Politics

Environmentalism and Politics

The empirical research project discussed by Daniel Press, in his book Democratic Dilemmas in the Age of Ecology, was suggested by many books and essays arguing the impossibility, or unlikelihood, that real progress will be made in environmental protection unless authority is somehow centralized. In contrast, others have argued that authority must be decentralized. Supposedly, the issue of democracy, or democratic institutions, runs throughout. While Press's discussion is informative, the results of the empirical study are disappointingly vague. If progress has been made through voluntarism and decentralization, what Press calls participatory democracy, it is a modest contribution to the overall solution needed. The interviews were more informative than the survey itself, but both seem to indicate that there are real limits to the amount that local movements can achieve.

The book suffers from a lack of philosophical perspective which should properly ask about the present state of democracy in America as a starting point. Neither the centralist nor the decentralist positions make a great deal of sense if the condition of democracy is already damaged. In fact, the centralist position may simply argue for a continuation of long-standing destruction of democratic institutions; while the decentralist position may argue for revitalization of democracy from the grass roots -- a task more daunting than merely arranging effective environmental action.

I shall argue, here, that the present state of democracy is, in fact, significantly damaged and that democracy is as much in need of repair and protection as the environment. In Freedom and Culture, a book written just prior to the Second World War, the American philosopher John Dewey argued that freedom cannot be sustained merely by institutions and constitutions. The maintenance of freedom lies in culture itself; if we do not possess a culture of freedom, our institutions will not be able to protect us. Dewey's main point, at that time, was that the real danger lay within and not in Europe. It is always easiest to see danger coming from without, of course, and the long history of post-war Cold-War relations with Russia and China confirms this. Throughout the intervening sixty years, Americans have naively assumed that they possess a democratic government and enjoy freedom, even while various essayists and political philosophers have pointed out many symptoms of democracy's deterioration.

There was little doubt in Dewey's mind that urbanization and industrialization threaten the effective performance of democracy. There is also no doubt that these tendencies have passed almost to completion, today, in the transformation of American society. This means, at the very least, major changes in American culture. In the transformation from rural agrarian to urban industrial culture, people lose both land and community, as we have seen elsewhere, this semester. Both real capital and finance capital become overwhelmingly powerful forces in society; meanwhile the majority of people are driven into the social situation of being a work force. Survival is increasingly connected with employment rather than work and, hence, the health of corporate enterprise becomes a universal and dominating interest. As Press notes, late in his own book, corporate capitalists have become so powerful that they can easily "punish" Americans for any policy decisions or initiatives they dislike. A tendency toward greater EPA enforcement, for instance, and the stock market falls 5%! Everyone is terrified; no one wants recession.

It takes tremendous wealth or the backing of tremendous wealth to win public office so why should political office holders pay attention to the 99% of Americans who are not wealthy. Image is far more important than reality. What is really required is "image maintenance" -- the image of being a faithful public servant while the contacts and agreements with wealth are clandestinely sustained. Little wonder that so few qualified American voters actually bother to exercise their balloting rights. What we have is oligarchy, not democracy. All of these problems were already worrisome to those who debated the creation of a powerful Federal government, in the late 1780s. But they never foresaw the extent to which urban capitalism would become a unified faction, wielding enormous power. Nor did they foresee the displacement of land-owning farmers who really constituted the core of democratic society.

But if democracy is in such poor shape in America today, where does that leave the argument between centralists and decentralists? It seems to me that environmentalists are not debating what to do with democracy so much as what to embrace in a mostly undemocratic society. To centralize authority further is extremely problematic, it seems to me, because it means replacing what has already become an invisible centralized authority with another. That is, since the economic interests of a small number of individuals orchestrate American government, today, the centralist argument is really aimed at displacing this powerful group with an environmentally enlightened bureaucracy of some kind. That would be a truly daunting task. To decentralize really means to attempt a restoration of democracy at the local level and to try to live democratically in spite of a continuingly less democratic national government. Unfortunately, local governments usually suffer from similar problems, e.g., the domination of powerful economic interests -- big timber corporations, mining companies, industrialized ranching and agriculture, and urban developers.

Index To Course Notes