Book Contents
| Social Connections |
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The natural sciences identify and define environmental processes; the humanities foster in us a sympathy with the environment and living nature. Both deepen our understanding and motivate us to reflect upon and change our personal values. But large-scale action is primarily understood and prompted by the social disciplines. Laws, public policy, market mechanisms—these are the principal tools in any effort to better the environment.
In the 1960s, when environmentalism was a marginal countercultural movement, environmentalists tended to see economics, law, politics, and all other human-created systems as the enemy. To some, environmental problems were so urgent that they trumped all other concerns and institutions. The maturation of the environmental movement in many countries has brought with it an understanding that human systems can have both intrinsic and utilitarian value; for example, that a just and equitable legal system is both an object of inherent value in itself and an instrument for effective environmental protection. Today most environmentalists see the environment as a primary value but one balanced against others such as individual freedoms, the democratic process, the rule of law, and economic stability. In recent years, as environmentalists have made peace with economics, the result has been the first steps in the appropriation of market mechanisms for the protection of the environment. Conversely, many individuals in business now see that environmentalism is often itself a force for economic growth and long-term efficiency.
In countries, such as those in Eastern Europe, in Latin America, and in the Middle East and Central Asia, where the environmental movement emerged or is emerging in opposition to military, communist, or religious dictatorships, it is often aligned at its core with democratic values, economic freedoms, human rights, individual rights, religious freedoms, rights of minorities, and the rule of law. Hungary is an interesting case study: scientific issues were among the few areas where the Communist regime tolerated limited dissent in the 1980s. When an environmental issue arose that galvanized the public (opposition to the proposed Gabˇcíkovo-Nagymaros dam on the Danube), there were demonstrations and petitions against government policy on an unprecedented scale. It was in this context of semi-legal environmental protest that opposition parties were able to organize themselves, hastening the collapse of the regime in 1989. All of Hungary’s opposition parties were initially “green” parties. What the 1956 revolution and three decades of the Cold War could not change, environmental concern finally catalyzed.
As well as a sphere of action, we look to the social disciplines for a more nuanced and complete understanding of the causes of environmental problems—and their solutions. Social disciplines provide insight into market failures, un-sound policies, and demographic trends that shape our relationship with the environment. Just as the understanding of natural ecological and evolutionary processes helps to reveal human social and psychological relations, so the understanding of human systems illuminates the ways that natural systems work. Most broadly, anthropology provides us with perspectives on the range of social possibility. Besides specific lessons on ecologically friendly technologies and practices, anthropology teaches that social institutions, which often seem so solid from within, are to a certain degree malleable and arbitrary, and this gives us a sense of multiple ways to relate to one another and to the environment. The study of other cultures teaches us something about our possible origins, and our possible futures.
Many milestones in the history of the environmental movement came with the codification of environmental principles into law: the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species Acts in the United States; and the Montreal Protocol and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species worldwide. Will the next legal watershed expand legal protection to include environmental justice, mandating a more equitable distribution of the risks of environmental degradation among social groups, both domestically and internationally? The study of human systems and the environment could not be complete without lessons from the one phenomenon that most impinges on the environ- ment—human population growth itself. The rise and redistribution of human populations has not only put an ever-increasing pressure on environmental resources, it initially produced the various cultures that we study in anthropology, the markets that we examine and regulate in economics, and the political and legal systems we fashion to govern our actions. Overspecialization in a single discipline can be dangerous and blinding. This can be especially true of the social sciences. For decades, economists neglected the external costs imposed on the environment by human actions, and jurists assumed that land lying unused was unproductive. There has been a movement in both these disciplines, and in the other social sciences, to incorporate a more en- vironmental worldview into the fabric of the discipline itself. But even where this has failed, the failure is often the result of a lack of connection, a lack of interdisciplinary thinking. In the discourse of environmental protection, the value of engaging in any social discipline, be it law, economics, anthropology, or political science, is great. Without including these disciplines, any view of the environ- ment and the human relationship to it is incomplete, and our chances for effectuating positive change vanishingly small. |