Why do some communities protect the environment more and others less? Troy D. Abel Assistant Professor of Environmental Policy Huxley College of the Environment
Our topics A story Some context Civic environmentalism Glocal ecological citizenship
Mr. Abel goes to Washington
1994 I found myself inside the beltway, next to the EPA, Congress, and all the machinations of 20 years of environmental policy. And I was more intrigued by what was happening beyond the beltway.
Two variations of civic: Your civic duties are things you do because you are a citizen, a contributing member of a local or regional community, a place. But civic also means devoted to improving the health, safety, education, recreation, and morale of a population in a place through nonpolitical means or at least through means that are outside traditional political action. John (1995). http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/17046/1/ar950108.pdf
92 Rio Earth summit starts the path towards the Kyoto Protocol The US Senate voted 95-0 that we should not be a party to any treaty without binding targets on developing nations BEFORE the Kyoto meeting in 1997. Clinton never submitted the protocol to the Senate. Bush also didn t.
Climate policy Politics. President Bush turned away from the European Union but also from hundreds of governments taking action. Could someone name some of those governments? Aalborg, Alessandria, Batangas, and so on. Unfamiliar? Seattle and Olympia, WA; New Orleans, LA and New Rochelle, NY; Buffalo, NY and Burlington, VT; Bellingham, WA and the list goes on totaling 150 U.S. municipalities who are doing more then the United States to protect the Climate.
Our topics A story Some context Civic environmentalism Glocal ecological citizenship
Why local climate action? Bowling alone The strength of weak ties The creative class
Bowling alone: America s declining social capital (Putnam 1995). This political scientist built this critique on his 93 work Making democracy work: civic traditions in modern Italy. He compared Italian regional governments and found them more effective in the north, less effective in the south. He concluded that it was because the north was more civic.
What makes a place civic? "... where no prior example of successful civic collaboration exists, it is more difficult to overcome barriers of suspicion and shirking. Faced with new problems requiring collective resolution, men and women everywhere look to their past for solutions. Citizens of civic communities find examples of successful horizontal relationships in their history, whereas those in less civic regions find, at best, examples of vertical supplication" (Making democracy work, p. 174).
Putnam s hypothesis: "Membership in horizontally ordered groups (like sports clubs, cooperatives, mutual aid societies, cultural associations, and voluntary unions) should be positively associated with good government. Since the organizational realities of political parties vary from party to party and region to region, we should expect party membership as such to be unrelated to good government (Making democracy work, p. 161).
Some rural sociologists applied Putnam s Italian hypothesis to U.S. counties. Small manufacturing firms, small retail firms, civic churches, and voluntary associations covaried together leading Irwin, Tolbert, and Lyson (1997) to describe these as measures of social capital. But their most civic places were Orange County (Los Angeles) and New York (Manhattan).
A county s civic engagement index depends heavily on its ABSOLUTE number of churches, small businesses, and informal gathering places, so the biggest counties have the highest scores (Irwin, Tolbert, Lyson 1997, p. 45).
My alternative civic index 1. Percent of persons 25 and older with a high school education; 2. Percent of owner occupied housing; 3. Percent of retail trade that were individual proprietorships; and 4. Percent of non-profit organizations that are membership associations.
I therefore hypothesized that: Counties with a higher civic index would be more likely to host communities doing more to protect the climate. Unexpectedly, I found the opposite. Counties with a higher civic index were less likely to adopt climate protection policies! Conversely, counties with more democratic votes were more likely to do more to protect the climate.
I concluded that my civic index captured one kind of social capital: Strong Ties. I again turned to sociology. Mark Granovetter published The strength of weak ties in 1973.
More recently, I ve been intrigued by creative capital instead of social capital. The economic geographer Richard Florida published The rise of the creative class in 2002. His creativity index includes: (1) the creative class share of the workforce; (2) innovation, measured as patents per capita; (3) high-tech industry; and (4) diversity, as measured by the gay index. In other words, technology, talent, and tolerance.
Bellingham ranked 57 th for 124 cities with less than 250,000 in population in 1999. We again ranked 57 th in 2004. But we ranked 10 th for tolerance!
Our topics A story Some context Civic environmentalism Glocal ecological citizenship
Environmental Federalism Policy substance Policy geography National Narrow Interest group governance Backbone CAA, CWA, Advocacy coalitions Broad Rational governance Eyes CERCLA, NEPA, TSCA Expert coalitions Local Populist governance Conscience NIMBY, EJ, Protest coalitions Civic governance Muscle Ecosystems Participatory coalitions Adopted from DeWitt John (2004), Civic Environmentalism in Environmental governance reconsidered
Our topics A story Some context Civic environmentalism Glocal ecological citizenship
Glocal borrowed from Lamont Hempel (2002) 3 rd generation environmental challenges like climate change require glocal (transboundary) and intermestic (multilevel) policy responses. The policy approaches and jurisdictional responsibilities that functioned reasonably well to limit resource use and past pollution at least when faithfully executed and enforced are proving inadequate for the task of managing the Earth s climate system (281).
Ecological citizenship involves Extending civic obligations from the social realm to the natural world. Enabling citizens to see themselves as members of communities encompassing both humans and nature and hence, to recognize their civic responsibility not just to each other, but to ecosystems.
One example is voluntary restoration ecology. Numerous environmental professionals have emphasized the importance of being in nature in order to care for nature (Light 2003, 407). Restoration restores the human connection to nature by restoring the part of culture that has historically contained a connection to nature. This kind of relationship goes well beyond mere reciprocity; it involves the creation of a value in relationship with nature beyond obligation. This kind of relationship is a necessary condition for encouraging people to protect natural systems and landscapes around them rather than trade them for short-term monetary gains from development. If I am in a normative relationship with the land around me I am less likely to allow it to be harmed further (Light 2003, 407).
Season of service Students cannot flourish unless the communities to which [they] belong flourish, and it is [their] (enlightened) self-interest to become a more responsible member of those communities whether they are [their] school, [their] neighborhood or [their] nation (or perhaps even [their] world) (Barber and Battistoni 1993). Our world is shrinking because of globalization, and our students need experiences that expand their notions of citizenship from the local to the global.
From Kates and Wilbanks (2003), Making the global local Make the global local. To be able to think globally in a local place, the global must first be made local. Local action therefore become important as a way to transmit information and understanding. They then create support for national and state actions, and enable informed local action.
Why do some communities protect the environment more and others less? Troy D. Abel Assistant Professor of Environmental Policy Huxley College of the Environment