Reconciling Different Strands of Environmentalism in Climate Change
From environmental philosophy to politics, via… ZOMBIES!
First, a little bit of pick-a-path science fiction to tease out different philosophical positions:
You are the last person on earth. Or so you think. The world population was decimated by an viral outbreak that turned every single person you are aware of into zombies. These zombies are harmless enough bunch. They don’t eat flesh. The virus turned them essentially to docile, brain dead walking corpses, and no more.
You tried every channel to communicate with other people, people that are somehow immune to this outbreak like you. You tried every day for the last fifty years. But you found no one.
The good news is, it seems you are very lucky to be immune to whatever that caused all this. The bad news is, you are the only one left, so human as you know will die with you.
You managed to survive all these year, but your luck runs out, eventually. While trying to get into the nuclear launch command centre in the US, hoping to find someone holed up in the world’s most secured location, you landed awkwardly, and broke your legs. You aren’t going anyway, and your food supply is running out, so you will die here. But you are sitting in front of the nuclear launch console. You have the codes. Someone conveniently stickered the launch code on a Post-it note right next to the console, along with his/her login name and password. You can launch the nukes to destroy the world. Would you do it?
The anthropocentric non-environmentalist would says: it doesn’t matter what the choice is. By definition, this person cares only about humanity (i.e. anthropocentric), and this person is perfectly willing to sacrifice the environment for the sake of humanity. This person is not necessarily a psychopath. This person cares just about humanity. When humanity comes to an end, what happens to the future of the environment doesn’t really matter.
The anthropocentric environmentalist also says: it doesn’t matter. By definition, this person cares about the environment only because of humanity, because humans are part of the ecosystem. When humanity dies with you, it doesn’t really matter what happens to the environment. (Incidentally, anthropocentric environmentalism is also called “enlightened” anthropocentricism. Whether it is enlightened enough in this sci-fi example is an open question…) In any case, life will find a way to evolve and survive on Earth, radiated or not.
The non-anthropocentric environmentalist says: it is wrong to nuke the world just because humanity dies. Humanity evolves out of the environment, so it is simply part of the ecosystem, not its ruler. Therefore humanity, and in this instance, the last human, has no right to decide the fate of all the things in the ecosystem. Specifically, the natural world has intrinsic value in itself, therefore humans (or the last human) have no right to destroy it.
The more interesting question is when you put these three archetypes into our present world, in particular, in our world concerning climate change.
The anthropocentric non-environmentalist will likely not care much about climate change. The argument will essentially be: humanity will just has to adapt to the reality of climate change, just like humans adapt to all sorts of climate in all parts of the world. It is simply a fact of life that the planet is heating up (or experiencing normal upward fluctuations). The cause of climate change is simply irrelevant.
The environmentalists however will care about climate change, but for different reasons. The anthropocentric environmentalist cares about climate change because climate change will have dramatic effect on human welfare. In particular, cities and landmass will be submerged under water; industries and economies will be disrupted. The cost of relocation and adaptation to climate change is simply too great, or who should foot the bill is an open and extremely contentious question. It is better and cheaper to prevent climate change from happening, for the sake of humanity, than to let climate change happen.
The non-anthropocentric environmentalist cares about climate change because it affects the whole ecosystem. Humanity is simply a part of the ecosystem, and therefore has no dominion over the ecosystem. If humanity “broke” the ecosystem because of greenhouse gas emission, then humanity also has a duty to “fix” the ecosystem by reversing or at the very least minimising climate change.
Notice that both anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric environmentalists acknowledge climate change is caused by humans. This is why fighting climate change is necessary for both of these archetypes, but for different reasons. To repeat, the anthropocentric environmentalist cares about climate change because it adversely affects humanity, whereas the non-anthropocentric environmentalist cares about climate change because humans have no right to mess up the environment. On the other hand, the anthropocentric non-environmentalist can be agnostic towards the cause of climate change.
For the anthropocentric environmentalist, concern about social issues goes hand-in-hand with environmentalism. This is because the reasons for caring the environment is the same reason to care about inequality and so on: to prevent human suffering, to rectify human injustice, and to advance human welfare in general.
For some anthropocentric environmentalists, like myself, climate change most importantly is an injustice. It is an injustice because those who are least responsible for climate change are most affected by it. People living in islands that will be submerged did not cause climate change. People in industrialised world, who have been burning fossil fuels for over two hundred years, or in the recent twenty years, to fuel development, are the cause. The next generation, who has no say on what their ancestors do, also has to suffer the direct consequence of climate change. The next generation therefore is also the victim of injustice brought by climate change.
We can also think of the injustice from a libertarian perspective: that it is unjust because the user does not pay. The classic libertarian example, given by Milton Friedman in his Capitalism and Freedom (pp.30–32, 50th anniversary edition), is of pollution: factories produce air pollution, and the nearby residents have to suffer the adverse effect of air pollution. Sometimes these effects will not materialise until much later. It is therefore simply an injustice that the factories producing the air pollution to not pay for the damage they caused. Instead of determining liability in civil court, and allows owners of the factories to litigate the case to death (sometimes literally), once the responsibility is determined the government needs to first swiftly extract compensation from the offending factories and then compensate victims. Better yet, it is the government’s responsibility to prevent factories from producing harmful pollution in the first place. Now of course, factories don’t simply produce pollution, they also produce green house gases. A hundred years ago, people did not think of green house gases as pollution, but with current climate science, now we do. So there is a libertarian argument supporting government intervention into stopping or preventing climate change.
Adding to injustice argument is that climate change will be enormously costly. The estimate of the cost of fighting climate change vs. doing nothing about climate change varies, but the general consensus is that doing nothing about climate change is more costly than limiting global temperature rise. One estimate from the UN in 2016 suggests that letting the world heat up by 4 degrees Celsius will cost the world economy 50% of its GDP, whereas limiting climate change to just 1.5 degree Celsius will cost the world economy “mere” 10% of its GDP. This point can be generalized from climate change to environmentalism, that environmentalism is simply a smart way to grow the economy. Waste reduction simply means cost reduction. Public transport simply means better transport. And so on.
For the non-anthropocentric environmentalist, human injustice or the cost of climate change is irrelevant. We share our ecosystem with all the other species on earth. If, by our hands, we drive species to extinction, or cause great disruption to the ecosystem, as climate change is supposed to do, then it is simply our responsibility to right this wrong we inflicted upon other species, and therefore we have a responsibility to stop or reverse climate change. This inter-species justice argument is also known as the “you break it, you buy it” argument. Notice that there is a similar commitment to justice in any case.
On the other hand, the anthropocentric non-environmentalist can be swayed by the justice and cost arguments, as long as climate change is accepted to be happening. For the anthropocentric non-environmentalist who does not care about justice nor the cost, then no action is needed. It is easy to see which anthropocentric non-environmentalist is not swayed to act: those who will least likely to lose out due to climate change, such as those incredibly wealthy, with their wealth used as buffer to lessen any impact due to climate change. For them, whether climate change is real or not is simply irrelevant: in any case, they and anyone they care about will have a lovely life. Colloquially these people are known as “selfish fucks”.
For the anthropocentric environmentalist like me, fighting poverty and fighting climate change is simply two sides of the same coin: both are justice issue. Climate change, as argued above, is an injustice. Poverty restricts a person’s life choices and therefore an inequality and an injustice. The non-anthropocentric environmentalist may not agree with the emphasis on justice, at the expense of the environment. But in my opinion, the anthropocentric environmentalist does not relegate environmental concerns as secondary. The anthropocentric environmentalist sees environmental concerns just as important as social justice. In addition, practically speaking, fighting poverty, is a prerequisite to fighting climate change: how can one expect to fight for climate change when one is too hungry in the stomach, or one is too cold in the weather?
The anthropocentric environmentalist position is also a bridge between the non-anthropocentric environmentalists and the anthropocentric non-environmentalist. Given that there are great many different people with different opinions, we need different kinds of arguments to convince different people to come together and make changes. And right now, as many people already understood, climate change is one of the most pressing issues facing humanity as a whole. Therefore we need a broad coalition to stop climate change. Using the cost argument to convince the non-environmentalists, in addition to other arguments, is simply one way to build a broad coalition.
Resources I referred to in writing this (in ascending order of technicality/ability to make people fall asleep):
Anthropocentricism in Wikipedia, in particular the section on environmental philosophy (Notice the sci-fi example above is an adaptation of John Passmore’s last man example.)
Anthropocentricism in Encyclopaedia Britannia
