Encyclopedia of

Global Environmental Change

egec

The volumes in this Encyclopedia are: Volume One The Earth system: physical and chemical dimensions of global environmental change Volume Two The Earth system: biological and ecological dimensions of global environmental change Volume Three Causes and consequences of global environmental change Volume Four Responding to global environmental change Volume Five Social and economic dimensions of global environmental change

Encyclopedia of

Global Environmental Change

Editor-in-Chief

Ted Munn
Institute for Environmental Sciences, University of Toronto, Canada

5
egec
Social and economic dimensions of global environmental change
Volume Editor

Peter Timmerman
IFIAS, Toronto, Canada

Copyright 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester Bafns Lane, Chichester West Sussex PO19 1UD, UK National: 01243 779777 International: ( 44) 1243 779777 e-mail (for orders and customer service enquiries): cs-books@wiley.co.uk Visit our Home Page on http://www.wiley.co.uk or http://www.wiley.com Copyright Acknowledgments A number of articles in the Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change have been written by government employees in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States of America. Please contact the publisher for information on the copyright status of such works, if required. In general, Crown copyright material has been reproduced with the permission of the Controller of Her Majestys Stationery Ofce. Works written by US government employees and classied as US Government Works are in the public domain in the United States of America. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except under the terms of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a license issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, W1P 0LP, UK, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. Other Wiley Editorial Ofces John Wiley & Sons Inc., 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158-0012, USA Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH, Pappelallee 3, D-69469 Weinheim, Germany Jacaranda Wiley Ltd, 33 Park Road, Milton, Queensland 4064, Australia John Wiley & Sons (Asia) Pte Ltd, 2 Clementi Loop #02-01, Jin Xing Distripark, Singapore 129809 John Wiley & Sons (Canada) Ltd, 22 Worcester Road, Rexdale, Ontario M9W 1L1, Canada

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 0 471 97796 9 Typeset in 10pt Times by Laser Words Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire

Editorial Board
Editor-in-Chief Ted Munn
Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Toronto, Canada

Volume Editors
Volume One The Earth system: physical and chemical dimensions of global environmental change Dr Michael C MacCracken, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA and Dr John S Perry, formerly, National Research Council USA Volume Two The Earth system: biological and ecological dimensions of global environmental change Professor Harold A Mooney, Stanford University, Stanford, USA and Dr Josep G Canadell, GCTE/IGBP, CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Canberra, Australia Volume Three Causes and consequences of global environmental change Professor Ian Douglas, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK Volume Four Responding to global environmental change Dr Mostafa K Tolba, International Center for Environment and Development, Cairo, Egypt Volume Five Social and economic dimensions of global environmental change Mr Peter Timmerman, IFIAS, Toronto, Canada

International Advisory Board

Dr Joe T Baker Commissioner for the Environment, ACT, Australia Professor Francesco di Castri CNRS, France Professor Paul Crutzen Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Germany Professor Eckart Ehlers IHDP/IGU Germany Professor Jos e Goldemberg Universida de S ao Paulo, Brazil Dr Robert Goodland World Bank, USA Professor Hartmut Grassl WCRP, Switzerland Professor Ronald Hill University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Dr Yu A Izrael Institute of Global Climate & Technology, Russia Professor Roger E Kasperson Clark University, USA Professor Peter Liss University of East Anglia, UK Professor Jane Lubchenco Oregon State University, USA Mr Jeffrey A McNeely IUCN, Switzerland Professor Thomas R Odhiambo Hon. President, African Academy of Sciences and Managing Trustee, RANDFORUM, Kenya Sir Ghillean T Prance University of Reading, UK Professor Steve Rayner Columbia University, USA

Contents
Preface to the Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change Preface to Volume Five The Human Dimensions of Global Change 1 The Changing Human Nature Relationships (HNR) in the Context of Global Environmental Change 11 Economics and Global Environmental Change 25 Ecological Economics 37 Environmental Politics 49 Global Environmental Change and Environmental History 62 Globalization in Historical Perspective 73 Technological Society and its Relation to Global Environmental Change 86 Relating to Nature: Spirituality, Philosophy, and Environmental Concern 97 Social Science and Global Environmental Change 109 The Emergence of Global Environment Change into Politics 124 The Environment and Violent Conict 137 Development and Global Environmental Change 150 Anthropology and Global Environmental Change Art and the Environment Attenborough, David Bahai Faith and the Environment BAT (Best Available Technology) Bateson, Gregory Brent Spar Brower, David Buddhism and Ecology Business-as-usual Scenarios 163 167 175 176 183 183 184 185 185 191 ix xv Earth Charter 216 Earth Day 216 Earth First! 217 Ecocentric, Biocentric, Gaiacentric 217 Ecofeminism 218 Eco-socialism 224 Ecosystem Approach 225 Ecosystem Services 226 Emergy 228 Encyclopedias: Compendia of Global Knowledge 228 Enlightenment Project 229 Environmental Defense Fund 230 Environmental Economics 230 Environmental Ethics 231 Environmental Movement the Rise of Non-government Organizations (NGOs) 243 Environmental Philosophy: Phenomenological Ecology 253 Environmental Psychology/Perception 257 Environmental Security 269 Environmental Sociology 278 Equity 279 Exxon Valdez Oil Spill 283 Francis of Assisi Friends of the Earth Futures Research Gaia Hypothesis Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand Governance and International Management Hazards in Global Environmental Change Hinduism and the Environment Homocentric Human Body, Immediate Environment 284 285 285 287 290 292 297 303 311 312

Carson, Rachel Louise 192 CBA (Cost Benet Analysis) 193 Chipko Movement 193 Christianity and the Environment 194 Circulating Freshwater: Crucial Link between Climate, Land, Ecosystems, and Humanity 201 Commons, Tragedy of the 208 Cousteau, Jacques 209 Deep Ecology Demographic transition Discounting 211 211 214

Indigenous Knowledge, Peoples and Sustainable Practice 314 International Environmental Law 324 ISEW (Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare) and GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator) 331

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CONTENTS

Islam and the Environment ISSC (International Social Science Council) Jains and the Environment Judaism and the Environment Kelly, Petra Kondratyev, Nikolai Dmitrievich

332 339 341 349 355 356

Precautionary Principle Property Rights and Regimes

455 457

Religion and Ecology in the Abrahamic Faiths 461 Religion and Environment Among North American First Nations 466 Roosevelt, Theodore 475 Scenarios Seveso Sierra Club Small is Beautiful Social Ecology Social Impact Assessment (SIA) Social Learning in the Management of Global Atmospheric Risks Soft Energy Paths Sovereignty and Sovereign States Sustainability: Human, Social, Economic and Environmental Theology Theories of Health and Environment Thoreau, Henry David Three Mile Island Torrey Canyon UNU (United Nations University) Virtual Environments Waldsterben WCC (World Council of Churches) Alphabetical List of Articles 476 482 483 483 484 484 485 487 487 489 492 492 502 503 503 504 505 508 509 511 523 553 569

Landscape, Urban Landscape, and the Human Shaping of the Environment 357 Leopold, Aldo 367 Life Style, Private Choice, and Environmental Governance 368 Literature and the Environment 370 Love Canal 382 Malthus, Thomas Robert 384 Man and Nature as a Single but Complex System 384 Modeling Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change 394 Modernity vs. Post-modern Environmentalism 408 Muir, John 411 Nasr, Seyyed Hossein National Environmental Law Nature New Ageism NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) Noosphere Phase Shifts or Flip-ops in Complex Systems Political Movements/Ideologies and the Environment Political Systems and the Environment: Utopianism Post-normal Science 412 413 419 420 421 421 422 429 443 451

List of Contributors Selected Abbreviations and Acronyms Index

Preface to the Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change

THE ENVIRONMENT
The word environment, whose dictionary meaning is simply that which surrounds, has in the last few decades become a buzzword , encompassing an exceedingly diverse array of elements and social issues. Taking the original meaning as a point of departure, it is clear that we humans depend totally on the environment provided by planet Earth for the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe. Thus changes in this environment must be of vital concern. Will Earth continue to sustain humans in a way that also encourages the ourishing of the other living things with whom we share the planet? This question has loomed ever larger as it has become more evident that human activities have been inducing major changes in all of the compartments of the global environment. We have converted forests and savannas to farms and cities; we have exhumed ancient treasures of fuels and minerals; we have used the rivers and winds as convenient sewers; and we have released entirely new chemical compounds and organisms into the environment. In the 1960s, the scienti c community began to use the word environment in this new non-specialist sense. Soon too, Departments of the Environment were created by many governments, and new scienti c journals began publication while others were re-named. For example, the International Journal of Air Pollution became Atmospheric Environment ! In the ensuing decades, the world community has come to see the environment in many different ways, as a life-support system, as a fragile sphere hanging in space, as a problem, a threat and a home. However, another vital insight began to emerge about 1980: the inescapably interlinked nature of these many environmental changes. On the very longest time scales, continental drift moved lands into different climates but also changed the climate of the globe itself. Photosynthetic life changed the atmosphere but also made possible more advanced life forms that could take advantage of the new environment. On shorter time scales, atmosphere and ocean often interact to produce the massive changes in the Southern Paci c that we term El Ni no and La Ni na, whose consequences extend across the planet, and profoundly affect even our socioeconomic systems. Indeed, we have come to realize that human-induced perturbations in the environment are becoming increasingly large, and are potentially coming to dominate the natural workings of the complex and interdependent global system that sustains life on Earth. Humans and their global environment are no longer independent; they are ever-increasingly becoming interdependent components of a single global system. Thus, the term global environmental change has come to encompass a full range of globally signi cant issues relating to both natural and human-induced changes in Earth s environment, as well as their socioeconomic drivers. This implicitly includes concerns for the capacity of the Earth to sustain life that have motivated the development of studies of global change and sustainable development in the last few decades. Analyses of global environmental change therefore demand input from the social sciences as well as the natural sciences (and indeed also from the engineering and health sciences) necessitating an inescapably interdisciplinary approach. Scientists from many disciplines have been attracted to this growing eld of global environmental change. This is particularly noticeable in the biological sciences through the encouragement of IGBP (International Geosphere Biosphere Programme), which invites ecologists to expand their eld of vision from the plot and landscape scales to the regional, continental and global ones, and to interact with scientists from other disciplines in exploring environmental change at these larger scales. Indeed this trend has encouraged publishers and scienti c societies to introduce new journal titles, and these publications from all accounts appear to be ourishing. At the same time, human social, economic, and cultural systems are rapidly changing under the in uence of growing globalization. In the economic sphere, for example, today s discourse centers on multinational corporations, the Global

GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

A broader and deeper understanding of the global aspects of environmental concerns emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, and a new phrase global environmental change acquired popular currency. Paleoresearch had revealed that environmental change was far from new, and by no means the sole result of the actions of heedless humans. Since the planet s formation, virtually every element of its environment has been undergoing massive changes on all space and time scales. Oxygen waxed and carbon dioxide waned in the atmosphere. Continents moved about the planet s surface like scum on a soup kettle. Great ice sheets grew and shrank. Above all, the force of life (the biosphere) emerged as a dominant driver of planetary change.

PREFACE TO THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

Economy, and the Globalization of Trade. Thus, the agendas of most of the physical, life, and social sciences increasingly focus on global-scale changes.

THE EVER-CHANGING ENVIRONMENT

Since the launching of Earth-viewing satellites, we have been able to see a constantly updated moving picture of our planet. Great weather systems sweep around the globe, waves of green and brown ebb and ow over the continents with the seasons, as do white waves of ice and snow. Nevertheless, a remarkable feature of the Earth system has been its relative stability. Since the dawn of life, the planets environment has remained within a range of conditions that has supported life. Moreover, with some notable and perhaps cautionary exceptions, changes from year to year, decade to decade, millennium to millennium, have been modest, particularly during the last 10 000 years. Many features of human society exhibit similar behavior. Civilizations and cultures evolve slowly for the most part in response to environmental, economic, and social driving forces over their long lives. Great cities like Rome endure through the ages. A citizen of ancient Babylon probably would have little difculty understanding the politics of modern Toronto. But today we appear to be entering an era of change unprecedented since Babylon was a cluster of mud huts. There are many reasons to believe that changes greater than humankind has experienced in its history are in progress and are likely to accelerate. Virtually every measure of human society numbers of people and automobiles, airplanes, energy consumption, generation of waste is increasing exponentially. While the values of a few indicators are leveling off, the magnitudes of annual increases of others remain immense. Major changes are becoming evident in many critical elements of the environment increasing carbon dioxide concentrations, stratospheric ozone depletion (not to mention the stratospheric Antarctic ozone hole and the possibility of a similar Arctic event), rising sea level, declining productivity of soils, widespread collapses of sheries, dramatic declines in biodiversity, destruction of tropical forests, etc. Within living memory, the countryside around large cities has been swallowed up by suburban developments and highways. Humans are stepping on the gas pedal of the planets environment, and perhaps recklessly breaking the survivable speed limit of global change. Paleoclimatological studies have shown that the stable environment that we take for granted has not always prevailed. Indeed, the relatively brief period in which human civilization has developed is somewhat unusual in its equable stability. Neolithic hunters in Europe some 13 000 years ago saw their climate shift from temperate to glacial in a single short lifetime. The evolution of human

society is punctuated by wars, pestilence, and technological revolutions. Major perhaps even catastrophic change could occur in the future, because we know it has occurred in the past. Rapidly advancing understanding of both natural and human systems and above all the ability to translate that understanding into quantitative models has enabled us to explore the future of our global society and its global climate with unprecedented realism. Although prediction of the single future path that we will follow is inherently unpredictable, it is possible to map a broad range of future environmental trajectories that we might take, each completely consistent with our understanding of how the system works. Such scenario-building exercises amply conrm our concerns that the changes of the 21st Century could be far greater than experienced in the last several millennia. Business-as-usual for human society appears to imply business-as-highly-unusual for the global environment.

THE INTERLOCKING BIOGEOPHYSICAL SOCIOECONOMIC SYSTEMS

Recognition came in the 1970s that many of the environmental issues are inter-connected through the biogeochemical cycling of trace substances, especially carbon, sulfur, nitrogen and phosphorus. In fact, in a prescient statement on the main environmental research priority of the 1980s, Mostafa Tolba (then Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme) and Gilbert White (then President of the Scientic Committee on Problems of the Environment) drew the attention of both the scientic and the science-policy communities to the need to understand the major global biogeochemical cycles in order to maintain the global life support systems in a healthy state (Tolba and White, 1979). Quoting from that statement,
We draw attention to the fundamental scientic importance of understanding the biogeochemical cycles which link and unify the major chemical and biological processes of the Earths surface and atmosphere. The results will have practical signicance for all of us who inhabit an Earth with limited resources and who, by our actions, increasingly affect the quality of the human environment.

So it is that many of the global environmental issues acid rain, stratospheric ozone depletion, climate change, nitrogen over-fertilization are inter-related through the global biogeochemical cycles. One of the interesting results of the study of the Earths history has been the discovery of the global teleconnections of the Earth system, with some major climatic shifts occurring simultaneously in the two hemispheres. In an analogous way, there has been recognition for a long time that human social, economic, and cultural systems are globally inter-related. That these are connected in turn to the

PREFACE TO THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

xi

Earth system was implicitly recognized as early as the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment. To manage the human responses to this enormously varied but at least moderately coupled world system in an era of increasing global change through the diverse array of local, national and international organizations is indeed a daunting challenge. An essential rst step is to describe past and present states, then to explain the various phenomena observed, and nally to develop predictive models (or at least a range of scenarios) describing the future behavior of this total Socioeconomic CulturalEnvironmental system. In this process, environmental scientists must learn how to assimilate better the new information constantly being received, although uncertainties, often large, will continue to exist. Within this mix, rational and effective policies must be developed that will balance the risks and costs of global environmental change in an adaptive way. Only then will we be able to even formulate, much less start to implement, rational and effective policies that cope effectively with global change. The prospect of change tempts us to think in terms of winners and losers. However, such analyses often do not play out in simple ways. For example, a modest increase in rainfall would cause farmers to rejoice while vacationers would despair. However, greater farm production can lead to lower commodity prices, thereby reducing farm incomes while making vacation food purchases less expensive. Human society is pretty well adapted to the present environment, so change is necessarily a challenge. In the longer-term, much depends on the ability of societies to respond, to adapt. Societies will differ in the resources natural, human, and technological that are available to them. They will also differ in terms of the values and priorities they attach to physical, social, and environmental goals, and in the social and political mechanisms that they employ to seek these goals. These differences in the human world of generations yet unborn may be as great and as signicant as the changes in the global environment. A major challenge for our times is to develop frameworks for understanding complex interdisciplinary issues of this complexity. No discussion of change and the future can be complete without consideration of risk. Projections of the future, however imaginative or soundly based, necessarily center on plausible, surprise-free scenarios population will increase, economies will advance, climate will change all typically slowly and smoothly. However, such projections made at the beginning of the 20th Century would have missed two World Wars, the automobile, aviation, space travel, television, and McDonalds in Beijing. By denition, genuine surprises cannot be predicted. However, an understanding of the impacts of past surprises may help us to make our society and our world somewhat more robust in the face of the unknown surprises that await us.

THE HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

The human dimension of global change has been dened as the ways in which individuals and societies contribute to global environmental change, are inuenced by it, and adapt to it. Many empirical studies have been undertaken that describe human activities in physical terms, based on various kinds of indicators. Rates of deforestation, urbanization, and changing levels of emissions of greenhouse gases are only some measurable contributors to environmental change. But the dynamics of human activities and global change are much more complex, and they reect the complexities of the humannature relationship. While the sheer burden of human activity on the planet is important, we know that the major forces at work are human beings operating together through political systems, corporations, interest groups, and beliefs that sway whole peoples. These raise questions about the nature of choice, about the hopes, dreams, and frustrations that impel people forward, or block them. At the moment, for instance, the dream of the good life which has been a critical element of every religious tradition in the world is increasingly being dened in terms of material possessions and powerful images that are shown on global media. Can this particular version of human happiness be sustained on a limited planet? Some people say that it can; others say that it cannot. The central questions about the role of human beings in global environmental change revolve around social, cultural, economic, ethical, and even religious issues. These are becoming more and more pressing, and more and more foundational as human beings deliberately or inadvertently modify more and more of the planet. It is also obvious that in this generation the modication of organisms and ecosystems may well extend to the modication of human beings themselves. Among the fundamental questions are: What motivates us towards saving or harming the environment? How do we see ourselves with regard to nature? What is our responsibility to this and future generations? Who do we think we are, and who would we like to become? Appropriately enough, Volume Five of this Encyclopedia wrestles, in many different voices, with these ultimate questions that remain intimately linked with the sweep of physical, chemical, biological, geographical, and institutional changes documented and discussed throughout the earlier four volumes. The Brundtland philosophy urges us not to reduce options for future generations. Implementation of this idea is, however, difcult. For example, it often seems more compelling to alleviate current poverty than to protect the environment and renewable resources for future generations. Many scientists agree that new approaches are needed to meld the social with the natural sciences in the policy arena. Some of the new methodologies that go beyond the physical sciences

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PREFACE TO THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

are described in Volumes Four and Five of this Encyclopedia, e.g., post-normal science, integrated environmental assessment, and the precautionary principle. In a commentary in which he described the 21st Century as the century of the environment, Edward O. Wilson began by referring to the growing consilience (the interlocking of causal explanations across disciplines) so that the interfaces between disciplines become as important as the disciplines themselves. He then stated that this interlocking amongst the natural sciences will in the 21st Century also touch the borders of the social sciences and humanities. In the environmental context, environmental scientists in diverse specialities, including human ecology, are more precisely dening the arena in which that species arose, and those parts that must be sustained for human survival (Wilson, 1998). This is a major challenge for environmental scientists. Already through DNA techniques, for example, it is possible to trace back connections amongst prehistoric peoples through the last Ice Age to modern times.

Volume 3 Causes and consequences of global environmental change (Ian Douglas, editor) Volume 4 Responding to global environmental change (Mostafa K Tolba, editor) Volume 5 Social and economic dimensions of global environmental change (Peter Timmerman, editor) The rst four volumes cover the broad issues of the science and politics of global environmental change. Volume Five adds an often understated but extremely important aspect, linking as it does, global environmental change to the socioeconomic, cultural and ethical dimensions of human societies. Here will be found a rich panoply of writings by people who are not natural scientists but who have thought deeply about the environment. It places global environmental change in a refreshing historical, sociological and cultural context. In many contributions, the time horizons of most interest are the last hundred and the next hundred years. However, some contributions dip backward millions of years. Throughout, the emphasis is upon the dynamics of the various processes discussed how and why did they change? A second recurrent theme is the interconnection of processes and changes What produces change? What is impacted by change? Finally, we attempt to deal even-handedly with natural and human-induced change, and with impacts on both the natural world and human society. From the numerous diverse articles in the Encyclopedia, we believe that the user can obtain a coherent picture of this complex and dynamic system of which we all are a part. To assist in promoting this coherence, each volume begins with a group of extended essays on major topics that embrace the eld covered in that volume. These are intended to provide an introduction to the topic, a convenient road map through cross-references for exploring the Encyclopedia. Then there follows, in alphabetical order, shorter articles on a variety of scientic topics, descriptions of scientic programs, denitions, acronyms, and biographies of leading contributors to the eld from Charles Darwin, through the Russian ecologist Vernadski, to the three most recent environmental Nobel Laureates Crutzen, Rowland and Molina. Indeed, these denitions, biographies and acronym denitions are, we believe, a uniquely valuable feature of the Encyclopedia. In the case of acronyms of international organizations and programs, it is no exaggeration to state that a young environmental scientist requires not only a good understanding of science, but also a good knowledge of acronyms, if they are to follow the discussions taking place at many international meetings! Also included in the alphabetic listings are abundant cross-references to related topics in the same or other volumes. The substantive scientic articles that comprise the meat of the Encyclopedia are original contributions by active scientists from around the world, and thus

THIS ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

More than two million papers are published every year in science and medicine, a twentyfold increase since 1940 that taxes the resources of concerned citizens, scientists, university departments, research institutes and libraries. At the same time, many policy-motivated organizations nd it difcult to draw together the necessary expertise for resolving the newly emerging environmental issues. The scientic literature relating to the environment is burgeoning. However, research syntheses are in general still scattered across a broad spectrum of journals and books, and information on global environmental change is not readily available in an inter-related way. In particular, it is quite uncommon for contributions from the natural sciences to appear in the same journal or workshop proceedings as contributions from the social sciences and the humanities. This Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change is a comprehensive and integrated reference in the broad area of global environmental change that will be conveniently accessible and productively usable by students, managers, administrators, legislators, and concerned citizens. The Encyclopedia consists of ve volumes of interrelated material: Volume 1 The Earth system: physical and chemical dimensions of global environmental change (Michael C MacCracken and John S Perry, editors) Volume 2 The Earth system: biological and ecological dimensions of global environmental change (Harold A Mooney and Josep G Canadell, editors)

PREFACE TO THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

xiii

represent authoritative and up-to-date summaries of the state of current knowledge, direct from the producers of this knowledge. A number of these articles break new ground in synthesizing and summarizing our understanding from novel viewpoints and in unconventional ways. Thus, readers will nd a wide variety of styles and approaches within the articles, reecting in a unique way the rich diversity of todays world science. The articles have also had the benet of careful reviews, particularly by our Editors. The scientic essays and some of the program descriptions begin with a few italicized paragraphs written for non-specialists. These are not intended to be abstracts of the paper to follow, but rather are aimed at providing the reader with an introduction into why the topic is important and where it ts into the broader aspects of global change a kind of encouragement to read on. Reading on should not be too difcult a task, since most of the scientic essays are written at the level of journals such as Scienti c American and AMBIO that are intended for the non-specialist. The Encyclopedia will be a valuable source of information for everyone with a general interest or a need-to-know in the various environmental elds (the natural sciences, socio-economics, engineering, the health sciences, and policy analyses) particularly as they relate to global-scale environmental change, its drivers, and its consequences. It is also expected that among the audiences for each volume will be practitioners and researchers in the elds covered by the other four volumes. We believe that this rather unusual indeed unique Encyclopedia will be used in a variety of ways. 1. Some people will employ it simply as a convenient source of information on specic topics What has been happening recently to the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean? Who was Roger Revelle? What is soil mineralization? What is ICSU or IGBP? What is the Kyoto Protocol? What is deep ecology?

2. Serious students in the environmental sciences may begin by reading one or all of the introductory essays, which present highly compressed crash courses in a range of central topics. 3. We believe that the substantive specialized articles that constitute the bodies of the volumes are productively and enjoyably readable in their own right. 4. Finally, a case has been made by one of the volume editors (Peter Timmerman) for encyclopedia browsing as an enjoyable and productive pastime (see Encyclopedias: Compendia of Global Knowledge, Volume 5). We believe that these ve volumes are in the tradition of the human aspiration towards the compilation of global knowledge that sparked the preparation of the rst encyclopedias in the 18th Century. Our Editors have had the benet of a marvellous postgraduate education in the course of the Encyclopedias evolution! We are immensely grateful to the many, many authors in our virtual university who have contributed their wisdom to this project.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Many helpful comments and draft paragraphs were received from the Volume Editors during the preparation of this Preface.

REFERENCES
Tolba, M K and White, Gilbert F (1979) Global Life Support Systems, SCOPE Newsletter, No. 7, October. 2 pp. Wilson, Edward O (1998) Integrated science and the coming century of the environment, SCIENCE 279, 2048 2049.

Ted Munn Editor-in-Chief

Preface to Volume Five

Volume Five is devoted to the social, political, economic, and spiritual dimensions of global environmental change, and as such represents a departure from the conventional focus on the purely physical aspects of global change. It highlights the profound shifts in human thinking and awareness that are required to wrap our minds around the advent of globalization, and our increasing ability to affect natural systems, sometimes to our own benet, sometimes not. This powerful role cannot simply be captured by treating human beings as if they were another natural force. Social, cultural, and economic ideas and institutions shape the desires and hopes, the conicts and resolutions of conict that are central to the human dimension of global change. Yet, at the same time, human beings are incontestably part of nature as other volumes in this Encyclopedia demonstrate. Volume Five overlaps with, and complements, these other volumes. Because of the complex weave of interaction between humanity and the environment, this volume contains many essays and articles that are more in the realm of probes than xed descriptions of their topics. Powerful words and powerful ideas, metaphors, myths, beliefs, images and artefacts these are all vehicles for the creation and shaping of meaning among human beings. Topics covered include the great political and economic theories, the most inuential views of nature from Plato to Rachel Carson, and the historic and literary seedbeds for the rise of environmental thought and practice in our time. Of particular importance in this volume are the introductory essays from leading gures in the eld, and special efforts have been made throughout to give space to alternative voices and ideas. Dialogue and diversity are essential to human development, and we hope that the reader is stimulated by this volume towards his or her own thoughtful response to the increasing responsibility for the future of the Earth that has come upon us in our time. Among the voices that we are privileged to present in this volume, the Editors would like to single out that of Ester Boserup, whose pathbreaking work as a student of the social dynamics of technological change, and of the role of women in economic development, make her an exemplar of the kind of interdisciplinary thinker so often proclaimed as necessary, and so seldom found. She died before the Encyclopedia could go to press, but we would like to dedicate this volume to her memory. Peter Timmerman Editor of Volume Five

The Human Dimensions of Global Change

PETER TIMMERMAN
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

The central icon of the environmental movement is the earth hanging in space, that mysterious and unexpected cargo brought back from the voyages to the moon. See Figure 1 in The Earth System, Volume 1. It appears on bedroom walls, refrigerators, and annual reports by multinational food companies. Blue-green and spherical against the stark blackness of space, it speaks of all things natural, all things green, the vision of one earth, one world.

Yet, part of its paradox is that this environmental symbol was the result of the most advanced technological project in human history (at that time), whose roots are easily traceable to the challenge of the Cold War, the long-range missile projects beginning in World War II, the atomic bomb, the militarization of space, and even the elegant camera technology that enabled the pictures to be taken. But the image is even more iconic and mysterious than that. At rst glance, it appears a lonely image the only home we have devoid of human reference points, at least at the distance of the moon. Yet a nagging question is: where are we in this picture? The easy answer is that we are in there somewhere, maybe waving, or drowning. The more intriguing answer is that we are the picture: that it took all of science and technology that is, all of the ability to provide a temporary earth in a plastic suit in deep space to keep a human alive and all of history, that is, not just evolution, but all the social and cultural reasons that would make a being turn around at a precise moment oating in space, pick out the earth from the surrounding darkness as something worth photographing, and then lift a camera to his eyes, focus, and take a picture with some purpose in mind. The literary critic, Marshall McLuhan, made a typically prophetic remark in 1970, in an obscure inaugural piece in an early environmental magazine (since defunct):
whereas the planet had been the ground for the human population as gure; since Sputnik, the planet has become gure and the satellite surround has become the new ground . Once it is contained within a human environment, Nature yields its primacy to art.

McLuhan here invokes the familiar image of the gureground reversal the faces that turn into vases, and back again; or the duck that ips into a rabbit and ducks back

again to suggest that while up until the arrival of the image from space, human beings saw themselves as gures on a ground, the environment is now a mere gure on human grounds. The gure-ground reversal suggests that this is a sudden perceptual shift; which may be the case, but its elements have been arriving for some time. One early element can be found in the idea that the higher you go off the earth, the closer you approach the realm of God. This is obviously exhilarating, but it is also blasphemous and unsettling. An early source is the temptation of Jesus, who, after being baptized by John, goes into the wilderness where he is threatened by the devil. Among the trials he undergoes is that of the potential for total earthly power; and the devil takes him to the highest point of the world and shows it all to him before Jesus rejects it. Peaks are for falling off of, as well as for gaining perspective. In later medieval literature, airborne journeys of a more lighthearted sort take to the skies, the hero drawn by geese or lifted up by air currents, or in a dream. Yet when Dante leaps off the earth and moves into the higher realms in The Divine Comedy, it is clear that this is unsettling. A later appearance of the earth from space, in Milton s Paradise Lost is ominously seen from the perspective of Satan, newly released from the prison of Hell, and ying around the universe looking for a new home away from home. This Godlike stance, epitomized by the image of the earth from space, is, as literature suggests, powerful. The arrival of global maps and globes in the 16th century was part of the great surge of Western power that began with the age of discovery and has only intensi ed its reach in the age of the Internet. The ability to hold the world in our minds is the forerunner of the ability to hold it in our hands, and vice versa.

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

Today we continue the same process. Again, it was McLuhan who said that in the age of satellites there is no more wilderness. There is hardly anywhere on the earth where one can hide, for example, from cruise missiles that, guided by satellite, can drop on a designated square meter of ground. The Hubble telescope, of which we have heard so much, has sister scopes whose magnifying powers are turned in to gaze on the details of our lives. It is clear that the American Armed Forces believe that the next high ground for military superiority is the satellite surround. Evidence of this could be found during the Gulf War in 1991, when the rst action of the Allied powers was to cut off access to international satellite pictures for the Iraqis, the result being that they were forced to ght essentially blind. Another related element, contributing to the gureground reversal, is the gradual increase in humankinds inuence over the physical systems of the planet. Other volumes in this encyclopedia highlight this encroachment, where human beings are creaming off and rearranging vast parts of the earths primary production for our own purposes. Certainly human beings have affected large chunks of the earths natural terrain before, but the ability to affect whole physical and chemical cycles of the planet surely represents a watershed (airshed, earthshed) in earths history. Our ngers and ngerprints are now and will continue to be all over the genetic future of a myriad species. The ground plans in which they will gure are human inuenced, human inspired.

THE HUMAN DIMENSION OF GLOBAL CHANGE

A volume of an encyclopedia on global environmental change that deals with the human dimension of global change is thus necessarily confronted with fundamental issues, of which the most fundamental remains: what does it mean to be human? Tightly related questions, but more obviously tractable (though one need not get too carried away with tractability) are: what is the relationship between human meanings and goals, and the tools, such as science and technology, that we are using to make those meanings and meet those goals? What does the humanizing of the planet mean? Is it manageable, possible, agreeable, delightful, horrifying? In 1996, the philosopher Thomas Nagel published a book called The View From Nowhere (Nagel, 1996), which describes in detail the stance which modern science wishes to take. Another philosopher, Hilary Putnam, actually refers to this stance as Gods Eye View (Putnam, 1995). The earliest intimation of that stance may be Archimedes famous remark, that if he were allowed to place his lever anywhere, he could move the world. This hints at the later stance, which is that the earth is not a privileged vantage point,

and in fact there is no privileged vantage point. Science seeks (or sought) to eliminate all the effects and inuences of special locations, investigators, etc., in favor of universal laws. This has been undermined at least at the popular level somewhat by the paradoxes of the observer and the observed at the quantum mechanical level of science; but the ethos remains intact. The social critics (Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, and others) of the Frankfurt School in the 1930s were among the rst to worry about the possibility that the search for this particular kind of enlightenment what we might call the universe lying spreadeagled on the dissecting table was not itself neutral. They suggested that the rhetoric of expanding human knowledge was harnessed to a very powerful unexamined Puritanical drive towards a pure objective truth, in the face of which ordinary human experience would wither and die. They also suggested that there is a complex connection between what we could call objectivity and the treating of the world as if it were an object. The experience of the Nazi years (which, among other things, led to the eeing of the Frankfurt School to America), and the arrival of the atomic bomb and the Cold War, substantially undermined the claims of what has been called the Enlightenment Project or the Age of Modernity (see Enlightenment Project, Volume 5). The claim that reason and science could improve the lot of humankind became juxtaposed against the claim that it could also destroy humankind. It was not enough to say that evil is always possible, and reason and science could be misused; critics began to question if there was something unreasonable in the very framework of modernity. The famous (or notorious) outcome of this was the arrival of postmodernism whose antagonism to modernity was described succinctly by the French philosopher, JeanFrancois Lyotard, as a suspicion of all grand narratives (Lyotard, 1984). These grand narratives included the spread of reason over the world, universal human rights, the redescription of the natural world in scientic terms, the increasing recasting of natural resources by technology, and globalization. It is worth pointing out in this context that virtually all the international organizations and initiatives represented in this encyclopedia subscribe to the grand narrative tradition, simply because they were either generated in the 19th century explosion of scientic networks and societies; or in the post-World War II heyday of the United Nations. Postmodernist thought is aligned to what is sometimes called postnormal science (see Post-normal Science, Volume 5), which is an expression of a similar form of skepticism about the rhetoric of neutral science. Postnormal science interrogates this rhetoric, but also examines the work practices of scientists, their worldview assumptions,

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the agenda-setting devices (e.g., why are scientists looking at this particular part of the world and not another?) and their communities. Rayner and Malone, in their overview essay for this volume, describe in detail a number of the tensions between the universalizing tendencies in the physical sciences and the less powerful (but often similarly universalizing) counterstrategies in the social sciences and the humanities (see Social Science and Global Environmental Change, Volume 5). To report on some personal experience, it was while I was involved with the project to establish the International Human Dimensions of Global Change Programme in the late 1980s that the project leaders found themselves practically, as well as theoretically, faced with the implications of the split between the worldviews of the physical sciences and those of the social sciences and humanities. Roughly speaking, however, the main dividing line is not between the sciences and the social sciences; in fact, the dividing line is within the social sciences, between those social sciences whose practitioners see themselves engaged in some form of quasi-physical science enterprise, and those that see themselves engaged in (what for want of a better phrase) what could be called meanings and frameworks. The practical implications of this were (and are) that models of global change generated by physical science institutions treat human beings as if they were another element in a diagram of boxes with wires. The output of certain social sciences parts of physical geography, anthropology, demography, etc. can t reasonably congenially into these wiring diagrams. Social behavior, communications, politics, and so on, are marginalized or added on as rhetorical ourishes in the form of feedback loops. On the other side of the dividing line, other social scientists and humanists assault the whole enterprise, i.e., that it is a symptom of the global situation we are in (the rationalized objectication of the world) and not a solution. This kind of standoff has complicated efforts to create international research programs that could usefully integrate the natural and the social sciences.

THE RISE OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT

Traditionally, histories of the environmental movement (especially in North America) begin with conservation efforts and egregious examples of early industrial pollution, and trace its evolution through the creation of national parks, the upsurge of interest in the 1960s through Rachel Carsons (1963) Silent Spring, and the arrival of environmental legislation in the 1970s and 1980s. This ts in with a progressive model of a set of problems, problems identied, an orderly political response, and so on.

In light of the above, however, I believe that a more powerful history links environmentalism to some central concerns of the Romantic movement in the late 18th century about the fundamental relationship between human beings and Nature, in particular the nature of Human Nature in a world increasingly subjected to human inuence. Moreover, the most compelling parts of works like Rachel Carsons are not about this or that pesticide, but about threats to what could be called the fabric of life, i.e., threats. As discussed more fully in Art and the Environment, Volume 5 and Literature and the Environment, Volume 5, the Romantic movement was driven by a desire to overturn and reconstruct what the artists, poets, and advanced political thinkers of the time believed to be an outmoded, and indeed repressively dead, cosmology. This cosmology patriarchal, hierarchical, and rational (in the sense of a machine-like logic) was increasingly being used to cage and tie down new expressions of human wellbeing. Because it was outmoded, it was like a snake skin or an exoskeleton that was too small externally applied, not internally generated. Among the metaphors applied to this cosmology were the mask and the machine. The mask ultimately derived from the critique of civilization fomented by the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau symbolized the hypocrisy and public demeanor of ancient powers, as well as the emerging urban populace alienated from those powers, and from each other. The opposite of the mask was the Man of transparent virtue, and part of the increasingly vicious theatre of the French Revolution (17891795) was the relentless stripping off of, rst, the masks of rank and station, and then, the stripping off of the masks of personal life down to the bone. The machine came to symbolize both the newfound energy that could stimulate a new world of wealth creation, but also the turning of people into creatures of the machine. The early Industrial Revolution appeared to be like the maw of some great creature, driving rural people away from their farms and villages, and into hideously polluted factories where they worked inexorably, hour after hour, day after day. The fact that incomes and life-expectancies began their also inexorable rise upward, and the uncomfortable fact that supposedly happy rural life before industrialization would not bear close examination, had less impact than the immediately obvious relationship between the dismantling of a seemingly organic world and the interim chaos that ensued. Capitalism turned everything into a resource for exploitation. To the Romantic writers and poets William Blake, Henry David Thoreau, Friedrich Schiller Nature becomes many things in the wake of the extraordinary eruption of industrialization into the world. Most obviously, it becomes a refuge from the ills of modernizing life, which is one of the sources for the conservation and parks movement. Less

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

obviously, it becomes a kind of comrade, or surrogatelike human beings, Nature is under threat. Some social ecologists see this as a central thread in modern environmental politics. Another aspect of Nature is its presence in the world as an alternative system or structure to that being raised by human ingenuity. The fact that it has a creative autonomy of its own, and is supremely inventive and complex in its own right, challenges the arrogance of technological man. For some people, Nature becomes an entry into a spiritual realm, and interestingly enough, it is critics like John Ruskin and poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins, who fasten on the intricate details of Natures design as the entry way; and not, as earlier, on Nature as a grand symbol. In this, one can see the growing inuence of natural science, initially on the Victorians, and later in the synthesis that would become the environmental movement. However important this history may be, the real history of the modern environmental movement, to my mind, begins with Hiroshima, and is followed very quickly by the revelations about the Nazi death camps. It was these events that concentrated a growing unease about the capacity of human beings to destroy themselves, and perhaps the world around them. We can begin to see a change of tone in environmental writing (still nature writing) in the 1950s (Rachel Carsons rst successes appeared then); and it is little remembered that the writing of Silent Spring coincided with the rst great international grassroots environmental action to stop the above-ground testing of nuclear weapons. Part of what fueled that successful political activity was the unsettling prospect of having what had hitherto been seen as a most benign metaphor, mothers milk, poisoned; and poisoned at a distance. Carsons pesticide poisoning at a distance amplied and echoed that other concern. These threats to the fabric of life to the possibility that rents in the fabric might be caused by human ignorance were (in my mind) the spiritual dynamic behind the environmental movement. In the 1970s, it went somewhat underground, as the nuts and bolts of environmental management took center stage. I say somewhat, because it could always be found, for example, in the concern for the potential loss of endangered species. But at various points, it has returned in full force to revitalize environmental activism. In the late 1980s, the prospect of a rent in the fabric of the sky the ozone hole regenerated a whole array of environmental actors and institutions. Similarly, if more slowly, the prospect of irreversible climate change has begun to concentrate the minds of many activists. The current activist environmental movement in part because of the political dynamic associated with global environmental issues (symbolized by the Rio Earth Summit in 1992) appears to be more inclined to return to the question of the role of modern industrialization and its technological imperatives. Globalization as a phenomenon

is becoming widely seen as the interim step towards the ultimate transformation of the Earth into a human enterprise. Since multinational corporations and the rhetoric of global free trade are propelling much of this, environmentalists have begun making more and more sophisticated critiques of mainstream economics.

ECONOMICS AND GLOBAL CHANGE

A central fact about contemporary life is that globalization is rooted in a range of theories and practices that derive from economics. This is contested by those who would prioritize political structures such as the nation state, or strategies of imperialism, or even social or legal or philosophical forces deriving from the spread of Western models of individualism across the globe. Nevertheless, if one sees in economics a complex web of all of these, ultimately justied by an almost religious belief in the virtues of the market system whose every whim needs to be tended, then its strength as a belief system for at least the elites in the West and their acolytes can be hardly disputed. Looked at historically, one of the most important aspects of modern economic theory and practice is that it represents the rst and most successful form of systems theory as applied to social systems. This is part of its power; and as will be discussed shortly, is essential to its ethical dimension. Economics, like the modern social sciences generally, originated in various attempts to do for the social world what Newton had done for the physical world, that is, nd a set of simple laws that would explain and underpin a complex set of phenomena. The Scottish and French enlightenment thinkers were haunted by this possibility; and among the rst, and among the most controversial, of the attempts at fullling this vision, was the provocative work by the British writer (actually born in the Netherlands) Bernard de Mandeville (1714), The Fable of the Bees. In the Fable, Mandeville breaks with the moral and spiritual traditions of the world, and argues that private vice should be encouraged, because spending on luxury goods, prostitutes, race horses, etc., generates many public benets through employment. Here in embryo is the central pillar of neo-conservative thought in our own day. What made Mandevilles work so inuential was the linking of local phenomena to global phenomena with opposite characteristics. The social thinker is either to trace the impacts of the local phenomena to their global outcomes from a neutral stance (the view from nowhere), or, even more inuentially, realize that the local phenomena can be described quite differently when seen from a higher vantage point. Moreover, the allocation of goods and bads can be dissociated from any notion that the Deity bestows them.

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This powerful systems model sat in the armory of the early economists, awaiting further renement. In the meantime, these economists, including the physiocrats in France (mid-18th century), and the classical economists Smith, Malthus, and Ricardo (1750s1830s) began the task of tracing out the transformation of Nature, people, and investments/nance/invention/buildings into land, labor, and capital. With each tracing, the relationship between economic activity and the physical world diminished, and was replaced by the intricate workings of the market. Perhaps one of the hardest things for a non-economist (actually, for most economists as well) to recognize is that economics does not deal with the physical world. This became particularly true after the rst neo-classical revolution in the mid 19th century associated with J S Mill, William Stanley Jevons, and others; and continued into the 20th century (with variations). Instead, it deals with the subjective desires of individuals, as expressed through competing demands signaled by prices, and adjudicated by a market whose other component is supplies, drawn to the market by the price signals, which are re-determined by the interaction of demand and supply. More modern theory speaks of rational allocation of scarce resources, but again, the real world only appears in the tenuous link supplied by an assumption of scarcity. As a result, in contemporary economic theory and practice, the natural world enters only as it inuences prices. If there is no price on koala bears, i.e., no one wants or values them, they do not exist. To deal with this problem (and others) is the domain of the emerging discipline of environmental economics (see Economics and Global Environmental Change, Volume 5; Environmental Economics, Volume 5). Among the tasks of this discipline are: to nd shadow values for environmental goods that do not show up in market prices; to develop surrogate measures for environmental value; subject environmental goods that currently have no legal or proprietary owners to privatization; and generally to internalize within the market what are called externalities. This environmental economics approach can be compared to the approach of ecological economics (see Ecological Economics, Volume 5). Ecological economics repudiates the entire superstructure of modern economic thought polemically described above; and rather proposes to return to the kinds of approaches characteristic of the French physiocrats, and others. Specically, ecological economists focus on a variety of physical aspects of human use of the resources of the earth to sustain life. This approach considers, among other things, what are the physical requirements to feed human beings, sustain agriculture year by year, harness energy, process mineral and chemical feed stocks for industrial production, and assess the ability of the earth systems to handle the waste products of our activities. There are a number of problems

with this alternative approach, of which perhaps the least serious is that there is no consistent set of measuring tools and common language among the variety of competing versions of ecological economists. Economists such as Daly and Cobb (1993) have been working for some years on alternative measures of gross national product and monitoring systems other than price mechanisms. More serious is the difculty of internalizing the other economic approach, which, whatever ones views, does currently drive the international economic system. The price mechanism is ingrained into the workings of virtually all decision-making processes, and acts as a fundamental purveyor of information in current society. Most serious of all are the intangible benets of the standard economic approach as a moral and ethical system. A lot that could be said about this, but I would like to discuss two issues on this topic briey. The rst, returning to where this section began, with Mandevilles vision, is that one benet of the standard economic approach is it allows people to repudiate compassion; or to put it another way, to feel good about being self-interested. Obviously, technical economists (welfare economists and the like) would protest this kind of remark; but I am speaking here about a general cultural inuence. Part of the neo-conservative agenda that has been so powerful in recent years is an argument that people who act compassionately towards the poor are acting inefciently. Indeed, they are, in fact, standing in the way of the improvement in the lot of the poor that would be produced by allowing the market to operate more efciently. Everything that interferes with the market social safety nets, public insurance, public health care is by denition inefcient, and thus drags down the potential for the economy. It is the hard-hearted economic realist who is really the benefactor of the poor. A related moral aspect of this system is that it is supposedly morally neutral. Since it derives from individual wants, whatever those wants may be, it says nothing about whether some wants are better than others. This classic attack on the amorality of utilitarians is, in fact, a source of pride to economic liberals; though they tend, paradoxically, to bemoan the loss of conservative values like family life that their system is happily destroying. The second (and related) issue is that not only are the origins of those wants now subjected to gross manipulation by corporate advertising; but at the heart of the system for a variety of obscure historical and sociological reasons one can nd a powerful model of the human which is being propounded. In this view, contrary to virtually all ethical and spiritual traditions in the world, human beings are fundamentally self-interested, and possessed of innite desires which can never be fully satised; and that rather than try and eliminate these desires, they should be encouraged. Similarly, consumption patterns are now fully seen

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

as expressions of one s personality. The rise of fashion, the need for status differentiation in an increasingly homogenized world, and the transformation of the citizen into a consumer rather than a producer, have all contributed to the seemingly unlimited growth in consumption in developed countries. As has been stated by numerous writers, the spread of this in nitely desiring consumer model to the developing world is doubly troubling. Analysts of the so-called ecological footprint the amount of extra resources needed to service developed country growth already argue that we will need three or four new earths to service a world population carrying around in its heads the lifestyles of North America.

MANAGING THE EARTH?

In the meantime, if we look at actual production patterns on the earth, designed to service this population, we can see very important trends in the technical means being deployed in the reordering of the planet for human ends. Approximately 40% of land-based net primary production (that is, plant-generated material), and over 25% of marine net primary production is now being diverted or rearranged for human use. Much of this is taken by the domestication of livestock, the harvesting of higher animals and sh, and agriculture. This is completely unprecedented. What is happening around the world is essentially a restructuring of ecosystems in order to maximize production, primarily through creating systems according to at least ve rules. 1. organize for harvesting of natural products at the peak of productivity. The productive peak for many natural ecosystems is at the end of the juvenile phase; concentrate for easier planting/monitoring/harvesting; replace/buffer/enhance ecosystem processes; add value at, and beyond, the farm gate; suppress extra-market externalities.

2. 3. 4. 5.

Here are two examples of some of these rules in operation. One example is sh farming. Worldwide natural sh stocks are in deep trouble, with something like 34% of sh species threatened with extinction. One solution is intensi ed sh farming in captive tanks. It is calculated that one in four sh that reaches market today comes from a sh farm. The problem is that a sh farm is a monoculture, and all the supporting services have to be brought in from the outside sh farmers are now competing with poultry and pork producers for grain and protein meal supplements, such as soybeans. These farms also produce high levels of waste, they suffer from outbreaks of disease, and forms of chemical pollution. This is exactly the same situation as in monocultural agriculture. The problem with the average managed eld

is that it is trying to turn back into a meadow or a forest. Today s agriculture requires immense inputs of pesticides, herbicides, gasoline for tractors, etc., in order to create an outdoor factory. The most recent types of high-yield corn require that all the microorganisms in the surrounding soil be killed off. This kind of agriculture is becoming more and more expensive, in part because the weeds and the bugs, i.e., the ecological precursors of a return to a meadow, are being chemically and biologically selected for resistance to whatever the latest crop strategy is. A similar process has been underway for many years in forestry. Rule one means that crops, trees and sh must be harvested in the juvenile phase and before they level off as adults, at which point it is economically inef cient for them to just be sitting around. This means that there are no older age cohorts left, which also means that the regeneration through decomposition disappears. If you have no old trees, you have no carbon being returned to the soil, no place for insects and other decomposers to nestle in, and so on. Rule two, which is essential to agriculture and mining, concentration and simpli cation means, in living systems, that there is no diversity, and that makes the system vulnerable to catastrophic attack by virus, bug, plague, weed, or genetic mutation or rapid climate change. Rule three means that all the processes of energy cycling, nutrient creation, removal of wastes, and so on, have to be imported into the simpli ed ecosystem from outside. In order to do that, energy is required, in addition to resources from somewhere else, which means that some other highquality ecosystem (or stock of fossil fuels) is being tapped into and degraded. It is based on the assumption that there is always somewhere else left to go to get the supplies needed to feed the arti cial ecosystem. Rule four, which is well known to farmers, means that the primary production of the ecosystem is virtually worthless it is essentially a host for what will happen next. A potato is worth nothing compared to barbacue potato chips. That is where the money is. A particularly ironic example of this came recently during the collapse of the East Coast Fisheries. One of the largest Canadian sh processors, which was instrumental in destroying the sheries, and has now moved on to the South China Sea, turned its attention to sh species that it had never bothered to sh for before, ground them up, and then rebuilt them as sh ngers in the shapes of star sh and seahorses, and was selling them at great pro t to Colonel Sanders and other fast food outlets in the US. Rule ve, which is perhaps the most important, is an attempt to eliminate the environment as a part of economic costs of production and marketing. The best example of this the one that is causing global warming is the suppression of geography to enable the smooth running of free trade. Free trade, or if you like, international free markets,

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depend upon the ability to ship goods to any place in the world without friction or at very low friction. Distance from one place to another is no longer to be a consideration. The reason this can be done more or less is the low price of fossil fuels. Cheap transportation means that California produce can compete, for example, with Ontario produce virtually year round. The reason why fossil fuels are cheap is that the earth subsidizes carbon dioxide and other emissions. The ecological costs of these fuels are not internalized: if they were, free trade would die tomorrow. As it is, we are awaiting global warming.

POLITICS AND THE WANING OF TRUST

Global change presents us with a number of issues climate change, the extinction of species, and the disposal of nuclear waste that require us to think in the very long term, over hundreds and maybe thousands of years. One reason why people have turned to ethicists and spiritual leaders to articulate new environmental ethics, and others to new environmental politics, is a sense that this kind of task is beyond the normal reach of our current ways of thinking, and requires something different. An important recent set of discussions has revolved around the concept of trust, what Niklas Luhmann (1979) referred to as one of the ways in which we try personally or politically to cope with uncertainty over time through vowing to be trustworthy, trusting others, entrusting ourselves to them, accepting trusteeships, etc. It is a little known fact that one central element of Western representative democracy grew out of a debate (actually a war) about whom to trust, how to entrust, and for how long, with decision-making power. The British Crown sought (under Charles I in the 1630s) to retain the power of taxation without representation (to use an anachronistic phrase) by claiming emergency powers to deal with supposed external threats to the nation. Charles wanted to build ships and get some extra pocket money. The ensuing Ship Money struggle and the Civil War that followed led the next generation of politicians and philosophers to work on the conditions for declaring emergency powers. The political theory and practice that evolved further claried the nature of the entrusting relationship between citizen and government as a whole, rst in Britain, and then elsewhere. As outlined by John Locke (among others), the contract between government and citizen became seen to be in part based on the entrusting of decision-making power to a representative body for a period of time subject to eventual review by the electorate. This historical interlude is important because it points up the fact that pivotal to the entrusting of decision-making to representatives was the idea of time: that the government could not always refer back to citizens for every decision

and indeed it was important not to do so, when issues were so complex or in need of such speedy resolution that constant referral back through simple referenda, etc., was unlikely to produce a better outcome than focused debates by representatives, who were free to be convinced by their opponents of the wisdom or folly of their position. Obviously, the legitimacy of this entire setup which is not exactly an accurate description of how things turned out in representative institutions around the world is now under great stress. Not only are even democratic governments currently more executive and less legislative, for a variety of complex reasons, than the ideal supposes, but citizens are now more educated and unwilling to defer to elected representatives than they may have been; and there has also been an evolution towards at least the rhetoric of more active participation by unelected individuals in the decisionmaking process. This has been aided and abetted by new communications technologies like the Internet. Representative democracies have not been able to come up with appropriate ways to respond to this desire for increased participation, and what is in place is somewhat haphazard and awed; and this has affected the ability of governments and institutions to respond to underlying public anxiety about fundamental environmental questions, and the whole range of longer term concerns in any other way than by bureaucracy. On the one hand, there is an increasing use of single issue referenda, which are subject to manipulation and distortion, but give people a voice or at least a gesture. On the other hand, there has arisen over the past while, a whole array of quasi-participatory committees, NGOs, and investigative bodies like the Environmental Assessment Review Panels and Royal Commissions. These usually report to Cabinet or Parliament, and they are supposed to engender trust that the pros and cons of the longer term are being weighed and assessed properly by experts as well as citizens in a deeper way. These new approaches seem, however, to do little to address some of the more fundamental distrusting going on out there. This is tied to the phenomenon that this section began with referring to: the increasing recognition that decisions being made (or avoided) are extending over larger and larger stretches of time and space, and having effects that are not part of the original mandate of the political institution making the decision. A classic example of this is the repudiation by outraged citizens of agreements made by town councils, and other local bodies, to site hazardous or radioactive waste facilities and the casting about for an appropriately legitimate level of government that can make that kind of decision. We didnt elect you to make that kind of decision , is the rallying cry. But democratic countries have not yet found any way of legitimating decisions about where to put high-level nuclear waste for a million years or more, in spite of a multitude of commissions, reports, inquiries, and so on.

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

Associated with this is an easily awakened mistrust of the elite and professional apparatus of rational management. Part of the legitimacy of government in our time is in its professed ability to manage any change rationally. The rise of the modern bureaucratic state is based on the premise that utilitarian calculations mixed with expert projection can cope rationally with most of the situations that will arise. So powerful has this rationalization been that on the occasions where symbols of managed rationality have broken down Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Vietnam they have threatened the legitimacy of the entire system of governance. Some philosophers suggest that the special form of rational management associated with the modern world was fatally crippled at Auschwitz. Others, less radically and more hopefully, suggest that people are now less prone to do things just because their government tells them to like walking unprotected into atom bomb test sites. Certainly one of the interesting facts of our time is that the citizenry and the environmental radical are often now arrayed on the side of prudential behavior with regard to proposed future risks; while governments, administrative experts, and corporate elites are essentially risk-prone. Their trust in their own capacities is undisturbed, in part because they are so locked into short-term forecasting. It is everyone else who nds themselves forced to inject pessimism and uncertainty back into the process; and to mandate the consideration of worst-cases and the very long term. It is usually said that politicians and the system are unable to think past the next election, and that this is somehow due to the greediness and short-sightedness of their masters, the electorate. While there is something to this, it is not everything. There are endless examples of the short-sightedness of the expert and the forecaster, whose models accentuate the present and discount the future. The expert can miss the forest for the trees, and the fact that there are no more trees may not show up as a loss on the balance sheet, if the property values can be cashed out elsewhere. Counter to these balance sheets and snazzy models is often something much humbler, more conservative (in the original sense) and simpler: the uneasy sense among the ordinary person that something has gone wrong, and that if we keep going the way we are going, things can only get worse. Common sense is not all that common, and I do not want to exalt the common man or woman as the paragon of all wisdom. Yet it was the philosopher Karl Popper who made the case that one of the great virtues of democracies was that sometimes the citizenry were the only people who could break the stranglehold of some grand stupidity that was mesmerizing the all-knowing powers-that-be. In this category a feeling for the overall wisdom of what is going on I would put the feel for the longer term.

Perhaps it is just living a life, or the fact of having children, or being the latest in a long story line that stretches back in time. Traditional cultures developed methods of thinking ethically over the longer term, and this is one of the reasons they were, in large part, sustainable. One crucial element of thinking about the longer term, facing the future, is facing towards the past. To develop a sense of responsibility over time, traditional cultures have relied upon ancestor worship and long-standing rituals. Thinking like an ancestor is a familiar strategy: respect for ones living elders, and ones long-dead ancestors provides one with a compass for what one should do now and also what one should do to keep faith with those people into the distant future. If we continue to do what has worked well in the past, then the future is secured. This kind of approach to risks is, of course, threatened when something new and unique comes along like nuclear power or PCBs. It is also threatened across the board by a society that, in cutting itself free from the cycles of the seasons and of ecosystems, no longer values the wisdom that comes from having been through the cycles many times. We value the innovations of the young; the old we discard and stuff away in old peoples homes, their wisdom useless to us. Another attempt to extend ethical or moral sentiments across time is associated with those cultures that believe in reincarnation. In Tibetan Buddhism, for example, people are encouraged to treat animals properly because they were ones mother in a previous lifetime (and there is always the possibility that becoming an animal is ones own fate). All beings are thereby linked across time by familial ties which engender respectful treatment. A third traditional approach, perhaps more familiar in what derives from a Christian culture, is to see things sub specie aeternitas, that is, under the gaze of eternity or God. Ones own actions, or the actions of others, can then be seen as part of a larger pattern or narrative. Related to this is the idea of the moral absolute or imperative. Moral absolutes are associated particularly with the work of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who expanded on a rich tradition going back at least to Plato. Moral absolutes (such as thou shalt not kill ) are supposedly free from historical or geographical specicity. This means that they stretch throughout time: it will always be wrong to do this, whatever the change in the situation. This kind of absolute moral stance can also reect a belief that the consequences of ones acts are not important that one should do the right thing, whatever happens. Long-term issues tend to foster absolutist positions, partly because the sense of a problem stretching out for a long time comes to equal forever. A moral and ethical consideration which seems to be new to our time is the idea of not doing anything to undermine the sustainability of life on earth we might say to

THE HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL CHANGE

fray fatally the fabric of things. This new consideration derives from our considerably enhanced power to affect earths biological and physical systems, which we have always previously been able to take for granted. Seedtime and harvest shall not fail was Gods pledge to Noah after the ood. Hans Jonas (in his 1984 book, The Imperative of Responsibility), referred to this as the ontological imperative. Essentially, human beings are now subject to a physical imperative which is simultaneously a moral imperative: the basic rule is not to threaten the continuation of life systems on the Earth. Many people already subscribe to the most drastic version of this imperative, which shows up as a revulsion towards extinction of species. It is a widely shared belief (supported by surveys) that since extinction is forever, endangered species require special treatment. It is not clear how old this sentiment is: that is, previous generations likely lacked the ecological knowledge (as do we still in many cases) to predict the ultimate consequences of the wanton destruction of individual members of species to the point where reproduction became impossible. A widespread assumption was that there were always more Xs where X came from. So there are perhaps gestures towards some new moral imperatives based on a new awareness of our capacities for destruction; and the broadening of a new moral horizon, based on our anxiety that there should continue to be dawns over the old horizon for as far as we can envision the future.

THREATS TO THE INTIMATE

The concerns over the threats to the fabric of life implied by certain facets of global environmental change have begun to return as in Rachel Carsons day not just to the local impacts and expressions of global change, but to what could be called threats to the intimate. An ordinary threat to the intimate is the issue of endocrine disruptors the possible disruption of the human endocrine system by some combination of the bath of chemicals within which people in modern societies operate. But a more extraordinary threat is posed by the prospect of genetic engineering, including ultimately the engineering of human life. Because genetic engineering obviously involves getting down to the guts of things, it is obvious that it provokes great fear and concern, some of which may well be technically unjustied. However, the underlying fear and concern is connected to the themes I have been discussing. We are on the verge of having human beings determine what the nature of the human is going to be. This presents us with a kind of moral vertigo, rather like sitting in a barbers chair looking into an innite set of retreating mirrors.

For environmentalists, the spread of uncontrolled bioengineering is certainly of concern; but it would be foolish to deny that there is also a visceral reaction to the whole enterprise, controlled or uncontrolled. This reaction is part of the often-unnoticed, deeply conservative strain in environmentalism; and it is in part a reaction to the oftenunnoticed, deeply radical strain in the modern economic enterprise. The fact that critics of protestors against bioengineering use a variety of economic and utilitarian arguments reinforces the belief that the experiment with the natural world is part and parcel of the growing push to experiment on human beings, who are, after all, themselves part of the natural world. So one is forced back onto some very old and familiar debates: is there more to human beings than their material parts, than their genetic makeup, etc? If there is, what is its basis? At the end, we return to the image of the earth from space. The French existentialist philosopher, Gabriel Marcel once made a distinction between what he called problems and mysteries. Problems from the Greek word problemata, to throw in front of are things that one can stand back from and attempt to solve from the outside. They can be cracked open, like nutshells. Mysteries, on the other hand, are things or questions that cannot be handled in this way: the more you try and solve a mystery, the more it pulls you in, the more it involves you personally in its solution. Murder mysteries are really problem novels there is a problem to be solved, and the detective moves on to the next one. True mysteries simply expand, deepen, the more you probe into them; and usually bring into question your own deepest beliefs and concerns. The earth from space looks like a problem How to manage planet Earth? is a familiar phrase, brought into currency by a special issue of Scientic American in 1989 but it is in fact a mystery, since it encompasses us, and calls into question the deepest wellsprings of our current World Project the transformation of the ground out of which we came into something more akin to our own wishes and desires.

REFERENCES
Daly, H and Cobb, J (1993) For the Common Good, Beacon Press, Boston, MA. Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984) The Postmodern Condition, A Report on Knowledge, Manchester University Press, Manchester, xxiii xxv/3 11/37 41. Jonas, H (1984) The Imperative of Responsibility, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Luhmann, N (1979) Trust and Power, Wiley, Chichester, UK. Nagel, T (1996) The View From Nowhere, Oxford University Press, New York. Putnam, H (1995) Comments and Replies, in Reading Putnam, eds P Clark and B Hale, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.

The Changing HumanNature Relationships (HNR) in the Context of Global Environmental Change
BERNHARD GLAESER
Social Science Research Center, Berlin, Germany

In his Metamorphoses or Transformations, completed in the year 8 AD, the great Roman poet, P Ovidius Naso tells the story of changes in nature, mythology, and human history. In particular, the philosophy lecture in Book 15 gives an amazing account of natural and social change that include such themes as global change (GC), the Gaia hypothesis, environmental destruction, and human and political development. Ovids depiction demonstrates the broad scope of natural and social change; it is the starting point for this attempt to discuss a variety of perspectives concerning the changing relationship between humans and nature in the context of global environmental change (GEC). The overall objective of this introductory essay is to convey a broad view of social and cultural aspects of GEC. It represents a Western, social science perspective, and re ects on todays discourses as in uenced or characterized by the turn from the second to the third millennium. It is concluded that the international scienti c community can and should play a vital role in nding solutions to sustain the environmental conditions for the sake of global livelihood, including social justice.

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SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

NATURAL VERSUS SOCIAL CHANGE

Relationships between humankind and nature are rst of all physical and material: they determine the very substance of and conditions for human survival. But, at the same time, humans interpret and construct relationships between themselves and nature. It is this complex interplay that constitutes and complicates consideration of the social and cultural aspects of GEC. Shifting perceptions relate to physical, economic, social, and cultural changes over time. The changing relationship between humans and nature is an open issue; the cultural and social sciences attempt to interpret it in terms of the following questions: What did the human nature relationship (HNR) look like before and after the start of GEC? What is the specic difference? When did GEC occur and with what consequences for the HNR? We do not really know the answers to these questions for several reasons. Natural as well as social systems are determined by perpetual change . When change ceases, the system stops functioning and perishes. There is disagreement as to the novelty of GC, because there is some dispute over the meaning of the term globalization . One view is that globalization indicates Western modernity; that it was initiated by Columbus discovering and exploiting the New World, followed, in turn, by the rise of capitalism and the age of technology. This view is based upon the idea that the Renaissance combined wisdom and the power of Mediterranean antiquity with northern European modernity, which really means globalization on a temporal, historical scale. We may note that the dominant view of globalization is entirely Eurocentric. Opinions differ as to the values attached to nature and the nature human relation. These values depend on the degree of an individuals exposure to nature, the needs he or she attaches to nature, the capacity for self-reection contained in these various concepts and the willingness to abstract from nature. Individuals, ethnic groups and cultural systems construct their own concepts of nature on which they rely and to which they relate. Stakeholders shape the respective HNRs.

concept of nature? Nature may mean cosmos, the origin of life, an object for philosophical contemplation or artistic production not to speak of its practical form as a natural resource serving as a vital factor of economic production. Are there different cultural outlooks, such as a typically oriental or typically occidental perspective? Ex oriente lux, enlightenment from the Orient, was the belief or romantic fashion at different ages, including contemporary New Age culture. What is the importance attached to the relationship-tonature topic and who are the winners and the losers of GEC? In Europe, during the 1990s, environmental issues lost a lot of appeal to issues of job security and the labor market; whereas in the rural developing world, environmental degradation and loss of soil fertility are often synonymous in that they determine income, livelihood and survival chances those of rural women more than anybody else (Kiely and Mareet, 1998; Klingebiel and Randeria, 1998). Finally, how does the sustainability concept serve in this context and at this point: What is its social dimension and its political outlook? Holistic, interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary approaches have won recognition. Consequences are felt by the research community who have become stakeholders in this eld. The mode of knowledge production will change and this implies yet another relationship: that between the natural and the social sciences as well as that between the sciences and the participatory involvement of other (non-scientic) stakeholders affected by GEC. In the political arena, global environmental politics is becoming a strategic issue as conicts over water have already appeared; environmental security (Brennan, 1999) follows military (Aspen Institute, 1999) and food security (Schulz, 1999). Structural policy is needed to give GC a proper shape (Schellnhuber and Pilardeaux, 1999).

NATURE: IS IT PERIPHERAL TO HUMANS?

As we use ever bigger telescopes to observe the universe, such amplication technology also enables us to literally view the past. We are not too far from witnessing the birth of the universe: Empirical evidence will tell us which hypotheses and theories are to be falsied. Light travels at a velocity of approximately 300 000 km s 1 , which means, for instance, that it takes sunlight a full eight minutes to reach the earth. These simple and well-known physical facts have theoretically interesting implications as scales increase. Imagine that we can see and photograph a galaxy at a distance of one billion light years away! Since the light weve thus observed has been traveling for so long a time, namely one billion years, we are, from a human standpoint, literally looking into the remote past without even knowing whether what we observe still exists.

These reasons suggest the following point of departure and focus. Since natural and social systems are characterized by perpetual, uninterrupted change, we shall focus on what appears to be its present mode, at the turn of the 21st century, and its corresponding interpretations, concepts and constructs. Humans and nature: which is central, which is peripheral? The age-old question is again raised. It has ethical and political consequences; these are labeled respectively as the anthropocentric and, conversely, the bio-ecocentric approach. What is the dominant

THE CHANGING HUMAN NATURE RELATIONSHIPS (HNR) IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

13

The Copernican revolution revealed the fact that the Earth was not the center of the universe, or even the center of the solar system. Our earth is simply a minute and by no means unique particle somewhere at the periphery of our galaxy, the Milky Way , and also of the presently known universe. This revelation could not be publicized freely at the time, because it hurt the interests of an important 16th century global player and stakeholder, namely, the Catholic Church. Throughout most of Europe, the Church held a monopoly on the interpretation of not only all metaphysical matters, but also the view of the world and all worldly matters. The Church of Rome represented God the Almighty on Earth, so it claimed, as an institutionalized human trustee. It intended to expand the domain of its monopolistic trust around the globe, along with the worldly powers that used re and sword to subdue the rest of humanity. So this interpretative and explanatory competence meant power, in a subtle way perhaps. The promulgation of the new heliocentric theory by the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (14731543) and the rise of science as a whole thus challenged the authority of the Church and its cultural imperialism. Today, half a millennium later, we witness a second Copernican Revolution (Schellnhuber, 1999) which calls our attention back to planet Earth. The Earth System as a whole is to be analyzed. Understanding it is the basis on which to develop concepts of and for global environmental management. Earth-System analysis (Schellnhuber and Wenzel, 1998) is the holistic and transdisciplinary attempt to model and simulate the ecosphere, i.e., the geosphere biospheric complex, including its climatic history as far back as half a million years ago. This is an endeavor that takes the Gaia hypothesis seriously the paradigm that interprets the Earth system as a cybernetic whole endowed with a self-regulating capacity (Lovelock, 1979). The basis of this theory is hardcore empirical data that demonstrate that self-regulating biospheric mechanisms have kept the Earths crust stable and its environment habitable. Biospheric evolution eventually produced humankind. After four and a half billion years of natural and eventually cultural evolution we have learned two things. First, we are capable of continuously undermining the conditions for our own survival. Global environmental change in the destructive mode can be seen, for instance, in human activities such as oil spills and toxic waste proliferation, perforation of the stratospheric ozone layer (thus exposing us to more UV B radiation), or nuclear warfare. Second, we have developed perhaps to a lesser extent the ethical and managerial tools to protect and safeguard the global environment against forces of destruction like those just mentioned (Parry and Livermore, 1999; Pearce, 1999). Again, interpretative and explanatory competence has a signicant role. Unlike 500 years ago, when enlightenment and the rationality of science freed humankind from

religious obedience to strive toward self-determination, it may now be the interpretative dialectics of mythology that reveal the destructive mode of science and technology: Humankind has become simultaneously Shiva and Vishnu, the Hindu gods who represent the concepts for Destruction and Preservation, respectively.

THE MILLENNIAL SHIFT: GNOSTICISM AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Today, at the beginning of the third millennium (AD in our Christianity-centered temporal accounting) environmental management has to cope with GEC. Fears of global destruction and extinction witnessed the earlier transition from the rst to the second millennium. According to the doctrines of Gnosticism, salvation could be attained only through the pursuit of spiritual truth and the transcendence of matter. Jesus Christ was considered by Gnostics to be noncorporeal. In keeping with this doctrine was the belief that the beginning of the second millennium would bring about the spiritual age. Gnosticism incorporated an apocalyptic and chiliastic vision of natures decline and Gods ultimate reign over Earth, 1000 years after the birth of Christ. Chiliasm is the doctrine stating that Christ will reign on Earth for 1000 years; ancient gnostic knowledge and belief originated in Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt, around the Mediterranean, and were revived by Scotus Eriugena in the 9th century (Voegelin, 1952, 1959). At present there seems to be a lack of interest in environmental (including GEC) issues, specically among social scientists. In the following I draw a parallel between the lack of interest in the natural world on the part of many social scientists and the lack of interest in the physical world by Gnostics. My thesis is that some concept-oriented or social-constructivist social scientists are, or behave as if they were, Gnostics. As proof of this, I briey review some current journals in the eld that devote special attention to the recent millennial shift. Independent of theories that explore such parallelism, the review provides an insight into which topics academics and editors of prominent journals consider of paramount importance during an historically important period. Some historical dimensions and explanations concerning the development of sociology and the motives of its representatives are presented as these relate to the HNR. Is GEC and/or the changing HNR of interest to social scientists? A few international academic journals focused their last issues in 1999 (or the rst issues in 2000) on millennial aspects: the transition from the second to the third millennium, its meaning and relevance for the development of social or interdisciplinary science. Let us look at four of these journals and their topical issue: two interdisciplinary publications and two specialized publications in sociology. I begin with the interdisciplinary publications, The

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SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

Ecologist (1/2000) and Universitas (12/1999), a Germanlanguage journal whose readership is mainly among university instructors and students. Both millennium issues concentrate on gnostic themes. The Ecologist (1/2000) deals with the cosmic covenant re-embedding religion in society, nature and the cosmos . Emphasized is the role that religion can and must play in saving what remains of the natural world , as Edward Goldsmith puts it in his editorial. Knowledge and values that attributed the utmost priority to the preservation of the creation were once propagated by the various religious groupings or cultures. The rediscovery and revival of ecological themes and cosmic theologies appear to be an environmental priority. The theological underpinnings of most religions relate the individual to society, the natural world, and the cosmos. Mainstream science committed the ultimate blasphemy in that Homo scienti cus has dei ed himself ; mainstream religion has lost its way and needs to return to its roots. Noah s ood symbolizes the forces of chaos. Historical storms and oods in Orissa (India) or Vietnam may remind us of this archetype human failure to observe the cosmic covenant, that is, to ful ll our contract to live in harmony with the laws of nature and the cosmic order (Goldsmith, 2000). Religious inspiration and perennial beliefs are to be found among the primal creeds or religions because these derive from the cosmic covenant the universal revelation given to humans (Grifth, 2000). Tribal stories maintain such wisdom and its ecological message (Wilson, 2000). So did classical mythology and the ecological worldviews of ancient societies such as those of Greek, Chinese, Egyptian, Indian, or Persian antiquity, by using the notion of the path that must be taken to maintain the cosmic order on which human welfare depends (Chaitanya, 2000; Goldsmith, 2000). Related cosmic and ecological insights are quoted for the Islamic and the Judeo Christian traditions, to some extent in uenced by the ancient civilizations (Barker, 2000; Echlin, 2000; Murray, 2000; Nasr, 2000; Rossi, 2000; Roth, 2000). The cosmos was embedded in the Church until western scienti c thought replaced the term creation with environment , thus separating human from non-human nature. The message of the special issue of The Ecologist is that such desecration of the cosmos ought to be reversed in the third millennium. Universitas (December 1999) entitles its special millennium issue Endzeiten, neue Zeiten? (Final age, new age?) and focuses on topics of transition (Geissler, 1999) between the two millennia. Western industrial societies have eliminated many rites of passage and transition; the symbolism of reworks, for instance, whose original intention was to vanquish evil spirits , has been lost. Instead, the transition from the second to the third millennium has been marked by spectacular events not necessarily of universal importance or interest such as who (in somebody s town) gives

birth to the rst millennium baby (Hilgers, 1999). In a similar way, the great issue of the apocalypse has changed. Originally, St. John the Divine pictured the apocalypse in The Book of Revelations as the vision of salvation coming about after a transitory collapse. This transitory collapse is itself frequently referred to as the apocalypse. The visionary apocalypse represented the advent of the millennial God s reign on Earth, the New Jerusalem as it was called. In the 20th century, Hitler and Stalin were associated with the advent of the apocalypse. The transitional period during which both leaders were in power was an extremely violent and bloody episode, characterized by massive internment in concentration camps and gulags, and massive human slaughter, in particular genocide. All of this was designed to purify human blood or to convince people to adopt the right doctrine , for the purpose of achieving some perfect millennial Third Reich or ideal post-historic age of communism. Yugoslavia has witnessed a sad revival of apocalyptic nationalism. The cyberspace apocalypse, fortunately somewhat less deadly, has led us into the third millennium. Virtual reality represents the New Jerusalem ; the cybernaut, as the new human , exists independently of bodily needs and achieves immortality as part of the permanent memory of a computer network. St. John s millennial Third Reich becomes the age of knowledge beyond the ages of agriculture and industrialization (Vondung, 1999). The fear of collapse was stirred up by the Y2K problem , the possibility of a global computer network breakdown. This was originally a technology problem that was heavily and massively mythologized perhaps because billions of dollars were at stake (Csef, 1999). Among the many predictions concerning the year 2000, the 1972 Club of Rome report on the limits to growth was misunderstood as a model to predict the real breakdown of the global economy due to resource depletion, environmental degradation, and population explosion (Schmid, 1999). To summarize, Gnosticism plays a vital role in the Universitas millennium issue. Global environmental change and changing HNRs are included but do not feature centrally. Globalization is featured outside the main section of that special journal issue in an interview (Reif, 1999) conducted with Harold James, a Princeton University historian, who speaks of globalization beginning in the 19th century and suggests that while the process may be deplorable for some, it is nevertheless irreversible. James cites earlier historical events and occurrences as evidence for globalization, such as the rst transatlantic cable in 1866, the New York stock exchange crashes of 1906 and 1907 and their immediate repercussions on the European stock markets, or unifying global trends in fashion, including the Japanese adoption of Western dress and fashion, and similar trends in the ne arts since the age of the Renaissance. As one reaction, globalization has also provoked some outcry such as the one referring to it as the

THE CHANGING HUMAN NATURE RELATIONSHIPS (HNR) IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

15

globalization trap (Martin and Schumann, 1996) or critics in the developing world who say, globalization equals imperialism . Earlier (just as they are today) protective tariffs were designed to bar international competition. Welfare and social legislation was designed to strengthen the nation state. Visionary third-ways , such as an attempted balance between the market and planned economy, are viewed by some as roads leading directly into Third World underdevelopment. GEC and the HNR do not appear to be connected with globalization in the sense it is used here. The sociologists world-view, similarly, seems in general to be less environment related and nature minded. We shall now turn to two sociology journals and consider their millennium special issues. The British Journal of Sociology (1/2000) and Current Sociology (4/1999) take up the millennial problematique, the latter focusing on the future of sociology and the social sciences , the former on sociology facing the next millennium . This could be an indicator of the importance attached to the issue of GC and the nature human relationship by eminent mainstream sociologists. The latter journal invited its contributors to consider what the Millennium might indicate about the history of human societies and especially how sociology is facing up to the challenges and opportunities posed , and to provide analyses of such transformations (Urry, 2000). Manuel Castells opens the volume by proposing a grounded theory of the network society as the social structure of the information age . The networks are empowered by the new communication technologies and reshape the relations of production, consumption, power, experience and culture. Ecologism is an example of an alternative network in opposition to dominant networks (Castells, 2000). Since the 1960s, globalization (along with complexity analysis and cultural studies) has transformed the context of sociology, according to Immanuel Wallerstein. He proposes a unied or re-unied historical social science as a truly global exercise (Wallerstein, 2000). Goran Therborn documents the shift from a universal to a global sociology in the second century after sociology became a discipline. He forecasts a comparative and competitive focus among the neighboring disciplines sociology, political science, and economics rather than along the social-versus-naturalsciences divide (Therborn, 2000). Cross-cultural, empirical comparison of societies in transformation, without worrying too much about theoretical concerns, is advocated (Esping-Anderson, 2000). The conict between the patchwork quilt of nation-states and the cosmopolitan order of human rights may open the door to the second age of modernity (Beck, 2000). Contributions on urban sociology (Sassen, 2000), cultural diversity and the internet (Featherstone, 2000), and mobile sociology (Urry, 2000) conclude the volume.

Dissenting from the social sociology orientation, a natural tilt can be detected in subsequent contributions. Science and technology studies and the social explanation of natural scientic facts work towards a physical sociology and its epistemology (Latour, 2000). The focus on socioenvironmental theory and the case of genetic modication of food reveal that the social sciences relationship to nature and environment matters (Adam, 2000). Timescape is conceived as the temporal equivalent of landscape. The timescape analysis of socio-environmental matters brings contextualized temporal complexity to the heart of social theory . Thus the time aspect is central to understanding sustainability and its emphasis on natures regenerative capacity. Intergenerational equity and cultural equity are at stake the ownership of reproduction has been transferred to transnational companies. A time-sensitive scholarly enterprise is the task that confronts social theory at the beginning of the new millennium (Adam, 2000). Current Sociology (Volume 4, (4) October 1999) reports the results of the symposium on The Future of the Social Sciences in the 21st Century which was the concluding session of the 14th World Congress of Sociology in Montreal in August 1998. The whole journal issue dwells on the pros and cons and various aspects of interdisciplinarity, of opening up to and collaborating with neighboring disciplines. Disciplinary boundaries should be negotiated, not simply closed down. To think in space-time and touch geography and history is recommended (Massey, 1999; similarly Allardt, 1999). An active interdisciplinarity is needed, in particular with economics, and also a transdisciplinary or intercultural approach (although the latter terms are not used explicitly, the idea they encompass is implied) to link up with different regions or countries in the age of globalization (Boyer, 1999). Finally, all fragmented perspectives, including those of singular, exclusive disciplinarity, ought to be abandoned in favor of a theoretical unitary reconstruction of the social sciences, if we wish to avoid both the barbarism of economist reductionism and the conservative nihilism of post-modernism (Boron, 1999). Are the millennial issues representative of social science and interdisciplinary thinking? Do they address the pressing environmental themes substantively and sufciently? To take up the scope of interdisciplinarity is certainly laudable per se and represents present-day avant-garde scientic development. The scientic base, though, appears a little narrow as the natural sciences have been left out, by and large. The HNR in the context of GEC was obviously not considered to be of major concern in the wake of a millennial shift. A few environmentally based and theoretically challenging contributions were competently put forward in the British Journal of Sociology. They do not, however, constitute anything close to a social science mainstream movement. To construct a concept of nature and the HNR is hardly even attempted. What are the conclusions as to

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SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

the relevance of the HNR and GEC for the social science mainstream? Has there been visible change? Let us briey review some specic aspects of the environmental sociology discourse as it began in the 1970s (we set aside the Chicago School of sociology in the 1920s) along with the global environmental movement. We argued earlier (Glaeser, 1996) that environmental sociology became established as a sociological subdiscipline in the US within the short time sequence from 19781980. The theoretically ambitious goal at that time was to acknowledge physical and biological factors as independent variables that inuence the dependent variables of social structure and social behavior. This was intended to become a new paradigm within the sociological knowledge canon to turn the sociological mainstream towards an HNR concept. The new disciplinary paradigm was dened through transforming the human exemptionalism paradigm (earlier called the exceptionalist paradigm ) into the new ecological paradigm (Dunlap and Catton, 1979). Traditionally, the dominant world-view had been to accept humans as the one unique and superior creature on Earth, capable of quick adaptation to environmental change for cultural rather than genetic reasons. The new ecological paradigm also deviated from a specic sociological tradition established by the early French sociologist Emile Durkheim (18581917), who postulated that social facts can only be explained by other social facts. In a most authoritative assessment, Buttel concluded in 1987 that environmental sociology had found recognition as a speciality within sociology. It did not succeed, however, in redirecting mainstream sociology (Buttel, 1987). In our view, Buttels evaluation was still valid in the 1990s (Glaeser, 1996); it provides the historical background and a broader base for the millennial focus discussed above. There was one innovation, however, that gradually altered the social science outlook. During the preparation phase of the United Nations Environment Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) Rio summit in 1992, GEC came up as a new political and scientic paradigm: In 1987, the theme had not yet been included in Buttels (1987) state-of-the-art review and agenda for environmental sociology. Once again sociology was slow in the uptake. An early exception to this was a contribution by Buttel and Taylor (1992) who advocated in favor of the societynature relation as a social construct; they argued as well that the GEC topic was a social construct simultaneously serving as a scientic concept and as a way of mobilizing the community of scholars. In short, environmental science and environmental movements are complementary. To date, we might interpret that proposal as an early attempt to integrate environmental stakeholders in a transdisciplinary scientic approach. Even at present, the HNR theme within the GEC context is still not social science mainstream, but it has gained momentum as will be demonstrated below. This is especially the case for the sustainability discourse in the

context of the social situation in the early 21st century. The remaining parts of this contribution will examine somewhat more closely the social dimension of sustainability and present some consequences with respect to historical, theoretical, behavioral and political aspects of the HNR within the GEC context.

SUSTAINABILITY: THE SOCIAL DIMENSION

What matters about GEC and sustainable development is the human dimension . But obvious difculties arise when operationalizing this idea (Rotmans, 1998; Rockwell, 1998). The concept of GC is broader than that of GEC. GC refers to the totality of changes on the planet Earth, including all human intentions and alterations (Rotmans, 1998). It involves both the biophysical and the human system, whereas GEC refers to the human-induced biophysical changes only. To disentangle the natural from the anthropogenic changes within the GEC framework represents a major exercise fraught with difculty. The sustainability concept, according to Merle Jacob, is ambiguous; its utility diminishes when one tries to operationalize the concept (Jacob, 1996). The ambiguity, oscillating between an anthropocentric orientation that focuses on the needs of future generations, and an ecocentric view that concentrates on living within the carrying capacity of supporting ecosystems, owes much to the normative character of the sustainability concept, as Rotmans argues, and depends on the cultural perspective of the actors using it. Hence different cultural perspectives would have to be elaborated and translated into different preferences so as to arrive at an operational denition of sustainable development that is linked to the notion of GC (Rotmans, 1998). The categorization of cultural perspectives and biased preferences could be linked to Dunlaps and Cattons (1979) paradigmatic shift and dichotomy between the human exemptionalist (exceptionalist) and the new ecological paradigm. Sustainability emerged as a new development paradigm out of the concept of ecodevelopment , its predecessor. The term was popularized by the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future , from 1987. The goal was to reconcile environment and development, yet there was a strong bias in favor of environmental sustainability, which, of course, was necessary to counterbalance the strong emphasis on economic growth. What is social sustainability ? When we discuss social, or perhaps more appropriately societal, sustainability we can build on a relative consensus by saying that we are searching for the criteria to explain why and how societies are sustained. It would then be possible to make some reasonable predictions about the future. We use data from six to eight thousand years of human civilization composed of, say, 200300 generations of people. Biologically speaking, this

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is minute even though we tend to think of it as a relatively long period in historical, political and sociological terms. What are the factors that maintain or help maintain a social entity for a longer period of time, such as a social group or society at large? Putting the question like this, hints at a quick and simple answer. On closer investigation, however, we see that it might involve the totality of social science theory including those parts that are yet to be written. With all of these constraints in mind, Serbser (2000) in a contribution to Gaia (see Gaia Hypothesis, Volume 5) a SwissGerman, multidisciplinary journal covering ecological perspectives in science, the humanities, and economics suggested the following procedure. Let us identify those or some of those necessary conditions without which social (societal) survival would not be feasible. We talk about formal requirements in a pragmatic sense: they should be independent of each other, yet in combination constitute the societal context in a total bio-cultural sense. Six preconditions (three cultural and three ecological) for a sustainable human society are suggested. The cultural order contains social action, constitution of social groupings, and their transformation in the sense of social change. These conditions for societal sustainability are contained in and derived from established contributions to sociological theory. The ecological order includes social space, social metabolism and dominance. Social action is intentional and linked to symbolic systems such as our language, which is sufciently imprecise to enable us to deal with complex issues. Social groups or social units as subsystems are constituted by the notion of self-identity and, complementarily, by a sharp outline dening other, competing social units. These groups undergo a constant process of reorganization, that is, transformation or social change. Social groups need a spatial environment as a constituting frame. Social space denes the situation of social action; it determines symbols and language. Social metabolism refers to the activities and interactions of social groups: they produce, they consume, and they reproduce themselves, under a regulatory framework of legal and ethical principles. Dominance, nally, refers to social control, the power structure and governance (including the system of checks and balances). All six features social action, social groupings, social change, social space, social metabolism, dominance according to Serbser (2000), work in combination and, as an interacting set, they determine the survivability and sustainability of a society. But (as Serbser notes with regret) these features and their interaction have hardly been taken into account in the social sustainability discourse. As these ideas are very recent, they are necessarily still somewhat vague. The yardstick to measure the degree to which they are analytically concrete and applicable could be

as follows: First, they could serve as a tool to facilitate the determination, perhaps on a quantitative scale, of whether or not any given social (or societal) situation is sustainable. Second, in a more dynamic sense, they could produce recommendations for the implementation of measures as an incremental approach to societal sustainability. The examples of integrated and sustainable coastal management or the deep sea commons, to take extreme and topical examples for regulated social processes, show that inequalities or simply competing interests need to be negotiated in a process of mutual control and bargaining. Even if some disagreement remains, consensus must be reached on the degree of disagreement accepted. If this does not happen, social exclusion will occur, either voluntarily or as a result of external force. The state or process of social exclusion is certainly not a sustainable one because there will always be group members, be it individuals or states, that will aim to reverse a dissatisfactory situation. It may thus be concluded that consensus building by negotiation indicates a state or process of social sustainability. We may term the absence of such indicators negative social sustainability . Global inequality is a topic that was discussed extensively in the 1970s on an international scale, as early as 1972, during the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE I) in Stockholm (Glaeser, 1997). The theme took on a new dimension during the GEC debate. More explicitly than ever before are NorthSouth relations and inequalities linked to environmental problems that have been intimately connected with livelihood concerns. Following the two oil crises of 1973 and 1979, and the lost decade of the 1980s which was characterised by huge public debt and structural adjustments in the South, GEC is no longer dened within a social or cultural context (Redclift and Sage, 1998). Environmental problems are viewed differently in the South than they are in the North. Poverty ecology gives priority to livelihood concerns (Agarwal and Narain, 1991); the focus is on the impacts of trade liberalization, the repayment of international debts, and structural adjustment. These aspects of globalization differ markedly from the lifestyle concerns characteristic of Northern wealth ecology . Here the environmental problems associated with GEC are climate change, acid rain, ozone depletion, loss of biodiversity and the collapse of sheries in various parts of the world. Two decades after the United Nations General Assembly had agreed in 1980 on a drinking water decade (Glaeser and Phillips-Howard, 1983), the absence of clean drinking water is still considered to be the major environmental problem for millions in the South, causing disease and epidemics as recently illustrated in Mozambique in 2000. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) policy and other adjustment policies may be responsible for environmental degradation when resource needs increase or

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additional pressures are exerted, for instance, on marginal soils or common goods. Two striking examples of this are forest depletion due to rewood extraction and sh stock depletion in coastal waters due to over-shing and eutrophication. Equity conicts are social sustainability conicts. The South cannot sustain itself in social terms if social inequalities exist. To reduce inequalities means to come closer to intragenerational equity which, on the other hand, could contradict intergenerational equity, that is, the care for future generations. Both equity issues could contradict the policy of environmental efciency using energy tax incentives or tradable pollution permits. The latter issue, equity versus environmental efciency, is based on the value we as a global society attach to nature, concretely to the service functions of the global ecosystem, such as the environmental cleanup function natures own regenerative capacity. Global commons, such as the oceans, are global sinks; they absorb, in particular, many carbon-based pollutants. Forests, too, act as global sinks in the sense of pollutant absorbers but, unlike the oceans, they are nationally owned. Social justice in the sense of intragenerational equity, for instance, in the case of forests, would thus call for compensation to be paid to the owners of common goods by the polluters. According to Redclift and Sage (1998), a global contract would mean that Southern development concerns would have to be met before Northern global environmental issues are contended with. So we have come full circle back to where we started 1972 in Stockholm! Environment versus development. From the developing world point of view, poverty reduction, redistribution of wealth and socioeconomic equality or at least equity may be the main issues of social sustainability environmental sustainability being its prerequisite. Some term it participation , consensus building through negotiation and social competition , or the absence of social exclusion . The overall theme is social justice. In a useful synopsis, Goodland (1995) produced a table in which social, economic, and environmental sustainability are juxtaposed. Following a widely accepted denition, sustainability means maintenance of capital. Capital embraces a social, a human and a natural form. Social (or moral) capital is constituted, among other things, by tolerance, compassion, patience, cultural identity, community cohesion, honesty standards, laws/institutions, and discipline, and requires maintenance in terms of shared values, equal rights, community participation, and religious and cultural interaction. The creation of social capital is needed to achieve social sustainability. Conversely, there can be no social sustainability without environmental stability the latter providing the basic conditions for the former. Environmental sustainability (as a pre-requisite for social stability) means that natural capital must be maintained.

Human welfare is to be improved by protecting raw material sources and by ensuring proper sinks for human wastes. Renewables are to be kept within regeneration rates; the depletion rate for non-renewables must be kept within the renewable substitution rate. The amount of wastes produced should not exceed the assimilative natural-environmental capacity. Scale is thus added to efciency and allocation as a third economic criterion. It constrains the throughput of energy and material through the economic subsystem and thus controls the use of natural capital from environmental sources to sinks. Economic sustainability means holding the scale of the economic subsystem within the biophysical limits and includes production and consumption. Economic sustainability devolves on consuming interest, rather than capital (Goodland, 1995). As economists value goods and services in monetary terms, major problems arise when natural capital is to be valued. This is especially true for resources of common access such as the oceans or air. The problem becomes all the more complicated, once we realize that more than just economic values are attached to natural goods and services. Our understanding of individuals values is limited; to understand and evaluate choices is a cross-disciplinary exercise. Ideally, economic values are represented by market transactions. If there is no market, as in the case of common access resources, transactions may be replaced by consumers willingness to spend time or money to gain access, or by their willingness to reveal a preference for a site or a style of recreation (Lockwood, 1999). The willingness-to-pay approach to elicit environmental values may be complemented by participatory social deliberation as a means to inform the environmental decision-makers (Brouwer et al., 1999). There are obvious limits to the economic valuation of nature and the environment. Economics can certainly not cope with what philosophers term intrinsic values of ecosystems, non-human species or the inanimate nature. Whether intrinsic values are justied and necessary for an environmental ethic is still a matter of dispute. The top value in a value hierarchy may be assigned to human survival or human quality of life on the one side, or to landscapes and the natural world on the other. These values will eventually be incorporated into decision processes and depend on (often conicting) positions held and adopted by stakeholders (Lockwood, 1999). Values and norms must be activated by cognitions specic to the environmental context, for instance, by adverse consequences anticipated for humans (anthropocentric value orientation) or for natural ecosystems (biocentric value orientation). Socio-psychological models are used to measure environmental values and attitudes, and to research whether these have been processed and transformed into corresponding behavior (Dunlap and Van Liere, 1978; Stern et al., 1993, 1995, among others). Held values reect

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social settings and norms and interact with policy issues. To incorporate environmental values and behavior into political decision-making would certainly enhance social sustainability. It appears that there has been a shift in the logical hierarchy of sustainability whereby the need for social sustainability is a motivating factor to pursue environmental sustainability, which, in turn, depends upon economic sustainability. In this sense, the approach followed appears to be anthropocentric, notwithstanding the fact that the notion of sustainability is inspired by the care for nature and the preservation of the environment, which may be termed enlightened anthropocentrism (Summerer, 1989). Environmental care can be integrated into authentic human development. Authors who agree with this somewhat normative statement will still disagree as to what is included in human development. If it is a rather qualitative concept in the sense of human well-being, measured in terms of health, knowledge, social order or community, it may not correlate closely with the quantitative concept of economic growth and material afuence (Dower, 2000). The question of values shows up again in the problem of alignment or non-alignment of social and natural change, in the Western world-view and enlightenment imperative to control and use nature, and in the dilemma between development and environment. It is fairly obvious that social sustainability and negative social sustainability to a large extent depend on the theory (or theories) involved. Sustainability and its converse are theoretically constructed but this does not mean that they are untrue or unreal: The notion of social construction simply implies that social action relies on social concepts, and that social concepts depend on perspectives, some of which are scientic. Social constructs determine not only the notion of social sustainability, they also determine the notion of environmental sustainability and, as a consequence, the relationship between humans and their social and natural environment between societies and nature. These relationships change as the underlying concepts change. The most recent of such transformations occurred in the context of what is most commonly termed, accepted, and constructed as GEC. The natural and the social sciences frame their variegated perspectives to deal with methodologically proper aspects of the HNR. Again, these perspectives are constructed in terms of scientic convention, and from the historical and methodological standpoint represented by a given discipline. Dissidents in different disciplines agreed on a dissenting perspective: that is, a unifying approach. Their scope has been integrative as opposed to analytical compartmentalized. The holistic approach to dealing with HNRs of various kinds and in a multitude of facets has been called human ecology . Human ecology, enriching the synthetic and systems oriented ecological outlook with the social and cultural human

actor approach, eventually became a new academic and subject of its own.

eld

CONCLUSION: GLOBALONEY OR WHAT?

What conclusions can we draw with respect to HNR and their changes within the GEC context and at the historic opening of the third millennium? We may sort and distinguish between aspects related to history, theory, ethics and behavior, and policy.
History

The public in most countries seems to be poorly informed about global risk issues. This is the outcome of an international survey of public awareness and concern about environmental problems conducted in 1992 by the Gallup International Institute in 24 nations, diverse in terms of their geography, economics and social settings. Yet, even if laypersons have a limited understanding of global warming in a more technical sense, the issue s appearance as a visible social problem has surely heightened the public s general sense that humans are having a detrimental impact on the environment (Dunlap, 1998). These concerns extend from the local to the global environment and include the various aspects of the environmental problematique. Ecological awareness has evolved over decades, beginning in the 1960s, and has developed into an ecological worldview. Public attention may oscillate in accord with uctuating media attention, but it is unlikely to disappear altogether. Environmentally oriented social movements and organizations have mushroomed in the North as well as in the South. To what extent public awareness translates into behavioral changes is a matter of dispute and ongoing research. The ndings on varying degrees of public awareness, on a basically high level, are supported by a media survey covering the American mass media in the ten-year period from 1987 to 1996 (Mazur, 1998). Until the late 1980s, environmental attention had focused either on biospheric issues exclusively, such as the destruction of rainforest or species extinction, or atmospheric hazards exclusively, mainly global warming, acid rain, and ozone depletion. Theses issues began to cluster during the 1987 1990 period, showing up as global problems. This was also a period of rising media coverage resulting in widespread public attention. Some of these hazards were connected; for instance, the greenhouse effect, the ozone hole, and the extinction of dinosaurs were interrelated in the public consciousness. A drop in the coverage of GEC can be observed for the period from 1992 to 1996, following the Rio summit. There are several explanations for this decline, none of which seems to be wholly satisfactory (Mazur, 1998). One plausible explanation, however, is that new

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story lines such as the downfall of the Soviet Union and the breakup of satellite countries in the early 1990s, or the Gulf War in 1991 had greater appeal for journalists and news agencies in an evolving age of news as entertainment: infotainment .
Theory

problem as inuenced and shaped by historical, social and political forces (Rosa and Dietz, 1998). In this approach, the emergence of scientic concern and the rise of public awareness are scrutinized; these issues eventually become more important than the environmental problem under dispute. Environmental threats to the global ecosystem or human health are perceived only to the extent that they attract media attention and are publicized accordingly. To a great extent, the social constructivist approach is reexive, and it is applied as a science of science meta-theory. Constructivist methodology is useful in detecting critical shortcomings in realist models, which may be based on or entail false (or at least uncertain) assumptions. Social constructionism, on the other hand, has been criticized for neglecting real world problems and concerns in that humannature relations and environmental change issues are constructed or conceptualized, that is, produced or created rather than extracted or mapped . It seems wise, then, to re-adopt the Kantian position in the sense that the strongholds of epistemological idealism and realism are to be combined. The critical potential of social constructionism should be retained without forgetting that the survival or livelihood problems facing humankind do not disappear when we turn our attention away from them. We may cautiously suggest that the issue of GEC has largely been adopted by natural scientists, who view themselves as realists. The underlying models and assumptions ought to be scrutinized by reecting which construction represents which stakeholders interests. The issue of HNR, on the other hand, has been taken up through idealist social science and theory of science. What is at stake here are HNR changes over time, space, and culture; the social construction of GEC themes is among the relationships under consideration. Recent examples of this include the identication of driving socio-political forces behind GEC, closely related to factors of modernity (Spaargaren and Mol, 1992; Mol and Spaargaren, 1993; Wilenius, 1999); an heuristic reading of classical sociology texts to provide theoretical insights into GEC studies (Prades, 1999), or the sacralization of nature and cosmocentric mythology (Giner and Tabara, 1999).
Ethics and Behavior

GC issues and the HNR are polarized between epistemological idealism and epistemological realism. The distinction between the two positions appears clearer than before despite the fact that there has been a certain tendency to tackle conventional environmental problems subjectively in the social sciences and objectively in the natural sciences: environmental awareness and reexivity versus hard facts and measured observation in environmental reality . Philosophers today may recall a comparable situation in the late 18th and the early 19th century when the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, resolved a similar academic conict. Contemporary social science investigations have either evolved along the path of social constructionism (or constructivism), representing neo-idealism, or they have followed an orientation that pre-supposes a material world independent of percipient human actors (Rosa and Dietz, 1998) neo-realism. The neo-realism guides the social and scientic analysis of environmental changes as well as the political economy interactions between environment and society. A famous example is the still inuential IPAT model which was proposed in the early 1970s and assumed that environmental impact I is a function of population size P, afuence per capita A, and technological development T (see DPSIR (Driving Forces Pressures State Impacts Responses), Volume 4). The systems approach in world modeling simulates similar relationships on the basis that there are crucial driving forces that regulate the system and that are probably inuenced by policy and politics. Social scientists have often criticized such concepts for being too simplistic. The approach, they argue, is too mechanistic and does not reect human agency to the extent that it is actually present, that is, the complexity and reexivity (reexiveness) of social action and political response (Glaeser, 1995; Rosa and Dietz, 1998). The neo-idealist orientation towards problems and research on environmental change issues highlights two aspects: 1. 2. the uncertainties in the body of knowledge and the scientic knowledge claims, and the attempt to provide explanations for scientic and public recognition of the environmental change

We take a closer look at the mythology issue since it takes up behavioral aspects and the ethical complex with respect to ecological rationality. Religious responses to GEC may inspire modications in how we treat the world environment, this in turn having repercussions for how we conceive human actions and what we deem to be a rational social order. These conceptions have shaped for certain ecology-minded groups in society, at least the present cultural situation which interprets GEC as risky.

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It is argued that eco-religion is a necessary condition to implant ecologically rational behavior. Environmental anxiety coincides with the chiliastic movement (see the section on the millennial shift: gnosticism and the environment) which views (eco)religious disobedience as cause for apocalypse. GC and growing scarcity are seen as a consequence of our environmental misconduct. Religious responses shift from monotheism to pantheism, whereby nature as God (deus sive natura ) becomes the object of worship. Examples like Lovelocks Gaia hypothesis or the deep ecology movement illustrate well how this potential can grow into a rm religious belief. Global ecological rationality will emerge as a new form of rationality and induce new cultural contexts of action affecting personal individual behavior and action to mitigate environmental destruction. Whereas eco-religion will eventually die, its behavioral aspects may still remain with future generations. The ecological ethic will thus survive the spirit of the corresponding religious beliefs that inspired it (Giner and Tabara, 1999). While the notion of ecological rationality considers the intricate relationship between religion and science, the mechanisms and processes for social change as a means to achieve global ecological rationality are not revealed. Still, it should be noted in our context of HNR that the metaphysical and ethical components of transformation are linked to social behavior and policy formation as they relate to GEC (Giner and Tabara, 1999), and as they are nally incorporated into everyday culture, manners and lifestyles of the world population, forgetting their ecoreligious roots.
Policy

Environmental policy and management represent the human action approach to GEC in the HNR. Globalization includes global environmental policy and management. Global environmental problems cannot be solved at the national level but the national level will still retain its importance and role in the development of environmental policy. The subsidiarity principle is pursued by the European Union. It means that a higher policy level replaces a lower policy level only if the lower level cannot appropriately take care of the problems under consideration. The subsidiarity principle is expected to be adopted on a global scale: Local environmental problems should be tackled locally; global problems should be dealt with globally. The pre-requisite that there be competent global scale actors to manage this, has thus far not been fullled. There is no World Environment Organization that has the power and the standing of the World Health Organization or the World Trade Organization. The global environment is regulated by Multilateral Environmental Agreements, such as the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which regulates the reduction of greenhouse gases. The agreement acknowledges global commons to which open

access is denied. To date there are more than 170 multilateral agreements to regulate environmental protection on a global scale. National participation is voluntary; not all countries sign or participate in such agreements. Whether an agreement is supported or opposed depends very much on the international epistemic communities that represent expert networks and act across national boundaries (Petschow and Droge, 1999; Swanson and Johnston, 1999). The international research community on the human dimensions of GC includes natural and social science scholars with common interests, working in universities, research institutions and government laboratories. They communicate with each other at conferences or workshops, through scientic journals, and via the Internet. Major changes in academic development, as induced by global environmental research, include the growing volume of inter- and transdisciplinary research to address human and environmental problems, the commitment to public policy and management, and the rapid diffusion of information, via the electronic media, among the research community and other stakeholders. This new structuring and production of knowledge is sometimes addressed and discussed as the electronic invisible college (Brunn and OLear, 1999). The members of the GC community have research interests in various overlapping areas within the humanenvironment interface: human ecology. They include cross-disciplinary clusters, working on specic topics such as environmental and climate change, land use and resource management, integrative coastal zone management and eco-tourism, sustainable agriculture, environmental protection and food security. The electronic invisible college promotes virtual conferences on specialized topics of GC among leaders, students, and practitioners. Scientic expertise provides important inputs into environmental policy, planning, and the decision-making process, from global level to local level. A major difculty, apart from the implementation decits, which have been widely discussed by political scientists, may be termed here (adopting macro economics terminology) the magic triangle of sustainability . Social (societal), environmental and economic sustainability represent conicting goals that must be optimized. Optimization means not only a participatory bargaining process between the stakeholders involved; it also requires scientic information, hard or at least fuzzy data with respect to changes in ecological carrying or absorbing capacity for a given region, and resulting social and economic impacts. Sustainability is very often not accountable when it comes to concrete cases. We live in a state of uncertainty regarding scientic data. The ethical and political consequence will then be to act cautiously, in a value-conservative mode: If the precise limits to sustainability are unknown, it is imperative that we not bar the path to increasing or at least maintaining sustainability. Just such a precautionary principle has, to some extent,

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been adopted in environmental legislation (see Precautionary Principle, Volume 4). Its implementation depends on the HNR that we as the 21st century GEC society wish to realize. Reviewing the politico-environmental agendas since Stockholm 1972, we may state cautiously that ecological modernization , which applies high-tech efciency and ecological taxes within a growing market, has won acceptance in many countries; whereas ecological structural change , which builds on the social reorganization of society to achieve consumerist modesty and lifestyle selflimitation, is far from becoming a political option. In summarizing and concluding let me raise a nal question: Is all talk of globalization just a lot of globaloney as a number of journalists and critics seem to believe or are there substantive issues that must and can only be dealt with on a worldwide scale globally; and, if so, what does dealing with them globally really mean (for Occident and Orient, North and South, women and men, rich and poor)? The HNR has been a major theme in natural philosophy for centuries, if not millennia. The aspect of change was added more recently with respect to concepts of nature. The global environment was hardly a human concern before the 1970s a decade that has witnessed the limits-to-growth discourse, the rst UN Conference on the Human Environment, and two oil crises reminding the global society of the simple fact that global natural resources are nite. The avant-garde of the social sciences dealt with all of the above issues; by interpreting them as social constructs, to reveal some different perceptions. The scientic community realized that the search for GEC solutions needs inter- and transdisciplinary (including non-scientic stakeholder) synthesis and policy related cooperation (among others: Brewer, 1986; Ravetz, 1986; Committee On Research Opportunities and Priorities For EPA, 1997). GC is reected in regional and local development. Development and change in different parts of the world or in different segments of society create winners and losers . Perceptions are usually considered to be a function of culture and development. The inverse tendency is also true: Perceptions such as humans are the masters of the universe (dominium terrae ) or exploitation of nature enables us to upheave the social order (dominium hominis ) induce or determine new developments. Globaloney ? This is pretty serious business. Let us work together to turn globaloney into meaningful efforts to provide every citizen of the globe with prosperity, security, and a healthy environment in which to thrive. This is what is intended by globally sustainable politics, policies, and livelihoods.

comments and constructive criticisms of the manuscript in its earlier stages. I am also grateful to Mary Kelley-Bibra and Emma Aulanko for technical assistance and other invaluable help in the nal preparation of this article.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank Wolfgang van den Daele, Rainer Dobert, Ted Munn, and Peter Timmerman for their helpful

THE CHANGING HUMAN NATURE RELATIONSHIPS (HNR) IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

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Dunlap, R E (1998) Lay Perceptions of Global Risk: Public Views of Global Warming in Cross-national Context, Int. Sociol., 13, 473 398. Dunlap, R E and Catton, W R (1979) Environmental Sociology, Ann. Rev. Sociol., 5, 243 273. Dunlap, R E and Van Liere, K (1978) The New Environmental Paradigm, J. Environ. Educ., 9, 10 19. Echlin, E (2000) An African Church Sets the Example, Ecologist, 30(1), 43. Esping-Andersen, G (2000) Two Societies, One sociology and No Theory, Br. J. Sociol., 51, 59 77. Featherstone, M (2000) Archiving Cultures, Br. J. Sociol., 51, 161 184. Geissler, K A (1999) Der Ubergang im Ubergang, Universitas, 54(642), 1162 1173. Giner, S and Tabara, D (1999) Cosmic Piety and Ecological Rationality, Int. Sociol., 14, 59 82. Glaeser, B (1995) Environment, Development, Agriculture, Integrated Policy Through Human Ecology, UCL Press, London. Glaeser, B (1996) Sociology of the Environment: a GermanAmerican Comparison, Human Ecol. Rev., 3(1), 32 42. Glaeser, B (1997) Environment and Developing Countries, in The International Handbook of Environmental Sociology, eds M Redclift and G Woodgate, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 101 118. Glaeser, B and Phillips-Howard, K D, eds (1983) Clean Water for Third World Development, Vierteljahresberichte: Problems of International Cooperation 94, 317 426, special issue. Goldsmith, E (2000) Religion at the Millennium, Ecologist, 30(1), 4 8. Goldsmith, E (2000) Archaic Societies and Cosmic Order a Summary, Ecologist, 30(1), 15 17. Goodland, R (1995) The Concept of Environmental Sustainability, Ann. Rev. Ecol. System., 26, 1 24. Grifth, B (2000) Return to the Center, Ecologist, 30(1), 9 11. Hilgers, M (1999) Zum Jahrtausendwechsel, Universitas, 54(642), 1125 1127. Jacob, M L (1996) Sustainable Development: a Constructive Critique of the United Nations Debate, Department of Theory of Science and Research, Goteborgs Universitet Goteborg. Kiely, R and Mareet, P, eds (1998) Globalisation and the Third World, Routledge, London. Klingebiel, R and Randeria, S, eds (1998) Globalisierung aus Frauensicht, Bilanzen und Visionen, Dietz, Bonn. Latour, B (2000) When Things Strike Back: a Possible Contribution of Science Studies to the Social Studies, Br. Jr. Sociol., 51, 107 123. Lockwood, M (1999) Humans Valuing Nature: Synthesizing Insights from Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Environ. Values, 8(3), 381 401. Lovelock, J E (1979) Gaia: a New Look at Life on Earth, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Martin, H P and Schumann, H (1996) Die Globalisierungsfalle. Der Angriff auf Demokratie und Wohlstand, Rowohlt, Hamburg. Massey, D (1999) Negotiating Disciplinary Boundaries, Curr. Sociol., 47(4), 5 12. Mazur, A (1998) Global Environmental Change in the News: 1987 90 vs. 1992 6, Int. Sociol., 13, 457 472.

Mol, A P J and Spaargaren, G (1993) Environment, Modernity and the Risk-Society: the Apocalyptic Horizon of Environmental Reform, Int. Sociol., 8, 421 459. Murray, R (2000) The Cosmic Covenant, Ecologist, 30(1), 25 29. Nasr, S H (2000) The Spiritual and Religious Background of the Environmental Crisis, Ecologist, 30(1), 18 20. Parry, M and Livermore, M, eds (1999) A New Assessment of the Global Effects of Climate Change, Global Environ. Change, 9, supplementary issue. Pearce, D (1999) Economics and Environment. Essays on Ecological Economics and Sustainable Development, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham. Petschow, U and Droge, S (1999) Globalisierung und Umweltpolitik. Die Rolle des Nationalstaates, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, B23/99, 23 31. Prades, J A (1999) Global Environmental Change and Contemporary Society: Classical Sociological Analysis Revisited, Int. Sociol., 14, 7 31. Ravetz, J R (1986) Usable Knowledge, Usable Ignorance: Incomplete Science with Policy Implications. In Sustainable Development of the Biosphere, eds W C Clark and R E Munn, IIASA-Book, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 415 432. Redclift, M and Sage, C (1998) Global Environmental Change and Global Inequality: North/South Perspectives, Int. Sociol., 13, 499 516. Reif, A (1999) Der Prozess der Globalisierung ist unumkehrbar, Interview with H. James, Universitas, 54(642), 1212 1220. Rockwell, R C (1998) From a Fictional Globe to Poetic Ecosystems: Modeling Human Interactions with the Environment, in Earth System Analysis. Integrating Science for Sustainability, eds H J Schellnhuber and V Wenzel, Springer, Berlin, 461 487. Rosa, E A and Dietz, T (1998) Climate Change and Society: Speculation, Construction and Scientic Investigation, Int. Sociol., 13, 421 455. Rossi, V (2000) Sacred Cosmology in the Christian Tradition, Ecologist, 30(1), 35 39. Roth, S (2000) The Cosmic Vision of Hildegard of Bingen, Ecologist, 30(1), 40 42. Rotmans, J (1998) Global Change and Sustainable Development: Towards an Integrated Conceptual Model, in Earth System Analysis. Integrating Science for Sustainability, eds H J Schellnhuber and V Wenzel, Springer, Berlin, 421 453. Sassen, S (2000) New Frontiers Facing Urban Sociology at the Millennium, 51, 143 159. Schellnhuber, H J (1999) Earth system Analysis and the Second Copernican Revolution, Nature, 402, supplement, C 19 C 23. Schellnhuber, H J and Pilardeaux, B (1999) Den Globalen Wandel Durch Globale Strukturpolitik gestalten. Aus Politik Zeitgeschichte, 52 53(99), 3 11. Schellnhuber, H J and Wenzel, V, eds (1998) Earth System Analysis. Integrating Science for Sustainability, Springer, Berlin. Schmid, K P (1999) Wahrlich, Wahrlich, Ich Sage Euch Was Uns Fur 2000 Alles Vorhergesagt Wurde und Warum Fast Nichts Davon Eintraf, Universitas, 54(642), 1150 1161.

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Schulz, M and Kracht, U, eds (1999) Food Security and Nutrition. The Global Challenge, St. Martin s Press, Berlin. Serbser, W (2000) Societale Nachhaltigkeit, Gaia, 9, 71 75. Spaargaren, G and Mol, A P J (1992) Sociology, Environment, and Modernity: Ecological Modernization as a Theory of Social Change, Society Nat. Res., 5, 323 344. Stern, P C, Dietz, T, and Guagnano, G A (1995) The New Ecological Paradigm in Social-psychological Context, Environ. Behav., 27, 723 743. Stern, P C, Dietz, T, and Kalof, L (1993) Value Orientations, Gender and Environmental Concern, Environ. Behav., 25, 322 348. Summerer, S (1989) Vorsorge contra Nachsorge Ist Umweltqualitat planbar? in Humano kologie. Grundlagen praventiver Umweltpolitik, ed B Glaeser, Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen, 272 285. Swanson, T and Johnston, S (1999) Global Environmental Problems and International Environmental Agreements. The

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Economics and Global Environmental Change

EBAN GOODSTEIN
Lewis and Clark College, Portland, OR, USA

Confronted with any environmental problem (whether toxic emissions from a local incinerator, or the vast conundrum presented by global warming) the question how much is too much? necessarily forms the starting point for an economic analysis. Since pollution and resource degradation are a by-product of material production, and human welfare depends upon both material production and a livable environment, what is the right tradeoff? Of course, such a question is a normative one; as such it has no objectively right or wrong answer. Although economists generally agree both on a common ethical framework, and a particular de nition of sustainability as a desirable social goal, there is signi cant disagreement about how much pollution and resource degradation society should tolerate if we are to achieve a sustainable economy. Some support the use of bene t cost (BC) analysis to guide resource development and pollution decisions; others prefer a stricter precautionary principle. As economists move to more positive analytical ground, however, broader agreement emerges, though on some points signi cant debate remains. First, why do laissez faire market economies generate unsustainable outcomes? Certainly because of negative externalities. These are dif cult to internalize through private negotiation owing both to the predominance in the economy of open access common property resources, and the diffuse nature of environmental harm. An additional argument is that markets encourage investments with rapid paybacks, at the expense of longer-term investments. Second, are there ways to reduce the costs of environmental regulation? Certainly by shifting away from the current prescriptive forms of regulation, to more exible, incentive-based (IB) approaches. A second approach supported by many environmental economists is to promote direct investment in clean technology. Finally, how can we promote environmental quality in poor countries? First, raising incomes for the poor majority is a critical step; in the face of desperate poverty, the environment will become rapidly degraded. Second, progress can be made in reducing population growth by recognizing the economic motives underlying fertility decisions. Third, the complex links between rich country consumption, the movement towards free trade and investment, and global environmental quality are important factors, if still poorly understood. Fourth, effective global environmental agreements are hard (but not impossible) to achieve because they are public goods, subject to free riding. How much pollution is too much? How can we do better? And how can we resolve pressing global environmental issues? Economic approaches to answering these questions share the goal of shedding light on the trade-offs implicit in different environmental policy choices.

THE ETHICAL FRAMEWORK OF ECONOMICS: UTILITARIANISM

Economists are in the contentious business of recommending what they perceive to be the mix of government policies and private market institutions needed to maximize, in Adam Smiths words, The Wealth of Nations . Wealth in the economists context should be interpreted broadly to mean all those things that bring people a high quality of life. Societies are poor, not wealthy, if they have polluted air and water; if they lack wilderness

areas for recreation and solitude; and if they are unable to satisfy a moral desire to protect other species from extinction. It is important to emphasize that economic analysts are concerned with human welfare or happiness. To an economist, saving the blue whale from extinction is valuable only insofar as doing so yields happiness (or prevents tragedy) for present or future generations of people. The existence of the whale independent of people is of no importance. This human-centered (or anthropocentric) moral foundation underlying economic analysis, which has

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as its goal broad human happiness or utility, is rooted in the 19th century ethical system known as Utilitarianism. Some environmentalists are hostile to utilitarian arguments for protecting the environment. Indeed, an economic perspective on nature is often viewed as the primary problem, rather than part of the solution. The philosopher Mark Sagoff (1995, 618) puts it this way:
the destruction of biodiversity is the crime for which future generations are the least likely to forgive us. The crime would be as great or even greater if a computer could design or store all the genetic data we might ever use or need from the destroyed species. The reasons to protect nature are moral, religious and cultural far more often than they are economic.

The focus on anthropocentric, utilitarian arguments by economists is not meant to discount the importance of other ethical views. Indeed, over the long run, non-utilitarian moral considerations will largely determine the condition of the planet which we pass on to our children and theirs. But economic analysis is rmly wedded to this utilitarian ethical framework; moreover, arguments about human welfare invariably crop up in debates over environmental protection, often playing dominant roles. Within this utilitarian worldview, sustainability takes on a particular meaning. Sustainable outcomes require that we reduce pollution (or stop depleting resources) if doing so, on balance, prevents the decline of living standards below their current level for the typical (median) member of any future generation (Pezzey, 1992).

MARKET SYSTEMS AND SUSTAINABILITY: EXTERNALITIES

Economists largely agree that pure free market systems are unlikely to generate sustainable outcomes (Goodstein, 1999a, Chapter 3). Laissez faire systems fail because of the existence of negative externalities: costs generated in the production or consumption of a good which are not borne by the producer or consumer of the good. For example, when I buy a liter of gasoline and burn it in my jet ski, I impose a variety of costs on society as a whole, ranging from the emission of local air and water pollutants, to global warming. Many of these costs are not reected in the price of gasoline. They are thus external to the buyer and seller. If all resources in an economy were privately owned, and environmental damages could be proved easily, then externalities would be internalized through private negotiation or litigation. For example, if Bill Gates owned the Mississippi River, and my jet ski was polluting it via emissions of soluble hydrocarbons, then Bill could sue me and force me to internalize the external costs imposed on his river. However, many important resources are not privately owned: the air, rivers and streams, oceans, most forests, deserts and other natural habitats. Moreover, environmental damages are often spread among many parties, and difcult to

prove in specic cases, creating high transactions costs for private resolution of the externality problem. Given these two features (the widespread presence of common property resources, and the high transactions costs associated with court claims for damages) economists agree that free market systems will generate excessively high levels of pollution and resource degradation. The conventional solution to this problem is to force companies and consumers to internalize externalities through government regulation. Regulation can be either prescriptive (command-and-control, CAC), in which rms are required to install particular types of clean up technologies, or it can be incentive based (IB). The latter approach includes both pollution taxes, and marketable permit systems. These IB methods internalize externalities by forcing rms to pay for pollution, but leave the specic method of pollution reduction up to the companies themselves. (These systems are discussed more fully below). If government forces rms to pay for pollution through regulation, how much should rms pay? The conventional view is that businesses should pay an amount per unit of pollution equal to the damage done by the last unit of pollution emitted (the marginal unit of pollution ). Thus, if the last ton of sulfur dioxide coming out of a power plant stack leads to economic damages of $200, than the plant should pay $200 for every ton that it emits. In competitive markets, setting pollution prices equal to marginal economic damage in this way balances the costs of pollution control (higher prices for products like electricity) against the benets (less damage from pollution like acid rain), leading to maximum total monetary benets to society. Economists have developed a variety of techniques to determine monetary values for pollution damages (Goodstein, 1999a, Chapter 8). These range from the mundane (fewer sick days for workers) to the highly controversial (placing a dollar value on stroke deaths prevented, reduction in child IQ avoided, or biodiversity preserved). How can these latter types of valuations be done? As one example, the value of a life saved in benetcost (BC) studies typically ranges from $210 million. These numbers comes from studies that examine the wage premium for risky employment. Put overly simply, economists have found that workers like police ofcers receive a wage premium of around $500 for accepting a 1 in 10 000 increase in the risk of premature death on the job. 10 000 police ofcers thus exchange one of their lives for about $5 million. One can quarrel with this line of reasoning on many grounds. And clearly, if considerations of this type dominate, then uncertainty in dollar valuations of the benets of environmental protection can loom large. Nevertheless, economists have developed a number of tools for monetizing important components of quality of life traditionally left out of measures like gross domestic product (GDP).

ECONOMICS AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

27

This allows society to put a monetary value on pollution prevention: for example, global warming damage estimates from carbon dioxide emissions from coal red power plants range from around half a penny per kWh to three cents per kWh (Krupnick and Burtraw, 1996). And while numbers in this range may ultimately turn out to be wrong, defenders of this kind of estimation of the dollar benets of environmental protection respond that even the wrong dollar value is better than the default price of zero.

MARKET SYSTEMS AND SUSTAINABILITY: SHORT TIME HORIZONS

While the problem of externalities can, in theory, be dealt with via regulation, free market economies have another feature which may lead to unsustainable outcomes. In modern market systems, rms expect prot rates of return on the order of 15 to 20% in order to induce them to either conserve resources or to invest in new technology. With such high discount rates, projects with payoffs occurring much more than ve years in the future seldom look protable. Thus, from a business perspective, it seldom makes sense to preserve rainforests on the grounds that in 50 years the biodiversity it contains will be highly valued; neither are energy companies much interested in solar power as long as cheap oil and coal have at least ve year lifetimes. It is easy to show that these short time horizons create a situation in which future generations are not as well off as we could possibly make them. If we invested more today in conservation of certain resources or in basic research and development (R&D), then we could with a high probability raise the welfare of our descendants. This is the general rationale for government support of science and technology. However, it is not clear whether our short-term bias is unsustainable, that is, whether it actually reduces the welfare of future generations below the level that we enjoy today. Even with their shortterm biases, market systems are incredibly dynamic in terms of the development of new technologies. It may be that the ve-year time horizon (coupled with government support for longer-term research) can still insure that the well-being of future generations will not decline. This depends in turn on the degree to which new technologies can substitute for depleted or degraded natural resources and ecosystem services (Goodstein, 1999a, Chapters 6 and 7).

SUSTAINABILITY: THE NEOCLASSICAL VIEW

The sustainability debate hinges on this issue of humancreated substitutes for natural capital: inputs (raw materials) and waste sinks serving the economic system. On this point,

two camps have developed: neoclassical and ecological. The neoclassical tradition in economics is based on a vision of broad substitutability of inputs and outputs: labor can substitute for capital in production; oranges can substitute for apples in consumption. Neoclassical economists acknowledge that the natural world supplies important inputs and waste sinks for the economic system. However, incremental degradation of this natural capital, it is argued, seldom leads to the loss of unique services; all have reasonable substitutes. Recall that sustainability was dened earlier as nondeclining welfare for the typical member of a future generation. The neoclassical argument is that investment in created, human-made capital can (and tends to) generate a ow of services improving quality of life which at least offsets the loss of services provided by degraded natural capital. This concept has been dubbed weak sustainability. Neoclassical economists often use the example of whale oil or copper telephone wires. As these resources became relatively scarce and their prices rose, petroleum and ber optics emerged as substitutes. What about a harder case like the loss of climate stability due to global warming? Neoclassical economists respond, rst that as greenhouse gas emissions are regulated, the externality is internalized, and the price of carbon dioxide (CO2 )-based services (like gasoline-powered automobiles) rise, then new low-CO2 technologies will emerge. Moreover, advances in agricultural techniques will insure adaptation to a changing climate, and dikes can be built to hold back sea level rise. Clearly there will be losers from climate change, but on balance, the argument goes, living standards for the typical person on the planet will continue to rise even in the face of moderate climate change. Neoclassical economists in this context are technological optimists. This means that they believe that in well behaved market economies (those in which negative externalities have been internalized via IB regulations like pollution taxes or marketable permit systems), substitutes will emerge for scarce (and increasingly expensive) natural resources and environmental waste sinks. System sustainability is thus assured by assumption. Technically, this means that the economy will display a positive rate of growth of per capita net national welfare, the familiar GDP measure of economic output adjusted downwards to reect the costs of economic growth. If net national welfare, which balances the benets of increased material consumption against the attendant environmental and social costs, is growing on a per capita basis, than by denition, the well-being of future generations is also rising (Goodstein, 1999a, Chapter 6). While (weak) system sustainability is generally assumed in the technologically optimistic neoclassical framework, sustainable decisions at the micro level should be made using BC analysis. For example, when considering whether

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or not to build a coal plant, one should compare the discounted stream of measurable monetary costs (material and environmental) over the expected life of the plant, against the discounted stream of measurable monetary benets (cheaper power). If the benets exceed the costs, than building the plant would be sustainable in the weak sense, because doing so would, on net, raise the welfare of the typical member of future generations. Future costs and benets are discounted in BC analysis to reect the opportunity cost of productive foregone investment. For example, the value of $100 received in 10 years (ignoring ination) is a lot less than the value of $100 received today. If the interest rate were 10%, I could invest that $100 today and have $260 in 10 years. Conversely, to have $100 on hand in 10 years I would need to bank only $39 today. This gure of $39 is called the Present Discounted Value of $100 received in 10 years, if a 10% interest or discount rate is available. While discounting makes sense for individual nancial decisions, at the social level it can generate perverse outcomes (see Discounting, Volume 5). To illustrate, suppose we are considering installing a lter on our coal plant that will generate a one-time-only benet of $100 million 100 years from now. At a discount rate of 10%, a $100 million benet gained 100 years from now is worth only $7200 today. The logic of BC analysis thus suggests that we should not spend a measly seven thousand dollars and change today to yield a benet of $100 million to our great grandchildren. Why? Because if we put the money in the bank, future generations would have more than $100 million on hand. The problem is that, for real world projects subject to BC analysis, we do not intend to put net savings in a trust fund; the alternative is instead to spend it elsewhere in the economy (say, to reduce energy prices from the coal plant) where it may or may not yield a 10% rate of return to society as a whole. While discounting makes obvious sense on a personal level for short time horizons, it breaks down for actions yielding a stream of social benets far into the future. On the ip side, not discounting at all also generates perverse outcomes. Consider a project that yields $1 worth of benets every year, forever. Such a project has innite value, and would thus seem to be worth sacricing the entire planets output to nance. Given these two extremes, there is a lot of debate over the proper approach to discounting future benets and costs (Portney and Weyant, 1999). If indeed the analysis is sensitive to the choice of a discount rate, or else tries to weigh controversial benets such as lives saved or biodiversity preserved, then uncertainties can easily grow large enough to render determination of a (weakly) sustainable outcome at the project level difcult, if not impossible.

SUSTAINABILITY: THE ECOLOGICAL VIEW

In contrast to neoclassical economists, ecological economists are technological pessimists (see Ecological Economics, Volume 5). Tracing their intellectual lineage explicitly to Malthus, ecological economists have no faith that technological substitutes for important natural resources, such as climate stability, will be forthcoming from real-world market systems. Thus, ecological economists would reject a coal plant following the logic that CO2 emissions are already destabilizing the global climate. Essentially, ecological economists argue that for important resources such as fresh water, ultraviolet protection, biodiversity and climate stability, the future consequences of current resource degradation are too uncertain to countenance the use of BC analysis. Instead ecological economists argue for what they call the Precautionary Principle (see Precautionary Principle, Volume 4). To preserve the welfare of future generations, therefore, unique forms of natural capital should be protected unless the costs of doing so are prohibitively high (Ciriacy-Wantrup, 1968; Daly, 1996). This strategy of protecting natural capital has the advantage of not relying on the development of uncertain substitutes to insure (weakly) sustainable outcomes. Thus following the Precautionary Principle promotes strong sustainability from an ecological perspective, by insuring that future generations will not be impoverished by the loss of natural capital. Moreover, the argument is often simultaneously advanced that the cost of protection will not be so high as is frequently claimed (Laitner et al., 1998). Along this line, ecological economists point to survey evidence suggesting that, in developed countries, broad growth in material consumption in fact buys very little increases in societal happiness. This occurs, it is argued, because beyond a basic level, utility from consumption depends on relative rather than absolute levels of consumption. To the extent that this is true, environmental quality is being sacriced only to feed a rat race in which human welfare does not rise with increased material consumption, clearly an unsustainable state of affairs (Mishan, 1968; Howarth, 1996). Which view is correct? Neoclassical economists argue that the ecological position is too extreme. They insist there are trade-offs, and that we can pay too much for a pristine environment. Resources and person-power invested in reducing small cancer risks or preserving salmon streams, for example, are resources and people that cannot be invested in schools or health care, also of value to future generations. BC analysis is needed to obtain the right balance of investment between environmental protection and other goods and services. Moreover, in the sustainability debate, neoclassical economists argue that history is on their side: Malthusian predictions have been discredited time and time again.

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Indeed, in recent years, some scientists have made stunningly bad forecasts regarding looming resource shortages. The problem with these predictions, as with Malthuss original one, was that they dramatically underestimated the impacts of changing technologies. Neoclassical economists point to these failed predictions to support their basic assumption that natural and created capital are indeed good substitutes: we are not running out of natural resources or waste sinks. Ecological economists respond that history is not a good guide for the future. One hundred and fty years after the beginning of the industrial revolution, the argument is that accumulating stresses have begun to fundamentally erode the resilience of local and global ecosystems upon which the economy ultimately depends. Indeed, ecological economists have largely shifted their 1970s concerns about running out of nonrenewable minerals and oil to concerns such as: biodiversity, fresh water, environmental waste sinks, and productive agricultural land. While ecological economists stretching back to Malthus have indeed done their share of crying wolf, this does not, of course, mean the wolf is not now at our door. The neoclassical and ecological perspectives differ dramatically in their assessment of the likelihood of sustainable outcomes from real world market economies. Nevertheless, both perspectives are economic: both accept the common denition of sustainability offered above; both are grounded in broadly utilitarian philosophy, and both deal in the currency of trade-offs. In addition, this is a debate about ends, not means. Ecological economists prefer that resource development or environmental degradation be regulated according to a precautionary principal; neoclassical economists prefer a BC test. When it comes to means, however, economists from both schools would prefer to see greater reliance on incentive systems than is provided by existing environmental and resource regulations (see below).

parts. The rst is uniform emission standards. All similar sources are commanded to meet identical emission levels. The control part of the name refers to the technology-based regulatory approach employed by much current regulation. Regulators specify, at a high level of detail, precisely which technologies rms must employ to reduce emissions. While this initial effort to internalize externalities was effective in many regards, CAC regulation is generally not cost-effective, either in the short run or the long run. (By cost-effective is meant achieving a given pollution reduction goal at the lowest possible cost.) Uniform emission standards raise costs in the short run, since all plants must meet the same reduction targets, regardless of differences in the cost of doing so. Technology-based regulation raises costs in the long run by sti ing incentives for innovation in new pollution control technology. These factors have led most economists to advocate a greater use of IB regulation like emission charges or marketable permit systems. More broadly, regulation has been criticized as ineffective on a variety of grounds: regulatory design and enforcement is subject to significant political in uence; regulation addresses symptoms in a piecemeal way, rather than underlying causes in a comprehensive way; regulations must be continually tightened or else they will be overwhelmed by economic and population growth; regulation has already picked off the easy targets: large, stationary pollution sources. Increasingly, pollution is arising from mobile sources like cars, and non-point sources like run-off from streets and farms.

THE CURRENT REGULATORY SYSTEM

Perhaps the most striking aspect of environmental regulation at the national level is its brief history. As recently as 1970, for example, the US had no major federal legislation controlling the discharge of pollutants into the air and water, no national regulations covering the disposal of hazardous waste onto land, no process for reviewing new chemicals, only a limited procedure for registering new pesticides, and no protection for endangered species. Beginning in the early 1970s, countries around the world began adopting national environmental protection legislation. Most of these laws required government agencies to develop detailed prescriptive regulation for several different types of industrial polluters. Economists have since dubbed this approach CAC regulation. CAC involves two

These factors have led some economists to call for greater government support for the development of technologies which are much cleaner in the rst place. Before discussing calls for reform, however, it is important to note that CAC systems have signi cant achievements to their credit (Goodstein, 1999a, Chapter 14). In the United States for example, in spite of the fact that economic activity more than doubled from 1970 to 2000, the general urban air pollution picture has actually improved, dramatically for lead. In addition, large reductions in air toxins have been recorded over the last decade. Industrial emissions of some water borne pollutants have dropped dramatically and, overall, water quality has improved a bit beyond 1970 levels. Regulation of hazardous waste is likely to prevent the development of future Love Canals. And the rising cost of disposal, along with the right-to-know regulations, and the potential for Superfund liability is beginning to focus corporate attention on reducing waste through pollution prevention. Particularly nasty new pesticides are not likely to make it through the EPA s initial screen, and under prodding from Congress, the agency will restrict the use of the

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worst of the existing pesticides in the rst few years of this century. Finally, only a few listed species have slipped into extinction. The fact that regulation has managed to hold the line against economic growth is in itself an impressive accomplishment.

DOING BETTER: INCENTIVE-BASED REGULATION

It is straightforward to see how uniform standards and government mandated technology requirements under CAC raise the costs of regulation. In the case of uniform standards, consider two neighboring oil reneries. Renery A, which has the ability to reduce emissions of say, nitrogen oxides, at very low-cost, is nevertheless expected to meet the same standard as next door renery B, a rm with very high costs of reduction. The reason this is not cost-effective is simple: the same overall emission reduction (and local air quality) could be achieved at lower cost by having the low-cost rm meet a tighter emission standard, while relaxing the standard for the neighboring high-cost rm. Similarly, in the short run, a single technological mandate is unlikely to provide the cheapest pollution control solution for different rms all over the country. This lack of exibility inherent in centralized, technology-based regulation raises costs (Goodstein, 1999a, Chapter 16). However, long-run cost effects are more important. Technology-based regulation works against technological improvement in several ways. First, once a rm has installed the government-mandated technology it has no incentive to do better. Second, the rm actually has a positive incentive not to do better. If, for example, it discovered a better technique for pollution reduction, and the EPA then decided to deem this new technology to be the standard, the rm might legally be required to upgrade its pollution control technology at other new facilities. Firms have a distinct incentive to keep the agency from upgrading the state-of-the-art technological standard. Finally, if in spite of these obstacles, rms do seek an innovative, non-approved approach, they must rst obtain regulatory clearance to do so. IB regulation provides an alternative to CAC. There are two kinds, closely related. The rst is a pollution tax (also known as an efuent or emission charge or fee). For example, to reduce power plant emissions of carbon dioxide, which fuel the greenhouse effect, society could institute a tax on emissions of, say, $25 per ton of CO2 . Alternatively, one might achieve a roll-back through a marketable permit system (also known as a tradable permit or cap-and-trade system). Here CO2 permits would be issued or auctioned to polluters only up to a certain target level of overall emissions. These permits could then be bought and sold by others, again putting a market price

tag on pollution (see Tradable Permits for Greenhouse Gases, Volume 4). The rst effect of IB systems is to eliminate uniform emission levels at different sites. Plants facing high costs of reducing pollution will cut back a little and either pay the emission charge or buy additional permits. Plants with low costs will cut back a lot, and either save on pollution taxes, or make money by selling some permits. Overall pollution levels can be set the same as under CAC regulation, but the compliance costs will be less as rms are given greater exibility, as well as incentives to make emission cuts at the lowest cost sites. The second benecial aspect of IB regulation is that it provides a exible framework for innovation. Firms can install any pollution control technology they desire. Moreover, IB regulation also establishes continuous incentives for technological progress. CAC regulation does not penalize rms for any pollutants they emit once they have installed the technology mandated by the government; by contrast under IB regulation rms pay for every pound of pollution coming out of the stacks. They do this directly under an emission charge system, but pollution bears a similar price under a cap-and-trade system. By reducing pollution towards zero, rms can make money by selling their excess permits. Textbook emission charge systems are not often found in the real world, perhaps because, as new taxes they are politically difcult to institute. By contrast, cap-and-trade systems are increasingly popular. The biggest success to date has been the acid rain program in the US. Initiated in 1995 to control the emission of sulfur dioxide from power plants, the program has functioned largely according to plan. SO2 emissions have been reduced by about half, and the program has generated signicant cost savings (Schmalensee et al., 1998). A couple of caveats are in order regarding IB systems. First, they only work well for pollutants that do their damage regionally or globally. If pollutant damage is local, than a simple IB system will generate hot spots: high pollutant damages around high cost-of-reduction plants. Second, the government must have good monitoring and enforcement capabilities. Firms must either pay the efuent charges due, or face stiff nes for any pollutants emitted above their permitted levels. In some cases, CAC regulation may be easier to monitor and enforce than an IB approach (Goodstein, 1999a).

DOING BETTER: PROMOTING CLEAN TECHNOLOGY

Regulation, whether CAC or IB, is designed to internalize externalities, and force rms and consumers to bear the social costs of pollution. Most economists agree that a shift towards greater use of IB regulation would help reduce

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the costs of environmental protection, and thus make it politically easier to achieve. But is getting the prices right through regulation (whether IB or CAC) enough to insure a sustainable economy? A second strategy is to directly promote the development and diffusion of clean technology: fuel-cell vehicles, solar and wind powered electricity, energy and water efciency technologies, alternative agriculture, recycling (Goodstein, 1999a, Chapter 18). Rather than rely solely on controlling pollutants at the end-of-the-pipe, advocates of this approach argue that government should promote the use of technologies which reduce polluting inputs and processes in the rst place. Technologies can be advanced through policies like R&D, consumer subsidies, and public procurement contracts. So called technology-forcing regulations can also promote new options; examples in the US include the Corporate Average Fuel Efciency (CAFE) standards, energy efciency standards for appliances, and the California zero emission vehicle requirements. From a theoretical point of view, government efforts to inuence the direction of technological progress can be justied by what economists call path dependence (Arthur, 1991). This theory maintains that current production technologies (for example, US reliance on private automobiles for urban transportation) represent only one possible path of development. A potentially cost competitive alternative in this case might be mass transit, dominant in many European and Japanese cities. The path a society chooses depends on a variety of factors, including the relative political strength of the conicting interests, chance historical circumstance, and, of course, consumer preferences and relative production costs. In the auto example, the US governments decision to construct the interstate highway system beginning after World War II, which in turn promoted suburban development, provided the decisive advantage to private transport. However, once a path has been chosen, other paths are closed off. This happens for three reasons. First, infrastructure and R&D investments are increasingly directed towards supporting the chosen technology, and diverted from the competing path. Second, the chosen technology is able to exploit economies of scale to consolidate its cost advantage. Third, complementary technologies develop which are tailored to the chosen path, further disadvantaging the competing path. In the transportation example, this would include the sprawling retail and housing patterns of US cities, which now virtually require a private vehicle for access. Path-dependence theory suggests that once a path is chosen, there is no easy way to switch tracks. However, in retrospect, we can see that technological choices have social consequences: the adoption of private transport, for example, has borne a substantial environmental cost. Thus, the role of government is to try and inuence the

current market driven process of technological development towards a path consistent with a sustainable future. Note that this theory assumes that governments in modern capitalist societies already necessarily play a major role in shaping technological change through infrastructure decisions and subsidy policies; the key here is to insure that the role is a positive one. Under a clean technology strategy, promotional efforts should be limited to technologies which are close to commercial development, generate a quality of service and have long-run production costs comparable to existing technologies, and are environmentally superior. Each of these requirements must be met, otherwise, the technology will not spread rapidly, and little environmental benet will result. But given these conditions, why arent private entrepreneurs developing them in the rst place? The answer lies in the short-term bias of market actors discussed above. Simply because clean technologies are potentially cost competitive does not mean that they are more protable than existing technologies. Entrepreneurs tend to introduce products which ll a market niche and provide at least temporary monopoly prots (computers, VCRs, cell phones). Clean technologies, by contrast, generally are not offering a new product; rather they go head-to-head to with an existing, well-established technology in a mature industry: electricity or transportation, for example. Thus they must enter an already competitive eld, where only normal prots can be expected. The only clear-cut advantage that clean technologies have is in their environmental impact. While this may provide some marketing leverage, it generally will not guarantee high protability. Under normal market circumstances, new technologies often take a substantial time to develop a widespread following. This is due to consumers lack of knowledge about the advantages of the new technology, as well as differences in consumer needs. The transition to any new technology requires a marketing commitment to overcome this lack of information. Marketing expenses are sunk costs, that is, costs that cannot be recovered if an investment fails. The higher the sunk costs associated with an investment, the riskier it becomes. Clean technologies face particularly high sunk costs (and thus high risk) because they do not market themselves by offering a service that consumers do not already have. Instead, clean technologies need to woo consumers from the use of the existing technology. While clean technologies offer comparable services, they also tend to require users to learn new consumption habits. This requires a big investment in marketing, which cannot be recovered if the business fails. In summary, many clean technologies are unlikely to be highly protable in the short to medium term; as a consequence, private sector investors show little interest. Government policy can change this equation by absorbing

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some of the risk associated with the introduction of these new technologies, nurturing infant industries. There is disagreement among economists as to how far government should move in this direction. Basic scientic R&D generates positive externalities; not all of the benet of innovation is captured by the inventor. For that reason, most economists agree that support of basic science is an important governmental role. Beyond that, however, while some argue that government should support signicant investment in clean technologies, others maintain that government should do nothing. In part this has to do with disagreement over the extent to which the short-term bias of market economies, discussed above, has on sustainable outcomes. Those opposed to government support for technology feel that, if the prices are right (that is, if externalities have been internalized), then the private market place will bring new technologies on line soon enough to avoid unsustainable levels of environmental damage. The disagreement also has to do with political economic views on the efcacy of government intervention into the economy. Opponents of clean technology promotion argue that the government is likely to promote the wrong technologies, and that these decisions are better left to a decentralized market process.

2.

3.

THE ECONOMICS OF THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT

This essay has so far outlined the theoretical relationship between laissez faire markets and sustainability, and discussed policy options at the national level for promoting sustainability. We now turn our attention to global environmental challenges: the complex links between widespread poverty in poor countries (working in part through high population growth rates), high levels of consumption in rich countries, and environmental degradation at both the global level and in the less developed world. Finally, we end with a look at the economics of global environmental agreements. In rich countries, it is commonly assumed that environmental quality can only be improved by sacricing material consumption. In poor countries, by contrast, a broad-based growth in income will, in many respects, tend to improve the quality of the environment. There are four close connections between poverty and the environment (World Bank, 1992). 1. For poor people, many environmental problems are problems of poverty. The biggest environmental health threats facing most people in poor countries are unsafe drinking water, compounded by inadequate sewage facilities, and urban air pollution. Exposure to indoor air pollution (smoke) from cooking and heating sources ranks close to industrial and auto air pollution as a concern. 4.

Poor people cannot afford to conserve resources. Out of economic necessity, poor people often put an unsustainable burden on the natural capital in their immediate environment. Urban residents scour the immediate countryside for fuel (rewood or animal dung) leading to deforestation or the elimination of fertilizer sources. Landless farmers are pushed into over farming small plots, farming on steep mountain slopes that soon wash out, or farming in clear-cut rain forests incapable of sustaining agriculture. Richer people demand more pollution control. As per capita income rises in a country, people begin to express a more effective demand for pollution control. Partly this has to do with education. As income rises, so do levels of awareness regarding environmental threats. Partly, it has to do with expanding democracy. As income rises, political participation tends to increase. As a result, people are provided with the opportunity to express a political demand for pollution control. Partly, it has to do with a shift in industrial composition: wealthier countries rely more on services and other relatively clean industries, while less developed countries have more basic manufacturing and mining. Finally, the relationship can be explained by relative risk considerations: when life spans are short due to inadequate nutrition or access to basic health care, concerns about respiratory, neurological and reproductive diseases, or cancer from pollution, are dampened. Population growth slows with increased income. The nal link between poverty and the environment lies in income growth as a means of population control, discussed later.

These four interconnections between poverty and the environment reveal that, in poor countries, one need not trade-off rising material living standards for improved environmental quality. In fact, the only effective way to improve environmental conditions is to alleviate the tremendous poverty faced by many of the people in these nations.

POPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT

Higher incomes tend to be associated with lower population growth rates. While the relationship is not hard and fast, for example, welfare families in America are not signicantly larger than the average, it holds as a general rule, both across countries, and within countries. Many factors go into determining family size; religious and cultural norms obviously play a prominent role. Yet the strength of the povertyfertility relationship suggests that economic factors are quite important as well (Dasgupta, 1995). In poor countries, children provide two important economic functions: health and old age insurance, and after early childhood, a potential supplement to family income.

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Given limited resources, a family could potentially obtain comparable economic benets following one of two approaches: a high investment strategy with one or two children, or a low investment strategy with many children. The high investment strategy would involve focusing all available resources on one or two children: insuring that they survive infancy, are provided with a healthy diet, and go on to attend school. Such a child might well land a good job, and increase family income substantially. For poor people with limited resources and restricted access to public services, the high investment strategy is very difcult to pursue. Moreover, it is tremendously risky. Suppose that after ve years of intensive investment, a single child dies. Yet, as income rises, the high investment strategy begins to be more attractive. Resources for the long-term (1518 year) investment are more readily available, and access to better health care means that the chances of premature death decline. This BC model of family size is a very crude one, omitting as it does very important issues of culture, kinship, religion, love and affection. Yet it does a good job explaining the strong relationship between poverty and fertility observed in many places around the world. In particular, because there are good economic reasons for poor people to have large families, simple provision of low-cost birth control is unlikely to solve the population problem (though it would certainly help). Can we use this BC model to suggest other effective policies for controlling population growth?
Balanced Growth and Provision of Social Services The povertyfertility relationship seems to provide a straightforward way to control population: eliminate poverty! Unfortunately, if nations were able to do this easily, they would have done so already. It does remains true, however, that balanced and rapid economic development which raises the material welfare of the poor majority is one of the most effective population control measures available. In addition to balanced growth, another way to reduce poverty and thus population growth rates is through the form of publicly provided social services: education, health care, and public pension plans. Reduced Infant and Childhood Mortality Improved public health is an important factor in reducing long-run population growth rates. The BC approach to family size suggest that improved health care would help slow population growth for one principal reason: the risk associated with investing in a childs health and education would be reduced, encouraging families to substitute quality for quantity. Education The economic model of family size tells us that population growth will slow when parents follow a strategy of high

investment in their children. A key element making such a strategy possible is access to education. This is true for three reasons. First, the availability of education directly lowers the cost of pursuing a high investment strategy to all parents, educated and uneducated alike. Second, as parents become educated themselves, a strategy of substituting quality for quantity also becomes easier, since the parents can provide guidance to the children. Finally, as parents become educated, their wages tend to rise. This increases the opportunity cost of parents time, making a low-investment strategy less attractive. This is true because a low investment, quantity strategy requires a bigger commitment of time devoted to child-rearing than does a high investment, quality strategy. Another way to look at this is that, as the parents wages rise, family income and economic insurance are better served by parents working than by raising more children. For this reason, education is particularly important for women, since they do most of the child rearing. One of the best ways to control fertility is to have women participating in the modern sector of the economy. All poor women work. However, employment in agricultural or household labor does not appear to reduce fertility. As the opportunity cost of the womans time rises, a quantity strategy becomes less and less attractive for the family as a unit. Education for women appears to have a strong impact on fertility control for other reasons as well. To this point, we have treated the family as a homogeneous unit, yet men and women play different roles in the family, and may have different ideas about the desirability of limiting family size. In the developing world, as in rich countries, the responsibility for taking birth control measures (whether abstinence, prolonged breast feeding, or a technological approach) generally falls on the woman. Thus the direct consumers of birth control devices and fertility control information are generally women, providing another argument for improved female education (see Ecofeminism, Volume 5). More importantly, however, most of the worlds societies are male dominated, patriarchal cultures. In such societies, women often must obtain approval from their husbands in order to control their fertility. This distinction is important, because holding all things equal, it is probably true that women prefer to have fewer children than do men. This is likely for a number of reasons: women do the vast majority of the hard work involved in child rearing; child rearing interferes with womens other economic activities; and child birth represents a signicant health risk for many women. Thus, policies which strengthen womens status and bargaining position within the family itself, for example, better education or access to paid employment, are likely to have important effects on fertility decisions, independent of their impact on overall family income and economic insurance.

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Family Planning Having argued above that poor people may have good reasons for having large families, it is also true that a big obstacle to pursuing a high investment strategy is lack of access to family planning services. There remains a large unsatised demand for birth control worldwide (World Bank, 1992).

GLOBAL CONSUMPTION AND TRADE

In discussions of population pressures on the environment, it is important to recognize that the environmental damage people do depends not only on absolute numbers, but also on the natural capital depleted and waste products generated by each person. As an upper middle class citizen of the US, I consume more than 100 times the resources used by the average individual from a poor country. The point here is not to induce guilt about af uent lifestyles, but rather to recognize that one needs to focus as much attention on reducing the environmental impact of high consumption in rich countries, as is paid to reducing population growth in poor countries. Moreover, although the population problem is concentrated in poor countries, through legal and illegal immigration, poor-country population pressure spills over into af uent countries. And while today the consumption problem is centered in rich countries, this too will begin to change as a growing number of poor country residents aspire to the consumption levels found in rich countries. Because inhabitants of rich countries are responsible for over two-thirds of global economic activity, at least twothirds of global pollution can be laid at our doorstep. The western European countries, the US and Japan comprise about 15% of the world s population, but they consume 71% of the world s output (World Bank, 1992, Table A.2). As a result, rich-country consumption has to date been responsible for most of the global atmospheric pollution: global warming, ozone depletion, acid rain, and radioactive contamination. Rich countries have had by far the biggest impact on polluting and over- shing the oceans. In addition to generating global pollution problems, there is a second element to the consumption pollution link. High levels of consumption demand in rich countries have been responsible for an unsustainable draw-down in environmental quality and the stock of natural capital in many poor countries. Many poor countries rely on the export of primary resources or agricultural commodities to earn money for imported fuel, food, consumer goods and weapons. In principal, this trade is environmentally sustainable. However, weak sustainability requires that any draw down in the stock of natural capital (whether oil or mineral reserves, rainforest resources, top soil, or air and water quality) be compensated for by investment in created capital.

The overwhelming demand for resources in rich countries (ranging from gasoline, to steel, to bananas, to beef) has in many cases depleted the natural capital stock in poor countries, without commensurate investment in created capital. Why has this occurred? Historically, colonial governments tended to drain resource-generated wealth from their colonies, investing little in human capital or infrastructure. In the post-colonial period, falling relative prices for primary resources, low taxes on politically powerful resource-based industries, and high levels of spending on military and imported consumption goods by the ruling elite have constrained investment in created capital. Finally, the burden of debt repayment has led to a ow of created wealth from poor to rich countries over much of the last 20 years. This is not to say that trade in agricultural commodities, or any other goods, is on balance, bad for the environment. Rather, to insure sustainability, the gains from trade must be invested in created capital suf cient to offset the drawdown in natural capital. If they are not, than rich-country consumption leads to unsustainable development in poor countries as surely as does rapid population growth. What is the relationship between trade and the environment? The pro free trade argument is that trade leads to economic growth, economic growth reduces poverty, and as we saw above, a reduction in poverty is a critical precondition for environmental protection in poor countries (Bhagwati, 1993). Poor countries often support trade liberalization through multilateral agencies like the World Trade Organization (WTO) in order to keep the rich countries from unilaterally imposing tariffs or other trade restrictions. International trade and investment can also facilitate the transfer of cleaner technologies from rich to poor countries. These positions clearly have merit. Yet critics respond, rst, that trade does not always lead to growth because, as argued above, suf cient pro ts from trade are not reinvested in poor countries to compensate them for their loss of natural resources. Second, even if economic growth occurs, the environmental bene ts which accompany growth can be overwhelmed by the increase in pollution from export production, leading to a decline in environmental quality in poor countries. Finally, critics charge that environmental regulations in rich countries will be weakened by liberalized trade and investment, as business mobility increases, and legal challenges are lodged by international competitors (Daly, 1993). On the former point, economists have found that in fact, very few businesses have ed from developed to underdeveloped countries to escape stringent environmental regulations (Goodstein, 1999b). This appears true in part because even for heavily regulated rms, environmental costs seldom rise above 2% of total business costs. Moreover, much pollution control technology is imbedded in modern plant design. A new chemical plant built by a multinational in Chile will in fact look a lot like one built in Texas. When

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rms do head to the South, the reason is, overwhelmingly, low wages. On the second point, free trade agreements can indeed bind the hands of environmental regulators, since they give foreign governments the ability to challenge certain regulations as trade barriers. In 1999, the US acting on behalf of Ford and Daimler-Chrysler, challenged a Japanese government initiative designed to reduce CO2 emissions from automobiles. The law required that new mid-sized cars sold in Japan have engines as efcient as the most efcient on the market, which were then produced by Mitsubishi. Under the rules of the WTO, the US sought to have the law overturned as a barrier to trade. If the WTO rules in favor of the US, Japan will have to rescind the law or face trade sanctions (Wallach and Sforza, 1999). Is free trade good or bad for the environment? More liberal trade is generally championed by economists because it is believed to increase efciency, and in the long run, raise material living standards across the board. However, the process of globalization is crafting a new set of rules that will benet some more than others, and it is also certain to generate many losers. The environmental challenge is to harness the efciency gains generated by trade into domestic investments in poor countries, thereby helping create a sustainable future. From this perspective, agreements promoting more trade should be viewed as a means to an end (stabilizing population growth, enhancing food security, transferring sustainable technology, and conserving resources) not as an end in itself. Yet at this point, trade agreements have only just begun to acknowledge environmental and sustainability concerns.

THE ECONOMICS OF GLOBAL AGREEMENTS

Beyond poverty, overpopulation, and the growth of environmental impacts from global over-consumption, transboundary pollution problems present serious threats to sustainability. Global warming, ozone depletion, acid rain, and exploitation of the oceans, Antarctica, and even outer space, are all processes occurring outside the jurisdiction of a single nation. There is no international environmental protection agency with the authority to regulate exploitation of the global commons. To address these problems, nations have begun to negotiate international agreements. However, economic theory suggests that effective international agreements are hard to develop. From an economic point of view, an international pollution control agreement is a public good, which must be provided voluntarily by the private nations of the world. Public goods are goods which are enjoyed in common; a classic example, if dated, is the warning service provided by a lighthouse. Technically, economists describe public goods as non-excludable. Once in operation, it is impossible to exclude any passing boat from utilizing the warning

beacon provided by the lighthouse. Public goods tend to be under-supplied in a free market economy precisely because many of those who benet can free ride if the good is provided at all. This than justies government in taxing the beneciaries, and then subsidizing the provision of public goods: for example, basic scientic research. Reducing global warming is a public good, because there is no way to exclude free riders from enjoying the climate stabilization benets provided by a treaty. However, in this case, there is no international government to insure that the sustainable level of protection is provided. The public-good nature of environmental treaties has two implications. First, treaties will tend to be too weak from a BC point of view, since signatory nations are reluctant to reveal and commit their true willingness-to-pay in the bargaining process. Second, once signed, nations will have a strong incentive to cheat on the agreement. Unilateral cheating is another way to free ride on the pollution control efforts of others. Of course, if everyone cheats, the agreement will collapse. Beyond free riding, agreement on burden sharing is difcult to achieve. In principle, each country might contribute their true willingness-to-pay for a treaty. This willingnessto-pay in turn would depend on both the benets received, and ability to pay. Both of these might vary widely between nations. For example, low-lying Bangladesh, has a tremendous stake in slowing global warming, and preventing a devastating sea-level rise. Yet the country is poor, and would have a difcult time nancing strong measures to reduce CO2 emissions. On the other hand, a land-locked, wealthy country like Switzerland has a high ability to pay, but may have fewer immediate interests at stake. A poor countrys willingness-to-pay to join an agreement will typically be much smaller than that of a rich country, simply because it has a much lower national income. Yet poor-country participation will often be vital. For example, if China were to further industrialize using its vast coal reserves, global warming would accelerate considerably. Given Chinas low willingness to pay for a reduction in global warming (as a result of its low income), a compensation fund would have to be established for China to sign a greenhouse treaty. Those with a high willingnessto-pay (typically rich countries) would have to pay for China to adopt less polluting and expensive energy sources. Otherwise, it would not be in Chinas interests to sign the treaty. If each nation did contribute its true willingness-to-pay, then the agreement process would generate an efcient level of global pollution control. However, a countrys underlying willingness-to-pay for an agreement is not a well-dened thing in the rst place, and is certainly not transparent to negotiators from other nations. Therefore, each nations bargainers will have an incentive to understate

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its true interest in a treaty in the hopes that others will shoulder more of the burden. In the extreme, a country might not sign a global warming or other environmental treaty at all, but still benet from the efforts of other nations, acting as a pure free rider. While the theory of public goods predicts that international environmental treaties will be both weak and susceptible to enforcement problems, agreements nevertheless do get signed and efforts are made to insure compliance. The 1986 Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer, in spite of the theory sketched out above, has been a remarkable success story. This was due to the perception on the part of many countries of a clear and present danger; relatively few pollutant sources; and the realization (after the treaty was signed) of relatively low compliance costs (Goodstein, 1999a, Chapter 22). By contrast, the struggle to implement the 1997 Kyoto global warming accord reects much more of the difculty in assigning burden sharing, and the free rider phenomenon. This agreement was signed by all of the developed countries, including the US, and calls for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to below 1990 levels. Following the model of the Montreal Protocol, poor countries were not required to participate at the outset. The rationale for this was two-fold: developed countries had caused the problem, and they had the resources to develop the alternative energy technologies needed for large-scale reduction in carbon emissions. However, there has been strong opposition in the US Senate and from President Bush to treaty ratication: not surprising, since the US is the biggest greenhouse gas polluter. The US Senate argues that poor countries should also be included in the treaty and required to reduce emissions at the outset. This position, if it is maintained, threatens to scuttle the entire agreement (Goodstein, 1999b).

regarding the right answers. But what we do agree on is the centrality of these three questions.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Portions of this essay were rst published in Economics and the Environment (John Wiley and Sons) and are used with permission.

REFERENCES
Arthur, B W (1991) Positive Feedbacks in the Economy, Sci. Am., February, 92 99. Bhagwati, J (1993) The Case for Free-Trade, Sci. Am., November, 41 49. Ciriacy-Wantrup (1968) Resource Conservation: Economics and Policies, 3rd edition, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Daly, H (1993) The Perils of Free Trade, Sci. Am., November, 41 49. Daly, H (1996) Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development, Beacon Press, Boston, MA. Dasgupta, P (1995) The Population Problem: Theory and Evidence, J. Econ. Literature, 33, 1879 1902. Goodstein, E (1999a) Economics and the Environment, 2nd edition, John Wiley & Sons, New York. Goodstein, E (1999b) The Trade-off Myth: Fact and Fiction about Jobs and the Environment, Island Press, Washington, DC. Howarth, R B (1996) Status Effects and Environmental Externalities, Ecological Economics, 16(1), 25 34. Krupnick, A and Burtraw, D (1996) The Social Costs of Electricity: Do the Numbers Add Up? Resour. Energy Econ., 18, 423 466. Laitner, S, Bernow, S, and DeCicco, J (1998) Employment and other Macroeconomic Benets of an Innovation-Led Climate Strategy for the United States, Energy Policy, 26(5), 425 432. Mishan, E J (1968) The Costs of Economic Growth, Staples Press, London. Pezzey, J (1992) Sustainability: An Interdisciplinary Guide, Environ. Values, 1(4), 321 362. Portney, P and Weyant, J (1999) Discounting and Intergenerational Equity, Resources for the Future, Washington, DC. Sagoff, M (1995) Carrying Capacity and Ecological Economics, Bioscience, 45(9), 610 619. Schmalansee, R, Joskow, P, Ellerman, A D, Montero, J P, and Bailey, E M (1998) An Interim Evaluation of the Sulfur Dioxide Trading Program, J. Econ. Perspect., 12(3), 53 68. Wallach, L and Sforza, M (1999) Whose Trade Organization? Corporate Globalization and the Erosion of Democracy, Public Citizen, Washington, DC. World Bank (1992) World Development Report 1992: Development and the Environment, Oxford University Press, New York.

CONCLUSION
This essay has provided a brief introduction to the economic analysis of global environmental change. For economists, the goal of sustainability (an improved quality of life for most people) is well dened, if hard to operationalize. Within this utilitarian framework, an economist will ask three questions. First, given that pollution and resource degradation are a by-product of economic output, how much pollution and resource degradation are consistent with a sustainable future? Second, once the pollution reduction or resource preservation target is set, how can we achieve our goal at the lowest possible cost? And nally, how can we address global environmental problems, including the pressures placed on the environment by widespread poverty; high population growth rates; unsustainable trade patterns; and the need for more effective global agreements? As indicated, there is often lively debate among economists

FURTHER READING
See various articles in Volumes 1 and 4 concerning climate change.

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Ecological Economics
RICHARD B NORGAARD
University of California at Berkley, CA, USA Economists, ecologists, and scholars from a variety of other disciplines have organized an intellectual community known as ecological economics. The International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE) was established in 1989, in response to a concern that the dominant ways of economic thinking have fostered particular forms of global change with detrimental social and environmental impacts. The constitution of the Society states: The purpose of the Society is the advancement of our understanding of the relationships among ecological, social, and economic systems and the application of this understanding to the mutual well-being of nature and people, especially that of the most vulnerable, including future generations. Note that ecological economists broadly stress the interaction of multiple systems and the "mutual well-being of nature and people", putting the emphasis on the interaction, rather than people or nature alone. The concern, however, is also focused on the "most vulnerable", again whether people or other species. Expanding on this general statement, ecological economists share three general concerns that are neither adequately recognized in dominant academic and professional economic circles, nor appropriately considered in political economic discourse. These are: (1) that economies must be understood as operating within the larger biogeochemical Earth System receiving energy from the sun; (2) that environmental sustainability depends on viable social systems; and (3) that progress toward the mutual well-being of nature and people is being thwarted by excessive material consumption on the one hand, and excessive material inequality on the other. Ecological economists are methodologically eclectic, using ecological reasoning and both dominant and alternative economics in their search for better understanding of the interrelations between people and their environment, for indicators of sustainability, and for ways of bringing individual human behavior into conformity with collective human goals. While the concern with excessive consumption and equity clearly makes ecological economics an alternative community for economists and ecologists in rich countries, these same concerns make ecological economics a very comfortable community for scholars addressing sustainable development in poor countries.

THE NATURE OF ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS

Many have tried to define ecological economics, few have reached the same explication (see, for example, MartinezAlier, 1987; Costanza, 1989; Costanza et al., 1997; Soderbaum, 2000). This difficulty, of some concern both within and beyond the field, arises for a variety of reasons. First, many researchers who self-identify as ecological economists use the models and methods of more conventional environmental economists. This has led some environmental economists to argue that there is nothing new in ecological economics. Yet the difference is clear. Ecological economists, as a whole, also use other models and methods, and actively discuss the strengths and weaknesses of environmental economic models in the contexts of the others. Second, since its modern beginnings, ecological economists have been searching for effective ways to understand and convey the importance of justice in the context of environmental sustainability and human dignity. Third, ecological economists have been grappling with how environmental problems require both new ways of understanding science and new ways of joining knowledge distributed among scientists, practitioners, and lay people to effect collective action. These latter two broad facets of ecological economics perplex both new entrants to the field and external observers who try to logically fashion ecological economics out of ecology and economics as narrowly defined. Fourth, and stemming from the first three, there is mild disagreement over whether (a) ecological economics should be striving for a new paradigm, a new set of integrative models, systems assumptions, and empirical methods, or (b) it should, or must, remain a large umbrella under

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Box 1 Working Assumptions of Ecological Economics economies and the global economy overall require energy, materials and diverse genetic/species/ecosystem patterns and reproductive capacities provided by healthy natural systems; current levels of energy use, material ows, and genetic/species/ecosystem loss are both unnecessary to a good life and a threat to the health of natural systems;

economies and the global economy overall require healthy social systems; current levels of material inequity are immoral, do not support human dignity, and are a threat to healthy social systems; current rates of economic change, especially the drive for globalization, are outpacing our abilities to adapt and maintain the health of social systems.

which economists, ecologists, and others scholars compare and contrast different models and learn together. These issues are central to this description of the eld. While the scope and direction of ecological economics are actively discussed, there is considerable agreement among ecological economists with respect to their working assumptions. Ecological economic reasoning is not unique in its dependence on working assumptions, general beliefs about society and nature. Each research community focuses on a portion of reality and makes assumptions about larger systems, or takes a very broad view and makes assumptions about the details. No discipline understands the whole of reality, so assumptions about the relations between the parts studied and the whole are a necessity. Economist Karl Schumpeter referred to the combination of assumptions and choice of model as a scholars preanalytic vision (Daly, 1996). The following working assumptions (see Box 1) are broad and highly generalized in nature. Relatively few ecological economists work from all of them, yet most ecological economists acknowledge the importance of each of them and how they work together. This recognition and respect demonstrate that ecological economists see the eld as a collective effort. Threats to natural and social systems are a threat to people overall, but they are especially a threat to todays poor and to future generations. Ecological economists put social and natural systems at the center of their thinking, rather than individuals. The term social systems encompasses all forms of economic and social organization, the legal and informal institutions that set the rules, and the knowledge and shared beliefs that allow people to understand each other. The metaphor of health helps elaborate the meaning of the mutual well-being of nature

and people . Yet desirable properties of these systems remain vague. When empirical research is conducted, specic favorable qualities of social and environmental systems are adopted. Some ecological economists argue that energy use or material ows or biodiversity are sufcient indicators of biogeochemical system health. These effectively serve as their working assumptions when conducting specic analyses. With respect to social systems, justice, participation, shared-learning, human dignity, and other terms are often invoked. Ecologists and natural scientists largely hold the assumption that the economy works within the larger biogeochemical system generally, hence the appropriateness of ecological as a modier to economics. The concern with human communities, and how these are threatened by inequity and the speed and character of current economic change, however, are nurtured by ecological economists broader roots in the social sciences and applied work in developing countries. By identifying environmental and social systems as central to their thinking, ecological economists are explicitly arguing that they are important, i.e., that they have value in themselves. The intertwining of natural system and social system concerns into one preanalytic vision owes much to the rich mix of scholars, from developed and developing countries, interacting through the ISEE during its rst decade. The sub-points in the working assumptions with respect to materialism, growth, and inequity are even more clearly value judgments. There are corresponding values integral to the working assumptions of mainstream economists. However, the values remain implicit, rather than explicit. By assuming, for example, that science allows us to rise above nature, and that material progress helps us all to live a better life, conventional economists are implicitly valuing these approaches. Whether one a priori presents people, as in nature or rising above nature, is not simply an issue of fact but a statement of a preference or goal as well. Similarly, ecological economists moral concern with the distribution of happiness, and their strategic concern that inequity threatens the health of social systems, are difcult to separate. Such value judgments help ecological economists select and frame their research and what subsequently appears in the ecological economics literature, just as surely as historic beliefs about progress and how it helps all affect the research and literature of mainstream economists.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
An appreciation for the historical path of economics is essential to understanding the ways in which ecological economists have parted from that path and what they seek through exploring alternatives (Christensen, 1989; Costanza et al., 1997, Chapter 2). The conclusions economists reach

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are determined by the structure of their formal models, the quality of their data on the state of the economy, and very general assumptions about the relationships between economies, society, and biogeochemical reality. The particular assumptions that economists have come to share over their history differ from those acquired by ecologists, for example, and set them apart as a separate academic tribe and professional culture. Some assumptions are embedded in the ways in which economic models simplify complexity to a manageable form. Some are rooted in the social issues and liberal political philosophy of the formative years of economics in the 19th century. Additional premises were embraced as economists assumed roles as technical experts in national governments and international agencies during the 20th century to evaluate public investments, assure full employment, promote development, and, most recently, facilitate trade and international capital mobility. While there has always been diversity in formal models and assumptions among economists, particular combinations of models and assumptions have clearly dominated at different points in time, complementing the problems at hand and the political economy of power affecting economic change within nations and internationally.
Classical Economic Origins of Ecological Economics

Ecological economists have an af nity with the way many classical economists, from the late 18th through most of the 19th century, combined moral reasoning and systems thinking to describe problems and point toward solutions. Many of the most important economists in this period also knew that environmental systems and resources were central to human well-being. The following vignettes of early economists provide critical background. Francois Quesnay (1694 1774) and the Physiocrats argued that economic activity should be governed in keeping with the laws implanted in Nature by Providence . Quesnay, an admirer of physics, named the school of economic thought he established to re ect the scienti c principles on which economic wealth was hypothesized to depend. Quesnay and his disciples developed a simple input output table of the economy, categorized by economic class, with all wealth owing from agricultural labor. A disciple of Quesnay, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, rose to the position of comptroller general in France in 1776, began to impose physiocratic reasoning to tax policy, and was soon relieved of of ce after offending too many political interests. While the arguments of Adam Smith soon surpassed those of the physiocrats, they in uenced many 19th century economists including Karl Marx. The input output table was a precursor to modern material ow models of economies. The physiocrats were early ecological economists in the

sense that the laws of natural science, to the extent they understood them, were integral to their understanding of economics. Adam Smith (1723 1790), widely recognized as the founder of modern economics, was a moral philosopher who argued that shared moral standards develop because individuals empathize with each other. Concerned with whether individual economic decisions summed to the common good, he reasoned that if two people choose to enter into an exchange, it is because the exchange makes each of them better off. So long as the individual decisions made by parties to an exchange did not adversely affect other people, society as a whole was better off through the exchange. Appealing to Judeo-Christian images of God, Smith invoked the metaphor of the market being guided as if by an invisible hand. Smith was not simply arguing for free markets in the abstract. Mercantilism, a system wherein the state granted sole trading rights to particular companies, favored a few over the many. Smith argued that freer markets would be better for people overall. Thus the rst modern economist fought the socioeconomic power system of the time with ethical and economic reasoning. His plea for the market and against government intervention was in opposition to the tight relations that had developed between companies and the state, not against government per se. The relations between corporations and government have changed many times since mercantilism, and they are again of some concern. Thomas Malthus (1766 1834), a clergyman turned economic philosopher, explained the prevalence of war and disease as material phenomena rather than as acts of God. He argued that human populations were capable of increasing exponentially and would do so as long as suf cient food and other essentials of life were available. He further hypothesized that people could expand their food supply only arithmetically through new technologies and expansion into new habitats. Given the geometric potential of population growth, and the arithmetic food constraint, population would periodically surpass food supply. At these times, people would ravage the land, go to war over food, and succumb to disease and starvation. Human numbers would consequently drop to sustainable levels, but the process would repeat itself again. Both Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace acknowledged that Malthus model of population pressing against an environmental constraint was key to their formulation of the theory of natural selection. Limits to growth are also central to many ecological economic models. David Ricardo (1772 1823) introduced a second model of how economic activity relates to the environment, not because he was concerned with environmental degradation or human survival, but rather to justify why landlords received a rent from their ownership of land. Ricardo argued that people would initially farm the land that

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produced the most food for the least work. As population increased, farming would extend to less-fertile soils requiring more labor. His model shows how increasing population drives people to farm in previously undisturbed areas and how higher food prices lead to intensied effort on land already in production. His model of how humans extend and intensify land use underlies many debates over development and conservation. John Stuart Mill (18061873), the son of social philosopher James Mill (17731836), argued that competitive markets complement individual liberty. Mill also wrote on both the immorality and the waste of subjugating women to men. He neither saw material prosperity as an end in itself nor thought continuous growth in material well-being was possible. Mill envisioned economies becoming mature and reaching a steady state, in which people would be able to enjoy the fruits of their earlier savings. The idea that economies would reach a steady state was logical. Change was common, unceasing growth was not, and relatively steady states rather than random change were perceived as natural. A century after Mill, Herman Daly, one of the founders of modern ecological economics, elaborated on the necessity and advantages of a steady-state economy (Daly, 1973). Karl Marx (18181883) criticized capitalism on the grounds that it left workers at a subsistence wage while capitalists thrived. Marx, an admirer of Darwin and biological thinking, was concerned with how the introduction of fertilizer inputs produced an agricultural revolution during the 19th century that not only detrimentally transformed social relations but irreversibly disturbed ecological relations as well (Foster, 1999). He had strong progressive beliefs, arguing that capitalism was but a phase in a larger inevitable history of progress toward socialism and eventually communism. While his long-run predictions still inspire resistance movements, the logic of his critiques, his moral stance, and historical approach are an integral part of many schools of social thought to this day. The capitalist economic system was tamed during much of the 20th century, partly in response to how Marx had framed its problems. Capitalism keeps changing and has become especially virulent again at the opening of the 21st century while inequity within and between nations has increased. Alfred Marshall (18421924) synthesized the work of the classical economists, retained their philosophical voice, and incorporated the ndings of the mathematicians who formalized economics. Among Marshalls many theoretical contributions to economic analysis can be found frequent references to the beauty of nature, and the importance of clean air and water to a decent city life. He argued that markets, driven by the possibilities for individual gain, would not provide sufcient public goods. Lastly, he argued that while economists had drawn very successfully on the

mechanical models of physics, the future of economics was in joining with biology.
Natural Science Origins of Ecological Economics

The classical economists were broadly read, aware of developments in the natural sciences, and thereby prone to address questions of natural limits. They were not, however, scientists themselves. Scientists, well aware of the rapidity of economic change during the 19th century, periodically asked how the laws being discovered in the natural sciences might affect the possibilities for economic progress (Martinez-Alier with Schlupmann, 1987). Serhii Podolinsky (18501891), writing on energy and economics during the 1880s, explored the implications of the efciencies of energy use as it ows from the sun, through agriculture, on through human consumption and labor output, and hence into the broader economy. Today, agricultural energetics and the possibilities for greater dependence on renewable energy are central to ameliorating climate change. Patrick Geddes (18541932) argued in the 1880s that economists inappropriately blended the physical processes of economies with monetary exchanges. Much like modern ecological economists, he argued that more could be revealed if we modeled the physical and the monetary processes separately. Leopold Pfaundler (18391920) argued in 1902 that physical principles needed to be applied to calculate the carrying capacity of the earth to derive realistic expectations for the future. Frederick Soddy (18771956), a Nobel laureate in chemistry, argued in the 1920s that economists did not understand how our economies are driven by current and stored energy from the sun, that stored energy was the only real wealth, and that the conception of monetary wealth implied that economists believed people could eat their cake and have it too . A J Lotka (18801949) borrowed from the mathematical developments in economics to outline a theory of value based on ecological tness (Kingsland, 1985). For reasons partly elaborated in the next section, economists did not respond to the early concerns expressed or alternatives provided by natural scientists. Today, many of these same concerns and alternatives drive the biophysical approaches of ecological economists.
The Rise of Modern Economic Culture

During the later decades of the 19th century, the market model became formalized mathematically and key concepts became much better understood. During roughly the same period, economics and the other modes of social analysis began to assert themselves as separate sciences, assuming an objective stance while actively trying to shed their ethical baggage. Economists turned increasingly inward, staying less and less in touch with advances in the natural sciences

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as well as with the other social sciences, while they pretty much dropped out of philosophical discourse all together. The less economists read beyond economics, the more natural their own assumptions appeared to them. Later, during the Great Depression, economists were brought into national governments to help stabilize economies and to undertake cost-benet analyses of alternative investments, of water projects rst, and eventually almost everything. Earlier arguments about achieving the greater good were modied to justify ignoring equity issues as economists concentrated on efciency in public policy analysis. Soon after, economists became signicant players in the new mission of international development, advocating that the best way to reduce poverty was through growth. As economics turned inward academically, the shared assumptions of economists narrowed and hardened even while economists new professional roles required that assumptions change with the problems and politics of the times. It is important to understand that while the models of economics have become better understood through their formal development, the assumptions inherent to the models have not changed. What changed during the 20th century was how economists used their models. Early economists compared the results of their economic reasoning with that of other forms of reasoning, playing them off each other to maximize understanding. As economists assumed greater roles in public decision-making, they needed to justify that the economic way of thinking was the best way of thinking. During the last decades of the 20th century, academic economists began exploring new approaches and broadening their thinking. Professional economists, however, still have had to defend established ways and particular answers.
Environmental Economics

followed by the energy crisis, environmental economics ourished, and the concept of market failure became central to economic understanding. The Association of Environmental and Resource Economists was founded in 1979. Though their roots include fairly radical thinkers, environmental economists have generally extended existing economic patterns of thinking to environmental issues rather than question whether economic thinking is a part of the problem. The professional role of economists in environmental agencies has reinforced the tendency to rally behind dominant approaches rather than raise fundamental questions. The assumptions embedded in the culture of economists, and largely assumed by environmental economists, were well established before the rise of ecology as a full-edged science in the second half of the 20th century. Economists assumptions about nature and possibilities for the future are rooted in an earlier time when technological change seemed to only solve problems, not create new ones as fast as it solved the old. In rich countries where the sub-discipline started, environmental economists tend to advocate modest corrections to the existing development paths (see Environmental Economics, Volume 5).
The Rise of Modern Ecological Economics

Environmental economics is a sub-discipline of economics. Its strongest roots are in the US where Richard T Ely, the founder of the American Economic Association at the end of the 19th century, also founded a school of land economics and utility regulation economics at the University of Wisconsin. Early environmental economists Ely, George Wehrwein, Marion Clawson, Maurice Kelso, and Siegfried Ciriacy von Wantrup raised fundamental questions from the 1920s into the 1960s about property, organization, environmental degradation, and resource conservation when much of the profession was engaged in mathematical renement of perfectly functioning markets. Environmental economists in the 1950s and 1960s Karl William Kapp, E J Mishan, John Krutilla, Allen Kneese, and Jack Knetsch questioned growth and its effects on the environment, when their colleagues were advocating greater resource use in developed and developing countries in an economic race with the former Soviet Union. With the rise in popular environmental concern in the early 1970s

In response to the narrowing of economic thought during the 20th century, a few scholars more open to thinking across natural and social science boundaries provided the foundations for modern ecological economics. Kenneth Boulding (19101993) worked with philosophers and natural scientists on a general systems theory in the 1950s, introduced the metaphor of spaceship earth to stress how economies must work within limits (Boulding, 1966) and subsequently wrote on ecodevelopment in a broad evolutionary framework (Boulding, 1978). Kneese et al. (1970) building on the rst law of thermodynamics, constructed material balance economic models to better understand the limits of markets. Odum (1971), an ecologist, developed an energetic systems view that he applied across ecological and economic systems. Georgescu-Roegen (19061994) argued that economic activity needed to be understood as an entropic process (Georgescu-Roegen, 1971). Systems theorists Meadows et al. (1972) wrote Limits to Growth, convincingly arguing that unlimited growth was impossible. Daly (1973) reintroduced Mills steadystate economy with arguments for limiting throughput of energy and materials. Entomologist turned energeticist David Pimentel documented the energy costs of alternative forms of agriculture (Pimentel, 1974). Karl-Goran Maler of Sweden explored some of the implications of materials balance to a general equilibrium economic approach (Maler, 1974). Passet (1979) in France began to combine economic and thermodynamic thinking, while Pillet teamed up with Odum (1987) to write on energy

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and economics. Many had already suggested corrections to the system of national accounts (SNA) so that, for example, expenditures correcting new environmental problems were not treated as benets, Roee Hueting of the Netherlands pushed the corrective process the furthest (Hueting, 1980). In 1982, about 40 economists and ecologists met in Stockholm, hosted by ecologist Ann-Mari Jansson, to explore how economics and ecology could be integrated (Jansson, 1984). At that meeting, Robert Costanza used the term ecological economics in a paper suggesting how energy analysis and economic valuation might be merged (Costanza, 1984). The term gained further prominence as the title to a book on how economists had resisted responding to challenges from natural scientists (Martinez-Alier, 1987). While the Stockholm meeting emphasized natural constraints, ecologist William Murdoch argued that distributional issues were absolutely central to understanding economies and environments in developing countries (Murdoch, 1984). In 1987, Joan Martinez-Alier hosted a second key meeting of ecologists and economists in Barcelona. At this meeting, the nature of our understanding of complex systems and what this meant for the policy process was clearly added to the agenda of ecological economics (Norgaard, 1989; Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1990). Following discussions at Barcelona, the journal Ecological Economics was started by Robert Costanza and Herman Daly who also took the initiative to found the International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE) soon after.

not t together. Thus ecological economists contend with different, and often somewhat incongruent, ndings from different patterns of thinking. When the understandings gained from separate models can be aligned, condence is gained. When separate understandings are in juxtaposition, conclusions are withheld and new questions are raised. How methods are used can best be described by looking at several particular issues ecological economists address.
Environmental Valuation

THE METHODS AND ISSUES OF ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS

Ecological economists are methodologically pluralistic (Norgaard, 1989). The eld includes economists using market, macro, institutional, Austrian, and Marxist forms of analysis. There are ecologists who do energetic analyses, population biology, evolutionary ecology, hierarchy theory, food web modeling, landscape ecology, and global biogeochemical modeling. Environmental historians, ecological anthropologists, development sociologists, systems theorists, and epistemologists and social philosophers, among others, also participate in ecological economics. Such a diversity of backgrounds is a strength, for each of the methods of the individual disciplines only spotlights a portion of the problem. Where models in economics and ecology share the same mathematical form, they can be combined into a broader, brighter light. Population models from ecology mesh nicely with production models from market economics. Inputoutput analysis is used in macro-economics and in food web analysis and some energy accounting models, hence can be readily combined. To the extent that evolutionary thinking has developed in economics, it combines comfortably with the approach of evolutionary ecology. Most of the models of ecology and economics, however, do

The relationship between market prices and value has long been at the center of controversy. Economists put a very specic meaning to the word value, defying the rich heritage of the term and constraining its meaning in discussions of the future. The early critiques of economics by natural scientists were driven by a concern that economists understanding of value was divorced from natural limits and processes. The idea that values are inherent to nature, an idea that fuels debates among environmental ethicists today, were explored under the concept of natural value, for example, by Lotka. During the latter half of the 20th century, economists colonized this realm of value too by developing a variety of techniques for putting monetary values on environmental goods and services, the values they would have if they were traded in markets. Ecological economists use these new techniques but interpret the results with greater caution than environmental economists for three major reasons. The rst concern of ecological economists with environmental valuation comes from within economic theory itself. How much people are willing to pay (WTP) for clean air, for example, assumes that people do not already have a right to clean air. When asked how much they would be willing to accept (WTA) to give up clean air, which assumes people have the right to clean air, people give answers that are two or three times WTP, and in some studies 10 times or more. Environmental economists have generally adopted the polluter pay principle, implying that people have the rights to a healthy environment (see PPP (Polluter Pay Principle), Volume 4). Yet in the case of contingent valuation research, environmental economists have adopted the convention that WTP gives more appropriate answers than WTA. Ecological economists have not adopted the same convention. Rather, they see the difference between WTP and WTA as a crucial example of an underlying problem in environmental valuation. The second concern is that market prices reect the existing distribution of rights more generally, not simply between polluters and pollutees, but between the rich and the destitute, wealthy nations and poor, those who choose traditional ways and those who embrace the market, and present and future peoples. Existing techniques for simulating how an environmental market would work, implicitly

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assume that the existing distribution of rights to resources and environmental services is the correct one. Howarth and Norgaard (1995) built an overlapping generations model of a hypothetical economy and showed that with all markets working perfectly, whether the economy was running at all for future generations depended on their having rights. With different assignments of rights across generations, resources have different prices over time. And when nonmarket environmental services were included in the model, environmental services have different values depending on the rights of future generations. Ironically, a motivating factor for doing environmental valuation has been to justify changing the law so that a wilderness area or an endangered species is saved for future generations. Yet neoclassical economics itself indicates that economic reasoning depends on the rights of future generations in the rst place. So, there is a major problem of circularity in standard environmental economic reasoning. The only way out of this circularity is to accept that questions about the distribution of rights must be addressed through some method of moral reasoning beyond the simple individual utility calculus behind economic reasoning. While such complications have long been recognized by utilitarian philosophers and economic theorists, acknowledging that economic reasoning alone does not result in unique answers, with respect to the public good, defeats the efforts of economists to provide simple answers to policy questions. Practicing economists, and many academics today as well, will respond that questions about the distribution of rights need to be addressed separately by others in other arenas, and that economics is just one input to the collective decision-making process. Yet the appropriate response within the economic framework would be to present policy makers with analyses indicating how different assignments of rights would affect people and how economic and non-economic activity would unfold over time. This would entail a deeper approach to economic analysis, more work for economists, and a new style of interaction with policy makers. Ecological economists have begun to take on this challenge. Third, in the economic model, individuals have predetermined preferences and the problem of valuation is one of aggregating them to a collective preference. Individuals, however, are not born with preferences. They acquire them interacting in society and through advertising and other commercially funded media. Acknowledging that individual preferences are socially constructed opens up values analysis to the processes of their construction, how they have changed over time, which interests have inuenced the changes, and whose ends are being served. It is well known that people respond differently as individuals than when as members of a group. This can be due to the social pressure of being within a group. It can also be due to the

fact that many things, such as clean air and biological diversity, are very difcult to obtain acting as an individual, and so individuals, when choosing between alternatives, do not think about these things as options. Ecological economists see individuals and groups as being able to draw on diverse multiple types of values and ethics depending on the context. Individuals have values and ethics rooted in their religion, sometimes more than one. They have values and ethics rooted in their particular cultural histories. And individuals and groups learn from their particular experiences and thereby develop values and ethics. Different values and ethical criteria are called forth depending on the setting, whether one is acting as an individual, a member of a family, within a profession, as a church member, as a citizen, etc. Because these categories are not exclusive and one is accountable in multiple, and not always foreseen, settings, weighing alternatives, individually and collectively, is considerably more difcult than a simple utilitarian calculus. It is also much more interesting (OConnor, 2000). In opposition to the western fact value dichotomy, ecological economists are a little more prone to see facts and values as interlocked. There were no predened preferences for biodiversity for example, before ecologists began to study the importance of biodiversity, and new technologies allowed us to better understand genetics in the last quarter of the 20th century. To be sure, we now recognize particular species and genetic traits as being important, as we have come to realize how something of prior value, say a medicinal drug, is obtained and must be protected. But such particulars are not biodiversity, though efforts to value biodiversity have certainly been attempted through aggregating particulars. Rather, we now value biodiversity per se even though there are multiple denitions of the term and we only know the number of species within an order of magnitude. In effect, biodiversity is a term like health, something that carries with it connotations of value as vague as the term itself, but very important to people nonetheless. Ecological economists are interested in how social systems produce and reproduce some types of values and not others at different times. They are interested in how new mechanisms for making collective choice can be established that take advantage of expert advice, economic calculations, and group learning. Values juries seem like an interesting possibility. When ecological economists do an analysis that aggregates values in a single numeraire, they explore its strengths and weaknesses from the perspective of values having multiple realms.
Correcting the System of National Accounts

The primary creator of the SNA, Simon Kuznets, warned that gross domestic product (GDP) simply measures market and government activity, not well-being. Karl William

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Kapp, an early ecological economist, documented how the accounts failed to consider natural resources appropriately as well as household labor (Kapp, 1950). Various economists, in response to the environmental concerns of the early 1970s, looked into the shortcomings of the SNA. Ecological economists, including Herman Daly, Robert Goodland, Rooe Hueting, Richard Norgaard, and Henry Peskin, participated during the 1980s in efforts hosted by the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank to correct the SNA. The goal was to treat the depletion of resource stocks like the depreciation of capital and to treat expenditures to correct expanding environmental problems as intermediate rather than nal products. These were seen as simply better accounting practices. Some also hoped, however, that sufcient corrections could be made so that GDP, or some new aggregate measure, not only made a serious effort to measure economic well-being but also to account for whether that well-being could be sustained. Working with Herman Daly, Clifford Cobb devised and undertook the empirical work to derive an Index of Sustainable Economic Well-Being (ISEW) (Daly and Cobb, 1989). The ISEW shows sustainable well-being increasing until around 1970, and then declining since. The ISEW, in different stages of evolution, has been calculated for many countries by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with similar results. The ISEW has evolved further in the hands of Rede ning Progress, a US NGO, into the Genuine Progress Indicator (Cobb et al., 1999). Even though rates of growth increased dramatically during the 1990s, the GPI declined because of increasing inequality, increased defensive environmental expenditures, and growth that has been at the expense of future generations (see ISEW (Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare) and GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator), Volume 5). Since the 1980s, governments around the world have begun to incorporate some of the suggestions to correct their SNA. They have consistently taken the approach, however, of developing satellite accounts of environmental expenditures and stock resource depletion, and not used this information to adjust GDP or devise a new aggregate indicator. The rationale for developing but not incorporating environmental and resource accounts has been explicated by a study of the US National Research Council (Nordhaus and Kokkelenberg, 1999). Whether one is devising a new aggregate indicator or simply establishing environmental and resource satellite accounts in monetary units, one must determine unique, defensible values for non-market goods and services. Since the 1980s, however, ecological economists have enriched their ranks and acquired a more complex understanding of values. This development makes it increasingly dif cult for ecological economists to recommend and defend any particular formal method for deriving non-market environmental

values for standardized accounting purposes. Accounting for resource depletion using values derived from current resource prices, for example, may grossly under-represent the value of that depletion, for new extraction technologies may be keeping current prices low while their value to future generations remains high. There is also a concern that no one indicator will ever be adequate. Herman Daly is fond of saying that looking at GDP to plan for the future is like driving forward looking into the rearview mirror. While looking out the windshield is a major improvement, those working on indicators of human well-being, environmental well-being, and sustainability are increasingly talking about a dashboard of indicators. Nevertheless, most ecological economists support environmental accounting as an improvement over not accounting for the environment. Ecological economists also hope that the process of deriving and disseminating environmental accounting information will help lead people to ask deeper questions.
Biophysical-Economic System Analysis

The efforts to link the natural sciences with economics are numerous, with none being dominant. At best, a cursory summary of the work of ecological economists can be provided. First, as methodological pluralists, ecological economists rely on the natural sciences in order to understand the limits of particular economic models and assumptions, and they accept the ndings of biophysical analyses on their own terms, as additional information of equal importance as that stemming from economic analysis. Second, ecological economists have linked, and in some cases integrated ecological and economic models. Third, the concept of joint production from economics has been developed as a link between economics and the natural sciences. Fourth, ecological economists have extended models from the natural sciences to economics, dispensing with traditional models of economics altogether. Each of these needs elaboration. Ecological economists often compare the differences in the insights derived from natural science and economics. Gowdy (1994), for example, has explored the concept of coevolution in biology, how it relates to cultural ecology in anthropology, restated institutional economics in coevolutionary terms, and compared all of this with conventional market analyses. Malte Faber and others have further developed the ideas of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, arguing that, as we rely less and less on current solar energy and more and more on fossil hydrocarbon and other mined resources, economic activity needs to be understood as moving toward a closed system and subject to the second law of thermodynamics (Faber et al., 1996). This means that we need to understand economic activity as an entropic process, as taking high quality energy and materials and reducing them to waste heat and dispersed minerals. Looking at new technology from this perspective, we see that it allows economic

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activity to accelerate, for entropy to increase faster, leaving less for the future, not more. Thus, to the extent that we rely on stock resources, especially of energy, progress is not possible, indeed even sustainability is not possible. The alternative, of course, is to return to relying on current solar energy, in part by working with natural systems. This, however, raises further issues. Humans are co-opting approximately 40% of the primary energy captured by terrestrial ecosystems (Vitousek et al., 1986). Ecological economists use this study as an indication of how human activity has transformed the environment, and as an indicator of the limits to further transformation. For Herman Daly and other ecological economists, the analysis of Vitousek stresses the urgency of moving to a steady state while there is still some margin left (Daly, 1996). Wackernagel and Rees (1996) have used biophysical analysis to calculate the ecological footprint of a population, the area of productive land and water needed to produce the resources it consumes and assimilate the wastes it produces. Ecological-footprints range from approximately 0.5 hectares per person for people in very poor countries to 10 or more hectares for average Americans; the rich use even more (see Ecological Footprint, Volume 3). Biophysical analyses provide critical insight into our use of stock resources (Cleveland and Kaufman, 1991), into carrying capacity, and into the difculties of moving toward life-styles consistent with carrying capacity (Folke, 1991; Kaberger, 1991; Jannson, 1991). While biophysical indicators create considerable controversy within ecological economics when their supporters argue that they are suitable for making policy directly, they contribute to how ecological economists understand the relationships between people and nature. Second, Volterras logistic growth curve has long been incorporated in the economics of forests and sheries. Going beyond this, but still building on the heuristic models of population biology, the eld of bioeconomics arose with the mathematical models of Colin Clark (Clark, 1976; Conrad and Clark, 1987). Ecological economists have pushed further in this direction. The relationship of biological concepts to ecological economics have been explored: ecological stability (Common and Perrings, 1992); ecological resilience (Brown and Roughgarden, 1995), and biological diversity (Norgaard, 1987; Perrings et al., 1995). Empirical research has also linked ecological systems and economic choices (Costanza et al., 1989). Third, some ecological economists argue that the idea of joint production from economics provides an adequate bridge to the natural sciences. A petroleum renery, for example, produces a range of products from jet fuel to tar, jointly in the sense that it is difcult to get one without the other. All production processes, however, jointly produce good things and bad things. Economists have simplied

their models by only looking at the good things produced rather than the total set of desired and undesired outputs that show consistency with the rst and second laws of thermodynamics. While economists have downplayed joint production as a relatively rare situation, from an ecological economic perspective, the concept of joint production provides a critical connection between economics and understanding from the natural sciences (Baumgartner et al., 2000). Fourth, a few ecological economists have dispensed with economic models altogether and used methods rooted in the natural sciences to understand the human predicament. For example, Howard Odum (1996) has argued that the concept of emergy , dened as the energy used up in an ecological or economic process, can be used to trace costs through ecological and economic systems, providing better measures of value and wealth. Odum argues that emergy analyses provide a scientic basis for choosing between alternative technologies and development projects (see Emergy, Volume 5). On the other hand, Richard Norgaard pursued a coevolutionary explanation of change to a conclusion that substantially changes how we treat expert knowledge. He argued that social and environmental change can be understood as a coevolutionary process between value, knowledge, organizational, technological, and environmental systems. Characteristics within each system select upon the tness of characteristics in the other systems such that they coevolve together, reecting each other, and becoming tightly interlocked. But change does occur through biological mutations, cultural innovations, and introductions from other ecosystems and cultures (Norgaard, 1994). Thus, collective action can best be based on a process of shared knowledge between scientists, those with traditional and experiential knowledge, and those who will actually be implementing the change.

THE FUTURE OF ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS AND RELATED ALTERNATIVES

The future of ecological economics depends on three broad issues. The rst is whether ecological economics will evolve into a new overarching paradigm or whether it will remain an umbrella under which multiple, contradictory analyses are undertaken. This has important ramications with respect to how ecological economics is put into practice. The second issue is whether ecological economics will become a eld that is embraced by scholars in the developing world as it has historically developed around scholars in Europe and North America. The third issue is how the scope of ecological economics will be affected by the development of other transdisciplinary elds. Of particular importance are the developments in agroecology, conservation biology, ecological engineering, and industrial ecology starting from the natural sciences, and the study of

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the commons and political ecology starting from the social sciences. At the same time, the elds of economics and ecology themselves continue to evolve and will also thereby affect the future of ecological economics.
New Overarching Paradigm or Continued Methodological Pluralism?

Among ecological economists, there is already considerable agreement on underlying assumptions and on the need to learn across models and disciplinary cultures. This agreement itself indicates ecological economics is a new overarching process, if not a paradigm. Many ecological economists from its beginnings, however, have pleaded for greater unity (Daly, 1984; Proops, 1989). To them, an overarching model, or perhaps a small set of broad models, is needed to understand, not simply describe, the big picture and to guide practitioners to appropriate particular models. Ecological economists need to establish a new language. Simply incorporating the languages of multiple disciplines, with the same words having different historical meanings, makes it difcult to communicate to the public and policy makers. Taking ecological economics to public and policy arenas has, thus far, entailed hiding its richness and concentrating on correcting the SNA or making arguments for reduced material and energy ows. The US Environmental Protection Agency made a small effort to understand how taking a broader approach to valuation might work (Bingham et al., 1995), but has not implemented any of the recommendations. Conventional economic thinking is well entrenched in political discourse and agency decision-making in part because it is simple and consistent. It is difcult to imagine how a eld as eclectic as ecological economics can have an impact without having comparable coherence. On the other hand, continuing the methodological pluralism of ecological economics is not a default position for its advocates. Rather, the pluralists have compelling arguments too. First, many scholars have sought unity within the natural sciences and within the social sciences without success, so the chances of unity across them are slim indeed. Methodological pluralism is a reality. At least for the foreseeable future, ecological economists should not pin their hopes on accomplishing something so difcult as unifying either the natural or the social sciences, let alone the combination of the two. Second, agreeing on less than a truly overarching model would entail reducing the scope of inquiry of ecological economics. This would make the eld more vulnerable to mistakes and surprise in the future. Third, reducing ecological economics so that it ts into the existing policy process is accepting defeat from the beginning. The existing political discourse is dominated from the top by those who have money. It needs reinvigorating with a new paradigm that is more democratic. Ecological economists, as pluralists, are more open

to discussing a multiplicity of values and incorporating the voices of those with traditional and experiential knowledge. With respect to the policy process, the existing agencies are set up to act on advice from experts speaking separately. Inter-agency task forces, science juries, and other interactive consensus-building innovations are opening up this process, and it is through these and further evolutions (Irwin, 1995; Stern and Fineberg, 1996), perhaps to full discursive democracy (Dryzak, 1990; Fishkin, 1991), that the richness of ecological economic understanding can be effective. Fourth, different methods inherently stress different values. By focusing on different things, each model says, this is important , and, by implication, that is not . The multiple languages, especially of the social sciences, also reproduce and transmit values from different historical and cultural settings. In this sense, the plea for cohesion in models and language is a plea for historical denial and cultural extinction.
Ecological Economics as a Global Enterprise

Ecological economics is becoming the preferred base for economists and other scholars working to implement sustainable development in economically poor countries. Scientists trained in western ways of thinking must overcome strong cultural barriers as they work in poor rural communities. From this perspective, disciplinary boundaries are but a minor nuisance. And implementing sustainable rural development clearly requires input from multiple disciplines. Scholars from the economically poorer countries are becoming stronger and more assertive as their numbers increase and as the economic gap between rich and many, though certainly not all, poor countries increases. The shared vision of development, with each nation developing a full complement of economic sectors and public services, has collapsed to a northern vision of globalization. NorthSouth tensions over the amelioration of climate change and biodiversity loss have arisen within the dominant conceptual and institutional frameworks. Ecological economics, with its emphasis on equity and respect for the diversity of ways of knowing, has a tremendous opportunity. Ecological economics could become a global network of scholars learning together, building a global vision for the future that respects diversity while demonstrating how that vision could be achieved.
Other Alternatives to Economics

In addition to the work of ecological economists, there are other efforts to affect how a narrow pattern of reasoning from economics has dominated modern policy and politics. Like ecological economics, most of the other alternatives also span multiple disciplines. Social scientists have joined in the study of common property management

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regimes. Economists and sociologists have joined to understand socio-economic systems together. Political economy, the study of power that has evolved across the social sciences since Marx, is now complemented by the emerging eld of political ecology. There are similar efforts centered in the natural sciences that are reaching across to the social sciences. For example, biologists concerned with the conservation of biological diversity are anxious to work with economists. Academics and practitioners are organizing around the ideas of ecosystem health, industrial ecology, and ecological engineering. Many ecological economists also participate in these other interdisciplinary efforts. And like ecological economics, most of these efforts are questioning the conventional assumptions of how science relates to the policy process. While it is clear that ecological economics is clearly focused on the interplay between ecological and economic understanding, all of the emerging interdisciplinary efforts ask related questions to some extent. Thus the future of ecological economics depends on how numerous parallel and overlapping interdisciplinary efforts evolve in the context of each other.

REFERENCES
Baumgartner, S, Dyckhoff, H, Faber, M, Proops, J, and Schiller, J (2000) The Concept of Joint Production and Ecological Economics, Discussion Paper Series No. 319 (June), Department of Economics, Universitat Heidelberg. Bingham, G, Bishop, R, Brody, M, Bromley, D, Clark, E, Cooper, W, Costanza, R, Hale, T, Hayden, G, Kellert, S, Norgaard, R B, Norton, B, Payne, J, Russell, C, and Suter, G (1995) Issues in Ecosystem Valuation: Improving Information for Decision Making, Ecol. Econ., 14, 73 90. Boulding, K E (1966) The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth, in Environmental Quality in a Growing Economy, ed H Jarrett, Resources for the Future, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD. Boulding, K E (1978) Ecodynamics: A New Theory of Societal Evolution, Sage Publications, Beverly Hills, CA. Brown, G and Roughgarden, J (1995) An Ecological Economy: Notes on Harvest and Growth, Chapter 5 in Biodiversity Loss: Economic and Ecological Issues, eds C Perrings, K-G Maler, and C Folke, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Christensen, P P (1989) Historical Roots for Ecological Economics Biophysical Versus Allocative Approaches, Ecol. Econ., 1(1), 17 36. Clark, C W (1976) Mathematical Bioeconomics: The Optimal Management of Renewable Resources, Wiley-Interscience, New York. Cleveland, C J and Kaufman, R K (1991) Forecasting Ultimate Oil Recovery and Its Rate of Production: Incorporating Economic Forces into the Models of M. King Hubbert, Energy J., 12(2), 17 46. Cobb, C, Goodman, G S, and Wackernagel, M (1999) Why Bigger is Not Better: The Genuine Progress Indicator 1999 Update, Redening Progress, San Francisco, CA.

Common, M and Perrings, C (1992) Towards an Ecological Economics of Sustainability, Ecol. Econ., 6(1), 7 34. Conrad, J M and Clark, C W (1987) Natural Resource Economics: Notes and Problems, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Costanza, R (1984) Natural Resource Valuation and Management: Toward an Ecological Economics, in Integration of Economy and Ecology: An Outlook for the Eighties, ed A M Jansson, Proceedings from the Wallenberg Symposia, Stockholm. Costanza, R (1989) What is Ecological Economics? Ecol. Econ., 1(1), 1 7. Costanza, R, Farber, S C, and Maxwell, J (1989) Valuation and Management of Wetland Ecosystems, Ecol. Econ., 1, 335 361. Costanza, R, Cumberland, J, Daly, H, Goodland, R, and Norgaard, R B (1997) An Introduction to Ecological Economics (an Intermediate Level College Text), International Society for Ecological Economics and St. Lucie Press, FL. Costanza, R, Perrings, C, and Cleveland, C J (1997) The Development of Ecological Economics, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham. Daly, H E (1973) The Steady-State Economy: Toward a Political Economy of Biophysical Equilibrium and Moral Growth, in Toward a Steady-State Economy, eds H E Daly and W H Freeman, San Francisco, CA. Daly, H E (1984) Alternative Strategies for Integrating Economics and Ecology, in Integration of Economy and Ecology: An Outlook for the Eighties, ed A M Jansson, Proceedings from the Wallenberg Symposia, Stockholm. Daly, H E (1996) Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development, Beacon Press, Boston, MA. Daly, H E and Cobb, J B, with contributions by Cobb, C W (1989) For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future, Beacon Press, Boston, MA. Dryzek, J S (1990) Discursive Democracy: Politics, Policy and Political Science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Dryzek, J S (2000) Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Faber, M, Manstetten, R, and Proops, J (1996) Ecological Economics: Concepts and Methods, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham. Fishkin, J S (1991) Democracy and Deliberation: New Directions for Democratic Reform, Yale University Press, New Haven. Folke, C (1991) Socio-Economic Dependence on the Life-Supporting Environment, Chapter 5 in Linking the Natural Environment and the Economy: Essays from the Eco-Eco Group, eds C Folke and T Kaberger, Kluwer, Dordrecht. Foster, J B (1999) Marxs Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology, Am. J. Socio., 105(2), 366 405. Funtowicz, S and Ravetz, J R (1991) A New Scientic Methodology for Global Environmental Issues, in Ecological Economics: The Science and Management of Sustainability, ed R Costanza, Columbia University Press, New York. Georgescu-Roegen, N (1971) The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Gowdy, J (1994) Coevolutionary Economics: The Economy, Society and the Environment, Kluwer, Boston, MA. Howarth, R B and Norgaard, R B (1995) Intergenerational Choices Under Global Environmental Change, Chapter 6 in The

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Handbook of Environmental Economics, ed D W Bromley, Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Hueting, R (1980) New Scarcity and Economic Growth: More Welfare through Less Production? Amsterdam. North Holland. Irwin, A (1995) Citizen Science: A Study of People, Expertise and Sustainable Development, Routledge, London. Jansson, A M, ed (1984) Integration of Economy and Ecology: An Outlook for the Eighties, Proceedings from the Wallenberg Symposia, Stockholm. Jansson, A M (1991) Ecological Consequences of Long-Term Landscape Transformations in Relation to Energy Use and Economic Development, Chapter 6 in Linking the Natural Environment and the Economy: Essays from the Eco-Eco Group, eds C Folke and T Kaberger, Kluwer, Dordrecht. Kaberger, T (1991) Measuring Instrumental Value in Energy Terms, Chapter 4, in Linking the Natural Environment and the Economy: Essays from the Eco-Eco Group, eds C Folke and T Kaberger, Kluwer, Dordrecht. Kingsland, S E (1985) Modeling Nature: Episodes in the History of Population Ecology, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Kneese, A V, Ayres, R U, and dArge, R C (1970) Economics and the Environment A Materials Balance Approach, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD. Maler, K G (1974) Environmental Economics: A Theoretical Inquiry, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD. Martinez, A J with Schlupmann, K (1987) Ecological Economics: Energy, Environment, and Society, Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Meadows, D H, Meadows, D L, Randers, J, and Behrens, III, W W (1972) The Limits to Growth, Universe Books, New York. Murdoch, W W (1984) Ecology and Economics: Integration and a Common Theoretical Problem, in Integration of Economy and Ecology: An Outlook for the Eighties, ed A M Jansson, Proceedings from the Wallenberg Symposia, Stockholm. Nordhaus, W D and Kokkelenberg, E C, eds (1999) Natures Numbers: Expanding the National Economic Accounts to Include the Environment, National Academy Press, Washington, DC.

Norgaard, R B (1987) Economics as Mechanics and the Demise of Biological Diversity, Ecol. Model., 38 (September), 107 121. Norgaard, R B (1989) The Case for Methodological Pluralism, Ecol. Econ., 1(1), 37 57. Norgaard, R B (1994) Development Betrayed: The End of Progress and a Coevolutionary Revisioning of the Future, Routledge, London. Norgaard, R B (1997) A Coevolutionary Environmental Sociology, in The International Handbook of Sociology, eds M Redclift and G Woodgate, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK. OConnor, M, ed (2000) Social Processes of Environmental Valuation, Special Issue, Ecol. Econ., 34(2). Odum, H T (1971) Environment, Power, and Society, John Wiley & Sons, New York. Odum, H T (1996) Environmental Accounting: Emergy and Environmental Decision Making, John Wiley & Sons, New York. Passet, R (1979) Leconomique et le Vivant, 2nd edition 1996, Economica, Paris. Perrings, C, Maler, K-G, Folke, C, and Holling, C S (1995) Biodiversity Loss: Economic and Ecological Issues, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Pillet, G and Odum, H T (1987) Energie, Ecologie, Economie, Georg Editeur SA, Geneva. Pimentel, D (1974) Energy Use in World Food Production, Environ. Biol. Rep., 74 1, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Proops, J L R (1989) Ecological Economics: Rationale and Problem Areas, Ecol. Econ., 1(1), 59 76. Soderbaum, P (2000) Ecological Economics: A Political Economics Approach to Environment and Development, Earthscan, London. Stern, P C and Fineberg, H V, eds (1996) Understanding Risk: Informing Decisions in a Democratic Society, National Academy Press, Washington, DC. Vitousek, P M, Ehrlich, P R, Ehrlich, A H, and Matson, P (1986) Human Appropriation of the Products of Photosynthesis, BioScience, 36(6), 368 73. Wackernagel, M and Rees, W (1996) Our Ecological Footprint, New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, British Columbia, Canada.

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Environmental Politics
ROBERT PAEHLKE Trent University, Peterborough, Canada Many analysts date contemporary environmental politics, especially in North America, from the 1992 publication Silent Spring, or from the first Earth Day (April 22, 1970). The historic roots of environmental politics of course run deeper, but it is first important to distinguish environmental politics from all other forms and aspects of politics. One way to do this is to draw a distinction between environmental politics and distributive (also called redistributive) politics. Distributive politics is about the involvement of government in the distribution and redistribution of economic and social benefits and disbenefits among the individuals, groups, interests, and regions of any given polity. It is also about the social and economic management inherent in the maximization of the total economic pie to be distributed. Environmental politics, in contrast, primarily focuses on the unintended negative consequences of this latter pursuit, on the protection of human health, on the well-being of other species and on the long-term future of human generations, or on such other nonmonetary values as wilderness. Given this focus, which favors not so much capital or labor, or rich or poor, environmentalism is sometimes said to be neither left, nor right (Paehlke, 1989). There is much truth to this claim despite the fact that many on the political right see environmentalism as a variant of the left, notwithstanding that are environmentalisms of the left, right and center. Left environmentalism looks to regulate corporate polluters and to democratize within the public sphere significant segments of economic decision making. Right environmentalism rather favors what are called market-based policy tools, worries a great deal about population (though it may simultaneously reject choice regarding abortion), and believes that the market is the best means of protecting the environment (through green products and other means of feedback to private economic decisions). Centrist environmentalism is inclined to some mix of these polar perspectives. Environmental politics has, essentially, placed three distinct value sets into competition with other societal objectives such as profit maximization or short-term economic growth. The three value sets are: (1) wilderness, biodiversity, habitat and nature; (2) pollution reduction and the protection of human health from environmental hazards; and (3) sustainability (Paehlke, 1997). Each of these has a deep history preceding the beginnings of contemporary environmental politics; those beginnings in effect identify when environmental politics became more integrated and rose to a significant place within the wider political agenda-setting process. After 1960 environmental issues came to have real resonance for significant numbers of people, were regularly reported in the media, and soon thereafter led to a wide array of relevant legislative initiatives and administrative points of contact. Long before that point, however, many of these values were advanced by an earlier conservation movement or put forward by thoughtful individuals. Arguably, broad-based environmental politics only became possible when and where a certain level of material prosperity had been achieved. As Samuel Hays (1987), the US environmental historian, noted: Evolving environmental values were closely associated with rising standards of living and education. But with rising incomes something beyond necessities and conveniences now lay within the reach of many; they may be called amenities. Environmental quality was an integral part of this new search for a higher standard of living. (Hays, 1987) Thus, from the 1950s onwards the amenities associated with prosperity came more and more to include outdoor recreation, air and water quality, and the protection of the broader-than-economic well-being of future generations.

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ENVIRONMENTAL VALUES: THE BASIS OF ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS

Concern for the rst of the three dimensions of environmental values, the preservation of wilderness and the conservation of nature, has deep roots, especially in North America, the US in particular. Conservation moved from the realm of ideas into the realm of environmental politics and policy in the late 19th century with the campaigns for and the creation of national parks, in Yellowstone (1872) and Yosemite National Parks in the US and Banff National Park in Canada (1885). Indirectly related to those events were the important writings of George Perkins Marsh, John James Audubon, and, perhaps especially, Henry David Thoreau. John Muir, a founder of the Sierra Club in 1892, contributed enormously to the development of the idea of wilderness and to the campaign to preserve it. Marsh (1801 1882), a Vermont lawyer and politician who traveled extensively, was one of the rst to systematically study the many ways in which humans have disrupted nature (see Marsh, George Perkins, Volume 3). Late in life, he produced a remarkable book that in many ways foreshadowed by a century the modern environmental movement. The book, (Marsh, 1965) Man and Nature in 1864, argued that humans had gained great power to alter nature and were doing so to the detriment of both nature and themselves. Marsh cited and documented the effects of deforestation, erosion, loss of biodiversity (he did not, of course, use that modern word), altered water regimes, and general loss of biological productivity. He cited examples from his native Vermont, from Europe and Turkey (where he had served as Ambassador) and argued that the destruction of wilderness in the pursuit of human gain was imposing too many costs. Parallel, but less documented, expressions of concern were advanced at the time by artist John James Audubon (1785 1851) and Henry David Thoreau (1817 1862). These early expressions of concern were heard, but the time was not ripe for environmental politics in practice which could lead to effective public action. At the time most North Americans were doing all they could to survive through agricultural pursuits which in turn required the clearing of forests, not their preservation. The writings of these authors are revered today as profound early insights, providing historic depth and richness to the contemporary environmental movement. The works of all three, from Audubon s paintings of birds to Thoreau s literary masterpiece Walden, served to inspire those who followed. Among those inspired by Thoreau s life and writings was John Muir (1838 1914). Muir took things further politically than did Thoreau. Also a gifted writer about nature, the Scottish born Muir, having explored vast tracts of America, including Florida and California on foot, published widelyread essays in the leading magazines of the day. In the 1880s Muir successfully campaigned for the establishment

of Yosemite National Park in California. Muir s Sierra Club remains today one of the largest and most in uential of North American environmental organizations. Earth Day is celebrated on a date near to John Muir s birthday. In the early part of the century, conservationist in uence in the US reached even into the White House, especially during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. Leading European gures in the early history of environmental thought include Gilbert White of Selbourne, England who provided, in the mid-18th century, one of the earliest detailed accounts of the complex associations and interactions within nature, a precursor to the modern science of ecology. Notable in the 19th century, as precursors of conservationism and as promoters of a poetic and aesthetic appreciation of nature, were Wordsworth, Ruskin, and Morris. This sensibility informed the formation of Great Britain s National Trust and the efforts to protect both the built and the natural environment. Equally important to the eventual development of environmental politics were political philosophers including John Stuart Mill, who was the rst to discuss steady state economics and Edmond Burke, whose organic vision of community and tradition even today lends support to political thinking regarding the environment. Finally here one must mention Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish chemist, who hypothesized in 1896 that the carbon dioxide produced by burning coal could ultimately contribute to warming the climate of the planet. The growth in human numbers and the spreading and sprawling of human settlement associated with industrialization and motorized transportation throughout the 19th and 20th centuries continuously and dramatically reduced the quality of habitat for wild plant and animals. Humans came to occupy and utilize a very high proportion of what was once wild space. Much of North America (excluding Canada s North), and virtually all of Europe and the rest of the world, is now a human-controlled landscape. Telecommuting and other new communications-based technologies may accelerate the dispersion of human habitation. As this process has advanced through the centuries, many have come to realize that only conscious conservation and careful land use policies can keep any signi cant portion of the planet open to wild non-human species and spaces. Two additional developments in the idea of conservation came with Aldo Leopold s land ethic and, later, the widely in uential ideas of deep ecology, especially the thinking of the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. Leopold, an early forestry graduate from Yale University, worked as a forester and wildlife manager. As he grew older he doubted more and more the utilitarian conservation philosophy which he had been taught and had practiced. Leopold developed a philosophy rooted in the science of ecology, in the interconnections between animals, plants, water and soil; he envisioned humankind as an ordinary member, rather than a conqueror, of the community of the

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land. Naess, and other deep ecologists writing in the 1970s, continued the development of an ecologically based ethic. They distinguished between a human-centered (anthropocentric) approach to human-nature relationships from an eco-centric (deep ecology) approach. Essentially, the latter views ethical issues from non-human viewpoints and has formed the basis for the animal rights movement, the radical defense of wilderness and the rejection of those forms of conservation based in resourcism wherein all nature is valued solely in terms of the needs of humans (see Leopold, Aldo, Volume 5). The ideas underlying the conservation movement prior to the 1960s were primarily focused on the conservation and preservation of resources, wilderness and natures diversity. However, in the early days of the environmental movement the primary emphasis within environmental politics shifted to pollution and the effects of pollution and toxic chemicals on human health. These new concerns had their own history, but prior to the 1960s did not often capture the public imagination or a place on the wider political agenda. In contrast, in the 1960s, many of what had come to be called environmentalists saw traditional conservation and wildlife protection organizations as too conservative, as not sufciently aware of the more important dimensions of the environmental crisis. The environmental movement looked more to urban concerns and did thereby reach, politically, a broader segment of the by then urbanized population than had the conservation movement. In effect, only some people care about nature and other species, but everyone can be aroused by concern with the air humans breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink. Historically, public, medical and political concern regarding air or water pollution can be traced to the ancient Persians and Romans and is even mentioned obliquely in the Christian Bible at Deuteronomy 23: 1213. In 1273 restrictions were placed on coal burning in the city of London and in 1661 the Englishman John Evelyn submitted a tract entitled Fumifugium regarding air quality in that city to Charles II. In 1713 the Italian physician Bernardino Ramazzini published a compendium of diseases related to toxic exposures and other hazards in the workplace and in 1775 Percivall Pott discovered an epidemiological link between coal tar exposure in British chimney sweeps and a higher incidence of scrotal cancer. In the 19th century there was limited legislative action regarding pollution in both Great Britain and the US (in mid-19th century in Britain, in 1876 in St. Louis and in 1881 in Chicago). Smokestacks were required, though pollution abatement as we now know it was not an available option. At the same time some water pollution in rivers was the result of the removal of open sewage from public streets and lanes. Only in the 20th century did pollution abatement progress signicantly, but that progress was in part the result of an even greater need. Human population swelled, pesticides

were more widely utilized, industrial capacity swelled enormously, and the array of toxic industrial chemicals broadened (especially with the massive post-WWII expansion of petroleum-based chemical industries). The environmental politics of pollution rst took hold with large numbers of people in the 1920s with regard to the risk of acute poisoning from pesticides such as lead arsenate and other arsenic-based agricultural chemicals. These concerns ran high in Europe and in the US and grew larger with the publication in the 1930s of two sensational bestsellers: One Hundred Million Guinea Pigs and American Chamber of Horrors. As a result, residues of arsenic-based insecticides on foods were regulated in the US in 1932, but those standards of protection were reduced later in the decade as overt public fears subsided. Soon afterwards these toxic pesticides were replaced with 1,1,1-trichloro-2,2-bis(p-chlorophenyl)ethane (DDT), hailed at rst as a miracle chemical. It was DDT and related pesticides that played a signicant role two decades later in the development of the contemporary environmental movement. With DDT and related compounds, the concern was less with direct toxicity of residues for human health, but rather with bioaccumulation within food chains and the resultant ecological disruptions. Many organic chemicals are persistent in the environment and accumulate in the bodies of virtually all animal life, in ever higher concentrations the higher one goes in the food chain (from insects to small sh to larger sh to eagles, for example). As Rachel Carson pointed out in Silent Spring anti-mosquito use of 1,1-dichloro-2,2-bis(p-chlorophenyl)ethane (DDD) at 0.02 parts per million (ppm) resulted in lake plankton with 5 ppm, small sh with 40300 ppm, and large sh with up to 2500 ppm. At 1600 ppm the sh-eating birds around the lake died out, at a time when the chemical was no longer detectable, even in trace amounts, in the lake. Contemporary environmental politics has been very much about the sciences of toxicology, epidemiology and ecology. What makes Rachel Carson a founding gure in environmental politics is her ability to integrate diverse small scientic ndings and to array that data and present it to a wider public of non-experts in a careful and forceful way. Carson was not afraid to draw conclusions and to do so in a very public way. Despite massive attacks on her science and her credibility by industry representatives, her views held up and a wide range of policy initiatives ensued (and a new dimension of politics was born) (see Carson, Rachel Louise, Volume 5). Concern with pollution in the public mind was also fueled by two acute air pollution disasters (in Donora, Pennsylvania in 1948 and in London, England in 1952), and perhaps as well by general fears related to then, widespread above ground nuclear weapons testing. Environmental politics arose out of these factors and soon eclipsed conservation concerns in terms of public attention.

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The third strand of environmental ideas and values, sustainability concerns, has also had a long history. The focus on sustainability values goes back at least to the writings of Thomas Robert Malthus (17661834). Malthus was a moralist who concluded that human population would inevitably outstrip humankinds ability to produce sufcient food; as he saw it, the former increased geometrically (or exponentially), while the latter increased arithmetically (or incrementally). Malthus was the ultimate naysayer to the boundless optimism in the liberal intellectual circles of the time wherein it was imagined that progress and increasing bounty were natural characteristics of the human condition. Where liberals believed in the perfectibility of humans, education, science and democracy, Malthus was a pessimist who only hoped that human depravity and overpopulation could be checked sufciently to avoid the worst of resource shortfalls and misery. Misery for the poor, however, was seen as one of three necessary checks on excessive human population growth; Malthus opposed the Poor Laws of the time as overly generous. Few contemporary sustainability advocates are eager to embrace Malthus as an intellectual heir, neither are they enthusiastic about W Stanley-Jevons, who published The Coal Question in 1865. This book presented a calculation of the rise in coal consumption in Great Britain between 1854 and 1864 (at 3.5% annually) and concluded, given known domestic reserves, that the burgeoning nascent industrial society was not likely to be long-lived. In his words:
we cannot long maintain our present rate of increase of consumption we can never advance to the higher amounts of consumption supposed the check on our progress must become perceptible within a century the cost of fuel must rise, perhaps within a lifetime, to a rate injurious to our commercial and manufacturing supremacy; and the conclusion is inevitable, that our present happy condition is a thing of limited duration. (Jevons, 1965, 271)

can and that the price paid is not always worthwhile it in net terms; and without technological selectivity and careful planning. That is a contemporary view of sustainability, though there is far from unanimity, even among environmentalists, regarding such matters. Two other, more modern, precursors of the sustainability debate are the American conservationists Faireld Osborn and Samuel Ordway. Osborn spoke of the goal of humanitarianism being, not the quantity but the quality of living (Osborn, 1953, 226). Population restraint and resource conservation in the name of a higher quality of life were central objectives for both Osborn and Ordway. Ordway (1953, 31), feared that without careful use:
basic resources will come into such short supply that rising costs will make their use in additional production unprotable, industrial production will cease, and we shall have reached the limit of growth. If this limit is reached unexpectedly, irreparable injury will have been done to the social order.

Jevons did not allow for the rise of an industrial economy based on other fossil fuels, traded globally and extracted even from under the sea. As off the mark as both Malthus and Jevons were, they were right that resources are available in only nite amounts, that there is some limit to the human population that can be supported by natures capacities, and that resource limits can restrain economic development and social well-being. Where they were wrong was in assuming that, inevitably, limiting outcomes would follow from shortages in one particular resource at one given level of technological development. They were also too early to appreciate the ecological and human health implications associated with continuous and simultaneous growth in human population, resource extraction and industrial production. It is not so much that the human population and total economic output cannot possibly grow, but that they

The solution: restraint and perhaps redirection of human material wants. In Osborns words, we must temper (our) demands and use and conserve the natural living resources of the earth (Osborn, 1948, 201). In Ordways Our needs can be supplied if our wants are bridled The false ideology which worships unlimited expansion must go (Ordway, 1953, 39). These views, penned and not widely inuential in the hyperexpansionist 1950s, when each years new automobiles were larger and less fuel efcient, would have had very great resonance within the environmentalist politics of the 1970s. Only then did these three strands of environmental thought, ecology, health, and sustainability, come together in an integrated way under a banner of environmental politics. Only perhaps from the late 1960s were these values widely important for more than eeting periods of time. Only after Earth Day (1970) could one speak of a significant environmental movement and environmental politics as a important force within the whole of society in a number of nations.

SINCE EARTH DAY: HIGHLIGHTS OF RECENT ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS

Following the publication of Silent Spring, public concern with pesticides, pollution and environmental protection continued to grow though these concerns were all but overwhelmed at the time by concern regarding civil rights (especially in the US) and opposition to the war in Vietnam (throughout the world). However, by the late 1960s concerns such as the accelerating growth of the human population worldwide and incidents such as the massive oil release from the Torrey Canyon off England in 1967 and the Santa Barbara offshore oil blowout in 1969, opposition to airport noise and the proposed Concorde and supersonic transport (SST) jetliners, threats to whale populations

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from heavy hunting with advancing technologies, concerns regarding nuclear power and nuclear testing, combined with a number of conservation issues, especially the proposed construction of a ski resort in Mineral King Canyon (in California) by the Disney Corporation and the proposed construction of a dam at Lake Pedder in the Australian state of Tasmania, accelerated the development of environmental politics. One important outcome of this new concern was the passage in 1969 of the pioneering piece of legislation in the US, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) which introduced environmental impact assessment, a procedure soon widely adopted. Another result of, and a further stimulus to, the growing salience of environmental politics was the rst Earth Day (April 22, 1970). US Senator Gaylord Nelson, a Democrat from Wisconsin, proposed the application of the teach-in techniques of the peace movement to rising environmental concerns. The results were remarkable. Time Magazine estimated that 20 million Americans took part, others that Earth Day events involved individuals in 1500 universities and 10 000 schools. There were simultaneous demonstrations in major cities and new organizations and publications arose in the year leading up to Earth Day and the year following. New, still signicant, activist organizations included Pollution Probe in Canada, Environmental Action in Washington, DC, and the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, DC. Also newly created within this two-year period were the (US) Environmental Protection Agency and Environment Canada. The early 1970s witnessed an array of strong new legislation within many jurisdictions. Following on NEPA and Earth Day, the US passed a new Clean Air Act in 1970 and a Clean Water Act in 1972. The Safe Drinking Water Act was passed in 1974 and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act in 1976. Canada passed its Clean Water Act and Fisheries Act amendments in 1970; its Clean Air Act in 1971, Ocean Dumping Control Act in 1975 and Environmental Contaminants Act in 1976. The European Council adopted its First Action Program (on the environment) in 1973 and issued directives on quality objectives for drinking water in 1975 and water quality in 1976. Generally, Europe was slower off the mark than North America in this period, but pioneering efforts such as the establishment of the publication The Ecologist and its 1972 publication of Blueprint for Survival are particularly notable. In Australia, following some initiatives at the state level, in 1974 the Whitlam Labor government passed an Environmental Protection Act requiring advance consideration of the potential environmental consequences of proposed resource initiatives. Whereas pollution was the focus of environmental politics on Earth Day, and in the ensuing period, sustainability issues also came to the fore, beginning in 1972 with the United Nations (UN) Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment. The conference emphasized a wide range of

issues related to environment and development, as well as trade in endangered species, the protection of cultural and natural heritage and the prevention of marine pollution. Stockholm was crucial to the early establishment of environmental politics on the global stage. That year also saw the publication of the Club of Rome sponsored Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972), which gripped public attention, in part because it was based on the then-new notion of a computer simulation. This best-selling book polarized public opinion between those who saw a need for radical reform of industrial society to avoid resource exhaustion, pollution and human overpopulation and those who defended the status quo. The long-term projections from trends put forward in the study were widely attacked, and doubtless awed in the details and in a number of the assumptions made. However, those aws were soon overrun by immediate real world events. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) slowed exports and radically escalated oil prices in 1973 (and again in 1979) and the world entered into the period of the energy crisis. The energy crisis accelerated and altered the course of development of environmental politics throughout the world. Oil prices rose rapidly and the price of other energy sources and most commodities, including food, rose with them. Sustainability attained an intensity of public concern easily equal to that of pollution and the protection of nature. As well, for the rst time, large numbers of people reected on the long-term viability of industrial society. Prior to 1973 few had, since the arrival of the age of oil, imagined a world without readily available and inexpensive energy. This new concern was particularly challenging to any who doubted the viability, or desirability, of nuclear energy. The energy crisis stimulated sales of fuel-efcient automobiles, energy efcient appliances and home insulation, but it did not straightforwardly advance support for all aspects of environmental politics. Through much of the 1970s, environmental concern with the dangers associated with oil tankers, pipelines and offshore oil exploration, opposition to nuclear power, and calls for the regulation of air pollution from coal seemed to some to stand in the way of energy independence and continuing prosperity. Environmentalists and OPEC alike seemed to challenge both the way of life and the economic wellbeing of wealthy individuals and societies. Environmentalists appeared to some to be saying no, or go slow, to every viable alternative to OPECs political and economic power. However, two factors soon lessened that political tension: the notion of soft energy paths and the reality of nuclear accidents (as well as the high and rising costs of nuclear construction and the unknown cost of the long-term management of nuclear wastes). A young physicist/environmentalist named Amory Lovins coined the concept of a soft energy path an energy future that combined signicant increases in

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energy efciency with the development of relatively environmentally benign, and renewable, energy sources (Lovins, 1977), solar power, wind power, geothermal energy, biomass, and small-scale hydroelectric generation. Detailed country-by-country studies were undertaken by Friends of the Earth and other environmental organizations to demonstrate the technical and economic feasibility of these combined options to both fossil fuels and nuclear power. Lovins himself was perhaps most concerned to undermine the view that nuclear electricity was a reasonable future alternative to fossil fuels; he emphasized the variety of risks associated with nuclear-generated electricity including the possible proliferation of nuclear weapons. Opposition to nuclear electricity was strong throughout the 1970s, especially in Germany, Sweden, Austria and the US, but notably not in France where Green politics had a much slower start than elsewhere in Europe and where there was also relatively wide nationalist-rooted support for a national nuclear weapons capability. The Nuclear industrys problems accelerated following the accidents at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 and the far more serious mishap at Chernobyl in 1986. Nuclear energy also suffered from two other problems. Especially punishing to nuclear power were high interest rates put in place in the early 1980s to counter high ination (resultant in turn in large part from high fossil fuel prices). Construction of nuclear power plants is slow and thus high interest rates resulted in an uneconomic level of costs before many nuclear plants on order or under construction were completed. New plant orders dried up almost everywhere and the newly forming German Green Party concentrated on issues related to nuclear power stations and nuclear weapons. Improvements in the efciency of electricity use (in electric drive motors, lighting xtures and appliances of all kinds) also slowed the demand for electricity despite a continuing increase in the number of uses. Economics, technology and environmental politics seemed to collectively conspire against nuclear energy for the remainder of the 20th century. The late 1970s and early 1980s continued to witness shocking new environmental disasters, in the massive release of dioxin in Seveso, Italy in 1976 and the 1978 revelations regarding the massive burial in the 1940s and 1950s of toxic waste in the Love Canal, New York. However, this period also saw the rst signicant political backlash against environmental protection advocacy. Economic interests hurt by conservation measures and anti-pollution regulations became more aggressive in the defense of their interests. Neo-conservatism (usually called neo-liberalism in Europe) came to power in Great Britain, the US and elsewhere and was often determined to deregulate and to shrink government. Ronald Reagan opposed the protection of remaining remnant redwood forests and campaigned openly against air quality regulations in Ohio and other

US coal mining regions. In ofce he appointed those who would roll back regulatory enforcement and who favored resource extraction interests. Environmental protection was no longer an uncontested motherhood issue; it had, in effect, come of age politically. During the Reagan years pro-environmental opinion waned somewhat, but the commitment of those concerned grew as evidenced by an expansion of membership in US environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club. At the same time Australia saw a massive mobilization to oppose the Franklin Dam in Tasmania and green parties were created in many European countries. While environmental politics could not quite maintain the surge of the late 1960s and early 1970s, environmental activism continued throughout the period of low governmental responsiveness during the early 1980s. By the mid- to late 1980s a series of events, new concerns and new scientic ndings brought a resurgence of wider public concern which led in turn to a new set of legislative and policy initiatives in the early 1990s. The most dramatic and visible events of the period were: the catastrophic release of toxic chemicals in Bhopal, India (1984), the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Ukraine (1986) and the massive oil release from the Exxon Valdez off the pristine Alaska coast (1989). New or growing concerns included an array of problems associated with the disposal of municipal solid waste and the siting of landlls and incinerators, widespread concern with species loss especially in relation to the rapid cutting of tropical rainforests, and continuing concern with acid precipitation and with the disposal of toxic and radioactive wastes. New scientic ndings also accelerated the renewed wave of environmental concern. Most notable of these were stratospheric ozone-layer depletion and climate warming resulting from the ongoing release of greenhouse gases. Of particular concern in this regard were the possibility of rising sea levels and possible threats to ocean phytoplankton and other basic life forms. By the late 1980s environmental matters were topping public opinion polls as issues of greatest concern. A new wave of environmental politics had begun and, as we will see below, both the environmental movement, and the response to it, was more sophisticated the second time around.

TWO WAVES IN CONTEMPORARY ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS

In many nations interest in environmental issues, and in non-governmental organization (NGOs) and environmental movement activity, was higher in the periods 19681975 and 19851992 than at any other time. When one compares the two periods, both the most important issues and certain characteristics of the movement were quite different. The rst wave saw the creation of some of the

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leading environmental organizations and the environmental movement was at the time motivated primarily by new ndings, perspectives and concerns regarding pollution, the potential for future resource shortages (especially energy), nuclear power, and rapid human population growth. Politically, the rst wave was often highly confrontational and many early environmental advocates stood well apart in manner and viewpoint from mainstream society. The second wave raised some challenging new issues, but was generally more accepted by the wider population and in some cases, accommodation was sought by economic and political elite. The early environmental movement in the rst wave sometimes displayed a signi cant apocalyptic and apolitical dimension. Modern industrial economies were seen by some to be on the brink of collapse, in danger of being suddenly overwhelmed by the pollution, diminishing resources (and the agrant waste of those resources), and out-ofcontrol population growth. Only some of the information advanced in this period was carefully grounded in scienti c ndings, but the assertions struck a public nerve nonetheless and provoked governments, universities, and scienti c organizations to expand their environmental research capabilities, to reorganize research priorities and even to develop new interdisciplinary approaches. As noted, it was in the early 1970s that many governments created environmental agencies and ministries. At the same time many universities, sometimes in surprising places, saw individual faculty and students direct research and teaching attention to a wide range of environmental issues. The locus for consideration of matters environmental could be as varied as departments of geography, political science, chemistry, biology, history, economics, or urban planning. Some interdisciplinary environmental studies programs grew very rapidly only to suffer enrollment declines as public interest waned somewhat (between the waves) in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Those declines con rmed for many critics within the universities that these issues and new approaches were but a ash in the pan and not, as claimed, a new and yet enduring approach to scholarship. Yet the declines were temporary and new sub- elds arose in everything from environmental ethics and economics to conservation biology and air pollution chemistry. This altered intellectual and scienti c terrain in universities, and the wider learning within society as a whole, signi cantly altered the environmental politics of the second wave as compared to the rst. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, graduates in environmental sciences and policy studies moved into ever increasingly professionalized environmental NGOs and policy consulting rms. Relevant government departments, previously predominantly populated by planners and engineers, added ecologists and other environmental scientists to their staffs and many engineering and law faculties, for example, added environmental

components to their degree programs. Individuals with extensive NGO experience were hired by government ministries, or returned to graduate study and/or joined professional consulting rms or university faculties. By the time of the second wave (1985 1992), both the issues and the fundamental character of the environmental movement had changed. The movement itself had become highly professionalized (a change that was not without its critics from within and without the NGO community). The second wave saw the re-emergence of preservationist and biodiversity concerns central to the conservation movement (dating back into the 19th century) and an increased interest in global issues. This contrasted to the rst wave where pollution and sustainability concerns dominated. The second wave also saw a more professionalized environmental movement provide ecological, economic, and legal analysis to government and to society at large. Environmentalism was much less on the fringe: environmental ideas were widely acknowledged and seen to be accepted by economic and political elite. A sophisticated array of technical options and policy tools was advanced rather than the vague notions of withdrawal from society and/or advocacy of crude end-of-the-pipe pollution controls so common in the rst wave. Environmental organizations discussed the importance of various taxation regimes, environmental user fees, governmental procurement patterns, environmental audits of industries, state-of-the-environment reporting, economy environment integration and sustainable development. Society itself had become more environmentally sophisticated through changes over the years in public school curricula, nature and conservation television programming, and the sheer numbers of individual citizens directly affected by environmental concerns from smog to the siting of nuclear power plants, from the loss of a favorite woodland to the safety of drinking water or food. In the second wave, in Canada for example, environment economy round tables were established at all levels of government bringing together environmental activists, industry leaders, labor unions, and government of cials. Less well-known were the long-established links between labor unions and environmentalists in both the US and Canada dating back into the late 1960s through the efforts of the United Auto Workers Union and the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union. In the 1990s the interactions, and sometimes, shared agreements were wider. Policy advances were sometimes made through these cooperative processes, especially at local level. More important perhaps, by the end of the second wave few participants saw the differences and distinctions between conservation and environmental organizations as important any longer. More dramatic as a characteristic of the second wave was the introduction by industries and retailers in Europe, North America and elsewhere of a wide variety of so-called

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green products. Many 1970s environmentalists would have been appalled at the very notion (and more than a few 1990s environmentalists had their doubts as well). Nonetheless, suddenly products with environmental claims were available from less polluting household cleaning products to energy-efcient lighting devices to road asphalt made from used tires to recycled paper and boxes. In Germany, Greenpeace entered directly into the business of producing energy-efcient refrigerators. Whatever the limits of green product practices, the introduction and wide acceptance of green products speaks to a considerable environmental capacity within both industry and society, and a very different style of environmental politics than in the more confrontational rst wave. Also typical of this shifting approach were environmental audits and life cycle analysis, both tools used directly by industry to assess the environmental effects of their operations and products. Much changed in terms of the way products were made, recycled, and sold to environmentally sophisticated consumers, but as well the centrality of government regulation of industry had declined. One way to understand these developments as a whole (from the late 1960s through the mid-1990s) is to see environmental capacity as having broadened and spread from environmental advocacy groups and universities into government agencies and the economy and society as a whole. Another way to understand the change is to see economic and political elite as becoming on the one hand more accommodating of some change, but also more sophisticated at delaying and at redirecting any calls for radical change. That is, the elite have become willing to shift products and processes where such changes are relatively inexpensive (and perhaps even protable), but seek to deect change from policies which would impact severely on prot margins or access to resources. Regardless of the overall accuracy of such interpretations, the second wave was different from the rst and it too faded in the face of the economic difculties of the 1990s. These recent challenges to environmental politics will be considered below, but rst it is important to identify the principal institutional structures of environmental politics: environmental organizations and Green Parties.

ENVIRONMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS: GREEN PARTIES VERSUS NGOs

In many locations the environmental movement has gone from a political movement of individuals and NGOs to one which also includes adherents to a Green Party. Most European countries, as well as Australia and New Zealand (which can boast the rst nationwide Green Party, the Values Party founded in 1972), now have Green Parties strong enough to have elected members of the legislature

at the provincial (state) or national level. In the Australian state of Tasmania the Green vote has exceeded 30% of the total on occasion. In Germany and elsewhere, Greens have held the balance of power at the state level, entered the government on the national level and governed outright in the city of Frankfurt. But in few other countries have Green Parties been so successful; in North America the Greens are all but absent despite the long-standing existence of a strong environmental movement. Why have Green Parties not been more widely successful, one might ask? Why in North America and elsewhere has voting for Green Parties never approached the level of support for environmentalism that exists in terms of public opinion polls or in terms of membership in environmental organizations? One reason for this limited success within electoral processes is that environmentalists have no consistent position on many political issues of great importance to many people. What is the Green position on gender or regional issues? What is the position of environmentalists on ination, unemployment, drunk driving, abortion or appropriate levels of taxation? Clearly there is none in most of these cases. It could be said that environmentalism is a truncated ideology: socialists, conservatives and liberals have consistent views on most questions, environmentalists do not. Some environmentalists are quite conservative on economic and social issues, others are quite progressive. It is hard to hold a political party together when its members simply do not agree, or even in some cases care about, some of the leading issues of the day. Many voters wonder how could a Green Party govern; in government a party must make decisions one way or the other. In addition, the road is difcult for any new political parties; the advantages of incumbency or recent incumbency are considerable. As well, Green Parties have succeeded almost exclusively within multiparty political systems, usually where there is some form of proportional representation (party voting, i.e., a percentage of the votes producing a set number of seats on a national or regional basis). In such a context Green Parties can more easily emphasize some issues and ignore others (or trade support on issues of lesser importance for gains on the environment). Only the Minister of the Environment in the coalition government of France formed in the late 1990s has been a Green. Green Parties work better in some systems than others. Where there are single-member constituencies, as in Canada, the US and Great Britain, Green Parties have not gained much ground, even where many people like green ideas. Usually, existing parties take up green ideas, whether there are successful Green Parties or not, so long as there is support for green ideas. These ideas have played an important political role for more than 30 years within widely varied institutional arrangements: clearly,

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then, environmental politics does not always require standalone Green Political Parties. In broad terms, political movements seek to inuence society and/or government; in contrast, political parties seek to become the government themselves or to be directly a part of it. Both Green Parties and NGOs inuence the way society and government function, altering some of the collective choices that are made and participating in a societal process called agenda setting. Agenda setting determines which issues are priority ones, which concerns get the most attention and resources, which are dealt with rst and most frequently by decision makers. All interest groups including environmental organizations, the media, business, political parties and many other organizations are involved in the process of agenda setting. A movement is not so formally organized as a political party or an interest group (NGO). Individuals in some roles and activities may be part of a movement without necessarily being members of NGOs or even seeing themselves as members of that movement. For example, a group of neighbors may oppose the siting of a landll or some other facility with environmental dimensions, though some are opposed to many objectives of the major environmental organizations. Nonetheless, their opposition to the particular project in question should be understood as contributing to the wider environmental movement. That movement includes, as well the larger, established environmental organizations such as Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, thousands of smaller organizations, as well as many unafliated individuals. A formal organization has members, regular meetings, likely a constitution of some sort, a budget, and so forth. A movement does not, it is much looser and more variable than that, but it certainly is identiable and visible. The heart of the environmental movement and environmental politics has, in most jurisdictions, been environmental organizations; environmental public interest groups or NGOs. Some are single issue oriented and eeting others are very large, even global in their scope of operations and some have continuous organizational histories of a century or more. It is not possible to present here anything like a full nation-by-nation list. There are many thousands of environmental organizations in North America alone. In the nations of the European Union more than 10 million individuals are members or active supporters of environmental organizations. One of the earliest European groups still in existence is Englands Commons, Open Spaces and Footpaths Preservation Society founded in 1865. The organizations with the greatest global reach include Greenpeace (founded by Canadians, but with at one point approaching million members in, for example, the Netherlands), the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) with activities on every continent, the International Union for the Conservation of

Nature (IUCN) based in Switzerland, and Friends of the Earth International (FOEI). Perhaps equally important are large conservation and environmental organizations based primarily within one nation: the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Wilderness Society, the Environmental Defense Fund, the National Audubon Society, the Nature Conservancy, and the National Wildlife Federation in the US. In Canada, in addition to Greenpeace and important parallel organizations of US or other origin, are Pollution Probe, the Canadian Nature Federation, the Toronto Environmental Alliance and the Western Canadian Wilderness Committee. Other important environmental organizations in the richer nations include: in Germany, the Bund fur Umvelt und Naturschutz Deutschland (BUND); in Denmark, the Danish Society for the Conservation of Nature (founded in 1911); in Australia, the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Tasmanian Wilderness Society; and in Great Britain, (in addition to large branches of Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace) a number of large, long-established, conservation organizations such as the National Trust and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Finally here it is important to identify several radical challenges to established environmental organizations. These challenges are ongoing and arise from many quarters, they continually prod larger organizations that inevitably become just somewhat more cautious as memberships and the size of professional staffs increase (and the need to raise funds and maintain membership size grows). Friends of the Earth was originally a split-off from the Sierra Club. The environmental justice movement, which emphasizes racial bias in the siting of environmentally undesirable facilities, has been very important in the US since the late 1980s. Numerous environmental justice grassroots organizations have been highly critical of the larger, more established environmental organizations for under representing visible minorities and their concerns. Also highly signicant since the 1970s has been ecofeminism, a movement within a movement which focuses on environmental issues which disproportionately affect women, especially but by no means exclusively women within developing nations (Warren, 1995). As well, the ideas of deep ecology helped to encourage an animal rights movement, and such radical wilderness protection organizations as Earth First!, and in so doing restored something of a confrontational style within second wave environmental politics. Also sometimes associated with a more radical strain of environmental politics is the simultaneous consideration of environmental concerns and the problems of poorer nations; here the movement has been pushed by such international groupings as the Rainforest Alliance.

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SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

THE COMBINED CHALLENGE OF ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT

Combined environment and development concerns came to prominent attention in the 1960s with a focus on rapid human population growth, especially within poorer nations. At the time this attention often had a neo-Malthusian tone and frequently contained warnings regarding imminent and widespread famine. Radical and direct interventions to slow birth rates were seen by some as appropriate and necessary initiatives. Paul Ehrlich (1975), in his widely read Population Bomb (rst published 1968), called for taxes (in the US) on cribs, diapers, and toys, followed by an aggressive anti-natalist foreign policy abroad. External policies were to include tying food aid to the adoption of strong population control initiatives by aid recipient nations. Ehrlich supported proposals in India for compulsory sterilization of males with three or more children. Garrett Hardin advocated state-issued licenses to reproduce, licenses which could be bought or sold on an open market. It is difcult to imagine assertions of this sort being put forward now and, needless to say, there were strong responses at the time as well. Some decades later those anticipated-to-be-imminent famines have thus far been avoided through improved food production and non-coerced population restraint (especially in Europe and North America, but in other nations as well). Nonetheless, human population may well already be well past the environmental optimum, but public attention has turned more to development than to population considerations. Barry Commoner (1972), responding to Ehrlich, argued that environmental damage was more a function of technology choices than of human population levels (or even of afuence). He further argued that human population restraint would follow from advances in economic wellbeing. Other analysts have noted strong correlations between population restraint and social policy advances such as equitable education and work opportunities for women, rising economic expectations, wider availability of old age pensions, and access to health care for infants. In other words, family size declines with social and economic advance; people will have fewer children when there is hope that those they do have will survive and that they themselves will not, in old age, be dependent on their children. Thus, while 1990s environmental advocates would still favor the universal availability of affordable birth control opportunities, the discourse on environment and development has changed very much since the 1960s. Population remains a concern, but the emphasis has turned to development, economic policy and equitable global access to resources. Following Commoners response to Ehrlich were a series of other studies, which further altered our sense of these issues. In the 1970s one important shift in tone was visible in the differences between Limits to Growth (1972) and a follow-up Club of Rome study Mankind at

the Turning Point (1974). Where the former emphasized the need to restrain human population, economic growth and resource use to protect the future, the latter emphasized the need to see growth as necessary within poor nations and resource and economic restraint as more appropriate in rich nations. Hungry people with few material possessions do not readily embrace blanket calls for restraint; global environmental politics required greater sophistication than that. Malthusian approaches to environmental protection waned further still with the insights of Amory Lovins and advocates of appropriate technology, and especially with the work of the World Commission on Environment and Development (the Brundtland Commission). The 1970s and 1980s saw many insights into more environmentally benign housing, agricultural and energy technologies which also promised economic advance, especially within lowdevelopment contexts. Lovins promotion of solar, wind and biomass energy production was an important part of this changing focus. The Brundtland Report, Our Common Future (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987), however, helped to further shift the focus from a more or less exclusive focus on the environmental costs of economic advance to a more balanced approach which included as well the environmental costs of failures to advance economically. Our Common Future advocated a balanced consideration of environmental protection and economic development (sustainable development) and asserted that both were necessary, more mutually supportive than mutually exclusive. In the language of the report:
In most countries, environmental policies are directed at the symptoms of harmful growth; these policies have brought progress and rewards and must be continued and strengthened. But that will not be enough. What is required is a new approach in which all nations aim at a type of development that integrates production with resource conservation and enhancement, and that links both to the provision to all of an adequate livelihood base and equitable access to resources (39 40).

The goal of the Brundtland Commission was to help to create a global environmental politics which was large enough to contain development advocates (mostly from poor nations), environmental protection advocates (mostly from rich nations) and enlightened representatives of government and business. It is not universally agreed that this attempt was successful, or that sustainable development is not an oxymoron. Nonetheless the discourse around the politics of environment and development has shifted a great deal. It is now widely known that some of the gravest environmental damage is linked to economic desperation. Few environmental advocates would deny any longer that economic growth restraint is equally appropriate everywhere or that there are not some opportunities for simultaneous economic growth and environmental protection, even in rich nations. Few

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would any longer ignore the importance of economic and social advance to the achievement of human population restraint or suggest that birth rate coercion was either moral or effective. The larger question remains however, as to what economic activities need to be restrained where and how and whether or not it is possible to simultaneously give a free hand to the forces of global economic growth and to achieve either environmental or social advance. Concern regarding environment and development has now largely merged into a larger debate surrounding economic globalization.

GLOBALIZATION AND SUSTAINABILITY

In the wake of the Cold War, global trade expansion and global trade regimes have rushed to ll the vacuum and to make the entire world secure for mobile capital investment. In this new context, global investors can bring enormous pressures to bear on governments by even implicitly threatening to withhold or transfer investment. This new reality bears in turn on an important question in environmental politics; the centralization or decentralization of environmental protection. In general, the smaller the unit of government and the less economically diverse the political jurisdiction, and the higher the local unemployment rate, the greater the relative power of mobile corporations. Thus, in recent years environmental protection rollbacks have been widespread and at the same time much environmental politics and decision-making has moved to the international, treatybased, level (see Environmental Movement the Rise of Non-government Organizations (NGOs), Volume 5). Before discussing environmental initiatives at the international level a distinction needs to be drawn between the fact of increasing global economic integration and the negotiated trade regimes, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). When a rm can pay skilled manufacturing workers a dollar or two a day in Indonesia, China or Mexico, it can easily afford to pay quite high tariffs to sell into the US, Japan, or Europe. This is especially true if, at the same time, rms avoid legal protection for trade unions, workplace health and safety regimes, and enforced environmental regulations. Trade treaties do not cause these problems. They may help to speed the trading process, but trade treaties also provide a potential opportunity to harmonize (average) upwards, rather than downwards, on labor and environmental standards. As with the NAFTA Side Agreement on Labor and the Environment, there is no technical (as distinct from political) reason why trade treaties could not contain progressive social and environmental provisions. There is also nothing but a lack of political will (obviously no small matter) which prevents common (and enforced) environmental regulations, as is virtually now the norm within the European Union.

An impressive array of multilateral and bilateral environmental treaties have recently been signed; indeed, since the late 1970s environmental politics seems to be as often conducted at the diplomatic level as at the national level. Major treaties include: the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (1973, 1979, 1983); the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone layer (1987); the Basal Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal (1989); the UN Biodiversity Convention (1992); and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992, followed by the additional agreement in Kyoto, Japan in 1998). Quite clearly it is the case that many global environmental problems can only be resolved with the active participation of many, if not most, nations. The larger question, however, is how effective is signing any number of international environmental agreements when there is no effective international enforcement? Moreover, the new realities of global corporate mobility and widespread employment vulnerability have enormous implications for environmental politics. Even in the richest nations, as well as in local government circles and among employees everywhere, there is now a thoroughgoing political timidity. Every government now fears losing employment, investment, and tax revenues. Almost any social behavior (even including child labor) is somewhere justied in terms of global competitiveness and employees and rms everywhere must compete with that new standard. No level of prot, or level of executive or product endorsement compensation, is seen any longer as unacceptable. Further, what would be seen in Europe or North America as environmentally intolerable, even outrageous, behavior, is almost expected in Nigeria, Indonesia, or Guyana, even when good corporate citizenship prevails on the environmental front in the Netherlands, Canada and/or the US. Interestingly, some of todays billionaires, not a reborn political radicalism, are often the very people raising questions about the need to nd ways to balance corporate power in the age of globalization. George Soros (1997, 47) argued:
Laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by the uninhibited pursuit of self interest. Unless it is tempered by the recognition of a common interest that ought to take precedence over particular interests, our present system is liable to break down.

James Goldsmith (1994, 17), the perhaps eccentric British/French billionaire is more direct:
47 Vietnamese or 47 Filipinos can be employed for the cost of one person in a developed country, such as France. Until recently, 4 billion people were separated from our economy by their political systems, primarily communist or socialist, and because of a lack of technology and of capital. Today all that has changed. Their political systems have been transformed,

60 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE technology can be transferred instantaneously anywhere in the world on a microchip, and capital is free to be invested anywhere the anticipated yields are highest.

Many in the world of environmental advocacy would conclude from such views that global economics requires global environmental and social standards; that is, that an economically integrated globe needs more political integration, not less. They conclude that if Southeast Asian forest workers earned even half the wages of those in the Pacic Northwest, the rate of destruction of tropical rain forests might well slow considerably, and simultaneously development would advance. Similarly, if Caribbean bauxite miners were paid half what a miner would earn in Germany, there would be less aluminum that was not recycled. There is now broad agreement that the economic, the social and the environmental are tied together in numerous ways; and that environmental advocates must work towards a consistent position regarding all three. Employment insecurity, it is agreed, undermines environmental concern, in both poor countries and rich. Environmental politics in the 1990s and beyond may well be moving toward greater integration within the broader political, and toward including in its expanded purview many aspects of social and economic policy. Expanding the purview of environmental politics at the intellectual level revolves around the rising importance of sustainability. This shift within environmental thought is especially pronounced in European environmental politics which are increasingly in the 1990s leading the way worldwide (and where wilderness issues have never had the salience that they have had in North America). One new approach to sustainability analysis is ecological footprint analysis, which concludes that it would take three Earths of resources to bring the whole of the human population to present North American living standards (Wackernagel and Rees, 1996) (see Ecological Capacity, Volume 3). This analysis, however, assumes that the gains in the poor nations will be based on the energy and materials consumption patterns of today s richest nations. That need not be true. One can envision a gross domestic product (GDP)/energy and materials ratio three or four times what is achieved at present, but this might still leave us several planets short should human population indeed double again as now seems all but inevitable. In the end, if one prefers a world that is both more equitable and environmentally sustainable, it is hard not to be open to the idea that the rich nations are rich enough, at least in terms of energy and material consumption. It would seem, though, that the poor everywhere could hardly use less of anything than they presently do without nding ways to gain in quality of life while holding their ground in terms of energy and materials use. Environmental politics must stress such things as the introduction of high quality, low cost public transportation, especially as

replacements for broken down, fuel inef cient automobiles. Also hopeful are demand-side management (DSM) initiatives by energy utilities directed at the needs of low-income customers. Nonetheless, it may well remain the case that the rich in the rich countries cannot be easily and sustainably supported even at present consumption levels and patterns if the more numerous poor everywhere are to advance signi cantly in the same terms. Politically, this view would seem all but impossible in the present context, but one might speculate that if there is to be a successful third wave in environmental politics it will come at the global scale and focus on sustainability and equity issues. Thus, two of the best prospects for future environmental politics in a globalized world are: (1) accelerating the adoption of technologies such as those outlined by von Weisacker et al. (1998) in Factor Four and (2) developing a global politics which would promote the distribution of fair shares of ecological space as outlined in Carley and Spapens (1998). The rst of these works contends that we must, through ef ciency gains and the de-materialization of GDP double global wealth while simultaneously halving resource and energy use. The second work advocates calculating resource use at the national level and comparing that use level to a national fair share of sustainable resources calculated on a global or regional basis. The educational power of such calculations could be considerable. The political challenge then becomes to nd ways to accommodate development based on that fair share without a loss in quality of life for those currently well off. Environmental politics would seem to have come a very long way in four decades: from local pollution issues to global multidimensional concerns, from seeing environmental issues as largely separate from distributional issues to seeing the two as bound up together. A long road has been traveled and progress has been made, but the challenges have not gotten smaller.

REFERENCES
Carley, M and Spapens, P (1998) Sharing the World, Earthscan, London. Carson, R (1962) Silent Spring, Houghton Mif in, Boston, MA. Commoner, B (1972) The Closing Circle, Bantam, New York. Ehrlich, P (1975) The Population Bomb, Rivercity Press, Rivercity, MA. Goldsmith, J (1994) The Trap, Macmillan, London. Hays, S P (1987) Beauty, Health and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the US, 1955 1985, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Jevons, W S (1965) The Coal Question, Augustus M Kelley, New York. Lovins, A B (1977) Soft Energy Paths, Ballinger, Cambridge. Marsh, G P (1965) Man and Nature: Physical Geography as Modied by Human Action, Harvard University Press, Cambridge.

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Meadows, D H, Meadows, D L, Randers, J, and Behrens, III, W W (1972) The Limits to Growth, Universe, New York. Ordway, S H (1953) Resources and the American Dream, Ronald Press, New York. Osborne, F (1948) Our Plundered Planet, Little Brown, Boston, MA. Osborne, F (1953) The Limits of the Earth, Little Brown, Boston, MA. Paehlke, R C (1997) Environmental Values and Public Policy, in Environmental Policy in the 1990s, eds N J Vig and M E Kraft, Congressional Quarterly Press, Washington, DC. Paehlke, R C (1989) Environmentalism and the Future of Progressive Politics, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. Soros, G (1997) The Capitalist Threat, Atlantic Monthly, 279, 45 8. von Weisacker, E, Lovins, A B, and Lovins, L H (1998) Factor Four: Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use, Earthscan, London.

Wackernagel, M and Rees, W E (1996) Our Ecological Footprint, New Society, Philadelphia, PA. Warren, K J (1995) Ecofeminism, in Conservation and Environmentalism: An Encyclopedia, ed R C Paehlke, Garland, New York. World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) Our Common Future, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

FURTHER READING
Kallett, A and Schlink, F J (1976) One Hundred Million Guinea Pigs, Ayer, Salem, NH. Lamb, R D (1976) American Chamber of Horrors, Ayer, Salem, NH. Mesarovic, M and Pestel, E (1974) Mankind at the Turning Point, Dutton, New York.

Global Environmental Change and Environmental History

IAN G SIMMONS
University of Durham, Durham, UK

To try and extract some of the ideas which intertwine with the environmental changes wrought by humans in the last 10 000 years, an agreed empirical historiography of change is needed. The article suggests that the major world-wide periods of human history for the present purpose can be determined by the type of economy pursued. In effect, these are periods which are characterised by access to energy sources and hence to the technologies available: these properties allow a society to change its surroundings, providing it has occupancy of the land and water for a suf cient time. Materialist historiography has always taken very seriously the notion that the ways in which people made a living were central to their other values and that technology drove history. The story of what has happened, where, and when, is well-documented at global, regional and local levels but less well developed is: (a) the relationships of such metamorphoses to changes in human thinking; and (b) whether all these alterations present history simply as one damn thing after another or whether there are emerging narratives of process in which we can see patterns emerging with a 10 000 year relevance.

THE EMPIRICAL NARRATIVE

The rst item in Johann Sebastian Bachs will is his share in a Thuringian coalmine. That fact can be seen as a nexus between a local environmental change, a global shift in economy, a family in its household and his searing representations in music of order and faith which comprise one of the high achievements of Western culture. But is there any connection between these statements other than that of being symbols on a piece of paper? How does the economy of a family, a region or a country or the world link to their ideas about the world or do all these aspects oat free of each other, with only coincidence in time in common? To try and extract some of the ideas, which intertwine with the environmental changes wrought by humans in the last 10 000 years, an agreed empirical narrative of change is needed. Much of this is provided in other sections of this Encyclopaedia and only a summary is given here. Table 1 suggests that the major world-wide periods of human history for the present purpose are determined by the type of economy pursued. In effect, these are periods which are characterised by access to energy sources, and hence to the technologies available: these properties allow a society to change its surroundings, providing it has occupancy of the land and water for a sufcient time. In this article the emphasis will be on the relations of those observed

alterations: (a) to the metamorphoses of human thought that accompanied them; and (b) to emerging narratives of process which we can construct with hindsight. A coda ponders whether there are lessons for today and tomorrow in this kind of hybrid-knowledge fabrication. Human history is reduced to economy in Table 1. This provides a starting point in the sense that materialist historiography has always taken very seriously the notion that the ways in which people made a living were central to their other values and that technology drove history. In the other direction, it is obvious that the environmental impact of a hunter-gatherer is likely to be less than that of a bulldozer, except that the one economy has in fact taken up about 90% of human evolutionary time and the other is (even loosely interpreted as any industrial economy based on hydrocarbons) only 200 years old; the bulldozer is largely a post-1940 development. Thus although the access to energy and technology of solar-powered agriculturists was restricted, their tenure of the earth has been long, and they have penetrated into some environments whose resilience in the face of their impacts was limited. The use of tabular format rather hides the fact, of course, that not all hunter-gathers have disappeared, and that there are some farmers who have little access to industrially produced materials. In both cases, a revival of the older ways is being promoted in some regions of the world. Nevertheless, the changes wrought by the industrial way of life and its

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Table 1 Global environmental history: a periodizationa Dates: approximately Huntergatherer 10 000 8000 BCE Energy sources; Energy consumption Solar energy captured recently as biomass 5000 kcal cap 1 day 1 Technology Stone, bone, basket, skins, wood Impacts Localized but signicant in marginal species and habitats Global impact of agriculture on soils, water and landforms: e.g., the terrace transfer of species on all scales Intensication of impact and spatial extension

Agriculturalist

8000 BCE CE 1750

Solar energy captured recently as biomass, wind and water 26 000 kcal cap 1 day 1

Addition of metals plus sophisticated construction methods, specialised tools; domesticated biota

Industrialist

CE 1750 1950

As above C stored solar energy as fossil fuels 77 000 kcal cap 1 day 1

Postindustrialist

CE 1950

As above C nuclear energy and alternative sources of solar-based energy 230 000 kcal cap 1 day 1

Intensication of material use in cities, as chemicals, as efuents, as machines Electronics; genetic manipulation

New chemicals and new genetics create uncertainties on larger scale

All rows contain the inuences in the rows above them unless explicitly excluded; cap, per capita.

post-industrial successor (which has the ability to generate large amounts of capital and spin it off into almost any part of the globe) cannot be gainsaid. An electricity-powered economy with a high proportion of services is sometimes labelled post-industrial but although it may call in resources from a low-energy, low-information periphery, it exerts many strong inuences upon the worlds ecology. It is fundamentally responsible for much of the appropriation of Net Primary Productivity by human societies, which now amounts to about 40% of the global terrestrial total. If the pre-agricultural terrestrial biomass was about 842 1015 g of carbon, the present gure is, according to Matthews (1984), 737 1015 g of carbon, a reduction of 12.4%. In spatial terms, this means that although 51.2% of the terrestrial surfaces can still be described as undisturbed, if rock, ice and barren land is taken out of the total, then that category totals only 27.0%. As calculated in economic terms, ecosystem services are worth about $33 trillion per year, which compares with the gross domestic product (GDP) of all the worlds nations at $18 trillion. Employing energy use as a surrogate for environmental impact, the current level of impress is 13.1 terawatts (TW); a human population of 12 billion people with a more evenly distributed access to energy might produce a footprint equivalent to 90 TW.

The story of what has happened, where, and when, is well documented at global, regional and local levels. What is less well developed is: (a) the relationships of such metamorphoses to changes in human thinking; (b) whether there are emerging narratives of process in which we can see patterns emerging with 10 000 year relevance. So this essay will attempt to discuss both an ideational narrative in which a history of ideas is interrogated for its relation to what actually happened in the world and a narrative of process in which longer-term processes are plucked out of the multifariousness of history for further examination.

THE NARRATIVE OF IDEAS

Two avenues will be followed here. The rst is the discussion of ideas, which seem to be connected to economies quite closely. If they are connected to economies: then they are bound up in the webs which link ecology, human use on the ground and what humans perceive in their minds. The second is the opposite: those actions and attitudes, which seem to oat free of the economies and ecologies of their time. Any reasonably accurate long-term perspective on humanenvironment relations can only be made by the historically well-informed. Those who relied on especially

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partial stories are likely to have constructed different views of the unfolding of society from those who had extensive assemblages to consult. An early symbol of the desire for inclusive compilations of knowledge is the model globe. The signicance of early examples such as that made by Martin Behaim in 1492 and annotated with the nature of commodities and business opportunities throughout the known world can scarcely be underestimated. Behaims globe, for example, was used to sell Magellans projected voyage to sponsors (Jardine, 1996). The gatherings of the 18th and 19th centuries take on a special signicance, starting perhaps with the Encyclop edie of 175156. A fundamental example is the ambitious aim of Alexander von Humbolt (17691859) to depict in a single work the entire material universe which led to his multi-volume Cosmos of 18451862. The detailed results of Charles Darwins global voyage, and his later observations and experiments also typify the desire to accumulate comprehensive bodies of knowledge, though Darwin (18091882) lacked the cosmic aspirations of Humboldt. No study of material-ideational links can ignore the centrality of Karl Marx (18181883). The environmental aspects of Marx are implicit rather than explicit and urbanindustrial rather than globalhistorical. Nevertheless, he viewed the integrated development of a political economy as a humanising, socialising and indeed internalising of natural substances and forces in the environment. According to Marx, therefore,
The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence but, on the contrary, their social existence which determines their consciousness.

Another attempt to interpret material history is espoused by Karl Kautsky (18541938). He attempted to show parallels between the processes of nature and those of human history. The non-human environment was in fact human-created or at least much modied in many aspects and therefore its evolution was social. Nevertheless it had material connections since for him every social innovation originated in the last analysis from a new technology. Thus technology is a predominant mediating inuence between the natural environment and human societies (Kautsky, 1988). A more recent re-statement of some of these notions has come from Max Oelschlager (1991), from whom there are assertions such as:
once the agricultural turn was made, philosophy and theology sprung forth with a vengeance the crucial interaction between existential and conceptual materials lying at the heart of cultural process and the ecological transition increased in both frequency and pervasiveness ideological reconstruction was inevitable. And The idea of nature as a machine was deeply rooted in the experience of the Industrial Revolution and the pervasive inuence of machines on life.

So one environmentally-oriented interpreter, Parsons (1977), is able to say that for Marx all human values, whether economically-linked like food, or higher values like music, have their ultimate origin in non-human nature. Yet Marx does not attempt to dene the equivalent linkages for pre-industrial economies in the detail that he applies to the separating and alienating effects of industrialisation in the context of the social relations of capitalism. Followers and explainers of Marx have tried to work out a deeper historical sequence. Ted Benton, for instance, has asserted that the theory of nature society relations which is developed in Capital is incapable of conceptualising todays populationresource environment interactions. Bentons reconstruction (1996) of the intellectual resources of Marx and Engels brings forward the notion that development is not a unilinear quantitative expansion of production but rather a range of qualitatively different ways of realising human social possibilities. Marxian analysis of pre-industrial societies may need to build upon Capital rather than simply apply it.

The rst of these statements traces its connections in part at least to the surpluses created by irrigated agriculture: philosophy may bake no bread, but an assured supply of bread enables philosophers to live. The second reinforces the Kautsky directive that technology is a key mediator between humans and all else. The development of fossil fuels has clearly allowed profound transformations of social structures to take place. New work groupings and new social groupings with specialised interests are examples. Goldblatt (1996) argues that industrialism does not cause capitalism (nor its environmentally degrading effects) but it does unleash it. It would be generally agreed that access to energy sources and to technology are principal factors but not the principal factor; they must be considered in relation to all other aspects of the social order. In Smils (1994) collection of work on business cycles in the West, there is a conuence of material change with economic life. This can be interpreted to show a coincidence between new energy sources and innovative prime movers on the one hand, and accelerated investment on the other. Innovation in energy technology and access falls in the middle of a business down-cycle and its adoption then coincides with the rise of the new upswing. The sequence suggested comprises: (a) the upswing of 17871814 is related to the development of coal and the stationary steam engine; (b) that of 18431869 is connected to moving steam engines in the forms of the steamship and the railroad, together with improvements in iron smelting; (c) that of 18981924 with the introduction of commercial electricity in the form of electric motors in factories; (d) the period around 1937 which coincides with the gas turbine, uorescent light and the discoveries in nuclear physics;

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and (e) the phase that was ended in 1973 by oil producing countries (OPEC), which had cheap oil, and the extensive and unquestioned use of the motor vehicle and nuclear ssion power. The ideational effects of these surges are difcult to trace directly, but there can be little doubt that each of them helped to strengthen the Promethean aspects of the western world-view. Grubler (1994) suggests parallel developments in western agriculture: innovation up to the mid-19th century, mercantilism from 18501935 and industrialization from 1935 to the present. Each of these was a cluster of biological, mechanical and social/organizational change, with the social sometimes preceding the new crops and new techniques. The idea of social structures founded upon the dissipation of energy is a meta-narrative that takes off from these abstractions and turns them into a general model. The classic work on the long-term relations of the natural environment and all facets of human societies is that of the Annales school of historians, and in particular the central gure of Fernand Braudel (19021985). He wished to understand patterns of nature as well as history, so that a radical inter-discipliniarity might be accomplished, using the insights of other social and natural sciences. If a long enough period of time was inspected, then not only the history of events (histoire evenmentielle ) might be better linked to the world in which it was situated, but the longue duree might the better include environmental change, which was seen as proceeding along a much slower time path than changes located solely in human actions. Braudel (e.g., 1972) saw environmental transmutation as the slowest vector in the whole society-nature complex, a point on which later appreciations of the rapidity of e.g., a climatic change or the onset and progress of soil erosion might well take a different view. In the end, though, the Annales view is of a complex rhythmical web in which environment has to be given a place but cannot crassly determine the nature of a society. If environment is often critical (in terms of the juxtaposition of mountain and sea in the Mediterranean basin, for example), it is rarely as direct as in the example of snow being brought down in summer from the Alps to Italian cities being the origin of the making of ice-cream. The tone is more of environmental than economic determinism. The French attempts to make long-term connections between economy and society are also exempli ed in the work of Georges Dumezil (1898 1986). He had the idea that the diverse cultures of the Indo Europeans (from Iran to Scandinavia) could be constituted in terms of the three functions of sovereignty, war and production. This last was, according to one commentator (Littleton, 1982), the least important (comprising the herder cultivator stratum) and so perhaps accounts for its lack of detailed treatment compared with the other two, in his major outputs. In view of the endpoint of Dumezil s analysis of the extent to which

a common linguistic ancestry is necessarily accompanied by a common social and cultural heritage, this seems like an opportunity missed. The same is true of Toynbee s great compilations (1976) of historical change which are heavily weighted in their treatment towards early civilisations. In these the causation runs from environment to religion and economy and the values do not stem in an obvious fashion from economy; periods of breakdown relate to political and social events, not rooted in an economy s structure. The advances of Islam into Europe in the 16th century or the Hellenic demise of 431 BC are little connected in any direct fashion with the imbalances between population, resources and environment in those regions at those times. One of the most complete attempts at linking economy and the non-material has come with the work of Thompson (1989). He articulated a number of global phases of an economic type, beginning with early agriculture along the margins of the mountains of south west Asia and ending with a Paci c Shift which corresponds largely with a postindustrial society. For each of these, he posits a series of intellectual and social characteristics, among which science and religion are numbered. The sequence does not include a speci c hunter-gatherer era but it is not dif cult to add one. Nor is it dif cult to add some other environmental linkages, such as dominant environmental pathologies and rates of population growth. One implication is that these are world-wide categories which transcend the varieties of culture found in, say, Europe, Africa and Asia. The descriptions given by Thompson, when translated to tabular form, make it necessary to remember that the transition from one category to another is regionally asynchronous. However, the work is certainly suggestive: the tying-in of a speci c type of religion to each economic phase raises interesting questions and taken together, each row might be said perhaps to constitute a worldview, if the cells are verbally connected and scanned for their emergent attributes. The notion that each stage of social change corresponds to its own types of law, government, religion (and other characteristics) was a major achievement of Giambattista da Vico (1668 1744) but who did not develop very far the notion of economy as a propellant of such change. His cycles of civilisation, in which divine, heroic and humanist phases went round more than once, did not attach themselves to, e.g., hunter-gatherers, irrigation agriculture and Mediterranean pastoralism. He did however suggest that Latin was a language which had evolved in a forest environment, making a case for the evolution of words like lex, ilex, aquilex, legumen and legere from a sylvan environment. But as Berlin (1992) points out, Vico s main contribution to thought is his distinction between the natural world as knowable but not intelligible, and the human world as knowable and intelligible. Because we made it; the suggestion, contra Descartes, that a reconstructive imagination

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(fantasia) was a third kind of knowledge needed by students of history, seems to have a great deal to commend it. The summation of this type of material seems clear: that in a few cases there seems to be a direct connection between the economy and some at least of the non-material values of a society. The attachment seems to be closer in solar-powered, pre-industrial economies, despite the assertion of Marx that all values arose from economics and class structure. In a sense this parallels the arguments for environmental determinism, which has always held more appeal in pre-industrial contexts, though it is clearly not absent in a post-industrial world.

DISSOCIATED TRENDS
If the links between economy and environmental values cannot be traced easily for the apparently obvious examples by the well-known analysts discussed above, then it is not surprising that a number of less obvious connections can be aired. One result of ranging across 10 000 years of change is the provision of examples to suit almost any taste in narrative. Rather like the Bible, something can be found to bolster any point of view. It is scarcely surprising then to be able to nd examples of environmental thought which bear no perceptible relationship to the material circumstances of their origins and development. Culture, say Harvey and Reed (1994), can take on the features of a chaotic cascade of symbols and ideas that have a life of their own. Hence humans appear to make themselves. To take one example: if we accept the magnitude of the Classical Greek achievements in both chronicling their own past as well as in thought about humanity and nature, then it is difcult to tie much of this to the particular agricultural economies of the time. Those economies had been in largely the same condition for centuries before the eforescence of thought that we associate with the golden age of Greek philosophy and history. There is one possible exception to this: in the soil erosion of Attica, the Epicureans found conrmation for their view that the earth was senile, overpopulated and generally on its way to perdition. If indeed their outlook can be traced to the combination of re and pastoralism prevalent on the mountains of Attica, there is a powerful link (Hughes, 1994). Even so, the actual course and intensity of the soil erosion has been disputed and its general role may have been exaggerated. But a false report is not necessarily any less inuential than a true one. A parallel ambiguity can be seen for the Renaissance period in Europe. Again, it is possible to interpret this as a owering of a particular culture, which bears no relation to major changes in production from the land. It is true that nature is relevant, as can be seen in the loving depictions of landscape which now become a part of so many paintings. Initially of the background but in the case of Piero di Cosimo and the school of Giorgione,

both around the turn into the 16th century, nature occupies much more of the frame, yet once more, no obvious connection with regional economic change is apparent. The contextual factor to be considered, perhaps, is that of increasing wealth, pride in ownership and in security made possible by trade and technology. Medieval Europe may not have been static technologically though less developed than China in terms of inventions, it had acquired a quantitative approach to matter, according to Crosby (1997). It is possible to suggest that advances in technology during the medieval centuries enabled societies to ourish in which the developments of thought, art, and consumption which could be later constituted as The Renaissance, were cultivated. But the really revolutionary ideas of the period and its aftermath, such as the new cosmologies of Copernicus (14731543) and Galileo (15641642) where, as John Donne (15721631) put it,
new philosophy calls all in doubt, The element of re is quite put out; The sun is lost, and thearth, and no mans wit Can well direct him where to look for it.

are certainly little related to energy efciency, climatic change, or soil type. Later centuries show some similarities. Keith Thomass book (1983) on the re-valuation of nature in England in the years 15001800 argues that in many ways the men and women of those years developed a willingness to be more tender towards the living but non-human components of their world. But nowhere does he hold that these are strongly related to material change. He associates a new kindness to animals with the oncoming of industrialization (both in Britain and elsewhere in Europe) but thinks that the conditions for it were in place by 1700, rather before any strong manifestations of the new order. Yet as he says, if the prerequisites were latent in the JudaeoChristian tradition, why did they emerge at a particular time and place, if it were not for changes in social and economic conditions? The point of nexus for him is the greater use of working animals in the sight of well-to-do townsmen or the clergy, though he embeds this in a wider context of cultural and social practices, mostly of a pre-industrial type. Possibly the growth of city living is more important than the primary economic type; there appears to be no major technological changes of a mediating kind. In her account of western ideas from the hunter-gatherers of the Americas through to sustainability, Merchant (1995) constructs an inclusive history in which the story of Western civilization since the 17th century can be conceptualized as a grand narrative of fall and recovery. The story is carried by the three subplots of religion, modern science, and capitalism. None of these, we may notice, enforces a particular economy, though capitalism and industrialization seem to be umbilically linked outside the former Communist nations. Individual values therefore are attached

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to this narrative as a whole rather than major changes in material circumstances. The same might possibly apply to other meta-narratives; in a different interpretation of Western ideas, Arran Gare (1993) details the withdrawal of philosophy from any attempt at totalizing of knowledge: it no longer deals with the whole worlds interactions of nature, history and society. In large measure, this is caused by a drift down the centuries towards the dominance of nihilism. Its current end-point is a highly individualistic society, which involves an extreme detachment from, and instrumentalization of, the world, whether that world be of nature or of other people. People in particular are not participants in the stream of life and in the becoming of the world but transcendent consciousness in a world of things which are only externally related to each other. The watchwords are reason, foresight and efciency. The connections to material conditions are at most secondary. This last point seems to emerge from many studies of the possibility of technological determinism, where a considerable body of opinion declares that technology constrains but does not determine. Even highly-coupled technological explanations of socio-economic change cannot account for all the variance in the historical picture: Bimber (1994) argues that even Marx was not really a technological determinist. But there are hard versions of technological determinism in which a sequence of technological development prescribes an evolutionary path for societies irrespective of their social and cultural practices. A softer version would apply this to industrial capitalism but not previous periods of history. Overall, technological determinism looks more convincing over big sweeps of time and place, but the picture seems more contingent at smaller scales. At both, the alternative to a kind of total freedom for technology is its social production. It is becoming increasingly clear that the gender relations of a society will be important in these kinds of connections.

evolution of different types of economy. Yet neither are they irrelevant to the construction of the Western worldview, which is now so dominant in all its aspects, including that of environmental thought. The bringing forward of the fragment and of the instant moment seems not to have diminished a belief in an ordered cosmos. Uncertainty within limits seems to be the only reasonable judgement upon the apparent free-oaters: like a kite in unskilled hands, there is a lot of swooping about even if the strings are nite in length.

FRAGMENTATION
Any world chronicle furnishes examples of social changes, which can be interpreted as producing societies in which the demands of the individual are addressed before those of the polity as a whole. Some of these metamorphoses also lead to instrumentalities where the non-human world comes very low in any list of priorities. In such an account of the Holocene, the starting point can be taken as our reading of hunter-gatherer societies which live within the compass of a unied mythology. The worldview thus engendered may well encompass all aspects of life: the relations between individual humans as well as between the group and its food sources are all referable to the same mythic structure as the social agglomeration and its place in the cosmos. It seems unlikely that such myths always provided for harmony among people or for an unuctuating relationship with resources (and so should not therefore be romanticised unduly) but nevertheless it provided a coherent explanation of uncertainties at most temporal and spatial scales. Very similar mentalities may have pertained in the earliest agricultural communities of the hill-lands of the Levant but once successful irrigation agriculture was established in the basins of great rivers (such as the Nile, TigrisEuphrates, Indus and Huang He), then stratied societies might emerge. They contained classes of people who were devoted to e.g., government, religion, or artisanship and so were no longer in daily physical contact with soil, plants and animals in the way that is inevitable for a hunter-gatherer. Such trends are obviously, intensied in urban societies, though the small absolute size of the pre19th century city must not be forgotten. Thus both for the townspeople and the farmers, the natural world is potentially an instrument of a cultural set of ordinances and not an intuitively perceived ow through the quotidian existence of all (Shepard, 1982). For some interpreters, this can be seen as the beginning of the regarding of nature as part of the Other. The relationships of this type of economy become closer after the development of fossil fuel energy in the 19th century. Modern technology has proved to be a fragmenter of myths, economic systems and land cover systems alike.

AGENCY AND STRUCTURE

In any summary of worldviews, therefore, the self-image of the human being is intimately bound up with what can be technologically achieved but which then feeds back in a self-aware view of him/herself that must surely affect humanenvironment relations but at a remove. These images might include: (a) the economic man (sic) of the post-Enlightenment period who is individualistic, materialistic and utilitarian; (b) the competitive individual beloved of the Social Darwinists; (c) the people who were successful because they could deal with the base instincts revealed by Freud; (d) the reductionist product beloved of psychologists who think that behaviour will someday be totally explicable at the molecular level; and (e) the notion that humans are essentially spirit in a contingent animal casing. None of these appears to be closely coupled to the

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Yet between say 5000 BCE and 1800 CE, the world was dominated by economies which depended upon recentlyxed biomass for their existence (Simmons, 1996) and within this pre-industrial world, some trends of social individuation can be discerned. For example, the communal life of the manor in medieval Europe was altered by the withdrawal of the lord and his lady to private apartments behind the hall, a change which eventually resulted in the 1718th century development of the corridor, allowing genuinely private rooms, especially bedrooms. Stronger movements towards social privatization from openness to seclusion start in the later Middle Ages (in Europe at least) and accelerate around 1800. Hence they partly coincide with and partly precede the development of industrialisation, with its reliance upon technology and its subsidy of current biomass by fossil fuels. Instances might include the banishment of (normal) death in public from the middle of the 18th century, death by execution in public disappears (mostly) between 1770 and 1870, and around 1800 prisons and madhouses cease to be public spectacles for the curious. Further, ca. 1800, the private enclosed space of the nuclear family begins to dominate in the west (Spierenburg, 1991). It is not surprising, then, that further and different kinds of drawing apart should come to pass in the 19th century, given all the innovations of all kinds that the century provided. Steiner (1989) proposes that the 1870s were the critical time, with the poetry of Stephan Mallarme as the emblematic event, since it rst explicitly dissociated word from meaning (his words reached out in all directions towards other words and images, being uid, ambiguous and suggestive, according to one critic) clearing the path for modern semiotics and eventually, an idealist view of the world as being only language. Yet, Mallarme can be seen to have written at a time when many connectivities were being severed. Examples include the pointillisime of Seurat, the making of moving lms as images per second, the pictures without object of Kandinsky, the loss of tonality in Schoenbergs music, the atomistic science of Cajal and the invention in Cuba (then a Spanish colony) of the concentration camp (Everdell, 1997). The shifts of 18701910 can perhaps be summed up in the transitions of the paintings of Piet Mondrian in those years or given a coda in the anxious splinters of T S Eliots The Waste Land of 1922. More recent developments include the individuation of entertainment and communications via the Walkman, the VCR (video cassette recorder) and the mobile telephone, the display of the dissected innards and body parts of animals as high art, the withdrawal of public broadcasting in favour of owned channels and its parallel in transport. There has also been a rise in the fragment rather than the prolonged: concert promoters speak of the increased popularity of shorter pieces (so performances of Dimitri Shostakovitchs 7th Symphony [80 min] are getting rare). TV programs

gravitate to the magazine format rather than any extended treatment, with childrens programmes becoming a total whirl of short spans and desperate camera angles. Most signicant of all has been the replacement in more than one national culture of the 5-day cricket game as the norm by various shorter and more colourful versions. Is there any reection of these long-term events in environmental connectedness? To quote a set of parallel examples is certainly not to establish a causal relationship. But it is not very difcult to see the setting out of different land cover and water use systems, which differentiate between production, pleasure and nature. In the case of the rst, common property resources have undergone constant attrition through several thousand years: the open elds of Europe have steadily become privately owned in the name, largely, of more intensive production. Much open and commonly held land was enclosed and reclaimed as soon as legal and technological systems allowed, examples can be found from the Fens of East Anglia to the American West. The second category can be seen in the way special places are set aside for recreational use in rural areas: the right to roam of e.g., Sweden is a rare phenomenon. Eventually there is the nature reserve and the wilderness in which wild nature (even pristine ecosystems if these can be proven) is set apart in a legal and often physical sense from the rest of the region in which it is situated. The UNCLOS (United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea) ndings attempted to apply the same trends to the oceans. The end-point of this group is found in the assertions of environmental conservatives that only total private ownership of resources and environment will prevent degradation.

COALESCENCE
For many discernible long-term trends in human affairs, a counter-current can be found. If we look at 10 000 years of human history and its relationship to natural history, comings-together can be discerned as well as drawingsapart. One of the earliest was the formation of empires, which covered large areas and facilitated within them certain uniformities. The Roman Empire, for example, imposed a largely uniform legal system from the Levant to Wales. Thus as early as the 15th century it would have been possible to trade a small and valuable item from Ireland to Japan. Similar processes were carried further by later imperia based on industry; the coalescence of these and earlier world systems has been chronicled by Wallerstein and his critics (Frank and Gills, 1993). The present-day equivalent seems to be the globally instantaneous electronic telecommunications that spin a digital web round the earth rather like candy-oss round a fairground stick. The difference between the 15th century and today is perhaps the way

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in which that system is, above all, devoted to processing the symbols of capital and allowing gobs of them to spin off and alight in one place or another to be the sweeteners of various developments. As well as the spinning of money, there is now the transfer of verbal information and image on an instantaneous basis via the Internet. It is easy to over-estimate the inuence of such a device since its distribution is rather limited and its driving forces, initially anarchic, seem to be coming under the control of big players. But as an embodiment of Vernadskys conception (1945) of the noosphere (a mind-sphere equivalent to the biosphere and atmosphere; see Noosphere, Volume 5), it comes closer than anything so far experienced, more so even than cheap travel by jet aircraft. For capitalistic modernism, the metaphor of the machine for both humanity and nature seems appropriate; the post-modernist world of virtual money seems not yet to have developed a comparable meta-metaphor. The binding systems with environmental linkages are often of a hybrid human-nature type like the oceans and atmosphere. Not only were these globally interactive in their natural state but the human impacts upon them have the potential to be spread globally. Some inuences are coalescent: that of the greenhouse gases is well documented and there is a persistent worry that there could be an equivalent in the oceans since they receive all the substances put upon the land and among these are many compounds toxic to life. The couplings revealed by intensive study of the temperature regime of the Pacic Ocean carry the implicit suggestion that any human-induced global warming may affect the frequency and intensity of for instance El Nino events. All these add up to a world in which the driving force of a population growth, which arrived at 6 billion in 1999, cannot be ignored at any scale. Demographic change can be seen as a non-reversible binding force which determines the size of the gyre which links humanity and nature, as indeed does the degree to which societies have access to commercial energy (Adams, 1988). Can these trends bring about coalescence and bindings within the organic and human spheres? Without doubt, there are material changes consequent upon empires and trade. The Roman Empire was the cause of the production of wheat throughout much of its extent since it desired that particular cereal for bread. It also affected nature in the pursuit of the circus: North Africa and Asia Minor for example were depleted almost entirely of their lion populations in order to obtain animals for these spectacles; Scotland contributed a bear to one such festive occasion. Trade and discovery encouraged the transfer of species from one continent to another, so that European weeds became as familiar in the tropics as potatoes in industrial cities of northern Europe. This process started as early as the spread of Neolithic crops from the Levant to Western Europe but received enormous impetus during the 16th

century conquests by European powers and again in the 19th centurys age of empire. The latter, for instance, brought about great ecological similarities in the tropics when different ecosystems were converted to the ubiquitous plantation producing rubber or plant oil. In todays environments, there are effects in the type of food production encouraged by the Green Revolution and its successor developments. Large amounts of fertilizers, biocides and water produce a uniformity of production methods, which the more rmly installed by the conditions of uniform produce demanded by industrial-nation supermarkets. The general uniformity of several kinds of tourist destinations (is this fenced-off and guarded resort hotel in Thailand, Kenya or the Caribbean?) is another outcome of the globalizing forces. World-wide, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is the institution which most produces this uniformity since it enforces the conception that every region must do what it does best without regard to local culture or the carbon-loadings brought about by exportoriented economies. The way in which the application of natural sciences seem most likely to bind globally is via biotechnology, in which genetic uniformity is the most strongly aligned to the demands of world commerce. Such as dictated by global trade organisations and development institutions with their you must do a lot of what you do best [as we judge it] policies, following the lead of international agencies. The reduction in the genetic diversity of crop plants during the 20th century as a result of commercial pressures to home in on one or two varieties or strains is well known. In that light, the advent of cloning from a single cell, as happened with a sheep in 1997, seems a logical development and full of business potential. It seems unlikely that it will produce a higher biodiversity in the world outside the laboratory, unless by some chance its search for genetic resources allies it to the conservationist movement.

IMPROVISATION AS A VIRTUE
The sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1989) points out that humans cannot communicate directly with the non-human world via speech. Though some New Age enthusiasts would dispute the assertion, most people in the Western world would, after a brief but regretful pause, agree. Luhmann suggests that in fact we talk to each other about the environment and since it is such a complex set of discourses, the discussions are separated out into a set of specialized channels in each of which there is resonance. Each of these channels corresponds to some recognised organizational conduit through which a discussion can ow. Thus we can have environmental economics, law, sociology, politics, religion, education, poetry, music, each containing a set of resonances about what is essentially the same thing but which has been represented in different ways.

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One more important cultural facet can be added: in the West there has long been a tendency to dualism. Thus in each channel, the thrust is towards a 0/1 dichotomy: legal/illegal, relative/absolute, scientic/nonscientic, economic/uneconomic, and in the last analysis, good/evil. Again relating to much earlier histories, there is the concomitant likelihood that the 1 state will be Us and the 0 state, the Other. Thus one outcome of attempts to represent the complexity of humanenvironment relations is a series of separations of both fact (in the sense of the facts of politics, economics and law, for example) and value in the connotation of what is acceptable and what is not. An appealing image for this analysis is that of the pipeorgan. Looking at an organ case, we see a number of pipes of different length which each sounds only one note but which can be on or off: the correspondence to Luhmanns idea of resonances is quite strong. In some organ cases, the pipes are grouped rather as our approach to knowledge is clustered: the sciences, the social sciences, humanities and similar groups. Pursuing the analogy, we remember that the instrument can be played to an exact score as laid down by a composer, or the player may improvise. Another image that could be helpful is that of the DNA (Di-ribo Nucleic Acid) molecule. Models show a double helix with the strands linked by base pairs. One strand could represent the actual changes in the world and the other our ideas about those transformations. The base pairs then look like the ways in which information about the one is transferred to the other. Some of the pairs will embody the best possible information ow whereas others will necessarily be fragmented or distorted. We can imagine a state in which information about an environmental process is not collected because it is too expensive or where known data are concealed because of the effect they might have on a companys share value. The model could be taken further to suggest the increasing magnitude of the interactions by widening the gyre of the helix and by colouring the strands to show the historic sequence. One problem is that it gives, as do tabular constructions, an air of inevitability: the possibility of contingent change looks unlikely. On the other hand, a creative piece of computer graphics might encompass all these aspects in a way several thousand words cannot.

TRENDS IN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORIOGRAPHY

The historian William Cronon (1992) has remarked that we have had studies of ecology and economy, or studies of nature, but too rarely have we had all three together. Apart from the actual difculties of bringing into one focus the different kinds of information provided in such approaches, there is perhaps the point that environmental history has tended to be directed towards certain ends. There are many

examples of histories, which are prophetic in the sense of being warnings against a future, which is either inevitable or avoidable by prompt action. In Classical Greece, for instance, the Epicureans thought that the land was senile, overpopulated and that generally both it and the population had declined in their capabilities since an earlier Golden Age when all was in an optimal condition. In the period from 1965 onwards, roughly, there has been a plethora of books on environment, which have traced trajectories of the decline of nature and the rise of overpopulation and pollution. Almost every period in recorded history has been seen as the turning point towards perdition: the Ancient Worlds eventual materialism, the desacralization of Medieval Europe, the anthropocentrism of the Renaissance, the mechanical model of the world of Newtonian physics as adopted enthusiastically by the industrial revolution, the relativism thought to be made possible by the discoveries of uncertainties of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, and the triumph of capitalism inherent in the fall of the Berlin Wall, have all been seen as signal events and processes on the way to hell. Some histories indeed suggest that a short but pyrotechnic existence is the evolutionary fate of the human species and that we might as well have a hell of a good party even if we are sick in the bushes afterwards. Within such over-riding themes, shorter periods attract more diverse agendas. In an era of the discovery of the ills of colonialism, the adverse environmental effects of imperial foresters, farmers and white hunters are bound to attract attention though some counterbalance has been offered by the role of colonial scientists in their prescient studies of the relation of rainfall, land use and environmental stabilities. Then again, reaction against some particular aspect of the present is often seminal. In the United Kingdom, the urban sprawl of the 1920s and 1930s reinforced myths about the rural idyll of (especially) the English village and provoked books, poetry and paintings that implanted the more acceptable faces of the pre-1914 landscape in peoples minds as the desirable piece of heritage that might have to be fought for. It was not the images of industrial Halifax, or bungaloid Peacehaven that were supposed to inspire Tommy in his trench in Flanders or his tank outside Tobruk, but the combination of thatched cottage, medieval church and friendly pub. In the race for the tourist dollar and yen, the environment of Scotland is a powerful adjunct, no matter that much of it results from centuries of over-exploitation by rich landlords eager for prots from timber, sheep and deer or that the tartan cult is a 19th century invention by an English cloth maker with some spare capacity and an eye for the purchasing power of the military. Romanticism, on the other hand, was largely provoked by the valuation of the individual over the mass. While it often attracted environmental icing (such as Wordsworths anathema to the coming of the railways to the Lake District), it

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is linkable to changes in the natural world only indirectly: by the growth of human population numbers, possibly. Yet the break with previous attitudes was absolutely critical in the revaluation of for example the mountain and other wild landscapes of Europe and North America, with incalculable consequences for the founding and management of national parks and for the rise of tourism. So the writing of environment history is bound to look out for examples of contingent turning points of an analogous character and the present time of turmoil of thinking and opinion-forming can thus be posited as a turning point from the pre-existing era governed by the machine metaphor to another phase, for which the appropriate language has not been born, but which will share in the renewed valuation of emotion, community and communication: a sort of environmental post-Diana syndrome.

ABANDONING BALANCE
The death in 1997 of the historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin recalls the relevance of some of his thought. He notes that the attainment of Utopias is usually accompanied by coercion on a large scale. The techno-centrics are accused of many sins in their exploitation of primary resources in developing countries, for example; the eco-centrics are labelled eco-fascists and associated with unsavoury regimes that were practitioners of some ecologically acceptable ideas. So Berlin (1991) would not favour the provision of a score with a de nite end in view; rather he is with the improvisers. He also reminds us of the relevance of the fragment of the Greek Archilochus, The fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing , for it is the Utopians that know one big thing and they are usually prepared to convert everybody to their point of view, like it or not. In our present context, then, Berlin s words seem germane. He suggests that a
perfect solution is, not merely in practice, but in principle, impossible in human affairs, and any determined attempt to produce it is likely to lead to suffering, disillusionment and failure.

no straight thing was ever made and in this context, no straight thing has ever been made nor is it worth trying. Fudge, muddle, crabwise-movement and indeed improvisation are the ways in which most attempts to construct a modus vivendi are made and which produce the greatest and most lasting successes. This raises the dif cult issue of the relation between pluralism and relativism. Many thinkers might agree that the independence of the non-human world imposes in the end some limits, as does the nite nature of the capabilities of the human organism, as indeed do the empirical possibilities of human organisation. Further, to echo Kierkegaard, relativism is possible for history but is much more dif cult in making decisions for the future (Lukes, 1998). There are, naturally, notional confrontations which we may be asked to consider, which are too far removed from the everyday to matter to us as individuals, though they may matter a great deal to others. Then there are real options, in which, as Manuel Castells (1998) exhorts:
liberation is for people to free themselves from uncritical adherence to theoretical or ideological schemes, to construct their practice on the basis of their experience, while using whatever information or analysis is available to them, from a variety of sources.

In this we can recognise not only the need for pluralism but also that analysis may include the best moral judgement that a shared, locally felt, democracy can produce. No place for Utopia, therefore; neither for existential hand-wringing. So organists need to follow J S Bach all the way: they need to be able to understand the scores and to leave some of them behind as inspiration for those to follow but the real genius is shown in the quality of the improvisations (see Virtual Environments, Volume 5).

REFERENCES
Adams, R N (1988) The Eighth Day, Social Evolution as the SelfOrganisation of Energy, University of Texas Press, Austin, TX. Benton, T (1996) Marxism and Natural Limits, in The Greening of Marxism, ed T Benton, Guilford Press, New York, 157 183. Berlin, I (1991) The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed H Hardy, Fontana, London. Berlin, I (1992) Vico and Herder, The Hogarth Press, London. Bimber, B (1994) Three faces of Technological Determinism, in Does Technology Drive History? eds M R Smith and L Marx, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 79 100. Braudel, F (1972) The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II, Harper Collins, London. Castells, M (1988) End of Millennium. The Information Age, Vol. 3, Blackwell, Malden, MA. Cronon, W (1992) A Place for Stories: Nature, History and Narrative, J. Am. Hist., 78, 1347 1476. Crosby, A W (1997) The Measure of Reality. Quantication and Western Society, 1250 1600, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Among other reasons, this is because there are incommensurables to be dealt with, there are choices between paths of equal good, and indeed some ultimate values may be incompatible with one another, then,
the best that one can do is to try and promote some kind of equilibrium, necessarily unstable, between the different aspirations of differing groups of human beings [this] is not a passionate battle-cry to inspire men to sacri ce and martyrdom and heroic feats. Yet if it were adopted, it might yet prevent mutual destruction, and, in the end, preserve the world.

The phrase crooked timber is from Immanuel Kant, who observed that out of the crooked timber of humanity

72 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE Everdell, W R (1997) The First Moderns. Pro les in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Frank, A G and Gills, B K (1993) The World System. Five Hundred Years or Five thousand? Routledge, London. Gare, A (1993) Nihilism Incorporated. European Civilization and Environmental Destruction, Ecological Press, Bungendore, NSW. Goldblatt, D (1996) Social Theory and the Environment, Polity Press, Cambridge. Grubler, A (1994) Technology, Changes in Land Use and Land Cover: A Global Perspective, eds W B Meyer and B L Turner, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 287 328. Harvey, D L and Reed, M H (1994) The Evolution of Dissipative Social Systems, J. Soc. Evol. System., 17, 371 411. Hughes, J D (1994) Pans Travail. Environmental Problems of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD. Jardine, L (1996) Worldly Goods. A New History of the Renaissance, Macmillan, London. Kautsky, K (1988) The Materialist Conception of History, ed J H Kautsky, Yale University Press, London. Littleton, C S (1982) The New Comparative Mythology. An Anthropological Assessment of the Theories of Georges Dum ezil, 3rd edition, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Luhmann, N (1989) Ecological Communication, Polity Press, Cambridge. Lukes, S (1998) Berlins Dilemma. The Distinction between Relativism and Pluralism, Times Literary Supplement, 4956, March 27, 8 10. Matthews, E (1984) Global Inventory of Pre-Agricultural and Present Biomass, Prog. Biomet., 3, 237 246. Merchant, C (1995) Reinventing Eden: Western Culture as a Recovery Narrative, in Uncommon Ground. Toward Reinventing Nature, eds W Cronon and W W Norton, New York, 132 159. Oelschlager, M (1991) The Idea of Wilderness, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. Parsons, H L (1977) Marx and Engels on Ecology, Greenwood Press, Westport, CN. Shepard, P (1982) Nature and Madness, Sierra Club, San Francisco, CA. Simmons, I G (1996) Changing the Face of the Earth, 2nd edition, Blackwell, Oxford. Smil, V (1994) Energy in World History, Westview Press, Boulder, CO. Spierenburg, P (1991) The Broken Spell. A Cultural and Anthropological History of Preindustrial Europe, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ. Steiner, G (1989) Real Presences, Faber and Faber, London. Thomas, K (1983) Man and the Natural World. Changing Attitudes in England 1500 1800, Allen Lane, London. Thompson, W I (1989) Pacic Shift, in Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought: Essays in Environmental Philosophy, eds J B Callicott and R T Ames, SUNY Press, Albany, NY, 25 36. Toynbee, A (1976) Mankind and Mother Earth. A Narrative History of the World, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Vernadsky, V I (1945) The Biosphere and the Noosphere, Am. Sci., 33(1), 1 12.

Globalization in Historical Perspective

JOHN H BODLEY
Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA

Globalization can be understood as a cultural process in which peoples, cultures, natural resources, and ecosystems from throughout the world are drawn into a single, vast, elite-directed network of production and consumption. Such a network was certainly in place by 1600, but its human and cultural roots lie much deeper. From a broad historical perspective, globalization is a scale phenomenon in which growth occurs in great waves up to the limits set by particular cultural organizational structures, in particular social and natural environments. When a growth threshold is reached, either some form of perhaps cyclical equilibrium is established, or a breakthrough beyond the limit is achieved to a larger scale. Another cultural transformation must take place before another growth wave can occur, and so on. Globalization is simply the most recent phase of a humanly driven cultural process designed to increase the scale of culture. The principal outcome of this growth process is greater concentration of social power. This growth process is fundamentally different from biological evolution, which is concerned with species-level survival, and may not be directed toward a goal of greater organizational scale and complexity.

THEORETICAL PRELUDE
Globalization resembles earlier cultural transformations, but it has produced a profoundly different cultural world because of the absolute quantities of people, energy ow, and materials involved, and the distinctive cultural institutions that globalization requires. The historical evidence suggests that beyond a certain minimum scale, cultural growth naturally becomes an elite-directed process that disproportionately benets the elite and shifts costs to the majority. This makes growth a difcult process to sustain, because elite decision-makers who enjoy increased benets, but are relatively unaffected by increased costs, have little incentive to accept natural or cultural limits. As used here, scale refers to the absolute size of population, economic values, or any quantitative variable related to human well-being. Culture scale refers to specic order of magnitude differences in the size of social systems, and the corresponding cultural features that support them. The theory is that scale-increases occur as an elite-directed process designed to disproportionately concentrate social power under elite control. In this respect, big may not be better for everyone, but small economies may be beautiful as Schumacher (1973) has observed. Scale theory, by emphasizing the role of human decisionmaking and decision-makers, addresses the theoretical shortcomings of orthodox cultural evolutionary theory, and offers a more useful way to understand globalization.

Evolutionary, historical, or sociological explanations of cultural development that take society as the unit that adapts itself under the inuence of natural selection are theoretically unsatisfactory, because such explanations make the growth process appear both natural and inevitable. These approaches also tend to ignore, or obscure, the role of human decision-making agents, and the differential distribution of the costs and benets of growth. Scale theory takes individuals and households as the active, decision-making units, and treats socially expressed culture, ideology, technology, and institutions as the means, or survival vehicles used by particular human agents to achieve their objectives and improve their life chances . This assumes that humans are primarily driven to survive and reproduce, and to ensure that their children will be able to do the same. In support of this primary biological objective, individuals may have an innate, although variable disposition to dominate and exploit others whenever possible, and they will seek to minimize their own effort by getting others to work for them. However, the existing institutional structure of culture sets limits on competitive striving by individual decision-makers. Scale theory is theoretically related to the evolutionary materialism approach outlined by sociologist Stephen Sanderson (1990, 1999), and the concept of dynamic materialism developed by economic historian Graeme Snooks (1996, 1997, 1998). The common assumption of these approaches is that globalization was not pre-ordained, is not

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inevitable, and is perhaps not even an adaptive, or benecial process for humanity as a whole, in contrast to the claims of orthodox evolutionary theory, and many current advocates of globalization. Robert Wright (2000) for example, claims that globalization is the product of natural cooperation, not competitive struggle. It is inappropriate to apply a purely biological model of evolution to cultural development because culture and cultural information are transmitted much more easily than genes. Culture change is an intentionally-directed process, that occurs through purposeful invention, diffusion, and/or imitation, rather than through random mutation and natural selection. However, because human genes and culture affect each other, it is more accurate to acknowledge that human development is a co-evolutionary process involving both culture and biology (Boyd and Richerson, 1985). Furthermore, civilizations do not reproduce and multiply, rather, they have historically grown larger and fewer. Carneiro (1978) and Naroll (1967) graphically demonstrate the long-run decline in the number of polities in the world, and Taagepera (1978a,b, 1997) shows how they have increased in territorial size. Civilizations may appear to compete with other civilizations as systems, but their human leaders are the actual competing units. When evolutionary success is measured by either adaptability or reproductive success, civilizations fare poorly as evolving organisms , because their diversity, numbers, and longevity decline over time. Culture itself was the key to human adaptive success, but the growth of human cultural systems has been curiously maladaptive for humanity as a whole because it has reduced cultural diversity, made patently less-sustainable cultures dominant, and actually increased the absolute number of people living under suboptimum physical conditions.

GLOBALIZATION AND SCALE THEORY

If globalization is fundamentally a scale phenomenon, it is important to consider the physical signicance of size. The scale of human society and culture is important theoretically because it is related to four crucial variables: 1. 2. 3. 4. the level and distribution of household well-being, standard of living, or human costs and benets; the distribution of decision-making power; the institutional complexity and technological organization of society; the trajectory of growth and the dynamics of change.

Scale-increase is a disruptive, increasingly expensive process that changes all of these variables, and disturbs pre-existing equilibria. It is difcult to imagine why natural selection would ever favor growth in the scale of society and culture in general, or the development of a global-scale culture in particular. Size is a crucial variable

in nature, where large things are understandably rare. Small animals can survive on fewer resources than large animals. They reproduce more rapidly, recover more quickly, and can adapt to change more easily than larger animals. This may be the reason why bacteria are the most successful organisms on earth and perhaps in the universe, considering total number of individuals, diversity of species, total biomass, and overall adaptability as the measure of success. Likewise, people living in small cultures can respond more quickly to environmental changes, and can make decisions more democratically than people in larger societies. Energy-intensive communications and transportation technology make it possible for global-scale societies to respond quickly to environmental crises, but bureaucracy and power inequalities bias such response. Because of their relative social equality, people in smaller societies are more able to share the benets of their success. Scale itself may be the most important variable, because basic human nature can be assumed to be a constant. The physical laws of gravity, and geometry mean that growth is an allometric process, in which internal relationships change disproportionately. For example, surface area increases geometrically by the square of length, and volume and mass increase by the cube of length. These principles also apply to cultural growth and development, and especially to globalization. The most critical disproportion for human societies is in the distribution of social power and decision-making abilities. Social power naturally becomes disproportionately concentrated in the elite as societies grow larger, unless specic cultural countermeasures are applied by the majority. This helps explain why cultural growth occurs, and calls attention to who directs change, and who most benets from it. Like biological organisms, the size and form of human societies occur within relatively narrow ranges determined by thresholds set by physical laws and the functional limits of culture. The population of autonomous small-scale, domestically organized prehistoric societies averaged only 500 people, and typically ranged within magnitudes of under a threshold of 103 (19 thousands), although there were much larger tribal world systems. Pre-modern politically-organized city-states, and agrarian empires did not normally exceed population magnitudes of 107 (1099 millions), also organized into agrarian world systems. Commercial organization produced a global economic world system that is unlikely to ever exceed a magnitude of 1010 (1099 billions). Human settlements also display remarkable, mathematically-predictable scale regularities. For example Roland Fletcher (1995, 7181) found that settlement size appears to be limited by the increasing difculty of interpersonal communication and the stress of interaction that can only be overcome by organizational, technological, or design changes. The interactions amongst people in

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a settlement increase exponentially as population grows, such that a 10-fold increase in population would theoretically produce a 100-fold increase in potential interaction. Domestically organized villages typically remain below a threshold of 200500 persons. The urbanization process, or the transformation of villages into cities, was the rst crucial step toward globalization. Cities have always been at the center of sociocultural transformation and economic growth. Urbanization began when power-seeking elites successfully developed new political and economic institutions to overcome the limits to societal growth that maintained domestic-scale villages in equilibrium. Fletcher (1995, 8290) concludes that the total area of urban settlements, and the rate of urban growth are limited primarily by the technology of interpersonal communication. As cities grew larger, commercial exchange became a virtual necessity, because political power can only effectively command tribute payment within relatively narrow limits. The earliest cities became possible, some 6000 years ago, with the development of bureaucratic political organization, supported by writing, or its functional equivalent. These cultural changes permitted a 100-fold increase in the area of the earliest cities, above the area of pre-literate, domestically organized villages, and a 1000fold increase in areal growth rate. Andre Gunder Frank (1990, 1991) and Gills and Frank (1991) argue that globalization is the culmination of a growth process that began with the world system some 5000 years ago based on the earliest Mesopotamian citystates. The rst cities of 2545 000 people required lengthy and expensive exchange networks, and imply the existence of at least a regional world trade system for their material support. Five thousand years of continuous growth in this world system required massive transformations in cultural organization and technology. Cities of 100 000 people or more, which appeared by perhaps 500 BC, required monetary systems, and the large-scale commercialization of food systems which ultimately prepared the way for the capitalism world system. During the 4000 years up to 1500 AD, the number of such large cities in the world steadily increased from perhaps 8 in 2000 BC to 75 by 1500 AD. Their average population size increased from 30 000 to 100 000 people, with the largest over 500 000. By 1500 AD the total number of people living in such cities may have exceeded 7 million people (Chandler, 1987; Sanderson, 1999, 112; Wilkinson, 1992, 1993), and would have required the vast exchange system that became the modern global-scale world system. This new world economy initially grew out of a European foundation between 1450 and 1640, and became a truly global-scale world system by 1815 (Wallerstein, 1974). Globalization is an urban-centered phenomenon. Since approximately 1850, the development of fossil fuels, railroads, electronic communication, mechanized printing, and the emergence of

large-scale corporate businesses permitted a 100-fold scale increase in the size of cities beyond the previous threshold of 100 km2 and 10 million people, and a 1000-fold increase in urban growth rates.

THE DYNAMICS OF CULTURE SCALE

During the past million years proto-humans and humans have experienced eight great transformative waves of cultural development (Table 1), each producing societies of successively larger scale, and a larger global population. In this development process, the dynamics of culture change itself changed, becoming more rapid, and more narrowly directed. Globalization is only the most recent such transformation. The rst transformation may have been completed 100 000 years ago. This coincided with the appearance of physically modern humans, and fully human culture based on shared, socially-transmitted, symbolic information, and speech. The second transformation beginning perhaps as early as 50 000 years ago saw the development of highly efcient foraging technology which allowed people to occupy virtually the entire globe. Growth to the limits of efcient foraging produced an equilibrium world of perhaps 10 million people, with leadership widely dispersed. The third transformation was the change from mobile to settled village life based on domesticated plants and animals during the Neolithic, which began at the end of the Pleistocene 1015 000 years ago. The Neolithic wave produced a world of tribal villagers with perhaps 85 million people. Cultures can be grouped into three broad-scale types according to whether social power is organized domestically, politically, or commercially. Social power is the way individuals and households secure the material, social, and cultural resources that they need to maintain themselves and successfully reproduce. It is assumed that everyone is naturally driven to seek social power, although the specic form that power may take is an important cultural variable. When social power was domestically organized, all households
Table 1 Great cultural transformations

Domestic scale cultures Hominoids Humans, 100 000 BP Humans Forager cultures, 50 000 BP (speech, art) Foragers Village farmers, 10 000 BP (domestication) Political scale cultures Villages Chiefdoms, 8000 BP Chiefdoms Agrarian civilizations, 6000 BP (urbanization) Commercial scale cultures Agrarian civilizations mercantile capitalism, 1450 AD Mercantile capitalism industrial capitalism, 1800 AD Industrial capitalism nancial capitalism, 1900 AD

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had relatively equal access to crucial resources, and there was no incentive for growth in either the scale of society or economic productivity. Domestic cultures displayed demographic equilibria in general balances with their resources that could be measured in millennia. However, they were not totally static. It is a striking fact that most important domestic technologies including weaving, ceramics, and domestication were produced in domestically organized societies, and the benets were universally distributed. An important cultural organization and scale line was crossed some 8000 years ago, when the rst aspiring power elites succeeded in transforming the characteristically weak, temporary, and informal village headman position into the coercive political of ce of chief that could be transmitted cross-generationally within a ranked descent line system. In this politicization process, village chiefs were then able to extend political power over more than a single village, producing simple, and then larger, and more complex chiefdoms that encompassed thousands of people. As soon as it became possible for individuals to consolidate their power gains, and transmit them to their children, the move up the scale to city-states, kingdoms, and agrarian empires occurred relatively quickly. The key difference between this kind of elite-directed transformation, and the previous domestically directed developments, is that the bene ts and costs were not equally shared. In this respect the politicization process is not fundamentally different from the contemporary commercial globalization process. Under politicization, elites assume life or death power over commoners, and extract surplus energy from them, treating them much like domesticated animals. Elites enjoy superior life chances, because they control vast material surpluses and can insulate themselves from natural shortages. Elites live in larger, more secure residences, and they surround themselves with domestic servants, and multiple wives and concubines. The scale of elite power corresponds directly with the scale of society, thus producing a natural incentive for elites to promote further growth. Commoners must feed themselves, pay taxes, ght wars, suffer famines, and become human sacri ces, either in temples, royal tombs, or on battle elds. Elite-directed cultural developments such as urbanization, intensive agriculture, monumental architecture, monotheism, writing, and military technology are designed to support political power and exclude non-elites. How this great political transformation occurred cannot be fully explained, but power-seeking individuals had to overcome the limits that the majority placed on their leaders. It is likely that this occurred when the majority was forced to choose among the lesser of evils under crisis conditions. One of the paradoxes of large-scale, politicallyorganized societies is that they are conspicuously unstable. Social inequality and continuous expansion are dif cult and costly to sustain using political power. Ancient agrarian civilizations displayed a persistent pattern of growth

and collapse, with a long-term trend toward increasing total area, population, and urbanization. Equilibrium was an exception, and few civilizations lasted more than 130 years, and only rarely did they exceed 300 years (Taagpera, 1997). The threshold for politically-organized empires was probably reached by the British Empire which brie y controlled one-quarter of the world s population and land area. Growth beyond that level called for a different form of organization, and this requirement was met by an expansion of commercial enterprises.

THE CAPITALIST ROOTS OF GLOBALIZATION

Globalization is a cultural process in which economic elites use commercial exchanges to create a supra-national, global-scale social system, a world-economy , that operates without a single centralized political power. As Wallerstein (1974) observes, an economically-based world system makes possible a much larger, more ef cient, and apparently more resilient system than could be integrated into a world-empire by political power alone. Globalization was created by the great cultural transformation that accompanied the rise of capitalism in Europe. Thus, capitalism itself is the key to understanding globalization. There have been many formal de nitions of capitalism, but its most critical feature is that it supports the rise to dominant decision-making power of commercial elites, who are able to concentrate social power by co-opting, and at times even directing the politicization process in order to promote their commercial projects. Capital is social power, whether in the form of nance capital, xed capital in buildings, equipment, and inventory, or land. Capital accumulation, rather than consumption, is the primary objective of a capitalist economy. Under capitalism, the commercial elite is dominant, but political rulers may sometimes also take a direct entrepreneurial role. Rulers support and defend commercial activities, they supply crucial infrastructure, and help to maintain and develop human capital by supporting public education, health, and welfare. The capitalist commercial elites are politically free to develop new institutions and organizational forms that allow them to accumulate capital by commercial business enterprises. The minimal formal elements of capitalism include developed markets for land, labor, and money. In classical Marxist terms, capitalism can be readily de ned as an economic system in which money is primarily exchanged for commodities, which are in turn exchanged for more money. This is production for commercial exchange, rather than for domestic consumption, or use value. The dominant purpose of exchange is to obtain a monetary pro t. The social structure of capitalism is distinctly unequal. Adam Smith (1776) described this inequality as specialization, or a division of labor between landlords, manufacturers, and laborers,

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arguing that laborers naturally needed masters. When viewed as a total economy (Snooks, 1994), a national capitalist economy has three sectors, with a household economy at the center, which produces, maintains, and allocates labor, and receives wages, salaries, interest, and goods and services from the private commercial sector and from the public, or political sector. The national economy is not a closed system, but gives and receives economic ows to and from other national economies. The basic organizational elements of capitalism include a world-economy with a geographic and hierarchical functional division of labor, and with strong national states at the core. The global hierarchy is expressed as an unequal international distribution of costs and benets in which the holders of capital are rewarded more generously than those who have only their labor to exchange. Maldistribution of power thus seems to be an intrinsic feature of this system, especially in the absence of a strong world-empire government. A long-running intellectual debate over the origins of capitalism and globalization concerns the relative importance of ideological factors versus material conditions. Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (1996) places capitalism within a broader European cosmology that views people as naturally evil and selsh. From this perspective, economic scarcity is also a natural and perpetual human condition, and it is a given that societies are controlled by hierarchical power structures and coercive governments. These ideas are sustained by the salutary beliefs that everyone will benet from economic growth driven by free market capitalism. These fundamental beliefs also explain the quest for increased social power and technological progress, which are thought to be natural and inevitable. Many anthropologists are cultural materialists, arguing that economic practices are primarily determined by material conditions. However they acknowledge that cultural ideas, or beliefs, are an important part of human motivation. The beliefs underlying capitalism can be treated as the ideological causes of globalization, because they rationalize the cultural transformations that produces globalization. From a materialist and a scale perspective, elite power-seeking is the primary motivation for globalization. However, the opportunities for power-seeking are limited by both environmental and cultural conditions as shaped by historical circumstance. Diverse belief systems can be mobilized to rationalize many different power-seeking strategies, and in that respect must be considered secondary to the personal motivation of power-seeking. To some extent, globalization was a consumer-driven process, but consumer demand is highly constrained by the cultural organization of power, political economy, and political ecology. Globalization was also not just a product of the market economy or monetization, because for millennia organized markets and money have linked villages, towns, and cities in all the major civilizations. However, local markets have primarily traded

in domestic staples, and beneted society as a whole. It was long-distance trade in luxury goods for the elite that made it possible for merchants to take advantage of protproducing price differentials and offered the initial step toward globalization.

THE EUROPEAN ORIGINS OF GLOBALIZATION

In order to explain the origins of the modern capitalist world, social scientists at rst focused on European science, exploration, and technology. Initially, they considered the Industrial Revolution to be the principal architect of material progress. However, 20th century historians demonstrated that capitalism preceded industrialization by centuries, and they argued that the long-term process of capital accumulation gradually produced widespread improvement in human welfare. For example, Snooks (1993, 4) ecstatically proclaimed that industrial growth since 1750, massively shifted the distribution of income in favor of the lower socioeconomic classes . At the same time many postmodern anthropologists argued that the commodities that were at the heart of globalization could be understood by their culturally unique symbolic meanings for individual consumers, and their use in the construction of individual self-identity (McCracken, 1988; Miller, 1987). Some even described commercialization as a democratic process in which markets, commodities, consumption patterns, and their cultural meanings came to be mutually constructed by marketers and consumers. Like earlier theories of cultural evolution, these postmodern interpretive approaches make capitalism and globalization seem both natural and inevitable, and avoid crucial issues of the distribution of material benets and social power. The capitalist global system was developed by merchants and investors centered successively in Venice, Antwerp, Genoa, Amsterdam, London, and New York. A growing number of elites in these urban trade centers enjoyed everhigher living standards and consumption levels, whereas wageworkers, serfs, or slaves gained little control over the conditions of daily life. Many Europeans did experience some improvements over the depressed living conditions and chronic insecurity they had experienced under feudalism. The economic elites who created the modern world system were responding to a historically unique set of circumstances. The crisis of feudalism from 12301400 that peaked in 1350 was the immediate precursor of the push for European commercial expansion overseas. This prolonged crisis was an unfortunate conjunction of bad weather, and overpopulation produced by gross inequality and over-consumption by the nobility. This situation created a century of hyperination, peasant rebellions, wars between the nobility, famine, and disease. The nobility

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raised rents to stay ahead of ination, but the less fortunate majority saw their absolute wages decline. The political and economic turmoil made it advantageous for the merchant and political elite, who were the only people capable of strategic economic planning, to turn to more capitalintensive technology, seek foreign resources, and invest in mercantile capitalism. Furthermore, the existence of autonomous market towns under the politically decentralized European feudal system created an obvious opening for enterprising merchants to expand their power (Sanderson, 1999). Economic crises spurred the growth of nancial capital because it forced governments to borrow from private lenders. Another round of ination and turmoil from 14701610 corresponded with the beginnings of longdistance overseas expansion, which was followed quickly by the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694, and the London stock exchange in 1697. Historian Fernand Braudel (1977) argued that successful commercial families were able to manipulate political and economic power within very hierarchical, but not totally closed European societies. A key element in their success was that they managed to transmit and accumulate their economic power across generations. Capital accumulation by a few households in an intensely competitive cultural environment confers a decisive advantage to the successful, as Snooks (1998) has observed. Accumulation would not be advantageous in a culture that distributed resources equitably. The fact that the European population had recovered from the 14th century devastation of plague and war by 1650, and began a long upward curve of exponential growth by 1800, suggests that most people were gaining some material benets from capitalism and globalization. Many ordinary households intensied their labor, producing more for the market, and engaging in wage labor as opportunities arose in the expanding cities. In this respect Europeans of all social strata participated in globalization, and beneted from it to some degree. However, very few were able to accumulate investment capital and secure economic independence. Some historians suggest that a consumer revolution or a democratization of consumption began in England and America as early the 18th century, and regard this as the rst appearance of mass consumption (McKendrick et al., 1982). Such an outcome would be evidence for a widely shared benet of globalization. However, even long after the beginning of globalization, living standards remained extremely inequitably distributed, and the benets of higher consumption levels spread very slowly. Consumption by the relatively powerless poor in the vast lower class was limited to the necessities of food and domestic durables. The shopkeepers, merchants, and professionals in the small middle class, could afford the comforts and decencies of house, groceries, bedding and tableware. The costly luxuries of the leisured lifestyle were reserved for the

handful of households in the upper gentry and aristocracy, who engaged actively in competitive emulation. As the global trade network of mercantile capitalism developed, newly imported commodities were generally consumed rst as luxuries by those in the highest social ranks, and were then very gradually diffused to the lower classes. By the 1680s, English merchants were importing different colors and qualities of cloth to appeal to specic social ranks, and giving out free samples to the nobility, hoping to both promote and prot from competitive emulation. The earliest imported consumer goods to become objects of mass consumption in England were pepper and dried fruit by 1559, tobacco by 1650, sugar by 1690, and tea by 1730 (Shammas, 1990, 1993). Wills (1992) stresses that new consumer markets did not just happen. They were created by intense competition between rival international trade monopolies. Theodore Rabb (1967) provides an excellent picture of the initiators and prime beneciaries of globalization who were centered in London between 1575 and 1630. In a given year, probably only 2500 individual investors owned the 33 joint-stock companies that actually funded and directed Englands mercantile-capitalism overseas expansion and thereby transformed the world. These economic elites represented no more than 0.25% of all households in the kingdom of some 5 million people. Three quarters of these investors were wealthy merchants who picked the only route open to them for material advancement, given their non-aristocratic social position. Only one quarter of the investors were drawn from the hereditary landed aristocracy, who represented the top 2% of the social hierarchy. Historian Lawrence Stone (1965, 1973) shows that the aristocrats were diversifying their investments in order to maintain their privileged social status which was threatened by the unsettled conditions accompanying the collapse of feudalism. European economic growth was certainly boosted by the 10-fold increase in the existing stock of gold and silver represented by imports to Europe between 1500 and 1680. The degree to which bullion was narrowly controlled is a truly astounding reection of the elite domination of the emerging global system as a whole. At this time, the Spanish hub of the New World silver trade was in Mexico city, where in an average year a mere 44 large investors handled more than 60% of total cargo value in trans-Atlantic commerce (Hoberman, 1991). The largest English development enterprise of the era, after privateering, was the British East India Company, which was founded in 1600. The East India Company proved to be an excellent investment. Seven of its trading expeditions conducted from 16011612 produced an average annual income of 132 for each investor. In England at that time 98% of households lived on less than 120 a year. Of course many of the larger investors owned shares in several different companies, and

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also received rents and other income. According to Gregory Kings (1936) careful estimates, by 1688 some 2000 large merchant traders were earning 400 a year, putting them economically almost equal with knights and esquires in the gentry class (King, 1936). Exploitation of low wage workers, slavery, trade monopolies, and privateering produced very high rates of returns on investments, but the very highest returns were enjoyed by aristocrats at the highest level of government who supplemented their investments with royal favors, bribes, and abuse of public ofce (Stone, 1973, 315). A few very high incomes undoubtedly accounted for much of the economic growth during this period, and not all was invested in further growth. Between 1600 and 1688 the total wealth of England more than tripled, and much of the new wealth nanced a frenzy of luxury building and consumption by the elite.

AGRARIAN TRANSFORMATION AND LONDON POVERTY, AD 15001700

The initial development of the modern world economic system is mirrored in the transformation of the English agrarian system between 1500 and 1700 AD This transformation was carried out simultaneously with overseas expansion, and was directed and nanced by many of the same few individual investors. The commercialization of grain removed a feudally-organized agrarian food system in which a land-owning aristocracy extracted surplus grain from a peasantry that was largely self-provisioning. At least 15 regional grain markets had emerged by 1500, and some 800 small towns grew up around local marketplaces. Similar conditions and transport factors meant that grain could be sold at the same price in each distinct market region (Gras, 1915). Even though local farmers could sell in any market town, the regional markets remained relatively isolated. Few specialist merchants were able to take advantage of price differentials in different markets. Local municipal authorities imposed numerous regulations on grain handling and marketing, all apparently designed to protect the consumer from price manipulations, poor quality, or dishonest measures. Middlemen grain traders, or wholesalers were regarded with suspicion, and widely assumed to be disreputable. The city of Londons population grew 10-fold between 1500 and 1700, as the city became the center of the expanding global economy. This order of magnitude population growth soon overwhelmed Britains medieval system of local and regional grain distribution. In 1250 London drew on a local grain market within a radius of 40 km, but by 1500 the city had grown to some 50 000 people, and the local market proved totally inadequate. London needed a much larger distribution system that could draw from all over England. In response, the volume of coastal grain shipments increased 10-fold between 1580 and 1680, and

a single national market emerged. After 1500 imported grain became increasingly important in the London market. Previously, the foreign grain trade was handled by foreign merchants, and largely in response to famines. The grain supply was so problematic that from 1514 to 1678 Londons municipal authorities bought and sold grain, established public granaries, and urged the guilds to buy and store grain for resale to consumers at reasonable prices during shortages. By 1700, London grain merchants were trading with Scandinavia, central Europe, Holland, Spain, the Caribbean, New England, Virginia, and Canada. As scale theory would predict, the new global food market disproportionately beneted a few very large merchants. Just four merchants handled half of Londons wheat export business during three trading seasons between 1676 and 1683 (Gras, 1915, 197). Londons population reached a phenomenal 700 000 people in 1700, and the most devastating plagues and famines seemed to be over. Most of the national population was no longer in control of their food distribution system, and with the large land-holders fencing off the open elds that the peasants had used for subsistence, and converting them to pastoral use, most rural households were also losing control over food production. Most foodstuffs, including grains, had become commodities that everyone had to purchase with cash. Englands national grain market was absorbed into a single global market. One could of course argue that the subsistence-level peasants ultimately beneted from these changes in the food system. However, no one should be forced to choose between rural, subsistence-level servitude, and urban poverty and wage-servitude. By the late 19th century conditions had clearly worsened for the majority. The New Domesday Book shows that 75% of the rural land in England and Wales in 1875 was held by just 14 000 large landholders, who represented a mere 0.28% of all households in a population now grown to 25 million people (Bateman, 1883). This was not an improvement over feudalism. 95% of households were left with less than 0.5% of all privately owned land. At the same time Charles Booth (18921903) found that 1.2 million people, more than 30% of Londons population, were living in poverty as dened by inadequate income and crowded housing conditions. The 18 000 wealthy, upper class people represented the top 0.5%. These data suggest that the previous four centuries of economic progress increased the absolute number of poor in England, and left most people with less control over the conditions of their daily life.

INDUSTRIALIZATION AND URBANIZATION IN AMERICA, 17902000

Between 1790 and 1990 the American population increased 65-fold, and national income expanded an incredible 1000fold. Even though America was widely perceived of as

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a land of opportunity, the actual distribution of income and wealth changed little and remained very inequitable throughout this period. Vast areas of Native American land were opened for settlement, but much of this land was difcult and expensive to develop, or it was controlled by land speculators. Economic growth did produce a large middle class, but the absolute number of very poor also increased, whereas the elite became inconceivably powerful. The primary cultural changes from mercantile capitalism to industrial and nancial capitalism that drove Americas economic growth were reected in changes in the agrarian system, much as in the earlier transition from feudalism to mercantile capitalism. In 1790 America was a rural nation in which 95% of the population lived on small, self-provisioning farms that produced limited marketable surpluses. By 1990 America was 75% urban, and agriculture was large-scale, capital-intensive, industrialized, and fully commercialized. This elite-directed cultural transformation was largely carried out within the space of four decades between 1850 and 1890, and clearly disadvantaged small-scale agricultural producers (Berry, 1977). Americas transformation required a series of massive changes in transportation, communication, production, distribution, and in the organization of business enterprise itself, that collectively expanded the speed and scale of commercial transactions (Chandler, 1977). The most important change was the creation of bureaucratically-organized, corporate businesses, that combined multi-unit enterprises and could amass capital and grow to a scale never before possible. Remarkably, few people actually nanced and directed these changes. Historian Peter Hall (1973) argues that Americas great national expansion was initiated in the 1850s by a tiny group of some 200 Boston families. These families were each worth at least $100 000 in 1848, owned 37% of the personal property in the city, and were the major shareholders in Bostons 50 largest banks and insurance companies (Pessen, 1973). At that time, Boston was a city of 137 000 people, much like London in 1580, and was the banking center for the entire country. The Boston elite accumulated trans-generational family fortunes from a mercantile base by investing prudently, marrying carefully, and forming dynastic trusts (Friedman, 1964; Marcus, 1992, 6070; Farrell, 1993). According to Hall, these wealthy New Englanders nanced the rst great American business corporations, and used their philanthropy to create the elite private foundations and colleges, such as Harvard and Yale, that trained the professionals who then built the institutional and ideological infrastructure for a commercially focused, elite-directed American nation. As America grew, the number of millionaire investors centered in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia expanded from an estimated 40 in 1860, to 2500 in 1870, and 3800 in 1897 (Soltow, 1975, 112113; Beard and Beard, 1934, 383384). At the same time more than half of

the adult male population remained landless, in spite of the Homestead Act of 1862 and the westward expansion movement. By 1900 there were perhaps 1500 industrial corporations with capital assets of $1 million or more, directed by some 18 500 corporate board members and major stockholders (Roy, 1983). Collectively these 22 000 nanciers and corporate directors formed an economic elite that represented less than 0.15% of American households in a nation of 76 million people. Their decisions to expand the scale and scope of commerce had transformed the nation and the world by the end of the 19th century. After 1900 small farmers were steadily marginalized by the technological changes promoted by the land grant colleges, the Department of Agriculture, and the Extension Service which promoted the interests of the largest agricultural producers, in response to corporate interests (McConnell, 1953; Domhoff, 1996). These new institutional structures in combination with the railroads, nanciers, farm machinery manufacturers, the petroleum and chemical industries, and mass-merchandisers account for the rapid dominance of the large-scale factory farm system. By 1987 the 100 largest corporate farms accounted for more than 10% of all agricultural production (Krebs, 1992, 28) and by 1992 14% of total farms accounted for 45% of all farm product sales (US Department of Commerce, 1996). This is the top-heavy agricultural model that was later promoted overseas as the Green Revolution, where it had the same marginalizing effect on small farmers. By the 1920s New York City had become the center of the evolving modern world system. Europes immigrant poor crowded into the slums of New York, where by 1900 some 2.3 million people, 70% of New Yorks population, were jammed into unsanitary tenements (DeForest and Veiller, 1903). Americas commercial-elite had already accumulated the worlds greatest concentration of economic power under the control of a few wealthy families, giant industrial corporations, and nancial institutions. Many New York families, nanciers, and corporate directors and their descendants played a leading role in creating the national and international institutional structures that produced a vast increase in the scale of the global economy. For example, John D Rockefellers personal fortune of $200 million gave him enormous inuence. However, nancier J P Morgans effective power was much greater. By 1912 Morgan exerted direct or indirect control over every sector of the national economy, with directorships or controlling interests in 34 large nancial institutions, 10 insurance companies, 32 transportation systems, 12 public utilities, and 135 other corporations, with combined assets of $45 billion (Brandeis, 1914). In 1994, one individual directed ve giant corporations with combined capital assets of $549 billion, and ten people directed 37 companies with combined assets of $2 trillion, representing nearly 10% of all corporate assets in the country (Bodley, 2000). In 1998

GLOBALIZATION IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

81

there were three executives who each controlled nancial assets of more than a trillion dollars in the three largest Wall Street investment rms (Califano, 1998).

TRIBAL VICTIMS OF GLOBALIZATION, 14502000

The globalization process included several phases of colonialism in which peripheral and external areas were incorporated into the expanding world system. Millions died during the initial mercantile-capitalist phase from 14501800 when many of the worlds great agrarian civilizations were brought under European domination. During the following industrial phase from 18001900, much of the rest of the world was added to the periphery of the world system. Europeans settled in the most favorable areas, and turned other peripheral areas into sources of raw materials and labor. However, dispersed colonies proved too costly and difcult to administer, and external colonialism came to a formal end in most of the world shortly after 1950. Internal colonial conquest continued throughout the 20th century until virtually all of the most isolated autonomous domestic-scale peoples and cultures were incorporated in the world system. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, Japan had completed its independent transition to capitalism, but ancient civilizations still existed in China and Africa, and there were numerous traditional kingdoms and/or chiefdoms in India, the Middle East, and the Pacic. The great Western colonial powers claimed 55% of the worlds land area, but exercised effective political control over only a third of the world (Clark, 1936, 5). Perhaps 200 million indigenous people, roughly 20% of the global population, still lived in autonomous and largely self-sufcient domestic-scale, tribal cultures, and still effectively controlled approximately half the world. Over the 150 years between 1800 and 1950 virtually all of this territory was conquered and incorporated into the world system in a process of internal colonialism in which as many as 50 million indigenous people may have died (Bodley, 1999a). Natural resources and labor owed into the world system from these formerly external indigenously controlled territories. This nal conquest produced a fully global modern world system, but at an enormous cost in ethnocide, genocide, and ecocide suffered by the peoples and territories that were forcibly incorporated. The conquest and incorporation of indigenous people and territory not only destroyed the economic autonomy and political independence of millions of indigenous peoples, it also had a devastating demographic impact. Demographic disruption often initially took the form of drastic depopulation, when people were enslaved and killed by invaders, and when they died from newly introduced diseases to which they had little immunity. Many cultural groups that

relied on fertility-limiting cultural practices to maintain low population densities were quickly exterminated by sudden increases in mortality. Many indigenous peoples died as a direct result of violence perpetrated by outsiders. Many governments organized military campaigns against tribes, and a few deliberately pursued genocidal policies in an effort to totally exterminate certain tribal groups. The largest loss of life probably resulted from the actions of individual colonists who acted on their own before governments established formal political control. Colonial governments sometimes intentionally left certain regions as uncontrolled frontiers, where their citizens were allowed to systematically kill and exploit tribal peoples. In areas where tribal people were not needed as labor, they were sometimes classied as non-human , and were killed with impunity. As early as 1837, under pressure from humanitarians, the British government ofcially acknowledged the human cost of colonialism in a lengthy Imperial Blue Book on aborigines (House of Commons, 1837), but the imperialism went unchallenged. As soon as indigenous peoples lost control over their territories and subsistence resources, it often became impossible for them to remain economically self-sufcient. Depopulation also reduced the economic viability of tribal groups, but competition with colonists over resources, especially when the tribal land base was reduced by government decree, was often the decisive factor compelling native peoples to participate in the market economy, whether as wage laborers or cash croppers. There was also a desire to secure manufactured goods, such as metal tools and factory clothing. However, the desire for trade goods was usually not sufcient to force tribals into full-time, permanent participation in the market economy. As long as indigenous groups retained a viable subsistence economy, they were often poorly motivated target workers, and colonial administrators used special taxes and laws to force them into the market economy. Involvement in the market economy became a self-reinforcing cycle, because wage labor disrupted traditional subsistence activities, and cashcropping depleted natural resources making self-sufciency even more difcult. The problem for most indigenous people was that they were forced into the global system at the very lowest level, without the economic resources to operate effectively in a capitalist world, and without the political power to protect their interests. Where reservations were set up for conquered indigenous peoples, or treaties were negotiated, as in the United States, lands that were originally communally held were often converted to individual ownership and acquired by outsiders. Reserves were often too small to support people, or valuable minerals rights were controlled by the state. In the last quarter of the 20th century, beginning in Australia, many indigenous groups formed political organizations and successfully regained more effective control over many of their territories. The

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SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

struggle for land rights and economic independence has been the central issue for indigenous organizations.

RICH AND POOR IN THE GLOBAL SYSTEM, 19502000

The global-scale world system that was already in place by the beginning of the 20th century has gone through a further organizational transformation since the global crisis of war and depression from 1929 1945. This transformation involved the construction of an elite-designed framework of international governmental institutions that included the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), both products of the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference held at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in 1944, the United Nations (UN, 1945) organization itself, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, 1947), and the GATT s successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO, 1995) (see GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), Volume 4; WTO (World Trade Organization), Volume 4). According to the preamble of the UN Charter, these new institutions were utopian visions designed to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war and for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples . The outcome of this transformation was a world system dominated by nance capital. By the end of the 20th century, money and the exchange of nancial instruments became more important than the movement and production of physical goods and services (Barnet and Cavanagh, 1994). The modern world system is not a self-organized system operating under the invisible hand of a global free market; it changes in response to pressures from speci c interest groups with unequal power. Governments continue to exercise sovereign rights over territories and are the primary agents in international political society, but as we have seen, a centralized global government would be too costly to be effective. Various non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become new actors in an emerging transnational civil society. New institutions are being designed by the interaction of NGOs and governments to deal with a multitude of speci c global issues (Young, 1997). The great transformation from industrial to nancial capital made commercial elites more in uential than political rulers. Those who bene ted the most from the global ow of nance capital at the end of the 20th century were an estimated six million individuals who each possessed investable assets of more than a million dollars. In 1997 the world s multimillionaires collectively controlled $17.4 trillion (Gemini Consulting 1998), which was more than half of global gross domestic product (GDP), yet they constituted less than 0.1% of global population. The world is now directed by economic decision-makers who are guided by the utopian

ideals of laissez-faire capitalism that call for aggressive reductions in the regulatory power of governments, the removal of all trade barriers, and global management by negotiations among private, self-selected interest groups with very unequal power. These changes are designed to further accelerate global economic growth, on the assumption that growth will bene t everyone (the trickle-down theory ). Unfortunately, in spite of the utopian objectives of the UN, the problems of scale and power increased after 1945. Although wealth continued to accumulate in the core of the world system, by the end of the 20th century much of the world was more impoverished and the global system was less sustainable than ever before. Accurate assessment of human welfare during the postwar period is impossible because there are no accurate gures for worldwide wealth and income distribution. However, the World Bank estimated in 1990 that more than 1 billion people were living in absolute poverty with per capita incomes of under $370 dollars. Three billion people lived in the 45 low income countries, with per capita incomes under $660. The average infant mortality rate in these poor countries was 8-fold greater than in the 24 high income countries where 812 million people lived. Raising the poverty line, and allowing for lognormal income inequality within each country suggests that in 1965 there were 2.8 billion (85%) poor and 50 million (1%) rich in the world (Bodley, 1999b, 2000). By 1997 there were more than 4 billion (70%) poor people, and 310 million (5%) rich people. Thus, economic growth reduced the proportion who were poor, and slightly increased the proportion who were rich. However, the absolute number of poor increased dramatically, far outpacing the absolute increase in the rich. This suggests that if we accept this global standard of economic well-being, growth since 1965 impoverished far more people than it enriched. This ampli cation of poverty during the 20th century duplicates the similar impoverishment process during the earlier transition from feudalism to mercantile capitalism, and again during the transition from mercantile to industrial capitalism in Europe and America. Both of these great transitions did little to change the pre-existing base of social inequality, but because of scale effects, they also produced tremendous increases in wealth and power at the top of the social hierarchy. At the same time, given high levels of inequality, even small improvements in the material level for people at the bottom of the hierarchy, in combination with new economic conditions, created new incentives for people to produce larger families. These changes created an unprecedented era of population growth. However, inequality, not population growth, was the primary cause of poverty. Amartya Sen (1981) pointed out that people died in modern famines not because of food shortages, but because inequality denied them access to income and productive resources.

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83

One of the guiding justications for the globalization of capital-intensive agriculture was that it was the only way to feed the world. However, malnutrition has proven to be an intractable social problem, rather than a technological problem. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO, 1999) concluded that there were more hungry people in the world in 1997 (830 million) than the entire population of the world (720 million) in 1750! Many under-nourished people were marginalized by more competitive capital-intensive enterprises, or by degraded environments. The chaotic transition from state socialism to new forms of capitalism in Eastern Europe produced 26 million undernourished people by 1997. When the concept of malnutrition was broadened to include vitamin and mineral deciency, and over-consumption, as well as calorie and protein deciency, it was estimated that three billion people, half of the worlds population, were malnourished by the year 2000 (Gardner and Halweil, 2000). This is equal to the entire population of the world in 1960! Forty years of economic growth may have actually magnied malnutrition. The power-concentrating effects of economic growth can be illustrated in Washington State, in the Pacic Northwest of the United States, where between 1960 and 1995 both population and per capita personal income doubled (in constant dollars). Washington beneted enormously from global trade in aircraft, information technology, and agricultural commodities, but these benets were very narrowly distributed and economic power became highly concentrated. A close look at the distribution of property ownership showed that as individual urban places grew larger, home ownership rates declined, and the holdings of the largest property owners steadily increased (Bodley, 1999b). Villages with populations under 2500 people displayed the most equitable distribution of property assets and business revenues. Corporate business and remotely owned businesses became increasingly important in larger urban places, and larger businesses captured a progressively disproportionate share of total sales volumes. In cities with populations of 100 000 or more, the top 3% of businesses received more than 80% of business revenues. As wealth became more concentrated, the elite created exclusive urban places, where ultra high property values formed barriers against non-elites. By 1998 individual social power was becoming grotesquely distorted by the phenomenal growth in global information technology corporations. The collective net worth of Washingtons billionaires was already nearly twice the value of all deposits in all the commercial banks in the state. Measuring their income as increase in net worth, in 1998 the income of Washington States 11 billionaires was already 28% of the total personal income in the state, and was growing at 35% a year. Greater Seattles economic elite occupied the same power position in the world as Londons economic elite in 1600, or Bostons elite in 1850, and they too were

personally transforming the world by their decision-making. Disproportionate power of this magnitude is clearly the product of scale, and it has profound implications for the future development of humanity. The global system seems to be approaching, and may have already exceeded, a scale threshold at which elitedirected, capital intensive commercial development becomes unsustainable, even assuming further technological miracles. It would be reasonable to predict that the powerconcentrating potential of globalization under nancial capitalism will soon be restrained, and perhaps reversed as new democratic political movements in the currently most developed centers of the global system press an effective argument for economic democratization. As more and more people feel disempowered by global markets and giant, monopolistic corporations, there will be strong incentives for political and economic decentralization. This decentralization of power may be accelerated by persistent political and economic collapses in impoverished peripheral areas that will force radical rethinking of the international development process. Economic democracy will require a restoration of economic power to households, small-scale producers, local and regional markets. This change could be supported by new local currency systems, and stronger local governments, even as large businesses and national governments give up power. Just as disenfranchised 17th century Englishmen developed the rst modern political party, the Levellers, that helped replace the powerful concept of the divine right of kings with the radical new concept that political power originated with the people, today people can form new political parties and take back the power they have granted to giant commercial corporations. It will become increasingly obvious that information technologies make it feasible for the majority to use less capital-intensive production and distribution systems. That will strengthen local communities, and produce a very high quality of life for most people. The economic efciencies of small scale will be quickly realized as local production and distribution systems replace the costly long-distance movement of materials, so that overly rewarded corporate elites and great private investors become unnecessary. The idea of economic globalization driven by all-powerful commercial corporations and great concentrations of nance capital will be a quaint anachronism, like the idea of divine kings.

REFERENCES
Algaze, G (1989) The Uruk expansion: cross-cultural exchange in early Mesopotamian civilization, Curr. Anthropol., 30, 571 608. Barnet, R J and Cavanagh, J (1994) Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order, Simon and Schuster, New York.

84 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE Bateman, J (1883) The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland, 4th edition, Harrison, London. Beard, C A and Beard, M R (1934) The Rise of American Civilization, Macmillan, New York. Berry, C J (1994) The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Berry, W (1977) The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, CA. Bodley, J H (1999a) Victims of Progress, 4th edition, Mayeld, Mountain View, CA. Bodley, J H (1999b) Socioeconomic Growth, Culture Scale, and Household Well-Being: A Test of the Power-Elite Hypothesis, Curr. Anthropol., 40(5), 595 620. Bodley, J H (2000) Cultural Anthropology: Tribes, States, and the Global System, 3rd edition, Mayeld, Mountain View, CA. Booth, C (1892 1903) Life and Labour of the People in London, Macmillan, London. Boyd, R and Richerson, P J (1985) Culture and the Evolutionary Process, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Brandeis, L D (1914) Other Peoples Money and How the Bankers Use It, Frederick A Stokes, New York. Braudel, F (1977) Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD. Braudel, F (1982) The Wheels of Commerce. Civilization and Capitalism 15th 18th Century, Harper and Row, NY. Braudel, F (1992) Civilisation Mat erielle, Economie et Capitalisme. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th 18th century, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Califano, D (1998) The Battle for Assets, Worth, 7(11), 106. Carneiro, R L (1978) Political Expansion as an Expression of the Principle of Competitive Exclusion, in Origins of the State: the Anthropology of Political Evolution, eds R Cohen and E R Service, Institute for the Study of Human Issues, Philadelphia, PA, 205 223. Chandler, Jr, A D (1977) The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Chandler, T (1987) Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth, St. Davids University Press, Lewiston, New York. Clark, G (1936) The Balance Sheets of Imperialism: Facts and Figures on Colonies, Columbia University Press, New York. DeForest, R W and Veiller, L, eds (1903) The Tenement House Problem: Including the Report of the New York State Tenement House Commission of 1900, Macmillan, New York. Domhoff, G W (1996) State Autonomy or Class Dominance? Case Studies on Policy Making in America, Aldine de Gruyter, New York. Farrell, B G (1993) Elite Families: Class and Power in Nineteenth Century Boston, State University of New York, Albany, NY. FAO, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (1999), The State of Food Insecurity in the World, Rome. Fletcher, R (1995) The Limits of Settlement Growth: A Theoretical Outline, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Frank, A G (1990) A Theoretical Introduction to 5000 Years of World History, Review, 2, 1 28. Frank, A G (1991) A Plea for World System History, J. World Hist., 2, 1 28. Friedman, L M (1964) The Dynastic Trust, Yale Law J., 73, 547 592. Gardner, G and Halweil, B (2000) Nourishing the Underfed and Overfed, in State of the World 2000: A Worldwatch Institute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society, eds L R Brown, C Flavin, H French, and L Starke, W W Norton, Worldwatch Institute, New York, 59 78. Gemini Consulting (1998) World Wealth Report 1998, Gemini Consulting, New York. Gills, B K and Frank, A G (1991) 5000 Years of World System History: the Cumulation of Accumulation in Core/periphery Relations in Precapitalist Worlds, eds C Chase-Dunn and T D Hall, Westview Press, Boulder, CO. Gras, N S B (1915) The Evolution of the English Corn Market: From the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Century, Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Hall, P D (1982) The Organization of American Culture, 1700 1900: Private Institutions, Elites, and the Origins of American Nationality, New York University Press, New York. Hoberman, L S (1991) Mexicos Merchant Elite, 1590 1660, Duke University Press, Durham. House of Commons (1837) Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements) Imperial Blue Book, British Parliamentary Papers, VII, 425. King, G (1936) Two Tracts: (a) Natural and Political Observations and Conclusions upon the State and condition of England, (b) Of the Naval Trade of England A 1688 and the National Pro t then arising thereby, ed G E Barnett, The John Hopkins Press, Baltimore, MD. Krebs, A V (1992) The Corporate Reapers: The Book of Agribusiness, Essential Books, Washington, DC. Marcus, G E and Hall, P D (1992) Lives in Trust: The Fortunes of Dynastic Families in Late Twentieth Century America, Westview Press, Boulder, CO. McConnell, G (1953) The Decline of Agrarian Democracy, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. McCracken, G (1988) Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities, Indiana University Press, IN. McKendrick, N (1982) The Consumer Revolution of Eighteenthcentury England in The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, eds N McKendrick, J Brewer, and J H Plumb, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 9 33. McKendrick, N, Brewer, J, and Plumb, J H (1982) The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of EighteenthCentury England, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN. McMahon, T A and Bonner, J T (1983) On Size and Life, Scientic American Library, New York. Miller, D (1987) Material Culture and Mass Consumption, Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Naroll, R (1967) Imperial Cycles and World Order, Peace Res. Soc., 7, 83 105. Pessen, E (1973) Riches, Class, and Power Before the Civil War, Heath, Lexington, MA. Rabb, T K (1967) Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575 1630, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

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Roy, W G (1983) Interlocking Directorates and the Corporate Revolution, Soc. Sci. Hist., 7(2), 143 164. Sanderson, S K (1990) Social Evolutionism: A Critical History, Basic Blackwell, Oxford. Sanderson, S K (1999) Social Transformations: A General Theory of Historical Development, Rowan and Littleeld, Lanham, MD. Schumacher, E F (1973) Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, Harper and Row, New York. Sen, A (1981) Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Shammas, C (1990) The Pre-industrial Consumer in England and America, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Shammas, C (1993) Changes in English and Anglo-American consumption from 1550 to 1800 in Consumption and the World of Goods, eds J Brewer and R Porter, Routledge, London, 177 205. Smith, A (1776) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol. 1, Strahan and Cadell, London. Snooks, G D (1993) Economics Without Time: A Science Blind to the Forces of Historical Change, Macmillan, London. Snooks, G D (1994) New Perspectives on the Industrial Revolution in Was the Industrial Revolution Necessary? ed G Snooks, Routledge, London, 1 26. Snooks, G D (1994) Portrait of the Family within the Total Economy: A Study in Longrun Dynamics, Australia 1788 1990, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Snooks, G D (1996) The Dynamic Society: Exploring the Sources of Global change, Routledge, London. Snooks, G D (1997) The Ephemeral Civilization: Exploding the Myth of Social Evolution, Routledge, London. Snooks, G D (1998) The Laws of History, Routledge, London. Soltow, L (1975) Men and Wealth in the United States 1850 1870, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 112 113. Stone, L (1965) The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558 1641, Oxford University Press, London.

Stone, L (1973) Family and Fortune: Studies in Aristocratic Finance in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Taagepera, R (1978a) Size and Duration of Empires: Systematics of Size, Soc. Sci. Res., 7, 108 127. Taagepera, R (1978b) Size and Duration of Empires: GrowthDecline Curves, 3000 to 600 B.C., Soc. Sci. Res., 7, 180 196. Taagepera, R (1997) Expansion and Contraction Patterns of Large Polities: Context for Russia, Int. Stud Q., 41, 475 504. United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census (1996) Statistical Abstract of the United States 1996 1997, 116th edition, Government Printing Ofce, Washington, DC. Wallerstein, I (1974) The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, Academic Press, New York. Weber, M (1930) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, George Allen and Unwin, London. Wilkinson, D (1992) Cities, Civilizations, and Oikumenes: I, Comp. Civ. Rev., 27, 51 87. Wilkinson, D (1993) Cities, Civilizations, and Oikumenes: II, Comp. Civ. Rev., 28, 41 72. Wills, Jr, J E (1993) European Consumption and Asian Production in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, in Consumption and the World of Goods, eds J Brewer and R Porter, Routledge, London, 133 147. World Bank (1995) World Development Report, Oxford University Press, New York. Young, O R (1997) Global Governance: Drawing Insights from the Environmental Experience, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

FURTHER READING
Durham and London, The Tudor Sumptuary Laws, Engl. Hist. Rev., 30(119), 433 449. Robbins, R H (1999) Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism, Allyn and Bacon, Boston, MA.

Technological Society and its Relation to Global Environmental Change

ESTER BOSERUP (Deceased)

Independent Consultant

The in uence of technology on environment, and vice versa, is a relatively new subject in scienti c discussion, but it has been crucial in human history. Historians divide human history in technological stages: the rst stage when small human groups subsisted on wild food, then the invention of agriculture, then urbanization, industry, and now an ongoing change from the industrial society to the electronic age. Since the industrial revolution in Western Europe a couple of centuries ago, there have been more and more examples of negative effects of technological change on the environment, fauna and ora, and also on human life.

ADAM SMITH AND MALTHUS

The basic relationship between technology and environment is strongly inuenced by a third factor: population size, as was pointed out two centuries ago, by the classical British economists Adam Smith and Malthus. They agreed on the crucial role of population change for human development, but while Smith thought population growth was a positive factor, Malthus thought it had negative effects. Smiths view was the generally accepted one: child mortality was very high and the family wanted to have many children to ensure that some would survive. Rulers also favored a larger population. Many inhabitants meant many productive workers and many soldiers to win wars and conquer additional territory. But because he observed the beginning of the industrial revolution, Smith added that population growth would not only increase the number of workers, but also their production per head, because it would make further specialization of labor possible. Malthus essay was a great sensation. He applied an ecological view, arguing that population growth reduces average incomes, because he considered the globe with its natural resources a constant, so population growth would reduce natural resources per head and increase mortality due to insufcient food production. The carrying capacity of the globe could not be exceeded. In retrospect, we can see that they both had a point. Population growth can have both positive and negative results, depending partly on the relative strength of the positive and negative factors, but also on the strength of a number of other factors, which economists and others, who use simplied models, fail to take into account rst of all social and

cultural factors. Therefore, we have neo-Malthusians who put great emphasis on the negative results of technological changes, which pollute air, fresh water, and soil, and threaten human life and health and the survival of fauna and ora. And we have anti-Malthusians, including many neoliberalists, who downplay the negative effects of modern technology on the environment, while focusing on the positive effects on average incomes. What we lack is an accepted theory of how all the relevant factors play together in the complicated process of economic and human development (Boserup, 1996). Malthus overlooked that carrying capacity is not a constant because there can be substitution between different resources, be it labor or capital investment as replacement for land or one metal for another, and the type of substitution which is possible depends on the particular resource endowment and other conditions for resource transfer or invention in the region under investigation. In other words, it is necessary to use a historical approach to answer the question of effects of major population change on technology and environment (technology is dened as including both material and method). Specialists from many disciplines have studied the relationship between changes in technology and in environment in addition to ecologists and natural scientists. One broad group consists of economic, medical, cultural, and general historians, another of archaeologists, anthropologists, and demographers. These groups have focused on historical changes in technology and environment in different parts of the world at different periods. But the problem has also been studied in a different way, concentrating on recent changes in the developing countries. Such studies have been

TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY AND ITS RELATION TO GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

87

made by researchers from many disciplines in universities and other institutions that focus on aid to developing countries. In this essay both methods have been combined, for instance by comparing the process of ancient urbanization in Asia and the Middle East and its relation to environmental change with the much later process of urbanization and industrialization in Western Europe under different environmental conditions.

THE DYNAMICS OF LAND USE

Ten thousand years ago, or earlier, some human groups changed from hunting and food gathering in forested land to shifting cultivation, felling the natural vegetation by re, sowing or planting seeds or roots, and after a few years when yields declined, repeating the operation in another spot leaving the preceding one fallow for two decades or more, until soil fertility had been fully regained. However, as their population continued to increase, the cultivators had to shorten the fallow and only bushes had time to invade the eld. With further growth of population, recultivation had to be made when only grasses had invaded the land. Forest fallow, the rst step of shifting cultivation, is still in use in thinly populated parts of many developing countries in all continents, for instance in the Indian Himalayas and in tropical Africa (see Shifting Cultivation and Land Degradation, Volume 3). If this type of gradual intensi cation of land use is allowed to go on, without the cultivator family carrying green manure or dung to the eld to preserve soil fertility, shifting cultivation is unsustainable and the land becomes sterile, but whether the process is renewable depends on the climate. With too little rain the land may become a desert, but with enough rain the original vegetation may come back, and the whole process may be repeated. However, if the cultivators have preserved soil fertility by manuring the elds with green manure or dung, and their populations continue to increase, they could go on from bush fallow, to more and more intensive short fallow systems, to annual cropping and, if the climate allowed it, to multicropping. This was, in fact, the way most of world agriculture developed before the industrial revolution created substitutes for the natural manure, and the human labor needed to apply it. In other words, the intensive systems of agriculture, which are used today in densely populated countries that still use traditional systems of agriculture, are repetitions of systems applied millennia ago. Land use is not static, but can be, and often was a dynamic adaptation to changes in population size and environment, and the process seems to have been similar in many parts of the globe (Boserup, 1965). The historical process replaced less land per head by more labor for current operations and investment in land improvement, including terracing of mountain slopes and

leveling of land, irrigation and draining. Gradually, over centuries or millennia, the environment changed. The landscape was transformed from a large forest with a few hunter-gatherer families to one of villages surrounded by arable elds, grassland for domestic animals and some forest for gathering of fertilizing matter, timber and fuel-wood. These processes motivated the change of tools by transfer of technology from more advanced neighbors or invention by trial and error and speculation, from digging sticks to hoes and to ploughs drawn by oxen or horses. Technological change is seldom exogenous, i.e., accidental or made by a so-called genius, but endogenous changes may be made if the motivation becomes strong, due to population change, or some other factor, often a lost war in the case of weapons. In agriculture, increasing local population with need for additional food production promoted an endogenous process of technological change, which augmented the carrying capacity of the land by using the increased labor force for current operations and labor investment. With intensi cation of agriculture more use was made of female and child labor. Already among hunter-gatherers, women and children took part in food gathering, but with shorter fallow the share of work performed by women and children increased until the system required very hard labor by the whole family all year round, as was documented by Lossing Buck in his research on China in the 1930s (Buck, 1937). The increasing use of family labor had, sometimes at least, a profound in uence not only on family life, but also on culture, and even religion. Forest people believe in forest spirits and use sorcerers and sacri ces to ask for protection. Sorcerers seem to be the rst professional group in human history; and in the Indian caste system the priests, the Brahmans, constitute the highest caste. But many agriculturists, for instance in Southern India, sacri ce to local female fertility goddesses to obtain a good harvest, while pastoralists sacri ce to male gods to obtain good results from their ocks of animals. The later disappearance of goddesses in most of the world seems related to the reduction of the role of women in the agricultural economy when the plough came into use, and to her lower status compared to that of men. The patriarchal system, where the male head of household can dispose of the labor power of other family members, led to intensi cation of food production through labor-intensive technologies. The right of adult men to dispose of the labor of other family members does even today encourage a pro-natalist attitude, polygamy, and keeping children away from school, even when there is free access to schools in the neighborhood. The increasing intensity of land use changed not only the use of family labor, but also land tenure. As long as the local population is small, there may be free access to forest, grazing and cultivable land which has regained fertility by

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fallow; with a larger population, only the local population has full rights to land, while foreigners must pay cropshares or work as slaves, tenants, or wage workers, with or without the right to graze animals in village grazing areas, and gather fuel and food in the forests surrounding the village. Until the middle of the 20th century diseases, including epidemics, to which the local population had not developed resistance, had kept long-term rates of population growth very low in developing countries, and similar to Europe in earlier centuries there had been periodic large declines of population, caused by epidemics and wars, often followed by forced migration and hunger. But during and after the Second World War a scientic effort was made to combat disease by means of modern technology also in many non-industrialized countries and colonies the result being a population explosion , due not least to a large reduction of child mortality. Because of the general acceptance of Malthusian theory in the industrialized countries, this acceleration of population growth created widespread fear of future world famine. So, similar to the transfer of Western medicine to developing countries, it was decided to start research aimed at transferring other modern Western technologies to densely populated Asian countries, where the problem was expected to become worst. Two types of research were started: one was aimed at improving the technology of contraception, the other was agricultural research aimed at raising crop yields by use of Western techniques, such as the use of chemical fertilizers and development of better seeds the so called Green Revolution (see Green Revolution, Volume 3). Green Revolution technologies can only be successfully introduced in areas with a reasonably good infrastructure: good transport facilities for both inputs and outputs, storage facilities, access to agricultural advisers and other extension services, and perhaps local research stations. All this is unavailable in regions of subsistence production and is not likely to be provided in the least developed countries, or in subsistence regions of large countries with much better prospects for agricultural development in more advanced and more densely populated areas. Therefore, the Green Revolution was promoted in densely populated Asian countries, simultaneously with improvement of the rural infrastructure in those areas, if necessary. The research was highly successful in stimulating production. However, both in the Asian areas for which it was designed, and in the Western industrialized donor countries, production increased so rapidly that the feared appearance of world shortages became one of embarrassing food surpluses. It also contributed to these unexpected surpluses, in that the rapidly increasing rural labor force in areas that continued to use traditional labor intensive technologies made it possible either to expand the area under cultivation or to increase cropping frequency.

When food surpluses increased in the industrialized western countries, their governments decided not to reduce government support to agriculture, but instead to give food aid to developing countries, and to lower export prices for food in order to be more competitive. Food aid and subsidies to food exports were granted not only to densely populated, but also to sparsely populated developing countries. But in many cases, a small population is not due to especially unfavorable natural conditions for food production, but it is the small home market, and lack of access to export markets, which force rural populations to remain subsistence producers, or to migrate to mines, towns or foreign owned plantations. Many governments in developing countries welcomed the chance to supply their increasingly populated towns with cheap food, or to sell the food with a large prot. In the rst case the effect was a discouragement to local agriculture, and food exports from the industrialized to the developing countries became very large. In Asia, the Green Revolution technology, the increasing rural labor force, and the large food imports, combined to satisfy the effective demand for food without the need for investments in expansion of the cultivated areas. But it would be wrong to interpret this as a sign of lack of reserves of uncultivated, but cultivable land. If it should become impossible to increase crop yields much further, the Green Revolution technology can be modied with more emphasis on land improvement by investment in hitherto uncultivated land and on further cropping intensity. The possibilities for further multiplication of food production are often overlooked because hunger and malnutrition among the poor are wrongly interpreted as lack of the capacity of world agriculture to produce sufcient food. Evans rightly talks about well-intentioned scientists who seek technological solutions to problems of social and economic inequity (Evans, 1998). Like other major technological changes, the Green Revolution had profound social and cultural effects. The income differences between areas with and without a Green Revolution became very large, and in the former there were important changes in family and fertility. When chemical fertilizer, pesticides, and mechanized inputs reduce the demand for the type of operations that were hitherto performed by women and children, the motivation for the male head of the household to be polygamic, and have a large number of children, is reduced or eliminated. Therefore, modernization of agriculture is accompanied by reduction of polygamy and fertility, except where strong religious inner and outer resistance against birth control delays the process, perhaps for a long time. Also, when children are less needed for agricultural or other work, they are more likely to be sent to school, but in many cases to schools, which are hostile to cultural change. In all cases, however, the reduction of fertility and agricultural toil create

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a very large improvement in the health and position of women. These effects are visible by a comparison between Asian areas with Green Revolution, and sparsely populated African countries. In the former, fertility is declining not only in urban, but also in rural areas. By contrast, there is much less fertility decline in the sparsely populated African countries, and it seems usually to be limited to urban areas.

MOBILITY AND URBANIZATION

After food production, the creation of urban centers is usually considered the next important step in technological development. Nearly all ruins of ancient towns are found in Asia and the Near East, a region with a dry and warm climate different from the cold and rainy climate of Western Europe. Both their early towns and their large cities antedate those of Western Europe by millennia, although insufciency of rain only allowed agriculture at river sites, where water was seeping in, or with irrigation. It seems that we have here one of the many examples where a handicap in this case shortage of water proved to be an advantage, because it stimulated invention, in this case of irrigation technology, both for food production and for transport. As long as their population was small, the cultivators lived on the shores of the river, or farther away from it, if there was natural seasonal overow of the river. When the population increased, the people helped the natural overow to spread more by digging small terraces on the mountain slope beside the river; and leading the water along these, they spread it by removing a few stones from the edge of the terrace. Another step in the development of irrigation was to dig canals in the plain below the mountains or hills from which the ood came, to spread the water more widely, thus increasing the area under cultivation. This was followed by a crucial technological change. Construction served to lift the water either by gates or dams, or by water-powered machines, i.e., shaduffs and waterwheels. In other words, the use of water power had been invented, and it had the additional advantage that it beneted both food production and transport of products and people, which now could move up-river even when unassisted by sails and wind power. So, also in these natural conditions, the increase of population motivated technological change. Not only in recent technological development, but throughout human history, changes in mobility and communication have been of crucial importance. In early times, many human groups depended solely upon human legs and perhaps primitive boats for mobility, but many pastoral peoples had large mountable animals (horses, dromedars, camels) and were therefore much more mobile

than were the hunter-gatherers and cultivators discussed above. The climatically dry and semi-dry zones of Asia and North Africa have for millennia been inhabited by pastoral peoples, either because their habitats have always been dry for climatic reasons, or perhaps have become so by human maltreatment of fragile land. Pastoralists subsist mainly by the products of their animals, supplemented by some vegetable food. If the group increased in size, they might make over-intensive use of the natural grazings and spoil the land, but sometimes they would avoid it by spreading more and more widely, and in large semi-dry areas they might become nomads, moving with their animals and tents, if possible by mounting the animals. The diet of pastoralists is richer in proteins than that of cultivators, and they are usually larger and stronger than cultivators, who subsist mainly on vegetable food. This, together with their much larger mobility, made them a formidable enemy for the cultivators in the river valleys. The nomads attacked their villages, enslaved their inhabitants, and made themselves rulers of the area, using the villagers to provide themselves and their families with vegetable food and domestic, sexual and sometimes military services. If a pastoral people came to rule a number of villages, their descendants might become hereditary nobility between the ruler and the subservient population of peasants. The family system and other cultural patterns of pastoralists are different from those of cultivators. Large animals belong to men, and mounted animals are a status symbol for male pastoralists. One may ask if a similar type of stratication had emerged in Europe, where the horses became a symbol of the high rank of the hereditary nobility that went to war on horseback, held tournaments and horse races and monopolized the right to hunt on horseback in the forests. Carneiro has suggested that it was a condition for early urbanization that the population lived in circumscribed areas, i.e., areas surrounded by deserts, steep mountains or seashores, which forced the inhabitants to intensify food production if they must feed an increasing population in that type of environment (Carneiro, 1998). If the circumscribed area was as large as in Mesopotamia and the large rivervalleys in India and China, a sufciently large and dense population could produce and transport enough food for creating large urban centers at an early date. Existence of large towns and cities depends on transport networks for food to the non-agricultural population living in the urban centers. Road transport was inefcient over long distances but a dense network of canals made supply to large towns possible for instance in China. But later, in the railway age, the Chinese canals proved to be a handicap because of the many bridges that had to be built. Thus, from being a technological leader until around 1500 AD, China, after

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the industrial revolution in Western Europe, turned into a non-industrialized developing country. In river valleys of Asia and the Near East, nomadic peoples from the Central Asian mountain range managed to create huge empires by conquering many hundreds of villages belonging to many different peoples, and using the inhabitants as soldiers. Wars were the means to get soldiers for further conquest, and construction workers for fortications and embellishment of towns. There were also productive infrastructural investments: large canals for transport of supplies and persons, and large dams for irrigation and expansion of the network of canals. In old times, large dams were made by an army of manual workers, and this technique continued to be used in independent India. The Indian government wanted to provide work for both local people and poor immigrants from other parts of India. It was a striking contrast to the simultaneous road building by the Americans in Vietnam, who used ultra-modern American mechanized equipment operated by American personnel. At the time of the old empires, there were violent uctuations in population, and the cruelty of the empires, both in war and peace, has been assumed to be a major explanation of these uctuations, but, as already mentioned, it seems likely that a major cause of the uctuations was epidemic diseases. Of course slaughter and famines among the fugitives contributed to the catastrophe. Today there are lorry transport routes all over India and AIDS has followed them. In Southern and Central Africa the epidemics threaten to be even worse than the old killers from earlier centuries. World population was not stationary before the demographic transition, as Malthus believed, but was slowly increasing with intermittent sharp declines, where epidemics are supposed to have been a larger killer than warfare. The means to avoid an epidemic was to ee to another area, thus spreading the epidemic further.

SUPPLY OF POWER FOR THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Western Europe had little urbanization before the industrial revolution. Because of the abundant rain, irrigation and water power never attained the importance it had in Asia, but Western Europe imported the techniques of waterwheels, on its small rivers, for milling of cereals and other purposes. In the 11th century, England had more than 5000 watermills in operation. By contrast, Western Europe with its long coastal lines from the Mediterranean to the Baltic Sea made more use of wind power for long-distance transport of products and persons than did Asia. With strong motivation to improve shipping technology, Western Europe succeeded in dominating the whole world in the 19th century, by means of its colonization policy in the other continents. This was

a big advantage for a region, which was relatively poor in natural resources. From an early age there were caravan routes inland between China, the Black Sea and the Russian rivers and lakes, and later trading routes along the Asian coast between East Asia and Europe. At the European end the trading routes became longer and longer, until European coastal settlements on the Mediterranean, the Atlantic coast, the North Sea, and the Baltic had become active participants in the Asian trade, with large government-owned or governmentsupported Asiatic Companies. At the rst stage of this development, the boats and small ships could only carry light goods, and the trade consisted of luxuries (silk, ne textiles, spices, precious stones and metals, processed or not) for the use of rulers and rich merchants in the areas served by the trade. But when improvements in shipbuilding made long distance transport of bulky and heavy goods economical, the Europeans expropriated deposits of ores, fertile agricultural land and forests behind their trading stations in other continents, and used them to produce raw materials or semi nished products for exports to Europe. When improvements in navigation made Atlantic crossing safer, the Europeans established themselves in America, produced tobacco, coffee, cotton and other crops in monoculture, partially with use of slaves bought or caught in America and Africa. The Atlantic crossing was followed by exploration of the coasts of other continents, and many of the areas where the trading stations were located ended by becoming formal colonies of European countries. Because most of the products exported from the colonies were owned by European companies and produced by cheap dependent non-European labor, colonial trade was very unequal, with large imports to Western Europe, and small exports of which a share was for consumption by the European civil and military personnel and businessmen who lived in the colonies. By continuing for centuries to deliver ores, timber and crops for a fraction of the real costs, the colonies actually nanced a great part of the Western European industrial revolution. Moreover, as Needham has shown, a large share of what has been considered proof of Western European inventiveness, was in fact technology transfer from China, either directly or via the colonies (Needham, 1954). But technological change promoted inventiveness, and the imports of new techniques were followed by important inventions by European scientists and businessmen, including the steam-engine and the railway, which linked the European countries together physically and economically, while the steamship linked them better to their colonies in the East, South and West. Because Western Europe made less use of water power than China, and only made use of coal much later, it eradicated much of its forests and imported timber from Sweden and Russia. Therefore, the Wooden Age lasted very

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long in Europe, but gradually more and more industries shifted their fuel supplies from wood to coal or water power, though the iron industry still used charcoal to melt ore. As late as 1750, per head output of iron in Europe was lower than in the least developed countries today, and the military sector took most of the supplies. Iron production in Western Europe is a classical example of a crucially important demand-induced technological change, and for a time Western and Central Europe became technological leaders on a world scale, owing to their large deposits of coal and ore in locations that were favorably positioned to attract both raw materials and market-oriented industries (Boserup, 1981). The Coal-Railway Age became a period of extreme centralization, both regionally and locally, with large ruralurban and eastwest migrations in Europe. The industrial importance of Italy, which had neither coal nor ore, was reduced until the 20th century, when its deposits of gas were discovered and exploited. Because of their access to raw materials produced by cheap colonial labor and expropriated land and mines, British and other Western European industrialists were very efcient exporters of industrial products and solidly in favor of free trade in the world market. But that did not prevent them from protecting their local manufacturing industries by means of high custom duties and later by quotas, because they had to pay much higher European wages, when the colonial products were processed in Europe. The result became the well-known pattern of colonial trade where the colonies delivered food and raw materials to the industrial countries, while Britain and other colonial powers delivered manufactured goods to the rest of the world. The industrial revolution promoted investment in private and government infrastructure: roads from railway stations and harbors to customers and other ancillary urban or rural services. Moreover, military technologies were improved and new armament factories built. In the military sector, as in the civilian, there was a beginning of the coming change from reliance on large numbers of soldiers and unskilled labor to more reliance on equipment and skilled specialists. Labor shortage was no more a permanent feature from now on it alternated with unemployment. The industrial revolution did not only create the business cycle, it also created the serious problem of pollution of the environment. Although there were accidents, and sometimes salinity, the Asian type of reliance on water power for industry and transport was a non-polluting technology, but in Europe the change from wood to coal had serious consequences because of the smoke. Though the burning of wood also produced smoke, that of coal became much worse and promoted tuberculosis, especially in mining and industrial districts, and in urban areas where the households used coal for heating. Also the new railways produced smoke in the densely populated areas, which they served.

Moreover, the rapid growth of both the mining and the processing industries resulted in concentrations of population in the most polluted areas, which were becoming both unpleasant and unhealthy. Because of the rapid urbanization the immigrants had to live either in old houses or in self-built huts, and the towns became surrounded by huge slums, which contributed to an increase in mortality and made room for employment of further immigrants. The natural landscape was transformed by the new ugly construction of mines and factories. This gave birth to the rst protest movement: the romanticist movement at the end of the 18th century, which regretted the damage made to landscape, fauna, and ora. The environmental movement was born of the industrial revolution. Like earlier structural changes in the economy, the industrial revolution in Western Europe was accompanied and followed by major political, demographic, occupational, and cultural changes. Organized labor movements appeared, due to the frequent periods of unemployment with downward pressure on wages. The new industries helped to put downward pressure on male wages by offering employment to young unmarried women with the result that the marriage age increased, reducing the birth rate, but for the poorest the increasing recruitment of child-labor in industry provided an inducement to continue high fertility and the decay of family life of industrial workers. Moreover, as a result of the industrial revolution, a new middle class of technicians and other specialists appeared, both in private enterprise and in government, and became a more important part of the labor force and of society in general. Following the French Revolution, secularization spread among intellectuals and the feminist movement was born, giving rise to employment of middle class women. In the 19th century, more and more industrializing countries introduced suffrage for men but, except in New Zealand, where women had to wait until the next century. The concept of human rights was until recently dened more narrowly than today, and the declaration of human rights by the French Revolution and the American Constitution covered only men. Not only were women excluded from the human race in the 19th century, but also colored natives in the colonies. Not only most Europeans in the colonies and at home, but also much of European science, agreed with the racist theory of European superiority in relation to other races, both blacks, reds, and yellows, and tried to explain racial difference by hereditary differences in, e.g., the shape of the skull. The embarrassing problem of technology transfer from Asia was avoided by classifying the ancient Greeks as Europeans and focusing higher education on the writings of Plato and Aristotle, forgetting about their oriental predecessors. The attitudes of European missionaries in the colonies were of course different, but usually they considered and treated the natives as children. Many whites in the colonies

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regarded only white people as real human beings, while members of other races were either considered sub-standard humans or not humans at all, a good excuse for killing or enslaving them in spite of the attitude of the European churches. In conformity with these racial theories, the Europeans arriving in Canada and Australia expropriated the whole territory declaring the land empty; these actions are today occupying the courts and generating public debates in both countries. Before the 19th century the loyalty of European populations had usually been to their ruler or to their local region, whether independent or not, but from the 19th century onwards, it changed in many cases to strong feelings of attachment to the Nation, i.e., the area under the same government, which had become strengthened by the appearance of national railways, mining centers, large industries, and increasing national government bureaucracies, civil and military. After the industrial revolution, Western European governments had made efforts to transform the European part of their possessions into national states, partly by propaganda and other support for what was labeled national culture, and partly by propaganda against or suppression of minority cultures. A strong means to obtain this was the increasing school attendance by compelling both teachers and pupils to use the national language only. The growth of armaments and other national industries and establishments, and the competition between the European countries in exports and acquisition of additional colonies, also contributed to a feeling of national unity. Not only were literature and art strongly inuenced by the national movements, but also science.

DECOLONIZATION AND NEOLIBERALISM

The industrial revolution had important long-term effects on military technology and world politics. Having helped France and England to win two world wars, the United States became the uncontested technological world leader, a change that was related to the environmental differences between these areas. Railways had been of central importance in the European process of industrialization, as already mentioned. On the North American Atlantic coast they were built early, but not over the enormous stretches of near-empty land, in the interior of the continent. Transcontinental railways were built with French and Russian capital, using local wood instead of coal, but they were unprofitable, and the foreign investors lost their money before the railways could make both ends meet under American ownership. Once more, however, a handicap became an advantage, because the poor protability of many railways induced American business and scientists to develop better means of power and transport, that could serve thinly populated areas

over very long distances better than the railway. The result became the American dominance in the automobile and aircraft industries, which derive power from oil, a product that was available within their own territory. Automobiles offer more exible transport than the railway, and aircraft contributes to globalization. For a time their inuence on the environment was positive, because they replaced the bulky and polluting coal by oil, but later both industries became serious polluters. After the Second World War, the United States used its inuence as a superpower to broker the liberation of the colonies of the European countries. The United States wanted this liberation, not only because of their own past history, but also because the colonial preferences in international trade discriminated against US exports. England and some other colonial powers accepted a peaceful liberation of their colonies, because many had become public burdens due to increasing expenditure on military and administration, and because liberation did not imply any change in ownership of private enterprises. To enable the former colonies to take over the costs of military and civil administration and other public infrastructure, the United Nations and some national governments created organizations of international aid to developing countries, and the World Bank provided long term nance for large scale investments in infrastructure and other major projects. An international boom followed the process of liberation of the colonies. The colonial powers had wanted to keep the colonies as suppliers of food and raw materials, and as markets for industrial products, but after independence, many former colonies wanted to industrialize, and change their pattern of trade. Many obtained grants and loans from donors to cover the expected decit. The American business community used the improved access to direct trade with former European colonies to create large multinational companies, followed by an increasing number of other countries. Multinational companies apply the most advanced technologies in their production of goods and services for the world market. Usually, they have their headquarters and top managers in the United States, Europe or Japan, with dozens or hundreds of enterprises spread over several continents. Unskilled labor is recruited where it is cheap, and qualied labor, technicians and computer services where wages are low, but qualications high for instance in India. The liberation of the colonies has allowed many developing countries to increase employment and incomes by becoming seats for one or more of the enterprises belonging to a multinational company or a sub-deliverer of materials or services. The multinationals are efcient producers in the world market, because they are cost-reducing for their customers, but often they are even worse despoilers of the environment than local industries, because they can choose

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to operate in the countries where they pay the least for protection of land and people, as was the case in Bhopal in India in 1984, where more than 5000 members of the local community were killed by a chemical leakage. Modern technology has saved millions of human beings, but also destroyed millions. Many modern inventions threaten human health or survival, while others contribute to the deterioration of the physical and biological environment and some do both. More often than not, enterprises, government bodies, and municipalities dispose of their waste, polluted by dangerous metals and chemicals, into rivers and lakes, or ugly mine tailings, reducing the access to fresh water and making the Green Revolution poisonous. Heavy agricultural machinery may despoil large areas of fragile soil. The oceans are polluted by in ow from poisoned rivers, cleaning of ships in open seas and many other polluting practices. In large cities, air pollution by motor traf c and domestic cooking and heating has become as unpleasant and dangerous to health as burning of coal was earlier. And nuclear energy, once considered a clean replacement for coal, has proved to be so controversial that calls for its abandonment are becoming strong and widespread. However, now it seems that better alternatives are on the way: more use of solar energy, perhaps combined with liquid hydrogen. Pollution of the water in rivers, lakes, and oceans can be avoided or repaired, and municipalities and governments often try to achieve this, by charging payments for use of clean water and for misuse of fresh water, but these payments are usually so low that it is cheaper for the consumers to misuse the resources. Not only too low penalties, but also too high premiums can cause disasters. Because of the high premiums paid in the Soviet Union to producers who exceeded their production plan, collective farms in Uzbekistan neglected to fallow their irrigated elds, bringing desalinization. To avoid or limit the misuse of natural resources, the producers should pay the costs of avoiding misuse, which is in most cases a fraction of the costs of repair, if that is at all possible. In many cases there are regulations which should induce or force producers to delay using new technologies, until suf cient scienti c investigations of the effects have been made, either by the producer or by government, but this is unlikely to be the case in countries that are eager to house subsidiaries of multinational companies. The problem of who should pay, the multinational or the country where one or more of its enterprises are located, concerns not only environmental costs, but also costs of public infrastructure, for instance roads, harbors, airports, and unemployment insurance. However, neoliberal theory undervalues the importance of infrastructure in modern economies. We meet the problem who should pay? whether we discuss environmental problems or the welfare state.

Many American economists have an easy answer: the neoclassical school tacitly assumes that infrastructure costs are negligible, so what is right for a business enterprise is also right for the economy. The economists are right in pointing out that, if the local, national or multinational company is charged more than its indirect costs, the price structure cannot be the correct guide for the market and the investments, but they conveniently forget that this is equally true if the company is charged less than the true costs, including the replacement costs of necessary infrastructure, be it private or public. For the same reason, it distorts the structure of world production, when virtually all governments in the industrialized countries, whether they are members of World Trade Organization (WTO) or not, give subsidies to non-competitive national producers and pose restrictions on imports from effective foreign producers of goods and services. The colonies of European countries had been handicapped in industrialization by the colonial trade system, but after they had become independent, many of them used the large grants of foreign aid in the rst period of independence to start ambitious programs of industrialization by investment in the types of physical and human infrastructure, which are needed for industrialization. Large infrastructures may take decades to complete and even longer before countries can begin paying back their loans; so many of the new projects proved to be more costly and took much longer to construct than foreseen, while in the meantime the 30 good years (1950 1980) were over. The neoliberal governments in the United States and England had reduced foreign aid, part of which was replaced by private loans or credits from international organizations especially the World Bank. As a result, many of the former colonies became heavily indebted and had to cut down on their investment plans, sometimes by arresting half nished developments. Some nanciers, getting nervous, tended to make the loans shorter and shorter, until a crisis broke out in one developing country after another. Production and employment were sharply reduced, and the large informal sector broke down, because its customers lost their incomes. The informal sector in developing countries consists of small enterprises, often family industries that produce traditionally-made goods and services for worker families and the lower-middle class, who prefer the cheap prices in this sector to better quality and design in the modern industrial and service sector. Because it uses traditional technology, the informal sector provides a large share of the employment and self-employment in developing countries. When the sharply reduced activities in both the modern and the informal sector made it impossible for large numbers of the urban population, and some of the rural too, to subsist, many, for instance in Africa, chose to return

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to subsistence production in the villages they had left for the town, but this was not possible, or was less attractive, for earlier rural-urban migrants from areas where the Green Revolution had made access to land more difcult or impossible. Many others chose to migrate to the United States, Canada or Europe, many of them to larger towns and cities, which more than ever became melting pots for people of different races, nationalities, languages, beliefs, and past experiences. In many of the developed western countries, to which not only economic, but also increasing numbers of political refugees turned in desperation, immigrants from less developed countries became more and more unwelcome, or were refused access, because of increasing resistance to immigration. This was so not only because the labor market was deteriorating, but also because of increasing resistance against having to live together with foreigners , especially if they belonged to a different national or religious group and had contradictory ideas on the role of women in the family. To adapt to the international crisis, which created overcapacities in many national and multinational companies, more and more of these have chosen to merge in order to reduce their costs especially by large reductions of personnel, both in developed and developing countries. For example, oil companies that had competed by constructing service stations next to each other discovered that the true costs of competition could be high. However, by cutting down on these expenses they added to the unemployment crisis in many of the countries where they operated. The mergers were not a means to avoid or reduce competition, but were aimed at sharpening the competition between the remaining larger and stronger multinationals and between them and national, private or government owned companies. Instead of aiming at a strengthening of the world economy, by cooperation both within the private sectors and between these and the government sectors, national and international, the neoliberalists continued to destabilize both the national economies and the world economy by their continuing efforts to destroy their competitors, be they national or international, instead of focusing on the common interest in stable growth of the world economy. The present prolonged crisis in most of the world markets is a repetition of the situation in the 1930s, when both mass consumption and investments continued to decline, until the new Keynesian policies increased mass consumption and promoted protable investments. But today, capital-exporting countries prolong the crisis by their sharp cuts in development-aid in a period where sharply increasing income inequalities also reduce mass consumption, thus reducing the protability of many investments.

GLOBALIZATION AND THE MODERN CASTE SYSTEM

From ancient times, large technological changes have been accompanied by and followed by fundamental changes in the economic and political organization of society, in religion, and secular culture. Adam Smith identied the process as more and more specialization of labor, while Marx interpreted it as a gradual change from an original one-class society, which after a long period of war between two classes, a rich and a poor one, ended with a lasting victory for the lower class, that had become the industrial working class. But Marxs interpretation of human history was wrong. Neither before nor after the time of Marx, was human history a war between two classes; it is much better interpreted in terms of the Indian multicaste system, if this is modernized by adding the scientic community with its increasing claim to be accepted as the rst caste. The ancient Indian system had three upper castes, the priest, the secular power (army), and the trader, with the rest of the Hindu population as sudhras , the fourth caste, and the adherents of other religions as non-caste foreigners . If we interpret this caste system as a stylized description of world history, the rst caste: the priest, replaces the sorcerer as the highest authority, after the shift from the gatherer to the producer of food, as mentioned earlier. The next step is a contest of power between the rst and the second caste, the priest and the king with his army, a ght for power that, for instance in Europe, lasted many centuries. It became more complicated when the third caste, the trader (later: nancier or capitalist) appeared, with urbanization and monetization, visiting villages as foreign tradesmen and lending money to the higher castes. The trader was often himself a foreigner; in Asia, Chinese or Indian; in Europe, Jewish. Sometimes he was massacred by caste members. In this period of history the European church was split into Protestants and Catholics, as explained by Max Weber. The next step in the contest between the castes was democratization. The sudhras became the electorate, thus becoming legal contestants for power, creating alliances (nearly everywhere precarious) with one or two of the higher castes. Finally, we have the struggle between the four castes and the non-caste foreign group, be that a minority or a subjugated majority, as was the case in the colonies, where discriminatory treatment of castes and religions was a means to retain power. The distinction between the members of the four castes and the non-caste group is even more divisive than the distinction between caste-members, and it explains why virtually all human societies have been more or less incessantly at war either with neighbors or in international or intercontinental alliances. For a particular people, wars were the means to become castes if they won, but non-castes

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deep below all others if they lost. The latter brought a catastrophic decline of status and income, if not of life. In addition to the three high-caste groups: the church; the government with its army; and the business world, modern societies have an additional caste, which like other castes tends to be hereditary: the scientic community distinguished by high-level education and employment in universities and other scientic or modern business institutions and enterprises. When the new caste appeared there was a struggle, as in Iran today, between the new caste and the rst caste, but it ended most often with a compromise. Recently, the scientic caste has become much more numerous and stronger as a result of the development of computer technology. It is the beginning of the fundamental technological change from the industrial to the electronic age, which has been supported and promoted by the multinational companies and by many governments and scientic institutions. The future change to the electronic age will bring masscommunication with English becoming the world language. This will make it possible for most of the future world population to be informed directly about conicting points of view of different countries and castes, instead of receiving only or mainly the propaganda of its own group. Already today, the spread of knowledge benets from information in the media from private and public international and regional organizations, including the ones focusing on protection of the environment (see Global Forest Watch, Volume 4). The explosive growth of electronic information is of particular importance for schools in thinly populated and in poor regions, where illiterate children (and adults) can come in direct contact with the world by pictograms (icons) and images instead of being cut off from globalization by illiteracy. Another group, which has beneted from the recent technological changes, are women from the new caste who have entered high positions by means of personal achievements or helped by heredity and education. By its achievements, especially in the natural sciences, members of the scientic caste have become not only respected, but also feared by the other castes, the reason for the latter being that the scientic caste has obtained spectacular results not only concerning nature, but also relating to humans, their health and survival. A widely read book speaks of the risk society, where both rich and poor are threatened by the risks of modern scientic interference with human health and food (Beck, 1992). The temptation is great to reduce cost and time, cutting short the time spent on research and development. The scientists, the laboratory, the producer, and even the government would like to be rst to come to market; thus gaining in prot and honor. But in the past, there have been disastrous results of insufcient research, like

the tragedy of the deformed Thalidomide-children, and, more recently, the lack of control with AIDS-contaminated blood. The damage is often discovered years later, and is in most cases irreparable. So the general public is roused to the risks of insufcient research, especially within genetic technology for food production and medical care. The public case for strict control both with existing and new potentially life-threatening technologies is strong, and it is imperative that concerned scientists, producers, and governments combine their efforts to prevent misuse and thoughtless behavior. In the international business community reaction to increasing globalization of the economy is positive, but that is not the case with most national governments, which are hamstrung by strong nationalism, which emerged in the industrialized countries in the 19th century and in the liberated colonies in the 20th century. With this background of increasing nationalism, it is not surprising that the meetings of the United Nations and other international organizations are often used to voice conicting national interests, instead of promoting international cooperation as a replacement for wars. Many adherents of economic globalization have a negative attitude to its cultural aspects. People with different cultures, religions, and customs have come much closer to one another, both because of immigration, and through increasing use of computer technology. For many, the reaction to this is negative. Because of nostalgia for the past and fear of the future, they revive abandoned old beliefs and customs, be they beliefs in spirits and fortune telling, customary dress, the patriarchal family pattern, or fundamentalist religious practice. The revival of many shadows of the past, which have been sources of serious conict, contributes to making the process of globalization more difcult. But it is not by returning to old customs of family and co-village preferences, or of racial prejudices, that the inescapable process of globalization can be carried out peacefully. In fact, we live in a period where increasing income differences, both within and between countries and continents, increase the risk that desperate individuals or governments will use the proliferating, more and more efcient, mass-killing technologies, and that they might succeed in eradicating all or a large share of humanity, deliberately or by error.

REFERENCES
Beck, U (1992) Risk Society, Towards a New Modernity, Sage Publications, London. Boserup, E (1965) The Conditions of Agricultural Growth. The Economics of Agrarian Change Under Population Pressure, Earthscan, London.

96 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE Boserup, E (1981) Population and Technological Change. A Study of Long-term Trends, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Boserup, E (1996) Development Theory: An Analytical Framework and Selected Applications, Population and Development Review, 22, 505 515. Buck, J L (1937) Land Utilization in China, University of Nanking Press, Nanking. Carneiro, R L (1998) Slash and Burn Cultivation Among the Kuikuru, Anthropologia, Carracas. Evans, L T (1998) Feeding the Ten Billion. Plants and Population Growth, Cambridge University Press, New York, 145. Needham, J (1954) Science and Civilization in China, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Relating to Nature: Spirituality, Philosophy, and Environmental Concern

FREDERICK FERRE
University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

Classical Greek philosophy had its origin about 2600 years ago. Human spirituality is much older. No one knows exactly when our early ancestors began to experience religious awe or fear or ecstasy, but paleontologists nd evidence of spirituality along with the tools and implements of the earliest remnants of Homo neanderthalensis as well as Homo sapiens. Burial rites and cave painting strongly suggest that with the rise of our species also rose deep feelings and comprehensive beliefs, shaping our relations to nature. The details of prehistoric spirituality must remain a subject for speculation, but it seems likely that tribal adoption of totem animals in uenced hunting practices, and that religious taboos and fertility festivals were involved in the invention and carrying on of agriculture. Because the great shift, about 10 000 years ago, from the mobile hunting gathering life to the settled existence of agriculture, and eventually cities, represents the single most signi cant change in the human relationship to nature in the entire history of our species; the spiritual attitudes guiding these practices had enormous signi cance for the environment. Earth worship, Sun worship, beliefs in spirits inhabiting elds, streams, and trees; ritual inhibitions on eating and mating; and the rise of shamans and priests, guiding group practices and keeping calendars: all these laid the foundation for deeply felt attitudes on what was permissible or impermissible in human dealings with the natural environment. Some of these attitudes may continue to resonate in the present day, almost too deep for notice or discussion. Vigorous discussion, however, of the alleged huge burden of guilt born by Christianity for sponsoring damaging environmental attitudes was prompted by a 1967 article by Lynn White, Jr, an eminent historian, in the magazine, Science. White accused Christian spirituality of undermining reverence for nature by isolating the holy in a transcendent creator God alone, thus leading to a sharp divide between the sacred and the profane. European attitudes based on such a spiritual dualism, applied from the middle ages to the present, White asserted, reduce nature to a mere resource for human use and development. His prescription was to counter a dangerous spirituality with an environmentally more benign one, also present in the Christian tradition, particularly that of St. Francis, who saw the sacred in nature all around him and wrote hymns to Brother Sun. As can be imagined, a variety of theological responses greeted this landmark critique. The debates continue to reverberate (see also Christianity and the Environment, Volume 5; Ecofeminism, Volume 5; Religion and Ecology in the Abrahamic Faiths, Volume 5). Philosophical as well as theological worldviews deeply shape attitudes toward nature. Classical Greek philosophy struggled with the de nition of the human position in nature, therefore in uencing the sorts of attitudes deemed appropriate for humans to take toward the environment. These philosophical issues were intimately (and interestingly) entangled with theological ones in the rst fteen centuries of the Christian era, separating again in the modern era, during which they have continued to shape the norms of human relations with other creatures, with matter in general, and with other persons in society. The dominant philosophical modern world picture was dualistic, with humanity and all values on one side, and the rest of the world, valuable, if at all, only because humans might value it, on the other. Alternative philosophical views have challenged this dominant picture, but in the atmosphere generated by the alliance of philosophical dualism with the early modern science of Galileo and Newton, these challenges have found it extremely dif cult to ourish. The environmental realities of late 20th and early 21st century modern industrial societies have shown the urgency of nding ways of relating to nature that will allow both human beings and the rest of nature to thrive.

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Hence there are calls for reexamination of the religious and philosophical grounds for the attitudes which contemporary men and women express in their treatment of nature and each other. The alienation between culture and nature, mind and matter, value and fact, sacred and profane, transcendent and immanent, needs to be healed. Assuming that most of the resources for changing any culture from within need to be found among the de ning achievements of that culture, resources from ancient Greek philosophy, biblical religion, and science will be especially valuable in any step toward reforming western postmodern environmental attitudes and practices. But since environmental changes and concerns are global, it will be important that foundations be laid for a wider ecumenical dialogue with spiritualities and philosophies drawn from non-western cultures as well.

RELIGIOUS POLARITIES OF IMMANENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE

Although the spiritual beliefs and practices of prehistoric humans pose many unknowns, there are rich sources of clues to be found in artifacts left by ancient peoples as well as in the observed beliefs and practices of recent or contemporary peoples living in preliterate (in this sense prehistoric) societies. The latter societies often share much in common with ancient practices of food production, hunting, housing, and the like, and may be surmised to have at least analogous worldviews and attitudes toward nature. The earliest religiously signicant artifacts left by ancient humans and contemporary preliterate societies both indicate strong attitudinal connections to nature. The sacred is felt as pervasive through, dwelling fully within, the natural environment. At one pole, spiritualities of this sort, in which the sacred is perceived as inside rather than outside the natural world, can be called spiritualities of immanence (in-dwelling the opposite of transcendent). Animals are revered. Hunting and agricultural tribes alike relate in totemic identi cations with characteristic powers of familiar species. Statuettes, the Venus gurines dating from the Upper Paleolithic Period (approximately 25 000 BC), depict women with exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics, breasts and buttocks, and are taken to indicate widespread fertility worship over a large geographical area, including Europe and Russia. Thousands of gurines of animals, and stone plaques of animals and people, show how important nature loomed in prehistoric consciousness. Also from the Upper Paleolithic (c. 15 000 BC) are cave paintings (e.g., at the Lascaux Grotto in South-central France) of animals, mainly in France and Spain but also in the Urals, probably created for ritual and magic involved with sustaining herd populations and with preparations for hunting. These show intense human interest in and close observation of the natural environment. After the rise of agriculture and civilization in the fertile crescent, earlier Great Mother and Earth Mother myths, preserved in writing by the earliest civilizations of Sumer and Akkad, trace all natural gods to dei ed female generosity. But male fertility gods were also of great importance in ancient times. In many Middle Eastern societies the god

Baal played a central role in relating humans to the natural order. In the mythology of Canaan, he is lord of storms, thunder, lightning, springs, and moisture in general. One of his tasks is to ght a major battle with Mot, the god of death, every seven years. If he wins, humans are assured seven years of plenty; if he loses, seven years of drought and famine result. In addition, in an obvious seasonal cycle, Baal must ght an annual battle with Mot toward harvest time. Baal always loses this encounter and winter comes, but his sister, Anath, annually revenges Baal by killing Mot, thus allowing Baal, and a new growing season, to return to life. Astarte, sister of Anath and Baal, represents another important Middle Eastern deity of sex and fertility, as well as of war. She was worshipped as the primary divinity of Tyre, Sidon, and Elath but also had important followings in Akkad, Egypt, and Europe. In Akkad she was known as Ishtar; in Egypt her name became assimilated to Isis; in Greece and Rome she was associated with Aphrodite (Venus), Artemis (Diana), and Hera (Juno); all aspects of the Great Mother. Aphrodite was patroness of human sexuality; Artemis was mistress of the animals, both wild and domestic; and Hera was matron of all things female, patroness of breast feeding, comforter of women. The opposite pole in relating to nature is that of transcendence, in which the sacred (envisioned as dwelling outside or above the natural universe) is carefully defended from contact with all this familiar landscape of crops, animals, war, and babies. In the cultural and religious melting pot of the eastern Mediterranean region in the second and rst millennia BC, nomadic Hebrew tribes partly assimilated, partly held themselves apart, in the struggle for supremacy between these two great attitudinal modes of relating to nature. As strongly re ected in the Bible, some of the Hebrews, on adopting agricultural and urban ways of life, were tempted to add also the worship of Baal and his fertility-oriented consorts to the worship of El or Yahweh, a deity associated with the more ascetic life of tents, sheep herding, and desert storms. Much to the offense of the stern supporters of tradition, many Hebrews tried to have it both ways, seeing the sacred in natural processes and indulging even in the ritual prostitution and sexual promiscuity accompanying agricultural festivals of planting and harvest.

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Hosea, an early Hebrew prophet during the reign of King Jeroboam II (786746 BC), had a wife who may herself have been a temple prostitute, to his great personal anguish and moral displeasure. Israel, the northern kingdom of the Hebrew tribes, is condemned by Hosea for likewise prostituting herself in observing the feasts of Baal, sharing her favors with paramours other than her true husband, Yahweh. Hosea foresees destruction of the northern kingdom, as punishment for the spiritual promiscuity illustrated by the fertility rituals he found disgusting. But in a striking oracle which he acts out, he redeems (buys back) his adulterous wife from prostitution to indicate that Yahweh, as faithful husband, will ultimately take back at least a cleansed remnant of the chosen people on whom he has established his covenant love. Other prophets, like Amos, Hoseas southern contemporary, thundered against the dilution of religious commitment to Yahweh represented by Baal-inspired attitudes toward the immanence of the sacred, and drew primary attention back to issues of transcendent principles of social justice instead. Caring for the poor, the weak, the vulnerable, not sacricial ritual or mere lip service, is where the sacred (what God ultimately cares for) must be located. Hebrew contempt for the fertility-related modes of spirituality showed itself from the time of Hosea and Amos in language as well. Earlier, Baal-terms had been accepted without discomfort. King Saul (ruled c. 10211000 BC) had a son, Ishbaal. Still earlier, Gideon, the judge, was known also as Jurubbaal. But Queen Jezebel, a princess of Tyre and Sidon who married King Ahab (ruled c. 874853 BC), campaigned vigorously to make worship of Baal exclusive and mandatory, aiming to replace the worship of Yahweh entirely. This polarized the atmosphere and afterward led the very name Baal to be replaced sometimes by the Hebrew word for shame, boshet. Ishbaal became Ishboshet and Baals sister goddess, Astarte, was renamed Ashtoreth, a compound of Astarte and boshet through which the Hebrews expressed their stern disapproval for her followers excessive immersion in sacred immanence. The textual analysis of the Hebrew Bible is complex and many layered. But eventually (by around 500 BC) the priestly tradition, whose authors were responsible for the creation story with which Genesis begins, absorbed and afrmed in stirring imagery the prophetic insistence on the transcendence of God, far above and beyond the realm of nature, formed as it was out of the chaos of the waters over which Gods spirit brooded. In later interpretation, this story was taken to depict the creation of the material universe out of nothing , so utterly distinct must the creation be from its transcendent Creator. In parallel, in keeping with the prophetic ideal, the opposition expressed in the Ten Commandments against other gods and especially against graven images , or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is

in the water under the earth , strongly reinforced in early Hebrew spirituality the refusal to nd the sacred anywhere in nature but only in the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage (Exodus, 20: 217). This stern stress on history and justice made for striking contrast with the morally easygoing emphasis, in competing spiritualities, on nding the sacred immanent within nature, whether in animals or in storms or in the Earths fertility. If the sacred in any worldview is understood as whatever is considered ultimately valuable, whatever is nally worthy of worship, then Hebrew consciousness came, over time, to locate the sacred exclusively in the transcendent God, eternal source of righteousness, standard of justice for human community, and paradigm of faithfulness to a covenant made and sustained despite the vicissitudes of history. Nature was signicant not in itself but mainly as the non-moral stage upon which the moral dramas of history could play out. Coming to this view of nature was a gradual process, and not without alternatives in the development of Hebrew spirituality. In Genesis itself stands an alternative creation story, older than the more familiar priestly story of Genesis 1. This older story of Genesis 2 depicts a different order of creation and a much closer relation between human beings, animals, and the material order. God creates the rst man not out of nothing but, rather, out of dust from the ground (Genesis, 2:7), and creates the animals afterward as helpers for man, so that he would not be alone (Genesis, 2:18). The animals all get their names from their human fellow creature. The power to give names does recognize the unique gift of language enjoyed by humanity, but it does not by itself suggest alienation or domination. Finally, to make a more tting helper, God makes the rst woman from organic tissue removed from the man. Differentiated mutuality (different parts in positive relation) is the mood of this older creation story. The later, principal creation story of Genesis 1, in contrast, does explicitly encourage domination. The rst humans are commanded both to multiply their numbers and to subdue all the rest of nature for human use and prot (see Genesis, 1:28). The moral tone expressed in the verb subdue by its Hebrew original is not gentle. The same verb, kabash, is found in violent contexts such as conquering enemies on the eld of battle, or even assaulting a woman by force (see Esther, 7:8). In this context, the various animals and plants are explicitly given to humans for rule and consumption. Humans, uniquely made in the image of God are intended to take dominion (Genesis, 1:26) by the Creator God himself, standard giver of justice and model of righteousness. Nature, far from being a locus of immanent sacred value, is seen instead as made up of things to be controlled and used.

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Within the Judaism and Christianity that grew out of early Hebrew spirituality, internal tensions can be found between the attitudes of dominion and those of differentiated mutuality. In Jewish law, animals were sacriced with good conscience, but, in contrast, farmers were forbidden to muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain (Deuteronomy, 25:4), suggesting attitudes of mutuality and fair play with animals. In Christianity, Jesus is shown withering a tree with a curse (see Mark, 11:226) and using a herd of swine as vehicles to send evil spirits over a cliff into the sea to perish (see Matthew, 8:3033), but also, in a more tender picture, he is quoted as appreciating the value of ravens and lilies, though differentiating their value from that of human beings, which he holds to be far greater.
Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds!

In America, in the 1960s, some theologians embraced and celebrated our cultures liberation from entangling spiritualities of immanence, a liberation provided to modern secular civilization by Biblical stress on the exclusive transcendence of the sacred (Cox, 1966).

THE LYNN WHITE CONTROVERSY

One of the most important single challenges to Christian self-congratulation on environmental attitudes came in 1967 from a seminal, wide-ranging article published by the historian, Lynn White, Jr, in the journal, Science (White, 1967). White, a noted expert on the thought and technology of medieval Europe, pressed a case leading squarely to the need for deep religious reform as a necessary condition for any long-term solution to the massive environmental destruction that humankind, led by western civilization, is wreaking on nature. Whites argument begins by noting the enormous impact the human race has had, and is increasingly having, on the natural environment, from taming the banks of the Nile six millennia ago, to the recent Aswan Dam. By irrigating, overgrazing, deforesting, and the like, humans have changed the face of the earth from time immemorial. But now there is a qualitative change. Since the onset of scientically-led technology, the impact of our race upon the environment has so increased in force that it has changed in essence (White, 1967, 1203). Science and technology, having such explosive powers when combined, need themselves to be understood if they are to be controlled. The linkage between them is a striking historical phenomenon, since for most of human history science was an elite, aristocratic activity and technology a lower-class function. Their recent marriage is the extraordinary outcome of the democratic revolutions of Western Europe, which, by reducing social barriers, tended to assert a functional unity of brain and hand (White, 1967, 1204). White continues: Our ecologic crisis is the product of an emerging, entirely novel, democratic culture. The issue is whether a democratized world can survive its own implications. Presumably, we cannot unless we rethink our axioms (White, 1967, 1204). The rst step toward this necessary rethinking, for White, is recognizing that science and technology as we know them are distinctly occidental. Though science has inherited much of value from other cultures, today, around the globe, all signicant science is western in style and method, whatever the pigmentation or language of the scientists (White, 1967, 1204). Equally important, though less often noticed, is the fact that this leadership (especially in technology) is not a new phenomenon. In Western Europe, by 1000 AD, at the latest, water power was used in a variety of industrial processes besides grinding grain; within 200 years, wind power was harnessed

Also,
Consider the lilies, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass which is alive in the eld today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you, O men of little faith? (Luke, 12:24, 27 28)

The spiritual development of Western Europe over the following millennia is complex, inuenced from many sources, but Christian ambivalence about the natural environment continued, with a gradual loss of the sense of differentiated mutuality. Mystical world denial, inuenced by strains of philosophical Platonism, drew attention away from the world of the senses and toward radically transcendent realms of the sacred. In this, Christianity took a different trajectory from Judaism, which (despite neoplatonic subthemes of its own) remained more of the earth, earthy, with less sharp distinctions between soul and body than came to typify the medieval Christian worldview. Even in Christendom, of course, practical work needed to be done, whether on feudal estates or in monasteries. But such secular interests were clearly distinct from what was ultimately important. Practical inventions abounded in the middle ages, released from restraints that might have been imposed by religions of immanence. Christian opposition to the Druids, for example, released the oak forests of Europe from the protection of Druidic veneration, transforming sacred groves into sources of lumber. These developments, strengthening the dominion attitudes of European Christians, have continued until recent times, with important reinforcement from modern philosophy and science (see the following section), and they are still reverberating throughout the industrial civilization (now worldwide) that traces its roots to Christian Europe.

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as well. The technologies of Europe did not excel those of other civilizations in delicacy but in power. Science, too, began to ourish in Western Europe much earlier than the more visible scientic revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus (14731543) and Galileo Galilei (15641642). Eager translation of scientic texts from Arabic and Greek into Latin began in the late 11th century and gained momentum. By the late 13th century, Europe had seized global scientic leadership from the faltering hands of Islam (White, 1967, 1204). How shall we account for this extraordinary (historically unprecedented) scientic and technological dynamism in Western Christendom? White proposes that the answer lies in the worldview of Christianity itself, particularly as interpreted by the theologians and applied by the peasants of Western and Northern Europe. In the terms of the section on religious polarities of immanence and transcendence, Christian exclusion of the sacred from immanence in nature freed Europeans to exploit the earth in unprecedented ways. White illustrates from the technology of plowing. Early plows, developed in Near Eastern and Mediterranean regions, where soil is light and dry, did not turn the sod but merely scratched it. Cross plowing was necessary, but two oxen were sufcient for such relatively gentle preparations for planting. In northern Europe, however, where soils are sticky and moist, another plow was invented as early as the seventh century. It was
equipped with a vertical knife to cut the line of the furrow, a horizontal share to slice under the sod, and a moldboard to turn it over. The friction of this plow with the soil was so great that it normally required not two but eight oxen. It attacked the land with such violence that cross plowing was not needed, and elds tended to be shaped in long strips. (White, 1967, 1205)

to have been double edged: By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects (White, 1967, 1205). Linking such attitudes to a passionate interest in natural science, motivated by a desire, as was often said, to think Gods thoughts after him, meant that modern western science was cast in a matrix of Christian theology (White, 1967, 1206). That theology was one of transcendence, not immanence. Thus White draws the following conclusions:
rst, that viewed historically, modern science is an extrapolation of natural theology and, second, that modern technology is at least partly to be explained as an occidental, voluntarist realization of the Christian dogma of mans transcendence of, and rightful mastery over, nature. But, as we now recognize, somewhat over a century ago science and technology hitherto quite separate activities, joined to give mankind powers which, to judge by many of the ecologic effects, are out of control. If so, Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt. (White, 1967, 1206)

Assessing guilt is one thing, suggesting solutions is something else. White does not believe that supercial approaches to environmental concerns, mechanical or cosmetic clean-up xes, will sufce, in view of the depth of the origins of these problems. But even science and technology, given their attitudinal and ideological makeup, are weak reeds. More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecologic crisis until we nd a new religion, or rethink our old one (White, 1967, 1206). To this end, White proposes that we ponder the greatest radical in Christian history since Christ: St. Francis of Assisi . St. Francis was a Christian who emphasized immanence.
The key to an understanding of Francis is his belief in the virtue of humility not merely for the individual but for man as a species. Francis tried to depose man from his monarchy over creation and set up a democracy of all Gods creatures. (White, 1967, 1206)

This violence changed the relations between humanity and the soil in a profound and ominous way.
Formerly, man had been part of nature; now he was the exploiter of nature. Nowhere else in the world did farmers develop any analogous agricultural implement. Is it coincidence that modern technology, with its ruthlessness toward nature, has so largely been produced by descendants of these peasants of Northern Europe? (White, 1967, 1205)

He held a belief in animal souls: souls with intrinsic value and worthy of religious salvation.
His view of nature and of man rested on a unique sort of panpsychism of all things animate and inanimate, designed for the glorication of their transcendent Creator, who, in the ultimate gesture of cosmic humility, assumed esh, lay helpless in a manger, and hung dying on a scaffold. (White, 1967, 1207)

White rejects the idea of coincidence. What people do about their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation to things around them. Human ecology is deeply conditioned by beliefs about our nature and destiny that is, by religion (White, 1967, 1205). The attitudes behind our current environmental crisis, encouraging exploitation of nature with no regard to non-human values is the residue of Christianity, White declares. Especially in its western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen (White, 1967, 1205). Victory over Druidism and other pagan religions of immanence turns out

With this in mind, and in the conviction that we shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man (White, 1967, 1207), White proposes that Francis of Assisi should be the patron saint for ecologists. Theological response to Whites critique was voluminous, and at times sulphurous. There is no need here to

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cover the blow-by-blow reaction of Christians to the ideas outlined above, but various general positions can be identied. It is at least controversial, for example, whether St. Francis is such a supporter of immanence as White claims. Are entities in nature sacred in themselves or simply as precious as gifts from God? Often such arguments are not so much direct refutations of White as meditations on Christian spirituality in relation to nature: meditations expressed in the context of a new sensitivity to environmental concerns stirred in the 1960s and focused by the Lynn White controversy. One position, taken by Cox (1966), preemptively celebrated all that White deplored. Cox embraced and welcomed the secularization of nature represented by Judeo-Christian desacralization of the sacred groves. In so doing, he recognized that the environment would lose a measure of protection, at least for a time.
Yahweh, the Creator, whose being is centered outside the natural process, who calls it into existence and names its parts, allows man to perceive nature itself in a matter-of-fact way. It is true, as some modern writers have pointed out, that modern mans attitude toward disenchanted nature has sometimes shown elements of vindictiveness. (Cox, 1966, 20)

Interpreting destructive environmental attitudes as simply the passing product of human immaturity makes no use of the Christian doctrine of sin, which could, if deployed here, account both for the human tendency to ravage nature and for the revenge of the Valkyries. An alternative position to Coxs, making sin central, does just this. The French social critic and theologian, Jacques Ellul, has long condemned technology (Ellul, 1964). More recently, in the midst of the Lynn White controversies, though not in direct reference to it, Ellul returns to the theological fundamentals of the human relation to nature (Ellul, 1984). The relation, he argues, was intimate and free in paradise, but after the primal fall of humanity into sin, the relation to nature is in all respects distorted and under the rule of necessity. Both concern for the earth and concern for social justice are of equal importance to God.
The comparison reveals how much God loves creation with all that it includes, its variety, its blossoming; and it means that the ecological destruction is of the order of sin: as considerable as war, genocide, the exploitation of man by man, injustice. There is no scale of sin; there is only the immensity of the love of God from which man claims to escape, the love which still endures for this creation that we ravage. (Ellul, 1984, 152)

But this vindictiveness is a passing phase, Cox argues, and should not be seen as a necessary part of mature secularization.
Like a child suddenly released from parental constraints, he [modern man] takes savage pride in smashing nature and brutalizing it. This is perhaps a kind of revenge pressed by a former prisoner against his captor, but it is essentially childish and is unquestionably a passing phase.

And ravage we must. For Ellul,

it is impossible to detach the relationship of man with the world from his relationship with God. It is no accident that from the moment when man challenged God (the 18th century), the technique of exploiting the world has taken off. It is no accident that the place where man decided that there was no God and that nature was purely natural is the place where the exploitation of the world developed (the west). (Ellul, 1984, 153)

The norm, rather, is quite different. The mature secular man neither reverences nor ravages nature. His task is to tend it and make use of it, to assume the responsibility assigned to the man, Adam (Cox, 1966, 20). Since this was written shortly before the publication of Whites essay and cannot be taken as a direct answer to it, Cox does not attempt to deal with the long, historical time frame of domination alleged by White. On its defensive side, his position is more focused on recent, obvious violence done to nature, by the union between secularized theory and practice that marks late modern western civilization. But, in addition, Cox launches an offensive, in keeping with the ancient prophetic stress on social rather than environmental concerns, against ancient and modern terrors created by the illicit sacralization of anything natural. This means that:
we should oppose the romantic restoration of the sprites to the forest. It may seem pleasant at rst to reinstate the tribal spirits, but (as Hitler made all too clear) once the Valkyries return, they will seek a bloodthirsty revenge on those who banished them. (Cox, 1966, 31)

Since God and scientic technology are mutually incompatible,

conversely, it is no accident that the rst great goal of the science oriented toward technology was to shake off the restrictions of divine tutelage. The effort to afrm science by itself, without limit, as judge of everything and carrying its own legitimization inevitably involved, as the other side of the coin, the devastation of the world, the squandering of possibilities, the frenzy of destruction. (Ellul, 1984, 153)

The faithlessness of Jews and Christians, who were in a position to understand this and respond with repentance by setting limits to human aggressiveness, has sealed the worlds fate. It means that they, and they alone, are responsible before God, for the disaster in which we are beginning to live (Ellul, 1984, 154). Ecological disaster, an inevitability for Ellul, may indeed be in store, say other theologians, but perhaps a middle way averting disaster can be found: a way in which humanity can

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play a more positive role tending the Earth with constructive rather than destructive interventions. The stain of sin, no matter how deep, must be balanced by the readiness of God to redeem any situation, no matter how bleak. For Egbert Schuurman, a Dutch theologian, only this additional assurance makes the Christian message a Gospel, good news . Gods grace holds the key to human repentance. This means that the stubborn pride that currently distorts human attitudes toward nature and society can at any moment be melted and a new order instituted. Humans need above all to pray for a widespread change of heart. Guided by the right motive, man in his cultural activity can be a blessing for nature (1 Kings, 4:3334) and at the same time enter into an open way toward the future (Schuurman, 1984, 117). Theologians of this middle way, regarding the proper human attitudes and actions on Earth may not look to St. Francis as the patron, as Lynn White suggests, but may prefer another outstanding gure in Christian history, St. Benedict. St. Francis celebrates unity with nature, but an ideal Franciscan democracy of all Gods creatures allows little scope for the sort of human leadership, manipulation, and control, that complex civilization requires.
Compared with St. Franciss deep feeling and sense of union with the natural world, St. Benedicts response was more practical, using nature with care and respect. The Benedictine monasteries combined work and contemplation. They developed sound agricultural practices, such as crop rotation and care for the soil, and they drained swamps and husbanded timber all over Europe. Benedictines were creative in practical technologies related to nature. (Barbour, 1980, 25)

PHILOSOPHICAL POLARITIES OF EXCLUSION AND INCLUSION

It is all very well for theologians to debate whether the natural environment should be regarded with respect, reverence or brotherly love, but if there are no fundamental categories available for general public understanding of how natural objects can be thought to have value at all, then the link between spiritual guidance and public policy is severed. This has been the case for most of the modern period. The outstanding philosophers of the age have tended to exclude values from any rm locus in nature, and the civilization whose modern conscience and institutions were shaped in the general worldview of its intellectual leaders reects this exclusion in its practices. Two feuding philosophers, both founding fathers of the modern worldview, agreed on little else, but did close ranks against the possibility of values subsisting, in any way, in nature. Thomas Hobbes (15881679) was a monist, a materialist who denied that the human soul is anything more than the reverberations of ne atoms; Rene Descartes

(15961650), in contrast, was a dualist who held that the soul is absolutely immaterial and free from contamination by material categories. Both, however, accepted the distinction, propounded earlier by Galileo Galilei, between primary and secondary qualities. The former, primary qualities are the properties of natural objects open to mathematical description, such as size and shape, weight and momentum, location and motion. These are held to be characteristics, actually belonging to the thing in itself. Since they can be quantied, they can be grasped with precision, understood objectively. The latter, secondary qualities are the colors, smells, tastes, sounds, and feels of things. They are changeable, relative to the setting and the condition of the perceiving organism. They cannot be quantied but can be described only vaguely by eliciting subjective memories not everyone shares. They are the source of countless illusions, optical, auditory, and tactile. In extreme cases they obviously do not belong to things but are merely in the perceiver. Galileo gives as an example the capacity of a feather to tickle. For some people it may have great tickle-power, but that is to say something about the people, not the feather. Now this tickling is all in us, and not in the feather, and if the animate and sensitive body be removed, it is nothing more than a mere name (Galileo, 1954, 86). But for Galileo, Hobbes, and Descartes, and through them for most modern philosophy, this same dependence on the presence of our animate and sensitive body is manifested by all the sensory qualities. As Galileo put it, Of precisely a similar and not greater existence do I believe these various qualities to be possessed, which are attributed to natural bodies, such as tastes, odors, colors, and others (Galileo, 1954, 86). From this comes the rst of the great cliches that virtually every school child has learned from modern philosophy: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, does it make a sound? The standard modern answer, of course, is no . Physical vibrations in air and earth will be caused, but without ears and minds to translate those quantiable vibrations into qualitative crackles and thumps, there is no sound, strictly speaking. But if the hues of autumnal leaves are not really in nature but only in animate and sensitive lookers, and if the tones of birds are not really in nature but only in animate and sensitive listeners, then how much more obviously subjective must be the feelings of approval and enjoyment that human beings experience while looking and listening within their environment! From this comes the second modern philosophical cliche: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder . This saying can, and must (in this philosophical framework) be generalized to all values. Just as beauty is generated by human appreciators, so must goodness be generated by human judges, and truth be generated by human thinkers. Nature itself possesses no such values. It is odorless, colorless, soundless and tasteless

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in itself. The gardenias smell, the sunrises hues, the brooks burble, and peachs avor are dependent on human presence. Therefore, it makes no sense to preserve them from human exploitation or even to respect them along with humans. It is conceptually unthinkable for them to have intrinsic value apart from humans; it would be sheer philosophical confusion to imagine that they could have standing against human interests, could be addressed with reverence, or treated with brotherly love. The immense prestige of the mechanical world picture created by Isaac Newton (16431727), which incorporated these key assumptions on the exclusion of qualities, values, and experience from the basic stuff underlying the natural world, greatly reinforced earlier views on the inert, intrinsically valueless character of nature in itself. This exclusionary world picture was then brought to its logical climax in the philosophical explosion lit by Immanuel Kant (17241804), who gave powerful deductive arguments for the absolute separation of the world we experience, the world in which we live and in which science works, from the world as it is in itself. Freedom, morality, knowledge, God, our own true selves (everything that is genuinely valuable) resides in the latter realm, which Kant called the Noumenal. Whatever can be experienced or even positively thought belongs to the realm of appearance, which Kant called the Phenomenal (Kant, 1966). Dignity is deserved only by moral agents, in Kant s view, and such agents must exclusively be rational, since morality itself consists in willing actions out of respect for moral lawfulness, and moral laws can only be recognized and obeyed by rational beings. Nothing in nature, therefore, can have dignity or (on the opposite side of the coin) rights. If we refrain from shooting an old, faithful dog which has served us well, it is not because the dog has a right to a comfortable retirement, for the dog cannot judge , but because we should cultivate tender feelings as part of our duty to humanity (Kant, 1963, 240). Later, in the 20th century, philosophers convinced by Kant (and the main thrust of modern philosophy) that rights-language has no place in connection with natural things, but unpersuaded that it is any more possible to demonstrate by reason alone the foundations of morality even among human beings, dismissed all values as mere emotional expressions of preference and aversion (Ayer, 1946, Chapter 6). On this view, such sayings as nature is intrinsically valuable or we should all respect the dignity of nature are literal nonsense. There is no way to verify or falsify such utterances if they are taken as attempting to make claims about matters of fact that could possibly be true or false. Any and all experienceable facts would be equally compatible with them. But if taken instead as expressions of a speaker s feelings of warmth toward nature or a wish that others might share such attitudes, the utterances can be seen to have a function. What they do

not do, however, is describe anything about nature itself, which stands extralinguistically as a vast realm of actual or possible appearances capable of con rming or confuting our hypotheses, and nothing more. Despite enormous differences in thought-worlds, interesting similarities link this recent philosophical view of nature to Plato s in the fourth century BC. Things and the appearances of things are low on the hierarchy of values for Plato (c. 428 348 BC). When sense experiences can be uni ed into formal concepts of things, and concepts can be linked into theories (mathematical and otherwise) of increasing inclusiveness, there is a corresponding rise in worth, for Plato, both epistemological and metaphysical. The natural world of constant change ranks only on the lower order of mere becoming; the intelligible Forms that give understanding, in contrast, qualify for the higher order of true being: changeless, eternal, beautiful. Finally all are ideally uni ed through the supreme form of the good. Finite things are not valuable in themselves as changing particulars bound to the cycles of generation and decay, but gain value only to the degree that they exemplify the eternally perfect forms that give them meaning. Plato s rmly exclusionist position, locating all genuine value outside nature in a higher, immaterial domain, was an easy t for Christian doctrine in need of a philosophical framework. There are Platonic themes inside the New Testament itself, especially in the Fourth Gospel, and during the rst three centuries AD, the early Church Fathers found the transcendence motifs of Judeo-Christian traditions hospitable to Platonic interpretations (Wolfson, 1970). Here, as noted in section one, no immanent sacredness in groves, neither Greek nor Druid, could nd legitimacy. The interplay between Christian spirituality and Platonic philosophy dominated European consciousness for more than 1000 years, encouraging other-worldly attitudes where ultimate values were at issue, bifurcating nature into a picture album lled with iconic reminders of eternal realities, on one level, and a mere warehouse for human exploitation, on the other. The exclusion of value from nature is the lead story of western philosophy, dovetailing nicely with the transcendence of value in dominant western spirituality. Still, there has all along been an undercurrent of dissent, not only in religion (as in St. Francis), but also in philosophy. Plato s most distinguished student, Aristotle (384 322 BC), dissented at once. Instead of banishing value from the substances in nature to an independent realm of eternal forms, Aristotle proposed that we understand natural things as the inextricable combination of forms with individualizing, spatially locating matter, a hylomorphic (matter form) way of including all that Plato found valuable, but fully within the burgeoning domain of change. Living things can then be seen as working out their own internal Forms, their natures or essential characters. Their intrinsic teleology

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(explanation of something in terms of the purpose it serves rather than in terms of its causes) can be fullled or frustrated. A tree can be chewed down before it has a chance to bear fruit, but a beaver can use its trunk and branches to build a dam in which to house and nurture precious offspring. Nature is a domain of competing and cooperating cycles of individual subjects of lives with intrinsic ends, norms of development, experiences, and satisfactions. All living things, for Aristotle, have souls, understood as the functioning of their innate characters, or forms. Plants have the powers of nutrition and reproduction and thus have vegetative souls; animals have these powers with the additional capacities of locomotion and sensation, giving them sensitive souls. Human beings have all the previous functions plus the conscious abilities to calculate and reect, which is what is meant by rational souls. In every case it is the whole organism that is functioning in the ways characteristic of its essential nature: matter and form working together. Particular beings do not merely exemplify something higher, but manifest and embody the values of their forms concretely. Aristotles dissent from Plato was lost to Europe for the rst millennium of Christian history, but it had been kept alive in Muslim thinking, and during the 12th century it was recovered by the West. This recovery, and its assimilation in the 13th century through the work of great scholastics like Albert the Great (12001280) and St. Thomas Aquinas (12241274), severely shook Platonic orthodoxy, but Aristotelianism prevailed, overwhelming the universities of the 14th and 15th centuries with the power of its new synthesis. Unfortunately for Aristotelian inclusionism, however, the very success of its worldview lured it into triumphalism. It became rigid and its science, scholastic in the familiar pejorative sense, the epitome of what modern thinkers like Galileo, Hobbes, and Descartes scorned as old-fashioned, reactionary word play. The value-excluding counterattack of modernity felt fresh and liberating in contrast. Still, in modern philosophy, as a persistent undercurrent, value including positions were voiced despite the inhospitable climate. Baruch Spinoza (16321677), in lonely isolation, worked out a brilliant counter to the dualism of Descartes and the materialist reductionism of Hobbes. His solution was to nd God in nature and nature in God, a pantheism in which everything should be considered to have innite attributes, of which mind and matter are only two; though two of great importance to human beings. Nature, comprising all there is or could be, should be seen both as determined and created, natura naturata (nature natured), and as free and self-creating, natura naturans (nature naturing). In both respects, every manifestation of nature is a mode of manifestation of the underlying divine substance, the innitely perfect one. Spinoza, having been expelled from his synagogue and enjoying few academic connections as a lens grinder, left no disciples, though his thought gained popularity in the 18th and 19th

centuries among romantic and counter-cultural thinkers like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (17491832) or Samuel Taylor Coleridge (17721834). Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (16461716) also argued against the grain of dominant western philosophy for an inclusionist position that took a very different shape from Spinozas. Leibniz, a universal genius who invented symbolic logic and co-discovered the calculus with Isaac Newton, developed a highly pluralistic worldview in which the elements of everything in nature are to be seen (as in Spinozas universe as a whole) with dual aspects of materiality and mentality. These ultimate monads (any elemental unit, like a soul) have experience and value, even if only dimly, for themselves. There are many different grades of monad, including human consciousness but in principle stretching high above and far below throughout the universe of things. Each manifests its own internal essence, much as Aristotelian living substances do. On Leibnizs theory of substance, there can be no direct relations among the monads, but all are coordinated by the creator God, whose perfection entails that only the best one of all the possible worlds that might have been created was actually realized. Leibniz in his time made few disciples. Excluded from the intellectual establishment represented by the Royal Society of London, he, too, had to await the 19th century for rediscovery and appreciation. Other philosophers, notably Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (17701831) and Henri Bergson (18591941) labored to develop conceptual frameworks, in which nature could be thought to include its own rich palette of values, and these philosophers and others developed strong followings, especially outside the circles of thought in which the methods and presumptions of modern science are taken for granted as authoritative. But these have always been views struggling to breathe in the atmosphere created by modern western culture, whose dominant religion, science, and mainstream philosophical tradition all work to smother ways of thinking that would include values directly in nature. The western industrial machine, if it is to be countered or transformed by modes of thought and spirit, has not yet met its match.

BALANCING THE POLARITIES

Although machines are the embodiment of ideas and attitudes, knowledge and goals, it is true that once they are embodied, they are not easily stopped by ideas and attitudes alone. So it is that the rapacious western industrial machine, now worldwide, is likely to require a special convergence of circumstances, both physical and mental, before it can be tamed to the requirements of environmental good citizenship. In part, this convergence actually began in the latter part of the 20th century, when industrial civilization began to choke on its own runaway excesses. Pollution of

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air, soil, and water, depletion of nonrenewable resources, desecration of precious beauty, distortion of social fairness between haves and have-nots: all these can be seen as plainly predictable outcomes of the modern system, not ukes, and thus they urgently require rethinking of the ideas, and adjusting the attitudes, that went into designing the industrial machine in the rst place. In this spirit Lynn White cast around for an alternative religious hero for Christians, offering St. Francis as inspiration. Had there been no environmental crisis, no pollution disasters, no species extinctions, no fears of still greater horrors ahead, there would have been no need to search for blame or to seek new spiritualities. But practical exigencies have in fact arisen, preventing reliance on the status quo. They call in question even powerful orthodoxies, which in the absence of crises might have remained unchallenged. The prestige of science and technology, now recognized as contributing to the problem, is not enough to quiet the challenge. Something profound has gone wrong. Perhaps the atmosphere of the 21st century may be more hospitable to deep ideational reforms offering more comprehensive thinking, ner spirituality, and healthier ways of conducting practical life on the Earth. The practical cash value of the polar clash between religions of transcendence and those of immanence comes down to the question whether the human race should conduct its business with nature as from above or from within the environmental order. The spiritualities of transcendence offer justications for the former; spiritualities of immanence provide support for the latter. Each speaks with power to shape attitudes and policies. Is there any hope of nding a position of balance where the dynamics offered by the two poles can both be incorporated? Such balance has not often been sought. Even if this position were to be found, actual religions would need to make potentially painful internal adjustments to incorporate it. But perhaps the urgencies of the present historical situation could make the early 21st century an era of rare openness to just such religious growth and change. Doing justice to the deep intuitions supporting human transcendence over nature without opening the door to heedless species chauvinism should be possible if actual human capacities are afrmed without indulging in the prejudicial snobbery that has too often distorted the afrmation. Human beings actually are different in profoundly signicant ways from anything else found in nature. Nothing else in the known natural universe can approach human capacities for conceptual freedom. Normal adult humans can manipulate linguistic symbols to take account of possible or actual states of affairs far remote from actual circumstances. Language allows humans to consider distant places ( across the mountains ) and remote times ( when Grandfather was a little boy , or next spring, at planting season ) and weave detailed tapestries of thought out of insubstantial ideas. This

capacity allows the development of long-term purposes and the fashioning of implements designed to achieve them. In this quite obvious way, human beings transcend the here and now of nature. Even highly intelligent non-human species do not come close to exhibiting human freedoms of dealing thoughtfully with what is not real and may never be real. In fact, one of the crucial ways in which humans use their transcendence over natures here-and-now is to prevent the actualization of unpleasant possibilities envisaged in thought and therefore countered. An equally crucial way of using transcendence is by long-range planning of complex desired outcomes that could never have become real without the steady application of purpose. Dreaming of distant futures and choosing between them, effectively harnessing present resources to achieve ideas and actualize outcomes: these are the basis for another sort of transcendence of nature, the transcendence of moral responsibility. Rocks slide and cause damage but are not responsible because they were only following the laws of physics and could have done nothing else under the given circumstances. Likewise predators kill but are not responsible. What they do is not deliberately chosen. Instincts rened by natural selection come into play as the animal responds, sometimes intelligently but always in ways restricted to the here-and-now of environmental circumstances. Human beings, in contrast, free to consider alternative possibilities in some detail and to choose which one to bring into actuality after (at least sometimes) extensive thought and sustained effort, transcend the rest of nature by carrying the burden of responsibility for outcomes deliberately achieved. The rest of nature operates by caused causes and cannot be blamed. Only human beings are inuenced by norms and ideals (for better or worse) and can be held to account for their actions. If humans did not transcend nature in this way, there would be no point in appealing for improved environmental policies. One does not appeal to stratospheric ozone to reverse trends for the good of the climate, or urge deer to stop reproducing for the good of their habitat; but one may appeal to humans, on behalf of a larger envisaged good, to sacrice some of their short-term interests or even to curb their appetites. And sometimes these appeals may be heeded, translated into action. Those who say that humans are no different from the rest of nature would in logic need to quiet their preachments. But of course preachments and appeals to conscience and ideals continue, appropriately, since humans do transcend nature in being morally responsible agents. In these special capacities, for ying conceptually above the here and now, for taking account of the remote future and considering which of various envisaged possibilities should be realized, for implementing deliberate purposes, for knowing the self as morally responsible agent and as precious center of awareness destined to die, we discover the special joys and pains of personhood. The spiritualities

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of transcendence, it seems, give voice to the justied awareness of the special value, the unique dignity, that goes with being a human person. So understood, this is far from a license to rape the rest of nature. It is, instead, the acknowledgment of special burdens and an invitation to unique satisfactions. Though unique in these ways (the ways in which human beings are persons) our human species is by no means unique in the multitude of ways in which we are organisms. The spiritualities of immanence, stressing the intense and comprehensive values of immersion in nature, are obviously correct in stressing continuities and their profound importance. Our bodies, like those of most living species, both animals and plants, are sexually reproduced; and this is good. The fertility festivals and orgiastic rites of early religions of immanence celebrated the sacredness of natures creativity, the urge to multiply and swarm, fructifying and lling every niche. Human bodies are made of meat and need nourishment. Metabolism reigns in us, as in all other forms of life. Food, water, air in adequate quantity and quality, are necessities for us as for all other living things in nature. The harvest festivals and hunting rituals associated with the spiritualities of immanence celebrate sacredness in domains of undeniably vital signicance. The Hebrew prophets, stressing the personalistic values above all (moral faithfulness, purity, justice) were offended by the organismic values they saw being venerated in prosperous agricultural Canaan. There were cultural and historical reasons for the revulsion of the prophets against the city-dwelling Canaanites. But there seems no logical requirement that we adopt the either/or attitudes they preached. Rejoicing in fertility need not be done unjustly, to the detriment of widows and orphans or against the interest of the powerless. On the contrary, acknowledging the continuities between our organic constitution and those of other animals, afrming the networks of relations between all animals and plants and the inorganic environment that supports the lives of all; these tributes to organicism are compatible with recognizing the unique values of personhood. Perhaps, if we were to speculate about the spiritual and ecological needs of the future, we should try to work out a new position, we could call it personalistic organicism, a viable spirituality that could live creatively in the dynamic tension between the poles of transcendence and immanence. If we could establish such a point of balance, then ecologically sensitive moral agents, enabled to feel and appreciate vital natural connections between humanity and all other life forms (immanence) through uniquely powerful personal norms (transcendence), might be liberated to seek social and ecological justice without sacrice of either aspect to the other. This is not the place for the detailed working out of this project, which has been undertaken elsewhere (Ferre, 1996, 1998, 2001). There is no reason in principle, however,

against hoping that the polar opposition between images of transcendence and immanence can be balanced in some yet more inclusive mode of spirituality. Can a synthesizing worldview, such as personalistic organicism, also hope to balance the theoretical tensions between the philosophies of exclusion and inclusion? The great strength of philosophies arguing for the exclusion of values from nature has been the argument from the necessary subject-dependence of value. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder , or some variant of this modern mantra, is hard to deny. What could beauty be, if entirely divorced from the possibility of any appreciator? Just as pain (or Galileos tickle) makes no sense apart from subjective awareness, so beauty and like values cannot be understood without ultimate reference to some center of appreciation or valuation. No purpose without a purposer; no love without a lover; no value without a valuer. Values have to be valued by some valuer to be real. The case is strong. Objective circumstances may be perfectly suited for grounding a joyful experience of beauty, but if the experience never occurs, those unrequited circumstances alone will not be enough to count as beauty itself. This much can be agreed. Such agreement, however, does not force the conclusion that nature has no values of its own. The inclusion of values in nature can simultaneously be afrmed by expanding the scope of subjectivity. Kant was right in stressing the centrality of mind, but wrong in dening mind too narrowly in terms of rationality, in which human persons stand out from the rest of nature. Modern philosophy in its main tradition has been deeply but mistakenly anthropocentric in assuming that only human beings are subjects in the relevant sense of the word. No one present , in this constricted thought frame, tends to mean no human at hand. If the old saw about the tree falling in the forest were reframed, however, in terms of sentient organisms, there would be a much richer and more nuanced answer. Squirrels, bears, birds, rabbits, deer (perhaps spiders and earthworms, too) would detect the crash and react, each in its own way. Similarly, if subjects (dened as at least dimly aware centers of experience) were to be acknowledged throughout nature, there could be no doubt that qualities too are rmly woven into natures fabric. Hummingbirds and bulls distinguish and appreciate the quality, red, in different ways. These appreciations, positive and negative, are facts about nature but also facts about how valuing is active in nature. Since butteries and bees are drawn to attractive visual appearances and odors, for example, natural selection among owers has run riot in sponsoring competitive beauty contests. Throughout in the air, on the land, deep in the sea the attractions and repulsions of positive and negative valuations are an obvious dynamic of nature. Thus, since practical ethics nally rests on the felt obligation to show appropriate respect to quality and value, of

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whatever kind, wherever found, a worldview recognizing subjective valuings beyond the human, will gain a rm basis for thinking through and proclaiming human duties, owed directly to entities in nature as well as to fellow human centers of value. Broadening the scope of subjectivity can balance the polarities between the truths of exclusion (only subjects, not inert objects, can ground value) and the truths of inclusion (subjects are everywhere). But this can happen only if the great divide, mistakenly fostered by Kantian anthropocentrism, is successfully challenged. As one such challenger, personalistic organicism, stressing the continuities beneath the differences between entities in nature, will recognize alliances with other philosophies of continuity. Aristotles stress on the innate teleologies of things, that they seek goods of their own and have their own fulllments, will be an important insight to retain. Spinozas and Leibnizs view that all things have internality, a mind-like character, will be another. Also alert to new data and theories, personalistic organicism will stress a postmodern physical understanding of the energetic, selforganizing universe that increasingly, through much of the 20th century, was revealed by science. Not the inert particles of Newton and Kant, but the dynamic wave-events of 21st century physics, interpreted as moments of extremely simple experience, will offer personalistic organicism an inspiring model for the basic elements of the vibratory universe (Whitehead, 1925). These, as they creatively wrestle actuality out of potentiality, are natures minimum units of value, both in themselves and for others (Whitehead, 1976). On such a postmodern speculative vision, responsive both to dynamic science and to balanced spirituality, a postmodern ecumenical dialogue is conceivable between religions and philosophies, East and West, on new ways to cooperate in the quest for social justice among persons and for moral consideration of the Earth.

REFERENCES
Ayer, A J (1946) Language, Truth and Logic, 2nd edition, Victor Gollancz, London.

Barbour, I G (1980) Technology, Environment, and Human Values, Praeger, New York. Cox, H (1966) The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective, 2nd edition, Macmillan, New York. Ellul, J (1964) The Technological Society, translated by John Wilkinson, Vintage, NY, originally published as La Technique ou lEnjeu du Si` ecle, (1954), Librarie Armand Colin, Paris. Ellul, J (1984) The Relationship between Man and Creation in the Bible, translated by W Deller and K Temple, in Theology and Technology: Essays in Christian Analysis and Exegesis, Vol. 73, eds C Mitcham and J Grote, University Press of America, Lanham, originally published (1974) as Le Rapport de lHomme a la Creation Selon la Bible, Foi et Vie, 137 155. Ferre, F (1996) Being and Value: Toward a Constructive Postmodern Metaphysics, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY. Ferre, F (1998) Knowing and Value: Toward a Constructive Postmodern Epistemology, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY. Ferre, F (2001) Living and Value: Toward a Constructive Postmodern Ethics, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY. Galileo (1954) Opere, in Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, Vol. IV, ed E A Burtt, Doubleday, Garden City, 333. Kant, I (1963) Lectures on Ethics, translated by Lewis Ineld, Hackett, Indianapolis, IN. Kant, I (1966) Critique of Pure Reason, translated by M Muller. Doubleday, Garden City, New York. Schuurman, E (1984) A Christian Philosophical Perspective on Technology, in Theology and Technology: Essays in Christian Analysis and Exegesis, eds C Mitcham and J Grote, University Press of America, Lanham, originally published (1980) as Technology in a Christian-Philosophical Perspective, Potchefstroom University, Potchefstroom, South Africa. White, Jr, L (1967) The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis, Science, 155(3767), 1203 1207. Whitehead, A N (1925) Science and the Modern World, Macmillan, New York. Whitehead, A N (1976) Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected edition, eds D R Grifn and D W Sherburne, Free Press, New York. Wolfson, H (1970) The Philosophy of the Church Fathers, 3rd edition Harvard, Cambridge, MA.

Social Science and Global Environmental Change

STEVE RAYNER1 AND ELIZABETH L MALONE2
1 Columbia 2 Pacic

University, New York, NY, USA Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA

The descriptive tradition in the social sciences, which tends towards quantitative methods of tracing stocks and ows of social data through time and space, has been seen as more useful in mainstream global environmental research that relies on natural science methods and models. The interpretive tradition has been relegated largely to the sidelines, with its concerns to understand motivations, ideas, and values, and its frequent analytic focus on narrative and text. The descriptive approach derives much of its strength from simplifying assumptions about complex behaviors and tends to assume homogeneity of human responses to price signals. It therefore is often used for largescale analyses. In contrast, the interpretive approach emphasizes variation and complexity, sometimes to the point of resisting simpli cation on principle. It therefore tends to produce local and disaggregated analyses. Descriptive researchers tend to see themselves as outside observers and to make utilitarian assumptions; interpretive researchers see themselves as participants in their studies and often assume individual rights-based ethics. These are differences in kind that are both essential to research in global environmental change. For example, descriptive approaches have revealed much about what would happen under various scenarios of climate change, but interpretive approaches can provide value-related parameters as a basis for choosing among candidate policies. Collaborative research that includes both descriptive and interpretive approaches has been carried out in studies of actual decision-making, which is a social-political process, not a rational, utility-maximizing one; and in mutual learning systems that incorporate models and negotiation. Further collaborations among researchers from both traditions and policymakers can help to bridge the current gap between industrialized and less industrialized countries, to expose assumptions that can improve decision making under uncertainty, and to make policy decisions more implementable and effective (see Box 1).

TWO STYLES OF SOCIAL SCIENCE

Social science in general is characterized by a longstanding gulf between two traditions or styles of analysis. One is the descriptive tradition, that identies and traces stocks and ows of population, goods, services, wealth, and information, through time and space. Statistical modeling is an important tool in this approach. The other is the interpretive tradition, that seeks to understand the motivations, formation of ideas, sources of values, the creation and interpretation of information, and the development of shared understanding as the basis for the conduct of discourse and human actions in society. Focus on text and narrative is a frequent focus of this approach.

Because the two approaches are so different in kind, there has traditionally been little cross-fertilization between them. Models in both kinds of social science are simplications intended to enable analysis of more complex cases. Simplications tend to be more accepted in quantitative models; in qualitative models, they may be seen as mere stereotypes. Descriptive models, which tend to be mathematical or quantitative, are incomplete in that they cannot account for the full variety of behavioral variations among diverse human populations. Interpretive models, which tend to be verbal or qualitative, are also incomplete in that they are seldom capable of powerful generalization from case studies. Public policy makers and private sector decision-makers tend to favor the descriptive style of analysis because it usually provides quantitative information that can be

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Box 1 The Two Approaches to Social Science Analyses of Global Environmental Change The descriptive tradition: Quantitative book-keeping of stocks and ows of social data Assumes homogeneity in human responses over large areas Models global change as a series of interconnected big boxes Research agendas usually set by natural scientists

The interpretive approach: Emphasis on dening problems, rather than solving them Seeks to understand motivations, sources of values, interpretation of information Studies are most frequently undertaken at small spatial scales and results are often disaggregated Research agendas set by social scientists

represented as an objective basis for an organization s decision making, independent of the judgment of any particular decision-maker. In the social science of global environmental change, the gulf between descriptive and interpretive approaches is exacerbated by the heavy reliance of global environmental science on models designed to represent the stocks and ows of resources and pollutants in an environmental medium, such as land, the atmosphere, or the ocean. These models can be made to interface with the models of
Atmospheric composition Atmospheric chemistry

economic growth and resource use that are typical of social science in the descriptive mode. Opportunities for social science collaboration in major international scienti c research programs addressing global environmental change, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have been largely focused on extending the framework already established by the natural sciences. For climate change, that framework consists of a four-box conceptual model: quanti ed emissions of greenhouse gases, atmospheric chemistry, climate and sea level, and ecosystems. Within this framework (Figure 1), the social sciences provide highly aggregated data on human activities leading to greenhouse gas emissions. These data can be used to drive natural science models of global atmospheric chemistry and physics. In turn, the natural sciences aim to model climatic impacts on managed and unmanaged ecosystems upon which humans depend. At this point, social scientists are invited to project the outcomes of these changes for large-scale patterns of agricultural and industrial activity, stimulating macroeconomic and technological responses, which, in turn, may eventually alter anthropogenic emissions estimates. The outputs of such research are presented as data: grist to the decision-maker s mill. The same framework shapes the bulk of research undertaken within the international social science programs of climate and other global environmental change research, such as the Human Dimensions Programme of the International Social Science Council, which emphasizes stocks, ows and driving forces of change, particularly in relation to land use and the industrial metabolism of society.
Climate and sea level

Climate

Ocean carbon cycle

Ocean temperature sea level

Human activities Energy system Other human systems

Ecosystems Terrestrial carbon cycle Unmanaged ecosystem

Agriculture, livestock and forestry

Coastal system

Crops and forestry

Hydrology

Figure 1

Elements of the climate change problem (Source: Watson et al., 1996)

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Even though the style of social science emphasized in these programs seems quite compatible with the cyclical framework postulated by the natural sciences, there has been signicant concern about the issue of bridging the gap between natural and social sciences, a gap that is invariably taken for granted and associated with much hand wringing. Much is often made of the differences between the two intellectual traditions, exemplied in the distinction between the experimental tradition (including bench or laboratory science) and the study of human nature and the history of ideas. The comparisons inevitably nd the social sciences wanting with respect to the characteristics of theoretical consensus about fundamentals, measurability and phenomena and computability of relationships among them, and precision and accuracy of prediction. The explanations for these differences range from the charitable observation that social behavior is inherently more complex than the behavior of natural systems to the less charitable assertion that the social sciences are younger and, thus, less mature than natural science. Since Snows (1959) classic essay on the two cultures, we have become accustomed to the idea that the intellectual landscape bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment is bisected by a major fault line. But, the most signicant fault does not, in fact, fall between the natural and the social sciences. Indeed the conceptual and methodological approaches of modeling the behavior of demographic and macroeconomic systems are essentially indistinguishable from those employed to model changes in the atmosphere or in ecosystems. The signicant intellectual rupture falls right in the middle of the social sciences, one side of which blends seamlessly with natural science while the other side ultimately merges into the humanities. In debates about global environmental change, this rupture means that some social science research has been used while other research, though relevant and potentially useful, has not been employed in either formulating the issues or addressing them.

THE DESCRIPTIVE APPROACH

The descriptive approach primarily uses inventories and accounting systems for the stocks and ows of people, money, raw materials, commodities, and pollutants. For example, Figure 2 depicts human driving forces, land use, and land cover as discreet units that interact with each other in much the same ways that software modules interact. The descriptive tradition in social science derives from the empirical philosophy underlying natural science descriptions, specically Newtonian science. Newtonian science is based on the belief that the mind learns everything from what is evident to the senses. English empiricist philosophers, following Locke (16231704), postulated that the

human mind is a tabula rasa (clean slate) upon which the external world is accurately reected (Locke, 1690). The radical empiricist David Hume (17111776) claimed that all knowledge derives from sensory experience. It has become almost a cliche to observe that Humes philosophy is a Newtonian science of Man. Newtonian thermodynamic determinism is the background of the descriptive tradition in the social sciences. This approach developed among scholars concerned with wealth, trade, and population in the century following Newtons (16421724) formulation of the laws of thermodynamics and Harveys (15781657) description of the circulation of the blood. Indeed, Francois Quesnay (16941774), the key gure among the physiocratic economists of prerevolutionary France was also the royal physician. He drew explicitly upon Harveys physiology in describing the economy. His Tableau Economique, published in 1758, is generally considered to be the rst schematic description of an entire economy. The physiocratic models departed from previous thinking about the economy in that they did not invoke human choice, desire, and intention to explain the behavior of the economic system. Instead, attention focused on the characteristic operations of the system, i.e., what can be observed and measured. A generation later, Ricardos (17721823) model of the economy also elides human intentions (Gudeman, 1986, 45). His concept of the individual is not explicitly elaborated, but the actors in his model, whether landowners, capitalists or laborers, lack intentionality. Ricardos view of the human is exemplied by his difference with Malthus (17661834) over Says Law, according to which supply creates its own demand. For Malthus, demand is not a mechanistic response to supply, because it is made up of both the power and the will to purchase. But Ricardo (1814, VI : 133), foreshadowing the declaration of the apocryphal Madison Avenue advertising executive, If we make it, theyll buy it! maintained that the will is very seldom wanting where the power exists . Variable tastes and changing desires were not part of Ricardos image of the human. Ricardos model moved even further away from concern with human intentions than those of the physiocrats by his use of a mathematical schema, which emphasizes form at the expense of content. After Ricardo, economic models took on the mechanical characteristics of closed thermodynamic systems or mass-balance equations. Following in the steps of the physiocrats and Ricardo, the descriptive approach relies heavily on the ability to count, weigh, and measure things such as numbers of people, industrial productivity, or degrees of wellbeing. This aspect has led some commentators (e.g., Robinson and Timmerman, 1993) to describe the descriptive method as a physical ows approach. However, less tangible elements, such as beliefs and values, can also be represented in the descriptive method as counts of the number of people

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Studies of social drivers

Decision systems analysis Global political economy

Biogeochemical assessments Global cycles Carbon cycle models Atmos. chem. models

Global

Politics

Economics

Climate models

Emissions models

Population Macro decision system Social/ cultural structure Regional climate/chemistry

Markets Regional

Political

Air chem.

Pollution Regional transport climate

Public policy

Human aspirations Culture Needs and wants Local

Micro decision system

Land assessments

Soil Consumption Production

Water

Geography and climate

Vegetation

Nutrients

Figure 2

The stocks and ows approach of the descriptive paradigm (Source: Rayner et al., 1994)

professing them, e.g., mass survey research or analyses of voting behavior. Knowledge and values converted to quantities in this way can therefore be accounted for as stocks and ows. The descriptive approach has several advantages. The results of descriptive social science investigations are able to draw on the legitimacy of the natural sciences, by mirroring the scientic method and the thermodynamic paradigm. Counting and measuring can provide insight into the scope and severity of a problem or locate probable causes among many candidates. Descriptive analysis can compare various pathways from the standpoint of economic efciency. Its simplifying assumptions and equations can lay out large problems and render them more tractable. And,

nally, because the descriptive approach deals primarily with tangibles, it provides a basis for control; e.g., counting tons of fossil fuel used can provide a basis for a tax scheme that will limit the number of tons burned. This approach is typical of economics and demography as well as much of (American) quantitative sociology, behavioral psychology and quantitative political science. The descriptive approach in social science and its preeminent place in policy analysis arose as part of the larger intellectual effort to devise technologies that could enhance the rational management of nature and society by the emerging modern state. Headrick (1990, 59) points out that, As early as the seventeenth century (governments) encouraged the increase in knowledge of and power over

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nature . Headrick lists examples, such as the patent system introduced in England in 1623 and the founding of scientic societies throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. This was the prelude to a massive increase in the rate of global resource extraction. He continues, Insofar as technology is knowledge of nature and how to manipulate it for human ends, it follows that countries with the most information are also the most able to develop their economies and transform the land (Headrick, 1990, 59). The social science technologies of the same period included the new eld of statistics, which emerged in the mid-18th century as the practice of inventorying the resources of the state. Merchant (1990, 682) eloquently describes the contribution of the descriptive paradigm to the development of modern political, commercial, and industrial power:
When mapped by explorers and cartographers, catalogued and inventoried by militarists and computer scientists, (nature) is controlled by an eye of power and subject to unlimited surveillance. Foucaults model of the panopticon of Jeremy Bentham, in which an entire prison can be surveyed from a single central tower, translates to the concept of a cultural overseer.

product (GDP) statistics. For climate change policies, this has been a source of the disjoint between cost effective strategies and effective implementation. Furthermore, the descriptive method is epistemologically realist. The meaning of belief and value structures and the ways in which they are constituted, reproduced, transformed, and translated into action in social life are treated as unproblematic in this approach. Inquiry into these is rmly located outside of the descriptive method within what we refer to as the interpretive method.

THE INTERPRETIVE APPROACH

In contrast, the interpretive method focuses on understanding the meaning that human agents create in the conduct of social life, upon which they build their understanding of their world, and through which they seek to act upon that world. Thus the interpretive method focuses on the nature of experience, the structure of perceptions, the recognition of interests, and the development of frameworks for collective action. Because these factors often elude quantication, the interpretive method has often been characterized as qualitative social science, contrasted with quantitative approaches that we describe as the descriptive method. However, we eschew this particular distinction between the two traditions for three reasons: 1. Interpretive social science need not be qualitative (some practitioners having devised sophisticated methods to quantify phenomena that are not as obviously susceptible to counting as heads or barrels). The quantities in descriptive analyses are, in any case, often a numerical representation of a qualitative judgment on the part of the analyst rather than an empirical quantity. The distinction between quantitative and qualitative measurement is actually rather fuzzy (for example, dresses may be sold as small, medium, and large or as sizes 216).

This stance has been variously described as the separation of the subject from the object, Man/Nature dualism, and instrumentalism. As Latour (1986, 29) observes:
we can work on paper with rulers and numbers, but still manipulate three-dimensional objects out there . Distant or foreign places and times can be gathered in one place in a form that allows all the places and times to be presented at once.

Thus, the descriptive tradition in both natural and social science separates us from nature and society while providing us with a signicant level of control over them. For example, this power is highly concentrated in the computer models that we currently use for tracking materials ows and their consequences in both environmental science and macroeconomics, for example, general circulation models of climate and general computable equilibrium models of the economy. Like all sources of power, this one comes with a price tag; separation of knowledge from the knower. The development of the modern industrial state relied on strategies of control, and modes of mapping, tabulation, recording, classication, and demarcation. These increasing levels of control over nature meant also increasing separation from experiences that should be part of the decision-making process. Faced with disembodied parcels of descriptive facts, decision-makers may become more and more isolated from experience of how myriad decisions transform production and consumption at the level of the community, the rm, and the family. For example, in debates about the cost effectiveness of climate change mitigation measures, the hardships of poor people in environmentally marginal areas (deserts, coasts) may be hidden in world gross domestic

2.

3.

The distinctions between descriptive and interpretive approaches can be rather fuzzy, as well. In fact, within the interpretive approach a researcher can take data of all kinds, quantitative and qualitative, and make coherent meanings that can be used to devise workable arrangements, to effectively address problems, and to set up usable process frameworks. For example, anecdotal and case study evidence can be used to supplement or supplant statistical data. And, of course, the descriptive approach usually includes some interpretive analysis, e.g., in the discussion following the presentation of results and in the conclusions and recommendations of technical reports. The interpretive tradition in social science emphasizes the essentially social character of the operation of the

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human mind. The interpretive method is strongest in history, cultural anthropology, and (European) qualitative sociology. Interpretive analyses of various kinds of global environmental change have addressed the framing of the problem as well as issues of stakeholder involvement, sociocultural values, the nature and production of knowledge, and policy implementation (research and development investment, technology selection and diffusion, etc.). The interpretive tradition derives from philosophical discussions about how human beings acquire knowledge and form (or are formed into) social structures. Although the interpretive tradition can be traced back to classical Greece, the modern interpretive tradition derives from Immanuel Kant s (1724 1804) disagreement with the English empiricists. Kant speci cally rejected the radical empiricist claims of Hume, that all knowledge derives from sensory experience, insisting instead that reason was itself a capacity of the human mind that shaped experience. Thus, in contrast with the descriptive approach, the interpretive tradition has always distinguished itself by its emphasis on human choice and intentionality. The mind s structuring of sensory experience derives from three sources: the physiology of the human nervous system, the unique historical experience of the individual, and the social and cultural categories and rules that are provided by language and by membership in a family and a larger community.
Kant introduces a new conception of knowledge. Knowledge does indeed have as a source the Humean element of impressions, the sensory element in which the mind is passive . But Kant continues, there is another element in our knowledge, which is derived not from sensory experience . The second element comes from the mind itself. The human mind is not a blank tablet or an empty cupboard as the empiricists Locke and Hume claim. It is equipped with its own pure concepts by means of which it organizes the ux of sensory impressions into substances, qualities, and quantities, and into cause and effects. (Lavine, 1984, 193 194)

data presented to them, emphasizing the sociocultural and institutional (including political) processes involved. The systematic study of such processes yields understanding that can help us make critical choices, knowing what assumptions and decision elements underlie those choices. As Ryle (1949) suggested, thinking does not take place in the head, but all around us. What we think with is not a private metaphysical mind, but words, pictures, gestures, actions, and both natural and manufactured objects. Indeed we assign symbolic meaning so as to impose some sort of order and coherence on the stream of events. In so doing, we sift and lter our sensations of the world. Contemporary studies on the physiology of the mind (Edelman, 1994; Damasio, 1994) reinforce the physical basis for thinking that can be conjoined with individualistic and social/cultural theories of knowledge and action.
In the process of making the whole business comprehensible, some perceptions are admitted, some rejected, and others combined or broken down. If we did not lter experiences in this way or make use of public symbols for organizing perceptions and communicating them to others, then we would be likely overwhelmed by the variety of possible interpretations that could be assigned to events. We would have to abandon intellect and discourse and thereby be forced, like the lower animals, to rely on instinct. Mankind would be reduced, as Geertz (1973) has observed, to mental basket cases . (Gross and Rayner, 1985, 3 4)

Different people, of course, organize and assign meanings to their experiences differently. Though we have the same general brain structures and turn our eyes to the same world, there are variations in what we see. As Kuhn (1970, 193) says:
research shows that very different stimuli can produce the same sensations; that the same stimulus can produce very different sensations; and, nally, that the route from stimulus to sensation is in part conditioned by education. Individuals raised in different societies behave on some occasions as though they saw different things.

However, while seeking to avoid imposing a deterministic framework on the study of human choice, the interpretive social sciences, exempli ed by the philosopher and historian Wilhelm Dilthey (1833 1911) retained their commitment to provide systematic understanding of its manifestations.
Dilthey wanted to uphold the humanist component of historical science without compromising ideals of rigor and objectivity. He thought of interpretation as a disciplined quest for orderly connections in an observable world; a way of doing science, not of escaping science. Yet he often expressed the difference between the human and natural sciences by drawing a sharp distinction between understanding and explanation: We explain nature, we understand mind . (Selznick, 1992, 76)

The interpretive method insists that no standpoint exists outside of history or of society from which either can be independently observed. All organized knowledge, by de nition, depends upon socially construed conventions for its organization. In this sense, the interpretive method treats knowledge as having no objective existence. However, most interpretive social scientists use comparison of interpretations to generalize human behaviors.

STYLE AND SCALE

The descriptive approach derives much of its strength from simplifying assumptions about complex behaviors. It tends to assume homogeneity (or at least a tendency to homogeneity) of human responses to price signals. It

One of the primary foci of the interpretive method is the understanding of how humans draw meanings out of the

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therefore is capable of high levels of aggregation in its analyses. In contrast, the interpretive approach emphasizes variation in human motivation. It explores complexity, sometimes to the point of resisting simplication on principle, regardless of how useful or appropriate it might seem. Indeed, attempts to simplify within interpretive models are often criticized as stereotyping. The interpretive approach therefore tends to produce highly disaggregated analyses. As a result of their different approaches to aggregation, the two kinds of social science tend to be comfortable at different extremes of scale. The descriptive approach tends towards large-scale analyses, with the nation state (which grew up with the descriptive approach) often accepted unquestioningly as the appropriate level for many descriptive analyses. The descriptive approach may be more suited to initial analysis of problems at the global scale; the stance of the observer and tendency toward aggregation can facilitate analysis at that level. The interpretive approach, on the other hand, tends to focus on the local scale of face-to-face discourse. Here, the human individual is often regarded as being the natural, self-evident unit of analysis. It is often difcult to demonstrate the relevance of social science at this scale to global-level research agendas. However, the case is frequently made Not only that the human activities that drive and mitigate environmental change vary signicantly by region or place, but also that historical or local contextual factors are so inuential that understanding must be grounded in the specics of the case (Turner et al., 1990, 18). In the last analysis, the activities that drive land-use change or anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are always local, and whatever the impacts of global environmental change on human populations, they will be experienced at the local level.

The issue for the social sciences is not merely the assertion of the importance of local level analysis. As a result of the polarization of the descriptive and interpretive methods, research areas in the social sciences are shaped like an hourglass (Figure 3). That is, theories, methods, and data are underdeveloped at the middle scales between the individual and the nation state. Furthermore, correspondence between the macro and micro scales is often treated in a simplistic way. The nation state or the rm is often treated as if it were one large individual, with a unitary intelligence and decisionmaking capacity. Or the resources of real individuals may be represented merely by dividing total resource by the number of people, resulting in the creation of a mere per capita ; the anonymous average person from whom per capita statistics are derived.
The image is of a male person, sometimes a homunculus inside each of us, sometimes a gigantic system incorporating the whole of society or the world. Our pervasive microcosm to whose outlines all our explanations are drawn to t is a quintessential stranger; he has no family or friends, no personal history, his emotions are not like ours, we dont understand his language, still less his purposes. (Douglas and Ney, 1998)

Macro, descriptive research studies

Meso-level studies

Micro, interpretive research studies

Figure 3 Social science research concentrated at macro and micro scales

For example, in the eld of energy modeling, bottomup analysts project individual behavior onto the national scale (one large individual) while top-down analysts assume that the behavior of individuals reects that of the national population in proportion to their numbers (per capita ). Although the names of the modeling approaches seem to indicate macro and micro scales, in fact neither approach is based on a theory of micromacro scale articulation; both are descriptive approaches that assume undifferentiated individuals. Local-level analyses, on the other hand, often focus on individuals and small, specialized institutions without regard to their generalizability (more studies are needed to determine whether similar results can be found in neighboring villages); or their generalizability is taken for granted, i.e., village level solutions are recommended for settings the world over. Linking the local and the global is frequently cited as one of the most challenging aspects of climate and other manifestations of global change. Few attempts have been made to validate studies at one end of the scale with those at the other, and the research studies are sparse at the middle levels, especially those that articulate connections among individuals, groups of various sizes and cultural backgrounds, and global level players in global environmental change issues. From the perspective of the social sciences, meeting this imperative requires, as a rst step, linking the interpretive and the descriptive approaches, using the research approaches and strengths of each, and expanding the reach of study, as appropriate, into various middle

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scales, with appropriate integration of overlap. However, as discussed in the next section, the viewpoints cannot and should not be merged; each makes unique contributions to scientic knowledge.

Against this view, Ingold argues that:

The difference between them (local and global perspectives) is not one of hierarchical degree, in scale or comprehensiveness, but one of kind. In other words, the local is not a more limited or narrowly focused apprehension than the global, it is one that rests on an altogether different mode of apprehension; one based on an active perceptual engagement with components of the dwelt-in world, in the practical business of life, rather than on the detached, disinterested observation of a world apart. (Ingold, 1993, 40 41)

STYLE AND STANDPOINT

Throughout the social sciences, there is poor understanding of the articulation of human behavior at the local level to the behavior of the global social and economic system. Furthermore, available knowledge of local behaviors has not yet penetrated very deeply into the global environmental change assessment and research agendas of the IPCC, the IGBP and the Human Dimensions Programme of the International Social Science Council. Linking the local and the global cannot be achieved simply by increasing the scale and quantiability of interpretive analysis to meet a more thickly textured descriptive analysis as it attempts to accommodate lower levels of aggregation. The gap between the two approaches is not merely spatial but raises fundamental issues of what kinds and sources of knowledge we value as analysts. Contrasting 16th century iconography with contemporary satellite photographs, Ingold (1993) illustrates the situation by tracing the change in the standpoint of human inquiry from the Enlightenment to the present (Figure 4). In Maffeis Scala Naturale of 1564, the scholar is shown at the center of the environment consisting of 14 concentric spheres envisaged to form a giant stairway, the ascent of which, step by step, affords more comprehensive knowledge of the world through experience within it. In modern satellite imagery, the scholar experiencing the world from within, is displaced by an observer viewing the world from without. This descriptive standpoint favors observation over experience. Local (interpretive) knowledge, originating in experience, is downgraded as partial, parochial, and ultimately unreliable. Global knowledge is treated as universal, total, and real.

Figure 4 Local and global standpoints. (Reproduced by permission of Routledge in Ingold, 1993)

If the two standpoints are so different in kind, how can a potential for complementarity be applied to a global environmental change issue? The descriptive approach provides an absolutely vital link between the social sciences and natural science analyses of global environmental change. Collaboration between natural science and the descriptive approaches has revealed much about what would happen under various scenarios, but it does not help in choosing among the probable or feasible scenarios. To understand these issues, we also require interpretive approaches that can introduce qualitative and value-related parameters. For example, both approaches are highly relevant to current negotiations about how to implement the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC). The FCCC states that The ultimate objective is to achieve, in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Convention, stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system . Further, policies and measures to deal with climate change should be cost effective so as to ensure global benets at the lowest possible cost . A particular ceiling for greenhouse gas concentrations can be maintained in a variety of ways. Some will be more costly than others. Economic analysis in the descriptive tradition can show that it is more expensive for all nations to stabilize emissions individually than for the world to stabilize emissions jointly. But some regions might be better off under an individual stabilization scheme. Descriptive analysis can identify conditions under which high population countries would have an incentive to drop out of an international agreement to control fossil fuel carbon emissions in the post-2000 period, even if emissions rights were allocated on an equal per capita basis. Descriptive analysis can also highlight the need to construct dynamic international agreements, capable of being modied as global changes occur and societies evolve. But the descriptive approach cannot successfully explore social and ethical dimensions of different political options and has difculty dealing with tradeoffs between equity and efciency. Redressing the disconnection in style, scale, and standpoint within the social sciences will at least require bringing together the descriptive and interpretive methods. Using and broadening established mechanisms, researchers can adopt

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either a multidisciplinary or an interdisciplinary approach. In the former, scientists from various elds work together on a problem that has been dened within the framework of one particular discipline. A truly interdisciplinary approach involves people from different elds working on a problem that they have dened together in a way that it cannot be dened from within any single discipline. Interdisciplinary research often yields insights not otherwise attainable. Perhaps the strongest reason for exploiting the complementarity between the two approaches is the nature of global environmental issues. The dimensions of global environmental change simply cannot be adequately addressed without using both approaches. Furthermore, strong linkages between the two can provide a further bridge to rich resources within the humanities that can also help to deal with fundamental issues such as social justice. For example, the development of eco-feminism (see Ecofeminism, Volume 5) represents just one linkage between research in the humanities and social sciences, centering on an environmental debate. Arguments about the right relation between humans and non-human nature often have their basis in spiritual and moral values which rely on evidence from theology, moral philosophy, and literary imagery as much, if not more than, scientic data. Eco-feminism, which has been linked with neo-paganism (specically, goddess worship), draws its rationale from a sociological critique of the twin oppressions of the domination of women and nature (Merchant, 1992, 185). Sociological, political, and image-rich arguments are blended, for example in Woman and Nature: The Roaring within Her (Grifn, 1978). Drawing on such diverse notions as the reconstitution of the subject and elemental divinity, Grifn and others seek to demonstrate the importance of women (and womens work) and non-human nature. Part of the profeminist argument revolves around the idea that women, as the carrier of children, are the rst environment and thus have a special link with other nurturing systems in nature. Another part of the argument relies heavily on statistics about the type and value of womens work in agricultural and other economic systems.

the province of philosophy and theology. Thus, bridging the gap between the descriptive and interpretive traditions in social science (and even exploiting the commonalties between interpretive approaches in the social sciences and the humanities) is an imperative for effectively linking the practice of scientic and moral reasoning in confronting global environmental change. A further practical imperative to integrate the descriptive and interpretive methods is the need to understand human choice in social change as well as aggregating market behavior and mapping demographic change. Following in Ricardos footsteps, the descriptive method assumes continuity of human preferences and consistency of human behavior over time. The descriptive models do not seek to explain the values that humans hold. They therefore cannot anticipate sudden ruptures in social behavior resulting from changes in values and the institutional arrangements that embody those values, or to assess the potential for changing human motivations through political or other forms of social intervention. Because a vast array of human behavior involved is effectively compressed into drivers and responses, the descriptive approach encourages the adoption of behaviorist kinds of explanations for the actions of social systems and the individuals within them. Hence, policy prescriptions based solely on the descriptive paradigm are limited to instrumental tinkering with technology and prices. But, social systems involve human choice; unlike a billiard ball shot across a table or an electron orbiting the nucleus of an atom, a human being has the ability to make conscious decisions about the directions in which he or she is moving and at what speed. Although social decisionmakers are often constrained by their own paradigms and the initial conditions of the problem they are attempting to resolve, the existence of human choice means that their actions cannot be accounted for in purely deterministic terms.

VALUES IN SCIENCE
Human choice also raises a methodological problem for the construction and operation of descriptive social science. Science, whether natural or social, is conducted by humans and is thus itself subject to human choice. Humans choose what to study and what to ignore, what methods to use in their analysis, and what criteria to apply in determining the validity of the data gathered. For instance, do we study energy conservation or geoengineering? Do we assess quality of life or longevity? Must we have an untreated control population or can we learn from studies that treat all subjects? In making these choices, researchers and decision-makers inevitably make value judgments. However, when the value-based assumptions embedded in the theory or model

LINKING SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUES

At the human level, global environmental change is ultimately an ethical issue. Just as technical analyses and arguments prove insufcient to persuade communities to use imported technologies, human decisions about the threat of global environmental change are not merely technical. They are decisions about equity, what is fair in our relationships with each other and about natural ethics, what is right with respect to our relationships with nature. While the analysis and description of ethical systems as social phenomena belong in the social sciences, the normative exercise of ethical reasoning is traditionally

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disappear into the background, they come to be seen as natural and are uncritically accepted, often without any conscious thought about either their presence or their implications. Indeed, the more that scientists reduce human choice within descriptive models, the more that they interfere as agents. Excluding human agency from applied social science research is itself a powerful and constraining assertion of the researcher s own choice upon society. Since we humans cannot stand outside of history and society to observe and describe them, we must use the insights of interpretive social science to make the underpinnings of our analysis as explicit as we can. Interpretive social science brings to the conduct of scienti c inquiry an awareness of the impact of human choice, by introducing re exivity into the research and policy making processes. Re exivity is the self-conscious examination of the implicit assumptions that are inevitably embedded in any analytical approach. In the descriptive approach, assumptions may be systematically laid out but are typically unquestioned within the research study. This is consistent with the outside observer stance of the descriptive researcher. If, however, these assumptions are made explicit, the researcher has an opportunity to question them, rather than taking them as given. The interpretive contribution of keeping assumptions visible adds meaning to the research results by providing clear boundaries and caveats. Thus, if research in the two paradigms can be integrated, a more complete analysis can be accomplished. The descriptive approach only works effectively when scientists take their assumptions for granted, so that they can structure experiments that will have meaning within those assumptions. Acting scienti cally means acting on the assumption of a determinate nature waiting to be described by a neutral observation language (Fish, 1994). In the natural sciences, Kuhn (1970, 163 164) notes:
that once the reception of a common paradigm has freed the scienti c community from the need constantly to re-examine its rst principles, the members of that community can concentrate exclusively upon the subtlest and most esoteric of the phenomena that concern it. Inevitably, that does increase both the effectiveness and the ef ciency with which the group as a whole solves new problems.

However, while in daily life the ability to do more things with less deliberation may be a sign of technical and social development, it also increases the danger of unwelcome surprise. The interpretive social sciences have the capability to make the implicit explicit, to provide society with the tools of re exivity and to enhance society s resilience to shocks. Combining the re exivity of the interpretive with the instrumental knowledge of the descriptive method seems an obvious course for improving our understanding of the human dimensions of global environmental change and use in policy making. A re exive social science drawing effectively on both the descriptive and interpretive methods could help identify the multiplicity of characteristics needed to achieve successful solutions, both immediate and longer term, associated with varying alternative global environmental management strategies.

SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH AREAS IN GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

Global environmental change may not be the deciding factor in whether humanity as a whole ourishes or declines. The resilience of human institutions and their ability to monitor and adapt to changing conditions seems to be more important. Therefore, the social sciences have much to contribute towards illuminating issues such as pollution, climate change, and biodiversity. This section provides a brief discussion of issues taken up by social scientists in climate change research (Rayner and Malone, 1998) to indicate the breadth of social science contributions to global environmental change research. Insight into how scientists choose to study global environmental change and how they form a scienti c consensus demonstrates the basis on which issues are taken up: and on what basis they could be taken off the agenda. To avoid promoting unrealistic public and policy-maker expectations of scienti c prediction and control over nature, the scienti c community thus must work for acceptance and public authority through patiently constructing communities of belief that provide legitimacy through inclusion, participation, and transparency. Similarly, knowing why and how people decide that global environmental change is worthy of attention reveals the variety and roots of human values and concerns. Forms of social solidarity appear to be a crucial variable in shaping people s sensitivities to risk in general and threats to environmental and climate change in particular. Furthermore, equity is a crucially important issue, but at least three equity principles can be applied: proportionality, priority, and parity (Thompson and Rayner, 1998). Recognizing the broader debates inherent in environmental change issues (development is another) may allow policy makers to address a number of important problems concurrently.

Humans must reproduce and extend cultural conventions that are unquestioned in everyday life. As Alfred Whitehead has said in another connection,
it is a profoundly erroneous truism that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations, which we can perform without thinking about them. This is of profound signi cance . We have developed these practices and institutions by building upon habits and institutions which have proven successful in their own sphere and which in turn become the foundation of the civilization we have built up. (Hayek, quoted in Koford and Miller, 1991, 22)

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Sorting out causal explanations and prescriptions for change puts the debates about environmental change in a new light and provides new ways of nding common concerns and areas of agreement. For example, in climate change debates different groups cite population, consumption, or the market as the villain; since all of these diagnoses are partial explanations, debates among groups can lead to stalemate. When confronted by such a dilemma, social scientists can examine alternative framings of the problem and solution that will be helpful in resolving the issues. The rational-choice model of decision-making is an inadequate guide in global environmental change issues. Social science research can identify and delineate alternative decision-making frameworks that include quality and meaning issues. A broadly based framework may help to reveal win-wins that have been overlooked. Resource management practices (for land, water, energy, etc.) are the immediate cause of environmental degradation. Social science research can describe the human activities that give rise to environmental concerns, identify possible mitigation actions, indicate where adaptations will be necessary, and illuminate how institutional and cultural structures and abilities to change will both constrain and open up possibilities to make and implement policy. Social science research demonstrates that the process through which choices articulate across scales is not a linear mechanism that consistently produces the most rational alternative at the next highest scale. Rather, it is a social as well as a knowledge process that requires a high level of trust and agreement (including standardization of methods and results) to gain recognition at another scale. Research that describes choice processes is important; equally important is research that describes processes by which individuals can be persuaded to conform with new normative requirements of corporations and governments, as implemented by the decision-makers who are their ofcials.

designed to assess and facilitate the development of industrial capitalism but which also held out the prospect of civil or corporate leaders being able to rationally assess the impact of decisions on the wellbeing of the statistical population. It is but a short step to turn the possibility of such a means for calculating what would contribute to the greatest happiness of the greatest number into the imperative that one should pursue that goal. The solution that provides the greatest happiness of the greatest number also must be an efcient solution, since any departure from efciency, also by denition, reduces the amount of good available for distribution. A bias toward the value of efciency is inherent in the methods of policy analysis and utilitarianism has been the ideological position most forthrightly incorporating this standard as a central value (Heineman et al., 1990, 38). However, it can be seen that efciency is not merely a technical issue or an indication of rational behavior within utilitarianism, but is also an intrinsically moral imperative that arises from the descriptive paradigm itself. Thus, the utility principle domesticated moral diversity for decision-making authorities by offering the capability to measure and monitor the stocks and ows of societal good, the usual proxy for good being wealth in some form. By the same process, decision-maker awareness of alternative ethical considerations was systematically attenuated. The imperative to provide for societal good at the highest level of aggregation provides no guidance for securing the happiness of minorities and individuals, even of those individuals in the happy majority.
The guiding criterion for policy is the greatest good for society, quantitatively dened. But contemporary utilitarians, primarily economists and theorists of public choice, like Bentham, still have no principle for distributing this social good according to manifest principles of equity. (Heineman et al., 1990, 40)

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: UTILITY- AND RIGHTS-BASED APPROACHES

The descriptive and interpretive approaches embody quite different normative imperatives for decision-makers. The tendency of the descriptive paradigm towards high levels of aggregation gives rise to a top-down decision-making rationality. The quantitative aspect of the paradigm leads to an essentially utilitarian perspective on decision-making. That is, the practice of inventorying the stocks and ows of goods and bads creates the conditions for a decision framework based on a technique for calculating societal happiness measured by their distribution (Bentham, 17481832). The rise of utilitarianism as an explicit decision-making principle in the 18th and 19th centuries paralleled the development of systems of national accounting and statistics

In contrast, the tendency of the interpretive tradition to focus on the individual rather than the nation state directs the attention of scholars working in that paradigm to the particular circumstances of decision-making rather than to the aggregate outcome. Attention to disaggregated particulars, combined with the dominance of methodological individualism, articulates smoothly with an orientation towards bottom-up, rather than top-down decision-making. The insights of the interpretive paradigm are more likely to be of interest to those who espouse libertarian or egalitarian ethics, emphasizing the rights of the individual or the minority in the face of majority preferences, as, for example, in Kantian ethics and the Jeffersonian political tradition in the US. Hence, the interpretive paradigm is often associated with a critical stance towards the status quo, and is often equated with and labeled as the critical tradition in social science, which marginalizes its signicance by denition.

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Increasing insight into the diversity of motives, values, and preferences of individuals, however, actually tends to frustrate utilitarian social accountancy, which depends on blending out such distinctions in the process of aggregation. It is hardly surprising therefore, that the insights of the interpretive paradigm are not merely considered irrelevant to, but actually have to be excluded from utilitarian decisionmaking in order to preserve the rationality and legitimacy of the utility principle. Hence, the distinction between two social science paradigms is not merely an artifact for the history of ideas or a scholarly distinction of mere academic interest. It actually lies at the heart of the crisis of governance that pervades the local, national, and global communities at the start of the 21st century. That is, the tension is very real between interdependence and independence, between pursuit of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and the assertion of individual, local, or ethnic rights that ought not to be violated even at the expense of the aggregate good. Whereas Kants principle that every person is to be regarded as an end in him or herself is generally recognized as a form of the doctrine of human rights, Bentham dismissed the concept of rights as plain nonsense and the imprescriptible rights of man as nonsense on stilts (Russell, 1946, 742). He denounced the articles of the Declaration des droits de lhomme as falling into three classes: (1) Those that are unintelligible; (2) those that are false; and (3) those that are both (Russell, 1946, 742). Similar vituperation for the social inefciency of rightsbased ethics is not unheard of among contemporary utilitarians. For example, in response to proposals by sociologist Robert Bullard that current inequities in the distribution of environmental burdens on minorities and the poor should be addressed on an environmental rights basis, rather than according to risk-based criteria, economist Albert L. Nichols responded:
This framework has considerable popular appeal, but it ultimately is counterproductive from the perspectives of both society as a whole and even the specic groups it tries to champion. Moreover, it provides little practical guidance to environmental decision-makers trying to set priorities. Bullards proposed environmental justice framework makes continued inequities in protection more likely . (Nichols, 1994, 267)

Clearly these are not merely technical arguments about the best way to clean up the environment. Similar clashes between the utilitarian- and rights-based views arise over the projected costs of climate change. In response to damage estimates that climate change will result in a decline of global productivity of less than 1% over the course of this century, utilitarians have expressed the view that only lowcost mitigation measures can be justied. On the other hand, those who espouse a rights-based approach point out that even less than 1% of global productivity over 100 years may translate into considerable suffering and premature death for millions of poor people in vulnerable regions of the less industrialized world. The issues of risk and justice provide good loci for probing inextricable links between analytic methodologies and underlying social commitments to the Kantian individual in him or herself or the Benthamite aggregate good. Often such issues seem to be intractable when descriptive research and analysis provide the only framework for addressing them. Typically, policy makers do approach risk characterization as a technical issue: exposure pathways, dose, response, etc. However, the technical information is unlikely to inuence citizens living in an area where environmental risk is present. If the science policy relationship remains squarely in the descriptive mindset, the response to citizen objections is likely to be collecting more technical data; the inclusion of values and worldviews will not be an option. However, if the science policy relationship is collaborative and includes interpretive data, science will be more integrated into the policy context, more contextual and openly value laden, less oriented to mastery over natural and social processes, and more accessible to the public at large (Robinson, 1992b, 249). To the extent that scientists, policy makers, and the public can learn about each others positions and preferences, the solution space for a problem of risk analysis becomes larger and a solution more possible.

USE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH

In the same way that collaboration is needed between researchers who use descriptive and interpretive approaches, researchers and policy makers need to forge more collaborative relationships. An important element of this collaboration must be the use of both approaches and multiple tools to illuminate many facets of the issues at hand. Current arrangements and policy discourses tend to favor the descriptive approach, although this was not always the case. The policy analysts of the Reformation were the hermeneutic (interpretive) religious scholars who advised both Catholic and Protestant kings and princes about all aspects of policy based on the interpretation of holy texts and secular precedents.

Bullard replied that his proposals

are no more regressive than the initiatives taken in the 19th century in eliminating slavery and Jim Crow measures in the US. This argument was a sound one in the 1860s when the 13th Amendment of the Constitution was passed despite the opposition of proslavery advocates, who posited that the new law would create unemployment (slaves had a zero unemployment rate), drive up wages (slaves worked for free), and inict undue hardship on the plantation economy (loss of absolute control of privately owned human property). (Bullard, 1994, 260)

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The descriptive approach to policy making is usually considered to be more appealing to policy makers because of its immediate potential for instrumental use. Quantitative analyses of responsiveness to tax rates or the effectiveness of regulation can, in principle, be directly translated into a set of policy choices about whether to implement a carbon tax or appliance efciency standards, and even at what level taxes or standards should be set. In other words, descriptive research usually manages to come up with a bottom line. Generally, interpretive social science tends to be dismissed by policy makers and their social science advisors as lacking this potential to provide practical guidance. How can social scientists provide powerful, practical research ndings sufciently mindful of research limitations? Can we replace or redene the model of scientic truth being directly used by policy makers? And what would such a researchpolicy relationship look like? First, we can recognize that our model does not actually mirror reality, i.e., policy makers do not frequently make direct use of descriptive researchs bottom lines. Empirical research in the US (where the instrumentalist emphasis on the bottom line is probably most strongly emphasized) shows that, despite a generally positive attitude to such analysis, it is seldom acted upon in any directly identiable fashion (Rich, 1977; Weiss and Bucuvalas, 1980; Whiteman, 1985; House and Shull, 1988). These studies indicate that the actual impact of descriptive policy analysis is much more diffuse. Indeed, Weiss (1982) suggests that the real usefulness of policy analysis may lie in enlightenment rather than instrumental purposes, less as a tool for solving specic problems than as a way of orientating people towards issues. And much of this is not deliberate, direct, and targeted, but a result of long-term percolation of social science concepts, theories, and ndings into the climate of informed opinion (Weiss, 1982, 534). The apparent concreteness of descriptive social science information in practice seldom makes it any more usable by decision-makers for obtaining enlightenment than the results of interpretive studies. Both may contribute equally. However, once a course of action is chosen, descriptive data may be more frequently invoked for the purposes of rationalization and persuasion (Patton, 1978; Whiteman, 1985). Speaking (scientic) truth to (policy making) power is thus revealed as a coercive illusion worthy of Frank Baums Wizard of Oz. The answer to what will we do if we abandon speaking truth to power? is that we will do what we have always done but with greater awareness of what we are doing . Abandoning illusions is the rst step on the path to authentic empowerment of individuals and communities. Once that step is taken, we nd that paradigms do exist for the relationship of science researchers and policy makers. For example, Robinson, in a series of articles (Robinson, 1982, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1992a) has argued that

the Dragnet view of science (named for the US television series whose no-nonsense detective hero would prompt witnesses to deliver Just the facts maam ) is at the root of perhaps the most fundamental misconception underlying standard views of the science/policy relationship: that it is a one way ow of objective information from science to policy (Robinson, 1982). He proposes instead a model relationship in which researchers, policy makers, and the public form mutual learning systems (Robinson, 1992a) that use modeling tools to explore alternative futures (backcasting) rather than trying to predict the future (forecasting). Elements of this model include the explicit recognition that policy questions are not essentially questions of fact but of value, and that both a physical ows perspective and an actor-system perspective are needed to provide a usefully integrated approach to policy questions (Robinson, 1991). Such a collaboration would also help researchers and policy makers cope with both uncertainty and ignorance about how the social and biogeophysical systems interact. Indeed, uncertainty about these interactions is of such magnitude as to be better characterized as indeterminacy. Furthermore, this indeterminacy is likely to persist well beyond the timeframe in which actions would need to be taken to prevent, mitigate, or manage potential undesirable aspects of the human nature interactions. Making assumptions explicit is essential to make natural and social science more relevant and more effective in policy making. When applying a model or theory to a particular situation, the reexive researcher considers carefully whether or not the assumptions embedded in the approach actually match the policy context in which the knowledge is being used. If they do not, then the information obtained will not be valid for that context; knowledge is thus conditional. Policy decisions that ignore this conditional aspect often meet with strong opposition from people who do not feel that the assumptions are valid for the case at hand. For example, in democratic societies, if political institutions base their policy decisions on assumptions about human behavior that seem irrelevant to the publics experiences of itself and the world around it, they risk eroding the very legitimacy they rely upon to implement their policies. An important effect of a collaboration between (both kinds of) science and policy would be the inclusion of social science analyses from the industrializing world. The Southern sensibility has emerged from an experience with weak institutions of governance (Banuri, 1993). Consequently, Southern critics have challenged the modern descriptivist features of instrumentalism, impersonality, and legitimization of impersonal violence. Further, the Southern sensibility sees environmentalism as based in an integrated perception of humans and nature, placing emphasis on issues of justice, equity, institutions of governance, and property rights. Including these perspectives as data in the global environmental change debate acknowledges the

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genuine interdependence of rich and poor nations and broadens the solution space for global policy making. Re-forming the relationship between environmental science research and environmental policy making would make space for the useful research that exists within interpretive science, for the alternative world views of less industrialized peoples, and for policy making strategies that account for uncertainty and indeterminacy. The environmental science and policy community would then include needs, wants, and beliefs in its data sets alongside measurements and statistics. Policy decisions and agreements would explicitly include social organization data and cultural assumptions as well as market and consumption data in global environmental policy decisions to make them more implementable and effective.

REFERENCES
Banuri, T (1993) The Landscape of Diplomatic Conicts, in Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Con ict, ed W Sachs, Zed Books, London. Bullard, R D (1994) Unequal Environmental Protection: Incorporating Environmental Justice in Decision-making, in Worst Things First: The Debate Over Risk-based National Environmental Priorities, eds A D Finkel and D Golding, Resources for the Future, Washington, DC. Damasio, A R (1994) Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, G P Putnams Sons, New York. Douglas, M and Ney, S (1998) Missing Persons: Personhood in the Social Sciences, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Edelman, G M (1994) Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind, Basic Books, New York. Fish, S (1994) Theres No Such Thing as Free Speech (and Its a Good Thing, Too), Oxford University Press, New York. Geertz, C (1973) The Interpretation of Culture, Basic Books, New York. Grifn, S (1978) Woman and Nature, the Roaring Inside Her, Harper and Row, San Francisco, CA. Gross, J and Rayner, S (1985) Measuring Culture: A Paradigm for the Analysis of Social Organization, Columbia University Press, New York. Gudeman, S (1986) Economics as Culture: Models and Metaphors of Livelihood, Routledge, London. Headrick, D R (1990) Technological Change, in The Earth Transformed by Human Action: Global and Regional Changes in the Biosphere over the Past 300 Years, eds B L Turner, W C Clark, R W Kates, J F Richards, J T Mathews, and W B Meyer, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Heineman, R A, Bluhm, W T, Peterson, S A, and Kearny, E N (1990) The World of the Policy Analyst: Rationality, Values, and Politics, Chatham House Publishers, Chatham, NJ. House, P W and Shull, R D (1988) Rush to Policy, Transaction, NB. Ingold, T (1993) Globes and Spheres: The Topology of Environmentalism, in The View from Anthropology, ed K Milton, Routledge, London.

Koford, K J and Miller, J B (1991) Habit, Customs, and Norms in Economics, in Social Norms and Economic Institutions, eds K J Koford and J B Miller, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI. Kuhn, T S (1970) The Structure of Scienti c Revolutions, 2nd edition, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Latour, B (1986) Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands, Knowledge Soc., 6, 1 40. Lavine, T Z (1984) From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophical Quest, Bantam Books, New York. Locke, J (1690) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, T Basset, London, reprinted in 1990 by Scolar Press, Aldershot. Merchant, C (1990) The Realm of Social Relations: Production, Reproduction, and Gender in Environmental Transformations, in The Earth Transformed by Human Action: Global and Regional Changes in the Biosphere over the Past 300 Years, eds B L Turner, W C Clark, R W Kates, J F Richards, J T Mathews, and W B Meyer, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Merchant, C (1992) Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World, Routledge, New York. Nichols, A L (1994) Risk-based Priorities and Environmental Justice, in Worst Things First: The Debate over Riskbased National Environmental Priorities, eds A D Finkel and D Golding, Resources for the Future, Washington, DC. Patton, M Q (1978) Utilization Focused Evaluation, Sage Publications, Beverly Hills, CA. Rayner, S and Malone, E L (1998) Human Choice and Climate Change, Volume 4: What Have We Learned? Battelle Press, Columbus, OH. Rayner, S, Bretherton, F, Buol, S, Fosberg, M, Grossman, W, Houghton, R, Lal, R, Lee, J, Lonergan, S, Olson, J, Rockwell, R, Sage, C, and van Inhoff, E (1994) A Wiring Diagram for the Study of Land-use/Cover Change: Report of Working Group A, in Land-Use and Land Cover: A Global Perspective, eds W B Meyer and B L Turner, II, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Ricardo, D (1814) The works and correspondence of David Ricardo, ed P Sraffa (1952), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Rich, R F (1977) Uses of Social Science Information by Federal Bureaucracies, in Using Social Research in Public Policy Making, ed C H Weiss, Lexington Press, Lexington, KY. Robinson, J B (1982) Apples and Horned Toads: On the Framework-Determined Nature of the Energy Debate, Policy Sci., 15, 23 45. Robinson, J B (1988) Unlearning and Backcasting: Rethinking Some of the Questions We Ask about the Future, Technol. Forecast. Soc. Change, 33, 325 338. Robinson, J B (1990) Futures under Glass: a Recipe for People Who Hate to Predict, Futures, 22(9), 820 43. Robinson, J B (1991) Modelling the Interactions between Human and Natural Systems, Global Environ. Change, 1, 629 647. Robinson, J B (1992a) Of Maps and Territories: the Use and Abuse of Socioeconomic Modeling in Support of Decision Making, Technol. Forecast. Soc. Change, 42, 147 164.

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Robinson, J B (1992b) Risks, Predictions, and Other Optical Illusions: Rethinking the use of Science in Social Decisionmaking, Policy Sci., 25, 237 254. Robinson, J and Timmerman, P (1993) Myths, Rules, Artifacts, and Ecosystems: Framing the Human Dimensions of Global Change, in Human Ecology, Crossing the Boundaries, eds S D Wright, T Dietz, R Borden, G Young, and G Guagnano, Society for Human Ecology, Fort Collins, CO. Russell, B (1946) History of Western Philosophy, George Allen and Unwin, London. Ryle, G (1949) The Concept of Mind, Hutchinson, London. Selznick, P (1992) The Moral Commonwealth: Social Theory and the Promise of Continuity, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Snow, C P (1959) The Two Cultures, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Turner, B L, Clark, W C, Kates, R W, Richards, J F, Mathews, J T, and Meyer, W B (1990) The Earth Transformed by Human Action: Global and Regional Changes in the Biosphere over the Past 300 Years, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Watson, R T, Zinyowera, M C, and Moss, R H, eds (1996) Climate Change 1995: Impacts Adaptations, and Mitigation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Weiss, C H (1982) Policy Research in the Context of Diffuse Decision-Making, in Social Science Research and Public Policy-Making, ed D B P Kallen, NFER-Nelson, Windsor. Weiss, C H and Bucuvalas, M J (1980) Truth Tests and Utility Tests, Am. Soc. Rev., 45, 302 313. Whiteman, D (1985) The Fate of Policy Analysis in Congressional Decision-Making, West. Political Q., 38, 294 311.

The Emergence of Global Environment Change into Politics

JOHN DUNN
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Unlike most major elements of contemporary politics, global environmental change entered the political eld, not under the peremptory impress of immediate political incentives, but through a slow, vague, diffuse and uneven shift in belief. The beliefs in question, moreover, were not about the properties or potential conduct of fellow human beings, but about the residually non-human setting of human life in its entirety. Local environmental change, apparent or real, has been seen as politically signi cant throughout the history of our species, in myth since Noahs ood, and in recorded reality since at least ancient Egypt. Even today most environmental changes which are seen as politically important are relatively local in incidence or highly differentiated in their spatial signi cance (Elliott, 1998; Held et al., 1999). Global warming has very different medium-term implications for the inhabitants of the Maldives or the Sahel than it does for those of Berkshire. The holes in the ozone layer, when they appear, cover some bits of the humanly inhabited map and not others. To see global environmental change as a factor and focus within contemporary politics is not to ignore (still less to deny) this drastic variation in impact and signi cance. It is simply to register the cumulative effect, and the awesome prospective signi cance, of a novel practical preoccupation and a fresh way of seeing the setting and destiny of human political life as a whole. It is easier, naturally, to plot the cumulative effect thus far than to assess the prospective signi cance (Dunn, 1998). But since the impact so far in practice is relatively modest, and the prospective signi cance at the limit genuinely eschatological (the termination of human life through the consequences of human action), it would be an error of judgement to concentrate principally on the more tractable topic.

Since global environmental change emerged into politics in the rst place through a hesitant change in belief and not an abrupt alteration in the matrix of political incentives in any denite political location, it can only be understood adequately by identifying where that shift came from. At present we do not really know. We still have no compelling and thorough intellectual history of the interactive dynamics of the large range of natural sciences whose combined cognitive resources give us our best assessment, either of how much damage the natural setting of human existence has already undergone, or of how rapidly we can expect it to continue to deteriorate, or even of what could, in principle, be done effectively to retard, halt or reverse some of these processes of deterioration. We have no coherent synthetic study of the often very idiosyncratic and obsessive personal odysseys of individual scientists or publicists who picked out major sources of continuing damage to habitat, and conveyed them eloquently to mass audiences in countries which permitted such communication. Either of these would be an exacting technical exercise in the contextual history of ideas (Dunn, 1996). Each, if it was done convincingly, would

carry important implications. Because the major capitalist countries today still make the primary contribution to global environmental deterioration through the continuing momentum of their productive systems, and since they also, at present, continue to provide much the best access to public media and the least obstructed channels for mass communication, some of the main political ambiguities of their emerging preoccupation are already writ large in both of these two histories. As yet, however, none of us can do much more than guess intelligently at the contours of the histories themselves. It is extraordinarily difcult in principle to explain why any important passage of intellectual history should have gone as it did, not least because these passages necessarily contain episodes of real intellectual creativity (Quinton, 1999). Intellectual creativity, for reasons made familiar by Karl Poppers supposed proof of the impossibility of predicting the future of any natural science (Popper, 1957), may just in detail be beyond human explanation. What certainly is important in this sporadic and amorphous shift in belief, however, is its timing, its

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location, and its dependence on rapid diffusion of images and judgements, on the relative independence of such diffusion from the immediate purposes of holders of political authority, and perhaps, too, on a certain dedicated obstinacy and crankiness on the part of some of its main carriers. For major shifts in belief to be practicable at all, it is necessary for their protagonists to be able to endure loneliness and unpopularity, and to be willing to seem and go on seeming damagingly eccentric. Many very different things happen as global environmental change emerges into politics, but one disconcerting and inevitably elusive thing which does so is that quite bizarre and apparently personal obsessions of the far periphery move insistently towards the centers of power, responsibility, judgement and eventual choice in world politics. This is not a process which anyones personal or professional experience of politics can equip him or her to chronicle with much ease or assurance. It is a standing temptation to condent misjudgements from virtually any angle. But it is every bit as important for the human future to learn to see it more accurately as it is to learn to judge more accurately just how deeply and in what ways we are still damaging our habitat, and what we can do to improve our judgement adroitly and at some speed. If we are to do so, we must improve our collective assessment of whom or what to trust (or distrust) to instruct us on the risks which we are running, on how these risks can be minimized, and against which of them we can, to any signicant degree, insure ourselves by other courses of conduct which remain open to us. All of these are political tasks as much as cognitive puzzles. None of them is a matter about which any individual human or group of humans can yet be said to know exactly what is the case (let alone what could become the case). Some of them are matters about which the very idea of exact knowledge is probably confused in the rst place. When social scientists or politicians now speak of the emergence of global environmental change into politics, what they have in mind is not merely this morass of political suspicion and bemusement. It is also the appearance, in a readily speciable set of institutional sites, of a relatively determinate agenda of novel concerns (Hurrell and Kingsbury, 1992). The concerns themselves may have come originally from quite personal and historically contingent acts of judgement on the part of particular individuals, but they have become an agenda through an increasingly definite and insistent political process. They have imposed themselves rst on the attention, and then on the purposes, of those in authority (insofar as they have any) by at least threatening to limit or were remove the power of those who were previously unaware of them or were more than prepared to ignore them. By this stage, plainly, they had indeed altered the matrix of political threats and rewards faced by professional politicians in and out of ofce, and

made their inroads precisely by doing so. In this process personal change of belief broadens out into the modulation of public opinion, and public opinion, in turn, in due course condenses into an effective political force pressing political leaders in novel directions. To map this diffusion accurately it would be necessary to relate together very variegated sorts of changes, from the creation and development of political parties, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) or pressure groups, through the impact of each of these on the dynamics of party competition in different nation states, and on to the impact of all of them together on state bureaucracies, inter-state negotiations, treaties and their enforcement, and the creation or modication of international organizations, initiated by state decision but exerting, for some purposes, at least a persuasive or normative authority over the states which have created them. As global environmental change emerges into politics, it does not merely create a new agenda and a novel political eld centered on that agenda. It also forges a multiplicity of fresh institutions and practices which take that agenda for their own and press different elements of it to what they take to be their own (and the globes) advantage: this provides both a milieu of existence and an endless series of actual or potential teams of action, usually competing more or less acrimoniously for attention, nancial resources, inuence, and even power. While the agenda and many of the participants are novel enough, many of the constituents of this new eld are altogether more familiar. They were there before; and they depend neither for their power nor for their raison d e tre on this novel eld. This is uncontroversial in the case of nation states and much of their public bureaucracies. It is uncontroversial for the main legal and organizational frameworks of the national economies, from whose interactive global dynamics the environmental changes largely emanate. It is even uncontroversial in the case of the principal international sites of political or legal authority above all the United Nations (UN) itself. The new institutional sites are at most subordinate agencies of older institutional sites which still clearly hold greater authority, or (in the case of Green parties in a number of countries as yet principally in Western Europe) competitors of limited efcacy with older and better entrenched institutions in the same settings. Only in the eld of pressure groups or NGOs (Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth) has the novelty of the agenda yet bred correspondingly novel types of agent with the vitality and innovative capacity to press it home in essentially unprecedented ways. All of these sites offer an opportunity for careers open to talent, energy and luck, and redirect political initiatives accordingly. There is no a priori reason why some of them should be more important, more dependably benign, or more irredeemably corrupt than others. Some analysts or participants put such trust as they can muster in NGOs

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or in the conceptually still more diffuse substance of civil society, global or national. Others not merely focus on, but presume the essential practical rationality of, at least some existing states or institutional processes of inter-state cooperation. Others still place altogether greater condence in the heuristic delicacy and epistemic reliability of market processes, conning their political attention to the question of how to minimize impediments to the latters functioning by designing an optimal regulatory regime. None of these viewpoints is simply inane. But none offers a privileged perspective on the bewilderingly complex and still largely opaque eld which the agenda of global environmental change is attempting to address. This is not as yet a eld which can be surveyed as a whole with any assurance from any given human vantage point. There is no strong reason to believe that it will ever become such. To improve our understanding of it, we must divide it up into more manageable components, and postpone asking how these components in the end bear upon one another until we have mustered a reasonably complete and accurate inventory of each of them. It is best to begin with the immediate sources of the most drastic global environmental changes, which plainly fall in the realm of economics. Some important, and often environmentally highly destructive, forms of economic production are closely tied to the logic of military competition today (Held et al., 1999), as they have been for several centuries in the past (McNeill, 1983; Kennedy, 1988). But the principal dynamic source of environmental degradation is still a process of acutely competitive expansion in the production and exchange of goods and the diffusion of services, driven on the supply side by the quest to accumulate capital and on the demand side by the quest for greater and more rewarding consumption. There is little agreement, unsurprisingly, on whether the global economy forms in any real sense a unity, or whether it is governed by a single overarching logic (Brenner, 1998; Wallerstein, 1995; Little, 1982; Lal and Myint, 1994). There is still less agreement as to whether the process of economic development itself implies a predestined direction for the future evolution of economies and polities across the world, or even on where that direction is most likely to lie. Is the world trading system likely to be more liberal or less so in 25 years time? Are there likely to be many more, or far fewer, or roughly the same number of clearly consequential sites for major political or economic choice in the world in several decades time? But while there is sharp dispute over the degree, scope and signicance of present globalization, and the inevitability or otherwise of future globalization, and some variation in optimism about the possibility of generating more sustainable patterns of development within the next generation or two, virtually no coherent analysis of the politics of global environmental change assumes marked and protracted retardation of growth in the production and consumption of

goods and services, the velocity of economic transactions, or the ow of international trade. This may be more an index of cowardice or failure of imagination than of rationally secured belief. But the continuity of assumption across sharply contrasted personal dispositions and political tastes is an important political factor in itself, and has done much to shape the sequence of international diplomatic negotiations on response to global environmental change which have centered on the new agenda and provided its most prominent and potentially consequential entree into politics. To focus in this way on global economic dynamics is not to presume that all political action is prompted in the last instance by a narrowly economic causality. But it certainly is to accept the decisive role of economic struggle and effort in setting the limits to political possibility in this domain, as it does throughout modern politics (Dunn, 1990b). Politics sets its own limits, in return, on how economic activity can be and is organized (Dunn, 1999). But in a human world so comprehensively reshaped by the history of capitalism, it does so throughout on terms which are obtrusively set by the requirements for competitive success on markets which, however doctored they may be, can never be fully controlled by political choice. One very important practical question which is already being tested in the domain of global environmental change is whether (and how far) collective political intelligence and can hope to reestablish control over the blind, convulsive, irresponsible dynamics of competitive economic effort. This has been under spirited dispute for several hundred years; and the answer remains disconcertingly open, not least because a less discerning review of political will, examined over time, makes it all too clear how much easier it is to disrupt or obstruct large-scale economic activity than to bring it under rm control. This is as much a truth about economic organizations themselves as it is about the interaction of formally political with formally economic institutions. But its political signicance is every bit as momentous as its signicance within narrowly economic activities. What made it politically impossible to ignore global environmental change any longer was the transformation brought about by the great economic boom after the Second World War which came to an end in 1973 (Brenner, 1998). The next quarter of a century may have seen less rapid growth in the more advanced capitalist economies, and some degree of regression for extended periods of time in state socialist economies and their uncomfortable successors (Brenner, 1998). But, virtually throughout, it also saw a continuation of net global economic growth, and growth from an initial level so high that the pace and scale of global environmental degradation became at least blearily apparent to the most myopic and irresponsible holders of state authority. (See Held et al., 1999, 390396 for an account of the progress of global environmental degradation and its economic embedding.) As it did

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so, it set up and intensied a steadily more obtrusive and extensive network of diplomatic interactions, institutional invention, and attempts to modify economic and political practices to diminish the harm which they were so conspicuously inicting. At stake throughout this political and economic adjustment were both the urgency and relative priority of minimizing particular threats, the range of expedients through which the diminution might most effectively be undertaken, and the necessarily vexed question of who precisely was to pay for it and at whose expense. The relative urgency of minimizing particular threats was initially the preoccupation, principally of political amateurs, with a high degree of sensitivity to environmental vulnerability. But even it penetrated the world of professional high politics with some rapidity from the early 1980s, reaching as unlikely targets as Britains Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The assessment of how best to meet these threats clearly required diplomatic and economic expertise but she soon convinced career politicians and public ofcials of the importance of addressing it. The allocation of responsibility for meeting the bill, still more clearly, was the stuff of high politics and intense interstate diplomatic activity throughout. The core of this process of recognition and incipient political response was a series of major international conferences, running from the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972, to the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio in 1992 (Elliott, 1998, Chapter 1). Before 1972, international agreements which bore directly and explicitly on the protection of the environment, focused principally on the preservation of wildlife, the law of the sea (alongside the law of war, the rst major focus of efforts to develop a truly international law), and from the 1970s onward the attempt to contain the obvious and acute threat of nuclear armaments, like the menace of nuclear winter (Elliott, 1998, 811). The danger posed by nuclear weapons, for obvious reasons, was a focus of very high and distinctly arcane politics from the point at which the scale of their potential for destruction rst became clear to anyone but nuclear physicists in effect from the Manhattan Project onwards. An intensely controversial issue throughout this history has been just what did in fact determine the political and military choices made by state powers, not merely over the deployment or use of nuclear or thermonuclear weapons, but even over the development of civil nuclear power as a basis for national electricity supply (Alperovitz, 1995; Clark and Wheeler, 1989; Freedman, 1981; Gowing and Arnold, 1974; MccGwire, 1987). Because it has been so intensely politicized and so evidently consequential throughout its history, both within particular states and still more so in the more conictual relations between them, this has been the last area of global environmental degradation in which public opinion has made a clear political impact. Even in

countries like Sweden, where popular attitudes have been deeply affected by Green awareness for decades, the politics of transforming a domestic electricity industry, largely based on nuclear power, have been as slow as they have proved painful. Not even the disastrous explosion in the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in 1986, the pollution which this scattered so rapidly over such immense distances, and the dramatic impact of this on European, and indeed, world public opinion, proved sufcient to accelerate the shift from nuclear to other energy sources for electricity production. What it may well have done in retrospect, however, is to halt the formidable momentum of the nuclear industry up to that point. The concern for the preservation of wildlife had a protracted imaginative past in the slow modulation of European conceptions of the proper relations between human beings and other living creatures (Thomas, 1983; Dunn, 1969; Passmore, 1974). But it had, of course, a very different imaginative past in other areas of the world, whose religious traditions had long taken a less anthropocentric view of the relative signicance of humans and other creatures (Gombrich, 1971; Carrithers et al., 1985). In European colonial or imperial territories, and above all in British India, the practices of preservation were often more closely linked to the preservation or extension of elements in the lifestyle of a land-owning aristocracy or gentry than they were linked to the systematic commercial exploitation of natural resources, or the attempt to contain the damage which this was always likely to inict. In the peculiarly ecologically vulnerable continent of Africa, interstate agreements between the European powers to preserve wildlife were signed as early as 1900, virtually as soon as the scramble for Africa was completed, and well in advance of the more far-reaching Convention on Nature Protection and Wildlife Preservation of 1940 which covered the western hemisphere as a whole. In the African case, it seems clear, the 1900 agreement was not a response to extensive damage already plainly done, but rather a conscious prophylactic exercise in stewardship, reecting a deliberate acknowledgement and assumption of human responsibility for non-human nature (cf. Passmore, 1974). This may have had very limited effect on the dynamics of subsequent ecological degradation. But it certainly conrms that concern for such degradation is neither a recent prerogative nor necessarily an index of deep political disaffection in the face of existing political or economic power or privilege. A purer case of eventual cultural revulsion at the environmental destructiveness and brutality of the exploitation of land resources over a far longer period in fact several centuries is given by the territorial subjugation and ethnic displacement which marked Europes impact on the North American continent (Cronon, 1983, 1992). In the United States, popular organizations for the preservation

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of wilderness areas and bird and animal species (the Sierra Club, the National Audubon Society) helped both to prompt and also to respond the opportunities provided by the National Parks network (Runte, 1997), and furnished a potent basis of organization and experience for the very much larger numbers of private citizens who began to sense the ecological crisis which faced their country in the 1960s and 1970s. One way of seeing what has happened in the emergence into politics of global environmental change is to see this as the rapid and disconcerting conuence of two startlingly different sorts of political setting and two starkly contrasted types of human meaning. One setting is the exercise of statecraft from the summits of highly organized and always prospectively coercive pyramids of power and authority. The interpretation of the goals of statecraft and the constraints upon it is always open to erce dispute; but over time it strongly favors a focus on the distinctive rationality and the often singularly perturbing mores of states as such: on raison d e tat (Meinecke, 1957). The other setting is the movement of the individual soul or sensibility, increasingly importuned within the cultural history of the West, to respond with Romantic excitement and veneration to the wonder of the rest of nature, the non-human setting of human life, and to measure itself by the depth and energy of its response (Taylor, 1989, 1992; Unger, 1999). A third setting and type of meaning, the economic rationalization of production and exchange under an increasingly globally pervasive capitalism, has penetrated both ruling elites and popular sensibilities quite deeply, but in very different ways. It has moved the imperative of economic efciency ever closer to the center of raison d e tat (Dunn, 1990b; Baldwin, 1992; Keohane, 1984; Gilpin, 1987). But it has also inamed the post-Romantic sense of spiritual self-regard in the face of the dizzy commodity fetishism of modern mass consumption, and has intensied revulsion at the cumulative damage which this inicts. In the earlier stages of these twin developments, it was easy to doubt that their simultaneous occurrence could be of any enduring political importance. How could the personal, the aesthetic, and the often self-consciously unworldly, converge effectively with the carefully self-protected and heavily armed sites of ultimate coercive authority and organizational control in collective human life (in their own vision, largely impersonal, deeply inured to ugliness, at least at a safe distance, and worldly to the last degree)? This was an encounter for which neither element could genuinely and clear-headedly wish, especially in its earlier stages: at best a collision which was bound to deform many of the purposes which came together in it, at worst a nightmare chaos which threatened all that each held dearest. For state elites, even in a representative democracy, this perspective cannot readily change. For them, the shifting preoccupations of their fellow citizens are always more likely to prove an irritation

or inconvenience than a steady source of gratication. But the citizens, consumers and producers, who give these elites their power as well as their legitimacy, have their own lives to live and naturally prefer their own wills and sentiments to bear on the ways in which they are governed. In representative democracies, moreover, they are assured that this is both a right and a genuinely available opportunity (Dunn, 1992). The increasingly hazardous and alarming momentum of global environmental change was thus a brusque threat to the format of existing politics and to the imaginative habits and practical routines fostered and reinforced by that format. Above all, it was a challenge to the implicit assumption that these were in good working order and could be condently trusted to take effective care of the ongoing destinies of modern human populations on the latters behalf, and without too close invigilation from outside the ranks of their habitues. It was also thus a challenge to the existing institutional division of political, social and economic labor, and to the professionalization of political and public bureaucratic life. What it suggested, above all, was not that the existing incumbents of high political and bureaucratic roles should be cashiered and promptly replaced with human alternatives with different tastes, dispositions or purposes, in the manner suggested by the development of the routine organizational apparatus of modern representative and administrative politics since the French Revolution (Finer, 1997; Manin, 1997; Dunn, 1992, 2000). Instead, it was that these roles, as a whole, should somehow be deinsulated, and opened up to far more diffuse, and often instrumentally pretty unreasonable, movements of taste and surges of anxiety, dispersed across the population at large. This was a prospect calculated to dismay any selfrespecting political class or professional stratum; and it was obvious enough that it could readily and rapidly do far more harm than good (as it may already have done in a number of prominent instances, like the Brent Spar oil platform disposal decision). What was not obvious was how it could well be avoided, or what more promising model of overall political and institutional transformation was in principle available. As it emerged into politics, the hazards of global environmental change underlined, above all, a need for rapid large-scale transformation of many prominent human practices. A case can be made for seeing the key site for this change in three distinct ways as lying in the realm of culture (in the conceptions of the goals of human life and the consequent living priorities of given human populations); as lying in the main organizing logic of economic activity; or as lying in the genesis and strengthening of new institutions of coordination and control, which can determine how every human population will in fact respond to the newly recognized, and ever less comfortably parochial, context of its physical existence. These different locations of the

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need for change clearly imply very different strategies for fomenting change. Judging their current plasticity or potential responsiveness is not merely largely the prerogative of different academic disciplines. It also requires, at least in the rst instance, a hypothetical presumption of relative stability in each of the other two. A world of generalized and indeterminate ux cannot be assessed coherently from any particular angle, and precludes rm judgement, even in principle, on how best to respond to it. Such a world is no more tractable in practice; but at least it does not rule out comprehension in principle. Seen over time, moreover, it is distinctly less discouraging even in practice. Thirty years ago, very little of our present scienti c basis for assessing the more salient elements in global environmental change was yet available. Much of what we can now determine with relative accuracy was a matter for the purest (and most projective) speculation. Today many of the most consequential judgements of the degree and imminence of the peril in which we stand remain alarmingly unclear, and hence continue to be ercely contested even by the ablest scientists directly concerned. Some of the most devastating potential scenarios are likely to remain effectively imponderable in any foreseeable future. But we have no reason whatever for seeing our world (as a whole) as a domain of generalized and indeterminate ux, and every reason to hope that we may succeed in determining what, within it, is modifying what, and in what ways, far more accurately and sensitively, even in the next few decades. To do this, we need above all to learn to take the formats of our existing elds of academic or cognitive specialization more lightly and less literally to see these formats more as precarious and politically driven artefacts, and less as cultural treasures or dependable deliverances of the obvious. When and if we learn to do this, the hypothetical bracketing of adjacent cognitive domains will become both easier and more natural, and we can begin to learn how to judge how each given domain bears on the others. In place of a categorical assumption of external xity grounded mainly in intellectual habit, or an epistemically gratuitous presumption of in nite social and political plasticity grounded solely in personal temperament, we can hope to develop a controlled heuristic strategy of open inquiry. Such a strategy could (and would need to) interrogate all elements of the motivation, interactive dynamics and institutional context of human behavior, in face of a still rapidly deteriorating habitat, and address throughout the question of how that deterioration can be arrested or reversed. If we think of these three potentially decisive sites for adjustment, and see the adjustment itself as a single collective task for our species over time, it is clear at once how hard it is to judge how much of the task can sanely be assigned to each site. If the crucial site proves to be the domain of culture, the task is one for the human spirit:

this is because the fundamental, but endless choice of all human beings is what sort of persons we wish to be and what sort of lives we wish to live. Assessing grounds for hope (or despair) in this domain is an ancient human preoccupation: a task in the rst place for religious practitioners or moralists, and then perhaps, more academically, for theologians and philosophers, historians, sociologists or psychologists, especially, in the end, perhaps for psychologists. The inductive record here is certainly discouraging. Grounds for despair come at least as readily as grounds for hope. And hope itself, when it does come, seems often to come less from grounds of any speci able kind than from sheer biological vitality. Can psychologists learn to judge the fundamental properties of the human spirit? Can they in principle ever tell us, even over a very long span, whether or not a human being is a kind of creature which could learn, morally, to live far more responsibly, temperately and delicately than ever before in any numbers? Can a person learn a very different level of patience, tolerance and generosity towards immense numbers of fellow humans quite far away, of whom very little is known? Modern capitalist civilization is founded on the focusing and intensi cation of the effort to get what we want and to live, within its ever shifting contours, as happens to please us: on the pursuit of modern liberty (Constant, 1988, 313 328). Can this, in principle, be transposed into a tissue of tasteful and dependable selfinhibition in the service of a threatened global ecology? On balance the historical odds seem clearly against it. Perhaps no psychologist (perhaps not even psychologists as a profession in their entirety) can be said to know this to be a task beyond the unmediated resources of the human psyche. But insofar as it is cumulative at all, the intellectual history of psychology as a would-be science leads us to expect it to prove so. And however limited their present contribution to telling us whether we collectively possess the spiritual resources to preserve our global habitat, it is at least less paltry than the advice which they can yet offer on the question of how best to mobilize the resources which we do have for the purpose. If the crucial site is the organizing logic of economic activity, the task is principally for economists, for those who design and implement governmental economic policy, and above all for those who lead and manage very large economic enterprises. The key problem here is how to modify structures of incentives so that at least as much continues to be produced and exchanged inde nitely, but with altogether less attendant damage. The task is to alter the grounds for action of economic agents, to limit negative externalities, and to do so without impairing the dynamism, or exibility of adjustment, of the overall economic activity off which, through which, and within which, human populations all now live. There has been very extensive study of the economics of global environmental problems over the last three decades, and some de nite intellectual

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headway in analyzing both their sources and the range of means through which it might be possible to handle them effectively (Dasgupta and Maler, 1997; Mabey et al., 1997; Swanson, 1996; Haugland et al., 1998). What is already clear from this study is that, whilst there are no rigid economic obstacles to lessening the pace and scale of environmental damage, the costs of halting or reversing such damage, even where it could in principle be reversed, are vast enough to preclude its reversal in many elds in the imaginable future. Equally clearly, the allocation of these costs between different groups of human beings over time is a matter of politics through and through, and certain to remain just as bitterly contentious for the imaginable future as it has already proved over the last quarter of a century. If the crucial site of decision is neither in culture nor in the technical design of economies, but in the devising and implementation of novel institutions of coordination and control through which to recapture some degree of control over our cumulative damage to our habitat, the challenge in the end is to our capacities for reexive prudence and political cooperation (Dunn, 1990a, conclusion). The task is, above all, one of political understanding and political action. A pessimistic view would see all three of these tasks as already unmistakably beyond us. The spiritual assignment of chastening greed, enhancing temperance and composure, and guiding us back into a more serene harmony with the rest of the world which we have so deformed and deled, suggests familiar Platonic remedies for spiritual corruption: a harsh censorship, a formidable closure of experience, a rigid structure of authority, made politically credible only by uninhibited cultivation of dubiously noble lies. This dees the logic of modern politics and modern economics more or less in their entirety. There is no reason whatever to believe that the power could still be mustered to impose it, and every reason to fear that the harm which it would certainly do would massively outweigh any possible good that might also ow from it. The economic assignment of internalizing the negative externalities suggests an endless battery of technocratic expedients, of which the only aspects about which we can yet be reasonably condent is that most of them will not work in practice, and that, in their entirety, they will largely reproduce the drastic inequalities in life chances everywhere embodied in existing economies, and reinforce the acute resentment which these already arouse. The political assignment of judging together what our predicament really is, choosing together how to respond to it, and cooperating with one another to ensure that these choices are implemented, suggests familiar oscillations between the invention and parading of international institutions for cooperation, and sustained haggling and mutual intimidation within these (along with other older sites) to impose the costs even for

the outcomes which we do, on balance, favor on others who are even worse placed to afford them: an unrelenting struggle in which the strongest members of society will still take what they can and the weak still yield what they must (Thucydides, 1921, 158). Neither the spiritual, the economic nor the political task, however, can safely be written off. In all three, some degree of contribution is almost certain to prove indispensable, if any secure headway is to be made in such a devastatingly complicated, slow, unobvious and sequentially uninviting endeavor. The least rewarding to focused thought in the short run is the direct assault on the psyche, not least because the focus in question is so extraordinarily hard to maintain. Much more promising is a careful reconsideration of the relative elasticity of technocratic economic expedients and more overtly open-textured political conceptions and practices. The economic expedients (above all the design of regulatory regimes and tax systems) can articulate with some precision with the still more plainly technical appraisal of the dimensions and rectiability of environmental degradation, to make up a joint agenda of what most imperatively needs to be modied, and how it can best be modied. This would certainly not show that we can so modify it in practice. But it would make it as clear as it can be made that we must possess some good reasons for wishing to modify it. The agenda of global environmental change over the last quarter of a century has been an attempt to capture such a joint assignment (Brenton, 1994; Vogler and Imber, 1996; Tolba and Rummel-Bulska, 1999; McCormick, 1995). The diffuse but sometimes very vigorous political processes which came to bear on the major international environmental meetings from the Stockholm summit of 1972 to the Rio Summit of 1992 and since (Thomas, 1994), and which now permanently surround all governmental and intergovernmental environmental policymaking, have been a sustained attempt to interpret and implement that agenda in practice as their participants judged best. The UN Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm in June 1972 (Elliott, 1998, 12) in the presence of the Prime Ministers of Sweden and India, set the pattern for subsequent diplomatic and organizational initiatives in limiting environmental damage by issuing a declaration, adopting an Action Plan, and spawning the new UN Environment Programme (UNEP), founded in 1973, with its headquarters in Nairobi, under the leadership rst of the Canadian Maurice Strong and then of the Egyptian Mostafa Tolba (Tolba and Rummel-Bulska, 1999). From its foundation, this organization represented a precarious (and very poorly funded) compromise between the competing anxieties of the wealthier and poorer countries, and a clear concession to the fears and jealousies of existing UN agencies. But its subsequent impact on a string of inuential meetings to assess and respond to global environmental

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change in many different elds (Elliott, 1998, 109) was not merely a testimony to the skills and determination of its own leadership, but also an index of the increasingly evident urgency of the issues at stake, and the diplomatic and political advantages of approaching these, not through the political apparatuses of individual sovereign states, or the cumbersome machinery of the UN General Assembly, but through a specialized institution fully devoted to the purpose. In the two decades between the Stockholm meeting and the much larger and more ambitious UN Conference on Environment and Development held at Rio de Janeiro in June 1992, the agenda of global environmental deterioration became much more dense and more differentiated and acquired a quite new political momentum. It also generated a wide range of new institutions, practices and agreements to monitor or respond to the many different dimensions of environmental degradation. By the time of the Rio meeting, the national delegations accredited to the conference were larger and more numerous, and in many cases led by their respective Presidents or Prime Ministers. In addition they were ofcially supplemented by over 1400 accredited NGOs; and the conference itself was paralleled by a Global Forum with more than 30 000 participants, held under NGO auspices and organization (Elliott, 1998, 19). Both the conference itself, and the activities surrounding it, were the focus of unprecedented media attention. By its close, the conference had adopted three wide-ranging formal agreements and drawn up two major new conventions, one on climate change and the other on biodiversity. Even in retrospect it is hard to distinguish the ultimate effect of this urry of diplomatic activity from the rhetorical vigor and invention lavished upon it, and the individual and institutional careers advanced by it. A skeptical assessment would see the main clear gains as lying in the strengthening and extension of the global apparatus of scientic monitoring, and the political afrmation of the urgency and priority of the goal of limiting further ecological degradation, rather than in the relatively modest and still largely unimplemented provisions for forest protection embodied in the Rio Statement of Forest Principles (Elliott, 1998, 8589), the precariously coherent Framework Convention on Climate Change, the practical impact of which remains very much in contention (Elliott, 1998, 6873), or the Convention on Biological Diversity, which has little immediate prospect of slowing the rate of species loss in marine or forest environments (Elliott, 1998, 7389). In all of these domains, what does decide the ultimate outcome of such initiatives is not the personal political taste of a small range of powerful political leaders in wealthy countries (let alone of a much larger range of leaders of much poorer ones). It is the balance of political and economic force in intensely fought distributive struggles across the economies and societies of the world. It is never, in principle, possible to see what that balance is at any point in time, although it

sometimes becomes quite easy to judge in retrospect what it must have been, with several decades of hindsight. In interpreting the pace and vigor of political response to perceptions of environmental deterioration, it is most illuminating to consider separately the relative technical tractability of the project of arresting or reversing the damage, and the structures of interest involved both in suffering the damage itself and in bearing the cost of averting it. Where great concentrations of wealth or economic power have a large stake in things as they are (the eating habits of Japanese consumers at the height of the bubble economy, the energy industries of western powers, or indeed of the former Union of Soviet Socialist RepublicsUnion Of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and its successor states), the political assignment of altering them rapidly is virtually impossible. Where the great majority of the worlds present population have a large (and in the short term an inextricable) stake in things as they are, it is also normatively uninviting. Assigning the costs for arresting global warming with any rapidity is not merely a matter of balancing the power of very powerful interests against the human needs of very large and poor populations; it is also a matter of balancing huge short-term costs against potentially even vaster long-term gains, in a political context in which the losses are devastating and impossible to overlook, while the gains cannot in principle be guaranteed to accrue at all, and will accrue, if they eventually do, only to persons who are in many cases quite different from those who now bear the costs (Part, 1984). Ecological degradation harms the interests, and arguably violates the rights and threatens the needs, of future generations of human beings. But any allocation of the costs of seeking to forestall it is bound to entrench on the interests of some present or future human beings, and quite likely in practice to impair the rights, or even encroach on the needs, of many groups of human beings who have no idea of what is at stake and no means of defending themselves against the measures in question. The politics of global environmental change cannot therefore be validly understood as a struggle between virtuous, clairvoyant and deft NGOs, consciously devoted to world salvation, and vicious, obtuse and clumsy states or corporations, more or less inadvertently committed to world destruction. Nor, self-evidently, can it be validly understood as the mirror image of such a struggle, with the normative signs reversed. What it is above all is a very maladroit and confused exploration of just how dangerous and destructive global environmental change really is, and an understandably acrimonious range of quarrels about who is to blame for its grimmest aspects, and who has either the responsibility or the power to begin to cope with them. Anyone who nds this surprising would simply show that they do not understand what politics is really like or why it is as it is (Dunn, 2000).

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The speed and clarity with which environmental damage is identied and challenged in the rst place has depended, throughout human history, both on the freedom, condence and political effectiveness of its immediate victims, and on the salience of the damage itself. The pace at which that damage is arrested and reversed depends at least as much on the technical tractability of the process to intentional human intervention. When the Iraqi occupying forces set re to the oil wells of Kuwait, their political master fully intended the scale of destruction which he unleashed. But most important environmental damage is an unintended side effect of activities pursued for quite other reasons; and a very large proportion of it is still as unwelcome as it is unanticipated. If we consider six of the major dimensions of global ecological degradation in relation to one another crossborder acid rain, stratospheric ozone-depletion, deforestation, loss of biological diversity, and global warming (with its attendant threat of massive climate change), it should by now be possible to explain much of the pattern of political response by relating together their relative salience, the political strength or weakness of their immediate victims, the power of those with a major stake in the activities which principally cause them, and the costs and technical tractability of beginning to remedy them. Unsurprisingly, no one has yet attempted an overall interpretation of this ambition. (For a thoughtful and well-informed synoptic view see Held et al., 1999). But it is not difcult to suggest its main outlines. Marine pollution has been one of the earliest foci of interstate environmental concern, both because of the obtrusiveness of some of its aspects, and because it is so plainly, in most cases, beyond the authority or power of any particular state to control or rectify. In the case of more vulnerable seas in areas with relatively wealthy populations (the Mediterranean, for example), the dangers were identied relatively early, and attempts made to remedy them. But the main threat of marine pollution has come from the vast expansion in world water-borne trade since 1945 and the hectic development of the world oil industry, especially from off-shore elds in the last quarter of a century. The starkest destruction thus far has come in the case of huge inland water bodies in the former Soviet Union (Lake Baikal, the Aral Sea), where the immediate victims were effectively politically impotent, and from major oil spills. Particularly vulnerable major sites at present include the Arctic and Antarctic regions (where the international attempt at environmental protection has been especially strong, not least because initial territorial appropriation was still minimal), and the Caspian Sea, which is both a fully enclosed water body and the site of vast oil and gas reserves in a populous and still relatively impoverished region. Marine pollution remains extraordinarily difcult to police, with the relation between those who inict and incur

its costs in most instances impossible as yet to turn into structures of clear mutual accountability. But it is reasonable to expect much further effort to make them more so, because the interests in marine pollution cannot in principle, over time and under accurate interpretation, outweigh the interests in preventing it. Since the interests in its continuance for the most part also lack tight and rm links to major state powers, and the technical possibilities for enhanced surveillance must be virtually limitless, in the end this effort is likely to win some success. Only in the case of the oil industry is it hard to imagine rapid progress in arresting marine damage; and here the explanation is less the sinister political linkages of major oil producers than the virtually worldwide mass interest in continued access to low cost energy supplies, especially for transport, cooking, and over much of the world, heating. It is not an accident that the most prominent and entrepreneurially dynamic executive of a major oil company over the last few years, Sir John Browne of BPAmoco, should also be the most prominent exponent of the imperative for the industry to respond effectively to the cumulative threat of its environmental damage. In Western Europe cross-border acid rain was the rst major political focus for environmental concern and resentment in the post-war epoch, with the forests and lakes of Scandinavia as the most evocative site of harm, and the principal perpetrators seen as the cars, trucks and power stations of the UK and Germany (Held et al., 1999, 404405). Due to the relative diplomatic and economic intimacy of Western Europe, some degree of accountability for these harms was established with comparative ease, and sustained effort has been made for at least a decade to modify the technologies of power stations and road transport to cut levels of nitrogen and sulfur dioxide emissions. A more recent and alarming example of cross-border atmospheric pollution was the month-long smog which engulfed much of the Malay peninsula and Northern Indonesia in the summer of 1997 as a result of Indonesian forest res. Here, the prospect of rapid adjustment to avert further damage seems poor, since the level of cooperation and mutual condence embodied in the SouthEast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is still distinctly lower than in the case of the European Union, the immediate economic circumstances of the majority of the populations in question already straitened, the dynamics of economic growth severely disrupted, and the political coherence and efcacy of the Indonesian state still far below those of any Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development member. An even less promising site for prompt recticatory action is the atmospheric pollution induced by trafc, power stations, and in many instances wood-burning, in the vast metropolitan urban agglomerations of the worlds poorer countries, from Delhi to Mexico City. Paradoxically, the most encouraging instance of political response to global environmental damage has come

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from one of the more recently identied and unnerving examples the damage to the ozone layer, with its sharp prospective increase in harmful radiation. The source of that damage has been the use over the last half century of chlorouorocarbons (CFCs), principally in refrigeration (Held et al., 1999, 396397). The decisive evidence for the scale and immediacy of this threat came from scientists of the British Antarctic Survey (Rajan, 1997, 4445), gathered between 1982 and 1984 and published in 1985. The complex process of initial international political response to this evidence, commercial haggling over, and subsequent enterpreneurial adaptation to, its implications by major producers of CFCs, and political bargaining between wealthier and poorer countries over distributing the costs of adjustment, was bound to take some years (Rajan, 1997, Chapters 3 and 4). But in retrospect, the time-span between the publication of the British Antarctic Survey teams article in Nature in May 1985, the signature of the Montreal Protocol restricting CFC use in September 1987 (Rajan, 1997, 54), and its coming into effect in an amended version late in the summer of 1992, in a form which took better account of the interests of the poorer countries, was remarkably brief. We do not know quite why the response was this speedy. The startlingly grim implications of the Antarctic data? The unambiguous source of the damage? The relatively small number of major producers of CFCs and the clear (if expensive) availability of means to replace them with a far less damaging alternative? But the combination of shock and available remedy does offer some insight into how we might hope to alleviate other equally clear but less imminent menaces at a less hectic pace, where the costs of doing so are not too forbidding. Deforestation, and loss of biodiversity through this and many other means, have proved far harder to arrest. Assessing responsibility for each, and allocating the costs of even attempting to bring them to an end, have been bitterly politically contentious, both within many individual states, and between groupings of wealthier and poorer states across the world. The complexities of perception and ambivalences of sentiment evoked by each reach back as far as civilization itself, and are inextricable from the history of class or ethnic conict in most human societies (Thompson, 1975; Cronon, 1983). With the massive human population growth of the last half century and its prospective extension into the next few decades, levels of deforestation, to which the English or Italians became accustomed several centuries ago, and which the subcontinent of South Asia has undergone over the last century, now prospectively threaten the great rain forests of West and Central Africa, and even in the end the Amazonian basin itself. The extension of agriculture and stock-raising at the expense of forest cover, so long seen as the least equivocal index of human advance, now appears not as a single unambiguous good, but a potentially ever less coherent sequence of increasingly wanton actions. The

political impetus to persist with each remains extremely powerful; but the overall practical rationality of doing so is steadily harder to defend. No area of world trade today is as dominated by the political power of sinister and consequentially damaging interests as the agricultural exports of North America and the European Union, with their massive internal subsidization. The relation between markets and food supplies has been morally fraught throughout modern history; and even the most compelling case for laissez-faire in the eld of food is hard to reconcile with the levels of market distortion locked into the routine politics of most long-established capitalist democracies. This is not an aspect of human social existence in the world today which any extant ideology articulates clearly and evaluates compellingly, though there is, of course, widespread and sometimes sophisticated understanding of the harms and benets that ow from the bewildering variety of individual practices. The most effective arguments for the imperative of preventing further deforestation are prudential, and center on its prospective impact on global warming, and hence on climate change. The gap between recognizing the force of the arguments and halting (or even reversing) deforestation is immense, and certain to remain for a long time as economically perturbing as it is politically challenging. But at least deforestation is a relatively salient phenomenon, something which could, in principle, in due course be tracked accurately by satellite camera (see Global Forest Watch, Volume 4). The loss of biodiversity is inherently more nebulous, and far harder to measure until it is already too late. The prudential arguments for the urgency of arresting it involve far more speculative judgements, many of them about future scientic advances, while the normative arguments for the same conclusion, stressing the enormity of eliminating natural differentiation itself, have little solid foundation in the great majority of extant human cultures, and receive scant tendential support from the spread of the industrialized economies and ever more commoditized forms of life. It is hard to be condent, in the case of plant, marine or animal life, that net loss of biodiversity will slow in the near future, and just as hard to believe that the domestic political judgement and diplomatic nesse of states today equip them to focus effectively on this issue and cooperate rmly and deftly with one another in responding to it (Rajan, 1997, Chapters 7 and 8). The most politically interesting and potentially consequential dimension of ecological degradation so far identied is the process of global warming through the combustion of fossil fuels, and its prospective impact on climate across different human habitats. Whilst the scale and timing of disruption are thus far impossible to estimate accurately, it is striking how rapidly the levels of risk ultimately at stake, have come to be accepted, even by those with the clearest immediate stake in continuing

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to deny them (Houlder, 1999a). In marked contrast with British governmental vacillation over the hazards presented by genetically modied food crops (Houlder and Wigton, 1999), and the collapse of the UN Cartagena meeting in February 1999 on the biosafety protocol in the face of US insistence on pressing its entitlement to export genetically modied crops under the rules of the World Trade Organization (1999), there now appears to be little coherent governmental opposition in international negotiations to the need to lower emissions of greenhouse gases and enhance the efcacy of energy use with some rapidity. This is certainly not an index of the limited scale or political importance of the interests which will suffer directly and immediately from any such adjustment. In each case, these could hardly be more extensive. What it reects, above all, is the universality of the interest in having a viable habitat, the imponderability of the scale of risk in question, and the relative simplicity and obtrusiveness of the mechanism which will initiate the harm (however complicated its subsequent mediation proves to be). Unlike older and starker preoccupations like desertication (where there has been extensive international coordination to limit the threat, under the auspices of the UNEP (Elliott 1998, 9094), or shrinking or degenerating water resources (Houlder, 1999b), what drives home the signicance of global warming is not its immediacy or concreteness, but the potential limitlessness of its incidence and the comprehensiveness of its scope. It is these two together which explain the density and tenacity of the diplomatic negotiations which led up to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change of May 1992 and its signature at Rio, and which overrode the very limited practical gains of the Convention itself (Elliott, 1998, 6869) and the sharp divisions of interest which had ensured these, to establish a far more denite (and perhaps even prospectively effective) set of mechanisms for addressing the issue a mere ve years later in the December 1997 meeting which drew up the Kyoto Protocol (Grubb et al., 1999). A core provision of the Kyoto Protocol is the system for trading permits for the provision of greenhouse gases, which is intended to redistribute the physical burden of limitation in such a way as to meet the agreed limits, rapidly and at the lowest net cost in individual welfare or economic growth foregone. Any process of bargaining and coordination which involves parties with highly unequal assets is likely to generate results which are disquieting on grounds of justice (Barry, 1989). But no large-scale political process of this kind can be conducted behind a veil of ignorance. To produce any measure of concrete agreement, and still more to secure agreements which stand any real chance of being implemented in practice, it is essential to identify outcomes which reect a clear common interest, which is evidently more important than the necessarily even clearer

conicts of interest over how the costs of securing it are distributed between the parties. Only extended experience of trading emissions permits, in the context of an evolving international trading regime and a world economy whose dynamics are certain to remain highly erratic for the foreseeable future, will show whether the Kyoto Protocol has established a formula for adjusting global production over time to the need to lower fossil fuel consumption in the longer run. What is already clear is that the Kyoto Protocol, even if observed, will at most slow the accumulation of greenhouse gases for many decades to come, and that the process of coordination is certain to remain arduous across the different forms through which it must be pursued from individual national industries or nation states, through economic blocs like the European Union, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or ASEAN, to the global panoply of UN organizations. The unintended effects of policy instruments like national energy taxes on the international competitivity of high energy use industries such as steel show the indispensability of coordinating widely. The laborious and often opaque activity of diplomatic haggling throughout the global negotiations on climate change of the last two decades, shows the proliferating costs in time, patience and analytic effort in every further attempt to coordinate policies. Strong a priori grounds for doubting whether coordination in face of sufciently discrepant structures of interest can be either possible or rational (Olson, 1965; Hardin, 1982, 1995; but cf Axelrod, 1997) must be offset by weaker inductive grounds for recognizing that a great deal of coordination does in fact sometimes occur. In the end, what does and will decide the degree of coordination is the internal process of political judgement itself, a process led by active cognitive interest, but also distorted throughout by personal folly and sometimes far from benign passions (Dunn, 2000). What has emerged into politics with the agenda of global environmental change is an overwhelming new political challenge. The most myopic of us can readily see that this challenge is bound to intensify many old political problems, and not unlikely to impair some of our existing resources of organization and mutual condence for dealing with many components of our familiar political predicaments. What is less easy to see is whether the challenge itself might, or could not, generate fresh resources, whether of organization or of mutual condence, with which to try to confront it. Hardest of all is to judge how the balance between sharpening challenge, faltering institutions and weakening mutual condence, and tentative genesis of new institutional structures and changed sensibilities and dispositions, is likely to come out over time. But even this is best seen in the end, less as a question about how to interpret the human world, than about how to change it for the better. It is not

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a scientic question with an, as yet unknown, scientic answer, but a practical question which can be answered only in practice. It will, of course, be answered by what we and our descendants prove to do, and fail to do. There is every reason to fear that it may be answered very badly, as, in a sense, it now turns out, it has been answered for most of recorded human history. Since, for the rst time in that history, we now have good reason to believe that we hold the fate of our own species fully in our own hands, there is clear urgency to learn to answer it far better. This is a challenge not just to our moral imaginations and limited self-control, but to the very core of our practical good sense: our will and capacity to preserve ourselves individually and collectively over time. Above all, today and for the imaginable future, it is a challenge to our political judgement (Dunn, 1998).

REFERENCES
Alperovitz, G (1995) Atomic Diplomacy, 2nd edition, Pluto Press, London. Axelrod, R (1997) The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-based Models of Competition and Collaboration, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Baldwin, D A (1992) Economic Statecraft, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Barry, B (1989) Theories of Justice, Harvester Wheatsheaf, London. Brenner, R (1998) The Economics of Global Turbulence: a Special report on the World Economy 1950 1998, New Left Rev., 229, May June. Brenton, T (1994) The Greening of Machiavelli, Earthscan, London. Carrithers, M, Collins, S, and Lukes, S, eds (1985) The Catgeory of the Person, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Clark, I and Wheeler, N (1989) The Origins of British Nuclear Strategy, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Constant, B (1988) Political Writings, ed B Fontana, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Cronon, W (1983) Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England, Hill and Wang, New York. Cronon, W (1992) Nature s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, Norton, New York. Dasgupta, P and Maler, K G, eds (1997) The Environment and Emerging Development Issues, 2 Volumes, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Dunn, J (1969) The Political Thought of John Locke, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Dunn, J (1990a) Interpreting Political Responsibility, Polity Press, Cambridge. Dunn, J, ed (1990b) The Economic Limits to Modern Politics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Dunn, J, ed (1992) Democracy: The Unnished Journey, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Dunn, J (1996) The History of Political Theory, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Dunn, J (1998) Democracy, Globalization and Human Interests, Il Politico, 43, 353 374. Dunn, J (1999) How Politics Limits Markets: Power, Legitimacy, Choice, in The Politics and Economics of Power, eds S Bowles, M Franzini, and U Pagano, Routledge, London, 85 100. Dunn, J (2000) The Cunning of Unreason: Making Sense of Politics, Harper Collins, London. Elliott, L (1998) The Global Politics of the Environment, Macmillan, Basingstoke. Finer, S E (1997) The History of Government, 3 Volumes, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Freedman, L (1981) The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, Macmillan, London. Gilpin, R (1987) The Political Economy of International Relations, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Gombrich, R (1971) Precept and Practice: Traditional Buddhism in the Rural Highlands of Ceylon, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Gowing, M and Arnold, L (1974) Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy 1945 1952, 2 Volumes, Macmillan, London. Grubb, M, Vrolijk, C, and Brack, D (1999) The Kyoto Protocol: a Guide and Assessment, Earthscan, London. Hardin, R (1982) Collective Action, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD. Hardin, R (1995) One for All: the Logic of Group Con ict, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Haugland, T, Bergesen, H O, and Roland, K (1998) Energy Structures and Environmental Futures, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Held, D, McGrew, A, Goldblatt, D, and Perraton, J (1999) Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture, Polity Press, Cambridge. Houlder, V (1999a) BPAmoco Chief Sets Out Case for Energy Taxes, Financial Times, 13th January, 6. Houlder, V (1999b) UN Warns of Water Wars Next Century, Financial Times, 19th March, 4. Houlder, V and Wigton, D (1999) UK Moratorium on Modi ed Crop would Break EU Law, Financial Times, 19th February, 20. Hurrell, A and Kingsbury, B, eds (1992) The International Politics of the Environment, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Kennedy, P (1988) The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Unwin Hyman, London. Keohane, R (1984) After Hegemony, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Lal, D and Myint, H (1994) The Political Economy of Poverty, Equity and Growth: a Comparative Study, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Little, I M D (1982) Economic Development: Theory, Policy, and International Relations, Basic Books, New York. Mabey, N, Hall, S, Smith, C, and Gupta, S (1997) Argument in the Greenhouse: the International Economics of Controlling Global Warming, Routledge, London. MccGwire, M (1987) Military Objectives in Soviet Foreign Policy, Brookings Institution, Washington, DC. McNeill, W (1983) The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force and Society since AD 1000, Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Manin, B (1997) The Principles of Representative Government, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

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Meinecke, F (1957) Machiavellism, translated from the German by D Scott, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London. Olson, M (1965) The Logic of Collective Action, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Part, D (1984) Reasons and Persons, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Passmore, J (1974) Mans Responsibility for Nature, Duckworth, London. Popper, K R (1957) The Poverty of Historicism, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London. Quinton, A (1999) My Son the Philosopher (review of Randall Collins, the Sociology of Philosophies), New York Review of Books, 46, 8/4/99. Rajan, M G (1997) Global Environmental Politics: India and the North South Politics of Global Environmental Issues, Oxford University Press, Delhi. Runte, A (1997) National Parks: the American Experience, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE. Swanson, T M, ed (1996) The Economics of Environmental Degradation: Tragedy for the Commons? Edward Elgar, Cheltenham. Taylor, C (1989) Sources of the Self, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Taylor, C (1992) The Ethics of Authenticity, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Thomas, C (1994) Rio: Unraveling the Consequences, Frank Cass, London. Thomas, K (1983) Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500 1800, Allen Lane, London. Thompson, E P (1975) Whigs and Hunters, Allen Lane, London. Thucydides, V (1921) History of the Peloponnesian War, translated by C F Smith, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Tolba, M and Rummel-Bulska, I (1999) Global Environmental Diplomacy: Negotiating Environmental Agreements for the World, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Unger, R B (1999) Democracy Realized, Verso, London. Vogler, J and Imber, M (1996) The Environment and International Relations, Routledge, London. Wallerstein, I (1995) After Liberalism, The New Press, New York. World Trade Organization (1999) Financial Times, 26th February.

FURTHER READING
McCormick, J (1995) The Global Environmental Movement, 2nd edition, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester.

The Environment and Violent Conict

DANIEL M SCHWARTZ
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

Increasingly, violent con ict and the potential for such con ict is being linked to environmental problems such as water pollution, over- shing, deforestation, and global warming. Research suggests that it is developing nations that are most vulnerable to this environmentally induced con ict. Environmental stress is rarely considered to be the sole factor in precipitating con ict, which can take the form of both con ict between and within nations. In many cases environmental stress is a relatively distant factor, acting in combination with other economic and social factors such as poverty and weak governments. In other cases, con ict breaks out when rival nations, or rival groups within a nation, battle for diminishing supplies of environmental resources. Although environmental stress is usually only one cause of con ict among many, the evidence suggests that it can play an important role, and that violence may be avoided by addressing environmental problems. Interest in the linkages between environmental stress and violent con ict has grown rapidly in the last two decades. In part, this is because the end of the Cold War has shifted discourse on the issue of security in both academia and policy circles. Although traditional threats to security such as conventional and nuclear war still exist, there has been an increasing recognition that security is also tied to less apparent dangers such as chronic poverty, infectious disease, and the depletion and degradation of environmental resources.

INTRODUCTION: THE CHANGING NATURE OF SECURITY

In 1977, Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute published Rede ning National Security, a pioneering work, which argued that the most signicant security dilemma facing humankind was an ever-widening gap between the supply of, and demand for, environmental resources (Brown, 1977). This idea challenged mainstream conceptions of security and launched a debate on the topic of redening security that has grown increasingly sophisticated over the last two decades. In the mainstream schools of thought that focus on the issue, security is (and always has been) largely synonymous with state security. In a world comprised of self-interested and calculating individuals, the state is seen as the purveyor of authority and security. Without the state, individuals would live in what 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes termed a state of nature, and life would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Moreover, mainstream security analysts believe that the greatest challenge to state security comes from outside the state in the form of military force or organized violence. The most effective means for a state to repel an outside threat of force is to engage the enemy with military force of its own.

Academics and policymakers who agitate for a redenition of security, contest these assumptions made by mainstream analysts. Some proponents of redening security argue that the focus of security should be shifted away from the state, and nearly all contend that threats to security should include non-military ones especially environmental stress. These proponents champion the concept of environmental security to challenge the near monopoly that mainstream security analysts have held in the past. Environmental security analysts that encourage a move away from state security, favor either a shift upwards to the global level, or downwards to the individual level. A shift upwards to the global level is encouraged by those who contend that environmental problems such as global warming and ozone depletion transcend national boundaries and highlight the oneness of a world divided along arbitrary and increasingly meaningless political boundaries. Those who favor a shift downward to the individual (or human) level, assert that environmental problems such as urban pollution often affect human wellbeing more than they affect an abstraction such as the state. Other environmental security analysts, however, do not favor a shift away from state security. They insist that as long as the state continues to be the central organizing principle in global politics, state security should continue to be the focus.

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Although some environmental security analysts do not agitate for a movement away from state security, most maintain that non-military threats to security are at least as important as military threats. They point out, for instance, that the annual toll of individuals suffering from infectious diseases, such as the Ebola virus and AIDS, far outnumbers the global number of battleeld casualties in the last decade (Pirages, 1996, 13). In short, these analysts contend that security must not be measured only in terms of military might, but also in terms of economic wellbeing, social stability, and environmental health. Environmental security analysts have made some tangible headway in their attempt to redene security. At the national level, for instance, the US Department of Defense, in 1993, created the position of Deputy Under Secretary for Environmental Security. At the international level, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme have explicitly recognized the issue of environmental security (Schwartz and Singh, 1999; Gleditsch, 1997). But efforts to redene security have also been met with suspicion and outright scorn. Skeptics argue that proponents of environmental security are mere opportunists, dressing up environmental concerns in security garb, with the intention of shifting resources away from military budgets to environmental budgets. Moreover, critics contend that too broad a denition of security renders the concept meaningless for all intents and purposes. But there is yet another way in which environmental stress and security may be inextricably linked. Recent research has discovered various ways in which environmental stress can lead to the outbreak of violent conict. Environmental stress can contribute to resource shortages, which can provoke conict between nations and induce conict within nations. Environmental stress can also engender and interact with economic and social phenomena such as poverty and weak governments to create conict between and within nations. These linkages are discussed in detail below. For our immediate purposes, however, it is important to note that even if we hold to a mainstream conception of security in which military threats prevail the environment-conict nexus suggests that the environment can be an important component of security. If environmental stress can in fact contribute to violent conict within and between nations, then even the staunchest of mainstream security analysts must recognize the importance of environmental issues.

ENVIRONMENT AND VIOLENT CONFLICT

The notion that disputes and violent conict can erupt over access to environmental resources appears commonplace: international wars and civil conicts have been fought over access to land and resources since time immemorial.

Three factors, however, make modern-day analyses on environment and conict novel. First, there has been a shift in focus from non-renewable resources such as oil and minerals, to renewable resources such as water, cropland, forests, and species. Most experts concur that conicts over non-renewable resources will continue to erupt. The Gulf War, for instance, was fought, at least in part, over access to oil. But for the rst time, renewable resources are being considered as systematic factors in the explosion of hostilities. Second, modern-day analyses on environment and conict emphasize the role of population growth in fostering environmental stress. Throughout this essay, I use the term environmental stress (or environmental problems) to indicate the degradation and depletion of renewable resources. Although I will not make explicit reference to it on every occasion, I consider population growth to be intimately connected to environmental stress. As a population grows, the demand on environmental resources increases; and as the demand on environmental resources increases, the abundance of the resource itself shrinks while the existing supply is often over-taxed. Although some demographers have recently predicted that population growth will actually begin to decline worldwide in approximately 50 years, there is also an overwhelming consensus that the global population will hit between 7.5 and 10.5 billion in the year 2050. With such large increases predicted for the near future, population growth will continue to be intimately connected to environmental stress. Finally, as will be discussed in detail below, modernday analyses on environment and conict often focus on the manner in which environmental stress can combine with other economic and social factors to produce conict. Whereas past analyses focussed solely on conict over environmental resources, modern-day analyses also assess how the degradation and depletion of renewable resources can act in conjunction with social and economic conditions to produce conict between and within nations. In what follows, I examine the various ways in which environmental stress can precipitate violence. Before examining these linkages, however, I distinguish between wideranging environmental stress and localized environmental stress. By wide-ranging, I refer to environmental problems that are affecting the entire globe or large areas of the world simultaneously. Two prominent examples are global warming and depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer. By localized environmental stress, I refer to environmental problems that are affecting small areas of the globe at different times. Examples include deforestation and water pollution. This distinction notwithstanding, it is important to emphasize the global nature of all environmental stress. The interconnectedness of the environment makes it likely that even the effects of localized environmental problems will spread beyond their initial boundaries. Water

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pollution, for instance, can easily spread beyond the immediate boundaries of its inception through groundwater and tributaries. Moreover, global economic and social forces make it likely that the roots of localized environmental problems can be traced back to forces outside of the area immediately affected. Deforestation in many developing nations, for instance, is partly the result of growing demand for lumber and wood by-products in developed nations.

INDIRECT INTERNAL CONFLICT

Evidence to date indicates that environmental stress is most likely to result in conict when it engenders and interacts with social and economic factors to produce conict within a nation. Because the evidence for this type of conict is abundant, and because the processes identied here will shed light on all of the various conict types discussed below, I will spend a good deal of time explicating indirect internal conict. I consider this type of conict to be indirect, because conict does not arise over a particular environmental resource. Rather, the conicts are often typical ones, including ethnic conicts, class conicts, revolutions, insurgencies, etc. But the cause of these conicts can often be traced back, in part, to environmental stress. Conict is internal when environmental stress produces violence within the boundaries of a nation. The process that leads to conict can often have cross-border dimensions, such as when cross-border migrations that are induced by environmental stress play a role in creating conict. And, as noted above, local environmental stress itself is often the result of global environmental change and economic forces. Nevertheless, if the conict itself is conned to within the perimeters of a particular nation, we can consider the conict to be an internal one. There are at least ve pathways to indirect internal conict that involve environmental stress: economic decline, migrations, social segmentation, erosion of civil society, and curtailment of the state. These pathways rarely work in isolation from one another. In most cases, the various roads to conict are very complex and involve elements from a number of pathways working in synergy. To better understand the role that environmental stress plays in engendering conict, however, it is useful to parcel out these pathways and examine each one individually before considering the ways in which they criss-cross one another to form the broader roads to conict.
Economic Decline

Perhaps one of the most evident and widely cited social effects of environmental stress is economic decline. There are many types of environmental stress that can contribute to economic decline, including wide-ranging environmental

problems such as global warming and stratospheric ozone depletion, as well as more localized environmental problems such as deforestation, water pollution, and over-shing. Although environmentally induced economic decline can lead to general economic malaise in society, it is more likely to affect the poorer segments of society and thus widen the differential between rich and poor. This is because it is the poorer segments of society that are more likely to be highly dependent on environmental resources, and less able to buffer themselves from the effects of environmental stress (Homer-Dixon, 1999, 88). It is essential to keep in mind that environmental stress is only one cause among many contributing to economic decline and widening income gaps. Nevertheless, it appears that it can be an important factor. Global warming, for instance, could lead to a rise in sea level and produce more frequent extreme weather events such as hurricanes and tornadoes. These events, in turn, could cause major property damage to coastal regions and result in the injury to, and/or loss of, human life. Global warming may also lower precipitation in some regions and yield pest infestations. These effects would strain the economic resources of local regions and nations. Myers (1993, 174), for instance, contends that global warming could cause the United States grain belt to become unbuckled, with as much as half of the farmlands in the Southeast failing, California running out of water to irrigate its huge areas of cropland, and many of the countrys woodlands and forests fading from the scene. Most analysts, however, including Myers, note that it is developing nations that will likely bear the brunt of global warming. For example, regions that are already plagued with fragile environments, such as the Sahel and the Indian subcontinent, could face severe droughts that signicantly undermine their agricultural productivity. Stratospheric ozone depletion can also induce conditions that lead to economic decline. For instance, by depressing immune systems, stratospheric ozone depletion can increase disease rates in humans and animals. Some experts suggest that recent increases in the occurrence of skin cancers and eye cataracts in the Southern Hemisphere are already attributable to depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer. Stratospheric ozone depletion can also adversely affect agricultural productivity. Studies suggest, for instance, that stratospheric ozone depletion could reduce crop yields by anywhere from 5% for wheat to 90% for squash. Finally, and perhaps most ominously of all, stratospheric ozone depletion can wreak havoc on entire ecosystems. Phytoplankton-based food chains in the sea, for instance, could be disrupted. If phytoplankton are affected, higher levels in the food chain such as zooplankton and sh would likely be affected as well (Myers, 1993, 166167). If these impacts from stratospheric ozone depletion materialize increased disease rates in humans, declining

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agricultural productivity, and ecosystem damage government coffers would inexorably feel the pinch between increasing demand on national and regional health care systems, and decreasing revenues from agricultural and shing sectors. Although developed nations would hardly be immune to the impact of stratospheric ozone depletion, it is again developing nations that would likely suffer the direst economic consequences because they often lack the infrastructure and economic exibility to mitigate the impacts. If the potential ramications from global warming and stratospheric ozone depletion are sound in theory, there is little documented evidence to date that would support the connection between these wide-ranging environmental problems and economic decline. The socio economic effects of global warming and stratospheric ozone depletion, quite simply, have not yet begun to play themselves out in any systematic way, although there are indications that this is beginning to happen. The link between more localized environmental stress and economic decline, conversely, has been evident for years. Many regions, especially in the developing world, are already feeling the nancial sting of localized environmental stress. Deforestation, for instance, has had particularly pernicious consequences for regional and national economies. Large-scale unsustainable logging practices may reap shortterm rewards for a nation, but these logging practices can also sow the seeds of long-term economic decline once initial supplies are exhausted. Barber (1997, 5354), for example, argues that Indonesias unsustainable deforestation practices over the last three decades created huge amounts of wealth, but also sacriced future prots that are now sorely missed by the nations economy. Deforestation can also reduce the available supply of fuel wood the wood that many people in developing nations are highly dependent upon for their daily energy requirements. As the supply of wood dwindles, prices rise, forcing poor families to spend an increasing portion of their budget on this resource. In Chiapas, Mexico, for instance, rapid deforestation of the Lacandon rainforest over the last two decades has deprived local citizens of much needed wood. The lack of fuel wood, in turn, has contributed to widespread poverty in the region (Homer-Dixon and Percival, 1996, 1720). Finally, deforestation can foster silting, soil erosion, and desertication; change regional hydrological cycles and precipitation patterns; and decrease the lands ability to retain water during rainy periods. All of these effects limit agricultural productivity, cause damage to pivotal infrastructure such as roads and bridges, and reduce the hydroelectric capacity of rivers. Homer-Dixon (1999, 8193) notes that in China, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, much cropland has been lost or degraded by erosion. And on the Filipino Island of Palawan, only half of the potential

farmland is irrigable because of the hydrological effects of decreases in forest cover. Water pollution has also created economic decline by limiting agricultural activity and fostering disease. These effects have been particularly acute in the Middle East. Homer-Dixon (1999, 9092), for instance, contends that in Gaza, water aquifers have been salanized from overpumping and severely polluted from agricultural run-off. The result has been damaged soil, declining crop yields, and severe reductions in potable water. Routine consumption of polluted water has led to widespread health problems in Gazas Palestinian population, straining health care budgets and retarding economic development. Finally, over-shing has induced economic decline. Some developed nations have seen their economies eroded by the collapse of sheries. Canada, for instance, has at various times imposed moratoriums on commercial cod shing on the East Coast and severely restricted commercial salmon shing on the West Coast. But once again, it is developing nations especially regions that are highly dependent on their sheries which have been most affected by the depletion in sh stocks. For example, Lang (1995) traces regional and national economic decline in Kenya back to a combination of water pollution and overshing in Lake Victoria a key body of water for the nation and a pivotal source of revenue for many citizens.
Migration

A second pathway from environmental stress to conict is through migration. Wide-ranging and localized environmental stress, in conjunction with other social and economic factors, can induce movements of people within national borders as well as between nations. Sometimes large and spontaneous migrations are caused by environmental factors, such as oods, droughts, and locusts. Flooding in Mozambique and Madagascar during February and March, 2000, for instance, caused large and rapid movements of people in these African nations. The degradation and depletion of renewable resources, however, is often a distant cause of migration. It may, for instance, contribute to economic decline, which subsequently contributes to migration. Further, this type of environmentally induced migration rarely involves large and spontaneous upheavals of people. Rather, the migration occurs slowly over long periods of time. These two caveats notwithstanding, migration induced by the depletion and degradation of renewable resources can be an important pathway to conict, especially in developing nations where peoples livelihood is often tied intimately to these resources. The availability of arable land is likely one of the most important factors contributing to migration. This is especially evident in developing nations where agriculture can constitute a sizeable portion of local economies. Of

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course, it is not the availability of arable land per se that induces migration, but rather the economic prospects that correspond to this availability. A scarcity of arable land will create economic decline, which acts as a push factor and decreases the quality of life, thereby inducing migration. Moreover, the prospect of migrating to verdant regions, where land is not scarce, can create a pull factor by offering migrants an enhanced quality of life. Large in uxes of people can often lead to a host of new environmental problems in the migrants destinations, thereby perpetuating a cycle of environmental stress and migration. A scarcity of arable land is often caused, in part, by environmental stress. Deforestation, in particular, can induce ooding, soil erosion, and deserti cation, which can then degrade the nutrient base needed for agriculture. Hazarika (1993) identi es just such a process in Bangladesh during the 1980s. By deforesting upstream areas in the Himalayas, downstream soil was exposed to rain and winds. Consequently, the ooding which naturally occurs in this area was signi cantly exacerbated, and land degradation ensued. Combined with rapid population growth, land degradation forced farmers to divide the remaining arable land into ever-smaller portions. As the prospects for farming became increasingly grim, Bengalis began to look across the border to the relatively plush lands in Northeast India. The result was a gradual movement of over 10 million Bengalis to Northeast India. Similarly, Renner (1996, 106) contends that massive deforestation and soil erosion played an important role in decreasing the agricultural productivity of peasants farming the highland areas in Ethiopia. As a result, large numbers of peasant farmers migrated to the Ogaden area in southeastern Ethiopia where the prospects for farming were perceived to be substantially better. Environmentally induced land scarcity is not the only factor that can lead to economic decline and migration. Smil (1992, 17 19) posits that water and air pollution have engendered migrations from the interior provinces of China to the country s eastern and southern coastal regions especially coastal cities where prospects for earning a decent wage are widely considered to be far superior to those in the interior provinces. Similarly, Wegemund (1996, 307 311) points to a shortage of fuel wood (caused primarily by rapid deforestation) as well as a scarcity of water (caused in part by water pollution and in part by increasing demand on the resources) as two key environmental problems that have yielded signi cant migrations in Africa s Senegambian region.
Social Segmentation and Erosion of Civil Society

While studies on the linkages between environmental stress, economic decline, and migrations are quite common, the impact of environmental stress on social segmentation and civil society has yet to receive widespread attention.

Homer-Dixon (1999, 96 98) demonstrates, however, that environmental scarcity can produce social segmentation by deepening divisions among ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups. Homer-Dixon also shows how environmental stress can fray the web of networks in society made up of nongovernmental organizations, unions, and community service organizations. These societal networks form the core of civil society, and are key to mediating the relationship between individuals and the state. Just as migrations can occur as a result of both environmental stress and economic decline, social segmentation and the erosion of civil society can occur as a result of a complex interaction between environmental stress, economic decline, and migrations. Again, environmental stress in these cases is a distant but potentially important cause. Homer-Dixon argues that environmental stress can contribute to a scarcity of resources, which can then deepen the fault lines between those who pro t from those scarce resources and those who are impaired by the scarcity. Environmental stress, he argues, encourages competition among groups for control of resources critical to survival and prosperity, and it encourages resource-dependent groups to turn inward and to focus on narrow survival strategies. This competition over resources often takes place against a backdrop of economic decline, which is also, in part, the result of environmental stress. Moreover, the vicious cycle between poverty and migration, discussed above, can also play a role by increasing competition for ever-scarcer resources in recipient nations. Critical to his analysis of social segmentation, is what Homer-Dixon has called resource capture. Resource capture occurs when environmental stress and population growth combine to encourage powerful groups within a society to shift resource distribution in their favor. By shifting the resource distribution in their favor, these powerful groups capture the resource and prosper from speculation and monopolistic pro ts. Although this process increases the wealth of powerful groups in society, it also produces a signi cant scarcity of environmental resources for weaker and poorer groups in society. As competition for resources increases, tensions between rival groups within the poorer segment of society are heightened. Moreover, tensions are often in amed by powerful group leaders, who use divide and conquer tactics to solidify their clout. Social segmentation is intimately tied to the erosion of civil society. When a society segments and the various factions turn inward, the myriad societal networks that are crucial to the functioning of a society can quickly disappear. Researchers have argued convincingly that these networks are crucial to the functioning of a society because they help to build bonds of trust between people of differing ethnic, religious, and linguistic backgrounds. Moreover, as these networks erode, civil society quickly weakens, thereby

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reducing the ability of marginalized people to articulate their demands on the state. These processes of social segmentation and erosion of civil society are illustrated by Homer-Dixons analysis of events in South Africa from the mid 1980s to mid 1990s. With the collapse of Apartheid, large numbers of blacks began to migrate from their homelands which often suffered from severe environmental deterioration and poverty to the countrys urban centers. The migrants settled in peripheral and ecologically sensitive lands in the urban centers, such as hillsides and river valleys. The huge inux of people onto these lands induced further environmental problems such as water pollution and deforestation. These environmental problems, in turn, promoted economic hardship and provided a window of opportunity for powerful warlords local leaders who control their own paramilitary to seize control of the remaining resources. With scarce resources rmly in their hands, warlords were able to illicit the support of their local groups, which were often divided along ethnic lines (e.g., the Zulu and Xhosa) and family-based lines. The warlords exploited these societal divisions in order to promote their own interests. Consequently, competition between local groups increased, social segmentation solidied, and the societal networks that form the core of civil society were severed.
Curtailment of the State

the state. In particular, environmental stress can threaten the incomes of elites that depend on the extraction of an ever-degrading and depleted resource base. Consequently, these elites may turn to the state for compensation, or they may act to block institutional reforms that would distribute more fairly the costs of rising scarcity. Alternatively, environmental stress can increase the scarcity and value of resources, thereby generating opportunities for powerful coalitions of elites to gain control of these resources in a process similar to that of resource capture, described above. As these elites become increasingly powerful, they can challenge the authority of the state. Increasing land scarcity in the southern Chinese province of Guandong, for instance, has created huge prots from land sales, inducing developers and corrupt ofcials to illegally control these revenues and ignore dictates from the state in Beijing.
The Roads to Conict

The fth and nal pathway from environmental stress to conict is through curtailment of the state. Environmental stress, in conjunction with other social and economic variables including economic decline, migration, and social segmentation can curtail key institutions of the state. The state generally consists of the group of institutions in society that wield authority and make binding rules for the nation, or regions within a nation. Homer-Dixon (1999, 98102) identies at least two ways in which environmental stress can curtail key state institutions. First, environmental stress may increase the nancial burden on the state. Environmentally induced economic decline, for instance, may compel the state to increase the size of subsidies; and environmentally induced migrations into urban centers can greatly augment infrastructure requirements such as sewers and water piping. For instance, Homer-Dixon argues that to deal with acute water scarcity in China induced by a combination of pollution and population growth the state must spend huge sums on new infrastructure such as wells, dams, canals, pipelines, and irrigation systems; and it must build large facilities to control industrial and municipal pollution. Second, environmental stress can affect state elites, such as high-ranking ofcials and business people with close connections to the upper echelons of decision-making in

The ve pathways from environmental stress to conict economic decline, migrations, social segmentation, erosion of civil society and curtailment of the state rarely work in isolation from one another. The pathways are often complex, and involve shared elements. For example, social segmentation can involve both economic decline and migrations, both of which can be induced by environmental stress. But how do these pathways actually interact to produce conict? Here the complexity gets ratcheted up another level. There simply are no necessary or sufcient causes of conict, and there is no single pathway to conict that one can consistently discern. Nevertheless, by mapping out the criss-crossing pathways and their complex interactions, one can begin to make out some broader roads to conict. These roads can be traversed along many different combinations of pathways. Figure 1 illustrates the various combinations. Below I discuss a number of these possible combinations and provide some examples to illustrate the processes. One possible road to conict involves both economic decline and curtailment of the state. As noted above, environmentally induced economic decline rarely affects an entire society or nation uniformly. Rather, it usually widens the gap between rich and poor, which then fosters grievances among the poorer segments of society. If this element of society perceives the state to be the over-arching cause of the economic injustice they are experiencing, they might initiate conict with the state in an attempt to reverse their plight. These challenges to the state can assume various forms, including armed rebellion, guerrilla warfare, terrorism, and coups d e tat. But challenges to the state are likely to occur only if challengers perceive the state to be vulnerable. Conict with the state, then, is most likely to take place when a segment of society is aggrieved and when the opportunity for reversing

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Environmental stress Wide-ranging environmental problems Global warming Ozone depletion Acid rain

Social, economic, and political ramifications of environmental stress

Violent conflict Insurgencies against the state

Economic decline

Social segmentation and Erosion of civil society

Armed rebellion Guerilla warfare Terrorism Coups d tat Identity - based conflicts Ethnic conflict Religious conflict Racial conflict Clan conflict

Localized environmental problems Deforestation Soil erosion Loss of arable land Flooding Drought Water pollution Water salinization Declinine fish stocks

Migrations

Curtailment of the state

Urban violence Crime Wanton destruction

Figure 1

The roads to conict

their status is present. Environmental stress, as discussed above, can inuence both of these factors by contributing to economic decline and curtailment of the state. Suliman (1992) contends that the road to conict in Sudan has followed these pathways. Since 1983, violent attacks by the Sudan Peoples Liberation Army have been taking place against Sudanese state institutions, as well as businesses associated with the state. A majority of analysts trace the roots of this conict to development projects conducted by the state controlled largely by elites in Northern Sudan in which resources are extracted from the South. Many Southern Sudanese consider these development projects to be a form of economic exploitation that would enrich only the state and its cronies. Suliman, however, traces the roots of this conict back further than most analysts. He contends that state-led development projects in Southern Sudan were initiated, in part, because deforestation and an increase in large-scale mechanized farming had induced desertication and land degradation in the northern regions of the country. Economic decline in Northern Sudan not only compelled the state to look south, but also strained their nancial resources. Given the grievances of Southern Sudanese, and the compromised power of the state, many Sudanese have supported and participated in violent attacks against state institutions. Another possible road to conict involves economic decline, migration, and social segmentation. As discussed

above, environmental stress can contribute to economic decline which, in turn, can engender small-scale but persistent migration. When migrants enter a new territory, they often upset the existing political balance and consequently deepen divisions in society. The result can be a society consumed by conict. The type of violence that this combination of events can trigger is often different from the conicts discussed above, which featured attacks directed against the state. When social segmentation sets in, conicts between identity-based groups are more likely to result. The identities upon which these groups are based include race, language, religion, and lineage. Events in Northeast India during the 1980s illustrate this process. As discussed above, Northeast India received millions of Bengali migrants during the 1980s. These Bengali migrants were driven to the Indian states of Assam and Tripura, in part by environmental stress and economic decline. In Assam, Bengali migrants were perceived as economic competitors and religious outsiders. Moreover, Bengali migrants shifted the balance of political power by developing signicant inuence in local institutions. As a result of these processes, social segmentation hardened between the predominantly Hindu Assamese and the primarily Muslim Bengalis. More than 4000 lives were lost in ensuing violence between 1979 and 1985. In Tripura, a similar series of events created small-scale but persistent

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violence between identity-based groups that continues to the present (Homer-Dixon, 1999, 141142). A nal example of a possible road to conict involves all of the pathways identied above economic decline, migration, social segmentation, erosion of civil society, and curtailment of the state. This combination of processes can be especially pernicious when the migration involves large movements of people from rural areas to urban centers. Violence in these cases may not only take the form of insurgencies against that state and identity-based conict; it can also take the form of urban violence that includes crime and wanton destruction. Because rapid urbanization is a characteristic common to many developing nations today, this process is especially salient. Events in South Africa during the 1980s and 1990s illustrate this process. As described above, environmental stress in South Africa induced ruralurban migration, which combined with further environmental stress and economic decline to engender social segmentation. As a result of this social segmentation in South Africas urban centers, societal networks were eroded or simply unable to take hold in the rst place. Compounded by increasing demands on the state and a decreasing ability of the state to meet these demands, a number of urban centers in South Africa most notable in the Johannesburg and KwaZuluNatal regions began to experience widespread political and criminal violence that persists today. Homer-Dixon (1999, 164166) contends that Pakistan has traveled a similar road to conict. In Pakistan, water pollution, deforestation, and soil erosion have engendered economic decline and large movements of ruralurban migration. In Karachi, Pakistans largest urban center, the massive inux of people has created urban slums that suffer a chronic shortage of basic urban amenities such as potable water, garbage disposal, and electricity. This squalor and shortage of basic amenities, has induced resource capture the process identied above whereby local group leaders gain control of a resource and prosper from speculation and monopolistic prots. In Karachi, this process has manifested itself in local maas that obtain water from illegal hydrants or from poorer districts in the city and then sell it for exorbitant prot often to the very people from whom the water was pilfered. This process of resource capture has not only furthered economic decline, but has also hardened social segmentation between Karachis many competing ethnic groups, and eroded many of the societal networks that make up the citys civil society. Underpinning all of these factors are crippled state institutions that cannot meet the increasing demands of the urban populations. Environmental stress has not only reduced Pakistans state revenues but has spurred rural urban migration that has simultaneously increased nancial demands on local and national governments. Moreover, corruption and cronyism plague both national and local

governments. With institutionalized channels of protest and action stymied, Pakistani loyalties and allegiances have become increasingly localized and social segmentation has further solidied. The result of the interaction of all these pathways to conict has been increasing urban violence. This violence has taken the form of all three types of conict described above, including urban violence (e.g., rising crime rates), ethnic-based violence (e.g., conict between the Punjabis, Pathans, and Sindhi ethnic groups), and violence directed at the state (e.g., attacks on the Karachi Electricity Supply Corporation).

INDIRECT INTERNATIONAL CONFLICT

Just as environmental stress can engender and interact with social, economic, and political factors to produce conict within nations, a similar process can lead to conict between nations. I call these conicts indirect international conicts. International conict between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969 involved some of the processes identied above. On July 14th, 1969, El Salvador launched an invasion of Honduras, commencing a battle that has been coined the Soccer War, because hostilities were launched immediately following a series of hotly contested World Cup matches. The conict lasted only 100 days, but claimed the lives of several thousand individuals, turned 100 000 into homeless and jobless refugees, and inicted severe economic losses on both nations. Although many pundits have blamed the outbreak of conict on a bitter rivalry cultivated during the World Cup soccer matches, Durham (1979) shows that environmental stress was one of the key underlying factors contributing to this international war. Deforestation and soil degradation, in conjunction with rapid population growth, forced landless peasants in El Salvador to migrate to Honduras, where many poor Hondurans were already struggling with their own scarcity of arable land. Large landowners in Honduras, who had previously been held responsible by poor Hondurans for their economic plight, successfully redirected blame onto the newly arrived El Salvadoran migrants. Hondurans reacted by expelling the El Salvadorans, which then prompted the government of El Salvador to ofcially close its borders to Honduran refugees and eventually declare war on its neighbor. Molvoer (1991) contends that a similar process of environmental stress and migration combined to produce conict between Somalia and Ethiopia in 19771978. Overgrazing induced widespread deforestation and desertication in Somalia, which prompted large migrations of Somali pastoralists into Ethiopian territory. The migrations brought the Somali pastoralists into increasing competition with Ethiopian groups dependent on local resources.

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The bitter competition between these groups fuelled tensions between Ethiopia and Somalia that eventually found its outlet in armed conict between the nations. These two cases suggest that environmental stress especially localized environmental problems such as deforestation and soil degradation can contribute to conict between nations in much the same way that environmental stress can contribute to internal conicts. Just as with the internal conicts described above, it is developing nations that are most at risk of succumbing to these forces, because these nations are often highly dependent on environmental resources and lack the ability to mitigate the effects of environmental stress. Developing nations, however, may not be the only nations at risk of environmentally induced international conict. With the onset of wide-ranging environmental problems such as global warming, acid rain, and stratospheric ozone depletion, the spectre of international conict that involves developed nations are portrayed as increasingly likely scenarios. Lipschutz and Holdren (1990, 126129) argue that, to date, the connection between environmental stress and international conict has been weak, because localized environmental stress tends to affect the offending country more than any other nation. The damage incurred from this localized environmental stress has only rarely been sufcient to evoke a signicant shift in a nations conduct in the international arena. With the onset of environmental problems such as global warming, however, these dynamics may shift. Wide-ranging environmental stress threatens to produce unprecedented magnitudes of change: change that could foment large social and economic upheavals that inexorably drag developed nations into the fray. For the time being, of course, the potential for indirect international conict that involves developed nations is based on reasoned conjecture rather than empirical evidence. Nevertheless, the scenarios conceived by some analysts are not beyond reason. Perhaps the most apocalyptic scenario sees hemispheric conict between developing nations in the South and developed nations in the North. The most common underlying environmental cause in this scenario is global warming. Although the impact of global warming may be gradual, the possibility of non-linear effects remains. If global temperatures pass a certain unknown threshold, for instance, changes in the planets physical systems may be rapid and advance at a greatly increased magnitude. The grave scenarios involving hemispheric conict sometimes draw on the potential for these non-linear effects of global warming. Gleick (1989, 338) notes that global warming could affect key goods and services such as freshwater availability and food productivity. The societal impacts of these climatic changes, he writes, will be widely distributed, but they are likely to be felt far more severely by poorer

nations, posing important and still unresolved questions about equity, fairness, and international environmental ethics. Similarly, Lunde (1991) contends that diplomatic disputes over responsibility for the generation of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as disputes over the potential ramications of global climatic change, are likely to play into already-existing tensions between southern and northern nations. And Renner (1996) asserts that the politics of global warming is quickly shaping up as a dispute between the industrialized North, accounting for the bulk of emissions, and the South, which perceives itself to be a victim of global warming. While all three aforementioned analysts reject the notion of an all-out international conict between North and South, they caution that global warming is an issue that can cause tensions between these hemispheric counterparts to rise steeply, increasing the likelihood of such violence. Another route to conict between northern and southern nations is through large-scale migrations and dislocations of people. Localized environmental problems, such as soil degradation and over-shing, can cause small-scale but persistent migrations in developing nations. Some analysts contend that wide-ranging environmental problems such as global warming, coupled with rapid population growth and increasing disparities in wealth, could induce large-scale migrations from the developing to the developed world. Although small-scale migrations from the developing to the developed world already exist migrations from North Africa to Europe, for instance, are common wide-ranging environmental problems could exacerbate this process. Large-scale migrations could increase tensions between northern and southern citizens, and eventually induce hemispheric violence. Renner (1996, 109112) notes that citizens in many developed nations have become fearful that they are now being invaded, not by armies and tanks, but by migrants who speak other languages, worship other gods, belong to other cultures, steal their jobs, and threaten their way of life. Many industrialized nations, including the United States, Germany, and France, have witnessed signicant domestic movements to curb the growing tide of refugees pounding at their borders on a daily basis. The spectre of massive inuxes of people from the developing nations to developed nations elevates the possibility of the rest of the world against the West. Other scenarios for international war envisage regional wars between developing nations and developed nations, as well as between developing nations. Again, wide-ranging environmental stress is predicted to be the catalyst of such wars, especially given the potential for non-linear effects. Myers (1993, 118121), for instance, forecasts a potential downside scenario for the Indian Subcontinent, where global warming produces chronic shortages of food and water. These conditions aggravate tensions between India

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and Pakistan, and eventually escalate into nuclear threats and hostilities. Similarly, Myers (1993, 146 148) downside scenario for the Americas sees huge numbers of Mexicans illegally migrating into the United States because of resource shortages, disease, and chronic poverty caused by global warming. The massive in ux of illegal migrants then compels the United States to invade its southern neighbor in an effort to cut off the routes traveled by the migrants.

DIRECT INTERNATIONAL CONFLICT

If environmental stress may contribute indirectly to international con ict, it is the potential for direct international con ict that has garnered the most attention from scholars, government of cials, pundits, and the general public alike. By direct con ict, I refer to violent hostilities that arise when two or more parties vie for control and/or access to environmental resources. In these instances, two or more nations engage in con ict over particular renewable resources in the same way that nations have fought wars in the past over non-renewable resources such as minerals and oil. There are a number of renewable resources that could potentially elicit international con ict, such as cropland, sheries, and forests. Indeed, international incidents over sheries have already taken place. In 1995, for instance, a Canadian warship red shots across the bow of a Spanish trawler, in a feud between the two nations over shing rights along Canada s east coast. It is the increasing competition over access to water resources, however, that constitutes the greatest threat of direct international con ict. Access to freshwater resources lakes, rivers, and groundwater aquifers is perceived by many to become the most important casus belli of the 21st century. Government of cials have long made portentous claims about the advancing threat of water wars. In 1979, for instance, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat declared, The only matter that could take Egypt to war again is water. In 1990, Jordan s King Hussein made similar declarations. Academics studying the issue have made equally portentous claims about the potential for con ict over water. Cooley (1984, 3), for example, contends that Long after oil runs out, water is likely to cause wars, cement peace, and make and break empires. And Star (1991, 19) argues that Water security will soon rank with military security in the war rooms of defense ministries. Water attracts such widespread attention as a potential casus belli, because this resource is a mainstay of life. Gleick (1998, 3) notes that freshwater is integral to all ecological and societal activities, including the production of food and energy, transportation, waste disposal, industrial development, and human health. Yet the availability of freshwater resources is declining signi cantly in many regions in the world. As population growth heightens the

demand on water resources, water pollution and climatic change are combining to simultaneously decrease the supply. If annual water availability drops below 1700 m3 per person, domestic self-suf ciency becomes almost impossible. Gleick estimates that there are already over two dozen nations that fall below this threshold, including nations in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Caribbean. Moreover, freshwater resources do not respect the political boundaries created by humankind. Gleick estimates that more than half the land area of the world, and perhaps 70% of inhabitable land areas, is in an international watershed where river ows or lakes are shared. And he notes that over 220 river basins are shared by two or more nations. Furthermore, these water resources are neither distributed nor shared equally. In the Nile river basin, for instance, Egypt is endowed with a renewable supply of just 1.8 km3 year 1 , but extracts as much as 55.1 km3 year 1 far more than their renewable supply. In the same river basin, Ethiopia is endowed with a renewable supply of 110 km3 year 1 , but extracts only 2.2 km3 year 1 . Con icts over water resources have already been documented. Indeed, Gleick notes that water wars are nothing new to human history. Forty- ve hundred years ago, the control of irrigation canals was the source of con ict between the states of Umma and Lagash in the ancient Middle East. Twenty-seven hundred years ago, Assyria and Arabia clashed over the control of water wells. In the modern era, Israel and Syria have engaged in international con ict over water resources on at least two occasions. In 1965 1966, Syria tried to divert headwaters of the Jordan away from Israel, prompting Israel to attack the Syrian diversion facilities. And the 1967 Yom Kippur War in the Middle East was initiated, in part, because of disputes between Israel and Syria over the Jordan River. With increasing environmental stress, there is a fear that con ict over water will become much more frequent in the near future. There are already many disputes over water resources that threaten to boil over into con ict. In the Middle East, the issue of water scarcity remains largely unresolved. An agreement between Israel and Syria over access to the waters of the Banias River, for instance, is still on the bargaining table. Jordanian concerns about Syrian dams on the Yarmouk River also remain unresolved. But the spectre of con ict over water is not unique to the Middle East. In Europe, Czechoslovakia and Hungary nearly came to blows in 1992, because of a dispute over the construction of a dam and the diversion of waters on the Danube River. In Africa, Bostwana, Nambia, and Angola have disputed access to the shared waters of the Chobe River since the 1980s. In Asia, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, and China have all engaged in disputes over the waters of the Mekong River. In South America, Ecuador and Peru engaged in small-scale armed skirmishes in 1995, in part because of disagreement over the control of the

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headwaters of the Cenepa River. And in North America, Mexico and the United States continue to vie for control over the waters of the Rio Grande. Despite growing fears that environmental stress could exacerbate water resource conicts, some experts on environment and conict maintain that these scenarios are based more on hyperbole than theoretical and empirical strength. Homer-Dixon (1999, 139), for instance, contends that international wars over river water are likely only when a narrow set of conditions hold: The downstream nation must be highly dependent on the water for its well-being; the upstream nation must be able to restrict the rivers ow; there must be a history of antagonism between the two nations; and the downstream nation must be militarily much stronger than the upstream nation. He argues that these restrictions explain why international disputes over river water have only rarely escalated to international armed conict. Others argue that social and economic forces mitigate the threat of water wars. The potential for international conict over water resources is eased, for instance, by global awareness of the interconnectedness of environmental issues, the expansion of economic interdependence, the involvement of international organizations, the evolution of international law in the eld of transboundary water resources, and the potential for new technologies that relieve environmental stress.

DIRECT INTERNAL CONFLICT

Just as nations may clash over renewable resources, populations within nations may likewise come into conict. Although direct internal conict may occur over water, other renewable resources such as sheries and arable land may also be sources of tension. Compared to international conicts over water, the threat of direct internal conict has received very little attention in academic and policy circles. This is not entirely surprising, given that nations often contain relatively robust legal/institutionalized mechanisms for resolving disputes that occur within national boundaries, whereas these mechanisms are often relatively impotent in the international system. Nevertheless, conict over resources can occur (and has occurred) within national boundaries. The mechanism that ignites these conicts is much the same as that for direct international conict. When a resource becomes increasingly scarce within a nation, tensions may rise between groups that are competing for these resources. Environmental stress can contribute to the scarcity of resources. Population increase, for example, may increase the pressure on available arable land, while deforestation and soil degradation may decrease the supply of this arable land.

Groups that compete for these resources may be divided in a familiar way along ethnic, religious, or linguistic lines. Alternatively, these groups may be divided along vocational or professional lines. Loggers, for instance, may come into conict with naturalists over the preservation of forests. Conict can also occur between competing groups within a given vocation. Indigenous loggers, for example, could clash with non-indigenous loggers vying for the same forestry resources. Developing nations are once again the most vulnerable to direct internal conict. This is because these nations are often characterized by deep fault lines between competing groups, and because they often lack sufcient legal/institutionalized mechanisms for dealing with disputes between competing groups. Gleick (1998, 56) notes, for example, that for much of the 1970s and 1980s, Indias Karnataka and Tamil Nadu peoples clashed over irrigation rights to the Cauvery River. A 1991 Interim Order handed down by the Cauvery Waters Tribunal an institution set up by the state of India to resolve the ongoing dispute only exacerbated tensions between these two groups, resulting in the deaths of over 50 people. Although developing nations are the most susceptible to these types of internal conicts, developed nations are not entirely immune. In the United States, for instance, the Los Angeles Valley aqueduct was repeatedly bombed in 1924 by a group of farmers perturbed that water was being diverted from their communities to urban centers in Southern California. The same region almost witnessed conict in 1935, when the state of Arizona came to the brink of conict with the state of California over plans for construction of the Parker Dam and subsequent diversion of water from the Colorado River (Gleick, 1998, 5). More recently, in 1999, native and non-native shers on the East Coast of Canada clashed on several occasions, after the Supreme Court of Canada granted natives the right to sh year round for lobsters.

CONCLUSIONS: RESEARCH DEBATES AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS

The evidence presented above appears to highlight a disturbing trend in the international system. Increasingly, violent conicts are being linked to the depletion and degradation of renewable resources. These conicts may take the form of violent clashes between and within nations over particular renewable resources such as freshwater and sh stocks. Or the degradation and depletion of renewable resources may engender and interact with other economic and social factors such as poverty and weak states to foster conict between and within nations. Environmental stress is almost never the only factor leading to conict. Nevertheless, it can be an important one.

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Although copious evidence exists to support the environment-conict linkages, a number of theoretical and methodological criticisms have been leveled at the research, calling into question the validity of existing evidence on the environment-conict nexus. I will not offer a comprehensive review of the controversies here. Rather, I will briey highlight a few criticisms that my colleagues and I have dealt with in detail (Schwartz et al., in press). These criticisms deal with issues that I consider the more pertinent ones under contention. One of the most important theoretical criticisms of environment-conict research is that linkages between environmental stress and violence are overstated, because humanity shows astonishing capacity to adapt to environmental problems. Markets stimulate human inventiveness and commerce that open up new sources of scarce resources, encourage conservation, and create technologies that allow substitution of relatively abundant resources for scarce ones. Critics contend that environment-conict researchers have failed to consider these adaptive processes in their theoretical models. Although adaptive processes certainly operate in many cases, societies often fail to adequately adjust to environmental stress. This is especially true for many developing nations, where institutions and markets can be weak and inexible. Moreover, environmental stress itself can have debilitating effects on some economies, societies, and social groups. It is for these reasons that developing nations are more susceptible than developed nations to the social manifestations of environmental stress. Environment-conict research is also criticized on theoretical grounds for neglecting to consider the role that social phenomena play in the creation of environmental stress. Critics contend that the causal arrow that traces a route from environmental stress (e.g., soil degradation) to social and economic phenomena (e.g., migration and poverty) through to conict (e.g., ethnic strife) is misleading, because environmental stress itself is caused in large part by social and economic factors. They argue, therefore, that the causal arrow should begin with social and economic phenomena. There are at least three reasons why the causal arrow can begin with environmental stress. First, environmental stress is not only inuenced by social variables like institutions and policies; it can itself affect these institutions and policies in harmful ways. This is the case when shortages of a renewable resource, such as cropland or forests, motivate elites to seize control of the resources remaining stocks (the process of resource capture, explained above). In other words, we should not assume that social variables are completely independent and external starting points in the causal chain; it turns out that they can be affected by environmental scarcity, sometimes negatively. Second, the degree of environmental stress a society experiences is partly a function of the particular physical characteristics of the

societys surrounding environment. These characteristics are, in some respects, independent of human activities. For instance, the vulnerability of coastal aquifers to salt intrusion from the sea and the depth of upland soils in tropical regions are physical givens of these environmental resources. Third, once environmental stress becomes irreversible as when most of a countrys vital topsoil washes into the sea then the stress is, almost by denition, an external inuence on society. Even if enlightened reform of institutions and policies removes the underlying social causes of the stress, it will remain a continuing burden on society because the environmental stress itself is irreversible. Aside from these important theoretical criticisms, environment-conict researchers have also faced methodological criticisms. At issue in these methodological critiques are key issues pertaining to causation i.e., the notion that one or more factors can cause an outcome to occur. The concept of causation has been debated in philosophical circles for hundreds of years. Although some consensus has emerged on how social scientists can show causation, the issue has hardly been resolved with any nality. In order to show causation, mainstream social scientists favor quasi-experimental methods, in which potentially confounding variables are controlled and cases are selected in a random manner. The single case-study method neither controls for confounding variables nor selects cases in a random manner. Consequently it is widely perceived to be awed by mainstream social scientists. Critics contend that because environment-conict researchers have used the single case-study method rather than the quasi-experimental method to gather evidence, they are not able to make legitimate claims about causation. My colleagues and I argue that the single case-study method in fact plays an important role in complementing the quasi-experimental methods preferred by mainstream social scientists. In order to demonstrate this, we draw on a distinction between causal effect (i.e., the impact that one variable has on another variable) and causal mechanism (i.e., the linkage between two or more variables). We argued that both causal effect and causal mechanism are essential to showing causation. Although quasi-experimental methods can estimate causal effect, they say little about causal mechanism. The single case-study method, on the other hand, can trace casual mechanisms but can not estimate causal effect. We argue that research to date on environment and conict has demonstrated the causal linkages between environmental stress and conict (i.e., causal mechanism), but has not yet determined the degree to which environmental stress plays a role relative to other factors in the generation of conict (i.e., causal effect). We conclude that a next crucial step in environment-conict research is to estimate the causal effect of environmental stress.

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While theoretical and methodological debates surrounding environment-conict research continue in academic circles, at least some policymakers in foreign policy circles have begun to incorporate the research into their agenda. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), for instance, has conducted a State Failure Task Force Report on the relationship between environmental stress and the outbreak of violent conict such as revolutions, ethnic strife, and genocides (Esty et al., 1999). And the Canadian counterpart to the CIA, the Canadian Security Intelligence Services (CSIS) has also recognized the linkages between environmental stress and violence (Gizewski, 1997). For some, interest by the CIA and CSIS in environmentconict research has only conrmed their worst fears: that by including environmental issues in debates over security, actions pertaining to the environment may become increasingly militarized. Although these fears may have some basis, environment-conict research does suggest that if policymakers want to mitigate conicts and enhance security in the future, they must pay attention to the state of the environment.

REFERENCES
Barber, V (1997) Environmental Scarcities, State Capacity, and Civil Violence: the Case of Indonesia, University of Toronto Press, Toronto. Brown, L R (1977) Rede ning National Security, Worldwatch Institute, Washington, DC. Cooley, J K (1984) The War Over Water, Foreign Policy, 54, 3 26. Durham, W H (1979) Scarcity and Survival in Central America: Ecological Origins of the Soccer War, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Esty, D C, Goldstone, J A, Gurr, T R, Harff, B, Levy, M, Dabelko, G D, Surko, P T, and Unger, A N (1999) State Failure Task Force Report: Phase II Findings, in Environmental Change Security Project Report, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC, 5, 48 68. Gizewski, P (1997) Environmental Scarcity and Conict, Commentary: a Canadian Security Intelligence Service Publication, 71, Spring 1997. Gleditsch, N P (1997) Conict and the Environment, Proceedings of the NATO advanced research workshop, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht.

Gleick, P H (1989) Climate Change and International Politics: Problems Facing Developing Countries, Ambio, 18, 333 339. Gleick, P H (1998) The Worlds Water: 1998 1999, (Advanced Copy), Island Press, Washington, DC. Hazarika, S (1993) Bangladesh and Assam: Land Pressures, Migration and Ethnic Conict, Occas. Pap. Ser. Proj. Environ. Change Acute Con ict, 3, 45 63. Homer-Dixon, T F (1999) Environment, Scarcity, and Violence, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Homer-Dixon, T F and Percival, V (1996) Environmental Scarcity and Violent Con ict: Brie ng Book, University of Toronto, Toronto. Lang, C (1995) Environmental Degradation as a Cause of Political Conict, Social Stress, and Ethnic Tensions, Occasional Paper No. 12, Environ. Con icts Proj., Swiss Peace Foundation, Berne. Lipschutz, R D and Holdren, J P (1990) Crossing Borders: Resource Flows, the Global Environment, and International Security, Bull. Peace Proposals, 21, 121 33. Lunde, L (1991) North/South and Global Warming Conict or Cooperation? Bull. Peace Proposals, 22, 199 210. Molvoer, R K (1991) Environmentally Induced Conicts? Bull. Peace Proposals, 22, 175 88. Myers, N (1993) Ultimate Security, W W Norton, New York. Pirages, D (1996) Microsecuirty: Diseases, Organisms, and Human Well-Being, Environ. Change Secur. Project Rep., 2, 9 17. Renner, M (1996) Fighting for Survival: Environmental Decline, Social Con ict, and the New Age of Insecurity, W W Norton, New York. Schwartz, D M and Ashbindu, S (1999) Environmental Conditions, Resources, and Con icts, United Nations Environment Program, Nairobi. Schwartz, D M, Deligiannis, T, and Homer-Dixon, T F (in press) Environmental Scarcity and Violent Conict: A Response to Gleditsch, in Environmental Con ict, eds P F Diehl and N P Gleditsch, Westview Press, New York. Smil, V (1992) Environmental Change as a Source of Conict and Economic Losses in China, Occas. Pap. Ser. Proj. Environ. Change Acute Con ict, 2, 5 39. Starr, J R (1991) Water Wars, Foreign Policy, 82, 17 36. Suliman, M (1992) Civil War in Sudan, Occasional Paper No. 4, Environ. Con icts Proj., Swiss Peace Foundation, Berne. Wegenmund, R (1996) Ethnic Transborder Conicts in the Senegambian Region Caused by Environmental Degradation, in Environmental Degradation as a Cause of War, eds G Bachler and K Spillman, Verlag-Ruegger, Zurich.

Development and Global Environmental Change

WOLFGANG SACHS
Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Energy, Environment, Wuppertal, Germany

The notion of development, offering language to the desire of many nations for justice and dignity, has been a powerful idea forcing global environmental change. The article traces the rise and decline of the development idea over the past 50 years. It attempts to uncover the concepts many layers of meaning as they built up during post-war history; it exposes the bitter legacies socially, culturally, environmentally which have been left behind by this period; and it points to the recent transition from development to globalization. Finally, some prospects are sketched out for achieving more equity outside the framework of conventional development.

HISTORY
The rise of epochs often go unnoticed, but the dawning of the development age occurred at a precise date and time. On 20 January 1949, President Harry S. Truman, in his Inaugural Address to Congress, dubbed the home of more than half the worlds people underdeveloped areas. This was the rst time that the word underdevelopment (OED, 1989, XVIII, 960), which was later to become a key category ordering global relations, was used by a prominent political gure. Truman, after drawing a sharp line between democracy and communism in the rst part of his speech, directed the attention of his audience to the Southern Hemisphere with the following words:
Fourth, we must embark on a bold new program for making the benets of our scientic advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas. More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate. They are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas. For the rst time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of these people. (Truman, 1949)

the assumptions of both the earlier colonial and the later globalization periods.
Linear Global Time and the Rule of Gross National Product (GNP)

With these high-ying words of the Point Four Program, the development age, the particular period in world history following the colonial era, was opened (to be superseded some forty years later by the globalization age). In this period, the relationship between Europe/America and the rest of the world was being shaped by specic assumptions about time, geographical space, and relevant social actors. These assumptions came to frame the development discourse; they stand in continuity and contrast with

In the light of the concept development , all peoples on the globe appear to move along one single road. The lead runners show the way; they are at the forefront of social evolution, indicating a common destination even for countries which had highly diverse trajectories in the past. Many different histories merge into one master history, many different time scales merge into one master time scale. The imagined time is linear, only allowing for progressing or regressing; and it is global, drawing all communities worldwide into its purview. In contrast to cultures which may embrace a cyclical view of time or which live out stories enshrined in myths, the linear view of time privileges the future over the present, and the present over the past. As the concept of linear global time spreads, indigenous peoples like the Rajasthani in India or the Aymara in Peru, for instance, are compelled to put aside their particular chronographs. They are inevitably pulled into the perspective of progress. Of course, the belief in progress predates the development age by almost two hundred years. The European Enlightenment was already able to interpret the multiplicity of cultures in space as a succession of stages in time, viewing history as a never-ending process of improvement. Taken from biology, the metaphor development constructed history as a process of maturation; society is likened to, say, a ower which develops according to inner laws, in a continuous and irreversible fashion, towards a nal stage of bloom. However, since about 1800,

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development has only been used as an intransitive concept (Wieland, 1979); authors such as Hegel, Marx, and Schumpeter conceived it as a process of historys own making, but not yet as a project to be carried out under the direction of human will and reason (Lummis, 1996). This changed with the advent of the development age. Development took on an active meaning; it turned into a project of planners and engineers who set out to systematically remodel societies to accelerate maturation; a project to be completed within several decades, if not years. Such optimism was facilitated by the fact that economic performance had become the all-encompassing measure of a countrys excellence only after 1945. Sir Frederick Lugard, the inspirer of British colonial theory in the 1920s, had still conceived the task of a colonial power as a dual mandate; as both the economic development of colonial territories for the benet of industrial countries and as moral concern for the native populations (Lugard, 1922). Economic progress and the welfare of the natives had been considered as two distinct duties; the civilizing mission had comprised both developing resources such as land, minerals and timber, and elevating the natives to a higher level of civilization. It was only at the time of Truman that the double mandate collapsed into one: development. The former distinction between an economic and a moral realm vanished, a sign of a conceptual shift. From then on, not only resources gured into the development formula, but people as well. Inversely, the moral concern for people was eclipsed by the economic concern for growth. This shift indicated that a new worldview had come to the fore: the degree of civilization of a country can be measured by its economic performance. As it happened, this measure of excellence has been available only since 1939, when Colin Clark for the rst time compiled national income gures for a series of countries, revealing the gulf in living standards between rich and poor (Arndt, 1987, 35). GNP per capita provided a ready-made indicator for assessing the position of countries moving along the road of development. Informed by an economic worldview and aided by a statistical toolkit, experts for decades to come de ned development as growth in output and income per head. A developing country is one with real per capita income that is low relative to that in advanced countries like the United States, Japan, and those in Western Europe (Samuelson and Nordhaus, 1985, 812).
Hierarchic Global Space and the Imperative of Catching-up

As already indicated, the chrono-politics of development was, and is, accompanied by a particular geo-politics (Di Meglio, 1997). Through the prism of development, the confusing diversity of nations across the globe appears as a clear ranking order shaping the orientation of both

the powerful and the less powerful. After all, the very metaphor of development implies predominance. Just as immature fruit can be only recognized by comparing it to a mature fruit, the stages of underdevelopment can only be recognized by displaying particular societies as examples of maturity. Development without predominance is therefore like a race without direction; assigning the positions of leaders and followers is part and parcel of a developmentalist construction of history. While inequality between nations in colonial times was understood within an authoritarian framework, which can be likened to a father-child relationship; in the development age it was seen in an economic framework, which can be likened to a race between differently endowed runners. Indeed, staying with that image, it can be said that development policy basically had two objectives: rst, bringing countries onto the racetrack, i.e., into the orbit of the world market; and secondly, turning them into competent runners, i.e., putting them on a path of sustained growth. However, it was only after the diversity of living conditions had been reduced to a hierarchy of aggregate national income gures that the enormous distance separating rich and poor countries leaped into view. No matter what ways of life the Kikuyus in East Africa or the Gujaratis in India cherished, no matter what ideals they aspired to, in the development mindset their diversity is crammed into one single category; they are underdeveloped. Thus, entire peoples found themselves locked into being de cient, de ned not according to what they are and want to be, but according to what they lack and are expected to become. As is so often the case, the de nition of the problem already implied the solution. When low income is considered the salient problem, raising incomes is the key solution. Any desire for change in Southern countries was thus reinterpreted as demand for economic development, casting aside other possible interpretations: for example, that oppression or dependency might be the problem which would call for liberation or autonomy as a solution. Nor was there a notion that cultures might in the rst place aim for non-economic ideals, be it the integrity of the clan or the celebration of religious rituals. On the contrary, the race in the economic world arena, like any race, was seen to be dominated by the imperative of catching up. Indeed, the chrono-politics and geo-politics particular to the development idea engendered a monumental historical promise: the promise that, at the end of the day, all societies would be capable of bridging the gap to the rich and sharing in the fruits of industrial civilization. It may be in this promise that the foundation of the development creed in Christian thought becomes most palpable (Rist, 1997). Development can be understood as a secular salvation story, constituting an ecumenical community, which places its trust in the good works of providence and faithfully follows the path of predestination (Tenbruck, 1989).

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Rising Nation States and the Social Contract

After World War II it was incumbent upon the United States to project a New World Order. Germany and Japan had been defeated; France and Britain seriously wounded. As the colonial powers lost their grip on the world, independence movements sprang up in the South and claimed the right to nation states. A power vacuum opened which threatened to be lled either by violence or communist takeovers. In this situation, the US launched (following its own self-image) self determination, free trade, democracy, and international cooperation as the core values of a future order. A world was presented which is held together by economic interdependence and not any longer by political dominion. Economic strength had taken the place of military power. As colonialism had occupied overseas territories, the doors to political freedom would be thrust open: provided, at least, that trade could ow freely. The US, having itself emerged as a nation from an anti-colonial struggle, readily backed the process of de-colonization, proclaiming at the same time economic development as an overarching goal. Development was thus a conceptual vehicle for American dominance with a liberal face; it allowed for heralding national independence while expanding predominance. A new model of power appeared on the horizon: anti-colonial imperialism. Decolonization implied the building of numerous nation states in Asia and Africa. As in 19th century Latin America, the nationalist leaders aspired to that model of political organization, which had been forged into a European norm through centuries-long struggles against the Pope, local lords, and foreign intruders. The nation, after all, is an imagined community, residing within the connes of a particular territory and governed by a sovereign state (Anderson, 1983). Establishing the nation as the relevant community (as opposed to family clans or religious afliations), carving out governable territorial units, and imposing the authority of a bureaucratic state, was an arduous task which called for a mobilizing narrative. The development idea provided legitimation; it became the raison d e tre for the emerging states. The new governments largely internalized the image thrust upon them by the countries perceived as advanced; they saw in the ght against underdevelopment the mission of their nations. In a certain sense, the right to self-determination had thus been acquired in exchange for the right to self-denition (Rist, 1997, 79). Moreover, the perspective in which one would eventually catch up with the rich countries restored self-respect and pride to countries, which had been humiliated by colonialism. Such a perspective promised the new countries an equal standing among nations; the demand for development expressed the desire for recognition and justice. What fuelled the determination to catch up was a double asymmetry in power between the South and the North. Culturally, the West had become the intimate enemy (Nandy, 1983)

of the indigenous elite, giving shape to their imagination of success; and politically, the might of the North had become so formidable that pure survival instinct forced the South to seek similar economic and technological means. As this asymmetry widened during the decades which followed, the demand for development grew stronger and more desperate up to the point of codifying a right to development in the United Nations General Assembly of 1986. Then and before, the emerging countries reinterpreted the power gap as a development gap. Apart from some exceptions, they saw no other choice than to join the race. However, the rich nations also had a stake in making development a global project, in whose name a social contract of cooperation could be forged between North and South. After the horrors of war, it was commonly held belief in the UN that peace could only be preserved by launching economic development on a worldwide scale. Virtually all countries rejected at that time the supremacy of the market and believed in the active management and planning of the economy by the state (Hobsbawm, 1994). In particular the US, attributing the outbreak of war in Europe to economic disorder, remembered their own successful management of the crisis during the New Deal, when J M Keynes had recommended state action to counter unemployment and underproduction. Freedom from fear and want had been already held out by President Roosevelt in the Atlantic Charter of 1941; it is from this point that development became a cornerstone of the mission of the UN. For the sake of stability and peace, the need for economic growth (steered along through public intervention) was projected upon the world. In this sense, development can be seen as an exercise in global Keynesianism to keep disorder at bay. Both the hegemonial needs of the North and the emancipatory needs of the South converged upon the prospect of development.
The Poor as Target and the Dethronement of GNP

The situation was rather straightforward in the two post-war decades. Despite differences in approach, development had been identied with economic growth, if not plainly with industrialization. No matter if shortage of physical capital or shortage of human capital was seen as the major decit, both answers (capital formation or schooling) had aimed at increasing the ow of goods and services. However, the concept of development began to be contested in the 1970s when attention shifted to the poor, exposing the failure of growth to benet the large majority of people. Robert McNamara, incoming President of the World Bank, put a nger into the wound:
Growth is not equitably reaching the poor Rapid growth has been accompanied by greater maldistribution of income in many developing countries We should strive to eradicate absolute poverty by the end of the century. That means in practice the elimination of malnutrition and illiteracy, the reduction

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of infant mortality and the rising of life expectancy standards to those of the developed nations. (McNamara, 1973)

Merely watching the rate of income growth was not enough anymore, the social content of development now mattered. For whose benet? emerged as the benchmark question. As a consequence, the scope of attention expanded; not only the middle classes boosting market output, but also the populations left out by growth, and even the victims of growth, all became targets for specically designed interventions. Development was thus redened as something transcending growth, as economic growth plus redistribution, plus participation, or plus human development. In this vein, throughout the years that followed in quick succession, areas like employment, equality, poverty eradication, basic needs, informal sector, and women were established as elds of development action, each of them bringing a new set of tools and a new tribe of experts to the fore. With these extensions, a conceptual ination set in. Soon, development meant everything and nothing, the concept ceased to denote anything in particular, it just connoted good intentions. It had no content, but retained a function: it justied any action in the name of some higher evolutionary goal. However, what the concept lost in semantic precision, it gained in political versatility. Opposing camps both claimed to promote development; the struggle over meaning reected from now on the struggle over policy. In particular, the controversies turned again and again on the role of economic growth, with a focus on GNP growth lined up against a focus on social or (later) environmental quality. While the rst focus cherished the positivism of growth, the latter centered on non-economic wealth. While the rst pushed output, the latter cured the consequences. It thus follows that development can be both the injury as well as the therapy. At any rate, this dichotomy continued to shape the development debate for subsequent decades (Nederveen Pieterse, 1998). A straight line runs from the International Labour Organization (ILOs) world employment strategy in 1970 to the basic needs approach and nally the Human Development Reports of United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in the 1990s. Similarly, a line can be drawn from the export promotion of the Asian Development Bank in the 1970s to structural adjustment in the 1980s and nally the bailing-out policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the 1990s. Some growth skeptics have subsequently redened development as enlarging peoples choices and capabilities, a formula which provided the foundation for the Human Development concept with its emphasis on literacy, health and participation. Its essence is to place development at the service of peoples well being rather than people at the service of development (Banuri et al., 1994, 16). Even this view, however, (along with more

recent creations like the social capital approach) cannot escape the shadow of the development creed; the Human Development Index is, much like the GNP, a decit index; it ranks countries hierarchically, assuming that there is only one best way of social evolution.
A New International Order and the Rise of Third Worldism

The states, which had emerged out of the crumbling colonial empires, did not stay long without a voice in international affairs. After the Nonaligned Movement had formed at Bandung in 1955 so as to put some clout behind the de-colonization process, the G 77, set up in 1963 at the eve of the rst United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Conference, aimed at articulating collective bargaining power in the world economic arena. Development ceased to be seen as an objective to be achieved in individual countries, but was thought to require a less hostile international economic structure. Obstacles to development are not just to be found in domestic habits and institutions, as suggested by the modernization discourse; they now present themselves as well in the detrimental terms of international trade. This framing of the development problem was intellectually prepared and further elaborated by the so-called dependency theory , which identied structures of unequal exchange and in general the gradient of economic power as the source of continuing underdevelopment. Responding to their structurally peripheral position, Southern countries, perceiving themselves as sharing the same destiny, formed a coalition demanding a new international economic order. The South opposed itself to the North: a constellation which reached its highpoint in the 1970s as the oil exporting countries successfully displayed their collective market power with regard to the afuent economies. Although the demand for redened rules in the world economy weakened as the oil cartel collapsed and the debt crisis exploded in the 1980s, the G 77 continued to be a major player in UN politics, in particular after the rise of East-Asian countries as serious competitors. In 1991 the South Commission restated the call for a fair world order (South Commission, 1991). More specically, the moment the North began to call upon the South for cooperation in environmental matters, the Southern coalition, all internal differences notwithstanding, renewed their grievances about the asymmetry of power. Since then, in environmental negotiations, the claims to greater economic space are bargained against demands for a wiser use of the biosphere. Until today, however, this quest for equal power and recognition remains focussed on relations between states, leaving the question of inequality within countries in the dark. Just as the Declaration on the New International Economic Order of 1974 had failed to mention domestic inequality even once, the calls for greater justice still sounded

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hollow in the nineties because the ongoing marginalization of social majorities remained hidden behind the veil of national sovereignty.
Disrupted Nature and the Conservation of Development in Time

In the 1980s, the promise of development received a second blow. While a decade earlier the persistence of poverty had begun to undermine the concepts social viability, now the emerging natural limits to growth cast doubts on its long-term viability. Combustion based on fossil energy, the core of industrial metabolism, threatened to overburden the atmosphere and the growing world economys voracity for living resources threatened to destabilize forests, water quality and soils across the globe. Against the backdrop of emerging biophysical limits to economic growth, the development idea underwent yet another round of conceptual ination. Following the logic of turning victims into clients, development had to be reworked to allow for both innite growth and preservation of nature. Again, a qualier was attached, dening sustainable development as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), 1987, 8). The formula pointed to the future, but to a bleak future of scarcities rather than a bright future of progress. It called for development choices that would not drastically restrict the environmental space available for future generations. Although highlighting justice in time, the canonical formula underemphasized justice in social space. Constraints imposed by the present generation on future generations were given prominence over constraints imposed by powerful groups on less powerful groups within one generation. Needs and generations , after all, are socially neutral terms; they do not allow for vertical distinctions. Yet such distinctions are crucial when it comes to intra-generational equity. Whose needs and what needs are supposed to be met? Is sustainable development supposed to meet the needs for water, land and economic security or the needs for air travel and bank deposits? Is it concerned with survival needs or with luxury needs? Leaving these questions up in the air, the acceptance of sustainable development in circles of privilege and power was facilitated, obfuscating the point that there may be no sustainability without restraint on wealth. Furthermore, by linking sustainable to development, a terrain of semantic ambivalence was created. The new concept subtlely shifted the locus of sustainability from nature to development; while sustainable previously had referred to renewable resources, it now referred to development. With that shift, the perceptual paradigm changed. The meaning of sustainability slid from conservation of nature

to conservation of development. Given that development had conceptually become an empty shell, which may cover anything from the rate of capital accumulation to the number of latrines, exactly what should be kept sustainable was unclear and contentious. Hence all sorts of political players, even fervent protagonists of economic growth, have in subsequent years been able to couch their intentions in terms of sustainable development. The term had soon become selfreferential, as a denition offered by the World Bank neatly conrms: What is sustainable? Sustainable development is development that lasts (World Bank, 1992, 34).

LEGACY
For fty years, development has been much more than just a socio-economic endeavor; it has been a perception which models reality, a myth which comforts societies, and a fantasy which unleashes passions. However, perceptions, myths, and fantasies rise and fall independent of empirical results and rational conclusions. They rise when they are pregnant with promises, and they fade when they turn into sterile commonplaces. Achievements such as the average rise of per capita GNP in Southern countries from 1960 to 1997 at a rate of 2.1% per year, the success story of a number of East-Asian economies, or the declining rates of infant mortality even in the group of low-income countries, are not indicative enough to fortify the faith in development. In the same way, the enumeration of failures, such as the rising absolute number of poor people (living on less than $1 per day) worldwide, and their slowly increasing relative number in Sub-Saharan Africa as well as in Latin America, is not necessarily forceful enough to undo that faith. Instead, a world-view, like development, loses appeal when the implicit promises cease to command credibility. This is what has happened in the last 1015 years; the three founding promises: that economic development will spread across global space, improve human destiny, and continue for ever in time, have turned stale.
Social Polarization

After fty years of development, the promise of greater justice in the world has largely evaporated. In the international arena, the notorious gap in income between North and South has not been bridged; on the contrary it has widened to an extent that it is now unimaginable that it could ever be closed. In 1996, the 20% of the world population living in afuent countries had an income at their disposal 82 times higher than the poorest 20% of the world population; in 1960, it was just 30 times higher (UNDP, 1998, 29). Upon closer inspection, to be sure, the picture is far from homogeneous because these relative gures hide, for instance, that per capita income in oil-exporting and in East Asian countries has sharply risen during the last 20 years.

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But absolute impoverishment proceeds at the same time; per capita income in more than 80 countries is today lower than it was 10 or more years ago (UNDP, 1999, 3). Social polarization among countries advances, while the size and the composition of the poles may change. The world might have developed, indeed: but in two opposite directions. Looking at the over-all picture, it is probably no exaggeration to say that the aspiration of catching up with the rich has ended in a blunder of planetary proportions. This is even more true if one considers the destiny of large majorities of people within most countries; the polarization between nations (often, but notably not in India and a number of East Asian countries) repeats itself within each country. In Brazil, for example, the share of the poorest 50% of the population in national income amounted to 18% in 1960, while it fell to 11.6% by 1995 (UNDP, 1998, 29). Economic growth, it turns out, has often failed to reach its most heroic objective; to alleviate the burden of the poor. Investments in ports, roads, steel mills and fertilizer plants might have fuelled national income, but they have rarely trickled down to the poor. In fact, it has taken decades of misplaced development assistance to discover that there is only a loose relationship between levels of economic growth and levels of poverty. Growth, it turns out, is certainly not sufcient for mitigating poverty; land rights, community coherence, and self-organization have been shown to be at least as important. Yet, precisely these conditions of livelihood have often been undermined in the pursuit of growth. Dams displace people, machines substitute rural workers, cash crops replace subsistence crops, urban migration follows the loss of self-afrmation. More often than not, the natural and social base of livelihood economies have thus been exploited for building the base of a market economy. Against this backdrop, it is not astonishing that the spread of misery has often accompanied economic growth. The development perception, having for a long time seen poverty as simply a lack in income, failed to appreciate life-enhancing, non-market resources for the poor, such as rights, social capital, and natural resources. As a consequence, the application of growth recipes had a polarizing effect; it turned frugality into misery, making a minority better off in the process. Moreover, in staying true to its bias that only income growth matters, the development perception remained blind to the effect of unequal power relations. However, as access to money and nonmoney resources is determined by power, growth without redistribution of power enabled the urban middle classes, manufacturers, and big farmers to corner the gains of prosperity, shifting the cost to small farmers, indigenous people, and the urban proletariat. And still today, a totally disproportionate share of economic gains in Southern countries goes to the rich and politically well connected (Ayres, 1998, 126). Through development, furthermore, countless

people have been drawn into the money economy, a transition which modernized both poverty and wealth (Illich, 1971). Where the gradient of power and prestige is calibrated according to purchasing power, expectations tend to explode while opportunities remain limited. Given that satisfaction is relative to expectations, fuller integration into the money economy may therefore even increase the feeling of poverty. Television sets in shacks have become symbols for the unbridgeable gulf between means and expectations.
Unsettling of Cultures

The most dramatic and far-reaching social change of the second half of the 20th century, the one which separates the modern world forever from the past, is the death of the peasantry (Hobsbawm, 1994, 289). This marked the end of several thousand years of cultural evolution when the overwhelming majority of the human race lived by agriculture, raising livestock or harvesting the sea as shers. After the peasants of rural Europe and Japan had more or less stopped tilling the land by the 1960s, Latin America, large tracts of Asia, and North Africa followed suit in the last decades of that century. Only three regions of the globe remained essentially dominated by their villages and elds: Sub-Saharan Africa, South and continental South East Asia, and China. However, while in the Northern countries the population of the shrinking agrarian world was largely absorbed by the expanding industrial world, in the Southern countries only a minority in this transition found a dignied living in towns and cities. Nevertheless, urbanization has continued to change the human condition on an ever more massive scale. Just during the last 25 years, the share of the world population which is living in urban areas went from slightly more than one third to one half, a gure which is expected to rise to two thirds by 2025 (World Bank, 2000, 46). Development policy, indeed, had set out to propel agrarian societies into the urban-industrial age. It sought to replace traditional Man by modern Man, an endeavor which, however, ended in fatal success; while traditional Man has vanished, modern Man has by no means arrived. Living in a no-mans land, exiled from tradition and excluded from modernity, has become the destiny of most of the worlds people. Nothing less than turning entire societies upside down has been the intent of development planners right from the start. For example, the 14-person mission to Colombia, the rst of its kind sent out by the Bank for Reconstruction and Development (later the World Bank) in 1949 arrived at the following conclusion:
Piecemeal and sporadic efforts are apt to make little impression on the general picture. Only through a generalized attack throughout the whole economy on education, health, housing, food, and productivity can the vicious circle of poverty be

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decisively broken. But once the break is made, the process of economic development can become self-generating. (Escobar, 1995, 24)

In this engineering spirit, experts set out to remake societies from a host of locally based subsistence communities into nationally integrated economies. They aimed at reorganizing social ties in functional terms, as called for by the ambition to set up machinery geared towards producing growing amounts of material wealth. Under the expert s gaze, time-honored ways of living and knowing faded into oblivion, reduced to obstacles to development . Instead, decontextualized production models, depicting people and nature as abstract objects to be changed, were projected upon in nitely diverse human realities. People rarely gured as agents in the framework of rationalist planning (Hobart, 1993); their interests, passions, and knowledge hardly mattered against the backdrop of grand schemes for resource mobilization. Small wonder that development strategies based on such models failed time and again; they were too much in dissonance with the dynamics of a given community. It is for this reason that development has always produced both order and chaos. At any rate, development has often failed to grasp the rich complexity of non-economized societies. It could not appreciate, for instance, that such settings can be regarded as symbolic sites (Zaoual in Rahnema, 1997; Apffel and Marglin, 1998) where communities live out narratives that link them to their divinities or where social energy is primarily invested in the upkeep of a network of friends, relatives or clan members. In such circumstances, any modernization will run quickly into communitarian constraints, as relations to divinities or to fellow citizens are likely to collide with the requirements of functional performance. To put it in more general terms, development has aimed at achieving that decisive shift which distinguishes modern civilization from all others: primacy is not given any longer to the relations between people, but to the relations between people and things (Dumont, 1977). In the rst case, events are evaluated in the light of their signi cance with regard to neighbors, relatives, ancestors, and gods: whereas in the second, they are judged according to what they contribute to the acquisition and ownership of things. This impersonality postulate (Banuri in Apffel and Marglin, 1990) according to which impersonal relations are inherently superior to personal relations can well be regarded as speci cally Western; to make it prevail is what development as modernization was all about. It is probably true that this shift has been a mixed blessing for large majorities of the world s people. On the one hand, it moved many regions and classes into the modern world with its liberties and conveniences; on the other, it disembedded countless persons from their cultures, sending them to join the global majority of underconsumers. As long as cultures (both large and small ones) are con ned

to themselves, people everywhere have tended to view the corner of the world they inhabit as particularly favored and their own ways of life as good: that is, quintessentially human (Tuan, 1986, 1). However, as all cultures are drawn into the maelstrom of global interaction and assimilation, reinforced by the transborder ow of images, this self-con dence can hardly be maintained. As borders limited the space of comparison, they facilitated limited, but attainable satisfaction, while a borderless world, making the space of comparison explode, offers unlimited, but often unattainable satisfaction. This goes a long way in explaining why both excitement and dissatisfaction grow along with globalization.
Natures Predicament

After the Second World War, the US, along with other industrialized nations, could still feel it was at the forefront of social evolution. After 50 years this premise of superiority has been fully shaken (if not shattered) by the ecological predicament. Using the racetrack metaphor, development may have been a race, which was conducted unfairly, and which has driven the majority of runners to exhaustion, but its demise is imminent before the tribunal of history because the horses appear to be running in the wrong direction. From the local to the global level, many experiences have shown that the sources (water, timber, oil, minerals etc.), sites (land for mines, settlements, infrastructure), and sinks (soils, oceans, atmosphere) for the natural inputs of economic growth have become scarce or have been thrown into turbulence. As a consequence, the promise that development will continue for ever has collapsed. For instance, if all countries followed the industrial example of emitting per capita on average 11.4 tones of CO2 annually, the emissions of six billion people would amount to roughly 68.4 billion tones; more than ve times the 13 billion tones the earth is capable of absorbing. In other words, to bring all countries up to the present standard of living in af uent countries, ve planets would be needed to serve as source for the inputs and sinks of economic progress. Against this backdrop, development has moved into an impasse. With biophysical limits to economic expansion (hard to pin down and ever contestable, but nevertheless real) emerging in the last quarter of the 20th century, the North cannot be held up as a model any longer; the trail-blazers are without a compass. The recognition of the niteness of the earth has been a fatal blow to the idea of development as envisaged by Truman. In fact, ecological constraints represent only half the story; they are compounded by the fact that approximately 20% of the world population consume 80% of the world s resources. The majority of the global consumer class roughly those that have a bank account, some career prospects, and access to a car can be found in the North.

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It is those 20% who eat 45% of all meat and sh, consume 68% of all electricity, 84% of all paper, and own 87% of all cars (UNDP, 1998, 2). They can be called the omnivores (Gadgil and Guha, 1995), namely those who are capable of cornering environmental resources to their benet at the cost of other groups. In the global context, the industrialized countries tap into the patrimony of nature to an excessive extent; they draw on the environment far beyond their national boundaries. The ecological footprint (Wackernagel and Rees, 1996) (see Ecological Footprint, Volume 3) that they produce is larger (and in some cases much larger) than their own territories; a great deal of the resources and sinks they utilize are not available for other countries anymore. In fact, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries surpass the (in terms of ecology and equity) admissible average size of such a footprint by a magnitude of about 7585%; as matters stand today, the wealthy 25% of humanity occupy a footprint as large as the entire biologically productive surface area of the earth. In a closed environmental space, the question of how much is tolerable therefore becomes intermingled with the question, who is getting how much? But also within countries, in particular Southern nations, the consumer classes often succeed in sequestering themselves against environmental burdens, leaving the noise, the dirt, and the ugliness of the industrial hinterland at the doorsteps of less advantaged groups. In 1994 13% of Southern urban citizens lacked access to clean drinking water, and almost twice as many did not even have the simplest latrines (World Bank, 2000, 140). Contrary to the fata morgana of development, health conditions for the poor in cities are today worse than in rural areas. Moreover, just as in the case of the citizens of the industrial world, the Southern middle classes live off the resource base which supports the ecosystem people (Gadgil and Guha, 1995), that third of the world population (UNDP, 1998, 80) which derives their livelihood directly from free access to land, water, and forests. Building large dams and extracting ore, drilling groundwater wells and capitalizing agriculture for the benet of the urban classes often degrades the ecosystems on which they depend. As the appropriation of resources can often only proceed after the rights of inhabitants have been denied, human rights violations frequently go hand in hand with resource conicts (Johnstone, 1994). Such kinds of pressures, adding to others like unequal landholdings or a growing population, may turn ecosystem people into landless and rootless squatters who have no other choice than exhausting fragile lands and woods. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that development in these cases deprives the poor of their resources in order that the rich may live beyond their means. In sum, environmental degradation arises from two contradictory settings: one of success and domination, the other

of marginality and powerlessness. In the rst instance, corporations and consumers of the afuent world dispose of the economic power to mobilize, if necessary over long distances, huge amounts of resources, producing pollution, devastation, and turbulence in the process. In the second instance, poor people without purchasing power degrade their habitats, after having lost their traditional rights or any other kind of entitlement to secure sufcient sources of livelihood. Both the degradation by the afuent and the degradation by the poor can be largely considered the outcome of one and the same process of economic development. Resource voracity on the part of the powerful, and resource scarcity on the part of the powerless, combine in pushing the planet to the brink.

TRANSITION
It is not just its own fading promises, but also shifts in the world economy that have contributed to the decline of the development age. Since the mid-1980s the accelerated rise of globalized markets along with the arrival of an information-based economy has profoundly changed the post-war international order, a transformation which played itself out fully the moment that the EastWest division of the world collapsed in 1990. In essence, studies on development had concentrated on the transition of nation states from agrarian to industrial. With globalization, the coordinates of modernization have changed; the agenda is now dominated by the shift of power from nation states to transnational markets and from industrial structures to informational structures. Deterritorialization and dematerialization (see Dematerialization of the Economy, Volume 4) have emerged as powerful trends, which escape the categories of development, without however, canceling the aspirations behind it. For the hopes which nourished the development creed are more alive than ever the hope of the poor for a life in dignity as well as the hope on the part of Southern elite to be nally on an equal footing with the afuent North.
Globalization Instead of Development

In the course of globalization, what can be called the Westphalian constellation (Menzel, 1998) is reaching its end. For it was after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which established the principle of territorially bounded sovereignty that a particular form of polity, the European nation-state, came into existence. In its idealized version, the nation-state circumscribed a territory upon which a polity, an economy, a nation, and a culture rose. Like a container, it was supposed to hold society in all its layers within a demarcated space, creating a self-enclosed entity which in turn engaged with other such entities on the international level (Beck, 1997). Though reality never conformed to this

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conception entirely, these containers nally burst open with globalization. Goods, money, information, images, people ow across borders, giving rise to a transnational social space where interactions occur over long distances, sometimes even in real time. As a consequence, the former (though always partial) integration of economy, polity, and culture within a territory breaks apart, turning states into just one player amidst transnational networks of exchanges in many spheres of life. Against the background of these changes, development loses both its object and its agent. As a matter of course, the development discourse had focussed on the transformation of territorially bounded societies; they were thought to be the units by which social evolution proceeds. States were thus the privileged sites of development. However, as societies are perforated by transborder ows (be it through foreign capital, satellite television or migrants), the objective of development planning begins to dissolve. Attention no longer focuses on developing national economies, but either on inserting certain players successfully into the world market or on securing livelihoods for local communities. Likewise, the agents of development change. While previously the state was expected to be the engine of development, several new agents, all of them moving largely irrespective of borders, now diminish the role of the state. In this vein, private foreign investment has overtaken public assistance, television imagery has superseded national narratives, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have shouldered many development projects. At the present time, the development concept looks strangely out of place in the era of globalization. Furthermore, the development creed had been embedded in a conception of linear worldwide progress, which fails to resonate with a globalist mindset. During the heyday of industrial modernity, history had been conceived as a movement with a direction, a universal process whose pointer was called rationalization or liberation (Bauman, 1992). This predominance of time over space in ordering worldviews, however, has been turned around by the shift in consciousness, which is connected with globalization. For what captures the attention of the post-modern mind is not a clear universal sequence of social change, but the simultaneous presence of a plurality of differences across geographical or virtual space. In perception, space gradually gains the upper hand over time; it is not the sequence of things that matters, but their possible combinations. The present change in guiding metaphors can be taken as an illustration; the road of progress is being replaced by the connectivity of networks . While the former saw societies as progressing along a time scale, the latter sees shifting patterns of ows between non-contiguous locations. In the transnational and digital world where success depends on being inserted into relevant, ever shifting circuits and not primarily on the position of ones country on the racetrack,

the development idea ceases to express the excitement of the day.

The New Divide

Among other things, globalization tends to undercut social solidarity, both nationally and internationally. As societies are less and less contained within nation states, the reciprocal links between social classes, which constitute a polity, become weakened. After all, the nation state, in particular as long as social Keynesianism had been on the agenda, was capable of rebalancing the relations between the rich and the poor, be it as welfare state in the North or as developmentalist state in the South. Under the pull of the transnational economy, however, the social contract which lay at the core of the redistributive state has begun to unravel. As the elites aspire to catch up with the vanguards of the international consumer class, their old-style sense of responsibility for the disadvantaged sections of their own society withers away, because they themselves, instead of feeling superior with respect to their countrymen, feel now to be inferior with respect to their global reference groups. Following this drift, governments are inclined to ally themselves with the globalizing forces and increasingly show disregard for the majority of their citizens who live outside the global circuit (Kothari, 1993). Committed to promoting the insertion of their industries and middle classes into global markets, they consider the non-competitive social majority a liability rather than a boon. As a result, in many societies a split opens up between the globally oriented middle class on the one side and (in terms of the world market) superuous populations on the other. While globalization removes barriers between nations, it thus erects new barriers within nations. Equally, the social contract between rich and poor nations, which, all counter forces notwithstanding, had laid the base for international development policy after the Second World War, did not survive the onslaught of transnational competition. Neither within nor between states is there much concern any longer for redistribution. Already in the 1980s the politics of structural adjustment largely replaced the development consensus, giving priority to macroeconomic stability in favor of an unhampered transborder mobility of capital. Deregulation and liberalization were supposed to bring indebted countries up to the standard of a free-trade player: yet in many cases the less advantaged sections were just brought to their knees. Disregarding social and environmental costs, currency stability became the entrance ticket to the circuit of transnational capital ows, and thus became the overriding objective of the IMF and the World Bank. This implied a shift of focus; the concern of dominating development agencies was now creating a stable playing eld for transnational corporations and was no longer interested in improving the welfare of

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the people. However, the process by which development institutions could become agents of the world market rather than agents of societal welfare was facilitated by the success of about ten emerging markets in export-led growth. Along with the former rise of oil producing economies and the dissolution of the Eastern Block, this success nally split the Third World as a somewhat homogenous group of nations. South Korea, for example, which in 1960 had still been on a par with Bangladesh, produced in 1996 as much output as the entire Sub-Saharan African region. Globalization, in other words, made a number of Southern economies (or regions therein) into players on the world market, at the price, however, of driving a deeper wedge between them and the large majority of countries in the South. The more that shifting transnational space encompasses not entire countries, but only larger or smaller sections of a country, the more obsolete the NorthSouth division becomes. Indeed, the dividing line, if there is any, in the world of globalization does not primarily run between Northern and Southern countries, but the line separates the global middle class on the one side and the excluded social majority on the other. The global middle class is made up of the majority in the North and a smaller elite in the South; its size equals roughly that 20% of the world population which has access to an automobile. Globalization accelerates and intensies the integration of this class into the worldwide circuit of goods, communication and travel. But an invisible border separates in all nations, in the North as well as in the South, the rich from the poor. Entire categories of people in the North, like the unemployed, the elderly and the competitively weak, just as entire regions in the South, like rural areas, tribal zones and urban settlements, nd themselves excluded from the circuits of the world economy. Even information-based capitalism, by linking valuable players and places in a non-contiguous pattern, turns people and territories across countries into black holes of informationalism (Castells 1998, 161). At any rate, the major rift today appears to be between the globalized rich and the localized poor; the NorthSouth divide, instead of separating nations, runs through each society, albeit in different congurations.
Security Instead of Development

As the development consensus faded away, two themes have emerged in its wake. The rst is globalization and is concerned with the stability of the transnational economy. Its aim is the expansion of global markets leading to greater welfare. The so-called Washington Consensus of 1986, which declared structural adjustment to be the highest form of development, can be considered its take-off point, and the IMF its guardian. The second theme cherishes security and is concerned with protection against risks.

Its aim is the need for prevention in the face of threats to human survival and dignity. UNDPs Human Development Report, which annually explores the state of human security, may exemplify this current, although the debate on environmental security (Mathews, 1989) is part of this mode of thought as well. To some extent, the two themes are merely a reincarnation of the 1970s conict between topdown, pro-growth on the one side, and bottom-up, pro-poor approaches on the other. The concern for security crystallized in the 1990s after the promises of development had lost credibility. With the high-ying optimism that once powered development withering away, the perceptions changed; the South ceased to be seen as young and full of potential, as in the time of Truman, but as the breeding ground of social and environmental turbulence. In particular, no one still clung to the ideal of a radiant future for the social majority, which has become superuous in terms of the global economy. The best that could be achieved is survival in decency. Moreover, as globalization not only provides comforts, but many woes as well, the North felt increasingly threatened by immigration, civil wars, and environmental competition. As a consequence, the South is no longer considered with hope, but with suspicion; developing countries turn into risk zones, and their less advantaged citizens are primarily perceived as risk factors. Development policy shed its skin again. It has now largely adopted a security agenda where prevention replaces progress as the objective of development. Catching up is out of the question, assistance now aims at preventing the worst scenario from happening. Securing peoples livelihood is the noble concern, projects for clean water, market access, woodless stoves, or community organization, are typical examples: a far cry indeed from reaching a modern paradise. But also the notion of security is a contested terrain; the question looms large: whose security that of vulnerable people or the security of the OECD-dominated economy? While, for instance, many NGOs work to enable the less advantaged to protect themselves, on the diplomatic level the stakes are often different. International negotiations (in particular environmental negotiations), in a world risk society, deal implicitly with the defense of the stronger against the risk presented by the weaker. The redistribution of risks and not any longer the redistribution of economic opportunities is their hidden agenda. For both grassroots movements and governments, security has thus become a key concern because this is all that is left of the development idea after the belief in progress has vanished (see Environmental Security, Volume 5).

PROSPECTS
The development age might have withered away, but its core agenda is still unnished. For decades, development

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had provided language for voicing the desire for justice. Yet justice in both its basic forms, as redistribution of opportunities and as recognition of otherness, fails to have made much progress, at least beyond the connes of the global middle class. However, the agenda is not only unnished, it also faces new constraints. For the meaning of justice is bound to change in an era of biophysical limits. As long as limits were not on the horizon, justice could be identied with growth. The famous metaphor of the growing cake which eventually offers larger pieces for everyone without imposing smaller pieces on anybody illustrates how the idea of open-ended growth could nicely sidestep hard questions on equity. But in a closed environmental space, the claim for justice cannot be reconciled any longer with the promise of material intensive growth, at least not for the worlds majority. For this reason, the quest for justice will need to be decoupled from the pursuit of development with a capital D.
Contraction and Convergence

Towards Resource-light Economies

Under conditions of nitude, there is only a limited part of the global environmental space available for each country. Therefore, the concept of development as a racetrack without a nishing line is historically outdated. In order to envisage sustainability scenarios for this century, in particular in the context of climate change, it is helpful to distinguish two distinct trajectories beginning from two opposite poles and spanning a variety of initial conditions. Northern countries start their trajectory towards a low-risk and equitable level of fossil energy ows from high consumption levels, reducing them over time until they reach levels sustainable in terms of both ecology and equity. This may be called the trajectory of contraction. Southern countries, on the other hand, start from relatively low levels of fossil energy ows, increasing them over time until they approach the trajectory of industrial countries at sustainable levels of resource throughput. This may be called the trajectory of convergence. Both trajectories pose related, but different, challenges. For industrial countries, the challenge consists in bringing down resource ows without a decline in human well-being and in social justice. For Southern countries, however, the challenge consists in raising levels of resource consumption at a much smaller gradient than industrial countries did historically; increasing human well-being concurrently with equity. A similar logic applies to inequalities within countries. Given that the omnivores are not conned to the North, retreating from excessively occupied environmental space will be expected from Southern middle classes as well. After all, the elite in countries like Mexico, China, and Brazil rival the population of many OECD countries in numbers. Therefore, the trajectories of contraction and convergence also apply to the development paths of different social classes.

The models of wealth brought about by the spectacular growth in the OECD countries in the last fty years are structurally oligarchic; they cannot be generalised across the world without putting everyones life chances in jeopardy. Chemical agriculture, the automobile society or meat-based nutrition are all cases in point. For this reason, the move towards models of frugal use of wealth among the afuent is a matter of equity not just of ecology. However, conventional development thinking implicitly denes equity as a problem of the poor. But designing strategies for the poor, developmentalists worked towards lifting the bottom, rather than lowering the top (Goodland and Daly, 1993). The wealthy and their way of producing and consuming werent under scrutiny, and the burden of change was solely heaped upon the poor. In future, however, justice will be much more about changing the lifestyles of the rich than about changing those of the poor. In order to move towards resource-light economies, two broad strategies can be distinguished. The rst is the attempt to gradually decouple economic output from resource ows. For instance, enhancing the ecological efciency of technologies and organisational structures, aims at reducing the volume of resource input per unit of economic output. In all likelihood, the efciency of resource use can be enormously increased; examples for eco-intelligent production and services abound (see Dematerialization and Sustainable Development, Volume 4). The second strategy is the attempt to decouple quality of life from economic output. Indeed, quality of life has many sources beyond purchasing power; it derives from non-monetary assets as well, such as access to nature, participation in community, or the wealth in public goods. What is at stake here is not the efciency, but the sufciency in resource use. Such an orientation aims at the art of sustaining higher qualities of life out of a given set of material inputs; it ponders how much is needed for attaining welfare, value, beauty, and meaning. In brief, the transition to resource-light economies is likely to require a dual-track strategy: a reinvention of means (efciency) as well as a prudent moderation of ends (sufciency). In other words, it is about doing things right and about doing the right things.
Leapfrogging into the Post-fossil Age

For Southern economies the challenge is to embark upon growth patterns that are both pro-environment and pro-poor, without going through all the stages of industrial evolution as Northern countries did. At the present moment when the fossil-fuel age is on the decline, economies that once were said to be lagging nd themselves in a favourable position. Not yet being locked into old-style industrialisation, they have the prospect of leapfrogging into a post-fossil

DEVELOPMENT AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

161

age, skipping the resource intensive styles of production and consumption of the industrial world (see Leapfrogging Technology, Volume 4). For instance, Southern countries face important decisions about introducing and designing infrastructures such as energy, transport, sewage, and communication systems, the introduction and maintenance of which in industrial countries have caused the earth s resources to dwindle. Today, many Southern countries are still in a position to avoid this unsustainable course, opting without further detours for infrastructures which would allow them to embark upon a low emission and resourcelight trajectory. Investment in infrastructure such as ef cient rail systems, decentralized energy production, public transport, grey-water sewage, surface irrigation, regionalized food systems, dense urban settlement clusters etc., could set a country on the road towards cleaner, less costly, more equitable, and less emission intensive development patterns. It goes without saying, however, that such a choice is in the rst place not a technical, but a cultural one; it requires envisaging models of wealth different from those in the North.

economy. Ensuring sustainable livelihoods (the ability of an individual or a family to meet their basic needs in a manner that is digni ed, but does not undermine the natural resource base on a large scale) will therefore largely require policies which put democracy, equity, and environmental care before the quixotic pursuit of monetary economic growth. See also : Sustainable Development, Volume 4; Sustainability: Human, Social, Economic and Environmental, Volume 5.

REFERENCES
Agarwal, A and Narain, S (1989) Towards Green Villages, CSE, New Delhi. Anderson, B (1983) Imagined Communities, Verso, London. Apffel-Marglin, F and Marglin, S A (1990) Dominating Knowledge. Development, Culture, and Resistance, Clarendon, Oxford. Apffel-Marglin, F (1998) The Spirit of Regeneration. Andean Culture Confronting Western Notions of Development, Zed, London. Arndt, H W (1981) Economic Development: A Semantic History, Econ. Dev. Cult. Change, 26, 463 484. Arndt, H W (1987) Economic Development. The History of an Idea, Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL. Ayres, R U (1998) Turning Point. An End to the Growth Paradigm, Earthscan, London. Banuri, T, Hyden, G, Juman, C, and Rivera, M (1994) Sustainable Human Development, UNDP, New York. Bauman, Z (1992) Intimations of Postmodernity, Routledge, London. Beck, U (1997) Was ist Globalisierung? Suhrkamp, Frankfurt. Castells, M (1998) End of Millenium, Blackwell, Oxford. Dumont, L (1977) From Mandeville to Marx, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Di Meglio, M (1997) Lo sviluppo senza fondamenti, Asterios, Trieste. Escobar, A (1995) Encountering Development. The Making and the Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Gadgil, M and Guha, R (1995) Ecology and Equity, Routledge, London. Goodland, R and Daly, H (1993) Why Northern Income Growth is not the Solution to Southern Poverty, Ecol. Econ., 8, 85 101. Hobart, M (1993) An Anthropological Critique of Development, Routledge, London. Hobsbawm, E (1994) The Age of Extremes. A History of the World, 1914 1991, Pantheon, New York. Illich, I (1971) Celebration of Awareness, Boyars, London. Johnston, B R (1994) Who Pays the Price? The Sociocultural Context of Environmental Crisis, Island Press, Washington. Kothari, R (1993) Growing Amnesia. An Essay on Poverty and Human Consciousness, Penguin, Delhi. Lugard, F (1922) The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, Blackwood, Edinburgh.

DEMOCRACY AND ECOLOGY

Environmental resources are valued as a source of livelihood, by groups as diverse as the shermen of Kerala, the forest dwellers of the Amazon, the herders of Tanzania, and the peasants of Mexico. Over the centuries many of these communities had developed complex and ingenious systems of institutions and rules regulating ownership and use of natural resources in such a way that an equilibrium between resource extraction and resource preservation could be achieved (see Indigenous Knowledge, Peoples and Sustainable Practice, Volume 5). However, particularly under the pressure of the resource needs brought forth by the omnivores, their basis of livelihood has been undermined, degrading their dignity and sending many of them into misery. In such a context, sustainability in the rst place means ensuring the rights of communities both to their resources and to their culture. Democratic rights and resource productivity are particularly intertwined when it comes to ecosystem people. For their livelihood such communities need to undertake efforts to increase the productivity of all components of the village ecosystem; from grazing and forest lands to croplands, water systems and animals (Agarwal and Narain, 1989). After all, they often suffer from a shortage of biomass rather than from a shortage of cash. However, only conferring a substantial degree of control over their resource base to communities will ensure the degree of power and participation necessary for cultivating forests, elds and waters according to local rules and customs. Democratic rights and entitlement to resources are thus prerequisites for building a biomass-based, non-carbon

162 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE Lummis, C D (1996) Radical Democracy, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. Mathews, J T (1989) Redening Security, Foreign Affairs, 68, 162 77. Menzel, U (1998) Globalisierung versus Fragmentierun, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt. McNamara, R (1973) Address to the Board of Governors, Nairobi. Nandy, A (1983) The Intimate Enemy. Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, Oxford University Press, Delhi. Nederveen Pieterse, J (1998) My Paradigm or Yours? Alternative Development, Post-Development, Reexive Development, Dev. Change, 29, 343 373. OED (1989) The Oxford English Dictionary 1989, entry underdeveloped , Vol. XVIII, 960. Rahnema, M and Bawtree, V (1997) The Post-development Reader, Zed, London. Rist, G (1997) The History of Development, Zed, London. Samuelson, P and Nordhaus, W (1985) Economics, McGraw Hill, NY. South Commission (1990) The Challenge to the South, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Tenbruck, F H (1989) Der Traum der Sakularen Okumene. Sinn und Grenze der Entwicklungsvision, in Die kulturellen Grundlagen der Gesellschaft: der Fall der Moderne, Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen, 291 307. Truman, H (1949) Public Papers of the President of the United States: Harry S. Truman, US Government Printing Ofce, Washington, DC. Tuan, Y F (1986) The Good Life, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison. UNDP (1998) Human Development Report 1998. UNDP (1999) Human Development Report 1999. Wackernagel, M and Rees, W (1996) Our Ecological Footprint, New Society, Gabriola Island. Wieland, W (1979) Entwicklung, in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, eds O Brunner, W Conze, and R Koselleck, Klett-Cotta Stuttgart, 199 228, Vol. II,. World Bank (1992) World Development Report 1992, Oxford University Press, New York. World Bank (2000) World Development Report 1999/2000, Oxford University Press, New York. World Commission on Environment and Development (WECD) (1987) Our Common Future, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

FURTHER READING
Sachs, W (1992) The Development Dictionary, Zed London. Sachs, W (1999) Planet Dialectics. Explorations in Environment and Development, Zed London.

A
Adaptation
see Adaptation Strategies (Opening essay, Volume 4)

Animal Liberation
see Environmental Ethics (Volume 5)

Animal Rights
see Environmental Ethics (Volume 5)

Anthropocene
see Anthropocene (Volume 1)

scale of culture and the concentration of social power (Bodley, 1994; 2000; 2001). It is signi cant that people living in small-scale cultures were better able to maintain long-term, relatively resilient relationships with the natural environment than peoples living in larger scale cultures. Cultural resiliency is a key feature of successful long-term human adaptability. It is the cultural ability to minimize human-caused detrimental impacts to the environment, while smoothing out the human impact of natural environmental uctuations. Cultural resiliency also means minimizing destabilizing uctuations in human population and human demands on the natural environment. The concept of resiliency is more than that of balance or equilibrium, because it emphasizes the dynamic aspects of human and natural system. These conclusions are contrary to long established beliefs about evolutionary progress, and they challenge the popular ideology that unlimited growth, especially economic growth, is a natural process, and the best way to improve human well-being. Anthropologists have always been concerned with the relationship between the people they studied and the natural environment. Since the late nineteenth century, the rst professional anthropologists focused their research on tribal peoples who were directly dependent on natural resources for their survival. The environment was obviously too important to be ignored. Initially, anthropologists studied how people exploited the environment, then they asked how culture might in turn be shaped by the environment, or by the nature of the humanenvironment relationship. Nineteenth century anthropologists were often natural historians, and it was common then, and still today, for them to be very broadly interdisciplinary, with interest, and sometimes formal training, in geography, geology, zoology, and botany. During the rst half of the twentieth century the anthropological interest in environmental issues led to the identication of cultural ecology as a distinctive sub-discipline. Contemporary prehistoric archaeologists often maintain a focus on environmental issues. Most early academic anthropologists rejected any simple environmental determinism, but they grouped similar cultures into large culture areas that often reected underlying

Anthropocentrism
see Environmental Ethics (Volume 5)

Anthropology and Global Environmental Change

John H Bodley
Washington State University, Pullman College, WA, USA

The most striking general conclusion to be drawn from the cultural ecological data in the anthropological record is that the speed and scale of resource depletion and environmental degradation accelerates with increases in the

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SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

common cultural adaptations to generalized natural areas. Before 1950, pioneer cultural ecologist Julian Steward, cautiously observed that over time people tended to organize themselves in similar ways to exploit similar environments, thus producing broadly similar cultural types in widely separate areas of the world. By the late 1960s, cultural ecologists began to apply equilibrium models to smallscale cultures, treating them as human systems in balanced, adaptive relations with natural ecosystems. These functionalist approaches were largely abandoned because they could not explain how systems developed and changed, and they often treated cultures as articially closed systems. Since the 1980s, cultural ecologists have increasingly situated the peoples they study within the national and international political economy, and interest has shifted to approaches that will help local peoples defend their resources and subsistence economies. Many contemporary anthropologists continue an environmental focus, but it has broadened to include contemporary commercially organized, and global scale cultures, as well as existing indigenous peoples with small-scale societies.

CULTURAL EVOLUTION AND HUMAN ADAPTABILITY

One of the longest-running theoretical debates in anthropology concerns the nature of cultural evolution. The orthodox view as originally developed by Morgan (1877), and rened by White (1949, 1959) and others (Sahlins and Service, 1960), was that general cultural evolutionary progress was an inevitable and benecial process of growth and development leading stage by stage to more complex societies, using more energy more efciently, and with greater adaptability and security. Cultural evolutionists thought that evolutionary progress was such a self-evident human benet that they did not demonstrate it. White (1949) emphatically declared that culture evolved as the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year increased. The assumption was that cultural evolution gave people greater control over nature, and this was good for people. However, it is signicant that the most enthusiastic anthropological exponents of these measures of cultural progress wrote before the energy shortages of the 1970s, and before the United Nations Brundtland Commission (WCED, 1987) report on sustainable development. Thoughtful reconsideration of all the standard measures of cultural evolutionary progress suggests that it must be a maladaptive process. Leslie White attributed the most recent step in cultural development to the switch to fossil fuels and nuclear energy, but it is now obvious that the advantages of this may prove illusory. Cultures can be arranged in a progressive general evolutionary sequence of increased energy use running from 5000 to 12 000 kcal per capita per day in small-scale band and village societies, 26 000 kcal

in pre-capitalist agrarian civilizations, and 230 000 kcal consumed by Americans in the 1970s (Cook, 1971). However, critics pointed out that this sequence does not account for the eventual depletion of fossil fuels, the serious decits in using non-renewable energy to produce food energy, or the costs of the waste by-products of energy production and consumption. Hubert (1969) predicted that global petroleum production would peak in 1995, and that the supply would be virtually exhausted by 2075. The most telling criticism was the calculation that if energy consumption increased at 5% a year for 200 years, the waste heat produced would equal the heat of incoming solar radiation and the earth would burn up. Fortunately, before such a Sun Day the polar ice caps would melt and rising sea levels would ood out most of the power plants (Luten, 1974). Human reproductive success would also be an unattractive measure of human evolutionary progress. If the production of larger, more complex cultural systems is the measure of evolutionary success, then the process still seems maladaptive for long-term human survival, because fewer, larger, more homogenous, and less durable cultures have replaced more numerous, more diverse, and more durable small cultures. Greater cultural complexity creates a human survival problem in part because larger, more complex cultural systems incorporate and subordinate smaller systems. Some of the evolutionary theorists recognized that smallscale cultures might actually be better adapted to particular local ecosystems than large-scale cultures. White (1949) observed that foragers, with the simplest cultures, may have had the most satisfying kind of social environment that man has ever lived in. Sahlins (1968) noted that foragers were successful because they limited their wants to the consumption levels that their environment and technology could support and they lived satisfying and afuent lives. As the contemporary environmental crisis began to unfold, many anthropologists commented on the connections between self-sufcient small-scale societies and greater social equality, and relative equilibrium with the environment (Bodley, 1975). This suggested the possibility that increased social scale caused inequality, poverty, and global environmental change. More recent biocultural evolutionary theory shows how cultural evolution could become a maladaptive process that would undermine the resiliency of both natural and human systems. From the biocultural perspective, cultural evolution is produced by changes in culture, which is conceived from the ideas that human behavior is directed in the same way that genes create biological organisms. Cultures change as shared symbolic information changes. The important difference between genes and culture is that individuals intentionally produce and transmit culture, and they can borrow from many sources (Boyd and Richerson, 1987). However, the scale of culture inuences how it is created and transmitted. Cultural transmission is frequently

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biased, because people emulate the beliefs and behavior that appear to be most successful. Cultural emulation is easy and efcient, but it can lead to maladaptive runaway economic growth and power aggrandizement, which in turn cause global environmental change. In small, domestically organized societies the members of each household are daily making cultural decisions about technology, production, and consumption. In larger scale, politically organized societies, cultural evolution becomes a political process in which a single ruler can direct the actions of thousands, or even millions of people (Durham, 1991). Household-level decision making is inherently more responsive to local social and environmental conditions, but it can be over-ridden by political rulers who may be far removed from the environmental consequences of their decisions (Rappaport, 1977a,b). Thus, it is not surprising that large scale agrarian civilizations directed by political elites, frequently collapse because they exhaust the resource base, generate social conict, or become too costly to maintain.

THE UNIQUENESS OF THE CONTEMPORARY ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS

Bennett (1976) describes a seemingly inevitable ecological transition from environmental equilibrium to disequilibrium. From this viewpoint there is nothing particularly unique about global environmental change. Bennett placed small-scale, tribal societies at the equilibrium end of the continuum, but argued that all people had the same behavioral propensities that would lead to drastic environmental change. However, this mixes human means, ends, and secondary consequences. Biocultural theory maintains that all people are driven by a human nature that seeks domestic security and the future welfare of ones children. Small-scale societies achieve these human ends cooperatively by remaining small, consuming resources sustainably, and resisting aggrandizing individuals who would promote security-reducing growth in consumption. Some people in commercially organized cultures competitively elevate their consumption levels in order to obtain these same ends for themselves. Bennett argues that equilibrium cultures are only pauses in the overall historical tendency toward exponential increases in environmental use and impact. However, historical tendencies are not inevitable; they are the outcome of particular events and individual decisionmaking. By the 1980s, as global economic growth and environmental problems intensied, some anthropologists began to argue that people have never been in equilibrium with the environment. For example, Rambo (1985) called Malaysian shifting cultivators primitive polluters, because they put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and lived in smokelled houses. He declared that primitive and civilized

societies interacted with the environment in essentially the same way. In a similar vein, Krech (1999) maintains that Native Americans were not always conservationists, and were in the process of exterminating the bison before Europeans arrived. These revisionist anthropologists, and many others (Headland, 1997) were reacting against the widespread tendency of some environmentalists and deep ecologists to attribute a mystical oneness with nature and an ecological nobility to tribal peoples. The mistaken implication of such romanticism of the human past, would be that our only salvation is a return to the Stone Age. This is a misleading issue because anthropologists have abundant evidence that tribal peoples were pragmatic materialists who burned on a large scale, sometimes killed more animals than they needed, felled trees to harvest fruit, and were not always guided by the spiritual sanctity of nature. There is also evidence that prehistoric humans hunted some animals to extinction, and may have contributed to the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna, such as New World elephants, although there is much controversy on the details (Martin, 1984). These facts need to be viewed in a larger perspective. The reality is that until 8000 years ago, when the world was still domestically organized and inhabited by only 8 million people living mostly in mobile bands at extremely low densities, there was no need for deliberate conservation practices. Likewise, optimal foraging theory suggests that intentional over-hunting would have quickly proven unproductive, because as prey species become scarce, hunting them becomes inefcient (Smith, 1983). Archaeological evidence that Australian aborigines successfully lived as hunters and foragers for at least 60 000 years (Roberts et al., 1990), and that aboriginals in Southern Africa successfully survived as a people for 130 000 years (Klein, 1979) leaves little doubt that people living in very small-scale societies produce resilient cultural systems able to maintain very long-term balances with their natural resources. The archaeological record needs to be compared with the estimates at the end of the twentieth century showing a high proportion of plants and animals threatened with extinction, or nearing threatened status (Baillie and Groombridge, 1996; Tuxill, 1999). Nothing in human prehistory or history compares with the present rate of global environmental change. It is remarkable that the scale of global change corresponds directly with increases in the scale of culture. This was dramatically conrmed by the ARCHAEOMEDES project, an interdisciplinary investigation of 30 000 years of environmental change in the Mediterranean region initiated by the European Union in 1992. Researchers found that the measurable rate at which land degradation could be observed from land clearing, erosion, and dessication increased progressively by orders of magnitude from tens of millennia during the Paleolithic, to millennia during the

166 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

Neolithic, to centuries during the Roman era, and to decades under industrial capitalism since 1850. In one region of Spain, researchers found that half of all the erosion over the past 10 000 years had occurred in the past 500 years, and it had accelerated over the past 150 years (Leeuw, 1997).

improve the material security of their households under cultural conditions of economic scarcity produced by social inequality and competitive striving. The important point is that economic scarcity and environmental problems are produced culturally by social inequality, they are not natural conditions.

THE DRIVING FORCES BEHIND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

The most widely accepted anthropological explanation for the rise of cultural complexity and intensi ed environmental problems has been population pressure on carrying capacity. Carrying capacity must be de ned in relation to particular environments and technologies, and is not a constant (see Carrying Capacity, Volume 4). Population pressure is also a variable that can be different under different consumption demands and distribution patterns. Nevertheless, population pressure remains a powerful explanatory model. It is a variation on Malthus (1895) observation that population has the potential to grow at a faster rate than food production. Population pressure and subsistence intensi cation have been used to explain the Mesolithic to Upper Paleolithic transition (Hayden, 1981), the domestication of plants and animals leading to the transition from the Upper Paleolithic to the Neolithic (Cohen, 1977), increased energy input and technological innovation in agriculture (Boserup, 1965), and the origin of the state and civilization (Carneiro, 1970; Steward, 1949). All of these changed the environment. Population pressure has also been explicitly linked to contemporary environmental problems (Ehrlich, 1968; Homer-Dixon, 1991). The problem with all of these population pressure explanations is that often they do not explain population pressure itself, and they do not deal with the social inequality that also produces scarcity. The archaeological record demonstrates that for most of human prehistory population growth was minimal, not because of high mortality, but because fertility was culturally limited (Hassan, 1981). In domesticscale cultures in the absence of political pressures women opted for small families, because extra children were a disadvantage. Only in politically organized and commercial societies are there strong externally imposed incentives for population growth. When anthropologists have looked at extreme examples of supposed population pressure producing environmental stress and human misery, whether in Bangladesh (Hartmann and Boyce, 1982), Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, 1992) or El Salvador (Durham, 1979, 1995), they have found that social inequality, not population, was the problem. Viewed from a culture scale and biocultural evolutionary perspective, the driving force behind global environmental change is the natural human desire of individuals to

ANTHROPOLOGISTS, INDIGENOUS PEOPLES, AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

Cultural ecological researchers have often helped indigenous people defend their ecosystems and natural resources against deterioration caused by the uninvited intrusion of outside commercial interests. The most important anthropological support, from both archaeologists and cultural anthropologists, has been in helping indigenous communities document their long-term use of particular places and resources, in order that extensive, traditionally owned and used territories can be legally titled to communities and protected. In some cases it has been useful to document that traditional uses were sustainable. Anthropologists have also helped demonstrate that indigenous communities have highly developed knowledge of their ecosystems, including the names and natural histories of plants and animals. Some indigenous communities have asked researchers to help them with the dif cult problem of managing natural resources for both subsistence and commercial uses. Other communities have sought to protect portions of their territories for eco-tourism (see Indigenous Knowledge, Peoples and Sustainable Practice, Volume 5).

REFERENCES
Baillie, J and Groombridge, B, eds (1996) 1996 IUCN Red List of Threatened Animals, World Conservation Union (IUCN), Gland, Switzerland. Bennett, J W (1976) The Ecological Transition: Cultural Anthropology and Human Adaptation, Pergamon Press, New York. Bodley, J H (1975) Victims of Progress, 1st edition, Cummings, Menlo Park, CA. Bodley, J H (1994) A Cultural Scale Perspective on Human Ecology and Development, in Advances in Human Ecology, Vol. 3, ed L Freese, JAI Press, Greenwich, CT, 93 112. Bodley, J H (2000) Cultural Anthropology: Tribes, States, and the Global System, 3rd edition, May eld, Mountain View, CA. Bodley, J H (2001) Anthropology and Contemporary Human Problems, May eld, Mountain View, CA. Boserup, E (1965) The Conditions of Economic Growth, Aldine, Chicago, IL. Boyd, R and Richerson, P J (1985) Culture and the Evolutionary Process, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Carneiro, R L (1970) A Theory of the Origin of the State, Science, 169, 733 738. Cohen, M N (1977) The Food Crisis in Prehistory: Overpopulation and the Origins of Agriculture, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.

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167

Cook, E (1971) The Flow of Energy in an Industrial Society, Sci. Am., 224(3), 134 144. Durham, W H (1979) Scarcity and Survival in Central America: Ecological Origins of the Soccer War, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Durham, W H (1991) Coevolution: Genes, Culture, and Human Diversity, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Durham, W H (1995) Political Ecology and Environmental Destruction in Latin America, in The Social Causes of Environmental Destruction in Latin America, eds M Painter and W H Durham, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI, 249 264. Ehrlich, P (1968) The Population Bomb, Ballantine, New York. Hartmann, B and Boyce, J (1982) Needless Hunger: Voices from a Bangladesh Village, Institute for Food and Development Policy, San Francisco, CA. Hassan, F A (1981) Demographic Archaeology, Academic Press, New York. Hayden, B (1981) Research and Development in the Stone Age: Technological Transitions Among Hunter-Gatherers, Curr. Anthropol., 22(5), 519 548. Headland, T N (1997) Revisionism in Ecological Anthropology, Curr. Anthropol., 38(4), 605 630. Homer-Dixon, T F (1991) On the Threshold: Environmental Changes as Causes of Acute Conict, Int. Secur., 16(2), 76 116. Hubert, M K (1969) Energy Resources, in Resources and Man, National Academy of Sciences, ed W H Freeman, San Francisco, CA, 157 242. Klein, R G (1979) Stone Age Exploitation of Animals in Southern Africa, Am. Sci., 67(2), 151 160. Krech, III, S (1999) The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, W W Norton, New York. Leeuw van der, S E (1997) ARCHAEOMEDES: a DG-XII Research Programme to understand the Natural and Anthropogenic Causes of Land Degradation and Deserti cation in the Mediterranean Basin, University of Paris, Paris. Luten, D B (1974) United States Requirements, in Energy, the Environment, and Human Health, ed A Finkel, Publishing Sciences Group, Acton, MA, 17 33. Malthus, T R (1895) An Essay on the Principle of Population (Parallel Chapters from the [1st] and [2nd] Editions), Macmillan, New York. Martin, P S (1984) Prehistoric Overkill: The Global Model, in Quaternary Extinctions: a Prehistoric Revolution, eds P S Martin and R G Klein, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ, 553 573. Morgan, L H (1877) Ancient Society, Holt, New York. Rambo, A T (1985) Primitive Polluters: Semang Impact on the Malaysian Tropical Rain Forest Ecosystem, Anthropological Papers no. 76, Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, MI. Rappaport, R A (1977a) Maladaptation in Social Systems, in The Evolution of Social Systems, eds J Friedman and M J Rowlands, Duckworth, London, 49 71. Rappaport, R A (1977b) Normative Models of Adaptive Processes: a Response to Anne Whyte, in The Evolution of Social Systems, eds J Friedman and M J Rowlands, Duckworth, London, 79 87.

Roberts, R G, Jones, R, and Smith, M A (1990) Thermoluminescence Dating of a 50 000-year-old Human Occupation Site in Northern Australia, Nature, 345, 153 156. Sahlins, M and Service E R, eds (1960) Evolution and Culture, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI. Sahlins, M (1968) Notes on the Original afuent Society, in Man the Hunter, eds R B Lee and I DeVore, Aldine, Chicago, IL, 85 89. Scheper-Hughes, N (1992) Death Without Weeping: the Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Smith, E A (1983) Anthropological Applications of Optimal Foraging Theory: a Critical Review, Curr. Anthropol., 24, 625 651. Steward, J H (1949) Cultural Causality and Law: a Trial Formulation of the Development of Early Civilization, Am. Anthropol., 51, 1 27. Steward, J H (1955) Theory of Culture Change, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL. Tuxill, J (1999) Appreciating the Benets of Plant Biodiversity, in State of the World 1999: a Worldwatch Institute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society, eds L R Brown, C Flavin, H French, and L Starke, W W Norton, New York, 96 114. WCED (World Commission on Environment and Development) (1987) Our Common Future, Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York. White, L A (1949) The Science of Culture, Grove Press, New York. White, L (1959) The Evolution of Culture, McGraw-Hill, New York.

FURTHER READING
Politis, G G, Prado, J L, and Beukens, R P (1995) The Human Impact in Pleistocene-Holocene Extinctions in South America: the Pampean Case, in Ancient People and Landscapes, ed E Johnson, Museum of Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, 187 205.

Archimedes
see Anthropology and Global Environmental Change (Volume 5)

Art and the Environment

Peter Timmerman
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

This artistic dimension of global environmental change is complex and underexplored. It ranges from the roots of the

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artistic impulse in human beings that impels them to explore, shape, and make their mark on the world; to the artefacts in art, music, architecture, gardens, etc., that result from this impulse. If art is often what human beings make when they are at their freest and most creative, it also thrives on the transformation of the real, the material, the tightly constrained into works of art that capture some otherwise inexpressable element of the nature of being in the world. We can see that the artistic expression of the environment is always happening; but it seldom expresses itself directly. The dynamic pressures of global environmental change are similarly nding their way into the arts of todays world. Todays artist is a direct inheritor of the Romantic idea that the great artist (or the great work of art from the great artist) is some kind of antenna of the race: and apart from the elemental human delight in art, we can also explore art for its extraordinary capacity to intimate the deeper undercurrents within what has happened, is happening, and is to come in the world around us. The following article deals primarily with the artistic impulse in general (primarily in painting). See Landscape, Urban Landscape, and the Human Shaping of the Environment, Volume 5 for more details on a related topic.

the medium, that is, what is the basic material in which the artist is working, its characteristics, its limitations, its possibilities. The content, that is, the subjects, themes, or ideas that the artist is using the medium to express. The role played by the work of art, that is, is it a picture for sale, a building for living in, a ritual mask for a dance, or whatever. The audience, who the work is for, if anyone; and, lastly, the artistic impulse and expression, the capacity to create.

THE ARTIST AND THE ENVIRONMENT

In considering the arts and the environment, we can look at the last of these aspects rst, since it will give us a perspective on the tensions and dynamics of artistic expression. In his pathbreaking book, Playing and Reality, the child psychoanalyst D W Winnicott (1963) argued that when infants begin to deal with the world, they are initially immersed in an non-separate environment, since they have not yet created a sense of themselves as individuals. The separation into selves (primarily mothers and children) takes a long time, and the fears and tensions involved are often handled through play. Play is the crossing backwards and forwards across boundaries that are in part created and discovered through play. A child learns how to move, what things break and what things dont, and what actions will get punished (or rewarded) and by whom. Play is the process whereby this can happen without too much danger. For Winnicott, the ability to play is central to the creative process. He sees that, among the problems children (and artists) face are the times when their play is somehow constrained, or becomes truly dangerous, or the transition to reality is somehow thwarted. In many ways, the artist is someone who seems to be able to keep the impulse to play with the materials, boundaries, and environment around him or her into adulthood. It is this which helps to explain their ability to make connections that have not been made by others; to be humorous about or threatening to the status quo ; and occasionally to provide insights into worlds that some believe to be beyond human boundaries. At the same time, this ability has often been seen as unholy or dangerous; and there is a consistent thread running through the history of artistry as being to madness near allied.

ELEMENTS OF ART AND THE ENVIRONMENT

The earliest artworks we have are symbolic of many aspects of the arts and the environment, including global environmental change. The cave paintings in Altamira, Spain, Lascaux, France, and elsewhere, which date from roughly 35 00015 000 years ago, depict on their walls large herds of animals that were soon to be extinct; and the movements of those herds can be linked to the progress and retreat of the ice sheets of the last ice age. Perhaps of even more relevance is the fact that we cannot say what these exquisite works of art were for. We can call them art, but there are various theories of their purpose; charms to increase the herds, sympathetic magic to give the hunter some control over the beasts, an expression of spiritual kinship with the animal world, or simple delight in being able to represent them. This mysterious entrance into the relationship between the arts and the environment persists. The most obvious aspect of this relationship is representation, the picture of a tree or an animal that impresses us because it looks like, or at least reminds us, of that which is being represented. There seems to be a basic human delight in the power or playfulness of drawing or painting an image of something else on a different medium. But there are other aspects of the impulse towards art that are at least as important; and, given that many people are now familiar with abstract act, it is clear that art is not all about lifelike pictures. Among the main aspects of the artistic impulse worth considering are:

EARLY ENVIRONMENTAL ART

This initial focus on the artist is somewhat misleading, since not only do we have no records of individual artists for many centuries; but the whole idea of the artist is a

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somewhat modern or romantic casting of the topic towards the individual. Nevertheless, the idea that the creative impulse is associated with the playing with or negotiation of boundaries in ones surrounding environment can be very fruitful. Many of the cave animal paintings can be seen to respond to the cracks and crevasses of the walls, humps of animals being painted on outcroppings of walls, etc. In other animal and spirit paintings from around the world, we can also see that there is a kind of intimacy with the physical material supplied by the environment. For instance, in the Peruvian desert south of Lima, there are vast geoglyphs (earthmarks) believed to be about 4000 years old including animal and geometric patterns, hundreds of meters in size. Many aboriginal communities engaged in making petroglyphs (stone marks) and other paintings both above and below ground. This earth art (which has recently been resurrected by contemporary artists seeking to express concerns about the environment) is, as already mentioned, possibly linked to various kinds of spiritual ritual or magic. Anthropological research in the last 200 years has shown that in many kinds of spiritual ritual or magic, a symbolic structure is established linking the patterns created by the tribe or priesthood or shaman on the earth with the spiritual realm. It is very important to recognize that the strong boundaries between the human, the animal, and the spiritual worlds that are characteristic of contemporary Western life would be seen as bizarre to virtually all other peoples in the history of the world. Rather, the boundaries between these worlds or realms were seen as permeable and changeable and transitory. The sacred spaces and sacred times set up by rituals were often designed to mimic the underlying order of the cosmos, and the artistic artifacts (masks, images, music, dancing) as aspects of that order; or as a part of the continuing conversation with the spiritual world. This role of the art object persists, not only in the familiar paintings of the Madonna and Child over the altars of many Christian churches around the world, but also in the residual feelings of people when they look at a Cezanne painting and somehow sense that they are in touch with some deeper aspect of reality as portrayed by a dish of apples. When we look at the origins of architecture, we can see that the megaliths of ancient Europe (like Stonehenge), the great temples of the Mayans, and the vast Pyramids, all have connections and orientations towards the sacred and the spiritual. Even in domestic architecture, the elementary forms of building (walls, roofs, spaces for entrances, exits, etc.) mingle the utilitarian with the orientation towards meaning; the hearth, the shrine, the basic axis of the village or town. Much of the ofcial art that survives, associated with the large kingdoms of Egypt, Sumer, Assyria, etc., of the

ancient world, depicts the natural world in accordance with some aspect of the ritual needs of the societies involved, though there is obviously some delight in the excellence of the craftsmanship and artistry involved in these depictions. For example, in Egyptian art, such as the palette of King Narmer, circa 3000 before the Christian era (BCE), or mural panoramas of voyages down the Nile (or the river of Death), one nds a sensitivity to the lush river world, and to the dignity of animals (many of which were worshipped as gods). Assyrian art, depicting the hunting and killing of lions and other animals, glories the powers of the allconquering king, but also depicts the throes of the animal as well.

ART AND THE ENVIRONMENT IN THE CLASSICAL AND MEDIEVAL PERIODS

Art historians are confronted with some severe difculties in dealing with representations of the environment in the classical arts of Greece and Rome, because so little painting remains apart from mosaics and some paneled rooms. These tend to favor the decorative and the pastoral (the pastoral being an art form that evokes the rural retreat of the wealthy from the increasingly dirty town). Much of the rest of landscape representation is symbolic or serves as a backdrop to human endeavors. In Greek culture (epitomized by the ourishing of Athens from 600300 BCE), landscape as a theme is practically non-existent, except in two areas: the continuing presence of the pagan gods of nature in certain forms of nature (e.g., the home of the gods on Mount Olympus) including the local gods of place; and the appearance in the Hellenistic period (after 300 BCE) of the beginnings of proto-sciences such as geography and epidemiology that obliquely made reference to natural forms and processes. From later Roman paintings (often copies of earlier Greek artworks), we can recover a variety of versions of pastoral, the rural scene, and make-believe landscapes illustrating mythological scenes from Homer or other legends. Through the period of the Roman Empire, there continues this somewhat haphazard interest in nature. The arrival of Christianity had a twofold effect: rst of all, as Christianity became more powerful, it systematically destroyed as much of the previous pagan tradition (including pagan shrines and holy groves) as possible; and second, it emphasized even more strongly the peripheral role of the natural world. What was now central was the spiritual struggle of Man towards God, and the natural environment was replaced by the spiritual environment. Images of animals or plants (when they did not appear as marginal decorations to manuscripts) were saturated with symbolic reference, exemplied by the sheep and the shepherd that can be found portrayed around the cupolas of Byzantine churches.

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While there were breaks in this artistic tradition (most notably with the reevaluation of the natural world associated with the gure of St. Francis of Assisi circa 1200 AD), it is not really until the arrival of the Renaissance in the 15th century that the natural world by itself is seen as anything other than a space of symbols with no inherent interest of its own, though it was occasionally connected to the power and splendor of an all creating Deity. Indeed, in the evolving tradition, Nature became more and more seen as a wild space, symbolic of the spiritual dangers of wilderness and irrationality. If we look brie y at the neighboring world of Islam, which ourished in the Middle East from the 7th century, and provided a strong challenge to the medieval West, we nd that while images of nature were banned from representation, the whole tenor of Islam in this period led to extraordinary advances in science, geography, history, astronomy and chemistry. Islam was much more favorable to the exploration of nature as an expression of the signs and symbols of Allah than Christianity in this period. Unfortunately this does not appear overtly in the artifacts that survive from that time, which are almost completely made up of abstract decoration (derived, in part, from the example of beautiful cursive patterns of Arabic writing of passages from the Koran). Later developments (in the 14th century and after) in, for example, Persian miniature paintings that do contain landscapes were in uenced by Chinese paintings (Islam connecting with China down the long trade routes).

ART AND THE ENVIRONMENT IN THE ORIENT

Some reference should be made to artistic expression and Nature in the Oriental world, speci cally China (Chinese principles in uenced the arts of Korea and Japan, and make it an appropriate single example of a vast topic). There are two main ideas at work in those Chinese arts associated with environment, which include such arts as geomancy (known as feng-shui or the appropriate placing of buildings and parks), poetry, and landscape painting. The rst idea, which eventually becomes associated with the spiritual tradition of Taoism, but which goes back to the dawn of Chinese civilization, is that there is no separation between the order of the natural world and the order of the moral or social worlds. There is a kind of natural moral order in the world, called the Way, the Tao. Human dif culties come from straying away from that order. Similarly, proper balance of natural forces will help to improve the moral world. For instance, mountains and water are like interacting opposites (what the Chinese refer to as yin and yang ) (see Land Transformation in China: 3000 Years of Human Ecological History, Volume 3); the height of the mountain balances off the depth of the

water; the movement of water contrasts with the stillness of the mountain. The placement of dwellings, and the contemplative isolation of the scholar or monk, all rely on the balancing energy of natural elements. The second idea, associated with the philosopher Confucius (circa 600 BCE) and his in uential descendents, is that the natural, moral, social, and political orders should all be in harmony, and that the central pivot of this harmony is not necessarily the natural order, but rather the cultivated order of the nobleman (or ruler). Confucius occasionally uses natural imagery, one of his sayings is that The wise delight in water; the good delight in mountains , referring to the balance between appropriate action and the stability of the ancient state and rules of justice, but his emphasis is on the cultured order. This approach was particularly in uential in the extremely elite cultures of the T ang (618 907 AD) and later Chinese dynasties saturated with Confucian thought. The artistic expression of these ideas is most familiar in the Chinese landscape scrolls, which unfold vast misty landscapes expressing Taoist environmentalism; in which tiny meditative gures or rustic shermen can occasionally be picked out. Many landscapes (and later gardens associated with this artistic impulse) also gesture in the direction of the Taoist Lands of the Blessed: the future Paradise within which all will dwell. The tiny gardens that can be found around Chinese and Japanese Buddhist (and Taoist) monasteries and temples attempt to reproduce in stones, mosses, sand, and miniature trees, the vision of these lands. In painting, the poetic and the theoretical meet in artists like Wang Wei (699 761 AD) whose long poetic sequences unfold along with extensive landscapes that the viewer wanders through. Further, the very materials and acts of painting are resonant with orientations toward aspects of the natural order whose penetration is essential to the greatest art. Often the artist is exhorted, through disciplined exercise, to submerge or eradicate the self, allowing the larger natural order to speak through the brush. This contrasts with the very different stance taken by the Western artist (at least until the modern period).

ART AND THE ENVIRONMENT IN THE RENAISSANCE

The Renaissance period (1450 1600) in Western culture saw the beginnings of a reevaluation of the natural world, in part due to a series of struggles over the legacy of Aristotelian science which began reappearing in the West in the 12th and 13th centuries (many of the scienti c writings of Aristotle and other Greek philosophers with an interest in the workings of nature had in fact been preserved by Islamic scientists). The ferment and cross-fertilization between this Aristotelian science and the already existing Christian

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tradition (based in large part on a neo-Platonic base) would eventually lead to the growth of an experimental tradition that overturned the whole medieval world view. Curiously enough, the artistic signal for this ferment came about in part as a glorication of the perspective of the individual observer, thanks to the invention of perspective in the 1400s. Previous to this, the presentation of space in paintings was shaped by meaning (for instance, more important people would be higher in the paintings) and not by any desire for accurate representation. Perspective introduced the eye view of the spectator as a standard from which, by simple geometric rules, a consistent space could be generated within which landscapes, buildings, cities, etc., could be organized. The irony is that this space, which provided a methodology for representing nature in such a convincing way that it has become totally natural to us, is in fact an abstracting of space. Every space is treated the same: special or sacred places no longer inuence the world of representation within which they are portrayed. We can link this development of a framework of abstracted space to the similar and simultaneous development of abstracted time with the arrival of the mechanical clock. In the architecture and painting of the Renaissance, we see the twin drives of clarifying and ordering of spatial representation. This new power provided artists with the capacity to explore, almost as if they were early scientists, the phenomena of light and shade, as well as the dynamic portrayal of weather, water, and the atmospherics of distance perception (for instance, the bluing of color as a landscape retreats away from the viewer). Leonardo da Vinci is of course the most famous representative of this, and in his paintings as well as his manuscripts, we can see the probing mind of the artist who uses his art as an exploratory tool into different elds, like anatomy, mechanical engineering, and ballistics. For environmentalists, this new power can be seen as a double-edged sword. For it is in this period that the new methods of representation become allied to the emerging forces working towards the control and reshaping of the natural environment. This was part of the restructuring of what could now be called the early modern world, which wrested control from the Church and vested it in nation states. These states embarked on a quest for power, which has not ended yet. The most obvious of the ways in which the arts were associated with this quest included the arts of mapmaking (essential to the management of the new lands associated with the voyages of discovery; see e.g., Delano-Smith, 2001), theatrical and painterly spectacle (ranging from the glorications of the church in the various projects in the Vatican to the various historical allegories by Rubens for the French and English kings), and the architectural grandeurs of St. Peters Basilica in Rome.

Less obviously, the art of the period increasingly focuses on the autonomous individual who walks through a world of his own creation; or at least his own substantial manipulation. Even that seemingly most natural of all painting genres, the landscape, which originates in the Netherlands (a new state of the era), and which is characterized by the absence of human beings in a central role in the depictions, cannot get away from the fact that the picture is designed to be seen according to the rules of perspective, which require the observer to hold the whole scene together. Towards the end of the 17th century and into the 18thusually known as the Age of Reason or the Enlightenmenta further tension was added to the depiction of nature with the arrival of the powerful abstract notions of Newtonian time and space, and the emerging image of a physical world subjected to absolute laws of physics. This coincided with the rise of the absolutist state, whose most familiar artifact was the formal garden at Versailles, home to the Sun King, Louis XIV of France. The great landscape artists of the period, such as Claude Lorrain (16001682) and Nicholas Poussin (15941665), depicted landscapes derived from classical history and mythology, which provided the viewer with images from an idealized memory of a Roman or Greek past that might be reproducible again. As the Age of Enlightenment continued, the ideal emotions (of virtue, duty, obedience, reverence to noble ancestors) symbolized by these paintings began to be superseded by less restrained emotions and sentiments. In hindsight, we can see that these emotions, like a breeze uttering through the leaves of pastoral scenes, were the forerunners of the greater storms that would usher in Romanticism (17501850). In the run up to Romanticism (which is the seedbed for modern environmentalism ) the role of nature as depicted in paintings and articulated in poetry and literature, oscillates between the emerging picture of a universe structured like a vast clockwork operated by an increasingly distant maker; and a related, but different picture of human beings connected to each other and to nature by sympathetic and empathic emotions or sentiments; captured in poems like James Thomsons (17001748) The Seasons, where each season inuences the sensitive soul. With hindsight, we can see that this oscillation is an uneasy solution to the deeper problems associated with the imaginative consequences of the nal breakup of the old world view that had buttressed the old world for so many centuries.

ART AND THE ROMANTIC ENVIRONMENT

This previous world view, which had supported the social and political order of things through an ascending pyramid of order and control which was felt to reect a divine order of increasing rationality and access to higher truths, came

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to be seen increasingly as bogus or at least out of date when confronted with newly restless (and increasing) populations, the redrawing of the maps of the world and the cosmos, and the surging potential for scientic enlightenment. Artists found themselves not only profoundly inuenced positively by the vast increase in human capacities to harness energy through science, technology, and industrial organization; but also profoundly worried about the consequences of aspects of that harnessing in the disruptions of the Industrial Revolution. The Romantic Revolution was, for artists, simultaneously an exultation of what was now possible for the individual or the awakened community, throwing off its ancient fetters; and a dark warning about the repressive possibilities of new powers in new hands. Politically, this helped propel the revolutionary struggles of the French Revolution (1789), an essential moment in the rise of modernity. Artistically, the Romantic artist fastened onto the idea of the artist himself (and now for the rst time practically, herself) as the embodiment of the alienated human being in a world being transformed by factories and machines. The creative artist was that special form of the alienated human being whose antennae or capacities were capable of bridging (after creative or political struggle) the emerging gap between the self and the outside world, being given over increasingly to industrialization. The allies of the alienated human being in his or her struggle could most obviously be found in the similarly struggling realm of nature, since nature was herself becoming more and more subjected to forces of mechanization and alienation. At the same time, however, natural places could provide a refuge from the increasing power of human technology. The continuing landscape tradition in art was obviously an important vehicle for these emerging themes. In 1757, the English philosopher Edmund Burke wrote his immensely inuential treatise on aesthetics, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, in which he crystallized an emerging theme of the period, which was that the natural world was, among other things, potentially a place of emotional (sublime) power; for example, the sense of overpowering awe at the sight of Niagara Falls. This was, as it were, the most powerful way to overcome the split between human and nature: by the shock of brute natural experience. Landscape as a symbol or a carrier of emotion was central to the 18th and 19th century paintings of Gainsborough, Constable, and Turner in England, Caspar David Friedrich in Germany, the Barbizon School in France, and others. Some of the themes of these paintings include: vast mountains, waterfalls, landslides, or immense forests within which the human presence is dwarfed or muted into meditative silence (Turner; Friedrich); nostalgic scenes of ordered country life, before the onslaught of industrialization (Constable);

Oriental, historical, or classical landscapes that are far from contemporary life (Corot; Bonington; Delacroix); the simple rustic life of peasants and farming (Millet; the Barbizon school).

The whole range of Romantic nature portrayal in art was simultaneously reinforced by similar themes in Romantic poetry, music, novels, etc. The sensitivity towards nature was a barometer of ones personal sensitivity; and often of ones politics. The most important English writer on art and the environment in the 19th century was unquestionably John Ruskin. Ruskin was a central inuence on a number of continuing themes, such as the return of Gothic style architecture to public buildings, the emphasis on handicraft work (that would be picked up by William Morris later), and various campaigns to save monuments (such as St. Marks in Venice). His greatest claim is probably that he taught a couple of generations of artists and writers to engage in the intense study of natural forms and details. Ruskin believed that in the details of natural forms could be found spiritual patterns and truths, and that they were portals of self (and social) awakening. The descendants of Ruskin include not only the PreRaphaelite painters of his own day, some of them who were committed to Ruskinian detailing in their work, but much later photographers like Ansel Adams who specialised in intensely grained portraits of natural objects like rocks, trees, and waterfalls. The mention of photography also reminds us that in Ruskins day artists were being challenged by the new phenomenon of the photograph that could capture details of the world in an instant, details that might take days or weeks to obtain on a canvas. The French Impressionists, though in many ways quite different than photographers in their aims, nevertheless found themselves often engaged in kinds of work allied to at least some of the tendencies that could be found emerging (over time) in photographic aesthetics. Among these were the emphasis on the immediate response to a scene; the organizing of a scene by light, shade, and color rather than by underlying physical structures or the rules of classical perspective; and the increasing use (particularly by Degas) of seemingly accidental frames around scenes so that pictures began to look as if they were sudden glimpses into reality rather than long-meditated artifacts. In a sense, the Impressionists were the culmination of the Perspective Project, except that their observer was acutely sensitive to the immediate atmospheric environment, so that form begins to dissolve into light, color, and seasonality, as in Monets late studies of Rouen cathedral and haystacks at different times of year. Almost immediately, this dissolution was countered by returns to certain kinds of classical formalism (as in the paintings of Cezanne),

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and the deploying of forms and visual elements generated, not by the physical world, but by symbolic or emotional expressiveness. The most famous examples of these are the late works of Vincent Van Gogh, whose Sunowers are simultaneously visionary piercings into the primal energy of the natural world, and also expressions of the artists own emotional vocabulary of line and color. Cezanne, too, in his intense study of the modeling of natural objects, nds himself pressed into creating a painting language remote from the previous conventions of representation.

ART AND THE MODERN ENVIRONMENT

It is a truism of art history that the late 19th century pressed the traditional norms of representing the natural environment to their limits; and that Picasso (drawing on the work of Cezanne and others) broke those norms completely. Modernism in art, literature, and other areas, was exemplied by the collapse of a primary logic of correspondence. In a logic of correspondence, x and y in the artwork correspond to X and Y in the world, and that is how representation works. This is replaced by a logic of coherence, where the internal coherence of the elements of the artwork is more important than their potential correspondence to an outside world. A novel like James Joyces Ulysses (1922) gets much of its power from its one-to-one correspondence to a day in Dublin, it is the last gasp of the traditional novel. Joyces last novel (modernist or postmodernist), Finnegans Wake (1941) has only the vaguest external reference: its structure is internal (and in fact, the novel, if it is a novel, has no beginning or end, but is circular). Similarly, the most avant-garde artistic expression moves away from simple representations of the natural world, just at the moment when photography makes such representations normal, and in fact begins to provide representations of parts of the natural world unrepresented before, thanks to time lapse photography, microphotography, satellite photography, etc. Typically, a modernist painter like Marcel Duchamp, in his Nude Descending A Staircase No. 2 (1912) will use images derived from the work of Eadward Muybridges photosequences of movement. But he will use them to pattern the movement of descent of a gure so that it breaks up what would (in traditional art) have been a frozen moment on a stair. There may be some relationship (though this is extremely controversial) between the coherence model of modern art and the virtual disappearance of landscape from the artists repertoire for about 50 years following the arrival of Picasso on the scene. It survives overtly in the warped or dreamlike images of the Surrealist painters, and the cool urban spaces of the American painter Edward Hopper. Nevertheless, the art historian is aware that abstraction ;

which appears to be the most unrepresentative art of all; abstraction (associated with Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondriaan, and others), originated in a complex desire by these artists to abstract from the real world deeper spiritual and emotional forms than could be captured simply by representational pictures. The abstract painting often can be seen as a formal or emotionally expressive landscape (an interior landscape of the mind, or simply of the possibilities of the basic elements of paint itself) canvas, color, light, frame, etc. Certainly, throughout the modern period there have been artists engaged in representative art, but until recently, they were completely marginalized. Interestingly enough, it is in marginal forms like watercolor that many artists of nature (Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargeant, Andrew Wyeth) and many nature artists (that is, wildlife artists) worked. One critical fact about the modern artist is his or her sophistication with regard to all previous forms of representation. The way in which artists will subvert photographic realism, for instance, or tease the viewer with false hopes that x will indeed represent X, all serve to highlight, or undermine the norms of visual representation. This kind of approach, pioneered by the Dada artists during the First World War as an attack on the kind of normalcy that could have generated a world war, xed on photomontage and collage as possible subversive forms. Pop art, in the 1960s, worked variations on this. Today, on many fronts, artists are engaged in a kind of guerilla warfare against the juggernaut of stale or compromised images that are constantly regurgitated through the marketing machines of the economic system. A kind of anti-art can be seen wherever environmental activists are to be found; posters, parodies of advertising campaigns, cartoons, expressive collages, etc.

THE RETURN OF EARTH ART

The advent of Earth Art or Eco-Art was in many ways a reaction to certain aspects of modernism (particularly those parts of modern art that seemed to be complicit in those parts of modernity that are threatening to the natural world), but are also rooted in an artistic sensitivity to the increasing burden of global environmental change. One distinct element of modern art has been a devotion to abstract or formal structures whose relationship to an external world are not necessarily immediate or conventional. Among the results of this in the buildings associated with the International Style (from the late 1920s) e.g., was a kind of unrooted geometricization of form and structure; i.e., you could build a perfectly formal skyscraper anywhere in the world. The best architects would, of course, relate their efforts in subtle ways to their surroundings; but the vast burgeoning of big box buildings, and the complacent hubris of post World War 2 urban planning generated (at least

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among certain artists and architects) a revulsion towards the whole ethos associated with what was increasingly referred to as The Modernist Project . This Project was seen as deeply rooted in a kind of unstoppable juggernaut of capitalist development, mingling engineering, planning, market economics, and the rhetoric of democracy together into a completely seductive paradigm. The revulsion against this has taken many forms, from the guerilla art forms already mentioned, to attempts to resuscitate a local dimension to art, architecture, and sculpture; to recover a sense of place, as well as space. This has been embodied in different forms in different arts. For example, in sculpture, some people have taken their cue from Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, who worked in organic forms, and were very sensitive to the relationships of human beings in the environment; while others have explored the long tradition of the monument in the landscape, the obelisk, temple, pillar. The mutual transformation of monument, landscape, and human observer has been explored in Environmental Sculpture (sculptures that are large enough to create an environment within which the observer moves) and in the very inuential Earth Art. Earth Art is in many ways a return to the glyphic projects of early humankind, exemplied by the earthworks in deserts, on mountain tablelands, and in caverns. Robert Smithsons great earthworks (like Spiral Jetty on the Great Salt Lake in Utah) and Christos wrapping of landscapes and buildings, are different ways of highlighting the tensions created by our contemporary abilities to reshape the earth for our own purposes. As Lee (see Landscape, Urban Landscape, and the Human Shaping of the Environment, Volume 5) further discusses, there are numerous variations in what contemporary artists have seized upon in our situation. To give only one example of something that might contrast with the grand scale of a Smithson or a Christo, an artist like the Chilean Cecilia Vicuna collects shells, wood, pieces of wool and vicuna (!) in what she has called precarious art; tiny pieces of nature rescued for a moment (Merewether, 1992). It is worth also pointing out in this context that there is a widespread greening going on, most notably in architecture. With new interests in: local or vernacular buildings that were always sensitive to its environment out of necessity; in new technologies for building, heating, cooling, and otherwise improving the efciency of buildings; and in living buildings with roof gardens, greenhouses, and other natural process devices (see Greening of Cities, Volume 3). There are also basic concerns with recycling, the use of chemicals in painting, and so on, that are now part of the consciousness of most artists.

CONCLUSIONS
This review of the vast array of artistic responses to environmental change has focussed on the main line of artistic endeavor. An equally brief, but completely different review, might focus instead on the art of what Westerners would consider to be marginal peoples (traditional crafts, indigenous arts, and unofcial art of all kinds) whose arts both speak of different relations to their environments, but are also more and more subject to the complexities of living in a world becoming saturated with the visual and aural products of Western commercial culture. A third review would ignore the past almost completely, and report from the artistic trenches of today, exploring the experiences and expressiveness of artists, still acting, as the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley once described them, as the unacknowledged legislators of the race. Their ability to capture and portray aspects of reality that we have not seen before, is one reason why they are so important to us. But it is also easy to overplay that, as well; as if artists have to be spokespeople for anything. It is not clear (if it ever was) what the role of the artist is (or what art is for, if anything) but, as an artist friend of mine once said: You know that canary in the mine? Everyone always says that it was there as a warning for the miners. I think they had it there for that purpose; but Ill bet they liked hearing it sing, too.

REFERENCES
Delano-Smith, C (2001) The Hidden Meanings of Maps, Nature, 411, 133 134. Merewether, C (1992) Walking on the Wild Side: Savage Paradigms, in Eco-Art: Elaboration, Coordination and Execution of the ECOART Project, Spala Editora, Rio de Janiero. Winnicott, D W (1963) Playing and Reality, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth.

FURTHER READING
Appleton, J (1996) The Experience of Landscape, John Wiley, Chichester. Beardsley, J (1989) Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape, Abbeville, New York. Janson, H W and Janson, A F (1995) History of Art, 5th edition, Harry N Abrams, New York. Treagar, M (1980) Chinese Art, Oxford University Press, New York. Warnke, M (1994) Political Landscape: Art History of Nature, translated by D McLintock, Reaktion Books, London.

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Attenborough, David
(1926 ) David Frederick Attenborough, British naturalist, author and broadcaster, has done more than any other person to popularize and create an interest in natural history in the UK and in many parts of the world through his many television programs and series produced by BBC television. After serving in the Royal Navy from 1947 1949, he joined the staff of an educational publishing house. In 1952 he moved to the BBC as a trainee producer and soon established his reputation through his famous Zoo Quest series, aired from 1954 1964, which took the viewers to many remote places Sierra Leone (1954), Guyana (1955), Indonesia (1956), Papua New Guinea (1957), Argentina and Paraguay (1958), the Southwest Paci c (1959), Madagascar (1960), northern Australia (1962) and down the Zambesi from source to mouth in (1964). His next series was Eastwards with Attenborough set in Southeast Asia followed by The Tribal Eye which examined sculpture (one of his hobbies), weaving, metal casting and other tribal activities around the world. He received worldwide acclaim and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Desmond Davis Award for his 1979 13-part series Life on Earth, then the most ambitious series ever produced by the BBC Natural History Unit. This was followed by The Living Planet series in 1984, and The Trials of Life in 1990, which dealt with animal behavior. His series The First Eden was

a survey of the impact of humankind on the lands around the Mediterranean, which was followed by Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives, a series on fossils. A popular series was Life in the Freezer, about wildlife in the Antarctic (1990). He treated plant life in The Private Life of Plants, which was aired in 1995. His most recent series in 1998 was on birds of the world. In this long record of natural history broadcasting, Sir David has treated many aspects of biodiversity and has drawn attention to the fragile nature of natural ecosystems, which has stimulated interest amongst many different audiences. Sir David was knighted in 1985 for his services to broadcasting, was made a commander of the Royal Victorian Order in 1991, and a companion of honor in 1996. He has received honorary degrees from many universities including Cambridge, where he studied for his rst degree in natural sciences from 1945 to 1947. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1985, the year in which he also received the Founders Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. He is the recipient of the International Cosmos Prize 2000. He has received many other awards and medals including an International Emmy Award in 1985. He has served as a trustee of the British Museum, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the Worldwide Fund for Nature and a President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Sir David s hobbies include music, tribal art and, of course, natural history. His books include: The Private Life of Plants, BBC (1994), and The Life of Birds, BBC (1998).
GHILLEAN T PRANCE UK

B
Bahai Faith and the Environment
Richard M Landau
Georgetown, Ontario, Canada

This article explores the basic principles and beliefs of the members of the Bahai Faith and then examines how these can and are being applied to environmental and development challenges worldwide. Starting with a brief exploration of the basic spiritual tenets enunciated by Bahaullah, the prophet-founder of the Bahai Faith, this article examines the Bahai prescription for resolving the dif cult challenges before humanity. The Bahai Faith began in the nineteenth century in Persia and today numbers over six million adherents worldwide. Bahais believe that all world religions originate from a common divine source and that Bahaullah was the messenger from God for this era. Contained in his teachings are speci c measures to usher in a new world order based on spiritual principles. The article concludes with an exploration of the participation of the Bahai International Community (BIC) in the United Nations (UN)-sponsored initiatives as well as a range of development and environmental projects undertaken by national and local Bahai communities. The author has been a member of the Bahai Faith in Canada since 1973 and is a graduate of Carleton University and the University of Ottawa. A leader in interfaith dialogue, Mr Landau is author of The Willing Suspension of Belief: How the Worlds Religions Can Work Together. The Bahai Faith, which was founded in 1863, is the worlds second most geographically widespread religion with more than six million adherents living throughout the worlds nations, territories, islands and outposts. Following the example and teachings of their prophet-founder Bahaullah (AD 18171892), the worlds Bahais consider themselves to be the citizens of one country. Bahais regard the world as one organic unity.

The Bahai Faith considers the monotheistic world religions part of an ever-advancing continuum that has a design. Each religion, they assert, has its origins in a common source or Godhead. A covenant exists between God and humanity whereby God reveals his plan gradually through his messengers. This is the fountainhead of human progress. Thus, from time to time, God sends forth prophets with revelations appropriate for a specic people at a specic period of human development. In keeping with the idea of this progressive revelation, often the laws and customs of preceding revelations are abrogated with the advent of each succeeding religion. For Bahais, Bahaullah has revealed Gods message to humanity for the current age; an age which will be characterized by world unity. Bahaullah (translated as The Glory of God), who was born in Persia, revealed numerous volumes of scriptures and laws upon which the Bahai Faith is founded. He lays claim to being the most recent in a line of chosen messengers from God that includes his immediate precursor known as The Bab (translated as The Gate), Mohammed, Jesus, Moses and Abraham as well as Zoroaster, Buddha and Krishna. The Bab (18191850) who was born in Shiraz, Persia revealed in 1844 that he was the gate for one greater than himself who would begin his mission to humanity in 1863. Ecclesiastical and civil authorities in Persia, alarmed by the rapid growth of the Babi movement and The Babs claim to a revelation from God, persecuted his adherents and martyred The Bab on July 9, 1850. Likewise, because of his teachings, Bahaullah spent his adult life in prison and exile in various outposts of the Ottoman Empire, nally living out his last days under house arrest in the port city of Akka, near Haifa, Israel. While the Bahai Faith has its origins in Islamic Persia, it is a discrete and independent faith that claims to represent the fulllment of prophecies in the sacred texts of the preceding world religions. Bahais hold all revealed scriptures in highest regard as the word of God, believing that the teachings of Bahaullah, by virtue of the fact that they are the most recent revelation from God, are the most relevant for today. The many teachings revealed by Bahaullah cover every aspect of life and relations between humanity and creation. Among the most basic tenets is a belief in the unity and

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interconnectedness of all things: the singularity of God; the equality of the races, sexes and all humanity; and that the chief task facing humanity is the construction of a just and merciful world-embracing civilization. The pursuit of unity is reected in the Faiths administrative order which includes elected local, regional, national and international administrative bodies. The worldwide headquarters of the Faith is located on Mount Carmel in Haifa, Israel the nal resting place of the remains of The Bab. Bahais believe unity should also characterize the relationship between humanity and the natural environment created by an all-powerful God. In the words of Bahaullah (1976: section CXXXII, 288), Ye are all the fruits of one tree, the leaves of one branch. From the Bahai perspective, humanity is both physically and metaphorically linked to the world. In a letter, Shoghi Effendi (1933), a direct descendant of Bahaullah and known as the Guardian of the Bahai Faith, wrote:
We cannot segregate the human heart from the environment outside us and say that once one of these is reformed everything will be improved. Man is organic with the world. His inner life moulds the environment and is itself also deeply affected by it. The one acts upon the other and every abiding change in the life of man is the result of these mutual reactions.

For every part of the universe is connected with every other part by ties that are very powerful and admit of no imbalance, nor any slackening whatever

In another reference, he remarked:

Cooperation and reciprocity are essential properties which are inherent in the unied system of the world of existence, and without which the entire creation would be reduced to nothingness. (Abdul Baha, from a hitherto untranslated tablet)

At the very heart of the Bahai view of the relationship between humanity and the natural universe is the belief that all of creation is an expression of the many names and attributes of an all-powerful God. Like the many different attributes of God, the natural realm has diverse causes or ideal environments in which it ourishes and expresses itself. Life is tenacious and can adapt itself to such diverse climates as polar, temperate, tropical and desert.
Nature in its essence is the embodiment of my name, the maker, the creator. Its manifestations are diversied by varying causes, and in this diversity there are signs for men of discernment. Nature is Gods will and is its expression in and through the contingent world. (Bahaullah, 1982) Every man of discernment, while walking upon the earth, feeleth indeed abashed, in as much as he is fully aware that the thing which is the source of his prosperity, his wealth, his might, his exaltation, his advancement and power is, as ordained by God, the very earth which is trodden beneath the feet of all men. There can be no doubt that whoever is cognizant of this truth, is cleansed and sanctied from all pride, arrogance, and vainglory. (Bahaullah, 1979)

Bahais recognize that the world is undergoing rapid socio-economic transitions that make the protection of the environment and sustainable development both critical and challenging. Bahais believe that only an integrated, balanced and comprehensive world view with a belief in a divine creator and unity of purpose will resolve environmental and development challenges. For example, when science and technology dont serve a divinely ordained purpose, they will actually contribute to the erosion of the planets biodiversity. Materialistic civilization that replaces the idea of citizen with consumer cannot concern itself with the long-term viability of life on Earth.

THE INTERCONNECTEDNESS OF HUMANITY AND THE EARTH

The Bahai view on environmental conservation and sustainable development holds that: (a) because the natural universe is a reection of the majestic qualities and attributes of the Supreme Being, it inspires and should be accorded the utmost respect; (b) all of creation is interconnected, and (c) that the unity of humanity is the essential truth and compelling force in this age. Of this, Bahaullah (1976: section CXVII, 250) wrote: The Earth is but one county, and mankind its citizens. The concepts of world citizenship, prudent stewardship of the Earth, and the interconnectedness of all things is the essence of the Bahai Faith. Abdul Baha (1982) (translated as Servant of the Glory), the son of Bahaullah amplied this point:

Yet, while nature is seen as the repository of the many attributes of God, Bahais are not pantheists, i.e., they do not worship nature or hold it in high esteem for its own sake. The natural realm exists to serve a humanity that has as its task the carrying forward of an ever-evolving divinely ordained world order that will usher in universal peace and harmony. As such, Bahais believe that humanity must act as a wise steward of the natural realm, though neither nature nor humanity is at the core of the universal design. Rather, it is God.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGE AND SOLUTIONS

Just as humanity, the environment and spirituality are all interconnected, so too are the factors that have led to the environmental challenges. Speaking on behalf of the worldwide community of Bahais, the BIC ofce at the UN issued a statement making the point:
None of these problems the debilitating inequities of development, the apocalyptic threats of atmospheric warming and

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ozone depletion, the oppression of women, the neglect of children and marginalized peoples, to name but a few can be realistically addressed without considering all the others. None can be fully addressed without a magnitude of cooperation and coordination at all levels that far surpasses anything in humanitys collective experience. (Bahai International Community, 1998a)

According to the BIC, the unfettered exploitation of planetary natural resources is one symptom of a sickness of the human spirit. Thus, any lasting solution to the environmental and developmental challenges will need to recognize the spiritual nature of each human, the interdependency of all humans, and their relationship with the environment. In other words, development will need to be more than simply for short-term economic advantage; it must also further and benet the minds and spirits of all humanity. Clearly, cooperation between all peoples, governments and agencies will be required to effect lasting solutions to the environmental challenges. However, the BIC points to certain trends in the world which tend to undermine the very foundations of collaboration. Among these it includes:
the widespread lack of moral discipline, the glorication of greed and material accumulation, the increasing breakdown of family and community, the rise of lawlessness and disorder, the ascendancy of racism and bigotry, and the priority given to national interests over the welfare of humanity all of which destroy condence and trust, the foundations of collaboration. (Bahai International Community, 1997a)

will be the need for carefully planned maintenance of agricultural lands. Bahais believe that science and technology can only provide answers to sustainable development when they take into account the needs of the human soul. For example, there is little value in building high-efciency vast networks of concrete urban roads if the style of architecture blocks sunlight, prevents people from walking and generally leaves the human being dwarfed.
The vast forces of science and technology must be harnessed to serve the material, intellectual, emotional and spiritual needs of the entire human family. This will require that all peoples be involved in generating scientic knowledge and determining its applications. As participation increases, technologies which have tended to desensitize and alienate, to make satisfying work and crafts redundant, to destroy the environment, and to cause sickness, inrmity or death, will, no doubt, be reconsidered, redesigned or abandoned. (Bahai International Community, 1997b)

It is the Bahai position that only the abandonment of these destructive trends will create the necessary setting in which the spiritualization of humanity can be realized and the consequent unity and cooperation between humans can develop solutions to meet the environmental challenges.
Such qualities include love, compassion, forbearance, trustworthiness, courage, humility, cooperation and willingness to sacrice for the common good qualities of an enlightened citizenry, able to construct a unied world civilization. (Bahai International Community, 1997a)

THE NATURE OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Development, in the Bahai view, is an organic process in which the spiritual is expressed and carried out in the material (Abdul-Baha, 1995). As with the environmental challenge, the Bahai view calls for broad-based organic answers that are consistent with the development of the spirituality of all people. For example, community growth and development will need to respond to the genuine need of all people to have close contact with the natural world. This will inuence all aspects of development from design and engineering to community and land-use planning. Primary among these

Stewardship, from a Bahai point of view means that the value of nature and its preservation cannot be expressed in sheer economic terms. A more balanced approach to sustainable development can only result when planners have a deep understanding of the signicance of the natural realm in the material and spiritual development of all humanity. Consequently, good stewardship and prudent management of the Earths resources is not merely an add-on that is developed in response to a paucity of the resources, but rather an essential and fundamental responsibility that must be given fullest consideration at all times. Good stewardship doesnt involve rescuing nature from environmental disasters. It involves long-term planning that minimizes any possibilities of such emergencies occurring. Material development which serves solely an economic master is not a model favored by the Bahais. They believe that the diverse peoples of the world will be more inclined to support development policies and programs if they are based on spiritual principles and the inherent dignity of the human being. As such, Bahais have proposed that spiritual indicators be applied to measure the value of development in terms of its impact on the spiritual, cultural and social advancement of humanity. These indicators are drawn from the essential teachings of Bahaullah. For example, one of the main tenets of the Bahai Faith is that men and women are equal. Bahais believe that just and sustainable development will only be possible when women worldwide are welcomed as equal co-partners in every eld of endeavor.
For Bahais, the commitment to the emancipation of women is not a recent development nor is equality of the sexes a vague ideal. It is our conviction that the unication of the human race depends on the establishment of the equality of men and women. (Bahai International Community, 1998b)

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Another of the Bahai development indicators concerns the equitable distribution of wealth. One of the basic tenets of the Bahai Faith is the need to redress the extremes of wealth and poverty whereby absolute impoverishment and lavish luxury are virtually side by side. Experts tells us that there are enough resources in the world to meet the needs of all humanity. Therefore, to eliminate poverty, we will need to nd more equitable methods of distribution and we will need to moderate excessive and sometimes wasteful consumption and the accumulation of wealth for its own sake. At the same time, nations will need to develop fair and equitable trade relations built on the principle that the trading partners are true equals. If development is to be sustainable, the Bahais suggest the following:
Wealth is most commendable, provided the entire population is wealthy. If, however, a few have inordinate riches while the rest are impoverished, and no fruit or benet accrues from that wealth, then it is only a liability to its possessor. If, on the other hand, it is expended for the promotion of knowledge, the founding of elementary and other schools, the encouragement of art and industry, the training of orphans and the poor in brief, if it is dedicated to the welfare of society its possessor will stand out before God and man as the most excellent of all who live on Earth and will be accounted as one of the people of paradise. (Abdul Baha, 1990)

relations, and reform in the behavior and patterns of human consumption. Drawing on these teachings, the BIC prepared a statement for the proposed Earth Charter for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in 1992. In the document, the Bahais outlined the process for achieving universally acceptable standards:
It is our conviction that any call to global action for environment and development must be rooted in universally accepted values and principles. Similarly, the search for solutions to the worlds grave environmental and developmental problems must go beyond technical utilitarian proposals and address the underlying causes of the crisis. Genuine solutions, in the Bahai view, will require a globally accepted vision for the future, based on unity and willing cooperation among the nations, races, creeds, and classes of the human family. Commitment to a higher moral standard, equality between the sexes, and the development of consultative skills for the effective functioning of groups at all levels of society will be essential. (Bahai International Community, 1997c)

Universal education is one of the requirements that will speed the advent of a world united to promote common cause. Education that promotes a world consciousness and the understanding that there is an integral connection between every human being will create the conditions in which humanity is united to meet environmental and developmental challenges. Unity is a prerequisite for any effort to safeguard the Earths habitat. The type of unity envisioned by the Bahais encompasses much more than just geography, climatology or biology. Rather, it is the outgrowth of an undying belief that humanity is a one world community. In such a community, it seems only logical that matters of economic relations and sustainable development must be addressed with a balanced universal perspective that takes into account the worlds many cultures and resources.

The document proposed that representatives of the worlds religions be assembled, possibly under the auspices of the World Bank or the UN Development Programme, to consult about spiritual principles and their impact on both the individual and the progress of society (Bahai International Community, 1998a). Such an assemblage, the Bahais believe, could reach common agreement on a limited number of spiritual principles and how these would provide a basis for developing policy priorities. Based on this agreement, goals and benchmarks for progress would be established and monitored by the organization under whose auspices the assemblage is convened. The Bahais believe that the world religions can take the initiative and collaborate because of the common thread that unites all of the worlds major religious traditions.
The changes required to reorient the world toward a sustainable future imply degrees of sacrice, social integration, seless action, and unity of purpose rarely achieved in human history. These qualities have reached their highest degree of development through the power of religion. Therefore, the worlds religious communities have a major role to play in inspiring these qualities in their members, releasing latent capacities of the human spirit and empowering individuals to act on behalf of the planet, its peoples, and future generations. (Bahai International Community, 1997c)

PROPOSED COURSES OF ACTION

Calling on principles enunciated in the revelation of Bahaullah, whom Bahais regard as the messenger and prophet from God for this age of humanity, the Bahais of the world have proposed specic courses of action that will protect the environment and dene the parameters of sustainable development. Over 100 years ago, Bahaullah called for an international legal system, sharing of the worlds resources, a realignment of the worlds economic and governmental

Furthermore, the cooperation of an international development agency would signal their recognition of the significance of the spiritual dimension of human nature. Already the internationally accepted Agenda 21 and The Habitat Agenda have acknowledged that the spiritual needs of the individual and of society are signicant factors in human progress and are inseparable from ecological, economic, social, and cultural development. The next step would involve the development of consultative processes on both the national and local

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levels whereby communities would be encouraged to utilize and develop their own independent spiritual measures for action, derived from the larger plan. Such plans and policies would likely have the backing of many and would receive the formalized support of religious authorities and institutions. In a reection of the Bahai administrative order, which has no clergy but devolves responsibility on each individual right down to the local community, the Faith stresses the importance of local action in any initiatives.
Development must be decentralized in order to involve communities in formulating and implementing the decisions and programs that affect their lives. Such a decentralization need not conict with a global system and strategy, but would in fact ensure that developmental processes are adapted to the planets rich cultural, geographic, and ecological diversity. (Bahai International Community, 1997c)

Bahais believe that the individual has a key role in the unfolding of a planetary system of sustainable development. Therefore, acknowledging the spiritual dimension of humanity and providing for the moral, emotional, physical and intellectual development and education of each person will be a building block toward a new vision of planetary society. To meet the environmental and development challenges, Bahais afrm that the top-down model of community development will need to give way to a more participatory, knowledge-based and values-driven process of governance. When people view the decision-making process as something they own not as a remote and Byzantine system of laws they will accept their responsibility for shaping a new world. At the very core of the environmental and developmental crises facing humanity, Bahais believe, there is a lack of moral leadership that pervades every level of decision making from the highest levels of government to the family unit itself. This is evidenced by the constant discovery of political scandals that reveal a bankruptcy of ethical leadership. Humanity may have even lost its ability to dene and identify morality in leadership because of the barrage of messages that obfuscate and confuse the issue. While the worlds religions, development organizations, governments and individuals are all called upon to play a role in sustainable development, long-term solutions will require a new and integrated vision of global society. This vision will have as its underpinnings and its charter, a new set of values based on the belief that all of humanity is one. For Bahais, the very bedrock and hope for a sustainable new world order is the acceptance of the oneness of humanity. This principle will cause the restructuring of the worlds administration to reect the fact that the world is one nation. This does not mean that any culture or nation must abandon its distinctive identity. In fact, the entire principle of unity in diversity, which the Bahai Faith

champions, supports and actively encourages each peoples right to maintain, protect and uphold its distinctiveness in the face of the homogenizing inuences of international capital. In the Bahai view, world unity is not mutually exclusive of cultural diversity and national autonomy. Each person can legitimately have a balanced sense of pride in his or her culture and national identity. However, every person is called to a broader notion of loyalty: the uplifting and progress of the human soul, of every human being and the entire world civilization. The Bahai approach emphasizes that the world is one nation and it calls for a universal auxiliary language, which may in the future prove to be English. The yet to be determined auxiliary language will facilitate inter-cultural communication and will not replace peoples own mother tongues. Each individual maintains the right to preserve his or her cultural identity and mother tongue.
In the view of the BIC, acceptance of the oneness of humanity is the rst fundamental prerequisite for this reorganization and administration of the world as one country, the home of humankind. Recognition of this principle does not imply abandonment of legitimate loyalties, the suppression of cultural diversity, or the abolition of national autonomy. It calls for a wider loyalty, for a far higher aspiration than has so far animated human efforts. It clearly requires the subordination of national impulses and interests to the imperative claims of a unied world. It is inconsistent not only with any attempt to impose uniformity, but with any tendency towards excessive centralization. Its goal is well captured in the concept of unity in diversity. (Bahai International Community, 1997d)

The BIC believes that the change in consciousness that would be represented by the adoption of the term world citizenship is a prerequisite before the peoples of the planet can accept and promote a coordinated and reasonable approach to global sustainable development. The entire idea of world citizenship can only take hold when one accepts the inter-relatedness of all human beings, of the impact of their actions upon each other. It means that the world is no longer constituted of billions of discrete beings and scores of disconnected governments and trans-national corporations. With the advent of world citizenship, each accepts that his or her actions in any part of the globe is likely to have impacts well beyond the local or regional spheres of inuence. The Bahai understanding of the implications of world citizenship extends beyond simply a new passport or slogan:
World citizenship encompasses the principles of social and economic justice, both within and between nations; non-adversarial decision making at all levels of society; equality of the sexes; racial, ethnic, national and religious harmony; and the willingness to sacrice for the common good. (Bahai International Community, 1997e)

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The BIC believes that the most effective method for promoting sustainable development is logically through adoption of world citizenship. The full meaning and import of world citizenship will have an impact on the way nations conduct themselves with each other. When humanity and its economic, social, and political orders are preoccupied with disunity, antagonism and rigid provincialism, the Bahais submit that there is no room for a concerted worldwide strategy on sustainable development. In other words, any effort to realize sustainable development can only be marginally successful without the animating principles of world citizenship and one-world homeland. The prerequisites clearly call for harmony and unity amongst all peoples and nations of the world. In a paper entitled World Citizenship: a Global Ethic for Sustainable Development, presented to the rst session of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, 14 25 June 1993, the BIC re ected at length on the necessary rst step of establishing the concept of world citizenship. They went so far as to lay out a plan for its introduction and the requisite actions of the world leaders.
They should foster an ethic of service to the common good and convey an understanding of both the rights and the responsibilities of world citizenship. Using the concept of world citizenship as an integrating theme, the UN should publicize its ideals, activities and goals, so that people come to understand the unique and vital role the UN plays in the world and, therefore, in their lives. Similarly, the UN should promote world citizenship in all its public activities, including celebrations of its historical milestones and tours of UN headquarters. Every UN document that deals with sustainable development should also include this principle beginning with the preamble of the proposed Earth Charter. World citizenship must become the single most important point of ethical reference in all UN activities. The services of the advertising industry should be enlisted to promote world citizenship. (Baha i International Community, 1997e)

In such a world society [t]he economic resources of the world will be organized, its sources of raw materials will be tapped and fully utilized, its markets will be coordinated and developed, and the distribution of its products will be equitably regulated The enormous energy dissipated and wasted on war, whether economic or political, will be consecrated to such ends as will extend the range of human inventions and technical development, to the increase of the productivity of mankind, to the extermination of disease, to the extension of scienti c research, to the raising of the standard of physical health, to the sharpening and re nement of the human brain, to the exploitation of the unused and unsuspected resources of the planet, to the prolongation of human life and to the furtherance of any other agency that can stimulate the intellectual, the moral and spiritual life of the entire human race.

According to the BIC, it is the actions of governments, non-governmental organizations, the forces of capital, society in general, and signi cant individuals that will determine how quickly humanity arrives at a universal consensus for sustainable development. The onus is on every party to consciously and deliberately give a thorough evaluation to the meaning of the goals toward which they are working. This will ensure that all parties can be effective partners in progress. The BIC says that clear goals, meaningful policies and standards, identi ed programs, and agreed upon indicators of progress are necessary if advancement toward humanity s common future is to be charted and regular corrections to that course determined and carried out (Baha i International Community, 1998a).

BAHAI ACTION ON SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Representing the world s Baha is, the BIC of ce at the UN has played a prominent role in the various UN-sponsored summits on the environment and sustainable development. Exemplary among these, was the participation of the BIC in the Earth Summit the Rio de Janeiro Conference in June 1992. The Baha is focused on the Earth Charter (see Earth Charter, Volume 5) which they felt was potentially the most signi cant document under consideration at Rio de Janeiro. In numerous languages they circulated nearly one million copies of the environmental and development statements of the BIC. In the opening paragraph of its presentation to a preparatory working group of the UNCED, the BIC wrote of the Charter:
It could offer a unifying vision for the future and articulate the values upon which a peaceful, prosperous and harmonious world society could practically be constructed. In so doing, the Earth Charter could lift the context of deliberations on humanity s future to a new level to the level of principle. Only discourse at the level of principle has the power to invoke a moral commitment, which will, in turn, make possible the discovery of enduring solutions to the many challenges confronting a rapidly integrating human society the Earth

THE PROMISE OF A BETTER FUTURE

The Baha is believe that there are dual processes at work in the world: the one best characterized as spiritualizing, embryonic, and bene cial to humanity; the other is the decaying and destruction of institutions and ways of thinking that no longer serve an evolving worldwide civilization. The Baha is are optimistic that humanity will survive the serious environment challenges and development issues facing it. They believe that the covenant God made with Abraham and Noah and has renewed with every Messenger sent to humanity is evidence of the long-term viability of humanity. This does not, however, allow humanity to abdicate its stewardship responsibilities nor the huge commitment to persevere and make sacri ces and changes that will transform the world. Shoghi Effendi (1980) looked forward to this renewal of civilization:

182 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE Charter can tap a powerful source of individual and collective motivation, which will be essential for the reorientation of the world toward a sustainable future. (Bahai International Community, 1997f)

8. 9. 10.

The Bahai presentation to UNCED urged that the idea of the oneness of humanity should be proclaimed in the preamble to the Charter, which should then be taught in the worlds schools and communicated worldwide in preparation for the organic change in the structure of society which it implies (Bahai International Community, 1997f). In fact, the landmark Peace Monument unveiled at the conclusion of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro was an initiative of the BIC. At the Summits closing ceremony, soil from some 40 nations was deposited by children into the 5-m high monument. Each year since the Summit, World Environment Day in Rio includes a ceremony at the monument during which soil from other nations is added. The inscription on the monument is the words of Bahaullah: The Earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens. Both Bahai communities and individual Bahais are in the forefront of activities aimed at furthering conservation and sustainable development. The following list is a small sample of projects Bahais are involved with worldwide: 1. 2. The establishment of a Bahai ofce of the environment as an adjunct of the BIC ofce at the UN. Issuing a 1989 compilation of Bahai writings Conservation of the Earths Resources. The text has been studied by Bahai communities worldwide. Numerous national and local Bahai communities have established their own environmental ofces and committees, often in cooperation with like-minded organizations. In Japan, Canada, Brazil, Taiwan, Colombia, the Philippines and other nations, Bahai communities have established curricula for education about the environment. Nur University in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, an institution of higher learning, established on Bahai principles, offers a Masters degree in Development. A range of publications dealing with environmental and developmental issues is now published by Bahais. This includes: One Country, a quarterly newsletter of the BIC; Ecologia Y Unidad Mundial, an Argentine Bahai newspaper; and others. The Bahai Vocational Institute for Rural Women, located in India and the Clean and Beautiful Swaziland campaign founded by a Bahai Dr Irma Allen have both received Global 500 Awards from the UN Environment Programme. An organic farming project by the Bahai community of Japan teaches how to grow food without articial fertilizers or pesticides.

11. 12. 13.

In rural Kenya, a Bahai-sponsored development project encourages and empowers village women to develop their own entrepreneurial weaving businesses. In Bolivia and Malaysia, Bahai communities have launched sh farming projects. Bahais in the UK, the Philippines, Singapore and Taiwan have all organized and/or sponsored arts and educational activities geared to creating awareness of the fragile environment and conservation. Local Bahai communities in the UK have become active proponents of Local Agenda 21, working with partner groups and with local authorities. Working in collaboration with other organizations, the BIC hosted two World Forestry Charter Gatherings in 1989 and 1994. The BIC made a formal presentation to the World Faiths and Development Dialogue hosted by the President of the World Bank and the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace during the Lambeth Conference, February 1998.

Finally, as if to address directly the very issue of environmental biodiversity and sustainable growth, the architecture and landscaping of each of the Bahai Holy Sites around the world is a model of the blending of natural and architectural beauty, efciency and diversity. Each of these sites features a diverse range of ora to reect the Faiths teachings about diversity and the buildings are designed to complement and augment their surroundings. For more information, visit: www.bahai.org the ofcial website of the worldwide Bahai community; www.bic-un.bahai.org/i-e-env.htm a page of the website of the BIC ofce at the UN, which lists and links to environmental papers released by the BIC.

3.

REFERENCES
Abdul Baha (1982) Selections from the Writings of Abdul Baha, Bahai World Centre, Haifa, Section 137, 157. Abdul Baha (1990) The Secret of Divine Civilization, Bahai Publishing Trust, Wilmette, 24 25. Abdul Baha (1995) Paris Talks, 12th edition, Bahai Publishing Trust, London, 9. Bahai International Community (1997a) Sustainable Development and the Human Spirit, UN. Bahai International Community (1997b) Sustainable Communities in an Integrating World, UN. Bahai International Community (1997c) Earth Charter, UN. Bahai International Community (1997d) International Legislation for Environment and Development, UN. Bahai International Community (1997e) World Citizenship: a Global Ethic for Sustainable Development, UN. Bahai International Community (1997f) The Earth Charter/Rio De Janeiro Declaration and the Oneness of Humanity, UN.

4.

5.

6.

7.

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Bahai International Community (1998a) Valuing Spirituality in Development, UN. Bahai International Community (1998b) Women and Men: Partnership for a Healthy Planet, UN. Bahaullah (1976) Gleanings from the Writings of Bahaullah, Bahai Publishing Trust, Wilmette, IL. Bahaullah (1979) Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, Bahai Publishing Trust, Wilmette, 44. Bahaullah (1982) Tablets of Bahaullah, Bahai World Centre, Haifa, 142. Shoghi Effendi (1933) Letter to an Individual Bahai, Through his Secretary, 17 February. Shoghi Effendi (1980) The World Order of Bahaullah, Bahai Publishing Trust, Wilmette, 203 204.

Bateson, Gregory
(1904 1980) Gregory Bateson was a British anthropologist, trained at St. Johns College, who built his career in the US, and who also made signicant and innovative contributions in the elds of communication, cybernetics, information, psychiatry and learning theory. He was the son of geneticist William Bateson who is regarded as the founder of the eld of genetics, and grandson of William Henry Bateson, who had been a master at St. Johns College where he brought about signicant reforms. Gregory was rst married to Margaret Mead with whom he pioneered the use of visual methods in ethnographic research in Bali (Lipset, 1980). They were parents of Mary Catherine Bateson, an anthropologist and contemporary author who collaborated with him and who carries on some elements of his work. Beginning with the publication of the ethnography Naven in 1936 (Bateson, 1958), a consistent underlying theme in all of Batesons work was a concern with science as a process of knowing rather than an accumulation of facts, and with the social implications of errors in scientic thought that occur as a result of what Whitehead referred to as the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, or that of regarding scientic explanation as a description of external and concrete phenomena, rather than as a product of interaction between the observer and that which is observed. A second fallacy he observed was that of seeking to control an interactive system of which one is a part, through quantitative measurement. An example of these types of errors is found in the characterization of ecosystems at a single level of analysis, as composed of discrete entities that respond mechanically to inputs and outputs of energy. According to Bateson, reliance on this type of analysis would only increase the likelihood of runaway ecological degradation, because the false sense of an ability to predict and control the factors of interest would only make a pathological system more efciently pathological. This would lead to more rapid selfdestruction, since it does not address the false premises upon which the model is based. Organizing society and technology around this false sense of control would also reduce exibility and thus the capacity to respond to ecological degradation (Bateson, 1979; Harries-Jones, 1995). The most famous example of this in Batesons work is the alcoholic who attempts to assert his mastery over his drinking problem by resorting to a stiff drink to bolster himself. Instead, Bateson stressed the importance of relationships that provide the basis for organization, and that are a greater limiting factor than energy. Relationships, which are sustained through communication of information rather

BAT (Best Available Technology)

The term BAT has undergone a signicant change in meaning since its introduction into environmental policy debates in the early 1970s. Initially, BAT meant regulation through a technological standard, under which the relevant government agency requires rms to employ the pollution control or abatement technology that yields the lowest level of pollution. The US Clean Air and Clear Water Acts also instructed regulators to consider feasibility and cost factors; BAT was interpreted to mean designating of the most effective currently demonstrated and cost-effective technology. These trade-offs were highlighted in various elaborations, including BAT economically achievable, BAT not entailing excessive costs, best available demonstrated technology, and best practicable technology. The actual practice of regulation by technological standard was soon criticized on two grounds. By the mid-1970s, it was widely viewed as having the effect of stalling or even freezing the introduction of new technology; though requiring use of particular technology created a stable base level of environmental protection, it also inhibited further progress by discouraging innovation. In the 1980s, critics contended that actual technological standards were emphasizing endof-pipe treatment rather than pollution prevention. Greater acceptance of economists arguments that market incentives would yield more pollution control at less overall cost, and environmentalists arguments for preventing or minimizing pollution through redesign of goods and industrial processes produced a very different policy debate in the early 1990s. BAT came to mean the production technology yielding the greatest reduction in pollution rather than a regulatory approach.
M J PETERSON USA

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than by energy ows, are also important as a source of information about context and meaning. Recursive relationships in turn lead to pattern, which cannot be characterized through linear logic and quantitative analysis, which are therefore inadequate for characterizing living systems. An example of this error is found in Darwinian theories of evolution, in which evolution is characterized as a linear process and a force of progress, which fails to account for organization and denies interdependent relationships among organisms and their environment (Bateson, 1979; HarriesJones, 1995). Another important contribution was his concept of the double-bind, a paradoxical and incoherent situation in which contradictory rules appear simultaneously relevant, such as when a child receives conicting cues from a parent, or in which a playful situation is understood literally. In other words, given that meaning changes with context, behavior is constrained by a perceived context or denition of a relationship that is no longer relevant, which leads to nonsensical beliefs. Context is taken to include relationships as well as fundamental premises and habitual behaviors that are seldom questioned, all of which constrain action, and that are normally taken as a given. In clusters, such beliefs have been linked to schizophrenia as well as to forms of common madness (Bateson, 1979; Jaeger, 1994). Associated with this is the concept of deutero- or double-loop learning, which refers to learning about context which, in contrast with rote-learning, provides a frame of reference and meaning to a given situation. Papers addressing these and related concepts were brought together and published in his best-known book, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Bateson, 1972). Bateson alluded a number of times to a new unnamed science, for which, in his nal book, Mind and Nature (Bateson, 1979) he offered a set of epistemological principles. In sum, he is widely regarded as having provided a new perspective on the ecological predicament. In retrospect, many of his ideas can be found embedded in the concepts of post-normal science and adaptive management of ecosystems (Tognetti, 1999).

Jaeger, C C (1994) Taming the Dragon Transforming Economic Institutions in the Face of Global Change, Gordon and Breach, Yverdon. Lipset, D (1980) Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist, Beacon Press, Boston, MA. Tognetti, S S (1999) Science in a Double-bind: Gregory Bateson and the Origins of Post-Normal Science, Futures, 31, 689 704.
SYLVIA S TOGNETTI USA

Best Available Technology (BAT)

see BAT (Best Available Technology) (Volume 5)

Biocentrism
see Environmental Ethics (Volume 5)

Brent Spar
The public protest against the dumping of an oil-contaminated derelict off-shore petroleum platform was a watershed in the clout of non-government organizations. Transnational giant, Royal Dutch Shell, backed down in the face of massive public outrage organized by Greenpeace. The Brent Spar, a 4000-tonne oil installation, was to be towed from the North Sea and dumped in the North Atlantic, pursuant to a permit issued by the government of the UK on February 16th, 1995. Greenpeace launched protests in May, 1995 including the occupation of the rig off-shore by scientists and others. Greenpeace argued that dumping a rig at sea would set a dangerous precedent and would undo the progress against ocean dumping. North Sea environment ministers were to meet in June in Denmark on the issue of ocean discharges of hazardous substances within the Oslo and Paris Commission (OSPARCOM). The Brent Spar issue caught re in a dramatic way as Greenpeace catalyzed a massive public outcry against Shell. Shell, its reputation already severely damaged by allegations of environmental and human rights abuses in the Niger Delta, initially rejected its critics complaints. It had never backed down in the face of public protest, even in the high-prole and international controversy that followed the death of author and Shell critic Ken Saro-Wiwa at the hands of Nigerian dictator General Abacha.

REFERENCES
Bateson, G (1958) Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View, 2nd edition, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Bateson, G (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Chandler, San Francisco, CA. Bateson, G (1979) Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, Bantam Books, New York. Harries-Jones, P (1995) A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson, University of Toronto Press, Toronto.

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But the growing momentum in the movement opposed to dumping the Brent Spar increased. By June, Shell reversed itself and, although the towing of the installation was already underway, announced it would not dump the Brent Spar at sea but would tow it into a Norwegian fjord, where it remains today. Subsequently, the controversy is remembered as one of exaggerated claims about the degree of contamination of the oil installation by Greenpeace, which has admitted its estimates subsequently proved false. Greenpeace, however, maintains that despite its errors, the precedent against ocean dumping of oil installations was important and one which was subsequently endorsed by 11 of the 13 North Sea nations within OSPARCOM.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada

working to integrate peace, environmental, human rights and social justice groups. His biography, Encounters with the Archdruid by John McPhee, is in its 27th printing. Brower is best remembered for his successful campaigns to keep dams out of Dinosaur National Monument, the Yukon and the Grand Canyon. He also played a signicant role in the creation of national parks and seashores in Kings Canyon, the Redwoods, the North Cascades, Alaska and Cape Cod, among many others.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada

Buddhism and Ecology Brower, David

(1912 2000) David Brower was one of North Americas leading environmentalists. Over his extremely active life, he founded and steered some of the worlds most inuential environmental organizations. In all things, he was supported by Anne Brower, his equally ecologically aware wife. An accomplished climber and ski mountaineer enthusiast, David Brower joined the Sierra Club in 1933, and was elected to its national board in 1941 (see Sierra Club, Volume 5). He became the organizations rst executive director in 1952, a position he held until 1969. Under his leadership the organization grew from 2000 to 77 000 members. In 1969, he left the club staff on request. Despite a number of policy differences, Brower continued to be perennially elected to the Sierra Club Board (in 1983, 1986, 1995 and 1998), resigning in 2000 complaining that the organization lacked a sense of urgency in its campaigns. He died 6 months later. In 1969, Brower turned his attention to the creation of a grassroots, activist organization, Friends of the Earth (FoE) (see Friends of the Earth, Volume 5). Brower realized his vision of a truly global organization with member groups in 63 countries. But, once again, as executive director of FoE (US), he experienced conict with the board of directors. Brower believed FoE should pursue nuclear disarmament. The culminating issue was the board directive to relocate national headquarters from San Francisco to Washington, DC. Browers intransigence led to his termination in 1982. When Brower went to court to challenge the FoE Boards action, the news made the front page of the New York Times. In 1982, Brower founded Earth Island Institute as well as the biennial Fate and Hope of the Earth Conferences, During its 2500 year history, Buddhism has evolved across a wide range of physical and cultural geographies. From the Theravada traditions in tropical South and Southeast Asia, to the Mahayana schools in temperate and climatically diverse China and Japan, to the Vajrayana lineages in mountainous Tibet, the Buddhist teachings have been received, modi ed, and elaborated in many ecological contexts. Across this history, Buddhist understandings about nature and human-nature relations have been based on different teachings, texts, and cultural views. These have not been consistent by any means; in fact, some views directly contradict each other. Scholars debate whether or not Buddhist philosophies of nature led to any recognizable ecological awareness among early Buddhists. Most members of early Buddhist societies, including many monks, preferred the comforts of village life over the threats of the wild. Only forest ascetics chose the hermitage path with its immersion in wild nature. The word (nature) itself has many different meanings in various Asian languages. Concepts and attitudes towards nature vary across time and place as well. Indian Buddhist literature, for example, shows relatively little respect for wild nature, preferring tamed nature instead; Japanese Buddhism reveres the wild but engages it symbolically through highly developed art forms. Even with these distinctions, Buddhist texts do contain many references to the natural world, both as inspiration for teachings and as a source for ethical behavior. For those exploring Buddhist teachings in the context of the environmental crisis, Buddhist traditions are potential sources for philosophical and behavioral guidelines towards nature. From the earliest guidelines for forest monks to

Stephanie Kaza
University of Vermont, Burlington, USA

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the hermitage songs of Milarepa, from the Jataka tales of compassion to Zen teachings on mountains and rivers, the inheritance is rich and diverse.

EARLY BUDDHIST VIEWS OF NATURE

Buddhism developed as a major world religion in the 5th century before the common era (BCE) in north India, where the historical Buddha lived and taught. At the time, the region was undergoing ecological upheaval through the growth of urban centers and political centralization. Previously uninhabited forests were cleared for agricultural expansion and town development. Wild areas that were home to rhinos, elephants, tigers, and large snakes, were seen as lled with threat but also available as marginal land. The Buddha and his followers took advantage of some of these lands but adapted their teaching and retreat times to accommodate the farming seasons and to draw on local community support. In the canonical story of the Buddha, there are many references to nature, especially trees. The Buddha to be, Siddharta, was born the son of a king of the Shakya tribe in the foothills of the Himalayas. His birth took place under a tree, and as a young man, Siddharta spent many years wandering in the forests and mountains of India in pursuit of spiritual understanding. At the time of his enlightenment, he had been sitting at the foot of a large bodhi tree (Ficus religiosa) for seven days. According to the story, the Buddha vowed not to move from the tree until he gained some understanding of the source of human suffering. For many years after, he taught in shaded groves to large gatherings of monks and lay people. After six days and nights of sitting in meditation, in a state of great concentration, he perceived all his previous lives in a continuous cycle of birth and death, and then saw the vast universe of birth and death for all beings. From this he came to understand the law of cause and effect or karma and the universal existence of suffering due to impermanence. This was the First Noble Truth. Then he realized the driving force behind birth and death, craving or attachment to existence: the Second Noble Truth. As the Buddha saw that all phenomena, i.e., all of nature, arise from complex sets of causes and conditions, he realized that liberation from suffering lay in this very insight: the law of mutual causality or dependent origination (in Sanskrit pratityasamutpada, in Pali paticca samuppada). This was the Third Noble Truth: the path to release from suffering. He further laid out a prescription for practice in the Fourth Noble Truth of the Eight-fold Path. He named right livelihood, right practice, and right speech, among others, as methods for achieving release from suffering. The Buddha s profound appreciation for the universal existence of suffering engendered in him a lifetime compassionate response, expressed in the form of sharing his

teachings with others. He saw that compassion (karuna ) and loving kindness (metta ) for all beings arises directly from this understanding of the nature of suffering. Early Buddhism was strongly in uenced by the Hindu and Jain principle of ahimsa or non-harming. Buddhist teachings urged monks not to harm any living thing; killing animals for food was against the monastic code. The classic Jataka Tales of India recount the many former lives of the Buddha as an animal or tree when he showed great compassion to others who were suffering. Over 500 tales have been handed down from the oral tradition, ranging from simple animal fables to fragments of heroic epics. It is said that the verses and stories were told by the Buddha himself as a way of commenting on particular life situations challenging his students. In each of the tales, the Buddha-to-be sets a strong moral example of compassion for plants and animals in his many lifetimes before his rebirth as the Buddha (Beswick, 1956). The Agganna Sutta from the Pali Canon collection of early Buddhist texts relates the Buddhist counterpart of a creation story in which human activities clearly affect their environment. The original beings are described as selfluminous, subsisting on bliss and freely traveling through space. At that time it is said that the earth was covered with a avorful substance much like butter from which greed originated. The more butter that the beings ate, the more solid their bodies became. Difference of form appeared and the more beautiful ones developed conceit and looked down on the others. Self-growing rice appeared on the earth to replace the butter and before long, people began hoarding and then stealing food. As people erred in their ways, the richness of the earth declined. The point of the sutta is to show that environmental health is bound up with human morality (Ryan, 1998). Other suttas also spell out the environmental impacts of greed, hate, and ignorance, showing how these three poisons produce both internal and external pollution. In contrast, the practice of generosity, compassion, and wisdom can reverse such environmental decline and produce health and purity. The early monastic code, the Vinaya, contained a number of guidelines for caring for the environment (De Silva, 2000). Monks were not to travel during the rainy season for fear of killing the worms and insects that come to the surface in wet weather. Similarly, monks were not to dig in the ground or drink unstrained water. Even wild animals were to be treated with kindness. Plants too were not to be injured carelessly but respected for all they give to people. Buddhists adopted a reverential attitude toward large trees, carrying on the Indian tradition regarding vanaspati or lords of the forest. Some of these huge trees were thought to be former Buddhas; protecting trees and preserving open lands were considered meritorious deeds. The Buddha constantly urged his followers to choose natural habitats to engage

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in meditation, free from the inuence of everyday human activity.

NORTHERN VIEWS
As Indian Buddhism developed into many strands of philosophy and practice, teachings were carried north to China. Each sect emphasized particular texts, principles, and practices, each with varying degrees of application to environmental concerns. The Hua Yen school of Buddhism, which arose in 7th century in China, placed particular emphasis on the law of interdependence or mutual causality. Ecological understanding of natural systems ts very well within the Buddhist description of interdependence (Cook, 1989). Throughout many cultural forms of Buddhism, nature is perceived as relational, each phenomenon dependent on a multitude of causes and conditions. These causes include not only physical and biological factors but also historical and cultural factors, i.e., human thought forms and values. The Hua Yen Avatamsaka or Flower Ornament Sutra used a teaching metaphor, the Jewel Net of Indra, to communicate the innite complexity of the multi-causal universe. This cosmic net contains a multifaceted jewel at each of its nodes, with each jewel reecting all the others. If any of the jewels becomes cloudy (toxic or polluted), the less clearly it reects the others. To extend the metaphor, stresses on any of the net lines, e.g., through loss of species or habitat, affect all the other lines. Likewise, if clouded jewels are cleared up (rivers cleaned, wetlands restored), life across the net is enhanced. Because the net of interdependence includes not only the actions of all beings but also their thoughts, the intention of the actor becomes a critical factor in determining what happens. This, then, provides both a principle of explanation for the way things are, and a path for positive action. The law of interdependence suggests a powerful corollary, sometimes noted as emptiness of separate self. If all phenomena are dependent on interacting causes and conditions, nothing exists by itself, autonomous and selfsupporting. This Buddhist understanding (and experience) of self directly contradicts the traditional Western sense of self as a discrete individual. Philosopher Alan Watts called this assumption of separateness the skin encapsulated ego, the very delusion that Buddhist practices seek to cut through. Interpreting the Hua Yen metaphor, modern American poet Gary Snyder suggests the empty nature of self provides a link to the wild mind, or access to the forces that determine the nature of life (Snyder, 1995). These forces act outside of human inuence, setting the historical, ecological, and even cosmological context for life. Tien-tai monks in 8th century China believed in a universal Buddha nature that dwelled in all forms of life. Sentient (animal) and non-sentient (plant) beings and

even the earth itself were seen as capable of achieving enlightenment. This concept of Buddha nature is closely related to Chinese views of chi or moving energy that is ever changing, always taking on new forms. Thus their views of nature reect a dynamic sense of ow and interconnection between all beings, with Buddha nature arising and transforming constantly. Northern or Mahayana schools also came to emphasize the path of the bodhisattva, one who vows to serve others until all the worlds suffering is extinguished. Where earlier Theravada schools emphasized achieving enlightenment and leaving the world of suffering, the northern schools inuenced by Confucian social codes, placed great value on service to others. Tibetan schools reinforced this vow by encouraging people to treat all sentient beings as possibly having been their mother in a former life. Bodhisattva acts of service are thus personally motivated, creating a foundation for a kind of virtue ethic. This directly applies to relations with plants and animals as well as people, encouraging environmental protection and kindness as important to enlightenment. As Zen Buddhism became established in Japan, monastic temples were often built in mountainous or forested places. The strong tradition of haiku and other classic verse forms cultivated a sense of oneness with nature, from insects to landforms. Dogen (12001253), founder of the Soto sect of Zen, spoke of mountains and waters as sutras themselves, the very evidence of the Dharma arising (Dogen, 1986). He taught a method of direct knowing, experiencing the dharma of nature with no separation. The goal of meditation was non-dualistic understanding, complete communion or transmission between two beings. Dogen showed how much of human suffering described in the First Noble Truth generates from egoistic views based in dualistic understanding. Enlightenment is then the breakthrough or liberation from these views to experience the self and myriad beings as one interpenetrating whole.

MODERN BUDDHIST ECOLOGICAL VIEWS

Buddhist environmental teachers and writers at the beginning of the 21st century emphasize ve primary arenas of practice and philosophy which support an environmental view: interdependence, compassion, mindfulness, nondualistic views, and detachment from self (Kaza and Kraft, 2000). At the heart of the Buddhas path is reective inquiry into the nature of reality. Some people experience interdependence in its more ecstatic forms of communion with plants and animals or sacred places. But engaging interdependence in todays environmental context also means undertaking rigorous examination of conditioned beliefs and thought patterns regarding the natural world. This would include such challenges as objectication of plants and animals, stereotyping of environmentalists, dualistic

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thinking of enemyism, the impacts of materialism, and environmental racism. The law of interdependence is based on an understanding of the nature of the many relations at play in a situation. This could mean, for example, assessing whos who in an environmental conict from a context of historical and geographical causes and conditions. Such investigation includes learning about ecological relationships under siege as well as observing the distribution of power across human political relationships. The practice of ahimsa or non-harming arises from a true experience of compassion. Buddhist precepts or ethical guidelines are based fundamentally on reducing the suffering of others. The rst precept, not killing, has been applied to environmental dilemmas related to food, land use, pesticides, pollution, and cultural economic invasion. The second precept, not stealing, suggests examining the implications of global trade and corporate exploitation of resources. Not lying brings up issues in advertising and consumerism. Not engaging in abusive relations covers a broad realm of cruelty and disrespect for non-human others. Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh interprets the precept prohibiting drugs and alcohol to include the toxic addictions of television, video games, and junk magazines. Non-harming extends to all beings, not merely to those who are useful or irritating to humans. It has also been applied to environmental oppression of plants, animals, rivers, rocks, and mountains as well as to human oppression based on race, class, or gender discrimination. This Green Buddhist teaching is congruent with many schools of ecophilosophy, which respect the intrinsic value and capacity for experience of each being. Mindfulness practice, a natural support to Buddhist environmentalism, is being taught in a range of contexts. The basic teachings of the Satipatthana Sutta or the mindfulness text, cultivate awareness of breath, body, feelings, and mind. Walking and sitting meditation are used to generate a sense of centered presence and alertness. Such mindfulness generates appreciation and respect toward the natural world, with practices related to food and eating, time and place, and personal wellbeing. Those practicing mindfulness are encouraged to slow down, consider their actions carefully, and make every effort not to cause suffering to others, including plants and animals. Most political battles play out as confrontations between apparent enemies: loggers verses spotted owl defenders, housewives verses toxic polluters, bird lovers verses pesticide producers. From a Buddhist perspective, this kind of dualistic hatred destroys spiritual equanimity. Thus it is much better to work from an inclusive perspective, offering kindness to all parties involved, even while setting rm moral boundaries against harmful actions. A Buddhist orientation to non-dualism can help to stabilize a volatile situation and establish new grounds for negotiation.

Buddhist texts emphasize a strong relationship between intention, action, and karmic (actions in a previous existence) effects of an action. If an environmental campaign is undertaken out of spite, revenge, or rage, that emotional tone will carry forth into all the ripening of the fruits of that action (and likely cause a similar reaction in response). However, if an action is based in understanding that the other party is also part of Indras Jewel Net, then things unfold with less antagonism. Perhaps the most signicant teaching of the Dharma relevant to Buddhist activism is the practice of detachment from the ego-generating self. Thus, a Buddhist approach to environmental activism would be non-heroic, i.e., not motivated primarily by the need for ego identity or satisfaction. Strong intention with less orientation to the self relieves the activist from focusing so strongly on results. One does what is necessary in the situation, not bound by the need to reinforce ones ideas or to have it turn out a certain way. Small b Buddhists have been able to act as bridge builders in hostile or reactive situations by toning down the need for personal recognition. Cautioning against the self-serving ego, Buddhist teachers emphasize the power of kalyana mitta, or spiritual friendship: acting together in mutual support to help others practice the Dharma and take care of this world. The Buddhist path of liberation includes the practice of physical, emotional, and mental awareness. Such practice can increase appreciation for the natural world; it can also reveal cultural assumptions about privilege, comfort, consumption, and the abuse of nature. Scholar Alan Sponberg suggests that a Buddhist environmental ethic is a virtue ethic, based fundamentally on development of consciousness and a sense of responsibility to act compassionately for the benet of all forms of life. Through the practice of Green virtue ethics, modern teachers encourage students to be environmentally accountable for their actions, from eating food, to using a car, to buying new clothes. Through following the fundamental precepts, environmentally oriented Buddhists can practice moderation and restraint, simplifying needs and desires in order to reduce suffering of others.

RECENT HISTORY OF BUDDHISM AND ECOLOGY

In the last few decades, Buddhists around the world have responded creatively to environmental problems, drawing on principles of Buddhist philosophy and practice. Forest monks in Thailand lead meditation walks around polluted areas; Tibetans collaborate with western nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to expose recent environmental destruction in Tibet. American Buddhists have worked on issues of consumerism, wilderness protection, and animal rights. One of the earliest voices for Buddhist

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environmentalism was Gary Snyder, North American Zen student and poet, who illuminated connections between Buddhist training and ecological activism. In the 1950s and 1960s, members of the Beat generation and the 1960s counterculture explored these links further, saying that spiritual leadership was necessary to halt planet-wide ecological destruction. In the 1970s the environmental movement swelled, and Buddhist centers became well established in the West. Some retreat centers confronted ecological issues head on. The Zen Mountain Monastery in New York faced off with the Department of Environmental Conservation over a beaver dam and forestry issues. The Green Gulch Zen Center in Northern California worked out water use agreements with its farming neighbors and with the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. At a time when vegetarianism was not a popular choice, most American Buddhist centers refrained from meat eating, often with awareness of the associated environmental problems. Several Buddhist centers made some effort to grow their own organic food. By the 1980s Buddhist leaders were explicitly addressing the eco-crisis and incorporating ecological awareness in their teaching. In his 1989 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, His Holiness the Dalai Lama proposed making Tibet an international ecological reserve. Vietnamese peace activist and Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh spoke of interbeing using ecological examples. Zen teachers Robert Aitken in Hawaii and Daido Loori in New York examined the Buddhist precepts from an environmental perspective. The US-based Buddhist Peace Fellowship, founded in 1978, gave prominence to environmental concerns on its activist agenda. In Thailand, village priests took the initiative to perform ritual ordination of signicant trees as a symbolic gesture of solidarity with threatened forests. Other monks engaged in efforts to question economic development and its environmental impacts. Plastic bags, toxic lakes, and nuclear reactors were targeted by Buddhist leaders as detrimental inuences on peoples physical and spiritual health. Similarly, in Tibet and Burma, Buddhist environmentalists drew attention to oil pipelines, hunting of endangered species, and threats to unique habitats. In the Western world, the topic of Buddhism and ecology was picked up by Buddhist publications, conferences, and retreat centers. The Buddhist Peace Fellowship produced a substantial packet and poster for Earth Day 1990. The rst popular anthology of Buddhism and ecology writings, Dharma Gaia, was published by Parallax Press that same year, following the more scholarly collection, Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought. World Wide Fund for Nature brought out a series of books on ve world religions, including Buddhism and Ecology. Buddhist magazines such as Tricycle, Shambhala Sun, Inquiring Mind, Turning Wheel,

and Mountain Record devoted whole issues to the question of environmental practice. In 1990 Middlebury College in Vermont hosted a conference on spirit and nature where the Dalai Lama stressed his commitment to protection of the environment. At the 1993 Parliament of the Worlds Religions in Chicago, when Buddhists gathered with Hindus, Muslims, pagans, Jews, Jains, and Christians from all over the world, a top agenda item was the role of religion in responding to the environmental crisis. Parallel interest in the academic community culminated in ten major conferences at Harvard University, dening a new eld of religion and ecology. The rst of these conferences, convened by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grimm in 1996, focused on Buddhism and Ecology (Tucker and Williams, 1997). The academic community, however, did not address the practice of Buddhist environmentalism. This was explored by socially engaged Buddhist teachers such as the Dalai Lama, Sulak Sivaraksa, John Daido Loori, Philip Kapleau, Bernie Glassman, Christopher Titmuss and Thich Nhat Hanh. Joanna Macy developed a transformative model of experiential teaching designed to cultivate motivation, presence, and authenticity. Her methods were strongly based in Buddhist meditation techniques and the Buddhist law of codependent arising. Working with John Seed, Buddhist Australian rainforest activist, she developed a ritual Council of All Beings to engage peoples attention and imagination on behalf of all beings (Seed et al., 1988). Thousands of councils have now taken place in Australia, New Zealand, the US, Germany, Russia, and other parts of the Western world.

BUDDHIST ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISM

Examples of Green Buddhism on the front lines are still relatively rare. They reect three major types of activism, which characterize environmentalism today: (1) holding actions of resistance; (2) structural analysis and alternatives; and (3) cultural transformation. Holding actions aim to stop or reduce destructive activity, buying time for more effective long-term strategies. In Northern California, a small group named the Ecosattvas has been protesting the logging of old-growth redwood groves. For one demonstration, they created a large prayer ag covered with human handprints to serve as a testimony of solidarity for those participating in the resistance actions. Later, several Ecosattvas made a pilgrimage into the heart of the Headwaters Forest, carrying a Tibetan treasure vase with gifts and prayers on behalf of the redwoods. Moved by the suffering of animals in research cages, factory farms, and export trade stores, two Zen students in the San Francisco area formed a Buddhist animal rights group. Drawing on principles of non-harming, they educated Buddhists about the plight of monkeys, beef cattle,

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and endangered parrots. One of them has continued this work in Europe, focusing on the cruelty of large-scale pig farming. Addressing the dangers of nuclear waste, a Berkeley-based study group protested the storage of nuclear waste below ground. As an alternative they developed a vision of nuclear guardianship for storage containers above ground that was based in Buddhist spiritual practice. In a parallel action, Zen student and artist Mayumi Oda helped to organize Plutonium Free Future and the Rainbow Serpents to stop shipments of deadly plutonium to Japan. The second type of activism, structural analysis and the creation of alternative visions, has also engaged modern Buddhists. In 1997 the Soka Gakkai afliated group, the Boston Research Center for the 21st Century, held a series of workshops addressing the peoples Earth Charter, an internationally negotiated set of ethical guidelines for humanEarth relations. The center published a booklet of Buddhist views on the charters principles to stimulate discussion before adoption by the United Nations (Morgante, 1997) (see Earth Charter, Volume 5). Members of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists and Buddhist Peace Fellowship started a Think Sangha to undertake structural analysis of global consumerism. Collaborating between the US and Southeast Asia, they held conferences in Thailand on Alternatives to Consumerism, pressing for moderation and lifestyle simplication. The third type of activism, transforming culture, is barely underway and is sometimes met with resistance. Buddhist centers in rural Northern California, the Green Gulch Zen Center and Spirit Rock, and the Zen Mountain Monastery in New York already demonstrate a serious commitment to the environment through vegetarian food practices, land and water stewardship efforts, and ceremonies which include the natural world. In the Sierra foothills of California, Gary Snyder has been a leader in establishing the Yuba River Institute, a bioregional watershed organization working in cooperation with the Bureau of Land Management. Members have undertaken survey work, controlled burns, and creek restoration projects with the local community. Planning ahead, Snyder estimates the level of commitment necessary to reinhabit a place and build a community that might eventually span generations. The Zen Mountain Center in Southern California is beginning similar work, carrying out resource management practices such as thinning for re breaks, restoring degraded forest, and limiting human access to preserve areas. Applying Buddhist principles in an urban setting, Zen teacher Bernard Glassman has developed environmentally oriented small businesses which employ local street people, selling products to socially responsible companies such as Ben and Jerrys. Several Buddhist centers have developed lecture series, classes, and retreats based on environmental themes. The Zen Mountain Monastery offers Mountains and Rivers retreats based on the centers commitment to environmental

conservation. These feature backpacking, canoeing, nature photography, and haiku (poems), as gateways to Buddhist insight. The Ring of Bone Zendo offers backpacking sesshins in the Sierra Mountains. The Green Gulch Zen Center co-hosts the Voice of the Watershed, a series of talks and walks across the landscape of the two valleys. The Manzanita Village in Southern California includes deep ecology practices, gardening, and nature observation as part of their mindfulness retreats. Most of these examples represent social change agents working within Buddhist or non-Buddhist institutions to promote environmental interests. In addition to these organizational initiatives, individual Buddhists are taking small steps to align their actions with their Buddhist practice. Many people, Buddhists included, are turning to vegetarianism and veganism (not eating animal products) as more compassionate eating choices for animals and ecosystems. Others are committed to eating only organically grown food, as a way to support pesticide-free soil and healthy farming. Sulak Sivaraksa in Thailand insists that the Western standard of consumption is untenable if extended throughout the world. Some Buddhists have joined support groups for reducing credit card debt, giving up car dependence, and creating work cooperatives. For many students, environmental awareness and personal change ow naturally from a Buddhist practice commitment.

CONCLUSION
How might Buddhism and ecology affect the larger environmental movement and how might it inuence Western Buddhism in general? Will Buddhist environmentalism turn out to be more environmental than Buddhist? The answers to these questions must be largely speculative at this time, since Green Buddhism is just gaining a footing. It is possible that this edgling voice will be drowned out in the brownlash against environmentalists, or in Western resistance to engaged Buddhism. Environmental disasters of survival proportions may overwhelm anyones capacity to act effectively. The synergistic combination of millennialism and economic collapse may atten Green Buddhism as well as many other constructive initiatives. But if one takes a more hopeful view, it seems possible to imagine that Green Buddhism will grow and take hold in the minds and hearts of young people who are creating the future. Perhaps some day there will be Ecosattva chapters across the world afliated with various practice centers. Perhaps Buddhist eco-activists will be sought out for their spiritual stability and compassion in the face of extremely destructive forces. Buddhist centers might become models of ecological sustainability, showing other religious institutions ways to encourage ecological culture. More Buddhist teachers may become informed about environmental issues

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and raise these concerns in their teachings, calling for moderation and restraint. That being said, Buddhism is not the only or necessarily the best path for dealing with the environmental crisis. Moral leadership and community organizing from all religious traditions are needed to stop the downward spiral of planetary ecological devastation. Committed practitioners of non-harming can inspire others who are trying to resist destructive practices. Ecologically articulate Buddhists can advance inter-religious dialogue to meet the challenges of global warming, over-consumption, and other systemic ills. Drawing on a Buddhist perspective, academics, policy analysts, and poets can bring fresh insights to once intractable problems. What happens next lies in the hands of those who are nurturing this wave of enthusiasm for Green Buddhism. Religious leaders, teachers, and scholars as well as younger generations, full of energy and passion for protecting the home they love, will determine the shape of Buddhism and ecology in the future. As the rate of environmental destruction continues to accelerate, many forms of dialogue and activism are sorely needed. Buddhism and its environmentally supportive teachings have much to offer. Like other world religions, this ancient tradition is being called once again to offer its wisdom and teachings in yet another context.

FURTHER READING
Batchelor, M and Brown, K (1992) Buddhism and Ecology, Cassell, London. Callicott, J B and Ames, R T (1989) Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY. Chapple, C K (1993) Nonviolence to Animals, Earth, and Self in Asian Traditions, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY. Habito, R L F (1993) Healing Breath: Zen Spirituality for a Wounded Earth, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY. Hunt-Badiner, A (1990) Dharma Gaia, Parallax Press, Berkeley, CA. Kapleau, P (1982) To Cherish All Life: a Buddhist Case for Becoming Vegetarian, Harper and Row, San Francisco, CA. Macy, J (1991) Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory: the Dharma of Natural Systems, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY. Macy, J and Molly, Y B (1998) Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World, New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, British Columbia. Nhat Hanh, T (1993) Love in Action, Parallax Press, Berkeley, CA. Queen, C (2000) Engaged Buddhism in the West, Wisdom Publications, Cambridge, MA. Schmidthausen, L (1997) The Early Buddhist Tradition and Ecological Ethics, J. Buddhist Ethics, 4, 1 42. Sivaraksa, S (1992) Seeds of Peace, Parallax Press, Berkeley, CA. Sivaraksa, S (1999) Socially-engaged Buddhism for the New Millennium, Suksit Siam, Bangkok. Snyder, G (1995) A Place in Space, Counterpoint Press, Washington, DC.

REFERENCES
Beswick, E (1956) Jataka Tales: Birth Stories of the Buddha, John Murray, London. Cook, F (1989) The Jewel Net of Indra, in Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought, eds B J Callicott and R T Ames, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY, 213 229. De Silva, L (2000) Early Buddhist Attitudes toward Nature, in Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism, eds S Kaza and K Kraft, Shambhala Publications, Boston, MA, 91 103. Dogen, E (1986) Shobogenzo: Zen Essays by Dogen, translated by T Cleary, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, HI. Kaza, S and Kraft, K (2000) Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism, Shambhala Publications, Boston, MA. Morgante, A (1997) Buddhist Perspectives on the Earth Charter, Boston Research Center for the 21st century, Cambridge, MA. Ryan, P D (1998) Buddhism and the Natural World: Toward a Meaningful Myth, Windhorse Publications, Birmingham. Seed, J, Macy, J, Fleming, P, and Naess, A (1988) Thinking like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings, New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, PA. Snyder, G (1990) The Practice of the Wild, North Point Press, San Francisco, CA. Tucker, M E and Duncan, R W (1997) Buddhism and Ecology: the Interconnectedness of Dharma and Deeds, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Business-as-usual Scenarios
A business-as-usual scenario is also called a surprise-free scenario. The expression was invented by Herman Kahn to describe a baseline scenario from which alternative scenarios can be created. It is based on current trend data assuming that no unusual events change the direction of the trends. Kahn also said that the biggest surprise would be if the surprise-free scenario actually occurred. Contrary to popular belief, the business-as-usual scenario does not imply that current conditions will remain unchanged; instead, these conditions change in the forseeable future based on current dynamics.
JEROME C GLENN USA

C
Capitalism
see Globalization in Historical Perspective (Opening essay, Volume 5)
pesticides, unleashed as a new arsenal of synthetic toxic substances at the end of the Second World War. Her work on the subject was originally published in The New Yorker magazine and then in book form as Silent Spring in 1962 (Carson, 1962). Silent Spring caused a storm of controversy. It became a best-seller, catalyzing environmental groups calling for the banning of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) and other chemicals linked in Carsons work with widespread damage to wildlife and to human health. The chemical industry lobby was well prepared for Silent Spring and launched a merciless attack on Carson. Although she had expected denials and debate over her claims, she was unprepared for the highly personal nature of the charges. As her obituary in The Baltimore Sun noted, industry spokesmen tried to depict her as a neurotic, frustrated, hysterical personality of no scientic standing, a mere popularizer and hobbyist. Unmarried and childless, the industry argued that such a woman could not legitimately claim concern for future generations. Rachel Carson defended her well researched work with appearances before Congressional committees. What the public did not know was that even as Silent Spring was published, Carson was already ghting breast cancer, the disease that would ultimately take her life just 18 months after publication of her most critical work. Before her death, she fullled a lifelong dream, to see the California Redwoods with Sierra Club executive director, David Brower (see Brower, David, Volume 5). David Brower attributed her success by telling her publisher, Paul Brooks, she did her homework, she minded her English and she cared. (Brooks, The House of Life.) Silent Spring remains a vitally important book 40 years after its publication. Far from stale, the book accurately anticipated many of the more subtle health risks of chemical pesticides, including endocrine disruption and xenooestrogenic effects. In Rachel Carsons own words, As crude a weapon as the cave mans club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life, Silent Spring (Carson, 1962). Despite her efforts and the movement she sparked, pesticide sales continue to soar and are now valued at tens of billions of dollars annually around the world.

Carson, Rachel Louise

(1907 1964) Rachel Louise Carson, scientist, author, and heroine to millions, launched the modern day environmental movement with warnings that humanity was poisoning itself and the biosphere. Her best selling book Silent Spring is her lasting legacy. Rachel Carson was born in 1907 in Pennsylvania, US. From her landlocked childhood, her afnity for the oceans began with graduate work in biology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. Financial constraints prevented Rachel Carsons pursuit of a doctorate, and she assumed a teaching position at the University of Maryland. She continued her marine eld research, teaching in the summer sessions at Johns Hopkins for 7 years. Her postgraduate research included studying at Woods Hole, MA. She became a government marine biologist and in the 1930s began her popular writing career with a series of articles in the Baltimore Sunday Sun. One expanded article was published in The Atlantic Monthly. That article ultimately was expanded into her rst book, Under the Sea Wind (Carson, 1941). The publication 10 years later of The Sea Around Us (Carson, 1951) gave Rachel Carson commercial success and fame. She resigned her job as a government marine biologist to more fully dedicate herself to writing about the growing threats to the natural world she loved. Carson next published in 1955, The Edge of the Sea (Carson, 1955), her third book described as a poetic biography of the ocean. It was quickly followed by The Sense of Wonder (Carson, 1956). The next phase of her lifes work was to collect and research the evidence of the damage caused by chemical

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REFERENCES
Carson, R L (1941) Under the Sea Wind, Oxford University Press, New York. Carson, R L (1951) The Sea Around Us, Oxford University Press, New York. Carson, R L (1955) The Edge of the Sea, Houghton Mifin, Boston, MA. Carson, R L (1956) The Sense of Wonder, Harper and Rowe, New York. Carson, R L (1962) Silent Spring, Houghton Mifin, Boston, MA.

FURTHER READING
Lear, L (1997) Rachel Carson: Witness to Nature, Holt, New York, 1 634 (see also Zuk, M (1997) Science, 298: 1897 for a book review).
ELIZABETH MAY Canada

in the future, thus a dollar today is worth more to an individual than a dollar receivable in one year), and because of the existence of a positive interest rate in the market. Discounting has the effect of reducing the scale of benets and costs that accrue far into the future. A social discount rate is often used. It does not reect a market rate, but is instead based on a social time preference rate or the social opportunity cost of capital. Discounting is criticized on the basis that it treats future generations unfairly. Depending on the choice of a discount rate, CBA may favor immediate consumption or diminish the value of environmental costs incurred far into the future.
KEVIN S HANNA Canada

CBA (Cost Benet Analysis)

CBA is a method for evaluating public sector investments. It ideally considers all benets (gain in utility) and costs (loss in utility) due to a project regardless of to whom they might accrue. CBA is also ideally timeless, in that all costs or benets are considered, irrespective of when they may occur. The method simply weighs, in monetary terms, benets versus costs. If benets are greater than costs, then the project is potentially acceptable. There are three main challenges associated with the approach: measurement, valuation, and discounting. The measurement of intangible costs and benets may be difcult or inappropriate in some contexts. Aesthetic, cultural, ecological, or social utility may not be easily amenable to quantication. Beyond the problem of measuring a utility, the assignment of a monetary valuation can also be difcult. The use of shadow prices (imputed value for an item that has no clear market value) or surrogate markets (where a shadow price can be developed from a marginal rate of substitution or transformation) are sometimes used to address valuation problems. An important problem in valuation is the accuracy or representativeness of the value assigned to a benet or cost, especially those that are inherently intrinsic. Discounting (see Discounting, Volume 5) is the process of nding the value today of future benets and costs. A rate of interest is applied to a sum (discounting is the reverse of compounding) to calculate present or future value. Future benets and costs are discounted because of the belief in time preference (people prefer benets today rather than

Changing HumanNature Relationships (HNR) in the Context of Global Environmental Change

see The Changing HumanNature Relationships (HNR) in the Context of Global Environmental Change (Opening essay, Volume 5)

Chipko Movement
The Chipko Movement is celebrated globally by the environmental movement, heralded as a glorious example of eco-feminism, forest preservation, and local control over natural resources. The movement began spontaneously from a single incident in the Himalayan region of Uttar Pradesh, India in April 1973. Forested slopes around a village had been sold to logging concessions. Village women, fearing a loss of fresh water and destabilized slopes once the forests were gone, literally hugged the trees to prevent contractors from felling them. The word chipko means to embrace. Village women, Dhoom Singh Negi and Bachni Devi, among many others, spread the word with the Chipko slogan What do the forests bear? soil, water and pure air. The movement has its roots in Gandhian theory and many prominent writers and philosophers became its leaders. The movement was embraced as a spiritual one, tting the context of ancient Sanskrit scriptures, as well as other religions invocation of the unity and oneness of life, by prominent philosopher and Chipko adherent, Dr Indu

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Tikekar. The movement spread through many parts of the Himalayan region of Uttar Pradesh. In 1980, Indias Prime Minister, the late Indira Gandhi, responded to public appeals with a 15-year moratorium on logging in the Himalayan forests of Uttar Pradesh. The movement also included prominent men as leaders. Sunderlal Bahuguna, a Gandhian activist, whose appeal to Mrs Gandhi had proved successful, subsequently embarked on a two year, 5000 km trek by foot thorough the Himalayan regions, spreading the Chipko message beyond Uttar Pradesh. Bahuguna expressed his message as Ecology is permanent economy . The expanded movement succeeded in stopping clearcut logging in the Western Ghats and the Vindhyas. The Chipko movement continues to lobby for a new natural resources policy, more sensitive to local peoples needs and ecosystem sustainability.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada

Christianity and the Environment

David G Hallman
World Council of Churches, Toronto, Canada

to creation. However, the degree of Christian engagement in environmental concerns should not be exaggerated. It still represents a minority concern within the broader framework of theological, spiritual and social justice preoccupations. Several communities of experience, often from the margins of the Christian mainstream, have had a particularly important impact on theological understandings of the relationship of humans to the broader natural world. In particular, eco-feminist theologians, indigenous peoples, and activists and ethicists from developing nations of the Economic South have challenged the dominant approaches and have contributed insights that have deepened and, in some cases, redirected the focus of Christian involvement in environmental issues (see Note on Terminology, at the end of this article). Out of the plethora of environmental challenges facing the world, a number have become priorities for the engagement of the wider Christian ecumenical community and will likely grow as major challenges for the future. These include climate change, the exploitation of both humans and nonhumans by the forces of the global economy and trade, and the spiritual values that can underpin a more sustainable relationship between human societies and the rest of the natural world.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Christianity played a role in the development of the western industrialized economic model that is at the root of many of our current ecological problems. Hallman (1992) gives an analysis of the interconnections among science, religion and economics in the genesis of todays ecological crises and an identication of new models from the disciplines for living more sustainably. Through various sources, Christianity provided support for the scientic and industrial revolutions. From early in the Middle Ages, monasteries preserved and encouraged scholarship in classical Greek and Roman culture. Without this data base, modern intellectual development and scientic progress would have been immeasurably slowed. When Protestantism emerged, it emphasized the distinction between the Creator and the creature. In effect, the reformers desacralized the natural world and focused attention on humanitys standing and condition before God. This contributed to the study and manipulation of nature by the budding sciences. Francis Bacon contended that all Creation had meaning only in relation to humanity.
Man, if we look to nal causes, may be regarded as the center of the world insomuch that if man were taken away from the world, the rest would seem to be all astray, without aim or purpose. (Thomas, 1983)

Western Christianity is a relative latecomer in recognizing and expressing concern about contemporary human assaults on ecosystems. The path of awakening for Christians has included not only growing awareness of the seriousness of the ecological crises but also the role that their own tradition has played in the relationship between human societies and their environments. Some of the major tenets of western Christian thought and practice contributed to a perception of an exalted place of the human within the broader natural world which provided some of the legitimacy for scienti c, economic and technological exploitation of nature. But throughout the history of Christianity, there are also inspiring examples of individuals and schools of thought which championed a concern for the well-being of all creatures. In recent times, Christians have become conscious of that checkered history and have become convinced that caring for creation needs to be a fundamental part of how they live out their faith in the world. In addition to the work of theologians reconceptualizing Christianity to respond to the ecological challenge, individual Christians, community parishes, and national and international ecumenical institutions have become active in addressing many of the threats

Ian Barbour notes that: The desacralization of nature encouraged scientic study, though it also (along with other

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economic and cultural forces) contributed to subsequent environmental destruction and the exploitation of nature (Barbour, 1990). The industrial revolutions that followed the scientic revolution also beneted from religious attitudes of the day. Early Protestants believed in industrious, disciplined work as they shifted the religious focus from otherworldly to innerworldly asceticism. The blessing of economic success could be seen as an outer sign of inner faith and assurance of salvation. The virtues of frugality and simplicity, coupled with hard work and saving, converged with the needs of early capitalism. People worked hard and saved, but didnt spend on material indulgence: that was just the ethic needed to establish a capital base. There was a sense of religious fervor among those involved in the early scientic and economic pursuits: God was beckoning humanity to use all of its intelligence to usher in a new day of enlightenment and prosperity. The natural world was seen as yielding its long-held secrets to the rigor of scientic experimentation. Economic theories were formulated to describe the unseen laws that governed supply and demand. There was a genuine conviction among the theologians, scientists and economists that Gods will was being realized in their efforts. Theological attitudes which viewed the natural world primarily as a God-given resource whose utility related to exploitation for human purposes continued as a dominant perspective until relatively recently. A document from the 1961 Assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC) states that the Christian should welcome scientic discoveries as new steps in mans domination of nature (Granberg-Michaelson, 1994). The pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes of the Second Vatican Council expressed a general expectation that:
(human beings), created in Gods image, received a mandate to subject (to themselves) the earth and all that it contains thus, by the subjugation of all things to (humanity), the name of God would be wonderful in all the earth.

THEOLOGICAL CHALLENGES
An American historian, Lynn White Jr, was one voice that did much to stimulate public awareness of the critique of Christianity in relation to environmental problems. In a famous 1967 article in the journal Science entitled The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis, White maintained that Judeo-Christian scriptures, theology and traditions must accept some responsibility for societal attitudes that allowed for exploitation of the environment (White, 1967). The environmental criticisms leveled at Christianity by White and others shook theologians and lay Christians. Fortunately the response was not in the main defensiveness but rather the launching of an extended period of reection, reanalysis of scripture and theology, and reconceptualization of models for the interrelationship of God as creator, the human species, and the rest of creation. There are three main areas that have been identied in Christian theology and scripture as being particularly problematic. The most frequently cited is the concept of God giving humans authority over all creation:
Let us make the human in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the sh of the seas, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. (Genesis 1:26)

Though these broad streams of religious intellectual thought have contributed over the past several hundred years to a perception of the natural world as exploitable without consequence, there have been Christian spiritual voices offering a different perspective. Mystics such as Hildegaard of Bingen and St. Francis of Assisi articulated a reverence and valuing of all life for its own sake that contrasts with the more utilitarian approach of later Christianity. There have also been communities of religiously motivated persons over the centuries such as monastic orders, which practiced a conservation ethic in relation to nature around them. These earlier religious voices and practices concerned about the wellbeing of all creation have found new relevance during the past several decades as Western Christians have come to see the seriousness of the ecological problems facing the Earth.

Theologians and biblical scholars have helped to place this seeming blanket mandate for domination into a context which highlights a range of conditionalities tied to this authority. In Genesis, the story of creation precedes the arrival of evil or the fall. Thus, the giving by God of this authority over other creatures occurred at a point where humans were without sin and hence would be expected to exercise that dominion in ways pleasing to God who created and loves the world. Secondly, there is another creation story in Genesis 2, which uses very different imagery for the human relationship to the rest of nature. The human is to till and keep the garden. This dominion theology perspective challenges an unrestricted exploitive authority that could be read into the rst creation story. Canadian theologian, Douglas John Hall, was an early exponent of stewardship theology, which sought to transform Christian approaches away from the unfettered dominion model toward one of responsible caring for the Earth. Hall (1982) argues that stewardship means that humans are given responsibility to care for the world as Gods stewards. That is, humans do not own the Earth but are Gods surrogate caretakers: The Earth is the Lords and the fulness therof; the world and all that dwell therein (Psalm 21:1). To care for the Earth as God would care for it points to a much more responsible attitude since we believe that God loves the Earth. Further, as stewards, humans will be held responsible by the Master, for the care which they have exercised, or failed to exercise, on that which belongs to the Master.

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A second theme in Christian theology which has been seen as posing problems for our relationship to the environment is the dichotomy which is identi ed between the spiritual and the physical. In the New Testament Epistles, we hear a number of references that would seem to counsel rejection of this physical world including the following:
Do not love the world or the things of this world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in him. (I John 2:15) Do you not know that friendship with this world is enmity with God? Therefore, whoever wished to be a friend of the world, makes himself an enemy of God. (James 4:4)

However, biblical scholarship that gained added relevance as environmental awareness grew, has helped to place these letters to communities of early Christians into historical context. At a time when the general expectation was that the end of the world was at hand and that Christ would be returning soon, the writers were encouraging their readers not to place their faith in material wealth. While there has been a persistent thread over the centuries stressing the religious af rmation of creation s goodness, there have also been interpretations of these passages strongly emphasizing otherworldliness and rejection of this world. Environmentalists have worried that such theology could undermine a social attitude of concern for the wellbeing of the Earth. A third concept that has been identi ed in the critique of Christian theology is the emphasis on personal moral will as the ultimate de ning characteristic of the human. While there are philosophical traditions that have also focused on moral agency, Christian theology has given it a particular priority. Though an emphasis on moral will does not of necessity lead to a negation of the value of the natural world, some of its implications seem to point in that direction. Since only humans exercise moral choice and judgement via rational processes, it was believed that higher value was attributed to the human than to the creatures lacking these capacities. The elevation of the rational capacities also implied the denigration of other attributes such as emotions, intuition, and sense perception itself.

would prove quite unsettling to the church hierarchy. Stewardship theology referred to above was another of the initial responses and did much to af rm that biblically sound and intellectually rigorous alternate understandings to dominion theology were possible. Process theology has been a further approach that has widely in uenced the evolving Christian thinking about the ecological crisis. Based on the work of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, process theologians such as Cobb and Grif n (1977) developed a systematic application of Whitehead s ideas with the emphasis on God s loving interrelatedness with creation. Cobb in particular has played a signi cant role through his writings in articulating the ecological implications of process theology (Cobb, 1972; Cobb and Birch, 1981; Cobb and Daly, 1989). One of his principal arguments has been the inherent interconnection between God, humanity and the natural world. for process theology, as an ecological theology, human beings are part of nature Humanity is seen within an interconnected nature (Cobb, 1972) . German theologian Jurgen Moltmann comes to similar conclusions within the framework of his own theological analysis. In a book based on his Gifford Lecture series, Moltmann emphasizes the relationship of God to all creation as the starting point.
An ecological doctrine of creation implies a new kind of thinking about God. The center of this thinking is no longer the distinction between God and the world. The center is the recognition of the presence of God in the world and the presence of the world in God. (Moltmann, 1985)

NEW THEOLOGICAL DIRECTIONS

The critiques of Christianity by Lynn White Jr and others helped to unleash a robust period of theological reconceptualization regarding the relationship of humans to the rest of creation. In addition to these challenges from outside the religious community, there were also those within the faith who were shaking traditional approaches. The creation-centered work of Thomas Berry and Matthew Fox from within the Roman Catholic tradition provided a radical reorientation to understandings of the interrelationship of God, humanity and the rest of creation. Their writings

Through biblical analysis and systematic theological argumentation, Moltmann describes various manifestations and implications of the presence of the Spirit of God within creation. A consistent theme is the centrality of relationship as the most fundamental de ning characteristic of existence. Theological understandings such as Moltmann s and those of process theology echo and in some ways enhance scienti c discoveries and reconceptualizations of the 20th century which have also moved in the direction of an emphasis on the primacy of relationships within matter and the natural world. Eco-feminist theologians have articulated perceptive analytic critiques of traditional Christian theology in terms of its destructive contribution to the ecological crisis and have posited new models for understanding the relationship between humanity and the rest of creation. While recognizing and recovering much rich insight in the Biblical scriptures that can help ground a new environmental ethic, eco-feminist theologians are nonetheless more prepared than some other theologians to acknowledge the ambiguity of the Bible. This stems in part from the broader feminist analysis that recognizes the cultural conditioning

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of many of the scriptural writers working as they were in very patriarchal societies. Eco-feminist approaches to reection on ecological theology and ethics draw on a broad range of human capacities. Their methodology and the content of their analysis are interconnected in the recognition that our ecological problems are due in part to a hierarchical valuing of creatures and the attributes associated with them. Men have been seen as the most valued and the traditional male-oriented emphasis on rationality, control and exploitation has dominated both in human relationships and in terms of the Earth. Eco-feminists insist that intuition and emotion are indispensable as elements in the repertoire of human response if we are to make signicant progress in solving our environmental problems. They argue that a reorientation toward the Earth will require a foundation of love and caring for life in its fullness not just rationalistic analyses and technological xes (see Ecofeminism, Volume 5). There are creative options proposed by eco-feminist theologians for new theological approaches to our relationship with creation. The web of life is one image that eco-feminists use to emphasize the interrelatedness and interdependence of the various elements of creation. Sallie McFague has suggested reimaging God not only as father but also as mother (the nurturer of all life), as lover (the most intimate of relationships), and as friend (a constant and supportive presence) (McFague, 1993). Such models of God provide a deeper appreciation of the role of God as creator and sustainer of life and can contribute to values that would be more environmentally sensitive: e.g., as protection of life, joy and love in our relating to the Earth, and solidarity with the oppressed members of creation. Chung Hyun Kyung (1994) has done much to popularize eastern religious and cultural appreciations for the unity of all life and the sacredness of creation. Bringing such insights into dialogue with more traditional Christian approaches has provoked considerable controversy. It is nonetheless an essential contribution if Western Christianity is to honestly acknowledge its cultural role in the economic development model which has come to dominate the global economy and to seek partnership with other faith traditions in building a value base for an Earth ethic. Equally threatening to some Christians have been the insights being offered by indigenous peoples around the world. Struggling back after several centuries of cultural oppression by colonizing powers, many indigenous peoples are recapturing their traditions that include important understandings of ways in which to relate sustainably to the natural world around them. Western societies seeking to reconceptualise their relationship to the Earth could benet from the rich contributions of indigenous creation stories, the understanding of nature as being members of ones family, rituals used to relate to the various seasons and

creatures in the natural world, and concepts of community organization for long-term sustainability (Rajotte, 1998). Particularly helpful have been the writings of people of indigenous heritage who have connected native spirituality and Christian theology such as the American Indian George Tinker, Stan MacKay (a Canadian of Cree origin) and Rob Cooper (a Maori from Aotearoa, New Zealand) (Tinker et al., 1994). There has been a risk in the rejuvenation of native spiritual ecological insights that Christians and others might appropriate those concepts and rituals into their own practices in a romanticized manner without recognizing the historical context out of which those indigenous understandings emerged. In part to respond to this risk, indigenous peoples have raised tough political and economic issues related to the ongoing oppression of their cultures and societies in addition to sharing elements of their native spirituality. Christian communities have been challenged to acknowledge and repent of their role over the past centuries as agents of cultural genocide. Some churches and ecumenical organizations have acted in solidarity with indigenous peoples in their struggles in local, national and international forums. Theologians, ethicists and activists involved in environment and development issues in countries of the economic South have been another source of critical social, economic and political critique of the western development model and its links to Christian traditional understandings of the relationship of humans to the rest of creation. Theological contributions from the economic south on issues of ecotheology have been relatively recent. Theologians and ethicists from these countries have understandably been more preoccupied with the economic struggles of their countries which have suffered 500 years of exploitation by imperialistic nations, colonializing powers and now global nancial institutions. Countries in Latin America produced a vibrant movement of liberation theology that played a pivotal role in articulating the ethical basis for a systemic social, economic and political critique of the western economic model and its historical exploitation of the south. However, many of the liberation theologians were as anthropocentric and utilitarian in their orientation toward the non-human elements of the natural world as were the tradition Christian theologians of the North. However, as the depth of the ecological crises became more apparent as well as their interlinkages with the western economic development model, theologians and ethicists from countries of the Economic South began to make important connections between the historical struggles of their countries and environmental problems. Moreover, justice for the poor had always been the primary focus of liberation theologians and it was becoming clear that the poor were also the most vulnerable to the health and social effects of environmental problems.

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Leonardo Boff from Brazil is among the more prolic and insightful theologians who has sought to develop an integrated approach to socio-economic issues and environmental concerns. While recognizing the contributions of various critical responses to the prevalent social model such as liberation movements, pacist and non-violence groups, and ecological movements, Boff argues for the need for a more integrated approach.
It is important today to articulate these different critiques of the dominant system. However, we must urgently seek to develop a new paradigm for society that does not repeat the mistakes of the old but integrates all human beings in a more humane way and establishes more benevolent relationships with the environment. (Boff, 1994, 1997)

I would also add some of my own writing to this list of attempts to take the richness of the theological and ethical debates and make it more popularly available to a wider Christian audience, for instance, A Place in Creation Ecological Visions in Science, Religion and Economics (Hallman, 1992) and Ecotheology Voices from South and North (Hallman, 1994).

CHURCH ENVIRONMENTAL RESPONSES AT LOCAL, NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL LEVELS

To write about Christianity and the environment is not just to discuss the theological and ethical reections that have propelled the faith into serious confrontation with the ecological crisis. That rejuvenated faith, having had its eyes opened to the seriousness of the problems, its own historical complicity, and most importantly, new models of engaging theology and spirituality in relevant responses, is being expressed in action. Church denominations in many parts of the world have prepared educational and action resources to assist their members learn more about environmental problems within an ethical and spiritual context and to offer opportunities for activities to make a constructive difference: US churches circulated information packets and lobbying suggestions to congregations at Earth Day to encourage them to press for effective endangered species legislation. German churches did a study of energy use in churches as a prelude to a campaign to become more energy efcient. Philippine churches ran educational programs on forestry and collaborated with other social groups in a campaign for a moratorium on wide scale logging. Tanzanian environmental workshops were held for church and community leaders and included work on specic projects such as dam building to preserve badly needed water for irrigation. Dutch churches encouraged members to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions from transportation 3% per year. Zimbabwean churches have integrated tree planting into their liturgies. Japanese Christians collaborated with Buddhists, Shintos and members of New Religions to host an interfaith gathering and march during the 1997 session of the UN negotiations on climate change in Kyoto. Argentinean Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, and Episcopal churches worked together to host an ecumenical service during the 1998 session of the UN negotiations on climate change in Buenos Aires. Swedish churches bought parcels of forestland to ensure that they are harvested in a sustainable manner.

The insights and analyses of theologians, ethicists and activists from countries of the Economic South have had a signicant impact on the work on environment and development issues by churches and ecumenical organizations such as the WCC (see WCC (World Council of Churches), Volume 5). Theologian Jesse Mugambi from Kenya has enriched ecumenical understandings of the social, economic and environmental impacts of colonialization in Africa and has articulated nuanced analyses of so called globalization and the homogenization processes where a few power centers dictate the rules for the rest of the world. Aruna Gnanadason from India who is working currently as a staff member of the WCC has provided leadership in the integration of gender justice with ecology and economic development. It is impossible to note all of the inuential theologians and ethicists who are contributing today to deepening Christian reection on the implications of the ecological crisis and what the faith has to offer as constructive responses. Mary Evelyn Tucker, John Grim, Dieter Hessel and Rosemary Ruether, all of whom have done writing in their own right, have made a very important contribution through the organizing of the April 1998 Conference on Christianity and Ecology on behalf of the Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions. The resulting book includes contemporary reections by many of the most important theologians and ethicists concerned today about the ecological crisis. Larry Rasmussen and Dieter Hessel have produced a book that looks at implications for the church of engagement in ecological issues after bringing together a wide range of theologians, ethicists, and practitioners for a 1998 Conference on Ecumenical Earth, at Union Seminary in New York. Rasmussen (1996) has also written an ambitious integrative book Earth Community, Earth Ethics which combines analyses of the interrelated crises of environmental degradation and global economic injustice with the articulation of new visions that integrate biblical reection, theological rigor, and inspiring spirituality.

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Canadian churches advocated against plans for the premature and potentially dangerous disposal of high level nuclear wastes. The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople has sponsored environmental education programs for youth and a special seminar focused on environmental problems around the Black Sea.

The list could include many more examples of efforts by churches at national and local levels to translate their faith into practice in caring for the well being of creation. Persons involved in organizing such efforts will be the rst to acknowledge that, though progress is being made, it remains an ongoing struggle to convince the churches as institutions and the individual members of the importance of engagement in environmental issues. At the international level, several ecumenical organizations, especially the WCC, have played a role in both fostering theological and ethical reection on ecological concerns as well as facilitating the active engagement of their member churches in specic issues. An important consultation was organized by the WCC in 1974 in Bucharest and brought together scientists, economists and theologians to discuss implications of the recently published study of the Club of Rome Limits to Growth. One of the important contributions of this event was the articulation of the concept of sustainability, the idea that the worlds future requires a vision of development that can be sustained for the longterm, both economically and environmentally. During the 1970s, the WCC had a program on the just, participatory and sustainable society (JPSS), which included the Energy for My Neighbor project which was intended to sensitize churches about energy problems faced by developing countries and to activate practical steps to ameliorate the energy situation of those in need, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Conference in 1979 on Faith, Science and Technology, which became known primarily for its controversial position on nuclear power. In 1983, the WCC Assembly in Vancouver adopted a process-focused action plan on justice, peace and integrity of creation (JPIC) through which churches were encouraged to work together on these interrelated themes. Many churches became increasingly attentive to environmental concerns during this period, adopting policy statements and initiating education and advocacy activities on specic issues. The JPIC process culminated in a World Convocation on Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation in Seoul, Korea in 1990, at which a series of ten theological afrmations and specic covenants for action were approved. They provide a description of the interrelatedness of economic inequity, militarism, ecological destruction, and racial injustice and the theological, ethical and spiritual basis for afrming and sustaining life in its fullness. There have also been a number of occasions of interaction between Christian theologians and leaders of other living

faiths, focused on rediscovering the important contributions from within the traditions and sacred writings of each of the faith systems, which could help move human societies toward greater respect for the natural world. One of these events was an interfaith consultation hosted by the WCC in August 1991 to develop proposals for inclusion in an Earth Charter. The 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro provided an opportunity for witnessing to the spiritual dimensions of the ecological crisis. Many faiths were represented at the Rio Earth Summit and held joint vigils, ceremonies and workshops. The WCC sponsored a major ecumenical gathering bringing to Rio 150 representatives of churches from over 100 countries for two weeks of prayer, worship, study and involvement in the Earth Summit. Particularly important were the connections made with many other non-governmental organizations representing environmental groups, development bodies, and womens networks. During the 1990s, the WCC work on environment-related issues focused primarily on global climate change, monitoring the work of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, and beginning a more signicant engagement in ethical issues raised by the growth in the biotechnology industry.

CHALLENGES FOR THE FUTURE

Climate change has become one of the major foci for international ecumenical activity on ecological issues and is likely to continue to be so as the threat increases. Not only does climate change represent a threat to the well-being of Gods Earth but it is also a profoundly ethical issue since it is being precipitated largely by the rich industrialized countries while the consequences will be suffered disproportionately by the poorer developing countries and by future generations. The ecumenical community through the WCC has participated in the UN negotiations on climate change treaties since 1989. In 19961997, the WCC sponsored an international petition campaign to build greater public pressure on the governments of industrialized countries to take action to reduce their emissions as a lead up to the Kyoto Summit in December 1997. The WCC made a major statement on climate change as an issue of justice at the Kyoto Summit (World Council of Churches, 1997). Churches in many countries have organized educational and advocacy activities and have sponsored ethical reections on climate change within the context of models for sustainable societies. These programs have been accompanied with resources to assist individual members take practical steps in their own homes, lives and communities to reduce energy use and contribute to limiting the emission greenhouse gases.

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A second major challenge which will likely increase in importance for the Christian community in the future is the interconnection of the environment and the global economic system. These are well illustrated in the climate change issue but they also go beyond and encompass global trade, the role of multinational corporations and international nancial institutions, and the scandalous economic inequities between peoples of the world. The ecumenical community has a long history in advocacy and action for economic justice and a more recent history with environmental issues. These two become interconnected when dealing with the implications of increasing economic globalization. Addressing globalization will pose a challenge to the churches in terms of their capacity for analysis of complex systems, resources to be engaged from local to global levels and the strength to persevere despite intense pressure that can be mounted by the vested power structures being critiqued. A third challenge for the future is the reconceptualizing of the churches important environmental activity in a spirituality that can both inspire the work and sustain those involved. Throughout western culture generally, there is a widely perceived thirst for spiritual nourishment to counter the bareness of contemporary consumerism and materialism. Institutional religion is aware that many people nd its forms of worship and engagement do not adequately satisfy their spiritual needs. Thus, both Christians active in social and environmental issues within churches and nonChristians outside the church, feel the need for greater spiritual nourishment. Concern for the well being of the Earth is one area where a nurturing of spiritual values can be linked intrinsically with a justice agenda.

South to denote the poorer nations. While I recognize the clumsiness of the phrase and the increasing difculties in making generalizations between the North and the South in our increasingly complex world, this is the designation that I nd most satisfactory to date.

REFERENCES
Barbour, I (1990) Religion in an Age of Science, Harper & Row, San Francisco, CA. Boff, L (1994) Social Ecology: Poverty and Misery, in Ecotheology Voices from South and North, ed D G Hallman, WCC Books, Geneva, and Orbis Press, New York. Boff, L (1997) Cry of the Poor, Cry of the Land, Maryknoll, Orbis Press, New York, 114. Cobb, Jr, J (1972) Is it too Late? A Theology of Ecology, Bruce Publications, Beverley Hills, CA. Cobb, Jr, J and Birch, C (1981) Liberation of Life, Cambridge University Press, New York. Cobb, Jr, J and Daly, H (1989) For the Common Good: Redirecting Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future, Beacon Press, Boston, MA. Cobb, Jr, J and Grifn, D (1977) Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition, Christian Journals, Belfast. Granberg-Michaelson, W (1994) Creation in Ecumenical Theology, in Ecotheology Voices from South and North, ed D G Hallman, WCC Books, Geneva, and Orbis Press, New York. Hall, D J (1982) The Steward: A Biblical Symbol Come of Age, Friendship Press, New York. Hall, D J (1986) Imaging God: Dominion as Stewardship, Erdmans/Friendship Press, Grand Rapids, MI. Hallman, D G (1992) A Place in Creation Ecological Visions in Science, Religion and Economics, United Church Publishing House, Toronto. Hallman, D G (1994) Ecotheology Voices from South and North, WCC Books, Geneva, and Orbis Press, New York. Kyung, C H (1994) Ecology, Feminism and African and Asian Spirituality, in Ecotheology Voices from South and North, ed D G Hallman, WCC Books, Geneva, and Orbis Press, New York. McFague, S (1987) Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age, Fotress Press, Philadelphia, PA. McFague, S (1993) The Body of God: an Ecological Theology, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, MN. Moltmann, J (1985) God in Creation: an Ecological Doctrine of Creation, SCM Press, London. Rajotte, F, ed (1998) First Nations, Faith and Ecology, United Church Publishing House, Toronto and Cassell, London. Rasmussen, L (1996) Earth Community, Earth Ethics, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY. Thomas, K (1983) Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500 1800, Allen Lane, London. Tinker, G, MacKay, S, and Cooper, R (1994) Ecotheology Voices from South and North, ed D G Hallman, WCC Books, Geneva, and Orbis Press, New York. White, Jr, L (1967) The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis, Science, 155, 1203 1207.

NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY
Terminology is very complex when trying to describe different regions of the world today. In United Nations (UN) parlance, reference is made to developed and developing countries to distinguish between the richer primarily northern and western industrialized nations and the poorer primarily southern nations. However, many people object to that vocabulary because it implies a higher level of technological and social sophistication for the developed countries. Third World was another term that was current for some time but that has also fallen out of favor because again it suggests an ordering of value or worth in comparison with the First World. A distinction between the North and the South has become more utilized because most of the poorer nations are south of the equator and south does not carry any particular value connotation. Not all of the poorer countries are in the geographic south and there are some industrialized nations in that region. Hence, for my purposes in this paper and in my other recent writings, I have come to use the phrase countries of the Economic

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World Council of Churches (WCC) Statement to the High Level Segment of the Third Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP3) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (1997) Kyoto, Japan, available from the author (c/o The United Church of Canada, 3250 Bloor St. W. Toronto, M8X 2Y4, fax 1-416-232-6005 e-mail: dhallman@uccan.org).

TIME TO LOOK AT THE BLOOD SYSTEM OF THE BIOSPHERE

One thing characterizing our time is the predicament in which environmental decision makers nd themselves: squeezed between two shields. On the one hand, the public expects them to repair the environmental damage that has already materialized; on the other, the public expects them to be forward-looking and ensure that growing demands on socio-economic development will not make the problems even worse. A necessary basis for future-oriented decision-making is a minimum of basic understanding of fundamental relationships between humans and the natural landscape hosting their life-support system (freshwater, biomass production, presence of minerals and energy sources, etc.). Past studies on environmental effects of human activities have not produced such an understanding but often got caught up in the considerable complexity of ecosystem behavior. Moreover, one fundamental component the water cycle acting as the bloodstream of the biosphere tends to be absent in many such studies (Falkenmark, 1997). Equally remarkable is the lasting land/water dichotomy and the considerable conceptual barriers to realizing the water dependence of land use and biomass production. In the water community, the alertness to water scarcity problems (CFWA, 1997) tends to be concentrated to allocation problems within the so-called water sector (water supply for household, industry, and irrigation). This attention is, however, quite recent. Most countries have probably not started to deal with it but pursue supply strategies, as in the past. Not much attention is being paid to upstream/downstream con icts of interest. It is getting increasingly clear that humanity s genuinely water-dependent future cannot be discussed without attention to water s deep involvement in many different functions in both nature and society. For example, potential water-related constraints to global food production are starting to send serious concerns through the scienti c community (Falkenmark, 1997b; Falkenmark et al., 1998 and references therein). The nite character of the freshwater circulating on the planet has made it essential that the water requirements for food production be properly entered into global water resources assessments. This situation has made it necessary to expand our attention from the conventional water sector focused on societal use of the liquid ow of blue water in aquifers and rivers to include also the vapor ow of green water involved in rainfed biomass production in agriculture, forestry and natural vegetation systems (Figure 1) (Falkenmark and Rockstrom, 1993). Evidently the plants do not mind if the water available to the roots is naturally in ltrated rainwater or external irrigation water that has been added from groundwater or surface water. Since the land cover is instrumental in the rainwater partitioning process at the ground surface, land

Circulating Freshwater: Crucial Link between Climate, Land, Ecosystems, and Humanity
Malin Falkenmark
Natural Science Research Council and Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), Stockholm, Sweden

A simplied holistic view is presented of humanity s present environmental predicament as seen from a freshwater perspective. Like the doctor who bases much of his diagnosis of a patient on his blood system, its circulation and quality characteristics, the author bases her diagnosis of the world ecosystem of which Man is a part on the bloodstream of the biosphere, i.e., the water cycle. The aim is to identify the most crucial actions in future-oriented decisionmaking. In contrast to a widespread but false belief that water is very simple and can be handled within the water sector, many parallel functions and manifold appearances have to be taken into account when addressing the interaction between human society and the physical landscape hosting its life-support system. Fundamental regional differences in terms of both vapor ow of green water involved in biomass production, and liquid ow of blue water available for societal use in aquifers and rivers are highlighted. It is shown that the developing world at present experiences a threefold escalation: of water stress, of water dispute proneness, and of water pollution load. Analysis suggests that water accessibility constraints will increasingly disturb global food security. Escalating food needs make it particularly important to nd ways of reconciling upstream/downstream con icts of interest especially as intensied upstream biomass production (agriculture, forestry) easily leads to downstream river depletion. Such depletion will generate increasingly severe problems for water-dependent societal activities and aquatic ecological services downstream.

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Rainfall

Evaporation loss

Transpiration

Flood flow Infiltration Groundwater recharge Plant uptake River flow

Groundwater seepage

Figure 1 The rainfall partitioning into the vertical green water branch, encompassing productive and non-productive components, and the semi-horizontal blue water branch, encompassing the water in groundwater aquifers and rivers

use changes tend to alter the partitioning of the incoming rainfall between these two water ows, and therefore inuence the blue water that is available for allocation within the water sector. The water cycle sets a large-scale exterior constraint to both human and natural life. The aim of this article is to tie together a whole set of water-related phenomena within a joint conceptual framework. This framework starts from the basic interactions between human society and the lifesupporting landscape in which we live. It demonstrates the enormous management problems that population growth generates due to waters deep involvement in these interactions, and identies a set of urgent actions.

TECHNOSPHERE AND BIOSPHERE SHARE THE SAME BLOOD SYSTEM

It is probably not much of an exaggeration to state that water is the most misunderstood component of life. It is mistakenly taken as quite simple, since it is part of everybodys daily life. In reality it is extremely complex with many parallel functions in both nature and society: health function, habitat function, psychological and religious functions, carrier functions (solutes, silt), and production functions (green-water dependent biomass production, blue-water dependent socio-economic production). Successful environmental management therefore critically depends on our ability to address such complexity. Water lls all living beings, it has vital functions on all scales from the planetary scale down to the cell scale. It is a universal solvent, carrying nutrients to the cells and waste products away from the cells. In the life-support system, it acts as a carrier of dissolved matter, as a key food substance for both humans and fauna, as a key raw material in plant production, and as a habitat for aquatic ora and fauna. In society it functions almost as a lubricant of industrial

development through all its key functions in industrial production (carrier, solvent, washer, cooler). At the same time, water is a key operator in different collapse-driving processes: as carrier of microbiological disease agents to humans, in its tendency to form oods and inundations, as eroding agent, and as contaminant carrier in general. Since all ecosystems are water-dependent, water is fundamental as a silent messenger in generating ecosystem degradation and biodiversity disturbances from human manipulations of the landscape. To facilitate communication on these complex issues, the following simple metaphor may be helpful (Falkenmark, 1997a). Human activities in the landscape can be illustrated as involving interaction between a social sphere and a landscape sphere. The imperative in the social sphere is to satisfy the basic needs of the population of water, food, energy, etc. and meet their aspirations in terms of goods and services. Performing this involves manipulations of land and water in the landscape for harvesting the natural resources there (water, biomass, energy, minerals). These manipulations are physical (clearing, tilling, drainage, well drilling, pipes and canals) and chemical (agricultural chemicals, waste produced in the social sphere and disposed of in the landscape: to the air, to the land, or directly to the water bodies). Since the natural laws operate in the landscape, side effects are produced, building up into air pollution, land degradation, water degradation and as higher order effects, i.e., ecological degradation. If the needs and aspirations of the inhabitants are not satised or as a response to frustration raised by the exacerbating environmental side effects, reactive responses occur in the social sphere: passive ones like famine, poverty, diseases, disputes, suffering, or active ones like riots, environmental migration, policy changes, etc. Waters multifunctional involvement in the interaction between human society and the physical landscape is reected in its manifold appearances in terms of: the provision of water supply for various societal activities; water as a resource manifested as availability in rivers and aquifers, water involved in the production of plant substance from carbon dioxide from the air and water from the soil; streaming water as a source of energy; and water bodies as habitats for aquatic biota; side effects of human landscape manipulations manifested as water quality degradation; altered seasonality in the rivers; escalating oods, river depletion; and aquatic ecosystem degradation; water-related diseases, societal damage by inundations, etc.

The sectorial organization of society implies that also the political driving forces on demands on the water that

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ows through the landscape are sectored and unconnected although they are all dealing with the same water (Falkenmark, 1997a): the health authorities are interested in water supply and sanitation to protect against water-related diseases, high morbidity and mortality; the agricultural authorities are responsible for crop production to keep famines away, generating raised water requirements, often also land degradation; the environmental authority is responsible for habitat protection to avoid ecosystem degradation and problems with protein nutrition; the economic development authority is responsible for industrial production, thereby generating increasing water requirements, often also pollution loads.

2. 3.

waters function as a universal solvent continually moving down the landscape in the river basin; the integrity of the water cycle circulation, transferring impacts of human manipulations along the chain from atmosphere to land and terrestrial ecosystems to groundwater and rivers to water bodies/lakes and aquatic ecosystems to coastal waters and marine ecosystems (Figure 2).

The rst of these links can be further claried by referring to the distinction earlier indicated between two complementary types of water ows (cf. Figure 1): the invisible vapor ow back to the atmosphere referred to as green water ow which is part of the plant production process; the liquid ow passing above and below the land surface referred to as blue water ow and consisting of the surplus or non-evaporated precipitation.

The tunnel view tendency in each of these sectorial bodies introduces an incoherence in decision-making that explains much of the past difculties in coping with emerging environmental problems.

A CLOSER LOOK INTO THE UNDERLYING WATER PROCESSES

Landscape manipulations, that are necessary to harvest the natural resources, generate side effects through: 1. the water partitioning of incoming precipitation in its interaction with soil and vegetation;

Food, fodder, ber, fuelwood and timber are all produced by green water, and thereby involve a consumptive use (Lvovich and White, 1990) which is of the order of 6006000 m3 of water per ton biomass produced, depending on the hydroclimate. Human societies (municipalities, industries, irrigation schemes, etc.) are run by blue water withdrawn from rivers and groundwater. Such uses tend to add a pollutant load to the water when returned to the river. In its contact with the land surface, incoming precipitation passes two partitioning points (Falkenmark, 1986):

a Waste gases e Manipulation of soil and vegetation Man b c Water supply g

Atmosphere

Precipitation Evaporation Landscape f Sea evaporation

Ground- h Flood flow water flow

Ocean

d Waste water flow

Water bodies

i River flow

Figure 2 Mental continuity-based image of the water cycle, linking the net sea evaporation, the wetting of continental landscapes, the recharge of aquifers, the ood ows in rivers, and the river discharge back to the sea. Mans interactions are indicated by the four horizontal arrows to the left: (1) waste gas output to the atmosphere; (2) manipulation of soil/vegetation physically and chemically; (3) water withdrawals from aquifers and rivers; (4) wastewater output to water bodies. When the population grows, these arrows will grow in size, whereas the water-ow arrows in the system will change only when climate changes

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at the soil surface, dividing the precipitation between ood ow and inltration; in the root zone, dividing the inltrated water between plant uptake and groundwater recharge.

Since land use activities modify soil and vegetation, they also inuence this partitioning and therefore both the amount of river ow and its seasonality (uctuations between low ow and high ow). Land conversions that involve major vegetation changes tend to impact this water partitioning, and result in green/blue water redirections, traditionally spoken of as water balance changes. Deforestation typically reduces the green water return ow to the atmosphere and therefore increases the ow in the blue water branch (a typical result is water logging (see Waterlogging, Volume 3), as happened on the Hungarian Plain, increased river ow, or ood ows). In South Africa, a major campaign is now employing over 42 000 people to eradicate invasive alien plants, that are more water consumptive than the natural vegetation. The campaign has double objectives: on the one hand to increase the blue water ow that is available to support society s water needs, on the other to restore degraded biodiversity. Reforestation works the opposite way, easily producing river depletion. In South Africa afforestation and reforestation after more than 5 years is allowed only with issued permits (van der Sel, 1997). Due to the importance of this land/water linkage, in the South African government water issues are handled by a joint Ministry of Water Affairs and Forestry. The frequent recommendation of forest plantations to protect vulnerable soils from crusting and erosion easily neglects the lower partitioning point in Figure 1 while concentrating all its interest on the upper one. This neglect may lead to surprising river depletions developing as unexpected side effects of the plantations. The second link is related to the combined effect of water both as a solvent and as a substance involved in key chemical interactions between the in ltrating water and the geological surroundings taking place in the root zone (Falkenmark and Allard, 1991). It is widely known that the water-divides formed by the hilltops in the landscape de ne the water ow modules, i.e., the drainage basins, each enclosed by its own water divide. Therefore, the precipitation that does not return to the atmosphere as green water, forms blue water and either feeds the river with rapid ood ow or passes underground as groundwater ow, seeping back to the surface in springs, local hollows and valley bottoms. A slope in the landscape is typically divided into uphill recharge areas where the rainwater moves downwards through the root zone, recharging the groundwater and downhill discharge areas where groundwater returns back to the land surface. In the recharge areas, bogs may develop, fed by precipitation. In the local hollows, groundwaterdependent wetlands develop; and in the valley bottoms the

groundwater seeps back to the surface and either evaporates, feeds riparian forests or recharges the water courses with a time-stable ow. In the riparian zone, groundwater and ood dependent riparian wetlands may develop. The chemical composition of the natural water develops as the in ltrating water passes from recharge to discharge areas (Falkenmark and Allard, 1991). It rst interacts with two systems: the organic root zone system which adds carbon dioxide and humates, making the water aggressive, and the soil system from where available minerals are picked up. As the water arrives down into the groundwater zone it has acquired two cardinal characteristics: alkalinity/acidity and redox potential (see Redox Potential, Volume 2). These two in combination determine what the water picks up along its continued underground pathways through deep soil and bedrock. The resulting chemical composition in the seepage zone, where the rising water meets oxygen again, characterizes the biodiversity there. The third link relates to the continental part of the water cycle as such. The global water cycle links the ocean, the atmosphere, the land and its terrestrial ecosystems, the water bodies and their aquatic ecosystems, and the marine water and coastal and marine ecosystems. The water cycle is the mega-desalinization plant of the planet on which life here depends. It is energized by the energy from the sun. On the continents water is moving above and below the ground surface under the law of gravitation. The third link is illustrated in Figure 2 where man s interventions with the cycling water has been distributed among the different compartments as indicated by the four arrows to the left: waste gas output to the atmosphere; manipulation of the soil/vegetation physically and chemically; water withdrawals from aquifers and water bodies; waste water output to water bodies.

When population grows these arrows grow in size, whereas the circulating water ow will change only when climate changes.

FUNDAMENTAL REGIONAL DIFFERENCES IN CHALLENGES

Now that this basic mental image of the interaction between society and the physical landscape hosting the life-support system has been explained and discussed, the next step is to explore fundamental regional differences in the principal system: on the one hand those related to the hydroclimate in uencing the green water ow, on the other the differences in the blue water ows. It is thought-provoking to note that most industrialized countries are located in the temperate zone. There, water blindness is widespread and people tend to take water for

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granted. Unfortunately, it seems that water blindness is widespread also, however, in the South. The poorest countries are in the dry climate tropics and subtropics where the everyday question number one is where to nd the water and food needed to survive. The fact that many colonial powers in the tropical and subtropical countries based their understanding on natural conditions in temperate climates invites the question whether their decisions were environmentally deleterious and introduced rather than eliminated environmental problems. Turning next to fundamental blue water differences (renewable water only), Figure 3 gives a global level overview of the water resources situation in the world today. The present level of water withdrawal (use to availability ratio or technical scarcity) is shown against the population pressure on water (number of individuals sharing each ow unit of water or demographic water scarcity) (Falkenmark and Lundqvist, 1998). In this diagram, different levels of per capita water use (in cubic meters per person and year) show up as a diagonal line. Moving up the vertical scale is costly and means more reservoirs, canals and pipelines but also more administration. Experience suggests that when withdrawals exceed 20% of the availability, investments for reservoirs, transfers, irrigation schemes, etc. start to be costly as seen in the national economy. Moreover, in dry climates it is difcult to mobilize more than 50% due to evaporation losses from reservoirs. One hundred percent is only possible to reach by large scale waste water reuse, by underground storage, or where a large river passes right through a country so that
% 100 MAs/Kaz

the water is easy to access. Moving along the horizontal scale, on the other hand, means more water competition and disputes, and increased pollution load since there are more people polluting each ow unit of water. In this diagram, the world regions form ve rather distinct clusters with radically different water resources predicaments: truly water-scarce regions with high population pressures on water resources, technically close to the hydrological ceiling altogether 1.6 billion inhabitants in 1995 and rapid population expansion; the water spenders, i.e., regions with a moderate to high water mobilization level, moderate population pressure, and very high per capita water use due to large scale, low-efciency irrigation altogether a rather stable population of 0.3 billion; an average-level set of regions, moderate in all three senses mobilization levels, population pressure and per capita use altogether 2.5 billion and some of them with ongoing population expansion; a group of water rich regions with low mobilization level, low population pressure, and moderate per capita use altogether a rather stable population of 0.8 billion; an outlier group with low mobilization level and per capita use a rapidly growing population currently 0.4 billion people.

The diagram suggests that population growth is pushing large parts of the world towards the right, i.e., a situation
1000 m3 person year 1

NAfr 60

Technical scarcity withdraw-to-avail. ratio

40

Cauc USA

WAs SAs SEur S/FSU CEur N Chi/Mong

20 SEAs

10 Austr 5

CAm EAfr SAfr 200

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2000 p/flow unit

Demographic scarcity

Figure 3 Fundamental regional differences in the water scarcity predicament. The gure shows characteristics in terms of demographic and technical water scarcity, respectively, for Shiklomanovs 26 global regions. The diagonal line shows per capita water withdrawal of 1000 m3 person 1 year 1 , needed for food self-sufciency in semiarid tropics and subtropics. (Data from Shiklomanov, 1996)

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of growing dispute proneness and pollution loading. Ultimately, a growing proportion of available water will no longer be usable due to too much pollution (Lundqvist, 1998). This is evidently a real danger to socio-economic development in the developing world since it may lead to societal stagnation wherever industries employing large groups of the population are closed down by court orders, due to excessive water pollution, or where pollution-driven frustration generates riots and social unrest. There are several cases, for example in India where this process is starting to develop. Figure 3 can also be used to see the implications of population growth for food production (Falkenmark, 1997b). Most critical is the extra blue water needed to secure food supply in dry climate regions, where yields are low due to water shortages and plant damage from dry spells. The situation was recently explained in a Round Table on water scarcity and global food insecurity in Ambio (Falkenmark et al., 1998). It was assumed that, in semi-arid climates (where most of the rapidly growing populations are), maybe 50% of crop water requirements may be provided from inltrated precipitation, while irrigation has to contribute the remaining 50%. This adds up to a blue water need of 800 m3 year 1 . Adding another 200 m3 year 1 for households and industry leaves us with a water need of 1000 m3 year 1 altogether. Many regions are moving to under the food self-sufciency line, and will increasingly become dependent on food imports. This analysis suggests that water will increasingly limit food self-sufciency possibilities in dry climate regions with rapid population growth. Countries that will not be able to stay self-sufcient, due to lack of accessible water, should study their comparative advantages in order to nd out what to export in exchange for food imports.

FROM HYDROEGOISM TO HYDROSOLIDARITY

What are then the key challenges of the near future when it comes to nding out what some of the crucial actions
Upstream manipulation

would be? The overriding task is to successfully cope with environmental preconditions while satisfying societal needs. Evidently, waters ow through the river basin links human activities upstream with opportunities and problems downstream. Therefore, downstream societies are in a sense the prisoners of the upstreamers (Figure 4). Human interactions with the water can be divided in two categories: water-dependent activities and waterimpacting ones. Mans water-impacting activities are basically of three kinds: land use conversions (inuencing blue/green water partitioning, as already indicated in the above discussion of deforestation and reforestation); water withdrawals/ow management (inuencing river ow and low/high ow seasonality); and the addition of pollution loads. It has in particular to be realized that water use may involve consumptive water use (Lvovich & White, 1990); most of the water withdrawn for irrigation is evaporated into the atmosphere. The result is downstream river depletion (e.g., Aral Sea basin, Yellow River in China). After nonconsumptive use, on the other hand, where water is used in a through-ow based manner, the water used goes as a return ow either to groundwater or to the river, generally carrying a pollution load of agricultural chemicals, industrial and/or municipal pollutants. Downstream water users and ecosystems will suffer from these changes in water quantity and quality. Protection of downstream water interests for wetland protection and conservation of biodiversity will demand conservation of a certain minimum ow. Some experts say that at least 25 percent of the river ow has to remain for downstream ecosystems, others that 75 percent has to remain. Such criteria are evidently equivalent to posing constraints on acceptable upstream consumptive use and pollution load respectively, i.e., upstream food production. The conicts of interest here, in other words, involve existentional issues for humanity that will now have to be honestly faced. It is extremely important that these upstream/downstream conicts of interest be adequately realized. True negotiating

Downstream stakeholders Direct water use Ecological services Riparian wetlands Aquatic ecosystems Coastal ecosystems

Land conversion Flow modification Pollution load

River Water flow seasonality water quality

Household Industry Irrigation Navigation Hydropower

Figure 4 Conicting stakeholder interests in terms of water-impacting activities and water-dependent activities, respectively, for which reconciliation methods will have to be developed

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arenas will have to be developed so that the unavoidable side effects of manipulations, required for the satisfaction of societal needs, can be analyzed and discussed in an intentional way rather than arriving as unintentional surprises as has often been the case in the past (Rockstrom et al., 1999).

2.

3.

THREE CRUCIAL TASKS FOR THE NEXT 30 YEARS

It is clear from the above that the present predicament, particularly of the developing world, includes three phenomena: escalating water competition; escalating dispute proneness; escalating pollution load.

Ensuring that water remains usable for all the societal sectors depending on it. This points to the critical need to go from today s willful neglect of water pollution to a situation where both industry and agriculture take water pollution seriously, and try to minimize their contributions (Lundqvist, 1998). Developing mechanisms for con ict reconciliation between upstream land and water use, and downstream water use and ecosystem services (Falkenmark, 1998). This points to the crucial need to develop a water ethic, which has to be up to date and based on an understanding of how the life-support systems function.

On the regional scale, the upstream/downstream dependencies within river basins involve major challenges related to evident con icts of interest, whether the river basins are national or transnational, shared amongst several countries. Fortunately, there is probably also a proneness to create institutions that facilitate cooperation. A set of fundamental regional differences have to be kept in mind (all regions suffer from recurrent oods): In western countries the key problem is water pollution (basically chemical) reducing water usability, threatening human health and aquatic ecosystems downstream. In newly industrialized countries (post-communist countries and monsoon-climate countries in the humid tropics) the key problem may be water shortage during the dry season (lack of dilution water) and/or a combination of microbiological and chemical pollution. In the lowest income countries the key problem is dif culties in making water accessible for use (small rivers go dry most of the year, large rivers are international), water competition is escalating, and dispute proneness and pollution loads are rapidly growing as water demands for socio-economic development increase.

If society has to manipulate land and water and those manipulations inevitably produce side effects, then the creation of a sustainable development policy which does not undermine its own resource base must be an issue of balancing the manipulations needed against the side effects produced (Falkenmark and Suprapto, 1993). Criteria are needed for this balancing: both human-ecological (groundwater must remain drinkable, land must remain productive, crops and sh must remain edible); ecological (biodiversity and crucial ecological services must be preserved) and socio-economic (poverty and hunger must be eradicated, and income generated).

HUMAN RIGHTS AND HUMAN OBLIGATIONS: BROADENING THE PERSPECTIVE

As already indicated the general belief that the water issue is very simple and can be handled within a water sector is altogether false. In reality it is as complex as the ow of blood in the human body. A doctor would never make his diagnosis of a sick patient without considerable attention to his blood system. The past neglect in environmental sciences of water s many different roles in the interaction between development and environment has seriously delayed a proper understanding of so-called environmental problems and led to much lip service and redundancy in statements at international meetings. The price paid in terms of human suffering cannot be quanti ed but it can be noted that since the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, the world population has expanded by some 2500 million, mainly in the developing countries where the environmental problems have only gotten larger. Much stress is presently being put on human rights to water; an example of our careless language. What is tacitly being referred to is not water as such but the provision of safe household water. The fundamental importance for humanity s future of nding ways for peaceful sharing of the precipitation falling over a joint river basin between

This overview suggests that three key challenges have to be urgently addressed: 1. Supplying food in water-short countries, unable to feed their rapidly growing populations. This may be foreseen to involve expectations of a six-fold export from temperate zone countries (the breadbasket of the world) to help feed these water-short countries unless continued forest clearance for rainfed agriculture be accepted as a vital weapon in a global strategy to feed humanity.

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those living upstream and those living downstream, however, suggests that there is an even larger need for human water solidarity. In the future, human water obligations have to be given equal weight to the right to safe household water. Given a situation where upstream and downstream countries tend to have tremendous problems in agreeing on issues on the sharing of transboundary water systems, this indicates the need for seeking support from religious and philosophical circles in the search for a water ethics. See also : GEWEX (Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment), Volume 1; Hydrologic Cycle, Volume 1; Hydrology, Volume 1; Limnology, Volume 1; Soil Moisture, Volume 1; Buffering Capacity, Volume 2; Eutrophication, Volume 2; Hydrology, Volume 2; PET (Potential Evapotranspiration), Volume 2; Salinization, Volume 2; Fisheries: Pollution and Habitat Degradation in Tropical Asian Rivers, Volume 3; Groundwater Withdrawal and the Development of the Great Man-made River Project, Libya, Volume 3; Indus Basin: a Case Study in Water Management, Volume 3; Inter-basin Transfer (IBT) for Water Supplies, Volume 3; Irrigation: Environmental Impacts, Volume 3; Irrigation: Induced Demise of Wetlands, Volume 3; Marshes, Anthropogenic Changes, Volume 3; River Regulation, Volume 3; Salinity and Agriculture, Volume 3; Water Resources: Baltic, Volume 3; Water Resources: Great Lakes Case Study, Volume 3; Water Use: Future Trends, and Environmental and Social Impacts, Volume 3; Waterlogging, Volume 3; Yellow River, China: a Case Study in Water Resources, Volume 3; Aral Sea, Volume 4; Great Lakes Region of North America, Volume 4; Lake Victoria, Volume 4; Nile River, Volume 4.

Falkenmark, M (1998) Dilemma when Entering 21st Century Rapid Change but Lack of Sense of Urgency, Water Policy, 1, 421 436. Falkenmark, M and Allard, B (1991) Water Quality Genesis and Disturbances of Natural Freshwaters, The Handbook of Environmental Chemistry, Vol. 5, Part A, ed O Hutzinger, Springer-Verlag, 45 78. Falkenmark, M, Klohn, W, Lundqvist, J, Postel, S, Rockstrom, J, Seckler, D, Shuval, H, and Wallace, J (1998) Water Scarcity as a Key Factor Behind Global Food Insecurity Round Table Discussion, Ambio, 27(2), 148 154. Falkenmark, M and Lundqvist, J (1998) Towards Water Security: Political Determination and Human Adaptation Crucial, Nat. Resour. Forum, 21(1), 37 51. Falkenmark, M and Rockstrom, J (1993) Curbing Rural Exodus from Tropical Drylands, Ambio, 22(7), 427 437. Falkenmark, M and Suprapto, R (1993) Population-landscape Interactions in Development. A Water Perspective to Environmental Sustainability, Ambio, 21(1), 31 36. Lundqvist, J (1998) Avert Looming Hydrocide, Ambio, 27(6), 428 433. Lvovich, M M and White, G F (1990) Use and Transformation of Terrestrial Water Systems, in The Earth as Transformed by Human Action, eds B L Turner, II, W C Clark, R W Kates, J Richards, J T Mathews, and W Meyer, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 235 252. Rockstrom, J, Gordon, L, Falkenmark, M, Folke, C, and Engvall, M (1999) Linkages among water vapor ows, food production and terrestrial ecosystem, Conserv. Ecol., 3(2), 5. Shiklomanov, I A (1997) Assessment of Water Resources and Water Availability of the World, Background Report to the Comprehensive Assessment of the Freshwater Resources of the World, Stockholm Environment Institute and World Meteorological Organization. van der Sel, D W (1997) Sustainable Industrial Afforestation in South Africa under Water and Other Environmental Pressures, in Sustainability of Water Resources under Increasing Uncertainty, Vol. 240, IAHS Publication, 211 216.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This paper is a revised version of my Volvo Environment Prize lecture, published in Ambio, Vol. 28, No. 4, June 1999.

Civic Science
REFERENCES
CFWA (1997) Comprehensive Assessment of the Freshwater Resources of the World, UN and SEI, World Meteorological Organization, Geneva. Falkenmark, M (1986) Freshwater Time for a Modied Approach, Ambio, 15(4), 192 200. Falkenmark, M (1997) Societys Interaction with the Water Cycle: a Conceptual Framework for a More Holistic Approach, Hydrol. Sci., 42(4), 451 466. Falkenmark, M (1997) Meeting Water Requirements of an Expanding World Population, Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Biol. Sci., 352, 929 936.

see Precautionary Principle (Volume 4)

Commons, Tragedy of the

Tragedy of the commons is used to refer to a situation in which people who share in the use and benets of a resource are inclined to damage or over-use it. Examples include

COUSTEAU, JACQUES

209

public lands, sheries, waterways and public byways, the airwaves, and the atmosphere. Those who use this phrase typically assume that the word commons means that access is open to all; from that premise the argument is that the rational user of a common resource has no incentives for self-restraint (Hardin, 1968). There is no way to assure that other users will not take advantage and that the one who tries to conserve will be able to reap the benets in the future. This idea is often used as an explanation for local, regional, and global environmental degradation and as a rationale for either government intervention in or privatization of resources used in common. However, it is important to recognize that in many cases access to resources held in common is not open access; and that they are managed through rules agreed upon by the users, as well as user-generated systems for monitoring and enforcement (McCay and Acheson, 1987; Ostrom, 1990). This is true for many local-level communities using forests, grasslands, sheries, and other common resources, and it is also true for many international environmental regimes. Consequently, a second meaning of tragedy of the commons is the situation in which government intervention, privatization, and other factors diminish the effectiveness of local and user-based institutions for common resource management, creating environmental problems. Related are situations in which resettlement schemes, violence, or privatization programs result in the displacement of people dependent on commonly held access rights, intensifying their poverty and, in many cases, forcing them to intensify their use of marginal and vulnerable natural systems or to become part of urban-industrial systems. See also : Property Rights and Regimes, Volume 5.

Cousteau, Jacques
(1910 1997) Jacques-Yves Cousteau was a French oceanographic explorer and lmmaker who was best known for his prime time television series in the 1960s and 1970s, his role in the development of the rst self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (SCUBA) equipment, and his advocacy for conservation of the marine environment. Cousteau had no formal education in science or engineering. However, later in his career he was awarded honorary degrees (DSc) from California, Harvard, and Ghent. He entered the French Naval Academy in 1930, and eventually reached the rank of captain. His initial intention was to be a navy pilot but he seriously injured one of his arms in a car accident, ending his ying career. He started swimming to strengthen his arm and developed his love for swimming in the sea. Cousteau subsequently experimented with goggles, snorkels and other diving equipment. Cousteau and Emile Gagnan, an engineer from Paris, developed the Aqua-Lung (i.e., the rst SCUBA gear) in 1943. This revolutionized diving since it freed divers from heavy diving suits requiring cumbersome air hoses and lifelines. The invention allowed free swimming and facilitated greater exploration of the ocean. During World War II, Captain Cousteau conducted espionage for the French Resistance. He received decorations (e.g., Croix de Guerre) and was made Knight of the Legion of Honour for his efforts. After the war and with money from a British philanthropist (Thomas Loel Guinness), he acquired a decommissioned American-constructed minesweeper that had served in the British navy. He used this ship, the Calypso, for ocean exploration until it sank in Singapore Harbor in 1996. Cousteau and Jean Mollard, an engineer, developed a miniature submarine known as the Diving Saucer (1959) that allowed deep sea observation. He also developed other underwater equipment, conducted studies on underwater living and heliumoxygen diving techniques, and improved color photography by perfecting the underwater camera. Cousteau greatly raised public awareness of ocean issues as a prodigious author and lmmaker. His book, The Silent World, published in 1953, was enormously

REFERENCES
Hardin, G (1968) The Tragedy of the Commons, Science, 162, 1243 48. McCay, B J and Acheson, J M, eds (1987) The Question of the Commons, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ. Ostrom, E (1990) Governing the Commons, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
BONNIE J MCCAY USA

Cost Benet Analysis (CBA)

see CBA (Cost Benet Analysis) (Volume 5)

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successful. It sold ve million copies and was translated into 22 languages. His subsequent extensive number of highly successful books included The Living Sea, The Whale Mighty Monarch of the Sea, and Jacques Cousteaus Calypso. His 1956 lm, The Silent World, won the Academy Award for best documentary. He also won Academy Awards for The Golden Fish (1959) and World Without Sun (1964). Cousteaus series of television documentaries, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau (19681976), popularized marine issues and educated the public. By the end of his career he had written or contributed to more than 50 books and at least 150 lms. Jacques Cousteau earned numerous honors during his 70 year career. He was the director of the Musse Oceanographique of Monaco for 31 years (despite lacking a science degree), a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and a member of the Academie Francais. Other honors include the Special Gold Medal of the National Geographic Society (1961), placement on the United Nations Environment Programmes Global 500 Roll of Honour for Environmental Achievement (1988), and the James Smithson Bicentennial Medal from the Smithsonian Institute (1996). Despite these honors, he has stated that he felt his

success in increasing public awareness and concern for the ocean was his greatest achievement. The efforts of Jacques Cousteau for advocacy and promotion of ocean conservation are continued by the Cousteau Society Inc., which he founded in 1973. Photo: from Columbia and The Silent World.

FURTHER READING
Earle, S (1997) Cousteau Remembered, Popul. Sci., 251(4), 80. Glasgow, E (1997) Jacques Cousteau and the Discovery of the Sea, Contemp. Rev., 271(1580), 135 138. Madsen, A (1986) Cousteau: An Unauthorized Biography, Beaufort, New York, 1 270. Marden, L (1998) Master of the Deep, Natl. Geogr., 193(2), 70 79. Schick, E A, ed (1997) Obituary of Jacques-Yves Cousteau from New York Times A p. 1 (June 26, 1997). Current Biography Yearbook, H W Wilson, New York, 1 699. The Cousteau Society, Accessed May 3 (2000) Jacques-Yves Cousteau: Sailor and Explorer, http://www.cousteausociety. org/aboutjycc.html.
GLYNN GOMES Canada

D
Deep Ecology
Deep Ecology is the most fundamental form of ecocentrism. Its holistic view considers that humans are not separate from nature and that the earth, Gaia, is one organism, whose every (interdependent) part has intrinsic value. Current abuse of nature ultimately stems from inappropriate belief systems, most particularly Christianity, and the classical scientic worldview developed in the West during the Enlightenment. These are held to encourage anthropocentrism and attitudes of separation from and superiority to nature. Such attitudes are termed shallow, whereas Deep Ecology (the distinction was made in 1972 by the philosopher Arne Naess) is considered so because it fundamentally challenges such Enlightenment Project assumptions. See Enlightenment Project, Volume 5. Deep Ecology celebrates richness, diversity and equality among all Earths creatures, holding that humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs. The lifestyles and practices stemming from such a principle emphasize simplicity, frugality, self-reliance, steady-state economics and limiting human population size. Invoking Aldo Leopolds land ethic, Deep Ecology regards human intervention in nature as inherently destructive. It seeks instead to preserve and expand wilderness areas. Deep Ecology criticizes classical sciences contemporary monopolization of respectable approaches to knowing the world and nature, seeing the predominance of rational thought as endemic to the anthropocentrism that has produced ecological crisis. By contrast, deep ecologists advance intuition as an equal or even superior form of cognition. Through intuition, they argue, the continuity between the human self and the rest of the cosmos may be properly apprehended and appreciated. Hence, drawing on diverse inuences such as Heidegger, Buddhism, native American insights and Western romanticism, Deep Ecology calls upon people to develop a quasi-mystical ecological consciousness by which they will feel themselves part of the natural world, as a self-in-self. Social Ecology and Eco-socialism roundly criticize Deep Ecology for displaying reactionary and anti-humanist tendencies.
DAVID PEPPER UK

Defense Fund, Environmental

see Environmental Defense Fund (Volume 5)

Demographic transition
Wolfgang Lutz and Anne Goujon
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria

The global demographic transition was the salient feature of world population changes throughout the 20th century. It is the reason underlying the population explosion that brought world population size from 2.5 billion in 1950 to six billion in 2000. But it is also the explanation why birth rates have been declining around the world and are expected to further decline where they are still high. As a consequence, population growth has already leveled off in many developed parts of the world and is expected to level off in all parts over the course of the 21st century. A decline in birth rates does not immediately result in the stabilization of population size, due to the fact that a very young population a consequence of past high fertility results in an increasing number of potential parents over several decades. This phenomenon is called the momentum of population growth. In 1945, Frank Notestein developed the paradigm that all populations undergo a process of demographic transition at some point in their history. The demographic transition theory has evolved as a generalization of the sequence of events observed in what are now developed countries. The model distinguishes four phases in the evolution of populations. In the initial phase of the transition, the combination of high birth and death rates produces a slow or no growth equilibrium. That happened throughout most of human history: The world population grew slowly because birth and

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death rates uctuations cancelled each other (see Figure 1). In the second phase, death rates begin to fall because of exogenous factors such as rise in living standards (better nutrition, hygiene) and improvements in health. This phase is a period of rapid population growth. The demographic transition theory asserts that in the third phase, and after some delay, the decreases in mortality will be followed by a decrease of fertility rates. During this phase, the population growth rate will decrease. The latter phase is when there is a quasi equilibrium between low birth and death rates. Different societies have experienced transition in different ways, and today various regions of the world are following distinctive paths (Tabah, 1989). Many developed countries are in the last, fourth stage, or even beyond that, as many European countries have reached below replacement fertility levels and seem to stay at those levels. All world countries have gone through the second stage of the transition (mortality decline) and most are in the third stage of fertility decline or at a post-transition stage. The demographic transition began in more developed countries (MDCs) in the 18th century and spread to less developed countries (LDCs) in the last half of the 20th century (Notestein, 1945; Davis, 1954, 1991; Coale, 1973). In MDCs, mortality rates declined comparatively gradually beginning in the late 1700s and then more rapidly in the late 1800s; fertility rates declined, as well, after a lag of 75 100 years. The demographic transition started much later in LDCs. The rst sign of a decline in mortality rates only appeared during the period between the two world wars. Average annual population growth rates doubled to reach 1% year 1 . Nevertheless, it was only in the 1950s and 1960s that the diffusion of medical techniques and progress in public health allowed the global population growth rate to increase dramatically. It reached 2.4% during the 1960 1970 period for the developing world.
7000 6000 5000 4000 3000 2000 1000

The broad result has been a gradual transition from a small, slowly growing population with high mortality and high fertility, to a large, slowly growing population with low mortality and low fertility. On the theoretical level there are two different ways to explain demographic transition. In one view, the fertility decline is a direct response to the mortality decline. This so-called homeostasis argument claims that societies tend to nd an equilibrium between births and deaths. When death rates decline due to progress in medicine and better living conditions, the equilibrium is disturbed and the population grows unless birth rates decline in response to the new mortality conditions. The fact that fertility tends to decline many years after a decline in mortality may be explained by a perception lag. The equilibrium is supposed to be attained by a country when it reaches replacement-level fertility; that is an equilibrium in which each generation exactly replaces itself. The replacement fertility level depends on the sex ratio at birth, as well as on the mortality between birth and the end of reproductive life. In countries that are through the stage of mortality decline (all MDCs and some LDCs), the level of replacement fertility is about 2.1 children. The alternative to the homeostasis argument assumes that modernization of society acts as a driving force of both declining mortality and declining fertility. Fertility decline lags behind mortality decline, according to this view, because fertility is embedded in the system of cultural norms more strongly than mortality, and therefore changes more slowly. The historical record of Europe where fertility sometimes declined simultaneously with mortality and population growth was generally much lower than in today s high fertility countries tends to support the second explanation. But the two arguments are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Figure 2 illustrates the example of demographic transition in two countries: Austria, a developed country in

Beginning of demographic transition in LDCs Beginning of demographic transition in MDCs

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50

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30

20

10

CBR Austria

CDR Austria

CBR Mauritius

CDR Mauritius

0 1819 1829 1839 1849 1859 1869 1879 1889 1899 1909 1919 1929 1939 1949 1959 1969 1979 1989

Figure 2

The demographic transition in Austria and Mauritius, crude birth (CBR) and death (CDR) rates

Central Europe and Mauritius, a developing country in the Indian Ocean. Both nations have good records for birth and death rates going back more than a century. Until about 1880 in Austria, annual birth and death rates uctuated widely. These uctuations can also be observed in Mauritius until 1945, due to epidemics, the changing severity of endemic diseases (notably malaria), and changing weather conditions (cyclones). Whenever birth rates are consistently above death rates, as was the case in Mauritius during the late 19th century, the population grows. After 1880 in Austria, death rates started to decline until they had reached approximately their present level after World War II. The decrease in mortality rates started 70 years later in Mauritius but the decline was much more abrupt than in Austria. Death rates in Mauritius declined precipitously due to malaria eradication and the introduction of modern medical technology. Although the speed of the mortality decline and original levels of mortality were different in the two countries, the two developments were of the same nature. However, in the Austrian case, birth rates started a slow decline soon after the death rates, which is somehow typical of European countries, thus supporting the validity of the modernization argument mentioned above. On the contrary, in Mauritius, birth rates remained high or even increased somewhat due to the better health status of women (a typical phenomenon in the early phase of demographic transition). By 1950 this had resulted in

a population growth rate of more than 3% year 1 , one of the highest in the world at that time. Birth rates subsequently declined, with the bulk of the transition occurring during the late 1960s and early 1970s when the total fertility rate declined from more than six children per woman to less than three within only seven years, probably the worlds most rapid national fertility decline. This decline occurred on a strictly voluntary basis and resulted from the combination of high female educational status and well-implemented family planning programs (Lutz, 1994). Because of the still very young age structure of the Mauritian population, current birth rates are still higher than death rates and the population is growing by about 1% year 1 despite fertility at around replacement level. Empirically observed trends in all parts of the world have overwhelmingly conrmed the relevance of the concept of demographic transition to LDCs. With the exception of pockets where religious or cultural beliefs are strongly pronatalist, fertility decline is well advanced in all regions except sub-Saharan Africa, and even in that region many signs of a fertility transition can be perceived. In Southeast Asia and many countries in Latin America, fertility rates are on par with rates seen in MDCs only several decades ago, and in several countries, such as China, Taiwan, and Korea, fertility is at sub-replacement levels. In Southern Asia and North Africa, the demographic transition has not followed the pattern of a clear lag between the

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decrease in death rates preceding a decrease in birth rates. The two rates declined almost simultaneously, somehow resembling the historical European pattern over the last 40 years. The biggest difference between the demographic transition processes in what are now the MDCs and LDCs has been the speed of mortality decline. Mortality decline in Europe, North America, and Japan came about over the course of two centuries as a result of reduced variability in the food supply, better housing, improved sanitation, and, nally, progress in preventive and curative medicine. Mortality decline in LDCs, in contrast, occurred very quickly after World War II as a result of the application of Western medical and public health technology to infectious, parasitic, and diarrheal diseases. Life expectancy in Europe rose gradually from about 35 years in 1800 to about 50 in 1900, 66.5 at the end of World War II, and 74.4 in 1995. In LDCs, it shot up from 40.9 at the end of World War II to 62.1 in 1995. The increase was particularly impressive in Eastern Asia, where life expectancy at birth increased from around 40 to more than 70 years over that period. In Africa it only increased to slightly above 50 years, with life expectancy now falling in several countries due to AIDS. The increase that took MDCs about one and a half centuries to achieve came to pass in LDCs in less than half a century. As a result of the speed of the mortality decline, populations in LDCs are growing three times faster today than did the populations of present-day MDCs at the comparable stage of their own demographic transition. Major social and economic changes, often summarized by the notion of modernization, are at the heart of the demographic transition theory. The changes in fertility trends are only one aspect of the radical social changes that many developing societies are experiencing. Cultural change, urbanization, and mass education have spread the image of the smaller nuclear family. It is to be expected that within the rst decades of the 21st century, the nal stages of demographic transition will be reached in all parts of the world. See also : Demographic Change: Indonesian Transmigration, Volume 3; Demographic Change: Peopling of the Paci c Islands, Volume 3; Demographic Change: the Aging Population, Volume 3; Global Population Trends, Volume 3.

Davis, K (1991) Population and Resources: Fact and Interpretation, in Resources, Environment and Population: Present Knowledge, eds K Davis and M S Bernstam, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1 21. Lutz, W, ed (1994) Population Development Environment: Understanding their Interactions in Mauritius, Springer-Verlag, Berlin. Notestein, F W (1945) Population the Long View, in Food For the World, ed T W Schultz, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 36 57. Tabah, L (1989) From One Demographic Transition to Another, Popul. Bull. UN, 28, 1 24.

Development
see Development and Global Environmental Change (Opening essay, Volume 5)

Discounting
Discounting is a method of weighing monetary values that occur in different time periods (Portney and Weyant, 1999). The construction of a dam, for example, entails large expenditures on labor and materials while the dam is being constructed; revenues from hydropower accrue over the next 100 years, say, with relatively minor operating costs. Will the value of electricity over the next 100 years pay for the construction costs and provide investors a market return? Investors convert values at different time periods to a present value equivalent by discounting to the present. One dollar put in the bank at 10% interest is worth $1.10 in a year, thus $1.10 (a year from now) has a present value of $1. If the $1 were left in the bank for two years, it would be worth $1.21 (11 11), or $1 (two years from now) has a present value of 1 121 D 0826. More generally, investors are interested in the net present value (NPV), i.e., whether the present value of the benets is greater than the present value of the costs.
n

NPV D

REFERENCES
Coale, A J (1973) The Demographic Transition, in Proceedings of the International Population Conference, Vol. 1, International Union for the Scientic Study of Population, Li` ege, Belgium. Davis, K (1954) The World Demographic Transition, Ann. Am. Acad. Polit. Soc. Sci., 237, 1 11.

t0

Bt C t 1 C r n

where Bt is the benet or revenue in year t , Ct is the costs in year t , and r is the rate of interest. Economists justify discounting future benets and costs in public decisions because both investors and consumers appear to discount future returns and costs. Furthermore, future harms can be offset by investing pennies today.

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215

For example, suppose one tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2 ) emissions in the year 2000 imposes $1000 of costs on individuals living in the year 2100. With investments earning 8%, those generating the emissions could offset the $1000 loss by investing a mere $0.45 today. A very important caveat is in order. Discounting is inappropriate when society determines on ethical grounds that future generations should have the right to particular environmental or other conditions. Howarth and Norgaard (1995) have shown that when rights are assigned to future generations, the economy can still operate efciently. For example, people may determine today that it is unethical to subject future generations to the unknown risks of global warming. Climate change would be averted on ethical grounds. The economy can still function efciently given the new understanding of the rights of future generations, but those in the present generation who benet from the prior distribution of rights would be worse off.

REFERENCES
Howarth, R B and Norgaard, R B (1995) Intergenerational Choice Under Global Environmental Change, Chapter 6, in The Handbook of Environmental Economics, ed D W Bromley, Blackwell, Cambridge, MA. Portney, P R and Weyant, J P, eds (1999) Discounting and Intergenerational Equity, Resources for the Future, Washington, DC.
RICHARD B NORGAARD USA

Dominion Theology
see Christianity and the Environment (Volume 5); Theology (Volume 5)

E
Earth Art
see Art and the Environment (Volume 5); Landscape, Urban Landscape, and the Human Shaping of the Environment (Volume 5)
Rockefeller of Middlebury College, Vermont, traveled the world collecting thousands of interventions. Difcult balancing and negotiation took place to develop a document that could be acceptable across various and very diverse cultures, religions and social norms. In March 2000, the group met to nalize and approve the document. It will be presented to the UN at the special session marking 10 years since the Earth Summit in 2002. The Earth Charter attempts to set out a framework of ethics and values to re-dene the way humanity interacts with the natural world. Unlike previous environmental statements, such as the Stockholm and Rio Declarations, the Earth Charter has a profoundly spiritual basis. It acknowledges the concern for individuals within a species to be protected from cruelty. It enunciates the need for the practice of non-violence and not merely the absence of conict. The Earth Charters fundamental commitments are to:
respect the Earth in all its diversity; care for the community of life with love, understanding and compassion; build democratic societies that are just, sustainable and peaceful; secure Earths bounty and beauty for future generations.

Earth Charter
The success of such global efforts as the International Declaration on Human Rights led planners of the UNCED to initiate negotiations for an Earth Charter. Beginning in August 1990, the Road to Rio process of preparatory meetings aspired to draft an inspiring, meaningful and relevant call to a new relationship between humanity and the biosphere. The effort engaged many non-governmental organizations (NGOs), particularly those within the faith community. Various drafts were circulated by the Society of Friends, the Buddhists and the Franciscan Institute (devoted to the life of Saint Francis of Assisi). But negotiations fell apart before the 1992 Earth Summit. In an exchange that captured the differing visions of delegations, north and south, Canadian Ambassador Arthur Campeau urged that the statement be free of United Nations (UN) bureaucrat language; that it be simple, clear and inspiring, the sort of document you could hang on a childs bedroom wall. To which a delegate from a developing country responded, Our children dont have bedrooms. The failure to achieve an Earth Charter saddened a number of its promoters, notably secretary general of UNCED, Maurice Strong. It was Strong who subsequently ensured that the fth anniversary of Rio (Rio Plus 5, March 1997) launched a renewed effort to draft an Earth Charter. Strong co-chaired an Earth Charter Commission, with former President of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbechev, and included an impressive roster of past and current heads of government, celebrities, indigenous people, parliamentarians, religious leaders, youth and activists. The Commission released a benchmark draft in March 1997 and held a three year process of public outreach and debate. The chief drafter, Steven

The intent is to secure a place for the Earth Charter as soft law through seeking widespread public support from around the world.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada

Earth Day
The rst Earth Day, April 22nd, 1970, was nearly exclusively an event observed only within the US, but by its 13th anniversary, April 22nd, 2000, the event was global and involved half a billion people in over 100 countries. Earth Days humble beginnings grew out of the antiVietnam War movements effective use of teach-ins on college campuses in the 1960s. US Senator Gaylord Nelson and Denis Hayes organized the rst Earth Day as a consciousness-raising and educational event. The US

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was reeling from news that Lake Erie was dead due to eutrophication, as proclaimed on the cover of Life magazine, and the chilling warnings of Rachel Carsons Silent Spring, less than a decade before. Earth Day gained rapid acceptance and was marked by a Presidential Proclamation signed by the then US President Richard Nixon. Large US corporations, such as General Motors and Coca Cola, joined in declarations of corporate environmentalism. The success of the 1970 event can be tied to the passage of key environmental protection legislation in the US, such as the Clean Air Act, as well as the creation of governmental environment departments, a trend that was solidied by the rst United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972. Earth Days founders had initially not intended the day to be celebrated annually. Subsequent Earth Days have reected the ebb and ow of public environmental support. Earth Day 1971 was a much smaller affair than that in 1970; while Earth Day 1990 was huge, Earth Day 1991 was nearly invisible. Denis Hayes was once again the chief organizer of Earth Day 2000, which focused on climate change. As a millennial bash it succeeded in gaining media attention, with a full special edition of Time magazine devoted to it. April 22nd has emerged after three decades as having a rm hold on the name Earth Day.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada

originated with the FBI agent. The EF! members were acquitted. Other EF! activists have experienced similar suspicious acts and violent sabotage. Pacic Northwest anti-logging activist Judy Barry was blown up in her car. She survived, but was seriously disabled. She maintained until her death years later that she had not been transporting the explosives as claimed by the authorities. EF! continues to attract primarily young eco-activists. EF! is currently active in 13 countries. The group disavows hierarchies and conventional organizational structure. Its UK web page proclaims, EF! has no central ofce, no paid workers, no decision-making bodies, and is not even an organization in the normal sense of the word. Its approach has led to a number of similar direct action groups, such as the Ruckus Society.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada

Ecocentric, Biocentric, Gaiacentric

Ecocentrism is an ideology or worldview that centers on and prioritizes the whole planetary ecosystem as the prime source of value and the proper focus of our attention. The term is virtually synonymous with biocentric (centering on the whole biosphere) and Gaiacentric (centring on Gaia the earth, whose systems form one living organism). Such foci distinguish this worldview from anthropocentrism, whose humanistic priorities regard human perceptions and interests as the source of all value in nature. Ecocentric/biocentric/Gaiacentric ideology underlies deep ecology environmentalism. Its central ethic assigns intrinsic value to all animate and inanimate elements in the cosmos value, that is, which would reside in these elements even if human beings were not there to attribute their own values (for instance, economic utility) to nature. Intrinsic value implies that the role of humans is simply that of equal members of the ecological community, with no preemptory rights over other species or other parts of the system. Ecocentrism also emphasizes the importance of balance and interconnectedness in nature and of retaining the unity, stability, diversity, and harmony of all ecosystems. Ecocentrism reects the inuences of early 12th century organicist philosophy, 19th century Romanticism and anarchism, and of an arcadian tradition in ecological science and in literature. This last is manifest in Aldo Leopolds Land Ethic (1949, A Sand County Almanack), which holds that A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity,

Earth First!
Earth First! (EF!) is the brainchild of an angry environmentalist and self described redneck, Vietnam veteran Dave Foreman. Al Gore, in Earth in the Balance (published in 1991), quotes Foreman as saying, Its time for a warrior society to rise up out of the earth and throw itself in front of the juggernaut of destruction, to be antibodies against the human pox thats ravaging this precious beautiful planet. Seeing so much destruction of vanishing wilderness in the US, Foreman established a group under the banner No compromise in defense of the earth. Unlike other environmental groups working within the system to achieve change, EF! adopted tactics outside the law, espousing monkey wrenching and direct action. EF!, which has since disavowed the practice, spiked trees to discourage logging (a spiked tree can cause serious injury to a logger whose chain saw meets with unexpected metal). In 1989, Foreman and three other EF! members were arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on charges of conspiracy to blow up a dam. The FBI had inltrated the group and all discussions of explosives had

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beauty, and stability of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. Some other ecocentric principles derived from Leopolds land ethic include: everything is connected to everything else; the whole is greater than the sum of the parts (synergy); human and non-human nature are a unity (see Leopold, Aldo, Volume 5). From these principles, and from the notion of a whole ecological community of which animals, plants and humans are all equal members and interdependent parts, it is suggested that the environment has direct rights, that it qualies for moral personhood and that it is deserving of a direct duty. Ecocentrism then clearly places the environment on a moral par with humans, giving it a biotic right. If applied in practice, such a right would foster environmental protection and preservation over the approach of conservation the latter implying managed change in accordance with considerations of economic utility. It would also confer legal standing on wildlife and other elements in nature, enabling environmentalists to defend them in court against the damaging effects of potential development, as has happened in the US.
DAVID PEPPER UK

Ecocentrism
see Environmental Ethics (Volume 5)

Ecofeminism
Karen J Warren
Macalester College, St Paul, MN, USA

The term ecofeminism was coined in 1974 by Francoise dEaubonne to call attention to womens potential to bring about an ecological revolution (dEaubonne, 1974). Unlike earlier feminisms, which focused on sex-roles, equal rights, equity in the workplace, educational opportunities for women (e.g., liberal feminism), socioeconomic conditions of women as workers (e.g., Marxist feminism), ecofeminism understands feminism to be a movement to end all systems of domination, including the domination of non-human animals and nature. Since 1974, ecofeminism has surfaced throughout the globe in the form of both women-initiated, grassroots environmental actions and interdisciplinary perspectives on the inextricable interconnections among human

systems of unjusti ed domination both of humans and earth others. The distinctiveness of ecofeminism, then, is that it is a feminist environmentalism and an environmental feminism. Just as there is not one feminism, there is not one ecofeminism. There is no one, uni ed ecofeminist perspective on environmental issues. What ecofeminists have in common is a commitment to the historical interconnections among human systems of domination (including the unjusti ed domination of non-human nature), and to replacing oppressive practices, policies, and philosophies with ones that are not. What makes ecofeminism feminist is its starting point: It begins with women and sex/gender analysis to call attention to the interconnected exploitations and liberations of women, other human others (e.g., people of color, poor people, children, colonized peoples) and earth others. What makes ecofeminism ecological is that nonhuman animals and nature are integral to the practice and theory of ecofeminism. Ecofeminism not only makes visible the ways in which the well-being of the natural environment is linked to the well-being of diverse groups of humans; it also expands on the notion of a human self as an ecological self. Using insights from both the environmental movement and ecology in the framing of ecologically responsible and sustainable policies, practices and philosophies, ecofeminism has emerged as a political movement among all racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, gendered, and geographical locations. Ecofeminism is represented by a variety of feminist perspectives and practices. It nds expression in a wide range of (mostly) women-initiated, community activist initiatives around such issues as air and water pollution, biodiversity and cultural diversity, deserti cation and deforestation, indigenous agriculture and food production, toxins and hazardous waste disposal, global warming and acid rain, human overpopulation and habitat destruction, species preservation, development and biotechnology. The slogan of ecofeminism might well be: nature is a feminist issue. At the heart of ecofeminist practice and theory are the various interconnections historical, causal, empirical, economic, political, scienti c, symbolic and literary, linguistic, conceptual, ethical, religious and philosophical between systems and practices of domination. As a movement of global environmental change, the main project of ecofeminism is two-fold: to make visible the ways in which the exploitation and destruction of the non-human environment is tied to the exploitation of women, people of color, children, and the poor; and to develop policies, practices, and philosophies which undo and overcome these interconnected dominations. There is literally no area of environmental concern that falls outside the interest of ecofeminist activism and theory. This is not surprising, considering the intimate connections between the health, status, and well-being of the non-human environment and the health,

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status, and well-being of women and other human others cross-culturally now and in the foreseeable future. According to ecofeminists, any plausible, workable, responsible agenda for the 21st century will include ecofeminist insights into and solutions to the globally interlocking systems of exploitation and domination.

EMPIRICAL WOMENNATURE INTERCONNECTIONS

Since the starting point of ecofeminism is women, at the outset ecofeminism focuses on womennature interconnections. But since all women are of some race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, geographic location, sexual orientation, and marital status, ecofeminism is also about race nature, classnature, geographic locationnature, sexual orientationnature, and marital statusnature interconnections. For simplicity, this essay subsumes these varieties of interconnections under the generic rubric women nature interconnections. One way to reveal the sorts of concerns that characterize ecofeminism is to consider empirical data on womennature interconnections. Such data help to clarify why nature is a feminist issue.
Trees

the Northern Hemisphere (the North) to the Southern Hemisphere (the South) often do not recognize the full extent of womens contributions to all aspects of agricultural work (e.g., in plowing, planting, harvesting, weeding, processing and storing crops, and caring for livestock), involve technological improvements which are not aimed at training women or which develop products inappropriate from the standpoint of local women (e.g., solar stoves for women in Africa who cook before dawn and after dusk, or maize shellers that are more time-consuming to use than when women shell by hand).
Water

Tree shortages are a problem in many parts of India. Historically, rst-world development policies that replaced indigenous, multispecies forests with monoculture eucalyptus and teak plantations solved the problem of too few trees, but in a way that disproportionately affected the livelihoods of local women. Traditionally, women in rural India have gendered responsibilities to maintain domestic economies, which are highly dependent on trees and tree products for food, fodder, fuel, herbs, dyes, medicines, household utensils and building materials, and incomegenerating activities. Monoculture eucalyptus is unpopular among local women because it provides no food, fodder, herbs, dyes, and medicines and is a problematic fuel. Replacement of indigenous forests with eucalyptus thereby affects womens abilities to maintain household economies, especially when these women also must take on the labor tasks of the local men who move to city areas to work in the eucalyptus plantations.
Food

Less that 50% of the population of the South has a source of potable water or facilities for sewage disposal. Since women and children in the South perform most of the water collection and distribution work, it is women and children who are disproportionately harmed by the presence of unsanitary water. Also, the time spent by women and children in water collection in Africa and Asia (from 517 h each week) is time unavailable for other activities (e.g., attending school). Droughts and oods exacerbate the situation. Droughts and oods are among the most serious natural disasters in the South, contributing to desertication, deforestation, and soil erosion on a large scale. But it is poor people, especially women and children, who are most seriously affected by these natural disasters, since they constitute the largest group who live in those areas. The North also has water-related problems that disproportionately affect women, communities of color, and the poor. The presence of lead and leaking chemicals, as well as the improper disposal of hazardous wastes, has contributed to groundwater contamination of municipal water supplies in all parts of the US. Ground water, the drinking water source for nearly half of the US population, disproportionately affects inner city poor, especially pregnant women, women of color, children, and the elderly, more than other groups.
Toxins

Women farmers globally grow at least 59% of the worlds food; in parts of Africa, women grow 8090% of the food. Women farmers tend to work longer hours, have fewer assets and lower incomes than men farmers, primarily because their access to credit is limited. Agricultural policies and practices exported from

The United Church of Christs Commission on Racial Justice published an already classic report in 1987 entitled Toxic Waste and Race in the United States. The commission found that race is the most important determinant in the location of hazardous waste in the US. Three out of every ve African and Hispanic Americans, and more than half of all Asian Pacic Islanders and American Indians live in communities with uncontrolled toxic waste sites. Emelle, Alabama, which is almost 80% African American, houses the nations largest hazardous waste landll, receiving toxins from 45 states. Probably the greatest concentration of hazardous waste sites in the US

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is on the predominantly African American and Hispanic south side of Chicago. Navajo Indians are the primary workforce in the mining of uranium in the US. However, the dumping of uranium tailings on Navajo (and other American Indian) lands has resulted in higher percentages of health risks (e.g., miscarriages for pregnant women, gynecological cancers, cleft palate and other birth defects) than non-Indian populations. According to ecofeminism, awareness of these empirical interconnections between the status and treatment of women and other human sub-dominant groups, and the status and treatment of non-human nature, must be part of any informed environmental practice, policy, or philosophy. But ecofeminism doesnt stop there. Awareness of other sorts of womennature interconnections must also be made visible, addressed, and, where unjustied domination is involved, replaced by life-afrming practices, policies, and philosophies.

of modern science, which sanctioned the exploitation of nature, unchecked commercial and industrial expansion, and the subordination of women. According to Merchant (1980, 2)
The metaphor of the earth as a nurturing mother was gradually to vanish as a dominant image as the Scientic Revolution proceeded to mechanize and to rationalize the world view. The second image, nature as disorder, called forth an important modern idea, that of power over nature. Two new ideas, those of mechanism and of the domination and mastery of nature, became core concepts of the modern world.

ADDITIONAL WOMENNATURE INTERCONNECTIONS

These examples provide concrete illustrations of ways in which the exploitation of women is intimately connected to the destruction of the earth. They also make visible why sensitivity to the plights and expertise of women and other human sub-dominants is important to any informed feminism, environmental activism, and environmental policy. But these empirical connections are just one sort of womennature interconnection of interest to ecofeminists. Consider some of the other ones. Some ecofeminists have focused on historical interconnections between the domination of women (and other humans others) and the domination of Earth. Ecofeminist philosophers, for example, have been among those who trace patterns of domination to the Western philosophical tradition of rationalism, according to which the mental trait of reason or rationality is both the essence (or hallmark) of humanness and that which elevates (at least some) humans above the inferior, physical, bodily, corporeal realm of nature (Plumwood, 1993). Drawing on the dualisms of mind/body, reason/emotion, culture/nature, that which is associated with mind, reason and culture is claimed to be superior to that which is associated with body, emotion, and nature. In systems of domination, the subordinated others (e.g., women, slaves, children) have historically been identied with the inferior physical world of nature; the justied domination of these other human others is based on their alleged association with what is biological, natural, bodily, or physical. Ecofeminist historian Carolyn Merchant provides a different account. Merchant argues that the death of nature occurred between 15001700, when an older world order was replaced by a reductionist, mechanistic world view

This change in controlling imagery was directly related to changes in human attitudes and behavior toward the earth. Whereas the nurturing Earth image can be viewed as a cultural constraint restricting the types of socially and morally sanctioned human actions allowable with respect to Earth, the new images of mastery and domination functioned as cultural sanctions for the denudation of nature. According to Merchant, the change in dominant nature imagery from organism to machine permitted the removal of classical moral constraints on how one treats mother nature, a living organism. The mechanistic metaphor thereby helped sanction the exploitation of inert, passive nature as object of study. These historical interconnections raise important conceptual issues about social systems of oppression and domination, conceptions of the human self, and the nature of human responsibilities to the non-human world. For example, ecofeminist philosophers have provided analyses of fundamental features of oppressive conceptual frameworks that underlie systems of domination (Warren, 1990). A conceptual framework is a set of basic beliefs, values, attitudes, and assumptions about oneself and ones world. It is a historically located, socially constructed thought world a lens through which one sees and interprets the world. When a conceptual framework is oppressive (e.g., a sexist, racist, or classist conceptual framework), the beliefs function to justify the unjustied domination of the other (e.g., women, people of color, the underclass). There are ve noteworthy features of an oppressive conceptual framework: (a) value-hierarchical, updown, thinking; (b) oppositional and mutually exclusive valuedualisms (either or thinking); (c) conceptions of power which advantage the power of ups over downs; (d) conceptions of privilege which systematically advantage the ups over downs; and (e) a logic of domination: a moral premise which justi es the subordination of downs by ups on the grounds that the ups have a morally relevant trait which the downs, as downs, lack. Whether the conceptual framework is sexist, racist, classist, heterosexist, colonialist, or ethnocentric, insofar as they are oppressive conceptual frameworks, these ve features seem to be shared in common (Warren, 2000).

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These basic conceptual interconnections among social systems of domination are important to ecofeminist philosophy. Oppressive conceptual schemes justify relationships of domination and subordination through a logic of domination, which asserts that whatever is up deserves to be up and is morally justied in treating as inferior whatever is down. When women, people of color, the poor or children are downs in up down relationships of domination and subordination, their justied subordination often has rested historically on their alleged association with the inferior, non-mental realm of animals and nature. In this way, sexism is conceptually tied to naturism, i.e., the unjustied domination of animals and non-human nature. There are two basic ways this conceptual link occurs. First, sexism and naturism are linked through an oppressive conceptual framework characterized by a logic of domination. Since all feminists must oppose the logic of domination (required by patriarchal arguments for sexism), and since the arguments for the domination of nonhuman nature presuppose the same logic of domination, all feminists must oppose the arguments for the domination of non-human nature. The logic of traditional feminism thereby requires extending feminism beyond a concern with sexism, or even a concern with all forms of human subordination, to a concern with naturism; naturism must also be included about the systems of domination that feminism opposes (Warren, 1990). The second conceptual reason sexism and naturism are linked has to do with the concepts of gender and nature. The concept of gender is socially, historically, and materially constructed. Both the concept women, and the identities of particular women, are constructed from and reect such factors as race/ethnicity, class, age, affectional orientation, ability, geographic location, and religion; to be a woman is to be a woman of a certain race/ethnic, class, age, affectional orientation, ability, geographic location, and religion. This means that there is no pure gender; gender always occurs in conjunction with race, class, age, affectional orientation, geographic location. Similarly, the concept of nature is socially and humanly constructed; it is not a xed, static, self-evident, given or absolute concept. What is meant by nature, and even what counts as a natural object for humans, is constructed from and reect such factors as the race/ethnicity, class, age, affectional orientation, geographic location, and religion of humans who name, describe, judge, understand, and interact with nature. The meanings of nature are constructed out of human values, beliefs, attitudes and assumptions different and differing human conceptual frameworks. Obviously, the claim that women and nature are social constructions does not deny that there are actual humans and actual non-human natural entities. One can hug a human, climb a tree, swim a river, cultivate a plant, destroy an ecosystem, or enjoy being in nature. These entities (e.g.,

humans, trees, nature) are physical realities. But what is meant by human, tree, or nature, and what constitute the identities of humans, non-human natural entities, and nature are social realities as well. These social realities are social constructions. What constitutes country for Australian aboriginal peoples is not what Europeans mean by country, land, landscape, property, or wilderness. In the words of anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose, the closest European and American-derived expression is nourishing terrain, a place that gives and receives life. Not just imagined or represented, it is lived in and lived with. Country is sacred, alive, conscious, the law, place, managed, owned, land. Country knows, hears, smells, takes notice, takes care, is quiet, dangerous, lonely, sorry or happy or sad, is healthy, sick, or not so good. Country is criss-crossed with song lines and the tracks of the Dreamings: walking, slithering, crawling, ying, chasing, hunting, weeping, dying, giving birth (Rose, 1996, 35). The relationships between people and their country is a a kinship relationship, and like relations among kin, there are obligations of nurturence. People and country take care of each other (Rose, 1996, 49). Such linguistic differences about what something is called are important to ecofeminism. As many philosophers (e.g., Wittgenstein) have argued, the language one uses is deeply embedded in conceptions of oneself and ones world ones conceptual framework. When that language is sexist or naturist, it reects and reinforces conceptions of women and non-human nature as inferior to, having less status, value, or prestige than, that which is identied as male, masculine, or human (i.e., male). Such is the case with the language used historically in Western societies to describe women and nature. Women are described in animal (nature) terms as pets, dogs, cats, pigs, cows, sows, foxes, chicks, serpents, bitches, beavers, mares, old mares, old bats, old hens, mother hens, pussies, pussycats, cheetahs, bird-brains, hare-brains, elephants, and whales. Language that animalizes or naturalizes women in a patriarchal culture where animals are seen as inferior to humans (men) thereby reinforces and authorizes womens inferior status. Similarly, language that feminizes nature in a patriarchal culture where women are seen as subordinate or inferior reinforces and authorizes the domination of nature. Mother nature is raped, mastered, conquered, mined, controlled, poked, prodded, and pried into; her secrets are penetrated and her womb is put into service by the man of science. Virgin timber is felled, cut down; fertile (not virile) soil is tilled and land that lies fallow is barren (not impotent) and useless, like a woman who cannot conceive a child. The exploitation of nature and animals is justied by language which feminizes them; the exploitation of women is justied by language which naturalizes women. Just as the justication for the dominations of women and non-human nature is reinforced by sexistnaturist language,

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so too the justication for the domination of people of color is reinforced by racist-naturist language. For example, in the US, the justication for dominating African American men was bolstered by language and images of sub-dominant children, animals, and nature. Slaves were mere brutes, animals, dogs, coons, apes. African American men were denied the rights of citizenship as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race (Stone, 1974; n 19). The legal status of slaves as things, mere property or chattel was accepted law in the 1850s. Languages of domination are crucial to effective implementations of the logic of domination by colonizers. Standard European and Anglo-American land-use attitudes and descriptions of wilderness involve the peculiar notion that if one cannot see traces of ones own culture in the land, then the land must be natural or empty of culture (Rose, 1996). Terra nullius (land that was not owned) was the ofcial doctrine of (white) Australia until overturned by the High Courts Mabo Decision in 1995. That decision marks the rst time Aboriginal and Islander peoples occupation and ownership of country was formally and publicly acknowledged. The view that land with no ownership is uninhabited wilderness is familiar in the US as well. Wilderness is often conceived as wild, idle, worthless frontier until tamed and cultivated through the white settlers agriculture. Land that just lies there, barren, useless, uncultivated, for example, untouched virgin prairie, has no value until domesticated by the white mans plow. White racism is not just a social construct around skin color and ethnicity; it is also an ecological construct, one that reects and reinforces ecological as well as social factors. Many ecofeminists argue that cultural transformation must occur if these interlocking systems of domination are to be eliminated. Since historically there are important symbolic interconnections between the domination of women (and other human others) and the domination of non-human nature, one must examine a cultures images, rituals, rites, ceremonies, stories, myths, songs, literature, theologies, religions and spiritual practices. Some ecofeminists have examined the religious and theological symbols that affect our cultural views about humans and nature. For example, ecofeminist theologian Elizabeth Dodson Gray argues that the Christian biblical tradition is a hierarchical order of creation, a pyramid of dominance and status, where woman comes after and below man, children come after women, and pets, animals, plants and nature itself follow, in descending order of status and worth. Gray argues that we need to think ourselves out of such a patriarchal conceptual trap by revisioning a theology of creation that is not a hierarchical pyramid of dominance and subordination (Gray, 1979).

Other ecofeminists (spiritual ecofeminists) agree with Gray. Despite their very vocal critics, including ecofeminist critics, spiritual ecofeminists (e.g., Spretnak, 1982) argue that non-patriarchal, earth-based spiritualities are not only necessary to any healing relationship between humans and the earth, but to any liberatory ecofeminist politics. The politics of womens spirituality must be a Green politics. Some ecofeminists turn to literature, particularly womens nature writing, to affect a cultural transformation. Paula Gunn Allen, Margaret Atwood, Rachel Bagby, Annie Dillard, China Galland, Sally Gearhart, Susan Grifn, Linda Hogan, Winona LaDuke, Ursala Le Guinn, Marge Piercy, Leslie Marmon Silko, Alice Walker, and Terry Tempest Williams are just a few of the women who have explored these interconnections through their stories, poems, novels, and essays. Ecofeminist literature is important because cultural images reect not only who we are but help shape who we become. Attitudes toward animals, plants, mountains, rivers what Leopold (1949) refers collectively to as the land reect deeply seated values about culture, nature, wilderness and the wild, and human nature. Some nature writers romanticize and uncritically idealize wilderness. Others imagine a wild landscape inhabited by humans who occupy a unique place as co-members of the ecological community. Still others challenge the very concepts of nature and wilderness, and the historical construction of a nature/culture dualism, which puts (some) humans in oppositional superiority over nature. The emerging eld of ecofeminist literary criticism examines the political dimensions and ramications of these concepts within ideologies of domination, while seeking to develop literature and criticism that emphasizes appropriate and edifying human relationships within the ecological community. When one challenges cultural sources of systems of domination, epistemological claims also get challenged. Whose knowledge? and Knowledge according to whom? become important questions, since ecofeminist theory and practice always examines the social context in which epistemological claims are generated. Women in the socalled developing world who have gender responsibilities for managing forests, for example, may have invaluable technical knowledge about multiple uses of trees, based on their hands-on, daily, lived experience as forest managers. Their experiential ways of knowing their epistemology may challenge mainstream, Western conceptions of the objectivity, value-neutrality, and impartiality of genuinely scientic knowledge claims. Epistemological worries often interact with psychological ones. Ecofeminist sociologist Ariel Salleh, for example, challenges ethical and epistemological positions that embody a distinctly masculine sensibility, which desires to transcend nature and culture. Salleh argues that since ecofeminism reveals the patriarchal conceptual foundation

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of the continued destruction of the natural environment, what is needed is that the unconscious, psychological connection between women and nature needs to be made conscious, and the hierarchical fallacies of the great chain of being acknowledged, in order for any real growth towards a sane, humane, ecological future (Salleh, 1984). Given the nature of some of these interconnections between the treatment of women and the treatment of nonhuman nature, it is not surprising that perhaps the most visible ecofeminist theory and activism has been in the political arena. Conferences, workshops, direct actions, and grassroots organizing around environmental issues have been initiated globally by a new radical core of low-income women environmentalists. These women are motivated by the irrationalities of capital-intensive growth and the destruction of their domestic economies. Whether it is the Chipko movement in India, the Womens Pentagon Actions in the US, the Seminar on Ecofeminism at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro (1992), or the varieties of global women-initiated actions for better health care, reproductive rights, and environmentally safe neighborhoods, ecofeminist activism has an international presence as a distinctly feminist and environmental movement. Lastly, much of the scholarly literature of ecofeminism has focused on environmental ethics. Minimally, the goal of ecofeminist ethics is to develop theories and practices concerning humans and the natural environment that are not male-biased and which provide a guide to action in the pre-feminist present. This has involved the development of a variety of ecofeminist ethical positions and practices, where notions of care, loving perception, friendship, sharing, appropriate reciprocity, and kinship emerge as morally relevant and important values. One needs only to look at the range of ecofeminist positions regarding such practices as factory farming, vivisection, worldwide trafc in wild animals, violence toward women, health care, reproductive technologies, the location of hazardous waste, and environmental conservation and preservation to see the impact of ecofeminist moral theory in moral practice. Since its inception as a distinct feminism, environmentalism, and form of feminist practice in 1974, ecofeminism has emerged as an important, timely, powerful movement at local, national, international, and global levels. As a social and political movement, ecofeminists have taken the lead in exploring the roles of science, development and technology in the development of environmental policies (e.g., on biodiversity, global warming), practices (e.g., the development of biotechnologies), and decisionmaking structures (e.g., for implementing Agenda 21), which make the expertise of women and indigenous peoples central to both the analysis and resolution of pressing environmental problems. Ecofeminist activism has produced change through numerous kinds of action, including direct

action, civil disobedience, strikes, boycotts, demonstrations, lobbying, and other more traditionally recognized forms of political action (Sturgeon, 1997). Ecofeminist activists have engaged in coalition building among and across different constituencies (e.g., peace, environmental, womens, antiracism, anti-colonialism, animal rights movements). And ecofeminist activists have raised awareness about the interconnections among all political and economic structures of domination and exploitation. As a theoretical position, ecofeminist scholarship has broadened and deepened Western and non-Western views in such different arenas as the arts, economics, ethics, geography, history, literature, philosophy, politics, religion, sociology, and science. It has helped shape a new sense of our human selves as ecological, relational selves who are both similar to and different from non-human nature in distinct and important ways. It has been a leader in the environmental justice movement, and has helped white Western feminism to expand its self-conception to recognize not only the interconnections among forms of human domination and liberation based on gender, race, class, affectional orientation, age, and geographic location, but among these and the domination and liberation of non-human animals and nature. Perhaps the most important theoretical contribution of ecofeminism is simply the starting point of its environmental analysis: using concrete empirical data and womens felt, lived experiences to show the very real interconnections between the plight of women, other human others, and the domination of non-human nature. This starting point makes any adequate theory or practice of feminism, environmentalism, or human liberationism intimately and inextricably interconnected. The remarkable cross-cultural ourishing of ecofeminism internationally since dEaubonne (1974) coined the term is testimony to its power and promise. Ecofeminism is visible in the practical, policy, and theoretical spheres. It is grassroots, multiracial/multiethnic, local and global. It is action-oriented, giving voice to local women-initiated environmental practices. It is forward-looking and transformative in focus, moving us beyond harmful social systems of domination, which endanger all life on earth. According to ecofeminism, any feminism, environmentalism, or environmental policy which fails to include ecofeminist insights into the unjustied and interconnected dominations of women, other human others, and non-human nature will simply be inadequate for the needs of the 21st century.

REFERENCES
dEaubonne, F (1974) Le Feminisme ou La Mort, Pierre Horay, Paris. Gray, E D (1979) Green Paradise Lost, Roundtable Press, Wellesley, MA.

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Leopold, A (1949) The Land Ethic, in A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, Oxford University Press, New York. Merchant, C (1980) The Death of Nature, Harper and Row, San Francisco, CA. Plumwood, V (1993) Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Routledge, London. Rose, D B (1996) Nourishing Terrains, Australian Heritage Commission, Canberra. Salleh, A K (1984) Deeper than Deep Ecology: The Eco-feminist Connection, Environ. Ethics, 6, 339 345. Spretnak, C, ed (1982) The Politics of Womens Spirituality, Doubleday, Garden City, NY. Stone, C (1974) Should Trees Have Standing? William Kaufmann, Los Altos, CA. Sturgeon, N (1997) Ecofeminist Natures, Routledge, London. Warren, K J (2000) Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What it is and Why it Matters, Rowman and Littleeld, Lanham, MD. Warren, K J, ed (1997) Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN.

Economics and Global Environmental Change

see Economics and Global Environmental Change (Opening essay, Volume 5)

Economics, Environmental
see Environmental Economics (Volume 5)

Eco-socialism
Eco-socialism is a radical homocentric application of socialist analysis and prescriptions to environmentalism. It also modies traditional socialism to take account of environmental issues and perspectives. Its critical analysis of history, social change and economics draws particularly on Marxs (early) writings, especially as interpreted by William Morris. Its prescriptions often revive utopian socialist traditions of decentralization, direct economic democracy, communal ownership of the means of production, etc. Hence the brand of socialism represented is close to anarchist-communism, although there are some major differences between eco-anarchists and eco-socialists concerning analysis and strategies. Eco-socialisms historical materialist analysis locates the causes of contemporary environmental abuse in the workings of the economic mode of production of capitalism, and the institutions and world view necessary to its functioning. Eco-socialism argues that environmentally unsustainable development is inherent to capitalism, therefore to end the former, the latter must be abolished and replaced by socialism. In socialism, it is argued, people can end the alienation from nature and from each other that causes environmental degradation, yet production and industry in pursuit of Enlightenment Project ideals could continue. Such production, with distribution, would be rationally planned perhaps by an enabling state, or, in more anarchistic visions, by bodies representing federation of local communities and regions. Eco-socialist society would rediscover and express our real relationship to nature neither separation and superiority, as contemporary capitalism presupposes, nor of mere equality, as ecocentrism believes. Rather, society and nature are dialectically related, so that each is a manifestation of the other. Nature is socially produced, and what humans do is natural. Socialist communities would recognize that they are not intrinsically determined by natures limits, as deep ecology believes. But they are likely to want to steward,

FURTHER READING
Adams, C, ed (1993) Ecofeminism and the Sacred, Continuum, New York. Anderson, L, ed (1991) Sisters of the Earth, Vintage Press, New York. Cuomo, C J (1998) Feminism and Ecological Communities, Routledge, London. Gaard, G, ed (1993) Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature, Temple University Press, PA. Kolodny, A (1984) The Land Before Her, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC. Mellor, M (1997) Feminism and Ecology, New York University Press, New York. Mies, M and Shiva, V (1993) Ecofeminism, Zed Books, Atlantic Highlands, NJ. Murphy, P D (1995) Literature, Nature, and Other, State University of New York, Albany, NY. Ruether, R R (1974) New Woman, New Earth, The Seabury Press, New York. Shiva, V (1988) Staying Alive, Zed Books, London. Warren, K J, ed (1996) Ecological Feminist Philosophies, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN. Warren, K J (1990) The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism, Environ. Ethics, 12, 125 146. Zahava, I, ed (1988) Through Other Eyes, The Crossing Press, Freedom, CA.

Ecological Economics
see Ecological Economics (Opening essay, Volume 5)

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protect and wisely manage relationships with nature, for the benet of all community members.
DAVID PEPPER UK

Ecosystem Approach
What constitutes valid science and a valid scienti c method? That question has never been fully resolved to the satisfaction of every informed scientist who has employed a scienti c method that had been duly legitimated within some network of expert and responsible peers. There have always been critics to challenge any claim that some particular kind of science was the correct or the best one. Perhaps a view shared most widely among scientists is that honest and modest skepticism is a necessary ingredient within science. An opposing view might be termed fundamentalist. The concept that species including humans have emerged historically within evolution, in which natural selection plays a strong role, was presented scienti cally by Charles Darwin and others in the mid-19th century. Some Christian scholars took exception to the whole notion of natural evolution. Skeptical scientists and theologians may enjoy debating but fundamentalistic scientists and theologians clash. The con ict within science concerning evolution is not as well known as that between some scientists and some theologians. In the mid-19th century the physicists and chemists were using experimental methods in laboratories to discover many laws of nature. These scientists preferred to view the world and cosmos as a kind of clockworks in which every phenomenon had a prior cause; cause effect linkages could be described and explained fully in linear deterministic terms. In principle, a fully informed scientist could draw diagrams, de ne terms, write formulae and insert numbers that altogether explained something completely. Such a scientist could achieve conceptual closure, which presupposed that nature itself was closed to seminally new happenings. But the concept of evolution implied that nature was open to the emergence of new species, say. So some aspects of nature must remain open even though linear laws like those of Isaac Newton, which appear to be deterministic, may also play a role. Are universal laws only partially successful in constraining the contextual processes apparent in evolution? Or may there be ways of perceiving contextual phenomena that are consistent with universal laws, or vice versa ? Generally, should a scientist start with accepted linear universal laws and then study apparent non-linear exceptions in particular contexts, option A. Or

should he/she start with non-linear contextual speci cs and try to infer quasi-linear universal generalities, option B? Perhaps a dialectical approach can be taken in an attempt to be fair to both options. Eventually some scientist may nd or has found a way to synthesize and transcend such a debate. The concepts of ecology, ecological systems and ecosystems arose within geological, biological and geographic studies that addressed the tension between these two mindsets, or what Magoroh Maruyama calls mindscapes. Thus Ernst Haeckel, a contemporary of Darwin, worked at the interface of evolution through natural selection and an approach that has come to be called environmental determinism. Later ecologists such as Arthur Tansley deliberately chose option A, more or less. Other ecologists such as Frederick Clements chose option B. An early stage of a synthesis may now be emerging with a focus on complexity as in the innovations of Lynn Margulis, James Lovelock and many others, option C. Each approach continues to have its protagonists entering the 21st century, though the ranks of option C appear to be swelling at the expense of options A and B. According to this simplistic classi cation, three somewhat different versions of ecosystem approach can now be encountered in the scienti c and popular literatures that focus on biological phenomena. Within much of contemporary biology there may still be an underlying presupposition that the disciplined, disinterested scientist can make objective observations, conduct logically correct analyses and infer valid generalities about some features of reality. Such a presupposition may be termed deterministic or positivistic. Thomas Kuhn apparently intended his notion of a paradigm to relate to a properly justi ed inference obtained by using an approach based on such a presupposition. On the other hand, these terms, and especially ecosystem approach, are coming to be used with perceived phenomena that include what is formally biological and much more. Some include global atmospheric and hydrological processes, the current manifestations of which are strongly dependent on historical biological events. Or cultural economic and governance processes may be included. An ecosystem approach may even be invoked with respect to cosmogenesis, or the evolution of the cosmos during the past 10C billion years. With some of these wider applications of the term, positivistic presuppositions may be replaced by a set of constructivist presuppositions that relate primarily to the working hypotheses within a network of scienti c peers and not to some prior notion of external reality. Within such a mindscape, a particular version of an ecosystem approach may be perceived as a dynamic movement rather than a Kuhnian paradigm. Within current governance processes related to environmental issues, a linear deterministic version, as in option

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A, may still be found in some research and management, related to utilitarian interests in natural resources, say. Option B may dominate with preservationist interests as in biodiversity. Option C may dominate in studies and practices concerning natural/cultural systems in which the residents are committed to a policy of responsible reciprocity or caring sharing among all the kinds of creatures, as with the role of Aboriginals in environmental matters. Innovators with an option C kind of ecosystem approach may nd useful roles for contributions by option A and B kinds, so long as the latter do not act to prevent their transcendence as in option C.

Lovelock, J E (1979) Gaia: a New Look at Life on Earth, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Margulis, L (1998) Symbiotic Planet: a New Look at Evolution, Basic Books, New York.
HENRY A REGIER Canada

Ecosystem Integrity
see Ecosystem Integrity (Volume 4)

FURTHER READING
Caley, M T and Sawada, D, eds (1994) Mindscapes: the Epistemology of Magoroh Maruyama, Gordon and Breach, London. Fuller, S (2000) Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Kay, J, Regier, H, Boyle, M, and Francis, G (1999) An Ecosystem Approach for Sustainability: Addressing the Challenge of Complexity, Futures, 31, 721 742. Keller, D R and Golley, F B (2000) The Philosophy of Ecology: from Science to Synthesis, University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA.

Ecosystem Services
Ecosystem services are the goods and life support functions provided by natural ecosystems and their species that sustain and fulll human life. Ecosystem services are the prot that we as humans reap from the Earths natural capital.

Table 1 Ecosystem services and functions adapted from Costanza et al. (1997) with permission from Nature (http: //www.nature.com/) Ecosystem services Regulation of atmospheric chemical composition Regulation of global temperature, precipitation, and other biologically mediated climatic processes at global or local levels Capacitance, damping and integrity of ecosystem response to environmental uctuations Regulation of hydrological ows Storage and retention of water Erosion control and soil retention within an ecosystem Soil formation processes Storage, internal cycling, processing and acquisition of nutrients Recovery of mobile nutrients and removal or breakdown of excess or xenic nutrients and compounds Pollination and movement of oral gametes Biological control (trophic dynamic regulations of populations) Examples Carbon dioxide (CO2 )/oxygen (O2 ) balance, O3 for UVB protection and SOx levels Greenhouse gas regulation, DMS production affecting cloud formation Storm protection, ood control, drought recovery and other aspects of habitat response to environmental variability mainly controlled by vegetation structure Provisioning of water for agricultural (such as irrigation) or industrial (such as milling) processes or transportation Provisioning of water by watersheds, reservoirs and aquifers Prevention of loss of soil by wind, runoff, or other removal processes, storage of stilt in lakes and wetlands Weathering of rock and the accumulation of organic material Nitrogen xation, nitrogen, phosphorous and other elemental or nutrient cycles Waste treatment, pollution control, detoxication Provisioning of pollinators for the reproduction of plant populations Keystone predator control of prey species, reduction of herbivory by top predators (continued overleaf )

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Table 1 (continued ) Ecosystem services Refugia; suitable habitats for resident and transient populations That portion of gross primary production extractable as food That portion of gross primary production extractable as raw materials Sources of unique biological materials and products Examples Nurseries, habitat for migratory species, regional habitats for locally harvested species, or overwintering species Production of sh, game, crops, nuts, fruits by hunting, gathering, subsistence farming or shing The production of lumber, fuel or fodder Medicine, products for material science, genes for resistance to plant pathogens and crop pests, ornamental species (pets and horticultural varieties of plants) Eco-tourism, sport shing and other outdoor recreational activities Aesthetic, artistic, educational, spiritual and/or scientic values of ecosystems

Providing opportunities for recreational activities Providing opportunities for cultural and other non-commercial uses

Ecosystem services range from regulation of the chemical composition of the atmosphere, to water supply to pollination to recreation. Prugh (1995) categorizes these services into four main areas, regulation, carrier, production, and information services. Regulation services are provided, for example by the atmosphere in protecting the Earths inhabitants from meteorites, and ltering UVB radiation. Ecosystem processes such as atmospheric chemical composition, climate, water, nutrient cycling, soil and wastes are also regulated by nature for life to exist on Earth. Carrier services from nature provide the space and a suitable substrate for humans to live and play, and as a habitat for all of the Earths plants and animals. Nature provides production services by supplying the oxygen, water, food, medicines, raw materials and other resources to humans and other living creatures. And information services provided by nature include aesthetics, artistic inspiration and scientic education and information. Table 1 adapted from Costanza et al. (1997) lists a variety of ecosystem services. See also : Ecosystem Services and Costing, Volume 2; Natural Capital, Volume 2.

Daily, G C (1997) Natures Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems, Island Press, Washington, DC, 1 392.
ADAM FENECH AND ROGER HANSELL Canada

Ecosystem Value
see Ecosystem Services and Costing (Volume 2)

Ecotheology
see Christianity and the Environment (Volume 5); Theology (Volume 5)

REFERENCES
Costanza, R, dArge, R, de Groot, R, Farber, S, Grasso, M, Hannon, B, Naeem, S, Limburg, K, Paruelo, J, ONeill, R V, Raskin, R, Sutton, P, and van den Belt, M (1997) The Value of the Worlds Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital, Nature, 387, 253 260. Prugh, T (1995) Natural Capital and Human Economic Survival, ISEE Press, White River Junction, VT.

and La Nina: El Nino Socio-econimic Impacts

see El Nino and La Nina: Causes and Global Consequences (Volume 1)

FURTHER READING
Baskin, Y (1997) The Work of Nature, Island Press, Washington, DC, 1 263.

Emergence of Global Environment Change into Politics

see The Emergence of Global Environment Change into Politics (Opening essay, Volume 5)

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SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

Emergy
Emergy is a term developed by Howard T Odum (Odum, 1986, 1996) for use in environmental and economic accounting. Odum has been an important contributor to energetic analysis of ecosystems and has a long history of applying energy analysis to questions of environmental and human well-being (Odum, 1971). Emergy measures both the work of nature and of humans previously required, directly and indirectly, to generate a product or service. While natural ecosystems run on current ows of solar energy moderated by storage systems with fairly rapid turnover, the human economy also draws heavily on very long-term solar storage in the form of fossil hydrocarbons and has begun to tap nuclear energy. Odum does not ask how much energy it took to produce the fossil fuels or nuclear energy, but he does argue that the net energy, the difference between the energy in the resource and the energy required to mine, transport, and process the resource into a usable form, is the important measure. Odum argues that all energy should be converted to solar equivalents, or solar emergy, for accounting consistency and because of the dominant role of the sun. Odum (1971) believes that there is a fourth law of thermodynamics which he has labeled the maximum power principle, or more recently the maximum empower principle. In the competition among self-organizing processes, network designs that maximize empower will prevail (Odum, 1996). Thus, he argues that by selecting choices that maximize emergy production and use, policies and judgments can favor those environmental alternatives that maximize real wealth, the whole economy, and the public benet (Odum, 1996). Odum and his co-researchers have used emergy analysis to explore specic issues such as the relative desirability of different fuels, to broad questions such as the sustainability of alternative modes of development. Howard Odum has established a school of energy analysis with a sizeable number of followers, largely trained with Odum, who advocate that emergy analysis should replace, or at least complement, other forms of analysis, especially economic analysis as currently practiced. Critics argue that energy ows do not fully characterize all of the critical aspects of environmental systems, that human values cannot be reduced to energy determinism, and that it is highly unlikely that society will eliminate the diverse institutions through which decisions are currently made, and reduce the power of those interests supporting current institutions, and replace them with institutions for emergy analysis. At the same time, the insights from emergy analysis may prove sufcient to extend existing institutions so as to incorporate yet another approach and reduce somewhat the dominance of economic interests and reasoning.

REFERENCES
Odum, H T (1971) Environment, Power, and Society, Wiley, New York. Odum, H T (1986) Emergy in Ecosystems. Ecosystem Theory and Application, ed N Polunin, Wiley, New York. Odum, H T (1996) Environmental Accounting: Emergy and Environmental Decision Making, Chapters 1 and 16, Wiley, New York.
RICHARD B NORGAARD USA

Encyclopedias: Compendia of Global Knowledge

Peter Timmerman
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

to collect all the knowledge scattered over the face of the earth, to present its general outlines and structure to the men with whom we live, was Diderots description of his purpose in the Encylopedie ou Dictionnaire Raisonne des Sciences, des Arts et des Metiers (1751 1772). This encyclopedia was the symbol (and a central driving force) in the French Age of Enlightenment, and had at least two purposes: to wrestle knowledge free from the hierarchical institutions that held onto it as a source of their power and prestige; and to promote the idea that reason could penetrate into every aspect of human activity. Among the most famous articles in the encyclopedia were those on the arts and crafts, including du Quesnays path-breaking work on the systematic analysis of land as the basis of economic development. The growth of encyclopedias in the 18th century (including the earlier Chambers Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1728), the immediate forerunner of the Encyclopedie, and the later British (Scottish) Encyclopedia Britannica (17681771) fostered by Andrew Bell, can be seen as the expression of a number of different forces at work. First, there was a powerful sense that the emerging sciences of the previous 100 years were beginning to generate substantial amounts of new knowledge that needed to be synthesized for a general reading audience. Second, there was an emerging new middle class in Europe who had or could be persuaded to have a need for enlightenment. Third, both Britain and France were now extensively involved in exploration and colonial developments that were beginning to encompass the entire globe.

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When Germany became a colonial power, and an aspirant to global power, it too generated its lexicons and the classic Lobel-Brockhaus encyclopedias. The vast Soviet Encyclopedia (19261947 and later editions) is a famous example of the symbolic power of encyclopedias, since the creation of the Encyclopedia unfortunately coincided with a whole sequence of ups and downs in ofcial versions of everything, and caused innumerable headaches (and not a few dangers) for compilers and revisers through the years. This was in the grand tradition of Diderots earlier work, in which a number of entries had to be penned anonymously. Behind these specic creations, there also lurks the perennial dream of having all knowledge at ones ngertips (and possibly the whole world under ones command). As Collison (1966) notes, it was Francis Bacon (15611626) who wanted to re-organize all human knowledge into a 130-part hierarchical study divided into main areas (external nature, Man, and Mans actions upon nature), below which would be sub-areas, and so on. The impulse behind this was, in a sense, to discern or bring order into a world whose previous structural meaning (the medieval Christian world view) had been profoundly shaken. The potential structure, topics, and outlay of encyclopedias have (since Bacon) been the subject of many tendentious discussions (McArthur, 1986), ranging from whether alphabetizing entries (neutral, handy, but unimaginative) is best, to the potentially innite possibilities being envisaged (and beginning to be created) by online storage and retrieval systems. The explosion of knowledge has not been matched, but has certainly been accompanied, by an explosion of specialized encyclopedias in music (Grove), the social sciences (Seligman), and innumerable science encyclopedias, dictionaries, lexicons, etc. Virtually all of them wrestle with the same issues: comprehensiveness versus selectivity; organizational structure; issues of balance; timeliness, accuracy, appropriate assessment. Global environmental change represents a signicant challenge to the encyclopedist, for all the reasons cited above. The impulse to assess that change has perhaps been best captured in the series of books spanning over a century inspired by George Perkins Marsh The Earth As Modi ed by Human Action (1885, rst published as Man and Nature, 1864), most recently The Earth As Transformed By Human Action (Turner, 1990), which, if not absolutely encyclopedic, are at least inspired by the possibility of a great global perspective on our situation. Similarly, there are extensive international scientic and social scientic projects whose products could be seen as informal encyclopedias of global environmental knowledge. There are post-modern voices that consider encyclopedias and similar projects to be signicant examples of the

total globalizing mentality of the continuing enlightenment project, that is, the use of homogenized and rationalized information as a tool for power. Others of whom this author is one rather remember days as a child sitting in a deep armchair with a huge volume of some encyclopedia, diving into distant worlds I might never visit. Encyclopedias are probably still big enough to serve both purposes, and others.

REFERENCES
Collison, R (1966) Encyclopedias: Their History Throughout the Ages, Hafner, New York. McArthur, T (1986) Worlds of Reference, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Turner, B L (1990) The Earth as Transformed by Human Action, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

FURTHER READING
Diderot, D (1967) The Encyclopedia: Selections, ed and translator S J Gendzier, Harper and Row, New York.

Enlightenment Project
The Enlightenment was an 18th century European philosophy emphasizing reason and individualism rather than tradition. The attempt to apply scientic rationalism throughout human knowledge is sometimes termed the Enlightenment Project. This term has come to represent all the ideals associated with the modern period of the 18th to 20th centuries. These ideals form a grand narrative which is optimistic about human history, seeing in it the working out of progress particularly in terms of increasing material welfare and universal justice in which all of humanity can share. This is to be achieved partly through scientic and technological advancement, following Francis Bacons creed that scientic knowledge equals power over nature, and that this power is to be used for the benet of Mans estate, freeing all humanity from scarcity and protecting it from natures caprices. Additionally, the Enlightenment Project would emancipate societies from the irrational yolk of myth, religion and superstition, by deriving moral and legal principles from rational thought alone. Such principles e.g., the universal declaration of human rights, social justice, sanctity of human life, freedom of speech, equality of opportunity and/or outcome should be applied everywhere.

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This thinking has formed the basis for the spread of Western-style values, including democracy and capitalism, in global modernization. Ostensibly, it champions rational enquiry as the basis for all knowledge, together with the beliefs that only intellectual progress could bring world order and happiness, and that objective science and universal morality and law are attainable as David Harvey says in his 1989 book, The Condition of Postmodernity, the Enlightenment Project s axiom was that there was only one possible answer to any question. Postmodernists now challenge this on empirical grounds that the pursuit of grand narratives made the 20th century in particular one of massive and widespread human oppression and suffering.
DAVID PEPPER UK

stacks, Earth First! spikes trees, and Sierra Club lobbies congress, EDF is in the boardroom. EDF s Alliance for Environmental Innovation, in collaboration with Pew Charitable Trusts, represents one of the only environmental organizational efforts at direct engagement with private corporations to facilitate higher environmental corporate performance. EDF has actively promoted such solutions as emissions trading, both to address local air pollution problems as well as a global approach to reduce greenhouse gases. EDF continues to be active on issues of chemical releases and recently targeted the pollution problems created by expanding intensive livestock factory farms.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada

Environment and Violent Conict

see The Environment and Violent Conict (Opening essay, Volume 5)

Environmental Economics
Environmental economics addresses how environmental problems arise, how market mechanisms can be used to improve environmental quality, and the level of quality that most ef ciently balances preferences for material goods and for environmental services (see Ecological Economics, Volume 5). From the perspective of neoclassical economic theory, environmental problems exist because markets for environmental quality are incomplete or totally absent. Markets fail because rights to the services of the environment are unclear or cannot be assigned to individuals and must be held in common. One person cannot obtain cleaner air without everybody obtaining cleaner air, so clean air cannot be sold to individuals and must be obtained collectively. Government action is justi ed by market failure, and environmental economics addresses what governments should do. Economists argue that markets maximize the difference between the bene ts and costs of providing a good. Environmental economists thus argue that the level of environmental quality should be determined so as to also maximize the differences between the bene ts and the costs. The costs of obtaining environmental quality are typically relatively easy to measure for they are the value of the market goods forgone to install pollution control equipment or take other steps. Environmental valuation is the art and science of estimating the bene ts that do not have market equivalents. Valuation techniques include looking at defensive and corrective expenditures that could be avoided if environmental quality were improved, analyzing how differences in environmental quality affect land values, deducing from individual behavior what people would be willing to pay,

Environmental Defense Fund

One of the United States rst and most respected environmental groups, Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) was founded in 1967 by residents of Long Island, NY, who were pressing for a ban on the pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT). In 1972, EDF members felt that their efforts, and those of others, were rewarded by the decision by the US government to ban DDT. From EDF s small origins, it grew quickly within the United States. (It has no international branches). By 2000, it had over 300 000 members and 170 professional staff members, including more than 75 full time scientists, lawyers and economists. EDF headquarters are in New York City, but it has substantial of ces in Washington, DC, and seven other US cities. Its 1998 budget was $27.8 million. The organization s hallmark is professionalism. Its members provide nancial support, but are not engaged in governance nor are they active participants in election campaigns. In terms of its organizational niche, EDF represents policy research and the extolling of market mechanisms to nd environmental solutions. As a caricature of organizational culture, if Greenpeace hangs banners from smoke

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and simply asking people what they would be willing to pay for improved environmental quality. The efcient level of pollution is achieved when the additional costs of clean-up just equal the additional benets. The dominant approach is to regulate the level of pollution allowed by each polluter, adjusted for size or output of the production unit. Environmental economists, however, argue that it is more efcient to determine the appropriate level of total pollution, distribute this right among polluters, and then allow polluters to trade pollution rights. With tradable permits, polluters who can reduce pollution more cheaply do so and sell their permits to those whose costs of pollution reduction are high (see Tradable Permits for Sulfur Emission Reductions, Volume 4). This results in an efcient reduction of pollution in that the level of environmental quality sought is achieved at the least cost. Alternatively, this same efcient result could be achieved by taxing pollution or subsidizing pollution reduction. Environmental economics also addresses the harvesting of biological and other renewable resources and the mining of minerals, or non-renewable resources, over time. The rate of interest plays a central role in the efcient rate of use, along with the rate of reproduction or replenishment for renewable resources, and the expected future demand for the resource. For both renewable and non-renewable resources, the pattern of use over time that maximizes net present value is the economically efcient rate of use (see Discounting, Volume 5).

FURTHER READING
Chapman, D (2000) Environmental Economics: Theory, Application, and Policy, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.
RICHARD B NORGAARD USA

Environmental Ethics
J Baird Callicott
University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA

An environmental ethic is a set of behavioral rules, or a set of principles or precepts for governing human behavior toward the natural environment. Environmental ethics may mean more than one such ethic that is, simply the plural of environmental ethic. More usually it refers to the philosophical subdiscipline devoted to constructing and justifying an environmental ethic. This article is about environmental ethics in both senses. It reviews a number of the

most notable environmental ethics that philosophers have recently constructed and tried to justify and thus it surveys the new philosophical subdiscipline devoted to that enterprise. In response to a popular perception of an environmental crisis in the late 1960s, the two words in the title of this article were rst put together early in the next decade. Environmental ethics (the philosophical subdiscipline) made its debut as a formal area of study with a college course in the subject at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point in 1971. It gradually developed and solidi ed in 1979 with the advent of Environmental Ethics, the journal which has been continuously published ever since. During the 1980s, anthologies, monographs and textbooks in environmental ethics began to appear. During the 1990s, several more journals devoted to environmental ethics began publication and the literature in the eld continues to grow exponentially. In retrospect, an earlier informal environmental ethics literature can be identi ed. Doing so is to some extent a matter of philosophical bias and taste but the following authors would probably be recognized as seminal by all authorities: White (1789); Thoreau (1854); Marsh (1864); Muir (1916); Leopold (1949) and Carson (1962). The concept of an environmental crisis was probably seeded in the Zeitgeist by a popular book, The Quiet Crisis, by Udall (1963), US Secretary of the Interior in the John F Kennedy administration. (The loud crisis was presumably the Cold War threat of nuclear holocaust). Also in uential was The Closing Circle by Commoner (1971). What happened to precipitate a quiet environmental crisis seems to have been this. In the spirit of beating swords into plowshares, technologies developed for warfare during the 1940s were adapted for peaceful use in the age-old human war against nature. The high combustion air polluting engines developed to power bombers, ghters and tanks powered postwar bulldozers, tractors and harvesters. Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT), made infamous by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring, was rst developed to delouse allied soldiers and then applied as an agricultural pesticide. Most spectacularly, atomic ssion developed for the war-ending superweapon, was harnessed to produce electricity. Through the 1950s no downsides to such technologies were widely noticed or publicized. After a decades time lag, however, their detrimental effects began to be evident to the naked eye, nose and ear. Air over major cities became dirty and smelly and pulsed with the ubiquitous noisy throb of gasoline and diesel motors. Rivers became open sewers, murky with municipal and industrial waste. A whole North American Great Lake appeared to be dying. Soil erosion accelerated. Spilled oil fouled beaches. Mankind was poised to realize the long held dream of conquering nature, only to nd that to the victor belong the spoils was in the case of this triumph an ironic

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proverb. The cartoon character Pogos malapropism was often quoted: we have met the enemy and he is us. This great awakening to an environmental crisis occurred in the most hyper-energetic and hyper-critical decade of the century in which the rhetoric of revolution was so commonplace that it began to be exploited commercially. (Advertisers, for example, urged Americans to join the Dodge Revolution). To address the monumental environmental crisis, nothing short of a revolution in ethics seemed adequate. Historically in the West, ethics appeared to be not just incidentally but militantly anthropocentric. A major pastime of Western philosophers had been to ruminate on what it was about human beings that made us unique, superior to all other creatures and exclusively worthy of moral treatment. In the Judeo Christian tradition of thought, it was our being created in the image of God; in the Greco Roman, it was our innate rationality. By whatever device, Western philosophy had with virtually one voice insisted upon a great gulf separating human nature from that of the lower animals, to say nothing of plants and the abiotic aspects of the environment. A revolutionary environmental ethic would have to de ate human pretensions and rehabilitate a philosophically denigrated nature.

ANTHROPOCENTRISM
Scarcely before the call by Richard Sylvan (Routley, 1973) for a new, environmental ethic had been heard, there appeared a staunch defense of the resources of anthropocentrism and the Western tradition of ethics to address the environmental crisis. Passmore (1974) argued that anthropocentric Western ethics would adequately protect the environment but only if actually implemented, if practiced as well as preached. He saw, furthermore, a dire threat to the achievements of Western civilization its traditions of rationalism and humanism in the call to develop a wholly new non-anthropocentric ethic and supporting metaphysics or to borrow one from Asian traditions of thought, as some had suggested (White, 1967).
Strong Anthropocentrism

goods extracted from the environment by one person or group of persons results in harm suffered by another person or group. For example, if logging steep slopes results in siltation of streams which prevents salmon from successfully reproducing, a strongly anthropocentric environmental ethic might censure the loggers or the timber barons for whom they work, only if commercial salmon sherman are materially injured. And then the moral matter might be settled by a transfer of funds from the injuring to the injured parties. In their own right, the soil, the salmon and the stream have no moral standing whatever. The contribution of specialists in environmental ethics to strongly anthropocentric environmental policy is minimal in comparison with that of environmental scientists and economists. Most of the expertise informing such debates is hydrological, geological, biological and economic, etc. The specic contribution of environmental ethicists, under such strongly anthropocentric circumstances is to apply off the rack, as it were familiar, well-established ethical theories to the novel environmental situation (Pojman, 1999). The strongly anthropocentric environmental ethicist will, for example, come to an issue prepared to apply the latest model of Kantian ethics, utilitarianism, virtue ethics or rational choice theory generated in the ivory tower by the most celebrated philosophical pooh-bahs of the moment.
Environmental Justice

The anthropocentric strain of environmental ethics has remained vigorous and persistent. A kind of unapologetic, uncritical anthropocentrism sometimes characterized as strong anthropocentrism still dominates environmental economics and most of public environmental policy. The environment represents a pool of natural resources or environmental goods, and a sink for wastes or environmental harms. The best allocation of environmental goods and harms is measured in units of human utility, quantied in units of currency such as dollars or pounds sterling and determined by conventional economic calculations (Krutilla and Fisher, 1985). Ethics enters the equation only when

Because economics is more sensitive to considerations of efciency than of justice, some strong anthropocentrists argue that environmental economics needs to be augmented by considerations of environmental justice (Wenz, 1988). For example, in the United States a greater percentage of black people than their percentage in the total population live uncomfortably close to a toxic waste dump or incinerator. Although the use of DDT has long been banned in the United States, it is still manufactured there, and exported for use in less developed countries. These and similar unequal distributions of environmental goods and especially harms appear prima facie to be unjust. Strongly anthropocentric theories of environmental justice are designed to critique and mitigate instances of environmental injustice. Sometimes included within the purview of environmental justice is consideration of the welfare or rights of future human generations (if any there be) to natural resources and environmental amenities (Partridge, 1981; Sikora and Barry, 1978). Morally enfranchising future generations requires less application than creative modication of standard Western moral philosophy because new and challenging philosophical conundrums arise. How, for example, can non-existent persons have rights? Contemporary utilitarians dene happiness not in terms of pleasure and pain as did classical utilitarians but in terms of preference satisfaction. How, thus, can we know what sort of environment

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future human generations may prefer? They may prefer Disney-like simulations to real nature and virtual to actual reality. Furthermore, shifts in environmental policy to take into account the welfare and rights of future human generations might alter the actual composition of future generations. Imposing, say, a stiff energy tax on the present generation as a means to ensure that future generations can have their fair share of fossil fuels might, as one consequence, induce more people of the present generation to stay home at night, turn off the lights and go to bed early. That in turn might change the timing or frequency of the sexual activity of the present generation thus changing which gametes unite to form the embryos of future people. If so, a policy that was designed to benet the people who would exist in the future, before the policy was adopted, would not benet them at all indeed it would have cost them their lives and would benet other future people instead. I do not suggest that these problems are fatal to the moral enfranchisement of future generations; I only suggest that they pose a distinctly philosophical challenge to a strongly anthropocentric environmental ethic that includes future human generations. Where future generations are concerned, therefore, environmental policy makers may feel as great a need to consult philosophers as to consult economists.
Weak Anthropocentrism

Weak anthropocentrism typically also morally enfranchises future human generations (Norton, 1984). In addition, it considerably broadens the notion of what counts as a human interest in the environment. People value nature, weak anthropocentrists point out, not only as a pool of material resources (food, ber, fuel, and so on) but as a pool of psycho-spiritual resources as well. People recreate in unspoiled nature; take aesthetic pleasure and spiritual solace in it; they even take comfort in just knowing that bits of unspoiled nature exist, although they may never directly experience them. Indeed, some weak anthropocentrists suggest that nature might be a moral resource for people (Partridge, 1984). Resource economists work diligently at the contingent valuation or shadow pricing of these natural amenities, because they rarely have an actual market price. People are asked what they would be willing to pay for a clean river in which to canoe or for a view of a mountain range unobscured by smog (Cummings et al., 1986). Also among popular economic methods of calculating the monetary value of such is the travel-cost method in which the money people spend (on gasoline, food, lodging, outdoor gear and so on) to visit unspoiled natural areas is calculated to value (in the economic sense) a national park or designated wilderness area (Peterson and Sorg, 1989). Unfortunately, an old growth stand of cathedral redwoods, say, will usually be worth far more money as a

timber resource than as a psycho-spiritual resource, despite the best efforts of environmental economists to maximize the shadow monetary value of the latter. Weak anthropocentrists, therefore, typically insist that some human values should not be expressed in monetary terms (Norton, 1988). As Kant (1785) once remarked, some things have a price, others a dignity. People are not entirely unanimous in their opinion about what things have a dignity, any more than about what things are worth spending money on. The appropriate place for things with a price to compete is the market; the appropriate place for things with an alleged dignity to compete is the political arena (Sagoff, 1988). People vote with their money in the marketplace for Rovers, say, but not for Yugos. For those things for which a price is inappropriate, people vote with their choices at the ballot box, albeit usually indirectly. They vote for representatives at various levels of government who, among other things, stand for certain values for a community free of pornography shops, or for environmental quality: clean air and water, protection of wilderness areas and endangered species, reduction of greenhouse gases, and so on. Further, values settled politically should, ideally, trump market values. For example, in most industrialized societies, the political process has strongly afrmed the value of human emancipation: human beings should not be sold for slaves at any price, no matter what the market will bear. Similarly, weak anthropocentrists insist that humanly valued aspects of nature designated wilderness areas, national parks, endangered species should not be for sale at any price (Sagoff, 1988). In addition to environmental goods and harms, attention has increasingly been directed to free ecological services performed by unspoiled nature, such as soil building and stabilization, water retention and purication, nitrogen xation, and crop pollination. These too have been valued monetarily by economists (Costanza et al., 1997). The monetary valuation of ecological services has also been criticized from a weak anthropocentric point of view (Sagoff, 1997). Mention of the Kantian dictum that some things have a price, others a dignity, reminds us that Kant grounded the dignity of persons in their intrinsic value. By parity of reasoning, if some aspects of nature also have dignity, must they have it because they also have intrinsic value? However, anthropocentrism, by denition, weak as well as strong, restricts intrinsic value to human beings and acknowledges only the instrumental value of nature. The difference between strong and weak anthropocentrism may be summed up then as follows. Strong anthropocentrists recognize only the commodity, amenity and service value of nature and express all such values in monetary terms. The economic reduction of all environmental values, also severely short-changes future generations because a Euro presently in hand is worth more than a future Euro, the discount rate roughly corresponding to the current interest rate.

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Thus, if an environmental economist were to compare the present monetary value of undeveloped potential commercial real estate in a metropolitan area, on the one hand, to its green-belt amenity value expressed in Euros for people living 100 years hence (estimated by contingent valuation and travel cost), on the other, the future environmental amenity value would be discounted at say 6% per year. Weak anthropocentrists recognize the commodity and service values of nature, but are reluctant to lump the wide range of psycho spiritual resources into the amorphous category of amenities. Most important, weak anthropocentrists oppose the expression of the psycho-spiritual values of nature in monetary terms. Although anthropocentric, all environmental values, in other words, are not preferences. One may prefer chocolate ice cream to strawberry and sh and chips to steak and kidney pie but the way one values Lake Windemere is not of the same order. Therefore, the most basic difference between strong and weak anthropocentrism is that the former treats all values as preferences, which are expressible in monetary terms. The latter treats preferences as a subset of human values and recognizes in addition a suite of environmental values aesthetic, moral, religious, demeaned by strong anthropocentrists as mere amenities that transcend preferences and that are not appropriately expressed in monetary terms.

NON-ANTHROPOCENTRISM
Non-anthropocentrists seek to provide intrinsic value for non-human natural entities and/or nature as a whole. Animal liberation and animal rights are not the same as environmental ethics. Indeed, in practice, concern for animal welfare and environmental concerns are often opposed. People for the ethical treatment of animals (PETA), for example, are often in the front lines of resistance to plans to protect endangered species of native plants by exterminating the bloated populations of feral goats, pigs, burros or what have you threatening them. Nevertheless, one approach to non-anthropocentric environmental ethics is based on the theoretical foundations of animal liberation and animal rights. Contemporary anthropocentric environmental ethicists, strong and weak, typically take anthropocentrism for granted and do not bother to defend the intrinsic (or noninstrumental) value of human beings. Classically, however, anthropocentrists defended the intrinsic value of human beings by positing an intrinsic value conferring property, alleged to be possessed by human beings alone. One such candidate property is the image of God alleged to characterize all and only human beings. Such a property, however, is philosophically maladroit because it is nonempirical. Not on argument, but on faith, one must accept that human beings are in fact created in the image of God, for that image cannot be found by autopsy or inference. For

those outside the specic communities of faith in which the image of God is a tenet the Judaic, Christian and Muslim communities such a proposition is either meaningless or dubious. Moreover, defending anrthropocentrism by appeal to a non-empirical intrinsic value conferring property, such as the image of God, would dangerously open up a Pandoras box of other, more noxious non-empirical properties that might even more narrowly restrict the class of beings possessing intrinsic value. Racists, for example, might nd in the same religious sources a non-empirical property that morally disenfranchises people of color who allegedly bear the mark of Cain. Sexists, similarly, might nd in the same religious sources a non-empirical property that morally disenfranchises women, who were created from Adams rib and who are, thereby, made subservient to men. Thus, modern anthropocentric philosophers have overwhelmingly preferred to follow Kant (1785) and claim that reason is the intrinsic value conferring property possessed by all and only human beings. The theoretical fulcrum leveraging the intrinsic value of non-human animals is the argument from marginal cases (Regan, 1979). If reason is not to serve as a mere sanitized and secularized substitute for the image of God, it must be an empirically detectable property. A minimally rational being must be able to do certain things pass certain tests that evidence the possession of this property, such as to perform simple arithmetic calculations, solve simple practical problems, or use language meaningfully. Most human beings can do all such things, but some cannot. These are the marginal cases from which the argument takes its name. They are usually identied as infants, the severely mentally impaired and the abjectly senile. Because they are not rational, they do not have intrinsic value; and because they do not have intrinsic value, they fall beyond the moral pale and may be treated as we treat non-human animals. And how is that? We use animals as subjects for harmful medical experiments and tests, raise them in miserable conditions and slaughter them for food, hunt them for sport, display them in zoos and so on. The tails side (pun intended) of the argument is that many animals that conventional Western ethical theory and practice morally disenfranchise are minimally rational, according to these objective measures. Non-human primates have been observed to make and use tools in order to solve simple problems, have learned to use American sign language (to say nothing of the complex, but so far undeciphered social vocalizations of whales, dolphins, and elephants), to scheme and plan, and so on.
Animal Liberation

But back to the heads side of the argument from marginal cases coin. If we are to morally enfranchise the marginal cases, we must identify a capacity that the marginal cases possess as the intrinsic value conferring property. Bentham

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(1789), a contemporary of Kant, argued that the capacity to experience pleasure and pain, called sentience, ought to be that property. Also, sentience is arguably more relevant to the bene t that it confers than reason. For why are we concerned how others treat us except that we can suffer? But many kinds of animals are also sentient. They too, therefore, possess intrinsic value and should thus be morally enfranchised equally.
Animal Rights

As Bentham knew full well, however, it is perfectly possible to raise animals comfortably and slaughter them painlessly. If we also hide their fate from them, so that they do not dread it, we can have our moral cake (or meat), so to speak, and eat it too. For that reason, Regan (1983) has proffered an alternative intrinsic value-conferring property being the subject of a life, that is, being a self with a capacity to enjoy a rich subjectivity shared by us and those animals that people most care about (mammals) as the conceptual foundation of animal rights. To be a subject of a life, according to Regan, implies, among other things, having desires, preferences, beliefs, memory of the past, anticipation of the future, and a sense of personal identity through time. In Regan s opinion all mammals one year old or more are subjects of a life, so understood, and thus should also enjoy the basic rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Subjects of a life represent only a tiny fraction of the natural environment. Many more animals are sentient than are subjects of a life. But even if we stipulate that sentience is the proper intrinsic value conferring property and that all animals are sentient including those without a central nervous system animals, nevertheless, still represent only a small part of the environment. Hence, even if all animals were granted full moral standing, only a small part of the environment would be morally enfranchised. Therefore, some environmental philosophers, concerned not exclusively or even primarily about animals, but about the environment more generally, have tried to build a more inclusive non-anthropocentric ethic on the theoretical platform of animal liberation and animal rights theory. I shall turn to that construction project in a moment. Before leaving the present matter, I should note that some partisans of animal liberation/animal rights argue that animal-oriented ethics, per se, may double dip as environmental ethics. At rock bottom, the argument runs parallel to the argument that strong anthropocentrism may serve as an environmental ethic (Jamieson, 1998). Wild animals can survive and ourish only in appropriate habitat. To ensure the welfare or protect the rights of animals would, therefore it seems, require us to preserve their habitat. We could call this a strong zoocentric environmental ethic. Undeveloped, the environment is instrumentally valuable to a wide variety of animals, as well as to us human beings as a

pool of natural resources. The fatal problem with strong zoocentrism, as it seems to me, emerges when we consider that different kinds of animals have different habitat requirements. Thus preserving the habitat of one kind of animal will evict another kind. And if, as Singer (1977) reasons, all animals are equal, we have no theoretical justi cation for being biased in favor of one kind of animal instead of another. How thus can we say that habitat for endemic, native salmon spawning is to be preserved at the cost of displacing habitat for cosmopolitan, exotic carp; or that woody habitat for white tailed deer is to be preserved at the cost of displacing grassy habitat for domestic cattle?

BIOCENTRISM
Just as animal liberation and rights theorists challenge reason as the intrinsic value conferring property, so biocentric environmental ethicists challenge sentience or being a subject of a life as the intrinsic value conferring properties. The capacity to experience pleasure and pain, to say nothing of the suite of capacities comprehended by the phrase subject of a life, did not come into existence gratuitously or for their own sakes. Rather, sentience and most other capacities of consciousness evolved to foster the preservation of the organisms that possess them (Goodpaster, 1978). What is of ultimate value to organisms is to live and ourish. Pain and pleasure are powerful motivators toward that end, rewarding life-fostering behaviors and punishing life-threatening ones. The ability to remember the past and imagine the future enables organisms to learn from experience and to anticipate eventualities, which enhance their ability to survive and ourish. But if life itself is the be all and end all of organic existence, then maybe we should think that all living beings have intrinsic value. The rst biocentrist seems to have been Schweitzer (1923) who insisted upon a reverence for life. He was a professional physician and musician, but only an amateur philosopher. A close study of Schweitzer s rhetoric reveals that he was primarily in uenced by Schopenhauer (1818), a neo Kantian philosopher who argued that the unknowable Ding an sich (thing in itself), which Kant believed to lurk in all phenomena, was the will to live. The will to live is one and the same in all things, inanimate as well as animate, according to Schopenhauer. Schweitzer, however, seems not to have appreciated the full sweep and grandeur of Schopenhauer s philosophical vision and himself thought the will to live inhabited only living beings. Therefore, just as we human beings experience it vividly and poignantly when our lives are threatened, so too do all other kinds of living beings. A biocentric ethic, Schweitzer believed, could be based on the capacity that we cognitively advanced living beings have for empathy and compassion with all

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the others, who are, in essence, identically the same as ourselves. Such a frankly metaphysical grounding of intrinsic value in nature is now quite out of philosophical fashion, though Schweitzer remains popular. Independently of Schweitzer, Feinberg (1974) suggested that having interests is what entitles a being to basic moral rights and that interests are compounded of conations, which consist of drives, aims, goals, latent tendencies, directions of growth and natural fulllments whether conscious or not. Conative plants and other living beings, although lacking consciousness of any kind, may nevertheless have interests, in this sense, and thus intrinsic value, and moral rights. Feinbergs suggestion was rst taken up by Goodpaster (1978), then developed by Taylor (1986) into a full edged biocentric theory of environmental ethics. Although Taylor carefully distinguishes between inherent worth and intrinsic value, this and other such conceptual niceties are too ne grained for presentation here. The following must sufce. Parallel to Regans notion of a subject of a life, Taylor argues that all organisms are teleological centers of life. The operative term, here, teleological has long been in the philosophical lexicon and is formed from the Greek telos, meaning end, goal, or purpose. All organisms have innate drives, aims, goals teloi in a word which can be realized or frustrated. The most basic ones are to grow, to ourish, and to reproduce. Therefore, all organisms have inherent worth (intrinsic value) and all have it equally. Taylor avoids going so far as to claim that all teleological centers of life have rights, but he does argue that they are owed respect. A moral agent should respect all organisms and leave them alone to realize their own ends. How then can a moral agent realize his or her own teloi ? One must eat, be clothed, sheltered, educated, cured, all at the expense of other teleological centers of life. Taylor (1986) attempts to resolve morally the inevitable conicts of interest arising between equally valuable teleological centers of life. He begins with the right of each person to self-defense. Taylor argues that when, for example, a disease-causing bacterium invades ones body, one is entitled to defend oneself with lethal antibiotics. Then to this unambiguous paradigm of self defense he assimilates the more problematic cases taking the life of another organism to feed oneself, to clothe and shelter oneself, and so on.

ECOCENTRISM
Taylors arguments justifying human exploitation of other teleological centers of life seem inconsistent with the severe constraints of his biocentric theory of environmental ethics, and are therefore not very convincing. But even if they were, biocentrism is beside the point. Environmentalists are simply not concerned about the welfare of individual

shrubs, bugs and grubs. The medicinal eradication of millions of disease-causing bacteria in the intestines of a human being is not an environmental concern except if the improvident use of antibiotics breeds resistant strains of bacteria; and then the concern would be less distinctly environmental than one of public health. Nor are environmentalists morally concerned about killing trees in a forest for the purpose of improving the overall health of the forest, or about culling excess deer on an overpopulated range. Environmental concerns typically focus on levels of biological organization beyond individual plants and animals populations, species, communities, ecosystems, biomes, the biosphere and on non-organic aspects of the environment, such as rivers, lakes, bays, gulfs, seas, oceans, soils and the atmosphere. Environmentalists are morally concerned about the extirpation of populations of certain species, such as the Bengal tiger from the Indian sub continent, about the threatened global extinction of species, such as the blue whale, about the integrity of biotic communities, especially temperate prairies and tropical rainforests that are so rich in variety of species, about the health of ecosystems, such as the Oostvaardersplassen or Chesapeake Bay, about anthropogenic acid deposition, atmospheric pollution, global warming and such. To develop a relevant environmental ethic, one that directly addresses actual environmental concerns, we must step outside what may be called the modern classical paradigm of ethics. Goodpaster (1979) identied the common argument form of the two dominant schools of thought in modern ethics one going back to Bentham (1789), the other to Kant (1785) as a generalization of egoism. I (ego ) demand that you consider my welfare or respect my interests when your actions affect me. I justify that demand by appeal to some capacity I possess rationality, sentience, having a rich inner life or consciousness, having interests which makes me intrinsically valuable and therefore entitles me to moral considerability. By the same token, however, I am obliged to consider the welfare or respect the rights of all those who possess the same capacity. This argument form underlies anthropocentrism, animal liberation/animal rights, and biocentrism. They differ only in the choice of the intrinsic value-conferring capacity and thus in the set of morally considerable entities they recognize. In the case of anthropocentrism, the intrinsic value-conferring property is reason; in that of animal liberation, it is capacity to suffer; in animal rights, experiencing a rich subjective life; in biocentrism, having interests. At the end of the day, however, the modern classical paradigm leaves us with only individuals individual human beings, individual animals, individual organisms being morally considerable. Environmental concerns, however, are almost always holistic. Thus, we must go back to the theoretical drawing board and start afresh.

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THE LAND ETHIC

Of all the environmental ethics so far devised, the land ethic, rst sketched by Leopold (1949), is most popular among environmentalists. In his essay, The Land Ethic, Leopold begins by alluding to Darwins account of the origin and development of ethics in the Descent of Man. The Leopold land ethic is thus grounded in evolutionary biology therefore making it more consonant than any alternative so far devised with the sciences that inform contemporary environmental concern (Callicott, 1989). The existence of ethics presents a problem for Darwins attempt to show how all things human can be understood as having gradually evolved by natural (and sexual) selection, from traits possessed by closely related species, his project in The Descent of Man. An ethic demands that moral agents selessly consider the interests of others in addition to their own. The theory of evolution would seem to predict, however, that the selsh would out-compete the seless in the struggle for existence, and thus survive and reproduce in greater numbers. Therefore, greater and greater selshness, not selessness, would seem to be selected for in any population of organisms, including those ancestral to Homo sapiens. But history indicates the opposite: that our remote human ancestors were more callous, brutal, and ruthless than we are. At least so it seemed to a rened English gentleman who while serving as naturalist on the round the world voyage of the HMS Beagle had observed rst hand what he and his contemporaries regarded as states of savagery and barbarism similar to those from which European and Asian civilizations were believed to have emerged. Without a convincing evolutionary explanation of its existence and progressive development, Darwins pious opponents might point to ethics among human beings as a clear signature by the hand of providence on the human soul. To the conundrum presented by the existence and allegedly progressive development of ethics, Darwins resolution is straightforward and elegant. For many kinds of animals and especially for Homo sapiens, lifes struggle is more efciently prosecuted collectively and cooperatively than singly and competitively. Poorly armed by nature, as solitaries, hominids would fall easy prey to their natural enemies or starve for lack of the wherewithal to obtain food. Together our primate ancestors might stand some chance of fending off predators and attacking prey larger than themselves. Like many other similarly situated species, evolving human beings thus formed primitive societies; or put more precisely, those hominids that formed primitive societies evolved. But without some rudimentary ethics, human societies cannot stay integrated. As Darwin (1871) puts it,
No tribe could hold together if murder, robbery, treachery, & c., were common; consequently such crimes within the limits of the same tribe are branded with everlasting infamy; but excite no such sentiment beyond these limits.

Darwins speculative reconstruction of the evolutionary pathway to ethics begins with altruistic parental and lial affections which motivate parents (perhaps only the female parent in many species) to care for their offspring and their offspring to desire the company of their parents. Such affectionally bonded nuclear families are small and often ephemeral societies, lasting, as in the case of bears, only until the next reproductive cycle. But the survival advantage to the young of being reared in such social units is obvious. Should the parental and lial affections chance to spill beyond the parental-lial relationship to that between siblings, cousins and other close kin, such plurally bonded animals might stick together in more stable and permanent groups and defend themselves and forage communally and cooperatively. In which case there might also accrue additional advantages to the members of such groups in the struggle for life. Thus do mammalian societies originate in Darwins account. By themselves, the social impulses and sentiments are not ethics. An ethic is a set of behavioral rules, or a set of principles or precepts for governing behavior. The moral sentiments are, rather, the foundations of ethics, as Hume (1751) and Smith (1759) argued, a century or so before Darwin considered the matter. In addition to the social sentiments and instincts, Homo sapiens evolved to a high degree of intelligence and imagination and uniquely possessed a symbolic language. Hence, we human beings are capable of generally representing those kinds of behavior which are destructive of society (murder, robbery, treachery, & c.) and articulating prohibitions of them in emotionally colored formulae thou shalt not kill, steal, bear false witness, etc. which formerly we called commandments and today call moral rules. So much then for the origin of ethics. Darwin goes on to account for the development of ethics. As human social groups competed with one another for resources, the larger and better organized out-competed the smaller and less well organized. Hence clans, rstly, merged into tribes; tribes, next, into nations; and nations, eventually, into republics. The emergence of each of these levels of social organization was attended by a corresponding expansion of ethics. Darwin (1871) sums up this parallel growth of ethics and society as follows: As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached there is only an articial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. Further, with the emergence of each new level in the social hierarchy the clan, the tribe, the nation, the republic, the global village the content of the moral code changed or was supplemented to reect and facilitate the novel structure of each newly emerged level.

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During Darwins lifetime, a universal ethic of human rights was only dimly visible on the horizon. By the midtwentieth century, when Leopold was gestating the land ethic, a universal human rights ethic may have seemed more nearly attainable. In any case, Leopold, often called a prophet, looked farther ahead than did Darwin himself, indeed farther ahead than Darwin could have looked in the absence of a well developed ecological world view. Leopold (1949) summarizes Darwins natural history of ethics with characteristic compression: All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. Then he adds an ecological element, the community model of the biota espoused most notably by Elton (1927). Ecology simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively: the land (Leopold, 1949). When we all learn to see land as a community to which we belong not as a commodity belonging to us (Leopold, 1949) that same simplest reason, of which Darwin speaks, might kick in. And when it does, what results will be a land ethic that changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it (Leopold, 1949). Basically, what Leopold did to cook up the land ethic was to take over Darwins recipe for the origin and development of ethics, and add an ecological ingredient, the Eltonian community concept. According to Leopold (1949), a land ethic implies respect for fellow members and also for the community as such. The land ethic, in other words, has a holistic dimension to it that is completely foreign to the mainstream modern moral theories going back to Bentham and Kant. The holistic dimension of the land ethic respect for the community as such, in addition to respect for its members severally is, however, not in the least foreign to the Darwinian and Humean theories of ethics upon which it is built. Darwin (1871) could hardly be more specic or emphatic on this point. Actions are regarded by savages and were probably so regarded by primeval man, as good or bad, solely as they obviously affect the welfare of the tribe, not that of the species, nor that of an individual member of the tribe. This conclusion agrees well with the belief that the so called moral sense is aboriginally derived from the social instincts, for both relate at rst exclusively to the community. Hume (1751) insists that we must renounce the theory which accounts for every moral sentiment by the principle of self love. We must adopt a more public affection and allow that the interests of society are not, even on their own account, entirely indifferent to us. That is not to say that Hume, certainly, and even Darwin make no theoretical provision for a lively concern for the individual members of society as well as for society per se. Darwin (1871) writes of the all important emotion of sympathy. Sympathy means with feeling and so can extend

only to feeling that is, sentient individuals. It cannot extend to levels of social organization beyond the individual, which have no feelings per se. Hume and Darwin, however, recognized other moral sentiments than sympathy, some of which patriotism, for example relate as exclusively and specically to societies as sympathy does to sentient individuals. In the Leopold land ethic, in any event, the holistic aspect eventually eclipses the individualistic aspect. Toward the beginning of The Land Ethic, Leopold (1949), as noted, declares that a land ethic implies respect for fellow members of the biotic community, as well as for the community as such. Toward the middle of The Land Ethic, Leopold (1949) speaks of a biotic right to continue but such a right accrues, as the context indicates, to species, not to individual specimens. Toward the end of the essay, Leopold (1949) writes a summary moral maxim, a golden rule, for the land ethic: A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. In it, there is no reference at all to fellow members. They have gradually dropped out of account as the The Land Ethic proceeds to its climax. Because of its focus on the biotic community as such, the Leopold land ethic may be called ecocentric. Ultimately traceable, as it is, to the theory of moral sentiments developed in the eighteenth century by David Hume and Adam Smith, the several objects of moral respect recognized in the ecocentric land ethic, do not so much have intrinsic value as they are valued intrinsically. The difference is not merely semantic. Intrinsic value, as conceived by Kant and his contemporary intellectual descendants, is what philosophers now call a supervenient property that is, an objective property that piggybacks on another objective property. For Kant, as noted, that latter property is reason, for Singer it is sentience, for Regan it is being the subject of a life, and for Taylor, being a teleological center of a life. For the contemporary intellectual descendants of Hume and Smith, however, value is rst and foremost a verb, not a noun that designates an objective (albeit supervenient) property. Something is, in other words, valuable only if it is valued by some valuing subject. And we human valuing subjects value things in at least two different ways: instrumentally and intrinsically. One values ones house, automobile and other useful artifacts instrumentally. One values ones self, spouse, children, other relatives, friends, neighbors, fellow citizens, fellow man intrinsically. One also values intrinsically ones family, municipality, country and the human race, per se that is, as collective wholes. One may value intrinsically a wide array of other things as well. Indeed, one can value anything under the sun intrinsically the Eiffel Tower, for example, or even a worn-out old shoe. But we usually do not value any and everything intrinsically; we usually do so for a reason. A

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fundamental reason is a sense of belonging to a community of interdependent parts.

The Problem of Ecofascism and the Land Ethic

Holism is the land ethics principal strength, because actual environmental concerns are holistic, but also its principal liability. According to Leopold (1949), we Homo sapiens are but plain members and citizens of the biotic community. Then it would seem that the summary moral maxim of the ecocentric land ethic applies to Homo sapiens no less than to the other members and citizens of the biotic community. A human population of more than six billion individuals is a dire threat to the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. Thus the existence of such a large human population is ethically wrong. To right that wrong should we not do what we do when a population of white tailed deer or some other species irrupts into and threatens the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community? We immediately and summarily reduce it, by whatever means necessary, usually by randomly and indiscriminately culling the members of such a population respectfully, of course until its numbers are optimized. It did not take its critics long to draw out the apparently vitiating implication of the ecocentric land ethic. According to them, the land ethic is a case of environmental fascism because the good of ecological wholes takes precedence over the good of the component individuals, including human individuals, according to Aiken (1984), Regan (1983), Ferre (1996), and Shrader-Frechette (1996). If so, it must be rejected as monstrous. Happily, it does not. To think that it does, one must assume that Leopold proffered the land ethic as a substitute for, not an addition to, our venerable and familiar human ethics. But he did not. Leopold refers to the various stages of ethical development from tribal mores to universal human rights and nally, to the land ethic as accretions. Accretion means an increase by external addition or accumulation. The ecocentric land ethic is an addition to our several accumulated social ethics now more than ever, strongly individualistic not something that is supposed to replace them. With the advent of each new stage in the accreting development of ethics, the older stages are not erased or replaced. I, for example, am a citizen of a republic, but I also remain a member of an extended family, and a resident of a municipality. And it is quite evident to us all, from our own moral experience, that the duties attendant on citizenship in a republic (to pay taxes, to serve in the armed forces or in the Peace Corps, for example) do not cancel or replace the duties attendant on membership in a family (to honor parents, to love and educate children, for example) or residence in a municipality (to support public schools, to attend town meetings). Similarly, the duties attendant upon citizenship in the biotic community (to preserve its integrity,

stability, and beauty) do not cancel or replace the duties attendant on membership in the human global village (to respect human rights). As members of multiple communities, each generating ethical obligations, how do we prioritize when duties to one community or its members conict with duties to another? Naess (1989) suggested two complementary priority principles for resolving such conicts. The rst we might call the inverse scale principle (ISP). One should give priority to obligations to ones nearest and dearest community members and ones nearest and dearest community as such to ones family, municipality, etc., in that order. Hence, if in a time of general scarcity, one faced a choice between sharing ones severely limited resources with family members or with unrelated neighbors, the right thing to do would be to share with family members and refuse neighbors. The second we might call the degree-of-interest principle (DIP), which counters the ISP. If the interests at stake are of unequal strength, the lesser interest should give way to the greater. For example, in circumstances not of general scarcity but of unequal distribution of plentiful resources, some are needier than others. If one is relatively wealthy and ones neighbor is desperately poor, then the strong interest in having the wherewithal for survival of ones neighbor should take priority over the weaker interest of satisfying the superuous consumer preferences of oneself and ones family members. Applying these priority principles to moral conicts arising between obligations relative to a biotic community and those relative to a municipality, we might conclude that if our choice were between the destruction of a regional biotic community (and the extinction of its endemic species), on the one hand, and the starvation of the citizens of local human communities, on the other, then priority should be given to our obligations relative to the municipality, in accordance with the ISP. However, in the famous case of the conict between the endangered spotted owl and the threatened old growth forest in the Pacic Northwest of the United States, on the one hand, and the regions logging/milling communities, on the other, that is not the conundrum we face. Other employment alternatives are available to loggers and mill workers. The biotic community interests at stake are much greater the destruction of a unique biome and the extinction of its endemic species. Hence in this case, the DIP countermands the ISP. Unfortunately, in some parts of the world, the ethical dilemma does involve the very livelihood, not just the lifestyles of local peoples. For example, some people face the choice of feeding themselves and their families and by doing so contributing to the destruction of tropical forests and a global mass extinction event, on the one hand, or starving, on the other. For them the choice is clear and unambiguous. They must slash and burn. Because they are not my neighbors or fellow nationals, however, it is not entirely

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clear what national and international policies, with respect to such practices, I should support.
Change and the Land Ethic

Leopold penned the land ethic at mid century. Ecology then represented nature as tending toward a static equilibrium, and portrayed disturbance and perturbation, especially those caused by Homo sapiens, to be abnormal and destructive. In view of the shift in contemporary ecology to a more dynamic paradigm (Botkin, 1990), and in recognition of the incorporation of natural disturbance to patch and landscape scale ecological dynamics (Pickett and Ostfeld, 1995), we might wonder whether the land ethic has become obsolete. Has the paradigm shift from the balance of nature to the ux of nature in ecology invalidated the land ethic? I think not, but recent developments in ecology may require revising the land ethic. From Leopold s original summary moral maxim or golden rule of the land ethic, we may be left now with only the preservation of a biotic community s beauty as a criterion of a thing s land-ethical rightness or wrongness. Despite all the idle talk about beauty being in the eye of the beholder, ecological beauty might not be an altogether inadequate or relativistic criterion by means of which to judge a thing s environmental rightness or wrongness. Hume (1751) notes that broad shoulders, a lank belly, rm joints, a taper leg; all these are beautiful in our species, because signs of force and vigor. Natural beauty is far less relative and ckle a judgment of taste than we are wont latterly to acknowledge; it is, as it were, an aesthetic registry of robust good health. And indeed Leopold (1999) linked ecological beauty to land health. Land was healthy and therefore beautiful to those with a re ned taste in natural objects in Leopold s estimation, when its ecological processes were being carried out normally. Such ecological processes include photosynthesis; energy transfer through lengthy food chains and tangled food webs, capped by long lived, large bodied carnivores; the recruitment, retention, and recycling of nutrients; the stabilization of soils; the modulation of water ows; and the resistance to and rapid recovery from perturbation by wind, re, ood, pest, pathogen, and other disturbances. Leopold was, moreover, aware of and sensitive to natural change. He knew that conservation must aim at a moving target. How can we conserve a biota that is dynamic, ever changing, when the very words conserve and preserve especially when linked to integrity and stability connote arresting change? The key to solving that conundrum is the concept of scale. Scale is a general ecological concept that includes rate as well as scope; that is, the concept of scale is both temporal and spatial. And a review of Leopold s The Land Ethic reveals that he had the key, though he may not have been aware of just how multiscalar is change in nature. There, Leopold

(1949) writes, Evolutionary changes are usually slow and local. Man s invention of tools has enabled him to make changes of unprecedented violence, rapidity, and scope. Leopold was keenly aware that nature is dynamic, but, under the sway of mid-century equilibrium ecology, he conceived of natural change primarily in evolutionary, not in ecological terms. Nevertheless, scale is equally normative when ecological change is added to evolutionary change, that is, when normal climatic oscillations and patch dynamics are added to normal rates of extinction, hybridization, and speciation. As noted, Homo sapiens is, in Leopold s opinion, a part of nature, a plain member and citizen of the land community. Hence, anthropogenic changes imposed on nature are no less natural than any other. Nevertheless, because Homo sapiens is a moral species, capable of ethical deliberation and conscientious choice, and evolutionary kinship and biotic community membership add a land ethic to our familiar social ethics, anthropogenic changes may be land-ethically evaluated. But by what norm? The norm of appropriate scale. Let me rst recount Leopold s use of the temporal scale of evolutionary change as a norm for evaluating anthropogenic change. Consider the current episode of abrupt, anthropogenic, mass species extinction which many environmentalists intuitively regard as the most morally reprehensible environmental thing going on today. Episodes of mass extinction have occurred in the past, though none of those has been attributed to a biological agent. Such events are, however, abnormal. Normally, speciation outpaces extinction which is the reason why biological diversity has increased over time. So, what is land-ethically wrong with current anthropogenic species extinction? Species extinction is not unnatural. On the contrary, species extinction anthropogenic or otherwise is perfectly natural. But the current rate of extinction is wildly abnormal. Does being the rst biological agent of a geologically signi cant mass extinction event in the 3.5 billion years tenure of life on Planet Earth morally atter us Homo sapiens? Doesn t that make a mockery of the self-congratulatory species epithet: the sapient, the wise species of the genus Homo? Now let s apply this model to a quandry that Leopold himself never considered. Earth s climate has warmed up and cooled off in the past. So, what s land-ethically wrong with the present episode of anthropogenic global warming? We are a part of nature, so our recent habit of recycling sequestered carbon may be biologically unique, but it is not unnatural. A land-ethical evaluation of the current episode of anthropogenic climate change can, however, be made on the basis of temporal scale and magnitude. We may be causing a big increase of temperature at an unprecedented rate. That s what s land-ethically wrong with anthropogenic global warming.

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Temporal and spatial scale in combination are key to the evaluation of direct human ecological impact. Long before Homo sapiens evolved, violent disturbances regularly occurred in nature. And they still occur, quite independently of human agency. Volcanoes bury the biota of whole mountains with lava and ash. Tornadoes rip through the countryside, leveling houses and trees. Hurricanes erode beaches. Lightning sets res that sweep through forests and savannas. Rivers drown oodplains. Droughts dry up lakes and streams. Why, therefore, are analogous anthropogenic disturbances clear cuts, beach developments, hydroelectric impoundments, and the like environmentally unethical? As such, they are not. Once again, its a question of scale. In general, frequent, intense disturbances, such as tornadoes, occur at small, widely distributed spatial scales, while spatially more extensive disturbances, such as droughts, occur less frequently. And most disturbances at whatever level of intensity and scale are, mathematically speaking, stochastic (random) and chaotic (unpredictable). The problem with anthropogenic disturbances such as industrial forestry and agriculture, suburban development, drift net shing is that they are far more frequent, widespread, and regularly occurring than are non-anthropogenic disturbances. They are well out of the spatial and temporal range of disturbances experienced by ecosystems over evolutionary time. Proponents of the new ux of nature paradigm in ecology agree that appropriate scale is the operative norm for ethically appraising anthropogenic ecological perturbations. For example, Pickett and Ostfeld (1995) note that the ux of nature is a dangerous metaphor. The metaphor and the underlying ecological paradigm may suggest to the thoughtless and greedy that since ux is a fundamental part of the natural world, any human caused ux is justiable. Such an inference is wrong because the ux in the natural world has severe limits two characteristics of humaninduced ux would suggest that it would be excessive: fast rate and large spatial extent. Among the abnormally frequent and widespread anthropogenic perturbations that Leopold (1949) himself censures in The Land Ethic are the continent-wide elimination of large predators from biotic communities in Europe and North America; the ubiquitous substitution of domestic species for wild ones; the ecological homogenization of the planet resulting from the anthropogenic worldwide pooling of faunas and oras; the ubiquitous polluting of waters or obstructing them with dams. The summary moral maxim of the land ethic, however, must be rendered more dynamic in light of developments in ecology over the past quarter century. Leopold acknowledges the existence and land-ethical signicance of natural environmental change, but seems to have thought of it primarily on a very slow evolutionary temporal scale. Even so, he thereby incorporates the concept of inherent

environmental change and the crucial norm of scale into the land ethic. In light of more recent developments in ecology, we can add norms of scale to the land ethic for both climatic and ecological dynamics in land-ethically evaluating anthropogenic changes in nature. One hesitates to edit Leopolds elegant prose, but as a stab at formulating a dynamized summary moral maxim for the land ethic, I will hazard the following: A thing is right when it tends to disturb the biotic community only at normal spatial and temporal scales, so as not to mar its beauty (or health). It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

SUMMARY
In conclusion, then, there are two fundamental genera of environmental ethics, anthropocentrism and non-anthropocentrism. Of the former there are two species, strong and weak. Strong anthropocentrism reduces all environmental values to preferences capable of economic expression and valuation in monetary terms. All environmental decisions can be made by weighing benets against costs, tempered by considerations of environmental justice. Weak anthropocentrism agrees that all environmental values are instrumental, but insists that some are not preferences. Human environmental values that conict with preferences are more properly institutionalized politically than made to compete economically. There are several species of non-anthropocentrism. Two, animal liberation and animal rights, are not, properly, environmental ethics; and indeed, are often at odds with environmental concerns and values. A third, biocentrism the proposition that all living beings possess intrinsic value and merit respect builds upon the theory of animal rights. Though proffered as an environmental ethic, biocentrism is hardly relevant because it morally enfranchises only individuals, while actual environmental concerns are almost always holistic. Ecocentrism, a fourth species of non-anthropocentrism, is holistic in focus. In its original articulation by Aldo Leopold, the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community is the standard of right environmental conduct. Allegations to the contrary notwithstanding, ecocentrism does not entail environmental fascism. For, as Leopold conceives it, a land ethic is an addition to, not a substitute for, our more individualistically inclined social ethics and all other things being equal, our more venerable social ethics take precedence over the land ethic when they conict. Contemporary ecology, however, posits a more dynamic than stable nature and more loosely associated than tightly integrated biotic communities, existing at multiple scales, subject to a wide variety of periodic disturbances. A more dynamic ecocentrism would morally limit anthropogenic change and disturbance to normal temporal and spatial scales, thus to preserve the lands health and beauty.

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REFERENCES
Aiken, W (1984) Ethical Issues in Agriculture, in Earthbound: New Introductory Essays in Environmental Ethics, ed T Regan, Random House, New York, 274 288. Bentham, J (1789) An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Botkin, D (1990) Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty First Century, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Callicott, J B (1989) In Defense of the Land Ethic, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY. Carson, R (1962) Silent Spring, Houghton Mifin, Boston, MA. Commoner, B (1971) The Closing Circle, Knopf, New York. Costanza, R, dArge, R, de Groot, R, Farber, S, Grasso, M, Hannon, B, Naeem, S, Limburg, K, Paruelo, J, ONeill, R V, Raskin, R, Sutton, P, and van den Belt, M (1997) The Value of the Worlds Ecosystem Services, Nature, 387, 253 260. Cummings, R, Broockshire, D, and Schultz, W (1986) Valuing Environmental Goods: a State of the Art Assessment of the Contingent Valuation Method, Rowman and Allenheld, Totowa, NJ. Darwin, C R (1871) The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, J Murray, London. Elton, C (1927) Animal Ecology, Sidgwick and Jackson, London. Feinberg, J (1974) The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations, in Philosophy and Environmental Crisis, ed W Blackstone, University of Georgia Press, Athens, 43 68. Ferre, F (1996) Persons in Nature: Toward an Applicable and Unied Environmental Ethics, Ethics and the Environment, Vol. 1, 15 25. Goodpaster, K E (1978) On Being Morally Considerable, J. Philos., 75, 308 325. Goodpaster, K E (1979) From Egoism to Environmentalism. Ethics and Problems of the Twenty- rst century, eds K E Goodpaster and K E Sayre, University of Notre Dame Press, IN, 21 35. Hume, D (1751) An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Jamieson, D (1998) Animal Liberation is an Environmental Ethic, Environ. Values, 7, 41 57. Kant, I (1785) Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Johann Friedrich Hartknoch, Riga. Krutilla, J and Fisher, A (1985) The Economics of Natural Environments. Studies in the Valuation of Commodity and Amenity Resources, Resources for the Future, Washington, DC. Leopold, A (1949) A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, Oxford University Press, New York. Leopold, A (1999) For the Health of the Land. Previously Unpublished Essays and Other Writings, eds J B Callicott and E T Freyfogle, Island Press, Washington, DC. Marsh, G P (1864) Man and Nature, Charles Scribner, New York. Muir, J (1916) A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, Houghton Mifin, Boston, MA. Naess, A (1989) Ecology, Community, Life Style, translated by D Rothenberg, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Norton, B G (1984) Environmental Ethics and Weak Anthropocentrism, Environm. Ethics, 6, 131 148. Norton, B G (1988) Commodity, Amenity, and Morality: The Limits of Quantication in Valuing Biodiversity, in Biodiversity, ed E O Wilson, National Academy Press, Washington, DC, 200 205.

Norton, B G (1996) Environmental Ethics and Weak Anthropocentrism, Environ. Ethics, 6, 131 148. Partridge, E P (1981) Responsibilities to Future Generations, Prometheus, Buffalo, NY. Partridge, E P (1984) Nature as a Moral Resource, Environ. Ethics, 6, 101 130. Passmore, J (1974) Mans Responsibility for Nature, Charles Scribners Sons, New York. Peterson, G and Sorg, C, eds (1989) Toward a Measurement of Total Value, USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station General Technical Report, Fort Collins, CO. Pickett, S T A and Ostfeld, R S (1995) The Shifting Paradigm in Ecology, in The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and Patch Dynamics, eds R L Knight and S F Bates, Academic Press, Orlando, FL, 261 278. Pojman, L P (1999) Global Environmental Ethics, Mayeld, Mountain View, CA. Regan, T (1979) An Examination and Defense of One Argument Concerning Animal Rights, Inquiry, 22, 189 219. Regan, T (1983) The Case for Animal Rights, Berkeley University of California Press, CA. Routley, R (1973) Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental Ethic, in Proceedings of the 15th World Congress of Philosophy, Vol. 1, Bulgarian Organizing Committee, Sophia Press, Varna, 205 210. Sagoff, M (1988) The Economy of the Earth, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Sagoff, M (1997) Can We Put a Price on Natures Services, Report from the Institute of Philosophy and Public Policy, 17(3), 7 12. Schopenhauer, A (1818) Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Hesse and Becker, Leipzig. Schweitzer, A (1923) Civilization and Ethics, translated by A Naish, Black, London. Shrader-Frechette, K S (1996) Individualism, Holism, and Environmental ethics, Ethics Environ., 1, 55 69. Singer, P (1977) Animal Liberation: A New Ethic for Our Treatment of Animals, Avon, New York. Sikora, R I and Barry, B (1978) Obligations to Future Generations, Temple University Press, PA. Smith, A (1759) Theory of the Moral Sentiments, eds A Millar, A Kinkaid, and J Bell, Edinburgh. Taylor, P W (1986) The Ethics of Respect for Nature, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Thoreau, H D (1854) Walden, Tichnor and Fields, Boston, MA. Udall, S (1963) The Quiet Crisis, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York. Wenz, P (1988) Environmental Justice, State University of New York, Press, Albany, NY. White, G (1789) The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne in the County of Southhampton, reprinted by Macmillan (1900), London. White, L (1967) The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis, Science, 155, 1203 1207.

FURTHER READING
Callicott, J B (1999) Beyond the Land Ethic, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY.

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Environmental Movement the Rise of Non-government Organizations (NGOs)

Elizabeth May
Sierra Club of Canada, Ottawa, Canada

the earliest environmental groups toward the end of the 19th century. A case can be made for the inclusion of public health activists as early environmentalists. Florence Nightingale, for example, bemoaned that the Thames was used as an open sewer and worked to improve standards of public health through improved sanitation:
It did strike me as odd sometimes, that we should pray to be delivered from plague, pestilence, and famine, when all the common sewers ran into the Thames and fevers haunted undrained land, and the districts which cholera would visit could be pointed out. I thought that before cholera came that we might remove these causes, not pray God would remove the cholera. Suggestions for Thought (1860)

Although active in promoting environmental policies since the 19th century, environmental NGOs became a more profound force in the latter decades of the 20th century. Environmental groups operate at local, community, provincial/state, national and international levels. Generally, they exist based on public nancial support and involve millions of citizens around the world. Typically and culturally, NGOs are more robust in democratic societies, but emerge as countries transit from totalitarian to democratic governance. The rise of NGOs has corresponded to a declining role of the nation state in an era of increased global corporate rule. In response, environmental NGOs are themselves increasingly globalized and acting in signi cant ways on international issues, from United Nations (UN) fora to the World Trade Organization (WTO). The role of NGOs has been accepted by the UN organizations with increasing openness through the preparatory process for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), and the June, 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Resistance to NGO participation in other institutions, such as the World Bank and the WTO, has spilled over into the streets of Washington, DC for a number of years and in Seattle in November 1999 at the third ministerial meeting of the WTO. NGOs, as a signi cant force within civil society, will likely continue to occupy an increasing area of political space as the challenges of global environmental change weaken existing institutions. Reformers of all kinds have long organized themselves into groups and associations to press for change. Successful movements put themselves out of business, such as the slavery abolitionists and the womens suffrage movement. The rst successful mass mobilization campaign can be traced back to the UK abolitionists campaign in the 18th century. NGOs became an accepted part of society dating from the FrancoPrussian war and the creation of the Red Cross. Although the term environment did not come into common usage until the 1960s, concern for nature, clean air and water and protection of animals led to the establishment of

The killing fogs of Londons smoke choked air also led to public protest and movements for change focused on the deleterious effects on public health. Such concerns had been voiced for hundreds of years, but most notably grabbed attention in 1952 when 4000 people died in an acute air pollution event in London. Similarly, the development of British common law remedies for nuisance and riparian rights were intimately tied to protection of ones right to clean air and clean water. Still, the existence of organized environmental groups is seen as a more recent phenomena.

THE NATURE LOVERS

In North America, early environmental groups were organized as hiking clubs, such as the Williamstown Club (1863), the White Mountain Club (1873) and the Appalachian Mountain Club (1876). In 1875, people concerned with the state of the nations forests organized the American Forestry Association. Unlike its current incarnation, it initially championed forest protection, urged tree planting, lobbied for parks and successfully established Arbor Day. As the industrial revolution and expanding populations in the Eastern United States pressed against shrinking wilderness, these societies expressed the romantic longing for wildness, inuenced by Henry David Thoreau and his 1854 book Walden (see Thoreau, Henry David, Volume 5). In this period, both the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club were formed. The Audubon Society and the American Ornithological Society were formed in the 1880s, with a primary mission of the study and protection of wild birds. The Sierra Club (see Sierra Club, Volume 5) was founded in 1892 with the broader goal of protecting large tracts of wilderness in the western US. Although the word environment was not used at the time, protection of wildness and the urgent imperative to protect nature from ruthless exploitation were common themes in the groups early literature. Founder John Muir (see Muir, John, Volume 5) wrote of government attitudes to American forests:

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(the government) is like a rich and foolish spendthrift who has inherited a magnicent estate in perfect order, and then has left his elds and meadows, forests and parks, to be sold and plundered and wasted at will, depending on their inexhaustible abundance. (Turner, 1985)

The Sierra Club was founded with the goal of introducing urban dwellers to the magnicence of the Sierra Nevada. Muir believed that by experiencing and enjoying the natural world, people would, through transformative and transcendental experience, become converts to the cause of preserving it. This formula proved very successful. Prior to the establishment of the Sierra Club, Muir himself helped persuade outdoorsman, adventurer and hunter US President Teddy Roosevelt to protect critical wilderness (see Roosevelt, Theodore, Volume 5). The rst national park had been Yellowstone in 1872, but public reactions had been adverse. In a strategy that foreshadowed Sierra Clubs tactics for the next century, Muir plotted a campaign to make Yosemite a national park. The plan included an insider Washington strategy with a Yosemite bill the locus of lobbying, a media strategy with articles in popular magazines extolling the virtues of Yosemite and the urgency of protecting it from development, penned by the now famous Muir, and mobilizing individuals by taking concerned people into the Yosemite wilderness. The Washington and New York lobbying was primarily the work of Muirs friend and collaborator Robert Underwood Johnson, whose role as associate editor of the nations leading literary monthly, The Century, proved crucial in mobilizing public support. The Yosemite bill passed into law in 1890. But the wilderness of Yosemite was incompletely protected with key areas, particularly the Hetch Hetchy Valley, remaining in state, rather than federal, control. Moreover, the magnicent sequoia forests north of the park were unprotected. These and other wilderness campaigns became the focus for the Sierra Club. In the spring of 1903 Muir accomplished the ultimate in lobbying coups; a camping trip into Yosemite with President Teddy Roosevelt. By the end of the trip, Teddy Roosevelt declared it would be a shame to our civilization to let them (sequoias) disappear. They are monuments unto themselves , (Turner, 1985, 826). It took several years more effort to get the bill expanding protection of Yosemite to include the Hetch Hetchy Valley through the California legislature, but ultimately, Muir and the Sierra Club prevailed. But the victory was not to be permanent.

described as preservationist, the movement for scientic forestry and wise use of natural resources was christened conservationist. The leading practitioners and advocates for conservation were Gifford Pinchot and Bernard Fernow. Pinchot was the son of a wealthy Connecticut family, who studied forestry in Germany and became the rst dean of the Yale School of Forestry, created through a large Pinchot family donation. German born and trained, Fernow was already established as a forester when Pinchot came on the scene. Pinchot replaced Fernow as the director of the Division of Forestry within the Department of Agriculture and Fernow became the rst dean of forestry at the University of Toronto. Both believed in the efcient use of forests and favored human use and benets over the love of and protection of wilderness in its own right. Pinchot and Fernow established forestry principles that persist to this day, favoring evenaged forest stands and the elimination of old growth. They championed sustained yield forest management. Initially, Muir and Pinchot were in league. In 1895, Muir even wrote:
The forests must be, and will be, not only preserved, but used; and like perennial fountains be made to yield a sure harvest of timber, while at the same time all their far reaching (aesthetic and spiritual) uses may be maintained unimpaired.

THE CONSERVATION MOVEMENT

Across North America another species of environmentalism was on the rise. If Muir and Sierra Club could be

But the unity of preservationists and conservationists was not to last. Two bitter disputes permanently split the American conservation movement. The rst was the question of the purpose and level of protection for National Forests. Pinchot and his followers believed that scientic forestry and logging should take place in these forests, while Muir and the Sierra Club had succeeded in having 21 million acres (eight million hectares) of forest set aside in 1897 as forest reserves with no mention of a commercial purpose. Although Muir originally tried to keep both forces unied in order to ensure the success of the cause of forest reserves, the tension between preservation and wise use ultimately snapped coalition efforts. Pinchots forces succeeded in having Congress pass a Forest Management Act (1897) which stated that the central purpose of reserves was to furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of citizens of the United States . The Act also included mining and grazing as acceptable activities within the forest reserve system. Pinchots colleague Bernard Fernow summed up the conservationist view, the main service, the principal object of the forest has nothing to do with beauty or pleasure. It is not except incidentally an object of aesthetics, but an object of economics . The conversion of national forest reserves to logging concessions was a blow to Muir, but it was nothing compared to the heart-breaking loss in the ght for the Hetch Hetchy.

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245

Muir and the Sierra Club had succeeded in having the dramatic Hetch Hetchy Valley added to the Yosemite National Park. One hundred and fty miles from the growing urban center of San Francisco, the Yosemite wilderness was seen through two very different lenses. To Muir, in wildness lay spiritual salvation:
thousands of tired, nerve shaken, over civilized people are beginning to nd out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life. (Nash, 1967)

eyes to the God of the Mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar. Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well, dam for water tanks the people s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated in the heart of man.

For others, the Hetch Hetchy Valley held another form of salvation, an abundant source of water for a parched city. The proposed damming of the Hetch Hetchy was sacrilege to Muir, but sensible to the wise-use conservation movement. As Pinchot wrote:
As to my attitude regarding the proposed use of the Hetch Hetchy by the city of San Francisco I am fully persuaded that the injury by substituting a lake for the present swampy oor of the valley is altogether unimportant compared with the bene ts to be derived from its use as a reservoir.

San Francisco s engineers had proposed damming the Hetch Hetchy in 1882, long before its inclusion in the Yosemite National Park. In 1890, even after its status as a protected area within a national park was established, the Mayor of the day requested permission to dam the river and use the water. The Secretary of the Interior, Ethan A Hitchcock refused, noting that a dam was inconsistent with the national park designation. But in 1906, San Francisco suffered the double blow of a devastating earthquake and re. The city s need for water aroused public sympathy far more than the preservationists love of wilderness. In 1908, Hitchcock s successor, James R Gar eld, approved the plan. The aftermath was an historic point in the growth of environmental groups as Muir, Johnson and the Sierra Club launched the rst nationwide environmental protest campaign in US history. The Hetch Hetchy became a national issue. The ght was bitter and the rhetoric brutal. Muir, who had long written of wilderness in terms of religious reverence, now wrote of its despoilers as Satanic. Johnson also took up the cause of protection of beauty and nature against the materialistic followers of Mammon in the context of a larger morality play. While Muir and Johnson urged that other sources be found for the city s water needs, even sympathetic President Teddy Roosevelt was convinced that there was no other suitable source for water. In 1912, Muir called those promoting the dam scheme:
temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism having a perfect contempt for nature instead of lifting their

In what may have been most painful for Muir, dam supporters included friends and residents of San Francisco within the Sierra Club. Warren Olney, one of the Club s founders, led a Club faction in support of the dam. Muir and Johnson acted through the California Branch of the Society for the Preservation of National Parks, to avoid the internal con ict. In 1910, through a referendum within the Sierra Club, Muir established that the Club also favored preservation over damming the Hetch Hetchy, by a vote of 589 161. Still, having to ght within the organization he had founded was a bitter pill. The San Francisco media lampooned Muir as a cranky old fanatic who cared more for trees than people. And there was no doubt his rhetoric had become more fanatical. But nationally, Muir and the preservationists had widespread support, with articles in the New York Times and many popular magazines. The rift within the conservation movement was profound. In 1913, the head of the National Conservation Association, Harry Slatterly, wrote to the Secretary of the Interior, Unfortunately, our good friends the nature lovers are still unreasonable in their attitude. There is grave danger they will again be able to block this most necessary legislation (Hays, 1972). Muir and the Sierra Club organized a broader coalition, pulling away groups, such as women s clubs, traditionally supportive of Gifford Pinchot and the utilitarian conservationists to the cause of Hetch Hetchy. The Hetch Hetchy issue galvanized a new wilderness preservation movement, with effective support from the women s clubs, hunter and sportsmen s groups, outing clubs, scienti c societies and academic institutions. One Senator noted that he had received 5000 letters urging him to save the Hetch Hetchy. National support was strong and Muir and his supporters felt the protests would succeed in thwarting the bill to dam the valley. In November 1913, Muir wrote to Johnson, we re bound to win, enemy badly frightened, Up and smite em! But the quiet and effective lobbying of in uential San Franciscans had done wonders for the city that wanted water. On December 6, 1913 the Senate vote favored damming the Hetch Hetchy, and despite best efforts, no presidential veto followed. Muir and the preservationists accepted their defeat on the Hetch Hetchy, nding solace, as Muir wrote, in the fact that the conscience of a whole country has been aroused from sleep . It was no exaggeration to say that the Hetch Hetchy controversy had awakened the nation. The wilderness movement in the United States continued after Muir s death in December 1914. The appreciation for the spiritual aspect of wilderness was most notably

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continued by Aldo Leopold (see Leopold, Aldo, Volume 5). In 1908 Leopold graduated from Yale School of Forestry, pursuing Gifford Pinchots philosophy, only to reject his utilitarian view of nature. In summarizing the American approach to nature, he wrote a stump was our symbol of progress . Although Leopold became president of the Ecological Society of America (founded in 1915), his largest contribution to the environmental movement was through his writing. His most inuential legacy, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches from Here and There was published in 1949.

WILDLIFE PROTECTION MOVEMENT

While the environmental movement took root in North America through wilderness campaigns, the movement also expanded in Europe through the latter part of the 19th century. Lacking vast tracts of wilderness, the focus of nature lovers was the protection of animals. As early as 1824, the rst organization concerned with non-human life was established in England by philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The British Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals championed the protection of domesticated animals. It was not until 1903 that the fate of wild species found an organizational champion, the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire. In 1900, a treaty was negotiated by the foreign ministers of colonial powers controlling the continent of Africa and signed in London the Convention for the Preservation of Animals, Birds and Fish in Africa. The Times of Londons coverage of the conference included a decidedly environmental message
The advance of civilization, with its noise and agitation, is fatally disturbing to the primitive forms of life. Commerce, moreover, discovers continually some new demand for the trophies of the chase. The horns, the skins, and the plumage of the beasts and the birds have an increasing market value. It is not surprising, therefore, that men of science have become alarmed at the prospect of the extinction of the most interesting and characteristic types of zoological development. (Bonner, 1993)

But it was not only scientists who worried about the perilous fate of Africas wildlife. The colonial dukes and lords and princes had come to regard the hunting of African game as their private domain. In 1903, the colonial big game hunters founded the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire. In the media, they were dubbed penitent butchers. These conservationists were not discouraged from killing lions under the terms of the 1900 treaty. The treaty actually called for protection only of those species which are either useful to man or are harmless . Hunting lions, leopards, hyaenas and wild dogs was consistent with the treaty. Conservationist US President Teddy Roosevelt was one of the big game hunters hosted by

British residents of East Africa. In a remark that highlights the different strands of the fabric of the environmental movement, when hiking through Yosemite, Muir had chastised Roosevelt for his love of hunting: Mr Roosevelt, when are you going to get beyond the boyishness of killing things are you not getting far enough along to leave that off? The hunter conservationist remains an important part of the modern environmental movement, found in groups such as the National Wildlife Federation in the US, its related Canadian Wildlife Federation, and Ducks Unlimited. Although now quite removed from hunting, the original founders of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which came into being in the 1960s, had come from similar origins. After the devastation of European human environments, Briton E M Max Nicholson worked to establish the rst international conservation organization with goals beyond Africa. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) came into existence in 1948, through the work of Nicholson and others (see IUCN (The World Conservation Union), Volume 4). Staffed by scientists, it established a reputation for credible and authoritative conservation research. Working with government and nongovernment members, IUCN (now known as the World Conservation Union) had a unique ability to inuence government policy. Still, it lacked the wherewithal to raise funds for its program. To meet this need, the WWF was founded. Public sentiment had been moved through the inuential writings of Sir Julian Huxley, scientist and rst head of the United Nations Educational, Scientic and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Huxley wrote a three-piece series in The Observer in 1960 describing his travels though Africa, the magnicent wild creatures and inexorable push toward their destruction. It moved Nicholson and other committed entrepreneurs to organize a fund-raising and campaigning arm for IUCN. IUCN and WWF were in partnership until WWF broke away to do its own work in the mid-1980s. (In the 1990s, the WWF ofcially changed its name to the Worldwide Fund for Nature.) The early connections between wildlife appreciation and royalty are maintained by WWF through the active roles of Their Royal Highnesses, Prince Philip and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. Key elements of an international environmental movement were in place by the middle of the 20th century, with factions concerned with wilderness preservation, conservation of natural resources, including wildlife for sustained use, and wildlife protection, ghting to keep species from going the way of the dodo. The movement had extended itself through much of the globe, although headquarters and impetus for action largely came from the source of the damage; the industrialized world.

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THE MODERN ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT

Most writers date the modern environmental movements birth as 1963 when Rachel Carsons classic Silent Spring was published (see next section and Carson, Rachel Louise, Volume 5). It is no doubt true that a new type of organization was required to tackle a new host of environmental threats. The by-products of warfare were changing the very nature of the environment. World War I gave the world chlorine compounds; World War II yielded chlorinated hydrocarbons, organophosphates, and increased radiation from the new technological ability to split the atom, for armaments and electricity. Pollution from industrial enterprises was compromising regional air quality and killing life in aquatic systems. The new chemicals brought new health risks. While the chlorine compounds and other toxic chemicals found commercial application as pesticides, the arms race led to global contamination with fallout from atmospheric testing and increased radiation from the nuclear power industry. It is clear that a prime motivation for widespread public protests against atmospheric nuclear weapons testing was the impact on public health, particularly on childrens health, around the world. A new type of international organization was born out of the movement to stop atmospheric testing. Although the campaign is usually characterized as part of the peace movement, it had all the hallmarks of environmental concerns. Nuclear testing was distributing tons of toxic radionuclides, including strontium-90, all around the world. Strontium-90s pathways mimic those of calcium. Taken up in grasses, consumed by dairy cows, the radiation made its way to milk. Once consumed, it was stored in bones and teeth, increasing the risk of childhood leukemias and later adult cancers. In response, the world saw its rst truly global grassroots movement in the late 1950s. Many of the groups were established by mothers concerned about nuclear weapons testing and the threat to their children. Although national groups of many different names were established, the largest umbrella, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) organized the key global events. The organization was aided by the prominence of one of its founders, Lord Bertrand Russell. The ubiquitous nature of its incorporation into popular culture can be seen to this day in the use of its symbol as the peace sign. The circle with a semaphore was the symbol for the letters CND. In the US, the campaign against atmospheric nuclear testing was organized through the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, generally abbreviated to SANE. Key board members included the leading liberal thinkers of the day: editor of the Saturday Review Norman Cousins, repeat candidate for president, Norman Thomas, and the author of

the best-selling book, Baby and Child Care, Dr Benjamin Spock. The Ban-the-Bomb movement held large marches, launched petition drives, and enlisted celebrities and Nobel laureates in its campaign. In the UK, an annual Eastertime march built public support and momentum. The march started in 1956 when a single Quaker walked from London to a military research facility at Aldermaston, a distance of 54 miles (87 km). The following year, 100 people marched. By 1959, there were 3000 marchers. But, the most celebrated and successful march was in 1960 when over 100 000 marchers made the journey towards London from Aldermaston, culminating with a giant rally at Trafalgar Square. Marchers came from national groups from around the world, with committees from Ghana, South Africa, Greece, Israel, Cyprus, the US, Canada, Ireland and France. The line of the march stretched a distance of ten miles (16 km), Marchers were applauded by supporters along the sidelines, and Musicians played along the route. An enormous volunteer effort orchestrated lodging en route, mostly on school and church oors, and canteen wagons served three meals a day. The youngest marcher, Martin Dowling, was seven weeks old. The eldest, in a wheel chair, was nearly 100. The march was led by Canon Collins, the canon of St. Pauls Cathedral and by Jacquetta Hawks, historian, wife of J B Priestley. Many Labour members of parliament marched as well. The Aldermaston March of 1960 was a major media event, covered by television and radio news around the world. If Woodstock had happened rst, it would have been dubbed the Woodstock of the Ban the Bomb movement. The grassroots political movement was rewarded when in September 1963, the governments of the United States, the Soviet Union and the UK entered into the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The treaty banned the testing by detonation of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. While the treaty is often characterized as part of the developing movement for non-proliferation and peace, it spoke most immediately to ending the widespread dispersion of nuclear contamination through the atmosphere. The Test Ban Treaty was not the rst multilateral agreement to deal with an environmental concern. The early part of the 20th century also saw a number of binational treaties between Canada and the United States; rst the 1909 Boundary Waters Convention, which created the International Joint Commission, and the Migratory Birds Convention. But the Test Ban Treaty was arguably the rst created in global fashion and resulting from the efforts of NGOs.

SILENT SPRING
The modern environmental movement is usually traced to the publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (Carson,

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1963) (see Carson, Rachel Louise, Volume 5). Silent Spring chronicled the health and environmental threats of the escalating and widespread use of chemical synthetic pesticides. The book was both well written and well researched and became a bestseller. Despite the vociferous efforts of the chemical lobby to attack the credibility of Rachel Carson, she became a hero to many Americans. Her warnings led to the creation of new citizen groups working to have certain pesticides banned. Efforts in Long Island, NY to ban dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) led to the creation of the Environmental Defence Fund (see Environmental Defense Fund, Volume 5). Traditional groups, such as the Sierra Club, now under the leadership of its rst executive director, David Brower (see Brower, David, Volume 5), broadened the organizations mandate to tackle pollution and pesticides. Through the late 1960s, a huge increase in environmental awareness burgeoned in the US. In some ways, it could have been seen as an extension of the movement against the war in Vietnam. But within the political debate taking place in the US, the new environmental movement was often accused by the anti-war movement of being safe, white, and middle class, detracting from the tougher issue of predominantly black US soldiers drafted to ght an unpopular war in Southeast Asia. Still, both movements grew in strength. In the fall of 1969, the US government planned to conduct an underground nuclear test in Amchitka, Alaska, and suddenly a new protest movement was sweeping the US to stop the test. Scientists feared that the blast might actually destabilize an area with signicant fault lines, with the potential for a catastrophic earthquake. The US Secretary of Defense took his whole family to Alaska to demonstrate his faith in the safety of the nuclear test, but opposition mounted. US President Richard Nixon was besieged with telegrams and letters urging that the test be cancelled. The grassroots opposition also came from north of the border, where a small group in Vancouver organized themselves as Greenpeace to oppose the tests. The test proceeded, but the movement for environmental protection was growing. In 1970, Life magazine ran a cover story, Lake Erie is Dead. The Cuyahoga River in Ohio had caught re from the chemicals that had been dumped there by local industries. The emblem of the US crest, the mighty bald eagle, was near extinction due to the pernicious effects of DDT as it moved through the food chain. The reproductive success of the bald eagle, as top predator, was dangerously compromised. The growing movement was harnessed by Denis Hayes and US Senator Gaylord Nelson in a national teach-in called Earth Day (see Earth Day, Volume 5). April 22nd, 1970 galvanized a new and modern movement for environmental protection. Earth Day was ofcially recognized

by Presidential Proclamation from US President Richard Nixon. Large corporations seeking public favor, from Coca Cola to Proctor and Gamble, endorsed the event. Tens of thousands of people participated from coast to coast, with limited activities in Canada as well. Meanwhile, the environment movement was increasing in Europe as well. In the UK, the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) was formed and championed by the visionary Barbara Ward (see Ward, Barbara, Volume 4). David Brower, having left Sierra Club, founded Friends of the Earth (FoE) in 1969 (see Friends of the Earth, Volume 5) and afliate FoE groups were formed in Europe and elsewhere. Greenpeace, also, was forming national groups around the world. As well, local grassroots efforts for environmental protection were being organized in many countries.

STOCKHOLM
The gathering strength of public concern for the environment was recognized by the UN in the rst Conference on the Human Environment, in 1972 in Stockholm. The UN conference is remembered for its adoption of the Stockholm Principles for Environment as well as for the NorthSouth split. Brazil boycotted the conference, believing that the industrialized worlds environmental agenda was code for stalling development in the developing world. Yet, the conference was, by any measure, a success. Secretary general for the conference, Canadian Maurice Strong, immediately sensed the need to include the environmental movement. Under UN terminology, such citizens groups were called NGOs. The organizing of a parallel NGO conference for Stockholm was a rst of its kind. Maurice Strong also commissioned a popular non-ofcial book for the conference. Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet, by Ward and Dubos (1972), contributed to a growing global environmental consciousness. Surprisingly, it became a bestseller and was printed in twelve languages. Speaking to the NGO conference at Stockholm, US anthropologist Margaret Mead, in what would become a motto for environmental groups for generations to come, said Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has . The years leading to the UN Summit in Stockholm and those immediately following saw the mainstreaming of environmental concerns. Governments at all levels created departments of the environment. New pollution control legislation was brought forward in countries around the world. In the US, legislation included the National Environmental Protection Act which established environmental assessment, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act.

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The rst major wave of environmental activism receded in response to the apparent acceptance by government and corporations of the demands of NGOs. Alternatively, the oil shock of the early 1970s has been credited with dampening demands for environmental protection. Still, the oil crisis instilled an ethic of energy conservation, if briey, in the psyche of Americans and Canadians. Major auto manufacturers moved to produce more energy efcient cars. Amory Lovins promoted soft energy paths and demand-side energy management. The energy conservation movement led to the creation of a new type of environmental NGO, one concerned with technological innovation for conservation and renewable energy sources. Environmental groups grew around the world in response to increased pressure on natural spaces and growing pollution. In Australia, the Conservation Society and other groups arose to stop the ooding of Lake Pedder, protect the Great Barrier Reef, the forests of Tazmania as well as to oppose uranium mining. Penan and Dayak indigenous people in Borneo organized with Malaysian environmental groups to call for protection of the rainforest, while in Brazil, rubber tappers, known as seringueiros, organized for economic rights as well as protection of the Amazonian rain forest. In December 1988, seringueiro leader, Chico Mendes, was murdered just outside his Xapuri home, despite the presence of state-provided bodyguards. In India, women organized to protect forests through the Chipko movement (see Chipko Movement, Volume 5), while in Kenya, Wangaari Mathai organized the planting of trees through the Greenbelt Movement. Even within the totalitarian system of the USSR, voices of environmental activists were heard. New environmental threats through the next few decades created focused campaigns for change. In the mid-1970s, the thinning of the ozone layer led rst to consumer campaigns to avoid those cosmetic products using ozonedepleting clorouorocarbons (CFCs). As consumers, primarily in the US and Canada, stopped buying products containing CFCs, the manufacturers stopped using them, hailing their commitment to environmental protection. It was not for another decade that citizens realized CFC use had continued and expanded through use in other products, from air conditioning to blown foam insulation. Governments responded to powerful environmental NGO campaigns in global negotiations leading to the Montreal Protocol in 1989. Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) was particularly associated with this campaign as was the Washington, DC, based Ozone Action. By that time, the role of NGOs within high level negotiations had grown. NGO representatives were included within the delegations of many industrialized country governments. NGOs spoke from the oor in plenary, as well as dominating the streets in demands for change.

BRUNDTLAND TO RIO
In the last years of the 1980s, the second major wave of public environmental activism was cresting. It happened to coincide with the hearings of the UN sponsored the World Commission for Environment and Development (WCED or more commonly known as the Brundtland Commission). The WCED was chaired by the leader of the Norwegian parliamentary opposition, Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland. But, when the government in power fell, newly anointed Prime Minister Brundtland did the unexpected: she remained chair of the commission. Other commission members included the former secretary general of the Stockholm Conference Maurice Strong, Ambassador Mohamed Sahnoun of Algeria, Guyanas Shridath Ramphal, the secretary general of the Commonwealth of Nations and the Deputy Prime Minister Mansour Khalid of the Sudan, to name a few of the 22 members. Unlike other groupings of prestigious and powerful personages pulled together in major commissions, the Brundtland Commission held public hearings around the world. In Indonesia, Brazil, Norway, Zimbabwe, Kenya, the USSR, Canada, Japan, they sought out the views of indigenous peoples, peasant farmers, and NGOs of all shapes and sizes. Hundreds of individuals and groups presented their views on environment and development to the Commissioners. In the process, the role of NGOs and the political space they occupied was expanded. The WCED report, Our Common Future, was released in 1987, many of its pages reect a recognition of the role of NGOs as important catalyst for the emerging concept of sustainable development. One of the key recommendations of the Brundtland Commission was for a major global conference on the linked problems of environment, development and militarism. The WCED recommended that a UN Summit be convened in 1992, marking 20 years since Stockholm. That advice led to acceptance by the UN General Assembly of a global conference focusing on environment and development. Militarism was dropped from what the Brundtland Commission termed a three-legged stool. The UNCED was held in June 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; thus improving prospects for bridging the NorthSouth divide that led to Brazils 1972 Stockholm boycott. The Rio process expanded the role of NGOs in multinational issues. The negotiations at the rst Preparatory Committee (Prep Com) meeting, held in Nairobi, Kenya in August 1990 were delayed for several days until the issue of the scope of NGO participation rights could be resolved. Hard-line opposition to opening the process of negotiations nearly stymied the effort for greater transparency. But, in the end, the issue was resolved in favor of previously unknown opportunities for NGO contribution to global policy development. NGOs, whether those traditionally accepted within the UN Economic and Social

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Council (ECOSOC) bureaucracy or not, would be permitted to speak in plenary at the discretion of the chair and attend most working group negotiations. The advent of electronic communication, via the internet, engaged many more NGOs around the world. Experimental efforts at early Prep Coms evolved by the time of the Earth Summit into a well respected daily bulletin of the progress of negotiations, distributed in paper form, but simultaneously, around the world. Earth Negotiations Bulletin was a agship project of Canadas International Institute for Sustainable Development. NGO engagement in the Rio process led to a new level of policy awareness as well as international networking between and among NGOs. Targeted effort was made by northern NGOs to ensure that voices from the developing world were heard. Prominent and respected southern analysis from activists like Indias Vandana Shiva, Malaysias Martin Khor and Walden Bello of the Philippines group, Global South, reached a larger and wider audience. Martin Khor of the Third World Network in Penang had long worked under the spectre of potential political harassment and arrest. Through the course of the Rio preparatory process, his keen political analysis came to be appreciated by the Malaysian government. In time, even Malaysia welcomed NGO participation on its delegation. By the time the Earth Summit was held in Rio in June 1992, thousands of NGOs from around the world had become engaged in the process. The NGOs, with the assistance of Maurice Strong who was once again secretary general of the conference, occupied substantial political space at the conference as well as holding a global forum, or peoples response to the governmental process, parallel to UNCED. Strong also recruited Ecuadorian NGO leader, Yolanda Kakabadze, who went on to head the IUCN (now known as the World Conservation Union), to coordinate NGO relations for UNCED. The womens movement became prominently involved in the Rio process through the efforts of the Womens Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), led by the indefatigable feminist and former US Congresswoman, Bella Abzug. Youth organizations became involved, as did aboriginal peoples. Within the non-binding agreements for future action, known as Agenda 21, there was explicit recognition of the role of major groups. These were identied as environmental groups, development organizations, womens groups, youth and indigenous peoples.

RIO TO SEATTLE
Progress made in identifying NGOs, increasingly with other sectors labeled civil society, as legitimate agents of change deserving of political space in governmental affairs, was solidi ed in the ongoing work of the UN.

The follow-up to the Earth Summit commitments: the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention for the Protection of Biological Diversity, the Rio Declaration and the voluminous, 40 chapter, Agenda 21 all of these important documents were relegated to a new institutional body, set up within the UN backwater, the ECOSOC. The Commission for Sustainable Development (CSD) held annual reviews of progress in the spring of every year. NGOs continued to have substantial rights of participation. But little progress was being made in meeting the Rio targets. The Rio Earth Summit produced a weak set of goals, and still weaker political will to achieve them. Annual CSD meetings offered ministers of environment the opportunity to share their frustration over their expulsion to the political wilderness. Every government had identi ed competing priorities that left the Earth Summit goals in the vast heap of the marginal and unloved. The reality was that Rio had emerged as the environmental wave of public awareness was already receding. Heads of government issued their Rio promises, went home and, for the most part, forgot them. Other global summits continued to include signi cant NGO participation. In 1994, the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) met in Cairo. Issues of population and reproductive rights that had been pushed to the back burner in Rio were nally dealt with in Cairo. Large numbers of NGOs, many veterans of the Rio process, brought forward environmental concerns within the context of the political mine eld of population pressures. The Cairo Programme of Action explicitly embraced the work of the Earth Summit, two years before. It spoke to issues of unsustainable production and consumption, the need to ensure sustainable levels of consumption as well as the need to balance population numbers. The year after Cairo, world leaders met in Copenhagen in March 1995 to negotiate commitments to improve the human condition. The World Summit on Social Development (WSSD) also recognized extensive rights of participation for NGOs. Within months, the UN was again hosting a conference (Beijing, September, 1996) the UN Fourth World Conference on the Rights of Women. This brought thousands of NGOs both to the of cial and, a now expected, parallel NGO conference. The documents from the Beijing Conference, the Beijing Declaration and the Beijing Platform for Action, were heavily in uenced by the lively North South debate of NGOs, from environmental, development, human rights and women s groups from around the world. It can be argued that the seriousness of purpose of governmental enterprise is directly, and inversely, proportional to the extent of NGO participation. While NGOs received credentials and became accepted players in the Rio process, the real confrontation was in negotiations under the General

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Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) within the decade long Uruguay Round. Aggressive trade liberalization was supported by abundant political will. By 1996, the Uruguay Round had succeeded in establishing a powerful, centralized enforcement and governance body, the WTO. In retrospect, it is interesting how the two sets of global agreements, one to protect the planets life support systems from the ravages of human activity, the other to ensure that human activity would not be impeded by any barriers such as troublesome environmental measures, could proceed side by side. With the same governments negotiating, there were no discussion within either process of the other. But there is no question which global vision had the upper hand. The WTO had teeth, the Rio agreements an impressive set of gums. Moreover, there were scattered references to the path to sustainable development through trade liberalization and the free ow of foreign direct investment throughout Agenda 21. In addition to targeting new areas for trade liberalization (the removal of trade barriers designed to protect domestic production from cheaper imports) the Uruguay Round set out to create an institutional home for the GATT, a global umpire of trade rules with extremely effective sanctions for any country violating the GATT. Into this arena, there was no room for NGO engagement. The rst ministerial gathering of the WTO, in Singapore in December 1996, offered NGOs observer status to the opening plenary of speech making. But the actual negotiations, in the WTOs own decision-making culture, left out not only NGOs, but most governments. Key agreement was reached on issues within small informal talks between the Europeans, the United States, Canada and Japan. Developing country diplomats could be found wandering the corridors and asking Martin Khor of the Third World Network if he had heard what was taking place behind the closed doors. The Singapore meeting can be noted for one important decision. Developing countries managed en masse to block the introduction of an investment treaty into the WTOs deliberations. The efforts to accomplish a multi-lateral treaty to protect investors rights intensied within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The treaty under negotiation was dubbed the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI). Unexpectedly, opposition to what seemed an obscure bit of business in a little known international agency spawned a new and powerful international force, the anti-globalization movement. In January of 1997, the text of the draft MAI was obtained by NGOs and placed on the internet. Public Citizen, a Ralph Nader founded organization in Washington, DC, played a prominent role in spreading information about the MAI from its web site. The text made it clear that, going beyond the position of dominance that trade had achieved through the GATT, the MAI would provide corporations with potential compensation for reduced

expectations of prot. Word spread through the internet and through global gatherings, such as the corridors of the CSD meeting at the UN, that something new was afoot to further undermine environmental protection and domestic regulation. The OECD, which had promised a deadline of completed negotiations for spring 1997, moved the deadline to spring 1998. Within governments, it appeared that little consensus had been reached between trade ministries and less powerful departments. In particular, ministries of culture expressed doubts about the MAI. The French Minister of Culture, in particular, openly criticized the homogenizing terms of treating culture like a product. The many aspects of society perceiving threats in the draft MAI text banded together in a new and broader coalition of environment groups, labor unions, development organizations, health advocacy groups, cultural organizations, educators, womens groups, and aboriginals. Opposition to the MAI spread globally in an unprecedented and grassroots fashion, aided by the internet. OECD governments increasingly found themselves on the defensive domestically over support for a treaty to decrease nation state powers of regulation and increase private corporate rights. By spring, 1998, the announced deadline for completing the MAI, the negotiations collapsed. A new global movement experienced the power of democratic protest. Parallel efforts had been under way for years to reform or shut down international nancial institutions, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Through the late 1990s the spectre of Third World Debt was also subject to a global campaign. Jubilee 2000 was initiated by church groups in the UK, but spread globally as well. Its call for reduction and removal of debt loads on heavily indebted, poor nations, led to improvements in debt cancellation by governments. Into the simmering and now well-organized network of NGOs from around the world came the news in 1998 that the third ministerial meeting of the WTO would be held in the US, in Seattle, Washington. The news was a gift to a movement aware of its gathering momentum. Previous WTO ministerial sessions had been in Singapore and Geneva. Neither location is conducive to attracting large numbers of protesters. Seattle was an ideal location and groups around the world began to organize. Within the US, the key to fullling promises of massive demonstrations in Seattle was the support of the trade union movement, the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). Environmental groups, from Sierra Club to Greenpeace, animal welfare groups such as the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, prodemocracy and trade groups, such as Ralph Naders Public Citizen, began working with the labor movement, churches and a growing coalition of interests concerned about the

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impact of economic globalization. Voices from the South also prepared for Seattle, and key thinkers and visionaries, like Martin Khor and Vandana Shiva, as well as hundreds of organizations began planning for Seattle. European activists, as well, made Seattle a focal point. Canadian anti-free trade campaigner Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians, played a key role. By November 1999, over 50 000 people lled the streets of Seattle. The reality is that the WTO was in trouble well before Seattle. The extent to which its rulings exceeded valid trade concerns led directly to a process of political delegitimization of the institution. There was a high level of public distrust as the WTO struck down environmental and health regulations. The trade ministers could no longer count on negotiating under a shroud of secrecy. Unlike the Uruguay Round, the political interest in the WTO process had now expanded beyond trade negotiators. The defeat of the MAI awakened ministers of other portfolios to the reality that trade negotiations were too important to be left to trade ministers. Globally, environment and culture ministers, in particular, were paying attention. They had to pay attention because the public and the news media no longer viewed trade matters as arcane. And because, after the defeat of the MAI, it was clear to a growing citizens movement that global trade ghts were winnable. The negotiations in advance of the third ministerial meeting had not gone well. No progress had been made on a draft declaration for the ministers in over a year. Two weeks before the Seattle meetings, the preparatory talks in Geneva ended in failure. Intractable issues included agricultural subsidies, with the EU in violent disagreement with US plans to target its subsidies, as well as implementation issues, dealing with complaints mostly against developing countries that they were too slow in implementing the Uruguay Round. On these and other complex issues, there would be no prepared declaration. Everything would have to be negotiated on the ground in Seattle. Two weeks before Seattle, invitations to world leaders and heads of government were quietly withdrawn. Of heads of governments, only US President Bill Clinton would attend. And, as it turned out, he embraced the protesters demands for core labor standards. It was the coup de grace that ensured no agreements would take place in Seattle. The street demonstrations and police over-reaction will be the lasting images of Seattle. But as an exercise in citizen political strength, Seattle is much more signicant for the growing strength of NGOs. The NGOs involved had developed a strong critique of the current threats of increased corporate rule. They coordinated across huge distances and raised awareness within their own countries. The culminating days of teach-ins and protests in Seattle further increased media coverage and global public identication of a new and previously obscure institution, the WTO.

CONCLUSION
For more than a century, environmental groups have played a major role in evolving governmental and societal responses to the human-caused degradation of our natural world. NGOs have scored many signicant victories: from national parks and protection for endangered species, to global treaties to protect the ozone layer, and end nuclear testing. Individual toxic substances have been banned through NGO campaigning and new technologies with reduced environmental impacts have been embraced more quickly. In the process, many environmental groups have become themselves bureaucratized and seen as part of the mainstream. Despite victories in individual cases, ecological integrity is everywhere threatened. Global environmental health is signicantly worse now than at any time in human history. NGOs have, however, continued to provide an essential watchdog and public education function in every nation on earth. It can be argued that as the role of governments and the nation state itself is shrinking, the role of NGOs is expanding. Civil society, at a global level, is organizing in new ways. Democratic expression as a counter balance too, increasingly powerful, private sector interests is a different role for NGOs than lobbying parliaments for governmental action. NGOs will likely continue to occupy an increasing area of political space as the challenges of global environmental change weaken existing institutions.

REFERENCES
Bonner, R (1993) At the Hand of Man, Alfred A Knopf, New York. Carson, R (1963) Silent Spring, Fawcett World Library, New York. Hays, S (1972) Conservation and the Gospel of Efciency, Athenaeum, New York. Nash, R (1967) Wilderness and the American Mind, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. Turner, F (1985) Rediscovering America: John Muir in his Time and Ours, Viking Penguin, New York. Ward, B and Dubos, R (1972) Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet, W W Norton, New York. WCED (1987) Our Common Future, Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York.

Environmental Politics
see Environmental Politics (Opening essay, Volume 5)

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Environmental Philosophy: Phenomenological Ecology

Ingrid Leman Stefanovic
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

In many respects, industrialized society perceives problems of ecology and human dwelling to be technical matters of environmental and architectural management. No less important, however, are assumptions that shape the way that we frame environmental research, policies and programs. How we perceive and implicitly evaluate our built and natural environments in uence the questions we ask as well as the solutions we propose in matters of ecology and human settlement planning. Environmental philosophy explores precisely such issues of how we understand and value our built and natural worlds. Within this eld, phenomenology the investigation of hidden structures of experience has a distinctive role. Rather than construct abstract, speculative ethical theories, the phenomenological method aims to illumine tacit paradigms and worldviews that underlie our relationship with the environment. For example, studies of the impact of the automobile on the environment typically investigate technical matters such as frequency of car use or degree of degradation of agricultural lands. The phenomenologists contribution to the discussion arises from a concern to uncover tacit elements of human experience that subtly but effectively inspire our strong emotional ties to the car. In the absence of an understanding of peoples values, loves and modes of behavior, technical solutions may be dif cult to implement. To explore implicit patterns of meanings that condition our everyday behavior becomes a central concern of environmental phenomenology or, as some have coined the eld, phenomenological ecology.

PHENOMENOLOGY IN A CALCULATIVE ERA

Of pivotal and major importance to the eld has been the work of German phenomenologist Martin Heidegger, who distinguished between two kinds of thinking in the Western, metaphysical tradition: calculative and originative (Heidegger, 1966). Calculative thinking is linear, goal-directed and essentially quantitative, seeking maximum efciency in its control and mastery of discrete, empirically dened entities. Originative thinking examines the foundations of calculation, by investigating not just things but relations between things. Such thinking requires openness to the deeper mysteries of existence that are more than mere logical puzzles to be calculatively ordered. We have become particularly expert in calculative thinking and, in most cases, we equate calculation with genuine

thinking per se. Such thinking computes ever new, ever more promising and at the same time more economical possibilities, racing from one prospect to the next (Heidegger, 1966, 46). Specically result-oriented, calculation seeks to organize individual facts and entities with a goal of maximum efciency, dexterity and control. In such a scenario, the world appears as a collection of discrete objects subject to human command. Nature becomes a gigantic gasoline station that we envision is ours to tame and direct (Heidegger, 1966, 5051). Such a reductionist interpretation of the meaning of thinking arises from within a historical tradition that primarily concerns itself with empirical, quantiable realities, rather than some foundational, qualitative issues that exceed such quantitative measures. An atomistic analysis of beings (referred to by phenomenologists as ontic analysis ) takes precedence over any inquiry into the mystery of Being itself (that is, ontological inquiry). Calculative thinking assumes that which is subject to measurement and quantication is real and actual. Material entities, as well as ideas and concepts that can be categorized and delineated in the clear and distinct fashion of bounded entities, are implicitly valued above all else. At the same time, positivism the theory that knowledge is based on natural objects and properties that can be veried by the empirical sciences gains prominence in a calculative era that assumes that only clearly bounded, materially evident entities are real. When positively existing entities acquire such precedence, nebulous phenomena such as relationships or negations that cannot be seen as fully present consequently are not subject to serious management. In its fascination with things, our era becomes oblivious to the signicance of any phenomena that cannot be secured through measurement, or categorical control. Favoring calculative parameters, originative thinking is obscured and forgotten as a genuine possibility of reection. Why is this forgetfulness of relations, negations and voids at all important to environmentalists? Consider rst how the modern, positivist worldview interprets a particular negative phenomenon of absence, in a case of blindness or not seeing. St. Thomas Aquinas articulated an interpretation of this privation that is symptomatic of the calculative paradigm (Barrett, 1958). Aquinas appropriated an Aristotelian perspective that distinguished between ens reale (real Being) and ens rationis (conceptual Being). On this understanding, the cataract on the eye is real, because it can be empirically measured and it is an actual, positive entity. On the other hand, while blindness can be said in some sense to exist, as the absence of sight, it is only conceptually. The problem with this interpretation, however, is that it downplays the experiential signicance of the phenomenon of blindness. The philosopher William Barrett points out that for the man whose life has suddenly been thrown into

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complete darkness, non-seeing, a privation, has descended on him with more crushing effect than brick from a rooftop (Barrett, 1958, 288). To reduce the depth of this experiential signicance to the status of mere conceptual Being denigrates the human cost of such loss of sight and, to this extent, has to be philosophically misplaced as well. Nevertheless, strange as it may seem, in a tradition that assigns reality only to positively existing entities, the absence of sight can only be dened in terms of a conceptual truth. The alternative is to subject the phenomenon of blindness to a reductionist paradigm whereby it is circumscribed wholly within the presence of a material object a cataract. Analogously, one might imagine how the calculative worldview assigns value to a clear-cut forest. What matters is the timber resource, extracted and manufactured into positively existing entities for human use. Proceeding within a management scenario driven by economic utility, of far less value are the nebulous and too-complex-tomeasure impacts on ecosystem functions, processes and relationships. The original forest matters only to the extent that it is a positively existing resource, or else that it exists conceptually in the mind as a fond but overly romanticized image or memory. The philosophical paucity of the calculative paradigm arises once again when one considers the human impact of involuntary displacement. My home is expropriated and I am required to move to another location. Technically speaking, as my house is bulldozed, it is no longer. Is its signicance merely to be relegated to the level of a eeting memory or conceptual reality? The trauma of involuntary displacement clearly can indicate more than the physical destruction of a house. Instead, it may mean the end of a whole way of life and a radical de-centering of my very being. The fact that Western society no longer engages in the large-scale displacements of the 1960s urban renewal programs indicates that, implicitly, we know that the absence of home means signicantly more than the destruction of a material object. Rather, the loss affects us deeply in terms of our very sense of place. In fact, we are beginning to sense that we interpret our built and natural environments, not merely in terms of reductionist categories but, more primordially, from a more complex, holistic perspective.

POSSIBILITIES OF ORIGINATIVE THINKING

It may appear that the obvious alternative to reductionist, calculative thinking would be a form of holism. Environmentalists themselves increasingly advocate precisely such an alternative. For instance, the Brundtland Commission emphasizes the need to integrate economic, socio-cultural and environmental concerns, building on the ecologists widely accepted recognition that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts .

While these appeals can be quite compelling, ecoholism is hardly unproblematic. It may well be true that everything is ultimately connected in some way to everything else. Philosopher David Cooper has a point, however, when he notes that it is without interest and moral implication that a falling tree in Australia has some connection with the birth rate of ies in Alaska; and it is false if it is meant that such connections must be detectable, let alone signicant (Cooper, 1992, 166). How broadly is the holistic net to be legitimately thrown if it is to be practically and morally relevant? Other problems with the holistic alternative also arise. If the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, does that conclusion relegate the individual parts to a lower status on the moral hierarchy? Environmental philosopher Tom Regan les this charge of eco-fascism against holistic thinking. Holistic philosophers who argue that one is justied in sacricing individuals in order to preserve other species or the integrity of ecosystems are subject to this charge of fascistic rule of whole over parts. Another major difculty with advocating holistic thinking as an alternative to calculation relates to the problem of denition. Amidst the growing sentiment that environmental problems require holistic, interdisciplinary solutions, there are calls for the development of more comprehensive indicators of sustainability. The World Bank proposes an Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) (see ISEW (Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare) and GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator), Volume 5) to measure gross domestic product but to include natural and social parameters as well. President Clintons Council on Sustainable Development called for the creation of a number of new economic, social and environmental quality indicators. Again, however, the question arises: does holism mean simply throwing a wider net around discrete entities to accumulate an ever-larger inventory of indicators? From a phenomenological viewpoint, these efforts to describe a holistic alternative to positivism remain philosophically problematic because they remain immersed within the calculative paradigm. To say that everything is connected to everything else remains focussed on individual, discrete entities that may (or as Cooper points out, may not) be meaningfully interconnected in some way. These efforts do not call for a genuinely different kind of thinking than the calculative that simply seeks to amass a great many individual things in a broader web of signicance. The same problem occurs with accumulating a larger array of indicators, under the guise of interdisciplinary thinking. Genuinely holistic approaches must do more than simply collect an ever-increasing number of entities, if the phenomenologists call for an alternative to calculation is to be heeded. Finally, in deference to Regans criticisms, holistic thinking must accomplish more than a grand synthesis or construction of a Super-Part, bigger and better than the individual parts beneath it.

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How do we genuinely move beyond calculation, once we recognize that reductionist versions of positivism fail to capture the increasing complexity of environmental problems? Phenomenology offers an alternate vision. The originative, ontological thinking that Heidegger proposes is grounded in hermeneutics, the art of interpretation of texts. If we try to read as a word a conglomeration of letters, e.g., rgonaci and then rearrange the letters as organic , the second reading generates more than a mere re-conguration of individual letters. On the contrary, in the latter case, an implicit order now recognized among the letters allows for a shift in the act of interpretation that reveals the meaning of the word as a whole. In fact, when we read a text, the understanding consistently interprets holistically, although we may not be explicitly aware of this fact. Consider how reading requires something different than the accumulation of individual words on a page. The experience of reading is more than merely additive, in that I do not simply store up a linear series of individual words so that, at the end of the sentence, I compute the series into a meaningful totality. Rather, the hermeneutic experience reveals an interplay between the signicance of the text as a whole, and its progressive illumination through its parts words, sentences and paragraphs. Because reading is other than merely summative or sequential, it offers a particularly revealing, everyday example of how understanding is holistic, where the whole means something intrinsically other than a superpart (Bortoft in Seamon and Mugerauer, 2000). In this respect, Heidegger distinguishes between the totality that we analytically or sequentially construct and the wholeness of the world that is more subtly, tacitly revealed to the understanding. The world itself is much more than something subsequent that we calculate as a result from the sum of all beings. The world comes not afterward but beforehand, in the strict sense of the word Instead, it is so self-evident, so much a matter of course, that we are completely oblivious to it (Heidegger, 1982, 165). The task for ontological thinking, then, becomes one of illumining how we are in-the-world immediately, prethematically meaning prior to the reductionist move of dening and segregating discreet entities from the referential context within which they nd their place. Originative thinking will aim to uncover the underlying conditions of the possibility of calculation and the scientic analysis of discreet entities. In that case, the question to ask is: how might such a phenomenological undertaking affect our inquiries into the meaning of our built and natural environments?

RETHINKING SENSE OF PLACE

When Heidegger urges us to re-evaluate the calculative paradigm, he invites us to think meditatively or

originatively, which is to say to raise anew the question of the meaning of Being. Rather than investigating individual entities in isolationeither the human subjectivity or objective environmental conditions he urges us to reect upon the relation between human beings and the places wherein they dwell. We are more than simply isolated subjectivities but are in-the-world, the hyphenation emphasizing an essential belonging of human beings to their environments. To inquire about how we are in-the-world, prior to articially separating and reifying subjective and objective entities, entails a different kind of ontological thinking that is less concerned with beings than Being itself. How might we ontologically and phenomenologically describe the way in which we are in the world? Heidegger believes that, fundamentally, the way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is dwelling. To be a human being means to dwell (Heidegger, 1971, 147). When we build our settlements, we do not simply erect physical constructions of particular proportions. Nor is it enough to say that buildings can be more meaningfully described as cultural symbols or that they possess social, economic or technological signicance on top of their material substantiality. Phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard points out that the lived experience of our environment is of more than mere physical artifacts. A house that has been experienced, he writes, is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space (Bachelard, 1964, 47). Similarly, in describing human beings as dwellers, Heidegger wants to say that built spaces are neither mere external objects nor social constructs but rather, spaces open up by the fact that they are let into the dwelling of man Dwelling is the basic character of Being in keeping with which mortals exist (Heidegger, 1971, 157, 160). Noel Arnauds simple but pointed remark captures these insights succinctly: I am not merely contained within space, but on the contrary, Je suis lespace o` u je suis. (I am the space where I am) (Bachelard, 1964, 137). Ones fundamental comportment in-the-world is dened by Heidegger in terms of a spatializing and temporalizing activity of understanding and a primordial engagement with a world that is itself more than a static entity. Why, then, is the relationship between humans and their world not simply one that can be dened as a correspondence between two static, present-at-hand entities? Heidegger asks his readers to consider a common example of how we relate to our environment. As I head toward the door of a lecture hall, I am already there and I could not go to it at all if I were not such that I am there. I am never here only, he argues, as this encapsulated body; rather, I am there, that is, I already pervade the room and only thus can I go through it (Heidegger, 1971, 156157).

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Poet Pierre-Jean Jouve reiterates this thought when he writes: Car nous sommes o` u nous ne sommes pas. (For we are where we are not) (Bachelard, 1963, 211). Certainly, we exist among positively existing entities but our way of being among those entities includes a holistic engagement with a broader, referential context that, as nothing particular, nonetheless opens up the condition of the possibility of entities appearing as entities. This relation of human beings in-the-world moves beyond an engagement with speci c things to include the more mysterious, incalculable ontological phenomenon of dwelling and what others beyond Heidegger have come to refer to in terms of a sense of place (Mugerauer and Relph in Seamon and Mugerauer, 2000). Philosopher Edward S. Casey maintains that to exist at all as an event is to have a place to be implaced The point is that place, by virtue of its unencompassability by anything other than itself, is at once the limit and the condition of all that exists (Casey, 1993, 13, 15). How we are in the world, in the most primordial sense, is as emplaced. Architect Christian Norberg-Schulz suggests that spirit of place is a qualitative, total phenomenon that cannot be reduced to any single property without losing its concrete signi cance. On such an interpretation, natural and built places are more than mere geographical locations along geometrically de ned parameters. Phenomenologically understood, the experience of dwelling is much more rich, diverse and engaging than can be captured in any reductionist catalogue of entities. A key element of phenomenological inquiry relates to how entities belong together in place as well as how we might better encourage that sense of place through more sensitive design and policy-making. Heidegger maintained that the Western, metaphysical tradition has slipped into a forgetting of the question of the meaning of Being and, at the same time of necessity, this forgetfulness has compromised our understanding of the meaning of dwelling and being-at-home in our natural and built worlds. The task remains to see how we might further investigate this forgetfulness and seek a more balanced relationship with the places that we inhabit.

PHENOMENOLOGICAL METHODS OF INVESTIGATING NATURAL AND BUILT PLACES

Within a calculative frame of reference, one interprets the notion of method as a logical, linear process of reasoning that demands that speci c steps be followed, in order that de nitive results are achieved. In marked contrast to the calculations of positivist science, Heidegger tells us that the phenomenological, scienti c method is never technique. As soon as it becomes one, it has fallen away from its own proper nature (Heidegger, 1982, 21).

Originative, phenomenological interpretations will involve something other than a how-to manual or a transparent, technical delineation of discrete rules. What announces itself within a phenomenological notion of method is a more iterative, process-oriented approach to investigating entities and the underlying ontological conditions of their appearance. Yet Heidegger does concede that there are three basic components to the phenomenological method: reduction, construction and destruction (Heidegger, 1982, 19). For us, phenomenological reduction means leading phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a being to the understanding of the Being of this being (Heidegger, 1982, 21). Since ontology is de ned as an inquiry into the meaning of Being, phenomenology is ontology. Methodologically, a key concern will be to nd ways to illumine a holistic, ontological vision of the phenomenon under investigation, rather than to merely catalogue individual, discrete moments. At the same time, phenomenologists know that Being does not become accessible like a being. We do not simply nd it in front of us (Heidegger, 1982, 21). More than a merely negative methodological measure that opposes beings, phenomenology requires that we should bring ourselves forward positively toward Being itself in a free projection and in engaged, phenomenological construction . That such a move is more than a merely arbitrary, subjective projection is ensured by a methodology that includes a destruction , that is, a critical process in which the traditional concepts are deconstructed down to the sources from which they were drawn (Heidegger, 1982, 23). Underlying traditions and taken for granted patterns of understanding are thereby laid bare. In short, it seems that the phenomenological method will seek to move from an investigation of beings, to a reduction to ontological grounds. Such a move will do more than relinquish individual entities altogether, but instead will require a special comportment and constructive engagement with the world an engagement that demands a free projection that is both creative and originative at the same time. Finally, as a destruction or dismantling of those arti ces that conceal originary meanings, the phenomenological method will seek to uncover the tacit sources of the traditions that sustain our ways of thinking and the holistic context wherein our questioning is grounded in the rst place. Accepting such an understanding of phenomenology, one is still drawn to ask: how do these components translate into actual investigative procedures for the study of built and natural environments? How do we study concretely and holistically the manner in which we are emplaced in-the-world, without compromising the ontological endeavor?

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One strategy for illumining ontological presuppositions of dwelling consists of a deconstruction of place-based narratives. While common methods of investigating perceptions and values include such tools as standardized questionnaires, the phenomenologist believes that such thematic approaches by denition cannot accommodate the complexity of prethematic presuppositions that are taken for granted before we conceptualize specic responses. Rather than reify peoples perceptions within preconceived frameworks and parameters constructed in advance by researchers, phenomenological interview techniques lean toward less structured approaches to uncovering perceptions of place. In the words of philosopher Jim Cheney, the deconstruction of spontaneous narratives encourages us to avoid totalizing discourse and the top-down imposition of universal, preconceived theories as we collectively seek to tell the best stories we can to uncover our communities storied residence and local, bioregional truths. The phenomenological task is to illumine from the ground up, so to speak, holistic visions of place that emerge from spontaneous, unstructured narratives of peoples lived experiences. Other phenomenological strategies seek to describe more holistically our modes of dwelling in natural and built environments. From phenomenological readings of actual places to interpretations of artistic and literary accounts, to thoughtful, rst-hand observation of particular settings, the primordial concern is to illumine taken-for-granted paradigms that condition environmental perceptions and interpretations of place (Stefanovic, 2000). At times, the way of phenomenology can be frustrating, to the extent that methods challenge traditional attitudes and require a new way of seeing and of asking questions. Nevertheless, properly employed, the methods are rigorous and high standards of qualitative research are demanded. Whether engaged in a phenomenological reading of place or in-depth interviews, the task is to illumine taken-for-granted attitudes and investigate the ontological grounds of judgments that, in every case, inevitably frame the process of environmental decisionmaking by scientists, public policy makers and laypersons. It is for this reason that phenomenology is described by some philosophers as nothing less than foundational ecology.

Cooper, D (1992) The Idea of Environment, in The Environment in Question: Ethics and Global Issues, eds D E Cooper and J A Palmer, Routledge, London. Heidegger, M (1966) Discourse on Thinking, Harper and Row, New York. Heidegger, M (1971) Building Dwelling Thinking in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, Harper and Row, New York. Heidegger, M (1982) Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN. Seamon, D and Mugerauer, R, eds (2000) Dwelling, Place and Environment: Towards a Phenomenology of Person and World, Krieger, Melbourne, FL. Stefanovic, I L (2000) Safeguarding Our Common Future: Rethinking Sustainable Development, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY.

Environmental Psychology/Perception
Charles Vlek
University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands

REFERENCES
Bachelard, G (1964) The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas, Beacon Press, Boston, MA. Barrett, W (1958) Irrational Man, Doubleday, New York. Casey, E S (1993) Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN.

Global environmental problems have socio-behavioral causes for which technology offers only one (partial) solution strategy. Focusing on fundamental mechanisms of environmental degradation, this entry is about models and methods for social behavior change to reduce collective environmental risks. The exposition develops around an analysis of societal driving forces, economic system characteristics, and individual determinants human needs, opportunities and abilities underlying stressful behavior patterns. The common-resource (or: commons) dilemma paradigm is utilized as a general model for understanding and managing con icts between (short-term) individual and (long-term) collective interests. Following this model, any collective environmental problem and its behavioral causes rst need to be diagnosed. Secondly, an evaluation and weighting of individual benets versus collective risks is required. And thirdly, well-tuned policy interventions must be consistently planned, executed and evaluated. Various behavioral science ingredients are introduced for a sources and causes analysis of collective environmental problems and for specifying effective ways to limit environmental risks within sustainable levels. Particular attention is devoted to human needs and values, and the relative importance of material wealth for people s overall quality of life. It is hoped that, hereby, physical and economic scientists as well as policy makers may be

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inspired to conduct more fundamental problem analyses and to design more effective policies than is customarily done.

MACRO-LEVEL DRIVING FORCES OF UNSUSTAINABILITY

More than 20 years ago Ehrlich and Holdren (1971) introduced a simple formula to estimate the total environmental impact of a particular society, country or region. The present popular version of this equation is: I D P A T , or: environmental impact (I ) equals the product of population size (P ), the degree of afuence (A) per person, and the quality of the technology (T ) used to produce one unit of afuence. The formula implies that there are three different fronts at which the battle for sustainable development is to be fought, viz. population, afuence (production and consumption) and technology. The formula also reveals the substitutability of one component by another. To illustrate, total environmental impact might remain constant under considerable population growth, as long as average personal afuence and/or the resourcefulness per unit of afuence is/are proportionally reduced. Also, while total environmental impact stays constant, the degree of afuence per person may well increase signicantly, provided that the number of people and/or the resourcefulness per unit afuence is/are proportionally reduced. Under an IPAT-perspective, for example, several Organizations for Economic Co-operation and Development countries (like the Netherlands) have little reason to feel comfortable about their sustainability: their population keeps growing partly through immigration their afuence is increasing they are set on economic growth, and the resource needs of their production and consumption technology is hardly decreasing. Also from an IPATperspective, (Winter, 1996, 23) even nominates the US for the worlds most overpopulated country, not per km2 but given its citizens afuence and the resource demands of its technology. The IPAT formula enables one to explain, predict and eventually manage the size and seriousness of environmental impact, for different geographic regions or countries of the world, to determine the most important impact growth factor(s) and to draw conclusions on optimal environmental management policies. Goodland et al. (1994) have systematically examined the potential for change in the three areas covered by the IPAT formula: (1) limiting population growth; (2) limiting afuence and consumption growth; and (3) reducing the resource needs of production and consumption technology. Like Corson (1994), these authors generally focus on a number of policy priorities, which are different in character for high-income and low-income nations of the world. For example, highincome nations are advised to work on:

transforming the culture of consumerism into an ethics of sufciency and environmental sustainability; internalizing environmental costs in energy prices and accelerating the transition to renewable energy sources (Goodland et al., 1994, 153).

In contrast, the authors advise low-income nations to give priority to: accelerating the transition towards population stability , supporting technologies which provide increased employment opportunities for unemployed and underemployed individuals , and improving efforts towards poverty alleviation (p. 154). Goodland et al. (1994, 154) generally conclude: technological change and population stabilization cannot sufce to move the world towards an environmentally sustainable future. Instead, a reduction in per capita consumption in high-income nations and a decrease in environmental throughput are required . In a mid-term report of a multidisciplinary project about sustainable household metabolism, Noorman and Schoot Uiterkamp (1998, 252) conclude:
the challenges posed by climate change and the desire for equity are formidable. It is clear that to achieve the reduction goals indicated above will require major changes in the metabolism of households and of production. Specic redesign rather than evolutionary change is essential, although this may appear to be at odds with the actual trend of ever-growing development, production, consumption, and disposal of products and services. This is especially true in areas where the fastest growth in consumption is in high energy intensive items (such as cars).

If we search for the socio-behavioral causes of population growth, increasing afuence and an ever more resourcehungry technology, we hit upon other driving forces of unsustainable development, viz. institutions as vehicles for governing human societies, and culture as the conglomerate of socially shared beliefs, values and attitudes. Embedding and shaping the latter two forces are historical developments such as industrialization, division of labor, urbanization and market competition; see Ro pke (1999) who indicates two fundamental pre-conditions for the historical generation of wealth in the North, viz. the availability of cheap fossil fuels and the immense transfer of resources from the South to the North (Martinez-Alier, 1995). This is in line with Dietz and Rosas (1997) argument that the technology component in the IPAT-formula encompasses much more than was originally suggested. Actually T incorporates cultural, social, technical and infrastructural factors, which together determine how much environmental impact an activity is producing. Adding culture and institutions to the IPAT-formula might yield a CIPAT-equation. After rewording just two factors we obtain TEDIC, to indicate a complex of technological, economic, demographic, institutional and cultural developments in industrial society, which did and do stimulate societal (global, or regional) unsustainability. In Dutch, te dik, pronounced similarly as TEDIC,

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means too big or too fat. In a different wording and order, the ve driving forces have also been distinguished by Stern (1992); see also Vlek (2000). The several driving forces of unsustainable development are schematized and claried in Figure 1, which also indicates that (un)sustainability involves economic security and social well-being as well as environmental quality. What Dietz and Rosa (1997) noted about technology (see previous paragraph) may be similarly argued about population as well as afuence: P and A, too, incorporate cultural, social, technical, infrastructural and other factors driving their (geographically different) growth, particularly during the last 50 years. For population, Hilderink (2000) has computer-simulated the effects of various relevant factors such as fertility, diseases, birth-control and health policies, environmental conditions and economic growth. His conclusions are that in most regions population growth will come to a standstill, that world population in 2055 will stay below 9 billion after which it will decrease to 7.6 billion in 2100, and that United Nations population projections tend to be exaggerated. For afuence, to be further discussed herein, basic behavior determinants are peoples

needs, opportunities and abilities (NOA) to produce and/or consume, as also indicated in Figure 1. In terms of Figure 1 one may conclude that the battle for sustainable development pertains not only directly to population, afuence (production/consumption) and technology, but also indirectly to institutions and culture. Thus, on the basis of an intense series of experts and stakeholders meetings, Vellinga et al. (1995) distinguish ve strategic policy options for reducing the societal risks of climate change. These are, respectively: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. no regrets: the climate problem is too uncertain, priorities will be given to policy instruments serving other (socio-economic and environmental) objectives; least regrets: a serious climate risk problem is acknowledged, but policies will be aimed at a balancing of the risks of intervention and non-intervention; acceleration: climate change is addressed along with other, shorter-term environmental problems, making use of synergies and positive feedbacks in society; technological innovation: technology is the only way to meet growing demands and provide environmental security; institutional and cultural change: technology being insufcient, major cultural and institutional changes are required to create a sustainable society.

History Culture Institutions

Population

Affluence

Technology

Somewhat to their surprise, the authors noted that among project participants there was less agreement about the ve strategic policy options above than about various elds of action that might be addressed (more or less strongly) under all ve directions, e.g., introduction of ecotaxes, a low-carbon transport system, renewable energy sources, and the stimulation of technological and cultural innovations.

Number of producers consumers

Volume of production and consumption - needs - opportunities - abilities

(Resourcefulness of) Means to produce and consume

MESO-LEVEL PRODUCTIONCONSUMPTION CYCLES

The driving forces represented in Figure 1 are characteristic of a complex socio-economic system in which capital, labor and environmental resources are being used for the production of goods and services to meet the needs and desires of numerous consuming individuals, groups and organizations. To understand this complex metabolism of society vis a ` vis the natural environment, it is necessary to appreciate the interwovenness of household consumption and industrial production. Figure 2 represents what may be called the production-consumption cycle, as institutionalized in a social, i.e., government-regulated market economy. A more elaborate version of Figure 2, also containing an inner consumer self-production cycle, is presented in Vlek et al. (2000). Figure 2 reects the simple truth that consumers and producers need each other for different reasons, and

Economic wealth Social well-being Environmental quality (Sustainability)

Figure 1 Schematic representation of driving factors underlying economic, social and environmental sustainability dimensions, as embedded in history, culture and institutions

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Government
T lab axe ou s r

Income Labour

Ta
ies id bs Su

xe

In co me

Energy Energy Land Consumer Mobility Waste Housing Feeding Clothing Education Recreation Turnover Products Utilities Industry Agriculture Transport Commerce/Services Producer Land Raw materials Waste Transport

Figure 2

Model of the production-consumption cycle in a government-regulated market economy

that both parties need some government regulation, for which government in turn needs consumers and producers, again for different reasons. The relationships among the three groups are expressed in ows of money, products, labor, taxes and subsidies. The main system functions for consumers are feeding, clothing, housing, education and recreation. The major functions for producers are energy provision, industrial production, agriculture and stock-breeding, product distribution and services. Inputs from outside the socio-economic system come from various environmental resources such as energy, raw materials and land area. External outputs or derivatives occur in the form of various kinds of waste, mobility and noise. A second observation about Figure 2 is that the whole (Western) production-consumption system is steadily accelerating. This is because it operates under the economic goal of ef ciency, because ef ciency breeds ef ciency and because most people involved cherish ef ciency for reasons of social comparison, competition and status. If ef ciency were less dominant and if material wealth were de-emphasized as one quality of life variable (see further herein), social market economies could decelerate as well as dematerialize (see Dematerialization and Sustainable Development, Volume 4), to the bene t of other important qualities of life, including social justice, environmental security and natural biodiversity. Figure 2 can also illustrate a third, not so obvious point. This is the mutual interdependence of producers eco-ef ciency and consumers suf ciency. Eco-ef ciency is the producer s strategy of reducing the overall resourcefulness per unit of production goods or services (see Eco-ef ciency, Volume 4). However, the bene cial effects

of eco-ef ciency may be undone by (further) consumption growth and rebound (or take-back) effects. Hence, ecoef ciency on the producer s side needs a counterpart on the consumer s side. The latter must necessarily be a strategy of suf cient consumption or suf ciency (Durning, 1992, Chapter 10; Goodland et al., 1994; Reisch and Scherhorn, 1999). This stands in contrast to the current (highly-industrialized) norm of ever-growing, continually maximizing consumption patterns (never enough, says homo oeconomicus).

MICRO-LEVEL DETERMINANTS OF RESOURCEFUL BEHAVIORS

For understanding individual producer and consumer behaviors, and as a prelude to the planning of needed social behavior change, some well-established theories and models of human behavior must now be considered. Following the NOA-model as presented in Figure 3 (translated from Vlek et al., 1997; inspired by Olander and Tho gerson, 1995), individual consumer behavior is considered as dependent upon the needs (Ns), the opportunities (Os) and the abilities (As) to undertake a particular activity. Needs and opportunities interact to shape people s motivation to perform an activity, while opportunities and abilities together determine subjects behavioral control. Hence, changing resourceful consumer behavior (or producer behavior, for that matter) would involve changing people s (or organizations ) needs, their physical, technical or social opportunities and/or their physical, mental or nancial ability or capacity to engage in the relevant behavior. The NOA-model may be linked to the model of

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developments acting on

Needs Motivation to consume Opportunities Behavioral control Abilities Behavioral processing

Figure 3 The NOA model of individual consumer behavior. The implicit and explicit forces. at the left are taken to be cultural, institutional, economic and other types of inuential societal developments

the social market economy as represented in Figure 2, in order to identify the various actors and factors underlying any partys NOA to undertake resourceful behaviors. Geller (1989) has proposed an integration of applied behavior analysis (ABA) involving immediate rewards or punishments, following instrumental and social learning theory (see Geller et al., 1982) and a pragmatic social marketing approach (Kotler and Zaltman, 1971). Gellers (1989) four-stage ABA-marketing model sequentially comprises: (1) market analysis; (2) market segmentation and selection of target behaviors; (3) design of market strategy and ABA; and (4) evaluation via self-reports and behavior observations. Documentation and dissemination of results plays a key role in the models practical application. Stern et al. (1999) have proposed and tested a value belief norm (VBN) theory for understanding environmentalism in peoples actions and behaviors. Their VBN theory links conceptions of moral norms, personal values and environmental attitudes into a coherent set of practical measurements. Their empirical study was aimed at explaining peoples degree of environmental citizenship, their privatesphere behaviors, and their willingness to sacrice for the support of government policies. Stern et al.s study revealed that VBN theory is a far better predictor of environmental behavior indicators than other, less coherent conceptions of peoples environmental motivation. This demonstrates that social and personal norms and values play crucial roles in changing behaviors. The three models just discussed may each be considered as a general matrix for approaching human behavior change. Their consistent message is that effective policies should be aimed at changing fundamental determinants of unsustainable behaviors. In working with such models it is useful to distinguish four basically different types of behaviors. These may be categorized following two major dimensions under which specic behavior determinants can be specied. The rst dimension ranges from deliberately planned or reasoned behavior on the one hand, to automatic behavior involving well-established habits, on the other. The second dimension ranges from private to public

behavior determinants. The resulting two by two scheme is depicted in Table 1, whose quadrants may be conveniently labeled as deliberation, social comparison, repetition and imitation, respectively. For each behavior type two relevant, well-established behavior theories are indicated. This simple psychological taxonomy may help us nd an appropriate behavior theory or model and methods to understand and possibly inuence environmentally impactful behaviors. The message here is that the four behavior types should each be addressed in a specic well-tuned way, in order for behavior change to come about. For example, repetitive (habitual) behaviors may best be approached via changes in a persons physicaltechnical environment. In contrast, deliberation may be inuenced via argumentative information about optimal choices. Likewise, imitative behaviors may best be changed via social example setting and the pressure of social norms. Alternatively, social comparison is rather sensitive to argumentative information about other peoples behavior. Disregarding the behavioral distinctions in Table 1 may yield perhaps well intended (and costly), but possibly ineffective policy strategies. Exploiting the taxonomy of Table 1, Jager et al. (2000) have computer-simulated consumer behaviors to clarify which individual and social behavior mechanisms would lead to a earlier or later depletion of a common resource. In several simulation experiments contrasting Homo psychologicus and Homo oeconomicus, Jager et al. demonstrated that resource depletion was accelerated by an optimism effect, an imitation effect and an adaptation effect, which all ourished under uncertainty about the current size of the common resource.

Macro-level

SHORT-SIGHTEDNESS: COGNITIVE LIMITATIONS AND BIASES

Whatever behavior theory applies, there always is the human condition of psychological limitation, which makes environmental risk management rather difcult. Modern societies are confronted by huge discrepancies between the complexity, the uncertainty and the temporal extension of major environmental costs on the one hand, and the relative simplicity, certainty and immediacy of social and economic benets on the other. By their very nature, the short-term, concentrated benets are cognitively more available and can be better appreciated than the longterm, widespread costs. Bjorkman (1984) uses the term proximal cognition to explain this unevenness, which tends to make large parts of modern society to be the prisoner of an us, here and now trap (Vlek and Keren, 1992). This precludes prudent long-term planning and decision making about developments involving major environmental impacts. Historically, such a psychological imprisonment is fairly unique, since earlier societies did not (yet) have the knowledge and the technical means for such large-scale

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Table 1 Four different behavior types in two dimensions (translated from Vlek et al., 1997) Private determination Deliberation: Reasoned behavior Decision and choice theory Theory of planned behaviorb Repetition: Classical conditioning theorye Instrumental learning theoryf
a

Public determination Social comparison: Social comparison theoryc Relative deprivation theoryd Imitation: Social learning theoryg Theory of normative conducth

Automatic behavior

The theory of planned behaviorb (Ajzen, 1991) also incorporates a social component, the subjective (social) norm; hence it partly ts also under public determination. References for the other seven theories are: a Hogarth (1987), cd Masters and Smith (1987), e Pavlov (1927), f Skinner (1953), g Bandura (1977), and h Cialdini et al. (1991).

and multidimensional environmental exploitation as has occurred particularly during the past 50 years. Pawlik (1991) has indicated ve fundamental reasons for most peoples lack of appreciation of large-scale environmental risks such as global climate change. First, the signals of climate change, as exemplied by atmospheric temperature changes, are relatively weak compared to the background noise of normal temperature variations. Second, cause effect gradients of global environmental change are strongly masked and extended in time; it is very difcult to tell which effects are the (indirect, long-term) result of which causes. Third, low-probability (extreme weather) events tend to be seen as impossible and their occurrence as accidental; this hinders the design of effective risk management strategies. Fourth, there is a large social distance separating actors and victims of global environmental change; this naturally suppresses actors feelings of responsibility. Fifth, there is a low perceived cost-effectiveness of conservation behavior; often wasteful behavior is more protable here and now. In an international review of studies about human responses to environmental stress, Jager and Vlek (1993) conclude that people are inclined to deny and remain passive about those kinds of environmental nuisance and risk that they believe to be uncontrollable. In a critical psychocultural analysis Gladwin et al. (1997) wonder: why is the northern elite mind biased against community, the environment and a sustainable future? These authors identify four principal and interrelated origins (pp. 238 240): (1) a cognitively bounded biological mind; (2) an obsolete worldview mind; (3) an addicted contemporary mind; and (4) a delusional psychodynamic mind. They then formulate four sets of hypotheses about the different minds and provide a research agenda for investigating the conditions for developing a sustainable mind. For example, hypothesis two (p. 241) reads: the biomind is adapted for proximity rather than distance . Hypothesis 10 (p. 248): the viewmind conceives reality according to individualism rather than communitarianism . Hypothesis 11 (p. 250): the contempmind is programmed to favor market

efciency rather than social justice . Their hypothesis 19 reads: the psychomind protects the self from anxiety via rationalisation rather than accurateness .

COMMONS DILEMMAS IN PRODUCTIONCONSUMPTION ACTIVITIES

The cognitive motivational factors and tendencies just described are at the basis of what nowadays is known as the common-resource (or commons) dilemma (Hardin, 1968; Platt, 1973; Dawes, 1980; Vlek, 1996). In such social situations a collective (environmental) cost or risk is incurred or generated via the combined negative externalities of numerous individual benet-seekers who act independently from one another. Vivid examples are the exploitation of shing grounds by various companies, metropolitan air pollution through massive use of motor vehicles, and largescale damage to natural ecosystems by expanding road infrastructure. Note that societal meso-level processes in productionconsumption cycles (cf. Figure 2) operate as revolving doors for collective risk generation and management, as they are rooted in often powerful organizations of resourceful activities. In our times, the classical conict between individual and collective rationalities has acquired frightening proportions. Regarding highly industrialized society the Belgian philosopher Vermeersch (1988, 29) dramatically formulates this conict as follows (translated from the Dutch):
the whole forms a system which rushes on autonomously, and nobody can guarantee that somewhere at the end of the route there is a goal waiting which is still meaningful for people. The aimlessness, the irrationality of the total system is being obfuscated by the utter rationality of the systems separate components.

The situation Vermeersch refers to represents a class of market failures that Kahn (1966) has called the tyranny of small decisions. The environmental and social consequences of such social traps (Platt, 1973) are also discussed by Hirsch (1976).

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The examples above also indicate that many commons dilemmas have a layered structure comprising various contributing actors and risk managers, who may be identied at the micro-, meso- and macro-levels of society. Individuals may be embedded in groups, which are embedded in organizations, which are embedded in countries. This may go up to the international level where diplomats are facing complicated dilemmas concerning, e.g., the abatement of global atmospheric warming. Due to their layered structure, such commons dilemmas are hard to manage, since there is ample room for external cost-shifting behaviors as well as great difculty to reach workable control agreements. For social policy makers, a common-resource dilemma if recognized as such constitutes a permanent (dynamic) contrast between a collective risk and an often large collection of individual benets; minimization of the risk and maximization of the benets are incompatible social goals between which a trade-off is to be made. Thus, the solution of any commons dilemma consists of a sustainable balance between numerous individuals (and/or groups, organizations, countries) benets and the collective costs and risks for all. What happens in a commons dilemma usually exceeds the physical, cognitive and motivational scope of individual actors. Therefore, the basic question is how the collective cost or risk can be validly assessed, effectively evaluated and acceptably managed so as to stay within sustainable limits (not easy to assess in advance). Collective risk management is a matter of decision-making about risk acceptance and the selection of practical strategies for risk control via social behavior change. Such risk management
Table 2 Nine policy tasks for managing commonresource dilemmas (after Vlek, 1996) I. Problem diagnosis 1. Analysis and assessment of the collective-risk and risk generation process 2. Promoting social risk perception and communication 3. Analysis and assessment of (numerous) individual benets II. Decision making 4. Weighing of collective risk against total individual benets (need for change?) 5. If risk unacceptable: specication of safer behavior alternatives 6. Setting risk reduction objectives and translation into behavior goals III. Risk control 7. Design and selection of policy instruments for behavior change 8. Programmatic application of various strategies for behavior change 9. Monitoring, evaluation and feedback of effects of risk reduction policies

may be most effective if it links up with the problem diagnosis concerning the behavioral processes whereby the risk is being generated or enhanced. Each major risk management step may be unfolded into three different policy tasks. Thus, understanding commons dilemmas and managing collective risks revolves around nine distinct policy tasks, as listed in Table 2. The three divisions of Table 2 indicate the key problems in understanding and managing collective risks in commons dilemma situations: raising awareness and appreciation of the collective risk, weighing the risk against (total) individual bene ts, and promoting social behavior change (or restraint). This partly overlaps with three well-known keys to resolving social dilemmas (Dawes, 1980) knowledge, morality and trust. In a thorough analysis of commons dilemma problems Edney (1980) emphasized territorialization (or regionalization, to increase users responsibility) and trust (to reduce competition) as essential solution strategies.

STRATEGIES FOR SUSTAINABLE BEHAVIOR CHANGE

Commons dilemmas re ect persistent con icts between many individual (producer and consumer) interests on the one hand, and a small number of (large-scale) collective interests on the other. As dilemmas, they may be resolved only by the achievement of a safer, sustainable balance of individual and collective bene ts and risks. The nature and the effectiveness of various solution approaches have been investigated in a great number of laboratory and some eld experiments (e.g., Dawes, 1980; Messick and Brewer, 1983). Most of these approaches may be categorized under seven general strategies for social behavior change (Vlek, 1996; see also Cook and Berrenberg, 1981; De Young, 1993; Gardner and Stern, 1996, Chapter 7), as given in Table 3 along with exemplary speci cations. Strategies 1 (PhAA) and 3 (FES), and certain (physical) forms of strategy 6 (OCh) would initiate so-called structural (or: hard) solutions to a commons dilemma, whose basic nature or type would thereby be altered. Strategies 2 (RaE), 4 (IEC), 5 (SMS), certain other (mental) forms of strategy 6 (OCh), and strategy 7 (CVM) would imply cognitivemotivational (or: soft) solutions (Wilke, 1989). Through the latter, individual actors would be induced to behave in a cooperative (i.e., collectively rational) manner, while the basic nature and payoff structure of the commons dilemma would be maintained. Structural solution strategies are generally more effective, but they are often not available or not easily implemented. Speci c cognitive motivational solution-strategies (RaE, IEC, SMS and some OCh) are more easy to design and apply, but their effectiveness is generally lower; in many cases, however, they are the only thing one can rely on. CVM stands relatively by itself as

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Table 3 Strategies for collective risk management in commons dilemmas (Vlek, 1996) 1. Provision of physical alternatives, (re)arrangements (PhAA) 2. Regulation and enforcement (RaE) 3. Financial economic stimulation (FES) 4. Provision of information, education, communication (IEC) 5. Social modeling and support (SMS) 6. Organizational change (OCh) Adding/deleting/changing behavior options, enhancing efcacy Enacting laws, rules; setting/enforcing standards, norms Rewards/nes, taxes, subsidies, posting bonds About risk generation, types and levels of risk, others perceptions and intentions, risk reduction strategies Demonstrating cooperative behavior, others efcacy Resource privatization, sanctioning system, leadership institution, organization for self-regulation Appeal to conscience, enhancing altruism towards others and future generations, reducing here and now selshness Do nothing, the quay will turn the ship

action. Disaster scenarios may thus initiate self-destroying prophecies, as society tries to steer away from them. The barriers to sustainable behavior change are manifold. In fact, like solutions, barriers may also be listed under the (rst) seven rubrics of Table 3. Some examples are: absence of physical or technical alternatives (PhAA), insufcient and/or ineffective law enforcement (RaE), inconsistency of nancial incentive systems (FES), unawareness of ones own causal role and possible contribution to solutions (IEC), absence or invisibility of model behaviors by opinion leaders (SMS), organizational goals biased towards short-term survival (OCh), and importance of social status in spending capacity (CVM). Specic variants of the seven strategies may be used to overcome such difculties.

TRADABLE EXPLOITATION RIGHTS

One special combination of strategies RaE (as government regulation), FES (as payment according to use), IEC (as information provision) and OCh (as privatization) may prove to be an effective as well as efcient approach towards managing common goods. This is the management system known as tradable emission permits, more generally to be labeled as tradable exploitation rights (see Tradable Permits for Greenhouse Gases, Volume 4; Tradable Permits for Limiting Stratospheric Ozone Depletion, Volume 4; Tradable Permits for Sulfur Emission Reductions, Volume 4; Transferable Fisheries Quotas (TFQs), Volume 4). The idea here is that, for the collective as a whole, some central authority determines the maximum sustainable exploitation of some social or environmental resource (to be consumed, enjoyed or polluted), and then distributes (equally, shall we say) among its constituents a collection of tickets each representing a xed limited exploitation right. Tickets are tradable, so that they may be purchased by those who need a greater than average resource use, from those whose demand is less than average. Ticket prices are established under free-market laws of demand and supply, but the total resource exploitation, corresponding to the ownership of a certain number of tickets, may not be exceeded. If necessary, the central authority may reduce the extent of exploitation per ticket. Alternatively, it may allow for increased exploitation, if the total resource regenerates more quickly than was originally estimated. See Koutstaal and Nentjes (1995) for an economic and legal analysis of the possibilities and limitations of tradable emission permits. The system contains several elements of the alternative commons dilemma games as discussed by Ostrom (1990, Chapter 1). Tradable exploitation rights as a politicaleconomic risk management system raises a number of fundamental questions. These are mainly concerned with the assessment

7. Changing values and morality (CVM)

By default: 8. Wait and See (WaS):

a cultural solution (cf. Section 2) on which much behavior change might come to rest. The (rst) seven strategies listed in Table 3 may be applied in different variants and they may be directed at different target behaviors. Because each strategy has its own strengths and weaknesses which may be summarily expressed in its behavioral elasticity (a dose effect relationship) it is generally wise to apply well workedout combinations of strategies. Obviously, any strategy for social behavior change should be carefully tuned towards the intended target individual, group or organization. The latter should be studied to some extent beforehand, so as to obtain basic information necessary to design an effective approach. One solution by default to a collective environmental risk problem is nicely expressed in a Dutch saying translated as the quay will turn the ship. That is, number eight in Table 3: WaS will automatically elicit behavioral (catastrophe) responses from causal agents, but these behavior changes then cannot be but inappropriate, too little and too late. Making such unsustainability scenarios palpable e.g., via scenario studies would mean that individual actors are (better) enabled to live under the shadow of the (common) future and duly undertake preventive

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of the maximum tolerable overall exploitation of a given resource, the initial distribution (or perhaps: auctioning out) of exploitation tickets, and the central authoritys monitoring and control over actual resource exploitation and possible violations of individual purchased rights. Effective functioning of such a system obviously requires collective rules and a sanctioning system. It also necessitates efcient operation of demand and supply pricing mechanisms. It also demands adequate provision of information and communication about exploitation rights, their availability and the monitoring and control of their actual utilization. If appropriately implemented, tradable exploitation rights would prohibit free riding, whilst the unfairness of a xed exploitation charge to both small and large exploiters would be avoided (see the discussion of demand revelation by Yamagishi, 1995, 313). How tradable exploitation rights as a system actually works under variations in certain basic characteristics, is a matter of controlled experimentation and creative eld study. Practical examples are the distribution of tradable quota-rights for sea-shing, dairy milk production and animal manure production, respectively, in the countries of the European Union. A promising application would involve transportation kilometers, to limit total environmental impacts from motorized transport. In view of the common-resource dilemma model of collective environmental problems, tradable exploitation rights is an almost ideal risk management system, because it is aimed at the necessary balance between individual and collective interests, between government and market and (thus) between individual freedom and social equality. A related risk management system, also involving a combination of various Table 3 strategies, is bond pledging or hostage posting for ensuring collectively responsible behavior. The basic idea is that individual actors promise to be cooperative, and that they commit themselves by pledging a bond (which serves as a hostage). The bond or hostage is lost when they defect and behave against the collective interest. Raub and Keren (1993) and Keren and Raub (1993) discuss the theoretical nature and implications of such a system, and they offer empirical evidence for its effectiveness. An interesting practical example from environmental policy is couched in a Swiss proposal to drastically increase fuel prices for motorcars, and then at the end of each year pay a bonus out of a national fuel fund to those who would prove to have driven less than a certain number of car-kilometers (VCS, 1990).

management strategies and systems discussed above can be instrumental in bringing about social change. From such policy foundations as well as from various empirical research (e.g., De Young, 1993; Oskamp, 1995; Gardner and Stern, 1996; Steg and Vlek, 1997) we may distill the following essential conditions for social behavior change, considered from the subjects point of view; see Table 4. Fullling these conditions is like answering obvious questions by subjects of policy intervention campaigns, such as: what is the problem? What is my own responsibility? What (else) could I actually do? Will others cooperate as well? Can we trust risk experts and managers? Where would this all lead to? The latter question in particular is rarely addressed in environmental policy debates. Sustainable futures have much to do with meeting basic human needs and values (cf. WCED, 1987), to be discussed herein, in the section on human needs and values.

HUMAN NEEDS AND VALUES

Individuals, groups and organizations consume raw materials, energy, products and services because they are driven by basic needs and wants, because they cherish cultural beliefs and values, and because they are guided by social and economic institutions. Together, need satisfactions and value manifestations make up peoples quality of life. The latter is a multidimensional concept comprising variables such as health, family relations, work, income, housing accommodation, safety and environmental quality (see, e.g., Ormel et al., 1997; Gatersleben and Vlek, 1998; Diener, 2000). Quality of life is not necessarily affected by additional commodities that consumers are urged to desire through clever advertising. The reason is that material goods can be associated with the promise to fulll needs they are not suited to fulll. Human needs and values are numerous and have been the subject of various taxonomies (McDougall, 1932; Maslow, 1954; Max-Neef, 1992; Schwarz and Bilsky,
Table 4 Essential subject-conditions for social behavior change 1. Sufcient awareness of and insight into the collective environmental problem 2. Appreciation of ones own contribution to the problem and ones co-responsibility for solutions 3. Visibility and consistency of strategic policy goals 4. Availability of feasible behavior alternatives 5. Personal (extrinsic and/or intrinsic) incentives for behavior change 6. Basic trust in cooperation of fellow subjects 7. Basic trust in relevant management agencies and authorities 8. An acceptable image of the future resulting from social behavior change

CONDITIONS FOR SOCIAL BEHAVIOR CHANGE

Global environmental problems offer good reasons for social behavior change. Common-resource dilemmas confront subjects with necessary risk benet trade-offs and the prompting of direction of needed change. The risk

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1987). Maslows well-known needs hierarchy relates physiological, safety, belongingness, esteem and selfactualization needs. Maslow holds that the lower needs are more elemental, and hence override the higher needs in case of deprivation. Max-Neef (1992) has proposed a taxonomy of nine human needs, which successively involves subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, leisure, creation, identity and freedom. The author separates these general needs from the various specic ways in which they may be satised. Four existential categories of needs satisfaction are distinguished: being, having, doing and interacting, respectively. For example, a persons need for identity may be satised by being outspoken, having a German shepherd dog, regularly doing hard work, and interacting (meeting) with friends in the local cafe. Being, having, doing and interacting to satisfy certain needs or to manifest certain values often involve raw materials, energy, products and services. A general question, therefore, is: to what extent may valid (general) human needs be fullled in a far less energy- and material-intensive way so as to better t into societys sustainable development? Another question is: to what extent and in what way might resourceful need-satisfying states (being), possessions (having), actions (doing) or interactions be reinterpreted such that they are going to be seen as actually far less need-satisfying than they originally were considered to be? The latter question touches upon the possible illusory nature of culturally normal and socially accepted ways of needs satisfaction, and it would entail a discussion about more authentic and meaningful ways of satisfying our real needs. After surveying various theories and taxonomies of human needs and values, Vlek et al. (1998) used a shortlist of 22 different quality of life variables to explain peoples feelings and judgments about prospective changes in their countrys environmental and economic conditions. It appeared that (Dutch) questionnaire respondents expected more positive changes from environmental quality improvement along with economic recession, than from (further) environmental deterioration along with continued economic growth. In a household scenario evaluation study, Poortinga et al. (2000) requested 450 respondents to rate each of the 22 variables for its importance to their overall quality of life. After factor analysis it appeared that, with one exception (social justice), the 22 variables could be compactly summarized into seven factors, together explaining 60% of the variance in peoples importance judgments. These factors, together with the variables that they include, are given in Table 5, in topbottom order of averaged importance. Note that maturity, openness to change and material wealth were judged to be less important than family, health and safety, personal freedom and achievement.

Jackson and Marks (1999) scrutinize the question: to what extent does economic growth actually deliver increasing welfare, as is being supposed in neo-classical economics? They refer to Max-Neefs (1995) threshold hypothesis which holds that, in Western-industrial growth patterns, the many economic goods are increasingly being counterbalanced by three basic economic bads, viz. depletion of natural resources, degradation of the natural environment, and various costs to the quality of human life. After considering various data on increased consumer spending on material as well as nonmaterial needs (such as leisure), Jackson and Marks (1999, p. 439) appear to nd it difcult to infer increased needs satisfaction from increased expenditure. They also state that material consumption might well provide pseudo-satisfaction of nonmaterial needs or even inhibit or violate those needs. Ever since Adam Smith (1776), economists have argued that human welfare depends on material wealth, and even today they neglect the contrary experience suggesting that their assumption is valid only when people live in material scarcity. In an afuent society, welfare loses its correlation with wealth.
The reason why economic growth no longer brings a sense of greater well-being, why the pleasures our new possessions bring melt into thin air, is that at the level of afuence of the American middle class what really matters is not ones material possessions but ones psychological economy, ones richness of human relations and freedom from the conicts and constrictions that prevent us from enjoying what we have.

In debates about quality of life dimensions such as health, family relations, work and leisure time we often underestimate the fundamental human need for variety and change (not so important following Table 5): we generally dont want to be, have, do and interact with the same (person, goods, jobs or other people, respectively) every day or week of the year. Most people (want to) vary
Table 5 Seven quality-of-life (QoL) factors summarizing 21 out of 22 specic QoL-variables (given in brackets)a 6. Family health and safety (health, partner and family safety) 3. Personal freedom (freedom, privacy, leisure time) 7. Achievement (education, work) 2. Environmental quality (environmental quality, nature/biodiversity, aesthetic beauty) 5. Maturity (identity/self-respect, security, spirituality/religion) 4. Openness-to-change (social relations, change/variation, challenge/excitement) 1. Material wealth (money/income, comfort, status/recognition, material beauty)
a From top to bottom factors bundle from (roughly) more to less important QoL variables. Factor numbers indicate the order of eigenvalues, i.e., the percentage of total variance explained by that factor.

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in their behaviors between: rationality and emotionality, security and challenge, stability and change, uniformity and variety, tradition and innovation, comfort and hardship, inconspicuousness and social distinction, communality and individuality, and between norm-adherence and norm-transgression. Any kind of consumption (or production) pattern sustainable or not should therefore incorporate reasonable variations along the existential polarities indicated above. If sustainable behavior would (only) be rational, secure, stable, uniform, traditional, comfortable, inconspicuous, communal and norm-adherent, it would fundamentally deter most people for literally all too human reasons. Scitovsky (1976) might summarize this by saying: such a life would provide much comfort all right, but it would not give enough pleasure .

CONCLUSIONS AND SUGGESTIONS

Environmental damage and risks local, regional and global result from a complex whole of diverse behavior patterns making up a lively society. Harmful effects, in the short and/or the long term, can only be prevented if one addresses the causal mechanisms and the sources of environmental over-exploitation. Therefore, collective environmental problems are socio-behavioral problems for which technology offers only one (partial) solution strategy. Other strategies should be focused on population, economic processes, societal institutions and cultural beliefs, norms and values (cf. Figure 1). In several respects, global environmental problems may be too far away for us, here and now, to appreciate and care about them. The psychological trick for managing them nevertheless would be to coordinate global policy measures with more proximate regional and local policies. This can only be accomplished via causes-andsources oriented policy approach. Taking again the example of mass motorization, policies could be aimed at reducing global carbon dioxide emissions, regional air pollution and land use, and local noise and safety problems simultaneously, if they acted comprehensively on the private motorcar system as underlying a spectrum of environmental pollutants. In democratic countries, effective environmental policies tend to be politically controversial, if not unacceptable. This can be understood in terms of the common-resource dilemma, where individual freedom stands in permanent opposition to social equality. In their tragic choice theory, Calabresi and Bobbitt (1978) even hold that freedom and equality are incompatible social goals, whilst a democratic system by nature cannot warrant equal allocation of opportunities and wealth. However, the ideal solution nding a sustainable balance between freedom and equality requires powerful statesmanship, which may be based on the principle that individual liberties should be

subordinate to collective social and environmental qualities essential for all. Finally, global environmental policy makers are facing huge differences in sustainability pro les between different regions of the world. The United Nations Human Development Report 1998 (UNDP, 1998, 1) states: the 20th century growth in consumption, unprecedented in its scale and diversity, has been badly distributed, leaving a backlog of shortfalls and gaping inequalities . Shortly after the appearance of Our Common Future (WCED, 1987), William Ruckelshaus (1989), a former director of the US Environmental Protection Agency, wrote that sustainable development should mean: (a) economic development within ecological limits; and (b) worldwide equitable economic development (Ruckelshaus, 1989). From a psychological point of view, these two international problems rest upon very similar foundations. Both global environmental degradation and widespread human poverty challenge human intelligence, international trust and worldwide morality, so that we can be aware of the problems, design creative solutions and work towards a common future of economic security, social well-being and environmental quality. If we can y around the world within 48 hours, shouldn t we be able to understand and manage the global problems that modern life entails?

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Vlek, C, Reisch, L A, and Scherhorn, G (2000) Transformation of Unsustainable Consumer Behaviors and Consumer Policies, A Research-programming Report for the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (Industrial Transformation), Department of Psychology Report no COV 00 04, 1 52, University of Groningen, Netherlands, (also in IHDP Industrial Transformation: Research Directions, ed P Vellinga, Bonn (G), IHDP, in press). Wachtel, P (1989) The Poverty of Af uence. A Psychological Portrait of the American Way of Life, New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, PA. WECD: World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) Our Common Future, Oxford University Press, New York. Wilke, H (1989) Promoting Personal Decisions Supporting the Achievement of Risky Public Goods, in Social Decision Methodology for Technological Projects, eds C Vlek and G Cvetkovich, Kluwer, Dordrecht and Boston, 39 59. Winter, D (1996) Ecological Psychology: Healing the Split between Planet and Self, Harper Collins, New York. Yamagishi, T (1995) Social Dilemmas, in Sociological Perspectives on Social Psychology, eds K S Cook, G A Fine, and J S House, Allyn and Bacon, Boston, MA.

Environmental Refugees
see Environmental Refugees (Volume 4)

Environmental Security
Steve Lonergan
University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada

With the demise of the Cold War, there has been a rethinking of our traditional perspectives on security. Numerous authors have posited that our concentration on military security may be out of date, and that factors such as disease, human rights, and environmental degradation may pose equal, or even greater, threats to national security. At the same time, there is an increasing sense that states may not be able to guarantee the security of communities and individuals, particularly in reference to these new threats. Global environmental change poses a threat not only to the natural systems on which life depends, but may pose risks to the security of individuals directly. The purpose of this article is to present these views, and provide a new way of thinking about the human dimensions of global change.

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THE EVOLUTION OF ENVIRONMENT AND SECURITY RESEARCH

National security has focused traditionally on protecting the territorial integrity and political sovereignty of the state from military aggression from other states. This generally has involved forming alliances and investing in military assets in order to deter potential adversaries and use force effectively when required. In recent years, there has been increased emphasis placed on expanding the traditional conception of security to include so-called non-conventional threats such as resource scarcity, human rights abuses, outbreaks of infectious disease, and environmental degradation caused by toxic contamination, ozone depletion, global warming, water pollution, soil degradation and the loss of biodiversity (Ullman, 1983; Renner, 1989; Westing, 1989). These discussions, in turn, have stimulated research on examining the specic relationship between environment and security. The literature on environment and security emerged in the 1970s. However, prior to this, as early as the 1950s, discussions on the issue of environmental change and security occurred without explicit use of the term environmental security (Osborn, 1953; Brown, 1954; Ophuls, 1977). Following from these discussions, in 1977, the US Central Intelligence Agency established an environmental center to assess the relationships between environment and security. The US militarys use of defoliants in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War focused international attention on both the intentional and unintentional environmental damage caused by war. The Additional Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva Convention on the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conicts (1977) was the rst of two treaties with major environmental importance that stemmed from international concern over excessive environmental degradation in Vietnam (Diederich, 1992). This primarily humanitarian agreement has to date not been ratied by a number of major powers, including the US, France and the UK, although most objections do not center on the environmental issues contained in the agreement. Efforts to develop more stringent denitions for the prohibition of widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment continued with the 1977 Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modication Techniques (the ENMOD Convention), the second of the post-Vietnam treaties. By the early 1980s, various institutions and writers began addressing security beyond strictly military concerns that affect the state. The United Nations (UN) Commission on Disarmament and Security chaired by Olaf Palme of Sweden, made a distinction between collective security and common security. The former implied the more traditional interstate military security issues, while the latter reected the growing array of non-military threats, including economic change, resource scarcity, population

growth and environmental degradation. This was followed by the new political thinking of Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev that promoted the concept of comprehensive security as a cornerstone of international politics. Comprehensive security included various threats, including nuclear war, poverty, and global environmental issues. Coincidentally, numerous writers addressed the issue of expanding the denition of security to include non-military threats. Richard Ullman, for example, offered the following denition of threats to security:
A threat to national security is an action or sequence of events that; 1) threatens drastically and over a relatively brief span of time to degrade the quality of life for the inhabitants of a state, or 2) threatens signicantly to narrow the range of policy choices available to the government of a state or to private, non-governmental entities (person, groups, corporations) within the state. (Ullman, 1983, 133)

While still circumscribing security within state boundaries, Ullman sought to expand the range of threats to security beyond the traditional military concerns. The suggestion to broaden the denition of security to include environmental threats was by no means limited to American sources. Although the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, is best known for its denition of sustainable development, the commission also called for recognition that security was partly a function of environmental sustainability. The Commission highlighted the causal role environmental stress can play in contributing to conict while also stating that a comprehensive approach to international and national security must transcend the traditional emphasis on military power and armed competition (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987, 290). Westing (1989) elaborated on this statement by noting that comprehensive security has two intertwined components: political security, with its military, economic and humanitarian sub-components, and environmental security, including protecting and utilizing the environment. The 1986 nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl and its attendant devastation for neighboring human populations and ecosystems placed health considerations squarely within a security framework for many people. The next year, President Gorbachev proposed ecological security as a top priority that de facto would serve as a forum for international condence building. The initial phase of environment and security research concluded at almost the same time as the end of the Cold War. Articles by Matthews (1989) and Myers (1989) summarised much of the debate on broadening conceptions of security. Like earlier contributions, these efforts addressed two key issues. First, there was a need to redene security to include a new range of threats. Such threats included

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population growth, resource scarcity, and environmental degradation. Second, there was an acceptance that the object of security was no longer simply the state, but ranged to levels above and below the level of the state. Myers (1993), for example, equated security with
Human wellbeing: not only protection from harm and injury but access to water, food, shelter, health, employment, and other basic requisites that are due of every person on Earth. It is the collectivity of these citizen needs, overall safety and quality of life, that should gure prominently in the nation s view of security. (Myers, 1993, 20)

Similar to the arguments made by the World Commission on Environment and Development, Myers argues for moving from security as a freedom from various threats to security as a freedom to access environmental services. Today, critiques of this early literature often emphasize its ahistorical and alarmist character. Some historical analyses suggest that environmental change has been a key determinant of the rise and fall of civilizations: and, ultimately, of progress in many areas of endeavor. In short, there is nothing new about this relationship. Moreover, some critics argue, the claim that human activity is hastening a catastrophe becomes less in uential as the years and decades pass. In spite of its aws, however, the early literature initiated an important debate and laid the foundations for the more rigorous research programs of the 1990s.

ENVIRONMENT AND CONFLICT

Assessing the nature of linkages between environment and security has proven dif cult. The complexity of multiple interactions and feedback poses tremendous empirical and methodological hurdles. The ambiguous and contested nature of the term security also complicates research and policy in the area of environment and security (Dokken and Gr ger, 1995; Lipschutz, 1995; Deudney and Matthew, 1999). As noted previously, the meanings attached to the term range from a narrow state-based de nition of safety from armed con ict, to a much broader conception of security as synonymous with human well-being. In the 1990s a number of researchers have tried to circumvent this discussion by ignoring the word security and concentrating speci cally on the role of environmental change and resource depletion as potential causes of violent con ict (Homer-Dixon, 1991, 1994; Libiszewski, 1992). Such conict, in turn, could pose a serious threat to the security of individuals, regions and nation states. The general discussions on the nature of security and the role of environmental degradation as a contributor to insecurity and con ict are labeled by Levy (1995a) as the rst wave of environment and con ict research. The empirical research that attempted to prove a link between environment and con ict has been

labeled by Levy (1995b) as the second wave of environment and con ict studies. Work at the Peace and Con icts Studies Program at the University of Toronto (Homer-Dixon, 1991, 1994; Homer-Dixon et al., 1993), the Environment and Con icts Project (ENCOP) in Zurich and Bern (e.g., Libiszewski, 1992; Spillman and Bachler, 1995), and the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (e.g., Molv r, 1991; Gleditsch, 1992; Lodgaard and Hjort af Ornas, 1992; Gr ger and Smith, 1994; Dokken and Gr ger, 1995; Hauge and Ellingsen, 1997), among others, all contributed towards this effort (see also, Durham, 1979; Westing, 1986; Gleick, 1989, 1991; National Academy of Science, 1991; Lonergan and Kavanagh, 1991). These empirical studies have been crucial, not only in terms of advancing the scholarly discussion of the links between environmental change and violent con ict, but also in publicizing the potential role environmental degradation may play as a contributor to violent con ict. Although many studies focused on the somewhat muddled concept of environmental scarcity rather than on environmental degradation per se, the conclusion by Homer-Dixon et al. (1993) was clear: scarcities of renewable resources are already contributing to violent conicts in many parts of the developing world . Subsequent work by Bachler (1998) demonstrated that environmental degradation and resource depletion may play a number of different, and sometimes subtle, roles in affecting security and contributing to con ict. These include environment as background to the tensions, as a channel leading to tension, as a trigger, as a catalyst or as a target. Some scholars have been critical of this deterministic perspective on environment and con ict (e.g., Deudney, 1991; Dalby, 1992; Conca, 1994; Levy, 1995a,b; Hartman, 1998). Despite the range of case studies undertaken, the evidence for a direct causal link between environmental degradation and violent con ict (implied by Homer-Dixon s statement above) remains speculative and anecdotal.

CLARIFYING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE AND CONFLICT

The environment and con ict literature posits that several types of environmental threats may have the capacity to contribute to insecurity and to produce con ict as well. Constraints on resources are a crucial factor that is often discussed in the literature (Choucri, 1991). Rapid industrialization and population growth in many regions have resulted in an increased demand for both renewable and non-renewable natural resources, and as Ullman (1983) and others have noted, competition for resources has historically been a major cause of con ict. This simple statement seems intuitively reasonable; however, there are some who feel it overstates the importance of resources and the environment as contributors to con ict (Lipschutz, 1995). At

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rst glance, the availability of water in the Middle East; the depletion of sh stocks off the east coast of Canada; and deforestation in Brazil, Thailand and elsewhere have all been, or have the potential to be, the source of conict. It has further been suggested that atmospheric change (both global warming and stratospheric ozone depletion) has the potential to cause signicant societal disruption, according to the US National Academy of Science (1991) and Myers (1993). In addition, land degradation (or land use change in general) may directly affect societys ability to provide food resources for a growing population, or may indirectly affect other changes, such as global warming. Homer-Dixon (1994) provides some evidence of these relationships and concludes that environmental scarcity (which includes environmental change, population growth, and an unequal distribution of resources) causes violent conict. While this contention remains open to debate, it is increasingly accepted that environmental degradation is at least a contributor to conict and insecurity. Several other authors have attempted to clarify the possible relationships between the environment and conict or security as well. Wallensteen (1992), for example, proposes a seven-point classication of the connection between environmental destruction and conict and/or security. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Environmental destruction leading to reduced resources available to society and thus resulting in more contention in society at large. Environmental destruction leading to a shift in power between already existing parties. Environmental destruction leading to the formation of new parties, as part of a reaction to environmental destruction. Environmental destruction leading to environmental issues becoming important for established parties. Environmental destruction leading to environmental issues becoming more central in political affairs than other issues in society. Environmental destruction leading to conict behaviour involving environmentally based groups. Environmental destruction leading to environmentally based conict behaviour involving environmentally based groups.

over resources or national interests, or any other type of conict. They are traditional conicts induced by environmental degradation. Environmental conicts are characterised by the principal importance of degradation in one or more of the following elds: overuse of renewable resources, overstrain of the environments sink capacity (pollution); or impoverishment of the space of living (1992 : 13).

It is clear that the environmental variable is perceived to play a number of different roles in its links to violent conict. This is reected in Dokken and Gr gers (1995, 38) denition of environmental conict as a conict that involves environmental stress or degradation, whether as cause, consequence or intervening variable; perhaps in combination with social, ethnical or political elements . Libiszewski provides the following operative denition of an environmental conict:
Environmental conicts manifest themselves as political, social, economic, ethnic, religious or territorial conicts, or conicts

The types of environmental issues examined as potential contributors to conict are highly varied in terms of; (1) where they occur geographically (2) at what level they occur (local, national, regional, global) (3) the speed with which they occur and (4) the sources for their occurrence. The types of social, political and economic problems produced or exacerbated by environmental scarcity are equally diverse. A number of researchers prefer the term environmentally induced con ict to environmental con ict to describe the environments causal roles. Environmentally induced conict leaves more latitude for incorporating the multiple causes that are characteristic to all conicts. Initial evidence points to the environment as an underlying, distant, or background variable that inuences or intensies the conict (Dokken and Gr ger, 1995). The term environmentally induced con ict also assists in the necessary distinction between the causes of conict and the issues that are being fought over. Unlike conicts over non-renewable resources or resource wars where the resources themselves are the alleged object of contention, environmentally induced conicts often are not viewed as a unique kind of conict. Instead environmental variables contribute to social effects that are the more traditional grievances precipitating conict (ethnic differences, relative deprivation) (Gurr, 1993; Homer-Dixon, 1994). The environmental variables do not directly cause the conict per se but instead make more salient the variables that can precipitate conict (Libiszewski, 1992). Many researchers do expect environmentally induced conict from renewable resource scarcity to become increasingly frequent. Unlike non-renewable resources, technological innovation and the market have only achieved limited success in developing substitutes for renewable resources (clean air, fertile top soil) according to this line of argument. Therefore, history may not be a good indicator of future potential for conict. Increasing environmental degradation and resource depletion, the result of increased population, higher use of natural resources per capita, and a constant or decreasing supply of environmental amenities, are pushing ecosystems into a highly uncertain and complex ecological future. This expectation of increasing environmental scarcity encourages many observers to predict an accompanying increase in environmentally induced conict (Homer-Dixon, 1994; Winnefeld and Morris, 1994; Bachler and Spillmann, 1996; Kahl, 1997; Bachler, 1998).

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WHAT TYPES OF ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE AFFECT SECURITY?

The environmental forces that have been presented as contributing to insecurity are many. Environmental calamities such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, oods and drought have always presented a threat to human existence, and their human impact has increased considerably in scale as people have moved into disaster-prone areas. The pace of other, human-induced forms of environmental degradation and resource depletion (e.g., deforestation, desertication, land degradation, erosion, salinization, siltation, climate change), while often more gradual, has been growing rapidly in recent decades owing to a combination of increasing demand, improving technological means of exploitation, and the lagging pace of conservation and control. Meanwhile the ability and perhaps also the inclination of people to adapt to environmental stress is increasingly challenged, particularly where resources and environment provide the principal basis of their livelihood, as is the case in much of the developing world. Types of environmental change/degradation, which may affect security, include the following:
Natural Disasters

Table 1 Annual water availability, 1995 (selected countries) Annual water availability, 1995 (cubic meters per capita) 528 563 923 362 314 103 111 792 254 211 443 359

Country Algeria Burundi Egypt Israel Jordan Kuwait Libya Rwanda Saudi Arabia Singapore Tunisia Yemen
a

Source: World Resources, 1996 1997 (1996) Oxford University Press, NY.

Natural disasters include oods, volcanoes and earthquakes. They are usually characterized by a rapid onset, and their impact (destructiveness) is a function of the number of vulnerable people in the region rather than the severity of the disaster, per se. Poor people in developing countries are the most affected because they are the most vulnerable. (Droughts, despite a slower onset, are also included in this category.) Recent earthquakes in Pakistan, and ooding in many regions of the world indicate not only the destructiveness of disasters, but their ability to affect large numbers of people.
Cumulative Changes or Slow Onset Changes

Do factors such as water scarcity and human-induced soil degradation in and of themselves affect security? The linkage is much more indirect; in most cases, one or more of the following conditions are also present: rapid population growth, economic decline, inequitable distribution of resources, lack of institutional support and political repression.
Accidental Disruptions or Industrial Accidents

This category includes chemical manufacture and transport and nuclear reactor accidents. The two most obvious examples are the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986, and the Union Carbide accident in Bhopal, India, in 1987. Between 1986 and 1992, there were over 75 major chemical accidents which killed almost 4000 people worldwide, injured another 62 000, and displaced over two million. Most of these displacements, however, were temporary.
Development Projects

Cumulative changes are generally natural processes, occurring at a slower rate, which interact with, and are advanced by, human activities. The processes include deforestation, land degradation, erosion, salinity, siltation, waterlogging, desertication and climate warming. Humaninduced soil degradation is one factor that directly affects economic sufciency in rural areas. Water shortages also may affect security, and Table 1 notes countries which are experiencing (or will soon experience) conditions of water scarcity, where water scarcity is generally considered to be less than 1000 m3 per capita per year (this is a rough estimate only; many countries are able to supplement their water supply through expensive alternatives such as desalination (e.g., Kuwait) or importing water (e.g., Singapore)).

Development projects such as dams and irrigation systems often involve forced resettlement and affect many aspects of human security. In India, for example, it has been estimated that over 20 million people have been uprooted by development projects in the past three decades. The Three Gorges Dam project in China, expected to displace 1 million people and the Sardar Sarovar Dam project in India are the most notable present examples. Rapid urbanization in some regions of the world is also forcing people from their land; conversion of agricultural land to urban uses has long been a phenomenon in the north, and increasingly this is the case in the South as well.

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Conict and Warfare

Environmental degradation is considered by many to be both a cause and an effect of armed conict. Although the evidence of wars being fought over the environment is weak (except, of course, over the ownership of land), there is an increasing use of the environment as a weapon of war or, as Gleick (1990) notes, as a strategic tool. One obvious example in this category is the threat by Turkey to restrict the ow of the Euphrates to Syria and Iraq in order to pressure Syria to discontinue its support of Kurdish separatists in Turkey. Other examples include the purposeful discharge of oil into the Persian Gulf during the Gulf War and the destruction of irrigation systems during conicts in Somalia. Such activities have similar and, indeed, more immediate consequences as do the slow onset changes noted above. But in these cases, it seems clear that the environment is merely a symptom of a larger conict, and the root cause of any insecurity is the conict itself, and the reasons behind it.

high Cold War funding levels. Environmental critics also decry the conception of environmental security that has developed as an uniquely Northern and Western term; it is viewed as unacceptable to the South as a paradigm for environmental problems.

CRITICISMS OF REDEFINING SECURITY IN ENVIRONMENTAL TERMS

Critics commonly point out the greater likelihood of the militarization of the environment than the greening of security as northern security institutions search for new missions in the post Cold War period. The term as it is used in this context is Wand ver s (1995). Others share the concern expressed by the term with their own distinct critiques (Deudney, 1990, 1991; Dalby, 1992, 1994; Finger, 1991, 1994; Conca, 1994; Lipschutz, 1995; Gleditsch, 1997). With environmental security being used as a political slogan to gain attention for the environment, the risk is that the historically powerful military institutions will co-opt the green rhetoric rather than willingly giving up resources to more effectively address the new threats to environmental security. Some observers suspect that security may be redened to include environmental considerations merely at a rhetorical level (i.e., national security strategies) but would fail to produce a simultaneous reorientation or dismantling of security institutions and mindsets (Conca, 1994; Finger, 1994; Kakonen, 1994). More broadly, some critics charge that environmental security encompasses too many problems and threats; for example, problems associated with infectious disease, global warming, environmental damage during war, deforestation, water scarcity, and nuclear waste. With such diverse problems included as the focus of environmental security, the term loses meaning and utility as an analytical tool because there is no delineation of what is included and what is not (Deudney, 1991; Dokken and Gr ger, 1995; W ver, 1995). Instead, linking environment and security merely represents a normative slogan conveying the urgency of addressing global problems in determining the priority of political battles (Levy, 1995a,b). This criticism illustrates how environmental security is held to different standards for different purposes. Those in academia criticising environmental security as a normative political slogan are asking that the term perform as a sharpened theoretical tool. They discount the early calls for rede ning security, sometimes termed the rst wave of environmental security literature, as undeveloped, a conceptual trick or minimally useful (Levy, 1995; Gleditsch, 1997). From a policy perspective, the rhetorical use of the term is less troubling than the failure by its adherents to suggest speci c policy priorities and interventions which would accompany any rede nition.

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY

Throughout the environment and security debate, many writers have been critical of linking the two terms. Researchers and analysts from a traditional security perspective tend to discount the role that environmental degradation or resource depletion plays in precipitating violent conict. They further argue that broadening the denition of security to include a laundry list of modiers (environmental, ecological, economic, food, human, comprehensive, common) undercuts the terms utility by making it mean something different to each of multiple constituencies. Military critics of tying environment and security together also claim that performing environmental missions takes time and resources away from preparations for the traditional war ghting mission and therefore undermines preparedness and effectiveness in battle. Environmental critics also claim that there is little evidence to support the argument that environmental degradation or resource depletion has a signicant role in causing violent conict, and especially interstate conict. Furthermore, the methodological shortcomings of much of the research undermine the ndings that do support a case for linking environment and violent conict. Critics also fear that propagating the term environmental security could lead to the militarization of the environment rather than the greening of security. Military institutions, instead of undergoing fundamental change to re ect new security priorities, are more likely to co-opt and weaken the non-statist, non-threat based, cooperative ethic of environmental rescue. This criticism is reinforced by the perception that security institutions are searching for new missions to justify their

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The above criticisms arise from authors who assign a high priority to the importance of coming to grips with global problems. However, others continue to nd considerable utility in the purely statist and militaristic security assumptions and therefore oppose widening the purview of security to new and different threats (Walt, 1991). They argue that while the Cold War has ended and the dangers of a bilateral stand off have abated, emerging military threats demand a traditional denition of security with continued priority support for the military. Nuclear, chemical and biological weapons proliferation, terrorism, and ethnic conict remain reasons enough not to dilute the denition of security with peripheral, non-military concerns. There are also criticisms of environmental security, which are based on the perspective of the South. Egyptian diplomat Saad (1991), for example, argues that invoking the term environmental security represents a new Northern justication for continuing the inequitable power relationship between North and South. She worries that wealthy countries of the North can afford to care about the environment and will undermine the international legal principle of sovereignty in the name of a higher goal called environmental security. The principle of sovereignty, from the perspective of the South, provides some defense against exploitation by recognizing each state, no matter how weak in capabilities, as the legitimate authority for control over the resources within its borders. By this reasoning, Northern states may be tempted, in the name of environmental security, to try to dictate the patterns of natural resource usage, development priorities and population policies to developing countries. The stability and welfare of some states rest on sets of social power relationships surrounding the utilization of natural resources (large, politically empowered landowners in Brazil, for example). The elite in certain countries may therefore nd an alteration of past social bargains, for the sake of environmental conservation, to be a larger threat to state security than the environmental destruction itself (Conca et al., 1995). Such perspectives raise barriers to obtaining the cooperation of the South with respect to addressing global environmental problems under the guise of environmental security. This argument implicitly recognizes the importance of national or regional perspectives in dening or operationalising environmental security. The content and meaning of environmental security varies across nations and regions. These differences present difculties when trying to mobilize action on a global scale under the label of environmental security.
Twenty years ago, the emphasis was on ending the pollution that the industrialized North had been inicting on the nations of the South. The goals were clean air and water and arable land, the requisites of a decent life; and the modality was

international cooperation. Today, however, the North has seized hold of environmental issues by using them to cloak its own security concerns. (Saad, 1995, 273)

The prominent focus on environmental stress and violent conict in the environmental security literature also presents an additional cause for Southern suspicion of the term. The Norths concern with environmentally induced conict can easily be viewed as a convenient means to distract attention from Northern environmental problems. High rates of consumption in the North or the historical depletion of resources do not gure prominently in causal models, yet they are integral elements in the larger environmental picture. Global issues such as climate change and stratospheric ozone depletion are not often recognised as salient issues in environmentally induced conict because their long time lines guarantee marginal relationships to violent conict. The sources for these global problems tend to emanate disproportionately from the North. Furthermore, Northern interest in environment and conict linkages often extends only to a concern for regime stability and international security implications. The operationalization of environmental security within the traditional security institutions may stop short of fundamental interest in Southern problems of resource degradation and depletion, poverty, and the inequitable distribution of wealth.

ENVIRONMENT, HUMAN SECURITY AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

The World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED, 1987) and the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, have reinforced the notion that economic development is necessary to improve quality of life and well being. However, to be sustainable, this development must incorporate environmental, social, political and economic considerations consistent with a strong commitment to equity and a concern for resource limitations and the viability of ecosystems. Indeed, it is well accepted that environmental, social, political, and economic systems are interlinked; any actions involving one of these necessarily affects the others. Even our perspective on environmental change is constrained by social, economic, political and cultural factors; for example no universal denitions of degradation, scarcity or even pollution exist. These terms are dened by context and value systems. This multi-dimensional characteristic implies that the question of whether environmental degradation is a cause of conict is misguided. What we should be asking is whether environmental change (linked to a range of other factors) contributes to social tensions, and whether these tensions

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may result in instabilities (and, quite possibly, conict). The past decade of discussions on sustainability have further taught us that any assessment of how environment and security are related must take into account how these other factors inuence sustainable development and, in particular, how growth must acquire both environmental and social meaning. A particularly relevant criticism of the existing literature is that the debate on environment and security has largely ignored a discussion of how environmental security ts into the broader context of international development, social welfare and sustainable development. Although there have been calls for attention to comprehensive security (Westing, 1986) and a multilevel approach to security (Gr ger, 1996), most authors fail to recognize the one overwhelming argument in favor of linking environment and security: environmental problems must always be presented from within a broader perspective that encompasses various forms of equity, including world poverty . This is because poverty and inequity are two of the key factors contributing both to environmental change and to tension and insecurity throughout the world. For research on environment and security to gain social legitimacy, it must incorporate elements of social justice. In turn, for development to be sustainable, it must include the protection of human rights. These concerns are embodied in the broader concept of environment and human security. What is human security? A further issue that has received little attention in the literature is that space matters. Some authors have recently called for a reshaping of our spatial perspective on linking environment and security. There has been a strong plea for regionalism (sub-national and supra-national) which should be decided on the basis of eco-geography (Dokken and Gr ger, 1995). Here eco-geography implies that the region of concern is dened by ecological boundaries (e.g., watershed or eco-region) and not simply political boundaries. Regionalism need not be conned to ecological regions; it may incorporate ethnic or other factors as well. Perelet (1994) also argues that environmental security problems must focus on the ecosystem level. It has also been suggested that research must focus on the local level or at least at the lowest possible spatial scale for the insecurity/conict being studied. This has been termed the subsidiarity principle (Mische, 1989; Dokken and Gr ger, 1995). For example, the relationship between environment and poverty must be viewed locally and in the context of broader human security dimensions. This is absolutely crucial if we desire to incorporate local knowledge and make the process of development a truly participatory one. These two trends have stimulated further questions on the relationship between environmental security and the goal of a sustainable society.

ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE AND HUMAN SECURITY

So where does this leave the link between environment and security? Coincidental with the claim that environmental degradation may be a threat to conict/security has been the move to interpret security more broadly to encompass notions of human welfare, where there is no immediate prospect of armed conict. A better way of framing the issue might be in terms of insecurities (Gr ger, 1996; Lonergan, 1997). As noted above, the appeal of a broader notion of security, framed in terms of insecurities, is obvious. It allows one to include the key issues of equity and impoverishment, along with other non-conventional threats to security. It also is multi-dimensional (and multi-level according to Gr ger, 1996); this allows us to introduce into the debate issues of human, environmental and social rights, acting at all spatial levels, from the individual to the global. However, as noted above, many authors have expressed signicant concerns with using a broader denition of the term security. But even accounting for these concerns, it is clear that there remains a need to reassess our traditional perspectives of security and focus more on the insecurities posed by nonconventional threats. We must also recognize that society is in a profound period of rapid social, economic and environmental change. While continued growth in gross world product may imply improvement in social welfare, there are many disturbing indications that this is not the case for much of the worlds population. The number of wars has increased dramatically over the past three decades. However, since 1960, these have primarily been intrastate conicts, where inequity is a key feature. This leads to the inescapable conclusion that while environmental degradation and even resource depletion as causes of conict may be overstated, it is undeniable that increasing inequities in society are likely a major source of these (and other) non-conventional threats to individual security. At the same time, there is recognition that traditional approaches to national security may not, in turn, ensure the security of individuals and communities. This applies to global efforts aimed at curbing global warming and ozone depletion to local sustainable development initiatives. Again, this calls for a broader notion of security, one that focuses on the human element, despite the ambiguities and difculties this may cause. See also : Environmental Changes Driven by Civil Conict and War, Volume 3; The Environment and Violent Conict, Volume 5.

REFERENCES
Bachler, G (1998) Why Environmental Transformation Causes Violence, in Environmental Change and Security Project Report 4, Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, DC, 24 44.

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Bachler, G and Spillman, K R (1996) Environmental Degradation as a Cause of War Vol. 2 3, Ruegger Verlag, Zurich. Brown, H (1954) The Challenge of Mans Future, Viking, New York. Choucri, N (1991) Resource Constraints as Causes of Conict, Ecodecision, 2, 52 55. Conca, K (1994) In the Name of Sustainability: Peace Studies and Environmental Discourse, Peace Change, 19, 91 113. Conca, K, Alberty, M, and Dabelko, G (1995) From Ecological Conict to Environmental Security? in Green Planet Blues: Environmental Politics from Stockholm to Rio, eds K Conca, M Alberty, and G Dabelko, Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 239 244. Dalby, S (1992) Security, Modernity, Ecology: The Dilemmas of Post Cold War Security Discourse, Alternatives, 17, 95 134. Dalby, S (1994) The Politics of Environmental Security, in Green Security or Militarized Environment, ed Jyrki Kakonen, Dartmouth Publishing, Brookeld, 25 54. Deudney, D (1990) The Case Against Linking Environmental Degradation and National Security, Millennium: J. Int. Stud., 19(3), 461 476. Deudney, D (1991) Environment and Security: Muddled Thinking, Bull. At. Sci., (April), 22 28. Deudney, D and Matthew, R A (1999) Contested Ground: Security and Con ict in the New Environmental Politics, SUNY Press, Albany, NY. Diederich, Jr, M D (1992) Law of War and Ecology a Proposal for a Workable Approach to Protecting the Environment Through the Law of War, Military Law Rev., 136, 138 160. Dokken, K and Gr ger, N (1995) The Concept of Environmental Security Political Slogan or Analytical Tool? International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), Report 2. Durham, W H (1979) Scarcity and Survival in Central America: Ecological Origins of the Soccer War, Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, CA. Finger, M (1991) The Military, the Nation State and the Environment, Ecologist, 21(5), 220 225. Finger, M (1994) Global Environmental Degradation and the Military, in Green Security or Militarized Environment, ed Jyrki Kakonen, Dartmouth Publishing, Brookeld, 169 192. Gleditsch, N P (1992) Conversion and the Environment, Proceedings of a Seminar in Perm, Russia, November 1991, PRIO Report No. 2, International Peace Research Institute, Oslo. Gleditsch, N P (1997) Con ict and the Environment, NATO ASI Series Vol. 33, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands. Gleick, P (1989) The Implications of Global Climate Changes for International Security, Climate Change, 15, 303 325. Gleick, P (1990) Environment, Resources and International Security and Politics, in Science and International Security: Responding to a Changing World, ed E H Arnett, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, DC, 501 523. Gleick, P (1991) Environment and Security: The Clear Connections, Bull. At. Sci., (April), 17 21. Gr ger, N and Smith, D (1994) Environment Poverty and Conict, International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), Report 2.

Gr ger, N (1996) Environmental Security? J. Peace Res., 33(1), 109 116. Gurr, T R (1993) Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Con icts, US Institute of Peace, Washington, DC. Hartman, B (1998) Population, Environment and Security: A New Trinity, Environ. Urban., 10(2), 113 127. Hauge, W and Ellingsen, T (1998) Beyond Environmental Scarcity: Causal Pathways to Conict, J. Peace Res., 35(3), 299 317. Homer-Dixon, T F (1991) On the Threshold: Environmental Changes as Causes of Acute Conict, Int. Secur., 19(1), 5 40. Homer-Dixon, T F (1994) Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conict: Evidence from Cases, Int. Secur., 16(2), 76 116. Homer-Dixon, T F, Boutwell, J, and Rathjens, G W (1993) Environmental Change and Violent Conict, Sci. Am., 268(2), 38 45. Kandakandonen, J (1994) Green Security or Militarized Environment, Dartmouth Publishing, Brookeld. Kahl, C H (1997) States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World, IWPS Environment and Security Project, September, 1 60. Levy, M A (1995a) Is the Environment a National Security Issue? Int. Secur., 20(2), 35 62. Levy, M A (1995b) Time for a Third Wave of Environment and Security Scholarship? The Environmental Change and Security Project Report, 1, 44 46. Libiszewski, S (1992) What is an Environmental Con ict? Environment and Conicts Project (ENCOP), Occasional Paper No. 6, Center for Security Studies and Conict Research, Zurich. Lipschutz, R D (1995) On Security, Columbia University Press, New York. Lodgaard, S and Hjort af Ornas, A (1992) The Environment and International Security, International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), Report 3. Lonergan, S (1997) Water Resources and Conict: Examples from the Middle East, in Con ict and the Environment, ed N P Gleditsch, NATO ASI Series Vol. 33, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 375 384. Lonergan, S C and Kavanagh, B (1991) Climate Change, Water Resources and Security in the Middle East, Global Environ. Change, (September), 272 290. Mathews, J T (1989) Redening Security, Foreign Affairs, 68, 162 177. Mische, P M (1989) Ecological Security and the Need to Reconceptualize Sovereignty, Alternatives, 14(4), 389 428. Molv r, R K (1991) Environmentally Induced Conicts? A Discussion Based on Studies from the Horn of Africa, Bull. Peace Proposals, 22, 175 188. Myers, N (1989) Environment and Security, Foreign Policy, 74(Spring), 23 41. Myers, N (1993) Ultimate Security: The Environmental basis of Political Stability, WW Norton, New York. National Academy of Sciences (US) (1991) Policy Implications of Global Warming, National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC. Ophuls, W (1977) Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity: Prologue to a Political Theory of the Steady State, W H Freeman, San Francisco, CA.

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Osborn, F (1953) Our Plundered Planet, Little Brown, Boston, MA. Perelet, R (1994) The Environment as a Security Issue, in The Environment: Towards a Sustainable Future, Dutch Committee for Long-term Environmental Policy, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, MA. Renner, M (1989) National Security: The Economic and Environmental Dimensions, Worldwatch Paper 89, Worldwatch Institute, Washington, DC. Saad, S (1995) For Whose Bene t? Rede ning Security in Green Planet Blues: Environmental Politics from Stockholm to Rio, eds K Conca, M Alberty, and G D Dabelko, Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 273 275. Spillman, K R and Bachler, G (1995) Environmental Crisis: Regional Con icts and Ways of Cooperation, Environment and Con icts Project Occasional Paper No. 14, Center for Security Studies and Con ict Research, Zurich. Ullman, R H (1983) Rede ning Security, Int. Secur., 8(1), 129 153. Wallensteen, P (1992) Environmental Destruction and Serious Social Con ict: Developing a Research Design, in The Environment and International Security, eds S Lodgaard and A Hjort af Ornandas, (PRIO Report No. 3, 47 54), International Peace Research Institute (PRIO), Oslo. Walt, S M (1991) The Renaissance of Security Studies, Int. Stud. Q., 35(2), 211 239. Wand ver, O (1995) Securitization and Desecuritization, in On Security, ed R Lipscutz, Columbia University Press, New York, 46 86. Westing, A H (1986) Global Resources and International Con ict: Environmental Factors in Strategic Policy and Action, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Westing, A H (1989) The Environmental Component of Comprehensive Security, Bull. Peace Proposals, 20(2), 129 134. Winnefeld, J A and Morris, M E (1994) Where Environmental Concerns and Security Strategies Meet, Rand, Santa Monica, CA. World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) (1987) Our Common Future, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

of environmental sociology still lacks a seminal work which could lift it into the mainstream of debate in the broader eld of sociology. Sociologists therefore engage in environmental issues with the aim of enriching mainstream sociological theory, rather than attempting to ambitiously transform the discipline. A dening feature is the work of Dunlap and Catton to replace an anthropocentric approach (Human Exemptionalism Paradigm) with their ecocentric, New Ecological Paradigm. Although this approach has been viewed as over-ambitious, it has stimulated and catalyzed a diversity of paradigms and theoretical approaches to the study of environmental sociology. Buttel (1987) has cited scholarship: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. ve key areas of environmental

Dunlap and Catton s new human ecology; environmental attitudes, values and behaviors; the environmental movement; technological risk and risk assessment; the political economy of the environment and environmental politics.

Environmental Sociology
Amar Wahab
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

Environmental sociology is the study of reciprocal interactions between the physical environment, social organization and social behavior (Sydenstricker-Neto, 1997). Unlike a sociology of environment perspective, which applies traditional social theory to the study of environmental issues, it focuses on the interaction between social and environmental systems. According to Hannigan (1995), the eld

Alternatively, Hannigan (1995) has identi ed two distinct problems as central to the existing literature on environmental sociology: (1) the causes of environmental destruction; and (2) the rise of environmental consciousness and movements. The new ecological paradigm explanation of environmental destruction focuses on the competing functions of environment as supply depot, living space and waste depository within an assumed global carrying capacity (Dunlap and Catton, 1979). This model is concerned with the increasing globalization of environmental problems and the increasing production of waste, but is criticized for its limited incorporation of social de nition. An in uential alternative explanation, deriving from political economy, emerges out of Marxist ideology which identi es industrial capitalism, in which the corporation and the state can be seen as being in opposition to its own citizenry, as the major cause of environmental degradation (Hannigan, 1995). In this explanation, capitalism is said to generate the treadmill of production (Schnaiberg, 1980), which operates regardless of the carrying capacity of the ecosystem. The second problem currently tackled by environmental sociology, looking at environmental consciousness and movements works with an array of hypotheses. Perhaps one of the more in uential of these is the new middleclass thesis which has focused on the conceptualization and constitution of new social movements (NSMs), i.e., activism by individuals and groups who are deemed to possess post-materialist values. According to Hannigan (1995), there have been environmental sociologists such as Steninmetz (1994) who have contested the class basis of NSMs

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activism and others such as Habermas (1987) and Beck (1992) who have suggested that NSMs have emerged in marginal spaces, in a culture of political closure organized by the corporate state (which may help to explain their relative ineffectiveness). Hannigan has also employed a social constructionist perspective, which focuses on the social, political and cultural processes by which environmental conditions are dened as risky and actionable. He views the construction of environmental problems and conicts as hinged on the processes of assembling, presenting and contesting claims. It is important to note though, that the discourse on environmental sociology has been primarily focused on environmental problems in the economic North, with very little reconceptualization based on the works of third world scholars and integration of development discourses in the South. Criticism surrounding some of the silences regarding interlocking systems of race, space, gender, sexuality, class and other social axes of power that are embedded in the rubric of alternative discourses is less than forthcoming. Some of the themes which have been popularized by environmental sociology involve environmental problems related to agriculture, energy and fuels, hazards and risks, leisure/recreation, natural resources, social impact assessment, and sustainable development. Some central works in the eld of environmental sociology include Dunlap and Canton (1979), Hannigan (1995) and Schnaiberg and Gould (1994).

Equity
Henry Shue
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

REFERENCES
Beck, U (1992) The Risk Society, Sage, London. Buttel, F (1987) New Directions in Environmental Sociology, Annu. Rev. Sociol., 13, 465 488. Dunlap, R E and Catton, Jr, W R (1979) Environmental Sociology, Annu. Rev. Sociol., 5, 243 273. Habermas, J (1987) The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2, Polity Press, Cambridge. Hannigan, J (1995) Environmental Sociology: A Social Constructionist Perspective, Routledge, New York. Schnaiberg, A and Gould, K A (1994) Environment and Society, St. Martins Press, New York. Steinmetz, G (1994) Regulation Theory, Post-Marxism, and the New Social Movements, Comp. Stud. Soc. Hist., 36(1), 176 212. Sydenstricker-Neto, J (1997) Environmental Sociology: a Resource Page, http://trochim.human.cornell.edu/gallery/Neto/Envsoc1.html.

Environmentalism
see Art and the Environment (Volume 5); Literature and the Environment (Volume 5)

Intense debates about the requirements of equity have been at the very heart of the international negotiations about what to do about rapid climate change, ever since those negotiations began in the 1980s. In this context, equity, distributive justice, and fairness are alternative terms for the same set of requirements. Economists and lawyers tend to use the term equity, and philosophers normally discuss distributive justice, but these disciplinary preferences in terminology have no systematic signi cance. In both cases, the professionals are talking about what ordinary people call fairness. Equity, or fairness the terms are employed interchangeably in this article is a feature that the division of an aggregate or total among multiple parties often ought to have. Fairness is an ethical requirement to be met by speci c, concrete allocations, divisions, or distributions of bene ts and burdens. The fundamental point about fairness is that what matters is not the average per capita distribution of some aggregate, which tends to be the focus of economic analysis and which, after all, is a merely theoretical distribution, but the relative sizes of the actual shares of the aggregate that various parties each have. Multiple questions usually arise about fairness. What is a fair result (substantive fairness)? What is a fair process (procedural fairness)? What connection, if any, is there between substantive and procedural? In the case of climate change, the multiple tasks required can each be performed by means of fair or unfair processes, and with fair or unfair results; these tasks include the allocation of the costs of adaptation to actual climate change, the allocation of the costs of the mitigation of potential climate change, and the allocation of the limited total of emissions of greenhouse gases compatible with mitigating climate change. Winners and losers will be spread both across the geographical dimension, including the international, and along the temporal dimension, including the intergenerational. How they will be spread is uncertain but will be deeply affected by the political decisions made under the Framework Convention on Climate Change. Many of those decisions can consequently be assessed as fair or unfair. Since the maximum severity of climate change will depend upon the date of the technological transition away from the energy technologies that worsen the problem, the fundamental question of intergenerational fairness is whether policy options, like the exibility mechanisms in the Kyoto Protocol, advance or delay this date of transition.

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MULTIPLE QUESTIONS
Fairness can be a feature of an outcome: the question is then whether the various parties among whom some total is to be divided each receives a fair share. That is the question of substantive fairness. On the other hand, the question of fairness sometimes applies to the process that produces the outcome: this question is whether the manner by which the total is divided among the various parties is fair. This is the question of procedural fairness. Complex and important questions arise about the relation, if any, between procedural fairness and substantive fairness. Sometimes, in one kind of case, the basis for judgments of substantive fairness and the standards for judgments of procedural fairness are independent of each other. Substantive fairness and procedural fairness can each be specied separately. For example, if a murder has been committed and someone is to be punished, the only substantively fair outcome is for the punishment to be inicted upon the murderer, the guilty person. Most societies have elaborate standards for the procedural fairness of murder trials standards like a presumption of innocence for the accused, and adequate opportunity for the accused to make a defense. Yet, tragically, it is entirely possible for a perfectly fair trial a trial satisfying all the standards of procedural fairness to lead to the conviction of an innocent person, which is a substantively unfair outcome: the punishment of the innocent. Even the procedurally fairest systems of criminal law are fallible and sometimes reach substantively unfair outcomes by convicting innocent persons. Here procedural fairness does not guarantee substantive fairness. By contrast, in other kinds of cases there is no basis for judging the fairness of outcomes that is independent of the fairness of the procedure that produces the outcome. A lottery is the clearest example. Suppose a prize is to be awarded by having everyone who wants the prize place a piece of paper with his/her name on it in a hat and having someone who is blindfolded pick one name. It makes no sense for someone whose name was not selected to say after the drawing that the outcome is unfair because the wrong person won the prize. There is no wrong person if the lottery was conducted fairly, as there is when an innocent person is convicted. The only standard of fairness in the case of a lottery is procedural fairness: the right outcome is whatever outcome results if the process is conducted fairly. Here fairness is randomness. In the case of a lottery, by contrast with a criminal trial, there is no such thing as a person who, in advance of the drawing, somehow ought to be selected for the prize, analogous to the person who, in advance of the criminal trial, ought to be chosen for the punishment. Sometimes, of course, when the prize in a lottery goes to someone who does not need it, and other participants in the lottery do need it, objectors say too bad, the prize should have gone to someone who needed it . If this is to have

any solid basis, it must be construed as an objection to this use of a lottery process. If the prize genuinely ought to have gone to someone needy, then no lottery should have been conducted at all (or participation in the lottery should have been restricted by the rules for the lottery to people who needed the prize). The objectors, then, are contending that what had been treated as a prize in a lottery ought not to have been made a lottery prize because, in fact, a relevant basis for judgments of substantive fairness, namely need, was available; therefore, instead of having held a lottery that awarded the prize randomly, a completely different kind of process should have been used to allocate the prize to someone who needed it. Defenders of the lottery might be able to reply that although some things sometimes ought to be allocated according to need, this lottery prize is not one of them, and nothing is wrong with using a fair lottery to award it. This is now a debate about a choice among processes and about the relevance, if any, of a particular substantive basis (need) to that choice of process (see Box 1).

MULTIPLE TASKS
The global effort to deal with climate change simultaneously faces several challenges that can be distinguished from each other in theory but must all be handled in practice by means that are at least complementary, if not mutually supportive. Each of these tasks raises all three kinds of questions about equity. Since climate change is already occurring, and since current concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere constitute a commitment to additional climate change, one task will obviously be adaptation to climate change. Adaptation will require expensive adjustments, and one cluster of questions about equity concerns the division of the costs, and the benets, of adaptation (see Box 2).

MULTIPLE DIMENSIONS
The negotiations about whether to take effective action concerning climate change are conducted by national governments; and measurement and reporting of sources, sinks, and net emissions are all categorized in national terms. Consequently, it is difcult to overlook the fact that equity issues have dimensions that are spatial: the international distributions of costs and of emissions. Many debates about the international division of the benets and burdens have been pure conicts of national interest, even when sometimes clothed in the rhetoric of equity. International equity will be attained only if powerful national states aim explicitly at it; nothing supports any hope that the pure clash of national interest will somehow lead to international equity. Nevertheless, even the nations that are too weak to defend

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Box 1 Multiple questions Substance Procedure Relation between rst two In the case of climate change, some of the fundamental issues about equity concern disputes of the kinds illustrated in the text. Many economists assume that the use of efcient markets is analogous to the use of a fair lottery, in that whatever distribution results is unquestionably acceptable; this is equivalent to assuming that there are no well-grounded principles of substantive fairness by which market outcomes can be assessed. Much of the support for the exibility mechanisms in the Kyoto Protocol (Clean Development Mechanism [Article 12], Joint Implementation [Article 6], and Trading in Allowed Amounts of Emissions [Article 17]) appears to rest on such an unargued assumption that whatever consequences for the allocations of costs and of emissions are generated by fair processes are unchallengeable on grounds of substantive fairness. This ies in the face of the solidly grounded view that, for as long as the generation of greenhouse gas emissions is essential to human subsistence, every person needs to benet from at least a minimal level of emissions. If the global ceiling on total emissions is sufciently low, the only distribution that could possibly guarantee everyone the necessary minimum would be an equal distribution. To guarantee that minimum, market processes need to be restrained by universal inalienable rights to benet from a minimum level of emissions. One needs to determine for each situation not only: (a) whether grounds for judging substantive fairness are available and if so, what they are; and (b) whether standards for procedural fairness are available and if so, what they are; but also (c) in which cases internally fair processes are adequate, meaning that whatever outcome they produce is therefore acceptable, and in which cases substantive fairness should be the basis for adopting one kind of process rather than another, meaning that a process, even if internally fair, is fully adequate only if it is the best means to fair outcomes.

themselves successfully against unfair treatment at least have ofcial representatives (see Box 3).

INTERGENERATIONAL EQUITY AND INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGY

A deeper point about technology is buried in the second tendency. The basic decisions concerning climate change are choices about energy technology. Choices about which nations are to bear the current costs of technological transitions obviously implicate international equity; and choices about the rate of technological innovation deeply affect intergenerational equity in a less obvious way. The second tendency ingrained in current approaches to climate change is not to abandon fossil-fuel technologies until their continued retention becomes too expensive for the current generation, and meanwhile to avoid investing very large amounts in research or development of alternative energy technologies. This clearly favors the current generation strongly, although the issue of fairness is whether this favoritism is unreasonably strong. This tendency and the rst tendency (to select lowest-cost-rst solutions) are related; the rst supports the second it is believed to be cheaper to continue to spread into the less-developed states the current form of industrialization that depends on fossil-fuel than to introduce alternatives. However, many other factors, including entrenched political and economic interests and lack of imagination, also underwrite retention of the familiar fossil-fuel technology that is the most important contributor to climate change. The primary issue of intergenerational equity here is not, however, merely the

obvious one of deferring costs so that they fall upon generations later than ones own, although that is an issue too. Sooner or later, human societies will make a transition from reliance dominantly upon fossil-fuel-driven technologies to reliance on one or more alternative energy technologies. The issues are: at what point in history should this transition be made (substantive intergenerational equity)? how should this date be determined (procedural intergenerational equity)? The current tendency is to allow the date to be determined by relative prices in energy markets. The general idea, according to abstract assumptions in economic theory, is that at some time the prices of fossil fuels will have risen high enough, and the price of some alternative energy will have dropped low enough, that rational consumers will switch to the alternative energy source. The price of alternative energy will have dropped, relative to fossil fuel, because at some point entrepreneurs will have realized that investments in this kind of technological innovation could then be protable in the relatively short-term. The date of the transition, according to most economists, ought to be determined by the prices prices are the right basis given the moral assumptions underlying economic theory. Consideration of intergenerational equity, on the other hand, might suggest that, depending upon many complexities that cannot be explored here, political action ought to be taken to advance the transition to an earlier date. One critical issue is whether human societies can continue to rely predominantly upon fossil fuels for a signicantly longer time without making the severity of climate change greater than it otherwise would have needed to be. In other words,

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Box 2 Multiple tasks Costs of adaptation Costs of mitigation Allowed emissions Relation among rst three One means toward controlling the costs of adaptation is abatement, or mitigation, of climate change. Adaptation tackles the effects of climate change; mitigation attempts to slow the rate of climate change itself. Obviously mitigation and adaptation are not separate matters; for example, the less mitigation accomplished, the more adaptation required, other things being equal. Nevertheless, the allocation of the costs and the benets of mitigation need to be considered independently from the costs and the benets of adaptation because, to mention only one consideration, any reasonable basis for dividing the costs of mitigation might be different from any reasonable basis for dividing the costs of adaptation. At least in theory it is possible that the parties who ought to bear most of the costs of adaptation are different from those who ought to bear most of the costs of mitigation. These rst two tasks fundamentally concern the fair sharing of nancial burdens and benets. The substantive question, in both cases (adaptation and mitigation), is: who pays? The procedural question in both is: how is it to be determined who pays? The third profoundly important allocative task is the distribution of greenhouse-gas emissions themselves, and, thus, of the activities that produce the emissions. Who is allowed to emit what portion of the global total of allowable emissions? If rapid climate change is to be avoided, an enforceable ceiling must be imposed by the international community on the global aggregate of emissions. That total must, in turn, be divided somehow among the people of the world. For as long as economic activity depends upon the burning of the fossil fuels that emit greenhouse gases, the fair distribution of this limited total has unsurpassed importance. One crucial consideration is that powerful states are unlikely to restrict themselves to the shares they are allocated unless their allocation seems reasonably fair. The simplest way for the distribution to seem fair is for it transparently to be fair. Equity may be politically essential to effectiveness. A second crucial consideration is that, with the overall total severely limited, those who exceed their own fair share will, in fact, be depriving others of their minimum entitlement, unless those others make up for the encroachment by exceeding the mandated total and thereby frustrate the ultimate purpose of the entire effort. Finally, just as the realization that questions of equity must be analyzed into substantive and procedural leads to the further question about how the two are to be related, the realization that the tasks of equity need to be distinguished into fair allocation of adaptation costs, fair allocation of mitigation costs, and fair allocation of the emissions themselves leads to the further question: how, and/or on what basis, are these three tasks to be related? Is there a fair, coordinated solution to all three problems?

Box 3 Multiple dimensions Spatial (International) Temporal (Intergenerational) Relation between rst two: date of technological transition The temporal dimension of equity is more easily forgotten, but nothing affects more human beings than the intergenerational distributions of costs and of emissions. Indeed, future generations are usually the unrepresented, and, therefore, most vulnerable parties of all, in spite of the fact that the unnoticed other side of the coin in most of the decisions made about how much burden the current generation will handle, is how much is consequently left for succeeding generations to bear. For example, every decision about the relative emphasis to be placed on (present) mitigation efforts as opposed to (future) adaptation efforts is also a decision about the intergenerational allocation of effort and resources. Two tendencies deeply engrained in the current approaches to climate change shift the burdens toward our grandchildren, and their grandchildren, especially strongly. The rst tendency is the largely unquestioned assumption that it is only rational always to pursue least-cost-rst solutions to mitigation. While this may often be rational if no interests are given full weight except the interests of the current generation, it is far from evident that such solutions are rational in light of the interests of future generations or are equitable to them. The danger to the future has two aspects. First, if the level of expenditures were xed independently, then the choice of a least-cost-rst approach would at least mean that, for the given expenditure, the most would be accomplished. In reality, however, nothing keeps expenditures xed, and consequently, many parties will choose to accomplish the same amount of mitigation for a lower expenditure rather than accomplishing more mitigation for the same expenditure. The result is not that more is accomplished to slow climate change but only that less is spent now. Second, least-cost-rst can mean highercost-later, unless technological advances that reduce the costs of the currently more expensive tasks at least keep pace with the passage of time. Spontaneous technological advances might occur in time to contain costs for future generations, but simply to assume net technological progress would be a largely groundless gamble for which future generations will pay if it turns out badly.

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is it the case that the more distant the date of the transition away from fossil fuels, the more severe climate change will become before it stops worsening (because of the greater maximum atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases)? This depends upon whether, during the period of the continued predominant reliance on fossil fuels, society is willing and able to cap its greenhouse gas emissions at a level that does not make climate change progressively worse by continuing to expand the atmospheric concentration. This is an open question, the answer to which will be determined by decisions yet to be made. However, those decisions could make matters much worse for future generations than they would be if a political initiative was taken to move the date of transition to an earlier time. If: (1) the choice is made to take no political action to advance the date even though the price of alternative technologies becomes competitive with the price of fossil-fuel technology; and (2) the choice is made, meanwhile, to allow the annual rate of emissions to remain high enough to continue to increase atmospheric concentration, then in order to avoid mitigation costs for the current generation, much higher mitigation costs will have been imposed upon future generations. This appears to be a compound injustice toward our descendants.

Ethics, Environmental
see Environmental Ethics (Volume 5)

Ethnoscience
see Indigenous Knowledge, Peoples and Sustainable Practice (Volume 5)

Exxon Valdez Oil Spill

The spill of crude oil from the Exxon Valdez is probably the world s most infamous tanker disaster, although it was not the world s largest oil spill. In the minutes after midnight of March 24th, 1989, the Exxon Valdez, its captain intoxicated, ran its single hull onto a shoal in the northeastern portion of Prince William Sound, off Alaska. The tanker was carrying nearly 1.3 million barrels of North Slope crude oil. Fully one- fth of that cargo spilled into the sound: 11.2 million gallons of crude (42 million liters). Initially, there were hopes the crude could be contained due to the relatively calm seas. But three days after the Exxon Valdez ran aground, strong northeasterly winds blew up and dispersed the oil hundreds of kilometers from the accident site. The mixing of oil and water, agitated by wind and wave action, created a substance known as mousse which was carried 750 km (470 miles) from the grounding site. The oily mixture washed ashore along a huge expanse of Alaskan coastline, from Prince William Sound to southern Kodiak Archipelago and the Alaska Peninsula. Thousands of sea birds and mammals were killed by the oil. Hundreds of volunteers attempted the rescue and recovery of oiled birds. Exxon spent tens of millions of dollars in attempted remediation, including sand blasting of beaches. The cost of clean-up had a positive economic effect on the state s gross national product (GNP), generating more economic activity than if the cargo had safely reached its destination. Within Prince William Sound, 790 miles (1271 km) of shoreline were oiled, as well as another 2400 miles (3862 km) of shoreline in the Kenai Peninsula Kodiak Archipelago region. Long-term studies continue about the impact of the spill.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada

FURTHER READING
Agarwal, A, Narain, S, and Sharma, A, eds (1999) Green Politics, Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi. Att eld, R (1999) The Ethics of the Global Environment, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Brown, P G (2000) Ethics, Economics and International Relations, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. de-Shalit, A (1995) Why Posterity Matters, Routledge, London. Franck, T M (1995) Fairness in International Law and Institutions, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Grubb, M (1995) Seeking Fair Weather: Ethics and the International Debate on Climate Change, Int. Affairs, 71, 463 496. Grubb, M, Chapuis, T, and Duong, M H (1995) The Economics of Changing Course, Energy Policy, 23, 417 431. Grubb, M, Vrolijk, C, and Brack, D ( 1999) The Kyoto Protocol: A Guide and Assessment, Royal Institute of International Affairs, London. Jones, C (1999) Global Justice, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Paterson, M (1996) International Justice and Global Warming, in The Ethical Dimensions of Global Change, ed B Holden, Macmillan, London, 181 201. Pogge, T W (1998) A Global Resources Dividend, in Ethics of Consumption, eds D Crocker and T Linden, Rowman and Little eld, Lanham, MD, 501 536. Shue, H (1999) Global Environment and International Inequality, Int. Affairs, 75, 531 545.

F
Factor-four Scenario (Double the Output with Half the Resources)
see Ecological Economics (Opening essay, Volume 5)

Fernow, Bernard
see Environmental Movement the Rise of Non-government Organizations (NGOs) (Volume 5)

Flip-op of a Complex System

see Phase Shifts or Flip-ops in Complex Systems (Volume 5)

Focus Group
see ULYSSES (Urban Lifestyles, Sustainability, and Integrated Environmental Assessment) (Volume 4)

Francis of Assisi
(1181 1226) Francis of Assisi, Saint, mystic, cleric, was born at Assisi (Italy) to a wealthy merchant family. It was assumed that he would enter the family business, although apparently for a time he was a troubadour and soldier. In 1201 he took part in an attack on Perugia where he was taken hostage

and held for a year. It was during this period that he began to turn to religion, although after his release he enlisted in another military venture. It was at this time that he had a dream in which God called him to do His works. He returned to Assisi and began to care for the sick. In 1206, he had a vision in which Christ called on him to repair his church, which Francis interpreted as being the Church of San Damiano, near Assisi. He devoted himself to repairing the church. Francis gave up his rights and possessions, and then began to preach. He was joined by others and his group soon numbered eleven, it was then that he gave them the short Rule (a set of rules of conduct for his new order). Pope Innocent III granted approval for a brotherhood, called the Friars Minor. Although based at Assisi, they preached across central Italy calling for the return to a life of Christ, one that emphasized simplicity, poverty, and a faith in Gods care, rather than possessions. In 1212 Clara Scif, inspired by his devotion, joined Francis and formed the Poor Clares sisterhood. In 1219 Francis journeyed with crusaders to the Near East. The brotherhood grew into an order, and larger numbers were attracted to Francis message of simplicity in life, poverty, piety, and humility before God. He wrote a more detailed Rule, which in time was further revised by new leaders of the Franciscans. In this time he also became known for his walks in the woods and hills, and his sermons to birds and animals. What is more likely is that he preached about nature rather than to it. In nature Francis saw the work of God, and to abuse or dele Gods creatures was an affront to God and an act of debasement. Francis saw nature as an extension of God. Understanding the beauty and spirituality of nature was for Francis an integral part of his devotion and piety. His vision of Gods world was based on a trust in Gods love and he believed that poverty (taking no thought in tomorrow) would enable him to experience that love most fully. This linked him to the poor and disadvantaged and remains a strong part of his appeal today. Later, he gave up leadership of the Order and went to the mountains to live a life of secluded prayer. For Francis, his life in the hills and forests brought him closer to the essence and presence of God. It was in the wilderness

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that he received the stigmata (wounds of Christ). He did return to visit the Franciscans, and also had a small group of followers. In the fall of 1226 he died at Porziuncula, near Assisi. Regardless of Francis original beliefs, he is today considered by many to be the Patron Saint of ecology. For example, his name served as the rallying point for efforts such as the Assisi Declaration from the World Wildlife Funds anniversary gathering at Assisi (in September 1986).
KEVIN HANNA Canada

activism buttressed by effective national and international campaigning.

ELIZABETH MAY Canada

Futures Research
Allen Tough
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

Friends of the Earth

Friends of the Earth (FoE) was founded in 1969 in the United States by former Sierra Club Executive Director, David Brower (see Brower, David, Volume 5). Although the organization and Brower ultimately had a well-publicized and acrimonious parting, it lived up to its founders vision of an effective family of national groups within an international organization. By 1988, the organization had established relatively autonomous member organizations in 61 countries, all within an international federation; FoE-International (FoEI). One of FoEs clearest successes has been the spread of the network to countries in the developing world, and a relatively democratic decision-making structure between and among national FoEs. Expansion to the south took off after the 1986 annual general meeting, which was hosted by the Malaysian FoE, Sahabat Alam Malaysia. FoEI was also one of the rst international environmental groups to recognize the need to support developing civil society in the former USSR. Although founded in the US, FoEs international headquarters is in Amsterdam. Combined global membership in 1988 was close to one million, and the combined annual budget of FoEI was nearly $200 million (US), with 700 full time staff members. FoE, like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, is prepared to tackle a wide range of concerns, from forests to pesticides, climate change and ozone depletion to nuclear energy, and the damming of rivers. FoEs US head ofce in Washington, DC has developed a global leadership role in nongovernmental organization (NGO) campaigns to reform the environmental policies of Export Credit Agencies and international nancial institutions. Its US Executive Director, Brent Blackwelder, was arrested in the Washington protests against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the spring of 2000. FoE (UK) has been in the lead in protesting genetically modied foods. FoEs style is campaign driven, not corporate. It aspires to grassroots

Futures research is a small but vibrant eld of inquiry, theory, and practice. It does not predict or promote one particular future. Instead, it studies a wide range of potential or alternative futures. Sometimes these are spelled out in the form of stories about the future, usually called future scenarios or images of the future. Often one or two of these will be very positive, one or two very negative, and the rest somewhere in between. Some of these scenarios are more likely than others, of course, but often these are the negative ones. This exercise can help us choose our preferred futures and work toward making them actually happen. Long-term global environmental change plays a key role in almost every future we can imagine. Climate patterns, water, food, species and oil affect almost every scenario. Similarly, various possible socio-economic and political scenarios will have major effects on the global environment. Various futures for science and technology, too, could greatly affect the environment. If nanotechnology succeeds in building things atom by atom, molecule by molecule, it may enable us to transform toxic wastes and improve the environment cheaply and easily a scenario that sharply differs from the usual long-range forecast. For understanding global environmental change, futures research is most useful when it focuses on a horizon between 30 and 100 years from now. Shorter term scenarios can more easily pretend that the environment is not an important factor. At the other extreme, one can be fairly sure that global environmental change will not be high on the agenda for public policy 1000 years from now: either it will have been solved much earlier or we simply will not be here. The eld of futures research arose from the need for post-war planning in the late 1940s. In its early decades, it dealt largely with positive images of the future. The largest conference of futures researchers in history was held in Toronto in 1980; about 5000 attended. Even at that stage, very few of the papers mentioned war, environment, or population growth as major problems.

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Now the eld has matured, although it is still remarkably small in light of humanitys needs for thoughtful longterm planning. The major international organization for futures researchers is the World Futures Studies Federation. The Future Generations Program at the University of Malta holds regular conferences and in 1997 encouraged the United Nations Educational, Scientic and Cultural Organization General Conference to adopt a declaration on the responsibilities of the present generations towards future generations. The Foundation For the Future studies the major factors affecting society over the next 1000 years. Although various university departments offer single courses on futures research, under a variety of titles, only a few graduate programs in the world focus on futures research. Because it focuses on humanitys long-term future, or on future generations, futures research can provide a crucially important perspective to our understanding of global environmental change. By forcing us to look far ahead, futures research makes us realize the crucial need for achieving a sustainable society (and an appropriate size of population) that does not exceed the long-term carrying capacity of our environment and resources. In this way, we can give future generations an opportunity equal to ours instead of a devastated planet crowded far beyond that of today. Ideally we would like to see human well-being and the quality of life improve around the world over the next few decades, but at least we can try to ensure that they do not markedly decline. If we fail to make the needed changes if massive permanent deterioration of our physical environment and resources occurs then future generations could be much worse off than we are. At times, individuals and societies make certain choices because of immediate benets. At other times people look ahead and wisely give up some immediate benets because of greater long-term benets. Futures research encourages this longer-term or future generations perspective. Within such a perspective, longer-term decisions make excellent sense, both at the individual and the societal levels. Futures research employs a variety of approaches. Three of the most common are extrapolation, scenario-building, and the Delphi method. Computer simulation is not so common, partly because of its complexity, but it is particularly relevant for forecasting global environmental change. Extrapolation involves simply continuing a series of trends into the future. The variables could be temperature, population, stock prices, or yield per hectare. In the short run, extrapolation can be very successful because the recent track record of a variable is often the best indicator of the next few months. But in the long run extrapolation becomes risky since many trends eventually reverse.

Scenario construction is a more creative futures methodology than extrapolation. At one extreme, creating a set of scenarios is quite similar to writing science ction or future fantasy. It can be a deeply personal effort to build richly detailed stories of how things might unfold between the present and some future date. Alternatively, scenarios can be constructed by a group of managers or citizens in order to reect on various possible futures for their company or region. They can be asked to construct the most likely futures, their preferred futures, the worst and best possible futures, or some combination. A global thinktank called the Millennium Project of the American Council for the United Nations University uses questionnaires, interviews, and scenario contributors from around the world to build its scenarios, presented in their annual State of the Future report (Glenn and Gordon, 2000). Many scenarios elicit strong emotions, ranging from Lets do everything we can to avoid that horrible possibility through to Id like to devote my life to achieving that beautifully positive image of the future (see Scenarios, Volume 5). The Delphi method involves repeated surveys of a panel of experts on likely future events and achievements, sometimes even on the most likely date that each will occur. Because the results of each round are fed back to the respondents in their next round, the expert opinions often move toward a consensus position. In order to take into account the ways in which variables and contingencies may inuence the outcome, a Delphi study may add cross-impact analysis by constructing a matrix to show their interdependencies (Bell, 1997). Computer simulation can be used to develop and manipulate models of the atmosphere, the biosphere, the economy, or a mix of all three. This approach usefully forces the futures researcher to explicitly and precisely state many assumptions. The resulting model can be used to answer questions about the likely outcome if certain changes occur in key variables or policies. What will happen to world resources and population, for instance, if we continue with the status quo, often called the business-as-usual scenario ? (see Business-as-usual Scenarios, Volume 5) What if we truly shift to a policy of sustainability (Meadows et al., 1992)?

REFERENCES
Bell, W (1997) Foundations of Futures Studies, Transaction, New Brunswick, NJ. Glenn, J C and Gordon, T J (2000) State of the Future at the Millennium, American Council for the United Nations University, Washington, DC. Meadows, D H, Meadows, D L, and Randers, J (1992) Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future, Chelsea Green, Post Mills, VT.

G
Gaia Hypothesis
G R Williams
Guelph, Canada

Gaia was the name given in Greek mythology to Mother Earth. Thus, it is etymologically related to all our words pre xed with geo-, such as geography and geology. In 1972 James Lovelock appropriated the name Gaia for his concept that the total ensemble of living organisms which constitute the biosphere (and) can act as an active adaptive control system able to maintain the Earth in homeostasis (Lovelock and Margulis, 1974a). This imaginative suggestion has gained considerable popular support but has been the subject of trenchant scienti c criticism. The concept of Gaia arises as an attempt to answer two questions. First, how is one to account for the anomalous composition of Earths atmosphere? The atmosphere of Planet Earth is anomalous in two respects. The mixture of gases in our atmosphere is far from chemical equilibrium. For example, over geological time, nitrogen and oxygen would be expected to react to form oxides of nitrogen. The coexistence of methane and oxygen in the atmosphere is an even more convincing example, departing from thermodynamic equilibrium by a factor of 1030 . The atmosphere of Earth is also anomalous in comparison with that of the other terrestrial planets, Venus and Mars. On these planets the composition of the atmosphere is close to chemical equilibrium. There is little free molecular oxygen (O2 ) and the predominant gaseous species is carbon dioxide (CO2 ). Lovelock suggested that the aberrances on Earth are caused by the activities of the global biota and that, more generally, the detection of such anomalies could be used as a criterion for the presence of life on a planet (Lovelock, 1975). The spectroscopic detection of thermodynamic anomalies in the atmospheres of planets orbiting other stars is now becoming a possibility. Such evidence would be a remarkable vindication of Lovelocks suggestion. The control experiment has already been performed: a y-by of Earth by the spacecraft

Galileo found profound departures from chemical equilibrium indicative of the presence of life (Sagan et al., 1993)! The second question to which the Gaia concept seeks to provide an answer is, how has life been able to persist on Earth for a period of at least 3.5 billion years? For this length of time the environmental conditions of the planetary surface must have remained within limits that life in its various forms could tolerate. As Lovelock and Margulis (1974b) noted:
Stable temperature, pH and element cycling requirements for life must have been met on this planet for the entire recorded history of the Earth. Organisms found in extreme environments are highly specialized. If the Earth had frozen for even a few tens of thousands of years, or if hot acid springs had been widely distributed for even a single epoch, these occurrences would have been discerned from the fossil record.

This stability suggests a control system similar, for example, to those that maintain constancy in such characteristics as body temperature and the concentration of such blood constituents as hydrogen ions and glucose. This constancy of the internal environment, homeostasis, forms the model for the Gaian idea that the conditions of the external environment have been held within limits favourable to life since its origin 3.53.8 billion years ago. The key point to Lovelocks use of the word Gaia is that it brings together two ideas. First is the idea of an adaptive control system analogous to the thermostatic control of room temperature, involving a sensor (thermostat) and effector (furnace or air conditioner). Such a system is inferred from the persistence of life through the geological record. Second is the idea that this control is exercised through the collective activities of the biota. Such control may be inferred, he suggested, from the anomalous chemical composition of the atmosphere. The two ideas are connected (for instance global temperature is profoundly affected by atmospheric composition) but it is essential to the Gaian notion that both be present. In Lovelocks view Gaia is not just a global control system (inorganic control mechanisms can be postulated) nor is it just the global biota. Rather, Lovelock suggests that the global biota, are responsible for maintaining the steady state (but non-equilibrium) properties of the surface of the Earth (Williams, 1996).

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The idea of a living Earth, given a name that has religious overtones, has acquired considerable popular appeal. However, some concern has been expressed that an undue emphasis on the adaptability and resilience of the environment (and even its ability to heal itself) might encourage insouciance with respect to the deleterious effects of human activities. That Lovelock s concept is not consonant with those who would interpret Gaia as allowing unfettered human disruption of the environment is clear. However, within the Gaian scheme of things, the species Homo sapiens has no privileged position and a degree of stability consonant with the persistence of many forms of life might permit a range of environmental conditions incompatible with human existence. Environmental activists have focused attention on the central role ascribed to the global biota and on the name Gaia, which conjures up a sense of reverence for life. For instance, there is a Missa Gaia commissioned by and performed annually in New York City s Cathedral of St. John the Divine. A search of the World Wide Web for Gaia alone displayed 36 339 pages, and 1453 pages for the association of Gaia and Lovelock. Within the scienti c community, the analysis of the Gaian hypothesis by geochemists and biologists has focused on a number of issues. The notion that a biota can play a catalytic role in determining planetary processes has become more fully appreciated. It has been recognized for many years that the oxygen of the atmosphere is derived from water through the biological process of photosynthesis. More recently, the seasonal uctuations in atmospheric carbon dioxide, that are such a conspicuous feature of the Mauna Loa record, have been recognized as testimony to the ability of the biota to in uence atmospheric composition. But scientists studying the important inorganic cycles of the planet have been reluctant to assign a signi cant role to the biota (Holland, 1984). More recently, as geochemists have started to analyze planetary issues from a systems analysis point of view (Kump et al., 1998) focusing on biogeochemical cycles, Lovelock (1986) has suggested the term geophysiology, to bring together those focusing on such cycles with those searching for biotic control systems but the word lacks the mythological resonance that gives the earlier Gaian idea its impact. It is this latter notion (of a global biotic control system) that has led to the strongest criticism of the idea of Gaia (Williams, 1996, Chapter 5). In early formulations of the idea, Lovelock did not hesitate to write both of control of the global environment by the biosphere (which might be uncontroversial) and of control for the biosphere . Insofar as the latter has teleological implications, i.e., it implies that the Gaian system exhibits purposiveness, this runs counter to mainstream contemporary biological thinking. Indeed, if one wished to speak of a living Earth or Earth as an organism, it would be almost mandatory to present evidence of such purposiveness. Thus the real problem lies

not with the implication of a purposeful Gaia, but with the absence of any account as to how purpose would be built into the Gaian organism. For those entities that biologists recognize as organisms, apparent purposiveness is accounted for by natural selection. Recently, evolutionary accounts have even provided an explanation for cases of cooperative activities of organisms in communities. In addition, cooperation among biotic components is seen in all multi-cellular organisms, which depend upon cooperation between the genes expressed differentially in the differentiated tissues. More relevantly, a similar cooperation can exist between genes in different organisms. However, such cooperation has been demonstrated only within communities of closely related individuals. A global organism would require intergenomic interactions among organisms of many very different species separated by long distances. To most biologists the possibility of such large-scale symbioses seems improbable to impossible. The problem may be expressed in another way. Apparent purposiveness arises in living systems because the random mutation of genes throws up occasional variants that can survive and reproduce better than the original strain or can survive and reproduce in ecological niches inaccessible to the original strain. Such an evolutionary scenario for the Origin of Species has two prerequisites, time and genetic potential variation. There has been plenty of time, four billion years, over which action could take place. What the Gaian concept appeared to lack was a means of explaining the source of genetic potential variation (Ehrlich, 1991) (the grounds for selective success are not important if a means can be identi ed). Symbiotic cooperation may be as important as interspeci c competition, but there must be a vast reservoir of variation, and it must be heritable variation, on which cumulative selection can operate. (Note that the idea of interplanetary selection has never been proposed other than as a reductio ad absurdum (Dawkins, 1982)). Watson and Lovelock (1983) attempted to meet the objections of biologists by constructing a model of a planetary world that was receiving radiation from a star, the output radiation of which was increasing monotonically. In their formulation, the temperature of the planet was set by the balance between incoming and outgoing radation; the latter comprising both re ected and re-radiated energy. If the planetary albedo was held constant, the surface temperature of the planet would rise as the radiative output of the star increased. The expected increase in temperature could be readily calculated using the Stefan Boltzmann relationship between radiation and temperature. Lovelock and Watson then seeded their imaginary planet with daisies of two types: black and white. At lower stellar output the black daisies ourished and decreased the planetary albedo, thus increasing the surface temperature; as the stellar output increased, the white daisies competed successfully. This increased the planetary albedo and the surface

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temperature was modulated below the value expected for a lifeless planet. Thus, the presence of these two variants (black or white) of a single species on Daisyworld produced a remarkable stabilization of a global environmental parameter (see Daisyworld, Volume 2). Like the original concept of Gaia, the Daisyworld model has produced both interest and controversy. It has been elaborated to accommodate multi-species interactions and it has been demonstrated that some variations of the model are destabilizing. Nonetheless, the original model can be said to have fullled its original purpose. It provides an existence theorem that shows that competition between the populations of black and white daisies can produce global environmental stabilization without any teleological presuppositions being built into the model. The problem with Daisyworld is not that the model did not work but that it was so remote from the real world to make its applicability uncertain. The daisies have no physiology or biochemistry, they are simple geometrical black or white discs. And they are introduced into Daisyworld at the will of the modeller. Once again, the problem of evolution appeared to have been evaded. If stability depends upon the daisies having some particular optimum temperature for growth, how is that value achieved? In the model it is inserted by the modeller; whereas in the real world temperature optima are phenotypic characters arrived at by Darwinian selection. While the specic example had shortcomings, it did prompt scientists to search for similar feedback in the real world. The regulation of the temperature of the real planet Earth, as opposed to the imaginary planet Daisyworld, does in fact provide some possible areas in which to look for supportive evidence for the Gaian idea. One focus of effort was to try to understand the relationship of global biological activity to the well documented ice ages of the past million years (the Pleistocene). Analyses of air bubbles entrapped in ice cores from the Arctic and Antarctic provide important information about the chemistry of the atmosphere during the more recent glacialinterglacial cycles (Lorius et al., 1990). These records indicate that the concentration of the most important greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, varied in approximate synchrony with the temperature record. From the Gaian perspective, in its most direct sense, it might be suggested that a biotic thermostat should be evident in which the onset of an interglacialglacial transition (global cooling) would be accompanied by an increased level of carbon dioxide that would offset or ameliorate the fall in temperature. In fact the opposite is evident from the observations; global cooling occurs concomitantly with a decrease of carbon dioxide and, correspondingly, there is an association between global warming and increased carbon dioxide. The precise causes of the changes in carbon dioxide are not understood but such effects appear to suggest a positive feedback rather than the negative feedback that

one might expect as a characteristic of Gaia. That is, if the changes in carbon dioxide are driven by biological activity, then the biota are acting to destabilise global temperature such that a relatively minor response to cyclic changes in insulation is thus amplied rather than attenuated. Proponents of the Gaia concept might point to the fact that life persisted through the ice ages (e.g., through the mechanism eventually acting to offset the cooling) or even that the range of temperature variation allowed might have contributed in some way to later sustaining more abundant life (e.g., by usable soil). Another suggestion of a Gaian connection to the regulation of the surface temperature of Earth is provided by an intriguing relationship between the production of dimethylsulphide (DMS), (CH3 )2 S, by marine algae and cloud formation over the open ocean (Charlson et al., 1987) (see Dimethylsul de (DMS), Volume 1). Cloud formation is limited by the availability of cloud condensation nuclei. In a marine environment, remote from land, one of the principal sources of such particles arises from the atmospheric oxidation of DMS. DMS is an end product of algal metabolism, predominantly formed when the algae are ingested by zooplankton. Atmospheric oxidation of the DMS occurs principally by reaction with the OH radical (see OH Radical: is the Cleansing Capacity of the Atmosphere Changing?, Volume 2). The oxidation prod2 ucts, CH3 SO can act as cloud condensation 3 and SO4 nuclei. The particles formed in this manner appear to be of more signicance in cloud formation than those formed from sea salt. Cloud formation, in turn, can increase global albedo and affect the global radiation budget. Thus, the metabolic activity of marine algae can modulate global surface temperature. Lovelock regards this as an important instantiation (representation by on example) of the kind of processes that one would expect to encounter when looking at Earth from a Gaian perspective. However, to qualify as conrmatory evidence, such processes should be involved in a negative feedback loop. Further, to meet the Darwinian argument, the benecial effects of such a loop have to outweigh the metabolic costs to the organisms responsible for DMS production. Since Lovelock drew attention to this important climate/biota relationship in 1987, much effort and ingenuity have gone into suggesting how such a feedback might occur but no model has been generally accepted. At the observational level, measurements of CH3 SO 3 in ice cores associate the low temperatures of the last ice age with high CH3 SO 3 and therefore with increased cloud formation. As in the case of carbon dioxide, the activity of the biota appears to have been destabilizing. The decrease in temperature would be more pronounced as the result of both a drawdown of atmospheric carbon dioxide, leading to a reduced greenhouse effect, and an increase in DMS production, leading to an increase in global albedo.

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The concept and notion of Gaia is intriguing, it has provoked interesting areas of scientic inquiry and it continues to provoke much debate. As analysis of the Earth as a system continues, the Gaian contribution has been an enhanced recognition of the role of the biosphere. Two effects on biology are likely to persist: a new interest in very large-scale symbioses and a new consciousness of the importance of microbial processes in global ecology. Thus, some acceptance has been given to that part of the Gaian view which sees the functioning of the planetary biosphere as being dominated, today as it has been for 3.5 billion years, by microorganisms (see Microbial Diversity, Volume 2). Is Gaia merely a description (fanciful, useful, or both) of the state of affairs on one particular planet, Earth? Or is Gaianness, to use computer jargon, platform-independent? If Lovelocks suggestion that habitation of a planet will always result in an anomalous planetary surface were ever to be substantiated, then Gaia theory would take its place among the major imaginative leaps of scientic thought. One might particularly liken it to the 19th century formulation of the Laws of Thermodynamics, rules that apply to assemblages of matter, independent of structure or location. While further investigation of the Earth will be fruitful in expanding understanding, the search for life elsewhere in the Universe, which was Lovelocks original impetus for development of the concept, will provide its most stringent test.

Sagan, C, Thompson, W R, Carlson, R, Gurnett, D, and Hord, C (1993) A Search for Life on Earth from the Galileo Spacecraft, Nature, 365, 589 593. Watson, A J and Lovelock, J E (1983) Biological Homeostasis of the Global Environment: The Parable of Daisyworld, Tellus, 35(B), 284 289. Williams, G R (1996) The Molecular Biology of Gaia, Columbia University Press, New York.

Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand

(1869 1948) Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, also known as The Mahatma (The Great Souled One), is most famous as the non-violent force behind the independence of India from British rule in 1947. His spiritual stance on the struggle for truth (satyagraha ) also led him into developing his inuential teachings and practices on economics and what would now be called alternative living. The idea of small is beautiful, based on the book of the same name by Ernest Schumacher, derives ultimately from Gandhis example. Gandhi was born in 1869 in Western India, and as a young man traveled to London to study law. This gave him insights into British culture that were invaluable in later life; for example, well placed letters to The Times, or appeals to the British sense of fair play. While in London in the late 1880s, he became caught up in various alternative groups, made up of spiritualists and vegetarians, who were interested in Eastern thought. Ironically, it was these Westerners who awoke Gandhi to the strengths of his own Indian traditions. Gandhi also absorbed the writings of Leo Tolstoy on non-violence, and was particularly inuenced by John Ruskins book, Unto This Last, which attacked the classical economists views of human nature as selsh and competitive. This became hybridized with his own Indian traditions, a mixture of Hinduism and the non-violent religion of Jainism. As a result, beginning with his career in South Africa as a barrister, Gandhi evolved a sophisticated strategy for pressuring governments and companies to change their policies. This combined exhaustive legal work on the issues at stake with a general mobilization of the affected parties in non-violent protest. Gandhi believed, quite early on, that the main reason for the maltreatment of the Indian communities (and others later on) was that these communities had themselves internalized the vision of their current masters. By non-violent protest, these communities were

REFERENCES
Charlson, R J, Lovelock, J E, Andreae, M O, and Warren, S G (1987) Oceanic Phytoplankton, Atmospheric Sulfur, Cloud Albedo, and Climate, Nature, 326, 655 661. Dawkins, R (1982) The Extended Phenotype, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Ehrlich, P (1991) Coevolution and its Applicability to the Gaia Hypothesis, in Scientists on Gaia, eds S H Schneider and P J Boston, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Holland, H D (1984) The Chemical Evolution of the Atmosphere and Oceans, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Kump, L R, Kasting, J F, and Crane, R G (1998) The Earth System: An Introduction to Earth Systems Science, Prentice Hall, New York. Lorius, C, Jouzel, J, Raynaud, D, Hansen, J, and Letreut, H (1990) The Ice-core Record: Climate Sensitivity and Future Greenhouse Warming, Nature, 347, 139 145. Lovelock, J E (1975) Thermodynamics and the Recognition of Alien Biospheres, Proc. R. Soc. London B, 189, 167 181. Lovelock, J E (1986) Geophysiology: A New Look at Earth Science, Bull. Am. Met. Soc., 67, 392 397. Lovelock, J E and Margulis, L (1974a) Atmospheric Homeostasis By and For the Biosphere: The Gaia Hypothesis, Tellus, 26, 1 10. Lovelock, J E and Margulis, L (1974b) Homeostatic Endencies of the Earths Atmosphere, Origins of Life, 5, 93 103.

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empowered, and were morally strengthened by their very refusal to resort to violence. This gave them superiority over their supposed superiors, who inevitably resorted to violence, violence that would in the long run undermine the ofcial claims to legitimacy. Accompanying this non-violent approach to political conict, Gandhi further explored the personal and social aspects of the pure in heart, through experiments in simple living in ashrams, that is, small communities of believers. These experiments in weaving ones own cloth, cleaning out latrines (seriously threatening in a caste-ridden society where only untouchables were supposed to do this), milking goats, etc., were eventually made part and parcel of Gandhis politics. He argued that before one could rule the nation (the raj ) one had to be able to rule oneself (swaraj ) and that this entailed, among other things, making ones own products, like clothing (swadeshi ). This was a direct attack on the vast British import/export businesses centered in India. In the 1930s, as the struggle for Indian independence heated up, Gandhi became world famous, both in prison and out on the march. His contests against the British government mobilized millions of followers in extraordinary scenes of non-violent resistance. Simultaneously, Gandhis constant effort to understand and develop the implications of the search for spiritual truth, in the personal as well as political spheres made him a beacon for some, and a headache for others. An escalating series of fasts and non-violent protests brought the British government to the reluctant admission that they would have to grant some form of independence to India: a process that was delayed by the onset of World War II. Throughout this period, the political party associated with Gandhi (the Congress Party, headed by a disciple of Gandhis, Nehru) continued to advocate independence. This was further complicated by the gradual dissolution of a Hindu-Muslim partnership, which would eventually lead to the bitter partition of India into India and Pakistan. Throughout the run up to Independence (in August 1947) and the rioting and ghting that accompanied it, Gandhi struggled against the tide of violence. He was himself shot by a Hindu militant on January 30, 1948. Near universal mourning ensued. Gandhis economic and environmental teachings were immediately repudiated by the new Indian government, which embarked on widespread industrialization and quasisocial central planning. Some of Gandhis disciples continued to press his teachings and practices subsequently, to marginal effect. Nevertheless, it can be seen that Gandhian non-violence as a concept and a practice has been one of the most inuential weapons in the struggle for justice over the last 50 years. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr was only one of those for whom Gandhis model was central. The

peaceful revolutions in Eastern Europe, the Philippines, and most recently in Yugoslavia owe much of their inspiration and tactics to Gandhis spiritual pressure. The core idea, that both sides in any struggle are seeking a truth, which the seemingly weaker side can impress upon the seemingly stronger through its commitment to the justness of its cause in the face of violence, has become widely practiced. Martin Luther Kings idea that segregation is a degradation of whites as much as, if not more than, blacks, also derives its moral suasion from a Gandhian vision. In recent years, Gandhism has maintained its immediate political inuence among environmentalists, notably in the mobilization against the Narmada dam, and the Chipko womens movement in Northern India. His writings on self-rule at the village level remain central to participatory models of development. Finally, over the longer term, it is his attempt to lead a spiritually holistic life, where non-violence includes non-violence against the things of the Earth that makes Gandhi a continuing gure to be reckoned with in the environmental movement worldwide.

REFERENCES
Gandhi, M K (1927) An Autobiography: or, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth. Iyer, R (1986) The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
PETER TIMMERMAN Canada

Garden, Landscape
see Landscape, Urban Landscape, and the Human Shaping of the Environment (Volume 5)

Global Environmental Change and Environmental History

see Global Environmental Change and Environmental History (Opening essay, Volume 5)

Global Forests: Citizen Monitoring

see Global Forest Watch (Volume 4)

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Globalization
see Development and Global Environmental Change (Opening essay, Volume 5)

Globalization in Historical Perspective

see Globalization in Historical Perspective (Opening essay, Volume 5)

voices in international forums, only the state is recognized as voter. Therein lies the heart of the dilemma of international management: The state represents a range of demographic constituencies that organize around territorial conglomerations but international problems transcend territoriality and even their mere denition (let alone solutions) cannot be readily mapped over the global arrays of national sovereignty. Moreover, the state is notorious for its porousness (just about everything leaks across national borders) thereby compounding the dual tasks of discharging responsibility and the effective execution of authority.
Challenges to Governance

Governance and International Management

Nazli Choucri
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

The essence of the management challenge worldwide is how to reduce the critical disconnects between the demands for coordination and governance, on the one hand, and the supply of legitimate or legitimized mechanisms, on the other given current realities and evolving complexities.
Modes of Collaboration

In the absence of world government, the matter of global governance assumes particularly important proportions. This is especially true in the environmental domain as human activities generate signi cant problems of global scale and scope. At issue are formalizing modes of moderating con icts and enhancing prospects for cooperation among nations in a context where the proverbial anarchy prevails, modulated by rapid change and increased complexity. Signi cant among these complexities is the variety of actors and agents whose interactions are subject to international management; nation-states, international corporations, non-governmental groups, local actors, and regional agencies are among the most salient of these actors. And, as international rules for collaboration and management consolidate, new actors appear to be emerging with new demands and new propensities for con ict or cooperation as the case might be.

Few international realities are as readily discernable and ephemeral, at the same time, than the diversity of collaboration potentials. These range from issue-specic bilateral agreements (formal or informal) to broad ranging, comprehensive global accords (again, formal or informal). In general terms, the logic of international management rests on three key questions, generally known as the why, when and how of global accord: 1. 2. 3. Why collaborate? When to collaborate? How to collaborate?

GLOBAL REALITIES
The reality of global politics, and its legal underpinnings or lack thereof, is that only states are enfranchised to act on behalf of individuals. Only states represent populations; only governments represent constituencies with legal standing. Individuals per se have, as of yet, no formal mechanism of representation other than the state. While there is evidence of some movement toward recognition of alternative

Of the many conditions that necessitate global accords, two are particularly apt in reecting the cluster of reasons driving the quest for accord. Countries collaborate (a) in the pursuit of common interests, or (b) in the management of common aversions. In the rst instance, states seek collaboration in order to jointly pursue some objective that they might not be able attain individually. In the second, the quest for collaboration is driven by the awareness that they face common adverse conditions that require coordinated action for effective management. This general logic presumes that countries can identify their specic preferences and objectives, as well as vulnerabilities and sensitivities, and that countries are able to identify the conditions under which unilateral action is not appropriate or bilateral operations will not be effective. By denition, collaboration involves self-imposed internal or external constraints on national sovereignty. Internal constraints mean refraining from taking actions that have

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national consequences. External constraints mean refraining from generating adverse effects outside territorial boundaries. In the environmental domain, broadly dened, as well as in the domain of sustainable development, global accords involve both sets of constraints.

Doing damage by doing nothing. Simply by choosing not to take a stand, nations can accentuate prevailing environmental problems; thus, the costs of not participating in evolving environmental accords will be equivalent to overt opposition.

IMPERATIVES OF INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT

Underlying the development of modes of international management is the evolution of shared understandings, common formulation of problems at hand, and a joint search for modes of coordinated action. In those terms, the accords themselves are the end product of one type of process; namely that of reaching an agreement. The follow-up requirements involve an entirely new and often complex set of processes at both national and international levels. The duality, framed in terms of joint pursuit versus common aversion, begs the question of contents, i.e., what is it that is being pursued or needs to be avoided? Who is it that is engaged in avoidance or in pursuit of aversions? What would be the impacts of success or failure (assuming clarity on criteria for each)? How would any of this make a difference? When might this matter most?
Collaboration Imperative

Once collaboration takes place in an institutionalized context, one might ask: why does institutionalization happen?
Institutional Necessity

To simplify, the conventional understanding is that institutionalization at the global level takes place in order to: (a) consolidate and pursue new norms; and (b) coerce states that resist the new norms, and pressure states breaking norms into conformity with the collective understanding; (c) reduce uncertainty in process, outcomes, and information; and in some cases (d) generate and maintain shared modes of communication, understandings, and explanations. Finally, institutionalization is believed to (e) facilitate mediation among con icting actors, and (f) enhance overall prospects for problem solving. All of the above is contingent on some minimum degree of shared understanding of the challenges at issue, in combination with the dual principles of participation and representation in a world based on the principle of national sovereignty.
Key Trends

Collaboration becomes an imperative when the problem is recognized, when it is pervasive, and when it eludes unilateral solution and, above all, when no action inevitably means a worsening outcome. These properties are well illustrated in the environment domain characterized by uncertainty, irreversibility, and complexity. Collaboration becomes a global imperative when: Nature is a player. This means that environmental effects of human action may take on unanticipated forms, whose uncertainties are suf ciently great as to insert a random element of strong proportions that cannot be contained by human action. Damage is due to legitimate action. Far from re ecting pathology and deviance, environmental damage is often due to the most normal, routine, and legitimate behavior, whose very nature may be condoned if not lauded worldwide. Force cannot work. In such contingencies, the deployment of troops, the most conventional instrument of force, is a singularly ineffective, if not a remarkably useless course of action, in that the response is irrelevant to the nature of the challenge. Compliance is imperative. The pervasiveness of environmental dislocation means that no one can be immune from attack so to speak and that everyone s security is contingent on compliance by everyone else.

In this connection, three trends have contributed to the increasing importance of international environmental management. The rst pertains to the increasing role of scientists in shaping the policy agenda. By drawing attention to environmental dislocations due to human activity, by voicing views expressed by a critical mass of scientists playing an important catalytic role by pressing for political recognition of the problems at hand, they exert pressure at national and international levels for policy response. The second trend relates to matters of trial and error, precedent, and renewed efforts in the domain of environmental policy formulation and coordination. The international community has gradually developed a set of principles that reinforce the fabric of international environmental agreements. These include the precautionary principle and the polluter pays principle, among others. The third trend is the increasing attention at the national and international levels to matters of capacity building for environmental management as well as increased investments in national environmental reporting.

MODES OF INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT

In the domain of environmental management and sustainable development, the spectrum of management

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modes ranges from formal agreements with legally binding commitments (i.e., the conventions) to informal agreements and soft law (like Agenda 21), on the one hand, and a set of varied instrumentalities and modalities, on the other. These patterns (framed in Table 1 below) are incorporated in the knowledge-based global networking system entitled, the Global System for Sustainable Development (GSSD). Used for examining the implications of global accords at local, national, and international levels, GSSD is currently operating in multiple languages and in different parts of the world. While items (1) and (2) in Table 1 are those most commonly mentioned when referring to global accords, it is often useful to consider that these modalities are often supported by a combination of modes (3) (14) as relevant. Conceived as legally binding international commitments, the Conventions represent the strongest form of accord and require the most intrusive forms of institutional supports. This latter consideration is due to the fact that formal commitment entails a corollary commitment to put in place enabling mechanisms: nationally or internationally, as the case may be. This corollary is in the nature of an insurance policy. To reduce potentials for non-compliance due to capacity constraints (i.e., countries may be unable as opposed to being unwilling to comply) a range of capacity building measures increasingly accompanies formal commitments. This is especially the case in the domain of environment and sustainable development. Many of these measures are in the nature of institutional innovations, which can often impinge on traditional conceptions of sovereignty.

Table 1 Modes of governance and international management as represented in the Global System for Sustainable Development (GSSD) (1) Agenda 21 (2) Formal conventions, spanning a range of general and comprehensive issues, as: Atmospheric Hazardous wastes Marine environment Terrestrial resources Freshwater resources Nuclear, safety, and related technology Others (3) New development and investment mechanisms Cleaner development mechanism (CDM) Joint implementation Activities implemented jointly Innovative investment system (4) Technology agreements, such as: Technology transfer Training and implementation (5) Monitoring performance Limits on hazardous activities Benchmarking systems Compliance records (6) Codes of conduct and voluntary agreements (7) Financial and investment codes Environmental conduct Voluntary agreements Human rights issues Other (8) Conict management and peace strategies Dispute resolution Peace keeping Conict prevention Other (9) Population management Population policies International migration strategies Resettlement initiatives Other (10) Economic adjustments and agreements (11) Trade regimes and agreements (12) Environment agreements (13) Corporate responses Organizations Agreements Private-public partnerships Social responsibility (14) Strategies of international institutions
Source: http://gssd.mit.edu.

INTERNATIONAL RESPONSES AND INSTITUTIONAL INNOVATIONS

When environmental issues are rooted at the local level and travel to the global commons, when individual actions generate global dysfunctionalities, and when states are unable to manage their own environmental agenda, then national governments and their instruments are placed in a precarious position. On the one hand is the situation discussed below (within state borders) that often eludes governmental management. On the other hand are cases where competing sovereignties (each subject to similar elusiveness) seek common principles and modalities of convergence.
Evolving Modalities

Given that states remain the only voters in global forums, nonetheless, there has been a discernable move toward expanded forms of international management involving both participation and representation of non-state actors.

This move is driven by the realization that environment and sustainability are characterized by rather novel properties distinguishing this realm of evolving international law from other domains of international interaction. For example, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Kyoto Protocol and the follow-up

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measures, all targeted specically to environmental factors, serve to illustrate the institutional innovations as well as the attendant disconnects (see United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and Kyoto Protocol, Volume 4). Among the distinctive features is the framework strategy, rather than precise commitments; process orientation coupled with target specications; provision for internal as well as international institutional supports; and commitment to long-term adjustment processes based on expectations of innovations in policy instruments. Less formal than the UNFCCC process, but no less pervasive, is the Agenda 21 process; including the formulation of the contents of Agenda 21, and institutionalization of the follow-up mechanisms via the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development. Central to these novelties is the tendency for various interests and interest groups to organize networks of communication that eventually become networks of inuence. As a result, the increased use of observer status in international forums, combined with the provision of space and the allocation of time for various non-governmental groups to convene during the formal negotiation processes has given non-state actors new venues for voicing their concerns, if not their demands. While none of these innovations alters the fundamental constitution of global politics and none of this transforms the basic sovereignty of the state, it does render the state more transparent and its formal actions subject to greater scrutiny. These processes are designed to accommodate non-state actors and interests only to the extent that these can be incorporated within the formal structures of deliberation among sovereign entities. But the consolidation of these new institutional processes invariably serves as conduits through which the demands of local constituencies can be reected in global forums. Invariably, also, they point to the fundamental disconnect, for example, that the mayors of mega cities are not (and cannot be) at the negotiation table nor is there any legal provision for their presence. However, they now have access to transmission mechanisms that may ensure that their views may make their way through the global policy formulation process.
Transcending or Incorporating the State?

What happens next if the views do make their way through the formulation process? In essence the same challenges of disconnect remain. If, and only if, the national government is willing (or agrees) to engage in a dialogue with the mega city institutions (or mayors), can authority devolve from the state to sub-national units and to extra-territorial institutions? Both instances reshape the responsibilities of the state and the scope of its leverages.

In the absence of any serious potential for redesigning the global state system, the most plausible approach might involve rendering more robust some of the existing instrumentalities. Among these are: (a) international pressures on national government to formally account for urban representation in global forums (as part of the national delegation or in nongovernmental contexts); (b) formal arrangements among sub-national governments (such as mayors or functional equivalents) to represent their own interests directly in global forums (as nongovernmental agencies); (c) organized interest articulation of sub-state (or transstate) representatives to obtain new incentives from national institutions or international institutions, (d) potentials for direct negotiation on projects that arise in the context of CDM (cleaner development mechanism) discussions, and other. As an example, much of the deliberations and reporting of outcomes for UNFCCC 5th Conference of Parties (COP/5), has stressed two major venues of deliberation the state centered forums and the non-governmental organization (NGO) based deliberations. However, even when diversity of interests is evoked, it is almost always with reference to diversity of interests across states. The disconnects at hand pertain to the global implications of sub-national interests and of their potential disjunction with national interests. The data requirements (within the context of national reporting as well as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)) are nationally dened, sectorally formatted, and activity framed (as observations permit). In addition, we can discern the foundations for four new venues, any one of which might have some merit, but altogether, they may create signicant next steps in the question for viable modes of international management. These can be characterized as: (a) consolidation of cross-national political networks supporting collaboration; (b) combining resources for generating and marshalling needed knowledge buttressing the demands for collaboration; (c) maintaining a sustained presence in international forums to inuence the evolution of accommodation to non-state actors; and (d) exerting organized and mounting pressures on national representatives toward greater international management. Many of these developments are converging around the notions of civil international society and of civic global responsibility, where both qualier c terms reect a new recognition of non-state agencies, and the potential legitimization of the international civil (in contrast to state centered) society. Finally, it is important that such venues may contribute signicantly to the consolidation of the two critical conditions for effective management, at any level, local or global. These are: (a) viable and relevant modes of representation; and (b) effective and standardized mechanisms for participation. The international community is in the

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midst of a grand experiment, namely developing modes of international governance and global management in a still largely sovereign centered world, without imposing formal government and institutions of governance that mirror those of the state system. See also : International Environmental Law, Volume 5.

Choucri, N, ed (1993) Global Accord: Environmental Challenges and International Response, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. The Fridtjof Nansen Institute (1999) Yearbook of International Co-operation on Environmental and Development, Earthscan Publications, London.

FURTHER READING
Brown-Weiss, E and Jacobson, H K, eds (1998) Engaging Countries: Strengthening Compliance with International Environmental Accords, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, http://gssd.mit.edu.

Green Parties
see Political Movements/Ideologies and the Environment (Volume 5)

H
Hazards in Global Environmental Change
Kenneth Hewitt
Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada

The prospect of disasters related to, or magni ed by, global environmental change is increasingly debated. The problem arises in at least four ways: (i) Dangerous trends: environmental damage or transformations themselves threaten extreme harm; for example, ozone-layer depletion, bioconcentration of toxic contaminants or the emergence of drugresistant epidemic diseases. (ii) Magni ed risks: there may be increases in the incidence and scale of disasters associated with age-old threats such as droughts, re or pests. Examples include the role of deforestation in oods and wild res, and of climate change in weather hazards or an expanded range of insect-borne epidemic disease (see Natural Hazards, Volume 3). (iii) Novel threats: new or magni ed disasters may arise from the development and deployment of technological innovations, or from deliberate environmental modi cations and megaprojects. Some identify such risks with, for example, the introduction or escape of genetically engineered organisms into the biosphere, very large water and power schemes, or ocean oor mining. (iv) Increasing social vulnerability and adaptive capacities. This class of problem is related to the fact: that the occurrence and form of a disaster always depends both upon dangerous conditions and the state of human communities exposed to them: increasing social vulnerability and adaptive capacities. The likelihood and impacts of disasters are transformed by demographic, organizational, work and life style changes even in relation to environmental hazards that do not themselves change in severity or incidence. Endangerment arises with urbanization, transformations in industry, agriculture, transportation, and leisure activities worldwide. Only where

public safety measures keep pace, will dangers be kept in check. Modern innovations and organized responses also counteract such dangers. Research, forecasting, standards, protections, insurance and other safety nets, have dramatically improved public security or the ability to survive damaging events in some places. Societal vulnerability and adaptability apply, of course, in all four of these disaster contexts. And they involve another issue of global change: changing approaches to disasters. In addition to new disasters and changing risks, there are emerging constituencies, technologies, agencies and agendas relating to disasters. They demand or promote re nements in understanding, or a recasting of the problem. A strong impetus comes from changing expectations of, and dif culties for, national or international emergency preparedness, for humanitarian assistance and activism by, or on behalf of, disaster victims (IFRCRCS, 1998). Most disaster-related investigations still focus upon environmental and technological agents that may cause harm, whether oods and earthquakes, oil spills, or viral diseases. There is a continual ow of new ndings and renements regarding these hazards. Few will question the importance of such knowledge for risk assessments in a changing world. Nevertheless, the importance of social or cultural understanding, and the dangers of neglecting it, are increasingly recognized (Hewitt, 1983; Blaikie et al., 1994; Quarantelli, 1998; Enarson and Morrow, 1998; Oliver-Smith and Hoffman, 1999). To grasp the meaning and impetus of these concerns, we must consider their relation to entrenched and contested views of the disaster problem. Most of us may feel we know a disaster when we see one. Yet, like any other general problem development, poverty, war, ruined habitats it is much harder to nd a widely agreed characterization of disaster, adequate for scientic and humanitarian purposes. Approaches tend to split, rstly, between those preoccupied with what is unique about disasters, and those that link them to broader conditions of environment and society.

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DISASTER IN AND OF ITSELF

Disaster or calamity identi es a primary form of experience; a condition of great fear, life-threatening harm and loss. There is also a sense of something untoward, violent, tragic. Everyone dies, but mass deaths by re or ood, in a plane crash, an avalanche, a famine or terrorist attack, seem specially terrible misfortunes. There is not just untimely death and thwarted life. The capacities a person might otherwise have to escape or survive are overwhelmed as in a nightmare. There is the agony of abandonment by, or being unable to protect, loved ones. Also conveyed is the sense of singular occasions or historic(al) turning points (Elliot, 1972; Scarry, 1985). At their worst, there is little to distinguish the disasters of war, famine, natural and technological catastrophe or pandemic disease. People have always lumped them, or their imageries, together: ruined homes, uprooted families, hungry, exhausted and desperate folk eeing the devastation or huddled in makeshift shelters, the injured and the heaped up dead. Most disasters share this common and dreadful content (Sorokin, 1942). Hence, it is argued they are, above all, humanitarian problems demanding all reasonable efforts to prevent or mitigate them, especially where human-induced changes threaten to make them worse. Some technical or of cial de nitions also accept and characterize disasters as distinctive and special problems, though they distance themselves from victims feelings and startling imagery. A recent, clear example de nes disasters as:
non-routine events in societies or their larger subsystems (e.g., regions, communities) that involve social disruption and physical harm. Among the key de ning properties of such events are (1) length of forewarning, (2) magnitude of impact, (3) scope of impact, and (4) duration of impact. (Kreps, 1995)

or symptomatic of, the social systems in which they occur (Morren, 1983).

DISASTER MYTHS AND THE PRINCIPLE OF CONTINUITY

Extraordinary terror, trauma, destruction and death surely occur in disasters. Few can argue against paying special attention to them and the worst hit areas. However, comparative and general studies reveal a very different balance of conditions. In most events, most property and persons within a designated disaster areas, are only slightly harmed, or unscathed physically. Even where they are in small numbers, survivors who are not completely disabled, usually carry out most or all of the primary life-saving and harmreducing activity. In the crucial hours or days before outside help arrives, if it arrives, they rescue those who would, otherwise, be lost. Much, or most emergency relief, food and shelter, is provided by households within or near the devastated areas. However, popular or media images not only focus on the more or less heroic rescue efforts of outside agencies, the armed forces, international relief and modern technologies. They also portray the disaster in terms of wall to wall devastation, chaos and panic; or concentrate on the more pathetic and prostrate victims, anti-social behavior such as looting, and lucky or miraculous survivals (Ploughman, 1995). Disaster research has shown that these are usually exceptional cases, or re ect mistaken assumptions, stereotypes and selective reportage. Instead, most survivors act, as far as is humanly possible, in terms of the concerns and responsibilities they had before, whether in families and the community, their institutional position or professional skills. This suggests the need for what Quarantelli and Dynes (1977) call a principle of continuity with, rather than a radical separation of disaster from, preexisting societal conditions and normal human responses. If so, how and how far preexisting conditions and resources in uence peoples responses to disaster are important questions. These, no less than the severity of ood or re, decide the capacities of those at risk to survive and cope. In turn, this suggests that the key questions of global change are how it alters people s vulnerability; and how it erodes or bolsters their adaptive capacities.

Establishing dimensions that seem to bracket disasters as extreme events, and separate them from other times and places, has been a concern of contributing disciplines. There is a preference for impersonal dimensions or mechanisms, in contrast to the experiential or vernacular views, described earlier:
a state/condition destabilizing the social system that manifests itself in a malfunctioning or disruption of connections and communications between its elements or social units; partial or total destruction/demolition; physical and psychological overloads suffered by some of these elements (Por riev, 1998)

INTERPRETATIONS OF CALAMITY
In the broadest terms, explanations of disaster involve four sets of factors: 1. Dangerous agents or hazards, such as earthquake or re, viruses or toxic chemicals, equipment failure or collisions, that initiate the destructive event, or cause most of the damage.

Modern ideas de ne disasters, especially, in relation to, and as the opposite of, predictable, normal, and stable conditions. However, there are other professionals who reject or strongly qualify the idea of disaster as a unique or separate problem. Rather, they see disasters as endemic to,

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2. 3.

4.

Vulnerability of exposed persons, property or activities to dangerous conditions, (discussed in detail below). Risk-reducing and disaster-mitigating measures, which may be directed at particular hazards, or vulnerabilities, and include organized emergency preparedness. Contexts and intervening conditions, factors that indirectly, but sometimes decisively, inuence the above three. For example, changes in vegetation cover by forest industries or clearance for agriculture affect ood-generating runoff. Population density, health and well-being which will change due to economic development or urbanization, alter risks of epidemic disease. Technological innovations increase risks though directed at, say, productivity or consumer demand. Such conditions intervene between dangerous forces and vulnerable people to modify their interactions, whether for good or ill, but arise or vary independently. Global change is as likely to affect risk through a range of societal and habitat transformations, as in directly altering ood hazards, safety equipment or high risk technologies.

Disaster is the actualization of social vulnerability we interpret the notion of social vulnerability as an independent factor (predictor) of risk (Carlo Pelanda, 1981)

Here, danger is seen to arise from styles of settlement and land use, occupations, technological innovations, wealth and political inuence. To accept this means that disaster reduction and emergency preparedness would have to focus much more on the risks embedded in existing social systems, and on global changes that alter peoples exposure, capacities and everyday developments.

SOCIALLY DISCRIMINATE OR INDISCRIMINATE EVENTS?

The external force/extreme event view also tends to accept that death and loss in disasters are a function of the type, intensity and distribution of the damaging agent, but socially indiscriminate affecting old and young, rich and poor, men and women at random and, in effect, equally. The opposing view emphasizes the evidence that who lives and dies, the scale and severity of losses, are strongly pregured in the social order. They clearly identify certain persons or groups, places or activities, as much more vulnerable. Again, this directs us to conditions and developments in society. Social vulnerability, and adaptive capacities must be examined, and the roles of cultural and environmental contexts. The result is a view of the origins of disaster that departs more or less strongly from mainstream, agent-specic investigations that emphasize exceptional or disaster-specic responses.

Actual disasters involve all four sets of factors, but most disaster studies and related activities focus on just one of them. An agent-specic or hazards perspective remains the prevailing perspective. Moreover, this encourages a view of disasters as originating outside, or beyond social control:
Disaster means the impinging upon a structured community of an external force capable of destroying human life or its resources for survival, on a scale dire enough to excite public alarm, to disrupt normal patterns of behavior (Lemons, 1957)

With respect to technological and social hazards, this idea of disaster converges with that of the accident (Green, 1997) in which danger is not merely identied with unforeseen and unwanted occurrences, or human error, but a domain of uncertainty:
were there perfectly accurate predictions of what would occur and when it would occur in the intricate web of atmospheric, hydrological and biological systems, there would be no hazard (White, 1974)

VULNERABILITY OR THE HUMAN ECOLOGY OF ENDANGERMENT

A vulnerability perspective considers especially how communities are exposed to dangers, the ways in which they are readily harmed, and the protections that they lack. When disasters do occur, it directs attention to peoples capacities to withstand, cope with, mitigate and recover from damages. It examines whether, or how well, they are served by organized relief and rehabilitation measures (Table 1). Here, the problem of disaster is seen to depend primarily upon on-going societal conditions or developments. It depends upon many aspects of society that, by design or default, can decrease or exaggerate the impact of damaging agents. However, if particular forms of vulnerability relate to particular hazards, peoples vulnerability can arise more or less independently of where ood, storm, epidemic disease or explosion may occur, and their severity. Vulnerability is largely created within, distributed or offset by, the social order. It depends upon how society treats people according to their age, class, or religion; on gender and

This view of disasters as uncertain, unscheduled or accidental events, serves to detach them from preexisting conditions, and the control of on-going social life, and place them in a realm of extreme and rare natural or technological processes. The only possible social responses are then seen as specialized technical efforts to model and counteract such extreme forces and events (Hewitt, 1983). There is a radical contrast, once again, with interpretations in terms of conditions of everyday life:

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Table 1 The main forms and conditions of vulnerability (after Hewitt, 1997, 144) 1. Exposure to dangerous agents or conditions through occupation, location near a dangerous facility, lifestyle 2. Physical weakness or susceptibility through predisposition, age, disability, impairment of persons, poor design of buildings, insecure practices 3. Disadvantage, or structural weakness involving lack of resources, capabilities or access to facilities, often identied with poverty, dependency, exploitation and social injustice 4. Defenselessness or lack of protection to counter weaknesses, to prevent or avoid dangerous situations, emphasizing protection otherwise available in the society concerned 5. Lack of resilience or capacities, where the means and ability to respond are limited and impaired, options are not recognized, and readiness for creative responses missing 6. Powerlessness, an inability to gain access to, or inuence safety arrangements; exclusion from and inability to get the attention of the relevant and inuential social agencies

other divisions of labor; on cultural values and legal rights (ORiordan, 1986; Enarson and Morrow, 1998). Of course, everyone is vulnerable, at least in an absolute or worst case sense. Some persons, activities or places may be vulnerable because neither they nor anyone else has the means to make them safer. Moreover, people in all situations can, and usually do, accept some risks. Yet, a majority of those who actually suffer harm and loss in most disasters are found to be vulnerable in ways that some, if not most, members of their own, or other societies, are not. The homes which collapse in earthquake are not merely structurally unsafe and badly sited, but usually house people disadvantaged in cultural and economic ways (Blaikie et al., 1994). In almost all famines, it is the already hungry or malnourished, who suffer starvation and death (Sen, 1981). Many if not most refugees have been displaced after long-term struggles with livelihood insecurity or coercive treatment (Zwi and Ugalde, 1991). Some people seem driven into, or trapped by, vulnerability syndrome. Rather than a single weakness or category, they are victimized by a whole social context (Wisner, 1993). However, even in less severe cases, vulnerability is a relative condition, and can only be dened and assessed in relation to the safety which others actually enjoy.

as important. Only the most impaired or injured are not, in some measure, active agents in their own survival, if not in larger community needs. There is no form of vulnerability which some or all societies do not deliberately work to reduce and offset. Social safety nets, defenses, insurance, and emergency preparedness can and do mitigate harm. They reduce and offset weakness, or offer protections for the specially vulnerable, for children, the elderly or disabled. Direct and longer-term involvement with communities at risk, shows how survival turns upon community values and arrangements (Watts, 1983; Vaughan, 1996). Adaptive and coping capacities are also embedded in on-going activity. Patterns of everyday living pregure and constrain the readiness, capacities, resources and values that will apply in a crisis. Resourcefulness and creative responses may be seriously undermined where social conditions promote submissiveness and dependency, or where individuals, groups and communities nd their autonomy constantly opposed and suppressed by the interests of powerful others. Indeed, people who are relatively more endangered, less well-provided with protections and lacking in adaptive capacities, are typically found to be politically weak as well. Defenselessness most often reects powerlessness (ORiordan, 1986; Watts and Bohle, 1993). The victims of natural and technological disasters have often, already, been victimized by an unjust, exploitative or coercive social order (Corradi et al., 1992; Kroll-Smith, 1995). In these views too, the forms of vulnerability and adaptive behavior are not taken as peculiar to what happens during an earthquake or re. Rather, they direct us to domestic and local spaces of risk, and everyday behavior and conditions. However, as global change studies show, everyday life is nowadays subject to unprecedented changes and risks.

SOCIAL RISK AND DISASTERS IN A TECHNOCRATIC AGE

Today, vulnerability and its changing forms relate, increasingly, to the emergence and reach of late modern society and its institutions. The geographies and contexts of risk relate mainly to whether people live within or outside such societies, and the degree of their access to, or exclusion from, modern safety and security measures. In the wealthier, late modern countries and enclaves, permanent arrangements, infrastructures and organizations play an overwhelming role in vulnerability, and in the origins of, as well as responses to, disaster. This applies, in particular, to routine public safety and everyday, widely dispersed or chronic dangers. They include institutionalized arrangements to deal with trafc accidents, household res, illnesses of childhood or the elderly, crime or product safety. These have become the special responsibility of

HUMAN ADAPTABILITY
Although vulnerability mainly suggests weakness and absent protections, studies of it nd that peoples active capabilities or resilience in relation to dangers, are at least

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government, private or non-governmental organizations, oversight agencies or service industries. They involve the largest expenditures on public safety. Vast sums of private and public money are allocated to insurance and welfare; to health, policing and the courts; to re ghting, transportation or product safety; to the armed forces, factory or mines inspections, and so on. Whole disciplines and professions have developed to research and carry out these functions, or to train staff for the relevant organizations. Although, by denition, disasters overwhelm routine arrangements, in modern societies responses are largely dependent upon large, complex organizations, albeit from outside the disaster zone. Such organizations, as Perrow (1995) expresses it, have in effect absorbed society . Moreover, the permanent large organizations dealing with chronic dangers, play decisive roles both in limiting and in responding to disasters. In most countries this applies, especially, to the role of the armed forces. Meanwhile, large organizations, their policies, priorities and performance substantially determine each persons safety or vulnerability. Nearly all jobs are in large public and private organizations, and a persons job and status in them, is the main determinant of exposure to, and protection from, risks. On the other hand, to a growing extent, disasters arise from the fallibility, excesses, or deliberate actions, of these organizations. This is so for many of the graver dangers identied with global change: accidents that arise within or from complex, high-risk organizations. Examples include the Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl nuclear disasters, Bhopal, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill (Sagan, 1993). The German sociologist Beck (1992) has identied such predicaments with what he calls the risk society. He believes we now confront a new modernity in which the manufacture of risks, or technoscientic accidents, increasingly overshadows productive and progressive forces. He sees peoples risk positions, essentially another way of describing vulnerability, as related not just to hazardous processes but to work, food, a place to live, even their leisure choices. Yet, these positions are embedded in, and change with, the more or less extensive risk-producing, risk-averting and risk-redistributing strategies of modern institutions. In relation to global change, he describes the epochal problem of the risk society in this way:
As nature becomes permeated by industrialization and as tradition is dissolved, new types of incalculability emerge [specically] the production of risks is the consequence of scientic and political efforts to control or minimize them. (Beck, 1998)

and large organizations. There can be sharp variations in vulnerability within cities and countries, even between members of the same family or neighborhood (Enarson and Morrow, 1998). Disasters, or possible responses, in different regions of the earth, depend upon developments and connections involving those same large organizations. At least, they are involved in massive humanitarian relief efforts in areas remote from cities and industrial development. Meanwhile, the world social space of vulnerability is increasingly a direct or indirect consequence of conditions related to national or global economic, technological, environmental and political inuences (Blaikie et al., 1994; Oliver-Smith and Hoffman, 1999).

KNOWLEDGE WORKERS
This condition also places the problem of knowledge center stage. Mainly through the role of large organizations, computerized and centralized controls, thought and action are increasingly in the hands of, or dependent upon, knowledge workers most of whom are not teachers, academics or intellectuals! They are persons in public and private organizations who work with and through formal systems of information gathering, assessment and communication. They rely upon training in, and facility with, standard technical practices. Even those called practitioners ambulance dispatchers, trafc policemen, volunteers in public charities spend much of their time writing things down, exchanging and reading what (ofcial or non-ofcial) others communicate, developing or reading other peoples web pages, analyzing and assessing data or undergoing training in such matters. Knowledge workers include virtually all the people who help to generate plans, consultants and inspectors reports, write eld manuals, sit in committees or dispense orders. To be sure, there are still huge numbers of people, worldwide, whose work is largely manual, whether producing food or raising children, who do not, or cannot participate in the textual and computer literate world of modern knowledge. But ever fewer of them act independent of some technology, procedures and goals, designed and monitored by the knowledge workers. All of this is also part of large organizations and extends their roles. However, disaster is one of those problems others are violence, madness, poverty in a world of plenty, crime, addiction, abuse or dropping out that are specially intractable for, and uniquely threatening to, the rationalized, systematized social order of large institutions (Hewitt, 1983; Burchell et al., 1991). Indeed, part of the current debate concerns how far our approaches to disaster, and their failings, reect the preoccupations of technocratic organization more than the objective dangers or the predicaments of those at risk (Ericson and Haggerty, 1997).

Meanwhile, social risk positions and the geography of disasters have been transformed according to access to, or exclusion from, the benets of modern safety arrangements

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WHOSE DISASTERS? THE REVERSAL OF EXPERTISE

The contrast between the experience or witnessing of disaster, and technical knowledge work, is not merely one of time and place, but of differing concerns and perspectives. If this seems obvious, it is often ignored in technical disaster work. This not only tends to treat issues from a distance, abstractly and in terms of governmental or other centrally organized responses. It is well known that large organizations can be quite insensitive to, or unaware of, the concerns not merely of vulnerable communities and those trying to cope with and recover from catastrophe, but of other organizations (Turner, 1978). Part of the problem for responsible agencies and professionals, is the extent to which knowledge and understanding of vulnerability and disaster involve a rethink of their normal ideas. It is not only that suffering and witnessing extraordinary violence justify the oft-quoted feeling of survivors that anyone who was not there could not possibly know or understand. In addition, to the extent that disaster depends upon personal and societal vulnerability or resilience, then it becomes a matter of grasping the circumstances, needs and concerns of those at risk. Vulnerability is always closely bound up with where people live, their work and specic relations to habitat and the larger society, their values and expectations. The idea that someone from outside, however sophisticated in, say, ood hydrology, engineering safety or radiation ecology, can recognize and give a balanced assessment of risks and needs, is socially absurd especially when there is also an inability to speak the language of those at risk, or being new to the culture, group, and habitat involved. Such is often the plight of the visiting expert; an urbanite speaking to rural peasants, a well-off person trying to understand those living in abject poverty, a survey team of men where women are the most vulnerable, or play a decisive role in family safety. Without doubt there are things the expert is uniquely able to say and do. The impacts of modern technologies, practices and organizations reach into every corner of the earth, if they do not aggravate or cause the disasters that occur. Experts have privileged opportunities to represent the vulnerable to the powers that be, and vice versa. Since large organizations control important resources and actions, it matters how the professionals state the case. But social understanding requires listening to and recognizing the cultural and psychosocial condition of those at risk. Again, a vulnerability perspective directs us to their situation and predicaments, rather than just impersonal dimensions, processes and organizational procedures. Or rather, it confronts us with the problem of translating between technical understanding into what are variously termed local, gendered, vernacular and indigenous languages or knowledge (Becker, 1991).

CONCLUDING REMARKS
To summarize, social vulnerability and adaptability depend, in large measure, upon on-going material and social life or their transformations. For that reason, they are surely of decisive importance for the growing concern over sustainable human communities and habitat relations. To adapt to global changes in a sustainable way is, above all, to avoid disastrous collapses. It requires that developments should not put people and property on a collision course with great hazards, or make them less able to withstand or cope with existing risks. It suggests that technological innovations or projects, even consumer goods, that may carry high risks should be subject to exceptional constraints.

REFERENCES
Beck, U (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity Translated, ed M Ritter, Sage Publications, London. Beck, U (1998) Politics of Risk Society, in The Politics of Risk Society, ed J Franklin, Polity Press/Blackwell, Oxford. Becker, A (1991) A Short Essay on Languaging, in Research and Re exivity Sage, ed F Steier, London, 228 235. Blaikie, P, Cannon, T, Davis, I, and Wisner, B (1994) At Risk: Natural Hazards, Peoples Vulnerability and Disasters, Routledge, London. Burchell, G, Gordon, C, and Miller, P, eds (1991) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Harvester-Wheatsheaf, London. Corradi, J E, Fagen, P W, and Garretc n, M A, eds (1992) Fear at the Edge: State Terror and Resistance in Latin America, University of California Press, Berkeley. Elliot, G (1972) Twentieth Century Book of the Dead, Penguin, Harmondsworth. Enarson, E and Morrow, B H, eds (1998) The Gendered Terrain of Disaster: Through Womens Eyes, Praeger, Westport, CT. Ericson, R V and Haggerty, K D (1997) Policing the Risk Society, University of Toronto Press, Toronto. Hewitt, K (1983) The Idea of Calamity in a Technocratic Age, in Interpretations of Calamity from the Perspective of Human Ecology, eds Hewitt, K, Allen, and Unwin, London, 3 32. Hewitt, K (1997) Regions of Risk: a Geographical Introduction to Disaster, Addison Wesley Longman, London. IFRCRCS (1998) World Disasters Report, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Martinus Nijhoff, Dordrecht. Kreps, G (1995) Disaster as systemic event and social catalyst: a clarication of subject matter, Int. J. Mass Emerg. Disasters, 13, 255 284. Kroll-Smith, S (1995) Toxic Contamination and the Loss of Civility: 1994 MSSA Plenary Address, Sociolog. Spect., 15, 377 396. Lemons, H (1957) Physical Characteristics of Disasters: Historical and Statistical Review, in Disasters and Disaster Relief, ed De Witt Smith, Ann. Am. Acad. Political Soc. Sci., 309(January), 1 14. Morren, Jr, G E B (1983) A General Approach to the Identication of Hazards and Response, in Interpretations of Calamity

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from the Perspective of Human Ecology, ed K Hewitt, Allen and Unwin, London, 284 297. Oliver-Smith, A R and Hoffman, S M (1999) The Angry Earth, Routledge, New York. O Riordan, T (1986) Coping with Environmental Hazards, in Geography, Resources and Environment: Theses from the Work of Gilbert F. White, II, eds R W Kates and I Burton, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 212 309. Pelanda, C (1981) Disasters and sociosystemic vulnerability, Preliminary Paper #68, Disaster Research Center, University of Delaware, Newark, DE. Perrow, C B (1995) Society at Risk in a Society of Organizations, in Populations at Risk in America: Vulnerable Groups at the End of the Twentieth Century, eds G J Demko and M C Jackson, Westview Press, New York, 19 35. Ploughman, P (1995) The American Print News Media Construction of Five Natural Disasters, Disasters, 19(4), 308 326. Por riev, B N (1998) Issues in the De nition and Delineation of Disasters, in What is a Disaster? ed E H Quarantelli, Routledge, London, 56 72. Quarantelli, E H, ed (1998) What is a Disaster? Routledge, London. Quarantelli, E L and Dynes, R (1977) Responses to Social Crisis and Disaster, Annu. Rev. Sociol., 3, 23 49. Sagan, S D (1993) The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents and Nuclear Weapons, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Scarry, E (1985) The Body in Pain, Oxford University Press, New York. Sen, A (1981) Poverty and Famines: an Essay on an Entitlement and Deprivation, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Sorokin, P (1942) Man and Society in Calamity, E P Dutton, New York. Turner, B A (1978) Man-made Disasters, Wykeham Publications, London. Vaughan, D (1996) The Story of an African Famine: Gender and Famine in Twentieth Century Malawi, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Watts, M J (1983) Silent Violence: Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Watts, M J and Bohle, H G (1993) Hunger, Famine and the Space of Vulnerability, GeoJournal, 30(2), 117 125. White, G F, ed (1974) Natural Hazards: Local, Regional, Global, Oxford University Press, New York. Wisner, B (1993) Disaster vulnerability, geographical scale and existential reality, in Worlds of Pain and Hunger: Geographical Perspectives on Disaster Vulnerability and Food Security, ed H Bohle, Freiburg Studies in Development Geography, University of Freiburg, Freiburg-im-Briesgau. Zwi, A and Ugalde, A (1991) Political Violence in the Third World: a Public Health Issue, Health Policy and Planning, 6(3), 203 217.

Kreps, G R (1998) Disaster as Systemic Event and Social Catalyst, in What is a Disaster? ed E H Quarantelli, Routledge, London, 31 55. Pelanda, C (1982) Disaster and Socioeconomic Vulnerability, in Social and Economic Aspects of Earthquakes: Proceedings, Third International Conference, Bled, Yugoslavia, 1981, eds B G Jones and M Tomazevic, Cornell University, New York, 67 91. Perrow, C B (1984) Normal Accidents: Living with High-risk Technologies, Basic Books, New York. Waterstone, M, ed (1992) Risk and Society: the Interaction of Science, Technology and Public Policy, Kluwer, Boston, MA.

Health and the Environment: Theoretical Approaches

see Theories of Health and Environment (Volume 5)

Hetch Hetchy Valley

see Environmental Movement the Rise of Non-government Organizations (NGOs) (Volume 5)

Hinduism and the Environment

O P Dwivedi
University of Guelph, Guelph, Canada

FURTHER READING
Green, J (1997) Risk and Misfortune: the Social Construction of Accidents, University College London Press, London.

The Hindu religion offers a challenging perspective on the subjects of respect for nature (including the principle of the sanctity of all life on this planet and elsewhere) and environmental conservation. In Hinduism, human beings are not given any absolute dominion over their own lives or over the life of any non-human being; only the Supreme God has absolute sovereignty over all creatures, including humanity s life and death. The sacredness of God s creation requires that no damage be in icted on other species without adequate justication. People are not supposed to act as viceroys of God over the earth; nor should they assign degrees of relative worth to other species. All life forms (human and non-human alike) are of equal value and all

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have the same right to existence, but only humans have special obligations to care for the environment. In addition, only humans, unlike any other species, are obliged to live in harmony with nature by exercising control over their cravings and obsessions, mainly because they have the Godgiven capability of free will.

THE VEDIC HERITAGE

Hinduism is the name given to the most widespread religion on the Indian subcontinent. It has had a long history, extending back at least to the arrival of what are now thought to be IndoIranian tribes in northern India about 2000 before the common era (BCE) considered the Vedic period whose beliefs were mingled with, or layered over, the original indigenous religions in the region. Concerning the dates of the Vedic period, there remain differences of opinion among some Western Indologists and Indian scholars. For example, Grifth (1889) mentions that the Vedic period occurred between 1500 and 1400 BCE, while Indian scholars such as Tilak (1936) and Kane (1966) suggest about 50004000 BCE. Perhaps a more realistic date could be about 2000 BCE, see Kak (1994). After the literature associated with the Vedic period (known as the Vedas), there appeared the later Upanishads (addenda to the Vedas, and considered to be datable around 600 BCE, (see Hume, 1977, 6 and Deussen, 1980), and an array of stories and epic poems like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, that together generated the vast diversity of greater and lesser gods, personal and public rituals, and all the elements that populate todays Hinduism. The ancient Hindu literature is divided into the Shrutis and Smritis. Shrutis denote the entire body of sacred Vedic Scriptures, which are considered to include the four Vedas, the Upanishads, and some other related texts. Smritis are a number of other Hindu sacred Scriptures created after the Shrutis, including the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the Dharma-shastras (religious books on Hindu law and behavior), and the Puranas (18 books on Hindu mythologies). The relationship between human beings and nature attracted the seers of the early Vedic period who contemplated the mysteries of the Creation, the place of heaven and earth, and even beyond. Those Vedic seers would not accept as nal what they saw around themselves; instead they asked many penetrating questions, not only about life but also about death and destruction. They were equally interested in the mystery of Creation and the establishment of this universe. Through their deep thinking, guesses, conjectures and postulations, they came to acknowledge that the material causes of this creation happened to be the Panch Mahabhutas (Five Great Elements): earth/Prithivi, air/vayu, space/akash, waters/Apah, lightre/Agni (Aitareya Upanishad, Chapter III, Verse 3).

These ve Mahabhutas are cosmic elements that create, nurture, and sustain all forms of life, and after death or decay, they absorb what was created earlier; thus they play an important role in preserving and sustaining the environment (Dwivedi, 1997a). It should be noted that these Mahabhutas have been deied in the Vedic, and also later in the Puranic literature (starting from 300 BCE to 900 CE). Further, they, all together, are regarded as allpervasive and omnipresent elements having great creative potency; in addition, they together constitute Brahman (the Almighty God, the all-pervading One, the Supreme Godhead) who manifested the universe and whose manifestation goes on forever. As mentioned in the Shvetashvatara Upanishad:
The Brahman by whom this entire universe is engulfed. this creation is governed by Him as well as the ve great elements: earth, air, space, water, and light. (Shvetashvatara Upanishad, Chapter 6, Verse 2)

Prithivi (Earth)

The Rig Veda describes Prithivi as a divinity as well as one of the Mahabhuta elements. She is the mother and upholder of all (Rig Veda, Book X, Hymn 18, Verse 10; and Book 1, Hymn 155, Verse 2). Prithivi is also identied with the goddess Aditi: a mother and protector of the holy cosmic law; she is also regarded as a divine ship, full of life-sustaining harvest. She, along with the four other Mahabhutas, sustains our universe. This relationship between earth and humans is superbly depicted by Rishi Atharva (a rishi is a priest/seer), in the Prithivi Sukta (Hymn to Mother Earth) of the early Atharva Veda. (A Sukta is a short composition of verses which relate to a specic subject under discussion. Each Veda consists of several Suktas). This hymn exemplies the relevance of environmental sustenance and biodiversity to human beings (Satvalekar, 1958). It consists of several prayers including one that promotes the concept of Vasudhaiv Kutumbkam, or the family of Mother Earth (Dwivedi, 1998).
Vayu (Air)

Vayu is the bond and the thread that keeps the universe together. Vayu is also praised like Prana (the life-sustaining breath) it is the germ of the world and a transformer of seed; without Prana, nothing survives.
Akash (Space)

The term Akash denotes space rather than sky or ether as mentioned in some translated Vedic literature. It is not a material or physical element. In Chhandogya Upanishad, a discussion takes place among Rishis; they nally agree that it is the Akash (space) out of which all beings

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(their souls) come, and it is where they go back after their death; thus, the Akash is the nal resting place of all beings (Chhandogya Upanishad, Book I, 9th Part, Verse 1).
Apah (Water)

Being was himself incarnated in the form of various species. This Lord says, in one Purana:
this form is the source and indestructible seed of multifarious incarnations within the universe, and from the particle and portion of this form, different living entities, like demi-gods, animals, human beings and others, are created. (Srimad-Bhagavata Mahapurana, Book I, Discourse III:5)

According to the Vedas, water was the rst of the cosmic elements. The Rig Veda says that in the beginning, all was water, and there was darkness which engulfed it (Rig Veda, Book X, Hymn 129, Verse 3). Further, the Rig Vedic Hymn 23 (Book I, Verses 1621) considers water to be the reservoir of all curative medicines and of nectar. Waters are the mothers of all beings, and they are the foundations of all in the universe (Lal, 1995, 9). The genesis of the Universe takes place in the primeval water. The following verse from the Atharva Veda (Book IXX, Hymn II, Verses 1 and 2) illustrates the place of water in our lives:
may the waters from the snowy mountains bring health and peace to all people. May the spring waters bring calm to you. May the swift current be pleasing to you; and may the rains be a source of tranquility to all. May the waters of the oasis in the desert be sweet to you; and so be the waters of ponds and lakes. May the waters from wells dug by humans be good to them, and may the healing powers of water be available to all beings.

This is further demonstrated by a famous series of divine incarnations, as pertinently enunciated by Dr Karan Singh (1986) in the Assisi Declaration. (These were declarations on religion and nature made by religious leaders representing Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism and Islam at the Basilica di S Francesco, Assisi, Italy, 29 September 1986 at the time of the 25th Anniversary of the World Wide Fund for Nature):
the evolution of life on this planet is symbolized by a series of divine incarnations beginning with sh, moving through amphibious forms and mammals, and then on into human incarnations. This view clearly holds that man did not spring fully formed to dominate the lesser lifeforms, but rather evolved out of these forms itself, and is therefore integrally linked to the whole of creation.

Hindus consider water to be a powerful medium for purication and also a source of energy. Sometimes, just by the sprinkling of pure water in religious ceremonies, it is believed that purity is achieved. That is why, in the Rig Veda, prayer is offered to the deity of water:
the waters in the sky, the waters of rivers, and water in the well whose source is the ocean, may all these sacred waters protect me. (Rig Veda, Book VII, Hymn 49, Verse 2)

Agni (Light/Fire)

Agni is considered in the Vedas as the spring of our life because it creates life on earth. Agni, in later Vedic description, is known as the sun and light. In the form of the sun, Agni is regarded as the soul, and also as the ruler and preserver of the world (Maitrayana Upanishad, Chapter 6, Verse 35). These ve Great Elements, taken together, denote the deep bond between human beings and creation; as such, Hindus are urged to show proper respect and due care for these essential elements.

RESPECT FOR FAUNA IN HINDUISM

The most important aspect of the Hindu religion pertaining to the treatment of animal life is the belief that the Supreme

Among the series of incarnations of Vishnu (Vishnu is one of the Hindu Trinity who incarnates on earth to protect righteousness and good), was his rst appearance in the form of Matsya (a giant sh), when due to the continuous rain, the entire earth was going to be submerged in water. This giant sh appeared with a mysterious boat into which a human pair went along with samples of all herbs, seeds, and all kinds of living creatures. After the rains stopped, a new creation began. The second incarnation was in the form of Kurma (a tortoise), when because of the churning of the Ksheer Sagar (Milky Ocean), a tortoise was needed to hold Mount Mandarachal, which was being used as a churning pestle. Without churning the sea, the demi-gods would not obtain the nectar to make them invincible when ghting with demons. The third incarnation was in the form of Varaha (a boar): when a demon king Hiranyaksha captured the earth, the boar hid it under massive garbage with unendurable stench and lth; and thus the earth was rescued. The fourth incarnation was in the form of Narasingha (half-man halflion) to ght the demon king Hiranyakashyap, who after defeating all demi-gods had declared himself to be the God of universe. Since the demon King was indestructible by man or animal, the god Vishnu had to be incarnated in the form of a manlion. The fth incarnation was in the form of Vamana (a dwarf) when another demon-king Bali became so powerful that he defeated all demi-gods and conquered the entire universe. So Vishnu appeared in the form of a dwarf brahman, visited the court of Bali, and retrieved the entire universe, and restored demigods to their place in heaven. The sixth, seventh, eighth

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and ninth incarnations were in the form of humans to protect the earth from oppressors and tyrants. But as Rama (the seventh incarnation), he was closely associated with monkeys, and as Krishna (the eighth incarnation as a cowherd) he was surrounded by cows, peacocks, deer, etc. The ninth incarnation was in the form of the Buddha who preached non-violence towards all creatures. So, since Lord Vishnu was incarnated into various living forms, Hindus accord reverence to species. The Srimad Bhagavatam Mahapurana further states:
one should look upon deer, camels, monkeys, donkeys, rats, reptiles, birds, and ies as though they were their own children. (Book 7, Discourse XIV:9)

Similarly, the Yajnavalkya Smriti warns of hell-re (Ghora Naraka) to those who are killers of domesticated and protected animals:
the wicked person who kills animals which are protected has to live in hell-re for the days equal to the number of hairs on the body of that animal. (Yajnavalkya Smriti, Acaradhyayah, Verse 180)

In addition to this, many animals and birds are revered by Hindus as these are consort of various gods, goddesses, and incarnations, as illustrated in Table 1. Almost all the Hindu scriptures place a strong emphasis on the notion that Gods grace cannot be received by killing animals or harming other creatures. That is why not eating meat is considered both appropriate conduct and ones Dharma (Dharma is considered as the Cosmic order, duties and obligations based on social and religious laws handed down by tradition and practices). Further, in the Manusmriti, a warning is given that:
a person who kills an animal for meat will die of a violent death as many times as there are hairs of that killed animal. (Manusmriti, Chapter 5, Verse 38)
Table 1 Animals and Wildlife Associated with Gods/Goddessesa Animals/Birds Lion Wild goose Elephant Bull Rat Swan Eagle Serpent Fish Monkey Horse Peacock Parrot Owl Vulture Crocodile Tortoise Tiger Dog Deer Donkey Makar
a

Further, in the Narsingha Purana, it is mentioned that a person who roasts a bird for eating will surely be a sinner. In Mahabharata, there is a story concerning Rishis and God debating the merits of offering grain or the sacricial lamb (goat) at the end of Yajna; the Rishis insisted that according to the Vedas, the sacricial material ought to be grain only. It seems that the practice of grain sacrice might have started from that time. In summary, Hindu scriptures enjoin its followers from hurting animals.

RESPECT FOR FLORA IN THE HINDU RELIGION

As early as in the time of the Rig Veda, tree worship was quite popular and universal in India. The tree symbolized the various attributes of God to the Vedic seers. The Rig Veda regarded plants as having divine powers, with one entire hymn devoted to their praise, chiey with reference to their healing properties (Rig Veda, 10.97). During the period of the great epics and Puranas, the Hindu respect for ora expanded further. Trees were considered as being animate, feeling happiness and sorrow. Green trees were likened to a living person, as illustrated by the following verse from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (3.9.28):
just like a tree, the prince of the forest, so the man is, in truth; His hairs are the leaves, his skin resembles the external bark. Out of his skin streams forth the blood, like the juice or the sap out of the tree. It ows out from the wounded man, like the sap of the tree, when it is cut. The esh is comparable to the wood (of the tree), the sinews are like the inner bark; The strong bones are like the inner core of the wood, the marrow resembles the marrow (pith) of the tree.

Associated with Gods and Goddesses Durga Brahma Indra, Ganesha Shiva Ganesha Saraswati Vishnu Shiva, Sun Kama Rama Sun Kartikeya, Saraswati Kama Lakshmi Shani Ganga River Yamuna River Katyayani Bhairava, Dattatreya Vayu Shitla Kama, Varuna

Source: Dwivedi and Tiwari (1987).

The Hindu worship of trees and plants has been based partly on utility, but mostly because of the divinity assigned to them. Ancient Hindus considered it their duty to save trees, and in order to do so they attached to every tree a religious sanctity. The following deities, for example, are considered to have made their abode in these trees/plants: Lakshmi in Tulasi (Ocinlum sanctum), Shitala in Neem, Vishnu in Pipal/Bodhi (Ficus religiosa), Buddha in Ashoka, Shiva in Bilva/Bela (Aegle marmelos), Brahma and Vishnu in Vata (Ficus indica), Van Durga (tree deity) in Asvathha (Tropbis aspera). Table 2 further illustrates the names of

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307

Table 2 Trees and Plants Associated with Gods/Goddesses and Spiritsa Trees/plants Asvathha Vata Tulasi Soma Bela Ashoka Amalaki Tala Mango Kadamba Neem Palasa Pipal Fig Narikel (coconut) Sheora Sij Tamal
a

POLLUTION AND ITS PREVENTION IN HINDU SCRIPTURES

Hindu scriptures reveal a clear conception of what can be called an eco-care system. On this basis, a discipline of environmental ethics developed that formulated codes of conduct (Dharma) and dened humanitys relationship to nature. An important part of conduct is maintaining proper sanitation. In the past, this was considered to be the duty of everyone and any default was a punishable offence. As Kautilya wrote (Kautilyas Arthasastra, Book II, Chapter 36, Verse 145):
the punishment of one-eighth of a pana should be awarded to those who throw dirt on the roads. For muddy water one-fourth pana, if both are thrown the punishment should be double. If latrine is thrown or caused near a temple, well, or pond, sacred place, or government building, then the punishment should increase gradually by one pana in each case. For urine the punishment should be only half.

Associated with Gods/Goddesses Vishnu, Lakshmi, Ancestors Brahma, Vishnu, Hari, Kuber Lakshmi, Vishnu, Ancestors Moon Maheshwar (Shiva) Buddha, Indra Lakshmi, Kartikeya Buddha, Spirits Lakshmi, Govardhan Krishna Shitala, Mansa Brahma, Gandharva Vishnu, Krishna, Ancestors Vishnu, Rudra Moon Van-Durga, Lakshmi Shitala Krishna

Source: Dwivedi and Tiwari (1987).

certain trees and plants that are closely associated with various deities. In India, Nepal and Bhutan, there are many sacred forests and groves where green trees and plants are protected. Also, for Hindus, the planting of a tree is still a religious duty. Thus, sanctity has been attached to many trees and plants. Through such exhortations and various writings, the Hindu religion has provided a system of moral guidelines towards environmental preservation and conservation. Perhaps this rationale impelled the Hindu law-giver Rishi Manu when he declared that people should not fell green trees even for fuel (Manusmriti, Chapter 11, Verse 64). The cutting of trees and destruction of ora was considered a sinful act. Later, Kautilyas Arthasastra prescribed various punishments for destroying trees and plants (Kautilyas Arthasastra III 19:197):
for cutting off the tender sprouts of fruit trees, or shady trees in the parks near a city, a ne of six panas shall be imposed; for cutting of the minor branches of the same trees, twelve panas, and for cutting off the big branches, twenty four panas shall be levied. Cutting off the trunks of the same, shall be punished with the rst amercement; and felling shall be punished with the middlemost amercement.

Hindus considered the cremation of dead bodies and the sanitary maintenance of the human habitat to be essential acts. When, in about 200 BCE, Charaka wrote about Vikriti (pollution) and diseases, caused by pollution of air and waters, specically about air pollution (Charaka Samhita, Book Vimanastanam, Chapter III, Verse 6.1), he said:
the polluted air is mixed with unhealthy elements. The air is uncharacteristic of the season, full of moisture, stormy, hard to breath, icy cool, hot and dry, harmful, roaring, coming at the same time from all directions, bad smelling, oily, full of dirt, sand, steam, creating diseases in the body and is considered polluted.

And about water pollution, he wrote (Charaka Samhita, Book Vimanastanam, Chapter III, Verse 6.2):
water is considered polluted when it is excessively smelly, unnatural in colour, taste and touch, slimy, not frequented by aquatic birds, aquatic life is reduced, and the appearance is unpleasing.

The healing properties and medicinal value of water have been universally accepted provided it is pure and free from all pollution. Ancient Indian thinkers were aware of the reasons for polluted water. That is why Manu advised:
One should not cause urine, stool, cough in the water. Anything which is mixed with these un-pious objects, blood and poison, should not be thrown into water. (Manusmriti, Book IV, Verse 56)

Even in modern times, it is popularly believed by Hindus that many trees have their own deity, Vriksha-devata or Van-devi, who is worshipped with prayers and offerings of water, owers, sweets, and encircled by sacred threads (Dwivedi and Tiwari, 1987). That is why for Hindus, forests were never seen as places of darkness and unknown dangers (akin to what Europeans thought), instead these were places of worship, meditation and intimate harmony.

Today, many rivers are still considered sacred. Among these, the river Ganga is considered by Hindus as the most sacred body of water. In Pravascitta Tatva (1.535), disposal of human waste or other pollutants there has been prohibited since time immemorial (Dwivedi and Tiwari, 1987, 84):
one should not perform these 14 acts near the holy waters of the river Ganga: i.e., putting excrement, brushing and gargling,

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SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

removing cerumen from body, throwing hairs, dry garlands, playing in water, taking donations, performing sex, having attachment with other sacred places, praising other holy places, washing clothes, throwing dirty clothes, thumping water and swimming.

Needless to say, this prohibition has been more honored in the breach than the observance nowadays. On pollution in general, the great epic, Mahabharata mentions that:
from pollution, two types of diseases occur in human beings. The rst, which is related with body and the other with mind, and both are inter-connected. One follows the other and none exists without the other. (Mahabharata, Rajdharmanusasanparva, Chapter 16, Verses 8 9)

The above-listed examples show that during ancient times, eco-care was proclaimed, and probably practiced where possible. Through these injunctions and religious duties, a mechanism was developed to create a proper respect for nature a mechanism based on cosmic ordinance and divine law which provided a base for eco-spirituality.

It is dif cult to say when a human being rst got involved in the cycle of Karma, but once a person is in it, he/she cannot escape, even if incarnated in new and different forms in this world. The main reason for its continuation is the indestructible nature of the energy of Karma; it is this energy that may appear today under one name and form, but will reappear under another name and form when the former has died. In this way, Karma is related to the Hindu concept of re-birth (Punarjanma) because the reappearance in various forms is the cycle of birth and death. That is why, in Hindu scriptures, the Atman (soul) never dies, it is eternal, but at the same time it is involved in the cycle of Karma. It is for this reason that Hindus believe that one must suffer tomorrow for what one does today; and the day after tomorrow, for what one does tomorrow; and nally, one suffers in the next life for what one does in this life; and in this way the cycle of Punarjanma continues. This is what was also said by Bhisma to King Yudhisthira after the Great War of Mahabharata:
O King, although a particular person may not be seen suffering the results of his evil actions, yet his children and grandchildren as well as great grandchildren will have to suffer the results of those actions. (Mahabharata, Shanti Parva, 129:21)

KARMA, THE CYCLE OF BIRTH AND REBIRTH AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Karma means all deeds/actions performed and their consequences, which govern a person s life, and which may continue in the next life because of the philosophy of the migration of soul from one birth to another. People often confuse the Law of Karma with the Law of destiny. The Law of Karma may be said to mean that each act, willfully performed, leaves a consequence in its wake. These consequences, also called Karma-Phala (fruits or effects of action) remain always with us, although their impact may not be felt immediately. It also means that every action performed creates its own chain of reactions and events, some of which are immediately visible, while others take time to surface. Environmental pollution is but one example of the Karma of those people who thought that they could continue polluting the environment without realizing the consequences of their actions for future generations. As a matter of fact, there is a boomerang effect of our Karma; or to put it another way, whatever action we do on others recoils, although not always by a direct reaction and not immediately but often by unconnected ways, on our lives, and sometimes in its own exact measure (Dwivedi, 1994). Once the cycle of Karma starts, it continues without a break; and although a person may be dead, yet Karma survives in the form of a memory on to the next life of a departed soul. As it is mentioned in Mahabharata:
an action which has been committed by a human being in this life, follows him again and again (whether he wishes it or not). (Shanti Parva, 139:22)

The environmental crisis facing humanity today relates to the concept of Karma, which becomes even more significant. For in Hindu scripture, the rewards or punishment of Karma are described as events that will happen in the future, and sacri ce is described as Apurva (futuristic) KarmaPhala, the results of which have not yet been seen. We need to realize that the destruction that we are in icting on our natural surroundings will have future repercussions, which will be felt not only by our children, but also by ourselves due to the Law of Karma, which causes us to return to earth in a subsequent birth. If we recognize and act on this philosophy of life, then and only then will people start paying due respect to nature as well as taking a stake in the care for the environment. Finally, the concept of Karma envisions an interrelatedness between what we do in this world and what may result now and/or in the future. This appreciation is the key to the point being made here. All of our actions are interrelated with and interconnected to what eventually happens in this world. Although we may not face the consequences individually, nevertheless, someone else will be burdened with or bene t from our actions. It is in this context that the concept of Karma as a guiding force to protect the environment becomes meaningful. The Hindu belief in the cycle of birth and rebirth, wherein a person may come back as an animal or a bird, gives these species not only respect, but also reverence. This provides a solid foundation for the doctrine of Ahimsa non-violence (or non-injury) against animals and human beings alike. Hindus have a deep faith in the doctrine of non-violence. It

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should be noted that the doctrine of Ahimsa presupposes the doctrine of Karma and the doctrine of rebirth (punarjanma). The soul is continually reborn in different life forms such as birds, sh, animals, and humans. Based on this belief, there is a profound opposition in the Hindu religion (as well as in Buddhist and Jain religions) to the institutionalized killing of animals, birds and sh for human consumption. Not only, as mentioned, do almost all of the Hindu scriptures place strong emphasis on the notion that Gods grace can be received by not killing his creatures or harming his creation (Dwivedi, 1997a); but further, the pain a human being causes to other living creatures will eventually return to that person later, either in this life or in a later rebirth. It is through the transmigration of the soul that a link is provided between the lowliest forms of life with human beings.

HINDU ECO-SPIRITUALITY TODAY?

Hindu eco-spirituality, in ancient and medieval times, has provided a system of moral guidelines towards environmental preservation and conservation. Environmental ethics, as propounded by ancient Hindu scriptures and seers, were practiced not only by common persons, but even by rulers and kings. They observed these fundamentals, sometimes as religious duties, often as rules of administration or obligations for law and order, but always as principles properly knitted into the Hindu way of life. That way of life enabled Hindus, as well as other religious groups residing in India, to carefully use natural resources, but not to have any divine power of control and dominion over nature and its elements. If such has been the tradition, philosophy, and ideology of Hindu religion, what then are the reasons behind the present state of environmental crisis facing India; and more specically, the seeming indifference about environmental protection and conservation among the masses? As we have seen, ethical beliefs and religious values inuence peoples behavior towards others, including our relationship with all creatures and plant life. If, for some reason, those noble values become displaced by other beliefs, that are either thrust upon the society or transplanted from another culture through invasion (as happened later in India), then the faith of the masses in its earlier spiritual tradition is shaken. Given about nine centuries of foreign religious and cultural domination by Islamic and Christian cultures, which penetrated all levels of Hindu society, appropriate answers and leadership did not come from its religious leaders and priests; consequently, the masses became ritualistic and inward looking. Added to this are the forces of materialism, consumerism, individual and corporate greed, and the capriciousness and corruption among politicians, bureaucrats and business people. Under such circumstances, religious values

that acted as sanctions against environmental destruction have been sidelined as those insidious forces inhibit the religion from continuing to transmit the ancient values which encouraged respect and due regard for Gods Creation (Dwivedi, 2000b). How can the original ancient values and wisdom be transmitted into practice? Can there be an approach for a Dharmic ecology? Can there be a practical Dharmic ecology? And can it be practiced in India? Many people wrongly believe that India is a Hindu country, not realizing that it is a secular state where secularism, as practiced nowadays, means a disregard for all religions, especially the mainstream Hindu religion and culture. As such, it will take time for any Dharmic ecology to be operationalized in India. Besides, it is not sufcient to examine and extol the ancient wisdom of Hindu seers, to dwell on the Vedic and Puranic heritage, and then simply hope that a self-correcting process and automatic implementation of those noble ideas will take place to remedy those environmental problems. What is more important is how to put into practice an ecological vision and to make it relevant to modern times. A common strategy for environmental stewardship needs to be developed so that, in the end, people will subscribe to an environmentally caring world. That strategy requires that people show their commitment and care, both individually and collectively, for Mother Earth, and for her natural gifts, which sustain our life-system. Because unless people are able to inculcate eco-care vision, there will be no sustainable future. It is worth pointing out in this context that we can draw on the powerful concept of satyagraha, which literally means persistence and endurance for the truth. This concept excludes the use of violence, because it is believed that, since humans are not capable of knowing absolute truth, we are not competent to punish. The word satyagraha was initially coined in South Africa by the most famous modern Indian, Mahatma Gandhi (see Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Volume 5) to distinguish the non-violent resistance of the Indians of South Africa from the contemporary passive resistance of suffragettes and others. Non-violent resistance embodies ve basic elements that ought to be followed by those who wish to use this technique. These ve elements are purity of: (a) motive; (b) means to be used; (c) suitability of place; (d) time; and (e) the mental status of the doer/agent. An action is a vishuddha dharmic ashtra (a righteous and proper weapon) if it meets those ve conditions. Thus, satyagraha is not conceived as a weapon for the weak only; furthermore, it is different from civil disobedience, passive resistance, and non-cooperation. Satyagraha differs from passive resistance in that the latter has been regarded as a weapon of the feeble. While it avoids violence, passive resistance does not

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exclude the use of violence if, in the opinion of the passive resister, the occasion demands it. However, it has always been distinguished from armed resistance, and its use was at one time conned to the Christian martyrs. Civil disobedience, although being a branch of Satyagraha, is still different to non-violent resistance. Civil disobedience is a response to immoral statutory enactments, and signies a persons displeasure with some statutory law (it was rst used to show displeasure at paying taxes). Civil disobedience presupposes the habit of willing obedience to laws without fear of sanctions; therefore, it can be practiced only as a last resort and by a select few in the rst instance at any rate (Gandhi, 1961, 325). Furthermore, it should be noted that noncooperation predominantly consists of the individual withdrawing cooperation from the state that has become corrupt or immoral, but excludes the use of civil disobedience which results in state-inicted punishment. Civil disobedience is a branch of Satyagraha, for it can be practiced by children and the masses, but it does differ in fundamentals. Carried to its utmost limit, Satyagraha is independent of monetary or other material assistance, and denitely independent of physical force or violence. As Gandhi said:
Indeed, violence is the negation of this great spiritual force, which can only be cultivated or wielded by those who will entirely eschew violence. (Gandhi, 1961, p. 34)

advocates and practitioners of this approach, rather than staying on the sidelines. Hindu religious leaders should: take initiative and help secular institutions by providing timely and appropriate advice to encourage greater integration of eco-care approaches into the educational curricula; strengthen the capability of secular institutions to meet their goals of sustainable development and environmental conservation; promote the important concept of Sarva bhoot hitey ratah (serving all beings equally); take the lead in promoting the concept of Vasudhaiv Kutumbakam, i.e., the family of Mother Earth, and the obligation of humanity to accept a world of material limits; protect and restore places of ecological, cultural, aesthetic and spiritual signicance; and build partnerships across social, economic, political and environmental sectors, including dialogue with other religions and spiritual traditions (Dwivedi, 2000a).

It is a force that may be used by individuals and communities, and which may be used in domestic as well as political affairs. This universal applicability is thus an example of its permanence and invincibility. It can be used by men, women and children, as long as they are not capable of meeting violence by violence. Therefore, Gandhi believed satyagraha to be an effective tool in the ght for truth and a basis for non-violent resistance. In relation to the environmental crisis, this Gandhian philosophy has been effectively used in India. The example of the Chipko movement is an illustration that nonviolent resistance can work toward environmental protection (Dwivedi, 1997b) (see Chipko Movement, Volume 5). Another example is the Narmada Bachao Andolan (the movement to save Narmada River from damming), which has forced the World Bank to reconsider its loan to India for that massive hydroelectricity project. We therefore need to consider a satyagraha for the environment saturated with the concepts of eco-care and Dharmic ecology; and we need to become effective

The choice before the Hindu religion (as well as before all other religions) is either to care for the environment or be a silent participant in the destruction of planetary resources. Partnership with secular institutions must be forged and cooperation fostered at local, regional, national and international levels. An environmental and sustainable development strategy, based on the lines suggested above, could offer a way of bridging the gap and making the essential link between secular, scientic and spiritual forces.

NOTES
Verses quoted in English from various Upanishads are from Deussen (1980); verses in Sanskrit for Isavasya Upanishad, Aitareya Upanishad and Shvetashvatara Upanishad are from Upanishad Anka of Kalyan (1949).

REFERENCES
Deussen, P (1980) Sixty Upanisads of the Veda, translated from German by V M Bedekar and G B Palsule, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 2 Volumes. Dwivedi, O P (1994) Our Karma and Dharma to the Environment, in Environmental Stewardship: History, Theory and Practice, ed M A Beavis, Institute of Urban Studies, University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Canada, 59 74. Dwivedi, O P (1997a) Vedic Heritage for Environmental Stewardship, Worldviews: Environ., Cult. Religion, 1(1), April, 25 36.

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Dwivedi, O P (1997b) Indias Environmental Policies, Programmes and Stewardship, Macmillan Press, London. Dwivedi, O P (1998) Vasudhaiv Kutumbakam: A Commentary on Atharvediya Prithivi Sukta, 2nd edition, Institute for Research and Advanced Studies, Jaipur, 1st edition published in 1995. Dwivedi, O P (2000a) Dharmic Ecology, in Hinduism and Ecology: the Interaction of Earth, Sky and Water, eds C K Chapple and M E Tucker, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 4 22. Dwivedi, O P (2000b) Classical India, A Companion to Environmental Philosophy, Blackwell, New York, 37 50. Dwivedi, O P and Tiwari, B N (1987) Environmental Crisis and Hindu Religion, Gitanjali Publishing House, New Delhi. Dwivedi, O P and Tiwari, B N (1999) Environmental Protection in Hindu Religion, in Ethical Perspectives on Environmental Issues in India, ed G A James, APH, New Delhi, 172 173. Gandhi, M K (1961) Non-violent Resistance, Schocken Books, New York. Grifth, R T H (1889) The Hymns of the Rig Veda, ed J L Shastri, 1973, Motilal Banarasidass, Delhi. Hume, R E (1977) The Thirteen Principal Upanishads, Oxford University Press, New York. James, G A (1998) Ethical Perspectives on Environmental Issues in India, APH Publishing Co, New Delhi. Kak, S (1994) The Evolution of Writing in India, Indian J. History Sci., 28, 375 388. Kane, P V (1963) Dharmashastra Ka Itihas (in Hindi and Sanskrit languages), Uttar Pradesh Hindi Sansthan, Lucknow, India. Kautilyas Arthasastra (1967) ed R Shamasastry, Mysore Publishers, Mysore. Lal, S K (1995) Pancamahabhutas: Origin and Myths in Vedic Literature, in Prakrti: An Integral Vision, ed S Narayanan, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi, 5 21. Satvalekar, P S D (1958) Prithivi Sukta: Atharvaveda, Book 12, Swadhyay Mandal, Surat. Singh, K (1986) The Hindu Declaration on Nature, The Assisi Declarations (Messages on Man and Nature) made at Assisi, Italy, 29 September. Srimad Bhagavata Mahapurana (1982) Translated by C L Goswami and M A Shastri, Gita Press, Gorakhpur. Tilak, B G (1936) Gita Rahasya, Tilak Brothers, Poona. Upanishad Anka of Kalyan (1949) Gita Press, Gorakhpur, 23(1).

Manusmriti (The Laws of Manu) (1975) Translated by G Buhler, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi. Rigveda (1974) Commentary by M D Saraswati, 12 volumes, Sarvadeshik Arya Pratinidhi Sabha, New Delhi.

Holon
see Phase Shifts or Flip-ops in Complex Systems (Volume 5)

Homocentric
Carolyn Merchant (1992, Radical Ecology) applies the term homocentric to an anthropocentric position that fosters care and stewardship for nature for humanistic as distinct from ecocentric reasons. Since the environment is crucial to human well-being and survival, then we have an indirect duty towards it one derived from communal human interests. This means assuring that the Earth remains environmentally hospitable to human life, and that its beauty and resources are preserved so human life may continue to be pleasant. As such, homocentrism is to be further distinguished from egocentrism, where the latter is an anthropocentrism based on prioritizing the desires of individuals rather than the communal good. Egocentrism underpins laissez-faire capitalism, with its inherent tendencies to exploit the environment, whereas homocentrism would, at the very least, regulate the market for the sake of wider social and environmental goals or even replace capitalism by socialism. Both utilitarianism and Marxism espouse a homocentric ethic, hence eco-socialism is a homocentric variety of radical environmentalism, as is, according to Merchant, social ecology. Homocentric ethics focus on society, therefore emphasizing the social good and social justice owing from the (Christian) ethic of environmental stewardship. Unlike ecocentrism, which would protect nature for its intrinsic value, homocentrisms utilitarianism would allow managed transformation of nature where the resulting sum of human welfare was to be increased over that accruing by leaving it alone. As Merchant describes it, homocentrisms ethics combine the mechanistic approach of egocentrism with the organicism of ecocentrism. Effectively this means that

FURTHER READING
Atharva Veda (1982) Translated by Devi Chand, Munsiram Manoharlal Publishers, New Delhi. Charaka-Samhita (1983) Translated by Priyavrat Sharma, Varanasi, Chaukhambha Orientalia. Mahabharata (1988) Translated by M N Dutta, Parimal, Delhi. Mahabharata (1994) Gita Press, Gorakhpur, Gorakhpur, India in Sanskrit with Hindi translation.

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homocentrism would apply science and technology derived from analytical and reductionist thinking in the cause of furthering what is seen as an intimate, organic and dialectical relationship between society and nature (see Ecocentric, Biocentric, Gaiacentric, Volume 5).
DAVID PEPPER UK

Human Body, Immediate Environment

Catriona Sandilands
York University, Toronto, Canada

The human body is a site of environmental change at a variety of levels. Perhaps most obviously, the impacts of many environmental problems are tangibly experienced by human beings as bodily symptoms; from sunburns to cancers, environmental degradation becomes part of everyday knowledge for many people through questions of bodily harm and danger. In this view, the body is a site for research concerning the consequences of particular environmental changes on human life; it is also a powerful trope for forms of political mobilization that link human health and environmental protection, including breast cancer and anti-nuclear activism. Broadly speaking, the human body is the site of our primary physical experience and knowledge of environments; we interact with our environments through (at least) the bodily processes of touch, taste, smell, sight and hearing. These sensory sources of knowledge are inuenced by our species physiology (e.g., human beings have differently organized senses than bees), but also by our specic cultures and activities (e.g., automobile travel, horseback riding and walking lead to very different views of a landscape). Viewed as sites where culture and physiology interact, bodies are important for understanding both ontological and epistemological dimensions of environmental change. According to geographer Neil Smith, the body is a socially and physiologically constituted scale of place in which varied changes occur and interact, including biological maturation and decay, social identication and differentiation, and daily and intergenerational reproduction (Smith, 1991). In this sense, the human body is an

environment, a site in and over which multiple conicts and struggles take place: access, control, pleasure and pain, health, meaning, interpretation, mobility. The physical/social constitution of the body can thus be seen as a site of environmental change. Larger-scale environmental processes can also be understood as having specic manifestations in the environment of the body; the human body is understood not just as an effect of other scales of change but as a unique site where changes occur in particular ways, at least in part because of particular social and cultural relations of that scale. The prevalence and distribution of breast cancers in industrialized nations, for example, cannot be understood without reference both to the physiological impact of environmental hazards on womens bodies (e.g., the presence of organochlorines in water and consumer products) and to the complex social relations in and through which womens bodies have different histories (e.g., of such risk factors as exposure to toxins, access to health care and experiences of childbearing, variously affected by class, race, ability and sexual orientation). Altogether, these factors highlight the complexity of body/environment politics and the importance of an approach to environmental change that includes social and cultural elements; we are not, in fact, all in the same boat. In a related vein, Elizabeth Grosz argues that bodies and environments are mutually dening (Grosz, 1995). Environments including both their biological and cultural elements orient and organize bodily senses and perceptual (spatial) information; they also leave traces on and in the body in the form of symptoms but also memories and desires. These impacts inspire particular forms of bodily action, in which the body becomes a site or agent of intervention into that environment. For example, a hot and humid day may inspire some people to use air conditioning and others to enjoy the heat; the more people that choose the former, the more energy use and air pollution, thus having an impact on the atmosphere, etc. Far from there being a single, natural reaction to an environmental change, bodies are encultured (e.g., ones preference for cooler or warmer temperatures is, at least in part, a question of memory and desire); they are also active participants in the environments that shape them. Although this understanding of mutual inuence between bodies and environments may seem commonsensical, it is important to note its implications. First, as Grosz (1995, 109) writes, if bodies are not pregiven, environments cannot alienate the very bodies they produce . In other words, there is no single ideal environment for the body, and the appropriateness of any given one has a great deal to do with social and cultural factors (this is not to say that there are no limits to possibility, only that there is certainly more than one). Second, if bodies and environments are involved in a dialectical relationship, and if there

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is no single and biologically a priori template for the ideal form of this relationship, then it becomes of paramount importance for environmentalists to investigate a variety of different axes of in uence. Speci cally, as is suggested in much contemporary environmental thought, forms of social, political, and economic power have an enormous effect not only on bodies and environments individually, but on their modes of interaction. In these respects, the ontological question of mutual body/environment in uence is also an epistemological question; bodies shape knowledge of environments, and vice versa. Although sensory experience is clearly part of the creation of this knowledge, it is also the case that more socially and culturally sedimented in uences are at work. Bodies and environments can, in the terms of social theory, thus be understood as sites of inscription (meaning that they are partly de ned by culture) and as elements of discourse (meaning that they circulate as signs within the realm of language, artifact and culture). Such understandings are signi cant because they point to the fact that representations of the human body as environment are, in fact, themselves an important part of the process of environmental change. For example, the metaphorical understanding of the earth as a human body, often (as in the case of some Gaia imagery) a female one, has led historically (and may continue to lead) to particular, often damaging assumptions about the nature of each.

REFERENCES
Grosz, E (1995) Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies, Routledge, London. Smith, N (1991) Homeless/Global: Scaling Places, in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, eds J Bird, B Curtis, T Putnam, G Robertson, and L Tickner, Routledge, London.

Human Dimensions of Global Change

see Scientic Responses in an Era of Global Environmental Change (Opening essay, Volume 4); The Human Dimensions of Global Change (Introductory essay, Volume 5)

Human Ecology
see The Changing HumanNature Relationships (HNR) in the Context of Global Environmental Change (Opening essay, Volume 5)

I
I PAT Equation
see Modeling Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change (Opening essay, Volume 5)

Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) and Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI)
see ISEW (Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare) and GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator) (Volume 5)

Indigenous Knowledge, Peoples and Sustainable Practice

Douglas Nakashima1 and Marie Roue 2
1 2

calling for the integration of indigenous and science-based knowledge. While indigenous peoples who have been lobbying for such recognition have reason to be satis ed, there are also reasons for concern. Are scientists serious enough about this emerging issue to go so far as to question the construction of their own knowledge? Or at the end of the day, will they do little more than add a veneer of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and then carry on business as usual? For the time being, the scienti c and the development communities views indigenous knowledge rst and foremost as a resource to be appropriated and exploited. Integration with (or more accurately into) science implies the application of a validation process based on scienti c criteria that purportedly separates the useful from the useless, objective from subjective, indigenous science from indigenous beliefs. Through this process, knowledge corresponding with the paradigm of Western science is extracted, and the rest is rejected. While this cognitive mining may be pro table to science, it threatens indigenous knowledge systems with dismemberment and dispossession.

INDIGENOUS, LOCAL OR TRADITIONAL ECOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE (TEK)?

The challenge of understanding indigenous knowledge begins with the perplexing task of deciding how it should be named. On this matter, few persons agree. Or to be more precise, everyone recognizes that existing terms are for one reason or another unsatisfactory. Should one speak of TEK, the term coined when the eld emerged in the public arena in the 1980s? Or abandon this designation in favor of the term indigenous knowledge? TEK has the advantage of immediately evoking the temporal depth of these sets of knowledge and of clearly agging their domain, that of nature, while at the same time raising the question of their relationship to the ecological sciences. Associating the term traditional, however, with societies that, in the not so distant past, were dismissed as primitive or savage raises the phantom of social Darwinism. The term is all the more inappropriate, if our penchant for constructing binary oppositions leads us to conceive traditional

UNESCO, Paris, France Centre National de la Recherche Scientique, Paris, France

Indigenous knowledge is entering into the mainstream of sustainable development and biodiversity conservation discourse. Article 8(j) of the Convention of Biological Diversity (Rio, 1992) has contributed to this process by requiring signatories to: respect, preserve and maintain knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities embodying traditional life-styles relevant for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity . As the potential contribution of indigenous knowledge to key items on the global agenda gains widening recognition, an increasing number of scientists and policy-makers are

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as a counterpoint to modern, and to think of traditional knowledge as xed in the past and not susceptible to change. Finally, it may be misleading to apply the term ecological to sets of knowledge whose content and nature extend well beyond the connes of one scientic discipline to include such knowledge as the movements of constellations, the strength of ocean currents or the elasticity of sea ice, and to encompass not only empirical knowledge, but also practices and know-how, value systems, ways of life and worldviews. The fact is that indigenous peoples do not share the dichotomous occidental worldview that separates the material from the spiritual, nature from culture, and humankind from all other life forms, and as a result they do not do science in isolation from other pursuits. While the label indigenous knowledge has the advantage of explicitly designating one of the groups of peoples most concerned those who designate themselves as indigenous peoples, it raises other concerns. Who is indigenous and who is not? What peoples wish to be designated by this term and which do not? Indeed, this label is poorly adapted to the realities of Asia and Africa, where all peoples are native and any attempt to designate one group as indigenous but not another, provokes confusion. In these regions, unlike in the Americas or Australia, histories of human occupation have not followed a pattern whereby a wave of colonizers coming from abroad has supplanted or dominated a population that, due to its earlier and lengthy presence, is clearly identiable as aboriginal or indigenous. Furthermore, in several African countries, particularly former colonies of francophone nations, the label indigenous has retained a strongly negative connotation due to its past history of use by colonial oppressors. For this reason, the expression farmers knowledge and local knowledge are sometimes preferred. The term local knowledge has the additional advantage of not excluding non-indigenous farmers, shers, health practitioners and others whose extensive knowledge of the natural milieu is also a product of resource-based livelihoods extending across many generations. Its major weakness is a lack of specicity, as most knowledge can be labeled local. Faced with the complexities of dening indigenous, special rapporteur J R Martinez Cobo provided a report in 1983 to the United Nations (UN) Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, in which he stressed the right of indigenous peoples themselves to dene what and who is indigenous. Further to this principle of self-identication, criteria retained to dene the quality of being indigenous include common ancestry with original occupants, a distinct ethnic identity and shared patterns of vulnerability. These denitions are clearly of a political nature. They offer peoples encapsulated within states that may be reluctant to recognize territorial rights or

the right to pursue a distinctive way of life, an opportunity to assert their difference and their collective identity. The debate on who and what to dene as indigenous is far from closed, and it is unlikely that any single denition will satisfy all parties. Today, the UN Working Group of Indigenous Peoples estimates the world population of indigenous peoples as some 300 million, belonging to some 5000 groups in more than 70 countries, the largest population residing in Asia.

WHAT IS INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE?

Indigenous knowledge systems are the complex arrays of knowledge, know-how, practices and representations that guide human societies in their innumerable interactions with the natural milieu: agriculture and animal husbandry; hunting, shing and gathering; struggles against disease and injury; naming and explaining natural phenomena; and strategies for coping with changing environments. It is through this ne-grained interplay between society and environment that indigenous knowledge systems have developed diverse structures and content; complexity, versatility and pragmatism; and distinctive patterns of interpretation anchored in specic worldviews. Whereas knowledge is conceived in Western culture as an abstract entity independent from practice (e.g., science as opposed to technology), such a compartmentalized view is alien to indigenous societies. It would be self-defeating to consider farmers knowledge of rain patterns, soil types and crop varieties apart from the ways in which this information is put into practice in their elds. In other words, indigenous knowledge includes not only knowledge but also know-how. Transmission is not only oral, but also in the context of doing (Figure 1). Finally, unlike science, indigenous knowledge does not oppose the secular to the spiritual, and therefore does not separate the empirical and objective from the sacred and intuitive. In indigenous societies, such boundaries are permeable. On the one hand, much knowledge of nature falls within the empirical realm. Hunters have detailed knowledge of the habitat, behavior, diet and migration patterns of their prey. Farmers know how crops should be rotated to maintain soil fertility and which plant products have insecticidal or medicinal properties. This science of the concrete, however, blends imperceptibly into the metaphysical realm. For the hunter, the success of the hunt is as much due to assistance from spirit helpers, as it is to skillful tracking and steady shooting. The continued ow of water for the farmers eld is attributed as much to their respect for the deity of the sacred headwater forests, as to the water-drawing properties of the trees themselves. The concrete and the spiritual co-exist side by side, complementing and enriching rather then competing and contradicting.

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Figure 1 Knowledge transmission through observation and practice: young Inuk boy helping his father skin and butcher a caribou (Rangifer tarrandus) on the banks of the Kuujjuaq River (Arctic Quebec, Canada). (Photo by D Nakashima)

ON THE NATURE OF THE SCIENCE OF THE CONCRETE

While the current wave of interest in indigenous knowledge dates back no more than a few decades, the knowledge systems themselves have accompanied humankind through countless millennia of environmental change and cultural adaptation. The societies that developed them did not wait for ofcial recognition before forging cultural landscapes and domesticating plants and animals that continue to play a major role in todays global economy. In 1962, Claude Levi-Strauss, a philosopher and renowned anthropologist, published his seminal work on The Savage Mind. In his opening chapter entitled the The Science of the Concrete, he reects on the nature and character of indigenous knowledge, which he also qualies as mythical thought (LeviStrauss, 1962). More recently, Berkes (1999), a human ecologist, has dedicated a book to indigenous knowledge entitled Sacred Ecology. Between the early work of LeviStrauss and Berkes recent overview, numerous observers have pondered over these knowledge systems. While some accord them great value and others dismiss them as nonsense, their dual nature, combining the material and the spiritual, has been evident to all. The rst scientist to dedicate himself to the contemporary study of indigenous knowledge was Harold Conklin, who completed his thesis at Yale University in 1954 on The Relations of Hanunoo Culture to the Plant World (Conklin, 1954) (the Hanunoo are indigenous peoples of the Philippines). Pioneering a new discipline, ethnoscience, which would later come to be called the new ethnography, he dedicated himself to the study of a societys knowledge of its natural environment, through the examination

of indigenous semantic categories. It is true that studies of human relations with plants and animals existed well before the 1950s, and that this intellectual tradition continues to this day under various labels composed of the prex ethno-, followed by a qualifying term: ethnobotany, ethnozoology, ethnominerology. Ethnoscience, however, introduced a radically different approach that focused upon the knowledge of nature possessed by local peoples themselves. Unlike ethnobotany or colonial economic botany, which are basically applied Occidental sciences carried out in exotic locations and among exotic peoples, ethnoscience strives to understand the view from within (an indigenous worldview). As a branch of cognitive anthropology, it focuses upon elucidating a cultural grammar, structures of thought built into the local language. For the rst time, the recording of indigenous taxonomies was to reveal not only the breadth of a peoples knowledge, but also insights into its very nature (cf. Friedeburg, 1979; Bulmer, 1979; Berlin, 1992; Ellen, 1993). The classicatory prowess of indigenous peoples is on a par with that of scientists. As Levi-Strauss has amply demonstrated, the breadth of indigenous taxonomic knowledge is impressive: a single Seminole informant can identify 250 plant varieties and species, Hopi Indians recognize 350 plants, the Navajo more than 500. The Subanun of the Philippines use more than 1000 botanical terms and the Hanunoo, close to 2000. The diversity and sophistication of plant and animal use also attests to the subtlety of indigenous observations and the capacity to systematize knowledge and know-how. The Buriyat of Siberia, for example, derive from a single species, the bear, no less than 52 therapeutic applications: seven distinct uses for the

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meat, ve for the blood, nine for the fat, 12 for the brain, 17 for the bile, and two for the fur, etc. As impressive as these gures may be, for the Hanunoo, plants are not the stuff of lists, but rather objects of passionate and prolonged debate. Having rigorously recorded Hanunoo discussions during and after the evening meal, Conklin concluded that plants, especially cultivated varieties, were the focus of a majority of exchanges. Combining the expertise and interests of systematic and economic botanists, Hanunoo conversations centered upon the hundreds of characteristics which differentiate plant types and often indicate signicant features of medicinal or nutritional value (Conklin, 1954, 97). This knowledge is acquired very young and expanded throughout an entire lifetime. One morning, a seven-year-old Hanunoo girl surprised Conklin by suggesting that he show her the pictures of Browns three-volume guide to useful plants of the Philippines. On her own initiative, she began to comment on the text, assigning each plant a hanunoo name, or solemnly declaring that she had not seen that plant before. At the end of her remarkable performance, she had identied 51 out of 75 plants with only two errors! While a science of the concrete might be expected to have practical applications as its sole preoccupation, Levi-Strauss argues that indigenous knowledge is motivated by considerations other than utility. He cites Speck, for example, who has documented for the Indians of northeastern US and eastern Canada, an extensive herpetological taxonomy that is comprised of distinct terms not only for each genus, but also for species and certain varieties. Yet this knowledge is not practical, as reptiles and amphibians have no economic utility for these groups. Similarly, not only do the Pygmies distinguish between a phenomenal number of plants and animals, but they have also developed detailed knowledge of the habits and behavior of several species, including bats, that cannot be considered to be useful to them. These and other examples, drawn from numerous observers in diverse societies, have led LeviStrauss to conclude that it is not, as one might expect, use that leads to knowledge. Of the endless trials conducted for the sake of knowing, only a few end up providing useful results:
animals and plants are not known because they are useful, they are found to be useful or interesting because they are rst known . (Levi-Strauss, 1966, 9)

THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF SCIENCE AND OF INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE

The image of the Other held by the West shifts from one extreme to another. Since the time of the rst encounter, indigenous peoples have always been a source of

fascination. For many Occidentals they embody the ultimate otherness and, as such, they have been the object of both admiration and scorn. Are the savages the embodiment of our unattainable dreams of freedom, courage, purity, simplicity and social equality? Or are they, as we imagine we were before becoming civilized cunning, cruel, ignorant, without faith or order, heeding only the law of the jungle? Until the development of cultural ecology in the 1960s (Lee and Devore, 1968), hunters and gatherers were portrayed as our poor backward cousins, struggling through great efforts and pains to maintain themselves just at the brink of survival. Subsequently, they became the distinguished representatives of what Sahlins (1972) has termed the original afuent society, rich not in material wealth, but luxuriating in time freed by the efcacy of their adaptation to the natural milieu and the adoption of a non-consumptive (Zen) lifestyle. Given these enduring disparities between our views of indigenous peoples, the deep ambivalence of our contemporary discourse on indigenous knowledge should come as no surprise. It is through pronouncements about the Other that Western society plays out its own doubts and fears. In this period of global change, have advances in science and technology brought well-being or alienation to our societies? Whenever the issue of indigenous knowledge is discussed, sooner or later the recurrent question of validity is raised. Is it scientic? Or, being composed of odds and ends, does it combine the best with the worst, juxtaposing without distinction empirical observations and obscure superstitions? As a rst response, we must understand the persons behind the question. Science is a social construction of our own society, which being modern and Occidental is determined both historically and geographically. It presupposes a separation of the spiritual from the material, of religion from knowledge, and of culture from nature. Such a dissected worldview is not shared by indigenous cultures whose philosophy is better characterized as a cosmovision or as holistic. For this reason, qualifying the knowledge of indigenous people as science is both misrepresentation and reductionism. Nevertheless, this fallacious and futile approach of seeking ourselves in the Other has provided the basis for an entire critique of indigenous knowledge. It is formulated in most cases as negative denitions, i.e., what indigenous knowledge is not. For example, science denes itself as experimental (deductions from hypotheses are tested), systematic (results can be replicated) and universal (results are independent from context, as variables are isolated and controlled). In contrast, indigenous knowledge is often said to be practical (determined by immediate need and utility), local (only applicable in the setting in which it was developed) and contingent (context dependent).

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Some even speculate whether this knowledge might lie somewhere between perception and conception, and better be considered as much skill, as concept (Sillitoe, 1998, 229). How do New Guinea highlanders assess the quality of their soil? Even if the results of their analysis do not differ from that of the agronomist, they are reprimanded for not being able to offer up on a platter the analytical discourse that the scientist requires. When asked to explain why or how, they reply: If one is a farmer, one just knows . But in this dialogue between the deaf, where are the barriers and to whose limits are they due? Scientists conclude that indigenous people lack the analytical capacity to raise their skills from the plane of the local and pragmatic to that of the systematized and universal (Sillitoe, 1998). But as Sillitoes comments suggest, highlander farmers are undoubtedly equally frustrated by the difculty of communicating their knowledge to scientists, and bewildered by the constraints that the latter impose on how knowledge must be packaged. Instead of opening all intellectual and sensorial pathways (touch, smell, taste, sight, sound) and accepting the farmers invitation to feel the texture of the soil, smell its composition or taste its acidity, scientists narrow-mindedly insist that explanations pass by the single limited channel of an intellectual discourse compatible with the Occidental literate tradition. For the scientist, if a farmers knowledge cannot be reduced to the written word, then it is not knowledge, but remains merely skills. All of these criticisms (or more politely, denitions of what indigenous knowledge is not) arise from our own ethnocentrism and an inability to extricate ourselves from our own culturally-embedded point of view.

KNOWLEDGE AS A BASIS FOR SUSTAINABLE PRACTICE

Overshadowed by the pomp and promise of modern science and technology, indigenous knowledge systems have been disregarded until recently. While scientists and development agencies are only beginning to acknowledge their signicance, their enduring role as the mainstay of local food production and health care in the developing world cannot be questioned. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, local knowledge guides the decisions and practices of small-scale farmers who represent 7090% of agricultural producers and more than 60% of the population. Artisanal shers, who represent more than 90% of the sheries work force world-wide, rely on their own knowledge and skills to locate sh, navigate safely at sea and bring home the catch. Similarly, it is estimated that some 80% of the worlds population fullls their primary health needs through the use of traditional medicines. Even in industrialized countries, local knowledge accumulated across generations continues to play a fundamental role in sustaining localized resource

use practices whether they be small-scale farming, shing, trapping or the gathering of wild produce. Since the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development, and in particular the coming into force of the Convention on Biological Diversity, increasing attention has been drawn to the contributions that indigenous knowledge can make to global biodiversity conservation objectives. This emerging role for indigenous knowledge holders has owed quite naturally from the recognition that most remaining regions of the world that are biodiversity rich are also homelands for traditional and indigenous peoples. This is no simple coincidence, as in sharp contrast with the biodiversity impoverishment that accompanies the processes of modernization and industrialization, the persistence of traditional ways of life has gone hand in hand with the maintenance of local ecological systems and the conservation, and even enhancement, of biodiversity. In these areas represented as wilderness or virgin in the Western mind, indigenous knowledge participates in the transformation of nature to create cultural landscapes, the products of social systemecosystem interaction. One dramatic, but by no means unique, example of this process is the use of re by Aboriginal peoples in Australia to create landscapes that are ecological mosaics (cf. Case Study 1 below). This sustainable practice, which is vital for maintaining biological diversity, has now been integrated into National Park policy in certain parts of Australia through directives that explicitly call for the reinstatement of traditional Aboriginal burning regimes. Inventories of local biodiversity can also benet from knowledge encoded in local languages in the form of indigenous categories of natural objects. Finally, as indigenous peoples retain within their knowledge systems an inter-generational memory of uctuations, trends and exceptional events in relation to the local environment, they can contribute importantly to understanding processes of change, whether these might be long-term, global transformation processes or circumscribed local events. The invaluable contribution of indigenous knowledge to environmental and social impact assessment processes, for example, has been convincingly demonstrated. Modernization and uniformization of agricultural practices has also triggered a severe loss of biological diversity of domestic plant and animal stocks. Here again, pastoral and peasant communities that have maintained traditional modes of production have today become the major custodians of the worlds crop and domestic animal diversity. In tropical agroecosystems in Thailand and Indonesia, for example, peasants commonly maintain more than 100 domestic plant species, as well as harboring in their paddies, rice varieties adapted to a range of environmental conditions (Altieri, 1999). Slash and burn agriculture as practiced by the Karen of northern Thailand offers one example of a sustainable farming system based upon indigenous knowledge

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and practice, that enhances biological diversity (cf. Case Study 2 herein).

CASE STUDY 1: ABORIGINAL FIRE REGIMES AND THE CREATION OF CULTURAL LANDSCAPES
Gagadju, indigenous hunter gathers of Australia s Northern Territory, focus their subsistence activities on a coastal fringe penetrating no more than a few kilometers inland (Lewis, 1989; Nakashima, 1998). Two habitat types dominate this area of atlands: tall-open eucalyptus forest and eucalypt woodlands. Interspersed between these habitats are freshwater oodplains, paperbark swamps and rain forest stands. A steep sandstone escarpment dominated by Spinifex and other grasses as well as by shrubs, marks the inland boundary of the coastal atlands. This tropical savannah ecosystem has been and continues to be shaped by the Gagadju through the judicious application of re. Burning practices are carefully orchestrated, paying close attention to season, habitat, wind direction, state of vegetative growth, moisture levels, previous burn locations and accumulation of debris. The Aboriginal calendar is divided into six seasons. Three of these constitute the wet period of the year: rst, a season of pre-monsoon storms; followed by the monsoon season; and nally the period of knock em down storms. The dry period follows, also divided into three seasons, beginning with a cool, humid season, then a cold weather season and nally a period of hot, dry weather. The Gagadju begin their annual cycle of burning towards the end of the wet period and conduct most burning activities during the ensuing cool and cold weather seasons of the dry period. During the hot, dry season when vegetation is extremely ammable and res are dif cult to control, burns are only conducted under very limited circumstances.
Burning Patterns on the Floodplains

fashion farther and farther out onto the oodplain. On each occasion, previous burn areas and fresh vegetative growths on moister soils serve to contain the re. This burning of the oodplains serves several purposes. First, the early res around the perimeters of rain forests and paperbark swamps create re barriers that shelter these fragile habitats from res occurring later in the season. Second, the razing of mature, dry stands of grasses triggers a regrowth, whose tender leaves lure kangaroos and wallabies out from adjacent rain forest stands in the early morning and late evening, thus offering the Gagadju hunting opportunities. Finally, the Gagadju note that res also favorably alter the oodplain habitat for the nesting of waterfowl, particularly magpie geese.
Creating Fire Mosaics

With the end of the monsoon season, water levels on the oodplain begin to recede. Sedges and grasses, which spring up on the exposed ats, quickly mature and are dry before the coming of the knock em down storms. The Gagadju set their rst res in these dry grasses, knowing that the burn will die out along the edges of the rain forests and paperbark swamps (much too moist at this season to burn) and will continue outwards into the oodplains no more than some 2 10 m. These habitat types differ markedly in their sensitivity to re. When dry, the grasses of the oodplains, as those on the escarpment, burn easily and recover quickly. In contrast, the vegetation of rain forests and paperbark swamps is re-sensitive, recovering from a burn only with considerable dif culty. At intervals of a few weeks, the Gagadju ignite and burn successive strips of grasses as they mature and dry, proceeding in this

Beginning during the cool season and at the start of the cold season, the Gagadju set res in the tall-open forest and eucalypt woodland habitats that dominate the coastal atlands. These habitats are highly susceptible to burning and at the same time, well adapted to re. In the understory, leaf litter accumulates quickly and has high oil content, while sorghum grasses provide a dense cover. While these burn easily when dry, the vegetation is nevertheless quick to recover. Thick bark shelters eucalyptus trees from understory res, and high canopies reduce the likelihood of res spreading into the forest crown. Wind intensity and direction are important allies. The Gagadju use strong midday winds to aim the re towards areas of moister vegetation or previous burn sites to limit the extent of the burn. Furthermore, strong winds prevent heat and ames from licking up into the forest canopy, thus protecting trees in ower that will subsequently provide humans and animals with edible fruit. Early in the cold season the res go out after a few hours and burn relatively small areas. As the season progresses, the vegetation becomes successively drier, and res burn longer and cover larger areas. Fires in these wooded habitats serve a number of functions. Circles of re are used as a hunting technique, driving animal prey to waiting hunters. By removing surface vegetation and debris, burning facilitates the gathering of yams and roots and the hunting of goannas (Figure 2). Burn sites attract kangaroos and wallabies that come to graze the fresh re-growth of grasses. Furthermore, these serial burnings create an ecological mosaic composed of sites at different stages of recovery from burning. This heightens biological diversity and provides the Gagadju with a choice of subsistence opportunities. Finally, regular bouts of controlled burning impede the growth of thick tangles of underbrush and prevent the dangerous build-up of leaf litter and debris that can result in uncontrollable wild res. The central role of traditional Aboriginal burning practices in maintaining biological diversity, and in creating

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Figure 2 Shaping landscapes with re: Aboriginal peoples use controlled burning to maintain a habitat mosaic that offers a variety of foraging opportunities. Here a woman sets off to hunt goannas on a newly burned site (Northern Territory, Australia). (Photo by B Glowczewski)

and maintaining the cultural landscapes of Australia, has gained ofcial recognition by National Park authorities in certain parts of the country. In Kakadu and Uluru National Parks the re-establishment of traditional Aboriginal burning regimes has become an explicit Park management goal.

CASE STUDY 2: SWIDDEN CULTIVATION AS SUSTAINABLE PRACTICE THE KAREN OF NORTHERN THAILAND
Slash-and-burn (swidden ) agriculture continues to be an important mode of agricultural production in many parts of Africa, Asia, South and Central America and the Pacic (see Shifting Cultivation and Land Degradation, Volume 3; Swidden, Volume 3). It has also been at the heart of one of the most prolonged and vociferous debates over the sustainability of this traditional practice. While the debate is far from closed, there is growing awareness today that swidden agriculture as practiced by many indigenous peoples is not only sustainable, but also contributes to other pressing global concerns including conservation of domestic and wild biodiversity, as well as carbon storage.
Land Use Strategies of the Karen

village, often at the base of slopes where sediment fans have been created by the erosion of soils from swidden elds above. Lands used for rotational swidden agriculture are much more extensive, lying in a broad band surrounding the village. Families divide their holdings into plots among which cultivation is rotated on a 710 year basis. Fields are cultivated for only one or two seasons before being returned to fallow. The different types of forested areas, unlike rice paddies and swidden elds, are held as common property. The extensive community forests provide the Karen with wood and other forest products, as well as serving to graze livestock. Watershed forests harbor the headwaters of major water sources and are denoted as sacred.
Creating and Maintaining a Biologically Diverse Landscape

The Karen land use strategy is based upon the maintenance of several major categories of land that can be distinguished by their use, location and the pattern of ownership: rice paddy elds, areas of swidden cultivation, community forest and watershed forest (Figure 3) (Rerkasem and Rerkasem, 1994; Nakashima, 1998). Rice paddies are owned by individual families and tend to be established close to the

Through a judicious mixture of tradition, adaptation and innovation, the Karen people shape the landscape to create and maintain a high level of heterogeneity. From the resultant rich biological diversity, they extract a multitude of materials and products that fulll nutritional, socioeconomic, aesthetic and spiritual needs. Within swidden elds under cultivation, major crops of upland rice, maize and, increasingly today, cash crops such as cabbage, are intercropped with an astounding variety of traditional swidden products such as beans, eggplants, cucurbits, sesame, chilies, yams, gourds, pumpkins, various greens, and spices. Fruit trees, cotton and medicinal herbs are also planted in these elds (Rerkasem and Rerkasem, 1994). Further to this diversity of cultivated species, Karen farmers also foster the rapid recovery of secondary growth in the fallows, not only to maintain soil fertility and limit

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Watershed forest

Watershed forest

Community forest P C O A B P O B P C A O B Village O B C A O P B O B C A

ad

Sacred forest

P O B C P

A C

P B A P

Ri

ve r

B A

C O B

Figure 3 Organization of land use by the Karen of Nong Taw (Chiang Mai Province, Thailand) showing paddy elds (P), swidden elds (O under cultivation; A rst year fallow; B 3 4 year fallow; C 5 7 year fallow), community forest, watershed forest and sacred forest for rituals associated with birth. (Map by J Odochao and C Vaddhanaphuti. Reproduced by permission of Chayan Vaddhanaphuti)

Ro

erosion, but also to re-establish a botanical community of which they make full use. When clearing a eld for cultivation, branches and brush are left on the ground and burned, providing the soil with nitrogen and carbon-rich ash. Trees are cut well above ground level, leaving roots intact and stumps rising some tens of centimeters above the ground (Figure 4). These stumps sprout quickly, speeding recovery of the forest after cultivation and thus maintaining soil fertility. Furthermore, plots are distributed so as to ensure that recently used elds juxtapose old fallow plots whose advanced secondary growth speeds the recovery of cultivated lands by providing an abundant supply of seeds. From the rst year onwards, the fallow elds provide important supplies of medicinal plants, food in the form of mushrooms, tubers and shoots, as well as areas for the grazing of livestock. After several years, the number of plant species re-established on these sites numbers in the 100s, approaching the biological diversity found in adjacent uncut forest areas, such as the community and watershed forests. The Karen agro-ecosystem also encompasses the use and management of permanently forested lands. Community forests provide wild food products such as mangoes, jackfruit, bamboo shoots, mushrooms, greens and edible herbs, as well as medicinal herbs, rewood, and timber and bamboo

for construction. Watershed forests, as vital sources of water for swidden and rice paddy elds, are maintained in a state close to forest climax and strictly protected. Today the loss of traditional lands to logging interests or commercial plantations and state policies encouraging permanent and intensive agriculture are posing major threats to many swidden cultivators. Less land means shortened fallows and depleted soils, jeopardizing the sustainability of traditional practices. Moving from shifting cultivation to permanent agriculture entails major losses in both biological and cultural diversity, and raises the specter of the millions of hectares of Southeast Asia covered by speciespoor Imperata cylindrica grasslands, a direct result of the failure of permanent agriculture on phosphorus-poor tropical soils. Rather than import traditional Occidental models of resource exploitation, such as permanent cash monocropping or large-scale non-selective logging, the sustainable practices of small-scale swidden farmers like the Karen should be recognized and supported. They offer numerous benets including long-term sustainability of local environments and lifestyles, as well as the conservation of domestic crop varieties for many species, and wild plant and animal communities whose biodiversity approaches that of unexploited forest areas and remains far superior to that of permanently cultivated elds. Finally, recent

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Figure 4 Karen swidden elds showing various stages of regeneration. When clearing elds for cultivation, swidden farmers encourage re-growth by cutting certain trees well above ground level and leaving others intact (Chiang Mai Province, Thailand). (Photo by D Nakashima)

research suggests that agroforests in general, and shifting cultivation in particular, can contribute signicantly to carbon sequestration, by replacing conventional monocropping or Imperata grasslands with cyclical systems that include forest production.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS AND INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE: THE THREAT OF COMMODIFICATION

While biodiversity managers or development practitioners are only beginning to dene a role for indigenous knowledge, its utility in another domain has been fully recognized and is being vigorously acted upon. Bio-prospecting, the quest for natural products to be exploited for commercial gain, is explicitly targeting traditional knowledge holders. In this arena, the pharmaceutical, agricultural and biotechnological industries have been particularly active.

They recognize that the accumulated knowledge and traditional practices of indigenous communities are a powerful resource that can greatly facilitate the task of identifying useful new varieties of domestic plants or animals, isolating novel biological components, or developing innovative technologies and techniques. Recognition, however, has not automatically led to acknowledgement and the need to share benets with the community is regularly overlooked. The patenting of domestic plant varieties, traditional medical products and other biological resources whose identication and use are embedded in traditional knowledge has been a source of grave concern for developing countries and indigenous communities. By conferring upon foreign companies or individuals the exclusive right to exploit for commercial benet certain inventions that are in fact based upon indigenous knowledge, the patenting process transforms persons who do what they have always done into patent infringers. In one infamous case, the woundhealing capacity of turmeric, known and used in India for centuries, became a patented invention in the US. As a result, it became illegal for Indians residing in the US to use turmeric for this purpose. Similarly, a European patent on the fungicidal properties of the neem plant privatizes the botanical knowledge of Indian farmers who, for generations, have used this natural pesticide in their elds. In the end, both of these patents were revoked, but only after long and costly challenges mounted by the government of India (Duteld, 1999). Similarly, the Bolivian National Association of Quinoa Producers has mounted a challenge against a US patent relating to a unique male sterile variety of the quinoa plant, a characteristic long known to Andean peasants and used by them to control the development of new hybrids. As Gari (1999, 6) astutely points out this patent does much more than just hijack indigenous knowledge for the eventual material benet of a developed country. It also strengthens and spreads the Western paradigm of nature and science , by presenting knowledge pillaged from Bolivian peasants as the cutting edge of biotechnology. Patents are only one of several legal instruments that constitute the current regime of intellectual property rights (IPRs). Others include trademark, copyright, geographical indication and plant variety rights. For indigenous knowledge holders, IPRs have been more often a source of problems, rather than solutions. Certainly they serve to protect the interests of companies that engage in bio-piracy, the unauthorized exploitation of biological resources and indigenous knowledge. A key debate today is whether contemporary IPR regimes can be adapted to also defend the interests of those who are custodians of indigenous knowledge. To counter the granting of patents prejudicial to indigenous peoples, actions have been taken before the World Trade Organization under the agreement on traderelated aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPS).

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While providing a forum for overturning inappropriate patents, nothing in the TRIPS Agreement has been expressly designed for the protection of indigenous knowledge. Nevertheless, existing IPR arrangements may offer some viable options, and efforts are being made to explore these possibilities, including the development of sui generis (of its own kind) systems. The World Intellectual Property Rights Organization, for example, has recently created a commission on genetic resources, traditional knowledge and folklore, whose mandate includes the investigation of innovative measures to accommodate the exceptional characteristics of indigenous knowledge systems. The challenge is a sizable one. IPRs have evolved within narrow socio-economic and political contexts. Designed to protect individuals whose inventions require safeguarding in view of their potential commercial value, they remain largely incompatible with indigenous knowledge, which is collectively owned; whose invention extends across generations; and whose raison d etre is not pro t, but ecological understanding and social meaning. Due to this incompatible nature, legal rights may have impacts quite other than those intended. By protecting select elements in isolation from the larger cultural context, they encourage the fragmentation of cultural systems. By designating knowledge owners, they may trigger social dissension between those recognized as proprietors and others who are excluded. Finally, as IPRs protect knowledge by setting rules for their commercial exploitation, ironically they may in the end merely facilitate the appropriation of traditional knowledge by the global marketplace.

RELATIONS OF POWER: KNOWLEDGE APPROPRIATION OR INDIGENOUS EMPOWERMENT?

The scienti c and development community views indigenous knowledge rst and foremost as a resource to be appropriated and exploited. Even scientists with the best of intentions may accelerate the demise of other knowledge systems by valorizing components resembling science and implicitly (or explicitly) casting dispersions on other elements that in science s view are mere superstition and belief. Such a process captures and instrumentalizes indigenous knowledge, strengthening the hand of those in positions of power at the expense of indigenous peoples. This is not to argue against the exchange and sharing of knowledge between scienti c and indigenous systems. However, as Agrawal (1999) underlines, it would be irresponsible and a disservice to indigenous peoples to ignore the power relations that de ne such processes, and in particular, to fail to appreciate the implications of the severe power asymmetry between indigenous peoples and proponents of science.

To seek a way forward, it is important to come back to the questions of culture and worldview. For scientists, culture is a foreign element whose consideration falls outside the bounds of their profession (though they would probably agree to associate the cultural factor with the indigenous component of the equation). They are quite reluctant to admit that the culture of science is, in itself, a valid object of study. Cultural constructions such as the opposition of Nature (environment) and Culture (society), and the differentiation of rationality from spirituality, the empirical (science) versus the symbolic (religion), have provided science with its very foundations, and remain today an everyday reality of scienti c thought and practice. These tenets are such an integral part of the scienti c worldview that natural scientists are not aware of them as speci c cultural interpretations of the world. For them, they simply represent reality. Scienti c reality, however, differs from that lived by indigenous knowledge holders, whose conceptions of the world include pathways between natural and societal realms and whose spirituality infuses everyday objects and everyday acts. In other words, there is no sound basis for deciding that one worldview offers a superior reference point for reality than another. We can of course arbitrarily choose and given science s institutional power, it is not surprising that the objective and rational scienti c method is repeatedly called upon to judge other knowledge systems. But it is important to recognize that this is a societal choice, not one defensible from any neutral or extra-cultural perspective. Consequently, the encounter between scienti c and indigenous knowledge must be understood as a meeting of cultures, with the cultural component as prominent in one camp as the other. Full appreciation of this perspective alters our approach to articulating (a better term than integrating) scienti c and indigenous knowledge. Emphasis must be placed on leveling the playing eld and appreciating indigenous knowledge not as static sets of information to be conserved ex situ and integrated into science, but as dynamic components of contemporary indigenous societies and cultures. Accordingly, the protection of indigenous knowledge may better pass through pathways such as conserving indigenous language (as knowledge is encoded in language), ensuring knowledge transmission within the societies themselves, empowering indigenous societies so as to increase their control over processes of change, and ensuring continued access to the environments upon which their ways of life depend (see Development and Global Environmental Change, Volume 5).

REFERENCES
Agrawal, A (1999) Ethnoscience, TEK and Conservation: on Power and Indigenous Knowledge, in Cultural and Spiritual

324 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE Values of Biodiversity, ed D A Posey, UNEP, Nairobi, Kenya, 177 180. Altieri, M A (1999) The Agroecological Dimensions of Biodiversity in Traditional Farming Systems, in Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity, ed D A Posey, UNEP, Nairobi, Kenya, 291 297. Berkes, F (1999) Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management, Taylor and Francis, Philadelphia, PA. Berlin, B (1992) Ethnobiological Classi cation: Principles of Categorization of Plants and Animals in Traditional Societies, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Brush, S B and Stabinsky, D, eds (1996) Valuing Local Knowledge: Indigenous People and Intellectual Property Rights, Island Press, Washington, DC. Bulmer, R N H (1979) Mundane and Mystical in Kalam Classication of Birds, in Classi cations in their Social Context, eds R Ellen and D Reason, Academic Press, London, 57 80. Conklin, H C (1954) The Relation of Hanunoo Culture to The Plant World, Yale University, University Microlms Inc., Ann Arbor, MI. Duteld, G (1999) Rights, Resources and Responses, in Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity, ed D A Posey, UNEP, Nairobi, Kenya, 503 515. Ellen, R (1993) The Cultural Relations of Classi cation: an Analysis of Nuaulu Animal Categories from Central Seram, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Feit, H (1973) Ethno-ecology of the Waswanipi Cree; or How Hunters Can Manage Their Resources, in Cultural Ecology, ed B Cox, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 115 125. Friedberg, C (1979) Socially Signicant Plant Species and Their Taxonomic Position Among the Bunaq of Central Timor, in Classi cations in their Social Context, eds R Ellen and D Reason, Academic Press, London, 81 101. Gari, J A (1999) Biodiversity Conservation and Use: Local and Global Considerations, Science, Technology and Development Discussion Paper No. 7, Center for International Development and Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Johannes, R E (1978) Traditional Marine Conservation Methods in Oceania and Their Demise, Ann. Rev. Ecol. Syst., 9, 349 364. Lee, R B and De Vore, I, eds (1968) Man the Hunter, Aldine, Chicago, IL. Levi-Strauss, C (1962) La pens ee sauvage. Librairie Plon, Paris [English translation (1966) The Savage Mind, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL]. Lewis, H T (1989) Ecological and Technical Knowledge of Fire: Aborigines Versus Park Rangers in Northern Australia, Am. Anthropol., 91, 940 61. Nakashima, D (1998) Conceptualizing Nature: the Cultural Context of Resource Management, Nat. Resour., 34(2), 8 22. Rerkasem, K and Rerkasem, B (1994) Shifting Cultivation in Thailand: Its Current Situation and Dynamics in the Context of Highland Development, Forestry and Land Use Series No. 4, International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), London. Roue, M and Nakashima, D (1999) The Discourse of Ecological Correctness: of Dam Builders Rescuing Biodiversity for the Cree, in Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity, ed D A Posey, UNEP, Nairobi, Kenya, 406 412. Ruddle, K and Johannes, R E, eds (1985) The Traditional Knowledge and Management of Coastal Systems in Asia and the Paci c, UNESCO, Jakarta, Indonesia. Sahlins, M (1972) Stone Age Economics, Aldine, Chicago, IL. Sillitoe, P (1998) The Development of Indigenous Knowledge: a New Applied Anthropology, Curr. Anthropol., 39, 223 252.

Indigenous Peoples
see Globalization in Historical Perspective (Opening essay, Volume 5)

Interdisciplinary vs Multidisciplinary
see Social Science and Global Environmental Change (Opening essay, Volume 5)

Internalization of Damage Costs

see Internalization (Volume 4)

International Council of Scientic Unions (ICSU)

see ICSU (International Council for Science) (Volume 4)

International Environmental Law

M J Peterson
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA

International environmental law is the branch of international law addressing human interactions with nature,

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with particular focus on protecting the biosphere, including its subsystems, natural processes, and species diversity from serious harm caused by human activities and regulating the human use of natural resources. Its substantive and procedural principles, norms and rules are expressed in a growing number of global, regional, and bilateral treaties, declarations and action programs issued by international conferences and intergovernmental organizations, and emerging rules of customary international law. These specify goals towards which governments should strive, environmental standards they should incorporate into their cooperative and individual efforts to protect the environment, and certain procedures they should follow in cooperative and individual efforts to protect the environment from signi cant harm. Because international environmental law only addresses states (acting through their governments), it forms only one part of the legal structure designed to promote greater environmental protection. The activities of individuals, households, groups, and private rms remain subject to the national legal system of the state where they act or of which they are a national. Thus, effective protection of the environment requires that international and national environmental law be aligned. This process has been promoted by the extensive borrowings of principles and norms between both levels, international programs that spread regulatory expertise and increase the administrative capacity of developing states, and the efforts of a highly active transnational environmental movement. One institutional difference between national and international law makes developing, revising, and enforcing international law more complex: the international system lacks the central legislative, executive, and judicial bodies that maintain national legal systems. Development and implementation of international rules depend on a more complex process of bargaining and mutual in uencing between states equal in legal status as sovereigns but unequal in terms of size, wealth, and level of industrialization. This process is increasingly affected by popular pressures within states and the transnational activities of interest groups and social movements. Both the general international law applying to all states and particular treaties negotiated between two or more states have long re ected concern about aspects of nature. Perceptions of the abundance of sh stocks in uenced positions in the 17th century debates between proponents and opponents of the principle of freedom of the seas. Sharing navigational and other uses of rivers and lakes straddling the territory of more than one state promoted development of a distinct law on international watercourses. Disease control, protection of plants, migratory birds, and animal species, distribution of shing rights and prevention of over shing on the high seas became the subjects of multilateral and bilateral treaties in the late 19th and early

20th centuries. Pollution at sea, particularly from oil tanker operations and waste dumping, transport of hazardous substances, radiological hazards from military and civilian uses of nuclear energy, and transboundary water and air pollution umes were added to the subjects of treaty making after World War II (Ruster et al., 1983; UNEP, 1990). Concerns about protecting nature or natural resources were gathered under the common heading of international environmental law, only after ecological worldviews highlighting the interconnection of natural systems and the deleterious consequences of their alteration by human conduct were diffused widely among governments during the preparations for and discussions at the 1972 United Nations (UN) Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm Conference) (Schachter, 1991; Caldwell, 1998). The 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (Rio Conference), with its emphasis on the strong interconnections among environmental protection, economic development, and participatory governance at both national and international levels ensured that the integration of international environmental law with other branches of international law would be taken as seriously as its further development. The process of developing international environmental law has been shaped by several particular characteristics of environmental issues. It also involves development or wider use of several procedural innovations in negotiating, revising, and implementing international agreements meant to speed those processes and adapt them more fully to contemporary needs. So far it has yielded considerable, though not complete, consensus on a set of overarching principles and policy norms to guide the handling of speci c environmental problems as well as an ever increasing set of global, regional, and bilateral agreements regarding a wide range of environmental problems.

THE SPECIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

International environmental law is distinct from other branches of international law not because it is relatively new, but because international environmental issues have several distinct features that give international law-making and law application in that eld a distinct character. Relatively large and persistent uncertainty about impacts of human action or inaction on the biosphere is the most important of these characteristics. This uncertainty is a compound of changing scientic understanding of natural biosystems, changing natural system responses to human-induced stresses, and changing degrees of human-induced stress as technology alters, global human population increases, and consumption patterns shift. Uncertainty is not unique to

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environmental issues, but it has more sources and appears to operate within wider bounds than for other issues. Heavy reliance on expert advice, not just from scientists but also from engineers, resource managers, and economists, marks the formulation and implementation of regulatory decisions because of the breadth and pervasiveness of uncertainty. Many environmental problems are very subtle in their early stages, and their identication depends on the enhancement of human perceptual abilities provided by scientic instruments. Assessing alternate solutions generally involves fairly complex assessments of causal relations among multiple factors as well as comparative cost-benet analyses. Lawmakers must consider impacts over a relatively long time horizon because of the timelags between introductions of new technology or other changes in human activity and alteration of natural systems in response. Ensuring national compliance with environmental commitments imposes heavy administrative burdens on governments since most of the activity creating the need for explicit environmental protection is undertaken by individuals, households, business rms, and other private entities rather than by government agencies or ofcials. In many respects, international environmental law is a set of mutually agreed mandates directing governments to develop and use their administrative capacities in particular ways. The activities regulated are characterized by widespread externalities: both the bad effects of neglecting the environment and the good effects of improving environmental protection extend beyond the property of the private entity involved and often beyond the territory of the state where the activity occurs. This means that the full costs or benets are not borne or enjoyed by the private entity or even the country creating harms or providing benets to others, with the result that law must often include incentive schemes or other mechanisms for inducing actors to take the full range of costs and benets into account. At the same time, international environmental law shares two signicant characteristics with other branches of international law. Necessity for integration or coordination of rules with other branches of international law. Integration will be particularly strong with those other branches of international law regulating use of physical spaces (law of the sea, law of international watercourses) or the exploitation of resources (much of international economic law). The less extensive overlaps with human rights law and the law of warfare are also sufcient to pose coordination problems, requiring similar

processes of balancing the values promoted by the different branches of international law and ensuring that their rules are compatible with each other. Entanglement in wider debates about the future structuring of international, national, and local governance. International law will be affected by the results of current debate concerning whether the world will remain divided into some 200 states claiming sovereignty over their individual territories and populations. On the one side are governments and publics resistant to giving up sovereignty, whether by making promises to other states or by transferring signicant governing authority to an intergovernmental organization like the UN Environmental Programme or a supranational organization like the European Union. These fears are particularly strong in developing states, where any signicant centralization of authority is seen as an effort by the industrial states to maintain dominance of the global economy. The fears have been shared by segments of public opinion on both populist or nationalist right and socialist left in many of the industrial states, who see the process as one of yielding to distant and unaccountable elites. On the other side are two strong currents of opinion within the environmentalist movement regarding national sovereignty as an anachronism: one because it stands in the way of the greater global centralization needed to ensure a sustainable world, and the other because it stands in the way of shifting governance to a smaller scale promoting more sustainable lifestyles through application of local knowledge and face-to-face mutual accountability. Similar debates have raged in the elds of international human rights and international trade. All three have intensied as critics have demanded that the World Trade Organization pay more attention to environmental and labor issues. These critics see the interrelated debates as amounting to a choice between globalization on terms decided by a multinational corporationdominated elite, and participatory political institutions seeking creation of a just world by regulating markets.

PROCEDURAL INNOVATIONS
The widespread and growing sense of urgency in addressing environmental problems has encouraged government ofcials, legal advisers, and diplomats involved in developing international environmental law to adopt a number of procedural innovations. These are aimed at speeding up the traditionally slow processes of negotiating multilateral treaties

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or developing new rules of customary international law, accommodating the need for a wide range of information in decision-making, and providing greater mutual pressure for implementing agreed policy measures than has traditionally existed at the international level (see, e.g., Brown-Weiss et al., 1998; Kiss and Shelton, 1999; Victor et al., 1998 for greater detail.)
Framework Treaty Protocol Form

The older practice of distinguishing between the main portion of a treaty and annexes, protocols, or schedules containing detailed rules that can be modied as needed through an expedited amendment process, has been developed more fully in the framework treaty-protocol form used in many of the major global environmental treaties negotiated since 1985 (Kiss, 1993). The framework treaty identies the environmental problem to be addressed and species procedures for the meetings of the parties that determine the regulatory measures to be adopted, monitor their implementation by participating national governments, and assess the state of the natural systems involved and the efcacy of the regulatory measures with an eye to their revision. The protocols stipulate the particular regulatory measures selected and may also elaborate on the procedures for joint decision, implementation review, and results assessment. Most protocols are developed later as governments gain better understanding of the problem, develop clearer conceptions of possible solutions, and work out the political deals necessary to assure participation by enough governments to provide good chances of success. By making the protocols relatively easy to add to, delete, or amend (whether by delegating that task to the meeting of the parties or by using rules specifying a deadline for opting out), they can be revised as new information or new understanding of policy options develops. Governments thus take an incremental approach to regulation, rather than attempting to work out all the details in a single negotiation, as attempted at the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea in 19731982 (see Ozone Layer: Vienna Convention and the Montreal Protocol, Volume 4; United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and Kyoto Protocol, Volume 4).
Periodic Situation Assessment

causes of an environmental problem and the complexities of coping with uncertainty as regulatory responses are formulated. Scientic assessments of the dimensions of the environmental issue at hand often precede or form an important part of the initial negotiation of an environmental treaty. The major environmental treaties also provide for periodic assessment of both the state of the natural environment and of relevant technology or regulatory measures through parallel scientic and technical advisory committees. These periodic assessments create what Sand (1996, 792) calls a pre-ordained learning process in which governments are kept informed of changes in or newly developed knowledge about natural systems, technology, and the efcacy of regulatory responses.
Ongoing Implementation Review

Since the perceived successes of the effort to protect the ozone layer, environmental treaties have included: provisions for reporting policy actions and relevant statistics regarding production or emission of pollutants, joint review of efforts in a multilateral implementation committee separate from but reporting to the Conference of the Parties (COP) (see Conference of Parties, Volume 4), and dispute resolution. The considerable success of non-adversarial approaches to encouraging better implementation relying on consultation, persuasion, and provision of assistance for administrative capacity building have inspired debate among international lawyers and political scientists regarding the relative importance of compliance promotion and a more traditional enforcement approach in promoting compliance with treaty commitments (Chayes and Chayes, 1995 and Downs et al., 1996 provide clear statements of the contrasting views.)
Extensive Use of Soft Law

All law-making and law revision rests on assessments suggesting that a problem is sufciently important to warrant attention, can be solved or abated through consciously directed human action, and will likely be solved or abated by adopting a particular set of regulatory measures. International environmental law has formalized situation-specic assessments to an unusual degree because of the need for scientic investigation to demonstrate the existence and

Building on the traditional international law distinction between the legally non-binding voeux or recommendations of international conferences and the legally binding obligations of written or oral promises made to other governments, international lawyers have developed a new concept, soft law. It covers statements of desired goals and agreed policy directions forming a political or moral commitment stronger than summarized in the traditional understanding of recommendations but still falling short of legal obligation (Dupuy, 1992). Most soft law, like the Stockholm Declaration (1972) and Rio Declarations (1992) and Agenda 21 (1992), is the product of agreed statements adopted at international conferences, but some treaty provisions may also express soft law commitments. The use of soft law is particularly extensive in international environmental law because of the widespread belief that environmental problems must be addressed more

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rapidly than the traditional forms of treaty-making allow. Advocates of soft law approaches claim that they help overcome the hesitations induced by uncertainty by allowing governments to make preliminary commitments that can be adjusted later and permit negotiations to get beyond least common-denominator policy choices. Critics worry that heavy reliance on soft law encourages papering over disagreements and creates confusion about what governments have or have not committed themselves to do, making it harder for others to call them to account for lagging in implementation.
Explicit Opening of the International Law-Making Process to Participation by Non-state Entities

Domestic democratization in many parts of the world and the vast increase in transnational activism by organized social movements have combined to increase demands for broader participation in the formulation and revision of international environmental law and the monitoring of governments compliance with it. Environmental groups have had considerable success lobbying international conferences, inspiring similar activity by other groups while the scienti c and technological assessment panels generally consist of persons drawn from the scienti c, industry, labor, and environmental communities as well as government bureaucracies (see Integrated Assessment, De nition of, Volume 4; ULYSSES (Urban Lifestyles, Sustainability, and Integrated Environmental Assessment), Volume 4; Post-normal Science, Volume 5).

EMERGING PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL LAW

Each branch of international law contains certain broad principles that express a reason to prefer or avoid a particular result or behavior. These principles do not specify how to act in particular situations; rather, they orient action by indicating the goals and other considerations to be emphasized when deciding how to act. The struggle to de ne these principles has been intense because reorienting international law to take environmental protection more seriously has required rede ning the central international legal principle of state sovereignty to highlight responsibilities to protect the natural environment. Some of this rede nition was accomplished by expanding traditional doctrines of good neighborliness and abuse of rights, and reinterpreting the traditional legal maxim sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas (use what is yours in a manner that does not harm others). While successfully expanding state responsibilities towards other states, these adaptations of traditional doctrine fell short from an ecological point of view because they failed to provide a basis for obligation to protect nature, natural processes, or natural resources when the environmental

impact of human activity is con ned within the territory, airspace, or maritime jurisdiction of a single state. Efforts to establish that broader obligation have been troubled by two persistent disagreements. The rst involves different emphases on the balance to be drawn between the generally accepted principle of permanent sovereignty over natural resources and wealth, highlighting the right of each state to adopt its own program of economic organization and regulation, with the emerging rules of environmental protection. The second stems from disagreements between those who believe that the basic purpose of international environmental law is to enhance human existence by promoting living within the limits of nature and those believing that its basic purpose is to protect the intrinsic value of the biosphere. These have occasionally inspired strong controversy on particular policy questions, but have played out more generally in the reluctance of many governments to accept the notion of an environmental right. Governments of developing states in particular have worried that accepting such a right might erode the also controversial right to development that they have been advocating for many years. Recent intergovernmental declarations, multilateral treaties, and controversies regarding their application in particular situations have yielded considerable convergence on a set of principles of international environmental law establishing obligations to weigh protection of the environment heavily in decision-making and action. Though the exact legal status of some principles remains in doubt, and their generality often leads to controversy about their application in speci c situations, these broad principles provide the basic orienting statements of current international environmental law. The principle that states must ensure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not harm the environment in other states or global common areas. This principle has the strongest connection with traditional international law principles concerning the rights and duties of sovereign states, as well as the clearest expression in international environmental declarations and treaties. The principle of sustainable development. This is sometimes treated as part of international environmental law and sometimes as a principle mandating the closer integration of international environmental and international economic law (e.g., Sands, 1996). It was rst formulated in its current terms by the UN World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) (Bruntland Commission), which de ned it as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs . The International Court of Justice stopped short of calling sustainable development a legal principle in the Gabcikovo-Nagymaros Case

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(1998), but did characterize it as an objective that states are legally obligated to take into account in decisions on economic policy and particular projects. Third World governments have been particularly insistent that the principle means that economic development will not be subordinated to environmental concerns; environmentalists have been equally insistent that it means environmental protection cannot be subordinated to economic development. Yet this mandate to balance and serve both concerns provides little guidance for striking that balance in particular situations. It is clearest on questions of time horizon, strongly favoring adoption of longer-term perspectives in decisionmaking. The principle of intergenerational equity. This is closely linked with that of sustainable development through reciprocal reference. Sustainability suggests maintaining natural systems over time spans longer than a single generation, while intergenerational equity is dened in terms of acting in such a way that future generations have as many alternatives in use of ecosystems and resources as are available to the current generation. The notion that future generations have legally enforceable rights has inspired considerable controversy, but there is no serious dissent from the underlying claim that governments and other actors must shift away from a xation on the immediate future (whether this be the next prot or loss statement for businesses or the next election for governments) if they are to provide adequate environmental protection. The controversy about how to do so is considerable, and fuelled by the way longer-term thinking rubs against well entrenched economic (the discounting of future returns) and political (constituencies are those persons alive today) thinking. The principle of common concern. This articulates the belief that environmental problems are the concern of all states and is an effort to institutionalize two standards of conduct. The rst is that environmental protection, like more traditional duties to provide effective administration of territory or newer duties to respect human rights, is one of the standard obligations of sovereigns, one of the duties that, paired with a set of rights to political independence, territorial integrity, and nonintervention by other states, are integral to the status of sovereign. Applied strictly, the principle means that failure to adopt adequate domestic environmental law is itself a violation of international obligations, a reading that governments have been reluctant to take very far. The second is that obligations deriving from customary or treaty-based international environmental law are owed to the international community as a whole, not simply to the state or states directly harmed

by failures to protect the environment. Ambitious efforts to establish all failures to comply with an environmental agreement as violations erga omnes (matters about which any state may complain) still inspire controversy, but the principle has supported the institutionalization of the right to point out implementation failures by other states on a problem-byproblem basis in the new system of ongoing implementation review. This principle is reinforced by the traditional principles of good neighborliness and cooperation among states, which are not unique to international environmental law though they have environmental expressions. The related principle of common but differentiated responsibility. This expresses the general terms of ongoing bargaining between developing states and industrial states regarding who will provide what part of the effort and nancial resources needed for international environmental cooperation. It rests on moral claims that the industrial states greater role in causing environmental problems (by industrializing without the burden of environmental protection measures and continuing patterns of proigate resource consumption and waste generation) plus their greater ability to redress them (through possession of more advanced technology and greater nancial resources) mean that they should bear most of the burden of environmental protection. In some respects the principle can be seen as a generalized interstate expression of the polluter pays principal (see PPP (Polluter Pay Principle), Volume 4). Though triggering intense bargaining whenever invoked in a particular environmental negotiation, the principle has promoted use of several methods of differentiating obligations in recent environmental treaties. These include: allowing grace periods that give developing countries more time to meet emission standards; dening different baselines that allow developing countries to increase pollution levels to accommodate a measure of economic growth; providing nancial assistance; and even accepting that developing country implementation is contingent on provision of nancial assistance. However, the current emphasis on a binary categorical distinction between industrial and developing states will need modication in coming years, partly because at least some developing countries are or soon will be signicant contributors to pollution problems and partly because the distinction ignores the highly varied situations and economic performances of developing states. Shifting from the current focus on differential norms and rules distinguishing amongst named groups of states to a focus on contextual norms and rules based on differences in situation (Magraw, 1990) would permit better accommodation to the environmental implications of differences in size, geography, climate,

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and economic circumstances of different countries (see Common but Differentiated Responsibility Principle (Stockholm/Rio), Volume 4).

POLICY NORMS (PRINCIPLES) OF INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL LAW

International environmental law also includes a number of policy norms that provide guidance regarding the forms or objectives of regulatory measures to be adopted at the international and national levels. Most of these policy norms (frequently called principles to emphasize their importance, a reection of the lack of standardized terminology for the various types of legal prescription in international law) originated in the national law of a particular state, but were adopted more widely as their usefulness in promoting more effective environmental protection was perceived. The policy norms of international environmental law thus serve as a summary of and mandate to adopt what governments agree are the best national regulatory practices. More specic guidance regarding the precise sort of regulatory measure to adopt (direct control, emissions standards, ambient standards, product standards, process standards, recycling or return rules) and the sort of related economic incentive schemes to adopt is specied on a problem-by-problem basis in the growing body of multilateral, regional, and bilateral treaties and codes of conduct developed through intergovernmental organizations. The polluter pays principle (norm) which asserts that the costs of protecting the environment should be borne by those whose activities pose dangers to it. It developed primarily in national discussions of how to pay for cleaning up or avoiding pollution, and rests on rational choice assumptions that changing incentives by altering the costs of activity or inactivity will trigger changes in behavior. It was developed in the national environmental law of several industrial states to justify imposition of pollution taxes, direct regulations requiring polluters to install specied pollution abatement equipment, and to signal that the days of free use of the environment as a sink for all manner and quantities of waste were at an end. It serves similar functions at the international level. The precautionary principle, initially elaborated primarily in West Germany, endorsed in Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration, and incorporated into several later multilateral treaties, mandates that action be taken to avoid long-term consequences of some present-day activity when there is signicant uncertainty about the extent or material causes of damage from an activity. Traditionally such uncertainty was used as an argument

for deferring the imposition of limits on an activity. The precautionary principle shifts the terms of argument by placing the burden of proof that an activity is safe on those who would undertake an activity rather than on those who would impose regulations. In the strictest readings, precaution would require regulators to allow only those activities posing no danger of harm to the environment. Implementing the precautionary norm raises three interrelated controversies: 1) what standard of proof should guide assessments of anticipated environmental effects, 2) what constitutes a harm, 3) what constitutes a danger of harm. Dening danger requires answering two questions: how much harm could result from an activity and what is the probability of that harm occurring. Disagreement on all these matters has made the norm controversial among those who regard it as requiring elaboration of a generally applicable standard. The level of disagreement declines when the norm is understood as mandating an approach to policy that favors erring on the side of caution in authorizing or regulating an activity (see Precautionary Principle, Volume 4). The norm that governments should promote use of environmentally benign technologies. It rst developed in Western Europe but has won wide endorsement. Any controversy it inspired is focused on how far technology choices may be based on the comparative costs of adopting different technologies, leading to a range of formulations ranging from best available technology (BAT) to best available technology not entailing excessive costs (BATNEEC). Developing county governments have invoked the norm to support their claims that they should enjoy access to technologies on more favorable terms than currently prevail in international commerce. The norm of prior assessment of environmental impacts of proposed activities, rst developed in the USA and later adopted in other parts of the world. It supplements the precautionary principle by requiring serious efforts to understand environmental consequences before major activities proceed, and has been linked to efforts to develop more transparent and accountable government through arguments that it should include opportunities for comment from the general public. The prior notication norm, which is both a continuation and an extension of international rules with a long history. Multilateral treaties regarding particularly hazardous activities, such as maritime transport of nuclear materials, operation of nuclear power plants, transport of toxic or hazardous substances, and incidents of oil pollution at sea, have long included obligations of notication. Most of these obligations involve notication of accidents likely to have effects abroad; a few

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also mandate the sharing of data regarding hazardous or toxic chemicals or the securing of prior consent from the government of another state before shipments of certain substances to addressees on its territory occur. The public information norm, which is well developed in the domestic legal systems of western industrial states, but only beginning to be dened in international law. It is given particularly strong emphasis by those seeking to increase the direct participation of nongovernmental organizations and other non-state entities in environmental governance, but arriving at a consensus international denition is difcult because of the variety of national practices on the subject (see Governance and International Management, Volume 5).

Sand, P H (1996) Institution-building to Assist Compliance with International Environmental Law, Zeitschrift f ur auslandisches offentliches Recht und V olkerrect, 56, 773 793. Sands, P (1996) Principles of International Environmental Law I: Institutions, Standards, and Implementation, Manchester University Press, Manchester. Schachter, O (1991) The Emergence of International Environmental Law, J. Int. Aff., 44, 457 493. Stockholm Declaration (1972) Int. Leg. Mater., 11, 1416 1421. UNEP (1990) International Register of Environmental Treaties, United Nations Environment Program, Nairobi. UN World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) Our Common Future, Oxford University Press, New York. Victor, D, Raustiala, K, and Skolnikoff, E B (1998) The Implementation and Effectiveness of International Environmental Agreements, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

For treaty texts, see the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy Multilateral Treaty Database, www.tufts.edu/ etcher/multilaterals.html and CIESIN List of Multilateral Treaties relating to the Environment, www.sedac.ciesin.org/ entri/texts-home.html web sites; for current developments see the Yearbook of International Environmental Law and the Yearbook of International Cooperation on Environment and Development.

International Social Science Council (ISSC)

see ISSC (International Social Science Council) (Volume 5)

REFERENCES
Agenda 21 (1992) Agenda 21: Program of Action for Sustainable Development, United Nations, New York. Brown-Weiss, E, McCaffrey, C, Magraw, D B, Szasz, P, and Lutz, R E (1998) International Environmental Law and Policy, Aspen Law and Business, Gaithersburg, NY. Caldwell, L K (1998) International Environmental Policy, 3rd edition, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Chayes, A and Chayes, A H (1995) The New Sovereignty, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Downs, G W, Rocke, D M, and Barsoom, P N (1996) Is the Good News about Compliance Good News about Cooperation? Int. Organ., 50, 379 407. Dupuy, P-M (1992) Soft Law and the International Law of the Environment, Michigan J. Int. Law, 12, 420 435. Gabcikovo-Nagymaros (1998) Case (Hungary v. Slovakia) (1997), Int. Leg. Mater., 37, 162. Kiss, A (1993) Les Traites-cadres: Une Technique Juridique Characteristique du Droit International de lEnvironnement, Annuaire Francaise de Droit International, 39, 792 797. Kiss, A and Shelton, D (1999) International Environmental Law, 3rd edition, Transnational Publishers, Ardsley, NY. Magraw, D (1990) Legal Treatment of developing Countries: Differential, Contextual, and Absolute Norms, Colorado J. Int. Environ. Law Policy, 1, 69 99. Rio Declaration (1992) Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, United Nations, New York, also in Int. Leg. Mater., 31, 874 880. Ruster, B, Simma, B, and Bock, M (1983) International Protection of the Environment: Treaties and Related Documents, Oceana Publishers, Dobbs Ferry, NY.

ISEW (Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare) and GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator)
Aggregate economic indicators, such as gross domestic product (GDP), are derived from the system of national accounts (SNAs) that are now standardized across nations. The indicators measure the rate of market and government activity of an economy and are used for comparisons over time and between nations. Economic goods and services produced in households, in subsistence economies, and through the contribution of non-market environmental services are not included in the SNAs and hence are not included in the aggregate indicators. The missing information also results in misrepresentations and misinterpretations of the market data that are included (see Ecological Economics, Volume 5). These concerns have led to the development of expanded accounting systems and alternative indicators, the most famous of which are the ISEW and its evolutionary offshoot, the GPI. Economists frequently argue that it is inappropriate to represent GDP per capita, or other indices derived from the SNA, as measures of well-being, or even economic

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well-being. Nonetheless, economists and others frequently use these terms in exactly this way. In light of this, many have argued that reasonable aggregate measures of wellbeing need to be developed. The ISEW was conceived by Herman Daly and John Cobb and developed by Clifford Cobb (Daly et al., 1989) to be a superior indicator of economic well-being. They also hoped that the index would indicate what the sustainable level of well-being was. The ISEW corrects, at least partially, for the absence of the household and environmental sectors in the SNA. It also takes the additional step of addressing equity, arguing that adding $1000 to the annual consumption of a rich person does not improve welfare nearly as much as it would for a poor person. Further, the ISEW does not include government expenditures on national defense, health care, prisons, etc., because they are largely partial corrections for problems that have grown worse over time. An ISEW has been calculated for many European countries. The GPI in the US evolved from the ISEW and is being promoted by a non-governmental organization, Rede ning Progress. GDP per capita in the US nearly tripled during the second half of the 20th century. The GPI shows well-being increasing more modestly from 1950 into the early 1970s and then drifting downward. GDP and ISEW show similar patterns in Europe. The ISEW, GPI, and other alternative indicators have played a modest role in environmental debates about economic growth in developed countries and have prodded the World Bank (Lutz, 1993) and national governments (Nordhaus and Kokkelenberg, 1999) to consider amending the SNAs. However, alternative indicators have yet to be incorporated in the debate over NorthSouth equity and global environmental change.

Islam and the Environment

Fazlun M Khalid
Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences, Birmingham, UK

REFERENCES
Daly, H E, Cobb, Jr, J B, and Cobb, C W (1989) Appendix for the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future, Beacon Press, Boston, MA. Lutz, E, ed (1993) Toward Improved Accounting for the Environment, an UNSTAT-World Bank Symposium, The World Bank, Washington, DC. Nordhaus, W D and Kokkelenberg, E C, eds (1999) Natures Numbers: Expanding the National Economic Accounts to Include the Environment, National Research Council, Washington, DC.

FURTHER READING
Uno, K and Bartelmus, P, eds (1998) Environmental Accounting in Theory and Practice, Kluwer, Dordrecht.
RICHARD B NORGAARD USA

It has often been observed that Islam cannot ordinarily be described as a religion and that it prescribes a way of life that goes beyond the performance of rituals. The word for religion (d n) is found in the Quran (anglicized spelling: Koran; this is Islams sacred text on which much of this essay is based). The word d n, which appears in 90 different places, often in contexts that place it outside the purely ritual. D n in essence describes an integrated code of behavior which deals with personal hygiene, at one end of the spectrum, to our relationships with the natural order at the other. It provides a holistic approach to existence, it does not differentiate between the sacred and the secular and neither does it place a distinction between the world of mankind and the world of nature. However, this Islamic mode of expression is now severely attenuated, having been swept aside by the forces of history, like the other older traditions, into a domain which treats the natural world exclusively as an exploitable resource. As what we now understand by modernity advanced, as the secular ethic progressively seeped into the Muslim psyche and as industrial development, economic indicators and consumerism became the governing parameters of society, there has been a corresponding erosion of the Muslim perception of the holistic and a withering of its understanding of the sacred nexus between the human community and the rest of the natural order: The creation of the heavens and the earth is far greater than the creation of mankind. But most of mankind do not know it (Qur an 40:56). For these and other reasons, Muslims in various parts of the world have in recent times sought the reversal of these trends through the re-establishment of Islamic governance based on the Islamic code known as the Shar ah. Deeply embedded in its matrix are detailed and sometimes complex rules, which lay down the basis for Islamic environmental practice. Islamic jurisprudence contains regulations concerning the conservation and allocation of scarce water resources; it has rules for the conservation of land with special zones of graded use; it has special rules for the establishment of rangelands, wetlands, green belts and also wildlife protection and conservation. Much of the traditional institutions and laws associated with sound environmental practice in Islam have now fallen into disuse. Although the re-establishment of Islamic governance is an aspiration held by an increasing number of Muslims, there is now a growing movement amongst them, led by thinkers like Seyyed Hossein Nasr (see Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, Volume 5), who place an immediate priority in dealing with

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the intractable problems that the human race is creating for itself by overexploiting and degrading the planet beyond repair. Credit is due to Seyyed Hossein Nasr for almost single handedly rekindling the consciousness of not only Muslims, but of adherents of other traditions, to the dimension we have come to describe as faith and nature. His rst exposition on this subject was a series of lectures in May 1966, delivered at the invitation of the University of Chicago, which was eventually published (Hossein, 1968). He has written voluminously on this theme since then; see, for example, Hossein, 1996. For Muslims this crisis calls for a fresh evaluation of the teachings of Islam and its practice in the present globalized order.

A GLANCE AT THE BASICS

Islam is the name of the religion discussed in this contribution. A Muslim (called a Musselman in the 18th century) is a follower of Islam. The word Islam literally means submission or surrender, and a Muslim is one who surrenders his will to the will of God. A Muslim country is one in which the majority of people are Muslims there are about 60 such countries in the world. The roots of Islamic environmental practice are to be found in the Quran and the guidance (sunnah) of Prophet Muhammad. Prophet Muhammad is the Prophet of Islam and is usually referred to by Muslims as the Messenger of God (Rasulullah). He was born in 570 AD in Mecca and died in 632 in Medina, in what is now Saudi Arabia. Over the centuries, Islamic practice has been elaborated by a succession of scholars and jurists responding to real problems experienced by the growing community of Muslims in various parts of the world. The Islamic worldview is based on the belief in the existence of an all powerful creator who is the same God (Allah in Arabic) of the other monotheistic faiths, Judaism and Christianity. Muslims learn from the Quran that God created the universe and every single atom and molecule it contains and that the laws of creation include the elements of order, balance and proportion: He created everything and determined it most exactly (25:2) and It is He Who appointed the sun to give radiance and the moon to give light, assigning it in phases Allah did not create these things except with truth. We make the signs clear for people who know (10:5). What may be described as the Islamic creed has three aspects. The rst is the core value system that Islam establishes, which is islam itself and in this context is taken to mean submission. The second is faith (iman) and the third is good personal conduct (ihsan) traditionally described as righteousness or piety. Islam, in its verb context, is elaborated in what is commonly described as the ve pillars. The rst of these is a two-part declaration (shahada) bearing witness that there

is no God but God and that Muhammad is the Messenger of God; the second is the performance of the ve daily prayers (salat); the third is the annual payment of a specic tax (zakat); the fourth is to fast during the month of Ramadhan (sawm); the fth is to make the pilgrimage (haj) to Mecca at least once in a lifetime for those who have the means to do it. Iman was described by the Prophet Muhammad as knowing with the heart, voicing with the tongue and expressing with the body. This requires the profession of faith in God, His angels, His books, His messengers, the nal day and acceptance that life in all its expressions emanates from the divine source. Ihsan is described as the act of worshipping Allah as if you see Him, knowing that even if you do not see Him, He sees you. This goes much beyond the ritual prayers; and every good action performed by a believer is seen as an act of worship. This is commonly expressed by Muslims as doing what is pleasing to Allah, who is ever present, ever watchful. Taken as a whole as it is intended to be, caring for planet Earth, our only home, is integrated within the framework of this value system. This is then an everyday concern for the Muslim, which the Quran reminds him by saying, We have not omitted anything from the Book (6:39) and He said Our Lord is He Who gives each thing its created form and then guides it (20:49). We will now look at how this is reected in daily life.

THE ETHICAL DIMENSION

One of the stories often told by Muslims concerning the environment is the instruction by Abu Bakr, the rst Caliph (Khalif) of Islam to his armies. In addition to telling them not to harm women, children and the inrm, he ordered them not to harm animals, destroy crops or cut down trees. There were two elements present in this decree: the rst, to establish justice even as the Muslim armies fought, and the second, to recognize the value of nature. It should also be noted that the environment was not an issue or subject for separate treatment in life as it owed onwards in both war and peace. The human condition was never separated from the natural order. It was a matter to be reckoned with at every moment of existence like the very air we take into our lungs. Abu Bakr was the rst of four rightly guided caliphs who succeeded the Prophet after his death. They were known as such because of the lengths to which they went to incorporate the instructions in the Quran and the Prophets example into their rule. The rule of the rightly guided caliphs lasted from 632 to 661 (AD) and became the time, including the time of the Prophet, which all Muslims to this day seek to emulate. In attempting to reproduce the Prophetic model what the rightly guided

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caliphs did was to set a pattern that would evolve into the matrix that formed the basis of the Islamic legal system known as the Shar ah and which very soon came to circumscribe Muslim life. The word Shar ah has an interesting etymology with strong environmental connotations. It means a way or path in Arabic and its derivation refers to the beaten track by which wild animals come to drink at their watering places. It is the road that leads to where the waters of life ow inexhaustibly (Eaton, 1994; 180). As Muslim populations grew and expanded territorially, their requirements in government became increasingly complex and the Shar ah accordingly became more sophisticated. To the Quran and Sunnah were added two other elements: the consensus (ijma) of scholar jurists and the process of reasoning by analogy (qiyas). Islamic law (qh) evolved out of this process and there are two other traditional instruments which were incorporated into this system and which could usefully serve the purpose of formulating environmental law in the Muslim world today. The rst of these is interpretation in context (ijtihad) and the second is custom and practice ( urf wa adat). The Shar ah expanded and evolved within this framework to set dening standards for Muslim behavior within the divine decrees of the Quran, including inter alia family law, civil law, commercial law and environmental law. From the time of the Prophet, law has taken precedence over theology; this is stated to be the case because Islams concern is about humankind and its relationship with the rest of creation, beginning, of course, with itself. The law is about dening these relationships and the following are examples of how the Quran sees it (4:134).
You who have iman (faith); be upholders of justice, bearing witness for Allah alone, even against yourselves or your parents and relatives. Whether they are rich or poor, Allah is able to look after them. Do not follow your own desires and deviate from the truth. If you twist and turn away, Allah is aware of what you do

laid down in the Quran. These imperatives come under numerous headings but they could be distilled into just three categories for our purposes, bearing in mind that public good (al masalih al mursalah) is the ultimate objective (Doi, 1984). Muslims are to do what is right, forbid what is wrong and act with moderation at all times: let there be a community among you who call to the good, and enjoin the right and forbid wrong. They are the ones who have success (3:104). The Quran again uses an environmental theme in exhorting humankind to be moderate; (6:142):
it is He who produces gardens, both cultivated and wild, and palm trees and crops of diverse kinds and olives and pomegranates both similar and dissimilar. Eat of their fruits when they bear fruit and pay their dues on the day of their harvest, and do not be proigate. He does not love the proigate.

The Shar ah also evolved within the guidelines set by three principles agreed upon by scholar jurists over the centuries. They are: 1. 2. 3. the interest of the community takes precedence over the interests of the individual; relieving hardship takes precedence over promoting benet; a bigger loss cannot be prescribed to alleviate a smaller loss and a bigger benet takes precedence over a smaller one. Conversely a smaller harm can be prescribed to avoid a bigger harm and a smaller benet can be dispensed with in preference to a bigger one.

THE NATURAL ORDER IN ISLAM

As the Islamic tapestry unfolded in its expression over the centuries, we discover that there are no references to the environment, as we understand it today. The word nature, which is an abstraction, cannot be found in the Quran and the closest modern Arabic usage is the word b a which connotes a habitat or a surrounding. The word nature will continue to be used in this essay for linguistic convenience. For a further explanation on terminology, see Khalid (1999). The Quran speaks of creation (khalq) and it contains two hundred and sixty one verses where this word is used in its various grammatical forms derived from the root kh l q. These verses contain references to the human world; to the natural world of the Earth, from trees to turtles, from sh to fowl; and to the sun, stars and skies. The very rst revelation of the Quran to the Messenger used this word in its verb form to dramatic effect, Recite in the name of your Lord who created, created man from clots of blood (96:1). Creation is the fabric into which the tapestry of life is worked. Creation or nature is referred to as the signs (ayat) of Allah and this is also the name given to the verses of the Quran. Ayat means signs, symbols or proof of the divine.

Truth takes precedence over love, even love for ones parents, and love is known habitually to conceal the truth. There is no compromise with truth and justice,
so call and go straight as you have been ordered to. Do not follow their whims and desires but say, I have iman (faith), in a book sent down by Allah and I am ordered to be just between you (42:13)

The Quran also asks us to be just to our natural surroundings, We did not create the heavens and earth and everything between them, except with truth (15:85). Like the Muslims who had succeeded the Prophet and had attempted to give expression to the divine decree, the scholar jurists approached this matter with great diligence and formulated an ethical base derived from the imperatives

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As the Quran is proof of Allah so likewise is His creation. The Quran also speaks of signs within the self and as Nasr (1993) explains,
Muslim sages referred to the cosmic or ontological Quran they saw upon the face of every creature letters and words from the cosmic Quran they remained fully aware of the fact that the Quran refers to phenomena of nature and events within the soul of man as ayat for them forms of nature were literally ayat Allah.

As the Quran says, there are certainly signs in the earth for people with certainty; and in yourselves. Do you not then see? (51:20, 21). Writing from another perspective, Faruqi and Faruqi (1986) say:
Its (natures) goodness is derived from that of the divine purpose. For the Muslim, nature is nimah, a blessed gift of Allahs bounty to transform in any way with the aim of achieving ethical value Since nature is Allahs work, His ayat or signs, and the instrument of His purpose which is absolute good, nature enjoys in the Muslims eye a tremendous dignity.

The Quranic view holds that everything on the earth was created for humankind. It was Gods gift (nimah) to us, but a gift with conditions nevertheless and it is decidedly not something that one runs and plays with. The earth then is a testing ground of the human species. The tests are a measure of our acts of worship (ihsan) in its broadest sense. That is living in a way that is pleasing to Allah, striving in everything we do to maintain the harmony of our inner and outer environments. As our interaction with the environment evolved, it manifested itself in a range of rules and institutions. As the Muslim community expanded out of its sparse desert environment, it was confronted by many challenges, one of which was relative abundance. This brought about other problems like over exploitation and waste. Muslims applied themselves to these problems assiduously and it would be salutary to look at this legacy. For more information on this subject see Bagader et al. (1994); Llewellyn (1992); Dien (2000). The following is a brief summary of how the Shariah developed in this area over the past 1400 years.
Legislative Principles

The Quran says about these matters (16:6569):

Allah sends down water from the sky and by it brings the dead earth back to life. There is certainly a Sign in that for people who hear. There is instruction for you in cattle. From the contents of their bellies, from between dung and blood, We give you pure milk to drink, easy for drinkers to swallow. And from the fruit of the date palm and the grapevine you derive both intoxicants and wholesome provision. There is certainly a Sign in that for people who use their intellect. Your Lord revealed to the bees: Build dwellings in the mountains and the trees, and also in the structures which men erect. Then eat from every kind of fruit and travel the paths of your Lord, which have been made easy for you to follow. From inside them comes a drink of varying colours, containing healing for mankind. There is certainly a Sign in that for people who reect.

1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Allah is the sole owner of the earth and everything in it. People hold land on usufruct that is, for its utility value only. There is a restricted right to public property. Abuse of rights is prohibited and penalized. There are rights to the bene ts derived from natural resources held in common. Scarce resource utilization is controlled. The common welfare is protected. Bene ts are protected and detriments are either reduced or eliminated.

Institutions

1.

The universe we inhabit is a sign of Gods creation as is the environment of our innermost selves. They both emanate from the One Source and are bonded by only one purpose, which is to serve the divine will. This bonding of the cosmic to the subatomic is the deep ecology of Islam but it is not a relationship of equals as we can see in the hierarchy of the food chain dominated by Man. Whilst the primary relationship is that between the Creator and the rest of His creation, the Creator Himself determined a subsidiary one, that between Man and the rest of His creation which the Quran denes as follows: It is He Who created everything on the earth for you (2:28); We did not create heaven and earth and everything between them as a game (21:16); We did not create heaven and earth and everything between them to no purpose (38:26); He wanted to test you regarding what has come to you (5:48).

People who reclaim or revive land (ihya al mawat) have a right to its ownership. 2. Land grants (iqta ) may be made by the state for reclamation and development. 3. Land may be leased (ijara) for its usufruct by the state for its reclamation and development. 4. Special reserves (h ma) may be established by the state for use as conservation zones. 5. The state may establish inviolable zones (al-har m) where use is prohibited or restricted. Every settlement has a right to create such zones managed by the people and where use is severely restricted. Additionally, it is permitted to establish these zones adjacent to sources of water and other utilities like roads and places of public resort. 6. Makkah and Mad nah are known as the two inviolable sanctuaries (al-haramain) where trees cannot be cut down and animals are protected from harm within their boundaries. They serve as examples of best practice.

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7.

Charitable endowments (awqaf) may be established with specic conservation objectives.

Enforcement

The primary duty of the Islamic state is to promote the good and forbid wrong doing. As part of these functions, it has the mandate to protect land and natural resources from abuse and misuse. From its earliest years the Islamic state established an agency known as the hisba whose specic task was to protect the people through promoting the establishment of good and forbidding wrong-doing. This agency was headed by a learned jurist (muhtasib) who functioned like a chief inspector of weights and measures and chief public health ofcer rolled into one. He was also responsible, among other similar duties, for the proper functioning of the h ma and al har m zones and he acted as what one might describe as an environmental inspectorate. The development and application of these principles and institutions have seen a decline over the past two centuries, as another worldview based on the exploitation of natural resources for prot gradually overtook this model. We are experiencing the consequences of this now. However, there are clear indications as to how this Islamic heritage has been and could again be put to good use in the modern context.

AN EMERGING RESPONSE
The Muslim world was gradually co-opted into the new world order by force of arms and by force of economics. The rst is history and the second present day reality and what the Muslims lost in between these twin processes was the sap of Islam and their unique way of perceiving the universe. For Muslims, their d n is a whole, an organic reality, where every element has a function as a part of this whole. For example, Islam law does not make sense without the ethical dimension of the divine revelation. Law in the West is amoral. It deals with human ends for human purposes. The Muslim idea of the highest form of civilization is that it is the one that is pleasing to Allah. In todays Western-dominated global order of which Muslims are a part, conspicuous consumption has become the highest imperative. Muslim nation states of which there are now about 60, are willing co-optees to this consumer ethic. These are however, supercial considerations; and deep in the interface between Islam and the West are two irreconcilable factors that call for some examination. The rst is the matter of existence itself and how it is to be dened and the second is the matter concerning money and how it is to be used. The traditional worldview, which includes that of the West, was challenged by what we have come to know

as the Enlightenment (see Enlightenment Project, Volume 5), having its origins in 16th century Europe. These events are usually seen as a time in which science began its ascendancy over religion. Tarnas (1996) observes that this movement achieved its maturity in the 19th century, nally resulting in a radical shift of psychological alliance from the divine to humankind. Descartes (the French philosopher, mathematician) nally breached the oodgates of the old order by splitting mind from body and proclaiming a dualistic worldview in his well known statement I think, therefore I am (cogito ergo sum). One result of the Enlightenment was science, including the scientic capacity for rendering intelligible certain aspects of the material world and for making mankind (in Descartes own words) Master and possessor of Nature . This view is on a collision course with how Islam teaches the Muslim to view the world. There is only one master and possessor of nature and that is the One Who created it, Allah. This is unequivocally expressed in the very rst line of the Quran Praise be to Allah, the Lord of all the worlds (1:1) and the last verse in the Quran Say: I seek refuge with the Lord of mankind, the King of mankind, the God of mankind (114:13) and repeatedly in between. After Descartes, Isaac Newtons world view led to the well known mechanistic conception of the universe and totally away from the holistic and organic interpretation of things. The result was after the 17th century science and religion became totally divorced (Nasr, 1990). People would nd it impossible to live in todays world without money, but one increasingly comes across interesting appraisals of it like the following for example: in spite of all its fervid activity, money remains a naked symbol with no intrinsic value of its own and no direct linkage to anything specic (Kurtzman, 1993). Money has come to be recognized as mere tokens and:
there is something quite magical about the way money is created. No other commodity works quite the same way. The money supply grows through use; it expands through debt. The more we lend, the more we have. The more debt there is, the more there is. (Kurtzman, 1993)

These tokens of value that we create from nothing and use everyday grow exponentially ad innitum. But we know that the natural world, which is subject to drastic resource depletion, has limits and is nite. This equation is lopsided and the question is for how long can we continue to create this innite amount of token nance to exploit the real and tangible resources of a nite world. Looked at from this perspective, money, as the modern world has contrived it, assumes the characteristics of a virus that eats into the fabric of the planet. The consequences of this become visible as global environmental degradation. This magical system underwent a metamorphosis in 1971 when President Nixon of the US unilaterally abandoned

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the gold standard. This is not the place to go into the background of this event, sufce it to say that, by abandoning the gold standard he also moved the world into a new standard: the interest standard . (Kurtzman, 1993). It is generally known that Islam prohibits usury or the taking of interest and the term used in the Quran for this is riba. (For an appraisal on interest see Diwaney, 1997) This term has wide connotations and simply put, it means one cannot have something out of nothing. Thus, riba is also seen as prohibiting the free creation of credit. The Quran denounces these practices vehemently and we can see why from the foregoing discussion: those who practise riba will not rise from the grave except as someone driven mad by shaytans (satans) touch (2:274); also, you who have iman (faith)! have taqwa (awe) of Allah and forgo any remaining riba if you are muminun (believers). If you do not, know that it means war from Allah and his Messenger (2:277, 278). No other proclamation in the Quran matches this degree of trenchancy. The Muslim world today is comprised of nation states (not an Islamic concept) that are wholly or mostly Muslim and Muslim minorities, from the very large to the very small, living in non-Muslim countries. Muslim countries may be divided into two categories. The rst, into those that describe themselves as Islamic states but who will freely admit that the way they run their affairs is a far cry from the example laid down by the Prophet, the Right Guided Caliphs and the paradigm of the Quran. The second group consists of secular Muslim states where Islam plays a ritualistic role in varying degrees of intensity. However, both these groups, as willing or unwilling co-optees to the new world order, resort to the methods and institutions that are part of it, in order to trade for instance. One such institution is the banking system, and every Muslim state, Islamic or secular has banks with or without the approval of the scholar jurists who did much to build the Shar ah over the centuries into a potent force for just government. It should be obvious from this that it becomes almost impossible for Muslims whether individuals or nation states, to give expression to a normative Islam under the present globalized system. A system that is in direct conict with two fundamentals that are part of the Islamic worldview. There now prevails a schizoid tendency in Muslim society whereby it strives to maintain its deep attachment to Islam while it persists in tasting the fruits of the current order. However, people are increasingly taking a serious look at the current model of endless growth that supplies a contrived demand for consumer goods, which appears to be insatiable and which is, in the end, impacting on the biosphere with drastic consequences. This concern is reected in the West by the growth of activism and protest organizations. These same trends (differently expressed) appear in the Muslim world. The form this usually takes is the

demand for the establishment of the just order under the Shar ah to replace the socialist and capitalist models, which are now seen as failures. It is difcult to see where these demands for change will take Muslims but it is increasingly felt that the current order is untenable in terms of keeping the planet in good repair. Muslim minorities, particularly those living in the West, have an important role to play. Living in the belly of the beast gives them the advantage of perspective and their understanding of events could lead to an unique contribution to the melting pot of ideas that could lead us out of this impasse. For example, Muslim groups in the West are re-examining alternative currencies and ways of trading that are based on the qh of Islam and not on falsehood (Douthwaite, 1996). Corruption has appeared in both land and sea because of what peoples own hands have brought about so that they may taste something of what they have done, so that hopefully they will turn back (30:40). In other words learn from your mistakes. One could say with a reasonable degree of certainty that the environmental problems we see today would not have happened in a society ordered in accord with Islamic principles because its world view dened limits to human behaviour and contained excess (Khalid, 2000). We have seen how this was done in the realm of environmental protection although its stated aim was not precisely that. Rather it came about in the course of establishing public good, one of the basic principles of the Shar ah. Safeguarding against human excess had the effect of protecting the natural world. The Shar ah evolved holistically and new situations were dealt with through the processes we have discussed above. However, there is nothing to stop this from continuing. However there are important impediments to its proper application today: 1. The Shar ah is no longer supreme even in Islamic states because of the dominance of the global system now in place. The inuence of international trade and nance is a case in point. The Hisbah which was once the environmental enforcement agency is now virtually non existent. Increasingly civil administration is separating itself from the body of the people who are coming to be known as the religious authorities, i.e., a clergy, which is not recognized in Islam. This is the case in the Sunni tradition of Islam, which accounts for about 85% of the worlds Muslim population. The Shia tradition has an established clergy. The concept of d n is wearing thin and as a consequence the holistic approach suffers. Following the Western model, Muslim states increasingly function in watertight compartments. As a mirror of what is happening in the West, Muslim economists and environmentalists are two separate species with opposing perspectives.

2. 3.

4.

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5.

The nation state model, which all Muslim countries have adopted, has economic development as its highest priority. Coping with environmental change is much lower on the scale.

The Balance Principle

In one of its more popular passages, the Quran describes creation thus (55:15):
The All-Merciful taught the Quran, He created man and taught him clear expression. The sun and moon both run with precision. The stars and the trees all bow down in prostration. He erected heaven and established the balance

The following is a crystallization of what we consider to be the essentials which will bring into focus the dimensions of change that are needed today from an Islamic perspective. These ideas have been developed by us over the past decade and discussed at various international forums. However, we are at a disadvantage because the principles we are discussing have been plucked out of the Islamic tapestry so assiduously woven over the past 14 centuries. They work best as part of the whole, but how they t together in todays context and how the whole can be improved, applied and made sense of are matters for open discussion. The planetary system, the earth and its ecosystems, all work within their own limits and tolerances. Islamic teaching likewise sets limits to human behavior as a control against excess and it could be said that the limits to the human condition are set within four principles. They are the unity principle (Tawh d); the creation principle (Fitra); the balance principle (Mizan); and the responsibility principle (Khal fa).
The Unity Principle

Allah has singled out humankind and taught it clear expression the capacity to reason. All creation has an order and a purpose and is in a state of dynamic balance. If the sun, the moon, the stars did not bow themselves, i.e., serve the purpose of their design, it would be impossible for life to function on earth. This is another way of saying that the natural order works because it is in submission to the Creator. It is Muslim in the original, primordial sense.
The Responsibility Principle

Tawh d is the foundation of Islamic monotheism and its essence is contained in the declaration (Shahada) which every Muslim makes and is a constant reminder of faith. It is there is no God but God (lailaha illa-llah) and is the foundational statement of the Unity of the Creator from which everything else ows. The second half of this declaration is Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah (Muhammadur Rasulullah). He is Allah, Absolute oneness, Allah the Everlasting Sustainer of all (112:1, 2). It is the testimony to the unity of all creation and to the fabric of the natural order of which humankind is an intrinsic part: what is in the heavens and the earth belong to Allah. Allah encompasses everything (4:125). This is the bedrock of the holistic approach in Islam as this afrms the interconnectedness of the natural order.
The Creation Principle

This principle establishes the tripartite relationship between the Creator, humankind and creation. God created everything for humankind and appointed it the vice-regent (Khalif) on this earth: it is He Who appointed you Khalifs on this earth (6:167). This role was one of trusteeship (amanah) which imposed a moral responsibility, We offered the Trust to the heavens, the earth and the mountains but they refused to take it on and shrank from it. But man took it on. (33:72). This assumption of responsibility made humankind accountable for their actions, Will the reward for doing good be anything but good? (55:59). We can deduce in outline from these four principles that creation that is both complex and nite is yet exact. It emerged from one source and was designed to function as a whole. Humankind, like the rest of the natural world, was, as part of the natural patterning of creation, in a state of goodness with potential for good actions. It is inextricably part of this pattern, but is the only element of it with choice, that can choose to act against the divine Will using the very gift of reasoning bestowed upon it by the Creator. Submission to the divine will, the natural law that holds in check the instincts of the predator, is the way to uphold our responsibilities as the Creators Khalif. Humankind are the guardians of the natural order.

The Fitra principle describes the primordial nature of creation: Allahs natural pattern on which He made mankind (30:29). Mankind was created within the natural pattern of nature and being of it, its role is dened by this patterning itself. For a discussion on Fitra, see Yasien Mohammed (1996). Fitra is the pure state, a state of intrinsic goodness and points to the possibility that everything in creation has a potential for goodness and the conscious expression of this rests with humankind.

CONCLUSION
The position set out in this essay is that of Islam and as we have observed earlier, there is a clear issue of conicting paradigms. The question is how to implement the teachings and practices of one worldview into an institutional framework devised by another that has a diametrically opposite outlook. Although it may be possible to incorporate the principles of Islamic environmental law into the legislative

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programs of Muslim countries, the problem will remain one of implementation unless appropriate institutional arrangements are made to replace the old and now virtually defunct ones. It is also interesting that efforts to meet the challenge of environmental change in Muslim countries are made by secular agencies; this is only to be expected, as this is generally not seen as a Muslim problem. The role of the Muslim scholar jurists has been redened into a religious one as the nature of the Muslim state has changed in its attempt to cope with modernity. The Muslim scholar jurists were unwilling partners to this change and were replaced by a secularized administration, which gradually weakened the scholar jurists inuence as it began to take charge. However, there is an awakening amongst Muslims to the realities of environmental change and therein lies a paradox. There is just an off chance that this may lead Muslims to the discovery that they may be on the wrong side of the tracks.
Note

Khalid, F M (1999) Qur an, Creation and Conservation, Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences, Birmingham. Khalid, F M (2000) Islamic Pathways to Ecological Sanity An Evaluation for the New Millennium, Ecology and Development, J. Inst. Ecol., 3, Bandung, Indonesia. Kurtzman, J (1993) The Death of Money, Little, Brown & Co, Boston, MA. Llewellyn, O (1992) National Legal Strategies for Protected Areas Conservation and Management, Paper delivered at IVth World Congress on National Parks and Protected Areas, Caracas, Venezuela. Nasr, S H (1990) Man and Nature, The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man, Unwin Hyman, London. Nasr, S H (1993) The Need for a Sacred Science, Curzon Press, Surrey. Tarnas, R (1996) The Passion of the Western Mind, Pimlico, London. Yasien, M (1996) Fitra, Ta-Ha, London.

The translation of the Quran used is that by Bewley and Bewley (1999). In subsequent references to the Quran in this essay, a quotation is followed by the chapter and verse numbers in parentheses. The actual names of the chapters have been left out for convenience.
Transliteration of Arabic vowels

ISSC (International Social Science Council)

ISSC (Conseil International des Sciences Sociales) was founded in October 1952 on the basis of a resolution adopted by the 6th United Nations Educational, Scienti c and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) General Conference in 1951, with its secretariat located in UNESCO s headquarter in Paris, the ISSC is an international non-pro t scienti c organization. It has as it aims and objectives the interdisciplinary coordination of research and the promotion of the understanding of human society in its environment. As such, and in line with its primarily organizing functions, ISSC concentrates on the promotion and coordination of social sciences on a global scale. The ISSC, at present is comprised of 14 scienti c international associations/organizations (member associations), six national academies and research councils (member organizations) and a number of associate members, most of them social science associations. ISSC s ultimate goal is to encourage social scientists and social science organizations to engage themselves in scienti c research of global-scale problems with a special focus on social, cultural and economic issues. In line with this mission statement, ISSC describes its main tasks and functions as follows: 1. to encourage and promote research in the social and behavioral sciences for the bene t and well-being of humanity and its environment, including global issues of concern to the world community;

a pronounced as a in cattle, a pronounced as a in father, i pronounced as i as in n, pronounced as ee as in sheep, u pronounced as oo in foot, u pronounced as oo in soon.

REFERENCES
Bagader, A A, El-Chirazi El-Sabbagh, A, As-Sayyid Al-Glayand, M, Samarrai, M U I, and Llewellyn, O A (1994) Environmental Protection in Islam, IUCN Environmental Policy and Law Paper, 20, second revised edition, Gland, Switzerland. Bewley, A and Bewley, A (1999) The Noble Qur an, Bookwork, Norwich. Dien, M I (2000) The Environmental Dimensions of Islam, Lutterworth, Cambridge. Doi, A R I (1984) Shariah: The Islamic Law, Taha, London. Douthwaite, R (1996) Short Circuit, Green Books, Totnes Devon. Eaton, G (1994) Islam and the Destiny of Man, Islamic Texts Society, Cambridge. El Diwaney, T E (1997) The Problem With Interest, Ta Ha, London. Faruqi, I R al and Faruqi, L L al (1986) The Cultural Atlas of Islam, MacMillan, New York. Hossein, N (1968) Man and Nature The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man, Allen and Unwin, London. Hossein, N (1996) Religion and the Order of Nature, Oxford University Press, New York.

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2.

3. 4.

5.

to encourage and pursue global, international and inter-organizational collaborative scientic activities in the social sciences at a multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary level among the members of the ISSC; to stimulate, develop, coordinate, enhance and promote inter-disciplinary social scientic programs across institutional, national and regional contexts; to collaborate with the United Nations and its agencies, and particularly with other governmental and non-governmental organizations to further these aims; to provide, through suitable channels, information about its activities and the worlds social science community to the public and to other interested parties within the public at large.

In pursuit of these aims and goals, ISSC maintains, at present, a limited number of both interdisciplinary and international research programs. These include the Comparative Research Program on Poverty, and the Conict Early Warning System Research Program. Together with the International Council for Science, ISSC also co-sponsors the International Human Dimensions Program on Global Environmental Change, a program of special importance for the cooperation between natural and social sciences. More information on ISSC can be obtained from www. unesco.org/ngo/issc, ISSC/CISS, UNESCO-1, rue Miollis, 75732 Paris Cedex 15, France. Tel.: 33 (0)1 4568 2558; Fax: 33 (0)1 4566-7603.
ECKART EHLERS Germany

J
Jains and the Environment
Kerry Brown12
1 2

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Oakland, CA, USA

The Jain Declaration on Nature:

All the Venerable Ones of the past, present and future discourse, counsel, proclaim, propound and prescribe in unison: Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture or kill any creature or living being (Acharanga Sutra 1.4.1.1-2). translated by Singhvi (1990)

For nearly three millennia, the Jain people have inhabited a universe that is both inter-galactic and microscopic in its proportions, and bustling to bursting with souls, all of whom are to be treated non-violently (while not proposing harm to microscopic one-sensed beings, Jainism does allow that the practical limit of ahimsa (universal non-violence) is life-forms with two or more senses). Ahimsa is the rst principle of Jainism, and it is a tall order, as the Jains well know. What do you eat? Where do you sit? The Green consciousness now trespassing on global consumer culture presents a critical challenge and opportunity for a faith that, of all the so-called world faiths, is most obviously and self-consciously saddled with being environmental. If these people cant set an example, who can? Jainism is of course an indigenous religion, indigenous to India, and most of the seven million Jains still live there with concentrations in Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka (Jain, 1986) and perhaps 200 000 Jains in East Africa, the United Kingdom (UK), North America and lightly scattered around the Pacic Rim. More precisely, it is indigenous in the sense that, as well as its 2500 year old philosophical and socio-political roots shared with Buddhism that provide the ascetic, atheistic avor, and the metaphysical credentials of world religion, there is an older root that is distinctly animist. Together they generate in Jainism one of those invaluable irresolvables that keep a religion alive and tussling with itself. While at

one level the Jains are or should be, according to their scriptures, working as hard as they can to get out of the material bondage and heading for eternal salvation, this is a religion that has busied itself with mind-boggling catalogues of the universes geography, mathematics, biology and physics in which time, space, matter, motion, rest, and souls are all wrapped up together. It is a religion that believes in an innity of souls that have never existed separately from matter, nor have they created it. Each soul has its own beginningless, endless autonomy, is beleaguered by karma (spiritual guilt) that exists as physical particles, and, even after eternal release, will maintain shape and size. It is a religion that has its feet dug rmly, and rather comfortably, in a very real earth while advocating some of the most severe physical hardships imaginable to unearth oneself. So this is the grain of sand rubbing on the religious order (like the middle-eastern religions problem of good and evil with an omniscient and benecent God or Buddhisms compassion for an ultimate emptiness), that either produces a pearl of great value or a very sore oyster. The inner tension has probably contributed to Jainisms long-standing durability and dynamism at both the cutting edge of Indian society and in its courts of power. It is hard to be swept away when the ground you stake is wide, when youve got the skinniest monks and the most well padded magnates. At the most obvious level, the rise of vegetarianism and the demise of animal sacrice in the sub-continent owe much to the Jains. Mahatma Gandhis non-violent revolution had Jain ngerprints on it and he acknowledged his Jain friend and mentor Rajchandra Mehta, along with Tolstoy and Ruskin, as the three people who had most deeply inuenced him. (Gandhi, 1958). But the modern demands on environmental sensibility and practice are more extensive than even the Jain ascetics whisk-broom, sweeping tiny creatures out of danger of their tread. And while over 7000 Jain monks and nuns are probably causing less harm than any one on the planet, what about the rest of the Jains? At a practical level, many Jains are almost outfaced by their faiths complex cosmology and demanding ethics. It is not surprising that they rest on personal vegetarianism, the base-camp of Jainism, and up the ante by removing gs, garlic and onions (thought to have a density of microcosmic life on them), resort to only fruits and leaves of plants, or

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just go on a fast. Supplementary actions include sponsorship of one of the Jain animal sanctuaries in India, tree planting, public promotion of vegetarianism and protest on matters such as the killing of millions of cattle with mad cow disease in Britain, culling of kangaroos by Australian farmers, and veal production in Europe. And in the meantime the modern lifestyle of a successful and afuent community has developed which begs all sorts of questions. Nowadays Jain businessmen are part of the industrial complex, jetting the world in planes that dispense more pollutants in one ight than their Mercedes manages in a year, but they would probably still hesitate to burden a horse and ride to London (in Jainism, animal transport is considered an infringement of the animals autonomy and ease). Taking the letter of the law expressed a 2000 years ago, identifying its spirit, and creating updated guides for living that are commensurate with where we are now, is a work in progress. This work by one of the oldest guards of the environmental movement has some interesting indicators for us all.

progress as their personal business, but their physical safety in the meantime as a matter of shared concern. Everybody, however small and simple their consciousness, has a right to be here for their own sake, no one elses, and stay as long as they can, without harm from others. It appears that Mahavira or his followers in some way absorbed a strand in the elaborate braiding of Indian traditions that had a closer eye on the physical here and now. It may have come from previous teachers of the nirgranthas: Pashva, the 23rd Jain Tirthankara (circa 850 in Varanasi), or Nemi, the 22nd Tirthankara, thought to have ourished in Saurashtra and been contemporary with Krishna (see Renou, 1953, 114; Jacobi, 1884, 276279). But from wherever this commitment to understanding the nature and unshakeable physicality of the world came, it has stuck.
First knowledge of the world, then compassion for it (Dashavaikalika 4.10). translated by (Dundas, 1992, 138)

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Like most latter-day world religions (with the exception of the body of traditions we call Hinduism), Jainism began as a challenge to assumed spiritual values and, by implication, the socio-economic order. The rst Jains were nirgrantha (the unattached ones). Vardhamana (599527 BCE) who became Lord Mahavira (great hero), divested himself of the princely trappings of his kshatriya caste, right down to stripping off his clothes and pulling out his hair. He was the 24th and last Jain Tirthankara (ford-builder) in the most recent of the endless cycles of Tirthankaras or Jinas (spiritual victors). Mahavira was an historical contemporary of Gautama Buddha in the Magadha region, near modern Patna, in northern India. Both men were leaders of anti-brahmanical (and rival) sects in the region, teaching a theory and praxis that had universal law rather than god at the helm, applied itself without caste privilege or the need for brahmanical mediation, and herded souls through the material plane of suffering toward something innitely more desirable and everlasting. These reform movements were part of the late Vedic period (circa 1000500 BCE) in which meditation and ascetism became paths to a oneness beyond the hurly burly of Indian gods and goddesses. They were also rattling the caste systems cage. Buddhism and Jainism are the only two reform sects from this period to have survived and become religions in their own right, albeit with very different histories, the former fading from India to become one of the largest religions in the world, the latter nding a minority niche in India which it has frequented to this day. From the start, Jainism, even more than Buddhism, or indeed any other religion, has seen each beings spiritual

By the third century BCE, Jainism had divided into two sects, following the sojourn of a group of Jains during famine in the region of modern-day Karnataka. When they returned 12 years later, they were naked and their co-religionists were not. The Jains who had gone south, the Digambaras (sky-clad) sect maintained that complete nakedness was a prerequisite of moksha (eternal release) which also meant that you had to be a man since the female nuns did not take up this practice. This matter and some difference in the details of omniscience have at times led to bitter acrimony between the Digambaras and the Svetambaras (cotton or whiteclad). For the social and doctrinal implications of the controversy, see Jaini (1991). The Svetambaras are much larger in number and include two reform sects. The Sthanakavasis (hall-dwellers) began in the 15th century and, like protestant movements in Europe and India, decried their religious hierarchys laxity of practice and trappings of worldly power. The icons of the Jinas and the Jain temples that had become such a spectacular and expensive aspect of Jainism were declared inimical to the process of salvation. Building temples was also reviled for the destruction it wreaked on small life forms in the soil. Sthanakavasi monks and nuns wear a cloth over their mouths, similar to a surgical mask, to prevent themselves inadvertently swallowing small airborne beings. A further Svetambara split in the eighteenth century generated the Terapanthas (path of the thirteen) who advocated ahimsa (non-violence) as total non-interference, to the good or bad, in the lives of other beings, with the exception of giving alms to ascetics. Both reform sects remain small but are well respected and provide a benchmark of good practice that has inuenced the wider community. Despite the Terapanthas non-interference, they are today the most socio-politically active Jain sect.

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The other noteworthy matter in Jain history is their survival. What with Hinduisms absorptive powers and the waves of Mughal religious intolerance, it is little short of a miracle to still be there with a distinct identity some three millennia later. The reasons for this as identied by Jaini (1979, 1994), boil down to four general principles which in many ways hold true for Jains socio-political activity today, environmental and otherwise: 1. Encourage community participation : Jain leaders quickly developed a spiritual path and texts for a laity who did not want to renounce everything and take up the life of an ascetic. This laity unobtrusively held their ground when the holy people were under re from Mughal or Brahman militancy. Build contacts with the establishment : Jains had considerable success at converting local maharajahs or establishing an inuential presence in their courts. They were seldom completely out of fashion or favor. A Jain monk even managed to persuade Akbar, the Mughal emperor (who reigned 15561605) to release prisoners and caged birds and to prohibit the killing of animals on certain days Akbar renounced his much loved hunting and restricted the practice of shing. However, his enthusiasm took a more predictable turn the following year when those orders were extended and disobedience to them was made a capital offence. (Smith, 1917) Pick your battles : in times of strong Hindu resurgence that could have swept them away, the Jaina acharyas (spiritual leaders) kept up their philosophical scrapping with the Brahmans but did not do battle with social and cultural mores. They pegged Jainism tightly to a somewhat raried spiritual practice. This did of course also weaken their role in social change, as for instance in the acceptance of the caste system as the cultural (but not cosmic) order. Co-opt popular culture for your own message : Jain acharyas took the hugely popular arts and literature around Rama and Krishna and produced their own revalued Jain versions. Hindu deities were not so much dismissed from the Jain cosmos as demoted.

and/or fear of nature that many other religions and the environmental movement bring to it are not appropriate. Maitri, friendliness, with its connotations of detached well-wishing; samyaktva, equanimity; abhaya, fearlessness; kshama, forgiveness for harm done; and daya, empathy, are the key words in the recommended relationship with the rest of the living and non-living world. There is in Jainism a strong tone of pragmatism and a wariness of anything that has a whiff of emotion, of losing ones independence in passion over another, animate or inanimate.
Living and Non-living Entities: Jiva and Ajiva

2.

3.

The second century CE Jain scripture, the Tattvartha Sutra ( Manual of That Which Is, the only scripture accepted by Digambara and Svetambara sects, translated by Tatia, 1994), explores seven categories of truth. The rst category is the existence of souls (jiva), the second is the existence of non-sentient entities (ajiva), namely, matter, time, space, the media of movement and of rest. Both categories are equally real and have been mixed together forever with the aid of subtle karmic matter. The Jain word for a living thing jiva is the same word as for soul. To save souls, you save life. And this is not the NeoPlatonic world soul but that of a real person. Every living thing has its own insoluble and unique soul, the knower. It is a horizontal rather than vertical ordering, that recognizes the rst principle of ecology, the singularity of each being. It reminds us perhaps not to get so tied up in species salvation that we forget that species is a human taxonomy (using procreative compatibility as the primary criterion) to make order out of a world which in fact never repeats itself. Every individual life is a one-off and has value because it matters to the one who has it. It is not a resource. For this reason an environmental program that included selective culling of species would struggle for Jain support.
Whatever beings there are, whether moving or non-moving you shall not hurt, whether knowingly or unknowingly. All beings desire to live, no one wants to die. Therefore, a nirgrantha refrains from all acts of injury (Dasavaikalika Sutra, 4, 11). translated by (Jaini, 1979, 66)

4.

The Jain philosophy of anekanta (many pointedness) was no doubt a contributing factor in this diplomatic virtuosity and has remained as an ability to look at an issue and nd another way of coming at it.

COSMOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY

For Jains the physical world is not dismissible either as maya (illusion) or the temptations of Satan, nor is it imminently lovable as the creation of a Creator god. It never started, it will never end and it did not require an eternal spirit to think it up. It just is. Emotions such as love

The Tattvartha Sutra offers the most detailed description of the Jain universe, including mathematical calculations and enumeration of the smallest units of time and space and matter, the qualities and cohesion of atoms, the rings of oceans and islands of galactic proportions and quantity that make up the earthly plane, the categories of life forms according to sensory development, the various classes of karmic particles, the plunging and ascending layers of hell and heaven and their denizens, and even descriptions of black gaps in the sky that are described as dense masses of matter which will suck in a passing god and his spaceship should he veer too near. There is to be sure the ultimate goal of spiritual liberation, but liberation is not so very

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distant. It is a state of permanent, disembodied omniscient bliss, still within the cosmos and still within a measurable space. Furthermore, for Jains who are not ascetics, such a vaulted ambition is not to do with this lifetime. They will be reborn. Like the other eastern religions, Jainism sees material reality as a never ending cycle of creation and destruction, so Jains cannot be so easily mobilized by apocalyptic visions of environmental disaster, as can minds marinaded in the judgement day of the middle-eastern religions. They are mobilized by individual suffering.
Non-violence: Ahimsa (The Philosophy)
There is nothing so small and subtle as the atom nor any element so vast as space. Similarly, there is no quality of soul more subtle than non-violence and no virtue of spirit greater than reverence for life (Bhagawati Sutra). quoted and translated by (Singhvi, 1990, 6)

One who neglects or disregards the existence of earth, air, re, water and vegetation disregards his own existence which is entwined with them. quoted and translated by (Singhvi, 1990, p 7)

But ultimately we are all alone.

Man it is you who are your only friend, why do you want a friend other than yourself? (Acharanga Sutra 1.1.3.4. A Svetambara scripture). translated by (Dundas, 1992, 37)

Action and Reaction: Karma

Ahimsa is the headline and the subtext of Jain philosophy and practice. It is an intention, a state of mind in which one restrains and ultimately eradicates one s passions, namely anger, pride, deceit and greed thereby restraining the violent acts that arise from these passions. Unintentional harm, even if it kills someone, is not violent. This does leave open the possibility of deciding what is harmful. But the scriptural rider to ahimsa is the proscription against laxity. Although there are beautiful prayers such as the Kshamapana (prayer of forgiveness) from the Jain scriptures that speak of universal friendship and of deep regret for harm to other beings, the sense of Jain ahimsa is more of noninterference than fussing after. We are not here to protect and coddle other beings or mismanage their affairs, but to let them be. In the business of existence, beings are going to get hurt. So action must be taken with this awareness in mind. Non-action may be preferable. In a hyperactive global society, that thought is almost unthinkable. And of course non-action has its own problems when others are taking actions that are harmful. The live and let live approach, which is often the corollary by which Jains explain ahimsa can be laissez-faire.
Independence: Parasparopagraho Jivanam

The principle of action and reaction is native to most religions, and to physical science, and the very basis of our environmental troubles, but astonishingly absent from political and economic policy. For Jains, it is fundamental that your actions will have results that will affect you as well as others. The mechanism of karma is a major preoccupation in the Tattvartha Sutra. Following the categories of sentient and non-sentient beings, the next four categories of truth take up the mechanism of karmic particles, their in ux, binding, cessation of in ux, and falling away, respectively. There is communality about the results, although not to the point that we can quietly unload the results of our misdeeds on someone else and slink off unharmed. Independence is at least as important a tenet as interdependence. The instinctively scienti c mind of Jains is also apparent here. Retribution is not a matter of interference from another dimension. Karmic particles of different varieties exist as subtle matter which ow and stick to us according to our thoughts, words and deeds. They are a missing link between what are usually considered two dimensions, spiritual and physical. Finally, we must note the seventh category of truth, liberation from worldly bondage that the cessation of karmic in ux makes possible. Much of Jain practice is promoted in the scriptures on the basis of personal bene t on the path to spiritual enlightenment (and tolerable reincarnations in the meantime) rather than for ecological or social bene t. But as we shall see, in the socio-political climate of today, a shift in perspective is evident.
Anekantavada: The Doctrine of Many-sidedness

Parasparopagraho Jivanam

The popular sutra parasparopagraho jivanam (Tattvartha Sutra 5.21) is often translated as all life is interdependent, but it does not have the same meaning as in Buddhism, where the idea of an individual self has only a nominal reality. The individual self is very real for the Jains and one is stuck with it for eternity, so interdependence is interdependence. It is not oneness dressed up as twoness. True,

The Jain doctrine of anekanta, literally, not-onesided, states that all knowledge, except the omniscience of a liberated soul, is only partial truth from a particular point of view. Every individual, not just human, has his or her own unique worldview. All are incomplete but valid views of reality with a personal mix of truth and delusion (courtesy of deluding karmas). Anekanta sweeps away anthropocentrism and dogma. To deny the validity of other s views or to see one as total truth leads to the blindness of dogma.

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In Jainism, empirical science is one of ve types of incomplete and until there is wisdom distorted knowledge. Although there is not the space to explore them here, the Varieties of Knowledge, Gateways of Investigation, Philosophical Standpoints and the Sevenfold Predication of Reality (as both permanent and changing) provide the intellectual grist of anekantavada, and are mechanisms for clearing or at least seeing a few blind spots before trying to nd solutions (Tatia, 1994, 927, 135140). It produces an instinctive non-exclusivity in the mind that has done much for Jain survival and which Jains bring to any situation, including environmental problems.
Wisdom, Knowledge, Action: Samyag-darsana-jnana-caritra

The doctrine of anekantavada is downstream from the Three Jewels of Jainism in which wisdom comes before knowledge which comes before action and together they take us to enlightenment. Truth or wisdom is not about the number of practical facts that we have under our belt but the values which inform our selection and the use of these facts in our actions. It seems so obvious (and the Jains are not alone in pointing it out) yet more than 2000 years later information technology is tipped to save the world. And knowing for instance that fossil fuels are harmful, has not changed the fact that our homes and businesses are emitting greenhouse gases as if there were no tomorrow. Modern society is living proof of the Jain philosophy that there are many views, much knowledge, but they do not equal wisdom.

necessary component of effective environmental preservation. How far do you go? Vegetarianism is the start and sometimes the nish of ahimsa for Jains. No esh or eggs, and there are many other reductions of diet beyond this; all the way to fasting, which tends to occur in the Jain calendar when other people have feasts. Food and sex are the rst ports of call, but restraint in movement of oneself and ones goods, in the accumulation of possessions are all prescribed. Stealing is dened as taking anything that is not given, which, in a world where there is no creator god handing out pastoral rights, puts a very tight reign on our use of natural resources. Ahimsa and the supporting vows challenging the idea that we should express ourselves as widely and noisily as possible. Just because you can do something doesnt mean you should or that it is worth doing. Self-restraint sits next to the Jain injunction for self-reliance.

JAINS AND THE ENVIRONMENT TODAY

There is among many Jains today, especially the youth, the feeling that saving the environment is their call. Contemporary Jain identity is increasingly identied with nature conservation as a social responsibility rather than primarily a path to personal liberation. Our Environment, Our Responsibility (front page of Ahimsa June December, 1997). Despite the unmatched extremes of their ascetics, per capita, the Jains would number among the richest religious communities. Their indomitable interest in materiality has generated fabulous arts and crafts, as well as an economically and politically successful community. Their worldly muscle is beyond their numbers. Professionally, they are concentrated in disciplines and arenas which have direct sway on the post-industrial juggernaut. The mechanism that drove Jains into businesses and professions which these days include the motor industry, agricultural commodities, textiles and their associated chemical industries, information and communications technology, pharmaceuticals, diamond cutting, accountancy, politics and publishing, was the ancient prohibition on professions recognized to be harmful to other life such as animal husbandry and its byproducts, forestry, hunting, shing, quarrying, mining, and the military. Even crop farming is a moral mineeld for a good Jain. Its not easy to grow things without killing other things. Once upon a time, business was a relatively harmless undertaking. Now the Jains nd themselves in an environmental quagmire. Modern business practice and its growth into sustainable environmental practice is where, potentially, they can contribute most. The articulation of modern Jain identity is exemplied in two publications of the early 1990s, and in the activity they spawned. The publications reveal developments in Jain thought and social organization as well as some of the processes by which environmental activism is taking hold.

PRACTICE
Ahimsa and the Five Vows

Non-violence in Jainism is essentially restraint. Restraint is related to scarcity of resources but the opposite, the seething abundance of the world and the damage that can be done when you start crashing around in a crowded place. The Jain laity have been given identity and direction by a set of anuvrats, little vows, that are the same principles but with less strict practices than those of the mahavratas, great vows, of the monks and nuns.
Abstinence from violence, falsehood, stealing, carnality and greed, these are the vows (Tattvartha Sutra 7.1). translated by (Tatia, 1994)

Ahimsa, non-violence, the rst of the ve Jains vows is described in the scriptures as the fence of the other vows. All are based on restraint. They are a quintessentially passive position, and therefore deeply antithetical, horrifying even, to globalizing Western culture, yet an increasingly

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The Right Literature

The Jain Declaration on Nature is a small booklet. The Jains were the eighth faith community to produce such a declaration when they joined the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Network on Conservation and Religion in 1990. (The work of that network has since been taken over by the Alliance for Religion and Conservation (ARC)). The scale of international input from members of all Jain sects including businessmen, religious leaders, scholars and political gures was unmatched by any other faith. This tiny faith community also produced a declaration that had the biggest circulation. The rst print run was 5000 and it has been reprinted twice in English and translated and printed in Gujarati and Hindi. It has operated almost as The Jain Declaration, appearing as basic information at non-environmental events such as the exhibition of Jain art at the V&A Museum in London and the 1993 World Parliament of Religions. It provided text and set a tone for other publications. The presentation of the Declaration and Jain entry into WWFs Network was, for the Jains, an historic event marked by, among other things, the inaugural souvenir edition of the quarterly Ahimsa with articles on conservation from Jains all over the world. Ahimsa has continued to produce news for the international Jain community with a strong environmental emphasis. The existing Jain press in India, including one of its largest media groups, the Times of India, owned by Jains, also picked up the event and recognized its historic importance.
Refocusing

To take an even more specic example, the all important sutra 5.21 of Tattvartha Sutra, parasparopagraho jivanam, which was quoted and elaborated upon in the Declaration, and also appears on its dedication page. The literal translation is most closely expressed as Souls impact one another through their will. In That Which Is: Tattvartha Sutra, the translation is Souls render service to one another (these services are then identied as both benecial and harmful). The Declaration translates it as All life is bound together by mutual support and interdependence. It is a subtle shift of language, a slight change of anekanta, but it is a move from accepting the interference of others whether you like it or not, to actually needing them. Again, as anyone who has family knows, these things are not mutually exclusive. The variants in translation of this maxim provide an example of how environmental issues are realigning and refreshing humanitys various orthodoxies, not just across what had been a growing scientic religious divide, but between spiritual traditions. To return to our particular example, the shift in emphasis from independence to interdependence by Jains and by the modern zeitgeist owes at least as much to Buddhism as to the ecological sciences.
Intra-faith and Inter-faith

It is by looking at The Declaration on Nature and a contemporaneous translation of the almost 2000 year old Tattvartha Sutra and its classical commentaries that we see the dynamism of Jainism in response to its environmental grain of sand. Both works were produced under the auspices of the London-based Institute of Jainology with the collaboration of the India-based Bhagwan Mahavir Memorial Samiti. At one level, there is nothing in the lucid ten pages of The Jain Declaration of Nature that is not somewhere in the dense 370 pages of That Which Is: Tattvartha Sutra. But although nothing has changed, everything has changed. In Tattvartha Sutra, the principles exist in a dizzying cosmological order through which the reader is marched for the purpose of understanding how to free oneself from the tenacious grip of diverse karmic particles that block ones spiritual liberation. In The Jain Declaration on Nature these principles and practices are stripped down to the core and described not in terms of the individuals spiritual gains but in terms of the good of the whole natural world. The two are not, of course, mutually exclusive, that is the Jain point, but it is a matter of emphasis.

There is nothing like a shared crisis to bring people together. Like most religions the Jains have managed to ght more vehemently among themselves than with anyone else; the 2300 year old dispute between the Digambaras and the Svetambaras over the requisites for spiritual enlightenment is probably one of the longest running domestic quarrels in history. The Jain Declaration of Nature and the translation of Tattvartha Sutra marked an historic collaboration across all Jain sects whose only precedent had been the celebration of the 2500 anniversary of Mahavirs nirvana. Jains from all over the world and all sects came to present the Declaration in London and in the process discovered that amongst them they were doing, and could do, more than they realized for conservation. It opened up channels of individual and organizational communication, which continue to function. For Jains, joining the WWF also offered the possibility of collaborating with other religious communities on environmental programs. As we have seen, tolerance and collaboration with other faiths is Jain, both philosophically and historically. The journal Ahimsa has included positive ecological attitudes of other faiths to highlight the shared ground (Ahimsa, vol. 7 no. 4, June Dec. 1997, 8). This touches on one of the time-bombs of our escalating environmental troubles, the scramble for diminishing resources that will breakdown along community lines, which in the rst instance is usually religious. Interfaith work becomes part of a preventive program.

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The Establishment and Social Change

The Jain Declaration was the entry document into the Network of the largest environmental non-governmental organization in the world whose president, His Royal Highness (HRH) the Duke of Edinburgh, has championed collaboration with religions. The Institute of Jainology (IOJ) was the driving force behind the Jain Declaration. The IOJs board of trustees, primarily businessmen, called in Jain political gures in India and abroad, the acharyas of the four Jain sects, the only other all-sect Jain organization (based in Bombay and again dominated by businessmen) and international Jain scholars. The main author of the Jain Declaration was Indias High Commissioner to Britain through much of the 1990s. The Jain Declaration was presented to HRH Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace. Prominent Jains from India, Africa, America and the UK came to present it. The event was surrounded by community celebrations and prayers and spun into the rst Jain Environment Day organized by Jain youth in London. It was taken very seriously as a commitment to work with WWF. The Declaration was subsequently presented to the Prime Minister of India. The environmental outreach to Jains and other religions by WWF and more recently by the World Banks Vice Presidency for Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development, taps naturally into that hybrid phenomenon of religion as a world institution. The World Bank heard very clearly from the Jains that agricultural practices such as the feeding of vegetarian animals with the pulped offal of their own species and then the animals slaughter by the millions in Britain when they subsequently developed mad-cows disease is not only totally unacceptable but deeply distressing to Jains.
Jain Environmental Action

habitats are under threat by overpopulation, it has been hard to think of, let alone, protect the habitats of other beings. So the rst Jain nature reserve was in the UK and was one of the earliest endeavors after the presentation of the Declaration. With the advice of the local councils environmental department, it was established at the largest UK Jain center on the outskirts of London with 32 ha of oak trees, some 300 years old, valuable wetland, and many species including the endangered badger. The reserve was opened on the rst Jain Environment Day in 1992 organized by the Jain youth and attended by 1000 local Jains. Local schools as well as the Jain community are actively encouraged to visit it. Every summer the youth association works to ensure its vitality. It provides a small example of a shift in Jain understanding of their ahimsa for other beings habitat matters.
Reforestation In India and abroad, tree planting is a popular Jain environmental activity both as a sponsorship by the adult community and as something that children do. Schoolchildren at Bahubali Vidyapith in Karnataka have reforested the hillside behind their school. Holy places are now also part of this activity. The distinctively designed and superbly engineered Jain temples are among the most beautiful and beautifully maintained in India. And they continue to be built on a scale that has not been seen in the West since the days of the great European Cathedrals. They are important centers of community life. With the exception of the Sthankvasi and Terapanths sects, funding a temple is recognized as a karmically meritorious act as well as one which affords status in the community. Palitana in Saurashtra is the site of the largest Jain (Svetambara) temple complex, more a small town, a stunning cluster of white pinnacles which, until not so long ago wandered over the brown hills of Saurashtra with only one tree left. It is said to be where the rst Tirthankara of this epoch, Rushabhdeva, gave his rst sermon. Reforestation of these hills with native trees was a direct response to joining WWF. For some years, the IOJ has been working with local Jain trusts, the Gujarat government and their foresters, the local community and ARC. Water systems are in place and planting is being done in batches of 1000 trees. The project has included a 9-day environment camp for 200 students and 10 professors who, along with instruction, planted 2000 trees. Greening of Palitana is a model and an attempt to direct some devotional energies and resources swirling around temples toward the natural world. Jain Youth in Rural India Over several decades, Veer Seva Dal ( Brave Service League) in the states of Karnataka and Maharashtra has had youth participation numbering in the hundreds of thousands. The activities have been traditionally Jain, including

What does this mean in practical terms?

Vegetarianism Vegetarianism is, for Jains, the rst vow of any true environmentalist. They continue to be tireless proponents of it throughout India. In the UK where 10% of the population are now vegetarian, the Young Indian Vegetarian Association is Jain dominated and they also have an active role in the national Vegetarian Society. In the process of validating and promoting their practice through public campaigning, young Jains are also being educated ecologically; they are learning about the macro-economic choices for agriculture that raise questions not only about what you produce but how and where you produce and distribute it. From Animal Sanctuaries to Nature Reserve Jain animal sanctuaries and hospitals for old and sick animals are a feature of India. In a land where human

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strong campaigns for vegetarianism among the rural villages and also native tree planting, much needed in a land where basic human needs for fuel are still tied to wood. Over 100 000 trees have been planted. Hillsides and roadsides to Jina shrines have done particularly well. This pool of committed young villagers is a potential resource that can be tapped into for a number of tasks, including helping to make the transition to solar energy from wood fuel, eliminating the use of pesticides, and other environmentally sustainable village-level projects.
Western Jain Youth Working the Five Vows

The Ahimsa Environment Award was launched under the auspices of the IOJ at the Indian High Commission in London in 1993 and promoted and judged with the assistance of WWF. The Award took the ve Jain vows as the basic questions for competitors to answer: Non-violence : How has your organization/group reduced its production of harmful waste? Truth : How open is your organization/group about the impact of its practices on the environment? Non-theft : How much use does your organization/group make of sustainable and non-depleting resources? Restraint : How much has your organization/group reduced its use of natural resources? Non-possession : How does your organization/group implement sharing of the Earths resources?

Giving up all possessions, most forms of food, curtailing your movements and, when the time comes, fasting to death, is not the sort of stuff that attracts people in droves any more than telling people they have to give up their fossil fuelled, agri-business lifestyle. As the Jains have discovered, there is a ne line between moderating ones extremes and faking it. The Jain laity have traditionally used their ve vows as a basis for evolutions in their lifestyle, not as a great leap into goodness that never happens. The Young Jains group in the UK took up this approach in their dealings with the environment identifying modern causes of harm to nature that could become part of ones vows of restraint against violence, those tricky negotiations with the self we all face around the use of cars, levels of consumerism, etc. The principle is basic, but you have to build the habit, and start to create a new normality.
Business: The Hardest Nut to Crack

The winner in the business category, announced at a dinner attended by three hundred UK Jains, was a recycling paper manufacturer and the runner-up was the creator of ecological balanced plant macrocosms for ofces. The Award has not continued but, like so much of the work, it opened a door. Especially for the younger generations, business practice is now linked to environmental practice and to the Jain vows. How far the Jains go with that is still to be seen. The business and political wherewithal of the Jains and their religious teachings that do not need to have environmental principles wrested from an anthropocentric grip, offer this ancient religion an extraordinary opportunity to be a leader in one of the most important challenges of modern life.
The Jain tradition enthroned the philosophy of ecological harmony and non-violence as its lodestar . (Jain Declaration on Nature) Jains should be leading examples of environmentally-friendly citizens. (Ahimsa Environment Award promotional leaet)

Given that business was the practice that once took Jains away from acts of ahimsa, its role in generating environmental harm is not an easy thing for Jains to face and goes straight to the heart of their current life in the world. As noted earlier, Jains have avoided any professions or businesses where there is use, or traditionally recognized destruction, of the bodies of living beings, but knowledge about how we destroy other life is growing daily. The fact that some fertilizers sold to the third world are bone meal (often banned in the West), has recently come to the attention of Jain business people who are buying agricultural products such as sugar cane and groundnuts for their factories. If it is conrmed that their suppliers are using these fertilizers, then alternative sources or fertilizers will be found. Yet Jains are the diamond merchants of India, they will cut diamonds for jewelry but they will not mine them because of the damage to earth-dwelling life forms caused by mining. Someone else does that. The importance of highlighting interdependence in Jain thinking becomes clearer. In modern business it is possible to destroy other life without direct contact with their bodies. You just have to destroy their habitat.

REFERENCES
Dundas, P (1992) The Jains, Routledge, London. Gandhi, M K (1958) Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (62 vols), 1958 76. Government of India Publication Division, Delhi, 32.4, 32.4. Jaini, P S (1979) The Jaina Path of Puri cation, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Jaini, P S (1991) Gender and Salvation: Jaina Debates on the Spiritual Liberation of Women, University of California Press, CA. Jaini, P S (1994) The Jaina Faith and its History, in Umasvati, That Which Is: Tattvartha Sutra, translated by Tatia, Harper Collins, San Francisco, CA. Jain, M K (1986) A Demographic Analysis on Jains in India, India J., 21.2, 33 50.

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Renou, L (1953) Religions of Ancient India, Schochen Books, New York. Singhvi, L M (1990) The Jain Declaration on Nature, Institute of Jainology, London. Smith, V A (1917) The Jain Teachers of Akbar, in Essays Presented to Sir R. G. Bhandarkar, Poona. Tatia, N (translator) (1994) Tattvartha Sutra: That Which Is, Harper Collins, New York.

discrimination and persecution that had affected them in the past.

The earth is the Lord s and the fullness thereof The world, and they that dwell therein. (Psalm 24)

These words encapsulate the Jewish approach to the environment. The sense of wonder at the world around us pervades the history and the writings of the Jews. Not only in the biblical creation story of the Garden of Eden, through the founding fathers of the tribe, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (circa 1800 before current era (BCE)), on to the development of the nation in the time of Moses and Joshua (circa 1200 BCE), but throughout the thousands of years of Jewish history. This amazement at the manifold expressions of nature went hand in hand with a realization that there was an eternal force moving through all things, whom the Hebrews called God, and other names, but, unlike all other peoples, insisted that divine force or being could not be reproduced in any physical form. Thus was the purest form of monotheism born. With such a basic belief, and a relationship of thanksgiving to the Eternal, it is not surprising that the people developed many teachings as to the preservation of man s home, planet Earth, and all that it contained. Nor is it surprising that, once centuries of clerical and legal oppression were thrown off, and the modern age of scienti c discovery began, Jews, unhindered by theological dogma, played a notable role in the advance of science, the ever-widening systematic discovery of the nature of God. There was no con ict. Thus, what follows will endeavor to describe in more detail Jewish teachings and practice which, in relation to the environment, were most advanced. Those teachings were based on a belief that we are the recipients of God s bounty, and that the moral law, as to the sanctity of life and living things, is the inevitable corollary of such basic faith. Judaism is based on both faith and reason, on the soaring idealism of the biblical prophets and on the practical application of basic teachings by the rabbis, over millennia, adapting to changing circumstances. The expression rabbi bears no comparison to priest. It simply means one acknowledged to have a degree of knowledge and learning and, hopefully, wisdom, that enables him (or now her) to carry out teaching, and judicial and pastoral duties. Whilst there is belief in a future life, Judaism is very much a this-world faith, seeking, through a sense of balance and moderation, justice and reason, to advance mankind s physical and spiritual condition, and thus to become closer to the eternal spirit, in fact as the Hebrew Tikkun Olam indicates, to repair the world.

FURTHER READING
Jacobi, H (1884) Jaina Sutras, Oxford (Sacred Books of the East, 22), Reprinted by Dover Publications, New York, 1984. Umasvati (1994) That Which Is: Tattvartha Sutra, translated by Tatia, Nathmal, Harper Collins (& ISLT), San Francisco, CA.

Judaism and the Environment

Aubrey Rose CBE
Barnet, Hertfordshire, UK

Judaism is the religion of the Jews. It has a continuous history of almost 4000 years and, like Hinduism, is not only one of the oldest of faiths, but one which has been the source of other major religions. Although particularistic in being linked to one people, it is universal in its concepts and beliefs. Its uniqueness is that it has survived whether its adherents dwelt in their natural home, the land of Israel, or whether scattered over the face of the earth. Due to the history and the multi-millennial experience of the Jewish people, Judaism has relevant teachings that are global, that relate to the environment, as well as to the process of change. In fact because it emphasizes learning and action rather than dogma and theology, it has not been in con ict with developing scientic ideas, such as evolution. Thus, it has been possible for a leading modern ecologist, Professor David Bellamy, to state:
It is indeed a sobering thought that the early writings of the Jewish people encompass all the basic recommendations of the World Conservation Strategy.

It is likewise no coincidence that individual Jews have played a notable role in the advance of knowledge and of science through the ages, and especially in the last two centuries when Jews were gradually freed from institutional

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It is a remarkable story, which, despite emanating from a tiny people, has been a major inuence on world history. Hence its approach to the environment is worthy of consideration. The future of our planet and all in it depends largely on Mans own actions. If those actions are guided by a moral law balancing needs, then the planet can survive. If, however, there is no guiding law, and material exploitation proceeds apace, regardless of consequences, then environmental change will be so drastic that we may well destroy the globe, the environment, and ourselves. Judaism is one of the world faiths that try to bring the moral law into our treatment of our home, our planet. A brief word, therefore, about Jewish history is necessary to indicate the background to environmental teachings. Whilst there are various theories as to the origins of the Hebrews, the general view is that they emanated from a tribe based at the conuence of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates (now in southern Iraq), their leader being Abraham, born in Ur of the Chaldees. His wanderings took him eventually to the land of Canaan, a land promised to him and his descendants. Among those descendants were his son Isaac and grandson Jacob, the latter producing a progeny later identied as the 12 tribes of Israel. The group prospered agriculturally, especially when Jacobs son Joseph held a position of authority in Egypt, where most of the Hebrews dwelt for over 400 years. Persecution and slavery led to the exodus from Egypt of what had now become a nation in about 1220 BCE under the inspired leadership of Moses and thence to the conquest of the promised land under Moses successor Joshua. Subsequent government by Judges was followed by the appointment of monarchs, the most notable being David who established a centralized authority in Jerusalem. By 930 BCE on the death of Davids son Solomon, the kingdom split in two, the northern half, Israel, succumbing to the Assyrians in 721 BCE, whilst the southern part, Judea, ourished until 586 BCE, when most of its population were carried off to Babylon. Before the century was out, however, Jews began to return to Judea, to reestablish the Temple as their national shrine, and to continue their religious life. Greek inuence later pervaded the land, although sovereignty was regained after the revolt of the Maccabees in about 140 BCE, though Roman control was established in 63 BCE. Efforts to restore national freedom continued for decades, exploding in the Jewish revolt of 6670 Current Era (CE), brutally suppressed by Rome, though ickering again in 132 CE, another vain uprising against the dominant Roman power. Jewish sovereignty in the land was not restored until 1948 with the establishment of the modern state. Perhaps almost as remarkable as the story in the land itself is the Jewish Diaspora (dispersion of the Jews). The

Babylonian community ourished for over 2500 years until 1960, whilst, at the time of the birth of Christianity, Jews were settled throughout Mediterranean lands. In fact those communities enabled the Christian message Christianity being then a sect of Judaism to bear fruit amongst pagan peoples. There was also a Jewish Diaspora in Arabia, as indicated in the story of the Prophet Mohammed, as well as in India. The main Diaspora developed in western Europe in the rst millennium, developing extensively from about 1500 in eastern Europe. Similar communities arose in parts of the British and Dutch empires, where religious tolerance reigned, extending to South America, the Caribbean, Australia and parts of Africa. However, the bulk of world Jewry in 1850 lived in eastern Europe. Russian persecution and pogroms led to a massive movement of Jews, from 1880 to 1914 westwards, resulting in the present communities of western Europe and, especially, the United States. Also, from about 1880 began the Jewish return to the land of Israel, though Jews had always lived there throughout the centuries. This movement accelerated with the advent of Nazism in the 1930s, as well as the movement from Arab lands after 1948. This continued existence of a people largely separated from its native land for such periods of time has continually perplexed historians, as it appears to have no parallel. Yet the sources of this survival are clear, and have a distinct bearing on the Jewish approach to ecology. Most of Jewish history for the rst 2000 years of the peoples existence derives from the Bible, conrmed frequently by archaeological discoveries, as well as some writings by nonJewish sources. But the last 2000 years has seen an immense burst of Jewish creativity, particularly rabbinic Judaism. The rst ve books of the Bible, known as the Torah, and the teachings of the Prophets, set out, not only beliefs as to God and morality, but also highly detailed instructions as to treatment of the land, animals, trees, an ecological blueprint as David Bellamy recognized. For example the destruction of fruit trees was forbidden, even in time of war, according to the book of Deuteronomy. This was enlarged upon by rabbinical teachings, rst in the Mishnah, a codifying operation completed in about 200 CE as well as in the Talmud, compiled during the subsequent 300 years in Jerusalem and Babylon, containing over 3 000 000 words in 63 books. From the simple admonition not to cut down fruit trees the rabbis and teachers developed the doctrine of bal tashchit thou shalt not destroy enlarged on by subsequent teachers to prevent people committing waste, the basis of modern recycling processes. The great Jewish philosopher and teacher, Maimonides (11351204), in turn enlarged on this basic principle as follows:

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It is not only forbidden to destroy fruit-bearing trees but whoever breaks vessels, tears clothes, demolishes a building, stops up a fountain or wastes food, in a destructive way, offends against the law of thou shalt not destroy. Judaism afrms without reservation that the world is Gods creation and that whoever helps to preserve it is doing Gods work.

Clearly most, if not all, major religions developed in preindustrial times, when populations were small, and when the land, its ownership and use, dominated society. It could be argued therefore that these religions are not relevant to our present problems. But that would be shortsighted and supercial. What religions did, and certainly what Judaism did, was to lay down certain essential principles, often based on moral values, which could be adapted as society evolved. It is worth looking at a few fundamental beliefs and values of Judaism to see how they affect environmental practice. The creation story in Genesis is instructive. Our environment, our world, all creation, was the work of God. This labor took six days. On each day God looked at what he had achieved and saw that it was good . After the creation of man in his own image , God saw that it was very good . This story, be it accepted literally or metaphorically, reects Jewish optimism that life is good, but also that the unity of God is reected in the unity of all creation. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, is the famous statement of Jewish belief. Albert Einstein, in pursuit of that unity, refers to the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty. Enough for me, the mystery of eternity of life and the inkling of the marvelous structure of reality. He reects the glowing words of Isaiah and the Psalmist as to the wonders of creation, when he refers to a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignicant reection . Evolution presents no problem. As a modern commentator, Chief Rabbi Dr Hertz, states, there is nothing inherently un-Jewish in the evolutionary conception of the origin and growth of forms of existence from the simple to the complex, and from the lowest to the highest . Judaism regards man, made in Gods image, as being at the apex of this structure, enjoined not merely to subdue nature, but also, as stewards or trustees, to till it and to preserve it (Genesis). Out of this creation story two important environmental teachings emerge. First the institution of the Sabbath day, a uniquely Jewish idea. On each seventh day not only must human beings rest, but also the land, and all the animals, perhaps the rst animal right in history. This idea of rest for the land is in complete accord with modern agricultural theory. It extends also to every seventh year (Shemittah), and to the 50th or Jubilee year. Thus, in a way, Jews

recognized that man had a duty to respect the rights of the land and of animals, all part of creation. The second teaching relates to biodiversity. Again and again in the creation story reference is made to of its own kind grass, seeds, fruit, trees, sea and land creatures, birds, each after its kind. This acknowledgement of biodiversity is reected also in the story of Noah and his ark, into which went many species, with a view to procreation and replenishing the earth. This respect for the existence of species, their right to exist, is the basis of the Jewish view of conservation. There is also reected concern for the individuality of the species. The Bible sets out in great detail which species may or may not be eaten, which species may not be yoked together, e.g., the ox and the ass, as the stronger will harm the weaker. Indeed concern for animals is reected throughout biblical and rabbinical literature. A righteous man has regard for the life of his animal (Proverbs) led on to the Talmudic injunction that a man should feed his animals before himself. The Biblical book of Exodus enjoins one to take care of stray animals; even animals of ones enemy, and especially of injured animals. There is a like prohibition against killing an animal together with its young, to prevent one witnessing the death of the other. Maimonides again:
The panic of animals under such circumstances is very great. There is no difference in this case between the pain of humans and the pain of other living beings, since the love and tenderness of the mother for her young is not produced by reasoning but by feeling and this faculty exists not only in humans but in most living things.

The Talmud, with its diverse opinions from 2000 contributors, is agreed, however, that unnecessary pain should never be caused to animals or living creatures (tsaar baalei chayim ). Thus, Judaism is opposed to fox or big game hunting, bullghting, any use of animals for sport which causes pain. Also abhorrent is the trapping of animals for luxury furs, the mowing down of elephants for ivory or merciless hunting of whales. For self-defense or for food, animals may be killed, and shechita, the process of ritual slaughter, is an attempt to lessen pain caused to the animal. In fact the ideal diet was intended to be vegetarian (Genesis 1.29), but meateating was permitted after the time of Noah, provided the blood, the life of the animal, was excluded before eating. This contrasted vividly with the practices of surrounding peoples. These few points illustrate the extraordinary respect Judaism has for life, in Hebrew, chayim. There is sanctity to life, which must be respected. Thus, in Talmudic times capital punishment was rarely carried out. In modern Israel, the death penalty was abolished except for Nazi criminals. Only one person has been executed in 50 years, the Holocaust murderer Eichmann. Even the strict injunction to

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desist from work or other acts on the Sabbath is overruled in the interests of preserving life (pikuach nefesh ). Modern Israel has become an ornithologists delight. There is a mass annual migration of birds, of many varieties, northwards and southwards. These birds are cherished and sanctuaries are built for them. Five hundred species of birds have been observed. In almost all Mediterranean countries, there is a mass slaughter and shooting of these migrating birds. Not so in Israel, the birds are living beings. Whilst culling may at times be necessary, to kill birds as a sport is not part of Judaism or the Jewish tradition. Perhaps Judaisms view of the environment is best illustrated by its attitude to trees. The tree is a thing in itself as well as a symbol. It appears in the rst chapter of Genesis. By the second chapter it has become an allegory, the tree of life. The tree in Genesis is instructive. In 1901 Jews established as one of the oldest environmental bodies, the Jewish National Fund, primarily to plant trees in the arid Holy Land. Every Jewish household worldwide has, since then, had a little box in which pennies, cents and centimes were deposited to raise money for trees. Since 1945 over 200 000 000 trees have been planted in Israel, to prevent soil erosion, create shade, preserve the water level, each tree, of its kind, planted according to the nature of the soil and climate, pines near Jerusalem, cypress on coastal plains, and eucalyptus and acacia in saline soil in the southern Negev and Arava. In what in early Talmudic times was a well-wooded country, restoration in the 20th century has resulted in 40 000 ha of natural forest, 40 recreation areas and parks, 700 picnic and recreation sites, while scientic planting in the desert-like Negev, savannahization, is creating a new and hopeful situation that could be of benet to all desert areas in the world. Whilst Judaism celebrates both a secular and religious New Year, it also has a special New Year for Trees (Tu BShevat ). As winter departs and spring approaches, this festival is celebrated worldwide by a burst of tree-planting, especially by children. The extraction of oil from land and seabed was a major environmental feature of the 20th century, with prominent political and economic consequences. There is a view that, in the 21st century, water will replace oil as a dominant issue. Seas and rivers, lakes and streams, have suffered from chemical pollution, a signicant global change. World health authorities estimate that 80% of disease arises from impure, affected water. As with trees, Judaism has a similar view as to water. Its purity is vital. It is also a symbol. The Bible, and the rabbis, constantly refer to living waters (mayim chayim ). But in actual terms, the same principles apply. Water should not be wasted but conserved. Hence, innovative procedures were developed such as trickle drip system of watering plants,

desalinization, irrigation procedures, transportation of water by a water carrier, use of solar energy for heating and hot water, accumulating and diverting ood water through dams, creating a marine nature reserve on the Red Sea coast, as well as a process for recycling water and funding steps to prevent marine pollution. It is instructive to cite an example of, how with the best of intentions, mistakes can be made. The Huleh lake wetland in Galilee was drained, as other wetlands have been drained. The result was not what was expected. The wetland had operated as a natural lter and cleansing mechanism for the Sea of Galilee, slowing down water movement, allowing nutrients to be used by the wetland species. The drainage resulted in problems, causing silting and algae blooms, as well as a loss of species. So the whole process had to be reversed, and now the Huleh wetland is again a source of joy, for species, birds and people. Another vital Jewish teaching is thereby illustrated, the interdependence of all phenomena in creation, which we disturb at our peril. There is a typical Talmudic story, or Midrash, of God taking Adam by the hand in the Garden of Eden and saying, Look around you. See what I have given you. Look after it well, because if you destroy it, there will be no one to put it right. This illustrates another Jewish belief that we have free will to choose between good and bad, and, environmentally, between positive change and negative change, between sensible conservation and ruthless destruction. It is possible that just as the plague of human immunodeciency virus (HIV)/acquired immunodeciency syndrome (AIDS) burst on mankind in the second half of the 20th century, multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome (MCS) may become the 21st century afiction. It is estimated that one in one hundred people, especially in industrialized countries, suffer from this disease. It aficts those who are sensitive to all the impurities poured into the air; petrochemicals, pesticides, air fresheners, sprays for home and farm, disinfectants, fungicides, toxic substances, and other seemingly benign substances that actually add to the greenhouse effect and stratospheric ozone depletion. For an increasing number of people air pollution represents a potent, ever-present threat to their health, if not to life itself. Many are prisoners in their own homes. Researchers have now also discovered an alarming increase in bronchial illness, especially asthma. What we are doing is simply poisoning the air, and ourselves. The problem, even in pre-industrial times, was considered in the Bible and by the rabbis of old. Deuteronomy enjoined the efcient clearance of excreta. The Talmud even stated that one should not live in a place that has no privy (or even no vegetable garden or owers). How surprising to nd in the book of Leviticus advocacy of substantial green belts (migrash ) around certain cities, a principle developed by later rabbis to apply to all cities.

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Maimonides description of polluted air over eight hundred years ago, cannot be bettered:
The quality of urban air compared to the air in the deserts and forests is like thick and turbulent water compared to pure and light water. And this is because in the cities, with their tall buildings and narrow roads, the pollution that comes from the residents, their waste, cadavers, and offal from their cattle, and the stench of their adulterated food, makes the entire air malodorous, turbulent, reeking and thick, and the winds become accordingly so, although no one is aware of it.

Maimonides might almost have had some modern cities in mind. He continues with advice as to where to live so as to avoid the polluted air. All these biblical and rabbinical provisions emanate from the view that the people should be holy, for which purpose cleanliness of mind, body and environment, was essential. One rabbi commented, physical cleanliness leads to spiritual purity . Hands had to be washed before eating, on rising from bed, and after going to the privy. To emphasize the signicance or the soul of each act or sight, a blessing (Berachah ) was to be intoned. Hence, Judaism is full of blessings, for every possible occasion, the gift of food, the gift of beauty, the gift of wisdom, and the gift of life. The rabbis of Mishnah times, 1800 years ago, even set out views on limitation of noise pollution. Incidentally, a ` propos the population explosion, a major factor in environmental change, the rabbis stated the biblical injunction (mitzvah ), be fruitful and multiply was satised if parents had at least two children. It is not surprising that the Bible and the Talmud were so concerned with environmental matters. Land and livestock were the chief forms of wealth. Jews were the people of the land as much as of the Book. Their main festivals, New Year (Rosh Hashanah ), Passover (Pesach ), Pentecost (Shavuot ) and Tabernacles (Succot ), although overlaid with religious signicance, were all basically harvest festivals which encouraged men and women to appreciate the cycle and produce of the natural year. Also, what Judaism did was to bring moral teachings into each festival so that, for example, the harvester is enjoined to leave part of the lands produce for the poor, the widowed and the orphan. This is a biblical injunction, one of the many commandments (mitzvot ) of the faith. The Bible, apart from its historical and religious content, is also, in effect, a textbook of the environment. It contains the most wonderful and detailed descriptions of landscapes, animals, and owers. The Psalms, Song of Songs, Isaiah, Ruth, are full of environmental allusions, decked out in the most vivid and beautiful language. The Bible has been an immense help to those administering the 280 Nature Reserves in Israel, guiding them in the restoration of animals to the land such as the oryx, which

had long disappeared. By chance, Israel, and Jerusalem itself, are at the meeting point of three climatic zones. In the northern half of the country, with its Mediterranean climate, as Professor Safriel, formerly Chief Scientist of the Nature Reserves Authority points out, not less than 25 species of wild progenitors of food plants live in natural habitats. They constitute an unprecedented rich genetic source; a bank of genes for resistance for use by farmers the world over. He points out that seeds are normally stored in gene banks, whereas the wild plants in their natural habitats are continually exposed to the changing environment and their general constitution is constantly molded by the forces of natural selection . An echo perhaps of the words of Genesis each of its own kind . Yet another echo relates to Professor Safriels description of the vital thin layer of microscopic, unicellular algae that carpets the desert surface of the Negev, the southern half of the land. Professor Safriel compares this to the surface in Sinai where the desert is overstocked with goats and camels who tear off the delicate algal mesh and the deserts soil crust breaks and disappears. Interestingly, it was the rabbis of Talmudic times who warned against the damage done by allowing sheep and goats to feed without control. Professor Safriel adds that Israel as a whole, being at a global climatic transition zone, has major world signicance in monitoring environmental change, particularly global warming due to the greenhouse effect. Who would have thought that, when medieval cartographers placed Jerusalem at the center of the world, they may have had a point! One benet from being so sited is that the Hebrew University Botanical Gardens in Jerusalem, in its 24 ha, is able to grow plants, bushes and trees native to the ve world continents, a treasure of botanic diversity. Thus, love of land and its produce has been a golden thread running through Judaism and Jewish life from the earliest times. In this century, Jews have developed arboreta, herb gardens, experimental botanic centers for plants and trees, worldwide, from Exbury Gardens in Britain to a plant resource station in Hong Kong, from remote farms in Nova Scotia, Canada, to the hillsides of Brittany, France, and of course, Biblical gardens in Israel and elsewhere. The following illustrates this attachment to nature. In the eighteenth century in Eastern Europe, there arose an exciting, exuberant, religious grouping called Hasidism. They believed not only in study and learning, but in joyful prayer and song. Their founder was to be seen invariably in elds and forests. In 1760, one of the foremost gures of that group, Rabbi Shneour Zalman, married. He received a substantial dowry. With his wifes agreement, the whole of that dowry was placed in a fund to help

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Jews develop agricultural settlements and to learn the arts and crafts connected with farming and the land. Thus, though urbanized, largely through external pressures, Jews have never lost their attachment to nature and the land, rediscovering in recent years, particularly with the impact of the return to Israel, the basis in nature for much of their Jewish heritage. The land of Israel is today beset with numerous and serious environmental problems. These are largely the result of the sudden inux of people from many lands in the last half century, but there are dedicated people imbued with the spirit of the past who actively pursue the causes of conservation and balance between the needs of nature and of society. For example, the high aims and clear philosophy of the Nature Reserves Authority reect well the principles enunciated by both Bible and Talmudic rabbis, adapted to the modern scientic world. Those aims are summarized by the Authority as follows:
All living organisms and natural phenomena have a right to exist nature is beauty and a fundamental component of our physical and cultural existence nature is quality of life nature is the main resource for scientic progress which improved the wellbeing of humanity human progress depends upon a positive relationship with nature we must practice the wisest use of natures richness without diminishing its reserves protection of genetic diversity of wild species found in Israel could be critical for the future of human agriculture and animal husbandry we are obligated to preserve this lifesupport heritage for future generations.

abused. Reverence for life and creation is essential, as also is humility. When Job rails against fate, God says to him,
Where were you when I laid the earths foundations? Do you know the laws of heaven? Or impose its authority on earth? (Ch. 38)

The Jewish view of the world is God-centered, not mancreated. In Abraham Joshua Heschels words, the world is not a gigantic tool-box for the satisfaction of mans needs . Rather does Judaism say, in humility,
How manifold are Thy works, O Lord. In wisdom has Thou made them all. (Psalm 104)

Neither Bible nor rabbis could have expressed the Jewish view better. There are many examples of Jewish teachings on the environment. Only the main points can be touched on in this review. Much of value, especially detail, is necessarily omitted. There is an understandable and perennial problem for scientists, who deal in provable facts, experimentation and observation, in recognizing the religious impulses enshrined in many faiths. Yet modern quantum physics may be moving closer to the insights expressed or hinted at in the teachings of world religions. Certainly Judaism is not opposed to science, as witness the disproportionate number of Jewish scientists, provided the essence of humanity, of individuality, is not thereby

These words were echoed thousands of years later by Albert Einstein when, pursuing the idea of a unied eld force, he continued to be amazed at the mystery of life, the marvelous structure of reality, and the search to comprehend a portion, be it never so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature . Another ethical value in the Jewish outlook is moderation. Judaism, from Genesis and the Ten Commandments onwards, through rabbinical law (Halacha ), has always imposed behavioral limits on individuals. Moderation implies a self-limitation on consumption and accumulation of wealth or as Isaiah described it adding house to house, eld to eld . On the contrary, the rabbis of old taught Who is rich? He who is happy with his portion . Hence the ruthless pursuit of wealth, development that takes no account of ecological cost, of the assault on nature, on forests, seas, land, atmosphere, witnessed in the 20th century, is contrary to the spirit and teachings of Judaism as developed over millennia as society itself evolved. As the pace of scienti c discovery increases, and may perhaps develop in ways we cannot as yet foresee, so the challenge to Judaism, and all other religious faiths, will grow. There will be evolution, adaptation, advance, yet the basic principles enunciated so long ago by the Hebrew prophets and developed, century after century, by the rabbis, will continue to be the guiding light of Judaism and of the Jewish people.

K
Kelly, Petra
(1947 1992) Petra Kelly was a founder of the German Green Party and a forceful leader of environmental and eco-feminist causes. Petra Karin Kelly was born in Guenzburg, Bavaria, in what was then West Germany. In 1960, she moved to the United States with her mother and stepfather, US Army Colonel John E Kelly, her biological father having left the family in 1954. Living in Columbus, Georgia, young Petra became involved in the civil rights movement. She went on to study at American University (BA 1970), and won a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship, serving as a teaching assistant for one year. Kelly was active in the student movements against the Vietnam War, nuclear energy, and for civil rights, social justice and womens rights. She worked as a volunteer in the presidential campaign of the late Senator Robert F Kennedy. In 1970, her 10 year old sister, Grace, died of eye cancer. Petra responded by founding, with her grandmother a cancer research support foundation in her sisters name. In 1971, she received an MA in political science from the University of Amsterdam. She worked as a civil servant within the European Community headquarters in Brussels. In 1973, she formally adopted an orphaned Tibetan foster daughter, Nima. In 1979, she helped found the Green Party, committed to principles of non-violence and environmental protection. When in 1980 she became party leader, she was the rst woman in German history to head a political party. She held the post of chairperson and speaker for the Greens executive board until 1982. On March 6, 1983, Kelly was among 27 Green Party members elected to the German parliament, the Bundestag. She served in the Bundestag until the election of December 1990, failing to win the requisite percentage of the votes, 5%, to ensure parliamentary representation. Kelly was honored with the Swedish Parliaments Right Livelihood Award in 1982, and the Peace Prize of the US group Women s Strike for Peace in 1983. She was on the international board of the World Womens Congress in 19901991, within the Womens Environment and Development Organization. In the early 1980s, she became involved with a fellow Green Party MP, retired Major General Gert Bastien, 25 years her senior. They were inseparable and a powerful force, jointly calling for accountability for superpowers possession of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, opposing German economic ties with South Africa, organizing tribunals to examine human rights in Tibet, and Chinas treatment of dissidents. She and Bastien were arrested in 1983 for blockading US military bases. In October 19, 1992, Kelly and Gert Bastien were found in their home dead, both of gunshot wounds. The Bonn police concluded that Bastien had killed Kelly and then himself. No suicide note was left, and Bastien appeared to have been interrupted, stopping in mid-word in a mundane letter, his electric typewriter still on. This and the unlocked upstairs door have left some to suspect an unknown assailant was responsible. Regardless of the theory, two things are clear. Kelly did not die by her own hand, and the world lost an inspiring and powerful voice.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada

Kondratyev Cycles
see Kondratyev, Nikolai Dmitrievich (Volume 5)

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Kondratyev, Nikolai Dmitrievich

(1892 1938) Nikolai Dmitrievich Kondratyev was an outstanding Russian economist of the 20th century. His work is widely recognized internationally, and the term Kondratyev Long Wave is named after him. (In the US, for example, he became a member of the American Academy of Social Sciences, the American Economic Association, The American Statistical Society, and the American Association on Agricultural Economic Problems.)

Nikolai Kondratyev conducted fundamental investigations into the theory of long-wave economic dynamics; he is the author of works on predicting and long-term planning of economic development and on mathematical statistics and agrarian sector development. The idea of economic long-wave cycles was based on Kondratyevs analysis of a large body of statistical data on the dynamics of the average level of commodity prices, capital interest, wages, foreign trade turnover, and the extraction of cast iron and lead, covering a 140-year period. Kondratyev not only predicted the great world depression of the late 1920searly 1930s but he also believed in its inevitability. Orthodox Marxists attacked Kondratyevs concepts and he was persecuted for his beliefs. He died in one of Stalins prison camps but he was nally rehabilitated posthumously in the Russian restructuring period.
LIUDMILA ROMANIUK Russia

L
Land Ethic
see Environmental Ethics (Volume 5)

Landscape Garden
see Landscape, Urban Landscape, and the Human Shaping of the Environment (Volume 5)

Landscape, Urban Landscape, and the Human Shaping of the Environment

Brenda Lee
Montreal, Quebec, Canada

For ve centuries, landscape has been used to describe domesticated nature (historically, the British sense), the apparently untouched wild (the American sense) and the pictoral representation of both. It is a complex concept within which the natural and cultural, visual and functional, real and reproduced, interpretive and descriptive, bounded and boundless have been very tightly interwoven. As a technical term, landscape is believed to have been rst used to relate natural and cultural elements in landform by Carl Sauer Morphology of Landscape (Sauer, 1925). In the last two decades its capacity to connect has been exploited by an increasingly wide range of historical, cultural and feminist geographers, and by researchers outside the geographic eld. Sympathetic branches of archeology, cultural anthropology, culture studies, literary criticism, sociology, philosophy and art history, to link cultural perception of place within society and nature, to the forms that comprise the

physical world. Next to place, landscape has become the most important medium for exploring culture nature interactions. Metaphorically, landscape has replaced context to portray the sweep of signi cant features that meets a focused gaze. Landmarks of its modern use might begin with J B Jacksons founding of Landscape Magazine in 1951, and include Hoskins (1958); Nairn (1965); Lynch (1972); Williams (1973); Meinig (1979); Watkins (1982); and Cosgrove and Daniels (1988). In the natural sciences, landscape ecology developed from the recognition that the proper study of ecology must include Humankinds very signi cant interventions. Applied ecology, although de ned much earlier in the German scienti c literature, was given form in Europe and North America in the early 1930s; it wasnt until the early 1980s, however, that the term landscape was widely accepted as a functionally bounded unit of those patchy ecosystems that Humankinds activities produce (e.g., see Tjallingii and de Veer, 1982, and for an overview of the consolidating disciplines, Schreiber, 1990 and Forman, 1990). The International Association for Landscape Ecology was founded in 1982 to unite the increasingly proli c European and North American work in the biological, geological and geographic sciences. This work has selective links to, but is not integrated with, related activities elsewhere in the humanities and social sciences.

LAND INTO LANDSCAPE: THE MEANING OF THE TERM

The meaning of landscape has therefore never been more complex. Its ambiguity was marked by Meinig (1979) through an identication of 10 of the scenes that it was possible for the scanning eye to behold: nature (the skin of mother earth); habitat (mans domesticated home on earth); artifact (evidence of mans intention); system (of interconnected elements, hydrological to highway); problem (condition of deterioration demanding remedial action); wealth (via a nancial appraisal of its worth, existing and value-added); ideology (symbol of the values, the governing ideas, the underlying philosophies of a culture); history (the complex cumulative record of the work of nature and

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man in this particular place); place (the unique constellation of characteristics and experiences of each locale); and aesthetic (function subordinated to the painterly laws of intention, form, light and balance). Two versions of its original and essential meaning exist. The rst reaches back beyond the rst English usage of the Dutch painters technical term landschap (landskip recorded in 1598; the correct land-scape in 1603) to the Old English landscipe, interpreted as the district or region inhabited and worked by a particular society of people. J B Jackson anchors the old English term in the original neolithic relation of land and its rst farming populations. The Northern European Germanic word land referred to a clearing and scape to a collection of like objects. Similarly, in the southern regions, the Latin pagus or pact, established the essential socio-political nature of the derivative in modern Romance languages. Landscape was the worked territory of farming peoples. Perceptual denitions are, importantly, derivative. The second account places more signicance on the break in usage (no record exists of the term in middle English) and the cultural development of self that accompanied the exploration of nature as a signicant subject of art. Since antiquity, nature had played important decorative, iconographic and supportive roles for the mind, keyed to various symbolic associations; and to medieval and early Renaissance minds, nature was a key medium of Christian symbolism and allegory. It was painters from Switzerland (Konrad Witz 14001447 AD being the rst fully to embed his gures within a topographically identiable countryside), the Low Countries (Joachim Patinir, Hubert and Jan Van Eyck, Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1400s1600s), Italy (Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione Brunelleschi having earlier worked out scientic perspective 1460s1500s) and Germany (Albrecht Durer, Albrecht Altdorfer (1500s) who constructed the bases in spatial form and light for the rst landscapes that were painted for the value that they had themselves: the 17th century Dutch explorations of naturebased reality that gave interpretive primacy to the individual experiencing subject. This was a time when the new perspective allowed a more realistic and enigmatic nature to emerge on paper, and when the new Renaissance fascination with things-in-themselves began to enliven nature, human and wild. This new nature had a life of its own, and the tension between emblematic projection and expressive interpretation characterizes all early landscape art. The transition from emblem to expression i.e., from a landscape mirroring cultural associations to that evocative of the personal experience of nature, has been often explored in theatre (Zimbardo, 1986), poetry (Wasserman, 1968), literature (Abrams, 1958) and landscape design (Hunt, 1992). Landscape here has become, in Malcom Andrews words, worldscape (1999): the myriad of compositions that can be formed from interacting natural and cultural

lives-in-themselves. From political to scientic, each picks out its eld of signicant objects and relationships. While it is difcult not to use the term landscape for all historical treatments of humanized nature, this second understanding is founded in the belief that the concepts modern English formulation accompanies, and depends upon, the individuation and internalization of the analytic Western self. Landscape is, in this sense, essentially a perceived composition of meaningful objects. It is landscape that most accurately represents Coopers (1992) denition of environment as a eld of signicance. Landscape, which encompasses the changing patterns of sky, land use and seasonal weather and vegetation, is thus a momentary individual phenomenon, which, like the connoted word, is generalized to a series of widely accepted denotations. This second understanding is sometimes portrayed as purely visual or pictorial; but the aesthetics of land is argued to be much more active, supporting bodily orientation and the related phenomenological experience of being expressly here; doing expressly this (Berleant, 1997; Cooney, 1999) in some space. The meaning of landscape to those professions dedicated to its design and management has a particularity of its own. For practitioners of landscape architecture, landscape is narrative: a historically produced composition of biogeochemical forces and the artifacts of human use, which cannot properly be a site of possible intervention until it is understood (see Spirn, 1998). In practice, since conicts must be resolved and indeterminancies settled in making a design or management plan, only the most practicable outputs of the natural and social landscape sciences can be drawn upon. For environmental managers, the historical narrative exists, but is normally superseded by the structural detail, which is so difcult to integrate into landscape design: i.e., the characteristics and interactions of its composite units. These units are typically the bounded areas of interest that form patterns within a landscape. Landscape to an environmental or ecological manager is thus the largest functional unit within which smaller sub-units operate, both horizontally and vertically: i.e., an ecosystem. Its study as an (open) system has, since the early 1950s and more actively, since the early 1980s gathered together the disciplines previously isolated in specialized studies of ecosystem components (air/weather, surface/subsurface, rock, soil, plants, animals, etc.) so as to assess comprehensively their reactions to, and effects on, human action (see for example, Williams, 1993). See also Landscape Ecology, Volume 2.

CHANGING HUMAN PATTERNS ON THE LAND: THE EARLIEST CULTURES

If we move to the earths landscape itself, the earliest human effects can be traced to the African Old World

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tropical forest, whose primates are thought to have given rise to the hominids that rst moved out into the grassland and savanna. Through three major glacial periods (500 0008000 BC) Paleolithic hunting societies survived in small encampments, of which evidence has been found in the north African coastal countries, the east Mediterranean, Italy, France and the British Isles. With the recession of the Wisconsin glaciation, these societies advanced out into the temperate forests of every continent. Their general patterns of movement and settlement (population at that time of around ve million) are interpretable through pollen analysis and the relative locations of settlement remains. Those unearthed are small, temporary shelters, the oldest of which lie within the French Terra Amata beach camp (400 000 BC): a grouping of oval huts, sized to hold about 15 people, formed of branches or small trees supported by exterior rings of stones. Palaeolithic sites in general show evidence of hearths (re is thought to predate the period), wooden spears, hand axes and the separation of living and ritual quarters. It is the paintings in the ritual caves of France and northern Spain that appear to mediate the powerful spiritual relationship between the earliest human societies and their world, where nature appears as a force rather than a place itself. The agricultural revolution producing the Neolithic landscape (80004000 BC) introduced the dynamic force of the human reorientation of natural purpose. Not only were wild grains cultivated (wheat and barley); but both plants and animals (dogs, goats, sheep and pigs) were domesticated i.e., they were genetically selected wittingly or unwittingly, and thus induced to develop in ways that depended upon human care and will. Control of nature was here being taken into human hands. Originating in the area of the Mesopotamian river valleys, cultivation and domestication were extended west along the shorelines of Mediterranean and Atlantic Europe, changing forest coverage patterns through clearing, exhausting soils and simplifying ecosystems through substitution of the myriad forest and grassland species. Irrigation, which may have started in Egypt about 3050 BC, or perhaps earlier in Iraq, allowed intensication of both agriculture and settlement (development of the hydraulic civilizations of the Tigris, Euphrates and Indus valleys) and brought further changes in the form of salinization, a primary contributing factor in the Sumerian abandonment of land and settlements that peaked about 1700 BC. In terms of built form, the oldest known Neolithic settlement is Jericho (7500 BC); the largest and most complex, Turkeys Catalhoyuk (6000 BC), which was fed by the new urban function of trade. These are both highly compacted sites, of mud-lled timber frame construction, which turn their backs on the landscape, opening inward and upward. The most haunting remnants however are the Neolithic ritual structures sacred monuments,

temples and tombs the best known of which is Stonehenge (c. 2000 BC). Built and rebuilt over a millennium, its purpose may have been to understand and celebrate the astronomical geometry of the sky (but this remains under active debate). Another expression of landscape was perfected in the Egyptian civilization (4000100 BC) taking its cue from the forms and rhythms of the Nile: 800 km of fertile plain bisected by the river and bounded by desertied grassland. Memorial structures paralleled the river course, the pyramids in Upper Egypt and the temples, incised into the Lower Egypt mountains themselves, to the north. Settlements, although similarly orthogonally disposed, were clearly subsidiary to the monumental landscape, constructed to memorialize what became after the unication of Upper and Lower Egypt (about 3000 BC) the absolute ruler: in the Old Kingdom he was the son of Re, the Sun God; in the Middle Kingdom, he became God himself (Re and the transcendent Amon).

ANTIQUITY
When we turn to Greek culture (a primary root of Western culture), we nd the relation between attitudes to nature and patterns of settlement and exploitation to be less clear. Aristotelian ontology, or the study of the nature of existence, places Man and his endeavours rmly within the natural realm. On the one hand, Nature was, in general, the theatre of the Gods; and the notion of a pastoral retreat, although immortalized in the Roman poet Virgils Eclogues and Georgics, actually originated with the Greek school founded in Alexandria by Theocritus (c. 300260 BC). On the other hand, the various understandings of civilized human advancement were each tied in some way to the control of natural forces. Greek cities had no treatment of waste; and its agriculture goats and sheep, vineyards, olive groves and cereal crops was notoriously hard on the soil cover, particularly on the more ecologically fragile mountain slopes. Coates (1998) remarks on Platos (unheeded) account of the environmental effects of clearing and overgrazing in his dialogue Critias, likening the bared Attic mountainsides to the emaciated form of a once ourishing man. Coates also points out that, in any case, perception of the natural world for the Greeks was not as a place or locale but a constellation of forces, albeit with human personalities. It was these forces and their biogeological effects that supplied some of the most important design determinants for Greek buildings. City design began as an intuitive response to distinct land formations, the practical art of city building not formally constituted until the Roman technical writings of Pliny, Frontinus, Varus and Vitruvius. In contrast to the static sculptural forms of Egypt, early Greek city building was organic, asymmetrical and

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sensitive to the perceptual rhythms of sequential colonnaded space. The late or Hellenistic Greek city-states formed a foundation for Roman reconstruction in the second century BC. In contrast to the Greeks, the Romans were engineers and administrators, intent on extending Roman law over the colonizable world. This was accomplished through construction of the renowned roads, bridges, aqueducts and lines of fortication, the orthogonal division of land into farming units and the founding of settlements also along orthogonal grids tied most often to shoreline geometry. By the third century AD, Rome had stretched its imperial infrastructure completely around the Mediterranean Sea, north to Scotland, and east to Trabzon on the southeast coast of the Black Sea, founding, apart from most of the important Italian cities Paris, Nimes, Trier, Lyons, London, Vienna and Cologne. Roman law made manifest the divine will. The monumental impulse was, as a result, foundational to Imperial construction, which extended the reach of its built form through development of the arch. From the enormous cadenced aqueducts to the massive amphitheatres, stadiums and baths, Roman city design compressed its components into axial routes, moving large quantities of earth to do so. As Coates (1998) again notes, it was a resource-intensive civilization: the Roman baths alone must have consumed enormous tracts of forest. At its most extensive, the Empire reduced the Mediterranean temperate forest to the upper slopes of much of the Middle East and North Africa, stripping the soil of its fertility and ood control capacity as well. Agricultural land was further reclaimed through largescale drainage of marshlands in central Italy and the Tiber estuary. With an AD 250 population of 1.2 million, Rome itself was a signicant source of human and animal waste. The environmental contribution to the Empires disintegration, although not traditionally recognized, was argued as early as 1864 by George Perkins Marsh to be significant (Marsh, 1970). See also Marsh, George Perkins, Volume 3. Although Imperial structures were designed to dominate the land completely, the Jellico and Jellico (1975) point out that design of the smaller places such as the delicately poised Temple of Vesta at Tivoli (205 AD) demonstrated a capacity to balance sensitively the natural and human orders. This capacity was exploited in the Roman gardens, which expanded in importance with the size and luxury of the Roman villa, and the public parks that lined the Tiber.

MEDIEVAL LANDSCAPES, THE ENGLISH EXAMPLE

The disintegration of the Roman Empire into Germanic states in the West and the various components of the

Byzantine Empire in the East was accompanied by a decay of its vast urbanized network and of the cities it had fed. Apart from the few that remained as active trading centers, such as London and Milan, and the founding of Rome s Christianized capital, Constantinople (330 AD), most cities disappeared as vital centres. This occurred through losses in population (famine, disease, lowered birth rates) and desertion to the rural areas, where increasingly autocratic estates could provide the protection and livelihood that the Empire under siege could not. In contrast to the classical, the medieval landscape was therefore essentially a working countryside. Its pre- and post-Roman plant composition and coverage, previously thought to be substantially native, is now argued to have been impacted by intense competition for all land types woodland, peat, forage pasture amongst the peasantry, and between these and the hunting landed gentry. By 1086, 85% of England s native woodland and wood pasture was gone, and many of its large indigenous mammals. Population density then varied by county but, for example, it averaged 13.5 per 100 hectares in the ve east midland counties assessed by the Medieval Settlement Research Group (Lewis et al., 1997). Expansion of cultivation onto the poorer soils subsequently speeded land conversion to the unwooded pasture associated later with England s rolling hills. The earliest and structurally most important forti cations were the monastic colonies. It was here that the ordered life now tted to the tasks of the new spirituality was maintained until it passed to the urbanizing settlements, complete with clock, account book and structured day (Mumford, 1961). The later forti ed estates and towns were organized to support the structures and routines of feudal privilege (defense, industry, trade and capital accumulation); at the same time, the unforti ed towns, villages, hamlets, farm clusters and individual farmsteads were organized to meet the needs of the agricultural sector. The commonly imagined medieval town was walled off, having fractured and in lled the Roman grid to create a tight maze of narrow lanes bounded by unbroken building walls, relieved by irregular green spaces, dominated by town and/or guild hall, gothic cathedral, church or chapel, and perhaps a palace or castle. New towns and additions to old ones were normally built along a exible grid, however, and unwalled settlements were often arranged around a broad delineated eld system, communal grazing area or cattle route to upland pasture. Settlement, in general, expanded with the 12th century feudal revolution and died back in the 14th century following the plague (1348 1349) and its recurrences, associated labour shortages, the deterioration of particular soil types that forced a switch from grain cultivation to pasture, and the conversion of whole villages and their eld systems to enclosed pasture (Lewis et al., 1997).

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RENAISSANCE LANDSCAPES: ITALIAN AND FRENCH CLASSICISM

A central aspect of modernity is the secularization of many of the elements of the medieval religious framework. The forces that led to this include: the spread of a proto-market economy in the 15th century, its move to the outer edges of towns, specialization and increasing trade across Europe, Asia and the Americas; the development of the new science, particularly the 16th century challenges to the Scholastics hold on truth; the relocation of divine spirit within the laws and manifest reality of the natural world itself; the insight that the inner core of the individual was a realm that was not xed, but was worthy of being explored; the challenge presented by Copernicus and the discovery of the New World putting all previous knowledge in doubt, and fostering a stance of scepticism.

directed innitely outward through the use of the long penetrating allee and the recapitulation of sky in its numerous reecting pools. As Eisenberg (1998) reminds us, this was a landscape in which power was expressed not vertically as with medieval castles and cathedrals but horizontally, outward with the expansive aspirations of its Sun King. Its astronomical cost, in materials, water provision for its pools, canals and baroque fountains (a full display consumed more water daily than the 600 000 residents of Paris), potted plants, trees, hedges and the labour for installation and upkeep, not to mention in human lives lost in construction, aggravated publicly that of upkeep of the court. It contributed to the subsequent shift in emphasis to those landscapes which nature could (largely) maintain herself.

THE ENGLISH LANDSCAPE GARDEN

The deepening and extension of the pastoral ideal was accomplished in Britain. The plea for nature as the wellspring of human freedom was rst made at the turn of the 18th century by Addison, Shaftesbury, Pope and Switzer, although a garden that would follow natures irregularity was described as early as 1685 (Sir William Temples Garden of Epicurus). Characterizing the transition from Renaissance formalism to the point at which the English country house was unmoored from its axial attachments and set aloft in a sea of grass, amid archipelagos of wood (Eisenberg, 1998) is Sir John Vanbrughs Castle Howard (1701). Himself a set designer, Vanbrughs achievement was to work out the spatial arrangement of the Palladian redesigned medieval castle and its 16th and 17th century grounds to incorporate the principles and literary references just retrieved from the classical tradition. He alluded as well to his own Gothic past. What he produced was a carefully choreographed blend of ancient, medieval and new: a rolling English meadow partitioned with lake and woodland marked by Gothic references (gates, walls) that recontextualized a series of classically referenced architectural forms (temple, bridge, obelisk, pyramid). In 1770, Thomas Whately wrote that it must be examined, compared, perhaps explained, before the whole design is well understood (Hunt, 1992). This was in fact Hunts comment on the landscape at Stowe, the naturalization of which by William Kent (c. 1735) produced one of the most inuential (and best maintained) examples of emblematic landscape. Kents Temple of Ancient Virtue literally engages in dialogue with the Temple of British Worthies across the dip of a lagoon bisecting his Elysian Fields, the grounds overall containing over 30 such referential structures. Hunt places the transition to a garden that evokes an interior personal, rather than an exterior social, reaction in Kents Grecian Valley at Rousham (1738). He notes: the subtle varieties of the valley afford a landscape that seems

Before the widespread use of the efcient manufacturing technologies that this new philosophy unleashed, the great releases and achievements of the Renaissance remained within its arts. Among the most important of these was the secular garden, the product of a revival of the classical appreciation of nature, classical building form (principally via Alberti) and the increasing attractiveness to the Florentine and Roman aristocracy of the rural retreat. This retreat was enclosed, as was its medieval predecessor, but, since it was set into the Italian hillside, it necessarily offered spectacular views into the countryside beyond. Of the most accomplished, Albertis Villa Quaraccchi, Tribolos Villa Medici and Boboli Gardens, Raphaels Villa Madama, Ligorios Villa dEste, Vignolas Villa Lante, the Villa Bernadini, Santi di Titos Villa Bombicci, and the Villa Gamberaia, the most complicated might be the 1652 Baroque Villa Garzioni, in Collodi, Tuscany. Its seven levels connect a small open-air theatre in the rear, down a sloped parterre, through a series of stair-connected landings, to a central heraldic tapestry of boxed hedge and reecting pools. What was newly valued here was the relevance of the Roman pastoral ideal: the belief that exposure to the countryside could be a powerful urban antidote, a source of spiritual and aesthetic renewal. And of course from here, the commodication of landscape was just a short step away. In France, Andre le Notre (16131700) (amongst many others) brought the villa garden to its ultimate expression for Louis XIV in Versailles, by wrapping it around the residence and extending its constellations of grand avenues out through the forest to form a great imperial landscape. Views within this extraordinarily complex composition are

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to answer our moods, that allows a unique and individual response by each visitor to its unobtrusive character (Hunt, 1992). We are here at the genesis of modern landscape. Its arrangement of visual elements and evocative depths are traditionally believed to have been drawn from the paintings of Claude, Gaspard and Salvator Rosa; these may have been more inuential in the literary picturesque, however. For spatial structure, argument is made for Renaissance stage design, particularly the court masque scenery of Inigo Jones. The elements of Kents expressive landscapes were codied by Lancelot (Capability) Brown, whose popularity gave him a tremendous amount of English land to clear, carve, plant and irrigate in his characteristic pastoral mould. Studies over the past two decades in English art/architectural history and historical geography have pointed to the impacts of the enclosure movement that privatized these grand estates. By transforming the working countryside into genteel recreational grounds, blocking views of distracting functions and aestheticizing the poverty of those remaining on or visible within its frame, those contributing to the picturesque movement not only appropriated land for landscape, but created a universe that eliminated and/or instrumentalized its rightful historic users and use. The shift in ownership also created increasingly concentrated and intensied farms, feeding a growing population and sending increasing numbers of the formerly landed peasantry, into the cities. The pastoral ideal contributes independently of these very real effects, however, and it is possible also to say that an eminently debatable Romantic, expressive view of nature was here taking hold. As Hunt (1992) points out, the picturesque tradition of these designers gave each a frame for admitting a particular amount and form of educated wilderness into the domestic country scene. It is this tradition that has structured landscape design ever since. (See later section on Parks Movement.)

THE EUROPEANIZATION OF NORTH AMERICA

It is now understood that just as the Neolithic agricultural landscape was more domestic than wild, that of the pre-Columbian New World contained complex cultures interacting in equally complex ways with their own native environments. North American ecologists are moving toward their Scandinavian counterparts in the rejection of wild or primitive ecosystems altogether and their substitution by the concept of gradients of human impact (Williams, 1993). Estimates of Amerindian densities in the early 17th century have been raised from sparse to those approaching Western Europe in the American east coast forests. Each Amerindian Nation developed its own means of controlling and exploiting resources: cereal crops and corn were extensively cultivated, sh and game harvested; lines of communication and trade established; territory (and its

patterns of use) taken, lost and recovered. Human use is suggested to have produced a landscape mosaic prior to European settlement. The re used to produce the clearings and shoots that attracted game, and to keep open cultivated land, for example, may have produced much of the midwestern prairie; the sh and game harvested may have reduced species diversity, and certainly limited populations of large game such as elk and buffalo. Relations with nature have been described as a matter of contractual agreement based on pragmatism, fear, and respect born of self-interest (Coates, 1998); but it is clear that they were also tuned to a life within nature for which the West had no appropriate theoretical model. European conquest replaced indigenous common property conventions with a system of privatization and exploitation geared to commodity production and trade. It famously brought disease, a change in religious orientation, dispossession, and relocation; and environmentally, much more timber clearing, more intensive and destructive patterns of cultivation, much larger permanent settlements and a signicant upgrading of resource use. It was depletion that pushed the fur trade originating along Quebecs Saguenay and St Lawrence routes through the Great Lakes, for example west to the Rockies. Replacement of fur in the early to mid 19th century with the timber and charcoal industries stripped the US of half its forest cover by the 1920s. Fire further introduced large populations of aspen and jack pine into the then simplied native forests, particularly around the Great Lakes and areas of the Rocky Mountains. Urbanization began in port towns along the Atlantic and St Lawrence coastlines and remained a port phenomenon until its westward expansion in the 19th century. Until then, people actually moved away from the urban centres to small resource-based communities and farms. Urban society was limited to the few large port/administrative cities in both Canada and the US; if rural, it remained a thin elite layer over discrete areas of countryside. Into the second third of the 19th century, just 8% of Americans and 3% of Canadians lived in towns over 5000. It was not until the colonial economy was superseded by factory production in the last half of the century that signicant movement from country to city began, and its specialization at the turn of the century, that the cities began to explode. By 1930 in the US and 1960 in Canada, the urbanrural ratio was 5050; by 1990 in both countries it was just over 70%. That life took place within a rural landscape for most North Americans until some time in the mid-20th century did not prevent the shaping of both cultures by views of nature that were strongly idealized. In fact, both nations were deeply split. On the one hand, there was the pastoralism identied with nation in Britain and the US, and the wilderness that turned much of the early Canadian culture inward. The ideal of nature as a cleansing source, as a

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retreat from urban ills, is, in all Western cultures, itself deeply ambiguous: it is at once a source of personal/national moral strength and of the elite exclusionism discussed in the previous section (see Buell, 1995 for its American implications). Practically speaking, its rejuvenative potential was the source of the early Parks Movement (see later section on Parks/Garden Cities Movements); its economic potential was mined unabashedly by the railway industry on both sides of the border in the last quarter of the 19th century, to promote the touristic picturesque. On the other hand, there was another Nature, the Nature that (literally) fed colonial mercantile exploitation and the vigorous industrial capitalism that was established when mercantile structures nally gave way. Here, the dignity of humankind lay in its capacity for control; and John Lockes interpretation of Nature provided the (God) given resources with which to begin.

to the 1830s stimulated more fascination and awe than disgust; while those during and after the 1830s could, for the vast majority of residents, be characterized by Mumfords phrase, factory, railroad and slum . The pattern of New World industrialization tended to be led by resource extraction, but the industrial cities on all continents were increasingly tooled to produce and distribute the products intended to increase quality of life: the urban environment of production, now severed from that of consumption, was thus unserviced, unrelieved, bleak, lthy and crowded beyond description.

THE PARKS/GARDEN CITIES MOVEMENTS

The appalling condition of 19th century western industrial cities fed the view that urban life, if productive of a nations nest culture, was in principle bad for the soul and destructive to ones health. Reform was pushed from the bottom up, by womens societies, church groups, physicians, architects, landscape architects, engineers and town planners, particularly in Germany, Britain and the US. Following the 1893 Chicago Worlds Fair, impetus from North American sources committed to design and civic improvement coalesced into a city beautiful movement, producing European inspired designs to ennoble the citys core. These featured the classically designed, monumentally scaled institutions and urban components that industrial cities lacked: grand treed avenues, plazas and parks, parliamentary buildings and city halls, colleges, museums, libraries, etc. What was sought was coherence, visual variety and civic grandeur (Van Noos, 1977). However, the state of the citys basic sanitary, service and transportation infrastructure, fragmentary, often privately (and terribly) run or missing altogether and of its housing stock was a concern as early as in the 1860s. A key component that predated the beautication movement and survived its destruction was the redemptive insertion of Nature into the city as parkland. Its most powerful North American advocate, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, was concerned primarily with integrating the park fully into the large-scale town plans then being initiated and he developed many of the techniques by which this could be done. His designs (along with his partner Calvert Vaux), among them New Yorks Central Park (his rst, in 1858), Brooklyns Prospect Park, Washingtons Capitol grounds, the park systems of Buffalo and Boston, and Montreals mountain park, drew explicitly on Englands pastoral garden design: landform and planting were arranged to isolate the park from the city and to create experiences both of enclosure and of the vastness of nature itself. Water was wound through meadow and forest; texture was increased through insertion of rocky outcrops and planting variety; experiential variety and surprise were,

19TH CENTURY INDUSTRIALIZATION

Industrialization transformed agriculturally based economies and landscapes to economies and landscapes devoted predominantly to resource extraction, rening and manufacture: a development with massive global consequences, both rural and urban. In Britain (the rst nation to undergo industrialization), as across Europe, the textile industry, coal mining, and pig iron production, were intensied through introduction of the mechanized loom, the replacement of water with steam power and large-scale iron foundries, thereby tripling growth in industrial towns in the rst half of the 19th century. Factories, coexisting with home manufacture, took over in the last half of the century as the available technology upgraded expectations of what kinds of output could be forthcoming in an increasingly dynamic capitalism. Factories were redesigned to transmit power and reduce the ever-present hazard of re; they were iron-framed, initially to support the heavy machinery used to spin ax; and made vastly larger and more complex as the scale of operations increased and processes became more diverse and dangerous. Concrete was introduced toward the second half of the century, rst in ports and then, as it was cheaper than iron-frame, into construction of the factory buildings themselves. Factory complexes walled in vast courtyards around their central power source(s) creating environments of noise, heat, dust, smoke, refuse and noxious by-products. Power production depended on, and tended to concentrate around, the coal mines (themselves centres of human and environmental devastation). All this was integrated and increasingly concentrated, rst by the systems of engineered canals and then by the new networks of railroads. While there clearly existed many industrial landscapes, those prior

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overall, inserted into a serpentine formation designed to maximize tranquility. Facilitating this was the separation of vehicular from pedestrian trafc, the roads crossing the park sunk below, thus protected from, the level traversed on foot. Olmsteads strenuous attempts to keep out other reform activities (political as well as recreational) were consonant with his belief that the park must remain an antidote to city life and that political conict would dissipate within a commonwealth of free and diverse people, contained in an orderly public environment, governed by a benign and sanitary administrative state (Blodgett, 1996). The obvious problems with this kind of politics in an increasingly structured, and multiethnic, population, combined with increasing pressure for the infrastructure supporting active recreation and team sports, pushed parks design into an interactive, urban phase by the 1920s. Particularly during the post-war boom of the 1950s, parks were created to house the modern recreation facilities: pools, courts, gymnasia, community centres, playing elds and tracks. The new park was a community hub. Further rounds of evaluation were brought about by the city planning exercises of the 1960s and again in the early 1980s, when smaller neighbourhood parks and childrens playgrounds were added to increasingly integrated networks, and play equipment was introduced, standardized, or rejected for adventure playgrounds and nally reintroduced. The redemptive ideal of Nature survives, however, not only in the large open parkland that remains in most Western cities, but equally importantly in the now controversial villa in the countryside concept resident in the winding, spacious suburb. What only kings could demand once, was now the prerogative of every commoner who could get hold of the land itself (Mumford, 1961). The standards for urban living laid down in such suburban communities as Olmsteads Riverside (near Chicago, 1869) had been codied particularly by Ebenezer Howard and Clarence Perry into requirements for residential living. Howards Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1902), outlining a cooperative joint-ownership alternative to capitalist land development, placed a network of new urban settlements of xed population size (32 000) into rather than over a natural landscape, protecting residential areas from industrial encroachment and both from growth by an encompassing greenspace and the agricultural land beyond. Howard and the members of his 1899 Garden City Association were responsible for Englands rst new towns, Letchworth (designed by Unwin and Parker, 1902) and Welwyn garden cities (1917); and suburbs (Unwin and Parkers Hampstead Garden, north-west London, 19051909). Garden city concepts underlay 13 other British new towns, those in the Union of the Soviet Socialists Republic, Holland, Sweden, Italy, Australia and later variants across both the old and new worlds. They have remained at the core of lowdensity residential construction (see for example, Hall and

Ward, 1998). Clarence Perrys The Neighbourhood Unit: a Scheme of Arrangement for the Family-Life Community (1929) systematized conditions he had enjoyed in the Long Island suburb of Forest Hills Gardens. Residential units called neighbourhoods were laid out around community centres and elementary schools, the walk to which would not exceed 15 minutes. In both concepts, all homes were furnished with their own tiny remnant of estate life: the grassed yard. In this way, the urban fringe that had previously been home both to the rural estates and the dispossessed became accessible to the middle class. The tight walking/horsecar city of the 1850s1880s, expanded by the radiating corridors of the electric streetcar (to the 1920s) and the local road networks of the 1930s and 1940s nally consumed the vast suburbanizing areas on its periphery, with the construction of the freeway networks of the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. The most memorable and difcult legacy of early 20th century civic design may be that of the wholesale creation of new national capitals: Edwin Lutyens monumental Edwardian New Delhi (19121913) for example; the garden city/City Beautiful-inspired Canberra, work of American architect and associate of Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Burley Grifth (1913); Brasilia (1960s), the astonishing work of modern art by artist/landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx and a team of architects originally associated with Le Corbusier.

WHERE WE ARE: THE MODERN/ POSTMODERN LANDSCAPE

Modern urban landscapes are clearly identied by post-war efforts to disentangle and systematize land uses (separating home, commerce and industry; street from major artery or freeway); to upgrade use-intensity (achieving a higher capital return, particularly on the new commercially integrated ofce towers and the interior commercial malls themselves); to highlight the structural monuments to commerce (downtowns ever taller and more distinctive corporate buildings/symbols); and to transform the postindustrial city into a site of consumption and entertainment. All of these developments have been highly controversial, and attempts have been made since the early 1960s to counteract the separation of city components, the reduction and privatization of public space (streets, squares, parks), the intense commercialization of downtown areas and functions, and the ever-expanding use of adjacent farm and wetland (perhaps started by Jane Jacobs groundbreaking 1961 work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities). There has existed, from this time, a movement that itself is scattered, internally diverse and conictual to re-instill the best of the pre-industrial city. The new urbanism, in its many manifestations, seeks to reintegrate home and

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commerce, restore people and function to public space, compact and diversify the spread-out, single-use areas now comprising modern cities. To move forward, to the earths millennial landscape, we might pick up Keekok Lees distinction between the natural and the artifactual. The natural is that which directs itself, which contains its own teleology or goaloriented mechanisms; the artifactual is that which has been willfully produced by Man, the material embodiment of human intentionality (Lee, 1999). Today, the frontiers of human control extend far and run deep. Human-induced change is now, in most of the signi cant realms of the environment affected, of unprecedented size. Many forms of human alteration have either become signi cant fractions of natural change or surpassed it altogether (Meyer, 1996). It is clear that rates of change, their impact, recoverability and bene ts vary signi cantly across the globe, and that it is no longer possible to label all change to the natural landscape bad. It is, in fact, no longer possible in most areas to distinguish a natural landscape from another kind. A globalizing economy has brought more of the earth s land surface under a capital maximization regime; at the same time, an increasingly sophisticated microtechnology has allowed human penetration into the smallest of organic processes, taking over genetic control of an increasing array of organisms hoped to provide economic bene t in some way. Some of these organisms have wide-ranging impacts when released into natural environments, willfully or by mistake. The effects of introduced species are controversial, but past experience with known cases has shown that the temporary species enrichment often spells impoverishment in the long term (Meyer, 1996).
Furthermore, technologies of the rising future, such as molecular nanotechnology, in synergistic combination with biotechnology and microcomputer technology, could intensify this tendency to eliminate natural kinds, both biotic and abiotic as well as their natural processes of evolution or change. (Lee, 1999)

These have become not simply timely, but fundamental questions to a growing number of people.

THE REHABILITATION OF EARTH THROUGH ART

Questions about land, power, form and meaning have been asked and answered most directly in the realm of land art (the term land art itself is more common in Europe; Earthworks and Earth Art tend to be used in the US). Thrust into the ow of American art genres in 1968 by a few American gallery renegades, its antecedents explicitly reach back to the earliest human landmarks. The rst of these were clearly spirit-related. In the most extensive and celebrated of the neolithic painted caves, the Lascaux Caves in the Dordogne (25 000 10 000 BC), the placing of animal and human images upon the rock surface seems to have meant to bring into being the forces surrounding the progress of life. The reality of the images literally animates the cave enclosures and structures the experience of its progressively powerful rooms. Neolithic megaliths later made these forces manifest on the land s surface, the tombs and monuments transforming select sites and landscapes into sacred places of ancestral respect. The apogee of these monumental forms however, the later Stonehenge in Wiltshire (2000 BC), seems to have been constructed for the Gods themselves, as were the pre-Roman land scrapings (e.g., Berkshire s White Horse of Uf ngton). These produce images that can only be fully appreciated from above, by a transcendent, celestial eye. The making of land into monument, paradise, arcadia, temple, tapestry, stage, emblem, canvas and sculpture from Babylon s elaborate hydraulic gardens to the small perfect residential creations of contemporary landscape architects Garrett Eckbo and Michael Hough is land art. The movement that brought the earth s surface back as an explicit medium in the 20th century, however, grew out of the minimalist sculpture of the 1960s, itself created as a series of stark environmental statements. In moves designed to break free of the commodi cation of art, its modernist gallery commercialism, artists sought more democratic, spiritually valid media and viewing sites. Once a small number of sculptors in the US, Germany, Japan and England had discarded the pedestal and the gallery, they began to produce works which formed their own sites. The use of land had been pre gured by Isamu Noguchi s (unbuilt) World War II designs for forms that spoke the unspeakable: Tortured Earth (1943) reproduces the bodily ravages of war in large slashed earth mounds; Sculpture To Be Seen From Mars (1947) would have mounded the face of a desert into the blank, shocked geometric features of post-atomic Man. Practitioners were drawn to land art not only by the state of art, but also by the earth, and the practice of landscape

In sum,
it can at least be asserted that an overall picture is apparent of unsettlingly rapid, sizable, and escalating change in the global environment. If regions differ in their immediate vulnerability to it, their increasing interdependence in a world economy more tightly knit than ever before may make them unprecedently vulnerable in the long term. (Meyer, 1996)

We have moved from the inscription of our gods onto the landscape to the inscription of the landscape itself. The number of texts dealing with our understanding and treatment of nature has exploded in the last ve years. They deal with the questions: what can we now call Nature? landscape? and what now, can we experience as our gods?

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architecture. Michael Heizer sought to found a uniquely American art on the excavation and emplacement of a human geometry on the landforms of southwest desert sites. I think the earth is the material with the most potential because it is the original source material (Bourdon, 1995). Walter de Maria began in Germany, but produced his most memorable work in the American southwestern as well. His 19741977 Lightning Field near Quemado, New Mexico planted 400 stainless steel poles in a grid aligned for height (averaging just over 6 meters) on the desert oor. The work tends to disappear in the glinting sun of the day and, in the occasional storm, grounds the spectacular play of lightning it is designed to attract. The Bulgarianborn Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude then outdid the others for spectacle (and socio-economic organization) by (among other similar projects) covering a bay of Australian coastline (Wrapped Coast, Little Bay, One Million Square Feet, Sydney 1969), joining two Colorado mountain peaks with 381 m of orange ame and fold (Valley Curtain, Grand Hogback, Rie 19701972) and most famously, bringing 5.5 m of gleaming white sail down 40 km of California countryside into the Pacic for two weeks in 1976 (Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties). It is Robert Smithson, however, who produced the prose to articulate the movements soul. Smithson was attracted to the expressive and rehabilitative potential of industrial sites. He is best known for his spiral of limestone and black basalt curving off the shore of Utahs Great Salt Lake (1970). This site was a rotary that enclosed itself in an immense roundness. From that gyrating space emerged the possibility of the Spiral Jetty (in Beardsley, 1998). British land art has tended to the more subtle and ephemeral. For Richard Long (Walking a Line in Peru 1972, 1975 Line in the Himalayas of White on Grey Stone, 1981 A Line in Scotland) the walks themselves, the arrangement of stones and artifacts of the actions photographed are his works of art. Hamish Fulton photographs his walks through environments visibly unmoved by human intention. Andy Goldsworthys Cracked/Broken Pebbles (Lancashire 1978) and his gold-leaf wrapped rock (Yellow Elm Leaves over a Rock, Low Water Oct. 15 1991 Dumfriesshire, Scotland) set up small beautiful acts of Man in nature. David Nashs Wooden Waterway 1978, and Running Oak Table 1978 lay odd and distinctly human arrangements of natural materials into a forest clearing. Ian Hamilton Finlay has created a small, densely allegorical neo-classical turf and cut-stone inlay landscape, Little Sparta in the Pentland Hills, Scotland. Finlays return to socially reverential emblems is explicit and changes with his intervention through time. Land art has also produced the environments more commonly associated with landscape architects. Robert Morris, Herbert Bayer and Andy Goldsworthy have worked with reclaimed industrial and urban waste sites. Michael Heizer

used the material and topography of a reclaimed strip mine overlooking the Illinois River to create the massive mounded forms of ve indigenous water creatures (Ef gy Tumuli 19831988, Ottawa Illinois, for the Ottawa Silica Company Foundation). The newest urban land art, however, is the garden, particularly in the hands of designers such as Peter Walker (e.g., Tanner Fountain on the Harvard Campus, Cambridge, Mass. 1984, where a sphere of mist is projected over concentric circles of stones placed within a shallow grassy bowl) and Martha Schwartz, whose 1979 Bagel Garden turned the front of her Boston terrace house into a tapestry of delicately planted black soil, purple aquarium gravel overlain with shellacked bagels and framing box hedge. Schwartz typically uses unconventional materials and a combination of formal historical and minimal/pop art forms to turn landscape into its own particular art (see Art and the Environment, Volume 5).

CONCLUSIONS
The very fruitful integration of the natural and social sciences, and the arts, in the study of landscape and cityscape, has paralleled the globalization of human-induced change. This change is an extremely complex, locally distinct phenomenon, sensitive not only to culture and population growth and decline, but also to policy initiatives at every level and the powerful programs of international nance, development and aid. The compelling attraction of nonhuman nature and of the landscape that reects its formative forces has, in part, been that of the essential other : of the powers and beings beyond our control that surround and contextualize our human life. The modern humanization of the planet itself threatens to recontextualize human life with the products of its own making, that is, to make perfectly narcissistic an existence once shared with its originating forces and beings. What this would do to the conditions of life that have inspired fear, awe, love and creative dialogue since Man has been able to contemplate his own small size is yet to be understood.

REFERENCES
Abrams, M H (1958) The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, Norton, NY. Andrews, M (1999) Landscape and Western Art, Oxford University Press, New York. Beardsley, J (1989) Earthworks and Beyond, Abbeville, NY. Berleant, A (1997) Living in the Landscape: Toward an Aesthetics of Environment, University of Kansas Press, KS. Bourden, D (1995) Designing the Earth: the Human Impulse to Shape Nature, Harry N Abrams, New York. Buell, L (1995) The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

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Coates, P (1998) Nature: Western Attitudes Since Ancient Times, University of California Press, CA. Cooney (1999) Social Landscapes in Irish Prehistory, in The Archeology and Anthropology of Landscape, eds P J Ucko and R Layton, Routledge, New York, 46 64. Cooper, D E (1992) The Idea of Environment, in The Environment in Question, eds D E Cooper and J A Palmer, Routledge, London, 163 180. Cosgrove, D and Daniels, S (1988) The Iconography of Landscape, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Davis, K (1965) The Urbanization of the Human Population, Sci. Am., September, 213(3). Eisenberg, E (1998) The Ecology of Eden, Alfred A Knopf, New York. Forman, R T T (1990) The Beginnings of Landscape Ecology in America, in Changing Landscapes: an Ecological Perspective, eds I S Zonneveld and R T T Forman, Springer-Verlag, New York, 35 41. Hall, P and Ward, C (1998) Socialable Cities: The legacy of Ebenezer Howard, John Wiley and Sons, Chichester. Hunt, J D (1992) Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Hoskins, W G (1958) The Making of the English Countryside, Hodder and Stoughton, London. Jellico, G and Jellico, S (1975) The Landscape of Man: Shaping the Environment from Prehistory to the Present Day, Thames and Hudson, London. Kostof, S (1995) A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals, Oxford University Press, New York. Lee, K (1999) The Natural and the Artifactual: The Implications of Deep Science and Deep Technology for Environmental Philosophy, Lexington Books, New York. Lewis, C, Mitchell-Fox, P, and Dyer, C (1997) Village, Hamlet and Field: Changing Medieval Settlements in Central England, Manchester University Press, Manchester. Lynch, K (1972) What Time is This Place? MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Marsh, G P (1970) The Earth as Modi ed by Human Action, Arno, New York (rst published in 1874 under the title: Man and Nature ). Meinig, D W, ed (1979) The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes, Oxford University Press, New York. Meyer, W B (1996) Human Impact on the Earth, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Mumford, L (1961) The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects, Harcourt, Brace and World, New York. Nairn, I (1965) The American Landscape: A Critical View, Random House, New York. Schreiber, K F (1990) The History of Landscape Ecology in Europe, in Changing Landscapes: An Ecological Perspective, eds I S Zonneveld and R T T Forman, Springer-Verlag, New York, 21 34. Spirn, A W (1998) The Language of Landscape, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. Tjallingii, S P and de Veer, A A, eds (1982) Perspectives in Landscape Ecology, Proc. Int. Cong. Netherlands Soc. Landscape Ecol., PUDOC, Wageningen, The Netherlands.

Van Noos, W (1977) The Fate of City Beautiful Thought in Canada, 1893 1930, in The Canadian City, eds G A Stelter and A F Artibise, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 162 185. Wasserman, E R (1968) The Subtler Language, The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, MD. Watkins, D (1982) The English Vision: The Picturesque in Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Garden Design, Harper and Row, New York. Williams, M (1993) An Exceptionally Powerful Biotic Factor, in Humans as Components of Ecosystems: The Ecology of Subtle Human Effects and Populated Areas, eds M J McDonnell and S T A Pickett, Springer-Verlag, New York, 24 39. Williams, R (1973) The Country and the City, Oxford University Press, New York. Zimbardo, R A (1986) A Mirror to Nature: Transformations in Drama and Aesthetics, The University Press of Kentucky, KT.

Leapfrogging Technology
see Leapfrogging Technology (Volume 4)

Leopold, Aldo
(1887 1948) The name Aldo Leopold has become something of a mantra among environmentalists. The use of this mans name evokes, from his writings and his personal example, a sensing of the scientic complexity of the biological world, combined with a sensing of the elegant beauty which can be discerned in natural science. It is associated with a code of ethics: a code that offers a moral baseline by which our social system could exist constructively within the limits of biological productivity. At his birth in 1887 in Burlington, Iowa, there seemed to be no reason to anticipate the intellectual impact that this person would have. At the time of his boarding school at Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, he was noted as a bright and somewhat reclusive lad, who had developed a remarkable ability to see and to interpret nature, with an insight that others could not see. At the time of his graduation from Forestry School at Yale University

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(1909), his biographers note evidences that he may have appeared to his contemporaries as quite self-assured: a feature, which might have contributed to some initial management problems during his employment with the United States Forest Service (19091924). But during this time, his extraordinary perceptive skills with nature led this young forester to discern two impending catastrophes that others could not see: the destructive effects of runaway deer populations, and the impending debacle of soil erosion. At this early age, he was able to foresee the need for preservation of wilderness, and he originated the establishment of the Gila Wilderness area in the state of Arizona. When Aldo Leopold published his book on Game Management (1932), and became of Professor of Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin (1933 until his death in 1948), he had earned a reputation as a ne scholar, a writer of impressive power, and an intellectual leader (albeit in a non-classical academic subject). Yet in his lifetime, his perceptiveness and his grasp of ecological issues was not always appreciated. While Aldo Leopold was recognized as the leader of the profession of wildlife management, his efforts to provide scientic leadership in resource management in the State of Wisconsin were voted down. His authorship of some of the most perceptive ecological and philosophical essays focused on the beauty that can be perceived in nature, and led to ethical generalities that were recognized as stunning pieces of writing. Yet four major publishing houses rejected his manuscripts that later led to the book, A Sand County Almanac. At the time of his death, in 1948, the power of the mantra of Aldo Leopold was only making its rst emergence. But then, A Sand County Almanac was accepted by a publisher just days before he died: note the powerful metaphor of a major leader of ecological and ethical thinking who died while ghting a grass re on a neighbors farm. It is probable that his blend of scientic knowledge about natural history, ecology, and management, with the essentials of ethical behavior that can serve as the baseline for sensible ecology, was the powerful pulpit from which he could speak about mankinds relationship to the natural world. I personally doubt that he felt that his writings and teachings would have a very widespread impact. But then the full tenor of his post-mortem voice began to rise in the last half of the 20th century. The readership of A Sand County Almanac rose continually during the 50 years after its publication (1949, Oxford University Press, New York), breaking the usual performance of literary/scientic books which ordinarily have a half-life of about six years. Instead of fading, this book has been reprinted more than thirty times, and sold more than two million copies in the last 50 years. It has been translated into nine foreign languages. The demand has been sufciently great that a second book of his essays was published in 1953 (Round River, Oxford University

Press, New York). Several other collections of his early writings have appeared (Aldo Leopolds Wilderness, edited by D E Brown and N B Carmony, Stackpole Books, Harrisburg PA, 1990; The River of the Mother of God and other essays by Aldo Leopold, edited by S L Flader and J B Caldicott, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 1991; For the Health of the Land, edited by J B Callicott and R E T Freyfogle, Island Press, Washington, DC, 1999; and The Essential Aldo Leopold, edited by C Meine and R L Knight, University of Wisconsin Press Madison, WI, 1999). And, most important, a denitive and sensitive biography, Aldo Leopold, his life and work, has been written by Curt Meine (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 1988). Today, the mantra of Aldo Leopold has become a byword for environmentalists around the world; this man is considered to be the father of the science of restoration ecology. His central role in terms of ethical life-styles has stimulated the formation of a new branch of ethics and morality centered on the health of the Earth. One example of his concise denitions of a land ethic: A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. People come regularly to visit his farm in Wisconsin as a site of inspiration and intellectual renewal. Aldo Leopold has become a powerful mantra for ethical lifestyles. Being introduced at meetings of environmentalist groups, I have had lovely youngsters shriek, Oh, you must be the son of Aldo Leopold followed by embraces and kisses. At another meeting recently, the chairwoman suggested a standing ovation for the son of Aldo Leopold. It is difcult to dene the magnitude of the stimulus that this man has left to the world of environmentalism. Photo: courtesy of the Aldo Leopold Foundation Archives.
A CARL LEOPOLD USA

Life Style, Private Choice, and Environmental Governance

Peter Timmerman
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

One of the great emerging issues that society faces is the relationship between lifestyle choices and environmental

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burdens. The most obvious way of describing this governance problem is the shift from point-source problems, which characterized many jurisdictional responses in the 1970s 1990s, to current non-point source problems. But it is much more complicated than that, and poses signi cant social, political, and economic concerns for the 21st century.

DEFINING ENVIRONMENTALISM
A central issue in contemporary environmentalism is how to deal with life-styles and private choices. The environmental movement has until now not been able to convince people that many looming environmental problems are rooted in the larger production and consumption patterns of modern society. There is a lot of lip service given to life-style changes, but the underlying patterns are tenacious. To deal with this many environmentalists believe will require a transformation of the economic/industrial production system, on the one hand; and on the other, a lifestyle transformation amoung individuals and families. There has obviously been some movement on both these fronts. Industries have been altered; and individuals and households have blue boxes; schools have green curricula; the environment is everywhere. But the environmental agenda is persistently driven by a purity model and not a sustainability model. The purity model emphasizes clean air, pure water, and the elimination of waste products. It ts in very well with the residual Puritanism of many Anglo Saxon countries, and the whole range of related middle class values. It is naturally associated with personal health, and the general fears about pollution and toxic chemicals. For Ministries of the Environment, this has meant a strong focus on environmental health, on toxin abatement, on end-of-pipe elimination of pollutants, and so on. The environment enters as a carrier or pathway for the delivery of toxic chemicals. Of course, the other aspect of the environmental agenda is present. People have a broad concern about endangered species and some endangered spaces. There is also broad support for doing something, as long as it is not too onerous (e.g., blue boxes). There are also fears about global climate change and other global issues. But it is clear that after 30 years of the environmental movement that a broad reconsideration of lifestyles by the vast majority of the population in developed countries (let alone developing countries) has not happened. If it is assumed that consumption of goods and services, especially with the advent of consumerist lifestyles in the developing world, will drastically increase, there are usually two safety valves proposed. The rst safety valve is that the greening of industrial production and

materials and energy use is rapidly improving, and that will mean that we will be able to continue our consumptive lifestyle without increasing the ecological burden. The second safety valve (related to the rst) is that a knowledge and service economy will gradually virtualize a substantial range of current commodity ows. Neither of these assumptions is completely plausible. While there have been substantial savings made in the elimination of many metals, materials, and energy, the economic growth patterns seem to have simply begun lling the new space available. There is also little evidence that virtualization is going to replace the need for physical resources any time soon. For example, teleworking seems to be a factor in increased car use in suburban belts.

FUNDAMENTAL DRIVERS OF THIS EMERGING ISSUE

Perhaps the fundamental driver of this issue is the model of human well being encapsulated in middle-class ways of life. This is now being promulgated through the media, a model which was embryonic in Southern California and in early suburban New York in the late 1940s, but which has now spread around the world. This lifestyle carries with it a set of intrinsically woven choices about urban and suburban housing, garden structures, transportation biases, and so on. These seem to be only marginally separable, though some separation has been made for example, smoking and hard liquor consumption patterns have changed drastically over time. Behind this model is a second driver, namely the powerful assumption of choice as the core element in freedom and freedom of expression. This assumption is historically rooted in a set of religious practices and ideals (concerning free will and sin in Christianity), but has more recently become incorporated within economic theory. In the 19th century, economics was transformed away from a classical model of analyzing supply and demand curves based on resource, labor, and land use, into a neo-classical model which developed the notion of the rational allocation of scarce resources by individuals seeking to maximize their personal utility. This model dovetailed effectively with the rise of consumer society. We now have a cultural model of self-fulllment encapsulated in the phrase: shopping is freedom. The objects that we buy are now the carriers of self-expression and creativity. This consumerist ethos is most overtly widespread in children and teenagers, who are acutely conscious of label, product, and status. The school system is currently under assault by corporate marketers and others

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attempting to break down the barriers between the cultural space of school and the cultural space of commercialism. At the heart of this struggle is the struggle over who will control the myths, stories, and images of society.

Literature and the Environment

Peter Timmerman
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

HOW WILL THIS ISSUE FURTHER EVOLVE?

The place of government in this situation is very dif cult, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is a long history of misguided government intrusion into trying to reshape human behavior. Nevertheless, the women s movement and other activities prove that governments do have a clear role in fostering and enabling change through legislation, advice, and leadership roles. A simple example of this in the case of consumerism has been government support for alternative automobile eets, recycling, and using pilot activities as examples of best practices. The big problem, as already mentioned, is the disjunct between personal choice, personal lifestyle and the recognition of those choices and the burden on the environment. I suspect that this is about to alter, in part because the environmental movement is undergoing a signi cant shift in its areas of concern (see Editor s Introduction and Environmental Politics, Volume 5). It will become ever clearer that the relationship between personal well-being and environmental well-being is much subtler and more powerful than has been credited hitherto. The best example is the extraordinary case of the stratospheric ozone hole, where people suddenly found themselves threatened with the violation of a basic right that they did not even know they had before the right to walk outside on a sunny day. It will be clearer as the 21st century continues that these kinds of threats threats to the fundamental fabric of life through species loss, climate change, biotechnology, and the rest, will threaten the very de nition of the human. This is already unsettling, but it will become even more unsettling as violations of immune systems, private genetic information, and global deterioration in certain ecosystems accelerate. One can predict that the relationship between these issues and fundamental issues of human well-being will force a recasting of what constitutes the environment and environmental well-being, and that personal sustainability and environmental sustainability will be more tightly drawn together. This development will allow governments, citizens, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and industries to renegotiate the boundaries of choice, freedom, and the burdens that current patterns of choice are placing on the environment. This will be very dangerous, but very necessary. The relationship between the arts, in general, and environmental change is complex, and certainly not restricted to the presence of images or descriptions of nature as content. Literature poetry, plays, novels, non-ction is, in part, an alternative environment where the powerful tools of literary form can work within a set of internally generated imaginative rules to explore communicable experience. Literature may be said to have its own ecologies, and has certainly generated worlds of its own. This article focuses, through the examination of selected pieces of literature, on the Western literary tradition; and for a variety of reasons, including space restrictions, deals with the mainstream tradition, particularly in works of the Romantic period (1750 1850). One of the other reasons is that Romanticism is a pivotal moment in modern literature, as well as culture more broadly; and it is a direct in uence on the rise of modern environmental thought and practice. To elucidate the importance of Romanticism, I draw upon the myth-critical school, associated with the work of the Canadian literary critic, Northrop Frye (1947, 1968), which, whatever its limitations in other areas, provides a very powerful apparatus for entering into some of the more revolutionary aspects of literary practice as it applies to cosmologies and mythologies. In particular, this article argues that a central role of literature in the context of environmental change is to be an expression and sometimes a fomenter of changes in world views. This is one powerful way in which literature interacts with environmental change: that is, not just recording people s feelings about changes in the natural environment, but challenging and restructuring their mental maps of the world by means of story, character, style, language.

INTRODUCTION
In the summer of 1816, a group of English hippies including Lord Byron and his friend Percy Shelley went to Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Coming after the battle of Waterloo, 1816 was the rst time that anyone from England had been allowed to travel in Continental Europe for a decade, and tourists ocked across the Channel. Lake Geneva was special because it had been the site of a famous romantic novel by the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie: or The New Heloise, and

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the little party of travelers was looking forward to a summer of wandering around the shores, soaking up the atmosphere. Unfortunately, the summer of 1816 was the year without a summer thanks to the explosion of Mount Tambora in the Southeast Pacic, which cast a pall over the skies of the world, and cooled off or deranged weather patterns everywhere. Lord Byron and his party were forced to stay inside their rented house and watch the rain, day after day. On one such day, they all decided to make up ghost stories. Shelleys wife, Mary, had a dark dream, which she turned into what everyone agreed was the best of the ghost stories, about a scientist who decides to create a human being. Thus, Frankenstein (Shelley, 1818) was born. This is an interesting example of the relationship between the environment and literature, and highlights one way in which much of the creative interplay between the constructed world of human culture, and the natural world within which that culture is created, works. It is almost a parody of the not very creative idea that the environment might be a cause of literature, the way people used to argue that geography causes culture. It is only marginally less creative than the conventional notion that the environment appears in literature as the content of the novel, poem, or play. A more useful way of thinking about literature and the environment derives from the Romantic movement of the 18th and 19th centuries though not completely beholden to it which focused on seeing literature as in part an expression of human exploration of the relationship between the self (consciousness, mind, imagination) and the outside world (nature, environment, materiality); but that the nature of this expression was not just the content, but the quality of style, the voice of the author or narrator, the shape of the stories being told, and so on. One critical element in this exploration is provided by metaphor the imaginative leap between two different realms or categories as seen by the creative mind. This mind need not be a literary mind the Gaia Hypothesis (see Gaia Hypothesis, Volume 5), that the Earth might be seen as a single, living organism is a creative metaphor; though many scientists would opt for its milder cousin, the simile; that is, the Earth may be treated for the moment as if it were akin to an organism, or a self-organizing system of sorts. Another example is provided by the 19th century chemist, Kekule, who could not solve a problem in the arrangement of chemical bonds, and had a dream about a snake biting its own tale, which gave him the idea of the potential for the circular bonding pattern: another creative metaphor.

rational logic through comparison of two syllogistic patterns (Men are Grass, Bateson, 1987). The rst, very familiar, syllogistic pattern is:
Men die. Socrates is a man. Socrates will die.

This Aristotelian syllogism is (in part) a deductive machine with a hypothesis (Men die), a fact in the world potentially subsumable under that class (Socrates is a man), and then a new relation when the fact is put into that class (Socrates will die). A second pattern, which looks like the rst, but is in fact a logical fallacy is:
Grass dies. Men die. Men are grass.

This is the fallacy of afrming the consequent, and its fallaciousness (and dangerousness) can be seen in the following further example:
White is pure. There are white people. White people are pure.

METAPHORIC AND RATIONAL LOGIC

The anthropologist Gregory Bateson, just before his death, wrote a pathbreaking comparison between metaphoric and

The grass syllogism, however, is familiar to readers of the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible, as a powerful linking together of two different categories (men, grass) by means of metaphor. This kind of categorization and making of connections can be as systematic and powerful as the rational logic associated with scientic hypothesis generation; but the two solitudes (to use C P Snows term) can be antagonistic to each other. Indeed, it has been one of the complaints of the modern poet that the scientist is draining all the poetic mystery out of the world, by challenging the traditional web of metaphoric connection; while, on the other hand, the scientist complains that writers dont know any science. What makes the writers world work is the making of connections that may not be overtly rational, but may make meaningful sense as metaphor. For example, there is no scientic reason why blue should be associated in Western culture with the musical blues, but most writers will be able to play on those associations when necessary. Similarly, the idea that a weeping willow is actually weeping is obviously absurd to a botanist or forester; but as a symbol, it may well be a powerful carrier of an emotion in a story. One thing that separates modern literature from earlier literatures (and non-Western literatures) is that earlier literatures can depend on the expectation that the entire culture within which the literature operates also subscribes to metaphoric logic. It is only in modern Western culture that the idea that nature and human experience have no metaphoric connection to each other has ourished. Among the reasons why Shakespeare continues to have such an inuential role in modern culture is the fact that

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he lived at a pivotal moment in the shift away from a universe of mutually resonant meaning (the end of the 16th century), and is sensitive to the shift, very often giving us some characters who still respond to traditional signs and symbols of the environment, and others, more modern, who dismiss them merely as old wives tales. As an example of the former, the night before Julius Caesar is stabbed in Shakespeares play Julius Caesar (1597), Cicero and Casca speak. Casca reports on what he is seeing:
Casca: Are you not moved, when all the sway of earth Sways like a thing unrm? O Cicero! never till tonight, never till now, Did I go through a tempest dropping re. Either there is civil strife in heaven, Or else the world, too saucy with the gods, Incenses them to send destruction. Cicero: Why, saw you anything more wonderful? Casca: A common slave you know him well by sight Held up his left hand, which did ame and burn Like twenty torches joined; and yet his hand Not sensible of re, remained unscorched Men all in re walk up and down the streets, And yesterday the bird of night did sit Even at noonday, upon the market-place Hooting and shrieking. When these prodigies Do so conjointly meet, let not men say These are their reasons, they are natural ; For I believe they are portentous things Unto the climate that they point upon. Cicero: Indeed, it is a strange disposed time; But men may construe things after their fashion Clean from the purpose of the things themselves. (I, III, 4 35)

Here Casca represents the world of symbols, portents, signs from the gods, that are warning of impending civil war; while Cicero represents the newly rational Man, sceptical, aware of how signs may be false, mere rumor, hysteria, and connected only by projection from human desire.

In this section I want to sketch out two rough cosmologies, the rst from the beginning of literature, in Sumeria; and the second, the evolving medieval Christian synthesis cosmology that broke down at the beginning of the modern era. These are not the only cosmologies available. They are simply two of the most important, particularly for the ways in which they think about, and structure, in myth and story, the cultural map of Nature. In most cultures, the cosmology is woven into stories that are told orally, and have been handed down by word of mouth for many centuries. The Western tradition is special (which does not mean specially good), in that much of its tradition was very quickly written down, and the mainline tradition has been a strongly literary one from very early on; though the origins of the stories that make up the tradition are almost certainly long oral traditions that have been lost or rewritten. Western traditions begin the story of the creation of the Earth and sky usually with some kind of a Creator God, and often with a story about how the sky and the Earth came together and mated (the sky being male, and the Earth being female). A number of other cultures start things off completely differently. For some, the universe comes out of its own insides, like a spider spinning a web out of its own guts. For others, everything comes up to the surface of the sea; and that is how things got going. In some cultures, things are even sung into existence. It should also be stressed that what is being sketched out here is the mainline Western tradition, against which other oral traditions and contrary stories struggled, and often lost. Of particular importance is the continual appearance and disappearance of dangerous story fragments about women and other strange beings whose role in the mythology is troubling and often suppressed or twisted. Scholars have only recently become interested in these marginalized stories, in part because of the light they shed on mythologies that refused to t into the big story.
The Origins of Earth and Sky

NATURE AND MYTH IN PRE-MODERN COSMOLOGY

We can think of cosmologies proposed descriptions of the universe and mythologies stories that inhabit and illuminate the universe as forms of metaphor writ large. They are large-scale structures of meaning, many of whose elements and characters appear in literary works, while the works themselves inuence the overall feel of how it is to live in such a universe. For example, Dantes Divine Comedy (1330) is an imaginative journey through the cosmology of medieval Western Europe; but the power of Dantes vision of his journey had incalculable effects on the birth of the sense of what it means to be a modern Western individual in such a universe.

The rst myths in the Western tradition of which we can read begin in the Near East, and are associated with the hydraulic civilizations of Sumer (Southern Iraq), Egypt, and later, Babylon, and Assyria. These cultures grew out of the surpluses generated by the ecological richness of alluvial soils in the big river basins of the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates rivers. Through extensive irrigation and complex management works, these cultures were able to feed large numbers of people, and also build the worlds rst big cities (the same process was going on in India and China). Essential to the survival of these cities was the organization that kept the irrigation systems going, and the predictability of changes in river ow according to the seasons. Furthermore, as these cities grew richer, they became subject to attack by enemies, which necessitated the

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growth of armies. All this complexity led to the creation of writing, accounting, and monumental architecture. In the earliest Western stories drawn from the Middle East, the Earth is seen as a piece of land (often a hill) surrounded by, or oating on, the waters of Chaos, waters that will drown the world unless they are countered by creative power. However, these waters are also life giving, especially in an area with so little rain: in some myths the great waters are the source of all beings. By analogy with a room or a temple, the Earth is often seen as holding the sky up by four pillars on each corner, representing the four directions, and we still use this image in talking about going to the four corners of the Earth. The Earth has its natural rhythms associated with seasonal change, the rising and lowering of rivers, seedtimes and harvests. The Sky has an intimate relation to this process, but it seems to be much more abstractly orderly, more designed, less subject to human inuence. Unless you are an astronomer, the sky at night presents the following picture: there are xed stars, that do not seem to move relative to each other, though they move as a whole through the night sky through the year. They have strange patterns, called constellations, which look as if they might mean something, especially those associated with seasonal shifts. Every once in a while, certain stars seem to move, called planets, which is a Greek word meaning wanderer, because they seem to be wandering among the stars. These appear at different times of the year, which can be predicted, but they move in a puzzling fashion. Also in the night sky in the Northern Hemisphere, there is a swatch of white stars called the Milky Way, which many myths see as some sort of gateway to heaven. Obviously, the moon is the largest body in the night sky, and it has a monthly rhythm which is predictable, and which was very early on associated with the highs and the lows of the tides of the rivers and sea. Because of its similarities with female rhythm (the word menstruation derives from a word for month), the moon was constantly associated with the female, and with tidal waters. This is not universally true, but became more and more accepted in Western myth. Most important of all was the sun, which very quickly became associated with ruling power. Some cultures, such as the Egyptian, toyed for a while with having a Sky Goddess (Nut) separate from the Sun God, but this rapidly disappeared. The sun was all-powerful, and ruled the day. Most of the gods and heroes of the Near East were associated with the Sun God, who was invariably male, and kingly. Crowns had rays of the sun attached to them; kings carried orbs (the sun symbol) and the chariot of the King moved over the world the way the chariot of the sun moved across the sky. To reinforce this, the earliest agricultural myths explained the creation of the world as the sexual intercourse of the Earth (female) with the Sky God or sun (male), and this

would be symbolized by the plow (male sexual organ) entering the furrow of the female (female sex organ), and seeding the soil with semen. Other versions of this would connect the Sky God with the rain, again, male potency being rained down on the waiting female Earth. These myths strongly reinforced the idea that the male was active and creative, while the female was passive. This helped set up a whole pattern of male-oriented myths of power, that reinforced the social organization of the period, which was becoming increasingly dominated by priests, kings, and hierarchical organizations. This was essentially patriarchal, i.e., dominated by a male-structured mythology. There are indications, though the evidence is extremely controversial, that there was at least a strong counter mythology, especially in other regions of the Near East such as Crete, that focused on the power of women, particularly associated with their dominant role in early agricultural practice and in their role as childbearers. This matriarchal culture is very often characterized (in the surviving male cultural mythology) by a myth of a powerful Queen choosing her temporary male partners, who are perhaps sacriced when they lose their usefulness as defenders. In the earlier period there were several different stories, and competing gods. For instance, another important piece of the cosmological structure was the God of Storms, who sometimes competes with the Sky God for supremacy; as do other gods associated with primal forces, like re. These cosmologies altered signicantly with changing social structures, though the main lines began to harden. By about 1000 BCE in the Babylonian epics and stories, a mythical structure was in place which was picked up and modied in part by the Israelites, a wandering tribe of shepherding peoples who seem to have traveled throughout the Near East, settling in Palestine following experiences in Egypt, captured in the oldest parts of the Bible. It was this adoption of the reigning Near Eastern mythology as a backdrop or set of assumptions in the early books of the Bible that was so important for the rest of the Western tradition.
The Rise of the Hero

One last element of this mythology needs to be put into place, which is the idea of the hero (and occasionally the heroine) who usually represents the human race in its struggle to survive in a strange world. This hero is almost always seen as more than human, a superman, or Hercules, who is related to the Gods in some way. This hero has a series of adventures, which carry him through the world, and help to make sense of it. This hero structure often mirrors the activities of the Gods in sustaining the world. For instance, one of the great myths of the world is the sun going into the darkness every

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night, and being reborn every morning. The darkness is like chaos: a place of confusion and death. The hero, following the track of the sun, goes down into the place of darkness at the end of the world, or the bottom of the world, and there wrestles with various evil forces, and then resurfaces to begin the cycle of the world all over again. The hero travels through various levels of the world, from the highest to the lowest and back again. Let me summarize all the above in Figure 1. It represents a composite of the Western worldview, about 700 BCE, which would be found with variations all over the Near East and the Mediterranean. The most important single fact about this myth structure is that the higher up you go the more ordered it becomes. This is because God or the Creator is also the embodiment of order, and the human beings who are closest to him, the kings and the priests who rule human society, also embody order. Notice also that the highest order is more and more removed from most natural processes. This suggests that the higher order is rational, and associated with the powers of the human mind separated from the turbulence of the lower world. A second important fact for mythological purposes is that the imposition of order from the top down is a central part of any story that ts within this structure. In general, the king, Sky God, God as Creator, is visualized as coming down into the disordered world and imposing order on it according to a rational plan. The resistance to that is seen to be irrational, and associated with the demonic. The farther down one goes, the more ungodly Nature is, the more dangerous, and the more associated with darkness, uncontrolled swirling water, and chaos. The process of myth creations takes these levels, and the images and symbols associated with these levels, and weaves them into powerful stories. We have already referred to the story of the hero who descends into the realm of darkness and wrestles with the darkness. The darkness is associated symbolically in geographical terms with caves
Heaven: Rational order = God, Cosmos, Stars, Sky, Father, Male Lower heaven: Serving order = Gods, Angels, Priests, Kings, Cities Higher earth: Highest human order = Paradise, Utopia, Community

and labyrinths; bodily with the lower bowels (the bowels of the Earth); meteorologically with wild chaotic oceans (as in storms and tempests); and animalistically with huge devouring serpents, gigantic whales, beasts that are halfhuman and so on. The archetypes are very long-lasting in the Western tradition, and show up in other traditions as well: for example, the image of being swallowed by a whale as a symbol of hell appears in the biblical book of Jonah, in the novel, Moby Dick, in the childrens story, Pinocchio, and in the second Star Wars lm. In other words, each mythological level clusters a range of images and symbols around itself, and one of the ways of identifying the kind of story one is in is checking out the symbols, images, and metaphors that pop up. It is not as simple as that, of course, because some of the images have changed over time, and have become used as parodies and ironies of themselves. But an initial grasp of how these clusters of images works is of interest, particularly as we continue to explore shifts in the images and ideas of Nature over time. In the great Sumerian and Babylonian stories and epics, the hero journeys through the realms of darkness and of the gods, for a variety of reasons, including the need to tame the turbulent world to the purposes of humankind. Here is an excerpt from Inannas Journey To Hell (from approximately 1500 BCE). Inanna was a powerful goddess in Mesopotamia. Inanna descends into hell during the dry season of the year, ostensibly to rescue her husband from death, but mythically to restore the natural cycle of life to the kingdom. Here is a brief scene of her return, with devils attached to her like leaches:
Over the corpse hanging on a spike, They scattered the bread of life, They sprinkled the living water, And Inanna stood up alive. She will come up from the pit, but the Anunnaki (demons) seized her, The Judges said, Who has ever returned out of hell unharmed? She is coming, Inanna is coming from the pit! Devils are fastened to her thighs, devils walk beside her, meagre like reeds, thin as pikestaves. There goes in front of her a thing With a sceptre, but he is no minister She is coming, Inanna is coming From the pit! (trans Sandars, 1971)

Lower earth: Lowest human order/Animal world (world of confused daily life) Hell: Demonic order: Chaos, Counter-order, Devils, Death

Figure 1 others]

Ancient western cosmology [after Frye and

The mythical quest of the female to restore health to an ailing kingdom is a widespread complementary story to the questing male battling more obvious threats to the kingdom (like monstrous beasts). In Egyptian myth, for example, the queen/goddess Isis has a King/husband Osiris, who is murdered by his brother Seth, and his body scattered around the world. The world loses coherence, and the kingdom withers. Isis travels the world, discovering and piecing the

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fragments of Osiris back together again, and when he is fully restored, order and fertility returns to the land. These myths of Inanna and Isis began to surface in the rst millennium BC, and following the conquering of Egypt by Alexander the Great in the 300 BCE period, the myth of Isis in particular spread around the Mediterranean. A Greek equivalent was the myth of Demeter and Persephone. In this myth, Demeter, who was the goddess of fertility, has a daughter Persephone who is captured by the chief God of the underworld, Pluto. Demeter goes down into Hell to rescue her daughter, but discovers that her daughter has eaten six pomegranate seeds while being captured, which requires her to stay in Hell for six months of the year forever after. It is during those months that the world loses its fertility.
The Arrival of the Christian Story

These myths of Demeter, or of Isis the Eyptian, or of any number of other Gods, spirits, etc., were widespread in the ancient world until after the arrival of Christianity. The whole array of beliefs and stories is usually referred to as paganism, and what paganism means, generally speaking, is the worship of multiple gods, particularly in sacred natural places, like woods, forests and caves, and these gods often are the spirits of animals or powers in the world. As a reection of the multiple cultures and multiple inuences in the region, the stories and myths are themselves multiple, and often reect a belief that the natural world is subject to constant surprise and transformation. Ovids Metamorphosis (late 1st century, BCE) is a classical Roman expression of this widespread set of beliefs. Somewhere around 1500 BC, a tribe of nomadic peoples, the Hebrews, were wandering around northern Mesopotamia. It is probably important that they were nomads, that is, that they werent part of a rigid city culture, and didnt carry around with them statues or big pictures. They were saturated in the mythological culture of the region, but they developed a signicantly different worldview over the next 700 years. The story of this evolution is told in the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible (see Christianity and the Environment, Volume 5; Judaism and the Environment, Volume 5). At the heart of this story is the idea of monotheism, which is more than just the idea that there is one God. Essentially, the Hebrews came to believe that they had a special God who had created the whole world and everything else in it, but was not Himself any part of that world. A central part of the idea is a radical questioning of what it means for something to have power spiritual power. The Hebrews said, you people worship all kinds of Gods, animal gods, female gods, male gods, gods of fertility, etc. But what is the power that all these gods share? What is the power that gives them power?

There were other cultures that had a King of the Gods, Zeus, or Jupiter, but they were just more powerful versions of the other gods. What was the sacred power itself, which all these gods supposedly had? These were ultimately screens for the One True God, and could be done away with. The second thing the Hebrews pointed out was that life with a lot of gods was confusing. You never knew which gods were on your side, and which were against you. You had to spend your whole day sacricing to this god, and not forgetting that one, and so on. The Hebrews argued that it was ridiculous for people to be worshipping trees and animals: they should be worshipping the one true holiness that created the trees and the animals and gave them life. This radical attack on the multiple natural gods of the ancient world was also part of the Hebrews tribal strategy. When they entered what is now Israel/Palestine, which was then called Canaan, they proceeded to ght against all the local tribes, and part of their ght was against all the local gods, including the local versions of Ishtar, Baal, and other spirits. The early books of the Bible capture the massive rethinking of Nature that went on in the creation of such a worldview. The upshot of the rethinking is that, in the end, though Nature can, and should, be seen as a glorious creation of God through which we might be able to get a glimpse of Gods great wisdom and knowledge, it no longer has any intrinsic spirituality of its own. It is a vehicle for the greatness of God. In the Hebrew Bible, we still get glimpses of the old tradition, some snippets about the old Canaanite religion, and a lot of complaining that pagan worship refuses to die; but by and large the Canaanite religion disappears from view as time passes. It so happens that the Jewish people were only a minor player in the Ancient Greek and Roman world, so they were tolerated as being a bit eccentric. The God of the Hebrews joined the rest of the diverse array of gods and goddesses that peopled the Mediterranean. All this changed with the arrival of Christianity. When Jesus was crucied around 35 AD, He was originally thought of as just one more Jewish radical, but thanks to the efforts of, among others, a man who would later be called St Paul, who was both a Roman citizen and a Jew, Christianity began to spread around the Mediterranean. It took root because of its promise of individual salvation from death, and its intolerance for other religions. It was a bit like Microsoft: you can have no other operating system but mine. Thanks to a series of events, culminating in the conversion of one of the later Roman emperors, Constantine to Christianity, Christianity became the most powerful religion in the Roman Empire, but unlike the other religions whose adherents were happy to let other religions ourish,

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Realm of God the Father: God moves all Universe moves up towards God Jesus redeems all Lower cosmos: Stars and planets in their pure spheres

GOD/angel realm primum mobile Fixed stars Saturn Jupiter Mars SUN Venus Mercury Moon Fire Air Water Earth

Continual descent of Jesus, Mary, Angels, Saints, to assist humans in ascending to God Nature is redeemed in the Body of Christ.

Higher earth: Highest human order = Paradise, Jerusalem, The almost redeemed world of second nature Lower earth: Lowest human order/animal world (world of confused daily life) The fallen world of sin, unredeemed nature Hell: Demonic order: Chaos, Counter-order, Devils, Death

Hell

Figure 2

Medieval western cosmology. Primum mobile, the sphere that moves all other spheres [after Frye and others]

the Christians went on a 300-year rampage, destroying all the Roman cults, burning down the Great Library at Alexandria (associated with Isis), and hacking down all the sacred forests and groves associated with the pagan gods. Having done this in the Mediterranean, they then proceeded to do the same throughout Western Europe, culminating in driving underground the Celtic Gods of Ireland and the Norse Gods in Scandinavia. This extraordinary story ended, in about the year 1000, with virtually the entire Western world being subject to Christianity. The central mythological and cosmological structure that had been extant before was now subjected to a strong narrative based on a single salvationary drive; i.e., the entire cosmos was part of a redemptive process whereby a fallen world intensied by fallen human beings was, at the end of time, to be re-perfected. The ideal Hero was Jesus, whose story became the template for the journey of Everyman through the world. The early Christian literature, based on this very powerful vision of the spiritualization of the world, saw Nature as either irrelevant, or as a realm of symbols whose meaning was connected to the larger spiritual journey of the soul. In fact, Nature was seen as the realm of wilderness and danger, far removed from the realm of God. As this world view developed, it dovetailed with leftover astronomical and physical assumptions of the ancient GraecoRoman world, which (for instance) argued that the Earth was the lowest realm, made up of the element Earth, and that the higher one went away from the Earth, the more one approached perfection. For example, the planets and stars in the heavens moved in concentric circles (actually, transparent spheres) around the earth, and so on. Again, as in the earlier cosmology (Figure 1), the higher you went,

the more rational the world became, until you reached order and truth, God. A map of this cosmology (Figure 2) shows the dimensions of the Medieval/Renaissance universe, and also the cluster of literary images that held together views of nature throughout that period. Our lower nature is subject to temptation; and the wild of the uncultivated natural world is a symbol of that temptation. This wilderness should be turned into a garden, or a farm, or ultimately a city, just as the soul should be cultivated. In Dantes Divine Comedy, the hero (guided by Virgil, the ghost of the dead Roman poet), descends into hell, at the center of the earth, and reascends in the Southern Hemisphere, where he climbs the mountain of Purgatory, at the top of which he nds himself in a kind of paradise, like the original lost Garden of Eden. After this, he leaps up into space (guided by his long lost love, Beatrice) and rockets through space towards the ultimate place of God beyond the stars. This literary journey maps the whole natural and spiritual world of his time.

SECOND NATURE AND THE WINTERS TALE

As already mentioned, one of the most important aspects of Shakespeares work is that it appears just at the moment when the late medieval world view is being superseded by the early modernist world view. To repeat, Shakespearean literature (and that of his contemporaries and some successors) often operates according to metaphoric logic categorization based on resemblance or co-incidence. A mandrake root was shaped like a human being, and therefore had inuence over human beings. The

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conguration of stars at ones birth was not an accident: the planets had different inuences, as did different plants, animals, etc. The importance of this is that the metaphoric view allows for a certain amount of positive valorization of natural nature, even in the medieval Christian period. An important medieval distinction was between natura naturata and natura naturans nature more or less as a noun, and nature as a living verb, naturing. Shakespeare is fascinated by the power of nature naturing. Among the most interesting characters in his plays are bastards, who are always standing up and proclaiming their devotion to the raw powers of nature. In the late Shakespeare plays, like The Winters Tale (1613), nature (in one role) becomes something much more benign, and becomes tied to certain ambiguous functions of nature in literary art. The most obvious of these is the pastoral world of rustic shepherds and shepherdesses. Another was the garden. A third, and hardest of all to articulate, was the great benignness of Natures rhythms in the world. In Shakespeares late plays, there are tempests, bears, shipwrecks, etc., but one is constantly led to believe that it will all work out, that something is going on deeply in the world to reconcile everything. This is one reason why they all feel like fairy stories. As the title suggests, there is a storylike quality to The Winters Tale, and it is obviously haunted by winter (a season and a mood). In the scene excerpted below, a shepherdess greets two lords, who are searching for Prince Florizel, the heir to the kingdom, who has fallen in love with her. Unbeknownst to these lords, the shepherdess, Perdita, is herself a princess; they believe her to be a mere rural peasant. As with Ophelia in Hamlet, Perdita is uent in the metaphoric language and etiquette of owers. The scene opens with her gracefully giving rosemary and rue (and explaining their symbolism) to the two gentlemen. When they suggest that she is giving them winter owers, she points out that she has avoided giving them natures bastards carnations and gillyvors. Because these plants were known for their genetic sports their streaking and changes in patterns (piedness) suggested waywardness they are symbols of natures indiscriminate sexuality. Perdita is staking out civilized ground. The next paragraphs provide a central discussion of the Renaissance view of nature and natures art what was called second nature. Second nature is what cultivation does: it takes the waywardness of nature and harnesses it to nobler ends. Perdita opens the discussion by using the term art for the process of creating nature (Natura naturans), and is naturally wary of it. Polixenes who is about to denounce his son for fooling around with a mere shepherdess brings in a different metaphor: the metaphor of grafting. In grafting, a branch of a growing tree is cut off and grafted onto another. The force of nature that continues the growth process eventually produces a next

generation stronger and healthier than the earlier one. So Polixenes argues that human art can use natures powers to improve nature. Thus, Shakespeare gracefully intertwines the theme of human cultivation and nature, with the irony that the supposedly rural shepherdess is herself a gure of the highest hidden art.
Perdita: For you theres rosemary and rue; these keep Seeming and savour all the winter long: Grace and remembrance be to you both, And welcome to our shearing! Polixenes: Shepherdess a fair one are you Well you t our ages with owers of winter. Perdita: Sir, the year growing ancient The fairest owers of the season Are our carnations and streakd gillyfovers, Which some call natures bastards; and I care not to get slips of them For I have heard it said There is an art which in their piedness shares With great creating nature. Polixenes: Say there be; Yet nature is made better by no mean, But nature makes that mean; so, over that art Which you say adds to nature, is an art That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry A gentler scion to the wildest stock, And make conceive a bark of baser kind By bud of nobler race; this is an art Which does mend nature; change it rather, but The art itself is nature. (IV, III, 72 96)

ROMANTICISM AND AFTER

Beginning about the time of the Industrial Revolution, due to a variety of forces, the synthesized ChristianPtolemaic cosmology began to collapse, and there arose a new cosmology, which we can call the creative, romantic, or revolutionary cosmology. This has remained with us ever since, and lives in uneasy relationship with the fragments of the earlier imaginative cosmology that still operate. What happened was that the previous worldview, which was hierarchical kings, priests, male centered, rule-oriented and rational was no longer able to use the cosmology to support the existing power structure. The new emerging world of astronomical discoveries, the discovery of the new world, the new physics, etc., all confused the world picture; and during that period of confusion, there was also a widespread assault on hierarchical forms of government throughout Europe. As a result, the world order of the people on top (let us now call it that ofcially) began to be attacked and parodied by means of a counter-cosmology. It is the persistence of both cosmologies the ofcial line, and the romantic line that is essential to understanding how the myths and images of the modern Western world work, and especially modern environmentalism.

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Heaven (Hell): Mechanical, Abstract rationality, God as absent, Tyrant king, Priest Universe as absurd prison [Earth as minor planet around a minor sun] Civilization (Hell on earth): Alienating city, industrialization hypocrisy, subject/object split, loss of harmony with nature and community Symbols: False marriage, Bad government; Mask, Blank street, Machine. Nature (Potential source of healing) Wilderness as non-human source, model for non-alienated noble savage Symbols: Mountains, Oceans, Lakes, far from Civilization; True love; Huts; small communities. Inner world (Potential heaven or hell): Inner journey down into chaos to dissolve split between self, other, nature through creativity, intuition Symbols: Satan as Hero, isolated poet searching for forbidden truth, branded/lightning, dabbles in the occult , forbidden love , incest, madness, anti machine science alchemy not chemistry. Political energy now derives from the bottom : proletarian, revolution, mob energy.

Figure 3

Modern cosmology/mythology/romantic parodic, countermyth

The Romantic countermodel broke through in a number of different places it shows up in the American and French Revolutions, and has since been central for artists, musicians, environmentalists and others. Let me describe a third cosmology (Figure 3), this time from the top to the bottom. It is somewhat less clear than the previous two. The reason is that one of the powerful things going on in the new cosmology is an attempt to parody and satirize the old cosmology. Remember that this is a cosmology, and a mythology, so the energy of it is carried through symbols, images, and metaphors. To begin, the earlier world view was organized hierarchically, the higher you went, the more rational, ordered, and powerful you became, because you were getting closer to God. The new worldview inverts and parodies this approach, because it no longer believes explicitly in the natural right of rulers to rule. This was one of the causes and outcomes of the American (1776) and French (1789) Revolutions.

The whole idea of the top becomes not the place you want to go to reach heaven. It is now the place of innite space, the strange empty abstract cosmos ruled over by the laws of Isaac Newton. It is blank, inhuman, full of stars that no longer have any relevance to our lives. God has disappeared, turned into a puppet master or a watchmaker. This connects to a very powerful image of kings and gods not as reasonable beings, but as repressive rulers. The forces of authority are now thought of, not as spreading truth and reason from high places, but as being in charge of a repressive machine, designed to stie human expression. Elements of this machine are increasingly seen as arbitrary creations of the repressive mind, and among the arbitrarinesses is the association of the masculine with the rational. The next level down is the city of darkness, which is no longer the city of light, the holy organized rational city of Jerusalem. Rather it is the place of alienation, where faceless people work for the machine. This was particularly true in the rst years of the industrial era, where the

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whole structure of society was disrupted. Previously rural farm communities and family groups were uprooted and turned into workers. Workers, by denition, are gears in the machine. They have lost their humanity, and have become human resources. The city is also associated with alienation, which shows up in the emerging idea of the lonely gure in the crowd. This becomes a powerful image in the new Romantic poetry of the 19th century. In William Blakes poem, London of 1794 we get some idea of this (William Blake, 17571827). Here are a couple of verses:
I wander through each chartered street, Near where the chartered Thames doth ow, And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man, In every infants cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forged manacles I hear. How the Chimney sweepers cry Every blackening church appalls, And the hapless soldiers sigh, Runs in blood down palace walls.

And so on. The streets and the river are chartered mapped, sold and the human mind is now manacled, chained and shackled. The crisscross of square streets in the new modern city contrasts with the organic wandering streets of the medieval town. The city begins to grow, and to engulf its surroundings. Similarly, just as human beings are being eaten up by the machine, so also is Nature being eaten up by the machine, and being transformed into objects. Power is the power over, the control over human beings and nature, which is created by having control over the wealth created by the machine, and this in turn is a creature of civilization. Here is Blake again, in one of his late poems Jerusalem. A revolutionary poet is speaking:
O Divine Spirit, sustain me on thy wings, That I may awaken Albion (Britain) from his long and cold repose; For Bacon and Newton, sheathd in dismal steel, their terrors hang Like iron scourges over Albion: reasonings like vast serpents Infold around my limbs I turn my eyes to the schools and universities of Europe And there behold the Loom of Locke, whose Woof rages dire Washed by the Water wheels of Newton: black the cloth In heavy wreaths folds over every nation: cruel works Of many wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic Moving by compulsion each other, not those in Eden, which, Wheel within wheel, in freedom revolve in harmony and peace.

Here Blake summarizes his attack on the whole Industrial Revolution. He sees wheels without wheels (without here means outside of) as a mixture of clockwork, waterwheels, mechanisms imposed from the outside; as opposed to the

organic development of wheels within wheels he sees in some future Paradise or Eden. The whole civilization has become poisoned. For Romantic writers, it may be that progress was making people healthier and wealthier, but they were also being progressively pulled apart from each other, and from nature. Among the powerful Romantic themes was the idea of the noble savage, the very powerful idea that would haunt Romanticism from then on, which was that peoples, races, that were closer to nature were somehow better and wiser than people who belonged to civilization in general, and Western civilization in particular. The noble savage identied with the increasingly marginalized indigenous peoples who were being chewed up by the new Western machine was not alienated from his (or her) community, and had a special relationship with the natural world. In contrast to them, civilized Man was split up the middle. Socially, naturally, and even in conict with his own mind for we begin to see that the mind-forged manacles may reect the larger world view a rational conscious mind/identity, alienated from ones own physical world. If we go back to the cosmological chart, we can see this great split, which is rampant in the industrialized mind. For the Romantic writers and critics, this was the equivalent of a new fall of man, a tragic moment in human history against which they rebelled. How is this split, these alienations to be overcome, or healed? In the early Romantic era, there were two main answers, one political, and the other artistic, or creative. The political answer was revolution. Essentially what was required was for the mass of those being turned into machines to revolt and overthrow the masters on top. Here we enter the next realm of the new cosmology: the idea that the bottom is the source of creative energy. It may look like the old hell, but it is where the next revolution would come from. Throughout the 19th century, and even in our own century, there is this image of the crowd, the mob, the mass of workers on general strike, like some dark force from a volcano, nally breaking through the stiing authoritarian machine towards some wider liberation which would nally sweep aside the old institutions. It was these images that were at the heart of the French and Russian Revolutions. The revolution from below was the force that would lead to the new heaven of Utopia. One of the starkest images that operated throughout the next hundred years was that of the blacksmith (and later the steelworker) working in the industrial equivalent of hellre, with a hammer, striking blows for freedom in the midst of the dark factory. This was the political answer. The split which was caused by repression would be overcome by the workers on the day

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when they realized that the forces of repression were not just imsy, but were being kept in power by their ability to keep the workers in ignorance of their true capacity to rule themselves without masters.

THE ARTIST AS RADICAL

A related answer, which moves us back into the details of our cosmology, was that Nature might become a source for a new regenerative force. If part of the symptoms of our problems could be seen in the destruction of Nature, and in the separation of the human from the natural, overcoming that split might also be relevant. Nature was naturally not human, so while it might be polluted, at its heart might be something different, which could regenerate the lost original human nature again, sort of like repairing the original fall of man in the Christian tradition. Not only was nature not human, at least some parts of it could be seen to have an organic structure, one that naturally developed, rather than being imposed from the outside, by machine. Again, notice that one of the important inversions of the previous cosmology is going on here. In the previous cosmology, wilderness was a place of chaos, of entanglement in irrational natural forces, leading one on to hell. In the new cosmology, wilderness, simply because it is not part of the machine, is a potential entry point into heaven, or at least paradise. The very fact that it is uncultivated makes it a starting point for the rebirth of a non-infected culture. Also notice that it is the uncultivated, the non-rational, the pre-split in all its forms that becomes a source of new strength, of the divine energy of revolt. It is not a coincidence that we nd in this period a new respect emerging for children, who come to be seen as unspoiled gures, not as adults in training (and modern educational theory dates from this early romantic period) for aboriginal peoples the noble savages I spoke of (we begin to get romantic stories like the Last of the Mohicans) and the initial upgrading of womens voices that takes place in the opening of the 19th century with women like Mary Wollestonecraft. Of equal importance is the rise of the artist, the creative person, the musician and poet, who represent the overcoming of the split between the mind and the world through their imaginations or their works. How does the artist, the musician, the creative person, overcome the split between the human and the natural? There are two approaches that have become well known. One is associated with the image of the lamp. In this image, the idea is that the artist, through his or her creative mind illuminates and reaches out into the natural world, and overcomes the split through the power of new artistic power. We can hear this, for example, in the music of Beethoven, like his 5th Symphony, where the composer

seems to hammer away (like a blacksmith) at the elements and forces of the world around him. This is an active approach (to say the least). A second approach is for the artist or the poet to become more humble in the face of Nature to become sensitive to the details and the rhythms of the natural world, to learn Natures lessons. Over time, this cleansing of perception will reveal deeper truths of the universe to the artist. We can see this approach in the work of John Ruskin, who combined an environmental concern with a call for detailed analyses of Natures designs in owers, rocks, trees, and atmospheric phenomena. These two approaches are often mingled together in different artists. When we look at a painting, like The Sun owers from the quintessential Romantic artist, Vincent Van Gogh, we cannot say whether Van Gogh was imposing his vision on the sunowers, or saw them in themselves more deeply than we can. In earlier cosmologies, the way you learned was by going up to high places, going to the city, nding a wise male leader. There were exceptions to this, but only partexceptions: for example, in Dantes Inferno, the hero goes down into hell, but that is only the beginning of the journey up to the highest stars. In the Romantic movement, we nd that the idea of the journey down into the underworld in the previous cosmology, becomes the journey of discovery itself. This is because the new hell is caused by the repressive actions of the forces of order. The Romantic artist (and later versions of that, like the rock musician) goes out to the marginal peoples, down into the slums, away from the center of power. It is only there that the truth of repression is really to be seen for what it is. The people who live in the new hell are more liberated, because (in a parody of the earlier cosmology where the closer you got to God, the more rational everything became) the new cosmology argues that the farther you get away from authority, the more truth can be found. Since rationality is being imposed from the outside, irrationality may be more truthful than rationality. The madman may be saner than the doctor. Lastly, the descent into a liberating new hell may be a descent into the personal hell, the unconscious mind. The poet, the musician, repelled by the repressive nature of modernity, descends into a variety of personal and social hells, and supposedly returns from that with new messages that will transform the world. The mythology of drugridden visionary rock musicians comes directly from this cosmology. This descent into the mind may be echoed by the descent into the wilderness. The artist may go into the heart of darkness, go on a vision quest, seek out the truths that can only be found far from civilization. Inner nature and the natural world become linked, because both are on the run from the forces of human technological control. This helps

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explain some of the attractiveness of the ight away from civilization into nature.

MODERNITY AND THE CONTEMPORARY ARTIST

These Romantic themes, and the dark cosmology that goes with it, have remained central tools in the hands of writers and artists. Much of the literature of the 20th century explored the themes of the alienating environment of the city, the potentially liberating, but also potentially dangerous, voyage into the natural environment, and the journey of the hero and heroine into inner nature. A novel like George Orwell s 1984 paints the environment of the city as alienating, repressive, and one without any hope. The only time that the characters nd any liberation is when they escape to Nature, temporarily. The same is true in Aldous Huxley s Brave New World and many other powerful indictments of contemporary life. A new theme that has emerged in literature since World War II, and is paralleled by the rise of the environmental movement, is the possibility raised by nuclear war of the elimination of all life on earth. For writers, this has been inescapably linked to the experience of the death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau, where the whole question of civilization came under question. The German critic, Theodor Adorno, famously said that one could no longer write poetry after the Holocaust. The dark hole of that experience sucked the life out of the pretense of words. Since then, writers have been constantly haunted by threats to the fabric of life; and this has shown up in the themes and characters they write about. Nevile Shute s On The Beach (1959), which portrayed the consequences of the global spread of nuclear fallout, has a good claim on being the rst modern environmental novel, saturated with the themes just outlined. Of increasing interest in recent years has been the strength of nonction writing about the environment, re ecting in part the presence of large amounts of scienti c or naturalistic fact in contemporary life. Writers like Gary Snyder (Earth House Hold) and Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek), anthropologists like Richard K Nelson (Make Prayers to the Raven), biologists like Sandra Steingraber (Living Downstream), and farmers like Wendell Berry (Home Economics) grounded their environmental writings in exemplary detail, and often used them as springboards for moments of personal discovery.

I choose it, not because it is a great poem, but because as the author, I can speak to it somewhat freely as to the intentions and sources of its creation, and how it was intended to relate literary forms to environmental changes. This may give some insight into the literary process (or at least one writer s process). The poem was part of a suite of poems called The Fate of the Earth and Other Poems published in the Canadian environmental magazine Probe Post (Timmerman, 1988). This particular poem draws on the literary tradition called pastoral, which was used in The Winter s Tale. It was a sophisticated Greek and Latin form of verse (and sometimes prose) about simple shepherds in rustic landscapes, either singing about the joys of the rural life, or complaining about a shepherdess who would not love them, or the troubles of farmers in an uncertain world. Many writers Virgil, Horace, Pope, Shakespeare, Sidney used this form, often disguising criticism of mainstream urban society under the guise of simple unlearned folk. There was also a kind of utopian dream associated with this simplicity, which was classically located in a place called Arcadia in Greece. Accompanying the poem was a photograph of a famous painting by Nicholas Poussin (see Art and the Environment, Volume 5) called Et in Arcadia Ego. The painting shows a group of shepherds in Arcadia huddled around a large tomb upon which are carved the words Et in Arcadia Ego, which is a reference to death. That is translating from the Latin I Too Am In Arcadia. Naturally, this means that there is no escaping from death, not even in the beautiful natural simplicity of Arcadia. With this introduction, here is the poem:
And Death, Too, is in Arcadia
The house of Nature sags against the rain. The sap fails in the sugar maples, and the cry of the waterbirds fades like mist over morning by grey, secret inlets. The rustle of wind is the whisper of weeping. There is Death in the woods, lling the air, down along the marshlands, dropping out of the once benevolent skies, shedding hot tears of helpless pain. The webbing of life tears and drifts apart: poison pulses from the snow, and the land soils itself into the stream, and the lake slowly wearies of all its children. Against its own, its deepest rhythm dying, Nature screams and warps against the grain. And look, here, look here in the depths of faltering Arcady, even the gravestones dissolve in grief at things never seen or heard before in any version of pastoral.

CONCLUSION: AND DEATH, TOO, IS IN ARCADIA

In searching for a piece of recent writing about the environment to conclude this essay, I decided to use the example of a poem, written by myself, and published in the mid-1980s.

The poem was written in the speci c context of acid rain, but also more generally in relation to a world in which

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things that naturally symbolize goodness, like rain and mothers milk, are turned into poisons. There is a strange situation where the natural processes are turned against themselves, and the deep rhythms of nature are warped by the inuence of human chemical poisoning. One important aspect of the poem is that, like the distant lakes and waters affected by acid rain, Arcadia is far away, and yet affected by long-distance transport of pollutants. I carefully used images and ideas from the scientic literature on the loss of leaf cover, stresses on trees, loss of water birds, early snowmelt at the beginning of the year that pulses acid into lakes just at prime birth time for sh, and so on. However, there is an even stronger connection to one powerful theme in the pastoral poetry tradition: the mourning for the lost shepherd. In the English poetry tradition, the most famous example of this theme is John Miltons poem Lycidas (1642). In this poem, which mourns the loss of a young poet who was drowned at sea, the whole of nature is bidden to mourn as well for the loss of one who loved nature:
With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, And every ower that sad embroidery wears. Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed, And daffadillies ll their cups and tears, To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.

REFERENCES
Bateson, G (1987) Men are Grass, in Gaia: A Way of Knowing, ed W I Thompson, Lindisfarne Press, Great Barrington, MA. Buell, L (1995) The Environmental Imagination, The Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA. Empson, W (1935) Some Versions of Pastoral, Chatto and Windus, London. Sandars, N K (1971) Poems of Heaven and Hell From Ancient Mesopotamia, Penguin Books Ltd., Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK. Shelley, M W (1818) Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus, Broadview Press, Peterborough, Ontario. Timmerman, P (1988) The Fate of the Earth and Other Poems, Probe Post, Summer 1988, Pollution Probe Foundation, Toronto.

FURTHER READING
Abrams, M H (1953) The Mirror and the Lamp, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Bate, J (2000) The Song of the Earth, Macmillan Press/Picador, London. Berry, W (1987) Home Economics, North Point Press, San Francisco, CA. Dillard, A (1974) Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Random House/Vintage, New York. Frye, N (1947) Fearful Symmetry, University Press, Princeton, NJ. Frye, N (1968) A Study of English Romanticism, Random House, New York. Nelson, R K (1983) Make Prayers to the Raven, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Snyder, G (1969) Earth House Hold, New Directions, New York. Steingraber, S (1998) Living Downstream, Random House/Vintage, New York.

This is a classic example of what was discussed earlier with reference to Julius Caesar where the sympathies of nature for human beings are assumed. In my poem, I was trying to evoke the images of the dying poet, but with a modern twist, to evoke the dying of nature, and also to suggest that this was something new in the history of the world (never seen in Arcadia or anywhere) the possibility of the dying of nature. An oblique reference is made to a famous book on pastoral by the literary critic William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (Empson, 1935). Also, among the guiding images of the nal lines of the poem is that of sculptures and tombstones that I had seen in city graveyards that had been worn down by air pollution over the years, and were themselves symbols of the destructiveness of contemporary environmental problems. A brief technical point, which may highlight the way in which, in a poem, everything matters, including the form as well as the content, is that I used a number of what are called weak endings where the rhythm of the word is such that there is a strong beat on the rst half of the word, and a weak, falling off rhythm at the end words like weeping, dropping, lling, shedding so as to evoke sadness and loss. There are also lines like the rustle of wind is the whisper of weeping that are meant to give the reader the sound of the wind in the threatened woods. These kinds of considerations and many others go into the response of those who write literature today in the face of the environmental crisis.

Long-wave Economic Cycles (Kondratyev Cycles)

see Kondratyev, Nikolai Dmitrievich (Volume 5)

Love Canal
Love Canal was the name given to a suburban subdivision in Niagara Falls, NY. Residents rst became aware of their proximity to toxic waste through a Niagara Gazette newspaper article by Michael Brown in April 1978. Local

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housewife, Lois Gibbs, quickly emerged as the key organizer of a community riddled with fears for their health. She initially began a petition campaign to close the 99th Street School, built in the virtual center of what had been the dumpsite, abandoned by a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum. By August 1978, the New York Commissioner of Health declared a state of emergency and ordered the closing of the school. Within days, US President Jimmy Carter declared an emergency and provided funds to permanently relocate 239 families living within the rst two rows of homes closest to the former waste dump. The community campaigned for the relocation of all 900 families. In May 1980, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released results from blood tests of residents showing

chromosome damage. Love Canal activists took two EPA ofcials hostage. On May 19th, Lois Gibbs issued an ultimatum: commit to relocating all Love Canal residents by noon May 21, or What weve done here today will look like a Sesame Street picnic to what well do then. The White House agreed to permanent relocation by the deadline. Occidental Petroleum has paid nearly $250 million (US$) to compensate residents and reimburse state and federal government clean-up costs. In 1990, the EPA announced that sections of the area were safe for resettlement. The controversy is credited with sparking the EPAs Superfund Programme.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada

M
Malthus, Thomas Robert
(1766 1834) Thomas Robert Malthus, clergyman, professor, political economist, was born in Great Britain to a well-to-do country family. He studied mathematics at Cambridge, and was ordained a minister at the age of 22. Malthus served as a clergyman and as professor of modern history and political economy at Haileybury College. His ideas and eventual economic philosophy were molded in part by the debates he had with his father, who held optimistic views of human progress. Malthus himself saw social problems growing in exponential terms. Malthus views of the economic and social implications of population growth were contrary to the common economic assumptions of the day. Most viewed population growth as being a positive by-product of economic growth and social advancement. In 1798, Malthus published his Essay on the Principle of Population (there were seven editions in all). In the essay, Malthus held that while population grows exponentially, the availability of food and other resources grows arithmetically. But population would be held in check by periods of plague or war. Technological advances would provide periods of social stability, until the power of exponential population growth again resulted in too many people for available resources. Social discord would inevitably return. An essential point in Malthus argument is that in the longrun, population would always tend to remain above the level that resources could adequately support. Malthus wrote in his essay that population is constantly acting upon man as a powerful stimulus urging him to the further cultivation of the earth, and to enable it to consequently support a more extended population. In addition to the pervasive impact of population on human cultural conditions, his theory also alludes to the existence of a static stock index. This index holds that there are absolute limits to resource availability and limits to the positive affects of human innovation. It was in this realm of thought that he maintained an ongoing debate with his friend David Ricardo. Though Ricardo agreed with the Malthusian notion of population growth, he disagreed with the implications. Ricardo argued that technological innovation, substitution, and the discovery of new resources would be the inevitable cultural responses in essence the stock index was neither static nor binding. The Malthusian notion of scarcity and population also contributed to a theory of wages (iron law of wages, or Malthus law of wages). This proposed that an increase in the wage rate results in an increase in population, this in turn depresses wages, and thus wages remain mostly at a subsistence level. His theological background was reected in his economic and social thought. Famine and poverty were certainly seen as natural, and hence, divine outcomes. He also believed that moral constraints (abstention from sex) were an essential part of addressing population, though he had doubts about the practicality of this solution. The ideas of Malthus were rened within the neoMalthusian tradition. In this realm, the idea of absolute scarcity and the exponential impact of population growth have been quite attractive to ecologists, and to many in environmental movements. Such perspectives see a strong relationship between the geometric impact of economic and social consumption, and absolute limits inherent in nature.
KEVIN HANNA Canada

Man and Nature as a Single but Complex System

Michael Thompson
The Musgrave Institute, London, UK and The University of Bergen, Norway

No matter how lightly we tread on the Earth, we cannot avoid altering it. And, as it alters, so the way we tread on

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it our ecological footprint, as it is sometimes called is, in turn, altered. On and on. Natural scientists tend to look at this interaction of the human and the natural from the Earths perspective, The Earth as Transformed by Human Action (Turner et al., 1990) being the classic text. Social scientists tend to look at the interaction from the sociocultural end: Living with Nature (Fischer and Hajer, 1999), with its subtitle Environmental Politics as Cultural Discourse, is a recent example. But can we go further? Can we push each of these approaches (the natural scientists and the social scientists) to the point where they actually meet and give a single, uni ed theory of our relationship with nature? Yes we can, chorus two schools of thought: one sociological, the other ecological. The rst has its roots in social anthropology and is, properly speaking, a theory of sociocultural viability (but, since that is too much of a mouthful, it has been shortened to Cultural Theory, with the capital letters serving to distinguish it from other theorizing about culture). The second has emerged from natural resource ecology, where those whose interest is in grasslands, sheries, forests and so on encounter the institutions that are doing the exploiting and the managing, not as organized arrangements of people and their various convictions as to how the world is, but as patterned interventions in the ecosystems they are studying. In this article, we describe a uni ed theory, and some of its implications for policy.

A ROAD WITHOUT END

The classic assumption, in both ecology and social science, is that there is a one-way transition from state A to state B. In ecology, the process of succession (Clements, 1916; Odum, 1969) ensures that an initially unstructured state of affairs (one huge niche lled with anarchic, opportunistic and competitive organisms (the r-strategists)) is steadily transformed into a climax community: a structured and stratied arrangement of diversied niches, with clearly dened interrelationships between the species (the K-strategists) that occupy them (see r K Strategies, Volume 2). In social science, this predictable, linear and equilibrium-seeking model of change is paralleled by a number of grand theories in which some inexorable logic moves us all from mechanical to organic solidarity (Durkheim, 1893); from community to society (Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, Tonnies, 1887); from traditional to modern (Weber, 1922); from status to contract (Maine, 1861); from capitalism to communism (Marx, 1859); or, as modern theorists of institutions put it, from markets to hierarchies (Lindblom, 1977; Williamson, 1975). Different masters may dene their As and their Bs differently, but all subscribe to a two-fold scheme and to some driving force (such as rationalization, internal contradiction, or

spiraling transaction costs) that carries the totality from A to B. These transitions, whether ecological or socio-cultural, are all in the direction of more orderliness, more differentiation, more connectedness, and more consistency and, once they have gone as far as they can go in that direction, that is that. In other words, these models of change end up making change impossible. Of course, something on the outside may intervene and mess things up, thereby setting the whole thing in motion once more but, left to themselves, these models get ecosystems and socio-cultural systems from A to B and then stop. Change, these models tell us, is a temporary phenomenon. These models are beginning to be seen as less than satisfactory. They explain change by getting rid of it, and they are increasingly incapable of making sense of what is actually going on. They have now been challenged by models that are indeterministic (i.e., more than two-fold) and make change a permanent and essential feature of existence: the four-fold institutional scheme proposed by Cultural Theory (Thompson et al., 1990) and the four-fold ecocycle advanced by Holling (1986). If social and ecological systems are as these models say they are, their interaction will inevitably result in complex and non-linear dynamics, giving an unpredictable, always out of equilibrium, and never ending sequence of transitions between multiple states. And none of these will ever be the end of the road. In the classic social science formulation, two kinds of solidarity interact. Markets are the competing players, all merrily bidding and bargaining with one another; hierarchies are the benign authorities who ensure that the various conditions for playing of this trading game (a level playing eld, for instance) are in place. Cultural Theory does not reject this foundational distinction. Rather, it argues that there is more to life than just markets and hierarchies and that you will lay yourself open to all sorts of unwelcome surprises if you go on assuming that hierarchies and markets explain it all. Take, for instance, the Brent Spar oil storage structure. If there were only markets and hierarchies, then the solution that was agreed between Shell (the market actor) and the British Government (the hierarchical actor) would have come to pass, and the Brent Spar would now be mouldering in its watery grave (see Brent Spar, Volume 5). It is not; it is sitting bolt upright in a Norwegian fjord. Greenpeace, an actor from a third kind of solidarity (we call it egalitarianism), winged its way in, literally, and totally transformed the outcome. Since this was written, a nal decision (negotiated between Shell and Greenpeace) has been reached, and the structure is now being cut up into cylindrical sections to a roll-on/roll-off ferry terminal in Norway.

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Nor is it just Brent Spars that cause trouble for the simple markets and hierarchies approach. A recent analysis of how things are actually done in Himalayan and Alpine villages (Price and Thompson, 1997; this article is based, in large part, on this 1997 paper, which has a more extensive set of references than is included here) strongly suggests (as we will see in a moment) that, if these mountain farmers relied on just markets and hierarchies, neither they nor their environments would be the way they are. Nor is this inadequacy of the markets and hierarchies framework conned to economically marginal mountainsides. The ills of the American city have recently been blamed on the public-private partnerships that were seen as the solution (Brion, 1992). Hierarchies and markets, in coming together in this cozy and unseemly way, have totally excluded community (the egalitarian solidarity) and forced the citizenry into a state of atomized, alienated subordination and systematic exploitation (fatalism: the fourth and rather passive, solidarity that completes the typology). At the global level, the three active solidarities (markets, hierarchies and egalitarianism), altogether with the markedly different problem de nitions and solution de nitions that each of them generates, are clearly discernible in the climate change debate. Indeed, they are what make that debate possible, each voice all the time de ning itself in contradistinction to the other two. Hierarchists pin the blame on population. Individualists (the supporters of market solidarity, which Cultural Theorists call individualism) see it as stemming from people being able to treat the environment as a free good. Egalitarians insist that it is pro igacy (excessive consumption, especially in the richest nations of the world) that is the root of it all. Their solutions essentially, reduce population (hierarchy), get the prices right (individualism) and frugality (egalitarianism) are so divergent that each constitutes part of the other two s problems. Frugality, it turns out, requires the abdication of capitalism: the driving force of the individualist s solution. The population diagnosis, as far as the egalitarians are concerned, blames the victim (the South, which is where all the population growth is), and lets the guilty party, the North, off the hook. And the sorts of market interventions that both the hierarchists and the egalitarians, in their different ways, are intent on will, the individualists insist, get the prices even more wrong than they are at present! (See Chapter 4, Vol. 1 of Rayner and Malone, 1998, where the self-organization of these three voices is set out by means of a painstaking discourse analysis). This means that human interactions with the environment cannot be effectively analyzed using theoretical frameworks

that allow just one or two positions. Such frameworks are insuf ciently variegated. This is the main practical message from Cultural Theory, and it is a highly discomforting message for policy makers generally and, in particular, for those who build the computer-based models that underlie most policy making within the broad area that is now labeled sustainable development. In most of these models, the representation of the microlevel, the household (in energy modeling) and the farmer (in land-use modeling), is singular: an economically rational utility maximizer. Such a representation recognizes just one voice (that of individualist solidarity) and silences the other two. More recently, modelers have progressed to the classic formulation and recognized two of the voices. The International Geosphere Biosphere Programme Land-Use and Land-Cover Change (IGBP LUCC) project (see IGBP Core Projects, Volume 2), for instance, notes that land-use and land-cover change is taking place increasingly under the in uence of the market, and that this justi es a model based on economic theory: a decentralized setup in which all agents individually solve their inter-temporal maximization problems, consumers maximizing utility, rms maximizing pro ts and so on. If the markets are competitive, so the argument runs, these agents can take prices as given, but in those instances where markets are not competitive, the optimization has to be done by government or some other higher level authority. But the third voice (that of egalitarian solidarity) is still excluded, leaving the policies that such models underpin wide open to the sorts of nasty surprises that have overtaken Shell and the government in Britain and the public private urban regeneration partnerships in the United States. Two-voice modeling, though an improvement, is still insuf ciently variegated. Like one-voice modeling, it is still wedded to optimization and managerial control, when what is needed is constructive negotiation between all the voices: the democratization, in other words, of decision processes that have been depoliticized and treated as merely technical. This is a topic that, since the debacles over mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) and genetically modi ed crops in Britain, the dismantling of the Millau MacDonald s by the French sheep farmer Jose Bove, the Battles of Seattle and Prague (vehement demonstrations against the World Trade Organization), and a host of similar events around the world, is increasingly on national and international agendas. But, to actually do that democratizing, we have to avoid silencing any of the voices, and that is something that current approaches, being insuf ciently variegated, cannot do. To help clarify what sort of differences a suf ciently variegated framework makes, and to gain a more re exive

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(personal) understanding of what is going on in our own social systems and environments, we can take a close look at the surprisingly complex lives of the seemingly simple folk who live in the Himalayas and the Alps. These people, Cultural Theorists would point out, know something that the single problem-single solution merchants who tend to dominate policy-making in advanced industrialized societies have managed to forget.
Solidarities in Action

Himalayan villagers parcel out their transactions with their physical environment into four distinct solidarities, each of which is characterized by a distinct management style. Agricultural land, for instance, is privately owned whilst grazing land and forests are communally owned. But grazing land and forests do not suffer the tragedy of the commons (see Commons, Tragedy of the, Volume 5; Property Rights and Regimes, Volume 5) because transactions in their products are under the control of a commons managing institution. Villagers appoint forest guardians, erect a social fence (a declared boundary, not a physical construction) and institute a system of nes for those who allow their animals into the forest when access is forbidden, or take structural timber without rst obtaining permission. If the offender is also a forest guardian, the ne is doubled; if children break the rules, their parents have to pay up. Informal though they may seem, and lacking any formal legal status, these arrangements work well in the face-toface setting of a village and its physical resources. Drawing on their home-made conceptions of the natural processes

that are at work (their ethnoecology ), the forest guardians regulate the use of these common property resources by assessing their state of health, year by year or season by season. In other words these transactions are regulated within a framework that assumes, rst, that you can take only so much from the commons and, second, that you can assess where the line between so much and too much should be drawn. The social construction inherent to this transactional realm is that nature is bountiful within knowable limits. This, to make a link with the ecological theories of Holling (1986), is the myth of nature perverse/tolerant (Figure 1). With agricultural land, however, decisions are entirely in the hands of individual owners, and elds (unlike communally owned resources) can quite easily end up belonging to the moneylenders. In recent years, when forests and grazing lands have suffered degradation (for a variety of reasons, not the tragedy of the commons), villagers have responded by shifting some of their transactions from one realm to the other. For instance, they have allowed trees to grow on the banks between their terraced elds (thereby reducing the pressure on the village forest) and they have switched to stall feeding their animals (thereby making more efcient use of the forest and grazing land and receiving copious amounts of manure which they can then carry to their elds). In other words, transactions are parceled out to the management styles that seem appropriate and, if circumstances change, some of those transactions can be switched from one style to another. Since they are subsistence farmers, whose aim is to remain viable over generations (rather than to make a

Asymmetrical transactions Fatalist Hierarchist

Nature capricious Unfettered competition Individualist

Nature perverse/ Tolerant Fettered competition Egalitarian

Nature benign Symmetrical transactions

Nature ephemeral

Figure 1

The Solidarities, their myths of nature and their transactional realms

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killing in any one year) their transactions within their local environment can be characterized as low risk, low reward. However, during those times of the year when there is little farm work to be done, many villagers engage in trading expeditions, or in migrant labor in India. Trading expeditions are family based, family nanced and highly speculative: high risk, high reward. So a farmers individualized transactions, when added together over a full year, constitute a nicely spread risk portfolio. The attitude here (and particularly at the high risk end of the portfolio) is that Fortune favors the brave, Who dares, wins, Theres plenty more sh in the sea . Opportunities, in other words, are there for the taking. The idea of nature here is optimistic, expansive and non-punitive: nature benign (Figure 1). Social scientists in general, and institutional economists in particular, would see these two realms as corresponding to their classic distinction between hierarchies and markets, and would have no difculty in explaining the processes by which some transactions are switched this way or that (though they would be surprised to nd that the hierarchy was a village-level commons managing institution, not the state). But (and this is the essence of the Cultural Theory argument) hierarchies and markets do not exhaust the transactional repertoire of the Himalayan villager. Some collectivized transactions do not involve formal status distinctions (such as those between forest guardians and ordinary villagers) and some individualized transactions are marked by the absence of bidding and bargaining (an essential characteristic of the markets that are generated by the individualist solidarity). The plurality, in other words, is four-fold, not two-fold. In many parts of the Himalayas (especially the Indian Himalayas), village autonomy is always under threat, because powerful outside actors are also laying claim to the forest resources that are so vital to Himalayan farming systems. One very effective response to this external threat has been the Chipko Movement (see Chipko Movement, Volume 5). This is a grassroots and highly egalitarian social movement, in which women (who are largely responsible both for fodder gathering and fuelwood collection) predominate. Chipko means to stick, and the Gandhian strategy is to physically hug the trees, thereby preventing them from being appropriated. Those villagers of a slightly less non-violent disposition actually chase the logging contractors (and the government forestry ofcers who have been corrupted by the contractors) out of the forest with their kukris (long curved knives). In the Narmada Valley, farther to the south (where a vast development project is under way), they have now done the same to the representatives of the World Bank: a South Asian counterpart to the Brent Spar surprise. (Indeed, the World Bank pulled out in 1993 but the project is still

being promoted by Indian State Government and market borrowings.) So far as these threatening external transactions are concerned, it is certainly not a case of plenty more sh in the sea , nor is there even a safe limit, within which the commercial extraction of timber would be sustainable. All external predation is seen as catastrophic in its consequences. Hence the spectacularly uncompromising collectivist response of the tree huggers, whose idea of nature is one in which any perturbation of the present low-key regime is likely to result in irreversible and dramatic collapse: nature ephemeral (Figure 1). Finally, in every village, we may be sure, there will always be some people who sneak wood from the forest when no one is looking, who can never quite get together the capital, the contacts and the oomph to go off on trading expeditions, and who manage somehow not to be around when its all hands to the tree hugging. These are the fatalists: people whose transactions are somehow dictated by the organizational efforts of those who are not themselves fatalists. Theirs is a life in which the world is always doing things to them (sometimes pleasant, sometimes unpleasant) and in which nothing that they do seems to make much difference. Why bother? is the not unreasonable response of the fatalist. If that is how the world is, then learning is not possible and, even if it were, there would be no way of beneting from it. The idea of nature here is one in which things operate without rhyme or reason: a atland in which everywhere is the same as everywhere else: nature capricious (Figure 1).
From Simple to Complex

Completing the typology with these two solidarities (egalitarianism and fatalism) makes some important differences. For instance, once we understand egalitarian solidarity, we can avoid the sorts of surprises that have been visited upon the Brent Spar and the Narmada River Project. And we can see that, only if all the transactions are in the fatalistic realm (the one realm where learning is not possible), would the prevalent assumption (evident, for instance, in the hierarchists diagnosis of the climate change problem) and the IPAT equation (see Modeling Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change, Volume 5) that there is a direct relationship between population increase and environmental degradation hold true. But there is much more to it than this. Change, in the conventional theory, is deterministic. If youre knocked out of hierarchy, youll end up in the market, and vice versa. But, in Cultural Theory, change is indeterministic: leave A and you can end up at B, C or D, and when you leave whichever one of these you have arrived at, there are three possibilities, on and on.

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Conventional theory treats human systems as simple (linear, deterministic, insensitive to initial conditions, equilibrium seeking, and predictable); Cultural Theory treats them as complex (non-linear, indeterministic, sensitive to initial conditions, far from equilibrium, and unpredictable). Simple systems are manageable in the sense that, once we understand enough about them, we can dene some desirable state of affairs (sustainable development is the current favorite) and then steer the totality towards it. But this, as our next example makes clear, is not possible if the system is complex.
A Swiss Example

villagers ensuring that they have the full four-fold repertoire of management styles, and by their being prepared to try a different one whenever the one they are relying on shows signs of no longer being appropriate. The Davosers, like their Himalayan counterparts, have now been in their valley for more than 700 years, without destroying either themselves or their valley in the process. This achievement would not have been possible if they had opted for just one management style, or even for the two that the prevalent orthodoxy allows!
Multi-vocality

Moving from the Himalayas to the Alps, we nd much the same four-fold allocation of transactions, with agricultural land being privately owned and grazing land (and sometimes the forests) being communally owned. But the Swiss forests, unlike those of the Himalayan villagers, are physically sandwiched between the high pastures (communally owned) and the valley oor (privately owned elds, houses and hotels). Over the centuries that the Davos valley has been settled, to take a speci c locality, both the elds and the grazing land have expanded at the expense of the forest. The trees on the steeper slopes have stayed in place, acting both as a source of timber and as a barrier against avalanches. However, it is dif cult to achieve both these functions simultaneously. The Davosers have often set in train changes in the forest s age structure which, decades later, have resulted in exceptional avalanches reaching the valley oor and threatening the destruction of the entire community. Every time this unpleasant surprise has befallen them, the Davosers have responded by switching their forest management onto the all in the same boat egalitarian style. Later, it has sometimes shifted to the hierarchist style, often to the individualist style (with farmers owning long thin strips of forest running all the way from valley oor to alpine pasture), and sometimes to the fatalist style (as happened, for instance, when the avalanche danger was clearly perceived yet extraction continued in response to the demands of various mining booms and, in more recent years, the demand for ski-runs). Surely, you might think, they would have got it right by now. To think that is to assume that there is one right way; but as Cultural Theory shows us, that is not the case. There is no way of ever getting it right, because managing one way inevitably changes the forest, eventually to the point where that way of managing is no longer appropriate. This would happen even if there were no exogenous changes (like the mining and tourist booms) which, of course, there always are (even in seemingly remote places like the Himalayas). Viability can only be achieved, therefore, by covering all the bases: by the

Himalayan and Alpine villages, with their transactions parceled out in these four very different ways, are impressively multi-vocal. More than that, as is evident from the examples of stall feeding and trees on private land (in the Himalayas) and of alternative forest management styles (in the Alps), they have the ability to switch transactions from one way to another whenever it seems likely that this might be more appropriate. Since the behavior of the villagers is continually altering the resource base on which they depend, their villages would not be viable if they did not have this in-built (messy, noisy and argumentative) mechanism. Schapiro (1988) has dubbed this sort of setup (in which each conviction as to how the world is, each myth of nature, is given some recognition) a clumsy institution. This is in contrast to those more elegant, and more familiar, arrangements (tidy, quiet and suavely consensual) in which just one conviction holds sway. The terminology is deliberately counter-intuitive, clumsy institutions having some remarkable properties that are not shared by their unclumsy alternatives. To understand just how remarkable clumsy institutions are, imagine for a moment that you are some God-like experimenter, able to reach out and change this is or that variable in a Himalayan village s environment, or to move it bodily east or west, north or south, across the convoluted landscape. As you bring in the logging contractors, or take it 100 km eastwards or 1000 m higher, the village will shift its transactions this way or that between its four options until it has adapted itself to its changed circumstances. In other words, it will maintain its viability thanks to the very practical learning system that is part and parcel of its fourfold plurality. If the village did not have this plurality, and was an elegant and unclumsy institution, like many national forestry services, including Britain s Forestry Commission (Tomkins, 1989) and the United States Forest Service (Hirt, 1994), it would not be able to do this. Something along these imaginary lines, it turns out, is what has actually happened, and continues to do so. As we go from one Himalayan village to another, the relative strengths of the four ways of organizing vary. Egalitarianism, for instance, is strongest in those parts of the

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Himalayas that are most prone to commercial logging. As one moves eastwards, from India (with its powerful center and its colonial heritage of Reserved Forests) into Nepal and Bhutan, so the Chipko Movement and its counterparts become less of a force to be reckoned with. If the inequitable external threat is absent then so too, it appears, is the communitarian response to it. However, the most dramatic of these variations is northsouth: between the strongly individualized Buddhist villages and the strongly collectivized Hindu villages a day or twos walk downstream. These are Furer-Haimendorfs (1975) adventurous traders and cautious cultivators, respectively: apt characterizations which readily map onto two of the four social beings (individualists and hierarchists, respectively) that we have described above. Cultural Theorists, we should explain, use the term social being to describe the behavior to which an individual must conform, and the convictions that he or she must espouse, to help maintain the form of social solidarity to which he or she belongs. The prime mover, therefore, is not the individual (the psycho-physiological entity) but the form of social solidarity. Thus, the terms hierarchist, individualist, egalitarian, and fatalist denote available roles (or management strategies) that individuals step into, or out
Box 1 A Swiss villagers day During the growing season an individual may on one day milk his cows, cut hay, thin saplings, maintain an avalanche control structure and wash dishes in a restaurant. The cows though privately owned are grazed on pasture owned by a specic set of long-established families. The hay is on his own private eld; the saplings are part of a forest owned by another set of families; the avalanche control structure is on private land but maintained by agreement by the village; and the restaurant is owned by a multinational hotel chain. This framework is fairly stable from season to season but the individual has a very different pattern of activity in the winter when the cows live in his private byre and much of the land is snow covered and barely used unless the valley includes a ski resort. If it does, then he has opportunities for work without leaving the valley. If not then he may leave to work elsewhere, thereby reducing the use of scarce resources at home. Thus in winter the human ecosystem centered on the valley is concurrently simpler and wider. So our Swiss villager has a portfolio of transactions and management styles that uctuates with the seasons and also with the longer-term dynamics (such as those that in altering the age-structure of the forests can eventually shift a whole category of transactions from one style to another). Like his Himalayan counterpart, he owns his hayelds and cows. These are private property; he can buy or sell them acting as an individualist, subscribing to the myth of nature benign.

Fatalism

Hierarchy

Individualism

Egalitarianism

Figure 2 Transitions between solidarities and their associated transactional realms (individuals are able to move without causing change. It is when some transactions are shifted from one realm to another that we get change)

of, as their daily lives, or the changing seasons, take them from one transactional realm to another (Figure 2). (See also Box 1: A Swiss villagers day). Though all four roles are present in both the Buddhist and the Hindu villages, more transactions are in the individualist quadrant in the former, and in the hierarchist quadrant in the latter. Furer-Haimendorf (1975) shows how the small agricultural surpluses of the cautious cultivators become the payloads of the adventurous traders yaks as they set off on their journey into Tibet, and how the salt they bring back eventually nds its way to the cautious cultivators

Coming from an old-established family, he is a member of a forest cooperative (Waldgenossenschaft) that gives him specic rights to cut trees and imposes a duty to maintain the forest. He is also a member of a pasture cooperative (Alpgenossenschaft) which annually decides the grazing season and the number of animals he may graze and requires him to contribute to the cowherds upkeep. These are small-scale hierarchical institutions which have developed over the generations (in between the periods when the forests are privatized and their associated transactions transferred to the more exploitative individualist management style) in response to the limitations as well as the opportunities imposed by the natural environment: nature perverse/tolerant. As a voting member of the commune, he also has a duty to maintain resources that contribute to its survival such as the avalanche control structures that protect houses, elds and roads from damage. This tends to be an egalitarian involvement which recognizes that when it comes to these sorts of hazards, all the members of the community are in the same boat and that each should contribute his equal share: nature ephemeral. Lastly as a dishwasher in a multinationally owned restaurant, he is effectively a replaceable fatalist. His involvement is necessary if the enterprise is to continue but he has no interest in its future nor it in his and he can be paid off at any time (he will almost certainly lose his job at the end of the summer season).

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who cannot produce this vital commodity. The distinctive strategy of each thus makes viable the others, and we begin to see how it is that each village, in adjusting to its circumstances (which include the other villages), creates and takes its place in a social and cultural ecosystem, in which the marked divergence of the parts sustains the whole. Nor is this a fanciful analogy. As we show below, the adventurous traders strategy matches that of the omnivorous and opportunistic r-selected species; the cautious cultivators strategy matches that of the specialized and niche-dependent K-selected species (see r K Strategies, Volume 2). The fatalists do for social systems what compost does for natural systems (provides a generalized resource for renewal). The egalitarians, through their small-scale communal fervor, are creating enclaves of low-level energy (what Marx, 1967, called primitive capital) in places where neither the r-selected nor the K-selected species can make any impression (Holling, 1986; Thompson et al., 1990; Holling et al., 1993). So the ambitious hypothesis that is being sketched here is very different from the way people usually think about the interactions of social and natural systems. There is, on this view, no way of ever getting it right: of bringing the social into long-term harmony with the natural (which, of course, is the whole idea behind sustainable development). Instead, each is a four-fold and plurally responsive system, and their time-lagged interactions ensure that there can be no steady-state outcome. The whole system is in a perpetual unsteady state: changes at each level (the social and the natural) adapting to the other and changing it in the process, thereby setting in motion another set of changes. On and on. Nor are these changes predictable, as they would be if each level had only two possible states: hierarchies and markets, for instance, or, as is discussed below, their ecological analogues. Order without predictability (as opposed to transition from A to B, or oscillation between A and B, that the two-fold hypotheses give us) is the crucial idea behind this Himalayan story.

THEORIES OF CHANGE THAT MAKE CHANGE PERMANENT

Change, Cultural Theory argues, occurs because the four forms of social solidarity are not impervious to the real world. Just because people insist that the world is as their myth of nature tells them it is, it does not follow that the world really is so. If it is, that is ne, but if it is not, they have an uphill struggle. Surprise (the outcome of the ever widening discrepancy between the expected and the actual) is of central importance in dislodging people (and their transactions) from their form of social solidarity. And it is these various mismatches between what a way of life promises and what it delivers that continually tip people (and transactions) out of one form of social solidarity and

into another. Of course, this hypothesis does require that the world, at times and in places, be each of these possible ways: otherwise we would all eventually end up surprised into the single true way. And it would help the surprises to continue indenitely if the world itself kept changing. Neither of these suggestions, some ecologists would argue, is particularly far-fetched. Holling (1986) and Holling et al. (1993) for instance, have elaborated the notion of requisite variety into a powerful critique of the conventional idea that the climax community, the ecosystem in which each specialized species has its stable and ordered niche, is the end of the organizational road. This critique exactly parallels Cultural Theorys dissatisfaction with the conventional hierarchies and markets account of things, in that it argues that there must be four, rather than just two destinations. Hollings critique is that the climax community eventually complexies itself to the point where it undermines its own stability: an inevitable collapse, which has been proved mathematically by May (1982). This does not mean that an entire climax community (the Amazon rain forest, for instance) will suddenly disappear, but it does require any climax community to be patchy: to always include some localized areas in collapse as, for instance, happens when a mature tree crashes to the ground. At this catastrophic moment, all the energy that is tied up in all the niches and interdependencies of the climax community is released. Holling, well aware of the parallel with Schumpeters (1950) theory of economic maturity, collapse and renewal, refers to the transition from the climax community to compost, as creative destruction. Nor, he argues, is this the end of the road. With the whole place suddenly awash with capital (loose energy), the challenge is to x it before it all disappears, by soil leaching, for instance. This, of course, is where the unspecialized and cooperative fence builders (microorganisms mostly) come into their own, gathering up the loose energy into small bundles that, as yet, have no connections with one another. But even this is not the end of the road, because the stage is now set for the appearance of yet different ecological players. These are the unspecialized but opportunistic, fast breeding and highly competitive r-selected species. These generalized exploiters (weeds, rodents and so on) are able to harness all the energy gradients that are now in place between all these unconnected bundles of energy. But these r-selected species, as they exploit and colonize this environment, inevitably begin to push it into a rather more patterned and interconnected state, thereby making it less conducive to their way of doing things and more suited to the sort of energy-conserving strategies that characterize the K-selected species: those specialized, slower breeding and often symbiotic, plants and creatures, which are the vanguard of the complex and increasingly ordered whole that constitutes the climax community.

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Creative destruction

Compost

Climax community
io n

Re

n e w al

Co

ns

v er

at

tipped out of one quadrant of the Cultural Theory scheme and into one of the other three, it comes as something of a shock: a surprise. Surprise, in other words is always relative, which explains why, whenever something unexpected befalls us, there is always someone who saw it coming! The theory of surprise (Thompson and Tayler, 1986; Thompson et al., 1990) is built on this relativistic, but far from unconstrained, foundation: an event is never surprising in itself; it is potentially surprising only in relation to a particular set of convictions about how the world is; it is actually surprising only if it is noticed by the holder of that particular set of convictions.

Pioneer community

Enclaves of low level energy

Exploitation

Figure 3 The complex critique of the conventional assumptions about natural systems (redrawn from Holling, 1986 to be homologous with Figures 1 and 2)

In other words, once you bump up the number of ecological strategies from two to four, there is no end to the road. Instead, there is a never ending set of transitions (twelve in all) that exactly parallels (in terms of dynamics, not substance) the social transitions of Cultural Theory. Holling goes on to argue that, while all twelve of these transitions do happen, there is a tendency for some to predominate at certain stages, thereby creating a fairly regular sequence of transitions: from specialized interdependence (the climax community) to unstructured fragmentation (compost) to unspecialized cooperation (energy xing) to unspecialized competition (the pioneer community) to specialized interdependence (the climax community, again) and so on. He calls this sequence an ecocycle, and its description (which can be supplemented with descriptions of all the other cycles that are possible but, Holling believes, less pronounced) helps us to see the gulf (some might use the expression paradigm shift ) that separates this model of change from the conventional one (Figure 3). Is there, then, a socio-cultural equivalent of Holling s ecocycle? Yes, there is, and it can be most easily set out by reference to the theory of surprise: the theory that provides the bridge between the institutional and the natural: between us and the rest of nature.

For instance, an individualist, whose myth assures him that an ecosystem is so robust that it will recover from any perturbation, will be surprised when it collapses catastrophically. Similarly, a hierarchist who is convinced that all ecosystems can be managed, with predictable results, will be surprised when this turns out to be untrue. Conversely, an egalitarian, who believes that nature is precarious, will be surprised when those who have disregarded precautions do not reap the expected disaster. And a fatalist will be surprised if bene ts, which he expects to be randomly distributed, continue to arrive. Thus, surprises may be either pleasant or unpleasant, and a never ending sequence from one myth of nature to another may be proposed. Though all twelve transitions (see Figure 2) are possible, and we cannot say for sure what their order will be, we can spin a story to help us understand what is going on by privileging one particular sequence of possible changes so as to generate the sociocultural analogue of Holling s ecocycle. Let us start with nature benign. In this state of the world, there is an excess of opportunity over existing investment, and this state, when interrogated by the myriad actions of individual agents, results in a positive-sum game in which a hidden hand keeps adding to the welfare of the totality. As long as the excess continues (that is, as long as there is no rim to the deep basin that contains the ball), and learning by experimentation continues, we have the state of affairs assumed by neoclassical economics. But, as they say in show business, Nothing recedes like success and eventually exploitative behavior causes the upper edge of the basin to turn downwards: nature perverse/tolerant. The excess, for some actors, has now vanished. Transaction costs rise steeply, innovation brings losses more often than pro ts, and markets fail. This is the transition from markets to hierarchies described by the new institutional economics (Williamson, 1975). Hierarchically sustained transactions, in their turn, transform the environment that ushered them in and

ALWAYS LEARNING, NEVER GETTING IT RIGHT

A myth of nature provides its holder with a way of seeing the world and with a way of not seeing it. This means that, if the world happens not to be the way the myth holder is convinced it is, he or she will not notice this discrepancy straight away. Enlightenment, therefore, is always time lagged and, since it results in the enlightened one being

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eventually the pocket of stability implodes: nature capricious. Both hierarchy and individualism (which has, of course, survived in the pocket) now start to lose their transactional grip and the world becomes a confusing, contradictory and unpredictable place: a place of which the fatalists attitude; Why bother? makes perfect sense. This atland, however, is less hostile to those small, egalitarian and self-disciplined groups that strive to bring their needs down within what they perceive to be Mother Natures frugal limits, and these groups are therefore well placed to take advantage (though that is not quite the right word) of the recessive realities that are about to overwhelm the conventional institutional arrangements: the hierarchies and the markets. In this next stage, nature ephemeral, all increases in scale bring punitive diseconomies, and the economy (like the universe that contains it) winds down and down. The entropy principle (Georgescu-Roegen, 1971) and the dictum small is beautiful (Schumacher, 1973) make economic sense (see Small is Beautiful, Volume 5). Yet, no matter how lightly everyone treads on the Earth, the ball eventually rolls down the slope, coming to rest in some other basin (nature benign ) and we are back where we began: in a positive sum world that rewards the bold and skilful and that brings increasing returns to those who are prepared to act expansively.

Throughout this process, changes in the environment result from the actions of those whose strategy happens to be best suited to making the most of the environment in which they nd themselves. As more and more of these strategists act, these endogenous changes accumulate, and the environment passes over a threshold into a state better suited to one of the other strategies, ad in nitum. Though this complex model may start at the same place as the simple one and have the same dynamics, its paths are innitely more surprising and unpredictable. In this inherently complex system, in which ecological and sociocultural components interact, each myth of nature captures some aspects of the world at some time. No one of them is ever right all the time and everywhere, and this means that each has its vital part to play. Clumsy institutions nurture that vitality; elegant ones destroy it.

REFERENCES
Brion, D J (1992) The Meaning of the City: Urban Redevelopment and the Loss of Community, Indiana Law Rev., 25(3), 685 740. Clements, F E (1916) Plant Succession, an Analysis of the Development of Vegetation, Carnegie Inst. Wash. Publ., 242, 1 512. Durkheim, E (1893) De la Division du Travail Sociale: e tude sur lOrganisation de Soci et es Sup erieurs, Alcan, Paris.

Fischer, F and Hajer, M A (1999) Living with Nature: Environmental Politics as Cultural Discourse, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Georgescu-Roegen, N (1971) The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Hirt, P W (1994) A Conspiracy of Optimism, Nebraska University Press, Lincoln, NE. Holling, C S (1986) The Resilience of Terrestrial Ecosystem: Local Surprise and Global Change, in Sustainable Development of the Biosphere, eds W C Clark and R E Munn, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 292 320. Holling, C S, Gunderson, L, and Peterson, G (1993) Comparing Ecological and Social Systems, Beijer Discussion Paper Series No. 36, Stockholm Beijer International Institute of Ecological Economics. Lindblom, C (1977) Politics and Markets: The Worlds PoliticalEconomic System, Basic Books, New York. Maine, H S (1861) Ancient Law, John Murray, London. Marx, K (1859/1967) Capital, Basic Books, New York. May, R (1972) Will a Large Complex System be Stable? Nature, 238, 413 14. Odum, E P (1969) The Strategy of Ecosystem Development, Science, 164, 262 270. Price, M F and Thompson, M (1997) The Complex Life: Human Land uses in Mountain Ecosystems, Global Ecol. Biogeogr. Lett., 6, 77 90. Rayner, S and Malone, E L (1998) Human Choice and Climate Change, Battelle Press, Columbus, OH. Schapiro, M (1988) Judicial Selection and the Design of Clumsy Institutions, South. Calif. Law Rev., 61, 1555 1569. Schumacher, E F (1973) Small is Beautiful: a Study of Economics as if People Mattered, Blond and Briggs, London. Schumpeter, J A (1950) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Harper and Row, New York. Thompson, M, Ellis, R, and Wildavsky, A (1990) Cultural Theory, Westview, Boulder, CO. Thompson, M and Tayler, P (1986) The Surprise Game: an Exploration of Constrained Relativism, Warwick Papers in Management, No. 1, School of Industrial and Business Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry. Tompkins, S (1989) Forestry in Crisis, Christopher Helm, London. Tonnies, F (1887) Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Wissenschaftlich, Darmstadt, translated by C P Loomis (1957) as Community and Society, Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, MI. Turner, II, B L, Clark, W C, Kates, R W, Richards, J F, Matthews, J T, Meyer, W B et al. (1990) The Earth as Transformed by Human Action, Cambridge University Press, New York. von Furer-Haimendorf, C (1975) Himalayan Traders: Life in Highland Nepal, John Murray, London. Weber, M (1922) Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Mohr, Tubingen, translated by E Bischoff et al. (1978) Economy and Society: an Outline of Interpretive Sociology, University of California Press, Berkeley. Williamson, O (1975) Markets and Hierarchies, Analysis and Anti-Trust Implications: a Study in the Economics of Internal Organization, Free Press, New York.

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Management of Nuclear Wastes

see Nuclear Waste: Geological Issues (Volume 3)

Mitigation
see Adaptation Strategies (Opening essay, Volume 4)

discussed. These dimensions relate to the interactions between humankind and the global ecosystem. How do human activities change our environment, how are humans affected by changes in our environment, and how does humankind respond to these changes? This contribution focuses on the behavior of humans in relation to their environment. Moreover, two fundamental related issues are discussed: Given our limited knowledge of reality, we have to make all kinds of subjective assumptions about the functioning of human and natural systems in order to make decisions. How can models be of help for decision-making when subjectivity is unavoidable in developing models? On the macro-scale, phenomena are observed which are the result of actions of agents on lower levels such as of households, rms, organizations and nations. How can we explore future developments of these macro-scale phenomena?

Modeling Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change

Marco A Janssen
Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands

The history of humankind is a continuing record of interactions between peoples efforts to improve their well being and the environments ability to sustain these endeavors. Environmental constraints have led to innovations and social development, as well as social stagnation and human suffering. While the interactions throughout most of history were on a local scale, during the last decades awareness has grown so that the complexity and increasing scale of the interactions are demanding new forms of environmental management. New threats to mankind emerge, such as climate change, acid rain, ozone depletion, resource exhaustion, reduction of biodiversity, and limits to the availability of food and unpolluted fresh water. In fact, the globe is changing rapidly due to human activities, and humankind is, and will increasingly be, suffering from global environmental change. One response from the scienti c community to understand the relations between human activities and the environment is the use of modeling, that is, constructing formal descriptions of natural and societal change and their mutual interactions. Although making accurate predictions for long term future developments is inherently impossible, models can help us to show the interdependence of various activities and consequences in time and space. In that way, models can be used to communicate information and insights from the scienti c community to policy makers and other stakeholders. A number of fundamental issues in modeling the human dimensions of global environmental change are

Although there is an increased use of modeling human dimensions of global environmental change, these issues are not well captured in current mainstream modeling practices. These issues are discussed in the context of developments in modeling human dimensions during the last 30 years and address promising developments for the future. There are many kinds of models. A general classication is the distinction between formal mathematical models and non-formal models such as stories and cartoons. Sometimes people are role models of how one might live, such as Nelson Mandela or Claudia Schiffer. Only the formal models are dealt with here. The advantage of these formal models is that they are explicit and many of them are computer models that can be used to do repeated experiments. Formal models are used in science very frequently, especially since the seminal work of Isaac Newton, more than 300 years ago. Formal models were mainly used to describe natural systems, such as calculating the trajectories of cannon balls or celestial bodies. Due to the success of these models, mathematical models were increasingly used in social science, especially in economics. However, human beings are not similar to cannon balls. Human beings can decide to obey trafc laws, but cannon balls cannot decide to obey the law of gravity. The application of models from physics to social phenomena is problematic, but is still widely used. This article addresses new ways of modeling social phenomena by using multi-agent modeling to simulate interactions between agents, which are behavioral entities such as persons, households and rms. But rst the eld of modeling human dimensions of global environmental change is discussed.

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Currently, models are widely used to describe the relations between human activities and the environment. Moreover, these models have often played a central role in setting environmental problems on the policy agenda, by exploring the consequences of alternative scenarios and by designing acceptable solutions for managing environmental problems. An example of an environmental problem for which the use of models is central is climate change. The possibility of human induced climate change is actually a policy problem that was put on the agenda after alarming model-based studies. Svante Arrhenius estimated at the end of the 19th century the consequences of a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide on the global mean temperature to be about 3 C. Since the late 1950s, atmospheric carbon dioxide has been measured systematically, and currently the level is about 30% higher than pre-industrial levels. During the last 30 years, more detailed climate system models have been developed, and the results are compared with the increasing amount of (satellite) data. Still, these models are not able to describe observed climate accurately on a detailed spatial level. Besides increased efforts in modeling the climate systems, models of the human dimensions of climate change have been developed. These models were used to speculate on the possible consequences of climate change on economic growth, agricultural production and human health. Furthermore, models were developed to estimate the costs of mitigating so-called greenhouse gases. The impacts of climate change on various social and ecological factors are based on laboratory experiments, extrapolations from eld studies, historical (regional) climate-change analogues and expert judgements. The increased insights into potential impacts of human induced climate change led to the current high position of the climate change issue on the policy agenda. Policy decisions related to climate change are mainly determined by model outcomes. Many uncertainties, speculative assumptions and lack of information surround these outcomes. Thus, because the potential consequences of climate change as estimated by models are so severe, the precautionary principle is often advocated to reduce potential risks. Nevertheless, it is clear that the many uncertainties that surround the model outcomes have generated an intensive debate. Some scholars highlight the potential benets of climate change on, for example, agricultural production, due to higher levels of atmospheric CO2 and more suitable temperatures in Canada and Russia. Others argue that human induced climate change will not occur due to damping feedbacks of the biogeochemical cycles. Various scholars warn of positive feedbacks that may amplify climate change to catastrophic levels. The mainstream opinion on the size and impacts of climate change is represented by the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international scientic organization established in 1988 to assess scientic research on climate change. In

1995, the IPCC concluded that the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human inuence on the climate. Although science is not a democratic process, the assessments of the IPCC try to synthesize a mainstream picture of the climate change issue which can be used in the international policy process to formulate policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Such an authorized synthesized picture on the problem is desired by policy makers, since they have difculty in handling the many uncertainties and complexities of the climate change problem. The modelbased analysis of the IPCC suggests objective assessment. The idea that models can create objective predictions of the future is widespread among stakeholders who deal with global environmental change. Some stakeholders who doubt this objectivity do not want to use any model analysis at all. However, the traditional view that models guarantee or suggest objectivity is outdated. Model analyses, especially related to human dimensions, are highly inuenced by subjective assumptions and interpretations. The challenge is to design ways to use models in such a way that they improve our understanding of reality. Improved mental models can improve decision-making. Therefore, the model-projections itself are not the most important element of model; rather it is the modeling process and the end use of models. This debate mirrors the discussion on world models during the early 1970s.

WORLD MODELS
Integrated models addressing the human dimensions of global environmental change elaborate a tradition that was founded in the early 1970s by the Club of Rome (see Club of Rome, Volume 4). Over the past 30 years many models have been built in the tradition of system dynamics, as well as other modeling techniques. In the early days the models of the Club of Rome were criticized as being based on too few empirical data, too high an aggregation level, and too many subjective assumptions. The criticism of the earlier models still holds for many of the current modeling activities. The models of the Club of Rome were the so-called World models. Jay Forrester developed the World 2 model during the summer of 1970 based on his system dynamics approach. According to this approach, the world can be described through a conglomeration of interacting feedback loops. The World 2 model can be considered as a rst sketch of a world model, without empirically based estimation of suggested causal relations. A larger project, led by Dennis Meadows, resulted in the World 3 model, and the inuential book Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972). The World 3 model contains the resource sectors, population, pollution, capital and agriculture on an aggregated global level. The standard run of the World models is one of growth followed by collapse

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Population Food Industrial production Pollution Resources

1900

2000

2100

Figure 1 Standard Run of World 3. (Adapted from Meadows et al., 1972)

especially important for the linkages between subsystems. Examples were the effects of pollution on health, the interaction between demographic and economic dynamics, the role of technological innovations in resource availability, and the relations between material and energy inputs and economic output. Second, the complexity of the underlying subsystems and the linkages made it questionable whether a high aggregation level can lead to meaningful and relevant interpretations and results. These problems of subjectivity and aggregated relations are still relevant for the current use of models. Although the use of models has increased, we still have no satisfactory solutions of how to manage incomplete information and insights, large uncertainties and different scales. This is illustrated here by the characteristics of the current generation of global models.
Integrated Assessment Models of Global Change

(Figure 1). The collapse occurs because of non-renewable depletion. The industrial capital stock grows to a level that requires enormous input of resources, more and more capital must be used to obtain those resources, leading to less re-investment, and nally the collapse of the industrial base. Population decreases when the death rate is driven upward by a lack of food and health services. If the resource base is assumed to be much larger, collapse happens only a few years later due to food shortages and/or high pollution levels. Although it was recognized that there are various shortcomings in the models, Meadows and his colleagues argued that the model behavior was fundamental and general, and sufciently developed to be of some use to decision-makers.
Managing Uncertainty, Complexity and Incomplete Information

Numerous scholars have criticized the World-model studies. Economist WD Nordhaus classied the World 2 study as misleading since it was not empirically tested enough and ignored mainstream economic insights. Other scholars concluded that due to the scarcity of relevant empirical information, relationships in the world models are subjective. Given the uncertainties, other sets of equally plausible assumptions can lead to a completely different picture. In fact, the outcomes of the models are largely the mental models of the model builders. Some of the criticism was misplaced. The model outputs were interpreted as predictions, not merely as scenarios, i.e., what if futures. So, when the predictions did not come true, scientists were blamed for inaccurate doomsday forecasts. Actually, the Limits to Growth scenarios had a profound effect on the public and government. Scientic criticism on the World models of 30 years ago mainly concentrate on two topics. First, subjective assumptions had to be made about model relations and parameters due to incomplete knowledge or even ignorance. This was

Global modeling re-emerged during the early 1990s as integrated assessment modeling, mainly because of the importance of the global climate change problem (Janssen, 1998). Integrated assessment models try to describe quantitatively as much as possible of the cause effect relationships and the cross-linkages and interactions between the elements of the world system. Integrated assessment models are usually composed from meta-models of various subsystems. A meta-model is a simplied, condensed version of a more complicated and detailed model, which provides approximately the same behavior as the expert model from which it is extracted. Integrated assessment models are one of the tools in the toolkit of integrated assessment. Other tools are policy exercises, dialogues between science and policy people, data analysis, scenario analysis and expert models. Integrated assessment is therefore a broader approach aimed at helping prioritize policy-making and research activities and giving insights into uncertainties and missing links of knowledge. It is used in a process whereby knowledge from a variety of scientic disciplines is combined, interpreted and communicated, with various stakeholders such as scientists, policy makers and non-government organizations involved. The integrated models that are used describe the whole cause effect chain from economics, energy production, emissions, land use changes, to changes in the biogeochemical cycles, the climate system, and impacts of climate change on human activities and the environment. There is no single approach to capturing the complexity of the system as a whole. In general, two types of approaches can be considered. The rst approach, process-oriented modeling, is rooted in natural science and simulates the consequences of economic development on energy production, land use changes, biogeochemical cycles, climate system and impacts of climate change. The models are

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often detailed at the spatial and temporal level. The other approach, cost bene t modeling, is rooted in economics and maximizes discounted long-term welfare. Models using this second approach describe the physical consequences in less detail, but express the impacts of climate change and the efforts to reduce emissions in monetary units in order to derive an optimal response by balancing costs and benets. Both approaches are confronted with the same dilemmas as the World models of the early 1970s. Although much more empirical information is available, many components in models are surrounded by large uncertainties. Therefore, subjective assumptions have to be made. Also the complexity of scales remains an unsolved issue. Besides these problems, most integrated assessment models have limited abilities to capture the broad human dimensions of climate change. The models are suitable for generating projections of economic output and the costs of climate change, but they are limited in many ways. Simple macro relations are assumed between economic activities and physical processes, but empirical insights are conicting. Current (economic) models focus on utility of consumption as the driving force of human behavior, although it is questionable how this is related to the quality of life. There is limited insight into the physical dimension of satisfying human needs, but this understanding is needed before something plausible can be said about decoupling economic development and environmental pressure. Current integrated models include only the free market as an institution, although there are many other forms of economic organization and institutions. One of the reasons for the limitations of the current generation of integrated models is the use of a rather mechanistic modeling paradigm, which is not able to include novelty, evolution and surprise. The role of modeling paradigms is now discussed in more detail.

MODELING PARADIGMS
A lot of controversies among modeling studies are caused by the difference in modeling approach that is adopted by the various scientists. Each modeling approach, or in a broader context, each modeling paradigm, involves its own set of theories, concepts, mathematical techniques, and accepted procedures for constructing and testing models. We can distinguish between deterministic and stochastic models, simulation and optimization models, reductionistic and integrated models, linear and non-linear models, one-agent and multi-agent models, and so on. Instead of discussing all kinds of possible paradigms, the difference between the reductionistic Newtonian approach and the complex adaptive systems approach is examined. This illustrates the transition in science that is currently occurring and explains fundamental differences on how to use models for assessing the future.

Mathematical modeling has long been inuenced by physical science, which has developed a mechanistic, reversible, reductionistic and equilibrium-based explanation of the world. This proved to be very successful in calculating trajectories of moving objects (e.g., cannon balls) and predicting the positions of celestial bodies. The work of Isaac Newton, culminating in the Principia Mathematica Philophiae Naturalis in the late 17th century, was, and still is, very inuential. The associated rational and mathematical way of describing the world around us was also applied in the social sciences, economics and biology. Despite the fact that later developments in the natural sciences seriously constrained the applicability of the mechanistic paradigm, its relative simplicity had a great appeal to scientists from various disciplines working with models. However, despite the widespread use of this approach, the mechanistic paradigm is increasingly criticized. The foundations of the mechanistic view: reversibility, reductionistic, equilibrium-based and controllable experiments, have faded away in the light of a number of new scientic insights. First, the discovery of the Second Law of Thermodynamics brought down the notion of reversibility. The Second Law states that the entropy of a closed system is increasing. This means that heat ows from hot to cold, so that less useful energy remains. One of the consequences of the Second Law is the irreversibility of system behavior and the single direction of time. Changes within systems cannot reverse back just like that (irreversible). This is in contrast to many mechanistic models, in which time can easily be reversed to calculate previous conditions. Second, the equilibrium view of species was brought down by Charles Darwins book on the origin of species during the middle of the 19th century. The static concept of unchanging species was replaced by a dynamic concept of evolution by natural selection and adaptation of species, thereby fundamentally changing our view of nature. Natural systems are in continuous disequilibrium, being interdependent and constantly adapting to changing circumstances. Third, the theories of quantum mechanics have confronted us with a fundamental uncertainty regarding knowledge about systems, especially on the level of atoms and particles. The uncertainty principle of Heisenberg is well known, stating that it is impossible to simultaneously measure the position in space and momentum (mass times velocity) of any particle. The statement by Laplace in the early 19th century that if every position of every atom was known, the future might be predicted exactly, became therefore a lost illusion. Moreover, the notion of fundamental uncertainty implied that fully controlled experiments are strictly speaking not possible. Notwithstanding the fact that these developments in the natural sciences changed our perception of the world, (mathematical) models are still mainly based on

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a mechanistic view of systems. For example, current mainstream economics is based on its success during the period after the Second World War, which was characterized by stable economic growth. Technology could seemingly handle any difculty that came along. Afuence was seen as growing and permanent, and the standard of living, it was believed, would continue to improve for individuals and generations. The world economy was a place of simple equilibria and linear responses. Costbenet analysis, optimization and econometric models seemed to be quite appropriate. Since the 1970s, various events have made us aware of the non-linearity of economic systems. The oil crisis ended unlimited economic growth, the Berlin wall collapsed in 1989, the Asian nancial crisis at the end of the 1990s, the various crises on the stock markets, and so on. The economic system seems to be characterized by unstable states, non-linear responses and unpredictability. Still, mainstream economics uses its successful tools of the early days, probably because of their analytical power; certainly not because of their ability to explain reality. Increasing numbers of economists are trying new tools to explain the observed behavior of economic systems. This has led to the study of non-linear dynamics and evolutionary processes as emerging elds in economics although not always accepted by mainstream economists. This new type of economics studies the formation of patterns, evolution of economic systems, endogenous technologies, and so on. Furthermore, next to analytical tools, this new eld of economics uses computers as a kind of laboratory to test hypotheses. The emergence of new ways of studying the world around us has also emerged in other disciplines where studies are made of the origins of order, self-organization, emergence of structures, adaptation of agents in a changing environment, and many more new ideas. The general focus of this new modeling paradigm is to study how systems change and organize their components to adapt themselves to the problems posed by their surroundings. Examples of these systems are economies, ecosystems, immune and nervous systems, organisms and societies. Although various scholars long ago discussed the importance of studying the evolution of systems, the rapid developments of the computer have provided scientists with a new tool in recent decades, which can be used to investigate evolution, self-organization, interactions between agents and emergence of structures on a macro scale by simple local rules. These systems can be grouped under the common name complex adaptive systems. They are studied by a number of new computation-based modeling tools, including genetic algorithms, cellular automata, neural networks, and articial life forms. The characteristics of these new types of tools are illustrated using one of these tools: genetic algorithms. Genetic algorithms have been developed to simulate the process

of natural selection by considering a population of agents producing offspring who are similar, but not identical, to their parents. This process depends on three genetic operators: selection, crossover, and mutation. Selection means that the genetic algorithm selects n copies of the strings (genetic code) in the population by a random process that favors the most t. Subsequently, these copies are probabilistically paired in a mating process whereby each pair produces two offspring by means of crossover and mutation. Crossover means that two offspring are created with a certain probability that the genetic information is crossed over; otherwise, the offspring are identical to the parents. In the case of crossover, the parent strings of genetic information are split randomly and are swapped to shape two new strings. Each element of the genetic information has a small probability of being altered. This mutation is independent of what happens with the other genetic information. Due to their adaptive characteristics, genetic algorithms are powerful tools for improving and nding good solutions even in complex changing environments. Moreover, genetic algorithms are based on irreversible changes, stochastic processes and evolution (see Resilience, Volume 2). Genetic algorithms are one of the computational tools used for developing models to study complex adaptive systems, which emerged as a new eld in science. Since the late 1980s, the Santa Fe Institute has provided a prime focus for exploring and deepening the insights from complex adaptive system studies and provided new opportunities for transdisciplinary studies (Waldrop, 1992). It is expected that the study of complex adaptive systems will become an important eld in transdisciplinary environmental science. The Resilience Alliance is one of the rst international communities to study environmental science from this new perspective. An overview of their work is given in Gunderson and Holling (2001).
Validity of Models

An important difference between the two modeling paradigms is how to use models, and how to validate models. From the viewpoint of mechanistic explanations of reality models are valid when predictions generated by the model are not rejected. An example of this Popperian type of validation is the development of an econometric model. The timeseries of data is split into two. One part is used to estimate the model and to generate predictions, and the second part to test the predictions of the constructed model. This empirical validation leads to problems according to the complex adaptive systems paradigm, which focuses on evolving structures and is often based on qualitative insights. Since small differences in initial values can lead to large output differences, models of complex adaptive systems are not suitable to generate predictions. In fact, this problem goes back to the classical three-body problem (e.g., the system involving EarthMoonSun), which

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has been studied extensively with a variety of methods beginning with Newton. Despite the large number of studies, no complete analytic solution in closed form has been found. Furthermore, for some initial conditions this system is found to produce chaotic unpredictable behavior. This example shows that when interactions among agents are taken into account, the Newtonian approach does not work. Therefore, validation in this line of modeling is based on expert judgements and relations with theoretical insights. This type of validation can be called conceptual validation. In fact, validation is not a test, but a subjective process. The difference between opinions on how to measure the quality of models leads also to differences in how to use models. According to the Newtonian modeling paradigm, a model that is tested empirically and is validated can be used to make accurate and objective predictions. However, according to the complex adaptive system perspective, models can only be used to study qualitative structures, and should be used interactively to be able to exchange insights and stimulate discussion on uncertainties. In the physical sciences, one no longer refers to model validation, but rather to model performance, which is provided by statistical measures such as the root-mean-square differences between model predictions and observed values. If one wants to describe the orbits of planets, a mechanistic model is a perfect tool. Mechanistic models are even suitable tools when one wants to send men to the Moon. But in situations of many uncertainties and surprises, such tools will not work. In the case of living beings, mechanistic approaches are of limited explanatory power. In the rest of this article modeling human dimensions of global environmental change from the perspective of complex adaptive systems is discussed. From this new perspective, we look at how to design and use models for exploring the future. But rst, one of the main seeds of uncertainty and subjective assumptions is discussed: stability characteristics of systems.

The myth of stability can be represented graphically as a ball at the bottom of a valley (Figure 2a). Perturbations only temporarily knock the ball away from the bottom of the valley. An implicit assumption of this myth is that systems have the capacity to damp all kind of disturbances. An alternative myth is the obverse, namely the myth of instability. Systems are assumed to be very sensitive to disturbances. Every disturbance can lead to a catastrophe. Applied to environmental issues, the myth of instability explains why some people argue that human activities should not be allowed to disturb the natural system. Any degree of pollution or degradation of extraction can lead to a collapse of the system. This myth can be visualized by a ball on a peak (Figure 2b). Any perturbation can lead the ball to roll down the slope. A third myth is in between the myths of stability and instability, namely a system is assumed to be stable within limits. When the system is managed well, the system can absorb small perturbations. This myth can be visualized as a ball in the valley between two peaks (Figure 2c). A more advanced framework is to consider multiple stable states. As depicted in Figure 2(d), this myth can be represented as a number of peaks and valleys. The ball is resting in a valley and is able to absorb a certain degree of disturbance. However, an extreme disturbance can push the ball over a peak such that it will rest in another valley, an alternative equilibrium state. Examples of these multiple states are lakes, which can ip from an oligotrophic to a eutrophic state due to inputs of phosphates, and rangelands that ip from a productive cattle-grazing system into a less productive rangeland dominated by woody vegetation, triggered by variability in rainfall. A myth of systems that is more advanced, and lies in line with the complex adaptive system modeling paradigm, is the myth of resilience.

MYTHS OF SYSTEMS
Different perceptions of reality can be visualized by different myths of stability, that is the perception of how systems function. According to the equilibrium myth, systems are in equilibrium. External effects can push the system briey out of equilibrium, but it automatically returns back to the previous equilibrium situation. This myth corresponds very well with the Newtonian-modeling paradigm. Not only the natural system is considered to be in a natural equilibrium, but also the economic system of supply and demand is in equilibrium due to control of the invisible hand. This metaphor from economist Adam Smith, proposed at the end of the 18th century, was a powerful explanation of micro-behavior in order to describe an elegant mechanical description of the macro-level of economic behavior.
(a) (b) (c)

(d)

Figure 2 Myths of nature: (a) nature is stable; (b) nature is unstable; (c) nature is stable within limits; (d) nature has different stability domains

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Myth of Resilience

The myth of resilience does not only consider the balls moving up and down the peaks and valleys, but also considers possible movements of the peaks and valleys themselves. In this evolutionary picture stability domains can shrink, and disturbances that previously could be absorbed no longer can be. This view has important implications for managing systems. From the perspective of the previous myth of systems, systems could be known perfectly. Surprises may lead to changes of management, because the balls moved in another valley, but in principle, management was simply a matter of controlling the system. From the perspective of an evolving landscape, one has to manage a system in the face of fundamental uncertainties over the functioning of the system. One continually observes the system in order to respond adequately. Moreover, small human-induced perturbations are supported in order to learn from the system. This type of management is called adaptive management (see Adaptive Environmental Management, Volume 4). Holling (1986) has proposed a framework for resilience to explain the transitions in behavior of the system. He distinguishes four basic functions common to all complex systems, and a spiraling evolutionary path through them (Figure 3). This evolutionary cycle can be used to explain transitions in social systems, as well as in ecosystems. The central idea is that the four-phase adaptive cycle emphasizes a loop from conservation to two phases of destruction and reorganization in which innovation and

nservation Co

chance assume dominant roles. The reorganization phase occurs when a rare and unexpected intervention or event shapes a new future. In this state, the system is most likely to be transformed by innovation, and agents have the greatest potential to inuence the future of the system. When the agents do not react properly to changes in the system, it can ip into a new kind of system. As mentioned before, the landscape is changing. This has much to do with different speeds of change in the various scales of systems. For example, due to phosphorus accumulation in sediments of lakes, recycling of phosphorus from these sediments can lead to surprises. The slow variable, the sediment, can reduce the capability of the lake to absorb an external disturbance. The equilibrium levels of concentration of phosphorus in the water, the fast variable, can therefore change due to changes in the slow variable (Gunderson and Holling, 2001). According to the myth of resilience, problems could be caused by local human inuences that slowly accumulate to trigger sudden abrupt changes that may affect the vitality of societies. There are counteractive forces that give ecological systems the resilience and adaptability to deal with considerable change, and that provide people with the capability to innovate and create. However, nature, people, and economies are suddenly now coevolved on a planetary scale, each affecting the others in such novel ways, and on such a large scale, that large surprises may overwhelm the adaptive and innovative capabilities of people. One challenge of sustainable development is, therefore, how to stimulate coevolution of human activities and environmental change.
Different Perspectives on the Problem of Climate Change

Stored capital

organizat i Re

ti o

E x p lo it a

R el

ea

se

r
Connectedness

Figure 3 The dynamics of a system as it is dominated by each of four processes: rapid growth (r ), conservation (K ), release ( ), and reorganization (a). The arrows indicate the speed of the cycle. The short, closely spaced arrows indicate a slow change, while the long arrows indicate rapid change. The cycle reects systemic change in the amount of accumulated capital (nutrients, resources) stored by the dominant structuring process in each phase, and the degree of connectedness within the system. The exit from the cycle at the left of the gure indicates the time at which a systemic reorganization into a less or more productive and organized system is most likely to occur. (Adapted from Gunderson and Holling, 2001)

The discussion of myths shows various possible subjective interpretations of reality. The importance of different perspectives for modeling the human dimensions of global environmental change is now illustrated. There are various concepts designed to classify different worldviews. Like the case of modeling paradigms, there is no true classication of worldviews. A contribution, which gives a general description of perspectives on natural and human systems and social relations, has been made by Michael Thompson and his colleagues in their cultural theory (Thompson et al., 1990). This theory has been used to classify different types of institutional designs in relation to global environmental change. The cultural theory has been an inspiration for implementing worldviews in formal models, because it includes perspectives on human as well as natural systems, it claims generality, and its explanation of perspectives rationalities is deterministic. The cultural theory combines anthropological insights with ecological insights, resulting in different cultural types.

on

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The three main worldviews in the Cultural Theory are the following types: 1. Individualists assume that nature provides an abundance of resources, and remains stable under human interventions. A responsive management style is advocated. Egalitarians assume that nature is highly unstable, and a small human intervention may lead to complete collapse. A preventive management style is preferred. Hierarchists assume that nature is stable in most circumstances but can collapse if it crosses the limits of its capacity. Therefore, control is advocated as a management style.

2.

3.

As discussed earlier, human induced climate change is a topic surrounded with many uncertainties. It is, therefore, an excellent example to illustrate how worldviews
18

can be quantied to simulate alternative futures based on different perceptions of reality. Such an analysis has been made by Janssen and de Vries (1998) who developed a simple integrated ecological economic model for which they implemented three versions based on alternative assumptions on climate sensitivity, technological change, mitigation costs, and damage costs due to climate change. Egalitarians, for example, assume high climate sensitivity, high damage costs, low technological development, and low mitigation costs. For management styles, they assume different strategies for investments and reductions of emissions of carbon dioxide. By contrast, the individualist, for example, assumes a strategy that maximizes economic growth, and emissions are reduced only if a certain threshold of economic damage is exceeded. The hierarchist tries to balance economic growth and climate change by assuming the IPCC estimate of climate sensitivity.

Fossil CO2 emissions (Gt C)

16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2

Utopia Dystopia

0 2000 2010 2020 2030 2040 2050 2060 2070 2080 2090 2100

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Time in years
4.5 4.0 3.5 3.0 2.5 2.0 1.5 1.0 0.5 0.0 2000 2010 2020 2030 2040 2050 2060 2070 2080 2090 2100 Utopia Dystopia

Temperature change (degrees Celsius)

(b)

Time in years

Figure 4 Expected carbon dioxide emissions (a) and temperature increase according to the egalitarian utopia and a possible dystopia (b) (individualistic management style in an unstable global system)

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Suppose that all of the agents in a model world share one of the three extreme worldviews. If agents are assumed to have perfect knowledge of their world, their utopia can be simulated. If their worldview is incorrect and they still apply their preferred management style, their dystopia can be simulated. An example is presented in Figure 4. In the egalitarian utopia, emissions of carbon dioxide will be reduced to zero within a few decades, leading to a modest temperature change. However, if the individualistic worldview manages a world that actually operates according to the egalitarian worldview, emissions increase until climate change causes such an economic disaster that emissions are reduced by the collapse of the economy. By introducing a population of agents with heterogeneous worldviews, a complex adaptive system is produced. It is assumed that the better an agent worldview explains the worlds observed behavior, the greater is the chance that
18 Egalitarian

an agent will not change its worldview. On aggregate, there is a trend towards changing to the worldview that explains the observations in the most likely way. Suppose that reality is one of the three possible worlds, and an agent obtains information over time that causes him to change (or not) his perspective on the climate change problem. Three sets of projections are derived in which agents adapt to climate change (Figure 5). Prior to the year 2040, the observed climate change does not lead to domination of one of the worldviews. After 2040, the climate signal becomes clear enough that one of the worldviews begins to dominate. In the event of the world functioning according to the egalitarian worldview, the emissions growth stabilizes on average in the coming decades and decreases to a level below half the present amount of emissions. However, this reduction cannot avoid a global mean temperature increase of about 2.5 C in the 21st century.

Fossil CO2 emissions (Gt C)

16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2

Hierarchist Individualist

0 2000 2010 2020 2030 2040 2050 2060 2070 2080 2090 2100 (a)

Time in years
4.5 4.0 3.5 3.0 2.5 2.0 1.5 1.0 0.5 0.0 2000 2010 2020 2030 2040 2050 2060 2070 2080 2090 2100 Egalitarian Hierarchist Individualist

Temperature change (degrees Celsius)

(b)

Time in years

Figure 5 (a) Expected carbon dioxide emissions and (b) temperature increase according to different views on the functioning of the global system, and where the worldviews of agents change in time

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The explicit inclusion of subjective perceptions of reality has led to a rich variety of possible futures. This will not simplify decision-making, but can improve decisionmaking since a large set of plausible scenarios is presented. This type of modeling is currently applied in different areas of global and regional environmental change. Each system in which it is not certain that it will remain stable under all kinds of disturbances, can in principle be studied by explicitly assuming different perceptions of reality. It is the expected that this type of modeling will be especially interesting for simulation of institutional dynamics.

MACRO-LEVEL DYNAMICS
Although there are often uncertainties about the relations, global models simulate macro-level dynamics. Here, we focus on the most important macro-level drivers of global environmental change, which are population size, economic development and technological change. In the early 1970s, Paul Ehrlich and John Holden described the environmental impact of society by the well-known IPAT equation: I D P A T . Here environmental impact equals the product of population size, the degree of afuence per person and the environmental impact from the technology used to produce one unit of afuence. The coming sections discuss three factors that are closely related to the IPAT equation: population growth, material and energy consumption of economies, and technology development. For each factor, empirical information on the macro-scale provides information on possible developments in the long term. However, extrapolating historically derived macro-level relations involves subjective assumptions. Therefore, it is important to explore the consequences of these subjective aggregated relations and to improve understanding of the empirically derived macrolevel information.
Demographics and Human Health

transition, and at what rate? Most population projections are based on the assumption that all countries will go through the demographic transition leading to a leveling off of population growth during the 21st century. Observed transitions in demographics are the result of changes in individual behavior, technology and norms, improvement of health care, use of contraceptives, age of marriage, literacy, position of woman, regulation of abortion, etc. It is expected that due to all these variables involved, the demographic transition will not occur everywhere to the same degree and at the same speed. Therefore, subjective assumptions have to be made in order to develop projections for the coming centuries. Assumptions about the health transition in various regions of the world are even more difcult since various diseases are related to global environmental change (skin cancer due to stratospheric ozone depletion), behavior (lung cancer from smoking), emerging new diseases (acquired immune deciency syndrome AIDS) and even some reemerging old diseases due to the development of new resistances (malaria). It is therefore difcult and subjective to project health conditions of our descendants.
The Material and Energy Consumption of Economies

Population growth is one of the main causes of global environmental change. The continuing population growth can be explained by changes in demographics and health. The so-called demographic and health transition describes how populations can go through typical demographic and health stages when they change from living in pre-industrial conditions to having a mortality pattern that is found in the post-modern societies (see Demographic transition, Volume 5). The shapes of the demographic transition curves are well known, but are in fact a hypothesis based on cross-national and longitudinal studies. In developed countries the demographic transition has reached the nal stage. But how will this development of fertility and mortality gures continue in the future? Will the developing countries follow the same

An economic system can be viewed as a living system, consuming material and energy inputs, processing them into usable forms, and eliminating the wastes. The metabolism of economies has changed signicantly during the last two centuries. A world economy has emerged that produces agricultural, and industrial products and services in large volumes, and transports them all over the globe. Agricultural production has increased due to more and more intensive use of land. Productivity has improved due to biological innovations in the form of new crops, new agricultural practices, mechanization, and increasing synthetic inputs. The same holds true for industrial production, which is increased due to the increasing consumption of energy and materials. Currently, the service sector is becoming increasingly important, stimulated by increased personal mobility and more individualistic lifestyles. These economic developments have led to an increase of material and energy use in absolute gures, but also in per capita gures, and have led to all kinds of disturbances of biogeochemical cycles. These disturbances have led to environmental change on various scales. The debate whether the environment is able to sustain economic development goes back to Thomas Malthus at the end of the 18th century, who argued that food production could not be increased quickly enough to keep pace with the growing population. But due to a faster increase of agricultural productivity than expected, a decrease in birth rates, and the growing import of food, Malthus homeland

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(Great Britain) did not collapse. Since the early 1970s, stimulated by the Limits to Growth report of the Club of Rome, the debate on economic growth and the environment has emerged again. In the last 30 years, there have been attempts to improve the physical reality of economic models by including mass balance conditions, and laws from thermodynamics. However, there is still no clear theory on the relation between economic development and the environment. In the 1990s a lot of empirically based studies were published on the relation of environmental pressure of an economic system and the average income. This so-called Environmental Kuznets curve (see, for example, de Bruyn, 2000) (Figure 6) consists of three phases: 1. 2. 3. initially income growth parallels progressively increasing environmental pressure; next, further income growth leads to increasing environmental pressure until it reaches a maximum; further income growth leads to a reduction of environmental pressure.

physical and nancial dimensions of economic systems like the environmental Kuznets curve are used to explore future material and energy consumption.
Technological Change

Unit costs

An explanation for this pattern is that at higher income levels, individuals will attach more value to environmental quality; this means more income spent on less damaging consumption, as well as more democratic support for stringent environmental policies. An important implication of the environmental Kuznets curve is that growth by itself would be able to solve environmental problems. However, the empirical support for this hypothesis is weak and mainly based on cross-sectional analysis. It is not clear whether the curve differ for different types of environmental pressures, what is the inuence of policy measures and technological change, and whether observed trends in the past will continue in the future. Some studies suggest that delinking of environmental pressure and economic output has only been a temporary phenomenon caused by efciency and technology improvements after the oil crises of the 1970s (de Bruyn, 2000). The cheap energy prices of the 1990s led to a relinking of environmental pressure and economic output. Despite the many uncertainties, relationships between

Technology development is the source and remedy of environmental change. This is called the paradox of technology and the environment. It is the source, because it creates the ability of societies to mobilize more materials and energy, and because it creates new materials and substances with direct environmental impacts. On the other hand, technology can also be the remedy because it increases productivity and efciency of economic activities and invents specic technologies to prevent pollution. It is therefore important to understand the dynamics of technological change. Arnulf Grubler (1998), in his book on technology and global change, discusses general mechanisms on the diffusion of technology. The question is how a new technology is adopted at a large social and spatial scale. This can be visualized by the stylized technology life cycle (Figure 7a). In the beginning, a new technology is imperfect, and various possible designs are
Indicator of performance (e.g., total market, market share, technical performance)

Saturation

Growth

Embryonic phase

(a)

Time

Basic R&D

Applied R&D

Environmental pressure

Investment (b)

Cumulative experience

Income per capita

Figure 6 Environmental Kuznets curve

Figure 7 (a) a stylized technology life cycle; (b) a stylized learning curve, where axes scales are logarithmic. In the beginning costs decrease due to basic R&D. When the potential of the technology is demonstrated, applied R&D investments reduce the costs further until a level is reached for which costs are competitive. (Adapted from Grubler, 1998)

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explored. The market effect is small, but the increase that occurs during the growth phase is characterized by increasing standardization and falling costs. Finally, the growth rate slows down as the market becomes saturated. In this phase the market is in the hands of a few suppliers. Technology life cycle is related to the developments of costs. There is a lot of empirical evidence that the decrease of a technology investment cost is related to the accumulated investments in the particular technology. This learning-by-doing can be formulated by the technology learning curve (Figure 7b). The costs (on a logarithmic scale) decrease linearly with an increase in cumulative experience (on a logarithmic scale). The main uncertainty of technology in the early phase of development is the slope at which the costs decrease. In mainstream economic models, technology is often included as an exogenous variable. Such an assumption leads to wait-and-see policies because investments are delayed until clean technology has become available at suitable cost levels. Such a policy differs from insights derived from the learning curve, which suggest stimulation of investments in clean technology allowing costs to decrease. Insights into technology dynamics show stylized facts derived from empirical studies. This provides tools for modeling technology development. The main question is how does an individual technology penetrate the market, and how can governmental policy stimulate the diffusion of green technology? Many decisions of individuals inuence this evolution. Therefore, we need to have more insights into models of human behavior.

Figure 8 Macro level phenomena emerge from behavior of agents on the micro level

Behavior of human agents is much more difcult to capture by simple rules. Two types of human behavior can be distinguished: individual behavior, and behavior of groups and institutions.
Individual Behavior

UNDERSTANDING THE EMERGENCE OF STYLIZED FACTS

The observed stylized facts, the observed macro relations, are the result of decisions of many agents. They are emergent properties of a complex adaptive system. To improve our understanding of these observed stylized facts, we should develop tools to understand them. One way is to use models that are able to simulate these emergent properties from the bottom up. Like the cartoon (Figure 8), understanding of macro level phenomena can only be derived by studying the behavior of micro level agents. In the case of a school of sh, multi-agent studies have shown that ocking behaviour can be simulated by using three simple rules for each agent: separation: steer to avoid crowding local ockmates; alignment: steer towards the average heading of local ockmates; cohesion: steer to move toward the average position of local ockmates.

Since theory development in social science is rather fragmented, various models of human behavior exist. In fact, different disciplines study only particular aspects of human behavior. One central element, or better, one stylized problem, is found in most models of individual behavior. Humans are assumed to maximize their well being given budget constraints. These budget constraints mainly relate to income and time. Within economics and psychology, different variations exist on this stylized problem. In the formal approach of conventional economic theory, this means that the rational actor, the Homo economicus, maximizes its own well being. This Homo economicus is assumed to have perfect knowledge of the system in order to nd the global optimum. In the case of uncertainties, the probability distributions are perfectly known. These assumptions make it possible to formalize human behavior in an unequivocal way. A drawback is the existence of much empirical evidence that real humans do not behave in this way. For example, experiments show that humans discount the near future at a higher rate than the distant future, experience well-being with relative changes instead of absolute levels, and are about twice as averse to taking losses as to enjoying an equal level of gains (e.g., Thaler, 1992). Some economists, like Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon, argue that humans are rationality bounded. First, no person can ever assemble all the information required for an optimal decision. Second, even if one could, decisions are usually so complex that no simple algorithm exists

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for evaluating all possible options. Third, a persons own decisions depend on the decisions of other persons. Simon argues therefore that humans satisce instead of maximize their well being. A consequence of relaxing the assumption of maximizing behavior is the large set of possible rules that describe behavior. The formalization is not unequivocal anymore. Thanks to the development of new simulation techniques such as cellular automata, genetic algorithms and neural networks, and the widespread availability of personal computers, social scientists are exploring new ways of modeling human behavior (e.g., Gilbert and Troitzsch, 1999). Psychologists and other social scientists include different indicators than are usually used in economics. Psychologists focus on satisfaction of various types of needs such as understanding, freedom, identity and leisure. Furthermore, all humans are different. They differ in their abilities, mental models, preferences and opportunities. In contrast with Homo Economicus, decisions depend on social interactions, as well as on individual considerations. In fact, humans are assumed to perform different cognitive decision processes in different situations. The mental models of humans are important elements in cognitive processing. Differences in perceptions of reality can result in different behavioral patterns. Although humans can learn, they will never have the perfect knowledge that is needed to maximize well being as performed by Homo Economicus. This picture of human behavior is in line with the complex adaptive system-modeling paradigm. Since humans cannot perfectly control their own situation, they design institutions to regulate human interactions, as well as interactions between society and the environment.
Institutions and Collective Actions

commons is an example of open access, where everybody can harvest without individual punishment. However, other types of property regimes to regulate common resources are related to group, individual and governmental property. The success of self-organization of effective institutions to control common resources depends on property regimes, as well as evolution of norms and design of rules. Again, this is an excellent example of complex adaptive systems.

DIFFERENT WAYS OF USING MODELS

It should be clear by now that models are not of use to accurately predict future developments of human dimensions of global environmental change. Although models are often used for this purpose, there are more suitable purposes for which they are of importance. In fact, they can be used to overcome the problems raised during the analysis of the current generation of integrated assessment models. Instead of focusing on a single model used for prediction, a combination of different types of models should be used to explore hypotheses and uncertainties. Models can be used in different ways. Here, three different goals of use are distinguished: to understand observed stylized facts, to improve decision-making of complex problems due to interactive use of models, and to explore possible futures by scenario developments.
Understanding Stylized Facts

Institutions contain formal constraints (rules, laws, constitutions), informal constraints (norms of behavior), and their enforcement characteristics. They shape human interactions and the way societies evolve through time, and can also be important to regulate human activities in relation to ecological conditions. A stylized problem that is generally used to study institutions is the so-called commons dilemma, widely discussed as a result of the well-known analysis of Garrett Hardin on the Tragedy of the Commons (see Commons, Tragedy of the, Volume 5). According to this analysis, the commons tend to be overharvested since each agent harvests to the point where private costs equal the benets, whereas harvesting imposes additional social costs on the rest of the community. However, historical analyses of common resource properties have found many examples where the tragedy did not happen (Ostrom et al., 1999). Communities often had ways of self-organizing to prevent overexploitation of the commons, also known as closed commons. Success of self-organization depends heavily on the characteristics of property-right systems. The tragedy of the

In the descriptions of the various sectors a number of stylized facts were identied, such as the demographic and health transition, diffusion of technology, and environmental Kuznets curves. These macro-level observations are the result of behavior of agents at smaller scales. To understand stylized facts, and to explore possible changes in macro-level relations, we need to study the behavior of the underlying components. Can we explain the diffusion of technology by using simple rules for agents? Under which assumptions can an environmental Kuznets curve be simulated by micro-level decisions of economic agents? This type of question relates to current work in evolutionary economics. Various studies analyze what are the important characteristics of rms and technology development to explain structures emerging in specic markets. Examples are the size distribution of rms, and the large number of rms during the beginning of a new market. Such analyses are also frequently performed by various other disciplines, and are assumed to be valuable to understand the underlying dynamics of the observed stylized facts.
Interactive Use of Models

Models are not prediction machines, and should not be used in this way. Moreover, for policy analysis, models

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should be made available in such a way that they can be used in an interactive fashion. The recent developments in graphical user interfaces, PC availability and Internet, should make it possible to use simple transparent models by a large community of stakeholders. Models can be used in this way as learning tools. Using models in this way is exactly what we can learn from the work of Dorner (1996). Dietrich Dorner and his colleagues study decisionmaking in complex situations. Their research design is to develop micro-worlds, which are computer simulation models of a management problem, and to ask real persons to manage the system. These management problems vary from a simple climate-control system to regulation of a virtual society. Because the participants in the game have an incomplete picture of reality, their attempts to manage the system can lead to catastrophes. Dorner concludes that managing complex situations requires experience, and this experience can be built up by playing management games, like training pilots in ight-simulators.
Scenario Development and Alternative World Views

to overcome current problems. A promising start can be made when models are used in a more explorative way. Current models are often used as truth-machines. But the predictions, the glimpses of the future derived from electronic oracles, should not be our main interest. Since the future is inherently unpredictable, models should be used to enrich our insights into the behavior of complex reality. Improvements of our mental models can help us to improve our decision-making. The concept of complex adaptive systems can be a promising starting point to think about new ways to develop and use models concerning human dimensions. Systems evolve, and therefore models assessing the future should focus on evolution and change. This requires the inclusion of disciplines nowadays not highly involved in modeling, such as psychology, institutional science, history and anthropology. Modeling human dimensions of global environmental change is a way of managing uncertainty and complexity. The tools discussed in this article can help us to experience and learn this art.

REFERENCES
Ayres, R U and Simonis, U E, eds (1994) Industrial Metabolism Restructuring for Sustainable Development, United Nations University Press, Tokyo, Japan. Clark, W C and Munn, R E, eds (1986) Sustainable Development of the Biosphere, Cambridge University Press, London. de Bruyn, S M (2000) Economic Growth and the Environment: an Empirical Analysis, Kluwer, Dordrecht. Diamond, J (1997) Guns, Germs and Steel A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13 000 years, Vintage, London. Dorner, D (1996) The Logic of Failure Recognizing and Avoiding Error in Complex Situations, Perseus Books, Reading, MA. Gilbert, N and Troitzsch, K G (1999) Simulation for the Social Scientist, Open University Press, London. Grubler, A (1998) Technology and Global Change, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Gunderson, L H and Holling, C S, eds (2001) Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems, Island Press, Washington, DC. Holling, C S (1986) The Resilience of Terrestrial Ecosystems: Local Surprise and Global Change, in Sustainable Development of the Biosphere, eds W C Clark and R E Munn, Cambridge University Press, London. Hughes, B B (1999) International Futures: Choices in the Face of Uncertainty, Westview, Boulder, CO. Janssen, M A (1998) Modelling Global Change The Art of Integrated Assessment Modelling, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham. Janssen, M A and de Vries, B (1998) The Battle of Perspectives: A Multi-agent Model with Adaptive Responses to Climate Change, Ecol. Econ., 26, 43 65. Meadows, D H, Meadows, D L, Randers, J, and Behrens, W W (1972) The Limits to Growth, Universe Books, New York. Meadows, D H and Robinson, J M (1985) The Electronic Oracle: Computer Models and Social Decisions, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester.

Traditionally, scenario analysis starts with an initial forecast which is called the base case or reference scenario. Then alternative assumptions are made of initial conditions, equations and parameter values. The resulting projections are called scenarios. Differences between the scenarios and the references are used to evaluate uncertainties and possibilities of policy to inuence the future. However, due to the implicit assumptions within every model, one reference scenario will not be enough to assess policy options. In fact, a set of reference cases should be used, which capture the main variety in alternative assumptions (Rotmans and de Vries, 1997). Scenario analysis should be seen as computer-aided storytelling, where different stories can serve as a starting point for analysis. Analyzing policy options for different types of futures, can give insights into the robustness of these policies. Explicitly using different starting points can reduce the illusion that model-based analyses are objective predictions. In such a way, models can serve as a medium for discussion instead of an electronic oracle.

CHALLENGES FOR THE FUTURE

Important weaknesses of current modeling activities, related to human dimensions of global environmental change, are the inherent subjective assumptions of parameter values and relationships, and the fact that macro-relations are used of phenomena which emerge from local interactions between agents. The challenge in the coming decades will be to use new developments in modeling tools and the use of models

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Ostrom, E, Burger, J, Field, C B, Norgaard, R B, and Policansky, D (1999) Revisiting the Commons: Local Lessons, Global Challenges, Science, 284, 278 282. Rayner, S and Malone, E L, eds (1998) Human Choice and Climate Change, Battelle Press, Columbus, OH. Rotmans, J and de Vries, B, eds (1997) Perspectives on Global Change, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Thaler, R H (1992) The Winners Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Thompson, M, Ellis, R, and Wildawsky, A (1990) Cultural Theory, Westview, Boulder, CO. Waldrop, M (1992) Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, Simon and Schuster, Toronto.

Modernism
see Art and the Environment (Volume 5)

Both environmentalism and postmodernism mark fundamental changes in the status and viability of modernity. The two movements converge insofar as they focus on those features of modernism that have contributed to the ecological crisis. Ecology originally meant the science of the household, and as such should be concerned with the rich variety of activities that create and sustain our daily lives: everything from the construction and maintenance of the human habitat to the plurality of biotic processes intrinsic to life on Earth. According to the environmental and postmodern critiques, modernity has increasingly undermined this human-ecological variety to create a world industrial order and a global monoculture. Under the sway of this simplifying modernism, the diversity that has made up the human household and the planetary biotic community has been externalized, devalued and oftentimes destroyed. Environmental and postmodern thinkers have therefore sought to revitalize ecological and human diversity. The problematic aspects of modernism that are the focus of both environmental and postmodern critiques include: 1. the specialization of thought into separate realms of science, ethics and aesthetics; the separation of culture from nature; the binary demarcation of human from non-human; the denition of self or mind as a subject having dominion over an objectied natural world; the identication of that subject with Western culture and the masculine gender.

Modernity vs. Post-modern Environmentalism

Daniel R White
Honors College, Florida Atlantic University, Jupiter, FL, USA

2. 3. 4. 5.

Postmodern environmentalism provides a critique of, and a set of alternatives to, modern industrial society. It criticizes the separation of science from ethics and aesthetics, its separation of nature from culture and self from other, its Eurocentrism, and its sexism. As alternatives, it offers interdisciplinarity, reconciliation, multiculturalism, and ecological feminism. In place of modernist logical hierarchies and categorization of the world into things, postmodern environmentalism provides a communicative paradigm emphasizing metaphoric comparisons and interchanges among diverse inhabitants of the human-ecological community. Finally, this new outlook combines technology and nature in the creation of an emerging form of human-ecological identity, called the cyborg. Postmodern environmentalism is related to post-normal science (see Post-normal Science, Volume 5) in the following ways: (1) both are concerned with complex systems; (2) both offer a critique of the specialization and dogmatism of normal science; (3) both reintroduce value judgements (as in ethics and aesthetics) and environmentalist politics into policy decisions involving the natural sciences.

The combination of these modernist ideas has, according to environmental and postmodern thinkers, contributed largely to the ecological crisis. The replacement of these problematic features of modernism with viable alternatives has become, therefore, a principal aim of environmentalist and postmodern thought. Both movements, accordingly, emphasize interdisciplinary thinking that re-links science, ethics and aesthetics. Both argue that cultural concerns like knowledge, value and beauty are in part derived from and have consequences for the natural world. Both make clear that the human and the non-human are inseparable aspects of ecological communities. Furthermore, both attempt to provide new forms of communication for the interdisciplinary study of ecological and human identities and relations. Finally, both emphasize the value of cultural and gender diversity, particularly the contributions of non-Western peoples and of women, to the creation and maintenance of the ecological household. Postmodernism often invokes metaphor rather than logic to express its ideas. So it is appropriate to say that environmentalist and postmodern ideas have become interwoven in a new tapestry entitled postmodern environmentalism on whose fabric new forms of thought and action are appearing.

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Box 1 Some denitions

modernity : The broad cultural movement from the 16th through the 20th centuries, focused on the idea of progress, and particularly on the betterment of human life through science and technology. In standard Western philosophy (epitomized by the work of Immanuel Kant) it includes the partitioning of knowledge into three spheres of inquiry: science, ethics, and aesthetics. postmodernity : A cultural movement of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, based on the perceived failure of modernity to achieve its goal of human progress. It focuses on the ideas of cultural, social, and biological diversity, the rights of women and minorities, multiculturalism, and environmentalism. In philosophy it emphasizes interdisciplinary connections among the spheres of modernity (science, ethics, and aesthetics). environmentalism: A contemporary philosophical movement advocating the legislative, political, ethical, and aesthetic defence of ecosystems as well as the preservation of a sustainable human ecology. Its outlook implies an environmentalist critique of modern industrial technologies insofar as they reduce biodiversity and undermine the viability of ecosystems to support life. cyborg: A cybernetic organism of bionic human (Merriam-Webster). A new postindustrial form of

technology based on the communication sciences. Still in its initial stages of development, the cyborg is increasingly capable of autonomous behavior simulating human conduct. It is therefore an innovative hybrid of nature and culture. Cloned organisms, including the biologically engineered human beings on the horizon, are examples of cyborgs. teleological : an adjective based on the Greek words telos (purpose) and logos (word, or explanation). Teleological means purposive or designed or explained in terms of purpose or design. In the information sciences it has largely been replaced by the adjective teleonomic, based on telos and nomos (usage, convention). Teleonomic means simulating purpose, or the quality of apparent purposefulness in living organisms that derives from their evolutionary adaptation (Merriam-Webster). Teleological explanation was rejected by modern science because it was associated with premodern ideas of design embraced by theology. Postmodern and postnormal science (see Post-normal Science, Volume 5) employ teleological or teleonomic explanation, as part of their reintroduction of ethical and aesthetic ideas (including those of purpose and design) into environmental discourse.

In standard modern philosophy, natural science requires the empirical description of nature without ethical or aesthetic considerations. Standard ethical thought, in turn, deals with what ought to be while science deals with what is. Aesthetics, similarly, deals with questions of beauty and sublimity (awe) that are neither factual nor ethical but, instead, are matters of taste. It further considers teleological (or teleonomic ) questions about the apparent design of living things. See denition of teleological in Box 1. Environmentalist and postmodern thinkers, in response, have argued that the description of nature or any object involves ethical and aesthetic dimensions. To select an object for description, e.g., requires that it be differentiated in value from some other object or as a gure against a background. That differentiation in value may be either ethical, in that the selected gure is chosen because it ought to be studied, or it may be aesthetic, because it is pleasing to study. In either case, the choice is teleological, in that it selects an object in terms of the purposes of the researcher. The observer of the natural world may also attribute some intrinsic purpose to it. Yet, these ethical, aesthetic and teleological dimensions are excluded by the modernist description of nature. They are relegated to specialists in disciplines outside of science. The demarcation of culture as separate from nature, as well as human from non-human, is also typical of the modernist description of a natural object, say a tree. Tree, after all, is a word. In the terminology of linguistics it is a signi er, which denotes a signied concept which in turn denotes a perceived object such as the familiar conguration of trunk and branches. In postmodern terms the cultural

activity of naming is part of the nature described by the word. The tree cannot be referred to as a natural object without the cultural activity of naming, i.e., it belongs to the whole system of what we mean by nature. The description of a tree therefore implies a linguistic system. According to linguistic theory, the selection of the signier tree and its associated concept displaces all of the others that might be chosen. Hence the tree and the not-tree are two aspects of the same binary system of language, the same code. To demarcate the tree from all that is not-tree, thereby saying that it must be treated as a separate entity, is an initial arbitrary act by scientic modernists, yet it involves the very ethical or aesthetic judgments that modernism would exclude from science. To treat the tree as a separate entity cut off from its linguistic system, furthermore, is analogous to cutting it out of the ecosystem an act that has not only biological but also ethical and aesthetic consequences. From the perspective of postmodern environmentalism, this amounts to separating the tree from the forest and its inhabitants. The cutting is done by a self considered to be separate from nature. The separation of the self from nature is typical of the Western cultural tradition. That this kind of subject is built into the descriptions of science indicates that modern science, at least, is an artifact of the same tradition science is cultural. The scientic self is typically male and, in the view of postmodern environmentalism, objecties the feminine body of nature based upon masculinist preferences: power, prot and control. Postmodern environmental science, therefore, promises to be feminist and multicultural, as well as communicative.

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To learn how to see the forest and the trees simultaneously, postmodern environmental science has invoked the theory of communication. This theory focuses on the forms of connection and exchange between living things, e.g., on the interchange of words between speakers, or signals between computers on the Internet. It, furthermore, models organisms as artifacts or cyborgs emergent from the communicative processes of evolution. A cyborg is an arti cial organism, a creature that is a hybrid of biology and technology. It is therefore, in the broadest sense, a work of ction: it has been made up from the elements of nature and culture. Cybernetics is the science underlying the construction of cyborgs. It is based on a broad analogy between the behavior of organisms and machines. Its central question is, What must we assume is going on inside an animal or a robot that allows it to act in an apparently purposive manner? The answer is that both must be in communication with their environments. Communication, in turn, is de ned in terms of negative feedback: a technical way of saying that an organism or a machine selects a particular course of action by excluding alternatives. In terms of communication theory, e.g., in order to catch a y, a frog must rst exclude all of the alternate courses of action the insect might take. By so doing, it selects the course the y is on. The frog then lashes out its tongue to the point along the course where the y will be when the tongue arrives. A guided-missile frigate would use the same negative logic to shoot down an incoming aircraft, and presumably so would you or I as we reach to catch a ball arcing toward us over a baseball eld. The frog, frigate or ball player might be organism or machine or human: the requirements for selecting a course of behavior based on negative feedback are basically the same. This selection is, in turn, teleological, ethical and aesthetic: the purpose, choice, and preference of the organism or machine or human being are intrinsically bound up with its selection of a course of action. The cyborg is a de nitively postmodern construction because it breaks down the boundaries between culture and nature: it is a hybrid of cultural and natural processes understood in terms of communication. As the design science underlying the cyborg, cybernetics would view the forest and the trees simultaneously by providing a recursive vision of nature and culture. Negative feedback, paradoxically, includes a description of courses of action it must exclude in order to select its object. Because the process of feedback takes place in time and space, it must continuously update the position of the subject (frog, frigate, human) in relation to the object ( y, aircraft, baseball). You and I must keep our eye on the ball if we want to catch it, constantly adjusting our position relative to the incoming y (so to speak). The full description of subject and object at any time must also include, as we have seen, the relative positions of and alternative actions

excluded by both. If the ball were alive and capable of adjusting its own actions by negative feedback, like the hedgehogs that serve as croquet balls in the Queen s famous match in Lewis Carroll s Alice in Wonderland, then our game would be all the more complex (as it is, indeed, for the frog or frigate). Think of the subject s position as being on one side of a circuit and the object s as being on the other. Consider the subject s descriptions of the object to be messages in that circuit. Now the messages in the circuit will re ect a spiral of differences between a series of subject and object positions. In this spiral, the description of the object must include a description of the subject (because they are always relative to one another) so that the overall system becomes self-referential. A self-referential system is recursive insofar as it refers back to itself, constantly revising its self-image. Your description of the incoming baseball must include a description of your position relative to the ball, and that description is constantly shifting as you and the ball approach one another on the eld. This constantly self-correcting ensemble of subject and object is a good de nition both of the cyborg and the postmodern self. Both are hybrid artifacts generated by recursive communication in which subject and object are constructed within a spiral of differences. The spiral ultimately includes subject and object, self and other, culture and nature, trees and forest, in a postmodern-ecological design. That design has utility for survival because it yields a coadaptive evolutionary relationship between each of the aforementioned dichotomies. This relationship is precisely what the modern idea of nature lacks and the postmodern idea provides.

FURTHER READING
Bateson, G (1987) Steps to an Ecology of Mind, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Haraway, D (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, New York. Hayles, K N (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Ihde, D (1990) Technology and Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN. Merchant, C (1980) The Death of Nature: Woman, Ecology and the Scientic Revolution, Harper, New York. McCulloch, W and Pitts, W (1965) The Embodiments of Mind, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Trinh, T M (1989) Woman, Native, Other, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN. White, D R (1998) Postmodern Ecology: Communication, Evolution and Play, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY.

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Muir, John
(1838 1914) John Muir, naturalist, explorer, writer, and conservationist, was born in Scotland. The Muir family emigrated to the US in 1849, settling in Wisconsin. His childhood was harsh and work-lled, but at an early age he became a keen observer of the natural world and an accomplished craftsman. In 1860, Muir entered the University of Wisconsin, and in 1863 he traveled across the largely untouched northern US and Canada. In 1867 he suffered an eye injury while working. While he soon regained his sight, the event was to change Muirs life. He turned to nature. Muir walked from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico; sailed to Cuba and Panama, and then in 1868, up to San Francisco. California became his home. In 1868, he journeyed on foot through meadows, wildower elds, and into the high country of the San Joaquin Valley. Later he wrote: it seemed to me the Sierra should be called not the Nevada, or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light the most divinely beautiful of all the mountain chains I have seen. In 1874, he began a series of writings titled Studies in the Sierra. Fame ensued and his works were soon known throughout the US. In 1880, he met his future wife Louise and later they had two daughters. He entered the farming business with her father, and prospered. Muir continued to visit the Sierra Nevadas, and traveled extensively abroad, eventually seeing all the corners of the globe. He also returned to writing, publishing articles and books about his travels and naturalist philosophy. Muirs

writings assumed a spiritual quality that inspired his readers with his love for nature. In 1890, due in large part to the inspiration of Muirs works, Yosemite National Park was created. Muir was also the catalyst for the creation of Grand Canyon, Sequoia, and Mount Rainier parks. In 1892, Muir and friends founded the Sierra Club, as Muir stated to do something for wildness and make the mountains glad (Muir remained Club president until his death in 1914). In 1901, Muir published Our National Parks, a work that was to become quite inuential. He also formed a friendship with Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, a connection that was to have an important impact on the development of American conservation policy. Muir and the Sierra Club worked to protect the Sierra Nevadas. In 1913, a dramatic battle was fought; a campaign to prevent the damming of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, which was then within Yosemite, but the battle was lost. The valley was dammed to supply water and electricity to San Francisco, and to break the Citys reliance on a private utility monopoly. However, the event had a galvanizing effect on supporters of the National Parks. The incident also ended his friendship with Pinchot, who had supported the project. Muir died the following year. John Muir has been called the father of the American National Parks system. He was certainly one of the most inuential and powerful of the early conservationists. John Muirs ideas and writings have had a lasting impact and legacy on the environmental movement. The Sierra Club is now among the most inuential global environmental organizations (see Sierra Club, Volume 5).
KEVIN HANNA Canada

N
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein
(1933 ) Hossein Nasr (Seyyed is an honoric title designating a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad) has long been the most visible proponent of environmental values from an Islamic perspective, and is one of the most signicant contemporary Iranian philosophers. His approach follows the perennial philosophy associated with Frithjof Schuon, Titus Burckhardt and Rene Guenon, in which timeless truths are seen as being expressed in a variety of historical cultural and philosophical traditions. Nasr was born in Tehran, Iran into a family of scholars, physicians and Sus (Muslim mystics). From secondary school onward he was educated in the US, rst at the Peddie School in New Jersey where he was class valedictorian, then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he received an honors degree in mathematics and physics in 1954. He went on to study at Harvard, where he completed a doctorate in the history of science in 1958. He then returned to Iran where he taught philosophy and the history of science until the revolution of 1979. In 1963, at the age of 33, Nasr became the youngest full Professor of the university. He served as Dean of the Faculty of Letters from 19681972 and briey as Vice Chancellor. In 1972, the Shah appointed him Chancellor of Aryamehr University, a new technical institution modeled on MIT. The following year, under the patronage of the Queen, Nasr established the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, which hosted the eminent scholars Henri Corbin and Toshihiko Izutsu, among others. Following the 1979 revolution, he returned to the US, where he taught rst at the University of Utah, then Temple University, and nally at the George Washington University, where he has been University Professor of Islamic Studies since 1984. He has also held visiting positions at Harvard, Princeton, and the American University of Beirut. In 1981, he became the rst Muslim to deliver the Gifford lectures at Edinburgh. One of Nasrs major contributions to the eld of education, especially during his years in Iran, was his emphasis on approaching the study of Islamic philosophy and science from the perspective of his students own Islamic and Iranian traditions, in contrast to the external approach of Western Orientalists. He thus strove to bring about a synthesis drawing on the strengths of both Western and non-Western intellectual traditions. Alongside his academic pursuits, Nasr has also sought knowledge through traditional means, such as the largely oral transmission of learning from master to disciple characteristic of Susm. In this context he studied Islamic philosophy and other disciplines under the tutelage of Mohammad Hossein Tabatabai, Abol-Hassan Qazvini, and Mohammad Kazem Assar. Anticipating the well-known 1966 critique of his fellow historian of science Lynn White, Jr, in his Rockefeller lectures at the University of Chicago earlier the same year (subsequently published as Man and Nature: the Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man), Nasr argued that the emerging environmental crisis was rooted in a spiritual crisis. He has taken up this theme in many of his later writings, including his Cadbury lectures at Birmingham in 1994, which were published as Religion and the Order of Nature in 1996.

FURTHER READING
Nasr, S H (1968) Science and Civilization in Islam, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Nasr, S H (1978) An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines, revised edition, Shambala Publications, Boulder, CO. Nasr, S H (1996) Religion and the Order of Nature, Oxford University Press, New York. Nasr, S H (1997) Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man, revised edition (1967), Kazi Publishers, Chicago, IL.
RICHARD FOLTZ USA

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National Environmental Law

M J Peterson
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA

National environmental law comprises those branches of the national law of each state addressing human interactions with nature, focusing primarily on protecting the biosphere including its subsystems, processes, and species diversity from avoidable signi cant harms arising from human activity. National-level environment law-making, like the counterpart process at the international level, is affected by the special characteristics of environmental problems: high uncertainty about the effects of human activity on the biosphere, heavy reliance on scienti c, engineering, and economic expertise in the formulation and enforcement of legal rules, necessity of considering long time horizons, and complexities of ensuring compliance among a wide range of private, quasi-public, and public actors. National legal systems have long addressed land and water use, resource management, public and private construction, health and sanitation, food safety, and waste treatment, but environmental law did not emerge as a separate branch of national law with its own statutory basis, administrative organs, and jurisprudence until the late 1960s and early 1970s. Environmental laws adopted in the 1970s focused primarily on control and reduction of pollution, wastes, and hazardous or toxic substances. Their scope has broadened in subsequent decades as societies have realized that many human activities have signi cant effect on the natural environment. Thus, by the mid 1990s it was possible to de ne environmental law in very broad terms as the body of law intended to minimize the impact of activity by individuals, households, business rms, other private and public legal entities, and government agencies on natural ecosystems and resources (e.g., McGregor 1994). However, the de nitions that guide actual legal practice continue to focus primarily on the broad subject areas of air quality, water quality and use, biodiversity and wildlife management, environmental impact and risk assessment, control of hazardous and toxic substances, remediation of hazardous substance contamination, and liability for pollution damage (e.g., Rosencranz, 1991; Baker, 1997; Findley and Farber, 1999).

relationship between government and governed. The government holds rights to prescribe, apply, and enforce the law to all individuals, other private legal entities, and subordinate public entities that are its nationals and to those private individuals and entities of foreign nationality operating within the states land, maritime, and aerial domain. In turn, those entities have an obligation to obey. Individual states political systems vary considerably in the extent to which they provide effective governance, allocate governmental authority among different levels (e.g., federal, provincial, and local), maintain mechanisms for holding government ofcials accountable to the citizenry, and incorporate bottom up initiatives in policy-making, but all ultimately rest on a hierarchical organizing principle. Second, national legal systems contain several types of rules, each with a distinctive function in the overall legal system. Rules of recognition, some pertaining to the national legal system as a whole, and others to environmental matters in particular, stipulate how laws, regulations, and customs are adopted, amended, or repealed. Substantive rules perform any or all of three functions: constitutive rules dene types of actor, conduct, or situation; regulatory rules stipulate the forms of conduct to be adopted or avoided in particular situations; consequential rules specify what can happen to actors as they conform or fail to conform to substantive rules. In addressing air pollution, for example, any national legal system must contain constitutive rules dening what types and levels of emission constitute pollution, regulatory rules outlining how actors producing emissions should act to control those emissions, and consequential rules establishing rewards for compliance or (more commonly) punishments for non-compliance with the regulatory rules. Finally, environmental laws actual impact on actor behavior depends on varying combinations of willing support for the particular legal rules, more diffuse law habits that incline actors to respect the law in place even when they disagree with certain of its stipulations, material inducements to comply and material punishments for non-compliance. The chronology of efforts to develop national environmental law is very similar around the world, a reection of the strength and success of transnational and intergovernmental efforts to increase the salience of environmental concerns among governments and private actors alike. Concern about the impact of industry, agriculture, and urban life on the general condition of the air, lakes, rivers, and streams and waterways, and strong public demands for reducing air and water pollution, emerged in North America, Western Europe, and Japan at about the same time in the mid to late 1960s, as a product of changed beliefs about the origins and desirability of pollution. Though concern about air and water quality inspired national legal regulations in the

CHARACTERISTICS AND DEVELOPMENT OF NATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL LAW

National environmental law shares the main features of other branches of national law. First, it operates within a centralized political system based on a hierarchical

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19th century (e.g., the British Alkali Inspectorate Act), even in 1950 the urban fogs, composed of smoke and particulates emitted by electricity generators, building heating or cooling systems, and factories, were viewed as unavoidable by-products of industrial prosperity despite awareness that urban dwellers experienced higher incidence of respiratory diseases. Within 15 years, governmental and popular attitudes had been transformed: greater concern about the human health effects of poor air quality, plus the diffusion of ecological worldviews conceiving of the biosphere as an interrelated whole in which change in one part had signicant ramications through all other parts, had transformed perceptions of pollution. Smoky emissions were no longer perceived as a sign of industrial might and prosperity, as a quasi-natural phenomenon beyond control, but as a bad that could be reduced or avoided through concerted human action. Incorporation of these changed perceptions into national policy was signaled by the US Clean Air Act of 1970, the rst Japanese pollution laws of 1970, the German Federal Environmental Program of 1971, and the rst European Community Environmental Program in 1973. Though some Leninist leaders continued to maintain that environmental degradation was a by-product of a private enterprise economy, the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and its Eastern European allies had also begun adopting environmental laws. Though the characteristic environmental problems facing Third World countries were different stemming far more often from inadequate access to safe water, fuel, and sanitation than from industrial emissions perceptions of a need for national environmental law were diffused rapidly to Third World governments through the preparations for and holding of the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm. While insisting at the Stockholm Conference and later multilateral negotiations that international environmental law must not become a vehicle for frustrating their own development efforts, Third World governments did accept the need to begin incorporating environmental concerns into their own national laws. India adopted its rst explicitly environmental statutes in the early 1970s, though it developed a comprehensive framework statute only in 1986 after the Bhopal chemical leak revealed significant weaknesses in Indias environmental law, and created strong public pressure for strengthening it. The Chinese government appeared unimpressed with concerns about the environment at the Stockholm conference, but some of its leaders were paying attention to pollution problems and other environmental concerns even before the political and economic reforms of the 1980s. Statutory changes were paralleled by administrative reorganization. The increased importance attached to environmental concerns was institutionalized by the establishment of an umbrella environmental body to coordinate governmental and private action. These bodies, often cabinet-level agencies or ministries,

were established in the major Western industrial countries during the early 1970s and in most other countries during the 1970s and 1980s (Baker et al., 1985; Janicke and Weidner, 1997). The extent of change in substantive legal rules inspired by new concern with the environment, and the process by which it was accomplished, have varied from country to country, depending partly on governmental and public perceptions of the nature of environmental problems and the means available for their management, and partly on the national legal rules specifying how revision of substantive law should be accomplished. Because each national legal system has its own balance among statutes, judicial decisions, and customary practices as sources of law, the process of accommodating contemporary ecological awareness into law has thus differed sharply. In the UK and the civil law states of Europe, the primary emphasis has been on legislative amendment of the law codes. In the common law systems of Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, and the USA, the process has involved a combination of legislative action and active judicial renement of common law doctrines. In most Third World countries, the process has also involved legislation, but to varying degrees has also featured reinterpretation of traditional customary rules still used in the mix of indigenous and European-inspired law that forms the contemporary legal system. The global spread of problem denitions, relevant scientic knowledge, information about possible regulatory approaches, and model laws, encouraged by non-governmental environmental organizations like the World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace International, quasi intergovernmental ones like the World Conservation Union, the United Nations Environment Programme, and other global or regional intergovernmental organizations, has not erased national differences, but has meant that there is considerable common ground in environmental discussions. International environmental agreements have also created a body of common goals for those states that have become parties, and on some occasions provided developing states with nancial and other resources needed for effective monitoring and enforcement.

BASIC PRESUPPOSITIONS OF NATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL LAW

Though some environmentalists have argued for treating nature generally or other species of life as having distinct legal rights apart from those of humans, national environmental law systems are generally based on constitutive rules that classify humans individually and in their various collective groupings as the subjects of law-holding rights and duties and responsible for their actions in complying or not complying with the law. Natural places and resources are classied as objects of law that the subjects of law may or may not use in particular ways as they go about their

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activity. Individuals (natural persons) and collective entities (legal persons) are most often connected to natural places and resources through property rights regimes, which dene who may have access to what places on what terms and may put any resources found in those places to use, either in situ or by removal for purposes of providing fuel for human activities requiring energy inputs of heat, light or power or for working, into tools and other usable objects. Property rights regimes vary on several dimensions, but the most important involves the basis of de ning access rights. Four possibilities have been most prominent in human history: open access, community property, individual property, and controlled access. Under an open access regime, a particular natural place is open to anyone who can reach it, and any resources within it are open to use in situ or after being carried away on a rst-come rst-served basis. Little law is needed, other than prohibitions against attempts to close off the area. In community property regimes, which are historically far more usual than open access ones and formed the subject of Hardin s famous tragedy of the commons (see Commons, Tragedy of the, Volume 5), access is limited to members of a particular community most often de ned by geographical proximity or traditions of seasonal use who may use resources in situ or take them away according to community norms about shares. Local customary law most often governs membership in the community and members resource use; under modern conditions, the national legal system is needed to provide protection by af rming community property, and protecting it from intrusions by outsiders. In individual property rights regimes, an individual, household, or legal person enjoys exclusive access to the place that is its property and controls all resource use. In most national legal systems that property-holder (typically called the owner ) may use the place or resources directly, rent or sell the place or resource rights to others, or leave the place and resources unused. Under controlled access property regimes, places and resources are governed by a central authority, which determines who may enter on what conditions and use resources in situ or take them away. Much of the debate regarding environmental law focuses on the relative advantages and disadvantages of each type of property rights regime for promoting environmental protection and sustainable uses. Most national legal systems assume that open access regimes are not viable for contemporary levels of population and intensity of resource use; they institutionalize varying degrees of reliance on community property, individual property, and controlled access regimes. Western legal systems, common law and civil law alike, rely most heavily on individual property rights regimes, though certain forms of community property and of controlled access through government licenses exist as well. Community property regimes are more common in nonWestern systems, though they vary considerably from place

to place. They coexisted with individual property rights even before colonial era impositions of individual property rights regimes by European powers, and are enjoying some revival today as scholars demonstrate their viability as modes of regulating resource use (e.g., Berkes, 1989; Ostrom, 1990). Bad experiences with Leninist central planning have discouraged primary reliance on controlled access through central licensing, but such systems remain in place for particular areas or activities in most countries. Property rights regimes establish who is responsible for the use of a particular area and its resources, but do not guarantee environmentally sustainable patterns of activity. Most national environmental law is built on the basic assumption that environmental degradation occurs because individuals, households, rms, and other entities have no incentive to pay attention to the environmental burden of their activity, as long as they can pass all or part of the costs of coping with that burden to others. Thus, the primary task of national environmental law is to limit or even prevent such transfers. Successful prevention requires a variety of legal instruments because such transfers can occur geographically, economically, or temporally, and each type is best addressed through somewhat different rules. Geographical transfer occurs when wastes or pollution are allowed to spread beyond the edges of an actor s own property, and are inhibited through substantive legal rules prescribing that ownership or other property rights do not include a right to cause harm to others or their property, and through procedural norms requiring property holders to control harm equally stringently, regardless of whether it occurs on or off the property. Economic transfers occur when one actor s activity degrades a common resource like water or the atmosphere, leaving others to pay for coping with the degradation. Economic transfers are inhibited through the polluter pays principle and emissions charges, water or land use fees, charging cleanup costs or nes for excessive emissions that reinforce nancial incentives to avoid across-actor transfers. Transfers across time occur when actors handle a problem with a quick x, such as underground storage of highly radioactive wastes, which leaves the basic environmental problem to be solved later at considerable expense. These transfers are inhibited by legal norms lengthening time horizons, such as intergenerational equity, the precautionary principle, and mandatory prior environmental impact assessment. Since most national legal systems have permitted such transfers in the past, and actors came to view such transfers as part of life, regulation to limit or end such transfers strains previously held beliefs and will remain a source of resistance to environmental law until ecological awareness, social mores, and habit make avoidance of such transfers the basic pattern of social behavior. Environmental law has been a particularly dynamic branch of national law in all countries, marked by a high

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rate of legislative, administrative, and judicial activity for several reasons. Public concern about the environment has expanded to encompass more problems, creating demands for more regulations. Improved scientic understanding of ecosystem dynamics, and the impact of human activity on those dynamics, has been a source of demands for additional regulations or reformulations of existing ones to take advantage of current knowledge. Technological change in particular sectors of the economy, together with the broader shifts in patterns of production and distribution of goods and services resulting from the increasing volume of cross-border transactions, and the transition from the mass production-mass consumption pattern of the 1950s to the current information-intensive and exible production pattern, have also required adjustments of legal rules. The most widespread change in the national legal context has been a shift in the general approach to limiting inter-actor transfers of environmental costs. Most of the pollution control legislation adopted in the 1970s relied on a command and control regulatory regime, under which designated government agencies were given authority to determine environmental standards and to dene the means by which other actors would meet those standards (see Demand Management, Volume 4). Thus, the US Clean Air and Clean Water Acts authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to determine national air and water quality standards and then to stipulate the technological means by which users or air or water would control their emissions so that the standard would be met. Command and control operated more exibly in countries like Japan and the UK, where statutes establish broad guidelines which government agencies apply exibly through discussions with industry, and there is a strong emphasis on abating pollution through use of specied pollution control or cleanup technology. In India, it took the form of attaching conditions to permits for business activity, an environmental extension of the wellestablished license raj approach to regulating private rms general business activity. A command and control regulatory regime has the advantages of ensuring uniform standards throughout the territory of the state, assuring that all actors accomplish some minimum degree of environmental protection, and placing all rms under similar cost burdens. Yet it also has the disadvantages of cumbersomeness, since a central agency has to make far-reaching and highly detailed decisions and, at least as applied in many countries, an inexibility inhibiting adjustments to local conditions. While a command and control approach can, in principle, promote technological innovation through adoption of progressively tighter emission limitations and other technology-forcing devices, in practice it often inhibits innovation because rms and others have no incentive to do anything but adopt the governmentmandated pollution abatement technology.

By the mid 1980s, the problems with command and control regulatory regimes were being criticized from two distinct standpoints. One, generally identied with the political right and neoliberal economic theory, argued for replacing command and control with market-based measures altering actors propensity to create environmental harm either by increasing the cost of causing harm or subsidizing harm avoidance. Advocates argued that measures like emissions taxes, tradable emissions or resource extraction permits, and rules permitting rms to choose how they will meet government-determined emissions or ambient quality standards, would yield greater environmental improvement at lower cost than the command and control approach. The other, generally identied with Green parties and other elements of the political left, argued that central regulation should be replaced by a radical decentralization of authority, transformation of production and consumption patterns away from energy and resource-intensive consumerism towards localized self-sufciency, and a populist emphasis on local knowledge and local justice. Both views share a skepticism of centralized government: the rst prefers heavier reliance on private ordering through contract while the second prefers local self-organizing as a way to resist capture of the law-making process by corporations and experts. Though most forcefully expressed in the USA, market-based approaches grew more inuential in many countries during the 1990s. This shift reected some experience with particular command and control regulatory regimes, but even more the problems of centralization, opacity, and non-accountability encountered in countries where state-owned enterprises operate all or most major industries. These were most obvious in the USSR and other Leninist states. As reliance on market-based measures increased in the 1990s, criticisms of such reliance continued. Advocates of local self-sufciency continued to make their case for a complete turning away from industrial ways of life. A broader coalition, ranging from the socialist left to the center, continued to support government regulation though seeking greater transparency and accountability in corporate and governmental activity. Demands for greater public participation in environmental decision-making were reected in support for prior environmental impact assessment, right-to-know laws regarding hazardous substances and workplace safety, access to government-held information (freedom of information laws) and opportunities for public comment before major public projects began. National environmental law in most countries thus remains the subject of considerable contention as actors pursue both their immediate concerns and their visions of how society as a whole should function. National environmental law has also been affected by the ongoing debate about how to specify the desired environmental conditions. Law-making in the 1960s and 1970s was

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marked by strong debate between advocates of regulating by emissions standards, which would specify the maximum amount of pollution that could be released by any single pollution source (such as a power plant, factory, or vehicle), and by ambient standards, which would specify the maximum acceptable level of each particular form of pollution (such as sulfur dioxide, nitrate, or lead) in the water or air. The debate about the relative merits of focusing on the individual sources of pollution, or the aggregate effects of pollution-generation, was eventually resolved in a both/and fashion, in which ambient standards provide the baseline from which regulators determine whether and how to regulate individual emitters. More recently, the connections between particular emissions of pollution and the ambient air or water quality have been drawn more precisely by using the critical loads methodology to determine acceptable pollution rates by reference to the absorptive capacity of the air, water, land, or vegetation of an area, as well as ambient air or water quality (see Critical Load, Volume 3). Almost all national legal systems must also address problems that arise from fragmentation of governmental authority. This is most obvious in federal states where lower-level government units (states, lander, provinces, etc.) have constitutionally-protected powers, but also occurs in unitary states if actual management of certain activities is delegated from the national government to more localized authorities. In the Netherlands, for instance, 125 water boards, each responsible for a particular part of the country, administer many aspects of water use policy. The same dilemmas that plague development of international environmental law whether standards should be uniform or respond to differences in local conditions, whether environmental measures in one area, such as recycling requirements, serve also or primarily as ways to favor local over outside rms, whether differences in standards trigger races to the bottom as rms seek to relocate activity to places with less stringent rules, or races to the top as rms conform to the generally stricter standards prevailing in the industrial states so they can sell in those markets mark the development of national environmental law. This is particularly noticeable in large federal states like India or the USA, and is also prominent in efforts to develop European Union (EU) environmental law.

ENSURING COMPLIANCE WITH NATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL LAW

At rst glance, political centralization and organization of states along hierarchical principles appear to make the problem of securing compliance with national environmental law one of effective application of the administrative and coercive apparatus of the government. Yet even tight hierarchies founder if too many citizens react to law with inaction, grudging partial compliance, or outright

violation. National legal systems typically seek to draw on all motivations for compliance present among the private and other actors whose conducts are addressed; advocates of different regulatory regimes simply place different degrees of emphasis on different motives. Advocates of command and control rely, in the last instance, on a strong administrative state capable of monitoring actors behavior, identifying non-compliers, and imposing sanctions that will induce non-compliers to change their behavior. Advocates of market-based regulation rely more on aligning legal rules with actors current self-interests or using law to change conduct by shifting actors incentives to the point that compliance becomes more highly valued than noncompliance. Advocates of local sustainability rely primarily on persuasion to accept new values and beliefs, socialization into new norms of conduct and psychological desire to remain in good standing with others in the community. Yet when considering possible environmental law, advocates of all three share certain appreciations. All treat actors as responsible agents who are capable of thinking about their situation and making conscious choices. All assume the legal system will provide sufciently clear rules that compliance can be distinguished from non-compliance. All assume that actor behavior and the legal process are both transparent enough that particular non-compliers can be identied and called to account, and that the legal system will afford opportunities for determining whether a particular instance of non-compliance is the result of conscious action, ignorance of rules (though most national legal systems do not accept ignorance as an excuse for non-compliance), accident, or intervening circumstance that made compliance impossible, before deciding whether a particular violation is best addressed through provision of information (about the environmental problem or about the laws requirements), assistance in overcoming inability to comply, incentive to comply, or punishment of failure to comply. The national environmental law of particular countries use several mechanisms for securing compliance, with the mix actually used reecting national legal traditions on the broad problem of promoting obedience to the law. National systems tend to place great emphasis on administrative elaboration of standards, monitoring of actor compliance, and imposition of penalties for noncompliance. The more heavily a national legal system relies on administrative elaboration and enforcement, the greater the burden on government agencies to recruit and retain technically qualied personnel capable of formulating rules that will produce the desired changes, and taking action when pollution or other environmental damage results from human activity. At the same time, no government relies solely on government personnel in environmental rule-making and enforcement. Administrative rule-making typically involves a degree of prior discussion

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with the private and public actors likely to be covered by the rules. Though posing dangers of regulatory capture, in which the least enthusiastic of the regulated determine the pace and content of rules, prior discussion affords opportunities to exchange views, explain the rationale for particular rules, and secure target actors perspectives on the feasibility or unfeasibility of different possible rules. Many national legal systems attempt to limit the danger of regulatory capture through provision for public comment on proposed regulations before they go into effect, or for prior discussions that include other groups likely to be affected by target actors conduct (e.g., the governmentlabor business consultations in the European corporatist systems). Use of administrative rules requires establishment of systems for monitoring behavior. Many of these are mechanical; scientic instruments located at or movable to particular sites for direct observation of emissions or ambient air or water quality. Satellite-based remote sensing systems offer possibilities of monitoring changes in land use, vegetation patterns, and habitats as well as identifying sources of signicant pollution plumes. Complaints from nearby residents or environmental groups, who do their own monitoring, often supplement administrative agency efforts. Involvement of national courts in applying environmental rules varies considerably. In many common law countries, much environmental law was created as private persons or organizations, able to show they suffered direct damage to themselves or their economic activity from pollution, invoked common law notions of nuisance, negligence, and trespass against those responsible for the pollution. Dealing with pollution did require reinterpretation of these traditional concepts, but many judges shared the rising public concern and were willing to innovate. The owering of public interest litigation, most notable in the USA and India, also required some changes in the rules dening who has a right to sue whom over what, to allow suits by environmental and other organizations rather than individuals or rms and to permit class action suits in which some of those harmed sue on behalf of all. The very high level of court involvement in formulation and enforcement of environmental law in the USA reects that countrys conditions, and has three main sources. First, the general common law emphasis on judicial interpretation has been much enhanced through the principle of judicial review, which allows individual citizens and other private entities to challenge the consistency of statutes or particular administrative actions with basic constitutional provisions including the Bill of Rights. Second, the national governments administrative apparatus is relatively weak compared to those of other industrial states, and many federal statutes compensate for that weakness by allowing individuals or rms to sue other entities for non-compliance or to sue government agencies over non-enforcement. This practice dates

back at least to the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, and has been incorporated into the major US environmental statutes, even though the US Supreme Court has reined in the practice since the mid 1990s by narrowing the criteria for determining who is eligible to sue over what matter. Whereas environmental organizations le most of the citizen suits seeking better enforcement, business rms and other targets of environmental regulations are the source of most challenges to the constitutionality of some statutory provision or administrative act. Third, the separation of powers into three coordinate executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government often promotes judicial activism by emphasizing the courts status as a coequal branch of government. Though sharing the common law tradition, the UK and many of the Commonwealth countries have parliamentary political systems where executive and legislative powers are fused, and courts defer more to parliamentary sovereignty in matters regulated by statute than do their US counterparts. In civil law states, the courts role is even more constrained; there, administrative agencies and review panels are the primary mechanism for applying environmental rules and determining whether non-compliance has occurred; citizen suits are not institutionalized in the legal process and judicial review is limited to constitutional courts or courts of cassation (annulment) with authority to vacate (to make void) administrative actions. For states who are members of the EU, the provision for European Court review of national compliance with EU directives and regulations has created possibilities of regional judicial review. Yet judicial activism can occur even where there is no formal separation of powers and no common law system. Japanese courts played a signicant role in the initial development of environmental law in Japan, through judgments requiring businesses responsible for major pollution damage to provide extensive compensation to victims and pay punitive damages. Judicial activism has been more constant in India (a parliamentary common law state), despite a notoriously slow court system, where advocates of the poor and marginalized have taken up environmental cases as one part of a broader program of public interest litigation encouraged by the Indian Supreme Courts liberal interpretation of standing to sue, citizen suit provisions in Indian environmental statutes, and the distinctive Indian legal customs regarding writs of mandamus (which order a government agency to exercise its legal authority), prohibition (which enjoin a government agency from acting in a way contrary to statute), and certiorari (which remove a case from a lower court or an administrative agency to a higher one) allowing private citizens to sue government agencies for actions or inactions. National environmental law thus exists at the conuence of well-established national legal traditions and increasingly

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widespread knowledge about ecosystems and the impact of human activity on them. Differences in ecosystems, patterns of human activity, cultures, and legal traditions mean there will always be considerable variation in national environmental law. All national environmental law systems face the challenge of helping move societies from environmentally-oblivious to environmentally-aware modes of human conduct. Each will nd its own way to ensure that national law and property rights regimes incorporate environmental values and that actors are discouraged from persisting in patterns of activity that shift the environmental burdens of their activity to others through geographical, economic, or temporal transfer. For an interesting comparison, see International Environmental Law, Volume 5.

Nature
Nature is notoriously difcult to dene. In his touchstone denition in his anthology Keywords, the social critic Williams (1983) says that it is both perhaps the most complex word in the language and that any full history of the uses of nature would be a history of a large part of human thought. In light of these sobering judgments, a short denition should simply point out the major distinctions in the use of the word, and some of the words with which it is often paired or compared. The word derives ultimately from a cluster of terms around the past participle of the Latin verb, nascor, to be born; terms that include the use of natura as a noun indicating blood-relationship, physical afnity, etc., and that are generally associated with the idea of something having a nature or a quality of its own. This becomes linked with a second cluster of terms and meanings that suggest that there is a larger nature of things (perhaps with a capital N for Nature). Roman philosophers like Cicero and other Stoics intimated that natura rerum the nature of things might be an elemental god or physical force underlying all things. A third set of associations set the forces of nature (even the personied goddess Nature or the great god Pan) in opposition to the forces of civilization. The rst set of associations something having a nature of its own has a long subsequent history, ranging from the idea that to be natural is to be true to oneself, to todays claims that something is 100% natural. Natural here is being given the connotation of truth, purity and integrity. A different, but comparable idea is the Chinese concept of the Tao (the way), which suggests that the right path for human living is to match ones self to the moral structure (the Tao) inherently part of the natural world. In the West, a related idea (traceable back to Cicero) is that of natural law a law that does not need to be legislated because it is so obviously part of human experience, and allegiance to which aids human ourishing. This would have a long history, culminating (a) in the idea of human rights as inalienable because they are (if you subscribe to a doctrine of rights) part of the denition of what it is to be human; and (b) in various controversial claims about natural law by conservative institutions, e.g., slavery is natural, woman are naturally nurturing, homosexuality is unnatural, and so on. In the Middle Ages, and into the Modern Era, the dominance of Christianity cast a suspicious shadow over all versions of being natural, that allied human nature with the natural world, when that world was seen as the pagan world of unredeemed physical nature. It was considered

REFERENCES
Baker, R, ed (1997) Environmental Law and Policy in the European Union and the United States, Praeger, Westport, CT. Baker, M, Bassett, L, and Ellington, A (1985) The World Environment Handbook, World Environment Center, New York. Berkes, F (1989) Common Property Resources: Ecology and Community-based Sustainable Development, Bellhaven Press, London. Findley, F W and Farber, D A (1999) Cases and Materials on Environmental Law, 5th edition, West Group, St Paul, MN. Janicke, M and Weidner, H, eds (1997) National Environmental Policies, Springer, Berlin. McGregor, G (1994) Environmental Law and Enforcement, Lewis, Boca Raton, FL. Ostrom, E (1990) Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Rosencranz, A, Divan, S, and Noble, M L (1991) Environmental Law and Policy in India, Tripathi, Bombay.

FURTHER READING
Berry, J F and Dennison, M S (2000) The Environmental Law and Compliance Handbook, McGraw-Hill, New York. Koeman, N S J (1999) Environmental Law in Europe, Kluwer Law International, The Hague. Pardy, B (1996) Environmental Law: A Guide to Concepts, Butterworths, Toronto. Shea, E E (2001) Environmental Law and Compliance Methods, Oceana, New York.

Natural Law
see Nature (Volume 5)

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to be tempting and dangerous, because it was disordered and distant from God. The ultimate Paradise of Christian mythology was either a redeemed garden (of Eden) or a city, Jerusalem. Wilderness was the place of demons and temptation, as it had been for the Israelites and Jesus both, as they wandered in the wild desert. For the medieval Christian, the important task was not to align oneself with the forces of wild nature, but with humankinds true nature which was in alignment with the ordering power of God. Human beings were exhorted to redeem their wild, corrupt nature by moving towards their second nature a cultivated nature that had to be worked upon, and transcended. In several places in the Bible, Heaven is described as the city of light. In the Romantic era (17501850), this third set of associations nature versus cultivation was turned on its head. Given the pressures of the Industrial Revolution, and the widespread repudiation of hierarchical political and social structures based on outmoded versions of order, romantic writers claimed a primal afnity with nature, because nature was now a place of refuge, and positively comparable as a complex, organic whole, to an increasingly alienated atomized machine culture. Nature was once again the original home from which human beings had fallen into civilization. The destruction of nature began to be seen as analogous to the increasing destruction of elements of human nature by the forces of industrialization. This recasting of nature as positive has had a number of effects, not all of which are themselves positive. For example, the image of a pure primal energy force associated with nature the life or death force inuenced the rise of Nazi blood politics. Other effects, which have still not been fully worked through, include the raising of fundamental questions about whether there is such a thing as human nature, whether human beings are lying to themselves when they consider themselves to be independent moral agents capable of rising above nature, and so on. On the other hand, environmentalism owes its very existence to the positive reevaluation of the need for unhumanized nature, and the protection of natural processes (which we do not fully understand) in the modern world. Finally, it is worth noting that the second set of associations with which we began Nature as a catch-all term for everything in the material world is certainly widespread today in the sciences, where nature is synonymous with the natural world, that is, the physical world. Because of the complex web of historic and philosophical meanings attached to the term, however, it often causes confusion wherever different disciplines meet, especially across the physical sciences, social sciences, and humanities.

REFERENCE
Williams, R (1983) Nature in Keywords, Fontana, London.
PETER TIMMERMAN Canada

Naturism
see Ecofeminism (Volume 5)

New Ageism
New Ageism is a diffuse, piecemeal movement of groups and individuals both inside and outside environmentalism. They share a conviction that the world is undergoing a major transformation, involving a shift in consciousness, towards a new mode of being. Contemporary New Agers follow the astrologers contention that a new age is entered about every 2000 years, maintaining that the Age of Aquarius is displacing the current Age of Pisces. Pisces has been dominated by polarization and con ict between cultures, civilizations, religions and races. Western consciousness has particularly been driven, through mistaken conceptions of reality as composed of irreconcilable dualities like mind and body, male and female, society and nature. By contrast the Aquarian Age will be one of harmony, holism, balance and heightened moral and spiritual awareness. Society and nature will no longer be separated. Transition to the New Age will follow changes in the consciousness of some individuals. They will form disparate, scattered groups promoting such things as ecology, feminism, spirituality, etc., and will eventually coalesce to form a critical mass, catalyzing all peoples into the new thinking, thus creating a global consciousness. This process will be facilitated by advanced communications technology, such as the internet. New Ageism draws on an eclectic mix of spiritual and other traditions, such as Eastern mysticism, Western religions (the ideas of the Catholic priest, Teilhard de Chardin, are seminal), alternative medicine, ecological science and new physics. Its idealistic analysis and prescriptions focus on changed attitudes as the spur to changed behavior. It rejects the materialist analyses of old-style politics, which analyze behavior in relation to economic class interests. Paradoxically, perhaps, New Ageism often revives

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pre-modern beliefs, such as paganism, pantheism, animism and vitalism.

DAVID PEPPER UK

NIMBY (Not In My Backyard)

NIMBY is an acronym indicating that people living near a proposed development (e.g., waste dump, highway bypass, nuclear power station) strongly object to having the development situated near them, although they would not necessarily oppose the development if it were located elsewhere. A related expression used in parts of the USA is locally unacceptable land use (LULU).
R E MUNN Canada

scientic one. Two French philosophers, Edouard Le Roy and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin introduced the term in the early 1920s. Teilhard de Chardin described the noosphere as the conscious and thinking membrane enveloping the globe, whose emergence was caused by the appearance of humans on the Earth and by the development of human intelligence. Vladimir Vernadsky, the Russian natural scientist and philosopher, gave a more scientic connotation to the word noosphere. He envisioned the noosphere as an inevitable evolutionary stage of the biosphere where human thought and activities become major forces in the evolution of the Earth. Given that humans can change the chemical composition of air and water, create articial minerals, reroute rivers, and breed new types of animals and plants, their power to transform the environment is now comparable to the transforming forces of nature. Vernadsky saw anthropogenic environmental changes as inevitable, manifesting the beginning of a new evolutionary stage of the biosphere. See also : Vernadsky, Vladimir, Volume 2.

REFERENCES

Non-anthropocentrism
see Environmental Ethics (Volume 5)

Le Roy, E (1927) Lexigence Idealiste et le Fait dEvolution, Boivin, Paris. Teilhard de Chardin, P (1980) The Phenomenon of Man, English translation, Harper Collins, London. Vernadsky, V (1944) A Few Words About Noosphere (in Russian), Adv. Mod. Biol., 18(2), 118 120.
GALINA CHURKINA Germany

Noosphere
The noosphere is a sphere of interaction between humans and nature where conscious human actions become a major determining factor of its evolution. The denition of noosphere has evolved from a spiritual notion to a more

Not In My Backyard (NIMBY)

see NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) (Volume 5)

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Phase Shifts or Flip-flops in Complex Systems

Henry A Regier and James J Kay
1 2 1

University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Living things self-organize into systems that must be partly closed to maintain identity and integrity, but must also stay partly open in order to accumulate high quality resources in categories such as mass, energy and information and to void wastes also belonging to these categories. A living thing must also stay partly open in order to interact, often reciprocally, with other living systems and with features of its non-living environment. Non-living things may also selforganize systemically, but in less complex ways. Living things in general have evolved capabilities to self-organize into a number of different complex phases, states or stages and to shift from one of these to another in response to changes in internal and external phenomena. Many living systems, especially organisms, have evolved capabilities to proceed autonomously through cycles of such stages. The life history of an insect, for example, exhibits a progression from fertilization to egg to larva to pupa to adult to dead body. Such a one-way or ontogenetic development with transformations between stages may be perceived as a special case of the kind of organizational changes that we focus on here; we do not include such specialized one-way cases in the present discussion. Instead, we focus on systemic reorganizations that occur between different relatively stable states of a living complex system and are reversible, more or less. (Of course, strict reversibility is not possible because living systems are subject to the second law of thermodynamics.) The kind of shifts on which we focus may occur abruptly and haphazardly in response to a particular kind of stimulus that is relatively unexpected and catastrophic in its context; or it may occur in a more orderly way for some stimulus that is always expected with significant probability in its context. We emphasize that, for this essay, the concept of shift between phases has a similar meaning to flip between stable states, and a two-stage flip-flop between alternate states. We do not include a concept of ontogenetic, one way changes through a genetically pre-ordained series of stages; to do so would increase the scope of our essay beyond our present purposes. We include as natural, some features of living things that some people would refer to as cultural. Some species such as humans may exhibit strong cultural features as well as the necessary natural features, while other species such as bacteria may exhibit few if any cultural features. We do not presume to understand fully any natural and natural/cultural features of reality that we address. Some people may perceive some features of humans and human societies to be both cultural and unnatural; our intent is not to include consideration of such unnatural features in the present essay. The natural base of strongly cultural living systems must remain open to mass, energy, and information flows, as is the case with all living things. Cultural manifestations are also open culturally in that they thrive on such resources as beauty, ethical goodness, respect and caring and try to divest themselves of the opposite of these qualities; ugliness, evil, disrespect and hate.

ECO-STUDIES
Academically, numerous overlapping kinds of eco-studies may be perceived; we refer explicitly to five kinds here. The prefix eco-(from the Greek oikos, home as an edifice with its inhabitants) relates to a generic home-like phenomenon in which a living entity interacts with its living and non-living environment, which may include an artificial dwelling place. This approach parallels the combined

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consideration of text and context by some scholars with a focus on information. A living entity may have living sub-entities within it. It follows from this basic perception that study of an eco-phenomenon transcends any conceptual dichotomy between analytical reductionism and observational or intuitive holism. Neither the reductionistic nor the holistic approach is wrong; instead each is just half-baked. Sometimes the eco-approach is termed holonistic, with the hol referring to whole, and the on, referring to part and this makes explicit the transcendence of the reductionismholism debate. The versions of eco-studies include: 1. Eciatrics (from eco and iatros as pertaining to physician or medicine) includes public health studies of humans and domestic animals with respect to effects of pathogens on organisms and populations, as in epidemiology, and risk assessment studies of effects of toxins and contaminants on the organismal and population health of humans and other species. Ecology or ecologics (from eco and logos as pertaining to reasoned knowledge) here narrowly dened and including interactive aspects of meteorology, hydrology, geology as well as conventional biology, and relating to the contemporary real time processes of biological evolution. Economics (from eco and nomos as pertaining to law or laws) in which the practices of benetcost accounting and monetary risk assessment may be of minor signicance overall compared, say, to an understanding of the self-organizing features of local sharing of ecosystemic goods/bads and services/disservices in a communitarian regime, and/or to global trade within a constrained free enterprise regime. Ekistics (from oikizo meaning the establishment of a settlement) relating to the self-organizational development of human urban and rural settlements, physical infrastructures, industrial complexes, the information highway, etc. Ecumenics (from oikoumenos meaning all beings in community) here with a focus on participatory governance within an extended community of interest groups or stakeholders, and including informal, extraconstitutional decision-making structures and processes that transcend boundaries between people of different nations and jurisdictions and thus complement the formal, constitutional laws, treaties and agreements of autonomous nations, as those were once perceived.

2.

3.

4.

5.

To study living systems, the psychologist and game theorist Rapoport (1986) has emphasized identity, organization and goal directedness. In a compatible way, the writer Koestler (1969) focused on self-organization, hierarchy and openness. Koestler excluded some connotations of

hierarchy, e.g., the control hierarchy within a large military unit. Instead he referred to reciprocal nested interactions among holons, i.e., things that act as wholes but also as parts of larger wholes, within a form of organization that may be termed a holonarchy. A well-known example of a loose holonarchy is the interactive complex of nested formal and informal organizations within a multi-tiered form of liberal democratic governance, as may be described in ecumenics. The conceptual domain that includes the ve nested versions of eco-studies sketched above, plus some others, may be termed an ecogeny. The sufx refers to genesis, which refers here to emergent self-creation guided in part by a priori genetic hardware as well as by learned software, both augmented by new autonomous programming. Cooperative study by colleagues and ourselves in the North American Great Lakes Basin, for example, makes use of all those versions of eco-studies within an ecosystem approach that may be perceived as a special case of integrated ecogenic studies. Haas (1999) might refer to our self-organizing study group as a kind of epistemic community and we might refer to ourselves more specically as an eco-epistemic community. Here epistemic relates to a compendium of shared perspective and knowledge that is offered as having particular relevance to a major cultural challenge or opportunity. Some scholars may relate this epistemic concept to that of an expanded version of what Thomas Kuhn referred to as a scientic paradigm (see Fuller, 2000). Incidentally, we have chosen not to include an explicit notion of paradigm shift, but note that our version of that notion is implicit throughout. In other words, what we here dene as ecogeny has ipped from being a suppressed theme within modernism to become a key theme within post-modernism. Many non-living as well as ecogenic systems can exist in more than one phase, state or topological domain of attraction as the ecologist C S Holling has long emphasized. After being harangued by Holling for many years to provide him with Great Lakes data that would demonstrate ecological phase shifts, one of us, Regier, nally asked himself the question: If phase shifts have occurred, where and how could we look for evidence of such events? He decided to search for limits to the adaptive self-organization of a sh association (considered as a holon) to an array of intensifying stresses by humans in the larger environmental holon, and then examine whether another phase self-organized beyond a limit or threshold. Sure enough, the evidence was there, though it may not have been fully consistent with Hollings expectations. (See section titled Benthic and Pelagic Attractors in Ecosystems for more information on this issue.) Researchers on natural and cultural systems once used single phase, deterministic, cybernetic systems as models. Any phase shift was then perceived as a catastrophic failure of pre-programmed cybernetic adaptiveness. Researchers

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now perceive natural/cultural systems to be self-organizing and morphogenetic, and some phase shifts are just part of the adaptive, emergent capability of the evolving system. (Here morphogenetic implies that the forms or structures as morphs as well as the related processes of living things emerge through self-organizational genesis.) The death of a living system is an ultimate kind of phase shift when all adaptive capabilities are over-ridden, because the stresses either are too intense or act too rapidly. When ecogenic realities are changing rapidly, as is now the case in many parts of the biosphere, one might expect adaptive and emergent phase shifts to be common, and catastrophic shifts all the way to systemic death to occur as well. Selected examples are sketched below to demonstrate that phase shift events now occur ubiquitously. We note again that phase shifts may be referred to as ip-ops between organizational states as in discussion of major back and forth changes in the earths climate that have seemingly occurred suddenly in the past. We start with nonliving systems, then turn to living systems in which cultural features are not emphasized, and then to living systems in which cultural features are emphasized. But we do not address unnatural things like any divine acts of deities or things for which no empirical data are conceivable.

trout, for example. From an ecological perspective, each of these involves a different kind of phase shift from liquid to solid.
Different Phases of Flow Dynamics

EXAMPLES OF PHASES AND PHASE SHIFTS IN BIOPHYSICAL SYSTEMS

Different Phases of Water

Everyone knows that water can occur in different phases, e.g., liquid, solid and gas. When some research physicists focused on phase shift phenomena with water, their model implied the existence of a fourth phase, under special circumstances. They called it the gaquid phase and found that it materialized under the expected articial combination of temperature and pressure. When a liquid water system cools through 0 C it freezes to become a solid water system. The detailed features of the freezing process are anything but deterministic in a simple way, when viewed at a molecular scale. In nature, it is generally not possible to predict either precisely how and when liquid water will freeze during a cooling regime or the crystalline form of ice that results. The freezing phenomenon itself is of major importance to those aquatic living things which have to nd some way to adapt anatomically and/or physiologically and/or behaviorally to freezing. Such adaptations in turn may be perceived to involve phase shifts in anatomy and/or physiology and/or behavior. At a more macroscopic level, the kind of ice that forms in a stream is important ecologically. Anchor ice, frazzle ice and surface ice have quite different implications for brook

When water ows at low velocities across a smooth surface, it may move as a sheet with laminar ow; at higher velocities it may ow in complex turbulent swirls. Turbulent ow in turn may occur as a number of different sub-phases. Researchers in uid dynamics have focused much scientic attention on: what determines which phase of ow regime will occur in a particular context; the macroscopic features of the threshold between the phases; and the more microscopic details of the phase shift process itself. Their understanding, condensed in the form of a Reynolds Number, allows them to predict quite accurately a phase shift between turbulent and laminar ow within a pure liquid. The more particles or lumps in the system, the less accurate any forecast based on such a pure system Reynolds Number will be. The issue of phases and phase shifts in the ow regime is of key importance to aquatic organisms. While migrating, for example, salmon may use a standing wave in turbulent ow to catapult themselves over an obstruction in a river. To rest, a sh may select a site of laminar ow downstream from an obstruction and adjust its ns so that it rests lightly on the bottom. One dramatic example of such phase shifts in uids is the well-dened transition from conductive to convective heat transfer. If a uid is contained between a hot and a cold boundary, heat transfer will occur through the uid. Consider thin soup in a pot on a stove as an example. For small temperature differences between the surfaces, the heat transfer is by random molecular motion, conduction. However as the temperature increases, a critical point is reached at which a new phase emerges, convection. With convection the uid molecules self-organize to move together in rolls or Benard cells as coherent wholes. As the temperature difference between hot and cold boundaries increases, the original conguration of Benard cells may self-organize into a more complex conguration. With each phase shift, more heat is transferred, per unit time, than in the previous phase. At a human scale, avoiding the phase shift from conduction to convection is at the heart of the design of double pane and triple pane windows. These windows are designed so that convective heat transfer cannot emerge, thus limiting the heat loss through the window to that of conduction. At a regional scale, on clear summer days with a particular kind of atmospheric stratication, the Suns warming of the land surface leads to warming of the overlying air. Bubbles of such warm air of decreased density may then form spontaneously and episodically to rise and erupt into

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an overlying cooler layer; these bubbles of warm clear air may transform into cumulus clouds within the cooler layer. In particular locales, successive uffy clouds that emerge may be evenly spaced in the drifting upper layer. At the global scale, the emergence of large convection cells in the atmosphere, called Hadley cells (see Hadley Circulation, Volume 1), helps to transfer heat from the equator to the pole, thus reducing north-south temperature differences between the equator and the poles. Many kinds of phase shifts may occur within the hydrosphere and the atmosphere, since these spheres consist of uid components with different properties acting and interacting across boundary layers under the in uence of solar radiation.
Flows in Water Courses and Flood Plains

intense periods of turbulent stress for the living system of a river. Such a river may be perceived to be angry and may not approximate benign steady-state conditions at any time of year.
Phenology and Seasonal Phase Shifts

Rivers carve water courses or channels out of the substrate to accommodate their ows during most days of a year, but not during high ow rates when ooding occurs. It is important to note that the course that a river cuts through a landscape is usually not large enough to include the ows of normal annual oods. The area known as the oodplain and its valley in turn have also been created, at least in part, by the continually shifting meandering river course, and especially by its oods. Hydrologists do not fully understand why a river self-organizes as a biphasal phenomenon, with one phase for small to moderate ows, and another phase for large ows. But hydrologists have inferred generalizations about the channels and ood plains of particular aquatic systems that have adapted over long periods of time to the underlying geology, under the in uence of climatic regimes that have operated in quite predictable ways. A river channel, ood plain and the larger valley are always dynamic; they may approach a steady state under conditions like those sketched above, but they are never in equilibrium with their surroundings. For example, a river never stops dissolving and eroding its substrates and walls. Living organisms, especially large plants and animals that eat the plants that live within and beside a river, strongly in uence the self-organizing hydrological activities and usually have a taming in uence on the waters, to the advantage of the organisms. Cultural practices in a watershed strongly modify the temporal and spatial features of the natural ooding regime, e.g., by putting a river into an engineered channel, or by cutting down forests farther upstream. In effect a ooding phase shift occurs more frequently during a year if the watershed becomes ecologically degraded or is developed inappropriately, and the river has not had enough decades to adapt to those changes. Thus conventional unsustainable development has led to more frequent and more rapid phase shifts of the ow regime, and thus to more frequent and

In temperate regions as in the Great Lakes Basin, the annual cycle involves a spring and summer phase that is dominated trophically by composers that use the sunlight s energy for photosynthesis, e.g., plants, and a fall and winter phase dominated by decomposers that use the energy of organic matter derived from photosynthesis and stored in summer, e.g., animals and fungi. Each of these phases and their transitions are intricately choreographed in what could be called a pristine, old growth state of the Basin ecosystem. The term is extended here beyond its familiar use as in old growth forest, to mean any ecosystem that has evolved its own complexity under benign conditions over extensive periods of time. Unsustainable development disrupts the natural self-organizing processes, so that the sequential features within phases and particularly during the phase shifts become less predictable, from the perspective of the extant species. In warmer regions, the climate may include a wet season and a dry season. Cyclical changes, somewhat similar to those sketched above occur here, too.
Benthic and Pelagic Attractors in Ecosystems

Moderately deep natural aquatic ecosystems that are not much in uenced by technologically careless humans usually have clear waters and a biotic association or benthos that is linked strongly to the bottom of the waters. In effect a benthic attractor or self-organizing system then emerges to serve its own ends, for example by preying on the open water association or pelagos to keep the water above it transparent and by hoarding phosphates and other nutrients that deprive pelagic organisms of these resources. Ecologically, the benthic association has similarities to the old growth state of primeval forests or grasslands. There are long-lived, large, sessile or sedentary plants, invertebrates and vertebrates with some of the latter migrating annually in stereotyped patterns. The dominant species of the benthos may be termed K-selected (see Box 1). Unfortunately it happens that nearly all the cultural stresses imposed by humans act to impair and incapacitate such a benthic attractor. Near the surface in moderately deep waters, a pelagic attractor, mostly with r-selected species (see Box 1), may then self-organize because ample nutrients then occur in those waters. A burgeoning pelagic association may then act so as to further suppress the benthic attractor already harmed by unsustainable cultural practices. This is a case of positive feedback, which occurs

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Box 1 The meanings of the r and K terms The r and K symbols originated in a particular formula for the physical growth of an organism, but have taken on a metaphorical life of their own in discussions of species successions as related to phase shifts. In an early successional stage, as in a cultivated eld that is reverting to nature or with the herbaceous vegetation in a temperate forest in spring, r species that are small, short-lived, fast growing, early maturing and tolerant of uctuating environmental conditions generally thrive and reproduce rst. These are gradually replaced in late spring by activation of K species that are large, long-lived, slow growing, late maturing and intolerant of uctuating environmental conditions. Within phase changes, the switch from dominance by one type to dominance by another is generally not complete (see r K Strategies, Volume 2).

The saprobien system bears some resemblance to the decomposer association that forms on the bottom of strongly eutrophic lake waters of moderate depth. Excessive enrichment of waters with plant nutrients may cause more severe eutrophication as hypertrophy. In relatively quiescent waters there may then emerge a surface association with oating and decomposing mats of algae, fungus, slimes and bacteria together with blooms of toxic algae where the matting is not continuous. Caddy (1993) has observed ecological phenomena in enclosed and semi-enclosed seas subjected to unsustainable development that are similar to the phase shifts that we and others have inferred for freshwaters.

commonly in an early stage of the self-organization of a phase of a living system. With further organization, negative feedbacks are generated within the evolving new phase to counter-balance the positive feedbacks, or even to exceed the positive feedbacks, as in some over-mature senile, or old growth manifestation of a phase in an ecosystem. The terms oligotrophic (few food items) and eutrophic (many food items) are commonly used to denote aquatic systems in which benthic and pelagic attractors, respectively, are dominant. These may be taken to be code words, since much more than trophic status is involved in oligotrophic type and eutrophic type systems. In Regier and Kay (1996) and Kay and Regier (1999), we have focused attention on the kind of phase shifts between states that are dominated by the benthic and the pelagic attractors in the three basins of Lake Erie. Other researchers are taking a comparable approach to shallow or lentic waters of coastal wetlands and deeper or lotic waters as in rift lakes. With respect to the whole gamut of aquatic ecosystems, there may be more kinds of attractors, and related phase shifts. One such state, that of a saprobien system, is particularly objectionable to humans in warmer parts of the world. European researchers who studied the effects of sewage outfalls on rivers starting a century ago rst described a saprobien system. Just downstream from an outfall, sewage decomposes aerobically and this process may quickly exhaust the oxygen in the water. With farther movement downstream, the aerobic organisms die and anaerobic organisms become dominant. Ecological production by anaerobes may generate foul smelling gases based on reduced forms of sulfur, carbon and nitrogen, as also is the case with poorly managed cesspools. Farther downstream, the demand for oxygen by the biota can be met by the slow diffusion of oxygen from the atmosphere into the water, and this marks the downstream boundary of the saprobien system.

FROM GREYBROWN TO GREENBLUE TECHNOLOGY

In the past, hydrological engineers were expected to correct the destructive behavior of streams that were excessively turbulent because of abuse upon abuse to which these streams and their watersheds had been subjected. Though the ecological causes of the destructiveness of an abused stream were understood in the mid-19th century by George Perkins Marsh (see Marsh, George Perkins, Volume 3) and others, there was not then an adequate planning or regulatory capability (see following section) to correct enough of these abuses at their sources to permit the stream to recover its gentler features. So the engineers resorted to dealing with local effects where some crisis had erupted, often by creating an ugly new water course with concrete and steel and enclosing it with tall fencing because people who fell into raging waters in such a channel were likely to drown. This concrete and steel grey brown technology exacerbated the turbulent adverse effects downstream, which then called for more concrete and steel with more muddy water, etc. This is an example of positive feedback within anti-ecological technology. A phase shift in planning and management of such human-altered streams occurred when the governance processes switched so that a watershed ecosystem approach came to use natures way; green blue technology. This phase shift involves compatible phase changes in the disciplines of engineering, of planning and in the expectations of affected residents. Such a comprehensive phase shift might be resisted by a government administration committed to encouraging the production and sale of concrete and steel, say, and to providing remunerative contracts for conventional engineering and construction rms. Government patronage, with the help of greybrown bureaucrats, has long funded ecosystemically abusive engineering works related to harbors and streams. The institutional connections between a government agency, an industry and the relevant profession or interactive set of professions that led to such

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autocatalysis or positive feedback has been referred to as an iron triangle in the US. With streams of the Great Lakes Basin, we appear to be in the throes of a phase shift toward an ecosystem/watershed/landscape approach, i.e., to greenblue technology.

A CRUCIAL CULTURAL PHASE SHIFT AT A GLOBAL LEVEL

As has become increasingly obvious in many United Nations (UN) conferences since 1970, a crucial policy initiative on food, environment, population and development anywhere in the world has been to facilitate the selfempowerment of women (see Ecofeminism, Volume 5). Eco-feminists can explain much better than we can the necessity for a cultural phase shift toward a status for women that they prefer and must have. This involves a systemic change in the status of men, or at least of some men. According to women leaders of this movement, such a phase shift should not be a zero-sum game, in that few women want to compete directly with men to the disadvantage of men. Instead the shift should move from a culturally impoverished state of male dominance to a richer and better state of cross gender partnership. At the UN Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994, for example, strong resistance to such a phase shift came from male clergy who propounded narrow, fundamentalistic versions of the JudeoChristianMuslim family of religions. Though they may raise important ethical issues, such clerics and their male followers may not be disinterested personally since they may lose status and power with such a shift. Many men who are not constrained by these fundamentalisms are making common cause with self-empowering women. What are some of the implications of a gender-related phase shift for Great Lakes Basin ecosystems, say? The phase shift from the greybrown to greenblue technology sketched above may well be due in part to the increased participation in recent decades by women in all aspects of research, planning and management related to those streams. Twenty years ago one of us, Regier, supervised the thesis research on the sh of the Credit River (near Toronto) by Deborah Martin, now Deborah Martin-Downs (Martin, 1984). She had learned to identify all sh in all life stages so that it would seldom be necessary to kill and preserve specimens. So she had data but few specimens, and sometimes could not respond in the usual way to a query whether she really had seen a specimen of a particular species at a particular locale. Though there were raised eyebrows and some testy queries during her oral examination, nobody considered the absence of dead specimens as a serious weakness of her method, and all respected her ethics. Such ethics may

require that high expertise in recognizing sh species in the eld be demonstrated for skeptical colleagues. In the Great Lakes Basin since the 1950s, some, and perhaps most of the key environmental victories have been won with leadership by women. Many of the women were unpaid volunteers or underpaid activists. Mostly it has been well paid men who then led with the implementation. Men should participate in correcting the degradation now so obvious in ecosystems everywhere. Of course, there were always individual men who were not part of the degrading culture. Similarly there were women who were willingly part of it, and may occasionally have been leaders of the degrading progressive modernism (see also Ecofeminism, Volume 5).

INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND CORRECTION OF AN EARLIER PHASE SHIFT

In the UN conferences of the 1970s (on food in 1970, on the environment in 1972 and on population in 1974), some attention was focused on the injustices directed toward indigenous peoples as a consequence of invasions of their lands and waters by modern progressives. This theme became much more pronounced in the 1990s UN conferences on the environment and development, population and women. Agenda 21, issued by the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, has a strong section on indigenous peoples. With respect to Great Lakes Basin waters, aboriginals non-ceded rights are coming to be recognized again, very belatedly. Since many aboriginals, both women and men, are re-committing themselves and their people to nature stewardship, this process of re-empowerment should be welcomed. As with empowerment of women, re-empowerment of indigenous peoples should enrich our impoverished culture. Tolerance of diverse cultures may be as desirable as biodiversity. The phase shift toward fair status for indigenous or native peoples is not yet assured in the Great Lakes Basin generally, or elsewhere in the world. Non-native guardians of these waters are committed to partnerships with the native guardians (see also Indigenous Knowledge, Peoples and Sustainable Practice, Volume 5; Religion and Environment Among North American First Nations, Volume 5).

FROM MODERNISM THROUGH POST-MODERNISM TO WHAT?

Some thirty years ago the Western World apparently passed beyond the centuries-long era of modern progress, in a massive cultural phase shift that is still underway. The management guru, Drucker (1989) has sketched this shift in

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ways that many would consider brash, but after publishing widely acknowledged seminal works for over 50 years; some continuing brashness from Drucker may be tolerable. Druckers ecological perspective on all of this emerged out of the new discipline of business administration, and is similar to what we refer to here as ecogenic. One of us, Regier (1995), has listed some 15 transitional phenomena that occurred in or about 1968, at about the time inferred by Drucker to be the height of land between the conceptual basin of the modern era and the conceptual basin of the new era. The latter era is still apparently nameless; though some people refer to it as post-industrial or postmodern. Stronger commitments to deontological ethics (ethics based on a deep shared sense of what is right and what is wrong with respect to duty) may increasingly be trumping modernist commitments to utilitarian ethics; ethics based on the greatest good for the greatest number. Integrity may be a code word for such a deontological commitment. In the 1960s social integration, toward a new and desirable cultural integrity, was directed toward correcting racial and gender inequities in Western countries. Since then, integration of many indigenous peoples into emerging political systems has been leading toward a mosaic landscape integrity that is apparent politically, culturally and ecologically, from an ecogenic perspective. Agenda 21, that outcome of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio, includes deontological as well as utilitarian commitments to global programs of several kinds, e.g., to preserve biodiversity. Thus a deontological commitment to biodiversity concerning Great Lakes Basin waters links to a compatible global commitment. Such connections should be recognized and be supported by strong institutional links, as has been attempted at the federal Canadian level. Local stream stewards, say, could draw encouragement from the sense that they are necessary parts of a global ethical commitment to ecological integrity.

efforts to reverse the shift may be very costly and take much time because of the effects of systemic inertia or hysteresis. There is, as yet, no strong empirical evidence to support optimism about the 21st Century. The new era, following the cultural phase shift sketched above, may play out worse than the progressive modern era that is now behind us. For example, it may turn out that our environmental and cultural reforms will have been too little and too late; and we humans may trigger ips into a succession of less desirable states of kinds that we have not yet encountered. Ecogenically there may then be no way back to something resembling an earlier manifestation of our biospheric home.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
An earlier version of this essay appeared in: Stream Corridors: Adaptive Management and Design, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Natural Channel Systems, March 14, 1999, Niagara Falls, ON. Credit Valley Conservation Authority, Georgetown, ON. Patti Young, coordinator of that 1999 CD publication, has granted permission to publish the present revised version.

REFERENCES
Caddy, J F (1993) Towards a Comparative Evaluation of Human Impacts on Fishery Ecosystems of Enclosed and Semi-enclosed Seas, Rev. Fish. Sci., 1(1), 57 95. Drucker, P F (1989) The New Realities, Harper and Row, New York. Fuller, S (2000) Thomas Kuhn: a Philosophical History for Our Times, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Haas, P M (1999) Social Constructivism and the Evolution of Multilateral Environmental Governance, in Globalization and Governance, eds A Prakash and J A Hart, Routledge, London. Kay, J J and Regier, H A (1999) An Ecosystemic Two-phase Attractor Approach to Lake Eries Ecology, in State of Lake Erie (SOLE) Past, Present and Future, eds M Munawar, T Edsall, and I F Munawar, Ecovision World Monograph Series, Backhuys Publications, Leiden. Koestler, A and Smithies, J R (1969) Beyond Reductionism, Hutchinson, London. Martin, D K (1984) The Fishes of the Credit River: Cultural Effects in Recent Decades, M.Sc. Thesis, Department of Zoology, University of Toronto. Rapoport, A (1986) General System Theory: Essential Concepts and Applications, Abacus Books, Cambridge, MA. Regier, H A (1995) Ecosystem Integrity in a Context of Ecostudies as Related to the Great Lakes Region, in Perspectives on Ecological Integrity, eds L Westra and J Lemons, Kluwer Academic Publications, Dordrecht. Regier, H A and Kay, J J (1996) An Heuristic Model of Transformations of the Aquatic Ecosystems of the Great Lake St. Lawrence River Basin, J. Aquat. Ecosyst. Health, 5, 3 21.

CONCLUSIONS
Nine kinds of systemic phase shifts have been sketched above, all in a conceptual context of dynamic self-organizing ecogenic systems. We hope that this evidence sufces to make the point that such phase shifts are now ubiquitous in all the ve versions of eco-studies to which we have referred here. If so, our educational, research, practice and governance initiatives should more clearly reect that awareness. Practically, a precautionary principle invoked in the context of a commitment to sustainable and responsible use implies that informed judgement be exercised to avert phase shifts to undesirable states. Once a phase shift has occurred,

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FURTHER READING
Caley, M T and Sawada, D (1994) Mindscapes: the Epistemology of Magoroh Maruyama, Gordon and Breach, London. Kay, J J (1984) Self-Organization in Living Systems, Ph.D. Thesis, Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo. Rapport, D J and Regier, H A (1995) Disturbance and Stress Effects on Ecological Systems, in Complex Ecology: The PartWhole Relations in Ecosystems, eds B C Patten and S E Jorgensen, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Regier, H A, Jones, M L, Addis, J, and Donahue, M (1999) Great Lakes St. Lawrence River Basin Assessments, in Bioregional Assessments: Science at the Crossroads of Management and Policy, eds K N Johnson, F Swanson, M Herring, and S Greene, Island Press, Washington, DC. Regier, H A, Welcomme, R L, Steedman, R J, and Henderson, H F (1989) Rehabilitation of Degraded River Ecosystems, Can. Special Publication Fish Aquat. Sci., 106, 86 97. Steedman, R J and Regier, H A (1987) Ecosystem Science for the Great Lakes: Perspectives on Degradative Transformations, Can. J. Fish Aquat. Sci., 44(Supplement 2), 95 130.

Philosophy, Environmental
see Environmental Philosophy: Phenomenological Ecology (Volume 5)

Pinchot, Gifford
see Environmental Movement the Rise of Non-government Organizations (NGOs) (Volume 5)

Political Movements/ Ideologies and the Environment

David Pepper
Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK

There is no one, politically uniform, environmental movement in the West, but a series of movements and groups. They represent a massive growth in popular concern about

the negative ecological consequences of economic and technological development since the 1960s. Initial worries, like those over the impact of agricultural chemicals on the environment, soon broadened to include all pollution caused by economic and technological development, and the issue of population growth, consumerism and resource use. This developed into a challenge to the whole notion of progress implied in Western development since the Enlightenment, and to industrial society and its view of social justice. After some early impact on policy in the 1970s, there was a period of retrenchment from environmental legislation in the 1980s by Western governments. They were in uenced by the arguments of business and industry, which in a climate of increasing global competitiveness saw environmental and social spending as brakes on ef ciency and pro ts. While this climate still prevails, the of cial stance of governments since the 1992 Rio Conference has been that the interests of pro table business and environmental protection are compatible. Hence environmental sustainability principles are supposed to be incorporated into all main policy areas under the development model known as ecological modernization. Environmental movements have reacted to these trends by developing political parties, pressure groups and other approaches. These have sought to in uence government from the outside via public opinion, and also to become part of policy formulation from the inside. In the 1990s there has also been a revival of direct action, which sometimes breaks the law, by environmentalist factions who are disillusioned with the democratic processes. Two approaches to environmental politics have developed. Reformism seeks to change society substantially to achieve environmentally sustainable development, but not to the extent of abandoning capitalism and the modern scienti c, technological and managerial expertise on which mainstream development is based. Radical environmentalism, however, does ultimately wish to radically change or remove capitalism, replacing it with forms of localized development that prioritize social need, direct grass-roots democracy, and environmental protection rather than economic and technological growth. Mainstream environmentalist political ideology, therefore, re ects these currents, drawing on radical and reformist political traditions going back at least as far as the 18th century. Reformism re ects conservative, liberal and democratic socialist traditions. Environmental radicalism is especially in uenced by anarchist and revolutionary socialist traditions, mingled in with some conservative thinking. The result is a very mixed and sometimes incoherent ideology, whose underlying current re ects either an ecocentric approach which prioritizes the needs of natural ecosystems, or a human-centered (anthropocentric) approach which prioritizes human social, economic and cultural considerations. The fact that mainstream environmentalism

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re ects all these in uences and cross-currents could be seen strategically as both a strength and a weakness.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENTS ORIGINS AND CONCERNS

Everyday political discourse now frequently refers to the environmental movement, a late twentieth-century manifestation of widespread concern in the West about the negative ecological consequences of economic and technological development. Strictly speaking such references are only partly accurate. First, there is no one, coherent environmental movement, as much of the rest of this entry will con rm. Rather, there is a whole complex of movements and ideologies, within and outside conventional politics, expressing environmental concern and proposing social and political solutions for it. Secondly, environmental movements did not originate in the late 20th century; they are rooted in earlier movements. In America, the 19th century wilderness preservation movement, inspired by John Muir, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, gave rise to the Sierra Club, from which in 1969 a group of more radical conservationists splintered to produce Friends of the Earth. In Europe, the National Trust, one of the UK s major contemporary environmental preservation groups, was founded in 1895. The founding group was inspired by challenging, questioning attitudes towards industrialism and progress posed by people such as John Ruskin and William Morris: it also drew on feelings for natural landscape inspired by Romantic gures such as William Wordsworth. Other direct in uences on today s environmentalism include the development of the science of ecology, whose leading gures included 18th and 19th century naturalists such as Gilbert White, Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel. The work done on population by Thomas Malthus is also directly re ected in the modern movement, as is the in uence of 19th and early 20th century anarchists and utopian socialists (see Political Systems and the Environment: Utopianism, Volume 5). Furthermore, in between the World Wars there were vigorous movements in the West showing concern for nature and for healthy lifestyles, including vegetarianism. These were intertwined with both left and right-wing (including fascist) political movements, among both the masses and intellectuals (for a description of the roots of the environmental movement, see Pepper, 1996). However, it is true to say that environmental movements, which started to emerge in the 1960s, have shown greater scope, range and connectivity than any previous environmental movement. This was inevitable, given: (a) the global advance of modernizing societies and economies: (b) the development of instantaneous and ubiquitous global communications networks: and (c) the unprecedented power of post-war technologies to create alarming environmental

changes. As sociologists Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens emphasize, today s society is exposed to unprecedented risks and uncertainties, whose origins it is often dif cult to unravel, determine and control (Beck, 1992, 1995). These include environmental risks of (particularly Western) society s own making. The rst of these to trigger widespread alarm, marking the dawn of modern environmentalism, was that caused by the chemical substances used in agriculture. They were identi ed in Rachel Carson s iconoclastic work, Silent Spring (1962) (see Carson, Rachel Louise, Volume 5). Before this book, American and European conventional wisdom held that chemical pesticides and herbicides were an unalloyed blessing: helping developed countries under capitalism to repel Malthusian spectres of famine and want, and build that steadily-advancing material prosperity on which the American Dream and post-war European recovery were based. The questioning, sparked by Carson s book, of this conventional wisdom, and the subsequent wave of popular skepticism about scienti c advances, technological experts and the motives of big corporations, fed into what is now described as a condition of post-modernity , which some see as the prevailing mode in Western thought. In it, all those things enshrined in the notion of progress adopted since the Enlightenment have been questioned and often denounced. Of course, there always was a critical, counter-cultural minority current in the West accompanying industrial and democratic revolutions, and its 1960s expressions in the hippie, civil rights, anti-nuclear and feminist movements fed directly into the environmental movement. Many sociologists see all these together as a coherent wave of new social movements forming the basis of postmodern politics. New social movements are inspired by single issues, but they also express the unease, disillusionment and aspirations of the newly emerged (professional, especially) middle-classes. Some commentators think that as such, they have supplanted the old basis of political discourse, in worker-capitalist relations and struggles over distributing material wealth. The concern with pesticides soon widened to embrace all environmental pollution caused by modern technologies, including nuclear power and weapons, and then in the 1980s and 1990s, the internal combustion engine, gene modi cation, factory farming and the like. In the late 1960s and 1970s, too, there was growing questioning of mass production and mass consumption, combined with a wave of near-hysteria about human population growth, particularly growth in the third world. Thus emerged the neo-Malthusian limits to growth school (Meadows et al., 1972, 1992; Hardin, 1968, 1974; Ehrlich, 1969; Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 1990). This contradicted the widely held views that materially based economic growth could continue ad innitum, and that levels of af uence enjoyed in the West could be attained by all the world s population (which

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appeared to be increasing exponentially). Limits to such growth were imposed by earths carrying capacity by constraints such as the inability of eco-systems to provide enough resources to feed growth or to soak up the pollution associated with it. Based on such arguments, early environmental movements successfully prevailed on American and European governments to legislate tighter environmental standards in the 1970s, and to set up agencies and procedures designed to protect the environment. In America, particularly, groups mounted successful legal challenges to development likely to endanger animal and plant species survival, grounding them in an eco-centric philosophy which said that nature has intrinsic value: value beyond its usefulness to humans. This was all done in a prevailing political-economic climate where the legitimacy of state spending and market intervention to mitigate the worst social effects of the free market was upheld by a signicant majority of politicians. Hence, if business and industry now had to spend some potential prots on procedures, processes and technologies to protect the environment, this was regarded as proper and necessary. However in the 1980s and 1990s, in the face of intensifying global competition and pressures on prot margins, the philosophy of economic laissez-faire took on new political vitality. Neo-liberal governments in North America, Australia and Europe began anew to prioritize economic growth and to side with industry in regarding regulations and tax-funded public spending on high levels of social and environmental protection as undesirable business overhead costs which must be reduced. Consequently a retrenchment phase began, with relaxation of regulation, and downward pressures on environmental protection spending. Although ofcially such attitudes have now changed, their momentum persists in anti-environmentalism, where, for instance, some business corporations form unofcial coalitions (e.g., the European Round Table or the Global Climate Coalition) specically to lobby against pressures from environmental lobbies. They challenge, for instance, the validity of scientic research which suggests that human-induced global warming is signicantly increasing. At the same time, the 1990s saw a new phase where environmentalist concerns seem to have been taken on board by mainstream politics. Nearly all of the worlds governments were ofcially represented at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development; the Rio Conference. And very many of them signed that conferences declarations, amounting to broad and unspecied commitment to the notion that environmental protection must be integrated into the mission of universalizing material prosperity a mission still to be achieved, however, through global marketization and the search for economic growth. Hence the idea of materially-led universal development was not abandoned, but the caveat was added that it must be sustainable, meaning that the resources needed for it should not

be destroyed, and the options open to future generations to live at least as well as the present one should not be foreclosed. The development model, which is supposed to enable this is that of ecological modernization (see Political Systems and the Environment: Utopianism, Volume 5). During this phase of environmental concern, sustainability objectives have been written into mainstream policy programs of the leading industrial nations, intending that they should be integrated within economic and social objectives. This clearly means that the limits to growth schools major premise, of incompatibility between growth and environmental protection, has been rejected in favor of its obverse the idea that the two are necessary to each other. As these phases of environmental concern have progressed, the emphases in the mainstream of environmental movements have altered. The initial focus was on single issues, but quickly this developed into the skeptical questioning, mentioned above, of industrialism and modernity. This put environmental pressure groups generally at odds with the establishment and the political mainstream. Through the 1980s, however, they began to acquire more inuence, augmented by electoral success in some European countries. During and after the Rio Conference, some groups (e.g., Friends of the Earth) gained semi-ofcial status as non-government organizations (NGO). As such, they make formal presentations to the UN Commission for Sustainable Development, and in some cases are incorporated onto the panels of local Agenda 21 organizations set up in towns and cities in the wake of Rio. At the same time as environmental groups have developed their expertise and mainstream inuence, their underlying analyses of causes and effects of environmental problems have often become more sophisticated. They are more likely to highlight problems like the internal growth dynamic of capitalism and its inherent tendency to take only partial and short-term perspectives on problems, the apparently unavoidably uneven nature of development as global modernization, the inextricable connection between environmental problems and social inequity and injustice and the way in which Western afuent lifestyles leave substantial ecological footprints in third-world countries (e.g., toxic waste produced in the West being shipped to the third world for dumping or processing). The overall political direction of such a critique may point towards radical social change, beyond that envisaged in even strong approaches to ecological modernization. This has uncomfortable implications for Western mainstream politics. Hence, late-1990s environmental movements followed two paths. Some groups, or factions within groups, persisted along the channels of conventional political action, such as running for ofce, lobbying and advising government and other bodies. Other groups and factions began a new wave of direct action (both peaceful and violent) and civil disobedience, intending to block developments

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such as the growth of road trafc into residential areas, the building of new roads, nuclear waste dumping, trials of genetically-modied crops, or foxhunting and other animal abuse. In some of these protests, notably over major road development at Twyford Down and Newbury in the UK, such eco-anarchist protestors have been supported by many middle-class citizens living conventional lifestyles. The former have been concerned about general environmental and social principles, while the latter have been representing their own limited, local interests (the NIMBY not-inmy-back-yard syndrome). What unites these unlikely bedfellows is (a) shared concern about quality-of-life issues, including environmental quality (b) deepening conviction that commitment to protable, efcient, competitive business should not be prioritized above all other socialeconomic policy considerations (c) increasing skepticism and frustration with Western democracy, on the grounds that it is more responsive to the needs of international business lobbies than to those of the ordinary citizen. This last concern is responded to in some areas of EU policy, for instance rural development, where resources are being put into developing bottom up, community-led initiatives. It is also reected in the growing number of academic texts concerned with environmental democracy (e.g., Mason, 1999).

TYPES OF ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT

Environmental movements includes green parties, pressure groups within mainstream political parties, non-party pressure groups, direct action groups, local community groups, communes and individuals exercising lifestyle choices. Connelly and Smith (1999) stress how the ethical underpinnings of these groups are extremely diverse and difcult to reconcile as one movement. They identify New Zealand as the location of the rst green party, founded in 1972. The second was started in the UK in 1973, but the most prominent in electoral terms has been Die Gr unen. This began from community groups in West Germany in 1980 and achieved government in coalition with social democrats in 1998. Electoral success appears to depend very much on the voting system adopted, hence UK Greens had 15% of the vote in the 1989 European Parliament elections but took no seats on the basis of a rst-past-the-post system. In 1999 however, when proportional representation was adopted, the Greens took two seats from a much lower percentage vote. However, the constant problems, which beset mainstream politicians of principle, have also dogged Green parties. In attaining and widening electoral support, or in actual government, principles have usually had to be compromised and this has opened internal splits between pragmatists, or realists, and fundamentalists. Such splits have been very public in Germany, leading to the resignation of leading Grunen members and the vilication of many who stayed,

but they have been mirrored elsewhere. Ongoing internal debates and squabbles have occurred on such issues as the importance of obtaining ofce as opposed to the virtue of remaining a principled opposition, organization versus spontaneity, and the desirability or otherwise of playing the mainstream game involving party hierarchies, charismatic leaders, professionalism, media manipulation and public image. The UK Green Party suffered considerably in the early 1990s from such conicts, and has not completely recovered. Meanwhile, in less than two years of government Die Grunen have compromised principles to the extent that internal critics fear that the most that has been achieved has been to help create a more viable capitalism; i.e., one which has been alerted to the dangers to itself arising from environmental problems. These kinds of tensions mirror the dichotomy discussed below, between radical and reformist approaches to, and inuences on, the environmental movement. Such tensions occur within groups and also within individuals. They result in what Dobson (1995) has identied as public and more private faces of radical environmentalism, where the desire for fundamental social change and the overturning of the economic order become deliberately muted themes in public debate for fear of frightening off ordinary members of the public. Despite the limited electoral impact of Green parties, what seems an inexorable rise in public concern about environmental issues is illustrated through data cited by Connelly and Smith (1999) on eight UK environmental pressure groups. Their total membership rose from 1.5 m in 1980 to 4.3 m in 1995. Some of them, like the National Trust and Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, are long established and indisputably conservative and safe from the point of view of conventional political parties. Nonetheless, their growing strength has contributed to the greening of these parties. In the UK, Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Labour parties all have their own internal environmental pressure groups, and the amount of manifesto space devoted to environmental policy has steadily increased since the mid-1980s. But British politicians have been slow and recalcitrant in many environmental policy areas by comparison with politicians in Scandinavia, Germany and the Netherlands. These latter countries have been at the forefront of projecting environmental policy within the EU, and as a result of some success here, Britain, once known as the dirty man of Europe, has been drawn into a more enlightened approach. This raises an interesting geopolitical dilemma for the British environmental movement, since both radical and reformist wings tend to champion the idea of government decentralization and more inclusive local democracies. Large-scale economic, social or political structures are resisted in favor of localism and decision taking at the lowest possible level. But when this last principle, of

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subsidiarity, has been applied by the European Union (UN) in relation to environmental matters it has sometimes enabled British governments to claim powers over their own development decisions, which have been unpopular with environmentalists. The latter have been driven to look to the supranational bureaucracy of the EU for protection from their own government. Pressure groups do not seek electoral ofce, but, rather, hope to inuence public policy. They act in support of a cause, rather than the narrower sectional interests of their members. Indeed there is an ongoing debate within Greenpeace about whether to have members at all, rather than just supporters. Pressure groups seek inuence from inside government, through petitioning, lobbying and eventually being accepted as consultants during the stage of policy formulation. As a result, they attempt to make themselves credible by acquiring a reputation for painstaking scientic research of integrity, and for reasonableness, professionalism and a willingness to dialogue and compromise with opposition groups. One such example in the UK is Transport 2000, a coalition of environmental groups concerned about transport issues, which have won government and public over to its view that private car use must be curbed in favor of public transport investment. Pressure groups also seek to apply outside pressure on governments via public opinion. This requires a higherprole approach, staging media events, demonstrations, petitions and consumer boycotts. Flamboyant mediagrabbing tactics are often at the edges of the law, or involve breaking it before backing down in the glare of publicity, to disrupt, for instance, whale shing, nuclear tests or public enquiries into development projects. Hence pressure groups have to achieve a balance between two approaches, and this may be a source of ongoing internal disputes. Whether this balance swings towards or away from more conventional, respectable and patient methods may well depend on the perception, which the group has about the nature of the democracy within which it works. If the belief is that this follows a pluralist model, in which many different interest groups have more or less equal opportunities to inuence policy direction, then the group may concentrate on methods appropriate to this. If, however, the view is towards an elitist model, where some interests are seen as unfairly dominating the political process by virtue of their economic and political strength often exercised in corridors of power then less legal methods may be followed. Direct action groups are of the latter persuasion. They include the likes of American Earth First! (Wall, 1999), with its monkeywrench tactics of civil disobedience and ecotage committed on the physical infrastructure of big development projects, such as dams. Then there are tree dwellers and tunnel diggers who have gained huge publicity in antiroad and anti-airport protest in Europe, North America

and Japan. There are squatters, like those in The Land is Ours group, who invaded derelict land owned by the Guinness Corporation and scheduled for major development in Wandsworth, London they set up a model sustainable village for ve months in 1996 before being evicted. And there are arsonists who set re to agricultural developments and scientic establishments in the name of animal liberation. When challenged about why they do not use legal channels of protest and persuasion, they will reply that these channels are merely token, giving a veneer of democracy to what is in fact a corporate state run by a coalition of bureaucrats, business leaders and, perhaps, union bosses. Partly in response to this kind of critique, and partly as a result of budgetary cuts in local government spending, there has been a growth in the 1990s of local voluntary community-based groups. These seek, legally and often supported by government grants, to improve the economic prospects and social and environmental quality of life of their local community. They include such environmentally oriented groups as housing cooperatives, conservation and recycling projects, urban agriculture, box schemes (where the produce of nearby organic farms is sold direct to households) and local employment and trading schemes (LETS, where goods and services are exchanged by means of local currencies). A skeptical view of such developments is that they help to exonerate the state-supported public sector from its duties to provide social, health and environmental care for all, which is why states generally have a favorable view of them. A more positive perspective is that they represent a process whereby people take their lives and destinies into their own hands, therefore reclaiming some political power. This constitutes a major theme voiced with increasing urgency by environmentalists since the 1960s. They argue that if people regain control over their lives, and are re-embedded into their communities and localities, it is axiomatic that they will behave in more environmentally sustainable ways. Through living more rounded and satisfying lifestyles, it is reckoned, people will not want to seek fulllment in an endless round of material consumption. This is the basis on which ecologically based communes operate. The heyday of such alternative communities was in the 1970s, when (especially) rural property and land were cheap to acquire. Back-to-the-land groups often resolved to achieve a large measure of selfsufciency, in food if not energy, and to do it in ecologically benign ways. Although they usually failed in this objective for any sustained period, and although they encountered many problems in trying to create alternatives to the nuclear family and non-oppressive social relations, many of these communities have lasted into the 1990s. However, they have not remained immune to social trends in the mainstream society to which they form a counterculture, but have fallen prey to increasing materialism, privatization and

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preoccupation with maintaining nancial viability (Pepper, 1991). Notwithstanding this, they have contended with a set of problems which they prefer to the problems and insecurities of living in conventional society. A further manifestation of environmentalism has been in the application of its personal-is-political motif to consumerism itself. The green consumer movement peaked in the 1980s, but survived into the 1990s particularly as the ethical consumer and investor movements (see Green Investment, Volume 4). It is now part of the ecological modernization approach to development, and is based on the idea, championed by neo-liberal political economists like von Hayek in the 1950s, that in spending our personal money we are casting votes. These votes indicate desire for and satisfaction with the products we buy, and the processes and organizations through which they are produced. Hence, it is argued, if we buy ecologically sound products and services, with environmentally sound ingredients produced in environmentally friendly ways, and if we shun products which do not meet this description, producers will have to change their ways accordingly or go out of business. Through this kind of consumer movement, chlorouorocarbons (CFCs) have been eliminated from aerosols and refrigerators, real animal furs have been largely replaced by articial ones, and, possibly, the development of foods containing genetically modied organisms has been arrested. Additionally there has been a big boost for organic food producers, tea and coffee producing cooperatives, and so forth. However, the green consumer movement has not produced the widespread changes which were once claimed for it, and it has not defeated the skepticism of radical environmentalists. For one thing, its success depends on the presumptions that consumers have access to reliable and honest information about the products they buy, and are prepared to spend time and money acquiring and acting on such information. None of this has been proved accurate. Furthermore, the idea that money is a vote also carries the corollary that a large part of the potential electorate is disbarred from voting by virtue of poverty, especially in times of recession. And in any case, the proposition that consumption of material goods is a remedy for environmental problems rather than being their major cause is still impossible to swallow for radical environmentalists.

would reform capitalism and market economics to a greater or lesser degree, but would not replace them by another economic system. One of the main arguments within it is about how much to intervene in the market economy (see below). It reacts to environmental problems from a perspective which some call techno-centric. Techno-centrism manifests faith in science, technology and rational management of ecosystems to solve environmental problems. Elements of conservative thinking also may mingle with this reformist approach of the cultural mainstream. Ecological modernization is the sustainable development model, which has evolved from reformist environmentalism. By contrast, radical environmentalist approaches seek to eliminate environmental problems at their root, rather than simply reacting to the damage caused by the normal operations of global capitalism. This would entail fundamental social change, either by eliminating or completely reconstructing capitalism. Hence the environmental debate is shifted out of the cultural/economic mainstream and becomes counter-cultural: often drawing on older countercultural traditions such as anarchism or utopian socialism. It includes: social ecology, based largely on anarchist principles as interpreted particularly in the work of Murray Bookchin (e.g., 1990), which is also informed by Marxist analysis (see Social Ecology, Volume 5). eco-socialism, based on revolutionary rather than reformist (e.g., social democrat) socialism, and also informed by Marxist analysis. Libertarian, decentralist and communalist in principle, it is ultimately opposed to the state (see Eco-socialism, Volume 5). deep ecology, which focuses on fundamental changes in attitudes and values towards nature starting with the individual (Devall and Sessions, 1985). Its social prescriptions are anarchistic but also informed by elements of conservative thinking (see Deep Ecology, Volume 5). ecofeminism, which insists on the elimination of patriarchy as a prerequisite to founding a sustainable society. It is also informed by anarchist and socialist analyses of material processes in society, but emphasizes as well the importance of changes at the cultural level (see Ecofeminism, Volume 5).

POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES AND ENVIRONMENTALISM

Figure 1 shows different forms of environmentalism when considered particularly from the standpoint of political ideologies. It differentiates principally between radical and reformist approaches. The latter embrace mainstream cultures political ideologies of liberalism and democratic (as practiced by labor and social democrat parties) socialism. It

Deep ecologys approach is eco- or bio-centric: that is, focused on non-human nature and the whole biosphere. Eco-centrism claims that nature has intrinsic value above and beyond the value merely conferred by humans. Ecosocialism, by contrast, shares an anthropocentric stance with reformist environmentalism. This regards humans as the ultimate source of all value and is prepared, if it comes to a crunch, to elevate human interest above that of animals and plants. Social ecology claims to transcend both anthropocentrism and biocentrism.

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Radical, Counter-cultural [mainly anti-capitalism] Deep ecology: Based on ecocentrism, intrinsic value in nature, and anarchism. Looks to both humanism and ecocentrism, based on anarchist and feminist principles. Humanistic and revolutionary socialist politics (libertarian, decentralist, utopian socialism). Elevating women s culture and feminine values to counter repressive male ethos. Changing relations of reproduction.

Reformist, Mainstream cultural [Pro-capitalism] Conservatism: Preservationism, NIMBY-ism, Stewardship of nature. Market mechanisms and privatization of the commons. Market intervention, e.g., environmental taxes, tradeable pollution rights plus voluntary agreements plus regulation.

Social ecology:

Free market liberalism:

Eco-socialism:

Social reformism: [Welfare liberal/ democratic socialist]

Eco-feminism:

Mainstream: [Ambiguous about capitalism, but demanding considerable reform] Incorporates and reflects both sides. Some radical long-term aims, but reformist methods pragmatic Green parties, pressure groups and lobbies Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, World Wide Fund for Nature, New Economics Foundation, and other non-government organizations.

Figure 1

Environmentalisms and their political ideologies and approaches

Mainstream environmentalism, as represented by the movements and groups discussed above, tends to be a hybrid a m elange of both radical and reformist approaches. As also suggested, the mainstream environmentalist movements proponents and actors often hold radical views (including eco-centrism and opposition to capitalism), but they may show pragmatism, believing that to make some environmental headway by reform is better than to make none at all. The works of some of mainstream environmentalisms most inuential gures (e.g., Schumacher, 1973; Porritt, 1984; McKibben, 1990) contain currents of socialism, anarchism, conservatism and social reformism. The following discussion will illustrate how elements of traditional political ideologies inform both radical and reformist wings of the environmental movement, before going on to consider what aspects of green political ideologies might be considered as unique. Before commencing it should be stressed that assessing green thinking against more traditional political ideologies is fraught with difculties. Political philosophies are mainly diffuse rather than tightly coherent, changing and evolving with time. They also contain inconsistencies, they

overlap, the terminology is confusing, and there may be considerable differences between what is popularly thought of as, say, liberal or socialist and what in theory they are. Popular views of political ideologies are colored by the utterances of party politicians, but there are few correspondences between political parties and the political philosophies they might claim to represent. And because party politics is political there may be deliberate or unintentional attempts in debate to misrepresent them: because they are dened and evaluated subjectively, different people will make different interpretations of what they are. Additionally, political ideologies tend to differ in their interpretation between different countries. The view of them given below is written from a Euro-centric perspective, based on the British experience. Finally, it should be acknowledged that it is one thing to note similarities between, say, anarchist and green ideologies, but this does not necessarily signify historical links between them in the way of common threads of thinkers, writers or activists. Anarchy, like other political philosophies, comes specically from political activism and social theories. By contrast, the green movement over the past

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half-century originated from the concerns of scientists (like the Ehrlichs, Hardin, Fraser-Darling or Capra) who began to make political statements about society stemming from the results of their scientic work. They were not founded in any way on what the likes of Edmund Burke, Karl Marx or Peter Kropotkin wrote about such gures were invoked afterwards. Hence the early statements from environmental movements were often politically naive and ideologically incoherent.

TRADITIONAL CONSERVATISM
The words conservation and conservatism both have the same root. And the ideas of tradition, continuity, stability, and dislike of sudden change but an acceptance of slow organic change (i.e., which is not planned or blueprinted or revolutionary) all feature in conservative thinking and all are compatible with at least some environmentalist thought. In conservatism the analogy between society and nature is strong: just as ecosystems need to be changing organically, not precipitously, so does society. As with nature, variety and structure in society are essential to achieve the all important goal of stability. Social revolutions (and new technology) upset the natural social order. Conservatism perceives this order to be hierarchical, though this does not mean that respect is not due to those lowest in the chain of being. Hence relationships between higher and lower orders might be oppressive and economically exploitative but they nevertheless involve mutual obligations: they are not just one-way. However, those lower in the social order should accept the naturalness and inevitability of their position. Such beliefs foster a romantic view of traditional societies. So also is there a liking for traditional pastoral landscapes and grand architecture, expressed in reformist environmentalism in Britain in the work of long-established nature and conservation groups like the National Trust, Councils for the Protection of Rural England and Wales, County Landowners Association and the Civic Trust. Conservative environmentalism involves a conception of stewardship on the part of landowners holding the land in trust for a future generation (again there is the idea that social obligations attach to power). This draws on Edmund Burkes injunctions about wise stewardship, and proposes that long-cherished virtues of efciency, order, thrift, selfhelp, tradition, patriotism and nationalism should be the basis of environmental politics. Faced with the dilemma posed by Garrett Hardins (1968) commons parable, in which individuals tend to use the resources of Earths commons proigately because the costs of so doing accrue to society as a whole rather than to them specically, conservatives would usually argue for enlightened private ownership of the commons as the best way to value and conserve them. They might also accept Hardins (1974) arguments for coercion to curb population growth,

and to promote the social and environmental consciousness appropriate for population control. Edward Goldsmith (see, for instance Mander and Goldsmith, 1996) is a prominent radical environmentalist who seems to argue for conservative values. He wants to see Western societies re-embedded in strongly held belief systems, such as those enshrined in religion, for he thinks that strong religions are stabilizing forces making for social unity. Goldsmith has held up the caste system in India as the kind of social organization, which is compatible with an ecologically and socially sound society sound because it is stable, and in balance with the natural environment. The way of life, like the structure and mechanisms of an ecosystem, is designed to maintain order. A sustainable societys common values must, above all, involve respect for ecosystems this respect must be absolute and not negotiable. In common with many environmentalists (such as the more liberal Fritz Schumacher), Goldsmith argues for small-scale organization as the geographical basis for achieving the other desirable things. His radical environmental conservatism starts from the assumption of the family as the essential unit of social organization: what preserves this (such as the traditional stereotyped role for women) is to be encouraged. And it rejects industrial society as aberrant. The desire to recapture small-scale traditional society leads Goldsmith constantly to idealize primitive peoples and tribes in Africa, Australasia, etc. Deep ecologists seem particularly inclined towards such idealization of pre-modern societies. They often hold up the North American Indian, for instance, as a paragon of ecological virtue, citing religious beliefs which apparently regard nature as part of the tribal community and require it to be treated with much respect (see for instance Callenbach, 1981). Archaeological evidence, however, often suggests something rather different; that notwithstanding beliefs, native American actions towards nature may have been frequently exploitative (see Religion and Environment Among North American First Nations, Volume 5). Economically, contemporary conservatism partly embraces neo-liberalism, as expressed in the doctrines of Adam Smith, since this revives the free market tradition which marked the beginnings of industrial capitalism. This seems particularly true in North America, for although many Thatcher conservatives in Britain did follow Smith, other more traditional conservatives expressed misgivings at their lack of wider social responsibility to those low down in the socio-economic hierarchy. Traditional conservatism may grade into fascism, also known as right-wing irrationalism, or extreme romanticism. Some consider that Hitler spoke about the homeland almost in an ecological sense, using biological analogies of race, soil, homeland, folk and blood to describe the state as a living organism in developing his imperialistic theories. Bramwell (1989) describes how European Nazis showed

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a liking for vegetarianism, the back-to-the-land movement and bio-dynamic farming. She observes that neo-fascist organizations in Europe have all taken onto their platform a green perspective. Fascisms key elements include the use of biological metaphors, the stress on the organic community and the individuals need to merge with it, the elevation of ritual, intuition, and the mystical, and the distrust of the rational. These elements may be found in some ecological writings, especially those promoting deep ecology activism. However it is unlikely that environmental movements as a whole would become fascistic because of their fundamental globalist inclusivism. That said, there have in the past been calls for a marrying of some of the elements identied above with a centralized authoritarian state (see Heilbroner, 1975; Ophuls, 1977), though without the crusading rejection of rationality necessary for fascism to exist. Heilbroner and Ophuls reached their authoritarian prescriptions reluctantly: but they were very pessimistic about the global condition, and thought that the nature of the required remedial action was so radical and electorally unpopular that no other institutional arrangement could possibly deliver.

have recourse to law, which would defend their property rights. Groups of citizens might also sue the originators of pollution which lowered the quality of the air or the seas in their neighborhood. (This philosophy thrives particularly in the United States, where ordinary citizens have frequent recourse to law.) In response to objections that the originators of pollution may be hard to identify, the freemarketers might suggest technological solutions, such as the possibility of tagging all emissions with trace amounts of identifying chemicals. The free-market ideology also underlies systems of tradeable pollution rights, initiated in the US in the 1990s (see Tradable Permits for Sulfur Emission Reductions, Volume 4). The Federal Government sells to industry the rights to emit, for instance, sulphur dioxide. The total amount of rights issued conforms to a ceiling determined by Government as appropriate to an area: this ceiling can be raised or lowered as thought t. If a rms productive processes exceed the amounts of pollution that it has rights to emit, it can either pay to install cleaner technology or buy further rights from other rms who have less need for them. So far, this approach has met with limited success.

FREE MARKET LIBERALISM

A strong ideology in the nineteenth-century, free market liberalism, was revived in the late twentieth century in the neo-liberalism which tends to support global marketisation. It is advanced by techno-centric environmentalists like Anderson and Leal (1991), following the example of Simon and Kahn (1984). They are aggressively optimistic about the free markets potential, allied to technology, to solve environmental problems. The invisible hand of market forces under which individuals pursue self-interest, they argue, gives society more environmental protection than will any kind of intervention or regulation, which is a constraint on liberty. Thus if a natural resource is running out, its increased scarcity will push up the price of the goods or services that come through that resource. This will encourage entrepreneurs, with scientists and technologists, to devise some substitute for the resource, or more ingenious ways of providing the same goods and services. Similarly, there is money to be made from clean technologies like non-harmful aerosols, biodegradable plastics, catalytic converters and the like, so, as ecological modernizers say, there is no practical dichotomy between the interests of capitalism and environmental quality. This ideology also underlies calls for privatization of the natural resources of the earths commons. Its basic argument is that property held in common tends to be neglected, whereas individuals look after what they own. If private owners were to abuse or run down their resources, they themselves would suffer. And if others polluted their resource (their land or the waters within it), they could

SOCIAL REFORMISM (ALSO KNOWN AS WELFARE LIBERALISM, DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM)

Social reformists also believe in capitalism, but not without restraints and controls to limit its harmful effects on some people (the economic losers) and the environment. They emphasize the role and supreme importance of the individual and his/her enlightened self-interest in protecting the environment. In Western pluralist democracies, the parliament or congress constitutes the main forum through which environmental views and interests will be heard and protected. Rationality, the rule of law, technology and environmental and economic management (cost-benet analysis, reform of taxation) will all help to secure the goals of environmentalism. Following the father of English liberalism, John Stuart Mill, social reformists are ambivalent about how desirable unselective economic growth is, appreciating also the need for diversity in society and nature (compatible with their belief in pluralism). Support, is still strong for private ownership of resources, and the notion of the invisible hand by which individuals seeking to maximize their personal benet allegedly bring greatest aggregate benet, to society. But they are also aware of the wider society and communal good, and that what is good is what brings most benet and happiness to most people (Benthams utilitarianism). By this measure, environmental protection is rational and desirable. Hence planning laws, taxes on non-recycling industries or pollution, and welfare provision to enhance urban environmental quality and environmental

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education, are all legitimate ways for the state to intervene, but only as much as is strictly necessary, in the free market. Social reformists are generally techno-centric, and many of their approaches underlie ecological modernization. They are predicated on signicant government intervention in the free market, manipulating it in favor of environmental measures. Hence they advocate tax incentives and disincentives, permits and other moderately coercive management devices to control pollution and the use of environmental resources in the earths commons. The rationale behind the eco-consumerist movement owes much to welfare liberalisms belief in enlightened self-interest (i.e., that educated, informed and rational people are aware of the benets to themselves of not behaving totally selshly and without thought for wider social and environmental interests). In Europe, social reformists are found in all mainstream groupings, including Conservative, Liberal, Social Democrat/Democratic Socialist and Green parties. As social reformists, democratic socialists emphasize their belief in the need for pluralist democracy and the power of parliament as the major way to achieve social change. Many now believe that capitalism can be reformed to take on board traditional socialist aims if it is guided and occasionally coerced by a moderately strong central and local state. Few inuential members would advocate the necessity of abolishing capitalism or the global market as the answer to contemporary social or environmental problems. However, this form of socialism would like production to meet social and environmental needs alongside the exigencies of prot creation, hence it can be quite strongly interventionist in the free market. It may, too, favor decentralization of many of the states functions. The approach to sustainable development advocated by the UKs Real World Coalition of environmental and social welfare groups (Jacobs, 1996) is essentially social reformist. It might be argued that in todays climate of neo-liberal global marketisation, based on extending and derestricting free trade and competition, their aspiration to elevate social inclusion and environmental sustainability considerations to a level of importance equal with profitability is somewhat utopian (see Political Systems and the Environment: Utopianism, Volume 5).

REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM
For years, many environmentalists have dismissed socialism as being equally culpable with capitalism in creating environmental crisis. They have regarded it as part of mainstream culture because of its unashamed anthropocentrism, and would therefore baulk at seeing it categorized in Figure 1 as engendering a form of radical environmentalism. But socialism itself is more complex than they seem to believe. And eco-socialism derives from particular socialist

traditions that in fact have nothing to do with the kind of materialism and disregard for nature traditionally associated with the state centralist, self-styled socialist regimes behind the old iron-curtain. Eco-socialisms roots lie in utopian socialism and the Marxism of William Morris (see Political Systems and the Environment: Utopianism, Volume 5, and Wall, 1994), rather than Stalin. As such, it is clearly counter-cultural, radical and opposed to mainstream values. Though eco-socialists and social ecologists criticize each other, they also have much in common. Revolutionary socialism is a minority political current, unlike reformist socialism. However, together with anarchism it has strongly inuenced all radical environmentalism. It fundamentally rejects capitalism and advocates production for social need but not prot, and common ownership of the means of production and distribution; thus it would deal with the commons problem by having these areas under genuine common ownership and control. It contains different schools of thought about the role and importance of the state in revolutionary and post-revolutionary society. Though the state has no place in the ultimate communist society, a more democratic and decentralized form of state than exists in most contemporary Western society may be seen as important in helping to create a transition towards that society. Revolutionary socialisms analysis of the societynature relationship generally follows Marxist lines, seeing nature and environment as socially produced, and environmental problems as inherent in the nature of capitalism. Again, opinions differ on how much they may be solely located here. The analysis of how to get to an ecological society which equates with a (perhaps moneyless) communist one, is based on the mechanism of class struggle. Neo- and orthodox Marxists, however, may differ amongst themselves on who might be the principal agents and actors in creating this society faith in the potential effectiveness, or even existence, of a working class proletariat is not universal amongst eco-socialists (see Gorz, 1982). Marxists tend to see the rise of environmentalism itself in class terms, sometimes regarding it as bourgeois and counter-revolutionary. This may mean open hostility towards environmental groups and campaigns, though more often than not there is an uneasy alliance between reds and greens based on agreement on ends but not necessarily on means or analysis of causes. Marxists by and large believe that environmental, feminist, peace and third-world campaigns are, or should be, all part of the ultimate struggle against global capitalism itself. From Marxisms materialist perspective, the ills which these campaigns highlight are all outgrowths of capitalist relations of production. Such campaigns, furthermore, should focus less on the reform of the individuals attitudes and values and more on the collective political struggle of the world proletariat.

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Major inuences on European environmentalism, like Andre Gorz and Rudolph Bahro, have tended towards the revolutionary socialist view in the past, but no longer do so. The Socialist Party of Great Britain, Socialist Workers Party and Militant (who spell out the eco-socialist case eloquently and simply in Cock and Hopwood, 1996) are all British political groups who incorporate green issues into orthodox Marxist analysis.

GREEN ANARCHISM
Anarchism suffuses all varieties of radical environmentalism, including deep and social ecology, eco-socialism and eco-feminism. Anarchistic groups within environmentalism share fundamental beliefs about the need for organic societies but some are anti-urban and anti-industrial, so displaying afnities with conservative thought. American eco-anarchists may incline towards radical, libertarian liberalism. Indeed, in espousing the individual as the basic social unit, anarchism is sometimes thought to embrace the cornerstone of liberalism although anarchists might dene concepts like individual and freedom in ways different from that of a mainstream liberal. But then much anarchism has major afnities with socialism, and it is probably true that eco-anarchists are mainly anarcho-communists, looking particularly to Kropotkin for inspiration (see Political Systems and the Environment: Utopianism, Volume 5), or possibly anarcho-syndicalists (based on trade unions as major revolutionary agents). There is the rejection of capitalism, desire for common ownership of the means of production (resources), and, in resource and income sharing communes, with distribution according to need. But, unlike socialism, there is strong rejection of any possible role for the state, intermediate or not. Eco-anarchism informs the rural communes movement, but may also inspire urban communes, the urban Reclaim the Streets movement, the squatter movement ( property is theft) and self-help urban community groups. The urban movement is particularly strong in North America, while in Australasia, anarcho-syndicalism which is uncompromisingly urban-centered has been a powerful force in green/trade union activism. Anarchists are prominent in what is becoming a world-wide militant movement against global capitalism in the early twenty-rst century. Notwithstanding the common roots and many correspondences which exist between eco-anarchism and ecosocialism, there are also some major divergences between the two (see Pepper, 1993). For instance eco-anarchists often reject the old class politics, seeing social change as consequent on the action of individuals in forming spontaneous, mutualist, non-hierarchical groups to live out their politics, thus setting an example for others to follow. The personal is political, and person equals planet are maxims

from more liberal American anarchism (i.e., Roszak, 1979), which appear to have great inuence. Anarchism considers that social hierarchies and not class constitute the key to oppression: hence eliminating hierarchy is the prerequisite for eliminating oppression. Socialists argue the reverse, insisting on the need for revolutionary political class struggle to change the relations between people, which are contingent on the material, economic, organization of production. Anarchists with an emphasis on practical lifestyle politics believe that only by people sidestepping (living outside) the economic and social structures of conventional society can those structures be overthrown.

FEMINISM
The notion that we must eliminate social oppression and hierarchy if we are to form an ecological society is but one of many ideas, which are held in common between feminism and anarchism as applied to radical environmentalism. Eco-feminists often propose an essential convergence between women and nature. This is rstly because their biological makeup inevitably associates women, more than men, with the natural functions of reproduction and nurturing. Secondly, women and nature have in common that they are exploited by men, both economically and in being objectied and politically marginalized. During and since the 1970s, debates within eco-feminism have focused on several schools of thought, including cultural eco-feminism and social ( socialist/anarchist) eco-feminism (see also Ecofeminism, Volume 5). Cultural eco-feminism considers that the root problems of how Western cultures treat nature could be solved by a womens culture, providing practical and philosophical guidelines to sustainable development. Since menstrual cycles follow phases of the moon, and fertility follows the rhythm of the seasons, then women might be regarded as inherently close to nature. Hence eco-feminist culture would draw on ancient myths combining women and nature, mother and earth, in cooperative relationships: caring, nurturing, mutually giving and receiving. This eco-feminism says, further, that female culture is concerned with the body, the esh, the material; with natural processes, emotions and subjective feelings and private life. By contrast, male culture emphasizes the mind, intellect, reason, culture, objectivity, economics and public life. Male culture always seeks to transcend natural constraints on what humans can do: men constantly ght to conquer, exploit and mould nature to leave their mark behind and achieve immortality and transcendence. Merchant (1982) describes how, during the period of the scientic revolution, Francis Bacon and the Royal Society pledged to reveal the secrets still locked in her [natures] bosom and to conquer and subdue her. Most high technologies, including new female reproductive technology, are developed by men

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and are said by this school to constitute a continuation of mens dual domination of women and nature. Cultural eco-feminism, then, means liberating nature from the repressive male ethos so that it will be respected as a sustainer of life. Capra (1982) urges the necessity for a return to a balance of yin and yang characteristics in people and society as the foundation for a new, ecologically benign society (see Land Transformation in China: 3000 Years of Human Ecological History, Volume 3). This might be achieved through women, individually and in groups, discovering their authentic natures and celebrating and afrming them. Such consciousness-raising may need to exclude men, on the grounds that they could have a negative impact on it while it is still nascent and before it is strong enough to resist male domination. Then there can also be celebration of pagan myths and rituals, and associated pastimes like tarot cards and astrology, which afrm respect for Mother Nature and the essential interconnectedness of humans and nature. This latter leans towards New Age thinking, and some greens and feminists (particularly of the social variety) reject it. As Plumwood (1993) argues, the whole idea of connecting with nature could be regressive and insulting, portraying women as passive reproductive animals immersed in the body and in unthinking experience of life. Materialist social eco-feminism draws on traditions in non-mainstream European socialism, including utopian socialism, classical anarchism, early Marx and William Morris work. They all insist that exploitation of nature relates to exploitation in society, emphasizing social and political rather than personal aspects of the domination of women and nature. Hence womens oppression is seen as interwoven with class, race and species oppression. But social eco-feminism also rejects the crude economic class reductionism of some Marxism; so it does not accept that womens oppression is merely a special case of exploitation of the proletariat, or that to establish socialism would mean automatically ending womens or natures oppression. Mellor (1997) wants to modify or reconstruct Marxist theory, to make a socialist eco-feminism. If, she argues, the way societies organize themselves to get material subsistence (economic relations of production) plays a key role in shaping society, so also must the way we organize ourselves to materially continue as a species (i.e., the relations of reproduction). Hence the material world of motherhood, not merely the (still largely male) material world of industrial production, should provide ideas and values for shaping an alternative (socialist) society. These ideas and values are altruistic: they include taking immediate responsibility for meeting the needs of others. But as things stand, the dominance of capitalist relations in Western society ensures that the stereotypically male standpoint mediates all knowledge. Its view of nature as a commodity will prevail over the female view of unity with nature.

Other calls to construct a social eco-feminism often emphasize the importance of ideas and attitudes, calling on women to unite with the environmental movement to reshape the underlying values of a conventional society based on hierarchical organization and domination of some people by others. According to Plumwood, one of the major wrong ideas in our culture is the tendency towards dualistic thinking. For, as Eckersley (1992) suggests, patriarchy is a subset of such thinking the philosophical dualism that has pervaded Western thought. So, for instance, imagining that there is a fundamental distinction between society and nature suggests that they are separated, making it easier for the former to exploit the latter. And strongly identifying women with nature, as in cultural eco-feminism, implicitly or explicitly links men with exploitation of both. All this reinforcement of dualistic thinking feeds that very patriarchal culture to which feminism is opposed. Eco-feminism shares with socialism an internationalist mentality; opposing womens oppression worldwide. It recognizes that in the third world, women, not men, constitute the backbone of production as well as reproduction. Eco-feminism in this context has therefore meant pushing for women to be involved in decisions about land use and control. Eco-feminists have resisted land appropriation by government and (Western) commercial rms, while, however, the men who own the land have often given in to the seductions behind the modernization model of development. While some third-world women have been co-opted by modernization, helping to provide the cheap labor for inappropriate development such as dams and nuclear power stations, others in the 1980s have instead adopted the bypass strategy. They have set up enterprises and movements that attempt to exclude the involvement of international capital (e.g. Chipko in India, South African cooperatives, green zones in Mozambique). They have supported, therefore, a localized development model rather than global modernization.

MAINSTREAM GREEN IDEOLOGY: OLD OR NEW POLITICS?

Bearing the mark of all these inuences, mainstream green political ideology, or ecologism (Dobson, 1995) is an eclectic, pragmatic and shifting mix of ideas, but with some recurring themes. Green activists often hold it as a point of principle that they are neither left or right, but forward, or above the old politics: The basic political choice today is not between Right, Left or Center, but between conventional gray politicians and the Green Party, said that partys 1992 UK manifesto. But of course, when they start to talk about what we should do about the eco-crisis, environmentalists must become involved in old politics. Hence the ideology of ecologism contains tensions between:

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1.

2.

Ecology-based politics, emphasizing the pre-eminence of sustaining natural systems as the universal basis for social organization. Such eco-centrism constitutes ecologisms main claim to be a new politics. Socially-based politics, seeing ecological problems as outgrowths of social problems, and seeking to solve the former by, rst and foremost, solving the latter. These constitute the old politics, raising questions, which have been the concern of traditional ideologies for several hundred years.

Environmentalists who concentrate on the second category often seem to follow a relatively coherent and identiable analysis of the problems and sets of prescriptions to remedy them i.e., they align with one or other of the more traditional political ideological camps. Most of those in the rst category, who prioritize eco-centric concerns, present a more diffuse image, spreading themselves across the political spectrum and accumulating bits of traditional liberal and socialist ideology, spiced with dashes of conservatism. In the terminology of the old politics, perhaps a majority of these eco-centrics gravitate towards social reformism (especially in their public utterances), while a vocal minority embrace, especially, eco-anarchism, in the context of one or more of the radical camps outlined in Figure 1. But for all those in this rst category, politics start from the perspective of ecology and the need to maintain eco-system integrity. For those in the second, social matters are as important (or more so) than ecological ones: they are fundamentally anthropocentric. An overall predisposition towards social reformism emerges in common mainstream green positions, which say that social change must proceed from individuals, but that change is also needed in the economic structures of society. They often do not totally reject capitalism indeed are enthusiastic for at least small-scale versions of it, but see social need and environmental quality as criteria to be elevated above the prot motive. They see a crucial but benign role for the state, in both facilitating the development of individual responsibility and laying down regulatory and legal frameworks governing group behavior in particular. This (grudging) acceptance of the state (and of parliamentary politics by Green Party supporters) wanes where eco-anarchism acquires more inuence. Nature is the ultimate legitimation for and the source of social laws in the mainstream green canon. But, as noted above, matters of social justice are increasingly important to most environmentalists. Technology is not rejected, but it must be appropriate and democratically accessible to all, as well as soft on nature. Scientic knowledge and rationalism are regarded as useful, but many environmentalists insist that these must be balanced by elevating emotional and intuitional knowledge to a more inuential position in environmental decision-making than that currently accorded. Democracy and individual freedom are

cornerstones of mainstream green ideology. Democracy is to be extended to all natures creatures (animal rights, vegetarianism, veganism). But the importance of the community is also stressed. However the collective, e.g., trade unions in the production processes, is not seen to be as important as in traditional politics. Emphasis in mainstream green ideology, as in social reformism generally, has swung from our collective power as producers to our individual power as consumers. The disdain for the industrial way of life, and the old politics which was noted above in connection with early environmentalism, still persists as a current in mainstream environmentalism. It may be coupled with a tendency towards irrationalism and mysticism which becomes more strident in deep ecology and New Age approaches. Whether they publicly own or disown this spiritual wing of the radical ecology movement, it is apparent that most mainstream greens do have deep ecology/New Age tendencies. This shows in their support for a bio-ethic, for nature mystication (Gaianism), and their belief in spiritual paths and self-discovery, self-realisation and consciousness raising through therapy techniques as routes to political change. The innate conservatism in idealizing nature, and in the denial of a politics of social change in favor of one of individual change, is often uncomfortable to those more on the left of the green movement.

STRATEGY
If mainstream green thinkers and activists do show an eclectic mix of pragmatic politics, taken partly from old reformist and radical political ideologies, and putting an ecological emphasis onto the whole, this could be seen in positive or negative terms. On the positive side, it could be argued that mixing elements of older ideologies will produce something more appropriate to the modern world which is not the world in which these ideologies were formulated. Thus a politics can be reached which is compatible with the needs of an ecologically sound society: these needs might best be seen not in the old terms of class war or material wealth distribution alone. An ecological crisis like holes in the ozone layer threatens us all, and in any case so-called socialist societies have not had a better relationship with nature than capitalist societies. Such a common sense approach to politics might also appeal to a wide range of people, not being seen as extremist. More negatively, the result of doing this could be merely an ideological mish-mash. It might sound theoretically appealing but is destined to break down in practice, because it contains some irreconcilable contradictions. (Such as the idea proposed by some environmentalists that green consumerism and other pressures will create multinational corporations that are environmentally sustainable

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and will put environmental and social goals before that of prot.) Ideological inconsistency could lead to some strange conceptions of a sustainable society, as conveyed by some libertarian environmentalists. They demand signicant increases in personal freedom, and an end of state domination of society. But at the same time they campaign for potentially repressive universal laws embracing the interests of natural eco-systems. This could lead to a society where communities which sanctioned the dumping of toxic wastes could be heavily punished, but those who allowed child abuse or racism to ourish might be excused on the principle that local communities should have an absolute right to self-determination in the social sphere. For one of environmentalisms recurrent themes is respect for a diversity of cultures, i.e., respect for otherness. Part of the contemporary debate about environmental politics concerns such post-modern sentiments, along with the tendency discussed above to reject progress and modernity. While some greens like Atkinson (1991) are content to see environmentalism as essentially a form of post-modern politics, others are anxious to rescue the Enlightenment Project and the gains from the Industrial Revolution for environmentalism. John Barry (1999), for instance considers ideological green politics in relation to the French and industrial revolutions. He thinks that they want to accept and radicalize the democracy begun by the former, but to reject the industrial revolution. This latter would be mistaken, he believes. He says, probably correctly, that green politics should be an immanent critique of modernity which however does not want to reject progress: rather, to redene what is meant by the word, making it apposite to strong sustainability principles, including social justice and ecosystems integrity. With this approach, the promise of modernity, which has hitherto eluded the majority of the worlds people, will not be forgotten, but can perhaps be realized for this majority. See also : Precautionary Principle, Volume 4.

REFERENCES
Anderson, T and Leal, D (1991) Free Market Environmentalism, Pacic Research Institute for Public Policy, San Francisco, CA. Atkinson, A (1991) Principles of Political Economy, Behaven, London. Barry, J (1999) Rethinking Green Politics: Nature, Virtue and Progress, Sage, London. Beck, U (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, Sage, London. Beck, U (1995) Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk, Polity, Cambridge. Bookchin, M (1990) The Philosophy of Social Ecology, Black Rose Books, Montreal.

Bramwell, A (1989) Ecology in the Twentieth Century: a History, Yale University Press, London. Callenbach, E (1981) Ecotopia Emerging, Banyan Tree Books, Berkley, CA. Capra, F (1982) The Turning Point, Wildwood House, London. Carson, R (1962) Silent Spring, Houghton Miin, Boston, MA. Cock, M and Hopwood, W (1996) Global Warning: Socialism and the Environment, Militant Publications, London. Connelly, J and Smith, G (1999) Politics and the Environment: from Theory to Practice, Routledge, London. Devall, W and Sessions, G (1985) Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered, Gibbs M Smith, UT. Dobson, A (1995) Green Political Thought, 2nd edition Unwin Hyman, London. Eckersley, R (1992) Environmentalism and Political Theory: Towards an Ecocentric Approach, University College Press, London. Ehrlich, P (1969) Eco-catastrophe, Ramparts, 8(3), 24 28. Ehrlich, P and Ehrlich, P (1990) The Population Explosion, Simon and Schuster, New York. Gorz, A (1982) Farewell to the Working Classes: an Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism, Pluto, London. Hardin, G (1968) The tragedy of the commons, Science, 162, 1243 1248. Hardin, G (1974) Living on a lifeboat, BioScience, 24, 10. Heilbroner, R (1975) An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, Calder and Boyars, London. Jacobs, M (1996) The Politics of the Real World, Earthscan, London. Mander, J and Goldsmith, E, eds (1996) The Case Against the Global Economy: and for a Turn Toward the Local, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, CA. Mason, M (1999) Environmental Democracy, Earthscan, London. McKibben, W (1990) The End of Nature, Penguin, London. Meadows, D H, Meadows, D L, Randers, J, and Behrens, W (1972) Limits to Growth, Earth Island, London. Meadows, D H, Meadows, D L, and Randers, J (1992) Beyond the Limits: Global Collapse or a Sustainable Future, Earthscan, London. Mellor, M (1997) Feminism and Ecology, Polity, Cambridge. Merchant, C (1982) The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scienti c Revolution, Wildwood House, London. Ophuls (1977) Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity: Prologue to a Political Theory of the Steady State, W H Freeman, San Francisco, CA. Pepper, D M (1991) Communes and the Green Vision: Counterculture, Lifestyle and the New Age, Green Print, Basingstoke. Pepper, D M (1993) Eco-socialism: from Deep Ecology to Social Justice, Routledge, London. Pepper, D (1996) Modern Environmentalism: an introduction, Routledge, London. Plumwood, V (1993) Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Routledge, London. Porritt, J (1984) Seeing Green, Blackwell, Oxford. Roszak, T (1979) Person/Planet, Gollancz, London. Schumacher, E F (1973) Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Really Mattered, Abacus, London. Simon, J and Kahn, H (1984) The Resourceful Earth, Blackwell, Oxford.

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Wall, D (1994) Green History, Routledge, London. Wall, D (1999) Earth First! and the Anti-Roads Movement, Routledge, London.

free market global economy where matters of social justice and environmental quality are given equal or greater priority than the pro t motive; a somewhat unlikely scenario perhaps.

Political Systems and the Environment: Utopianism

David Pepper
Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK

INTRODUCTION: MEANINGS OF UTOPIANISM

The Oxford English Dictionary denes utopia (no-place) as an imaginary location with a perfect social and political system. Most contemporary thought and action about the environment could be described as utopian in some way. Environmentalists, be they radical or reformist (see Political Movements/Ideologies and the Environment, Volume 5), wish to see signicant change towards a much improved society where development will be sustainable, that is, where the old antipathy between the exigencies of human progress and the integrity and diversity of natural ecosystems is resolved in some kind of harmony. Kumar (1988) describes utopianism as a form of thinking, invented by Thomas More (Utopia, 1516), which became a social movement in the West in the 19th century. From then on, some people, including environmentalists, have striven to realize utopia here on earth. Whereas earlier utopias, including those of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, were Christian-based (Manuel and Manuel, 1979, referred to hereafter as the Manuels), Europe and America were swept in the 19th century by a wave of secular messianism, of which socialism was the dominant expression. Kumar identies three locations of utopian expression: 1. 2. 3. in practical experiments, for instance of Robert Owen and many New World communities; in ctional societies, like Etienne Cabets Icaria; in social philosophies, such as those of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Comte and Marx.

Utopias are imaginary locations with perfect social and political systems. Utopianism is strong in environmental thought, where political and economic commentators often spell out the principles of an ecologically sound society, and writers of ction create ecotopias: ecologically ideal societies of the future. Additionally, environmental activists may set up small, would-be ecotopian communes, where they try to practice self-suf ciency within non-hierarchical social relationships. The ecologically ideal society is usually envisaged as small-scale and decentralized, with local communities forming the basic social, economic and political unit, but larger units are also formed through confederation. Environmental and social quality of life is high, and consumption of material goods is low in these local economies where production is for social need, not pro t. There is direct democracy, and nation states and international trade via multinational corporations play a subordinate role, or are non-existent. Nature is respected and stewarded, and biodiversity is high. Ecotopianism draws on utopian activists and thinkers of the past, including the 17th century Diggers and the utopian schemes and experiments of anarchists and utopian socialists such as Charles Fourier and Robert Owen in the early 19th century. The late 19th century writers, William Morris and Peter Kropotkin, have perhaps been the greatest historical in uences. Their socialist and anarchist visions are apparent in todays social ecology schemes for an ecological economy and society, while Teilhard de Chardins mid-twentieth century ideas about the evolutionary progress of humankind have particularly in uenced deep ecologys view of a future perfect society. Utopianism is also a term sometimes applied to those who seem to have unrealistic, impractical and ill thought out ideas about societys future direction. It is not only the idealistic schemes of radical environmentalists which are prone to this somewhat derogatory charge. The vision of the future proffered in the mainstream model of development known as ecological modernization (EM) could also be guilty of utopianism. For it imagines a future highly competitive capitalist,

These examples were all socialist-leaning, and a related ideological movement, that of anarchism, has been much connected with socialist utopianism. Both are extremely germane to contemporary environmentalist utopias, heavily inuencing classic ecotopias; such as those of Reich (1970), Schumacher (1973), Le Guin (1974), Goldsmith et al. (1972), van der Weyer (1986) and, notably, Callenbachs Ecotopia and its prequel Ecotopia Emerging (1978, 1981). But there are also other inuences, such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardins Phenomenon of Man (1965), which feeds strands of idealism and technological optimism into, particularly, deep ecology/new age utopianism: this also sometimes reects the utopianism of capitalist free market ideology. Authorities on the utopian subject, such as the Manuels, regard Marxism as a secular resurgence of millenarian (believing in a period of good government, great happiness

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and prosperity ; Oxford English Dictionary), paradisaical, apocalyptic thinking. Marxism is an unchristian euchronia (looking forward to an ideal time rather than place) in as much as it sees a future society of inde nite progress and growing freedom. In it, Men make their own history in full consciousness of their power, collectively, to shape their own society, and not subject to forces, economic, historical or mystical, beyond their control. (Socialists, however, often deny that Marxism is utopian, since Marx speci cally rejected the notion that members of a future communist, free society should be shackled by visions and blueprints inherited from previous generations.) Many environmentalists today, whether they call themselves Marxist or not, assert similarly that the key to an ecologically benign society is an inclusive democracy where the will of the majority prevails over economic and social decision-making. Armed with such freedom and with reason, they argue people will avoid living inharmoniously with nature, since this would undermine majority interests. As the Manuels point out, utopianism is popularly associated with a literary genre: a dramatic narrative portrayal of a way of life which is essentially good, embracing the underlying principles of an optimum society and embodying a set of implicit (usually optimistic) assumptions about human nature. But additionally, utopianism is a state of mind which often appears in the constitutions of a restructured polity and in the plans, outlines or blueprints of a universal republic. The line between such idealized blueprints and political and social theory is often blurred. The Manuels also show how utopianism is tied to speci c social con icts, and utopians, in rejecting the existing society, take political sides. Much late 20th century utopianism (including ecotopianism) re ects the condition of post-modernity, in its skepticism about modernity and the Enlightenment Project (the mission expressed strongly in the 18th century, and founded on scienti c, technological and industrial development in pursuit of universal material and social progress). Progress, as expressed through material af uence and the achievements of science and technology are often eschewed. The nuclear family, Fordist production, global modernization: all may be conspicuous in contemporary utopianism by their absence. The Manuels refer, almost disparagingly, to specialist utopias (including environmentalism and feminism) identifying with 1960s and 1970s counterculture, which arose in response to post-industrial apocalyptic visions of overpopulation, nuclear disaster, or Frankensteinian experiments gone wrong. (Two ecological dystopias which incorporate such visions are by Harrison (1966) and Wright (1997)). These, in true post-modern fashion, often entirely rejected theory. They had, the Manuels say, no identi able character beyond being usually virulently anti-urban. A bit of transcendence, body mysticism, sexual freedom, the abolition of work, the end of alienation, they wryly add (p. 808),

noting that this countercultural utopianism appealed to young people who found conventional society wanting, but it was, unlike earlier utopianism, not oriented to the long idealized future. Rather, it related to immediate existence and to the miniature rather than the large-scale model. This seems only partly true of ecotopianism at the end of the 20th century, which tends to bear out the Manuels view (p. 803) that however much it appears to change, the utopian bazaar is cluttered with old fashioned wares that are all too familiar. The picture is complicated by the fact that, of course, not all contemporary utopianism is countercultural. As will be argued below, the neo-liberal utopianism of the free market suffuses today s mainstream ideology and practice of global modernization, and its mainstream environmental component, known as ecological modernization EM. The case for identifying this as utopian rests on a normative interpretation of the word which is particular to Marxist thought. Essentially, this holds that while it may be valid to envisage and facilitate social change (i.e., towards socialism), it is utopian, i.e., unrealistic and impractical, to do so in a way that underplays the importance of factors (especially economic) militating against such change. The charge of utopianism, in a derogatory sense, was leveled by Marx and Engels against the utopian socialists such as Robert Owen, and the anarchists:
What was designated utopian according to this approach, was the imagination of the possibility of total social transformation involving the elimination of individualism, competition and the sway of private property, without a recognition of the necessity of class struggle and the revolutionary role of the proletariat in accomplishing the transition. (Jones, 1983, 505, emphases added)

By extension, this means that the approach of some ecoanarchistic alternative communities, who think it possible to create in the midst of capitalist society a coexisting microcosm of a non-capitalist utopia, which it is hoped might spread by example, is utopian, naive, and doomed to failure. It also implies that social democratic attempts to reform capitalism, rather than replace it by radically changing its economic character and relations of production, (the EM approach) are similarly unrealistic and destined to remain in that place called nowhere.

RADICAL ENVIRONMENTALISMS ECOTOPIA SUMMARIZED: THE IDEAL MODEL OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Modern environmentalism bears the imprint of both radical and reformist political ideologies (see Political Movements/Ideologies and the Environment, Volume 5). There are four main strands of radical environmentalism: deep ecology (which often fuses into new ageism ), social ecology, eco-feminism and eco-socialism. These strands are

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politically diverse and often incompatible; yet they also share strong unifying features, in their intent, rst, to replace current society by some form of radical alternative and, secondly, to ensure that this radical alternative should be intrinsically socially and environmentally sustainable and just. A third source of unity is the very considerable commonality in their detailed visions of ecotopia/ecochronia. The lineaments and features of their economic, political and social life, and their geographies, have more in common than of difference. In terms of the contemporary jargon of models of sustainable development, ranging from weak to strong, the radical environmentalists ecotopias may be seen as ultra-strong, or as Baker et al. (1997) term it, they constitute an ideal model (IM). One criterion by which this IM of sustainability differs from other approaches is that it does not countenance a role for conventional economic growth in its denition of development: rather it seeks development in other aspects of wealth, such as quality of life. The account here draws on ecotopian works referred to previously, and also in Sale (1985), Devall and Sessions (1985), Kemp (1992), Milbrath et al. (1994), Mander and Goldsmith (1996), Douthwaite (1996) and Fotopoulos (1997); a fairly representative and diverse set of radical environmentalists. However, notwithstanding their divergences, they share most if not all of the principles outlined in Table 1, amounting to development aims of cultural identity, self-reliance, economic and social democracy, social justice and ecological balance. Working from such principles, some important elements of the economy, society and geography of the sustainable society corresponding to this IM can be pictured.
Economy

Table 1 Major principles underlying the ideal model IM of sustainable development

Stability, self-reliance and cooperation are key IM concepts underlying production, work and distribution. Self-reliance would root communities back into their locality, decreasing dependency on the global economy. It implies as much self-sufciency as possible, locally meeting basic needs for food, housing, welfare, and energy. Communities could generate their energy from multiple combined local sources; watermills, photovoltaics, windmills, and biomass such as straw, dung, woodchips from coppicing and forest waste. Contributions to and withdrawals from a grid would coordinate production, while conservation, and savings from reduced transport, would greatly reduce energy needs. The principle of common ownership of the means of production in action would be seen in farms and horticultural enterprises owned by community land trusts and/or supported by subscribers paying for food in advance of or after distribution. Such enterprises exist today, and are usually small and substantially organic, utilizing low energy inputs and local plant and animal strains. Industries, services and

Economy Economys purpose is to satisfy need, not to create prot. Needs include satisfying, creative work, good health, spiritual and cultural fulllment, social interaction and high environmental quality, as well as food, shelter, etc. Communities/individuals dene their own needs and satisers Local production to meet local basic needs Economic confederation and inter-regional exchanges to meet extra local needs, e.g., energy, transport, cultural, and non-basic needs Mutual aid rather than strict reciprocity is the basis for any exchanges Economic wealth should not be concentrated or taken out of communities Total or partial common ownership and control of means of production and distribution From each according to ability: to each according to need, within limits, or unconditionally Holistic accounting Sustainability and self-reliance imply living within limits: limits to economic growth and consumption Stable human population levels Community/regionally planned economy; markets have minimal or no role Society and politics Local community is the basic social unit Confederation and inter-regional interchange (e.g., via information technology) to avoid parochialism, bigotry, conservatism, deviancy Cultural diversity giving social strength Participatory, bottom-up democracy, informed by subsidiarity Individuals/communities take responsibility for their own lives These last two imply economic democracy, direct political democracy, egalitarianism and non-hierarchical relationships, i.e., dispersal of power Emphasized values include cooperation, non-hierarchy, non-patriarchy, equity, justice, social cohesion, compassion, love, peace, respect for nature Holistic thinking Science/technology controlled by and serves the whole community Education a key resource, and tool for social change State has an enabling role, or none at all Nature Valued for its own sake and/or for humanistic goals Biodiversity fostered and preserved It is axiomatic that the community focus of society fosters sustainable relationships with nature Permacultural principles apply to interaction with the land Each system/production cycle can continue indenitely without ecological deterioration

shops would also be community supported. In Fotopoulos eco-socialist/anarchist utopian economic democracy,

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citizens assemblies would make all the macroeconomic decisions. Micro decisions, on how individual factories and businesses operationalized citizens targets, would be controlled by workplace assemblies delegating powers to supervisory boards. Eco-socialist and deep ecology visions often dwell on the virtue of creative artisanship (rather than the current alienating division of labor) to full the social aims of work. They may also emphasize team production, and the need for individuals not to over-specialize. However, this does not amount to rejecting specialist roles, including management. But possessing and exercising expertise must not create power hierarchies: there should be distinction without rank. While some, like Sale, envisage labor without wage, looking perhaps to distribution via free shops, Fotopoulos dismisses this as being based on a socialistic fantasy of inherent abundance. He shares most green and neo-classical presumptions of inherent scarcity, and would distribute work, goods and services in his hypothetical non-money economy through a complicated scheme involving basic and non-basic vouchers. Everyone would receive the former for lifes essentials, with a strong expectation that all able bodied people will work. Most would also do extra-voluntary work, for non-basic vouchers to exchange for communitydesignated luxuries (perhaps obtained through exchanges with other regions and communities). But whether vouchers or money were used, they would be only locally valid, after the manner of existing local employment and trading systems (LETS) schemes, and could not be accumulated or removed from communities by individuals. In the transition towards the ultimate non-money economy, Fotopoulos envisages that peoples savings and investments would be effected through local banking, credit union and provident schemes, which would all be amenable to confederation. In very many ecotopian visions, the anarchists conferral principle would be vital in equalizing resources between communities, in investing in and organizing infrastructure, and in overall production planning. For Fotopoulos, outcomes, in individual incomes and wealth, might well be unequal, but inequality would result from individuals voluntary decisions, e.g., to do less work, or perhaps to do the most sought-after jobs, which therefore might attract less remuneration than undesirable tasks.
Society and Politics

and between local communities. Such visions tend, Kemp et al. (1992) believe, towards true communism; where producers and communities join together to regulate rationally and for themselves their exchanges with nature; a situation increasingly rare within capitalism. This context fosters individuals fulllment, but not at the expense of others. Most radical visions emphasize libertarian, anti-statist principles, but their society is also highly organized, needing strong civil institutions. The spatial division of power is intended to promote equality, efciency, welfare and security. The fact that this may be utopian in the sense of unrealistic, is recognized by Le Guin, whose anarchist planet, Anarres, is by no means perfect. She sees that because of the principles of diversity and self determination, not every community or region would be likely to heed democratic, just and ecologically sound values. (Le Guins quasi-utopia, incidentally, is more believable and palatable by virtue of its presentation, warts and all, as an imperfect society; often dour, austere and a place of daily struggle to maintain cherished principles. It is, paradoxically, more inspiring than the incredible worlds of William Morris, Huxley or Callenbach, where people seem perpetually wreathed in sanctimonious smiles of happiness). In detail, therefore, the search is for a system that works even if people in it are not good, with structures, or devices like peer disapproval, to minimize errant behavior undermining majority interests. Fotopoulos supplies considerable structural detail of his future inclusive democracy. Its citizens assemblies, taking local decisions, would be augmented through rotating, mandated, recallable delegates, on appointed bodies like community courts or militia. They would also send similar delegates to regional and confederal councils, where different community aims would have to be composited and operationalized via majority voting or consensus.
Geography and Understanding of Place

All ecotopias rest on the argument that more inclusive styles of government, oriented towards generalizable interests, are better suited to addressing environmental degradation than existing less inclusive styles. Inclusive styles are predicated on decentralized decision-making, including economic decisions. Hence, IM visions all revolve around communitarian values, reviving, says Douthwaite, the spirit of the Irish Meitheal, which was and is a working party system based on mutual support and trust within

It is here, perhaps, that different versions of IM have most in common; all reasserting localism to countervail capitalisms inherent globalism. Global modernizations geography is one of dependency, whereby the lives of communities are shaped by events and decisions originating at considerable distances. By contrast the IMs decentralized geography would create protective space for communities and regions. In its communitarian cultures and collective economies, families and communities would own their means of livelihood. Its mainly small enterprises would minimize returns to capital and maximize returns to labor, and much investment would be in local rather than spatially distant regions. To radical environmentalists, one key benet of decreasing the scale of living would lie in enabling people to understand readily the effects of their actions on their community and its ecosystems. Communal ownership of the

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means of production would preclude externalizing social and environmental costs, because there would be no external places. For where value systems fostered mutual aid rather than economic competition, it may be reasonably supposed that other parts of the world would be regarded as extensions of ones own community and region. The confederal principle, allied to information technology, should help such changes in geographical perception. Parochialism and spatial inequity could thus be avoided. Outside relationships and exchanges, not being based on strict market reciprocity, would likely foster non-dependent, non-injurious interaction and cultural tolerance, in what would be a global economy. Localism, by providing economic security, should create a climate where racism and authoritarianism would wither away. Nation states might also wither, giving way to continental and sub-continental confederal alliances. The European Union (EU) might become a series of autonomous regions within a unied European framework. Bioregionalists, such as Sale, and many deep ecologists, seek to dene regions by recognizing natural boundaries within which clear carrying capacity limits are acknowledged. Knowing about regional cultures, folklore, history and natural cycles would constitute a major element in bioregional citizenship, involving walking the territory and attuning consciousness to nature. A bioregion is any part of the earths surface whose rough boundaries are determined by natural characteristics rather than human dictates, (Sale, 1985, 55). It is distinguished from other bioregions by particular attributes of ora, fauna, water, climate, soils and landforms, and by the human settlements and cultures these attributes have given rise to. There is much variation in views about the maximum viable size of the primary political unit, the local community. Estimates may range from one to 10 000 people. This would clearly necessitate politically reconstructing most cities into relatively autonomous neighborhood units, confederated into city regions: perhaps, as Sale envisages, by breaking bigger cities down into smaller ones of 250 000 maximum size, generating their own energy. In this way, 150 new USA cities would be created. Additionally, cityscapes are much changed, as in Callenbachs Ecotopia, where gardens, rooftops, community allotments and city farms burst forth with the fruits and owers of intensive cultivation. Douthwaite envisages that increased rural self-reliance would give city-based service providers less to do, encouraging countryward migration. This anarchistic scattering of the city into its local region would re-establish city/country reciprocity: what remained of the former would provide rural services and be fed by its rural hinterland through box schemes (regular supplies of boxes of produce direct from farm to consumer), farmers markets and the like.

PRINCIPAL INFLUENCES ON RADICAL ECOTOPIANISM

As suggested above, radical ecotopia reects inuences from the 19th century and before, deriving particularly but not exclusively from socialist and anarchist utopianism. To environmentalists who see common ownership of land as a key issue (reected in groups like Reclaim the Streets or The Land is Ours or the alternative communities movement), Gerrard Winstanley is a seminal gure. In The Law of Freedom in a Platform, or True Magistracy Restored (1652) Winstanley outlined a vision where land would be set free for the commoners. Environmentalists celebrate him particularly for his actions in assembling a community of commoners, the Diggers, who dug and planted the commons on George Hill, Walton, Surrey, in 1649. In their reluctance to envisage violent seizure of landowners private property, and their hope that instead the landowners would voluntarily give up their lands and join them, these diggers foreshadowed an important aspect of green anarchist/social ecology strategy: that of preguring the desired society. This means that no strategy or approach (like violence, or social hierarchies) which would not feature in the utopia itself should be contemplated as part of the transitional struggle; this point became central to 19th century arguments between anarchists and Marxists. A more paternalistic form of preguring might be seen in Robert Owens utopian experiments. A businessman and mill owner between 1800 and 1812, thereafter he began to criticize contemporary society and economy. He reformed the conditions for his own mill workers at New Lanark, Scotland, then proposed and initiated self-sustaining communities of about 5003000 people each, without private property, organized in rectangular units close to manufacturing plants and surrounded by intensive agriculture. Such exemplary communities were to lead to a cooperative socialism embracing the earth, formed by a new generation of rational beings. Another utopian socialist, Charles Fourier (17721837), also strongly inuences anarchist-feminist, communalist radical environmentalism. He envisaged phalansteries, communities of about 1700 people, as basic social units, with no overarching state regulation. In them, creative talents were expanded, meals and child-care were communal, and industrial armies carried out environmental projects. Traditional family relationships were dissolved and replaced by a wide spectrum of sexual relationships. The phalansteries reected Fouriers view that all humans are born with their own innate instinctual drives, and utopia would be a place where each personality would be allowed to come out. Although capital, private property and wealth disparities remained, all were emotionally satised and spiritually rich. This suggests an essentially liberal utopia: the creation of an environment where all individuals could satisfy themselves. Fouriers

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theme of enhanced life quality, perhaps compensating for lower material standards, features strongly in the seminal ecotopian visions of Schumacher (1973) and Goldsmith et al. (1972). The 20th centurys commune and back-to-the-land radical environmentalism (Pepper, 1991) has many links and resonances with similar 19th century alternative communities (Hardy, 1979, and Gould, 1988). Two of the strongest inuences on them have been Peter Kropotkin and William Morris. OSullivan (1990) considers that Morris applied Marxism to provide radical environmentalists with a document setting out many of their basic ideas in plain English. This includes voluntary simplicity; rejecting the false material wants and sprawling, ugly, polluting developments engendered by capitalism in favor of the simple joys of the lovely earth (Morris, 1887), and fellowship. He demonstrated his eco-socialist credentials by identifying commercialism and commodication under capitalism as the source of natures impoverishment. Unlike deep ecologists, he did not oppose the fruits of industry per se, particularly organized in small workshops as craft production, nor did he abhor any change made to nature by humans. He saw a place for machines, in doing any unpleasurable work: again a theme in much modern ecotopianism, as seen, for instance, in the post-industrial utopia of Andre Gorz (Frankel, 1987). Morris also inveighed against pollution, urbanization of the countryside by mass housing and alienation of the laborer from his/her creativity, and consumerism. In News from Nowhere, there is no private property as a right, hence no hierarchy based on it, and little crime, except for that based on sexual passions. Nowhere, say the Manuels, goes alongside Edward Bellamys Fourierist Looking Backward 2000 1887 (1888) in a tradition of nostalgic socialist utopias which bypass the dynamism of industrial-scientic modern civilization. Their visions represent genteel socialism; non-threatening to Victorian capitalism (although Morris savagely attacked capitalism) and therefore open to the charge of utopianism in the Marxist sense. Morris vision is close to anarchism, and for Kropotkin (1892, 1899) anarchism would lead to true communeism: the free association of producers without class division, wage slavery or even money. He initially conceived of his ideal communes as a specic spatial form (based on the Russian mir), but later, like Marx, he saw them less specifically as groupings of individuals with mutual interests in thousands of towns and villages. His picture of an ideal communist landscape is close in detail to that of the IM, and his principle of mutual aid as a key evolutionary law heavily infuses both social ecology and (paradoxically) deep ecology and new ageism. Fotopouloss (1997) inclusive democracy echoes Kropotkin in many respects, although Fotopoulos, a disciple of Murray Bookchins social ecology, does not, like many eco-anarchists, fall prey to utopianism in

underestimating the immense power of capital to resist challenges to its self-perpetuating exigencies. Much radical ecotopianism (bioregionalism, deep ecology and the new ageism into which this can merge) shows anarchistic leanings in its visions, but nonetheless lacks anarchisms materialist, socialist perspective as the basis of such visions. Rather, it is idealistic, and here two 20th century utopians seem particularly inuential, Teilhard de Chardin and Aldous Huxley. Callenbachs Ecotopia (1978) closely resembles Huxleys Island (1962). The latter was a curtain raiser to 1960s and 1970s idealism and its rejection of consumer materialism, conformity, alienation and the perceived dangers of globalization and science allied to capitalism, such as large-scale development, nuclear war/power, pollution and waste and overpopulation (Huxley gured on the sleeve of the Beatles Sergeant Pepper album). Huxleys remedies for these evils, and the basis of his utopia, draw particularly on traditions associated with Eastern mysticism and the passive and pragmatic praxis they foster, and on the imagined liberating power of drugs and sexual freedom. His utopians achieve nirvana on an island paradise surrounded by global threats like oil exploration or the terrifying increase in Chinas population, by a combination of tantrik yoga, coitus suspendus, meditation, trance, autosuggestion and awareness-enhancing drugs, all mixed in with scientic enlightenment, particularly in the application of biological and ecological principles. His utopians avoid the pitfalls of wider society by virtue of the right people being intelligent at the right moment and they feel no need for things bad and thin and boring, such as speedboats or television, wars, revolutions, revivals or political slogans. This all resonates with that strain in environmentalism and other new social movements that emphasizes the power of reason and right thinking, answering perhaps to the angst of middle-class Western intellectuals, but being highly utopian in the sense of eschewing the realities of class politics based on the economic nature of capitalist society. Teilhard de Chardins Phenomenon of Man (originally written in 1947) is one of a complex of inuences on idealistic radical ecotopianism; a perspective suffusing deep ecology and new age tendencies that see evolution towards a higher state of consciousness as the key to ecological salvation. These inuences include Eastern and Western mysticism, and certain interpretations of 20th century science by such writers as Capra, Sheldrake, Bohm, etc. They are competently synthesized in Peter Russells Awakening Earth (1991). The starting point is with the evolution of Gaia (the earth as a living being) which is considered to be guided by design rather than Darwinian chance into new orders of complexity, diversity and connectivity (see Gaia Hypothesis, Volume 5). This holistic, organic, monist and optimistic evolutionary perspective embraces

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de Chardin s theology, envisioning Earth s becoming a social super-organism. It would comprise diverse but interdependent individuals and societies, coalescing in their thoughts and ideas through the power of love and the growing density of global communications. Eventually billions of individuals form a single inter-thinking group or noosphere (see Noosphere, Volume 5). This is a realm of consciousness which has evolved from material living matter (biosphere), that in turn evolved from non-living matter (geosphere). Eventually all three spheres are to become an organic unity. This euchronia will be point Omega, when Gaia will have become one supermind. Beyond this, Gaia might merge into a Gaia eld: a galactic superorganism. Such a conceptual scheme loosely follows Hegel s view of history as a process of emerging world spirit. The noosphere is a universal belt of psycho-social forces that has evolved, not smoothly, but in a series of leaps in response to environmental crises at different stages of earth s history. The Manuels note that for all the science (anthropology, biology) buttressing this schema, it can only be looked on as a dream of reason. The speci cally Christian element in de Chardin has not, on the whole, impacted on modern ecotopianism, although van der Weyer s Wickwyn (1986) is a rare exception. However, feminist utopianism has been more in uential. The society of Ecotopia, for instance, is almost ruthlessly feminist, while Capra s New Ageist Turning Point (1982) makes feminine values the key to impending ecotopia. Marge Piercey s Woman on the Edge of Time (1979) was much-loved by 1970s radical environmentalists. In it, the heroine jumps from contemporary society to an androgynous one where relationships and child care are rede ned, lifestyles are simple and natural, and there is, again, free love. The latter theme is recurrent in ecotopian IMs, because of its supposed contribution to heightened quality of life, and mitigation of the overpopulation problem. A more distant feminist utopia, Charlotte Perkins Gilman s Herland (1915), is usually ignored, though in it most things which environmentalists deplore (war, greed, money, stupidity) have been banished.

EM: REFORMIST ECOTOPIANISM?

Both left- and right-wing critics of free market liberalism have long detected a form of utopianism (in the derogatory sense) in the belief that the free market can bring a world of social justice, ecological sustainability and universal freedom (Gray, 1999). However, in the past two decades a new environmental discourse has emerged, which seems to give new impetus to this utopianism. Rejecting the pessimistic 1970s Limits to Growth perspective, this discourse embraces modernity, rationalization and internationalism, and is posited on continuing global marketization

under capitalism. EM has become the mainstream, reformist organizing basis for new institutional procedures and perspectives to manage environmental problems. As an approach to sustainable development, EM is seen by its most enthusiastic adherents as not merely a technocratic project to modify global modernization environmentally, but also as a form of institutional learning and cultural politics that heralds new ways of seeing and new opportunities for an emerging global civil society in the face of global economic forces and environmental problems. EM discourse is complex, but its core features, which have become the basis of the environmental policies of Western states, are outlined in Table 2. Essentially, EM theory holds that a new phase of development is possible, and is happening, where capitalism (involving constant economic growth, technological development and the spread of consumerism through global marketization) and the goals of environmental conservation are reconcilable. Indeed, it sees environmental protection not as an impediment to capital accumulation but as a potential source of further accumulation; economic bene ts and competitive advantage being said to accrue from preserving genetic diversity and from anticipatory environmental protection, rather than paying out to clean up a mess. In this positive-sum game, technological and managerial experts, business and industry all become key actors in ful lling the environmental agenda, rather than its enemy, as environmentalists often suspect. As an approach to sustainable development, EM clearly ts well with capitalist ideology and could be regarded as a form of social democracy without the big stick; for while the state legislates for EM s policy principles, in the contemporary ideological climate of laissez-faire, its role becomes contextual and steering, rather than dirigiste as in post-war Europe. For left-leaning environmentalists, particularly, however, EM represents a form of environmental utopianism in the Marxist sense, essentially because it envisages widespread new behaviors that would in reality serve as a brake or impediment on the operation of capitalist economic forces. Therefore, its principles and assumptions are bound to be unrealistic. For instance, EM proposes that conventional economic growth and environmental protection are compatible; yet in reality economic growth leads today to global warming, rapid loss of species diversity and other undesirable effects. It assumes that rms will embrace anticipatory environmental technology because of its long-term profitability, but in fact most Western rms still opt for the quicker pro ts offered by end-of-pipe technologies (or by simply evading environmental standards). In any case it is unrealistic to assume that anticipatory technology can signi cantly lower environmental degradation in a growth economy, since gains from such technologies (e.g., catalytic converters) are more than offset by growing consumption (e.g., more cars and road-kilometers).

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Table 2 Features of EM Ecological Modernizationa

EMs Realms (Hajer) (1) New policy-making principles: e.g., from react and cure to anticipate and prevent; integrated pollution abatement; integrating environmental concerns into all ministries; techniques allowing rms to integrate environment into cost-risk calculations, such as polluter pays, cost-benet analysis, risk analysis, precautionary principle, tradable pollution rights, pollution charges and taxes (2) A new role for science in policy-making, especially ecological systems science. Experts take a central role (3) Environment protection seen as a source of growth: low- and non-wasteful anticipatory technologies generate prots (4) Nature reconceptualized: a public rather than a free good, so efciency involves internalizing environmental costs (5) Burden of proof reassigned: to the suspected polluter, not the damaged party (6) Policy-making opened up: new participation and partnerships, e.g., between business and non-government organizations. Voluntary agreements rather than command and control regulation are encouraged Weak EM Discourse Includes (Dryzek) Anticipating unwanted outcomes of production/consumption, through systems approaches Instrumental view of nature as provider of resources and services Continued existence of capitalist political economy Reassurances about continuing modernization, growth, progress Weak EM Discourse Excludes (Dryzek) Consideration of: limits to growth; Third World development paths; international environmental footprints of industrial development; a non-instrumental view of nature; alternatives to capitalist political economy Preoccupation with equity and environmental justice Unfettered free market economics Unrestrainedly optimistic view of growth and development. Strong EM Discourse May Include (Christoff) An international dimension Non-western development approaches Deeper changes in beliefs and morality Elevating equity, futurity, ecological imperatives by comparison with narrow economic goals Re-embedding society in community, region, ecosystems: limits to modernization
a

widespread among, for instance, US and EU businesses, because they take most decisions from short-term, sectorspecic perspectives, as must happen in the increasingly competitive global marketplace. Hence the hope that capitalist institutions can or will signicantly reform, to take on environmental sustainability, is pious. For this would require giving equal weight to economic and to environmental and social justice goals, so that economic and civil spheres would become compatible as in the social democratic agenda. But in the real world Western civil and social democratic politics are increasingly subordinated to global marketizations economic agenda. For to re-establish prot levels after the 1950s1970s round of Keynesian welfare spending, capital has often resisted social justice and environmental goals. These goals usually represent unacceptable costs. Whereas the sustainability agenda requires evening up wealth distribution, and substantial social spending, capitalisms inevitable dynamic is to concentrate wealth (Fotopoulos, 1997). And EM contains other utopian, idealistic assumptions which would not bear close scrutiny, for instance that Western afuence could be universalized in an environmentally sustainable way, that trickle down economics work, or even that economic growth is a universal good. On this account, then, it is not only young and starryeyed idealists or iconoclastic intellectuals who indulge in environmental utopianism: establishment pillars do the same, though in a different way. This raises the question of whether utopianism is a good or bad thing. If everyone does it yet no environmental resolution is reached, perhaps the habit should be discouraged. However, the notion of futurity is a cornerstone of the sustainability debate, hence it would be utopian to envisage that utopianism could ever be avoided in that debate.

REFERENCES
Baker, S, Kousis, M, Richardson, D, and Young, S (1997) The Politics of Sustainable Development: Theory and Practice within the European Union, Routledge, London, 1 40. Callenbach, E (1978) Ecotopia, Pluto Press, London. Callenbach, E (1981) Ecotopia Emerging, Banyan Tree Books, Berkley. Capra, F (1982) The Turning Point, Wildwood House, London. Christoff, P (1996) Ecological Modernisation: Ecological Modernities, Environ. Politics, 5(3), 476 500. de Chardin, P T (1965) The Phenomenon of Man, Harper and Row, New York. Devall, B and Sessions, G (1985) Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered, Gibbs M Smith, Salt Lake City, UT. Douthwaite, R (1996) Short Circuit: Strengthening Local Economies for Security in an Unstable World, Green Books, Totnes. Dryzek, J (1997) The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Sources: Hajer (1995), Dryzek (1997), Christoff (1996).

Attitudinal change underpins EM theory, which envisages that rms will embrace the more holistic accounting and planning for longer time horizons which are necessary for sustainability. However, such changes are not at present

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Fotopoulos, T (1997) Towards an Inclusive Democracy: the Crisis of the Growth Economy and the Need for a New Liberatory Project, Cassell, London. Frankel, B (1987) The Post Industrial Utopians, Polity Press, Cambridge. Gilman, C P (1915) Herland, 1979 edition, Womans Press, London. Goldsmith, E, Allan, R, Allaby, M, Davoll, J, and Lawrence, S (1972) Blueprint for Survival, Ecologist, 2(1), 1 43. Gould, P (1988) Early Green Politics: Back to Nature, Back to the Land and Socialism in Britain, Harvester Press, Brighton. Gray, J (1999) False Dawn: the Delusions of Global Capitalism, Granta, London. Hajer, M (1995) The Politics of Environmental Discourse, Ecological Modernisation and the Policy Process, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Hardy, D (1979) Alternative Communities in Nineteenth Century England, Longman, London. Harrison, H (1966) Make Room! Make Room! (lmed as Soylent Green ), 2nd edition (1992), Penguin, Harmondsworth. Huxley, A (1962) Island, Harper Collins, London. Jones, G S (1983) Utopian Socialism, in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, ed T Bottomore, Blackwell, Oxford, 504 506. Kemp, P et al. (1992) Europes Green Alternative: a Manifesto for a New World, Green Print, Basingstoke. Kropotkin, P (1892) The Conquest of Bread, Freedom Press, London. Kropotkin, P (1899) Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow, Freedom Press, London. Kumar K (1988) Utopianism, in The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, eds A Bullock, O Stallybrass, and S Trombley, Fontana, London, 888 889. Le Guin, U (1974) The Dispossessed, Victor Gollancz, London. Mander, J and Goldsmith, E (1996) The Case Against the Global Economy and for a Turn Toward the Local, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, CA. Manuel, F E and Manuel, F P (1979) Utopian Thought in the Western World, Blackwell, Oxford. Milbrath, L, Downes, Y, and Miller, K (1994) Sustainable Living: Framework of an Ecosystemically Grounded Political Theory, Environ. Politics, 3(3), 421 44. Morris, W (1887) The Society of the Future, in The Political Writings of William Morris, ed A L Morton (1979), Lawrence and Wishart, London, 188 203. OSullivan, P (1990) The Ending of the Journey: Wm Morris, News from Nowhere and Ecology, in Wm Morris and News from Nowhere: a Vision for Our Time, eds S Coleman and P OSullivan, Green Books, Bideford, 169 181. Pepper, D M (1991) Communes and the Green Vision: Counterculture, Lifestyle and the New Age, Green Print, Basingstoke. Piercey, M (1979) Woman on the Edge of Time, The Womens Press, London. Reich, C (1970) The Greening of America, Random House, New York. Russell, P (1991) The Awakening Earth: the Global Brain, Arkana, London. Sale, K (1985) Dwellers in the Land: the Bioregional Vision, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, CA.

Schumacher, E F (1973) Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Really Mattered, Abacus, London. van der Weyer, R (1986) Wickwyn: a Vision of the Future, Society for the Propogation of Christian Knowledge, London. Wright, R (1997) A Scienti c Romance, Anchor, London.

Politics, Environmental
see Environmental Politics (Opening essay, Volume 5)

Positivism
see Environmental Philosophy: Phenomenological Ecology (Volume 5)

Post-modern
see Political Movements/Ideologies and the Environment (Volume 5)

Post-normal Science
Jerome R Ravetz
Research Methods Consultancy Ltd., London, UK

Post-normal science is a new conception of the management of complex science-related issues (Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1999; Ravetz, 1999). It focuses on aspects of problem solving that tend to be neglected in traditional accounts of scienti c practice: uncertainty, value loading, and a plurality of legitimate perspectives. It provides a coherent explanation of the need for greater participation in science-policy processes, based on the new tasks of quality assurance in these problem areas. It is a means of illuminating, explaining and then guiding innovative decision processes that are happening spontaneously all over the world. The management of complex natural systems as if they were simple scienti c exercises has brought us to our present mixture of triumph and peril. We are now witnessing the emergence of a new approach to problem-solving strategies in which the role of science, still essential, is now appreciated in its full context

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of the complexity and uncertainty of natural systems and the relevance of human commitments and values.

INTRODUCTION
In the sorts of issue-driven science relating to global climate change, typically facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high, and decisions urgent. The sound science that is frequently invoked as the requirement for rational policy decisions may be an unaffordable luxury. The traditional distinction between hard, objective scientic facts and soft, subjective value judgments is now inverted. All too often, we must make hard policy decisions where our only scientic inputs are irremediably soft. In these new circumstances, invoking truth as the goal of science is a diversion. A more relevant and robust guiding principle is quality, understood as a contextual property of scientic information. Appropriate intellectual tools are required for these new tasks. A scientic methodology designed for controlled experimentation and abstract theory building can make effective use of a picture of reality that reduces complex phenomena to their simple, atomic elements. However, that is not best suited for the tasks of science-related policy today. The traditional normal scientic mind-set fosters expectations of regularity, simplicity and certainty in the phenomena and in our interventions. However, these can inhibit the growth of our understanding of the new problems and of appropriate methods for their solution. These new problems are characteristic of complex systems. These are not merely complicated; they involve interrelated subsystems at a variety of scale levels and at a variety of sorts. Thus, we now know that every technology is embedded in its societal and natural contexts, and that nature itself is shaped by its interactions with humanity. In such complex systems, there can be no single privileged point of view for measurement, analysis and evaluation. Moreover, in these systems there is generally no hidden hand whereby selsh individual actions automatically benet the wider societal and natural communities; hence there is no substitute for morality in the good conduct of our affairs. The phenomena of life, society, and now the environment, cannot be captured, nor their problems managed, by sciences which assume that the relevant systems are simple. In terms of such paradigms, they will always present anomalies and surprises. Post-normal science has been developed as the appropriate methodology for complex natural and social systems. The term post-normal provides a contrast to two sorts of normality. One is the picture of research science as normally consisting of puzzle solving within the framework of an unquestioned and unquestionable paradigm, in the theory of Kuhn (1962). Another is the assumption that the policy context is still normal, in that such routine puzzle

solving by experts provides an adequate knowledge base for decision making. The great lesson of recent years is that this assumption no longer holds. We may call it a post-modern rejection of grand narratives, or a green, notin-my-back-yard (NIMBY) politics. Whatever its causes, we can no longer assume the presence of this sort of normality of the policy process, particularly in relation to global climate change. The frequent, almost ritualized calls for debate on major policy questions of risks and the environment are an implicit recognition of their post-normal character. In such novel contexts, there is a new role for natural science. The facts that are taught from the textbooks used in institutions are still necessary, but they are no longer sufcient. Contrary to the impression that the textbooks convey, in practice most problems have more than one plausible answer, and many have no well-dened scientic answer at all. Further, in the articial world studied in academic science courses, it is strictly inconceivable that science-related problems could be tackled and solved except by deploying the accredited expertise. Practical techniques, which cannot be explained in principle by accepted science, are commonly dismissed as the products of blind tradition or of chance. When persons with no formal qualications attempt to participate in the processes of innovation, evaluation or decision-making, their efforts have tended to be viewed with suspicion or scorn. Post-normal science provides a means for correcting this sort of mind-set.

POST-NORMAL SCIENCE
As a theory, post-normal science links epistemology (study of the grounds for knowledge) and policy, for its origins lie in the relations between those two domains. Its authors were concerned that the sciences devoted to solving risk and environmental problems (such as those in ecology and toxicology) are radically different from those that are instrumental in creating them (such as the applications of physics and molecular biology). In comparison to those traditional sciences, the policy-relevant sciences have enjoyed less prestige and funding, are less mature scientically, and are more subject to external inuences and constraints. By the criteria of the traditional philosophy of science, their results frequently fail to attain the status of sound science. It has been argued that they should, therefore, be rejected as evidence in policy debates; but a more appropriate conclusion would be that the philosophy of science needs recasting. Post-normal science provides a response to these crises of science and philosophy, by bringing facts and values into a unied conception of problem solving in these areas, and by replacing truth by quality as its core evaluative concept. Its principle of the plurality of legitimate perspectives on any problem leads to a focus on dialogue, and on mutual respect and learning, wherever possible.

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Post-normal science comprises those inquiries that occur at the interfaces of science and policy where uncertainties and value-loadings are critical. It can be analyzed as a policy cycle including: policies, persons, procedures, products, and post-normal assessment; it also extends to the downstream phases of implementation and monitoring (Funtowicz et al., 2000). Depending on the particular context, the task may be more like policy-related research, or science-related decision making, or creative technical-social innovation. In the case of global climate change, all three sorts are in play; the distinctions are never absolute, as the whole endeavor is a complex system. Post-normal science can be located in relation to the more traditional problem-solving strategies by means of a diagram (see Figure 1). On it, we see two axes systems uncertainties and decision stakes. When both aspects are small, we are in the realm of normal, safe applied science, where expertise is fully effective. When either is medium, then the application of routine techniques is not enough; skill, judgement, sometimes even courage are required. This is professional consultancy, with the examples of the surgeon or the senior engineer in mind. In such cases, the creative element in the problem is more an exercise in design than the discovery of facts. Our modern society depends on armies of applied scientists pushing forward the frontiers of knowledge and technique, with the professionals performing leading roles in technical and policy matters. In recent years we have learned that even the skills of professionals are not always adequate for the solution of science-related policy issues. When risks cannot be quantied, or when possible damage is irreversible, then we are out of the range of competence of traditional sorts of expertise and traditional problem-solving methodologies. This situation is represented on the diagram as the
High Post-normal science

Decision stakes

Professional consultancy

Applied science

Low Systems uncertainties

High

Figure 1

Post-normal science

outer band, that of post-normal science. We notice that the band extends through the whole quadrant, right up to the region where systems uncertainties vanish. This feature re ects the fact that, if in some policy process the decision stakes are very high (as when an institution is seriously threatened by a proposed policy), then a defensive strategy will involve challenging every step of a scienti c argument, even if the systems uncertainties are actually quite small. The management of systems uncertainties through the involvement of decision stakes occurs even in routine science. Whatever the statistical test, there will always be errors: some true correlations will be rejected (Type I) and false ones will be accepted (Type II). A balance must, therefore, be struck between the error-costs of excess speci city and those of excess sensitivity, respectively; and that balance depends on the policy framework of the test. For example, if the problem is detecting possible harm from contaminants, it is better to err on the side of precaution and be more inclusive; a test designed around avoiding false positives could exclude potentially important information (Type I error), which could then remain permanently unknown. The well-known con dence level expresses this value-driven choice. Researchers do normally not assign it; rather they automatically apply the level that is standard for their eld. When a problem is recognized as post-normal, even the routine research exercises take on a new character. For the value-loadings and uncertainties are no longer managed automatically or unself-consciously. As they may be critical to the quality of the product in the policy context, they are the objects of critical scrutiny by researchers themselves as well as by their peers. Thus, normal science itself becomes post-normal, and is liberated from its traditional unre ective, dogmatic character. The awareness of global climate change is well on the way to transforming all our conceptions of policy problems in the post-normal direction. For example, passenger transport had traditionally been seen as an essentially straightforward engineering problem of maximizing mobility, subject to the constraints of cost and safety. Now transport technologies and policies are strongly in uenced by environmental considerations of many sorts. Moreover, the need to control the increase in private passenger transport depends directly on lifestyles. Together with the systematic uncertainties of global climate change, there are crucial decision stakes in conceptions of the good life, along with considerations of equity between peoples and generations. The entire population of passenger transport users effectively becomes an extended peer community; for the success of sustainable transport technologies will depend on the effectiveness of users commitment to the values of the global environment.

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EXTENSIONS OF THE PEER COMMUNITIES

There are now many initiatives, increasing in number and signicance all the time, for involving wider circles of people in decision-making and implementation on environmental issues. The contribution of all the stakeholders in cases of post-normal science is not merely a matter of broader democratic participation. For these new problems are in many ways different from those of research science, professional practice, or industrial development. Each of those has its established means for quality-assurance of the products of the work, be they peer review, professional associations, or the market. However, for these new problems, the maintenance of quality depends on open dialogue amongst all those affected. This we call an extended peer community, consisting not merely of persons with some form or other of institutional accreditation, but rather of all those with a desire to participate in the resolution of the issue. Since this context of science is one involving policy, we might see this extension of peer communities as analogous to earlier extensions of the franchise in other elds, such as womens suffrage and trade union rights. This is not merely a matter of extensions of liberty; with post-normal science we can guide the extension of the accountability of governments (the foundation of modern democratic society) to include the institutions involved in the governance of science and technology. Extended peer communities are already being created, in increasing numbers, either when the authorities cannot see a way forward, or when they know that without a broad base of consensus, no policy can succeed. They are called citizens juries, focus groups, consensus conferences, or any one of a great variety of other names; and their forms and powers are correspondingly varied. Nonetheless, they all have one important element in common: they assess the quality of policy proposals, including a scientic element, on the basis of their level of scientic comprehension combined with their knowledge of the ways of the world. Their verdicts all have some degree of moral force and hence political inuence. These extended peer communities will not necessarily be passive recipients of the materials provided by experts. They will also possess, or create, their own extended facts. These may include craft wisdom and community knowledge of places and their histories, as well as anecdotal evidence, neighborhood surveys, investigative journalism and leaked documents. Such extended peer communities have achieved enormous new scope and power through the Internet. Activists scattered among large cities or rainforests can engage in mutual education and coordinated activity, providing themselves with the means of engagement with global vested interests on less unequal terms than previously. Along with the regulatory, evaluative function of extended peer communities, another function, even more

intimately involved in the policy process, is springing up. The discovery is being made, again and again, particularly at the local level, that people not only care about their own environment but can also become quite ingenious and creative in nding practical, mixed social and technological means for its improvement. For local people can imagine solutions and reformulate problems in ways that the accredited experts, with the best will in the world, do not nd normal. This is most important in the phases of policyformation, and also in the implementation and monitoring of policies. Thus, in addition to extending the traditional processes of quality assessment, participants can enhance the quality of the problem-solving processes themselves. Even more than in environmental issues, numerous groups of patients and activists in the medical eld have been demonstrating post-normal science at work. Post-normal science belongs to a growing family of approaches to the understanding of the new predicaments of science and society. Beck (1992) has described the risk society and the development of sub-politics, effectively the extended peer communities. Wynne (1996) has contributed on extended facts and the need for extended peer review. Irwin (1995) has stressed the importance of the contribution of local communities and activists. Jasanoff (1998) has analyzed the effectively post-normal situation of science in the courtroom, and showed how citizens can exercise effective quality control there. What we call science has undergone many changes over the centuries in its objects, methods and social functions. The previous century saw science rise to unimaginable achievements in knowledge, power and then destructiveness. With post-normal science we are characterizing the changes that will be necessary for our civilization to become sustainable, and thereby to survive.

REFERENCES
Beck, U (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, Sage, London. Funtowicz, S and Ravetz, J R (1992) Three Types of Risk Assessment and the Emergence of Post-normal Science, in Social Theories of Risk, eds S Krimsky and D Golding, Greenwood, Westport, CT, 251 273. Funtowicz, S and Ravetz, J R (1993) Science for the Post-normal Age, Futures, 25, 735 755. Funtowicz, S and Ravetz, J R (1994) Uncertainty, Complexity and Post-normal Science, Environ. Toxicol. Chem., 13, 1881 1885. Funtowicz, S and Ravetz, J R (1999) Post-normal Science an Insight Now Maturing, Futures, 31, 641 646. Funtowicz, S, Shepherd, I, Wilkinson, D, and Ravetz, J (2000) Science and Governance in the European Union: a Contribution to the Debate, Sci. Public Policy, 27(3), 327 336. Irwin, A (1995) Citizen Science, Routledge, London. Jasanoff, S (1998) The Eye of Everyman, Soc. Stud. Sci., 28, 713 740.

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Kuhn, T S (1962) The Structure of Scienti c Revolutions, Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL. Ravetz, J (1999) What is Post-normal Science? Futures, 31, 647 654. Wynne, B (1996) Misunderstood Misunderstandings: Social Identities and Public Uptake of Science, in Misunderstanding Science? eds A Irwin and B Wynne, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 19 46.

Poverty
see Development and Global Environmental Change (Opening essay, Volume 5)

Poverty and the Environment

see Economics and Global Environmental Change (Opening essay, Volume 5)

communitarian democracy. The precautionary principle will prevail because the political mood of environmentalism is moving towards sustainability, because a more inclusive stakeholder involvement in environmental decision taking is becoming the vogue, because scenarios about possible future environmental states are much more readily available due to huge computing power and the internet, and because an anxious citizenry is beginning to take the management of environmental risk into its own hands. The precautionary principle emerged from German law in the late 1970s as the vorsorgeprinzip. This was taken to mean acting with care and with anticipation, in order to prevent avoidable harmful effects to humans and the environment. The vorsorgeprinzip was promoted by the Brandt Government as a justication for state intervention in the economy, for forward planning, and for the encouragement of clean technology. It was thus a justication for the aggressive intervention of the state in land use management and in the direction of investment into export-earning technological advance, pushed by tough and pro-active environmental regulation. The basic principles of the precautionary principle are: Thoughtful action in advance of scienti c proof : most environmental future states cannot be forecast with any certainty. There are neither the data nor the modeling accuracy to do the job. Where the burden of evidence falls on the side of possible harm, the precautionary principle is invoked, even though taking action will cost money. Leaving ecological space : because we cannot be sure how tolerant ecosystems are to human intervention, it is necessary to leave ecological space as a buffer against our ignorance. Sometimes this practice is placed into law, as, for example, is the case in South Africa. There, the 1998 National Water Act provides for an entitlement of water for nature as an act of precaution. Human users, beyond allocation for essential needs, have to come second. This general principle, notably as regards water, will become more widespread. Care in management : because it is not possible to predict all possible consequences of any environmental management decision, it is necessary to focus on the vulnerable and the most likely losers of a possible course of action. This max-min strategy of risk management is a feature of empowerment in a modern democracy, transferring an element of trust and respect to the politically most marginal. Shifting the burden of proof : possibly the most dramatic outcome is the legal and political shift of the burden of proof away from those likely to be harmed by a possible course of action, towards those who plan to change the status quo. In the past, all that a developer had to do was to show that no likelihood of unreasonable harm would ensue for a particular course of action. With the

Precautionary Principle
Tim ORiordan
University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

The precautionary principle emerged in Germany in the 1970s and has become a central plank in European Union environmental policy since the early 1980s. The precautionary principle as applied to environmental management is based on the idea of acting prudently in advance of full scienti c certainty, leaving room for ignorance in the use of resources, and placing the onus of proof on those who propose to change, to show that there will be no harm as a result of their proposed actions. In recent years the precautionary principle has moved from the realms of science and environmental management to the politics of risk, social responsibility, trade and protecting the well-being of the innocent and vulnerable. The attraction of precaution lies in the aphorisms a stitch in time saves nine, and better safe than sorry. Its signicance as a guiding principle in environmental science lies in its challenge to conventional science, its preference for the victim of potential environmental abuse, and its shift in the nature of valuation techniques in favor of a more

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precautionary principle, the balance of proof falls on the developer to show that particular interests will not be harmed at all. The precautionary principle is brought into environmental management for seven reasons: There is an active civic science : citizens want to be directly involved in providing the valuation and validation of scientic data and ndings. The future of genetically modied organisms in foodstuff, for instance, is no longer a purely scientic matter. The more citizens groups are involved, the more the precautionary principle will be applied. The scope for collapse of vulnerable ecosystems is real : the scare stories over the losses of biodiversity, of tropical forest removal and of coral reef bleaching have caused many active citizens to believe that we simply cannot know enough about the precursors to ecological collapse. Indeed, it is difcult for ecologists to come up with indicator conditions in species that provide a satisfactory basis for predetermining system collapse. This is why a more participatory ecological science is required. Dislocation at a local level accumulates to seriously adverse global consequences : precaution is necessary to stop the global commons from being degraded by millions or even billions of micro-level individual actions; no one individual has any incentive, other than altruism, to control his/her consumer behavior. In this sense, precaution is both proactively regulatory, and also personally educative, for it creates a wish in both the producer of products and services, and in the consumer, for a sense of responsibility for planetary stewardship. Vulnerable groups are championed by citizens justice organizations : the rise of the eco-justice movement has been stimulated by civil rights groups, and by the growing evidence that environmental harm is disproportionately directed towards the poor, the vulnerable and the politically marginalized. The act of precaution is now being used to create a citizens right to a healthy environment. Again, this procedure places a political bias on disadvantaged groups to be empowered. How far this can effectively be implemented remains to be seen. Business is worrying about corporate reputation : the scares over genetically modied organisms in food, or infectious salmon anaemia in sh-farmed salmon have seriously damaged public trust in corporations promoting such practices. This, in turn, has led to a popular resistance to eat food from elds or sh farms experiencing these modications: in various recent polls, over 54% of British consumers will consciously avoid such foodstuffs. Therefore, businesses embarking

on environmental audits and social responsibility programs also expose themselves to applying the precautionary principle in a more aggressive manner. Regulation is more transparent : the role of the regulator has been made more difcult due to the rise of the Internet, and to the scrutiny of intervener consumer and environmental organizations. No longer is regulation a secretive and private matter. Increasingly, all regulatory actions have to be open and accountable to an active citizenry that is looking to the precautionary principle to guide the levels of environmental safeguards being set for all classes of social groupings. Like science, regulation is a more participatory activity, and hence values and aspirations of various interested parties are now a legitimate part of standard setting and permitting. Direct action is more ubiquitous : direct action, involving illegal protest, over administrative and commercial acts that no longer are tolerated by angry citizens organizations, is not new. But these days it has adopted a greater potency due to the variety of opportunities available, the inquisitiveness of the media, the tolerance of the politicians, and the intolerances of the police. An additional factor is the general feeling that playing by the rules will not result in adequate political response. Direct action is a recognition that formal democracy is ineffective. Informal democracy is seen as a lever of citizen power. In these days of precaution and civic activism, direct action becomes increasingly attractive and innovative (see Public-driven Response to Global Environmental Change, Volume 4).

For precaution to work properly, however, there needs to be a change in both science and law beyond what is occurring today. The incorporation of soft values relating to being more in tune with nature and more sensitive to the legitimate aspirations of all others is a matter that separates interdisciplinary science as currently practiced from post-normal science (see Post-normal Science, Volume 5). The science of including feelings, of introducing trust, and of nurturing sensitivity for the interests of others is not quite born. Nor are the joint property rights of stewardship fully developed. This is the extension of property rights to include the well-being of ecosystem functioning and social connectedness in all aspects of managing land, natural resources, and the commons. There is a part-way stage in this legal revolution in the application of the public trust doctrine. This states that any avoidable damage to the interests of others must be recognized and compensated, and also that the ability of those likely to be adversely affected, should be enhanced by training and mediation for empowerment. This is the widening context of the application of the precautionary principle in contemporary environmental management. It is opening windows on science, law, politics,

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regulation and moral norms. Precaution continues to be a truly transformationist concept. See also : Environmental Movement the Rise of Nongovernment Organizations (NGOs), Volume 5; Political Movements/Ideologies and the Environment, Volume 5.

FURTHER READING
Cable, S and Cable, C (1995) Environmental Problems, Grassroots Solutions: The Politics of Grassroots Environmental Conict, St Martin s Press, New York. O Riordan, T and Cameron, J, eds (1994) Interpreting the Precautionary Principle, Earthscan Publications, London. O Riordan, T and Jordan, A (1995) The Precautionary Principle in Contemporary Environmental Management, Environ. Vals., 4(2), 191 212. O Riordan, T (1999) Environmental Science on the Move, in Environmental Science for Environmental Management, 2nd edition, ed T O Riordan, Longman, Harlow, 1 27. O Riordan, T, Cameron, T, and Jordan, A, eds (2001) Reinterpreting the Precautionary Principle, Cameron May, London. Rawcliffe, P (1992) Environmental Groups in Transition, Manchester University Press, Manchester. Tickner, J and Raffersperger, C, eds (1999) Putting the Precautionary Principle into Practice, Island Press, New York.

property, government property, and public property (as for example in the Swedish allmennsretten). Property may also be understood in terms of the kinds of rights people hold, including degrees of exclusivity and inclusivity. Private property is at the exclusive end of this continuum, and public property, implying the right not to be excluded (Macpherson, 1978), is at the inclusive end. The language of property regimes is often used in discussions of environmental problems. Property regimes are systems of governance or regulation that differ from each other in terms of which property rights are most prevalent or controlling. Many writers use terms similar to open access, common property, state property, and private property when talking about different systems of resource management (e.g., Bromley and Cernea, 1989; Feeny et al., 1990). Although there are problems with this scheme (McCay, 1996) and other ways to label the systems (e.g., Ostrom et al., 1999), it provides a useful framework for discussing property regimes and the environment. In trying to understand how property rights affect the ways people relate to their environments, we specify just what kinds of rights are held and by whom, and examine how particular property rights are nested within larger systems of rights and duties as well as their embeddedness in cultural and political traditions. In the Anglo American legal tradition, property is often described in terms of bundles of rights, i.e., distinct though interrelated rights (Rose, 1994). For example, exclusive rights of access or use, rights to income from the property, rights to change attributes of the property, the right to gift or will it to one s heirs, and the right to sell or lease it may or may not be part of a particular bundle of rights or ownership. The owner may have some sticks in the bundle of rights but not all, and ownership can be overlapping and complementary. For example, in a housing condominium, the owner of an apartment or townhouse holds exclusive rights to live in and decorate the interior but has ownership in common with others of the exterior of the building and perhaps the grounds. He/she may hold the right to vote on decisions about management of the common property but is required to abide by the decision rules. His/her right to transfer ownership to someone else may or may not be subject to approval of an association of co-owners. The condominium is in a larger community, which subjects it to taxation and to zoning and other regulations, and so forth. An open access system is one where there are few if any barriers to entry or use and no regulation of the activities of resource users; this is the condition meant by commons in the well-known essay The Tragedy of the Commons (Hardin, 1968) (see Commons, Tragedy of the, Volume 5). It is also one of the powerful assumptions of the formal models used in economics to depict the tendency for resource users to over-exploit resources (Gordon, 1954; Scott, 1979).

Process Theology
see Christianity and the Environment (Volume 5); Theology (Volume 5)

Property Rights and Regimes

Bonnie McCay
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

Property rights are fundamental institutions of all societies. They are the formal and informal rules about how people relate to things and places they value. Property rights may be dened in terms of who holds rights whether persons (individuals, business rms and other units with the legal identity of persons), organizations, governments, or loosely dened latent groups (Olson, 1965) such as the public or all humankind. Thus, we talk of individual property, communal

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As long as access is open, there are no incentives for resource users to take care of the resource because of the temptation to free-ride on the efforts of others. An open access system is also one where present users cannot really control the behavior of others, who can come and go as they please, reducing the benets of individuals efforts to conserve. Open access is accompanied by other special assumptions, such as the self-interested, prot-maximizing individual and the paradoxical assumptions of complete information on the one hand and lack of communication on the other (McCay and Acheson, 1987; Feeny et al., 1996). Recognition of the limitations of these and other assumptions lies behind skepticism about the universal appropriateness of prescriptions that follow from the open access model: convert the system to either a private property or a state property (governance) regime. Private property and state property are the regimes usually identied as solutions to the tragedy of the open access commons. Here, state property does not refer to the things and places owned exclusively by a government (like a defense departments munitions depot) but rather to governments ownership of the right and means of regulating or governing the use and distribution of common or public resources as well as ownership of lands in trust for the public. It is better to refer to it as state governance (Berkes and Feeny, 1990; McCay, 1996). According to economic property rights theory, over-exploitation and economic difculties created by open access regimes require the strong arm of state governance because users of shared property cannot be counted upon to regulate themselves. Among the problems with this conclusion is over-reliance on the state as a homogeneous, benevolent, all-knowing entity interested in and capable of acting on behalf of long-term as well as short-term interests. This view of the state or its regulatory authorities is implicit in economic property rights theory, but it rarely ts the evidence of historical and contemporary reality (Feeny et al., 1996). Even better, according to the theory, is reliance on private property (especially in the liberal notion of exclusive ownership of most or all of the sticks in the bundle of rights). The idea is that private owners will have the incentives that public users lack to properly manage resources. However, the argument that private property is superior policy is faulty on logical as well as empirical grounds (Ellickson, 1993; Christman, 1994). It also rings false in theoretical circles. Under conditions of high rates of discounting the future and low rates of reproduction of the resource, a private owner is no less likely than a common user to over-exploit the resource (Clark, 1973). Moreover, some resources cannot easily be treated as private property: their physical features may be such that it is difcult to exclude others from them, and even if one did exclude others from part of them, what one does may affect the benets that another realizes. They are common pool resources; any

property rights asserted over them are necessarily imperfect, and the result is market failure. Hence, there must be alternatives. The metaphor of an open access tragedy and the prescriptions of privatization and government intervention are often used in discussing environmental problems. They are linked to policy debates between command and control and market-based environmental control measures. Command and control refers to state governance (borrowing from criticisms of the socialist and communist governance systems). Market-based environmental protection refers to the creation of quasi-private property rights within the framework of state governance in order to improve compliance and efciency while achieving social goals. Examples include air pollution systems that use tradable emission permits and sheries management systems using transferable individual quotas. Tradable emissions permits were used to phase out lead in gasoline and reduce sulfur emissions in the US, providing greater exibility and thereby economizing (Hahn and Hester, 1989). Similar programs have been used to eliminate ozone-depleting gases and to control acid rain and tropospheric ozone in the US. Canada, Chile, and Germany are other countries using tradable permits (Tietenberg, 1995, 1998) (see Tradable Permits for Greenhouse Gases, Volume 4; Tradable Permits for Limiting Stratospheric Ozone Depletion, Volume 4; Tradable Permits for Sulfur Emission Reductions, Volume 4; Transferable Fisheries Quotas (TFQs), Volume 4; Quotas in International Environmental Negotiations, Volume 4). In marine sheries, annual quotas for how much may be caught without jeopardizing the sustainability of a sh stock may be allocated to individual participants, just as pollution emission rights are allocated to individual polluting rms after a permissible level is established in relation to legal and scientic criteria (National Research Council, 1999). A recent review of these individual shery quota (IFQ) systems in the US, Canada, Iceland, and New Zealand highlights the many issues, costs, and benets of privatizing rights to shares of a quota. Reviews such as this have led to consideration of how to balance the benets of market-based allocations with the concerns of individuals, communities, and industries for the future of their jobs and investments, as well as the broader societal concern with sustainable development. This effort includes attempts to develop market-based instruments that increase the conservation incentives for holders of exclusive rights while dealing with problems of equity, stewardship, and resilience (ability to adapt to changes in the environment) (Young and McCay, 1995). Largely neglected thus far in the policy deliberations of major countries is the role of common property governance. Property rights scholars now object to the use of the term commons as equivalent to open access because it ignores the historic and contemporary importance of institutions in

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which people share rights of access and use and have some degree of regulation of their activities on the commons (Ciriacy-Wantrup and Bishop, 1975; Cox, 1985; McCay and Acheson, 1987; Hanna, 1990; Bromley, 1992). Experimental and comparative case studies have helped create an understanding of the internal and external conditions under which common property institutions develop and are sustainable as well as those under which they falter (Ostrom, 1990; McKean, 1992). Examples of external and internal conditions that promote community success in commons management include the ability to clearly dene and regulate entry to membership in the community. It is also important to have autonomy from outside governance, to enable local experimentation and adaptation to local conditions, but to obtain enough legitimization and other assistance from the outside to help members of a community monitor the conditions of the resources or environments about which they care, so that they have reliable and accurate knowledge about those conditions. Local communities may also need external help to deal with spillover effects among communities. Critical internal factors include the ability to achieve broad participation in decision-making and implementation even where there are signicant differences among participants; to create consensus about the fairness and rightness of the regulations; and the ability to monitor behavior and outcomes and to enforce and appropriately modify rules and regulations. Some factors pertain to the features of the environment, such as whether the ow of resources or risks from it is predictable or unpredictable and how abundant those resources or dangerous those risks are (cf. Ostrom et al., 1999). Ironically, external conditions that promote community failure in these and other regards include the perverse effects of the very forces promoted as solutions to commons problems: intervention of the state and the workings of markets (McCay and Jentoft, 1998). An emphasis on common property governance leads to three questions for broader understanding of global environmental change. The rst is how to develop effective community-based systems for environmental protection and management. Community-based management has become a priority for international lending agencies and, even more so, non-governmental organizations in many industrialized and less-developed countries. However, it is not easy to implement, particularly where communities and the environmental resources with which they interact have been disrupted by warfare, migration, and disease, as well as long histories of subjugation and control by colonial powers, corrupt or unreliable political regimes, and economic restructuring due to international debt burdens. As much to the point is the poorly dened status of community property rights in most nations. Second is the question of what can be learned from community-level studies that can inform efforts to improve

international-level environmental regimes, the scaling up challenge. Important work is being done in this regard by students of international environmental regimes (Young, 1999, 1997; Haas et al., 1993). Beyond the borders and boundaries of national jurisdiction, one might presuppose open access, which is supported by the international legal and political framework accepting the nationstate as the top level of sovereignty. Consequently, by law it is up to the nationstate to regulate uses of natural resources and their environments even in international realms, including the oceans (beyond 200 nautical miles from coastal borders) and the atmosphere and true frontiers (i.e., Antarctica). The international regimes that have arisen have some of the features of community-based common property regimes, such as reliance on trust which is built upon prior experience and interaction. Boundaries are necessarily more porous and enforcement a signicant problem, as is shown in Canadas actions in the mid-1990s to protect straddling stocks of sh which migrate between Canadian and international waters. But communities do develop, based on shared knowledge about scientic ndings as well as commitments to international solutions to environmental problems. More work needs to be done on whether or not the communities which evolve in these international diplomacy and scientic settings, so-called epistemic communities (Young, 1994), are appropriate structures for the development of common property regimes, or whether they will remain weakened versions of separate but equal state governance regimes. The third question is how the interests and concerns of communities can be better incorporated into the policies and actions of governments and of private persons and rms. This refers to old but still relevant questions concerning social impacts and participatory management (also known as democracy in action). These are questions about the role of civic society in shaping the world, the earth, and the globe for tomorrow. All property regimes for dealing with environmental problems require viable civic institutions.

REFERENCES
Berkes, F and Feeny, D (1990) Paradigms Lost; Changing Views on the Use of Common Property Resources, Alternatives, 17(2), 48 55. Bromley, D W, ed (1992) Making the Commons Work: Theory, Practice and Policy, Institute for Contemporary Studies, San Francisco, CA. Bromley, D W and Cernea, M M (1989) The Management of Common Property Natural Resources: Some Conceptual and Operational Fallacies, World Bank Discussion Paper 57, The World Bank, Washington, DC. Christman, J (1994) The Myth of Property: Toward an Egalitarian Theory of Ownership, Oxford University Press, New York.

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Ciriacy-Wantrup, S and Bishop, R (1975) Common Property as a Concept in Natural Resources Policy, Nat. Resour. J., 15, 713 727. Clark, C W (1973) The Economics of Over-exploitation, Science, 181, 630 634. Cox, S B J (1985) No Tragedy on the Common, Environ. Ethics, 7, 49 61. Ellickson, R C (1993) Property in Land, Yale Law J., 102(April), 1315 1400. Feeny, D, Berkes, F, McCay, B J, and Acheson, J M (1990) The Tragedy of the Commons: Twenty-Two Years Later, Hum. Ecol., 18(1), 1 19. Feeny, D, Hanna, S, and McEvoy, A F (1996) Questioning the Assumptions of the Tragedy of the Commons Model of Fisheries, Land Econ., 72(2), 187 205. Gordon, H S (1954) The Economic Theory of a Common Property Resource: The Fishery, J. Political Econ., 62, 124 142. Haas, P, Keohane, R, and Levy, M (1993) Institutions for the Earth: Sources of Effective Environmental Protection, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Hahn, R W and Hester, G L (1989) Where Did All the Markets Go? An Analysis of EPAs Emission Trading Program, Yale J. Regul., 6(1), 109 153. Hanna, S (1990) The Eighteenth Century English Commons: a Model for Ocean Management, Ocean Shoreline Manage., 14, 155 172. Hardin, G (1968) The Tragedy of the Commons, Science, 162, 1243 1248. Macpherson, C B (1978) Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions, University of Toronto Press, Toronto. McCay, B J (1996) Common and Private Concerns, in Rights to Nature: Ecological, Economic, Cultural and Political Principles of Institutions for the Environment, eds S Hanna, C Folke, and K-G Maler, Island Press, Washington, DC, 111 126. McCay, B J and Acheson, J M, eds (1987) The Question of the Commons: The Culture and Ecology of Communal Resources, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ. McCay, B J and Jentoft, S (1998) Market or Community Failure? Critical Perspectives on Common Property Research, Hum. Organ., 57(1), 21 29. McKean, M A (1992) Success on the Commons: a Comparative Examination of Institutions for Common Property Resource Management, J. Theor. Politics, 4(3), 247 281. National Research Council (1999) Sharing the Fish: Toward a National Policy on Individual Fishing Quotas. Committee to Review Individual Fishing Quotas, Ocean Studies Board, National Academy Press, Washington, DC.

Olson, M (1965) The Logic of Collective Action, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Ostrom, E (1990) Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge University Press, New York. Ostrom, E, Burger, J, Field, C B, Norgaard, R B, and Policansky, D (1999) Revisiting the Commons: Local Lessons, Global Challenges, Science, 284(April 9), 278 282. Rose, C M (1994) Property & Persuasion; Essays on the History, Theory and Rhetoric of Ownership, Westview Press, Boulder, CO. Scott, A (1979) Development of the Economic Theory on Fisheries Regulation, J. Fish. Res. Board Can., 36, 725 741. Tietenberg, T H (1995) Design Lessons from Existing Air Pollution Control Systems: The United States, in Property Rights in a Social and Ecological Context: Case Studies and Design Applications, eds S Hanna and M Munasinghe, The World Bank, Washington, DC, 15 32. Tietenberg, T H (1998) Ethical Inuences on the Evolution of the US Tradable Permit Approach to Air Pollution Control, Ecol. Econ., 24(2,3), 241 257. Young, M D and McCay, B J (1995) Building Equity, Stewardship and Resilience into Market-Based Property-Rights Systems, in Property Rights and the Environment: Social and Ecological Issues, eds S Hanna and M Munashinghe, The Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics and The World Bank Washington, DC, 87 102. Young, O R (1994) International Governance; Protecting the Environment in a Stateless Society, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. Young, O (1997) Global Governance: Drawing Insights from the Environmental Experience, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Young, O, ed (1999) Science Plan for Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change, International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change, Bonn, Germany.

Psychology/Perception, Environmental
see Environmental Psychology/Perception (Volume 5)

R
Reexivity
see Social Science and Global Environmental Change (Opening essay, Volume 5)

Refugees, Environmental
see Environmental Refugees (Volume 4)

Relating to Nature: Spirituality, Philosophy, and Environmental Concern

see Relating to Nature: Spirituality, Philosophy, and Environmental Concern (Opening essay, Volume 5)

Christianity and Islam, Jainism and Taoism, and indigenous traditions. Papers from these conferences are being published as books. This series will provide a major library on the issues of ecology and world religion. This article focuses on the three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. These faiths differ from Asian or indigenous religions in being not only monotheistic, but also imaging God solely as male. They are also marked by a strong separation between God as Creator and Nature as Creation. These faiths were challenged some years ago when the historian of science, Lynn White, wrote a widely read article in which he charged that the biblical mandate in Genesis 1:28, giving humanity absolute dominion over the earth, was the major religious root of the ecological crisis (White, 1967). In this text God is represented as saying to the newly created humans, ll the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the sh of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth . The language used in this verse suggests a power relationship of military conquest and forcible subjugation by humans of the rest of nature. Both Jewish and Christian scriptural and theological scholars have been engaged in refuting White s claims that the Bible as a whole mandates such an unlimited and exploitative relationship to nature as is suggested in Genesis. A number of Muslim writers have also taken up this issue of the view of human power over nature as re ected in the Qur an, itself rooted in Hebrew Scripture. Jewish scholar Eric Katz has pointed out that Genesis 1:28 can hardly mean absolute and unlimited power over nature since the very next verse, Genesis 1:29, mandates a vegetarian diet for humans and animals. It is only after the corruption of society and God s punishment of humanity by the ood, that humans are allowed to kill and eat animals. But this is clearly seen as a fall from an original ideal of a more peaceful world (Genesis 9:2 4), but even then there are limits to human use of animals. Animals are to be killed in such a way as not to eat the blood. Ismar Schorsch, writing on the Jewish view of ecology, suggests that the picture of humanity in relation to nature found in Genesis 2 3 is more the normative one for the

Religion and Ecology in the Abrahamic Faiths

Rosemary Ruether
Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston, IL, USA

All the major world religions have been responding to the ecological crisis in recent decades by examining their traditions for resources to promote a more sustainable relationship between humanity and nature. In 1998 1999 the Center for World Religions at Harvard University assembled ten global conferences on the relationship of ecology and ten different world religions. Major gatherings of scholars examined the resources for ecological spirituality and ethics in Buddhism, Confucianism, Shinto, Hinduism, Judaism,

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Bible. Here humans are seen as created from the topsoil of the earth, and as having afnity with the land from which they are made. They are not allowed to eat anything they wish in the garden. When they violate this commandment and seek to seize the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, human status degenerates. They are made to till the earth by the sweat of their brow. Hard struggle to survive, not lordly dominion, is the actual lot of humans in history. For both writers the basic view of humans and nature in the Hebrew Bible is rooted in a theocratic understanding of creation. God is the creator of nature, and God alone has sovereignty over it. In the words of Psalm 24: The earth is the Lords and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein . The laws of Jubilee clearly state that God remains the owner of the earth: The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for all the land is Mine, because you are strangers and sojourners before Me (Lev. 25:23). Humans have only delegated authority over the earth, as representatives or stewards of God who remains its owner. This role of stewardship mandates both responsible care and limited use of the earth. This view of the Godhumannature relationship is reected throughout Hebrew law, both in the Bible and in its talmudic development. The Hebrew Bible reects an agricultural people, and many of the divine commandments express a basic concern to limit human use of the land, its plants and animals, and to prevent abuse. The raising of goats and sheep is limited because of their excessive impact on the land. Grape vines and live trees are not to be used in sacrice, because they are needed for food. Open land is to be preserved around towns. Trees are not to be cut down in war. Nothing is to be wantonly destroyed. Places of human habitation are to be separated from places of work that create smoke, dust and smells. Human sewage should be buried. Perhaps the central Jewish ethic of ecological sustainability is found in the sabbatical legislation. This legislation proscribes a series of periodic cycles, seven days, seven years and seven times seven years, the ultimate cycle of the Jubilee. Work is limited to a six-day period, following the example of God in creating the world. On the seventh day, not only the farmer, but his human and animal work force are to rest: On the seventh day you shall rest, so that your ox and your donkey may have relief, and your home born slave and resident alien may be refreshed (Ex. 23:12). In the 7-year cycle, care is given to the poor, the wild animals and the renewal of the land:
For six years you shall sow your land and gather its yield; but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, so that the poor of your people shall eat and what they leave, the wild animals may eat. You shall do the same with the vineyard and your olive orchard. (Ex. 23:10 11)

Hebrew slaves are to be set free without debt in the seventh year (Ex. 21.2). Levitical laws mention slaves, hired laborers and animals allowed to rest during the sabbatical year, living off the untilled land along with the farmer (Lev. 25:67). The Jubilee year, that occurs every fty years, is to see a yet more profound restoration of the rights of all humans with respect to the land and animals. Those who have fallen into slavery are to be released. The debts that have accumulated during the past forty-nine years are to be liquidated. The earth is to lie fallow, human workers, animals and land given rest. Land conscated due to debts is to be restored. The vision here is a general righting of relations in order not to endlessly extend a system in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, a society of a few wealthy, slave-owning landlords and many slaves or indebted workers. Justice and sustainability are to be periodically restored through a cyclical permanent revolution . Hebrew Scripture also makes clear that humans are not the mediators of all relations between God and nature. God has many direct relations with other creatures, animals and planetary spheres, which humans know not of. The smallness and limits of the human arena of knowledge and control is emphasized in texts such as the book of Job. God rebukes human arrogance with such words as:
Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth, when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy? Can you hunt the prey for the lion or satisfy the appetite of the young lions? Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars is it at your command that the eagle mounts up and makes its nest on high. (Job. 38 39)

In Hebrew Scripture the non-human world is not dead matter . It is animate and has its own lively relationship with God, independent of humans. God is present throughout the natural world. Both natural blessings and disasters reect Gods presence, both in blessing and in judgment. The non-human world understands this, better than humans.
But ask the animals and they will teach you; the birds of the air and they will tell you; ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you, the sh of the sea will declare to you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this? In his hand is the life of every living thing, and the breath of every human being. (Job. 12:7 10)

The Hebrew worldview neither sacralizes nature as divine in itself, nor secularizes it. Humans have an important, but limited role. Reality is theocentric, in a way that relativizes and limits human power and places all things under divine sovereignty, as its ultimate owner and continuing source of life. Gods relation to each creature is personal and direct, and each creature responds to its creator with praise and joy.

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The Islamic view of the Godnature human relation has some differences from that of Hebrew Scripture, but it is rooted in the same basic understanding. Muslim tradition is concerned to emphasize Gods absolute unity (against the Christian Trinity) and sovereignty over all creation. Islam rejected the Jewish tradition that God rested on the seventh day, after creating the world, since that seemed to suggest that God was nite, becoming weary and needing rest. Creation is not something that happened in a primordial moment and then was completed. Rather God continually creates. All creation, and everything in it, is dependent on God for its existence from moment to moment. There is less emphasis on the limits of human rule, although the ban on pork and wine suggests that humans do not just have all of nature at hand for their consumption. Humans are exalted as the vice-regents of God. As such they are superior not only to the animals, but even the spiritual beings. The angels bow before the wonder of Gods supreme creation, the Human. Yet the Quran (Koran) also sees all creation, and not just humans, as praising and giving thanks to God. All natural things are to be respected as fellow creatures. The idea of human vice-regency itself implies that humans are not the ultimate owners of the Earth. The Islamic view, like the Hebrew, is theocratic. God alone is sovereign; humans hold a delegated power over the Earth and are accountable to God for their tenure. They will be ultimately judged as to how well or badly they exercised this stewardship. Thus the eschatological (end of time) emphasis in Islam on the coming judgment is not understood as an escape from the earth that allows humans to ignore its wellbeing. Rather it is the ultimate accounting before God, by which they will be held responsible for their stewardship. The idea that God creates the world from moment to moment, that all things lie directly in the hand of God, also lends itself, particularly in the poetic and sapiential (wisdom) traditions of Islam, to a mystical sense of all created things as the signs of Gods presence. Nature lies within Gods surrounding presence. In that sense it is God who is the ultimate environment that surrounds and encompasses humanity, as in the Quranic verse: But to God belongs all things in the heavens and the earth, and he it is who encompasses (muhit) all things (IV:126). Although nature is not sacred in itself, it is sacred, or one might say sacramental, as signs and pointers to God, who is present in every moment as its sustaining creator. As Islamic writer, Seyyed Hossein Nasr (see Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, Volume 5) puts it:
In reality, humans are immersed in the Divine Muhit (encompassing environment) and are only unaware of it because of their own forgetfulness and negligence. To remember God is to see Him everywhere and to experience His reality as alMuhit. The environmental crisis may in fact be said to have

been caused by the human refusal to see God as the real environment which surrounds and nourishes our life.

The Islamic tradition of sacred art forbids the human image lest this be confused with the representation of God. In this sense the human face and gure, even if Gods vice-regent, is never to be used to image God. But Islamic art makes exuberant use of nature, particularly owers and vines, and the Arabic letters of the Quran, as pointers to Gods presence. Nasr sees the Muslim world as having failed to cultivate an ecological spirituality and ethic in modern times, rooted in this Islamic vision of God as the ultimate environment of life, because of its poverty and colonization by the West. This colonization of Muslim lands, as in other regions, such as Asia and Africa, has resulted in a conictual relation to Western power and technology, which is the main source of ecological devastation in the modern world. For Nasr, Christians too are part of a revelatory tradition in which God is present as the ultimate environment of human life. But they have replaced this faith with a view of Promethean (autonomous) man who has absolute and unlimited power over the earth, unrestrained by obligations to either God, fellow humanity or the rest of creation. It is this view of human autonomy that Nasr sees as an apostasy (renunciation) from God and as the root of the environmental crisis in the West that has infected the rest of the world through Western colonizing power. Muslims have been torn between modernists, who have sought to emulate this power and technology of the West, without any critique of its effects in impoverishing the earth and the majority of human beings, and fundamentalists who have been resisting this Western inuence, but have interpreted this resistance primarily in terms of restoring certain legal customs, such as female dress. The sapiential (wise) traditions of Islam have been ignored, and this has prevented the development of a deeper resistance to such devastation of the earth based on the vision of the relationship to God that is present in nature. For Nasr the solution to the ecological crisis is, for Muslims and also other peoples, to recover those spiritual traditions that direct them to a proper relationship to God.
Humanity cannot save the natural environment except by rediscovering the nexus between Spirit and nature and becoming once again aware of the sacred quality of the works of the Supreme Artisan the solution to the environmental crisis can come about only when the modern spiritual malaise is cured and there is a rediscovery of the world of the Spirit, which, being compassionate, always gives of itself to those open and receptive to its vivifying rays. The bounty of nature and its generosity to the human race are proof of this reality, for despite all that we have done to destroy nature, she is still alive and reects on her own level of being the love and compassion, the wisdom and the power, which belongs ultimately to the realm of the Spirit. In this crisis of unprecedented proportions, it is nature as Gods primordial creation that will have the nal say.

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Nasrs words provide a profound challenge to Western Christians. What are the roots of an ecological spirituality and ethic in Christianity, and how have these been denied in the development of western technological society and its colonialist exportation? What is the connection between Christianity and this development of secularity, industrialism and colonialism? Are these developments simply a denial of the true Christian view of the nature human relationship? It was common a generation ago to see secularity, industrialism and technology as the products of the Christian genius. But now that these are seen to have negative rather than positive impacts, many Christians have been questioning the association between Christianity and these western patterns of life. Christianity is rooted in the Jewish tradition and shares with it the Hebrew Scripture. But the dening of this scripture as Old Testament also implies a reinterpretation of it as partially superceded. The parts of the Hebrew Bible that the Christian tradition has seen as superceded and no longer in force are particularly the legal codes which enshrine limitations on human use of nature; laws of kosher foods, sabbatical rest and avoidance of pollution. After the rst generation of Galilean Christianity, the early Christians were urban people without roots in rural life. Hence the Jewish legislation related to the renewal of the land made no sense to them. Christians became a people gathered from many ethnic groups and no longer related to a particular land and ethnic community. They dened the church as a new spiritual people of God who anticipated a heavenly kingdom beyond this earth, rather than as a renewed people and land within history of Jewish redemptive hopes. Christianity also based itself in a realized messianism that understood Jesus of Nazareth as the incarnation of God. This violated the separation of God and humans central to Judaism. Both Judaism and Islam have strongly rejected this idea as idolatrous, as the divinizing of a human being. Christian redemptive hope in the early centuries spoke of God having become human so that humans could become God. But this did not lead, in classical or medieval Christianity, to a Promethean idea of the human as replacing God. This was because Christianity rooted itself in a concept of human fall and redemption that emphasized human sin and weakness and dependency on divine grace. Also, human redemptive hope did not focus on power over this present creation, but a transformation of creation into the Kingdom of God or the replacement of creation with a new spiritual creation beyond the present nite world. These elements of denial of the body and the world in anticipation of a transcendent redemption outside of history have sometimes been seen as a major source of Christianitys negative relation to creation. Despising the body and the material world has been seen as leading Christians to neglect and abuse of nature. But there is not a

clear relation between otherworldliness and the ecological crisis. The Christian view of nature was more complicated than is suggested by an anti-material stance. Christianity in the second to third centuries contended with and rejected the most extreme forms of body-spirit dualism in the form of Gnosticism. The cosmological Christology that was developed by its leading anti-gnostic theologians, such as Irenaeus of Lyon, rooted redemption in the restoration and completion of creation, as body and spirit together. Humans were made in the image of God and mandated to grow into the likeness of God by increasing union of the human with the divine will. But humans created a break between Gods will and their own willfulness. God sent a series of revelations to return humans to the right path, culminating in the incarnation of Christ. Christ is the incarnation in human form of the divine Logos through which the world was created in the beginning. This is understood as renewing the ontological (the nature of) grounding of the whole creation, not just of humans. In the incarnation of Christ, divine creative power permeates Nature in a deeper way so that the bodily becomes the sacramental bearer of the divine and the divine transforms the bodily into ever more spiritual and immortal form. This is seen as taking place in three stages. There is the era of the Church when Christians grow ever more unied with God through Christ in the sacraments. Next comes a millennial era when the whole of creation experiences peace and harmony in God. Finally there is the ultimate transformation of creation into an immortalized union with God. In Irenaeus words:
For there is one Son who accomplished his Fathers will and one human race also in whom the mysteries of God are wrought the wisdom of God, by means of which his handiwork, conrmed and incorporated with his Son, is brought to perfection; that is, His offspring, the First-Begotten Word should descend to the creature and that it should be contained in Him, and on the other hand that the creature should contain the Word, and ascend to Him, passing beyond the angels, and be made after the image and likeness of God. (Adv Haer.V.36.3)

Classical Christianity through the middle ages situated itself in a profound tension between a demonic and a sacramental view of creation. As cut off from and alienated from God, not only humanity, but the whole creation is distorted and becomes an instrument of evil. But as renewed in Christ, it is reunited with the divine Word, the creator, sustainer and redeemer of the universe. Seen through the eyes of Christ, the whole universe is sacramental; all things become signs that testify to the presence of God, its creator, and lead the seeker to contemplative union with God. Christian monastic life is a good example of this tension between world denial and world renewal in Christianity. As a way of life that ees sexuality, the body and the world, it may seem to be the epitome of a Christian negation

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of the goodness of creation. Yet in its main expressions, particularly in the Benedictine tradition, asceticism is not a rejection of the body and the earth, but rather a rejection of exploitation and excess, a return to simple living in harmony with other humans and creation. Even fasting and the vegetarian diet are seen as creating harmony of body and spirit, restoring the paradisiacal age before the fall into sin. Monastic life is seen as representing the beginning of a restoration of the original harmony and justice. Communal property overcomes the exploitative division of Gods creation into private property that sets up unjust divisions between poor and rich, destroying Gods original intention that the earth be shared by all equally. The monk befriends animals who minister to him, overcoming the enmity between humans and animals that came about after the ood (Gen. 9:23). Monastic communities returned to a simple, subsistence form of life that pioneered sustainable agriculture at a time when the unsustainable system of military and slave-driven urban organization of late Roman life was toppling. Monastic communities were centers of literacy and education, as well as sources of service to society and to the poor. Not surprisingly, the creation of new forms of Christian ecological community today that seek to withdraw from consumerism, create sustainable societies and witness against injustice in society often model themselves on new forms of monastic life. One of the Christian ecological movements in the United States seeking to create such ecological communities is Sisters for Earth, a network of Roman Catholic religious women who seek to reshape their lands, buildings and community life to make them centers of ecological living and learning. The Calvinist Reformation and the Scientic Revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries represent key turning points in the Western concept of its relation to nature. In these two movements the medieval struggle between sacramental and demonic views of nature were recast. Calvinism dismembered the medieval sacramental view of nature. For Calvinism, nature was totally depraved. There was no residue in it of divine presence that could sustain natural knowledge or any relationship to God. Redemptive knowledge descends from beyond nature, in the form of the revealed word available only through scripture, as preached by the Reformers. While Calvinism dismembered the sacramental view of nature, it reinforced its demonic universe. The fallen world, the physical universe, as human groups outside of the Calvinist Church, lay in the grip of the Devil. Even within the Calvinist Church, the threat of the Devil lurked. Women particularly were the gateway of the Devil. Among Protestants, Calvinists in Scotland and New England were the primary witch hunters. The Scientic Revolution appeared to move in the opposite direction. It sought to exorcise the demonic from nature,

reclaiming the universe as an icon of divine reason manifest in the laws of nature, knowable through empirical observation and mathematics. In the 17th and 18th centuries the more animist forms of natural science that sought to unify spirit and matter lost out to a strict dualism of transcendent intellect and dead matter, of Newtonian Physics and Cartesian Reason. Nature was secularized. It was no longer seen as the theatre for a cosmic struggle between God and the Devil. Both demonic and angelic spirits were driven out of it. God was excluded from any active presence in nature to become the distant rst cause and nally disappeared altogether as a scientic premise. Nature becomes dead matter in motion, moving obediently according to mathematical laws knowable to a new priesthood of scientists. According to Roger Bacon (Novum Organum and The Masculine Birth of Time), due to Eves disobedience humans lost their original dominion over nature. Through science, this dominion over nature will be restored to human hands. As the presupposition of divine ownership of nature disappears, humans, specically the male elite of scientists and entrepreneurs, are understood as having unlimited, sovereign power over nature to do with it what they will. It is here that we nd the birth of the Promethean man decried by Seyyed Hossein Nasr. In Western society, the application of science to technological power and use of nature marched side by side with colonialism. From the 16th to the 20th centuries Western Europeans would appropriate the lands of the Americas, Asia, Africa and the Middle East and reduce their populations to slavery or low paid labor. The wealth accrued from this vast appropriation of land, its resources, and human labor would fuel ever new levels of technological development, transforming material resources into new forms of energy and mechanical work, control of disease, increasing speed of communication and travel. With this expanding wealth and power, the western elite grew increasingly optimistic, imagining that this expanding technology would gradually conquer all problems of material scarcity and push back the limits of human mortality. Christian hope for millennial blessedness in the culminating era of history was translated into scientic technological terms as the ideology of endless progress. However in a short three-quarters of a century this dream of innite progress has turned into a nightmare. The medical conquest of disease, lessening infant mortality and doubling the life span of the afuent, insufciently matched by birth limitation, especially among the poorest, has created a population explosion that is outrunning the food supply. The gap between poor and rich, between a wealthy, industrialized section of the world and the impoverished masses has grown ever wider in the last 25 years. Increasingly global society is being split between two worlds, those who enjoy the benets of ever expanding

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forms of technology, and those who have fallen out of the bottom of the modernized world into desperate poverty: reverting to pre-industrial means of subsistence or surviving on the garbage of the afuent world. The western scientic and industrial revolutions have been built on injustice from the beginning. It has been based on a vast takeover of land, agricultural, forest and mineral wealth, appropriated through the exploitation of indigenous peoples. This wealth has owed back to enrich the West, together with local elite, while impoverishing the land and the exploited people. This system of global afuence, with its high consumption of energy and its waste, cannot be expanded to include the poor without destroying the basis of life on the planet itself. We are literally destroying the air, water and soil on which human and planetary life depends. Can this global system be changed to avert disaster, and do the worlds religions have something to contribute to this conversion? I believe that religious traditions have both wisdom and motivational power to contribute. The three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, have important insights that can guide such a transformation. A key change in self-understanding is found in the belief that humans do not have absolute power of nature. Rather they have a delegated role for which they must be responsible to the ultimate source of life. Religious laws that mandate limited use of nature, and that understood humans, God and nature as standing in a covenantal relationship, calling for periodic restoration of justice and sustainable balances, can inspire us today. Global movements, such as the Jubilee 2000 project to cancel the global debt of the poorest countries, and international covenants to limit toxic wastes, draw on this Biblical tradition. Efforts to create a global ethic accepted by all world religions, such as the one crafted by the meeting of the Parliament of the Worlds Religions in Chicago in 1994, seek to draw on religious traditions for ecological guidance. The development of a World Charter for Nature, that would parallel the International Declaration of Human Rights, is a similar effort to create a global ecological ethic based on all the worlds moral traditions. Religious traditions are critical to providing the vision, and the spiritual commitment, to make such a change. But these traditions are only beginning to overcome their ancient animosities toward each other and to translate their insights into practical guidelines to guide human development toward more just and sustainable ways of living.

Katz, E (1994) Judaism and Ecological Crisis, in World Views and Ecology, eds M E Tucker and J Grim, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY, 55 70. Nanji, A, Denny, F, and Baharuddin, A (2001) Islam and Ecology, in Religions of the World and Ecology, eds M E Tucker and J Grim, Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions, Cambridge, MA, in press. Nasr, S H (1992) Islam and Environmental Crisis, in Spirit and Nature: Why the Environmental Crisis is a Religious Issue, eds S C Rockefeller and J C Elder, Beacon, Boston, MA, 83 108. Ruether, R R (1992) Gaia and God: an Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing, Harper, San Francisco, CA. Schorsch, I (1992) Learning to Live with Less: a Jewish Perspective, in Spirit and Nature: Why the Environmental Crisis is a Religious Issue, eds S C Rockefeller and J C Elder, Beacon, Boston, MA, 25 38. Sokol, M (2001) Judaism and Ecology, in Religions of the World and Ecology, eds M E Tucker and J Grim, Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions, Cambridge, MA, in press. Timm, R (1994) The Ecological Fallout of Islamic Creation Theology, in World Views and Ecology, eds M E Tucker and J Grim, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY, 83 95. White, L (1967) The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis, Science, 155, 1203 1207.

Religion and Environment Among North American First Nations

Freda Rajotte
Canadian Coalition for Ecology, Dauphin, Canada

FURTHER READING
Hessel, D and Ruether, R (2000) Christianity and Ecology, in Religions of the World and Ecology, eds M E Tucker and J Grim, Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions, Cambridge, MA.

The First Nations peoples of North America consist of several hundred distinct ethnic groups, each of which had a unique language and culture, and which, at the time of European colonization, had adapted differently to the particular physical environment in which they lived. The last 500 years have seen vast changes to both the physical and cultural (economic, social and political) environment. The adaptation of each tribal or ethnic group of First Nations peoples to these changes has been in uenced by many factors, including: the degree of persecution, suppression, assimilation and forced migration, size of reservation lands, their isolation or degree of proximity to urban centers and markets, the presence of minerals, timber, arable soils and other resources, and above all to the degree that they have been able to retain or reconstitute their own religious belief systems and values as distinct from the North American mainstream.

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INTRODUCTION
At the time when European settlement in North America began in the 16th century the land was already occupied by a great variety of different ethnic and cultural groups that have been referred to collectively as Natives, Aboriginals, Indians, or the preferred term, which will be used here First Nations. Each group developed its own culture, language, life style and traditions, and each is the subject of numerous anthropological, social and economic studies. At least 300 different languages were spoken. Despite this diversity, it is possible to make some generalizations concerning life style and relationship with the physical environment. Settlement of the North American continent began somewhere between 40 000 and 30 000 years ago, and scholars generally agree that it consisted of numerous groups migrating from Northern China and Northeastern Asia over a long period of time. They came via the Aleutian Islands, which formed a land bridge across the Bering Sea during the last Ice Age, between approximately 30 000 and 14 000 years BP (before the present), when moisture was locked up in glaciers and vast continental ice caps, and sea levels were lower. Through thousands of years of migration and cultural evolution, every part of North America became settled. (While this article considers only the Canada and US mainland, migration lled Mexico, Central and South America as well.) As the continental glaciers withdrew, people hunted and settled on the land progressively revealed by the retreating ice. And everywhere, the people adapted their life styles and culture to the vastly different environmental conditions. From the arid lands bordering Mexico to the rain forests of the Paci c Northwest coast, to the Arctic Circle, tribal groups developed methods of hunting, shing, cultivation, house construction and social organization that uniquely suited the resources and the land. In each area the life style and economy became adapted to the local environment. Major factors included the abundance of animals and sh; the type and density of vegetation, the fertility of the soil and ease with which it could be cultivated; the length of the growing season, and the abundance of materials (wood, adobe, hides, etc.) for the construction of housing. Above all the climate was a major factor in uencing clothing styles, housing types, and the seasonality of activities such as hunting local wildlife and migratory herds, and cultivation of crops. This lengthy period of settlement by First Nations peoples certainly had an impact on the North American environment. However, the extent of this impact varied considerably according to the environmental region and cultural life style of the people and was very minimal compared to the impact of human activities during the 20th century. For example, it seems certain that the systematic use of re kept the grassland plains of the continental interior relatively free

from forest encroachment, and undoubtedly increased the extent of these lands. In the arid Southwestern US, there is evidence of some pueblo settlements having been abandoned before the arrival of Europeans. It appears that the removal of trees from the surrounding hills had increased the aridity of the land used for cultivation and speeded its deterioration. The environmental impact of people was restricted by the simple fact that if the people did not adapt to the cycles of the seasons, or if they depleted the animal or plant resources, they would die. The knowledge and skills needed for hunting, shing, farming, gathering medicinal herbs, storing food, raising children, building and carving, constructing houses and making clothing, boats and weapons, were passed on from generation to generation. Winter was generally regarded as the season for story telling and passing on myths of origin, tribal histories and knowledge concerning social roles and expectations. Stories, mythologies, rites, dances, ceremonies and rituals all served to keep the cultures alive and vital. Thus, over thousands of years, the First Nations peoples developed unique ways of living in relative harmony both within their social groups and with the natural world around them. Traditionally northern groups in the taiga forests, Arctic tundra and barren lands, have followed a seasonal migration pattern, shing and sealing in the Arctic waters, and following the caribou herds in their annual migration across the Arctic plains. While some still follow this same pattern, almost all carry with them modern, high-powered, hunting ri es and steel traps. Many travel to hunt or sh by snowmobile, and depend to varying extent on supplies own in from the South. The use of traditional dog sleds or of kayaks is increasingly becoming a pleasure and tourist activity. Military activities and oil exploitation in the Arctic pose a serious danger to the continued existence and health of the remaining caribou herds. In the heavily forested Northwest coastal regions, marine resources were abundant. Hunting and berry picking supplemented shing. Here, many communities had winter villages with substantial community and family lodges, and also temporary summer quarters where families moved at the time of the salmon migration up river to harvest and dry sh. With forests of giant trees at hand, and an abundance of food easily available, there was time and energy to build huge timber lodges, and giant oceangoing canoes. Even the decorative arts such as wood carving had reached an amazingly advanced and stylistic form. In North America s vast interior plains, the buffalo herds once provided the basic support for the life of the people, supplying them not only with food, but also with materials for clothing, shelter and weapons. The buffalo was so important that it also became central to their mythology and rituals.

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In the forested regions of Eastern America, the basic activity of hunting was supplemented by harvesting natural products, such as wild rice, maple sugar and berries and by cultivating gardens of squash, corn and tobacco. In the dry southwest of America, in the semi-desert and high plateau regions, corn has traditionally been the basic staple. It is generally grown together with beans, squash, potatoes and a mixture of many other indigenous crops such as peppers and tobacco. Here, people are particularly dependent upon the rainfall, and many of the religious rites and ceremonies are related to rain and the successful harvest of the corn crop. During this long period in pre-contact America, there was not only an extraordinary diversity of tribal cultures and languages, but also an equally diverse range of mythologies and religious ceremonies and rituals. From the seasonal chants and ceremonial dances of the Pueblo peoples of the southwestern deserts, to the shamanistic practices of the nomadic Inuit of the Arctic, from the totemic peoples of the Pacic Northwest coast to the buffalo hunters of the plains, or the lodge societies of the eastern woodlands, it was hardly possible to speak in general terms of a single Native or First Nations religion. However, as noted by Clarkson et al. (1992) The life of people became a reection of the life of the earth and our ancestors became intimately connected and inseparable from these realities. Through many years of experience, trial and error, hunger and hardship, our ancestors learned that the depletion of plant and animal life in their immediate environment meant starvation and death .

IMPACT OF IMMIGRATION
When Columbus landed in the Americas just over 500 years ago it has been estimated that there were at least 100 million people, or approximately one-fth of the human race living there. Almost immediately on contact this population began to decline. This was partly due to warfare and to the superior weapons of the settlers; but, far more seriously, during the rst hundred years or more it was due to exposure to European diseases. The ships that followed Columbus in ever increasing numbers, brought not only explorers, soldiers, gold seekers, and missionaries, but also off-loaded domestic animals and plants, and even unwanted pests such as rats and eas. Perhaps the most destructive of all the new arrivals were the European viruses for which the Native American people had no immunity. Wave after wave of epidemics of inuenza, diphtheria, smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, chicken pox and cholera swept through the Americas, until;
less than a tenth of the original population remained. Perhaps 90 million had died It was the greatest mortality in history. (Wright, 1993)

When the rst European settlers began to arrive on the east coast, it was the First Nation peoples who introduced them to many new things essential for their survival. These included canoes and snowshoes, unfamiliar wildlife such as the moose, beaver and wild turkey, and domestic crops such as tobacco, pumpkins, beans and corn. However, soon the tide of land-hungry immigrants grew in number and surged westwards across the continent, surveying and dividing up the land into private farms and townships. The very different belief systems, and opposing views on the relationship between people and the land, underlay much of the tragedy of mutual misunderstanding and conict between First Nation and immigrant peoples. During the past 500 years, not only were the First Nations populations decimated and dispossessed of almost all of their lands, but European immigrants brought with them their own politico-economic views (predominantly capitalism, private ownership and prot) and their own religious systems (predominantly various Christian denominations). Clearly each could have learned much from the other, but sadly a relationship of great potential turned into a tragedy of mutual incomprehension. European settlers had no concept of hierophantic Nature, i.e., of Nature being an embodiment of the spirit world. Native Americans did not think in terms of personal ownership of sections of land, nor of hunting and killing for sport. It is a mark of particularly obtuse religious blindness, that governments, which established religious freedom clauses in their constitutions, suppressed Native religious practices, while giving free reign to Christian missions and residential schools. Not only were Native traditional belief systems eroded or obliterated, but also their religious ceremonies, such as the sun dance, potlatch, and sweat lodge were made illegal. Sacred objects were stolen to be sold as curios or art objects, many nding their way into museums of anthropology around the world. Even graves were plundered and ancestral bones exhumed and taken for study or display. The new arrivals saw the land as virgin and empty: free for the taking. It only awaited civilization and development for its forests, soils and minerals to yield vast riches. In the way, however, stood mountain ranges, impenetrable forests, vast plains with an unbelievably harsh climate, and the last remnants of the indigenous population. All were seen as challenges to be overcome, as obstacles to be conquered, or as hindrances to be swept away. Throughout the 19th century, armed confrontation frequently took place between First Nations peoples and settlers. Armed with superior weapons, and often supported by military forces, the settlers inicted heavy casualties, and pushed the remnant indigenous peoples onto small areas of reservation land. Treaties were made between various First Nations and Britain (in the case of Canada) and the American government, and were as quickly ignored

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and broken by the settlers. Systematically, encroachment or annexation reduced or eliminated these reservation lands. On several occasions, cart loads of blankets infested with diseases, such as smallpox, were used to wipe out entire Tribal groups. Some groups, such as the Beothuk peoples of Newfoundland, were eliminated by genocide. Other groups were so depleted that the few remaining families moved away, died out, or intermarried and merged into the larger population. Sometimes entire peoples were illegally relocated to poorer and more remote locations. In 1830, US President Jackson signed into law a bill that required all Indians living in the east (predominately Cherokee) to leave their homes and be relocated west of the Mississippi River. During the long trek, called the Trail of Tears, guarded by federal soldiers, and attacked by bandits and thieves, many died of exhaustion, sickness and starvation. Only in the more remote areas of the Northern taiga forests, in the Arctic regions, and among the Pueblo peoples of the arid Southwestern US, were the people never conquered nor forcibly removed, and so were able to maintain their traditional way of life.

IMPACT OF 500 YEARS OF EUROPEAN SETTLEMENT

First Nation peoples had always seen the land as sacred, as given by the Great Spirit or Creator. Those peoples belonged to the land, were part of the sacred circle of life, and were charged with protecting and preserving it. The European settlers and colonists perceived the land in a totally different way: for them land was a commodity, it was property, wealth, and security, to be measured out and owned. The land belonged to them; they did not belong to the land! The land became a resource to be bought and sold, but above all to be developed, controlled, mastered and made to produce. While the First Nation peoples were trying desperately to retain their identity and their unity with the land, the inexorable westward migration of settlers across the Americas was focused upon something very different upon the acquisition of free land and resources (timber, minerals and fertile soils). All were migrants, uprooted peoples, and most were poor. Many of them had been evicted from their homes (e.g., during the Scottish Highland Clearance), or had been displaced by war. The dreams and efforts of such immigrants and pioneers were focussed upon security, ownership and wealth. Their interests lay in claiming and fencing-in their personal property, in establishing homes and farms, towns and transportation routes. They brought with them familiar domestic animals and crops from Europe, and set about establishing a civilization similar to, but they hoped better than, that of Europe. They saw North America as a vast unoccupied space, as a place of limitless opportunity and freedom.

So, throughout the last 500 years, the ecology of North America has been vastly changed. The economy has been transformed from subsistence to commercial. The sparse population and small settlements have been replaced by a large and growing population centered in urban and industrial agglomerations. The vast herds of buffalo of the continental interior have been eliminated, often wantonly, and the way of life of the Plains First Nations peoples wiped out. The prolic seas of both the east and west coasts, with their vast, seemingly inexhaustible shoals of sh, and beaches teaming with marine mammals, have been sadly depleted. Also, the great salmon runs of the rivers of both the Pacic Northwest and of the Atlantic Northeast coasts have been either destroyed entirely by damming or greatly depleted by over-shing, pollution, or water diversion for urban, agricultural or industrial use. And while settlers cleared vast areas of forestland for cultivation, most of the remaining forested areas have been clear cut. In some areas they have been cut two or three times, to provide both lumber and raw material for the pulp and paper industry. Many species of animals and plants, once plentiful, are either extinct, like the passenger pigeon, or endangered as their habitat is destroyed or as they are relentlessly hunted and trapped. In a mad rush after gold, the land could be ripped apart, and slag heaps left to mar and poison the landscape for generations. However, the early gold rushes in California and the Yukon were as nothing compared to the open cast coal, copper and iron ore mines, and the oil and gas exploitation, that were to follow.

A TIME OF RENEWAL AND HOPE

In the 19th century, government policies in both Canada and the US favoured forced assimilation. In the US, the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887 resulted in another 86 million acres (35 million ha) of reservation land being lost and at least 90 000 indigenous people being left homeless. A battered and demoralized remnant population seemed to have little will or ability to oppose two of the most powerful governments of modern industrial states. Even in the 1950s discussions were still underway to consider the termination of federal government responsibility for reservation lands in the US, and the extinguishment of treaty rights and status in Canada. Amazingly, in the early 1960s, a series of Native conferences and growing protest movements gathered public attention and increasing general support to rectify and make amends for such a vast injustice. Several startling military confrontation Wounded Knee (1973, in North Dakota, US), and Kanehsatake (1990, in Oka, Quebec, Canada) were widely covered by media and seen on TV screens around the world, underlining the urgency of the

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situation. These events and numerous others, such as the highly publicized reoccupation of Alcatraz Island (off the California coast, formerly used as a prison), acted as a catalyst to First Nations peoples. Miraculously, since the 1960s, there has also been a remarkable renaissance of traditional religious beliefs and practices. This renaissance underlies and sustains a huge surge in cultural pride that is reected in everything from art and clothing, to restoring tribal languages, economic development, and ling land claims. Scholars have begun to take a more open view of Native religious traditions. Disillusioned by the destructiveness of western culture, some people have begun to look to First Nations elders for a spiritual understanding that is more respectful of nature and of community values. This religious revival has created a widespread interest and even a following among the general population, a surprisingly large and growing number of whom may attend powwows, are eager to study traditional Native spirituality, and participate in some of the ceremonies.

nuclear waste dumps, to casinos and resort developments. In Connecticut, the Mashantucket-Pequot now own one of the largest casinos in the world employing over 9000 people. By the late 1990s, more than 160 US tribes and several reserves in Canada (e.g., Rama, Ontario) were operating casinos. In Canada almost every reserve has established its tribal land claim ofce, and is preparing for, or has already led, a land claim before the relevant government (provincial, territorial or federal). Some of the rst substantial land claims to have been heard have been upheld by the courts.

RESTORING ANCIENT TEACHINGS IN A MODERN CONTEXT

After nearly 500 years of cultural suppression, many First Nations people care very little about spirituality or nature, or about traditional ceremonies. In many communities the majority may be adherents of some Christian denomination, or of the Native American Church (the most widespread religion among US Native peoples), which combines some fundamentalist Christian beliefs with Native teachings. Its most important sacrament involves the eating of the buttons of the peyote, a hallucinogenic cactus (still classed as an illegal act in the US). Among the First Nations of Southwestern America, the Ute, Apache, Navajo and other Pueblo nations who were never conquered or displaced, many of the traditional teachings and rituals, healing chants and sand paintings, as well as the seasonal dances with katchina masks, remain virtually unchanged and intact. Similarly the Iroquois ceremonies conducted in longhouses in northeastern US, and closely tied to the agricultural seasons, appear to have changed very little. Where fundamental rituals and ceremonies were banned and made illegal, many tribal societies are now carefully researching and reestablishing them. For example, the Potlatch feast, with its masked dancers and lavish give-away ceremonies of the Pacic Northwest coast, associated with the Kwakiutl, Nootka, Haida, Tsimshian, Tlingit and Salish societies, was declared illegal from 1884 until 1951. It has now been reinstated, with an associated revival of master carvers preparing spectacular dance masks, totem carvings, and large sea-going canoes. Today many young people learn to dance and act the ancient stories and legends of their ancestral heritage. This is paralleled on the central plains, by the reestablishment of the annual sun-dance ceremony on many reserves, and the almost ubiquitous sweat lodges, which are constructed at almost all powwows, ceremonies and local celebrations. Its use has become popular with non-Native peoples as has smudging, which involves carrying a braid of smoldering sweetgrass around the circle

RESPONDING TO THE MODERN ENVIRONMENTAL SITUATION

The adaptation of First Nations peoples to environmental change can only be understood in the context of the history of the last 500 years of European contact. For First Nations peoples, it has been 500 years of occupation, epidemics, and disinheritance, of broken treaties, stolen land, racism and increasing impoverishment. All too often this resulted in a legacy of despair, poverty, high unemployment, and the alcoholism and violence that are generated by these conditions. Today, approximately half of all those claiming First Nation or part First Nation ancestry are living in urban areas, have intermarried, or have been assimilated into the general population. Because of racism and discriminatory government policies, very few Native people not on the reservation lands are independent farmers. On the reservations, a different and detailed answer would have to be given in each case, according to factors such as: the size of the land base, size of the population, degree of forced relocation, traditional skills, proximity to urban areas and markets, resource base and climate zone, degree of political autonomy, and educational level of the population. In 1975 the crucial Self-determination Act was passed in the US and 150 groups immediately led for ofcial tribal status. Many more applications are currently being led. Each recognized tribe enjoys a direct government-togovernment relationship with the US, and can establish its own government, tribal court, police and educational system. Freed from federal and state regulations, the tribal governments can and do turn reserve lands into anything from

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and offering it to each person so that they may cleanse themselves in its smoke. A sweat lodge (or impi ) is a small circular dome of willow branches, half sunk into the earth, and always directionally oriented, into which the shaman or elder brings heated rocks. In the dark interior of the lodge, water is poured onto the rocks producing steam. Participants experience a primordial microcosm of creation, similar to reentering the womb, constituted of earth, air, re and water. It is a ceremony of cleansing and rebirth. The Iroquois Mide peoples and the Kivas of the Pueblo peoples use a similar symbolism. At the other extreme are numerous communities where ancient beliefs and traditions are irrecoverably lost, where remnant populations were displaced from their lands and forcibly moved, some many times over, to make way for European settlers. While much has been lost, an astonishing amount remains or has been reconstituted. Today native people travel widely and many join in the powwow circuit, traveling from one community powwow to the next. Research and information are communicated rapidly by email, fax and phone, so that similar customs and teachings spread easily over a wide area. Native Spirituality is a recognized university course in many Native Studies departments, and many elders give seminars or otherwise make their teachings available to the general public. Today, it even seems possible, while acknowledging the diversity of ceremonies and rituals, to make certain generalizations about First Nations faith and belief systems.

and as long as the hoop was unbroken, the people ourished. The owering tree was at the center of the hoop, and the circle of the four quarters nourished it. The east gave peace and light, the south gave warmth, the west gave rain, and the north with its cold and mighty wind gave us strength and endurance. This knowledge came to us from the outer world with our religion. Everything the power of the world does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. Our teepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nations hoop, and nest of many nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children. (Black Elk Speaks, 1988)

FAITH AND BELIEF SYSTEMS AMONG FIRST NATIONS

All First Nations traditions recognize the interconnectedness of the human, natural, and spirit worlds. The inclusiveness of the circle or Sacred Hoop has become the almost universal symbol for Native spirituality. It encompasses all the directions (east, north, south and west), all four seasons (Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter), and all stages of life (infant, youth, adult and elder). It can be used as a basis of prayer and thanksgiving to offer thanks to all four directions, all kinds of weather, and all aspects of life for all times of day: dawn, daylight, sunset and night. It can be used as a guide to the correct building and sighting of a pueblo, lodge or teepee. It is the symbol for completeness and inclusiveness of the whole community, and the whole of the interrelated creation:
You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the power of the world always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. In the old days when we were a strong and happy people, all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation,

In contrast, European settlers superimposed straight lines and grid patterns upon the land. Railways and roads cross the plains in straight lines for hundreds of km; property is divided up into rectangular parcels. There is a common awareness that life is spiritual: everything that exists has within it an element of sacredness. Nature, in its entirety, is hierophantic that is, a source of spiritual revelation. Everything the land, water and sky, sun, moon and stars, plants, animals, birds, sh and people all manifest some aspect of the spiritual reality that infuses the whole of creation. This basic view of the world means that Mother Earth (the major source of all life) must be treated with respect, not viewed as a commodity to be owned, or bought and sold. The physical environment should only be used with care and reverence. A successful hunt or a good harvest was accepted with thanksgiving and the food was shared among the community so that no one was in want. Neither does Nature exist solely for human use. All life has access rights to the use of land, water and air. Ceremonies among First Nation North Americans generally center around the drum. The drum may be referred to as the heartbeat of Mother Earth, and forms a connection to the spirit world. Around the drum with its circle of drummers and singers, the dancers move in a large circle, feet close to the earth, and moving to the rhythmic beat and chants. First Nations peoples respect animals as sacred. Traditionally, prayer and ritual accompanied hunting, which was seen as a sacred activity, only undertaken when food was needed. Care was taken to give thanksgiving following a successful hunt, and to respect the animal that had been killed to provide food and materials for clothing, etc. Great care was taken not to over-hunt or endanger a species existence. However, from the earliest days of contact with Europeans, Natives were encouraged to hunt and trap for furs and pelts for trading. Today, many, especially in the northern taiga forests, still earn a signicant income from running trap lines or hunting, but snowmobiles are generally used to reach trap lines, and high-powered ries for hunting.

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This has caused controversy over the relationship between traditional practices and hunting rights claims. For each clan and people, certain creatures have a greater spiritual signicance. Individuals may undertake a vision quest (several days of solitary fasting and prayer in a wilderness area) during which time they may receive a revelation from the spirit world through a specic creature, which will then become their guardian spirit. People enter a special relationship with their guardian animal, never hunting or harming it in any way, but seeking its presence, assistance and wisdom. Through their sacred animal (eagle, buffalo, bear, snake, raven or other creature), the spiritbeing manifests itself as a personal or as a clan protector. Some claim that they receive warnings or guidance or even that their lives have been saved during a crisis such as sickness, re or a car crash, by their guardian animal. The totem carvings of the Northwest Pacic coast are like heraldic crests. Each pole recounts a specic clan history and mythology, recounting the stories of the relationship of clan elders with guardian and sacred animal spirits (actual animals like the raven or whale) or mythological ones (like the thunderbird). That creatures embody the invisible spiritual realm is the profound meaning underlying sacred mask dances, e.g., the seasonal cycles of katchina dances of the Southwestern Pueblo peoples. In these dances, the spiritual reality becomes embodied in and takes possession of the physical form of the mask and the dancer so that the dancer becomes temporarily the actual manifestation of the ancestral or animal spirit. (This is similar to claiming the actual presence of Christ in the elements of the Christian mass.) Shamans or medicine men or women are central to the traditional belief systems and rituals of First Nations peoples throughout North America. They are highly respected as intermediaries between the spiritual and material worlds, and can also effect healing. Through solitude, communing with nature, fasting, prayer, purication and selfdiscipline, shamans undertake journeys into the spiritual realm, where they seek help and assistance, wisdom and healing power. Revered shamans and elders are recognized and honored by becoming pipe bearers. Smoking the sacred pipe is undertaken to bring the smoker into close contact with the spirit world. While some Shamans may be trained in western medicine or nursing, all have a profound knowledge of the medicinal properties of local herbs. They are concerned not only with physical healing, for which many patients may go rst to a local clinic or hospital, but also with holistic healing of body, mind and spirit. They can be effective both with individuals and with communities that are experiencing high levels of unemployment, poverty, despair, addiction, violence and soaring youth suicide rates. Native existence itself is deeply and inseparably rooted in the land in Mother Earth. The land belongs to all

creatures that live upon it. A peoples traditional economy, culture and self-image are based upon the continuous habitation of place . Myths of origin, cultural histories, and self-perception, as well as rituals and sacred sites are located in and around a tribes traditional lands. It is alone, in nature, that one goes on a vision quest to seek wisdom. Mother Earth nurtures us, feeds us, inspires us, and it is back into the land that our bodies are returned at death. The earth is sacred. People and place together form a sacred cultural unity. While all of nature is the theatre for spiritual revelation, these specic sacred sites are incorporated into tribal mythologies and rituals. Each site is afliated with a specic local mythology and tribal history. Thus, the relocation of a tribal group or destruction of the site means that essential links to the spirit world are lost. To understand this is to understand why the conquest and removal of people from their traditional lands was cultural genocide. Throughout North America specic landforms, such as springs, mountains or high bluffs are regarded as especially sacred. Here spiritual elders and shamans commune with the mystery of the spirit realm and receive visions, revelations and healing power. Sacred sites may be enhanced with petroglyphs, medicine wheels (marked out in rocks), or earth mounds (such as the Great Serpent Mound of Ohio). For pueblo peoples, kivas subterranean rock-built chambers mark the site where the original peoples emerged from the underworld. While most sites have been defaced or even completely destroyed over the last 500 years, attempts are now being made by many First Nation peoples to protect some of the remaining sites under constitutional freedom of religious practice clauses. George Tinker, a First Nation author from Colorado explains that:
Native American spirituality and values, social and political structures, and even ethics are rooted not in some temporal notion of history but in spatiality. This is perhaps the most dramatic (and largely unnoticed) cultural difference between Native American thought and western intellectual tradition. The question is not whether time or space is missing in one culture of the other, but which is dominant. Of course, Native Americans have a temporal awareness, but it is subordinate to our sense of place. Likewise the western tradition has a spatial awareness, but it lacks the priority of the temporal. Hence, progress, history, development, evolution and process become key notions that invade all academic discourse in the West. (Tinker, 1992)

The inner, spiritual forces that exist within all creatures, continue their never ending journey after the death of the outer physical form, and they may continue for a while to have a relationship with living beings, and inuence events. Many ceremonies fulll the function of mediation between the spirit world, the human world and the world of nature, for a continued and reciprocal relationship is perceived between the living and the dead. These ceremonies may show respect, offer thanksgiving for good fortune or

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seek blessing upon future endeavors, e.g., successful hunts, abundant rainfall or healing. Care must be taken that we do not harm nature. Many of the decisions made today by proprietors, corporations and governments take a very short-term view, and seek immediate prots. This shortsighted approach means that as governments change, and corporations merge or move, there is no accountability when the negative effects of industrialization policies become apparent many years or even decades later. In comparison, traditionally, when Native bands consider development options, they consider what the likely impact will be, not only for the immediate future, but also upon their children and childrens children to the seventh generation.

Although some 112 000 square km of the New Sogobia reservation was designated as the property of the Western Shoshone nation in 1863, and this was later con rmed in 1869, the US military has conducted some 670 weapon test explosions there since 1963, usurping 90% of their land.
By 1980, 42 operating uranium mines, 10 uranium mills, ve coal power plants and four coal strip mines were in the vicinity of the Navajo reservation. Approximately 15 new uraniummining operations were under construction on the reserve itself. Although 85% of Navajo households had no electricity, each year the Navajo nation exported enough energy resources to fuel the needs of the state of New Mexico for 32 years. (La Duke, 1992)

TODAY AND TOMORROW

Throughout the 1990s and into the 21st century a resurgence of epic proportions has swept through the First Nation societies of North America, as they seek to free themselves from control and domination by colonial powers. The recent resurgence of Native spirituality, while causing some social con ict, is generally leading to increased cultural pride. Many reservations now organize annual celebrations of traditional dancing and hold powwows, Indian days, Treaty days, or enact ceremonies, to which the general public is invited. Tourism is an increasingly important sector. There is also a recovery and development of traditional arts, from weaving carpets, making pottery or designing jewelry among the southern Pueblo peoples, to the carving of dance masks, boats, and traditional totem and house poles along the Northwest coast. In the far north, the Inuit produce stone carvings and prints that are in high demand in national and international art galleries. In the eastern forests and on the central plains, there has been a resurgence in the making of elaborate dance costumes, beaded foot wear, powwow costumes, canoes, snow shoes, and in the construction of traditional lodges. First Nations peoples have held with amazing tenacity to their own understanding of people-land relationships which is radically different than that of the dominant majority. They continue to confront governmental, industrial and church agencies with their alternative world-view. Most elders today would see themselves as guardians of Mother Earth. This has led them into increasingly frequent con ict with corporations and governments that plan to develop local resources by destructive means. Thus, there have been many demonstrations, marches, petitions, and road blockades trying to stop clear cut logging, open cast mining, dam construction, and military weapons testing on reservation lands, or on lands whose status is currently being claimed or disputed in the courts. The following examples may give some idea of the scale of the problem.

Despite continuing protest of the Innu People of Labrador and Northeast Quebec, their traditional life style has been rendered nearly impossible. In the 1950s, many were forcibly resettled into villages, when the Churchill River dam ooded ancient burial grounds and important areas of their hunting territory. In the early 1980s, the military base of Goose Bay was established, and used as a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) training base for lowlevel ight, which disturbs the caribou herds and makes sustained hunting impossible. Now mining companies have led over 13 000 claims in the area around Voisey Bay, Labrador. Coal strip mining is a particular problem to the Cheyenne and Navajo-Hopi peoples. The Cheyenne reservation is virtually surrounded by coal strip mines, railroads, electric generating plants and transmission lines. Adjoining the reserve lies the largest federal coal sale in the history of the US the Powder River Coal lease, which follows the major water source the Tongue River. Several coal- red power plants lie on or adjacent to the Navajo-Hopi lands, and the vast Black Mesa mine supplying coal to the Four Corners Power plant was the only man-made object seen by the Gemini Two astronauts from outer space. It caused not only pollution and falling water tables but also the relocation of some 10 000 people. Across Canada, from the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia, to Temagami, Ontario, to the Maritimes, First Nation peoples have been among the rst to organize protests against the huge timber leases sold to corporations for clear-cut logging. They have often been joined by the public in mass demonstrations, but have had only very limited success in changing government policies. For native people, the destruction of the forests together with their wildlife, and the deterioration of streams and rivers, and consequently of shing, has generally been disastrous. Although clear-cutting may generate a few short-term unskilled jobs for local First Nations people, trap lines are lost, hunting and traditional ways of life become more dif cult, and in the long-term it leads to increasing impoverishment of the community as a whole.

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Similarly, almost all the major rivers in Canada have been dammed for hydroelectric developments. Some of these, like the Churchill Dam (Labrador), or the W A C Bennett Dam (British Columbia), or the vast James Bay Project of Northern Quebec, are among the largest engineering works of the 20th Century. Not only have the huge reservoirs behind the dams destroyed the most productive areas of lowland for vegetation, wildlife, and migratory birds, but sometimes the ow of rivers has been diverted or even reversed, resulting in the disruption of water tables, and resettlement of communities. Generally, if compensation is paid, it is only in cash, not in equivalent land and resources. This leaves the problem of increasing unemployment, cultural destruction, and despair in its wake. In conclusion, one can only say that the response of First Nations peoples to 500 years of change in both the physical and social environment is in a state of very rapid transition. At one extreme are the isolated reservations where traditional reliance upon hunting and shing (albeit using ries, outboard motors, and snowmobiles) is still possible, although it may be seriously threatened by both the impact of pollution, and by the increasing corporate demand for resource exploitation. At the other extreme are examples like the Cherokee nation who have developed a large manufacturing center (including component parts for IBM, General Dynamics, and the US Army, among others), as well as retail and hotel sectors. The political and administrative center of Tahlequah handles an annual budget in excess of $75 million. In two areas in particular, traditional ways of life have continued relatively undisturbed. One of these is on the vast semi-desert reservations of the Pueblo peoples of the Southwestern US. The other area is in the Canadian North and Alaska. The territory of Nunavut, established in 1999, covers approximately one-fth of the land area of Canada. With a population of approximately 27 700 people, who are 90% aboriginal, it has the same autonomy as other territories and provinces. Even in both of these regions, modern transportation, education, medical services, expanding commercial sectors, resource exploitation and western forms of government and policing, create a large, and ever-increasing impact. Unfortunately, in many of the smaller and more isolated reservations, where the land area is too small to support traditional hunting, and too poor to farm, as much as 90% of the population may still depend upon some form of government payments. A few Native bands whose reservation land lies in large and growing urban centers have been able to develop their property and lease or rent it at considerable prot. On many other reservations new commercial developments are appearing continuously: from casinos, shopping malls and tourist hotels to a resurgence of handcrafts, from toxic waste storage facilities to fashion designing.

On independent band reservation land, mining and oil and gas exploitation is now generally under the management of Native corporations. On larger reservations, sustainable logging operations, modern farming and industrial developments are being established. For the future, it seems safe to say that the only thing that is certain is continuing change. It would seem that the general movement towards increased autonomy will almost certainly continue in both the US and Canada. Eventually, the vast number of land claims will wend their way through the court systems, and be settled. However, the very size, number and complexity of claims (e.g., almost the entire land area of the province of British Columbia is currently being claimed by various Native bands) means that the nal determination of land will inevitably disappoint many. Will future developments on reservation lands be more environmentally sustainable than in North America as a whole? For the immediate future, the most urgent consideration for many band councils and governments is to improve the employment opportunities and raise the standard of living for people who have traditionally been impoverished and demoralized. Yet access to land is central to long-term indigenous health and cultural identity. Land and people are inseparably bound. The Native community can only be healthy in body, mind and spirit when the land is also healthy. The land is the promise of a healthy future for generations yet to come, it is where the bones of the ancestors lie, it links the past and the future, and it is sacred. Thus, while some indigenous people are among the poorest of the poor they are also holders of the key to the future survival of humanity. See also : Indigenous Knowledge, Peoples and Sustainable Practice, Volume 5.

REFERENCES
Black Elk Speaks (1988) Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, as told through John G Neihardt (rst published 1932), University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE. Clarkson, L, Morrissette, V, and Regallet, G (1992) Our Responsibility to the 7th Generation: Indigenous Peoples and Sustainable Development, International Institute for Sustainable Development, Winnipeg, 10. LaDuke, W (1992) Indigenous Environmental Perspectives, A North American Primer, Akwe:kon J., 52 70. Tinker, G (1992) The Full Circle of Liberation, Sojourners, October, Box 29272, Sojourners Resource Center, Washington, DC, 12 17. Wright, R (1993) Stolen Continents: The New World through Indian Eyes, Penguin Books, London.

FURTHER READING
Bordewich, F M (1996) Killing the White Man s Indian: Reinventing Native Americans at the End of the 20th Century, Anchor Books, Doubleday, New York.

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Government of Canada (1996) Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, ve volumes, Ottawa. Indian Claims Commission Proceedings, a Publication of the Indian Claims Commission (Canada). A Continuing Series of Ofcial Reports, www.indianclaims.ca. Versluis, A (1994) Native American Traditions, Element Books, Rockport, MA.

Romanticism
see Art and the Environment (Volume 5); Literature and the Environment (Volume 5)

Roosevelt, Theodore
(1858 1919) Theodore Roosevelt, US president (19011909), led one of the most dynamic lives of any US president. He was born into a wealthy and privileged New York family. Roosevelts childhood was one of constant illness, but he overcame his inrmities through a self-imposed regimen of strenuous exercise. Strong will became a hallmark of his personality. He attended Harvard and studied law at Columbia. In 1884, his wife Alice and his mother died on the same day Alice from complications of childbirth, and his mother from a long illness. Roosevelt went to his ranch in the Dakota Territory where he slowly overcame his loss by living a tough physical life far from the world he knew in New York. In 1886, he married again, to Edith Carow. During the SpanishAmerican War, Roosevelt was Lieutenant Colonel in the Rough Rider Regiment, and he led a famous charge at the battle of San Juan. This war hero

status added to his celebrity image, and shortly after he was elected New York State Governor (1898). Later, he served as vice president to William McKinley. McKinley was assassinated in 1901, and at the age of 43, Roosevelt became the youngest president in US history. He brought a new vigor to the presidency, a change from the staid and conservative McKinley. Roosevelt held the ideal that the government should be an arbiter and promoter of social and economic equity. Roosevelt embraced anti-trust legislation that soon dissolved monopolies in the railways and oil industry. The extensive use of executive power was a dening characteristic of his administration. He wrote I did not usurp power, but I did greatly broaden the use of executive power . Roosevelt believed that as steward of the people he must act forcefully to enhance the public good. Roosevelt pushed the US toward a more discernable global role. Speak softly and carry a big stick was an adage he popularized. He backed construction of the Panama Canal, and won the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating an end to the RussoJapanese War. However, he also had an important and lasting impact on conservation thought. The time Roosevelt spent in the Dakotas had an impact on his tenure as president. He developed a love of the wilderness early in his life, and later saw the closing of the frontier and the settlement of the western landscape as the symbolic loss of what dened America. His friendships with John Muir and Gifford Pinchot provided kindred spirits for his romantic view of the American landscape, and they in turn greatly inuenced his conservation program. Roosevelts executive power gave him an opportunity to add vast areas of the west to the national forests, and to preserve places of special beauty such as the Grand Canyon. Despite this, he was a man of environmental contradictions while being a keen observer of nature, he was also an avid hunter. Roosevelts conservation was based on a utilitarian ideal it was not about the absolute preservation of nature, but instead it was about the wise use of public lands and resources. His administration saw the creation of the rst large resource bureaucracies. By the close of his presidency, Roosevelt had insured that the public would be the dominant landowner in the American West, and that the conservation ideal would long serve to guide the culture of American resource management. Photo: Pach Brothers.
KEVIN HANNA Canada

S
Salinity, Waterlogging and Agriculture Socioeconomic Perspectives
see Salinity and Agriculture (Volume 3)
political dynamics, scienti c discovery, and technological innovation largely determine the future. However, human choice increasingly shapes the future. This in uence makes the effort to consider the balance between what we want and what is possible worthwhile. Scenarios should be judged by their ability to help decision makers make policy now, rather than whether they turn out to be right or wrong. Good scenarios are those are: (1) plausible (a rational route from here to there that make causal processes and decisions explicit); (2) internally consistent (alternative scenarios should address similar issues so that they can be compared); (3) suf ciently interesting and exciting to make the future real enough to affect decision making. A scenario could be constructed to show how continuing war, Acquired Immune De ciency Syndrome, and environmental destruction could lead to increased African migration to Europe, which triggers racial con icts. The purpose of this scenario would be to alert decision makers about strategic interventions to make the scenario wrong. Conversely, The Millennium Project (Glenn and Gordon, 2000) constructed a global normative scenario to the year 2050 to illustrate how policy could dramatically improve the human condition. Here the purpose was to organize hundreds of previously collected positive developments and strategies into one whole picture that showed how policies, technologies, and changing human behaviors could have synergistic effect, and might become self-ful lling to some degree. Herman Kahn introduced the term and concept of scenarios into planning in connection with military and strategic studies conducted by the Rand Corporation in the 1950s. He further popularized the concept in the 1960s as director of the Hudson Institute, a private nonpro t research center devoted to issues related to US public policy, international development, and defense. In 1967, Kahn along with Anthony Weiner examined the future possibilities of world order, describing potential power alignments and international challenges to American security in a book entitled Toward The Year 2000 (Kahn and Weiner, 1967). One of their worlds depicted an arms control agreement between the US and the former Soviet Union; another assumed the former Soviet Union would lose control of the Communist movement; a third projected construction of new

Scenarios
Jerome C Glenn
American Council for the United Nations University, Washington, DC, USA

A scenario is a story that connects a description of a speci c future to present realities in a series of causal links that illustrate decisions and consequences. A speci c year should be stated, such as 2025, and subject focus like a country, an industry, peace and con ict, etc. A scenario is not a single prediction or forecast, but a way of organizing many statements about the future. Herman Kahn was the father of scenario construction. He de ned scenarios as narrative descriptions of the future that focus attention on causal processes and decision points (Kahn, 1967). The purpose of scenarios is to systematically explore, create, and test both possible and desirable future conditions. Scenarios can help generate long-term policies, strategies, and plans, which help bring desired and likely future circumstances in closer alignment. They can also expose ignorance; show that we do not know how to get to a speci c future or that it is impossible. Exploratory or descriptive scenarios describe events and trends as they could evolve, based on alternative assumptions on how these events and trends may in uence the future. Normative scenarios describe how a desirable future can emerge from the present. Although it is not possible to know the future, it is possible to in uence elements of it. The forces of nature, social and

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alliances among countries. In the book, Kahn and Weiner also described the technology hardware of the future, which included centralized computer banks with extensive information on individuals as well as parents able to select the gender and personal characteristics of their children through genetic engineering. This work was done under the Commission on the Year 2000 sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Since the future can never be accurately or completely known, most planners and futurists today reject the idea that planning should be conducted against a single most likely image of the future. Rather, sets of scenarios should be used in planning; if the sets encompass a broad span of futures and plans are generated to cope with their eventualities, then the plans will be robust and the future can be met with some degree of con dence. The Millennium Project has produced the largest annotated scenario bibliography with over 400 scenario sets, available at http://www.acunu.org/millennium/information. html, which are organized in the Futures Matrix in the following domains: demographics and human resources; environmental change and biodiversity; technological capacity; governance and con ict; international economics and wealth; integration or whole futures.

important since policies can deect those paths. In policy studies, families of scenarios are often used to illustrate the consequences of different initial assumptions, different evolutionary conditions, or both. For example, a study of transportation policy might involve constructing several scenarios that differ in their assumptions about birth rates, population, migration, and economic conditions, as well as the costs and availability of various forms of energy. When a set of scenarios is prepared, each scenario usually treats the same or similar parameters, but the evolution and actual value of the parameters described in each scenario are different. The goal of generating scenarios is to understand the mix of strategic decisions that are of maximum benet in the face of various uncertainties and challenges posed by the external environment. Scenario building, in conjunction with a careful analysis of the driving forces, fosters systematic study of potential future possibilities both good and bad. This forecasting approach enables decision makers and planners to grasp the long-term requirements for sustained advantage, growth, and avoidance of problems.

HOW TO CONSTRUCT ALTERNATIVE SCENARIOS

Numerous methods have been developed to create scenarios, ranging from simplistic to complex, qualitative to quantitative. Some are created by one author acting alone, some by teams; and others through global participatory processes as in the Millennium Project (Glenn and Gordon, 2000). Many methods have similarities, although they may have unique features and use different terminology. Most approaches recognize the need to understand the system under study and identify the trends, issues, and events that are critical to this system. While each is not feasible to explain in detail, a brief description of several and a lengthier description of one are worthwhile. Coates & Jarratt of Washington, DC, US, uses the following process to develop scenarios for a variety of clients, including countries and businesses. Coates & Jarratt begin by dening the universe of the area of interest. Key variables shaping the future are identied using a wide range of sources. Usually some 630 variables affecting the future situation are nominated. This list is then winnowed down by eliminating redundancies, a process that usually results in 620 variables. In the next step, the scenarios to be created are dened. One scenario usually presents a continuation of the present forces at play. Other scenarios may include an optimistic or positive scenario, which may be based on one or two of the particularly prominent variables. These scenarios may involve such occurrences as a technological breakthrough or change in government policy. Other scenarios can be framed around important futures, such as business booms, collapses, or other important occurrences. In

DESCRIPTIONS OF SCENARIOS
The term scenario comes originally from the dramatic arts. In the theater, a scenario refers to an outline of the plot; in movies, a scenario is a summary or set of directions for the sequence of action. Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network, a think tank in Emeryville, CA, often compares the initial process of creating a scenario with writing a movie script (Schwartz, 1992). Often in creating a scenario, a team of people considers such questions as: what are the driving forces? What is uncertain? What is inevitable? Similarly, scriptwriters formulate an idea and develop characters. Schwartz describes characters as the building blocks of scenarios. In general, the term scenario has been used in two different ways: rst, to describe a snapshot in time, or the conditions of important variables at some particular time in the future; second, to describe a future history, i.e., the evolution from present conditions to one of several futures. The latter approach is generally preferred because it can lay out the causal chain of decisions and circumstances that lead from the present. The most useful scenarios are those that display the conditions of important variables over time. In this approach, the quantitative underpinning enriches the narrative evolution of conditions or of the variables; narratives describe the important events and developments that shape the variables. When scenarios are used in futures research and policy analysis, the nature of evolutionary paths is often

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general, 36 scenarios are usually sufcient. The variables are then reviewed to determine what is a plausible qualitative and quantitative range of the value for that scenario. The scenarios can then be assigned to individuals for creation. Once completed, the scenarios should be reviewed for comprehensiveness and completeness, and then edited to ensure consistency in approach, layout, style, and format. Coates & Jarratt emphasize that scenarios can be used to achieve different goals. Whereas some are designed to present a completed future, others may be used as points of departure for future discussions, such as policy implications. On some occasions, transition scenarios may be appropriate to development that describes the process of getting to certain end states. These transition scenarios can be either a separate set of scenarios or part of the primary scenarios themselves. Peter Schwartz, a former member of the Royal Dutch/Shell scenario team, describes several steps in the scenario development process in his work The Art of the Long View. These steps include: identify the focal issue or decision; identify the key forces and trends in the environment; rank the driving forces and trends by importance and uncertainty; select the scenario logics; ll out the scenarios; assess the implications; and select the leading indicators and signposts for monitoring purposes (Schwartz, 1991; 226234). Thomas Mandel and Ian Wilson of SRI International wrote an excellent description of scenarios in a report entitled How Companies Use Scenarios: Practices and Prescriptions (Mandel and Wilson, 1993). In this SRI report, the authors explain the scenario development process. In the rst two steps, management decides what it needs to know in order to make business decisions, and a scenario team describes the events, trends, and uncertainties that could impact the decision-making process. The team then analyzes forces that will shape the future business environment, both from within its own industry (competition) and outside of it (social, political, economic, etc.). The team then develops scenario theories or logics, which are differing views of the way the world might work in the future. Each theory takes into account critical drivers and uncertainties. Using the theories already developed as a guide, the scenarios are then described in sufcient detail to identify implications of decisions and to help develop and assess strategy options. Michel Godet, from the Laboratory for Investigation in Prospective Studies in Paris (Godet, 1993), begins the scenario development process by constructing a base image of the present state of a system. This image is broad in scope, detailed, and comprehensive, dynamic, and descriptive of forces for change. The base image is constructed by delineating the system being studied, including a complete listing of the variables that should be taken into consideration as well as subdivisions of these variables (i.e., internal

and external, as descriptive of the general explanatory environment). This step is followed by a search for the principal determinants of the system and their parameters, often using structural analysis. The scenario process involves examining the current situation and identifying the mechanisms and the leading actors (inuencers of the system through variables) that have controlled or altered the system in the past. This process continues with development of actors strategies. Construction of the database is followed by construction of the scenarios. Godet combines various futures research techniques in scenario development. For example, he nds that morphological analysis can be used in scenario construction since scenarios are, in essence, a conguration of identied components. Godet cites the large number of possible combinations as a drawback in this application of morphological analysis, but offers a solution in the form of computer software that helps limit the eld. Ute Von Reibnitz of Strategische Unternehmensberatung makes the case that the ability to create different futures situations allows planners to deal with scenarios that fall between two extremes. In his book Scenario Techniques (Von Reibnitz, 1988), Von Reibnitz describes the process of constructing scenarios. Step one entails an analysis of an organizations structure, strengths and weaknesses, and goals and strategies. Step two involves an examination of areas and factors of external inuences with attention to their interrelationship and dynamics. Step three is an analysis of the development of the future of inuencing factors. Step four clusters different alternatives to form logical and plausible structures for scenarios. Step ve incorporates these structures into scenarios that describe system dynamics and changes. The process concludes in Step six with an analysis of opportunities and risks. In Business Futures, the Institute for Futures Research (1992) has presented yet another approach that begins with the identication of key issues. This step is subdivided into denition of mission, objectives and aims, and description of strategies and key decision-making parameters, followed by identication of key environmental forces, composed of environmental scanning, spotlighting of crucial issues, and listing predetermined events and forces for change. In the next step, the scenario logic is dened, the actors identied, and their likely behavior examined. Multiple scenarios are then created, and the implications of each are tested. The concluding step involves presentation of these scenarios to planning forums in order to evaluate their implications for action programs. The Millennium Project of the American Council for the United Nations University (Glenn and Gordon, 2000) uses large-scale participatory processes. To construct a global normative scenario, hundreds of futurists, scholars, business planners, scientists, and policy makers who work for international organizations, governments, corporations,

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non-government organizations, and universities identi ed and rated norms that formed the core of the normative scenario. In order of preference, the participants selected the following top four norms around which to form the scenario: environmental sustainability, plenty, global ethics (the identi ed and accepted ones), and peace. The others in order of preference were health, freedom, access to universal education, equity, preservation of the human species, enlightenment, exciting and meaningful life, selfactualization, longevity, everyone has everything they want, and security. The body of the normative scenario was composed of the actions that would be required to address the 15 global challenges that had been identi ed through several rounds of global questionnaires to the Millennium Project participants. These actions connected the present world to the normative future of 2050. A scenario review panel was formed of long-term normative-oriented participants of the project to review and improve the draft of the scenario. The Millennium Project global exploratory scenarios to the year 2025 also used a participatory process of questionnaires and interviews to collect information, but used a computer model with quanti able outputs to assure self consistency. The developments and policies found to be important by the participants provided fodder for the scenarios; these developments and policies were incorporated in each of the projected worlds. The method of incorporating the global model was also novel. Rather than having the model drive the scenario, the scenario drove the model. As usual, the drafting of exploratory scenarios began with the choice of the principal independent dimensions (axes) that seemed to force the worlds under examination to differ. Future worlds were formed around these choices using techniques described below. In the next step, these explicit scenarios were used to provide the backdrop for the choice of the values of the exogenous variables in the selected model. Therefore, when the model was run, it s output was consistent with the scenario on which the exogenous variables were based and the model provided quantitative estimates of the value of variables that were then incorporated within the scenario. While several different global models were considered, International Futures by Barry Hughes, University of Denver, was selected. It was well documented, relatively easy to use, and was made freely available to the project. For a more complete description of this approach see http://www.acunu.org/millennium/scenarios/index.html. The development of scenarios can range from a lengthy and intricate process to an abbreviated workshop. Peter Bishop, for example, has used the SRI/Shell/GBN scenario technique in introductory futures workshops. These workshops, in a four- to six-hour period, can complete a full development sequence of a scenario. The primary purpose of these workshops is to experience the process, not to

utilize the actual results of the scenario. During this process, Bishop takes the group through the setting up of scenarios, developing scenario logic, and drawing out scenario implications. By asking focused questions, e.g., what is the most important issue concerning human resources for health care over the next 10 years , what will stay the same about this issue that will limit its alternative futures , and what is changing about this issue that will alter its future , Bishop sets up the scenarios and develops the scenario logic. During the process workshop, participants come to appreciate a wide range of variables that affect the future, as well as the interrelationships among those variables and the existence of alternative, plausible scenarios for the future. Finally, it is worthwhile to explore one process in depth. This particular methodology is the one developed by The Futures Group.
Preparation

Dene the scenario space: a scenario study begins by de ning the domain of interest. Given a clear statement of the domain, analysts list key driving forces thought to be important to the future of the domain. In a study performed by The Futures Group for MITRE Corporation about the social environment of crime, driving forces of law enforcement funding and social attitudes toward crime were de ned as ultimately important. To the degree possible, these driving forces should be independent axes in a scenario space. If three such forces were de ned, the space would be three-dimensional. With two forces, scenario space is twodimensional. In the law enforcement case, these axes helped de ne four scenarios of interest: 1. 2. 3. 4. high funding, permissive attitudes toward crime; high funding, repressive attitudes toward crime; low funding, permissive attitudes toward crime; low funding, repressive attitudes toward crime.

De ning a large number of alternative worlds is often neither necessary nor desirable. A smaller set of choices that encompass the range of major challenges and opportunities usually suf ces. A few possibilities may need to be excluded as illogical or insuf ciently plausible over the planning horizon. The nal selection of worlds should be suf cient to present a range of opportunities and challenges, but should be small enough in number to handle. Four to ve worlds seems ideal to capture a range of future challenges and opportunities.
Development

Dene the key measures: within each scenario, certain key measures are described. These measures might include forces such as economic growth, legislative environment, technology diffusion and proliferation, or competitive

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capability, among others. The key measures need to be selected with care. They should have the potential for great impact on the outcome of the scenario; a factor is largely irrelevant if it could develop over a wide spectrum of future values but have little impact on the issue at hand. Every scenario in the set will include projections of the same measures. De ne the events: this list of events will also appear in each scenario. These events shape the scenarios in several different ways: they can impact the key measures, change the chains of causality that lead from the present to the future, and/or make certain policies more or less likely to work. The probabilities of the events are different in each scenario and depend on their position in the scenario space. Project the key measures: trend impact analysis is a useful technique for projecting the key measures. Briey, the historical data for each of the measures is projected using time-series methods. The events, expressed probabilistically, are combined with the extrapolation using Monte Carlo methods to produce a new median forecast and a range of uncertainty. Since events within a scenario impact several measures wherever they are used, they have the same probability; thus, internal consistency is promoted. Prepare descriptions: given the quantitative forecasts of the measures based on the probabilistic description of the impacting events, many chains of causality become apparent, and cohesive narratives describing the future histories can be prepared.
Reporting and Utilization

is clearly a good policy to pursue. The other scenarios may give rise to contingent policies that can be called on if the circumstances develop that the scenarios depict.

SOME GENERAL GUIDELINES IN SCENARIO CONSTRUCTION

The most useful scenarios are sharply focused. They focus on critical issues facing the organization. The number of issues for consideration and the number of possible scenarios are almost endless. Without a clear direction, the discussion of drivers is difcult to limit. The number of alternative worlds expands exponentially, and the list of variables can become unworkably long. The best defense is to dene the focus from the outset. Ask yourself: What planning questions need to be addressed? What variables are most needed in order to address these concerns? Emphasize qualitative analysis at the start. While numbers and formal models are often valuable sources for understanding future prospects, they can be distracting at the early stages of scenario development. Quantication can be valuable in later stages. Formal models also can provide an effective way of separating the many parts of a complex system for close consideration. Some argue that trying to select the most likely scenario is inappropriate. The best scenarios reect many variables and possible turns of events that shape the dynamics of the system under study. Any single scenario that purports to dene the most likely particular path through this maze is unlikely to materialize over the years to come. Fortunately, the scenario-building process does not focus on uncovering the most likely forecast but, rather, on identifying the range of feasible outcomes. See also : Policy Exercises: a Tool for Solving Environmental Policy Dilemmas, Volume 4; Futures Research, Volume 5.

Document: in most cases, the best documentation is a simple series of charts and narratives describing the future history represented by each scenario. As thinking surrounding the scenarios is driven farther down in the organization, several levels of documentation for each of the scenarios is often useful. A top-line summary gives readers a quick, intuitive feel for the characteristics of a world from the perspective of a selected future time (say, 2010) how it developed, and what the decisive events were that caused the world to develop as it did. Contrast the implications of the alternative worlds: how different are the business decisions and planning goals you would pursue considering each alternative world? What actions and commitments offer your organization the most resilience in the face of these uncertainties? Testing policies: the range of scenarios can be used to test policies. In any study, a list of alternative actions is prepared. This list may come from the decision makers after reading the scenarios. Each is dened as precisely as possible. Then, using quantitative techniques if possible, the policies are tested in each of the scenarios. When a particular policy produces desirable results in all cases, it

SOURCES OF FURTHER INFORMATION

Futures, Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann, Linacre House, Jordan Hill, Oxford, OX2 8DP UK. Tel.: C44 865 310166; Fax: C44 865 310898. Futures Research (Zukunftsforschung), Publisher: Swiss Society for Futures Research, SZF, Haldenweg 10 A, Muri, Ch-3074, Switzerland. Tel.: C41-031-952-66-55; Fax: C41-031-952-68-00. Futures Research Quarterly, Publisher: World Future Society, 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450, Bethesda, MD 20814 USA. Tel.: C1 (301) 656-8274; Fax: C1 (301) 9510394. Futurescope, Publisher: Decision Resources, Inc., 17 New England Executive Park, Burlington, MA 01803 USA. Tel.: C1 (617) 270-1200; Fax: C1 (617) 273-3048.

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Futuribles, Publisher: Futuribles International, SSR rue de Varenne, 75007 Paris. Tel.: C33-331 42-22-63-10; Fax: C33-331 42-22-65-54. Planning Review, Publisher: The Planning Forum, 5500 College Corner Pike, Oxford, OH 45056 USA. Tel.: C1 (513) 523-4185. The Futurist, Publisher: World Future Society, 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450, Bethesda, MD 20814 USA. Tel.: C1 (301) 656-8274; Fax: C1 (301) 951-0394. Long-Range Planning, Publisher: Pergamon Press, Headington Hill Hall, Oxford OX3 OBW UK. Tel.: C44 (865) 79141; Fax: C44 (865) 60285. Social Indicators Network News (SINET), Publisher: PO Box 24064, Emory University Station, Atlanta, GA 30322 USA. Tel.: C1 (404) 373-4756; Fax: C1 (404) 727-7532. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Publisher: Elsevier Science, Publishing Co., Inc., 655 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10010 USA. Tel.: C1 (212) 6333941; Fax: C1 (212) 633-3990. Technology Forecasts and Technology Surveys, Publisher: Technology Forecasts, 205 S Beverly Drive, Suite 208, Beverly Hills, CA 90212 USA. Tel.: C1 (213) 273-3486.

University, Rome, Italy; and Dr Terry ODonnell of the University of Massachusetts.

REFERENCES
African Futures (1993) A Methodological Guide to the NLTPS Process, UNDP, Abidjan, Cote DIvoire. African Futures (1993) Issue Identi cation: Phase I of the NLTPS Process, UNDP, Abidjan, Cote DIvoire. African Futures (in press) Probing the Future: Techniques, Tools and Methods, UNDP, Abidjan, Cote DIvoire. Becker, H S (1982) Constructing and Using Scenarios: an Aid to Strategic Planning and Decision Making, World Future Soc. Bull., September/October, 13. Becker, H S (1983) Scenarios: a Tool of Growing Importance to Policy Analysts in Government and Industry, Technol. Forecast. Soc. Change, 23, 95 120. Becker, H S (1989) Developing and Using Scenarios Assisting Business Decisions, J. Bus. Indus. Marketing, 4(1), 61 70. Bell, D, ed (1968) Toward the Year 2000, Houghton Mifin, New York. Boroush, M A and Thomas, C W (1992) Case Study: Alternative Scenarios for the Defense Industry After 1995, Planning Forum, 20(3), May/June. Boroush, M A and Thomas, C W (1992) Case Study: Defense Markets in an Era of Geopolitical Change, Planning Rev., May/June 1992. Boucher, W I (1985) Scenarios and Scenario Writing, in Nonextrapolative Methods in Business Forecasting, ed J S Mendell, Quorum Books, Westport, CT. Coates, J F (1985) Scenarios Part One: the Future Will Be Different from the Present. What Do I Have to Do to Persuade You? in Nonextrapolative Methods in Business Forecasting, ed J S Mendell, Quorum Books, Westport, CT. Coates, J F (1985) Scenarios Part Two: Alternative Futures, in Nonextrapolative Methods in Business Forecasting, ed J S Mendell, Quorum Books, Westport, CT. Esterhuyse, W (1992) Scenarios for South Africa: Instability and Violence or Negotiated Transition? Long Range Planning, 25(3), 21 26. Federal Energy Administration (1974) Project Independence Report, US Government Printing Ofce, Washington, DC. Freeman, S D, ed (1974) A Time to Choose, Final Report by the Energy Policy Project of the Ford Foundation, Ballinger, Philadelphia. Glenn, J C, ed (1999) Futures Research Methodology, American Council for the United Nations University, Washington, DC. Glenn, J C and Gordon, T J (2000) State of the Future at the Millennium, CD-ROM section Appendix, American Council for the United Nations University, Washington, DC. Godet, M (1993) The Scenario Method, From Anticipation to Action, in A Handbook of Strategic Prospective, 53 78, UNESCO, Paris. Godet, M, Bourse, F, Chaupy, P, and Menant, I (1991) Futures Studies: a Tool-Box for Problem Solving, UNESCO, Paris. Godet, M (1990) Integration of Scenarios and Strategic Management: Using Relevant, Consistent, and Likely Scenarios, Futures, 22(7), 730 739.

ENDNOTE
Much of this material was drawn from the chapter on Scenarios in Futures Research Methodology by the Millennium Project, American Council for the United Nations University, http://acunu.org, edited by Jerome C Glenn with support from United Nations Development Programmes African Futures Project. This methodology series includes: (1) introduction & overview; (2) environmental scanning: (3) participatory methods; (4) structural analysis; (5) the Delphi technique; (6) systems and modeling; (7) decision modeling; (8) scenario construction; (9) trend impact analysis; (10) cross-impact analysis; (11) technological sequence analysis; (12) relevance trees and morphological analysis; (13) statistical modeling; (14) simulation-gaming; (15) futures wheel; (16) normative forecasting; (17) genius forecasting, vision, and intuition; and (18) methodological frontiers and integration.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to The Futures Group and reviewers who made many important suggestions and contributions: Dr Fabrice Roubelat, Electricite de France; Dr Joseph Coates of Coates and Jarratt; Dr William M Brown, retired from the Hudson Institute; Dr Peter Bishop, University of Houston; Dr Pavel Novacek, Palacky University, Czech Republic; Dr Stanislaw Orzeszyna, World Health Organization; Mr Larry Hills, US Agency for International Development; Dr Eleonora Masini, Pontical Gregorian

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Heydinger, R B and Zentner, R D (1983) Multiple Scenario Analysis: Introducing Uncertainty into the Planning Process, in Applying Methods and Techniques of Futures Research, eds J Morrison, W L Renfro, and W I Boucher, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA. Institute for Futures Research (1992) Business Futures 1992, ed P H Spies, University of Stellenbosch, Bellville, South Africa. Kahane, A (1992) Scenarios for Energy: Sustainable World vs. Global Mercantilism, Long Range Planning, 25(4), August. Kahn, H and Weiner, A J (1967) The Year 2000: a Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years, Macmillan, New York. Klein, H E and Linneman, R E (1981) The Use of Scenarios in Corporate Planning Eight Case Histories, Long Range Planning, 14(5), 69 77. Mandel, T F and Wilson, I (1993) How Companies Use Scenarios: Practices and Prescriptions, SRI International, Report No. 822, Spring. Martino, J (1972) Technological Forecasting for Decision Making, Elsevier, New York. Meadows, D, Meadows, D, and Randers, J (1972) The Limits to Growth, Universe Books, New York. Millett, S M (1992) Case Study: Battelles Scenario Analysis of a European High-Tech Market, Planning Forum, 20(2), March/April. Millett, S M (1992) Case Study: Los Angeles 2007, Planning Forum, 20(3), May/June. Saxena, J, Sushil, P, and Vrat, P (1992) Scenario Building: a Critical Study of Energy Conservation in the Indian Cement Industry, Technol. Forecasting Soc. Change, 41, 121 146. Schoemaker, P J and van der Heijden, C A (1992) Case Study: Integrating Scenarios into Strategic Planning at Royal Dutch/Shell, Planning Forum, 20(3), May/June. Schwartz, P (1991) The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World, Doubleday, New York. Schwartz, P (1992) Composing a Plot for Your Scenario, Planning Forum, 20(3), May/June. Simpson, D G (1992) Key Lessons for Adopting Scenario Planning in Diversied Companies, Planning Forum, 20(3), May/June. Stokke, R, Boyce, T A, Ralston, W K, and Wilson, I H (1991) Visioning (and Preparing for) the Future: the Introduction of Scenarios-Based Planning into Statoil, Technol. Forecasting Soc. Change, 40, 73 86. Taylor, C W (1990) Alternative World Scenarios for Strategic Planning, US Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, Carlisle Barracks, PA. Taylor, C W (1992) A World 2010: a New Order of Nations, US Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, Carlisle Barracks, PA. Taylor, C W (1993) Eliminate Future Shock, Chemtech., July, 12 15. Tenaglia, M and Noonan, P (1992) Scenario-Based Strategic Planning: a Process for Building Top Management Consensus, Planning Forum, 20(2), March/April. Von Reibnitz, U (1988) Scenario Techniques, McGraw-Hill, Germany.

Wack, P (1985) Uncharted Waters Ahead, Harv. Bus. Rev., September/October. Wack, P (1985) Scenarios: Shooting the Rapids, Harv. Bus. Rev., November/December. Werner, M (1990) Planning for Uncertain Futures: Building Commitment Through Scenario Planning, Bus. Horiz., 33(3), 55 58. Whipple, III, W (1989) Evaluating Alternative Strategies Using Scenarios, Long Range Planning, 22(3), 82 86. Wilson, I (1978) Scenarios, in Handbook of Futures Research, ed J Fowles, Greenwood Press, Westport, CT. Wilson, I (1992) Teaching Decision Makers to Learn from Scenarios: a Blueprint for Implementation, Planning Forum, 20(3), May/June. Yergin, D and Gustafson, T (1993) Russia 2010: and What it Means for the World, Random House, London. Zentner, R D and Gelb, B D (1991) Scenarios: a Planning Tool for Health Care Organizations, Hosp. Health Services Admin., 36(2), 211 222. Ziemer, D R (1992) A Decision Support System to Aid Scenario Construction for Sizing and Timing of Marketplaces, Technol. Forecasting Soc. Change, 42, 223 249.

Seattle WTO Third Ministerial Meeting

see Environmental Movement the Rise of Non-government Organizations (NGOs) (Volume 5)

Security, Environmental
see Environmental Security (Volume 5)

Seveso
The Seveso incident focused attention on the risks of chemical manufacture and of the health hazards of tetrachlorodibenzo para-dioxin (TCDD). On July 10th, 1976, the town of Seveso, Italy, near Milan, was the victim of extensive contamination by the most toxic of synthetic chemicals, TCDD. A chemical plant manufacturing trichlorophenol exploded as a result of a safety valve rupture. The explosion sent a cloud of TCDD material over an area of several square kilometers. Although the total amount of TCDD was very small, estimated at

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about one kilogram, the chemical is so acutely toxic that the event was catastrophic for the community. Birds fell from the sky and the towns livestock were slaughtered. Many pregnant women sought abortions rather than risk birth defects associated with TCDD. Many of the towns residents were evacuated. Some 200 residents developed a skin disorder called chloracne, noted as associated with TCDD and observed in US soldiers in Vietnam who handled the herbicidal mixture, Agent Orange, which was contaminated with TCDD. Health studies monitored the residents following the explosion. Increased rates of leukemia, lymphoma, and sarcoma, as well as gall bladder and biliary tract cancer, were observed in the exposed population. There was thorough documentation of TCDD levels in blood and clinical follow-up of the exposed residents. Thus the explosion contributed to medical understanding of the impact of TCDD exposure. The Seveso incident also led to governmental action in the European Community, particularly in relation to hazardous waste sites.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada

Tree Grove in Yosemite, Muir persuaded US President Theodore Roosevelt to build a national park system. The Sierra Club has been instrumental in protecting national parks and monuments including the Grand Canyon, Mount Ranier, Kings Canyon, Glacier, Sequoia, Olympic, Death Valley, and Rocky Mountain. In the 1960s, the Sierra Club emerged from its strong California base to build a national organization. It expanded to deal with modern environmental threats such as air and water pollution, as well as it traditional campaigns such as protecting wild rivers from hydroelectric dams. Strong leaders such as Michael McCloskey and David Brower led the Sierra Club to new prominence in the conservation movement. The organization is different from other environmental groups in having an engaged membership. The grassroots, volunteerbased operating style of the Sierra Club has made it a powerful lobbying force in the US. It is subject to the criticism from more radical environmental groups that it is too conservative. Currently, the Sierra Club has chapters across the US, as well as inuence through the related, but relatively independent, Sierra Club of Canada.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada

Shallow Ecology
see Deep Ecology (Volume 5)

Small is Beautiful
Small is Beautiful Economics as if People Mattered was written by E F (Fritz) Schumacher in 1973. The book sold over one million copies in the US alone and contributed substantially to critical analysis of the role of technology, economies of scale as well as the environmental impacts of mega-projects. Schumacher went on to publish A Guide for the Perplexed, and a third book, Good Work, was published posthumously based on his lectures. E F Schumacher died on September 4th, 1977. The essence of Schumachers creative thinking emerged through his work for a report to the government of India in 1962. He advanced the concept of intermediate technology, and later founded the Intermediate Technology Development Group in London, UK. Schumacher rened the argument that simpler, people-scaled technologies were more appropriate for the poor in developing countries. He furthered these theories through his work through the 1950s and 1960s as economic advisor to the British coal industry. He also advanced the cause of organic farming through the British Soil Association. Small is Beautiful in many ways anticipated the doctrine of sustainable development (Brundtland, 1987) as Schumacher did not oppose growth, per se, but argued cogently for a kind of growth that did not degrade

Sierra Club
The Sierra Club is North Americas oldest environmental organization. Founded in 1892, it has grown to be the largest membership-based environmental group in the United States with over 550 000 members. Its founder, John Muir, was a Scottish naturalist and writer. Muir championed the protection of the Sierra Nevada with colleague Robert Underwood Johnson, editor of Century magazine. Their efforts led to the creation of the Yosemite National Park in 1890. When the park continued to be threatened by local ranchers seeking grazing rights within the park, Muir founded the Sierra Club, in his words to do something for wildness. He believed that if he could take primarily urban dwellers into the wilds to experience the Sierra Nevada rst hand, they would become converts to the cause of wilderness. In its earliest days, the Sierra Club was essentially a hiking club. But it developed a huge inuence. Around a legendary campre at Mariposa Big

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living systems, locally or globally, but which, rst and foremost met human needs. Smaller mills, mini-plants, operations at human scale provided the template for a radical and profound challenge to prevailing economics and an unquestioned embrace of technology.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada

and where exploitation of nature is minimal and production is environmentally friendly.

DAVID PEPPER UK

Social Ecology
Social ecology is a small but important environmental movement that integrates the study of human and natural ecosystems through the attempt to understand the relationships between culture and nature. It is often contrasted with deep ecology (see Deep Ecology, Volume 5), of which it is highly critical. Social ecology s starting point is that environmental problems result from social attitudes and practices, therefore the former must be solved by focusing on and changing the latter. An alternative socially and ecologically benign future can be constructed by reharmonizing people s relationship to the natural world, and this will be achieved by reharmonizing their relationship with each other. The latter may be done through maximizing individual autonomy, eliminating hierarchical relationships (particularly humans over nature and vice versa, but also within human societies, such as patriarchy and class oppression) and creating in their stead simple social relationships, including direct, inclusive, economic democracies. The state, capitalism, and giantism are all considered inimical to social ecology s vision of harmonious society, which marries anarchism and ecology drawing particularly on the anarcho-communist legacy of Peter Kropotkin. Social ecology s most in uential theorist is Murray Bookchin. His critical, holistic worldview places human behavior and institutions within an ecological context that represents social relations as a web of dynamic interrelated systems. But unlike (some interpretations of) deep ecology, Bookchin s approach would not prioritize nature over human society, nor would it dismiss the social aspirations of the Enlightenment Project. It would seek to be neither ecocentric nor anthropocentric, but again unlike deep ecology it sees humankind as evolution s highest expression, i.e., nature s consciousness, so human transformation of nature is natural and desirable. Social ecologists present speci c utopian visions of a rational, ecological society, where labor is organized into small, human-scale communities without power hierarchies,

Social Impact Assessment (SIA)

Social impact assessment (SIA) is the process of analyzing (predicting, evaluating and re ecting) and managing the intended and unintended consequences on the human environment of planned interventions (policies, programs, plans, and projects) so as to create a more sustainable biophysical and human environment. A short form of this de nition is: SIA is the process of analyzing and managing the intended and unintended consequences of planned interventions on people. SIA is more than a technique or tool; it is a philosophy about development and democracy, which considers pathologies of development (i.e., harmful impacts), goals of development (such as poverty alleviation or gender equity), and processes of development (e.g., participation, capacity building). SIA is an overarching framework that considers all potential impacts on humans and their communities including: (1) changes to people s way of life, i.e., how they live, work, play and interact with one another on a day to day basis; (2) changes to their culture, community, neighborhood and local biophysical environment; (3) demands on their political systems, social institutions and community infrastructure; (4) effects on their health and well-being, on their personal and property rights; and on their fears and aspirations for themselves and their families. The objective of SIA is to ensure that development that does occur maximizes the bene ts and minimizes the costs of development, especially those costs borne by the community and often not adequately taken into account by international development agencies decision-makers, regulatory authorities and developers. By identifying impacts in advance: (1) better decisions can be made about which projects should proceed and how they should proceed; and (2) mitigation measures can be implemented to minimize the harm from a speci c project or projectrelated activity. SIA has three different levels of meaning: (1) as a paradigm or eld of research and practice; (2) as a methodology or environmental management instrument; and (3) as a discrete step (or speci c task) within a methodology. SIA is used at these different levels often

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485

with some people failing to appreciate that different meanings or levels exist. As a paradigm, SIA consists of a body of knowledge, techniques, and values. Various people identify themselves as SIA professionals, or list SIA as a discipline or specialty area. There is a community of scholars engaged in research and practice of SIA. These are people who practice the methodology of SIA and who undertake associated social and environmental research to inform the practice of SIA. As a methodology or instrument, SIA is the process (series of steps) that SIA professionals follow in order to assess and manage social impacts. That process requires substantial interaction with interested and affected peoples. At its narrowest meaning, SIA refers to the task of assessing likely social impacts of a proposed project within an environmental assessment framework (see Social Impact Assessment, Volume 4).
FRANK VANCLAY Australia

Social Learning in the Management of Global Atmospheric Risks

Adam Fenech
Meteorological Service of Canada, Downsview, Canada

When applying a social learning framework, researchers ask questions such as: Who (individual, organization, country) learned? Was the learning from within the social group, among social groups or from another country? Who was the teacher? Who was the learner? What was learned? What knowledge, experience, or norm was learned? How did this knowledge, experience or norm t or rede ne existing practices, models and decisionmaking processes? How did the learning occur? Who brought new information to bear on the existing issue? Where did the new information come from? How long did the new information take to formulate into an issue? A major study applying a social learning framework to the environment has recently been completed under the leadership of William C Clark, Harvard University (Clark et al., 2001). It provides a better understanding of how human societies learned from earlier responses and other countries and organizations in the management of global atmospheric risks. The study applies the social learning framework to global atmospheric risks namely acid rain, global climate change and stratospheric ozone depletion from the International Geophysical Year of 1957 to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development of 1992. In the context of environmental issues, Clarks book provides a major entry point into the eld of social learning. From this project, we present a couple of Canadian examples namely stratospheric ozone depletion and climate change to illustrate the concept.

SCIENTISTS-TO-SCIENTISTS LEARNING
One form of social learning is a scientist obviously learning from other scientists. What is not so obvious is that, for example, the cadre of Canadian scientists from Environment Canada, who inform and advise the Canadian government, often learn from scientists from other countries about issues, even if other scientists from Canada are already teaching the same message. For example, John Hampson, working at the Canadian Armament Research and Development Establishment (CARDE) in Val Cartier, Quebec in the early 1960s, provided the rst statement of concern that human activities could harm the stratospheric ozone layer. Hampson was looking for radiative early-warning signals of incoming missiles, focusing on water vapor from both high-ying aircraft and rockets, arguing that hydrogen species arising from the photochemical dissociation of water could lead to ozone destruction. His work appeared only in CARDE technical reports, which, though widely circulated among both Canadian and American atmospheric and defense research communities, were never taken seriously. Hampson also raised the concern of ozone depletion from

Social learning is how humans, as individuals and groups, adopt and spread new concepts, knowledge and skills. It has recently begun to be applied to the process by which societies respond to environmental issues. There was a clear recognition during the late 1980s of the need for a better understanding of how human societies perceive and respond to global environmental change over time, i.e., social learning. Most of the previous understanding of how societies learned re ected the perspectives of a very narrow range of countries and groups, and was focused on key scienti c discoveries and decisions, with little attention to the historic connections between them. There was little critical discussion of what might be appropriately learned from the experience of dealing with other environmental problems, and from the experience of dealing with them in other places or countries. For a general reference, see Rose (1993). This publication is a critical collection of studies on the various kinds of social learning encountered in policy making.

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increased air trafc in the atmosphere; yet the Canadian government did not take action until the issue was raised in response to an American research program in the mid 1970s investigating the issue of supersonic transport emissions. This avenue of learning from scientists-to-scientists illustrates the importance of the teachings being presented in person, either by sending a Canadian scientist to an international gathering to bring the teachings back to Canada, or by bringing the teacher directly to Canada. For example, Sherry Rowland attended a 1975 seminar at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, presenting his theories that developed the mechanism for chlorine catalysis of ozone, and identied chlorouorocarbons as the largest potential source of stratospheric chlorine. This gave the issue visibility and some initial credibility in Canada. However, the teaching is not blindly accepted by the learners, since in this case Canada required its own monitoring, modeling and science to conrm the implications and necessity for response.

MEDIA-TO-PUBLIC LEARNING
Another obvious learning channel is from media-to-public. The media acts as a teacher of the Canadian public, creating controversies that spark scientic investigation and government action. The surprise here is that in many instances, the media attention comes from American sources, thus making the US media a teacher and the Canadian public and Canadian media learners. For example, US media coverage of the US Senate Committee hearings of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) scientist Hansens concern about the climate change issue sparked Canadas own media to report on the consensus of scientists that climate change was a real concern. This Canadian experience is repeated in many other countries.

that indigenous peoples display by the mere fact of their livelihood and existence being tied to the land, and to what the wilderness offers in terms of food and medicines. Traditional knowledge is linked as well to the passing of knowledge from one generation to another, allowing events in the far past to be passed on through storytelling. Community knowledge refers to the knowledge of a natural resource such as sh or trees by people who live in villages and hamlets. These communities also have knowledge about the changing environment because they are close to the land and wilderness, relying on it for their existence. The value of traditional or community-based knowledge has not been fully realized as there have been no attempts to merge this informal, non-scientic understanding with the rigorous scientic method of current experts. Other approaches are required to fully appreciate the value that traditional and community-based knowledge can provide to understanding our changing environment (see Indigenous Knowledge, Peoples and Sustainable Practice, Volume 5). This new eld opens up a myriad questions. Where do people get their information? Who are the champions of new ideas? What gives an idea prominence or acceptability among experts and in the public domain? Is there an optimal model for social learning that we could use to speed up the social learning curve for environmental issues?

REFERENCES
Clark, W C, Jager, J, van Eijndhoven, J, and Dickson, N M, eds (2001) Learning to Manage Global Environmental Risks: a Comparative History of Social Responses to Climate Change, Ozone Depletion and Acid Rain, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, in press. Rose, R (1993) Lesson-Drawing in Public Policy, Chatham House Publishers, Chatham, NJ.

OTHER ASPECTS OF SOCIAL LEARNING

There are many other forms of social learning, ranging from top-down trickle-down arrival of issues, to peer-topeer exchanges (as exemplied in the scientist-to-scientist model), to bottom-up experiential learning, i.e., the experts are bafed by the kinds of things that ordinary people learn by living every day. For example, one form of bottom-up learning has garnered increasing interest over the years as the value of traditional or community knowledge has been appreciated and sought out by researchers. Traditional knowledge refers to the understanding of the natural environment that indigenous peoples possess. Traditional knowledge stems from the inherent closeness to the environment

FURTHER READING
Environment Canada (1988) The Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security Conference Statement, Report from the Conference on The Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security, June 27 30, 1988, Toronto, WMO, Geneva.

Social Science and Global Environmental Change

see Social Science and Global Environmental Change (Opening essay, Volume 5)

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Social Sustainability
see The Changing HumanNature Relationships (HNR) in the Context of Global Environmental Change (Opening essay, Volume 5)

REFERENCE
Lovins, A B (1977) Soft Energy Paths: Towards a Durable Peace, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada

Sociology, Environmental
see Environmental Sociology (Volume 5)

Soft Law
see International Environmental Law (Volume 5)

Soft Energy Paths

The term soft energy paths, was coined by environmental theorist and energy critic Amory Lovins in Soft Energy Paths (Lovins, 1977). It can be understood as a reversal of dominant thinking at the time; shifting the focus of energy planning from meeting anticipated demands with increasing energy supplies, to reducing demand through efciency. Lovins arguments to leave the hard path of energy planning, a path of brittle, inexible systems dominated by energy mega-projects, long-transmission lines and bleeding energy losses, were based on the demand side management approach. The key to soft path energy planning is to match energy source to energy demand. A barrel of energy saved has the same value to the economy as a barrel of energy found. Thus, energy efciency and conservation create energy along the soft path. Lovins called such energy negawatts. According to Lovins:
The energy problem, according to conventional wisdom, is how to increase energy supplies to meet projected demands. The solution ever more remote and fragile places are to be ransacked, at ever greater risk and cost, for increasingly elusive fuels, which are then to be converted to premium forms (electricity and uids) in ever more costly, complex centralized and gigantic plants.

Sovereignty and Sovereign States

Karen T Litn
University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

The modern international system is comprised of sovereign states, meaning that each state is in principle legally and constitutionally independent. In practice, however, sovereignty is generally conceived more broadly in terms of some combination of control, autonomy, and authority (Lit n, 1997). Control, like power, is the ability to produce an effect. Autonomy, or independence, is related to control since the ability to make and implement decisions on ones own requires some degree of power. Authority refers to the recognized right to make rules. The tension between environmental protection and state sovereignty is evident in the famous Principle 21 of the 1972 Stockholm Declaration, which articulates the states sovereign right to exploit its own resources and its responsibility not to harm the environment beyond its borders. While sovereignty is most commonly interpreted as a states right to exercise control and authority within its own territory, the history of international environmental treaty making may be read as an effort by states to strike a balance between rights and responsibilities. Many international relations scholars believe that sovereignty is being eroded, or at least recongured, in the face of growing interdependence, including efforts to address global and transboundary environmental change. The apparent mismatch between nature and the structure

To illustrate the inappropriate nature of focusing on supply as opposed to demand, Lovins wrote:
to ask which is the greenest supply of electricity is somewhat like shopping for the best buy of brandy to burn in your car, or the best buy in antique furniture to burn in your stove. From the end use point of view it is to ask the wrong question.

Lovins inuential work has continued, in partnership with Hunter Lovins, from their base at the Rocky Mountain Institute. Their most recent book, co-authored with Paul Hawken, is Natural Capitalism.

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of politics has been expressed in the famous dictum: The Earth is one, but the world is not (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987). As environmental issues emerged on the international agenda in the early 1970s, some analysts predicted that global ecological interdependence would help bring about the demise of the sovereign state system and its eventual replacement by some far-reaching supranationalism or even world government (Falk, 1971; Ophuls, 1977). More recently, with the proliferation of local and transnational environmental non-governmental organizations in the 1980s, some observers have predicted the erosion of sovereignty from below, with power and authority devolving from sovereign states to the grassroots (Ekins, 1992). Although the erosion of sovereignty thesis is appealing, a counter argument can be advanced that ecological integrity and state sovereignty, are not necessarily in opposition. One might claim that only the state possesses sufcient authority, resources, and territorial control to enforce environmental regulations (Litn, 1993). Two important developments since 1970 support this position: the establishment of national environmental agencies throughout the world and the negotiation and implementation of a host of environmental treaties. Moreover, since some challenges to state sovereignty, such as efforts to promote free trade by eliminating environmental restrictions, may be harmful, some would claim that sovereign states are key defenders of the environment (Esty, 1994). Neither the erosion of sovereignty thesis nor the sovereignty as bulwark thesis, however, does justice to global environmental trends. Both positions conceptualize sovereignty as monolithic rather than multidimensional. Rather, sovereignty should be understood as a historically variable set of aggregated practices. The scope of state autonomy may be narrowed by international and domestic pressures, as the erosion of sovereignty thesis claims, even as the problem solving capacity of states increases, as the second view suggests. Because international environmental responses typically involve trade-offs among autonomy, control, and authority, it is more accurate to say that states engage in sovereignty bargains (Byers, 1991) instead of ceding some monolithic principle of sovereignty. States may voluntarily accept limitations on their decisionmaking autonomy, for instance, in exchange for a greater ability to protect natural resources either within or beyond their own territorial jurisdiction. Thus, sovereignty appears to be recongured, rather than simply eroded, by efforts to address transnational and global environmental change. Developing countries are particularly sensitive to the possibility that their sovereignty will be compromised by international efforts to address environmental problems.

The principle of sovereignty over natural resources, which has engaged the United Nations since 1952, is often cited by developing countries opposed to what they perceive as environmental colonialism. For instance, efforts by industrialized countries to internationalize the issue of tropical deforestation in the 1980s and 1990s met with opposition from developing countries, which claimed sovereign jurisdiction over their natural resources. The principle of nonintervention, which is key to state sovereignty, is taking on new meanings in light of environmental change. In the past, it was primarily understood in terms of a sovereign states expectation that foreign powers would not intervene politically and militarily in its own affairs. As we enter the 21st century, the meaning of nonintervention is being renegotiated in the context of global ecological interdependence. When chlorouorocarbons released in Seattle deplete New Zealands ozone layer and nuclear fallout from the Chernobyl reactor decimates Scandinavias reindeer, new norms of nonintervention are required. As environmental concerns insert themselves increasingly into world politics, and as the political and economic effects of such developments as massive species extinction, climate change, and the globalization of western modes of consumption become increasingly inescapable, sovereignty will be recongured in ways that cannot be fully anticipated today.

REFERENCES
Byers, B (1991) Ecoregions, State Sovereignty, and Conict, Bull. Peace Proposals, 22(1), 68 72. Ekins, P (1992) A New World Order, Routledge, London. Esty, D (1994) Greening the GATT, Institute for International Economics, Washington, DC. Falk, R (1971) This Endangered Planet: Prospects and Proposals for Human Survival, Vintage Books, New York. Lit n, K (1993) Ecoregimes: Playing Tug-of-War with the NationState, in The State and Social Power in Global Environmental Politics, eds R Lipschutz and K Conca, Columbia University Press, New York. Lit n, K (1997) Sovereignty in World Ecopolitics, Mershon Int. Stud. Rev., 41(2), 167 204. Ophuls, W (1977) Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, W H Freeman, San Francisco, CA. World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) Our Common Future, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Stewardship Theology
see Christianity and the Environment (Volume 5); Theology (Volume 5)

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Strong Anthropocentrism
see Environmental Ethics (Volume 5)

1.

Subsidiarity Principle
see The Changing HumanNature Relationships (HNR) in the Context of Global Environmental Change (Opening essay, Volume 5)

2.

Output rule: Waste emissions from a project or action being considered should be kept within the assimilative capacity of the local environment, without unacceptable degradation of its future waste absorptive capacity or other important services. Input rule: Renewable resources: (e.g., forest, sh) harvest rates of renewable resource inputs must be kept within regenerative capacities of the natural system that generates them. Non-renewables: depletion rates of non-renewable resource inputs should be set below the historical rate at which renewable substitutes were developed by human invention and investment according to the Seraan quasi-sustainability rule (see below). An easily calculable portion of the proceeds from liquidating non-renewables should be allocated to the attainment of sustainable substitutes.

Sustainability: Human, Social, Economic and Environmental

Robert Goodland
World Bank, Washington, DC, USA

SERAFIAN QUASI-SUSTAINABILITY RULE OF NON-RENEWABLES

The Seraan rule pertains to non-renewable resources, such as fossil fuels and other minerals, but also to renewables to the extent they are being mined. It states that their owners may enjoy part of the proceeds from their liquidation as income, which they can devote to consumption. The remainder, a user cost, should be reinvested to produce income that would continue after the resource has been exhausted. This method essentially estimates income from sales of an exhaustible resource. It has been used as a normative rule for quasi-sustainability, whereby the user cost should be reinvested, not in any asset that would produce future income, but specically to produce renewable substitutes for the asset being depleted. The user cost from depletable resources has to be invested specically in

The four main types of sustainability are human, social, economic and environmental. These are de ned and contrasted in Tables 1 4. It is important to specify which type of sustainability one is dealing with as they are all so different and should not be fused together, although some overlap to a certain extent. Specialists in each eld best deal with these four types of sustainability. For example, social scientists have a lot to say about social sustainability; economists deal with economic sustainability and biophysical specialists deal with environmental sustainability. A denition of environmental sustainability (ES) has been given by Daly (1973, 1974, 1992, 1996, 1999) and Daly and Cobb (1989):
Table 1

Comparison of Human, Social, Economic and Environmental Sustainability: Human Sustainability

Human sustainability means maintaining human capital. Human capital is a private good of individuals, rather than between individuals or societies. The health, education, skills, knowledge, leadership and access to services constitute human capital. Investments in education, health, and nutrition of individuals have become accepted as part of economic development As human life-span is relatively short and nite (unlike institutions) human sustainability needs continual maintenance by investments throughout ones lifetime Promoting maternal health and nutrition, safe birthing and infant and early childhood care fosters the start of human sustainability. Human sustainability needs 2 3 decades of investment in education and apprenticeship to realize some of the potential that each individual contains. Adult education and skills acquisition, preventive and curative health care may equal or exceed formal education costs Human capital is not being maintained. Overpopulation is intensifying and is the main dissipative structure worsening per capita indices. That is far graver than overcapitalizing education so that laborers have PhDs

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Table 2 Comparison of Human, Social, Economic and Environmental Sustainability: Social Sustainability Social sustainability means maintaining social capital. Social capital is investments and services that create the basic framework for society. It lowers the cost of working together and facilitates cooperation: trust lowers transaction costs. Only systematic community participation and strong civil society, including government can achieve this. Cohesion of community for mutual benet, connectedness between groups of people, reciprocity, tolerance, compassion, patience, forbearance, fellowship, love, commonly accepted standards of honesty, discipline and ethics. Commonly shared rules, laws, and information (libraries, lm, and diskettes) promote social sustainability Shared values constitute the part of social capital least subject to rigorous measurement, but essential for social sustainability. Social capital is undercapitalized, hence the high levels of violence and mistrust Social (sometimes called moral) capital requires maintenance and replenishment by shared values and equal rights, and by community, religious and cultural interactions. Without such care it depreciates as surely as does physical capital. The creation and maintenance of social capital, as needed for social sustainability, is not yet adequately recognized. Western-style capitalism can weaken social capital to the extent it promotes competition and individualism over cooperation and community Violence is a massive social cost incurred in some societies because of inadequate investment in social capital. Violence and social breakdown can be the most severe constraint to sustainability

Table 3 Comparison of Human, Social, Economic and Environmental Sustainability: Economic Sustainability Economic capital should be maintained. The widely accepted denition of economic sustainability is maintenance of capital, or keeping capital intact. Thus Hickss denition of income the amount one can consume during a period and still be as well off at the end of the period can dene economic sustainability, as it devolves on consuming value-added (interest), rather than capital Economic and manufactured capital is substitutable. There is much overcapitalization of manufactured capital, such as too many shing boats and sawmills chasing declining sh stocks and forests Historically, economics has rarely been concerned with natural capital (NC) (e.g., intact forests, healthy air). To the traditional economic criteria of allocation and efciency must now be added a third, that of scale (Daly, 1992). The scale criterion would constrain throughput growth the ow of material and energy (NC) from environmental sources to sinks Economics approaches value things in money terms, and have major problems valuing NC, intangible, intergenerational, and especially common-access resources, such as air. Because people and irreversibles are at stake, economic policy needs to use anticipation and the precautionary principle routinely, and should err on the side of caution in the face of uncertainty and risk

Table 4 Comparison of Human, Social, Economic and Environmental Sustainability: Environmental Sustainability (ES) Although ES is needed by humans and originated because of social concerns, ES itself seeks to improve human welfare by protecting NC. As contrasted with economic capital, NC consists of water, land, air, minerals and ecosystem services, hence much is converted to manufactured or economic capital. Environment includes the sources of raw materials used for human needs, and ensuring that sink capacities recycling human wastes are not exceeded, in order to prevent harm to humans Humanity must learn to live within the limitations of the biophysical environment. ES means NC must be maintained, both as a provider of inputs (sources), and as a sink for wastes. This means holding the scale of the human economic subsystem (D population consumption, at any given level of technology) to within the biophysical limits of the overall ecosystem on which it depends. ES needs sustainable consumption by a stable population On the sink side, this translates into holding waste emissions within the assimilative capacity of the environment without impairing it On the source side, harvest rates of renewables must be kept within regeneration rates Technology can promote or demote ES. Non-renewables cannot be made sustainable, but quasi-ES can be approached for non-renewables by holding their depletion rates equal to the rate at which renewable substitutes are created. There are no substitutes for most environmental services, and there is much irreversibility if they are damaged

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replacements for what is being depleted in order to reach sustainability, and must not be invested in any other venture no matter how protable. For non-renewable energy, a future acceptable rate of extraction of the nonrenewable resource can be based on the historic rate at which improved efciency, substitution and re-use became available. These calculations show the folly of relying on technological optimism, rather than on some historic track record.

REFERENCES
Daly, H E, ed (1973) Toward a Steady State Economy, Freeman, San Francisco, CA. Daly, H E (1974) The Economics of the Steady State, Am. Econ. Rev. March, 15 21. Daly, H E (1992) Allocation, Distribution and Scale: Towards an Economics which is Efcient, Just and Sustainable, Ecol. Econ., 6(3), 185 193. Daly, H E (1996) Beyond Growth: the Economics of Sustainable Development, Beacon Press, Boston, MA. Daly, H E (1999) Ecological Economics and the Ecology of Economics, E Elgar Publications, Cheltenham. Daly, H E and Cobb, J B (1989) For the Common Good, Beacon Press, Boston, MA.

CAUSES OF UNSUSTAINABILITY
When the human economic subsystem was small, the regenerative and assimilative capacities of the environment appeared innite. We are now painfully learning that environmental sources and sinks are nite. Originally, these capacities were very large, but the scale of the human economy has exceeded them. Source and sink capacities have now become limited. As economics deals only with scarcities, in the past source and sink capacities of the environment did not have to be taken into account. Conventional economists still hope or claim that economic growth can be innite or at least that we are not yet reaching limits to growth.

FURTHER READING
El Serafy, S (1989) The Proper Calculation of Income from Depletable Natural Resources, in Environmental Accounting for Sustainable Development, eds Y J Ahmad, S El Serafy, and E Lutz, The World Bank, Washington, DC. Hueting, R, Bosch, P, and de Boer, B (1995) The Calculation of Sustainable National Income, Organization for International Cooperation, Den Haag, Netherlands [and] Indian Council of Social Science Research, New Delhi, 195.

T
Technological Society and its Relation to Global Environmental Change
see Technological Society and its Relation to Global Environmental Change (Opening essay, Volume 5)

Theories of Health and Environment

Trevor Hancock
Trevor Hancock Inc., Kleinburg, Canada

Theology
In the context of humanenvironment relations, there are four kinds of theology: Ecotheology is theological reection focused on the relationship of faith to ecological wellbeing and social justice. Dominion theology refers to theological worldviews that perceive humans as being placed by God at the top of a pyramid of value with all other creation made expressly for the use of humanity and over which humans could exercise dominion or control. Stewardship theology is a challenge to traditional dominion theology that argues that humanitys place within creation is not one of authority but one of responsibility to care and nurture the Earth on behalf of the creator. Process theology is a school of theology that emphasizes the inextricable linkages of humans within the entirety of the creation.
DAVID G HALLMAN Canada

Early theories of health still commonly found in many cultures throughout the world understood health as the result of the characteristics and behavior of the individual and his or her relationship with the community, nature and the spirits or gods. The role of healers was to re-establish balance and to drive out evil spirits. Three great healing traditions (Greco-Arabic, Indian [Ayurvedic] and Chinese) share common ideas about maintaining equilibrium among the humors, taking into account environmental factors, and addressing personal factors and the spiritual dimension. In Europe, from the 2nd century AD until the 19th century, the miasmic theory that atmospheric and environmental conditions were responsible for the transmission of epidemic diseases competed with the contagion theory, which suggested that transmission was via minute infective agents or spores, and the theory of individual predisposition. While passive acceptance of environmental conditions marked much of this period, activist Boards of Health rst appeared in Northern Italy in the 15th century. Later, the social hygiene movement of the 18th century laid the groundwork for the emergence of the public health movement in the early 19th century. The public health approach addressed environmental sanitation and living and working conditions that had been worsened by the industrialization and urbanization of the 19th century. At the same time, improved nutrition, education and other social and economic development factors in turn, based upon exploitation of the earths resources contributed to a signi cant increase in life

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expectancy and health in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But with the identi cation of bacteria in the 1870s and the development of effective vaccines and, in the 1930s, antibiotics, the pendulum swung toward a medical model of health focused on the individual and the treatment of speci c diseases. This has been the dominant paradigm for most of the past 100 years. Beginning in the 1970s, however, there has been a growing awareness that healing and caring for the individual is much more than just xing the body, and that the determinants of health are much broader than simply the provision of medical care. In addition to recognizing that much of the improvement in health in the 19th and 20th centuries has been due to social and economic development, the view from space has helped us to understand that we all share a small and fragile planet and that our health is inextricably linked to the health of its ecosystems. Three powerful new, and complementary, models that are emerging in the western world in many ways represent a return to the public health model of the 19th century and to even earlier theories of health as balance within the person, balance between the individual and other people and balance between humans and nature. These three models holistic medicine, population health and ecosystem health represent a new synthesis, a new theory of health with roots that are thousands of years old.

health not only as a human attribute but as an attribute of living systems as a whole, from local ecosystems to the global ecosystem that some call Gaia (Lovelock, 1979) (see Gaia, Volume 2). Such systems need to be balanced and in harmony, just as our own internal systems do, a process known as homeostasis. When our human systems are in such a state of balance, we are said to be healthy; health has become a useful metaphor for such a condition in ecosystems as well. Perhaps today, then, we would extend the WHO de nition somewhat to state that health is a state of complete physical, mental, social and ecological wellbeing . In doing so, we would be returning to some much older theories of health.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES

The concept that humans are somehow separate from, and superior to, the environment is a relatively recent one. It is primarily a product of Western thought in the past few hundred years, and has been particularly apparent in the last hundred. But for much of human history, humans have understood themselves to be a part of, and subject to the whims of, nature, often personi ed as some form of spirit or god. Good health resulted from living a good life in harmony with nature which included appeasing the gods and ill health was seen as the result of a loss of that harmony, a loss of balance, or a punishment from the gods. Healing then became a matter of restoring harmony and balance, in one s self, with the community, with nature and with the gods. Healers or shamans used a wide array of naturally occurring healing substances, and as well communicated with the spirits or gods in an attempt to restore balance and harmony and to drive out evil spirits. Such beliefs and cultural practices can still be found in many parts of the world, and in our multi-cultural societies can also be found in many Western societies. Three great ancient healing traditions have been important in the evolution of modern understanding of health and healing, and the relationship between health and the environment. Shahi et al. (1997) argue that the fundamental beliefs and practices of those three traditions GrecoArabic, Indian (Ayurvedic) and Chinese share much in common and that Evidence exists of signi cant crossfertilization between these three great humoral traditions of medicine, with the exchange of ideas and products . Commonalities include: health is dependent on maintaining equilibrium among the humors (earth, water, re and, depending on the tradition, air, ether, wood and metal); this equilibrium is affected by such personal factors as age, sex, temperament, food consumption and nutritional status; all three systems took into account environmental factors such as the seasons, the cardinal directions (north,

INTRODUCTION
It seems that every culture and every period in history has a theory of health what it is, what determines health and how to achieve it. The by-now classical World Health Organisation (WHO) denition of health (see WHO (World Health Organization), Volume 4) as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or in rmity is revealing both for what it says and for what it does not say. First, perfect health, i.e., a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, may be a goal to be striven for, but it is probably unattainable. Second, if health is more than the absence of disease, then the prevention and treatment of disease alone will never be enough to achieve this. This suggests that the health care system, with its focus on the treatment and, to a lesser extent, the prevention of disease, is a necessary but not suf cient determinant of health. Third, and perhaps most revealing in the context of this encyclopedia, is that the focus of the WHO de nition is on the individual (physical and mental well-being) and their social context (social well-being) but there is no reference to the environmental or ecological context. This probably re ects the tenor of the time, when there was little or no awareness of global change and what we now think of as ecosystem health (see Ecosystem Health, Volume 4). But today we recognize the importance of

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south, east and west), the cycle of birth, growth and death and the condition of places, as well as emanations (miasmas ) from decaying organic materials, from swamps and from the earth (miasma is a Greek word for pollution); there is an all embracing order of things which aligns the organization of human and other life, society and the universe, balancing polar opposites such as light/dark, moist/dry, heat/cold, etc.; many of the therapeutic interventions focused on modifying the patients diet and surroundings, as well as using a wide range of medications (Shahi et al., 1997).

THE PUBLIC HEALTH APPROACH

The Renaissance, which owered in northern Italy and spread across Europe in the 15th century, brought with it a renaissance of public health as well. Boards of Health were established in most of the major city-states of Northern Italy in the 15th century, primarily in response to epidemics of plague, a bacterial disease with a high mortality rate that is spread by the bite of infected eas from rats to humans, as well as directly from humans to each other. Unhygienic and over-crowded living conditions undoubtedly hastened the spread of this dreadful disease. (For an excellent review of the broad historical sweep of this and other major diseases, their environmental and social roots and their impact on historical events such as the conquest of the Americas, see McNeill, 1976). By the 16th century, the Boards responsibilities included such diverse areas as hygiene, sanitation, food quality, burials, the regulation of hospitals, physicians and apothecaries and the control of prostitutes and vagrants. They had broad powers to regulate public gatherings, enforce quarantine laws, issue health passes and carry out inspections (Cipolla, 1976). The public health approach of these times was still based primarily on the miasmic theory the belief in the role played by atmospheric and environmental conditions in the transmission of epidemic diseases. Its rival, the contagion theory, was championed by Jirolamo Fracastoro (14841553). He suggested an alternative hypothesis, that epidemic spread of disease occurred as a result of the transmission of minute infective agents or spores from person to person either directly, via intermediaries, or through the air (Shahi et al., 1997), although these agents were thought to be chemical, not biological in nature bacteria had yet to be discovered. Over time, these two theories became synthesized. But throughout this period from the Dark Ages to the 18th century, with some notable exceptions such as the activist Boards of Health in Renaissance Italy, the general attitude seems to have been passive the environment was a given, and little could be done to change its impact on health. However, with the beginnings of the scientic revolution in the 17th century and the Age of Enlightenment in Europe in the 18th century came a more critical, rationalist and activist ideology. This new activism, when applied to public health, became known as social hygiene. Its leading proponent was the Abbe Claude Fleury (16401723). This movement was the precursor to, and provided the foundation for, the public health movement of the 19th century. Perhaps the greatest exponent of public health in the 18th century was Johann Peter Frank, Director-General of Public Health in Austrian Lombardy (Northern Italy) from 1786. This pioneer of social medicine established

The Greeks, for example, fully understood the need to balance both healthy living and healing, or treatment. Thus the Greek god of medicine, Asclepius, son of Apollo, had two daughters: Panakeia, the goddess of treatment (from whom we get the word panacea ) and Hygeia, the goddess of healthy living, from whom we get the word hygiene. A key gure is that of Hippocrates (460377 BC), the Greek Father of Medicine, whose school was founded on the island of Kos. (Many physicians today still take the Hippocratic Oath on graduating.) Among the many works attributed to Hippocrates is one entitled Airs, Waters, Places , in which the relationship between health and the environment is discussed. It was felt important to pay attention to the quality of the air, the direction and qualities of the winds, the quality of the water, the local topography and climate and other factors, in choosing a place to live that would be healthy. Here we have a clear example of the way in which human health and human settlements were seen to be related to each other and to the quality of their environment. Indeed, by their commitment to natural law and to observation, the Greek physicians laid the groundwork for the science of medicine. The last great physician in this tradition was Galen, who lived in the 2nd century AD. Writing about Galen, noting that three major factors were then believed to contribute to ill health atmospheric corruption (miasma), individual predisposition and contagion Winslow (1943) observed that:
Here in the 2nd century AD were the three factors which were to dominate scientic thinking up to the age of Pasteur. For more than 1600 years the history of epidemiology is a story of a shifting emphasis on these three basic conceptions.

The Romans were also well aware of the relationship between the environment and health, undertaking massive public works projects to provide clean water and to remove human wastes in their towns and cities. But with the coming of the Dark Ages in Europe, much of this knowledge of hygiene and healing was lost, although kept alive in the Islamic world, from where this knowledge was gradually re-acquired in the Middle Ages.

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hygiene as a systematic science and advocated the creation of state medicine. Frank taught that the greatest wealth of a state lies in its subjects, who should be as numerous, healthy and productive as possible (Frank, 1976). Frank was concerned with the harmful impact of Man upon his environment. He had a healthy scepticism about the ability of physicians and hospitals to inuence the health of a population, and he was concerned with the deleterious effect upon health that a poor life style had, whether that lifestyle was chosen or imposed. He saw the role of public health as helping to maintain the security and stability of the state, which he viewed as a benign and paternalistic protector of its people. The need to maintain the security and stability of the state was also of great concern to Edwin Chadwick, the English lawyer and public servant who is seen as the father of modern public health. In an article written in 1828, Chadwick contended that the environment must inuence health and wellbeing, which in turn are the pillars of social stability, and that the best means to ensure social stability was for the state to promote health and wellbeing by improving the environment (Ringen, 1979). Chadwick was one of the chief architects of the new Poor Law of 1834, which helped make industrialization possible by establishing the mobility of labor. But within a few years Chadwick became concerned that the poor social and health conditions of the laboring class might result in unrest, even revolution. Thus the famous Sanitary Report of 1842, which examined the health conditions of the laboring class, while undoubtedly sparked by an humanitarian concern, was also concerned with improving conditions enough to avert serious social unrest. Frederick Engels powerfully portrayed those conditions in 1845, when he described Manchesters River Irk as:
a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream in dry weather, a long string of the most disgusting, blackish-green slime pools are left standing from the depths of which bubbles of miasmatic gas constantly arise and give forth a stench unendurable even on the bridge 40 or 50 feet above the surface of the stream. (quoted in Girouard, 1985)

Commission in 1843. Again led by Chadwick, the Commissions work led to the adoption of the sanitary idea and to the establishment of public health measures such as housing standards, sewer systems, hygiene regulations and proper public water supplies. A Health of Towns Association, established in 1844, with branches all over Britain, supported the Commissions work.
The work of the Health of Towns Association in pressing for the application of the sanitary idea and its insertion into policy making had a dramatic effect on public health in Britain in a comparatively short space of time. (Ashton, 1992)

Thus by the middle of the 19th century, the contribution of lthy environments and appalling living and working conditions to the health of the population was well established, along with a strong and active public movement to support social and political intervention to modify the environment. Its apogee, perhaps, came in the 1870s when Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson, a disciple of Chadwick, marked the passage of the great Public Health Act of 1875 by describing his vision of a city of health:
a community so circumstanced and so maintained by the exercise of its own free will, guided by scientic knowledge, that in it the perfection of sanitary results will be approached, if not actually realized, in the co-existence of the lowest possible general mortality with the highest possible individual longevity. (Richardson, 1875)

But through one of those ironic twists of fate, the 1870s were not only the time of the Great Public Health Act and of Benjamin Ward Richardsons vision of a healthier city, but were also the time at which the bacteriologists were announcing many of their most exciting discoveries about bacteria, insect vectors, animal reservoirs of disease and human carriers and were developing effective vaccines and anti-toxins. These discoveries ushered in a very different theory of health, one that was to become the dominant model in much of the world over the next century.

while Hippolyte Taine wrote of his visit to Manchester in 1859:

Earth and air seem impregnated with fog and soot. The factories extend their anks of foul brick one after another, bare, with shutterless windows, like economical and colossal prisons through half-open windows we could see wretched rooms at ground level, or often below the damp earths surface. Masses of livid children, dirty and abby of esh, crowd each threshold and breathe the vile air of the street, less vile than that within . (quoted in Girouard, 1985)

THE MEDICAL MODEL OF HEALTH

Throughout history, the Hygeian or public health and Panakeian or medical/therapeutic models have co-existed and contended. For much of the 19th century, the Hygeian model was dominant. But with the identication of bacteria and the renement of biological and clinical research, the emphasis shifted towards the Panakeian model, with its emphasis on nding the specic cause of disease in bacteria, in nutritional and metabolic disorders, in biochemical and molecular changes. In this medical model, health is seen primarily as the absence of disease. The medical model has become powerful because it has been allied to the scientic method and the dominance

It was environmental conditions such as these that led to the British government establishing the Health of Towns

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of Western culture and civilization in the past couple of hundred years. This analytic model has focused its increasingly narrow attention on organs, on cells, on microorganisms, on genes, and on molecules as causes of disease. But this focus has also tended to exclude the broader environmental, social and economic factors at play. In essence, the medical model is a reactive model, looking for disease and then seeking a treatment for it (a pathogenic model ) rather than seeking to understand what determines good health and how to maintain and improve it (a salutogenic model, as Antonovsky (1978) termed it). At its simplest, the medical model sees a single cause the measles virus, for example and a single effect the disease of measles. This simple cause and effect model lies behind the search for specic treatments for specic diseases, a search that has had some remarkable successes. But it also quickly became apparent that simple exposure to a pathogenic organism such as the measles virus, while necessary for the disease to occur, was not sufcient. The epidemiological triangle of agent, host and environment, sought to explain this by identifying differences in the environment (which might affect transmissibility, for example), in the host (who might be resistant) or in the agent (which might differ in terms of dose, virulence, etc.). Further complicating matters is that some causes (smoking, for example) might have multiple effects (several forms of cancer, heart disease, stroke, respiratory disease, low birth weight and many other diseases) while some diseases (heart disease, for example) might have multiple causes (inherited susceptibility, high blood pressure, smoking, high cholesterol levels, infection, lack of exercise and other factors). The medical model of health has had some spectacular successes, particularly in the development of antitoxins and vaccines to protect against infectious disease (the eradication of the scourge of smallpox is a high point), antibiotics to treat bacterial (but not viral) disease, medications to control high blood pressure and many other diseases, and some forms of cancer therapy. In recent years a vast array of chemotherapeutic agents has been developed for all manner of minor and major, chronic and acute, physical and mental health problems, as well as surgical treatments for both major and minor health problems. In addition, Western medicine has shown itself to be remarkably effective at dealing with traumatic injuries that in the past would have been fatal. Indeed, so widespread and pervasive has this model become that the concept of medicalization has been developed to describe the extent to which medicine inltrates and even distorts our lives and our societies. Illich (1976) has famously discussed iatrogenesis (doctor-caused disease) as not simply clinical disease resulting from errors, unanticipated side effects and the over-use of diagnostic and therapeutic techniques, but also has described social and

cultural iatrogenesis the medicalization of many normal parts of life such as feelings of dis-ease, validation of disability or work and school absenteeism, or the processes of birth and death. This growth in modern Western medicine has also occurred at the same time as a massive increase in life expectancy, which for all its faults remains the most commonly used overall index of health. Life expectancy at birth for women in Canada, for example, increased from 43.8 years in 1871 to 76.4 years in 1971 (Bourbeau and Legare, 1982), while in Chile male life expectancy at birth increased from 29 years around 1910 to 72 years in 1998 and female life expectancy at birth in Japan in that same period increased from 43 to 83 years (WHO, 1999). Globally, life expectancy at birth has increased from 48 years in 1955 to more than 65 years in 1995, and is projected to increase to 73 years by 2025 (WHO, 1998). On a regional basis, average life expectancy at birth in 1997 ranged from 53 in the African Region of WHO to 72 in the European region and 73 in the American region. The largest increases in life expectancy at birth between 1975 and 1997 were found in the Eastern Mediterranean region (12 years) and the Southeast Asian region (11 years), with more modest but still substantial gains of 67 years in the African, American and Western Pacic regions, while the European region posted a gain of 2 years (WHO, 1998). As a result, there has been a widespread belief that our long lives and better health are attributable to modern Western medicine, which has only served to strengthen the dominance of the medical model. However, since the 1970s new theories of health have been emerging, rooted in a questioning of the efcacy of the medical model and in a more salutogenic orientation.

NEW PERSPECTIVES
One aspect of the questioning of the medical model comes from the psychological and social sciences. For while the medical model of health focuses mainly on the bio-physiological dimension, there is also a psycho-social dimension to disease, a perception that we call illness. Moreover, people may feel ill without there being any evidence of bio-physical disease. Norman White, a Canadian psychiatrist, has suggested a bi-axial model, one axis representing the biophysical spectrum from disease to physiological health, the second axis representing the psycho-social spectrum from illness to a sense of well-being. In such a model, people may be physiologically healthy but psychosocially ill, or they may have physiological disease but feel well (undiagnosed high blood pressure would be a good example of this). We are not simply biological systems, we are also psycho-social beings, and theories of health must recognize this fact.

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A second powerful response to the power of the medical model and its failings has been the (re)-emergence of a more holistic model of health that pays greater attention to the relationship between body, mind and spirit, an area generally neglected by modern Western medicine. This has involved a dramatic growth in the desire of knowledgeable and empowered consumers to be much more involved in their own health care, both through self-care and mutual support and through an increased emphasis on healthy living and the personal use of natural therapies. At the same time practitioners of holistic, alternative or complementary medicine in the West have been rediscovering and re-applying insights and wisdom from traditional healing practices rooted primarily in Eastern philosophies. Naturopathic, homeopathic and ayurvedic methods, acupuncture, shiatsu, massage, meditation and many other healing modalities have been growing rapidly in the West in the past few decades, in response to the growing public disillusion with the hard science values and practice of modern Western medicine. Their emphasis on healthy living, on caring, on re-establishing balance and harmony and on the use of natural remedies links them not only to the ancient healing traditions discussed earlier, but to modern concepts of wellness and ecosystem health. While holistic medicine was and is a critique of the clinical aspects of the medical model, a critique of the role of medicine in improving health was also developing in the 1960s and early 1970s. Thomas McKeown Professor of Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Birmingham in England began to inquire into the factors that led to improved health in England and Wales in the 19th century. His answers were somewhat surprising; he showed that the major factors leading to improved health had been improved nutrition, improved hygiene, limitations in family size (all of these rooted in economic and social development) and the development of vaccines in the late 19th and early 20th century and of antibiotics in the 1930s (McKeown, 1979). In short, McKeown found that improvements in health had not been primarily due to improvements in medical care, but to the combination of social and economic development. McKeowns work formed the basis of a seminal Canadian report in 1974 that, for the rst time, suggested that a national, and for that matter world-wide, policy focus on provision of health care was insufcient. The Lalonde Report A New Perspective on the Health of Canadians proposed the health eld concept in which four factors environment (physical and social), lifestyle, health care organization and human biology were the key determinants of health (Lalonde, 1974). Importantly, the Lalonde Report proposed that major improvements in the health of Canadians will result primarily from changing lifestyles, improving our environments, and advances in our understanding of human biology . The Lalonde Report

was inuential not only in Canada but also in the US and in Europe, where it spawned similar reports in the years that followed. Over the past 25 years, the analysis has been rened. The initial emphasis and still a strong focus today was on lifestyle. One estimate suggested that up to 50% of preventable mortality was attributable to lifestyle diseases, which were sometimes called diseases of choice. The implication was that if only people would make healthy and wise choices, much ill-health and premature death could be avoided. The wellness movement that emerged in the 1970s focused on the individuals personal responsibility to avoid smoking and excessive drinking, to improve tness and nutrition, to learn stress management and to develop environmental awareness and a sense of spiritual and emotional well-being (Ardell, 1977). However, critics of this approach, while acknowledging that healthy choices are important, pointed out that environmental, social, economic and cultural circumstances and our living and working conditions shape and sometimes constrain those choices. Over time, this led to the emergence of the concept of population health. Taking their cue from the work of McKeown, advocates of population health (e.g., Evans et al., 1994) have pointed to the signicance of the economic and social determinants of health, drawing attention in particular to the importance of poverty and inequality and the inuence of social status on health. This in turn has been linked to factors such as self-esteem and sense of self-worth, to the inuence of the social hierarchy and of the degree of control over working conditions, and to the relationship between the mind and the bodys immune system, a eld of study known as psycho-neuro-immunology. The research ndings suggest that such factors may be as important as conventional risk factors such as smoking, diet and exercise in the development of heart disease. For example, the 1999 World Health Report cites evidence that suggests that the most important factors that have led to the reduction in mortality between 1960 and 1990, based on data from 115 low and middle income countries, were ascribable to the generation and utilization of new knowledge (which includes but is much more than medical knowledge and technology), improvements in the educational level of women and improved income, in that order (Wang et al., 1999, cited in WHO, 1999). However, while strong on the social and socio-economic factors, the population health approach is curiously silent on the inuence of the built and natural physical environments on population health status. The neglect of the built environment within which the social processes of population health occur is particularly unfortunate because the most signicant human environment today is the built environment. Globally, half of humanity now lives in urban settlements, while in the

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developed world some 80% of the population is urbanized. Moreover, humans spend most of their time indoors, especially in the developed world. In North America, people are indoors almost 90% of the time and in their cars 5% of the time, leaving only 5% when they are outdoors (Leech et al., 1996). The built environment is a human artifact comprising both a physical and a social environment, and it constitutes the human ecosystem. Understanding human health increasingly means understanding the effects of complex urban physical and social environments and processes upon the health of urban residents. It also means understanding how the urban way of life affects the health of the wider natural ecosystems of which they are a part. The ecological perspective on health has emerged from the growing importance of ecology, and from the growing awareness of global change and its health implications; human health is inextricably linked to ecosystem health. The view of earth from space has made it apparent, as never before, that we are bound to and part of a fragile and beautiful place, a living planet that some call Gaia. At the same time, this global perspective and the modern science of ecology has enabled us to understand how potent is our power to affect the global life support systems on which we depend. For while the increase in life expectancy and other measures of health that we have experienced may seem to be due primarily to the dramatic social and economic development we have undergone, this development has in turn been based upon industrialism s exploitation of the earth s resources notably energy, forests, soils, minerals and the oceans and the accompanying widespread pollution of our environment, indeed of the planet as a whole. Thus, in a very real sense, our current high level of health and long lives have been purchased at the expense of the environment. But global change is not without cost (see McMichael, 1993, or Chivian et al., 1993, for good overviews of the health implications of global change) (see Environmental Change and Human Health: Extending the Sustainability Agenda, Volume 3). Global warming, ozone depletion, acid rain and other climate and atmospheric changes threaten our health; global warming in particular will increase the range of the mosquitoes that spread malaria, dengue fever and other diseases, as well as the distribution of other disease vectors. More severe storms, oods and droughts will also add to the burden of infectious diseases as well as causing hunger, malnutrition and trauma. The depletion of such renewable resources as sheries, forests, topsoil and fresh water aquifers threatens our food supplies and may cause both malnutrition and mass migration, with all its attendant misery, diseases and deaths. Environmental pollution and ecotoxicity the widespread contamination of entire ecosystems and food

chains with persistent organic pollutants (POPs) has made it apparent, as the North American Indian Chief, Seattle, is reputed to have remarked more than 100 years ago, that we are all part of the web of life, and whatever we do to the web of life, we do to ourselves . We simply cannot tell what a lifelong exposure to low levels of multiple POPs will mean for the health and well-being of today s infants, nor for the health of other species that are equally exposed. This applies also to the loss of habitat that we are causing and the accompanying loss of biodiversity as a result of a human-created mass extinction; we do not know how many strands of the web of life we dare sever. And the massive increase in trade and travel that has accompanied globalization has meant that exotic diseases (such as West Nile fever, spread by birds and mosquitoes) or exotic vectors (such as the Asian Tiger mosquito, a hardy mosquito that has been introduced into the USA and that spreads dengue and yellow fever) will become more widespread. There is thus a growing awareness that human health is dependent upon ecosystem health, and even a concern that human health can no longer be sustained if the industrial and economic growth that has been the basis of improved health undermines the ultimate determinants of health the Earth s life support systems and natural resources (World Resources Institute, 2000).

A NEW SYNTHESIS
Any modern theory of health thus has to take into account and integrate the bio-medical model (including its complementary or alternative versions), the wellness and lifestyle approach, and the social, economic, built and natural environmental determinants of health. In his depiction of a sane, humane and ecological society, the British futurist Robertson (1978) described sanity as balance within the individual, humanity as balance between the individual and other people in their communities and around the world, and ecology as balance between humans and nature. These three concepts in many ways represent the three broad themes in the re-conceptualization of health described above that have emerged in the late 20th century: holistic medicine and wellness, with its focus on the individual s balance and harmony; population health, with its focus on social conditions and processes; and ecosystem health, with its focus on the relationship between human health and the health of the planet. They all have roots in much earlier models of health. A focus on holistic medicine and wellness harkens back to much older views of the importance of diet and nutrition, of maintaining balance in leading a healthy life, and in forms of treatment which address the body, mind and spirit together. It might perhaps be considered part of the Panakeian tradition.

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Improved living and working conditions were a major factor in improving health in the 19th century, and population health reminds us that social and economic development remains important today, while the modern-day Healthy Cities and Communities movement takes its inspiration directly from its Victorian predecessors. As in Hippocrates time, we still have to be concerned with airs, waters and places, with the quality of our human settlements and our buildings. Maintaining and improving urban and suburban environments and the social and physical quality of the homes, schools, workplaces, institutions and other settings where we spend most of our time remains an important task for those concerned with public health. This is the Hygeian tradition. We are rediscovering that in order to be healthy we have to be in tune with nature, both at a local level and globally. As with the re-emergence of holistic medicine, this is in some respects a return to our roots, to an awareness of our place within, rather than apart from and superior to, nature. Healthy people can only exist within healthy communities and on a healthy planet. This might be considered the Gaian tradition.

A synthesis of these three concepts may lead to a new understanding of health. What follows is a model of the human ecosystem that provides such a synthesis, a theory of health for the 21st century that seeks to integrate these new theories of health.

AN ECOLOGICAL MODEL OF HEALTH

All models reect the contemporary intellectual and cultural context in which they are created, and, of course, all models are wrong, in the sense that they are only a model of reality, not reality itself, and that they reect the personal context of those who create the model, which in turn reects the cultural, social and intellectual context of their times. That having been said, a modern theory of health has to incorporate the biomedical, holistic medicine, wellness, population health, and ecosystem health perspectives. The Mandala of Health (Hancock and Perkins, 1985; Hancock, 1985) is one such model (see Figure 1), reecting our current understanding of the elements of the human ecosystem that determine health. Developed in the early 1980s to explain the new public health approach in the City of Toronto in Canada, it builds upon and expands the four health elds of the Lalonde Report.

Culture

Community Lifestyle

Personal behavior

Family Spirit

Psycho-socioeconomic environment

Sick care system

Body

Mind

Work

Human biology

Physical environment

Human-made environment

Biosphere

Figure 1

The Mandala of health. A model of the human ecosystem

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Mandala is the Buddhist word for an intricate circular design used as a focus for meditation. It has also been dened as a circular symbol of the universe: it is in this latter sense that the term is used; the Mandala is a circular symbol of the universe of health. At the center of the Mandala, the focus for our concern, is the individual human being. That individuals health is a function of their body/mind/spirit integration and well-being, the central concept of holistic medicine and wellness. That individual is shown as existing within a family. For most of us, for most of our lives and in particular in those important but vulnerable parts of our lives encompassed by infancy, childhood, adolescence, parenthood and old age, the family is our most immediate social environment, just as our home is our most immediate physical environment. The family constitutes one of the great mediating structures of our society: it buffers and protects the individual members from the impacts of community and society; it establishes our values, attitudes, standards and behaviors; it supports us and protects us. (Of course, it must be admitted, families can also have a negative effect, causing stress, even mental and physical damage, the latter through violence.) The individual and his/her family are in turn affected by four key factors human biology, personal behavior, psycho-socio-economic environment and physical environment. These four are in fact variants of three of the four Lalonde health elds, namely lifestyle, environment and human biology. Human biology affects personal and family health through such things as the genetic transmittal of mutations and inborn errors of metabolism, through physiological and biochemical functioning, the competence of the immune system (and the links between the psyche and the immune system), and through the aging process, to name but a few. Personal behavior is obviously a determinant of health, although constrained and modied by many other factors. The behaviors we are concerned with can be loosely grouped into health promotive or protective behaviors such as proper eating habits, taking regular exercise, managing stress effectively, using seatbelts and crash helmets, and using preventive and other health care services appropriately; and health risk behaviors which include smoking, drug and alcohol abuse, driving dangerously or while drunk and so on. The term psycho-socio-economic environment addresses two related areas of great importance. The rst is concerned with our psychosocial environment, including pressure from our peers at school, at work and in other situations, the inuence of media and advertising and related factors. By socioeconomic environment, we are referring primarily to the inuence of social status, class or income, which have profound inuences

on peoples knowledge, skills, resources and opportunities, and on their living and working conditions, as they attempt to lead healthy lives. By physical environment, in this particular section of the model, we are referring primarily to the immediate indoor environment of home, school, workplace and other indoor settings where most people, especially in industrialized countries, spend so much of their lives. The design of our buildings, their air quality and the hazards (physical, chemical, mechanical and biological) they contain have important effects upon health.

The next level of the Mandala shows three particular connections between these four factors that are of importance to health. The rst of these is called the sick care system. This term is used specically to indicate that what we usually refer to as the health care system is in reality primarily concerned with sickness rather than with health. This is not to belittle the system, or those who work within it, far from it. The role they perform is indeed a vital one and when we become sick we would all like to have an effective and efcient sick care system to care for us. But those working within that system have primarily been trained in the recognition, diagnosis and treatment of disease, and are often less knowledgeable about the maintenance and promotion of health, skills in which they have not usually been trained. A second important point is that the sick care system is primarily concerned with human biology and personal behavior (in the sense of physical and mental health) and is not very involved with and often not very concerned about the other elements of the Mandala. This is why the sick care system is only a relatively minor determinant of health. Work forms a very important function in our lives, at least in the Western industrialized culture. Not only is the physical environment of the workplace frequently a hazard to health, so too is the mental and social environment of the workplace, which can be a source of stress, alienation, boredom or frustration. On the other hand, work is an important part of our social identity, can often be an important source of meaning and purpose in our lives and provides one of our key social networks. The term lifestyle is here shown to be the consequence of the interaction of personal behavior with the psycho-socioeconomic environment, within the context of community and culture. Lifestyle is a complex phenomenon, not simply a matter of personal behavior and personal choice. As an example, imagine trying to lead the lifestyle of a Buddhist forest monk in downtown Toronto in the middle of winter. While such a lifestyle choice is clearly possible, it is also clearly a difcult one to make and to sustain, given our social and cultural environment and our physical environment. On the other hand, it would clearly be

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quite easy to choose such a life in a country like Burma. The point of this example is not to deny the existence of free choice, merely to indicate that choice is constrained and limited by broader social, cultural and environmental factors. All of these factors function within a third level of the Mandala, namely that of the community and the humanmade environment. As already indicated, the community has its own set of values and standards, and its own social and cultural characteristics that inuence our health. Human services are organized at the community level in the areas of health, education, social services, recreation and other areas by the public, private/for-prot and voluntary/nonprot sectors. In addition, the community has a broad range of organizations, groups and networks which provide what McKnight (1995) has termed associational life or what Putnam (1993), among others, refers to as social capital churches, self-help networks, neighborhood associations, service clubs, unions, school and home associations, and so on. They play a vital role in our health by providing the social networks and social support necessary for healthy social functioning. The human-made environment encompasses the built environment of neighborhoods and urban settlements. But the notion of the human-made environment also encompasses the human-modied environment massive agricultural, energy, transportation and other systems which have left virtually no segment of the world untouched or unmodied by human hands. All of these systems, and all of this human modication have enormous implications for health. The nal level of the Mandala encompasses culture and the biosphere. These are the overarching contexts within which we lead our lives. Culture refers to cultural norms and values that underlie how we think about health, how we believe health and illness are determined and what steps we take as a society and as individuals to improve health or treat illness. In countries as culturally diverse as Canada and the United States now are, there are many different cultural norms and values at work, from those of the aboriginal people to the cultural beliefs of recent immigrants from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. Nonetheless, the basic cultural values and beliefs are rooted in the JudaeoChristian heritage, Western ideologies of liberty and democracy, scientic rationality, technological civilization and domination of nature. These all greatly affect our understandings of and approach to health. The biosphere is the ultimate determinant of health. The biosphere is the term used to describe that thin shell of the planet that contains plant and animal life. It is this thin skein of the web of life that keeps us alive, providing our life support systems and a range of other eco-services. The rediscovery in recent years of the ecological principles that

our ancestors and aboriginal people understood so well has led us to accept that we are a part of and within nature, rather than separate from and dominant over nature. Only through such an understanding will we come to accept, as the 1990 World Health Day slogan puts it, that we really should think of our planet, our health. The Mandala of Health has proved to be a useful conceptual model for understanding health, and an important teaching tool. As with all such models, it will no doubt be superseded with time. But for the moment, it is a useful representation of our modern theory of health. See also : Infectious Diseases, Volume 2; Environmental Change and Human Health: Extending the Sustainability Agenda, Volume 3; Urban Climate and Respiratory Disease, Volume 3; Urban Poverty and Environmental Health, Volume 3; Policy Responses to Public Health Issues Relating to Global Environmental Change, Volume 4; WHO (World Health Organization), Volume 4.

REFERENCES
Antonovsky, A (1978) Health, Stress and Coping, Jossey Bass, New York. Ardell, D (1977) High Level Wellness: an Alternative to Doctors, Drugs, and Disease, Rodale Press, Emmaus, PA. Ashton, J (1992) The Origins of Healthy Cities, in Healthy Cities, ed J Ashton, Open University Press, Milton Keynes. Bourbeau, R and Legare, J (1982) Evolution de la Mortalite au Canada et au Quebec, 1831 1931, Les Presses de l Universite de Montreal, Montreal. Chivian, E, McCally, M, Hu, H, and Haines, A (1993) Critical Condition: Human Health and the Environment, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Cipolla, C (1976) Public Health and the Medical Profession in the Renaissance, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Evans, R, Barer, M, and Marmor, T, eds (1994) Why Are Some People Healthy and Others Not? The Determinants of the Health of Populations, Adeline de Gruyter, New York. Frank, J P (1976) A Complete System of Medical Policy, ed and translated by Lesky, originally published 1786 1810, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD. Girouard, M (1985) Cities and People: a Social and Architectural History, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. Hancock, T (1985) The Mandala of Health: a Model of the Human Ecosystem, Fam. Community Health, 8(3), 1 10. Hancock, T and Perkins, F (1985) The Mandala of Health a Conceptual Model and Teaching Tool, Health Educ., 24(1), 8 10. Illich, I (1976) Medical Nemesis, Pantheon Books, New York. Lalonde, M (1974) A New Perspective on the Health of Canadians, Of ce of the Canadian Minister of National Health and Welfare, Ottawa. Leech, J A, Wilby, K, McMullen, E, and Laporte, K (1996) Canadian Human Time-Activity Pattern Survey Report and Population Surveyed, Chronic Dis. Can., 17, 118 123.

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Lovelock, J E (1979) Gaia: a New Look at Life on Earth, Oxford University Press, Oxford. McKeown, T (1979) The Role of Medicine: Dream, Mirage or Nemesis, Blackwell, Oxford. McMichael, A (1993) Planetary Overload, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. McNeill, W (1976) Plagues and Peoples, Anchor Press, Garden City, New York. McKnight, J (1995) The Careless Society: Community and its Counterfeits, Basic Books, New York. Putnam, R (1993) Making Democracy Work, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Richardson, B (1875) Hygeia: a City of Health, MacMillan, London. Ringen, K (1979) Edwin Chadwick, the Market Ideology and Sanitary Reform, Int. J. Health Serv., 9(1), 107 120. Robertson, J (1978) The Sane Alternative, James Robertson, London. Shahi, G S et al. (1997) A Historical Perspective, in International Perspectives on Environment, Development and Health: Toward a Sustainable World, eds G S Shahi et al., Springer, New York. WHO (1999) World Health Report, WHO, Geneva. WHO (1998) World Health Report, WHO, Geneva. Winslow, C E A (1943) The Conquest of Epidemic Diseases: a Chapter in the History of Ideas, Princeton University Press, NJ. World Resources Institute (2000) World Resources 2000 2001: People and Ecosystems The Fraying Web of Life, Oxford University Press, New York.

Thoreau, Henry David

(1817 1862) Henry David Thoreau, US writer, poet and philosopher, is considered to be the godfather of American environmentalism, due to his authorship of Walden, his ascetic lifestyle as illuminated by Walden, and his later contributions to natural history. Thoreau was born in Concord, MA, in 1817, and was inuenced early on by a powerful intellectual and spiritual movement in New England called the transcendentalists, of which the most famous gure was Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882). This movement sought to apply the teachings of German Romanticism in an American context. These

teachings sought spiritual understanding in generating powerful connections between the newly emerging individual in modern society, and the unspoiled natural world. Thoreau, and others more loosely associated with the transcendentalists, were open to many inuences, including the earliest translations in the west of Buddhist and Hindu writings. Upon graduation from Harvard in 1837, Thoreau began a haphazard career as a writer, land surveyor, worker in his fathers pencil factory, and occasional lecturer. His rst book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) which described a boat journey Thoreau and his brother took (embellished with natural history, stories, and embedded short essays on a variety of subjects), was a complete failure. Thoreau continued to publish natural history essays and travel essays in American magazines throughout the rest of his life, of which the most famous are probably Ktaadn and the Maine Woods (1848), Cape Cod (1855) both later turned into books and Walking (1862). His essay Civil Disobedience (1849), written in opposition to the war with Mexico, has been widely inuential in setting out the citizens responsibilities in the face of what can be considered immoral acts by ones own government. His most famous book Walden is a composite diary of the years 18451847, during which Thoreau chose, as an experiment, to build a hut and live a marginal life beside Walden Pond, approximately 3 km away from his native Concord. The book deliberately challenges many of the working assumptions of the culture of his time, particularly the obsessions with work, property, and getting on. In chapters such as Economy, Thoreau parodies these obsessions, and simultaneously promotes a range of other values: voluntary simplicity, humility, and simply watching the world pass by. Walden weaves together in beautiful, clear prose, these social and political themes, together with details of the natural history of the pond and its environs. Since its publication in 1854, Walden has become a touchstone of the environmental movement: evidence of this can be seen in the very public, and ultimately successful struggle in the 1990s to protect Walden Pond from encroaching development. In recent years, more attention has been paid to Thoreaus Journal, his daily record of natural history that he kept intermittently from 1838, and then rigorously from the mid1840s on. There are indications that he intended turning this into a larger natural science book, but died before this could be carried out. Scholars currently see this later more intense focus on the details of natural processes as symptomatic of a continuing dynamic tension between the demands of literary art and the rigors of science in Thoreaus late work. The Succession of Forest Trees (1859) is generally regarded as Thoreaus main contribution to natural history, in which he sets out the rst scheme of ecological succession. In this period, he also became widely known for his support for anti-slavery, and his lectures, including The Last Days of

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John Brown (1860), brought him to the attention of a wider audience. Thoreau died of tuberculosis in 1862. The elegy at his funeral by his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson was also inuential in bringing Thoreau to public attention. By the turn of the 20th century he was rmly in the pantheon of great American writers; and his well-wrought phrases, such as In Wildness is the Preservation of the World have entered the environmentalist armory. Photo: G F Parlow.

FURTHER READING
Bode, C (1975) The Portable Thoreau, revised edition, Viking Penguin, Harmondsworth, Middlesex. Buell, L (1995) The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, The Belknap Press, Harvard, Cambridge, MA. Harding, W (1982) The Days of Henry Thoreau, Alfred A Knopf, New York.
PETER TIMMERMAN Canada

Not until the morning of March 30, 1979 did the governor suggest that pregnant women and families with small children might want to leave the area. Over the weekend, an estimated 140 000 people evacuated. Estimates by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) study group were that TMI had come within thirty to sixty minutes of meltdown. Previous NRC worst case analyses had estimated that a major nuclear reactor meltdown could create an area of disaster that might be equal to the State of Pennsylvania. Coincidentally, as TMI occurred, a major Hollywood movie about a nuclear plant accident, The China Syndrome, was playing. A scientist character in the lm quoted the NRC area the size of Pennsylvania destruction estimate. Estimates of deaths due to the accident vary from several hundred excess cancers to several thousand. There has not been a single new nuclear reactor built in the United States or Canada since the TMI accident.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada

Three Mile Island

Three Mile Island (TMI), a commercial nuclear reactor 16 km southeast of Harrisburg, PA, was the site of the most serious reactor accident in North America. On March 28, 1979, at approximately 4 a.m., Unit 2 at TMI moved to an automated shutdown. The reactor technicians on duty inadvertently uncovered the core of the reactor creating conditions that could lead to a meltdown. A valve in the reactor, forced open by the sudden and violent shutdown, had stuck open, allowing cooling water to pour from the reactor. The auxiliary pumps came on, as programmed to ensure adequate water to cover the core. Unaware of the stuck valve, the technician on duty, Craig Faust, believed the core to be receiving too much water and shut off the pumps. Operators also opened another drain line to remove what was interpreted as dangerously high water levels. Remaining water turned to steam, the uranium rods overheated and ruptured. Radioactive water was discharged outside the reactor, and radioactive gases, were vented.

Torrey Canyon
Torrey Canyon, an oil tanker which ran aground in the English Channel in 1967 was the worlds rst major oil spill. Torrey Canyon became a spark for the growing environmental movement in the late 1960s. It remains one of the most devastating oil spills in history. The Torrey Canyon spilled 31 million gallons (117 million liters) of oil into the English Channel, resulting in the death of between 40 000 and 100 000 seabirds. Later well-known oil spills released a fraction of the cargo of the Torrey Canyon. The Amoco Cadiz spill in March 1978 off the coast of Brittany coated an estimated 100 km of coastline, but spilled far less oil, 1.5 million barrels of crude oil. In July 1983, the Alrenus wrecked on the coast of Louisiana spilling 2.27 million gallons (eight million liters) of oil. The Exxon Valdez spill (see Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, Volume 5) lost about one-fth of its cargo, 11.2 million gallons (42 million liters) with devastating environmental effects.
ELIZABETH MAY Canada

UVWY
Underdevelopment
see Development and Global Environmental Change (Opening essay, Volume 5)
This post-graduate research and training institution does not have professors or students. Instead, the UNU is a worldwide network of networks of scholars whose purpose is to develop options for the solution of problems that require truly international collaboration. It is the UNs think tank and has published hundreds of books, facilitated thousands of research fellows, and conducted hundreds of conferences and workshops to further knowledge of human security and development. See http://unu.edu. UNU has scholars instead of countries on its governing council and funds about half of its research though an endowment. These approaches helps ensure academic autonomy. Although headquartered in Tokyo since it opened in 1975, UNU has research and training centers and programs around the world with their own governing councils and funds in areas such as: development economics in Finland, new technologies in the Netherlands, software technology in Macau, advanced studies in Japan, natural resources in Ghana, biotechnology in Venezuela, leadership in Jordan, regional governance in Belgium, environmental health in Canada, food and nutrition in the US, sheries in Iceland, and conict resolution in the UK. UNU headquarters has two primary programs: (1) peace and governance; and (2) environment and sustainable development. The second of these focuses on humanenvironment dynamics including environmental governance, policy, and advanced training especially in developing countries. Its research contributes to the work of the UN system and seeks partnerships with others involved in sustainable development research and training. It publishes the journal Global Environmental Governance and has established the Global Environment Information Center to reach out to the larger community on environmental issues. For a description of one of the UNU programs, see Scenarios, Volume 5.

UNEP Chemicals
see IRPTC (International Register of Potentially Toxic Chemicals) (Volume 4)

United Nations University (UNU)

see UNU (United Nations University) (Volume 5)

UNU (United Nations University)

The UNU is the principal academic research institution of the United Nations (UN). It is an organ of the UN similar to the UN Development Programme or the UN International Childrens Emergency Fund, and reports to the General Assembly and the UN Economic and Social Council. Its role is to focus intellectual resources from many nations on world problems of interest to the UN system. It organized the rst conference on the Human Dynamics of Global Environmental Change in 1988, pioneered intergenerational environmental law, led the Mountain Agenda at the UN Conference on Environment and Development, and other environmental efforts.

JEROME C GLENN USA

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Utilitarianism
see Economics and Global Environmental Change (Opening essay, Volume 5); Social Science and Global Environmental Change (Opening essay, Volume 5)

Utopianism
see Political Systems and the Environment: Utopianism (Volume 5)

Value of an Ecosystem
see Ecosystem Services and Costing (Volume 2)

the resources of the 21st century and the source of economic growth and wealth creation. Environmentalists understand the power of symbols, and the meanings that come with new forms of representation. Consider the profound shift in human thinking brought about by globalization, a shift symbolized by the image of the earth as seen from space. How has this structured the way we think about the natural world? Environmentalists have also engaged in the exploration of a complex boundary the interface between nature and culture. What insights and perspectives might they bring to the exploration of the boundary between the physical and virtual worlds brought on by our engagement in virtual environments? Virtual environments have been made possible by developments over the past 40 years in ICTs, interactive computer graphics, and VR. These environments vary in their representational richness, i.e., in the nature of the media, and the specic forms of symbolic representation that comprise them, e.g., text, graphics, audio, video, etc. But it is the ways in which this class of technologies is capable of extending our senses and our intelligence that has the potential to change not only the way we work, live and learn, but also the way in which we think. As Postman (1992), reminds us:
New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop.

Virtual Environments
Gale Moore
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

The term virtual environment is used very broadly to describe a variety of computer-generated spaces. Virtual environments have been made possible by developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their convergence with a broad range of electronic media, Internet and virtual reality (VR) technologies, both synchronous (same time) and asynchronous (different time). These technologies constitute what Kitchin (1998) has called cyberspatial technologies, referring to the term Cyberspace, rst used by William Gibson in his science ction novel, Neuromancer (1984) to describe electronic space. We experience these environments as real, when they are in fact, representations of reality that do not exist in the material world, except in the technical components that comprise them. This broad de nition draws attention to the variety and diversity of digital media that characterize these environments, and provides a continuum along which readers outside this eld of research can move if they wish to explore further. We live in an era characterized by the intensication of the symbolic: information and knowledge are

The experiences of users in these emerging representational worlds, and the signicance of these environments in both shaping and being shaped by these experiences, is a topic of considerable research and debate and one that demands an interdisciplinary response. Todays virtual environments are the current end product of a long movement across the spectrum of technologies that have changed our relation to time and space the train, for example, in the 19th century, and in the 20th century the telephone. However, as we move toward the virtual reality (VR) end of the continuum, they are also more than this. The familiar experience of the telephone may be used to illustrate the concept of virtuality. Today, the telephone is so embedded in the activities of everyday life that we forget that the voice we hear at the other end of the line a voice instantly recognizable if that of a friend or family member is not actually a voice, but a representation of that voice. With todays digital packet switching networks, the voice is not only digitized, or broken down into a string of ones and zeros, but the packets created travel by various routes to their nal destinations. The receiver perceives a continuous conversation and a familiar voice. In reality, this is simply a representation of the voice, and if the technology breaks

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SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

down, the voice will neither be recognized nor understood. We do not stop to think of the telephone as a type of virtual environment, but the communication space or environment supported by the technology of telephony is, in essence, virtual. The immersion in a virtual threedimensional (3D) world is only an extension along this continuum. At the VR end of the human machine continuum, we are dealing with technologies that are more postmodern than modernist in their application, i.e., a world of symbols and representation in which multiple realities can be simulated. As our senses are extended, the boundaries between the real and virtual world are blurred. Increasingly, it will be dif cult to discern what is real when increasingly large parts of our reality are, in fact, virtual or more accurately, a virtuality. Rheingold (1992) suggests these environments are not real in the sense that we understand the physical world, nor are they virtual, the opposite of real. The system s virtuality is a structure of seeming the conceptual feel of what is created. The physical body recedes; the mind and senses are at the forefront. Identity becomes labile, symbols are real and we immerse and navigate in an electronic world. It is this vision of a disembodied future, a blurring of the boundary between the human with the machine. There is an increasingly symbiotic relationship between the physical and virtual worlds. Virtual environments are like this; this is part of their power and our fascination with them.

TYPES OF VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS

The rst type of virtual environment information environments will be the most familiar. These are primarily text-based, and a number have emerged around the power of computer technology to store large quantities of data. Information environments have helped solve two of the great problems of the human mind: limitations on the amount of information that can be stored, and the problem of retrieval. These environments augment human intelligence by freeing the human mind to carry out activities for which it is uniquely suited pattern recognition, evaluation and contextualization. We navigate through vast data spaces and digital libraries of information, manipulate textual and numeric symbols, and give them representational form that conveys the underlying pattern and relationships uncovered by the human mind. Information management, or more fashionably, knowledge management, are current expressions of the potential of information environments. Initially, these environments could support only one user at a time, but their power multiplied when machines could be networked. A fascinating example is the exponential growth of the World Wide Web, a global collection of hypertext documents that allows users with a browsing program such as Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator, to access what, in a few years,

has begun to approximate an electronic global Alexandrian Library. Closely related are the communication environments ; spaces in which people interact, not only with data and its representation, but also with other people what researchers call human human computer-mediated communication. Media such as email, listservs, bulletin boards, and chat, make it possible for people across the globe, who are connected to the Internet, to interact in new ways that challenge our understanding of time and space. Many of these are text-based environments, and individual media may be either synchronous, i.e., they require that users be present at the same time, or asynchronous, as is the case with email, where messages can be sent and received at different times. Chat services, such as Instant Messenger recently entered the public domain. In a typical chat environment, the user has a series of icons representing people who are willing to chat. These people may be local or distributed around the world. At a glance they can observe who in the group are currently online (the icon changes color) and, hence, are accessible. Even if a chat is not initiated, this awareness of friends and colleagues affords an opportunity for interaction that is, at a minimum, comparable to awareness of the presence or absence of others in a physical of ce environment. While the potential for interaction may appear limited in these environments, the increased availability of computers and access to the Internet since the mid 1990s has, in fact, resulted in an explosion of online communities groups of people sharing a common interest who meet regularly using a variety of mediated communication tools and environments. These communities and their members have been an important subject in recent years, drawing attention to the potential of even these limited environments to support rich and complex forms of social interaction. Collaborative environments or collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) are applications that allow multiple users to meet and to communicate, and depending on the representation richness of the environment, to collaborate and to share a variety of documents and artifacts. The rst examples of this type of environment are MUDs (multiple user domains ). There are a number of other environments such as MOOs (multiple object-oriented ), or MUSEs (multiple user social environments), which, while differing in technical functionality, provide a similar opportunity for social interaction. Initially, MUDs were textbased, and used a variety of textual conventions such as emoticons (e.g., ;-) is a smile) to enrich their real-time conversations, and to compensate, in part, for the lack of gesture, eye contact, voice tone and in ection normally available in face-to-face communication. A rich visual vocabulary of emoticons now exists. MUDs have traditionally been developed within the context of speci c groups of users, and the ways in which these spaces are socially

VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS

507

constructed is of particular interest. Research has found that these virtual spaces often became places, i.e., settings with their own culture and behavioral norms. While these spaces do not realistically represent a specic place in the material world, they do represent a type of place, for example, a classroom or a cafe. Behavioral norms and community standards emerge out of the interactions of the members of the group involved in the CVEs, and deviant behaviors are punished. The power of these environments is further increased when a variety of media and forms of representation are supported. Today, there are a number of commercial CVEs available, which can be accessed using a standard Web browser. Examples include: Placeware www.placeware.com , Teamwave www.teamwave.com or eRoom www.eroom.com . The majority support standard communication activities, both synchronous and asynchronous, such as email, document sharing, and chat. The more sophisticated environments also provide tools to support interaction and negotiation voting and document versioning, for example. A number offer both public and private spaces and storage areas for les and work in progress. Access to, and use of these environments no longer require the acquisition of a new set of skills. However, while the potential of these environments for community building, as well as supporting collaboration in the workplace, is real, the sociology of these spaces is still not well understood, and they are often underutilized. More recently, CVEs have appeared that incorporate a visual component, more specifically, a 23D visual representation of the space in which participants can interact with each other and with objects. Before moving to these VR environments, mention should be made of another type of virtual environment: media space. Media spaces are audiovideo computermediated communication environments. Unlike the CVEs discussed above, media spaces connect two or more sites in real time and like the telephone, or a videoconference, allow users to see the physical reality at the remote end and to hear what is taking place. In the Ontario Telepresence Project (Moore, 1997), a variety of types of spaces, for example, ofces, meeting rooms, etc., were connected across two geographically separate locations. In the media space, it was possible to meet colleagues in their ofces even though they were not in the same city. It was also possible to check the parking lot at the remote location to see if a colleagues car or bicycle was there, or to wander the corridors at the remote location, glancing around looking for someone. Multiple monitors were used at each end to keep the person space and the task space separate. While information on computer screens was being shared, individuals could both see and talk with each other as they might if colocated. Pauses and silences could be interpreted, as could interruptions at either end. Media spaces were designed in the context of real world practices and one of the challenges

of this research was to support presence i.e., to represent over distance the richness and experience of face-to-face interaction such as gesture, tone, and gaze awareness. From the 1960s on, advances were being made in distinct areas such as interactive computer graphics and VR, but these advances would not converge until the 1990s. Rheingold (1992, p 46) traces VRs roots back to the 1930s and early experiments with immersion, such as Cinerama, but he argues that VR progressed slowly in the 1970s as it waited for enabling technologies to mature. While media space researchers had been concerned about one type of presence, researchers in robotics had a different view of telepresence, namely, how to support human intelligence when it is necessary to carry out activities remotely; e.g., to defuse a bomb or carry out a surgical procedure. Some of these experiments relied on head-mounted displays, or data gloves, and other research came from the entertainment and games environment. By the 1990s, however, these areas were converging to create a powerful new reality a reality in which a number of human senses were extended or augmented. It is at this end of the continuum that the boundary between the material world and virtual world is softening, shifting, and blurring. In the future, the virtual environments will be as familiar or perhaps more familiar than the physical environments we experience today. The most accessible of the newer CVEs are the virtual reality environments, which use modeling languages such as virtual reality modeling language (VRML), and allow for participation using a web browser and the Internet. Virtual worlds are a popular form of these environments. These surreal multi-user 23D worlds generally do not represent actual places in the world, but are imaginary landscapes that provide spaces or opportunity for human interaction. These are real-time or synchronous environments in which people are represented by graphical icons known as avatars. There is a strange out-of-body sensation as you navigate through these worlds, sometimes ying, meeting and interacting with others. You may nd yourself in conversation with familiar characters such as Alice in Wonderland or Wanda the Fish; two popular avatars that people select to represent themselves. These worlds are, in general, themed, and provide fascinating insights into the nature of identity in a postmodern culture. The coherence of a single physically embodied identity slips away if one desires, and multiple persona are not unusual. The technology makes it possible, but the motivation of the participants and the nature of the communities that evolve continue to raise questions about the nature of human experience. A number of these environments can be visited. The Contact Consortium web site maintains a useful set of links www.ccon.org . Other CVEs are grounded in real-world practices, but most continue to be based on spatial metaphors. While the environments may not be realistic in terms of a specic

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SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

location in the physical world, many, like MUDs, are realistic in terms of the type of place they represent. For example, you recognize that you are in an ofce or a store and individuals behave in ways that are coherent with the repertoire of socially appropriate behaviors understood in the physical world. Extensive social and behavioral research is increasingly part of the development of these environments, underlining the desire to understand how these shared visualizations and environments can be used to support new forms of collaboration among people. John Robinson and his colleagues at the Sustainability Research Institute at the University of British Columbia www.sdri.ubc.ca have created a space of particular interest to environmentalists. They have created 2D models (accessible from a Web browser) to increase the understanding of sustainability issues. Through the development of thought-provoking technology-aided experiences, which solicit user input and provide a visual representation of outcomes based on this input, users deepen their understanding of highly complex issues. The most technically complex of the virtual environments are in the realm of VR. As Mitchell (1995) articulates: virtual reality technologies partially or totally immerse users in an interactive visual, articial, computer-generated environment; instead of the users being spectators of a static screen, they are participants in an environment that responds . The key differentiator of these environments is that the users are immersed and interact with the environment in realistic ways. No longer the stuff of science ction, these environments are at the interface between the real and the virtual world. Surgeons, for example, can now rehearse a difcult operation using a 3D representation of an actual patient. Airplane manufacturers can design and engineer an entire aircraft in a 3D environment. There is no physical scale model; the rst plane that is built, ies. The design team may be distributed across the globe and work together in real time. The range of activities that VR supports, and the nature of the collaborations that are possible, suggest it will be applicable to many of the activities and interactions of daily life. How will our societies change as material reality and social interactions are augmented and mediated in the ways VR makes possible? The cyberspatial technologies that comprise virtual environments extend and augment human intelligence and are changing not only what we think about, but also what we think with. If we directly apply this theme of virtual environments to the prospects for global environmental change, one pervasive notion is that as the natural or social environment deteriorates, people will increasingly move into virtual environments. The dystopians give us images of a retreat from public space into new worlds supported by technology. The utopians see the potential for human good. However, like the technologies that have gone before and those that are ahead, virtual environments are neither good

nor bad, nor are they neutral. They emerge out of a specic socio-historical context and out of a specic set of social relations. They are shaping and being shaped by those who design, build and use them. Cyberspace may be a consensual hallucination, but when the electricity goes out the illusion cannot be sustained. We are forever embodied its the human condition, and in the end it is nature that holds sway.

REFERENCES
Gibson, W (1984) Neuromancer, Gollanz, London. Kitchin, R (1998) Cyberspace: The World in the Wires, Wiley, Chichester. Mitchell, W J (1995) City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Moore, G (1997) Sharing faces, places and spaces: The Ontario Telepresence Project Field Studies, in Video-Mediated Communication, eds K Finn, A J Sellen, and S Wilbur, Lawrence Erlbaum Association, Mahwah, NJ, 301 321. Postman, N (1992) Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, Vintage Books, New York. Rheingold, H (1992) Virtual Reality, Simon and Schuster, New York.

Vulnerability
see Precautionary Principle (Volume 4)

Waldsterben
Waldsterben is a term widely used in Europe to denote forest decline in the late 1970s and early 1980s when it became a public issue. In mountainous regions particularly in the vicinity of the Poland, Germany and Slovakia triangle, thousands of hectares of forest died in a few years. The causes of waldsterben are complex, and may include direct damage to needles and leaves from industrial sulfur emissions, long-range acidic deposition, drought and mobilization of heavy metals in acidifying soils. Waldsterben is very photogenic and therefore it caught the attention of Green Parties, and other environmental non-governmental organizations. It is interesting to note, however, that the overall trend in forest growth in Europe over recent decades has been increased productivity. See also : Nitrogen Deposition on Forests, Volume 2.
R E MUNN Canada

WCC (WORLD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES)

509

WCC (World Council of Churches)

The WCC is a fellowship of about 350 denominations worldwide with a combined membership of approximately 400 million persons. The participating churches in the WCC cooperate on programs of world development and relief, theological reection and education, and advocacy on issues of justice, peace and creation. Environmental concerns have been a dimension of the WCCs activity for over 30 years. Since 1988, climate change has been the main focus for the environmental work. The WCC Climate Change Programme includes preparation of resources on theological and ethical dimensions of the problem, support for environmental activities of churches in the South, and coordination of advocacy at the international level and among industrialized countries whose societies are responsible for the majority of emissions leading to climate change. For further information, contact The World Council of Churches (Justice, Peace and Creation Cluster), 150 route de Ferney, PO Box 2100, 1211 Geneva 2, Switzerland. Tel.: 41-22-791-6111; Fax: 41-22-7910361, Email: mpt@wcc-coe.org, Web site: www.wcccoe.org.
DAVID HALLMAN Canada

Weak Anthropocentrism
see Environmental Ethics (Volume 5)

Weak Sustainability
see Economics and Global Environmental Change (Opening essay, Volume 5)

Weed
see Weed (Volume 2)

World Council of Churches (WCC)

see WCC (World Council of Churches) (Volume 5)

YinYang Principles
see Land Transformation in China: 3000 Years of Human Ecological History (Volume 3)

Alphabetical List of Articles

Acid Sulfate Soils 3:151 Acoustic Thermometry 1:161 ACSYS (Arctic Climate System Study) 1:161 Adaptation Strategies 4:80 Adaptive Environmental Management 4:139 Aerosols, Effects on the Climate 1:162 Aerosols, Polar Stratospheric Cloud 1:167 Aerosols, Stratosphere 1:169 Aerosols, Troposphere 1:172 Afforestation: Environmental Impacts 3:156 Agarwal, Anil 4:140 Agassiz, Louis 1:175 Agenda 21 4:140 Agricultural Intensication in Java 3:159 Agricultural Intensication in Western Europe 3:162 Agricultural Subsidies and Environmental Change 3:168 Agroforestry 3:172 Aircraft Emissions 3:178 Air Pressure 1:176 Air Quality, Global 1:177 Albedo 1:182 Allometric 2:135 AMIP (Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project) 1:183 Andersen, Stephen O 4:143 Angiosperm/Gymnosperm 2:135 Animal Physiology and Global Environmental Change 2:136 Animal Production, Feedlots, and Manure Problems in the US (Agriculture, Intensive) 3:186 Antarctica 1:184 Anthropocene 1:189 Anthropogenic 3:190 Anthropogenic Impacts on Atmospheric Oxygen 2:140 Anthropogenic Metabolism and Environmental Legacies 3:54 Anthropology and Global Environmental Change 5:163 Anticyclone 1:191 APN (Asia Pacic Network) 4:143 Aquaculture and Environment: Global View from the Tropics to High Latitudes 3:190 Aquaculture in Asia 3:196 Aquaculture: Salmon Farming 3:200 Aral Sea 4:534 Arctic Air Quality 1:191 Arctic Climate 1:193 Arctic Ocean 1:199 Arctic Oscillation 1:201 ARM (Atmospheric Radiation Measurement) Program Arrhenius, Svante Art and the Environment Asteroids and Comets, Effects on Earth Atlantic Ocean Atmospheric Angular Momentum and Earth Rotation Atmospheric Composition, Past Atmospheric Composition, Present Atmospheric Electricity Atmospheric Motions Atmospheric Structure Attenborough, David Autotroph/Heterotroph 1:203 1:204 5:167 1:204 1:211 1:211 1:213 1:216 1:218 1:221 1:243 5:175 2:143

Bahai Faith and the Environment 5:176 Baltic Sea 4:517 Basel Convention 4:146 BAT (Best Available Technology) 5:183 Bateson, Gregory 5:183 Benedick, Richard Elliot 4:148 Benthic/Pelagic 2:145 Biocenosis 2:145 Biocomplexity 2:145 Biodiversity in Freshwaters 2:146 Biodiversity in Soils and Sediments: Potential Effects of Global Change 2:152 Biodiversity: The UNEP Denition 2:159 Biogeochemical Cycle 2:159 Bioindicators 2:160 Biological and Ecological Dimensions of Global Environmental Change 2:1 Biological Invasions 2:11 Biomass Burning 3:205 Biomass Burning in Rural Homes in Tropical Areas 3:214 Biomass Fuel Power Development 3:216 Biomass Use for Urban Fuels in Developing Countries 3:217 Biome 2:166 Biome Models 2:166 Biome BGC Ecosystem Model 2:171 Bioremediation 3:218 Biosphere 2:174 Biosphere Enhancement Ratio (BER) 2:175 Biosphere Reserves 2:175 Bjerknes, Jacob 1:245

512

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ARTICLES

Black Sea Blue Plan Bolin, Bert Boreal EcosystemAtmosphere Study (BOREAS) Boreal Forest Boreal Forest Carbon Flux and its Role in the Implementation of the Kyoto Protocol Under a Warming Climate Bourdeau, Philippe F J Brent Spar Brinkhorst, Laurens Jan Broecker, Wallace S Brower, David Bruce, James Brundtland, Gro Harlem Buddhism and Ecology Budyko, Mikhail Ivanovich Buffering Capacity Business-as-usual Scenarios

4:521 4:148 1:245 2:177 2:179 4:149 4:152 5:184 4:153 1:246 5:185 4:153 4:154 5:185 1:248 2:184 5:191

2:186 C3 and C4 Photosynthesis Capacity Building 4:156 Capacity, Assimilative 3:220 Carbon and Energy: Terrestrial Stores and Fluxes 2:190 Carbon Cycle 2:198 Carbon Dioxide Concentration and Climate Over Geological Times 1:249 Carbon Dioxide, Recent Atmospheric Trends 1:254 Carbon Monoxide 1:261 Carnegie AmesStanford Approach (CASA) 2:202 Carrying Capacity 4:156 Carson, Rachel Louise 5:192 Caspian Sea 4:524 Cattle Grazing: Impacts on Land Cover and Methane Emissions 3:221 CBA (Cost Benet Analysis) 5:193 CENTURY Ecosystem Model 2:206 CEOS (Committee on Earth Observation Satellites) 1:261 Cereal Cultivation (Agriculture, Extensive) 3:228 Chandler Wobble 1:262 Changes in World Marine Fish Stocks 3:238 Chaos and Cycles 2:209 Chaos and Predictability 1:263 Charney, Jule Gregory 1:266 Chernobyl 3:241 Chipko Movement 5:193 Chlorouorocarbons (CFCs) 1:267 Christianity and the Environment 5:194 Circulating Freshwater: Crucial Link between Climate, Land, Ecosystems, and Humanity 5:201 CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) 4:157 Clean Development Mechanism 4:158

Cleaner Production 4:158 CLIC (Climate and Cryosphere) 1:269 CLIMAP (Climate: Long-range Investigation, Mapping, and Prediction) 1:269 Climate 1:270 Climate Agenda 1:270 Climate Analogues 1:271 Climate Change 1:271 Climate Change Assessment, United States 4:544 Climate Change, Abrupt 1:272 Climate Change, Detection and Attribution 1:278 Climate Change: an Emerging Issue in the Global Agenda 4:163 Climate Feedbacks 1:283 Climate Model Simulations of the Geological Past 1:296 Climate Sensitivity 1:301 Climatic Extremes 3:243 Climatology 1:308 Climax Vegetation 2:215 CLIVAR (CLImate VARiability and Predictability) 1:311 CloudRadiation Interactions 1:312 Clouds 1:316 Club of Rome 4:166 CO2 Enrichment: Effects on Ecosystems 2:215 Coastal Zone Management 4:166 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) 3:247 Common but Differentiated Responsibility Principle (Stockholm/Rio) 4:168 Commons, Tragedy of the 5:208 Community Richness 2:224 Conference of Parties 4:168 Conservation Biology 2:228 Consumption Patterns: Economic and Demographic Change 3:249 Contaminated Lands and Sediments: Chemical Time Bombs? 3:98 Continental Drift 1:321 Controlled Environment Facilities in Global Change Research 2:228 Convection 1:325 Convention on Biological Diversity 4:169 Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP) 4:173 Coral Bleaching (19971998) 2:231 Coral Reefs: an Ecosystem Subject to Multiple Environmental Threats 2:232 Coriolis Effect 1:326 Cousteau, Jacques 5:209 Cretaceous 1:329 Critical Load 3:252 Crop Models 2:241 Crutzen, Paul J 1:330 Cryosphere 1:330 CSD (Commission on Sustainable Development) 4:178

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ARTICLES

513

Cumulative Environmental Assessment Curi, Kriton

4:178 3:253

Daisyworld 2:247 Dansgaard Oescheger Cycles 1:332 Darwin, Charles Robert 2:247 Data Banks: Archiving Ecological Data and Information 2:248 De Wit, C T 2:259 Deep Ecology 5:211 Deforestation and Habitat Fragmentation in the Amazon Basin 3:255 Deforestation in Historic Times 3:259 Deforestation, Tropical: Global Impacts 3:265 Demand Management 4:181 Dematerialization and Sustainable Development 4:96 Dematerialization of the Economy 4:183 Demographic Change: Indonesian Transmigration 3:272 Demographic Change: Peopling of the Paci c Islands 3:273 Demographic Change: the Aging Population 3:277 Demographic transition 5:211 Depletion of Stratospheric Ozone 1:140 Deposition, Dry 2:260 Deposition, Wet 2:261 Deserti cation 3:282 Deserti cation Convention 4:183 Deserti cation, De nition of 3:282 Deserts 1:332 Development and Global Environmental Change 5:150 Dimethylsul de (DMS) 1:343 Discounting 5:214 Distance Learning and Environment 4:186 Disturbance 2:261 DIVERSITAS 2:268 Dobr s European Environment Assessment Process 4:547 Dooge, James 4:191 Dowdeswell, Elizabeth 4:192 Downscaling 1:346 DPSIR (Driving Forces Pressures State Impacts Responses) 4:193 Dust 1:347 DVI (Dust Veil Index) 3:290 EA (Environmental Assessment) Earth Charter Earth Day Earth First! Earth Observing Systems Earth System History Earth System Processes Earthquake Intensity and Magnitude Scales 4:194 5:216 5:216 5:217 1:61 1:31 1:13 3:293

Earthquakes Triggered by Human Activities 3:294 ECA (Economic Commission for Africa) 4:194 ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) 4:195 Eco Taxes 4:195 Ecocentric, Biocentric, Gaiacentric 5:217 Eco-ef ciency 4:106 Eco-engineering to Promote Ecological Sustainability in China in an Era of Global Environmental Change 4:548 Ecofeminism 5:218 Ecological Capacity 3:296 Ecological Dumping 4:198 Ecological Economics 5:37 Ecological Footprint 3:302 Economics and Global Environmental Change 5:25 Eco-socialism 5:224 Ecosystem Approach 2:225 Ecosystem Health 4:199 Ecosystem Integrity 4:199 Ecosystem Services 2:226 Ecosystem Services and Costing 2:272 Ecosystem Stability 2:281 Ecosystem Structure and Function 2:282 Ecotones 2:283 Ecotoxicology 3:302 EEA (European Environment Agency) 4:200 Eemian 1:352 Ehrlich, Paul 2:288 EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) 4:201 El Ni no 1:353 El Ni no and La Ni na: Causes and Global Consequences 1:353 El Ni no/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) 1:370 El Viejo 1:370 Elton, C S 2:289 Emerging Environmental Issues 4:72 Emergy 3:303 Emergy 5:228 Emissions Trading 4:201 Encyclopedias: Compendia of Global Knowledge 5:228 Endangered Species 4:201 Energy Balance and Climate 1:371 Energy Balance Climate Models 1:376 Enlightenment Project 5:229 Environment 2:290 Environmental (Eco) Labeling 4:210 Environmental Assessment of Major Development Projects 4:203 Environmental Cadmium in the Food Chain 3:303 Environmental Change and Human Health: Extending the Sustainability Agenda 3:130 Environmental Changes Driven by Civil Con ict and War 3:146

514

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ARTICLES

Environmental Data Report 4:204 Environmental Defense Fund 5:230 Environmental Economics 5:230 Environmental Education 4:206 Environmental Ethics 5:231 Environmental Movement the Rise of Non-government Organizations (NGOs) 5:243 Environmental Philosophy: Phenomenological Ecology 5:253 Environmental Policies for the World Oceans 4:212 Environmental Politics 5:49 Environmental Psychology/Perception 5:257 Environmental Refugees 4:214 Environmental Responses: an Overview 4:1 Environmental Security 5:269 Environmental Sociology 5:278 EOS (Earth Observing System) 1:382 Equilibrium Response 1:382 Equity 5:279 ESCAP (Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacic) 4:218 EU (European Union) 4:218 European Network for Research in Global Change (ENRICH) 2:290 Eutrophication 2:292 Evolutionary Processes in Ecosystems 2:292 Extinctions (Contemporary and Future) 2:301 Extinctions and Biodiversity in the Fossil Record 2:297 Exxon Valdez Oil Spill 5:283 FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) 4:219 Feedbacks, Chemistry Climate Interactions 1:384 Fingerprinting 1:388 Fisheries: Effects of Climate Change on the Life Cycles of Salmon 3:309 Fisheries: Minamata Disease 3:312 Fisheries: Pacic Coast Salmon 3:314 Fisheries: Pollution and Habitat Degradation in Tropical Asian Rivers 3:316 Fixed Nitrogen 2:308 Food Consumption Patterns and their Inuence on Greenhouse Gas Emissions 3:323 Food Webs 2:308 Forest Gap Models 2:316 Forest Logging Systems in Tropical Countries: Differential Impacts 3:328 Forest Stand 2:323 Forest: the FAO Denition 2:324 Fragmentation and Corridors 2:324 Francis of Assisi 5:284 Franklin, Benjamin 1:390 Freshwater Fisheries 2:327 Friends of the Earth 5:285 Fronts 1:391

Fugacity Functional Biodiversity Futures Research

3:335 2:20 5:285

Gaia 2:332 Gaia Hypothesis 5:287 GAIM (Global Analysis, Interpretation and Modeling) Program 1:392 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand 5:290 GARP (Global Atmospheric Research Program) 1:392 GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) 4:221 GAW (Global Atmosphere Watch) 1:393 GCDIS (Global Change Data and Information System) 1:393 GCOS (Global Climate Observing System) 1:394 General Circulation Models (GCMs) 1:394 Generic Decomposition and Yield (GDAY): A Model of Global Change Impacts on Plant and Soil 2:332 GEO (Global Environment Outlook) 4:221 Geoengineering: a Way to Stabilize Global Climate? 3:336 Geographic(al) Information Systems (GIS) 4:222 Geography 3:337 Geological Cycling 1:397 Geomorphological Change for Urbanization and Industry 3:338 Geomorphological Change: Landscape Modication for Recreation 3:345 Geomorphology 1:402 Geothermal Heat 1:402 GESAMP (Joint Group of Experts on the Scientic Aspects of Marine Environmental Protection) 4:226 GEWEX (Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment) 1:402 Glaciers 1:404 Global Environmental Change and Environmental History 5:62 Global Environmental Change and Natural Disasters 4:227 Global Forest Watch 4:231 Global land cover and land use trends and changes 3:13 Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) 2:336 Global Plate Tectonics 1:410 Global Population Trends 3:16 Global Terrestrial Observing System (GTOS) 2:337 Global Warming Potential (GWP) 1:411 Globalization in Historical Perspective 5:73 GOALS (Global OceanAtmosphere Land System) 1:411 Goldemberg, Jose 4:233 Goodman, Gordon 4:234 Governance and International Management 5:292 Great Lakes Region of North America 4:536

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ARTICLES

515

Green Investment 4:235 Green Revolution 3:347 Greenhouse Effect 1:413 Greenhouse Food Production (Agriculture Intensive) 3:352 Greening of Cities 3:356 Greenland 1:413 Greenland Ice Sheet 1:419 GRID (Global Resource Information Database, of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Division of Early Warning and Assessment) 4:237 Ground Temperature 1:422 Groundwater Withdrawal and the Development of the Great Man-made River Project, Libya 3:362

Habitat 2:339 Hadley Circulation 1:427 Halocarbons 1:427 Halophyte/Halophobe 2:339 Hare, Kenneth 1:428 Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) 3:371 Hazards in Global Environmental Change 5:297 Heinrich (H-) Events 1:429 Hinduism and the Environment 5:303 Holdgate, Martin 4:239 Holdridge Life Zone Classication 2:339 Holling, C S 2:340 Holocene 1:431 Holocene: Climate Changes and Society 3:372 Homocentric 5:311 Houghton, John Theodore 1:432 Human Body, Immediate Environment 5:312 Human Disturbance of the Earth System: Dynamics and Complexities 3:1 Humidity 1:432 Hurricanes, Typhoons and other Tropical Storms Descriptive Overview 1:433 Hurricanes, Typhoons and other Tropical Storms Dynamics and Intensity 1:439 Hutchinson, G Evelyn 2:341 Hydrouorocarbons 1:447 Hydrogen Peroxide Trends in Greenland Glaciers 1:447 Hydrologic Cycle 1:450 Hydrology 1:464 Hydrology 2:343

IAHS (International Association of Hydrological Sciences) IAI (Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research) IAMAS (International Association of Meteorology Atmospheric Sciences)

1:466 4:241 and 1:466

IAPSO (International Association for the Physical Sciences of the Oceans) 1:467 Icebergs 1:467 ICREA (International Commodity-related Environmental Agreements) 4:242 ICSU (International Council for Science) 4:242 IDNDR (The International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction) 4:242 IDWSSD (International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade) 4:244 IFIAS (International Federation of Institutes for Advanced Study) 4:244 IGAC (International Global Atmospheric Chemistry) 1:467 IGBP (International Geosphere Biosphere Programme) 2:350 IGBP Core Projects 2:37 IGBP Terrestrial Transects 2:351 IGBP-DIS (International Geosphere Biosphere Program Data and Information System) 2:351 IGY (International Geophysical Year) 1:468 IHDP (International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Change) 4:245 IHP (International Hydrological Program) 1:468 IIASA (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis) 4:246 Imbrie, John 1:469 IMO (International Maritime Organization) 4:246 Impacts of Global Environmental Change on Animals 2:56 Indicators on Environmental Quality and Sustainable Development 4:247 Indigenous Knowledge, Peoples and Sustainable Practice 5:314 Indus Basin: a Case Study in Water Management 3:377 Industrial and Anthroposystem Metabolism 3:73 Industrial Ecology 4:248 Industrial Responses to Stratospheric Ozone Depletion and Lessons for Global Climate Change 4:65 Infectious Diseases 2:357 Infrared Radiation 1:470 Insect Pests and Global Environmental Change 3:381 Integrated Assessment 4:250 Integrated Assessment Models of Global Change 4:253 Integrated Assessment, Denition of 4:249 Integrated Pest Management (IPM) in an Era of Global Environmental Change 4:261 Inter American Institute for Global Change (IAIGC) 2:363 Inter-basin Transfer (IBT) for Water Supplies 3:387 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): an Historical Review 4:265 Internalization 4:278

516

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ARTICLES

International Biosphere Program (IBP) a Foundation for Global Studies 2:364 International Environmental Law 5:324 International Environmental Prizes 4:279 International Environmental Standards 4:281 International Organizations in the Earth Sciences 1:156 International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) 3:391 Intertidal Zones 2:365 Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) 1:476 IOC (Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission) 4:287 Ionosphere 1:476 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 1:477 IPCS (International Program on Chemical Safety) 4:288 IRI (International Research Institute for Climate Prediction) 1:477 Iron Cycle 2:369 IRPTC (International Register of Potentially Toxic Chemicals) 4:289 Irrigation: Environmental Impacts 3:392 Irrigation: Induced Demise of Wetlands 3:399 ISCCP (International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project) 1:478 ISEW (Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare) and GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator) 5:331 Islam and the Environment 5:332 ISLSCP (International Satellite Land Surface Climatology Project) 1:478 ISO (International Organization for Standardization) 4:290 Isostasy 1:479 ISSC (International Social Science Council) 5:339 IUCN (The World Conservation Union) 4:290 IUGG (International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics) 1:479 Izrael, Yuri A 4:291

Kondratyev, Nikolai Dmitrievich Kovda, V A

5:356 3:411

Jains and the Environment Jet Stream JGOFS (Joint Global Ocean Flux Study) Joint Implementation Judaism and the Environment Junge Layer

5:341 1:481 1:483 4:292 5:349 1:483

Karst Kassas, Mohamed Keeling, Charles David Kelly, Petra Keystone Species Kondratyev, Kirill Yakovlevich

3:411 4:292 1:484 5:355 2:375 1:485

La Nina 1:487 Lahars 3:413 Lake Baikal 3:413 Lake Victoria 4:539 Lakes and Rivers 2:375 Lamb, Hubert H 1:487 Land Cover and Climate 1:488 Land Degradation in the Mediterranean 3:417 Land Reclamation from Seas 3:424 Land Subsidence 3:430 Land Surface 1:493 Land Transformation in China: 3000 Years of Human Ecological History 3:430 Landscape Ecology 2:383 Landscape, Urban Landscape, and the Human Shaping of the Environment 5:357 Lang, Winfred 4:294 Lapse Rate 1:499 Large Scale Biosphere Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA) 2:383 Last Glacial Maximum 1:500 Latent Heat 1:500 LEAD (Leadership for Environment and Development) 4:294 Leapfrogging Technology 4:295 Leopold, Aldo 5:367 Life Cycles 2:385 Life Style, Private Choice, and Environmental Governance 5:368 Lifetime (of a Gas) 1:501 Lightning 1:501 Lightning and Atmospheric Electricity 1:502 Limnology 1:503 Literature and the Environment 5:370 Lithosphere 1:503 Little Ice Age 1:504 LOICZ (LandOcean Interactions in the Coastal Zone) 2:389 London Dumping Convention 4:297 Long-term Ecological Research (LTER) System 2:390 Lorenz, Edward N 1:509 Love Canal 5:382 Lovelock, James 1:510 Low Concentration Methane Bearing Gases 3:435 LRTAP (Convention on Long Range Trans-boundary Air Pollution) 4:297

MacNeill, Jim MaddenJulian Oscillation

4:299 1:511

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ARTICLES

517

Malnutrition, Infectious Diseases and Global Environmental Change 3:440 Malone, Thomas F 1:511 Malthus, Thomas Robert 5:384 Man and Nature as a Single but Complex System 5:384 Manabe, Syukuro 1:512 Mangrove Ecosystems 2:395 Margalef, Ramon 2:401 Marine Mammal Exploitation: Whales and Whaling 3:446 Marsh, George Perkins 3:450 Marshes, Anthropogenic Changes 3:451 Materials Flow Accounting 4:300 Materials Flows for Mining and Quarrying 3:454 Maunder Minimum 1:514 Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) 4:307 May, Robert M 2:401 Medieval Climatic Optimum 1:514 Mediterranean Sea 4:528 MEPC (Marine Environment Protection Committee) 4:308 Mercury in the Environment 2:402 Mesosphere 1:516 Mesozoic 1:516 Metadata 2:409 Metapopulations 2:411 Meteorology 1:517 Methane Clathrates 1:518 Methane: Industrial Sources 3:461 Methane 1:517 Methyl Bromide 1:520 Microbial Diversity 2:421 Migrations: The Environmental Challenge of Population Movements 3:465 Milankovitch, Milutin 1:522 MINK (Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas) Study 4:550 Model Simulations of Present and Historical Climates 1:114 Modeling Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change 5:394 Modeling Regional Climate Change 1:523 Models of the Earth System 1:99 Modernity vs. Post-modern Environmentalism 5:408 Molina, Mario J 1:533 Monitoring in Support of Policy: an Adaptive Ecosystem Approach 4:116 Monitoring Systems, Global Geophysical 1:534 Monsi, Masami 2:426 Monsoons 1:539 Montreal Protocol, Multilateral Fund for the Implementation of 4:309 Mooney, Harold A 2:426 Mountain Climates 1:540 MSU (Microwave Sounding Unit) 1:541

Muir, John Multi-issue Assessments Munk, Walter Munn, Robert Edward (Ted)

5:411 4:316 1:541 1:542

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein 5:412 National and Local Responses to Desertication 4:319 National Environmental Law 5:413 National Responsibilities for Greenhouse Gas Emissions 3:472 National Self-interest: a Major Factor in International Environmental Policy Formulation 4:323 Natural Capital 2:428 Natural Climate Variability 1:544 Natural Hazards 3:479 Natural Hazards: Social and Policy Responses 4:328 Natural Records of Climate Change 1:550 Natural Systems: Impacts of Climate Change 2:67 Nature 5:419 New Ageism 5:420 Niche 2:429 Nile River 4:542 NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) 5:421 Nitrate Leaching 3:493 Nitrate Protection Zones in Europe 3:493 Nitrogen Cycle 2:429 Nitrogen Deposition on Forests 2:435 Nitrogen Fixers 2:442 Nitrogen Mineralization 2:446 Nitrogen: Agricultural Uses and their Impacts 3:499 Nitrous Oxide 1:554 No Regrets Principle 4:334 Non-equilibrium Ecology 2:446 Non-linear Systems 2:450 Noosphere 5:421 North Atlantic Oscillation 1:555 Nuclear Waste: Geological Issues 3:506 Nuclear Winter 3:515 Obasi, G O P 4:335 Ocean Circulation 1:557 Ocean Conveyor Belt 1:579 Ocean Drilling Program 1:581 Ocean Observing Techniques 1:581 Oceanography 1:584 Odum, Eugene P 2:456 OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) 4:335 Oeschger, Hans A 1:585 OH Radical: is the Cleansing Capacity of the Atmosphere Changing? 2:457 Oil and the Arctic Environment 3:517 Oil Fires: Kuwait 3:523

518

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ARTICLES

Oil Industry: Cultural Impacts and Environmental Risk Tolerance 3:525 Oil Shales and Tar Sands 3:528 Oligotrophic/Heterotrophic/Eutrophic 2:458 Orbital Variations 1:586 Organic Farming and the Environment 3:532 Ozone Depletion Potential (ODP) 1:590 Ozone Hole 1:590 Ozone Layer: Vienna Convention and the Montreal Protocol 4:337 Pacic Decadal Oscillation 1:592 Pacic North American (PNA) Teleconnection 1:594 PAGES (Past Global Changes) 1:596 Paleoclimatology 1:596 Paleozoic 1:597 PAR (Photosynthetically Active Radiation) 2:460 Parameterization 1:598 Passerine 2:460 Peruorocarbons (PFCs) 1:598 Permafrost 1:598 PET (Potential Evapotranspiration) 2:461 Phase Shifts or Flip-ops in Complex Systems 5:422 Phenology 2:461 Phenotype/Genotype 2:465 Phosphorus Cycle 2:466 Phosphorus Water Quality Objectives 3:542 Phosphorus: Global Transfers 3:536 Photochemical Reactions 1:601 Photosynthesis 2:470 Phytophagy 2:471 Planetary Boundary Layer 1:603 2:471 Plant Competition in an Elevated CO2 World Plant Dispersal and Migration 2:81 Plant Functional Types 2:481 2:489 Plant Growth at Elevated CO2 Plant Ontogeny 2:496 Plants Carbon Balance and Growth 2:497 Plants from Cells to Ecosystems: Impacts of Global Environmental Change 2:94 Plate Tectonics 1:605 Pleistocene 1:607 Policies for Sustainable and Responsible Fisheries 4:343 Policies for Sustainable Forests: Examples from Canada 4:351 Policies that Promote Sustainable Energy Futures 4:356 Policies to Achieve Sustainable Agriculture 4:358 Policies to Achieve Sustainable Tourism 4:362 Policy Exercises: a Tool for Solving Environmental Policy Dilemmas 4:366 Policy Responses to Public Health Issues Relating to Global Environmental Change 4:47 Political Movements/Ideologies and the Environment 5:429

Political Systems and the Environment: Utopianism Polynyas Population Sizes, Changes Post-normal Science PPP (Polluter Pay Principle) Precautionary Principle Precautionary Principle Prediction in the Earth Sciences Prehistoric People and Forest Soils Productivity Productivity of Terrestrial Ecosystems Projection of Future Changes in Climate Property Rights and Regimes Public-driven Response to Global Environmental Change 5:443 1:607 2:504 5:451 4:368 4:369 5:455 1:607 3:546 2:515 2:516 1:126 5:457 4:21

QuasiBiennial Oscillation (QBO) 1:611 QuasiDecadal Oscillation 1:613 Quaternary 1:615 Quotas in International Environmental Negotiations 4:371

r K Strategies 2:540 Radiative Forcing 1:616 Radionuclides, Cosmogenic 1:618 Radiosondes 1:619 Rain 1:622 RAINS (Regional Air Pollution Information and Simulation) 4:552 Raven, Peter 2:522 Red Tide 3:548 Redeld Ratio 2:522 Redox Potential 2:523 Refugees and Human Conict 3:548 Regional Responses to Global Environmental Change 4:515 Relating to Nature: Spirituality, Philosophy, and Environmental Concern 5:97 Religion and Ecology in the Abrahamic Faiths 5:461 Religion and Environment Among North American First Nations 5:466 Remote Sensing 2:524 Remote Sensing, Terrestrial Systems 2:528 Residence Time (of an Atom, Molecule or Particle) 1:622 Resilience 2:530 Respiration 2:531 Restoration, Ecosystem 2:532 Revelle, Roger Randall Dougan 1:623 Rhizosphere 2:539

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ARTICLES

519

Rice and its Spread: Double Cropping; New Varieties Environmental Consequences and Methane Gas, Sustainability 3:116 Richardson, Lewis Fry 1:624 Risk Management in an Era of Global Environmental Change 4:375 River Regulation 3:551 Roberts, Walter Orr 1:625 Rodin, Leonid E 2:540 Roosevelt, Theodore 5:475 Rossby Waves 1:626 Rossby, Carl-Gustaf 1:626 Rosswall, Per Thomas 2:541 Rowland, F Sherwood 1:627 Runoff 1:628 Salinity Salinity and Agriculture Salinity Patterns in the Ocean Salinization Scenarios SCEP (Study of Critical Environmental Problems) Scienti c Responses in an Era of Global Environmental Change SCOPE (Scientic Committee on Problems of the Environment) SCOR (Scientic Committee on Oceanic Research) Sea Ice Sea Level Sea Surface Temperature Sedimentary Records of Long-term Ecological Change Seismic Risk (and Risk Assessment) Sensible Heat Seveso Shifting Cultivation and Land Degradation Shipping: Harbors and Ports Sierra Club Small is Beautiful SMIC (Study of Mans Impact on Climate) Snow Social Assessment Social Ecology Social Impact Assessment Social Impact Assessment (SIA) Social Learning in the Management of Global Atmospheric Risks Social Science and Global Environmental Change Socially Responsible Investment Soft Energy Path Soft Energy Paths Soil Amelioration 1:629 3:559 1:629 2:543 5:476 4:382 4:36 4:383 1:640 1:640 1:645 1:650 2:112 4:383 1:656 5:482 3:565 3:572 5:483 5:483 4:385 1:656 4:386 5:484 4:387 5:484 5:485 5:109 4:393 3:583 5:487 3:583

Soil Deterioration and Loss of Topsoil 3:587 Soil Erosion 4:395 Soil Mineralization 2:543 Soil Moisture 1:658 Solar Irradiance and Climate 1:659 Solar Variability, Long-term 1:666 Southern Ocean 1:668 Southern Oscillation 1:672 Sovereignty and Sovereign States 5:487 SPARC (Stratospheric Processes and their Role in Climate) 1:672 Speth, James Gustave 4:397 Stable Isotopes 2:544 START (Global Change System for Analysis Research and Training) 4:398 Stockholm and Beyond 4:398 Storm Surge 1:673 Strategic Environmental Assessment 4:403 Stratosphere 1:674 Stratosphere, Chemistry 1:675 Stratosphere, Ozone Trends 1:682 Stratosphere, Temperature and Circulation 1:697 Strong, Maurice 4:406 Sub-grid Processes 1:704 Succession 2:551 Succession, Denition of 2:550 Suess Effect 2:557 Sunspots 1:704 Suomi, Verner Edward 1:707 Sustainability: Human, Social, Economic and Environmental 5:489 Sustainable Cities Policies 4:406 Sustainable Development 4:411 Sustainable Development of Energy Resources in Small Island Developing States (SIDS) 4:412 Sustainable Development Policies in Small Island Developing States 4:416 Sustainable Development Policy 4:422 Sustainable Energy Policies 4:86 Sustainable Transportation 4:426 Sverdrup, Harald Ulrik 1:708 Swidden 3:594 Symbiosis 2:557 Tamm, Carl Olof 2:559 Taxon 2:560 Taxonomy/Systematics 2:560 Technological Society and its Relation to Global Environmental Change 5:86 Temperate Coniferous Forests 2:560 Temperate Deciduous Forests 2:565 Temperate Grasslands 2:569 Temperature 1:709

520

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ARTICLES

Temperature Increase: Effects on Terrestrial Ecosystems 2:575 Terrestrial and Freshwater Ecosystems: Impacts of Global Change 2:122 The Changing Human Nature Relationships (HNR) in the Context of Global Environmental Change 5:11 The Earth System 1:1 The Emergence of Global Environment Change into Politics 5:124 The Environment and Violent Conict 5:137 The Global Temperature Record 1:82 The Human Dimensions of Global Change 5:1 Theology 5:492 Theories of Health and Environment 5:492 Thermohaline Circulation 1:710 Thoreau, Henry David 5:502 Thornthwaite, Charles Warren 2:581 Three Mile Island 5:503 Tickell, Crispin 4:436 Tidal Power Development 3:596 Tides, Atmospheric 1:710 Tides, Oceanic 1:710 Toepfer, Klaus 4:436 TOGA (Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere) 1:713 Tolba, Mostafa 4:437 Tornadoes 1:713 Torrey Canyon 5:503 Tourism and Ecosystems 3:597 Tourism as a Global Driving Force for Environmental Change 3:609 Tourism: Climate Change and Tourist Resorts 3:623 Toxic Wastes: Generation and Disposal: a Case Study of UK Practice and Legislation 3:628 Tradable Permits for Greenhouse Gases 4:438 Tradable Permits for Limiting Stratospheric Ozone Depletion 4:446 Tradable Permits for Sulfur Emission Reductions 4:450 Trade Winds 1:715 Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes 3:631 Transboundary Water Resource Management: The Example of the Canada/US IJC (International Joint Commission) 4:553 Transferable Fisheries Quotas (TFQs) 4:455 Transient Response 1:715 Transport and Species Dispersal 3:632 Transport Infrastructure 3:643 Transport: Global Freight and Passenger Flows 3:633 Trends in Environmental Management in the Last 40 Years 4:15 Trends in Global Emissions: Carbon, Sulfur, and Nitrogen 3:35 TRMM (Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission) 1:716 Tropical Forests 2:582

Tropical Savannas Tropopause Troposphere Troposphere, Ozone Chemistry Tropospheric Temperature Tsunamis, Causes and Consequences Tucker, Jim Tundra Tunguska Phenomenon

2:586 1:717 1:717 1:718 1:720 1:725 2:592 2:593 1:730

UARS (Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite) 1:732 Ultraviolet Radiation 1:732 ULYSSES (Urban Lifestyles, Sustainability, and Integrated Environmental Assessment) 4:460 UNCED (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development) 4:460 UNCHS (United Nations Centre for Human Settlements) 4:461 UNCLOS (United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea) 4:462 UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) 4:463 UNDP (United Nations Development Program) 4:464 UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) 4:464 UNESCO (United Nations Educational Scientic and Cultural Organization) and the Environment 4:465 UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) 4:466 UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organization) 4:468 United Nations Conferences on the Environment 4:469 United Nations Convention to Combat Desertication (UNCCD) 4:474 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Regional Seas Programme (RSP) 4:476 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Saskawa Environment Prize 4:477 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and Kyoto Protocol 4:478 UNSCEAR (United Nations Scientic Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation) 4:485 UNU (United Nations University) 5:504 Urban Climate and Respiratory Disease 3:649 Urban Ecosystems 3:655 Urban Heat Island 3:660 Urban Population Change 3:666 Urban Poverty and Environmental Health 3:672 Urban Sulfurous and Photochemical Smog 3:678 Urban Wastes 3:684 Use of Epidemiological Data to Develop Air Quality Standards for Short-term and Long-term Environmental Health Benets 4:485 Valued Ecosystem Component Vavrousek, Josef 4:493 4:493

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ARTICLES

521

Vegetation Ecosystem Model and Analysis Project (VEMAP) VEI (Volcanic Explosivity Index) Vernadsky, Vladimir Villach Conferences Viral Diseases and the In uence of Climate Change Virtual Environments Volatile Organic Compounds, Biogenic (VOCs) Volcanic Eruption, El Chichon Volcanic Eruption, Krakatau Volcanic Eruption, Mt. Pinatubo Volcanic Eruption, Tambora Volcanic Eruptions Volcanic Eruptions: Mt Merapi, Indonesia Volcanoes and Cities Volcanoes and the Environment Volvo Environment Prize von Humboldt, Alexander Vostok, Subglacial Lake

2:603 3:689 2:604 4:494 3:690 5:505 2:605 1:736 1:736 1:737 1:737 1:738 3:694 3:696 3:699 4:495 2:609 1:744

Wadi 3:707 Waldsterben 5:508 Walker Circulation 1:749 Ward, Barbara 4:497 Waste Dumps in Megacities: Case Study of Istanbul 3:707 Waste: the Global Mass and its Management 3:709 Wastes: Land ll and Land Raising 3:713 Water Resources: Baltic 3:720 Water Resources: Great Lakes Case Study 3:721 Water Resources: R o de la Plata 3:723 Water Use: Future Trends, and Environmental and Social Impacts 3:84 Water Vapor: Distribution and Trends 1:750 Waterlogging 3:726 Watson, Robert T 4:498 Wave Power Development 3:726 WBCSD (World Business Council for Sustainable Development) 4:498

WCC (World Climate Conferences 1979 and 1990) 1:752 WCC (World Council of Churches) 5:509 WCED (World Commission on Environment and Development) 4:499 WCP (World Climate Programme) 1:752 WCRP (World Climate Research Programme) 1:753 Weather 1:754 Weather Extremes and Climate Impacts: a Case Study for the United States 3:728 Weathering 1:755 Weed 2:611 Wegener, Alfred 1:755 WFC (World Food Council) 4:500 WGNE (Working Group on Numerical Experimentation) 1:756 White, Gilbert 4:500 Whittaker, Robert H 2:611 WHO (World Health Organization) 4:501 Wilson, Edward Osborne 2:612 Wind Chill 1:756 Wind Power Development 3:733 WMO (World Meteorological Organization) 1:757 WOCE (World Ocean Circulation Experiment) 1:759 Woodwell, George Masters 2:613 World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) 4:503 World Conservation Union (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species 4:508 World Energy Consumption Trends 3:734 World Energy Council 3:738 Worldwatch Institute 4:509 WRI (World Resources Institute) 4:510 WTO (World Trade Organization) 4:510 WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) 4:511 Yellow River, China: a Case Study in Water Resources Younger Dryas

3:740 1:761

Contributors
Hussein Abaza UNEP, Geneva, Switzerland GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) Waleed Abdalati NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA Greenland Ice Sheet Gina A Adams Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA Biodiversity in Soils and Sediments: Potential Effects of Global Change Nazeer Ahmad The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago Acid Sulfate Soils Bryant Allen The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia Shifting Cultivation and Land Degradation Swidden Myles R Allen Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Didcot, UK Climate Change, Detection and Attribution Keith Alverson PAGES (Past Global Changes) International Project Ofce, Bern, Switzerland Climate Change, Abrupt Stephen O Andersen US Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, USA Industrial Responses to Stratospheric Ozone Depletion and Lessons for Global Climate Change Meinrat O Andreae Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Mainz, Germany Dimethylsulde (DMS) John T Andrews University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA Heinrich (H-) Events Natalia G Andronova University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA Budyko, Mikhail Ivanovich Climate Sensitivity Karen L Aplin University of Reading, Reading, UK Atmospheric Electricity Christof Appenzeller Swiss Federal Ofce of Meteorology and Climatology, Zurich, Switzerland North Atlantic Oscillation John W Ashe Permanent Mission of Antigua and Barbuda to the United Nations, New York, NY, USA ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) Sustainable Development Policies in Small Island Developing States Cynthia S Atherton Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA, USA Carbon Monoxide Troposphere, Ozone Chemistry Robert U Ayres Center for the Management of Environmental Resources, Fontainebleau, France Dematerialization of the Economy Eco-efciency Industrial Ecology Internalization C Scott Baker Auckland University, Auckland, New Zealand Marine Mammal Exploitation: Whales and Whaling James A Baker Ministry of Natural Resources, Sault Ste. Marie, Canada Adaptive Environmental Management

524

CONTRIBUTORS

Marcia B Baker University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA Clouds Dennis Baldocchi University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA Carbon and Energy: Terrestrial Stores and Fluxes Georges Balmino Centre National dEtudes, Toulouse, France IUGG (International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics) Tapas Kumar Bandyopadhyay Ministry of Environment and Forests, New Delhi, India Cattle Grazing: Impacts on Land Cover and Methane Emissions Kaj Barlund UN Economic Commission for Europe, Geneva, Switzerland LRTAP (Convention on Long Range Trans-boundary Air Pollution) Guy B Barnett CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Canberra, Australia Natural Systems: Impacts of Climate Change Leonard A Barrie Paci c Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA Arctic Air Quality Roger G Barry University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA Cryosphere Mountain Climates Brad Bass University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada Downscaling Greening of Cities Michel Batisse Centre Dactivitees Regionales du Plan Bleu, Sophia Antipolis, France Blue Plan Mediterranean Sea UNESCO (United Nations Educational Scientic and Cultural Organization) and the Environment

F A Bazzaz Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Plant Competition in an Elevated CO2 World Plants from Cells to Ecosystems: Impacts of Global Environmental Change Lee Beck United States Environmental Protection Agency, Research Triangle Park, NC, USA Methane: Industrial Sources B Beckage Duke University, Durham, NC, USA Plant Dispersal and Migration Juerg Beer Swiss Federal Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (EAWAG), Duebendorf, Switzerland Solar Variability, Long-term Burton Bennett New York, NY, USA Chernobyl UNSCEAR (United Nations Scientic Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation) Charles Bentley University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA Antarctica Icebergs Polynyas Andre Berger Institut dAstronomie et de G eophysique G. Lema tre, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium Climate Model Simulations of the Geological Past Milankovitch, Milutin Orbital Variations Elizabeth K Berner Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA Carbon Dioxide Concentration and Climate Over Geological Times Robert A Berner Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA Carbon Dioxide Concentration and Climate Over Geological Times Malcolm C M Beveridge University of Stirling, Stirling, UK Aquaculture and Environment: Global View from the Tropics to High Latitudes Aquaculture: Salmon Farming

CONTRIBUTORS

525

R G S Bidwell Queens University, Kingston, Canada Allometric Angiosperm/Gymnosperm Autotroph/Heterotroph Benthic/Pelagic Biogeochemical Cycle Bioremediation Conservation Biology Fixed Nitrogen Habitat Halophyte/Halophobe Niche Nitrogen Mineralization Oligotrophic/Heterotrophic/Eutrophic PAR (Photosynthetically Active Radiation) Passerine Phenotype/Genotype Photosynthesis Phytophagy Plant Ontogeny Respiration Rhizosphere Soil Mineralization Symbiosis Taxon Taxonomy/Systematics Ambassador Lars Bjorkbom Stockholm, Sweden Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP) Howard B Bluestein University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA Tornadoes Stephen Bocking Trent University, Peterborough, Canada Marsh, George Perkins John H Bodley Washington State University, Pullman College, WA, USA Anthropology and Global Environmental Change Globalization in Historical Perspective Rumen D Bojkov World Meteorological Organization, Geneva, Switzerland Stratosphere, Ozone Trends Ester Boserup (Deceased) Independent Consultant Technological Society and its Relation to Global Environmental Change Philippe Bourdeau Universit e Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium DPSIR (Driving ForcesPressuresState Impacts Responses) Ecotoxicology EU (European Union) IPCS (International Program on Chemical Safety) IRPTC (International Register of Potentially Toxic Chemicals) Scientic Responses in an Era of Global Environmental Change

Ian Bowler University of Leicester, Leicester, UK Agricultural Intensication in Western Europe Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) Michelle Boyle University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada Monitoring in Support of Policy: an Adaptive Ecosystem Approach Guy Brasseur Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany Crutzen, Paul J OH Radical: is the Cleansing Capacity of the Atmosphere Changing? Peter Brimblecombe University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK Aerosols, Troposphere Atmospheric Composition, Present Atmospheric Structure Jeffrey R Brook Meteorological Service of Canada, Toronto, Canada Use of Epidemiological Data to Develop Air Quality Standards for Short-term and Long-term Environmental Health Benets Thomas M Brooks Center for Applied Biodiversity Science, Conservation International, Washington, DC, USA Extinctions (Contemporary and Future) Barbara E Brown University of Newcastle, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK Coral Bleaching (19971998) Kerry Brown Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Jains and the Environment Janet Browne Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London, UK Darwin, Charles Robert Jim Bruce Ottawa, Canada Global Environmental Change and Natural Disasters Villach Conferences IDNDR (The International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): an Historical Review

526

CONTRIBUTORS

Paul H Brunner Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria Anthropogenic Metabolism and Environmental Legacies Dirk Bryant World Resource Institute, Washington, DC, USA Global Forest Watch Reid Bryson University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA Jet Stream Robert W Buddemeier Kansas Geological Survey, Lawrence, KS, USA Coral Reefs: an Ecosystem Subject to Multiple Environmental Threats Keith Bull Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, Monks Wood, UK Critical Load Joanna Burger Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, USA Tourism and Ecosystems Kevin Burke University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA Lithosphere Virginia Burkett US Geological Survey, Lafayette, LA, USA Intertidal Zones Richard T Burnett Health Canada, Ottawa, Canada Use of Epidemiological Data to Develop Air Quality Standards for Short-term and Long-term Environmental Health Benets Ian Burton Meteorological Service of Canada, Downsview, Canada Adaptation Strategies International Environmental Prizes White, Gilbert David M Bush State University of West Georgia, GA, USA Storm Surge

Elizabeth Bush Meteorological Service of Canada, Downsview, Canada Air Quality, Global James H Butler National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Boulder, CO, USA Methyl Bromide John Caddy Imperial College, London, UK and CINVESTAV, Merida, Mexico Policies for Sustainable and Responsible Fisheries J Baird Callicott University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA Environmental Ethics Josep G Canadell CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Canberra, Australia Biological and Ecological Dimensions of Global Environmental Change Mooney, Harold A Mark Cane Lamont-Dohety Earth Observatory, Palisades, NY, USA Bjerknes, Jacob Annika Carlsson-Kanyama Environmental Strategies Research Group, Stockholm, Sweden Food Consumption Patterns and their Inuence on Greenhouse Gas Emissions William J Carlyle University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Canada Cereal Cultivation (Agriculture, Extensive) Henri Carsalade FAO, Rome, Italy FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) WFC (World Food Council) David Cartwright Peters eld, Hampshire, UK Tides, Atmospheric Tides, Oceanic

CONTRIBUTORS

527

S Catovsky Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Plant Competition in an Elevated CO2 World Plants from Cells to Ecosystems: Impacts of Global Environmental Change Thure E Cerling University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA C3 and C4 Photosynthesis Stable Isotopes Marie-Lise Chanin CNRS/SA, Verrieres le Buisson, France SPARC (Stratospheric Processes and their Role in Climate) Piers Chapman Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA WOCE (World Ocean Circulation Experiment) Leslie Charles NASA, Washington, DC, USA CEOS (Committee on Earth Observation Satellites) Marion Cheatle UNEP, Nairobi, Kenya GEO (Global Environment Outlook) Anilla Cherian American Foundation for the University of West Indies, New York, NY, USA Sustainable Development of Energy Resources in Small Island Developing States (SIDS) Walter Chomentowski NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA Deforestation and Habitat Fragmentation in the Amazon Basin Nazli Choucri Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA Governance and International Management John R Christy University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, AL, USA MSU (Microwave Sounding Unit) Tropospheric Temperature

John A Church Antarctic CRC and CSIRO Marine Research, Tasmania, Australia Southern Ocean Galina Churkina Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena, Germany Biocenosis Noosphere Vernadsky, Vladimir Ralph J Cicerone University of California, Irvine, CA, USA Rowland, F Sherwood Phillip J Clapham Northeast Fisheries Science Center, Woods Hole, MA, USA Marine Mammal Exploitation: Whales and Whaling Jennifer Clapp Trent University, Peterborough, Canada Basel Convention J S Clark Duke University, Durham, NC, USA Plant Dispersal and Migration Kenneth E Cockshull Horticulture Research International, Warwick, UK Greenhouse Food Production (Agriculture Intensive) Rita R Colwell National Science Foundation, Arlington, VA, USA Biocomplexity Arthur Conacher University of Western Australia, Crawley, Australia Salinity and Agriculture Hadrian F Cook Imperial College at Wye, Ashford, UK Nitrate Protection Zones in Europe Claudia Copeland US Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA Animal Production, Feedlots, and Manure Problems in the US (Agriculture, Intensive)

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CONTRIBUTORS

Steven Cork CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Canberra, Australia Ecosystem Services and Costing Michael Coughlan World Meteorological Organization, Geneva, Switzerland Climate Agenda WCP (World Climate Programme) Curt Covey Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA, USA Asteroids and Comets, Effects on Earth Climate Analogues Model Simulations of Present and Historical Climates Peter Crabb Australian National University, Canberra, Australia Irrigation: Environmental Impacts Salinization Waterlogging Wolfgang Cramer Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany Biome Models Paul Crutzen Max-Planck Institute for Chemistry, Mainz, Germany Anthropocene Nuclear Winter Charles Curtis University of Manchester Environment Center, Manchester, UK Nuclear Waste: Geological Issues Walter F Dabberdt National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, USA Radiosondes Kenneth A Dahlberg Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, USA Green Revolution Gretchen C Daily Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA Ehrlich, Paul Virginia Dale Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA Disturbance Succession

Trevor D Davies University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK Lamb, Hubert H John Dearing University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK Sedimentary Records of Long-term Ecological Change R L Desjardins Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Ottawa, Canada Boreal EcosystemAtmosphere Study (BOREAS) Hama Arba Diallo Secretariat of the Convention to Combat Deserti cation, Bonn, Germany United Nations Convention to Combat Desertication (UNCCD) Ricardo Diez-Hochleitner The Club of Rome, Madrid, Spain Club of Rome Susan L Donoghue University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Volcanoes and the Environment Bo R Doos Vienna, Austria Lorenz, Edward N Jane Dougan Nova Scotia Southeastern University Oceanographic Center, Dania Beach, FL, USA Distance Learning and Environment Ian Douglas University of Manchester, Manchester, UK Changes in World Marine Fish Stocks Earthquake Intensity and Magnitude Scales Earthquakes Triggered by Human Activities Emergy Environmental Changes Driven by Civil Conict and War Geomorphological Change for Urbanization and Industry Global land cover and land use trends and changes Human Disturbance of the Earth System: Dynamics and Complexities Indus Basin: a Case Study in Water Management Karst Land Subsidence Materials Flows for Mining and Quarrying National Responsibilities for Greenhouse Gas Emissions Red Tide Urban Ecosystems World Energy Consumption Trends World Energy Council

CONTRIBUTORS

529

Cheryl A Doyle ENVIRON Corporation, Princeton, NJ, USA Urban Wastes Harold E Dregne Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA National and Local Responses to Desertication Soil Erosion Les Duckers Coventry University, UK Wave Power Development David Dudgeon The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Fisheries: Pollution and Habitat Degradation in Tropical Asian Rivers Peter N Duinker Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada Policies for Sustainable Forests: Examples from Canada Sustainable Development Valued Ecosystem Component Henri J Dumont Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium Black Sea Caspian Sea John Dunn University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK The Emergence of Global Environment Change into Politics John A Dutton Pennsylvania State University, PA, USA Suomi, Verner Edward O P Dwivedi University of Guelph, Guelph, Canada Hinduism and the Environment James R Ehleringer University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA C3 and C4 Photosynthesis Stable Isotopes Eckart Ehlers University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany von Humboldt, Alexander ISSC (International Social Science Council)

Paul R Ehrlich Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA Raven, Peter Omar E El-Arini Multilateral Fund Secretariat, Montreal, Canada Montreal Protocol, Multilateral Fund for the Implementation of Aleya El Bindari Hammad The Robert S Wagner School of Public Health Services, New York, NY, USA Policy Responses to Public Health Issues Relating to Global Environmental Change WHO (World Health Organization) Rasha El Diwany The Robert S Wagner School of Public Health Services, New York, NY, USA Policy Responses to Public Health Issues Relating to Global Environmental Change Essam El-Hinnawi National Research Center, Cairo, Egypt WCED (World Commission on Environment and Development) Osama A El-Kholy Arabian Gulf University, Manama, Bahrain Cleaner Production Environmental (Eco) Labeling Regional Responses to Global Environmental Change Tolba, Mostafa Trends in Environmental Management in the Last 40 Years Mahmoud Kh El-Sayed University of Alexandria, Alexandria, Egypt Coastal Zone Management David Elliott The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK Tidal Power Development J Cynan Ellis-Evans British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge, UK Vostok, Subglacial Lake Derek M Elsom Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK Urban Sulfurous and Photochemical Smog

530

CONTRIBUTORS

Jeremy Eppel Environment Directorate, Paris, France OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) Paul R Epstein Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA Infectious Diseases Jenni L Evans The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA Hurricanes, Typhoons and other Tropical Storms Dynamics and Intensity Robert Evans Anglia Polytechnic University, Cambridge, UK Soil Deterioration and Loss of Topsoil Malin Falkenmark Natural Science Research Council and Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), Stockholm, Sweden Circulating Freshwater: Crucial Link between Climate, Land, Ecosystems, and Humanity Benjamin S Felzer NOAA/Of ce of Global Programs, Silver Spring, MD, USA Agassiz, Louis CLIMAP (Climate: Long-range Investigation, Mapping, and Prediction) Cretaceous DansgaardOescheger Cycles Eemian Holocene Last Glacial Maximum Mesozoic Paleozoic Pleistocene Quaternary Adam Fenech Meteorological Service of Canada, Downsview, Canada Social Learning in the Management of Global Atmospheric Risks Ecosystem Services Natural Capital Frederick Ferre University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA Relating to Nature: Spirituality, Philosophy, and Environmental Concern Robert Finkel Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA, USA Radionuclides, Cosmogenic

John Firor National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, USA Roberts, Walter Orr Ian A Fleming Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, Trondheim, Norway and Coastal Oregon Marine Experiment Station, Oregon State University, Newport, OR, USA Fisheries: Effects of Climate Change on the Life Cycles of Salmon Life Cycles Richard A Fleming Great Lakes Forest Research Centre, Sault Ste. Marie, Canada Biome Biosphere Climax Vegetation Ecosystem Stability Environment Forest Stand Holling, C S Integrated Pest Management (IPM) in an Era of Global Environmental Change Keystone Species Landscape Ecology Life Cycles Productivity r K Strategies Succession, Denition of Weed Robert L Fleming Great Lakes Forest Research Centre, Sault Ste. Marie, Canada Life Cycles Richard Foltz University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA Nasr, Seyyed Hossein Lee Frelich University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN, USA Temperate Deciduous Forests Burkhard Frenzel Universit at Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany Holocene: Climate Changes and Society Elbert W (Joe) Friday, Jr National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC, USA Public-driven Response to Global Environmental Change Weather Roland Fuchs International START Secretariat, Washington, DC, USA START (Global Change System for Analysis Research and Training)

CONTRIBUTORS

531

Jed Fuhrman University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA Microbial Diversity Inez Fung University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA Tucker, Jim W S Fyfe University of Western Ontario, London, Canada Waste: the Global Mass and its Management Boris K Gannibal St Petersburg, Russian Federation Rodin, Leonid E John H C Gash Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Wallingford, UK Deforestation, Tropical: Global Impacts F Gassmann Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), Villigen, Switzerland Public-driven Response to Global Environmental Change W Lawrence Gates University of California, Livermore, CA, USA AMIP (Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project) Climate Climate Change WGNE (Working Group on Numerical Experimentation) Jean-Pierre Gattuso Laboratoire dOc eanographie de Villefranche, Villefranchesur-mer, France Coral Reefs: an Ecosystem Subject to Multiple Environmental Threats Michael Ghil University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA Natural Climate Variability Richard Gilbert Centre for Sustainable Transport, Toronto, Canada Sustainable Transportation Filippo Giorgi Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy Modeling Regional Climate Change

Bernhard Glaeser Social Science Research Center, Berlin, Germany The Changing HumanNature Relationships (HNR) in the Context of Global Environmental Change Michael Glantz National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, USA Aral Sea Jerome C Glenn American Council for the United Nations University, Washington, DC, USA Business-as-usual Scenarios Scenarios UNU (United Nations University) Michael Goch eld Rutgers University, NJ, USA Environmental Cadmium in the Food Chain Jose Goldemberg University of S ao Paulo, S ao Paulo, Brazil Leapfrogging Technology Policies that Promote Sustainable Energy Futures Frank B Golley University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA International Biosphere Program (IBP) a Foundation for Global Studies Spring Gombe The Robert S Wagner School of Public Health Services, New York, NY, USA Policy Responses to Public Health Issues Relating to Global Environmental Change Glynn Gomes Gomes Consulting Enterprises, Oakville, Canada Cousteau, Jacques M Gomez-Erache Facultad de Ciencias, Montevideo, Uruguay Water Resources: R o de la Plata Robert Goodland World Bank, Washington, DC, USA Environmental Assessment of Major Development Projects Social Assessment Strategic Environmental Assessment Sustainability: Human, Social, Economic and Environmental

532

CONTRIBUTORS

Eban Goodstein Lewis and Clark College, Portland, OR, US Economics and Global Environmental Change James R Gosz University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA Global Terrestrial Observing System (GTOS) Long-term Ecological Research (LTER) System Andrew Goudie University of Oxford, Oxford, UK Geomorphology J Goudriaan Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands Crop Models Anne Goujon International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria Demographic transition Global Population Trends Stith T Gower University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA Productivity of Terrestrial Ecosystems Thomas E Graedel Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, New Haven, CT, USA Industrial and Anthroposystem Metabolism David J Griggs Meteorological Ofce, Bracknell, UK Houghton, John Theodore A P Lino Grima University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada Demand Management Transboundary Water Resource Management: The Example of the Canada/US IJC (International Joint Commission) Richard S Gross Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, USA Chandler Wobble Michael Grubb The Royal Institute of International Affairs, London, UK Tradable Permits for Greenhouse Gases

Arnulf Grubler International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria Trends in Global Emissions: Carbon, Sulfur, and Nitrogen Charles Guest Australian National University, Canberra, Australia Viral Diseases and the In uence of Climate Change Lance Gunderson Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA Resilience Peter M Haas University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA United Nations Conferences on the Environment Tahar Hadj-Sadok UNFCCC, Bonn, Germany Clean Development Mechanism J Michael Hall NOAA, Silver Spring, MD, USA IRI (International Research Institute for Climate Prediction) David Hallman World Council of Churches, Toronto, Canada Christianity and the Environment Theology WCC (World Council of Churches) Kevin Hamilton University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI, USA Quasi Biennial Oscillation (QBO) Allen L Hammond World Resources Institute, Washington, DC, USA Indicators on Environmental Quality and Sustainable Development Trevor Hancock Trevor Hancock Inc., Kleinburg, Canada Theories of Health and Environment Kevin Hanna Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada CBA (Cost Bene t Analysis) Common but Differentiated Responsibility Principle (Stockholm/Rio) Eco Taxes Francis of Assisi Malthus, Thomas Robert Muir, John PPP (Polluter Pay Principle) Roosevelt, Theodore UNCED (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development)

CONTRIBUTORS

533

Roger Hansell University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada Ecosystem Services Natural Capital Joan Hardjono Padjadjaran State University, Bandung, Indonesia Agricultural Intensication in Java Demographic Change: Indonesian Transmigration F Kenneth Hare University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada Climatology Richard Harrington IACR, Rothamsted, UK Insect Pests and Global Environmental Change R Giles Harrison University of Reading, Berkshire, UK Atmospheric Electricity L D Danny Harvey University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada Carbon Cycle Climate Feedbacks Energy Balance Climate Models Greenhouse Effect Parameterization Radiative Forcing Sub-grid Processes Paul H Harvey University of Oxford, Oxford, UK Community Richness A L Heathwaite University of Shef eld, Shef eld, UK Nitrate Leaching Nitrogen: Agricultural Uses and their Impacts Grant Heiken Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, USA Volcanoes and Cities Ann Henderson-Sellers Lucas Heights Science and Technology Centre, New South Wales, Australia ISLSCP (International Satellite Land Surface Climatology Project) Land Surface Soil Moisture Dudley Herschbach Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Franklin, Benjamin

Kenneth Hewitt Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada Hazards in Global Environmental Change Natural Hazards Kaz Higuchi Meteorological Service of Canada, Toronto, Canada Boreal Forest Carbon Flux and its Role in the Implementation of the Kyoto Protocol Under a Warming Climate Carbon Dioxide, Recent Atmospheric Trends David W Hilbert Tropical Forest Research Center, Atherton, Australia Non-linear Systems R D Hill The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) Rice and its Spread: Double Cropping; New Varieties Environmental Consequences and Methane Gas, Sustainability J HilleRisLambers Duke University, Durham, NC, USA Plant Dispersal and Migration Tadaki Hirose Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan Monsi, Masami Annette Hladik Eco-Anthropologie, CNRS and Mus eum National dHistoire Naturelle, Brunoy, France Agroforestry Richard J Hobbs Murdoch University, Murdoch, Australia Fragmentation and Corridors I J Hodgkiss The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) Peter Hogberg Department of Forest Ecology, Umea, Sweden Nitrogen Deposition on Forests Tamm, Carl Olof E H (Ted) Hogg Canadian Forest Service, Edmonton, Canada Boreal Forest

534

CONTRIBUTORS

C S Holling University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA Resilience Lon L Hood University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA QuasiDecadal Oscillation Leen Hordijk Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands RAINS (Regional Air Pollution Information and Simulation) Pierre Horwitz Edith Cowan University, Joondalup, Australia Limnology David Houghton University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA Latent Heat Sensible Heat Temperature John Houghton IPCC, Geneva, Switzerland Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): an Historical Review R A Houghton Woods Hole Research Center, Woods Hole, MA, USA Woodwell, George Masters Robert W Howarth Environmental Defense, Boston, MA, USA Nitrogen Cycle S Mark Howden CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Canberra, Australia Natural Systems: Impacts of Climate Change Brian Hoyle University of Southampton, Southampton, UK Shipping: Harbors and Ports Shaopeng Huang University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA Ground Temperature

Lesley Hughes Macquarie University, New South Wales, Australia Bioindicators Bruce A Hungate Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ, USA Terrestrial and Freshwater Ecosystems: Impacts of Global Change Keith A Hunter University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand Iron Cycle Tahir Husain Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. Johns, Canada Oil Fires: Kuwait Pat Hutchings The Australian Museum, Sydney, Australia Marshes, Anthropogenic Changes Gary R Huxel University of California, Davis, CA, USA Food Webs I Ibanez Duke University, Durham, NC, USA Plant Dispersal and Migration C C Jaeger Potsdam-Institute for Climate Impacts Research (PIK), Potsdam, Germany Public-driven Response to Global Environmental Change Anthony C Janetos World Resources Institute, Washington, DC, USA Remote Sensing, Terrestrial Systems Marco A Janssen Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands Modeling Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change Bengt-Owe Jansson Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden Baltic Sea

CONTRIBUTORS

535

Arne J Jensen Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, Trondheim, Norway Fisheries: Effects of Climate Change on the Life Cycles of Salmon Arne Jernelov International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria IIASA (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis) Mercury in the Environment Thomas B Johansson United Nations Development Programme, New York, NY, USA Sustainable Energy Policies Peter Jones Biffa Waste Services Ltd., Buckinghamshire, UK Wastes: Landll and Land Raising Philip D Jones University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK The Global Temperature Record Pavel Kabat Wageningen University and Research Centre, The Netherlands Large Scale Biosphere Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA) Veijo Kaitala University of Jyv askyl a, Jyv askyl a, Finland Population Sizes, Changes Paul Kanciruk Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA Metadata B Kasemir Swiss Federal Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (EAWAG) Duebendorf, Switzerland Public-driven Response to Global Environmental Change Mohamed Kassas Cairo University, Giza, Egypt Environmental Education Holdgate, Martin Nile River

Reah Janise Kauffman Worldwatch Institute, Washington, DC, USA Worldwatch Institute James J Kay University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada Monitoring in Support of Policy: an Adaptive Ecosystem Approach Phase Shifts or Flip-ops in Complex Systems Stephanie Kaza University of Vermont, Burlington, USA Buddhism and Ecology Mary Kearney Toronto, Canada DVI (Dust Veil Index) Lahars VEI (Volcanic Explosivity Index) Stjepan Keckes Borik, Rovinj, Croatia GESAMP (Joint Group of Experts on the Scientic Aspects of Marine Environmental Protection) United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Regional Seas Programme (RSP) Michael Keller United States Forest Service, USA Large Scale Biosphere Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA) William W Kellogg Boulder, CO, USA SCEP (Study of Critical Environmental Problems) SMIC (Study of Mans Impact on Climate) Bruce E Kendall University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA Chaos and Cycles Mansour Khalid African Centre for Research & Environment (ACRE), Nairobi, Kenya Brundtland, Gro Harlem Fazlun M Khalid Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences, Birmingham, UK Islam and the Environment

536

CONTRIBUTORS

Joel G Kingsolver University of North Carolina, NC, USA Impacts of Global Environmental Change on Animals Douglas Kinnison National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, USA Photochemical Reactions Stratosphere, Chemistry John Kirkby University of Northumbria at Newcastle, Newcastle-uponTyne, UK Refugees and Human Conict Robert J Klee Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, New Haven, CT, USA Industrial and Anthroposystem Metabolism Peter Klopfer Duke University, Durham, NC, USA Hutchinson, G Evelyn Gunay Kocasoy Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey Curi, Kriton Waste Dumps in Megacities: Case Study of Istanbul Ch Korner University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland CO2 Enrichment: Effects on Ecosystems Akira Kudo Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan Fisheries: Minamata Disease Gunnar Kullenberg International Ocean Institute, Gzira, Malta Environmental Policies for the World Oceans IOC (Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission) Howard Kunreuther University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA Risk Management in an Era of Global Environmental Change Yochanan Kushnir Columbia University, Pailsades, NY, USA Pacic North American (PNA) Teleconnection Sea Surface Temperature

Karin Labitzke Meteorologisches Institut der FU-Berlin, Germany Stratosphere, Temperature and Circulation S LaDeau Duke University, Durham, NC, USA Plant Dispersal and Migration Richard M Landau Georgetown, Ontario, Canada Bahai Faith and the Environment Ray Langenfelds CSIRO Atmospheric Research, Aspendale, Australia Anthropogenic Impacts on Atmospheric Oxygen Sandra Lavorel Centre dEcologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive CNRS, Montpellier, France Plant Functional Types Nigel Lawson University of Manchester, Manchester, UK Materials Flows for Mining and Quarrying Judith Lean Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC, USA Solar Irradiance and Climate Sunspots Martin J Lechowicz McGill University, Montr eal, Canada Phenology Brenda Lee Montr eal, Quebec, Canada Landscape, Urban Landscape, and the Human Shaping of the Environment Rik Leemans National Institute of Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, The Netherlands Biomass Fuel Power Development Cecil E Leith Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA, USA Chaos and Predictability

CONTRIBUTORS

537

A Dennis Lemly Virginia Tech University, Blacksburg, VA, USA Irrigation: Induced Demise of Wetlands A Carl Leopold Boyce Thompson Institute of Plant Research, Ithaca, NY, USA Leopold, Aldo Erkki Leppakoski Abo Akademi University, Turku, Finland Water Resources: Baltic Manuel Lerdau State University of New York, Stony Brook, NY, USA Volatile Organic Compounds, Biogenic (VOCs) Christian L eveque CNRS-Programme Environment, Meudon, France Biodiversity in Freshwaters Joel S Levine NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA, USA Biomass Burning Simon A Levin Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA Whittaker, Robert H S F Lienin Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), Villigen, Switzerland Public-driven Response to Global Environmental Change John Lingard University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK Agricultural Subsidies and Environmental Change Policies to Achieve Sustainable Agriculture Karen T Lit n University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA Sovereignty and Sovereign States Changming Liu Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China Yellow River, China: a Case Study in Water Resources

Diana Liverman University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA Inter American Institute for Global Change (IAIGC) Steve Lonergan University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada Environmental Security Paul Longley University College London, London, UK Geographic(al) Information Systems (GIS) W M Lonsdale CSIRO Entomology, Canberra, Australia Biological Invasions Michel Loreau Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, France Evolutionary Processes in Ecosystems Wolfgang Lutz International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria Demographic transition Global Population Trends Robyn Lyons UNCHS, Nairobi, Kenya UNCHS (United Nations Centre for Human Settlements) Michael C MacCracken Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA, USA ARM (Atmospheric Radiation Measurement) Program Broecker, Wallace S Climate Change Assessment, United States Equilibrium Response Fingerprinting General Circulation Models (GCMs) IAMAS (International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences) IAPSO (International Association for the Physical Sciences of the Oceans) Junge Layer Madden Julian Oscillation Methane Models of the Earth System Molina, Mario J Nitrous Oxide Prediction in the Earth Sciences Sea Level The Earth System Transient Response UARS (Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite) Gordon MacDonald International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria IIASA (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis)

538

CONTRIBUTORS

Tom Mace USEPA/OEI, Research Triangle Park, NC, USA GCDIS (Global Change Data and Information System) Anson W Mackay University College London, London, UK Lake Baikal Donald Mackay Trent University, Peterborough, Canada Fugacity Piers Maclaren Piers Maclaren and Associates, Rangiora, New Zealand Afforestation: Environmental Impacts Jim MacNeill Ottawa, Canada World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) Joe Macquaker University of Manchester, Manchester, UK Oil Shales and Tar Sands Weathering Charles L Mader Mader Consulting Co, Honolulu, HI, USA Tsunamis, Causes and Consequences John J Magnuson University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA Lakes and Rivers Jerry D Mahlman Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA Manabe, Syukuro Projection of Future Changes in Climate Paola Malanotte-Rizzoli Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA Munk, Walter Elizabeth L Malone Paci c Northwest National Laboratory, USA Social Science and Global Environmental Change

Michael E Mann University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA Little Ice Age Medieval Climatic Optimum Nathan J Mantua University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA Pacic Decadal Oscillation Jane C Marks Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ, USA Terrestrial and Freshwater Ecosystems: Impacts of Global Change Gregg Marland Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA Geoengineering: a Way to Stabilize Global Climate? Pablo A Marquet P. Universidad Cat olica de Chile, Santiago, Chile Metapopulations Karen Martin Pepperdine University, Malibu, CA, USA Animal Physiology and Global Environmental Change Douglas G Martinson Columbia University, Palisades, NY, USA Sea Ice Julia Marton Lefevre LEAD International Inc., New York, NY, USA Dooge, James LEAD (Leadership for Environment and Development) Pierre Matarasso Centre International de Recherche sur lEnvironnement et le D eveloppement, CNRS-EHESS, Nogent sur Marne, France Integrated Assessment Models of Global Change Pierre Mathy European Commission, Brussels, Belgium European Network for Research in Global Change (ENRICH)

CONTRIBUTORS

539

Elizabeth May Sierra Club of Canada, Ottawa, Canada Brent Spar Brower, David Carson, Rachel Louise Chipko Movement Earth Charter Earth Day Earth First! Environmental Defense Fund Environmental Movement the Rise of Non-government Organizations (NGOs) Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Friends of the Earth Kelly, Petra Love Canal Seveso Sierra Club Small is Beautiful Soft Energy Paths Three Mile Island Torrey Canyon James McCarthy Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA IGBP (International Geosphere Biosphere Programme) Rosswall, Per Thomas John P McCarty Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, USA Restoration, Ecosystem Bonnie McCay Rutgers The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ, USA Commons, Tragedy of the Property Rights and Regimes Raymond A McCord Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA Data Banks: Archiving Ecological Data and Information Metadata Mack McFarland DuPont Fluoroproducts, Wilmington, DE, USA Chlorouorocarbons (CFCs) Halocarbons Hydrouorocarbons Peruorocarbons (PFCs) Kendal McGuf e University of Technology, Sydney, Australia Hurricanes, Typhoons and other Tropical Storms Descriptive Overview J McLachlan Duke University, Durham, NC, USA Plant Dispersal and Migration A J McMichael London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK Environmental Change and Human Health: Extending the Sustainability Agenda

Ross E McMurtrie University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia Generic Decomposition and Yield (GDAY): A Model of Global Change Impacts on Plant and Soil Jeffrey A McNeely The World Conservation Union, Gland, Switzerland Biosphere Reserves CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) Convention on Biological Diversity Endangered Species IUCN (The World Conservation Union) World Conservation Union (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) Michael J McPhaden National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Seattle, WA, USA El Nino El Nino and La Nina: Causes and Global Consequences El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) El Viejo La Nina Southern Oscillation Ernesto Medina Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Cient cas, Caracas, Venezuela Tropical Savannas Mark F Meier University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA Glaciers Thomas A Mensah London, UK IMO (International Maritime Organization) London Dumping Convention MEPC (Marine Environment Protection Committee) UNCLOS (United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea) William K Michener University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA Data Banks: Archiving Ecological Data and Information Metadata John Middleton Brock University, St. Catharines, Canada Sustainable Development Policy Dennis S Mileti University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA Natural Hazards: Social and Policy Responses

540

CONTRIBUTORS

Bruce Mitchell University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada IDWSSD (International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade) Water Use: Future Trends, and Environmental and Social Impacts J Mohan Duke University, Durham, NC, USA Plant Dispersal and Migration Detlev Moller Brandenburg Technical University, Cottbus, Germany Hydrogen Peroxide Trends in Greenland Glaciers Iris Moller University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK Land Reclamation from Seas Christopher N K Mooers University of Miami, Miami, FL, USA Monitoring Systems, Global Geophysical H A Mooney Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA Biological and Ecological Dimensions of Global Environmental Change Gale Moore University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada Virtual Environments Hedley Moorwood Brown and Root NA Limited, Kingston, UK Groundwater Withdrawal and the Development of the Great Man-made River Project, Libya Pierre Morel NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA EOS (Earth Observing System) Carol Morris Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education, Cheltenham, UK Organic Farming and the Environment Linda D Mortsch Waterloo, Canada Great Lakes Region of North America

Richard Moss IPCC, Geneva, Switzerland Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): an Historical Review Walter Munk University of California, La Jolla, CA, USA Acoustic Thermometry Sverdrup, Harald Ulrik R E Munn University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada Anthropogenic Biodiversity: The UNEP Denition Biosphere Enhancement Ratio (BER) Bourdeau, Philippe F J Cumulative Environmental Assessment EA (Environmental Assessment) Ecological Dumping EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) Emerging Environmental Issues Forest: the FAO Denition Holdridge Life Zone Classication ICREA (International Commodity-related Environmental Agreements) ICSU (International Council for Science) Izrael, Yuri A Joint Implementation Kondratyev, Kirill Yakovlevich Multi-issue Assessments NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) No Regrets Principle SCOPE (Scientic Committee on Problems of the Environment) Wadi Waldsterben Mary Fran Myers University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA Natural Hazards: Social and Policy Responses Norman Myers Oxford University, Oxford, UK Environmental Refugees Shahid Naeem University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA Functional Biodiversity May, Robert M G J Nagy Facultad de Ciencias, Montevideo, Uruguay Water Resources: R o de la Plata Ken Nagy University of California, Los Angles, CA, USA Animal Physiology and Global Environmental Change Douglas Nakashima UNESCO, Paris, France Indigenous Knowledge, Peoples and Sustainable Practice

CONTRIBUTORS

541

Takakiyo Nakazawa Tohoku University, Tohoku, Japan Carbon Dioxide, Recent Atmospheric Trends Choucri Nazli Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA Governance and International Management Mark Newman Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, USA Extinctions and Biodiversity in the Fossil Record Abdul Rahim Nik Forest Research Institute Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Forest Logging Systems in Tropical Countries: Differential Impacts Carlos Nobre Brazilian Space Research Institute, Brazil Large Scale Biosphere Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA) Richard J Norby Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA Temperature Increase: Effects on Terrestrial Ecosystems Richard B Norgaard University of California, Berkley, CA, USA Discounting Ecological Economics Emergy Environmental Economics ISEW (Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare) and GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator) Gerald R North Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA Energy Balance and Climate Patrick D Nunn The University of the South Paci c, Suva, Fiji Demographic Change: Peopling of the Pacic Islands Rory O Brien University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada Green Investment Socially Responsible Investment Tradable Permits for Limiting Stratospheric Ozone Depletion

Phil O Keefe University of Northumbria at Newcastle, Newcastle-uponTyne, UK Biomass Burning in Rural Homes in Tropical Areas Biomass Use for Urban Fuels in Developing Countries Refugees and Human Conict Tim O Riordan University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK Precautionary Principle Thoraya Obaid UNFPA, New York, NY, USA UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) G O Obasi World Meteorological Organization, Geneva, Switzerland Lake Victoria Dennis S Ojima Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA Vegetation Ecosystem Model and Analysis Project (VEMAP) Frank Old eld PAGES (Past Global Changes) International Project Of ce, Bern, Switzerland Climate Change, Abrupt PAGES (Past Global Changes) Reuben J Olembo National Committee on the Implementation of the National Environment and Coordination Act, Nairobi, Kenya Dowdeswell, Elizabeth Richard J Olson Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA Data Banks: Archiving Ecological Data and Information Metadata Naomi Oreskes University of California, San Diego, CA, USA Continental Drift Global Plate Tectonics Richard E Orville Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA Lightning Robert Paehlke Trent University, Peterborough, Canada Environmental Politics Soft Energy Path

542

CONTRIBUTORS

Thomas Pagano University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA Hydrologic Cycle Tim Palmer European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), Reading, UK Rossby Waves Garth W Paltridge University of Tasmania, Tasmania, Australia Albedo Jyoti Parikh Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai, India Consumption Patterns: Economic and Demographic Change Claire L Parkinson NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA Arctic Ocean William Parton Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA CENTURY Ecosystem Model Vegetation Ecosystem Model and Analysis Project (VEMAP) Jos e M Paruelo Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina Temperate Grasslands Jonathan A Patz Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA Urban Climate and Respiratory Disease Robert W Pearcy University of California, Davis, CA, USA Plants Carbon Balance and Growth W Richard Peltier University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada Earth System History Isostasy Joyce E Penner University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA Aerosols, Effects on the Climate Feedbacks, Chemistry Climate Interactions

Frits Penning de Vries IBSRAM, Jatujak, Bangkok, Thailand De Wit, C T David Pepper Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK Deep Ecology Ecocentric, Biocentric, Gaiacentric Ecosocialism Enlightenment Project Homocentric New Ageism Political Movements/Ideologies and the Environment Political Systems and the Environment: Utopianism Social Ecology A C Perdomo SOHMA, Montevideo, Uruguay Water Resources: R o de la Plata Marta P erez-Soba Plant Research International, Wageningen, The Netherlands Plant Growth at Elevated CO2 John S Perry Alexandria, VA, USA ACSYS (Arctic Climate System Study) Air Pressure CLIC (Climate and Cryosphere) CLIVAR (CLImate VARiability and Predictability) GAIM (Global Analysis, Interpretation and Modeling) Program GARP (Global Atmospheric Research Program) GAW (Global Atmosphere Watch) Humidity IAHS (International Association of Hydrological Sciences) IGBP-DIS (International Geosphere Biosphere Program Data and Information System) IGY (International Geophysical Year) IHP (International Hydrological Program) International Organizations in the Earth Sciences JGOFS (Joint Global Ocean Flux Study) Lapse Rate LOICZ (Land Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone) Maunder Minimum Monsoons Natural Records of Climate Change Ocean Conveyor Belt Ocean Drilling Program Oceanography Revelle, Roger Randall Dougan Richardson, Lewis Fry SCOR (Scienti c Committee on Oceanic Research) The Earth System WCC (World Climate Conferences 1979 and 1990) WCRP (World Climate Research Programme) WMO (World Meteorological Organization) WOCE (World Ocean Circulation Experiment) Anders Persson European Center for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), Reading, UK Atmospheric Motions Coriolis Effect Rossby, CarlGustaf

CONTRIBUTORS

543

Dorothy Peteet Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, Palisades, NY, USA and NASA/GISS, New York, NY, USA Younger Dryas G D Peterson University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA Resilience M J Peterson University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA BAT (Best Available Technology) International Environmental Law National Environmental Law Geoff Petts The University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, UK Inter-basin Transfer (IBT) for Water Supplies River Regulation Roger A Pielke, Jr National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, USA Weather Extremes and Climate Impacts: a Case Study for the United States Roger A Pielke, Sr Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA Convection Land Cover and Climate Planetary Boundary Layer Lars Pierce California State University, Monterey Bay, CA, USA Biome BGC Ecosystem Model Orrin H Pilkey Duke University, Durham, NC, USA Storm Surge David Pimentel Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA Malnutrition, Infectious Diseases and Global Environmental Change Giovanni Pitari Universit` a LAquila, LAquila, Italy Aerosols, Polar Stratospheric Cloud Aerosols, Stratosphere

Catherine Plume World Resource Institute, Washington, DC, USA Global Forest Watch Gary A Polis (Deceased) University of California, Davis, CA, USA Food Webs Henry N Pollack University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA Geothermal Heat Ground Temperature Bruce Pond Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, Peterborough, Canada Monitoring in Support of Policy: an Adaptive Ecosystem Approach Hendrik Poorter Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands Plant Growth at Elevated CO2 Naomi Poulton UNEP, Nairobi, Kenya UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) Edan Prabhu FlexEnergy Inc., Mission Viejo, CA, USA Low Concentration Methane Bearing Gases Ghillean T Prance University of Reading, Reading, UK Attenborough, David DIVERSITAS Tropical Forests Colin Price Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Israel Lightning and Atmospheric Electricity Gerda K Priestley Universitat Aut` onoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain Geomorphological Change: Landscape Modication for Recreation Ron Prinn Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA OH Radical: is the Cleansing Capacity of the Atmosphere Changing?

544

CONTRIBUTORS

L Pritchard Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA Resilience Alex Pszenny Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA IGAC (International Global Atmospheric Chemistry) Ron Pulliam University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA Odum, Eugene P Armando Rabuffetti Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI), Sao Jose dos Campos, Brazil IAI (Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research) Robert Raiswell University of Leeds, Leeds, UK Geological Cycling Freda Rajotte Canadian Coalition for Ecology, Dauphin, Canada Religion and Environment Among North American First Nations V Ramaswamy Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Princeton, NJ, USA Infrared Radiation James T Randerson California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA Carnegie AmesStanford Approach (CASA) Esa Ranta University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland Population Sizes, Changes David J Rapport University of Guelph, Guelph, Canada Ecosystem Health Peter Raven Director, Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, MO, USA Wilson, Edward Osborne

Jerome R Ravetz Research Methods Consultancy Ltd., London, UK Post-normal Science Steve Rayner Columbia University, New York, NY, USA Social Science and Global Environmental Change Helmut Rechberger Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria Anthropogenic Metabolism and Environmental Legacies William E Rees University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada Ecological Capacity Ecological Footprint Henry Regier University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada Capacity, Assimilative Carrying Capacity Ecosystem Approach Ecosystem Integrity Ecosystem Structure and Function Freshwater Fisheries Great Lakes Region of North America Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) Phase Shifts or Flip-ops in Complex Systems Policies for Sustainable and Responsible Fisheries Water Resources: Great Lakes Case Study Peter B Reich University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN, USA Temperate Deciduous Forests James F Reynolds Duke University, Durham, NC, USA Controlled Environment Facilities in Global Change Research Non-equilibrium Ecology Peter Rimmer The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia Transport: Global Freight and Passenger Flows Paul G Risser Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA Ecotones John Roberts Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Wallingford, UK Hydrology

CONTRIBUTORS

545

David A Robinson Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, USA Snow Alan Robock Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA Volcanic Eruption, El Chichon Volcanic Eruption, Mt. Pinatubo Volcanic Eruptions Volcanic Eruption, Tambora M Rocca Duke University, Durham, NC, USA Plant Dispersal and Migration John Rodda Wallingford, Oxfordshire, UK Hydrology Runoff Henning Rodhe University of Stockholm, Stockholm, Sweden Arrhenius, Svante Bolin, Bert Liudmila Romaniuk St. Petersburg, Russia Kondratyev, Nikolai Dmitrievich Aubrey Rose CBE Barnet, Hertfordshire, UK Judaism and the Environment Richard D Rosen Atmospheric and Environmental Research, Inc., Lexington, MA, USA Atmospheric Angular Momentum and Earth Rotation Norman J Rosenberg Paci c Northwest National Laboratory, Washington, DC, USA MINK (Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas) Study William B Rossow NASA/Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, NY, USA ISCCP (International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project) Marie Roue Centre National de la Recherche Scienti que, Paris, France Indigenous Knowledge, Peoples and Sustainable Practice

Donald T Rowland The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia Demographic Change: the Aging Population Rosemary Ruether Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston, IL, USA Religion and Ecology in the Abrahamic Faiths Iwona Rummel-Bulska United Nations Environment Programme, Geneva, Switzerland Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes Lindsey E Rustad USDA Forest Service, Durham, NH, USA Temperature Increase: Effects on Terrestrial Ecosystems Wolfgang Sachs Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Energy, Environment, Wuppertal, Germany Development and Global Environmental Change Na s Sadik United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), New York, NY, USA UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) Marie Sanderson University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada PET (Potential Evapotranspiration) Thornthwaite, Charles Warren Catriona Sandilands York University, Toronto, Canada Human Body, Immediate Environment Edward Sarachik University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA TOGA (Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere) David Satterthwaite International Institute for Environment and Development, London, UK Urban Population Change Urban Poverty and Environmental Health Ward, Barbara

546

CONTRIBUTORS

Robert A Schiffer Columbia, MD, USA Earth Observing Systems Michael E Schlesinger University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA Climate Sensitivity Edwin K Schneider Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies, Calverton, MD, USA Hadley Circulation Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) Trade Winds Walker Circulation Ann Schram Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA Mooney, Harold A Wilfried Schroder Bremen-Roennebeck, Germany Wegener, Alfred Ulrich Schumann Institut f ur Physik der Atmosph are, Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany Aircraft Emissions Daniel M Schwartz University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada The Environment and Violent Conict Jonathan M O Scurlock Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA Data Banks: Archiving Ecological Data and Information Metadata Dian J Seidel NOAA Air Resources Laboratory, Silver Spring, MD, USA Water Vapor: Distribution and Trends Keith L Seitter American Meteorological Society, Boston, MA, USA Anticyclone Fronts Ionosphere Mesosphere Meteorology Rain Stratosphere Tropopause Troposphere

Roderick W Shaw Rodshaw Environmental Consulting Inc., Nova Scotia, Canada Emissions Trading Tradable Permits for Sulfur Emission Reductions Ramine V Shaw International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP), Bonn, Germany IHDP (International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Change) Marjorie Shepherd Meteorological Service of Canada, Toronto, Canada Use of Epidemiological Data to Develop Air Quality Standards for Short-term and Long-term Environmental Health Benets Drew Shindell Columbia University, New York, NY, USA Arctic Oscillation Ross Shotton Food and Agriculture Organization, Rome, Italy Transferable Fisheries Quotas (TFQs) Henry Shue Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA Equity Herman H Shugart University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA Forest Gap Models Jagadish Shukla Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies, Calverton, MD, USA Charney, Jule Gregory Monsoons W Brian Simison University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA Plate Tectonics Ian Simmons University of Durham, Durham, UK Global Environmental Change and Environmental History Prehistoric People and Forest Soils

CONTRIBUTORS

547

Joanne Simpson NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA TRMM (Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission) Ashbindu Singh UNEP, Sioux Falls, SD, USA GRID (Global Resource Information Database, of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Division of Early Warning and Assessment) Ronald Skeldon University of Sussex, Falmer, UK Migrations: The Environmental Challenge of Population Movements David Skole NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA Deforestation and Habitat Fragmentation in the Amazon Basin Vaclav Smil Winnipeg, Canada Eutrophication Phosphorus: Global Transfers Irina N Sokolik University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA Dust Ricard V Sol e Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, USA Extinctions and Biodiversity in the Fossil Record Richard C J Somerville University of California, San Diego, CA, USA Cloud Radiation Interactions Keeling, Charles David Soroosh Sorooshian University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA Hydrologic Cycle Jean-Francois Soussana INRA, Clermont-Ferrand, France Nitrogen Fixers Richard Southwood University of Oxford, Oxford, UK Elton, C S

Ian F Spellerberg Lincoln University, Aotearoa, New Zealand Transport and Species Dispersal Kelly Sponberg NOAA, Silver Spring, MD, USA Climatic Extremes Detlef F Sprinz Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany National Self-interest: a Major Factor in International Environmental Policy Formulation Jorg Stadelbauer Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat, Universitat Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany Tourism: Climate Change and Tourist Resorts James T Staley University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA Microbial Diversity Anna Mia Stampe Danish Space Research Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark Greenland William R Stanley University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA Oil Industry: Cultural Impacts and Environmental Risk Tolerance David Stanners European Environment Agency, Copenhagen, Denmark Dobr s European Environment Assessment Process EEA (European Environment Agency) Vavrousek, Josef Ingrid Leman Stefanovic University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada Environmental Philosophy: Phenomenological Ecology Will Steffen IGBP Secretariat Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, Sweden IGBP Core Projects IGBP Terrestrial Transects

548

CONTRIBUTORS

Marc K Steininger NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA Deforestation and Habitat Fragmentation in the Amazon Basin Amy Stevermer University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA Ultraviolet Radiation John W B Stewart University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada Phosphorus Cycle William M Stigliani Center for Energy and Environmental Education, University of Northern Iowa Cedar Fall, IA, USA Buffering Capacity Contaminated Lands and Sediments: Chemical Time Bombs? Materials Flow Accounting Policy Exercises: a Tool for Solving Environmental Policy Dilemmas Redox Potential Bjorn Stigson World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), Conches-Geneva, Switzerland WBCSD (World Business Council for Sustainable Development) Ronald J Stouffer Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA Projection of Future Changes in Climate Colin Summerhayes UNESCO, Paris, France Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) N Sundararaman WMO, Geneva, Switzerland IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Nick Sundt Of ce of the US Global Change Research Program, Washington, DC, USA Methane Clathrates Sutikno Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia Volcanic Eruptions: Mt Merapi, Indonesia

J Keith Syers Naresuan University, Phitsanulok, Thailand Environmental Cadmium in the Food Chain Soil Amelioration Hiroaki Takagi APN Secretariat, Kobe, Japan APN (Asia Pacic Network) Fumio Takashima Tokyo University Fisheries, Tokyo, Japan Aquaculture in Asia Lynne D Talley Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, La Jolla, CA, USA Atlantic Ocean Ocean Circulation Salinity Salinity Patterns in the Ocean Thermohaline Circulation Derek Taylor Open University, Milton Keynes, UK Wind Power Development Trevor C Telfer Institute of Aquaculture, Stirling, UK Aquaculture: Salmon Farming Jaume Terradas Universitat Autonoma de Bellaterra, Bellaterra, Spain Margalef, Ramon Hans Teunissen World Meteorological Organization, Geneva, Switzerland GCOS (Global Climate Observing System) David J Thomas Axys Analytical Services Ltd., Sidney, Canada Oil and the Arctic Environment Morley Thomas Environment Canada, Downsview, Canada Bruce, James Hare, Kenneth Michael Thompson The Musgrave Institute, London, UK and The University of Bergen, Norway Man and Nature as a Single but Complex System

CONTRIBUTORS

549

John B Thornes Kings College, London, UK Land Degradation in the Mediterranean H Tiessen University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada Phosphorus Cycle Peter Timmerman University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada Art and the Environment Emerging Environmental Issues Encyclopedias: Compendia of Global Knowledge Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand IFIAS (International Federation of Institutes for Advanced Study) Life Style, Private Choice, and Environmental Governance Literature and the Environment Nature The Human Dimensions of Global Change Thoreau, Henry David Sara F Tjossem University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA May, Robert M Sylvia S Tognetti Takhoma Park, MD, USA Bateson, Gregory Mostafa K Tolba International Center for Environment and Development, Cairo, Egypt Agarwal, Anil Andersen, Stephen O Benedick, Richard Elliot Brinkhorst, Laurens Jan Conference of Parties CSD (Commission on Sustainable Development) Dematerialization and Sustainable Development ECA (Economic Commission for Africa) Environmental Data Report Environmental Responses: an Overview ESCAP (Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacic) Goldemberg, Jose Goodman, Gordon Kassas, Mohamed Lang, Winfred MacNeill, Jim Obasi, G O P Ozone Layer: Vienna Convention and the Montreal Protocol Speth, James Gustave Stockholm and Beyond Strong, Maurice Tickell, Crispin Toepfer, Klaus UNDP (United Nations Development Program) UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organization) United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Saskawa Environment Prize Volvo Environment Prize Watson, Robert T Allen Tough University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada Futures Research

John R G Townshend NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA Deforestation and Habitat Fragmentation in the Amazon Basin Kevin Trenberth National Center for Atmospheric Research/Climate Analysis Section, Boulder, CO, USA Earth System Processes GOALS (Global Ocean Atmosphere Land System) Paul Try International GEWEX Project Of ce, Silver Spring, MD, USA GEWEX (Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment) Compton J Tucker NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA Deforestation and Habitat Fragmentation in the Amazon Basin Robert R Twilley University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, LA, USA Mangrove Ecosystems Sushel Unninayar Columbia, MD, USA Earth Observing Systems Susan Ustin University of California, Davis, CA, USA Remote Sensing Tapani Vaahtoranta Geneva Centre for Security Policy, Geneva, Switzerland National Self-interest: a Major Factor in International Environmental Policy Formulation Jeroen P van der Sluijs Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands Integrated Assessment Integrated Assessment, Denition of ULYSSES (Urban Lifestyles, Sustainability, and Integrated Environmental Assessment) Herman van Keulen IBSRAM, Bangkok, Thailand De Wit, C T

550

CONTRIBUTORS

Frank Vanclay Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, Australia Social Impact Assessment Social Impact Assessment (SIA) Vera Vasll evskaya M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russian Federation Kovda, V A Scott Vaughan North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation, Montreal, Canada International Environmental Standards ISO (International Organization for Standardization) WTO (World Trade Organization) Charles Vlek University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands Environmental Psychology/Perception James A Voogt University of Western Ontario, London, Canada Urban Heat Island Christiaan Vrolijk The Royal Institute of International London, UK Tradable Permits for Greenhouse Gases

Rusong Wang Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China Eco-engineering to Promote Ecological Sustainability in China in an Era of Global Environmental Change Land Transformation in China: 3000 Years of Human Ecological History Richard H Waring Oregon State University, OR, USA Temperate Coniferous Forests Karen J Warren Macalester College, St. Paul, MN, USA Ecofeminism Stephen T Washburn ENVIRON Corporation, Princeton, NJ, USA Urban Wastes E C Weatherhead University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA Ultraviolet Radiation Thompson Webb, III Brown University, Providence, RI, USA Imbrie, John Natural Records of Climate Change Paleoclimatology

Affairs,

David Welch Paci c Biological Station, Nanaimo, Canada Fisheries: Pacic Coast Salmon Robin L Welcomme Imperial College, London, UK Freshwater Fisheries Robert A Weller Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA, USA Ocean Observing Techniques Gunter Weller University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK, USA Arctic Climate Permafrost Douglas Whelpdale Meteorological Service of Canada, Downsview, Canada Air Quality, Global Deposition, Dry Deposition, Wet Munn, Robert Edward (Ted)

Ilija Vukadin Institute for Oceanography and Fisheries, Split, Croatia Phosphorus Water Quality Objectives Amar Wahab University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada Environmental Sociology James C G Walker The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA Atmospheric Composition, Past Diana H Wall Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA Biodiversity in Soils and Sediments: Potential Effects of Global Change

CONTRIBUTORS

551

Daniel R White Honors College, Florida Atlantic University, Jupiter, FL, USA Modernity vs. Post-modern Environmentalism Gilbert White University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA Geography Malone, Thomas F Rodney R White University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada Sustainable Cities Policies Robert Whittaker University of Oxford, Oxford, UK Volcanic Eruption, Krakatau Anne Whyte Mestor Associates, Russell, Canada Capacity Building Diane E Wickland NASA, Washington, DC, USA Large Scale Biosphere Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA) Stephen L Willetts The Willetts Partnership, Atherstone, UK Toxic Wastes: Generation and Disposal: a Case Study of UK Practice and Legislation G R Williams Guelph, Canada Daisyworld Gaia Gaia Hypothesis Lovelock, James Redeld Ratio Suess Effect Martin Williams Adelaide University, Adelaide, Australia Desertication Desertication Convention Desertication, Denition of Deserts Michael Williams University of Oxford, Oxford, UK Deforestation in Historic Times Mary P Williams Silveira United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, Geneva, Switzerland Agenda 21

Michael Winter Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education, Cheltenham, UK Organic Farming and the Environment Donna Wise World Resources Institute (WRI), Washington, DC, USA WRI (World Resources Institute) A Wokaun Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), Villigen, Switzerland Public-driven Response to Global Environmental Change Amanda Wolf Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand Quotas in International Environmental Negotiations Poh Poh Wong National University of Singapore, Singapore Tourism as a Global Driving Force for Environmental Change Philip A Wookey Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden Tundra Donald J Wuebbles University of Illinois at Urban-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA Depletion of Stratospheric Ozone Global Warming Potential (GWP) Lifetime (of a Gas) Ozone Depletion Potential (ODP) Ozone Hole Residence Time (of an Atom, Molecule or Particle) Jih C Yang International Center for Environment and Development, Cairo, Egypt Dematerialization and Sustainable Development Sergey Yazev Astronomical Observatory of Irkutsk State University, Irkutsk, Russia Tunguska Phenomenon Chen Yong China Seismological Bureau, Beijing, China Seismic Risk (and Risk Assessment) William Young Monash University, Victoria, Australia Transport Infrastructure

552

CONTRIBUTORS

Eugenio Yunis World Tourism Organization, Madrid, Spain Policies to Achieve Sustainable Tourism Michael Zammit Cutajar United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Bonn, Germany Climate Change: an Emerging Issue in the Global Agenda United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and Kyoto Protocol

Joy B Zedler University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA Restoration, Ecosystem Herman Zimmerman Division of Earth Sciences, National Science Foundation, Arlington, VA, USA Oeschger, Hans A

Selected Abbreviations and Acronyms

AAAS AABW AAIW AAM AAO ABA ABA ACC ACC ACE ACRIM ACSDE ACSYS ADB ADCP ADP AEM AEP AERONET AES AFL-CIO AFRO AGAGE AGBM AGCM AGGG AIJ AIRS AJDE ALE ALE/GAGE/AGAGE American Association for the Advancement of Science Antarctic Bottom Water Antarctic Intermediate Water Atmospheres Angular Momentum Antarctic Oscillation Abscisic Acid Applied Behavior Analysis Administrative Committee on Coordination Antarctic Circumpolar Current Aerosol Characterization Experiment Active Cavity Radiometer Irradiance Monitor American Center for the Study of Distance Education Arctic Climate System Study African Development Bank Acoustic Doppler Current Prolers Adenosine Diphosphate Adaptive Environmental Management Agri-Environmental Programs Aerosol Robotic Network Atmospheric Environment Service American Federation of LaborCongress of Industrial Organizations Regional Ofce for Africa Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment Ad Hoc Group on the Berlin Mandate Atmospheric General Circulation Model Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases Activities-Implemented-Jointly Atmospheric Infrared Sounder American Journal of Distance Education Atmospheric Lifetime Experiment Atmospheric Lifetime Experiment/Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment/Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment ALNs AM AMAP AMIP AMS AMS AMSR-E ANEN ANPP AO AOC AOGCM AOPC AOSIS APAR APC APN ARC ARGO ARM ASCEND 21 ASEAN ASPSO ASTER ATOC ATP ATSR AVHRR Asynchronous Learning Networks Amplitude Modulation Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project Accelerator Mass Spectrometry American Meteorological Society Advanced Scanning Microwave Radiometer African Non-government Organization Environment Network Above-ground Net Primary Production Arctic Oscillation Areas of Concern Atmosphere Ocean General Circulation Model Atmospheric Observation Panel for Climate Alliance of Small Island States Absorbed Photosynthetically Active Radiation Association for Progressive Communications Asia Pacic Network Alliance for Religion and Conservation Array for Real-time Geostrophic Oceanography Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Agenda of Science for Environment and Development into the 21st Century South-East Asian Nations International Association for the Physical Sciences of the Ocean Advance Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reection Radiometer Acoustic Thermometer of Ocean Climate Adenosine Tri-phosphate Along-Track Scanning Radiometer Advanced Very High-Resolution Radiometer

554

SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

AVU AWS BAHC BALTEX BaPMON BAS BAT BATNEEC BATS BBS BC BCE BDT BER BES BFTCS BGC BIBEX BIC Biome-BGC BLB BMRC BOD BOREAS BP BPOA BS BSAP BSE BUND BWRs BYDV CABO CAC CACGP CAER CAG CAP

African Virtual University Automatic Weather Station Biospheric Aspects of the Hydrological Cycle Baltic Sea Experiment Background Air Pollution Monitoring Network British Antarctic Survey Best Available Technology Best Available Technology not Entailing Excessive Costs Biosphere Atmosphere Transfer Scheme Breeding Bird Survey BenetCost Before the Common Era Telecommunication Development Bureau Biosphere Enhancement Ratio British Ecological Society BorealForest Transect Case Study Biogeochemical Cycling Biomass Burning Experiment Bahai International Community Biome-biogeochemical Cycles Boundary-Layer Budget Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre Biochemical Oxygen Demand Boreal EcosystemAtmosphere Study Before the Present Barbados Program Of Action Black Smoke Black Sea Action Plan Bovine Spongiform Encephalopothy Bund fur Umvelt und Naturschutz Deutschland Boiling Water Reactors Barley Yellow Dwarf Virus Centre for Agrobiological Research Command-and-Control Commission on Atmospheric Chemistry and Global Pollution Community Awareness and Emergency Response Citizen Advisory Groups Common Agricultural Policy

CARDE CARs CART CAS CASA CBA CBD CCAMLR

CCC CCC CCCO CCD CCE CCFM CCN CCOL CCPs CDIAC CDM CDS CDT CDU CDW CEA CEA CEC CEC CECSD

CEEC CEF CEFFIC CEI CEOS CEQ

Canadian Armament Research and Development Establishment Central Asian Republics Cloud and Radiation Test-bed Commission for Atmospheric Sciences Carnegie AmesStanford Approach Cost Benet Analysis Convention on Biological Diversity Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources Canadian Climate Centre Chemical Coordinating Center Committee on Climatic Change and the Ocean Convention to Combat Desertication Coordinating Center of Effects Canadian Council of Forest Ministers Cloud Condensation Nuclei Co-ordination Committee on the Ozone Layer Capacity Controlling Parameters Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center Clean Development Mechanism Catalogue of Data Sources Canyon Diablo Triolite Christian Democratic Union Circumpolar Deep Water Cost Effectiveness Analysis Cumulative Environmental Assessment Cation Exchange Capacity Commission of the European Communities Comprehensive Experimental Communities for Sustainable Development Central and Eastern European Countries Controlled Environment Facilitie European Council of Chemical Manufacturers Federations Central European Initiative Committee on Earth Observation Satellites Council on Environment Quality

SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

555

CERES CERES CERs CET CFC CFS CGCM1 CGIAR

CIA CIAP CIESIN CIMMYT CIS CITES

CIV CLAES CLAW CLIC CLIMAP CLIVAR CLRTAP CMA CMEAL CMG CMIP CND CNES CNG CODATA

Cloud and Earth Radiant Energy System Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies Certied Emission Reductions Central England Temperatures Chlorouorocarbon Canadian Forest Service Canadian Global Coupled Model Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research Central Intelligence Agency Climatic Impact Assessment Program Center for International Earth Science Information Network International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center Commonwealth of Independent States Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora Community Importance Value Cryogen Limb Array Etalon Spectrometer Charlson, Lovelock, Andreae and Warren Climate and Cryosphere Initiative Climate: Long-range Investigation, Mapping and Prediction CLImate VARiability and Predictability Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution Chemical Manufacturers Association CO2 Model-experiment Activity for Improved Links Committee on Mathematical Geophysics Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament Centre National dEtudes Spatiales Compressed Natural Gas National Committee for Committee on Data for Science and Technology

COL COMESA COP COSPAR CPEs CR CREAD CRF CSA CSD CSIC CSIRO CSIS CSM CSR CSR CST CTB CTD CTE CVEs CVM CZCS CZM C&D D-O DAAC DART DCA DEC DEM DEOS DFE DGVM DIC DIN DIP

Commonwealth of Learning Community of Eastern and Southern Africa Conference of the Parties Committee on Space Research Core Programmes Critically Endangered Inter-American Distance Education Consortium Concentration Response Function Canadian Standards Association Commission on Sustainable Development Consejo Superior De Investigaciones Cient cas Commonwealth Scientic and Industrial Research Organization Canadian Security Intelligence Services Climate System Model Competition Stress Disturbance Corporate Social Responsibility Committee on Science and Technology Chemical Time Bomb Conductivity, Temperature, and Depth Committee on Trade and Environment Collaborative Virtual Environments Changing Values and Morality Coastal Zone Color Scanner Coastal Zone Management Construction and Demolition Dansgaard-Oescheger Distributed Active Archive Center Dynamics of the Arctic Treeline Detrended Correspondence Analysis Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Elevation Model Distance Education Online Symposium Design-for-Environment Dynamic Global Vegetation Model Dissolved Inorganic Carbon Dissolved Inorganic Nitrogen Degree of Interest Principle

556

SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

DIP DIS DistEdNet DIWPA DJGI DJSGI DLDC DMSP DOE DOLY DPSIR DSM DTR DU DVDs DVI DWBC

Dissolved Inorganic Phase Data and Information System Distance Education Net Diversitas Western Pacic and Asia Dow Jones Global Index Dow Jones Sustainability Group Index Distance Learning and Developing Countries Defense Meteorological Satellite Program Department of Energy Dynamic Global Phytogeography Model Driving ForcesPressures State ImpactsResponses Demand Side Management Diurnal Temperature Range Dobson Units Digital Versatile Disks Dust Veil Index Deep Western Boundary Currents

EETINA

EEZ EFA EFTA EIA EIP EIRIS EIS EITs EM EMAN EMAS EMEP EMRO EMS

E/MSY EA EAC EAGGF EBCM EC EC ECA ECE ECLA ECLAC

ECOSOC ECOSOC ECOWAS EDD EDF EdNA EEA

Extinctions Per Million Species Years Environment Agency Eco-Agricultural Counties European Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund Energy Balance Climate Model Electrical Conductivity European Commission Economic Commission for Africa Economic Commission for Europe Economic Commission for Latin America Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean Economic and Social Council United Nations Economic and Social Council Economic Community of West African States Ecological Demonstration Districts Environmental Defense Fund Education Network Australia European Environment Agency

Emwis ENCOP ENMOD ENRICH ENSO EOF EOS EOSDIS

EPA EPIC EPOC ERBE ERC ERS ERS ERSC ES

Environmental Education and Training Institute of North America Exclusive Economic Zone Education for All European Free Trade Association Environmental Impact Assessment EcoIndustrial Parks Ethical Investment Research Service Environmental Impact Statement Economies in Transition Ecological Modernization Ecological Monitoring and Assessment Network Environmental Management Systems European Monitoring and Evaluation Programme Regional Ofce for the Eastern Mediterranean Environmental Management Systems Euro-Mediterranean Information System Environment and Conicts Project Environmental Modication Techniques European Network for Research in Global Change El Nino Southern Oscillation Empirical Orthogonal Function Earth Observing System Earth Observing System Data and Information System Component Environmental Protection Agency Erosion-productivity Impact Calculator Environment Policy Committee Earth Radiation Budget Experiment Emission Reduction Credit Earth Resources Satellite European Remote Sensing Satellite Environmental Remote Sensing Center Environmental Sustainability

SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

557

ESA ESA ESAMI ESCAP ESE ESM EST ET ETH EU EWEs EXPRESSO

Environmentally Sensitive Area European Space Agency Eastern and Southern African Management Institute Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacic Earth Science Enterprise Earth System Model Environmentally Sustainable Transport Emissions Trading Eidgenoessische Technische Hochschule European Union Extreme Weather Events Experiment for Regional Sources and Sinks of Oxidants Free Air CO2 Enrichment Feed Attractant Devices Federation of Astronomical and Geophysical Data Analysis Services Food and Agricultural Organization First Assessment Report Federal Bureau of Investigation Framework Convention on Climate Change Foreign Direct Investment Federal Emergency Management Agency FinancialEconomic Stimulation Forest Inventory and Analysis Federation Internationale des Ingenieurs-Conseils First ISLSCP Field Experiment Federated Information Infrastructure Frequency Modulation Friends of the Earth Fraction of Photosynthetically Active Radiation Food Conversion Ratio Swedish Counsel for Planning and Coordination of Research Forest Stewardship Council Foundation of Economic Teaching File Transfer Protocol Forests, Trees and People Newsletter

FWCC FWCW

First World Climate Conference Fourth World Conference on Women

GDAY GAAP GAIM GAME GARP GATS GATT GAW GCDIS GCIP GCM GCMD GCOS GCR GCSS GCTE GCTE-NEWS

FACE FAD FAGS FAO FAR FBI FCCC FDI FEMA FES FIA FIDIC FIFE FII FM FoE FPAR FRC FRN FSC FTE FTP FTPP/FAO

GCTE/IGBP

GDP GDPS GEC GECHS GEF GEIA GEMS GEN GEO GEOSECS

Generic Decomposition and Yield Generally Acceptable Accreditation Principles Global Analysis, Interpretation and Modeling GEWEX Asian Monsoon Experiment Global Atmospheric Research Program General Agreement for Trade in Services General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade Global Atmosphere Watch Global Change Data and Information System Continental-scale International Project General Circulation Model Global Change Master Directory Global Climate Observing System Galactic Cosmic Ray GEWEX Cloud System Study Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystems Global Change in Terrestrial Ecosystems Network of Ecosystem Warming Study Sites Global Change of Terrestrial Ecosystems/International Geosphere Biosphere Programme Gross Domestic Product Global Data Processing System Global Environmental Change Global Environmental Change and Human Security Global Environment Facility Global Emissions Inventory Activity Global Environment Monitoring System Global Environmental-labeling Network Global Environment Outlook Geochemical Ocean Sections

558

SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

GESAMP

GEWEX GFDL GIA GIN GIS GISP GISS GIWA GKD GLA GLASOD GLOBE

GLOBEC GLOSS GLWQA GMOs GMT GNP GO3 OS GOALS GODAE GOES GOOS GOS GPCC GPCP GPI GPP

Joint Group of Experts on the Scientic Aspects of Marine Environmental Protection Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory Glacial Isostatic Adjustment Greenland, Iceland and Norwegian Geographic(al) Information Systems Global Invasive Strategies Program Goddard Institute for Space Studies Global International Waters Assessment Global Knowledge for Development Goddard Laboratory for Atmospheres Global Assessment of Soil Degradation Global Learning and Observations to Benet the Environment Global Ocean Ecosystem Dynamics Global Ocean Sea Level Observing System Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement Genetically Modied Organisms Greenwich Mean Time Gross National Product Global Ozone Observing System Global Ocean Atmosphere Land System Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite Global Ocean Observing System Global Observing System Global Precipitation Climatology Center Global Precipitation Climatology Project Genuine Progress Indicator Gross Primary Productivity

GPS GRDC GRI GRID GRIP GSSD GTOS GTS GTU/GTTI

GUO GVaP GWP GWP

Global Positioning System Global Runoff Data Center Global Reporting Initiative Global Resource Information Database Greenland Ice Core Project Global System for Sustainable Development Global Terrestrial Observing System Global Telecommunication System Global Telecommunication University/Global Telecommunication Training Institute Global Urban Observatory Global Water Vapor Project Global Warming Potential Gross World Productivity

HABs HACCP HadCM2 HadRT HALOE HAO HAPEX HCFC HDF HDGCP HDPE HELCOM HFC HIRS HLW HMs HNC HNR HPS HRDI HRDLS HRV HSB

Harmful Algal Blooms Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point Hadley Center for Climate Research and Prediction Hadley Center, United Kingdom Meteorological Ofce Halogen Occultation Experiment High Altitude Observatory Hydrologic Atmospheric Pilot Experiment Hydrochlorouorocarbon Hierarchical Data Format Human Dimensions of Global Change Programme High Density Polyethylene Helsinki Commission Hydrouorocarbon High Resolution Infrared Sounder High Level Waste Heavy Metals Hoy No Circula HumanNature Relationship Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome High Resolution Doppler Imager High Resolution Dynamic Limb Sounder High Resolution Visible A Humidity Sounder for Brazil

SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

559

HWRP

Hydrology and Water Resources Programme Integrated Assessment International Atomic Energy Agency International Association of Geodesy International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy International Association of Hydrological Sciences Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research Integrated Assessment Model International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science International Association for the Physical Sciences of the Oceans International Association of Seismology and Physics of the Earths Interior International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earths Interior International Biodiversity Observation Year International Biological Programme Institute for Biological and Chemical Research on Field Crops and Herbage International Commission of Atmospheric Chemistry and Global Pollution International Commission for Atmospheric Electricity International Civil Aviation Organization International Chamber of Commerce International Convention on Combating Desertication and Drought International Commission of Climate International Commission for Clouds and Precipitation International Commission for Dynamic Meteorology International Center for Environment and Development

ICEE ICES

IA IAEA IAG IAGA IAHS IAI IAM IAMAS IAPSO IASPEI IAVCEI IBOY IBP IBS ICACGP ICAE ICAO ICC ICCD ICCl ICCP ICDM ICED

ICESat ICLEI ICMMA

ICOLP ICPAE

ICPD ICPM ICPs ICRAF ICRC ICREA ICRP ICSU ICT ICZM IDEP IDGEC IDNDR IDRC IDWSSD IEA IEA IEC IEEA IEEP

Independent Commission on Environmental Education International Council for the Exploration of the Sea Ice Sheet Altimetry Mission International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives International Commission of Meteorology for the Middle Atmosphere International Cooperative for Ozone Layer Protection International Commission for Planetary Atmospheres and their Evolution International Conference on Population and Development International Commission for Polar Meteorology International Coordinating Programmes International Council for Research in Agroforestry International Committee of the Red Cross International Commodity-related Environmental Agreements International Commission on Radiation Protection International Council for Science Information and Communication Technologies Integrated Coastal Zone Management Institute for Economic Development and Planning Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change The International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction International Development Research Center International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade Integrated Environmental Assessment International Energy Agency Information, Education, Communication Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting International Environmental Education Program

560

SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

IFCS IFF IFIAS IFRC IFS IGAC IGBP IGBP DIS

IGBP LUCC

IGEMS IGFA IGIDR IGO IGOS IGY IHD IHDP

IHP IIASA IIED IIP IISD IJC ILEC ILO ILTER ILW IMAGE

International Forum on Chemical Safety Intergovernmental Forum on Forests International Federation of Institutes for Advanced Study International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Integrated Farming Systems International Global Atmospheric Chemistry International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme International Geosphere Biosphere Programme Data and Information System International Geosphere Biosphere Programme Land-Use and Land-Cover Change Integrated Global Earth Monitoring Systems International Group of Funding Agencies Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research International Governmental Organization Integrated Global Observing Strategy International Geophysical Year International Hydrological Decade International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change International Hydrological Program International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis International Institute for Environment and Development Instituto De Investigaciones Pesqueras International Institute for Sustainable Development International Joint Commission International Lake Environment Committee Foundation International Labor Organization International LTER Intermediate Level Wastes Integrated Model to Assess the Greenhouse Effect

IMAR IMF IMI IMO IMO IMS INC IOC IOC IOI IOJ IOMC

ION IPAT

IPCC IPCS IPF IPM IPO IPPC IPPs IPR IPS IR IRC IRI IRPTC IRRC IRRI ISAAA

Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region International Monetary Fund International Meteorological Institute International Maritime Organization International Meteorological Organization Information Management System Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission International Ozone Commission International Ocean Institute The Institute of Jainology Inter-organization Program for the Sound Management of Chemicals International Ocean Network I is a Function of Population Size P, Af uence Per Capita A, and Technological Development T Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change International Program on Chemical Safety Intergovernmental Panel on Forests Integrated Pest Management International Project Of ce International Plant Protection Convention Independent Power Producers Intellectual Property Right Investment Promotion Service Infrared International Radiation Commission International Research Institute for Climate Prediction International Register of Potentially Toxic Chemicals Investor Responsibility Research Center International Rice Research Institute International Service for the Acquisition of AgriBiotech Applications

SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

561

ISAMS ISCCP ISEE ISEW ISLSCP ISO ISRIC ISSC ITCZ ITEX ITQ ITU IUBS IUCN IUGG IUMS IVI IWC IWRB

Improved Stratospheric and Mesospheric Sounder International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project International Society for Ecological Economics Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare International Satellite Land Surface Climatology Project International Organization For Standardization International Soil Reference and Information Center International Social Science Council Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone International Tundra Experiment Individual Transferable Quota International Telecommunication Union International Union of Biological Sciences World Conservation Union International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics International Union of Microbiological Societies Ice-Core Volcanic Index International Whaling Commission International Waterfowl and Wetlands

LAI LANDSAT LAR LBA LCA LCDW LDCs LDEO LEAD LETS LGM LHS LI LIA LIFDC LIS LLN LLW LMD LMF LMOs LNWT LOAEL LOICZ LOS LPG LP HC LRTAP LTER LUCC LUCF LULU LWF MAAs MAAT MAB MAC

JEMA JERS JGOFS JOC JPIC JPSS JSC

Japan Electrical Manufacturers Association Japanese Earth Resources Satellite Joint Global Ocean Flux Study Joint Organizing Committee Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation Just, Participatory and Sustainable Society Joint Scientic Committee

Leaf Area Index Land Satellite Leaf Area Ratio Large Scale Biosphere Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia Life Cycle Assessment Lower Circumpolar Deep Water Less Developed Countries LamontDoherty Earth Observatory Leadership for Environment and Development Local Employment and Trading Schemes Last Glacial Maximum Leaf Height Seed Low Intensity Little Ice Age Low Income Food Decit Countries Laurentide Ice Sheet Louvain-La-Neuve Low Level Wastes Laboratoire De Meteorologie Dynamique Leaf Mass Fraction Living Modied Organisms Low and Non-waste Technologies Lowest Observable Adverse Effect Level LandOcean Interactions in the Coastal Zone Law of the Sea Liquid Petroleum Gas Low ProbabilityHigh Consequence Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution Long-term Ecological Research Land Use and Land Cover Change Project Land-use Change and Forestry Locally Unacceptable Land Use Learning Without Frontiers Mycosporine-like Amino Acids Mean Annual Air Temperatures Man and the Biosphere Maximum Admissible Concentration

KLD KRIP

Kinder Lydenburg and Domini Kano River Irrigation Project

562

SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

MACS MAFF MAI MAP MARC MARPOL MARPOL/73

MASTER

MBL MBLA MCS MCS MCSD MEAs MEDPOL MEPC METAP MFA MGO MIDAS MINK MIPS MIS MISRs MISSR MIT MITI MJO MJRA MlDAs MLS

Mobile Air Conditioning Society Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food Multilateral Agreement on Investment Mediterranean Action Plan Monitoring and Assessment Research Center Marine Pollution Convention International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships, 1973 Method for the Analysis of the Substance Concentrations of Treatment End-products and Recycling Goods Marine Biological Laboratory Multi-beam Laser Altimeter Monitoring, Control and Surveillance Multiple Chemical Sensitivity Syndrome Mediterranean Commission on Sustainable Development Multilateral Environmental Agreements Mediterranean Pollution Program Marine Environment Protection Committee Mediterranean Environment Technical Assistance Program Materials Flow Accounting Main Geophysical Observatory Minimal Impact Dairy Systems Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas Material Input Per Service Unit Marine Isotope Stage Multi-angle Imaging Spectrometers Multi-angle Imaging Spectroradiometer Massachusetts Institute of Technology Ministry of International Trade and Industry Madden-Julian Oscillation Michael Jantzi Research Associates Maritime Industrial Development Areas Microwave Limb Sounder

MODIS MOO MOP MOPITT MPC MRT MSC MSC E&W MSEY MSS MSU MSW MSY MTOs MUDs MUSE MWP NAAQS NADW NAFO NAFTA NAM NAO NAPAP NAR NAS NASA NASDA NAST NATO NATT NBII NBP NCAR

Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer Multiple Object-oriented Meeting of the Parties Measurement of Pollution in the Troposphere Maximum Permissible Concentration Mean Residence Time Meteorological Service of Canada Meteorological Synthesizing Center East & West Maximum Sustainable Economic Yield Multi-Spectral Scanner Microwave Sounding Unit Municipal Solid Waste Maximum Sustainable Yield Multimodal Transport Operators Multiple User Domains Multiple User Social Environments Medieval Warm Period National Ambient Air Quality Standards North Atlantic Deep Water Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization North American Free Trade Agreement Northern Hemisphere Annular Mode North Atlantic Oscillation National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program Net Assimilation Rate National Academy of Sciences National Aeronautics and Space Administration National Space Development Agency National Assessment Synthesis Team North Atlantic Treaty Organization Northern Australia Tropical Transect National Biological Information Infrastructure Net Biome Production National Center For Atmospheric Research

SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

563

NCDC NCEP NCPC NCSA NDIR NDVI NECC NECT NEDI NEP NEPA NERC NESDIS

NetCDF NEUC NFIP NGDC NGO NHANES II NHC NHMSs NIEO NIMBY NIR NIS NMAT NMHSs NMVOCs NOA NOAA NOAA/AVHRR

National Climatic Data Center National Center for Environmental Prediction National Cleaner Production Center National Center for Supercomputing Applications Non-dispersive Infrared Normalized Difference Vegetation Index North Equatorial Countercurrent North East China Transect National Environmental Data Index Net Ecosystem Production National Environment Policy Act Natural Environment Research Council National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service Network Common Data Form North Equatorial Undercurrent National Flood Insurance Program National Geophysical Data Center Non-Governmental Organization National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey National Hurricane Center National Hydrometeorological Services New International Economic Order Not In My Backyard Near-infrared Network Information System Nighttime Marine Air Temperature National Meteorological and Hydrological Services Non-methane Volatile Organic Compounds Needs, Opportunities and Abilities National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer

NOAA/CMDL

NOAEL NODC NPF NPOESS NPP NPPs NPV NRC NRCS NSA NSDAF NSF NSM NSOW NSR NVZ NWIS NWT

National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/ Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory No-Observable Adverse Effect Level National Ocean Data Center Northern Prawn Fishery National POESS Net Primary Production Nuclear Power Plants Net Present Value Nuclear Regulatory Commission Natural Resources Conservation Service Nitrate Sensitive Area National Soils Data Access Facility National Science Foundation New Social Movement Nordic Sea Overow Water Northern Sea Route Nitrate Vulnerable Zone National Water Information System Northwestern Territories

OALOS OCh OCM OCS ODA ODP ODP ODS OECD OFIA OGCM OLS OOPC OPEC ORNL

Ocean Affairs and Law of the Sea Organizational Change Ocean Color Monitor Photolysis of Carbonyl Sulde Ofcial Development Assistance Ocean Drilling Program Ozone Depletion Potential Ozone Depleting Substances Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development Ontario Forest Industries Association Oceanic General Circulation Model Operational Linescan System Ocean Observation Panel for Climate Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries Oak Ridge National Laboratory

564

SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

ORNL DAAC OSPARCOM OSY OTAG OTEC OWC PAC PAGES PAHO PARN PBL PCAST PCBS PCC PDO PEM PEPC PERSIANN

Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center Oslo and Paris Commission Optimum Sustainable Yield Ozone Transport Assessment Group Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion Oscillating Water Column Public Advisory Committees Past Global Changes Pan American Sanitary Bureau Pacic and Arctic Railway and Navigation Company Planetary Boundary Layer Presidents Council of Advisors on Science and Technology Programme on Capacity Building in Science Program Coordinating Center Pacic Decadal Oscillation Particle Environment Monitor PhosphoenolPyruvate Carboxylase Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information using Articial Neural Networks Potential Evapotranspiration People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals Peruorocarbons Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration Plant Functional Type Pressure Gradient Force Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture Provision of Physical Alternatives, (Re)arrangements Participatory Integrated Assessment Prior Informed Consent Paleoclimate Modeling Intercomparison Project Pacic North American Teleconnection Pattern Pacic North American Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellites Persistent Organic Pollutant Polluter Pay Principle

PR PREPARE PRISMA PSE PSI PSMSL PTA PTWI PWMA

Precipitation Radar Preventive Environmental Protection Approaches in Europe Project on Industrial Successes with Waste Prevention Producer Subsidy Equivalent Pressure State Impact Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level Preferential Trade Area for Eastern and Southern Africa Provisional Tolerable Weekly Intake Provincial Wildlife Management Area Quasi-Biennial Oscillation Regional Air Pollution Information and Simulation Regional Climate Model Radiative Convective Models Reduction In Exposure Renewable Energy Technologies Relative Growth Rate Russian Research Institute for Hydrometeorological Information International NGO Network on Desertication and Drought Reservoir-induced Seismicity Red List Authorities Risk Mitigation Measures Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Regional Seas Programme Research, Technological Development and Demonstration Government Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Committee Social Assessment Surface Area Density Society of Automobile Engineers South African Fire-Atmosphere Research Initiative

QBO RAINS RCM RCMs RE RETs RGR RIHMI RIOD RIS RLA RMMs RSAS RSP RTD RWMAC

PET PETA PFC PFRA PFT PGF PGRFA PhAA PIA PIC PMIP PNA PNA POES POP PPP

SA SAD SAE SAFARI

SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

565

SAGE SAIDE SAL SALT SAMW SAR SAS SBI SBSTA SC-IDNDR

SCANTRAN SCAR SCEP SCOPE SCOR SCOSTEP SCOWAR SCUBA SC IGBP

SEA SEARO SEDI SEP SFA SFM SGOMSEC

SIA SIDS SIO SLOSH SLP

Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment South African Institute for Distance Education Structural Adjustment Loans Savannas in the Long-term Sub-Antarctic Mode Water Synthetic Aperture Radar Statistical Analysis Software Subsidiary Body for Implementation Subsidiary Body for Scientic and Technological Advice Special Committee for the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction Scandinavian Transect Scientic Committee on Antarctic Research Study of Critical Environmental Problems Scientic Committee on Problems of the Environment Scientic Committee on Oceanic Research Science Committee on Solar Terrestrial Physics Scientic Committee on Water Research Self-contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus Scientic Committee for the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme Strategic Environmental Assessment Regional Ofce for South-east Asia Committee on the Study of the Earths Deep Interior Swiss Eco-Points Substance Flow Analysis Sustainable Forest Management Scientic Group on Methodologies for the Safety Evaluation of Chemicals Social Impact Assessment Small Island Developing States Scripps Institution of Oceanography Sea, Lake and Overland Surges from Hurricanes Sea Level Pressure

SMAP

SMIC SMM SMOW SMS SNA SOE SOI SOIREE SOLAS SOLSTICE SOM SOYGRO SPARC SPI SPOT SPS SPSS SRES SSA SSM SSS SST STAP STARs START STC STF STP SUBSTA SUCROS SUSIM SWCC

Short and Medium Term Priority Environment Action Program Study of Mans Impact on Climate Solar Maximum Mission Standard Mean Ocean Water Social Modeling and Support System of National Account State of the Environment Reports Southern Oscillation Index Southern Ocean Iron Release Experiment Safety of Life at Sea Solar/Stellar Irradiance Comparison Experiment Soil Organic Matter SOYbean GROwth Simulation Model Stratospheric Processes and their Role in Climate Sustainable Process Index Syst` eme Pour lObservation de la Terre Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures Statistical Package for Social Sciences Special Report on Emission Scenarios Stratospheric Sulfate Aerosol Soft Systems Methodology Sea Surface Salinity Sea Surface Temperature Scientic and Technical Advisory Panel Special Target Areas of Research Global Change System for Analysis, Research and Training Scientic and Technical Committee Subtropical Front Standard Temperature and Pressure Subsidiary Body for Science and Technological Advice Simple and Universal CROp Growth Simulator Solar Ultraviolet Spectral Irradiance Monitor Second World Climate Conference

566

SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

SWIR SWMA

Short-Wave Infrared National Wildlife Refuge

UNILO UNCCD

TDE TEAP TEK TEM TFIAM TFQ TFR THC TIR TIROS-I TNCs TOC TOGA TOMS TRACE-A

TRIPS TRMM TVA TVE TWAS

Throughfall Displacement Experiment Technology and Economic Assessment Panel Traditional Ecological Knowledge Terrestrial Ecosystem Model Task Force on Integrated Assessment Modeling Transferable Fisheries Quota Total Fertility Rate Thermohaline Circulation Thermal Infrared Television and Infrared Observation Satellite Transnational corporations Technical Options Committee Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer Transport and Atmospheric Chemistry Near the Equator-Atlantic Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission Tennessee Valley Authority Township and Village Enterprises Third World Academy of Sciences

UNCED

UNCHE UNCHS UNCLOS UNCSD UNCTAD UNDP UNECE UNEP UNEP-WMO

UNESCO

UNFCC

UNFPA UNGA UNGASS UNHCR

UARS UCAR UCDW UCL UCLA UCT UHI UKMO ULYSSES

UN

Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite University Corporation for Atmospheric Research Upper Circumpolar Deep Water Urban Canopy Layer University of Los Angeles Coordinated Universal Time Urban Heat Island United Kingdom Meteorological Ofce Urban Lifestyles, Sustainability and Integrated Environmental Assessment United Nations

UNICEF UNIDO UNITAR UNSCEAR

UNU UNU ZERI URL USDA

United Nations International Labor Organization United Nations Convention to Combat Desertication United Nations Conference on Environment and Development United Nations Conference on the Human Environment United Nations Centre for Human Settlements United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development United Nations Conference on Trade and Development United Nations Development Program United Nations Economic Commission for Europe United Nations Environment Programme United Nations Environment Program-World Meteorological Organization United Nations Educational Scientic and Cultural Organization United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change United Nations Population Fund United Nations General Assembly Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly United Nations High Commission for Refugees United Nations Childrens Fund United Nations Industrial Development Organization United Nations Institute for Training and Research United Nations Scientic Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation United Nations University United Nations University Zero Emissions Research Initiative Unique Resource Locator United States Department of Agriculture

SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

567

USEPA USFS USGCRP USGS USLE USSR

United States Environmental Protection Agency US Forest Service US Global Change Research Program US Geological Survey Universal Soil Loss Equation Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Valued Ecosystem Component Volcanic Explosivity Index Vegetation Ecosystem Model and Analysis Project Visible and Infrared Scanner Very Long Baseline (Radio) Interferometry Very Large Crude Carriers Visible and Near-Infrared Vision of International Charter on the Environment by Students Voluntary Observing Ship Virtual Reality Modeling Language West Antarctic Ice Sheet World Business Council for Sustainable Development World Climate Applications and Services Programme World Council of Churches World Climate Data and Monitoring Programme World Commission on Environment and Development World Climate Impact Assessment and Response Strategies Programme

WCP WCRP WDC WEC WEDO WEPP WFC WGMS WHA WHO WICEMII WINDII WMO WMO/IMO WOC WOCE WorLD WPRO WQB WRI WSSD WTO WTO WWF WWW YD

VEC VEI VEMAP VIRS VLBI VLCCs VNIR VOICES VOS VRML

WAIS WBCSD WCASP WCC WCDMP WCED WCIRP

World Climate Programme World Climate Research Programme World Data Center World Energy Council Womens Environment and Development Organization Water Erosion Point Predictor World Food Council World Glacier Monitoring Service World Health Assembly World Health Organization World Industry Conference on Environmental Management Wind Imaging Interferometer World Meteorological Oganization World Meteorological Organization/International Meteorological Organization World Ocean Circulation World Ocean Circulation Experiment World Links for Development Regional Ofce for the Western Pacic Water Quality Board World Resources Institute World Summit on Social Development World Tourism Organization World Trade Organization World Wildlife Fund World Weather Watch Younger Dryas

Index
Abidjan, Cote dIvoire 3:578 Aboriginal re regimes 5:319 Above-ground net primary production (ANPP) 2:570 Abrahamic faiths 5:461 Absolute humidity 1:432 Absorbed photosynthetically active radiation (APAR) 2:202 Abutilon theophrasti 2:214 Abyssocottus 3:414 Accidental disruptions 5:273 Acer rubrum 2:83 Achaean eon 2:297 Acid rain 1:318, 4:74, 5:498 Acid sulfate soils 3:151 Acidic deposition 4:450 Acidi cation 2:127 Acoustic thermometry 1:161 ACRIM-III 1:75 Active Cavity Radiometer Irradiance Monitor (ACRIM) 1:732 Adalia bipunctata 2:161 Adaptation applications 4:83 context 4:80 de nitions 4:80 determination of need 4:82 history 4:80 insect pests 3:384 private sector corporations and businesses 4:83 reasons for assessment 4:81 socio-economic systems 4:83 species 2:160, 4:83 strategies 2:79, 4:80 Adaptive ecosystem, monitoring 4:120 Adaptive environmental management (AEM) 4:139 Adaptive management 5:400 strategies 4:179 Adaptive strategies 2:482 ADCP 1:70 Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) 2:191, 194 ADEOS satellite series 1:80 Advanced very high pressure radiometer (AVHRR) 2:572 Advanced very high resolution radiometer (AVARR) 2:528 Aedes aegypti 2:163 Aeronautical Meteorology Programme 1:758 Aerosol Characterization Experiment (ACE) 2:43 Aerosols 1:26, 387 anthropogenic 1:164 atmospheric 1:317 concentrations 1:180 effects on climate 1:162 effects on clouds 1:165 effects on stratospheric chemistry 1:680 future effects 1:166 gas phase precursors 1:164 mineral 1:347 secondary sources 1:163 sources 1:163 stratospheric sulfate (SSA) 1:483 sulfate 3:182 Afar Depression 1:335 Afar Desert 1:339 Afforestation 3:7 environmental impacts 3:156 Africa tourism 3:626 wetlands 3:399 Agarwal, Anil 4:140 AGCMs 1:203, 287, 291, 292 Agenda 21 4:140, 178, 205, 363, 473, 5:427, 431 contents 4:141 further program 4:142 implementation 4:142 programme 4:461 review 4:142 Agenda setting 5:57 Aggregate extraction 3:342 Aging population demographics 3:277 dependency 3:281 future alternatives 3:282 regional variations 3:279 rejuvenation 3:279 Agni 5:305 Agrarian transformation 5:79 Agricultural Meteorology Programme 1:758 Agricultural policy 4:358 pricing policy examples 4:359 schematic presentation 4:359 Agricultural production 2:241 Agriculture and environment, global views 3:190 Chinese 3:431 climate change 3:236 credit policy 4:361 environmental and public health concerns 3:189 environmental policies 4:361 extensive cereal cultivation 3:228 geography of intensi cation 3:164 intensi cation 3:164, 166 Java 3:159 western Europe 3:162 intensive 3:10, 186, 352 nitrogen cycle 3:500 nitrogen uses 3:499 property rights policy 4:361 research and technology policy 4:360 Rhine Basin 3:106 salinity 3:559 subsidies 3:168 sustainable development 4:358 water resources 3:363 water use 3:89 see also Organic farming Agroforestry 3:172 damar 3:176 global climate change 3:177 history 3:173 literature 3:173 new systems 3:174 research 3:173 system analysis 3:174 temperate systems 3:177 traditional knowledge 3:173 Agrosystem, complex man-made 3:175 AIDS 5:214 Air afforestation impacts 3:158 chemical composition 1:319 composition changes 3:181 Air monitoring programs 1:177 A r Mountains 1:338

570 INDEX
Air pollution 1:177, 2:118, 3:148, 678, 4:74, 486 acidifying 4:450 and climate change 3:650 emissions 4:485 fossil fuels 3:649 historical perspective 3:649 potential impacts on climate change 3:652 regional responses 4:515 temperate coniferous forests 2:563 tourism contribution 3:614 urban 3:683 see also LRTAP; RAINS Air pressure and wind 1:224, 225 Air quality 3:653 global 1:177 standards 3:680, 4:485 urban 3:681 Air temperatures, past 2:547 Air trafc 3:178 scheduled ights 3:640 Air travel 3:644 Airborne sensors 2:524 Aircraft emissions 3:178 Akash 5:304 Alaska, oil industry 3:527 Albedo 1:27, 182, 342, 2:247 denition 1:182 ground-level measurements 1:182 low solar zenith angle 1:183 spectral 1:182 surface 1:183 Algae, harmful 3:380 Algae-elds 4:522 Algal bloom 3:548 Allergens 3:653 Allometric coefcient 2:135 Allometric growth 2:135 Alpine areas 2:75 Alpine plants 2:162 Aluminum oxide 1:155 Amazon Basin chemical time bomb 3:111 deforestation 3:255 habitat fragmentation 3:255 mercury cycle 3:111 Amazonia, LBA 2:383 American Chamber of Horrors 5:51 American Federation of Labor Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) 5:251 AMIP (Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project) 1:756 Ammonia 1:163, 2:433, 443 anthropogenic emissions 3:46 Anarchism 5:439 Ancient teachings 5:470 Andersen, Stephen O 4:143 Anekantavada 5:344 Angiosperms 2:135 Angular momentum 1:211 Animal liberation 5:234 Animal physiology 2:136 Animal production 3:186 environmental impacts 3:189 Animal rights 5:235 Animal sanctuaries 5:347 Animal sources, methane emissions 3:222 Animal wastes 3:188 disposal problems 3:188 methane emissions 3:222 Animals abundance 2:60 climate change impacts 2:60 distribution 2:60 distributional shifts 2:62 ecology 2:289 endangered species 4:201 extinction 2:57 impact of global environmental change 2:56 migration routes 2:549 physiology 2:136 phytophagous 2:471 plant migration by 2:84 predicting responses to global changes 2:65 Annual average temperature 1:371 Anoxia in coastal waters 3:109 Antarctic 2:74 Antarctic Bottom Water 1:189 Antarctic ice cores 1:188 Antarctic ice sheet 1:186 Antarctic Oscillation (AAO) 1:202 Antarctic ozone hole 1:148 Antarctic upper atmosphere 1:186 Antarctica 1:21, 184, 648 atmosphere 1:188 climate 1:185 geography 1:184 geology 1:184 ice loss 1:467 international research 1:189 ocean 1:188 paleoclimate 1:188 physical characteristics 1:185 sea ice 1:188 weather 1:185 Anthropocene 1:189 Anthropocentrism 5:232 strong 5:232 weak 5:233 see also Non-anthropocentrism Anthropogenic, use of term 3:190 Anthropogenic emissions ammonia 3:46 carbon 3:35 consumption vs. production 3:58 global trends 3:58 nitrogen 3:45 nitrogen oxides (NOx ) 3:45 Anthropogenic ows vs. natural ows 3:57 Anthropogenic impacts 2:140 Anthropogenic metabolism cities 3:67 environmental legacies 3:54 future strategies 3:69 legacies derived from 3:67 limits at back end and not at front side 3:68 phenomenology 3:55 sinks 3:68 Anthropogeomorphology 1:402 Anthropology and global environmental change 5:163 Anthroposphere, metabolism 3:55 Anthroposystem, metabolism 3:77 Anticyclone 1:191 Anti-personnel mines 3:146 Ants, leaf-cutting 2:590 AOGCMs 1:288, 290, 524 Apah 5:305 APN (Asia Pacic Network) 4:143 Appalachian Mountain Club 5:243 Applications of Meteorology Programme 1:758 Applied geomorphology 1:402 Aquaculture 3:9 Asia 3:196 environmental issues 3:200

INDEX

571

overview 3:190 salmon farming 3:200 Aquaducts 3:644 Aquatic ecosystems aging 2:458 redox potentials 3:108 Aquatic organisms 2:378 Aquifer recharge 1:341 Arable cultivation 3:501 Aral Sea 3:562, 4:533 attempts to save 4:535 demise of 4:533 prole 4:534 protection 4:535 Arboviral diseases 3:692 Arctic 2:74 Arctic Climate System Study (ACSYS) 1:269 Arctic environment, climate change 3:522 Arctic Ocean 1:199 Arctic Oscillation (AO) 1:201 Arctic Oscillation (AO) index 1:202 Arctic ozone hole 1:150 Arctic plants 2:162 Arctic tundra 2:594 Argentiere glacier 1:505 Argentina, terrestrial transects 2:355 Aridity causes of present-day 1:333 evidence of previous 1:335 Aristotle 5:105 ARM (Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program) 1:203 Array for Real-time Geostrophic Oceanography (ARGO) 1:69, 537 Arrhenius empirical relationship 2:282 Arrhenius, Svante 1:204 Art and environment 5:167 classical 5:169 early environmental 5:168 Earth 5:173, 365 medieval period 5:169 modern environment 5:173 Oriental 5:170 Renaissance period 5:170 Romantic period 5:171 Artist and the environment 5:168 Ascend 21 4:43 Asia aquaculture 3:196 tourism 3:626 Assimilative capacity 3:220 Association of Small Island States (AOSIS) 4:424 Asteroid tsunamis 1:729 Asteroids 1:205 global consequences of impacts 1:208 impact hazard today 1:210 impacts over Earth history 1:205 populations 1:206 Asthenosphere 1:410 Atmosphere energy budget 1:240 water storage 1:450 zonal and annual mean radiation budget 1:374 see also GAW (Global Atmosphere Watch); Lower atmosphere; Upper atmosphere Atmosphere Ocean General Circulation Models. See AOGCMs Atmosphere ocean interaction 1:22 Atmosphere ocean mixed layer deep ocean exchange processes 2:199 Atmospheric angular momentum (AAM) 1:211 Atmospheric chemistry 1:284, 2:567 models 1:105

stratosphere. See Stratosphere, chemistry Atmospheric circulation, summary 1:239 Atmospheric component of global climate models. See AGCMs Atmospheric electricity 1:218 Atmospheric ow 1:242 Atmospheric gases 1:146 affecting ozone 1:144 longwave radiation 1:470 Atmospheric general circulation models (AGCMs) 1:285 Atmospheric hazards 3:480 Atmospheric lapse rate. See Lapse rate Atmospheric Lifetime Experiment/Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment/Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (ALE/GAGE/AGAGE) 2:458 Atmospheric modeling 1:756 Atmospheric motion 1:221 computer models 1:222 driving and retarding forces 1:223 friction in 1:224 observing 1:222 without friction 1:223 Atmospheric particles 1:473 Atmospheric Research and Environment Programme 1:758 Atmospheric structure 1:243 Atmospheric temperature structure 1:284 Atmospheric transport model intercomparison 2:50 Atomic radiation. See UNSCEAR Attenborough, David 5:175 Attractors, complex systems 4:116, 118 Australia tourism 3:626 wetlands 3:404 Australian Bureau of Meteorology 1:434 Austria, demographic transition 5:213 Automobiles 3:643 Autotrophy 2:26, 143 Autotropic respiration 2:191 AVHRR 1:72 Avicennia marina 2:400 Awash River 1:339 Azotobacter 2:443 Bacteria 3:218 Bahai Faith 5:176 proposed courses of action 5:179 BAHC Earth System Modeling 2:51 Bakers Table 2:99 Balance principle 5:338 Baleen whales 3:446 Baltic, water resources 3:720 Baltic Sea 4:516 Declaration 4:518 sheries 4:518 geology 4:516 map 4:517, 519 natural capital 4:518 oceanographic data 4:518 organism assembly 4:516 Bamako Convention 4:285 Barbados Program of Action (BPOA) 4:416 Barcelona Convention 4:527 Barrow, Alaska 2:594 Basel Convention 3:632, 4:146 amendment 4:147 control system 4:147 principal objectives 4:146 protocol on liability and compensation 4:147 Basel Declaration on Environmentally Sound Management 4:147 BAT (Best Available Technology) 5:183, 330

572 INDEX
Bateman, Gregory 5:183 BATNEEC 4:177, 5:330 Bay of Fundy 1:712 Beaked whales 3:446 Benedick, Richard Elliot 4:148 Beneciary fees 4:197 Benthic attractors 5:425 Benthic organisms 2:145 Bergson, Henri 5:105 Best available technology (BAT) 5:183, 330 Best available technology not entailing excessive costs (BATNEEC) 4:177, 5:330 Betula papyrifera 2:103, 104 Bhopal, India 5:54 Bidirectional reection distribution function 1:183 Bifurcation diagram 2:455 Big Moose Lake, acidication 3:103 Bilateral environmental standards 4:285 Biocenosis 2:145 Biocentricism 5:217 Biocentrism 5:235 Bioclimatic indices 2:168 Biocomplexity 2:145 Biocontrol methods 2:17 Biodiversity 2:297 and CO2 2:221, 223 and ecosystem functioning 2:24 and microbial life 2:421 and organic farming 3:533 denition 2:159 freshwater 2:146 functional 2:20 functioning 2:22 empirical approaches 2:22 experimental tests 2:22 inland waters 2:381 lakes 2:381 rivers 2:381 sediments 2:152 soils 2:152 tundra 2:600 Biodiversity loss 3:137 tourism contribution 3:615 Biogeochemical cycling (BGC) 2:20, 159, 171, 172, 379, 423, 532, 3:3, 9 Biogeochemical feedbacks 2:102 Biogeochemical uxes 2:168 Biogeochemical models 2:168 Biogeochemistry 2:20 Bioindicators 2:160 Biological diversity, see also Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Biological hazards 3:484 Biological invasions. See Invasions Biological pump 2:370 Biology, global environmental change 2:1 Biomass 3:653, 680 use for urban fuels 3:217 Biomass burning 3:205 and desertication 3:287 eld experiments 3:207 gaseous and particulate emissions 3:206, 209 geographical distribution 3:208 global estimates 3:209 nitrogen 3:207 nitrogen oxides 3:207 oxygen 3:207 tropical areas 3:214 Biomass enhancement ratio (BER) 2:491, 493 Biomass res 3:490 Biomass fuel power development 3:216 Biomass plantations 3:217 BIOME3 model 2:568 Biome biogeochemical cycling (BGC) ecosystem model 2:171 Biome distributions 2:167 Biome models 2:166 Biomes 2:166 carbon and energy uxes 2:196 Biophages 2:315 Biophysical feedbacks 3:10 Bioremediation 3:218 Biosphere 2:174, 604 and health 5:500 carbon metabolism 2:1 detoxication 3:98 freshwater perspective 5:201 future 2:223 hazards 3:484 human impact 2:174 metabolism 2:3 retoxication 3:98 structure 2:3 Biosphere enhancement ratio (BER) 2:175 Biosphere reserves 2:175 Biospheric Aspects of the Hydrological Cycle (BAHC) 2:37 Biota 2:21 Caspian Sea 4:523 functional classication 2:29 functional divisions 2:30 lakes 2:378 rivers 2:378 taxonomic versus functional classications 2:35 Biotic hazards 3:483 Biphenols 3:631 Birds 2:460 experimental studies 3:603 extinctions 2:306 Pacic Islands 2:57 investigator effects 3:602 observational studies 3:603 Bjerknes, Jacob 1:245 Black Sea 4:520 biological diversity 4:521 decline of biota after 1950 4:522 dissolved oxygen 4:523 environmental degradation 4:522 geological history 4:520 hydrogen sulphide 4:522 map 4:521 Bleaching 2:231 see also Coral bleaching Blocking highs 1:238 Blood lead levels 3:632 Blue Plan 4:148 Blue Planet prize 4:280 Boiling water reactors (BWRs) 3:509 Bolin, Bert 1:245 Bolling Allerod interstadial 1:275, 418 Bombs 3:146 Boreal ecosystem atmosphere study (BOREAS) 2:177, 183 Boreal forest 2:73, 179 average monthly climate 2:181 burning 3:208 carbon ux 4:149 global distribution 2:180 Boreal forest transect case study (BFTCS) 2:353 BOREAS 2:177, 183 Borrasus abellifera 3:148 Bosnia 3:548 Boundary-layer budget (BLB) 4:150

INDEX

573

Bourdeau, Philippe F J 4:152 Brent Spar 5:184, 385, 388 Brick clay extraction 3:341 Brinkhorst, Laurens Jan 4:153 Broecker, Wallace Smith 1:246 Brogger Peninsula 2:601 Bromine 1:153 Bromine oxide (BrOx ) 1:680 Bromocarbons 1:680 Brower, David 5:185, 285 Browneld sites 3:343 Bruce, James 4:153 Brundtland, Gro Harlem 4:154 Brundtland Report 5:249 Buddhism 5:185 early views of nature 5:186 environmental activism 5:189 modern ecological views 5:187 northern views 5:187 recent ecological history 5:187 Thailand 5:188 Budyko, Mikhail Ivanovich 1:248 Buenos Aires conference 4:445 Buenos Aires Plan of Action 4:441 Buffering capacity 2:184 Buffers 2:184 Building codes 4:379 promulgation and effective enforcement 3:732 Burning, biomass. See Biomass burning Business-as-usual scenario 5:191 Butteries 2:61, 162, 452, 548 C3 photosynthesis 2:69, 186, 194, 470, 573 C4 photosynthesis 2:69, 186, 194, 470, 573 Cadmium anthropogenic emissions 3:58 anthropogenic vs. natural ows 3:57 atmospheric 3:304 deposition to air, water and soil 4:303 ecological effects 3:306 economic issues 3:306 effect on human health 3:305 exposure, risk assessment 3:305 in food chain 3:303 Provisional Tolerable Weekly Intake (PTWI) 3:306 Rhine Basin 4:302 risk management 3:306 sources 3:304 urinary 3:305 Calcium, in soil 3:585 Cambrian 2:297 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) 5:247 Canada emission trading 4:454 sustainable forest policies 4:351 Canada Geographic Information System 4:225 Canada US Bilateral Air Quality Agreement 4:285 Canada/US IJC (International Joint Commission) 4:552 Cancer 3:305 Chernobyl accident 3:242 CAP 3:247 costs and benets 3:248 objectives 3:247 principal measures 3:247 reforms 3:248 Capacity, assimilative 3:220 Capacity building denition 4:156 international efforts 4:156

Carbon anthropogenic emissions 3:35 isotope ratios 2:546 partitioning 2:102 sequestration 2:444 source 2:26 stores 2:196, 197 terrestrial stores and uxes 2:190 see also CENTURY generalized ecosystem model; Redeld ratio Carbon-10 2:544 Carbon-11 2:544 Carbon-12 2:544 Carbon-13 2:544 Carbon-14 2:544, 557 Carbon-15 2:544 Carbon-16 2:544 Carbon-9 2:544 Carbon balance and plant growth 2:497 deforestation 3:269 Carbon cycle 1:284, 2:95, 191, 198, 549, 4:151 long-term 1:252 whole-plant feedbacks 2:102 Carbon dioxide (CO2 ) 1:178, 183, 190, 204, 2:572, 3:178 absorption bands 1:473 and biodiversity 2:221, 223 and plant tissue quality 2:221 and water relations 2:220 and water vapor exchange 2:194 anthropogenic emissions 2:201 atmospheric 1:26, 189, 249, 254, 291, 338, 411, 468, 501, 517, 2:69, 94, 95, 140, 161, 173, 188, 193, 201, 216, 249, 450, 487, 549, 3:181, 216, 4:149, 229 trends 1:254 changes during the industrial era 1:250 climate change 1:411 concentration 2:175, 191, 3:181, 315, 355, 4:38, 430 concentrations 1:518 cycle 2:159 direct GWPs relative to 1:411 elated concentrations 2:489 elevated 2:46, 62, 94, 125, 442, 471, 608 emissions 1:166, 3:216, 476, 477, 4:325, 428, 5:401, 402 energy related 3:47 gas aring 3:473 per capita 3:8 enrichment 2:5, 215 factors affecting 1:252 fertilization 4:150, 151 xation 2:422 xing 3:353 from 550 million to 500 000 1:251 global cycle 3:182 global observing network 4:150 Greenland 1:416 ice cores 1:260 increasing atmospheric 2:563 interaction with other global change factors 2:494 interactive effects 2:488 inter-annual variation in ux from natural sources 1:258 isotropic signatures 1:258 measurements Mauna Loa record 1:484 since 1958 1:249 measuring atmospheric concentrations 1:260 Model-Experiment Activity for Improved Links (CMEAL) 2:173 Precambrian 1:252 pre-industrial changes during last millennium 1:249 production 2:532 sampling stations 1:257

574 INDEX
Carbon dioxide (CO2 ) (continued ) sources 1:368 tropical rainforests 3:269 tundra 2:596 Carbon uxes Boreal Forest 4:149 tundra 2:596 Carbon isotope ratio 2:188, 189, 549 fossil fuels 2:549 Carbon isotopes in fossils 2:547 Carbon metabolism, biosphere 2:7 Carbon monoxide (CO) 1:179, 261, 384, 3:680, 4:486 concentrations 1:261 levels of 2:608 Carbon/nitrogen ratio 2:102, 436 Carbon tetrachloride 1:153 Carbonate sediments 2:200 Carbonyl sul de (COS) 1:483, 681 Cardiac hospitalization rates 4:488 Cargo ballast water 3:633 Carnegie-Ames-Stanford Approach (CASA) terrestrial biogeochemical model 2:202 Carrying capacity 4:156 maximum human load 3:298 Cars. See Automobiles Carson, Rachel Louise 5:51, 192, 247, 430 Caspian basin, map 4:525 Caspian Lake 4:521 Caspian Sea 4:523 biota 4:524 geological history 4:523 impacts 4:524 rehabilitation 4:526 water level uctuations 4:524 Caste system 5:94 Catalytic cycle 1:677 Catastrophic events. See Natural disasters Catastrophic risks, impact 4:375 Catchment 2:345 Cattle grazing and land cover 3:221 and pastoral change 3:224 CBA (cost bene t analysis) 5:193 Cenozoic cooling 1:338 Cenozoic desiccation 1:337 Cenozoic tectonism 1:337 Centrifugal force 1:328 CENTURY Ecosystem Model 2:206, 333 major structural components 2:206 use and testing 2:208 CEOS (Committee on Earth Observation Satellites) 1:71, 261 Cercopithecus patas 1:339 Cereal cultivation 3:228 Chamaenerion (Epilobium) angustifolium 2:559 Change, permanent 5:391 Change theories 5:391 Chaos 1:16, 263, 2:209, 4:31 in ecological dynamics 2:213 mathematical background 2:210 Chaotic systems 2:452 Chapman mechanism 1:676, 677, 680 Charney, Jule Gregory 1:266 Chemoautotrophs 2:143 Chemical potential, surrogate 3:335 Chemical sinks, wetlands as 3:109 Chemical substitutes, case study 4:387 Chemical time bomb (CTB) and climate change 3:112 concept 3:99 Chemical weathering 1:755 Chemoheterotroph 2:26 Chemosynthesis 2:422 Chernobyl nuclear disaster 3:241, 5:54, 301 Childhood mortality 5:33 China agriculture 3:431 eco-development 3:433 human ecology 3:430 land transformation 3:430 loess sequence 1:341 sustainability 4:547 see also Yellow river Chipko Movement 5:193, 249, 388 Chlorine 1:153 Chlorine nitrate (ClONO2 ) 1:154, 681 Chlorine oxides (ClOx ) 1:679 Chlorocarbons 1:427 Chloro uorocarbons (CFCs) 1:144, 146, 150, 153, 178, 267, 384, 411, 427, 474, 501, 520, 533, 679, 4:65, 74, 283, 309, 314, 387, 428, 446, 5:434 commonly used 1:267 concentrations 1:145 estimated global consumption 1:268 ows and stocks 3:66 phase-out case study 4:386 Christianity 5:104, 194, 211, 461 arrival of 5:375 challenges for the future 5:199 environmental responses at local, national and international levels 5:198 historical background 5:194 new theological directions 5:196 theological challenges 5:195 Chromium, anthropogenic emissions 3:58 Cirrus clouds 3:184 CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) 4:157, 283 Cities and volcanic eruptions 3:696 linear metabolism 3:59 parks/gardens movements 5:363 Safer Cities Programme 4:462 structural changes affecting 3:670 sustainable policies 4:406 world s largest 3:669 world s most rapidly growing 3:670 see also Urban Civil con ict 3:146 and forest resources 3:148 Clausius Clapeyron relation 1:384 Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) 4:158, 165, 357 Clean energy 3:710 Clean technology 5:30 Cleaner production 4:99, 158 Clear air ice precipitation 1:320 Clear-sky feedbacks 1:285 CLIC (Climate and Cryosphere) 1:269 CLIMAP (Climate Long-range Investigation, Mapping, and Prediction) 1:269, 469 Climate analogues 1:271 and energy balance 1:371 and weather 1:15 chemistry interactions with 1:384 components 1:308 de nition 1:270 driving forces 1:18 effects of aerosols 1:162 equilibrium states 1:115 land surface interactions 1:494

INDEX

575

model simulations 1:114 mountain 1:540 natural climate variability 1:120 pre-industrial period 1:123 predictability 1:265 projection of future changes 1:126 sensitivity 1:375 spatial structure 1:24 20th century 1:121 see also CLIC; CLIMAP Climate Agenda 1:270 Climate change 4:74 abrupt 1:272 and cloud characteristics 1:287 and hydrologic cycle 1:459 and tropical storms 1:438 and variations representation 1:111 and viral diseases 3:690 anthropogenic impacts 2:105 anthropogenic inuences 1:25 attribution 1:28 CO2 1:411 correlations between modeled and observed changes 1:278 crop models 2:244 decision-making to combat 4:254 denition 1:271 desert regions 1:341 detection and attribution 5:1-5 new developments 1:279 disease 2:64 downscaling 1:346 elements of 5:110 factors contributing to 1:389 future implications 1:277 global agenda 4:163 Holocene 3:372 impacts on atmospheric chemistry 1:387 impacts on natural systems 2:201 key recent studies 1:280 millennial scale 1:273 observed 1:23 over past 550 million years 1:252 pests 2:64 problem of 5:400 projections 1:29, 461 regional. See Regional climate change sediments 2:156 soils 2:156 spatial structure 1:24 time-history of recent changes 1:279 United States 4:543 see also Fingerprinting Climate cycle 4:84 Climate extremes 3:1, 243, 4:230 and natural disasters 4:229 conjunctive 3:246 denition 3:243 examples 3:244 importance of 3:243 trends versus truisms 3:244 Climate feedbacks 1:283, 382 Climate models fast feedback processes 1:285 simulations geological past 1:296 reliability 1:114 transient simulations 1:299 Climate policy, international 4:252 Climate predictability. See CLIVAR Climate protection 4:388

Climate sensitivity 1:284, 382 Climate simulation 1:114, 756 Climate stabilization, geoengineering for 3:336 Climate system 1:13 Climate variability 3:653 see also CLIVAR Climate variations and glacier uctuations 1:404 Climate warming 4:149 and water use 3:238 potential effects 3:382 Climatic geomorphology 1:402 Climatic Impact Assessment Program (CIAP) 1:678 Climatic response, feedbacks 1:27 Climatology 1:308 denition 1:308 key approaches 1:309 Climax community 5:391 Climax vegetation 2:215 CLIVAR (CLImate VARiability and Predictability) 1:311 Cloud albedo 1:317 Cloud amount 1:288 Cloud and Radiation Test-bed (CART) 1:203 Cloud changes 1:284 Cloud characteristics and climate changes 1:287 Cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) 1:317 Cloud feedbacks 1:287 Cloud height 1:288 Cloud properties and processes 1:285 Clouds 1:19, 27, 316 agricultural regions 1:318 and longwave radiation 1:318 and precipitation 1:316 and shortwave radiation 1:317 effects of aerosols 1:165 lightning 1:501 polar regions 1:319 schematic view 1:317 urban regions 1:318 Club of Rome 4:166, 400, 5:395, 404 Coal, transport movements 3:636 Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies (CERES) Principles 4:236 Coastal degradation due to tourism 3:618 Coastal superquarries 3:342 Coastal waters anoxia in 3:109 eutrophication 3:503 Coastal zones 2:77 environmental change by tourism 3:620 management 4:166 Cocoyoc Symposium on Patterns of Resource Use, Environment and Development Strategies 4:400 Coke manufacture, methane emissions 3:463 Collaboration, global imperative 5:293 Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) 5:506 Colobanthus quitensis 2:162 Colonizing stage 2:550 Combined environment and development 5:58 Combustion gas disposal 3:710 Comephorous 3:414 Comets 1:205 global consequences of impacts 1:208 impact hazard today 1:210 impacts over earth history 1:205 populations 1:206 Shoemaker-Levy 9 1:205 Command and control (CAC) 5:26 regulation 4:446 Commodication, threat of 5:322 Common Agricultural Policy. See CAP

576 INDEX
Common but differentiated responsibility 5:329 Common but differentiated responsibility principle (Stockholm/Rio) 4:168 Common concern 5:329 Common property management 5:46 Commons, tragedy of the 5:208, 415 Communications developments 3:6 infrastructure 3:644 Community Development Programme 4:462 Community forest 3:173 Community importance value (CIV) 2:25 Community richness 2:224 Competition 2:485 Competition stress disturbance (CSR) 2:482, 485 Complex dynamics 4:31 Complex hazards 3:483 Complex systems 5:422 man and nature 5:384 monitoring 4:116 properties 4:118 Composting 2:544, 3:686 Compound hazards 3:483 Computer simulation models 1:114, 2:241, 4:251 Concentration response functions (CRFs) 4:487 Conceptual model hierarchical structure 4:127 monitoring 4:130 Conference of Parties (COP) 4:168, 172, 439, 441, 480 Conict and environment 5:271 and environmental change 5:271 and warfare 5:274 see also Environmental stress; Violent conict Confucianism 3:431 Conifers ecological distribution 2:561 evolution 2:561 geographic distribution 2:561 physiological and morphological adaptations 2:561 Connectivity 2:325 Consequential rules 5:413 Conservation, incentives 4:102 Conservation biology 2:228 Conservation movement 5:244 Conservatism 5:436 Constellations 5:373 Constitutive rules 5:413 Construction 3:7 Construction materials, US 3:57 Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) 4:361 Consumer-driven dynamics 2:380 Consumption, environmental impact 5:34 Consumption patterns 4:164 economic and demographic change 3:249 Consumption pollution link 5:34 Contaminated lands. See Land contamination; Soils Contemporary invasions 2:87 Continental drift 1:321, 647 historical background 1:321 lessons from 1:324 rejection 1:323 Continentality 1:334 Continuity, principle 5:298 Contraction, trajectory of 5:160 Contraction theory 1:321 alternative 1:322 Contrails 3:182 Controlled environment facilities (CEFs) 2:228 Convection 1:325 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) 4:169 contents 4:169 ex situ conservation 4:170 nancial resources 4:171 impacts 4:171 in situ conservation 4:170 incentives 4:170 knowledge base 4:169 research 4:170 sustainable use 4:170 Convergence, trajectory of 5:160 Convergent boundaries 1:410 Coral bleaching 2:231, 232 Coral reefs 1:363, 2:163 degradation due to tourism 3:617 Coregonus autumalis migratorius 3:415, 417 Coriolis effect 1:191, 326 Coriolis force 1:225, 326 history 1:326 rotating planet 1:328 turntable 1:327 variation 1:329 Coriolis parameter 1:327 Corn industrial engineering 4:548 Corporate Average Fuel Efciency (CAFE) standards 5:31 Corporate environmental behavior and nancial performance 4:235 Corporate environmental leadership 4:66 Corporate environmental reporting 4:236 Corridors 2:324 Cosmic rays 1:476 Cosmology Christian Ptolemaic 5:377 medieval western 5:376 pre-modern 5:372 Cost benet analysis (CBA) 5:193 Cost benet modeling 5:397 Costing, ecosystem services 2:272 Costs, internalization 4:278 Cousteau, Jaques 5:209 CQUESTN 2:445 Crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM) 2:186, 471 Creation principle 5:338 Creative destruction 5:391 Cretaceous 1:207, 329, 516, 2:297 climate modeling 1:297 Critical loads 3:252, 4:175, 5:417 Crop farming 3:228 Crop models 2:241 applications 2:245 climate response 2:243 comparison exercises 2:244 history 2:241 input-output models 2:245 limitations 2:242 Crops environmental effects 2:243 see also Plants Crossover 5:398 Crude oil, transport movements 3:636 Crude petroleum, Arctic environment 3:517 Crust 1:503 Crutzen, Paul J 1:330, 677 Cryogen Limb Array Etalon Spectrometer (CLAES) 1:732 Cryosphere 1:330 and hydrologic cycle 1:450 see also CLIC CSD (Commission on Sustainable Development) 4:43, 178 Cultural attitudes 3:6 Cultural eco-feminism 5:439

INDEX

577

Cultural eutrophication 4:349 Cultural evolution 5:164 Cultural landscapes 5:319 Cultural oligotrophication 4:349 Cultural theory 5:391, 401 Culture scale 5:73 dynamics 5:75 Cultures, development 5:155 Cumulative changes 5:273 Cumulative environmental assessment (CEA) methodologies 4:179 Cumuliform clouds 1:326 Cumulus clouds 1:326 Cumulus congestus clouds 1:326 Cumulus convection 1:325 Cumulus humulus clouds 1:326 Curi, Kriton 3:253 Current carbon budget 2:201 Cut-off lows 1:238 Cybernetics 5:410 Cyberspace 5:505 Cyborg 5:410 Cystoseira 4:522

4:178

Daisyworld model 2:247 Damar agroforest 3:176 Dams environmental impacts 3:553 worlds largest 3:553 Danger, exposure to 5:299 Dansgaard Oescheger (D O) cycles 1:272, 273, 332 Dansgaard Oescheger (D O) events 1:430 DART (dynamics of the Arctic treeline) 2:354 Darwin, Charles Robert 2:247 Darwins theory of evolution 2:560 Data and Information System (DIS) 2:40 Data archive 2:257, 258 functions 2:252 Data banks 2:248 examples 2:249 future directions 2:257 historic examples 2:248 overview 2:249 present-day 2:249 subsetting 2:255 user interface 2:255 Data collection and storage 4:134 Data delivery 2:255 Data entropy 2:410 Data formats 2:254 Data preservation 2:250 Data rescue 2:257 Data sharing 2:256, 258, 410 Data storage and distribution 2:251 DDD 5:51 DDT 2:379, 3:98, 302, 416, 417, 4:76, 262, 519, 5:51, 248 environmental incidents 4:518 Dead Sea Rift 1:335 Death, statistics 4:62 Decadal variations 1:367 Decision-making macro 3:7 to combat climate change 4:254 Decision processes, risk management 4:377 Decision systems 3:6 Declaration des droits de lhomme 5:120 Decolonization 5:92, 152 Deep ecology 5:211, 217, 434, 444, 448

Deforestation 1:497, 2:325, 3:7, 158, 732, 4:74 Amazon Basin 3:255 and desertication 3:287 and development 3:270 carbon balance 3:269 classical era 3:260 early modern times 3:262 global impacts 3:265 history 3:259 Middle Ages 3:261 pre-historic 3:259 20th century 3:263 Demand management 4:181 Dematerialization 4:18, 183, 249, 5:157, 160 and cleaner production 41:100 and information age 4:100 and sustainable development 4:96 corporate environmental action 4:99 technologies 4:99 understanding 4:98 Democracy and ecology 5:161 Democratic socialism 5:437 Demographic entrapment 3:142 Demographic transition 5:211 Demographics aging population 3:277 and health 5:403 consumption patterns 3:249 Pacic Islands 3:273 world trends 3:16 Dengue fever 3:692 Denitrication 2:287, 423, 432, 445 Dental amalgam 2:407 Denudation rates and mining activities 3:458 Deontological ethics 5:428 Deposition dry 2:260 wet 2:261 Derelict land, re-use 3:343 Descent of Man, The 5:237 Deschampsia antarctica 2:162 Deschampsia exuosa 2:437, 438 Desert Margins Initiative (Nairobi) 4:185 Desertication 3:10, 282 and drought 3:285 and overgrazing 3:285 causes and consequences 3:284 convention 4:183 denition 3:282, 283 extent and severity 3:283 impediments to combating 4:184 lessons learned 3:289 modern myths 1:342 national and local responses 4:319 overview 4:184 see also UNCCD Deserts 1:332, 2:70 denition 1:332 dust 1:342 encroachment 1:342 environmental change 1:343 evidence of formerly wetter climates 1:335 groundwater 1:341 landforms antiquity 1:337 past climatic events 1:339 prehistoric peoples 1:339 tropical anticyclonic 1:334 world distribution 1:333 Detergents, phosphates in 3:544 Deterritorialization 5:157

578 INDEX
Detoxication, biosphere 3:98 Detritus 2:314 Developing countries 4:165, 183, 5:200 fertility levels 3:20 life expectancies 3:24 national trends 4:8 population trends 3:16 sustainable transportation 4:433 technological innovation and leadership 4:94 Development 5:150 and environment 5:58 and population 5:32 and security 5:159 chrono-politics 5:151 conservation in time 5:154 cultures 5:155 decline 5:157 geo-politics 5:151 history 5:150 legacy of 5:154 projects 5:273 prospects 5:159 social polarization 5:154 Third World 5:153 Development projects, environmental assessment (EA) 4:203 Dew point 1:433 De Wit, C T 2:259 1,1-Dichloro-2,2-bis-(p-chlorophenyl)ethane. See DDD Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane. See DDT 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid 4:262 Diesel engines 3:678 Digital formats 2:254 Dimethylsulde (DMS) 1:163, 284, 343, 348, 384, 2:373, 425 Dinitrogen 3:494 Dinitrogen pentoxide (N2 O5 ) 1:681 Diome distribution/biogeochemistry models 2:169 Dioxin 5:54 DIS Land Cover Classication 2:52 Disasters 5:54 experience 5:298 explanations 5:298 myths 5:298 reversal of expertise 5:302 socially discriminate or indiscriminate events 5:299 technocratic 5:300 see also Natural disasters Discounting 5:28, 214 ecosystem services 2:279 Discrete logistic model 2:454 Diseases and pests 2:64 vector-borne 3:691 Dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) 22;64 Distance learning 1:468, 4:186 digital divide 4:188 electronic mailing lists 4:190 history and evolution 4:187 international organizations 4:190 newsgroups 4:190 Distichlis 3:451 Distributions 2:160 Disturbance response groups, identication 2:486 Disturbances 2:261, 550 anthropogenic causes 2:262 global change 2:264 management implications 2:264 natural causes 2:262 recovery process 2:266 Divergent boundaries 1:410 DIVERSITAS 2:268, 4:42 DMAPP 2:607 Dobr s Assessment 4:547 Dobson spectrophotometer 1:146 Dobson units (DU) 1:141, 676 Dominion theology 5:196, 492 Dooge, James 4:191 Dow Jones global index (DJGI) 4:235 Dow Jones sustainability group index (DJSGI) 4:235 Dowdeswell, Elizabeth 4:192 Downburst 1:325 Downscaling, climate change 1:346 Downstream development 1:238 Downward convection 1:325 DPSIR (Driving Forces Pressures State Impacts Responses) 4:44, 193 Drainage basin 2:345 Dreissena polymorpha 2:534, 4:524 Drinking water 3:85 see also IDWSSD Drosophila 2:62 Drosophila subobscura 2:161 Drought 1:477, 2:347, 3:244, 487 and desertication 3:285 Dry convection 1:325 Dry deposition 2:260 Dry microburst 1:325 Dumping, ecological 4:198 Dumping of wastes. See London Dumping Convention Dust 1:347 deserts 1:342 emission 1:349 impacts 1:348 measurements and modeling of properties 1:350 particles 1:348 properties during atmospheric transport 1:349 Dust veil index. See DVI DVI 3:290, 689 applications 3:292 calculation 3:291 problems with 3:291 Dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) 2:169, 481

Early warning indicators 4:79 Early warning systems 3:550 Earth art 5:173, 355 managing 5:6 origins 5:372 radiation balance 1:18 Earth Charter 5:216 Earth Day 5:49, 52, 53, 216, 248 Earth First! (EF!) 5:217 Earth observing system 1:61, 2:250 current requirements and issues 1:63 in situ systems, networks and programs 1:68 satellites 1:80 see also EOS Earth resources mapping and surface characterization satellites Earth Science Enterprise (ESE) 2:250 Earth sciences, international organizations 1:156 Earth Summit 1:539 Earth System 1:538 and social system 3:5 forcing and feedback variables 1:67 human disturbance of 3:1 key parameters and variables 1:61 state variables and parameters 1:66

1:73

INDEX

579

Earth system models 1:99, 109, 682 applications diagnosis of prevailing conditions and empirical (experimentbased) prediction 1:99 explanation of causal connections 1:99 Earth system history 1:101 general approaches to creating 1:100 horizontal-dimension models 1:105 interannual uctuations representation 1:111 laboratory models and eld experiments 1:100 management and policy analysis 1:100 mathematical analysis 1:102 numerical modeling approaches 1:103 other celestial bodies as 1:102 prediction and projection of future conditions 1:100 recent past as model for the future 1:102 regional models 1:109 representations of individual processes 1:110 testing performance 1:110 vertical-dimension models 1:104 zero-dimension models 1:104 zonal models 1:106 see also speci c models Earth system processes 1:13 Earthquake-generated tsunamis 1:726 Earthquakes 3:8, 488, 513 intensity and magnitude 3:293 losses 4:383 prediction 1:537 reservoir-induced 3:294 triggered by human activities 3:294 see also Seismic risk Earth s rotation 1:225 Earth s surface 1:310, 503, 538 ow patterns forced by 1:238 longwave radiation 1:474 East Timor 3:549 EBCMs 1:373, 376 climate modeling hierarchy 1:376 general applications 1:379 single latitude zone 1:378 speci c examples 1:380 structure 1:377 ECA (Economic Commission for Africa) 4:194 Eciatrics 5:423 ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) 4:195 Eco-agriculture 4:547 Eco-Art 5:173 Eco-building 4:548 Eco-development, China 3:433 Eco-ef ciency 4:18, 44, 106 economic/organizational perspective 4:109 engineering perspective 4:111 historical background 4:106 increasing 4:111 organizational perspective 4:113 stages 4:111 strategy 4:108 Eco-engineering 4:547 rural 4:547 Eco-farming 4:547 Eco industrial parks (EIP) 3:76 Eco-industry 4:548 Eco-labeling 4:210, 211 Eco-labels, types 4:210 Eco-service, urban-rural 4:549 Eco-settlement 4:548 Eco-socialism 5:47, 434, 444 Eco-spirituality 5:309

Eco-studies, versions 5:422 Eco-taxes 4:195 instruments 4:196 Eco-toxicology 4:39 Eco-village 4:547 development 3:434 Ecocentrism 5:217, 236, 311 Ecocycle 5:392 Ecofascism and land ethic 5:239 Ecofeminism 5:33, 196, 218, 434, 439, 444 cross-cultural ourishing 5:223 scholarship 5:223 Ecogeny 54 Ecological capacity 51, 3:296 lightening the load 3:300 overshoot in 3:298 see also Human carrying capacity Ecological city 4:409 Ecological dumping 4:198 Ecological economic systems 4:118 narratives 4:119 Ecological economics 5:5, 37 biophysical-economic system analysis 5:44 classical economic origins 5:39 future 5:45 global enterprise 5:46 historical background 5:38 methods and issues 5:42 natural science origins 5:40 rise of modern 5:41 working assumptions 5:38 Ecological engineering 5:47 Ecological footprints 5:45, 157 analysis 3:302 urban 3:141 Ecological measurements, issues still to be addressed 2:276 Ecological model of health 5:499 Ecological modernization 5:431, 443, 449 Ecological resilience 2:530 Ecology 5:408, 423 and democracy 5:161 global 2:5 global environmental change 2:1 industrial. See Industrial ecology see also Social ecology Economic developments 3:138 Economic growth 4:183 Economic instruments 4:7 Economic sustainability 5:489 Economic systems, nonlinearity 5:398 Economics 5:41, 230, 423 and current regulatory system 5:29 and global environmental change 5:4, 25 ecological. See Ecological economics global agreements 5:35 rainforests 3:270 rise of modern economic culture 5:40 Economies 5:445 consumption patterns 3:249 Ecopolis 4:547 Ecosystem and natural selection 2:293 costing 2:272 function 2:282 functional groups 2:28 large-scale manipulation experiments and observations 2:6 redundant species 2:28 services 2:272 stability 2:281 stable states 2:277 structure 2:282

580 INDEX
Ecosystem approach 3:221, 5:225 Ecosystem functioning 2:24 relative importance of species in 2:24 Ecosystem health 4:199, 5:47, 493 Ecosystem services 2:20, 5:226 and global change 2:274 assessing 2:274 classication 2:273 concept 2:272 delivery 2:276 discounting 2:279 economic valuation 2:277 examples 2:273 key social issues to be addressed 2:277 private vs. public ownership 2:279 understanding 2:274 Ecosystems 2:22, 292 common structure 2:28 effects of global change 2:122 functional groups 2:27 fundamental structure 2:24 human impact 2:116 indirect interactions 2:294 integrity 4:199 monitoring 4:116 species redundancy 2:27 valued component 4:493 Ecotheology 5:492 Ecotones 2:283 climate change 2:285 concept 2:284 hierarchy 2:286 Ecotourism case study 3:600 statistics 3:598 Ecotoxicology 3:302 Ecumenics 5:423 Edge effects 2:326 Education and population growth 5:33 and Training Programme 1:758 see also Environmental education EEA (European Environment Agency) 4:200 Eemian 1:270, 353 Eemian interglacial, climate modeling 1:297 Egalitarianism 5:385, 389 Egocentrism 5:311 Ehrlich, Paul 2:288 Eichhornia crassipes 2:81 EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) 4:201 Ekistics 5:423 El Chichon volcanic eruption 1:736 El Nino 1:28, 230, 279, 353, 457, 476, 487, 645 causes and consequences 1:353 ecosystems impacts 1:362 historical background 1:354 oscillation 1:292 physics 1:358 socio-economic impacts 1:365 temperature and precipitation anomalies associated with 1:361 weather impacts 1:360 see also El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) El Nino La Nina events 1:309 El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) 1:22, 64, 69, 120, 212, 245, 343, 353, 370, 457, 487, 2:63, 70, 138, 163, 549, 3:723, 4:230 cycle 1:358 development of observing and forecasting systems 1:363 El Viejo. See La Nina Electric currents 1:502 Electric elds 1:502 Electricity, atmospheric 1:218, 502 Electromagnetic energy 1:371 Electromagnetic radiation 1:371 Electroplating 3:59 Elodea canadensis 3:415 Elton, C S 2:289 Emergencies, human impact 3:549 Emergent groups 2:482 Emerging environmental issues 4:72 action phase 4:78 characteristics 4:73 concern phase/issues of concern 4:78 denition 4:72 early warning indicators 4:79 future 4:72 horizon phase/horizon issues 4:78 management 4:77 new perspectives 4:74 overview 4:75 role of science 4:75 taxonomies 4:73 unforeseen issues 4:74 unlikely events 4:74 Emergy 5:224 concept 3:4, 303 use of term 3:303 Emission limits 3:63 Emission reduction credit (ERC) 4:453 Emission standards 3:63 Emission trading 4:165, 201, 357, 440, 451 Canada 4:454 Europe 4:454 merits and problems 4:440 nitrogen 4:453 questions and answers 4:453 sulfur 4:453 United States 4:453 Emissions aircraft 3:178 global trends 3:35 road transport 4:429 transport 3:646 see also specic types Emissivity 1:371 Encephalitis 3:692 Encyclopedias 5:228 Endangered species 4:201 Endotherms 2:136 Energy environmental impacts 3:736 terrestrial stores and uxes 2:190 transport 3:645 see also Sustainable energy Energy balance 2:192 and climate 1:371 Energy balance climate models. See EBCMs Energy balance models 1:106 two-dimensional 1:106 Energy budget atmosphere 1:240 latitudinal distribution 1:373 Energy consumption 5:403 world trends 3:734 Energy efciency improvement 4:98 SIDs 4:414 Energy end-use efciencies 4:91 Energy uxes 3:4 Energy innovation value chain 4:92 research and development (R&D) 4:93

INDEX

581

Energy intensity of industrialized countries 4:295 Energy ladder 3:217 Energy paths, soft 3:583, 5:487 Energy policies and sustainable futures 4:356 Energy production 3:709 Energy related carbon dioxide emissions 3:47 Energy resources, Small Island Developing States (SIDS) 4:412 Energy sources 1:234, 2:26 non-renewable 3:355 see also Biomass Energy types 3:734 Energy use future 3:736 present 3:736 Engineering feasibility study 4:204 Engineering resilience 2:530 Enlightenment Project 5:2, 229, 336 ENSO. See El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) Entrainment 1:325 Entropy-based evaluation (MASTER) 3:63 Environment and development 5:58 constituents 2:290 denition 2:290 human interference 2:290 Environmental agenda, social dimension 4:16 Environmental assessment 4:194 best practice or guidelines standards 4:286 development projects 4:203 Dobr s 4:546 national budgets 4:405 Environmental Cadmium in the Food Chain: Sources, Pathways and Risks 3:307 Environmental challenge and solutions 5:177 Environmental change and conict 5:271 and evolutionary processes 2:292 interactions between 2:104 seismic events 3:296 Environmental crisis 5:165 Environmental damage 5:34 Environmental Data Report 4:204 Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) 5:230, 248 Environmental disasters. See Disasters Environmental education 4:206 communication and media 4:209 denitions 4:206 ethics 4:207 guidelines 4:207 objectives 4:207 schools 4:208 tertiary 4:209 Environmental ethics 5:231 Environmental governance 5:368 Environmental groups 5:243 Environmental health and urban poverty 3:661 problems 3:675 Environmental historiograph 5:70 Environmental history and global environmental change 5:62 Environmental impact assessment 2:407, 3:3, 4:194 Environmental indicators 4:247 Environmental justice 5:232 rights-based approach 5:119 utility-based approach 5:119 Environmental law 4:7, 11 international 5:324 Environmental management command and control management 4:16 trends over 40 years 4:15

Environmental movement 5:243 histories 5:3 origins and concerns 5:430 types 5:432 Environmental organizations 5:56 Environmental philosophy 5:253 Environmental policy 4:11 dilemmas 4:367 industrialized countries 4:5 international 4:323 world oceans 4:279 Environmental politics 5:49 contemporary 5:54 recent highlights 5:52 Environmental problems critical 4:382 man-made 4:38 national level 4:2 Environmental programs, UN agencies 4:11 Environmental protection, investment 4:6 Environmental psychology/perception 5:257 Environmental refugees 4:214, 215 Environmental regulation 5:29 Environmental research development, government expenditure 4:6 Environmental responses international 4:9 overview 4:1 Environmental risk assessment, best practice or guidelines standards 4:286 Environmental security 5:269 critical perspectives 5:273 research 5:270 Environmental sociology 5:278 Environmental standards bilateral 4:285 regional 4:285 Environmental sustainability (ES) 5:489 Environmental systems feedbacks 3:9 maintaining 3:82 Environmental valuations 5:42 Environmental values 5:49 Environmentalism, dening 5:369 Environmentally sensitive area (ESA) 4:361 ENVISAT 1:80 EOS 1:23, 382 EOS Aqua 1:78 EOS Aqua/AIRS 1:79 EOS Aqua/AMSR-E NASDA 1:79 EOS Aura 1:79 EOS ICESat 1:80 EOS satellite series 1:76 EOS Terra 1:76 EOS Terra/ASTER 1:78 EOS Terra/CERES 1:77 EOS Terra/MISSR 1:78 EOS Terra/MODIS 1:77 EOS Terra/MOPITT 1:78 Eotros effect 1:329 Epidemiology and air quality standards 4:485 Equatorial waves 1:359 Equilibrium response 1:382 Equity 5:279 and innovative technology 5:281 multiple dimensions 5:280 multiple questions 5:280 multiple tasks 5:280 Eradication, species 2:17 Erosion, soil. See Soil erosion ERS (Earth Resources Satellite) Series (ESA) 1:73

582 INDEX
ESCAP (Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacic) 4:218 Estuaries, impacts of aggregate extraction 3:342 Ethics environmental 5:231 see also Land ethic Euphorbia candelabra 1:334 Euphydryas editha 2:162 Europe emission trading 4:454 nitrate protection zones (NPZs) 3:493 tourism 3:626 European Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund (EADDF) 3:248 European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts 1:454 European Network for Research in Global Change (ENRICH) 2:290 European Union (EU) 3:247, 549, 4:218 Eutrophic systems 2:458, 5:426 Eutrophication 2:128, 458, 3:720, 724 marine and coastal waters 3:503 Evaporation 1:452, 2:344, 346, 347 rainforests 3:265, 267 yearly average 1:456 Evapotranspiration 1:452, 2:380, 461 Evolution 2:560 Evolutionary processes and environmental changes 2:292 ecosystems 2:292 Exclusion, philosophical polarities 5:103 Exosphere 1:244 Exotic invasions 2:489 Externalities 5:26 Extinctions 2:297 birds 2:306 contemporary and future 2:301 estimates 2:303 hotspots 2:305 metapopulations 2:416 Extraction of minerals 3:295 Extraction processes 3:711 Extra-tropical storms 1:236 Exxon Valdez oil spill 5:283, 301 Eye, exposure to UVR 3:136 Fagus gradifolia 2:86 Fair weather electrication 1:220 Fairness 5:279 Family planning 5:34 FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) 2:324, 3:238, 4:41, 219 Farming, organic 3:532 Fast feedback processes 1:290 Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) 4:377 Feedbacks 1:382 chemistry climate interactions with climate 1:384 climatic response 1:27 environment system 3:9 mechanisms 1:375 Feminism 5:439 see also Ecofeminism Feng Shui theory 3:431 Fertility levels and population growth 3:20 Fertilizers 3:9 inorganic 3:539 inorganic phosphatic 3:539 policy 4:360 FGD waste 4:111 Fingerprinting 1:388 applications 1:279 Fire grasslands 2:572 mosaics 5:319 species tolerance 2:487 suppression 2:566 see also Forest res; Oil res First International Polar Year 1:156 First Nations peoples 5:466 Fish direct use 2:330 freshwater 2:327 habitat 2:328 indirect abuse 2:330 K-selected species 2:330, 331 r-selected species 2:330 Fish stocks, analysis 3:238 Fisheries 3:9, 136 Baltic Sea 4:518 ecosystems perspective 4:348 effects of climate change 3:309 El Nino effects 1:363 governance conventions 2:330 habitat degradation 3:316 management 4:346 ownership regimes 4:347 Pacic coast 3:314 policies 4:343 pollution 3:316 reforms of the 1990s 4:350 responsible 4:343 sustainable 4:343 transferable quotas 4:455 types 2:330 see also Aquaculture; Freshwater sheries; Minamata; Transferable sheries quotas Fixed nitrogen 2:308 Flip-ops 5:422 Floodplains 2:378 burning patterns 5:319 ows 5:425 forests 2:287 Floods and ooding 1:726, 2:347, 3:245, 486, 707, 730 Flow dynamics, phases 5:424 Flue-gas desulfurization (FGD) technology 4:107 Fluid injection, earth tremors induced by 3:295 Fluid removal, earthquakes induced by 3:295 Fluid withdrawal, subsidence due to 3:339 FLUXNET 2:45 Food, and ecofeminism 5:219 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) 2:324, 3:238, 4:41, 219 Food chains 2:405 cadmium in 3:303 Food consumption and climate change 3:323 and greenhouse gas emissions 3:323 Food production 3:134, 712, 5:88 and malnutrition 3:441 greenhouse 3:352 Food webs 2:308 age structure effects 2:315 as open systems 2:314 connectivity 2:310 current topics/trends 2:313 energetic 2:310 functional 2:312 interactive 2:312 omnivory 2:313 roles of nutrients and stoichiometry 2:315 structure 2:313 types 2:309

INDEX

583

Food yields 3:136 Forest decline 5:508.17 Forest res 3:210, 653 Forest Gap Models 2:316 Forest logging. See Logging systems Forest resources and conict 3:148 Forest soils 3:546 Forest stand 2:323 Forest webs even aged 2:324 uneven aged 2:324 Forests 2:324 decline 2:439 denition 2:324 ecosystems 2:536 gap models 2:316 nitrogen deposition 2:435 sustainable policies 4:351 temperate coniferous 2:560 temperate deciduous 2:565 urban 3:356 see also Afforestation; Agroforestry; Deforestation; Global Forest Watch; Temperate coniferous forests; Temperate deciduous forests; Tropical forests Fossil fuel burning emissions 3:473 Fossil fuel combustion 3:9 Fossil fuel use 3:8 Fossil fuels 4:183, 356 greenhouse gases 3:649 pollutants from 3:302 Fossil groundwater 1:341 Fossil Record 2:297 Fossils 2:547 Founex 1971 4:399 Fouriers Law for heat conduction 3:335 Fragmentation 2:324 Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) 4:292, 5:116 Framework treaty protocol form 5:327 Francis of Assisi, Saint 5:284 Franklin, Benjamin 1:390 Free air carbon dioxide enrichment (FACE) 2:5, 204 Free market liberalism 5:437 Freight. See Transport Freshwater biodiversity 2:146 circulation 5:201 global warming 3:310 Freshwater ecosystems 2:78, 458, 533 impacts of global change 2:122 Freshwater environment, petroleum hydrocarbons 3:521 Freshwater sheries 2:327 current status 2:331 degradation 2:331 Freshwater lakes 2:377 Friction in atmospheric motions 1:224 Friends of the Earth (FOE) 5:248, 285 Friends of the Earth International (FOEI) 5:57 Fronts 1:235, 391 Fuel consumption, aircraft 3:179 Fuel use for transport 4:434 Fuels biomass power development 3:216 reformulated 3:679 urban, biomass 3:217 Fugacity 3:335 Functional Groups 2:483 Fundamental niche 2:429 Futures research 5:285

Gaia 5:211, 217, 287, 448, 493 dening characteristics 2:332 Gaia Hypothesis 1:510, 2:247, 446 Gaiacentrism 5:217 GAIM (Global Analysis, Interpretation and Modeling Program) 1:392 GAIM Model Intercomparisons 2:50 Galactic cosmic ray (GCR) 1:678 Galileo 5:103 Gandhi, M K 5:290 Gap models 2:316 tests and applications 2:320 Gaquid phase 5:424 GARP (Global Atmospheric Research Program) 1:157, 392, 756, 757 Gas exploration, development and production, Arctic 3:518 Gas aring, carbon dioxide emissions 3:473 Gas-phase stratospheric chemistry 1:675 Gases lifetime 1:501 low concentration methane bearing 3:435 GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) 3:633, 4:221 GAW (Global Atmosphere Watch) 1:393 GCDIS (Global Change Data and Information System) 1:393 GCOS (Global Climate Observing System) 1:394 GCTE Elevated CO2 Network 2:46 GCTE soil erosion network 2:44 GCTE Terrestrial Carbon Cycle Synthesis 2:49 GCTE-NEWS synthesis of global warming 2:579 GDAY 2:332 daily version 2:333 mathematical analysis 2:335 GEH tree 2:342 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. See GATT General Circulation Models (GCMs) 1:108, 114, 288, 296, 309, 346, 374, 394, 4:82, 253 Generic Decomposition and Yield. See GDAY Genetic algorithms 5:398 Genetic resources, access 4:171 Genetically modied organisms (GMOs) 4:45 Genotype, denition 2:466 Genyornis 2:59 GEO (Global Environment Outlook) 4:221 Geochemical cycles gaseous 2:159 sedimentary 2:159 Geodesy 1:538 Geoengineering applications 3:337 climate stabilization 3:336 use of term 3:336 Geographical Information Systems (GIS) 4:222 component parts 4:223, 225 composite maps 4:224 denitions 4:224 locational problems 4:222 questions relating to 4:226 Geography applications 3:337 denition 3:337 investigations 3:337 Geological cycling 1:397 Geological hazards 3:482 Geomagnetism 1:538 Geomorphological hazards 3:482 Geomorphology 1:402 change for urbanization and industry 3:338 sports 3:345 Geophysical data 1:535 Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) 1:512

584 INDEX
Geophysical monitoring systems. See Monitoring systems GEOSECS programme 3:183 Geostationary environmental satellites (GOES) 1:72 Geothermal heat 1:402 Geotropism 2:558 Geranyl pyrophosphate (GPP) 2:607 GESAMP (Joint Group of Experts on the Scienti c Aspects of Marine Environmental Protection) 4:226 GEWEX 1:310, 402, 463 objectives 1:403 research foci 1:403 Glacial aridity 1:340 Glacial cycling simulation 1:111 Glacial-eroded sediment 1:429 Glacial/Holocene boundary 1:275 Glacial pluvial 1:340 Glacial terminations 1:272 Glaciers 1:19, 404, 500 annual average values of net balances 1:406 changes in area and volume 1:407 changes in size 1:407 dimensions 1:405 dynamics problem 1:407 environmental effects of changes 1:408 uctuations and climate variations 1:404 Greenland 1:447 ice cores 1:407 mass balances 1:405 total areas 1:405 winter and summer balances 1:406 Gliricidia sepium 2:443 Global 500 Roll of Honour 4:280 Global agreements, economics 5:35 Global air quality 1:177 Global Analysis, Interpretation and Modeling (GAIM) 2:41 Global Atmosphere Watch (GAW) 1:177, 758 Global atmospheric electric circuit 1:502 Global average temperature 1:371 Global carbon balance 2:197 future biosphere 2:223 Global carbon cycle 1:368 Global change, de nition 2:291 Global Change and Terrestrial Ecology (GCTE) 2:38 Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystems (GCTE) program 2:481 Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) 2:253 Global change system for analysis, research and training (START) 2:41 Global chemical models 1:109 Global climate change, lightning 1:221 Global climate models 1:109 Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) 1:753, 4:42 Global cooling 1:337 Global Data Processing System (GDPS) 1:68 Global Eco-labeling Network (GEN) 4:211 Global energy balance 1:18 Global environment facility (GEF) 4:481 Global environment monitoring system (GEMS) 4:39 Global environment outlooks (GEOs) 4:39 Global environmental change (GEC) airborne sensors 2:524 and environmental history 5:62 and social science 5:109 anthropology and 5:163 assessing effects of 2:124 biological and ecological dimensions 2:1 causes and consequences 3:7 citizens responses 4:33 current challenges and priorities for science 4:44 driving forces 5:166 European perspectives 4:25 hazards 5:297 human dimensions of 5:1 human drivers of 3:5 impact on animals 2:56 impact on plants 2:94 impact on terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems 2:122 integration 2:132 politics 5:124 public-driven response 4:21 regional assessments 2:525 regional responses to 4:514 risk management 4:375 satellite sensors 2:524 scienti c responses 4:36 social science and 5:3 Global Environmental Facility (GEF) 4:43 Global Environmental Monitoring System (GEMS) 1:70 Global Forest Watch 4:231 Global governance 5:292 Global land cover 3:13 Global mean temperature 1:281 Global models, three-dimensional 1:107 Global multi-issues 4:317 Global net primary productivity (NPP) 2:50 Global observing programs 4:42 Global Observing Systems 1:63, 68 Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment (GODAE) 1:537 Global Ocean Ecosystem Dynamics (GLOBEC) 2:39 Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) 1:537, 2:336, 4:42 Global plate tectonics 1:410 Global population trends 3:16 Global Precipitation Climatology Center (GPCC) 1:454 Global reporting initiative (GRI) 4:236 Global Runoff Data Center (GRDC) 1:454 Global technology cooperation Mexico, case studies 4:385 Thailand 4:386 Global Telecommunications System (GTS) 1:68 Global Terrestrial Observing System (GTOS) 1:538, 2:337, 4:42 Global Urban Observatory (GUO) 4:462 Global warming 1:27, 367, 712, 2:64, 85, 88, 331, 373, 579, 580, 3:315, 5:498 and rice 3:127 and skiing 3:346 and UHI 3:665 direct effects 2:575 ecosystem response evaluation 2:575 effects on freshwater ecosystems 2:129 effects on terrestrial ecosystems 2:129 evidence of response 2:579 freshwater 3:310 indirect effects 2:576 initial conditions 2:578 interactions with other elements 2:578 scenarios for 21st century 2:575 tourism contribution 3:614 variable time scale and direction of response 2:577 Global warming potentials (GWPs) 1:267, 411, 447 Global water cycle 2:132 Global Weather Experiment 1:392 Globalization 5:59 and development 5:157 capitalist roots 5:76 caste system 5:94 European origins 5:77 historical perspective 5:73 GOALS 1:411 Gold mining, mercury in 2:406 Goldemberg, Jose 4:233 Goldman prize 4:280

INDEX

585

Golf, impacts 3:345 Goodman, Gordon 4:234 Gopherus agassizii 2:137 Governance and international management 5:292 GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator) 5:331 Grasslands 2:68, 569 clearing 3:228 ecosystems 2:535 nitrogen applications 3:502 see also Temperate grasslands Gravitational force 1:329 Gravity 1:224 Great Depression 5:41 Great Lakes 4:535 case study 3:721 climate change 4:538 contaminants 4:536 diverting and exporting fresh water 4:537 responses to global change 4:536 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (GLWQA) 4:552 Great Man-made River Project, Libya 3:362 Green anarchism 5:439 Green Blue technology 5:426 Green ideology 5:440 Green investment 4:235 Green Parties 5:56 Green Revolution 3:347, 5:88, 93 Green screens 42, 97 Greenhouse food production 3:352 heating 3:355 open-roof 3:354 Greenhouse effect 1:19, 26, 27, 223, 248, 249, 413, 2:161 Greenhouse gases 1:27, 140, 190, 204, 273, 384, 411, 468, 675, 2:424, 457, 608, 3:178, 436, 4:165 and food consumption 3:323 anthropogenic 1:279, 281 emissions 4:164, 254, 410, 486 fossil fuels 3:649 highest emitters per km2 land area 3:475 highest per capita emitters 3:473 highest per unit GDP emitters 3:474 lowest emitters per km2 land area 3:475 lowest per capita emitters 3:473 lowest per unit GDP emitters 3:474 national responsibilities for emissions 3:472 reduction projects 4:292 total emissions per capita 3:475 tradable permits for 4:438 Greenhouse trapping (GHT) 1:291 Greenhouse warming 2:160 Greening of cities 3:356 Greenland 1:19, 21, 413, 647 carbon dioxide 1:416 climate 1:414 climate research 1:415, 416 geography 1:414 glaciers 1:447 Ice Core Project (GRIP) 1:417 ice cores 1:272, 273, 418, 447 ice loss 1:467 ice sheet 1:419 elevation change 1:421 map 1:414 Greenpeace 5:57 Grey Brown technology 5:426 GRID (Global Resource Information Database) 4:237 Gross domestic product (GDP) 4:295, 385, 5:43 Gross national product (GNP) 5:150, 152 Gross primary productivity (GPP) 2:191, 515

Ground temperature 1:21 Groundwater 1:451, 755 assessment 23;10 deserts 1:341 Groundwater contamination 3:495 Groundwater exploitation and subsidence 3:340 Groundwater quality, nitrate in 3:503 Groundwater systems 3:366 Growing season net ux (GSNF) 2:205 Growlers 1:467 Growth 2:161 Growth cycle 4:111 GTOS (Global Terrestrial Observing System) 1:70 Guanghan, China 4:549 Gulf of Alaska 3:315 Gulf War 3:146, 523, 548 Gymnosperms 2:135 Habitat destruction, tourism contribution 3:615 Habitat fragmentation, Amazon Basin 3:255 Habitats 2:339 lakes 2:378 rivers 2:378 urban ecosystems 3:656 Hadley circulation 1:227, 12:1198, 1:427, 476, 715 Hadley, George 1:427 Haiti, environmental refugees 4:215 Halocarbons 1:178, 427 growth in concentrations 1:144 Halogen Occultation Experiment (HALOE) 1:732 Halon-1301 1:146 Halons 1:153, 384, 680 Halophobes 2:339 Halophytes 2:339 Hantavirus 3:693 Harbors 3:572 Hare, Kenneth 1:428 Harmful algal blooms (HABs) 3:380, 548 Hazardous wastes 3:710 transboundary movements 3:631 Hazards, natural. See Natural hazards Health 3:732, 5:497 and biosphere 5:500 and environment 5:492 and environmental change 3:130 as sustainable state 3:142 awareness 4:48 ecological model of 5:499 medical model 5:495 nitrogen impacts 3:503 public 3:547, 5:494 see also Ecosystem health Health-based standards 4:487 Health benets of air quality standard 4:491 Health concerns, water use 3:90 Health effects, ozone 3:652 Health hazards due to global climate change 3:132 nuclear waste 3:507 Health issues lifestyles 4:61 policy responses 4:47 population dynamics 4:55 water supplies 4:51 see also WHO Health of the Planet 4:23 Health outcomes and value systems 4:54 Health protection 4:50

586 INDEX
Heat geothermal 1:402 latent 1:500 Heat storage, role of 1:21 Heatwaves 3:140 Heavy metals methylation 3:110 persistent organic pollutants 4:286 soil contaminated with 3:105 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 5:105 Heinrich (H-) events 1:429 mechanisms 1:430 outstanding problems 1:430 Helsinki Commission (HELCOM) 4:518 Herbaceous-dominated vegetation 2:486 Heroics in mythology 5:373 Heterosphere 1:244 Heterotrophic systems 2:458 Heterotrophy 2:26, 143 HFC-134a 4:388 Hierarchical structure, conceptual model 4:130 Hierarchy community based 4:118 theory 4:117 High Resolution Doppler Imager (HRDI) 1:732 High-nitrate low chlorophyll (HNLC) 3:183 Highway construction 3:711 Hilo, Hawaii 1:726 Hinduism 5:303 eco-spirituality 5:309 pollution and its prevention 5:307 treatment of animal life 5:305 Holdgate, Martin 4:239 Holdridge life zone classication 2:167, 201, 339, 487 Holism and human ecology 3:2 understanding 4:408 Holling, C S 2:340 Holocene 1:249, 275, 340, 431, 2:86, 286, 5:57 climate changes and society in Europe 3:372 Holon 2:283, 5:423 Holonarchy 5:423 Homeostasis 5:493 Homocentrism 5:311 Homosphere 1:243 Household energy problem 3:218 Housing and basic services 3:673 Hsinfengkiang, China 3:295 Human adaptability 5:164, 300 Human carrying capacity 3:296 Human conict 3:548 Human dimensions of global environmental change 5:1 Human disturbance of Earth System, dynamics and complexities 3:1 Human disturbance regimes 2:88 Human drivers of global environmental change 3:5 Human ecology and holism 3:2 China 3:430 Human ecosystem model 5:499 Human environment relations 5:67 Human health. See Health human impacts, cumulative effects 3:4 Human nature relationships (HNR) 5:12 Human needs and wants 3:2 Human obligations 5:207 Human rights 5:207 Human security 5:275, 276 Human shaping of the environment 5:357 Human sustainability 5:489 Human systems maintaining 3:81 redesigning 3:82 Human values and science 5:117 Humanitarian aid 3:549 Humanitarian assistance, institutional trends 3:550 Humanitarian issues 3:550 Humanity and Earth 5:177 Humidity 1:432 Hurricanes 1:439 categorization 1:434 overview 1:433 Hutchinson, G Evelyn 2:341 Hydrochloric acid (HCl) 1:154, 681 Hydrochlorouorocarbons (HCFCs) 1:145, 153, 178, 268, 384, 411, 427, 4:313, 428 Hydroegoism 5:206 Hydrouorocarbons (HFCs) 1:145, 178, 268, 384, 411, 427, 447 Hydrogen isotope ratios 2:546, 547, 548, 549 Hydrogen oxide (HOx ) family 1:677 Hydrogen peroxide (H2 O2 ) 1:447, 2:457 Hydrogen sulde (H2 S) in photosynthesis 2:423 Hydrologic cycle 1:19, 450, 2:343 and climate change 1:459 biospheric controls 2:37 conceptual diagram 1:452 data 1:453 uxes 1:451 human impacts 1:458 mathematical models 1:452 observed climatology 1:454 observed trends 1:462 quality measurements of individual components 1:454 reservoirs within 1:450 towards improved understanding 1:462 20th century observed changes 1:462 variations 1:457 Hydrological alterations 2:132 Hydrological hazards 3:481 Hydrological stores 2:344 Hydrology 1:464, 468, 2:343, 345 denitions 1:464 extremes 2:347 global 2:344 observing systems 1:536 rainforests 3:268 Hydrology and Water Resources Programme 1:758 Hydrometeorology 1:464 Hydrosolidarity 5:206 Hydroxyl radical (OH) 1:517, 677, 2:457 Hyperspatial imaging systems 2:527 Hyperspectral imaging systems 2:526 IAHS (International Association of Hydrological Sciences) 1:464 IAI (Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research) 4:241 IAMAS (International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences) 1:466 IAMs general structure 4:256 in science 4:259 mathematical structure 4:256 solving procedures 4:256 top-down versus bottom-up debate 4:257 uses 4:257 when and where exibility debate 4:258 IAPSO 1:467 Ice areal extent 1:284 role of 1:21 Ice-core volcanic index (IVI) 3:690

INDEX

587

Ice caps 1:19 Ice cores 1:518 atmospheric CO2 1:256 glaciers 1:407 Greenland 1:273, 274, 447 Ice dynamics, simulations 1:290 Ice sheets 1:21 Ice storms 3:486 Iceberg-rafted debris (IRD) 1:430 Icebergs 1:409, 467 ICREAs (International Commodity-related Environmental Agreements) 4:242 ICSU (International Council for Science) 1:158, 4:39, 242 ICSU (World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) 1:70 IDNDR (International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction) 4:242 IDWSSD (International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade) 4:244 IFIAS (International Federation of Institutes for Advanced Study) 4:244 IGAC (International Global Atmospheric Chemistry) 1:467 IGBP 1:392, 2:38, 350, 351, 469, 4:41 core projects 1:310, 2:37, 48 framework activities 2:40 implementation strategies 2:41 science trends 2:53 Terrestrial Carbon Working Group 2:51 IGBP LUCC 5:386 Igneous rocks 1:397 IGOS 1:71 IGY (International Geophysical Year) 1:156, 189, 355, 468, 538, 4:40 IHDP (International Human Dimensions Program on Global Environmental Change) 4:42, 245 IHP (International Hydrological Program) 1:468 IIASA (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis 4:44, 246, 452 Imaging technologies 2:528 Imbrie, John 1:469 Immanence 5:98 Immigration. See Migration Immune system, effect of UVR 3:136 IMO (International Maritime Organization) 4:246 Imperata cylindrica 3:273 Improved Stratospheric and Mesospheric Sounder (ISAMS) 1:732 Incentive-based regulation 5:30 Incineration, urban wastes 3:687 Inclusion, philosophical polarities 5:103 Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) 5:44, 331 Index system, data banks 2:254 Indicators calculating 4:135 categories 4:134 development 4:132, 134 environmental quality 4:247 generation 4:133 selection criteria 4:134 sustainable development 4:247 Indigenous empowerment 5:323 Indigenous knowledge 5:314 epistemology 5:317 Indigenous peoples 5:314 and environmental change 5:166 and phase shifts 5:427 Individual behavior 5:405 Indonesia aquaculture 3:197 transmigration 3:272 wild res (1997) 3:491 Indus Basin, water management 3:377 Indus River, freshwater diversion 2:400

Industrial accidents 5:273 Industrial ecology 3:4, 4:112, 248, 5:47 Industrial emissions 3:679 Industrial metabolism 3:4, 5, 6, 73 Industrial revolution, power supplies 5:90 Industrialization, 19th century 5:363 Industrialized countries, environmental policy 4:5 Industry leadership 4:65 Infant mortality 5:33 Infectious diseases 2:163, 357, 3:138 and malnutrition 3:442 person-to-person 3:134 vector-borne 3:133 Information age and dematerialization 4:100 Information and communication technologies (ICTs) 3:6, 4:187, 5:505 Information exchange 4:171 Information management 2:392 Infrared radiation 1:371, 470 concepts 1:470 physical effects 1:474 process 1:473 spectra 1:472 Inland waters ecosystems 2:380 science 2:376 Innovation 4:31, 5:294 Insect pests 3:381 active season 3:382 adaptation 3:381 extension of range 3:383 long-term datasets 3:384 response options 3:386 winter mortality 3:383 Insects, phytophagous 2:471 Institutional innovations 5:294 Institutionalization, global level 5:293 Institutions, environmental responsibility 4:7 Integrated assessment (IA) 4:249, 250 goals 4:250 Integrated assessment models. See IAMs Integrated Coastal Area Management 4:346 Integrated coastal zone management (ICZM) 4:167 Integrated environmental and economic accounting (IEEA) 4:39 Integrated Global Earth Monitoring Systems (IGEMS) 1:538 Integrated models 5:395, 396 Integrated pest management (IPM) 4:261 and global change 4:263 Intellectual property rights 5:322 Inter American Institute for Global Change (IAI) 2:363 Inter-basin transfer (IBTs) ecological impacts 3:390 global examples 3:388 history 3:387 North America 3:389 Siberia-Central Asia 3:389 UK 3:387 water supplies 3:387 Intergenerational equity 5:349 Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission 1:394, 753, 4:465 Intergovernmental organizations 1:157 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 1:28, 157, 278, 392, 409, 411, 3:7, 4:76, 163, 265 Internalization of damage costs 4:278 International agreements 4:3, 5:35 International Biological Program (IBP) 2:168 International Biosphere Program (IBP) 2:5, 364 International climate policy 4:252 International Council for Science (ICSU) 1:394, 538, 752, 4:156 International Environmental Education Program (IEEP) 4:206

588 INDEX
International environmental institutions 4:10 International environmental law 5:324 International environmental policy 4:323 International Environmental Prizes 4:279 International environmental responses 4:9 International environmental standards 4:281 non-binding negotiations 4:284 voluntary 4:286 International Geophysical Year (IGY) 1:156, 189, 355, 468, 538, 4:40 International Geosphere Biosphere Program Land-Use and LandCover Change. See IGBP LUCC International Geosphere Biosphere Program. See IGBP International Global Atmospheric Chemistry Project (IGAC) 2:39 International Human Dimensions Programme (IHDP) 2:350 International Hydrological Decade (IHD) 1:469, 4:465 International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) 5:248 International LTER (ILTER) network 2:393 International management 5:292 modes 5:293 International Maritime Organization (IMO) 4:308 International Meteorological Organization (IMO) 1:68 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 5:69 International organizations accomplishments 1:159 earth sciences 1:156 International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) 3:391 International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE) 5:37 International transfers of emission 4:441 International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) 5:57 International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) 1:538 Interstadials 1:332 Intertidal zones 2:365 classications 2:365 littorinid 2:365 lower 2:366 middle 2:365 upper 2:365 Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) 1:228, 476 Introduction to Hydrometeorology 4:154 Invasability 2:13 Invasions 2:87, 132, 567, 4:74 consequences of 2:14 control methods 2:16 denitions 2:11 interactions with other agents of global change 2:14 lag phases 2:12 meltdown 2:14 process 2:11 rates of conversion to pest status 2:13 rates of incursion 2:12 rates of spread 2:12 success factors 2:13 Invasive species 3:137 Inversion conditions 1:243 Invertebrates 2:162 Investment environmental protection 4:6 sustainable energy 4:90 see also Socially responsible investment (SRI) IOC (Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission) 4:287 IOC Global Ocean Sea Level Observing System (GLOSS) 1:70 IOC/WMO GOOS 1:69 Ionizing radiation 3:507 Ionosphere 1:244, 476, 502, 516 IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) 1:477, 3:7, 42, 4:252, 481, 5:395 IPCS (International Program on Chemical Safety) 4:284, 288 IRI (International Research Institute for Climate Prediction) 1:477 Iron 2:425 chemistry 2:372 fertilization experiments 2:372 missing ingredient 2:371 update by 2:372 Iron cycle 3:181 Iron ore, transport movements 3:636 Iron triangle 5:427 IRPTC 4:289 Irrigation 3:8 and desertication 3:288 and disease 3:93 and wetlands demise 3:399 benets 3:393 costs 3:395 environmental impacts 3:392 growth and global extent 3:392 Libya 3:364 sustainable 3:396 IRS (Indian Remote Sensing Satellite) 1:74 ISCCP (International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project) 1:159, 478 ISEW (Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare) 5:44, 331 Islam 5:332, 461 basics 5:333 ethical dimension 5:333 natural order 5:334 Islands, tourism 3:626 ISLSCP (International Satellite Land Surface Climatology Project) 1:478 ISO (International Organization for Standardization) 4:290 Isoprene 2:606 Isostasy 1:103, 479 ISSC (International Social Science Council) 5:339 Istanbul, waste dumps 3:707 ITEX synthesis of global warming 2:580 IUCN (World Conservation Union) 4:40, 290 Red List of Threatened Species 4:201, 508 IUGG (International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics) 1:479 Ixodes 2:64 Ixodes ricinus 2:163 Izrael, Yuri A 4:291 Jainism 5:341 and the environment today 5:345 business 5:348 cosmology 5:343 environmental action 5:347 historical background 5:342 philosophy 5:343 practice 5:345 Jakarta, transmigration 3:273 Japan, aquaculture 3:198 Java agricultural intensication 3:159 transmigration 3:272 Jebel Kassala 1:337, 338 Jet aircraft 1:155 Jet stream 1:481 denition 1:481 history 1:482 origin and description 1:481 signicance 1:481 JGOFS (Joint Ocean Flux Study) 1:483 Jinghua, China 4:548 Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS) 2:39, 43 Joint implementation 4:165, 292, 293, 357, 441 Judaism 5:349, 461 Junge, C E 1:483 Junge layer 1:483

INDEX

589

Jupiter 1:729 Jurassic 1:516 Kalahari transect 2:355 Kalimantan, biomass burning 3:209 Kalundborg, Denmark 3:77 Kant, Immanuel 5:104 Karen land use strategy 5:320 Karma 5:344 Law of 5:308 Karst 3:411 Karstic landscapes 3:411 Kassas, Mohamed 4:292 Keeling, Charles David 1:484 Keeling curve 1:484 Kelly, Petra 5:355 Kerosene 3:218 Keystone species 2:375 Klosterhede, Denmark 2:441 Knowledge appropriation 5:323 community-based 5:486 traditional 5:486 Knowledge workers 5:301 Kondratyev, Kirill Yakovlevich 1:485 Kondratyev, Nikolai Dmitrievich 5:356 Koppen classi cation 2:487 Korea, aquaculture 3:198 Kosovo 3:148, 549 Kovda, Viktor Abramovich 3:411 Koyna earthquake 3:295 Krakatau volcanic eruption 1:736 Kremesta reservoir 3:295 K-selected species 5:391, 426 K-strategies. See r-K strategies K strategists 5:385 KT event 2:297, 299 K T boundary 1:207 Kudzu 2:81 Kuwait, oil res 3:146, 523 Kyoto Protocol 1:427, 3:650, 4:149, 158, 163, 252, 284, 357, 388, 410, 424, 438, 441, 478 credibility mechanisms 4:484 emission targets 4:482 implementation mechanisms 4:483 un nished business 4:484 La Ni na 1:230, 366, 487, 645 bene cial effects 1:366 causes and consequences 1:353 effects on global weather variability 1:366 socio-economic impacts 1:366 weather impacts 1:366 see also El Ni no/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) Labor force, aging 3:280 Labrador Sea 1:419 Ladoga camilla 2:61 Lago de Nicaragua 2:376 Lahars 3:413, 706 Lake Baikal 3:413 Lake Erie 3:721 Lake Huron 3:721 Lake Kariba 3:295 Lake levels, Holocene 1:276 Lake Michigan 3:721 Lake Naivasha, Kenya 1:276 Lake Ontario 3:721, 4:538 Lake Peipus Project 4:519 Lake Superior 3:721

Lake Victoria 4:538 hydrology and climate 4:538 sustainability 4:540 water quality 4:539 Lakes 2:375, 378 climate change responses 2:380 eutrophic 2:377 mesotrophic 2:377 oligotrophic 2:377 productivity 2:379 structure and function 2:379 threats 2:382 typologies 2:376 Lamb, Hubert H 1:487, 515 Land, role of 1:20 Land air water system 1:400 Land contamination 3:98 Land cover 1:488, 3:5, 6, 10 cattle grazing and 3:221 global 3:13 IGBP/DIS Classi cation 2:52 urban 3:656 Land cover change 3:1 Land cover conversion 3:7 Land degradation 3:136, 5:87 and climate change 3:421 and disease 3:443 and vegetation 3:419 human impact 3:421 Iberian Peninsula 3:421 Mediterranean 3:417 mitigation 3:422 tourism contribution 3:614 Land disposal 3:686 Land ethic 5:237 and change 5:240 ecofascism and 5:239 Land ice 1:331 Land management 2:566 Land mines 3:146 Land Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone (LOICZ) 2:39 Land pollution, regional responses 4:515 Land reclamation 3:424 dumping and in lling 3:343 global context 3:424 history 3:425 methods 3:426 regional and global environmental impact 3:427 Southampton, UK 3:578 Land resources consumption, tourism contribution 3:614 Land re-use, brown eld sites 3:343 Land surface 1:493 bucket scheme 1:496 climate interactions 1:494 effects of changes 1:495 models 1:106 representations 1:495 water storage 1:451 Land transformation 2:325 China 3:430 Land travel 3:643 Land use 3:1, 6, 10 after deep mine-induced subsidence 3:339 and water resources 2:347 and weather extremes 3:732 change effects 2:155 dynamics 5:87 grasslands 2:572 history 2:566 trends 2:13

590 INDEX
Land use change 2:131, 488, 3:2, 5, 7 and natural disasters 4:228 and nitrogen in soil 3:501 estimated (1700-1996) 1:491 impacts 1:460 regional 1:490 Land Use/Cover Change (LUCC) 2:40 Land use patterns 3:139 Land use/transport/environment interaction 3:645 Landlls 3:713 methane emissions 3:463 Landform change in steeplands 3:338 Landsat 1:73 Landsat thematic mapper (TM) 2:528 Landscape modication 3:345 by aggregate and brick clay extraction 3:341 Landscape quality and organic farming 3:533 Landscapes 5:357 anthropogenic changes 1:489 antiquity 5:359 artifactual 5:365 biologically diverse 5:320 connectivity 2:326 ecology 2:383 English garden 5:361 environmental change 1:488 fragmented 2:325 global scale changes 1:492 industrialization 5:363 local scale changes 1:489 meaning 5:357 medieval 5:360 modern/postmodern 5:364 natural 5:365 North America 5:362 parks/garden cities movements 5:363 processes 2:326 regional scale changes 1:489 Renaissance 5:361 unfragmented 2:326 Landslide tsunamis 1:727 Landslides 3:489 Lang, Winfred 4:294 Lapita colonization 3:274 Lapse rate 1:325, 371, 499 feedbacks 1:285, 286 Large Scale Biosphere Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA) 2:355, 383 Laser scatterometers 1:71 Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) 1:270, 342, 500, 647, 2:85 Last Glacier Maximum (LGM), climate modeling 1:298 Late Glacial, climatic changes 1:298 Latent heat 1:500 Law 5:413 international 5:324 soft law 5:327 see also Environmental law; National environmental law LBA. See Large-scale biosphere atmosphere experiments in Amazonia Leaching 2:439, 446, 3:493 Lead anthropogenic emissions 3:58 emission 3:711 ows 3:81 global production 3:56 levels 3:632 re-smelting facility 3:632 LEAD (Leadership for Environment and Development) 4:188, 294 Leaf diffusion of CO2 into 2:195 transpiration of water vapor from 2:195 Leaf-level processes 2:95 Leapfrogging technology 4:94, 295, 5:160 Learning media-to-public 5:486 scientists-to-scientists 5:485 social 5:485 Legislative measures in pest control 4:263 Legumes, population dynamics 2:444 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von 5:105 Leisure, see also Recreation; Tourism Length of the day 2:339 Leopold, Aldo 5:51, 367 Leopold matrix 3:3 Less developed countries (LDCs) 4:358, 5:212 ports 3:578 Libya Great Man-made River Project 3:362 irrigation 3:364 water use and resources 3:362 Life cycle 2:385 analysis 3:4, 4:249 assessment 3:64, 4:210 salmon 3:309 technology 5:404 Lifestyles 5:368, 500 changes 4:31 health issues 4:61 Lifetime, gas 1:501 Lightning 1:219, 501 and atmospheric electricity 1:502 annual global ashes 1:221 cloud-to-ground 1:219, 501 global climate change 1:221 intercloud 1:219 intracloud 1:219 Limnology 1:503, 2:376 Linear global time 5:150 Liriodendron tulipifera 2:103 Literature and environment 5:370 arrival of Christianity 5:375 modernity and contemporary 5:381 pre-modern 5:372 radicalism 5:380 romanticism 5:377 Lithosphere 1:410, 503 Lithospheric mantle 1:504 Little Climatic Optimum 1:514 Little Ice Age 1:24, 407, 504, 514, 515 explanation for 1:508 regional variability 1:508 temperature variations 1:507 Lituya Bay, Alaska 1:728 Lituya glacier 1:728 Livestock, methane emissions 3:225 Local and invasions, species effects 2:567 Local Leadership and Management Training Programme 4:462 Lochmaea suturalis 2:437 Loess sequence, China 1:341 Logging systems damage to residual trees 3:328 effects on ow regimes and ooding 3:329 effects on water yield 3:329 level of forest disturbance 3:328 tropical countries 3:328 LOICZ Biogeochemical Model Project 2:46 LOICZ (Land Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone) 2:39, 389 London, poverty 5:79 London Dumping Convention 4:297 Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution. See LRTAP

INDEX

591

Long-term Ecological Research Network. See LTER Lorenz, Edward N 1:509 Lotka-Volterra model 2:213 Love Canal, Niagara Falls, NY 5:382 Lovelock, James 1:146, 510, 2:247 Lovins, A B 5:487 Lower atmosphere stability 1:319 structure 1:320 LPG 3:218 LRTAP 4:173, 297 organization 4:175 Protocols 4:174 LTER 2:390 general details 2:390 information management 2:392 international networking 2:393 management 2:392 site names and locations (US) 2:391 US partnerships/collaboration among networks 2:393 LUCC Science Plan 2:41 Lyapunov exponents 2:213 MacNeill, Jim 4:299 Macro-level dynamics 5:403 Maculina arion 2:300 Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) 1:511 Madeira river 3:112 Mader, C L 1:727, 729 Mader ooding technique 1:726 Magnesium in soil 3:585 Magnitude of effects 2:566 Magnoliophyta 2:135 Malnutrition 3:134 and global environmental change 3:440 worldwide 3:440 Malone, Thomas F 1:511 Malthus, Thomas Robert 5:51, 86, 384 Malthusian theory 5:88 Mammatus clouds 1:326 Man and nature, complex system 5:384 Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modi ed by Human Action 3:450 Man and the Biosphere (MAB) 2:175, 4:40, 466 Manabe, Syukuro 1:512 Mandala of health 5:500 Mangroves ecosystems 2:395 leaf litter 2:398 socioeconomic properties 2:397 spatial distribution 2:396 Mansholt Plan (1968) 3:247 Manure as agricultural asset 3:188 Marasmiellus troyanus 3:218 Margalef, Ramon 2:401 Marine ecosystems 3:9 Marine environment, petroleum hydrocarbons 3:520 Marine isotope stage (MIS) 1:430 Marine mammals, exploitation 3:446 Marine Meteorology 1:758 Marine Meteorology and Associated Oceanographic Activities Programme 1:758 Marine organisms 2:163 Marine pollution Mediterranean Sea 4:527 see also GESAMP; London Dumping Convention Marine species 2:163 Marine systems 2:137 Marine waters, eutrophication 3:503 Maritime transport 3:572

Market-based instruments 4:446 Market systems and sustainability 5:26, 27 Marsh, George Perkins 3:450, 5:50, 426 Marshes, anthropogenic changes 3:451 Mass ow analysis (MFA) 4:249 MASTER method 3:63 Material consumption 5:403 Material ows 3:4, 7, 80 assessment 3:61 comparison of prehistoric and modern Man 3:55 extractive industry 3:457 growth rates 3:55 natural 3:457 Vienna 3:59 Material input per service unit (MIPS) 3:64 Material turnover, prehistoric and modern Man 3:55 Materials mining 3:454 quarrying 3:454 recovery 3:686 utilization 3:711 Materials cycle 4:111 Materials ow accounting (MFA) 4:300 methodology 4:301 Rhine River 4:301 risk reduction policies 4:304 Materials intensivity 4:183 Mature stage 2:550 Mauna Loa record of CO2 measurements 1:484 Maunder, E W 1:514 Maunder Minimum 1:514 Mauritius, demographic transition 5:213 Maximum sustainable economic yield (MSEY) 4:307 Maximum sustainable yield (MSY) 4:307, 344 May, Robert M 2:401 Mean annual air temperatures (MAAT) 1:331 Mean annual precipitation (MAP) 2:570 Mean annual temperature 2:570 Mechanisms of impact 2:566 MEDA project 4:148 Media spaces 5:507 Media-to-public learning 5:486 Medical model of health 5:495 new perspectives 5:496 Medieval Climatic Optimum 1:514 Medieval Warm Epoch 1:514 Medieval Warm Period 1:408, 514 Mediterranean desertication 3:418 land degradation 3:417 Mediterranean Action Plan 4:148, 527 Mediterranean Basin, environmental degradation 4:148 Mediterranean Sea 4:527 changing the scenario 4:530 marine pollution 4:527 Mega-tsunamis 1:728 MEPC (Marine Environment Protection Committee) 4:308 Mercalli scale 3:293 Mercuric chloride 2:403, 404 Mercury and global climate change 2:408 (bio)chemical transformations 2:404 current scientic controversies 2:407 cycling 2:408 Amazon Basin 3:111 environmental 2:402 environmental cycling 2:404 general occurrence 2:403 in food chains 2:405 in small-scale gold mining 2:406

592 INDEX
Mercury (continued ) physical properties 2:403 poisoning catastrophe in Iraq 2:407 resident time in atmosphere 2:407 toxicity risks 2:407 toxicology 2:404 toxication 3:111 turnover 2:408 usage from Roman days to current practice 2:403 see also Minamata Meridional circulation 1:239 Mesopause 1:243 Mesosphere 1:243, 516 Mesozoic 1:516, 2:297 Metabolism anthroposystem 3:77 global 3:79 industrial 3:4, 5, 6, 73 national scale 31, 79 organism-centered 3:73 substance-centered 3:73 urban 3:78 utility of studies 3:80 Metadata 2:409 denition 2:409 description and standards available online 2:410 directories 2:252 global change science 2:410 Metal emissions 3:711 Metamorphic rocks 1:397 Metapopulations 2:411 extinctions 2:416 key concepts 2:414 models and theory 2:412 METEOR 1:72 Meteorology 1:517 monitoring strategies 1:536 Methane 1:178, 190, 384, 385, 468, 517, 2:424, 572, 3:178, 182, 4:428 abundance 2:605 atmospheric concentration 3:436 benets of low concentration recovery 3:438 collection and local consumption of low concentration gas 3:438 concentration increases 3:436 energy-producing technologies 3:437 generation 3:222 industrial sources 3:461 low concentration bearing gases 3:435 photooxidation 1:243 production and consumption in natural ecosystems 2:599 sources 2:605 tundra release 2:598 Methane clathrates 1:518, 647 Methane emissions 3:478 and cattle grazing 3:221 animal sources 3:222 animal wastes 3:222 anthropogenic sources 3:437 coke manufacture 3:463 current sources 3:223 future prospects 3:464 industrial combustion sources 3:462 industrial processes 3:464 industrial sector 3:461 landlls 3:463 livestock 3:225 methods for reducing 3:227 peat mining 3:463 wastewater treatment lagoons 3:463 Methanogenesis, rice 3:124 Methanotrophs 2:424 Methyl bromide 1:520 Methyl chloroform 1:145, 153, 2:458 Methyl mercury 2:404, 407 Mexico, global technology cooperation, case studies 4:385 Micro-evolutionary change 2:160 Microbes and global environmental change 2:424 Microbial diversity 2:421 Microbial life and biodiversity 2:421 Microcosm experiments 2:23 Microorganisms evolution 2:421 functional diversity of 2:422 global environmental change 2:424 in bioremediation 3:218 roles in biogeochemical cycling 2:424 symbiotic 2:423 Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) 1:732 Microwave radar 1:71 Mid-Holocene, climate modeling 1:298 Mid-latitude westerlies 1:234 Migration 5:468 and climate change 3:374 environmental challenge 3:465 future international 3:26 see also Plant migration Milankovitch changes 1:24 Milankovitch, Milutin 1:522 Milankovitch theory 1:522 Military intervention 3:549 Minamata 3:111, 256 Mineralization 2:544 Minerals extraction 3:295 production and associated earth materials movement 3:459 production statistics 3:455 Mining 3:7 hidden ows 3:455 informal and unrecorded activity 3:455 materials 3:454 operations 3:711 overburden 3:455 subsidence due to 3:339 MINK study 4:549 Miombo Network Plan 2:42 Mississippi River 2:432 Mnemiopsis 4:522, 524 Mnemiopsis leidyi 4:524 Mobility 5:89 Model simulations, climate 1:114 Modeling climate 1:28 future challenges 5:407 human dimensions of global environmental change 5:394 mathematical 5:397 paradigms 5:397 Models Earth system. See Earth system models using 5:406 validity 5:398 Modern environmental movement 5:247 Modernism 5:427 Modernity 5:408 MODIS 1:76 Moist adiabatic rate 1:325 Moist convection 1:325 Molina, Mario J 1:533 Molinia caerulea 2:437 Mombassa, Kenya 3:579

INDEX

593

Monitoring conceptual models 4:126, 130 ecosystems 4:116 enterprise 4:122 process 4:122 program attributes 4:124 program elements 4:125 Monitoring systems 4:79 ad hoc, de facto 1:537 general concepts 1:534 global geophysical 1:534 status 1:536 see also specic applications Monotheism 5:375 Monsi, Masami 2:426 Monsoons 1:228, 539 Montreal Protocol 1:144, 427, 447, 3:66, 4:65, 283, 339, 446 lessons learned 4:341 multilateral fund 4:309 Mooney, Harold A 2:426 More developed countries (MDCs) 5:212 Morphogenetics 5:424 Mortality future 3:25 gap models 2:319 Motorized transport 4:426 Mount Merapi, volcanic eruptions 3:694 Mount Pinatubo 1:148, 3:700 Mountain climates 1:540 Mountains, origin 1:321 MSU (Microwave Sounding Unit) 1:541 Muir, John 5:411 Multi-issue assessment 4:316 examples 4:316 guidelines 4:317 Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) 4:282 Multiple scenario construction 4:179 Multispectral remote sensing systems 2:525 Multispectral scanner (MSS) 1:73 Municipal solid wastes, see also Urban wastes Municipal solid wastes (MSW), recycling 4:549 Muslims. See Islam Mutation 5:398 Myriophyllum 3:415 Mythology and cosmology 5:372 Myxomatosis 2:300 NADPH 2:191, 194 Narmada River Project 5:388 Nasr, Seyyed Hossein 5:412 Nation States 5:152 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) 1:73, 220, 732, 2:250 National Assessment 4:543 National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) 1:454 National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) 1:454 National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) 1:454 National environmental law 5:413 basic presuppositions 5:414 characteristics 5:413 compliance 5:417 development 5:413 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) 1:512 tide gauge 1:727 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory (NOAA/CMDL) 1:257 National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) 2:572 National overview 4:544 National policies for sustainable development 4:417

National self-interest 4:323 explanatory variables 4:325 interest-based explanation 4:323 NATT (northern Australia tropical transect) 2:355 Natural analogs 3:507 Natural capital 2:428 Baltic Sea 4:518 Natural disasters 3:479, 5:273 and land use changes 4:228 future research 4:380 impact 4:375 losses from 4:228 mitigation 4:378, 380 policy implications 4:379 protection against 4:379 public private partnership 4:379 types 4:228 see also IDNDR Natural disturbances, succession 2:555 Natural ecosystems 4:249 climate change impacts 2:67 Natural hazards 3:479, 5:297 cyclical nature 4:329 new approach 4:331 recommended actions 4:332 social and policy responses 4:328 traditional approaches 4:330 see also specic hazards Natural selection and ecosystem 2:293 Natural succession 2:446 Natural systems 5:392 Nature 5:419 benign 5:388, 392 capricious 5:388, 392 ephemeral 5:388, 393 perverse/tolerant 5:392 relating to 5:97 Nature reserve 5:347 NCAR Community Climate Model 1:491 NECT (north east China transect) 2:354 Negative externalities 4:89 Negative feedback 1:382 Nekton 2:145 Neoliberalism 5:92 Nested holons 4:118 Net biome production (NBP) 2:168, 516 Net ecosystem production (NEP) 2:192, 334, 575 Net primary production (NPP) 2:168, 192, 202, 248, 334, 515, 568, 575 New Ageism 5:420, 440, 448 New Zealand, tourism 3:626 Newton, Isaac 51, 104 Niche 2:339, 429, 471 Nigeria, oil industry 3:526 Nile River 4:541 Nimbus 1:73 NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) 5:421, 452 Nitrate 1:179, 2:433 EC Directive 3:505 in surface waters 3:182 leaching 2:428, 3:493 Nitrate protection zones (NPZs), Europe 3:493 Nitrate sensitive areas (NSAs) 3:493, 505 Nitric acid (HNO3 ) 1:163, 180, 677, 678, 681 Nitric oxide (NO) 1:179 Nitrication 2:423, 433, 446, 3:493 Nitrogen 2:429, 442, 3:9 agricultural management 3:504 agricultural uses and their impacts 3:499 anthropogenic emissions 3:45

594 INDEX
Nitrogen (continued ) atmospheric loading and emissions 3:502 dose-ecosystem response relations 2:436 emission trading 4:453 ux from landscape to coastal waters 2:432 increased ecosystem demand 2:444 inputs to ecosystems 2:435 isotope ratios 2:546 leaching 2:439 mineralization 2:446 overfertilization 2:348 see also CENTURY generalized ecosystem model; Red eld ratio Nitrogen addition fertilizer 2:437 Nitrogen compounds 2:599 human activity causing 3:500 Nitrogen cycle 1:678, 2:379, 423, 429, 3:494, 500 Nitrogen cycling organisms, functional groups 2:29 Nitrogen deposition 2:104, 488, 608 forests 2:435, 567 initial effects 2:437 Nitrogen dioxide (NO2 ) 1:179, 3:680, 4:486 Nitrogen emissions, remedies 2:440 Nitrogen fertilization 3:502 Nitrogen fertilizer 2:431, 3:46 Nitrogen xation 2:308, 423, 430, 442, 558 effects of elevated CO2 xx symbiotic 2:443 Nitrogen imbalance, consequences of 3:503 Nitrogen Limited Forests 2:436 Nitrogen losses, agricultural 3:504 Nitrogen mineralization 2:579, 598 Nitrogen oxides (NOx ) 1:163, 179, 384, 677, 678, 2:433, 3:650, 678 anthropogenic emissions 3:45 atmospheric 2:433 emissions 2:457 Protocol 4:174 Nitrogen partitioning 2:102 Nitrogen pollution 3:504 Nitrogen saturation 2:439 Nitrogen trioxide free radical (NO3 ) 2:457 Nitrous oxide (N2 O) 1:178, 384, 386, 468, 2:424, 433, 572, 3:478, 494, 4:428 No-regrets principle 4:334 NOAA 1:72 Non-anthropocentrism 5:234 Non-dispersive infrared (NDIR) analyzer 1:260 Non-equilibrium ecology 2:446 Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 1:158, 3:548, 4:8, 460, 472, 5:54, 243, 431 forest policies 4:354 Nonlinear dynamics 2:210 and environmental variability 2:211 Nonlinear systems 2:450 dynamics 2:452 Noosphere 2:604, 5:69, 421 Normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) 2:202 North America europeanization 5:362 tourism 3:625 wetlands 3:405 North American First Nations 5:466 North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) 1:274, 277 North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) 1:419, 457 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 3:549 North-South divide 4:103, 5:159, 200 Northern Annular Mode 1:201 Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO) 4:285 Norway spruce 2:437 Not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) politics 5:421, 452 NPP 2:204 Nuclear accidents 3:241, 4:74, 5:54, 301, 503 Nuclear explosions 1:155 Nuclear ssion 3:506 waste management 3:509 Nuclear power 3:506 generation 3:509 see also Chernobyl Nuclear reactors 3:509 Nuclear testing 5:247 Nuclear war, potential impact 3:516 Nuclear waste conditioning, reprocessing and once through cycle 3:510 forms and categories 3:510 geological issues 3:506 health hazards 3:507 management 3:710 management principles and practice 3:513 management solutions 3:511 Nuclear weapons 5:247 Nuclear winter 1:330, 3:149, 515 Nutrient depletion 3:584 Nutrient loss soil 3:589 tropical rainforests 3:332 Nutrients biogeochemical cycling 2:379 mineralization/demineralization 2:543 Obasi, G O P 4:335 Ocean observing systems 1:537 salinity patterns 1:20 Ocean carbon cycle model intercomparison 2:50 Ocean circulation 1:20, 557 Ocean currents 1:20 Ocean models, mixed layer-only 1:290 Ocean temperature measurement 1:161 Oceanic tides 1:710 Oceanography 1:537 Oceans 1:450, 645, 2:76 anomalous regions 2:371 climate chemistry 3:181 environmental policy 4:279 iron fertilization 2:425 role of 1:20 tourism 3:626 Odum, Eugene P 2:456 OECD 3:549, 4:6, 43, 295, 336, 5:160 Off-shore petroleum industry 5:184 Oil, Arctic environment 3:517 Oil consumption trends and predictions 3:736 Oil crisis 5:398 Oil res effect on weather and the marine environment 3:524 effects on terrestrial environment 3:523 Kuwait 3:146, 523 Oil industry Arctic 3:525 cultural impacts and environmental risk tolerance 3:525 tropics 3:525 Oil shales 3:528 composition 3:529 extraction 3:530 origin 3:529 reserves 3:531 Oil spills 4:74 biological effects 3:521 Oligotrophic lakes 2:458 Oligotrophic systems 2:458, 5:426

INDEX

595

Oncorhynchus. See Salmon One Hundred Million Guinea Pigs 5:51 Ongoing implementation review 5:327 Ontogeny 2:497 Open burning, urban wastes 3:687 Operational Hydrology Programme Applications 1:758 Operational Hydrology Programme Basic Systems 1:758 Optimal ltering 1:388 Optimal weighting 1:388 Optimum sustainable yield (OSY) 4:307 Opuntia stricta 2:81 Orconectes rusticus 2:534 Organic carbon (CH2 O) 2:523 Organic farming 3:532 and biodiversity 3:533 and landscape quality 3:533 and natural resources 3:533 background 3:532 characteristics 3:533 denition 3:532 disbenets 3:534 principal features 3:532 soils 3:533 Organic matter loss from topsoil 3:589 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. See OECD Origin of Species 2:247 Ostrinia nubilalis 2:64 Our Common Future 4:154 Overcrowded dwellings 3:674 Overgrazing and desertication 3:285 Overshoot in ecological capacity 3:298 Oxidants 2:523 Oxidation processes 2:457 Oxidation reduction reaction 2:523 Oxygen anthropogenic impacts 2:140 atmospheric 2:140 photolysis 1:676 Oxygen-16 2:544 Oxygen-17 2:544 Oxygen-18 2:544 Oxygen isotope ratio 2:546, 547, 549 Oxygen isotope record 1:273 Oxygenated compounds 2:607 Ozone 1:180, 386, 468, 3:178, 181 absorption bands 1:473 and UV radiation 1:151 atmospheric gases affecting 1:144 chemical and physical processes affecting 1:146 concentration 1:675 decreasing 1:148 destruction 1:143 effects on climate 1:152 health effects 3:652 human-related effects 1:146 integrated column amount 1:143 monitoring network 1:676 photodissociation 1:143 potential for new impacts 1:154 stratospheric. See Stratospheric ozone total ozone column 1:143 tropospheric 1:281, 384, 2:608 variation in temperature and concentration with altitude 1:142 Ozone depleting substances (ODS) 4:65, 314, 446 Ozone depletion 1:520, 2:457, 4:74, 5:498 consequences 1:151 see also Stratospheric ozone Ozone depletion potential (ODP) 1:520 Ozone distribution 1:680

Ozone formation 3:678 and weather 3:650 Ozone hole 1:681 Arctic 1:150 Ozone layer 1:14, 4:148, 337 Ozone layer depletion 1:427, 447, 510 Ozone loss 1:676 Ozone observations 4:337 Ozone protection, policy considerations 1:153 Ozone vertical prole 1:680 Pacic and Arctic Railway and Navigation Company (PARN) 1:727 Pacic Decadal Oscillation (PDO) 1:367, 457 Pacic Islands bird extinctions 2:57 chronology of colonization 3:275 demographics 3:273 early human environmental relations 3:276 settlement-pattern changes 3:276 Pacic North American Teleconnection Pattern (PNA) 1:360 Pacic Ocean 3:315 Pacic Tsunami Warning Center 1:727 Paleoclimate modeling intercomparison project (PMIP) 1:298 Paleoecological research, sediments 2:112 Paleozoic 2:297 Pangaea 1:517 Papua, New Guinea 1:727 PAR (photosynthetically active radiation) 2:461, 524, 3:353 Paradigm shift 5:392 Parallel climate model 1:116 Parasitism 2:557 Parasparapagraho Jivanam 5:344 Pareto-optimality 4:278 Parks/garden cities movements 5:363 Participatory IA (PIA) 4:253 Particle Environment Monitor (PEM) 1:732 Particulate matter (PM) 4:486 standards 4:489 Particulates 3:678 primary sources 1:163 Parus major 2:62 Passerine 2:460 Past global changes (PAGES) 2:40, 48 Pastures and methane emissions 3:224 conservation 3:225 global status 3:224 Patch dynamics 2:419 Pattaya, tourism 3:620 Pattern analysis 1:388 Peacekeeping 3:549 Peat res 3:210 Peat mining, methane emissions 3:463 Peat wastage 3:588 Pelagic attractors 5:426 Pelagic organisms 2:145 People for the ethical treatment (PETA) of animals 5:234 PEPC (phosphoenol-pyruvate carboxylase) 2:443 Peruorocarbons (PFCs) 1:384, 427 Periodic situation assessment 5:327 Perkinsus marinus 2:163 Permafrost 1:648 Permian 2:297 Peroxyacetylnitrate (PAN) 1:180 Persistent organic pollutants (POPs) 1:427, 3:138, 416, 5:498 heavy metals 4:286 Protocol 4:187 Pest control biological methods 4:262 chemical methods 4:261

596 INDEX
Pest control (continued ) cultivation methods 4:261 legislative measures in 4:263 physical methods 4:261 Pest management, global change impacts 4:264 Pesticides 2:16, 5:51, 430 policy 4:360 Pests and disease 2:64 global change impacts 4:263 PET (potential evapotranspiration) 2:207, 461, 570 Petrol engines 3:678 Petroleum hydrocarbons Arctic concentrations 3:520 Arctic environment 3:517 Petroleum industry cultural impacts and environmental risk tolerance 3:525 off-shore 5:184 Petroleum seeps, Arctic 3:517 Petunia hybrida 2:101 pH regulation 2:159 soils 3:101 Phase shifts 5:422 and indigenous peoples 5:427 examples 5:424 global level 5:427 phenology 5:425 seasonal 5:425 Phases, examples 5:424 Phenology 2:62, 101, 160, 461 factors affecting 2:462 history 2:462 predicting effects of change 2:464 predicting long-term responses to climate change 2:464 recent shifts associated with changing climate 2:464 variations within communities 2:463 Phenotype denition 2:465 plasticity 2:466 Philippines, aquaculture 3:198 Philosophy 5:97 Phosphates in detergents 3:544 in surface waters 3:183 Phosphoglyceric acid 2:194 Phosphorus 2:466 anthropogenic environmental change effects on transformations and transfers 2:469 anthropogenic mobilization 3:538 biospheric reservoirs and uxes 3:538 global transfers 3:536 human impact 3:541 importance 3:536 in agricultural soils 3:540 in soil 3:585 in waters 3:541 natural stores and ows 3:536 water quality 3:542 see also CENTURY generalized ecosystem model; Redeld ratio Phosphorus cycle 2:466, 3:537 human intensication 3:538 soil 3:540 Photoautotroph 2:26 Photochemical reactions 1:677 Photochemical smog 3:678 Photoheterotroph 2:26 Photorespiration 2:194 Photosynthesis 2:28, 95, 192, 422, 470, 557, 3:181 C3 2:69, 186, 194, 470, 573 C4 2:69, 186, 194, 470, 573 down-regulation 2:97 respiration/decomposition 2:159 stimulation 2:490 Photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) 2:202 Phyllophora 4:522 Physical weathering 1:755 Physics and Chemistry of Clouds and Weather Modication Research Programme 1:758 Physiology 2:160, 161 Phytophagy 2:471 Phytoplankton 2:371, 378 Phytoplankton bloom dynamics 3:380 Pigovian tax 4:195 Pinus radiata 2:333 Pipelines 3:644 PIRATA 1:69 Place geography 5:446 understanding 5:446 Planetary boundary layer 1:489 Planetary electrication 1:218 Planets 5:373 Plankton 2:145, 523 Plant allocation patterns 2:101 Plant canopy 2:195 feedbacks between energy, carbon, water and nutrient uxes 2:193 Plant competition 2:471 Plant dispersal 2:81 Plant functional types (PFTs) 2:167, 481, 570 classication 2:481, 483 climate change response 2:487 construction 2:485 dentions 2:483 global change 2:487 resource gradients 2:485 Plant growth 2:471 and carbon balance 2:497 and primary production 2:220 dependence on environmental conditions and species identity 2:98 Plant migration 2:81 elements of 2:82 Plant ontogeny 2:496 Plant response 2:484 Plant soil feedback processes 2:102 Plant soil interactions 2:103 Plant tissue quality and CO2 2:221 Plantations, environmental impacts 3:156 Plants and global carbon cycle 2:95 architecture 2:101 carbon balance and growth 2:489 CO2 enrichment 2:216 CO2 uptake/water vapour-loss ratio 2:220 competition in elevated CO2 2:471 cycle of carbon and energy 2:191 developmental patterns 2:101 endangered species 4:202 feedbacks between energy, carbon, water and nutrient uxes 2:193 functional groups 2:28 global change impacts 2:332 growth at elevated CO2 2:489 impact of global environmental change 2:94 inter-generational population dynamics 2:475 interspecic interactions 2:475 intraspecic interactions 2:473 physiology 2:98 population genetic structure 2:474

INDEX

597

respiration/decomposition 2:159 role of competition 2:472 stand size and structure 2:473 urban ecosystem habitats 3:656 whole-plant feedbacks 2:102 see also Crops; Photosynthesis Plasmodium falciparum 2:163 Plastic materials, ow and stocks 3:64 Plate tectonics 1:324, 503, 647 theory 3:699 Plato 5:104 Pleistocene 1:249, 341, 2:58 Pliocene 1:338, 339 climate modeling 1:297 Poisonings 4:74 Polar Fronts 1:235 Polar orbiting environmental satellites (POES) 1:72 Polar regions 1:234, 2:74 tourism 3:625 Polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs) 1:680 Policy dilemmas 4:367 environment issues 4:367 Policy exercises 4:367 Policy responses, health issues 4:47 Political economy 3:7 Political movements/ideologies 5:429 Political systems 5:443 Politics and society 5:446 global environment change (GEC) 5:124 Pollutants fossil fuels 3:302 organic 3:218 removal 3:218 sources 3:678 types 3:678 Polluter Pay Principle (PPP) 4:108, 196, 368, 5:42, 195, 293, 329, 330, 445 Pollution 4:74, 5:430 abatement 4:16, 17 prevention 4:17, 18 Polychlorinated biphenols (PCBs) 35.36sp Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) 2:379, 3:98, 416, 417, 4:518, 519 Population afforestation impacts 3:158 aging See Aging population and development 5:32 global trends 3:16 projections 3:20, 27 see also Migration; Urban population Population change, urban 3:666 Population density 2:209 Population dynamics, health issues 4:55 Population expansion 1:190 Population uctuation effects of global environmental change 2:214 Population growth 5:384, 403 and education 5:33 and water resources 5:205 and water use 3:87 Population health 5:497 Population size changes 2:504 Population status, species 2:12 Population vulnerability to climate change 3:141 Ports 3:572 city/port interface 3:573, 580 development in advanced countries 3:574 less-developed countries 3:578 Positive feedback 1:382 Post-modern environmentalism 5:408 Post-modernism 5:427

Post-modernity 5:430 Post-normal science 4:45, 5:2, 451 Potential evapotranspiration (PET) 2:207, 461, 570 Potomogeton 33.47ch Poverty 3:732 and environment 4:58 and urban vulnerability 4:408 environmental problems 5:32 London 5:79 see also Urban poverty Poverty fertility relationship 5:33 Power supplies, industrial revolution 5:90 Precambrian 1:252 Precautionary principle 3:306, 4:164, 5:28, 293, 330, 455 and environmental management 4:369 overview 4:369 Precipitation 1:452, 455, 2:344, 345, 380 average annual 1:456 chemistry 1:318 cold season 1:529, 530 formation 1:317 Predator-prey cycles 2:213 Predictability 1:263 Prehistoric peoples and forest soils 3:546 Present Discounted Value 5:28 Preservationist 5:244 Pressure gradient force (PGF) 1:224 Pressurized water reactors (PWRs) 3:509 Price elasticity of demand 4:110 Primary succession 2:550 Primordial heat 1:402 Principia Mathematica Philophiae Naturalis 5:397 Prithivi 5:304 Private choice 5:368 Prizes 4:279 Procedural fairness 5:280 Procedural innovations 5:326 Process-oriented modeling 5:396 Process theology 5:196, 492 Productivity 2:161, 515 Property rights 5:457 Proterozoic eon 2:297 Protists 2:422 Pseudomonas 2:26 Public-driven response to global environmental change 4:21 Public health. See Health Public Weather Services Programme 1:758 Pueraria lobata 2:81 Pyroclastic ows 3:706 Pyroclasts 3:705 Quality-assurance and quality-checking (QA/QC) review of data and metadata 2:254 Quantum mechanics 5:397 Quarrying 3:7 and landform change 3:340 coastal superquarries 3:342 hidden ows 3:455 materials 3:454 overburden 3:455 Quasi-equilibrium analysis 2:335 Quaternary ice age, climate modeling 1:297 Quotas 4:371 Radar remote sensing systems 2:525 RADARSAT 1:74 Radiation, types 3:508 Radiation balance Earths 1:18 rainforests 3:266

598 INDEX
Radiation inversion 1:717 Radiation transport models 1:104 Radiative convective models (RCMs) 1:105 Radiative damping 1:283 Radiative forcing 1:284, 388, 3:186 Radical ecotopianism, principal inuences on 5:447 Radical environmentalism 5:444 Radio communication 1:476 Radioactive forcing 1:163, 166 Radioactive isotopes 2:544 Radioactivity 3:507 fundamental protection strategies 3:508 health-dose-risk 3:507 regulation 3:509 sources, types and damage caused 3:507 Radiogenic heat 1:402 Radionuclides 3:221, 241 natural environment 3:511 Rail infrastructure 3:644 Rail transport 4:426 Rain-shadow 1:334 Rainfall 2:346 intensities 4:229 partitioning 5:202 potential effects of changes 3:383 Rainforests. See Tropical rainforests RAINS (Regional Air Pollution Information and Simulation) 4:452, 551 Raven, Peter 2:522 Realized niche 2:429 Reclamation projects 2:532 Recompensating duties 4:242 Recompensating tariffs 4:242 Recreation 3:345 see also Tourism Recycling 3:686, 4:249 municipal solid wastes (MSW) 4:549 Red list of threatened species 4:201, 508 Red Sea, effects of tourism on coral reefs 3:618 Red tide 3:548 Redeld ratio 2:315, 522 Redox potential 1:755, 2:523 aquatic ecosystems 3:108 sediments 3:108 Reforestation 5:347 Refrigerant recycling, case study 4:387 Refugees 3:548 environmental 4:214, 215 Regional Acidication INformation and Simulation. See RAINS Regional analyses 4:544 Regional assessments, global environmental change 2:525 Regional climate change future perspectives in RCM research 1:531 modeling 1:523 processes of 1:523 simulations 1:528 Regional climate models (RCM) 1:347 Regional differences in water challenges 5:204 Regional ecology 2:380 Regional environmental standards 4:285 Regional institutions and actions 4:12 Regional models 1:109 Regional multi-issues 4:318 Regional Programme 1:758 Regional responses to Global Environmental Change (GEC) 4:514 Regional Seas Programme (RSP) 4:476 Regulatory rules 5:413 Rehabilitation projects 2:532 Relative growth rate (RGR) 2:490 Relative humidity 1:432 Religion 5:97, 461, 466 and environment 5:436 Remanufacturing 4:249 Remedial action plans (RAPs) 4:553 Remote sensing 2:524, 528, 4:225 information handling and calibration 2:529 Renewable energy technologies (RETs) 4:412 applications in SIDs 4:414 cost-effective 4:415 Repatriation 3:549 Reservoir-induced seismicity (RIS) 3:294 Reservoirs 2:347 environmental impacts 3:553 worlds largest 3:553 Resettlement schemes 3:272 Residence time 1:398 Residential emissions 3:680 Resilience 2:281, 530 denitions 2:530 myth 5:400 Resistance 2:281 Resource extraction 5:161 Resource gradient response 2:485 Resource preservation 5:161 Respiration 2:96, 433, 531, 3:182 Respiration reaction 2:523 Respiratory disease 3:649 hospitalization rates 4:488 Response groups to disturbance 2:485 Responsibility principle 5:338 Restoration, ecosystem 2:532 Restoration of degraded ecosystems climate change buffer 2:536 potential applications to climate change 2:533 status of science 2:537 Retoxication, biosphere 3:98 Revolutionary socialism 5:438 Reynolds Number 5:424 Rhine Basin agriculture 3:106 cadmium 4:302 Rhine River, materials ow accounting (MFA) 4:301 Rhizobium 2:308 Rhizoplane 2:539 Rhizosphere 2:539, 557 Ribulose bisphosphate (RuBP) 2:194 Rice 3:116 area and production in Java 3:160 average yields 3:121 breeding 3:122 ecology 3:124 environmental impacts 3:122 global warming 3:127 harvested area 3:121 high yielding varieties 3:122, 392 methanogenesis 3:124 origins 3:117 production systems 3:122 selection 3:122 spread 3:118 sustainability 3:128 Rice crop yields 3:391 Rice-eld ecology 3:392 Richter scale 3:293 Rift Valley fever 3:693 Rio Conference. See UN Conference on Environment and Development R o de la Plata case study 3:723 global change perspectives 3:725 hydroclimatic variability and change 3:724

INDEX

599

Riparian zone 2:378 Risk assessment, cadmium exposure 3:305 Risk assessment methodologies 4:179 Risk estimates, improving 4:378 Risk management and Global Environmental Change (GEC) 4:375 decision processes 4:377 social 5:300 Risk reduction policies, materials ow accounting (MFA) River basin, hydrology 2:345 Rivers 2:375, 378 biodiversity 3:316 climate change responses 2:380 rainforests 3:269 regulation 3:551 structure and function 2:379 tropical Asian 3:316 typologies 2:376 r K strategies 2:482, 540, 5:385, 391 r K symbols 5:426 Road transport 4:426 emissions 4:429 Roads, infrastructure 3:643 Rock cycle 1:397 Rock debris 3:413 Rock particles 1:409 Rockets 1:155 Rocks 1:397, 504, 2:159, 200, 3:711 disintegration 1:755 sedimentary 1:397 Rodin, Leonid E 2:540 Rooftop gardens 3:357 Roosevelt, Theodore 5:475 Roots, rainforest 3:265 Ross River virus disease 3:690 Rosswall, Per Thomas 2:541 Rothamsted Insect Survey 3:384 Ruminants, methane emissions 3:222 Runoff 1:452, 2:345, 346 glacier-fed 1:408 Rural eco-engineering 4:547 Rwanda 3:549 Safer Cities Programme 4:462 Saf r/Simpson scale 1:434 Sahara Desert 1:336 St Francis prize 4:280 St Lawrence River Basin 3:721 Salinity agriculture 3:559 and deserti cation 3:288 and irrigation 3:559 dryland agriculture 3:561 failure to implement solutions 3:562 human-induced 3:561 implications of climate change 3:563 Montevideo 3:724 ocean patterns 1:20 reversing salinization 3:585 soil 3:234 speci c situations 3:562 Salinization 2:543, 3:589 Salmon anadromous 3:310 as indicator 3:309 biology 3:201 distribution of species 3:201 life cycles 3:309 Paci c species 3:315

4:304

responses to climate change 3:310 sockeye 3:315 Salmon farming 3:9, 200 environmental issues 3:202 regulation 3:203 SALT (savannas in the long-term) 2:355 Sampling effect 2:24 Sampling sensors 1:535 Samyag-darsana-jnana-caritra 5:345 Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) 5:247 Sanitation 3:85 coverage by region 4:51 developing countries 4:52 see also IDWSSD Saprobien system 5:426 Saprophages 2:315 SAR 1:73 Satellite observations 2:592 Satellite sensors 2:524 Satellites 1:71, 535, 2:202, 4:225 long term imagery 2:528 meterological 2:572 new series of imagery 2:529 see also CEOS Savannas 2:68 terrestrial transects 2:355 see also Tropical savannas Saxifraga oppositifolia 2:600 Scale theory 5:73, 74 Scenarios 5:476 alternative 5:477 construction 5:480 descriptions 5:477 development 5:407, 479 preparation 5:479 reporting 5:480 utilization 5:480 SCEP (Study of Critical Environmental Problems) 4:382, 385 Science and human values 5:117 epistemology 5:317 IAMs in 4:259 post-normal 5:451 role in environmental policy 4:37 values 5:117 Science of the concrete 5:316 Scienti c and Technical Advisory Panel (STAP) 4:43 Scienti c Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) 1:189 Scienti c Committee on Problems of the Environment. See SCOPE Scientists-to-scientists learning 5:485 SCOPE (Scienti c Committee on Problems of the Environment) 4:39, 40, 45, 152, 383 SCOR 1:640 Screening 4:204 Sea ice 1:21 feedbacks 1:290 Sea level 1:645 factors causing change 1:647 observations 1:645 projected changes 1:649 rise 1:409, 3:135, 582, 4:230 variations 1:646 Sea surface temperature (SST) 1:22, 65, 212, 229, 245, 270, 289, 355, 2:231 Seasonal change, carbon isotope ratio 2:549 Seasonal cycle simulation 1:118 Seasonal timing 2:461 Seasonal variations 2:213 simulation 1:111 subtropical jet stream 1:233

600 INDEX
SeaWifs (Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor) 1:75 SeaWinds 1:80 Second Law of Thermodynamics 5:397 Secondary succession 2:550 Sectoral analyses 4:544 Security and development 5:159 see also Environmental security; Human security Sedimentary rocks 1:397 Sediments 2:152, 200 accretion of organic and inorganic 2:367 activities in ecosystems 2:153 and contaminated land 3:98 anoxic 2:379 atmospheric change 2:155 climate change 2:156 freshwater 2:153 global change 2:154 interactive effects 2:158 invasive species 2:157 land use effects 2:155 paleoecological research 2:112 records of long-term ecological change 2:112 redox potential 3:108 suspended yield 3:592 Seismic hazard 4:383 Seismic risk (and risk assessment) 4:383 Seismicity 3:294 Seismology 1:537 Selectin 5:398 Self-organization 4:31, 118 conceptual model 4:126 Self-organizing Holarchic Open (SOHO) Systems 4:120 Self-organizing phenomena 4:116 Semi-deserts 1:333 Senecio harveyanus 2:284 Senecio squalidus L. 3:632 Sensible heat ux, rainforests 3:267 Serial dependence 2:26 Seveso incident 5:54, 482 Sewage disposal 3:687 Sewage infrastructure 3:221 Shareholder activism 4:236 Shelterbelts 3:235 Shifting cultivation 3:565, 5:87 and environmental change 3:568, 570 Europe 3:567 negatively stereotyped 3:566 Shipping 3:572 bulk 3:635 container movements 3:639 deep-sea 3:635 liner 3:637 petroleum hydrocarbon inputs due to 3:518 substandard 3:638 Shoemaker-Levy-9 asteroid impact 1:729 Siberia, terrestrial transects 2:354 Sierra Club 5:243, 483 Silent Spring 5:50, 247, 430 Single large or several small (SLOSS) debate 2:325 Skagway tsunami 1:727 Skiing, impacts 3:346 Skin cancer 3:136 Sky, origins 5:372 Slow feedback processes 1:293 Slow onset changes 5:273 Small is beautiful 5:393, 483 Small Island Developing States (SIDS) administrative capacity building 4:421 areas requiring further action 4:421 energy resources 4:412 institutional strengthening 4:421 production, trade and consumption of commercial energy 4:412 sustainable development 4:412, 416 Small islands 2:77 degradation due to tourism 3:618 SMIC (Study of Mans Impact on Climate) 4:385 Smith, Adam 5:86 Smog 3:678, 680, 4:74, 486 alert systems 3:681 measures to tackle 3:682 restrictions 3:682 Snow, areal extent 1:284 Snow cover feedbacks 1:289 Snow storms 3:486 Social appraisal (SAp) 4:386 Social assessment 4:386 Social change processes 4:390 Social Contract 5:152, 158 Social ecology 5:434, 444, 448, 484 Social impact assessment (SIA) 4:387, 5:484 focus 4:388 methodology 4:392 principal features 4:388 Social impacts 4:389 pathways 4:389 potential 4:391 Social learning 5:485 Social processes, categories 4:390 Social reformism 5:437 Social risk 5:300 Social science and global environmental change (GEC) 5:3, 109 descriptive approach 5:110, 111 descriptive tradition 5:109 interpretive approach 5:110, 113 interpretive tradition 5:109 research applications 5:120 research areas 5:118 research style and scale 5:114 style and standpoint 5:109, 117 Social services, provision of 5:33 Social sustainability 5:489 Socially responsible investment (SRI) 4:393 Society and politics 5:446 Society for Ecological Restoration 2:532 Socio-economic systems 5:47 Sociology See Environmental sociology Sodium triphosphate (STP) 3:544 Soft energy path 3:583, 5:487 Soft law 5:327 Soil acidity, correction 3:585 Soil amelioration 3:583 historical context 3:583 present situation 3:584 Soil compaction 3:590 Soil degradation factors causing 3:591 human-induced 3:590 in susceptible drylands 3:284 types 3:591 Soil deterioration 3:587 evidence for 3:590 future outlook 3:593 mechanisms 3:590 processes 3:587 Soil erosion 3:232, 587, 712, 4:395 and logging systems 3:331 control 4:397 equations 4:396

INDEX

601

extent and severity 4:396 on-site and off-site impacts 4:396 rainforests 3:268 Soil evaporation 2:346 Soil mineralization 2:544 Soil moisture 1:21, 2:333 Soil organic matter 2:206, 3:230 Soil pollution 3:590 Soil properties, rainforests 3:268 Soils 2:152, 570 acid buffering domains 3:101 acid sulfate 3:151 activities in ecosystems 2:153 afforestation impacts 3:156 atmospheric change 2:155 bioremediation 3:586 climate change 2:156 contaminated 3:586 with heavy metals 3:105 forest 3:546 global change 2:154 global change impacts 2:332 human impact 2:117 interactive effects 2:158 invasive species 2:157 land use effects 2:155 magnesium in 3:585 nutrient-poor 2:589 organic farming 3:533 pH 3:101 phosphorus cycle 2:467 phosphorus in 3:540 preventing crust formation 3:586 rainforest 3:265 see also Salinity; Topsoil Solar activity 1:514 Solar Backscatter UV instrument 1:146 Solar cycle 1:514 Solar energy 1:183, 3:710 Solar irradiance 1:514, 522 Solar radiation 1:16, 152, 223, 333, 371, 456, 2:600 Solar/Stellar Irradiance Comparison Experiment (SOLSTICE) 1:732 Solar Ultraviolet Spectral Irradiance Monitor (SUSIM) 1:732 Somalia 3:548 Soot aerosols 3:182 South Cascade Glacier 1:408 South Geomagnetic Pole 1:186 South Pole 1:184 Southampton, UK 3:578 Southern Annular Mode 1:202 Southern Oscillation 1:230, 353, 354, 355, 356, 487 see also El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) 1:357 Sovereign states 5:487 Sovereignty 2:279, 5:487 Soviet Union, former 3:413 Space-based observing systems and programs 1:71 Space/time resolutions 1:64 Spain, land degradation 3:421 Spartina 3:451 Special sales and service taxes 4:197 Species 2:560 adaptation 2:160, 4:83 complementarity 2:24 dispersal and transport 3:632 distribution 2:162 eradication 2:17 evenness 2:224 functional groups and functional classication 2:27 functional roles 2:25

local effects 2:567 population density 2:209 population status 2:12 redundancy 2:27 relative importance in ecosystem functioning 2:24 richness 2:224 ecological time scale 2:227 evolutionary time scale 2:225 tolerance ranking 2:99 see also Threatened species Specic response groups 2:483 SPECMAP 1:470 Spectral analysis 2:213 Sperm whale 3:446 Spermatophytes 2:135 Speth, James Gustave 4:397 Sphagnum fuscum 2:438 Spirituality 5:97 Spitsberben 2:601 SPOT Image (France-CNES)[Centre National dEtudes Spatiales]) 1:73 Stable isotopes 2:544 abundances 2:545 natural variation 2:545 use in research 2:547 Stadials 1:332 Standards, international environmental 4:281 START (Global Change System for Analysis Research and Training) 4:398 State of the Environment Reports (SOE) 4:205 State Space, concept 2:451 Statistical analysis plant response 2:484 trait response 2:484 Steeplands, landform change in 3:338 Stefan Boltzmann Law 1:371 STEMP 2:206 Stewardship theology 5:196, 492 Stockholm Conference. See UN Conference on the Human Environment Stockholm Declaration 4:16, 469, 5:487 Stomata 2:195, 221 Stomatal conductance 2:96 Storms 3:486 assessment 3:728 names 1:433, 435 tropical. See Tropical storms Strategic Environmental Assessments (SEAs) 4:403 international treaties 4:405 privatization 4:405 sectorial 4:403 structural adjustment 4:404 Strategies 2:482 Stratopause 1:243 Stratosphere 1:14, 241, 243, 520, 717 chemistry 1:675 Stratospheric chemistry effects of aerosols 1:680 gas-phase 1:675 prospects for 21st century 1:681 Stratospheric ozone 1:281, 675, 2:156 advances in understanding 4:341 amount and distribution 1:143 depletion 1:140, 3:135, 4:65, 428, 446 formation and destruction 1:141 future trends 1:153 increases 1:152 production 1:141 scientic assessment 4:339 trends 1:147

602 INDEX
Stratospheric water vapor 1:384, 385 Stream hydrograph 2:347 Streamow, impacts of human activities 1:459 Streams productivity 2:379 threats 2:382 Stress tolerance 2:485 Strobilus (or cone) 2:135 Strong, Maurice 4:406 Stylized facts, emergence 5:405, 406 Subsidence 3:430 and groundwater exploitation 3:340 due to coal mining 3:339 due to mining and withdrawal of uids 3:339 Subsidies, agricultural 3:168 Subspecies 2:560 Substance ow analysis (SFA) 4:249 Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer 1:447 Substantive fairness 5:280 Subtropical jet stream 1:230 seasonal variations 1:233 Succession aquatic habitats 2:554 characteristics 2:552 concept 2:551 cycle 2:553 denition 2:550 endpoints 2:554 natural disturbances 2:555 process 2:551 Suess effect 2:557 Sulfate 1:163, 179, 279 acid soils 3:151 aerosols 1:281, 3:182 Sulfur anthropogenic emissions 3:42 emission reductions, tradable permits 4:450 emission trading 4:453 Protocol 4:174 see also CENTURY generalized ecosystem model Sulfur compounds 1:468 Sulfur cycle 1:284 Sulfur dioxide (SO2 ) 1:163, 166, 179, 2:439, 3:678, 680 Sulfur hexauoride 1:384 Sulfurous smog 3:678 Sumatra, biomass burning 3:209 Sumbawa, Indonesia 1:737 Sun 1:514 Sunspots 1:514 Supercells 1:714 Supersonic transports (SSTs) 1:675, 678, 3:186 Surcharges 4:197 Surface albedo 1:319, 320 Surface energy exchange, tundra 2:599 Surface moisture 1:319 Surface roughness 1:319, 497 Surface temperature 1:209, 319 trends 1:279 Surface water disposal 3:687 Surface water quality 3:503 Surface winds 1:715 Surtaxes 4:197 Sustainability 4:460, 5:59 and market systems 5:26, 27 China 4:547 Lake Victoria 4:540 neoclassical view 5:27 technologys role 4:98 threats to 4:97 types 5:489 water use 3:94 see also Unsustainability Sustainability Agenda 3:130 Sustainable Cities Programme 4:461 Sustainable development 4:18, 154, 400, 411, 460, 531, 5:160, 275, 328 and climate change 4:84 and dematerialization 4:96 Bahai view 5:178 concept 4:17 development in 4:99 dynamics 4:97 ecology, economy, society 4:423 elements 4:56 environment in 4:99 global negotiations 4:423 indicators 4:248 major principles 5:445 national policies for 4:417 objective 4:96 policy 4:422 reactive, anticipatory, radical responses 4:424 refocusing 4:96 scale 4:423 scenario 4:104 shared natural resources 4:515 Small Island Developing States (SIDS) 4:412, 416 strategic imperatives 4:506 values, ideology, strategy 4:424 WCED 4:506 Sustainable energy investments 4:90 policies 4:86 pricing and regulatory approaches 4:89 technologies 4:41 Sustainable practice 5:314 knowledge as basis for 5:318 Sustainable process index (SPI) 3:64 Sustainable transportation 4:426 developing countries 4:433 Sustainable use 4:170 SWAN code for modeling shallow water waves 1:726, 727 Swanson observations 1:729 Swidden 3:594 agriculture 3:566 cultivation 5:320 Swirl ratio 1:714 Swiss Eco-Points (SEP) 3:64 Symbiosis 2:557 faculative 2:557 obligate 2:557 Syngas 3:216 Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) 1:71 System analysis, agroforestry 3:174 System of National Accounts (SNA) 5:43 Systematics 2:560 Systems 2:450 myths of 5:399 Taiwan, aquaculture 3:199 Tambora volcanic eruption 1:737 Tamm, Carl Olof 2:559 Taoism 3:431 Tapajos river 3:112 Tar sands 3:528 composition 3:531 extraction 3:531 origin 3:531 reserves 3:531 Taraxacum of cinale 2:101

INDEX

603

Taxon 2:560 Taxonomy 2:560 Technical Cooperation Programme 1:758 Technological change 4:26, 5:404 Technological innovation and leadership in developing countries 4:94 Technological opportunities 4:26 Technological society and global environmental change (GEC) 5:86 Technology and water use 3:87 development 5:404 lifecycle 5:404 Technology and Economic Assessment Panel (TEAP) 4:65 Technology transfer 4:171 Technosphere 5:202 Temperate coniferous forests air pollution 2:563 climatic change 2:563 ecosystem responses 2:562 management options 2:564 Temperate deciduous forests 2:565 climate 2:568 impacts due to change in atmospheric chemistry 2:567 major global change elements 2:566 nature and extent 2:565 potential responses to global change 2:568 Temperate forests 2:72 Temperate grasslands 2:569 atmospheric composition 2:573 biogeochemistry 2:572 biotic characteristics 2:570 climate 2:570, 573 environmental controls 2:570 general characteristics 2:570 impact of global change 2:572 soils 2:570 Temperature annual average 1:371 global average 1:371 Temperature change 1:283 since 1850 compared to changes over the past millennium 1:250 Temperature estimation, planetary 1:373 Temperature increase 2:575, 5:401, 402 effects of terrestrial ecosystems 2:575 see also Global warming Temperature proles 1:21 Temperature record, global 1:311, 388 Temperature variations during past millennium 1:515 Tenere desert dunes 1:337 Tephra 3:705 Tephra-fall deposits 3:701 Termites, mound-building 2:590 Terpenes 2:607 Terrestrial ecosystems 2:172 carbon/nutrient interactions 2:598 impacts of global change 2:122 linkages among functional groups 2:26 Terrestrial environment, Arctic 3:521 Terrestrial systems 2:136 Terrestrial transects, IGBP 2:351 Terrestrial vertebrates 2:164 Tertiary 1:207, 338, 2:297 Tetrachlorodibenzo para-dioxin (TCDD) 5:482 Thailand aquaculture 3:199 global technology cooperation 4:386 Theology 5:492 Thermal energy 3:711 Thermal homeostasis 2:247 Thermal radiation 1:371, 372

Thermohaline circulation 1:20 Thermometry, acoustic 1:161 Thermosphere 1:243 Third World 5:200 Thoreau, Henry David 5:502 Thornthwaite, Charles Warren 2:581 Threatened species 4:201 red list 4:201, 508 Threats of the intimate 5:9 Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear accident 5:301, 503 Thunderstorms 1:219, 502 Thyroid cancer 3:242 Tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) 2:64 Tickell, Crispin 4:436 Tidal barrages 3:596 Tidal currents 1:710 Tidal elevations 1:710 Tidal marshes 3:451 Tidal power development 3:596 Tidal streams 1:710 Tides lunar 1:711 oceanic 1:710 see also Intertidal zones Time series analysis 2:213 TIROS 1:73 TIROS-I 1:72 TIROS-II 1:72 Toepfer, Klaus 4:436 TOGA (Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere) 1:64, 70, 159, 363, 364 Tolba, Mostafa 4:437 Topsoil acidication 3:590 loss 3:587 Tornado 1:713, 3:485 vortex 1:714 wind speeds 1:713 Toronto, Canada 4:537 Torrey Canyon, oil tanker 5:503 Total biomass enhancement ratio 2:99 Total column ozone 1:146, 154 Total least squares (TLS) estimation procedure 1:280 Total ozone mapping spectrometer (TOMS) satellite 1:143, 146, 148, 149 Total solar irradiance (TSI) 1:75 Tourism 3:623 and climate 3:624 and effects on functioning ecosystems 3:607 and environment 4:363 and environmental planning 3:606 and global change 3:624 areas of high environmental change by 3:619 economic signicance 3:623 ecosystems impacts 3:597 effects on animals and marine species 3:605 environmental and societal impacts 3:609 environmental changes due to 3:613 global 3:610 growth 4:362 guidelines 4:364 Mediterranean 4:530 possible effects on ecosystems 3:601 public sector 4:366 regional aspects 3:625 scenarios for environment change 3:622 SIDs 4:417 stakeholders 4:365 statistics 3:598 sustainable 4:362 sustainable development 3:619

604 INDEX
Toxic chemicals 4:74, 5:54 environmental effects 3:98 regulations 4:289 Toxic Waste and Race in the United States 5:219 Toxic wastes 3:710 and ecofeminism 5:219 disposal 3:628 generation 3:628 legislation 3:628 Toxicology. See Ecotoxicology Tradable consumption quotas 4:109 Tradable permits 4:446, 5:231, 458 emissions 4:109, 451 greenhouse gases 4:438 sulfur emission reductions 4:450 Tradable pollution rights 5:437 Trade liberalization 3:633 Trade Winds 1:229, 715 Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) 5:314 Traf c management measures 3:679 Tragedy of the Commons, The 5:208, 415 Trait correlation analyses 2:482 Trait response 2:484 Trait selection 2:484 Trajectory of contraction 5:160 Trajectory of convergence 5:160 Transaction charges 4:197 Transboundary water resource management 4:552 Transcendence 5:98 Transferable sheries quotas (TFQs) 4:455 concerns regarding 4:458 implementation 4:458 principal features 4:456 prospects 4:459 uses 4:457 Transform boundaries 1:411 Transmigration, Jakarta 3:273 Transpiration 1:21, 452, 2:346 Transport and environment 3:572 and species dispersal 3:632 emissions 3:646, 678 environmental impacts 3:645, 4:428 feeder systems 3:639, 641 freight ows 3:633 fuel use for 4:434 infrastructure 3:643 bene ts and costs 3:647 costs 3:645 instruments for change 4:432 interaction with land use 3:645 passengers 3:640 resource use 4:426 trends 4:432 urban 3:140 Transport system 3:218 Treadmill of production 5:278 Tree of Life 2:422 Trees and ecofeminism 5:219 and water cycle 3:157 damage in logging systems 3:328 gap models 2:319 Triassic 1:516 Triturus vulgaris 2:137 TRMM (Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission) 1:75 Trophic levels, change in interactions 3:384 Trophic relationships 2:309 Tropical cyclones 1:229, 3:245, 484, 4:230 averaged annual total numbers 1:437 development 1:435 meteosat image 1:437 overview 1:433 regions of occurrence 1:436 Tropical forests 2:71, 582 Amazon Basin 3:255 Tropical Meteorology Research Programme 1:758 Tropical ocean-global atmosphere study. See TOGA Tropical rainforests 3:265 Tropical savannas 2:586 biodiversity resource utilization 2:588 oristic diversity 2:587 life forms and their functional signi cance 2:588 mutualistic symbiosis 2:590 nutrient availability 2:590 Rhizospheric Associations 2:590 vegetation 2:587 Tropical storms characteristics 1:437 climate change implications 1:438 development and movement 1:437 overview 1:433 see also Hurricanes; Tropical cyclones; Typhoons Tropics, terrestrial transects 2:355 Tropopause 1:243, 717, 718 Troposphere 1:14, 243, 473, 499, 675, 717 Tropospheric hydroxyl (OH) 1:385 Tropospheric ozone. See Ozone Tsunamis 1:729, 3:489, 513 causes and consequences 1:725 earthquake-generated 1:726 Tucker, Jim 2:592 Tundra 2:593, 596, 599, 600 and global biogeochemistry 2:596 and global environmental change 2:595 background 2:593 carbon uxes 2:596 experiments with ecosystems 2:595 links with global radiation budget 2:599 Tunguska Phenomenon 1:208 Turbidity front image 3:725 Turbopause 1:243 Two-timing technique 2:335 Tyler prize 4:280 Typhoons overview 1:433, 439 structure 1:435 UARS (Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite) 1:74, 146, 732 Ultraviolet radiation 3:135, 185 ULYSSES project 4:25, 253, 460 UN agencies, environment programs 4:11 UN Commission on the Environment and Development (UNCED) 1:539 UN Conference on Environment and Development (Rio de Janeiro 1992). See UNCED UN Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm 1972). See UNCHE UN Conference on Trade and Development. See UNCTAD UN Conferences 4:469 UN Development Program (UNDP) 4:156 UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) 5:249 UN Economic Commission for Europe (UN ECE) 4:452 UN Economic Commission for Europe (UN-ECE), Convention on Long-range transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP) 3:252 UN Educational Scienti c and Cultural Organization UN Educational, Scienti c and Cultural Organization International Hydrological Program 3:707 UN Educational Scienti c and Cultural Organization. See UNESCO UN Environment Programme. See UNEP UN Framework Convention on Climate Change 4:163, 478

INDEX

605

UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) 3:549 UN International Marine Organization (IMO) 3:633 UN Scientic Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) 3:241 UN Special Assembly 4:402 UN (UN) 1:68, 3:548 UN University Zero Emissions Research Initiative (UNU ZERI) 4:113 UNCCD (UN Convention to Combat Desertication) 4:474 UNCED 1:477, 4:11, 12, 140, 183, 184, 205, 401, 460, 470, 473, 5:249, 275, 431 Rio Declaration 4:168 Uncertainty 2:67 IAMs 4:258 managing 5:396 UNCHE 4:10, 398, 469, 5:53, 248 UNCHS (UN Centre for Human Settlements), programs 4:461 UNCLOS (UN Convention on the Law of the Sea) 4:462 UNCTAD 4:463, 5:153 Underground explosions 3:295 UNDP 5:153 UNECE 4:44 UNEP 1:394, 538, 752, 757, 4:11, 39, 65, 184, 206, 237, 464 biodiversity 2:159 Environmental Data Report 4:204 Regional Seas Program (RSP) 4:476 Sasakawa Environment Prize 4:281, 477 UNESCO 1:394, 469, 753, 2:175, 4:206, 465 Unexploded bombs (UXOs) 3:146 UNFCCC 4:81 UNFPA (UN Population Fund) 4:466 UNIDO (UN Industrial Development Organization) 4:468 United States Arctic system science study 2:353 United States of America (USA) air pollution 3:652 climate change 4:543 emission trading 4:453 industrialization 5:79 prairies transect 2:354 residents views on global climate change 4:24 tradable permit system 4:448 urbanization 5:79 Unity principle 5:338 UNDP (UN Development Programme) 4:464 UNSCEAR (UN Scientic Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation) 4:44, 485 Unsustainability 5:87 causes 5:491 UNU (UN University) 5:504 Upper atmosphere research satellite (UARS) 1:74, 146, 732 Upwelling 1:334, 358, 362 Upwelling diffusion model 1:379 Urban air pollution 3:683 Urban air quality 3:681 Urban climate and respiratory disease 3:649 Urban conglomerations, worlds largest 3:669 Urban ecosystems 3:655 habitats for plants and wildlife 3:656 human habitats 3:658 metabolism 3:658 schemes for characterizing 3:657 Urban forests 3:356 Urban growth rates 4:54 Urban heat island (UHI) 3:660 and global warming 3:665 atmospheric controls 3:663 characteristics 3:662 effect of global environmental change 3:665 formation 3:662 formative factors 3:662

impacts 3:664 intensity 3:664 mitigation 3:665 surface controls 3:663 temporal development 3:662 types of 3:660 Urban infrastructure 3:81 Urban land cover 3:656 Urban landscape 5:357 Urban Management Programme 4:461 Urban metabolism 3:4, 78 Urban population basic statistics 3:668 change 3:666 regional distribution 3:667 Urban poverty and environmental health 3:661 susceptibility 3:675 vulnerability 3:675 Urban rural eco-service 4:549 Urban vulnerability and mortality 3:140 and poverty 4:408 Urban wastes 3:684 components 3:685 incineration 3:687 open burning 3:687 Urbanization 5:89 and environmental change 3:9 and health 3:139 and water use 3:87 future 3:671 geomorpholological change 3:338 levels 4:54 US 5:79 US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) 4:543 US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) 1:382 US National Assessment 4:544 US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory (NOAA/CMDL) 1:177 User fees 4:197 Utilitarianism, ethical framework 5:25 Utopianism 5:438, 443 meanings 5:443 UV radiation and ozone 1:151 UV-B radiation 2:156 enhanced 2:130 Vaccinium myrtillus 2:449 Value systems, health outcomes 4:54 Valued ecosystem component (VEC) 4:493 Values Party 5:56 Vavrousek, Josef 4:493 Vayu 5:304 VCL 1:80 Vector-borne diseases 3:691 Vedic heritage 5:304 Vegetarianism 5:347 Vegetation 2:215, 486 and land degradation 3:419 distribution 1:284 sampling 2:486 Vegetation Ecosystem Model and Analysis Project (VEMAP) 2:603 Vehicle emissions 3:678 Venice, Italy 3:575 Venice lagoon, Italy 3:576 Vernadsky, Vladimir 2:604 Vertical gardens 3:359 Vienna, material ows 3:59 Vienna Convention (March 1985) 4:338, 447

606 INDEX
Vietnam, chemical defoliants 3:146 Villach Conferences 4:494 Vinyl chloride monomers (VCMs) 3:148 Violence as health issue 4:59 Violent conict 5:137 Viral diseases and climate change 3:690 Virtual environments 5:505 types 5:506 Virtual reality (VR) 5:505 Viruses 2:422, 424 Vitality fertilization 2:440 Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) 1:180, 384, 2:605, 3:650, 653, 678, 683, 4:174, 430 effect of global change 2:608 major categories 2:605 oxygenated 2:607 phytogenic 2:606 Protocol 4:174 Volcanic Eruption Index (VEI) 3:292 Volcanic eruptions 1:736, 3:413, 488, 513, 694 and cities 3:696 crucibles of creation 3:704 DVI 3:291 effects 3:700 El Chichon 1:736 explosiveness 3:689 hazards 3:697 Krakatau 1:736 Mount Merapi 3:694 Mount Pinatubo 1:148, 3:700 risks to life and property 3:697 urban proximities 3:698 Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) 3:689 Volcanism detrimental effects 3:702 monitoring 1:538 Volcanoes 3:699 location 3:699 Volvo Environment Prize 4:280, 495 von Humboldt, Alexander 2:609 Vostok core 2:372 Vulnerability 4:369 Vulnerability assessment 1:347 Vulnerability perspective 5:299 Wadi hydrology network 3:707 Waldsterben 5:508 Walker Circulation 1:23, 229, 476, 749 War 3:146 Ward, Barbara 4:497, 5:248 Warfare, and conict 5:273 Waste composition, solid 3:708 Waste disposal methods 3:686 see also Animal waste Waste dumps, Istanbul 3:707 Waste management 3:709 urban systems 3:711 Waste prevention 3:711 Waste production, solid 3:708 Waste water, treatment and disposal 3:712 Wastes dumping of, see also London Dumping Convention landll and land raising 3:713 urban 3:684 see also Hazardous wastes Wastewater treatment lagoons, methane emissions 3:463 Water 1:468 afforestation impacts 3:157 and ecofeminism 5:219 dispersal by 2:84 distribution on Earth 1:454 freshwater sheries 2:327 multifunctional investment 5:202 phases 1:224, 5:424 see also Freshwater; Groundwater; Hydrologic cycle Water balance 2:347 mathematical schematic 1:453 Water Code, MAFF 3:505 Water courses, ows 5:425 Water cycle 2:344 and trees 3:157 continuity-based image 5:203 Water-dependent activities 5:206 Water exploitation, major problems 3:740 Water Framework Directive 3:7 Water-impacting activities 5:206 Water impoundment 2:132 Water level uctuations, Caspian Sea 4:524 Water management, Indus Basin 3:377 Water planning and management 2:347 Water policy, agriculture 4:360 Water pollution 2:118, 3:148, 5:93 Pattaya 3:620 regional responses 4:515 Water processes 5:203 Water protection, agricultural practice 3:505 Water quality 2:348 changing scale over time 3:500 effects of logging systems 3:331 nutrient enrichment 3:503 phosphorus 3:542 Water resources 2:347 agriculture 3:363 and population growth 5:205 Baltic 3:720 case study 3:740 development in a vulnerable environment 1:469 Great Lakes 3:721 R o de la Plata 3:723 transboundary management 4:552 use 3:8 Water scarcity predicament 5:205 Water stress 3:84 Water supplies health issues 4:51 inter-basin transfer for (IBTs) 3:387 Water travel 3:644 Water treatment 3:712 Water use 3:84 agriculture 3:89 bathing 3:86 biophysical ecosystems 3:86 climate warming 3:8 denition 3:84 efciency 2:96 environmental impacts 3:92 food preparation 3:86 health concerns 3:90 health issues 3:93 implications 3:94 key drivers 3:86 nature of economy 3:87 patterns and trends 3:86 policies 3:88 population growth 3:87 regional instability 3:93 regional patterns and trends 3:91 sectoral uses 3:89 social impacts 3:93

INDEX

607

social values and tastes 3:88 supply and demand management 3:94 sustainability 3:94 technology 3:87 temporal patterns of demand 3:91 urbanization 3:87 Water vapor 1:384, 433, 3:178 amount 1:284 and CO2 exchange 2:194 distribution 1:284, 750 feedback 1:291 increase 1:286 interannual variation 1:291 transport 1:452 upper troposphere 1:292 variations 1:291 Waterfront development 3:580 Waterlogging 3:584, 590, 726 Waters, phosphorus in 3:541 Watershed 2:345 Waterspout 1:713 Watson, Robert T 4:498 Wave power development 3:726 offshore technologies 3:727 point absorber technologies 3:727 predicted energy costs 3:728 shore-mounted technologies 3:727 world exploitable resource 3:726 WBCSD (World Business Council for Sustainable Development) 4:498 WCC (World Council of Churches) 5:195, 198, 509 WCED (World Commission on Environment and Development 4:411, 499, 503, 5:275 WCP (World Climate Programme) 1:752 WCRP 4:41 Weather and climate 1:15 and ozone formation 3:650 and ozone transport 3:652 predictability 1:263 Weather extremes 3:732 aggregation 3:729 and land use 3:732 assessment 3:728 attribution 3:729 climate impacts 3:728 comparison 3:730 contingency 3:729 costs 3:730 impacts trend data 3:730 multiple-order impacts 3:729 quantication 3:729 vulnerability mapping 3:731 Weather forecasts 1:263 improved 3:732 Weather prediction 1:756 Weather Prediction Research Programme 1:758 Weather simulation 1:111 Weathering 1:755, 2:200 Weed 2:611 Wegener, Alfred 1:755 Welfare liberalism 5:437 West Antarctic Ice Sheets (WAISs) 1:21, 188 Western Alliance 3:548 Western Canada Sedimentary Basin 3:295 Wet deposition 2:261 Wet microburst 1:325 Wetland ecosystems 2:534 Wetland systems 2:78

Wetlands as chemical sinks 3:109 future outlook 3:407 global examples 3:399 irrigation impacts 3:399 WFC (World Food Council) 4:500 WGNE (Working Group on Numerical Experimentation) 1:756 WHO, major accomplishments 4:502 Whales (and whaling) 3:446 commercial 3:447 ecological impacts 3:449 hunting 3:446 moratorium and status of stocks 3:448 opportunistic encounters and subsistence hunting 3:447 White, Gilbert 4:500 White, Lynn Jr. 5:100 White Mountain Club 5:243 Whittaker, Robert H 2:611 WHO (World Health Organization) 4:44, 502 Wild res 3:490 Wildlife afforestation impacts 3:158 protection movement 5:246 urban ecosystem habitats 3:656 Williamstown Club 5:243 Wilson, Edward Osborne 2:612 Wind, dispersal by 2:83 Wind and air pressure 1:224, 225 Wind energy 3:711 Wind farms 3:733 Wind Imaging Interferometer (WINDII) 1:732 Wind power, development 3:733 Wind speeds, tornadoes 1:713 Wind stress 1:714 Wind turbines 3:733 Winter sports, impacts 3:346 Wisconsin River 2:377 WMO (World Meteorological Organization) 1:157, 757 WMO GAW (Global Atmosphere Watch) 1:70 WMO Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) 1:69 WOCE (World Ocean Circulation Experiment) 1:64, 759 Women and Habitat Programme 4:462 Women and poverty 4:59 Women nature interconnections 5:219, 220 Woodfuel 3:218 Woodwell, George Masters 2:613 World 3 model 5:395 World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) 4:18 World Climate Applications and Services Programme (WCASP) 1:752, 758 World Climate Data and Monitoring Programme (WCDMP) 1:752, 758 World Climate Impact Assessment and Response Strategies Programme (WCIRP) 1:753, 758 World Climate Programme (WCP) 1:758 World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) 1:158, 392, 478, 753, 758 World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) 4:154, 401, 503, 5:275 World Conservation Union. See IUCN World Council of Churches (WCC) 5:195, 198, 509 World dynamics 4:259 World economy 4:183 World Energy Council (WEC) 3:738 World Glacier Monitoring Service 1:406 World Habitat Day 4:462 World Health Assembly (WHA) 4:501 World Health Organization (WHO) 3:306, 5:493 World Heritage Site 4:535

608

INDEX

World Industry Conference on Environmental Management (WICEMII) 4:18 World Meteorological Convention 1:68 World Meteorological Organization (WMO) 1:68, 177, 393, 394, 433, 681, 752, 4:41, 154, 539 World models 5:395 World Ocean Circulation (WOC) 1:759 World population (1 AD to 2000 AD) 5:212 World Tour Organization (WTO) 3:610 World Tourism Organization (WTO OMT) 4:362 World Trade Organization (WTO) 3:7, 247, 4:221, 510, 5:93, 251 World War I 5:247 World War II 4:9, 5:1, 92, 152, 156, 158, 247 World Weather Watch (WWW) 1:68, 758 World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) 2:410 Worldwatch Institute 4:509 Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) 5:57 WRAP (Waste Reduction Always Pays) 4:108 WRI (World Resources Institute) 4:510 WTO See World Trade Organization

Wuxing theory 3:431 WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) 4:511 WWW Surface-Synoptic 1:69 WWW U/A-Synoptic 1:68 Yangtze River 3:432 Yellow fever 3:693 Yellow River 3:432, 740 drying up courses 3:740 Younger Dryas 1:247, 273, 274, 275, 418 Yugoslavia 3:148 Zayed International Prize 4:281 Zhaodong, China 4:548 Zhong Yong 3:431 Zinc ow 3:59 Zonal climate models 1:107 Zooplankton 3:182