment. Engineers then build a pipeline that brings water more cheaply from elsewhere. On a shallow ecological argument, what happens to the case for protecting the hill?

A. It weakens, and may vanish. The hill was valued for a service that has now been replaced. Only an argument from intrinsic value — that the hill’s forest and its species matter in themselves — survives the arrival of the pipeline.

1.3.1 Deep Ecology and Shallow Ecology Compared

The two positions are best held apart by asking, of any environmental decision, three questions: why protect this, how deep does the diagnosis go, and what would count as success. Table 1.2 sets the answers side by side.

Compare Table

Notice that the two are not simply opposed on every point. Both would oppose the dumping of untreated effluent into a river; both would support a law against it. What separates them is the argument they use, and the argument determines what happens in the harder cases — when protection costs money, when the useful species has been saved and the useless one has not, and when a cheaper technical substitute makes the natural system look redundant.

Side Note

Descriptions of shallow ecology sometimes call its motive “selfish”. That word carries a judgement rather than an analysis, and it obscures something worth seeing: an argument from human self-interest is often the argument that succeeds, because it can be costed, legislated and enforced. A fair treatment states what the position claims and where it fails, and lets the reader weigh it.

1.4 Stewardship of Land

A steward is someone who looks after property that is not finally their own — a manager of an estate, a treasurer of a fund, a caretaker of a building. The word carries a particular flavour: authority combined with accountability. You may decide what to do, but you will have to answer for it to somebody.

Stewardship of land is an ethic that applies exactly this idea to land and to the natural resources bound up with it. It holds that land is held in trust rather than owned outright, and that the holder therefore has a duty of responsible planning, management and care — a duty owed partly to the wider society and largely to the generations who will hold the land after them.

Definition

(Stewardship of land is an environmental ethic based on responsibility and care for land as a resource, requiring that it be planned for, used and managed through conservation and sustainable practices so that its productivity and ecological health are preserved for future generations.)

Notice what this ethic does not say. It does not say that human beings should withdraw from the land, and it does not say that the land is valuable only for what it yields. It occupies a middle position: use is legitimate, but use without care is not. In terms of environmental orientation, stewardship is best described as a doctrine of human responsibility towards nature rather than as either a purely human-centred or a purely nature-centred position.

Why the ethic matters in practice

The practical reason for taking stewardship seriously is that most land is worked, not preserved, and the people who work it depend on it. Where a community’s livelihood comes from soil, pasture, forest or water, the condition of those resources is the condition of the community’s future income. A field farmed for a quick return and left saline is a livelihood spent in advance.

This is why the ethic keeps returning to the community rather than resting on individual virtue alone. A single careful farmer surrounded by careless ones will still lose the water table. Stewardship therefore encourages communities to take an active part in protecting the resources they depend on, and treats the maintenance of ecological health — the soil, the plants, the animals, the water — as part of ordinary land management rather than as a separate activity called conservation.

Theory Snapshot

Stewardship of land Proposed by: The ethic is old and has roots in farming and religious traditions, but its best-known modern exponent is Wendell Berry (born 5 August 1934), an American novelist, poet, essayist and farmer who has worked his own land in Kentucky for decades and writes from that vantage point. He graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1956, and his environmental writing — most influentially The Unsettling of America (1977) — argues that industrial agriculture damages soil and rural communities together, because it separates the people who make decisions about land from the people who live with the results. He has taken part in non-violent protest against nuclear power and against coal mining, and has received the National Humanities Medal. His ideology gathers around a few themes: sustainable agriculture, appropriate technology, healthy rural communities, local economies, and attachment to a particular place. Core idea: Land is held in trust, not merely owned; those who use it owe it care, and owe an accounting to future generations for the condition in which they leave it. Key terms: stewardship, care, responsibility, future generations, local economy. Evidence: Landscapes under long, continuous local management — terraced hill farms, community-managed pastures and village woodlots — have in many regions retained soil and water better than land held by distant owners with no stake in its long-term condition. Limitation: Stewardship is an ethic, not a mechanism. It depends on the user’s sense of duty and on secure, long-term attachment to a piece of land; where tenure is short, insecure or absentee, the ethic has nothing to hold on to, and critics argue it therefore cannot by itself restrain large-scale commercial pressure on land.

1.4.1 The Levels of Stewardship

Stewardship is practised at three levels, which differ in scale and in who carries the responsibility.

Conservation easement

A conservation easement is a legal arrangement that limits development on a piece of privately held land in order to protect its conservation values. Its defining feature is that it “runs with the land”: the restriction attaches to the land itself, so it binds not only the present owner but every future owner as well. This is what gives it force over time — the protection does not lapse when the property is sold.

Easements are created for stated purposes, such as maintaining and improving water quality, fostering the growth of healthy forests, maintaining wildlife corridors that allow animals to move between habitats, and ensuring that land remains available for sustainable agriculture and forestry. They also require monitoring and enforcement, since a restriction nobody checks is a restriction in name only.

The easement is a legal device of some countries rather than a universal one, and its details vary. What travels everywhere is the underlying idea: that a limit on the use of land can be made to outlast the person who agreed to it.

Land management

Land management is the process of managing the use and development of land, in rural and urban areas alike, so as to make the best use of it from an environmental as well as an economic point of view. It covers a wide range of activities — farming, mineral extraction, property and estate management, water management, eco-tourism projects and the physical planning of towns.

Because land is used for so many purposes at once, management is unavoidably the management of conflict. A stretch of level ground near a growing town may be wanted for housing, for a road, for irrigated farming and for a brick kiln. Each use forecloses the others. Land management is the human activity of working out, jointly, which use will be allowed and on what terms — which is why it is as much an exercise in negotiation as in technique.

Community stewardship

Community stewardship is the level at which planning and management of resources are treated as a community’s shared responsibility rather than an individual’s. Here the community sets development programmes and objectives that protect the landscape of its own region, and works in partnership to sustain both the natural resources and the human life of the area.

The reason this level exists is structural. Watersheds, grazing lands, forests and aquifers do not follow property lines. A well is drawn from an aquifer that many owners share, and no single owner can protect it. Wherever the resource is common, the stewardship of it has to be common too.

Compare Table

Side Note

“The community” is not a single voice. In many places the people most dependent on common land — tenants, herders, landless labourers, those who gather fuel and fodder — are precisely the people who hold no title to it and are least likely to be present when decisions are taken. Community stewardship works only to the extent that its arrangements include such users. Where it does not, a scheme can conserve a landscape and still transfer its costs to those with the least to spare.

1.5 Social Ecology

The schools you have met so far look at the relation between human beings and nature. Social ecology begins somewhere else. It looks first at the relations between human beings — and argues that these are where ecological damage actually originates.

Social ecology studies the relationship between people and their environment, giving particular attention to the social, psychological and cultural contexts in which that relationship is formed. Its central claim is blunt: the world’s ecological problems stem from social problems, and specifically from relationships of domination and hierarchy within human society. The position was developed most fully by the American thinker Murray Bookchin, who argued that the very idea of dominating nature grew out of the older and more familiar practice of some human beings dominating others.

Definition

(Social ecology is a school of ecological thought which holds that ecological problems arise out of social problems — above all out of hierarchical and dominating relationships between human beings — and that they cannot be resolved without addressing those social relationships.)

Follow the argument slowly, because it is easy to state and easy to misread. A society organised around ranking — where some groups command and others obey, and where exploitation of one group by another is normal — develops habits of thought in which domination itself seems natural. Once domination is the ordinary way of dealing with other people, treating rivers, forests and animals as things to be commanded requires no further step. Fig. 1.5-1 sets out the chain.

Diagram

Fig. 1.5-1 – flow: hierarchical and class relations within society → domination becomes the normal way of organising relationships → the natural world is treated as an object to be commanded → exploitation of soil, water, forests and species → ecological damage; a feedback arrow curving back from “ecological damage” to “hierarchical and class relations” labelled “the costs fall first on those with least power, reinforcing the hierarchy”

Notice the return arrow in that figure. Social ecologists point out that ecological damage is rarely shared equally: the polluted stretch of river, the quarry dust, the flooded low-lying settlement usually lie where the people with the least power live. Damage that follows the lines of social hierarchy also strengthens them, which is why the school treats the two problems as one problem.

Curiosity Corner

Q3. Why do some thinkers argue that an ecological problem is really a social problem in disguise?

A. Because, on their account, the decision to damage the environment is always somebody’s decision, taken within a structure that lets some people impose costs on others. Social ecologists argue that racism, exploitation and sexism are not separate from environmental destruction but the same habit of domination applied to different objects — and that a society which has learned to rank and command its own members will treat the natural world the same way. On this view, cleaner technology alone cannot fix the problem, because the technology is chosen by the same structure that caused it. Ecological problems, they argue, cannot be understood until the social issues underneath them are faced.

Two consequences follow. First, social ecologists hold that the systematic problem of hierarchy cannot be resisted by individual action — a person who consumes less has not altered the structure that decides what gets produced. It must instead be addressed by more careful ethical thinking and by collective activity grounded in democratic ideals. Second, the goal is stated positively rather than as a list of prohibitions: a society built on ecological principles, an organic unity in diversity, free of hierarchy and resting on mutual respect for the interrelationship of all aspects of life. In place of an ethic of domination, social ecology proposes an ethic of complementarity — different parts of a whole supporting one another rather than ranking one another.

Theory Snapshot

Social ecology Proposed by: Developed principally by Murray Bookchin (1921–2006), an American social theorist who spent much of his life arguing that ecological and social questions are inseparable. Core idea: Ecological damage originates in hierarchy and domination within human society; a society free of domination among people would not treat nature as an object to be commanded. Key terms: hierarchy, domination, complementarity, organic unity in diversity, collective action. Evidence: The distribution of environmental harm is strikingly uneven — polluting industry, waste disposal and hazardous work are concentrated where the affected populations have the least influence over the decision, which is a social pattern rather than a technical one. Limitation: The link runs one way in the argument but not always in the evidence. Societies with very different social structures have inflicted severe ecological damage, which suggests that hierarchy may not be a complete explanation. Critics also note that the remedy — a non-hierarchical society — is described far more clearly than the route to it.

1.5.1 Marxist Environmentalism

Marxist environmentalism is the strand of this thinking that takes its starting point from the writings of Karl Marx. It is important to be historically fair here: Marx belonged to an era in which the environmental consequences of industry were only beginning to be visible, and he did not write an environmental theory. What he wrote was a theory of labour, and later thinkers have drawn environmental conclusions from it.

Marx treated the environment as the medium of human labour — the material world upon which work is done. In his account, human beings are themselves part of nature, but nature’s condition comes to be shaped by, and dependent on, human labour. He expected that human beings would increasingly influence nature and in turn be influenced by it, and that science and technology would be the instruments through which nature was controlled.

He also noticed something that reads remarkably like a modern environmental argument. Studying the agriculture of his time, Marx observed that food grown in the countryside was consumed in the cities, and that the nutrients it carried ended up in urban sewage rather than back in the soil that had produced it. The soil was being drained of fertility at one end of the chain while waste accumulated at the other. Later scholars named this rupture the metabolic rift — a break in a natural cycle caused by the way production is organised. It is the same observation that underlies present-day concern about depleted soils and unreturned nutrients.

Two schools of thought developed from Marx’s view, and they draw opposite conclusions:

The Humanist group held that the scale of production must be curtailed in order to preserve the environment. Limiting production, on this view, is the only way to limit the destruction that production causes.
The Orthodox group held that science and technology can control nature and must therefore be promoted. Through them, human beings can gain knowledge of nature’s components and habitats and preserve them for future generations.

Exam Corner

Q. Both groups begin from the same writings and reach opposite recommendations. What exactly do they disagree about?

A. About whether technology is part of the problem or part of the solution. The Humanist group assumes that more production means more damage, whatever the technique; the Orthodox group assumes that damage is a defect of present techniques, which better ones can repair. Almost every modern environmental argument you will meet turns on this same disagreement.

1.5.2 Socialist Ecology

Socialist ecology, whose supporters are often called eco-socialists, is a distinct ideology that merges aspects of Marxism, socialism and libertarian socialism with green politics, ecology and opposition to globalisation. Its adherents are sometimes described as “Red–Green” — red for the socialist tradition, green for the ecological one.

The central claim of socialist ecology is that capitalism is the real cause of a linked set of troubles: poverty, social exclusion, environmental degradation and war. On this account, the expansion of capital is not one activity among others but a system that must keep growing, and it is this compulsion to expand that has made ecosystems vulnerable to pollution, to the depletion of natural resources and to the destruction of habitat. Eco-socialists argue that inequalities of race, sex and economic condition cannot be removed while production remains privately owned and directed towards accumulation, and that the restoration of depleted resources requires common ownership and grassroots action rather than adjustments at the top.

The counter-argument deserves an equally clear statement. Critics point out that severe environmental degradation has occurred under centrally planned economies as well as market ones — the drying of the Aral Sea and the heavy industrial pollution of parts of twentieth-century Eastern Europe are the usual examples — which suggests that the drive to expand production is not confined to any one economic system. They add that market economies have also generated the wealth, the technology and the regulatory institutions behind large measurable improvements, such as the removal of lead from petrol and the control of urban smoke. Eco-socialists reply that these gains were won by regulation against commercial resistance, and that some of them were achieved by moving polluting production elsewhere rather than by ending it. The dispute is genuine, and this book does not settle it.

The Four Laws of Ecology

Barry Commoner, whose work sits within this tradition, set out four short statements in his book The Closing Circle (1971) which have since been widely used as a compact summary of ecological thinking. They are known as the Four Laws of Ecology.

Everything is connected to everything else. There is one ecosphere for all living organisms, and what affects one affects all. A change made at one point in a system reappears at points nobody was looking at — a pesticide applied to a field turns up in the pond downstream, and then in the birds that feed there.
Everything must go somewhere. There is no waste in nature, and there is no “away” into which things can be thrown. Matter that leaves a chimney, a drain or a dustbin has not left the world; it has only changed address, as Fig. 1.5-2 shows.
Nature knows best. Human beings possess technology capable of altering natural systems, but a change introduced into a system shaped over a very long period is likely to damage it. The presumption should be against the alteration, not in favour of it.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. Every gain has a cost somewhere. Exploiting nature inevitably converts resources from useful forms into useless ones, and the cost, if it is not paid at the time, is only postponed.

Diagram

Fig. 1.5-2 – flow illustrating the second law: household and industrial waste → collection and disposal site → leachate into groundwater, gases into air, residues into soil → uptake by crops and water supply → back into households; label the loop “nothing is thrown away; it is only moved”

Theory Snapshot

Socialist ecology Proposed by: Barry Commoner (1917–2012), an American biologist and one of the founders of the modern environmental movement, is the figure the tradition is most often traced to. He took his bachelor’s degree in zoology from Columbia University in 1937 and his master’s and doctoral degrees from Harvard University in 1938 and 1941, served in the Second World War, and became a professor of plant physiology at Washington University in St. Louis. In the late 1950s he became widely known for his opposition to the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, having shown that fallout was entering the food chain. His books The Closing Circle (1971) and The Poverty of Power (1976) argued that environmental damage is built into the way production is organised rather than caused by individual carelessness. He stood as a candidate in the 1980 United States presidential election, and died in New York at the age of 95. Core idea: Environmental degradation, poverty and social exclusion share a single cause in an economic system driven to continuous expansion; ecological repair therefore requires changing how production is owned and directed, beginning at the grassroots. Key terms: eco-socialism, capital expansion, common ownership, grassroots action, Four Laws of Ecology. Evidence: Commoner’s own work traced specific post-war environmental damage to changes in production technology — synthetic materials and nitrogen fertiliser replacing older processes — rather than to population growth or consumer choice. Limitation: The claim that one economic system is the cause is hard to sustain against the record of severe pollution under other systems, and the alternative arrangement is not described in enough operational detail to be tested.

Compare Table

Whatever one makes of their conclusions, these three positions share a contribution worth carrying forward: they moved the environmental question out of the laboratory and into the study of how societies are arranged. After social ecology, it becomes difficult to discuss a polluted river without also asking who decided, who gained and who was left with the water.

1.6 Eco-Feminism

Where social ecology finds the root of ecological damage in hierarchy generally, eco-feminism points to one hierarchy in particular. Its argument is that the way a society treats women and the way it treats the natural world are not two facts but one, and that they can be traced to the same structure of thinking.

Eco-feminism is the position that the domination of nature and the domination of women arise from the same source, and that neither can be understood or corrected without the other. The term was coined in the 1970s by the French writer Françoise d’Eaubonne, at a time when the environmental movement was drawing large numbers of women into work for the preservation and conservation of wildlife, food, air and water.

Definition

(Eco-feminism is a school of thought which holds that the exploitation of the natural world and the subordination of women share a common origin in patriarchal structures, and which therefore treats environmental and gender equality as a single question.)

Patriarchy here means a social order in which authority, property and decision-making rest predominantly with men, and in which the work and interests of women are ranked below those of men. Eco-feminists argue that such an order carries a characteristic habit of thought: whatever is regarded as passive, endlessly available and requiring no payment can be used without limit. Women’s unpaid work of feeding, carrying, tending and caring is treated that way, and so are the soil, the forest and the water that perform their work without invoice. Fig. 1.6-1 sets the parallel out.

Diagram

Fig. 1.6-1 – two parallel columns under a common heading “treated as free, endlessly available and outside the accounts”; left column headed “women’s unpaid work” listing carrying water, collecting fuel and fodder, growing and preparing food, caring for the young and the ill; right column headed “nature’s unpaid work” listing soil fertility, pollination, water purification, climate regulation; a single arrow beneath both columns pointing to a box labelled “not counted, therefore not conserved”

The movement draws on the basic tenets of feminism — equality between the sexes, respect for organic processes, and a holistic view in which parts are understood through their connections rather than separately. Its stated aim is to build commitment to the environment together with an awareness of the relationship between women and nature, and to replace relations of power with relations of collaboration, in a society where every form of life is held to have its own essential value.

Among the issues eco-feminism has taken up are water pollution, deforestation, toxic waste dumping, agricultural development, animal rights and nuclear weapons policy.

Curiosity Corner

Q4. Why did some writers begin linking the way a society treats women with the way it treats land?

A. Because they observed the same pattern in both cases: work that is essential, continuous and unpaid tends to become invisible, and what is invisible in the accounts is not protected. A forest that purifies water sends no bill, and neither does the household labour of carrying that water home. Eco-feminists argue that a patriarchal order learns to treat both as free and inexhaustible, and that the two forms of exploitation therefore reinforce each other. They add a practical observation: where women’s work depends directly on water, fuel and fodder, environmental degradation reaches them first, which is why they have so often been the ones to organise against it.

Two strands within the movement

Eco-feminism is not one argument but two, and a student should be able to tell them apart, because they are criticised very differently.

The first strand holds that women have an especially close relationship with nature arising from their roles in bearing and raising children and in nurturing a family — that the connection is, in some sense, given. The second strand holds that the connection is social rather than natural: in many societies it is women who fetch the water, gather the firewood and fodder, grow and process the food, and who therefore possess detailed knowledge of local resources and feel their loss first. On this account the closeness comes from the division of labour, not from anything inherent.

Exam Corner

Q. A writer argues that women should lead forest protection because they are by nature more caring than men. What is the standard objection to this claim?

A. That it is essentialism — it explains a social pattern by an assumed natural trait. The objection is both factual and practical: the pattern varies widely between societies, which is what you would expect if it came from the division of labour rather than from nature; and an argument built on a supposed womanly quality can as easily be used to keep women confined to caring roles. The second strand of eco-feminism avoids the objection by pointing to who actually does the work.

Movements with women in the lead

Eco-feminist writing draws heavily on episodes in which women organised to defend the resources their work depended on. In Kenya, the Green Belt Movement mobilised rural women to plant trees on degraded land, linking soil, fuelwood and income in a single programme; its founder, Wangari Maathai, later received the Nobel Peace Prize. In the United States, residents of the Love Canal neighbourhood in New York State organised in the late 1970s after homes were found to have been built over a buried chemical waste site, and the campaign was led largely by local women.

In India, the Chipko movement of the 1970s in the Himalayan foothills brought villagers, many of them women, to stand around trees marked for commercial felling — the forests supplied their fuel, fodder and the stability of the slopes above their fields. Vandana Shiva, an Indian scholar who took part in Chipko, has argued from that experience that women’s daily interaction with the natural world gives them both a stake in it and a knowledge of it that development planning routinely overlooks.

The tradition of communities defending trees is older still. In 1730, at Khejarli near Jodhpur in Rajasthan, members of the Bishnoi community — whose religious code forbids the cutting of green trees — resisted the felling of khejri trees, and many lost their lives in the attempt. Amrita Devi, who led that resistance, is remembered in the name of a national award for wildlife conservation.

Theory Snapshot

Eco-feminism Proposed by: Named by Françoise d’Eaubonne, a French writer, in the 1970s; developed since by writers in many countries, including Vandana Shiva in India. Core idea: The subordination of women and the exploitation of nature come from the same patriarchal structure, which treats both as free, passive and inexhaustible; ecological and gender equality are therefore a single project. Key terms: patriarchy, essentialism, unpaid work, holistic connections, collaboration in place of power. Evidence: Where fuel, fodder and water are gathered rather than purchased, degradation raises the working day of those who gather them, and this burden falls disproportionately on women — a pattern documented across many regions, and reflected in the leadership of movements such as Chipko and the Green Belt Movement. Limitation: The first strand of the argument rests on an assumed natural closeness between women and nature that the evidence does not support and that can itself confine women to caring roles. Critics also warn that casting women as the environment’s natural custodians risks adding unpaid conservation work to an already heavy burden, and that eco-feminism has been stronger as critique than as a programme of practical measures.

Side Note

There is a distributional point buried in this section that is worth stating plainly. When a forest thins or a well runs dry, the cost is usually paid first in time rather than in money — an extra hour walked for fuel, a second trip made for water — and time costs of this kind appear in no economic account. That is why degradation can proceed for years while the recorded indicators of a region’s prosperity continue to rise.

1.7 Green Politics

Every school you have met so far is a way of thinking. Green politics is the attempt to turn a way of thinking into votes, seats and laws — to move environmental argument out of books and meetings and into the institutions where decisions are actually taken and money is actually allocated.

Green politics is a political ideology whose aim is to create an ecologically sustainable society, and whose roots lie in four commitments: environmentalism, non-violence, social justice and democracy. It began in the western world around 1970, and green parties have since achieved varying degrees of success in many countries. Its supporters share ideas with the ecology, conservation, environmentalist, feminist and peace movements, which is why green party platforms so often carry positions that look at first sight to have nothing to do with the environment.

Definition

(Green politics is a political ideology that seeks to build an ecologically sustainable society, resting on environmentalism, non-violence, social justice and democratic participation.)

The first party formed on environmental issues is generally taken to be the United Tasmania Group, founded in Australia in March 1972 out of opposition to a proposal to flood a lake for hydroelectric power. The significance of that moment is easy to miss. Until then, environmental concern had expressed itself through societies, campaigns and pressure on existing parties. From 1972 onwards it also contested elections in its own name.

Exam Corner

Q. Social ecology argues that individual action cannot change a structure. How does green politics answer the same problem differently?

A. By seeking the power to legislate. Rather than waiting for a change of world-view or of ownership, green politics enters the existing institutions and tries to change what is permitted, taxed and funded. Critics within the other schools reply that a party which must win elections will end up adjusting the system rather than altering it — which is the standing argument between the two approaches.

1.7.1 The Four Pillars of Green Politics

The German Green Party set out four pillars that have since been adopted, in one wording or another, by green parties in many countries. They are: ecological wisdom, social justice, grassroots democracy and non-violence. As Fig. 1.7-1 suggests, they are meant to be load-bearing together — remove one and the structure is held to lean.

Diagram

Fig. 1.7-1 – four columns of equal height supporting a single horizontal beam labelled “an ecologically sustainable society”; the columns labelled left to right “ecological wisdom”, “social justice”, “grassroots democracy”, “non-violence”; a short caption line beneath each column giving its core demand: “give back what is taken”, “fair distribution of benefits and burdens”, “decisions at the lowest practical level”, “change without coercion”

Ecological wisdom

Ecological wisdom is usually summed up in a single sentence: whatever we take from the earth, we must give back to the earth. It asks people to work out what sustainability requires in their own daily lives, and then to take on the larger problems that no household can solve alone — pollution prevention, waste management, renewable energy and energy efficiency, conservation, the treatment of animals, the protection of biodiversity, and the enforcement of environmental laws already on the books.

The last of these is worth pausing on. Green parties have long argued that a large part of environmental protection is not a matter of new legislation at all, but of enforcing what has already been enacted — a point that returns in later chapters on pollution monitoring and forest management.

Grassroots democracy

Grassroots democracy means designing political processes so that decision-making authority is shifted to the lowest geographic or social level of organisation at which a decision can sensibly be made. The principle is that democratic power should be exercised by, and vested in, the local community and its own representatives, and green parties often apply it to their internal working as well.

The argument for it is partly ecological. The people who live beside a river, a forest or a quarry hold information that no distant office possesses, and they bear the consequences of the decision. A rule made far away can be technically sound and locally unworkable.

Non-violence

Non-violence is the personal practice of being harmless towards oneself and others in all circumstances, resting on a refusal to injure people, animals or the environment. Green movements reject the use of violence against opponents, and understand non-violent action as a way of creating a social and political movement capable of opening a national dialogue — one that brings about change without necessarily defeating those who wish to keep things as they are.

1.7.2 Green Politics in Germany

The German Green Party grew out of three currents that ran one after another: the student protest movement of the 1960s, the environmentalist movement of the 1970s, and the peace movement of the early 1980s. It was formed as a provisional coalition of civic groups — citizens’ initiatives already campaigning on nuclear power, road building and local pollution — rather than as a party built from the top downwards. It was here that the four pillars were first identified as the party’s philosophy.

The party contested its first national election in 1980 without winning representation, and entered the federal parliament in 1983. Its early years were marked by an open internal argument that has since been repeated in green parties elsewhere: whether to hold to the programme in full and stay out of government, or to compromise in order to share power and obtain part of it. That argument has never been finally settled, and it is a real difficulty rather than a failure of nerve — a party that never compromises passes no legislation, and a party that always compromises has no distinctive programme left to pass.

1.7.3 Green Politics in England

The Green Party of England and Wales traces its origin to the People’s Party, founded in Coventry in 1973. It was renamed the Ecology Party in 1975 and became the Green Party in 1985 — a sequence of names that records the movement’s own progress from a general dissatisfaction, through an explicitly ecological programme, to an established political identity.

Its primary emphasis has been on environmentalism and political ecology, producing a party committed to non-violence, to a basic income for all citizens and to wide democratic participation. It has drawn substantial support at local level and has fielded a large number of local candidates.

The party’s stated core values, set out in its policy documents, gather around a few themes: that the survival of human beings depends on the diversity of the natural world, so all species must be preserved; that physical resources are finite, so a sustainable society is needed to secure any long-term human future; that basic material security should be a universal and permanent entitlement; that narrow economic indicators are a poor measure of a society’s success and should be abandoned; that conflicts should be settled non-violently and lastingly, taking the interests of minorities and of future generations into account; that decisions should be taken at the closest practical level to those affected by them; and that a society’s actions should take account of the wellbeing of other nations, other species and generations still to come.

Read that list against the four pillars and you will see how tightly the two fit. The fifth item in particular — the rejection of narrow economic indicators — is the point at which green politics meets the argument of the next section, and the point to which this book returns in the chapter on environmental economics.

Compare Table

Theory Snapshot

Green politics Proposed by: No single founder; it emerged around 1970 from environmental, peace and civic movements in several countries, the first party of the kind being the United Tasmania Group in Australia in 1972. Core idea: An ecologically sustainable society cannot be achieved by argument alone; it requires political power exercised through the four pillars of ecological wisdom, social justice, grassroots democracy and non-violence. Key terms: four pillars, sustainability, participation, subsidiarity of decision-making. Evidence: Green parties have obtained representation in many national and regional legislatures and have shaped policy on energy, waste and transport, sometimes from opposition and sometimes in coalition — demonstrating that environmental concern can be organised as a durable political programme rather than a single-issue campaign. Limitation: Environmental measures typically impose costs now for benefits that are diffuse and distant, which is an unfavourable arrangement for any party facing an election. Green parties also face a persistent internal tension between programmatic purity and the compromises required to hold office, and their vote share has in most countries remained modest.

1.8 Sustainable Development

The phrase is built out of two ordinary words — “sustain”, to keep something going, and “able”, capable of. Put together they describe a demand that sounds modest and turns out to be severe: that the way a society meets its needs today should be a way it could go on using indefinitely.

Sustainable development is a process of meeting human development goals while maintaining the ability of natural systems to keep supplying the natural resources and ecosystem services on which the economy and society depend. It is not a demand that development stop. It is a demand that development not consume the conditions of its own continuation.

Definition

(Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present generation without reducing the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.)

That formulation came from the World Commission on Environment and Development, whose report Our Common Future appeared in 1987 and put the term into general use. A second formulation, closer to the language of ecology, is also worth holding:

Definition

(Sustainable development is a pattern of development that meets human needs while maintaining the capacity of natural systems to provide the resources and ecosystem services on which those needs depend.)

The two say much the same thing from different directions — one from the side of people and time, the other from the side of natural systems and their capacity. Neither is a formula that decides cases. Both are tests to apply to a proposal.

1.8.1 Origin of the Idea

Development as we now understand it was not part of the vision of the first half of the twentieth century. Through the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth, large parts of the world were under colonial rule, and the thinking about social and economic development that did exist was largely confined to the ruling countries. The regions under colonial rule functioned mainly as suppliers of cheap raw material and cheap labour — an arrangement whose environmental consequences you will study in later chapters on agriculture and international trade.

The Great Depression of the 1930s forced a rethinking within the industrial countries themselves, which discovered how little social security their own populations had. The first response emphasised economic change — raising productivity and industrial output. Attention later shifted to social change: better education, health, sanitation and employment. But the benefits of higher output did not reliably reach the lowest levels of society, and this gap between aggregate growth and actual welfare became the central problem of development thinking.

That gap is what produced new ways of measuring. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — the total value of goods and services produced within a country in a year — records the size of an economy but says nothing about who receives the income or how long the production can continue. The Human Development Index (HDI), introduced by the United Nations Development Programme, was constructed to sit alongside such economic measures by combining income with health and education, so that a country’s performance is judged partly by how long and how well its people live.

Sustainable development extends the same criticism one step further, in time rather than in space. An indicator that counts this year’s output, however carefully adjusted for health and education, still says nothing about whether the soil, water and forests that produced it will be there next year.

Curiosity Corner

Q5. Can a country’s economy keep growing and still be called sustainable?

A. In principle, yes — but only under a condition that is easy to state and hard to satisfy. Growth is sustainable if the resources it consumes are renewed at least as fast as they are used and the wastes it produces are absorbed at least as fast as they are released. A country that expands its output by improving efficiency, shifting to renewable energy and returning nutrients to its soils can grow without eroding its base. A country that expands by drawing down groundwater, thinning its forests and loading its rivers is not growing sustainably, however healthy its figures look, because part of what is being recorded as income is really the sale of its capital. The question is never how fast an economy is growing, but what the growth is being drawn from.

1.8.2 The Three Dimensions of Sustainable Development

Sustainable development is usually described as resting on three dimensions, domains or pillars: the economic, the environmental and the social — often summarised as economy, ecology and equity. Fig. 1.8-1 shows the standard way of drawing them.

Diagram

Fig. 1.8-1 – three circles of equal size overlapping in the manner of a Venn diagram; circles labelled “Economic — output, income, employment”, “Environmental — resources, ecosystems, waste absorption” and “Social — equity, health, education, participation”; the central region where all three overlap shaded and labelled “sustainable development”; the three two-circle overlaps labelled respectively “viable”, “equitable” and “bearable”

The reason for insisting on all three is that a proposal can satisfy any two and still fail. A scheme that is profitable and environmentally sound but excludes the people who depended on the land is not sustainable, because it will be resisted, and resisted arrangements do not last. A scheme that is fair and environmentally sound but cannot cover its costs will close. A scheme that is profitable and popular but exhausts the resource has simply moved its failure into the future.

Underlying the diagram is a claim about systems. People and their communities live within social, economic and environmental systems that interact constantly, so a change made in one appears in the other two. A healthy society, on this account, is one that can endure into the future while providing a decent way of life for all its members — a definition of health that includes duration, not only condition.

1.8.3 Basic Principles of Sustainable Development

Seven principles are commonly used to make the idea operational.

Maintain and enhance the quality of life of residents. Quality of life differs from community to community, and its components include income, education, health care, employment, housing, legal rights, and freedom from pollution, disease and disaster. Each locality must define and plan for the quality of life it can realistically achieve, now and for the future.
Promote social and intergenerational equity. A sustainable community’s resources and opportunities should be available to everyone, regardless of age, sex, cultural background or religion. Intergenerational equity extends the same requirement across time: the generation now living should not secure its comfort by leaving a depleted world to those who follow.
Enhance the quality of the environment. A sustainable community understands itself as existing within a physical environment and a natural ecosystem, and avoids unnecessary degradation of air, oceans, fresh waters and natural systems.
Price must reflect the actual cost. The price of a product or activity should include the environmental damage caused in producing it, and those who violate environmental laws should bear the cost of the damage they cause. At present much of that cost is paid by people who are neither buyers nor sellers — a problem taken up in detail, under the name of externalities, in the chapter on environmental economics.
Social responsibility. Public and private sectors alike must conduct business with the importance of responsibility towards society and nature in view, since business draws its resources from both.
All things are inter-related. Human life, non-human life, ecosystems, plants and water form one connected whole; no form of life functions in isolation from the others, so problems have to be dealt with in an integrated way rather than one at a time.
Maintain and enhance resources. Resources are not infinite, and even renewable resources need time to regenerate. Conservation is therefore part of ordinary economic management, not an activity carried on separately from it.

Exam Corner

Q. A city meets its water demand by deepening its borewells each year as the water table drops. Which of these principles is being broken, and what would the alternative require?

A. Principle 7 most directly, and principle 2 close behind. The city is meeting present demand by drawing on a stock that regenerates slowly, so the cost is transferred to the next generation of users. The alternative would require abstraction to be brought within the rate of recharge — through recharge structures, reduced losses and demand management — rather than through deeper equipment, which treats a falling water table as an engineering problem instead of a budgeting one.

Theory Snapshot

Sustainable development Proposed by: The concept was given its now-standard statement by the World Commission on Environment and Development in its 1987 report Our Common Future, and has since been adopted as the common language of environmental policy worldwide. Core idea: Development should meet present needs without reducing the capacity of future generations to meet theirs, which requires that economic, environmental and social objectives be pursued together rather than traded against one another. Key terms: intergenerational equity, quality of life, the three dimensions, carrying capacity of natural systems. Evidence: Its diagnostic value is demonstrable — measures of national performance that include natural resource depletion regularly show a different picture from output figures alone, revealing growth that was partly financed by running down environmental assets. Limitation: The definition is broad enough to be claimed by almost anyone, which is both the reason for its success and the main criticism of it. Deep ecologists object that it still values nature for its usefulness to human beings. Others object that “needs” is left undefined, so that the same phrase covers a demand for restraint and a programme of continued expansion. Its defenders reply that a shared vocabulary in which opposed positions must argue is itself an achievement.

Try Yourself

Project link: Form 1 — addressing a current environmental problem at a local or regional scale, with problem identification and analysis, secondary data, some primary data, and the design of a solution. Choose one environmental problem you can actually see in your locality — a drain that overflows in the monsoon, a dumping point at a street corner, a stretch of road where dust is constant, a pond that has shrunk. Over four to six weeks, and with your teacher’s guidance, record what you can observe directly (how often, how much, who is affected and when), and collect published or municipal data on the same problem. Then set out one workable solution, saying plainly what it would cost, who would have to act, and which of the seven principles above it satisfies. Carry out all field observation in daylight, accompanied by an adult, from public ground only, and do not handle waste, effluent or standing water.

1.9 Organisations Working for the Environment

Ideas need carriers. The three organisations in this section grew out of the schools of thought you have just studied, and each one embodies a different answer to the question of how change is actually brought about — by confrontation, by partnership, or by publicity. Set side by side, they show how much practical difference a philosophy can make.

1.9.1 Earth First

Earth First is a radical environmental advocacy movement that emerged in the south-western United States in 1979 and was formally launched by its co-founders in April 1980. Its founding group included Dave Foreman, Mike Roselle, Howie Wolke, Bart Koehler and Ron Kezar.

Its ethos follows directly from deep ecology. In its early years the group put forward proposals that mainstream environmental organisations were avoiding — above all, the setting aside of very large areas of wild land from which development would be excluded altogether. It also established a fund for wild nature, whose money was used for research, publicity and education. By the mid-1980s its activists had explicitly identified themselves with deep ecology, promoting the view that every form of life on Earth has a value that does not depend on its usefulness to human beings.

The work followed the ethos. From 1987 onwards Earth First activists were increasingly associated with attempts to prevent development likely to damage the environment — logging, road building, construction and dams — using protest and civil disobedience at the site itself rather than lobbying at a distance.

Organisation Profile

Earth First What it is: A radical environmental advocacy movement that emerged in the south-western United States in 1979 and was launched in April 1980; it is deliberately not a conventional organisation, having no formal membership roll and no central hierarchy, and operates as a loose network of local groups. Mission: To defend wild nature without compromise, on the ground that wilderness and non-human life have value in themselves. How it works: Direct protest and civil disobedience at the site of a proposed development; publicity; a fund supporting research and education on wild nature; a decentralised structure in which any group may act in the movement’s name. Note: The absence of a central structure gives the movement flexibility but also means it cannot control what is done in its name. Some tactics associated with it — particularly the sabotage of construction and logging equipment — have been widely criticised as unsafe and unlawful, have drawn prosecution, and have been repudiated by other parts of the environmental movement and by many within Earth First itself.

1.9.2 World Wide Fund for Nature

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) is an international non-governmental organisation founded on 29 April 1961, with its headquarters at Gland in Switzerland. It began life as the World Wildlife Fund and adopted its present name in 1986, a change that signalled a widening of purpose from the protection of particular species to the condition of natural systems as a whole. Its emblem is the giant panda, and it is the world’s largest conservation organisation, with more than five million supporters.

Its mission is to stop the degradation of the planet’s natural environment and to build a future in which human beings live in harmony with nature. In pursuing this it concentrates on three biomes that between them contain most of the world’s biodiversity — oceans and coasts, forests, and freshwater ecosystems — together with endangered species, pollution and climate change. A biome, if the term is new to you, is a large natural region defined by its climate and its characteristic communities of plants and animals.

WWF’s strategy is one of partnership. It works closely with the world conservation union and in partnership with United Nations bodies, the World Bank and the European Union, and it accepts funding from individual supporters, from government sources and, to a smaller extent, from corporations. Its major goals are to conserve the world’s biological diversity; to ensure that the use of renewable natural resources is sustainable; to promote the reduction of pollution and wasteful consumption; to encourage millions of people to support conservation; and to ensure that the value of nature is reflected in decisions made by governments, businesses, individuals and communities.

Organisation Profile

World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) What it is: An international non-governmental conservation organisation founded on 29 April 1961, with headquarters at Gland, Switzerland, and offices in a large number of countries; formerly the World Wildlife Fund. Mission: To stop the degradation of the planet’s natural environment and to build a future in which human beings live in harmony with nature. How it works: Long-term conservation programmes concentrated on oceans and coasts, forests and freshwater ecosystems, alongside work on endangered species, pollution and climate change; partnership with governments, international agencies and businesses; funding drawn mainly from individual supporters, with smaller shares from government sources and corporations. Note: The partnership strategy gives WWF access to the institutions that make large decisions, which is its chief advantage. It is also the source of the criticism most often directed at it — that accepting corporate and government funding limits how sharply it can confront those same partners.

1.9.3 Greenpeace

Greenpeace is a non-governmental environmental organisation founded in 1971 at Vancouver in Canada, which grew out of a small group’s voyage to protest against nuclear weapons testing. Among its founding group were Bill Darnell, who supplied the name, and Dorothy Stowe. It now has offices in more than forty countries, with its international headquarters at Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and it is among the most visible environmental organisations in the world.

Its declared mission is to ensure the ability of the Earth to nurture life in all its diversity, and its campaigns concentrate on climate change, deforestation, overfishing, commercial whaling, genetic engineering and nuclear issues.

Core values and strategy

Two commitments define how Greenpeace works. The first is non-violent direct action: placing people, boats or equipment physically in the way of an activity in order to interrupt it and, just as importantly, to make it visible. The organisation is known for these direct actions, and the publicity they generate is treated as part of the method rather than a by-product of it. The second is independence. Greenpeace does not accept funding from governments, corporations or political parties, relying instead on individual supporters and foundation grants — a policy adopted precisely so that no campaign target can also be a donor.

Its objectives are usually set out as a short list of campaigning priorities:

Climate change, treated as the most threatening prospect for human and non-human life alike.
Protecting the oceans, including the establishment of marine reserves.
Protecting forest biodiversity.
Creating a toxin-free future by reducing the use of hazardous chemicals.
Encouraging sustainable agriculture through better farming practices.
Promoting peace, disarmament and non-violence.

Organisation Profile

Greenpeace What it is: An independent global environmental organisation founded in 1971 at Vancouver, Canada, with international headquarters at Amsterdam, Netherlands, and offices in over forty countries. Mission: To ensure the ability of the Earth to nurture life in all its diversity. How it works: Non-violent direct action combined with campaigning, investigation and publicity; six standing campaign priorities covering climate, oceans, forests, toxic substances, agriculture and peace; strict financial independence from governments, corporations and political parties. Note: Independence and visibility are its strengths; the corresponding weakness is that a method built on public attention works best against targets that can be dramatised, and less well against slow, diffuse problems such as soil loss or groundwater depletion.

Diagram

Fig. 1.9-1 – a horizontal spectrum labelled “how each organisation seeks to bring about change”; left end marked “working inside institutions” with WWF placed there (partnership, long-term programmes, mixed funding); middle marked “confronting institutions in public” with Greenpeace placed there (non-violent direct action, publicity, independent funding); right end marked “acting outside institutions” with Earth First placed there (decentralised local groups, civil disobedience at the site); a note under the spectrum: “moving right increases freedom of action and reduces access to decision-makers”

Compare Table

Notice the pattern that runs across the table. As an organisation moves from partnership towards confrontation, it gains freedom to say exactly what it thinks and loses the seat at the table where the decision is finally made. There is no arrangement that secures both, which is why the environmental movement has never consisted of one organisation and probably never will.

1.10 Summary

The movement and its schools

The environmental movement, also called the ecological movement, is a diverse scientific, social and political movement concerned with the conservation of nature and natural resources and with green policies. Its membership is wide — citizens, scientists, NGOs, professionals, forest departments, industries — and it has never been united in its goals.
Its modern growth can be dated through four milestones: the founding of the National Park Service in the United States in 1916; the first Earth Day on 22 April 1970, founded by Gaylord Nelson after an oil spill off Santa Barbara; the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment at Stockholm in 1972, which led to the United Nations Environment Programme; and the naming of the deep and shallow positions in 1973, after which the schools of thought separated.
A school of ecological thought is examined under four heads — definition, origin, basic principles and environmental orientation. Orientation is the decisive one: an anthropocentric position values nature for its usefulness to people, an ecocentric position holds that living things have intrinsic value of their own. The two often recommend the same action and part company when protection becomes costly or the human benefit disappears.

Deep and shallow ecology

Deep ecology holds that all life has intrinsic value and that the natural world is a balance of interrelationships in which each organism depends on others. It calls for a radical restructuring of modern societies, and asks questions past the level of symptoms down to the world-view that permits the damage.
Its eight principles are: value, diversity, vital needs, population, human interference, policy change, quality of life, and obligation of action. The principles of deep ecology are associated with Gary Snyder; the term itself was coined by Arne Naess. Principle 4, on reducing human population, is the platform’s most contested claim, since critics argue that damage tracks consumption more closely than numbers.
Deep ecology has fostered a system of environmental ethics resting on three commitments: wilderness preservation, human population control and simple living.
Shallow ecology, named by Arne Naess in 1973, seeks to conserve nature because human beings need it — the instrumental value position that underlies most working environmental law and management. Robert Costanza’s valuation of the world’s ecosystem services showed that the free services natural systems perform exceed the output of the economy that ignores them.
The two positions differ in orientation, in why nature should be protected, in how deep the diagnosis goes and in what counts as a remedy. Deep ecology reaches the root causes but offers little guidance on how change is to be achieved; shallow ecology works within existing institutions and produces results, but its protection lapses when the usefulness lapses.

Green politics and sustainable development

Green politics is a political ideology aiming at an ecologically sustainable society, rooted in environmentalism, non-violence, social justice and democracy, and beginning in the western world around 1970 with the United Tasmania Group of 1972 as the first party of the kind.
Its four pillars are ecological wisdom, social justice, grassroots democracy and non-violence. The German Green Party, formed from a coalition of civic groups, identified these pillars, contested its first national election in 1980 and entered the federal parliament in 1983. The Green Party of England and Wales began as the People’s Party at Coventry in 1973, became the Ecology Party in 1975 and the Green Party in 1985, emphasising political ecology, basic income and participation.
Sustainable development is development that meets present needs without reducing the ability of future generations to meet their own, a formulation given its standard statement by the World Commission on Environment and Development in Our Common Future (1987). It arose from the observation that aggregate growth, measured by Gross Domestic Product, does not reliably reach the poorest and says nothing about whether production can continue; the Human Development Index added health and education to the measurement, and sustainability adds time.
Its three dimensions are the economic, the environmental and the social — economy, ecology and equity. A proposal that satisfies only two of the three fails: it is resisted, or it closes, or it exhausts its resource.
Its seven basic principles are: maintain and enhance quality of life; promote social and intergenerational equity; enhance the quality of the environment; ensure price reflects actual cost; accept social responsibility in public and private sectors; recognise that all things are inter-related; and maintain and enhance resources, allowing renewable resources time to regenerate.
The concept’s breadth is both its success and the main criticism of it, since opposed positions can shelter under the same phrase and “needs” is left undefined.

Organisations

Earth First, a decentralised movement launched in the United States in 1979–80, applies deep ecology through protest and civil disobedience at the site of a proposed development, and has no formal membership or hierarchy.
The World Wide Fund for Nature, founded on 29 April 1961 with headquarters at Gland, Switzerland, works to stop the degradation of the planet’s natural environment through long-term programmes on oceans and coasts, forests and freshwater ecosystems, and through partnership with governments, international agencies and business.
Greenpeace, founded at Vancouver in 1971 and headquartered at Amsterdam, works to ensure the Earth’s ability to nurture life in all its diversity, through non-violent direct action and publicity, and refuses funding from governments, corporations and political parties.
The three occupy a spectrum from working inside institutions to acting outside them: moving along it increases freedom of action and reduces access to the people who make the decisions.

1.11 Key Terms

Anthropocentric — human-centred; treating the natural world as valuable chiefly because human beings need it.
Community stewardship — the level of stewardship at which a community takes shared responsibility for planning and managing the resources and landscape of its own area.
Conservation easement — a legal restriction limiting development on privately held land, which attaches to the land itself and so binds present and future owners alike.
Deep ecology — the philosophy that all living beings and natural systems have value in themselves, and that modern societies must therefore be restructured at the root.
Ecocentric — nature-centred; holding that living things and natural systems have worth independent of any use to human beings.
Eco-feminism — the position that the exploitation of nature and the subordination of women arise from the same patriarchal structure.
Ecological movement — another name for the environmental movement.
Ecological wisdom — the first pillar of green politics: that whatever is taken from the earth must be given back to it.
Ecosystem services — the benefits that functioning natural systems provide free of charge, such as nutrient cycling, climate regulation, water purification and pollination.
Environmental ethics — the branch of ethics concerned with what human beings owe to the non-human world and to future generations.
Environmental movement — the diverse scientific, social and political movement working for the conservation of nature and natural resources and for green policies.
Environmental orientation — where a school of thought locates value in the natural world, chiefly whether that value is human-centred or nature-centred.
Four Laws of Ecology — Barry Commoner’s four statements: everything is connected to everything else; everything must go somewhere; nature knows best; and there is no such thing as a free lunch.
GDP — Gross Domestic Product: the total value of the goods and services produced within a country in a year.
Grassroots democracy — the third pillar of green politics: shifting decision-making authority to the lowest practical geographic or social level.
Green politics — a political ideology seeking an ecologically sustainable society, resting on environmentalism, non-violence, social justice and democracy.
HDI — Human Development Index: a United Nations Development Programme measure that combines income with health and education to judge a country’s performance.
Humanist group — the strand of Marxist environmentalism holding that the scale of production must be curtailed in order to preserve the environment.
Instrumental value — the worth a thing has as a means to something else, rather than in itself.
Intergenerational equity — fairness between generations; the requirement that the present generation not secure its comfort by leaving a depleted world to those who follow.
Intrinsic value — worth that a thing possesses in itself, independent of its usefulness to anyone.
Land management — the process of managing the use and development of land in rural and urban areas so as to make the best environmental and economic use of it.
Marxist environmentalism — the environmental thinking derived from Karl Marx’s account of nature as the medium of human labour.
Metabolic rift — a break in a natural cycle caused by the way production is organised, as when soil nutrients leave the countryside with the harvest and never return.
NGO — Non-Governmental Organisation: a body that is neither a government department nor a business, working on a public purpose.
Non-violence — the fourth pillar of green politics: the practice of causing no harm to people, animals or the environment, and of refusing violence against opponents.
Non-violent direct action — interrupting an activity by physical presence rather than by force, in order to stop it and make it publicly visible.
Orthodox group — the strand of Marxist environmentalism holding that science and technology can control nature and should therefore be promoted.
Patriarchy — a social order in which authority, property and decision-making rest predominantly with men, and women’s work and interests are ranked below men’s.
School of ecological thought — a named position offering its own account of why environmental damage happens and what would count as putting it right.
Shallow ecology — the position that the environment should be conserved and protected because human beings depend on it.
Social ecology — the school holding that ecological problems arise from social problems, above all from hierarchy and domination between human beings.
Social justice — the second pillar of green politics: fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of cooperation, and of rights and duties within institutions.
Socialist ecology — the ideology merging Marxism, socialism and libertarian socialism with green politics and ecology, identifying capital expansion as the cause of environmental degradation.
Stewardship of land — the ethic that land is held in trust and must be planned for, used and managed so that its productivity and ecological health survive for future generations.
Sustainable development — development that meets the needs of the present without reducing the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
UNEP — United Nations Environment Programme: the United Nations body created after the Stockholm Conference of 1972 to coordinate international environmental work.
Wilderness preservation — keeping some areas free from development and management so that natural processes continue on their own terms.
WWF — World Wide Fund for Nature: the international conservation organisation founded on 29 April 1961, with headquarters at Gland, Switzerland.

1.12 Points to Ponder

If putting a price on a wetland is what finally persuades a government to protect it, has the wetland’s intrinsic value been defended or quietly abandoned?
Stewardship asks a user of land to accept costs now for benefits that arrive after they have gone. What arrangements — of tenure, law or community — would make that a reasonable thing to ask, and what happens where none of them exist?
Social ecology argues that societies which rank their own members will also treat nature as something to be commanded. Severe ecological damage has occurred under very different social systems. Does that weaken the argument, or only complicate it?
A green party that never compromises passes no legislation, and one that always compromises has nothing distinctive left to pass. Is there a principled place to stop between the two, or is the difficulty permanent?
Almost every government, company and campaign now describes its plans as sustainable. Is a term that no one opposes still capable of doing analytical work, and what test would you apply to separate the claim from the practice?
Deep ecology holds that quality of life and standard of living are different things. If a society’s consumption fell substantially while its health, education and security improved, which measures now in use would record that as progress, and which would record it as decline?

1.13 Objective Questions

The term “deep ecology” was coined by:

Gary Snyder
Arne Naess
Barry Commoner
Wendell Berry [1 mark]

A position that values a forest chiefly because it supplies timber, rainfall and tourist income is best described as:

Ecocentric
Anthropocentric
Eco-feminist
Socialist [1 mark]

Which of the following is NOT one of the four pillars of green politics?

Ecological wisdom
Grassroots democracy
Common ownership of production
Non-violence [1 mark]

The level of stewardship in which a legal restriction attaches to the land itself and binds all future owners is:

Land management
Community stewardship
Conservation easement
Wilderness preservation [1 mark]

“There is no such thing as a free lunch” is one of the Four Laws of Ecology stated by:

Murray Bookchin
Françoise d’Eaubonne
Robert Costanza
Barry Commoner [1 mark]

Assertion (A): Shallow ecology has been the basis of most working environmental law and pollution control. Reason (R): Arguments from human benefit can be costed, legislated and enforced within existing institutions.

Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
A is true but R is false.
A is false but R is true. [1 mark]

Assertion (A): A tenant on a one-year lease is unlikely to practise the stewardship ethic, however willing. Reason (R): The costs of caring for land fall at once while its benefits appear over several seasons.

Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
A is true but R is false.
A is false but R is true. [1 mark]

Assertion (A): Greenpeace refuses funding from governments, corporations and political parties. Reason (R): Greenpeace works mainly through long-term partnership programmes with international agencies.

Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
A is true but R is false.
A is false but R is true. [1 mark]

Match the thinker in Column A with the idea in Column B: | Column A | Column B | |—|—| | a. Gary Snyder | i. Stewardship of land | | b. Barry Commoner | ii. Eco-feminism | | c. Wendell Berry | iii. The principles of deep ecology | | d. Françoise d’Eaubonne | iv. The Four Laws of Ecology | [1 mark]
Match the organisation in Column A with the description in Column B: | Column A | Column B | |—|—| | a. World Wide Fund for Nature | i. Decentralised movement with no formal membership, launched 1979–80 | | b. Greenpeace | ii. Founded 29 April 1961; headquarters at Gland, Switzerland | | c. Earth First | iii. Founded at Vancouver in 1971; headquarters at Amsterdam | [1 mark]
Fill in the blank: The break in nutrient cycling between countryside and city, observed by Karl Marx, is known as the ______________. [1 mark]
Fill in the blank: The three dimensions of sustainable development are the economic, the environmental and the ______________. [1 mark]
State whether true or false: The World Commission on Environment and Development published its report Our Common Future in 1987. [1 mark]
State whether true or false: According to social ecology, the systematic problem of hierarchy can be resisted effectively by individual action. [1 mark]
Give the full forms of: (i) NGO (ii) UNEP (iii) HDI (iv) WWF. [1 mark]

1.14 Check Your Concepts

Define intrinsic value, and give one example of a natural feature being defended on that ground. [2 marks]
State any two of the four pillars of green politics and give the central demand of each. [2 marks]
What is meant by ecosystem services? List any three. [2 marks]
Give the full form of GDP and state one thing it fails to record about a country’s development. [2 marks]
Differentiate between deep ecology and shallow ecology on any three points. [3 marks]
Differentiate between the Humanist group and the Orthodox group within Marxist environmentalism. [3 marks]
Give reasons: a conservation easement is said to “run with the land”. [3 marks]
Explain, with one example, why social ecologists claim that an ecological problem is really a social problem. [4 marks]
Explain the two strands within eco-feminism that account for the connection between women and nature, and state the standard objection to one of them. [4 marks]
Evaluate the claim that valuing nature in money terms is the most effective way to protect it. Support your answer with one argument on each side. [4 marks]
Describe the three levels of stewardship of land, stating for each its scale, who carries the responsibility, and its chief difficulty. [6 marks]
State the Four Laws of Ecology and explain any two of them with an example drawn from an Indian setting. [6 marks]
Describe sustainable development: its definition, its three dimensions, and any three of its basic principles. Include one criticism that has been made of the concept. [6 marks]
Compare the World Wide Fund for Nature and Greenpeace with respect to their mission, their method of working and their sources of funding, and state one criticism made of each. [6 marks]

1.15 Passage-Based Questions

A municipal council proposes to fill in part of a town lake to build a parking area. Two groups oppose the plan. The first argues that the lake absorbs monsoon runoff, recharges the wells on which several colonies depend, and cools the surrounding streets in summer. The second argues that the lake’s fish, turtles and migrating birds have a claim to exist that the council’s convenience cannot cancel. Both groups sign the same petition.

Identify the environmental orientation of each group’s argument, giving a reason for your answer. [2 marks]
The council later announces a piped water scheme that will supply the colonies from a distant reservoir. Explain what happens to each group’s argument. [2 marks]
Which school of ecological thought does the second group’s reasoning belong to, and which of its principles does it rest on? [2 marks]

A village has grazed its cattle on a stretch of common land for generations. Over the last decade the grass has thinned, the topsoil has begun to wash away in the rains, and the herd sizes of individual households have risen. One family decides to graze fewer animals and to rest a portion of the pasture. Two years later the land is in no better condition, and that family’s income has fallen.

Explain why the careful family’s action did not improve the condition of the common land. [2 marks]
Which level of stewardship does this situation call for, and what would it require the village to do? [3 marks]
Name one principle of sustainable development that the present use of the pasture violates, and justify your choice. [2 marks]

A factory on a coastal river discharges its effluent into the water downstream of the town. The fishing settlement below the outfall reports smaller catches, and households there now walk further to reach clean water, a task done largely by the women of the settlement. The factory’s owners point out that they have broken no law and that the plant employs several hundred people from the district.

Using the argument of social ecology, explain why the effluent was discharged downstream rather than upstream. [2 marks]
Which of the Four Laws of Ecology does this situation illustrate most directly? Justify your answer. [2 marks]
Explain why the extra walking time is unlikely to appear in any economic measure of the district’s performance, and what an eco-feminist would conclude from that. [3 marks]

A newly formed green group in a small city adopts a programme with four commitments: to plant and protect trees along the canal, to make the corporation’s ward committees decide on local drainage works, to press for the existing effluent rules to be enforced against all units equally, and to conduct all its protests without obstruction or force. It contests the municipal election and wins three seats out of sixty.

Match each of the group’s four commitments to the pillar of green politics it expresses. [4 marks]
With three seats out of sixty, the group is offered a place in the governing coalition on condition that it drops the demand for equal enforcement. Set out the argument for accepting and the argument for refusing. [3 marks]

1.1 Modern Schools of Ecological Thought

How the movement grew

What makes a “school of thought”

The schools covered in this chapter

1.2 Deep Ecology

1.2.1 What Deep Ecology Means

1.2.2 The Principles of Deep Ecology

1.2.3 The Environmental Ethics of Deep Ecology

1.3 Shallow Ecology

Putting a price on what nature does

1.3.1 Deep Ecology and Shallow Ecology Compared

1.4 Stewardship of Land

Why the ethic matters in practice

1.4.1 The Levels of Stewardship

Conservation easement

Land management

Community stewardship

1.5 Social Ecology

1.5.1 Marxist Environmentalism

1.5.2 Socialist Ecology

The Four Laws of Ecology

1.6 Eco-Feminism

Two strands within the movement

Movements with women in the lead

1.7 Green Politics

1.7.1 The Four Pillars of Green Politics

Ecological wisdom

Social justice

Grassroots democracy

Non-violence

1.7.2 Green Politics in Germany

1.7.3 Green Politics in England

1.8 Sustainable Development

1.8.1 Origin of the Idea

1.8.2 The Three Dimensions of Sustainable Development

1.8.3 Basic Principles of Sustainable Development

1.9 Organisations Working for the Environment

1.9.1 Earth First

1.9.2 World Wide Fund for Nature

1.9.3 Greenpeace

Core values and strategy

1.10 Summary

The movement and its schools

Deep and shallow ecology

Stewardship, social ecology and eco-feminism

Green politics and sustainable development

Organisations

1.11 Key Terms

1.12 Points to Ponder

1.13 Objective Questions

1.14 Check Your Concepts

1.15 Passage-Based Questions