Started to write a long comment but realized it boiled down to: well lots of people get into environmental activism because they really like animals and nature while not being particularly inclined to systematize their moral views.
Unsurprisingly that leads to people acting as if they value nature for nature's sake (beyond instrumental benefits of diversity, happiness and even animal pleasure). I don't think they really have coherent preferences here but rather are just doing what most ppl do and cheering what makes them feel good and booing what makes them feel bad.
I think one good piece of evidence for this being widespread is how environmentalists will look at a picture of a city and be icked out, even though every dense urban area represents a very large swathe of land that did not have to be turned over to suburban sprawl
Marin County immediately comes to mind as a bastion of people who think good environmentalism is having a big tree next the garage that contains your pruis that you drive to a protest to stop the county from building a 5 over 1 on the lot of an abandoned 7/11
I don’t think that it’s true generally, but it certainly is true of a lot of neopastoralist types, especially the ones who have kind of a trad/right lean.
To be fair, "nature is great, therefore we should cram everyone in a dense environment where they never get to see it and their day to day existence is as far removed from it as humanly possible" is it's own kind of shitty equilibrium. Pastoralist preferences aren't meant to extend to "nature can and should be enjoyed only as something having abstract existence and not in person."
The solution to "sprawl competes with nature, density is hell to live in" is "minimize humans to limit sprawl externalities while allowing individual flourishing without creating so many people in an area that the only nature-preserving option is cramming them into hellish urban warrens."
In the US this view has some (limited) merit. Many of our dense urban centers are now walled off from nature by an hour-long drive through sprawl. That said, from my dense neighborhood in Philadelphia I can walk into 4,500 acres of second-growth forest in the heart of the city and there are 5 decent-sized state parks and a ton of trails within a 30-minute drive.
But if you look at cities in much of Europe and parts of East Asia (Japan most especially), nature is actually more accessible to ordinary people in the cities than it is even for American suburbanites.
In Tokyo, Zurich, Barcelona, Munich, Stockholm... you can pop on a train to a small town and catch a bus up into the (preserved) mountains at less expenditure of time and money than it takes to drive to a state park from a suburb of New York or Los Angeles.
We get that you like suburbs, that's fine, but please stop trying to launder your personal preference into some sort of objective claim about the way the world is. Literally *none* of the folks who prefer urban living here are attempting to do the same thing for all that you bitch about us.
I find your claim regarding the ease of getting into nature from Tokyo difficult to believe (although intriguing if true) given that the Tokyo meglalopolis occupies the basically the entire lowland area of its part of Honshu (IIRC about 7% of the whole island?) and looks like this:
I think your last sentence is unwarranted in view of both your first and the fact that contempt both implicit and explicit for suburban living is rife not only on this blog but in fact in the context of this very thread! Also I’m even conceding that sprawl is a problem in and of itself. Get off your high horse. “It’s expensive in time and money to get to nature from the city, particularly on public transit” isn’t a normative claim, and your comment was better served by arguing that this wasn’t necessarily factually true without that last bit.
If Matt wants to write about pastoralism it can damn well stand some minorly pastoralist-inflected engagement, although I guess if you’d prefer echo chambers and sanctimony you’re entitled to that, too.
There are 10,000' forest covered peaks within 30 minutes of any place in Los Angeles. And massive coastal state parks with miles of trails through natural spaces. Southern California is an outdoorsman's paradise. Getting outside is as easy as you want it to be.
Wow, a rival to our Forest Park. I, too, walk or take the bus to the trails. My current Japan trip planning shows trails and ropeways all over Tokyo and Kyoto, plus of course, fast trains to other nice spots.
>to be fair, "nature is great, therefore we should cram everyone in a dense environment where they never get to see it<
Many quite huge and dense cities are home to magificent park systems: residents can see trees and grass and ponds and woodlands every day. But also, living in the middle of a dense city need not mean you can't frequently visit nearby countryside. The verty fact of density *preserves* countryside.
“But also, living in the middle of a dense city need not mean you can't frequently visit nearby countryside.”
I would argue that practically speaking, it does, which is the motivation behind the putative Tahoe owner not living in the middle of the city. Living far from nature increases costs both monetary and time wise to benefit from it and visit it, although you are correct that density reduces sprawl funging against wildspace (somewhat. Often sprawl is into farmland rather than wilds.) The issue isn’t that visiting nature or having greenspace is “impossible” from the city any more than it’s responsive to YIMBY concerns to tell them to suck it up, live somewhere cheap and commute 3 hours each way - it’s that it’s relatively expensive and inconvenient compared to putative alternatives.
A dense city doesn't have to be a large city, so density doesn't mean humans have to be far from nature. If we turn a typical American suburb of 100k people into a Manhattan-dense urbanist town, everyone could live with a 10 minute walk of the edge of town and whatever wilderness lies beyond. The next town over would still be 10-20 miles away, but almost all of that intervening space would be left to nature if that town were similarly dense.
Ding ding ding. Strongly recommend people read Leon Krier on this. Per Krier, high-density cities and rural countryside are allies, and practically depend upon each other. Low-density development is the real enemy of the countryside.
Probably people have mentioned Portland here already. Back in the 70s Oregon looked at L.A. and put in Urban Growth Boundaries around the main (relatively small) cities. Portland already had a good close-in stock of small single-family houses from the old streetcar days, where liberal Boomers raised their families.
But now those craftsman houses are very expensive. Some high-rise condos and apartments for yuppies, but most families head to the suburbs. Because of the UGB, nature (second-growth national parks) and farmland are a half hour away. But when you limit sprawl, housing becomes more expensive.
But that was all back in the 1970s when Portland was still pretty small.
I've been shocked at how many people are icked out by the mere idea of disposable products. Not sure it's the same but even people who intellectually know that, it's not obvious if driving around (enough efficient than new delivery?) to reuse longer lasting furniture is an environmental win often still find the idea of disposability icky.
My intuition without any evidence is that if one can find a nice used couch across town it is likely good to drive to it and pick it up. New couches also come with transportation emissions, but I don’t want to dwell on this example.
A good application of this view is about recycling. I prefer aluminum or plastic drink/food containers because I know that glass is both hard to manufacture and requires a lot of emissions to move, including for glass recycling. Plastic often fails to be recycled despite consumers throwing plastic in the recycle stream, so I’m making peace with single use plastic containers that get trashed when used. There is more investment in municipal solid waste > syncrude > jet fuel which would probably capture more plastic (and dog doo and food/yard waste).
I think that's plausible though I figure the delta emissions from the delivery driver is extremely small. My point is just that people's reaction isn't that kind of cautious but uncertain judgement about net effects. They are directly offended by the idea of disposability -- many ppl will admit as such.
I don't think it's an accident that laws/movements came in to stop disposable bags/straws rather than say to minimize the number that escape into waterways or to target other problems.
I suspect it's just a common human inclination to avoid being wasteful.
This New Yorker article covers this wonderfully. It contrasts the actual environmental efficiency of living in dense cities versus the alternative, which focuses more on the aesthetics of nature than lessening human impact on nature.
I think if you make an honest effort to systematize these views the scale of destruction is kind of overwhelming.
The sheer numbers are just obscene and to doesn’t seem impossible to make these kinds of trade offs but it seems to me that it’s possible to imagine a scenario where people and biodiversity can mutually prosper.
I'm just not seeing how you even get there. The scale of the destruction isn't measured in number of acres cut down, species lost etc but in terms of how much that impacts future people.
I mean, in terms of biodiversity you get most of the mileage out of either rare habitats or the last little bit. Cutting down half the Amazon isn't going to eliminate half the species. Besides, if that really was doing the work then we'd be much more worried about ancestral grains in Eurasia and relatively less worried about the relatively small number of unique artic species.
And people often prefer to deal with megafauna only in a few designated parks. If it's just for future people's welfare then how worse is to preserve tigers in zoos and a few preserves? Worse sure but not proportionally to loss of territory.
I don’t think that is true re Amazon. Rainforests, unlike boreal forests for example, have a ton of slightly different species specialized to slightly different local niches. You do lose a lot of species that way (can’t speak to ”half” but you take my point).
Our secular, fractured, social-media-influenced (illiterate!) society pretty much leaves people on their own when it comes to developing some kind of informed and personally meaningful relationship with nature.
Yes, but presumably there are also leaders in the movement who have systemized their views to some extent. And they influence the ones who haven't, so the topic is still relevant.
I wouldn’t mind the anti-growth crowd if they owned the consequences of their choices. The UK is experiencing crises of various depths of general living standards but also specifically in housing, energy and water. When these crises hit, the folks who contributed to them by preventing the necessary infrastructure being built don’t say it’s a price worth paying, they go looking for bogeymen to blame. Typically people they already disliked such as leaders of large companies.
When people talk about degrowth, they definitely aren’t talking about degrowth for themselves. More likely, they probably imagine continuing growth in consumption (which is good) but without economic growth (which is bad).
The Conservatives have delivered what degrowthers claimed to want: less globalisation and higher taxes. And everyone can see it sucks.
So much of this degrowth sentiment seems to come from the idea that consumerism is inherently bad, and that people need to start consuming less, specifically less of the things that they do not care about or think are tacky.
“Collect experiences, not things!” While that is admirable, and travel is enriching, and most people do treasure their visits to national parks and world-class cities, travel STILL burns fuel. You can’t tell people to stop being tacky and materialistic and planet-ruining while contributing to global warming by traveling everywhere by plane.
By all means collect experiences, but don’t be an insufferable scold.
Yeah, tradeoffs are hard, and some parts of the environmental movement are ascetics.
But if you're denying that there's some intrinsic value to biodiversity and nature, I think you might find that it's not just blue-state hippies that disagree with you on that one.
There's also an asceticism element that has a quasi spiritualism quality for some people. And that’s fine, of course. But as a domestic political program it can be scoldy and a loser and problematic if it's imposed on the world's poor.
Scoldy and problematic sure, but 'a loser', are you sure about that? I tend to share David Abbott's opinion above, except while he lays the blame at only 'moneyed liberals' I suspect caring more about megafauna than Bangladeshi kids is actually a widespread preference across the political spectrum, and if anything more common among 'normie' low-information voters than highly-engaged types.
One example of this: when NATO withdrew from Afghanistan, in all the chaos at the airport was a British guy who ran an animal charity with a load of stray dogs and cats. His animals being left behind was a massive political issue in the UK; politicians reported more angry phone calls about these dogs than about almost any other issue ever. Nobody gave a shit about the Afghan translators and civil servants and whatever, but the dogs, whoo boy.
EDIT: I've just re-read what David Abbott actually wrote and I completely misread it; he clearly did not say it was 'only' 'moneyed liberals', apologies to him. Trying to do things too quickly I suppose.
The problem is that the global poor “get a vote,” so to speak.
Unless you envision a developed-world eco-fascist regime that literally scours the rest of the globe clean of industry by military force, developing countries will choose to make themselves into Indonesia or China or Malaysia whenever the opportunity arises, and if the developed world attempts to stop them they’ll instead become the USSR.
It’s a loser because it will never be popular among the people who matter most globally, and never popular enough at home for anyone to actually make material sacrifices for it.
Well, maybe some kind of global-but-locally-diverse religion would have the power to address climate change in a more gradual and gentle way. Thomas Berry talks about this in "The Sacred Universe." As far as I can see in history, bottom-to-top, massive cultural change can only come from religion (or an ideology such as Communism.) Religions are powerful, dangerous, and often uncontrollable, but they can also steer things in positive directions.
(Related sci-fi recommendation: The Mountain in the Sea. Pay attention to who the ultimate "good guys" are, at least the human ones.)
Maybe you can't impose it on the world's urban poor, but I wonder about how the poor in agricultural and rural areas relate to whatever natural environment they have around them. The (not quasi at all) spiritual connection between humans and nature arises naturally and provides a framework for passing on knowledge of the local environment. Lately I've been thinking of indigenous myths and stories as a kind of "memory palace" that can last for generations, since the way a community understands their myths can change with the times. All of that would be pretty boring if being out there hunting and gathering didn't include the possibility of various not-so-normal states of mind arising now and then.
Along with all the romanticism about indigenous spirituality going around, my idea about the world's poor and nature comes from a short tour of India. Around Chennai we visited some ancient shrines located walking distances from villages. Sometimes these arose around huge, ancient trees. There would be a long path to the shrine that was lined with hundreds of clay horses and other animals, 3 - 8 feet tall, that were the offerings of generations of the inhabitants. What all those generations "felt" on these local pilgrimages is inaccessible to me, and maybe to today's village residents as well, but those life frameworks-of-meaning are still around.
Even if the people around Chennai have unique cultural experiences that are hard to access when they look around their lands, it doesn't follow that all their thoughts and experiences remain similarly opaque. The poorer folk of Chennai can and do express their ideas about increasing their prosperity and the risks they deem acceptable to pursue courses of action. India is the world's largest democracy. It's got flaws, but that doesn't immediately negate sources of popular expression of will like election results from Chennai. There's also the role of community leaders, activists, writers, and thinkers who feel they can speak authentically for the wishes of the people of Chennai. Perhaps they don't represent the whole of Chennai, but their statements about what balance is best to strike between economic growth and environmental considerations can at least represent trends within the broader community. We don't need direct gnosis of their most sublime personal moments to hear what they have to say about carbon emissions.
I think you used a great word, "romanticism," to describe attitudes sometimes held about indigenous peoples or other human communities living on some degree of margin. Indigenous Ways of Knowing are invoked as an mythical body of knowledge held by these communities that has profound power and connection to the land. These alternative systems of learning are then surprisingly invoked to further goals which look a lot more like common American ideas on environmentalism and as a critique on capitalism using similar arguments as past communists but with new sources of authority.
Indigenous Ways of Knowing do exist, and they do have beautiful, unique wisdom traditions which guide lives. But it's too much to say that every member of a community has the same connection to these traditions and interprets them the same way. That said, if indigenous communities use this recent romantic sheen they've acquired to advance their political, economic, and social goals, then hell yeah!
But I just think it's wrong to flatten out the complex relationship an individual has with their culture and landscape, which is what we do when we see a little shrine and ponder how this must have such resonance for the people who live there. Some may have an inner moment of deep connection. Some may just be going through the outward forms of veneration like kneeling and chanting because that's just what you do on that particular day of the year. It's what everyone in those parts does. What's for dinner might be the though most present in their mind at the shrine, but if an outsider asked if the shrine is important, they'd jump up in vigorous assent. There's always internal complexity in an individual and their community that is variegated and rich. We take that away from them when we use references to their ideas and how we interpret them to advance our proposals, sometimes with communities expressing themselves clearer in opposition in other places.
I agree wholeheartedly with this thoughtful comment (additional thanks for some great words and phrases - see below.) You have expanded on the caveats that I would likewise bring to the table. Perhaps it's best expressed as "be wary of the pitfalls of romanticizing other cultures and faiths." Indeed, I know from experience within my own communities that no one ever relates to their traditions and wisdom like anyone else: it's always filtered through individual personality and experience. Likewise, sometimes it's mundane and routine, and sometimes there's a connection with something beyond. But at the same time communities foster common insights among individuals to bring them together. So then at the level of humanity itself, I believe we can always find some kind of transparency between ourselves and other people (although we never really know for sure, do we?)
I maintain that it's always valuable to ask questions, cautiously and respectfully, at the shrines of other peoples and other times. What can I learn here? Is there any possibility that I can relate to this on a deeper level that is part of our common humanity?
My own project goes beyond local and cultural motivations for environmentalism. I've been exploring my suspicion that humanity needs to come together on some deep, even primordial, level that encompasses the greater-than-sum total of our traditional wisdom and scientific knowledge. Only then will we gain the cultural power needed to confront the monstrous systems and infrastructures that we've created in our quest for comfortable survival on this planet.
Humility, an aspect of many traditional spiritualities, is sorely needed now. But "bowing before creation" can't be some kind of guilt-ridden, hopeless, or dutiful exercise—because then we just won't do it. It has to offer pathways of transcendence and deeper meaning to individuals and communities. And so I'll keep seeking far and wide for whatever can bring us together.
Nice writing: "direct gnosis" "surprisingly [yes indeed] invoked to further goals" "flatten out the complex relationship"
Of course, but do we really think that the preservation of, for example, much of the London green belt, is based on a serious consideration of its natural value as opposed to a reflexive protection of open space?
In the UK, the green belts officially have three motivations: “keeping urban sprawl in check, preventing towns from merging together and promoting the recycling of derelict land”. While I can see why people are motivated by the first and third, the second seems crazy to me. Why are people so concerned to prevent towns from merging?! I think they have ideas like, well, everyone knows that Oxford and Abingdon are different places with their own character, but if they merge, then Abingdon will just be another characterless part of Oxford, as unfortunately happened to Headington and Botley. But why is that supposed to actually be bad for anyone who isn’t just concerned with rah-rah Abingdon team spirit?!
Maybe they think local concerns are likely to be subsumed by the homogenization into a larger political unit? Although I'm no expert on the UK and AFAICT their whole "council" emphasis already takes municipal devolution / federalism pretty seriously so maybe that's a remote concern.
It’s US municipal governance on steroids, lol. We insist on artificial boundaries between contiguous and near-identical suburbs but at least we’ve allowed them to grow to be contiguous.
I suspect it's much more banal...U.K. population skews older, especially it's voting population. And older voters are just extremely reflexively "nothing should ever change forever and ever".
Obviously similar stuff in America, but (thankfully) not quite as extreme.
I think it also explains the depression people feel about climate change. Yes, we’re going opt for economic development, but this is going to come at the cost of the natural world as we know it. That’s a bugger of a decision to make...
But that's why we should be more serious about expanding permitting for solar and wind farms, nuclear plants, and transmission lines. Building these things might adversely impact local environments, but economic development is going to continue and we will get energy one way or another. So we should prioritize the energy infrastructure with the least total impact on the environment, minimizing the trade-offs.
I agree with all those actions. However what we are looking at now is just limiting the worst impacts. The chance we had to have our cake and eat it - economic progress and no environmental calamity - had passed.
I'm pretty sure he isn't. But if you value it the way we would value any other good (eg how much humans benefit in terms of enjoyment, greater natural resilience, more potential drug dev etc) you'll end up accepting that quite a bit of growth is good. You'll still want to preserve a bunch of wilderness but you'll also not try to clamp down growth.
Matt's post, and many of today's comments, seem to suffer from ecological illiteracy. Biodiversity, habitat, "nature"- these are not entries on a spreadsheet with monetary value. They are the sine qua non of human existence. They absolutely have intrinsic value.
Intrinsic value meaning separate from humanity? For me personally the answer is basically no, and I think that's true for most people. I think nature is beautiful and wonderful in its own right, but so are the stars. If humanity is gone then I don't really care what happens to the stars, nor do I care what happens to the polar bears or trees.
I think human societies only value things to the extent that human beings value those things. If no-one believes that there is any value to biodiversity and nature, then no human society is going to value that, however strong the argument that there is an intrinsic value.
Equally, there are lots of people who think that there is a value to biodiversity and nature, and therefore there is a value to that. The disagreement that you have with Matt (and with me) is over the word "intrinsic" - if every person on earth suddenly stopped valuing animals other than as resources (e.g. as food) then they would cease to be valued. But the force capable of changing billions of people's core value systems doesn't exist and if there were such a force, it would be doing far more dramatic things than changing the way we treat animals.
I think people are going to read this and conclude Matt supports paving paradise and putting up a parking lot if it means increased GDP in developing nations and can be done in a carbon neutral way, when that's not what he's saying.
Like everything, you need to think critically about priorities. Human flourishing is (and should be) our top priority since as far as we can tell in the universe, and certainly on this planet, it's humans and humans alone who are fully sentient beings capable of the greatest joys and the greatest suffering, and in the long run life has its best shot to last and expand if we are here to protect it (don't @ me with accusations of longtermism). But human flourishing is not the only priority. Ecological diversity is a priority, and ecological diversity is absolutely necessary for human flourishing. But when those two come into conflict, we should opt to maximize human flourishing and minimize the impact to ecological diversity, and not maximize ecological diversity and minimize the impact to human flourishing.
If you sincerely don't believe humans are intrinsically more valuable than just about anything else in existence, now we're having a values conversation and I can't help you. I think humans are unbelievably special and our extinction or failure to thrive would literally be a tragedy of universal proportions. We are not separate from nature, we are nature. We are not separate from a cold, uncaring universe, we are of that universe and made of it's dust and we those tiny pieces love and care about ourselves, therefore the universe loves and cares about us.
I prioritize human welfare over animal welfare and buy into a human-centered environmentalism, but that doesn't mean that animals should count for nothing (not that you are suggesting that). I think we can promote a conception of the good life where people live much more harmoniously with nature. Perhaps, it doesn't have to be zero-sum between humans and other forms of life.
Couldn't agree with you more. I hate the way we have made the term "natural" to mean not human. Are we not part of nature? Wouldn't any other animal do the same things if it adapted our level of intelligence? Isn't every species trying to spread out and thrive just like we do?
Neopastoralists should really rethink nuclear power given its much lower physical footprint. Always amazed at the inability of the envrionmental movement to prioritize.
I don’t think you should be amazed at all. Thinking seriously about tradeoffs and priorities is a rare trait in the human population (to the point where a lot of people are upset by the idea of ranking charities by outcome metrics and prioritizing donations by cost effectiveness).
Arguments about prioritization also make building and managing political coalitions really hard, which often makes it optimal for activists at certain stages of movement-building to just ignore them.
I think actually a lot of people really do like nuclear power and it's something of a canard to project 80s-style reactions to TMI and Chernobyl onto modern environmentalism -- the ratio of pro-nuclear to anti-nuclear sentiment on line is *incredibly* lopsided in favor of the former.
Fun fact: back in the early 60's lots of enviro groups like The Sierra Club supported nuclear power as a way to stop the construction of major dams that have massive impacts on local eco-systems (for example the Colorado River doesn't make it to the Gulf of Mexico anymore, although it had been doing that for millions of years).
Also, Chernobyl is now a fantastic nature preserve. It could've still produced plenty of electricity if it wasn't for external pressure to shut it down. Animals have much higher tolerances for radiation because their lifespans are generally far shorter than with humans.
The primary reason nuclear isn't prioritized is that it's really expensive. It can't cost compete in any way with fossil fuels, particularly natural gas, so would have to be massively subsidized. But maybe that's what we need? A national public utility?
I like humanity. I also like nature. I want both to survive and thrive, and I recognize that often there are tradeoffs between the two. But to pit those values against each other is as foolish as insisting that anyone who wants to address income inequality and poverty simply hates all business and wants the economy to tank.
I can want to preserve nature and limit the destructive potential of human technology while also wanting all people to live good, healthy, prosperous lives. The odd thing about this essay is Matt explicitly recognizes there are tradeoffs to be made about, say, the benefits of energy abundance versus the health hazards posed by pollution, but he dismisses all concerns “about biodiversity and nature” out of hand as sort of intrinsically ridiculous — unworthy of the tradeoff calculations he’d apply to other areas, I guess.
I think Matt is working with the current adversarial framework that already exists and is espoused by many in the environmental movement. He’s just speaking on the parlance of our climate language times, man. He’s going hard on the trade offs point.
I do think this is a little less nuanced than some of Matt’s other takes so I get the frustration with the style of messaging.
Yeah, the relative lack of nuance hit me this morning. I had to run an errand early this morning (in DC), and rather than walking straight up the arterial road, I meandered through the residential "back way." The city has been, for years, daylighting some channelized creek tributaries and planting those areas for better stormwater management (this is a v flood-prone area). I cut through a little "trail" they made, and was greeted by a chorus of frogs enjoying the water from yesterday's storms. It was magical and made me feel grateful to be alive.
Coming back and reading this, I envisioned a future world engineered to the hilt for human habitation but with little regard for biodiversity or even the little miracles of nature we now encounter on a routine day in the middle of a big city. I understand that there are tradeoffs, and that our current environment is totally altered compared with its "original" state - whatever that means. But I'd like to shoot for a better understanding of the interactions between human and nature, rather than a binary.
To me - and I spend a lot of time thinking about this - the "debate" isn't necessarily as adversarial as described here. There's a lot of (I wish I could think of a less pejorative word) ignorance. Framing like this isn't, IMO, going to win over many neopastoralists, whereas reading 1491 might spark an evolution in thought.
There's a lot of ignorance. There's also a lot of evasiveness, denial and every type of logical fallacy imaginable from environmentalists trying to avoid grappling with the idea of human vs environmental tradeoffs, and perhaps that's part of why the framing in this essay is so binary. But it really doesn't have to be!
There are also lots and lots of environmentalists who do grapple with the idea of human vs. environmental tradeoffs and are doing pro-human, pro-growth, environmentally conscious work and advocating similar policies. "Environmentalist" isn't a label that solely describes someone who will chain themselves to a tree. It's a fairly broad political descriptor and most environmentalists aren't extremists.
Me too! That's much of what made reading this kind of off-putting for me.
I'm an environmentalist, one who has been deeply frustrated by the discourse and the postures of most of the big enviro groups, and also by the unwillingness of so many people (people I know) to make even the slightest concession (like walking on a sidewalk rather than driving a half-mile on a nice day, or not blasting the AC while you have screen doors/windows open).
I don't go around scolding or even pointing stuff like this out. But I'm interested in theories of change that might help move things in a better direction. What was described in this post doesn't strike me as especially helpful in that regard.
There's only an adversarial framework if you take the most extreme examples of each side and pit them against each other. That's strawmanning and is not typical of Matt's takes. Most political capital actually spent on environmental causes by far is pro-growth. (Unless you go full libertarian and characterize sensible externality-pricing regulation as anti-growth.) The anti-growth environmental caucus is a chimera. Sure those folks exist, but they're marginal and have no real political power. The actual political debate is between pro-growth environmentalists and pro-growth anti-regulation advocates. Everyone is a neoliberal.
"Democrats reject the false choice between growing our economy and combating climate change; we can and must do both at the same time. We will use federal resources and authorities across all agencies to deploy proven clean energy solutions; create millions of family-supporting and union jobs; upgrade and make resilient our energy, water, wastewater, and transportation infrastructure; and develop and manufacture next-generation technologies to address the climate crisis right here in the United States."
Lol. I can't even. If you'd said the DCCC, sure, that's a campaign committee. But the Party has a platform and a policy agenda, which it tries to actualize, yes through elections, but also actual legislative and executive activity at various governmental levels from national to local. Democratic politicians actually do do things once elected.
I didn’t read this as a strict indictment of the neopastoral view (though there is no doubt where MY falls between the camps). To the contrary, I think recognizing that there may be an uneasy coalition of environmentalists for the environment’s sake and humanists who want a nice environment.
I think if you believe in both things, it leads you naturally to urbanism. As much growth as possible in places where there’s no more wilderness, and as little growth as possible in places that still have wildlife.
The reality is that suburban living is very popular, and I think that’s why MY is always so careful to say “I like urbanism but you don’t have to.”
Urbanism is a great endpoint. There also needs to be "ruralism," which includes efficient and respectful use of our rural human activities. Recognizing that urban and rural aren't opposites but, rather, different expressions of the same rules of human, land, and resource utilization was a "Eureka!" moment for me.
Yeah, I think it leads you a few different places. One is a preference for density, which I'd say isn't quite the same as urbanism. Another, more uncomfortable preference is for low (or zero, or negative) population growth. An ever-expanding population means greater demands on the environment, which means more and more painful tradeoffs between humans needs and wilderness. And if you think human needs should always trump nature (and in the hard cases, I think they generally should, because humans matter), infinite population growth leads inevitably to the extinction of nature.
But there’s a way out of that dismal trap. We can embrace (in fact, encourage!) declining birth rates and find a way to prosper with fewer people. I know that makes me sound like a radical anti-natalist or something, which I’m not. I just think that if you’re ardently pro-humanity and also ardently pro-nature, a gently shrinking population over the long run is the only way to go.
I don't think he's dismissed biodiversity as worthless, he goes out of his way to say that those things have value. It's just that sometimes those two things really are at odds with each other. We can't have a wolf pack living in New York city. We can have some of them in a small number of places where humans are scarce, but we will never reintroduce them to the urban environments that used to be their homes before industrialization, and we will certainly never have the numbers and biodiversity that they once had. There is no way to equally prioritize wolf biodiversity and human flourishing. One will take priority.
>But is this a good objection? We can’t allow immigration because it’s too beneficial to immigrants? I’m skeptical.<
Just to preemptively tackle an objection one inevitably sees when this question arises: no, in fact, there's nothing even slightly wrong about enticing skilled people away from developing countries.
In the first place, a human being's right to live where they want demolishes concerns about skill leakage: Human being aren't tools for us to do with as we please (even for goals as laudable as "help poor countries no longer be poor"). But secondly—and this is something I rarely see mentioned but fail to see how it couldn't be true—the fact that their best and brightest could potentially leave is a powerful incentive for dysfunctional governments to become more competent and effective at improving the lives of their citizens.
I don’t see much evidence that bad governments respond to incentives like that. If they still have a monopoly on violence and on taxation, the loss of a few smarty pants (who could potentially plot a coup or revolution TBH, if they stayed) isn’t going to sting.
The truth is that highly skilled emigrants send a lot of remittances boosting the economy directly, incentivize higher education levels, increase trade links, and ultimately contribute a lot to home countries from a distance.
Also would note that emigrants tend to create trade links between their home countries and their destinations, send capital home, and (in many cases) return with new knowledge. China and India both get some clear economic benefits from their diasporas.
I was about to type something like this up. This is even the case outside of skilled workers: remittances from the US make a up huge portion of the economies of Central America.
Although I see your point, I'm not sure that living where you want is a right. I would love to live in Denmark, but they are not very open to letting outsiders move in. Is a country's efforts to keep its own skilled workers there the other side of the coin?
>I'm not sure that living where you want is a right<
By that I meant, of course, liiving where you want is as right *to the extent you're able to gain admittence."
There's a non-crazy argument, mind you, that immigration barriers in a very fundamental sense are morally questionable. But it's not an argument I support.
But if one can indeed gain permission to live in Denmark or Canada or the United States, one's home country government possesses no moral right to stop one from moving there. But many governments throughout history have frequently engaged in the practice of blocking people from leaving. (Relatedly: I fervantly hope I'm wrong on this, but I fear we may begin to see this dynamic pop up more frequently in China.)
I think brain drain from Nazi Germany ensured their demise. We got their best physicists and the we built the first atom bomb. There's some evidence for you.
The modern industrial world presents significant environmental, health and safety risks, but we accept (and can try to minimize) those risks because they pale in comparison to the preindustrial world’s not just risk but near certainty of a short, miserable life of poverty and sickness.
I truly hope that the “less human impact” view doesn’t become the face of environmentalism, because not only is it a harmful ideology - it’s a political loser as well!
Some times yes, some times no. The anti-logging campaigns in the 80s really changed public perception of environmental issues and probably helped liberals with some voters. But it certainly realigned the coalitions and created a small chunk of voters who will never vote for Democrats no matter what stances they take. Threaten someone's livelihood and they will never forgive you.
Of course taxing net CO2 and methane emissions is just long term growth-ism. If we had consistent long term growth-ism we would not need "environmentalism" for the climate change problem, although there is SOME value in less human impact per se.
I feel like in such a world environmentalism would be primarily for things like wild and nature life preserves, which are good. It's good that some people take notice of what's happening with say the decline in the number of birds. It may well be a canary in the coal mine situation, so better to pay attention now.
Yes. Although preserving "nature" CAN be though of as an externality which conceptually could be optimized with Pigou taxation, it might be better thought of as a simi-global public good.
On the neopastoralism front, in local development conversations, it's pretty striking how often you encounter aging Berkeley hippie types who, with just the slightest scratch at whatever "greedy developers/not right for the neighborhood/etc" talking point, will quickly reveal some kind of hardcore population control view.
Paul Ehrlich Thought has remained pretty pervasive even though there’s now almost no chance that his fears will come true (partly because the population control advocates successfully made contraception widely available worldwide, partly because with Green Revolution crop improvements, we could comfortably manage 10B people or so.)
Without even weighing in on the merits of anything, getting the All Are Welcome here sign set to imply that they would support an American One Child Policy roughly 45 seconds into a conversation can give you some whiplash.
I'm not even sure what "reactionary leftism" could mean. Seems like an oxymoron. I think there's maybe a bit of reflexive authoritarianism that comes out when folks haven't really thought about their positions much, but I don't think any of that is "prominent" except maybe in particular geographic or social media enclaves. American liberals aren't aliens. We drink Miller Light and watch football games on Sunday afternoons just like everyone else.
Perhaps prominent is over-stating it. But I am referring to the group of people referenced in the parent comment. People who are in favor of liberalism in the abstract yet seem to be NIMBY, neopastoralist, anti-growth. Essentially it’s a zero-sum worldview where progress is suspicious and the government redistributes.
Nature doesn't care about biodiversity, ecological preservation, or animal welfare. Nature is amoral and apathetic. 99% of all species that have ever existed on Earth are now extinct; this gradually approaches 100% over time. Earth's environment and biosphere have been devastated and reformed countless times by the natural processes.
Any moral imperatives regarding the environment exist solely in the values and preferences of humans. Preventing biodiversity and habitat loss is important because living alongside lots of different animals and plants pleases us; protecting ecological features from pollution and environmental catastrophe is important because we enjoy seeing them in their pristine form.
Humans value high standards of living, we value rights and freedoms, and we value the environment. When we put environmental values into that framework with our other preferences, we can evaluate policies on the basis of costs and benefits, maximizing total value.
I actually think this ties together with the more conservative objection to building more housing; namely an overly romantic attachment to "nature" as something intrinsically better than cities. For the small (but influential in places like SF And NYC) lefty cohort, it's sort of what Matt describes. But for the (much larger) conservative cohort, it's that cities are where "bad stuff" happens and cities have "those people". But it all ends up with over sentimentalizing areas without many people. Reminds me of those "trad"* accounts that big up how great farming life is and how similar these tweets are to extreme lefty people evangelizing the same way of life but for environmental reasons.
Those "trad" tweets also point to a much more banal reason where right wing anti-development "lets protect nature" comes from which is pure fear of change.
*there was a tweet from a "trad" account making the rounds the other day that might be the "chef's kiss" example that small "c" conservativism is just absurd over the top nostalgia of the past. A tweet showing how supposedly better everything was 3 years ago...in July, 2020. Like, I think I speak for everyone when I say if you're nostalgic for the way the world was in July, 2020 you just might be an insane person.
I think a large number of people recognize some ways that the pandemic lockdown lifestyle was nice, even though on net it was bad. It’s just like wanting to be a child with no responsibilities again - no one actually wants to live under the restrictions children have to their autonomy.
Lots of people are nostalgic for the Obama years, actually. That approximate period is now receiving its post-hoc analysis in the world of fashion, in which it's termed "indie sleaze."
In some sense it's just millennials yearning for their college days, as everyone does, but there are some pretty big differences then vs now - it's the last time we had a handsome president, identity politics wasn't the be-all end-all for progressives that it is now, the concept of a "President Trump" was a joke, the awful pants called "joggers" weren't widespread, and it was still considered trashy to wear crocs in public. If people wanted to wear headphones they had to bother with cords; now a lot of people just walk around gabbing with their doofy airpods in 24/7....there were still good TV shows being made, like Mad Men, 30 Rock & Breaking Bad - the period has already been recognized as the Golden Age of Network TV for quite a while in TV-guy circles.
Anyway, the point is, nostalgia comes on fast when big changes are happening - but no, I don't really see much of a difference between 2020 and now myself. I suspect the conservatives you mention are just missing that Trump-is-president glee they were so recently full of.
Yes, well, I'm sure I would if I hadn't been in diapers. I do miss when Disney meant The Lion King instead of Frozen 7 but that's most of the recollection I've got.
"an overly romantic attachment to "nature" as something intrinsically better than cities."
I think there are plenty of people who prefer the aesthetics and potentially the lifestyle of country living regardless of their other politics. This might also be true if they live in a city and only vacation in the country so they get to experience it as a luxury instead of a daily life full of its own problems. The phrase "the grass is greener on the other side" is true for many circumstances.
Many humans, including a surprising number of moneyed liberals, really do care more about charismatic megafauna than poor, dark skinned children. The megafauna don’t vote and will never demand equality.
The children in question are either an abstraction or a source of distress when reading about [insert terrible newsworthy event in the global South here], whereas David Attenborough specials are popular (except for the part where invariably whatever cool thing was discussed is under threat from human development). The instrumental utility of the humans to the moneyed liberals is zero or negative but that of the charismatic megafauna is positive.
that’s a tempting belief to embrace because it harmonizes loving the megafauna with not being a douche. the problem is, you’d basically have to get poor nations to portuguese living standards before it would catalyze a potent environmental movement. that will take many decades, during which massive quantities of carbon would spew into the atmosphere and the poor polar bears would starve.
this reads like you think the only way to harm animals is through carbon emissions but no, like Mike said poor people are very good at hunting them or destroying their habitats. Not caring about animals until they are richer is what's going to happen, the choice we have is to try and help them to speed up the process, or let them do it on their own
That environmental movement was tenuous at best, focused entirely on the human flourishing aspects of environmentalism that Matt discussed here, and centered in cities with a PPP per capita income around 2X that figure at the time.
your example sort of proves my point. urban air pollution is a much bigger problem for humans who live in cities than for megafauna. developing countries will invest in the health and welfare of their human populations long before they care much about megafauna. if china starts putting a big hit into its gdp to protect panda bears, i’d concede your argument.
China puts loads of effort into protecting pandas nowadays! It doesn't have an appreciable impact on GDP because China is a massive country with a massive economy, but it doesn't mean they don't do a lot of work to save pandas. A better point for you would be that they don't seem to care very much about any animals *other* than pandas.
I think this is a false dichotomy. Many people who care about the environment—I want to say most but don’t have data—value both nature per we and human flourishing. Certainly I do.
Just because those values are sometimes in tension doesn’t mean there are or should be defined camps of ascetics and monomaniac utilitarians with human welfare as the only value. Maybe Matt would trade a penny + instrumental value to humans of pandas for killing all pandas but I wouldn’t even though i support permitting reform.
Sometimes terminal values conflict! Like telling and discovery the truth about the world and fostering happiness.
People failing to correctly perceive and then being clear headed and rational about tradeoffs among competing values strikes me as the much larger problem rather than genuine value conflict (wanting to have and eat cake and denying the tension etc.)
I don’t quite know what to do with the fact that animals and plants are super important to me. I feel like hard trade offs are to be made but seeimingly no one speaks for the innumerable lives destroyed in that process until we’ve reached the end and we have a mere rump of non-human life left in a world which is substantially reduced to a toy for people.
Having worked in the environmental field for 25 years I feel like I should comment, but to what I'm not quite sure. Yes, special interests drive policy, and in my view, in all the money spent, the only successes have been to ensure no group gets everything they want. I think we'd get the same or similar results if there were no special interest groups.
I would add that what used to be called "sustainability" (geared to smarter development) concentrates wealth and resources at the top. And I'd additionally add that incentives/programs that require urban property owners to do any maintenance (rooftop solar, storm water capture), unfortunately, have not gained the traction they need without heavy oversight or interference - and by default, makes greenfield development look more sustainable.
The change we need is a cultural one. I don't yet know if the fractionalization of environmental views is to weaken the voices to build something stronger, or to weaken them into being too small to achieve much. But, like I think Matt is trying to do, I also think you need to pay close attention to the money being spent and the value added.
“I would add that what used to be called "sustainability" (geared to smarter development) concentrates wealth and resources at the top.”
I’d be interested to know if this is better, worse or the same as traditional energy and industrial markets. I’d assume it’s probably in line with whatever economic or market system it’s operating within but I’ve never really seen any studies on it.
I wrote it because development is capital based - and those with capital tend to keep it, protect it against others acquiring it, and grow it. I doubt there would be studies for it.
I was going to contrast it with what was traditionally called "environmental" - which was concerned with human health and ecosystem functions - but my comment started going in too many directions, and I had to reign it in.
Started to write a long comment but realized it boiled down to: well lots of people get into environmental activism because they really like animals and nature while not being particularly inclined to systematize their moral views.
Unsurprisingly that leads to people acting as if they value nature for nature's sake (beyond instrumental benefits of diversity, happiness and even animal pleasure). I don't think they really have coherent preferences here but rather are just doing what most ppl do and cheering what makes them feel good and booing what makes them feel bad.
I think one good piece of evidence for this being widespread is how environmentalists will look at a picture of a city and be icked out, even though every dense urban area represents a very large swathe of land that did not have to be turned over to suburban sprawl
Marin County immediately comes to mind as a bastion of people who think good environmentalism is having a big tree next the garage that contains your pruis that you drive to a protest to stop the county from building a 5 over 1 on the lot of an abandoned 7/11
OMG! Renters!!! (But in Marin County they would probably all just be yuppies who can pay market or "luxury" rates.)
Are there many environmentalists who are ‘icked out’ by cities and believe suburbia is a better use of the land?
I don’t think that it’s true generally, but it certainly is true of a lot of neopastoralist types, especially the ones who have kind of a trad/right lean.
To be fair, "nature is great, therefore we should cram everyone in a dense environment where they never get to see it and their day to day existence is as far removed from it as humanly possible" is it's own kind of shitty equilibrium. Pastoralist preferences aren't meant to extend to "nature can and should be enjoyed only as something having abstract existence and not in person."
The solution to "sprawl competes with nature, density is hell to live in" is "minimize humans to limit sprawl externalities while allowing individual flourishing without creating so many people in an area that the only nature-preserving option is cramming them into hellish urban warrens."
In the US this view has some (limited) merit. Many of our dense urban centers are now walled off from nature by an hour-long drive through sprawl. That said, from my dense neighborhood in Philadelphia I can walk into 4,500 acres of second-growth forest in the heart of the city and there are 5 decent-sized state parks and a ton of trails within a 30-minute drive.
But if you look at cities in much of Europe and parts of East Asia (Japan most especially), nature is actually more accessible to ordinary people in the cities than it is even for American suburbanites.
In Tokyo, Zurich, Barcelona, Munich, Stockholm... you can pop on a train to a small town and catch a bus up into the (preserved) mountains at less expenditure of time and money than it takes to drive to a state park from a suburb of New York or Los Angeles.
We get that you like suburbs, that's fine, but please stop trying to launder your personal preference into some sort of objective claim about the way the world is. Literally *none* of the folks who prefer urban living here are attempting to do the same thing for all that you bitch about us.
I find your claim regarding the ease of getting into nature from Tokyo difficult to believe (although intriguing if true) given that the Tokyo meglalopolis occupies the basically the entire lowland area of its part of Honshu (IIRC about 7% of the whole island?) and looks like this:
https://i.redd.it/there-is-cities-and-there-is-tokyo-v0-tah3z8shp4z91.jpg?s=5780dc57b14f34288360d7301048f602630577c5
I think your last sentence is unwarranted in view of both your first and the fact that contempt both implicit and explicit for suburban living is rife not only on this blog but in fact in the context of this very thread! Also I’m even conceding that sprawl is a problem in and of itself. Get off your high horse. “It’s expensive in time and money to get to nature from the city, particularly on public transit” isn’t a normative claim, and your comment was better served by arguing that this wasn’t necessarily factually true without that last bit.
If Matt wants to write about pastoralism it can damn well stand some minorly pastoralist-inflected engagement, although I guess if you’d prefer echo chambers and sanctimony you’re entitled to that, too.
There are 10,000' forest covered peaks within 30 minutes of any place in Los Angeles. And massive coastal state parks with miles of trails through natural spaces. Southern California is an outdoorsman's paradise. Getting outside is as easy as you want it to be.
Wow, a rival to our Forest Park. I, too, walk or take the bus to the trails. My current Japan trip planning shows trails and ropeways all over Tokyo and Kyoto, plus of course, fast trains to other nice spots.
>to be fair, "nature is great, therefore we should cram everyone in a dense environment where they never get to see it<
Many quite huge and dense cities are home to magificent park systems: residents can see trees and grass and ponds and woodlands every day. But also, living in the middle of a dense city need not mean you can't frequently visit nearby countryside. The verty fact of density *preserves* countryside.
“But also, living in the middle of a dense city need not mean you can't frequently visit nearby countryside.”
I would argue that practically speaking, it does, which is the motivation behind the putative Tahoe owner not living in the middle of the city. Living far from nature increases costs both monetary and time wise to benefit from it and visit it, although you are correct that density reduces sprawl funging against wildspace (somewhat. Often sprawl is into farmland rather than wilds.) The issue isn’t that visiting nature or having greenspace is “impossible” from the city any more than it’s responsive to YIMBY concerns to tell them to suck it up, live somewhere cheap and commute 3 hours each way - it’s that it’s relatively expensive and inconvenient compared to putative alternatives.
A dense city doesn't have to be a large city, so density doesn't mean humans have to be far from nature. If we turn a typical American suburb of 100k people into a Manhattan-dense urbanist town, everyone could live with a 10 minute walk of the edge of town and whatever wilderness lies beyond. The next town over would still be 10-20 miles away, but almost all of that intervening space would be left to nature if that town were similarly dense.
Ding ding ding. Strongly recommend people read Leon Krier on this. Per Krier, high-density cities and rural countryside are allies, and practically depend upon each other. Low-density development is the real enemy of the countryside.
Probably people have mentioned Portland here already. Back in the 70s Oregon looked at L.A. and put in Urban Growth Boundaries around the main (relatively small) cities. Portland already had a good close-in stock of small single-family houses from the old streetcar days, where liberal Boomers raised their families.
But now those craftsman houses are very expensive. Some high-rise condos and apartments for yuppies, but most families head to the suburbs. Because of the UGB, nature (second-growth national parks) and farmland are a half hour away. But when you limit sprawl, housing becomes more expensive.
But that was all back in the 1970s when Portland was still pretty small.
Yes you are definitely providing a reasonable description of California environmental activists: Chevy Tahoe-driving suburbanites
And the OP comment was discussing “people (who) get into environmental activism”!
I've been shocked at how many people are icked out by the mere idea of disposable products. Not sure it's the same but even people who intellectually know that, it's not obvious if driving around (enough efficient than new delivery?) to reuse longer lasting furniture is an environmental win often still find the idea of disposability icky.
My intuition without any evidence is that if one can find a nice used couch across town it is likely good to drive to it and pick it up. New couches also come with transportation emissions, but I don’t want to dwell on this example.
A good application of this view is about recycling. I prefer aluminum or plastic drink/food containers because I know that glass is both hard to manufacture and requires a lot of emissions to move, including for glass recycling. Plastic often fails to be recycled despite consumers throwing plastic in the recycle stream, so I’m making peace with single use plastic containers that get trashed when used. There is more investment in municipal solid waste > syncrude > jet fuel which would probably capture more plastic (and dog doo and food/yard waste).
I think that's plausible though I figure the delta emissions from the delivery driver is extremely small. My point is just that people's reaction isn't that kind of cautious but uncertain judgement about net effects. They are directly offended by the idea of disposability -- many ppl will admit as such.
I don't think it's an accident that laws/movements came in to stop disposable bags/straws rather than say to minimize the number that escape into waterways or to target other problems.
I suspect it's just a common human inclination to avoid being wasteful.
This New Yorker article covers this wonderfully. It contrasts the actual environmental efficiency of living in dense cities versus the alternative, which focuses more on the aesthetics of nature than lessening human impact on nature.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/10/18/green-manhattan
I think if you make an honest effort to systematize these views the scale of destruction is kind of overwhelming.
The sheer numbers are just obscene and to doesn’t seem impossible to make these kinds of trade offs but it seems to me that it’s possible to imagine a scenario where people and biodiversity can mutually prosper.
I'm just not seeing how you even get there. The scale of the destruction isn't measured in number of acres cut down, species lost etc but in terms of how much that impacts future people.
I mean, in terms of biodiversity you get most of the mileage out of either rare habitats or the last little bit. Cutting down half the Amazon isn't going to eliminate half the species. Besides, if that really was doing the work then we'd be much more worried about ancestral grains in Eurasia and relatively less worried about the relatively small number of unique artic species.
And people often prefer to deal with megafauna only in a few designated parks. If it's just for future people's welfare then how worse is to preserve tigers in zoos and a few preserves? Worse sure but not proportionally to loss of territory.
I don’t think that is true re Amazon. Rainforests, unlike boreal forests for example, have a ton of slightly different species specialized to slightly different local niches. You do lose a lot of species that way (can’t speak to ”half” but you take my point).
Our secular, fractured, social-media-influenced (illiterate!) society pretty much leaves people on their own when it comes to developing some kind of informed and personally meaningful relationship with nature.
Yes, but presumably there are also leaders in the movement who have systemized their views to some extent. And they influence the ones who haven't, so the topic is still relevant.
I wouldn’t mind the anti-growth crowd if they owned the consequences of their choices. The UK is experiencing crises of various depths of general living standards but also specifically in housing, energy and water. When these crises hit, the folks who contributed to them by preventing the necessary infrastructure being built don’t say it’s a price worth paying, they go looking for bogeymen to blame. Typically people they already disliked such as leaders of large companies.
When people talk about degrowth, they definitely aren’t talking about degrowth for themselves. More likely, they probably imagine continuing growth in consumption (which is good) but without economic growth (which is bad).
The Conservatives have delivered what degrowthers claimed to want: less globalisation and higher taxes. And everyone can see it sucks.
So much of this degrowth sentiment seems to come from the idea that consumerism is inherently bad, and that people need to start consuming less, specifically less of the things that they do not care about or think are tacky.
“Collect experiences, not things!” While that is admirable, and travel is enriching, and most people do treasure their visits to national parks and world-class cities, travel STILL burns fuel. You can’t tell people to stop being tacky and materialistic and planet-ruining while contributing to global warming by traveling everywhere by plane.
By all means collect experiences, but don’t be an insufferable scold.
Yeah, tradeoffs are hard, and some parts of the environmental movement are ascetics.
But if you're denying that there's some intrinsic value to biodiversity and nature, I think you might find that it's not just blue-state hippies that disagree with you on that one.
There's also an asceticism element that has a quasi spiritualism quality for some people. And that’s fine, of course. But as a domestic political program it can be scoldy and a loser and problematic if it's imposed on the world's poor.
Scoldy and problematic sure, but 'a loser', are you sure about that? I tend to share David Abbott's opinion above, except while he lays the blame at only 'moneyed liberals' I suspect caring more about megafauna than Bangladeshi kids is actually a widespread preference across the political spectrum, and if anything more common among 'normie' low-information voters than highly-engaged types.
One example of this: when NATO withdrew from Afghanistan, in all the chaos at the airport was a British guy who ran an animal charity with a load of stray dogs and cats. His animals being left behind was a massive political issue in the UK; politicians reported more angry phone calls about these dogs than about almost any other issue ever. Nobody gave a shit about the Afghan translators and civil servants and whatever, but the dogs, whoo boy.
EDIT: I've just re-read what David Abbott actually wrote and I completely misread it; he clearly did not say it was 'only' 'moneyed liberals', apologies to him. Trying to do things too quickly I suppose.
The problem is that the global poor “get a vote,” so to speak.
Unless you envision a developed-world eco-fascist regime that literally scours the rest of the globe clean of industry by military force, developing countries will choose to make themselves into Indonesia or China or Malaysia whenever the opportunity arises, and if the developed world attempts to stop them they’ll instead become the USSR.
It’s a loser because it will never be popular among the people who matter most globally, and never popular enough at home for anyone to actually make material sacrifices for it.
Well, maybe some kind of global-but-locally-diverse religion would have the power to address climate change in a more gradual and gentle way. Thomas Berry talks about this in "The Sacred Universe." As far as I can see in history, bottom-to-top, massive cultural change can only come from religion (or an ideology such as Communism.) Religions are powerful, dangerous, and often uncontrollable, but they can also steer things in positive directions.
(Related sci-fi recommendation: The Mountain in the Sea. Pay attention to who the ultimate "good guys" are, at least the human ones.)
Massive cultural change overwhelmingly comes from changes in markets. at least since the mid-19th century.
Disgusting racist comment.
You what?
You made a disgusting racist comment.
Or maybe you're just an idiot who can't read.
Maybe you can't impose it on the world's urban poor, but I wonder about how the poor in agricultural and rural areas relate to whatever natural environment they have around them. The (not quasi at all) spiritual connection between humans and nature arises naturally and provides a framework for passing on knowledge of the local environment. Lately I've been thinking of indigenous myths and stories as a kind of "memory palace" that can last for generations, since the way a community understands their myths can change with the times. All of that would be pretty boring if being out there hunting and gathering didn't include the possibility of various not-so-normal states of mind arising now and then.
Along with all the romanticism about indigenous spirituality going around, my idea about the world's poor and nature comes from a short tour of India. Around Chennai we visited some ancient shrines located walking distances from villages. Sometimes these arose around huge, ancient trees. There would be a long path to the shrine that was lined with hundreds of clay horses and other animals, 3 - 8 feet tall, that were the offerings of generations of the inhabitants. What all those generations "felt" on these local pilgrimages is inaccessible to me, and maybe to today's village residents as well, but those life frameworks-of-meaning are still around.
Even if the people around Chennai have unique cultural experiences that are hard to access when they look around their lands, it doesn't follow that all their thoughts and experiences remain similarly opaque. The poorer folk of Chennai can and do express their ideas about increasing their prosperity and the risks they deem acceptable to pursue courses of action. India is the world's largest democracy. It's got flaws, but that doesn't immediately negate sources of popular expression of will like election results from Chennai. There's also the role of community leaders, activists, writers, and thinkers who feel they can speak authentically for the wishes of the people of Chennai. Perhaps they don't represent the whole of Chennai, but their statements about what balance is best to strike between economic growth and environmental considerations can at least represent trends within the broader community. We don't need direct gnosis of their most sublime personal moments to hear what they have to say about carbon emissions.
I think you used a great word, "romanticism," to describe attitudes sometimes held about indigenous peoples or other human communities living on some degree of margin. Indigenous Ways of Knowing are invoked as an mythical body of knowledge held by these communities that has profound power and connection to the land. These alternative systems of learning are then surprisingly invoked to further goals which look a lot more like common American ideas on environmentalism and as a critique on capitalism using similar arguments as past communists but with new sources of authority.
Indigenous Ways of Knowing do exist, and they do have beautiful, unique wisdom traditions which guide lives. But it's too much to say that every member of a community has the same connection to these traditions and interprets them the same way. That said, if indigenous communities use this recent romantic sheen they've acquired to advance their political, economic, and social goals, then hell yeah!
But I just think it's wrong to flatten out the complex relationship an individual has with their culture and landscape, which is what we do when we see a little shrine and ponder how this must have such resonance for the people who live there. Some may have an inner moment of deep connection. Some may just be going through the outward forms of veneration like kneeling and chanting because that's just what you do on that particular day of the year. It's what everyone in those parts does. What's for dinner might be the though most present in their mind at the shrine, but if an outsider asked if the shrine is important, they'd jump up in vigorous assent. There's always internal complexity in an individual and their community that is variegated and rich. We take that away from them when we use references to their ideas and how we interpret them to advance our proposals, sometimes with communities expressing themselves clearer in opposition in other places.
I agree wholeheartedly with this thoughtful comment (additional thanks for some great words and phrases - see below.) You have expanded on the caveats that I would likewise bring to the table. Perhaps it's best expressed as "be wary of the pitfalls of romanticizing other cultures and faiths." Indeed, I know from experience within my own communities that no one ever relates to their traditions and wisdom like anyone else: it's always filtered through individual personality and experience. Likewise, sometimes it's mundane and routine, and sometimes there's a connection with something beyond. But at the same time communities foster common insights among individuals to bring them together. So then at the level of humanity itself, I believe we can always find some kind of transparency between ourselves and other people (although we never really know for sure, do we?)
I maintain that it's always valuable to ask questions, cautiously and respectfully, at the shrines of other peoples and other times. What can I learn here? Is there any possibility that I can relate to this on a deeper level that is part of our common humanity?
My own project goes beyond local and cultural motivations for environmentalism. I've been exploring my suspicion that humanity needs to come together on some deep, even primordial, level that encompasses the greater-than-sum total of our traditional wisdom and scientific knowledge. Only then will we gain the cultural power needed to confront the monstrous systems and infrastructures that we've created in our quest for comfortable survival on this planet.
Humility, an aspect of many traditional spiritualities, is sorely needed now. But "bowing before creation" can't be some kind of guilt-ridden, hopeless, or dutiful exercise—because then we just won't do it. It has to offer pathways of transcendence and deeper meaning to individuals and communities. And so I'll keep seeking far and wide for whatever can bring us together.
Nice writing: "direct gnosis" "surprisingly [yes indeed] invoked to further goals" "flatten out the complex relationship"
Of course, but do we really think that the preservation of, for example, much of the London green belt, is based on a serious consideration of its natural value as opposed to a reflexive protection of open space?
In the UK, the green belts officially have three motivations: “keeping urban sprawl in check, preventing towns from merging together and promoting the recycling of derelict land”. While I can see why people are motivated by the first and third, the second seems crazy to me. Why are people so concerned to prevent towns from merging?! I think they have ideas like, well, everyone knows that Oxford and Abingdon are different places with their own character, but if they merge, then Abingdon will just be another characterless part of Oxford, as unfortunately happened to Headington and Botley. But why is that supposed to actually be bad for anyone who isn’t just concerned with rah-rah Abingdon team spirit?!
Maybe they think local concerns are likely to be subsumed by the homogenization into a larger political unit? Although I'm no expert on the UK and AFAICT their whole "council" emphasis already takes municipal devolution / federalism pretty seriously so maybe that's a remote concern.
“Why are people so concerned to prevent towns from merging?”
A preference for strong subsidiarity.
It’s US municipal governance on steroids, lol. We insist on artificial boundaries between contiguous and near-identical suburbs but at least we’ve allowed them to grow to be contiguous.
I suspect it's much more banal...U.K. population skews older, especially it's voting population. And older voters are just extremely reflexively "nothing should ever change forever and ever".
Obviously similar stuff in America, but (thankfully) not quite as extreme.
I think it also explains the depression people feel about climate change. Yes, we’re going opt for economic development, but this is going to come at the cost of the natural world as we know it. That’s a bugger of a decision to make...
But that's why we should be more serious about expanding permitting for solar and wind farms, nuclear plants, and transmission lines. Building these things might adversely impact local environments, but economic development is going to continue and we will get energy one way or another. So we should prioritize the energy infrastructure with the least total impact on the environment, minimizing the trade-offs.
I agree with all those actions. However what we are looking at now is just limiting the worst impacts. The chance we had to have our cake and eat it - economic progress and no environmental calamity - had passed.
Maybe they will crack carbon capture and geo-engineering. That’s what I hope anyway.
I'm pretty sure he isn't. But if you value it the way we would value any other good (eg how much humans benefit in terms of enjoyment, greater natural resilience, more potential drug dev etc) you'll end up accepting that quite a bit of growth is good. You'll still want to preserve a bunch of wilderness but you'll also not try to clamp down growth.
Matt's post, and many of today's comments, seem to suffer from ecological illiteracy. Biodiversity, habitat, "nature"- these are not entries on a spreadsheet with monetary value. They are the sine qua non of human existence. They absolutely have intrinsic value.
Intrinsic value meaning separate from humanity? For me personally the answer is basically no, and I think that's true for most people. I think nature is beautiful and wonderful in its own right, but so are the stars. If humanity is gone then I don't really care what happens to the stars, nor do I care what happens to the polar bears or trees.
I think human societies only value things to the extent that human beings value those things. If no-one believes that there is any value to biodiversity and nature, then no human society is going to value that, however strong the argument that there is an intrinsic value.
Equally, there are lots of people who think that there is a value to biodiversity and nature, and therefore there is a value to that. The disagreement that you have with Matt (and with me) is over the word "intrinsic" - if every person on earth suddenly stopped valuing animals other than as resources (e.g. as food) then they would cease to be valued. But the force capable of changing billions of people's core value systems doesn't exist and if there were such a force, it would be doing far more dramatic things than changing the way we treat animals.
I think people are going to read this and conclude Matt supports paving paradise and putting up a parking lot if it means increased GDP in developing nations and can be done in a carbon neutral way, when that's not what he's saying.
Like everything, you need to think critically about priorities. Human flourishing is (and should be) our top priority since as far as we can tell in the universe, and certainly on this planet, it's humans and humans alone who are fully sentient beings capable of the greatest joys and the greatest suffering, and in the long run life has its best shot to last and expand if we are here to protect it (don't @ me with accusations of longtermism). But human flourishing is not the only priority. Ecological diversity is a priority, and ecological diversity is absolutely necessary for human flourishing. But when those two come into conflict, we should opt to maximize human flourishing and minimize the impact to ecological diversity, and not maximize ecological diversity and minimize the impact to human flourishing.
If you sincerely don't believe humans are intrinsically more valuable than just about anything else in existence, now we're having a values conversation and I can't help you. I think humans are unbelievably special and our extinction or failure to thrive would literally be a tragedy of universal proportions. We are not separate from nature, we are nature. We are not separate from a cold, uncaring universe, we are of that universe and made of it's dust and we those tiny pieces love and care about ourselves, therefore the universe loves and cares about us.
Ok sorry, have a good morning everyone.
I prioritize human welfare over animal welfare and buy into a human-centered environmentalism, but that doesn't mean that animals should count for nothing (not that you are suggesting that). I think we can promote a conception of the good life where people live much more harmoniously with nature. Perhaps, it doesn't have to be zero-sum between humans and other forms of life.
Couldn't agree with you more. I hate the way we have made the term "natural" to mean not human. Are we not part of nature? Wouldn't any other animal do the same things if it adapted our level of intelligence? Isn't every species trying to spread out and thrive just like we do?
Neopastoralists should really rethink nuclear power given its much lower physical footprint. Always amazed at the inability of the envrionmental movement to prioritize.
I don’t think you should be amazed at all. Thinking seriously about tradeoffs and priorities is a rare trait in the human population (to the point where a lot of people are upset by the idea of ranking charities by outcome metrics and prioritizing donations by cost effectiveness).
Arguments about prioritization also make building and managing political coalitions really hard, which often makes it optimal for activists at certain stages of movement-building to just ignore them.
I think actually a lot of people really do like nuclear power and it's something of a canard to project 80s-style reactions to TMI and Chernobyl onto modern environmentalism -- the ratio of pro-nuclear to anti-nuclear sentiment on line is *incredibly* lopsided in favor of the former.
Online, sure, but among self-proclaimed environmentalists? Among people who show up at community meetings?
Fun fact: back in the early 60's lots of enviro groups like The Sierra Club supported nuclear power as a way to stop the construction of major dams that have massive impacts on local eco-systems (for example the Colorado River doesn't make it to the Gulf of Mexico anymore, although it had been doing that for millions of years).
Also, Chernobyl is now a fantastic nature preserve. It could've still produced plenty of electricity if it wasn't for external pressure to shut it down. Animals have much higher tolerances for radiation because their lifespans are generally far shorter than with humans.
The primary reason nuclear isn't prioritized is that it's really expensive. It can't cost compete in any way with fossil fuels, particularly natural gas, so would have to be massively subsidized. But maybe that's what we need? A national public utility?
This is such a misguided framing.
I like humanity. I also like nature. I want both to survive and thrive, and I recognize that often there are tradeoffs between the two. But to pit those values against each other is as foolish as insisting that anyone who wants to address income inequality and poverty simply hates all business and wants the economy to tank.
I can want to preserve nature and limit the destructive potential of human technology while also wanting all people to live good, healthy, prosperous lives. The odd thing about this essay is Matt explicitly recognizes there are tradeoffs to be made about, say, the benefits of energy abundance versus the health hazards posed by pollution, but he dismisses all concerns “about biodiversity and nature” out of hand as sort of intrinsically ridiculous — unworthy of the tradeoff calculations he’d apply to other areas, I guess.
I think Matt is working with the current adversarial framework that already exists and is espoused by many in the environmental movement. He’s just speaking on the parlance of our climate language times, man. He’s going hard on the trade offs point.
I do think this is a little less nuanced than some of Matt’s other takes so I get the frustration with the style of messaging.
Yeah, the relative lack of nuance hit me this morning. I had to run an errand early this morning (in DC), and rather than walking straight up the arterial road, I meandered through the residential "back way." The city has been, for years, daylighting some channelized creek tributaries and planting those areas for better stormwater management (this is a v flood-prone area). I cut through a little "trail" they made, and was greeted by a chorus of frogs enjoying the water from yesterday's storms. It was magical and made me feel grateful to be alive.
Coming back and reading this, I envisioned a future world engineered to the hilt for human habitation but with little regard for biodiversity or even the little miracles of nature we now encounter on a routine day in the middle of a big city. I understand that there are tradeoffs, and that our current environment is totally altered compared with its "original" state - whatever that means. But I'd like to shoot for a better understanding of the interactions between human and nature, rather than a binary.
To me - and I spend a lot of time thinking about this - the "debate" isn't necessarily as adversarial as described here. There's a lot of (I wish I could think of a less pejorative word) ignorance. Framing like this isn't, IMO, going to win over many neopastoralists, whereas reading 1491 might spark an evolution in thought.
There's a lot of ignorance. There's also a lot of evasiveness, denial and every type of logical fallacy imaginable from environmentalists trying to avoid grappling with the idea of human vs environmental tradeoffs, and perhaps that's part of why the framing in this essay is so binary. But it really doesn't have to be!
There are also lots and lots of environmentalists who do grapple with the idea of human vs. environmental tradeoffs and are doing pro-human, pro-growth, environmentally conscious work and advocating similar policies. "Environmentalist" isn't a label that solely describes someone who will chain themselves to a tree. It's a fairly broad political descriptor and most environmentalists aren't extremists.
Yes, I agree entirely.
Me too! That's much of what made reading this kind of off-putting for me.
I'm an environmentalist, one who has been deeply frustrated by the discourse and the postures of most of the big enviro groups, and also by the unwillingness of so many people (people I know) to make even the slightest concession (like walking on a sidewalk rather than driving a half-mile on a nice day, or not blasting the AC while you have screen doors/windows open).
I don't go around scolding or even pointing stuff like this out. But I'm interested in theories of change that might help move things in a better direction. What was described in this post doesn't strike me as especially helpful in that regard.
There's only an adversarial framework if you take the most extreme examples of each side and pit them against each other. That's strawmanning and is not typical of Matt's takes. Most political capital actually spent on environmental causes by far is pro-growth. (Unless you go full libertarian and characterize sensible externality-pricing regulation as anti-growth.) The anti-growth environmental caucus is a chimera. Sure those folks exist, but they're marginal and have no real political power. The actual political debate is between pro-growth environmentalists and pro-growth anti-regulation advocates. Everyone is a neoliberal.
What is the largest / most influential pro-growth environmentalist organization?
The Democratic Party?
"Democrats reject the false choice between growing our economy and combating climate change; we can and must do both at the same time. We will use federal resources and authorities across all agencies to deploy proven clean energy solutions; create millions of family-supporting and union jobs; upgrade and make resilient our energy, water, wastewater, and transportation infrastructure; and develop and manufacture next-generation technologies to address the climate crisis right here in the United States."
The Democratic Party is not an environmentalist organization. Their one and only purpose is getting Democratic candidates elected.
Lol. I can't even. If you'd said the DCCC, sure, that's a campaign committee. But the Party has a platform and a policy agenda, which it tries to actualize, yes through elections, but also actual legislative and executive activity at various governmental levels from national to local. Democratic politicians actually do do things once elected.
I didn’t read this as a strict indictment of the neopastoral view (though there is no doubt where MY falls between the camps). To the contrary, I think recognizing that there may be an uneasy coalition of environmentalists for the environment’s sake and humanists who want a nice environment.
I think if you believe in both things, it leads you naturally to urbanism. As much growth as possible in places where there’s no more wilderness, and as little growth as possible in places that still have wildlife.
The reality is that suburban living is very popular, and I think that’s why MY is always so careful to say “I like urbanism but you don’t have to.”
Urbanism is a great endpoint. There also needs to be "ruralism," which includes efficient and respectful use of our rural human activities. Recognizing that urban and rural aren't opposites but, rather, different expressions of the same rules of human, land, and resource utilization was a "Eureka!" moment for me.
Yeah, I think it leads you a few different places. One is a preference for density, which I'd say isn't quite the same as urbanism. Another, more uncomfortable preference is for low (or zero, or negative) population growth. An ever-expanding population means greater demands on the environment, which means more and more painful tradeoffs between humans needs and wilderness. And if you think human needs should always trump nature (and in the hard cases, I think they generally should, because humans matter), infinite population growth leads inevitably to the extinction of nature.
But there’s a way out of that dismal trap. We can embrace (in fact, encourage!) declining birth rates and find a way to prosper with fewer people. I know that makes me sound like a radical anti-natalist or something, which I’m not. I just think that if you’re ardently pro-humanity and also ardently pro-nature, a gently shrinking population over the long run is the only way to go.
I don't think he's doing that, he's just pointing there's a natural tension here. This pops up on a micro level, see this hyper local fight in my neck of the woods. Should you prioritize a "natural" trail used by just a handful of dedicated people, or pave it so that it can be accessible to a lot more people? It's a real trade off and you can't get away from it: https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2015/10/last-chance-ride-minnesota-river-bottoms-grass-roots-bike-route-s-soon-be-paved/
I don't think he's dismissed biodiversity as worthless, he goes out of his way to say that those things have value. It's just that sometimes those two things really are at odds with each other. We can't have a wolf pack living in New York city. We can have some of them in a small number of places where humans are scarce, but we will never reintroduce them to the urban environments that used to be their homes before industrialization, and we will certainly never have the numbers and biodiversity that they once had. There is no way to equally prioritize wolf biodiversity and human flourishing. One will take priority.
>But is this a good objection? We can’t allow immigration because it’s too beneficial to immigrants? I’m skeptical.<
Just to preemptively tackle an objection one inevitably sees when this question arises: no, in fact, there's nothing even slightly wrong about enticing skilled people away from developing countries.
In the first place, a human being's right to live where they want demolishes concerns about skill leakage: Human being aren't tools for us to do with as we please (even for goals as laudable as "help poor countries no longer be poor"). But secondly—and this is something I rarely see mentioned but fail to see how it couldn't be true—the fact that their best and brightest could potentially leave is a powerful incentive for dysfunctional governments to become more competent and effective at improving the lives of their citizens.
I don’t see much evidence that bad governments respond to incentives like that. If they still have a monopoly on violence and on taxation, the loss of a few smarty pants (who could potentially plot a coup or revolution TBH, if they stayed) isn’t going to sting.
The truth is that highly skilled emigrants send a lot of remittances boosting the economy directly, incentivize higher education levels, increase trade links, and ultimately contribute a lot to home countries from a distance.
Also would note that emigrants tend to create trade links between their home countries and their destinations, send capital home, and (in many cases) return with new knowledge. China and India both get some clear economic benefits from their diasporas.
I was about to type something like this up. This is even the case outside of skilled workers: remittances from the US make a up huge portion of the economies of Central America.
Although I see your point, I'm not sure that living where you want is a right. I would love to live in Denmark, but they are not very open to letting outsiders move in. Is a country's efforts to keep its own skilled workers there the other side of the coin?
>I'm not sure that living where you want is a right<
By that I meant, of course, liiving where you want is as right *to the extent you're able to gain admittence."
There's a non-crazy argument, mind you, that immigration barriers in a very fundamental sense are morally questionable. But it's not an argument I support.
But if one can indeed gain permission to live in Denmark or Canada or the United States, one's home country government possesses no moral right to stop one from moving there. But many governments throughout history have frequently engaged in the practice of blocking people from leaving. (Relatedly: I fervantly hope I'm wrong on this, but I fear we may begin to see this dynamic pop up more frequently in China.)
With regards to your last sentence, what do you mean “may”?
It’s already here.
I think brain drain from Nazi Germany ensured their demise. We got their best physicists and the we built the first atom bomb. There's some evidence for you.
The modern industrial world presents significant environmental, health and safety risks, but we accept (and can try to minimize) those risks because they pale in comparison to the preindustrial world’s not just risk but near certainty of a short, miserable life of poverty and sickness.
I truly hope that the “less human impact” view doesn’t become the face of environmentalism, because not only is it a harmful ideology - it’s a political loser as well!
Some times yes, some times no. The anti-logging campaigns in the 80s really changed public perception of environmental issues and probably helped liberals with some voters. But it certainly realigned the coalitions and created a small chunk of voters who will never vote for Democrats no matter what stances they take. Threaten someone's livelihood and they will never forgive you.
Of course taxing net CO2 and methane emissions is just long term growth-ism. If we had consistent long term growth-ism we would not need "environmentalism" for the climate change problem, although there is SOME value in less human impact per se.
I feel like in such a world environmentalism would be primarily for things like wild and nature life preserves, which are good. It's good that some people take notice of what's happening with say the decline in the number of birds. It may well be a canary in the coal mine situation, so better to pay attention now.
Yes. Although preserving "nature" CAN be though of as an externality which conceptually could be optimized with Pigou taxation, it might be better thought of as a simi-global public good.
On the neopastoralism front, in local development conversations, it's pretty striking how often you encounter aging Berkeley hippie types who, with just the slightest scratch at whatever "greedy developers/not right for the neighborhood/etc" talking point, will quickly reveal some kind of hardcore population control view.
Paul Ehrlich Thought has remained pretty pervasive even though there’s now almost no chance that his fears will come true (partly because the population control advocates successfully made contraception widely available worldwide, partly because with Green Revolution crop improvements, we could comfortably manage 10B people or so.)
Without even weighing in on the merits of anything, getting the All Are Welcome here sign set to imply that they would support an American One Child Policy roughly 45 seconds into a conversation can give you some whiplash.
There is a prominent strain of reactionary leftism among so-called liberal/progressives.
I'm not even sure what "reactionary leftism" could mean. Seems like an oxymoron. I think there's maybe a bit of reflexive authoritarianism that comes out when folks haven't really thought about their positions much, but I don't think any of that is "prominent" except maybe in particular geographic or social media enclaves. American liberals aren't aliens. We drink Miller Light and watch football games on Sunday afternoons just like everyone else.
Perhaps prominent is over-stating it. But I am referring to the group of people referenced in the parent comment. People who are in favor of liberalism in the abstract yet seem to be NIMBY, neopastoralist, anti-growth. Essentially it’s a zero-sum worldview where progress is suspicious and the government redistributes.
Nature doesn't care about biodiversity, ecological preservation, or animal welfare. Nature is amoral and apathetic. 99% of all species that have ever existed on Earth are now extinct; this gradually approaches 100% over time. Earth's environment and biosphere have been devastated and reformed countless times by the natural processes.
Any moral imperatives regarding the environment exist solely in the values and preferences of humans. Preventing biodiversity and habitat loss is important because living alongside lots of different animals and plants pleases us; protecting ecological features from pollution and environmental catastrophe is important because we enjoy seeing them in their pristine form.
Humans value high standards of living, we value rights and freedoms, and we value the environment. When we put environmental values into that framework with our other preferences, we can evaluate policies on the basis of costs and benefits, maximizing total value.
Nature is here is vile and base - Herzog
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL99NDUWJ0A
Criminal lack of likes on this comment.
I actually think this ties together with the more conservative objection to building more housing; namely an overly romantic attachment to "nature" as something intrinsically better than cities. For the small (but influential in places like SF And NYC) lefty cohort, it's sort of what Matt describes. But for the (much larger) conservative cohort, it's that cities are where "bad stuff" happens and cities have "those people". But it all ends up with over sentimentalizing areas without many people. Reminds me of those "trad"* accounts that big up how great farming life is and how similar these tweets are to extreme lefty people evangelizing the same way of life but for environmental reasons.
Those "trad" tweets also point to a much more banal reason where right wing anti-development "lets protect nature" comes from which is pure fear of change.
*there was a tweet from a "trad" account making the rounds the other day that might be the "chef's kiss" example that small "c" conservativism is just absurd over the top nostalgia of the past. A tweet showing how supposedly better everything was 3 years ago...in July, 2020. Like, I think I speak for everyone when I say if you're nostalgic for the way the world was in July, 2020 you just might be an insane person.
I think a large number of people recognize some ways that the pandemic lockdown lifestyle was nice, even though on net it was bad. It’s just like wanting to be a child with no responsibilities again - no one actually wants to live under the restrictions children have to their autonomy.
Lots of people are nostalgic for the Obama years, actually. That approximate period is now receiving its post-hoc analysis in the world of fashion, in which it's termed "indie sleaze."
In some sense it's just millennials yearning for their college days, as everyone does, but there are some pretty big differences then vs now - it's the last time we had a handsome president, identity politics wasn't the be-all end-all for progressives that it is now, the concept of a "President Trump" was a joke, the awful pants called "joggers" weren't widespread, and it was still considered trashy to wear crocs in public. If people wanted to wear headphones they had to bother with cords; now a lot of people just walk around gabbing with their doofy airpods in 24/7....there were still good TV shows being made, like Mad Men, 30 Rock & Breaking Bad - the period has already been recognized as the Golden Age of Network TV for quite a while in TV-guy circles.
Anyway, the point is, nostalgia comes on fast when big changes are happening - but no, I don't really see much of a difference between 2020 and now myself. I suspect the conservatives you mention are just missing that Trump-is-president glee they were so recently full of.
Only one of those three shows was a network show!
Yes, well, I'm sure I would if I hadn't been in diapers. I do miss when Disney meant The Lion King instead of Frozen 7 but that's most of the recollection I've got.
"an overly romantic attachment to "nature" as something intrinsically better than cities."
I think there are plenty of people who prefer the aesthetics and potentially the lifestyle of country living regardless of their other politics. This might also be true if they live in a city and only vacation in the country so they get to experience it as a luxury instead of a daily life full of its own problems. The phrase "the grass is greener on the other side" is true for many circumstances.
Many humans, including a surprising number of moneyed liberals, really do care more about charismatic megafauna than poor, dark skinned children. The megafauna don’t vote and will never demand equality.
The children in question are either an abstraction or a source of distress when reading about [insert terrible newsworthy event in the global South here], whereas David Attenborough specials are popular (except for the part where invariably whatever cool thing was discussed is under threat from human development). The instrumental utility of the humans to the moneyed liberals is zero or negative but that of the charismatic megafauna is positive.
exactly
that’s a tempting belief to embrace because it harmonizes loving the megafauna with not being a douche. the problem is, you’d basically have to get poor nations to portuguese living standards before it would catalyze a potent environmental movement. that will take many decades, during which massive quantities of carbon would spew into the atmosphere and the poor polar bears would starve.
this reads like you think the only way to harm animals is through carbon emissions but no, like Mike said poor people are very good at hunting them or destroying their habitats. Not caring about animals until they are richer is what's going to happen, the choice we have is to try and help them to speed up the process, or let them do it on their own
That environmental movement was tenuous at best, focused entirely on the human flourishing aspects of environmentalism that Matt discussed here, and centered in cities with a PPP per capita income around 2X that figure at the time.
your example sort of proves my point. urban air pollution is a much bigger problem for humans who live in cities than for megafauna. developing countries will invest in the health and welfare of their human populations long before they care much about megafauna. if china starts putting a big hit into its gdp to protect panda bears, i’d concede your argument.
China puts loads of effort into protecting pandas nowadays! It doesn't have an appreciable impact on GDP because China is a massive country with a massive economy, but it doesn't mean they don't do a lot of work to save pandas. A better point for you would be that they don't seem to care very much about any animals *other* than pandas.
They like elephants.
What a disgusting racist comment.Poor people care more about their pets than a racist like yourself.
I think that's probably not exactly true unfortunately. But it's a beautiful lie.
I think this is a false dichotomy. Many people who care about the environment—I want to say most but don’t have data—value both nature per we and human flourishing. Certainly I do.
Just because those values are sometimes in tension doesn’t mean there are or should be defined camps of ascetics and monomaniac utilitarians with human welfare as the only value. Maybe Matt would trade a penny + instrumental value to humans of pandas for killing all pandas but I wouldn’t even though i support permitting reform.
Sometimes terminal values conflict! Like telling and discovery the truth about the world and fostering happiness.
People failing to correctly perceive and then being clear headed and rational about tradeoffs among competing values strikes me as the much larger problem rather than genuine value conflict (wanting to have and eat cake and denying the tension etc.)
I don’t quite know what to do with the fact that animals and plants are super important to me. I feel like hard trade offs are to be made but seeimingly no one speaks for the innumerable lives destroyed in that process until we’ve reached the end and we have a mere rump of non-human life left in a world which is substantially reduced to a toy for people.
Having worked in the environmental field for 25 years I feel like I should comment, but to what I'm not quite sure. Yes, special interests drive policy, and in my view, in all the money spent, the only successes have been to ensure no group gets everything they want. I think we'd get the same or similar results if there were no special interest groups.
I would add that what used to be called "sustainability" (geared to smarter development) concentrates wealth and resources at the top. And I'd additionally add that incentives/programs that require urban property owners to do any maintenance (rooftop solar, storm water capture), unfortunately, have not gained the traction they need without heavy oversight or interference - and by default, makes greenfield development look more sustainable.
The change we need is a cultural one. I don't yet know if the fractionalization of environmental views is to weaken the voices to build something stronger, or to weaken them into being too small to achieve much. But, like I think Matt is trying to do, I also think you need to pay close attention to the money being spent and the value added.
“I would add that what used to be called "sustainability" (geared to smarter development) concentrates wealth and resources at the top.”
I’d be interested to know if this is better, worse or the same as traditional energy and industrial markets. I’d assume it’s probably in line with whatever economic or market system it’s operating within but I’ve never really seen any studies on it.
I wrote it because development is capital based - and those with capital tend to keep it, protect it against others acquiring it, and grow it. I doubt there would be studies for it.
I was going to contrast it with what was traditionally called "environmental" - which was concerned with human health and ecosystem functions - but my comment started going in too many directions, and I had to reign it in.