What is Environmental Politics?. Elizabeth R. DeSombre

What is Environmental Politics? - Elizabeth R. DeSombre


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for creating a problem; each of us contributes a little bit. Fisheries depletion happens because of global or regional fishing; one person’s consumption of fish, and even one vessel’s fishing, contributes only a small amount. Climate change comes from the actions of many people, all over the world; one person’s airline flight, car ride, or home heating forms an unimaginably tiny portion of the problem. This is part of what it means for environmental problems to be diffuse – caused and felt by many different actors – the implications of which are discussed further in chapter 4.

      An additional important element of collective action problems is that whatever benefit is created is shared collectively. If a group of people organize to stop air pollution from a local factory, everyone who breathes the air benefits, even if most of them did not participate in working for that outcome. (The same thing would be true of the people who continued to take plastic bags or cups when others refrained in an effort to decrease plastic waste, or a fisher who doesn’t decrease her fishing.) Those people who benefit without contributing are called “free-riders.”

      It can make sense to be a free-rider. At the individual level, most of us have busy, complicated lives, and making change is hard. If you went to the grocery store without bringing your own bag, the only way to get your groceries home may be to take a disposable bag from the store. The same is true for putting in the organizing effort to make political change. If you don’t participate in the protest or lobbying effort in your community to decrease air pollution, and it succeeds, you benefit from the cleaner air as much as those who did give their time and energy to political organizing, and you also have the benefits of whatever else you did with your time or resources.

      For businesses the logic is even clearer. Since it can be costly to internalize (or prevent) externalities, bearing that cost when you are not sure your competitors will do so is foolish. Until there is a regulation in place that requires everyone to make the change, being a free-rider on making environmentally beneficial change is likely to be good for business.

      The environment isn’t the only issue that faces collective action problems. Any situation in which action is individual and the effects are collective is a candidate for collective action problems. Students organizing to get better dining hall food is an example of a collective action problem because, if they succeed, the benefit accrues to everyone, regardless of whether they contributed to the effort to improve the collective food. Citizens creating a lobbying day to pass a law requiring internet neutrality benefit no more from their successful efforts than do those who put their attention elsewhere. But additional characteristics of environmental problems, described below, make the collective action problems they face likely to be worse.

       Common Pool Resources

      The second quality causes additional problems: CPRs are what is sometimes called “subtractable” (and sometimes called “rival”). That means that one person’s use of a resource (or contribution of pollution to a resource) can make that resource less useful for others. The factory that puts pollution into the air makes the air dirtier for others who want to breathe it. The fisher who takes fish from the ocean leaves fewer fish behind to reproduce or to be caught by others. That is part of what causes the environmental problem in the first place, but the most important aspect of subtractability is that it makes addressing the problem especially difficult. If most factories stop putting pollution into the air but one or two of them don’t, those factories can still decrease the quality of the air. If most who are fishing agree to fish less, those who do not change their behavior can simply catch more of the fish that remain. In other words, free-riders don’t just make it harder to cooperate (because you know that not everyone is bearing their fair share of the effort to solve a problem), they actively undermine the ability of others to address the problem. In some cases, free-riders can make solving the problem impossible.

       Time and Distance

      The potential disconnect between when and where an environmental problem is caused and when and where its effects are felt is another element of environmental issues with important implications for environmental politics. Some environmental problems are felt immediately after they are created, in close proximity to the activities that create them. Indoor air pollution from poorly ventilated stoves, one of the major sources of this type of pollution in poor countries, has these characteristics.

      But many environmental issues are experienced distant in either time or space from where the activities that create them take place. Invasive species may become a threat only decades or more after a first non-native species arrives in an ecosystem. Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) can cause problems for the stratospheric ozone layer a century or more after they were initially emitted. Some substances, such as greenhouse gases or acid rain, may take time to accumulate in sufficient quantities before major effects are felt.

      The same kind of disconnect happens with distance. Much of the plastic that ends up in the garbage patches in the middle of the ocean was used on land, often far from the coasts. Acid rain can occur hundreds of miles from the power plant emissions that cause it. Persistent organic pollutants, such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and dioxins, have been


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