Steve Vanderheiden

Eco-terrorism or Justified Resistance? Radical Environmentalism and the “War on Terror”:

Radical environmental groups engaged in ecotage—or economic sabotage of inanimate objects thought to be complicit in environmental destruction—have been identified as the leading domestic terrorist threat in the post-9/11 “war on terror.” This article examines the case for extending the conventional definition of terrorism to include attacks not only against noncombatants, but also against inanimate objects, and surveys proposed moral limits suggested by proponents of ecotage. Rejecting the mistaken association between genuine acts of terrorism and ecotage, it considers the proper moral constraints upon ecotage through an examination of just war theory and nonviolent civil disobedience.

The Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability

mote more stringent enforcement of laws through oversight of environmental regulatory bodies, which might support the enforcement of environmental legislation for more pressing problems. Countering the assertion that developing countries are not ready for rigorous environmental law, McAllister presents this study as a model for the establishment of meaningful environmental regulation and law. Brazil’s experiences show that legal enforcement can enhance regulatory effectiveness in a context where regulatory authority is historically weak. Although legalistic mechanisms have drawbacks, which McAllister carefully assesses, she suggests that prosecutorial institutions are a way to make justice accessible to citizens and, more importantly, for the law to be meaningful to them. A persuasive and highly original contribution to the aeld, Making Law Matter has analytic value for understanding a surprising case of legal effectiveness and institutional reform, and offers an optimistic perspective on the possibility for strengthening environmental protection through national law.

Distinguishing Mitigation and Adaptation

Baer et al. (Baer, Athanasiou, Kartha & Kemp-Benedict, 2008) seek to develop a single index for distributing the burdens associated with climate change mitigation and adaptation, and to do so in a way that rectifies shortcomings that have been associated with other ‘burden sharing’ approaches. Commendably, they recognize the importance of ‘development’ as a moral imperative that often competes with environmental objectives in climate justice models, and acknowledge the importance of accounting for those affluent consumers residing in poor countries that are sometimes mistakenly not assigned any remedial burdens for climate change. Unfortunately, their GDR framework offers no unique mechanism ‘to prevent national elites from escaping all burdens and shifting them to their poorest citizens’ (Baer, 2009, p. 275), for which they fault the more popular equal per capita approaches. Aside from the dubious ‘moral support’ implied by a model that posits ‘development’ as a kind of individual negative right, the same disaggregation difficulties would seem to plague the GDR as have been invoked against other approaches that assign burdens to nation-states on the basis of aggregate national data. Indeed, the GDR would appear to do less for individual development interests than would equal per capita approaches (such as my own) in that the former only posits an ‘exemption from costly climate policy-related obligations’ while the latter provide valuable resource rights that could at least in principle be earmarked toward improving conditions for the global poor. My focus here shall be on the first objective, however, which seems to purchase its parsimony at the expense of the moral foundations on which demands for climate justice rest. National obligations must be quantifiable if they are to serve as the basis for global climate policy, and the approach to assigning national burdens on the basis of the ‘common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities’ has the benefit of legal pedigree and philosophical respectability. Past and ongoing emissions as well as the capacity to reduce them both seem at first glance to be relevant to assignments of remedial responsibility, and the world’s nations have already committed to an approach that combines them through the UN Framework

Rethinking Environmentalism: Beyond Doom and Gloom

Readers of this journal are familiar enough with the environmental facts: human demand for resources and production of wastes exceeds the planet’s sustainable capacity, which portends future scarcity and potential calamity as resource stocks are depleted and pollution accumulates beyond dangerous thresholds. Deforestation decimates species habitats, industrialization intensiaes patterns of resource depletion and pollution, sprawl pushes the urbanwildland interface ever deeper into remaining undeveloped areas, and climate change threatens to exacerbate all these problems and more. Readers are also familiar with social scientiac analyses of the causes of such degradation and obstacles to its reform: the limited time horizons and regulatory incapacity of existing political institutions, social norms that encourage unsustainable consumption, collective action logic that undermines environmental responsibility, and the lack of reliable information concerning the environmental impacts of everyday choices all frustrate individual and collective efforts to live more sustainably. From such dismal projections, environmental politics is often caught between the pessimistic defeatism of those recommending unpalatable and unheeded solutions as the only means for averting ecological collapse, the futile jeremiads of those warding off apocalypse with compact ouorescent bulbs, and the naive optimism of the eco-pollyanna. Readers cycle between hoping against reason that the latter are somehow right and fearing against better regard for humanity that the former might be. A middle way is desperately needed, wherein hard-nosed realism about current threats and obstacles to meaningful change

Missing the Forest for the Trees: Justice and Environmental Economics

The field of environmental economics, while offering powerful tools for the diagnosis of environmental problems and the design of policy solutions to them, is unable to effectively incorporate normative concepts like justice or rights into its method of analysis, and so needs to be supplemented by a consideration of such concepts. I examine the two main schools of thought in environmental economics – the New Resource Economics and Free Market Environmentalism – in order to illustrate the shortcomings of their methods of analysis, taken on their own, and to demonstrate how a consideration of concepts like rights or justice might usefully supplement them.

Habitat Conservation Plans and the Promise of Deliberative Democracy

Abstract Recent reforms in U.S. environmental policy have been directed away from traditional command and control regulation or scientific management and toward collaboration and democratic participation in decisionmaking. Evaluating these changes requires attention not only to their effects on environmental protection, but also to the normative aims behind such democratization. This article examines a procedure that allows for collaboratively produced exceptions to the Endangered Species Act, paying particular attention to the normative and democratic dimensions of those experiments. Paradoxically, the effort to increase participation in policy processes has, in some cases, actually decreased opportunities for meaningful citizen input in the regulatory process, to the detriment of both environmental protection and democratic objectives.

What’s wrong with climate politics and how to fix it

possible or utopian? There are examples of hot (Iraq, Niger delta) and colder (Arctic sea) conflict, and of co-operation and negotiation (Baltic and Barents Sea, Lake Albert). How can we reduce conflict and uphold security of supply, avoiding volatility given that the era of abundant accessible cheap oil is over? Here the book is very strong, recognising that peak oil theorists have never argued that there is no more oil to be found at all. The question, given the status of oil as a conveyor belt returning CO2 to the atmosphere, is can we pull out of the ground the less easily accessible oil there is at a reasonable social, environmental and financial cost? Might we need to move more quickly to a renewable energy mix, rendering stocks of oil valueless? While out of the scope of this book, more radical renewable futures like that of the Zero Carbon Britain report, or even the current UK governments’ plans for 55 nuclear power stations might be worth exploring more. Key for the book is the ‘acceptability’ of oil given energy insecurity, oil wars, its role in inspiring terrorism, its reliance on corruption and authoritarianism in producer countries. The call of the anti-Iraq war protesters for ‘no blood for oil,’ Deepwater Horizon and human rights abuses in the Niger delta is made clear as are new areas of contestation including oil in the artic, tar sands and shale gas. So securing oil is not a zero sum struggle over a fixed resource but a struggle over what role oil will play in the future that means different things and has different implications for different people along the four nexuses of availability, accessibility, affordability and acceptability. Overall then this is an excellent primer for good undergraduate and postgraduate readers, but also for many climate change and peak oil activists whowant to understand just what the issues really are. Reading it will enable them to avoid mistakes, but also inspire them to carry on the struggle for a sustainable world made up of more equal, socially just societies and economies. We cannot avoid oil completely, but we can make it better while developing alternatives. Some countries will transition to a low-carbon economy, others will hunker down. Some communities and cities will do more than others, and perhaps it is at this local level that hope lies. The strength of this book is that it does not just talk about oil, but sits it within a wider energy mix. It is good that it is balanced but also political.

Leadership, Moral Authority, and Global Climate Change

When UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called anthropogenic climate change “the defining challenge of our time,” he called upon the United States and China to “play a more constructive role” in the ongoing international climate policy development process.’ Addressing world leaders upon the release of the fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and in advance of the COP-14 meetings in Bali, Indonesia, Ban hoped that his urgent plea might move international negotiations forward by imploring the world’s two largest greenhouse-gas polluting nations to lead rather than obstruct, and to contribute toward solutions to the same degree that both were contributing to the problem. To no one’s surprise, this call for climate policy leadership went unheeded, especially in the United States, where an unpopular president with a sordid history of obstructionism in domestic and international climate policy development had already abdicated all forms of constructive leadership on climate change and lacked inclination to try changing his administration’s course. Given its history on climate and energy issues, George W. Bush’s administration may not have been able to play a constructive role in Bali even if by some personal epiphany the president had decided to reverse course and take climate change mitigation seriously.

Global Governance of Food Production and Consumption: Issues and Challenges

Chambers, Robert. 1994. Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA): Analysis of Experience. World Development 22 (9): 1253–1268. Daviron, Benoit, and Stefano Ponte. 2005. The Coffee Paradox: Global Markets, Commodity Trade and the Elusive Promise of Development. London and New York: Zed Books. Raynolds, Laura. 2007. Fair Trade: The Challenges of Transforming Globalization. London: Routledge Press. Steve Vanderheiden