Environmental Policy & Philosophy: Interview With Dr. Bryan Bannon

Environmental policy (at least, in theory) seeks council from a wide selection of academic disciplines. Largely these contributions are limited to the natural and social sciences--chemistry, ecology, economics, etc. Yet are those fields typically charged with policy construction all that we need to consider? Dr. Bryan Bannon, environmental philosophy professor at Miami University, would ardently say no.

This past Monday I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Bannon, hoping to gain a new perspective on environmental policy. Not only did he fulfill this much-needed breath of fresh air, but his philosophical approach to concrete issues revealed the profound depth of environmental policy.

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Could you please describe your academic background?

I went to the University of Rhode Island for my bachelor’s degree in philosophy taking a rather circuitous route that eventually led to graduate school at the University of Memphis where I earned my Ph.D, also in philosophy.

How did you get into environmental philosophy, specifically?

It started by thinking about animals and animal rights. The more I read about how we treat animals, the more I realized that what leads us to treat animals in that way was more of a widespread problem prevalent in general human attitudes, rather than isolable in how we treat these particular beings. In reading about ways in which other people tried to extend ethical considerations towards animals, I thought, ‘How can we use these for other living beings without having to talk about the support systems that keep these living beings in existence.’ If the problem with animals is how we treat them as instruments for our use, such as clothing or food, then maybe this is problematic attitude to have toward beings in general and not simply towards animals alone.

How has your background in philosophy shaped your views concerning the environment?

It’s actually changed them quite a bit. You come in with a lot of preconceptions with what you need to do to “help nature.” You use words like sustainability and restoration, and you talk about green technology without ever really thinking about what it really means when we use those words. But when we talk about sustainability in terms of guaranteeing a resource base for the future, we’re not talking about a change in attitude and so we aren’t really being “green” in any meaningful way. Our dispositions don’t change. It’s as if you’re talking to a heroin addict and you say, ‘Look, in the quantity you take it, this drug is inhibiting your ability to survive, so we’re going to give you a limited amount of heroin each day.’ But that doesn’t address the problem; you want the addict to stop consuming. Ultimately one of the things philosophy has to offer us is a reflection upon the underlying attitudes behind terms like sustainability that might change the way we relate to things and curb both our metaphorical and our literal consumption. If we spent more time considering what make life meaningful and worthwhile, we might develop a very different attitude toward the natural world. And I think that’s more practical than many of the other things we take to be practical activities.

What do think philosophy’s role is in the mitigation of environmental crises?

There was an article that I read a long time ago that made a big impression on me called, ‘Environmental Philosophy is Environmental Activism’ by J. Baird Callicott. His argument is that what most people take to be practical activism requires changes in the cultural beliefs that most of us westerners hold, and therefore changes in the ways we deploy value, in order to be lasting and effective. One of the lessons I took from this was the importance of analyzing the implicit power relationships in our language and concepts concerning nature. If we continue to utilize concepts that surreptitiously maintain anti-ecological ideas as the basis for our activism, such as in the sustainability movement as alluded to earlier, our ecological policies will not be as beneficial as they could be. Scientists are very good at describing why things are the way they are and what’s the case about our world, and economists are good at talking about human survival on economic terms, but what philosophy is talking about it very different. It wants to question what kinds of values that are relevant to the decisions we are making in general. Take mountain top removal, for example. You can come up with economic plans that show its viability and through the use of technological means, you can talk about how to mitigate the environmental impact of strip mining; but in making those arguments we miss something insofar as they neglect our human relationship to nature. So what happens is we end up excluding the voices of the humanities in general from these kinds of discussions, and thus exclude our most valuable values and we create policy that isn’t always in nature’s (or even human) interest.

Are there other humanities that you feel get ignored in the policy debate?

Well, if you think about history, the historian’s eye can pick out different trends to our behavior that we miss when we talk about gross economic analyses. By ignoring history, we even miss the fact that natural places have an ecological history. Donald Worster’s book, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, is a great example. In it he shows the different ways in which different human attitudes have impacted natural environments, the grand interplay between humans and nature. Also, visual arts and literature. Holding up a mirror to what our relationship to nature is like and imagining what might be possible alternatives to our current relations with nature. Philosophy works in a similar way by offering alternative possibilities to the typical rational self interest that is the concern of economists or the biologists’ concern with survival and adaptation. Even from a humanistic perspective it doesn’t make sense to exclude other types of values from discussion, because they are human values too. You can talk about Homo economicus but that’s limiting of what humanism means. It’s just one aspect of it. If we’re really devoted to things like green industry and sustainability, we’d have to reorganize our markets around something different than the economic ideal of perpetual growth. By definition, it’s just not sustainable.

What do you see as the greatest challenge facing the new administration concerning environmental policy?

That’s a hard one… It’s tough because there are so many things. I think it’s demographics, specifically population distribution. Certainly the number of people in the world is high, and where they are located places high demands on the environment and gives us specific demands that can only be met through specific forms of technology that are unsustainable. The classic example is Phoenix, AZ. There’s no way in which a city that’s grown to that size and in that manner should ever exist there. And it can’t possibly do so sustainably—that is, certainly not without importing water. If there were ways we could adapt more harmoniously to our places as opposed to adapting our places to our way of living—that, I think is the greatest policy challenge that Obama has. It’s not to all-of-the-sudden switch to sustainable growth. It doesn’t matter that we have wind or solar power if we don’t change our basic attitudes. If we adapt and reduce our local impact than those things will be a part of that change. But until we have different relationships with where we live, then….but then again how do you form policy out of this…I suppose policy should be geared towards enacting those types of changes—localized harmony with our places—as opposed to taking the easy way out and debating issues like renewable energy vs. fossil fuels the right answer to which is already, in a sense, determined in advance..

Then what issues should carry the most weight when prioritizing environmental policy?

Honestly I think Andrew Light’s position is a good way to do it. Creating ways in which people become engaged with the upkeep of their place as opposed to leaving it up to government authorities to take care of it. If you’re the one primarily in charge of upkeep of your place, you’d be more prone to stop someone from messing it up. If you’re the one cleaning up messes, you’re not going to make a mess yourself. Obama had that idea about the nationwide service corps, and with something like that you could have engaged environmentalism. So maybe finding a way to make it so it’s not just about 18 and 19 year old kids doing service right before they go off to college, but a way to engage the entire nation in their local communities to create sustainability through localized, engaged caring for place.

More specifically, what type of policy (i.e. carbon tax, cap-and-trade, renewable energy innovation) is the best way to combat climate change?

Vegetarianism. Well, more generally, overhauling the way agriculture works. At least in terms of my understanding of where carbon gets created, we could do a lot of good by changing our dietary habits and the way we distribute food. It’s ridiculous that we can grow lettuce in California to export to Mexico and then import the same value of lettuce from Mexico. [responding to my confused look, he explains] Because food is considered a global commodity, we can buy certain foods more cheaply from abroad while still exporting the same commodities for a profit due to subsidies. It doesn’t make any sense. Subsidies and viewing food as a commodity to be traded in a global market screws everything up. Subsidies make sense if we were subsidizing family farms supplying local consumers, but when we’re subsidizing things like high fructose corn syrup, the corporations that make those products don’t need our help. Agribusiness doesn’t need our help.

What about other forms of subsidies?

It depends on what you’re subsidizing. You want to subsidize things that are enacting positive environmental changes but not things that have widespread negative impacts. The global market for food is a bizarre idea because of all the infrastructure needed to create it. Bioregionalist authors like Robert Thayer and Kirkpatrick Sale writes about adopting new ways of eating such as becoming a local-vore, buying and eating local. So I think subsidizing those farmers that are selling locally and not using industrial, corporate agricultural practices that are so damaging for so many reasons will go a long way.

Discourse is essential in environmental policy. Richard Alexander writes about the complex filtering system in which scientists generate reports, which are peer reviewed and published. These published reports are talked about by the media and by policymakers and eventually it trickles down to us. It’s all about the speech. In this regard, do you think it’s a good idea to frame policy objectives in terms of climate change (i.e. climate bill, carbon tax, cap-and-trade) as opposed to less politically loaded terms (i.e. clean energy investment, green job creation)?

I think that matters a great deal actually. I agree strongly with the point you made that language conditions, if not determines, the kind of changes people are willing to make. When I teach environmental ethics, my goal is to take the discussion out of a moralistic context that you’re “doing something wrong” by driving an SUV or owning a big house. Most people become resistant to what you are saying when you phrase things like that. Instead we have to shift the conversation to be one about ethical choice, about the kind of person you are becoming or what kind of community you are creating by performing certain actions. What’s appealing about this to many people is that it appeals to American individualism. We want to view ourselves as in control of our situation, yet it also forces us to confront the limits of our agency in terms of what we’re able to accomplish in our own lives. As long as we term green policy in economic terms I think we lose touch with what’s really at stake. We let ourselves off the hook ethically. By framing policy in terms of larger issues like global warming and climate change, you can begin to ask people, ‘How do we want today’s society to be viewed by historians in the future?’ And that’s an ethical question that goes beyond what kind of jobs we had or whether we invested in the right technology. Phrasing the issues this way asks the harder questions of what kind of people were these people. These are the questions that occur more readily to a philosopher or a student of literature.

That’s interesting, [laughing]. Your answer flipped my question.

How do you mean?

Well, the distinction I originally made was between contentious global warming terms versus more politically-neutral economic terms. A recent Gallup poll shows that more Americans than ever before are willing to sacrifice environmental protection for economic growth. Therefore, for the purpose of enacting positive environmental policy within the context of the nation’s primary concern of the economy, it might seem beneficial to frame these issues in terms of clean energy investments or green job creation. Is there a justifiable compromise that can be made, at very least in terms of framing?

Well, yes, I can see how it’s more efficacious in terms of getting people to ‘do the right thing.’ It seems as if we need, in some ways, to balance or do both at once between making the kinds of attitude changes that I was talking about before (in the long-term) and getting people to see the practical implications of their actions (more of the short-term) and not be on the ‘wrong’ side of things. I agree with you that if the attitude has flip-flopped then if we’re going to get things done, I think we might have to go-with-the breeze a bit, but I don’t think that’s an excuse to jettison the larger cultural changes we need. If that’s the way discourse ought to be framed in order to make certain short-term changes it ought not to put on the backburner these larger changes.

One question I’ve always struggled with deals with the issue of natural autobiography. It has become common knowledge in the environmental world that one’s childhood encounters with nature shape the degree of environmental engagement that person pursues as an adult. That’s what happened with me and pretty much every environmentalist I’ve spoken with. You’ve mentioned that much of the underlying issues behind these ecological crises are human attitudes, and I definitely agree. Yet, if our environmental attitudes develop from our childhood nature interactions, does this mean one has to have a significant natural auto-biography or at least some connection to a certain landscape to ever engage in environmental action?

I agree wholeheartedly. That’s why I push the idea of place so hard. We can design our places such that natural functions are not destroyed and to cultivate interactions with nature. If we design places in this way, people who live in urban areas and currently have limited access to what we consider to be “nature” can have a greater idea of what’s at stake. Having nature in cities, not just in park space but actually designing the cities differently such that they maintain some of the characteristics of the nature that surrounds them, can provide the kinds of experiences you describe. This idea goes back to the idea of localized caring for upkeep, and not just upkeep but place creation. This gives people the ability to define the way they want to live, to cultivate certain kinds of relationships to the natural environment. If that’s what we find valuable, then that’s what we should be offered. We shouldn’t have to drive to Yellowstone to get it.

Woah…so is that your vision of the ‘perfect world?’

That’s my quasi-utopian vision, yeah. I feel it’s something we can do short-term right now, incorporating plans like the ones Lester Brown [author of Plan B: 3.0] describes. This might be a way to combine practical policy questions with reevaluation of the ways in which we actually relate to nature and the dispositions we have towards nature.