What is the debate between anthropocentric environmentalism and ecocentric environmentalism

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Ch. 11

What is the debate between anthropocentric environmentalism and ecocentric environmentalism and what can it help achieve, according to Bell?

Ch. 12

What is participatory governance, according to Bell?

What is local knowledge? Can it be as important as scientific knowledge, according to Bell?

Ch. 13

What is the environmental sociological imagination according to Bell?

What does Bell mean by 'greening capitalism'?

What kind of relationship does Bell establish between 'the local and the global'?

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Mobilizing the Ecological Society Image 14 We have a purpose. We are many. For this purpose we will rise, and we will act. —Al Gore, 2007 There is an old fable that Mike enjoyed telling to his children when they were young, “Androcles and the Lion.” It is indeed old, 2,000 years at least. Some say it dates from the time of Caligula, who ruled the Roman Empire from 37 to 41 CE, and that it was written by Apion, a scholar from that day, and that it may be based on a real incident. Others say that it originally comes from Aesop, the Greek storyteller from the sixth century BCE. The earliest extant version of it is in the Noctes Atticae, or Attic Nights, of Aulus Gellius—20 volumes of random stuff that Gellius, a minor Roman official, scribbled down to pass the time while on a posting to Athens, which is in Attica.1 Gellius himself, at least, says he got it from Apion, not Aesop, and that Apion claimed to have been an eyewitness to the story. In any event, it is plenty old. There’s a good reason why people have continued to tell this story for so long. It is not just a story for the young; rather, it has an important message about community and environment and how to bring the two together into that biggest community of all. Here’s how it goes—or at least here’s how Mike used to tell it.2 How do we mobilize ourselves to build an ecological society, a community of care big enough to include humans, lions, and all other creatures—a community that recognizes, celebrates, and maintains our mutual dependences and independences? When those moments of passion arise, when the moment of truth comes between butchering Androcles and the lion or respecting their unique story, how do we encourage the crowd’s roar toward life and not death? How do we organize ourselves to work together for what we believe is right for the planet and its diverse inhabitants, even in the face of bad odds? The story of Androcles and the lion points out three foundations of ecological mobilization that environmental sociology also points out. We’ll call them the three cons of conceptions, connections, and contestations. The prefix con- is wonderfully multiple in its meanings. It can refer to “knowledge,” as in the words connoisseur, consideration (which means knowing the stars), con (as in the phrase “con job”), and cunning (which transforms con- into cun-). Con- can also mean “together” and appears in this usage in a host of words, such as consult, confide, convene, conversation, converge, conclave, concert, consent, and (transforming con- into com-) community and commonality. Plus, con- can mean “against,” as in the pros and cons of something, and in its full form as contra- in the words contradiction, control, contrast, and controversy. An effective environmental movement needs to be “pro” all of these basic meanings of con-. To mobilize the ecological society, we need ecological knowledge—conceptions. We need the solidarity of community ties—connections. And we need political strategy—contestations.8 Androcles had the ecological conceptions to begin with. Plus, because of his own experiences as a slave, he could relate to what the lion was going through; the two then built a strong solidarity of mutual connections that carried them through the years. Finally, based on that solidarity, the lion contested the government’s animal handlers, and Androcles made a compelling appeal, winning a remarkable political victory that brought freedom for human and lion alike. Whether the story is fact or fiction—and it has certainly had its share of reshaping over the years by various storytellers, including Mike—it is true in a deeper sense. As we shall see. There once was a slave named Androcles who belonged to the Roman governor of Africa. The governor was a cruel master and used to beat Androcles mercilessly. One day, Androcles saw his chance to escape, and he ran away into the wilderness. After running for hours, he spied a cave where he thought he could rest, hide, and spend the night. But as Androcles approached the cave, he heard a terrible roaring echoing from inside it, and a huge lion came out into the cave’s mouth. Androcles was frightened, of course, but he noticed that the lion was favoring one of his feet. Androcles looked more closely and could see something sticking out of the paw of the hurt foot. It was an old nail. Forgetting his own safety, for he probably could have outrun the lame lion, Androcles cautiously approached the brute. He took the hurt paw into his hands and pulled out the nail, and then did his best to clean up the infected sore. It just seemed like the right thing to do. After all, Androcles knew what it was like to suffer. The lion was ecstatic and gratefully licked Androcles’s face. The two, man and lion, became fast friends. They lived together in the cave and learned to hunt together, using the lion’s teeth and claws and Androcles’s hands and wit. They became inseparable, despite their differences, and in many ways precisely because of those differences. But they were a little careless one day. Some of the Emperor Caligula’s soldiers were out hunting for a lion for a show in the Circus Maximus back in Rome and caught the beast in a net. One of the soldiers recognized Androcles as the governor’s escaped slave, so they captured him, too. When the soldiers brought Androcles back to the governor, he flew into a rage about the poor slave. In those days before television, people enjoyed going to the circus to watch lions eat defenseless captives, and other gruesome sports. The governor condemned Androcles to the Circus Maximus to be used for this unhappy purpose. On the day of the event, great excitement filled the air as the crowd swarmed into the arena. Even the Emperor Caligula was there. After all, it was good for an emperor’s popularity to be seen putting on a satisfyingly bloody circus show, and Caligula was in political trouble because of his lavish spending on an expansion of his palace.3 Besides, Caligula was a rather bloodthirsty fellow himself. Tension mounted as the preliminary acts—foot races, weight lifting, gladiator fights, a chariot race— were held. Finally, Androcles was thrown into the ring, naked and unarmed. The lion, who had been starved for days, was also released into the ring. Snarling and roaring, the lion approached Androcles and prepared for a lethal pounce onto the modest frame of this gentle soul. But as he drew near to Androcles, the lion recognized who it was. The mighty cat lay down in front of Androcles, looked up at him, and began to mew softly.4 A few people in the stands began to jeer. They wanted blood. So some of Circus Maximus’s animal handlers came out with long pikes to poke and anger the lion into action. But the lion rose up, shook his great mane, and roared fiercely at the handlers until they retreated. Then, the lion lay down once again at Androcles’s feet, purring and swishing his tail.5 The circus crowd fell absolutely silent. Caligula, too, was astonished. He asked to have Androcles brought near to his viewing platform so he could question him. Androcles explained the strange history of his friendship with the lion, shouting up to the emperor high above on his portable throne. Caligula thought for a moment and then commanded that the story be written out on a tablet and passed through the crowd so all would know. After all, there were no loudspeakers in those days. Once the tablet had made its way through the multitudes, with those who could read explaining the matter to those who could not, Caligula rose up. Everyone immediately fell silent again to hear. Caligula shouted out, “Should we release Androcles and the lion?” The crowd roared its approval. Caligula held up his hand to silence them again, and then proclaimed, “The vote is clear. Let them both go free!” The crowd’s roar after that could be heard clear across Rome. For the next few months, Androcles and the lion walked through the city together, the lion on a light leash so as not to frighten anyone. People would give Androcles money and sprinkle the lion with flowers. And everyone who met them exclaimed, “This is the lion, a man’s friend; this is the man, a lion’s doctor.”6 But eventually, Androcles and the lion grew tired of the fuss, even though they now had plenty of money to live on. They returned to the wilderness and lived out the rest of their days together, the closest of companions. And so we learn that no act of kindness is ever wasted.7 Mobilizing Ecological Conceptions One of the oldest answers to the question of how to mobilize an ecological society is education. The environmental movement has put a huge amount of effort into environmental education. There are literally thousands of local environmental education centers and school programs across the world. There are dozens (it could even be into the hundreds) of professional associations of environmental educators at the regional, national, and international levels—for example, the North American Association for Environmental Education, founded in 1971; the Australian Association for Environmental Education, founded in 1980; the Maine Environmental Education Association, founded in 1982; and the Japan Society of Environmental Education, founded in 1990. Many countries publish environmental education journals, including Australia, Canada, Hungary, South Africa, the United States, and more, and there are several international journals. Since 2003, there has been an annual World Environmental Education Congress. There can hardly be an environmental organization, either governmental or nongovernmental, that does not put significant effort into education and public outreach. And think of all the TV programs and popular magazines that have carried environmental stories, from the Discovery Channel to National Geographic. In these many ways, the environmental movement has been working to put into practice the widely cited definition of environmental education from UNESCO’s (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) 1978 “Tbilisi Declaration,” to wit, Environmental education is a learning process that increases people’s knowledge and awareness about the environment and associated challenges, develops the necessary skills and expertise to address the challenges, and fosters attitudes, motivations, and commitments to make informed decisions and take responsible action.9 Sounds great. It is great. Much good has come of it. Nonetheless, after decades of environmental education, we still have massive environmental problems and significant issues with every goal mentioned in the Tbilisi Declaration’s definition of environmental education. The trouble is, knowing something doesn’t mean you can do much about it. If people find their lives organized so that it is hard for them to put their ecological knowledge into practice, then they are unlikely to do so. Why? For exactly that reason: because it is hard—especially when one tries to act as an individual. The pattern of our economy, technology, built environment, and ideologies presents tremendous obstacles to getting something changed when we try to act on our own. When people hear that they are doing something wrong that they feel they can’t do much about, they will likely try to dodge the implied sense of guilt by resisting knowledge. They may well accuse the bearer of environmental knowledge of playing a game of shame and blame to gain a position of moral superiority over the ecologically guilty. So they turn the page. They click the remote. They surf to another site. Does this mean that environmental education doesn’t accomplish anything? Hardly. We wouldn’t be writing this book if we believed that. But it does mean we should be wary of a behaviorist approach to environmental problems—the idea that if we change an individual’s attitudes, his or her behaviors will soon follow. Now, there is much that individuals have done that makes a real, marked difference, and we’ll talk about that more in the final chapter of the book. But we need to look at knowledge situationally, understanding the social contexts by which, and in which, people find themselves motivated to take action. Counseling individual action can overwhelm and disappoint people. The “knowledge and awareness” the Tbilisi Declaration advocates is not something one can insert into someone’s brain as she or he comes down an assembly line, a missing part that we slot into a skull as it goes by. These are social matters, not ones of individual mechanics. The Cultivation of Knowledge Think about what goes on in anyone’s day. It is awash with information. For it is not just the environmental movement that is trying to grab people’s attention. Every social movement, industry, and government agency is out there trying, as the Tbilisi Declaration describes, to increase “knowledge and awareness”; develop “skills and expertise”; and foster “attitudes, motivations, and commitments” that result in what each of those organizations regards as “informed decisions” and, we must hope, “responsible action.” The Internet. The newspaper. Television. Radio. Mail campaigns. Viral marketing. Flyers passed out on the street. Advertisements on buses, billboards, and T-shirts. Everyone is trying it all. And no one can pay attention to it all. There is simply too much. So which sources will someone key into, and which will he or she ignore? Plus, all the various sources out there often do not agree. (Indeed, if they did agree, they probably wouldn’t feel a need to put out a message of their own.) Which is confusing and confounding (two more con- words), as none of us is an expert in everything, even within our own fields of endeavor. We (Mike and Loka, that is) think we know quite a bit about environmentalism and environmental issues after many years of studying these matters. But there is a lot we don’t know. How do you conceptualize something without certainty? For example, Mike and Loka had a good look through the Fifth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a document that states climate change is “unequivocal”; that the changes in rising sea levels, concentrations of greenhouse gas, and diminished ice and snow are “unprecedented”; and that it is “extremely likely” that human factors have been the “dominant cause.”10 Mike has a geology degree and another in forestry, and Loka has a degree in geography. So between the two of us, we have some technical background in some of the relevant sciences. But most observers agree that these are interdisciplinary matters. And if something is recognized as being an interdisciplinary concern, that is another way of saying that no one person understands the whole thing. Moreover, who has read every one of the citations in the 1,552-page, four-volume Fifth Assessment Report? Not that reading them is enough to be sure of their veracity. Maybe the experiments and measurements and models were done wrong. Maybe the sources aren’t all reliable—which was indeed the case with a few of them in the Fourth Assessment Report, as the “Climategate” controversy showed.11 Scientists make mistakes. Everyone does. Scientists sometimes misunderstand what they see. We all do. But who has the time or the resources or the expertise to do all those experiments for her- or himself to see if others got it wrong? Which means each of us has to trust someone else who knows more about some aspect of something than we can determine on our own—and not just about technical matters of environmental science. Throughout the day, we ask others about things that have worked for them or that they have heard worked for others. Do we need to sample every poisonous mushroom for ourselves to believe that they are poisonous? That would kill us. Do we need to read every book, newspaper, and website for ourselves to decide which ones are worthwhile? We’ll never live so long. So we each rely on others— others we trust—to help guide us successfully through the day. But what if our friends are wrong? What if that supposedly poisonous mushroom was, in fact, safe and delicious? What if some bit of the knowledge in all those books, newspapers, and websites that our friends indicated, either explicitly or implicitly, that we shouldn’t bother with was, in fact, exactly what we needed both to better ourselves and to better the world? We may never know. The point is that education is not just about communicating facts. It never has been. It is also fundamentally about trust and the people by whom we gain a sense of what knowledge to pay attention to and what knowledge we can safely not pay attention to. Because of the centrality of trust, then, knowledge is not just knowledge. Knowledge is a social relation. And education is a social relation, too. Think of it as a matter of the cultivation of knowledge.12 By that we mean what we take to be knowledge is a matter of our self-identity and a matter of the social relations of trust that shape and come from self-identity. It’s an interactive matter. It’s ongoing. And it’s cultivated within culture and the resulting sense of lines of difference and lines of similarity we forge with and between others and ourselves. What we know is who we are. (Mike and Loka are environmental sociologists.) Who we are is what we know. (We therefore know a lot about environmental sociology.) Who we are and what we know are whom we know and whom we trust. (We gained our identities and much of our knowledge from other sociologists, environmentalists, and environmental sociologists, who give us professional recognition and whose work and experience we use as a base for our own. And we learned much from the individuals we’ve mentioned throughout the book. Those we’ve read. Those we lived with. Those we’ve interviewed. Those who have shared a piece of their knowledge with a stranger to open dialogue into unexpected places. All based on trust.) Some deep commitments are at work here. A person’s identity is who his or her friends and associates are and who his or her friends and associates are not. Given that your knowledge is linked to your identity and that both your knowledge and your identity are linked to others, a lot is at stake in the cultivation of knowledge. Yourself. Your friends. Your associates. Your confidence. Your confidences. These are matters that are close to the bone of how we consider our location in the world. These are matters that are hard to change. To cultivate knowledge is also to cultivate a sense of the ignorable. We don’t mean ignorance. Nor do we mean stupidity about reality. Rather, we mean that which we can safely disregard—which is central to what we consider important. We gain knowledge by paying attention. But to pay attention to one thing is to not pay attention to something else—indeed, it is to not pay attention to far more than we pay attention to. To be where we are, in tune and attentive to the place and the people, is to be not everywhere else and not with all those other people. To decide what counts for knowledge—useful knowledge that is appropriate to our lives, as we understand them—we must have some way to screen out far more that we will never know. We can try to read The New York Times every day (Mike does). But can we also read The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Irish Times, The Times (of London), Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and Al Jazeera? Every day? Cover to cover? And how about Sierra Magazine, the Ecologist, E/The Environmental Magazine, High Country News, and Environment Times? When we are already reading the National Review, The Spectator, and The Economist? So how do we know that what we focus on is what we should focus on if we haven’t looked at those things we are not looking at and will never look at? We don’t. But from the cues of culture, the cultures with which we identify and find trust in, we decide, almost without deciding, what is safe for someone like us to ignore. Cultivating Knowledge in the Fields of Iowa How, then, does anyone ever change and begin to tune in to other cultivations of knowledge, other conceptions of self and reality such as, say, ecological ones? Mike found himself asking this question some years ago when he lived in Iowa and encountered a marvelously successful organization: Practical Farmers of Iowa, or PFI for short. PFI is Iowa’s largest sustainable agriculture organization, with over 2,000 members, roughly half of whom are farmers. That may not seem like a lot when one considers that Iowa, a major farm state, has about 90,000 farms. But in 1985, the year the group began, there were hardly any sustainable farmers in Iowa, which has as industrialized an agricultural landscape as one can find anywhere on the planet. Some 60 percent of the state is covered by just two species of plants: corn and soybeans. Each spring, Iowa’s grain farmers gear up the machinery and chemistry to keep yanking this biomass out of the ground and into the mouths of hogs and cattle and, increasingly, into the mouths of ethanol and biodiesel factories. We’re talking factory farming in the extreme (see Figure 11.1). This is what most Iowa farmers do. But they don’t have to farm this way. In the years since 1985, PFI farmers and many other farmers have shown that sustainable agriculture works. It produces strong yields and solid incomes, while supporting families, communities, and ecologies. So why don’t more farmers change, and, conversely, if so few do, why do any at all? Figure 11.1 Industrial agriculture in Iowa. An articulated tractor discs and applies chemical fertilizer to a field, 2000. Figure 60 Source: Photo by Helen D. Gunderson. Used with permission of Helen D. Gunderson. The standard answer is that the structure of agriculture—markets, laws, subsidies, technologies— prevents them from changing to sustainable methods. After all, the government pours vast subsidies into corn and soybean production, which mightily maintain the existing pattern of markets, laws, and technologies, while giving a direct boost to farmers’ bottom line. But that doesn’t explain why some farmers change, especially as PFI farmers mostly come from the same situations as their conventionally farming neighbors. PFI farmers drive tractors. They wear “feed caps”—baseball-style caps that read “DeKalb” or “Cenex” or “Cargill” or “Pioneer” or the name of some other company that sells supplies to farmers. They were mostly raised in the communities where they now live, and often on the same farms. They are not a bunch of old hippies gone to seed. However, conventional farmers in Iowa have plenty of incentive to change. The structure of agriculture is not kind to most of them. That’s why farm numbers have continued to plummet in Iowa long after the fabled farm crisis of the 1980s and, in fact, were plummeting well before the farm crisis, too. As farm numbers continue to fall, so do the number of local businesses that service the farm economy. The loss of those businesses boards up main streets, churches, schools, and even houses across rural Iowa. The result is an odd paradox: lush fields worked by expensive, modern equipment spreading out to the horizon and away from abandoned Victorian homes with sagging porches and glassless windows and small-town main streets lined by plywood instead of plate glass (see Figure 11.2). So the structure of agriculture is rough on farmers’ communities. The stress of the work is often equally rough on their families. The danger of the work is hard on their own health. And the monocultures in the fields— pumped up and propped up by can’t-miss chemistry and “Big Iron,” as farmers say—literally send the land down the creek. The structure of agriculture is hard on the environment, too. Figure 11.2 The smoke and dust rises as a 1907 Victorian farmhouse in Pocahontas County, Iowa, is razed to the ground. Industrialization of agriculture has increased farm sizes so much that many farmhouses are abandoned and fall into ruin, and rural communities with them. Figure 61 Source: Photo by Helen D. Gunderson. Used with permission of Helen D. Gunderson. Given that their farms, communities, and land, and sometimes their families and health, are all eroding away, there is plenty of reason for conventional farmers to change to sustainable practices. They rarely do change, though, because what they are really farming out in their fields is something far more important to them than their crops. They are farming their selves. They are farming their sense of themselves as men and women, knowledgeable about and competent in what they do, maintaining a respectable place for themselves in the fabric of their communities, in which they have lived most of their lives, and sometimes all their lives. They do this farming with a stock of knowledge, built up over many years, often hard won, that serves as a continual investment in their identities, the more they draw on and add to this knowledge. It’s a lot to give up. Now, conventional farmers could be going to the series of field days that PFI puts on at members’ farms across the state, demonstrating sustainable practices. Sometimes they do. They could be accessing the information on sustainable practices offered by Iowa State University’s College of Agriculture and agricultural extension staff. Again, sometimes they do. They could be attending the winter meetings that the state’s organic and sustainable farmers put on that discuss the strong markets for sustainably raised farm products and that bring farmers together with eaters interested in helping promote agricultural change. At times, indeed, they do go. And when conventional farmers tune in to these events, they are often surprised to find out that PFI farmers have most of the same passions for farming life that they do—that there is a network of friends here that one can trust to help navigate through the poisonous mushrooms and the flood of potential knowledge each day brings. That discovery brings them back, again and again. One of the main leaders of PFI, a man we’ll call Earl, explained this discovery to Mike one hot summer afternoon at a field day at a PFI member’s farm.13 About 25 people were huddled under the shade of an old oak, and a few, including Mike, in the shadow of a huge John Deere tractor. Most of the crowd were PFI members. But there were several new faces, too. The farmer (not Earl) was explaining the importance of not putting too much fertilizer on a corn crop. “If your corn is looking dark green right through to the end of the year, you’re throwing your money away,” he told the crowd—meaning that if your corn is dark green that long you’ve spent more on fertilizer than you’ll get back in yield, however good the crop may look. Plus, you’ve just polluted the groundwater because you’ve probably used more fertilizer than the crop can absorb. In farming, as in other endeavors, wasting money often means wasting the environment. Mike knew Earl, whose own farm was just up the road, from earlier PFI events. Earl must have been finding it hard to concentrate in the heat, too, and he wandered back from the group by the oak to where Mike was standing. “All this fertility stuff must be a bit boring for you,” he said to Mike, in a kind of classroom whisper between naughty pupils. Earl knew by then that Mike was a sociologist and that he didn’t have a farm background. “Well,” Mike replied, a bit uncertainly, not knowing where this was going, “there’s a lot of it I can’t follow.” “Besides,” said Earl, “it’s all social. That’s where the real change has to come from. All this, this is just technical.”14 But how do these social relations of knowledge get going? The nine years of research Mike conducted on PFI with his colleagues Sue Jarnagin, Greg Peter, and Donna Bauer led to this conclusion: Change most commonly starts with a phenomenological rupture in people’s existing cultivation of knowledge, a wrenching experience that causes them suddenly to doubt the bases of trust upon which they had long committed themselves to this cultivation. That rupture is not something PFI creates. The strains of industrial agriculture are what rip the fabric of trust, often through a financial crisis or a health crisis, according to the farmers that Mike and his colleagues interviewed who had switched from conventional farming to sustainable practices. Dick and Sharon Thompson (their real names) were perhaps the best-known PFI farmers, and by the time Dick died in 2013, they had won several major environmental awards for their work (see Figure 11.3). They were among the first to switch to sustainable practices, back in the 1960s, in fact, and went on to help found PFI in 1985. Here’s how Dick once described the rupture, and his spiritual experience of it, in response to a crisis in the health of his livestock and his own overworked body: In January of 1968, while chopping stalks in field number six, going north, I was—I’d had it. All the work. The pigs were sick. My cattle were sick. I hollered “help.” That’s about the only way I know how to explain this. But some things started to happen. And a lot of things that happened seem to happen early in the morning. That thoughts come into my mind that I know that are not mine. So I want to share this. The creator wants to put a receiver, a still small voice, way down deep inside each one of us, for communication. It’s our choice. It’s not forced on us. If you want it, you can have it.15 Figure 11.3 Dick and Sharon Thompson, winners of many environmental awards, at their farm in Boone, Iowa, 1999. Figure 62 Source: Photo by Helen D. Gunderson. Used with permission of Helen D. Gunderson. Other farmers also described the unsettling period of rejecting a valued knowledge cultivation as a spiritual crisis. For example, one experienced it as a calling from God, speaking down from the sky one day when he was up on a ladder, painting his barn, and closer to the heavens.16 Another called it a “planned event” orchestrated by a higher being.17 Dale, another PFI member, explained the disorientation of the rupture well. He had been one of those market-oriented farmers, spending every free moment in front of a computer, watching the movement of prices on the Chicago Board of Trade. He made some good choices about when to sell and on futures contracts he signed, but also some bad choices. He had dug himself into a big hole with a string of bad guesses, but then thought he had the situation pegged. He had accumulated a good stock of grain to sell, even though it hadn’t rained in Iowa for a while. Because of the lack of rain, prices were good, and getting better day by day. Monday, he thought, I’ll sell. But that was 2 days too long. “You know, I had the boat loaded. But it rained over the weekend, so that was the end of that deal.” Dale laughed, wistfully. “The boat sunk in the harbor!”18 The financial crisis that ensued nearly drove him out of farming, like so many others before. And he began to doubt everything that he thought he knew about how to be a successful farmer. “I kind of lost confidence in myself, because some of the things I was doing before failed me. Naturally after your ideas and things had failed, well, then, soon you get kind of gun-shy. It’s taken me probably a couple years to gain my confidence back, so to speak.”19 How did he get it back? He happened on a notice for a PFI field day. He’d seen such notices before. He knew a couple of other farmers in his area were members. But this time he decided he would go. He wound up joining. Two years later, he had his confidence again. He had trust again, in himself and in others. He had a cultivation of knowledge back. Today he is farming differently, too. No longer a fence-row-to-fence-row grain farmer, he has a diversified operation based on integrating grass, livestock, and some grain crops through a 5- to 7-year rotation that breaks up pest cycles and fertilizes the ground without chemicals and with very little erosion. He is getting a lot more money per acre, too, because he is spending less and getting better prices by not emphasizing low-value commodities like grain. So he is no longer in the game of forever plotting to get his neighbor’s land to make a low-margin, high-volume income. In so doing, he is making space for more farmers and a stronger local community. And he also likes himself better. “But you know, going back, all these chains of events that have happened in my life, I’d have to say that I’ve been a better person because of it. And I have no remorse for the money I’ve lost or whatever. Because, the thing is, to me, it made me a better person.”20 New knowledge, new self. New self, new knowledge. New self, new knowledge, new friends. New self, new knowledge, new friends, new farm—a farm that sustains the land and its people. Cultivating Dialogic Consciousness Central to knowledge cultivation is not only the existence of social relations of knowledge, but also the character of those relations. As we’ll come to, PFI emphasizes a horizontal, dialogic process of engaging others and linking knowledge and identity. There are top-down, monologic ways, too. These monologic ways are by no means uncommon or unsuccessful, at least in the short term. Think of the “you” ads discussed in Chapter 2. Think of promotional campaigns fronted by a good-looking and famous person that many people would like to consider as a personal friend. Think of the religious leader who pitches a particular value by connecting it to traditions. Think of the manipulation of nationalist sympathies by unscrupulous politicians. These are all common practices. The theory of frame analysis describes top-down methods of knowledge cultivation well. Monologic ways of cultivation depend on framing issues so that people will respond to them as the framer desires. This is the skill of the “good communicator”—the orator who takes the symbols of the day and uses them to her or his advantage, or reframes them to the same effect. The key process is what David Snow and Robert Benford call frame alignment, by which an individual’s frames become congruent or complementary with what we have been terming a knowledge cultivation.21 Snow and Benford identify four basic tactics for aligning individual frames: frame bridging, which links frames; frame amplification, which invigorates the values behind a frame; frame extension, which widens a frame’s boundaries; and frame transformation, which reconfigures a frame’s meaning. Frames identify problems and attribute blame in particular ways that can be flexible or rigid. As we discussed in the ideology of environmental concern, those frames can mean the difference between inclusion and exclusion. Some frames are more narrow, and others, such as environmental justice, are master frames that cross many boundaries. And based on the credibility of the frame, such as who the articulators and claimsmakers are, a movement can sink or swim.22 Throughout, the effort is to link knowledge to social relations, often subtly (and, to those on the outside, often not so subtly) reshaping them. Probably any social movement, or indeed any social encounter, engages in at least a bit of framing. After all, rhetoric is inescapable. We are always representing, always engaging in social construction. There are many ways to describe any situation. As Chapter 9 discusses, you can never describe absolutely everything about anything. We all have to choose our words, and we do so with our audience in mind. It has long been this way. Two millennia ago, Aristotle wrote out a whole book on the matter. In his Art of Rhetoric, he distinguished among three forms of persuasion, noting that we generally use all three at once: Ethos, convincing by getting the audience to feel that the speaker is ethical and trustworthy; Pathos, convincing by getting the audience to emotionally experience the speaker’s point of view; and Logos, convincing by getting the audience’s agreement on the logic of the argument (yes, even social constructionists agree this is important).23 Frame analysis restates (and reframes) this ancient insight. Many environmental sociologists have applied frame analysis to understanding the success of the environmental movement and the success of countermovements to environmentalism. Barbara Grey has used it to understand conflicts over Voyageurs National Park in Minnesota.24 Dorceta Taylor has used it to understand the success of the environmental justice movement.25 Andrew Rhys Jones has used it to understand how the media portray global warming.26 Brian Walton and Connor Bailey have used it to understand the success of the wilderness preservation movement in Alabama, after years of little headway.27 Almost any Google search or Twitter feed will also exemplify framing at work, building online collective identities through rhetoric and hyperlinks, and galvanizing followers.28 It’s all over the Web. At least a bit of monologue is part of every social situation and every social movement. But do we want an environmental movement that stresses monologue as its main technique of knowledge cultivation? Paulo Freire, the great Brazilian philosopher of pedagogy, would have said no. If we want a humane, liberatory education that is truly based on trust, and not the appearance of trust, the main approach should be what Freire called conscientization—the building not of head-nodding agreement, but of critical consciousness in dialogue with the world.29 Head nodding leads to nodding off. Critical consciousness leads to a wide-awake creativity. Thus, dialogic education, and a dialogic knowledge cultivation, does not emphasize persuasion. Rather, it develops people’s critical capacities and welcomes their differences and disagreements as ways we grow and grow together. PFI wonderfully cultivates this critical and sustaining collaboration through which friends and colleagues stimulate each other to new knowledge for everyone, as Mike came to appreciate. PFI farmers, Mike discovered, love to argue with each other—not with negative, alienating disagreement, but through fostering mutual checks and balances with the experiences and insights of others, developing the ties of cultivation as they develop knowledge. Central to PFI’s critical approach are the group’s participatory research trials, conducted on-farm and often with the help of university researchers, in which farmers become scientists and scientists become farmers. Many of the techniques of sustainable agriculture are new or have been little studied by the professional research community. Plus, being a better scientist is a great way to be a better farmer. And as Chapter 4 discussed, to do science is to be open about one’s reasoning and to be open to the reasoning of others. On-farm, participatory research trials exemplify both of these opennesses by using methods that are accessible and explainable and by presenting the results to other farmer-scientists and scientist-farmers for their critical feedback. One tool of mutual critique that PFI uses is randomized, replicated plots, where you lay out an experiment on your farm in a way that allows you to take account of the variability of the soil and microclimate, so you know your result is due to your treatment and not due to an unrecognized environmental difference. Knowing what caused your result also means you can explain your result to someone else. Plus, you write down what you do. That, too, makes it a lot easier to explain your experiment (see Figure 11.4).30 Glen, a PFI farmer who recently switched his farm over to organics, explained how PFI’s dialogic approach helped him make the change: Figure 11.4 Cultivating knowledge in a machine shed. PFI farmers discuss the results of the group’s research trials, along with a university researcher, Iowa State University professor Kathleen Delate. Figure 63 Source: Photo by Helen D. Gunderson. Used with permission of Helen D. Gunderson. “I probably wouldn’t have taken that step . . . if I hadn’t had the knowledge to be able to document what I was doing, and some people there to hold my hand,” Glen described. “Just sitting down with people and arguing about how do we structure our costs and things.” Mike was really struck by his use of the word arguing, something that Midwesterners are generally known for trying to avoid. “It has been very valuable. In my organic operation now, I have weed control issues using the flame weeding and rotary hoeing and things.” Flame weeding is when farmers pass a gas flame along the rows of a crop when the weeds first start to come up, not to burn them but to superheat their sap so it bursts plant capillaries and wilts the weed; you have to do it when the crop is strong enough to take the heat, but before the weeds are. Rotary hoeing is another way to control weeds without chemicals. You use an array of barbed disks to crumble the surface of the ground, breaking up the contact of weeds with the soil; again, you have to do it when the weeds are small. Organic farmers in PFI, and elsewhere, have been trying to figure out when to use one versus the other. “Actually, that was my PFI trial this year,” Glen explained. PFI farmers get together in the winter to coordinate their research trials for the group and then debate the results everyone gets on their individual farms. “I had a statistically significant difference in weeds and yield. So I was pretty pleased with the trial.” “Using the flamer versus the rotary hoe?” Mike asked. Glen nodded. “In my mind, the flamer is the last tool in the toolbox for early season weed control. . . . I choose to use the flamer last because I think it is the most severe to the crop. There are people that argue that point with me, and that’s next year’s trial.”31 So the dialogue of critical consciousness continues, ever developing the conceptions and knowledge cultivation that make PFI strong. Which is exactly what the word consciousness means: con- for “together” and sci, another root meaning “to know,” yielding “knowing together.” Indeed, it’s the only way we ever really know. Mobilizing Ecological Connections How do we get that togetherness together? According to Garrett Hardin, at least, it won’t be easy. The Tragedy of the Commons In his famous 1968 article, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Hardin described the problem in stark terms. Imagine you are a shepherd grazing your sheep on your village’s common pastureland, back in the hills above the village. As a member of the village, you have the right to graze your sheep there, just as every other village member does. You’ve got only 10 sheep, though, and after a while you think, “Well, I’d be a bit better off if I added a few more to my flock.” Meanwhile, your fellow villagers are thinking the same thing about their own flocks. Pretty soon, as everyone adds a few more animals, there are a lot more sheep in the common pastureland. The pastureland is only so big, though. Eventually, overgrazing occurs. The grass cover gets thin, and the land starts to erode. Everybody’s sheep start to die. You wind up with fewer sheep than you began with, and the eroded common land is no longer capable of supporting as many sheep as it originally could: economic and environmental disaster. Here’s how Hardin, rather melodramatically, described the situation: The inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy. . . . The rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another . . . But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.32 Hardin intended this parable as a master allegory for all environmental problems. Three examples he mentioned in the article are traffic, pollution, and overfishing. Think of streets as a kind of commons, something we all collectively own—which, in fact, they usually are. As members of the community, we are free to drive on our city’s streets as much as we want. But what if everybody decides to get about this way? The result is traffic jams, smog, and the loss of alternatives as mass transit shuts down. Or think of the lake where your summer cabin sits as a kind of commons. It’s expensive to put in a good septic system, and it wouldn’t hurt you much to flush into a shallow leaching field close to the water’s edge, where, as it happens, it would be the cheapest and easiest place to put the field. The lake is pretty big, and it can handle a little bit of pollution. Besides, it would be hard for anyone to determine that you’re the one with the shallow leaching field close to the shoreline. Lots of cabins ring the lake. But what if everybody on the lake did what you’re doing? The oceans are a commons, too. A fisher might as well cast as big a net as possible. What one fisher does won’t have that much effect on overall fish stocks. Anyway, the other fishers are probably going to do the same, right? And soon the fish are gone. Hardin’s analysis is far from perfect, as we’ll come to in a moment. But it is hard to ignore the fact that traffic jams, for example, are on the rise. In the car-dependent United States, traffic congestion cost Americans a collective 5.52 billion hours and 1.88 billion gallons of fuel in 2011. That’s close to an hour a week per commuter in the United States. Total cost? $121.2 billion. And it’s getting much worse, year by year. By comparison, traffic congestion wasted a collective 1.12 billion hours in 1982.33 As for pollution, another of Hardin’s examples, many recreational lakes have been badly polluted by their users, and total annual air pollution deaths worldwide are huge: 1.64 million per year, as Chapter 10 discussed. As for fishing, stocks are in terrible shape in many parts of the oceans and have simply collapsed in the Grand Banks, leaving hundreds of fishing communities from Newfoundland to New England economically devastated. These are all examples of a more general class of circumstances, what social scientists call the problem of collective action: In a world of self-interested actors, how can we get people to cooperate for their own benefit? Individual actors pursuing their rational self-interest often lead us to irrational collective outcomes that, in fact, undermine the interests of those who enact them. The result is a striking paradox of social life: We often do not act in our own interests when we act in our own interests. Or, to put it another way, when we all do what we want, it often leads to outcomes nobody wants. Why It Really Isn’t as Bad as All That Hardin’s account of the “tragedy of the commons” remains one of the most discussed theories in environmental sociology, even nearly 50 years after it was written. The phrase “tragedy of the commons” is familiar to many in the general populace. Academics regularly employ it in analyses. In a quick search of the databases at our university library, we found over 4,000 peer-reviewed publications that discuss or reference the phrase.34 Over 200 academic articles were just from the year 2013, the most recent full year at the time we checked.35 In as specialized a realm as academia, this is a huge amount. Several of these articles extend the allegory of the commons far beyond environmental concerns, applying it to analyses of topics like corporate political donations, software piracy, financial markets, and bitcoins. Much of the reason for the continuing attention, though, is to point out how spectacularly oversimplified and overstated Hardin’s allegory is and how it diverts attention from some fundamental social processes at work in environmental problems.36 To begin with, Hardin seemed to blame common ownership of resources for the tragedy. But, in fact, we can find countless examples of highly successful use of commons for resource management. Grazing lands all across Africa, Asia, and South America; traditional systems of fisheries management in India and Brazil; even the private homes of modern families, which are a kind of commons in miniature and remain a highly popular form of social arrangement—these are just a few of the many examples of generally successful commons management.37 Indeed, common ownership is the primary way that people have managed their affairs for centuries. And it has, at least until recent years, largely worked.38 Rather than the tragedy of the commons, Hardin’s allegory is better characterized as the tragedy of individualism. For what breaks down Hardin’s commons is not collective ownership itself, but rather the inability (and perhaps unwillingness) of the herders to take a view wider than their own narrowly conceived self-interests. Herders, in fact, are unlikely to conceive of their interests so narrowly, at least in traditional commons. For one thing, Hardin assumes that no one will notice the overgrazing until it is too late. But herders out there in the pasture every day with their sheep are likely very quickly to note the deteriorating condition of the grass. For another thing, Hardin assumes that the herders do not communicate with one another. More likely, as soon as the herders notice the beginnings of overgrazing, they will walk over to each other’s houses in the village and have a few words about the situation. They will likely convene a gathering of some sort to try to work out an arrangement that restores the grass, while following local norms about the number of sheep each herder is fairly entitled to graze. More significant, however, is the reliance of Hardin’s allegory on a rational choice view of human motivation. People are, simply put, more complex—and thankfully so. We are moved by more than our own narrowly conceived self-interests, as Chapters 2 and 10 described. Equally important are the sentiments—the norms, the feelings of affection (and lack of affection) for others—we have in social life. These sentiments are a crucial aspect not only of our humanity but, as we shall see, of our interests as well. The Dialogue of Solidarities Let’s return to the story of “Androcles and the Lion” and the home truths it recounts, despite being a fable. It is not the usual sort of evidence that sociologists draw upon, but hear us out. To begin with, why did the lion spare Androcles in the ring, as he came up to him, all snarl and roar? At that moment, the lion could have had no idea that refusing to eat his former partner would result in freedom. Indeed, the Circus Maximus animal handlers might have decided to kill this apparently hopeless lion for failing to put on a good show. (The Circus Maximus was like that.) And why did Androcles initially pull the nail from the lion’s paw? At that moment, Androcles could have had no idea that pulling the nail would result in his gaining a friend and hunting partner. (Hunting partnerships between humans and lions are, after all, rather unusual.) And neither could he have known that they would eventually be able to return to the forest to live out their days together. The reason was, according to Apion, that the lion and Androcles were moved by more than narrow calculations of their own pure self-interests. They were moved as well by their sentiments: Androcles for a lion in pain, and the lion for a friend and former companion; Androcles for reasons of commitment to certain norms of behavior, and the lion for reasons of friendship, of affective commitment. These sentimental commitments, in turn, led to the promotion of their interests although they could not have known that at the time. This is a crucial point of criticism of the rational actor model described in the tragedy of the commons. What it means is that sentiments may promote interests but do not reduce to them. At the same time, interests promote sentiments. A large part of the reason Androcles and the lion liked each other is that, beginning with Androcles’s act of pulling the nail and extending through the lion’s refusal to eat Androcles, they had learned to rely on each other to promote each other’s needs. Because they helped each other out, they liked each other and shared a sense of commitment to common norms of social behavior. And because they liked each other and shared a commitment to common norms, they helped each other out. The story is thus another example of a dialogue, this time what we like to call the dialogue of solidarities. We use the plural because this dialogue is based on the interaction between two mutually supporting bases for social commitment: a solidarity of interests and a solidarity of sentiments. The interests of both Androcles and the lion were served through their relationship. But as well, they sensed the existence of sentimental ties—affection and common norms—between them. And the one constantly shaped and maintained the other. All this emphasis on sentiment may sound a little idealistic, the kind of rare altruism we sometimes hear about in stories or, as in this case, in an ancient fable. But sentiment is actually quite common—and quite necessary—in social relationships, at least those that endure across time and space. Consider, for example, a domestic union of some kind, two recent college graduates perhaps. They each have interests, such as careers. They make their job choices with the other partner’s interests in mind. They manage their home in ways that allow each to succeed at work. And thus they maintain a solidarity of interests. These domestic partners may not each be getting the same interest satisfied through their domestic union, however. Indeed, likely not, for everyone is different, as we know, which means everyone’s interests are at least a bit different. Maybe one is a graduate student following her or his intellectual passion, while the partner supports it in part because he or she foresees in the long term more household income. Or maybe one is a musician and the other a schoolteacher, leading to quite different rhythms of time demands and resource needs. As long as they can work out a way to coordinate these different interests, that’s fine. The important thing is not that their interests are the same, but that they are complementary.39 However, there are always time delays involved in complementary and cooperative action. How does one partner know that the other will come through when it is the other partner’s turn to make a career sacrifice? There are also always issues of space in complementary and cooperative action. The two domestic partners cannot keep each other under constant surveillance. How does each know that the other can be relied upon to coordinate shopping, to maintain monogamy (if the union is based on that understanding), to cover for each other when situations require it? The answer is, again, trust. This trust can exist because each believes the relationship to be based upon more than the narrow calculation of self-interests. Because each has affection for the other or because each has a sense of common commitment to common norms of interaction—or both—each can trust that the other will come through across the isolating reaches of time and space. Without this sense of trust that a solidarity of sentiments gives, no solidarity of interests can last long. The process works the other way, too. The persistence of a solidarity of interests is one of the principal ways that each partner comes to sense real affection and common normative commitment on the part of the other. If one partner violates that trust by not looking out for the other’s interests, chances are, frankly, that pretty soon they won’t like each other anymore, nor will they have faith that they share some crucial norms. Trust is the essential glue of both a solidarity of interests and a solidarity of sentiments. So, to return finally to the tragedy of the commons, one of the main reasons why herders on a commons usually manage to keep from overgrazing the pastures is that they trust each other. These are their neighbors, after all, and likely their kinfolk, too. These are the people they relax with, dance with, worship with, and marry. Of course, villages sometimes fall into considerable internal conflict, and when they do, those sentimental ties may go. If so, the grass on the pastures will likely go, too.40 The dialogue of solidarities is a kind of ecologic dialogue, a constant and mutually constituting interaction between the realm of the material (a solidarity of interests) and the realm of the ideal (a solidarity of sentiments). From this dialogue emerge solidarities of solidarities, if you will, within families, organizations, businesses, neighborhoods, villages, towns, cities, counties, provinces, states, nations, species, ecosystems, and all other kinds of commons. From this dialogue emerges community. Not only is there dialogue in the philosophical sense at work. A dialogue of solidarities depends upon dialogue in the everyday sense of the term: dialogue as communication. And communication means the mobilization of the social relations of knowledge. Right in the center of a dialogue of solidarities is the cultivation of knowledge, all mutually building and depending upon trust and upon each other. For from the cultivation of knowledge, we gain identification with norms and commitments—with sentiments. From the cultivation of knowledge, we also gain identification with where our interests lie. Neither interests nor sentiments are given in this life. Rather, they are created, and re-created, throughout our lives in interaction with each other and the world. If the paradox of collective action is that people often do not act in their own interests when they act in their own interests, the solution is clear: Also act on your sentiments. But consider those sentiments and those interests broadly and openly. That is, consider them dialogically. A Tale of Two Villages At least this is the everyday wisdom our colleague Peggy Petrzelka found among the Imazighen people of the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, widely known as the Berber.41 (Imazighen is the name they prefer.) Along the Imdrhas River Valley lie two villages, some 13 kilometers apart: Tilmi and M’semrir (see Figure 11.5). It’s not great cropland, and the Imazighen in the area have traditionally relied on grazing sheep and goats for income and sustenance. It’s not great grazing land either, however. The land is steep, and the climate is dry. So local villages use what they call the agdal system of collective management of the grazing lands, which have traditionally been held almost entirely in common. Under agdal, grazing schedules and any disputes are worked out through a local representative council of herders, known as the jemaa. The head of the jemaa is called the Amghrar, and he (it is traditionally a he) is elected by the local villagers. If signs of overgrazing start showing up or if there’s been a particularly dry spell, the jemaa will close certain areas of the commons to allow regeneration. The nuadar, two men from each village, are selected annually to keep watch on the commons to make sure that the guidelines of the jemaa are being followed. If someone violates the guidelines, he or she may be forced to pay an izma, a penalty. When fence repair, harvesting, or other work needs to be done, the villagers organize touiza—communal work teams. It’s a system that has worked for centuries. It has worked. Peggy, who speaks Arabic, got a chance to live for most of a year in the area. She soon noted what many in the area now frequently complain about: that in M’semrir, the agdal system is breaking down. The grass looks bad. Stocking rates are double what they should be. Violators are getting away without paying izmas. Much of the land has been privatized. Some people seem to be getting quite a bit richer, and satellite TV dishes have sprouted from a number of rooftops. Touiza is disappearing. People are scared of the Amghrar. The jemaa are increasingly an in-group who distribute grazing rights to each other and their friends. People are angry with each other. But in Tilmi, the grass still looks good. Stocking rates are just what they should be. Very little of the traditional commons land has been privatized. The jemaa distribute grazing rights in ways that everyone Peggy spoke with found generally equitable. Touiza is still going strong. There are very few satellite dishes. When they disagree with him, Tilmi residents tell the Amghrar to his face. That’s because they like him and are confident that he likes them, even when there are disagreements. Which there aren’t very often, because people in Tilmi still like each other. Figure 11.5 The dialogue of solidarities in two Imazighen (Berber) villages in Morocco. In Tilmi, the village up the Imdrhas River Valley and off the main road, solidarity is stronger, and the pasturelands are in better shape. In M’semrir, capitalist individualism and self-interest have undermined the dialogue of solidarities, and the pasturelands are suffering. Figure 64 Source: Petrzelka, Peggy, & Bell, Michael M. 2000. “Rationality and Solidarity: The Social Organization of Common Property Resources in the Imdrhas Valley of Morocco.” Human Organization 59(3): 343– 352. Reprinted by permission of the Society for Applied Anthropology. In fact, the people in Tilmi like each other so much that they dance together. A lot. It may sound romantic, but most evenings when the weather is fine and the work is done, a group of villagers get together to sing and dance in the village center. When there are family celebrations—a wedding, a circumcision—virtually the entire village attends, and the dancing can go on for days, until 2 or 3 in the morning. And they sing when they practice touiza, helping each other harvest their personal garden plots, or as they repair the road or clear snow. All this astounded Peggy. Yes, it may sound romantic, because it is romantic. But it is also what they really do. In M’semrir, however, people don’t dance much anymore. There may be a bit at family celebrations, but the whole village is no longer invited. Just close family and friends. In Tilmi, weddings are usually held together during the same season of the year, and the brides walk through the village together amid the throwing of dates, almonds, and figs from the roofs of the grooms’ houses to the crowds below. But in M’semrir, weddings are individual and scattered throughout the year, and the rich and festive foods are thrown only to the guests. Peggy went for a walk one day with Amina, a woman from M’semrir, up into the hills above the village. They paused for a rest on a high rock overlooking M’semrir and the Imdrhas Valley below. They got to talking about changing traditions in M’semrir. “We used to gather everyone and have one big party—now everyone has their own tradition,” Amina remarked. She pointed out what used to be the communal property, now divided into small private plots. “Nizha,” she said, using the Arabic name locals informally conferred on Peggy, “the words of today are not like the words of yesterday, and that which we did early is not that which we do today.” Why, then, this difference between the two villages? The Moroccan government has been working hard to “develop” the local economy, trying to increase the nation’s productivity and also people’s personal incomes. So they’ve developed regional market centers and have begun promoting tourism. They have also promoted privatizing much of the communal land, figuring that production would go up. But in the rugged terrain of the Atlas Mountains, it’s harder to bring “development” to the more remote villages. M’semrir is lower down the Imdrhas Valley, more accessible to the Jeeps of government officials and the delivery vans of the central Moroccan economy. Tilmi may be only 13 kilometers from M’semrir, but those 13 kilometers are up a twisty, rutted, dirt road, and the officials, tourists, and other bearers of “development” just don’t make it up there so often. People in Tilmi have heard of privatization, though. They aren’t that isolated. After all, they often go to M’semrir for its bigger, more vibrant marketplace. And they’ve toyed with some of the practices that the people of M’semrir have taken to. But thus far, they’ve only toyed with them. Thus far, they are still singing and dancing together. Thus far, they still have a dialogue of solidarities. Thus far, the grass is still green. How Big Is Your Solidarity? But can we create a dialogue of solidarities with aspects of our world that do not speak? Can we create community with nonhumans? Apion said yes. Androcles and the lion managed it, even though the lion did not know how to speak Latin and Androcles, as far as we know, did not mew and growl. Philosopher Bruno Latour says yes, too. One of the most basic points of actor network theory is that networks of actors (what Latour prefers to call actants, as Chapter 9 describes) extend well beyond the human, forming a broader coalition that he sometimes calls a “collective.” Now, this collective, this solidarity, is not necessarily symmetrical. Yes, we can imagine that lions have interests and sentiments and can form relations of trust, as anyone intimate with nonhuman mammals and other vertebrates can attest. They have ways of communicating their interests, sentiments, and trust. But butterflies and clams, rocks and soil, grass and trees? Here the interests and sentiments and trust will lie in our part of the collective, not theirs. Environmental sociologist Ray Murphy has suggested that, as we do not communicate with the nonarticulate actants in our collectives, an easier terminology is to think of these interactions as dancers who prompt each other. “The concept of ‘prompt’ captures the influence of nature’s dynamics on conceptions, discourse, and practices, without claiming the latter are determined by those dynamics,” Murphy writes. He goes on to say, Human agents dance with the moves of nature’s actants to form hybrid constructions, with both influencing the other and both having some autonomy. The dance can be adroitly or ineptly performed. An approach that analyzes movements between human agents and nature’s actants, like partners in a dance influenced by the other’s creative movements, can bridge the nature/culture divide in sociology and transcend the limitations of a one-sided approach that focuses solely on nature’s determinisms or human social constructions. The metaphor of dance captures the autonomous movements of nature’s dynamics without implying intentionality by the non-human partner, only movement.42 In other words, an actant does not have to be able to speak to be part of an environmental movement. What an actant needs is enough connections to be invited to the dance. Mobilizing Ecological Contestations So, you’ve got the conceptions your group needs, having developed a cultivation of knowledge, one that we hope emphasizes dialogue and conscientization, not monologue and PR. And you’ve got connections going, bringing interests and sentiments into solidarity and dialogue through trust and through your cultivation of knowledge, and we hope also bringing nonhuman actants into the collective. Great. Your grassroots environmental movement is well on the way. But what if government or corporations or the broader society doesn’t agree with what your movement is trying to do? What if others’ interests and sentiments lead them in other directions? What if they’d really prefer it if you and your connected community of environmental conceptions just went away? Indeed, if your group felt motivated to get something going and make a change, chances are not everyone would welcome what you wanted to do. Otherwise, it probably would be being done already. So let’s explore the environmental sociology of contestation: how environmental social movements successfully confront resistance and, in the end, often broaden their solidarities. Double Politics and the Political Opportunity Structure Saul Alinsky was a tough old bird, but an inspiring one. Starting with the people of the “Back of the Yards” neighborhood of Chicago in the 1930s, Alinsky more or less invented the notion of grassroots community organizing. Back of the Yards is next to where Chicago’s stockyards used to be—the district that Upton Sinclair made infamous in The Jungle. In the 1930s, Back of the Yards had appalling health conditions, poor housing, and the disorganized social life one often encounters among the disenfranchised and downtrodden. What Alinsky catalyzed, with notable success, was perhaps the first environmental justice movement, although no one called it that back then. Through the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, set up with Alinsky’s help, local people organized a cleanup of the stockyards, built homes, developed local businesses, and were instrumental in the founding of the National School Lunch Program. The Council is still going strong. Alinsky’s passions are also in the thousands of grassroots groups that have taken inspiration from what the Back of the Yards neighborhood has accomplished. Here is perhaps Alinsky’s most famous quotation, from his Rules for Radicals: Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.43 In other words, to think a grassroots movement can avoid friction is fiction. If there is something worth doing that hasn’t been done, it is probably because some powerful interests out there stand in the way. And if there is something worth doing that hasn’t been done, it probably won’t be easy. Indeed, most anything worth doing isn’t easy, or, again, it would already be done. So be ready to embrace conflict. Be ready for the sit-in, the march, the confrontation, the rough treatment. That was Alinsky’s message and method (see Figure 11.6). Other organizers, though, worry that this conflict-based approach can be off-putting to potential allies and that it works more by fighting fire with fire instead of with water. It resists the material expression of power as embodied in laws, regulations, police, locks, and fences with the material power of people out there on the street, blocking traffic and ready to fill the paddy wagons and holding cells. But maybe a better strategy is to look to changing the minds of those who make the laws, write the rules, instruct the police, smith the locks, and build the fences. Rather than a conflict model of contestation, organizers in the tradition of Michael Eichler argue for a consensus-based approach. “Instead of taking power from those who have it,” Eichler has written, “consensus organizers build relationships in which power is shared for mutual benefit.”44 Rather than a materialist approach, Eichler works on the side of ideas. Figure 11.6 Town sign for Defiance, Iowa. Figure 65 Source: Photo by Helen D. Gunderson. Used with permission of Helen D. Gunderson. So who is right? Which way is in fact the most successful? It’s yet another dialogue. Community sociologist Randy Stoecker suggests there is both a “vinegar” and a “honey” side to successful organizing—that both conflict and consensus have their place, and that most organizing involves a good bit of both.45 We like to call it the double politics of contestation.46 Stoecker suggests that a grassroots movement begins this double politics by first analyzing the political opportunity structure that it will have to contend with to gain its goals. Political opportunity theory originally comes from Peter Eisinger, who defined political opportunity as “the degree to which groups are likely to be able to gain access to power and to manipulate the political system”47—which sounds very instrumental, with its bald use of the term manipulate. But that’s exactly the point. We’re talking about strategy here. Many environmental sociologists have used this form of analysis to understand why some environmental movements, like the anti–nuclear power movement, have been so spectacularly successful, while others, like the anti–climate change movement in the United States, have gained so little traction.48 Plus, many authors have elaborated and refined political opportunity theory over the years.49 Stoecker usefully synthesizes these insights and adds a few twists of his own, pointing to four factors a grassroots group should think out in planning a successful strategy and in deciding whether to use more honey or more vinegar: The openness of decision makers to hearing grassroots concerns The implementation power decision makers have to do something about those concerns The structure of alliances that shape how decision makers will feel compelled to act The stability of all of the above So there you are, having a meeting one evening with your grassroots environmental group, sitting in a local church basement on some old folding chairs, drinking watery coffee and munching brownies while someone stands at the flip chart. Here’s what the group’s first line of questions should be, advises Stoecker: Who are the relevant decision makers we have to contend with, and are they likely to be open to what we have to say? Not likely to be very open? A definite minus. Here’s your second line of questions: But do those decision makers actually have the resources to implement what we’d like them to do—plenty of budget, staff, and legislative leeway? Yes? Well, that’s a plus for sure. The third line of questions is this: How about the interest groups that shape these decision makers’ sense of the politically possible and politically necessary? Are they for us or against us? A bit mixed? Could be worse. And the fourth line of questions, which concerns the stability of the answers to the other three, is this one: Do the alliances have some internal divisiveness? Nice. Does that divisiveness leave the decision makers a bit uncertain as to what to do? Double nice, at least for us. And the implementation power of the decision makers seems pretty secure? If we can get things turned our way, that will be great. Sounds like a mixed strategy of judicious applications of honey and vinegar both is the way to go. Double politics to the rescue. Most times, suggests Stoecker, the appropriate strategy will be like the above: some kind of mix of conflict making and consensus building. The specifics will vary, of course, and it will be important to pay close attention to those. Maybe you’ll be able to identify a decision maker from the start who is with you. Maybe the trouble will be that the decision maker doesn’t have the budget and staff to do much about your concerns and has to deal with alliances that don’t agree with you, with mixed stabilities for these. The honey and the vinegar will have to be doled out differently, then, but you’ll still want to use both. Sometimes, though, the honey and vinegar scorecard will come up pretty much all vinegar. Decision makers aren’t welcoming. Their implementation power is weak. The alliances are against you. And the situation seems quite stable. So do you get out your battered copy of Rules for Radicals and take to the streets, perhaps in some situations risking tear gas, rubber bullets, and worse? That is not an easy decision for any group, on both practical and ethical grounds. Is it practically worthwhile to attempt the conflict approach in such an unreceptive context? Is it ethical to put group members at such risk? Best check how strong your dialogue of solidarities is to begin with and consider how wide and significant the gaps are between your own group’s interests and sentiments and those of the context you are trying to change. But here’s some better news. As Stoecker points out, contestation unfolds historically. The conflictmaking approach of today, if reasonably successful, often lays the foundation for the consensus-building approach of tomorrow. Double politics is about gaining a face in the dialogue of decision making. Dialogue is not a “frictionless vacuum,” a space free of power. One gains face to speak, and to be responded to, through power. Dialogue requires face, and face requires power. Conflict can thus in time lead to consensus.50 Conflict can also destroy face, however. It’s a tricky matter, so don’t try it alone. Conflict is dangerous, of course. But also, the old approach of “good cop/bad cop” is one of the most successful strategies of double politics. The people doing the conflict making don’t have to be the same people doing the consensus building. In fact, they usually are not. The Double Politics of Practical Farmers of Iowa The history of PFI is a good example of double politics. The 1980s was a difficult time in the rural United States. The “farm crisis” came about after a period of massive industrialization in U.S. agriculture, funded by constantly rising farmland values in the 1970s and rising implement costs related to Big Iron. The Soviet Union was buying lots of grain, keeping prices high. The new machinery, chemicals, and hybrid crop varieties were yielding strong production. Banks were telling farmers to borrow and buy, borrow and buy, and borrow and buy. Farms got bigger. Tractors got bigger. The costs of both skyrocketed, but there was plenty of money around, and nobody seemed worried. Then, President Carter tried to punish the Soviet Union for its December 27, 1979, invasion of Afghanistan by ordering a grain embargo. U.S. grain prices immediately plummeted. Farmland values dramatically dropped soon afterward. Plus, inflation pushed interest rates to shocking levels. In January 1981, the U.S. prime rate hit 20 percent. Money got tight, and so did the banks. No more easy farm loans. The spending spree was over, and there was little way to pay for the binge. It was awful for rural life. Suicide rates tripled in rural states like Kansas and Nebraska. A farmer in Iowa shot his banker, and a farmer and son in Minnesota shot two of theirs. A Farmers Home Administration official in South Dakota, depressed from foreclosing farms, shot his family, his dog, and finally himself.51 New farm advocacy groups—the American Agriculture Movement, the National Family Farm Coalition, and PrairieFire Rural Action, to name a few—organized protests. In March 1986, hundreds of farmers blockaded a Farmers Home Administration building in Chillicothe, Missouri, with their tractors, and stayed until the end of the summer.52 Reverend Jesse Jackson showed up at that one, wearing bib overalls.53 Farmers also organized local protests to disrupt farm auctions and foreclosures, including one in March 1985 in Plattsburg, Missouri, that brought 1,500 protesters and turned ugly, with injuries and arrests.54 Rural people don’t usually do this kind of thing. As far as the officials at the College of Agriculture at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, were concerned, there were plenty of bad cops around. Farmers were angry with the university, too, for having led them down a rosy path of happy industrialism. Farm advocates were writing blistering critiques of university research priorities.55 Even some academics were among the bad cops, publishing their own critiques.56 So when a new farm group, Practical Farmers of Iowa, formed in 1985 in the next county over, the university was suspicious and standoffish. The university’s face was under considerable challenge, with its structure of alliances increasingly in tatters, and the university mainly responded by distancing itself from the threat. But in 1987, it all changed when the associate dean of extension at Iowa State at the time, Professor Jerry DeWitt, showed up in a three-piece suit to a PFI field day at Dick and Sharon Thompson’s farm.57 It began earlier that year when the Plant Pathology Department at Iowa State courageously invited Dick Thompson, the first president of PFI, to give a talk at a seminar series it was hosting on the farm crisis. DeWitt described the moment to Mike in his cluttered campus office, soda can in hand: It was the most formal I have ever seen Dick Thompson. I do remember that Dick Thompson was extremely nervous. And that was probably equal to the anxiety in the room of what was this guy going to say and what was he going to do. So it was sort of a moment of like two dogs looking at each other and not quite knowing what the other was gonna do, or who was gonna move first. It was sort of a stalemate. He was nervous, we were nervous. It was a quietly electric moment in Iowa State’s history. But Dick didn’t yell. He didn’t run down the university. He didn’t blockade the auditorium door with his tractor. He gave a measured talk in which he asked the university to do some research to help farmers interested in something other than the Big Iron, Big Chemical way. He also asked the university to have a look at the scientific research trials that PFI farmers had already started doing on their farms, set up with the help of a visionary Iowa State graduate student in agronomy, Rick Exner. In other words, Dick talked like the good cop of science. The university didn’t trust how PFI was doing science, though. PFI farmers were doing randomized, replicated plots, but they were doing them on a large scale that they could farm. When you are trying to control for unrecognized environmental effects in an experiment, a big dilemma in agronomic research is controlling the problem of field variability, as agronomists call it. Fields vary in slope, soil quality, and other environmental factors, often in significant ways over, say, 100 feet. One field, or even one side of a field, might give very different results from another. So agronomists typically do their research in small plots on the order of a few tens of feet square, or even smaller, and use the fact that there will still be many plants in even a small plot to do statistical comparisons. But you can’t profitably farm little plots like that. Dick Thompson had started out doing research more on the half-field scale of things, so he could still farm it. The trouble was, the results of his trials might just have been measuring environmental differences across one of his fields, and not differences in his farming methods. Dick had recognized that this was a problem. And he had gotten friendly with Rick Exner, the graduate student who later helped PFI set up its research trials. As a graduate student, Rick was not so tightly a part of the structure of alliances that kept the university moving along in its inertial way. He was one of those nodal people—someone who was positioned at the intersection of social networks—so valuable to any social movement.58 Rick was someone Dick could approach without anyone losing face. They discussed the problem of field variability, and Rick presented it to Chuck Francis, an agronomist at the University of Nebraska, safely distant from Iowa State but still part of the network of university scientists. (In fact, Chuck has gone on to become a very well-known agronomist and advocate of sustainable practices. But this was early on in the acceptability of sustainable agriculture in colleges of agriculture.) Chuck suggested that PFI try what agronomists call paired comparisons. Rick brought that back to Dick, and Dick came up with the idea of doing the pairs in field-length strips, one pass of the tractor each, so the field could still be farmed. A farmer could do one practice up the field, get off the tractor and make whatever changes to the equipment the experiment required, and do the comparison back down the field on the next pass, randomizing which strips got which treatment. By doing the trials one tractor pass wide, meaning just a few rows per strip, field variability could be assumed to vary equally for each strip. Then any difference in the comparison would not be a result of differences across the field. It had never been done at the university, though. A few weeks after Dick’s talk at the university, Rick talked Jerry DeWitt and another professor at Iowa State into sitting down with him and Dick. They met at a McDonald’s, the most nonthreatening location Rick could think of—off campus and anonymous. “That was a very tense meeting,” Jerry recounted to Mike: We went in there not knowing if we were going to argue or not. They said, “We’ve got something we think you ought to recognize.” And I represented, in a sense of body, [the view] that probably was saying, “Well, what you’re doing is not valid.” Across that little table there was a lot of tension. But Jerry took away with him their little diagram of randomized, replicated, field-length paired comparisons. A few days later, he brought it to yet another university professor, Reggie Voss. “What do you think?” Jerry recalled asking him. Reggie looked it over and said, “Yep, that’ll work. That’s valid.” Poof! When I heard Reggie Voss say, “Yes, that’s valid, that’ll work, that’s fine,” it was like, now wait a minute. For how many years have we been discounting what they’re doing as not workable? And they have been thinking, we will never recognize their work. It took one meeting, an hour meeting, a piece of paper, and a why-don’t-you-lookat-it. It took me 10 minutes to give it to somebody and Dr. Voss to simply look at it, and poof! All of that tension was over with. Jerry had heard there was a field day that day at Dick and Sharon’s farm, just a few miles from the university. He was so excited that he got into his university car and drove out there, in the three-piece suit of a dean, to shake Dick’s hand. It was quite a scene when he arrived. A big crowd of farmers in jeans and feed caps. Dick standing 10 feet above them in the bucket of a front-end loader so he could be heard. Jerry in his suit. Rick Exner remembered the moment this way: “So Dick got out of the bucket, talked to Jerry for about a minute, came back. He was quite pleased. DeWitt had gotten back in his car and left, and Dick said, ‘Sounds like we’re going to work together.’” Rick chuckled, happily thinking it over in his mind. “So this was at Jerry’s initiative?” Mike asked him. “Jerry really gets the credit for this, yes.” Over the next year or so, Jerry used his implementation power as associate dean to broker an unusual collaboration between a university and a farmer’s group. He found an office for PFI on campus and found some money to steer toward the group so they could hire a staff person for the office. PFI and the university would have equal say in hiring that person, and that person would be considered a university employee, with the university’s health care and retirement benefits. And who became that employee? Rick Exner. Over the years, PFI has grown to the 13 staff it had as of 2015. By now, dozens of university faculty and students have conducted hundreds of research trials with PFI farmers, using the field-length paired comparisons and other techniques and always bringing farmers and researchers together as partners through participatory research. And by now, PFI has helped thousands of farmers implement sustainable practices through the group’s cultivation of knowledge and dialogic sense of solidarity. As for Jerry DeWitt, he later went on to direct the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State—a different kind of administrator at a different kind of college of agriculture—until he retired in 2010. “PFI has meant a lot to me personally,” Jerry explained at the end of the interview, conducted before he retired. I would not be who I am today—I would not be where I am today or doing what I’m doing today—if it weren’t for PFI. It’s been that important. Sometimes you look back and you can see events that were real turning points in your life that you might not have realized were at the time. Well, PFI has been that for me. In other words, Jerry assigns the credit for this successful double politics just the other way around, to PFI and not to himself—a sure sign of a solidarity that is both wide and truly in dialogue. The Pros of the Three Cons As the success of PFI shows, cons can be pros—at least when we are talking about bringing together the three cons of conceptions, connections, and contestations. But the main thing is togetherness itself. In fact, if the reader will forgive us, the three words that we chose to represent the three cons do not derive from each etymological form of con-. Rather, they all derive from the “together” form. Conception means to put together. Connection means to tie together. And contestation means to bear witness together. Grassroots environmental movements succeed through this togetherness of these togethernesses. The trick is how to get a togetherness of togetherness, well, together. Environmental grassroots movements are not always as successful as a group like PFI has been, of course. If they were, environmental sociologists would not devote so much research to understanding how such achievements come about, and environmental activists would not be so interested in hearing the findings. Environmental sociology has no precise recipes to offer, however. The origins of movement success are often best understood after the fact, so dependent are they upon the happenstance of, say, a phenomenological rupture or having a willing and visionary nodal person at hand. These are matters of what we like to call dialogic providence—not luck, exactly, but situational opportunities that provide scope for agency and change.59 The reason why this providence is not just luck is that we can help create situations that invite these opportunities, even if we cannot predict what they will look like, when they will appear, or how they will turn out. The skill of a grassroots movement is in creating the situations as much as it is in acting upon the opportunities they may occasion. Like inviting people to a meeting at, of all places, a McDonald’s restaurant. No, there can be no recipe for success, just conditions that welcome success. Otherwise, there would be no success—only ineluctable outcomes in which agency is merely the working out of some socioenvironmental mechanism, and is thus not agency at all.60 And ineluctable outcomes are exactly what grassroots environmental groups are mobilizing to prevent. Governing the Ecological Society Image 15 The Earth is one but the world is not. —Bruntland Commission, 1987 Participation. Even for something as important as national elections, it’s hard to get people to turn out to vote. Usually, little more than half of the voting-age population manages it—about 50 to 60 percent in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, although sometimes hitting the low 60s. In the U.S. 2014 midterm elections, 36.4 percent of voters turned out to cast a ballot. Those were the lowest numbers since World War II.1 The situation is a good bit better in many European countries, with turnouts between 70 and 80 percent typical in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. But the trend is down in Europe, as it is in Japan and many other countries. A few countries do achieve quite high rates, especially Australia where the rate is almost always in the 80s.2 But voting is compulsory in Australia, and you pay a $20 fine if you don’t vote, unless you provide a “valid and sufficient” reason for not voting. If people don’t participate, willingly, how can you democratically govern or effectively resolve some of the world’s most pressing problems? Like water pollution. If people don’t feel that they have a voice in coming up with solutions, they are unlikely to want to implement them. The government could try to force solutions on everyone. But water use is such an everyday matter, it would take a Big Brother police state to make the laws stick. And even that might not work—in addition to not being a good way to run a society. So how can we make it possible for people to be part of the solutions, when participation is such a challenge? Loka and her colleague Noelle Harden reasoned that for people to want to participate in the democratic design of solutions for water pollution, they first need to know that such a problem exists.3 So a few years ago, they set out to cultivate knowledge in the community of Agraria, where the local lake suffered from high levels of phosphorus. They hosted public meetings. They ran newspaper and radio advertisements, posted fliers across town, and visited civic groups to spread the word that the nearby lake was on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s list for phosphorus “impairment,” the technical term EPA uses to mean that phosphorus levels are too high.4 Why worry? Most phosphorus “overloading” comes from agricultural runoff.5 When you have an “overload,” the consequences can be dire—like the infamous “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, an area about the size of Connecticut where toxic algae blooms feed on too much phosphorus and nitrogen rushing in from the Mississippi River and suck away the oxygen in the water, killing fish and marine plants.6 Sometimes when such blooms occur, the water becomes unsafe for humans or other mammals to drink, as regularly happens in Lake Erie.7 Aptly titled “A Dog’s Worst Friend,” the blooms can be especially dangerous for canines that unknowingly drink from and swim in afflicted water bodies, later dying from the toxic cyanobacteria.8 Loka and Noelle’s outreach in Agraria immediately attracted attention, but not the kind they anticipated. Soon after distributing fliers across town, Loka received a phone call from Eugene, the local public works director, accusing the poster of inappropriately describing the local water body as “polluted.” In addition to serving as a local recreation site, the lake was a public water source. Eugene requested that Noelle and Loka come to a special meeting with town council members and an aide to the mayor to discuss the project. Loka and Noelle agreed, and while waiting for the meeting to start, they made small talk with Charles, a city council member. “So you’re from the People’s Republic of Madison?” Charles abruptly asked with a smirk. Madison, the city where Loka lives (and Mike too), is widely regarded in the Midwest as a bastion of liberalism. Loka and Noelle laughed in return (albeit a bit dryly), and Loka said, “Yes. I guess sometimes we get that kind of reputation.” After the mayor’s aide arrived, the meeting began with Loka describing the collaborative nature of the project. “This process uses farmer and public meetings to allow those key groups to decide what ways are best to clean up the... ” Loka began. “It sounds like you’re reinventing the wheel,” Charles said, cutting in. “It sounds like what you’re doing is pretty much a clone of what we’ve done,” he said, referencing an agency-run study of the lake. “The lake’s not even polluted.” “The lake currently is impaired with phosphorus,” Noelle replied, matter-of-factly. “Phosphorus is an unregulated substance as far as the EPA is concerned,” Eugene responded. “That is what applies to our water supply,” meaning that legally it wasn’t polluted, in his view. “I think [the flier] could have been worded much better than ‘reducing pollution.’” Even after Noelle specifically reminded Eugene that the water body was listed on the EPA’s 303(d) list for phosphorus pollution, he continued to press his point. “When we’re talking about a public water supply, and people start using the word pollution, it creates a public perception that is, uh, not exactly conducive to our consumer confidence,” Eugene said. “We don’t want people storming city hall,” Charles added. As the conversation shook out, it became clear that the officials’ issue with Loka and Noelle’s project was not whether or not the lake had a phosphorus problem. It turned out that they agreed it did, albeit grudgingly. Rather, their issue was the public becoming familiar with the pollution, because it would make government officials look like they hadn’t done their job. Eugene objected so strongly, he requested that Loka and Noelle discontinue research in the area. Loka and Noelle continued their work anyhow, and with some encouraging results. By the end of their public engagement process, many local farmers—of their own volition—began establishing “grassed waterways” and other conservation practices.9 (A grassed waterway is a grass-lined channel for taking excess water from farm fields without causing erosion and nutrient runoff.) While most research has documented resistance from farmers to reducing phosphorus and nitrogen overloading, Loka and Noelle found something quite different. The government, in the case of Agraria, was the blockage in the flow of democracy, not the farmers. Once people learned about the problem, they wanted to do something about it. And they did. Things don’t always work out that way, of course. People often do require a bit of a stick to do the right thing. Maintaining a balance between individual participation, laws, bureaucratic structures, and legal rights can be a daunting challenge for any democracy. The engine of democracy takes a lot of parts to run. Citizens, to vote and participate, require information to make decisions and a sense that their participation matters. For society to function, laws protect individual rights, while ensuring one person’s rights don’t trample another’s—like a farmer’s right to plant a crop and a neighbor’s simultaneous right to clean water. Bureaucratic rules protect those rights, enforce the law, and deliver services. But sometimes, as with Eugene and Charles, protecting bureaucratic positions becomes more important than the public purpose their jobs are designed to serve. So they try to keep people quiet and in the dark, even though the discomfort that comes along with debate is precisely what keeps democracies strong. How do we balance structure with individual autonomy to allow for dialogic and ecologic governance? This chapter starts with the organization of the democratic state, and the opportunities and challenges afforded by democratic equality. Then we move to review the legal framework that provides environmental protections, and how determined groups and individuals prompt bureaucratic enforcement of seminal pieces of legis...
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Chapter 11
The debate between anthropocentric environmentalism and ecocentric environmentalism makes us to be
aware on how difficulty can be for one to learn about environmentalism and environmental issues.
According to Bell, one may think that he or she knows more about environmentalism after studying for long
about it, but the truth is that there is a lot we don’t know. In this chapter, ecocentrism and anthropocentris...


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