§ 3 THE POLITICS OF DESIGN 9 None So Blind: The Problem of Ecological Denial None so blind as those that will not see. —Mathew Henry Willful blindness has reached epidemic proportions in our time. Nowhere is this more evident than in recent actions by the U.S. Con- gress to deny outright the massive and growing body of scientific data about the deterioration of the earth’s vital signs, while attempting to dismantle environmental laws and regulations. But the problem of ecological denial is bigger than recent events in Congress. It is flour- ishing in the “wise use” movement and extremist groups in the United States, among executives of global corporations, media tycoons, and David Ehrenfeld coauthored this chapter. on main street. Denial is in the air. Those who believe that humans are, or ought to be, something better than ecological vandals need to understand how and why some people choose to shun reality. Denial, however, must be distinguished from honest disagree- ment about matters of fact, logic, data, and evidence that is a normal part of the ongoing struggle to establish scientific truth. Denial is the willful dismissal or distortion of fact, logic, and data in the service of ideology and self-interest. The churchmen of the seventeenth century who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope, for example, en- gaged in denial. In that instance, their blind obedience to worn-out dogma was expedient to protect ecclesiastical authority. And denial is apparent in every historical epoch as a willing blindness to the events, trends, and evidence that threaten one established interest or another. In our time, great effort is being made to deny that there are any physical limits to our use of the earth or to the legitimacy of human wants. On the face of it, the case is absurd. Most physical laws define the limits of what it is possible to do. And all of the authentic moral teachings of 3,000 years have been consistent about the dangers and futility of unfettered desire. Rather than confront these things di- rectly, however, denial is manifested indirectly. A particularly powerful form of denial in U.S. culture begins with the insistence on the supremacy over all other considerations of human economic freedom manifest in the market economy. If one chooses to believe that economies so dominated by lavishly subsi- dized corporations are, in fact,free, then the next assumption is easier: the religious belief that the market will solve all problems. The power of competition and the ingenuity of technology to find substitutes for scarce materials, it is believed, will surmount physical limits. Markets are powerful institutions that, properly harnessed, can accomplish a great deal. But they cannot substitute for healthy communities, good government, and farsighted public policies. Nor can they displace the laws, both physical and moral, that bound human actions. A second indirect manifestation of ecological denial occurs when unreasonable standards of proof are required to establish the exis- tence of environmental threats. Is the loss of species a problem? Well, if you think so, just name one species that went extinct today! The strategy is clear: focus on nits, avoid large issues, and always demand an unattainable level of proof for the existence of any possible prob- lem before agreeing to any action to forestall potential catastrophe. 86 THE POLITICS OF DESIGN True, no such standards of proof of likely Soviet aggression were re- quired to commit the United States to a $300 billion defense budget. But denial always works by establishing double standards for proof. Third, denial is manifest when unwarranted inferences are drawn from disconnected pieces of information. For example, prices of raw materials have declined over the past century. From this, some have drawn the conclusion that there can be no such thing as resource scarcity. But the prices of resources are the result of complex interac- tions between resource stocks/reserves, government subsidies, un- priced ecological and social costs of extraction, processing, trans- portation, the discount rate, and the level of industrial growth (which turned down in the 1980s). This is why prices alone do not give us ac- curate information about depletion, nor do they tell us that the plan- etary sinks, including the atmosphere and oceans, are filling up with wastes they cannot assimilate. Moreover, the argument from prices and other economic indica- tors does not take into account the sudden discontinuities that often occur when limits are reached. A typical example from physics is stated in Hooke’s Law: Stress is proportional to strain, within the elas- tic limit. The length of an elastic band is proportional to the stretching force exerted on it—until the band snaps. In biology, the population crashes that sometimes occur when carrying capacity is reached pro- vide another example. There are many more. Fourth, denial is manifest in ridicule and ad hominem attacks. People inclined to think that present trends are not entirely positive are labeled doomsayers, romantics, apocalyptics, Malthusians, dread- mongers, and wackos. In a book that dominated environmental dis- cussion on Earth Day 1995, Newsweek writer Gregg Easterbrook, for example, says that such people (whom he calls “enviros”) “pine for bad news.” They suffer from a “primal urge to decree a crisis” (1995, 440) and “subconscious motives to be alone with nature” (ibid., 481). Pessimism, for them, is “stylish.” They are ridiculous people with non- sensical views, who do not deserve a serious response; this relieves those doing the name calling and denying from having to think through complex and long-term issues. Fifth, denial is manifest in confusion over time scales. Again, Easterbrook spends the first 157 pages of his 698-page opus explain- ing why in the long view things such as climatic change and soil ero- sion are minor events. Shifting continents, glaciation, and collision THE PROBLEM OF ECOLOGICAL DENIAL 87 with asteroids have wreaked far greater havoc than human-caused degradation.“Nature,” he says,“has for millions of centuries been gen- erating worse problems than any created by people” (1995, xvii). I do not for a moment doubt the truth of this assertion. Nor do I doubt that from, say, Alpha Centauri, a nuclear war on Earth would scarcely make the midday farm report. Easterbrook enjoins us to place our ecological woes in the perspective of geologic time, and from a suffi- cient distance they do indeed look like a quibble. The earth is a fortress, he says, capable of withstanding all manner of insult and technological assault. But we don’t live on Alpha Centauri, and events that may be trivial in a million years loom very large to us with our 75-year life spans, our few-hundred-year-old countries, and our 8,000-year-old agricultural civilization. Denial is manifest, sixth, when large and messy questions about the partisan politics of environmental issues are ignored. In the fall of 1994, about the same time that Easterbrook would have been work- ing over the galley pages for his book, agents of the Republican party were drafting the final version of The Contract with America,a major goal of which was to dismantle all of the environmental laws and reg- ulations so painstakingly erected over the past 25 years. Ecological optimism was blindsided by political reality. Why is denial happening? It is happening, first,because in the face of serious problems such as the increasing gap between the rich and everyone else, and the related problems caused by unrestrained corpo- rate power, we look for scapegoats rather than confront problems di- rectly. Historian Richard Hofstadter once called this the “paranoid style of politics.” Practitioners of paranoid politics use conspiracy the- ories to explain why things are not as good as they ought to be. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, reliably awful enemies are more dif- ficult to find. Accordingly, environmentalists, bureaucrats, gays, and ethnic minorities have replaced communists as the enemies of choice. Second, and perhaps most obvious, denial is a defense against anxiety. Many of the environmental changes that are now happening are deeply disturbing, but they constitute only a part of the assaults on our well-being that most of us face daily. It is natural to want to lighten our load of troubles by jettisoning a few. Environmental prob- lems are rarely as personally pressing as sickness or loss of a job, so out they go. This kind of denial can provide some immediate relief of anx- iety. However, it merely delays the confrontation with ecological real- 88 THE POLITICS OF DESIGN ity until the time when environmental events, breaking through the screen of denial, force themselves upon us. When that occurs, our ecological troubles will be far more painful and far less tractable to deal with than they are now. Ecological denial is happening, third, because it seems plausible to the ill-informed. Polls show that only 44 percent of Americans be- lieved that human beings developed from earlier species, while only 63 percent were aware that human beings negatively affect biodiver- sity. This was the lowest response among the citizens of 20 countries surveyed. People so ignorant are mere fodder for those who would harness denial for their own purposes. Fourth, it may be fair to say that ecological denial is happening in the public because environmental advocates often appear to be elitist and overly focused on an ideal of pristine nature, to the exclusion of real people. We have not bridged the gap between environmental quality and class as imaginatively and aggressively as we ought to have done. As a result, many people see conservation biologists and envi- ronmental activists as members of yet another special interest group, not working for the general good. It is clear that we will have to do a better job explaining to the public why the environment is not an ex- pendable concern unrelated to real prosperity and community. How is this to be done? I would like to recommend the following steps. First, members of the conservation community must not deny that we live in a society which desperately needs fixing and in which denial is seductively easy and cheap, at least for a time. We must acknowledge and seek to un- derstand the connection between poverty, social injustice, and envi- ronmental degradation. We must acknowledge and seek to under- stand the connection between rootlessness and environmental irresponsibility. We must acknowledge and seek to understand the connection between the loss of functional human communities and the inexorable decline in the state of the earth. Second, we should take our critics seriously enough to read what they have to way. I recommend a close reading of books such as But Is It True? by the late Aaron Wildavsky (1995) and Ronald Bailey’s edited volume called The True State of the Planet (1995). We need to separate those things on which we may agree from those on which we cannot agree, the plausible from the implausible, and be utterly clear about the difference. THE PROBLEM OF ECOLOGICAL DENIAL 89 Third, we should take words more seriously than we have in the past. Without much of a fight, we have abandoned words such as “progress,” “prosperity,” and “patriotism” to those who have cheap- ened and distorted their meanings beyond recognition. We need to take back the linguistic and symbolic high ground from the deniers. At the same time, however, some of us need to be much more careful about using apocalyptic words such as “crisis.” “Crisis,” a word taken from the field of medicine, implies a specific time in an illness when the patient hovers between life and death. But few environmental problems conform closely to that model. We do not doubt for a sec- ond that we now face some genuine crises and that we will face oth- ers in the future. But for the most part, ecological deterioration will be a gradual wasting away of possibilities and potentials, more like the original medical meaning of the word “consumption.” Finally, we should all learn to recognize the signs of ecological de- nial, so that when we see it in operation we can expose it for what it is and force an honest discussion of the real issues that deserve our immediate and full concern. 90 THE POLITICS OF DESIGN 10 Twine in the Baler I recall a true story about an Ozark farmer who telephoned his neigh- bors one fine June day asking for help in getting in his hay. Arriving at the hayfield, people found the farmer baling his hay, but without twine in the baler. Unbound piles of hay, which would have to be en- tirely reraked and rebaled, lay all over the field. The farmer, with a bottle of whiskey in his lap, was feeling no pain, as they say, and did not seem to notice the problem, nor did the dozen or so men, simi- larly anesthetized, standing around the pickup trucks at the edge of the field. Believing the lack of twine to be a serious problem, one of the volunteers, a newcomer to such haying operations, suggested put- ting a roll of twine in the baler. To which an old-timer replied: “Naw, no need for that. Ol’ Billy-Hugh [the farmer in question] is having too much fun to stop now.” This story says something important about intention. Those of us who arrived on the scene ready to work failed to understand that the purpose of the event had nothing to do with getting in hay. This was a party, haying the pretext.Once we understood that, all of us could get in the flow, so to speak. A good many things, including politics, work similarly. One of the best books ever written about politics, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Edelman 1962), develops the thesis that the purpose of political ac- tivity is often not to solve problems but only to appear as if doing so. The politics of sustainability, unfortunately, provide no obvious ex- ception to this tendency to exalt symbolism over substance. And of symbols and words there is no end. The subject of sustainability has become a growth industry. Government- and business-sponsored councils, conferences, and public meetings on sustainability prolifer- ate, most of which seem to be symbolic gestures to allay public anxi- eties, not to get down to root causes. What would it mean to put twine in our baler? I would like to offer three suggestions. Getting serious about the problem of sustainability would mean, first, raising difficult and unpolitic questions about the domination of the economy by large corporations and their present immunity from effective public control. All of the talk about making economies sus- tainable tends to conceal the reality that few in positions of political or economic power have any intention of making corporate power ac- countable to the public, let alone reshaping the economy to fit eco- logical realities. Free trade, as it is now proposed, will only make things worse. Scarcely any countervailing power to predatory capital exists at the national level, and none exists at the global level. In such a world, economic competitiveness will be the excuse for any number of egregious decisions that will be made by people who cannot be held accountable for their actions. Putting twine in the baler in this instance would mean, among other things, enforcing limits on the scale of economic enterprises and undoing that piece of juristic mischief by which the Supreme Court in 1886 (Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad) bestowed on corporations the full protection of the Bill of Rights and the Four- teenth Amendment, giving them, in effect, the legal rights of persons (Grossman and Adams 1993). That decision, and others subse- quently, have placed U.S. corporations beyond effective public con- trol. The right to use their wealth as persons enables them to influ- ence the votes of legislators and to evade the law and weaken its administration. Exercising their right of free speech, corporations fill the airwaves with incessant advertisements that condition and weaken the public mind. The exercise of their economic power cre- ates dependencies that undermine public resolve. Their sheer perva- 92 THE POLITICS OF DESIGN [...]... wealth generated by the discovery of the New World The ratios of people to land and resources were fundamentally transformed until the middle of the twentieth century, when they once again approximated those of the year 1500 The rapid exploitation of fossil fuels has allowed us to continue the expansion for a while longer, but the end of the human efflorescence has come into view The modern age,” Webb... and the money invested elsewhere The owners of capital do not care whether A POLITICS WORTHY OF THE NAME 107 they make money in fisheries or condominiums The logic of exploitation is relentless, predisposing the system to tragic ends with many luxury goods but few fish The problem, in other words, is not that capitalists lack the right information about the full ecological costs of what they do, but rather... so, putting twine in the baler will mean expanding our perception of self-interest to include our membership in the larger enterprise of life over a longer sweep of time, and doing so with all the emotionally driven rationality we can muster 96 THE POLITICS OF DESIGN Conclusion Institutions purportedly dedicated to the life of the mind often suffer their own peculiar version of the twineless baler... to the views of Edmund Burke described in chapter 11 Jefferson, a man of the Left, and Burke, the patron saint of modern conservatism, both agreed that decisions of the present must be measured against the degree to which they encumbered future generations Both saw the possibility that tyranny might be remote in time as well as in space Writing within a year of each other, the views of the founders of. .. elections is a start The next step is to rein in the power of corporations by insisting that they abide by the terms of their charters The charters of those that cannot do business within 116 THE POLITICS OF DESIGN the terms of the law should be revoked A corporate version of “three strikes and you’re out,” for instance, would have a salutary effect on corporate behavior None of this, however, is likely... questions of political life as they did, but in recognition of ecological facts which they did not know The challenge before us is a design problem: how to A POLITICS WORTHY OF THE NAME 109 build a decent civilization that fits harmoniously into the ecology of North America over the long term We are not accustomed to thinking of the effects of political decisions in the long term, let alone as a problem of. .. decades from now They have failed to stop the hemorrhaging of life and protect biological diversity, soils, and forests They ignore problems of urban decay, suburban sprawl, the poisoning of our children by persistent toxins, the destruction of rural communities, and the growing disparity between the rich and the poor They cannot find the wherewithal to defend the public interest in matters of global trade... on the street, A POLITICS WORTHY OF THE NAME 1 13 the apartment block, or the neighbourhood People will once more begin to experience the phenomenon of home It will no longer be possible, as it has been, for people not to know what town they find themselves in because everything looks the same Our villages will once again have become villages Agriculture should once again be in the hands of the. .. enlightened self-interest, we could be optimistic, but alas, the issue is not so simple First, there is the question of whether it is possible to redesign capitalism to accord with ecological realities The problem is simply that the self-organizing principles of markets that have emerged in human cultures over the past 10,000 years are inherently in conflict with the self-organizing principles of ecosystems... Liberty As if every man was to regulate the whole of his conduct by his own will.” Rather, he defined liberty as “social freedom It is that state of things in which liberty is secured by the equality of restraint” (quoted in O’Brien 1992, 39 0) As the ecological shadow of the present over future generations has lengthened, the wisdom of Burke’s concern for the welfare of future generations has become more . ignored. In the fall of 1994, about the same time that Easterbrook would have been work- ing over the galley pages for his book, agents of the Republican party were drafting the final version of The Contract. pain, as they say, and did not seem to notice the problem, nor did the dozen or so men, simi- larly anesthetized, standing around the pickup trucks at the edge of the field. Believing the lack of twine. and weaken the public mind. The exercise of their economic power cre- ates dependencies that undermine public resolve. Their sheer perva- 92 THE POLITICS OF DESIGN siveness erodes the basis for