Feeding
People versus Saving Nature?
When
we must choose between feeding the hungry and conserving nature, people ought to
come first. A bumper sticker reads: Hungry loggers eat spotted owls. That
pinpoints an ethical issue, pure and simple, and often one where the humanist
protagonist, taking high moral ground, intends to put the environmentalist on
the defensive. You wouldn’t let the Ethiopians starve to save some butterfly,
would you?
“Human
beings are at the centre of concerns for sustainable development.” So the Rio
Declaration begins. Once this was to be an Earth Charter,
but the developing nations were more interested in
getting the needs of their poor met. The developed nations are wealthy enough to
be concerned about saving nature. The developing nations want the anthropocentrism,
loud and clear. These humans, they add, “are entitled to a healthy and
productive life in harmony with nature,” but there too they seem as concerned
with their entitlements as with any care for nature.1 Can we fault
them for it?
We
have to be circumspect. To isolate so simple a tradeoff as hungry people versus
nature is perhaps artificial. If we are too far abstracted from the complex
circumstances of decision, we may not be facing any serious operational issue.
When we simplify the question, it may become, minus its many qualifications, a
different question. The gestalt configures the question, and the same question
reconfigured can be different. So we must analyze the general matrix and then
confront the more particular people-versus-nature issue.
Humans
win? Nature loses? After analysis, sometimes it turns out that humans are not
really winning if they are sacrificing the nature that is their life support
system. Humans win by conserving nature—and these winners include the poor and
the hungry. “In order to achieve sustainable development, environmental
protection shall constitute an integral part of the development process and
cannot be considered in isolation from it.”2 After all, food has to
be produced by growing it in some reasonably healthy natural system, and the
clean water that the poor need is also good for fauna and flora. Extractive
reserves give people an incentive to conserve. Tourism can often benefit the
local poor and the wildlife, as well as tourists. One ought to seek win-win
solutions wherever one can. Pragmatically, these are often the only kind likely
to succeed.
Yet
just as obviously, there are times when nature is sacrificed for human
development; most development is of this kind. By no means is all warranted, but
that which gets people fed seems basic and urgent. Then nature should lose and
people win. Or are there are times when at least some humans should lose and
some nature should win? We are here interested in these latter occasions. Can
we ever say that we should save nature rather than feed people?
Feed People First? Do We? Ought We?
“Feed people first!” That has a ring of righteousness. The Rio Declaration insists, “All States and all people shall cooperate in the essential task of eradicating poverty as an indispensable requirement.”3 In the biblical parable of the great judgment, the righteous have ministered to the and Jesus welcomes them to their reward. “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink.” Those who refused to help damned (Matt. 28:31—46). The vision of heaven is that “they shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more” (Rev. 7:16), and Jesus teaches his disciples to pray that this will of God be done on Earth, as it is in heaven. “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matt. 5:11). These are such basic values, there is to be any ethics at all, surely food comes first.
Or does it? If giving others their daily bread were always the first concern,
the Christians would never have built an organ or a stained-glass window, but
rather always given all to the poor. There is also the biblical story of the
woman who washed Jesus’ feet with expensive ointment. When the disciples
complained that it should have been sold and given to the poor, Jesus replied,
“You always have the poor with you” (Matt. 26:11). While the poor are a
continuing concern, with whom Jesus demonstrated ample solidarity, there are
other commendable values in human life, “beautiful things,” in Jesus’
phrase. The poor are always there, and if we did nothing else of value until
there were no more poor, we would do nothing else of value at all.
Eradicating
poverty is an indispensable requirement! Yes, but set these ideals beside the
plain fact that we all daily prefer other values. Every time we buy a Christmas
gift for a wife or husband, or go to a symphony concert, or give a college
education to a child, or drive a new car home, or turn on the air conditioner,
we spend money that might have helped to eradicate poverty. We mostly choose to
do things we value more than feeding the hungry.
An
ethicist may reply, yes, that is the fact of the matter. But no normative
ought follows from the description of this behavior. We ought not to behave so.
But such widespread behavior, engaged in almost universally by persons who
regard themselves as being ethical, including readers of this article, is strong
evidence that we in fact not only have these norms but also think we ought to
have them. To be sure, we also think that charity is appropriate, and we
censure those who are wholly insensitive to the plight of others. But we place
decisions here on a scale of degree, and we do not feel guilty about all these
other values we pursue, while yet some people somewhere on earth are starving.
If
one were to always feed the hungry first, doing nothing else until no one in the
world were hungry, this would paralyze civilization. People would not have
invented writing, or smelted iron, or written music, or invented airplanes.
Plato would not have written his dialogues, or Aquinas the Summa
Theologica; Edison
would not have discovered the electric light bulb or Einstein the theory of
relativity. We both do and ought to devote ourselves to various worthy causes,
yet persons in our own communities and elsewhere go hungry.
A
few of these activities redound subsequently to help the poor, but the possible
feedback to alleviating poverty cannot be the sole justification of advancing
these multiple cultural values. Let us remember this when we ask whether saving
natural values might sometimes take precedence. Our moral systems in fact do not
teach us to feed the poor first. The Ten Commandments do not say that; the
Golden Rule does not; Kant did not say that; nor does the utilitarian greatest
good for the greatest number imply that. Eradicating poverty may be
indispensable but not always prior to all other cultural values. It may not
always be prior to conserving natural values either.
2. Choosing
for People To Die
But
food is absolutely vital. “Thou shalt not kill” is one of the commandments.
Next to the evil of taking life is taking the sustenance for life. Is not saving
nature—thereby preventing hunting, harvesting, or development by those who
need the produce of that land to put food in their mouths— almost like
killing? Surely one ought not to choose for someone else to die, an innocent who
is only trying to eat; everyone has a right to life. To fence out the hungry is
choosing that people will die. That can’t be right.
Or
can it? In broader social policy we make many decisions that cause people to
die. When in 1988 we increased the national speed limit on rural Interstate
highways from 55 to 65 miles per hour, we chose for 400 persons to die each
year.4 We decide against
hiring more police, though if we did some murders would be avoided. The city
council spends that money on a new art museum, or to give the schoolteachers a
raise. Congress decides not to pass a national health care program that would
subsidize medical insurance for some now uninsured who cannot otherwise afford
it; and some such persons will, as a result, fail to get timely medical care and
die of preventable diseases.
We
may decide to leave existing air pollution standards in place because it is
expensive for industry to install new scrubbers, even though there is
statistical evidence that a certain number of persons will contract diseases and
die prematurely. All money budgeted for the National Endowment for the
Humanities, and almost all that budgeted for the National Science Foundation,
could be spent to prevent the deaths of babies that die from malnutrition. We do
not know exactly who will die, but we know that some will; we often have
reasonable estimates how many. The situation would be similar, should we choose
to save nature rather than to feed people.
U.S.
soldiers go abroad to stabilize an African nation from which starving refugees
are fleeing, and we feel good about it. All those unfortunate people cannot
come here, but at least we can go there and help. All this masks, however, how
we really choose to fight others rather than to feed them. The developed
countries spend as much on military power in a year as the poorest two billion
people on Earth earn in total income. The developed countries in 1990 provided
$56 billion in economic aid to the poorer countries, but they also sold $36
billion worth of arms to them. At a cost of less than half their military
expenditures, the developing countries could provide a package of basic health
care services and clinical care that would save 10 million lives a year. World
military spending in 1992 exceeded $600 billion. U.S. military spending
accounted for nearly half this amount, yet in the United States one person in
seven lives below the poverty line and over 37 million people lack any form of
health care coverage.5 These are choices that cause people to die,
both abroad and at home.
But
such spending, a moralist critic will object, is wrong. This only reports what
people do decide, not what they ought to decide. Yes, but few are going to argue
that we ought to spend nothing on military defense until all the poor are fed,
clothed, housed. We believe that many of the values achieved in the United
States, which place us among the wealthier nations, are worth protecting, even
while others starve. Europeans and others will give similar arguments. Say if
you like that this only puts our self-interest over theirs, but in fact we all
do act to protect what we value even if this decision results in death for those
beyond our borders. That seems to mean that a majority of citizens think such
decisions are right.
Wealthy
and poverty-stricken nations alike put up borders across which the poor are
forbidden to pass. Rich nations will not let them in; poor governments will not
let them out. We may have misgivings about this on both sides, but if we believe
in immigration laws at all, we, on the richer side of the border, think that
protecting our life style counts more than does their betterment, even if they
just want to be better fed. If we let in anyone who wanted to enter the United
States and gave them free passage, hundreds of millions would come. Already 30
percent of our population growth is by immigration, legal and illegal. Sooner
or later we must fence them out or face the loss of prosperity that we value. We
may not think this is always right, but when one faces the escalating numbers
that would swamp the United States, it is hard not to conclude that it is sometimes
right. Admitting refugees is humane, but it lets such persons flee their own
national problems and does not contribute to any long-term solutions in the
nations from which they emigrate. Meanwhile, people die as a result of decisions
about who is admitted and who is not.
Some
of these choices address the question of whether we ought to save nature if this
causes people to die. Inside our U.S. boundaries, we have a welfare system that
ostensibly refuses to let anyone starve. Fortunately, we are wealthy enough to
afford this as well as nature conservation. But if push came to shove, we
would think it wrong-headed to put animals (or art, or well-paid teachers) over
starving people. Does that not show that, as domestic policy, we take care of
our own? We feed people first—or at least second, after military defense. Yet
we let foreigners die, when we are not willing to open up our five hundred
wilderness areas, nearly 100 million acres, to Cubans and Ethiopians.
3. Hunger
and Social Justice
The welfare concept
introduces another possibility, that the wealthy should be taxed to feed the
poor. We should do that first, rather than cut into much else that we treasure,
possibly losing our wildlife, or wilderness areas, or giving up art, or
underpaying the teachers. In fact, there is a way greatly to relieve this
tragedy, could there be a just distribution of the goods of culture, now often
so inequitably distributed. Few
persons would need to go without enough if we could use the produce of the
already domesticated landscape justly and charitably. It is better to try to fix
this problem where it arises, within society, than to try to enlarge the sphere
of society by the sacrifice of remnant natural values, by, say, opening up the
wilderness areas to settlement. Indeed, the latter only postpones the problem.
Peoples in the South (a code word for the lesser developed countries, or
the poor) complain about the over- consumption of peoples in the North (the
industrial rich), often legitimately so. But Brazil has within its own boundaries
the most skewed income distribution in the world. The U.S. ratio between
personal income for the top 20 percent of people to the bottom 20 percent is 9
to 1; the ratio in Brazil is 26 to 1. Just
1 percent of Brazilians control 45 percent of the agricultural land. The biggest
20 landowners own more land between them than the 3.3 million smallest farmers.
With the Amazon still largely undeveloped, there is already more arable land per
person in Brazil than in the United States. Much land is held for speculation;
330 million hectares of farm land, an area larger than India, is lying idle. The
top 10 percent of Brazilians spend 51 percent of the national income.6
This anthropocentric inequity ought to be put “at the centre of
concern” when we decide about saving nature versus feeding people.
Save
the Amazon! No!
The howler monkeys and toucans may delight tourists, but we ought not to save
them if people need to eat. Such either-or choices mask how marginalized peoples
are forced onto marginal lands; and those lands become easily stressed, both
because the lands are by nature marginal for agriculture, range, and life
support, and also because by human nature marginalized peoples find it difficult
to plan [or the long range. They are caught up in meeting their immediate needs;
their stress forces them to stress a fragile landscape.
Prime
agricultural or residential lands can also be stressed to produce more and more,
because there is a growing population to feed; or to grow an export crop,
because there is an international debt to pay. Prime agricultural lands in
southern Brazil, formerly used for growing food and worked by tenants who lived
on these lands and ate their produce as well as sent food into the cities, have
been converted to lands that use mechanized farming to grow coffee as an
export crop, to help pay Brazil’s massive debt, contracted by a military
government since overthrown. Peoples forced off these lands were resettled in
the Amazon basin, aided by development schemes fostered by the military
government, resettled on lands really not suitable for agriculture. The
integrity of the Amazon, to say nothing of the integrity of these peoples, is
being sacrificed to cover for misguided loans. Meanwhile, the wealthy in Brazil
pay little or no income tax that might be used for such loan repayment.
The
world is full enough of societies that have squandered their resources,
inequitably distributed wealth, and degraded their landscapes; and who will be
tempted to jeopardize what natural values remain as an alternative to solving
hard social problems. The decision about social welfare, poor people over
nature, usually lies in the context of another decision, often a tacit one; to
protect vested interests, wealthy people over poor people, wealthy people who
have exploited nature already, ready to exploit anything they can. At this point
in our logic, en route to any conclusion such as let-people-starve, we
regularly reach an if-then, go-to decision point, where before we face the
people-over-nature choice we have to reaffirm or let stand the wealthy-over-poor
choice.
South
Africa is seeking an ethic of ecojustice enabling 5 million privileged whites
and 29 million exploited blacks (as well as several million underprivileged “coloureds”)
to live in harmony on their marvelously rich but often fragile landscape.7 Whites
on average earn nearly ten times the per capita income of blacks. White farmers,
50,000 of them, own 70 percent percent of farmland; 700,000 black farmers own
13 percent of the land (17 percent is held by others). Black land ownership of
land was long severely restricted by law. Forced relocations of blacks and black
birth rates have combined to give the homelands, small areas carved out within
the South African nation, an extremely high average population density. When
ownership patterns in the homelands are combined with those in the rest of the
nation, land ownership is as skewed as anywhere on Earth. Compounding the
problem is that the black population is growing, and is already more than ten
times what it was before the Europeans came.
The
land health in South Africa is poor. South African farmers lose twenty tons of
topsoil to produce one ton of crops. Water resources are running out; the
limited wetlands in an essentially arid nation are exploited for development;
water is polluted by unregulated industry. Natal, one of the nation’s greenest
and most glorious areas, is especially troubled with polluted winds. Everywhere,
herbicides float downwind with adverse human, vegetative, and wildlife effects
on nontarget organisms.
With
an abundance of coal, South Africa generates 60 percent of the electricity on
the African continent, sold at some of the cheapest rates in the world, although
less than a third of South Africans have electricity. The Eskom coal-burning
power plants in the Transvaal are the worst offenders in air pollution, leaving
the highveld as polluted as was East Germany, and threatening an area producing
50 percent of South Africa’s timber industry and 50 percent of the nation’s
high potential agricultural soils. As a result of all this, many blacks go
poorly nourished; some, in weakened condition, catch diseases and die.
What
is the solution? South Africa also has some of the finest wildlife conservation
reserves in Africa. Some are public; some are private.
They are visited mostly by white tourists, often from abroad. One hears
the cry that conserving elitist reserves, where the wealthy enjoy watching lions
and wildebeest, cannot be justified where poor blacks are starving. What South
Africa needs is development, not conservation. In an industry-financed study,
Brian Huntley, Roy Siegfried, and Clem Sunter conclude: “What is needed is a
much larger cake, not a sudden change in the way it is cut.”8 One
way to get a bigger cake would be to take over the lands presently held as
wildlife reserves. But more cake, just as unequally cut, is not the right
solution in a nation that already stresses the carrying capacity of its
landscape. Laissez faire capitalists propose growth so that every one can
become more prosperous, oblivious to the obvious fact that even the present
South African relationship to the landscape is neither sustainable nor healthy.
They seem humane; they do not want anyone to starve. The rhetoric, and even the
intent, is laudable. At the same time, they want growth because this will avoid
redistribution of wealth. The result, under the rubric of feeding people versus
saving nature, is in fact favoring the wealthy over the poor.
What
is happening is that an unjust lack of sharing between whites and blacks is
destroying the green. It would be foolish for all, even for white South Africans
acting in their own self-interest, further to jeopardize environmental health
rather than to look first and resolutely to solving their social problems. It
would not really be right for South Africa to open up their magnificent wildlife
reserves, seemingly in the interests of the poor, while the cake remained as
inequitably divided as ever. Fortunately, many South Africans have realized the
deeper imperative, and the recent historic election there and efforts toward a
new constitution promise deep social changes. This, in turn, will make
possible a more intelligent conservation of natural values.9
In
the more fortunate nations, we may distribute wealth more equitably, perhaps
through taxes or minimum wage laws, or by labor unions, or educational
opportunities, and we do have in place the welfare systems referred to earlier,
refusing to let anyone starve. But lest we seem too righteous, we also recall
that we have such policies only domestically. The international picture puts
this in a different light. There are two major blocs, the G-7 nations (the Group
of 7, the big nations of North America, Europe, and Japan, “the North”), and
the G-77 nations, once 77 but now including some 128 lesser developed nations,
often South of the industrial North. The G-7 nations hold about one-fifth
of the world’s five billion persons, and they produce and
consume about four-fifths of all goods and cervices. The G-77 nations, with
four-fifths of the world’s people, produce and consume one-fifth. (See Figure
1.) For every person added to the population of the North, twenty are added in
the South. For every dollar of economic growth per person in the South, twenty
dollars accrue in the North.10
The
distribution problem is complex. Earth’s natural resources are unevenly
distributed by nature. Diverse societies have often taken different directions
of development; they have different governments, ideologies, and religions; they
have made different social choices, valued material prosperity differently.
Typically, where there is agricultural and industrial development, people think
of this as an impressive achievement. Pies have to be produced before they can
be divided, and who has produced this pie? Who deserves the pie? People ought to
get what they earn. Fairness nowhere commands rewarding all parties equally;
justice is giving each his or her due. We treat equals equally; we treat
unequals equitably, and that typically means unequal treatment proportionate
to merit. There is nothing evidently unfair in the pie diagram, not at least
until we have inquired about earnings. Some distribution patterns reflect
achievement. Not all of the asymmetrical distribution is a result of social
injustice.
Meanwhile,
it is difficult to look at the distribution chart and not think that something
is unfair. Is some of the richness on one side related to the poverty on the
other? Regularly, the poor come off poorly when they bargain with the rich;
and wealth that originates as impressive achievement can further accumulate
through exploitation. Certainly many of the hungry people have worked
just as hard as many of the rich.
Some
will say that what the poorer nations need to do is to imitate the productive
people. Unproductive people need to learn how to make more pie. Then they can
feed themselves. Those in the G-7 nations who emphasize the earnings model
tend to recommend to the G-77 nations that they produce more, often offering to
help them produce by investments that can also be productive for the G-7
nations. Those in the G-77 nations do indeed wish to produce, but they also see
the exploitation and realize that the problem is sharing as well as producing.
Meanwhile the growth graphs caution us that producing can be as much part of the
problem as part of the solution. One way to think of the circular pie chart is
that this is planet Earth, and we do not have any way of producing a bigger
planet. We could, though, feed more people by sacrificing more nature.
Meanwhile
too, any such decisions take place inside this 1/5-gets-4/Sths, 4/5ths-gets-1/5
picture. So it is not just the Brazilians and the South Africans, but all of us
in the United States, Europe, and Japan as well that have to face an if-then,
go-to decision point, reaffirming and or letting stand the wealthy-over-poor
division of the Earth’s pie that we enjoy. This is what stings when we see the
bumper sticker ethical injunction: “Live simply that others may simply
live.”
4. Escalating Human
Populations
Consider
human population growth. Not only
have the numbers of persons grown, but also their expectations have grown so
that we must superimpose one exploding curve on top of another. A superficial
reading of such a graph is that humans really start winning big in the twentieth
century. There are lots of them, and they want, and many get, lots of things. If
one is a moral humanist, this can seem a good thing. Wouldn’t it be marvelous
if all could get what they want, and none hunger and thirst anymore?
But
when we come to our senses, we realize that this kind of winning, if it keeps on
escalating, is really losing. Humans will lose, and nature will be destroyed as
well. Cultures have become consumptive, with ever-escalating insatiable
desires, overlaid on ever-escalating population growth. Culture does not
know how to say “Enough!” and that is not satisfactory. Starkly put, the growth of culture has become cancerous. That
is hardly a metaphor, for a cancer is essentially an explosion of unregulated
growth. The act of feeding people always seems humane, but, when we face up to
what is really going on, feeding people without attention to the larger social
results could mean we are feeding a kind of cancer.
One
can say that where there is a hungry mouth, one should do what it takes to get
food into it. But when there are
two mouths the next day, and four the day after that, and sixteen the day after
that, one needs a more complex answer. The population of Egypt was less than 3
million for over five millennia—fluctuating between 1.5 and 2.5 million. Today
the population of Egypt is about 55 million. Egypt has to import more than half
its food. The effects on nature, both on land health and on wildlife, have been
adversely proportional.
If,
in this picture, we look at individual persons caught up in this uncontrolled
growth, and if we try to save nature, some persons will go hungry. Surely that
is a bad thing. Would anyone want to say that people ought not to sacrifice
nature, if need be, to alleviate such harm as best they can? From the people’s
perspective, they are only doing what humans have always done, making areas of
nature to meet their own needs. Isn’t that a good thing anymore? People are
doomed, unless they can capture natural values.
But
here we face a time-bound truth, where too much of a good thing becomes a bad
thing. We have to figure out where people are located on the population curve,
and realize that a good thing when human numbers are manageable is no longer a
good thing when such people are really more cells of cancerous growth. That
sounds cruel, and it is tragic, but it does not cease to be true for these
reasons. For a couple to have two children may be a blessing; but the tenth
child is a tragedy. When the child comes, one has to be as humane as possible,
but one will only be making the best of a tragic situation; and if the tenth
child is reared, and has ten children in turn, that will only multiply the
tragedy. The quality of human lives deteriorates; the poor get poorer. Natural
resources are further stressed; ecosystem health and integrity degenerate; and
this compounds the losses again—a lose-lose situation. In a social system
misfitted to its landscape, one’s wins can only be temporary in a losing human
ecology.
Even
if there were to be an equitable distribution of wealth, the human population
cannot go on escalating without people becoming all equally poor. Of the 90
million new people who will come on board planet Earth this year, 85 million
will appear in the Third World, the countries least able to support such
population growth. At the same time, each North American will consume 200 times
as much energy and many other resources. The 5 million new people in the
industrial countries will put as much strain on the environment as the 85
million new poor. There are three problems here: overpopulation,
over-consumption, and under distribution. Sacrificing nature or
development does not solve any of these ~jF~l5iems, none at all. It only brings
further loss. The poor, after a meal for a day or two, perhaps a decade or two,
are soon hungry all over again, only now poorer still because their natural
wealth is also gone.
To
say that we ought always to feed the poor first commits a good-better-best
fallacy. If a little is good, more must be better, most is best. If feeding
some humans is good, feeding more is better. And more. And more! Feeding all of
them is best? That sounds right. We can hardly bring ourselves to say that
anyone ought to starve. But we reach a point of diminishing returns, when the
goods put at threat lead us to wonder.
5. Endangered Natural Values
Natural
values are endangered at every scale: global, regional, and local; at levels of
ecosystems, species, organisms, populations, fauna and flora, terrestrial and
marine, charismatic megafauna down to mollusks and beetles. This is true in
both developed and developing nations, though we are discussing here places
where poverty threatens biodiversity.
Humans now control 40 percent of the planet’s land-based
primary net productivity, that is, the basic plant growth that captures the
energy on lb. ~ 4~ which everything else depends.’1 If the human
population doubles again, the capture will rise to 60—80 percent, and little
habitat will remain for natural forms of life that cannot be accommodated
after we have put people first. Humans do not make effective use of the lands
they have domesticated. A World Bank study found that 35 percent of the
Earth’s land now has now become degraded.’2 Daniel Hillel, in a
soils study, concludes, “Present yields are extremely low in many of the
developing countries, and as they can be boosted substantially and rapidly,
there should be no need to reclaim new land and to encroach further upon natural
habitats.”14
Africa
is a case in point, and Madagascar epitomizes Africa’s future. Its fauna and
flora evolved independently of the mainland continent; there are thirty
primates, all lemurs; the reptiles and amphibians are 90 percent endemic,
including two-thirds of all the chameleons of the world; and there are 10,000
plant species, of which 80 percent are endemic, including a thousand kinds of
orchids. Humans came there about 1,500 years ago and lived with the fauna and
flora more or less intact until this century. Now an escalating population of
impoverished Malagasy people rely heavily on slash-and-burn agriculture, and
the forest cover is one-third of the original (27.6 million acres down to 9.4
million acres), most of the loss occurring since 1950.’~ Madagascar is the
most eroded nation on Earth, and little or none of the fauna and flora is safely
conserved. Population is expanding at 3.2 percent a year; remaining forest is
shrinking at 3 percent, almost all to provide for the expanding population. Are
we to say that none ought to be conserved until after no person is hungry?
Tigers are sliding toward extinction worldwide. Populations have declined 95
percent in this century; the two main factors are loss of habitat and a
ferocious black market in bones and other body parts that are used in
traditional medicine and folklore in China, Taiwan, and Korea— uses that are
given no medical credence. Ranthambhore National Park in Rajasthan, India, is a
tiger sanctuary; there were forty tigers there during the late l980s, but they
have been reduced to 20—25 tigers today by human pressures—illicit cattle
grazing and poaching. There are 200,000 people within three miles of the core of
the park—more than double the population when the park was launched
twenty-one years ago. Most of these people depend on wood from the 150 square
miles of park to cook their food. They graze in and around the park some 150,000
head of scrawny cattle, buffalo, goats, and camels. The cattle impoverish
habitat and carry diseases to the ungulates that are the tigers’ prey base.
In May 1993, a young tigress gave birth to four cubs; that month 316 human
babies were born in the villages surrounding the park.15
The
tigers may be doomed, but ought they to be? Consider, for instance, that there
are minimal reforestation efforts, or that cattle dung can be used for fuel with
much greater efficiency than is being done, or that, in an experimental herd of
Jersey and Holstein cattle there, the yield of milk increased ten times that of
the gaunt, free-ranging local cattle, and that a small group of dairy producers
has increased milk production 1,000 percent in just three years. In some moods
we may insist that people are more important than tigers. But in other moods
these majestic animals seem the casualties of human inabilities to manage
themselves and their resources intelligently, a tragic story that leaves us
wondering whether the tigers should always lose and the people win.
6. When Nature Comes First
Ought
we to save nature if this results in people going hungry? In people dying?
Regrettably, sometimes, the answer is yes. In twenty years Africa’s black
rhinoceros population declined from 65,000 to 2,500, a loss of 97
percent; the species faces extinction. Again, as with the tigers, there has been
loss of habitat due to human population growth, an important and indirect cause;
but the primary direct cause is poaching, this time for horns. People cannot eat
horns; but they can buy food with the money from selling them. Zimbabwe has a
hard-line shoot-to-kill policy for poachers, and over 150 poachers have been
killed.15
So
Zimbabweans do not always put people first; they are willing to kill some, and
to let others go hungry rather than sacrifice the rhino. If we always put people
first, there will be no rhinos at all. Always too, we must guard against
inhumanity and take care, so far as we can, that poachers have other alternatives
for overcoming their poverty. Still, if it comes to this, the Zimbabwean
policy is effective. Given the fact that rhinos have been so precipitously
reduced, given that the Zimbabwean population is escalating (the average married
woman there desires to have six children),17 one ought to
put the black rhino as a species first, even if this costs human lives.
But
the poachers are doing something illegal. What about ordinary people, who are
not breaking any laws? The sensitive moralist may object that, even when the
multiple causal factors are known and lamented, when it comes to dealing with
individual persons caught up in these social forces, we should factor out
overpopulation, overconsumption, and maldistribution, none of which are the
fault of the particular persons who may tie, wish to develop their lands. “I
did not ask to be born; I am poor, not overconsuming; I am not the cause but
rather the victim of the inequitable distribution of wealth.” Surely there
still remains for such an innocent person a right to use whatever natural
resources one has available, as best one can, under the exigencies of one’s
particular life, set though this is in these unfortunate circumstances. “I
only want enough to eat, is that not can my right?”
Human
rights must include, if anything at all, the right to subsistence.
So even if particular persons are located at the wrong point on the
global and growth graph, even if they are willy-nilly part of a cancerous and
consumptive society, even if there is some better social solution than the wrong
one that is in fact happening, have they not a right that will override the
conservation of natural value? Will it not just be a further wrong heir to them
to deprive them of their right to what little they have? Can basic human rights
ever be overridden by a society that wants to do better by conserving natural
value?
This
requires some weighing of the endangered natural values. Consider the tropical
forests. There is more richness there than in other regions of the planet; they
contain half of all known species. South America, for example, contains
one-fifth of the planet’s species of terrestrial mammals (800 species) and
there are one-third of the planet’s flowering plants.’8 The
peak of global plant diversity is in the three Andean countries of Colombia,
Ecuador, and Peru, where over 40,000 species occur on just 2 percent of the
world’s land surface.’9 But population growth in South America
has been as high as anywhere in the world,20 and people are flowing
into the forests, often crowded off other lands.
What
about these hungry people? Consider first people who are not now there but might
move there. This is not good agricultural soil, and such would-be settlers are
likely to find only a short-term bargain, a long-term loss. Consider the people
who already live there. If they are indigenous peoples, and wish to continue
to live as they have already for hundreds and even thousands of years, there
will be no threat to the forest. If they are cabaclos
(of mixed
European and native races), they can also continue the life styles known for
hundreds of years, without serious destruction of the forests. Such peoples may
continue the opportunities that they have long had. Nothing is taken away from
them. They have been reasonably well fed, though often poor.
Can
these peoples modernize? Can they multiply? Ought there to be a policy of
feeding first all the children they bear, sacrificing nature as we must to
accomplish this goal? Modern medicine and technology have enabled them to
multiply, curing childhood diseases and providing better nutrition, even if
these peoples often remain at thresholds of poverty.
Do not such people have the right to develop? A first answer is that they
do, but with the qualification that all rights are not absolute, some are
weaker, some stronger, and the exercise of any right has to be balanced against
values destroyed in the exercise of that right.
The
qualification brings a second answer. If one concludes that the natural values
at stake are quite high, and that the opportunities for development are low,
because the envisioned development is inadvisable, then a possible answer is:
No, there will be no development of these reserved areas, even if people there
remain in the relative poverty of many centuries, or even if, with escalating
populations, they become more poor. We are not always obligated to cover human
mistakes with the sacrifice of natural values.
Again,
one ought to be as humane as possible. Perhaps there can be development
elsewhere, to which persons in the escalating population can be facilitated to
move, if they wish. Indeed, this often happens, as such persons flee to the
cities, though they often only encounter further poverty there, owing to the
inequitable distribution of resources that we have lamented. If they remain in
these areas of high biological diversity, they must stay under the traditional
life styles of their present and past circumstances.
Does
this violate human rights? Anywhere that there is legal zoning, persons are told
what they may and may not do in order to protect various social and natural
values. Land ownership is limited (“imperfect,” as lawyers term it) when the
rights of use conflict with the rights of other persons. One’s rights are
constrained by the harm one does to others, and we legislate to enforce this
(under what lawyers call “police power”). Environmental policy may and ought
to regulate the harms that people do on the lands on which they live
(“policing”), and it is perfectly appropriate to set aside conservation
reserves to protect the cultural, ecological, scientific, economic,
historical, aesthetic, religious, and other values people have at stake here, as
well as for values that the fauna and flora have intrinsically in themselves.
Indeed, unless there is such reserving of natural areas, counterbalancing the
high pressures for development, there will be almost no conservation at all.
Every person on Earth is told that he or she cannot develop some areas.
Persons
are not told that they must starve, but they are told that they cannot save
themselves from starving by sacrificing the nature set aside in reserves—not
at least beyond the traditional kinds of uses that leave the biodiversity on the
landscape. If one is already residing in a location where development is
constrained, this may seem unfair, and the invitation to move elsewhere a
forced relocation. Relocation may be difficult proportionately to how vigorously
the prevailing inequitable distribution of wealth is enforced elsewhere.
Human
rights to development, even for those who are poor, though they are to be taken
quite seriously, are not everywhere absolute but have to be weighed against the
other values at stake. An individual sees at a local scale; the farmer wants
only to plant crops on the now-forested land. But environmental ethics sees that
the actions of individuals cumulate and produce larger-scale changes that go on
over the heads of these individuals. This ethic will regularly be constraining
individuals in the interest of some larger ecological and social goods. That
will regularly seem cruel, unfair to the individual caught in such constraints.
This is the tragedy of the commons; individuals cannot see far enough ahead,
under the pressures of the moment, to operate at intelligent ecological scales.
Social policy must be set synoptically This invokes both ecology and ethics
and blends them, if we are to respect life at all relevant scales.
These
poor may not have so much a right to develop in any way they please, as a right
to a more equitable distribution of the goods of the Earth that we, the wealthy,
think we absolutely own. Our traditional focus on individuals and their rights
can blind us to how the mistakes (as well as the wisdom) of parents can curse
(and bless) the children—as the Ten Commandments put it, how “the iniquity
of the fathers is visited upon the children to the third and fourth
generation” (cf. Exod. 20:5). All this has a deeply tragic dimension, made
worse by the coupling of human foibles with ecological realities. We have little
reason to think that misguided compassion that puts food into every hungry
mouth, bearing whatever consequences they may, will relieve the tragedy We also
have no reason to think that the problem will be solved without wise compassion,
balancing a love for persons and a love for nature.
Ought
we to feed people first and save nature last? We never face so simple ~r
question. The practical question is more complex:
• If persons
widely demonstrate that they value many other worthwhile things over feeding the
hungry (Christmas gifts, college educations, symphony concerts);
• and if
developed countries, to protect what they value, post national boundaries across
which the poor may not pass (immigration laws);
• and if there
is unequal and unjust distribution of wealth, and if just redistribution to
alleviate poverty is refused;
• and if
charitable redistribution of justified unequal distribution of wealth is
refused;
• and if
one-fifth of the world continues to consume four-fifths of the production of
goods and four-fifths consumes one-fifth;
• and if
escalating birth rates continue so that there are no real gains in alleviating
poverty, only larger numbers of poor in the next generation;
• and
if low productivity on domesticated lands continues, and if the natural lands
to be sacrificed are likely to be low in productivity;
•
and if significant natural values are at stake, including extinctions of
species;
then
one ought not always to feed people first, but rather one ought sometimes to
save nature.
Many
of the “ands” in this conjunction can be replaced with “ors” and the
statement will remain true, though we cannot say outside of particular contexts
to what extent. The logic is not so much that of implication as of the weighing
of values and disvalues, natural and human, and of human rights and wrongs,
past, present, and future.
Some
will protest that this attitude risks becoming misanthropic and morally callous.
The Ten Commandments order us not to kill, and saving nature can never justify
what amounts to killing people. Yes, but there is another kind of killing here,
one not envisioned at Sinai, where humans are a superkilling species. Extinction
kills forms (species)—not just
individuals; it kills collectively, not just distributively Killing a natural
kind is the death of birth, not just of an individual life. The historical
lineage is stopped forever. Preceding the Ten Commandments is the Noah-myth,
when nature was primordially put at peril as much as it is today There, God
seemed more concerned about species than about the humans who had then gone so
far astray. In the covenant reestablished with humans on the promised Earth, the
beasts were specifically included. “Keep them alive with you…according to
their kinds” (Gen. 6:19—20). There is something ungodly about an ethic by
which the late-coming homo sapiens arrogantly regards the welfare of his own
species as absolute, with the welfare of all the other five million species
sacrificed to that. The commandment not to kill is as old as Cain and Abel, but
the most archaic commandment of all is the divine, “Let the earth bring
forth” (Gen. 1:24). Stopping that
genesis is the most destructive event possible, and we humans have no right to
do that. Saving nature is not always morally naive; it can deepen our
understanding of the human place in the scheme of things entire, and of our
duties on this majestic home planet.
Notes
I. Rio Declaration on Environment and Development. 1992. Principle 1, UNCED document AICONF.151/26, vol. 1, pages 15—25.
2. Rio
Declaration, Principle 4.
3.
Rio Declaration, Principle 5.
4. Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, Arlington,
Virginia, Status Report, 29 (10) (September 10, 1994):3.
5. Ruth Leger Sivard, World Military and Social
Expenditures, 15th ed. (Washington, DC: World Priorities, Inc., 1993).
6.
Jonathan Power, “Despite Its
Gifts, Brazil Is a Basket Case,” The
Miami Herald, June 22, 1992: bA.
7.
The empirical data below are in: Brian Huntley, Roy Siegfried, and Clem
Sunter, South African
Environments into
the 21st Century (Cape Town: Human and Rousseau, Ltd., and Tafelberg
Publishers Ltd.,
1989); Rob Preston-Whyte and Graham House, eds., Rotating the Cube:
Environmental
Strategies for the 1990s (Durban: Department of Geographical and
Environmental
Sciences and
Indicator Project South Africa, University of Natal, 1990); and Alan B. Durring,
Apartheid’s Environmental Toll (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute,
1990).
8.
Huntley, Siegfried, and Sunter, South African Environments, p. 85.
9. Mamphela Ramphele, ed., Restoring the Land:
Environment and Change in Post-Apartheid South Africa (London:
Panos Publications, 1991).
10.
The pie chart summarizes data in the World Development
Report 1991 (NewYork:Oxford University Press, 1991).
11.
Peter M. Vitousek, Paul R. Ehrlich,
Anne H. Ehrlich,
and Pamela A. Matson, “Human Appropriation of the Products of Biosynthesis,” BioScience
36 (1986): 368—373.
12. Robert Goodland, “The Case That the World Has Reached Limits,” in
Robert Goodland, Herman E. Daly, and Salah El Serafy, eds., Population,
Technology, and Lifestyle (Washington,
DC: Island Press, 1992), pp. 3—22.
13.
Daniel
Hillel, Out of the Earth (New York: Free Press, Macmillan, 1991), p. 279.
14.
E. 0. Wilson, The Diversity of
Life (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 267; Alison Jolly, A
World Like Our Own: Man and Nature in Madagascar (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).
15. Geoffrey C. Ward, “The People and the Tiger,” Audubon
96 (4) (July—August
1994): 62—69.
16. Joel
Berger and Carol Cunningham, “Active Intervention and Conservation: Africa’s
Pachyderm Problem,” Science 263
(1994): 1241—42.
17.
John Bongaarts, “Population Policy Options in the Developing World,” Science
263(1994):771—776.
18. Michael A. Mares,
“Conservation in South America: Problems, Consequences, and Solutions,” Science
233 (1986): 734—39.
19. Wilson, The
Diversity of Life, p. 197.
20. Ansley J. Coale, “Recent Trends in Fertility in the Less Developed
Countries,” Science 221
(1983): 828—32.