Allocating Ecological Space

Abstract

Liberals have long been committed to two axiomatic claims about freedom: that the exercise of control within one's private space epitomizes individual liberty, and that each person must be free to define and pursue the good life for themselves. Together, these claims form a conception of freedom as autonomy (from the Greek Auto-Nomos, giving law to oneself), conceptualized as a personal space in which each can act according to one's own view of the good, free from external constraint. Liberal theories of justice have embraced such claims about autonomy, defining justice in terms that recognize sovereignty within one's personal space and protect individuality. John Rawls's primary goods,1 Ronald Dworkin's resources,2 and Amartya Sen's capabilities approach3 all focus on instrumental goods within a metric of egalitarian justice, allowing individuals full control over their personal spaces of autonomy while maintaining the bases for interpersonal comparison that distributive justice requires. This spatial conception of liberty has dominated liberal thought at least since J. S. Mill's observation that “the only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to attain it.”4 Here, Mill not only defines individual liberty in terms of autonomy, but he also specifies its limits: each of us should be free to pursue our own ideas about the good within our own space, bounded only by the space of others, where our acts infringe upon their autonomy.5 If this autonomous space is to play the role that Mill and other liberals have long assumed, it must be sufficiently large to allow for a wide range of actions and choices, allowing each to express their individuality without encountering the limits that Mill mentions and the constraints on action that they entail. If almost everything that I do impedes others from pursuing the good in their way—harming them directly, limiting their opportunities, or otherwise infringing upon their space—then my personal space becomes vanishingly small, and my liberty but a trivial abstraction. This spatial conception of freedom is challenged by analyses emerging from the ecological crisis, which offer competing accounts of personal space with quite different implications for the exercise of individual autonomy.6 Given ecological limits, aggregate ecological space7 (i.e., life-supporting natural resource-based goods and services, conceived in spatial terms) is finite and threatened by current patterns of over-appropriation, yielding imperatives to fairly allocate that space among various claimants, present and future. Uninhibited autonomy, as construed above, is not sustainable, justifying significant limits on both personal space and acceptable conceptions of the good life if one person's exercise of liberty is to be prevented from diminishing another's opportunity to do the same. The personal space of autonomy has always been physical and temporal as well as conceptual in that actions undertaken within it could affect current and future others, and consideration of such effects has always set the boundaries of each person's space. Ecological limits highlight the urgency of fairly allocating personal space, bounded in this same way but increasingly scarce, and require us to resurvey its conceptual boundaries in light of its physical and temporal ones. Nearly everything we do to survive (e.g., eating, breathing), not to mention activities associated with living well, makes a de facto claim on ecological space, and under conditions of scarcity this could be construed as (following Mill) depriving others of the ecological space they need to pursue their good, thus justifying severe limits on our actions and choices. Given such limits, basic actions like breathing and eating may reside wholly within my personal space of autonomy—at least as it is construed in the strong sense, in which I am completely autonomous—since they occupy ecological space that could be claimed by others and which is subject to distributive justice. Insofar as my sphere of personal liberty is construed as the domain of what Mill terms “self-regarding conduct” and in which he argues that “the public has no right to interfere,”8 it appears that this sphere of individual autonomy becomes vanishingly small in light of analyses concerning ecological limits. If activities as basic as eating and breathing make claims on shared ecological space rather than taking place within a purely private domain, then the liberal sphere of autonomy may be restricted to exclude even rudimentary human functioning, let alone my cultivation of the sort of individuality that Mill imagined. Since nearly all of my acts and choices make claims on ecological space, justice can no longer tenably be theorized primarily in terms of goods designed to maximize or maintain personal space, but must instead begin with considerations of how much shared space any person may defensibly claim. To challenge Mill's conclusions with his own logic, ecological limits suggest that very little of our conduct is genuinely “self-regarding” in the sense that justifies our “absolute” sovereignty within the personal spaces of autonomy in which persons enjoy “the liberty of tastes and pursuits.” Rather, nearly all of our conduct “concerns others” and thus makes us “amenable to society” and the limits placed upon our liberty in the interest of justice.9 Given the commitments of classic liberal theory transposed against the recognition of contemporary ecological limits, liberal justice must be transformed from a set of principles safeguarding liberty and autonomy to ones placing spatial limits on the ecological claims that persons make in their pursuit of the good life if it is to continue to play the role of arbiter among competing claims of individual freedom and guarantor of the social bases for personal autonomy. It must recognize the causal role that environmental conditions play in human welfare as well as the links between many of the activities associated with human welfare and declining environmental conditions. And it must treat the scope of justice as coterminous with that of the impacts of the relations that it governs, extending analyses of justice across national borders and over time where the circumstances of justice require. That is to say, justice must now be centrally concerned with allocating ecological space. The scarcity of ecological space need not undermine the classic liberal conception of freedom as autonomy, and indeed the allocation of ecological space defines the sphere in which persons can make the kind of autonomous choices that liberalism celebrates, within the constraints that it recognizes. Absent some notion of individual entitlement to ecological space, there can be no space for autonomy, for the two spaces are one and the same. I can be sovereign within my own space of autonomy only so long as I do not claim an unjust share of ecological space in the process. But the recognition of this scarcity by liberal theories of justice does require some rethinking of several classic liberal assumptions that are maintained by contemporary theories of egalitarian justice, and some changes of emphases and amendment of several normative judgments issuing from those theories in light of retained commitments from classic liberalism. In this essay, my aim is to consider how liberal egalitarian justice theory might be reshaped by heretofore unacknowledged ecological limits and how it might respond to the under-theorized but urgent imperative to fairly allocate ecological space. The fact of ecological limits and its implications for various dimensions of human endeavor have been slow to be incorporated into many existing scholarly fields, and political theory is no exception. As Aldo Leopold observed of the absence of an “ecological conscience” within the “intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions” of persons and normative theories, “the proof that conservation has not yet touched these foundations of conduct lies in the fact that philosophy and religion have not yet heard of it.”10 Since the development of classical liberalism predates the recognition of ecological limits and since the contemporary inheritors of that tradition remain beholden to many of its core premises about the human relationship with the natural world, it may not be surprising that political theory continues to be informed by unrealistic assumptions and to be naïve about the human potential to degrade the essential conditions for ongoing human flourishing. As this fact comes to be incorporated into political theory, its several normative implications will shape the continued evolution of liberal political thought in the same dynamic between empirical understanding and normative prescription that has marked that tradition's adaptability to change and ongoing relevance for the past three centuries. How, though, might liberal concepts of justice and autonomy be informed by this fact, and how might they be transformed by it? The fact of limits has been adequately observed elsewhere, but warrants a brief synopsis here to explicate its relevant features. Humans require environmental goods and services in order to survive, and desire additional goods and services beyond mere survival levels in order to flourish. We need clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and agricultural produce for food, clothing, and shelter. Our waste must be assimilated back into the environment, whether from bodily processes of digestion and respiration or from our use of energy and consumption of commodities. These needs are basic in that, following Henry Shue's distinction between basic and nonbasic rights, “any attempt to enjoy any other right by sacrificing the basic right would be quite literally self-defeating, cutting the ground from beneath itself,”11 and their dependence on natural ecosystems is essential in that technological substitutes for degraded resources do not currently and may not ever exist. The satisfaction of these basic human needs and further wants has some impact on the natural environment somewhere, and we can conceptualize our aggregate impacts in terms of ecological space, or the amount of the planet's surface area needed to sustain our demand for environmental goods and services at average levels of biological productivity. The best known of such measures is the ecological footprint,12 which offers perhaps the most ecumenical of matrices for gauging ecological demand at both individual and aggregate levels, but in order to focus on the spatial concept of ecological demand rather than the specific index for measuring it I shall use the more general term here. Demand for ecological space varies widely among persons and peoples. According to Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees, who developed the ecological footprint idea and index, the average American requires 5.1 hectares of ecological space in order to sustain her annual resource consumption and waste production, while the average Indian requires only 0.38 hectares and the average ecological footprint for all humans is 1.8 hectares.13 Manifold external drivers affect the size of such averages, including national stages of economic development, population density, housing patterns, and so on, but within any given society and social stratum considerable variation in footprint size exist. While one's social milieu is a factor in determining one's footprint, individual acts and preferences also clearly play a significant role. Members of a common social class in the same geographic region vary widely in the amounts of energy that is required to heat and cool their homes, the distances that they must commute for work or choose to travel for leisure as well as the fuel efficiency of their transportation choices, and otherwise make a wide range of choices that can significantly increase or decrease their individual claims on ecological space. Among the drivers of such wide interpersonal variation is a personal commitment to environmental sustainability: Some have a strong preference for reducing the amount of ecological space they require as part of their conceptions of the good, often for some mix of environmental and economic reasons, while others do not. Beyond some survival threshold, individual demand for ecological space is largely discretionary, and varies according to individual preferences and social norms that can increase or diminish that demand, making some norms and preferences more sustainable than others. One fact about ecological space has become manifestly evident in recent decades: there is not enough space to accommodate the current de facto claims made through human consumption patterns, let alone those of a more populous or affluent world. Wackernagel and Rees illustrate this fact and some of its implications: given the 8.9 billion hectares of biologically productive land and aquatic ecosystems worldwide and reserving the ecological goods and services from one-sixth of that space to support all nonhuman terrestrial and aquatic species, they estimate that the planet contains 7.4 billion hectares of ecological space that can be directed toward the satisfaction of human needs and wants. With a current global population of 6.7 billion persons14 and an average individual ecological footprint of 1.5 hectares, the world is currently running an ecological deficit of 0.4 hectares/person. This alone bodes ill for the planet's future, for reasons to be considered shortly. But as the authors provocatively observe, if all current persons were to consume resources and produce waste at the rate of the average American, we would need the ecological capacity of an additional three earths in order to support this one planet's human population alone. Average human footprints paint a disturbing enough picture of unsustainable human consumption patterns, but these wide deviations from the mean reveal equally wide variations in current claims on ecological space and the related difficulties in bringing about a sustainable planet. It is possible to accommodate this sort of excessive demand on ecological space in the short run, for example, by depleting stored energy reserves and natural capital like forests and fish stocks that generate natural resources or absorb waste. But this ongoing pattern of overuse is unsustainable and degrades ecological productivity over time, resulting in decreasing amounts of available ecological space to accommodate future demands. A sustainable planet is one that is able to live within its available ecological space, given various demands on that space by all its human and nonhuman residents. An unsustainable one is literally living on borrowed time, whether that debt is incurred to the planet's past, through depletion of stored nonrenewable resources like coal and oil, or to its increasingly bleak future, through the insidious bequest of depletion and pollution to future generations. From this one central fact, several related observations follow, and some normative implications that are often thought to follow cannot indeed validly be inferred. As I have argued elsewhere,15 global limits on ecological space based on the earth's ecological capacity cannot justify highly unequal national limits on ecological demand based solely on the unequal ecological capacities within national territories, as if nation-states are entitled to all and only the ecological resources located within their borders. Those with the good fortune of territorial natural resource wealth have no legitimate claim to far greater per capita ecological footprints merely by virtue of this natural abundance, and those fortunate individuals that command the contemporary surrogate for abundance in land cannot necessarily make a justified claim to proportionally larger shares of ecological space than their less fortunate counterparts. Principles of national and individual allocation cannot simply be inferred from global limits, which concern physical facts rather than normative claims. The sort of wide inequality in access to ecological space that is seen in current use patterns requires a separate justification from the natural distribution of ecological wealth, and may be indefensible on any terms. While the fact of ecological scarcity has been invoked on behalf of a variety of social and political agendas, other and more controversial premises are required before many such normative judgments can validly be reached. My interest here lies in what must follow for liberal political theory from recognition of ecological limits, not in what might follow from that in combination with other assumptions or biases. Another observation also necessarily follows: global limits combined with global demand that is well in excess of those limits entails some international, interpersonal, and intertemporal allocation of ecological space. At least some claimants on such space will be forced to curb their ecological demands in light of scarcity produced by the demands of others. Indeed, allocation must occur even when global demand for space does not exceed ecological limits, since it does not require competing claims but rather entails the division of some finite good among various parties. The conscious recognition of or effort to observe ecological limits is not a prerequisite to conceiving of human claims upon ecological space as constituting an allocation, as I use the term here, since to “allocate” presupposes neither a fair process or outcome nor any intention to deprive those receiving less or to reward those getting more. Allocations of this sort can be intentional and based in justified principles of distributive justice or they can be the unintentional result of current and future use patterns. If the present generation of humans ignores limits on its aggregate ecological footprint, whether from ignorance, antipathy, or outright malevolence, this necessarily comes at the expense of future generations. If the present generation as a whole observes such aggregate limits, then the refusal by one nation to do so comes at the expense of other nations, and within a country that observes national limits, individual refusals to limit consumption come at the expense of other citizens. Such is the logic of limits: more for any one necessarily means less for others. Several normative judgments can also be inferred from the fact of ecological limits combined with the inevitability of allocating scarce ecological space and a simple principle of non-maleficence. If the present generation, through its words and deeds, continues to ignore ecological limits and claims more than its share of ecological space, this will almost certainly make later generations vulnerable to current de facto allocation choices, just as the pollution of a river by upstream riparian users will almost certainly affect those living downstream. While scholars may debate the appropriate degree of culpability for harm that is unintentionally caused, this does little to mitigate the impact of the harm itself. Unsustainable levels of resource consumption and waste production cause avoidable harm and suffering, and we know enough about the causal chains linking over-appropriation of ecological space with the predictable harm that results to fault such acts as morally negligent, if not willfully malevolent. The over-appropriation of ecological space constitutes an unjustified claim to more than one's share of a finite resource that carries with it the necessary consequence that later generations will have to survive with less than their fair share of that shared resource, and so is unjust. Thinking about how ecological space ought to be allocated is thus not some optional and empty intellectual exercise, but is rather an inescapable imperative that can drive contemporary environmental policy decisions and act as a principled constraint on individual life plans and conceptions of the good, or its unfair allocation can be the unintentional but inevitable result of a collective failure to exercise due moral care. The fact of ecological limits and unavoidability of its allocation leaves open only two possibilities: the way in which persons, nations, and entire generations allocate ecological space can either be justified or unjustified. The claims that each makes on that space through their patterns of resource use and waste production can be just or unjust, a judgment that stands whether or not the parties in question acknowledge this to be the case. But what does it mean to allocate ecological space among persons and peoples? The term often conjures the image of some authoritative body that weighs opposing claims and issues limited use rights on the basis of such claims. While it is obvious that no such body exists, particularly at the global level, this image nonetheless captures the essential aspect of an allocation framework. When determining which of two or more contending parties are entitled to some scarce good, fair decisions must be guided by the strength of the respective claims rather than the identity or other irrelevant characteristics of the parties in question. That one party to the conflict may be wealthier, stronger, or better connected to political power cannot be allowed to influence allocation decisions unless these constitute criteria relevant to entitlement claims, regardless of the role that each plays in the de facto allocation of ecological space through current use patterns. Decisions about each party's warranted share of ecological space must be principled rather merely deferring to greater power or granting concessions to the first claimants, and should be justifiable to all on the basis of publicly defensible reasons and objectively measurable criteria. Such decisions, that is to say, are matters of distributive justice16 rather than issues of “might makes right” or its equivalent. By appealing to principles of distributive justice to allocate ecological space, it might appear as though the conventional distinction between ethics and political philosophy has been collapsed. Actions that make claims on ecological space—a broadly inclusive category that not only contains much of what was previously regarded as the domain of ethics but also much of what was once thought to exist outside of that sphere—must now be subject to principles defining the just distribution of that space. Should one exceed their just share, this transgression could be condemned as unjust in the distributive sense. That is, the normative judgment that they should not have acted as they did would be based on their indefensible claim to more than their share of ecological space, to the detriment of others. But notice that this is not identical to evaluating the act as wrong in a moral sense. Had the agent not already made all their prior claims on ecological space that caused the act in question to be the one that exceeded their individual budget, that act itself would not be unjust. Hence, it would be mistaken to describe particular acts or choices as unjust in this sense, though there may be some that by themselves bust ecological budgets and so result in injustice by necessity. Rather, a person's full package of actions or pattern of choices may adhere to or exceed their just allowances of ecological space. Normative judgments are thus applied to these packages or patterns, and not to the discrete acts or choices that exceed some threshold. Ethical judgment therefore remains in the picture, serving as a supplement to judgments based in distributive justice; the former is not subsumed within the latter. An act can be wrong without being unjust, as when the offense is other than an excessive claim on shared resources, and unjust without being wrong. To this latter possibility, which forces the reevaluation of a wide range of acts and choices, we now turn. Feminists invoke the slogan “the personal is political” in order to challenge the conventional division between public and private spheres, where the latter denotes acts and choices that are regarded as beyond the gaze of normative social or political judgment. Women's choices about whether to work or remain within the home as primary caregivers to their children, whether or not to marry or to conform to other conventional gender roles, and so on, have been successfully challenged as adversely affecting other women, and therefore not being the strictly personal choices that they were once considered. Resting on the liberal distinction between public and private, the feminist effort to politicize the personal choices of women (as well as men) can be regarded as less an effort to break this dichotomy and more an attempt to redraw the line dividing public and private spheres to accurately reflect the causal connections between the acts and choices of some and the opportunities of others, often through the constraining mechanism of social norms. Campaigns to politicize acts and choices that harm women aren't meant to obliterate the liberal sphere of protected self-regarding conduct, where persons can exercise autonomy free from the influence of state coercion or social pressure, but rather aim to ensure that other-affecting conduct does not insidiously masquerade as private in order to deflect normative critique. The aim and effect of such campaigns is not to make everything a political act, to be subject to public scrutiny and the force of social norms and possibly also to coercive regulation, but rather to update the boundary to reflect mistaken past assumptions and shifting intellectual terrain. As with feminist campaigns to politicize acts and choices that had previously if mistakenly been regarded as private, environmentalist efforts to call critical attention to many consumer choices likewise accept a liberal division between public and private but assert a mistaken identification of political acts and choices as strictly personal. Campaigns against highly fuel-inefficient sport utility vehicles (SUVs), for example, politicize personal transport choices on grounds that such decisions can potentially harm others and so must be subject to more than purely private esthetic and economic preferences.17 By the line of argument that emerges from this critique of automotive choice, the state not only has a right to regulate motor vehicle fuel economy but also has an obligation to do so, since excessively inefficient options significantly raise the likelihood that the consumers purchasing them will contribute to ecological harm through their over-appropriation of ecological space. While it would be hypothetically possible to avoid such harm with even the most fuel-inefficient choice of vehicles at sufficiently low rates of use, this logical possibility does nothing to mitigate the harm that does occur or to blunt the fact that it would be avoidable through fuel economy regulation. Moreover, one consumer's decision to buy a large and fuel-inefficient vehicle makes it more difficult for others to purchase smaller and more efficient models, given weight and bumper height incompatibilities that raise kill rates when the former collides with the latter.18 According to this claim, then, one's transport choices are political rather than personal; they are subject to normative consideration in ethics and/or political philosophy rather than being the purely personal choices that some opponents of automobile fuel economy regulation maintain. Regardless of the merits of this SUV critique, it serves to illustrate how a concern with ecological limits can politicize consumption choices that were previously treated as subject to personal preferences alone. It might be wrong to purchase and drive a vehicle that necessarily harms others, as by exposing them to higher risk of injury or death in collisions (as is the case with most SUVs)—an ethical judgment that holds regardless of what other choices that consumer makes. On the other hand, it would be unjust to consume energy and produce waste at rates that exceed one's fair personal allotment of ecological space, which is far more likely to result from the use of a fuel-inefficient vehicle than the comparable use of a fuel-efficient one. Normative arguments for regulatory standards on vehicle fuel efficiency take the latter form, claiming a public interest in personal transport choices that justifies the use of public coercion over such choices, here in the form of prohibitions against excessive inefficiency. Their concern is with just allotments rather than particular acts, so they focus on the relationship between vehicle choices and their effects on ecological space over time, noting the disparity in ecological impacts for otherwise-similar transportation services. But such regulations do not themselves allocate ecological space, for they place no upper limit on the overall amount of petroleum that any vehicle can consume or pollution it can emit. While their motive is derivative of concerns for allocating ecological space—assuming that regulatory incentives for promoting efficient transport choices will reduce aggregate as well as individual demand for such space—they lack the hard cap of a formal allocation. Appeals to justice such as these aim to remove the consumer's automobile choice from the realm of purely private acts, calling for external coercion to facilitate the mitigation of harm without directly prohibiting harmful acts. In doing so, they call attention to limits on ecological space, but stop short of any allocation of it to particular persons. In this sense, environmental standards for individual commodities like automobiles rest on a kind of second-order moral imperative in that the acts and choices they prohibit may not themselves be wrong or unjust, but they make it easier for users of