environment
Where's the Beach?
07/15/2011 12:04
And, just for fun, here's a pic of me with my Dad & Sister, looking at my first glacier, the source of the Rhine river. Long ago. I wonder what it looks like now?
Corporations, the environment, and Atlas Shrugged
06/30/2011 12:14
Corporations are, by their nature, the enemies of sustainable environments. That’s not because corporations are from the “dark side,” or because the people in them don’t care about the environment. It’s because corporations are legally structured to meet certain goals. Specifically, to produce returns to shareholders (dividends from corporate profits) and to increase shareholder value (stock price). The realities of corporate finance and economics require corporations to focus on returning dividends or growth to equity on a regular — and for most corporations that means quarterly — basis.
The production of quarterly growth or profits to distribute to shareholders is incompatible, in unavoidable ways, with environmental stewardship, sustainability; or in many cases, ironically, even with long-term growth and profits. So unless there are other mechanisms in place to make sure the environment is protected and carefully used to the advantage of all the “stakeholders” in society, it won’t happen. You can’t blame corporations for failing to do something they were specifically designed not to do.
The typical corporation does not contain tools or mechanisms to allow it to focus on the long-term or on the social or natural environment beyond the thing it was particularly chartered to do: make a specific product for a specific market. That doesn’t mean corporations are evil, it just means that they’re limited. Society needs other organizations that are designed to address these issues.
Evil only comes into the picture, when corporations or their champions try to prevent anyone else from speaking on behalf of these other social interests the corporations were not designed to address. It gets a little sketchy, when the corporations try to use government to shut down unions, or to let them drive the agenda on health & safety or environmental issues that are clearly at odds with the short-term growth and profit goals they were designed to pursue.
But again, you can’t blame corporations for doing what they were built to do. No matter how sympathetic to workers’ needs or the environment a corporate manager may personally be, his job requires him to put growth and profits first. That’s called fiduciary duty. Managers are legally liable if they don’t choose the shareholder’s interests over all others.
So a corporation’s managers and spokespeople should be expected to object when someone proposes a union, consumer protection or environmental regulations that will reduce their quarterly growth or profits. But this isn’t the end of the conversation, it’s just the beginning. That’s their job, and it’s the job of society to make sure that theirs isn’t the only voice in the conversation.
It should be a social dialog, not a corporate monolog.
The Ayn Randian, Atlas Shrugged assumption that there are no problems that cannot be solved by rationally self-interested individuals negotiating with each other, denies the possibility of this social dialog.The Atlas Shrugged point of view assumes that if steel-industrialist Hank Rearden discovered that the building of a particular factory or the siting of a particular mine would, for example, lead to the extinction of a species of owl, that Hank would do the right thing. Actually, it defines “the right thing” as whatever Hank chooses to do.
If Hank happens to be a bird-lover, or values biodiversity, then he is free to (and right to) move the factory or mine to somewhere else, or find a different way to get the job done. If however, Hank doesn’t really give a crap about birds, he’s equally right to go ahead and wipe out the owls. “People” aren’t able, in the Atlas Shrugged world, to legitimately argue that Hank’s actions are detrimental to “society,” because those ideas are collectivist, and therefore off limits.
The reason this is important is, that underneath it all, a lot of the people arguing for the political right these days wish they were living in the post-strike world of Atlas Shrugged. They want to live in a world where there is no legitimate voice to speak against the voices of corporations. This is ironic, because many of these people are politicians, and they’d be the first to go if the Randian revolution ever actually took place.
The other thing that doesn’t work about the anti-collectivist Ayn Rand world-view, when you try to apply it to reality, is that concentration of wealth happens. And it happens, ironically, in a couple of very collectivist ways.
The first collective that the Atlas Shrugged world-view empowers is the family. And even Rand recognized this. James Taggart inherits the railroad empire of his grandfather, and is not worthy of it. Okay, Francisco is the “triumph of the D’Anconias,” but the contrast between James and Francisco, that Rand repeatedly calls attention to, only proves that the inheritance game is a crapshoot. Even Andrew Carnegie knew this, and recommended against leaving fortunes to your children in his “Gospel of Wealth” — although he did not take his own advice, in the end.
The second, more dangerous collective that’s enabled by Atlas Shrugged involves the way real-world wealth is often accumulated. In the story-world, of course, fortunes are always and only made by creativity, discovery, or working harder than your competitors. But when you try to apply Rand’s hyper-individualism to this world, something else happens.
Imagine a world where everyone was only allowed to act in his individual, personal interest. Ignore for the moment that corporations are groups of people (collectives) that legally “pretend” to be a single individual. Imagine that you can only act for your own benefit — that society rejects group interests, and only recognizes individuals.
What would this world look like? Going back to the Hank vs. The Owls scenario: there would be no way a group of people could argue that preventing owl extinction was worth more than a factory or mine. There would also be no way to say that workers should be paid a particular wage, or that the environment should be treated in a particular way. Why not? Because the pain is distributed, and the profits are concentrated.
This is the world that Atlas Shrugged’s anti-collectivist ideology leads to. Say a corporation (a legal individual) wants to dump its chemical waste into a river, causing each of the people living downstream to have to buy bottled water instead of drinking river water. The corporation saves the millions it would have spent cleaning up after itself, and the people are slightly inconvenienced — lets say, $25 a month each, in bottled water costs. Okay, now in a world of only individual action, who’s going to step up to battle the corporation to save themselves $300 a year?
The question for Randians is, isn’t making a lot of people’s lives a little shittier so that a few people can get extremely rich the worst form of collectivism?
Modern politicians sometimes call this “socializing the costs and privatizing the gains.” I’m not sure whether they really get it, or have a solution, though. And it happens more often than we’d like to admit. For example, studies are beginning to show that high fructose corn sweeteners are bad for people — a negative effect that is not only widely dispersed, but delayed in time and uncertain in its extent. So how do we talk about responsibility? And then, of course, there’s cigarettes.
But it’s funny, because this was also something Andrew Carnegie knew all about. He was a big benefactor of libraries and schools, but he also regularly cut his workers’ wages. Carnegie believed that cultural institutions like museums were important, and that the workers would just spend the money on something frivolous if he let them have it. So, he cut their wages, because he could, and built symphony halls with the money. Was society better off? Maybe. But let’s not pretend this was democracy — it was aristocracy. And that’s in Atlas Shrugged, too. Remember, Ayn Rand was originally Alisa Rosenbaum, from czarist St. Petersburg.
The production of quarterly growth or profits to distribute to shareholders is incompatible, in unavoidable ways, with environmental stewardship, sustainability; or in many cases, ironically, even with long-term growth and profits. So unless there are other mechanisms in place to make sure the environment is protected and carefully used to the advantage of all the “stakeholders” in society, it won’t happen. You can’t blame corporations for failing to do something they were specifically designed not to do.
The typical corporation does not contain tools or mechanisms to allow it to focus on the long-term or on the social or natural environment beyond the thing it was particularly chartered to do: make a specific product for a specific market. That doesn’t mean corporations are evil, it just means that they’re limited. Society needs other organizations that are designed to address these issues.
Evil only comes into the picture, when corporations or their champions try to prevent anyone else from speaking on behalf of these other social interests the corporations were not designed to address. It gets a little sketchy, when the corporations try to use government to shut down unions, or to let them drive the agenda on health & safety or environmental issues that are clearly at odds with the short-term growth and profit goals they were designed to pursue.
But again, you can’t blame corporations for doing what they were built to do. No matter how sympathetic to workers’ needs or the environment a corporate manager may personally be, his job requires him to put growth and profits first. That’s called fiduciary duty. Managers are legally liable if they don’t choose the shareholder’s interests over all others.
So a corporation’s managers and spokespeople should be expected to object when someone proposes a union, consumer protection or environmental regulations that will reduce their quarterly growth or profits. But this isn’t the end of the conversation, it’s just the beginning. That’s their job, and it’s the job of society to make sure that theirs isn’t the only voice in the conversation.
It should be a social dialog, not a corporate monolog.
If Hank happens to be a bird-lover, or values biodiversity, then he is free to (and right to) move the factory or mine to somewhere else, or find a different way to get the job done. If however, Hank doesn’t really give a crap about birds, he’s equally right to go ahead and wipe out the owls. “People” aren’t able, in the Atlas Shrugged world, to legitimately argue that Hank’s actions are detrimental to “society,” because those ideas are collectivist, and therefore off limits.
The reason this is important is, that underneath it all, a lot of the people arguing for the political right these days wish they were living in the post-strike world of Atlas Shrugged. They want to live in a world where there is no legitimate voice to speak against the voices of corporations. This is ironic, because many of these people are politicians, and they’d be the first to go if the Randian revolution ever actually took place.
The other thing that doesn’t work about the anti-collectivist Ayn Rand world-view, when you try to apply it to reality, is that concentration of wealth happens. And it happens, ironically, in a couple of very collectivist ways.
The first collective that the Atlas Shrugged world-view empowers is the family. And even Rand recognized this. James Taggart inherits the railroad empire of his grandfather, and is not worthy of it. Okay, Francisco is the “triumph of the D’Anconias,” but the contrast between James and Francisco, that Rand repeatedly calls attention to, only proves that the inheritance game is a crapshoot. Even Andrew Carnegie knew this, and recommended against leaving fortunes to your children in his “Gospel of Wealth” — although he did not take his own advice, in the end.
The second, more dangerous collective that’s enabled by Atlas Shrugged involves the way real-world wealth is often accumulated. In the story-world, of course, fortunes are always and only made by creativity, discovery, or working harder than your competitors. But when you try to apply Rand’s hyper-individualism to this world, something else happens.
Imagine a world where everyone was only allowed to act in his individual, personal interest. Ignore for the moment that corporations are groups of people (collectives) that legally “pretend” to be a single individual. Imagine that you can only act for your own benefit — that society rejects group interests, and only recognizes individuals.
What would this world look like? Going back to the Hank vs. The Owls scenario: there would be no way a group of people could argue that preventing owl extinction was worth more than a factory or mine. There would also be no way to say that workers should be paid a particular wage, or that the environment should be treated in a particular way. Why not? Because the pain is distributed, and the profits are concentrated.
This is the world that Atlas Shrugged’s anti-collectivist ideology leads to. Say a corporation (a legal individual) wants to dump its chemical waste into a river, causing each of the people living downstream to have to buy bottled water instead of drinking river water. The corporation saves the millions it would have spent cleaning up after itself, and the people are slightly inconvenienced — lets say, $25 a month each, in bottled water costs. Okay, now in a world of only individual action, who’s going to step up to battle the corporation to save themselves $300 a year?
The question for Randians is, isn’t making a lot of people’s lives a little shittier so that a few people can get extremely rich the worst form of collectivism?
Modern politicians sometimes call this “socializing the costs and privatizing the gains.” I’m not sure whether they really get it, or have a solution, though. And it happens more often than we’d like to admit. For example, studies are beginning to show that high fructose corn sweeteners are bad for people — a negative effect that is not only widely dispersed, but delayed in time and uncertain in its extent. So how do we talk about responsibility? And then, of course, there’s cigarettes.
But it’s funny, because this was also something Andrew Carnegie knew all about. He was a big benefactor of libraries and schools, but he also regularly cut his workers’ wages. Carnegie believed that cultural institutions like museums were important, and that the workers would just spend the money on something frivolous if he let them have it. So, he cut their wages, because he could, and built symphony halls with the money. Was society better off? Maybe. But let’s not pretend this was democracy — it was aristocracy. And that’s in Atlas Shrugged, too. Remember, Ayn Rand was originally Alisa Rosenbaum, from czarist St. Petersburg.
Environmental History for Environmentalists?
03/27/2011 12:21
I've been thinking about less traditional applications of history, than the obvious "get a job in a history department" next step in the regular career path. I've always planned on writing for a wider public than other historians, but I've been wondering about other places, other people. Lucy will be going to COA next fall, which reminds me that there are environmentalists in the local area, too: over at Antioch.
So I started thinking about how I might pitch an environmental history or rural history course to a place like Antioch, which has a program that focuses on training environmental studies teachers and advocate/activists. It's fascinating, because I think this question challenges me to think about what would people who are not historians care about? In a real sense, I realized, my ideas about putting together syllabi have been unconsciously organized around the idea that I'd be selling the syllabi to history departments, rather than to the end-users (or even, ironically, the students). The question of packaging a course for historians is bypassed, when the people to whom I’d be selling an Environmental History syllabus are not themselves historians, but Environmental people. They wouldn’t care about historiographical in-fights like Johnston’s gripes about Cronon and Limerick, unless it leads to different action in the real world. So I have to go back, and look at things like Muir v. Pinchot, and ask, does this make a difference in real outcomes? More important, does it illustrate ideas that continue to animate environmental policy debates?
Is there a textbook? Radkau's Nature and Power? Cronon’s Uncommon Ground? Marks’ Origins of the Modern World?
I think the Horwitz's idea (in The Transformation of American Law) about how changes happen, illustrated by Steinberg, is important for environmentalists to understand. As is the Jacoby idea that even conservation can be class-oriented, and perceived differently by different classes. Scott, on central planning. Davis, on famine being a political choice. Maybe something specific on Latin America — but maybe not Miller. Maybe Cochabamba?
A comparison of history and culture? Cronon v. Merchant? Or just a Merchant excerpt, as an example of how environment is sometimes used metaphorically, and how this muddies the water?
Big themes:
Inevitability v. Contingency (or even agency)
Environment and Class
Environmental “reality” v. myth and culture
Climax v. Change — implications for responsibility
Globalism as loss of externality
Books I might include:
Crosby: The Columbian Exchange
Cronon: Changes in the Land
Steinberg: Nature, Incorporated
Jacoby: Crimes Against Nature
Lynn-Sherow: Red Earth
Scott: excerpts from Seeing Like A State and How Not to Be Governed
Worster: excerpts from Rivers of Empire
Davis: Late Victorian Holocausts
Smil: excerpt from Creating the Twentieth Century on nitrates
Guha: How Much Should a Person Consume excerpts
Opie: Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land
Olivera: Cochabamba! Water War in Bolivia
Hornborg: The Power of the Machine
Articles:
Raup v. Donahue
Cronon: “Getting Back to the Wrong Nature”
O’Connor: “Is Sustainable Capitalism Possible?”
Primary Sources:
Thoreau: Walden
Muir & Pinchot excerpts on Hetch Hetchy
Progressive Conservation and Country Life tracts
Mumford (“Fourth Migration”) v. Urban sanitizers and even Jane Addams
Carson: Silent Spring
Pollan: Omnivore or Defense of Food excerpts
(Other readings contextualizing Antioch’s favorite authors and texts)
Changes in the Land
06/04/2009 16:26
