Homeland Health: How Environmentalism Can Regain Lost Ground
Freyfogle, Eric T.
0NE LESSON THAT stands out from the 2004 elections is that the environmentalist stance is due for an overhaul. Few voters treated the environment as a decisive issue. John Kerry and other...
...A good way to deflect anecdotes is to bring back the missing characters—the neighbors, the people downwind, and so on...
...it is license...
...Yes, liberty is also essential, but what Americans have always valued is the liberty to live responsible lives...
...To regain the moral ground, the environmental cause might also make effective use of the expression "pro-life...
...TO TURN MATTERS around, environmental advocates need to work both on their offense and their defense...
...Once upon a time the two terms were used interchangeably...
...It is about protecting life, caring for Creation, and investing in America's future in ways that yield big dividends...
...It is also misanthropic, caring about nature more than people...
...In truth, declining stocks of many natural resources (metals, for instance) really don't pose direct environmental problems...
...New York has learned that it's far cheaper to protect watersheds in the Catskills than to treat drinking water once it's polluted...
...People are confused about what the cause seeks to accomplish and about the resulting costs...
...Environmental laws protect the downstream landowner from being flooded out when upstream owners drain their wetlands...
...That may be so...
...What is less clear and more damaging are the fights over who is required to present proof, what the burden of proof ought to be, and what qualifies as evidence...
...What about the thousands of Americans who die annually from air pollution emitted by power plants...
...Indeed, declining oil supplies can be a positive development ecologically...
...The environment needs to regain its status as a moral issue, as a question of right and wrong, tied to religion, distinctly pro-life, and linked to the welfare of generations to come...
...John Kerry and other proenvironment candidates had little or nothing to say about it, presumably for fear that strong comments could cost votes...
...Yes, private property is an essential element of American society, but surely we can insist that landowners act responsibly...
...If half of all adults can deny evolution, why not also deny the possibility of global climate change or resource shortages...
...Opponents are skilled in producing studies that appear to challenge nearly every factual claim...
...Compact communities with their lower infrastructure and transportation costs are similarly big savers...
...It is between conservation burdens imposed on landowners, who largely cause the problems, and monetary burdens imposed instead on taxpayers, who usually have nothing to do with the harms...
...Most troubling of all, on this issue of contested facts and burdens of proof, is the subtle move by the Christian right to encourage Christian voters to ignore science altogether on planetary issues...
...To stop one landowner from draining his wetland is to protect another landowner against flooding...
...As recently as the late 1980s, Democrats received ratings in the 65 percent to 70 percent range from the League of Conservation Voters...
...Industry estimated in 1990 that it would cost $14.8 billion per year to comply with new pollution standards for volatile organic compounds emitted by stationary pollution sources...
...The land as a fertile, ecological system is on the decline, and it is taking many life forms and human options along with it...
...But just as much credit (or blame) belongs to the environmental movement itself, which is fragmented, incoherent, and disinclined or unable to defend itself against opposing claims...
...Conservation ought to be voluntary, opponents claim, not coercive...
...But the cacophony inside the tent comes at high cost...
...Post hoc cost-benefit assessments of environmental regulations (excluding occupational safety standards, which pose different issues) routinely show economic benefits that exceed total costs...
...Critics assert that the cause is elitist, especially when it protects playgrounds and scenic vistas for the rich...
...The stance sounds sensible...
...The cause ought to enlist support from across the political spectrum...
...shouldn't we show respect for them...
...On questions about the means, the wise approach is to endorse pragmatism and support any tool that works, including market-based measures...
...Do we ignore serious problems just because they are only 80 percent likely, or 50 percent, or even 20 percent...
...So, too, do all other forms of life, from the soaring eagles and lumbering grizzlies to the flittering butterflies and thrashing salmon...
...Evidence supporting these claims is exceptionally weak, and the environmental cause needs to take the offensive on this point...
...Americans respond favorably to the call to base public policies on good science...
...It is about conservative living...
...Finally, HOMELAND HEALTH there are the recurring complaints that environmental measures are costly because they interfere with private property rights, undercut individual liberty, and are otherwise inconsistent with core American values...
...Others are not so obvious yet do just as much harm...
...Things need to change, and that can happen only if environmental leaders get together, take stock of where they are, develop common stances and rhetoric, and then work together to present shared messages...
...THE ENVIRONMENTAL cause needs to do a better job of dealing with the opposition's claims...
...Many green groups know this and use the e-word less often, if at all...
...They protect the rural dweller from having her home rendered unlivable due to the stench of a nearby hog operation...
...Fifteen years ago the first President Bush matter-of-factly declared himself an environmentalist...
...There's plenty of evidence to make us take environmental worries seriously...
...For most dwindling resources, the market is likely to find reasonable substitutes...
...And that's just the way to talk about it...
...In the case of property rights, the voluntary approach protects landowners who assert the right to misuse their lands (often harming their landowning neighbors...
...They should talk about the land as an integrated, ecologically functioning system, rather than straining to translate every environmental ill to the individual level...
...Nor do we base decisions only on data gathered in the course of scientific studies...
...Instead of talking negatively about risk and danger, they should speak positively about health...
...An environmental message focused on health, for land and for people, has obvious moral overtones...
...It has no organized way to counter widespread charges and to talk about economics, liberty, and private property...
...The problem with the term is that many audiences link it to by-now familiar complaints about the cause...
...by 2000, actual costs were estimated at from $1 to $2 billion per year, with benefits being perhaps ten times higher...
...It will not, on its own, produce landscapes that are healthy and pleasing for people, ecologically, aesthetically, and ethically...
...Republican ratings hovered near 35 percent...
...It is better viewed as a communitarian perspective in that it promotes the healthy, long-term functioning of communities as a whole, nature included...
...Environmentalists need to address these matters head on—without hiding behind posters of wolves, caribou, and puffing smokestacks...
...Since then Democratic ratings have risen above 75 percent...
...In recent decades, congressional Democrats have consistently compiled stronger environmental voting records than Republicans...
...If God could create the Earth in a week, giving it to humans to tend, surely God can save the Earth from any catastrophe (or save the faithful, at least...
...Utility industry estimates in 1989 placed the costs of the Clean Air Act's then-new sulfur dioxide program at between $4.1 and $7.4 billion per year...
...It also makes sense to avoid openly fretting about looming shortages of natural resources— the other familiar way of talking 50 n DISSENT / Summer 2005 about environmental ills...
...They worry also about the effects that environmental rules will have on liberty, private property, and the nation's ability to compete internationally...
...They need to rethink what they are about, what they are trying to accomplish, and the values and principles they hold high...
...Environmentalism is about land health...
...Among the terms opponents have deployed in efforts against environmentalists is the term "voluntary...
...and between 1933 and 1956, while vigorously promoting nature conservation, general manager of United Potash Company...
...It's about showing compassion and concern— for neighbors, for one's community, for children and future generations, for other life HOMELAND HEALTH forms, and for Creation as a whole...
...Meanwhile, political candidates have no good ways to discuss the environment because there are no messages, already familiar to voters, that they can weave into their speeches...
...Among communitarian causes, environmentalism stands out because it defines the relevant community to include other life forms, future generations, and even the geophysical Earth itself, linked in webs of interdependence...
...Doesn't a pro-life position logically include clean air and clean water...
...Voters must find homeland health just as compelling as homeland security...
...Job losses in one place are often offset by job gains elsewhere...
...Environmental protection is about promoting the health and prosperity of the entire land community...
...So do the downward fates of many wild species...
...the advent of the desired end times...
...Some of the claims are obvious...
...More politically significant is the drop in Republican support, which has come chiefly because the party's economic libertarians have defined the party's stance, not its social conservatives...
...The anecdotes don't talk about neighbors and other nearby residents, who have their own property rights and who might well be harmed by what the hapless landowners want to do...
...Communities along the Mississippi River have learned that it's cheaper to protect wetlands upstream than it is to build levees and berms to protect against flooding...
...It is positive rhetoric, phrased in terms of science, economics, liberty, private property, and prosperity...
...the actual costs as of 2000 were pegged at about $960 million...
...The same pragmatic approach should govern our interactions with nature...
...In the meantime, they make the task of the true reformers harder, undercutting the work of those who realize that American culture is defective and that business as usual in the land-use game will gradually pull down all lands everywhere...
...Let's start with the negative connotations that opponents have attached to the terms "environment" and "environmentalism...
...for example, that environmental protections undercut property rights...
...This is where the shift has occurred, and it is where the counterattack should aim...
...The better strategy is to focus on basic values and on DISSENT / Summer 2005 n 51 HOMELAND HEALTH the elements of practical wisdom...
...Opponents also learned how to capitalize on America's respect for science...
...Environmental protection is a kind of social insurance policy...
...No environmental author stands higher among today's faithful than Wendell Berry of Kentucky, whose morally charged writings reiterate conservative themes of the New Humanists and Southern Agrarians of the 1930s...
...Along with health, environmentalism is first and foremost about living responsibly...
...The opposite of responsibility is not freedom...
...Environmentalism is widely deemed a lib48 n DISSENT / Summer 2005 eral cause...
...The label is apt in the sense of affirming a willingness to use government to promote the common good, but not in the classic sense of liberalism as a move to liberate individuals from limitations on the pursuit of selfinterest...
...Another reason to avoid talk about means is that debates quickly bog down in nasty factual disputes...
...They are conservation groups, stewardship alliances, or groups that promote wildlife or sustainable agriculture...
...It is about acting cautiously in the face of dangers, looking out for our grandchildren, and preserving the simple joys of living in nature...
...They call upon owners to abide by the age-old principle of doing no harm, the bedrock rule of owning and using land...
...When talking about overall aims, environmental supporters ought to refer routinely to the welfare of the entire community of life, humans included...
...Environmental problems are more complicated than they used to appear to DISSENT / Summer 2005 n 4c9 HOMELAND HEALTH be...
...According to a 2002 Office of Management and Budget report, the estimated range of annual costs associated with all major federal environmental regulations had a mid-point of $162 billion...
...Republican HOMELAND HEALTH ratings have fallen to approximately 13 percent...
...In January 2005, an Environmental Protection Agency—commissioned report by a Harvard scientist, peer reviewed by EPA staff, calculated the benefits that would come by strictly reducing mercury emissions from power plants (largely a matter of enforcing current law...
...voluntary conservation shows proper respect for individualism and private property rights...
...The rhetoric used by opponents is not overtly anti-environmental...
...In any event, to talk about nature as a warehouse of resources (as the resource-shortage argument does) clashes with the more integrated, ecological view of nature that needs to stay front and center in all environmental rhetoric...
...Just as damaging for the environmental cause as these science traps are the frequent claims that environmental protection is simply too expensive or that it undercuts America's competitiveness...
...It is about the healthy functioning of the land as a whole, as an integrated natural system that includes people...
...DISSENT / Summer 2005 • 53...
...Voluntary action is more virtuous...
...Environmentalism grew out of the landconservation cause, which was led during the middle decades of the last century chiefly by businesspeople...
...Our ways of living in nature need correcting, before problems get even worse...
...It is this integrated organic system that needs to stay healthy if humans are going to prosper...
...What makes them nervous are the means used to achieve the goals—the regulations, land-use planning, permit systems, and restrictions on property rights...
...So too would other rhetorical tools...
...It promotes care for the Earth for future generations...
...It upholds the quality of life of people living today...
...personal friend of Herbert Hoover...
...Today, few Republicans and many Democrats would accept the label only with qualifications, if at all...
...Nature's functioning isn't declining ecologically just because we are using up supplies of copper or iron ore...
...Who knows, environmental destruction might foretell a looming day of judgment...
...Typical of them was Republican Horace Albright—zealous advocate for National Parks from 1914 until the early 1960s...
...The cause needs to stress new themes: the health of the land community as a whole, protecting life and creation, and investing in America's future in ways that yield big dividends...
...Too often groups work at cross purposes, with land trusts and some of the biggest organizations content to work within the system, challenging nobody and asking only for enough money to buy some pieces of land here and there...
...Future generations will inhabit the same lands one day...
...When the EPA two months later publicly announced why it rejected the strict guidelines, it ignored the Harvard study and set the estimated benefit level 99 percent lower...
...In the case of the environment, the message should be the same...
...We can learn here from current discussions about Social Security and Medicare...
...But they are hugely important...
...Only in the case of disputes over specific forms of contamination (such as mercury emissions from power plants) is it wise to reduce matters to the level of direct health threats to individuals...
...Terminology aside, the starting point in the rebuilding effort is to realize that voters continue to support environmental goals, and by wide margins...
...Opponents of environmentalism have learned key lessons since the early 1960s, when they unleashed a furious assault against Rachel Carson...
...The list goes on...
...There are hapless landowners who simply want to use their lands in ordinary ways and are told they cannot...
...The real dichotomy is not between voluntary and coercive conservation...
...Everyone sees that environmentalists and their opponents wrangle about facts...
...Regulatory measures trample on private property rights and infringe upon individual liberties...
...The environmental cause needs to steer clear of litigating facts in the public arena, because the public won't pay attention...
...the estimated range 52 n DISSENT / Summer 2005 of annual benefits had a mid-point of $999 billion...
...If well constructed and linked to core American values, a green message about caring for land and life ought to appeal to old-style conservatives who place morality and community above the capitalist market...
...Substantial credit for this anti-green shift goes to the capable and well-funded environmental opposition, which has been aided by journalists unwilling or unable to navigate polemical minefields...
...is easily attacked with anecdotal stories (didn't we worry 150 years ago about running out of whale oil...
...We need to be candid: environmental laws do produce losers as well as winners...
...and unwisely questions America's ingenuity...
...Countless citizens enjoy fishing, hunting, swimming, and watching birds...
...Opponents only need to sow seeds of doubt...
...There's no need to abandon the term "environmentalism," but the cause needs new terms and strategies to confront its adversaries...
...Advocates need to focus on the overall ends of environmental policy and on the basic values at stake, not the means...
...What needs saying is that to make conservation voluntary is to defend irresponsible conduct...
...These programs don't face immediate crises and yet the public is worried about them...
...Although environmental leaders may talk about an individual right to a healthy environment, the central strand of environmental thought focuses on nature and how humans ought to live in it...
...Here again, the environmental cause needs to respond...
...The more the discussion centers on values and overall goals, the more effective the message will be...
...It's up to the environmental side to prove its case...
...The rise in Democratic support has mostly come because legislative votes have dealt with measures to curtail environmental programs, not extend them...
...After all, didn't God provide for the Israelites in the desert when their natural resources ran out...
...But this is simply economic dislocation, of the type that the market produces every day (and trivial in comparison to decisions by corporations to move factories overseas...
...When it comes to oil—which is harmful both in extraction and use—our chief environmental worry is not that we are running out, it is that we are not running out fast enough...
...Real people lose jobs, and real companies incur net costs...
...And as the research proceeds, nothing changes...
...ERIC T. FREYFOGLE'S most recent book is The Land We Share: Private Property and the Common Good...
...The main defense, though, is this: environmental laws protect responsible, conservative landowner activities...
...A growing number of them are land trusts, which steer as far from the e-word as they can...
...Many environmental professionals exalt this diversity: conservation is a big tent, they announce, with room enough for rich and poor, urban and rural, black and white...
...Beyond that, such talk needlessly challenges America's faith in the market...
...They also call upon landowners to do their fair, reasonable shares in upholding the healthy functioning of their home landscapes...
...When the missing characters and their interests are also considered, environmental laws are more likely to promote property rights and individual liberty than to undercut them...
...The true misanthropes are those who pollute our air and drinking water, not those trying to keep it clean...
...It is to shield landowners and polluters who want to keep causing harm and don't like being told to stop...
...In all likelihood, Democratic support for environmentalism has softened...
...In fact, environmental controls bring economic gains rather than net costs...
...The issues seem mundane if not technical...
...Global climate change supplies a clear example of this decline...
...He teaches at the University of Illinois law school and is president of Prairie Rivers Network...
...And what forms of recreation could be cheaper and less elitist than camping, fishing, hunting, and simply enjoying the beauties of nature...
...Critics know this, which is why they swing hard at the means, attacking them ceaselessly as expensive, intrusive, and un-American...
...for example, that farm chemical runoff is a major cause of Gulf hypoxia or that biologically engineered crops pose genetic threats...
...Means are unimportant so long as they work and operate fairly, for citizens, landowners, and taxpayers...
...SINCE IT BEGAN in the 1920s and 1930s, the organized conservation movement has been characterized by countless organizations with varied aims and methods...
...New messages, carefully phrased and consistently repeated, could push voters to see the link between environmental disputes and responsible living...
...What sense does it make, though, to ignore a problem or danger simply because we can't prove scientifically that it is taking place...
...The environmental cause has developed virtually no response to this stance...
...Both systems are slowly failing, or so it is said...
...Environmental advocates might similarly employ the term "conservative" to remind audiences of its verbal link to conservation...
...WHEN WE GET beyond pollution-related squabbles, where the cost-benefit facts are the most confusing, the economic benefits of conservation become undeniable...
...To do that while calling for more research is to take a stance more reasonable and appealing than direct opposition...
...AS FOR GOALS, it makes sense for environmentalists to avoid the imminenthealththreat line of argument...
...The late Richard Weaver, conservative icon and author of the postwar classic Ideas Have Consequences, could comfortably fit within today's land-conservation cause...
...The environmental cause seeks to secure healthy lands and healthy people...
...What the market cannot and will not do is keep the land healthy in an ecological sense...
...Opponents typically present allegations about invaded property rights in anecdotal form...
...These used to be words with strong positive associations...
...gives the whole cause an unnecessarily negative cast...
...It is a positive word, resonant of liberty, linked to the American Way, and useful both in resisting regulations and justifying cash payments to landowners who refrain from harmful development...
...Environmentalism promotes human health, but has little to do directly with personal autonomy...
...Consistently and firmly used the message could help the environmental effort gain moral ground...
...Most of all it is about good citizenship, responsible living, and following the moral high path...
...Our chief worry, in short, is neither about resource shortages nor direct health threats to people living today, important as they are...
...Few audiences have the attention span to wade through the competing allegations...
...We don't insist on scientific proof in international affairs or in everyday life...
...It's hard to gauge the political effect of books such as the best-selling Left Behind series, but a literal embrace of their fantastic arguments could lead a person to ignore even well-grounded warnings of disaster...
...States with the toughest environmental standards typically have the highest wage rates...
...We see the approach used effectively on global climate change, for instance, and on issues about endangered species and toxic emissions...
...It's about avoiding unsafe conditions and needless risks...
...How do their liberties fit into the story...
...The cause costs jobs and undercuts business competitiveness...
...Environmentalists can turn things around if they can rethink their priorities and craft more coherent, consistent, morally compelling ways of addressing our environmental plight...
...Environmentalism is about using land conservatively...
...now they are ambiguous at best...
...The confusion on cost issues arises mostly because critics have done such a good job of narrowing inquiries so as to overlook or discount most economic gains...
...Rhetoric about responsible living has particular value in responding to the recurring criticisms...
...Republican leaders portray the environment as an issue relating to free enterprise and American competitiveness, not to morality and responsible living...
...Most of all, the movement needs to talk consistently and forcefully about good citizenship, future generations, and the morality of living responsibly...
...Just as important, they need to identify why voters are so worried and why the cause has stumbled...
...Only within the past decade or so, though, has this voting gap become a chasm...
...They could be again...
...Energy conservation can produce big savings compared with the costs of higher energy generation...
...We depend on the healthy functioning of this interconnected land and so will our grandchildren and their descendants...
...The conservation effort needs to take the initiative, on issues of economics, liberty, private property, and others...
...Morality needs to be part of our message, and so does an ecological understanding of the human predicament...
...sometime head of the National Park Service...
...They learned, first, that they don't have to win the scientific debates about environmental decline...
...Lacking cohesion, the movement has few or no acknowledged spokespeople...
...On top of the not-so-obvious list is a set of issues having to do with the factual and scientific groundings of environmental claims...
...The term requires careful handling, to be sure, yet its possibilities are alluring...
...Economic libertarians are unlikely to warm to the issue, but social conservatives could certainly do so...
...Conservation saves...
...Meanwhile, few people recognize how much it favors the environmental opposition, given that scientific "proof" requires far more than the courtroom, preponderance-of-the-evidence standard (it is often pegged at the 95 percent confidence level...
Vol. 52 • July 2005 • No. 3
