Ben King ‘07
Everyone knows that first-year college students get lost on campus during their first semester at school. It’s even easy to become disoriented in the dining hall, waffling between the lines for the chicken parmesan and the build-your-own burrito, or apprehensively scanning the lunch tables, hoping for a familiar face across from whom to set your tray. But who ever heard of an 18-year-old kid getting lost between reading assignments?
It takes a special combination of sardonically conflicting syllabi for that to happen. But it happened to me, a poor, intellectually-adrift first-year at Grinnell College. You see, two classes I am taking this semester both deal with the environment: my first-year tutorial “Decline and Renewal in the Heartland” and “Resource and Environmental Economics.” The perspectives, from which the classes are taught, could not differ more starkly. It is often hard for me to reconcile the prescriptions each gives for dealing with environmental problems.
The environmental problems pertinent to the focus of my tutorial are mainly those caused by agriculture—and to some extent industry—in the Midwest. The focus of my economics class is broader, but certainly inclusive of these problems. For the latter class, I read part of the book Free Market Environmentalism, by Terry Anderson and Donald Leal, a text that expounds the basic economic approach to righting environmental wrongs. Anderson and Leal would charge that environmental problems are bound to arise from agriculture and industry when firms (in this case farmers and manufacturers), and those buying their products, have no incentive to prevent the problems. Since everyone is naturally self-interested, no one who benefits from a market transaction (be they the seller or the buyer) will attempt to fix any external problems arising from that transaction unless doing so also benefits him or her.
The solution, then, is to internalize the problems into the market. Somehow, the stakes should be changed so that the creators of the problem have reason to remedy it. Up to this point, there is little conflict between the perspective of my tutorial and that of my economics class. But at this point they diverge. Anderson’s and Leal’s way of internalizing an environmental problem is to assign ownership to the land or environmental good that is being squandered. A classic example of such a solution is the establishment of property rights on grazing land on the nineteenth century American frontier, which the authors describe in detail. In the mid-1800s, there was enough pastureland to go around. Ranchers claimed grazing rights by simply keeping their herds consistently on an appropriately-sized piece of land; newcomers knew to look elsewhere for a place to graze their livestock. But by the 1870s, as more and more settlers moved west, the sheep and cattle populations had become more concentrated. There was less land to look for “elsewhere,” so the newcomers would infringe on pastures previously claimed by other ranchers. Without legal title to the land, the original ranchers could do very little to keep the new settlers’ herds away. In the big picture, the problem that resulted was environmentally devastating overgrazing: since the government owned the land, and anybody could legally use it, ranchers had nothing to lose and everything to gain from grazing as many livestock as they could, consuming as much grass as possible before someone else’s animals ate it. Land would be grazed down to the dirt, which would be blown or washed away without protective grass roots, undermining its potential productivity. For the individual rancher this meant that the size of his herd was being dramaticaly reduced. Ranchers organized themselves, in self interest, to create avenues for legal private ownership of land, so that their profits could be preserved. Once laws were changed and property rights began to be assigned to western lands, the practice of overgrazing was greatly diminished because ranchers could, with the aid of barbed wire and the courts, restrict other ranchers’ access to their pastures. They could then comfortably graze their livestock at a rate that would ensure a healthy level of grass growth, on which their successful operations depended.
While economists like Anderson and Leal want to harness self interest to deal with environmental problems, environmentalists of the type we read in my tutorial hope to make people less self-interested. In Aldo Leopold’s essay “The Land Ethic,” the famous Midwest conservationist writes about what he sees as the need for people to develop their personal ethical codes to include the land and the environment. He describes an ethic generally, as “the tendency of interdependent individuals or groups to evolve modes of co-operation,” and goes on to illustrate what ethics people already have: “The first ethics dealt with the relation between individuals….” And, “later accretions dealt with the relation between the individual and society.” However, Leopold says that the development of ethics has not gone far enough: “There is as yet no ethic dealing with man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. … The extension of ethics to this third element in human environment is, if I read the evidence correctly, an evolutionary possibility and an ecological necessity.”
What Aldo Leopold argues—and he is probably right—is that the environment would be better cared for if everyone had a “land ethic,” even within systems of property rights. But most likely, the conservationist’s method of environmental protection is not better than the economist’s, and vice versa. As Leopold points out, “One basic weakness in a conservation system based wholly on economic motives is that most members of the land community have no economic value.” For this reason, among others, property rights can be difficult to assign and enforce satisfactorily. In these cases, a “land ethic” may be a good substitute. Alternatively, while I think it is a brilliant idea to try to instill a land ethic in people, it is a formidable task. To revise society’s attitude toward the land would take a long time, and to trust solely in humanity’s environmental goodwill, however heightened it may become, would be dangerous indeed. A property rights system and an expanding land ethic can coexist, each helping in its own way to protect the environment.
Just as the first-year who is daunted by the dining hall eventually learns, through experience, that it is not necessary to choose between the chicken parmesan and the build-your-own burrito (those plates are big enough for both!), I have experienced the wonder of a liberal arts education. Rather than continually clashing and confusing me, my tutorial and economics class complement one another, helping me to look at environmental problems in a way I would not have been able to, had I only taken one of them.
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