Marius de Geus
Reform or revolution? I envisage a change of revolutionary depth and size by means of many smaller steps in a radically new direction. Does this essentially place me among the political reformists? Scarcely. The direction is revolutionary, the steps are reformatory.
(Naess 1989:156) In this chapter I want to investigate the extent to which the development of environmental problems has direct consequences for the role and structure of the state in contemporary society. In the first section I analyse the question of why most discussions of the environmental issue reach the conclusion that increased state interference in society is necessary. In the second section the proposition of William Ophuls that only the erection of an absolute state can protect humanity against a future environmental catastrophe is explored. In the third section, referring to the ideas of the anarchist political thinker Murray Bookchin, the radical green arguments for institutional decentralisation are outlined and the shortcomings inherent to this approach are examined. In the fourth section the three dominant models of ecological change in modern society are discussed. The fifth section deals with the question of what could be the basic principles of an ecological restructuring of western liberal democracy. In particular: what role does the state have to play and what kind of state is best suited to fight current environmental problems effectively? Finally, the main conclusion is drawn.
THE ROLE OF THE STATE
It is striking that in many discussions on the environmental issue the conclusion is reached that a growing interference of the state in society is absolutely necessary.
A good example of this is found in the programmes of the PvdA (the Dutch social democratic party) and the radical Vereniging Milieudefensie (the Dutch branch of the worldwide environmental organisation Friends of the Earth International).
In their programmes it is stated emphatically that a successful environmental policy requires a strictly normgiving, binding and effectively sanctioning state authority; a large, energetically acting and powerful state is a necessity (PvdA 1989:
4; Vereniging Milieudefensie 1991:17). In large sections of society, social democratic, christian democratic, and also liberal, the state is seen as an indispensable actor and often as the essential problem-solver in respect of environmental problems. But why is this position commonly defended?
A first reason is that in the case of resource depletion and environmental degradation, generally questions of collective goods and free-rider behaviour play a crucial role. Clean soil, air and water are collective goods that people try to profit from, but are not prepared to pay for. A rationally calculating individual will try to make use of the available collective goods, but will not be prepared to make a contribution in order to remove the pollution that was caused by his or her behaviour. A typical example of the working of this mechanism is given by Michael Taylor (1982) in his Community, Anarchy and Liberty:
Relatively straightforward and important instances of public goods and the free rider problem are to be found in connection with problems of resources and the environment. Consider for example a polluted lake, a receptacle for sewage and industrial wastes. Let us assume that an improvement in the quality of the water in the lake is considered to be a good by all the owners of houses and factories on its shore, who like to swim in it, sail on it, use it in their industrial processes, and so on, if it is sufficiently clean. If the water is well-circulated around the lake, such an improvement would be a public good for this group of people; it would be both indivisible (tending to perfect indivisibility with increasingly thorough circulation) and non-excludable (assuming that particular individuals cannot be or are not in fact excluded from using the lake). A lakeshore dweller or factory-owner could contribute to an improvement in water quality by taking his [sic] wastes elsewhere, treating them before discharging them into the lake or modifying his product. Making such a contribution to the public good is costly, and each member of the public good would most prefer everyone else to make a contribution while he has a free ride; but he would prefer everyone to contribute, including himself, to nobody doing anything about the polluted lake. Despite everyone having a common interest in a cleaner lake, nobody would voluntarily contribute to improving it if the costs of his doing so would exceed the benefits to him of the improvement in the water’s quality which would result from his contribution.
(Taylor 1982:43) In this case although everyone has an interest in the water becoming cleaner, none of the participants is prepared to make a substantial contribution towards it voluntarily and the participants will not take any initiative of their own to prevent the pollution, unless the gains for individuals supersede the costs. According to many thinkers only some overriding power—a state—can see to it that this kind of behaviour can be broken and is able to enforce that all the participants contribute to the elimination of the water pollution.
In fact, this is the argument that one finds in a well-established form in Hobbes’
Leviathan. According to Hobbes (1974) the unrestricted freedom of humans in the state of nature leads to an inherently unstable, disquietening and dangerous situation. Because of individual striving for power and freedom the collective good of preservation of life and the security of existence cannot come about. In these circumstances there will be ‘continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’ (Hobbes 1974:186). Only the erection of an encompassing central power, the state or Leviathan, can provide a way out of this impasse. The Hobbesian state can break the dilemma of ‘rational’
individual behaviour (the struggle between individuals for power) that leads to
‘irrational’ collective behaviour (a permanent state of civil war).
Garret Hardin (1973) has applied this chain of reasoning to the use that is made of the ‘Commons’ in our world. Individuals are likely to show parasitic behaviour with respect to the common spaces on the earth, since they are prone to reason with their own interests in mind. The egoistic actions of the participants will, according to Hardin, inevitably produce an environmental tragedy, unless people are prepared to consent to a system in which societally responsible behaviour can be ‘enforced’. Coercion from above is in Hardin’s view inescapable, but is bound to certain conditions:
To many, the word coercion implies arbitrary decisions of distant and irresponsible bureaucrats; but this is not a necessary part of its meaning. The only kind of coercion I recommend is mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected.
(Hardin 1973:145) William Ophuls (1973) makes use of the same line of reasoning as Hardin when he stresses the necessity for a supra-individual decision-making power and the need for compulsory measures by the state in order to save the environment.
According to him people have to choose between Leviathan or Oblivion:
If scarcity is not dead, if it is in fact with us in a seemingly much more intense form than ever before in human history, how can we avoid reaching the conclusion that Leviathan is inevitable? Given current levels of population and technology, I do not believe that we can. Hobbes shows why a spaceship earth must have a captain. Otherwise, the collective selfishness and irresponsibility produced by the tragedy of the commons will destroy the spaceship, and any sacrifice of freedom by the crew members is clearly the lesser of evils.
(Ophuls 1973:224) In his opinion we cannot escape from the fact of giving one person or group of persons absolute power over a considerable part of our actions. In general terms his conclusion is as follows: ‘Now we have discovered that the logic of individualism
creates conditions that require the reimposition of some kind of absolutism in order to avoid ruin’ (Ophuls 1973:228). Ophuls not only states that the existence of a state is a necessary condition to solve the current environmental problems, but also immediately adds that a state ‘along absolutist lines’ is essential.
A second reason to consider the state as an organisation of vital importance in order to tackle environmental problems is that industry forms a very strong centre of power in modern liberal democracy. Trade and industry will not voluntarily decide to decrease current levels of pollution. Only a robust centre of power—the state—will be able to resist the influence of organised trade and industry, whose primary goals are growth of production, increasing profits and long-term survival in a strongly competitive market economy, not protection of the environment.
The power of enterprises, especially that of multi-nationals, can be neutralised only by the strong countervailing power of an energetic state organisation (or a strong supra-national organisation) that will take into account the interests of others, like those of individual citizens and future generations.
A third reason for a central role for the state is to prevent counter-productive relations of competition between enterprises. Often enterprises find themselves in a stalemate. Companies that are prepared to behave in a more environmentally friendly way run the risk of being eliminated from the market, because of the higher prices of their products. When they, as forerunners, opt for extensive environmental investments and the passing on of the so-called ‘external costs’, their products become comparatively too expensive. The competitiveness of companies that move too quickly with environmental policies can easily be endangered. Enterprises that continue to produce high levels of pollution have lower production costs and are thus able to offer their goods to the market more cheaply. The result of this mechanism is that companies that dare to take the initiative will be punished by the consumer, unless the environmentally friendly character of the products is decisive for the consumer, despite the price that has to be paid. When a state or a supra-national organisation exists that enacts uniform environmental rules and emission norms for all enterprises in a certain branch of industry, the above-mentioned counterproductive relations of competition can be avoided. Because similar demands are put on all companies, ‘open and just relations of competition’ will prevail and nobody can hide behind the argument that forerunners in the domain of environmental measures run the risk of being harmed by the consumer via the market mechanism.
A fourth reason for viewing the state as an essential actor in the field of the environment is that there is a strong need for impartial expertise and the formulation of boundary conditions for sustainable development (e.g. what is a responsible and sustainable utilisation of the environmental wealth of the biosphere per inhabitant). What is needed is a collection of expertise to measure the level of pollution caused by certain specific kinds of behaviour, to decide what are ‘safe’ emission levels and norms, to set criteria for environmentally dangerous substances, and to collect relevant information concerning the possibilities for preventing and combating different kinds of pollution. These are complicated tasks