The marine "commons" discourse

Next in the series of posts (the last one is here) on "The Tragedy at 50" (by the way, if anyone wants a hard copy of the journal issue, please email me), is Harry Scheiber's "The 'Commons' Discourse on Marine Fisheries Resources: Another Antecedent to Hardin’s 'Tragedy'". The abstract:

Throughout the fifty years since its publication, Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” has been regarded as a seminal paper in the environmental movement, although his emphasis on population control (which actually formed the core concern of the article) has been largely forgotten. Hardin argued that free access by a growing population to common resources would inevitably lead to the depletion of those resources, citing as one example how maritime nations’ belief in the freedom of the seas, combined with their belief in the inexhaustibility of marine resources, had brought whales and many species of fish close to extinction. Hardin failed, however, to take account of the extensive debates throughout much of the twentieth century by scientists and policymakers on the general problem of the ocean commons — what they generally termed the “dilemma of the commons” — as it applied not only to living marine resources but also to mineral resources. By mid-century, as improved fishing technology gave rise to ever greater catches, the notion of the inexhaustibility of fisheries was largely discredited; hence scientists as well as experts in both national and international law became focused on addressing the dilemma of the commons through fisheries management, and specifically by determining the Maximum Sustainable Yield. Some economists, arguing instead for maximum efficiency, urged that open access be abandoned in favor of limited entry. Such measures to resolve the dilemma of the commons were the subject of numerous conferences (including the second UN Conference on the Law of the Sea in 1958) and were widely debated in scholarly publications and, indeed, by the late 1960s had been practically implemented by a number of laws and treaties. By 1966, national control over a twelve-mile fishing zone offshore of coastal nations had been well established. These developments regarding the oceans commons, predating Hardin’s article, were apparently either of no interest to him or (if he knew of them) purposefully subordinated to his main polemical objective, which was his Malthusian analysis of the commons issue and his call for limits on “human breeding.”

Goodbye Abbey, hello intersectional environmentalism

Sarah Krakoff recently posted a critical take on Edward Abbey on Environmental Law Prof Blog. Some highlights:

Abbey’s love-letters to Utah’s red-rock country spawned generations of canyoneering backpackers, and still serve as the heart of aesthetic and political defenses of desert wilderness. Ever since, Abbey has been attacked and defended. Was he racist, misogynist, and anti-immigration? He was. His views of Black and Brown people were deplorable, and his descriptions of women were retrograde. And yet, his defenders inevitably retort, we need his irascible, cranky, and irrepressible voice today more than ever.  

But do we? I have come to (re)bury Edward Abbey, not to praise him. (Abbey died in 1989 at the age of 62; he was buried illegally on public lands.) Or more accurately, to make a pitch for putting Abbey in his place and moving on. That place should be in the context of what it means to protect those same dramatic and soul-stirring landscapes without perpetuating an alienating version of what it means to be “truly wild,” or “truly radical,” or “truly environmentalist.” The problem with re-lionizing Abbey in 2018 is not just that he was sexist, racist, and xenophobic. But also that those views were sewn into his brand of so-called radicalism. They constituted the lenses through which he saw the landscape he aimed to protect.

What Abbey saw were beautiful empty places where white men (quite specifically) could be free and wild. Their version of wilderness preservation, even supplemented by the occasional nod to the evils of growth-dependent and extraction-based economies, was oblivious to the structures that enabled their seemingly unmediated encounters with the desert. Those structures included brutal and unscrupulous campaigns to dispossess Native people of most of southeast Utah. They included the failure of post-Civil War efforts to democratize homesteading by including eligible African Americans eager to flee the South. And they included, time and again, the cultural acceptability of exploiting women, both by treating them as fungible sex toys and by relying on them to mind the homestead and raise the young’uns. Abbey’s version of radical environmentalism assumes away all of the inequalities baked into his ability to be a free man in canyon country. Abbey also managed to alienate lots of white men while he was at it. He scorned ordinary work as part of his critique of corporate and industrial interests and romanticized manual labor even while he railed against ranchers and farmers in his midst.

The American abortion battle and the environment

Over at Legal History Blog, Mary Ziegler has been blogging about her new book, After Roe
The Lost History of the Abortion Debate (Harvard UP, 2015). Earlier this week she posted on "Population Control, Immigration, and Environmentalism"; here's an excerpt:

In After Roe, the population controllers’ story illuminates the changing relationship between the movements for legal abortion and women’s liberation. From the beginning, women played a crucial role in demanding legal access to abortion. Just the same, the early movement for abortion rights often shied away from women’s-rights arguments, and the relationship between the two movements was often rocky. At a time when women’s liberation remained controversial and women struggled for respect in the workplace, movement pragmatists believed that they would get results faster if they could convince voters and judges that legalizing abortion would have other desirable effects. Arguing that women had a right to abortion said nothing about how everyone else would benefit from legalization. By sometimes focusing on lower welfare costs, environmental benefits and reduced illegitimacy rates, movement members hoped to reach a larger audience.

All of that changed when the population-control movement found itself buried in scandal in the later 1970s. Sterilization abuse at home and abroad persuaded many observers that population policies were irrevocably racist and coercive. As population control became more controversial, feminists gained new influence in what would become the pro-choice movement. Population controllers also began staying away from the abortion issue, seeing it as another controversy that they could ill afford.

It seems that the implosion of population control had ramifications beyond the issues of abortion and family planning. In the 1970s, leading population organizations often advocated for abortion and family planning, environmental protection, and immigration limits. By contrast, organizations that lobby today for immigration limits, like NumbersUSA and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), almost never discuss environmental issues. Conversely, groups like the Sierra Club consistently avoid arguments about the environmental damage some tie to overpopulation.

Environmental justice in India

Environmental Justice recently published Ravi Rajan's "A History of Environmental Justice in India". The abstract:

Indian environmentalism has, for the most part, been about social justice. During the 1970s and 1980s, it was concerned with differential access to natural assets and ecosystem services. The Bhopal Gas Disaster of 1984 raised new issues, pertaining to industrial risk and safety. This article traces the history of environmental justice from the 1970s onward. It describes the perspective of Indira Gandhi, India's Prime Minister from 1967 to 1984, and her attempts at reconciling the environment with development and economic justice; discusses the emergence of a red-green environmentalism during the 1980s and 90s; and explores Bhopal and its implications; before addressing the issues that are front and center today, in the early twenty-first century.

The article has some trenchant quotes from Indira Gandhi's speech, "Man and Environment", at the United Nations Conference on Human Environment at Stockholm in 1972. Here's one:

The extreme forms in which questions of population or environmental pollution are posed, obscure the total view of political, economic and social situations…It is an over-simplification to blame all the world's problems on increasing population. Countries with but a small fraction of the world population consume the bulk of the world's production of minerals, fossil fuels and so on. Thus we see that when it comes to the depletion of natural resources and environmental pollution, the increase of one inhabitant in an affluent country, at his level of living, is equivalent to an increase of many Asian, Africans or Latin Americans at their current material levels of living…All the “isms” of the modern age—even those which in theory disown the private profit principle—assume that man's cardinal interest is acquisition. The profit motive, individual or collectives, seems to overshadow all else. This overriding concern with self and today is the basic cause of the ecological crisis.

Rajan writes:

Indira Gandhi's Stockholm speech was not just a one-off rhetorical flourish in an international forum. It also came to signify the codification of India's approach to development in the second half of the twentieth century. The essence of this approach was that India would strive to harness its natural resources, and invest in modern technology to raise the quality of economic life of the average person. At the same time, efforts would also be made to conserve the environment and preserve its vital forces. Indira Gandhi recognized that there were many shades of gray, and that this grand strategy was easier to talk about rhetorically than implement in practice. For example, she grappled with the consequences of development upon India's tribal peoples and their cultures, only to reconcile the inevitability of development. Again, despite her vehement critique of Western population control advocates, she ended up presiding over an extremely coercive, government-sponsored, forced sterilization program. She lamented the increasing monocultures that resulted with the pursuit of industrial forestry by the government's own forest department but appeared frustrated that her own government did not heed her concerns. In many speeches she repeated the argument in Stockholm that Western industrialism was not a paradigm for countries like India; and articulated the need for balance and alternatives, including, for example, appropriate technology and renewable energy. Yet, she offered no concrete alternatives or pathways for environmental governance.

The Malthusian Moment

As H-Environment is re-posting all their old roundtable reviews, we'll be noting some of them here. Today I'd like to note the rich and fascinating discussion of Thomas Robertson's The Malthusian Moment: Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism (Rutgers UP, 2012). Said "moment", with its concerns about finite resources insufficient to support a growing world population, supplied at least some of the intellectual background to the new American environmental legislation of the 1960s and '70s, and included classics such as Garrett Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons".

An example of the interesting roundtable commentary, here from Saul Halfon:

...modern Malthusianism, often referred to as neo-Malthusianism, is not synonymous with Malthus’s original theory, which was focused more narrowly on food and England, and bound tightly to an existing theory of class. Malthus also understood birth control as a moral vice and as a detriment to capital and so preferred the inevitability of population boom and bust among the lower classes (Perelman 1979). Neo-Malthusians by contrast are a decidedly interventionist bunch, particularly when it comes to reproduction, and they conceptualize natural limits in a much expanded way. Nevertheless, this position remains associated with Malthus because of its continued focus on natural limits in relation to geometric population growth.

Thus, in the age of ascendant liberalism throughout the post-war period, the traditionally conservative Malthusian position took on the mantle of interventionist, progressive radicalism, challenging the very premise of growth and progress by appealing to a naturalistic argument about limits. This position appeared at first to align well with post-Marxist interventionism which was similarly challenging liberal and capitalist growth models. The progressive branches of both movements supported greater social equality, particularly for women. The weak coalition between these two sets of actors, however, was fractured by concerns over coercion, immigration, and racism as the post-Marxist focus on social justice and distribution of wealth encountered the non-negotiability of a neo-Malthusian emphasis on natural limits. From this macro-political frame, Robertson’s story sheds new light on how the focus on limits managed to gain a foothold in the otherwise solidly liberal progressivism of post-war America, laying part of the groundwork for modern environmentalism, and how liberalism was ultimately reasserted.