What Level of Government for Ecologists?

Abstract

First and foremost, environmentalists have focused their attention on physical environment, on questions regarding quality of air, water, and soil. As radical as they may appear to be, most environmentalist groups focus on concrete solutions to solve our environmental problems. Greens and ecologists, on other hand, in addition to physical state of planet, are interested in larger, more institutional questions. Better known in Europe and particularly in Germany (Hulsberg, 1988), Greens constitute a political force that has made its political thought (Dobson, 1990)(1) and its parliamentary action felt in several countries. There are also ecologists who are less easily identifiable in terms of traditional public policy positions. Ecology was a term first reserved for study of natural settings and interactions found among its components. With time, ecology came to include study of interactions at human and institutional level. This article is an attempt to get acquainted with some of ecologists' views on institutional, organizational, and public policy questions, views which are extremely varied and, sometimes, contradictory. The institutional and human questions that have interested ecologists range from family, patriarchy, and feminism to decentralization, autoroutes, supermarkets, and world government. Of course, when ecologists venture beyond questions of air, water, and soil to focus on larger, more immaterial topics, contradictions and controversies are more likely to occur. Recently, for example, a fundamental controversy has raged in United States between, on one hand, Murray Bookchin, main proponent of social ecology, and deep ecologists on other hand. Bookchin accuses deep ecologists of turning back clock of social evolution, when they call for a greater respect for nature's fundamental laws (Hinchman and Hinchman, 1989, p. 212; Dobuzinskis, 1989, p. 5). The institutional debates among ecologists, or even among Greens, are by no means limited to die United States. The debates between fundamentalists and realists in West Germany are legendary. In France, ecologist Antoine Waechter's application of concept of bio-region to immigration policy has stirred debate in a country where immigration has been a very sensitive question for at least a decade (Nick, 1991, p. 13). Of course, not all ecological notions are concrete enough to stimulate debate on public policy. For example, notion that governments are needed to provide external controls on behavior only in highly |entropic' societies out of harmony with their environment (Hinchman and Hinchman, 1989, p. 220) is in interesting thought but policy advisers would be at a loss to start putting it into operation. The same could be said for idea that the mature ecosystem is an ensemble of unlike, yet closely integrated parts, (which makes) yeoman agriculture ... unnatural and feudalism natural, since latter combines unlike classes and occupations (Hinchman and Hinchman, 1989, p. 219). In order to illustrate some of ecology movement's institutional propositions, I will pay special attention to those that pertain to appropriate level of government intervention. Obviously, whether a given problem requires federal or local government intervention depends largely on nature of problem itself. Yet institutional ecologists, if only implicitly, have formulated principles and proposed arrangements in this regard. My goal is to examine some of these principles and propositions. Before moving into heart of topic, it may be helpful to point to some of general principles of ecologist movement, especially those that may have some bearing on institutional arrangements. Among those principles on which there is agreement, diversity is first and foremost: diversity exists in nature, and humans should not seek to artificially standardize their creations. …