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31.5.04

Powerlessness

The "retribution" rationale for punishment is often conceived of as an issue of reciprocity of harm -- and eye for an eye, you should feel as much pain as you caused me. But I think on the level of motivation, there's more to it than this sort of hedonic calculus. The basic impulse seems to come from the question of power.

One of the strongest moral desires people have is for agency. We want to shape our own sense of self and life-project (even if we do so by giving ourselves over to God or some group). Most crimes or injustices are premised on a loss of agency, a loss of power over who the victim is and what they can do. The frightening part of being mugged is as much the realization that you're not in control of the situation and that someone else is dictating to you as it is about having less money at the end.

Retribution, then, is an attempt to reestablish the victim's power. It's a way of proving you haven't lost your capability for agency while making your erstwhile dominator into a non-agent, rendered powerless over his own life and liberty.

This may explain some of the appeal of prison rape as an ultimate punishment. Regular prisoners retain some amount of dignity and agency, despite having their life so circumscribed by prison routine. But being raped invades one of the most private elements of the self, stripping the victim of control over something that should be a fundamental act of self-actualization. If "Bubba" can rape you, he's in total control. What's more, it's arbitrary power, regulated by Bubba's whims rather than the (paradoxically humanizing) regularity and predictability of a set of official prison rules. It's this total disempowerment that seems like the only fitting way to reestablish justice after someone has committed an egregious abuse of power.

Authorial Intent

I'm writing an awful lot about The Day After Tomorrow considering I'm probably never going to actually see it*.

Strangely enough, the only favorable review of the movie that I've seen (not that I've been looking that hard) comes from a conservative. Liberals seem eager to minimize its cinematographical merits in order to distance themselves from its wacky science, while Johnathan Last is apparently comfortable enough in his political stance that he can sit back and enjoy it as a fun disaster flick.

Last goes on to argue that TDAT can't be construed as a criticism of the Bush administration because neither the screenplay nor the book it's based on were originally written with an explicitly anti-Bush agenda in mind. That's a pretty strong version of the idea of authorial intent. Art is a pretty shallow pursuit if you can't reinterpret it and make new connections -- if it's not just wrong but illegitimate to see a movie whose theme is people dying because of their complacency about climate change, and then apply that message to the specific case of the Bush administration.

*Not that this is much of a rejection of the movie. I only see about two movies a year in a theater. This year I've already seen Return of the King, and I'd probably spend my money on Shrek 2 over TDAT.

30.5.04

"Bubba"

I'm starting to think that a good measure of someone's partisanship (which is different from the extremeness of their ideology) is whether they approve of rape. By this measure I'm pretty non-partisan, since I don't ever approve of anyone being raped for any reason. But I've noticed a disturbing tendency among wild-eyed Bush haters* to exult in the idea of their opponents being raped. It's not enough for the bad guys to be stripped of power, totally discredited, and thrown in jail. Ultimate justice involves "a cellmate named Bubba." Perhaps this is just my naivete about the world of power politics, or just a deep-seated aversion to the "retribution" model of justice, but I can't sink low enough to wish that kind of treatment on anyone (yes, not even Hitler).

*Yes, I'm sure it happens on the far right too, but I don't read those sites.

"I Support Environmental Protection, But I'm Not An Environmentalist"

Over at Open Source Politics, Joe Taylor approves of a post by natasha celebrating the death of environmentalism (which Jesse Taylor predicts will be the outcome of The Day After Tomorrow):



[I have to say here that the death of environmentalism might not be an entirely bad thing. Put a nail in the coffin already. Bollocks to people who want to spread a message of brotherhood with the animals, and double bollocks to those who like to talk about the sacredness of untouched nature. Kill environmentalism, and bring on the environmental science.

We don't need to protect the animals because they're cute, or unique, or interesting. We need to protect them because they keep us alive. We don't need to protect the trees because they're sacred and old, but because they filter our water, maintain our atmosphere, and keep our topsoil in place. Coral reefs shouldn't be protected because they're fun to visit, but because populations will starve and the reefs will cease to protect coasts from the full force of storms. The earth doesn't need us, we need it.]


Like natasha and Joe, I prefer a science-based and anthropocentric approach to environmental protection*. But that view is environmentalism. You don't have to join PETA and ELF to be an environmentalist. Saying otherwise is like the people who say "I believe in equality for women, but I'm not a feminist" -- they've fallen into the trap of thinking that only the extremists count as members of the movement.

To the extent that The Day After Tomorrow damages environmentalism, it won't discriminate between the spiritual environmentalism that natasha and Joe hate and the scientific environmentalism that they support. Rather, it will make people think that the positions taken by scientific environmentalism are spiritual and thus discredit the very thing natasha and Joe want to advance. People will be looking for a less radical approach to the environment, but they'll be more likely to see it in right-wing "sound science" than in environmental science, whose conclusions they've learned to associate with TDAT's wild hyperbole.

*Though I don't share their disdain for people who take the more spiritual view.

UPDATE: natasha clarifies her position in comments here and at OSP. Essentially she seems to be taking a pragmatic stance regarding the ineffectiveness of "spiritual" arguments for environmental protection.

29.5.04

Misunderstandings

Googling around, I find a strange accusation (scroll down to 4/25) made by Joe Taylor:

I dare the people who support the draft - e.g. Stentor Danielson (look for "debitage" on my blogroll) - to say directly to me what they really mean by supporting conscription: "I don't mind to see you killed if it'll further my Cause." Come on, guys, say it, even though you don't read this page...


I'm not sure where Taylor got the idea that I support the draft, but luckily for him I published an article a few days later clarifying my position (and using the very argument he offers, among others).

28.5.04

Geography Of "Soda"

This is why we have geographers (via Keywords). What strikes me is how polarized opinions are, especially on the east coast. Western Pennsylvania is hardcore pop country, while the eastern half drinks nothing but soda, and there's only an extremely narrow border zone. Likewise with the weird soda stronghold around St. Louis.

"Healthy Forests" In Action

Neighborhood Wildfire Plans Spark Concerns

... For the last six months, Perrin has joined dozens of neighbors in drafting a wildfire protection plan for 14 neighborhoods along the upper Deschutes River, from Wickiup Reservoir to Sunriver.

The plan is a result of the Healthy Forest Initiative, passed by Congress last December, which empowers communities to help decide how public land should be managed.

... But there is some concern that as small communities create their own forest-management plans, a patchwork of localized plans could prove difficult to coordinate.


This sounds like some good coming out of Healthy Forests. Of course, the usefulness of this kind of community planning depends on whether HF gets fully funded, which might not happen.

It also seems that HF is having some "success" in the courtroom:

Tree Cutters Find Success Under New Forestry Law

Since December, when President Bush signed a new forestry law, the government has won 17 consecutive court cases favoring timber cutting over challenges by environmentalists.

Bush pushed for the law that sponsors named the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, saying it would reduce wildfires in national forests by thinning trees while also limiting appeals and environmental reviews of proposed timber sales.

... The court victories mark a turnabout from recent years, when environmentalists succeeded in delaying and halting logging projects the Bush administration and many Western lawmakers said could have removed the trees and underbrush fueling wildfires.


Unfortunately, the article isn't clear on the distinction between fuel reduction forestry projects and non-fuel reduction forestry. Presumably HF would only aid the former, and the government was winning most of those to begin with. So a streak of 17 victories alone doesn't tell us a whole lot. I'd want to see details of particular court cases that engaged the provisions of HF.

Three Links

1. The European Biomass Industry Association did a study to see whether switching to biomass fuels could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I wonder what their conclusion was. I can certainly see the advantages of biomass over fossil fuels, but you'd think the WWF could find a co-sponsor with a little less of a vested interest in the outcome, to give their finding a bit more credibility.

2. Wanting to eliminate fire is like "wanting to have a turkey on Christmas Day, despite the fact that it's 35 degrees." A nice analogy for people who brought their British views of the environment and holidays to the Southern Hemisphere.

3. There's a major fire in New Mexico, luckily burning in a mostly rural area.

27.5.04

Dredge Defeated

Lobbyists Influence House Voters In 63-130 Rejection

Industry lobbyists won yesterday in Harrisburg, despite a strong push by two local lawmakers to enact legislation that would protect residents in our area and across the state.

... The legislation contained wording that called for a voter referendum to decide whether to allow dredge to be dumped in municipalities.

Lobbyists argued, essentially, that giving local residents a chance to vote against the dumping of waste products would destroy Pennsylvania's economy.


My first thought was that this was typically slanted Times-News coverage of this issue (though perhaps understandably so, since the key legislators are local). When I went looking for a different spin on the story, I found this article, credited to the AP, which matches -- in both tone and wording -- Donald Serfass's Times-News piece. Somebody is ripping off somebody.

I tried to find out more about how giving communities control over dredge dumping would destroy Pennsylvania's economy, but beyond the word "oppose" on the PA Chamber of Business and Industry agenda, I couldn't find a counter-argument on the sites of any of the opponents. I guess the destruction of the state's economy isn't a high priority. So somebody here is engaging in some exaggerated rhetoric.

Homophobia Down Under

Howard Warned On Bid To Jilt Gay Marriage

Moves by the [Australian] Federal Government to outlaw gay marriages would cost the Coalition votes at the next election, a Liberal MP warned yesterday as the Government's own backbenchers protested against the decision.

The Prime Minister, John Howard, said he would insert into the Marriage Act a specific definition of marriage as "the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others voluntarily entered into for life".

... Mr Howard has defended his plan to amend the Marriage Act, saying it did not discriminate against gays and that they were not prevented from having a same sex relationship.


If the concern cited in the first paragraph pans out, it would boost my faith in the Australian public (recall that the Australian Liberal party is conservative). And to John Howard: if you're going to reinforce the discriminatory status quo, at least have the guts to admit that's what you're doing. Spare us the twisted logic of how it's not discrimination against gays, it's discrimination in favor of straights, and the sad consolation prize that gays can still have a relationship (unless you're seriously considering taking even that much away).

26.5.04

John Kerry Isn't A Trustworthy Source Of Information But I'm Voting For His Policy Anyway

Going Both Ways On The Environment

More than a third of Americans say they don't trust President Bush "at all" as a source of information about the environment, according to a new survey of attitudes about the environment by the Global Strategy Group for the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Sciences. Kerry fares somewhat better, with 24 percent saying they don't trust him on the issue.

But before Kerry's campaign tries to make hay out of that finding, consider the flip side: Although 26 percent of Americans say they trust the president "a lot" for environmental information, only 12 percent say they feel that way about Kerry.

Another survey finding: Survey respondents mentioned environmental concerns (9 percent) almost as often as terrorism (10 percent) as "the most important problem in the United States in the next 20 years." The top-ranking concern is jobs and the economy (17 percent).

-- via The Commons


Amy Ridenour at The Commons says that "The lesson for politicians? Don't bother approaching environmental issues from a political perspective. It won't help you anyway." But I think that's a misreading of the poll. It's not that people distrust the candidates' environmental policies, it's that they distrust the candidates' statements of factual information. I, for one, don't base my understanding of (say) climate change on what John Kerry or George Bush have to say about it. I collect independent information -- from the news, scientific publications, personal experience, etc. Then I match my views on climate change to the policies advocated by the candidates. I don't much care what Kerry says about whether and how the climate is changing, I care what he says about what he's planning to do about it.

This interpretation -- that the candidates should be politicians and discuss policies "from a political perspective," rather than trying to be scientists and tell us how the environment is doing -- is supported by some additional information from Yale's press release:

A majority of Americans (56%) say that the candidates should talk more about their plans for the environment. A significant percentage of the electorate (37%) wants the candidates to talk "much more" about environmental issues.

And the public wants action as well as talk. Eighty-four percent believe the United States should enact stricter emissions and pollution standards for business and industry. This reflects substantial majorities of Democrats (92%), Independents (90%) and Republicans (68%).


In other words, the electorate wants the environment to be an issue, and raising its profile would be likely to help Kerry (he should beware of respondents' reluctance to sacrifice other values for the environment, though they're generally sympathetic to Kerry's view that environmental protection helps the economy). Particularly encouraging from his perspective would be the apparent close agreement on environmental issues between independents and Democrats, which suggests that environmentalism isn't some far left-wing cause that he needs to tone down in order to appeal to swing voters.

One interesting bit in the full report is the generally more positive attitude people have toward their local environment. 51% say that the national environment is "fair" or "poor," while only 43% say the same of their local environment. 67% think that the federal government needs to do more to protect the environment, while 61% say the same of the state and only 55% say their local government needs to do more. I'm not entirely sure what to make of this. Perhaps the immediacy of locally-concentrated environmental threats, as compared to the diffuseness of larger-scale ones, means that local governments have had a better record of success than the feds.

24.5.04

Log Cabin Democrats

Morat and Steve Gilliard can't understand why the Log Cabin Republicans stay Republicans when the GOP is so blatantly anti-homosexual. I'm not a fan of the "why are you gay people still Republicans"? line.

The main problem is that it portrays gay voters as one-dimensional. Yes, gay rights are clearly very important to someone who would join a group like the Log Cabin Republicans. But I imagine they also care about other things, like cutting taxes and the war in Iraq. I don't see how we have any call to demand that people sell out all but one of their principles. And if they came over to the Democrats, they'd get the same kind of flak -- "why don't you and Zell Miller take your pro-war views and go join the Republicans?"

Second, there's an important role for people working for change from within. If the Log Cabin Republicans ought to give up on the GOP and vote Democratic, why shouldn't all American gays give up on America -- which is still legally and socially a fairly homophobic country -- and move to Canada or the Netherlands? Because gay Americans have an attachment to the non-homophobia elements of America, and thus they'd like to stick around and reform the place. I don't think it's a hopeless cause. As bad as the contemporary GOP is, it (and the Democrats) used to be worse. Each succeeding generation is more gay-friendly than the last. The Log Cabin Republicans are in it for the long haul, to create what Matthew Yglesias has called "two non-insane parties." The two-party system is entrenched enough that the only way gay rights will ever be on a secure footing is for the GOP to be converted (in the same way that they were converted to supporters of Medicare and Social Security).

23.5.04

Noble Lies And Objectification

Plato famously defended the idea of the "Noble Lie," a falsehood propagated by the ruling class to keep the rest of society in line. The practice has been adopted by many a tyrant throughout history, and it's a rare ruler who hasn't been accused of spreading Noble Lies by his more radical opponents. Defenders of truth and freedom have made numerous counter-arguments, but what interests me about the Noble Lie is how it plays on the ideas of reflexivity and objectification.

Reflexivity is the standard explanation of why the social sciences can't work the same way as the natural sciences. The natural sciences study an objective world, attempting to develop theories that will explain it, help us to predict its changes, and perhaps even control it. This works because the natural world's principles of operation don't change. While formulating scientific laws can drastically change how we see nature and how we interact with it, they don't change nature itself. Snow falls just the same after we discovered the Bergeron process as before, and the same principles would continue to apply if we used our knowledge to intervene and provoke or forestall a snowstorm.

The social world, on the other hand, won't stay "out there." When a theory of anything is formulated, it becomes part of the social world. When that theory is about the social world, we encounter what's known as a reflexive situation. People change the rules of their behavior based on theories ranging from folk knowledge to social scientific investigation. Unlike crystals or trees, people won't sit still and let social scientists get their behavior figured out. Current trends place an ethical value on increasing the reflexivity of the research enterprise, involving informants in the process of data interpretation and disseminating results far and wide for public use.

What a Noble Lie does is short-circuit the process of reflexivity. The ruler's actions and knowledge never make it into the consciousness of the public because they're kept wedded to a stable lie about how society works. This enables the ruler to develop a body of objective knowledge about society, knowledge free of the complications of reflexivity. This kind of knowledge is more easily used for control of society. Essentially, a successful Noble Lie enables the ruler to treat society as an objective world, a thing "out there" that can be manipulated, but not changed by self-awareness.

More "Beyond The Pale"

The latest issue of the Commonweal Institute newsletter recommends the Media Matters for America site as a source for "the sort of 'I-can't-believe-they-said-that' quotes that every progressive should have at his or her disposal." They give some examples of the kind of quotes they mean (and yes, they're unbelievable), but they don't elaborate on the important question -- why I would want to have "'I-can't-believe-they-said-that' quotes ... at [my] disposal." Perhaps they would be useful if I needed to discredit Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh as individuals to an audience not familiar with the crazy things they say. Maybe they'd be useful as well if I wanted to do some guilt-by-association to take down some more reasonable conservatives (before I do that, I'll need to come up with a good defense of A.N.S.W.E.R. and Stalin, seeing as both my own opinions and theirs happen to fall to the left of center).

But outrageous quotes don't do anything to help construct an argument against actual conservative beliefs -- indeed, they do just the opposite. The whole idea of such quotes is that they're self-evidently wrong and thus in need of no arguments. But if Michael Savage and his fans believe that Arabs are "non-humans," then simply restating their belief is unlikely to make them reconsider. (I'm imagining someone saying to me, in a shocked voice, "you want to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions? and failing to be terribly convinced by my outraged interlocutor.)

The real effect of having "'I-can't-believe-they-said-that' quotes ... at [my] disposal" would be to taint my view of conservatism. The quotes would seem more representative of what conservatives think, and hence I'd start to feel like conservatism was self-evidently wrong and that therefore anyone who holds such views must be willfully refusing to think rationally. And I'm not interested in winding up like that.

20.5.04

Trip

Out of town for a few days.

19.5.04

Gas Price Pandering

In Oregon, Kerry Assails Bush on Gas Prices

The Massachusetts Democrat seized on reports of escalating gasoline prices to hammer the president's leadership during a speech at a job training center here. Recalling that Bush campaigned in New Hampshire four years ago during a spike in oil prices and promised to lobby the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to increase oil production, Kerry said: "Well I haven't seen any jawboning, have you? All I read about are sweetheart deals with Saudi Arabia."

Kerry outlined several steps that he said would help hold down gasoline prices, including diverting oil going into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and said the president has failed to do anything serious to stem the price rise.

... White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Bush is opposed to diverting oil from the petroleum reserve to bring down gasoline prices. He said the economic effects of such a move would be negligible and that the 700 million-barrel reserve should be used only in times of national emergency, when there is a severe disruption of the oil supply.


John Kerry needs to stop using this line of attack -- he's making me agree with Bush. For all the havoc that the Republicans' ties to the oil industry wreaks, Democrats have a frustrating tendency to pander to voters with promises of cheap gas.

18.5.04

Salmon Update

West Coast Salmon Likely To Remain Protected

The Bush administration yesterday infuriated Northwest developers and farmers by telling Congress it expects to keep Endangered Species Act protections for 25 of 26 troubled runs of West Coast salmon.

Environmentalists welcomed the news, but some said the administration acted only because of a backlash over its hatchery proposals.

... Just two weeks ago, based on leaked documents showing that federal agencies planned to count millions of hatchery fish alongside wild fish in assessing the health of salmon and steelhead runs, both sides assumed that the Bush administration was laying the groundwork to remove endangered-species protections.

-- via Chris Mooney


I appreciate the fact that it would have been nice if the administration had done the right thing from the get-go, but it seems excessive to dismiss the change of course as only as a result of a backlash. That "only" is how democracy works. We want our government to be responsive to public opinion.

New OSP

I've just favored Open Source Politics with a speculation on why so many liberals want John McCain as VP.

17.5.04

Comment Anxiety

It's frustrating sometimes to think about the fact that, once you take out all the search engine hits, I get less than a dozen readers each day. I won't claim that my posts are so insightful or well-written that I deserve a larger readership, but it can still be disappointing that, for all the time I spend writing here, my opinions don't register on the world's radar screen.

But on the other hand, I'm often afraid that people will read my blog. One of my major goals is to keep a record of my thoughts, so I post some pretty half-baked stuff. Whenever I scroll through my blog, I fear seeing a number next to the "comment" link. It usually means someone is challenging me on something, calling me out on the stupidity of what I've written and forcing me to defend myself (an expectation not helped by knowing that two people who semi-regularly stop by are of the intelligent conservative persuasion). My relief at seeing a "0" in the comments doesn't say much for how I'd handle being even moderately successful, especially since I'm not partisan enough to attract a comfortable echo chamber.

But maybe when you're more successful you get used to it. For me a comment is a big deal because I get so few of them. Maybe if I got a dozen on each post, I wouldn't be concerned about them, even the critical ones.

The strangest thing is that this is a relatively new phenomenon, at least in its intensity. I'm more anxious about readership and comments now than a year ago. You'd think that as I got more experienced as a blogger, became better educated (and thus better able to make good arguments), and developed more of a philosophical commitment to discursive democracy, it would go the other way.

(Note that this is not a "please comment more" whine or a "please be gentle" whine -- it's just me noting what's on my mind. Do not let this post affect your commenting habits.)

Wildfire On The Campaign Trail

U.S. Trims Wildfire Crews

The federal government may have about 30 percent fewer firefighters for this year’s Western wildfire season than it did last year, according to lawmakers — setting the stage for what could be an election-year debacle on the fire lines.

"All indications suggest that this will be an extremely challenging fire season, and we cannot afford to allow our federal firefighter capability to fall so far below last year’s level," Reps. Charles Taylor, R-N.C., and Norman Dicks, D-Wash., said in a letter late last week to Agriculture Secre tary Ann Veneman, addressing funding problems.

... "It's not dissimilar to budgeting for war," he [Mark Rey, the Agriculture Department's undersecretary for natural resources and environment] added. "You're going to be confronted with on-the-spot variables, and that's going to affect how it works."


It sounds like budgeting for a war -- specifically the Rumsfeldian "war on the cheap" style of budgeting.

The opening paragraph insinuates that a bad fire season would hurt Bush, but I'm not so sure. He was able to effectively use the California fires last year to get everyone behind his Healthy Forests plan, which is front and center in his claim to have been a good environmental steward. So bad fires could just give him an opportunity to highlight Healthy Forests. What would make it work against Bush would be if Kerry can get a strong counter-message out there. (Though he'll have to be careful not to get slammed for "politicizing" the issue, especially as the accusation of politicizing things looks to be central in this year's Republican message.)

You'd think that, with Bush making Healthy Forests such a big part of his environmental message and Kerry being such a strong environmentalist, that he would have a good message on wildfire control. Sadly, this post from last October is still correct. Searching Kerry's website, Healthy Forests seems to be mentioned in only two contexts -- as an example of misleading language, and as an example of Bush's giveaways to corporations. Both of these are important points. But Kerry also needs to have more than one paragraph of positive wildfire control policy.

Difference And Conversation

I'm reading Iris Marion Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference, which if nothing else refutes the claim that postmodernism has to be written in convoluted and opaque prose. She attempts to steer a course between Habermasian post-liberal critical theory and postmodern/poststructural theories of difference. Her central claim is that politics must embrace group differences, rather than erasing them through assimilation into a homogeneous ideal or denying them by viewing individuals as ontologically independent. She portrays group differences as nodal, rather than bounded, regions (i.e., defined by degrees of resemblance and social network linkage, rather than by hard categorization rules).

Her defense of group difference is basically existential. Rather than the classical liberal idea of the individual existing prior to social ties, she argues that we are "thrown" into a situation where we have group membership, common experiences and affinities with certain people, culture, etc. The goal, then, is not to shake off this specificity but to understand it and organize it into a meaningful sense of identity.

One of her main debts to postmodernism is the idea that oppressed groups are defined as Others relative to the dominant group's norm, thus making blackness, femaleness, homosexuality, etc. "deviant" and qualities to be overcome in the quest for full participation. Rather than accept the dominant discourse's definition of the ideal and attack social differences, she urges an acceptance of the existing social differences but a rejection of the definition of one way to be as the right way to be.

But often when she gives specifics, the ideal of "different but not objectively/universally better or worse" breaks down. Sometimes the case is simple, such as her insistence that we not idealize "standard" English and denigrate Ebonics or Spanish. But in other cases, she attributes value to non-dominant ideas/characteristics by reversing their hierarchical relationship to the mainstream. For example, she cites the land ethic that comes out of Native American tradition, describing it as a "critique" of white capitalism that Native Americans can be proud of. To describe this as mere difference would seem to imply that the white view of nature is just different as well -- it's appropriate for Native Americans to have their traditional land ethic and it's appropriate for white people to have an exploitative view of nature. I seriously doubt Young would see it that way.

It's not enough to leave this point there, as simply an illustration of the hypocrisy of people who claim to value difference while criticizing the dominant culture. What is needed is to move the value of difference beyond a separatist "you say to-may-to I say to-mah-to" relativism. Certainly giving a strong benefit of the doubt to other ways of seeing and being is useful, particularly when the individuals doing the seeing and being are less powerful (and hence less able to defend whatever is of value). What is needed is an idea of how groups can productively engage with each other across differences.

Donna Haraway makes a related argument about difference in her discussion of "the privilege of partial perspective." She argues first that a universalizing, objective viewpoint is impossible and that claiming it tends to mask the valuing of one particular viewpoint. Second, she argues that "partial perspective" -- the worldview arising out of the particular circumstances of a person's existential thrownness -- is a productive source of ideas. There are certain things that particular experiences will lead you to see that others wouldn't. But she doesn't stop by saying that the ideas generated by your partial perspective are good for you and similarly for different people. She concludes with an appeal to the usefulness of talking across differences in partial perspective, hearing other people's perspectives and using them to put your own in context and reconsider your own views. This last step is rather Habermasian -- indeed, it's the idea of the importance of real people in concrete contexts defending and rethinking their ideas in actual conversation with other real people in concrete contexts that is at the heart of Habermas's argument for discourse ethics rather than John Rawls' "objective" Original Position.

This Haraway-Habermas view helps to resolve the seeming contradiction of valuing the difference of Native American land ethics while portraying them as a critique of white views of the environment. The specificity of Native American heritage and experience helped them to generate and sustain a different way of looking at human-environment relations. This usefulness points out the importance of difference. But once that land ethic is created, it is not merely held as a point of pride and a guide to life for Native Americans. Rather, it is brought into dialogue with white ideas about the environment and offered as a proposal that merits consideration by other groups. Whites need not (and probably cannot) adopt it wholesale, but neither should we reject it outright as not relevant to us as white people. Rather, we should consider it and perhaps in light of it refine both our ideas about the environment and our existential relationship to our whiteness. Doing so may realign the constellation of affinities that defines our group differences, something that can only be accepted by getting beyond the anxiety about maintaining our identity that Young suggests is at the root of the creation of polarized norm-Other distinctions.

15.5.04

A Science Fiction Documentary?

Since that last post sort of bashed the precautionary principle and sort of agreed with a libertarian on an environmental issue (one publishing in Tech Central Station, no less), I have to earn my left-wing credibility back with a nitpick.

In another Commons post, Amy Ridenour quotes David Almasi saying "the likes of Al Gore and MoveOn.org ... want people to see it [the climate change disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow] as more of a documentary than the disaster film that it truly is." But on the very page that you get when you click the link in "MoveOn.org" in Almasi's statement, MoveOn says "'The Day After Tomorrow' is more science fiction than science fact." It seems that, in accordance with the hope I expressed, their campaign is taking the "any publicity is good publicity" tack and trying to use the movie as a jumping-off point to talk about the actual threat of climate change. But statements like Almasi's suggest I was right to worry that the movie's bad science will be conflated with actual environmentalist claims, and thus the latter will be rejected along with the former.

Incidentally, there's good news and bad news about Blogger's new search function. Good news: It gives you the permalink to the post, so you don't have to look at the date then crawl back through your actual archives to find the link. Bad news: Its search algorithm is still crappy -- "Day After Tomorrow" brought up no posts, despite the fact that I've written about the movie twice.

Precautionary Proverb

Via Juan Non-Volokh, I've found something I keep meaning to search for -- a contrarian environmentalism blog, The Commons (hopefully it proves worth reading consistently, though I'm probably jinxing it here). In the posts linked to by Non-Volokh, two authors take Jeremy Rifkin to task for an article promoting the precautionary principle (PP). Despite Rifkin's assertion that the PP is a groundbreaking post-Enlightenment new idea, it's basically classical conservatism -- "the world is extremely complex, so don't change anything unless you're really really sure you know what you're doing." The PP merely emphasizes the environmental applications, whereas conservatism focused on social changes.

Joel Schwartz argues that Rifkin is inconsistent in his use of the PP, since he's decidedly un-precautionary about changes he likes (such as hydrogen fuel). But I think the problem is in a slightly different place. Rifkin mistakenly characterizes the PP as a decision rule. In reality, I think the PP is a proverb. It's used to evoke a certain attitude and declare your feeling that it is applicable to a certain situation.

Schwartz rightly points out that total precaution is unfeasible. But so is total risk-seeking. We have to find some balance where we are willing to take the plunge despite a degree of uncertainty. What the PP amounts to is an assertion that, in the opinion of the person invoking it, we haven't been cautious enough. One could also invoke the inverse proverb -- "nothing ventured, nothing gained" -- if one believed we had been too cautious. Neither of these proverbs constitute a reason for a particular non-extreme level of risk or a rule by which we can test the appropriateness of our chosen level of risk. Rather, they are expressive claims that call on decisionmakers to consider whether they've shown too much/little caution. It's easy to get caught up in the beneficial possibilities of a course of action, so the PP can act as a reality check (and conversely for invoking "nothing ventured" to a worrywart).

Thus, the inconsistency of Rifkin's application is not a sin, by this understanding of the PP -- or at least, it's no more or less of a sin than favoring hydrogen fuel but opposing GM crops. One can dispute his implicit risk assessments in each case, but the PP is no more than an expression of the relationship between his preference and the course of action actually being pursued.

Tolerance

Mark Kleiman (via Matthew Yglesias) makes the old argument that it's hypocritical for pro-tolerance people to be intolerant of intolerant people. I don't think this argument holds up quite as well as it seems to on first glance. If your goal is to maximize total tolerance in society -- i.e., you treat tolerance as a social good rather than a personal virtue -- then it may be necessary to employ some selective intolerance. It's a contingent, rather than analytical, fact whether being intolerant of a bigot might maximize total tolerance by deterring him from practicing an amount of bigotry that outweighs your intolerance. It's similar to the way that, in the interests of maximizing freedom from coercion, we practice some selective coercion (enforcement of murder laws, for example).

That said, I think liberals and leftists often are too quick to assume that being intolerant of intolerant people will maximize tolerance. Barring situations of great urgency, I think it's better and ultimately more effective to change someone's beliefs and behaviors rather than cowing them into keeping silent. To do that, you need to demonstrate what respecting another viewpoint is like, by granting them a degree of tolerance. This is especially the case when numbers are not on your side -- we can probably keep the Republicans in the closet here at Clark, but good luck doing that in the country as a whole.

(And no, I'm not being intolerant of people who are intolerant of intolerant people. What makes tolerance different from acceptance is that you still disagree, and can make your case and try to convince others, but you don't show disrespect or coercion toward them.)

I should also point out that in my experience, the bad effects of hate (the strong, emotive form of intolerance) accrue to the hater as well as the hated -- though I'm open to the idea that my moral psychology is unusual. I don't mean merely that hate leads to retribution of some sort, but that the very act of (knowingly) hating makes me feel like a bad person. I won't say I'm not often tempted to blow off steam (more often than I care to think about, in fact), but it's like wanting to eat a whole box of ice cream. It sounds good in anticipation, but even before you're done you regret it.

14.5.04

Cost-Benefit Analysis

TAP has an interesting debate between Kerry Smith, a proponent of using cost-benefit analysis in making environmental decisions, and Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling, who oppose it. Though I'll doubtless be kicked out of the environmental movement for saying such a think, I think Smith has the stronger position:

Why then is there so much controversy about cost-benefit analysis? In my view, the reason is simple: It forces those with alternative agendas to place their cards on the table. The rationale for each proposed decision must be made explicit. Holistic, moral, safe, and fair criteria must be translated into specifics. Once this is done, the tradeoffs among alternative outcomes implied by these decisions can be compared with the wishes of the affected people and any deviation from those wishes must be explained.


The general principle of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) correct. It recognizes the necessity and inevitability of tradeoffs between different values, and forces us to be explicit about what those tradeoffs are. CBA is a tool for helping us structure our thought processes, not a black box that will spit out The Correct Answer. A CBA is an argument, a proposal for how to weigh the various considerations, not an incontrovertible decision or revelation of an objective fact. It's open to tinkering with the inputs and structures, while making such tinkering, and the assumptions behind it, transparent.

The one major revision I would make to CBA is to incorporate more of the techniques of handling uncertainty and utility scales that have been developed within the Decision Analysis framework. Monetary costs can be misleading because the amount of benefit associated with a dollar differs depending on how many dollars someone has. In any case, the criticisms made by Ackerman and Heinzerling aren't specific enough to differentiate between the various mathematically explicit decision procedures (such as classical CBA, Decision Analysis, Analytical Hierarchy Process, and Linear Programming). They argue:

The administration of George W. Bush is the most hostile to environmental protection of any in recent memory. It is also the most enthusiastic about the use of cost-benefit analysis to screen proposed regulations. Perhaps this is only a coincidence. Perhaps a process of carefully summarizing people’s preferences has found that the American public wants to weaken the Clean Air Act, drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, ignore the dangers of global warming, allow more polluting snowmobiles into national parks, use cheaper and less effective safeguards against SUV tire blowouts, accept high levels of mercury in our food and water, and so forth.

But we don't believe it. Gamblers know that dice that always roll snake-eyes are loaded. The same holds true for a decision-making method that repeatedly tells us to do less about environmental protection, even when public opinion polls tell us that the American people want to do more.

... It is a political tool used to undermine regulation, hardly ever to strengthen it. As Smith notes, cost-benefit analyses have occasionally supported environmental protection, as in EPA’s retrospective analysis of the Clean Air Act. In such cases the Bush administration -- populated by the most ardent defenders of cost-benefit analysis in executive branch history -- has pressed ahead in exactly the opposite direction, attacking rather than defending key provisions of the Clean Air Act, without mentioning the cost-benefit results.


In what way does "the Bush administration doesn't do CBA properly" imply "CBA itself is no good"? If the administration's CBAs are "loaded," then the problem is the loading. And the explicitness of analysis that CBA requires would seem to make it easier to identify the whether, how, and why of the administration's disregard for public preferences.

Almost no one attaches a price to the things they care most about. How much is your family worth to you? Or your religion? Or your health? By arguing that good decision-making requires monetary equivalents for environmental goals, the advocates of cost-benefit analysis degrade priceless values to the level of cheeseburgers and fries ...

Without cost-benefit calculations, we are not helpless or indecisive; without help from economists, ordinary people think profoundly and come to reasoned judgments about threats to life, health, and nature, and about our obligations to future generations.


I doubt that, for all the pieties about the sacredness and infinite value of human life, anyone seriously feels that way. We make tradeoffs in our lives all the time. If our health was really priceless, we would never eat so much as a single Dorito, or get within a hundred feet of a car. The fact that we drive around and eat junk food (among other activities with some level of risk) shows that -- as the authors go on to admit -- we're capable of making tradeoffs. What CBA does is ask us to try to be explicit and systematic about those tradeoffs.

When it disagrees with actual public opinion -- as it does so often on environmental issues -- we’d rather let the people decide.


Public opinion does not exist prior to and independently of the policymaking process. CBA incorporates public opinion into its analysis, and has the possibility of in turn shaping public opinion.

The numerous deaths avoided by reducing air pollution were given a monetary value, around $6 million apiece in today’s dollars. This was based on an average of the small wage increases that blue-collar workers in the 1970s and early 1980s supposedly received for accepting small risks of dying on the job. What do the wages of blue-collar workers decades ago, many of whom went to work out of economic necessity and without an explicit understanding of the risks they faced, have to do with our preferences, today, for cleaner air?

Some economists try to avoid this problem by asking people, in “contingent valuation” surveys, how much they would be willing to pay to avoid a hypothetical risk. But survey participants’ answers are heavily censored by the surveyors, who discard some answers for internal inconsistency and others for asserting too high a value for protecting health and the environment.


That CBA has been done poorly or ineptly should be no surprise. But it's only the explicitness of CBA that makes such specific criticisms possible. People's intuitions about what course of action is better incorporate these very kind of tradeoffs, in inchoate -- and thus dificlt to criticize -- form. Such intuitionism may be fine for private decisions. But major governmental policy changes should be obligated to make their reasoning clear, through a technique like CBA.

Smith says that we have limited resources and that we may have to trade one environmental or educational program against another. But why is it only good things that have to be traded against each other? What if we want both education and environmental protection, what if we want both protection of coastal wetlands and spending on climate change mitigation? Personally, we’d like to have it all, and finance it by giving up some useless missiles or tax cuts for millionaires.


Education versus environment is a tradeoff that CBA helps us analyze. So is education and environment versus missiles and tax cuts. I entirely fail to see how CBA requires us to make the former decision but prevents us from making the latter. Indeed, it would be helpful if Congress could use some form of CBA to decide whether money spent on missiles and tax cuts wouldn't be better put into education and environmental protection. Then we'd have a clearer basis for decision than Ackerman and Heinzerling's intuition (which I share) that the tradeoff would be beneficial.

Ultimately, it seems that most of Ackerman and Heinzerling's arguments point to the benefits of CBA, rather than detracting from it.

Cost-Benefit Analysis

TAP has an interesting debate between Kerry Smith, a proponent of using cost-benefit analysis in making environmental decisions, and Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling, who oppose it. Though I'll doubtless be kicked out of the environmental movement for saying such a think, I think Smith has the stronger position:

Why then is there so much controversy about cost-benefit analysis? In my view, the reason is simple: It forces those with alternative agendas to place their cards on the table. The rationale for each proposed decision must be made explicit. Holistic, moral, safe, and fair criteria must be translated into specifics. Once this is done, the tradeoffs among alternative outcomes implied by these decisions can be compared with the wishes of the affected people and any deviation from those wishes must be explained.


The general principle of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) correct. It recognizes the necessity and inevitability of tradeoffs between different values, and forces us to be explicit about what those tradeoffs are. CBA is a tool for helping us structure our thought processes, not a black box that will spit out The Correct Answer. A CBA is an argument, a proposal for how to weigh the various considerations, not an incontrovertible decision or revelation of an objective fact. It's open to tinkering with the inputs and structures, while making such tinkering, and the assumptions behind it, transparent.

The one major revision I would make to CBA is to incorporate more of the techniques of handling uncertainty and utility scales that have been developed within the Decision Analysis framework. Monetary costs can be misleading because the amount of benefit associated with a dollar differs depending on how many dollars someone has. In any case, the criticisms made by Ackerman and Heinzerling aren't specific enough to differentiate between the various mathematically explicit decision procedures (such as classical CBA, Decision Analysis, Analytical Hierarchy Process, and Linear Programming). They argue:

The administration of George W. Bush is the most hostile to environmental protection of any in recent memory. It is also the most enthusiastic about the use of cost-benefit analysis to screen proposed regulations. Perhaps this is only a coincidence. Perhaps a process of carefully summarizing people’s preferences has found that the American public wants to weaken the Clean Air Act, drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, ignore the dangers of global warming, allow more polluting snowmobiles into national parks, use cheaper and less effective safeguards against SUV tire blowouts, accept high levels of mercury in our food and water, and so forth.

But we don't believe it. Gamblers know that dice that always roll snake-eyes are loaded. The same holds true for a decision-making method that repeatedly tells us to do less about environmental protection, even when public opinion polls tell us that the American people want to do more.

... It is a political tool used to undermine regulation, hardly ever to strengthen it. As Smith notes, cost-benefit analyses have occasionally supported environmental protection, as in EPA’s retrospective analysis of the Clean Air Act. In such cases the Bush administration -- populated by the most ardent defenders of cost-benefit analysis in executive branch history -- has pressed ahead in exactly the opposite direction, attacking rather than defending key provisions of the Clean Air Act, without mentioning the cost-benefit results.


In what way does "the Bush administration doesn't do CBA properly" imply "CBA itself is no good"? If the administration's CBAs are "loaded," then the problem is the loading. And the explicitness of analysis that CBA requires would seem to make it easier to identify the whether, how, and why of the administration's disregard for public preferences.

Almost no one attaches a price to the things they care most about. How much is your family worth to you? Or your religion? Or your health? By arguing that good decision-making requires monetary equivalents for environmental goals, the advocates of cost-benefit analysis degrade priceless values to the level of cheeseburgers and fries ...

Without cost-benefit calculations, we are not helpless or indecisive; without help from economists, ordinary people think profoundly and come to reasoned judgments about threats to life, health, and nature, and about our obligations to future generations.


I doubt that, for all the pieties about the sacredness and infinite value of human life, anyone seriously feels that way. We make tradeoffs in our lives all the time. If our health was really priceless, we would never eat so much as a single Dorito, or get within a hundred feet of a car. The fact that we drive around and eat junk food (among other activities with some level of risk) shows that -- as the authors go on to admit -- we're capable of making tradeoffs. What CBA does is ask us to try to be explicit and systematic about those tradeoffs.

When it disagrees with actual public opinion -- as it does so often on environmental issues -- we’d rather let the people decide.


Public opinion does not exist prior to and independently of the policymaking process. CBA incorporates public opinion into its analysis, and has the possibility of in turn shaping public opinion.

The numerous deaths avoided by reducing air pollution were given a monetary value, around $6 million apiece in today’s dollars. This was based on an average of the small wage increases that blue-collar workers in the 1970s and early 1980s supposedly received for accepting small risks of dying on the job. What do the wages of blue-collar workers decades ago, many of whom went to work out of economic necessity and without an explicit understanding of the risks they faced, have to do with our preferences, today, for cleaner air?

Some economists try to avoid this problem by asking people, in “contingent valuation” surveys, how much they would be willing to pay to avoid a hypothetical risk. But survey participants’ answers are heavily censored by the surveyors, who discard some answers for internal inconsistency and others for asserting too high a value for protecting health and the environment.


That CBA has been done poorly or ineptly should be no surprise. But it's only the explicitness of CBA that makes such specific criticisms possible. People's intuitions about what course of action is better incorporate these very kind of tradeoffs, in inchoate -- and thus dificlt to criticize -- form. Such intuitionism may be fine for private decisions. But major governmental policy changes should be obligated to make their reasoning clear, through a technique like CBA.

Smith says that we have limited resources and that we may have to trade one environmental or educational program against another. But why is it only good things that have to be traded against each other? What if we want both education and environmental protection, what if we want both protection of coastal wetlands and spending on climate change mitigation? Personally, we’d like to have it all, and finance it by giving up some useless missiles or tax cuts for millionaires.


Education versus environment is a tradeoff that CBA helps us analyze. So is education and environment versus missiles and tax cuts. I entirely fail to see how CBA requires us to make the former decision but prevents us from making the latter. Indeed, it would be helpful if Congress could use some form of CBA to decide whether money spent on missiles and tax cuts wouldn't be better put into education and environmental protection. Then we'd have a clearer basis for decision than Ackerman and Heinzerling's intuition (which I share) that the tradeoff would be beneficial.

Ultimately, it seems that most of Ackerman and Heinzerling's arguments point to the benefits of CBA, rather than detracting from it.

13.5.04

Public Understanding Of Science

Dense Matter Indeed

... As science becomes more complex, more prominent in everyday life and more dependent on taxpayer dollars for research, Nobelist-breeding academies like Caltech are reaching out to the clueless — meaning most folks.

The goal is to nurture popular support for scientific endeavors by making them easier to understand. Public lectures are the front line of this campaign. But as Schwarz has learned, dumbing down the toils of super-nerds can strain the brawniest of brains.

"I don't think anybody's going to get the whole story," said Schwarz, before addressing 900 walk-ins at Beckman Auditorium, where Caltech holds a series of public lectures. "I am presenting some difficult subjects, like extra spatial dimensions. It's a little hard to visualize."


What's interesting about this story is that, while the public doesn't quite get what the scientists are saying, their support for science isn't diminished. They don't object to funding particle accelerators even if they have no clue what it's used for. As long as it's Science, they accept it. There's a sort of acquiescence to technocracy, to a division of labor where we trust the scientists to do the science. It's a viewpoint I can sympathize with, as I don't know any more about string theory or the big bang than the confused attendees at the lectures the article discusses.

The article seems confined to high-level physics topics. The technocratic attitude is easy when the subject is something that seems esoteric and distant. Why shouldn't I trust physicists? But I think we'd find a different result if they dealt with popularization of scientific topics that the public sees* as directly bearing on their lives -- say, cloning, or fire ecology, or mercury pollution**. In such cases I think there's a greater need for public understanding, a greater possibility for public understanding, and a greater threat of public skepticism.

There is a greater need for public understanding of science in seemingly life-relevant topics for two reasons. First is to maintain public trust in, and support for, the scientific enterprise. Because of the increased skepticism (on which more below), the public is less accepting of the argument from authority and thus needs to come to a real understanding (in the Habermasian sense) of the value of the science. Second, technocracy is neither advisable nor possible, a point I've argued at more length elsewhere.

There is a greater possibility for public understanding of science in seemingly life-relevant topics because people have more of a motivation to master the material. The environmental justice literature is replete with examples of cases in which concerned citizens, driven by a feeling of threat to their lives and homes, became sophisticated producers and users of scientific knowledge. I think there are some grounds for hope that, despite the tendency to ideologically reject science that conflicts with our desires, overall the public will more readily learn about life-relevant science than about seeming esoterica.

There is a greater likelihood of public skepticism of science in seemingly life-relevant topics because such topics bring the scientific enterprise within the scope of social maneuvering that people understand. It's logical that environmentalists would want to inflate the rate of extinction, or that tobbacco companies would want to show that smoking doesn't cause cancer. But who ever heard of ulterior motives for discovering the "up" quark? Doubtless they exist, but they're disciplinary politics far removed from most people's experience. But while this ability to see the possibilities of a failure to adhere to objectivity calls scientific findings into question, it also boosts the public's confidence in its ability to engage in the scientific debate. People are willing to participate because the science is intertwined with things they are familiar with. They feel qualified to have an opinion rather than simply shrugging and deferring to scientists' expertise.

*The crucial issue is the perception that a finding has relevance to everyday life, not whether it actually does.

**I think evolution is a case that goes both ways. I doubt I'm alone in being willing to smile and nod when presented with the esoterica of evolutionary biology because I don't feel it has a strong impact on my daily life. On the other hand, if my theological worldview required faith in a six-day creation, then I would be more critical, because evolutionary explanations threaten my philosophy of life.

Global Darkening

Doom May Loom Amid The Gloom

In the second half of the 20th century the world became, quite literally, a darker place.

Defying expectation and easy explanation, hundreds of instruments around the world recorded a drop in sunshine reaching the surface of Earth - as much as 10 per cent from the late 1950s to the early 1990s, or 2 to 3 per cent a decade.

... the dimming trend - noticed by a handful of scientists two decades ago, but dismissed at the time as unbelievable - is now attracting wide attention. Research on global dimming and its implications for weather, water supplies and agriculture will be presented in Montreal at a meeting of US and Canadian geological societies next week.


I'm not so surprised to hear about this possibility. The mechanism -- light blocked by pollution -- seems straightforward enough. I'm reminded of the discovery of the ozone hole. Scientists initially couldn't believe the data because it was so much bigger than anyone would have anticipated, but it turned out to be legit.

12.5.04

Bioregionalism Vs. Ayllus

The disjuncture between political boundaries and the boundaries of environmental systems has caused its share of problems. Consider the near impossibility of creating a workable solution to the Aral Sea crisis because the hydrological system is fragmented among at least six countries. Because of this, there have been numerous inter-jurisdictional institutions created to coordinate the management of border-crossing ecosystems.

Some people have taken this idea even further, creating a radical vision of bioregionalism. Bioregionalism is the philosophy that political boundaries should be redrawn based on ecological boundaries. This would not only reduce* cross-boundary management conflicts, but it would also allow each polity to assume a form most suited to managing the type of ecosystem it resides in.

Like many elements of the radical environmental movement, bioregionalists look to indigenous people for inspiration. In their view, indigenous people practiced a more or less bioregional way of life. But this is an unduly romanticized view of indigenous people. While their was of life was more sustainable than ours, and they were bioregionalists when looked at at a coarse scale simply due to the large number of polities they had, they exhibited plenty of borders drawn on the basis of social factors rather than natural systems. That alone is not a fatal objection to bioregionalism -- after all, they could consciously use the "ecological Indian" as a myth rather than as a historical fact, since its ability to represent their ideals is independent of what indigenous people ever actually did. More interesting is the fact that in some cases -- I venture to say most, at least in areas where the degree of environmental heterogeneity made it feasible -- indigenous people were explicitly anti-bioregional. They deliberately constructed their territories to cut across ecosystem boundaries.

The ayllus (clans) of indigenous Andean people are a classic example. Rather than differentiating into different tribes at different elevations, Andean social groups aimed at controlling a slice of territory spanning all the environments, from the coast through maize and potato farming areas to the arid altiplano and back down into the Amazon rain forest. When a group couldn't directly control access to a variety of environments, they would try to gain access through social connections (a strategy widely employed in Australia).

There are environmentally sound reasons for this effort to make polities cross-cut diverse bioregions (beyond the simple need or desire for a variety of products). It works as a risk-reducing strategy. If the potato crop fails, you still have the maize and the fish**. An ayllu-type system was possible in part because indigenous people rarely had the means to severely degrade their ecosystems and impose costs on their neighbors. They simply didn't need bioregional coordination of management in many cases. Thus they had more freedom to pursue the advantages of regional diversification.

The basic bioregionalist focus on homogeneous or systemically integrated regions overlooks the advantages of this kind of cross-cutting jurisdiction. But it does, as I mentioned, highlight an important issue of integrated ecosystem management, one becoming ever more important as our power over ecosystems (or at least our power to mess them up) increases. A better approach, then, seems to be some form of overlapping jursidictions. A proposal of this type has been made within the adaptive management literature. Studies of small-scale overlapping jurisdictions (e.g. school districts, police districts, etc.) suggests that, while having different (even arbitrarily different) boundaries for different functions may seem untidy and present bureaucratic hassles, such a system is more socially resilient in the long run. It seems no stretch to think that it would be more environmentally resilient as well.

*Only ever reduce, not eliminate. Geographers long ago realized that there is no one set of "true" natural regions.

**This point applies whether the bioregions are defined in terms of homogeneity of conditions or in terms of systemic integration.

11.5.04

Burning Idiots

Communities Debate Tree-Thinning Rules To Avert Fire Danger

... "There are people here who have four to five dead pine trees on their property, and they completely ignore everything," said [Sam] Corsino, chairman of the "fire-wise" committee for his subdivision. Why the ignorance?

"Because they're idiots!" he said. "Some people are not too bright."


Well, there's some refreshing honesty. This whole story -- indeed, the whole private-property fuel management debate -- seems to have this quote as an underlying assumption. The firefighters know best, they say we need to clear defensible space, and it's those selfish idiot homeowners who won't shape up. Mind you, I'm an advocate of defensible space and strong home-construction fireproofing measures. But it bothers me to see the media, as well as many of my fellow fire safety partisans, slipping into this easy technocratism. I think there's a good deal more to homeowner noncompliance with firefighters' recommendations -- there'd better be, or else I'll have nothing to write in my dissertation.

I was also very interested by this bit:

John Mosier and a business called Healthy Acre Forestry have taken matters into their own hands, creating maps that show which Prescott properties meet the local Fire Department's standards for defensible space and which don't.

His group recently sold their mapping services to two forested subdivisions. The idea is to create pressure on homeowners slow to get the thinning religion.

"The map is a very powerful tool," Mosier said.


My basic dissertation approach is looking like it will be framed more in terms of land change and sustainability science than political ecology, but I have a hope of being able to put some of my findings into the context of more "critical" political ecology and constructivist perspectives -- to speak to both sides of the methodological divide in geography, though not necessarily at the same time. There has been some interesting theory produced, usually in the context of postcolonial studies, about how maps are used to frame issues and define the discourse. The role of fire danger maps could be an interesting and different sort of case to apply those ideas to. It's something that I ought to keep in mind, anyway, as I'll certainly want to at least have a look at the fire danger maps that fire councils in NSW are required to produce and use in policymaking.

News Flash: Environmental Science Has A Social Component

A Matter Of Degrees

... The thread isn't the staggering complexity of the Earth's life support systems. Given sackloads more data and a few dozen more supercomputers strung together, we might just begin to cope with that. No, it's the infinite, and infinitely shifting human perceptions of, and reactions to, this drama now unfolding. Now here's something that we can, pedagogically speaking, get our teeth into.

It's got everything: business, politics, economics, love and hate, rich and poor, science and art, and also, for comic relief, a soupcon or two of sheer gormless stupidity. You can develop fancy academic models of human behaviour. The frog-in-the-beaker-of water-being heated analogy, for instance (frog put into hot water straight away would jump out; frog in heating water stays put until ... it's too late). It's multidisciplinary, and crosses the arts/humanities divide. It just needs a fancy title. How about psychoclimatics, say? That's got a nice ring to it.


I'm glad he's discovered the importance of studying the human dimensions of global environmental change just a century after geographers took up the topic. When he puts together his syllabus on "psychoclimatics," I recommend starting with Carl O. Sauer, B.L. Turner II, William Denevan, Gilbert F. White, Roger Kasperson ... I'm hopeful he'll find something in those readings a bit more sophisticated than the old boiling frog analogy.

It's frustrating how often people from the natural sciences stumble upon the idea that social issues require analysis as well, then proceed to theorize with apparent obliviousness to the fact that social scientists have been working on these problems for years. I'm open to the idea that an outsider may have some fresh perspective, but you've got to show that you're familiar with what's been said before (and are thus being neither redundant nor naive) if you want to advance it as a scientific proposition.

On the other hand, I'm frustrated with the failure of social scientists to do this kind of realm-crossing. Even within human-environment study, people who start out on the social side tend to stay there, unwilling to make a real attempt to grapple with the subject matter -- much less the theoretical literature -- of the natural sciences. Unfortunately I have to count myself among this group as well.

Perhaps I Should Watch Out For Airborne Pork

EPA Issuing Tough New Diesel Rules

The Bush administration announced tough new rules yesterday to curb harmful emissions from off-road diesel-powered vehicles, pleasing environmentalists after brokering a compromise with industry on deadlines.

Off-road diesel-powered vehicles, such as bulldozers, tractors and irrigation equipment, are among the largest sources of pollutants that scientists have linked to premature deaths, lung cancer, asthma and other serious respiratory illnesses. The regulations, which Environmental Protection Agency director Mike Leavitt will sign today, would reduce the emissions of nitrogen oxide and other pollutants from diesel engines by more than 90 percent over the next eight years.

... "It's remarkable that these strong rules come from the same administration that has otherwise turned back the clock on 30 years of environmental progress," said Emily Figdor, a clean-air advocate for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. "It's great to see science win out over the special interests for a change."

... "With an opportunity to score a slam-dunk, at the last minute the Bush administration committed an unnecessary foul," said Frank O'Donnell, executive director of the Clean Air Trust. "It caved in behind closed doors to political pressure from oil companies and delayed cleanup for fuel used in marine and train engines."


I don't dispute that the rule contains concessions to industry, and I suppose it's necessary to be on record indicating that the final rule is not perfect. But this seems like a situation in which positive reinforcement combined with making the contrast with the usual conduct of this administration is key. Positive reinforcement emphasizes that environmentalists are not implacably opposed to whatever the administration does, while making the contrast helps to forestall using this policy to greenwash its overall record, stressing that the positive evaluation is policy-specific.

10.5.04

Trojans And Indians

Belle Waring wonders why sports teams are named the "Trojans," considering that in the end the Trojans got soundly defeated. But it doesn't seem any stranger than all the teams named the "Indians," since the Indians also got beaten pretty bad in the end. Now, the Indian survivors and their descendants have made a (non-military) comeback, rebuilding their society and culture and pride. But that's not the era that the Chief Wahoo logos are trying to evoke, any more than "Trojans" refers (as some of Waring's commenters hypothesized) to their resurrection as the Romans.

In a way, though, picking a loser is appropriate. The ideals of good sportsmanship generally focus on being a good loser. So it makes sense to invoke the story of people reputed to fight nobly to the end despite being headed for defeat.

(Though I do note that, according to this list, there are nearly as many "Cowboys" (9) as "Indians" (10, plus two who have since changed mascots).)

9.5.04

Superfund

Superfund Could Be Weakened By Recommendations From EPA Subcommittee

Since President Bush took office, the Superfund program's budget has decreased by 25 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars, and some 50 percent fewer sites have been cleaned up, according to a report produced by the Sierra Club and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund. In fiscal year 2003, the Bush administration completed cleanups at only 40 Superfund toxic-waste sites, whereas an average of 87 Superfund cleanups were completed per year between 1996 and 2000.

Industry representatives and Bush officials argue that these numbers are misleading because many of the easiest-to-tackle Superfund sites were cleaned up early in the program's history, leaving behind bigger, more complex sites that take longer to deal with. Environmentalists counter that so-called "mega-sites" have been part of the agency's agenda for decades, and the shortfall is due to meager funding and a flimsy commitment to the Superfund cause.

... Among the range of recommendations [in a report released in April by an EPA subcommittee, which was accused of being loaded with industry representatives] that dissenting subcommittee members found problematic was the notion that sites be added to Superfund's National Priority List based on EPA's budgetary constraints, weighing the financial viability of site cleanups instead of focusing on how much of a threat sites pose to public health. Even more alarming to some was the suggestion that sites be cleaned up based on their potential to be redeveloped for commercial purposes -- a proposal that would disadvantage the cleanup of sites in rural communities and inner-city areas, which are generally less favorable markets for commercial development.


If the remaining sites are complex "mega-sites," that seems like a good reason to boost funding. The public health impacts aren't lessened by the complexity of the site, so complex sites demand more resources.

I have to disagree with the dissenters, though, on dismissing cost-effectiveness criteria for prioritizing cleanups. It sounds nice and high-minded to say public health should be the only issue. But when funding is as tight as they claim, it's even more crucial to get the best bang for our buck. One could plausibly argue -- and I'd be inclined to take this position, given that the NPL is hard to get on or off of, and thus far less changeable than budgets -- that NPL listing should be based purely on health considerations, but that the choice of which NPL sites to focus on remediating should be based on cost effectiveness. But that's really just shifting the issue back one stage.

Tiny DC

Matthew Yglesias says that "it's often said that Washington, DC is a surprisingly small city for capital of The World's Only Superpower." But really, it shouldn't be that surprising. After all, it was built for the purpose of being the capital. If it weren't for the US government, nobody would have bothered to drain the swamp on the Potomac. Since there's no independent reason for there to be a city there, it's not inclined to as much growth. The pattern holds for other countries as well -- Brasilia is dwarfed by Sao Paulo and Rio, and Canberra is a fraction the size of Sydney or Melbourne.

7.5.04

Posting Like Crazy

After barely posting anything all week, I've suddenly got a zillion little things to say. If you're not sick of hearing from me by now, you might be interested in my latest contribution to Open Source Politics, "In Defense of 'Climate Change'"

So Up My Dissertation Alley It Hurts, Part II

Residents Remain Cool To Wildfire Protection

... Fire Chief Manuel Navarro, was a battalion chief in Oakland, Calif., in 1991 when a wildfire exploded, killing 26 people and destroying 3,300 homes. Residents blamed the department for not telling them about the risk.

Navarro swore after that experience he would always warn people in areas prone to wildfires and tell them how to protect themselves and their homes.

... Complacency among residents who won't trim back the forest around their homes and a disregard for safety issues bother fire officials.

Last year, when Colorado Springs banned new cedar shingle roofs, homeowners ignored the warnings and rushed to install wood shingles just before the deadline.

... [Homeowner Howard Gill is] frustrated some neighbors refuse to do anything. He thinks their inaction increases his danger. "But I can't do anything about it," he said.

... [Homeowner Lee Wolford said] "There's always a concern for fire. But you live with the risk. We have a wood deck that we’re getting rid of. We're putting on a fire-retardant deck. We want to minimize the risk, but we don’t want to destroy the atmosphere. I'm not going to cut down every tree within 50 feet of my home. That's asking a lot."


This story hits a lot of important themes -- fire department frustration over homeowner noncompliance, homeowners valuing aesthetic amenities and private property over fire safety, trans-boundary and collective risk colliding with a fragmented property regime, and fatalism or "it can't happen here" attitudes.

Romney Vs. Climate Change

Romney Hedges On Global Warming

As he introduced a new state policy to combat global warming, Governor Mitt Romney had a surprise for the environmentalists gathered along the Charles River Esplanade yesterday: Personally, he's not sure global warming is happening.

During a news conference at which he formally announced the Massachusetts Climate Protection Plan, Romney said he decided not to take sides in the debate about "is there global warming or is there not, and what's causing it."

... "If climate change is happening, the actions we take will help," Romney wrote. "If climate change is largely caused by human action, this will really help. If we learn decades from now that climate change isn't happening, these actions will still help our economy, our quality of life, and the quality of our environment."

Romney said yesterday he considered the new climate plan a "no-regrets" policy. Even if greenhouse gases turn out not to be driving climate change, he said, the state will have improved air quality, stimulated the economy, and saved money by reducing its appetite for energy.

-- via Quark Soup


The story's lead paragraph (whose framing is apparently endorsed by Quark Soup, since quoting it is the entirety of the post there) is the likely, but unfortunate, way that Romney's position will play out. The focus will be on the apparent hypocrisy of proposing a plan to deal with a threat you don't believe in. Environmentalist enthusiasm for the plan will be tempered by the feeling that he's giving aid and comfort to climate change skeptics and the lost opportunity for a "Sister Souljah moment" as a Republican stands up to endorse the idea of human-induced climate change.

The most popular explanation offered for the weird positioning, raised later in the Globe article, will likely be the sort of "strategic positioning" argument that characterizes most political discussion. Romney is unlikely to win over most environmentalists (since they care about other issues as well), while he needs the support of climate skeptics. Thus he gives rhetorical reassurance to them even as his policy undercuts their cause.

But the more important thing that seems to be happening -- or what could be made to happen if the public discourse fixates on the second two paragraphs that I quoted rather than the first two -- is an attempt to move the debate beyond the "economy vs. environment" impasse that dominates most discussions of climate change. It's dangerous, of course, to maintain that the transition to a sustainable society can be made painlessly. But it's also true that environmental and other values are not a zero-sum game.

Romney's framing of his skepticism is in a sense an attempt to achieve an overlapping consensus (a sort of "Sister Souljah moment" on the pragmatic, rather than ideological, level). His affirmation of a shared viewpoint with skeptics is not merely damage-control for a policy that skeptics won't like. It's a positive claim that his policy can be justified with regard to their values. He's saying "even though my policy looks like it's something They would like, I'm still one of Us, and speaking as one of Us, I can say that We ought to support it. We can work with Them without selling out Our values." At the same time, though, I think "They" (and I'm part of Them) need to listen to Romney's case and recognize that They share the relevant values, and that it's worth trying to move forward without achieving agreement on all of Their values.

Grant Us Wisdom, Courage, And Heterosexuality

Speaking of the National Day of Prayer, take a look at the list of suggested prayer topics. Of the five institutions that they want us to pray for, the instructions for four of them are appropriately general and innocuous requests for guidance and responsibility. But under the heading "Education," we're not told to pray for the wisdom of our teachers and the moral and intellectual development of students. Rather, we're told to specifically pray against the spread of "homosexual propaganda." Neither of the two orientations -- nondenominational generalities or specific policy prescriptions -- is necessarily wrong, but it's strange to see them mixed together like that.

City Sizes

Will Baude links to this list of the world's largest cities in the course of reflecting on how easily one's geographical perceptions can get outdated in this changing world. For example, he's surprised that Sao Paulo is now third (after Tokyo and Mexico City).

I had the opposite reaction. Having heard a fair bit about the world's changing demographics but not having done any formal reading about it, my perceptions have overshot the mark in terms of how much city size ranks have shifted. So I was surprised to find that Washington-Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston all still outrank the major US growth centres like Dallas-Ft. Worth, Houston, and Phoenix. Lagos is a surprisingly small 26th on the list, and Buenos Aires hasn't surpassed London. On an Australian note, I hadn't realized that Sydney beats Melbourne by such a comfortable margin (as well as edging out Berlin).

6.5.04

The Opiate of the Bushes

Remarks By President Bush On National Day Of Prayer

... Americans do not presume to equate God's purposes with any purpose of our own. God's will is greater than any man, or any nation built by men. He works His will. He finds His children within every culture and every tribe. And while every human enterprise must end, His kingdom will have no end. Our part, our calling is to align our hearts and action with God's plan, in so far as we can know it. A humble heart is not an indifferent heart. We cannot be neutral in the face of injustice or cruelty or evil. God is not on the side of any nation, yet we know He is on the side of justice. And it is the deepest strength of America that from the hour of our founding, we have chosen justice as our goal.

Our greatest failures as a nation have come when we lost sight of that goal: in slavery, in segregation, and in every wrong that has denied the value and dignity of life. Our finest moments have come when we have faithfully served the cause of justice for our own citizens, and for the people of other lands. And through our nation's history, we have turned to prayer for wisdom to know the good, and for the courage to do the good.


The obvious issue to take with Bush's speech is its monotheo-centrism. He ascribes essentially Christian beliefs to "we Americans," not recognizing that many Americans believe something quite different. I'll leave the details of that case to others who can express them better than me.

What interested me is that, while it's Christian-centric enough to alienate non-Christians, it's pretty poor Christianity. I don't mean that simply in the sense that I think Christianity is consistent with, even demands, the kind of tolerance and impartiality that atheists and pagans would ask for. I think it would be appropriate if Bush spoke from his heart about his faith and what it means to him. But even if we rewrite his remarks to talk in personal, rather than collective, terms, the version of religion he gives is remarkably shallow. The speech is made up mostly of comfortable platitudes and pro forma humility before God. Perhaps part of it is a failed attempt to say something innocuous and uncontroversial in order to placate the non-Christians, and is simply a case of winding up with the worst of both worlds. But I think it's also indicative of a larger kind of malaise that tends to surround Christianity as a de facto national religion.

One of Jesus' major messages, as I see it, was "you cannot be righteous enough to earn God's love, but God loves you anyway." There are two parts there -- one a challenge, the other a reassurance. Both are critical, but Christianity has tended to emphasize the latter. And no wonder -- a message that lifts up the persecuted will have more appeal than one that is critical of the self-assured. The sinners and tax collectors flocked to Jesus while the scribes and Pharisees rejected him. Thus it was the sinners and tax collectors, the people who were most interested in the uplifting side of Jesus' message, who set the tone for the development of Christianity after Jesus' departure.

This balance of emphasis is all well and good when you're preaching to people who need to be uplifted, and Christianity has thrived among people who are persecuted. But the message gets distorted when it's preached to those who have power. For those whose faith comes before their experience, they invent persecutions in order to feel that their life coheres with the Christian message. For those whose experience comes before their faith, the Christian message becomes a sort of reassurance. Bush's speech stays squarely within his, and his audience's, comfort zone. He uses all the familiar phrasings, whose very habitualness saps them of their meaning, turning them into a bit of familiar ritual. The message of the speech is that we Americans are on the right track, that we're Godly people. It's all very self-affirming. And it's not at all what I think Jesus would have said to an audience of the leaders of the most powerful country in history.

If Bush wanted to make his speech memorable and meaningful, he should have tried to reclaim the other side of Jesus' message. This is the side that challenges us, the side that reminds us that we're not good enough, that we don't understand well enough. Perhaps on the occasion of a national day of prayer in a religiously plural nation, it should be a call to really listen to people of other faiths or none, to let their perspective disrupt your assumptions about how you live your life. It should be phrased in fresh and undiplomatic language that would jar listeners and make them think, rather than stroke them with familiar concepts. How can Jesus' message, which was so shocking two millennia ago, have been made so banal in its skewed adoption by a comfortable majority?

5.5.04

Warming West

A couple days ago, I complained that an AP story about climate change in the American West, as well as Chris Mooney's post about it, focused too much on the "is climate change caused by humans?" question. It looks like the Environment News Network is trying to frame the story my way, as they chose the headline " Debate over causes aside, warm climate's effects are striking in the West."

4.5.04

Natural Law Or Social Conditioning?

Joe Carter brings up an interesting point with regard to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.

Most everyone has simply stated that these soldiers “should have known” not to act the way they did. They seem to be under the impression that it is both obvious and beyond dispute and, therefore, no argument even needs to be made. Essentially, they're making an appeal to natural law. Like St. Thomas Aquinas, they agree that good and evil is intrinsic and knowable by all people (ST IaIIae 94, 4). These reservists should have known that such actions were wrong because all humans are endowed with the same moral intuition that humiliation and torture are evil acts.


Joe agrees that there is a natural law, but some degree of social conditioning is necessary to properly develop it. While the military builds a strong moral orientation into its members, reservists (such as the Abu Ghraib torturers) are exposed to the moral relativism of civilian culture that erodes their moral intuition. While not entirely sold on the idea that having the Geneva convention explained to them would have led the torturers to act right, he says "solid training on both the laws of war and the consequences for violating them might have been just the thing to stir their moral conscience."

There are two things I want to pick out of this argument. First is the question of implied natural law. I'm skeptical that humans share much more than a rudimentary inherent conscience (and that things that appear to spring from that inherent conscience are necessarily proper guides to action*). However, I don't think that one needs to presume a natural law framework in order to argue that the soldiers "should have known" not to torture. Though conservatives make a big deal out of the supposed moral relativism of modern life, there is a largely shared ethos -- as evidenced by the practically universal condemnation of the Abu Ghraib torture. Whatever its origin, the idea that you should not wantonly humiliate and torture anyone, even enemy soldiers of a different race and culture, is pretty well entrenched in American culture. So to say the soldiers "should have known" can refer to an element of "nuture" we expect them to share, not necessarily an element of "nature." The soldiers "should have known" not to torture in the same way that they "should have known" that you make words plural by adding "-s."

Second, the possibilities in Carter's post for the source of moral guidance are set up as either conscience or training. Either they just know that torture is wrong, or they should be taught that it's wrong. Both of these are individualistic notions -- either you look within your own heart, or you learn the principles in a rational manner.

What these options leave out is the importance of social reinforcement. People acquire their moral orientations from acting them out, playing the part of a moral person in interactions with others while having morality modeled for them by those who they admire or see as comrades. Eventually, the orientation becomes a habit, a role played effortlessly and subconsciously. This is how the military inculates the ethos that Carter claims non-reservists acquire -- indeed, "total institutions" like the military, or like the fraternities Carter talks about in his nice follow-up post, are especially likely to be scenes of this social production of morality. At Abu Ghraib, acting in accordance with the Geneva convention wasn't "how it's done." In fact, it's not just that they failed to assimilate non-torture morals. As per Carter's example of fraternities, the culture of Abu Ghraib likely reinforced a counter-morality that said that torture was not just acceptable but the proper way to treat prisoners. The same social mechanisms that have instilled in most of us an aversion to torture were twisted into promoting it. In such a scenario, individual conscience would have been swamped (unless it could ally with other consciences -- a classic collective action problem -- or reach out to outside sources of power, as the soldier who publicized the photos did).

*To link it back to my previous exchange with Carter, an evolved conscience is not as trustworthy as a God-given one.