17  Ethics, environmental change and human security

Roberto P. Guimarães

Introduction: sustainable development, from oxymoron to paradigm shift

Humankind has given the impression, especially in the past decade, that it is acquiring a clear understanding of the challenges that modern civilization will have to overcome in order to mitigate and adapt to environmental stress. Yet, the issues that seem to permeate the debate within and between nation-states elude the nature of the environmental crisis. The naiveté of many world leaders today recalls the example offered by Alvin Toffler (1974) about the simplemindedness of the elders of an Indian tribe that for centuries lived off the produce of a river at its doorstep. Its culture and economy are based upon fishing, boat building, and harvesting from the soil fertilized by the river, so that the future of this community merely repeats its past. But what happens when this tribe pursues its traditional style of development unaware that a dam is being built upstream? Its image of the future is misled, dangerously misled, for the river will soon dry up or become a trickle (Guimarães, 2003).

In effect, never before have we been so close not to disaster – in the way many zealot environmentalists believe – but rather to experiencing, on a planetary basis, the limitations of our fragile life support systems. Activists and intellectuals alike tell us that nothing short of a planetary ethics must arise if we are to survive as a species (Guimarães, 1991a). This transition to sustainability implies a profound change in the prevailing archetype of civilization, particularly in what it refers to as its cultural pattern of articulating humans and nature. An adequate understanding about this transition imposes the recognition that humankind is facing the exhaustion of a style of development that is ecologically wasteful (depletes the natural resource base), socially perverse (generates poverty and inequality), politically unjust (freezes absolute and relative scarcity of access to resources), ethically objectionable (disrespects human and non-human life forms), and culturally alienated (estranges fellow human beings and subjugates nature) (Guimarães, 2001). Thus, the often repeated statement that human beings must constitute the center and the raison d’être of development calls for a new development style that must be:

To further complicate matters, most scenarios discussed today about the new millennium emphasize the process of globalization, often defined exclusively in economic, financial or commercial aspects. Not a few, including myself, consider it more revealing to unveil globalization from a sustainable development perspective. These questions include, for instance, the economic rationality of globalization in its many dimensions vis-à-vis the dynamics and the pace of natural processes. Indeed, the prospects of a process of globalization founded upon an upward, unlimited and unchecked economic growth model are also seriously disputed, particularly in view of the reality of exhaustion of many natural resources (e.g., fauna, flora, non-renewable sources of energy) as well as of deterioration of natural processes which are crucial for the ecosystem viability of life on the planet (ozone layer, climate, etc.) (e.g., MEA, 2005; IPCC, 2007). As the poignant remark attributed to Kenneth Boulding (Uldrich, 2008:184; RSA, 2011), a leading pioneer of sustainability, indicates “anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

Environmental change as an ethical challenge

The sudden centrality of an ethical dimension in social life poses hitherto unforeseen challenges to the social sciences, and to the everyday concerns of citizens, government and private enterprises as well. Compounding these challenges is the current ideological discourse on ethics, markets, and governmental regulation. In this respect, what we confront nowadays no longer refers solely to the situation pictured in the report of the Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972), when attention was drawn to the exhaustion of natural resources. After all, society may confront such challenges, albeit in an imperfect and limited fashion, via substitution of natural capital for physical capital, be it through the invention of new products that substitute near-exhausted resources (e.g., hydrogen for petroleum to fuel transportation), be it by new technologies (more fuel-efficient engines) that enlarge existing reserves. What we face today are radically different circumstances. Present institutions must cope with the frailty of environmental processes that cannot be simply substituted by others. One cannot substitute the ozone layer, neither can climate stability be substituted, unless one accepts as valid the search of another planet to where earthlings may migrate once the cycles and natural processes which support life on Earth are ultimately drained. It characterizes the uniqueness of the contemporary world that the higher we rise in advancing our technological society, the more intimate and demanding the interconnections between ourselves and our forgotten nature become, as some of environmental services and natural resources for satisfying them become exhausted by global processes such as climate change. As the competition to grasp a greater share of resources goes unchecked, we place increasing strains upon the stability of our social and political institutions.

As already pointed out, this new (sustainability) paradigm emphasizes that development must produce qualitative changes in the quality of life of human beings. More than the mercantile goods and services exchanged in the market, these aspects include the social, cultural and aesthetic dimensions of meeting material and spiritual needs. After all,

Klaus Töpfer (2001) could not have been more poignant, condemning the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States, when he warned that:

What bonds and upholds this specific understanding of sustainability is the urgent need for a new ethics of development that incorporates current concerns for the environment. This follows an already established tradition in development ethics that dates back to Adam Smith (1976), has among its most important modern intellectuals Joseph Lebret and René Moreux (1942), Gunnar Myrdal (1968) and Dudley Seers (1969), and has been further expanded by the seminal works of Amartya Sen (1979, 1987, 1999). A good summary of the main tenets of development ethics can be found, among others, by Dennis Goulet (1971, 1995) and David Crocker (1991).

This subfield of development studies places a particular focus on the so-called agency approach to the traditional capabilities approach, introduced mainly by Amartya Sen in the 1980s (for more on the uses of the capabilities approach, see Des Gasper, 2002 and Martha Nussbaum, 2003). Both, agency and capabilities attempt to overcome the shortcomings of development theory and its derived policy-oriented models that aim for economic growth for its own sake to the detriment of social goals and individual freedom and happiness. Thus, for an ethics of development, aspects such as affluent consumption, hunger, inequality and other dimensions of discrimination based on gender or race assume the forefront of concerns. Not surprisingly, development ethics has grown in interest as the world becomes more unequal and more polarized between rich and poor nations. Likewise, for this brand of ethics the distribution of welfare within and among societies is central to guaranteeing development as much as differences in capabilities to transform resources into valuable activities for individual and social welfare. In short, development is not synonymous to economic growth but to enlargement of freedoms intra- and internationally.

The modern day concerns for the environment have extended development ethics even further precisely because they highlight the unequal distribution of resources, of access to resources and, most importantly, the negative impacts of environmental degradation brought about by unsustainable patterns of consumption mostly in affluent societies and minorities in poor countries. Hence, what is referred to here as the need for “new” ethics of development requires that economics rescue its roots, identity and initial purposes as oikonomy, or the material supply of the oikos, the household where humans live in. In a most fortunate coincidence, economics shares the same semantic root of ecology, the study of the laws that govern this home. Unfortunately, with the acceleration of modern times, economics has ceased to study ways and means to achieve well being for people. It has turned into an end in itself, a science in which anything that does not have monetary value is not worthy or valuable. This is turning into one of the most pernicious fetishes of modern times, despite the warnings of economists of the stature of the already mentioned 1999 Nobel economics laureate, Amartya Sen:

Empirical reality indicates also that wealth accumulation or economic growth does not constitute and has never been a requirement or precondition for development. Human welfare options are projected well beyond economic welfare (UNDP, 1999; UNDESA, 2005). Wealth in itself is not the decisive factor, rather it is the use a community gives to its wealth. Numbers clearly indicate that countries with equivalent levels of economic riches have radically different welfare levels. This combined reality of wealth inequalities and power concentration has led the UNDP to state that:

Human security as a public good, the policy crossroads of ethics and global environmental change

The sad reality today is that thirty years after the Stockholm conference, the warnings voiced by Margaret Mead are still waiting to be echoed by world leaders. In her wise words,

Until now, what one can see are only cosmetic changes to “green” current growth, without in fact enforcing those changes that governments committed themselves to in Rio in 1992.

As more scientific knowledge is available the limits for negotiating environmental conflicts that emerge can be summarized as follows: National leaders do not acknowledge that the security of the nation depends upon an environmentally sound development strategy; instead, environmental criteria are subsumed either by national security interests or economic criteria. Furthermore, rapid economic growth has high priority over conservation. On top of that, the techno-bureaucracy and the corporate elite share an ideologi cal orientation towards the private allocation of natural resources and of the “commons” in general (Guimarães, 1991a).

Economic elites in general, but particularly technocrats, have also learned the lessons of coping with innovations. The need to address global change problems constitutes a fairly recent public issue and, thus, represents an innovation, almost a revolutionary innovation to the policy process as well as to strategic development decisions in general. Faced with this new challenge, the governmental bureaucracy has continually adopted what Donald Schon (1973) calls dynamic conservatism. First, one accepts a discourse that incorporates the new issue, something that has been successfully demonstrated from Stockholm 1972 to Johannesburg 2002. Then follows the institutional stage of “containment and isolation,” when one literally throws the discourse into a bureaucratic box in the governmental structure, or into an internationally adopted agreement. Containment and isolation also have another important, beneficial side effect for dynamic conservatism. These processes lead to compartmentalization. Now that adequate institutions are in place, busily tilting against the windmills of global change, there comes the phase of “selective inattention.” In other words, environmental agencies must be at a bus stop where the bus of power does not stop. In short, in dynamic conservatism one should promote the minimum change possible so as to guarantee that nothing will actually change. It is dynamic because it is not the result of a carefully conceived scheme of overt resistance. There is no conspiracy theory at work here. The individual, group, or class is able to establish a connection between their special interests and the (inertial) interests of the social system as a whole (known not to be very fond of dramatic or profound changes). Because everyone is bound to be affected by hard policy choices in response to global change, there is no need to connive in accord against taking them seriously. It is just a question of letting the bureaucratic process run its course.

The foregoing remarks require also an attempt to rescue the sociopolitical aspects of the conceptual quandary embedded in much of the debate surrounding the new configurations of power brought about by globalization and the “new” international order. In light of the fact that these processes gained momentum after the fall of the Berlin Wall, not few scholars were quick to declare “the end of History” (e.g., Fukuyama, 1990), yet history seems to suggest with enough clarity that the market has never been a foundational principle of social organization, even though it may condition the economic behavior of social actors as producers and consumers. History indicates as well that the market economy is an excellent generator of wealth but it is also a most sure generator of profound social asymmetries (see e.g., Guimarães, 1990; UNDP, 1999; UNDESA, 2005).

Sustainable development, understood as the maintenance of the stock of natural resources and the environmental viability of societies to satisfy the basic needs and improve the quality of life of current and future generations, requires the democratization of the state, not its abolition, as well as the empowerment of civil society. As a matter of fact, there is a growing recognition that despite the ideological seesaw of the past decade, the state still holds a distinctive role in fostering development. First of all, the state still provides a contribution to development, which is unique, necessary and indispensable. It is unique because its logic transcends the logic of market forces, particularly in dimensions such as equity and social justice, which are foreign to market mechanisms and institutions. It is necessary because the very logic of capital accumulation requires the production of “public goods” that cannot be produced by competitive actors in the marketplace, particularly in the imperfect markets of emerging countries. It is indispensable because it addresses issues such as climate change, biodiversity depletion and many other “variables” not amenable to the micro-economic calculus of discount rates and rates of return, especially when future generations (who, by definition, cannot participate in today’s market) are brought into the forefront of environmental regimes (Guimarães, 2003).

The current debate over climate change offers a good illustration of the shortsightedness of using solely economic criteria to overcome the crisis (e.g., Beckerman and Hepburn, 2007; Broome, 2008). Equally misguided is the attempt to replace the State for market forces to foster adaptation instead of mitigation to face impending climate change. As has been forcefully argued in an analysis germane to the approach advocated here, limits to adaptation are endogenous to society, hence dependent upon the ultimate ethics, knowledge and cultural aspects, such as attitudes to risk, those different societies uphold (Adger et al., 2009).

Moreover, the challenges posed by poverty and social inequality aggravated by environmental degradation cannot be defined as individuals’ problems, embodying instead social, collective problems (Guimarães, 1990). It is definitely not a case of guaranteeing access, via the marketplace, to education, housing, and health or to an environment free of pollutants. Instead, these encompass the duty of recovering the collective (solidarity driven) practices of fulfilling material and spiritual needs of human well being. Against the backdrop of this reality, the internationalization of markets poses the greatest threat to the ability of state and public actors to maintain social cohesion and national identity, producing the fragmentation of power and strengthening the transnational articulation of partial, private segments of national societies.

Having been subjected to intense attack and having barely evaded “extinction” at the hands of the apostles of neoliberal economics and politics, the state is undoubtedly wounded and weaker now. If this situation is not reversed, be it in the arena of environmental regimes or in human rights and trade regimes, our societies will be confronted with public policies that, albeit their best intentions, will amount to ambulances that run around collecting the wounded and discarded people of a globalization riding the horses of neoliberal economics. All this takes place in a context in which greater portions of the decisions that are crucial for a nations’ future, and for social cohesion as well, are arrived at outside its territory and implemented by actors completely foreign to the social, political and economic realities of the country (Guimarães, 2004).

Concluding remarks: ethics and human security in the context of global environmental change

The single most important challenge facing the world in the New Millennium is in fact the quality of growth (i.e. the increase in the levels of well-being and the reduction of the socioeconomic inequalities), much more than its quantity (i.e. the simple increment of material output). One must also pay close attention to the implications of globalization for governance at all levels, planetary, regional, national, and sub-national. Many global dynamics simply ignore national boundaries. The erosion of nation states brings with it powerless governments and may lead to the end of governance. As suggested in a book commissioned by the UN University and introduced by Kofi Annan, then UN Secretary General:

There is also a growing consensus about the social unsustainability of the current styles of development, a reality of globalization in the midst of increasing poverty, social inequality and exclusion, a reality which certainly precedes but has been exacerbated by the very process of globalization. Addressing poverty and inequality requires efforts to achieve a balance between many complex, countervailing socio-economic forces. Although economic growth is necessary, it is not a sufficient condition to reduce poverty. Reforms are required in a number of different areas to increase the opportunities for and capabilities of the poor and other marginalized groups in order to spur inclusive growth and development and thereby reduce inequality. A healthy, well-educated, adequately employed, socially and environmentally protected citizenry contributes to social cohesion. Improved access by the poor to public assets and services (social and environmental alike) and income transfer programs to sustain the poorest families are essential to changing the structure of opportunities and are key to reducing the intergenerational transmission of poverty and inequality (UNDESA, 2005).

Hence, the future of sustainable development is intimately associated with the future of politics. Clive Lewis perhaps best captured the socio-political nature of the environmental crisis when he stated that “what we call the power Man over Nature is in fact the power of some men over other men, using nature as their instrument” (Lewis, 1947: 69). This implies that situations of environmental degradation reveal nothing else than inequalities of social and political power (patterns of relations among human beings and the form in which society is organized), as well as structural distortions of the economy (patterns of consumption of society and patterns of production organized to satisfy those). If this represents indeed an accurate description of environmental problems, it becomes rather evident that possible solutions to the current crisis of civilization via sustainable development will have to be found within the social system itself and not in some technological magic or market gimmick.

Projecting the realities of power between human beings in the long run, with the consequent implications about how these will bring about the incorporation of nature, the scenario turns even more delicate and somber. Indeed, just as the relationships of power are synchronically determined, there is also diachronic, inter-generational asymmetry of power among humans. In other words, each generation exercises power on subsequent generations (in making use of nature); while the latter, when modifying the inherited natural endowment, resist and attempt to limit the power of their predecessors. This process, repeated indefinitely, ends up not representing more power over the natural world, just the opposite, rendering human society more fragile in nature’s hands. The later in time a generation lives, and, by definition, the closer it lives to the extinction of species, the less power it will have at its disposal to adapt nature to its needs and wants and to dominate other humans. As Lewis (1947) concludes poignantly, albeit so appropriately (in a period when sustainability was not yet fashionable), human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. Those subjugated will not be “men at all; they will become artifacts” (1947: 77). Man’s final conquest will prove to be in fact “the abolition of Man.”

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