The cosmopolitan ecologist

I recently got to spend almost a week in Washington, DC. I’ve been thinking ever since about what Washington symbolizes, both to those who work there and to the rest of America.

To the rest of America, Washington has become synonymous with corruption in government. For a politician, to have spent too long “inside the Beltway” is a political liability, a sign of being out of touch with reality. Yet the architecture of DC still plays this symbolic role, reporters always standing in front of the Capitol while talking generally about American democracy. Americans love what these monuments to the Constitution symbolize, they are just deeply distressed about how low the art of governing has descended in recent decades.

To those who I’ve talked to who actually live in DC, the experience is considerably more multifaceted. First of all, there is the mass of citizens who have little to do with how the Federal Government operates. They watch the shenanigans of the government on TV with the rest of us, feeling vaguely embarrassed. For those in the government, at least the majority who are career civil servants (not to mention those idealistic folks in different NGOs), they feel rather hurt by the low public opinion of Washington. The work done by these civil servants is mostly non-political, the dull but extremely important task of administering a large country. Waves of political appointees come and go (most of them never really seeing Washington as anything other than a symbol), but beneath them the civil servants continue. This is both a very positive thing (a government needs continuity) and a sometime negative thing (the ship of state turns very slowly indeed).

I thought about all this as I wandered about the Mall and L’Enfants Washington. For me, it was personal, for I am seriously thinking about leaving Harvard’s ivory towers and going to work in DC at an environmental NGO. I feel at peace with this decision professionally, for it’s where I think I can do the most good for the environment. Yet it is indeed a weird time to move to DC, morally. The government, particularly the military-industrial complex (Eisenhower’s phrase, not mine), is arguably more powerful and more corrupt than ever before. I wonder sometimes what Cicero felt working in Rome (before his exile, at least). I suspect he felt similar to how all those career civil servants feel today: proud of their own work, still optimistic about their country’s potential, yet vaguely worried that more powerful tides are slowly pulling the ship of state toward dangerous shoals.

Posted by ecologist at 03:07 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Paul Hawken’s new book, entitled Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, makes a simple argument in a straightforward fashion. This makes the book infinitely more readable than another book that makes a similar argument in incomprehensible poetic prose, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt . The only problem with the clarity of Hawken’s argument is that it brings into full relief its deficiencies.

The book begins by chronicling the rapid rise of the NGO, both in sheer numbers and in political power. Somehow, this multitude of NGOs is part of “The Movement”, heading toward a consistent vision of a better world. Hawken makes an analogy to an immune system, where thousands of different cells each do one tiny thing and together the whole system creates a collective property called “immunity.” Another analogy (which Hawken doesn’t make) would be the similarity to free market economies, where thousands of firms each independently just try to make money but overall the system achieves “efficiency”. The clear message of the book is that even if only a small percentage of NGOs achieve their goals, they will help further “The Movement”.

In a sense, this kind of argument is motivated by the desire of progressives to believe we can win in the absence of a single unifying ideology. The principle problem with the argument is the fuzzy concept of a “Movement”. The diversity of NGOs is staggering, and I don’t see any real coherent goal that they all share. In fact, many more conservative NGOs (which presumably express at least somewhat real desires by real people) are working at cross-purposes with more liberal NGOs.

It’s much better to think of this explosion of NGOs as simply the birth of a global civil society. Just as we don’t expect consensus in a republic among all the elected representative, since their constituents are too diverse, neither should we expect consensus among NGOs. There’s a word for this explosion of NGOs, and it’s not “Movement”, it’s “Democracy”.

Posted by ecologist at 02:19 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Here’s a humble little suggestion for journalists: why not restrict use of the word “president” and “prime minister” to those who were elected in free and fair elections. The current standard policy for most newspapers is to use whatever title a leader wants to use, leading to absurdities like “President Kim Jong-il.” If you stop to think about it, North Korean’s leader is clearly not “the elected head of a republican state,” as Oxford’s New American Dictionary defines it. “Prime minister” also contains an implication of democratic principles: the head of an elected government; the principal minister of a sovereign or state.”

Such a restriction on titles would have to be done consistently, to avoid the appearance of propaganda (and would of course not apply to direct quotations from sources). Why not have a policy that every country with a Freedom House
score of “Not Free”. For example, here’s how you might write the names of leaders whose countries do not meet this criterion:

Algeria’s Leader Abdelaziz Bouteflika
Angola’s Leader José Eduardo dos Santos
Azerbaijan’s Leader Ilham Heydar oglu Aliyev
Belarus’s Leader Alexander Lukashenko
Bhutan’s King Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuck
Brunei’s Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Mu'izzaddin Waddaulah
Burma’s General Than Shwe
Cambodia’s King Norodom Sihamoni
Cameroon’s Leader Paul Biya
Chad’s General Idriss Déby
China’s Leader Hu Jintao
Congo (Brazzaville)’s General Denis Sassou Nguesso
Congo (Kinshasa)’s Leader Joseph Kabila Kabange
Cote de Ivoire’s Leader Laurent Koudou Gbagbo
Cuba’s General Fidel Castro
Egypt’s Leader Muhammad Hosni Said Mubarak
Equatorial Guinea’s General Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo
Eritrea’s General Isaias Afewerki
Guinea’s General Lansana Conté
Iran’s Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
Iraq’s Leader Jalal Talabani
Kazakhstan’s Leader Nursultan Abishuly Nazarbayev
Laos’s General Choummaly Sayasone
Libya’s Leader Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi
Maldives’s Leader Maumoon Abdul Gayoom
North Korea’s General Kim Jong-il
Oman’s Sultan Sayyed Qaboos bin Sa’id Al ‘Bu Sa’id
Pakistan’s General Pervez Musharraf
Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani
Russia’s Leader Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin
Rwanda’s General Paul Kagame
Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud
Somalia’s Leader Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed
Sudan’s General Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir
Swaziland’s King Mswati III
Syria’s Leader Bashar al-Assad
Tajikistan’s Leader Emomalii Rahmon
Togo’s Faure Essozimna Gnassingbé
Tunisia’s General Zine El Abidine Ben Ali
Turkmenistan’s Leader Gurbanguly Mälikgulyýewiç Berdimuhammedow
United Arab Emirates’s Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan
Uzbekistan’s Leader Islom Abdug‘aniyevich Karimov
Vietnam’s Leader Nguy?n T?n D?ng
Zimbabwe’s General Robert Gabriel Mugabe

Posted by ecologist at 10:19 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Quite by accident, I’ve read recently two autobiographies written in completely opposite styles, even though the lives of their subjects have some similarities.

Having visited South Africa, I of course had to buy a copy of Nelson Mandela’s A Long Walk to Freedom. It’s a powerful story, of a rural boy moving to a big city, becoming a freedom fighter, getting arrested and spending the next 20 or so years in jail, before ultimately emerging victorious and founding a new democracy. It’s told in a conventional way, in the first person, practically beginning “I was born in…” That actually makes it a gem to read, because the chronology sucks you in, the desire to know what happens next. It also left me much more educated about the history of the African National Conference and South Africa. What the book doesn’t do great is place one inside the head of Nelson Mandela, feeling for a moment the complex mixture of emotions that must have confronted him in prison. Rather, the narrator just says what he felt in a detailed but rather clinical tone.

I returned home and began reading Vaclav Havel’s new memoir, To the Castle and Back, which discusses his personal transition, from political prisoner under the communist regime to the president of a new democracy, and now to retiree. According to these three phases of his life, there are three types of narration, randomly interspersed: the transcript from an interview about his dissident days; bits of actual memos he wrote while president; and reflections from retirement written during a sabbatical in Georgetown. As a historical document, the biography fails; not even the basic chronology is clearly states, leaving the non-Czech reader totally confused. Perhaps that’s the point however. Havel says directly in several beautiful passages that while his life story after the fact has a certain simplicity, at no point during his life did it ever seem that way to him while he lived it. So, rather than seeing some of the epic speeches Havel wrote, we see his plaintive notes to friends who are late giving him comments on the first draft of said speeches. This book is a philosophically intriguing piece of prose, a biography that tries hard to kill the idea of a life’s narrative, and in the process leaves most of the facts a muddle. Still, one gets a good sense of what it was like to have experienced what he experienced, even if just for scattered instants.

Posted by ecologist at 03:06 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Sixty years ago this June, General George Marshall stepped into Harvard Yard and delivered what may be the most famous commencement speech of all time, proposing what came to be called the Marshall Plan. On the anniversary of Marshall’s speech, I’ve been reflecting on what has changed since 1947. The developing countries are in the midst of a massive urbanization that makes the redevelopment of Europe after WWII look puny, and yet American leadership on the international stage is nowhere to be found, making John Edwards comments at the end of the last debate so important.

Marshall’s plan involved massive transfers of funds from America to the rebuilding countries in Western Europe, totaling some $170 billion in today’s dollars. Yet as Marshall made clear, it was a bargain, for by investing in Europe’s redevelopment America was insuring its own security. As he put it, it was only “logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.” Marshall’s key insight was that aid, properly conceived, is not charity but an essential part of national security.

After WWII, the clear link between Europe and the U.S. was direct military conflict. Marshall essentially argued that if America did not aid Europe it would have to deal eventually with another world war started in that region. Today the link is not a direct threat of interstate violence, but the growing web of transboundary issues. The increasingly globalized nature of the world economy and environment make what happens over there, in the developing world, central to what happens here in America.

And there is a lot happening over there. This year, for the first time in the history of Homo sapiens, a majority of our species live in cities. This process of urbanization will continue, driven by the greater number of deaths than births among urban dwellers, as well as rural-to-urban migration. By 2030 the United Nations Population Division estimates there will be 1.75 billion new urban residents, the equivalent of building a city the size of Vancouver every single week. More new dwellings will be built in the next 25 years than currently exist in all of Europe. If you were to push all this new urban area together, a good guess is that it will cover an area the size of California.

I spend most of my professional time thinking about one potent link between urbanization in the developing world and America’s well-being, the environment. The billions of new urban dwellers will increasingly demand more and more oil to drive their cars, as they begin to approach American standards of living. How much oil they end up using depends on the form of the coming urbanization, and whether safe and efficient mass transit is available. That in turn will affect whether over the long-term, the number of potential consumers of oil will grow faster than oil supply, resulting in much higher prices at the pump.

Additionally, there is now broad consensus in the scientific literature of the serious potential effects of global warming. Some of these effects, such as the flooding of low-lying areas and climate-change induced famines, may create large movements of refugees. One recent study by the British NGO Christian Aid predicts 250 million refugees will flee global warming’s effects, a figure several times larger than the number of displaced people during all of WWII. Just how bad global warming will be depends, in no small part, on how the poorer countries of the world grow and urbanize.

Yet American leadership during this crucial period in history is mostly absent, or at least distracted by other issues. We have engaged in a war of choice in Iraq that in one year costs us almost as much as the entire Marshall Plan. At the same time, we remain stingy with our foreign aid, giving only 17 cents in aid for every $100 our economy produces. How far we have come since Marshall’s vision of enlightened investment in a better world! If America continues to shirk its responsibilities, we will be abdicating a leadership role in the globalized world of the 21st century, to our own detriment.

And that’s why I found John Edwards comments at the end of his last debate so heartening. When asked what he highest priority would be when he got into office, he said it would be to “re-establish America's moral authority in the world”, saying that in comparison other issues “become less important and subservient.” It was a subtle answer, and perhaps one not well suited to the quick sound bite. However, it reflects exactly the kind of positive reengagement with the world that American needs.

Posted by ecologist at 02:45 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I managed, quite by accident, to read two books recently that covered the same theme in different ways. Both discussed the sphere of public debate in the United States, and its relative decline in recent decades as media sources have become more celebrity-driven. One leaves you feeling righteous, but with no practical outlet for that emotion. The other is eminently practical and useful for a politician, but leaves me feeling a little queasy.

I picked up Al Gore’s Assault on Reason at the Harvard Coop. I’ll confess to not having bought it, but instead spent a pleasant hour sitting in a chair in a bookstore, reading most of the text. Gore argues that reasoned discourse in American democracy has all but disappeared, replaced by entertainment of the basest kind. This has led, moreover, to a loss of faith in reason itself, in democratic decisions made by an informed electorate. I believe in the righteousness of Gore’s call, and its something I’ve felt myself for a long time. But I don’t believe that a hortatory call to return to reason will do much good, just as it generally has not done the environmental movement much good.

I actually listened to Mark Halperin and John Harris’s book The Way to Win during a long drive down to Millbrook, NY. The central point of the book is that the modern media freak show exists, and politicians better learn how to tame it, or at least live with it. They outline two basic paths a politicians can take: the Clinton path (play to the center) or the Rove path (play to the base). I loved the book in a Machiavellian way (although the pro-Hillary bias was strong enough that I sometimes wondered if Halpern was also moonlighting for her campaign), but what scared me was the implication that what matters in the public debate is the sincerity and vehemence of a politician’s ideas, rather than a reasoned examination of politician’s ideas.

I want to believe in another route, some path for our society that lies between these two books. It would have to be more than an elegy for our (slightly more) reasoned past. It would have to be more than a moral call to return to the values of the Enlightenment. It must somehow be consistent with the brave new media world we live in. Sadly, I don’t know what the other route is. Even Mr.Gore’s admirable book just barely beings to point the way toward a Modernism for the 21st century.

Posted by ecologist at 07:54 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It’s finally spring here in Cambridge, in a chilly New England kind of way. There’s a nor’easter blowing through now, bringing a cold, hard rain, making the future marathoners miserable in anticipation of tomorrow. The real sign of the coming season was the delicate pink blossoms of the ornamental magnolia on my street. They are a grateful reminder that I’ve survived another winter, and a chance to muse on all that has passed since the last time these flowers bloomed.

 

Through the whole last year, the Iraq War continued. The build up to the war and its aftermath have now gone on longer than the entire process of falling in love, getting engaged, getting married, and celebrating my second wedding anniversary. Food for thought, that is. The war doesn’t seem likely to end until after January 2009, when a new president is sworn in.

 

I’ve been reading recently Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, and it seems to have special relevance now. All historical analogies are inexact and dangerous, but I think the American body politic could learn something from the ancient Athenians. If the theatrical speeches of Thucydides are to be believed, at least Athenian politicians would talk openly of the paradox between their internal democracy, at the time one of the most open in the world, and their empire. One quote in particular stood out, describing how the wars in defense of their empire subverted democratic discourse:

 

“To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action.”

These meditations have left me in a melancholy mood. The magnolia tree, it now appears, will have to bloom twice more before our troops are withdrawn from Iraq. And then, if history is any guide, there will be another war somewhere else rather soon.

 

I hold out hope though that someday a set of institutions will make outright was between nations as unthinkable as an attack between Maryland and Virginia within the United States, or indeed as an attack between France and Germany within the European Union. This dream was the subject of a sparsely attend seminar this week at the Sheraton Commander hotel, entitled “Democracy and the Future.” George Soros gave a rambling keynote address, which was nicely summarized in Amartya Sen’s response. If democracy is participation in power, in the discussion within a society of what should be and shall be, then while Athens was democratic internally it ended significant democracy for many of the citizens of other states. The same is of course true, although Dr. Sen was too polite to mention it, for the United States today: unless we strive for something greater, history will also remember us for our grand democratic experiment at home and our profound failure of imagination abroad.

Posted by ecologist at 02:39 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

On Friday, I got the chance to see the Prime Minister of France, Dominique de Villepin, give a speech in the Forum at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Outside, the snow was coming down in white swirls, making the streets slushy in Cambridge and slowing the traffic down to walking speed. Nevertheless, he entered into the building on time, wearing the standard politician uniform of a black business suit with tie. After a somewhat fulsome introduction by a Harvard professor, he took the podium and gave a decent speech.

 

I was there, primarily, because I remember with fondness M. de Villepin’s speech at United Nations, opposing the US-led invasion of Iraq. He revisited the Iraq issue during his Harvard speech, making the general point that no country, even the United States, is powerful enough to be a global hegemon by itself. Therefore, international institutions must be strengthened.

 

I agree with this thesis, and it was generally well received at the Kennedy School, which is always internationalist in its character due to its diverse make-up. However, the specific programs he proposed seemed rather uninspiring: expansion of the UN Security Council to include Germany, Japan, and a representative of Africa; an international conference to solve the Iraq problem; another international conference to solve the Palestinian problem; and increased foreign development aid. No real news was made during the speech.

 

Most interesting was what lines drew applause. The fiscally-conservative elements in the crowd gave him applause for his promise to continue slowly modernizing and opening France’s economy. The libertarian elements (in the original sense of that term) clapped loudly when he said no country should torture its prisoners. Disturbingly, there was almost no overlap between these two groups, leading me to wonder what ever happened to the traditional conservative position of support for free trade and respect for the rule of law

 

To his credit, M. de Villepin was brave enough to take 30 minutes of unscripted questions from the audience. This is more than can be said for several American politicians, including our current President. In fact, M. de Villepin was noticeably more relaxed during this question period than during his speech. He displayed the great rhetorical skill of subtly changing a question to one he wanted to answer, and then responding to the latter. At times this meant he skipped the substance of a question, as when he dodged a question about poverty among North African immigrants by discussing unemployment in France among the general population. Still, I’m willing to forgive this rhetorical evasion, for one in such a political position as he must avoid making news accidentally.

Posted by ecologist at 02:18 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I sit on the edge of the tidal basin. There is not a hint of ice on the water, and its surface is so smooth it mirrors the low-lying jets passing overhead. Other than their rumble all is quiet, save for the honks of geese and the occasional chatter of a nearby game of touch football. On moments when the wind blows right, I can smell the stables of the Park Service, a refreshing odor after the cleanness of the rest of the district. Across the water tourists swarm up the steps of the Jefferson Memorial, and many of them with anti-war placards are turned away, for of course one can’t protest without the proper authorization.

It is colder on the white marble of Jefferson’s memorial. Here, thin shards of ice swirl in the water. On rare moments a shorebird tries to stand on one of these icebergs, only to quickly topple off. On my walk here I was struck by how brutal the new WWII memorial looks, naked granite, filling part of the National Mall. If humanity has a 21st century as bloody as the one we just left, perhaps the Mall will be filled with war memorials, and they will have to cut down the cherry trees to make space. As Jefferson said, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”

I’m on the fringes now of the rally. The protestors haven’t yet filled up their designated area, even though it’s already 11pm. This doesn’t bode well for a massive turnout, but there are perhaps 50,000 people here, with more arriving every second. What fascinates me is the intricate ecology of these marches. The socialist and communist papers are hawked aggressively near the entrance- they are the bottom feeders of the march, the carrion eaters. Everywhere, college kids swarming, playing football, filling up the kid’s merry-go-round. Near the front is the stage, full of speakers and media types, who are mostly ignored by everybody. The exception is some of the preacher-types, like Jesse Jackson, that can still spur the crowd. Even Jesse’s speech was a little bizarre, coinciding as it did with a nearby tribal drumming rendition of “Give Peace a Chance,” complete with a sax being played in a decidedly Dixieland style. Bizarreness is the order of the day. There was a man pushing a grocery cart around selling cold pretzels. There were a group of folks with a sign that said “Arms are for hugging,” and they thus went around hugging people. Numerous cute babies walked around in activist costumes. A man wore a classic Minuteman colonial costume, except for 1980’s vintage running shoes.

I’m now happily sitting in Teaism in Penn Quarter, digesting my meal. The place has been taken over by activists, and has a hip bohemian vibe because of it. The march after the rally was exhausting, a slow-motion slog around the Capitol. It was pleasing to see us all stretched out, surrounding the building. Interestingly, the staffers in many of the Senate office buildings had put anti-war placards up in the windows, and a few staffers even greeted the crowd on behalf of their senator!

It’s nighttime now, and I’m looking out a plate glass window onto Connecticut Avenue. I marveled as I walked here how many contradictions float around the city. It is modern and clean, but there’s a homeless person over practically every street vent. One can sense the power that resides in the city when a black town car drives by, the man in the back wearing a tuxedo. And yet the city seems shockingly unsure of itself. To Americans, the land inside the Beltway has ceased to be a place where good happens, at least consistently (I still hold out hope), and instead is just a place of necessary secrets. You see this in some of the government servants who jog by on the Mall- they are proud of themselves for being in DC in a position of power, rather than for the good things they did with their power.

Posted by ecologist at 02:45 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I will be in Washington on January 27, for United for Peace and Justice’s legal, permitted demonstration against the escalation of the war in Iraq. The time seems ripe now, and an effective protest may make a huge difference. The new Democratic Congress has to listen to the anti-war movement, at least to some extent, for we are part of their constituency. Moreover, the growing consensus opinion that the troop escalation is wrong (70% in a recent AP poll) adds political clout to the protest. I am also happy, frankly, that UFPJ has decided not to work with ANSWER, a more militant coalition. This will make the message of the march more focused and clear.

 

Who knows if the march will really be effective, or change any Congressman’s mind about how to vote? My opinion is that every person should have a set of bedrock moral beliefs that are not cast aside when they are inefficient. One should, or course, try to make one’s actions in support of these beliefs as politically effective as possible. A decent argument could be made that protest events are less effective as a political tool in the US than they once were. But history is mysterious, and sometimes one has to act without knowing the full consequences of one’s action. Vaclav Havel writes eloquently about this with regards to the Charter 77. At the time it was a mostly symbolic manifesto calling for more civil freedoms within the Czech communist system. In the end, the Charter ended up starting a chain of events that profoundly changed the Czech system, but no one knew in advance it would turn out that way. At some point a man has to commit to concrete actions that are consistent with his beliefs and improve the world a bit, and leave the writing of future history to the historians.

 

There is a poisonous, hip irony out there on the web that is deeply cynical about the UFPJ march. Wonkette gives probably the most egregious example, when she says “It won’t make a bit of difference, but you might get lucky with a hippie!” While I’m sure there will be a few members of the hippie species at the march, the vast majority of folks will be quite normal middle-class liberals. Wonkette’s comments reveal a deep smugness. The entire blogosphere seems to me a bit like the salons of aristocrats in Paris in the 19^th century, supportive of the Enlightenment but fearful of the rabble.

 

There’s also a darker insinuation in Wonkette’s remarks, that this march is just protest for protest’s sake. Milan Kundera summarized this as kitsch:

“Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.”

Bloggers hate this second tear, and well they should- the most important function of the blogosphere is as a BS detector. However, our hip, poisonous irony has also banished the first tear. I reject that. In a democracy, I want people to react emotionally (but legally) when their government invades a foreign country, displacing hundreds of thousands and killing an almost equal number. I want people to shed that first tear. And if that makes me un-ironic and subject to Wonkette’s well-crafted satire, then so be it.

Posted by ecologist at 01:08 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I had lunch in a little joint just outside Emory University. It served an odd mix of falafel and sushi. A man in a kimono frying garbanzo beans is quite a sight. To top it off, they were playing Louis Armstrong’s cover of Edith Piaf’s Ma Vie en Rose, while the couple at the nearby table spoke Persian. It was so multicultural that it was comic. The experience reminded me that for all the problems of America, for all of its current follies overseas, it is still a magical land, a land where people of all races and creeds do mingle. This is particularly true in cities, where physical proximity and increased economic opportunities break down barriers among people. This is the heartland of America, not some rural portion of the middle of the country.

Posted by ecologist at 06:31 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The heavy book rests on my coffee table, half-read: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Abridged Edition (thank goodness!). It was some desire for intellectual completeness, for a sense of history, that enticed me to bring the tome home. Not Roman history, for I’m quite sure that there are better, more accurate modern histories, but rather the book itself as history. There is a certain set of old-school scholars (quite literally!) floating around Harvard Square who draw a part of their worldview from Gibbon’s prose, who interpret the current negative elements of American Society as a sign of moral corruption that inevitably arises from imperial power. It was to more fully understand this worldview that I picked up the work.

I was a bit surprised then, rather stupidly, to realize that the entire collapse of the Roman Republic into a despotic Empire merits nary a chapter. Living under a monarchy, Gibbon was quite naturally interested in why the Roman Empire varied from a quite well-run regime to the utter chaos of a Nero. And, to my untrained eye, Gibbon seems to draw a clear parallel to the English case: good rulers respect tradition and minimize flagrant uses of power. How exactly this pertains to the American Republic is thus quite unclear. Perhaps the dusty scholars of Harvard Square believe in the same way that to the extent respect for republican traditions restrains our chief executive, our Republic is strengthened.

I’ve also been quite shocked with the openness with which Gibbon mocks the Christian church. Today, as Richard Dawkins has learned, critiquing Christian superstition is the quickest route to being kicked out of the public debate. Something Gibbon said struck me as still true today, indeed perhaps behind the rise of fundamentalism that we see in most great religions today:

“The decline of ancient prejudice exposed a very numerous portion of humankind to the danger of a painful and comfortless situation. A state of skepticism and suspense may amuse a few inquisitive minds. But the practice of superstition is so congenial to the multitude, that if they are forcibly awakened, they still regret the loss of their pleasing vision.”

Posted by ecologist at 03:45 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

My career is an ecologist, trying to elucidate some of the painful details of how development can be made more sustainable. I often have wondered to myself how this career connects intellectually or philosophically with my passion against this war against Iraq, or indeed any such act of imperialism. I did, after all, meet my wife at an anti-war rally.

Recently, I was struck with the idea that perhaps the connection between the two is that both beliefs posit that there is some core of value and worth to each human being that is independent of the circumstances of his birth. Opposition to nationalism is predicated on the ideal that there are certain natural rights every person deserves, regardless of where on Earth’s surface he fell out of his mother’s womb. The fight for sustainable development argues that appropriate access to the natural heritage of mankind should be available to all, regardless of where or when they have been or will be born.

Posted by ecologist at 08:46 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The situation in Iraq is going from bad to worse, and the mainstream opinion now seems to be that this preventive (at best) war was a horrible idea. Into this milieu steps Stephen Walt’s new book, “Taming American Power: The Global Response to US Primacy.” He effectively outlines exactly how far ahead of other countries the US is, in terms of economic and (especially) military power. His list of tactics that countries use to partner with the U.S. is masterful, bravely including discussion off the power of lobbying groups like AIPAC. His discussion of the ways countries try to oppose the U.S. is remarkably thorough, from balancing to balking to binding. Finally, he outlines his own political position, and advocates a return to American’s traditional pattern of “offshore balancing.” All in all, a though provoking read on American military power from a mainstream liberal perspective.

It’s a perspective I wholeheartedly agree with, and one that on a pragmatic level I would advocate for. Still, what’s most interesting to what is not said. The strongest word Dr. Walt can bring himself to use to describe the U.S.’s power is “primacy,” and he even rejects “hegemony” as too strong a word. Dear God, if having a military budget seven times larger than any other country isn’t enough to make us a hegemon, what is? More importantly, I’m frankly disappointed in how the book stays stubbornly in a realist perspective, where sovereign states are doomed to struggle from power. International treaties are from this perspective just a convenient excuse to bind U.S. power, not an expression of the will of the international community. The best the world can hope for, according to Dr. Walt, is this or that country being hegemon. This is the best the brightest minds of the Kennedy School of Government can come up with? Why not talk openly, as President Kennedy did, about our desire for something other than a “Pax Americana,” our hope that something other than military power will control the fate of humanity.

Posted by ecologist at 04:35 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Last week was a busy week for me. I was doing lots of highly technical tasks related to my research. It was a bit boring, but stuff that I believe is intellectually important. And I was in the thrill of the hunt, in the bubble, lost in my little technical details.

So it was a shock when I emerged from my bubble to find that Congress had really done it: they had officially given the president the power to imprison whomever he wants, for as long as he deems proper, before trying them in a military tribunal that has only minimal consideration for the rights of the defendant. There seems to be some disagreement about what exactly this means for citizens, but it’s clear that for millions of legal immigrants into the United States, the right to petition for the writ of habeas corpus is gone.

In my own little prosperous corner of the country, Harvard Square, the thousands of foreign scholars all chuckle nervously in their beers. “It’s not like it’ll affect us,” they say, “just a handful of terrorists, and maybe a few unlikely Arab men wrongly picked up.” Maybe. Maybe we’ll look back on this a few decades the way we look back on the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during WWII- an aberration that didn’t infect the rest of the body politic. But often- not always but often- a precedent like this spreads. I worry that in a few decades we will come to define all those that question the government’s tactics in the war on terrorism as enemy combatants. Once the logical line of habeas corpus is gone, the boundary between those within the rule and those beyond the pale grows fuzzy indeed.

And yet life in Harvard Square goes on. We keep racking our brains about research, keep being scholars. During lunch, we leave the computers behind and sit in the gorgeous fall sun. Somehow it seems wrong that something so symbolically charged could be lost, and yet the flow of things move on. There’s a human desire, as Shakespeare well understand, for big events to resound throughout: Caesar’s death was foretold by freak omens and lightening. Instead, all is quiet once you turn off CNN.

Posted by ecologist at 05:12 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve been reading “Environmental Governance Reconsidered”, an excellent collection of essays on how environmentalists are trying to implement policy that leads to a healthier, cleaner world. In an eloquent intro, Robert Durant outlines the “second generation” of environmental governance that is now coming of age and moving out of the shadow of its ancestor, command-and-control legislation. Durant’s conception is really quite similar to James Speth’s idea of “jazz”: a flexible, non-hierarchical set of policies that are bottom-up, not top-down. Durant lists three main themes: reconceptualizing purpose, reconnecting with stakeholders, and redefining administrative rationality. While I agree with all three of these in principle, they also give me a deep sense of unease.

Essentially, “reconceptualizing purpose” means recognizing that most serious environmental problems cross national borders, and thus necessitate cross-border action. An obvious example would be global warming, where the actions of every nation affect every other nation. The difficulty, of course, is that sovereignty stops at the border: all international environmental treaties are essentially promises of better performance, with only weak, ad hoc enforcement provisions. Given this state of international anarchy, international environmental work has to collaborative and flexible. It seems to me quite dishonest of environmentalists to pretend that we are being flexible because it’s the best thing for the environment; we are being flexible because it’s the best we can do under the circumstances. The latter position, if adopted, also allows environmentalists to say clearly that sovereignty matters: meaningful progress on global environmental issues depends on having international enforcement mechanisms with teeth. Indeed, I would second here the calls of others for something like a World Environmental Organization, equivalent in power to the World Trade Organization.

“Reconnecting with stakeholders” is of course always important. I worry though that much of this topic really just advocates political devolution, the return of sovereignty to a level of governance below that at which the problem occurs. The environmental consequences of political devolution have been mixed at best. For example, local-rule for Forest Service lands often ends up empowering resource extraction industries at the expense of environmental interests.

“Redefining administrative rationality” seems to mean little more than being flexible, and avoiding command-and-control environmental policies. Cap-and-trade systems would be the preeminent example of a flexible “redefinition” of pollution controls, and have certainly been effective in some cases like the Clean Air Act. However, as the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol shows, these often end up being horribly complex and difficult to administer. They also are easily captured by industry for their own interests.

In sum, “jazz” may be a compelling metaphor, but some orchestration is needed. To stretch the metaphor some more, what we need is not free jazz stylings but a organized big band swing sound. In the international arena, this means strong treaty enforcement powers are needed. Other tactical issues are very important but ultimately secondary.

Posted by ecologist at 03:47 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I spend a lot of time in my job thinking about landscape fragmentation, the splintering of the land into smaller and smaller parcels, each subject to different ownership and different management. As I’ve discussed before, this is in a sense very democratic- a large proportion of Americans own a little plot of land and gain the economic benefits that entails. Still, the result has not been some Jeffersonian agrarian landscape, but suburbia. All this fragmentation has made land conservation very difficult, as a myriad environmental NGOs chase after ever smaller parcels of land, not to mention some of the other problems of sprawl.

I’ve been realizing though that it’s not just the land that’s becoming more fragmented. Within the US, the demographic data clearly show that our neighborhoods are becoming more and more segregated by class, the rich living with the rich, the poor with the poor. Internationally the situation is even starker: the average middle-class American will never see how the one-sixth of humanity in slums truly lives. Incredibly, Americans are as segregated by race now than they were during the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Perhaps most ominous for us as a democracy, our neighborhoods are now mostly of a single party-affiliation, meaning spirited political debates in public places are all too often a thing of the past.

Indeed, perhaps we live in the era of fragmentation, when we lose the experience of having a shared culture and instead retreat into our own world. The Internet, especially, has fragmented the media bubble. We now all, more and more, consume the news we want, tending to read sources with biases we already share. It’s not that this tendency is completely new- it’s always been there, we’ve all lived in different worlds to some extent. But now the Internet, which so many dreamed would break down barriers (and occasionally can) seems to be more often reifying them: the fragmented world keeps cracking into ever smaller pieces.

Posted by ecologist at 05:39 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

During a conversation with an ex-pat American here in Paris, we were discussing the very different perspectives on social change in the United States and France. The American perspective is mostly individualistic. Social change is seen as something to be achieved by changing the hearts of individuals, and above all by reforming one’s own life. One can see this tendency in the many hours individuals of the American Left spend practicing vegetarianism, recycling, and a whole host of important but fundamentally personal things. Occasionally, this philosophy reaches the silly level where adherents think their individual small acts will somehow magically change the entire world. In contrast, the French perspective is mostly collective, the critique mostly systemic. One sees this trend most severely in the vestiges of the Communist party, whose members believe that true social change will occur only with a revolution. This too reaches the height of absurdity, as when leftists here in France refuse to participate in current politics, preferring to wait for the promised revolution. In my own politics, I’ve always believed in a position somewhere between the two poles makes the most sense. It’s about building a politics of the actual rather than a politics of the ideal. As was once said, the perfect is the enemy of the good.

Posted by ecologist at 12:13 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

News broke this week of the National Security Agency’s seizure of essentially every Americans’ calling history that they could get their hands on. I feel shocked and saddened, but not particularly surprised, given the track records of the principles involved. Interestingly, the press coverage has focused on the scope of the program (some have defended that they aren’t listening to the content of the conversations) or its effectiveness (statistically, a database of all Americans’ phone call seems likely to generate so many false positives as to be useless for law enforcement). To me, this focus seems to miss the point. The Administration has clearly intentionally violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the FISA law. It has clearly intentionally violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the 4th Amendment. What is dangerous about the Bush Administration then is not this or that action and whether it is effective, but their direct assault on the principle of constitutionalism. I mean this in the broad sense, where constitutionalism is simply the limitation of government by a set of publicly-defined, transparent laws. The reason every English-speaking schoolchild studies the Magna Carta is that it was one of the first documents of constitutionalism; the actual specifics of the rules in the Magna Carta are quite unimportant to modern men.

Whatever your political party, you have to admit that constitutionalism is central to what made the United States the great democracy that it is: we are a country of laws, not of men. What does it mean then, that some of our men of letters argue that it doesn’t matter that the president knowingly and willingly violated the law, because it was effective? When any columnist or reporter makes this argument, they are becoming, in the terminology of Milan Kundera, “the ally of their own gravediggers.” If there is no constitutionalism, if there are no rules within which democracy functions, then there are no political writers, only polemicists. Honest political writing is an effort to influence public opinion so as to democratically shape policy. If there no laws for the powerful, then writers become little more than Mark Anthony to a Caesar: skilled orators, perhaps, but not free men.

Posted by ecologist at 08:40 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Major protects continued this week in Paris, as students and some unions agitated against a new labor law that makes it easier to higher and fire young workers. In the Anglo-American press, the protests have generally been portrayed as a bunch of unruly kids, causing trouble. Let’s leave aside the very real policy dilemma this law tried to solve, and look instead at this characterization of French students as unruly or, even darker, “ungovernable.” This characterization is actually common whenever we discuss France, and I believe its overtones are ominous signs of our lack of respect for democracy.

Larry Summers’ ouster from his post as Harvard is another example of this canard. In the media, it is often describe as a coup by a small cabal of liberal faculty out to get Dr. Summers since he wasn’t politically correct enough. Forget for a second whether you agree with Dr. Summers’ policies or not: couldn’t one just as correctly say “a large plurality of the faculty had no confidence in his leadership, and voted to remove him”? But no, instead Harvard is now the “ungovernable university.”

I believe this particular concept of “ungovernability” is a covert attack on democracy. Democracy is participation in power, as Cicero once famously wrote. Interest groups within a democracy must have enough freedom to reflect on what is in their political interest, and then have appropriate power to agitate for what they want. Granted, the process of reflection must be reasoned and measured, not a mob mentality; granted, the amount of power an interest group can wield should not be disproportionate with their support among the general populace nor inconsistent with fundamental rights (I believe it is this caveat being violated that led New York City to be called the “ungovernable city”). However, if both these caveats obtain,, then we must view protest and agitation as an integral part of democracy.

The students in France have thought deeply about what is good for them, and are fighting for it. While we might argue that their position is not ideal for France as a whole, we must admit that the students know their own interests better than we do! Similarly, the faculty thought deeply about the Summers regime, and realized they wanted him gon. Within his constituency, therefore, it was rational that he was forced out, even if many outside Harvard were not pleased. In short, when the Anglo-American press calls a group “ungovernable” it is usually because they have the temerity to govern themselves! Behind this conception of “ungovernability” is a deep elitism, an idea that a certain elite group knows better than “they” what is best for them, and since the result desired is not occurring, the system must be flawed. Nothing could be further from the idea of democracy; vigorous and strident political debate is not inimical to democracy, but essential to it.

Posted by ecologist at 02:49 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve been reading Amartya Sen’s marvelous book “Development at Freedom,” and I’ve found it revelatory, not for its novelty, but its clarity. Properly understood, Sen’s definition of “development” is functionally the same as the environmental community’s sacred goal, “sustainable development.” Basically, Sen argues that true development is the increase in the capability, or freedom, to live the way one would wish to live. He categorizes five instrumental freedoms: Political freedom, the ability to participate in the exercise of political power (Cicero’s definition); Adequate economic facilities to allow people to achieve their monetary goals; Social opportunities, arrangements that society makes for education, health care, and other essentials; Transparency guarantees, “the freedom to deal with one another under guarantees of disclosure and lucidity”; Protective security, such as minimal unemployment benefits.

If you stop to think about it, this is the world that “sustainable development” is supposed to create. We environmentalists have simply added three constraints to Sen’s freedom: there must be inter-generational equity, so that future generations have similar levels of freedom as today’s generation; there must be social justice, so that within a society the least free person has adequate freedom; and there must be trans-frontier justice, so that there is adequate freedom in all societies. I believe all three of these qualifiers are implicit in Sen’s writing, and in Rawls’ writing for that matter.

Despite the simplicity and beauty of this argument, I am well aware that it will make many of my fellow environmental scientists cringe. There is a fear that all this talk is too vague, and far too difficult to quantify. More and more though I think this can be overcome: look at the effectiveness of the UN’s Human Development Index, for example. I suspect many environmentalists also cringe because Sen’s definition of “development” explicitly has a political component. If the environmental mainstream really adopted it, it would be much harder for environmentalists to hid behind the vagueness of the term “sustainable development”, and work in authoritarian regimes like the Congo (Kishasha).

Posted by ecologist at 09:26 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This list goes out to all my friends and colleagues in Europe. I may share many progressive viewpoints with them, but I get occasionally frustrated by how they talk about the United States and its politics. The scope of the problem became more apparent after the chilly reception that Bernard Henri-Levy’s new book received in the United State, even among folks who are its natural ideological allies (see Garrison Keiler’s excellent review of the book for more). Here then are 10 facts European progressives should keep in mind when writing if they want Americans to be at all receptive to their argument:

1. America is a big country, which if overlaid on Europe would stretch from Lisbon to Baghdad. I say this not to be chauvinistic (although there are plenty of Americans who would be), but just to point out that there’s an enormous amount of terrain for a visitor like Mr. Henry-Levi to cover, ranging from swampy lowlands to vast deserts to tall sierras.
2. America is very diverse ethnically, with arguably more ethnic variation than Europe. Certainly, the percentage of Americans who are 1st or 2nd generation immigrants (10.4%) is far higher here than in the EU. These waves of immigrants have come in complex, spatially heterogeneous patterns, creating odd political outliers like the vehemently anti-Castro Cubans of Miami.
3. While perhaps not as culturally differentiated as Europe, where one switches languages every couple hundred miles, there is significant cultural variation in the US. The Southeastern States, with their legacy of slavery, are very different in culture and norms than the industrial Northeast. In the Western US it gets even more complicated: you have Nevada, where prostitution and gambling and just about everything else is legal, right next to conservative Mormon Utah! Most importantly, the United States has a pronounced cultural split between its urban and rural cultures. In many senses, these two groups are now fighting for power.
4. It is rather pointless to talk about “American culture” or “American politics” as a single unitary entity, any more than one can talk about a “European culture” without sounding a bit naïve to a European about the complexity and diversity of that continent.
5. There are of course some unifying traits for Americans, but they are rather few and far between, truthfully. Moreover, they tend to be of an almost philosophic nature, concerning our general temperament, rather than specific things like baseball or peanut butter (both of which substantial minorities of Americans hate). Alexis de Tocqueville does as good a job as anybody in sketching these things out, and I personally feel like no one’s really improved on his work.
6. Even the few unifying traits that exist have significant subpopulations in the US that counteract the general rule. Like all generalizations I as an American could make about Europeans, they would become harmful if they’re used to prejudge.
7. Politics in America is not some simple function of a unitary “American” character. In fact the federal system of state autonomy makes each state its own political world, to a degree many foreigners from countries with centralized governments often don’t understand.
8. Political parties in the US serve as broad coalitions, rather than as the strident unified political parties one sees in parliamentary systems. For constitutional and historical reasons (that I often bemoan) Americans are stuck with this system, which transfers all the public compromises among parties in a parliamentary system when they form a governing coalition into the back room, behind the scenes. Therefore, statements about the view of “the Republicans” strike most Americans as facile- it’s not even really worth talking politics about them until you recognize at least their 3 or 4 major constituents.
9. The current religious right-wing ascendancy at the Federal level really the political victory of a relatively small percentage of people who have control of one of our two parties, and so far haven’t shattered the rest of the party’s coalition. It doesn’t reflect anything near the majority of its own party.
10. All the electoral rules at a Federal level in the US have a consistent and intentional bias toward rural areas and away from urban areas, and toward “battleground states” (where neither party is dominant) and away from certain states (like California). This tends to make the Federal government in the US lag substantially behind urban areas in adopting progressive, cosmopolitan ideas. Don’t read too much into American culture by the politics in Washington.

Posted by ecologist at 09:22 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I just finished reading Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, and I must admit to being pleasantly surprised. I went into the work with a dislike of the book absorbed from dozens of leftist writers, who often described it as an unapologetic celebration of the victory of unbridled capitalism. I was amused to see it for sale, therefore, at an airport book kiosk (the selection of philosophy books in airports is truly bizarre), and flabbergasted to find that I agreed with Fukuyama’s main points. There has been an empirical trend over the last two centuries, and both Fukuyama and I are quite happy about it, although I disagree with his characterization of the process of democratization as inevitable in a Hegelian sense (as opposed to just highly probable and highly desirable). We both agree that what drives most people to overthrow authoritarian regimes and install democratic regimes is the desire for recognition, or thymos. We both believe that to some extent the appearance of civil liberties is correlated with economic liberties, although we might disagree about the arrow of causality. And we both fundamentally feel that De Tocqueville was right: there is sometimes a tradeoff between equality and liberty.

However, Fukuyama’s work reminds me of a general malady in philosophy: any sufficiently abstract philosophy can be made to support an author’s political and class interests. He sees the particular form of economic development known as the Washington Consensus as a positive thing, even though it is far from pure economic liberty. He sees military adventures to spread democracy at the barrel of a gun as a good thing, presaging the current Bush Doctrine. Most oddly, he sees efforts to reform and strengthen the United Nations as an evil effort: democracy within nation-states is good, but apparently democracy between nation-states is bad!

Still, fundamentally Fukuyama and I agree about what should be the United States’ goal in foreign policy, to help make the world more democratic, even if we disagree about the means to get there. How sad then that (it appears) the Democratic party establishment has abandoned this noble goal and seems to offer only “realism” as an alternative to Bush’s crusades. We are the party of true democracy at home, as we push to make sure every eligible voter can have their vote accurately counted. We are the party of true democracy abroad, as we push Bush to work through the United Nations Security Council to peacefully restrain Iran’s nuclear program. Why then have we ceded this ideological ground? What is the Democratic party, if we are not the champions of democracy?!

Posted by ecologist at 09:17 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

One of things that ecologists and conservations spend a lot of time worrying about is the process of “parcelization”, which is rampant worldwide. Parcelization is just an infelicitous term used to describe the process by which one parcel of land is split into many smaller pieces of land. It is seen as the first step in a sequence (or spiral) of events that inevitably reduce the ecosystem services that land provides to humanity. First, after some triggering event a large parcel is subdivided legally into a set of smaller parcels, whose boundaries are set by the landowner and the relevant town or county planning commission (in some states, like Massachusetts, landowners have free reign when it comes to how to subdivide their land). The triggering event is often the death of the previous landowner, which usually brings the land into the hand of his descendants, who are often interested in maximizing the sale value of the property by subdivision. Second, these smaller parcels are generally sold to a developer, who builds a set of houses that often perforate intact habitat. What’s worse, from an ecologist’s perspective, is that these small parcels are usually too small to be managed in an ecologically beneficial way- it is impossible to manage for forest resources in a sustainable way on a parcel below a certain size, just as it is impossible to use controlled burns to minimize the risk of catastrophic fire, just as it is difficult to provide habitat to many wide-ranging species. Third, landscapes almost never go back toward a more intact state, but instead the process of parcelization continues further.

I’ve realized recently, however, that there’s an ideological split between this way of talking about land and the old progressive ideal of land ownership. Thomas Jefferson and others propounded agrarianism, the desirability of every citizen having a small farm that provides a measure of self-sufficiency and economic stability. When freed slaves were promised the proverbial (and apocryphal) “40 acres and a mule”, the motivation was similar, to strengthen U.S. democracy by having all citizens having some basic landholdings. In most developed countries today, agrarianism seems irrelevant to the mostly industrial and postindustrial world we live in, but the ideal lives on in a sense in the quest of the U.S. to make sure home ownership is available to a broad spectrum of Americans. In developing countries, of course, land reform remains a contentious topic, and one that I believe must be addressed in countries where old colonial systems of concentrated land ownership persist.

Given this progressive pedigree of the ideal of an equitable distribution of land, ecologists and conservationists must be careful with how they talk about parcelization. We must state honestly what needs are driving increasing numbers of Americans to leave dense urban regions for less dense suburban or exurban regions:
1. Many people are simply moving away from cities in a quest to find an affordable way to own a house.
2. They are seeking access to recreational amenities, like a walk in the woods or the babble of a brook, that are often absent from urban settings.
3. They are fleeing negative aspects of urban like, like higher crime and bad public schools, by going out to the suburbs or exurbs.
Our goal as conservationists must be offer political alternative that satisfy these needs with a minimum of parcelization. These must be offered to the body politic not as solutions to the “evils of parcelization”, which will be inevitably portrayed as elitist, but as ways to more fully satisfy the needs of Americans while preserving the environment. After all, Thomas Jefferson did not present agrarianism primarily because of some mystical quality of the soil (although there’s a bit of that in his writings), but because ownership of small farms led to political opportunity and democratic power. In today’s world, owning a house on a 40 acre ranchette doesn’t bring any more political power to the owner than owning a smaller house on a ½ acre lot.

I can think of two ways that conservationists can begin to address the problem of parcelization. First, we need to make urban areas more livable places. If home ownership can be made more practical to urban dwellers, crime can be reduced, and schools can be improved that much of the things pushing young parents out of the city would cease. There is much work on this front by people pushing affordable housing agendas, etc., which is wonderful. Second, in more rural locations, we need to offer more viable legal means for a set of people to share ownership in a property without legally subdividing the land. For example, states could change their subdivision laws so that instead of having an absolute minimum lot size, an increased number of (small) lots could be created if they were clustered on one edge of a parcel. The remainder of the parcel would go under a conservation easement, and be open for recreational use by all members of the community.

Posted by ecologist at 09:15 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Previously, I’ve attempted to construct voting districts for the whole world, with an equal number of people in each one. This all stems from a proposal in George Monbiot’s book calling for a global parliament, as a compliment to or replacement for the United Nations and its one-nation-one-vote paradigm. Monbiot points out that this proposal is repulsive to many in the developed world, simply because of the overwhelming dominance in the system of the developing countries, due to their large populations. As a landscape ecologist and a geographer, I was interested in how this would look on a map. My previous algorithm for mapping this was very crude, and came up with very square-looking voting districts. My current algorithm allows the boundaries of districts to follow gradients in population density, and is a great improvement.

Below is a map of 400 voting blocks of approximately equal population, based on the excellent global grid of population in 1995 available from the Columbia Earth Institute. First of all, let me say what this map is NOT: It is not an attempt to put forth a reasonable set of voting districts (which would be rather arrogant of me, as such things are always the outcome of a political process), nor is it an endorsement necessarily of Monbiot’s scheme for a world parliament. The idea is to get people thinking about how political power would be distributed if every person on earth had equal voting power. While national boundaries are shown on the map to help orient the reader, they were not used at all in the creation of these voting districts, and so the districts freely span national boundaries when population densities require that. Note the high density of small regions in southeastern Asia, particularly India and China- this is simply due to the high population density in these places.

Click on the thumbnails below to view a global map and close up maps of a variety of areas. Each color is a region with around 15 million people. Note that these are high-resolution JPEGs  (600 DPI) that don't always display well in a browser, but if you download them they look and print great in something like Photoshop.

Now, technical details on how this was made: Population data were taken from the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), Columbia University; International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI); and World Resources Institute (WRI). 2000. Gridded Population of the World (GPW), Version 2. Palisades, NY: CIESIN, Columbia University. Available at http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/plue/gpw. This gives population estimates in latitude/longitude for cells that are about 5km on a side near the equator. To perform my calculations in a projection system that is more equal-area than geographic, the grid was projected into a Robinson projectio