debitage: part of the core tool and scraper tradition

debitage

3.6.06

Participation, For And Against

Zaid Hassan at Worldchanging manages to sum up much of where I think environmentalism needs to go:

Those of us working for social change should have one key idea flash-burned into our consciousness. If the communities we wish to benefit have not participated or been involved in decision making processes then there will be a lack of ownership and the initiative will most likely fail (if not sooner then certainly later). This key idea is forgotten again and again and the results are sadly predictable. Dialogue is a key tool in ensuring that this particular trap is avoided. Given the frequency with which this particular trap appears on the landscape of social change and development projects, a map to the terrain is no bad thing to be carrying.

Click through to the comments for a strong opposing viewpoint from Lorenzo (as well as some interesting subsequent dialogue), who throws some cold water on the naive participationist viewpoint that people are eager to get involved if only the technocratic boot would be taken off their necks. (Both Lorenzo and his critics cite anthropological evidence -- which should come as no surprise to fans of Alan Fiske.) Indeed, the early results of my dissertation (which I'll link in a few days once I finish it) suggest a mild version of Lorenzo's point -- most of the views of people in both New Jersey and New South Wales were that fire safety is the job of the Forest Fire Service or Rural Fire Service, and ordinary residents' role is to support their work.

The way to steer between these two opposing tendencies is twofold, I think. On the one hand, participation must be made available -- we can neither foreclose opportunities on the assumption that everyone will follow a basically Authority Ranking model, nor demand participation in a way that disrespects people's choice to be Authority Ranked. Second, we need greater attention to which situations tend more toward one model than the other. In particular, I would say that greater focus on participation would be justified when 1) the issue is more controversial (e.g. siting a nuclear reactor, versus ordinary controlled burning), and 2) when the decision is a key juncture that will shape the basis and assumptions of further routine policy. Risk perception research, including Grid-Group Cultural Theory, can be useful in identifying cases of the first type, while theories like the Adaptive Cycle offer some promise in the second case.

Stentor Danielson, 23:54, |

2.6.06

Freedom of Speech vs the First Amendment

Freedom of speech is a moral principle. The First Amendment (and associated jurisprudence) is one country's current attempt to translate a version of freedom of speech into law. A key difference is that freedom of speech is broader than the First Amendment, since most people would believe that there is some moral claim to freedom of speech in civil society and employment situations (even if they don't believe that claim ought to be enshrined in law), but the First Amendment applies only to actions by the government.

It irritates me the way people tend to conflate the two. Sometimes it happens because someone, feeling that their moral right to free speech has been infringed, assumes that the law will offer them succor. More common, however, is a situation in which someone asserts that their freedom of speech has been infringed by, say, an employer. Then a self-satisfied pedant will point out that the First Amendment doesn't cover that situation, and therefore their free speech has not been infringed. This pedantry misses the point -- the claim at stake is a moral one (perhaps even a moral claim to legal redress), not a legal one.

Supreme Court decisions define the scope of legal protections offered by the First Amendment. But they do not define the moral principle of freedom of speech, except insofar as the Justices make persuasive arguments in their opinions.

Stentor Danielson, 20:37, |

31.5.06

Conservatives Seeing The Root of The Problem

The New York Times has an excerpt from Roger Kennedy's new book, Wildfire and Americans. I've seen Kennedy give a talk on the themes in the book, so I have high hopes for it. Unfortunately the NYT excerpted a lot of scene-setting introductory material, so they never get to the real heart of Kennedy's argument. He says, in a nutshell, that our current fire problems are the result of a deliberate post-WWII strategy of subsidizing exurban sprawl -- both making it easier to build, and propping up communities through, e.g., expensive firefighting. So if we want to really solve the problem, we have to look at that underlying structural level.

Kennedy is a self-proclaimed Republican (albeit strongly anti-Bush), so his preferred solution is a "tax revolt" against subsidizing sprawl. I'm skeptical of that approach, but I think it's encouraging that some conservatives are seeing the kind of root-level issues of the geographical structure of society that environmentalists have long been concerned about.

Stentor Danielson, 19:57, |

Oil Is Injustice

It's unfortunate that concerns about the environmental impacts of oil seem to focus so single-mindedly on the role of oil in contributing to global warming. This tends to obscure the fact that oil production has very immediate impacts on the environment -- and those impacts are not distributed evenly. All around the world, indigenous people are having their health and their way of life taken away from them by oil production. The Washington Post highlights the case of Canada's northern First Nations:

... "The river used to be blue. Now it's brown. Nobody can fish or drink from it. The air is bad. This has all happened so fast," said Elsie Fabian, 63, an elder in a native Indian community along the Athabasca River, a wide, meandering waterway once plied by fur traders. "It's terrible. We're surrounded by the mines."

... "The environmental cost has been great," said Jim Boucher, chief of the Fort MacKay First Nations Council, which includes Cree and Dene Indians, 35 miles north of Fort McMurray. He grew up on land that is now a clawed-out mine pit. But he has led his people into the mines by creating native-owned companies providing catering, truck driving, surveying and other services. "There is no other economic option," he said. "Hunting, trapping, fishing is gone."

Stentor Danielson, 07:44, |

30.5.06

Slow Posting

Posting will continue to be light for the next few days, as I'm in the middle of writing up the analysis of the first half of my dissertation. It figures this would happen just as I'm getting a bit of new traffic from Alas.

Stentor Danielson, 07:18, |