A conservative look at "environmentalism." and a "right" approach to stewardship

[Pure]

A conservative look at "environmentalism." and a "right" approach to stewardship

http://www.amconmag.com/2007/2007_07_16/cover.html

a conservative looks at the environment and argues that its stewardship should NOT be left in the hands of the left.

----


July16, 2007 Issue
Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative



A Righter Shade of Green

While the Left pursues environmentalism to advance its global agenda, conservation is best entrusted to local stewardship.

by Roger Scruton

 

[DerelictionOfSanity]

There are very serious logical fallacies in that article. I'm not really sure where to start on them... I shall mull it over and repost.

 

[cantdog]

There's a book called "Hard Green" which has a reasoned, if flawed, rightist environmental take. Features nukes. Worth a hearing, will straighten out your head if you've gotten too mother jones.

 

[amicus]

Pure Evil, the Troll, posting items that stir controversy, purely for his satisfaction and the edification of his agenda...went beyond the pale in this instance.

by Roger Scruton...read a biography of this man if you want a perspective.

I wonder if a "Whiter Shade of Pale" a Procol Harum' song, inspired the title?

In the article, Scruton shows himself to be erudite and knowledgeable and, certainly, verbose and wide ranging.

In this case, the perversity of Pure, exposes the true degradation of the intellectual endeavors of the 'left' in no uncertain terms. Pure surely slipped up on this one.

Although you may not be educated enough to follow the references, I am.

Scruton presented a devastating expose' of the left wing liberal conspiracy. Really surprised that Pure would propagate such a thing.

What Scruton failed to do was offer a legitimate, rational, conservative solution and it is so, so simple.

The absolute and easy answer to environmental degradation by whomever, is simply this: Property rights, clearly defined and protected.

You have to figure it out, if interested, or pay me for lectures...and I ain't cheap.

Amicus

 

[cantdog]

Here's the link: Link-o-rooti.

 

[Pure]

i can't tell much about that about that book, cantdog; does he merely attack 'environmentalism,' like our own amicus, or does he agree there are serious problems about waste disposal and poisoning the environment. Scruton seems to agree to that, which is what i find interesting.

Further he puts his finger on a key issue: the ability of some producers to 'externalize' (what is actually a part of production costs) and avoid paying for consequences of pollution: IOW the guy who poisons the air with his manufacturing plant is generally going to be able to undersell the competitor with lots of smokestack filters, 'safe disposal practices,' etc. The forestry company that just hacks down a forest and leaves the detritus scattered about can undersell the one that tries to clean up, clear detritus, plant new trees or at least bush, etc. The former has avoided paying what are part of the true production costs of the lumber.

Our local AH right wing has nary a word on any "problem", and claim that any alleged "problem" is an invention of the socialists aiming for world government and destruction the US productive machine and the "American Way."

Perhaps because Scruton is a Brit conservative, he seems to lack the insane rancor and paranoia endemic to much of the American right.


PS:

Good morning to you too, amicus; sorry to hear the hemorrhoids are acting up again.

 

[Guest]

PS:

Good morning to you too, amicus; sorry to hear the hemorrhoids are acting up again.

Coffee spew.

 

[Pure]

ok, sarah

so what do you have to say about mr. scruton, other than you're glad you aren't named sarah scruton.

 

[BlackShanglan]

Although you may not be educated enough to follow the references, I am.

*cough* Ahem. I'm trying to take you at your word, Amicus, on the topic of not intending to affect a tone of disdainful superiority, but you don't always make that an easy task. Might we play a touch more gently with each other? Hold up your end of the bargain, and I will refrain from pointing out how hateful and helpless your name-calling makes you look.

And really, this deserved better, because I wholly agree with the main conclusion that you come to:

What Scruton failed to do was offer a legitimate, rational, conservative solution and it is so, so simple.

It actually took me a second shot at the article to make it to the alleged (but as Amicus points out, really non-existent) solution. It's a vague marshmallowly blob of empty catch-phrases. And that should be a lesson to us all. The author spent so long spewing his venom on everything that had ever annoyed him about the left that ultimately he failed to supply the one thing he'd really promised in his title: a different solution to environmental care. He took a motivated and interested reader (me) and nearly prevented me from even getting as far as what passes for his solution because he wasted so much time (and destroyed so much of his ethos) indulging himself in partisan vitriol. It ultimately appears that he has nothing else to offer.

Now, I am curious about two things. The first is this:

The absolute and easy answer to environmental degradation by whomever, is simply this: Property rights, clearly defined and protected.

While I realize that this is followed by this rather uninviting statement -

You have to figure it out, if interested, or pay me for lectures...and I ain't cheap.

- I'm going to ask for more explanation anyway, on the grounds that if you would like us to take an idea seriously and be persuaded by it, Amicus, you might have some stake in explaining enough of it to make it appear plausible. And to be clear, I'm not hostile to this concept, but I have questions about implementation that I think I'd need to see answered in order wholly to understand the proposal and its merits. These are my questions:

(1) Are you suggesting individual private property rights to all tangible real objects and properties, including all land?

(2) Are you considering a solution that involves joint ownership of some properties or objects? If so, what's wrong with the current approach of the government essentially acting as the de facto representative for the joint owners (all citizens)? If not, how we will handle ownership of things like air and water that move around and are not markable into individual plots?

(3) How will a property right solution be enacted to handle actions on one property that affect another (i.e., dumping toxic chemicals in a lake)? How will it differ in practical terms to the current approach of the government acting as a de facto representative of the joint owners (all citizens)?

Ultimately, I'm curious why you don't see current policy as essentially property-based. The government acts as the caretaker, the people of the country hold the intangible/non-markable stuff like air and oceans in joint ownership, and people who want to use those properties need to pay rent, promise not to destroy the property, and pay damages for any harm done. Do you disagree that this is the current model, or do you feel that that model has flaws?

The second point of interest for me is a common conservative paradox that appears in this article as it has appeared in many another round of reasoning, and I've always had difficulties with it. The reasoning, essentially, is this: individual citizenship and personal responsibility are enough to solve most of the most severe problms of our time, if only the government would stop trying to horn in with unworkable socialist solutions and let private citizenship step up and do the work.

This conclusion seems to me to rely on a number of unlikely assumptions and to have at least one direct contradiction at the heart of it, not to mention several other assumptions that seem to contradict common conservative assumptions.

First, it asks me to assume that individual responsibility and citizenship can't be expressed by voting for people who will plan and manage this project. I think that that is taking "individual" too literally. If we argue that individual responsibility can only consist of direct physical labor on behalf of a cause, most people aren't able to take responsibility for most things. Agreeing to help financially support an expert staff capable of carrying out a task is a means of expressing individual responsibility.

Second, the model of individual non-governmental responsibility for the environment seems to contradict conservative theory on property rights and capital. Typically, the model for capital investment is that those who put in the capital and labor - and only those - get to reap the benefits. That's the payoff for investment. However, with environmental issues like clean air and water, everyone reaps the benefits regardless of who actually puts in the time and money. This is a problem because the results don't match a capitalistic model. There is no limitation of benefits to the investors - and so there is no incentive to be an investor, as one's benefits will be the same regardless. The only way to actually match capital investment to benefits and to preserve the property rights of the investors is for everyone to pay, because everyone benefits.

Third, the premise that government programs discourage individual responsibility seems to me to rest on shaky ground. It suggests that people are less likely to try to solve a problem when someone else is also working on it. That's not necessarily true, and I'd argue that it's not predictably true either - particularly if we're assuming that there is the posited base of interested and responsibile citizens. I've watched people who are locked out of their cars trying to gain access, and they often keep trying in the period between calling a locksmith and having him show up. Closer to the topic, I know many people who carefully recycle and reduce waste on a scale larger than the required programs that their communities do run. Whether a person attempts to enact a solution to a problem seems to me on the whole to have more to do with whether the problem is perceived as serious and whether the person feels that some success is likely. While it's true that knowing that a government program is in place can reduce the sense of the former, it can also boost the sense of the latter. More to the point, in order for the program to actually be a problem - to do more harm than good - it would have to lower people's perception of the problem as serious farther than it lowers the effects of the actual problem. Presumably it would be doing some of the latter.

And that brings me to the last point, the actual contradiction in this position. Either government programs work, and they're a good idea, or they don't, and they're a bad idea. But if the programs don't work, then what is currently preventing these dutiful and civic-minded citizens who are ready to solve the problem from pitching in? If they are aware, as the right claims they are, of massive failures in the government's attempts to solve the problem with tax-funded proposals, then what is preventing them from acting? They know that the problem exists, they know that no good solution has been enacted, and they know that it is to their benefit to act. I can't see any likely conclusions here other than this: this posited band of citizens who would step up with an individual solution and fix the problem doesn't exist, or at doesn't exist in enough force to replace government efforts. Whether that's due to apathy, preference of short-term profit to long-term benefit, or flaws in the model of looking at the environment as a private capital venture (second point above), the fact that such people are not materializing in the midst of what critics claim is a failure of government programs to get the work done suggests either that the programs are not failing or that the step-up citizens don't exist. Neither of those options leads me to the conclusion that it's a good idea for the government to step out.

Shanglan

 

[WRJames]

Another point that I feel should be made -- a large corporation is not too different in its decision making process than the totalitarian regimes so properly derided in the article -- I'm speaking from personal experience here. I know I hired in a Hungarian refugee in the early eighties, and she used to tell me all the time that the stupidity and beauracracy made her feel right at home. If there is any concern about the environment, is it mostly for public consumption. The deeper motivation is to keep making those numbers so the executives can cash in their stock options.

So, the notion that "private enterprise" is a group of well informed, rational people making well informed rational business decisions, which would, presumably, include protection of the environment -- that notion fades once you really see inside one of these businesses. Sometimes the lunacy gets exposed publicly, as when the chair of GM was assuring reporters that his own information was that the American public still wanted large SUV's. But that is happening all the time, in private.

 

[BlackShanglan]

So, the notion that "private enterprise" is a group of well informed, rational people making well informed rational business decisions, which would, presumably, include protection of the environment -- that notion fades once you really see inside one of these businesses. Sometimes the lunacy gets exposed publicly, as when the chair of GM was assuring reporters that his own information was that the American public still wanted large SUV's. But that is happening all the time, in private.

That's a good point. The argument that people won't act in ways that are ultimately not in their own long-term interest is a popular one with capitalists, but (ironically, given Scruton's comments about the left ignoring human nature) it's never really held water. Whether one is talking about discriminatory hiring practices, pollution of the environment, or smoking crack, there are inevitably quite a large number of people who are happy to work against their own long-term self interest.

 

[flavortang]

*cough* Ahem. I'm trying to take you at your word, Amicus, on the topic of not intending to affect a tone of disdainful superiority, but you don't always make that an easy task. Might we play a touch more gently with each other? Hold up your end of the bargain, and I will refrain from pointing out how hateful and helpless your name-calling makes you look.

And really, this deserved better, because I wholly agree with the main conclusion that you come to:



It actually took me a second shot at the article to make it to the alleged (but as Amicus points out, really non-existent) solution. It's a vague marshmallowly blob of empty catch-phrases. And that should be a lesson to us all. The author spent so long spewing his venom on everything that had ever annoyed him about the left that ultimately he failed to supply the one thing he'd really promised in his title: a different solution to environmental care. He took a motivated and interested reader (me) and nearly prevented me from even getting as far as what passes for his solution because he wasted so much time (and destroyed so much of his ethos) indulging himself in partisan vitriol. It ultimately appears that he has nothing else to offer.

Now, I am curious about two things. The first is this:



While I realize that this is followed by this rather uninviting statement -



- I'm going to ask for more explanation anyway, on the grounds that if you would like us to take an idea seriously and be persuaded by it, Amicus, you might have some stake in explaining enough of it to make it appear plausible. And to be clear, I'm not hostile to this concept, but I have questions about implementation that I think I'd need to see answered in order wholly to understand the proposal and its merits. These are my questions:

(1) Are you suggesting individual private property rights to all tangible real objects and properties, including all land?

(2) Are you considering a solution that involves joint ownership of some properties or objects? If so, what's wrong with the current approach of the government essentially acting as the de facto representative for the joint owners (all citizens)? If not, how we will handle ownership of things like air and water that move around and are not markable into individual plots?

(3) How will a property right solution be enacted to handle actions on one property that affect another (i.e., dumping toxic chemicals in a lake)? How will it differ in practical terms to the current approach of the government acting as a de facto representative of the joint owners (all citizens)?

Ultimately, I'm curious why you don't see current policy as essentially property-based. The government acts as the caretaker, the people of the country hold the intangible/non-markable stuff like air and oceans in joint ownership, and people who want to use those properties need to pay rent, promise not to destroy the property, and pay damages for any harm done. Do you disagree that this is the current model, or do you feel that that model has flaws?

The second point of interest for me is a common conservative paradox that appears in this article as it has appeared in many another round of reasoning, and I've always had difficulties with it. The reasoning, essentially, is this: individual citizenship and personal responsibility are enough to solve most of the most severe problms of our time, if only the government would stop trying to horn in with unworkable socialist solutions and let private citizenship step up and do the work.

This conclusion seems to me to rely on a number of unlikely assumptions and to have at least one direct contradiction at the heart of it, not to mention several other assumptions that seem to contradict common conservative assumptions.

First, it asks me to assume that individual responsibility and citizenship can't be expressed by voting for people who will plan and manage this project. I think that that is taking "individual" too literally. If we argue that individual responsibility can only consist of direct physical labor on behalf of a cause, most people aren't able to take responsibility for most things. Agreeing to help financially support an expert staff capable of carrying out a task is a means of expressing individual responsibility.

Second, the model of individual non-governmental responsibility for the environment seems to contradict conservative theory on property rights and capital. Typically, the model for capital investment is that those who put in the capital and labor - and only those - get to reap the benefits. That's the payoff for investment. However, with environmental issues like clean air and water, everyone reaps the benefits regardless of who actually puts in the time and money. This is a problem because the results don't match a capitalistic model. There is no limitation of benefits to the investors - and so there is no incentive to be an investor, as one's benefits will be the same regardless. The only way to actually match capital investment to benefits and to preserve the property rights of the investors is for everyone to pay, because everyone benefits.

Third, the premise that government programs discourage individual responsibility seems to me to rest on shaky ground. It suggests that people are less likely to try to solve a problem when someone else is also working on it. That's not necessarily true, and I'd argue that it's not predictably true either - particularly if we're assuming that there is the posited base of interested and responsibile citizens. I've watched people who are locked out of their cars trying to gain access, and they often keep trying in the period between calling a locksmith and having him show up. Closer to the topic, I know many people who carefully recycle and reduce waste on a scale larger than the required programs that their communities do run. Whether a person attempts to enact a solution to a problem seems to me on the whole to have more to do with whether the problem is perceived as serious and whether the person feels that some success is likely. While it's true that knowing that a government program is in place can reduce the sense of the former, it can also boost the sense of the latter. More to the point, in order for the program to actually be a problem - to do more harm than good - it would have to lower people's perception of the problem as serious farther than it lowers the effects of the actual problem. Presumably it would be doing some of the latter.

And that brings me to the last point, the actual contradiction in this position. Either government programs work, and they're a good idea, or they don't, and they're a bad idea. But if the programs don't work, then what is currently preventing these dutiful and civic-minded citizens who are ready to solve the problem from pitching in? If they are aware, as the right claims they are, of massive failures in the government's attempts to solve the problem with tax-funded proposals, then what is preventing them from acting? They know that the problem exists, they know that no good solution has been enacted, and they know that it is to their benefit to act. I can't see any likely conclusions here other than this: this posited band of citizens who would step up with an individual solution and fix the problem doesn't exist, or at doesn't exist in enough force to replace government efforts. Whether that's due to apathy, preference of short-term profit to long-term benefit, or flaws in the model of looking at the environment as a private capital venture (second point above), the fact that such people are not materializing in the midst of what critics claim is a failure of government programs to get the work done suggests either that the programs are not failing or that the step-up citizens don't exist. Neither of those options leads me to the conclusion that it's a good idea for the government to step out.

Shanglan

You talk a lot, Shang.

 

[rgraham666]

Long term interests require things that are difficult for authoritarians of all descriptions.

First they require empathy, a feeling for the world and everybody in it. Since all authoritarian ideologies are highly elitist, in action if not in philosophy, empathy tends to be beyond them.

Second, it requires imagination. And imagination is generally something hunted down and stamped out by authoritarians. Imagination is uncontrollable and does not respect authority or deterministic behaviour.

Finally, long term interests require restraint, the ability to not get your own way. The current most popular ideology here in the West tends to denigrate restraint as a form of weakness.

So, in simple words, we're fucked.

 

[Pure]

shang, interesting observations, with which i concur largely, with one quasi exception.

it's certainly true he took his time coming to his proposals. left bashing, though a higher calibre than Limbaughs, took up much of his time.

but the man DID show awareness, in his remark about plastic bottles piling up. and his insight into cause is not one the left need argue about: producers cut costs by dumping production-related problem on others or on 'nature.' as the present Walmart success shows, if China makes Jeans in factories spewing polution and poisoning rivers, then those jeans for yet another reason besides labor, undersell american produced goods.

as to the quasi exception, look at this:

ami: //What Scruton failed to do was offer a legitimate, rational, conservative solution and it is so, so simple. //

Shanglan: It actually took me a second shot at the article to make it to the alleged (but as Amicus points out, really non-existent) solution. It's a vague marshmallowly blob of empty catch-phrases

I note, on the other side, that you question amicus "let there be unlimited rights in private property" as his solution.

Amicus' having a solution is why he's dangerous. As rg will agree, i believe ami is ideologically driven; he with his Fountainhead as Moses with the Tablets from the mountain.

I propose that Scruton's lack of a formulaic 'solution' is a PLUS. I think it shows his Oakeshottian leanings, RS being a true "conserver" and "conservative." The Randians and the neos are NOT true conservatives any more than are the Falwellians. The Randians have their blueprint for unfettered capitalism as it never existed and never will, though 1840 England approximated it. Rand is more than a little similar to Fourier with his plans. The neo cons "remake the world in america's image" is not inherently conservative as Bush's foreign undertakings attest.

IF one rejects the state as a source of wisdom, then local people figure things out and put them into effect. *There IS no blue print.* It's also worth mentioning the role that "enlightened" business practices can pay. One huge grocery chain just went public giving away cloth carrying bags; they say it will reduce the indestructible "plastic bag" disposals by "one billion per year."

As to government, i wonder what Scruton would say to something like tariffs, for the *old reason*, to level the playing field. The neo con and neo liberal "free trade" solution is death for American companies who cant utterly befoul air and rivers as lots of Chinese companies do. IF Scruton is not just an ideologue, then maybe he'd consider something like that, since it doesn't actually involve gov. controlling business.

--
I'm not sure if you'd agree to my decisive statement here; maybe you want to inquire. But I'd say Amicus "solution" is in fact no solution; it's not workable or effective in theory and practice, and the 'enlightened, rational acts' that the Randians postulate, esp. for entrepreneurs and "traders" simply do not show themselves very much.

It is a POSTULATE of Rand and Ami that two persons' rational self interests never conflict. Competition always works "for the best," that's the Candidian thrust. As the points above describe, and Scruton seems to know, there are conditions of "free competition" where one side essentially 'does in' the other, to the detriment of society and its individuals. (Walmart versus JC Penney's).

Putting it a different way, Scruton seems to know, as a realist, that some producers will aim for and get an 'edge' through offloading costs.
It may not be "rational" according the Rand and ami, but it's there as capitalist economic behavior. In fact, of course, its quite rational to club you and take your jewellry, or ravage your farm by polluting [e.g. dischargeing waste] upstream from it. Whereas "moral" is based on a reference to the "other guy" for whose survival one has, sometimes, to soft pedal the ruthless pursuit of 'own interest' (private interest).

 

[WRJames]

Long term interests require things that are difficult for authoritarians of all descriptions.

First they require empathy, a feeling for the world and everybody in it. Since all authoritarian ideologies are highly elitist, in action if not in philosophy, empathy tends to be beyond them.

Second, it requires imagination. And imagination is generally something hunted down and stamped out by authoritarians. Imagination is uncontrollable and does not respect authority or deterministic behaviour.

Finally, long term interests require restraint, the ability to not get your own way. The current most popular ideology here in the West tends to denigrate restraint as a form of weakness.

So, in simple words, we're fucked.

Well, it depends who you have in authority -- Nero or Marcus Aurelius? Any system of government seems to produce some good and some bad leaders -- the danger of the authoritatian regimes is that it's more difficult to get rid of the bad ones -- maybe.

As for controlling imagination -- don't we have political correctness at one end of the spectrum and traditional morality at the other putting a damper on our thinking? Weren't 911 or the Catholic sex scandal "unimaginable" disasters precisely becase we were not permitted to explore some of the underlying causes openly (for fear of the stigma of "anti-Semitism" or "pedophilia")?

 

[BlackShanglan]

You talk a lot, Shang.

That's a trenchant and insightful observation, Flavortang.

 

[flavortang]

That's a trenchant and insightful observation, Flavortang.

Break that down into words I can understand, Shang.

 

[Guest]

Break that down into words I can understand, Shang.

You is sort of smart.

 

[S-Des]

Break that down into words I can understand, Shang.

He's trying to tell you that he knows he uses lots of big words, but he has to do something with all that education.

 

[Pure]

requested breakdown

trench=ditch; chant=sing.

 

[flavortang]

You is sort of smart.

Sweet, I said words I can understand. You're throwing all these five-letter words at me. Who am I? Alfred Weinstein?

 

[Guest]

Sweet, I said words I can understand. You're throwing all these five-letter words at me. Who am I? Alfred Weinstein?

You is dumb.

 

[flavortang]

You is dumb.

Sweet... still. You're going to have to start abbreviating. I simply don't have the time to look up all those words in the dictionary to find out what they mean. I mean, really. Some people.

 

[S-Des]

Sweet... still. You're going to have to start abbreviating. I simply don't have the time to look up all those words in the dictionary to find out what they mean. I mean, really. Some people.

Um, what's abb...abb...abbroi...abre...that big word up there?

 

[flavortang]

Um, what's abb...abb...abbroi...abre...that big word up there?

Trust me, fellas. It's so much more fun playing dumb than it is playing smart. See, when I play dumb, people joke and have fun. If I played smart, I'd be engaged in endless, cyclical debates about things in which I'd have no real effect, aside from voicing my insignificant opinions on a erotic fiction message board . I'd rather have fun.

And S-Des, I don't even know what that 'abbrev' word was! I just sorta rolled the dice and made it up on the fly! Maybe it's Spanish for something?