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(05/07/14 3:57pm)
In the two years I’ve been writing this column, I’ve tried to minimize the chances that it might come off as just a repository for spewed sermons, and tried to focus more on the reporting responsibilities associated with editorial work. However, this is my last column in this wonderful paper, and I’ll be graduating soon; if I said I didn’t feel entitled to some room to wax twenty-something, I wouldn’t quite be speaking frankly. It troubles me that lately I feel I’ve been neglecting the ES side of me.
I transferred to Middlebury for the Environmental Studies program. I didn’t know this place existed until I read a book by Schumann Distinguished Scholar Bill McKibben for a course at another institution. I came here thinking I wanted to do environmental law, and that’s not the case anymore. I’ve spent both my summers in Middlebury working in the Sustainability Integration Office, and most of my closest friends here are ES majors. Yet for a lot of this semester, I had a hard time identifying as an Environmental Studies student at Middlebury even though this was the most ES-heavy semester I’ve had in three years here. The think the problem was preoccupation with another part of my life — one I had always seen as a compliment to my ES work, but had come to take over pretty much most of my time and energy.
There came a point however, where I came to realize that I had lost sight of what had meant most to me about my involvement with the ES program here and what brought me to Middlebury: the community. If there’s one thing that might count as something like the backbone of this school’s character, it’s our Environmental Studies program, and that’s precisely because of the extent to which the people who constituted to the good of community, and service to it. There’s a sense in which I think it’s simply the nature of the discipline — being concerned for the environment at least in some minimal way entails being concerned for something or someone outside the self. But the fact that Hillcrest is home to an ES program and not an ES department might at least lend support to an alternative explanation; does the interdisciplinarity give a way to argue that it could be the simple strength of our own community here that makes it dynamic? There’s probably some truth in both.
I’ve come to learn quite a bit about the world from the ES path I took — frustration usually only came from learning something about the way in which we’ve struggled to find solutions to environmental problems, or when decision-making fails. But the program succeeds in all the ways it does because it’s internalized its mission, to offer practical knowledge used to find solutions to practical problems. I don’t mean to say I took that for granted in some of my time here, but it often wasn’t always at the forefront of my own vision. Every now and then, I think we forget about how pressing of a matter it is that those actions get fixed. I know I have.
The whole point of a liberal arts education with a focus on the environment is to see the cause and effects of our actions, and how those actions can do less harm or mitigate any bit of it or maybe even do some good. Middlebury’s got some big decisions to make judgment calls on in the coming years. Whether it’s divestment, local food, local hydrocarbons, carbon neutrality or whatever other new problems the College finds itself in two, three, four, five years from now, it will have an opportunity to make a decision that can do some good for some community somewhere. I won’t have the chance to spend any more time working on solutions to these specific problems, but maybe there’s the chance out there in the real world to affect some real structural, institutional change (or maybe I’ll just have my wallet hold on to potential donations). In any case, I know its easy for an entity to get caught up in its own workings, but sometimes the community can clear some questions up for the self.
And sometimes, the commands the community makes force some more good out us. The College would do well to look to the people who care the most about that community for advice every now and then. The most beautiful part about this place is its ability to continually attract so many passionate young individuals committed to making change in the world. There’s little doubt in my mind that there will always be members of this community to do all it whatever it may take to make that happen — they’ll certainly have people to learn from.
(04/16/14 3:58pm)
I watched a video recently of a trio of prominent philosophers discussing what’s been termed as the “linguistic turn” in contemporary philosophy. In a nutshell, the linguistic turn marked a movement, beginning with Nineteenth-Century German philosopher Gottlob Frege and culminating in the work of the Twentieth-Century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, where philosophers got pretty bent up over the new idea that mind, consciousness and pretty much every other metaphysical topic philosophers deal with can only be rightly understood as an aspect of our linguistic lives. Our monopoly on rationality, that special human characteristic (the consensus on which has pretty much been on the books since the Greeks), became attributed to our status as users of language that stemmed from thought which mirrors or represents some logical structure.
What’s shown by a New York Times online article from last week, however, might help illustrate some of the research being done that’s starting to challenge these preconceived notions about whether or not there’s reason to be found elsewhere in the animal kingdom. New work done with crows, which required the animals to learn and then apply tasks like picking up stones and dropping them into tubes filled with water to raise water levels, allowing them to obtain rewards. The crows were able to learn to differentiate between different variations of the test, including instances where they were presented a choice between tubes filled with sand instead of water, objects that sank or floated, and solid or hollow objects. Sometimes the crows weren’t quite as savvy, as when they were unable to learn how to deal with instances where part of the testing apparatus was hidden or how water rose more quickly in a smaller tube. The takeaway from the study is, however, that the crows were seemingly conscious of the consequences of their actions – in a sense, the crows were cognizant of the causal relationships that were at play in their actions and the tasks they faced.
Now while these results don’t conclusively prove that there’s anything exactly like the dynamics of human intelligence or human mind at play in the heads of corvids, they might make us ask whether or not our standards for admitting that mind and language exist outside of human interactions are a little too strict. Obviously, one of the defining aspects of human language is that it puts us in touch with those outside of us in such a way as to make it apparent that they have minds. When we speak with someone else, there seems to be an aspect of immediacy provided by the commonality, in a way that makes meanings and intentions available in a way that might not appear to seem possible with non-language users.
Yet at the same time, if we can acknowledge that corvids can perceive something like our own notions of causality, would it really be as controversial to make the maybe-not-so-far-fetched claim that there’s some aspect of representation going along with that perception? Two weeks ago, when Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Tyler Burge came and spoke about primitive forms of mind, it seemed as though he was more than willing to admit that some animals might be capable of rudimentary forms of perception. When asked whether or not these same animals could be said to have a mind like we do, he denied the possibility.
But if we’re willing to concede that non-human animals can interact with one another socially, or even with us socially, why are we still so hesitant to allow that these interactions might constitute some primitive form of language? Now I never had any pet more complex than a fish or two, but believe me, I’ve seen how you dog lovers out there interact with your animals. Is the way we train dogs to respond to calls or live in a house all that different from the way we teach our children how to act? The way we intuitively act about and live with our pets seems to suggest that we think that there’s meaning in those relationships; at least one thing those three philosophers I spoke of earlier were able to agree upon was that meaning can’t exist outside of language. So, it might seem relatively straightforward to there conclude that if there’s meaning in an interaction, there needs to be language.
We still, however, seem hesitant to want to admit that there’s language or mind out there in the world beyond the one contained in human heads. I think so long as we’re so unwilling to admit that there are experiencing creatures beside ourselves, we’ll struggle to rationalize acting morally towards non-human life. If you ask me, it’s an unfortunate bit of hubris.
Artwork by CHARLOTTE FAIRLESS
(03/12/14 6:55pm)
This past Sunday, a New York Times opinion piece entitled “Global Warming? Not Always” made the claim that “the scientific evidence does not support an argument that human-induced climate change has played any appreciable role in the current California drought.” To support his argument, NOAA climate scientist Martin P. Hoerling writes that droughts of this magnitude are nothing new to Californians — similar, or even more severe, droughts have occurred in California in the 1930s and 1970s, suggesting that the recent dearth of rainfall in California might fit in perfectly with the observed historical precipitation and climate patterns. In turn, Hoerling concludes that we can’t lay claim to the knowledge that the draught is the product of an anthropogenically changed climate; my concern, however, is whether or not the claim to such knowledge should be all that important to us.
In contemporary philosophy, the standard account of knowledge — that is, the criteria that must be met in order to claim we “know” something — is tripartite, consisting in “justified true belief.” In short, we can say we know something if it is a belief about the world that we actually hold, when that belief accurately represents what is the case out there in the world, and that belief is held appropriately or with good reason. So while it might seem that I’ve just said the same thing twice in a row, there are actually important delineations that can be drawn between these three criteria that I won’t go into here. What’s important to us here is that we might take the claim Hoerling makes in his article to assert that in terms of empirical evidence, our claim to knowledge about whether the droughts in California were caused by anthropogenic climate change in some way fails the tripartite test. I’m now going to propose that we shouldn’t care whether or not it does; or, in a somewhat milder sense, that it doesn’t make much difference.
A recent joint publication produced by the National Academy of Sciences and British Royal Society outlines what, according to climate scientists, is our best evidence supporting the notion that humans are in fact changing the climate. The executive summary: we now, maybe more than ever, know we are. Our understanding of physics, climate models, and fingerprinting of climate change patterns has shown us that there is no realistic way that global temperatures and carbon levels could have increased the way they have without human involvement as it’s played out since we’ve industrialized.
The natural processes that have helped bring about the 0.8 degree (C) warming of the atmosphere are complex and multifaceted, such that I think it would be hard for us to deny that they are the same processes aggravating the conditions in California. Warmer weather means a longer growing season, which leads to increased water usage in commercial food production, as well as in the residential sector. While recent research might propose that “recent long-term droughts in western North America cannot definitively be shown to lie outside the very large envelope of natural precipitation variability in this region,” we might be able to make a claim to other important pieces of knowledge: that if global warming trends continue, human life as we know it will have to change dramatically and struggle more and more to respond to droughts like this one, we won’t be able to bring carbon levels back to pre-industrialized levels in any time-scale smaller than that of millennia, and countless species of plants and animals will go extinct. Fortunately, the NAS and Royal Society agree.
We might also make a different kind of claim — that it would, for one reason or another, be morally wrong for all of the above mentioned things to take place, if we can prevent their doing so. There’s also a funny thing about moral propositions: our criteria for saying that we know something to be true morally often differ from those things we claim to know empirically. Moral knowledge, at least in ordinary cases, seems not to request from us the same standards for empirical truth or justification. We might simply say that it would be a grave injustice for people to be marginalized by water shortages or biological diversity to be sacrificed for economic profit because we believe it to be so.
This article was not intended to lay out any kind of formal argument about the conditions we deem necessary to make claims for knowledge, or whether or not moral knowledge is the same kind of knowledge as empirical scientific knowledge. I think it’s obvious that the two should inform one another. “Knowing” whether or not one catastrophic drought was connected to anthropogenic climate change shouldn’t affect our decision to take the actions necessary to move towards a sustainable, resilient future.
(02/26/14 6:56pm)
The discipline of political science has come quite a long way since Aristotle’s Politics, arguably the classic work in the study of politics, which asked and answered questions about our nature as political animals. Whereas Aristotle’s methods in that book were primarily observational and logical, academics working in the study of politics today have rigorously developed and tested analytical and empirical methods at their disposal to “define, describe, explain and evaluate [political] phenomena.” However, beyond a descriptive account of why political phenomena play out the way they do, one might wonder what exactly an empirically-minded political science has to contribute to ventures of a more pragmatic type, especially when we’re presented with normative problems.
If the political problems that help give rise to environmental crises are primarily problems of action — that is, questions that require a particular answer that prescribes action in a given situation — then it seems like answering questions about how groups respond (or might respond) to a given political action should be useful, at the very least. That, maybe uncontroversially, might be what political science can be said to do. The graphs and tables displayed in journal articles and book chapters offer metrics (think changes in GDP, voter approval ratings, and the like) that give us supposedly objective means of looking at how various political events are caused. If all we wanted the study of politics to do was tell us what percentage of states a candidate needed to win in order to win the presidency, or tell us how Congressional spending rates have changed over time, then descriptive and analytical methods might be able to tell us the whole story.
Unfortunately, describing the way our government works isn’t the only project political studies have facing them; we might remember that the primary concern of Aristotle’s Politics was to identify the best type of state and how citizens in an ideal state might behave. As critical as the positive study of how humans interacted with one another was, his ultimate task was normative; the primary object of inquiry was to provide us with an idea of how the state and its citizens should act. Nearly everything that concerned the ancient study of politics centered around notions of the good — a far cry from the subject matter of today’s political science.
Maybe an obsession with power politics is why we’ve yet to find a political solution to the environmental problems we face on the local, national and global level. Is the study of the good too far removed from what we call political science? Commentators have criticized the methodologies political scientists use for a number of reasons.
In a 2012 New York Times article Jacqueline Stevens, Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, writes (rather harshly) that “Research aimed at political prediction is doomed to fail. At least if the idea is to predict more accurately than a dart-throwing chimp” and that her discipline has picked up the nasty habit of “mistaking probability studies and statistical significance for knowledge.”
New York University’s Bertell Ollman, is somewhat less critical of the discipline’s methods, but more so of it’s motives – “… with a few honorable exceptions— [Political Science] presents a view of society that either misses, or dismisses, or at best trivializes the fact that the political game is rigged.” While not wholly dismissive of departments’ attachment to Karl Popper’s scientific method, Ollman derides the discipline for perpetuating an impossibly one-sided dialogue centered around the desires of those in power.
And finally, an anonymous contributor to The Economist, Ripton, Vermont’s “MD,” while commentating on the efficacy of attempts to model the outcomes of presidential elections, points out that the kind of retroactive tweakings frequently made to predictive political theories don’t typically help validate the scientific methods employed in crafting forecasting models. If political scientists continue to ask for research dollars to develop models and other predictive tools that might help reaffirm its methods as “scientific,” then the ideal should be to strive for real scientific rigor.
Unfortunately, scientific rigor is only one of a number of tools that we’ll need to advance goals related to climate change, conservation and other environmental problems. Another large substantial of the equation concerns ironing out what precisely we think the best way of living on this planet is; what I’m suggesting is that while models might help us in making decisions by providing us with an idea of how political moves may be responded to, they can’t tell us much about how the masses should respond, and what they should demand of government. Environmental problems ask us for right action that considers more than just power interests — they ask that political power be exercised justly.
(01/23/14 12:48am)
Last Thursday I was fortunate enough to catch the screening of Pandora’s Promise in Dana Auditorium and the star-studded panel discussion that followed. The film offered an engaging narrative that provides an argument for nuclear energy that I’m sure supporters of the technology have been waiting for. Pandora’s Promise makes nuclear power seem sexy: clean, efficient and edgy. But, as the tension that filled the air during the panel discussion implied, the future of fission as a player in our energy mix — to say the least — is a touchy subject.
Director Robert Stone’s film tries very hard to debunk some of the main sticking points opponents to nuclear energy have held on to over the years. The film argues that nuclear power is far cleaner than any of the energy sources that make up substantial portions of our national energy mix (read: coal, oil, and natural gas), harmless in terms of the supposed health effects of background radiation and ready to meet our world’s energy needs as we transition into a fossil-fuel-free future. Stone’s story is driven by the testimonies of converted opponents of nuclear energy and gives detailed looks into the science behind the technology at play in the present generation of nuclear reactors. Many will certainly notice how little effort the film makes to address some of the more pressing criticisms of nuclear technology — namely, its cost — but charitable addresses of the opposition notwithstanding, the big question the film leaves unanswered is how big of a role nuclear power can realistically play in a renewable future.
One of the main criticisms that came out during the panel discussion in which Middlebury’s own Schumann Distinguished Scholar Bill McKibben took part concerned the expense associated with nuclear energy. Building nuclear power plants isn’t cheap and resources put towards nuclear development are resources taken away from that of other renewables like wind and solar. An interdisciplinary study published by MIT concluded that nuclear energy isn’t cost competitive with fossil fuels, but becomes more competitive if price is corrected by taking into account the social cost of carbon. It also specifies that once-through reactors (the conventional type that put out a lot of stuff we have to bury away in the ground) are more cost-effective and safe than thermal and fast reactors running on less wasteful closed-cycles. Further complicating the judgment on nuclear, the US Energy Information Administration identified the levelized capital costs of one megawatt hour for new for new electricity plants to be roughly equal to that of coal plants with carbon control and storage technologies, and far cheaper than offshore wind and solar (but more expensive than land-based wind operations, which bested coal as well). So it might seem like nuclear might be doing alright for itself after all in terms of the economics of energy.
What worries me more is the consideration of whether or not we live in a world that’s politically ready for large-scale implementation of nuclear energy. In industrialized countries, we might find fewer worries regarding the possibilities of nuclear plants becoming targets, or the development of nuclear grids leading to the development of nuclear arsenals. But in regions of greater political instability and conflict, throwing fission reactors into the fray as potential targets in countries with volatile power structures seems a bit more dangerous than giving them solar panels or windmills. We live in a world where we still have trouble getting along with one another on the national, much less international scene. The carbon footprint of the developing world is important, but we might want to consider whether large-scale nuclear development is appropriate for all parts of the globe.
However, I don’t think we should eliminate the potential role of nuclear power as a contributor to a cleaner future close to home. The technology will only get better so long as we continue to give it research attention and as much as I’d like to think that solar and wind can feed our country’s energy needs on their own, it’s unclear when photovoltaics and wind will scale up to the level required to completely phase out fossil fuels. Another consideration is importantly related to the last — whatever choices we make considering viable sources of energy will have to be made with the needs our society will and should have in the future. Unless we decide that decentralization of the grid is the way to go, whatever energy sources we commit to will need to meet the full needs of our economy. The question of what constitutes those needs is the subject of a value judgment that I think we have, at least up to this point, struggled to find an answer to. Keeping our options open until we answer that question might prove prudent.
(11/21/13 1:56am)
Akrasia is the ancient Greek word for “weakness of will,” or, in other words, acting against one’s better judgment. This past week makes me think that the U.S. might have itself a bad case of the stuff when it comes to climate questions.
As Greenwire and The New York Times report, the EPA lowered federal renewable fuel targets for the first time since 2007. Up until last Friday, the agency had hoped to have roughly 18.15 billion gallons of renewable fuels blended into the rest of the petroleum-based gasoline and diesel fuels on the market — 3.75 billion gallons of which was to include advanced biofuels not derived from corn inputs. On the revision, the nation’s fuel mix must contain 15.21 billion gallons of renewable fuels, 13.01 billion being conventional ethanol and 2.2 billion gallons of advanced biofuels. The question concerning the viability of ethanol as an alternative fuel notwithstanding, the EPA’s move appears to me to be little more than a concession to industry pressures.
That the rollback was called “a step in the right direction” by Jack Gerard, CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, disturbs me almost as much as his follow-up comment that “more must be done.” The EPA justifies its decision by appeal to the lack of market support for alternative fuels both at the pump and on the assembly line. However, the agency fails in any real way to provide an offsetting measure for the corresponding boom in domestic petroleum production in recent years. With less support for renewables and increased production of conventional fuels, reductions in emissions from nationwide automobile traffic take a huge hit.
In another equally depressing news bit, the U.S. seems to be preparing itself for a repeat performance of its 1997 Kyoto Protocol blunder. As world players gather in Warsaw, Poland for UN climate talks, the tone coming from Congress is less than enthusiastic. While some elected officials like Senators Ed Markey (D-Mass) and Ben Cardin (D-Md.) favor U.S. involvement in an international climate agreement, the two acknowledge that the present makeup of the Senate will make it extraordinarily difficult to win U.S. support for any such measure.
The President’s administration and others worldwide have pledged to develop an international arrangement to address the climate crisis by 2015, which would likely go into effect by 2020. However, sentiments from Senator John Barraso (R-Wyo.) that effectively damned EPA regulations for power plants for their economic effects as well as those of Senator Warren Hatch (R-Utah) who appealed to the “legitimate question of science” regarding the legitimacy of claims about climate change indicate that conservatives dogmatic denials of the facts might undermine yet another opportunity for the U.S. to take a leadership role in the global climate battle.
When the best evidence repeatedly points us towards taking action, we have seemed to develop a nasty habit of turning the other cheek and neglecting where our best deliberations might take us.
There is no denying that economic concerns should be an important consideration, but as my fellow columnist and editor, Zach Drennan, pointed out last week, fossil fuels — especially new, riskier extraction methods — are hardly a safe long-term investment. Investing in more resilient pathways makes more sense than leaving our future up to chance.
Policymakers, unfortunately, still see some reason to gamble on carbon — whether they are reasons to which we average citizens are blind or they are being hidden behind congressional backdoors, I cannot say. To open up fuel markets for more petroleum consumption while simultaneously resisting active contribution to mitigating problems caused by that consumption sets us up for nothing but failure. A few billion gallons of alternative fuels might only be a small portion of our total energy mix, but when we actively undermine progress, we drill holes in the water buckets that are supposed to help us put out a climate fire that is only growing.
(11/06/13 9:30pm)
We know that preservation of the South American rain forests is a necessary step in ensuring our future a stable climate. Why, then, is illegal logging in the Amazon still so prevalent?
Two weeks ago, the New York Times published a story explaining a recent chapter of Peru’s struggle to combat the black market timber industry ravaging its forests. The global demand for mahogany and other valuable hardwood types – more abundant in the Amazonian rain forests than anywhere else on Earth — has helped fuel illegal timber harvesting in some of the world’s most important forests. Like a similar story in National Geographic from April of this year, the Times articulates that many of the last big mahogany stands exist only within the boundaries of Indian lands. These areas prove difficult to patrol, and the indigenous communities that inhabit them are often as sympathetic to loggers’ cash as they are towards law enforcement.
What efforts are made to try and curtail illicit harvesting in protected areas and carry out conservation plans in managed lands are undermined by political corruption and a lack of other sources of income for the areas’ inhabitants. Military personnel, stationed to patrol locales and check that loggers have the appropriate documentation necessary to harvest trees, can only be so effective, and judges who are supposed to prosecute those caught in violation of policies, more often than not, take a bribe over the rule of law. Such conditions, together with the reluctance of distributors and businesses in the developed world to take precautions necessary for keeping “poached” timber out of their supply chains, might seem to draw a picture of a relatively bleak future for forests the Earth needs to breathe.
How might we go about trying to ensure that these forests — the importance of which links not only to climate change, but also biodiversity and human ecology — do not go damaged beyond repair? The problem will not be solved unless we tackle the conditions on the ground that perpetuates cutting as well as remedy the upstream demand that facilitates it.
Governance does not work in a given area unless it has the resources necessary for it to run. While I am not about to propose a solution for the lack of effective civil society in the Amazon, I do not think real progress can be made towards conservation goals without an effective means of enforcement. Military personnel can be paid off – the kind of social pressure capable of dissuading a judge from taking a bribe can only be instantiated through genuine community building. Getting people to take ownership over their political lives does not, and cannot happen overnight. However, if means are taken to lessen the influence that extra-governmental forces have on law enforcement and the justice system, then interests other than those of the governed might have a harder time interfering with regulation. Get the people involved in the way their government works — if we can set the scene for civic development, where livelihoods interact positively with an active role in the political process, conflicts like these will be easier to avoid and to mitigate.
At the same time, we in the North have our own part to play. If it is our demand for fine wood products that drives the illegal cutting taking place down south, then we should presumably do our best to make sure the wood we’re getting is ethically sourced. Sustainable forestry protocols can help, but as the examples at hand show, we have relatively little control what happens on the other end of the supply chain. I think we would do better to simply reevaluate what might be able to meet our material needs as conscious consumers. While we might not be able to control what emerging markets for rare hardwoods (read: China and India) demand, we might have a chance at trying to talk international markets into opting for more sustainable alternatives.
The story of the persistence of Amazonian logging only serves to bring our attention towards a central tension in our contemporary age — while economic development can appear to provide solutions for environmental problems, it invariably comes at a cost. Bringing commerce and nation-building to the global south might provide opportunities for development beyond natural resource exploitation, but questions regarding to the compatibility of capitalism and indigenous ways of life still fail to provide clear answers. Political liberalism, the panacea in vogue, may strengthen civil society to a certain extent. Problems arise, however, when liberal economics beat political liberalism out of the blocks.
(10/17/13 3:57am)
The U.S. Supreme Court has a number of high-profile environmental cases on deck for this term. As Greenwire reports, the Court can choose to hear cases that concern challenges from independent parties and 17 states calling for a broad review of the Environmental Protection Agengy’s (EPA) greenhouse gas regulations, questions about where we should limit campaign finance contributions and the Forest Service’s use of land on a Wyoming resident’s property. The most closely-watched recent development, however, concerns another Clean Air Act case and the EPA’s Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR).
In August last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled two to one that CSAPR regulations overstepped the EPA’s statutory authority to control emissions. The decision was justified in two parts. First, the Court opinion argues that the EPA is granted authority to require a state to reduce its emissions only by the amount that drifts over into other states, and CSAPR generally requires increased reductions. Second, the Court argues that the rule circumvents a state’s authority to develop its own greenhouse gas reduction plan; instead of deferring responsibility for regulatory design to the states, the Court claims the federal government too quickly prescribes a solution to a state’s problem.
A scathing 44-page dissent by Judge Judith Roberts asserts that the Court’s decision “trample[s]” on the Court precedents already set with respect to Clean Air Act issues. Roberts also claimed that the Court based its conclusion about overly-stringent regulations on arguments that were never made by the challengers. Environmentalists on the whole feel that Roberts got the law and the precedent correct, but which way will the Supreme Court decide?
Why shouldn’t the EPA be able to regulate emissions as CSAPR provides? The rule placed tougher restrictions on nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and particulate matter, which opponents of the rule claim put heavy burdens on the nation’s power plants and electrical grid. The measures would have resulted in a 50 percent cut in nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxides bringing in $280 billion in health benefits at a cost of $880 million to industry. The numbers seem hard to argue with, but Supreme Court decisions rarely consider empirical data exclusively.
The Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA that the EPA has the responsibility to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, but the issue here concerns more than a simple question of responsibility. Robert’s dissent points out that the states had their opportunity to come up with “good neighbor” State Implementation Plans to accord with the mandates, but many of them didn’t submit one before the window to do so closed. The statute states that the EPA can provide a Federal Implementation Plan “at any time within two years after the Administrator – finds that a State has failed to make a required submission . . . or disapproves a State implementation plan submission in whole or in part.” Stepping in to provide emissions reductions for the states then seemed to be a discretionary move on the part of the EPA, since the conditions for action were met.
With regards to arguments claiming that the EPA shouldn’t be able to require upwind states to abate more than what they contribute to pollution levels in downwind states, and that states should be held to more flexible standards, I think we’re faced with somewhat of an ideological question. While the question concerning how much the EPA can legally ask the states to regulate under Clean Air is certainly an important legal question, we might also ask to what extent the individual states should contribute to reducing emissions in the larger picture. It does seem reasonable to claim that states shouldn’t have to take action in abating more pollution than they send downwind, but I don’t think that should lead us to complacency. While state boundaries make it easy to point out where states’ duties end, the chain of responsibility concerning where power is used is less straightforward than where it is produced and where point-source pollution ends up. Considering that the power produced by point-source polluters could play a more important in interstate affairs (say commerce) than previously thought might help an argument for more proactive state action and tighter regulations.
The question of what shape future regulations relating to the Clean Air Act will take is ultimately a question for policymakers, but that of what shape those regulations can take is very much a judicial question. For that reason, the decisions that the Court may choose to make in the coming term should have significant effects on future expectations we’ll have regarding individual states’ roles in solving large-scale collective problems.
(10/03/13 12:29am)
As someone whose academic interests lie primarily in the humanities and social sciences, I would hardly identify as someone who “does science.” However, I am also someone interested in the environment, specifically the ways our ideas about our environment fit in with the ideas we have about pretty much everything else, including our ethics, our economics, and more fundamental notions about the way our world works. So when I do philosophy – a discipline which, at its core, is concerned with clear thinking – I take it to be of the utmost importance to have clear thoughts about the subject matter I am dealing with. Now where might someone obtain clear, correct ideas about the environment or any other natural phenomena? One of the most reliable sources has proven to be people who actually “do science.”
Some of the most important work in conservation efforts is done by those who might identify as natural historians. Natural history, as defined by Thomas L. Fleischner, Professor of Environmental Studies at Prescott College, consists of “the study of life at the level of the individual – of what plants and animals do, how they react to each other and environment, how they are organized into larger groupings like populations and communities.” Fleischner argues that the human practice of natural history provides the genealogical underpinnings for much of today’s natural science. While its present form can be traced most directly back to the work of Aristotle, Fleischner proposes that natural history may have been practiced for as long as our pre-historic ancestors painted on caves and learned to track the patterns of the animals they hunted. In short, natural history represents the human attempt to put into narrative an empirical record of the natural world. In an ecological context, if we do not know what’s actually occurring in ecosystems, we can’t make judgments about where our conservation efforts should be focused.
I think this represents one iteration of a key insight we might infer about the importance of a commitment to a scientific perspective: that the kinds of normative judgments we can reasonably make about matters face constraints imposed by what we can know about the world. We can make arguments for climate action based on romantic notions of “wild nature” found in literary sources, but a stronger argument might be supported by appeal to, say, trends in organismal populations observed in data provided by long-term studies, or climatological data. The idea that normativity might be rooted in what we can observe about the natural world is nothing new; the underpinnings of Aristotle’s work in ethics and political philosophy can be found in his works on animals, physics, and metaphysics – works that concerned the nature of things, or “first philosophy.” And it would be awfully hard for someone to consider herself a good philosopher of mind without an understanding of what neuroscience can tell us about our physiology.
At the same time, I would hardly admit that science has a monopoly over our possible modes of thinking. I clearly believe that there’s value in doing philosophy, and I enjoy a good book as much as any other pretentious humanities major. I am also cautious about situations where our science gets too far ahead of our ethics (see: climate issues, the nuclear age, etc.), but I am consistently hopeful that we can move past such issues because we have methods of understanding our way out of predicaments by means of explanation. It is a fact of the matter that many of our best explanations are scientific and materialistic — many, but not all. And as Columbia University philosopher Philip Kitcher points out in an article written in response to some of the positions held by Thomas Nagel (who my fellow columnist Harry Zieve-Cohen ’15 quotes in his column “A Defense of Books”) one of the main challenges to science and philosophy consists in trying to provide naturalistic explanations for things like consciousness and our systems of valuing. We can hardly say that things like love and death are topics about which science has no jurisdiction because it is likely that one day they are things we will have explanations for.
Science and materialism have been considered as viable perspectives for as long as natural science has existed as an offshoot of natural philosophy. Just as it would be impossible to provide an accurate natural history of a region while ignoring the role humans play in shaping the landscape, we cannot do good science without remembering the lens through which it develops and is performed – the human lens. I doubt that anybody in our community or academia legitimately questions the value of humanities. We will discover the actual nature of “meaning and truth” inasmuch as science and the humanities are capable of collaborating in writing the human narrative.
(09/12/13 1:05am)
On Aug. 28, each member of the Middlebury community hoping for a statement from the College concerning the divestment of our endowment from fossil fuel companies received what they had desired. However, the news contained in the email sent out by President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz wasn’t what many people were hoping to hear: Middlebury College will not be divesting its endowment any time soon. I have little doubt that this decision comes as a surprise to many of the individuals who have been following and pushing for the movement to divest, but that fact should make us no less inclined to believe that the College dropped the ball.
The email sent out by Liebowitz and its accompanying fact sheet cite important points pertaining to the financial nature of our endowment that form the basis of the argument underlying the Trustees’ decision not to divest. The first concerns the purpose of the endowment. Primarily, our nearly $1 billion endowment is meant to serve as “a trust that exists or the benefit of current and future generations.” The endowment helps provide a certain percentage of a current year’s operating expenses ($52 million, or 18% of the FY2014 budget), and its growth and returns ensure that it can meet the rising costs of running a college like Middlebury.
Second, the endowment is managed by an independent investment firm, Investure, that works with 150 independent managers to invest the $10 billion portfolio of funds belonging to Middlebury and 12 other colleges, universities, and foundations. This aspect adds an element of complexity to the investment of our endowment – divestment would not only require an overhaul of the way that Investure has structured its portfolio, but the consent of the other 12 consortium members.
We’ll consider the final point to concern the uncertainty that the administration says would accompany divestment. Given the “lack of proven alternative investment methods,” efforts will instead be directed instead towards making “positive differences” including developing a set of “Environmental, Social, and Governance principles” to guide future review of the College’s investment portfolio, creating ESG guidelines to help monitor investments and operations, and directing more of the endowment toward ESG ventures.
The President assures us that these measures will help alleviate many of the same harms that proponents of divestment claim our stakes in fossil fuel companies cause – and they very well may. However, positive action in one area of our conduct does not, and cannot, simply make up for inaction or morally wrong action in another. As far back as the Greeks, ethics has asserted that our characters are crafted by virtue of our actions. Middlebury gets a lot right in terms of environmental stewardship, and may continue to do so in the future. However, even the most stringent “ESG principles” won’t be able to wipe the blemish off our collective character that comes from our contentment with our morally flawed investment practices, regardless of the degree to which those practices may be dictated by the imperfect markets they operate in.
Yet at the same time, those practices have done exactly what the College has wanted them to do – i.e., to help ensure that the quality of a Middlebury education is as high as it can be. In that sense, I do not think the College has failed, in fact, far from it. But the fact that there is some large degree of dissonance between the pragmatic and moral aspects of the way we handle our money should set off some red lights, and it certainly has already. Red lights, however, can only go so far.
The main reason the Trustees have decided not to divest is the lack of a viable alternative. For as much as we hear about creativity and innovation here on this campus, this sounds an awful lot like settling to me. But we, the students, don’t have to settle for that answer and should instead take it as a challenge – one to show the administration that we don’t have to settle for the way things are and that divestment can be not just viable, but profitable. This is where the typical environmental factions can’t do it alone.
To all of you Economics students taking the new finance courses this year: put those skills to the practical test and slap on your resume that you provided your school’s administration with a profitable, sustainable investment strategy. New First-years: start coming up with solutions to these problem now because you can probably learn stuff hundreds of times faster than I can. Down the road, future generations of students like us won’t care how much the endowment grossed in FY2014. What will be valuable to them is the character of the place they will call home for four years.
(05/08/13 11:11pm)
News of the new Vermont Gas pipeline and the College’s announced endorsement of the project has created quite the stir among the community – and rightfully so. For a quick summary of the debate, see the dialogue that has taken shape between Zach Drennen‘13.5 and Cailey Cron‘13.5 and Anna Shireman-Grabowski‘15.5 within the columns of this section over the past few weeks. Both sides bring valid points and sound arguments to the table, and this week, I’ll do my best to show why the discourse represents exactly what the decision-making processes concerning issues like carbon neutrality needs: emphatic, concerned, critical judgements.
To begin, I agree with Cron and Shireman-Grabowski. In no way do I think propagation of natural gas – much less fracked gas – puts us on a track toward sustainable development or energy independence. In a life before Middlebury, I went to school for a year in New York’s Southern Tier, right on top of the Marcellus Shale – fracking ground zero. If there’s anywhere that can provide a look at the way in which political vitriol permeates the present discourse on natural gas extraction – like, well, the way fracking chemicals permeate shale rock – it’s there. For every environmentalist adamantly against the development of natural gas resources, there’s a lower-middle-to-lower-class “Average Joe” who believes with every fragment of their being that gas wealth and all its benefits is their fast lane to the American Dream. That’s not to say that the average American’s opinion isn’t misinformed or painfully unaware of the other economically viable alternatives to fossil fuel development, because that may very well be the case. I do think, however, that Drennen tries to make the point that we can’t immediately vilify the average American because of concern for those things closest to them, but rather that we should approach problems like this with open ears and open minds. This is especially true if we have vested interests in the matter, as is the case with carbon neutrality.
With that said, Cron and Shireman-Grabowski are right in pointing out that there are far better ways to provide energy savings than building a pipeline. Simple home improvement projects can often result in significant reductions in operating costs and energy efficiency. However, I think we sometimes take for granted how well Vermonters know this, as well as how politically active and well-informed they are. Considering our own knowledge of the alternatives to a new pipeline, the College’s continued support of the pipeline would represent nothing short of a public disservice to the people of Vermont.
The issue becomes slightly more complicated, though, when we consider whether or not opposing a pipeline means opposing biomethane. From my own involvement with and knowledge of the College’s carbon neutrality progress, the biomethane project would not, on its own, make us carbon neutral. Would it provide a viable means of replacing the 1,000,000 gallons of fuel oil we still burn every year? Yes, but there’s more to our carbon footprint than that. While it would only be one piece of the solution, it would be a pretty important one. It’s a shame that there may not be another feasible way of utilizing a new, truly clean technology like biomethane. Unless some benefactor-to-the-rescue willing to fund the construction of a Middlebury-to-Salisbury pipeline (to be used exclusively for the transport of biomethane) or an on-campus storage facility comes on to the scene, I don’t know if I could rightfully support biomethane as a viable step towards carbon neutrality. If we’re going to do carbon neutrality, let’s make sure to do it right.
If anything, this whole debate illuminates a point I spoke on in a column concerning this same topic earlier this year. In order for carbon neutrality at Middlebury to work, we, the students, the community, need to take ownership of it and responsibility for it. And that’s what’s happening here. This discourse is the practical application of everything we’re supposed to be learning about in the classroom – critical thinking and all that jazz. However, I don’t know if value judgments – like deciding what it means to be carbon neutral – can be made through cost-benefit analysis. If carbon neutrality at Middlebury is supposed to set some kind of precedent, which I assume it is, then we better make sure that however we go about doing it projects the values and virtues we want it to. I’ll assume environmental degradation isn’t what we hope to accomplish through becoming carbon neutral. We become like our virtues through our actions, and our actions alone. There’s no room in there for asymmetry.
(04/24/13 4:38pm)
As the Campus’s editorial staff pointed out last week, on April 3 the National Association of Scholars released a report titled “What Does Bowdoin Teach?” Authored by Peter Wood and Michael Toscano, and funded by Tom Klingenstein (a Williams College alumnus), the report attempts to systematically examine and reveal the various factors it sees as responsible for a supposed “fall from grace” of the American liberal arts college. The report also claims that Bowdoin’s institutional emphasis on sustainability is a product of the same kind of aversion towards what the authors see as the fundamental tenants of Western Civilization.
Wood and Toscano assert that the foundational underpinnings of “the Common Good” and general education at Bowdoin — “virtue and piety” — have been replaced with radical new cosmopolitan ideas of “social justice, transnationalism and sustainability.” While the report singles out Bowdoin, its derision of the school’s sustainability efforts are more a “one-size-fits-all” critique of environmentalism on the larger scale — and we should be worried. Here at Middlebury, we have claims to the oldest environmental studies program in the country, a commitment to carbon neutrality with goals loftier than Bowdoin’s and a mission statement that commits our curriculum to teaching environmental stewardship. For Wood and Toscano, these features of our community are not only ideologically misguided, but an apparent disservice to you and me.
What the authors see as the “sustainability agendas” that pervade dialogue at our colleges has apparently provided a detrimental distraction to our education. Wood and Toscano argue that where a liberal education had historically taught the development of “open-minded seeking of human excellence” and “great-souled men,” it now teaches “environmental literacy” within a larger intellectual climate uninterested in debating the value of what is taught. For Wood and Toscano, an environmentally-minded education comes at the cost of critical thinking abilities, rationalism and the ability to appreciate opposing arguments. I’m not sure they’re quite right.
The fact that learning institutions in our day and age are able to recognize the gravity of the problems facing our species serves as a testament to the vitality of the liberal arts. If critical thinking is about analyzing and weighing perspectives, then Wood and Toscano fail to see that sustainability and environmentalism represent the practical application of a cost-benefit analysis embodying the multi-epochal consideration of how human reason affects the world around us. Wood and Toscano are certainly right to point out that problems of collective responsibility like climate change will not be solved when ears are closed to alternative opinions, but they don’t propose solutions that will get us any closer to solving the problem. What they do offer is an appeal to the conservative ideals that perpetuate our inability to consider environmental issues with the weight they deserve.
Wood and Toscano’s fundamental criticism of Bowdoin lies in what they see as a failure to develop character in its students. The report claims that students are ill-equipped to confront what life has ahead of them because, like Middlebury, Bowdoin lacks a core curriculum that requires students to associate themselves with the intellectual pillars of western culture. Though the authors seem committed to the idea that American liberal arts have come to idolize diversity for diversity’s sake, they fail to acknowledge how the presence of a diversity of perspectives — western and non-western — can allow for the rethinking of how we apply the lessons that the western canon teaches. The principles underlying environmental and sustainability efforts worldwide — justice and equality — are the same principles that western culture has held near and dear throughout its history. Efforts to ensure that humans and other animals have a livable environment constitute no blind pursuit of the undermining of the individual as Wood and Toscano would have it. Rather, the movements seek to preserve the conditions that allow us to care about individual well-being and character development.
“What Does Bowdoin Teach?” concludes that self-restraint, self-criticism, moderation, “how to distinguish importance from triviality” and wisdom are some of the things lacking from a liberal arts education in this day and age. While all of these things seem to fundamentally motivate environmental education and sustainability efforts in American higher education, the authors assert that they can only come from an education committed to parochialism and tradition. If a college education today places an increased emphasis on cosmopolitan thinking, it is only because the problems that face our generation are cosmopolitan in nature and scope. Bowdoin and Middlebury College earn their classification as “liberal” precisely because they offer the opportunity to freely and dynamically craft conceptions not only of the good life, but the good environment.
(04/10/13 1:39pm)
Late last month, President Obama carried out his first major exercise of the powers granted to the president under the 1906 Antiquities Act, designating roughly 300,000 acres of land as new national monument area. This included land in New Mexico, Delaware, Maryland, Ohio, Washington State’s San Juan Islands and the Rio Grande del Norte, a 240,000 acre sagebrush mesa near the New Mexico-Colorado border. Environmentalists have touted these selections as a victory by environmentalists in a time where policy change has been somewhat hard to come by, but do they bear any real significance in light of the other environmental problems currently faced by the country? I think they do.
“National monument” is a designation the President can give to public land of particular national, historic or ecological interest, and offers a reasonable degree of federal protection to the area. The designation protects the selected land against excavation and allows for the establishment of a management plan for the area’s resources and wildlife. Any action that would defy the management parameters would require an Antiquities Permit to be obtained from the Secretary of whichever department oversees the land. The act has been used over 100 times by United States presidents; one of its most notable usages was Jimmy Carter’s designation of 56 million acres in Alaska as a means to buy time for the passage of the Alaska Lands Act in the 1970’s, an act later undone after legislation was passed. The powers granted to the president by the act are unique in that use is largely left to executive discretion, and the president’s proposals don’t require Congressional approval. Several national parks, including the Grand Canyon, saw monument status as a precursor to park status.
While Obama’s most recent usage is significant in that the Rio Grande constitutes his first landscape-scale designation, it seems unlikely that any of these new monuments are destined to join the national park system. In fact, the Rio Grande monument won’t come with any changes in management. It is thought, however, that the creation of the monument will help bring heightened economic activity to northern New Mexico.
So how does the landscape-scale monument factor into the current political landscape faced by President Obama? While the monument brings little significant change to the current state of Congressional gridlock, the new monuments mark a policy move that had been highly anticipated by environmentalists up until now. It’s always refreshing to see that the President occasionally remembers some of his comments about his commitment to the environment that certainly helped him win over many a vote in last year’s election. And I’ll be able to sleep easy at night knowing that Republicans still know how to shout at policy that protects American lands from energy development. However, these monuments cannot serve as the political substitute for action on higher-profile ecological and energy decisions.
As we continue to wait on Washington’s decision concerning the XL-sized elephant in the room, I find it hard to completely disregard the possibility that these monuments could be nothing more than a goodwill gesture. But the somewhat generous optimist in me can’t help but hope that these new designations will serve as a kind of hors d’oeuvre anticipating the main course of policy decisions to come, preparing the opposition for what will hopefully be even greater policy wins. Calls for a carbon tax or a denial of Keystone may go unanswered for a bit longer. In the meantime, we should appreciate the fact that we’ve got 300,000 more acres — no small amount — of federally protected land, set aside for our enjoyment.
(03/13/13 5:10pm)
The banner brandished by the dozens of students marching down Storrs Walk last Monday read “Divestment is a tactic; justice is the goal.” There’s often a good deal of talk about the j-word in any number of settings — legal, environmental, social, economic, etc. — and I think more often than not, we take its meaning for granted. Specifically, taken for granted in the sense that we may actually have some concrete idea of what the word means. While this article won’t attempt to provide a complete account of the nature of justice, it will try to point the dialogue in the right direction.
The argument put forward by the divestment movement, as I see it, seems relatively straightforward: we shouldn’t contribute financially to the functioning of companies that engage in behaviors we consider ethically reprehensible. Alright, fair enough. But are “ethics” and “justice” the same thing? It’s a question that’s plagued the philosophical community in its entirety, and one that probably won’t be resolved anytime soon. One of the more popular conceptions of justice in the Anglophone world offers a contractual conception of justice: that is, relationships take on some quality of justice when two parties enter into an agreement or contract with one another, and each then obtains certain rights. People have come up with other conceptions of justice (see distributive justice, justice as fairness, justice as property, global justice; the list goes on), but this idea of contractual justice is simple and tidy enough such that I think it might take us where we want to go for now. Now if there’s something unjust about, say, investing in oil companies or arms manufacturers, we have just one of the tools necessary to pinpoint what that is.
Seeing as this is an environmental column, we’ll start with environmental justice, and how divestment could somehow right an unjust situation. Let’s say investing in fossil fuel industries is unjust because their entire business model rests upon the combustion of materials which results in the release of carbon dioxide, which contributes to climate change, which will raise sea levels to the point of jeopardizing coastal livelihoods. We may then say that this is an unjust situation because the person whose shoreline property is now slightly more a part of the shore than they bargained for never entered an agreement which said they were alright with rising sea levels. Or maybe there’s injustice because of habitat loss that occurs — one could argue that because humans and animals both inhabit the same planet, each has an equal right to a safe habitat, or some variation on that theme. It’s the same basic premise which is supposed to justify our endangered species laws and other environmental regulations. There are countless other examples we could propose, but half of the challenge seems to be actually proposing them in the first place.
One of the problems that arises when dealing with problems with justice — something on which I was fortunate enough to have an extended discussion with recent guest lecturer David Abram — is that our ethical and moral frameworks are generally limited by our vocabulary and our conceptions of how things relate to one another. Humans have a hard time acting ethically or including non-human nature within our systems of justice because our way of speaking about such things is inherently isolating and anthropocentric. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing — the whole “language” thing has helped our species along its way for thousands of years. However, it also seems like the same manner of speaking has also led to the kind of injustices we find within our own society. I was fortunate enough to be referred, by a friend, to recent JusTalks keynote speaker Tricia Rose’s TEDx talk regarding social justice from Brown University. Revealingly, she observes that one of the fundamental problems in trying to solve issues of justice is that it is generally pretty difficult to talk about structural problems within the contexts of the structures in which the problems arise.
I think all of this helps to show that many of the problems taken on by various groups — those working towards divestment, climate change, food, social and racial equality — can find a lot of common ground once we start working out what justice, conceptually, means. Greater dialogue between all of these groups might help iron out some of the wrinkles preventing us from ending up at the same ends, and increasing communication could enable us to speak more freely with one another about issues which, individually, we’re far less likely to solve. Aristotle conceived justice as a virtue naturally associated with friendship, and that the truest form of justice had a “friendly” quality. While it may seem simplistic, a bit of friendship and some more cooperation could be exactly what our community needs.
(02/27/13 9:51pm)
If anything can be said of President Obama’s recent State of the Union address, it may be that it left environmentally-minded individuals with more questions than answers. The president wasted little time out of the gates bringing up energy issues (Politico has his first mention of renewable energy and “carbon pollution” on the third of the speech’s 10 pages), giving mention to the environment before other, less important fringe issues like the housing market, international policy and gun control. The ordering of the President’s speech was hardly the only nod that environmentalism received that night; in the very next paragraph (now on page four) the President explicitly stated that “we must do more to combat climate change.” Not “we should.” Not “we can.” “We must.” What the President presented us with was an imperative, just in case anyone managed to miss it, as in something absolutely necessary or required. So now that we have a verbal commitment to stopping climate from our commander-in-chief, how sure can we be that he’ll follow through?
A look at the past four years may provide a little insight for shaping predictions. While President Obama received no lack of criticism for a first term that, quite frankly, left environmental interests underwhelmed, to say that nothing happened for the movement during his presidency couldn’t be farther from the truth. The International reports that since 2007, U.S. carbon emissions have dropped by about 13 percent. Executive Order 13514, signed in 2009, told federal agencies that they had to make greenhouse gas reductions a priority, as well as provided targets for fleet reductions in petroleum use, improvements in water efficiency, waste stream reform. New fuel economy standards will mandate an average efficiency of 35.5 miles-per-gallon in cars and trucks by 2016, which along with proposals to cut $46 billion in fuel industry subsidies from the 2012 fiscal budget, will help wean our country off of its addiction to fossil fuels. The Obama administration has outlined plans for expansion of solar and wind energy development, and the president has made a number of Cabinet-level appointments (most notably the recent naming of REI President/CEO Sally Jewell as his pick for Secretary of the Interior) that put people with commitments to the environment in positions of real influence. The list of small victories goes on.
Yet there are still elephants — and elephant carcasses — lingering in the Oval Office. Any prospects for a national cap-and-trade may have died in 2009. Passage of that darn Keystone XL pipeline is still on the table. We’re still subsidizing fossil fuel companies with tax dollars, and 350.org had an absolute field day with the discovery that Obama was reportedly seen in Florida golfing with oil executives while thousands gathered in the streets of Washington to protest tar sands development. If anything, the sighting serves as a reminder of the President’s humanity; to play the role of idealist leader of the free world, one needs to be a politician. It’s unfortunate that all the under-the-radar accomplishments seem overshadowed by grandiose showings of ball-dropping on headline issues, but if the President is anything at all, it’s a pragmatist. While some may argue that pragmatism isn’t really what we need right now if we’re to solve the climate crisis, anyone who has read this column in the past can probably figure out that I’m not of that camp.
The rest of the President’s State of the Union address offered pragmatic, collaborative proposals for securing America’s energy future. It also provided a commitment to rebuilding our country’s crumbling infrastructure, including the energy sector, which echoed the calls for synergistic development of economy and sustainability raised by Nature Conservancy CEO Mark Tercek in his talk at the College last Thursday evening. I believe the speech’s real home run, however, came at its end, as Obama provided his own interpretation of the American condition: “We are citizens … [That word] captures the enduring idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations; that our rights are wrapped up in the rights of others.” If our president is right, and that our future is contingent not only on our cooperation but our inherent interconnectedness, then we have no choice but to work to reestablish our nation’s connection to its ultimate shared resource. You’ve got me Mr. Obama — that’s change I can believe in. It’s the change I want to believe in.
(02/13/13 3:41pm)
The other day it became strikingly clear to me how genuinely unaffected I’ve been by environmental issues. I’ve never been the victim of environmental injustice. I’ve never been oppressed (outright) by oil companies or arms manufacturers. Having clean water was only ever an issue when the town water companies worked on the pipes, and even then, it was only really an annoyance that delayed showering by an hour or two. I wouldn’t outright call myself a member of any kind of “environmental bourgeoisie,” but I’m certainly not in the position of the proletariat. I could maybe fit the role of the oppressed and marginalized in relation to multinational corporations, but that mentality just isn’t at the forefront of my consciousness on a regular basis. I look at everything that goes on in the news and can’t help but think, “I don’t have it that bad, but why can’t I stop caring?”
Maybe it’s just a matter of empathy. Caring about environmental issues for the sake of less fortunate others is a nice enough idea, but does it contain adequate motivation to justify action? Certainly legions of people would say yes, and maybe the beauty of the motive lies in its utter simplicity. It’s not all that unlike the Golden Rule — maxims are easy because they’re universal and straightforward. “I don’t like it when I can set my tap water on fire (á la Josh Fox’s 2010 documentary Gasland), so I won’t do anything that may put others in a position where their sinks double as grilles.”
But what if I don’t have to worry about flammable tap water, and/or will never be in a position where I have to worry about flammable tap water? It’s worrying about something completely foreign to me — as foreign as one’s neighbors on a suburban street often seem to the typical suburban resident. Even though the shared environment is there, anything to make that connection apparent to an observer isn’t. Call it the plight of the environmental middle class: comfortable enough to observe the problem, yet not endangered enough to care.
These observations bring me back to all the excitement Middlebury’s seen in the past months and the utter indifference I’ve felt towards all of it. I like the idea of divestment — I really, really do. But for whatever reason the dialogue’s tone always came off as unsettling; Schumann Distinguished Scholar-In-Residence Bill McKibben’s presentation at “Midd Does the Math” did, however, reassure me that divestment was something that could be talked about civilly and painted to me a somewhat better impression of the movement. I’m also tremendously excited that people are traveling to Washington, D.C. in the coming days to protest the pipeline. At the same time though, I feel no obligation or motivation to go down there myself and join them. All of these “buts” and “thoughs” only reify a feeling of lameness. I care, but I’m either too busy or too uninterested in the means to take part in certain parts of environmentalism. It’s hard, because I really, really want to be able to place equity in all the parts of environmentalism. There just seems to be some wall barring me from doing so.
This apparent staleness of environmentalism irritates me more than conventions of what constitutes tasteful published writing would allow me to articulate. If anything, I think it may shed light on some kind of necessity to think long and hard about what we want environmentalism to do not just in the world, but at home in our white and gray stone bubble. I’m not saying that environmentalism needs to please everyone, because dissonance, more than anything, may be the objective. What I am saying is the movement shouldn’t exclude. It shouldn’t alienate middle-class environmentalists. What environmentalism and activism need to do is remedy the fragmentation that’s occurred within them over the course of the past 20 or so years. Creating some kind of unified vision just may be worth the trouble.
(01/16/13 8:42pm)
Superstorm Sandy may be a bit of an afterthought now that both J-Term and winter in Vermont are well under way, but remnants of the catastrophic storm are still very much visible back home in New Jersey. Thankfully, my home and neighborhood managed to remain reasonably unscathed in the wake of the storm surge, as did much of northern New Jersey. However, coastal areas of the Jersey Shore and Long Island (Brooklyn and Queens included) along with Manhattan are still far from back to normal, and as NPR’s Pam Fessler reports, the relief aid flowing into the region teeters along the line between comprehensive and overwhelming. Donations of clothing and financial resources abound, but the reality brought before our eyes concerning the prospect of storms the magnitude of Sandy potentially becoming the norm begs the question of how long we can afford to continue putting bandages on the situation.
Though the lauded efforts brought forward provide welcome reminder that people are capable of being decent human beings every once in a while — see Governor Chris Christie’s uncharacteristic civility immediately following the storm — maybe the costs and damages faced by those affected by Sandy along with help of all who came to their aid may not have been necessary. While many argue that it was only a matter of time before Manhattan faced a disaster of this variety, evidence repetitively quoted by groups like 350.org points to the fact that in earlier decades storms like Sandy would have been an utter impossibility. Paired with our continued neglect to address issues of climate change, the present levels of long-lived greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are only going to increase the likelihood of more storms like Sandy and Irene before it, as well as necessitating Irene- and Sandy-scale relief efforts — more costs.
Economics refers to an externality as a cost or benefit not transmitted through price — in other terms, a failure of the market to accurately represent the cost of an action or choice. An externality, represented as marginal external cost, is the difference between the private and social prices associated with something; working within our Sandy example, let’s call it storm relief. Slate reports that the federal government is currently working out a proposal to bring roughly $50 billion in aid to New York and New Jersey. The New York Times last November estimated the cumulative damages faced by New York and New Jersey to be somewhere around $70 billion. So while Washington has thankfully committed to help mitigate some of the costs of storm relief, it still goes to show that, working on the assumption that Sandy’s magnitude was something affected by our own choices and behaviors — say, the consumption of fossil fuels — that $70 billion is a cost of that action that wasn’t included in the price of the choice that led to it. It was a price that occurred outside of the market.
Now I can’t say for sure that if people 20 years ago knew that disasters like Sandy would be the consequences of them filling up their tank of gas to get to work, they’d stop using gasoline. People will always need to get to work, but maybe someone who would eventually lose their house to a freak storm would rethink the cost of a gallon of gasoline; whether they’d still knowingly purchase it is another story. The crux of the matter is that the way we approach economic questions like these brings in the matter of how we value things — not just in the present, but in the future. If the cost of an action in the present won’t be returned or payed off in the future in terms of benefits, then the action won’t be carried out. Put another way, if the benefits of pollution abatement don’t exceed the cost of abatement in the present, then we’ll just keep polluting. The fact that it’s simple human tendency to value things in the present more highly than things in the future makes the situation exponentially more complicated.
How long can we ethically continue to neglect these issues of value? I can’t say. What I can say is that a disturbingly high number of families’ lives will probably never be the same, and that in itself may suggest that it’s time we consider just how many more storms we can realistically deal with. Sandy was an externality. Sandy was a market failure. Luckily, economics also tells us that we can fix externalities, and we still have the opportunity to reconsider where our ethics and values lie.
(11/29/12 12:06am)
I made the switch to Vibram FiveFingers and minimalist running footwear after pulling a hamstring last spring, and since making the change, I’ve had the longest stretch of injury-free running I’ve ever had. It was a relatively mild hamstring pull — something not terribly uncommon in runners — but still kept me off the pole vault runway for nearly two months. The worst part about the whole fiasco, aside from not being able to jump, was that no one was really able to tell me what caused it. After looking for ways to make my life of running and jumping somewhat more healthy, I eventually found myself thinking that maybe less really could be more.
What I found was that running injuries may not be an inherent risk associated with the activity, and may be more directly caused by the way we run. Research from Harvard’s Skeletal Biology Lab has supported the growing concern that modern running shoes, with thick cushioning and motion control technologies that allow us to run with a heel strike, have caused us to stray away from the way our bodies have evolved to run — on the middle or ball of the foot. Their findings illustrate that the legs are subjected to impact forces of up to three times the weight of the body upon heel strike, the same forces that commonly give rise to shin splints and stress fractures. Running with a forefoot strike, as is often used while running barefoot, results in experienced impact forces seven times less intense than what the legs are subjected to while heel striking because it utilizes the body’s natural shock-absorption systems of the foot arches and lower legs. Looking to Kenyan distance runners as exemplary, the Harvard researchers concluded that we don’t need a lot of shoe to stay healthy runners; that excess of shoe underneath us may be the cause of the problems.
The take-away here shouldn’t really be running-related (important note: it took me almost four months to transition to a barefoot running style; muscles and tendons need LOTS of time to adjust for the change). If anything, the study should prompt a reevaluation of how much we think we need. For the past 30 years, running companies have been telling us that we need more shoe, but the Harvard Lab’s research points to the contrary. In precisely the same way, the consumer culture we know and love maintains with an almost religious fervor that we never really have enough. There’s always another reason to go out and buy — and retailers would like to have us believe that the best means of maximizing utility is to work long hours to more stuff and support the economy, because that seventh storage unit sure won’t fill itself. But is more really better?
Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton, of the University of British Columbia and Harvard Business School, respectively, say no. Their research done on the intersection on wealth and happiness shows that greater material consumption seldom leads to increases in happiness. Researchers at Princeton have found that up until about $75,000, the average mood reported by American households did increase as income went up, but no trends were found beyond that point. Dunn and Norton also point out that research has shown that people in other countries all over the world gain greater satisfaction spending money on others than they do spending on themselves.
Rethinking how much we need to be happy could have serious implications on not just consumption, but the health of our communities and strength of our interpersonal bonds. If we’re less concerned with what extra we need to have, then we can expend more energy on what others need. If we use less energy personally, then what we have will go that much further before we hit some kind of crisis. The capacity to use more in no way predicates a necessity to use more. Nature has always managed to find its way getting along without excess.
In the aftermath of Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, The Sunday that Missed Out on the Naming Love and Cyber Monday, take a moment to ponder at what point it became acceptable to waste hours of our lives waiting in line to spend our livelihoods on things that probably won’t make us any better off. More often than not, less will probably feel better — I was convinced the first time I felt trail and Earth between my toes and underneath my soles.
(11/07/12 11:10pm)
It’s hard to believe that it’s been three weeks since His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama graced us with his presence and dropped enlightenment bombs like it was his job for two glorious days. With that said, this column may seem a bit dated, but hey, I needed to get that election column out the other week so you all could be good and educated before hitting the polls, and chances are that most of you haven’t completely forgotten about Tibet’s spiritual leader’s visit quite yet. Let’s take some time to revisit some of His Holiness’ more illuminating points, reflect on Buddhist teachings and talk about why “Educating the Heart” and “Cultivating Hope, Wisdom and Compassion” can play crucial roles in building our communities and preserving our planet.
For anyone unfamiliar, Buddhism is a rich and intricate religious tradition centered as much on philosophical inquiry and research as it is on teachings and practice. As His Holiness alluded to in his talk, much of Buddhist thought has been focused on closing the gap between our illusory perceptions and reality. As a result, Buddhism has provided insight in the areas of philosophy of the mind, psychology and the study of consciousness hundreds of years before modern mind science arrived at the same conclusions. And while His Holiness spared the audience from a longwinded discussion on Buddhism’s contributions to mind science, one product of Buddhist inquiry mentioned — and possibly one of the most important points made by the Dalai Lama in Nelson Arena — could hold particular importance in attempting to formulate an ethical case for environmentalism: the notion that there is no self, and that individuation is an illusion which must be overcome.
Now, that concept may have been a bit hard to swallow for most people in our society, and is enough to induce existential crises in those more philosophically inclined. It’s no mystery why our culture holds notions of the self and individual so near and dear; as Americans, we’re told not only that the highest end we can aspire to is personal success, but that even as a collective unit we’re inherently superior to every other group of people out there. American exceptionalism has proved exceptionally pervasive in our collective consciousness, and while I’m not trying to belittle all of the great things about the land of the free and home of the brave, it’s this precise kind of mentality that has facilitated the extent to which we view the way we treat the planet and other people as acceptable.
One of the effects of remedying this attachment to the thought of ourselves as separate from others is that the well-being of others gains a lot more value in the grand scheme of things. If we can reconcile the discrepancy in the way we value others in relation to ourselves, being concerned about community welfare — and goods and services shared by the community — becomes a whole lot easier. When greater equity is placed in the way others are affected by our actions, it gets somewhat harder to be alright with the costs of pollution and other kinds of environmental degradation to people who aren’t us — what economics calls externalities. And as His Holiness asserted during his talk, there’s even incentive to make this the case. We shouldn’t only be concerned for others’ well being as much as our own because it’s ethically appropriate; research has shown that the way our brains work, we even get satisfaction when helping others. So not only is there a case for not being mean to one another, there’s even a neurobiological case for being nice to one another. And in case anyone was wondering, the Dalai Lama has researched the biological sciences and psychology extensively.
So if there is anything to take from His Holiness’s visit to Midd, it’s that we need to be more trusting and open with everything outside of us — whether it’s our own self, our culture or our species. The world in which we live is shared, and we ought to start treating it as such. In the words of the His Holiness: “We are the generation that will shape the world to come.” Lets do so as a community.
As an aside, to all the people I heard after the talk claiming His Holiness does not “believe in climate change,” you’re wrong. During the student and faculty talk on Oct. 12, he acknowledged that the way nature’s cycles work is partially affected by our way of life. And when he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) forum on climate change on Oct. 15, he claimed that “all of humanity’s children will be affected by climate change,” and that a solution “will only come through compassion.”
(10/24/12 11:13pm)
Since roughly January, unless you’ve been trapped at the bottom of the sea in a mid-ocean ridge somewhere, spent no less than all of your time out in the backcountry or have failed to leave Bicentennial Hall (entirely possible), you’ve hopefully figured out that the number by which we refer to this year is divisible by four. But more importantly there’s one of those election things coming up — the general election. And you know what that means: time for roadside signs to start multiplying like invasive species. On a more serious note, we vote for local, state and Congressional offices, along with that other one, the office of the president. Granted that the first two digits of 2012 are 2 and 0, respectively, and not, say, 1 and 4, or 0 and 8, or even 1 and 9, the environment should be a hot issue. But for some reason, even though we’re in the midst of a 21st century election, it isn’t.
During this election, oddly enough, the most surprising thing about either candidate’s position on the environment is that we haven’t really heard much about it. Four years ago, President of the United States Barack Obama told us he’d heal the planet. Governor Mitt Romney made a joke or two about those comments at the Republican National Convention, and mentions now and then that as soon as he steps into office, he’ll do away with the Environmental Protection Agency. Though there were some allusions made by the President during his speech at the Democratic National Committee to the seriousness of climate change and a plan to reduce carbon pollution, there’s been little talk of either since. The fact of the matter is that neither candidate has outlined a concrete plan for how he will tackle the issues facing our country.
Unfortunately, the environment right now is a non-issue. Yet things like energy independence, natural gas and drilling for oil are. Some people (myself included) would argue that these topics are, to the contrary, some of the most important issues in the environmental dialogue today, though they haven’t been perceived that way by the public. Both candidates, if elected, will probably approve construction of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada, and most people couldn’t care less about where our oil comes from or how much of it is left in the ground, so long as it’s cheap. Actually arguing publicly that oil prices now are far below market value and that maybe we should be using less petroleum after all would be nothing short of political suicide. So why aren’t presidential debates flooded with questions about managing the national parks and wilderness areas, creating a sustainable energy future or cap and trade programs for carbon emissions? A look at why the country hasn’t made any significant environmental developments in the last 20 years may shed some light on the topic and requires going beyond presidential politics.
Annual studies conducted by the League of Conservation Voters for the last 30 years have tracked voting records in the House and Senate on environmental issues and illustrate just how deep into gridlock we are. Over almost four decades, statistics have shown that both parties have become even more polarized in either direction, with bipartisan support on environmental issues becoming less and less common. The environmental legislation passed in the latter half of the previous century was largely the product of bipartisan cooperation. So, where did it go? Other studies have shown that the overwhelming majority of Americans like the environment and would be reasonably bitter if something awful happened to it. The sad truth is that these attitudes often fail to materialize as points of action and usually play second fiddle to hotter topics like job creation, tax policy and national security.
I’m not trying to downplay any of those aforementioned issues, but that environmental topics have gotten so little significant attention from either candidate is downright silly. Further, the New York Times has fact-checked Romney’s claim of cutting back the environmental regulatory structure in place and concluded that doing so is a pipe-dream at best. If there’s one thing that should ignite political interest in voters about the environment, it is that nature is a shared commodity. I’d hate to think that the only way for it to become salient as an issue is some kind of catastrophe, but the trends displayed don’t prove promising. To say that I’m less than enthused about the candidates’ showing on the issue would be an understatement. But, if there’s any way of making our own opinions heard, it’s out at the polls on Election Day.