Amerika

There is something that rings strangely in the expression environmental democracy. Modern society hardly notices the oddity, having learned to receive with docility almost any concept to which the words democracy, rights, or participation are prefixed or appended. Yet the grammatical construction already contains a confession: while democracy is the noun, environmental is merely the adjective. The former designates what remains; the latter identifies the particular sphere to which it will be applied. We do not speak of a democratic ecology, in which politics would have to accommodate itself to an ecological reality that precedes it, but of a democracy that has decided to extend its procedures into the environmental realm. The difference seems minor until the two terms cease to coincide.

Democracy possesses a highly developed answer to one kind of question: who has the right to participate in a decision. Ecology deals with another, considerably less accommodating one: what consequences will that decision have within a material system? The answers may converge, but there is no reason to assume that they must. A majority can desire something impossible, imprudent, or destructive with impeccable democratic legitimacy. It may even be perfectly well informed while desiring it. The ecosystem, meanwhile, remains indifferent to the legitimacy of the masses’ decision.

A watershed does not distinguish between an intervention approved by popular consultation and one imposed by decree. Eroded soil does not recover more rapidly because its degradation was socially agreed upon. The reproductive rate of an animal population does not change according to the electoral percentage obtained by those wishing to exploit it. Nutrient concentrations, habitat fragmentation, energy flows, and carrying capacity belong to an order in which human approval possesses no authority, however consequential the weight of human decisions may eventually prove.

This banality ought to provoke some unease. Yet much of what is called environmental democracy attempts to solve ecological problems by expanding precisely what ecology itself does not recognize: the participation of human preferences.

The Escazú Agreement provides an especially clear example of this orientation. Its central pillars are access to environmental information, public participation in environmental decision-making, and access to justice. It is presented simultaneously as an instrument of environmental protection and as a human rights treaty. Its architecture is consistent with a political tradition that approaches ecological problems through rights of access exercised by persons: the right to know, the right to participate, the right to seek redress (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean [ECLAC], 2018).

None of this is trivial. A community capable of knowing that its water is contaminated is probably in a better position than one kept in ignorance. Transparency can expose damage, and the possibility of challenging public or private decisions can prevent concrete abuses. The problem appears at another level. None of these procedures answers, by itself, the fundamental question of an ecological ethic: what deserves to continue existing even when no human majority derives any benefit from it? It is precisely at this point that Deep Ecology parted ways decades ago with administered environmentalism.

The platform formulated by Arne Næss and George Sessions begins from a proposition that modern politics finds difficult to absorb: the flourishing of human and nonhuman life possesses value in itself, and the value of nonhuman forms of life does not depend upon their usefulness for human purposes. The richness and diversity of life likewise need not demonstrate an economic, sanitary, recreational, or cultural service in order to justify their preservation (Devall & Sessions, 1985; Næss, 1986). Taken seriously, this position alters the discussion at its foundations.

The forest no longer requires human advocates to demonstrate how much carbon it captures, how many tourism jobs it might provide, or how many people depend upon its hydrological regime. All of these things may be true and politically useful, but they still belong to the language of human utility. Næss recognized precisely this tension when contrasting Deep Ecology with conceptions of conservation whose ultimate concern remained human well-being. When the protection of nature depends exclusively upon human needs, he warned, it tends to fragment around objects that are particularly useful, visible, or appreciated, while the ecosystem as a whole remains subordinate (Næss, 1990).

Environmental democracy can scarcely escape this structure because its political subjects remain human. It may broaden the circle of those consulted. It may incorporate local communities, Indigenous peoples, specialists, associations, and future generations through indirect legal devices. It may refine procedure indefinitely, yet the difficulty remains: nature enters the room under human representation, while those possessing economic needs, recognized rights, and electoral preferences enter in their own right.

The problem becomes especially visible when conservation requires renunciation.

Modern democratic language works admirably when benefits can be distributed. It encounters greater difficulty when reality demands permanent limits. Closing a fishery, preventing urbanization, abandoning a road project, reducing extraction, excluding certain activities from a territory, or accepting that particular resources simply will not be available means imposing recognizable costs upon people living now for the sake of processes whose value may be distant, diffuse, or entirely nonhuman.

Deep Ecology also introduces a word that our age would prefer to leave vague: need. The third point of the platform holds that human beings have no right to reduce the richness and diversity of life except to satisfy vital needs. Næss insisted that the expression should function as a limit. Not every demand articulated through the market demonstrates the existence of a corresponding need (Næss, 1990).

Democracy, by contrast, possesses no equivalent mechanism that necessarily distinguishes between a vital need and an intensely felt preference. It can do so through laws, scientific knowledge, or specialized institutions, but at that point it introduces limits upon the immediate sovereignty of citizen preferences. The tension does not disappear; it merely moves elsewhere.

Here perhaps lies the deepest weakness of an environmental politics constructed around the individual. The modern democratic citizen arrives at the debate accompanied by an enormous moral infrastructure. He possesses rights, interests, expectations, and a dignity that the political order promises to recognize. The river brings nothing comparable. Nor does the unknown insect that will disappear when a wetland is drained. A species whose ecological function we barely understand lacks even the sentimental advantage enjoyed by large mammals. When interests collide, the entire political vocabulary is already tilted toward one of the participants.

Human rights have produced historically important protections against state power and other forms of abuse. Turning them, however, into the summum bonum from which every other consideration must be justified creates a genuine ecological difficulty. If nature deserves protection only when its protection can be translated into a human right—to health, water, property, culture, landscape, or survival—then we continue to inhabit the old anthropocentric universe. The reason for conserving certain things may have changed, but humanity as a collective remains the body that confers value.

The Deep Ecology platform begins from the opposite direction. It includes individuals, species, populations, habitats, and ecosystems within a sphere of consideration whose foundation is not their service to our species. Devall and Sessions even extend the meaning of “life” to rivers, landscapes, and watersheds understood as ecological wholes. From this perspective, the presence of inherent value does not depend upon its recognition by a human consciousness (Devall & Sessions, 1985).

Here environmental democracy encounters a difficulty that no additional quantity of participation can resolve by itself. The sum of anthropocentric preferences remains anthropocentric.

There is also a temporal problem. The person who votes, protests, litigates, or takes part in a consultation exists now. He feels today the cost of losing a job, paying more for energy, foregoing the construction of a house, or abandoning a traditional activity. Ecological consequences may unfold across generations. Some of the organisms that will bear part of that cost do not yet exist; others already exist but will never participate. Democracy may attempt to represent them, although such representation requires precisely a departure from the literal democratic principle, introducing knowledge, prudence, legal restrictions, or commitments that the present majority cannot simply revoke whenever they become inconvenient.

Ecology therefore introduces something that the modern political mind receives with difficulty: there are questions on which opinion is irrelevant. This is not because human beings lack intelligence, but because these questions belong to systems that human beings did not construct. It is possible to debate how the costs of a fishing ban should be distributed. It is not possible to deliberate the biological recruitment rate one would prefer the species to possess. A city’s layout can be put to a vote. The hydrological properties of soil that has just been sealed beneath concrete cannot. A legal right to live in a healthy environment may be declared, but that declaration does not itself produce the ecological processes capable of sustaining such an environment.

There is a certain involuntary arrogance in believing that every problem improves when more human beings acquire the right to express their preferences about it.

Ecosystems are not defective assemblies awaiting democratization. Nor are they embryonic states whose members have not yet obtained adequate representation. They are networks of material relationships in which the survival of some forms constrains the possibilities of others, and in which no political institution can indefinitely suspend the costs of disturbance.

Næss understood ecosophy as something broader than the technical management of pollution and resources. It was meant to integrate ecological, normative, social, and political questions within an encompassing view, precisely because any serious transformation in humanity’s relationship with the nonhuman world would necessarily affect fundamental economic, technological, and ideological structures (Næss, 1989). This demand is far more disturbing than merely incorporating citizen participation into existing environmental procedures. It forces a society to reconsider what it believes itself entitled to want.

Environmental democracy usually begins from the opposite end. It asks how to guarantee that everyone can intervene in the decision. Deep Ecology first asks what kind of decision would be compatible with the continuity of that which is not human.

When the two answers coincide, the conflict remains invisible. When they diverge, one discovers where the real loyalty had always been placed.

Perhaps the expression environmental democracy is therefore more accurate than it initially appears. The adjective obediently occupies its place. Nature may be protected, restored, and celebrated so long as those operations can be integrated into an order whose final authority continues to reside in human preferences, rights, and institutions. When an ecological limit demands something that this order regards as intolerable, it is the forest, the watershed, or the species that must present its credentials.

And the biosphere, of course, never learned how to vote. References

Devall, B., & Sessions, G. (1985). Deep ecology: Living as if nature mattered. Gibbs M. Smith.

Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. (2018). Regional agreement on access to information, public participation and justice in environmental matters in Latin America and the Caribbean. United Nations.

Næss, A. (1986). The deep ecology movement: Some philosophical aspects. Philosophical Inquiry, 8, 10–31.

Næss, A. (1989). Ecology, community and lifestyle: Outline of an ecosophy (D. Rothenberg, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.

Næss, A. (1990). Sustainable development and deep ecology. In J. R. Engel & J. G. Engel (Eds.), Ethics of environment and development: Global challenge, international response (pp. 87–96). Belhaven Press.

Tags: deep ecology, democracy