Environmental Research, Politics in Canada

The Place of Intrinsic Value in Environmental Politics

The news this year on the climate front continued to be alarming, especially the record low extent of summer sea ice in the Arctic.  The anthropocentric case for doing more to combat climate change seems self-evident.  A changing climate is very likely to be less hospitable to human needs than a stable one.  Arguments solely from self-interest therefore appear fairly quickly in the discussion of what to do.

But what of arguments not based on self-interest?  What place is there in the environmental discussion for a non-self-serving ethic, based on the idea that the natural world has intrinsic value, independent of human needs or human culture?  In fact, these ideas have been elaborated since the early days of the Does nature have its own intrinsic value?movement by Arne Naess and many others.  The notion of intrinsic value has seen its most prominent political expression in the discourses around parks and protected areas.  Groups like the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society continue to be  influential in establishing that ecological integrity should be a guiding principle of parks governance.  Protected areas symbolize many things, but one of the impetuses for protection is the awareness and recognition of a natural world with its own logic, its own measures, and its own ethical integrity, independent of the human.

Arguments that go beyond human self-interest, however, have not made a huge impact in the climate debate.  One problem is that an ecocentric ethic has been too closely associated with wilderness preservation.  Wilderness preservation is a legitimate basis for political action, however, wildernesses today are too physically remote, too closely managed, and too narrowly defined to be a solid basis for elaborating a larger argument about intrinsic value.  Biodiversity holds more promise, since natural biodiversity can be understood to operate from non-human principles.

Searching for intrinsic value.But what if the biosphere changes radically in response to climate change, what then becomes of an ethic of static preservation and intrinsic value?

In fact, I would argue that the best way and most effective way to integrate an ethic of intrinsic value in political decision making is to use an expansive and embedded approach. Such an approach would first of all recognize that intrinsic value and use value are not mutually exclusive ideas, and that something can be valued both for its usefulness to humans, and for itself.  Aristotle used the example of eyesight.  We value our eyesight both for its usefulness (we can see things and interact with the world more effectively with sight) and for its intrinsic value (we can appreciate sunsets and see the faces of loved ones).   The key test is not whether it would benefit humans to protect it, but would we miss it if it were suddenly taken away?  We can all imagine the sense of loss we would feel if our eyesight were suddenly removed, and we can all imagine the sense of loss as species disappear from the tree of life and the biosphere becomes irrevocably changed and even degraded.

This is a basis for building political action because of its universality.   Cultures may not agree on the value of any individual species but they can agree on the big picture of loss.  Practically speaking, the notion of intrinsic value for Canadians can be easily compared to the language of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Just as rights require entrenchment and defence by government and ordinary citizens, so, too, does nature.

Let’s not be afraid of the language of intrinsic value.  It is already all around us in political discourse.  Arguing that nature should be protected for its own sake makes a more robust position in favour of protection possible.  For example, it puts the onus on oil pipeline companies and developers to prove the worth of their activities, rather than on nature to prove its worth in human terms.

Global Political Economy, US Politics

Entanglement: The Enmeshment of the Economy and the Government

In quantum physics, there is the idea that a single particle can have an effect on a different particle many light years away.  Einstein called this ‘spooky action at a distance’.  In today’chicken_or_egg_400_clr_10064s globalized world, economic activity shows similar ‘spooky’ characteristics, indeed, it is virtually a truism to say that what happens in one industry or segment of an economy will inevitably affect others at great distances.   What is often overlooked in ideological debates between the right and the left, however, is the entanglement of the free market economy with the activities of government.  They are separate, just like particles separated by great distances, but they are so closely entangled. Action in one sphere will unavoidably affect the other. arrow_halves_join_400_clr_9621

Take, for example, the encroaching effects of the ‘fiscal cliff’.  An increase in taxes coupled with spending cuts, could potentially cause a drop of as much as 1% of GDP growth in the US.  The resulting reduction in economic activity would then impact government revenues, cutting into revenues just as measures to reduce the deficit kick in.  This makes these measures, therefore, essentially self-defeating.  Even a more measured response to deficit reduction that allows for some spending increase could potentially trigger inflation, since it will unavoidably give the impression that the government will just keep printing money to pay its debt. Inflation could also reduce economic activity and jeopardize growth, although it seems unlikely in the short term, by undermining investor confidence and leading to capital flight.  The result, as with the fiscal cliff, is the same: a hit to government revenues and a self-defeating policy.

The first step to breaking the cycle is to recognize that the favoured solutions of both the right and the left are both inappropriate in the present context.  Reducing taxes to stimulate the economy without accompanying measures to induce spending and investment just doesn’t work, there is no evidence of it ever having worked, and it does severe damage to the government’s ability to raise revenue.  At the same time, government spending does not have the growth-inducing impact as in the past because thuncle_sam_holding_money_pc_400_clr_1727e implied willingness to spend and borrow undermines investor confidence.

The solution lies in the awareness that government is both an economic actor and an economic hedge.  Contrary to the arguments on the right, government cannot just ‘get out of the way’ and let the market grow.  For one thing, it might grow somewhere else.  For another thing, markets need government to backstop their activities and stop them from imploding on themselves.  The sooner that people stop thinking of governments as part of the problem, and realize that free markets require governments to make decisions for the common good, the better off both the economy and the government will be.  Governments and markets are not the same thing, their purposes are different and their instruments are different, but they are irrevocably enmeshed together. 

Environmental Research, Global Political Economy, Politics in Canada, US Politics

A Leaner, Meaner Politics in the US: What About Canada?

In his book The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity will Remake American Politics Thomas Byrne Edsall argues that shrinking public and private resources will make politics leaner, meaner and less civil.  It’s not just that right and left disagree on how to distribute resources, it is a fundamental rift in the understanding of the purpose of the state itself.   It’s also not just a fight over ideas:  it is a battle for survival.  The supporters of the right, to pearth_tighten_belt_800_clr_7668araphrase Edsall, are ageing, embattled, middle to upper class whites living in decimated and depopulated suburbs who are increasingly bitter about the direction of the redistributive state.  In the past, the right’s call to arms was a kind of negative freedom (‘Don’t Tread on Me’) which fought to preserve the individual’s ability to choose their own forms of happiness unimpeded by state regulations.  The premise of this, we know now, was the expectation that everyone could gain from a growing pie.  No more.  Programs for which supporters of the right are the primary recipients (including Medicare and social security) are considered sacrosanct.  Programs from which others benefit (read black, immigrants, poor or public sector workers) like Medicaid, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or income supports, are untenable ‘entitlements’.  On the left, there is a counter-move to protect the public sphere from erosion while simultaneously trying to remain coherent in the face of a fiscal crisis and an unrelenting personal attack on Obama during an election year.  The left is increasingly turning to middle class minorities, immigrant and young voters who are far less steady in their support and are on the whole less well-established and more vulnerable both economically and politically.

These kinds of politics reveal rifts that have historically deep-soil_money_canada_pc_800_clr_2385eated roots but which linger below the surface until austerity and crisis reveal them.  What rifts lie below the surface of Canadian society that have been eroding the social consensus gradually and unrelentingly?  Could Canada go down a similar route?  Recent battles paint a picture of the possibilities.  With vitriolic flourishes the Harper government and environmentalists are fighting an increasingly pitched battle over oil resources.   The push for a pipeline to expand foreign markets for oil, whether through a Northern route or Keystone, has as its root a long-standing fear that overproduction of oil will drive the price down and shrink profits.  This is a real fear, since the flattening of oil prices will make the billions of dollars already invested uneconomic, and capital will flee.  On the one hand, it seems more like an embarrassment of riches than a problem of austerity: oil consumption is maintaining a steady stiff pace overseas and is set to grow, along with its negative climate impacts.  On the other hand, it has all of the set piece features of a zero-sum fight over a shrinking resource.  As anti-fossil fuel efforts grow, and as more bitumen-type oil production facilities are being developed in Latin America and more unconventional oil is prospected in the Arctic and other areas, the chances of oil revenues becoming restricted in the future is higher and higher.  If this happens, look for politics here to follow a similar path to those in the US, with the centre of the storm being the role of shattered_dollar_coin_800_clr_8730the state as a (re)distributor of resources.  With potentially shrinking state revenues due to tax reductions and few other signs of growth outside the resource sector, the temptation to retrench at the expense of the poor, immigrants, the disabled and other marginalized groups may well be irresistible.  On the other hand, another fight between regions in true Canadian fashion may be brewing.  I want to end on a positive note here.  Everything I’ve learned in teaching young people about politics in the last 15 years has taught me that if anything, youth are more accepting, welcoming, compromising and diverse than ever.  I can only hope that these qualities will enable the cultivation of a middle ground in the future in Canada that seems increasingly elusive in the divisive and paralyzing politics down south in the US.  If we are to believe Edsall, however, austerity could bring out the worst in all of us.

Popular Culture

An American Game of Thrones

As a graduate student, my academic advisor once told me that despite its hype, the American Revolution did not so much create a new system of government as replace one king with another.  The President has king-like symbolic power over the nation’s direction.  For this reason, and because of the diminished stature of the US in the world context, the US ‘throne’ is now a shrinking resource which will see fights the likes of no other in US history.  The polar opposite visions of the country will shrink the middle ground and with it the scope for any real action to be taken.  As the real power to influence events wanes, the symbolic power of the Presidency takes on ever more vitality.  Just look at the way that the President is personally blamed or celebrated (depending on the jobs numbers) for economic turns of events over which they have virtually no control.  Electing a new ‘monarch’ has all of the trappings of a winner-take-all fight in which, to paraphrase Cersei Lannister of Game of Thrones fame, ‘you win or you die’.  In this battle, the rules of engagement are murky.   The US ‘throne’ is now a

Ultimately, the game of thrones, whether in American politics or in the popular HBO series to which I have become hopelessly addicted, is about leadership.   The abiding moral paradox is that to earn the throne one must be ruthlessly focused on its attainment, but to keep it requires wiser, more subtle finessing and the ability to keep that ruthlessness in check when necessary.  This is the central distinction that Machiavelli made 500 years ago, encapsulated in the term ‘prudence’.   Warriors like Robert Baratheon (or George W. Bush)  fail as leaders because they lack the necessary diplomatic skill to inspire and activate their symbolic power.   Masters of finesse like Barack Obama (read Ned Stark) must constantly balance their leadership with the necessary hard edge needed to deter challengers, both domestic and abroad.  Such leaders do not necessarily relish or celebrate the violence they must commit.  But, taking the moral high ground can be hazardous to their health.

And what of the Lannisters (er, Mitt Romneys) of the world?  Wealth doesn’t automatically bring wisdom or the prudence necessary to rule.  The wealthy often prefer to manipulate things from the background rather than step forward to and take the power commensurate with their wealth.  In fact, the corruption that wealth brings erodes the necessary respect for power that is a requirement of prudence (Joffrey the false heir apparent, is a clear result of this corruption).  Romney, like Tywin, must constantly keep the ‘lower’ urges of his ‘clan’ from damaging his image.    Ned Stark

In this new age of symbolic power, appearance matters far more than reality, because to focus otherwise risks revealing the appalling truth: the President has little actual power to affect the economy, world affairs, or domestic governance.   The real decisions made in boardrooms, central bank meetings, and war rooms will go ahead with little reference to political affairs.  Collaboration will occur increasingly in secret, while the public sphere will be characterized by unending conflict.  To twist an old adage, in order to get anything done, it must not be seen to be done.  

Environmental Research

The Future is Now: Rio+20

History’s largest international conference is taking place this month to commemorate a series of milestones and assess progress on key environmental issues.  After thinking and writing about these issues for so many years, I hope readers will forgive the tone of this post, it’s admittedly ‘glass half empty’—on another day I might be more optimistic.

It’s been 40 years since the world’s first international Conference on the Human Environment was held in Stockholm in 1972.  Since then, anniversaries of these milestones have been held at various intervals, with the key turning point being the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio which established the notion of sustainable development and set the global agenda for the 21st century.

Sustainable development is development that…

In the past 40 years, entire generations of people have emerged from poverty, gained education, raised children, fallen into war, lost their homes, tackled disasters, and accumulated debt.  Countries have been formed, economies bankrupted, and entire societies have risen, fallen and stagnated.  The unrelenting trends of environmental destruction have been unshaken by these human earthquakes.  Virtually every curve follows the same pattern: from carbon emissions to depletion of the ocean fisheries to accumulation of plastics, the trends are unchanged.   The human acceleration of the carbon cycle, depletion and degradation of energy, growth in global population, and accumulation of wastes has proceeded at an unrelenting pace.

organic_growth_graph_400_clr_5097In 1992, Agenda 21 listed a series of aspirational goals: international cooperation, peace, and participatory sustainability were among them.  It was optimistic and mediocre.  It was the best we could do at the time, and in hindsight, probably the best we’ve ever done.  Looking back now, we can see the forces that were brewing to both advance and hobble the emergent global consensus.  Businesses got on board for the first time: tired of being labeled the enemies, and realizing the need to forestall government actions, they either went wholesale for a radical re-hauling of their practices or threw money and marketing at the problem to change perceptions.  All these years later, it’s hard to say which tactic had the greater impact.

As the environmental damage of some business activities became harder to avoid, reduce or hide, businesses changed tactics.   They labeled their environmental critics as ideological nutcases or foreign enemies.  Scientists were a tougher community to silence, but not impossible.  Funding think tanks to stir up doubt about global warming and buying politicians bought some industries some time to become too big to fail and so lock governments into subsidizing them when the inevitable crisis hit.

stick_figure_insert_key_earth_hole_pc_400_clr_1318For their part, the environmentalists were caught off guard by the ferocity of the counter-attack.  Hostage to the business cycle, their pessimistic message found solid ground in those populations whose stakes were lower and who had the most to gain from changes: the lower middle and upper middle (both countries and classes) had sufficient resources to spend with some discretion and when given a choice that make economic sense, they were willing and able to make changes.  They created new green enterprises, touted urban farming and wind and solar energy, and focused on changing the local level, leaving the large businesses the global field upon which to play.

In taking this hunker-down survivalist approach, however, many forgot that their local environments were dependent on the global in inseparable ways.  Their urban and suburban lifestyle was oil-fuelled and globally-adapted and vulnerable at its very core.

Governments essentially vacated in the face of irresolvable differences: they were derailed by issues of  fairness in compensation for losses, human rights claims, global inequities in resource distribution, and the unwillingness to give up any sovereign claims whatsoever.  While talking a good game, they utilized any and every opportunity to shift costs onto others and spare their own any discomfort.  The ‘others’ included future generations, other countries’ territories, and other species.  To be fair, there is no room for heroes in environmental negotiations, since the fault is increasingly everyone’s, and so, essentially, no one’s.123088183(2)

There are real problems to be solved here: air, land and water pollution can be reduced, species can still be saved, warming can be either accelerated or slowed.  Imagine what might be done in the next 40 years.  The earth cares not about how these things are accomplished, just whether they are.

#RioPlus20; #EndFossilFuelSubsidies

For more analysis and some governance solutions, see the excellent Earth System Governance Project: http://www.ieg.earthsystemgovernance.org/

Teaching and Learning

The Unbroken Line between Games and Education

University learning is often like a game.

Let’s play a game: I’ll set the rules.  Your goal: to perform various complex and skilled tasks in an adventure-style first person game involving personal quests, team cooperation, and writing, speaking, and recall tests.  Your goal: to achieve a sufficient level of accomplishment in each task to advance to future levels, with the ultimate goal of leaving the game.  Points are earned by passing tests or performing set tasks.  Extensive instruction is required to accomplish each task, and more time will be spent absorbing the instruction than actually performing the task.  Failure is severely punished, and results in setbacks to your progress in achieving the task.  There are no shortcuts, and the schedule of tasks is predetermined.   There may or may not be rewards for participating.

How many of us would wish to play this game?  Well, this is exactly what we ask students to do throughout their university careers.  Education is very much a game—if we understand a ‘game’ as a competitive activity with rules to test various skills and produce outcomes, such as winners or losers.  But gaming is associated with play, diversion, recreation, and less so with learning.  Nevertheless, because university learning is a poorly designed game, it does not do a good job of motivating people to learn.  The point system (marks) is often inconsistent, punishment is too severe, and too much time is spent absorbing information and not enough time is spent in applying the knowledge learned.

This can result in an inordinate focus on extrinsic motivators, which psychologists tell us can actually reduce initiative, creativity, and intrinsic motivation, which are all necessary to learning.  As Jane McGonigal points out, well-designed games work to enhance these traits, by using a feedback system that lets players know where they are in the 101433076process, setting up rules or limitations (sometimes unnecessary ones) that offer meaningful stakes, and allowing for ‘fun failure’ (spectacular failures that actually reward effort).  Frequent feedback and active learning techniques are already widely acknowledged as effective teaching strategies that enhance both motivation and deeper forms of learning.

Well-designed games allow players to progress at their own speed, with an awareness of how they compare with others, and foster social connection that helps players identify their contribution to a larger project.  Admitting that education is a game is not pejorative, neither is it to say that education should only be reduced to a game and nothing else.  Nevertheless, admitting that the game elements of university education tend to make it less motivating seems only a statement of fact.

Further Reading: Jane McGonigal Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How they Can Change the World Penguin, 2011

Politics in Canada

Harper: Solving Problems that Don’t Exist, Ignoring Ones that Do

Governments operate on two distinct tracks.  In one track, they make decisions according to an ideological architecture.  This is developed by the party elite, elaborated during the election campaign, and either refined or even jettisoned upon taking power. Governments also operate on another track, which involves making decisions ‘on the fly’ in response to rapidly-changing circumstances or urgent problems that require solutions.  Governments that follow the first track but ignore the second track,  risk being derailed by emergent or unexpected circumstances and problems that refuse to fade away. Governments that follow the second track exclusively, risk losing coherence and becoming bogged down in compromises that prevent bold action when needed on deep-seated and longer-term issues.

Whatever one might think of their ideological architecture, the Harper government’s program of action since achieving a majority has been rigidly and ideologically focused on the first track.  Conservative governments often tout their superior fiscal management and efficient governance, but when problems are ignored because of ideological short-sightedness, then this sacrifices the ability to be functional, efficient and fair.

The government’s single-minded pursuit of the purchase of F35s for the military is a good example.  In the face of disappointing progress on its development, buyers like Turkey, Australia and Britain have delayed or reduced their orders.  Not Canada, at least not yet.  Where is the urgent need to spend millions of dollars on military hardware?  What pressing requirement is driving this purchase?  With Canada standing down in Afghanistan and few urgent threats to national security looming on the horizon, the only explanation is ideological.

With a continuing budgetary deficit and the economy showing signs of weakness, the government is forging ahead as well with its tough on crime bill, which involves building more prisons, without releasing any information about its impact on the budget.  This is despite the fact that violent crime in Canada has been on the decline for the last thirty years, and the American experience has proven that increasing incarceration rates have actually increased the crime rate in that country.

The elimination of the gun registry similarly exhibits a puzzling and almost obsessive focus on problems that don’t need fixing.  All the evidence points to a decline in gun homicides since the introduction of stricter gun control in 1995.  Whatever information has been gained will be lost as the records are destroyed, to what end?  Given the willingness to spend on defence and in other areas, it does not seem that the savings (which are relatively minor) justify the loss.

Meanwhile, it took a housing emergency in Attawapiskat, only one of several Northern communities facing serious problems this winter, for the government to take remedial, and (as it turns out) heavily delayed, action.  This is despite the fact that Auditor General Sheila Fraser identified serious problems in May 2011. In her report, Fraser described the ‘unacceptable’ discrepancy in  government funding of education, housing, and services for First Nations.  These structural problems remain persistent and call for more than band-aid solutions.

Electoral politics do not explain these decisions particularly well, given that the Conservatives have a secure majority in Parliament and the Opposition parties are in disarray.  The first track (the ideological one) tends to dominate when  other problems do not make headlines or intrude in unpleasant ways on the government’s radar.  Deflection and diffusion can work to a point, but the underlying problems of poverty, discrimination, and environmental destruction continue.  These problems are not usually spectacular, but they are urgent.  Ignoring them has costs.  These costs will continue to mount up, in increased health care spending, crime problems, pollution, and other social ills, until such time as the government is unable to ignore them. This neglect is ultimately self-defeating.

Environmental Research, For Students, Interesting Links, Teaching and Learning

Student Showcase

Political Science students at Okanagan College this past Fall term have worked very hard to prepare work on cutting-edge political topics and issues.  Students were challenged to analyze a political problem, consider various policy options, and come up with creative solutions.  They prepared a blog, poster or paper to present their work.  This showcase is a sampling of some of the best work done this term.  My thanks to all of my hard-working students, it was a close competition among some outstanding submissions.  I am blown away with the outstanding work that you do!

Continue reading Student Showcase →

Teaching and Learning

Table of Educational Functions and Technologies

I have focused on those that are free, semi-free or web-based.  I have also focused on those that are best suited to educators’ purposes, or are customizable for particular functions, or are particularly inspirational examples of what is possible.

For a list of online educational resource libraries, visit: http://online-educational-resource-libraries.wikispaces.com/

Delivering Course Content

Improving Engagement

Encouraging Critical Thinking
Images

Presentation

Recording

Text

Video

 Assessment

Projects/Research

Sharing

 Crowdsourcing

Learning Objects/LMS

Simulation
Global Political Economy

Upside Down: A Post-Modern World System

In 1974, Immanuel Wallerstein argued that the world was composed of three types of economies: a core, a semi-periphery, and a periphery.  In the core countries, capital-intensive manufactured products with high levels of complexity and value-added were the primary source of national wealth.  In the periphery, labour-intensive primary resource industries were the main source of wealth.  The semi-periphery countries mediated between the twroller coastero, but all countries acted in accordance with the principles of the global capitalist system. What characterized the relationship between the three regions was the terms of trade among them: core countries accumulated wealth by extracting resources and labour from the periphery.  In the outskirts, raw materials were traded for machinery and technology. The semi-periphery managed the relationship between the other two, with a mixed economy based on trade.

Even though Wallerstein’s analysis was applied primarily to Western and Eastern Europe, no one had any illusions at that time about who constituted the core, and who the periphery.  At the commanding height of the world economy, the US was unrivalled as a trading powerhouse, the most efficient and competitive economy in the world, the driver and reference point for development for all countries (including the Soviet Union, the ostensible rival).  Americans were the world’s consumers, traders, thinkers, workers, and investors.  America defined the ‘core’ of the world economy.

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Today, Asia is the world’s factory and an exporting powerhouse, sucking in raw materials from abroad at a ferocious rate.  China is becoming the world’s braintrust, transforming trade goods into high-end tradable commodities and changing their workforce using technical and business knowledge to ‘reverse innovate’ new products and services. Today, Hollywood movies are released in China and India a full month before anyone in the US can see them.   Australia, Canada, the Middle East, and South Africa, formerly the nimble trading members of the semi-periphery, are now repositioning themselves as raw materials and commoditiesproducers, supplying the forests, minerals, food, and fuel for the new core countries.

In this post-modern world-system, unrecognizable as it is fromwinners and losersthat of 50 years ago, the core and periphery have switched places.  It is not so much ‘flat’ (as claimed by Thomas Friedman) as ‘bumpy’; with hills and valleys defined by the underlying forces of finance and production.  Sometimes the ‘bumps’ create stranged bedfellows, as Greece and Germany are discovering.   It is highly intermingled, more like a ‘neo-Medieval’ system of interlocking interdependencies coupled with rigid underlying hierarchies.

But as Wallerstein recognized, exactly which country plays which role is irrelevant. All of the things that are often deemed to make civilizations unique, like values, culture, soft power, technology, and even military prowess, are less important than the underlying patterns of wealth and exchange that dictate the range of motion that a country has.   Assuming, as America and Canada have recently, that one is immune to the disciplining forces of capitalism, and that capitalism will only ever  work in your own interests and against those of your competitors and partners; is a myopic failure of vision.  It assumes that only one vantage point exists or even matters, and neglects the realities of the new post-modern topsy turvy world.

"Without energy, nothing happens." ~Richard Heinberg, Author, The Party’s Over

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