5.2.05

Chivalry Between Consenting Adults

Hugo Schwyzer has posted a defense of his chivalrous behavior. His basic principle is to do what makes the recipient (the "chivalree," I'll call her) feel comfortable. So he'll hold doors and chairs for women who like that kind of thing, but he'll refrain from chivalrizing someone who is "hyper attuned to ... percieved injustices" and therefore uncomfortable with the situation.

But what about when the chivalrer feels uncomfortable? (Presumably Hugo's tolerance would trump his sense that chivalry is the correct behavior and so he'd never presume to hold me to his standards, but there's still an implication that it would be better if everyone did things his way -- and likewise for my position.) I'm not comfortable being asked to perform certain acts simply because I'm a man. This is particularly true when the act is premised on a generalization about men and women that doesn't apply to me -- for examplem, most women I know can probably bench-press more than I can, and if I were single I'd be dating mostly women who earned more than I do. I'm also not comfortable sending the message associated with chivalry to onlookers (or reinforcing it in either my own mind or that of the chivalree). It's a message that says that men and women have fundamentally different social roles, and that men are guardians of women's delicate constitutions. (However one may personally interpret chivalry, one must remember that the act can communicate something quite different to others.) On the other hand, the kind of gender-neutral courtesy that Schwyzer grew out of sends a message that I like much better -- that men and women are more alike than they are different.
Stentor Danielson, 13:38, ,

3.2.05

Christian Environmentalism

Fausto has a nice post up about the possibilities of justifying reverence for nature within the Christian tradition. The basic problem, as he states it, is that:

... although Christians may accept that creation is the product of a divine Creator, core Christian values are far more about how we relate to each other and to God than how we relate to the rest of creation.

I more or less agree with fausto's conclusions about the possibility of Christian nature reverence. But I think seeking grounds for nature reverence takes too narrow an approach to the underlying question. The interpersonal ethics emphasized by Christianity seem to me to be ample resources for Christian environmentalism. Fausto himself offers an anthropocentric justification for the need to find environmental values in Christianity:

Today, though, when the human population strains the earth’s capacity to sustain it, any religion that does not place sufficient value on the health of natural systems is in truth a very real danger to the future of our species.

The environment can be seen as just another system among others through which people can help or harm each other. Our interactions with the environment can be judged by their impacts on our fellow people. The Bible doesn't give us much indication of what type of decisions will have positive environmental impacts -- but it never purported to be a science book. Figuring out what our environmental choices will "do unto the least of these" is our job.

It's interesting to note here that the greatest strides thet Christianity has made in motivating environmentalism have come not in nature-as-an-end-in-itself middle class environmentalism, but in the environmental justice movement, where environmental choices are viewed through the lens of social justice. Churches in lower-class and minority neighborhoods have provided important spiritual and organizational capacity for groups fighting against locally unwanted land uses (toxic dumps, hog farms, etc.).
Stentor Danielson, 01:54, ,

1.2.05

Hegelian Ecology

For another installment of "interesting things I learned from my coursework," we turn to the issue of indigenous resource management, where I recently encountered an interesting dialectical synthesis of past scientific views.

Going back to the early days of scientific research on environmental management, the prevailing opinion was that indigenous people were rapacious. Being uncivilized, they lacked the scientific know-how to properly conserve their resources, and took too short-term a view. It was thus necessary for people like colonial foresters to save the natives from their own prodigality.

The rise of cultural ecology saw a shift in the other direction, as it was discovered that indigenous people had sophisticated environmental management systems that functioned much better than anything that the colonial or capitalist world could invent and impose. This research gave scientific credibility to the "noble savage" view, which argued that indigenous people lived in respectful harmony with the earth.

The growing consensus around praise for indigenous environmentalism led, inevitably, to contrarian research showing all was not quite so rosy. One example that really stuck with me was Shepard Krech's book The Ecological Indian, in which he argued that Native Americans did not have such sophisticated environmental knowledge that allowed them to adjust their resource use to sustainable levels -- indeed, many of them believed anti-environmental things such as that the bison herds were inexhausible. It was only their low level of technology and population, and hence their limited ability to act on their cornucopian views, that saved the American environment (at least before the introduction of guns and horses, which led to rapid environmental damage before the hunters worked out what their mistake was).

I've recently come across some interesting work by the resilience community (notably Fikret Berkes) that suggests that indigenous people often share the cornucopian view described by Krech, but that it's a good thing. In the context of the larger indigenous management system, cornucopian views encourage periodic intensive resource use -- pulses of high exploitation separated by "fallow" periods. And as it turns out, in many ecosystems this sort of pulsed resource use gives a higher and more sustainable yield than constant low-level extraction. Rather than counting on the stability of the ecosystem, pulsed strategies create small disturbances that lead to renewal. Thus native claims that hunting could increase the size of animal populations were, in a sense, right.
Stentor Danielson, 10:58, ,

31.1.05

Trying To Stay Afloat

It's really sad that I'm wishing I had a Democratic Senator so that writing to her/him would make some sort of difference. I wrote to Arlen Specter this morning telling him to vote against Alberto Gonzales. I tried to flatter him about being independent-minded and needing to help keep his party on the straight and narrow, but realistically speaking his vote is a foregone conclusion. Writing to Rick Santorum about it is a waste of the time it takes to conceive of the idea. On the other hand, if I were a Massachusetts citizen, it might do some good to write to John Kerry, since he (like most Democrats) could potentially be swayed to go either way.

It should be the other way around. I should be able to count on the Democrats to be lined up on the side of good, so that I can take advantage of living in a red-Senate state to try to push Specter to the left. But it's hard to aim the cannons at the enemy when all hands are needed to bail water on our own ship.
Stentor Danielson, 11:44, ,

30.1.05

A Pet Peeve

Can we stop appending "neo" to every mention of conservatives? If you want to refer to conservatives, we already have a word for that ("conservative") that's three letters shorter than "neoconservative." I realize the "neo" makes your rant sound more sophisticated and ominous, but it also usually makes it inaccurate.
Stentor Danielson, 23:03, ,

The Costs Of Firefighting

Should Landowners Or Taxpayers Pay Wildfire Costs? A new bill in the Oregon Legislature requires taxpayers to cover more of the costs of fighting forest fires on private land. Right now, timber companies and homeowners whose houses are placed among the trees pay the biggest fees. ... Supporters say the additional public subsidy is justified because taxpayers benefit from using private forest land. Also, statistics show the public causes about one-third of forest fires.

I don't have a clearcut position on exactly what proportion of firefighting costs should be paid by the public versus the landowner. Certainly there's a role for public aid, since wildfire doesn't respect property boundaries. But I think the second argument offered in support of increasing the proportion of costs paid by the public takes a bit of a narrow view of fire. It harkens back to the Smokey the Bear ideology, in which the problem of wildfire is a problem of too many ignitions. Certainly ignitions play a role, and there's no excuse for carelessness or arson. But the damage done by a fire, and the difficulty (and hence cost) of fighting it is going to be much more shaped by land use decisions on the affected land. These range from fuel reduction, to providing accessibility for equipment, to the layout of structures and other valuables (e.g. a cluster of buildings is easier to protect than scattered ones). For this reason, states like California, Arizona and Colorado that have the public cover the full costs seem to be taking the wrong approach, removing an incentive for landowners to make firefighting as efficient as possible.
Stentor Danielson, 13:14, ,