Environmentalism: Private or Public Morality?
Should companies and NGOs impose their moral beliefs on others?
Democratic systems of governance, especially those that guarantee true freedom of speech and religion, impose a substantial responsibility on citizens. As individuals, virtually all of us have our own belief systems, reflecting our heritage, our social and cultural environment, our religious traditions, and, hopefully, our reflection on what is good and true.
But a democratic system requires that we limit our efforts to impose those beliefs on others. Thus, for example, in societies where freedom of religion is a fundamental principle, such as France or the United States, believers in any particular faith are legally limited in the extent to which they can force others to follow their precepts. Such societies respect private moral beliefs, but also require a more tolerant, public morality. A fundamentalist may practice his or her private morality, which may be quite rigid, but is expected to respect other belief systems that coexist in that society -- a public morality of tolerance and shared ethics. Societies that don’t reflect this difference -- Afghanistan, for example -- can be very unpleasant for those who do not hew exactly to the prevalent belief system.
What does this have to do with environmental policy? Actually, a lot. Consider that most of the major environmental issues we deal with today -- loss of biodiversity; global climate change; degradation of water, air, and soil -- are global, if not physically, then because they are integral parts of global economic systems. And the world, of course, is profoundly multicultural, as any firm doing business in numerous countries can attest. There are indeed elements of global culture tending towards homogeneity, but these are interwoven with increasingly assertive local and regional cultural traditions, new ageographic communities of interest arising because of the Internet, and the increasingly varied institutional cultures of firms and NGOs.
A global governance system with any hope of managing this increasingly complex world must be, at least in terms of communication and participation, somewhat open and transparent -- in other words, it will resemble in many ways a confused global democracy. Analogously to a democratic country, it will make the same demands for a differentiation between private and public morality, albeit in a new context: to what extent can, or should, an NGO, firm, society, or country with strong "private" environmental moral beliefs impose them on other societies and cultures?
This conundrum is complicated by the adversarial history of environmentalism. In its early days, environmentalism needed to be ideological and powerfully emotional to overcome the barriers of existing practices and assumptions. Much environmentalism has succeeded to date precisely because private and public morality were conflated: protecting the environment was not just objectively good, but an almost religious campaign against evil. More fundamentally, scholars have long noted the extent to which modern Western environmentalism is culturally constructed, reflecting elements of Christianity (the return to a primordial, sparsely inhabited, and definitely not urban, Eden), and, in the U.S., the frontier experience. These two unconscious but culturally powerful drivers contributed a great deal to the force of early environmentalism.
But the issues now are more complex and, to a far greater extent, lie beyond the boundaries of unitary cultures and single countries. Environmentalism has moved from an overhead issue -- one to be dealt with only as an afterthought -- to a strategic one, but in doing so is called to a new maturity.
The very characteristics that gave early environmentalism its power in a national context now threaten to turn a progressive and effective movement into a largely unconscious agent of cultural imperialism and Western domination. Ideological rigidity becomes not a source of strength, but a powerful barrier to successful solutions -- an enemy of the environment, as those who are excluded and damaged by such approaches find their voices, and react in a backlash. For environment has indeed become an eternal issue, one that humans will have to be concerned about for the rest of their time upon the earth.
And yet, of course, we will not be similar to one another; that is not our nature. Working out the language and nuances of an appropriate public and private environmental morality is therefore an important step in our acceding to the responsibility our activities have laid upon us.
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Allenby is environment, health and safety vice president, AT&T, and adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. The opinions expressed are those of the author, not necessarily those of any institution with which he is associated.
But a democratic system requires that we limit our efforts to impose those beliefs on others. Thus, for example, in societies where freedom of religion is a fundamental principle, such as France or the United States, believers in any particular faith are legally limited in the extent to which they can force others to follow their precepts. Such societies respect private moral beliefs, but also require a more tolerant, public morality. A fundamentalist may practice his or her private morality, which may be quite rigid, but is expected to respect other belief systems that coexist in that society -- a public morality of tolerance and shared ethics. Societies that don’t reflect this difference -- Afghanistan, for example -- can be very unpleasant for those who do not hew exactly to the prevalent belief system.
What does this have to do with environmental policy? Actually, a lot. Consider that most of the major environmental issues we deal with today -- loss of biodiversity; global climate change; degradation of water, air, and soil -- are global, if not physically, then because they are integral parts of global economic systems. And the world, of course, is profoundly multicultural, as any firm doing business in numerous countries can attest. There are indeed elements of global culture tending towards homogeneity, but these are interwoven with increasingly assertive local and regional cultural traditions, new ageographic communities of interest arising because of the Internet, and the increasingly varied institutional cultures of firms and NGOs.
A global governance system with any hope of managing this increasingly complex world must be, at least in terms of communication and participation, somewhat open and transparent -- in other words, it will resemble in many ways a confused global democracy. Analogously to a democratic country, it will make the same demands for a differentiation between private and public morality, albeit in a new context: to what extent can, or should, an NGO, firm, society, or country with strong "private" environmental moral beliefs impose them on other societies and cultures?
This conundrum is complicated by the adversarial history of environmentalism. In its early days, environmentalism needed to be ideological and powerfully emotional to overcome the barriers of existing practices and assumptions. Much environmentalism has succeeded to date precisely because private and public morality were conflated: protecting the environment was not just objectively good, but an almost religious campaign against evil. More fundamentally, scholars have long noted the extent to which modern Western environmentalism is culturally constructed, reflecting elements of Christianity (the return to a primordial, sparsely inhabited, and definitely not urban, Eden), and, in the U.S., the frontier experience. These two unconscious but culturally powerful drivers contributed a great deal to the force of early environmentalism.
But the issues now are more complex and, to a far greater extent, lie beyond the boundaries of unitary cultures and single countries. Environmentalism has moved from an overhead issue -- one to be dealt with only as an afterthought -- to a strategic one, but in doing so is called to a new maturity.
The very characteristics that gave early environmentalism its power in a national context now threaten to turn a progressive and effective movement into a largely unconscious agent of cultural imperialism and Western domination. Ideological rigidity becomes not a source of strength, but a powerful barrier to successful solutions -- an enemy of the environment, as those who are excluded and damaged by such approaches find their voices, and react in a backlash. For environment has indeed become an eternal issue, one that humans will have to be concerned about for the rest of their time upon the earth.
And yet, of course, we will not be similar to one another; that is not our nature. Working out the language and nuances of an appropriate public and private environmental morality is therefore an important step in our acceding to the responsibility our activities have laid upon us.
--------------
Allenby is environment, health and safety vice president, AT&T, and adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. The opinions expressed are those of the author, not necessarily those of any institution with which he is associated.
