Ecological Politics and Democratic Theory (Routledge Studies in Extremism and Democracy)

Ecological Politics and Democratic Theory

Can democracy deliver the policies that greens want to see? If it cannot, how should environmentalists respond? Should they stoically accept defeat or reject democracy and look for an alternative form of government? Ecological Politics and Democratic Theory examines the reasons why some despair at the prospects for an ecological form of democracy, and challenges the recent ‘deliberative turn’ in environmental political thought. Deliberative democracy has become popular for those seeking a reconciliation of these two forms of politics. Demand for equal access to a public forum in which the best argument will prevail appears to offer a way of incorporating environmental interests into the democratic process. This book argues that deliberative theory, far from being friendly to the environmental movement, shackles the ability of those seeking radical change to make their voices heard in the most effective manner. Mathew Humphrey challenges beliefs about the relationship between ecological politics and democracy at a time when those who take direct action are being swept up in the ‘war on terror’. By calling for a more open and contested form of democracy, in which the boundaries of what constitutes ‘acceptable’ behaviour are not decided in advance of actual debate, Ecological Politics and Democratic Theory is an original contribution to the literature on environmental politics, ecological thought, and democracy. Mathew Humphrey is Reader in Political Philosophy at The University of Nottingham. He has published widely on questions of environmental political theory and its relation to democracy.

Routledge Studies in Extremism and Democracy Series editors: Roger Eatwell University of Bath

Cas Mudde University of Antwerp-UFSIA

This new series encompasses academic studies within the broad fields of ‘extremism’ and ‘democracy’. These topics have traditionally been considered largely in isolation by academics. A key focus of the series, therefore, is the (inter-) relation between extremism and democracy. Works will seek to answer questions such as to what extent ‘extremist’ groups pose a major threat to democratic parties, or how democracy can respond to extremism without undermining its own democratic credentials. The books encompass two strands: Routledge Studies in Extremism and Democracy includes books with an introductory and broad focus which are aimed at students and teachers. These books will be available in hardback and paperback. Titles include: Understanding Terrorism in America From the Klan to al Qaeda Christopher Hewitt Fascism and the Extreme Right Roger Eatwell Racist Extremism in Central and Eastern Europe Edited by Cas Mudde Routledge Research in Extremism and Democracy offers a forum for innovative new research intended for a more specialist readership. These books will be in hardback only. Titles include: Uncivil Society? Contentious politics in post-Communist Europe Edited by Petr Kopecky and Cas Mudde

Political Parties and Terrorist Groups Leonard Weinberg and Ami Pedahzur Western Democracies and the New Extreme Right Challenge Edited by Roger Eatwell and Cas Mudde Confronting Right Wing Extremism and Terrorism in the USA George Michael Anti-Political Establishment Parties A comparative analysis Amir Abedi American Extremism History, politics and the militia D. J. Mulloy The Scope of Tolerance Studies on the costs of free expression and freedom of the press Raphael Cohen-Almagor Extreme Right Activists in Europe Through the magnifying glass Bert Klandermans and Nonna Mayer Ecological Politics and Democratic Theory The challenge to the deliberative ideal Mathew Humphrey

Ecological Politics and Democratic Theory The challenge to the deliberative ideal Mathew Humphrey

First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2007 Mathew Humphrey This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0–203–96368–7 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0–415–31431–3 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–203–96368–7 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–31431–2 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–96368–5 (ebk)

This book is dedicated to Denis Innell Humphrey (1922–2004)

Contents

Series preface Preface Acknowledgements Introduction

xi xiii xv 1

PART I

Ecological politics against democracy 1

9

Crisis management: eco-authoritarianism and the inadequacy of democracy

11

2

Anarcho-primitivism and direct action politics

30

3

The ‘war on eco-terror’

47

4

The justification of environmental direct action

63

PART II

Democracy, deliberation, and ecological outcomes

79

5

Ecology, autonomy, and liberal democracy

81

6

Deliberative democracy and the challenge of radical environmentalism

94

7

Radical environmentalism and the idea of public reason

114

Conclusion

139

Notes Bibliography Index

145 154 165

Series preface

Although most of the books in this series address conceptual, philosophical, and theoretical issues, this is the first truly political philosophical study in the Routledge Studies in Extremism and Democracy. Moreover, it is the first study that focuses exclusively on an ideology normally associated with the left rather than the right (even if this is debated both within academic and ecological circles). Ecological Politics and Democratic Theory is a lucid and sharp intellectual analysis of the tensions and outright oppositions that exist between certain radical forms of ecologism and (liberal) democracy. Mathew Humphrey is the first to address this highly relevant subject in such a comprehensive and scholarly way and deserves huge credit not just for the successful way in which he has tackled this tricky topic, but for even daring to approach it. Unfortunately, many scholars in the field of ecologism and ‘green’ politics are still inspired more by political than academic concerns and therefore close their eyes to certain highly relevant questions, both academic and political. Humphrey does not contend that ecologism per se is anti-democratic. Rather, he stresses that his study raises crucial questions about the radical interpretations and tendencies of ecologism embraced by fringe elements of the movement. The influence of these activists and intellectuals should not be underestimated: in particular, deep ecology influences more moderate parties and thinkers, while direct action has effects well beyond the number of those involved. In Part I of the book, Humphrey analyses two important intellectual strands of radical ecologism: eco-authoritarianism and anarcho-primitivism. Drawing upon a broad range of thinkers and traditions, he convincingly shows the fundamentally naïve and anti-democratic foundations of these two different strands. The first part also discusses the moral status of environmental direct action, problematising the concepts of both (eco-)terrorism and civil disobedience in this regard. In Part II, the author moves from the descriptive to the prescriptive, focusing his attention more toward the merger of ecologism and democracy. He rejects deliberative democracy as the answer to the plight of the radical ecologists. Instead, Humphrey argues for a fairly conservative approach, that is, a widening of the scope of democratic contention, which would have to accommodate certain forms of direct action. It is here, however, that we see some grounds for doubt. On the one hand, Humphrey argues that ‘democratic’ society should ‘seek to set

xii Series preface out the boundaries of its own practice democratically’, and, on the other hand, he states that ‘we need a conception of democracy that perceives activism as part of democratic life’. But what if ‘democratic’ society does not want to perceive activism in such a way? In addition to providing a highly original and convincing analysis of the tensions and oppositions between radical ecologism and (liberal) democracy, Ecological Politics and Democratic Theory provides many insights that are of more general relevance to students of extremism and democracy. First, Humphrey shows how a sense of urgency plays a crucial part in the radicalisation of political activists and intellectuals. It is often this perceived urgency that makes political activists decide that they no longer have ‘time for democracy’. While the author convincingly shows that most claims of urgency are based on (gross) exaggerations of the state of the world, he does make a case for exceptions to ‘normal’ democratic procedure in cases where decisions have permanent consequences (irreversibility). However, if this justification of radical ‘one shot’ politics is accepted, it could possibly be applied to various other claims, including opposition to multicultural society and, even, European integration. Second, while deliberative democracy has been widely criticised for its elitist and unrepresentative character, that is, empowering the already empowered, Humphrey’s analysis uncovers the essentially (moral) conservative bias of this type of democracy. Consequently, his argument that radical ecologists have little to expect from deliberative democracy can be extended to radicals in general. Third, and finally, Humphrey’s call for a ‘normative typology of direct action’ provides an original if complex perspective on terms like terrorism and civil disobedience. Whether these terms can be construed as two poles of one moral dimension will definitely provide food for thought and contention among practitioners and students of radical politics alike. Roger Eatwell and Cas Mudde Bath and Antwerp, December 2006

Preface

I must confess that when I was asked to write this book for a series on ‘Extremism and Democracy’ my reaction combined enthusiasm with some misgivings. I tend to associate ‘extremism’ with the old totalitarian models of Nazism or Stalinism, or with racist and far-right politics today. I do not tend to think of green politics in ‘extremist’ terms, and I would be reluctant to tar its advocates with that brush (although as we will see some are happy to). Nonetheless, I do see certain strands of environmental politics as mounting a profound challenge to the existing system of capitalist liberal democracy in developed societies; and some activist groups, such as the Earth Liberation Front, are widely perceived as being ‘extremist’. Furthermore the radical green ideologies that often accompany activism, such as anarcho-primitivism, are not widely understood. At the time I received the invitation, I was planning to write something on how ecological and democratic politics can both come apart and come together, so it seemed that the offer came at the right time and I was happy to accept, despite the aforementioned misgivings about the ‘extremism’ label (those who see themselves as progressives are so much happier being called ‘radical’). My hope in writing this book is to achieve two things: first, to examine the ways in which some ecological thinkers and activists have rejected democracy, and this constitutes the focus of Part I. This part of the book is largely descriptive–analytic, looking at the ideas behind eco-authoritarianism and conducting a morphological analysis of the ideology of anarcho-primitivism. There is a normative component as well, however, as I question the moral status of environmental direct action and ask under what conditions it might be justified. Part II examines how ecological politics and democratic theory might come together. This part is largely normative, as I criticise attempts to make ecological soundness a precondition for liberal democracy, and suggest that green political theorists have been far too quick to embrace the normative demands of deliberative theory, which may actually serve to hamper the articulation of the demands of political ecologists. There is a descriptive–analytic component as well, however, as I examine arguments for conceptual innovation, the dispositional demands of deliberative theorists, and the critical literature on public reason. The second part of the book deals far more with the ‘academic’ strain of green political thought, whereas in

xiv Preface Part I there is more consideration of activist literature. Bringing these two literatures together has its difficulties, as they are articulated in a different mode and written for different audiences. Nonetheless, I believe that the political philosophy of activists and practitioners is as worthy of academic study as that which emanates from people who work in departments of politics and philosophy. I can only hope that the reader will agree.

Acknowledgements

The generation of any book, over a period of years, results in debts of gratitude to many people, and I hope I can do justice to those who have helped me here. Needless to say the quality of what lies between the covers is not necessarily related to the excellent assistance that has been provided by friends and colleagues. I owe Marc Stears an enormous thank you for allowing me to use parts of a paper we wrote together in Chapter 6, and for commenting upon a number of other draft chapters. You will doubtless recognise Marc’s contributions by the abrupt improvement in writing style. Ingolfur Blühdorn reviewed the entire manuscript, and offered exactly the kind of report one hopes for, along the lines of ‘publish this, it’s a very important book – and by the way, here are twenty five ways in which it could be made better’. I have followed many of Ingolfur’s excellent suggestions in the final round of revisions, and where I have kept to the original it has not been without due reflection. The early research work for this book was facilitated by Wolfson College, Oxford, who granted me a Charter Fellowship in 2001–2. Later work was facilitated by The Leverhulme Trust, with whom I held a Research Fellowship for 2003–4. The Centre for Political Ideologies at the University of Oxford gave me a highly convivial research home in 2004–5, for leave funded by the University of Nottingham. I am grateful to all of these institutions for allowing me to produce this book over five years rather than the fifty I think it would have taken me had I been teaching the whole time. Further thanks are due to those who were subjected to the presentation of early drafts at conferences and workshops, or who volunteered to read and comment on draft chapters. Thanks then to the Nuffield Political Theory Workshop, the Nottingham Political Theory Workshop and to participants in the Staff Seminar at the same institution, participants at the PSA Annual Conference in Leeds, and members of the Centre for Political Ideologies at the University of Oxford. On an individual basis, feedback from Tony Burns, Roger Eatwell, Michael Freeden, David Miller, Kieran O’Hara, Matthew Rendall, Andrew Robinson, and Chris Woodard has been invaluable. Last but far from least my thanks to Jayne, Kathleen, and Freya. The latter two did not exist when this research started, but they have proved to be an excellent distraction from thinking about the status of direct action in democratic societies or the normative demands of deliberative theory.

xvi Acknowledgements Parts of Chapter 4 appeared as ‘Democratic Legitimacy, Public justification and Environmental Direct Action’ Political Studies 54(2), 2006, Taylor & Francis. Parts of Chapter 5 appeared in ‘Liberal democracy and Environmentalism: The End of Environmentalism’ edited by Marcel Wissenburg and Yoram Levy (London: Routledge, 2004), Taylor & Francis. Parts of Chapter 6 appeared as an article written with Marc Stears ‘Animal Rights Protest and the Challenge to Deliberative Democracy’ Economy and Society 35(3), 2006, Taylor & Francis. Parts of Chapter 7 will appear as ‘Environmentalism, Fairness and Public Reasons’ in a forthcoming issue of Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 2007, Taylor & Francis.

Introduction

The rationale A leading green political theorist gave a paper recently at my current institution, and declared, inter alia, that green theorists had ‘done’ democracy, and were now moving on to the more interesting pastures of ‘green political economy’ (from where, for all I know, they may have moved on again by the time this book comes to print). My thought at the time, which I see no reason to revise, was that far from having ‘done’ democracy, green political theory had only just begun to make a serious engagement with it. It’s true that in the thirty-plus years since Club of Rome, thinking about the ecologism–democracy relationship has developed. Not all green thinkers now despair at the ability of democracy to deliver sustainability, and many are fully signed up for membership of the democratic deliberation society; but still, there is no reason to suppose that this engagement is complete. I will here sketch out some broad parameters of the subject matter, before moving on to a more detailed justification for the particular focus of this volume and an indication of the general thesis being put forward. Why ‘ecological politics’, why ‘democratic theory’, and why, particularly, should we be interested in the relationship between the two? It has become the norm to distinguish ‘ecological’ politics, which seeks fundamental change in the political and economic institutions of society, from ‘environmental politics’, which seeks to reform existing institutions in a ‘greener’ direction.1 Within each of these perspectives there are then a range of diagnoses of our current environmental ills, and propositions for future change. More ‘radical’ environmental perspectives, for example, would seek to unravel what they see as a whole raft of unsustainable technologies. By contrast, the relatively technocentric and optimistic perspective of (confusingly enough) ‘ “ecological” modernisation theory’ seeks to harness new technologies to environmental ends in order to foster a combination of economic growth with environmental sustainability.2 For all its heuristic usefulness, the ecological/environmental divide conceals (as such divisions usually do) as much as it reveals. What we have here is not a binary division, nor even a range of views along a single axis (such as an ‘ecocentric-anthropocentric’ continuum) but rather a complex range of positions in a multidimensional ‘space’ where one might be (amongst many other things)

2 Introduction an anti-statist revolutionary anarcho-primitivist, or a decentralising technological reformist, or an authoritarian centralising anti-capitalist, and still describe oneself as ‘green’, ‘ecologist’, or ‘environmentalist’, in terms of one’s political objectives. That is, in seeking to avert ecological disaster, place society on a sustainable footing, and/or preserve non-human nature (for future generations or for its own sake), one might think that centralisation of or decentralisation of power, radicalisation of or attenuation of democracy, the improvement of or eradication of capitalism – and so on for a host of other political arrangements – is a necessary step. ‘Ecological politics’ is here, then, merely a shorthand for political ideas and practices which seek to achieve environmental outcomes of one sort or another. Which ideas and what outcomes will vary from case to case, and the reader may be more inclined to allow some examples the imprimatur ‘ecological’ than others. This matters little, as a typology of ecological ideas is not the purpose of this volume. Indeed writing a book about ecological politics might be considered at least passé, if not fundamentally misguided, by those who argue that we are now in a condition of ‘post-ecological’ politics.3 Whilst it is true that ecological politics has (mostly) moved beyond some of the more straightforward attempts to read a politics out of ‘nature’, and is thus no longer ‘constructed around the concept of a single nature which was given to humanity and which provides the framework of human life’4 nonetheless the post-ecologism thesis overstates this change. It may apply to some of the more optimistic strands of ecological modernisation theory, but as we will see, there are still highly active political groups that are ‘inspired by an allegedly better past’ and who understand politics ‘by criteria of morality or immorality’.5 Post-ecological forms of politics may well exist, but they exist alongside ecological forms that show no signs yet of abating. That said, there is no doubt that the new discourses of ecological politics have developed alongside the older versions. In particular there have been attempts to move ‘beyond’ the view that there is a zero-sum trade-off between economic growth and environmental sustainability towards the position that with the smart (in an environmental sense) use of new technologies we can have ‘win-win’, with more (but qualitatively different) economic growth, but growth that has been ‘de-coupled’ from increasing levels of environmental degradation.6 Another trend that has attracted attention is the growth of ‘skeptical environmentalism’.7 Whereas there have always been ‘anti’ environmentalists,8 this rather more complex phenomenon comes from thinkers who position themselves as environmentally concerned but who question the assumptions, science, and philosophy behind what might be termed the ‘conventional’ environmentalist position. Skeptical environmentalists question the severity of some environmental problems, and the wisdom of spending resources on attempting to resolve those that are serious. These contemporary readings of the relationship between environment, technology, economics, and political institutions have created a far more diverse, fluid, and internally divided ‘environmental’ movement than that which existed in, for example, the 1970s, when political ecologists seemed to demand either deindustrialisation with decentralisation or deindustrialisation with authoritarianism. Of particular importance to this study is the ways in which the arguments under review relate ecological politics so defined to democracy, and of course ‘democracy’

Introduction 3 is also a complex and contested concept, and the theory of democracy has a far longer history than anything that could be recognised as ecological politics. Once again there will be no attempt here to impose an essentialist understanding of democracy onto the subject matter, it is more fruitful to follow the ways in which democracy has been conceptualised in ecological political argument, and enquire as to how this might best be developed in the future. Early attempts to delineate a relationship between ecological politics and democracy utilised a conception of liberal democracy as the appropriate form to assess.9 Thus, for example, the question that engaged William Ophuls was how to achieve environmentally sustainable political outcomes when people had preferences that reflected their short-term rational self-interest and which were thus inherently hostile to environmental outcomes. Why would any of us reduce our level of automobile use for the benefit of others or for some long-term future that we may not live to see? Democracy here is very much seen as a method of aggregating people’s pre-existing preferences, and whatever the problems may be in finding a fair and consistent method of aggregation, questioning the process of preference formation was not something covered by the writ of democracy. It is not only the nature of green politics itself that has changed significantly in recent years, the interpretation of the nature of democracy employed by green political theorists has altered as well. That is, aside from the debates about the nature and desirable forms of democracy that have taken place in ‘mainstream’ democratic theory,10 those interested in global sustainability have also reconsidered the democratic form. As we have seen, there are now a diverse range of attitudes towards democracy within the green movement, and the major distinction here appears to be this. Those that reject democracy conceive of it in its current liberal form, which is seen as something far worse than merely a mechanism for aggregating preferences. It is seen as a vehicle for the continuing domination of an economic and political elite, who are able to manipulate the party-based electoral system and mass media in order to prevent serious challenges emerging to their systemic power. Those who advocate democracy from a green perspective may well share this analysis, or something like it, of the existing democratic system. But unlike the first group this does not lead them to reject the whole institution of democracy as inherently oppressive, rather, they believe that democracy is reformable in a direction that can lead to more sustainable, and just, political outcomes than we currently have. The reforms called for generally seek more participatory, decentralised, and deliberative or discursive forms of democracy that will ensure a less unbalanced distribution of political power and within which the process of preference formation is seen as central to the democratic process rather than something that comes prior to it.11 In relation to these developments, this book will seek to serve a double purpose: on the one hand it will seek to introduce the reader to, or possibly remind them of, some of the tensions that have existed and still exist between ecological politics on the one hand and democratic politics on the other, and what the results of those tensions have been in terms of the practice of some green activists: for some, democracy really is an inherently anti-ecological political system, and that is taken as sufficient grounds to justify direct non-democratic action for environmental ends.

4

Introduction

Certain groups inspired by such beliefs have engaged in more-or-less co-ordinated activity in a number of countries, with a specific focus on attacks on property. This has inevitably brought such groups into conflict with the state and embroiled ecological activism in the whole discourse surrounding the ‘war on terror’. The first part of the book will examine the beliefs of these groups and how these beliefs are translated into political action, as well as discussing the thorny question of whether covert forms of direct action politics can by justified in democratic settings. The second function of the text is to contribute to the normative debate about how the relationship between ecological politics and democracy should be conceived. This runs through the commentary in Part I but becomes the main focus in Part II. In particular I suggest that the rush to embrace deliberative forms of democracy on the part of green theorists is at best insufficiently considered, and at worst fundamentally misguided and counter-productive. Green theorists may have ‘moved on’ from working on democracy, but if so they have acted rather like a sculptor hacking a few chips of a block of marble and declaring it a perfect copy of the Venus de Milo. There, is it seems to me, a great deal more work to be done here. If we accept Robert Goodin’s contention that there is no set relationship between democratic process and environmental outcome (a view that I would broadly endorse), then thinking about how such outcomes relate to such processes, and what may make these outcomes more or less likely, or what interference into the process we may have to tolerate to achieve outcomes that ‘we’ desire, remains an important task. The final point to make at this juncture is to elaborate on the reasons for pursuing this topic at the level of political theory. It might be suggested that if one is interested in the relationship between democracy and ecological outcomes, the appropriate form of research would be to seek to measure, empirically, whether actually existing democracies are more environmentally friendly than non-democracies. This kind of work would allow a measurable, rather than speculative, answer to the question.12 Of course work of this kind takes place and is important in telling us whether ‘actually existing democracies’ perform better than ‘actually existing non-democracies’ in environmental terms (they do, generally). There are however a whole range of important questions that cannot be addressed by work of this kind involving the normative aspirations of societies (or at least groups within them) who want to achieve some combination of ecological sustainability and democratic order. Whilst the political theorist cannot run laboratory experiments combining different forms of democracy with different levels of sustainability, it is possible to analytically assess the potential for certain forms of democratic process to deliver (or fail to deliver) different forms of environmental outcome. The radical environmentalist who rejects democracy tout court does so because of what s/he sees as in inherent incompatibility; those who endorse a deliberative from of ‘environmental democracy’ do so because they see the potential here for compatibility. All of these ideas and beliefs can be questioned in terms of their assumptions, forms of reasoning, conceptual consistency, and structural coherence.

Introduction 5

The argument The book is divided into two sections: the first examines tensions between ecological politics and democracy, from the perspective of those who believe that democratic forms of government will be unable to address the ecological crisis facing the planet. Such thinkers may be fundamentally sympathetic to the idea of democratic rule, but despairing of its ability to meet the environmental challenge in a timely way. They may, on the other hand, take a more jaundiced view of democracy, seeing it as a fundamentally pernicious political system that has within it, inherent tendencies to domination and ecological destruction. We engage with the arguments of the former types of thinkers in Chapter 1. These are thinkers who lack faith in the ability of democracy to change human behaviour in the ways that are necessary if we are to achieve ecological survival. From this perspective, democracy is all well and good in conditions where the prospect of ecological meltdown is not looming upon the horizon, but as it is, we have to (at least temporarily) reject it in favour of more effective, authoritarian form of government. This kind of survivalist literature reached its apogee in the early 1970s, when the ‘environmental crisis’ was cast almost exclusively (on the back of the Club of Rome Report13) in terms of resources – too much resource extraction, too much pollution, too many people. It might by now be considered an historical curiosity, but the more recent work of Laura Westra shows that this kind of thinking, whilst given a much more explicitly ecocentric basis, is still on the ecological political agenda. Whilst now rejected by many ‘progressive’ environmentalists,14 particularly in its forms, such as Hardin’s ‘lifeboat ethic’,15 that seemed to smack of racist, or at least isolationist, tendencies, survivalism employed a mode of analysis that remains useful today. Survivalists (or eco-authoritarians, I use the terms interchangeably) saw ecological problems as forms of the generic collective action problem (CAP) or ‘n-persons prisoner’s dilemma’.16 CAP remains a useful tool in explaining a whole range of environmental outcomes where unregulated access to common assets leads to their unsustainable degradation (recent concern about over-fishing on a global scale would be a good example of this),17 and has inspired research on alternative forms of property management that might allow us to common resources more effectively.18 Chapter 2 explores the tension between ecological politics and democracy from a different angle, looking at the politics of direct action and the ideas that surround this. Direct action politics has become a staple repertoire for a section of the radical ecological movement, and it appears, prima facie to be an archetypically anti-democratic form of politics. If we can not get people to support our case democratically, we will spike trees, burn down sawmills and ski resorts, and generally increase the costs imposed on our political opponents to the point where the activities we disapprove of become uneconomic. What kinds of idea motivate, or at least seek to justify, this kind of activity? There are two broad streams of what might be called ‘activist ideology’ in the ecological movement, deep ecology on the one hand and anarcho-primitivism on the other. I have examined the former stream of thought and its relation to

6 Introduction direct action elsewhere,19 and so in light of its growing influence20 the emphasis in this chapter is on anarcho-primitivism. In Chapter 3 I will go on to consider how such activity is understood by its opponents and at how environmental direct action is becoming swept up in the general rhetoric and politics of the ‘war on terror’ being waged in the West. I will suggest that, whilst such activity is defended as a form of civil disobedience, and attacked as a form of terrorism, it fits neither category well and that we need to extend our normative vocabulary in order to adequately conceptualise these forms of conscientious activism. Chapter 4 turns to the question of whether such conscientious activism can be justified in a democratic context. Even if the ‘terrorist’ descriptor were to be applied to activist attacks on property, that tells us nothing, despite the emotive nature of the concept, as to whether such action might be justifiable under certain circumstances and what such circumstances might be. I argue that there is an important constraint of irreversibility that applies with particular effect upon those seeking to preserve what they see as ecosystemic integrity, and that under these conditions it can be difficult to play the ‘democratic game’. This in turn offers the potential for justification for certain types of political acts that would not be justified if the problem of irreversibility did not apply. Furthermore, the problem of non-reversible policy outcomes does not apply only to the ecological field, and this form of justification may be open to protestors in other areas of politics as well. The politics of irreversibility is poorly understood and needs further development. Chapter 4 closes the first section of the book which focuses on how ecological and democratic forms of politics can come apart. The second section analyses the attempts that have been made to render ecological politics compatible with (indeed some arguments go further and attempt to show that an ecological politics is a necessary condition of ) democratic politics. Few, if any, of these writers think that this is true of democracy as it is already institutionalised in Western countries, despite the presence of green parties in some governing coalitions. It is a form of democracy suitably revised that holds they key to compatibility. There are two strands to this body of ideas. The first concerns the relationship of ecological politics to (a revised form of ) liberal democracy, and I discuss this in Chapter 5. Writings that directly concern themselves with liberal democracy are in the minority, however, as most ecologically orientated writers seek more fundamental changes to democratic systems in order for them to adequately assimilate ecological imperatives. More participatory forms of democracy have generally been favoured by green thinkers, and the late Murray Bookchin, for example, worked for many years with a model of ‘libertarian municipalism’ as a participatory form of democracy compatible with his vision of social ecology.21 In recent years, however, one line of democratic theory has been picked up with particular enthusiasm by a number of environmental theorists, and that is deliberative democracy, with its apparent ‘promise’22 of an ability to deliver on green values in a democratic way. The turn towards democratic deliberation has been a major emphasis in recent work within democratic theory, and a number of green

Introduction 7 thinkers have seen in it the potential to realise the values of ecological politics without resort to the kind of authoritarian solutions discussed in Chapter 1.23 In Chapter 6, parts of which were written with Marc Stears, I consider the case for deliberative democracy from the perspective of those who, like radical environmentalists, seek to instil a fundamental change in public political values. The outcome of this analysis is the view that the turn to deliberative democracy on the part of ecological thinkers is misguided because of the behavioural constraints that proponents of deliberative democracy seek to place upon the participants in debate, and their tendency to exclude those who cannot or will not play the ‘deliberative game’. The benefits that may arise from taking part in the deliberative turn are outweighed by the additional normative burdens that deliberative theory places upon already marginalised groups and the inherent conservatism of deliberative democracy that arises from that. We need a far more open, vibrant, and tolerant conception of democracy than theorists of deliberative democracy have thus far achieved if it is going to offer transformative political doctrines a fair hearing. Part of the reason that deliberative democracy would be burdensome for radical environmental groups lies in its reliance upon the strictures of public reason as part of its conception of acceptable political discourse. But if ecological politics cannot be cast in terms of public reason (that is, roughly, reasons that recognise the plurality of different views in society and rely merely upon ideas that can be endorsed from within a range of ‘reasonable’ comprehensive conceptions of the good) perhaps it is not worthy of support? I use Chapter 7 to explore the complex relationship between ecological politics and public reason. Is public reason unfair to ecological politics, and to ‘novel’ public reason more generally? Picking up from the debate between Jeremy Waldron and Lawrence Solum on this point, I argue that a ‘wide’ view of public reason comes close to meeting the unfairness complaint, but remains unfair to novel (and potentially public) reasons for as long as these reasons are disbarred from supplying adequate justification for political action on the grounds of their non-public nature. There are fundamental differences regarding ontology and the nature of justice involved between ecological thinkers and those who cleave to the liberal conception of justification provided by public reason, and these cannot be determined within the constraints of public reason itself, as they are problems relating to the very constitution of public reason. In the concluding chapter I seek to draw together, and make more explicit and systematic, the argument that emerges from the analysis conducted in the previous chapters. I review the ways in which radical environmentalism represents a challenge to democratic theory, and argue that, for all of the problems inherent in ecological politics, it is compatible with an open and tolerant form of democracy in which the boundaries of acceptable democratic behaviour are settled ‘from the ground up’ rather than by an a priori conception of the nature of ‘acceptable’ democratic deliberation.

Part I

Ecological politics against democracy

1

Crisis management Eco-authoritarianism and the inadequacy of democracy

Introduction The ‘survivalist’ or ‘eco-authoritarian’ strand of thinking about the relationship between ecology and democracy stands in poor repute today. This school of thought, which achieved prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s, now tends to be dismissed, as on the one hand overly pessimistic about both the imminence of environmental catastrophe and the human capacity for solving collective action problems, and on the other hand overly optimistic in its faith in the state to achieve environmental solutions in the absence of democratic agreement. Knowledge of eco-authoritarian literature is essential for understanding what came in its wake, which was, to a large degree, a reaction to the anti-democratic despair that the survivalists expressed. I want to emphasise in this chapter elements of this literature which give it continuing relevance today. One such element is the specific analysis of democracy that underpinned the politics of eco-authoritarianism. Whilst the authoritarian solutions suggested in this literature are widely criticised, the conception of democracy that underpinned the (often reluctant) advocacy of non-democratic politics is less frequently considered. As we shall see, there was a strong Schumpeterian strain to the eco-authoritarians’ understanding of democracy. In particular, the view that ordinary citizens are politically incompetent, especially at times of crisis, was deeply held. In this regard I want to draw an important distinction between the eco-authoritarian analysis of the relationship between ecological problems and democracy on the one hand, and their prescriptive political solutions on the other. I will argue that in many respects the analysis of the problems of collective action involved in environmental politics is accurate and well-judged,1 but that the conclusions that were drawn from it were certainly not the only logically compelling ones. In fact they were conclusions that were more likely to compound the problems than resolve them. The questions that the survivalists raise are difficult and profound, but it will be the ultimate argument of this book that these problems show the need for more, and more radical forms, of democracy rather than less of it. This chapter will begin with an examination of the assumed background conditions that led to the eco-authoritarian argument, particularly looming ecological disaster and the n-person prisoners’ dilemma. It will then go on to

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examine the form of value politics eco-authoritarianism w as ar ticulating, the political solutions it proposed, and some of the reactions against it that ha ve arisen from those working in the field of environmental political theor y.

Background conditions Ecological eschatology One of the driving forces of the eco-authoritarian approach to the relationship between ecological politics and democracy was the belief that time was running out fast. A set of empirical environmental conditions were taken as sufficiently well-founded to set strong constraints upon the feasible set of policy options. Policy change had to be both radical and speedily implemented, and these two factors together were taken to militate against standard liberal-democratic forms of politics. The sense of urgency that drives this view comes across clearly both in the literature that deals with human demography and that pertaining to environmental amenity and resource depletion. The long-run trend of economic growth could not be sustained ‘very much longer’ as the returns from the natural world are ‘rapidly diminishing’ (Heilbroner, 1974: 19). Indeed the ‘reality and gravity of the environmental crisis can no longer be denied’ (Ophuls, 1977: 1) and ‘we do not have much time to save the world from galloping destruction’ (Hardin and Baden, 1977: xii). If present economic trends continued, then the ‘limits to growth on this planet will be reached some time within the next 100 years’ (Meadows et al., 1972: 23). In terms of demographics the ‘battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death. . . . Our position requires that we take immediate action at home and promote effective action worldwide’ (Ehrlich, 1971: xi). One part of the context within which these works are produced, then, lies in a shared belief in imminent environmental catastrophe, and this has important consequences for the range of political solutions that the eco-authoritarians are prepared to consider, as ecological politics has to be implemented quickly, and that means policy change now rather than, say, seeking to change the values of the population over time. Even where the problem is taken to be fundamentally one of values, and even if education to change values is taken to be an effective method, we do not have the luxury of time to engender value change, either amongst the current cohort of citizens or between one generation and the next. Immediate policy shift is required, and this entails the need for (1) an effective agent of change and (2) the necessity of changing behaviour even absent any change in beliefs or values. This, as we shall see, was taken to entail that there would be an important role for the state in enforcing behavioural change on the part of its citizens. Rational actors and the collective action problem The second set of background assumptions concerned the motivational aspects of human behaviour and the problems of co-ordinating collective responses to

Eco-authoritarianism and democracy 13 collective problems. The understanding of the motivations and execution of human actions were based upon the rational actor model in its Schumpeterian mode.2 For Schumpeter, people have a much clearer understanding of their own personal, short-term interests than they do of their interests in respect of political questions, which frequently relate to policy choices filtered through complex social and economic problems and long-term time horizons. There are good reasons for this; we have sufficient control over the circumstances of our daily lives such that our actions can make a genuine difference to our welfare. If we know we can get the same model car cheaper at one showroom rather than another, or we understand that an item of electrical equipment is still under guarantee and can be exchanged for something new, this is important information. When it comes to the world of democratic politics, however, the understanding of the average citizen, says Schumpeter, drops to that of a ‘primitive’, who fails to understand complex processes of cause and effect (1943: 262). Who can say whether a drop in interest rates two years ago caused inflation today? Or whether a rise in the value of the national currency in the past led to increased unemployment now? It is not merely that these complex causal processes are difficult to understand, it is also that the average citizen has no incentive to try and understand them, which would involve a great deal of effort for little reward (the reward of a better informed vote, for example, which would have no more effect on the outcome of an election than an uninformed vote. Inefficacy does not reward information gathering). The implication of this argument is that when citizens do come to take political action within a democracy, they will be motivated by a narrow conception of their interests, and will possess only a very rough understanding of how to promote them through the ballot box. This certainly appears to be the assumption of the eco-authoritarians, who have no faith in the ability of citizens to act democratically with regard to a more (ecologically) enlightened sense of their self-interest. Citizens cannot be expected to vote for new laws that would curtail their existing freedoms in the name of long-term environmental sustainability. Nor can they be expected to modify their individual behaviour through appeals to an environmental ethic; and even if they did that, it would be counter-productive for them in the long run, at least for certain important behaviours (as explained in the following paragraphs). Furthermore, even when the pathways to environmental outcomes are understood, the gap between individual actions and collective outcomes is difficult to bridge. With regard to many environmental goods we are trapped in an n-person prisoner’s dilemma, which Hardin labelled, famously, as the ‘tragedy of the commons’ (Hardin, 1968). We know that our individual actions (my cycling to work rather than driving my car) makes no effective difference to the global impact of millions of cars polluting the environment, and so there is no incentive for me to give up my car journey under those conditions (I will be a ‘sucker’), even though collectively the mass abandonment of cars for cleaner forms of transport would of course make a huge difference. Thus we get what Barry and Hardin called ‘rational man, irrational society’3 as the aggregate of individually optimal decisions amass to a socially suboptimal outcome.

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In terms of the first of these points, that our democratic choices reflect a narrow understanding of our immediate interests and not an enlightened view of our longterm welfare, the case is made by Ophuls. He claims that we are now ‘so committed to most of the things that cause or support the evils’ with which he is concerned that ‘we are almost paralysed; nearly all the constructive actions that could be taken at present . . . are so painful to so many people in so many ways that they are indeed totally unrealistic, and neither politicians nor citizens would tolerate them’ (Ophuls, 1977: 224).4 Environmentally friendly policies can be justifiably imposed upon a population that ‘would do something quite different if it was merely left to its own immediate desires and devices’ (Ophuls, 1977: 227): currently left to these devices, the American people ‘have so far evinced little willingness to make even minor sacrifices . . . for the sake of environmental goals’ (Ophuls, 1977: 197). Laura Westra makes a similar argument in relation to the collapse of Canadian cod fisheries, which is taken to illustrate a wider point that we cannot hope to ‘manage’ nature when powerful economic and political interests are supported by ‘uneducated democratic preferences and values’ (Westra, 1998: 95). More generally reducing our ‘ecological footprint’ means ‘individual and aggregate restraints the like of which have not been seen in most of the northwestern world. For this reason, it is doubtful that persons will freely embrace the choices that would severely curtail their usual freedoms and rights . . . even in the interests of long-term health and self-preservation’ (Westra, 1998: 198). Thus we will require a ‘top-down’ regulatory regime to take on ‘the role of the “wise man” of Aristotelian doctrine’ as well as ‘bottom-up’ shifts in values (Westra, 1998: 199). Ophuls also believes that in certain circumstances (of which ecological crisis is an example) ‘democracy must give way to elite rule’ (1977: 159) as critical decisions have to be made by competent people. The classic statement of the collective action problem in relation to environmental phenomena was that of Hardin (1968). The ‘tragedy’ here refers to the ‘remorseless working of things’ towards an ‘inevitable destiny’ (Hardin, 1968: 1244, quoting A. N. Whitehead). Thus even if we are aware of where our longterm, enlightened interests do lie, the preferred outcome is beyond our ability to reach in an uncoerced manner. This is the n-person prisoners’ dilemma, a well established analytical tool in the social analysis of collectively suboptimal outcomes. A brief example could be given in terms of an unregulated fishery. The owner of trawler can be fully aware that there is collective over-extraction from the fishing grounds he uses, and so the question arises of whether he should selfregulate his own catch. If he fishes to his maximum capacity, his gain is a catch fractionally depleted from what it would be if the fisheries were fully stocked. If the ‘full catch’ is 1, then this catch is 1
, where  is the difference between the full stock catch and the depleted stock catch divided by the number of fishing vessels. If the trawlerman regulates his own catch, then he loses the entire amount that he feels each boat needs to surrender, and furthermore he has no reason to suppose that other fishermen would behave in a similar fashion, in fact he will expect them to benefit by catching the fish that he abjures. In the language of game theory he would be a ‘sucker’, and the rational course of action is to

Eco-authoritarianism and democracy 15 continue taking the maximum catch, despite the predictable conclusion that this course of action, when taken by all fishermen making the same rational calculation, will lead to the collapse of the fishery. Individual rationality leads to severely suboptimal outcomes. Under these circumstances an appeal to conscience is useless, as it merely places the recipient of the appeal in a ‘double-bind’. The open appeal is ‘behave as a responsible citizen, or you will be condemned’. But there is also a covert appeal in the opposite direction; ‘If you do behave as we ask, we will secretly condemn you for a simpleton who can be shamed into standing aside while the rest of us exploit the commons’ (Hardin, 1968: 246). Thus the appeal creates the imperative both to behave responsibly and to avoid being a sucker. In terms of democracy, what this entails is that, in general, we have to be prepared to accept coercion in order to overcome the collective action problem.5 The Leviathan of the state is the institution that has the political power required to solve this conundrum. ‘Mutual coercion, mutually agreed on’ is Hardin’s famous solution to the tragedy of the commons. Revisiting the ‘tragedy’ argument in 1998, Hardin held that ‘[i]ts message is, I think, still true today. Individualism is cherished because it produces freedom, but the gift is conditional: The more population exceeds the carrying capacity of the environment, the more freedoms must be given up’ (Hardin, 1998: 682). On this view coercion is an integral part of politics: the state coerces when it taxes, or when it prevents us from robbing banks. Coercion has, however, become ‘a dirty word for most liberals now’ (Hardin, 1968: 1246) but this does not have to be the case as long as this coercion comes about as a result of the democratic will. This however, requires overcoming the problems raised by the likes of Ophuls and Westra, that is, it is dependent upon the assumption that people can agree to coerce each other in order to realise their long-term, ‘enlightened’ self-interest. If they cannot, and both the myopic and collective action problem ecological objections to democracy are valid, then this coercion may not be ‘mutually agreed upon’ but rather imposed by Ophuls’ ecological ‘elite’ or Westra’s Aristotelian ‘wise man’. Under these circumstances there seems to be no hope at all for a reconciliation of ecological imperatives and democratic decision-making; we are faced with a stark choice, democracy or ecological survival. In addition to the judgement that individuals are unlikely to make a democratic choice for outcomes that curtail the freedoms and material benefits that they currently enjoy, there are other assumptions about human psychology that play a part in eco-authoritarian arguments. Whether or not these beliefs are well-founded they are worth recounting in order to flesh out the position under consideration here. Robert Heilbroner (1974: 110) believes that during periods of crisis, of which the current ecological ‘crisis’ is a good example, politics is pushed in the direction of authoritarianism, and because people feel a need for leadership in crisis situations, they revert to childhood attitudes and look for a parental figure to guide them through difficult times. Again the Schumpeterian underpinnings of much of the eco-authoritarian approach are clear. In the public sphere, people are prone to revert to childish attitudes and modes of reasoning, and so cannot

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be trusted to take crucial decisions concerning the long-term survival of human civilisation. Ophuls also holds that people tend to rely on their intuitions and ‘common-sense’ in seeking to make judgements about political decisions, but such tools are unreliable in the face of the counter-intuitive complexity of the human ecosystem. The majority are unlikely to be sufficiently well informed and motivated to make the responsible decisions required of them (1977: 162). Furthermore arguments based on the needs of future generations cannot be expected to perform the required ethical work, as the emotional and psychological bonds are taken to be insufficient to motivate the changes in behaviour that are necessary now (Heilbroner, 1974: 114–15).

Eco-authoritarian solutions So much, then, for the eco-authoritarian diagnosis; liberal democracy cannot save us because its choices are motivated by the wrong reasons and even were they not, we cannot overcome the collective action problem and still retain our liberal freedoms. ‘It is not technology that has single-handedly created the problems we face with regard to our natural environment, but our belief that the choices and preferences of the majority in democratic, affluent countries are and should be viewed as absolute, beyond discussion’ (Westra, 1998: 3). What about the proposed solutions offered by this group of thinkers? How does their version of ‘coercive politics’ work? The solutions on offer can be usefully broken down into two parts: changes in values and changes in institutions. It is because in ‘crisis’ conditions there is insufficient time to inculcate the former that stress is placed upon the latter, but both are required for an adequate analysis of the eco-authoritarian position. There are, as one might expect, variations in terms of the values that the eco-authoritarians are seeking to promote, depending upon which thinker one is referring to and which part of their argument. It is possible to make some generalisations however; most importantly, our ‘conventional’ ways of thinking about, and the importance vested in, justice, democracy, and liberalism are all challenged in the eco-authoritarian literature, and in their place are offered a value or set of values that is/are taken to be more in keeping with our newly discovered obligations to the non-human world or future generations.6 These latter values promote a particular conception of the good, and some notion of a politics of virtue that flows from that conception, be it, for example, ‘integrity’ on the part of Laura Westra or the triumph of political ecology over economics for William Ophuls. We will examine this call for value change in more detail before going on to examine the changes to political institutions that the eco-authoritarians seek. Values One of the most important strategies of the eco-authoritarians is to historicise certain principles that they see as being predominant in modern western societies. For them, we are in danger of seeing the values of liberty, democracy,

Eco-authoritarianism and democracy 17 and distributional justice as eternal verities whereas we should see them as products of a specific time and place, and more importantly, as products of, or at least as dependent upon, the existence of an economy of plenty which is both historically specific and fleeting. For Ophuls the discovery of the New World in particular liberated the Old World from ecological scarcity, and ‘created all the peculiar institutions and values characteristic of modern civilisation – democracy, freedom, and individualism’. However, the ‘golden age’ of these values is all but over and we have to return to something like a pre-modern, closed polity (Ophuls, 1977: 144, 145). In seeking to challenge what they see as widely accepted and deeply held values in contemporary societies, the eco-authoritarians seek to both promote a new set of values and recontest or downgrade existing ones on the grounds that they are harmful to the prospects of ecological survival. The fundamental divide here is between a politics of the right and a politics of the good. Eco-authoritarians see liberalism (as a manifestation of the politics of the right) as being a transient phenomenon crucially dependent upon the temporary conditions of material abundance ushered in by the fossil fuel age. Liberalism is a function of the material conditions that make it possible and is parasitic upon unsustainable economic policies. When the tragedy of the commons strikes, then ‘the concept of inalienable rights, the purely self defined pursuit of happiness, liberty as maximum freedom of action, and laissez-faire all become problematic’ (Ophuls, 1977: 152). As an account of the rights embedded in liberal ideology this is itself a contestable account, but it illustrates the way in which liberal democracy is understood in this body of literature. The problem lies in the rights that are granted which allow us to live according to our self-defined values. Westra also holds that the proliferation, under conditions of liberal democracy, of individual and aggregate rights is undesirable from an environmental point of view (1998: 57). The choices we make under these conditions are not constrained by a conception of the common good, and so can be harmful to all (Westra, 1998: 155). Hardin focuses on one particular right, that of procreation – it is ‘painful’ to have to deny, categorically, the claim embodied in the UN Declaration on Human Rights that ‘any choice and decision with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the family itself, and cannot be made by anyone else’ (1968: 1246). Nonetheless it is the case that to ‘couple the concept of the freedom to breed with . . . an equal right to the commons is to lock the world into a tragic course of action’ (1968: 1246). So, the kinds of ‘basic liberties’ that would be constitutionally entrenched in, say, a Rawlsian liberal society in order to ensure people the right to choose their own form of life are seen on this view as profoundly problematic in terms of their ecological consequences. Abrogating these rights may violate the liberal conception of justice, but ‘injustice is preferable to total ruin’ (Ophuls, quoting Hardin, 1977: 148). Justice, anyway, is one of the political concepts for which a move away from the liberal definition is suggested as explained later in this chapter. Against the politics of the right the eco-authoritarians recommend a virtue politics based upon a conception of the common good. Against the liberal desire to allow people to choose their own values, ‘wisdom’ tells us that not all values

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Ecological politics against democracy

are equal and that virtue matters in life (Ophuls, 1977: 237). Virtue here entails recognising the necessity of living life according to ‘ecological values’ and being prepared to abandon or reconfigure those values that are not conducive to the end of sustainability. Westra offers the overarching value of (ecological) ‘integrity’ as the embodiment of this politics of the common good. This in turn is defined in terms of ecosystem health, resilience, the optimum potential for speciation and development, and the non-constraint of non-human nature by the actions of human beings (see Westra, 1998: 7–8). Integrity ‘demands’ that approximately one-third of the earth’s surface be left in a wild and unmanaged state. The value of integrity is taken to embody the good of all, and so is uncompromising in its prescription of infinite, non-negotiable value to life (1998: 12). Integrity serves to ground the precautionary principle, which should be mandatory in public policy.7 Integrity is ‘more basic’ than justice, and is an anti-democratic principle (1998: 9) because democratic choices are inadequate when it comes to realising the principle (1998: 222). The principle is rendered ‘compatible’ with the idea of right simply by being recast in terms of a right, the fundamental and trumping ‘right’ to integrity, which is taken to operate at both a micro (organism) and macro (species, ecosystem) level. Only such a principle can protect people from unchosen harm, whereas democracy can inflict unchosen harms, or at least the risk of such harms, onto defeated minorities. As a manifestation of the common good it behoves all of us to live according to the principle of ecological integrity, and to the extent that we do not embrace this principle voluntarily, those in authority will have to force it upon us, rather in the fashion of the forced administration of anti-psychotic medicines. The Aristotelian ‘wise man’ referred to above will have the task of running a top-down regulatory regime – ‘the “top-down” regulatory and public policy aspect will have to be prescribed by an interdisciplinary team of biologists, ecologists, political scientists, medical specialists and philosophers with a strong traditional moral basis’ (1998: 198–9). Given our poor habits of making democratic decisions that are not underpinned by conceptions of the common good (1998: 155), of choosing leaders for the ‘wrong’ reasons and making decisions on the basis of uninformed preferences, we have to accept the imperative to downgrade the value of democracy and accept more authoritarian forms of public rule. This downgrading of the value of democracy is common across this literature, although at times it seems in tension with the projection of mutual coercion mutually agreed upon, which implies a democratically legitimated move towards authoritarian forms of government. So for example Ophuls suggests that certain normatively justified restrictions must be imposed upon a populace that would do something quite different (and more damaging) if left to their own devices. The problem lies in legislating the appropriate ‘temperance and virtue’ without ‘exalting the few over the many and subjecting individuals to the unwarranted exercise of power or to excessive conformity to some dogma’ (1977: 227). To return to the Schumpeterian theme one of the significant problems with democratic decision making for this group of writers stems from a belief that people vary significantly in terms of their

Eco-authoritarianism and democracy 19 competence to make appropriate political decisions, whereas a key assumption of democratic theory is that ‘people do not differ greatly in competence’ (Ophuls, 1977: 159). If they do so differ, ‘effective government may require the sacrifice of political equality and majority rule.8 Indeed in certain circumstances democracy must give way to elite rule’ (Ophuls, 1977: 159), such an elite being made up of the biologists, philosophers, and so on who function as the ‘wise man’ of Westra’s account. We may have to ‘respect’ a plurality of positions but we do not have to accord them equal weight in the political process (Westra, 1998: 220–1, although is not entirely clear how we show ‘respect’ to a political position by granting it inferior status to our own beliefs). The problem with this analysis is the epistemological barrier it seems to place in the path of us ever achieving mutual agreement upon the mutual coercion that is taken to be necessary. If we could reach such agreement we would be ‘democratically coercing ourselves to behave responsibly’ (Ophuls, 1977: 155) and thus the authoritarian government we place over ourselves would have a degree of democratic legitimacy. There is clearly, however, a problem with the analysis here. If we are both (1) woefully attached to the ‘wrong’ values already and (2) drop down to a childlike level of performance in the political sphere, it is difficult to see where the political resources are that would enable us to vote down the liberties to which we are apparently so attached. It seems rather more likely that eco-authoritarianism would consist in coercion that had not been mutually agreed and would thus lack that imprimatur of democratic legitimation, which in turn leaves open the question of how the ecological ‘wise man’ could ever reach a position of authority, given that ‘powerful economic and political interests’ are taken to be in fundamental opposition to ecological values and also to ‘manipulate’ the preferences of citizens (from what baseline of preferences, that is, what the counter-factual is here, is not clear). As well as downgrading the value of democracy, we must be prepared to similarly downgrade our attachment to liberties, the value of which have to be set against the politics of the common good. Indeed we must ‘eliminate’ hazardous and wasteful individual rights, including property and procreative rights. ‘Strong’ rights must be ‘basic’ only, and the prime instance of a basic right is that to ecological integrity. It follows from this basic right to integrity that ‘respect’ for ‘wildness for both its services and its component life’ is basic as well (Westra, 1998: 235). Limitations on rights to property, mobility, and procreation do not conflict with the ethic of (micro-) integrity because they are ‘compatible’ with respect for life (1998: 256). Ophuls comments that we should not fear that any concession of political rights to the community must lead to the total subjugation of the individual by an all-powerful state, as authoritarian rule can still be constitutional and limited (1977: 226). The nature of justice also arises in this literature, although not in a terribly systematic way; and once again there is a downgrading of the status of the value. Whereas Rawls, for example, and many who follow him take justice to be the ‘first virtue’ of social institutions, we now have to be prepared to sacrifice it for more basic ecological goods. Nothing can be moral that is in conflict with the

20 Ecological politics against democracy physical realities of our existence (Westra, 1998: 11), and as it is integrity that ensures this conformity, it is ‘more basic’ than justice as one must be alive to be treated justly. As we have seen, Ophuls holds that justice may have to be sacrificed for more basic goods, such as our long-term ecological survival. Finally, the ‘non-political’ values of economics will have to give way to the ‘political’ values of ecology. Laissez-faire economics has acted as a surrogate for politics. What Ophuls means when he makes this claim is that the fundamental distributional issues – the ‘who gets what, when, and how?’ questions of power over resources – have been persistently sidelined through the use of economic growth to allow unequal shares of a growing pie. As long as the game is not zerosum, the losers over distributional issues can be bought off with an absolutely larger amount even when this represents a static, or even diminishing, share of the total. With the end of growth that was predicted in this literature, politics returns to being a zero-sum game and distributional issues return to the fore. Thus, despite the downgrading of justice as a value, the problems of distribution come to stand in stark relief, and the state will have to fight resource battles with powerful economic interests (1977: 180).

Institutional architecture If these changes are necessary – the downgrading, curtailment and reconceptualisation of democracy, liberties, and justice, as well as the raising to primacy of integrity and ecological virtue – how are the necessary changes to come about? Value change represents the best ‘long-term’ hope but the ecological crisis is not a ‘long-term’ problem. These changes have to be introduced quickly and before there has been time to inculcate value shifts in the population. The downgrading of rights and liberties has to be achieved through policy and institutional change, even while the question of a long-term change of values is also addressed. For both these tasks what is required is political leadership and the institution of the state. The immediate problem lies in the collective action problem that arises in respect of the looming ecological constraints on economic activity and the potential collapse of the global commons. The end of the ‘golden age’ of material abundance, as we slide back down the other side of ‘Hubbert’s pimple’9 will bring about intense competition for scarce resources. To understand politics under these circumstances, we have to turn back to Hobbes and Burke, the political philosophers who conceptualised life under conditions of scarcity, and also to Plato, commended for his healthy mistrust of democracy. For Ophuls a crucial element of political philosophy is the definition of reality itself; political philosophy carries within it an ontological component which sets out the foundations of political possibility. The contemporary West he sees as defined by the ‘philosophers of the great frontier’ – Locke, Smith, and Marx. These are the political philosophers of abundance. For Locke the proviso of always leaving ‘as much and as good’ for others in appropriation could always be met even when there was no unappropriated land left, as the productivity of the

Eco-authoritarianism and democracy 21 land put to useful work would always create better opportunities for those coming later. Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ thesis was also dependent upon the assumption that the material goods would always be available for individual to accomplish their own economic plans. For Marx the ‘higher phase’ of communist society arrives ‘after the productive forces have . . . increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly’ (Marx, 1970: 19). For Ophuls these are all the political philosophies of abundance. Ecological crisis, however, returns us to the Hobbesian struggle of all against all (Heilbroner, 1974: 89). With ecological scarcity we return to the classical problems of political theory that 400 years of abnormal abundance has shielded us from (Ophuls, 1977: 164). Both liberalism and socialism represent the politics of this ‘abnormal abundance’ and with the demise of this period we return to the eternal problems of politics. Hobbes, then, is seen as the political philosopher of ecological scarcity avant la lettre. ‘Hardin’s “logic of the commons” is simply a special version of the general political dynamic of Hobbes’ “state of nature” ’ (Ophuls, 1977: 148). Competition over scarce resources leads to conflict, even when all those involved realise that they would be collectively better off if they could co-operate, ‘to bring about the tragedy of the commons it is not necessary that men be bad, only that they not be actively good’ (Ophuls, 1977: 149). It is this Hobbesian struggle that may impose ‘intolerable strains on the representative political apparatus that has been historically associated with capitalist societies’ (Heilbroner, 1974: 89). Coercion is seen as the solution (and it is hoped, although as we have seen not for terribly good reasons, that this coercion can be agreed democratically), and the appropriate agent of this solution is the state. The transition from abundance to scarcity will have to be centralised and expert-controlled, and it is unlikely that ‘a steady state polity could be democratic’ (Ophuls, 1977: 162). As we shall see in the following paragraphs, this faith in the ability of the state to institute centralised controls that would be obeyed by its citizens is one of the areas that has attracted fierce criticism from contemporary green political theorists. Burke is also cited as an appropriate political philosopher for the age of scarcity – the ‘last great spokesman for the pre-modern point of view’ (Ophuls, 1977: 233). There are a number of studies that seek to demonstrate the affinities between Burkean conservatism and environmentalism10 which tend to highlight his intergenerational perspective, his mistrust of radical notions of progress, and his emphasis on the limits to human knowledge. Ophuls is no different here. Emphasising the role of ‘stewardship’ in the work both of Burke and of ecological philosophers (1977: 233), he also highlights the need to protect the ‘little platoons’ that stand between the citizen and the state, that is, the need to protect civil society. Ophuls concurs with this view, although the anticipated ecological state will be authoritarian, it will still be constitutional and limited, and the individual must not be left alone and defenceless before it. Ecology is thus seen as a ‘fundamentally conservative orientation to the world’ and ‘in our search for a set of social and political ideas that correspond to an ecological world view, Burke will surely have much to teach us’ (1977: 234).

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Ecological politics against democracy

The other figure cited in this respect is Plato for, in particular, his distrust of democratic forms of government. The criticism of democracy that develops from this Platonist line of thinking is that highlighted earlier – it gives far too much weight to the short-term interests and appetites of its citizens and is incapable of coalescing around a common conception of the good. Westra believes that in the description of the democratic citizen painted by Plato we see the citizen of modern western society. Socrates sketches a portrait of the democratic individual; in the description, we recognize the individual living in an affluent modern country and the reasons our democratic institutions can and should be brought into question. What do these early ‘democrats’ do? Socrates says: . . . naming shame simplicity, they push it out with dishonour, a fugitive; calling moderation cowardliness and spattering it with mud, they banish it; persuading that measure and orderly expenditure are rustic and illiberal, they join with many useless desires in driving them over the frontier. (1998: 153) Westra makes her support for Plato/Socrates’ position clear: ‘individualistic free choices fostered by democracy, without the imposition of checks based upon a philosophical commitment to the “good,” are intellectually, morally, and in our world, even physically harmful to all’ (1998: 155). Ophuls also believes we can draw lessons from Plato, who argues that left to follow their own instincts, societies ‘overdevelop’, the consequence of which is ‘luxury, vice, class struggle, war, and many other ills’ (1977: 234). The appropriate prophylactic is ‘wise rule by philosophers who know that what men desire is not always desirable for them and that true justice requires the establishment of controls’ (1977: 234). Plato’s mistrust of democracy – the third stage of the cycle of descent into tyranny – is endorsed by these eco-authoritarian writers. It reflects a similar mistrust of people’s ability to act according to their own long-term interests. Humans are seen as creatures of appetite, unless they are ennobled by philosophical reflection sufficiently well to appreciate where the human good ‘truly’ lies. The modern equivalent of the Platonic democratic citizen is the stereotyped ‘ungreen’ consumer, who runs the kids to school in the 4  4 before returning to a house full of electronic gadgets, and buzzes around Europe during the holidays with cheap flights on Ryan Air or EasyJet. The overall view of liberal democracy articulated in the eco-authoritarian literature, whilst varying from author to author, has certain common and important threads. Liberal democracy is fine in a world where ecological scarcity does not impinge upon people’s lives, and where an ever-expanding economy is the expectation. The inequalities of liberal-capitalism are parasitic upon the defiance of ecological constraints; when they can no longer be defied, politics returns to being a zero-sum game and distributional conflicts will become intense. Furthermore, on a broadly Schumpeterian reading of human capacity in the public sphere citizens are not believed to have the capacity to either (1) democratically

Eco-authoritarianism and democracy 23 adopt measures that will curtail the freedoms they have become used to in the name of ecological restraint, nor (2) solve the ‘tragedy of the commons’ n-persons prisoners’ dilemma. This rather militates against the hope that the coercion required can be ‘mutually agreed’. In this reversion to childhood attitudes, especially at times of crisis, people look for strong leadership to lead them to salvation. In terms of political philosophy we must look not to the philosophers of plenty – Locke, Smith, and Marx – but to the philosophers of scarcity – Hobbes, Burke, and Plato – in order to think our way through the ecological crisis. When we do this we will see that what is required is rule by the wise, who can legislate, via the institutions of the state, for the temperance and collective selfcontrol that a population will not be able to achieve through its own devices.

The reaction to eco-authoritarianism There have been two main lines of reaction to the claims made by the ecoauthoritarian, one of which focuses on the ecological claims that underpin their political prognosis, the other on the political solutions that they offer. The first debate is essentially between optimistic and pessimistic perspectives on the ecological problems facing the world, and tends to come from those who are generally sceptical about the wisdom of environmentalism in general. The latter set of criticisms come from those who accept, broadly, the survivalists’ diagnosis of the ecological ills facing the world, but who disagree, often profoundly, with the authoritarian implications that are drawn from it. One of the first people to respond systematically to the ‘eco-doomsday’ scenario painted by Heilbroner, Ophuls et al., was the American economist Julian Simon. In a series of books and articles (some co-authored with Herman Kahn) he sought to discredit the notion that the world was becoming overpopulated with human beings, and that the planet’s resources were approaching a shortage of crisis proportions, as posited by the authors of the Club of Rome report. Simon does this through a challenge to the fundamental assumptions that underpin the work of the ‘eco-doomsdayers’, in particular how we think about ‘scarcity’ and how we conceptualise the relationship between human population size and resource availability. At the time Simon produced his major works on ecological concerns (1981, 1984) the most important ecological problems were taken to be those raised by the eco-authoritarians discussed earlier, namely decreasing resource availability and an increasing human population. Increasing numbers of people pursuing a dwindling number of resources was taken to imply impending disaster. Simon wants to challenge this view by getting us to think less like engineers and more like economists. The ‘engineering’ approach is, at its most basic, to measure the available stock of a resource, then measure the current rates of resource use, and extrapolate from these two variables an expected time to depletion. This approach will yield the shortest time to depletion as it assumes no changes in technology and no changes in ‘available’ reserves. By factoring in these elements, longer times to depletion emerge11 as the extraction process is assumed

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Ecological politics against democracy

to become more efficient through time and therefore previously unviable deposits become economic. This is well and good insofar as it goes, but the problem with ‘engineering’ estimates for resource depletion is that they are inappropriate except in the absence of a better method. ‘Technological forecasts of resource exhaustion are often unsound and misleading mainly for two reasons. (1) The physical quantity of a resource in the earth . . . is not known at any time. . . . (2) More important, even if the physical quantities of particularly closely defined natural resources were known, such measurements would not be economically meaningful, because we have the capacity to develop additional ways to meet our needs. . . . Thus the existing “inventory” of natural resources is operationally misleading; physical measurements do not define well what we will be able to use as future supplies. And hence the engineering method is not likely to produce sound forecasts’ (1981: 40). So, if we should not be thinking about resource consumption in terms of the engineering model, despite what Simon accepts as its ‘intuitive’ appeal, how should we conceive it? The answer is that we need to think about resource scarcity in the same way that economists (such as Simon) do. Scarcity is not on this view an absolute measure but rather a measure of the price of a commodity in relation to some other good or bundle of goods in the economy. For Simon this approach has a number of benefits; it relates the notion of scarcity to both the demand and supply of a product, thus factoring in the substitutability that Simon mentions; it allows us to make estimations based on long runs of statistical evidence of relative prices, and it allows for the possibility that stocks of commodities can become more rather than less abundant over time with changing technologies. The fundamental insight here is straight from page one of any economic textbook; that, ceteris paribus, if a product becomes scarce its price will tend to rise. Simon then takes one example, copper, and shows how over a long run of time (1800–1980) the scarcity of copper and measured by price relative to wages, and by price relative to the consumer price index, has declined substantially in the United States (Simon, 1981: 18–19, 24). These long-term past trends are the best basis we have for forecasting the future as well. There is no guarantee that today will be like tomorrow, but the more that today is the same as many days in the past, the more confidence we should have that tomorrow will be the same as well (it would be something of a shock if the sun did not rise in the morning). Thus the long-term trends of declining commodity prices should be expected to continue into the future, barring any sudden monumental shock to the system. Simon was, famously, prepared to put his money in the position occupied by his mouth. He offered his readers single-unit bets of $1,000 or $100 each up to a total of $10,000 on his belief that raw material prices would not rise. To anyone willing to take the bet he would ‘agree to pay you the market price of the same amount of that raw material on any future date you now specify’ (1981: 27). Simon’s most famous wager was with the demographer and ‘eco-doomsdayer’ Paul Ehrlich. They had just such a bet on the future prices of commodities, comparing the 1980 price of copper, chrome, nickel, tin, and tungsten with their

Eco-authoritarianism and democracy 25 prices in 1990. Simon won the bet comprehensively, as the price of every commodity fell between 1980 and 1990, ranging from nickel, where $200-worth at 1980 prices could be bought for $193 in 1990, to tin, where $200-worth at 1980 prices could be bought for a mere $56.12 These movements reflect Simon’s point in that (1) past trends were the best indicators available of future trends and (2) for purposes of human welfare these raw materials were less scarce after ten years, not more so. What has all this to do with democracy? Simon’s response to the ecoauthoritarian literature is also, indirectly, a democratic response, in that it is consistent with a defence of our existing political and economic arrangements. In the absence of any compelling environmental crisis the motivation for the authoritarian political solutions offered by Heilbroner, Ophuls, and others melts away. The fact that American citizens ‘have evinced little willingness to make even minor sacrifices for the sake of environmental goals’ (Ophuls, 1977: 197) ceases to be of concern as their current modes of activity are not threatening the planetary ecological meltdown being predicted. Democracies do not have to hand over power to the enlightened ecological elite and the personal choices that people make regarding work, transport, energy use, and reproduction do not sum to an impending environmental disaster. None of this entails that we do not need good information about environmental trends (the lack of such information in environmental discourse is one of Simon’s main complaints), or that governments should be unwilling to act if an environmental problem appears to be serious and urgent. Dealing with environmental problems entails, however, the use of scarce resources and this can only be justified if these resources cannot be put to a better use. Simon was writing in the early 1980s in response to a literature that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Wind forward twenty years and we could equally counterpose Laura Westra’s Living in Integrity from 1998 with Bjørn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist, which in its original form was published in the same year. Many of Westra’s arguments are similar to those of Heilbroner, Ophuls, and the Ehrlichs, even if their ethical grounding is somewhat different. People cannot be trusted to take environmentally sensitive decisions for themselves, therefore democracies are dangerous for the environment, therefore we need rule by the ecologically enlightened. In its turn, Lomborg’s book echoes many of the themes of the work of Julian Simon – we need accurate long-run empirical data, and what data we have shows that environmental indicators are getting better, not worse, with the possible exception of global warming. When it comes to the latter we have to think carefully about how we use scarce resources, and whether it makes sense to employ these in combating global warming or doing something else to improve human welfare (it is no accident that The Skeptical Environmentalist opens with a quote from Simon). If these works were our sole reference point for assessing the development of the environmental debate regarding ecology and democracy, we might believe that no progress in thinking about the ecology-democracy nexus had been made at all. The tables and figures may have been updated, but Westra and

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Lomborg rehearse, in a slightly different conceptual language, the arguments from 20 to 30 years before. The ‘litany’ (Lomborg) of environmental problems and looming disaster is the same, and the empirical/statistical/economic response is the same. The optimists and the pessimists have been slugging it out for decades, and here they stand, punch-drunk, in exactly the same spot where they started. Fortunately for those of us who are interested in this debate, these are far from the only perspectives on offer and there has been much new (which does not necessarily entail better) thinking with regard to the relationship between ecological politics and democratic politics. Some of this thought has been expended in the attempt to couple ecological and democratic politics in a non-contingent fashion, such that ecological politics has to be democratic and vice versa. As we shall see, this conception can be thoroughly misguided, although it does throw up some useful insights. The most important ‘green’ response to eco-authoritarianism (i.e. one that, unlike the Simon and Lomborg, accepts that there are serious ecological problems in the world, and even that ‘crisis’ may not be too strong a word for them), argues that there are (1) democratic solutions to this dilemma and (2) even if there are not, there is no reason to suppose that authoritarian ‘solutions’ will be any more effective than their democratic counterparts. This is particularly true if we take democracy to possess an epistemic function (Estlund, 1997) that will lead us to question the certainty of our own ‘justified’ belief in the face of democratic preferences to the contrary. John Barry, for example, suggests that green arguments for democracy rest upon democracy’s ‘integrative function’ (1999: 214); that is, democracy allows policy arguments to be drawn from a wide range of actors and perspectives, and this is taken to improve the chances of good decision-making. This epistemological argument for democracy is quite familiar to green literature (see also Smith, 2003). None of us, as individuals, knows with certainty which values humanity should live by, or which policies might best realise those values, so there is no place for an Aristotelian ‘wise man’ and the best we can hope for is that collective decisions are more likely to be wise ones. Minteer and Manning (1999: 192–3), from an explicitly pragmatist perspective, take a similar view. Environmental problems possess a complex political character, and so a democratic approach to the demands of environmental ethics is necessary. A Deweyan notion of democracy entails ‘genuine’ conversations about meanings and values, and such conversations bestow a legitimacy upon publicly adopted values which is of central importance. The idea of setting environmental policy on a single, coherent set of moral principles such as Westra’s principle of integrity, ‘possessed an undemocratic strain that we find troubling’ (Minteer and Manning, 1999: 200). Norton also holds that Westra’s anti-democratic arguments reflect far too much confidence in her chosen principles, furthermore to claim that such fundamental principles are entirely non-negotiable is to place yourself beyond the conventions of public discourse (2002: 24–6), and claim an epistemological privilege over your fellow human beings. Minteer denies that environmental philosophers have any such special knowledge (2002: 46), even if they do possess argumentative skills deriving from their specialisation. Sandilands makes a similar claim that most

Eco-authoritarianism and democracy 27 forms of environmentalism rely upon a justification through an appeal to science, but such appeals to science as a trumping argument put nature beyond public discussion (2002: 121). For this group of authors, as Barry reiterates (2002: 143) democratic modes of organisation are most likely to bring about ecological outcomes, and even if they do not, eco-authoritarianism is unlikely to be effective because of the difficulties of centrally imposing environmental policies upon an unwilling populace (Barry, 2002: 147; see also Agrawal, 2005). What is seen as necessary is to bring elements of the hitherto private sphere, especially decisions about personal consumption, under democratic control (Barry, 2002: 147).

Conclusion What are we to make, then, of this first wave of anti-democratic political responses to the environmental problems that the world was seen to face in the 1960s and 1970s? Robyn Eckersley usefully reminds us not to dismiss these texts out of hand, misplaced though some of their predictions may have been. She credits them with both drawing attention to the seriousness of the environmental problems facing human societies and, perhaps inadvertently, stimulating, in response to their authoritarian proposals, ‘the search for more deepseated cultural transformations along with alternative, nonauthoritarian institutions that would foster a more cooperative and democratic response to the environmental crisis’ (1992: 17). There is of course a tension that exists between these two points. It was one of the objectives of the eco-authoritarians to persuade us that, due to our impending ecological catastrophe there was insufficient time available to achieve a transformation in the cultural values of consumer societies. Heilbroner, Ophuls, and Ehrlich were reluctant authoritarians, the political solutions they proposed came about as a result of what they saw as immediate, fundamental, and severe ecological constraints. Thus to the extent that there is, as Eckersley suggests, sufficient time to engage in large scale cultural transformations13 then the urgency of the situation to which the eco-authoritarians draw our attention becomes less useful. Indeed the emphasis placed upon the urgency of the two strands of the eco-authoritarians’ assumed background conditions, overpopulation, and resource depletion/pollution accumulation, is one of the elements that has served to undermine the survivalist case. Ehrlich’s lost bet with Simon and the lack of credibility, in retrospect, of the eco-doomsday predictions of Ehrlich and others (‘England will not exist in the year 2000’14) provide strong ammunition for the economic and empirical criticism of the survivalist case that comes from the likes of Simon and Lomborg. Remember that Heilbroner and Ophuls were both in favour of cultural changes in attitude, and if they had believed there was time to inculcate a fundamental axiological change in Western societies they would, presumably, have softened their politically authoritarian proposals considerably. Rather than their political prescriptions, it may be more useful to examine the ways in which both ecological and democratic politics were conceptualised in the work of eco-authoritarian literature if we are trying to establish whether there is any

28 Ecological politics against democracy legacy here worth preserving. In terms of the politics of ecology, the conception employed is largely inspired by Hardin’s understanding of environmental problems, articulated in the ‘Tragedy of the Commons thesis, as an n-person prisoners’ dilemma. This brings thinking about ecological problems into the broad ambit of methodologically individualist, rational actor models of political behaviour, whereby individuals weigh up the advantages and disadvantages of certain paths of action in the light of their expectations of how others will respond to their own behaviour. The herdsman or fisherman knows that, whatever he does, it is rational for every other herder or fisher to overexploit the commons, and so if they do not also do so themselves they will be ‘suckers’ and make themselves worse off than their compatriots, whilst contributing almost nothing to staving off the eventual collapse of the common resource. This game-theoretic approach to environmental problems has been retained and developed by some of those writing in the field of environmental politics15 and has been employed, for example, in policy discussions with respect to climate change.16 It has been suggested that these collective action problems can be overcome by the sort of cultural transformation that Eckersley refers to – particularly in moving people to think in an ecocentric or deep ecological manner about the relationship between humanity and nature. Nonetheless, for those whose immediate concern is policy change under conditions of existing social preferences, and those who do not believe in the necessity and/or possibility of such widespread profound value change, the conception of the environmental problematic as employed by the eco-authoritarians remains useful – the ‘tragedy of the commons’ has remained a powerful explanatory device in environmental politics.17 The second element we need to examine is the conception of democracy at work in the eco-authoritarian literature, where it is construed as a form of politics hopelessly inadequate to the task of resolving our ecological crisis. Clearly here the model of democracy is one of preference aggregation, often labelled as the ‘liberal’ version of democracy.18 Policymaking is taken as structured through a form of representative democracy, and the representatives are chosen through some aggregation of peoples’ preferences. More than this, the conception of democracy on offer is clearly Schumpeterian (in reference to the view of democracy expounded by Schumpeter in his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy). The rather pessimistic Schumpetarian reading of the possibilities of democracy involves a number of elements, but the one that most clearly carries over into the survivalist literature is the assumption that, in comparison with their management of their everyday lives, citizens drop down to a childlike level of performance in the public political sphere. This psychological element runs through most ecoauthoritarian thought, a good example being Heilbroner’s claim that in times of crisis we have a childlike desire for ‘strong’ political leadership, allowing us to suspend our sense of adult responsibility in terms of both the cause of the crisis and the need to find a workable solution. This implies that the preferences that come to be aggregated through a democratic method are not well informed with regard to the problems at hand and bear little or no relation to any conception of long-term and enlightened interests. Indeed it is not even clear that people have

Eco-authoritarianism and democracy 29 any well-formed, clear or stable preferences for matters about which they may think only rarely, if at all (Sunstein, 2005). Rather their preferences reflect a short-term, self-interested desire for ‘business as usual’ in terms of such things as economic growth, job security, and the availability of consumer goods.19 Clearly, both of these conceptualisations can be, and have been, challenged. One can argue against the eschatology of survivalism and suggest that, for all the environmental problems that may exist in the world, there is no looming global environmental catastrophe (Lomborg, 2001). Second, one can challenge the conception of democracy on offer here as too thin and inadequately demanding on citizens in terms of their democratic responsibilities. As we shall see both of these approaches have been developed within the sphere of environmental political thought. Nonetheless, there are clearly many environmental problems in existence today that are amenable to the kind of analysis offered by the ecoauthoritarians, in particular with regard to what democracy can deliver in the way of environmental policy. Problems with pollution caused by transport are a good example here. In the United Kingdom the fastest growing set of emissions contributing to global warming emanate from the transport industry, in particular from rapidly growing road transport and aviation use. There is a close-to-scientific consensus on the existence global warming due to human activities, and broad (not universal) agreement upon the urgent need for developed and developing nations to take measures to combat this.20 Global warming has some strongly irreversible consequences and appears to be an environmental problem of the sort that fits with the eco-authoritarians’ representation. The production of greenhouse gas emissions represents a good example of the n-person prisoner’s dilemma as modelled by the tragedy of the commons. Any one person’s efforts in making a reduction of CO2 emissions would be dwarfed by the continuing increases of the rest of the world. Furthermore, the potential for democratic institutions to deliver reductions in CO2 emissions of the required amount is questionable, reflected in Tony Blair’s comment that it would be political suicide to propose an ecologically inspired increase in the cost of flying shortly before an election. For all that green political thinkers like to think that we have ‘moved on’ from the anti-democratic forms of ecological politics espoused by Hardin, Ehrlich, Heilbroner, and Ophuls, their conceptualisation of environmental problems and democratic politics still has some purchase today, and we should not underestimate the difficulties in achieving the kinds of cultural value changes that we shall see green theorists are committed to. Ecocentrism, or even an environmentally enlightened anthropocentrism does not come easily, and without such a change in values democracy’s ability to deliver ecologically sustainable outcomes remains in serious question.

2

Anarcho-primitivism and direct action politics

Introduction The last chapter examined one variety of ‘ecological’ thinking that was mistrustful of democratic politics, on the grounds that democratic decision-making procedures were unlikely to operate in such a way that they could solve environmental collective action problems. The device entrusted with the task of delivering the political solutions required was an authoritarian version of the state. What this strain of thought does not question is the desirability of political institutions such as the state, indeed the inability of the democratic state (rather than the state per se) to deliver environmental outcomes is what is seen as a cause for regret. The institutions of government are still viewed in this literature as one of humanity’s civilising achievements, and it is this modern civilisation that is at stake, and defended, in the move to authoritarianism. There is no fundamental questioning of, or retreat from, the values of Western civilisation. It is rather that we need to revert to a form of thinking about the nature/economy relationship that reflects the condition of scarcity in which we live. This is our existential circumstance, but Hobbes and Burke are no less a product of Western civilisation than Locke and Marx. Another group of ecological thinkers have problems with democracy of a very different sort, in that its very association with ‘civilisation’ is part of the problem. Civilisation is something to be attacked and, ultimately, destroyed, not something to be preserved even at the expense of liberal freedoms. These are the ‘primitivists’, or ‘anarcho-primitivists’ whose ideas are propagated through publications such as Green Anarchist and the ‘Black and Green’ website. It is so much a part of everyday discourse in Western societies to hear ‘civilisation’ talked of in positive terms (it is, for example, almost without exception a compliment to describe someone as ‘civilised’) that the thought of a political group being ‘against civilisation’1 jars against a series of ‘common sense’ notions regarding the preference of civilised to ‘uncivilised’ or ‘barbaric’ manners, behaviour, or institutions. Nonetheless, deeply ingrained cultural preferences such as these should not close our minds to the possible dangers of the values into which we are socialised, so the analysis of primitivism in this chapter will seek to render its arguments in their strongest form. Understanding anarcho-primitivism is important for a study of ecological

Anarcho-primitivism 31 politics and democracy for at least two reasons. First, as we shall see, it is a form of thinking that is frequently associated with forms of direct action politics that have been very influential in terms of how the green movement is perceived. The politics of direct action has, and is intended to have, a high media profile, and it is impossible to understand its motivation without knowledge of the ideas that tend to accompany it. Second, an appreciation of anarcho-primitivism tells against the common trend to think of ecological politics as a ‘single-issue’ domain. Anarcho-primitivists see ecological questions as a manifestation of a far deeper malaise of Western civilisation. Far from considering green issues in isolation, for them there is a fundamental and systematic problem with our existing order that manifests itself, partly, in such issues.2 This chapter will begin with a morphological analysis3 of the ideology of anarchoprimitivism. Whilst this is something of a radical subcurrent within the more general domain of green political thought, its connections with the direct action strain of politics characterised by ‘disorganisations’ such as Earth First! and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) entail that its political importance may be disproportionate to the number of people who publicly articulate the ideology. We will then go on to look more specifically at the politics of environmental direct action – how is it justified and what is it intended to achieve? Do its protagonists see it as part of a revolutionary struggle against the existing ‘system’, or is it connected to a set of more limited environmental goals? Are there any clear connections between activism of this sort and anarcho-primitivist ideology, or is it merely aimed at the preservation of ‘wilderness’?

The ideology of anarcho-primitivism The conceptual architecture of anarcho-primitivism contains, as the name suggests, many elements that can also be found in ‘mainstream’ anarchist thought, in particular a hostility to the state and its attendant institutions. There is a welldeveloped historical critique of the development of institutions of domination in society, which arise despite humankind’s basically social nature. An analysis of this critique leaves us with an array of disvalued political concepts, decontested in a manner that allows them to fit with the historical account. The flip-side of the negative history lies in the account of what was lost (the ‘primitive’ element in anarcho-primitivism). Anarcho-primitivists delineate the ways in which we can gain inspiration from this lost past in our attempt to build a free and equal future society. It is important to note that anarcho-primitivism does not, contra some interpretations4 seek simply to take us ‘back’ to a primitive or innocent age in which the knowledge gained over previous millennia is merely forgotten. It is a more complex phenomenon than that account would suggest. What its proponents do seek is inspiration from the anthropology and paleo-anthropology of primitive societies for the development of new ways of thinking and living. In the anarcho-primitivists’ historical account of the decline from a state of grace, the introduction or development of the division of labour is seen as

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a crucial step. The division of labour is seen to arrive coterminously with the development of agriculture and the switch from hunter-gatherer to pastoral forms of social life. With the arrival of settled agricultural communities land becomes crucial to successful societies, as once nomadic communities become static, they need to defend a delineated territory. Hunter-gatherer societies are seen as mobile groups with very fluid borders around the territory that they occupy. Furthermore as food sources are relatively plentiful in conditions of low population density there is little or no need to defend these borders against other groups. Thus hunter-gatherer life is interpreted as one of peaceful plenty under conditions of harmony between human beings and the natural world around them. Within hunter-gatherer groups there was need for neither hierarchy nor division of labour.5 With the turn to agriculture, the relationship between human beings and the land, and how that relationship is conceptualised, changes. The borders around communities now become clearly demarcated, and these borders have to be defended against other groups as the loss of cropland will be a disaster. This need for defence leads to the emergence of a class of people devoted to developing the skills of fighting – soldiers and armies. These people also require feeding, and so the production of food has to be administered so that this class get their ‘share’; thus counting, writing, state administration, and so on all develop. There also develops a class that carry out the ‘spiritual’ work of the community, shamans and elders, who claim divine authority and who also have to have their ‘share’ of agricultural production. Thus with the turn to agriculture there develops a whole ‘symbolic culture’6 of writing and counting which facilitates the division of labour and allows the mutation of once egalitarian societies into societies in which forms of domination exist through class (warriors, spiritual leaders, administrators) and patriarchy (these warriors, spiritual leaders, and administrators tend to be men). It should be noted that anarcho-primitivists are far from the only analysts of history to claim that the introduction of the division of labour marks a crucial turning point in society’s move toward an alienated, exploitative, and class-ridden state. Possibly the most famous version of this argument comes from Marx and Engels, where the division of labour is associated with the rise of idealism. In The German Ideology they have this to say: tribal consciousness receives its further development and extension through increased productivity, the increase of needs, and, what is fundamental to both of these, the increase of population. With these there develops the division of labour, which was originally nothing but the division of labour of the sexual act. . . . Division of labour only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labour appears. (The first form of ideologists, priests, is concurrent). From this moment onwards consciousness can really flatter itself that it something other than consciousness of existing practice. (1970: 51–2) Social ecologist anarchist Murray Bookchin traces the root of domination and hierarchy in society to the development of division of labour between young

Anarcho-primitivism 33 and old, as the no-longer-productive elder members of communities seek to obtain material security by claiming shamanistic powers. The elders and shamans rely on each other and then compete with each other for social privileges, many of which are attempts to achieve the personal security conferred by a certain measure of influence. Both groups enter into alliances with an emerging warrior caste of young men, finally to form the beginnings of a quasi-political community and an incipient State. Their privileges and powers only then become generalized into institutions that try to exercise command over society as a whole. (Bookchin 1991: 12) Bookchin imagines a gerontocracy to be the first form of hierarchy to have existed in human communities, swiftly followed by patriarchal forms. Despite the affinity of this account of prehistory with that of the anarcho-primitivists, and the widely perceived view of Bookchin as a ‘radical’ green thinker, anarchoprimitivists tend to be dismissive of his ideas,7 and it is certainly true that Bookchin is no primitivist.8 His work has included a defence of humanism against the attacks of deep ecologists, primitivists, and post-modernists, and the politics of social ecology is based around the notion of a decentralised participatory democracy based upon ‘humanly scaled cities’ and ‘libertarian municipalism’, thus retaining many of the artefacts of civilisation that primitivists tend to reject. The establishment of permanent classes of men whose functions in society are not directly productive, and the administration of the distribution of goods towards them, leads, as Bookchin suggests, to the establishment of permanent institutions of government that ‘try to exercise command over society as a whole’. For anarchoprimitivists the products of civilisation, such as counting and writing, however useful they may be, arise as part of the drive to dominate society on the part of the non-producing classes.9 The need to tally, to keep a record of production and distribution, only arises when a class(es) exist(s) that have to be sustained by the productive labour of others. On the back of the turn to agriculture and settled communities arises a military, hierarchical form of leadership, a bureaucracy, and ultimately the state and capital. Fighting any of these particular institutions, or the inequalities that accompany them, without seeing their overarching connections to civilisation, is to mistake the part for the whole and to misdirect the energy put into opposition. This is the strategic mistake of Marxists, conventional anarchists, and egalitarians – each sees part of the picture, and opposes one outcrop or institution, but none grasp the totality of need to destroy civilisation itself. Civilisation, also known as the Megamachine, also known as Leviathan, has to be destroyed before we can escape from the institutional oppression, exploitation, and domestication that we currently endure, but to achieve this requires a revolution in our thinking as well as revolutionary action. We are so conditioned to the acceptance of the rules of civilisation that it requires a radical switch in order to begin to think against it. There is a posited symbiosis here between thought and action – it is in active resistance that we learn to think resistance, and in thinking resistance we bring

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ourselves to act. This is perhaps to say no more than that thought and action inevitably run together, but it does illustrate the underlying idealism of much anarcho-primitivist thinking – we can begin to change the world by changing the way in which we think about it. Civilisation has two aspects that are central to the anarcho-primitivist critique. First it has an institutional architecture that facilitates oppression, exploitation, and the domestication of its human subjects. These institutions include the state, capital, organised religion, and technology. These institutions are dependent upon, and help to maintain, a set of power relations in society that maintain the systematic class, gender, and race-based inequalities and injustices prevalent in civilised society. Along with these institutions there is an accompanying ideology of civilisation, based upon deep rooted notions of ‘progress’, the value of consumption and work, domestication and order, and the underlying desires created by industrial society. The combination of institutional structure and ideology leaves us with a world in which most ‘civilised’ people lead lives that are ‘alienated’, ‘domesticated’, and ‘exploited’. For one anonymous author, although one of the key problems in our society is alienation, this ‘isn’t about capitalism per se’.10 Although for Marxists the key process of alienation lies in the separation of the worker from their product,11 for the anarcho-primitivist the problem is more deeply rooted in the social form. ‘[A]ny mega-machine society based on intense division of labour’s going to run the same, whatever rhetoric power/management specialists and co-ordinators use to justify their rule.’12 The problem with Marxism from this perspective is that it seeks to use the institutions of civilisation in order to liberate humankind, without realising that these very institutions are inherently oppressive. The idea of communism with the material abundance of capitalism for all is a chimera – ‘we’ve seen that this latter day “communism” won’t work already and note that Marxists reject the version that did work’13 – this ‘working’ version being the ‘primitive communism’ so scorned by Marx and Engels. As for capital, so for the state; we are faced, says Kevin Tucker, ‘with a very brutal and coercive warring state’.14 This state wears the ‘armour of history’, and fosters the illusion that because ‘we’ (the state is seen to depend upon an ‘imaginary collective’) have achieved a certain level of ‘progress’, we also choose to reinforce this progression and take it further. But this takes us constantly away from any possibility of reconnecting with egalitarian technologies. State-inspired progress merely leads to further and deeper alienation. This does not, however, imply that we should focus all of our concerns and resistance upon the state as an institution or range of institutions. This may be a ‘warring state’, but ‘the war is civilisation against everything else on the planet.’ Class, race, and civil wars are mere ‘functions within it’.15 The institution of the state embodies a distinct set of hierarchical power relations, but civilisation is ‘the overarching context within which the multiplicity of power relations develop’.16 Anarcho-primitivists seek not merely the reconfiguration of power relations in a more egalitarian form, but their complete abolition.17 In a reference to Foucault’s work, Zerzan claims that post-modernism ‘says to us that a society without power relations can only

Anarcho-primitivism 35 be an abstraction’ (2005: 221). This, however ‘is a lie, unless we accept the death of nature and renounce what once was and what we can find again’ (2005: 221). It is a central element of the primitivist thesis that there have existed societies where power relations were unknown (and a few such societies still exist today, outside of the grasp of civilisation), and that such societies can serve as inspiration for a future form of society where such relations are again abolished. The state is of course intrinsically connected with politics, as are democratic states with democratic politics. Unsurprisingly, given that politics and power intertwine, politics – as the art of government – ‘is not part of the primitivist project’.18 The only politics to be tolerated is one of ‘desire, pleasure, mutuality, and radical freedom’.19 Democratic politics is to be no more trusted than its putatively more authoritarian cousins. Actually existing democracies are seen as corrupt and infused by the influence of capital,20 and even absent such influence, democracy is a deeply problematic product of civilisation and the state. As the ‘Black and Green’ website insists ‘Anarchy is NOT Democracy’. For them ‘huge amounts’ of ‘anarchist’ literature consist of visions of radical democracy ‘dressed up in anarchist rhetoric’. Anarchists, including green anarchists, believe in the desirability of the absence of any form of political authority – and democratic government, of any sort, is inescapably a form of governing authority. ‘Anarchists are for a complete rejection of all authoritarian institutions/structures on principle. All governments impose themselves on the Earth and all life on it. So long as they exist, autonomy cannot.’21 Democracy is as much a part of the ‘problem of civilisation’ as any other institutional manifestation of it. Smith’s analysis of primitivism touches on this; progress, in the form of ‘Integrated World Capitalism’ wears the ‘mantle of democracy’ (Smith, 2002: 419). Democracy acts as a shield that diverts attention away from the ‘real’ power relationships that underpin civilisation, giving the appearance ‘the people’ have some control over events whereas in fact civilisation ‘becomes a huge machine that gains its own momentum, beyond the control of even its supposed rulers’.22 Thus ‘the “democracy” peculiar to our age must ensure that all this destruction has been carried out in our name and that, to some extent, we are all implicated in this guilt’ (Smith, 2002: 419). This ‘democratic dispersal’ of guilt entails that we all feel implicated in the actions of the megamachine. Thus we come to believe that the problem lies with ‘humankind’ or ‘human nature’ rather than taking a hard look at the institutions of civilisation. In sum, as put by one anonymous contributor to Green Anarchist, ‘The state, private property, the commodity system, patriarchy, and organised religion are inherently dominating institutions that must be destroyed if we are to create a world in which we are all free.’23 As an (anti-)political programme this is not unambitious, but it reflects the view that all of these elements are part of one overarching set of institutional and ideological oppressions.

The ideology of civilisation Along with the institutions of civilisation, anarcho-primitivists also posit an ideology of civilisation that carries independent weight in the system of domination.

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This consists in the mental forms that articulate and uphold the institutional forms of civilisation – they are the ideas that ‘we’ come to ‘believe in’ when our mental development is conditioned by the matrix of civilisation around us. In addition to a general background belief in the good of civilisation per se certain concepts are selected as crucial pillars of support for the edifice of civilisation. Chief amongst these is a belief in ‘progress’, which as we have seen takes us ever further away from the simple, egalitarian social forms that anarcho-primitivists value. In a supporting role is the phenomenon of desire as fostered in industrial society. The desires for ownership, private property, and political power are seen as rooted in a distortion of the human psyche fostered by industrial society. This is tied to questions of status in hierarchical societies and the culture of consumption in which a person’s worth is measured by their wealth or material possessions. This by-now commonplace criticism of consumerism, redolent of the Frankfurt School and particularly Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, is employed as part of a thoroughgoing critique of civilised society which leads to the conclusion that a revolutionary change or ‘total transformation’ of society and economy is necessary in order to regain our long-lost liberties. The idea of progress constitutes the ideology of the division of labour, that crucial staging post in the development of an oppressive, dominating society. Our civilisation ‘makes’ progress through the development of technology, the increase in wealth recorded in per capita GDP figures and the increasing opportunities for consumption – the satisfaction of desires – that this makes possible. One of the key ‘myths’ about progress is its apparent inevitability, the unstoppable march of technological development: as Smith puts it in his analysis ‘[i]n the modern world the ideology of progress had become second nature to us’ (Smith, 2002: 411). It is, rather like civilisation itself, seen by most as an unalloyed good.24 For Zerzan the ‘continuing myths’ regarding the ‘neutrality’ and ‘inevitability’ of our society’s technological development ‘are crucial in fitting everyone to the yoke of division of labour’.25 Even Marxists have, despite Marx’s own misgivings about the value of the division of labour,26 continued ‘in the trap of having, ultimately, to elevate the division of labour for the sake of technological progress’.27 Thus it is our valorisation of progress that moves us to endorse the division of labour, even though the ‘tendency of the division of labour has always been the forced labour of the interchangeable cog in an increasingly autonomous, impervious-to-desire apparatus.’28 The institution of the division of labour, and all of the hierarchical consequences that flow from it, are underpinned by our firm belief in the value of progress. What however, is this progress for, and why do ‘we’ believe that it benefits us if all it ‘really’ achieves is our subjection to the megamachine? How do anarchoprimitivists explain this ideological addiction? It appears to require some explanation, given that it is seen to reflect a distorted form of human consciousness. The industrial revolution ‘warped the dreams’ of people,29 and turned us into alienated, desiring consumers; because we fail to gain any satisfaction from our contributions to production under conditions of the division of labour, we look instead to the sphere of consumption as a compensatory realm. A switch to

Anarcho-primitivism 37 ‘ethical consumption’ or ‘green consumerism’ is of no help here. Ethical consumption ‘is steeped in petty moralism and guilt but rarely challenges consumption itself’ (Anon, 2003a: 8) being instead mere tinkering with a fundamentally flawed system. For Heinberg, in the unmediated world of primitive childrearing, human beings do not need to grasp for ‘transitional’ objects as there is no child-parent separation. Under conditions of civilisation it is the ‘powerful human need for transitional objects that drives individuals in their search for property and power’.30 Our industrial society manufactures these desires for transitional objects through the commodity form and mediated social relations. Craig Rosebraugh claims that the (dis)organisation for which he was a spokesperson, the ELF, along with the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), understand the role that such ‘desire’ plays in civilisation, and even in these movements; thus the ELF and ALF ‘have taken concrete steps to fight this desire within their own movements’ (2003: 9). Furthermore there ‘needs to be a direct focus on fighting this desire created by industrialization and the westernized way of life’ using ‘underground guerrilla tactics in the form of economic sabotage and beyond’ (2003: 9). The infamous 1998 arson of the Vial ski resort in Colorado, causing $12 m in damage was ‘on the right path towards targeting desire’ (2003: 9). How was this so, and what constitutes the ‘right path’ in the war against desire? Rosebraugh is calling for attacks upon what anarcho-primitivists tend to call the ‘symbolic culture’ of industrial society. ‘The idea in the United States is to look at just what makes the country what it is. What symbols, what propaganda, what physical objects are involved in creating the atmosphere of desire?’ (2003: 9). Tellingly the article these quotes come from is entitled ‘Beyond the ELF’ and involves a discussion of what a new direct action campaign against capitalism and industrial society should focus on. The answer is to ‘think big’ – ‘Wall Street, the stock market, Statue of Liberty, US Capitol, Mt Rushmore, Disneyland. . . . Realise the difference between pulling up an acre of G.E. crops and destroying Monsanto’ (2003: 9). These are listed as symbolic targets that would, if destroyed, strike a major blow against ‘false reality’. Places such as Disneyland represent the epitome of this ‘false reality’, the ‘hyper-reality that destroys human meaning, and hence solidarity, by simulating it with technology’.31 Against this we need to rediscover a ‘truly human’ discourse. The question of whether these ‘blows’ against symbolic institutions should be violent, and what ‘being violent’ might mean under these conditions, is a question we shall come to in the discussion of direct action. The concept of desire is interesting as it appears in both the positive and negative ledgers of anarcho-primitivist ideology. If we require a ‘war against desire’, then why would civilisation’s incarnation as an ‘impervious-to-desire apparatus’ be a problem, given that a lack of responsiveness to desire would appear to be a desideratum? Furthermore, despite the apparent hostility to desire discussed earlier, we discover that the publication ‘anarchy’ is a ‘journal of desire armed’, that the ‘green and black’ website is designated ‘Insurgent Desire’ and that an anarcho-primitivist claims that ‘Civilization, with its need to suppress whatever is wild, has taught us to distrust our instincts and desires. It needs to do

38 Ecological politics against democracy this in order to channel our wild energies into the domesticated activities of work and commodity consumption . . . the best thing we can do for wilderness is to let our own wildness break free by trusting and acting on our own instincts and desires.’32 The answer is that, of course, there is more than one conception of ‘desire’ at work here and that ‘desire’ in itself has the capacity to operate for good and ill, such good or ill being dependent upon whether this desire exists in its pure, ‘wild’, unmediated form, or whether it represents the ‘warped dreams’ of industrialisation. The key to this lies in the previous quote; our ‘desires’ and ‘wild energies’ have been channelled by civilisation into essentially submissive forms, working as we are told to work and consuming what advertisers tell us we want. ‘Desire’ is not bad per se but is destructive in this perverted form, and so the ‘war on desire’ is a war on this form of ‘manufactured’ desire. When we have reconnected with desire in its primal form it will become a creative rather than destructive attribute with respect to the ‘free’ forms of life that anarchoprimitivists wish to see us lead. The result of this combination of the effects of the institutions and ideology of civilisation is that we citizens live in a condition of domestication, alienation, and exploitation. Of these ‘domestication’ is the negatively appraised concept that has the least carry-over into other ideological lexicons. Domestication provides the most overarching term for the oppression that anarcho-primitivists believe that civilisation imposes on us. The allusion to the domestication of animals is deliberate – civilised humans are to primitives as domesticated dogs are to wolves: tamed and unfree. Both the turn to agriculture and industrialisation are seen as key stages on the road to domestication, the latter cementing a process already well under way thanks to the former. Zerzan makes clear that a turn to more ‘environmentally friendly’ forms of agriculture, such as organic farming, will make no difference to this root of oppression: ‘The point is plain: domestication is domestication, and embodies a qualitatively negative logic for the natural world. Agriculture per se brings a ruinous, unidirectional impact, despite the wishful thinking of those who envision a coexistence with domestication, consisting of benign, “green” methods that would reverse the global destruction of the land.’33 The problem goes back to our discussion of the institutional aspects of agriculture, the need to possess and defend a set area of land that leads to the development of a military caste who must live of the food production of others. Industrialisation gives this logic of agricultural settlement a further twist, the working class now have to be disciplined into working according to the needs of the owners of machinery, as documented in some detail in E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. For Leopold Roc in Fifth Estate the idea of an ‘industrial revolution’ was a ‘pure bourgeois lie’ whereby the ‘enemy deals a double blow, legitimising the existence of managers and hierarchy as unavoidable technical necessities and imposing a mechanical conception of progress, which is considered a positive and socially neutral law. Such a lie was obviously destined for the poor, among whom it was to inflict long lasting destruction.’34 It is because our domestication in conditions of civilisation is so all-embracing that a thoroughgoing revolution is necessary in order to regain our freedoms. Other aspects

Anarcho-primitivism 39 of industrial life – exploitation by capital, oppression by the state, alienation from our wild instincts, the religious suppression of desires, patriarchy, racism, and so on are merely functions of this overarching domestication.35

Overcoming civilisation So much, then, for the anarcho-primitivist analysis of our current predicament: when society has gone this badly wrong the shopping-list of institutions to be overthrown is, as we have seen, something of a challenge. Where do we begin and by what strategy and tactics can we hope to bring an end to all this and instigate a new realm of freedom upon earth? What is the ideal that the anarcho-primitivist hopes to realise, and how is the transition from here to there to be accomplished? Given the sham that is representative democracy, which as we have seen is understood as a method for dispersing guilt away from the power elite, there is no hope to be had from existing political institutions, which are themselves part of the problem. Anarcho-primitivism is in certain respects an anti-political political ideology, its protagonists see the need to engage in a struggle over power and influence now, but do so in order to create a ‘world without power relations’ in the future, thus the path of winning political power over others is not a viable option. Instead there needs to be a revolution, a ‘complete transformation’, and this is to be brought about through revealing the truly oppressive nature of civilisation. This is a revolution of deed and thought, the two being closely interconnected. In terms of deeds, what is advocated is a twin-track approach of a direct assault upon the institutions of civilisation, along with ‘prefiguration’, the creation of anarchoprimitivist communities that will demonstrate what a truly free life can be like – insofar as this is possible within the confines of the wider civilisation. In terms of thought the main requirement is a revalorisation of the primitive. For far too long the ‘primitive’ has been associated with savagery, backwardness, and poverty. Many anarcho-primitivist publications seek to dispel this interpretation as mere mythmaking – in particular a selective reading of the anthropological literature allows the primitive to be portrayed as living a ‘truly free’ life in which all basic needs are met, and for whom there is a great deal of time for leisure activities, with no divide between ‘work’ and ‘culture’ and above all no division of labour and no hierarchical institutions. The idea of ‘the primitive’ in anarcho-primitivism is mythic in the classic Sorelian sense. As with Sorel’s version of myth, the ‘primitive’ encapsulates a complex and comprehensive critique of existing society, and a vision of a desirable future, in a simple and colourful slogan. It is not (normally) that proponents of primitivism wish to literally drag human society back to paleolithic forms of life, minus all forms of modern technology. Rather they want people to think outside of a whole set of deeply socialised prejudices and assumptions, and understand how many of the ideas and institutions that ‘we’ value are actually subtle facilitators of oppression and domestication. They need people to ‘think against’ civilisation, and encouraging this is no easy task. The myth of the primitive serves as an invitation to this form of critical thinking.

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Direct action This is one of the most controversial areas of contemporary green politics, and as we shall see it is a facet of radical environmentalism that has fostered something of a backlash on the part of business interests and mainstream politicians,36 particularly in the United States where much of the economic sabotage recommended by anarcho-primitivists takes place. Direct action can be seen as both a symbolic and a ‘cost-levying’ form of politics, designed to both increase the costs of certain forms of behaviour of which radical greens disapprove, and to highlight the vulnerable and ephemeral nature of the institutions of civilisation. The costlevying aspect is made clear in this quote from the ELF: ‘Using real direct action in the form of economic sabotage, the ELF is targeting what the greedy entities care about, their pocketbooks. By inflicting as much damage as possible, the ELF can allow a given entity to decide it is in their best economic interest to stop destroying life for the sake of profit.’37 The ELF, along with its ‘sister’ organisation the ALF,38 and Earth First! are the radical environmental movements most clearly associated with direct action forms of politics. As ever in the relationship between movements and sets of ideas, there is no one-to-one mapping between the ideology of anarcho-primitivism and the ideas expressed by the movements that appear, on the surface, to represent the ‘activist’ wing of the ideology. There can be a number of reasons for this, genuine differences of ideas between ideologues and movement leaders, and a selfconscious distinction between the ‘private’ and ‘public’ languages of a movement. Thus before we attribute the actions of, say, the ELF to the ideological inspiration of anarcho-primitivism we need to proceed with some caution. In particular certain figures in Earth First! claim to be apolitical wilderness preservationists, doing whatever works to save wild areas from destruction and uninterested in wider forms of social change.39 Thus there is no straightforward way of relating the ideology of anarcho-primitivism to the activities of groups such as the ELF or Earth first! Nonetheless, particularly with respect to the ELF, there is clear overlap between the public proclamations of the group and the ideas articulated in journals such as Green Anarchist, indeed public spokespersons for the former also write articles for the latter and so, unsurprisingly, there are strong similarities between the ideas articulated in both settings. This being the case it is possible to examine the activities and publications of the ELF in the light of what, at its weakest, we may call the ‘inspiration’ provided by anarcho-primitivist thinking. In its own publications, the ELF tends to portray itself as anti-capitalist rather than anti-civilisation: ‘it is the very social and political ideology in operation throughout the westernized countries that is creating the various injustices on this planet and ultimately the destruction of life. That ideology is capitalism and the mindset that allows it to exist’ (ELF, 2001: 7). There is much about ‘greedy corporations’ and ‘profit seekers’ who make their money at the expense of the environment. This might seem to imply that (or at least be consistent with advocating) another non-capitalist form of economic and social organisation, which nonetheless retains the features of civilisation that anarcho-primitivists

Anarcho-primitivism 41 object to (e.g. domestication). The critique of capitalism is at times, however, broadened out into a critique of industrial society. For one thing the state (admittedly the state in capitalist society) is no more trusted than the corporation: ‘The state has repeatedly shown itself to care far more for the protection of commerce and profits than that of its people and the environment. To place faith in that same state as though it will do what is in the best interests of justice and life is utter foolishness and a grave mistake. The state is a major portion of the problem’ (ELF, 2001: 21). This is why it is a waste of time for an environmental organisation to work within the legal framework established by the state. ‘Laws are set up as a mere reflection of the morals and norms of the majority of mainstream society. Unfortunately, as a result of massive conditioning and the manufacture of desire, the mainstream public . . . is living a life of extreme over-consumption’ (ELF, 2001: 24). This latter passage in particular evokes some of the ideas expressed in Green Anarchist: the idea of a war against desire and the wider focus on industrialism rather than merely capitalism – ‘Particularly with the advent of the industrial revolution, the western way of life has been in complete violation of natural law’ (ELF, 2001: 6). This in itself is quite an interesting comment, the liberation that the ELF pursues for ‘all life’ is a freedom set within the confines of ‘natural law’, which in turn constitutes a higher law that is invoked in justification of economic sabotage. In this respect a distinction is drawn between natural law and ‘societal’ law: ‘Matters must be taken into the hands of the people who need to more and more step outside of this societal law to enforce natural law’ (ELF, 2001: 6). So the ELF is a law enforcement agency, but this has nothing to do with what lies on the statute books of ‘democratic’ societies. We have seen the characterisation of ‘symbolic’ institutions that Craig Rosebraugh (himself a former ELF spokesperson) believes should be targeted by direct action, the ELF FAQ pamphlet carries a similar list.40 ‘These symbols and forms . . . aid in directly destroying life and/or the spread of the destructive propaganda of the American Dream. The list is endless but could include such symbols in the U.S. as Mt. Rushmore, the Statue of Liberty, Disney, Wall Street, etc.’ ELF activists should choose ‘the most effective target possible’ using strategies and tactics ‘to cause the most amount of economic damage possible’.41 The hope is that such high-profile examples of environmental direct action will create a snowball effect, ‘the idea of momentum’ that will create an ‘actual movement’ that will grow and ultimately ‘successfully stop the destruction of life’.

Violence and covert action A perennial debate within the direct action movement concerns the questions of: 1 2

whether actions can permissibly be violent or whether they should be strictly non-violent and whether action should be overt or covert, and whether arrest and prosecution should be accepted as a morally appropriate outcome of direct action.

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On (1) there appears to be genuine disagreement within the ELF,42 such that one spokesperson has resigned over this very issue. The FAQ leaflet makes it clear that the ELF sees itself as a non-violent organisation: ‘The guidelines for the ELF specifically require members to take all necessary precautions to ensure no one is physically injured’ in any act of economic sabotage (ELF, 2001: 27). Indeed, in a remarkable prioritising of outcome over intent, we have the following: ‘If an action similar to one performed by the ELF occurred and resulted in an individual becoming physically injured or losing their life this would not be considered an actual ELF action.’ The act ‘may have had the same motives as the ELF but since a life form was injured it would not be considered an actual ELF action’. This is an extraordinary piece of self-exculpation only made possible by the (positively encouraged) cellular, non-hierarchical structure of the ELF. It is not something one ‘joins’, rather interested parties are encouraged to start their own ‘cell’ with trusted friends and act upon their own initiative in the name of the ELF. Thus the ELF spokespeople can always truthfully claim that no action was ever ordered by any ELF ‘high command’ or ‘army council’, as no such body exists. When a direct action goes right, it is credited to the ELF, but if, say, a security guard were to be accidentally killed in an arson attack, it will not be an ‘actual’ ELF action. By contrast, former ELF spokesperson Leslie James Pickering holds that not only is the ELF not a non-violent organisation, it should not aspire to be one. ‘I personally do not believe the actions of the ELF and ALF are “non-violent” and furthermore I see absolutely no logic in a judgment that struggle perceived as “non-violent” is the only legitimate kind to be waged’ (2003: 9). Pickering sees the ELF as part of a ‘larger movement struggling for revolutionary change’ and so their actions are more than ‘strictly environmental’ in their scope. Violence is acceptable at a time when we ‘desperately need to defend ourselves’ from the United States’ ‘global power, force-feeding its suicidal capitalist American Dream down the throats of everyone on the face of the planet’. At such a time anyone ‘hypnotizing the people with the “non-violence” as gospel dog-and-pony show is a criminal’, frequently under the influence of religion, itself one of the oppressive institutions of civilisation (2003: 9). This may in part be merely a question of semantics. Pickering considers ‘violence’ as ‘any act that aggressively harms or threatens harm to anyone or anything’ (2003: 9), which would include harm to impersonal institutions. The ELF FAQ pamphlet stakes out the terrain of non-violence as that in which harm is not done to living beings, leaving the infliction of harm on institutions within the realm of the non-violent. The harm considered here is direct harm, it is quite possible that people may be indirectly affected by attacks on institutions, become unemployed as the result of an arson attack, or lose their business. This does not trouble the ELF, as people should not be in businesses that harm the environment: ‘Individuals cannot blindly enter into any form of employment . . . without first considering who and or what that work is going to hurt’ (ELF, 2001: 29). So Pickering appears to see non-violence as a Gandhian commitment to bearing witness and peaceful protest, whereas the ELF make a sharp distinction between

Anarcho-primitivism 43 damage to property (non-violent) and damage to living entities (violent). The framing of the ELF as either a violent or non-violent movement has important implications for the political reactions to it, as we shall see. On the question of covert and overt action, the position of groups such as the ELF and Earth First! is quite straightforward. This is not to say that there have not been debates about this within the environmental direct action movement; at the time when the anti-GMO organisation GenetiX Snowball was active there was considerable internal debate as to whether covert or overt action was preferable.43 For the ELF, however, there are no good reasons for taking overt action and exposing yourself to arrest under conditions where the state is a non-neutral actor in the defence of capital, and this is a pragmatic rather than principled position. ‘The decision not to take public responsibility for each action is purely a strategic one. Why would anyone want to be caught and unjustly locked up when they could be free to continue destroying that which is killing life?’ (ELF, 2001: 25). The purpose of the movement is to stop the destruction of the natural world, and thus requires free agency on the part of activists. Furthermore, due to its position as the defender of capital and established interests, the state is not recognised as having any legitimate jurisdiction over the activists or their acts.

Prefiguration and the primitive in primitivism The vast majority of the theoretical output of anarcho-primitivist publications concerns either the critique of civilisation, the revalorisation of the primitive, or the strategy and justification of direct action politics. There is another action that can be taken here and now, however, in addition to direct actions, and that is the establishment of anarcho-primitivist communities that, in their organisation and embodiment of liberty prefigure so far as is possible within the confines of the wider civilisation, the communities that anarcho-primitivists hope to see established. The late John Moore writes on this in A Primitivist Primer, noting that anarcho-primitivism seeks a total transformation of society, of identities, of ways of life and ways of being, he argues that a crucial step on the road lies in the need to ‘develop communities of resistance, microcosms (as much as they can be) of the future to come – both in cities and outside’.44 What should such communities of resistance look like? How can we achieve the freedom that anarcho-primitivists seek? For the answer to this question we have to turn to the positive aspects of their ideology, the view of what kind of world they are trying to achieve. In particular, do primitivists actually seek to return us to a ‘primitive’ way of life, and if they do what does this entail? The revalorisation of the primitive that anarcho-primitivism calls for is based upon a view of primitive communities as the embodiment of much that has been ‘warped’ or destroyed during the onward march of civilisation and progress. John Zerzan tells us that life before domestication and agriculture was largely a life of leisure, intimacy with nature, sensual wisdom, sexual equality, and health. It is ‘another fundamental blow’ to civilisation when we learn that ‘not only was human life once, and for so long, a state that did not know alienation or domination,

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but . . . possessed an intelligence at least equal to our own.’45 Hunter-gatherer societies are taken to be free of the division of labour, practice usufruct rather than the fetish of private property, and have no division between work or culture.46 In his analysis Smith notes Zerzan’s view that it was not lack of intelligence or ambition that stopped Palaeolithic cultures advancing, it was rather the ‘success and satisfaction of a gatherer-hunter existence’ (2002: 415). The existence of primitive communities gives the lie to the claim that anarchism is somehow ‘against human nature’: ‘green anarchy is that state that people have lived in for 90% of history’,47 and ‘this was our human nature for a couple of million years.’48 The ‘primitive’ then, embodies a view of a pre-agricultural world in which there is no division of labour, where there is an absence of domination, domestication, and where inhabitants therefore enjoy a freedom from an oppression that those of us unfortunate enough to live in civilised times have built into our lives. It is a world that Smith describes as ‘untouched’ by ecological, economic, or ‘ethico-political’ contamination – a state of innocence. Is it the case that anarchoprimitivists seek to take us back to pre-modern hunter-gatherer lives? Do they really believe that we can ‘unmake’ all of the accretions of technology and knowledge that civilisation and progress have engendered? Do they really see all of the developments since the ‘agricultural revolution’ as negative in terms of their impact upon humanity? Smith thinks so, he suggests that the mistake of primitivists is to think that ‘innocence is a state of being rather than a mobilising myth, and that they want to return us to an innocent way of life’ (2002: 421). It is not, however, clear that the anarcho-primitivists’ use of the concept of the primitive is this straightforward, the discourse is always one of going ‘forward’, not backward, and the primitive is an inspirational tool in the creation of a new society, not a return to an old one. John Moore writes that the primitive is ‘a source of renewal and anti-authoritarian inspiration’ and that the aim is not to ‘replicate or return to the primitive, merely to see the primitive as a source of inspiration’.49 Similarly he later states that ‘There’s no blueprint . . . the envisioned future is not “primitive” in any stereotypical sense.’50 Similarly, the anonymous author of ‘Primitivism? Back to Basics’ asserts that anarcho-primitivists are not saying that future society should be like any pre-existing society, but rather than we can learn from the ones that ‘work’,51 and for Richard Heinberg we should not slavishly imitate the past but be ‘inspired’ by the best examples of human adaptation.52 These claims that there is ‘no blueprint’ and that we should merely take ‘inspiration’ from primitive societies suggests again that ‘the primitive’ does work as a mobilising myth in anarcho-primitivist ideology. ‘The primitive’ stands as a symbol for the obverse of all that is oppressive and corrupted about civilisation. It is a realm of freedom, and for all that the characterisation of ‘the primitive’ rests upon a selective reading of the anthropological literature on actual huntergatherer societies,53 the idea of the primitive is a tool of ideological mobilisation that does not require empirical content with regard to any particular huntergatherer community to fill it. My disagreement with Smith’s interpretation is that I believe that primitivist thinkers do not delude themselves into thinking that the primitive offers us a state of being to which we can straightforwardly return.

Anarcho-primitivism 45 The primitive as mobilising myth is articulated in a knowing rather than naïve fashion. Cummings notes that this role for the primitive stands in a long tradition in which romantics have found ‘whatever they desired in primitives. . . . Primitives have been “our Ventriloquist’s dummy” through which we make others become whatever is lacking on our world. “Is the present too materialistic? Primitive life is not – it is a precapitalist utopia in which only use value, never exchange value, prevails. Is the present sexually repressed? Not primitive life – primitives live life whole, without fear of the body” ’ (2001: 310, quoting Torgovnick). A ‘ventriloquist’s dummy’, or an ‘empty signifier’ (Laclau, 1996) is precisely what is required for a mobilising myth, as it can be fleshed out in almost any way that may suit the prevailing circumstance. Any form of oppression or domination that people believe exists in ‘civilised’ society is capable of having its antithesis projected on to the primitive. No police, no capitalism, no private property, no state, no standing armies, no politics, no government, no alienation, no hierarchy, no sexual repression, no patriarchy – one could go on. The primitive comes to stand for the opposite of all that is wrong with civilisation; there is, contra Smith, no need for this to exist as a ‘state of being’, even a possible rather than actual one, it merely requires that it can act as a source of inspiration for political action. One can ‘believe’ in the primitive in the same way that one could, according to Sorel (1999), ‘believe’ in the general strike, that is to see in it sufficient motivation to engage in revolutionary political activity.

Thinking outside of civilisation The obverse of the revalorisation of the primitive is the critique of civilisation that we have already discussed. The two come together in the anarcho-primitivist project of getting us to think beyond the confines of an almost all-embracing, allencompassing civilisation. It is all too easy to take civilisation and the benefits of ‘progress’ for granted, as unthinking ‘common-sense’. There are, after all, few peoples left on earth who live outside of the confines of civilisation, and intimate knowledge of these peoples is hardly widespread. The first task for anarchoprimitivists, then, is to shake some of our complacent beliefs about the benefits of technology, government, business, and so on. Direct action campaigns as an integral part of the ‘war on desire’ form part of this. Each time an arson attack or other direct action makes the mainstream media, it gives spokespersons of the ELF or Earth First! an opportunity to get their message across. Both Rosebraugh and Pickering believe this war needs to be intensified, with bigger and more frequent attacks on higher profile targets – activists have to think ‘strategically’. Actions must ‘not only become more strategic and be of an intensified scale, but they must also occur with much greater frequency’ (Rosebraugh, 2003: 9). Similarly, ‘I do not see the ELF only caring about the oppression caused by Vail Resorts Inc. and Boise Cascade. These are just platforms for a much larger message to get out on a global scale, and that message is “WE’RE NOT TAKING ANY MORE!” ’ (Pickering, 2003). The propaganda of the deed and of the word go hand in hand. Attacks on the symbols of manufactured desire also incur the

46 Ecological politics against democracy wrath of the state, but being listed by the FBI as the ‘number one problem’ in terms of domestic terrorism is ‘a noteworthy point in the struggle for liberation. It is recognition from the oppressor’ (Pickering, 2003) – earth liberation can no longer be ignored.

Conclusion At the outset of this chapter I suggested that there were two good reasons for examining the doctrine of anarcho-primitivism herein. With regard to the second of these reasons it should by now be clear that the diagnosis of our environmental ills on offer here is related to a comprehensive critique of our entire civilisation, which both domesticates us and distorts our desires into forms that threaten ecological destruction. Whereas, as we shall see in future chapters, much green thinking seeks a reconciliation of democracy and ecology, this strand of thinking rejects it outright, as part of the ‘megamachine’ of state and society that subjugates us and destroys our environment. It is not merely (although it is this also) that democracy in its current form is warped by massively unequal distributions of material wealth and political influence. It is that, by its very nature, democracy implies authoritative government rule implies unfreedom. Is anarcho-primitivism not, however, merely a marginal strand within the broader fabric of environmental politics? For all of its intrinsic interest, there are few people in the world who would describe themselves as ‘anarcho-primitivists’, so why devote this much space to an analysis of their beliefs? This brings us back to the first reason. The politics of direct action has become an important part of the repertoire of both radical environmentalists and campaigners for animal rights,54 and thus has also played in important role in the public perception of these movements and helped to shape the state responses to them. There are important linkages between anarcho-primitivism and direct action, and thus it is worth developing an understanding of the former, in order to appreciate the latter. The next chapter turns to the question of ‘framing’ environmental direct action and the struggle over its place in the democratic order. Seen by some of its supporters as a form of legitimate civil disobedience, it is interpreted by its opponents as a form of domestic terrorism. This fight over the interpretation of this kind of activity has crucial ramifications in terms of shaping state and society responses to environmental activism.

3

The ‘war on eco-terror’

Introduction Having explored the tenets of anarcho-primitivism and its connection with environmental direct action, we can turn to the question of the interpretation and reception of this form of politics within wider society. For those who are opposed to it, ecological direct action represents a fundamentally anti-democratic form of politics, in which self-appointed spokespeople both speak and act on behalf of ‘the environment’ in a way that their fellow citizens have no particular reason to find acceptable. This form of politics not only falls outside of democratic norms, it represents a profound challenge to the very existence of democracy, seeking to subvert it and replace it with an anarchic society for which there is no evidence of public support. This attempt to achieve their desired outcome by anti-democratic, forceful means renders ecological activists terrorists, specifically ‘eco-terrorists’. They pursue their aims through forms of economic sabotage, and on this view should incur the same degree of attention and punishment from the state as any other engaged in terrorist activity. For those who are more sympathetic to the aims and strategies of ecological activists, the picture is a good deal more complex. Who, after all, gets to decide where the boundaries of acceptable political behaviour within a democracy are set. Whilst acknowledging that most of what takes place under the rubric of direct action is illegal and covert, it may be that we need to radically rethink our understanding of what constitutes civil disobedience in democratic societies. Conscientious and proportionate, as opposed to arbitrary and disproportionate, forms of direct activism might be considered within the civil disobedience tradition. Thus, although illegal and taking place outside of the institutions of democracy, such acts are should be treated with toleration by the state, as civil disobedience is sometimes the only available method of communicating the moral urgency of an issue to which the majority of the population are not currently paying attention. The battle over the environment thus takes place at the semantic as well as the material level. Unsurprisingly, ‘eco-terrorism’ is the preferred term of the opponents rather than proponents of radical environmentalism. Even those amongst the radical environmental movement who advocate violent forms of direct action

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reject the ‘eco-terrorist’ label: ‘The outright condemnation of violent revolutionary [activity?] in America needs to come to an end before a true revolution can effectively take place. The system knows this, and its pigs are working harder than ever to brainwash the public into calling the ELF terrorists’ (Pickering, 2003). So, even when radical environmentalism is self-avowedly ‘violent’ it is not an example of ‘terrorism’. This appears, on Pickering’s view, to be because people have a ‘right’ to ‘fight for our very lives’ when they are being crushed by the megamachine. As with deep ecology direct action is portrayed as an act of self-defence.1 This view implies a view of terrorism such that it is always ‘offensive’ and never a ‘defensive’ form of action. It relies on the common intuition that action taken in self-defence is, or is likely to be, justifiable, and certainly more so than offensive forms of action. This intuition will often be correct, but this does not suffice to validate the argument. Questions of the ‘legitimacy’ of self-defence cannot evade questions of proportionality and minimal sufficiency. No such ‘right’ is anyway conceded by the opponents of radical environmentalism,2 who see the attacks on property (arson, graffiti, animal releases, etc.) undertaken in the name of earth liberation as terrorists acts that, as they are undertaken with some intent to ‘protect’ the environment, are best labelled a ecoterrorism. We need to ask what, on this view, constitutes ‘eco-terrorism’, and what the boundaries are that distinguish it for non-terroristic direct actions or forms of civil disobedience. For the Centre for the Defence of Free Enterprise (CDFE, an American pro-business organisation) ecoterrorism is a ‘crime committed to save nature’. As that might include trespass or refusing to pay tax, they decontest the idea further by stipulating that the ‘crime must have the characteristics of terrorism as defined by the FBI’.3 On this approved FBI account terrorism is the ‘unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives’.4 Terrorism becomes ecoterrorism when such objectives are ‘environmental-political reasons’ and committed by an ‘environmentally oriented, subnational group’. It follows, to the CDFE, that ‘the acts of the ELF, ALF and other extremist nature-saving networks are clearly terrorism and ecoterrorism under the law.’5 Bron Taylor, one of the few scholars to undertake serious analysis of the ideas of radical environmental activists, is quick to dismiss this ‘officially approved’ account of the nature of terrorism. Scholars of environmental conflict should see through the confusions of radical rhetoric on both sides and: refuse the temptation to sensationalize the environment-related conflicts. A good start in this regard would be to eschew broad definitions of the term terrorism, whether such definitions are promulgated by law enforcement authorities, self-appointed watchdog groups or scholars. This would require the rejection of the FBI’s (‘full employment’) definition of terrorism in which violence is not even a necessary element of ‘terrorist crime’! (1998: 24)

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Taylor then goes on to offer a more restrictive definition of terrorism, to which we shall return in the following section, which examines the ‘terror’ question in more detail. His implied point, that one needs to look closely at the source of a definition of terrorism, and examine how their account relates to their interests, is well taken. The Congressional testimony given by FBI Domestic Terrorism Section Chief James F. Jarboe endorses, as one would expect, the ‘broad’ view of terrorism promoted by his own organisation. Ecoterrorism constitutes an example of ‘specialinterest terrorism’, which ‘differs from traditional left-wing and right-wing terrorism in that extremist special interest groups seek to resolve specific issues, rather than effect widespread political change’.6 Special interest terrorism is an example of domestic terrorism which is the ‘unlawful use, or threatened use, of violence by a group or individual based and operating entirely within the United States . . . committed against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives’.7 Jarboe sees the roots of ecoterrorism as going back to 1977 and the activities of Sea Shepherd in attacking ‘commercial fishing operations by cutting drift nets’. If we count attacks on property, such as the cutting of fishing nets, as acts of terrorism, then groups such as the ELF and Earth First! would uncontroversially be domestic terrorist groups – as we have seen, spokespeople for these groups explicitly justify attacks on property in defence of the environment. The crux of the issue of course, lies in the decontestation of terrorism and in particular whether explicit attacks on property rather than people should be considered acts of terrorism or something else. Radical direct action environmental groups make a strong distinction between attacks on people and attacks on property. As discussed in the previous chapter, the ELF publishes explicit guidelines for direct action that insist that ‘no living creature’ should be harmed. Unintentional harm to a living creature would be sufficient to disbar a direct action as a ‘real’ act of the ELF. Despite the semantic slipperiness of this post-hoc rationalisation of an act as ‘really’, or ‘not really’ an ELF direct action, the distinction that radical environmentalists seek to make between attacks on property and attacks on people has to be given serious consideration. Furthermore, Taylor (1998) asserts that in his field research he finds that the commitment to not harming other living creatures in the pursuit of the movement’s goals is taken very seriously. Movement activists place themselves behind an ethical barrier that disbars them from attacks on living beings. The question then is partly whether others see them in the same ethical light, and partly whether this barrier is sufficient to prevent such activists from being reasonably portrayed as terrorists. This is important as much rides on the framing of environmental direct action in terms of how the state responds to such activity. Should attacks on property be considered terrorist acts? And if so, what types of attack and for what reasons? We can begin our inquiry with the argument, put forward by organisations such as the CDFE and accepted by the FBI that attacks on property should be so considered. Terrorism is, we were told by James F. Jarboe,

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the ‘unlawful use, or threatened use, of violence . . . against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives’ (Jarboe, 2002, emphasis added). Thus not all types of ‘attack’ on property fall under the ‘terror’ rubric. Arson carried out as a drunken prank, and arson carried out in the pursuit of a political goal such as preventing people from driving 4  4s (a number of attacks have been on 4  4 dealerships) are categorised differently, thus intent rather than outcome is crucial here. The terror label is only applied to those seeking to pursue social or political (rather than personal or straightforwardly criminal) goals. The question that is clearly begged here, in the eyes of the activists, is why attacks on property should be put on the same level as attacks on people in defining what ‘terror’ is, and this is something about which the FBI definition is silent. This in turn requires an assessment of a prior question: if ‘terror’ accompanies violence against persons or property, what constitutes the ‘use of violence’ in ‘furtherance of political or social objectives’? Is violence something that can have as its object only living organisms that can be harmed, or can ‘violence’ be done to nonsentient entities such as buildings or constitutions? As a complex concept that can be decontested in various ways, the idea of ‘violence’ is applied in different forms in different theoretical and ideological contexts. Looking to a general definition, such as ‘exertion of physical force so as to injure or abuse’8 may help to orientate our thoughts but will not resolve any substantive issues with regard to the concept. Again we can ask whether ‘injury and abuse’ are something that can be inflicted only upon living entities or whether it is sensible to talk of the ‘injury’ or ‘abuse’ of a building or institution. We need, then, to examine how the concept is employed in both anarcho-primitivist discourse and by the opponents of radical environmentalism. Do they agree or differ as to the nature of violence, and how does this feed in to their clear differences over whether environmental direct action constitutes a form of terrorism? One anarcho-primitivist writer taking a clear position on the question of violence is Leslie James Pickering, whose disagreement with the ‘mainstream’ ELF is precisely on this question of violent/non-violent action. Pickering states ‘I personally do not consider the actions of the ELF and ALF “non-violent” ’ (2003). This is because violence constitutes an act that ‘threatens harm’ to ‘anyone or anything’. The ELF/ALF oppose ‘oppressive institutions’, and to not threaten harm to such institutions ‘would therefore be failure’ (2003). So ‘violence’ here is clearly decontested to include harms to inanimate objects, and thus, even if there is a strict policy of not harming living beings, as per the ELF policy document, the actions of the ELF are still violent as they involve arson, tree-spiking, and other attacks on inanimate objects. One can see how this view would lead Pickering into conflict with other ELF members when the FAQ document released by North American Earth Liberation Front Press Office (NAELFPO)9 clearly states that ‘The ELF considers itself a non-violent organization as no physical harm has come to a human as a result of the group’s actions. This is by no means a sheer coincidence but in fact a commitment to the guidelines’ (ELF, 2001: 15). Here violence is decontested as that which harms humans, although given ELF discourse in other places there is little doubt that it would include other sentient

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creatures as potential objects of violence as well. An arson attack in which no living creature is harmed is not, however, on this decontestation, an act of violence but an example of non-violent direct action. Needless to say the opponents of environmental activism have no problem in endorsing the FBI’s account of terrorism as the ‘unlawful use of force or violence . . . against persons or property’, although the understanding of what violence is may be left implicit rather than explicit.10 One writer on political violence has a view on the person/property distinction that comes to the aid of the ELF perspective. For John Keane the ‘term violence should not be weighed down by elitist presumptions, such as the modern bourgeois conviction that “violence against things” is somehow equivalent to “violence against people”, as if “property” equals “people”, as if entering a military base by cutting through its reinforced steel fence and occupying its runway is the same as dropping bombs on living people from flying machines 10,000 metres up in the air’ (2004: 34). Keane argues that it is important to hold to an ‘older and more precise’ meaning of violence as physical force used against people, rather than the more contemporary overstretched versions of the concept. ‘Violence needs to be defined more soberly, with less normative flourish. It is better understood as more or less intended, direct but unwanted physical interference by groups and/or individuals with the bodies of others’ (2004: 35). On this view Pickering has misunderstood the nature of his own movement, in deliberately seeking to damage property but leaving living bodies unharmed, the ELF does indeed constitute a non-violent organisation. Keane’s view is not, however, universal amongst analysts of violence and terror. Jack P. Gibbs, in an account of the nature of terrorism that we will return to, holds that ‘writers often suggest that only humans can be targets of violence, but many journalists, officials and historians have identified instances of destruction or damage of non-human objects (e.g. buildings, domesticated animals, crops) as terrorism. Moreover, terrorists pursue their ultimate goal through inculcation of fear and humans do fear damage or destruction of particular nonhuman objects’ (Gibbs, 1989: 331). The final point made here is important, and concerns the relationship between violence and terror. If we believe that the purpose of labelling an activity as ‘terrorist’ is to denote that it is intended to cause fear and change behaviour because of that fear, then it seems we will have to do more than merely look at whether persons or property are directly targeted. If we believe that people can be made fearful through indirect effects and made to change their behaviour as a result, then it must at least be possible that attacks on property that have this effect can reasonably be labelled terrorist acts. If we further believe that it would be absurd to argue that people have been terrorised by non-violent acts, we have to allow for attacks on property to be considered both violent and potentially terrorising. The question then, in this context, revolves around the status of physical attacks on property and whether such attacks are (Pickering, Gibbs, Arnold, FBI) or are not (ELF, Keane, Taylor) examples of violence. Or perhaps even this is not the right question, even if we accept that these are all examples of violence, in normative terms there may be as much difference between one example of

52 Ecological politics against democracy violence and another as between locking someone up for ten minutes to prevent a major catastrophe, and depriving someone of their liberty, with no grounds, for their entire life. Even if we accept the Pickering/Gibbs/Arnold/FBI view, we should not be willing to consider the labelling of an act as ‘violent’ as the end of the matter. The form, purpose, and extent of the violence will all be relevant to any normative assessment of a politically violent act or series of acts. One can accept that the destruction of property will have a psychological effect on people, as well as increasing the economic costs incurred by the owner of the property and possibly its insurers. This may be considered a form of ‘violence’ against the person even though the person is not attacked directly, as it may lead to some of the outcomes of violence cited by Keane, such as ‘shock, speechlessness, mental torment, [and] nightmares’ (2004: 35). Indeed, and as Gibbs indicates, the psychological impact of an attack on property such as arson is surely part of the purpose of (at least many) such attacks. Attacks on the property of lumber companies could hardly be expected to bring a stop to logging activities unless there was an expected reaction on the part of logging company workers, directors, and shareholders. So, if we are joining Keane in defining violence in terms of the psychological reactions that actions generate; that is, focusing on the fear, panic, and concomitant changes in behaviour that can be engendered, then attacks on property would seem clear candidates for inclusion as acts of violence and, potentially, terror. At one level this may seem obtuse, as the inanimate objects of these attacks cannot react in either rational or emotional ways to attacks upon them. But this is of course far too narrow a view. It would seem absurd to suppose that attacks on property cannot give rise to the kinds of reactions that Keane is interested in. My house is an inanimate object, but if someone blows it up in an attempt to intimidate me and change my behaviour there is a strong chance, to say the least, that they would succeed. Given the strong indirect effects there is a sense in which an attack on my home or workplace would be an attack on me, despite the inanimate nature of the immediate target. Furthermore the extensive destruction of homes and other property has often been used as a weapon of intimidation. The relevant area of distinction may not be the apparently clear-cut divide between attacks on property and attacks on people (which is not as clear when psychological reactions are factored in), but may rather lie in the more difficult area of assessing proportionality, the relevancy of targets, and respecting the immunity of non-combatants. Attacking a lumber mill may be a violent act, but a very different one from fire-bombing a residential street.

Back to terror and eco-terror Even if we accept that acts of ‘ecotage’, such as arson and monkeywrenching, constitute acts of violence even when no living entity is harmed directly, are they also acts of ‘terror’? Of all conceptual questions this is perhaps as far from ‘merely semantic’ as one can get. The framing of direct activism as ‘terrorist’, and the assessment of direct acts as being ‘acts of terror’ by the state, affect fundamentally the kind of response the state will claim is legitimate, and the

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forms of statutes it employs, in response. Environmental activism has in recent years become entangled in the discourse on terror, with opponents in particular seeking to label direct action environmentalism as ‘eco-terrorism’ and seeking harsh punishments for its proponents.11 There have been proposals for a specific crime of eco-terrorism to be recognised by stature law in a number of US States, including, for example, Washington State and Pennsylvania.12 If enacted, these laws would enforce harsher penalties for criminal acts committed for environmental purposes than they would for the same crimes if they are committed absent any link to an environmental campaign. Yet, as we have seen, even those who advocate violence in defence of the environment rail against those who seek to portray organisations such as the ELF as terrorists (Pickering, 2003). The question of whether the activities of groups such as Earth First!, the ELF, and the ALF are terrorist revolves around a number of factors. We have discussed the distinction between attacks against people and attacks on property, but there are further questions in defining terrorism: regarding whether a terrorist movement is necessarily revolutionary, or whether a phenomenon such as ‘special-interest terrorism’ can really exist, whether attacks on people are terroristic when confined to military and security forces, or whether this is rather guerrilla warfare, whether states can be terrorist, whether terrorist acts are necessarily directed against symbolic targets, and so on. Not all of these issues will be germane to a consideration of ‘eco-terrorism’, but clearly some will. There is also the ‘most important, yet sadly most neglected question in the whole literature on terrorism; can the use of terrorism . . . ever be morally justifiable?’13 ‘Terrorism’ is, like most of the reasonably complex concepts used in political discourse, a difficult and contested notion, with different accounts offering a range of intensional components. Symeonidou-Kastanidou notes that one reason for failure to arrive at a generally acceptable definition of terrorism is that ‘throughout history, a wide range of diverse behaviours and situations have commonly been perceived and described as terrorist acts’ (2004: 18). This is to account rather than explain – the question is why have such a diverse range of activities all been described, by various times and by various people, as ‘terrorist’? One reason is that the characterisation of an act as terrorist ‘usually involves a politically-based evaluation’ (2004: 20), which is to say that understandings of political activity are themselves ideologically filtered. Not only do we have dispute as to whether an act is terroristic, but also acts that are accepted as such might be morally excused on the grounds that a marginalised section of the population has no alternative political strategy open to them. Even amongst scholars attempting disinterested understandings of the nature of terrorism there are significant differences between accounts, which is suggestive of the complex nature of the task of specifying a set of conditions under which activity can be reasonably defined as terrorist. Attempts at short, succinct definitions have the problem of frequently encompassing a wide range of activity as terrorist, as they do not specify a sufficiently comprehensive set of conditions, and do not allow fine-grained distinctions between different forms of ‘violent’ behaviour. For example Rubenstein treats terrorism as ‘acts of small group

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violence for which arguable claims of mass representation can be made’ (Rubenstein, 1987: 31). This picks up on certain aspects that may frequently be associated with terrorist acts, that they are undertaken for political motives which are often claimed to represent the ‘true wishes’ of the majority. But what of acts where no such claims are made? Groups inspired by religious values may believe the establishment of a theocracy is the will of God, regardless of the level of popular support for such an ambition. If this groups engages in violent acts in pursuit of its goals are they not terrorists merely because they do not claim ‘mass representation’ for their aims? Such short definitions also have the problem of leaving much out of the account – does the application of the terrorist label depend upon the form of organisation a group adopts? Or on the question of whether it seeks the revolutionary overthrow of the socio-economic system or merely to change one norm or policy within the existing system? Or on whether a group targets inanimate objects only or whether it also targets human beings, as so on? Any account of terrorism that seeks to address all of these dimensions will inevitably itself be multidimensional. One such multidimensional account is put forward by Jack P. Gibbs (1989: 330), who suggests that we should understand and delimit the notion of terrorism in the following terms: Terrorism is illegal violence or threatened violence directed against human or nonhuman objects, provided that it: 1) was undertaken or ordered with a view to altering or maintaining at least one putative norm in at least one particular territorial unit or population; 2) has secretive, furtive and/or clandestine features that were expected by the participants to conceal their personal identity and/or their future location; 3) was not undertaken or ordered to further the permanent defence of some area; 4) was not conventional warfare and because of their concealed personal identity, concealment of their future location, their threats, and/or their spatial mobility, the participants perceived themselves as less vulnerable to conventional military action; and 5) was perceived by the participants as contributing to the normative goal previously described (supra) by inculcating fear of violence in persons (perhaps an indefinite category of them) other than the immediate target of the actual or threatened violence and/or by publicizing some cause. Whilst there may be problems with this definition (why would not an attack intended to terrorise only the direct target of the attack (an animal research company, for example) not qualify as an act of terrorism?) it offers a reasonably complex and comprehensive attempt to capture the phenomenon, and is explicitly designed to systematise and add rigour to the intuitive understandings of terrorism that tend to underpin journalistic and popular discussions. It does, however, fall prey to Taylor’s objection to ‘broad’ accounts of terrorism in that it clearly

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includes within its remit attacks on ‘nonhuman objects’. By contrast Taylor (1998: 25) endorses the following account: The distinguishing characteristic of the terrorist . . . is a deliberate decision to abandon [conventional moral] restraints or to refuse to accept as binding the prevailing moral distinctions between belligerents and neutrals, combatants and non-combatants, appropriate and inappropriate targets, legitimate and illegitimate methods. The terrorist knows that others will regard his actions as shocking or as atrocities, and this is one reason why he acts as he does, for his object in using terror . . . is to create a ‘new consciousness’ by methods which provoke extreme emotional reactions – panic, horror, revulsion, outrage, sympathy . . . The nature of the act, not the status of the persons who commit it, is the critical factor. Note that this account does not take an explicit position on the human/non-human object division. It is at least possible that attacks on non-human objects of sufficient symbolic importance (think of Rosebraugh’s recommendations in the previous chapter) would provoke the necessary kinds of reaction. What is important here, however, is the idea of a loss of moral constraints on the terrorist’s part, the failure to accept the ‘prevailing moral distinctions’ between ‘belligerents and neutrals, combatants and non-combatants’. If we take this distinguishing criterion seriously, then one might well want to argue that the kinds of actions taken by ELF do not constitute terrorist acts. Their targets are carefully chosen, and they clearly believe that both the owners and operators of institutions such as sawmills and lumber companies, and holiday resort and housing developers are belligerents in the appropriate sense. Steve Vanderheiden also argues that this distinction between carefully chosen and random targeting is crucial. In an analysis applying the tenets of just war theory to ecotage, he notes that ‘the primary moral transgression of terrorism lies in its failure to respect the distinction between combatants and non-combatants’ (2005: 427). The random nature of terrorism, with indiscriminate targeting of innocents, is seen here as part of its very nature. The ‘secondary target’ of a terrorist attack is the broader public, who will suffer the feelings of panic and terror and may make behavioural changes as a result. A relevant question in relation to ecotage, then, is ‘whether or not the secondary target may be adequately terrorized when the primary target includes property but not persons, and the threatened future attack promises adherence to the same distinction’ (2005: 427). Here ‘not only are persons themselves not targeted, but also . . . ordinary persons need not fear for their property’ (2005: 427). This however, raises a problem – whose beliefs about who are ‘combatants’ and ‘belligerents’ do we employ in order to operationalise the concept? Whilst the owners of sawmills or holiday developments might not see themselves, or be seen by the general public, as ‘combatants’ in some great battle over the future of the planet, the activists certainly do view them in these terms. For the ELF the Vail Ski Resort just is a legitimate target, whatever the wider public opinion may believe. Similarly a religious fundamentalist may well believe all those who are

56 Ecological politics against democracy not co-religionists are legitimate targets in a religious war (think of the militant Anabaptists in sixteenth century Europe). Most of we ‘ordinary persons’ engage in environmentally damaging activities from time to time. If I am about to fly to a conference, and a radical ecological group severely damages the aeroplane (on the ground, whilst it is empty, taking care not to harm anyone, and so on) as part of a protest against dumping carbon in the upper atmosphere, was it or I a legitimate target, and so a combatant in the battle for the Earth’s future? Clearly we cannot just accept the accounts of the activists as to who is a belligerent as authoritative; conversely, however, the acceptance of ‘prevailing moral norms’ as authoritative risks uncritically imposing the very conventional norms that some groups in society will be struggling against. It may be the case that ‘the nature of the act . . . is the critical factor’, but the question of who gets to frame it is equally important. How do we cope with the problem of defining the terrorist act? We require an account that will allow us to make some normative distinctions between different acts taking place in different circumstances. So despite Taylor’s objections to accounts that incorporate attacks on property, I will for the moment employ Gibbs’ account in order to assess the activity of environmental direct action groups. There are two points to make in defence of this approach. First, it is at the very least unproven that attacks on property are not capable of inflicting feelings of ‘panic, horror’, and so on upon a target audience. Certainly if no psychological response was expected it would be difficult to explain the act. Second, and more important, the employment of a broad definition leaves open the normative status of ‘terrorist’ activity. Narrow accounts such as that endorsed by Taylor and Vanderheiden are designed to combine definition and moral condemnation. If terrorism can be defined sufficiently narrowly that it must include random violence against innocent targets, then it stands condemned almost axiomatically (though one might, as Walzer (2000) suggests, think of possible examples where this is not the case). If, however, the account is drawn in a less pejorative manner, then we may find ourselves in a position of defending some forms of terrorism, under some circumstances, as morally acceptable. This only appears counter-intuitive if we have already decided that terrorism must be morally reprehensible. Whereas perhaps we should join the FBI and include cutting fishing nets as a terrorist act, but also be prepared to defend this act when certain circumstances prevail. Gibbs’ relatively broad account will provide us with a framework by which we can assess whether (at least some of ) the acts of groups such as Earth First!, the ELF, or the ALF should be considered to be acts of terror, without prejudice to the question of whether such acts may be justified.

Environmental direct action: eco-terror or civil disobedience? To take the initial (unnumbered) of Gibbs’ criteria, terrorism is violence, actual or threatened, directed against human or non-human targets. We have discussed the violence/non-violence question in the previous section. If acts of physical force, such as arson, against non-human targets are counted as violent (and as we have seen a former ELF spokesperson thinks they should be) then many

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environmental actions would be potential candidates for acts of terror, but certainly not all. Acts that serve to make the protestor vulnerable, rather than the opponent, such a tree-sitting, do not come under the rubric of ‘acts of violence against human or non-human targets’. Acts such as arson against new developments are also of course illegal under existing laws, and this separates ELF-type actions from the ‘violence’ committed by companies when they legally fell forests or build over ecologically sensitive areas. Whether acts such as illegal logging should be considered terrorist on this broad account is something we can return to. Radical environmentalists certainly seek to overturn ‘at least one putative norm’. If they are ‘merely’ concerned about, say, the preservation of wilderness or species (as Dave Foreman and Earth First! claimed to be) they wish society to revalue those entities. Frequently, however, environmental direct action is claimed by groups (such as the ELF) linked to the anti-civilisation agenda, seeking the wholesale revaluation of values in society. Either way the actions that qualify above also qualify on criterion (1). On criterion (2) there is no doubt that groups such as the ELF organise in a cellular manner in order to avoid detection and make themselves difficult for lawenforcement agencies to penetrate. The UK Home Office accuses the ‘animal rights extremist’ movement of organising in a ‘quasi-terrorist cellular structure across the country’ (Blair and Blunkett, 2004: 9), as if this form of organisation in itself was sufficient for terrorist status to be ascribed. Given that the ELF has a similar structure (2) also seems to hold for some environmental direct actions. For opponents of environmental direct action, criterion (3) would probably seem quite straightforward, attacks on developments, company buildings, or machinery are clearly not for the ‘permanent defence of some area’, which would indicate ‘legitimate’ military activity, but are rather targeted attacks on the institutions and symbols of what radical environmentalists oppose. In terms of the self-understandings of radical environmentalists, however, there is a whole rhetoric of self-defence and the ‘defence of mother Earth’ which forms part of the justifications for direct actions. Activists do see themselves as ‘defending’ the whole of the natural world against a rapacious corporate culture that ‘is destroying all life on the planet. The only way, at this point in time, to stop that continued destruction of life is to by any means necessary take the profit motive out of killing’ (ELF, 2001: cover). Criteria (4) and (5) appear relatively straightforward, the concealed identity of activists is certainly designed to make them less vulnerable to state, if not exactly ‘conventional military’ action, and there is little doubt, judging from their own publications, that radical environmentalists wish to change the behaviour of people beyond the immediate target through inculcating fear of further acts of force.14 So, despite the self-understandings of many activists of themselves as nonviolent defenders of the Earth, it appears on Gibbs’ reading of terrorism to be sensible to accept that some acts of radical environmentalists should qualify as acts of terror. It is very important to understand what such a claim does and particularly does not entail. It does entail that organisations that engage in violence in order to achieve environmental-political goals can be reasonably considered terrorist organisations. It does not entail that every act carried out in the name of

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that organisation is a terrorist act. It does not entail that other environmental direct actions should not, as Jennifer Welchman suggests, come under the rubric of legitimate civil disobedience. It only allows us to view actions through an ‘ideal-typical’ account of what terrorism is, actual cases are likely to be messy, hitting some of these criteria but not others, and so boundary problems will remain. Most importantly, in terms of the normative argument to be pursued here, it does not entail that eco-terrorism is unjustified, nothing I have said so far implies that. This is something I will come back to at the conclusion of this chapter. Before that, I want to consider some counter-arguments to the claim that certain forms of environmental direct action, as currently practised, constitute examples of terrorism. One alternative view is that ‘ecotage’ should count as an example of civil disobedience, and the other is constituted by the activists’ own claim that, whatever else they may be, they are certainly not terrorists. The former argument is made by Jennifer Welchman, who suggests that the concept of civil disobedience in wide currency reflects a set of concerns prevalent in the United States in the 1960s, but which have less relevance today. Of particular concern at the time was the question of the draft for the war in Vietnam. This led to an interest in ‘indirect’ forms of civil disobedience – as one cannot directly ‘disobey a government policy of “containment” of communism’ (2001: 103). The nearest one can get is disobedience of laws or policies, innocuous in themselves, that buttress the offending policies such as trespass laws (2001: 103). These indirect protests ‘symbolized the rejection of government policies by some portion of the citizenry’, and this symbolic nature entailed that they were interpreted as a form of political speech. Since ‘it is merely speech it can neither be considered terrorism, no matter how indiscriminate the inconvenience caused nor criminality even if, as in the case of tax refusal, the protestor benefits from her illegality’ (2001: 103). This understanding of civil disobedience as communication was picked up, on Welchman’s view, by John Rawls and Carl Cohen, and has as a result become the conventional wisdom as to the nature of civil disobedience. Welchman urges us to revert to a slightly older tradition, associated with Bedau’s (1961) account of civil disobedience as occurring when one ‘acts illegally, publicly, nonviolently, and conscientiously with the intent to frustrate (one of ) the laws, policies, or decisions of . . . government’ (Bedau, in Welchman, 2001: 100). This allows us to include acts that are deliberately intended to directly frustrate a law or policy, but which are not intended primarily as acts of communication, despite their ‘public’ aspect. Welchman’s example of an act that would ‘count’ as civil disobedience according to Bedau’s account but not for Rawls/Cohen is problematic. The Underground Railroad in nineteenth century America sought to make fugitive slaves unrecoverable, so making the ‘ “Fugitive Slave Law” unworkable’ (Welchman, 201: 103). This was covert activity and it is not clear that it would satisfy Bedau’s criteria in that it was not ‘public’. Welchman claims, however, that covert acts can be part of the repertoire of civil disobedience. The ‘civil disobedience as communication’ view, however, makes this impossible: ‘Covert acts, always problematic for those who believed that political acts were not truly civil unless open and accountable, became even harder to include within the

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category of civil disobedience. . . . civil disobedience was now a mode of address, and thus, must be publicly made to command serious attention’ (2001: 103–4). If we move away from the Rawlsian notion of civil disobedience as an act of communication, we should ‘recognize that violence, threats of violence, covert acts of sabotage, blackmail, and even assault, are all means by which laws and legal practices might be obstructed . . . Direct assaults upon personal security pose perhaps the greatest threat to sociability, and so we might argue that [they] . . . should be excluded altogether. But violence against property, whether public or covert, is another matter. Tree-spiking, accompanied by adequate and convincing warning of the risks of handling affected trees does not appear to stretch civility to the breaking point. Thus we should recognize eco-sabotage as a form of civil disobedience’ (Welchman, 2001: 105). If Welchman is right, then the ELF, with its campaign of violence against property, could claim to be involved in a campaign of civil disobedience, not ecoterrorism, with all that might entail for how state and society should respond to this form of activity. Without such an accommodating account of civil disobedience, the ‘activities of groups like Greenpeace and GenetiX Snowball would have to be classified as harassment, vandalism, or even terrorism. But this seems plainly ridiculous’ (2001: 98). The problem here is that even on Welchman’s preferred definition, it is far from clear that eco-sabotage can be brought under the rubric of civil disobedience with any consistency. Bedau, we might remind ourselves, set the conditions of civil disobedience as acting ‘illegally, publicly, non-violently, and conscientiously’. A campaign of arson against economic targets such as the ELF’s appears to fail on at least two counts: whilst we can accept that is both illegal and performed for reasons of conscience, it is certainly not public, and by Welchman’s own admission it involves violence against property. She could of course claim to making a necessary conceptual move beyond Bedau’s account to include violent, covert acts, but she provides no justification for this, claiming instead to be reverting to (Bedau’s) ‘older’ tradition of thinking about civil disobedience. It thus seems that ecotage can be brought under the rubric of civil disobedience only at the cost of inconsistency in thinking about the nature of the latter. We cannot insist both that acts of civil disobedience be public and nonviolent and at the same time endorse acts that are both covert and violent as deeds that do not break the bonds of civility. As for the rejection of the ‘terrorist’ label from activists themselves, this operates in three ways; in terms of accounting for ELF-type activities as clearly something other than terrorism, in attacking the whole labelling exercise and the ‘war on terror’, and in contrasting the activities of radical environmentalists with the acts of ‘state terrorism’ carried out by the governmental opponents of environmental activists. Two or all three of these elements are frequently combined in the same account. We have seen already that Leslie James Pickering accepts that the ELF activities that he supports are acts of violence, why then, are they not also acts of terror? That he thinks they are not is clear: ‘the pigs are working harder than ever to brainwash the public into calling the ELF terrorists and the Pentagon a force for freedom’ (Pickering, 2003). Why are the ELF not terrorists? – because one

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has to ‘recognise the right and at times the necessity and duty of all people to defend ourselves when taking a beating, to fight for our very lives’ (Pickering, 2003). This constitutes a standard rhetorical move in the discourse of radical environmentalism; often taking their cue from the philosophy of deep ecology, proponents of direct action claim that, as our ‘transpersonal’ sense of self extends from our corporeal body to the natural world, acts to save that world constitute acts of self-defence, to which we have a right.15 As an approach to the justification of direct action, this argument is dangerous, as it seeks to bypass ethical considerations in favour of an ontological understanding of the nature of the self such that we ‘act because of what we are’. As one of the chief proponents of transpersonal ecology enthusiastically acknowledges, ethics becomes redundant in this scenario (Fox, 1990).16 Even if we recognise a right to self-defence, as noted in the last chapter it cannot follow axiomatically that we have the right to do anything we like in pursuit of that right. An alternative approach is to attack the whole notion of ‘terrorism’ and the recent ‘war on terror’. The latter in particular, can be read as an attempt by the state to generate fear amongst its citizens and thus generate loyalty to itself. It ‘should be obvious what the state gets out of terrorism. . . . “eternal threat, eternal loyalty” ’ (Anon, 2003b: 10). Furthermore the ‘indiscriminate nature of terrorism is mirrored in the indiscriminate nature of its definition’ which at worst descends to ‘anything opposed to us’ (Anon, 2003b: 10). The state then has the opportunity to pass draconian legislation which has ‘practically extinguished any freedoms of assembly, association and expression’ (Anon, 2003b: 10). These observations are then tied into the wider anarcho-primitivist critique of civilisation. Civilisation has always needed the ‘perennial wild men’ against which to set itself in opposition, be they Aristotle’s barbarians or the ‘wild men’ of medieval times. The ‘terrorist’ fits this bill for contemporary civilisation, frequently portrayed as ‘beasts’ by mainstream politicians and media (Anon, 2003b: 11). State responses to terrorism, however, such as the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, are ‘in orders of magnitude greater than the original terrorist acts’ showing that the ‘wild’ or ‘savage’ is ‘recast as a projection of the civiliser’s own unrestrained violence, their true savagery alibied’ (Anon, 2003b: 11). The ‘war on terror’ is thus a misnomer, as the ‘Civiliser’s true motive is to exert absolute control over the entire world, over what is wild in human nature and beyond’ (Anon, 2003b: 11). Against such an oppressive, totalitarian agenda, who could gainsay the ELF’s claims to be fighting a battle for freedom and the defence of the wild against the oppressive depredations and state and capital? The problem here is that the delegitimation of the ‘war on terror’, even if successful, does nothing in itself to justify direct action environmentalism. Even if the state is using the war on terror to generate support and curtail civil liberties, this does not demonstrate that the specific tactics employed by groups such as ELF are justifiable. The ‘war’ may justify resistance, but such justified resistance may be limited to acts of ‘public, non-violent’ civil disobedience. Further argument, at least, is necessary to show that state actions justify an ELF-type response. Furthermore, even on more sober attempts to define terrorism than those offered by politicians engaged in the

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‘war’17 some activities and the organisational form of ELF fits squarely, as we have seen, within a complex definition of terrorism, whilst this does not entail that ELF activity is not justified, it does show that the argument against the war on terror is only part of the equation. The third strategy is to attack the underlying distinction in discussions of terrorism between acts of violence committed by the state and acts of violence committed by non-state actors in pursuit of political goals. Why is there a widespread assumption that only non-state actors commit acts of terror, when states have a vast arsenal of the weaponry of violence at their disposal? It tends to be states that drop bombs ‘from flying machines 10,000 meters up in the air’, not non-state actors. Furthermore, if attacks on inanimate objects can be examples of violence and terror when carried out by ecological activists, what about illegal acts carried out by corporations and government agencies? Many lumber companies have been found guilty of illegal logging, is not this an example of violence against nature? Why is the account of violence entered on only one side of the ledger? If ecological activists could generate a rhetoric of ‘state terrorism’ and ‘corporate violence’ it may well assist them in terms of how the discourse of environmental politics works to frame their own activities. There would be a more level political playing field if violence and terror were recognised on both sides. However, in normative terms the problem is the same as that with their previous objection; relabelling the activities of the state and their corporate opponents does nothing in itself to tell us what normative judgement we should make about environmental direct action. This will still be contextual and relative to the justifications that the defenders of environmental activism can bring to bear in a particular case.

Conclusion The question of the characterisation of, and the justification for, environmental direct action presents some interesting problems. For its defenders, ecotage constitutes a justifiable form of civil disobedience, but for its opponents, the attacks on property characteristic of ecotage constitute acts of terror, and the passage of state legislation against eco-terrorism and the response of organisations such as the FBI suggest state support for this view. This leaves us with two problems: first, if ELF-type actions count as terrorist acts then ‘terrorism’ is a concept so broad that it can have little, if any, normative traction. As we have seen in employing Gibbs’ criteria of terrorism, to categorise is not (necessarily) to also make an ethical judgement. We could adopt a conception of terrorism that allows us to capture everything from the cutting of fishing nets and the mass murder of random persons, but this conflation obscures more than it enlightens. Although Gibbs’ understanding is nuanced, the political consequences of carrying the terrorist label are surely too important for us to think we can use a broad conception of terrorism and then make distinctions within it (‘type I terrorism is justified but type II is not’). For all the problems in conflating definition with moral condemnation, the negative consequences of being branded a terrorist by the state – ‘thereby sharply curtailing the civil liberties of suspected saboteurs and their

62 Ecological politics against democracy associates’ (Vanderheiden, 2005: 430) – are such that Taylor and Vanderheiden must be right. Our definition has to capture the distinction between acts (including attacks on property) that are intended both to damage a target group and instil deep and widespread fear in the broader population (by, for example, attacking the broader population in order to bring pressure to bear on a government), from attacks carefully targeted on property which have limited objectives and where every attempt is made to avoid harming living beings. In practice this distinction, like most, will have blurred boundaries (the owner of the Vail Ski Resort may well have felt victim of a terror attack) but the normative distinction is so substantive that it has to be recognised in our conceptual language. As it is, given the accounts of both terrorism and civil disobedience that are on offer, one is almost compelled to make a binary choice – if acts cannot be drawn under the umbrella of civil disobedience they must be considered acts of terror. If, however, the cutting of fishing nets constitutes an act of terror then we have to allow that some terrorist acts, within the context of existing democratic political systems, may be morally defensible – however counter-intuitive that may initially seem. We need either to make some fine judgements between different forms of terrorism, or, far better, begin to conceptualise the vast middle ground between acts that are recognised as paradigmatic forms of civil disobedience, and terrorism of the mass-murder type. We require a notion along the lines of ‘covert conscientious sabotage’ that is recognised as qualitatively different to random acts of mass violence against people, but which at the same time is also distinct from civil disobedience.18 Separating this activity from terrorism does nothing to imply that it should be tolerated in any particular case, but the criteria under which it might by justified would be substantially different to what might be required to justify terrorism. Whilst it seems to make sense to think in terms of a ‘continuum’ from terrorism to civil disobedience the ground between is radically under-theorised. A further problem to interpretation is that of justification, and making judgements about the justifications on offer, for environmental direct action. Direct action is seen as an archetypically non-democratic form of politics, in which a self-selected group of people (often seen as ‘extremists’) take action on behalf of a cause for which there is little public support, the assumption being that if there was sufficient support the democratic route would lay open before them. Furthermore when this action is based upon a comprehensive conception of the good, as environmental direct action will tend to be, it is also illiberal because it is not based upon beliefs that it would be reasonable to expect others to share. Radical environmentalists do not pursue their arguments in terms of public reason, nor with the democratic consent of the wider population, and they thus appear to violate both the liberal and the democratic tenets of liberal democracy. We will examine this question of the possible justifications for direct action politics in liberal democratic settings in the next chapter.

4

The justification of environmental direct action

Introduction We saw in the last chapter that, on a sufficiently (but not absurdly) broad definition of ‘terrorism’, some of the forms of direct action taken by radical environmental groups (in particular arson attacks on both public and private property) could be considered terrorist acts, in that, whilst they are ‘only’ attacks on inanimate objects, they are carried out by clandestine groups seeking to change (at least one) social norm through inculcating a fear of violence, and on most account it is this attempt to induce a psychological response and corresponding change in behaviour that marks out terrorist violence.1 This behaviour, it needs to be stressed, covers only a small portion of the activists’ repertoire, and Bron Taylor for one rightly cautions against any assumption that violence on the fringe indicates a more widespread belief in the acceptability of violence within the environmental direct action movement. Nonetheless, arson attacks have unsurprisingly generated a great deal of public notoriety for groups such as the ELF, and have been the main source of evidence for those seeking to promote new legislation against ‘ecoterrorism’. Indeed it is of course part of the point of such activity to attract public attention. The point made at the end of the last chapter was that, given the very real political ramifications of the ‘terrorist’ label, it should be defined narrowly rather than broadly. Still, even if we are prepared to label a minority of environmental direct actions ‘terrorist’, this tells us nothing, despite the rhetorical power of the ‘terrorist’ label, as to whether such activity is justifiable. The question of justification is one that should be left open to normative enquiry. I will, in this chapter, remain agnostic on the question of whether environmental direct action should be labelled terrorist or be considered something else entirely (I will however concede that it cannot be civil disobedience as standardly conceived in the liberal tradition). I want, in this chapter, to move away from a direct concern the rather emotive ‘terror’ question, and explore the normative dimensions of direct action politics within a democratic setting. I will ask whether non-democratic environmental direct action2 (of the kind which does not fit within accepted accounts of civil disobedience) is justified under conditions of ‘legitimate’ democratic governance, and if so on what grounds. If direct action in general cannot be justified,

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it would seem axiomatic that anything recognised as ‘eco-terrorism’ certainly would not be either. Three elements need to be specified at the outset. First, we shall be considering democracy in the form that would make it most difficult to justify non-democratic forms of direct action. When ‘democratic’ regimes are believed to be corrupt and open to undue influence by those with above average resources then justification for opposing ‘democratic’ outcomes might be relatively straightforward – they are unfair. In the context of this chapter, then, democracy will not only satisfy the conditions of ‘majority rule; universal suffrage; and free voting’ (van Parijs, 1996: 102) but will also be ‘ideal’, in the sense that it is ‘deliberatively legitimate’, and so recognised by all involved as being fair and inclusive.3 Second, the notion of political justification will be held distinct from that of political legitimacy. We can believe we have a reason to accept a policy (even if we disagree with it) because it was enacted through a process we recognise as legitimate. We can also believe we have reason to accept a policy because we believe it to be either morally right or at least not morally offensive; that is (for our purposes) because it is justified. These different reasons for acceptance have to be held distinct because problems can arise when policies that we recognise as acceptable on grounds of legitimacy, are still rejected on the grounds that we believe they are unjustified. Third, the forms of action taken by environmental activists have to be held distinct from what usually passes as ‘civil disobedience’ (Welchman, 2001), as it does not encompass the minimalism and publicity associated with the latter (see, for example, Rawls, 1999a: 176–89). Thus, by assumption, justification of environmental direct action will have to rest on different or further premises than justification of civil disobedience traditionally conceived. Justification for environmental direct action will, then, have significant hurdles to overcome. I will argue that, nonetheless, there is an important argument supporting public justification of environmental direct action, which lies in the nature of (at least an important subset of) the goods that environmentalists are seeking to protect. It is a fundamental part of the legitimation of the democratic way of doing business that there is policy reversibility. The lack of reversibility over an important range of environmental outcomes adds weight to the justification for environmental direct action. The next two sections of the chapter will establish the conceptual distinction between democratic legitimacy and justification. The following sections will look at the relationship between environmental politics and democratic process. Underlying the question that this chapter seeks to address is a view that what environmentalists want and what democracy delivers can be quite different. Whilst this may seem obviously true at an empirical level there are two possible objections to the view. One is to try and tie environmental outcomes directly into the meaning of democracy, thus a procedure that fails to deliver certain environmental goods is inherently undemocratic. I take on this argument in detail in the next chapter, and for the purposes of this chapter I merely reject it. If the reader disagrees with my analysis in the next chapter, they will have a reason to take issue with this chapter as well. The second strategy is not directly a refusal to

Environmental direct action 65 accept that democratic and environmental outcomes can come apart, but rather an attempt to show that environmental outcomes are demanded by justice, and that therefore any democratic outcome that contravenes the relevant environmental norms is in conflict with the demands of justice and should thus be overruled. I do take issue with this argument herein, suggesting that the posited environment– justice link succeeds only partially. Thus, over a range of their core concerns, environmentalists do face the dilemma of the ‘minority democrat’ when decisions go against their considered convictions. They lose out to democratically legitimate positions that are opposed to their own. How should they react to that? The penultimate section makes the argument in support of justification of direct action through policy non-reversibility, and briefly assesses the scope of this justification. The final section concludes.

Legitimacy Legitimacy, as understood here, can be a quality of both political institutions and of the legislative outcomes produced by those institutions. If, that is, a set of political institutions are accepted as legitimate then the products (laws, regulations) of those institutions will (usually) also be legitimate. This rests on the assumption that part of the legitimacy of a political institution rests upon its embodiment of fair procedures. So although the legitimacy of an institution and of a piece of legislation are analytically distinct, and may come apart in the case of procedural irregularity, for our purposes they will be treated as coterminous. Legitimacy is generally taken to be a function of process. Parkinson suggests that ‘at its most abstract’, legitimacy consists in the ‘moralization’ of authority (2003: 182); King that it describes the ‘acceptability of claims to authority’ (2003: 25). These two accounts have in common a belief that legitimacy rests on reason-giving; that what renders a political authority moral or acceptable is its commitment to giving reasons for policy decisions that can be understood and recognised as sound by those who are to submit to that authority. Note that it is this sincere commitment to public reason that renders institutions and their policy outcomes legitimate, not an expectation that everyone who lives under that authority will recognise the particular reasons given as compelling in every institutional or policy choice discussed. The practice of reason-giving invokes the notion of dialogue between the reason-giver and an audience, and the commitment to this is embodied in democratic procedures that are intended to be both fair and inclusive. This is taken, on the deliberative accounts of democracy that are centrally concerned with reason giving (and much favoured by green theorists),4 as being crucial to the legitimacy of political institutions. Goodin and Niemeyer (2003: 627) note that for deliberative democrats actual deliberation is ‘absolutely essential to democratic legitimation’. Estlund (1997) holds that even if participants reject the reasons for a policy, they can still accept them as legitimate if they accept them as emerging from a fair process that is more likely than they are, as individuals, to arrive at sound decisions. Bohman claims that public deliberation is uniquely suited to generating

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legitimate political decisions, but any such process of deliberation must be (and be seen to be) ‘inclusive and fair’ (Hauptmann, 1999: 859). Gutmann and Thompson (1996) hold that deliberation has the capacity to render non-unanimous decisions legitimate. For Joshua Cohen, the principle of deliberative inclusion ‘bridges the gap between “reasonable pluralism” and legitimate collective decisions’ (Cohen, 1996; Hauptmann, 1999: 868). Dryzek (2001) suggests that the claim at the core of deliberative democracy is that outcomes are legitimate to the extent that they receive reflective consent in an authentic deliberative process. Dryzek and List (2003) claim that for all deliberative democrats the essence of democratic legitimacy is the capacity of those affected by a decision to deliberate in the production of that decision. Deliberation, then works as a device that places the ‘losers’ in the democratic process to accept an unfavourable outcome that is nonetheless reasonable. It will be worth looking in more detail in what is being claimed here about the relationship between legitimacy and democracy, as it well help to clarify the distinction I will come to make between legitimacy and justification. At the ‘abstract level’ legitimacy was taken to entail the moralisation or acceptability of political institutions. Parkinson (2003, 2004) expands on this, noting that legitimacy is more frequently cited than explained. Following Beetham (1991), Parkinson constructs an account of legitimacy from three conditions, which he labels legality, justifiability, and consent (2003: 182–3). Authority can be ‘moralised’ (i.e. is capable of supplying moral grounds for obedience to itself) in the presence of all three of these factors. There are, in fact, four components in the Parkinson/Beetham decontestation of legitimacy: legality; source norms and content norms (which together constitute justifiability); and consent. What is important from our perspective is to assess these criteria in light of what is taken by the democracy theorists discussed earlier to be the key component of democratic legitimacy; that each person subject to a collective decision has had the opportunity to engage in a deliberative procedure prior to that collective decision being made. ‘Legality’ certainly seems to fit well with this account of legitimacy, as it refers to the ‘rules of the game’ which have to satisfy conditions of publicity (so that they can be learned) and stability (they do not have to be constantly re-learned). Legality is held ‘fairly uncontroversially subordinate to the other two’ conditions (Parkinson, 2003: 182), as the rules of the game may be just or unjust according to independent standards (a lottery to decide who gets beheaded by the state may be fair, in that all have an equal chance of the bad outcome, but it would hardly be just). ‘Content norms’ would also seem to be part of the deliberative conception of legitimacy, as they refer to the rules for dividing decision-makers from decision-followers. In a democracy, who gets to decide policy – elected officers, those selected by lot, everyone? Various schemes have been devised in order to address the ‘scale problem’ involved in establishing deliberative norms for large-scale societies, and all of course involve some set of rules regarding the division between decision-takers and decisionfollowers (which may be a rule that there should be no such division). ‘Consent’ involves the rules by which people offer their approval to decisions or regimes,

Environmental direct action 67 through acts of voting and other forms of political participation. Again, some kind of consent procedure seems at least implicit in the deliberative account of legitimacy.

Justification So far, then, so unproblematic. What about the other element of justifiability, ‘source norms’? This element is in turn subdivided, into ‘external’ source norms, which might involve ‘divine command, natural law, even scientific doctrine’ (Parkinson, 2003: 182) and ‘internal’ source norms which are either ‘tradition’ or ‘the people’. Under conditions of liberal government ‘the most legitimate source of authoritative decisions is considered to be all those people affected, rather than tradition or external sources’ (Parkinson, 2003: 182). Thus, under liberalism, the decision of ‘the people’ is taken to defeat the other internal source norm (tradition) and external source norms as well. The problem with including external source norms among the defeated class here is that they refer to a whole set of contrasting justificatory roots, which do not share the same referent point as an internal norm. They are directly related to one or more substantive principles. Why should ‘the people speaking’ trump appeals to religious or moral beliefs? As these are alternative sources, there is no reason to suppose that they will not in many cases conflict, and when they do, Parkinson offers no reason as to why ‘the people’ should, under liberal conditions, always be considered the privileged power. Claims of epistemological privilege on scientific grounds or through claims of more adequate reasoning are quite compatible with liberal-democratic (or indeed deliberative) forms of government. ‘Justification’ in this sense then, is also intimately concerned with reasongiving, but, crucially, here the reasons themselves, and the beliefs they underpin, count for more than the commitment to give reasons embodied in the notion of legitimacy. Justification does not have to rest on the truth or falsity of beliefs, but rather on such beliefs being grounded in reasons that are ‘stable in the face of acute and sustained criticism by others and of new information’ (Gaus, 1996: 31). The probability that such beliefs can remain ‘undefeated’ without being victorious opens space for the existence of multiple sets of publicly justified beliefs. Gaus’ requirement for public justification in actual dialogue moves him away from the Rawlsian condition of ‘reflective equilibrium’ as a form of justification,5 and offers a theory of justification which appears compatible with deliberative democrats’ insistence on the importance of ‘genuine’ dialogue. It also opens up space for the existence of ‘minority democrats’ whose public justifications for a policy are undefeated in argument, but have been defeated politically in whatever process of democratic consent is operative.

The environmentalist’s problem with democracy – a reprise of the theme from Chapter 1 The environmentalist’s complaint in this regard is that democratic procedures fail to guarantee the realisation of crucial ecological values, and can thus be unjustified,

68 Ecological politics against democracy even though legitimate. This takes us back to some of the arguments about the weakness of democracy rehearsed in Part I, although here I want to use them in consideration of the justification of direct action within a democratic polity, not as reasons for the suspension of democratic politics. ‘The presence of democratic institutions and due process is insufficient to save the ecological base on which all life and all human choices depend’ (Westra, 1998: 16). Furthermore democracies are no different to non-democratic regimes in terms of the threat they pose to the environment (Westra, 1998: 53). The problem lies not in the form of political system per se but in the content of the values that motivate the choices ‘we’ make. As discussed in Chapter 1, Westra holds that it is doubtful that people would freely embrace the choices that would in turn curtail their freedom (Westra, 1998: 198). Indeed our attachment to these freedoms has led to a proliferation of individual and aggregate rights that are undesirable from an environmental point of view (Westra, 1998: 57). Thus the liberal protection of individual freedoms stand condemned along with the ‘facile’ reliance on the democratic preferences of the majority in the liberal-democratic formula. Westra’s synopsis reflects Minteer and Pepperman Taylor’s (2002) view that much environmental writing fears both the humanism and the materialism of democracy. Her argument is also consistent with Goodin’s (1992) claim that environmentalists are attached to a substantive theory of value, and could only have attachment to a form of political process if that process constituted an appropriate method for realising those values in the world. If democracy, as Westra believes, is not an appropriate process, it should be rejected in favour of something more effective. Faith in democracy has in fact caused our environmental crisis, according to Westra, because we believe that the choices and preferences of a democracy should be ‘viewed as absolute, beyond discussion’ (Westra, 1998: 3). Such choices are taken to be, at least frequently, short-term and self-interested. They are, to borrow Callicott’s distinction, mere preferences as opposed to securely grounded moral values (2002: 93 – note, however, that for Westra these latter would still be problematic if they cut against the principle of integrity. It cannot be the preference/grounded moral value divide per se that matters to her argument).6 What else do we have to guide us? Not scientific advice or governmental standards (Westra, 1998: 10), but fundamental ethical principles, which can be provided for us by philosophers. Westra’s chosen fundamental principle is that of (ecological) integrity, which in uncompromising in that it prescribes infinite, non-negotiable value to life (Westra, 1998: 12). Integrity serves to ground the precautionary principle, which should be mandatory in public policy (Westra, 1998: 16), and realising the principle of integrity entails that it is ‘absolutely required’ that one-third of the area of the earth be left in a wild, unmanaged state. Integrity is ‘more basic’ than justice, and is an anti-democratic principle (Westra, 1998: 9) because democratic choices are not adequate when it comes to realising the principle (Westra, 1998: 222). The principle is, however, compatible with the idea of ‘fundamental right’, in this case the fundamental and trumping right to integrity. Only such a principle can protect people from unchosen harm, whereas democracy inflicts the preferences of the majority on the minority, which may include

Environmental direct action 69 preferences for exposure to harms, or at least risk of harms. Such democratically imposed harms cannot fit an informed consent model, as they remain unchosen by the minority, and thus the usually accepted connections between primary human rights and democracy can be shown to be weaker than usually thought (Westra, 1998: 70). Furthermore under such circumstances it is not at all obvious why the losing minority should be stoic in the face of this unchosen outcome (a position that is consistent with support for direct action based upon the principle of integrity). In the face of the failure of democratic processes to deliver on the principle of integrity, it is certainly possible to conceive of direct action as justified in opposition to the ‘wrong’ preferences of the majority, even if these preferences have been shaped in a process of deliberation. The ‘trumping right’ to integrity is resonant of the ‘right’ that former ELF spokesperson James Pickering cited, which people have to protect the Earth against the onslaught of civilisation. Putting aside the problems that would be involved in any political attempt to impose Westra’s principle of integrity on a public that has already adopted the ‘wrong’ values, in which the ‘uncritical’ defence of freedoms is symptomatic of the malady of democratic nations (Westra, 1998: 252), the problem she is struggling with is an old one. She believes that her ethical position, and the policy prescriptions that flow from it, are justified by external source norms rooted in environmental ethics. Given that this is the case, and given the importance of this ethic in overcoming what is taken to be a looming ecological crisis, what reason is there to respect the outcomes of democratic procedures (however fair and deliberative they might be) that cut against the principle of integrity? When such outcomes tolerate public or private institutions that violate the principle of integrity, why not take direct action against them? Whether intentionally or not, Westra’s approach offers a theoretical grounding for those who would take direct action in, as they see it, ‘defence’ of the environment; why should this losing minority remain stoic in the face of this unchosen (by them) violation of their values? This is a question we will return to, for the moment it is worth considering other environmentalist responses to this value conflict. Westra’s position, and her willingness to reject contemporary democratic norms is a radical one; today in the West the idea of ‘democracy’ as a valence issue, that is, as an unalloyed procedural good is deeply ingrained. Few practicing politicians would ‘run against’ democracy. If democracy is a (procedural) good, and environmental values constitute a (substantive) good, is there any way of achieving both simultaneously? One way to approach this problem is of course to seek to undermine the distinction between democracy as a procedural good and environmentalism as a substantive good, and run the two together. Here democracy may be seen as a procedural good with inherent substantive preconditions. This is an approach taken by a number of environmental theorists, including Robyn Eckersley (1996a,b), Andrew Dobson (1996a), and John Dryzek (1996). This argument is sufficiently important to merit detailed consideration, which I will reserve to the next chapter. It will suffice for the moment to observe that I believe it is ultimately unsuccessful, for reasons that will be set out there.

70 Ecological politics against democracy Environmentalism, justice, and liberal democracy There is another mode of argument available to environmentalist writers seeking to negotiate the path between legitimation and justification, and that is to appeal to justice, and in particular to rights grounded in the demands of distributive justice. The demands of justice constitute one area where democrats of a liberal inclination have long been comfortable in subordinating the possible wishes of majoritarianism in order to protect the rights they believe people have, which are founded in basic principles of fairness. If environmentalists can tie environmental desiderata into demands for rights based on justice, then the priority attached to principles of justice, according to a standard external to that of democratic legitimacy, can carry the day for environmental principles as well. Eckersley, for one, suggests that the ‘real’ debate is about how environmental justice and democracy are related, and Paul Wood has developed a book length treatment of the view that the protection of biodiversity is a matter of intergenerational justice.7 Principles of justice between generations will allow us to avoid the ‘democratic trap’ whereby the interests of future generations are sacrificed to the self-interest of a current majority (Wood, 2000: xi). Biodiversity conservation on this view is justified even if it is not in the immediate public interest to do so (Wood, 2000: xi). This, as with Westra, is because liberal-democratic government should follow a fundamental ethical principle, that of ‘the priority of biodiversity’ (Wood, 2000: xiii). Rather than Westra’s direct appeal to ecocentric notions of integrity, however, Wood makes the anthropocentric notion of justice between generations the lynchpin of his argument. Furthermore he offers readings of leading liberal theorists – Rawls, Dworkin, Raz, and Nozick – through which they are all lined up in support of the priority of his biodiversity principle. Serious problems, however, emerge in the attempt to link, in a non-contingent fashion, a commitment to intergenerational justice and the good of biodiversity protection. Biodiversity may be ‘an environmental precondition for our existence’ (Wood, 2000: xiii), but what does that entail? That we should preserve every species? Is there not, if this is the argument made for biodiversity conservation, a level of biodiversity above which, even if we think our world is more impoverished, our existence is not threatened? (And if our existence is not threatened, are our lives really impoverished because the dodo or diplodocus no longer exist? Why would this be a question of justice?) Wood responds to this foreseen line of attack with an approval of Norton’s intergenerational justice argument here. The salami slicing of one-at-a-time species loss may tip us over some catastrophe point, which entails that incremental loss of biodiversity is not equal to the incremental loss in the value of biodiversity, as any individual case of biodiversity loss might result in catastrophic value loss (Wood, 2000: 67–8). This would entail future generations inheriting a seriously impoverished world by comparison with ours, and thus justice requires the conservation of biodiversity (Wood, 2000: 131). Non-depletion of biodiversity should be considered a necessary side-constraint on human actions (Wood, 2000: 181).

Environmental direct action 71 There are problems here on at least two levels. First, there is the familiar debate as to whether there can be demands of justice operational between different generations. A recent argument to the contrary comes from Beckerman and Pasek (2001), who make the straightforward case that only entities can have rights, as future persons are not entities, they cannot have rights, be they grounded in intergenerational justice or anything else. Clearly if future generations have no rights, they can have no right to the protection of biodiversity now.8 The problem at the second level involves the interpretation on offer here of the liberal political theories Wood discusses, under each of which he claims a case for seeing the protection of biodiversity as a matter of justice, according to the principles already put forward by the four authors in question.9 An alternative reading, of Rawls and Dworkin at least, comes from David Miller. On his view biodiversity protection explicitly is not, and logically cannot, be part of the theories of justice espoused by these two liberal theorists. Rawls holds that resource use for environmental goods must be unanimously agreed; otherwise ‘there is no more justification for using the state apparatus to compel some citizens to pay for unwanted benefits that others desire than there is to force them to reimburse others for their private expenses’ (Miller, 1999: 157). Thus ‘environmental values are treated as preferences which may be pursued only within the limits set by the primary scheme of distribution that justice requires’ (Miller, 1999: 157). Short of unanimity, the state has no place enforcing the realisation of environmental goods. Similarly, Dworkin’s discussion of ‘Charles’, who has a very strong preference for the preservation of the snail-darter over the construction of a dam, is taken to be definitive of his view: ‘Dworkin makes it clear that Charles’s ambitions must be treated simply as preferences which give rise to no particular claims to justice’ (Miller, 1999: 159). It is not necessary to discuss these interpretations in detail, as the fundamental problem here is in Wood’s rejection of the ‘salami slicing’ of species on the grounds that any individual species loss may tip us over the edge into ecological catastrophe. This argument seeks to tie species loss to a ‘green’ version of the liberal harm principle. It is difficult to see how to substantiate a non-contingent claim to biodiversity preservation on this basis. There may, for example, come to be other ways of protecting ourselves from ecological catastrophe, such as the invention of machines to carry out the ecological functions of different species. This would satisfy the harm principle, but not the protection of biodiversity principle. This demonstrates the fatal problem involved in seeking to tie biodiversity protection to a version of the harm principle. The argument conflates two distinct elements, the protection of biodiversity and the prevention of ecological catastrophe. Whilst the latter is clearly intended to invoke the harm principle, the linkage between the two is far from obvious. The claim that ecological catastrophe is harm principle-violating is insufficient, there also has to be adequate linkage between species loss and such catastrophe in order to invoke the relevant liberal principle. Note that Wood is committed here to two claims if he wants to defend particular environmental policies in the light of his intergenerational

72 Ecological politics against democracy justice principle. The first is to claim a justified belief that the principle of intergenerational justice is trumping in the way that he suggests. Second, that any policy proposed on that basis is a policy that will realise the principle of intergenerational justice. To claim that with regard to principle S justification trumps legitimacy is one thing, to claim that p will produce S is however not a point of principle but a contingent (and quite possibly contentious) empirical claim.10 Even in the unlikely event of agreement on S there is always likely to be sincere disagreement as to p. So his advocation of p (e.g. biodiversity protection) through non-democratic means (we must, remember, avoid the ‘democratic trap’) must reflect certainty not only that S is justified but also that p will achieve S. In other words, supposing we agree that avoiding ecological catastrophe is a principle sufficiently important to override democratic wishes to the contrary (such as we might constitutionally bind ourselves to a ‘no ecological catastrophe’ principle. Concern for intergenerational justice might justify this, but then so may the rational self-interest of this generation.)11 There is still no reason why we should expect agreement that saving the Siberian Tiger from extinction is a way towards realising that principle now. All of that said, I should add that in respect to another important strand of environmental argument a justice-based justification is far more convincing. This concerns the distribution of environmental goods and bads amongst different groups of human beings in this generation. Authors such as Shrader-Frechette (2002) and Faber (1998) have shown that potentially life-threatening environmental burdens fall disproportionately upon the already economically disadvantaged. This seems to violate liberal theories of justice even on a Miller-type view of what they demand environmentally, as they concern goods that seem to belong within a ‘thin’ theory (Miller, 1999).

Democratic legitimacy, justification, and direct action If, then, core green issues such as biodiversity conservation cannot be brought under the rubric of justice or the necessary conditions for democracy, do we have to accept that they should be left to the outcome of the democratic process? Do greens have any justification in taking direct action in defence of such goods as biodiversity if these goods have been rejected by the population at large, in a free and fair process, in subordination to other goods that are granted a higher priority? We will assume the justification for direct action is along the lines espoused by Westra or Wood. That is, it is taken on the basis of defending the (trumping) principle of integrity, or it rests on an intergenerational justice-based argument on the need to preserve biodiversity or wilderness areas for future generations. We can assume that the activists have a sincere belief that these principles are openly justified in the Gausian sense, that is, robust in the face of criticism and new information (despite not constituting the view of the majority). Moreover, that their direct action will help to realise these principles (the belief that p will in fact lead to S) is also, for them, justified in the same sense. Nonetheless through a fair and inclusive (even in the eyes of the protestors) democratic process these values

Environmental direct action 73 have been rejected in policy-making. This merely reflects the fact that citizens are as likely to disagree as to what principles should govern public policy, or how to realise them, as they are about any other complex political or moral question. We will also assume that any laws actually broken in the continuance of direct action (such as trespass or breach of the peace) are likewise recognised by all parties as legitimate. Even if direct action was accepted as a form of civil disobedience12 it is far from clear that on the Rawlsian view it could be justified by either Westra’s or Wood’s principles. Such acts should ‘usually be limited to substantial and clear violations of justice’ (Rawls, 1999a: 183). Even if we put aside the views of theorists such as Beckerman and Pasek, and assume that there is such a thing as intergenerational justice, how can we be sufficiently convinced that developments such as GM crops, or any particular building project, really will leave future generations in a (justice-violating) inferior position? Again, we would have to be sufficiently sure that p will lead to a violation of S (we clearly will not take the protestors’ word for it) in order to confirm that civil disobedience was justified in any one case. Given the imponderable variables entailed in ascertaining whether a single development project would leave future generations better or worse off, all things considered, clearing this hurdle appears unlikely. On the influential Rawlsian view, then, it seems both that environmental direct action is unlikely to count as civil disobedience, and even if it does it is unlikely to be justified for justice-based reasons. I want to suggest however, that there is an element in the justification for democracy itself – that is in the appeal as to why we should recognise democratic outcomes as legitimate – that may open up a ‘space’ for the justification of forms of direct action in environmental matters, and possibly other spheres as well. One element in the account of democratic legitimacy is the reversibility of policy choices due to the open-ended nature of the democratic process. The democratic conversation does not cease with any one policy choice, as Habermas suggests: ‘the fallible majority opinion may be considered a reasonable basis for a common practice until further notice, namely, until the minority convince the majority that their (the minority’s) views are correct’ (1996: 306). Seyla Benhabib makes the same point: ‘the equal chance of all affected to initiate such discourse of deliberation suggests that no outcome is prima facie fixed but can be revised and subject to reexamination’ (1996: 72, my emphasis). Amy Gutmann holds that deliberation amongst free and equal citizens is the most defensible justification for provisionally settling controversial issues (1996: 344). For his part, William Rehg suggests that the ‘minority’ (i.e. outvoted) democrat has to accept that ‘At this point in time, the process of public justification tips the majority to judge differently than I do, so this is the solution we as a polity should try out for the time being’ (1997: 366, my emphasis). For many areas of policy, decisions are reversible in a broad sense over time. A decision taken today over taxation rates, forms of schooling, or levels of welfare benefit can all be revised; as Benhabib suggests, the policy conversation does not close. This is not entirely straightforward, as reversibility/ irreversibility is not a categorical distinction, these terms refer to the polar ends of

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a continuum. Path dependency and time’s arrow ensure there will be irreversible elements within almost any policy choices, and welfare gains and losses between time t and t  1 cannot be strictly reversed, even if they are stripped away at a future point. In this sense, irreversibility is the norm (Humphrey, 2001), or as Cass Sunstein puts it, ‘whether a particular act is “irreversible” depends on how it is characterized’ (2005: 116); this being so, opposition to irreversible outcomes is not the exclusive domain of one party to a political dispute. Despite, however, the non-reversible elements present in all policy outcomes, there is an important distinction to be made between situations where political actors are forced to play a one-shot strategy from those where repeated attempts at policy change are viable. If the wealthy are subjected to punitive tax rates, for example, it is true that the income losses they are subjected to between time t and t  1 cannot be reversed for that time period. Nonetheless, there are openings in a democratic system for the wealthy to campaign not only for an end to punitive tax rates, but also to have the wealth that would have accrued to them during this period restored. The loss is compensable in a way that allows an outcome that would have ensued in the absence of the policy (in this case the punitive tax rate) and is thus reversible in this sense. Where this is the case the losers over policy choices have no obvious reasons to employ extra-democratic methods in order to pursue their policy goals, on the proviso that the existing policy choice is not a ‘substantial and clear violation of justice’. The pressing point here is that to the extent that non-democratic forms of politics are illegitimate because democratic channels for policy change are open at t  1, t  2, and so on, then where such channels are not open in the future, the argument against non-democratic forms of politics is weakened. In the light of irreversibility it is more difficult to argue that those facing losses in the democratic process should be ‘stoic’ in the face of that loss. For (at least some of the major) environmental issues, such as global warming, biodiversity loss, and wilderness preservation, policy choices do not appear to be reversible in this way. Global warming is not taken to be reversible process (Ulph and Ulph, 1997), and for Wood’s central concern, biodiversity, not on any timescale short of millions of years of speciation. Neither of these policy areas can be ‘revisited’ by the same people involved in earlier policy choices in a manner that can be expected to undo the consequences of earlier decisions. When policy defeats are irreversible, in the sense that they involve the loss of irreplaceable goods, it removes one of the central arguments for accepting democratic outcomes – that the open democratic system ensures that any policy area can be revisited. What are the implications of this? Some environmental outcomes, such as localised extinctions, can be reversed, and there is a burgeoning literature on ecological restoration that trades on this fact.13 Some, however, cannot be, and over this range of irreplaceable environmental goods, option value14 is permanently foregone and environmental campaigners are playing a one-shot political strategy. Embarking on a political campaign after the event in order to enact policy change is not an option. Over this range of goods, where there is a justifiable belief in policy irreversibility, lack of alternatives adds weight to the

Environmental direct action 75 public justification of extra-democratic forms of politics against certain policy outcomes even when those outcomes are recognised as legitimate. This is not to suggest that the environmentalists’ preferred outcome should necessarily triumph in policy terms, nothing that I have said implies that. Rather it implies that society and the state should recognise the burden that irreversibility places upon those who are protesting against legitimate decisions, but who do not have the luxury of accepting a ‘provisional’ democratic settlement open to them. These burdens may well entail that forms of direct action taken in order to highlight, or merely register resistance to, an irreversible loss may be more readily justified than it would be in the absence of such burdens.

Objections to the argument One objection to this line of argument would be to suggest that non-reversible change is the norm for environmental systems – species, for example, become extinct continuously throughout natural history. The defence of environmental direct action presented here rests, this objection holds, upon an arbitrary distinction between human-induced environmental change and ‘natural’ environmental change. There is an underlying and unargued-for ethic of environmental change at work that holds natural irreversible change to be acceptable and humaninduced irreversible change unacceptable (it’s OK for dinosaurs to be extinct, but not dodos. Why would anyone think that?). It is true that there is here an underlying conception of interaction between the human and non-human worlds, but the distinction made therein between human-induced environmental change and non-anthropogenic environmental change can be defended as non-arbitrary. Ecosystems undergo constant ‘natural’ change, a good deal of which (such as species extinction, or global temperature shifts) will doubtless be irreversible on any human timescale. Furthermore the argument from non-reversibility does assume a moral distinction between anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic change, but such a distinction is commonplace in intra-human ethics and merely carries over into this account of human–nature relations. Human beings die: death is one of the two things (along with taxes) of which we are proverbially assured. The switch from a state of life to a state of death is a non-reversible change. Nonetheless, the fact that we expect this non-reversible change to occur naturally does not mean we lack a moral interest in cases where it is brought about prematurely, either as a deliberate act, as an accidental outcome of other human activity, or as a lack of human prevention of a non-anthropogenic event. It is obviously true that we make a strong moral distinction between death by natural causes and death at the hands of a fellow human being. The same principle applies here, in that a moral distinction is drawn between human-induced change to the non-human natural world, and that which occurs without human intervention. It may be less obvious that the principle should apply here, but there is nothing intrinsically absurd in making this distinction. It rests upon the belief that only human beings are capable of setting moral conventions to govern their relationships with other environmental entities. (So the process

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by which dinosaurs came to be extinct is unobjectionable, but that by which dodos met their fate was not. Thinking that makes sense, even if you disagree.) Another possible objection here is that using irreversibility as a justification for extra-democratic forms of politics opens a Pandora’s Box. Environmentalists do not have an exclusive engagement with irreversibility as the loss of irreplaceable goods, and any group seeking to defend a conception of the good based on already-existing institutions or who oppose non-reversible policy changes can make the same claims. Anti-abortion activists, for example, may claim that they now appreciate that it is the non-reversible consequences of a policy of democratically endorsed terminations that can be justifiably resisted according to extra-democratic means. Is this not a recipe for an anarchic explosion of politics pursued through direct action? There are two broad lines of response here, one of which is to deny that all forms of irreversible change matter equally in moral terms, and thus to draw a distinction between environmental and other forms of change. The other is to embrace the implied vision of activist politics rather than reject it. On the first one might employ the ‘context’ argument of Goodin or the claims put forward for those who have argued for the importance of ‘authenticity’ in nature conservation. Goodin (1992) suggests that environmental goods have particular value (to humans) because they constitute an external context, which frames and gives meaning to human lives. The irreversible loss of this context would be of profound consequence precisely because it would rob human lives of (at least one source of) meaning. The latter argument holds that, unlike many goods that contribute to human welfare, ‘authentic’ nature is a non-substitutable good, and thus different in kind from other goods which, even if subject to non-reversible destruction, can be compensated for (see, for example, Dobson’s review of this literature, 1998). If such arguments carry any weight they may give us reason to think that the environmental set constitutes a special category among goods that can be irreversibly destroyed.15 The alternative is to embrace, along with Iris Marion Young (2001), the prospect of a vibrant, disruptive, activist (and non-democratic in my sense, see note 2) form of political life operating within a broader democratic framework. Young notes (as does Habermas) that for many marginalised groups in a polity, forms of disruptive intervention such as direct action constitute the only feasible option for getting initially unpopular political positions into the mainstream agenda. Politics, even with deliberative institutions in place, could look very different from the deliberative ideal, employing a wide range of communicative forms, some of which may be positively disruptive rather than deliberative. Environmentalists may also consider their concerns to be marginalised in this way,16 and this would offer an alternative justification for eschewing the polite norms of deliberative democracy. Young’s vision is not of a political arrangement where any political activity is acceptable as long as the group undertaking it is sufficiently marginalised, and nor is it argued here that any activity is acceptable in opposition to irreversible change. The demands of justice are not suspended in these cases, even where the question of what constitutes an injustice (e.g. harm to

Environmental direct action 77 future generations) is in question. Nonetheless the demand for an openness to non-deliberative forms of politics holds in the name of political equality in Young’s case, and in recognition of the permanent loss of option value at stake in the argument here. Thus it may well be that a consequence of my argument is to open justificatory doors to groups other than environmentalists for forms of extra-democratic political activity in defence of irreplaceable goods. It does not seem to me that this is a substantial problem, the argument regarding irreversible change and democratic process is intended to be a general argument that applies with great appropriateness to the environmental case. Consistency may well entail that it applies to other political causes as well. None of this implies that democrats have to consider direct action in support of an ideology aiming to overthrow democracy, such as that considered in Chapter 2, to ever be justified. They are under no obligation to give the demolition squad directions to their front door. This just goes to reinforce the point that motivations matter in how direct action should be judged according to democratic principles. Protest against irreversible policy outcomes is one potential justification for direct action, but the wider context and the broader aims of the activists are still material to that judgement.

Conclusion I have sought in this chapter to show that (1) there is conceptual space for justified resistance to democratically legitimate institutions or policies; (2) as attempts to tie environmental outcomes into either the democratic process,17 or theories of justice fail (in the first case) and succeed only partially (in the second case) environmentalists are faced with the dilemma of the ‘minority democrat’ when democratic decisions go against them; (3) as one of the main rationales for accepting an outcome that violates one’s sincere beliefs under conditions of democracy is policy reversibility, the non-reversibility of some crucial environmental goods lends support to the justification of direct action by environmentalists in opposition to democratic outcomes; (4) this argument may well have scope beyond the confines of environmental politics.

Part II

Democracy, deliberation, and ecological outcomes

5

Ecology, autonomy, and liberal democracy

Introduction Part I of this book considered a number of important ways in which ecological politics and democracy might be said to ‘come apart’ in practice. When democracy is considered inadequate to the task of delivering the outcomes that greens seek, then as we have seen, one response is to dispense with democracy altogether. What ties together, despite their radical differences, eco-authoritarianism, anarchoprimitivism, and ecological direct action is that in all cases the democratic process or the entire democratic system is rejected in favour of something else. There is of course an obvious alternative to this approach; rather than rejecting democracy and seeing it as incapable of delivering ecological outcomes, we might also ask whether democracy can be reinvented in such a way that is does become capable of delivering ecological outcomes. Further still, might it be possible to forge a non-contingent link such that by its very nature, democracy is seen as a process that must guarantee certain ecological outcomes in order to be democratic? Bringing democracy and ecology together in this way involves conceptual analysis and normative argument, and in considering these arguments we move away from activism and activist literature towards as a form of ecological political theory that tends more towards the academic and scholarly. It is not that activists are not capable of conceptual analysis and thinking about political ideas, they engage in this activity consistently. It is rather that activists, just by being what they are, tend to focus on the failures of existing democratic systems to deliver ecological goods and to think about how they might act in the world in order to change political outcomes. Those who try to bring democracy and ecology together will also focus on the failure of existing forms of political organisation to deliver ecological goods, but rather than responding by engaging in direct action they will (or will also, the two activities are not mutually exclusive) set about writing a treatise on the ways in which democracy might be reformed in order to come into line with the demands of ecological politics. This body of literature falls into three main strands. First, ‘ecological modernisation theory’ has become one of the key devices for trying to bring ecology and democracy together. If we cannot expect people to democratically

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surrender personal lifestyle choices and the prospects of material gain for improvements in environmental quality, then we can, instead of simply abandoning democracy, seek to alter the trade-offs so that citizens are not faced with this kind of choice. Ecological modernisation theory seeks to do this by promising environmentally friendly forms of economic growth, where growth is ‘de-coupled’ from environmental degradation. There are opportunities for job and wealth creation through the development of cleaner, alternative technologies, shifts to ‘green’ forms of taxation, and the development of markets for carbon emissions and other forms of pollution. So ecological modernisation theory offers ecological soundness and economic success, a win-win scenario that avoids having to make impossible demands of voters; it offers a democracy-friendly way of being green. This is reflected well in the UK context with Michael Jacob’s (1999) attempt to make environmental policy palatable to New Labour through what he calls ‘environmental modernisation’. Ecological modernisation has been the subject of much analysis, and as one would expect it comes in more than one version. Technocentric, growthorientated ‘weak’ ecological modernisation has been ‘radicalised’ into a ‘strong’ version as well, ‘that places at centre stage the ecological integrity of ecosystems and life-support systems . . . [and] the conventional focus on pollution control and clean production may be expanded to encompass biodiversity and wilderness preservation’ (Eckersley, 2004: 75). Once, however, ecological modernisation comes in a form this ‘strong’ it becomes difficult to see what distinguishes it from the kind of environmental demands that it was feared nobody would ever vote for.1 Ecological modernisation theory has its critics, who challenge it in various ways. To take one example, the much vaunted ‘de-coupling’ thesis, by which economic growth can be separated out from environmental degradation, can be challenged in empirical grounds. ‘[M]any apparent examples of decoupling have only been achieved through a displacement of high energy-consuming and polluting industries to less-industrialised countries: quite simply, environmental damage has been exported. Furthermore, increased efficiency of resource use makes no practical difference if consumption of goods increases and the economy continues to grow’ (Connelly and Smith, 2003: 68–9). Clearly, ecological modernisation, to be convincing, has to be feasible on a global scale, and not merely serve as a mask for problem displacement; and it will be ineffective if efficiency gains are dwarfed by the increasing scale of resource depletion and pollution. Ecological modernisation theory, then, holds out some prospect that democratic processes and ecological outcomes can be brought together, as selfinterested citizens in liberal democracies become convinced that ‘green growth’ is good for them; it does not require large scale value change, nor the imposition of hair-shirt environmentalism. On the other hand, much rides on the empirical claim that growth and sustainability can be combined effectively, and that case is as yet far from proven. A second, and growing, body of literature explores the connections and disconnections between ecological politics and liberalism. The questions asked here are whether liberalism can be ‘environment friendly’,2 and if so to what extent?

Autonomy and liberal democracy 83 Insofar as it cannot be, should we be prepared to sacrifice liberal freedoms in order to achieve ecological ends? Given the subject of this book, however, I want to focus here on a third form of argument that stresses the ‘democratic’ element in liberal democracy and seeks to forge a non-contingent link between green values and liberal democracy. If such an argument can be successful it also has the potential to be very powerful in liberal-democratic societies. If the very system by which we define our political arrangements can be shown to demand certain ecological policies or pro-environmental institutions, then those who think of themselves as supportive of the liberal-democratic regime have reasons to pursue environmental outcomes. Once we recognise what being ‘truly’ democratic demands, we may decide to accede to these demands even if we are sceptical towards green values per se. For greens to somehow show that all democrats must join them in order to be democrats seems too good to be true, and I will argue that it is. It is no more convincing than it would be to suggest that one had to hold a certain religion, or be against abortion, in order to be a ‘true’ democrat. The positing of a necessary relationship between green politics and liberal democracy is a mistake, and constitutes an example of wishful thinking on the part of ecological political theorists. By this I mean that an understandable desire to pursue two political goods simultaneously has resulted in an attempt to forge a non-contingent link between these two goods when such a link is neither necessary nor plausible. In that sense it constitutes an example of (attempted) wish fulfilment, placing the cart of substantive outcome before the horse of analytical enquiry. Ultimately, that there may be both good reasons to be green and good reasons to be a democrat does not entail a necessary connection between green politics and democracy. It does not help the cause of thinking clearly about the demands of ecologism, nor the nature of democracy, to imagine that there is. In the process of forging an indissoluble link between ecology and democracy certain political concepts are stretched or truncated in order that they will support an ‘appropriate’ answer. In relation to this ecological version of liberal democracy, it is a fate that has particularly befallen the concept of autonomy, and the argument for a rights-based defence of democracy for which it is taken to be a foundation. In order that they can be used to bolster an argument for a noncontingent relationship between ecology and democracy, autonomy has to be decontested in a new way. This is not in itself necessarily problematic, but I will suggest that it is when as a result, a concept is denuded of the very elements that enable it to support the overarching argument of which it is a part. There is a methodological point to make here. I am not mounting a defence of an essentialist understanding of political concepts, such that there is a fixed core intension of, say, autonomy that, by definition, denies validity to a version of it lacking that core intension. Concepts are contested constantly (and they are contested whether or not they are also ‘essentially contestable’) and normally lack settled meanings. Particular ideologies or discourses will look to ‘decontest’ these meanings and to cement a word–meaning relationship, but such semantic closure can never be fully achieved.3 What I will be suggesting, however, is that there are

84 Ecological outcomes certain elements to the intensions of these concepts that are responsible for, or at least carry much of the weight of, their argumentative appeal. To the extent that new decontestations of these concepts remove these elements of the concept’s intensions they remove also the reasons that we have for finding these concepts to carry moral force. This is the case with the necessary connection argument for the relationship between ecology and democracy, whereby the notion of autonomy (and the notion of rights to basic liberties dependent on it) is robbed of much of its moral force when pressed into service on behalf of the environment. The new version of autonomy employed to link democracy with non-human nature is radically different to the concept of autonomy as traditionally employed in the discussion of human affairs. It is also thereby rendered in a form that leaves the connections between autonomy and democracy unclear. This leaves the necessary connection argument itself exposed as conceptually incoherent. The argument will proceed as follows. The next section will examine the ‘argument from preconditions’ – this is a relatively short section as I have nothing original or controversial to say about this argument; it exists rather for the sake of completeness. The subsequent section examines the ‘argument from principle’. About this I do have something to say and I will seek to show that the use of the concept of autonomy for according rights to the natural world is counter-productive. The following section concludes.

The argument from preconditions As noted earlier I have little new to offer in respect to the argument from preconditions, but I will nonetheless discuss it briefly because it provides one of the supporting pillars of the necessary connection claim, and because it has been explicitly run with the argument from principle in order to substantiate that claim (Dobson, 1996a). The argument from preconditions runs as follows. As Dryzek rightly notes, any claim that democracy is purely procedural would be incoherent. Democracy is self-binding, it must insist on certain preconditions for its own existence if it is to protect itself from destruction. This is what allows liberalism and democracy (despite the obvious tensions that have been felt acutely between liberals and democrats historically) to claim some necessary connection. Arguably democracy requires the set of liberal political rights to freedom of speech, conscience, assembly, and so on in order to persist. Thus the (liberal) removal of these rights from the democratic sphere into a constitutional sphere is acceptable as a guarantee of the preconditions of democracy’s continued existence. The ecological ‘argument from preconditions’ merely wants to add a sustainable, well-functioning natural life-support system to that set of prerequisites. Democratic communication and politics is dependent upon sufficiently good environmental conditions to allow its own continuation, and as Dryzek says this is the generalisable interest par excellence. As has been widely pointed out (e.g. Dobson, 1996a) this interest is so generalisable that it applies equally to authoritarian, non-democratic forms of communication and politics as it does to democratic forms. It is no more or less

Autonomy and liberal democracy 85 than an anthropocentric argument for sustainability, and is as much a precondition for business, sport, scholarship, and tiddlywinks as it is democratic politics. The argument from preconditions does tell democrats, in a compelling manner, why they should be ‘green’ (up to a strictly limited point – anthropocentric sustainability)4 but does nothing to tell greens why they should be democrats. If greens believe they can obtain their political objectives more effectively by non-democratic means, there is nothing here to persuade them to take the lessefficient route (Goodin, 1992).

The argument from principle The argument from principle diverges from the argument from preconditions in that it does explicitly claim that it is logically necessary for greens to be democrats, due to their attachment to certain moral positions. The main proponent of this argument is Robyn Eckersley (1996a,b), and her argument has been endorsed by Andrew Dobson (1996a). Eckersley suggests that it is possible to forge a necessary connection between ecology and democracy ‘in the same way’ that there has traditionally been considered to be a necessary link between liberalism and democracy, as discussed briefly earlier. Eckersley wants to ‘refashion’ the notion of rights ‘for ecological purposes’ in order to offer a less contingent mode of reasoning than standard utilitarian arguments for environmentalism (1996b: 213). This contingency can be challenged if green values are grounded in a defence of autonomy and non-domination. This ecological defence of autonomy is framed as the right of non-human nature as well as humans to develop autonomously, that is, to be free to ‘live and blossom’ in their own way, undominated by other agents. The instrumental and contingent green attachment to democracy can be avoided if green values were to be grounded in a broader defence of autonomy (let us say, for a moment, the freedom of human and non-human beings to unfold in their own ways and live according to their ‘species-life’) and, by association, a broader critique of domination (of humans and other species). If we are to give moral priority to the autonomy and integrity of members of both the human and non-human community, then we must afford the same moral priority to the material conditions (including bodily and ecological conditions) that enable that autonomy to be exercised. . . . humans, both individually and collectively, have a moral responsibility to live their lives in ways that permit the flourishing and well-being of both human and non-human life. (Eckersley, 1996b: 223) Eckersley accepts that a difficulty arises in using the language of autonomy here as non-humans cannot choose their own destiny ‘in a political sense’ (1996a: 180) however ‘if the general moral premise of respect for the autonomy of all beings is accepted . . . then humans (as the only moral agents) must collectively

86 Ecological outcomes acknowledge that human choices need to be constrained by a recognition of the interests of non-human beings’ (1996a: 180). Furthermore: the rights of individual organisms would need to be framed in the context of the requirement of larger autopoietic entities, such as ecosystems, in ways that maximize the opportunities for ecosystems and individuals (on which individual organisms are dependent) to flourish. (1996a: 189) Despite the initial expression of transcience (‘for a moment’) Eckersley holds to the ideas of flourishing, freedom, and autonomy expressed here in both papers under close consideration. The first quoted sentence offers the new decontestation of autonomy. It posits, in general terms, the idea that there are forms of life particular to species, and as such it is an empirical rather than normative claim, for which evidence would presumably be provided from zoological and similar studies (as well as anthropology for any claim that humans also have a ‘species-life’ (reminiscent, of course, of Marx’s writing on ‘species-being’)). Given the regularities of behaviour by members of the same species, which occur across time and space I see no reason to challenge the empirical claim, although establishing the nature of the ‘species-life’ of human beings presents some unique difficulties, given millennia of cultural accretions to human behaviour. Elephants in the wild behave differently to elephants in a circus, with the addition of an anthropogenic element distinguishing the latter: the claim that the former represents their ‘species-life’ and the latter does not is reasonable. The normative element enters at the point where we are told that such autonomous lives are to be given ‘moral priority’. We have to be wary of a circularity of argument here. We should not interfere with autonomous nature, because we value that autonomy, which it has by virtue of the fact that we do not interfere with it. We need independent reasons for valuing autonomous nature (i.e. for accepting the normative implications) for this argument to work. The ensuing claim that following a species-life permits flourishing and wellbeing is also empirical but with strong normative overtones in the language used. Who would not rather ‘flourish’ and possess ‘well-being’ than not? Again a sympathetic reconstruction can show the plausibility of the empirical claim – life lived in accord with the evolutionary fit between a species and its environment that has evolved over millennia is likely by some magnitude of probability to be a life for which that organism is well suited. Complications certainly arise when we ask what conditions must hold for an organism to be said to ‘follow its species life’. A claim that all natural entities thrive and possess well-being when they lead their species-life would clearly be false. We do not live in a world where that description could ever be accurate. Natural entities prey upon one another, they get sick or injured, suffer starvation and meet untimely ends in a whole variety of ways. This is not controversial or surprising to environmental philosophers, and clearly a denial of this is not what Eckersley is suggesting.

Autonomy and liberal democracy 87 She holds that autonomy is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for such flourishing and well-being. Yet there is a question here of what drives the claimed ‘moral priority’ of the autonomous life. Is it autonomy per se, or the flourishing and well-being for which it is a condition? The latter clearly matters, and yet if the well-being aspect of the claim is to be maintained, then a distinction can be made between those entities that do achieve their ‘species-life’ in terms of well-being and those that do not, and humans as moral agents may have responsibilities to ensure that entities are not denied this outcome. As noted, ‘flourishing’ invokes welfare considerations, as does of course ‘well-being’ and another of Eckersley’s preferred terms, ‘blossoming’. Furnishing both the necessary and sufficient conditions for flourishing would presumably place human beings under a rather fulsome and rigorous moral code with respect to non-human entities. Eckersley claims, on the contrary, that our duties to wild animals are clearly limited: Unlike domestic and captive animals, individual wild animals are not directly dependent on humans for their well-being and sustenance. Accordingly, humans do not have the same direct moral obligation toward individual wild animals as they do towards captive and domestic animals, and individual wild animals do not have the same kind of rights in relation to humans. (1996a: 192) She goes on to suggest, following Wenz, that we might consider domestic animals to have ‘positive rights’ against us and wild animals to have only ‘negative rights’ to non-harm. Claims for rights come with a high degree of moral seriousness, however.5 Those rights that are considered fundamental or basic to survival and well-being may not be abrogated, on most liberal views, except where such abrogation secures a yet more (or an at least equally) important right. This is one of the reasons why liberals have found rights to be a powerful language in which to articulate political values. A valid rights claim places human beings as moral agents under a duty to provide for the conditions of the right to be fulfilled. A right for entities to both ‘live’ and ‘blossom’ suggests a world in which human beings do a lot more than leave some ecosystems relatively undisturbed. We touch here of course on a familiar environmentalist objection to animal rights discourse, that if taken seriously it invokes an ethic of constant interference in the natural world in order to ensure animal well-being, flourishing, or blossoming (ditto in this case for plants and ecosystems). There are many examples of natural nonflourishing, non-blossoming, and absence of well-being that do not invoke the vital needs of any creature bar the victim. Animals and plants killed in floods and forest fires, or which succumb to disease, for example. In short there are a whole catalogue of ways in which entities can suffer large welfare losses (or at least fail to flourish) as a result of natural processes that have nothing whatever to do with the vital needs of any other organism. So if it is well-being that matters, morally, then the concept of autonomy appears to be redundant. The plants in the Palm House of Kew Gardens could hardly survive without almost constant human care

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and attention, does this entail that they do not flourish? If so why? If they do flourish even though they are not autonomous, why should we care about autonomy rather than flourishing? If autonomy is only a necessary condition of flourishing why are we not under an obligation to provide the sufficient conditions? Conversely, if autonomy is what matters, it cannot be because it suffices to guarantee the ‘blossoming’ or ‘flourishing’ of any individual organism or species. There are a number of possible objections to this critique. First it might be suggested that this focus on individual organisms is misplaced, what matters is the continued flourishing of species and ecosystems, and of course individual carriers of any particular genotype may not flourish. This would, however, be a misplaced argument, and I should add is not one Robyn Eckersley seems inclined towards, recognising as she does that an autonomy-based rights discourse is by its very nature individualistic. How anyway, could a species be said to possess well-being? If numbers of a species rise sharply, it may be said, metaphorically, to ‘flourish’, but then such increases can be signs of ecological imbalance and are not necessarily good for a species in the long-term. A more likely objection takes up the challenge presented earlier, and grasps the nettle in insisting that it is not well-being that is normatively crucial here, but autonomy per se. Autonomy may only be a necessary and not sufficient condition for flourishing, but it confers dignity upon existence in and of itself. Natural entities possess the capacity for autonomy and the reason why it is wrong to constantly interfere in natural processes in order to ensure their well-being is because this impinges upon that capacity. The right being claimed is a right to such an autonomous existence, which is a capacity or precondition for well-being although not well-being itself, nor any guarantee that well-being will be achieved. A possible advantage of autonomy over well-being, as the required moral criterion, is that it can be stretched to cover collective entities such as species and ecosystems as well as individual organisms, once the direct connection with well-being is broken. This in turn brings us to a more substantive concern about what is entailed in this particular decontestation of the concept of autonomy. Eckersley claims that the fundamental area of normative disagreement between greens and liberals is ‘the meaning and scope of autonomy and justice’ (1996b: 222), and it is autonomy that she invokes in the argument from principle. We are to give ‘moral priority’ to the ‘autonomy and integrity of members of both the human and non-human community’ but our notion of autonomy has to become ‘more inclusive’ and ‘socially and ecologically contextualized’ to reflect the fact that autonomy is only ever partial as certain ‘basic ecological conditions’ are necessary ‘preconditions . . . for . . . humans to practice democracy’ (1996b: 223–4, my emphasis). But here we have to be careful to maintain the distinction between the argument from preconditions and the argument from principle. We have seen that the argument from preconditions is valid but is far too weak to form a non-contingent link between green political theory and democracy. The argument from principle is supposed to achieve more, but if this is so it has to avoid a collapse back into

Autonomy and liberal democracy 89 the preconditions argument. The argument from principle is in itself a defence of autonomy, interpreted (ecologically) as a freedom to develop according to one’s own species-life, and this itself has now to become a foundation of the democratic theory that is being defended. Dobson makes this point clearly – ‘democratic and green thinking are (for Eckersley) linked by a common core notion of autonomy, in that the defence and extension of autonomy are what green thinking is about, while a belief in autonomy underpins defences of democracy’ (1996a: 143). This is a view that Dobson endorses, claiming that the ‘attribute of autonomy crosses the species divide rather than being confined to one side of it’ (whilst noting some of the problems that follow from such a conception), although he indicates later that he, unlike Eckersley, might restrict notions of autonomy to higher animals (1996a: 145). Indeed, and this shows clearly the difference between the old and the new (ecological) conceptions of autonomy, in a paper published in the same year Dobson says that attempts to extend autonomy across the species boundary ‘must founder’ – employing here the ‘old’ Kantian conception of the self-legislating subject (1996b: 137). Michael Mason resists the green extension of the notion of autonomy beyond human subjects, and suggests that green ends would be best pursued on the grounds of ecological human rights (1999: 62). John Dryzek for his part notes, in light of Dobson’s resistance to the extension of the notion of communicative ability to non-human nature, that ‘the capacity for autonomy is as controversial as the capacity for communication when applied to non-human entities’ (2000: 151). Autonomy has, like most concepts in politics and philosophy, been employed in a variety of ways (see, for example, Dworkin, 1988: 5), and as I have stressed already I am not seeking to defend an essentialist ‘correct’ definition of autonomy, nor do I see any in-principle objection to conceptual innovation and the development of new decontestations of concepts. Nonetheless conceptual innovation has to be tested against our existing usage, and if we believe that something important is lost in the innovative usage we may have reason to object to that innovation. Etymological appeals to foundational use are of course not in themselves indicative of the most appropriate conceptualisation; they can nonetheless provide a useful place to start, indicating the point from whence current usage develops. In the case of autonomy the ancient Greeks used the term autos (self) and nomos (rule) in relation to city-states, ‘A city had autonomia when its citizens made their own laws, as opposed to being under the control of some conquering power’ (Dworkin, 1988: 12–13). This immediately enlists the notion of an entity making laws for itself, of following a self-chosen path, which has remained a constant element in the manner in which the concept has been used subsequently. It is thus an empirical assertion that uses of the concept of autonomy have consistently invoked the idea of self-legislating subjects. Any new interpretation of autonomy that seeks to extend it to the non-human world will have to either (a) extend the notion of ‘self-legislation’ such that it can include non-human nature or (b) dispense with this component of the concept altogether. It then becomes a normative question as to whether a new decontestation of the concept that dispenses with that notion can be morally appealing.

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In the invocation of the argument from principle, the question at issue is not autonomous acts but the nature of autonomous agents. As Dworkin puts it, crucial to being autonomous is the ‘capacity to raise the question of whether I will identify with or reject the reasons for which I now act’ (1988: 15). Only in the presence of this capacity can it make sense to think of giving laws to oneself, as opposed to merely following laws that are laid down to us in our genetic predispositions. This capacity is something we expect to find in human beings alone.6 Now, any political theorist must be allowed the privilege of conceptual innovation, and Eckersley wants to employ a conception of autonomy that looks very different to the traditional concept. However, a decontestation of autonomy as ‘living out a species-life’ still leaves us requiring a conceptual language to distinguish the reflective life from the non-reflective life. These two things must remain morally different, unless we want to see no difference between, say, a tiger or a shark killing a human being and a human doing the same thing. If this is correct then shifting the ground of autonomy to living out a species-life achieves very little in taking the argument about ecology and democracy forward. If the connection between autonomy and democracy has involved protecting the sphere of reflective self-legislation, then this link does not change because we now redesignate the scope of autonomy to include non-reflexive subjects. There are at least two related, but slightly different responses that could be made to this line of reasoning from someone committed to the argument from principle. The first would be to claim that the ideal of the traditional conception of autonomy was always misplaced, as autonomy is only ever partial and is always constrained by ecological considerations. The mistake of liberalism on this view is that it rests upon an ‘incoherent and undesirable ontology’ – that of social and biological detachment (Eckersley, 2004: 104). The second would be to suggest that this account of autonomy is, if not incoherent, at least not the most morally appealing, and that a morally better account of autonomy would encompass not only humans but non-human nature as well. Note that we would still require a further argument here, which is that, furthermore, this new conception can be employed to link democracy with the capacity to live a species-life. That there are ecological constraints on autonomy is, I assume, uncontroversial. As Edward Goldsmith (1992) has pointed out, humans living in industrial society cannot will themselves to be able to live by breathing polluted air and drinking contaminated water, beyond certain limits these things just will disable us. Autonomy is always a matter of degree and always partial. Ecological limits do not, however, prevent us from conceptualising autonomy in terms of self-legislating subjects; we merely have to accept that this capacity operates within ecological constraints. The ecological reconceptualisation of autonomy has instead to offer an account of autonomy that ‘lets in’ non-human nature by granting it the relevant capacity (which of course will be different to the one above). This brings us back to the idea of ‘species-life’. An entity possesses autonomy when it has the capacity to live according to its species’ natural proclivities. The right to be free to ‘live and blossom’ in your own way is justified in terms of the protection of this capacity, such protection being manifested in human non-interference

Autonomy and liberal democracy 91 (the reworked concept of autonomy is similar, in this respect, to Westra’s notion of integrity discussed earlier). Casting the argument in terms of capacity to live a species-life rather than in terms of an outcome (actually ‘flourishing or blossoming’) could solve certain problems encountered above. If the right is clearly framed as a defence of the capacity rather than as an actual right to ‘flourish’ and this capacity is operative under the sorts of conditions that have evolved in the absence of human agency, then we can construct an argument for the protection of (say) wilderness areas because of the need to protect this capacity. There is no reason then to suppose that this would entail the protection of individual entities from natural cycles of predation and disease, for any entity may both possess a capacity and at the same time fail to manifest it. Is this, then, a more attractive notion of autonomy than the traditional idea of a self-legislating subject? I would suggest that what we lose by thinking about autonomy in this way is greater than what we gain, in that we relinquish the very intension of the concept of autonomy that makes for a morally powerful connection with liberal democracy. Autonomy as self-legislation is indicative of a capacity of reflection that enables human beings to transcend instinctual forms of behaviour, and this capacity has been what (most) liberal theorists have held to be of sufficient value to be worthy of rights-based protection. Furthermore it is this capacity which is taken to demarcate the human from the non-human realms. It can be conceded that non-human nature has an independence from humanity, it existed before us, and it will presumably continue to exist after we cease to, but entities in non-human nature do not reflect upon how to live their lives. Why would a conception of autonomy that dispensed with the notion of reflection and instead referred only to independence lose moral appeal? The argument here is not that the appeal for non-human nature to be granted a greater degree of non-interference than it currently enjoys lacks any moral weight. It is rather that ‘species-life’ has absolutely nothing to do with a connection between the protection of autonomy and liberal democracy. We can frame the problem in another way. Imagine the ‘capacity to live a species-life’ argument turned back upon human beings. What is our ‘species-life’? It is empirically almost certain that as a society we would not agree a definitive answer to this, and we would probably not even agree as to whether it is a sensible question (which is precisely where liberalism made its entrance). In the absence of such a definitive answer we may endorse a liberal approach and allow people to choose a mode of life for themselves – but this entails a capacity to, in Rawlsian language, frame, revise, and pursue a conception of the good; or a ‘Capacity to identify with or reject . . . reasons’ (Dworkin, 1988: 15). There is something distinctive here about the human form of life that traditional conceptions of autonomy appeal to. Here the defender of the argument from principle might suggest that autonomy consists in the capacity to lead a species-life, and it just so happens that the species-life of the human is one in which humans possess what would previously described as autonomy (a capacity to accept or reject reasons for acting), whereas for other species it does not. But the fact remains that

92 Ecological outcomes other species (or ecosystems) do not have to face these questions about how to live their lives, either individually or socially. So the connection of the new version of autonomy to democracy is no more than a conceptual sleight of hand, which robs autonomy of its intrinsic connection to liberal-democratic theory. If the capacity to choose a life ceases to be an element of autonomy then we will need a set of reasons to be morally concerned about it that appeal to this new conception of autonomy rather than the one described above. If living a ‘specieslife’ is what is somehow important to the welfare of non-human species, then it has to be defended in those terms – the living of a species-life. The new version of autonomy would cease to distinguish between a human capacity to live a life reflectively according to a chosen conception of the good and one that in which one did no more than follow one’s instincts. Stretching autonomy to cover the non-human world robs the concept of the ability to carve this distinction. It is, however, precisely this distinction which has allowed liberals to draw the intrinsic connection between democracy and the protection of autonomy. Autonomous entities have to be free to choose their form of life. That is the crux of the problem; democracy has been justified with reference to a particular conception of autonomy. If we decontest the notion of autonomy in a new way, then the relevant justifications we already have for democracy do not rest on that (new) conception of autonomy, they rest on something else (the old conception). Eckersley would then have to show, in a way she has not even attempted, why it is that we should now believe that democracy rests on the new conception. Stretching the concept of autonomy to cover non-human entities disables that concept as a grounding for democratic theory, at least in the absence of an explanation as to why democracy is justified by the need to ‘live a species life’. The environmental argument cannot have it both ways, it cannot hold both (a) that there is an intrinsic connection between autonomy and democracy, and (b) that (a) still holds even though we radically reconceive the notion of autonomy, without offering an argument that links the new conception of autonomy to democracy.

Facing up to contingency Asking the question ‘how can we forge a non-contingent conceptual relationship between ecology and democracy?’ has an unfortunate effect when used as a substitute for the more open ‘how can we best understand the relationship between ecological politics and democracy?’ What this produces is precisely what Eckersley denies, a ‘case of rigging the [democratic] system in favour of the environment’ (2000: 131) which is symptomatic of a slightly worrying more general trend in some green political thought, the attempt to eliminate contingency. This is true both of ecocentric environmental ethics, which seeks to render environmental protection non-contingent as an ethical demand (for a critique of this approach see Humphrey: 2002) and ecocentric political theory, which seeks to render a non-contingent relationship between ecological outcomes and democratic processes. If one sees the field of politics as ineliminably contingent (as I do, see also John Barry (1999)), then the attempt to achieve non-contingency

Autonomy and liberal democracy 93 can be seen as misguided. That there may be both good reasons to hold green values and also good reasons to be a democrat does not entail (although it is consistent with) a non-contingent, watertight and necessary connection between ecology and democracy. Better that one grasps the nettle of contingency and argues in the public sphere for one’s values and beliefs. If we believe that green arguments are good arguments, and we believe in the power of the best argument to ultimately convince, then environmentalists can embrace liberal democratic decision-making processes, contingency and all, and continue to make the case for green values. That said, if elements of liberal democratic practice seem inherently inimitable to environmental norms, there seems no good a priori reason why environmentalists should bind themselves to a set of political procedures in stark conflict with their axiology, and this is where the radical green challenge to democracy remains.

6

Deliberative democracy and the challenge of radical environmentalism With Marc Stears

Introduction If the argument for an inherent link between ecological politics and liberal democracy is ultimately unconvincing, where does that leave the search for compatibility between these two political phenomena? It may rule out one particular connection, but the relationship between ecological politics and democracy is complex, as both come in a variety of forms, and to show that liberal democracy cannot coherently be defined as something that must deliver green outcomes is not to show that democracy, in any form, is somehow inherently hostile to green values. We have seen that some strands of ecological political thought reject democracy altogether, either contingently, due to its inability to deliver, or fundamentally, as an inherently oppressive political system, attached as it is to the institution of the state and all that flows from that. There are, however, plenty of political ecologists who argue that we require more, not less, democracy, and we need to enquire into why this should be the case, what sort of democracy is being recommended, and whether we have good reason to believe that the posited connections between this form of democracy and ecological politics are tenable. Arguments for ecological forms of democracy frequently make the case for a move away from the nation-state level for democratic practice. Proponents seek instead smaller, decentralised forms of political community where decisions can be taken locally, when appropriate. For questions that affect a wider collectivity, a federal political structure can accommodate the need for higher-level governance. One of the better known proponents of this view is Murray Bookchin, and the politics of his social ecology is cashed out in terms of a participatory ‘libertarian municipalism’ of small-scale participatory democracies federally connected.1 It world also be true that most Green Parties participating in mainstream electoral politics would also see themselves as a force for democratisation in a similar sense.2 Along with this tradition of thinking about green democracy in terms of participation and decentralisation, there is another important recent strand of thinking in terms of this ‘ecological democratisation’,3 and this concerns the relationship between ecological politics and deliberative forms of democracy (Baber and Bartlett, 2005; Gundersen, 1995; Smith, 2003). It is this proposed

The challenge of radical environmentalism 95 compatibility between this form of democracy and ecological politics I will examine in this chapter. Green political theorists have tended to embrace deliberative democracy in recent work, as we shall see. I want to suggest that for all the supposed ‘promise’ of democratic deliberation for environmental politics, environmentalists should be very cautious abut embracing a form of democracy that makes strong dispositional demands that have an in-built bias towards preserving the status quo. From the early 1990s, the normative theory of democracy has taken what has become widely known as a deliberative turn. Under the tutelage of theorists such as Amy Gutmann, Dennis Thompson, John Dryzek, and Joshua Cohen, inspired by the work of Jurgen Habermas, political theorists have reconceived the essence of democratic process, seeing it now less in the counting of votes or the aggregating of preferences than in the ability of reasonable citizens to explain themselves to each other and to engage in mutually responsive discussion about the key political, economic, and moral concerns that exercise them. Democracy, on this deliberative model, involves the discursive pursuit of substantive agreement between citizens where such agreement is possible and the discursive delimitation of agreeable disagreement where it is not. As such, it places a series of demands upon citizens as they engage in political action. Citizens of an ideal deliberative democracy (unlike environmental activists) will not seek to prioritise their own limited conception of the good at the expense of others, nor will they seek to impose their will on others who could not understand, let alone agree, with their demands. The good citizen, on the deliberative model, explains herself to others, and presents those others with arguments for particular courses of action that are grounded in widely acceptable forms of public reason.4 Why should this form of democracy be seen as particularly friendly to ecological forms of politics, in preference to, say, the liberal forms analysed in the last chapter? Connolly and Smith give us three reasons for optimism. First, ‘deliberative institutions are likely to be more ecologically rational’ than existing liberaldemocratic institutions. This is because they improve information flows and open up the political system to voices with direct experience of ecological problems, who tend to be marginalised under existing political arrangements. Second, democratic deliberation is seen to promote ‘public spirited’ political preferences, as purely selfish preferences are weeded out in the process of democratic debate. Third, democratic deliberation ‘rests on an active notion of citizenship’, and thus offers people opportunities to experience and engage with forms of ecological knowledge that they might not otherwise encounter. They ‘provide a conducive arena in which to expose citizens to alternate ways of conceptualising relations between human and non-human worlds’ (Connelly and Smith, 2003: 73). As Smith is careful to note, the claim made here is not a naïve one to the effect that deliberative forms of democracy would guarantee ecological outcomes, but rather that deliberative institutions offer an environment in which the plurality of values in society, including green values, can be formed, articulated, and considered by others in the absence of systematic bias and distortion (Smith, 2003: 53).

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As a number of scholars have recently noted, however, whilst theory has been heading in this deliberative direction, democratic practice has been witnessing a series of contrasting developments. For as the theorists have been outlining their accounts of public reason, many of those actively engaged in the political process itself have been turning their back on the more polite practices of discursive exchange and returning to the streets. Even aside from the environmental activism discussed in previous chapters, there has been an explosion in political protest in the last few years – from the massed ranks of anti-war protesters in 2002 through the anti-globalisers of Seattle, Prague, and Genoa to animal rights activists – implying that at the very same moment that democratic theory becomes deliberative, democratic practice is once again becoming rather more dramatic. This sort of tension is not new in itself, of course. The theory and practice of democratic politics are often at odds. It almost goes without saying that politicians are not as thoughtful or honest nor citizens as committed or virtuous as many a democratic theorist would hope. But the gulf between deliberative democrats and the activists and protesters who have sought to reclaim the streets is not only more striking than many of these tensions, it is also potentially very revealing. For it allows us not only to criticise or bemoan actually existing practice but also to cast into critical scrutiny the claims of deliberative democracy itself. This is not a question of predictions or empirical judgements gone awry; it is a question as to whether the deliberative democrats’ normative recommendations are desirable in their own right. I have argued that environmental direct action may be justified in opposition to irreversible losses, but perhaps this view pays insufficient attention to the degree of fairness that deliberative forms of democracy can bring to the decision-making process. The issue here is who has got the democratic theory right: those who write about it professionally and call themselves ‘deliberative democrats’ or those who are currently engaged in the sharply contrasting version of dramatic democratic practice? This emergent tension has increasingly provided a focal point for new scholarship in democratic theory. Stanley Fish, Jane Mansbridge, John Meaderis, Ian Shapiro, and Iris Marion Young, have all recently drawn attention to the difficulties of reconciling deliberative democratic expectations with the practices of actual democratic politics.5 Environmental activists are of course at the forefront of this mobilisation of direct action politics. Importantly this kind of activity is not only undertaken by groups such as the ELF, at least some of whose members wish to see democratic political regimes completely overthrown, and who would not therefore have any particular reason to care about the compatibility of their beliefs and actions with a theory of democratic deliberation. Direct action is also undertaken by groups6 with more limited environmental goals, who do not seek the complete overthrow of the existing political order, and who would often claim that more, rather than less, democracy is needed. I want to use this chapter to explore this tension between democratic action and democratic theory. I will argue that there is more at stake here then merely a clash between ideal theory on the one hand and political action under non-ideal circumstances in the other. On this view, the necessity for direct action forms of politics fades away as we

The challenge of radical environmentalism 97 approach some deliberative ideal. I will instead argue that this opposition can help us understand how deliberative democratic theory is unattractive in very important ways, and why environmentally minded theorists should be far more cautious about embracing the tenets of deliberative democracy than they have been to date.

The non-deliberative politics of ecological protest On Monday 14 November 2005, Greenpeace activists blockaded Downing Street with tons of coal, in protest at Prime Minister Tony Blair’s perceived inaction on, and weakening position on, global climate change. The symbolic, rather than realistic, aim of the action was to seal Tony Blair within Downing Street for the day so that he could ‘clear his diary’ and spend ‘the day in his office working to strengthen Kyoto and cut British emissions, because so far all he’s done is make speeches’.7 Two weeks later Greenpeace again took direct action against Blair, this time disrupting a speech he was due to give on the question of nuclear power. Blair had this to say in response: ‘Like most tough issues what we actually need is an open and democratic debate, not one conducted by protests and demonstrations to stop people having the freedom to express their views.’8 It would be reasonable to see this disruption as an undemocratic form of political action in the sense spelled out in Chapter 4, as self-appointed guardians of the environment seek to curtail democratic debate. Furthermore, that Greenpeace should behave in this way may be seen by some as unsurprising, given Greenpeace’s notoriously undemocratic internal organisational arrangements.9 Nonetheless, Greenpeace is quick to appeal to democratic principles when, for example, it claims that new technologies such as Genetic Modification (GM) are being forced on populations against their will, or when one of its vessels gets banned from UK waters.10 Furthermore, in terms of Dobson’s ecologist/environmentalist distinction, Greenpeace is best seen as an ‘environmental’ (ergo moderate) rather than ‘ecological’ organisation as it does not seek the complete restructuring of the existing institutional architecture of Western nations, just more environmentally friendly forms of activity. Unlike some, it appears to believe we can achieve the latter without the former. Seeking to blockade the Prime Minister in Downing Street so that he can work on climate change is on a par with installing solar panels on the UK Deputy Prime Minister’s house, uninvited, or uprooting GM test crops (as performed by both Greenpeace and GenetiX Snowball). Environmental campaigners make a good case study for the relationship between democratic activism and democratic theory, as they advance moral and political ideals that not all would agree with, but few would reject as entirely unreasonable (discounting the revolutionary overtures of anarcho-primitivists). And as we have seen, although the kind of direct actions that they engage in may be seen as undemocratic, they are willing in other circumstances to appeal to democratic principles to support their cause. In possessing a range of views from those seeing themselves as apolitical nature preservationists to those who seek the ‘destruction of civilisation’, ‘the’ ecology/ environmental movement shows itself to be inherently and radically diverse.

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In this it is not unusual, as with most complex social movements, it is not a unitary phenomenon.11 Despite this diversity, environmental movement activism has at least two important strategies that are common across the spectrum and can be used to highlight a different conception of democratic politics to that espoused by deliberative democrats. That is, these strategies demonstrate a different understanding of the nature of democratic political life, they do not merely reflect the non-ideal political circumstances under which environmentalists currently labour. These two strategies are those of ‘cost-levying’ on the one hand and what I will call, for reasons that will become clear, a ‘non-economy of moral disagreement’. As we shall see, neither of these strategies fits well with deliberative democratic norms, and this might well give us reason to question the norms, rather than the form of activity.

Cost-levying and political equality Cost-levying is perhaps the central element of the political repertoire of environmental activists and it can proceed in at least three ways. First, it can be directly focused on a group of whom one disapproves: the constant breaking of a company’s windows increases their insurance charges, for example, and might lead them to reconsider their actions. Second, it can be indirectly focused on them: protesters might seek, that is, to make it more difficult in various ways for people to do business with corporations who behave in a manner of which they disapprove. Or, third, it can be focused on the state or broader society itself: protesters might thus try to increase the costs on third parties, holding them to ransom, as it were, until those third parties themselves turn on the objects of the protesters’ ire and get them to change their ways. Whichever of these three forms it takes, though, cost-levying is a relatively simple political device; one premised on the assumption that the incentive structures for particular courses of action can directly be altered by a politically engaged group of citizens, if those citizens target their behaviours in the right sort of way. Deliberative democrats are firm in their opposition to politics of this sort. Their most frequently articulated objection to it is rooted in the conviction that it is a form of politics that reflects existing imbalances in the distribution of political power. Gutmann and Thompson thus argue that cost-levying is a form of the politics of ‘bargaining’ that ‘accepts the current distribution of resources and power as a baseline, the place to begin the negotiations’ (2004: 114, a point repeated at 148–9). As such, ‘even under unjust conditions’ it is the politics of ‘deliberation’ rather than of direct cost-levying that ‘can make a . . . positive contribution to the elimination of injustice’ (2004: 42). Joshua Cohen similarly rejects this form of political endeavour because ‘inequalities in effectiveness’ of cost-levying are likely to correspond to ‘underlying social or economic inequalities in society’ (1996: 107). Politics as cost-levying, then, appears to reward those who have money, time, status, and wherewithal, and disempower those who do not. Seen as such, it is the value of political equality – the notion that each should count for one and none for more than one – which renders it an inappropriate form of

The challenge of radical environmentalism 99 democratic political activity. Put most simply, the more time, resources, and skill one has the more one is likely to be able effectively to levy costs but, if one believes in political equality one cannot consistently believe that initial inequalities should be the determinants of political decision-making. All that seems relatively straightforward at first glance; it is difficult to see how one could remain a democrat of any sort and explicitly reject the idea of political equality or question the notion that one’s political influence should reflect the force of one’s cause rather than size of one’s wallet. But at closer inspection, the inequality objection seems rather an odd one in this case. For the resources at the disposal of the protesting groups under examination here – say those opposed to genetic modification or the use of nuclear energy – clearly do not surpass, or even equal, those of their opponents. Indeed, in this case the protesters are more than likely to be vastly less wealthy than the governments and developers that they take on. They are outnumbered and outresourced in all sorts of ways, lacking access not only to financial resources but also to the formal and informal mechanisms of political power. It is not environmental activists who are invited to lunch with civil servants and government ministers, nor is it activists who write policy documents or corporate strategies. Rather, it is those who are committed to environmental exploitation of various sorts who inhabit these particular corridors of power. Indeed, if this is politics as David and Goliath struggle, then it is the protesters who are the Davids and their opponents who are the Goliaths. It is necessary to ask why, then, the protesters appear committed to a style of politics which ill-suits their position vis-à-vis their opponents? Why do they choose not to advocate the politics of deliberation which would explicitly seek to level the playing field and allow them to engage in a process of reason giving in ways that are designed to reduce the impact of existing resource differentials? One answer is that environmental activists of the sort we are concerned with here are simply incapable of engaging in the sort of reason-giving politics that deliberative democrats advocate. Seen this way, the protesters are best understood as unreasonable, even ‘fundamentalists’. They are incapable of offering explanations for their particular political protests, or at least incapable of doing so in terms that their fellow citizens might be expected to understand or endorse. The politics of ‘cost-levying’ is thus the only route available to them, even if it is a route which is unlikely to prove productive for people as weakly positioned in the political hierarchy as they are. But there is another answer available too. That answer begins with the recognition that small, or relatively unpopular, groups of political activists must find ways of placing their issues on the political agenda; they must somehow find leverage out of their otherwise uninfluential political position. In some cases, they might do so simply by explaining their case particularly well: by somehow persuading their fellow citizens to change their minds and thus change their actions by the force of their arguments, or the power of their reasons. But these cases are always likely to be rare if only because citizens of all sorts are simply unlikely to change their minds and behaviours very often and they are particularly unlikely to change

100 Ecological outcomes their minds in ways that require a significant reshaping of their fundamental worldviews or their ways of life. It is very difficult – or very costly, one might say – for citizens to alter established patterns of behaviour or to question deeply held views or cognitive styles. If recent political and social science has taught us anything, it is that such ‘stickiness’ is a central characteristic of the politics of modern democratic societies.12 The task facing all relatively small or (initially) unpopular groups, therefore, is to find a means by which to at least kick-start the process of reconsideration; a means which is effective, that is, in leading others to consider alternative modes of thought or behaviour to those to which they are habituated. It is in this regard that a particular set of cost-levying strategies have become the hallmark of an enormous number of relatively poorly situated political groups. At essence, such strategies are efforts to alter the cost-benefit calculation of other citizens by undermining the advantages that accrue to habituated patterns of thought and behaviour. Such a general strategy often takes a fairly precise range of forms. One such form is what the political sociologist Sidney Tarrow (1998: 96) has called the tactic of ‘disruption’. Disruption, as Tarrow summarises, is a form of political behaviour that intentionally seeks to obstruct ‘the routine activities of opponents, bystanders, or authorities’ and thus forces ‘them to attend to protesters’ demands’. As Habermas has suggested, the ‘activated periphery’ often need to introduce issues ‘via parliamentary (or judicial) sluices . . . in a way that disrupts the latter’s routines’ (1996: 358). Activists thus seek to get their issues on the agenda, and lead others to at least think seriously about their concerns on this model by getting in the way of the normal day-to-day behaviour of a range of other citizens, unsettling their practices, and thus waking them up to the protesters’ existence and their demands. As Iris Marion Young has rightly noted elsewhere, ‘one of the activist’s goals is to make us wonder about what we are doing, to rupture a stream of thought’ (2001: 687). If the ‘expected’ can be rendered the ‘unexpected’ in this way, then two advantages follow: attention is drawn to the protesters’ concerns and the costs of continuing with the currently acceptable practice is increased. The appeal of such a tactic lies, then, in the fact that it is capable of reducing the advantages that accrue to a particular mode of thought or action simply by virtue of citizens’ habituation to that mode. It thus appeals to the small or the initially marginalised precisely because it enables them to place their favoured options on a more equal footing with those of their more established counterparts. What all this goes to show, is that if political equality was indeed the primary consideration of deliberative democrats then particular cost-levying behaviours, such as disruption, should often be advocated rather than condemned. Many groups turn to the tactic, after all, precisely because they can find no other way of getting their opinions listened to, or advancing their cause, because they suffer as a result of currently existing political inequalities, especially inequalities brought about due to the habituation of citizens to particular ways of being or modes of thought.13 As John Medearis has recently argued, political strategies of the disruptive kind are often specifically ‘oriented towards transforming [the] unequal social power-relations that disadvantage some groups, hindering their

The challenge of radical environmentalism 101 equal inclusion in political contention and undermining democracy’ (2005: 69). If political equality is really our concern, therefore, then empowering activists to challenge the advantages of entrenched patterns of behaviour would appear to be a desirable rather than an undesirable form of democratic political action. The essential difference between deliberative democrats and the activists here under examination does not, however, lie in their differential attempts to redress the prevailing imbalance in political power and to equalise the political playingfield. Put most simply, it is not political equality which really matters here but the nature of the political strategy itself. For deliberative democrats there is something wrong with cost-levying, or disruption, unless it provokes more deliberation in the future, and that is because they believe there is something right with a different sort of political strategy. Environmental protestors, however, have a different conception of democratic politics, and in order to get a full picture of that it is necessary to move to the second of the environmental protestors’ political strategies.

The maximisation or the economy of moral disagreement? Cost-levying does not exhaust the environmental protestors’ strategic repertoire, for they do engage in more explicitly persuasive forms of political activity as well. They are frequently to be found on street corners explaining their views and attempting to build coalitions of support for their recommended reforms, they make frequent appeals through the mass media, and seek to utilise the normal range of deliberative forums to shape on-going dialogue and debate when the issue of environmental protection breaks into mainstream politics. This, however, does not make them ‘deliberators’ in the recognised sense for as they engage in dialogue they tend to employ a range of rhetorical strategies that would not endear them to deliberative democrats. Most notably, they are often to be found dramatically maximising the differences in their position with the position of their rivals. They do not seek compromise or agreement nor do they even often outline criteria for evaluation that could be shared with their opponents; they aim, instead, to use ‘non-violent, creative confrontation to expose global environmental problems and their causes’.14 Such a strategy stands, again, in sharp opposition to the deliberative democratic norm. In outlining the ways in which deliberative democratic politics should proceed, and the ways in which it is to be further differentiated from politics as a process of cost-levying on opponents, the theorists of deliberative democracy demand that democratic practitioners cultivate certain dispositions towards their political opponents, dispositions which incorporate the need to foster an ‘enlarged mentality’ or to ‘economise’ on moral disagreement with rivals. For Joshua Cohen this disposition is to regard one another as equals, and to argue ‘in terms of considerations that others have reason to accept’. This in turn affects the kinds of reasons that can be put forward in an ‘idealised’ deliberation – only those that are ‘compelling’ to others, otherwise reasons can be rejected as

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unacceptable (1996: 100). Seyla Benhabib, following Hannah Arendt, demands an ‘enlarged mentality’, which involves ‘reasoning from the standpoint of all involved’ (1996: 72). Graham Smith also notes the deliberative democrats’ demand for enlarged mentality, noting that it ‘entails a degree of moral courage to appreciate the force of arguments offered by people with whom we disagree’ (2003: 60). Perhaps the most extensively developed dispositional demands are those presented by Gutmann and Thompson, who place considerable emphasis on the necessity of what they call an ‘economy of moral disagreement’. What does this entail, and why is it considered important to democratic deliberation? Economy of moral disagreement (EMD) is rendered in two quite distinct ways by Gutmann and Thompson. These are: 1 2

The minimisation of distance between your own moral position and that of your opponent. That an opponent’s views on issue a should not affect how you treat them across any of a range of other issues b, c, d . . . n.

The first version of EMD demands that in making the case for one’s moral position, one seeks to minimise the moral distance between the arguments one puts forward in favour of one’s own principle(s), and the arguments that one’s opponents put forward for theirs. In seeking to maximise political agreement we ‘affirm that we accept significant parts of the substantive morality of fellow citizens to whom we may find ourselves deeply opposed in other respects’ (2004: 89). We remind ourselves that even when we have vehement differences with our fellow citizens over particular areas of moral conflict we nonetheless share many moral assumptions and beliefs as well. The second version of EMD indicates a demand for the separation of spheres of moral concern, rather than the minimisation of difference over a particular moral dilemma. If you and I disagree fundamentally about, say, abortion, that should not affect our relationship with regard to educational opportunities, equality before the law, access to health care, and so on. Someone’s views on one issue should not affect their treatment with regard to other issues. It should be noted that these two versions of EMD are distinct and neither logically implies the other. Citizens may seek to minimise their moral differences with each other on issue x but allow this disagreement to bleed over into differential treatment of each other according to matters y and z. Alternatively, they may compartmentalise in accordance with the demands of EMD version (2) but actually seek to maximise their moral disagreement with each other on issue x itself. To focus on version (1) (which is the version upon which Gutmann and Thompson concentrate), why is minimisation of moral disagreement taken to be a good and under what circumstances, if any, are exceptions permitted? In regard to the first question one of the aims of democratic deliberation is to foster a ‘politics of mutual respect’, and the possibilities for such respect are taken to be undermined by polarised moral argument. The fundamental intuition here is that we are more likely to feel respect for those with whom we know we have much in the way of moral belief in common.

The challenge of radical environmentalism 103 Nonetheless, the politics of mutual respect is ‘not always pretty’, as there are times when citizens will find it necessary to make ‘extreme and uncompromising statements’. Such statements operate some distance away from the principle of EMD, even if they may not take us all the way back to cost-levying, so why, and when, are they justified? In the two places where Gutmann and Thompson discuss this extensively, they invoke a future orientation as crucial in the justification of ‘extreme’ statements. Such statements may be justified when they draw attention to a ‘legitimate’ position which would otherwise be ‘ignored’ and in doing so they will ‘promote mutual respect in the long run’ (2004: 89). This in turn, of course, raises a number of further questions: what constitutes a ‘legitimate’ position for which non-deliberative forms of argument are justified? How can those considering whether or not to engage in non-deliberative forms of politics know, in advance, that what they do will ‘promote mutual respect in the long run’, or ‘lead to future occasions for deliberative criticism of injustice’? Why, anyway, are these the appropriate criteria by which to assess the acceptability of non-deliberative forms of politics? The claim that non-deliberative forms of politics may be justified when they are tied to a ‘legitimate’ view is deeply problematic from the perspective of deliberative democracy. This is because legitimacy is itself derived from public deliberation: the whole thrust of Gutmann and Thompson’s argument against ‘perfectionist’ liberals relies upon a distinction between political and private morality by which the former is crucially dependent upon a notion of public justification (2004: 43–5). The possibility of political legitimacy deriving from a source external to public justification (the kinds of external source norms discussed in Chapter 4) is ruled out, ‘It is not enough for an American president . . . to know in his heart that he is right’ (2004: 44). It follows that we cannot determine what a ‘legitimate’ political position is, absent the public justification that comes about as a result of deliberation, and therefore there cannot be, in the political sphere, an a priori ‘legitimate’ position that would ‘otherwise be ignored’ if it was not promoted by ‘extreme’ views. If there are no such ‘legitimate’ positions, but merely positions, how the supporters of such positions ever know that they would be justified in employing non-deliberative means? The public justification of such a position is precisely what is likely to be at issue under circumstances of public moral disagreement. If legitimacy cannot be established a priori, perhaps political agents should adopt the relevant future orientation. Remember that non-deliberative means were justified when they would ‘promote mutual respect in the long run’, or, as with cost-levying, ‘lead to future occasions for deliberative criticism of injustice’. If, therefore, protestors could be sure that such outcomes will prevail, then they have justification for using non-deliberative means now.15 This, however, threatens to place an insuperable epistemological barrier between the protestors and the justification open to them for employing non-deliberative means. How can any individual or group be certain that any form of non-deliberative action taken now will lead to increased opportunities for deliberative criticism and/or mutual respect between parties? Furthermore, if non-deliberative means of political

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protest are likely to lead to more mutual respect in the future, the argument for EMD would become redundant. This is because the argument for EMD rests on the premise that it is necessary for democratic politics to take place in an atmosphere of mutual respect and toleration. It therefore has to be the case for Gutmann and Thompson that non-deliberative forms of politics must be expected, under most conditions, to lead to a decline in mutual respect. ‘Future orientation’ is no more viable than a priori legitimacy as a way of justifying moves away from EMD. This brings us to a more fundamental question: just as with cost-levying activities so when activists are considering whether or not to employ non-deliberative means to promote a political cause why should they accept the need to ‘promote mutual respect’ or ‘lead to future occasions for deliberative criticism of injustice’ anyway? To begin to address this question, we need to consider why any political agent may consider means that reject the principle of EMD appropriate. As we noted at the outset of this section, violations of EMD occur not only when non-deliberative means are used, but also when the reason-giving involved in seeking public justification for a policy are not put in terms that seek to minimise moral disagreement. One of the reasons why agents might choose to act in this way that is highlighted by Gutmann and Thompson is that they are pursuing sectional interests rather than the common good. The naked pursuit of sectional interests is of course precisely what deliberative democracy, with its demands for arguments in terms of the common good, is designed to at least handicap, if not eradicate from politics completely. The failure of sectional interests to pursue their objectives in terms of the common good entails that, for deliberative democrats, they fail the test of legitimacy. There are, however, more interesting reasons why some groups may choose to pursue their objectives though non-EMD means. This is where they are making what they see as a moral case, in terms of the public good, but where the values being promoted are sufficiently at odds with dominant moral norms that ‘shock tactics’ are thought to be an effective medium of communication. To take a movement that is ‘related’ to environmentalism,16 animal liberationism is a good example of a moral position whose advocates often employ this strategy. The moral position being put forward is highly controversial and challenges entrenched moral views about the ethical status of animals. Why should nonEMD methods not be endorsed merely because they are seen as effective ways of changing how people think, particularly when the very issue of what constitutes an ‘injustice’ as at stake? It is precisely the point for animal rights protestors (as well as for those who believe in ‘ecological justice’) that we cannot rely upon our settled convictions about justice to guide us. It is only if the question of justice in the relationship between humans and animals is raised that there can ever be a possibility of ‘injustice’ in the relationship being recognised in the future, but protestors today can never be sure that such an outcome will follow. Animal rights protestors drawing parallels between our current treatment of animals and the Holocaust demonstrate the maximisation of moral disagreement.17 Such an analogy is designed to shock and confront, not to pursue common moral ground with ‘animal abusers’. Many people will doubtless find a comparison

The challenge of radical environmentalism 105 between the raising of livestock for meat and the murder of millions of human beings reprehensible, but for the animal rights protestors this is precisely the desired effect. The comparison forces people to think about livestock farming in a way they never would have before if they had not been presented with this image. It is not promoted in order to minimise the moral differences between animal rights activists and the wider public, but to maximise and highlight it. The reaction of one reader who found Eternal Treblinka ‘a mind-shaking, lifechanging book’18 is just what animal rights discourse intends to foster. Furthermore it is not done to promote deliberation in the ‘long run’, but simply to change the way people think about a moral problem and bring them closer to the ‘correct’ view. It is hard to see why this approach should be considered democratically reprehensible merely because it does not have the explicit aim of fostering future deliberation. On a more satirical plane the recent Greenpeace video ‘What does you car say about you?’ which shows workers spitting into the coffee of a colleague, and sticking the words ‘I am a prick’ to his back is a fairly non-deliberative attack on those who drive 4  4s, that bête noir of the environmental movement. Whether the effect is to reinforce the views of the already converted or make 4  4 owners feel ashamed of themselves, the film certainly does not follow the strictures of EMD and is as likely to further alienate 4  4 owners (in the unlikely event that they see it) from the environmental movement as make them reconsider their driving habits. The difficulty of justifying such non-EMD forms of politics in terms that deliberative democrats could accept is telling. It implies that to take the dispositional demands of deliberative democrats seriously would encourage a strongly conservative bias into debates about political morality, limiting the possibilities for transformative forms of politics. If those who seek to transform public morality are limited to making their public case in terms most acceptable to their opponents, and in a form that is ‘noncoercive’ on deliberative democracy’s view of coercion, they will have to adopt a reformist agenda, seeking ameliorative changes to existing institutional systems. Environmental activists can and do make the argument, for example, that areas of high biodiversity, in particular rainforests, may constitute a fecund source of pharmaceutical raw materials in the future. We never know what the potential value of an exterminated species may have been. This argument brings them onto the ground occupied by anthropocentric arguments, suggesting that it may be legitimate to preserve nature if the benefits to humankind are sufficiently high. Why, however, should environmental activists be expected to occupy this territory, rather than, say, drugs companies being forced to argue in terms of justice in the treatment of the natural world – in other words who is it that has to practise the economy of moral disagreement? The conventional morality sediments into the institutions and practices of a society, thus it will always be those seeking radical change in political morality who will be forced onto the territory of those seeking to defend the status quo – the relatively powerless must conform themselves to the dispositional demands of deliberative democracy. And that takes us back once again to the problems inherent in the argument from political equality.

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The ideal and non-ideal circumstances of democratic politics The discussion in the earlier sections raises a fundamental question regarding the divide between the theory of democratic deliberation and the approach of activists in ‘actually existing democracies’. I have suggested that environmental activists do not appear to have good reasons to conform their activities to the demands that normative deliberative theorists make with regard to cost-levying politics or an economy of moral disagreement. Rather, the value of political equality appears to demand that those who are seeking radical reorientations in public policy and political understandings might well seem to have good cause to turn to the politics of cost-levying and the rhetoric of profound moral disagreement in order to try to overcome the challenges they face in the contemporary political arena. One possible objection to this line of thought is to point out that these normative theorists are constructing an argument in terms of ideal theory, and that environmental protestors are belabouring under non-ideal circumstances. Under such non-ideal conditions there is no expectation that protestors will conform to political norms posited to serve under ideal conditions. Thus we will remember that for Cohen it was under idealised conditions that we are bound to make arguments that ‘others have reason to accept’ and it is under such ideal conditions that we can expect arguments such as those put forward by environmentalists or animal rights campaigners to be treated on their merits, rather than excluded from consideration due to imbalances in power and wealth. The apparent contradictions between the recommendations of deliberative theorists and the beliefs and practices of environmental campaigners melt away as the deliberative ideal is realised.19 There are two responses to this important objection, both of which touch on fundamental questions about the use of ideal theory in practical reasoning. The first response will be to examine the deliberative theorist’s own use of the ideal/non-ideal distinction, and we will see that their discussion of ‘imperfect’ deliberation allows for the normative demands of deliberative theory to be made even under non-ideal conditions, something that itself requires justification. The second response will look at the circumstances of democratic deliberation, where there is an important distinction to be made between contingent constraints upon ‘ideal’ deliberation and inherent constraints. My argument will be that the former constraints can reasonably be abstracted from, but the latter have to be considered part of any ‘realistic utopia’, and they have important implications for the normative appeal of deliberative democracy. In regard to the first response, if deliberative democrats wish to place normative weight upon the ideal/non-ideal distinction, they themselves need to be clear and consistent in its use. If movement away from the relevant ideal releases participants from the normative constraints of democratic deliberation, then the extent to which this is so and the degree to which such normative constraints still apply need to be stated systematically.20 Gutmann and Thompson stand in danger of collapsing the distinction when, for example, they treat the justification for the

The challenge of radical environmentalism 107 2003 Iraq war by the US government as an example of ‘imperfect’ deliberation, consistent with many of the strictures of their theory, because the US government provided reasons for its chosen course of action that others could have accepted (2004: 2). Such a claim is, of course, remarkable at a number of levels. Quite apart from the depressing prospect of having to rediscover Marx and Engels’ theory of ideology in order to understand how ‘reasons’ can sometimes work as a mask for rather less benign ‘interests’, it is clear that Gutmann and Thompson believe that their theory has application in the actual world of US politics as it exists in the present. Even under conditions where the reasons for going to war are based on secret intelligence, the validity of which no opponent is allowed to assess, the justificatory discourse of the war in Iraq is held to constitute an example of deliberation in action. There is no reason to suppose, therefore, that the discourse around environmental exploitation (generally more open than that surrounding secret intelligence) is not also to be held to be such an example of deliberation, and that, for deliberative theorists, environmental activists should be looking to desist in cost-levying and practise an economy of moral disagreement. If this is not so then deliberative theorists need to do far more work in relating ideal theory to non-ideal circumstances. In initial response to this charge, some deliberative democrats adopt a position very close to that of some of their critics and reopen the doors to the idea that some forms of cost-levying political action may indeed be acceptable in certain circumstances. Gutmann and Thompson thus insist that deliberative democracy does not entail that ‘every political activity itself be deliberative’ (2004: 56). Rather, they suggest, just as John Medearis appears to, that a wide range of political strategies may be invoked in response to unfair circumstances so long as those strategies themselves provoke ‘better’ deliberation in the long run. ‘When non-deliberative politics . . . are necessary to achieve deliberative ends’, they thus conclude, ‘deliberative theory consistently suspends its requirements for deliberation’ (2003: 51, cf. Medearis, 2004: 69–71). Such an idea may owe much to Jurgen Habermas, who notes that it can require a ‘long struggle for recognition’ in order to get issues considered in the political realm and also that it ‘is only through their controversial presentation’ that ‘such topics reach the larger public and . . . gain a place on the public agenda’ (1996: 314, 381). It is possible, then, that insofar as tactics such as ‘disruption’ succeed in placing issues on the table that would not otherwise be discussed they can indeed be supported by deliberative democrats rather than rejected, and as such the distance between our environmental protesters and deliberative democrats in general might be narrowed. The difficulty with such a response for the activist, however, is that deliberation must still itself follow from ‘disruption’. Disruptive tactics are thus desirable (or at least acceptable) when they both place issues on the agenda that might not otherwise be discussed and then give way to a reasonable discussion of the themes, at least in the longer run. It is here, of course, that the environmental protester and the deliberative democrat again part company. For the vast majority of environmental protesters do not understand the role of strategies such as

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disruption in terms of agenda-setting and deliberative initiation. They might well be pleased to promote widespread discussion of the environment or the morality of animal experimentation but they primarily understand their role rather in terms of their potential political outcome and they do not see the strategy of cost-levying as one that could be put aside in some future moment of political equality and deliberative politics. The desired outcome of an environmental protest might be brought about in the disruption-followed-by-deliberation-followed-by-decision pathway, but it might just as well be brought about by the disruption-followed-bynegotiation-followed-by-decision pathway, and to the protestors’ mind there is nothing less democratic in the latter than the former, even when the need to bargain has been brought about through the sense of political crisis created by activists themselves. Such a view has been crucial to political activists of many different kinds for generations. As Martin Luther King observed ‘you are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue’ (King, 1963). Of all the deliberative democrats, it is Jurgen Habermas who comes closest to endorsing this strategy. Habermas is still, however, a little unclear as to whether such an approach is acceptable in ‘ideal’ circumstances as well as ‘non-ideal’ ones. In considering Habermas’ position it is vital to recognise his crucial distinction between acceptable forms of politics for the informal public sphere, where dramatisation and disruption are acceptable, and for the formal democratic sphere, where they generally are not. It is also important to recognise that despite this distinction Habermas does always retain room for political ‘negotiation’ and bargaining, even in the ideal, as long as the conditions of bargaining are fair. Such a view clearly places Habermas much closer to the position of the activists than most Anglo-American political philosophers, although the dispositional demands of his discursive democracy may still present problems to many actual activists.21 This observation is, however, crucially important for it illustrates that the essential difference between deliberative democrats and the activists here under examination does not lie in their differential attempts to redress the prevailing imbalance in political power and to equalise the political playing-field. Put most simply, it is not political equality which really matters here but the nature of the political strategy itself. For deliberative democrats there is something wrong with cost-levying, or disruption, unless it provokes more deliberation in the future, and that is because they believe there is something right with a different sort of political strategy. The second response relates to the nature of non-ideal circumstances. If the non-ideal circumstances faced by activists are merely contingent, then the argument put forward here is not terribly interesting. We could seek to spell out the range of legitimate tactics activists might adopt as circumstances depart from the posited ideal, but the argument would not raise any fundamental problems with normative deliberative theory in terms of either its moral prescriptions or its use of ideal theory. I want to suggest however, that there is a more profound challenge that can

The challenge of radical environmentalism 109 be made to deliberative theory and its use of ideal theory, and that concerns inherent problems with the use of ideal theory in an exercise of practical reason of the sort that thinking about democracy inevitably is. The question here is: what is it reasonable to abstract away from in the construction of a political theory? One answer might be ‘anything and everything’, but this potentially leaves us with a very thin and less than useful way of thinking about politics. A more feasible alternative is to apply Rawls’ conception of a ‘realistic utopia’, where ‘political philosophy is realistically utopian when it extends what are ordinarily thought to be the limits of practicable political possibility and, in so doing, reconciles us to our political and social condition’ (1999b: 11). Habermas offers a similar understanding; approaching ‘ideal’ theory as a form of ‘methodological fiction’ which enables us to identify the avoidable and the ‘unavoidable’ in what he calls ‘social complexity’ (1996: 287). The point here is that certain elements of ‘practicable political possibility’ and our ‘political and social condition’ will remain even if we assume away such elements as differentials in power and wealth and refusals to engage in good faith deliberation, and these elements create problems for deliberative theory. The first set of problems has to do with non-reversibility, as analysed in Chapter 4. Gutmann and Thompson consider irreversibility and have this to say on the matter: ‘Even in the case of those [decisions] that are irreversible, like the decision to attack Iraq, reappraisals can lead to different choices later than were planned initially’ (2004: 6). This is plausible, and we can certainly accept for the purposes of argument that it is true. It has, however, nothing to do with the ‘provisionality’ reason for accepting democratic outcomes. There is nothing ‘provisional’ about a non-reversible outcome, at least not in the sense required of the ‘provisionality’ argument. It may be mutable in the future, subject to revisions, and so on, but by definition there can be no return to the status quo ante. So does this further argument from Gutmann and Thompson provide us with any reason to accept the democratic rules even when policy outcomes are non-reversible? The claim is that (democratic) reappraisals in the future can lead to different subsequent choices than may have been intended when the nonreversible policy was initially enacted. It is difficult to see why, if you oppose policy x now and believe that this policy will have bad non-reversible consequences, you should nonetheless accept the democratic outcome on the grounds that further argument may lead to ‘different choices later’. If you are seeking to avoid a bad non-reversible outcome, the possibility of making ‘different choices later’ as a result of democratic discussion following the non-reversible policy change may well be of little consequence. There may still be reasons to adopt deliberation but it cannot be the ‘change subsequent decisions’ reason that would work decisively in favour of following the rules of deliberation. Once provisionality falls from the picture, so does the justification for accepting deliberative rules that it underpins. This logic has to apply to environmental activists, when they see the policies that they are opposing as having fundamentally important non-reversible elements. If environmentalists are campaigning to save the last remaining elements of

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a species, for example, the possibility of making different choices in the future will be of scant regard in the present struggle to avoid the extermination. They therefore cannot believe that the provisionality argument applies, and so cannot have that reason available to them for following the deliberative-democratic path. In the absence of other compelling reasons, if they believe that a non-deliberative strategy offers the best opportunity for avoiding important and unwelcome irreversible change, they do have a strong reason to adopt that strategy. Provisionality cannot be a sufficient reason for abiding by the normative constraints of deliberative democracy, whatever the weight placed upon it by the theorists of democratic deliberation. The second set of conditions bring us back to the cost-levying and maximisation of moral disagreement arguments rehearsed earlier. When there are deeply entrenched, common frames of reference for thinking about principles of justice (say) and groups wish to challenge these, they may well have to resort to nondeliberative strategies even when their opponents are rational, reasonable, and committed to open deliberation. We can, for example, imagine a future world where non-human nature has its interests considered in policy making as a matter of right, and where it seems ‘obvious’ that it should never have been treated in the manner in which it was when instrumental approaches to nature dominated. In such a world it may seem equally obvious that environmental protestors, in seeking to push people’s perceptions of justice beyond the ‘natural’ human boundary, were as justified in using non-deliberative tactics as civil rights protestors and antebellum anti-slavery protestors were in their struggles. The crucial point is, however, that such a view can never seem obvious now, precisely because environmental protestors are pushing against an entrenched view of justice that draws a species-boundary around the human. In order to challenge that entrenched view, cost-levying politics and other non-deliberative strategies may be necessary, and it is certainly not clear that they are unjustified. We can assume that in any ‘realistic utopia’ there will still exist forms of conventional wisdom and widely shared cognitive frames that will inherently disadvantage groups seeking to present alternative conceptions of fundamental political principles. Any theory of democracy that wishes to remain open to such transformative forms of politics, and which values some notion of political equality in public debate, will have to be less normatively prescriptive than existing theories of deliberation.

Ecological politics and democratic political theory reconsidered The outcome of this argument is not to make a judgement as to whether environmental activists or their opponents are making the right moral judgement. I use environmental activism as an example of a movement that is seeking to transform existing public morality: the vast majority of people in the Western world engage in environmentally damaging, and possibly (collectively) disastrous activities on a daily basis. The point is rather that there is nothing inherently reasonable, and much that is unreasonable, in expecting environmental activists, and other

The challenge of radical environmentalism 111 similarly positioned protestors, such as those campaigning for animal rights, to abide by the rules of the deliberative game. This argument revolves essentially around two commitments: a commitment to political equality, and a commitment to radical innovation. Even in realistically ‘ideal’ circumstances, there will be groups in society who wish to mount a radical challenge to prevailing norms, including understandings of justice and of the boundaries of inclusion. A decent theory of democracy, I further contend, has to allow those groups effective voice. It has to ensure that conventional wisdoms are not protected simply because they are conventional, and it has to ensure that these groups have some means of overcoming the disadvantages inherent in their distinctiveness and unconventionality. Nor is this simply a requirement that deliberative democrats widen the forms of communication that they are willing to accept, as Iris Marion Young and John Dryzek have both argued.22 In order to be genuinely open to ‘the shock of the new’, democratic politics has to allow groups to employ a broad range of political strategies that encourage people to abandon established patterns and see things in ways that they are not initially comfortable with and that means allowing them to employ strategies which change individuals’ cost-benefit calculations and unsettle their established modes of thinking. This is not, however, to endorse the ‘agonistic’ approach to democracy widely associated with deliberative democracy’s most vocal critics, such as Bonnie Honig, James Tully, William Connolly and Chantal Mouffe. For agonists, deliberative democrats’ primary error lies in their apparent claim that the processes of deliberation could result in a substantial ‘agreement’ between citizens on matters of fundamental moral importance. As Chantal Mouffe outlines, the suggestion that ‘a universal rational consensus could be produced by an undistorted dialogue . . . is only possible at the cost of denying the irreducible antagonistic element present in social relations’ (Mouffe, 1993: 140). Agonists are committed to rejecting such a suggestion. They find the idea of widespread agreement of this sort both unlikely and undesirable; it is unlikely because it overlooks the irreducible pluralism of value on questions of fundamental importance and it is undesirable because even if such a consensus could be reached it would have to come at the expense of the creative independence that gives so much value to individuals’ lives in the modern world: ‘One of the shortcomings of the deliberative approach is that, by postulating the availability of a public sphere where power would have been eliminated and where a rational consensus could be realized, this model of democratic politics is unable to acknowledge the dimension of antagonism that the pluralism of values entails, and its ineradicable character’ (Mouffe, 2000: 23). Democratic politics, on this view, should be a politics that embraces disagreement and dissent, even in very vigorous forms, as it is only that kind of politics that reflects the real diversity that exists amongst the citizens of modern societies whilst also giving room for those individuals’ creative flourishing. The ‘main task for democracy’, on such a view, is not to pursue agreement, but to learn to live with difference and even to enable such difference to enrich our lives. These thinkers, thus, wish ‘to convert antagonism into agonism, enemies into adversaries, fighting into critical engagement’, as John Dryzek has helpfully

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summarised, and a healthy democracy is the process which enables us to do just that (Dryzek, 2005: 220). The difficulty with this argument from the perspective of activists such as those in the animal rights movement is, of course, its ambivalence on the issue of collective decision. Deliberative democrats, after all, are committed to the idea that processes of politics should be capable of forging a singular decision out of the multiplicity of views that currently obtains in modern society: it is precisely because states must govern that we need to be able to reach agreement on the questions that trouble us. In this regard, at least, environmental activists appear closer to deliberative democrats than to their agonistic critics. They wish, after all, to see certain practices prohibited not just discouraged through vigorous debate and contestation and (at least in general) they also wish to see that prohibition reached through a recognisably democratic process, rather than through simple state coercion. Unlike agonists, therefore, these activists do long for the day when a particular form of consensus is reached, a consensus on the treatment of non-human nature, and a new form of ‘justice’ promoted by the power of both public opinion and the state. The disagreement with deliberative democrats, then, flows solely from the contention that the behavioural limitations that deliberative democracy outlines present an unreasonable restriction on their political strategies. A more vigorous, contestatory approach to democratic politics is justified here not by any belief in the necessity of ‘agonism’ but by the demands of political equality and the requirement that innovative perspectives should be able to influence the decision-making process. That leaves us, of course, with the question of precisely what kinds of democratic limitations are, or more importantly should be, acceptable to activists such as those in the environmental and animal rights movements. If these are movements which accept the necessity (indeed, the desirability) of democratic collective decision, and are not rightly to be categorised as ‘terrorists’ or ‘fundamentalists’ who wish to impose their views on others irrespective of others’ positions on the same questions, then they will need also to accept that democratic politics cannot be a politics of ‘anything goes’. A justification for direct action, cost-levying, and the polarisation of moral disagreement should not, that is, become a justification for indiscriminate action or political violence. A theory of democracy must involve the identification of some sort of behavioural limitation. In many ways, the further identification of these limitations seems, of course, an enormous project; indeed, it would require the development of a new democratic theory itself. There are, however, two reasons to be optimistic that such a project could be completed. The first reason rests in the observation that the fundamental values of such a democratic theory are relatively easily identified. Such a theory would share the deliberative democrats’ belief in the importance of a democratic process that can lend legitimacy to collective decisions that are imposed on diverse populations, but it would diverge from deliberative democracy’s excessive behavioural limitations and ensure that groups can employ political strategies that can overcome the inequalities generated by the power of ‘conventional wisdom’.

The challenge of radical environmentalism 113 Such a democratic theory would, in other words, be informed by the values of political equality and radical innovation that have structured this entire discussion. The second reason for optimism rests in the observation that much actual democratic politics has operated in precisely this way for generations. Democratic activists seeking to overturn well-established political perspectives, to craft alternative theories of justice, and to persuade their fellow citizens of the necessity of breaking with the values of the past, have long made recourse to a wide range of political strategies – including cost-levying and the polarisation of moral disagreement – whilst also stopping short of insurrection, violence, or indiscriminate intimidation. There is, as a result, an enormous store of political wisdom upon which we can draw as we seek to delineate a more reasonable set of behavioural limitations. Activists, such as those in trade unions, in the civil, women’s, and gay rights movements, have, that is, long considered how far they should go in seeking to persuade their fellow citizens. They have not, of course, always made the right decisions: their evaluative judgements on political strategy could not always have been just. But then, as we have seen in this chapter, the deliberative democrats who dominate much of the relevant work in political theory today have gone even further awry. Democracy demands that we ensure that all citizens are granted an equal chance to challenge the conventional wisdoms that govern our society: democratic activists such as those in the environmental movement have properly recognised that fact, deliberative democrats have not. As we seek to understand how citizens should behave in a democratic political order, therefore, it is time that political theorists stopped demonising activists and the strategies they employ, and started examining the store of actual practical wisdom from democratic political movements of the past and of the present. It is from that wisdom that a viable democratic theory is most likely to emerge.

7

Radical environmentalism and the idea of public reason

Introduction We saw in the previous chapter that the demands of deliberative democracy, far from levelling up the playing field with regard to the demands of environmentalists, may actually increase the burdens placed upon them by placing moral injunctions against some of their most important strategies and tactics. One of the burdens that deliberative theorists place upon dissenting groups, and I will argue one of the most important, is that political arguments should be made in terms of public reason. We will examine the nature of public reason in detail in the next section, but briefly it comprises of the demand that, in making political arguments or justifying political actions, citizens refrain from invoking reasons that rest upon a comprehensive conception of the good that not all members of society can be expected to share (I could not expect my fellow citizens to accept an argument against abortion that rests upon the truth of Roman Catholic doctrine when many of them are not Catholics). Where, as in Western liberal democracies, there is a background condition of pluralism, then that injunction entails that we should not make political arguments from a comprehensive conception of the good at all, but rather from any one of a family of ‘reasonable conceptions of justice’ that people can be expected to endorse, or at least accede to, from the perspective of any reasonable conception of the good (we will also examine what it means to be ‘reasonable’ in this context). We will begin this discussion with an overview of the nature of public reason as articulated in liberal theory and the criticisms that have been made of the attempt to apply it as a moral standard to which (at least some) political discourse should aspire. I will take the ideal of public reason in the form in which it has been articulated by John Rawls, as this version has been influential in the theory of deliberative democracy, particularly in the work of Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, whose dispositional demands upon deliberative participants were to the fore in the previous chapter.1 We will then examine the relationship between public reason and environmentalism. As we shall see there is controversy as to whether the dictates of public reason should apply to environmental politics, and if they do, what form this might take and what arguments it would allow. Finally, we will turn to the question that continues the thread from the previous chapter,

The idea of public reason 115 are the strictures of public reason fair to novel political arguments of the sort that environmentalists see themselves as making? We will take as an illustrative example the attempt to put forward an argument for ecological justice. If the demands of public reason are not fair, what are the implications of this?

The substance and scope of public reason For John Rawls, public reason features in two of his three essential elements of deliberative democracy. It is there in its own right, and along with a framework of constitutional democratic institutions, it features in the desire on the part of citizens to follow and realise public reason in their political conduct. As public reason is considered such a central element of democratic deliberation, it is worth reflecting at length upon its relationship to the ideals and political demands of the radical environmental movement. Rawls develops the concept of public reason in a number of his writings that follow A Theory of Justice, particularly Political Liberalism (1993, 1996) and The Idea of Public Reason Revisited (1997) and these texts will form the basis for our interpretation of his position. In the latter piece Rawls suggests that public reason as the following five aspects (1999a: 574–5). 1 2 3 4 5

It applies to fundamental political questions. It applies to persons only as they undertake certain political roles. It has a content given by a family of reasonable political conceptions of justice. It involves the application of these conceptions in discussions of coercive norms to be enacted as legitimate law for a democratic people. It involves citizens checking that the principles derived from such conceptions satisfy the criterion of reciprocity.

The first two of these five features refer to the scope of public reason, and the latter three to its substance. Questions of both scope and content are relevant for the consideration of the applicability of public reason in respect to ecological politics. For the moment, we need to clarify the five aspects of public reason as set out by Rawls before going on to consider the problems raised in the critical literature. First, what are the ‘fundamental political questions’ to which public reason applies? It might be thought, for example, that questions of the governing of the economy were ‘fundamental’ in a way that environmental policy is not. Rawls is not, however, differentiating the importance of different policy areas, but rather delimiting the scope over which public reason has domain. As Rawls makes clear in Political Liberalism, public reason is to apply to ‘constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice’, the former referring to ‘what political rights and liberties, say, may reasonably be included in a written constitution’; the latter relating to ‘the basic structure of society and so . . . [e.g.] basic economic and social justice and other things not covered by a constitution’ (Rawls, 1996: 1).

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More specifically, ‘constitutional essentials and basic justice’ refers to the fundamental principles that specify the structure of government and the political process; the equal basic rights and liberties of citizenship (1996: 227); and a general conception of economic and social justice, such as ‘some principle of opportunity’ and a ‘social minimum’, but not specifically the conceptions of equality of opportunity and the difference principle as set out in A Theory of Justice, which by this time Rawls construes as deriving from a comprehensive liberal doctrine (1996: xviii). It is equally redundant to make claims based on the truth of liberalism when many fellow citizens will not be liberals. With regard to environmental matters and the scope of public reason Rawls has this to say ‘Many if not most political questions do not concern those fundamental matters, for example . . . statutes protecting the environment and controlling pollution; establishing national parks and preserving wilderness areas and animal and plant species’ (1996: 214). These issues will ‘sometimes’ involve fundamental matters, and a ‘full account’ of public reason would explain how they differ from constitutional essentials and why the dictates of public reason do not apply, or at least not as strictly. Whilst this seems to rule out environmental matters from the dictates of public reason, at least in a strict sense, Rawls hedges on this. His purpose is to show that public reason applies at least to constitutional essential and basic justice, for ‘[i]f we should not honor the limits of public reason here, it would seem we need not honor them anywhere’ (1996: 215). Having established this much, it may be the case that the dictates of public reason should apply to other political questions as well, and ‘I grant that it is usually highly desirable to settle political questions by invoking the values of public reason’. Nonetheless ‘this may not always be so’ (1996: 215). So, although environmental questions are explicitly listed as those for which we might vote our non-political values,2 they nonetheless may be questions for public reason when they involve constitutional essentials or basic justice, or if the scope of public reason should be extended beyond these areas, and that extended scope is such that it covers the subject matter of environmental politics. Whilst Rawls accepts that both of these conditions may apply (and thus his position is indeterminate), his contention that ‘the status of the natural world and our proper relation to it is not a constitutional essential or a basic question of justice. . . . It is a matter in which citizens can vote their non-political values’ (1996: 246) is sufficiently clear that we shall take him at his word. Environmental questions, unless they are clearly those that come under the rubric of constitutional essentials and basic justice,3 do not, for Rawls, have to be decided according to the tenets of public reason, at least not until such times as the conception of public reason becomes more fully developed. As for Rawls’ second condition, this is intended to limit the application of public reason to the appropriate aspects of political life, that is, when we are involved in the exercise of coercive political power, which is not justifiable unless exercised in accordance with a constitution the essentials of which all citizens can reasonably be expected to endorse (1996: 217). The dictates of public reason apply to public officials and candidates seeking office, to the discourse of judges

The idea of public reason 117 in their decisions, and to ordinary citizens when voting on matters that concern fundamentals. Public reason, in other words, applies to discussions that take place in the ‘public political forum’ (1999a: 575) and does not apply to discussions about fundamental matters that take place outside of this forum. Importantly, in this context, the ‘public political forum’ will include forms of coercive direct action conducted in support of political objectives. The third, fourth, and fifth elements of Rawls’ account refer to the content of public reason, which is, first, given content from ‘a family of reasonable political conceptions of justice’ (1999a: 574). The first question to ask here is what makes a conception of justice ‘reasonable’, as we will want to assess the ‘reasonableness’ of radical environmentalism. Onora O’Neill warns us, with some reason, that Rawls’ conception of the reasonable ‘is not easy to discern’ (1997: 413), and we have to consider its content when applied to conceptions of justice in comparison and contrast to its content when applied to citizens, or to comprehensive doctrines. Reasonableness for Rawls is closely tied to the notion of reciprocity; citizens, for example, are reasonable when ‘viewing one another as free and equal in a system of social cooperation over generations, they are prepared to offer one another fair terms of cooperation according to what they consider the most reasonable conception of political justice; and when they agree to act on those terms, even at the cost of their own interests’ (1999a: 578). This is the ‘first basic aspect of the reasonable’ according to Rawls (1996: 54). The second basic aspect is ‘the willingness to recognise the burdens of judgement’ (1996: 54) which reflect the complexity of both empirical and moral matters and the range of perspectives available in a pluralistic society. In short, it is not reasonable under these conditions to expect agreement on complex social and moral questions.4 As for comprehensive doctrines, these are reasonable when they display three ‘main features’. A reasonable comprehensive doctrine is an ‘exercise of theoretical reason’, covering the major religious, philosophical, and moral aspects of life. It is also an exercise in practical reason, in singling out which values are particularly important and ‘how to balance them when they conflict’. The third feature of such a doctrine is that it ‘draws on a tradition of thought’, and is thus stable over time. Evolving slowly in the light of what, from its perspective, are ‘good and sufficient reasons’.5 As to the reasonableness of a conception of justice, Rawls sums up rather pithily in A Theory of Justice: ‘As a rough rule a conception of justice is reasonable in proportion to the strength of the arguments that can be given for adopting it in the original position’ (1999b: 310). This short statement requires a good deal of unpacking, but the intuition behind it is that as the original position (with its accompanying veil of ignorance) is designed to ensure reciprocity and fairness, a conception of justice with strong arguments for implementation in the original position will satisfy (to that extent) the conditions of reciprocity and fairness in the real world. Conditions (4) and (5) can be dealt with more briefly; (4) relates content to scope, these reasonable conceptions of justice being applied to discussions of the legitimate use of coercive law, and (5) is a condition of reflexivity, citizens of

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a constitutional democracy should ensure that principles derived from any conception of justice acted upon do indeed meet the fundamental condition of reciprocity.

Public reason: problems and criticisms A considerable secondary literature has developed with regard to the notion of public reason, concerned with both its scope and its content. With regard to the political positions of radical environmentalists, four problems with public reason identified in the literature appear particularly germane. The first of these regards the scope of public reason, second the ‘width’ or ‘inclusivity’ of public reason, third the depth of pluralism as the background condition against which public reason is set, and finally the viability of public reason as a genuine alternative to ‘sectarian’ ideological belief.

Scope With regard to the scope of public reason, we have discussed Rawls’ views already, and seen that he brackets off questions about the extension of public reason beyond the constitutional essentials and basic justice. It is not that he is opposed to such extension in principle, but rather that he hopes to establish the need for public reason in what he takes to be the paradigm case before taking it into areas where the requirement for it seems less obvious. In this context, Jonathan Quong’s article on the scope of public reason is not so much an argument against (at least this version of) Rawls as an exercise in thinking about a question that Rawls defers. Quong suggests that the three main arguments offered for restricting public reason to a narrow range of questions (the priority argument, the basic interests argument, and the completeness argument) each assume, rather than demonstrate, that public reason does not apply beyond fundamentals. He argues instead that there are no good reasons for abandoning the major principles upon which the call for public reason is based – fairness and respect for persons – when we are discussing the coercive use of state power on non-fundamental political questions (2004: 246). We are, after all, still dealing with coercive authority, and the need for justification for the use of coercive power remains. As long as ‘there are reasons available to us that are suitably public in nature . . . what possible reason can we give that would justify ignoring them?’ (2004: 246). With respect to the environment, as we have seen Rawls himself cites various political values that can be at stake, and thus there are grounds for believing that at least some environmental questions should be amenable to public reason, even when they do not involve fundamentals (2004: 244; see also Bell, 2002). Environmentalists signing up to the principles of deliberative democracy should, it seems to me, endorse Quong’s view, as calls for the extension of deliberation over a broad range of political questions entail extending the scope of its normative commitment as well.6 This means that the endorsement of deliberative

The idea of public reason 119 democracy on the part of green theorists has far reaching effects. If public reasons are available, then these are what should be employed in arguing for ecological outcomes. If a claim about ecological justice is rooted in a comprehensive conception of the good, it violates the tenets of public reason if there are more ‘reasonable’ arguments on offer. The argument, for example, that non-human entities have a right to live a species-life may not be recognised as it involves controversial assumptions, which are not widely shared, as to the ethical status of non-human nature. Width The question of the ‘width’ of public reason refers to the balance between public reasons and non-public reasons in political discourse, and particularly to the question of whether there can be circumstances in which the political use of comprehensive doctrines can be justified even in the eyes of a political liberal. On a strictly ‘exclusive’ view only public reasons would be acceptable reasons over the range of questions (such as constitutional essentials) to which public reason was taken to apply. This is not the position that Rawls takes, in Political Liberalism he adopts an ‘inclusive’ view, arguing that we should accept the introduction of non-political values into debates about fundamentals when this will further the ideal of public reason in the long run (1996: 247). By the time of Justice as Fairness Revisited, Rawls has adopted a yet more inclusive view,7 and this ‘wide’ view tolerates the presence of non-public reasons, even when circumstances are not ‘non-ideal’ (2001: 90, fn. 12). The use of non-public reasons allow citizens to demonstrate ‘where they come from, so to speak’ and may ‘strengthen the forces working for stability’ (2001: 90). What, then, are the limitations on non-public reasons on the ‘wide’ view? With regard to fundamentals, non-public reasons cannot be decisive, and ‘the duty of civility requires us in due course to make the case for the legislation and public policies we support in terms of public reasons’ (2001: 90). For some critics, even this wide view is not sufficiently broad. David Reidy suggests that there are two fundamental political issues with respect to which public reason will be heteronomous and incomplete. One is where there are competing or conflicting political values of very great and equal weight (where his examples include affirmative action and human cloning). The other is where issues turn on the resolution of some background or preliminary issue with respect to which public reason is ‘more or less silent’. He considers animal rights and environmental protection as examples of the latter kind of issue. The ontological status of animals and the rest of the non-human world is precisely what is at stake. Whether, for example, animals have qualities that render them entitled to just treatment has to be decided before public reason can give a valid answer to questions of policy, but over precisely such questions public reason has nothing to say. When such gaps in public reason emerge, ‘there is only one path to a reasoned and determinate resolution, and it passes through the territory of non-public reason(s)’ (2000: 70–1).

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If this is so it appears to offer hope to radical environmentalists who want to make the case for pro-environmental policies in terms of their comprehensive conceptions of the good, as if resolutions to environmental problems pass ‘through the territory of non-public reason(s)’ then their comprehensive views would be legitimate reasons in public discussions over environmental policy, even when this policy directly impinged upon ‘fundamentals’. An argument for ecological justice, granting rights to non-human entities, would on this view be acceptable because public reason is ‘silent’ on the question of the moral status of animals, and thus we will have to argue according to our comprehensive conceptions. Not all accept Reidy’s reasoning on this question, however. Andrew Williams reminds us that, even if public reason is silent on some prior question (and he is more sceptical than Reidy that this will often be the case) then citizens governed by an ideal of reciprocity may prefer a mutually agreed decision procedure, such as random choice, over choice guided by non-public reasons (2000: 211). The flip of a coin may be preferable to the sacrifice of liberal political autonomy. This argument is dependent upon whether ‘liberal political autonomy’ can actually be. If it is possible to isolate political principles and public reason in the way that Rawls suggests we can, then a liberal-democratic society may well have something of value that it should be reluctant to surrender. Reidy’s latter cases, however, raise the possibility that deeper issues may be at stake here, and if there are ‘background or preliminary issues’ that are genuinely ‘prior’ to public reason, then perhaps liberal political autonomy is a vain aspiration, at least across some subset of political questions. As we will see, those who question the validity of public reason make something like this claim. Depth The depth of pluralism in modern, multicultural, democratic societies is also an issue that arises with respect to the role of public reason in political life. Deep pluralism is potentially a fatal problem for the ideal of public reason, because, in the words of Fred Frohock, public reason becomes ‘unintelligible’ under conditions of deep pluralism (1997: 834). The idea of public reason itself becomes ‘essentially contestable’ in these circumstances (Bohman, 1995: 255). What do these critics mean by ‘deep’ pluralism? To answer this we need to contrast it with the vision of pluralism envisioned by Rawls. Rawls is interested only in ‘reasonable’ pluralism with respect to his theory of justice, and under conditions of reasonable pluralism there are a variety of conceptions of the good and comprehensive doctrines that exist in society. Subscribers to these beliefs, in their reasonableness, accept a notion of reciprocity and the burdens of judgement and so lend support to democratic institutions. There are of course comprehensive doctrines that either are not, or possibly cannot be, adhered to in a way that is reasonable in this sense, but just because they are so they do not form part of the ‘overlapping consensus’ of reasonable doctrines. Doctrines that, for example, ‘reject one or more democratic freedoms’ must be contained – ‘like war and

The idea of public reason 121 disease – so that they do not overturn political justice’.8 From within conditions of reasonable pluralism citizens who affirm ‘reasonable but opposing comprehensive doctrines’ can generally endorse (one of a family of) a liberal conception of justice as ‘giving the content of their political judgment on basic institutions’ (1996: 39). Even if they do not think the conception of justice in operation is the best, they recognise it as fair, or sufficiently fair to be worthy of their (political) allegiance. Under conditions of deep pluralism, the question of ‘what higher order principles such as fairness consist of may be precisely what is at stake’ (Bohman, 1995: 253), and the problem of irreconcileability occurs across second-level as well as firstlevel principles. Under reasonable pluralism there is ‘a general agreement about the democratic procedures for settling . . . normative differences politically. Conflicts become “deep” when they challenge this basic framework or moral assumptions and political procedures’ (Bohman, 1995: 24). Where such deep conflicts exist, we cannot rely upon a procedure that assumes agreement on standards of judgement – the area covered by an overlapping consensus may become vanishingly small (Bohman, 1995: 255). Bohman (1995: 255) suggests that a public resolution of problems that reflect deep pluralism may be possible if 1 2

the political conception of justice is made more dynamic; and public reason is made plural not singular.

The first of these requirements reflects the fact that if ‘standards of fairness and impartiality are at issue, then the very procedures of compromise that appeal to them must be modified in public deliberation’ (1995: 269). We have, if you like, to ‘politicise’ our political conception of justice and open it up to public debate. The principles of justice have to be agreed in actual dialogue rather than being imposed a priori. The second requirement takes to task Rawls’ claim that there are ‘many non-public reasons and but one public reason’ (Rawls, 1996: 220) on the grounds that under conditions of deep pluralism there are also many public reasons, and the problem is one of accommodating plural public reason within a single political community. What we can hope for under these circumstances, when consensus is not available, is ‘weak plural agreement’, to which each side could assent for different reasons (Bohman, 1995: 269). Such an agreement allows for continued political co-operation between groups with deeply plural beliefs, and furthermore the basis for this co-operation is still clearly moral, as Rawls intends, and not merely a modus vivendi. Each group can see that it has moral reasons for accepting the governing political principles, even though these reasons will be different for different groups. Frohock also considers the possibility of employing public reason in deeply pluralist societies. His most relevant example, for our purposes, of a deep disagreement lies in the relationship of a ‘radical’ to the existing political system. Such a person ‘may not speak the same language nor share understandings of reality, even with members of the same political system’ (1997: 834). The fundamental problem with radical speakers is that they do not share the same ontology,

122 Ecological outcomes each ‘derived from an understanding of reality that in all vital matters excludes the rival ontology’ (1997: 836). Ontology here is taken to precede reasoning, as the understanding of reality at issue will shape the form of reason that is employed. This position captures quite precisely the arguments put forward by deep ecologists and ecocentric political theorists. For them ontology is indeed prior to politics, and the relational metaphysics to which they cleave is expressly in opposition to the ontology of liberalism, denying the very possibility of the liberal ideal of autonomy, which rests on an ‘incoherent and undesirable ontology’ (Eckersley, 2004: 104). The problem here is that where ‘deliberation is dependent on partisan interpretations that precede reasoning. . . . Public reason is no longer grounded in an overlapping consensus but in those values that are exclusively identified with factions’ (Frohock, 1997: 837). The language of reason is absorbed by these rival ontologies ‘all the way down’, so to speak, and ‘so completely absorb the vocabulary of reason that nothing is left as a public dialogue’ (1997: 837). When public reason fails in this way we have to resolve disputes by ‘other methods’, and Frohock goes on to suggest that we require a form of public reasoning that is ‘non-computational’ and which ‘allows collective terms to dominate simple merit adjudication’. The first entails that we avoid ‘top-down’ direction of political discourse according to second-order rules and allow an ‘unrestricted and continuing dialogue’ (so this would be a form of public discourse more open to views that challenge the status quo). The second represents a form of multiculturalism in that it ‘allows that state to permit nonliberal practices if the arrangements of the larger society are enriched or not threatened by these arrangements and the practices pass minimal thresholds identified by moral reasoning.’9 It is possible that those signing up to deliberative democratic principles could endorse Bohman’s amended version of public reason. The normative theory of deliberative democracy is dependent upon the idea of consensus or at least acquiescence on the part of democratic ‘losers’ that can be based on moral rather than modus vivendi terms. The demand for an EMD might stand satisfied if I make a case in terms that I could expect you to accept even if I do not, based upon what you would consider to be public reasons. This, however, raises questions about the integrity of political argument. If an atheist makes an argument based on a Christian stewardship ethic in order to convince a Christian of the merits of nature preservation, even though he thinks it is nonsense, does this entail a troubling lack of sincerity? It may, if the proposer acts as if he believes the argument himself in order to convince his Christian acquaintance, but that does not seem an essential move. He may preface the argument by suggesting that he does not believe this argument himself, but for someone with the beliefs of a Christian, it should be convincing, and thus avoid the insincerity charge. Viability The critique of public reason in terms of its viability suggests that public reason fails to offer an alternative to the sectarianism associated in liberal thought with comprehensive doctrines. On this view there is nothing distinctive or less

The idea of public reason 123 controversial about public reason in comparison to non-public reason when it comes to arguing for constitutional arrangements or public policy. This view is put forward by Robert Westmoreland, who argues that once we remove important confusions from accepted versions of public reason, we see that as reasons they are no more public, and no less sectarian, than many of their ‘conservative opponents’ (1999: 274). For public reason to ‘work’, the canons of reasonableness – the burdens of judgement and the moral commitment to view each other as free and equal – must be generally accepted. Public reason must itself be public (otherwise it is just an application of liberal ideology). Westmoreland points to a number of problems with the ‘publicness’ of public reason. Empirically, the ‘burdens of judgement’ proviso does not seem to form a popularly accepted conception of reasonableness. According to evidence cited by Gaus, at least half of respondents were ‘absolutists’, who believed that there is a definite solution to moral problems and that their view of the relevant matter is the right one. This suggests that the philosophical underpinnings of arguments for public reason may lack public support. The apparent dilemma for public reason is that it is either ‘populist enough’ to be supported by the public but then fails to support the relevant liberal principles, or it supports the relevant principles, but is then insufficiently supported by the public (1999: 280). In other words if the public do not accept the notion of the ‘burdens of judgement’, but instead believe that there are ‘right’ answers to moral and social problems, then the idea of burdens of judgement does not seem to be part of an ‘overlapping consensus’. So how can political justification be squared with significant disagreement, even in a ‘republic of public reason’? Nagel suggests that the ‘public fund of reason’ provides the criterion for distinguishing those issues that should be contested in the public arena from those that should not be. There are certain actions or forms of conduct (e.g. abortion, sexual conduct, killing animals for meat) that are nonpolitical because justifications for restrictions would be inevitably sectarian. The problem here (and this brings us back to the scope of public reason) is that on the one hand abortion and animal rights can be debated in terms of public reason (as, in the latter case, animal rights movements sometimes seek to do), and on the other hand, issues that Nagel wants to include as public, such as environmental protection, ‘can certainly engage what he calls bare personal moral convictions’ (1999: 284). There just is no easy way of bracketing off political controversies that are amenable to public reason from those that are not. More generally, reasonable people (who accept reciprocity and the burdens of judgement) may reject the notion that reasonableness is a requirement of public life, or may have an alternative reasonable conception of public reasonableness (e.g. like Habermas, we might believe that our public discourse should seek a conception of justice that is ‘ “valid” or in some sense “true,” not merely something that people can “reasonably” accept’ (Moon, 2003: 267)). But Nagel would remove alternative conceptions of reasonableness from public life; thus for Westmoreland Nagel’s conception of reasonableness ‘is not “political” in Rawls’s sense of “accepted by reasonable citizens on reflection” ’ (1999: 285), and we are on our way towards justification simpliciter. Now Nagel’s position begins to look like perfectionist liberalism, for which the notion of reasonableness invoked to

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keep abortion non-political appears to be part of the ‘whole (liberal) truth’. This leads to Westmoreland’s conclusion that, ultimately, we are ‘headed back to arguing political positions on the basis of our views about the whole truth’ (1999: 296) and public reason fails to overcome the sectarianism of comprehensive doctrines. If this is true, and public reasons are merely sectarian expressions of liberalism masquerading as non-ideological terms, then the whole edifice of deliberative democracy would be in danger of crumbling. As a central tenet of deliberative democracy public reasons are intended to operate as reasons that are accessible across ideological and religious boundaries, available to all who adhere to reasonable doctrines in a reasonable manner. But if the very notion of ‘reasonableness’ employed here implies a liberal ideological bias, then non-liberal conceptions are ruled out not because they are ‘unreasonable’ in any ‘non-ideological’ sense (if such were possible), but because they are not liberal or not capable of being held in a liberal fashion. I am not convinced that the ideal of public reason is merely (although it is inter alia) a weapon in the liberal ideological armoury, this seems too crude an interpretation of what the adherents of public reason are seeking to achieve. There is a genuine concern here about the stability of plural societies and an attempt to foster agreement from across a range of conceptions of the good (both liberal and non-liberal), which is dependent, as noted earlier, on the problematic idea of the autonomy of the political. The ‘wider’ the view of pubic reason, the less it appears to be an exclusively liberal principle, even if it always remains a liberal principle in inspiration. I will argue, however, that consideration of environmental ideas in relation to public reason demonstrates that it does operate as an unfair constraint on novel reasons for political actions.

Assessing the critique of public reason How can we begin to assess these criticisms of the ideal of public reason? A discussion of radical environmentalism and democracy is not the appropriate location for a comprehensive discussion of the ideal of public reason, but nonetheless a consideration of environmentalism in the light of the demands of public reason should be illuminating as questions regarding the scope, width, and viability of public reason, as well as the depth of pluralism in society, are all relevant. It might seem perverse to use an issue that Rawls considers outside of the scope of public reason to test it, but that very contention on Rawls’ part is itself contested, as we have seen. Is the environment an area to which the strictures of public reason should apply? Should the views of the ‘whole moral truth’ held by environmentalists ever constitute a decisive reason for adopting environmental policies? Do the beliefs of radical environmentalists demonstrate the existence of ‘deep pluralism’ and rival ontologies in political life, and if they do what are the implications of this? Are environmentalists merely engaged in ‘ideological war’ (Westmoreland, 1999: 283) with their opponents, each pitting sectarian beliefs, including sectarian beliefs about the role and value of public reason, against each other?

The idea of public reason 125 If environmentalists turn to deliberative democracy in order to get ecological issues on to the political agenda, then they inevitably involve themselves in the normative constraints on democratic deliberation that deliberative theorists look to impose. One of these, for Rawlsian versions of deliberative democracy, is the demand that (at least certain forms of) public deliberation covering (at least some, fundamental) political questions takes place according to the principles of public reason as set out above. Furthermore, as can be seen in the work of, for example, Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, these normative principles are taken by some deliberative theorists to apply to all political discussion, not merely constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice.10

A return to scope: sustainability and environmental justice To return to the ‘Rawlsian’ view, the dictates of public reason would still only apply at the level of fundamentals – constitutional essentials and basic justice. Do any of the claims that radical environmentalists make apply at that level? One author to consider this question is Derek Bell, who argues that public reason arguments can be used to justify two categories of environmental policy: sustainability and environmental justice.11 ‘Sustainability’ can be conceptualised in a number of ways, generally it is taken to combine two elements, on the one hand a time frame stretching across at least several generations, and second a commitment to preserving something like the prevailing conditions of life. The classic statement is still that contained in the Brundtland report (1987): ‘Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’ The correlative question is whether the existing socio-economic arrangements can be maintained (at least) or improved over a long time period without ‘compromising’ the ability of future generations to satisfy their own needs. If the answer is ‘no’, then the implication is that something in the current arrangements needs to change. For Rawls justice should establish ‘fairness between generations’ (1996: 273) and this implies a conception of sustainability in his account, and for Bell this in turn implies that ‘there must be limits to how much damage political liberalism can allow to the environment’ (2002: 708). The problem as Bell notes, is that it is difficult to determine how such a general commitment might cash out in terms of environmental policy. Take Bell’s contention that ‘we should avoid causing increases in the temperature of the earth if we can reasonably foresee that our actions will lead to circumstances of extreme scarcity’ undermining future generations’ ‘capacity to “have a decent standard of life” through “social cooperation” ’ (2002: 708). The consequences of global warming could indeed be dire, and one estimate puts the potential cost of the warming we are likely to experience at $5 trillion. Whilst this seems an enormous sum, the same work estimates the costs of seeking to severely curtail warming at between $107 and $241 trillion (Lomborg, 2001: 318, 324), much of which would be borne by developing nations. Whilst the accuracy of these figures

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is difficult to assess, and Lomborg is not an uncontroversial source, if the magnitudes are even approximately right we would make future generations much better off by focussing on economic growth rather than environmental protection. Thus it is far from clear that even our most ‘damaging’ current actions will lead to ‘extreme’ scarcity in the future, nor whether taking action to minimise the damage we are doing now will have less damaging results in the long run than ‘business as usual’. With regard to environmental justice there are two aspects to consider, the demands of environmental justice within this generation and the demands of environmental justice between generations. Bell incorporates three potential concerns within the remit of (intragenerational) environmental justice, namely protecting biodiversity due to its possible contribution to biological and medical knowledge, environmental pollution, and environmental planning. Of these three the first appears to be the weakest, as it is dependent upon an empirical connection between levels of biodiversity and advances in medical knowledge, and any such gains would have to be offset against the gains of economic development that may be responsible for reducing levels of biodiversity in the first place. As an argument for biodiversity preservation this is anyway only an argument for preserving a gene pool, not natural habitats, and as Lomborg notes, the ‘problem is that most of the time we do not know where to start looking. . . . so long as we do not even have any practical means of analyzing even a fraction of those plants already known to us, this cannot be used as a general argument for the protection of all species, for example in the rainforest’ (2001: 251). The problem is that we are not being asked to protect species that will have medical uses in the future, but rather species that may, possibly, at some point come to yield medical benefits. Once this degree of uncertainty enters the picture the trade-offs against the relatively certain short- to medium-term benefits of development become, at the very least, unclear. With regard to pollution and planning the claim is for the application of criteria of fairness in the distribution of the benefits and burdens. One can accept this as a necessary concomitant of the Rawlsian idea of reasonableness as reciprocity, but again it is not clear that this has any case out for environmentalists per se. It may lead us to site incinerators in Mayfair as well as Teesside, but in sharing the benefits and burdens of environmental policy fairly will not have any obvious implications for many of the issues that environmentalists are interested in such as the protection of biodiversity and wilderness areas. Unless access to ‘pristine’ nature is so important to human welfare that it comes under the ‘thin’ theory of the good, which is at the least a highly dubious proposition, then there is no obvious reason why we should not prefer economic development to environmental protection. In terms of intergenerational justice, a comprehensive attempt to develop an argument for the protection of biodiversity in terms of intergenerational justice comes from Paul Wood, whose arguments were considered in Chapter 4. Putting aside the objections of the likes of Beckerman and Pasek, and assuming that it is possible for one generation to have obligations grounded in justice with respect to future generations, can this be sensibly expected to lead to obligations to

The idea of public reason 127 protect biodiversity? As stated in the earlier chapter, Wood’s argument that there is such a demand rests on a crucial confusion between environmental catastrophe and an environment which is merely degraded in terms of possessing less biodiversity. Whilst the former outcome can plausibly be posited as a violation of the rights of future generations, on the assumption that it would deny them the opportunity to lead a worthwhile life of any sort, the latter scenario is far more problematic. If a degraded environment has been caused in the pursuit of economic growth, then a trade-off has been made between two goods (a diverse environment and a stock of wealth), and it is far from clear that either of these paths can be selected over the other on the grounds that one or the other constitutes a breach of our justice-based obligations to future generations. One would have to examine the magnitude of the trade-off in both directions, and whilst at either end of the spectrum we might feel there is a clear violation of justice (impoverished people with a pristine environment, or high material wealth leading to environmental collapse), for any point on the continuum between these points the demands of justice will be unclear. It thus appears to be the case that even for those areas where the demands of public reason appear most amenable to the concerns of environmentalists, the extent to which public reason will demand environmental outcomes is meagre, a weak conception of sustainability and the avoidance of environmental collapse being the most that is on offer. In terms of any stronger claims that environmentalists want to make with regard to biodiversity protection, wilderness protection, limiting human population growth, and so on we pass beyond those areas to which public reason has something definitive to contribute. On these questions we should perhaps be free to vote our ‘non-political preferences’, whether they be for or against environmental policies. This leaves Bell, for one, untroubled: ‘In a liberal democracy, it is up to the environmentalists to persuade enough of their fellow citizens of the value of their “green ideal” to turn the possibility of “green neutralist liberalism” into reality’ (Bell, 2002: 721). This brings Bell into the same camp as Miller: if enough people cannot be persuaded that it is worth expending scarce resources to ensure the survival of tigers, Dartford warblers or snail-darters (to take three examples form the literature) then it is quite fair (to both future and current generations) and legitimate to allow these species to slip into oblivion. Greens have to accept that the hope of forging a non-contingent link between green outcomes, liberalism, and/or democracy is chimerical, it would be better to grasp ‘the nettle of contingency and argue in the public sphere for your values and beliefs’ (Humphrey, 2004: 125). In the same way that Roman Catholics have to live in societies where abortions are legal, and are unable to impose their view (rooted in a comprehensive doctrine) of the sanctity of foetal life upon the larger community, so environmentalists have to accept that they live in a world where environmental destruction takes place, and that they cannot legitimately impose an ecocentric vision of the world upon their fellow citizens. If the green vision of the good is not widely shared, this is unfortunate for environmentalists, but no more than that.

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Alternative environmental questions and public reason To move on from explicit concerns about the environment rooted in human (intraor inter-generational) concerns, there are at least three policy areas that, whilst ‘fundamental’ to environmentalists, would not come under the rubric of constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice as interpreted by Rawls; these are wilderness preservation, the conservation of biodiversity, and ecological justice. These three areas are related but distinct, as one could preserve certain areas of wilderness without a broader commitment to preserving biodiversity, or one could accept that we have responsibilities towards sentient non-human entities without accepting any responsibility for the preservation of an entire species-type.12 In terms of the arguments that greens make for the protection of the non-human natural world, there is no doubt that many are firmly rooted in, and constitute expressions of, a comprehensive moral doctrine. This comprehensive doctrine may be religious (e.g. stewardship), ontological (e.g. deep ecology, ecocentrism) or moral (e.g. autopioetic ethics), and in reality is likely to combine elements of ontology, morality, spirituality, and so on. On the view of public reason expressed in Rawls’ later accounts, this is perfectly consistent with the ‘wide’ public reason that he came to endorse provided that the doctrine in which the views are rooted is ‘reasonable’ (although this would rule out Westra’s anti-democratic argument). Participants in public debate are at liberty to make arguments rooted in reasonable comprehensive doctrines, as these will allow citizens to make it clear to each other where they ‘come from’ in terms of the positions they support. Nonetheless, the ‘duty of civility’ demands that, ‘in due course’ we ‘make our case for the legislation and public policies we support in terms of public reasons’ (Rawls, 2001: 90). I take ‘in due course’ to entail that only appropriately public reasons can be decisive in terms of justifying a political choice. Three questions thus arise: is the comprehensive doctrine (or family of doctrines) adhered to by radical environmentalists reasonable in the Rawlsian sense, and thus allowable in public debate on the wide view? Second, do radical environmentalists have available to them public reasons for their preferred policies that can be delivered ‘in due course’? Third, if the answers to both of these are negative, does this entail that it is legitimate to exclude these radical environmental reasons from decisiveness in justifying action in the public realm, due to their failure to provide appropriate public reasons? This brings us to a further question, whether the application of the dictates of public reason is fair to radical environmentalism, and more broadly to novel political arguments in general.

Public reason, fairness, and novel political arguments The claim to be assessed here, then, is that the restriction on the use of comprehensive doctrines in public argument is unfair to groups who seek to transform the existing conventional political morality. The public reason restriction on political debate (which is explicit within normative conceptions of deliberative

The idea of public reason 129 democracy), on this view, places an iniquitous burden upon those seeking to offer novel reasons for political policy. The unfairness argument would run along these lines: 1

2 3 4

5

On a Rawlsian view, only public reasons can be offered as the decisive justification for the legitimate use of coercive power in political life with respect to ‘fundamental questions’. This may be the coercive power of the state, but would also include the coercive power of, for example, social movements engaging in forms of political direct action. Public reasons have to meet a criterion of reasonableness. Public reasons have to meet a criterion of being ‘widely shared’. (2) and (3) set demands that are arbitrary from a moral point of view, and which actively militate against political justifications that seek to transform public political morality, such as ecocentrism or animal rights. Therefore, the public reason restriction on political justification is unfair to groups and individuals seeking to offer such justifications.

The key objections here are to conditions (2) and (3) which are both taken to impose restrictions on justification for public policy that impose unfair constraints on novel political moralities. There is, however, a difficulty with (1) as well, which relates to one of the problems with public reason referred to earlier. Remember that under conditions of ‘deep pluralism’ the question of ‘what higher order principles such as fairness consist of may be precisely what is at stake’. This is also true of the question of what constitutes a fundamental political question. For Rawls fundamentals refer to constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice, and these set out the minimal scope for the domain of public reason. The problem, from an environmental perspective is that this represents an anthropocentric liberal conception of fundamental political questions. Constitutional essentials are fundamental because they protect rights grounded in justice, and ‘justice is the first virtue of social institutions’. The human individual is vulnerable to the predations of other individuals and larger groups, including (unjust) states, but constitutions should recognise that ‘each individual has an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override’ (1999b: 3) – thus Rawls’ well-known objections to utilitarianism as a basis for political theory. All well and good, but the unfairness objection raises Reidy’s question: what if there are disagreements that exist prior to the purposes of justice being set out as above? For example, what if some people believe that non-human animals (Regan, 2001), plants (Taylor, 1986), or even entire ecosystems should be incorporated within the remit of justice? Call this an ‘ecocentric view of justice’. On an ecocentric view of justice, whereby plants and animals could be recipients but not agents of just treatment, the parameters of ‘fundamental political questions’ would look very different, as it would not be merely human individuals who would be protected by principles of justice but also (according to the dictates of some different but not subordinate principles) animals and plants. Biodiversity protection might then be considered a fundamental matter, dictated by precepts of

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justice and not through people being free to vote their non-political values. Public reasons would not run out so quickly on environmental matters if other species were recognised as recipients of justice. The liberal response to this line of argument is to point out that an ecocentric worldview would be a highly controversial basis upon which to construct a theory of justice. Whilst it may be true for ardent ecocentrics and animal rights campaigners that species extermination is justice-violating and the meat trade morally equivalent to the holocaust (Davis, 2004; Patterson, 2002), this is not a view that would be shared by the vast majority of people, based as it is upon a comprehensive moral doctrine that relatively small numbers of people subscribe to. It is precisely the making of public policy in the basis of sectarian moral views that liberalism is designed to contain. Ecocentrism fails criteria (2) and (3), it is not reasonable, and nor it is widely shared. On those grounds it cannot form a stable basis for the constitution of a society marked by ‘reasonable pluralism’, but would have to employ the power of the state in an oppressive manner. An ecocentric state could be expected to construct a policy framework that would frustrate many people in the pursuit of their conception of the good, in the name of its own comprehensive doctrine. Restrictions on economic development, forms of travel, trade, and the treatment of non-human nature could all be expected. Even if ecocentrism itself is taken to be a reasonable comprehensive doctrine13 these restrictions on human activity in the name of a single comprehensive moral doctrine would not be agent-reasonable in that their imposition stands in denial of the burdens of judgement. That is, such imposition would not recognise that ‘many of our most important judgements are made under conditions where it is not to be expected that conscientious persons with full powers of reason . . . will all arrive at the same conclusion . . . . These burdens of judgment are of the first significance for a democratic idea of toleration’ (1996: 58). The principles of ecocentrism are not principles that people in a plural society can be expected to endorse from a variety of comprehensive moral doctrines, and so are not ‘political’ values in that sense. Nor are they already ‘widely shared’ in the public culture, unlike certain notions of ‘common sense’ and ‘non-controversial’ scientific findings and methods. We could not expect a general acceptance that these curtailments of human liberties were the result of anything other than the dictates of a sectarian ideology. If the principles of ecocentrism are not widely shared, and their imposition would contravene norms of reasonableness, should we have any cause to regret their exclusion from the domain of fundamental questions? The unfairness objection suggests that we should. As Jeremy Waldron puts it, ‘what this conception [of public reason] seems to rule out is the novel or disconcerting move in political argumentation . . . . Rawls’ conception seems to assume an inherent limit in the human capacity for imagination and creativity in politics, implying as it does that something only counts as a legitimate move in public reasoning only to the extent that it latches on to existing premises that everyone already shares’ (1993: 838).

The idea of public reason 131 Of course it is precisely the purpose of ecocentric thinkers (and animal rights activists) to present ‘novel or disconcerting’ arguments into the public sphere. Any transformative political discourse will by definition not partake of (all of) the commonly shared political beliefs already existent in a society. In the same way as it once would have challenged deeply entrenched and widely shared beliefs to advocate the end of slavery, or to promote racial or sexual equality, it now challenges widely shared beliefs to propose that animals have rights grounded in justice, or that biodiversity protection should take priority over economic growth. One does not have to argue that these positions are right, merely that if allowed to enter political debate over constitutional essentials and basic justice they might themselves become widely shared. Many of the arguments put forward by the proponents of the civil rights movement, such as Martin Luther King, were cast in terms of comprehensive Christian doctrines.14 Liberals tend to tolerate this as the outcome was greater justice in society – ‘the abolitionists and King would not have been unreasonable . . . if the political forces they led were among the necessary historical conditions to establish political justice, as does indeed seem plausible in their situation’ (Rawls, 1996: 250–1). The point is that, from the perspective of a future society in which the meat trade and animal experimentation are abolished, and in which animals are taken to have rights grounded in justice, it may well appear to be the case that earlier activists, making their case in terms of comprehensive moral doctrines, also intended to bring about ‘a well-ordered and just society in which the ideal of public reason could eventually be honored’ and whose political force was also ‘among the necessary historical conditions to establish political justice’. If, however, their arguments rooted in comprehensive moral doctrines are disbarred from the public political realm on a priori grounds, this situation may never be achieved. Thus ‘we have reason to be cautious about Rawls’ insistence that the idea of public reason “excludes comprehensive religious and philosophical doctrines” in favour of “the plain truths now common and available to citizens generally” ’ (Waldron, 1993: 839–40, emphasis in original). The point is that what now look like non-political reasons rooted in a comprehensive doctrine, adhered to by a minority of citizens, may come to be a public reason in the Rawlsian sense if it is allowed the space to compete for allegiance in the political field. It may come to be widely shared, and be in accordance with common sense and the non-controversial elements of science (ecocentric theories frequently appeal to ‘new’ scientific beliefs, grounded for example in quantum physics or ecology).15 If unfairness to novel political doctrines is to be avoided then, the public reason restriction in its Rawlsian form has to be weakened, if not removed completely. We should take a Millian rather than Rawlsian view of public discourse. Greens should be free to engage their comprehensive doctrines in all aspects of political debate, including those concerning constitutional essentials and basic justice, indeed use these comprehensive doctrines in order to change what ‘we’ think of as constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice. A response to this unfairness claim has been developed by Lawrence B Solum in answer to Waldron’s critique.

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The response denies that the liberal version of public reason is unfair to novel political arguments, for the following reasons:16 1 2 3 4

The unfairness objection fails to distinguish between acceptance and availability of reasons. The unfairness objection confuses universal agreement with wide agreement. The unfairness objection fails to explain why novel reasons cannot be sufficient. The unfairness objection incorrectly assumes the exclusive view of public reason.

On (1) the repost is that the unfairness objection focuses on the idea of accepted reasons and ignores what Rawls has to say about the availability of reasons. As Solum puts it ‘Waldron assumes that for a reason to be public in Rawls’s sense, it must be accepted by the public at large. Recall, however, that what Rawls said was a bit different; Rawls referred to reasons “now widely accepted, or available, to citizens in general” ’ (1996: 1476–7). Solum presses on the distinction between ‘accepted’ and ‘available’, on the grounds that reasons can quite plausibly be available to citizens even if they are not widely accepted. Reasons would be available if they ‘fit with the citizen’s other beliefs’, or follow ‘from the citizen’s other beliefs’, or if a reason is ‘intuitively plausible and does not contradict any of the citizen’s other firmly held beliefs’. Even reasons that ‘contradict current beliefs might be available if minor adjustments would render the whole system of belief more attractive with the addition of the novel reason’ (1996: 1477). This list is not intended to be exhaustive, but demonstrates a certain understanding of what it means for a reason to be ‘available’ to a citizen. Is the ‘availability’ response sufficient to remove most of the force of the unfairness objection, as Solum suggests it is? The response is not as decisive against the unfairness objection as Solum believes it to be, for at least three reasons. The first is simply a textual response, there are many more passages where Rawls cites the ‘acceptance’ or ‘acceptability’ rather than the ‘availability’ of ideas as the necessary criterion for them to have the status of public reasons.17 The claim that we should appeal ‘only to presently accepted general beliefs and forms of reasoning’ (1996: 224) is presumably intended to mean what it says. Solum argues that although Rawls may ‘occasionally’ state the ideal of public reason in terms of ‘pre-existing agreement’, there ‘is nothing in his underlying arguments that requires this restriction’ (1996: 1477). This is not obviously true. The ‘underlying arguments’ are presumably those that deal with how a society marked by ‘reasonable pluralism’ can obtain a moral agreement on constitutional essentials and basic justice, and part of this is that they must each be able to endorse a constitutional settlement because it is justified according to principles that they can accept as reasonable and rational. Reasons that cannot be accepted as reasonable and rational will not form the basis of a stable and justified constitutional agreement. It is not clear that ‘availability’ can do the same work here as ‘acceptability’, but this will partly depend upon how availability is interpreted, which is what we will turn to next.

The idea of public reason 133 The notion of an idea being ‘available’ might be interpreted in any one of a number of ways. Solum, as we have seen, relates it to the ways in which new ideas might be integrated with citizens’ pre-existing beliefs – they may be ‘intuitively plausible’, they may ‘fit with’ or ‘follow from’ other beliefs that we have, and even ideas that contravene existing beliefs might be available if they could render an entire system of beliefs ‘more attractive’. We should focus on the latter of these examples, clearly the concern that motivates those making the unfairness objection is not that ideas that might easily conform with our existing beliefs might be precluded but rather that ideas that represent a fundamental challenge to pre-existing norms are excluded because they cannot conform to the demands of public reason. The problem with Solum’s understanding of availability is that it appears to collapse the very distinction he is proposing between acceptability and availability. If a reason is recognised, now, as making our overall thought system ‘more attractive’ if it is included in that thought system, then it is acceptable. Accepting it is precisely what we are doing when we integrate it into our system of thought. It may be true that citizens would regard ecocentrism or animal rights, were they to accept them as extensions of their existing moral beliefs, to be elements that make their overall package of moral beliefs more attractive, but accepting them is what they would be doing. To say they are ‘available’ if they can be so integrated into people’s belief systems is to say no more than that they are ‘acceptable’ (i.e. we would, if the right conditions are met, be able to accept them) – whether or not they are actually accepted. If ‘availability’ is to be held distinct from ‘acceptability’ the Solum’s account of logical or psychological integration does not suffice, as it collapses availability back into a version of acceptability. An alternative reading of availability would simply be to assert that an idea is ‘out there’ in the public culture at large. An idea is available to the citizen in the sense that it is open to him or her to make use of. This sense of availability would have nothing to say about how such an idea might ‘fit’ with a citizen’s pre-existing beliefs, or how ‘attractive’ it might make the citizens overall package of beliefs. This gives us conceptual separation between acceptability and availability, but at an obvious price in terms of maintaining the dictates of public reason. If all that was necessary for an idea to count as a public reason was its availability in this sense, then the distinction between public and non-public reasons collapses, or at least the class of non-public reasons becomes vanishingly small. On this view the Roman Catholic arguments cited by Waldron (1993: passim) would be public reasons even though they make a direct appeal to a comprehensive religious doctrine (not shared by all), because they are well-known, widely understood, and available to anyone who is sufficiently interested. It does not appear then, that Solum’s reliance upon the acceptability/availability distinction can suffice to defeat the unfairness objection, because this distinction is unstable. Availability either collapses back into acceptability or if held distinct from it, serves instead to collapse the distinction between public and non-public reasons. Rawls (usually) employs the criterion of acceptability for good reason, and against this the unfairness objection remains undefeated.

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The second defence of public reason claims that the unfairness complaint confuses universal agreement with wide agreement. Solum is correct in his suggestion that Waldron is guilty of this confusion. It could not be a reasonable requirement of public reason that, within a pluralistic society, there is literal unanimity about the acceptance of a reason before it can count as public. The interesting question is whether any plausible version of the unfairness complaint would have to be guilty of this same confusion (so the question is whether the demand that a belief be widely shared is itself an unfair restriction). The point that Waldron makes in this regard is that an idea that is not widely shared now may come to be widely shared if enough people are exposed to its argumentative force, but that this is not going to happen if any such idea is excluded a priori from the realm of political debate on the grounds that it is not already widely shared now. To return to our example those making the case for an ecocentric conception of justice cannot make the case in terms of reasons that are widely accepted now, but if these reasons are disbarred from political discourse, then they will also be denied the possibility of becoming widely shared in the future. Solum’s response is that a reason does not have to be widely shared now, but rather something that could be widely shared. What matters now is ‘whether it is “widely available” ’. But this argument falls to the problems of maintaining a meaningful distinction between acceptable and available discussed earlier. The third response holds that the unfairness objection cannot show why it is the case that novel public reasons cannot be sufficient to the purpose of political argument. Solum’s response to Waldron’s version of the unfairness objection is to distinguish between different varieties of novel reasons. Waldron proposes a ‘premise that no one has thought of before’, and of course novel reasons may take this form. Solum reminds us that there are, however, ‘other models of political argument’, and a novel reason could emerge as the outcome of a Rawlsian process of reflective equilibrium, but be itself based upon widely shared principles and premises. Thus the unfairness objection ‘only applies to a subset of novel political arguments, those that cannot themselves be supported by considerations of public reason’ and this subset may be insufficiently large to ‘underwrite’ the unfairness objection (1996: 1480–1). This argument may indeed demonstrate that only some novel reasons are treated unfairly if they are a priori excluded on public reason grounds, as others can be supported by acceptably public reasons in a process of reflective equilibrium. Nonetheless this is a strange response unless the residual category of novel reasons is null or vanishingly small. For any novel reasons that cannot be supported by public reasons in the appropriate way are still, on this view, being treated unfairly, it is merely that there are not as many in this category as we might have thought there were before encountering this response. But how large does a category of reasons have to be before it is large enough to ‘underwrite’ the unfairness objection? The fourth response suggests that the unfairness objection incorrectly assumes an exclusive view of public reason, whereas Rawls recommends an inclusive or ‘wide’ notion of public reason. It is certainly true that Rawls conception of public reason became ‘wider’ (more accommodating to non-public reasons) in his

The idea of public reason 135 later works, culminating in the ‘wide view of public political culture’ outlined in The Idea of Public Reason Revisited. On this view ‘reasonable comprehensive doctrines, religious or nonreligious, may be introduced in public political discussion at any time, provided that in due course proper political reasons – and not reasons given by solely comprehensive doctrines – are presented that are sufficient to support whatever the comprehensive doctrines introduced are said to support’ (Rawls, 1999a: 152). This is what Rawls terms the proviso, which specifies public political culture as opposed to the ‘background culture’. Standards of public reason are not violated when non-public reasons are employed in political discussion, provided that properly public reasons are also provided in due course for the principles or policies that the non-public reasons were held to support. As Solum comments ‘One can imagine that novel political argument would be introduced in cases in which the proviso was satisfied, that over time these novel arguments would become part of the public political culture, and thus, that eventually, the novel arguments would become public reasons’ (1996: 1482). Although it appears low down Solum’s list, and he clearly believes that it is the first response that robs the unfairness objection of most of its force, this is actually a potentially powerful response to the unfairness objection. An ecocentric case for an extended conception of justice, or animal rights arguments, even when rooted in comprehensive doctrines, can still be employed as arguments in the public political arena without violating the dictates of public reason as long as the proviso is satisfied and public reasons are provided in due course and a principle is not adopted for merely non-public reasons. How could this be unfair to novel reasons when they are explicitly not being excluded from public political debate? We have to distinguish between allowing the expression of non-public reasons in political discourse and allowing non-public reasons to be decisive in political justification. The wide view of public reason allows the former but not the latter. The problem for Waldron is that he only considers public reason in its ‘restricted’ version. Does it matter that non-public reasons cannot be decisive? Is not this something that liberals (rightly) applaud, that non-public grounds such as religious doctrine cannot stand as decisive reasons for adopting public policy – at least not in the area of constitutional essentials and basic justice? This is what allows liberals to enforce, for example, women’s rights against those comprehensive religious doctrines that would seek to curtail these for non-public reasons. Whilst this is true, the ramifications for not allowing non-public reasons to be decisive have wider import, in particular we have to consider the justifications available for politically and discursively disadvantaged groups seeking to protest against existing laws, policies, and attitudes in society. As novel reasons are very unlikely to be public reasons on the grounds that, at the very least, they will not be widely shared, then it is at least possible, if not likely, that such groups will not have public reasons available to them in order to justify political action against the prevailing laws, institutions, or norms. The arguments of radical environmentalists are rooted in a comprehensive moral ideal regarding the relationship between human and non-human nature and the ontological status of the latter. These views are not ‘widely accepted’ (Rawls) and are not widely available in any

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of Solum’s senses. Although Solum’s final version of ‘availability’ is intended to open the door to transformative ideas, it is crucially dependent upon the criteria by which people will judge the ‘attractiveness’ of their set of ethical beliefs. Yet this attractiveness must itself be set in terms of existing beliefs and commitments, so it is far from clear that even this version of ‘availability’ succeeds in driving a sufficiently large wedge between available and acceptable to do the work that Solum requires. Take ecocentrism for example, on the one hand it is taken to represent an extension of egalitarianism across species. Thus if it captures our principles of egalitarianism better than anthropocentric beliefs it would be ‘available’ in Solum’s sense, as we come to see that a thorough commitment to our egalitarian beliefs entails egalitarianism in some sense between species. Principled opposition to racism and sexism logically entails opposition to speciesism as well. On the other hand, ecocentrism and its biocentric cousin are taken to fundamentally challenge a whole range of intuitions that people have about the nature of reality, the relative moral standings of different species, and the ways in which we judge the relationship between capacities and rights.18 If justifications for ecocentric ideas are judged against these background assumptions, most people would hardly expect their overarching moral framework to ‘become more attractive’ if it is thrown into turmoil through an attachment to something like Naess’ ‘biospherical egalitariansim’. Such a belief may be consistent with principled egalitarianism but it is in no way implied by it. In short, those who seek to transform the moral beliefs of existing society through novel reasons are unlikely, by virtue of that very transformative potential and novelty, to have public reasons available to them. Does this make it acceptable that society should deny them any justification for taking protest actions against existing laws, policies and norms on the grounds that they lack such reasons? The problem is that the argument against justification looks arbitrarily biased against novel conceptions of justice, with a major premise that justifiably decisive reasons will be public, and a (possibly unintended) minor premise that novel reasons cannot be public reasons, resulting in a conclusion that political acts based on novel arguments cannot be justified. This problem is especially acute when novel doctrines seek to extend the very notion of the ‘public’. ‘Public reason’ in its liberal version has to satisfy the principle of reciprocity between humans. There is a sense in which ecocentric theory seeks to extend the notion of the affected public to non-human nature as well, such that we would have to ask of the exercise of political power whether non-human entities could be expected to endorse it as well.19 Whatever the metaphysical problems raised by trying to think about non-human entities ‘endorsing’ anything, there is clearly dispute here as to the nature of the ‘public’ to whom the notion of public reason is applied, and this dispute cannot be settled through an appeal to public reason that takes the scope of the public to be pre-determined.

Conclusion When greens sign up to the normative project of deliberative democracy, they also sign up to the constraints that deliberative theorists wish to see placed upon

The idea of public reason 137 what will count as acceptable forms of political discourse. As Baber and Bartlett point out, different deliberative theorists place different prescriptions upon deliberation. James Bohman, for example, acknowledges ‘deep pluralism’ in society and his Habermasian account of deliberation is more accommodating to novel forms of public reason than the Rawlsian model adopted by, for example, Gutmann and Thompson. In this chapter we have focused particularly on the Rawlsian account of democratic deliberation and the form of public reason that is integral to it. From the forgoing discussion we can draw out the following points of particular relevance for public reason in relation to ecological politics. First, there seems to be no reason to doubt Quong’s suggestion that those who believe in the desirability of pubic reason should apply it to all questions concerning the use of coercive state power when such reasons are available. There appears to be no nonarbitrary reason to use non-public reasons when pubic reasons can be employed to justify state action. However, in the discussion of Bell’s account of public reason and the environment, it became apparent that public reason becomes indeterminate very early over a range of environmental questions. It may be sufficient to prevent us courting obvious ecological disaster, but once we have to trade future economic benefits against current environmental damage, or we are concerned with policies that have no obvious implications for human welfare, the well of public reason dries up. This may mean that we have to pursue these questions through the use of non-public reasons, although as Williams reminds us, this is not the only solution available when the writ of public reasons fails to extend sufficiently. Furthermore, the forms that ecological politics frequently takes, grounded in an ontology that is seen as a rival to widely accepted ontological premises, appears to endorse the view that our society is marked by ‘deep pluralism’, where we have not only differing conceptions of the good but rival conceptions of the nature of reality, of the scope and form of justice, and of the delineation of the ‘public’ or ‘community of the affected’ whose interests should be taken into account when making political decisions. Under these circumstances it becomes increasingly likely that Waldron’s complaint that the demands of public reason are unfair on novel reasons is true. As we have seen, however, the wider the conception of pubic reason, the more likely that it can accommodate novel reasons – although the demand that non-public reasons cannot be decisive even when employed leaves a residual unfairness in place. Where does this leave the relationship between Rawlsian public reason and ecological politics? There are two conflicting tendencies here, on the one hand if the writ of public reason does not run far into environmental territory it appears to leave political ecologists a free hand to employ arguments based upon their comprehensive conceptions when discussing environmental policy. If we have no public reasons to prefer development to conservation or vice versa, then people should be free to act in accordance with (for example) their belief in the intrinsic value of the non-human world. The question then becomes one of, as Bell suggests, persuading others of the desirability of one’s views.

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The counter consideration is that for political ecologists the scope of (liberal) public reason does not extend across many environmental questions because its remit is drawn too narrowly. Species preservation, for example, is not considered a matter of ‘basic justice’ because non-human species are, on this view, outside of the protection of principles of justice, to be considered instead under a principle of beneficence or similar. But why should we take this to be uncontroversial? If non-human entities were considered to be recipients of justice (as the ‘Great Apes Project’ desires for gorillas, chimpanzees, and orang-utans), then the writ of public reason would not run out so quickly in these areas, and preserving the wild habitat of these creatures may become a matter of justice. But how can ecological activists change people’s thinking about matters of basic justice if only arguments that are already widely shared can be decisive?20 Green public reasons would not be the same as liberal public reasons. The dictates of public reason give us another cause to be sceptical of the marriage of ecological politics and deliberative democracy – at least in its more Rawlsian versions. Ecologism is a new addition to the field of political discourse, and many of the arguments that it employs are novel ones. This very novelty ensures that these reasons are not currently ‘widely shared’ or ‘presently accepted’ in the broader political community, and so green reasons cannot be public reasons, except in rare cases where obvious and imminent environmental disaster looms. Beyond that, proponents of ecological politics do not seem to have any obvious reason to hamstring themselves by signing up to restrictions on acceptable forms of argument that handicap the very case they are trying to make.

Conclusion

Where now for ecological politics and democracy? As I make the final revisions to this conclusion, a group of environmental protestors are making a stand against global warming at the Drax power station in North Yorkshire. At least some of their number intend to close the power station down, for however brief a period, and the police are equally determined to stop them. Such an action is purely symbolic, even if the protestors succeed in shutting down the power station for a few hours, it will of course make no appreciable difference to climate change, but in their non-deliberative way the protestors hope to confront society with a long-term environmental problem which, although much discussed, they feel (as with Greenpeace and the blockade of Downing Street discussed earlier) has not yet been tackled sufficiently vigorously in policy terms. As Robbie Madden of the Rising Tide campaign group said: ‘We appreciate that a significant chunk of middle ground opinion will fall away if there is violence here, but direct action is essential. The pace of climate change gives us no alternative’ (in Wainwright, 2006). This sense of urgency, of an impelling moral obligation to prevent environmental degradation, is no different to that felt by the eco-authoritarians in the 1970s. Whereas for Robert Heilbroner and William Ophuls it was taken to justify the suspension of democratic freedoms, for Rising Tide and similar groups it justifies forms of direct action. In both cases, ‘actually existing democracy’ fails to deliver the environmental groups, and this entails the need for non-democratic forms of action. That said, whilst authoritarian states are fairly uncontroversially anti-democratic, the status of direct action within democratic theory is rather more indeterminate, and this is something we will come back to. The first part of the book examined the ways in which ecological politics and democracy can come apart, and whilst few would now argue for an authoritarian state as a response to environmental problems, the dilemmas with which the ecoauthoritarians wrestled remain with us. The management of common resources, and the danger of the unsustainable depletion of these resources, remains a thorny issue in environmental policy (Ellis, 2003). Democracy, however, remains merely a contingently bad form of political organisation for these writers, and if a form

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of democracy can be found that addresses the depletion/population/pollution problems that they are concerned with, it would be considered a viable political system. Given, however, the Schumpetarian view of human mental capacities that underpins the eco-authoritarian view, this outcome is unlikely. As we saw, this instrumental rejection of democracy has its critics on a number of grounds, chief of which lie in either (1) a rejection of the ‘doomsday scenario’ of impending ecological destruction or (2) a rejection of the view that an authoritarian state is the appropriate remedy for the failing of ‘actually existing democracy’. Both of these moves are still made today in relation to, for example, the global warming scenarios that are behind the protests at Drax. Whilst an ever-shrinking body of thought actually denies that climate change is taking place, arguments are still made to the effect that the costs of prevention will far outweigh the costs of allowing considerable warming to take place (Lomborg, 2001). A second strand of thought holds that climate change is down to natural rather than anthropogenic causes, implying that attempts to ameliorate climate change by reigning back greenhouse gas emissions would be futile (Hames, 2006). Strategy (2) is pursued by those who believe that our democratic institutions can be reinvented in ways that will allow us to tackle the problem effectively (Holden, 2002). For all that the problems with which eco-authoritarians struggled were and remain real, the faith they placed in an authoritarian state to resolve these problems was surely misguided. Whilst the inferior ecological record of nondemocratic states in itself proves nothing (how many of these states actually prioritised environmental goals?), the ability of a state to impose its ‘green will’ on an unwilling and resentful public who see their taken-for-granted freedoms being curtailed is questionable, in the absence of a monstrous architecture of green totalitarianism. Authoritarian states have often not been good at achieving those policy goals that they have prioritised, as the forlorn ambition of the Soviet Union to outstrip the productive capacity of the capitalist West testifies. There is no obvious reason to expect an authoritarian green state to be better than the Soviet Union at overcoming the internal divisions, inefficiencies, corruption, and perverse incentives that plague such states. If this instrumental rejection of democracy seems misguided, what of the in-principle rejection of democracy on the part of eco-anarchists? The view here is that democracy implies some form of institutional rule, and a division of labour between rulers and ruled that is inherently oppressive. Whilst democracy as it exists may be particularly objectionable, there is no hope here that a suitable radicalised, more egalitarian form of democracy can overcome the intrinsic problem of all organised forms of government. Anarcho-primitivism taps into the long-standing anarchist objections to any form of state, however apparently ‘democratic’ it may be. Even if we accept that existing forms of party-based democracy are reprehensible (and for all of the flaws of the party system that is a big ‘if ’), it is impossible to judge this critique until we have looked at some alternative models of democracy such as those discussed in Part II. Ultimately if we do not accept that all forms of democracy are inherently oppressive then we have no particularly strong reason to accept the fundamental critique of civilisation

Conclusion 141 articulated in anarcho-primitivism. Furthermore anarcho-primitivists are vague about the kind of alternatives they have on offer. Most, at least, do not want literally to drag us back to the Pleistocene, but the ‘primitive’ is meant to serve as some kind of guide or inspiration for a new form of society. Their reading of primitive society, however, rests on a highly selective reading of the available anthropological evidence. ‘Primitive’ humanity has been responsible for mass ecological extinctions and exterminations of rival communities (Diamond, 1993, 1998, 2005). It is far from obvious that there is any alternative model here for us to follow. There is another important question to ask of anarcho-primitivism, or rather those direct-action environmental groups that are inspired by it (or by the tenets of deep ecology). What should we make, morally, of the kinds of actions that groups such as the ELF and Earth First! engage in? How should we conceptualise this activity and how tolerant should the wider society be of it? To what extent does motivation matter? Is it morally different to burn down a building out of criminal intent (e.g. for insurance money), for reformist environmental ends, or for revolutionary anarcho-primitivist ends? The opponents of environmental direct action are clear in their view that attacks on property for environmental ends constitute an example of terrorism, and the perpetrators of such terrorist acts should be treated more harshly by the state than ‘mere’ criminals precisely because of the political motivation underlying the action. Even on a number of more disinterested accounts of terrorism, attacks on property are included as terrorist acts because of the kinds of psychological reactions that they can engender. The random firebombing of houses belonging to a particular ethnic or religious group, applied in order to drive that group out of a particular area, will surely bring about the feelings of shock, panic, and fear that theorists of terrorism are interested in. If attacks on property can spark feelings of terror, why would not we confer on such acts the label of terrorism? Problems arise, however, when we consider the implications of this view. How useful is a conception of terrorism that sweeps up everything from the cutting of drift nets on trawlers to the indiscriminate mass-murder of people who would generally be regarded as non-belligerents? Accounts of terrorism such as the FBI’s ‘full-employment’ definition are less than helpful in allowing us to make useful categorical distinctions between different forms of direct action. Accounts of terrorism may need to include some forms of attack on property, but surely not all attacks on property are the same in this regard? On the other hand, stretched conceptions of civil disobedience are no more helpful. Acts of covert arson probably do break the bonds of civility, and again a sweeping ‘catch-all’ conception of civil disobedience that places covert arson on a political–moral par with peaceful and open trespass is deeply problematic. There is research needed in developing a normative typology of direct action that is undoubtedly conscientious, but which fits neither the category of terrorism nor civil disobedience well.1 Normative judgements of any case of this kind of conscientious activism will be dependent upon questions of careful targeting and proportionality, it is all but impossible to establish whether such activity might by justified a priori.

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Nonetheless one possible justification for direct action (which would still have to be applied contextually) was explored in Chapter 4, namely where the policy being opposed has important negative and non-reversible consequences, such that protestors are playing a ‘one-shot’ political strategy. This brings us back to the protestors considered at the start of this conclusion. If climate change is happening, it has potentially serious and irreversible consequences. The protestors active at Drax cannot ‘revisit’ the question of global warming at some future point in order to prevent it, nor can the prospect of making ‘different decisions in the future’ be of much comfort to them. Under these conditions I suggest that we should consider them to have a strong justification for using a form of non-deliberative direct action to bring this problem to our attention, even where such action may involve covert law-breaking. Ecological politics and democratic systems may come apart, then, in that democratic systems fail to deliver ecological outcomes, and ecological activists may feel compelled to take non-democratic action in order to raise awareness of ecological political issues. But this, of course, is only one possible response to the problem, and one other response is to seek to reinvent democracy in such a way that it will succeed in delivering the kinds of outcomes that greens want to see. Part II engaged with arguments to the effect that democracy can be so reinvented. The suggestion that liberal democracy can be reconstructed around a new conception of autonomy in such a way that non-human nature must be allowed to live out its own independent life was rejected as conceptually incoherent. We then moved on to recent attempts to reconcile ecological outcomes and democracy through forms of discursivity or deliberation. The main finding of that examination is worth reiterating here. Far from being a radical, revolutionary form of democracy that will level up the playing field for the discursive consideration of environmental goods, deliberative democracy as it is currently proposed by a number of its adherents places dispositional and behavioural constraints upon democratic participants that have deeply conservative implications. When combined, the injunction against cost-levying, the demand for an economy of moral disagreement, and the insistence on public reason serve to disable radical attacks upon the status quo. When groups are beginning from a marginal position, and seek to challenge existing conceptions of justice or definitions of the democratic community, they need to be able to make use of a range of innovative and confrontational strategies that will challenge people’s ingrained assumptions and upset the rhythms of their daily lives. If the history of progressive politics should teach us anything, it should teach us that we close down the range of political strategies considered to be legitimate at our peril (Medearis, 2005). Where does this leave the relationship between ecological politics and democracy? One can agree with deliberative theorists that we require a way of overcoming the existing gross imbalances of power and communicative distortions that our current forms of democracy labour under, without going on to endorse their a priori communicative restrictions. But that cannot, of course, be the end of the story. These restrictions are adopted for a reason, and that reason is to ensure that democratic decisions are taken for the right reasons, because of the convincing

Conclusion 143 force of the best argument, or the recognition of an interest that all have in common. Rejecting these restrictions could imply that one is in favour of allowing ‘democratic decisions’ to be taken on the basis of cost-levying and intimidation. Surely it cannot be a democratically good thing if a logging operation stops just because the timber company is scared of losing valuable equipment to the depredations of eco-activists, who are no more than self-appointed ‘guardians’ of the environment? This objection raises crucial questions abut the nature of democracy. I have so far taken forms of direct action to be straightforwardly anti-democratic. Selfselecting groups of people seek to alter the cost-benefit calculations of a policy such that it becomes uneconomically expensive and so must cease, unless there is a very strong political will behind it. If this policy change is effected it will have nothing to do with the wishes of a majority of citizens and will not have come about as a result of open debate, ergo its undemocratic nature. Direct-action activity can, however, be framed very differently in terms of its relationship with democracy, as indeed it is by a number of campaigners. If we think back to Steve Best’s musings on the Patriot Act, he clearly conceived of activist protest as part of a tradition of democracy, rather than as something opposed to it. Why should we conceive of direct action in this way? This brings us back to our earlier comments, within a democratic polity (and even under ‘ideal’ conditions) some groups will hold beliefs that are outside of the mainstream, and they will require methods that allow them to bring these views to the attention of the majority. It may be that the majority opinion on, for example, the scope of justice is not held for terribly good reasons (we know, for example, that people often cling to beliefs in the face of very good reasons to believe the contrary (Gaus, 1996)). Groups seeking to challenge that conception of justice will need to bring their alternative to people’s attention, and it may well be that the polite forms of discourse recommended by deliberative theorists will be insufficient for that end. This kind of consideration indicates that we would do well to not only to tolerate direct action by such groups, but to refrain from imagining that political morality demands that they should make their arguments in terms of public reason, practice an economy of disagreement, or refrain from imposing costs on others. It may well be that society decides to maintain its existing conception of justice, and will not alter course despite the activities and passionate beliefs of the objectors, but this should be so after due reflection, which may only occur if the protestors are able to influence the political agenda. To take this view is not to object, at all, to the existence and use of deliberative fora such as citizens’ juries and deliberative opinion polling, but it is rather to question the political circumstances that will bring about the existence of deliberative mechanisms in relation to particular problems. In other words, this is a question of political saliency and who gets to establish it. The saliency of any political issue is not to be established through deliberative channels, but through the activities of those sufficiently impassioned by a cause to take action, combined with the response of the wider public to that action. We will only have a citizens’ jury on the rights of non-human nature and environmentalists and animal rights campaigners can get this issue

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on to the public agenda. It may then be considered through deliberative mechanisms, but it is unlikely to get there by deliberative means alone. In this sense, disruptive activity by special interest groups can be considered as part of the democratic tradition. As stated in Chapter 6, none of this is to demand a politics of anything goes – because I happen to be politically marginalised this does not entail that I can carry out a series of political assassinations in order to get my point across, effective though they may be. It does not imply that the demands of justice are laid down, even when they are being challenged, nor that the state should not seek to locate and punish covert law-breakers. It does, however, suggest that setting the boundaries of acceptable political behaviour is a far more difficult affair than the strictures of deliberative theorists suggest. If the margins of acceptability cannot be laid out in advance they will have to be established in actual discourse about the nature of democratic practice. It is not for the commanding heights of political theory to set down the limits of acceptable democratic practice in tablets of stone, but rather for those who are engaged in the practice of politics to negotiate the boundaries of that which can be tolerated. This may be a messy business, with rival conceptions of political morality in play and competing conceptions of what constitutes democratic practice. But it should surely be one of the elements of a ‘democratic’ society that it seeks to set out the boundaries of its own practice democratically. Democratic systems can never guarantee the ecological outcomes that green activists want to see, but we do better to consider their attempts to get us to engage with their demands (revolutionary anarchists aside) as part of the democratic process, rather than as seeing them as somehow beyond the pale of democratic life, to be to be regarded as equivalent to those who commit random acts of mass-murder. The activists camped at Drax are certainly engaging in a non-deliberative form of politics, but even if the ideal conditions of deliberation existed why would we want to rule them out of the democratic picture, as somehow beyond the pale? Questions of proportionality and harm do not disappear, but we need a conception of democracy that perceives activism as part of democratic life, rather than seeing it as a fundamental challenge to democratic norms.

Notes

Introduction 1 For a clear articulation of this distinction, see Dobson, 2000. 2 On ecological modernisation see Mol and Sonnenfeld, 2000. It also comes in ‘weaker’ and ‘stronger’ forms, the stronger versions taking it in the direction of ecologism. 3 Bluhdorn, 1997, 2000. 4 Bluhdorn, 1997: 141; Maldonado (n.d.). 5 Bluhdorn, 1997: 141. 6 Mol and Sonnenfeld, 2000. 7 Kirkman, 2002; Lomborg, 2001. 8 For coverage of anti-environmentalism see Rowell, 1996. 9 Ophuls, 1977. 10 Within the literature three significant streams of thought regarding democracy cast it in agonistic, deliberative, and liberal forms. See for examples Copp et al., 1993; Elster (ed.), 1998; Guttman and Thompson, 1996; Mouffe, 1993; Riker, 1982. 11 See for examples Baber and Bartlett, 2005; Bookchin, 1995a; Dryzek, 2000; Eckersley, 2004; Gundersen, 1995; Smith, 2003. 12 There are of course a number of empirical studies on the relationship between democracy and environmental outcomes, see for example Winslow, 2005. 13 Meadows et al., 1972. 14 Eckersley, 1992, see also Paehlke, 1996. 15 Hardin, 1974. 16 See especially Hardin, 1968. 17 See for example Ellis, 2003; Hastings, 2005. 18 Ostrom, 1990. 19 Humphrey, 2000. 20 Taylor, 2002: 37. 21 Biehl, 1998; Bookchin, 1995a. 22 Gundersen, 1995. 23 Baber and Bartlett, 2005; Smith, 2003. 1 Crisis management: eco-authoritarianism and the inadequacy of democracy 1 The view that the n-person prisoners’ dilemma, in particular, remains a useful frame of analysis for the environmental degradation of unmanaged commons is well established. See for example Connelly and Smith, 2003: 130–1. 2 See Schumpeter, 1943. 3 Barry and Hardin, 1982.

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4 One might think here of Tony Blair’s comment in the 2005 election that forcing up the price of air travel would be electoral suicide despite the contribution of aviation pollution to global warming. See for example: www.aef.org.uk/news/detail.php? art_id108 (accessed June 2005). 5 This becomes important when we return to look at contemporary ‘green’ taken on democracy, as it is a central contention of the proponents of ‘deliberative’ democracy, which many green theorists have come to endorse, that a non-coercive form of democratic politics is possible. 6 This implies that the political arguments based on these values are not justified by reference to public reasons. This has important implications for the relationship between ecological politics and democracy that we will return to in Chapter 7. 7 Promotion of the precautionary principle has become widespread in green political thought – see for examples Baber and Bartlett, 2005; Eckersley, 2004. For a much more cautious view, which endorses only an ‘anti-catastrophe’ principle, see Sunstein, 2005. 8 This position can be contrasted with that of Thomas Christiano, who argues that, despite empirical variations in the amount of knowledge that political actors bring to bear, the ‘equal consideration of the interests of citizens’, demands an equal distribution of basic rights (2001: 215). 9 See Hardin (1993: 140–2). 10 See for example Gray (1993), chapter 4. 11 For examples of these techniques and some sample figures see Simon (1981: 33). 12 The collapse in the price of tin signifies the break up of a tin-producing cartel in this period. 13 I am making an empirical judgement here that value change is a long-term process in comparison with the timescale necessary for top-down policy change. I further assume this is uncontroversial. 14 Quoted in Simon (1981: 27). 15 See for example Hanley and Folmer (eds) (1998). 16 See for example Raynor and Malone (eds) (1998). 17 In this regard see the important recent book by Pellikaan and van der Veen (2002). This empirical study of the Netherlands finds that people are motivated to act towards environmental improvement, but that much depends upon the social context of the collective action problem they are faced with. 18 See for example Riker (1982). 19 A further Schumpetarian insight, not pursued in the co-authoritarian literature as far as I can see, would be the claim that under any voting system the connection between people’s preferences and democratic outcomes is weak (for detail on this see Riker, 1982), thus even if most people did hold preferences for environmental policies there is no guarantee that a system of aggregating preferences would deliver this as the collective preference. This is particularly true if various alternative environmental pathways are on offer. 20 See for example the reports of the IPCC. www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/index.htm, but see also more sceptical arguments from Lomborg (2001) and Sunstein (2005: 171–4). 2 Anarcho-primitivism and direct action politics 1 The motto of Green Anarchist newspaper. 2 It is has to be said that they are hardly alone in this respect; ecocentrism and social ecology both, for example, engage in a comprehensive critique of current society on moral grounds. The view that environmental politics is a ‘single issue’ genre betrays a lack of familiarity with underlying arguments. 3 ‘Conceptual morphology’ offers a method for analysing political ideologies in terms of the political concepts they espouse, the way in which these concepts are interpreted

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31

(‘deconstested’) and the way in which the ideology structures the relationship between concepts, such that some are ‘core’ to the ideology whereas others are peripheral and so more malleable. For a comprehensive discussion see Freeden, 1996. For example, Smith, 2002: 421. See Zerzan Future Primitive at www.primitivism.com/future-primitive.htm (accessed November 2005). See Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Failure of Symbolic Thought at www. primitivism.com/emptiness.htm (accessed November 2005). See for example Green Anarchist 70, 9. See Bookchin, 1995b. ‘Levi-Strauss has argued persuasively that the primary function of written communication was to facilitate exploitation and subjugation (1955); cities and empires, for example, would be impossible without it. Here we see clearly the joining of the logic of symbolization and the growth of capital.’ Zerzan, Future Primitive at www.primitivism.com/future-primitive.htm Anon: ‘Primitivism: Back to Basics’ at www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/basics.htm (accessed October 2005). Marx makes it clear that alienation takes other forms as well, see his Economical and Philosphical Manuscripts (Marx, 1975). Anon: ‘Primitivism: Back to Basics’. Ibid. Tucker, Theses on the Fall of Civilization at www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/thesis.htm (accessed October 2005). Ibid. Moore, A Primitivist Primer at www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/primprimer.htm (accessed September 2005). Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. See Green Anarchist 70, 16. See Notes on Green Anarchy at www.blackandgreen.org/notes.html (accessed July 2005). Moore, A Primitivist Primer at www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/primprimer.htm (accessed September 2005). Anon (2003a) ‘Fuck “Alternative” Technology! Fuck the “Alternative” Green Ghetto!’ Green Anarchist 70, 8. Although the extent to which the increasing awareness of environmental problems has tempered this belief is an open question. Zerzan Division of Labour at http://raforum.apinc.org/article.php3?id_article2944 (accessed November 2005). See Marx and Engels (1970: 54). Zerzan Division of Labour at http://raforum.apinc.org/article.php3?id_article2944 (accessed November 2005). Ibid. Anon: ‘Primitivism: Back to Basics’ at www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/basics.htm (accessed October 2005). Heinberg, The Primitivist Critique of Civilization at www.eco-action.org/dt/critique.html (accessed July 2005). This analysis implies a kind of stunted emotional development on the part of human beings under conditions of civilisation. The ‘transitional object’ is usually taken to arise in the period when the child comes to realise that its mother cannot always bring its objects of desire to it without mediation. Thus it is frequently the first ‘not me’ object such as a security blanket that can provide comfort as the mother begins to distance herself from the child. See Winnicott (1971). Moore, A Primitivist Primer at www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/primprimer.htm (accessed September 2005).

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32 Feral Faun, Beyond Earth First! Toward a Feral Revolution of Desire at www. anti-politics.net/feral-faun/beyond-earth-first.html (accessed November 2005). 33 Zerzan, Domestication News at www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/domesticationnews.htm (accessed November 2005). 34 Roc, Industrial Domestication at www.eco-action.org/dt/inddom.html (accessed November 2005). 35 Tucker, Theses on the Fall of Civilization at www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/thesis.htm (accessed October 2005). 36 See Rowell (1996). 37 ELF (2001), Frequently Asked Questions about the ELF: pp. 8–9. 38 Although separate organisations, and despite past tensions, there is increasing evidence of co-operation and some common membership between radical environmental and animal rights movements (Taylor, 1998: 6; see also Marshall 2003). 39 This is the position articulated by Dave Foreman, for example, in the early days Earth First!. 40 This is suggestive of the probability that Rosebraugh authored at least part of the FAQ pamphlet, which is anonymous. 41 All references in this paragraph ELF (2001: 9). 42 On this see also Taylor (1998). 43 See the GenetiX Snowball website www.fraw.org.uk/gs/ (accessed November 2005). 44 Moore, A Primitivist Primer at www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/primprimer.htm (accessed September 2005). 45 See Zerzan Future Primitive at www.primitivism.com/future-primitive.htm (accessed November 2005). 46 Anon: ‘Primitivism: Back to Basics’ at www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/basics.htm (accessed October 2005). 47 Ibid. 48 See Zerzan Future Primitive at www.primitivism.com/future-primitive.htm (accessed November 2005). 49 Moore, A Primitivist Primer at www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/primprimer.htm (accessed September 2005). 50 Ibid. 51 Anon: ‘Primitivism: Back to Basics’ at www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/basics.htm (accessed October 2005). 52 Heinberg, The Primitivist Critique of Civilization. 53 See Zerzan, Future Primitive at www.eco-action.org/dt/critique.html (accessed July 2005), also Perlman, Against His-story, Against Leviathan www.primitivism.com/ leviathan.htm (accessed June 2005). For a very different view of the lives of huntergatherers see Diamond (1993, 1998). 54 On the latter see Humphrey and Stears (2006: 400–22). 3 The ‘war on eco-terror’ 1 On this see Humphrey, 2000. 2 Such as Ron Arnold’s Centre for the Defence of Free Enterprise, and the website Stop Eco-Violence at http://stopecoviolence.org/ (accessed September 2005). 3 See the CDFE website www.cdfe.org/ (accessed July 2005). 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Jarboe, 2002. I would take the view that groups such as the ELF do not want to engender ‘widespread political change’ to be a misunderstanding of their position, based on the analysis of the previous chapter. 7 Jarboe, 2002. The fact that cutting drift nets is seen as a ‘terrorist’ act is suggestive of just how broadly the FBI’s definition is drawn. Rather like a drift net itself,

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this account sweeps up a wide variety of species of direct action. As discussed in this chapter, the use of such a version of the concept leaves open the question of justification of ‘terrorist’ acts. Merriam-Webster Dictionary. North American Earth Liberation Front Press Office. See Arnold (1997: 106). One important analytical distinction has to be made at this point, between environmental terrorism on the one hand and eco-terrorism on the other. Environmental terrorism (see Chalecki, 2002: 46–64; Schwartz, 1998: 483–96) refers to activities that employ the environment as a terrorist target. Saddam Hussein’s orders to spill oil into the Gulf and set fire to Kuwaiti oil wells is often taken as an example of environmental terrorism, although this is not uncontroversial (Schwartz, 1998: 483–96). Eco-terrorism refers to acts that are employed in order to protect the environment from destruction (Arnold, 1997). See www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8129309/ (accessed July 2005), and www.animalrights. net/archives/year/2005/000084.html (accessed August 2006). Wilkinson (1981: 467–8). Note that Wilkinson employs a narrow definition such that terrorism must involve ‘the killing of the innocent’. To ask the moral question, we do not, however, have to adopt Wilkinson’s definition. See for example ELF (2001: 10). This claim may be controversial. Vanderheiden believes that the non-random nature of ecotage is an important part of the reason why it is not terrorism. This means that ‘ordinary’ people can feel secure in the knowledge that they will not be targeted. However, it can be assumed, at least, that an attack on one lumber company is intended to serve as a warning to other lumber companies that they could also be targeted, so there are still secondary targets here, even if they are ones that activists take to be belligerents. See Devall and Sessions (1985); Manes (1990). For the full development of this critique of deep ecology see Humphrey, 2000; for a response, Salleh, 2000. Such as John Prescott dismissing Greenpeace activist as ‘terrorists’. For a beginning of such work, and the development of a concept of ‘conscientious wrongdoing’, see Martin (1990: 291–310); also Vanderheiden (2005: 425–47), who suggests a set of criteria under which covert ecotage may be justifiable.

4 The justification of environmental direct action 1 Assuming, again, that ‘violence’ is something that can be done to inanimate objects. 2 By which I mean action such as tunnelling, tree-spiking, or tree-sitting that is intended to have an immediate effect. In environmental terms this entails ‘action designed not only or necessarily to change government policy or to shift the climate of public opinion through the media, but to change environmental conditions around them directly’ (Doherty et al., 2000: 1, emphasis in original). A good example of this would be the belief of some environmental activists that they can increase the cost of development projects to the point where they cease to make economic sense. This does nothing, necessarily, to alter government policies or underlying public attitudes. I take such activity to be ‘undemocratic’ for the obvious reason that this involves a small group (relative to the total number of adults in a population) seeking to alter political outcomes without the intermediation of public discussion or electoral consent. The actions considered here would include those that might reasonably be labelled ‘terrorist’ but includes actions such as tunnelling, which render the activist, not their opponent, vulnerable to injury. 3 I take these to be merely formal stipulations as I do not attach here the notions of fairness and inclusivity to any substantive institutional content. However, as environmental

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political theorists tend to favour deliberative forms of democracy, I will discuss this version at various points in the book. The enthusiasm with which green theorists have embraced deliberative or discursive forms of democracy is something to which we shall return. On this see Daniels, 1996. Also Light and de-Shalit (2003: 11–18) on ‘public’ reflective equilibrium, which appears more amenable to Gaus’ view than the Rawlsian version. Indeed it is not clear that ‘grounded moral values’ should carry greater weight than ‘preferences’ in democratic decision making when both can be seen as products of socialisation. See for example Taylor’s (1986) discussion on the moral weight of intuitions. There is a developing literature on environmental justice; Wood’s version is useful from the perspective of this paper for its focus on the non-reversible good of biodiversity. Parfit’s (1984) ‘non-identity problem’ raises a further problem, that even if future generations are recognised as having rights against harm, it is not clear that we can coherently claim that a policy enacted now ‘harms’ persons who will come into being in the distant future. I merely note these arguments here; I am not claiming that they defeat the intergenerational justice argument, although I think a different argument does defeat Wood’s version (see main text). Wood, Biodiversity and Democracy, 2000: 130–76. My thanks to Kieran O’Hara for discussion of this point. On anti-catastrophe principles see Sunstein, 2005. Welchman, 2001: 97–107, argues that in the light of recent developments in environmental politics we need to expand our notion of civil disobedience to include much that goes on under the label of environmental direct action. See for example the journals Restoration Ecology, Ecological Management & Restoration, and Ecological Restoration. Which interventions, and the extent to which they are reversible, is of course partially dependent upon one’s conception of natural integrity. On the assumption that no generation can bind subsequent generations to continue a preservationist policy, I assume that non-exploitation of an environmental good now preserves option value. It is unlikely, however, that these arguments can carry such weight. There are many things that can place a human life in context (religion, or gazing at the night sky), and it is far from clear that ‘nature’ is uniquely well-suited to this purpose. Young (2001: 670–90) certainly takes this to be the case. This has not yet been demonstrated, but will be in the following chapter.

5 Ecology, autonomy, and liberal democracy 1 This kind of morphing is common in green discourse; as concepts are pressed into service for radical environmental ends, they change character (their internal components and their referent points), often quite comprehensively. We see this in the case of ‘autonomy’ in this chapter. 2 See de-Shalit (1997). Also Hailwood (2004); Wissenburg (1998). 3 For more on this approach to conceptual argument, see Freeden (1996). 4 Just how ‘green’ such sustainability may be is highly questionable. It would not, for example, demand species preservation, unless we believe that democratic human society could not continue to function without that species. Such a criterion is likely to leave unprotected the large fauna, for example, that environmental groups tend to concern themselves with. 5 Here I agree with Lynch and Wells (1998: 151–64) that ecocentric claims should be treated with appropriate moral seriousness, but disagree with their tactic of presenting highly constrained immediate moral choices as appropriately illustrative. Eckersley (1998: 165–82) is right to contend that even if our course of action in such tightly constrained circumstances will be prima facie anthropocentric, we need to think

Notes 151 about the moral requirements of less constrained long term collective choices when discussing political morality. 6 As a capacity this is also something that will be manifested in different people to different degrees. It is an empirical question as to whether such qualities could be found in the ‘highest’ of the non-human species, such as the great apes, who may show an ability to think conceptually. It is unlikely that many other non-human creatures would demonstrate this capacity to any extent. Wissenburg (1998: 109–13) makes the point that an entity can lack autonomy yet still be a subject, and be entitled to moral considerability on that ground. 6 Deliberative democracy and the challenge of radical environmentalism 1 See Biehl, 1998. Decentralisation is no panacea for those who want to see democracy deliver green outcomes. The dangers of patronage and the domination by local elites hostile to environmentalism cannot be ignored. See Baber and Bartlett (2005). 2 See for example Spretnak and Capra (1985). 3 See Connelly and Smith (2003: 70–4). The comparison is with ‘ecological modernisation’. 4 For a brief background, see John Dryzek (2000: v). On ecological politics and public reason see the Chapter 7. 5 See, for examples, Fish (1999); Mansbridge (1996); Medearis (2004: 53–75); Shapiro (1999); Young (2001: 670–90). 6 Obvious examples here would be Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. 7 See www.greenpeace.org.uk/climate/climate.cfm?CFID2304783&CFTOKEN 93614806&UCIDParam20051114083611 (accessed November 2005). 8 At http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4478946.stm (accessed November 2005). 9 See Rucht (1995). 10 See www.greenpeace.org.uk/contentlookup.cfm?CFID3553126&CFTKEN 43899885&ucidparam19990815153314&MenuPointG-A (accessed November 2005). 11 For a discussion of movement diversity, see Della Porta and Diani (2001). 12 There is a vast literature on this theme for an introduction to which, see Pierson (2000: 251–67). 13 Which is not to suggest that all groups who turn to ‘disruptive’ tactics do so because they suffer from the consequences of significant political inequalities. 14 See www.greenpeace.org.uk/contentlookup.cfm?SitekeyParamC-A&CFID3553126& CFTOKEN43899885&MenuPointC (emphasis added) (accessed November 2005). 15 We need to be clear that it is justification that is at issue here. Nobody is claiming that protestors should be motivated by the thought of encouraging future deliberation, which would be bizarre. But if this is not likely to be the outcome of protest activity, it is not, for Gutmann and Thompson, justifiable. 16 Taylor (1998: 1–42), for example, notes the coming together of animal rights and environmental activists. 17 See for example Davis (2004: 1–20); Patterson (2002). Although the word ‘holocaust’ may have etymological roots in the immolation of sacrificial animals, the parallels being drawn in this literature are to the mass murder of human beings. Animal rights campaigners are not alone here, although they make the most systematic and explicit use of the concept. Former US Vice-President Al Gore talked in his Earth in the Balance of an ‘environmental holocaust without precedent’, and claimed that ‘the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of glass shattering in Berlin’ (1992: 177). 18 At www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1930051999/qid%3D1115907541/2029437706-4073424 (accessed November 2005).

152 19 20 21 22

Notes

See for a further example Cohen (1996). For an excellent example of such systematic treatment, see Fung (2005: 397–419). For a close discussion of this theme, see Chambers (1995: esp. 247). See Dryzek (2000) esp. 168–9 and Young (1996).

7 Radical environmentalism and the idea of public reason 1 In contrast, Habermas’ theory of communicative action operates in terms of the public use of reason rather than with a conception of public reason per se. Speakers are free to invoke what they understand to be valid norms, and if these are challenged, a speaker is expected to offer sincerely held reasons as to why the norm is valid. This does not imply, however, that any principles for which reasons can be so adduced will be recognised as valid. ‘[P]rinciples of justice cannot be based on a conception of the common good, since any such conception is necessarily rooted in a particular way of life and set of cultural self-understandings and therefore will fail the test of universalization’ (Moon, 2003: 267). The justification of norms depends on whether they ‘could find the rationally motivated assent of all those affected’ (Habermas, 1996: 228; see also 1990: 65). I do not take this discursive stipulation to be as restrictive as Rawlsian public reason, although the degree to which it is receptive to novel reasons remains an open question. 2 That is, we may vote according to our comprehensive conception of the good. 3 As Bell suggests sustainability and environmental justice do. See Bell (2002: 703–24). 4 For Rawls full specification of the burdens of judgement, see 1996: 56–7. 5 Quotes from Rawls (1996: 59). 6 See for example Gutmann and Thompson (2004: 29–30). 7 Which Rawls, with an unfortunate change of terminology, now calls the ‘wide’ view, in distinction to the ‘inclusive’ view. The problem is that one would expect a ‘wide’ view to be contrasted with a ‘narrow’ view, but the narrow view refers to the range of questions to which public reasons apply, not the mix of public and non-public reasons that are applied there. 8 Rawls, 1996: 64, fn. 19. Rawls generally holds that it is the citizens that hold comprehensive doctrines who have to accept reciprocity and the burdens of judgement in order to qualify as reasonable, and he provides separate criteria for the reasonableness of comprehensive doctrines. At times, however, he also seems to suggest that the doctrines themselves have to accept these democratic burdens in order to qualify as reasonable. 9 Frohock, 1997: 841, 843. This might cover the practices of sub-national groups who have nonliberal practices, but it will hardly suffice for radical ecologists who seek precisely to change the ‘arrangements of the larger society’. 10 See for example Gutmann and Thompson, 2004: 29–30. 11 Maldonado (n.d.) also holds that sustainability can be endorsed deliberatively. 12 We have to put aside, here, the ambition of anarcho-primitivists to overthrow civilisation. Although the arguments for this are cast in terms of generalisable interests, for Rawls and deliberative democrats public reason is the reason of a ‘constitutional democracy’, and so we will assume that we are here searching for arguments that can operate within that context rather than operate as a challenge to it. 13 See Rawls (1996: 59). 14 See Madearis (2004: 53–75). 15 See for example Mathews (1991). 16 These are taken from Solum (1996: 1459–86), upon whom this section draws extensively. What I call the ‘unfairness’ objection he calls the ‘novelty’ objection. I do not consider his final response here, which notes that public reason imposes obligations of political morality only, it does not justify legal restrictions on public debate. I take this to be both uncontroversial and not really the point at issue, which is about what political morality should demand.

Notes 153 17 ‘[O]ur exercise of political power is proper . . . only when it is exercised in accordance with a constitution the essentials of which all citizens may reasonably be expected to endorse in the light of principles and ideals acceptable to them as reasonable and rational’ (Rawls, 1996: 217). ‘[I]n making these justifications we are to appeal only to presently accepted general beliefs and forms of reasoning’ (ibid: 224). 18 On this see in particular Taylor, 1986. 19 See Eckersley, 2004 for the idea of a ‘community of the affected’ that can include the non-human. 20 The ‘Great Apes Project’ is actually a good example of a group using arguments that are already widely shared in order to try to extend the scope of rights. This means, however, that the demand rests on the similarity between great apes and humans, a form of argument that would be less useful for advocating the preservation of other species more distantly related to us. Conclusion 1 For a beginning see Carter (1998: 29–47), Fung (2005: 397–419), and Martin (1990: 291–310).

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Index

agonistic approach, to democracy 111–12 Agrawal, Arun 27 alienation 34, 36 anarcho-primitivism 30, 50, 140–1; civilisation 35–9; direct action 40–1; ideology 31–5; prefiguration and primitive 43–5; violence and covert action 41–3 Animal Liberation Front (ALF) 37, 40, 42, 50 animal liberationism 104 Arendt, Hannah 102 ‘argument from preconditions’ 84–5 ‘argument from principle’ 85–92 Arnold, Ron 148 n.2, 149 nn.10, 11 authenticity 66, 76 authoritarianism 5, 15, 30, 84, 139, 140; see also eco-authoritarianism autonomy 83–4, 85, 88, 120; argument from principle 85–92 availability and acceptability distinction 133 Baber, Walter F. 94, 137, 145 nn.11, 23, 146 n.7, 151 n.1 Baden, John 12, 145 n.3 Barry, Brian 13, 145 n.3 Barry, John 13, 26, 27, 92 Bartlett, Robert V. 94, 137, 145 nn.11, 23, 146 n.7, 151 n.1 Beckerman, W. 71, 73, 126 Bedau, Hugo A. 58, 59 Beetham, D. 66 Behrens III, William W. 12, 145 n.13 Bell, Derek 118, 125, 126, 127, 152 n.3 Benhabib, Seyla 73, 102 Biehl, Janet 145 n.21, 151 n.1 biodiversity 70, 105; protection 71, 126–7, 129–30

Black and Green website 30, 35, 37 Blair, Tony 57, 97 Blühdorn, Ingolfur 145 nn.3, 4, 5 Blunkett, David 57 Bohman, James 65–6, 120, 121, 137 Bookchin, Murray 6, 32–3, 94, 145 nn.11, 21, 147 n.8 Brundtland report 125 Burke, Edmund 21 Callicott, J. B. 68 capitalism 21, 34, 40–1 Capra, Fritjof 151 n.2 Carter, Alan 153 n.1 Centre for the Defence of Free Enterprise (CDFE) 48 Chalecki, Elizabeth L. 149 n.11 Chambers, Simone 152 n.21 Christiano, Thomas 146 n.8 civil disobedience 46, 47, 58–9, 60, 61, 73 civilisation 17, 30, 33, 34, 40, 60; ideology 35–9; overcoming 39; see also Leviathan; megamachine coercion 15, 18, 19, 21, 105, 116, 118, 129, 137 Cohen, Joshua 66, 98, 101–2, 152 n.19 collective action problem (CAP) 5, 20, 28; and rational actors 12–16 communication 47, 58–9, 76, 84, 89, 104, 142 communism 21, 34 community 32, 33, 43–4, 85, 88, 94, 108, 121, 127, 137, 138, 141 comprehensive doctrines 117, 119, 120–1, 128, 130, 131, 135 Connelly, James 82, 95, 145 n.1, 151 n.3 consent 66–7

166

Index

‘constitutional essentials and basic justice’ 115–16, 125, 128, 129, 131, 132 constraints 6, 7, 12, 20, 22, 27, 70, 90, 106, 124, 125, 129, 136–7, 142 content norms 66 Copp, David 145 n.10 cost-levying 40, 103, 106, 107, 110, 112, 113, 143; and political equality 98–101 Cummings, William 45 Daniels, N. 150 n.5 Davis, Karen 130, 151 n.17 ‘de-coupling’ 82 deep ecology 5–6, 28, 48, 60, 122, 141 deep pluralism 120, 121, 129, 137 deliberative democracy 6, 7, 66, 118–19, 122, 124, 125; and radical environmentalism 94, 114 Della Porta, Donnatella 151 n.11 democracy 2–3, 5, 18, 19, 28, 84; agonistic approach 111–12; environmentalist problem 67–72; instrumental rejection of 139–40; and justification for direct action 72–5; liberal democracy 3, 17, 22, 62, 67, 68, 70–2, 81, 127, 142 democratic politics: and ecological politics 110–13; ideal/non-ideal distinction 106–8; non-ideal circumstances 108–10 democratic trap 70, 72 de-Shalit, Avner 150 n.5 Devall, Bill 149 n.15 Diamond, Jared 141, 148 n.53 Diani, Mario 151 n.11 direct action 47–8, 51, 97, 108, 112, 117, 139, 143; see also environmental direct action direct action politics: and anarcho-primitivism 30 disruption 97, 100–1, 107–8, 144 division of labour 31–3, 36 Dobson, Andrew 69, 76, 84, 85, 89, 97, 145 n.1 Doherty, Brian 149 n.2 domestication 34, 38–9, 40–1 Drax power station 139, 140, 142, 144 Dryzek, John 66, 69, 84, 89, 111–12, 145 n.11, 151 n.4, 152 n.22 Dworkin, Gerald 71, 89, 90, 91 Earth First! 31, 40, 43 Earth Liberation Front (ELF) 31, 37, 40, 41, 42, 43, 48, 50, 55, 57

Eckersley, Robyn 27, 28, 69, 70, 82, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 92, 122, 145 nn.11, 14, 146 n.7, 150 n.5, 153 n.19 eco-authoritarianism 11; ecological eschatology 12; green response 26; institutional architecture 20–3; rational actors and CAP 12–16; reaction to 23–7; solutions 16–20 ecocentrism 28, 29, 92, 122, 129–31, 133, 135, 136 eco-doomsday 23 ecological catastrophe 27, 71, 72 ecological footprint, reducing 14 ecological integrity 18, 26, 82; see also integrity ecological modernisation theory 1, 81–2 ecological politics 1–2; and liberal democracy 3, 82–3 ecological protest 110–13, 139–44; non-deliberative politics 97–8 ecological scarcity 17, 21, 22 ecology 21; and democracy, non-contingent relationship between 92–3; see also individual entries economic growth 2, 12, 20, 82, 126, 127 economy of moral disagreement (EMD) 101–5 ecosystem 18, 75 ‘ecotage’ 52, 55, 58, 59, 61 ecoterrorism 63–4; see also ‘war on eco-terrror’ Ehrlich, Paul 12, 24, 27, 29 Ellis, Richard 139, 145 n.17 Elster, Jon 145 n.10 emissions 29, 82, 97, 140 Engels, Friedrich 32, 107, 147 n.26 engineering approach 23 environmental activists 64, 96, 99, 105, 106, 107, 109, 112 environmental catastrophe 11, 12, 29, 127 environmental direct action 49, 56–61, 96; environmentalist problem, with democracy 67–72; justification 63, 67, 72–3; legitimacy 65–7, 73; see also direct action environmentalism 21, 70–2; see also radical environmentalism; skeptical environmentalism environmentalist 5, 49, 57, 62, 67–72, 76, 124–5, 127, 135 environmental justice 70, 126 environmental movement activism 53, 110; cost-levying 98–101; non-EMD 104–5

Index 167 environmental movements, radical: Animal Liberation Front (ALF) 37, 40, 42, 50; Earth First! 31, 40, 43; Earth Liberation Front (ELF) 31, 37, 40, 41, 42, 43, 48, 50 environmental policy 14, 26, 27, 29, 71–2, 82, 120, 137, 139; environmental justice and sustainability 125–7 environmental problem 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 101, 120, 139; see also individual entries Estlund, D. 26, 65 Eternal Treblinka 105 Faber, D. 72 Faun, Feral 148 n.32 FBI 48, 49, 50 Fifth Estate 38 Fish, Stanley 96, 151 n.5 Folmer, Henk 146 n.15 Fox, Warwick 60 Freeden, Michael 147 n.3, 150 n.3 Frohock, Fred M. 120, 121, 122, 152 n.9 Fung, Archon 152 n.20, 153 n.1 Gaus, G. 67, 123, 143, 150 n.5 GenetiX Snowball 43 The German Ideology 32 gerontocracy 33 Gibbs, Jack P. 51, 54 Gibbs’ criteria of terrorism 56, 57, 61 global warming 25, 29, 74, 125, 139, 140 Goldsmith, Edward 90 Goodin, Robert 4, 65, 68, 76, 85 Gore, Al 151 n.17 Gray, John 146 n.10 Green Anarchist 30, 35, 40, 41, 146 n.1, 147 nn.7, 20, 21, 23 Greenpeace 97, 105 greens 4, 26, 38, 41, 81, 83, 85, 88, 127, 128, 131, 136, 142, 150 n.4 Gundersen, Adolf G. 94, 145 nn.11, 22 Gutmann, Amy 66, 73, 98, 102, 103, 104, 106–7, 109, 114, 125, 137, 151 n.15, 152 nn.6, 10 Habermas, Jurgen 73, 100, 107, 108, 109, 152 n.1 Hailwood, Simon 150 n.2 Hames, Tim 140 Hampton, Jean 145 n.10 Hanley, Nick 146 n.15

Hardin, Garrett 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 21, 28, 29, 145 nn.15, 16, 146 n.9 Hardin, Russel 13, 145 n.3 harm principle 71 Hastings, Max 145 n.17 Hauptmann, E. 66 Heilbroner, Robert 12, 15, 16, 21, 23, 25, 27, 28, 29, 139 Heinberg, Richard 37, 44, 147 n.30, 148 n.52 Hobbes, Thomas 21 Hobbesian struggle 21 Holden, Barry 140 Humphrey, Mathew 74, 92, 127, 145 n.19, 148 n.54, 149 n.16 The Idea of Public Reason Revisited 115, 134–5 industrial revolution 36, 38, 41 integrity 16, 19–20, 26, 68, 85, 88, 122; ‘trumping right’ to integrity 18, 69, 72 intergenerational justice 70, 71–2, 126 ‘invisible hand’ thesis 21 irreversibility 6, 29, 73–5, 76, 77, 109, 142 Jacobs, Michael 82 Jarboe, James F. 49, 50, 148 nn.6, 7 justice 17–18, 19, 64–5, 73, 76–7, 110, 117–18, 121, 136, 143; environmental justice 126; intergenerational justice 70, 71–2, 126 justification 7, 67, 72, 73, 103, 118, 136; for environmental direct action 63, 77 Kahn, Herman 23 Keane, John 51, 52 King, L. A. 65 King, Martin Luther 108, 131 Kirkman, Robert 145 n.7 Laclau, Ernesto 45 legality 41, 66 legitimacy 18, 19, 26, 43, 48, 52, 55–6, 64, 65–7, 70, 73, 74–5, 103–4, 105, 112, 120, 127 Leviathan, of state 15; see also civilisation; megamachine liberal democracy 3, 17, 22, 62, 67, 68, 70–2, 93, 114, 120, 127, 142; see also autonomy liberalism 17, 21, 67, 82–3, 84, 85, 90, 91, 122, 123–4, 130

168

Index

libertarian municipalism 6, 33, 94 Light, A. 150 n.5 List, Christian 66 Living in integrity 25 Locke 20, 23 Lomborg, Bjørn 25, 29, 125, 126, 140, 145 n.7, 146 n.20 Lynch, Tony 150 n.5 Madden, Robbie 139 The Making of the English Working Class 38 Maldonado, Manuel Arias 145 n.4, 152 n.11 Malone, Elizabeth L. 146 n.16 Manes, Christopher 149 n.15 Manning, R. E. 26 Mansbridge, Jane 96, 151 n.5 Marcuse, Herbert 36 Marshall, Craig 148 n.38 Martin, Michael 149 n.18, 153 n.1 Marx, Karl 20, 21, 32, 34, 107, 147 nn.11, 26 Marxism 33, 34, 36 Mason, Michael 89 Mathews, Freya 152 n.15 Meadows, Dennis L. 12, 145 n.13 Meadows, Donella H. 12, 145 n.13 Medearis, John 96, 100–1, 107, 142, 151 n.5 megamachine 34, 46; see also civilisation; Leviathan Miller, D. 71, 72 Minteer, B. A. 26, 68 Mol, Arthur P. J. 145 nn.2, 6 Moon, J. Donald 123, 152 n.1 Moore, John 43, 44, 147 nn.16, 22, 31, 148 nn.44, 49 moral position 85, 102, 104 moral priority 85, 86–7, 88 Mouffe, Chantal 111, 145 n.10 Nagel, Thomas 123 Niemeyer, S. J. 65 non-deliberative politics 77, 103–4, 107, 110, 144; of ecological protest 97–8 non-economy of moral disagreement 104–5 non-public reason 119–20, 135, 137 non-reversibility 74, 75, 109 non-violence 42–3, 50, 51, 101 normative conception 61, 86, 95, 106, 108, 122, 125, 128–9, 141

North American Earth Liberation Front Press Office (NAELFPO) 50 Norton, B. G. 26 ‘n-person prisoners’ dilemma 13, 14, 29 One-Dimensional Man 36 O’Neill, Onara 117 ontology 7, 20, 60, 119, 121–2, 137 Ophuls, William 3, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 27, 29, 139, 145 n.9 Ostrom, Elinor 145 n.18 Parfit, D. 150 n.8 Parkinson, John 65, 66, 67 Pasek, J. 71, 73, 126 Paterson, M. 149 n.2 Patterson, Charles 130, 151 n.17 Pellikaan, Huib 146 n.17 Pepperman Taylor, B. 68 Perlman, Fredy 148 n.53 Pickering, Leslie James 42, 45–6, 48, 50, 53, 59–60 Pierson, Paul 151 n.12 Plato 22 political action 7, 13, 45, 76, 95, 97, 101, 107, 124; see also individual entries political equality 77, 106, 112, 113; and cost-levying 98–101 Political Liberalism 115, 119 political philosophy 20–1, 23, 109 ‘politics of mutual respect’ 102–3 pollution 29, 82, 90, 116, 126 post-modernism 34–5 primitive 13, 31, 38, 39, 43–5, 141 A Primitivist Primer 43 public policy 18, 68, 73, 106, 119, 122–3, 128, 129, 130, 135 ‘public political forum’ 117 public reason 7, 114, 143; content 117–18; critique, assessing 124–5; depth, of pluralism 120–2; environmental questions, alternative 128; fairness and novel political arguments 128–36; scope 115–17, 118–19, 125–7; viability 122–4; width 119–20 Quong, Jonathan 118 radical environmentalism 4, 40, 47–8, 57; and deliberative democracy 95; and public reason 114; see also environmentalism

Index 169 Randers, Jorgen 12, 145 n.13 ‘rational man, irrational society’ 13 Rawls, John 64, 71, 73, 109, 114, 115–18, 119, 120, 121, 123, 125, 128, 129, 131, 132, 135, 152 nn.4, 5, 8, 13, 153 n.17 Raynor, Steve 146 n.16 ‘realistic utopia’ 106, 109, 110 reasonable pluralism 120–1, 130, 132 Regan, Tom 129 Rehg, W. S. J. 73 Reidy, David A. 119 resource depletion 12, 23–4, 82, 139 Riker, William 145 n.10, 145 nn.18, 19 Roc, Leopold 38, 148 n.34 Roemer, John E. 145 n.10 Rosebraugh, Craig 37, 41, 45 Rowell, Andrew 145 n.8, 148 n.36 Rubenstein, Richard E. 53–4 Rucht, Dieter 151 n.9 salami slicing, of species 70, 71 Salleh, Ariel 149 n.16 Sandilands, C. 26–7 scarcity 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 30, 125–6, 127 Schumpeter, Joseph 13, 15, 18, 28, 145 n.2 Schwartz, Daniel M. 149 n.11 Seel, B. 149 n.2 Sessions, George 149 n.15 Shapiro, Ian 96, 151 n.5 Shrader-Frechette, K. 72 Simon, Julian 23, 24–5, 146 nn.11, 14 skeptical environmentalism 2; see also environmentalism The Skeptical Environmentalist 25 Smith, Graham 21, 26, 82, 94, 95, 102, 145 nn.11, 23, 151 n.3 Smith, Mick 35, 36, 44, 147 n.4 socialism 21 Solum, Lawrence B. 131–2, 133, 134, 135–6, 152 n.16 Sonnenfeld, David A. 145 nn.2, 6 Sorel, Georges 45 source norms 67, 69 special interest terrorism 49, 53 species-life 86, 87, 90, 91–2 Spretnak, Charlene 151 n.2 Stears, Marc 94, 112, 148 n.54 Sunstein, Cass 29, 74, 146 nn.7, 20, 150 n.11 survivalists see eco-authoritarianism sustainability 1, 2, 3, 4, 13, 18, 84–5, 125, 127 Symeonidou-Kastanidou, Elisabeth 53

Tarrow, Sidney 100 Taylor, Bron 48, 49, 54–5, 63, 145 n.20, 148 nn.38, 42, 151 n.16 Taylor, Paul W. 129, 150 n.6, 153 n.18 terrorism 6, 46, 63 141; see also eco-terrorism; ‘war on eco-terror’ A Theory of Justice 115, 116, 117 Thompson, Dennis 66, 98, 102, 103, 104, 106–7, 109, 114, 125, 137, 145 n.10, 151 n.15, 152 nn.6, 10 Thompson, E. P. 38 ‘tragedy of the commons’ 13, 28 ‘trumping right’ to integrity 18, 68–9, 72 Tucker, Kevin 34, 147 n.14, 148 n.35 Ulph, A. 74 Ulph, D. 74 UN Declaration on Human Rights 17 unfairness objection: to public reason restriction 129–36 Vanderheiden, Steve 55, 61–2, 149 nn.14, 18 van der Veen, Robert 146 n.17 Van Parijs, P. 64 violence 50–2, 53–4, 62; and covert action 41–3; see also direct action; environmental direct action Wainwright, Martin 139 Waldron, Jeremy 130, 131, 133, 134 Walzer, Michael 56 ‘war on desire’ 37–8, 45 ‘war on eco-terror’ 47 ‘weak plural agreement’ 121 Welchman, Jennifer 58–9, 64, 150 n.12 Wells, David 150 n.5 Westmoreland, Robert 123, 124 Westra, Laura 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 25; principle of integrity 26, 68, 69 Wilkinson, Paul 149 n.13 Williams, Andrew 120 Winnicott, Donald 147 n.30 Winslow, Margrethe 145 n.12 Wissenburg, Marcel 150 n.2, 151 n.6 Wood, P. M. 70, 71–2, 150 n.9 Young, Iris Marion 76, 100, 150 n.16, 151 n.5, 152 n.22 Zerzan, John 34–5, 38, 43, 147 nn.5, 6, 25, 27, 148 nn.33, 45, 48, 53