The Ethics of the Environment
I am starting to write a series of entries telling people what to do (carbon tax, stop using bottled water) to protect the environment, and why it should be done (why as far as the physical, chemical, and biological effects that various actions have; global warming, plastic particles in wild animals on the bottom of the ocean). Before I address what and why, however, I would like to describe how to think about deciding what to do about our actions affecting the environment.
There is a whole body of various environmental derived theories of spirituality and ethics, but I'm not going to write about those. They mostly extend the ideas of rights or inherent value from just humans to other sentient beings or just to all of life, or even to landscapes as they existed before humans. The problem with these sorts of theories is that they tend to blow up a big beautiful romantic bubble of idealism that is popped the first time someone gets a roach infestation. It's fine to try regard all life as being equally deserving of legal rights as ourselves, but for many people that perspective is distant from why we should bend over and pick up some trash or stand up and turn off a light.
The environment is an example of a commonly held property, where anyone benefits by hurting the property, but where all suffer if everyone harms the property. Once I own a car, it is both quicker and cheaper for me to drive than to use mass transit. But if everyone keeps driving more and more, the atmosphere will be so full of carbon dioxide and the roads full of empty cars that we are all harmed. But even if I can just convince everyone else to stop driving, my own driving is still cheaper and quicker than public transit for me.
This is a class of decisions called the "Prisoner's Dilemma" There is an interesting article on some current research on this in the May 2007 Scientific American. It is quite a puzzle to economists why people choose actions that are personally disoptimal but optimal if the whole group chooses the same way.
The missing ingredient here is that people aren't that different, and we know that we aren't that different, and therefore we use a rule of thumb for deciding between A and B, "Do I want to live in a world where everyone chooses A or where everyone chooses B." Obviously, people don't use this principal all the time, but the experiments described in the links show pretty conclusively that people are using it, and I think that this principal of reasoning is crucial to the changes we need to make to fit everyone on the globe in the upcoming decades without massive social breakdown and without totally ruining the environment (being humans, we have already missed the window on not messing up the environment; that alternate history of maxing out at 3 billion humans and launching the first star ships in the year 1990 is not the kind of species we are; we wait until the precipice of disaster before changing our behavior).
I think that thinking about things, "Do I want to live in the world with everyone doing A or doing B?" is a pattern of decision making that we can teach and spread. Do I want a lot of trash in these woods? No. So I'll pick up the trash I see. Do I want yummy, tasty tuna to become extinct? No, so I won't eat it until it is being harvested in a sustainable fashion. Assuming everyone else makes the same choices, I'll walk through litter-free paths and my grandkids will get to enjoy tuna. And having that assumption while I'm deciding will make my decisions better.
The moment of choice is a somewhat mysterious thing to science. Choices are somehow not quite in the realm of modern physical theories. There's not really a water-tight definition of what a choice is, and we are all aware of the chain of cause and effect that go into our habitual choices. "I feel lonely when I'm the only person in a house, and so I feel better when I turn all the lights on." "I don't want to use these scuffed shoes, ... those jerks in junior high school...." So when we are making a choice, we are aware both of our limitations and our freedom. In this we share the same experience as all people making a choice, so it seems quite reasonable to make a part of our decisions that we are deciding for everyone. We aren't deciding for everyone, but we are a part of everyone, and we are deciding our part. Given that people do decide this way anyways, I think that it is time to make this perspective part of our toolkit for reasoning about choices.
What do you think?
Comments
I think you should stop using words like "disoptimal". They're not optimal.
Posted by: Greg | July 15, 2007 05:17 PM
But I also think this is a good undertaking, Chris, so thanks.
Posted by: Greg | July 15, 2007 06:08 PM
Chris, your point about choices is always running through my head on some level. Sometimes I think that the best thing I could do for the environment and the future of the human race is to simply cease to be. But I there's too much survivalist instinct in my brain to go that route. And even that choice reveals the limitation of individual action. Can my sole sacrifice stave off the extinction of the human race and possibly of most mammals?
I could retreat into a wilderness area, live off the grid, emit only as much carbon as is required for cooking. Yet I doubt that the earth can sustain all of us doing that. Surely there are potential environmental benefits to the fact that we organize into societies.
I envision a society in which we use our own locomotion (foot or bike) for most of our travel. Most of our food is grown close to us, using sustainable agricultural techniques. Wind and sun power account for much, if not all of our electrical needs. Work is accomplished close to home either through telecommuting or work nodes--eliminating the hour or two-hour or four-hour commutes that many people take into urban centers like Washington, DC. We all garden on whatever land we have around us. We all keep careful watch on resources. Post-consumer waste is minimized.
Does this sound like a bad world to live in? So what is the problem with achieving it?
The biggest hurdle, I believe, is our psychological grasp on convenience and novelty.
An example from my life: My daughter never seemed to get up in time to catch the bus, so it became a routine for me to drive her to school each day, despite the fact that school is only one mile away, and my work is only 1/2 mile. Thus, my habit for the past seven years has been to drive my daughter to school and then drive to the office. I can scold people for the CO2 they emit because of their choice to live in Frederick and work in DC. But I can't even be bothered to walk 1/2 mile to work or demand that my daughter either ride the bus or walk. The car is too much of a convenience.
This summer, I have made the choice to make my bike my primary vehicle, and I notice that I gain much more through that choice than I ever got from the convenience of the car. I arrive at work feeling more alert, healthier. And I get a closer look at like around me as I travel the streets on bike or on foot. It reminds me of when I lived in Italy when I was in my 20s and biked dozens of miles a day. I feel like a detoxed crack addict, wondering why I ever chose to abandon the clean life.
Yet, I still have the monkey on my back. I tell my wife that I'm going to bike to the store for Kitty Litter, she talks me into taking the car. I visit a relative in Bethesda--by car. And my very employment requires a tremendous burning of resources, output of CO2. Shaking off the conveniences of this modern life is no easy feat, but I agree that we each need to consciously figure and re-figure our choices.
Good topic, Chris
Posted by: Eric Bond | July 28, 2007 06:43 PM