ABOUT THIS BOOK
Since the birth of the modern environmental movement in the 1970s, the United States has witnessed dramatic shifts in social equality, ecological viewpoints, and environmental policy. With these changes has also come an increased popular resistance to environmental reform, but, as Eric T. Freyfogle reveals in this book, that resistance has far deeper roots. Calling upon key environmental voices from the past and present—including Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry, David Orr, and even Pope Francis in his Encyclical—and exploring core concepts like wilderness and the tragedy of the commons, A Good That Transcends not only unearths the causes of our embedded culture of resistance, but also offers a path forward to true, lasting environmental initiatives.
A lawyer by training, with expertise in property rights, Freyfogle uses his legal knowledge to demonstrate that bad land use practices are rooted in the way in which we see the natural world, value it, and understand our place within it. While social and economic factors are important components of our current predicament, it is our culture, he shows, that is driving the reform crisis—and in the face of accelerating environmental change, a change in culture is vital. Drawing upon a diverse array of disciplines from history and philosophy to the life sciences, economics, and literature, Freyfogle seeks better ways for humans to live in nature, helping us to rethink our relationship with the land and craft a new conservation ethic. By confronting our ongoing resistance to reform as well as pointing the way toward a common good, A Good That Transcends enables us to see how we might rise above institutional and cultural challenges, look at environmental problems, appreciate their severity, and both support and participate in reform.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
One / Leopold’s Last Talk
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226326252.003.0001
[Aldo Leopold;cultural change;holism;human exceptionalism;land community;land health;liberal autonomy;pragmatism]
Late in his life Aldo Leopold delivered over 100 conservation talks to varied audiences, only a few of which were published. A study of the extensive records of those talks, supplemented by his late writings, gives a clear sense of the main messages Leopold thought audiences most needed to hear if true conservation was to take root. Leopold urged people to see nature more holistically, as an integrated land community that included humans. This land community could be more or less healthy, he stated, and the health of it should provide the guiding beacon for all conservation efforts. Leopold also pushed audiences to realize that conservation success required significant if not radical changes in modern culture. After distilling and probing Leopold’s key messages, this chapter situates Leopold’s stances in modern philosophy. Leopold challenged presumptions about human exceptionalism and liberal autonomy; he questioned the reach of human knowledge; he presented nature in holistic terms; he embraced a theory of truth similar to that of American pragmatism; and he centered his normative vision on community welfare, on a good that transcended individual preferences. To succeed, Leopold concluded, conservation efforts needed above all to promote new ways of seeing, thinking, and valuing.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Two / The Love of Wendell Berry
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226326252.003.0002
[agrarian;civic republicanism;collective action;epicurean;local foods;stoicism;Wendell Berry]
For many, the Kentucky farmer and writer Wendell Berry has provided the surest conservation voice in the United States over the past several decades, especially for his appealing agrarian visions, his attention to local foods, and his calls to live ethically on and with nature. This chapter looks critically at Berry’s writings, finding much appeal in his attention to interconnections, his admission of human limits, his affectionate bonds with nature, and his calls to sink roots and act responsibly. The deficiency it probes has to do with Berry’s resistance to collective action, particularly through governmental means; with his near-exclusive focus on change within individuals as such. Berry’s community leaders show no interest in collective or political action at the community level, much less higher. Berry’s call for love is thus not attached to any plausible mechanism for widespread change. The needed critique of today’s culture thus may need to extend to the kind of individualism that Berry embraces. Reform calls not for Berry’s form of Jacksonian democracy but for something more like civic republicanism; not for Berry’s modern Epicureanism but for an updated Stoicism that stresses civic engagement.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Three / Impressionism and David Orr
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226326252.003.0003
[collective action;conservation;cradle-to-cradle;David Orr;environmental engineering;land planning]
David Orr stands as perhaps the preeminent American conservation voice linking the possibilities for progress through environmental engineering and cradle-to-cradle technology with the essential need for basic cultural and institutional change. This chapter brings together Orr’s views on nature and culture and his varied commentaries on the flaws in modern culture and in current economic and political arrangements. It argues that Orr’s wide-ranging, boldly colored, passionate essays work well to inspire audiences prone to agree with him. Yet his eclectic criticism fails to cohere into a clear reform message and is less valuable as a result. Even as he works at the local level on land-planning efforts, Orr puts little stress on needs for collective action at higher levels, either to promote the cultural messages he deems important or to instigate institutional reform. Orr’s impressionist, provocative presentations become more useful when distilled, pruned, and combined with the wisdom of others into a more coherent plan for social change.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Four / The Cosmos and Pope Francis
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226326252.003.0004
[economic inequality;encyclical;excessive consumption;global capitalism;Laudate Sí;Pope Francis;population;sustainable development]
With his encyclical, Laudate Sí, Pope Francis has joined the ranks of commentators who trace misuses of nature to grave flaws in modern culture and in the institutions that reflect and perpetuate these flaws. Francis similarly joins those who contend that the root causes of environmental decline also play roles in fostering economic inequality and injustice, and that efforts to address environmental ills must also address income and power inequities. This chapter rearranges the Pope’s wide-ranging comments into a more focused critique of modernity and a call for a fundamental change of direction by all peoples. At bottom, Laudate Si’ poses a stark challenge to global capitalism, to excessive consumption, and to widely-embraced ideas of sustainable development. The Pope’s message leaves key pieces undeveloped, including a blurry line between the use and abuse of nature, vagueness on whether efforts to aid the poor might rightly bring further short-term degradation, and inadequate attention to overpopulation. It is nonetheless a highly valuable contribution, one that aligns well with the similarly wide-ranging critiques of Leopold, Berry, and Orr, and includes intriguing hints that human population, at least in places, has reached excessive levels.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Five / Taking Property Seriously
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226326252.003.0005
[economic liberalism;environmental health;environmental reform;land-use planning;ownership;private property]
Private property is a key social institution, important economically and politically as well as for the cultural values embedded in it. Efforts to promote better interactions with nature—to promote environmental health and better land-use planning—commonly collide with entrenched ideas about private property. This chapter urges reform advocates to take on the task of thinking seriously about private property rather than, as now common, accepting prevailing ideas and norms as somehow inevitable and timeless. In fact, the rules of ownership have changed significantly over time in terms of what can be owned and the powers and responsibilities of owners. The institution is best understood, not as a pillar of individual autonomy or economic liberalism, but as a highly flexible, morally complex institutional tool that society can and should tailor to promote the common good. Environmental reformers have been greatly remiss in not studying the institution with care and formulating new visions of responsible ownership. This failing is part of a larger inattention to the root cultural causes of abusive uses of nature, cultural flaws that are embedded in and strengthened by commonly embrace ownership ideas.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Six / Wilderness and Culture
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226326252.003.0006
[wilderness;human construct;normative choice;social construction of nature;wilderness]
Wilderness both as place and idea has become contested, and for reasons that, when probed, help illuminate contemporary struggles to understand the natural world and to live well within it. Controversies about whether wilderness really exists—about the social construction of nature—stem from basic confusions about the distinction between ideas and language, which are always human created, and the realities of physical nature, which exists apart from humans even as we face limits on our ability to know it and cannot live without altering it. As a human construct, wilderness as idea and term can take many different forms: by some definitions, many wilderness areas still exist, by other definitions no wilderness remains. How we define wilderness and why we might protect it all call for human normative choices. Those choices in turn are best made through an all-things-considered assessment of how we might wisely distinguish between the legitimate use of nature and the abuse of it, and how wilderness protection might help efforts to keep on the right side of that normative line. It ends considering the ways wilderness and wilderness protection can help foster broader, essential cultural change.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Seven / Naming the Tragedy
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226326252.003.0007
[citizen;collective action;competitive individualism;Garrett Hardin;market-driven individualism;tragedy of the commons;consumer]
Garrett Hardin’s classic work on the tragedy of the commons can stand as a kind of Rorschach test, given the widely varied ways people interpret it based on the values and presumptions they bring to bear. The differing reactions arise in part because Hardin’s tale of the uncontrolled grazing pasture is incomplete and readers fill-in the narrative gaps in differing ways. This chapter revisits Hardin’s narrative to highlight the missing pieces. At the root of the pasture degradation was the failure of the grazers to work in concert to limit their actions; it was their go-it-alone, limits-be-damned, market-driven competitive individualism. The tale thus illustrates starkly the citizen-consumer dichotomy and how rationality can produce contradictory decisions depending on whether people act alone or together. In fact, every landscape, however fragmented and privately owned, remains a commons subject to abuse in the absence of collective action. Given the gaps in Hardin’s story, readers are left to guess why the grazers failed to work together and the possible reasons are many. A now-widespread reason is the dominance of competitive, market-driven individualism. A better name for the tale is thus the tragedy of individual liberation taken too far.
This chapter is available at:
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Conclusion: Thinking, Talking, and Culture
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226326252.003.0008
[Aldo Leopold;common good;communitarian;cultural change;environmental reform;Pope Francis;Wendell Berry]
Today’s environmental ills stem in significant part from aspects of modern culture. Environmental-reform efforts, accordingly, need to focus far more than they have on cultural change. This chapter reviews the problematic aspects of current culture, drawing upon the work of Leopold, Berry, Orr, and Pope Francis and upon the lessons embedded in contemporary wilderness debates, the tale of the tragedy of the commons, and widely accepted ideas of private ownership. Needed reforms would divert society in a more communitarian direction, one that recognizes and seeks to strengthen interconnections and interdependencies, that returns important normative choices to the public realm, and that embraces the common good as something more than the summed preferences of individuals. The chapter ends with a proposal for a unified, well-orchestrated reform push that aims above all at promoting new ways of seeing, thinking, and valuing nature and gives primacy to visions of lasting community health. It contrasts this reform starkly with progressive civil-rights reform efforts and the liberty-equality-diversity moral language that dominates it, stressing how the work for healthy lands needs to head in a much different moral direction.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
