University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: March 22, 2007

By KEVIN FRYLING
Reporter Staff Writer

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to the problems that face the environment, an expert on environmental sustainability recently told an audience in the UB Center for the Arts. Instead, he said environmental policies should stem from long-term, adaptive plans based on the values unique to each individual community.

NORTON

Bryan Norton, a professor of philosophy in the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech, presented "Sustainability: A Philosophy of Adaptive Ecosystem Management" on March 9 as part of a visit hosted by the Environment and Society Institute and the Department of Philosophy, College of Arts and Sciences. Norton also discussed "American Pragmatism and Environmental Ethics" later that day during a lecture in Park Hall.

A "radical shift" is needed to overcome the current discourse on environmentalism, which, Norton said, is currently caught up in "fruitless arguments" between "environmental economists and environmental ethicists" who cannot agree on whether the environment deserves protection based on economic value, such as natural resources, or intrinsic moral value, such as the power of nature to nurture and refresh.

"The shift that's crucial here is a shift from the argument about the abstract nature of value to a choice that is sufficiently concrete so that people can relate to it," Norton explained, pointing to the general preference for green space over parking lots as a basic example. "The reason they value green space need not be an issue as long as they can agree on the type and amount of green space that they need to protect their values. We can have a surface agreement about what to do without a deep agreement over the nature of environmental value."

Only after everyone in the community is represented can everyone work together to plan the future. "If you don't have all those voices, you're likely to choose a lot of bad ideas," Norton said. He also suggested a "three-scale approach" that takes into account short-, middle- and long-term interests to ensure a plan looks far enough ahead to sustain both current and future generations.

"Each generation has to reproduce itself," he noted, "but also it has to leave a viable environment for the next generation."

The short-term interests of communities in his model include economic goals, such as job production. "Middle-term" interests include local regional goals, such as land and water preservation, and long-term interests include such global goals as population control.

"If a policy makes it through that whole gauntlet of criteria," he said, "then there's our policy."

Of course, "It ain't gonna be easy," he said, noting that it takes patience to manage environmental problems since changes on the regional and global scale take place over the course of decades. But he also said that a plan should adapt if predicted improvements fail to manifest after a sufficient length of time.

"Adaptive management is not humans outside managing a system," Norton said, "but rather humans are in the system and they're managing themselves and the system.

"We have a great deal of ecological capital, but we've been spending it down...and I think there are many situations in the world where we've passed those thresholds and not noticed it," he added. "It's a matter of seeing the threshold before you go off the cliff."

Tree-planting programs in Third World nations (such as the one in Africa described by Nobel Peace Laureate Wangari Maathai during her Distinguished Speakers Series lecture on Feb. 2; for details, see https://www.buffalo.edu/reporter/vol38/vol38n22/articles/MaathaiDSS.html) are an example of a project that fits all the criteria, noted Norton. These projects generate economic benefit because growers profit from the sale of excess wood and seedlings, improve the local regional environment because trees restore topsoil on degraded land, and reduce global overpopulation because the other benefits mean families need fewer children to run the farmstead.

Closer to home, Norton pointed to a Georgia-based business that runs its operations on methane that has been removed from local landfills. This improves the environment on the regional scale because the business runs on cleaner and more efficient power, and benefits local taxpayers on the economic scale because the purchase of methane provides additional revenue to the local community, he said.

"Let's be creative," Norton urged audience members. "Let's assume, until we're proven otherwise, that for every problem there are solutions that are good.

"I don't believe in scarcity in the economists' sense of the term," he added. "The only scarcity I see is of good ideas. You get enough good ideas in the hopper and you beat scarcity."