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Implicit and explicit ethical norms in the environmental policy arena1
Ecological Economics 24 (1998) 299 – 309
Implicit and explicit ethical norms in the environmental policy arena1 Uno Svedin Swedish Council for Planning and Coordination of Research (FRN), Box 7101, S-103 87 Stockholm, Sweden
Abstract The environmental agenda, as it has developed over the last few decades, provides a long list of issues, most of which contain a high degree of normative components. These in turn connect to a broad area of cultural and ethical considerations which are not only related to specifically environmental topics. As the need grows for operationalization of international general environmental agreements, like the Rio-conventions, the implicit tensions in the documents will come to light. A careful understanding of the relations between the environmental policy discourse, its normative content and its cultural and ethical contextual embedding will thus, increasingly be needed. This paper examines the character of this explicit and implicit normative content. © 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. Keywords: Environmental ethics; Cultural context; Values; Environmental perception; Western rationality
1. Introduction The normative dimension in the environmental discourse has many facets. It pertains not only to the basic philosophical questions of the man – nature relationship, but also to more operational domains of thought, e.g. about equity and fairness and about societal changes or the role of technology. In order to understand the future options in environmental policy design, this normative content and its implicit roots have to be faced clearly. 1
Contribution to the SCASSS International Conference on ‘Ethics, Economics and Environmental Management,’ Friiberghs Herrga˚rd, August 25–27, 1995.
The ethics discourse is not only related to the level of private decisions on environmental issues, as is the case in various life style-oriented approaches about choices at the individual level. It also includes the broader realm of positions taken with regard to societally aggregated decision making. All decisions have ethical aspects, although the forms and degrees may differ. In the following, I want to discuss different forms in which the normative element appears in the environmental discourse. Some values could be judged to be of greater importance and to be more integrated parts of basic world views. I will refer to these as ethical considerations within the wider framework of values.
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The intention is to demonstrate the variety of normative implications connected to the environmental agenda and thus to point at areas of tension and degrees of conflict when contemplating environmental policy options.
2. The widened realm of environmental normative concern The environmental discourse has developed since the first UN Conference on the Environment in Stockholm in 1972. We face today large globally connected issues like those framed in UN international conventions on global climate change and on biodiversity, but also in packages of agreements pertaining to desertification, hazardous waste issues, dumping at sea or regional transboundary air pollution. Also, at the conceptual level, much work has been done during the last decades. The present framework—encoded in the declarations at the UN Rio UNCED Conference on Environment and Development — codifies much of the ‘sustainable development’ concept adopted by the Brundtland Commission in ‘Our Common Future’. (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987) The most important point here is the connection between ‘environmental’ topics, as such, and those concerning ‘development’. This includes the idea that concern for the environment is not necessarily in conflict with development, but rather is a precondition for an extended period of ‘growth’ in its traditional form as well. New lines of thought about the content and goals of that development have also been extensively suggested during the last few years. (Aniansson and Svedin, 1990; Svedin, 1992a; Sjo¨stedt et al., 1993). Increasingly, the links between the more specific ‘environmental’ concerns and developmental and economic goals have been stressed. (Gore, 1992). One example is the 1994 high level ‘White Paper’ of the European Community where the employment issue has been explicitly connected to the environmental discourse. Another example is the step by step process in the international trade domain, where the ques-
tions about environmental conditionalities are raised, although not yet fully elaborated. Still another environmentally related policy domain, where the normative dimension is evident, concerns the new and widened perspective on national and international security, earlier seen to be exclusively the realm of the military and economic strategic establishments. (Bjo¨rkbom and Svedin, 1991; Bengtsson et al., 1994). This broadening of the connected agendas widens the scope of the normative connotations as value elements from one area connect to other value elements in other domains. Within the new wide realm of problems, e.g. about distribution of vulnerabilities at individual, household and local community levels, as well as at a broader societal level, many equity-oriented issues come to the forefront. (Svedin, 1992b). Several aspects of the sustainability goal, as the equity dimension, the insistence on participatory modes of political processes, power distribution in a North–South perspective, the intergenerational aspects and the ‘development aspect’ in general, all contain strong normative elements.
3. The normative/ethical element at different levels Given these developments, a reasonable question is how the normative issues present themselves and in which way especially ethical considerations come to bear on the environmental policy domain. Already the selection of issues in a discourse, as well as the choice of the scope of connected problems which are included, have normative connotations. To this should be added the choice of theoretical framework and the repertoire of causalities to be considered and their possible connections, all of which express the features of the analysis. Since environmental phenomena are often induced or triggered by humans, normative aspects are inevitably included. If territorial planning has led to the establishment of ‘risky’ new human habitats around rivers and then exceptional weather conditions enhance seasonal floods, such
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phenomena otherwise considered to be rather ‘natural’, are normatively conditioned, as are other phenomena due to the enhancement of extreme events as outcomes of climate change induced by greenhouse gas emissions. Using the perspective of the Brundtland Commission, according to which both technology and social organization can be improved, it could be argued that already the idea of ‘improvement’ indicates a view on directions as well as some sort of judgement about potential feedbacks and repercussions. Who is to be favoured and who is to carry burdens in such schemes of changes — and on which normative grounds? These discourses pertain to all levels of decisions: intergovernmental (as the EU), governmental, or local, down to the level of individual actors. They also relate to different types of actors, e.g. the public sector, the business community or NGO groups. One of the clearest cases, where normative considerations are at work at all these levels, is the environment-population-development nexus. National governments may develop policy packages in this domain and may even negotiate them, e.g. as was done at the Cairo UN Conference 1994. But equally important are the decisions made every day by individuals all over the world on how to relate their personal practices to individually perceived sets of goals. (Lindahl and Landberg, 1994). On the other hand, issues about changing behaviour in an environmentally less problematic direction cannot be treated entirely as problems of personal life style which is decided upon only at the level of the individual. There are other decisions made within the life style domain which are aggregate in nature, which still have distinctly ethical aspects. The ethical aspects pertain as well to choices about societal structures made by humans in their roles as decision makers. Thus, easily made distinctions between issues seen to relate to specific levels or between on the one hand ‘ethical’ and on the other hand ‘operational’, ‘economically rational’ or ‘technical’ issues, should be avoided.
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4. Aspects of ethical considerations in the environmental policy field There is a broad spectrum of ways in which ethical concerns appear, from the most basic philosophical concerns to concrete policy choices.
4.1. Basic philosophical issues At this level, the issues concern the posture human beings should take with regard to the rest of creation. Are there intrinsic ‘bio-centric’ oriented rights for animals, bacteria, or plants (‘do trees have a standing’?) or are rights only those bestowed by humans on these other forms of existence for the sake of humans? (Jonas, 1979; Rolston, 1986; Meyer-Abich, 1989; Eckersley, 1992). In this latter case, rights allocated to the biological world at large could be seen as an outflow of the, in the best case enlightened, selfinterest of humans, emphasizing a long-term availability of existence forms for future potential use or services as essential for humankind (Dubos, 1980). This question is not the same as asking if rights only can be formulated through humans. You have to distinguish between an anthropocentric view about who is at the centre of the normative concern and a view about the medium (in this case a human being) through which such values are formulated and channelled.
4.2. The en6ironment-de6elopment linkage As has been stressed earlier, the connection between the ‘environmental’ issues and ‘development’ issues is not trivial. Which aspects should be seen to be related? How should causality relations be traced, not the least with regard to changing historical and cultural contexts? An illustrative case concerns the handling of the pathways of drought impacts on society. (Parry, 1986). In which way should the relevant phenomena be selected, e.g. those related to the natural domain of the drought itself and the causal paths leading up to it, but also the societal mechanisms connected to the increase or decrease of vulnerabilities before the event has occured, as well as
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through the provision of compensating means when the drought is a fact. The way in which the analytical systems boundary is deliberately set is part of this domain of concern. To conduct an analysis of issues pertaining, for example, to the Baltic region, requires specifications about the time and space scales facing the different logics of the natural and the societal systems. These issues about systems definitions are of central importance in international environmental negotiations. The problems in the climate change domain about the sequence of secondary and tertiary societal effects, exemplified above by the case of the drought, has to some extent been handled by the IPCC (The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), but also by the UN recent efforts to combat desertification and drought through the mechanism of a Convention. In all these cases, the choice of approach has ethical connotations.
4.3. Uncertainty and equity issues As a non-static view of both natural and societal processes is at the heart of a sustainability posture (e.g. in terms of the Brundtland Commission formulation), many ethical concerns about equity in a long time perspective are relevant. What are the effects of the uneven distribution of knowledge about potential futures and who are the victims of it? To what extent is the incompleteness of knowledge about certain issues at present problematic to different actors? How is the relative lack of knowledge today to be considered in relation to the need to choose an environmentally relevant position today? In which way should the uncertainties about future situations be taken into account when formulating a reasonable standpoint in an ethics sense with regard to distribution between generations? The relative technical and political uncertainties connected to the present stage of knowledge about long-term storage of nuclear waste exemplifies this issue. This holds true also for the uncertainty with regard to climate change, with potential impacts on positions in the negotiations about degrees of ‘burden sharing’ connected to the search for combatting or mitigation strategies.
Here, burden sharing is seen both in terms of sharing within this generation, but also as between generations. Who is vulnerable and for what type of threat? To which extent and within which time-frame? To which extent does an uneven distribution of knowledge about future possible climate conditions and the geographic distribution of impacts, e.g. through different forms of access to analytical simulation activities, provide a problematic asymmetry of power among negotiating partners in climate change negotiations?
4.4. The hierarchy of 6alues Connected to these types of questions is also the issue of a potential hierarchy of values. How should the criteria look like from which we would draw conclusions about an ordered structure of values? Can fundamentally different values be compared at all and ranked, or do we have to live with the impossibility of comparing? The case of the Inuit whaling hunt in Greenland makes the case clear. On one side stand values about safeguarding biodiversity, promoted by actors not specifically economically or culturally dependent on whaling, and on the other side, values connected with the survival of a small and threatened native population trying to make a living in traditional ways under harsh natural conditions. However, comparing is done in daily life. Would it then not be wiser to find forms of communicating implicit value ranking processes? Then we might find out what these ethical values are that are involved in this pragmatic de facto ranking of options. Policy actors are not necessarily in agreement about the hierarchy of values or about the probability of threat scenarios that can be considered. There might even be alternative choices of value distributions over time, e.g. with regard to the sequence in which environmental and developmental considerations should be given priority. In many of the rapidly growing economies of Asia today, societal development is seen to be more important now and for the forthcoming 30–50 years, as compared to environmental concerns, in order for these countries to achieve the industrial-
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economic transition the West already has performed. How should, in this context, ‘efficiency’ considerations be viewed in different time frames in relation to other normative concerns? When can ‘efficiency’ measures be seen as a supreme tool versus the achievement of other and seemingly competing goals? The various possible choices of an ‘efficiency’ definition also involve normative aspects of importance.
4.5. The choice of style of analysis The repertoire of ‘language’, in which one formulates a certain type of world view, has potentially strong implications for the normative content of such analytical statements, i.e. these forms are not neutral in principle, but have potentially ethical connotations. Researchers dealing with the interface between economy and ecology express different attitudes towards the possibility to reduce the multi-dimensional space of environmental conditions to one single form of variable, be it dollars or kilowatt hours. A strong tendency to reductionism may, perhaps introduced for the purpose to promote coherence in a comparative analytical sense, cut away important other dimensions of concern which carry important ethical aspects. Studies only based on willingness to pay approaches (about, e.g. willingness to pay to avoid the location of an imagined nuclear power plant) may, if not interpreted carefully, exemplify such risks. Attempts to study societal factors only within the framework of energy analysis may face similar types of risks of reductionism. However, carefully done and the premises distinctly stated, such studies do contribute to the overall knowledge, as they highlight the knowledge which is related to a certain perspective. Any type of analysis gives prominence to specific facets of an object, while other facets are relegated to the periphery or are moved out of sight. Such cut-off mechanisms have ethical implications, as many issues of ethical concern may express themselves in the deleted part of the conceptual universe. Ethics are strongly linked to this choice of a certain style of reasoning, whatever legitimation that particular form of analysis may
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have gained within its own frame of reference. The application of a too narrow approach, in terms of easily quantified costs and benefits and disregarding more subtle non-quantifiables, is an important case for scrutiny in this regard. All forms of reductionism of environmental concerns is an important area for ethical consideration. It is the way the reduction is applied and the degree to which it is used in a misleading way, not showing the limitations involved, that opens up for ethical scrutiny. Also the technical choice of a measure, which may seem neutral in value terms, might have far-reaching normative implications. One example is the choice of ‘per capita’ load figures instead of total aggregated sums of environmental load due, e.g. to consumption in a certain area. The two styles of approach will provide vastly different images and will thus convey different ethical implications: is this or that worrying? who is responsible? what is a ‘just’ approach with regard to the participating parties for the future? With reference again to climate change for exemplification, the use of a per capita measure for carbon dioxide emission for China, but also for the USA, conveys quite a different message about the severeness of the problem, as compared to a figure giving the total load from the same country. This in turn opens up for different demands on country actors in international negotiations. As the choice of analytical variables may shift the entire discussion about distribution of future responsibilities, it has ethical connotations, especially if the selected variables are used in mass media to push a certain line of argumentation deliberately, without regard to fairness and balanced views. The search for finding a reasonable sustainability path for our societies also involves the means by which we judge progress and how we measure the changes in both society and in nature. The present measure of gross national product (GNP), is today under much debate and quite some work is already devoted to reform. The new measures have to incorporate more of the earlier hidden costs of our development practices in relation to nature. For some analysts, the reformed ‘green GNP’ is seen as a practical incremental change of some
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measures in a technical sense. These reform ambitions, by no means implemented on a grand scale internationally so far, could however, also be seen as attempts to change fundamental value-based positions. Our economical measuring devices have earlier lacked a capacity to reflect important and central values with regard to nature, which basically are of ethical character. The present discussion about a relevant repertoire of sustainability indicators highlights this interest.
4.6. Operational choices and institutional design The choice of operationalization of a specific goal must be scrutinized with regard to the side effects the choice may have on other normative issues. A certain type of centralized institutional solution—potentially efficient for a narrowly interpreted environmental goal — may have detrimental effects, e.g. on participation and thus harm other associated and important values. The realm of the nuclear political controversy is highly permeated with exactly these types of considerations.
4.7. Agreement—At which le6el of principle? Certain operative principles may be possible to agree upon over a wide array of actors. One such rule could be that the environment should not be a free good. Resources must not be priced below the true costs of their use. Differences of opinion could still emerge, not about the principle, but of what constitutes a ‘true cost’. The value differences then emerge not at a very high level of principle but at a level closer to application.
5. The cultural context of the sustainability discourse The contextual nature of the environmental-development topic is important. The context of a specific policy package should be specified. The population-environment-development nexus, as has been referred to earlier, provides ample examples in this field. Theoretical models about, e.g. the demographic transition, which seem to fit
empirical data nicely in one setting, may not work in another. The fact that Sweden made the transition in a specific way during the last 100 years does not mean that another country today, with seemingly similar initial conditions, necessarily could repeat this performance in the same way. Indeed, the historical context is very different. One also has to define the geographical and cultural context within which your statements are supposed to hold. There is little use to try to provide universalistic answers in a domain like this. Instead you should frame your question in terms of which conditions, which historical setting, which groups of actors and which cultural framework are involved. There is also a need to be alert to the level of aggregation at which you choose to explore your issues. Distinctly ethical concerns (e.g. equity and justice issues) may hide within the variations made unseen by operating with figures expressing statistical mean values at a gross level. Issues connected, e.g. with the use of marginal lands must be treated at a level of statistics which do not aggregate over too many categories of land use, thus making the special phenomena of interest invisible. There is no ‘general’ form of sustainability which could be understood outside the framework of contextual specifications. (Svedin, 1991). As a consequence, ethical judgements connected with statements about sustainability have to specify the context in that particular case. For example, highly universalistic statements may face severe problems, not only in terms of difficulties of straightforward application, but also in missing the specific connotation within which a certain sustainability connotation could be understood. Population-resources issues are often strongly connected to a local context. Specifically, the local interpretation of the situation has to be taken into account. The cultural embedding is one of the most essential parts of the context within which the nature-society discourse has to be treated. (Hjort af Orna¨s and Svedin, 1992). What is the character of these cultural embeddings? Let us discuss a few examples.
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5.1. Interrelations of nature and time
5.2. Views on limits and growth
The idea of nature in antiquity, as the expression of a still unborn but potential future reality, changed during the course of history to our day’s more object and ‘thing’ like character. This in turn has deep going implications, e.g. on views of what constitutes natural resources; if they are phenomena originating from a generative type of nature which ‘creates’ the ‘resource’; or if they are ‘building blocs’ in terms of ‘raw material’ to be ‘developed’ and ‘refined’ within an upgrading human societal context. Thus, the key conflict pertains to the opposing positions about where the source of ‘true creation’ lies — inside or outside human intervention. As this conflict at the root has to do with opposing perspectives on the development of a ‘potentiality’, it distinctly relates to positions about the role of time. As this example shows, the ideas concerning time are strongly related to views of nature. The idea of the aging world (mundus senescens) within which everything is moving from a golden age to an era of final destruction was still a frequent topic in Renaissance literature. During the 17th century, the new outlook, based on the perspectives of natural science, changed the mentality. The interpretation of today of what constitutes the ‘arrow’ of time is still based on the 19th century natural science thermodynamic framework, based on probabilistic concepts. Such thermodynamical ideas have also influenced the debate on natural resources and their relationship to the economy during the last few decades. These ideas have had a profound influence also on the outlook on what constitutes life. In this way, these theories strongly connect to the environmental discourse and flavour environmental philosophy. The new perspectives of self-organization of systems and frameworks of thoughts about chaotic states also penetrate into the theoretical fundamentals of man-nature relations, not the least those related to problems of control or non-control (Prigogine, 1980; Rosen, 1986). Such world view images will probably have profound impacts for the future on the conceptual context within which ethical considerations will be made in the environmental realm.
Ideas about expansion or about intrinsic limitations to human endeavour are connected to basic cultural attitudes towards the conditions of life. Thus, the ‘limits-to-growth’ debate during the 1970s, as well as the discourses on ‘sustainable development’, or the ‘sustainable economic growth’ postures, all relate to the more profound cultural positions about existential limitations. They also relate to competing approaches on human capacity to expand ‘final’ limits as successive stages in the human development of society proceeds, as for example the neolithic and the industrial revolutions seem to indicate. They are also at the base of the Malthusian controversy, a battle ground for over two centuries in economic history. In particular, the role of human knowledge and how it is applied is a basic facet. At the normative level it has never been self-evident that human activity itself might be seen as a genuine contribution to what is ‘created’, e.g. in the form of new technology or in terms of new social innovations. The discussion about the nature of limits already occupied the interest of the Greek philosophers, e.g. Aristotle. Against a position which was seen to be too closed, Cusanus, towards the end of Medieval times, argued that God already had finished Creation. However, as Mankind was part of that Creation, the future was not closed, as an important part of the possibilities for further expansion was inherent in the human capacity for innovation. This broke the confines of a closed world within already set limits and upset the presumption about a constant repertoire of available phenomena. These types of elaborations, for sure, are still part of today’s environmental philosophy combat arena. The different positions in terms of world views distinctly influence the environmental ethics panorama. One example is the degree to which the ‘natural resources’ definition includes humanly induced elements or if these resources are ‘just out there’ in a sort of untouched pristine world. The example may seem theoretical, but it highlights the key component in how a resource becomes resource: by its inherent qualities, by the
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interference by humans, or both. This aspect of potentiality to provide a ‘service’ is strongly conditioned by the degree to which the human creative element interferes. The ethical element enters through the way this perception about a co-creation capacity is manifested in choices of human actions.
5.3. Views on technology and ci6ilization Technology, in the sense of a ‘labour saving device’, exists in most cultures. But if you broaden the definition to mean ‘the use of scientific knowledge in order to transform reality in accordance with aims set by man, this activity, when systematically pursued, is of fairly recent origin in history. This holds true as well of its pervasive character in all corners of life. The idea that man finds it self-evident to be able, and allowed, to use his knowledge to overpower the constraints of nature can, according to the contemporary philosopher Georg Henrik von Wright, be said to be the basis of a technological style of life (von Wright, 1978). This style is based on the ‘Western’ idea to use results of the process of search for truth as a basis for technological applications. In this respect ‘modern’ technological civilization differs from those of earlier times, which also to some extent, and as the result of trial and error of practical endeavours, developed sophisticated technological solutions to various problems. According to von Wright, it was not by chance that ‘the Western world’ developed the specific combination of ‘scientific’ search of knowledge and technological applications. Indeed, in order for the combination to take place, a certain perspective on the relationship between humans and the object of scientific interest, i.e. that of ‘nature’, is essential. One of the basic facets is the separation of the subject and the object. The diffusion of a technologically oriented society to all corners of the world and the establishment of its hegemony is thus related to a certain style of outlook on nature. The critique of civilization in our century in the ‘Western hemisphere’ has, in a cultural sense, technological society as well as the present dominant views of
nature as its targets, as these are drastic, inseparable and all pervasive expressions of our culture.
5.4. Logical distinctions as the basis of ‘Western’ rationality ‘Western’ culture has developed certain ways of making analytically sharp distinctions between categories. This has been a basis for many advances in ‘Western’ science. Such sharp distinctions, exemplified by the Linneaus’ taxonomy of plants and animals, are not necessarily the only framework of thought available, as is evidenced by the example of the more varied style of approach of Japanese culture, in which the emphasis lies more on a spectrum of nuances, rather than on an either/or type of approach between bipolar choices. This difference of style of reasoning has implications for the way science is done and for views on how human beings relate to other expressions of creation. In a system of sharp distinctions, humans are seen as very separate from ‘brute creation’, not the least in comparison to animals. Using the words of the late American historian of geographic thought, Clarence J. Glacken, the relationship of the human race to other forms of life is one of the central philosophical and religious questions as seen comparatively over many centuries of history (Glacken, 1992). The ‘gulf’ between humans and other living creatures is not universal, as is sometimes perceived ‘in the West’. There are several cultures in which there is a sort of spectrum without very sharp distinctions and where the blending of the different forms of life on a more equal existential basis has strong ethical implications. The present debate in ‘modern’ societies on rights of animals with regard to medical testing, procedures connected to slaughtering, etc. indicates some uneasiness also in ‘our’ culture, with regard to this sharp distinction between humans and the rest.
5.5. The secular and the spiritual Much of a typical ‘Western’ approach to environmental phenomena is based on a secularised materialistic world view (Jonas, 1979). This distin-
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guishes this culture from others in which nature is seen as animate. That such a ‘Western’ view is not only limited to the geographical Occident is illuminated by the eminent Italian orientalist G. Tucci, who has given a condensed expression of the tension of perspectives we are here referring to in terms of a comparison between ‘official modern Chinese’ outlooks and Tibetan ones (translated through a Swedish version of Tuccis’ work): ‘‘The meeting between marxist rationalism and the non-rational Tibetan mixture of myth, fantasy and magic means that two entirely different worlds of thought were confronted with each other; On the one side an unchangeable abstract pattern based on distinct images and responsibilities; on the other in principle the anarchic presence of invisible powers, mastering us, but which we may get control over by knowing their secrets. Realism on the one hand; mind ‘fantasy’ phenomena on the other. According to the new ideology: life of man limited in time and space and in the service of a society aspiring economic and social improvements at the cost of individual liberty. According to the Tibetan religious tradition: the highlighting of the individual through his/her relationship to a transcendent world of animate beings and a reduction of the importance of the visible part of existence in order to promote the invisible transcendent aspects beyond time and space’’ (Tucci, 1970). It is highly understandable that actors basing their policies on these two very different poles of world views also will express deeply different environmental ethics attitudes, as is also evident in the world of factual policies. The present Chinese forestry policy in Tibet is strongly characterized by ‘mining’ the forestry resource in contrast to the earlier traditional domestic long-term oriented Tibetan practices. The exploitation of one of the ‘holy lakes’ of Tibet for the use of hydropower would also have been unthinkable in the earlier Tibetan framework of culture. The moslem scholar S.H. Nasr, in sharp criticism of the mainstream Western view of Nature, states: ‘Nature has become desacralized for mod-
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ern Man…’ (Nasr, 1968). As seen from a Hindu perspective, the same sentiment is pronounced: ‘Formerly the unity of Nature and Man was expressed in the context of religious activities’. In fact ‘the powers of Nature were deemed sacred’ (Callicott and Ames, 1989; Bruun and Kalland, 1992; Singh, 1992).
6. Normative challenges in a world of growing tensions Sometimes it has been argued that there exists a certain degree of cultural consensus at the world level with regard to the environmental issues and that the Rio-declaration could be seen as an indicator of such a situation. The agreements in Rio 1992 contain a large number of operational criteria sector by sector gathered in the Agenda 21 part, basically of a long-term instrumental nature: and truly, the expressions of philosophical and ethical roots are there in the total framework. But it is hard to know to which extent the texts provide a witness of a deep consensus about the basic understanding, or to which extent the negotiators have used a sufficiently vague and sometimes ambivalent language of expression in order for the text to be agreed upon by almost all nations of the world. Some may argue that this degree of vagueness is less important than that the agreement about the platform at all was reached, disregarding the cultural discrepancies underlying such a ‘mild’ form of consensus. However, whatever the final interpretation about this may be, it is reasonable to argue that the force and long-term commitment in the local implementation is based on some degree of shared values, with regard to the cultural, emotional and motivational basis underlying the global agreement. In this sense, the implicit ethical foundations for the present environmental programme of action are still at the heart of the agenda. The exact relationship between the ethical considerations within the realm of environmental policy practice and the different frameworks of cultural world views is hard to trace in detail. However, the cultural framework provides the
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basis for the assessment about the extent to which people consider suggested policies to be relevant and legitimate. It also provides an emotional momentum to the entire environmental movement. The environmental ethics dimensions, as we have seen above, appear at many levels and in many contexts. The various aspects have strong connections to world views in the many domains of the environmental discourse. Sometimes they have strong direct implications for a specific measure to be discussed, sometimes the connection is less clear. Within the general discussions about the future of humankind, the environmental challenge has come to the forefront as we now are facing the next millennium. The way in which problems are perceived also provides the outer frame for solutions which could be considered (Svedin, 1995). The reflection on the normative content, including the ethical considerations, on aspects of futureoriented actions is essential, as it aims at improving the understanding of the conflicting aspirations of the world. Thus, we have to see clearer, both the explicit and the implicit normative elements in the repertoire of environmentally oriented decision making. The growing understanding will also prove to be of utmost importance in a situation of an increasing number of conflicts around the use of the resources of the planet and the different development models which are tried. This improved understanding about the basic values involved is also deeply connected to the perception about what it ultimately means to be a human being in our times.
References Aniansson, B., Svedin, U. (Eds.), 1990. Towards an Ecologically Sustainable Economy. The Swedish Council for Planning and Coordination of Research (FRN), Report 90:6, Stockholm. Bengtsson, A., Hjort-af-Orna¨s, A., Lundqvist, J., Rudengren, J. (Eds.), 1994. The Environment and free trade. EPOS Research Programme on Environmental Policy and Society, Department of Social and Economic Geography, Uppsala University, Uppsala.
Bjo¨rkbom, L., Svedin, U., 1991. Environmental security and the long-term European situation. In: Huldt, B., Herolf, G. (Eds.), The Swedish Institute of International Affairs Yearbook 1990 – 1991: Towards a New European Security Order. MH Publishing, Gothenburg, Sweden, pp. 151 – 158. Bruun, O., Kalland, A. (Eds.), 1992. Asian Perceptions of Nature. Nordic Proceedings in Asian Studies No. 3, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Copenhagen. Callicott, J.B., Ames, R.T. (Eds.), 1989. Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought. Essays in Environmental Philosophy, State University of New York Press, Albany. Eckersley, R., 1992. Environmentalism and Political Theory: Towards an Ecocentric Approach. UCL Press, London. Dubos, R., 1980. The Wooing of Earth. New Perspectives on Man’s use of Nature. The Athlone Press, London. Glacken, J.G., 1992. Reflections on the history of Western attitudes to nature. GeoJournal 26 (2), 103 – 111. Gore, A., 1992. Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. Plume, New York, NY. Hjort af Orna¨s, A., Svedin, U., 1992. Cultural variation in concepts of nature. GeoJournal 26 (2), 167 – 172. Jonas, H., 1979. Das Prinzip Verantwortung. Versuch einer Ethic fur die technologische Zivilisation. Frankfurt am Main. (See also The Imperative of Responsibility, In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age, 1984. Chicago, London). Lindahl Kiessling, K., Landberg, H. (Eds.), 1994. Population, Economic Development and the Environment. The Making of Our Common Future. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Meyer-Abich, K.M., 1989. Eigenwert der naturlichen Mitwelt und Rechtsgemeinschaft der natur. In: Altner, G. (Ed.), O8 kologische Theologie. Perwspektiven zur Orientierung, Stuttgart. Nasr, S.H., 1968. Man and Nature. The Spiritual Crises of Modern Man. Unwin Paperbacks, Rome and London. Parry, M.L., 1986. Some implications of climatic change for human development. In: Clark, W.C., Munn, R.E. (Eds.), Sustainable Development of the Biosphere. IIASA and Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Prigogine, I., 1980. From Being to Becoming. Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences. Freeman, San Francisco. Rolston III, H., 1986. Philosophy Gone Wild. Essays in Environmental Ethics. Buffalo. Rosen, R., 1986. On information and complexity. In: Casti, J.L., Karlqvist, A. (Eds.), Complexity, Language, and Life. Mathematical Approaches. Biomathematics, vol. 16, Springer, pp. 174 – 196. Singh, R.B.B., 1992. Nature and cosmic integrity: A search in Hindu geographical thought. GeoJournal 26 (2), 139 – 147. Sjo¨stedt, G., Svedin, U., Ha¨gerha¨ll Aniansson, B. (Eds.), 1993. International Environmental Negotiations - Process, Issues and Context. The Swedish Council for Planning and Coordination of Research, Report 93:1 and The Swedish Institute of International Affairs, Stockholm. Svedin, U., 1991. The contextual features of the economy-ecology dialogue. In: Folke, C., Ka˚berger, T. (Eds.), Linking
U. S6edin / Ecological Economics 24 (1998) 299–309 the Natural Environment and the Economy. Essays from the Eco-Eco Group. Kluwer, Dordrecht. Svedin, U., 1992a. The Challenge of the Societal Dimension to Environmental Issues: A Swedish Research Response. In: Svedin, U., Ha¨gerha¨ll Aniansson, B. (Eds.), Society and the Environment: A Swedish Research Perspective. Kluwer, Dordrecht. Svedin, U., 1992b. From manifest to likelihoods—Shifts in environmental problems perception in the post World War II era. In: Lodgaard, S., Hjort af Orna¨s, A. (Eds.), The Environment and International Security. PRIO Report No 3. International Peace Research Institute, Oslo.
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Svedin, U., 1995. Christopher Columbus’ situation and the challenge of understanding today’s global environmental issues. European Rev. 3 (1) 93 – 101. Tucci, G., 1970. Tibet. Lamornas land. The title of the original in English is Tibet-Land of Snows, Elek Books, London, 1967. World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), 1987. Our Common Future. Oxford University Press, Oxford. von Wright, G.H., 1978. Humanismen som livsha˚llning. So¨derstro¨ms, Borga˚.
Implicit and explicit ethical norms in the environmental policy arena1 Uno Svedin Swedish Council for Planning and Coordination of Research (FRN), Box 7101, S-103 87 Stockholm, Sweden
Abstract The environmental agenda, as it has developed over the last few decades, provides a long list of issues, most of which contain a high degree of normative components. These in turn connect to a broad area of cultural and ethical considerations which are not only related to specifically environmental topics. As the need grows for operationalization of international general environmental agreements, like the Rio-conventions, the implicit tensions in the documents will come to light. A careful understanding of the relations between the environmental policy discourse, its normative content and its cultural and ethical contextual embedding will thus, increasingly be needed. This paper examines the character of this explicit and implicit normative content. © 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. Keywords: Environmental ethics; Cultural context; Values; Environmental perception; Western rationality
1. Introduction The normative dimension in the environmental discourse has many facets. It pertains not only to the basic philosophical questions of the man – nature relationship, but also to more operational domains of thought, e.g. about equity and fairness and about societal changes or the role of technology. In order to understand the future options in environmental policy design, this normative content and its implicit roots have to be faced clearly. 1
Contribution to the SCASSS International Conference on ‘Ethics, Economics and Environmental Management,’ Friiberghs Herrga˚rd, August 25–27, 1995.
The ethics discourse is not only related to the level of private decisions on environmental issues, as is the case in various life style-oriented approaches about choices at the individual level. It also includes the broader realm of positions taken with regard to societally aggregated decision making. All decisions have ethical aspects, although the forms and degrees may differ. In the following, I want to discuss different forms in which the normative element appears in the environmental discourse. Some values could be judged to be of greater importance and to be more integrated parts of basic world views. I will refer to these as ethical considerations within the wider framework of values.
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The intention is to demonstrate the variety of normative implications connected to the environmental agenda and thus to point at areas of tension and degrees of conflict when contemplating environmental policy options.
2. The widened realm of environmental normative concern The environmental discourse has developed since the first UN Conference on the Environment in Stockholm in 1972. We face today large globally connected issues like those framed in UN international conventions on global climate change and on biodiversity, but also in packages of agreements pertaining to desertification, hazardous waste issues, dumping at sea or regional transboundary air pollution. Also, at the conceptual level, much work has been done during the last decades. The present framework—encoded in the declarations at the UN Rio UNCED Conference on Environment and Development — codifies much of the ‘sustainable development’ concept adopted by the Brundtland Commission in ‘Our Common Future’. (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987) The most important point here is the connection between ‘environmental’ topics, as such, and those concerning ‘development’. This includes the idea that concern for the environment is not necessarily in conflict with development, but rather is a precondition for an extended period of ‘growth’ in its traditional form as well. New lines of thought about the content and goals of that development have also been extensively suggested during the last few years. (Aniansson and Svedin, 1990; Svedin, 1992a; Sjo¨stedt et al., 1993). Increasingly, the links between the more specific ‘environmental’ concerns and developmental and economic goals have been stressed. (Gore, 1992). One example is the 1994 high level ‘White Paper’ of the European Community where the employment issue has been explicitly connected to the environmental discourse. Another example is the step by step process in the international trade domain, where the ques-
tions about environmental conditionalities are raised, although not yet fully elaborated. Still another environmentally related policy domain, where the normative dimension is evident, concerns the new and widened perspective on national and international security, earlier seen to be exclusively the realm of the military and economic strategic establishments. (Bjo¨rkbom and Svedin, 1991; Bengtsson et al., 1994). This broadening of the connected agendas widens the scope of the normative connotations as value elements from one area connect to other value elements in other domains. Within the new wide realm of problems, e.g. about distribution of vulnerabilities at individual, household and local community levels, as well as at a broader societal level, many equity-oriented issues come to the forefront. (Svedin, 1992b). Several aspects of the sustainability goal, as the equity dimension, the insistence on participatory modes of political processes, power distribution in a North–South perspective, the intergenerational aspects and the ‘development aspect’ in general, all contain strong normative elements.
3. The normative/ethical element at different levels Given these developments, a reasonable question is how the normative issues present themselves and in which way especially ethical considerations come to bear on the environmental policy domain. Already the selection of issues in a discourse, as well as the choice of the scope of connected problems which are included, have normative connotations. To this should be added the choice of theoretical framework and the repertoire of causalities to be considered and their possible connections, all of which express the features of the analysis. Since environmental phenomena are often induced or triggered by humans, normative aspects are inevitably included. If territorial planning has led to the establishment of ‘risky’ new human habitats around rivers and then exceptional weather conditions enhance seasonal floods, such
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phenomena otherwise considered to be rather ‘natural’, are normatively conditioned, as are other phenomena due to the enhancement of extreme events as outcomes of climate change induced by greenhouse gas emissions. Using the perspective of the Brundtland Commission, according to which both technology and social organization can be improved, it could be argued that already the idea of ‘improvement’ indicates a view on directions as well as some sort of judgement about potential feedbacks and repercussions. Who is to be favoured and who is to carry burdens in such schemes of changes — and on which normative grounds? These discourses pertain to all levels of decisions: intergovernmental (as the EU), governmental, or local, down to the level of individual actors. They also relate to different types of actors, e.g. the public sector, the business community or NGO groups. One of the clearest cases, where normative considerations are at work at all these levels, is the environment-population-development nexus. National governments may develop policy packages in this domain and may even negotiate them, e.g. as was done at the Cairo UN Conference 1994. But equally important are the decisions made every day by individuals all over the world on how to relate their personal practices to individually perceived sets of goals. (Lindahl and Landberg, 1994). On the other hand, issues about changing behaviour in an environmentally less problematic direction cannot be treated entirely as problems of personal life style which is decided upon only at the level of the individual. There are other decisions made within the life style domain which are aggregate in nature, which still have distinctly ethical aspects. The ethical aspects pertain as well to choices about societal structures made by humans in their roles as decision makers. Thus, easily made distinctions between issues seen to relate to specific levels or between on the one hand ‘ethical’ and on the other hand ‘operational’, ‘economically rational’ or ‘technical’ issues, should be avoided.
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4. Aspects of ethical considerations in the environmental policy field There is a broad spectrum of ways in which ethical concerns appear, from the most basic philosophical concerns to concrete policy choices.
4.1. Basic philosophical issues At this level, the issues concern the posture human beings should take with regard to the rest of creation. Are there intrinsic ‘bio-centric’ oriented rights for animals, bacteria, or plants (‘do trees have a standing’?) or are rights only those bestowed by humans on these other forms of existence for the sake of humans? (Jonas, 1979; Rolston, 1986; Meyer-Abich, 1989; Eckersley, 1992). In this latter case, rights allocated to the biological world at large could be seen as an outflow of the, in the best case enlightened, selfinterest of humans, emphasizing a long-term availability of existence forms for future potential use or services as essential for humankind (Dubos, 1980). This question is not the same as asking if rights only can be formulated through humans. You have to distinguish between an anthropocentric view about who is at the centre of the normative concern and a view about the medium (in this case a human being) through which such values are formulated and channelled.
4.2. The en6ironment-de6elopment linkage As has been stressed earlier, the connection between the ‘environmental’ issues and ‘development’ issues is not trivial. Which aspects should be seen to be related? How should causality relations be traced, not the least with regard to changing historical and cultural contexts? An illustrative case concerns the handling of the pathways of drought impacts on society. (Parry, 1986). In which way should the relevant phenomena be selected, e.g. those related to the natural domain of the drought itself and the causal paths leading up to it, but also the societal mechanisms connected to the increase or decrease of vulnerabilities before the event has occured, as well as
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through the provision of compensating means when the drought is a fact. The way in which the analytical systems boundary is deliberately set is part of this domain of concern. To conduct an analysis of issues pertaining, for example, to the Baltic region, requires specifications about the time and space scales facing the different logics of the natural and the societal systems. These issues about systems definitions are of central importance in international environmental negotiations. The problems in the climate change domain about the sequence of secondary and tertiary societal effects, exemplified above by the case of the drought, has to some extent been handled by the IPCC (The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), but also by the UN recent efforts to combat desertification and drought through the mechanism of a Convention. In all these cases, the choice of approach has ethical connotations.
4.3. Uncertainty and equity issues As a non-static view of both natural and societal processes is at the heart of a sustainability posture (e.g. in terms of the Brundtland Commission formulation), many ethical concerns about equity in a long time perspective are relevant. What are the effects of the uneven distribution of knowledge about potential futures and who are the victims of it? To what extent is the incompleteness of knowledge about certain issues at present problematic to different actors? How is the relative lack of knowledge today to be considered in relation to the need to choose an environmentally relevant position today? In which way should the uncertainties about future situations be taken into account when formulating a reasonable standpoint in an ethics sense with regard to distribution between generations? The relative technical and political uncertainties connected to the present stage of knowledge about long-term storage of nuclear waste exemplifies this issue. This holds true also for the uncertainty with regard to climate change, with potential impacts on positions in the negotiations about degrees of ‘burden sharing’ connected to the search for combatting or mitigation strategies.
Here, burden sharing is seen both in terms of sharing within this generation, but also as between generations. Who is vulnerable and for what type of threat? To which extent and within which time-frame? To which extent does an uneven distribution of knowledge about future possible climate conditions and the geographic distribution of impacts, e.g. through different forms of access to analytical simulation activities, provide a problematic asymmetry of power among negotiating partners in climate change negotiations?
4.4. The hierarchy of 6alues Connected to these types of questions is also the issue of a potential hierarchy of values. How should the criteria look like from which we would draw conclusions about an ordered structure of values? Can fundamentally different values be compared at all and ranked, or do we have to live with the impossibility of comparing? The case of the Inuit whaling hunt in Greenland makes the case clear. On one side stand values about safeguarding biodiversity, promoted by actors not specifically economically or culturally dependent on whaling, and on the other side, values connected with the survival of a small and threatened native population trying to make a living in traditional ways under harsh natural conditions. However, comparing is done in daily life. Would it then not be wiser to find forms of communicating implicit value ranking processes? Then we might find out what these ethical values are that are involved in this pragmatic de facto ranking of options. Policy actors are not necessarily in agreement about the hierarchy of values or about the probability of threat scenarios that can be considered. There might even be alternative choices of value distributions over time, e.g. with regard to the sequence in which environmental and developmental considerations should be given priority. In many of the rapidly growing economies of Asia today, societal development is seen to be more important now and for the forthcoming 30–50 years, as compared to environmental concerns, in order for these countries to achieve the industrial-
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economic transition the West already has performed. How should, in this context, ‘efficiency’ considerations be viewed in different time frames in relation to other normative concerns? When can ‘efficiency’ measures be seen as a supreme tool versus the achievement of other and seemingly competing goals? The various possible choices of an ‘efficiency’ definition also involve normative aspects of importance.
4.5. The choice of style of analysis The repertoire of ‘language’, in which one formulates a certain type of world view, has potentially strong implications for the normative content of such analytical statements, i.e. these forms are not neutral in principle, but have potentially ethical connotations. Researchers dealing with the interface between economy and ecology express different attitudes towards the possibility to reduce the multi-dimensional space of environmental conditions to one single form of variable, be it dollars or kilowatt hours. A strong tendency to reductionism may, perhaps introduced for the purpose to promote coherence in a comparative analytical sense, cut away important other dimensions of concern which carry important ethical aspects. Studies only based on willingness to pay approaches (about, e.g. willingness to pay to avoid the location of an imagined nuclear power plant) may, if not interpreted carefully, exemplify such risks. Attempts to study societal factors only within the framework of energy analysis may face similar types of risks of reductionism. However, carefully done and the premises distinctly stated, such studies do contribute to the overall knowledge, as they highlight the knowledge which is related to a certain perspective. Any type of analysis gives prominence to specific facets of an object, while other facets are relegated to the periphery or are moved out of sight. Such cut-off mechanisms have ethical implications, as many issues of ethical concern may express themselves in the deleted part of the conceptual universe. Ethics are strongly linked to this choice of a certain style of reasoning, whatever legitimation that particular form of analysis may
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have gained within its own frame of reference. The application of a too narrow approach, in terms of easily quantified costs and benefits and disregarding more subtle non-quantifiables, is an important case for scrutiny in this regard. All forms of reductionism of environmental concerns is an important area for ethical consideration. It is the way the reduction is applied and the degree to which it is used in a misleading way, not showing the limitations involved, that opens up for ethical scrutiny. Also the technical choice of a measure, which may seem neutral in value terms, might have far-reaching normative implications. One example is the choice of ‘per capita’ load figures instead of total aggregated sums of environmental load due, e.g. to consumption in a certain area. The two styles of approach will provide vastly different images and will thus convey different ethical implications: is this or that worrying? who is responsible? what is a ‘just’ approach with regard to the participating parties for the future? With reference again to climate change for exemplification, the use of a per capita measure for carbon dioxide emission for China, but also for the USA, conveys quite a different message about the severeness of the problem, as compared to a figure giving the total load from the same country. This in turn opens up for different demands on country actors in international negotiations. As the choice of analytical variables may shift the entire discussion about distribution of future responsibilities, it has ethical connotations, especially if the selected variables are used in mass media to push a certain line of argumentation deliberately, without regard to fairness and balanced views. The search for finding a reasonable sustainability path for our societies also involves the means by which we judge progress and how we measure the changes in both society and in nature. The present measure of gross national product (GNP), is today under much debate and quite some work is already devoted to reform. The new measures have to incorporate more of the earlier hidden costs of our development practices in relation to nature. For some analysts, the reformed ‘green GNP’ is seen as a practical incremental change of some
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measures in a technical sense. These reform ambitions, by no means implemented on a grand scale internationally so far, could however, also be seen as attempts to change fundamental value-based positions. Our economical measuring devices have earlier lacked a capacity to reflect important and central values with regard to nature, which basically are of ethical character. The present discussion about a relevant repertoire of sustainability indicators highlights this interest.
4.6. Operational choices and institutional design The choice of operationalization of a specific goal must be scrutinized with regard to the side effects the choice may have on other normative issues. A certain type of centralized institutional solution—potentially efficient for a narrowly interpreted environmental goal — may have detrimental effects, e.g. on participation and thus harm other associated and important values. The realm of the nuclear political controversy is highly permeated with exactly these types of considerations.
4.7. Agreement—At which le6el of principle? Certain operative principles may be possible to agree upon over a wide array of actors. One such rule could be that the environment should not be a free good. Resources must not be priced below the true costs of their use. Differences of opinion could still emerge, not about the principle, but of what constitutes a ‘true cost’. The value differences then emerge not at a very high level of principle but at a level closer to application.
5. The cultural context of the sustainability discourse The contextual nature of the environmental-development topic is important. The context of a specific policy package should be specified. The population-environment-development nexus, as has been referred to earlier, provides ample examples in this field. Theoretical models about, e.g. the demographic transition, which seem to fit
empirical data nicely in one setting, may not work in another. The fact that Sweden made the transition in a specific way during the last 100 years does not mean that another country today, with seemingly similar initial conditions, necessarily could repeat this performance in the same way. Indeed, the historical context is very different. One also has to define the geographical and cultural context within which your statements are supposed to hold. There is little use to try to provide universalistic answers in a domain like this. Instead you should frame your question in terms of which conditions, which historical setting, which groups of actors and which cultural framework are involved. There is also a need to be alert to the level of aggregation at which you choose to explore your issues. Distinctly ethical concerns (e.g. equity and justice issues) may hide within the variations made unseen by operating with figures expressing statistical mean values at a gross level. Issues connected, e.g. with the use of marginal lands must be treated at a level of statistics which do not aggregate over too many categories of land use, thus making the special phenomena of interest invisible. There is no ‘general’ form of sustainability which could be understood outside the framework of contextual specifications. (Svedin, 1991). As a consequence, ethical judgements connected with statements about sustainability have to specify the context in that particular case. For example, highly universalistic statements may face severe problems, not only in terms of difficulties of straightforward application, but also in missing the specific connotation within which a certain sustainability connotation could be understood. Population-resources issues are often strongly connected to a local context. Specifically, the local interpretation of the situation has to be taken into account. The cultural embedding is one of the most essential parts of the context within which the nature-society discourse has to be treated. (Hjort af Orna¨s and Svedin, 1992). What is the character of these cultural embeddings? Let us discuss a few examples.
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5.1. Interrelations of nature and time
5.2. Views on limits and growth
The idea of nature in antiquity, as the expression of a still unborn but potential future reality, changed during the course of history to our day’s more object and ‘thing’ like character. This in turn has deep going implications, e.g. on views of what constitutes natural resources; if they are phenomena originating from a generative type of nature which ‘creates’ the ‘resource’; or if they are ‘building blocs’ in terms of ‘raw material’ to be ‘developed’ and ‘refined’ within an upgrading human societal context. Thus, the key conflict pertains to the opposing positions about where the source of ‘true creation’ lies — inside or outside human intervention. As this conflict at the root has to do with opposing perspectives on the development of a ‘potentiality’, it distinctly relates to positions about the role of time. As this example shows, the ideas concerning time are strongly related to views of nature. The idea of the aging world (mundus senescens) within which everything is moving from a golden age to an era of final destruction was still a frequent topic in Renaissance literature. During the 17th century, the new outlook, based on the perspectives of natural science, changed the mentality. The interpretation of today of what constitutes the ‘arrow’ of time is still based on the 19th century natural science thermodynamic framework, based on probabilistic concepts. Such thermodynamical ideas have also influenced the debate on natural resources and their relationship to the economy during the last few decades. These ideas have had a profound influence also on the outlook on what constitutes life. In this way, these theories strongly connect to the environmental discourse and flavour environmental philosophy. The new perspectives of self-organization of systems and frameworks of thoughts about chaotic states also penetrate into the theoretical fundamentals of man-nature relations, not the least those related to problems of control or non-control (Prigogine, 1980; Rosen, 1986). Such world view images will probably have profound impacts for the future on the conceptual context within which ethical considerations will be made in the environmental realm.
Ideas about expansion or about intrinsic limitations to human endeavour are connected to basic cultural attitudes towards the conditions of life. Thus, the ‘limits-to-growth’ debate during the 1970s, as well as the discourses on ‘sustainable development’, or the ‘sustainable economic growth’ postures, all relate to the more profound cultural positions about existential limitations. They also relate to competing approaches on human capacity to expand ‘final’ limits as successive stages in the human development of society proceeds, as for example the neolithic and the industrial revolutions seem to indicate. They are also at the base of the Malthusian controversy, a battle ground for over two centuries in economic history. In particular, the role of human knowledge and how it is applied is a basic facet. At the normative level it has never been self-evident that human activity itself might be seen as a genuine contribution to what is ‘created’, e.g. in the form of new technology or in terms of new social innovations. The discussion about the nature of limits already occupied the interest of the Greek philosophers, e.g. Aristotle. Against a position which was seen to be too closed, Cusanus, towards the end of Medieval times, argued that God already had finished Creation. However, as Mankind was part of that Creation, the future was not closed, as an important part of the possibilities for further expansion was inherent in the human capacity for innovation. This broke the confines of a closed world within already set limits and upset the presumption about a constant repertoire of available phenomena. These types of elaborations, for sure, are still part of today’s environmental philosophy combat arena. The different positions in terms of world views distinctly influence the environmental ethics panorama. One example is the degree to which the ‘natural resources’ definition includes humanly induced elements or if these resources are ‘just out there’ in a sort of untouched pristine world. The example may seem theoretical, but it highlights the key component in how a resource becomes resource: by its inherent qualities, by the
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interference by humans, or both. This aspect of potentiality to provide a ‘service’ is strongly conditioned by the degree to which the human creative element interferes. The ethical element enters through the way this perception about a co-creation capacity is manifested in choices of human actions.
5.3. Views on technology and ci6ilization Technology, in the sense of a ‘labour saving device’, exists in most cultures. But if you broaden the definition to mean ‘the use of scientific knowledge in order to transform reality in accordance with aims set by man, this activity, when systematically pursued, is of fairly recent origin in history. This holds true as well of its pervasive character in all corners of life. The idea that man finds it self-evident to be able, and allowed, to use his knowledge to overpower the constraints of nature can, according to the contemporary philosopher Georg Henrik von Wright, be said to be the basis of a technological style of life (von Wright, 1978). This style is based on the ‘Western’ idea to use results of the process of search for truth as a basis for technological applications. In this respect ‘modern’ technological civilization differs from those of earlier times, which also to some extent, and as the result of trial and error of practical endeavours, developed sophisticated technological solutions to various problems. According to von Wright, it was not by chance that ‘the Western world’ developed the specific combination of ‘scientific’ search of knowledge and technological applications. Indeed, in order for the combination to take place, a certain perspective on the relationship between humans and the object of scientific interest, i.e. that of ‘nature’, is essential. One of the basic facets is the separation of the subject and the object. The diffusion of a technologically oriented society to all corners of the world and the establishment of its hegemony is thus related to a certain style of outlook on nature. The critique of civilization in our century in the ‘Western hemisphere’ has, in a cultural sense, technological society as well as the present dominant views of
nature as its targets, as these are drastic, inseparable and all pervasive expressions of our culture.
5.4. Logical distinctions as the basis of ‘Western’ rationality ‘Western’ culture has developed certain ways of making analytically sharp distinctions between categories. This has been a basis for many advances in ‘Western’ science. Such sharp distinctions, exemplified by the Linneaus’ taxonomy of plants and animals, are not necessarily the only framework of thought available, as is evidenced by the example of the more varied style of approach of Japanese culture, in which the emphasis lies more on a spectrum of nuances, rather than on an either/or type of approach between bipolar choices. This difference of style of reasoning has implications for the way science is done and for views on how human beings relate to other expressions of creation. In a system of sharp distinctions, humans are seen as very separate from ‘brute creation’, not the least in comparison to animals. Using the words of the late American historian of geographic thought, Clarence J. Glacken, the relationship of the human race to other forms of life is one of the central philosophical and religious questions as seen comparatively over many centuries of history (Glacken, 1992). The ‘gulf’ between humans and other living creatures is not universal, as is sometimes perceived ‘in the West’. There are several cultures in which there is a sort of spectrum without very sharp distinctions and where the blending of the different forms of life on a more equal existential basis has strong ethical implications. The present debate in ‘modern’ societies on rights of animals with regard to medical testing, procedures connected to slaughtering, etc. indicates some uneasiness also in ‘our’ culture, with regard to this sharp distinction between humans and the rest.
5.5. The secular and the spiritual Much of a typical ‘Western’ approach to environmental phenomena is based on a secularised materialistic world view (Jonas, 1979). This distin-
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guishes this culture from others in which nature is seen as animate. That such a ‘Western’ view is not only limited to the geographical Occident is illuminated by the eminent Italian orientalist G. Tucci, who has given a condensed expression of the tension of perspectives we are here referring to in terms of a comparison between ‘official modern Chinese’ outlooks and Tibetan ones (translated through a Swedish version of Tuccis’ work): ‘‘The meeting between marxist rationalism and the non-rational Tibetan mixture of myth, fantasy and magic means that two entirely different worlds of thought were confronted with each other; On the one side an unchangeable abstract pattern based on distinct images and responsibilities; on the other in principle the anarchic presence of invisible powers, mastering us, but which we may get control over by knowing their secrets. Realism on the one hand; mind ‘fantasy’ phenomena on the other. According to the new ideology: life of man limited in time and space and in the service of a society aspiring economic and social improvements at the cost of individual liberty. According to the Tibetan religious tradition: the highlighting of the individual through his/her relationship to a transcendent world of animate beings and a reduction of the importance of the visible part of existence in order to promote the invisible transcendent aspects beyond time and space’’ (Tucci, 1970). It is highly understandable that actors basing their policies on these two very different poles of world views also will express deeply different environmental ethics attitudes, as is also evident in the world of factual policies. The present Chinese forestry policy in Tibet is strongly characterized by ‘mining’ the forestry resource in contrast to the earlier traditional domestic long-term oriented Tibetan practices. The exploitation of one of the ‘holy lakes’ of Tibet for the use of hydropower would also have been unthinkable in the earlier Tibetan framework of culture. The moslem scholar S.H. Nasr, in sharp criticism of the mainstream Western view of Nature, states: ‘Nature has become desacralized for mod-
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ern Man…’ (Nasr, 1968). As seen from a Hindu perspective, the same sentiment is pronounced: ‘Formerly the unity of Nature and Man was expressed in the context of religious activities’. In fact ‘the powers of Nature were deemed sacred’ (Callicott and Ames, 1989; Bruun and Kalland, 1992; Singh, 1992).
6. Normative challenges in a world of growing tensions Sometimes it has been argued that there exists a certain degree of cultural consensus at the world level with regard to the environmental issues and that the Rio-declaration could be seen as an indicator of such a situation. The agreements in Rio 1992 contain a large number of operational criteria sector by sector gathered in the Agenda 21 part, basically of a long-term instrumental nature: and truly, the expressions of philosophical and ethical roots are there in the total framework. But it is hard to know to which extent the texts provide a witness of a deep consensus about the basic understanding, or to which extent the negotiators have used a sufficiently vague and sometimes ambivalent language of expression in order for the text to be agreed upon by almost all nations of the world. Some may argue that this degree of vagueness is less important than that the agreement about the platform at all was reached, disregarding the cultural discrepancies underlying such a ‘mild’ form of consensus. However, whatever the final interpretation about this may be, it is reasonable to argue that the force and long-term commitment in the local implementation is based on some degree of shared values, with regard to the cultural, emotional and motivational basis underlying the global agreement. In this sense, the implicit ethical foundations for the present environmental programme of action are still at the heart of the agenda. The exact relationship between the ethical considerations within the realm of environmental policy practice and the different frameworks of cultural world views is hard to trace in detail. However, the cultural framework provides the
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basis for the assessment about the extent to which people consider suggested policies to be relevant and legitimate. It also provides an emotional momentum to the entire environmental movement. The environmental ethics dimensions, as we have seen above, appear at many levels and in many contexts. The various aspects have strong connections to world views in the many domains of the environmental discourse. Sometimes they have strong direct implications for a specific measure to be discussed, sometimes the connection is less clear. Within the general discussions about the future of humankind, the environmental challenge has come to the forefront as we now are facing the next millennium. The way in which problems are perceived also provides the outer frame for solutions which could be considered (Svedin, 1995). The reflection on the normative content, including the ethical considerations, on aspects of futureoriented actions is essential, as it aims at improving the understanding of the conflicting aspirations of the world. Thus, we have to see clearer, both the explicit and the implicit normative elements in the repertoire of environmentally oriented decision making. The growing understanding will also prove to be of utmost importance in a situation of an increasing number of conflicts around the use of the resources of the planet and the different development models which are tried. This improved understanding about the basic values involved is also deeply connected to the perception about what it ultimately means to be a human being in our times.
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