Key Terms

Anthropocene: 

• The human epoch

• Defined by the impacts human activity has had on the environment.

• Many scientists believe that an epochial shift took place in the twentieth century for the first time in 11,000 years.

• Characterized as the “era of human” or Anthropocene era.

• A proposal to formally recognize it failed to reach consensus in the International Union of Geological Sciences, but the term remains important. 

The Great Acceleration:

• Acceleration of human activity that caused accelerated rates of erosion, sedimentation, chemical changes in the atmosphere → Environmental change.

• Began in 1950

• Interlinked socio-economic trends and earth systemic trends during this time.

  • Increases in population caused water + energy use, tourism, CO2 emissions, etc.

Civil Society: 

• The voluntary associations that exist outside the state and market.

• UN organizes civil society into nine major groups intended to reflect sectors of society:

  • Women,

  • Children

  • Youth

  • Indigenous Peoples

  • Non-governmental Orgs (NGOs)

  • Workers and trade unions

  • Business and Industry

  • Scientific and Research Orgs

  • Farmers

United Nations Environmental Program:

•  UN environmental agency working to make citizens and policy makers aware of changes from the great acceleration.

Actors in Global Environmental Politics:

• States: main actor in international relations. Often delegate power of authority to pass and enforce laws and facilitate cooperation and implementation. 

• Scientists

• Civil Society

• Businesses

Policy and Practice:

• Policy must have two qualities:

  • Effectiveness: how effective is the proposed solution for mitigating a problem

  • Equitability: how equitable is the solution in terms of distributing responsibility and risk

Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons:

• So long as human freedom is respected, and land and natural resources are freely available for anyone to use, such resources will slowly be destroyed. 

• The benefit of taking an additional unit of a resource goes to the individual in the short run, but in the long run, the depleted common won’t benefit anyone.

• Population Growth: makes the situation worse because the more people there are, the more users there are.  

• Hardin’s Assumption under the tragedy of the commons:

Hardin’s Two Options:

• Privatization: Bringing natural resources under control of market forces

• Socialization: Bringing natural resources under the control of the state.

3 Key Weaknesses of Hardin’s theory on Tragedy of the Commons:

Simplistic assumptions about human nature

Historical inaccuracies

Lack of consideration of other governance options

Open Access: 

• Refers to the condition whereby neither access nor use of a resource is controlled.

Communal Property:

• When a resource is owned and controlled by a group of people → group rights are legally recognized and respected in practice.

Communal Management:

• Form of management that governs community property

• Often replaced by centralized rules by marked based institutions because outsiders assume they are not environmentally sustainable.

2 Options Hardin Proposes to Stop Tragedy of the Commons, and Why they don’t work: 

• Reformation/Education

• Coercion:

• Soft Coercion

• Hard Coercion

Privatization:

• Putting commons under the control of individual private owners.

• People who own land will have more incentive to maintain them and keep them sustainable in order to reap the benefits in the long run.

• Free Market Environmentalism

Socialism

• Bringing the commons under the control of states/governing bodies.

Cornucopian Tragedy of the Commons:

• Believe there isn’t really a tragedy of the commons.

• Human knowledge is our primary and necessary resource.

• Humans will invent ourselves out of the TOC

• We will find a way to recycle our 

•  there is no tragedy, resources will continue to grow 

The Commons: 

• Resources that are not exclusively owned by any person(s)

• Two Characteristics of a Commons:

  • Excludability: it is difficult or costly to control access to the resource

  • Subtractability: when one person uses the resource it reduces the quantity or quality for others. 

Global Commons:

• Oceans, atmosphere, outer space, the moon, etc.

Res Nullius (nobody’s property): 

• Refers to parts of nature over which no state has recognized ownership, and all are legally free to use as they wish. 

Res Commuis (common property):

• Refers to parts of nature over which no state can claim ownership, but for which rules have been agreed to regulate all states' use of the resources, and to ensure that their use does not undermine the ability of other states to also use it. 

• Resources that are governed in common.

Voluntary Governance: 

• Globalization creates stronger connection between communities around the world, which can leave room for communal cooperation 

• Communal Cooperation: globally involved civil society groups and the public sector.

Population Curve/Population Growth:

• Exponential shape

• Trying to get birth rates to = death rates.

Scarce Resources

Invisible Hand

Environmental Governance: 

• process of decision making involved with environmental/ecological resources. 

Governance: 

• the various ways through which social life is coordinated including governmental regulation, bureaucratic rules, market mechanisms, and voluntary networks.

• Governments are just one actor involved in governance, corporate actors and non governmental organizations are also involved.

Marxism:

• Capitalist system that has contradictions.

• Marxist Theory: is inadequate for making sense of contemporary ecological issues, but contemporary revisions can allow us to apply the theory to ENVS.

Marxist Traditional Contradiction

• Central Contradiction between production and consumption.

• Tension between forces and relations of consumption

• Tension between owning and working class to produce goods for consumption.

  • Owning class goal: generate profit by selling goods at a higher price than production cost.

• The capitalist system cannot sustain both consumer demand and profit → the system will eventually collapse and workers will form labor movements.

Marxist Ecological Contradiction:

• Ecological Marxists: ecological contradiction becomes apparent when we acknowledge the role nature plays in sustaining economic activity.

•  Contradiction: the Earth is a closed system that cannot support infinite growth, but capitalism cannot survive without continual growth 

• Capitalism relies on the availability of Earth’s resources, but economic activity creates problems that damage the environment it depends on. 

• Capitalism creates competition for convenient resources to keep production costs low → competition creates environmental degradation and depletion at higher/faster rates. 

Capitalism Rifts:

• Capitalism alienates people from nature in two ways:

• Metabolic Rift: Capitalism interrupts the natural dynamic processes that connect humans with the Earth

• Ecological Rift: expanded and globalized because governments and corporations are promoting technological fixes to environmental problems, further alienating humans from the environment. 

Ecological Imperialism

• A central concept to ecological Marxism. 

• Scholars argue that environmental degradation needs to be understood in the context of relations between the core and periphery.

• Since colonization, the resources of non-European territories have been exploited to generate wealth and profit in distant countries.

• Colonial and post colonial countries have become locked into unequal relations whereby they incur most of the costs of environmental degradation and resource depletion in order to supply raw materials to industrialized countries. 

Overconsumption

• Marxists: individual consumption isn’t as big of a driver of environmental degradation as big industries and players such as construction, mining, manufacturing.

• Capitalist societies are characterized by growing levels of consumption.

Capital: 

• Stock of anything that has the capacity to generate a flow of benefits which are valued by humans → More than just financial or manufactured.

• Human Capital: health, knowledge, skills, motivation

• Social Capital: families, communities, businesses

• Natural Capital: renewable and nonrenewable resources → seas forest, natural systems

Sustainable Capitalism:

• In order to achieve sustainable capitalism, we must expand the idea of what capital is.

• 3 Steps

  • Increasing resource productivity and using savings and finance to shift toward closed loop production

  • Shift from product to service provisioning

  • Reinvest in ecosystems that support life and economy.

Closed Loop Production (Circular Economy):

• Using waste as a resource so there are no by-products of production.

Dematerialization:

• Achieving the same goods and services while decreased use of energy and resources. 

• Economic growth more sustainable

Eco Socialism:

• Socialist Society: Forces of production would be publicly owned and relations of production would be based on cooperation

•  Shifting from capitalism to socialism would remove the drive toward endless accumulation. 

Orthodox Eco Marxism:

• Free nature from control o the rick so that it can service needs of the working class

• Conservation not useful unless it serves human welfare

Humanist Eco Marxism:

• Humans are nature’s stewards and we carry the responsibility of caring for it.

Steady State Economy:

• When material wealth and population remain constant → Countries in poverty will continue to grow until this. 

Degrowth:

• Equitable and democratic downsizing of production and consumption in industrialized countries. Enables countries to prosper without growth to ensure an ecological future.

Carrying Capacity:

• the maximum human population size that Earth’s ecosystem can support sustainably over the long term without depleting resources or causing environmental degradation.

Population Growth:

• Population growth depends on a number of factors

• Birth Rate: The number of children born each year

• Death Rate: The number of people who die each year

• Fertility Rate: the number of children a woman will have over the course of her lifetime

• Life expectancy: how long a person is expected to live, normally denoted by an individual's country

Doubling Time:

• The time it takes for a population to double in size.

Demographic Transition:

• High Birth Rate / High Death Rate: Developing society that needs industrialization, healthcare, and other resources.

• High Birth Rate / Low Death Rate: 

• Low Birth Rate / Low Death Rate

• Many developing countries are in the second stage and are experiencing a population boom. We need to help them reach the third stage where their population size is not causing an issue for the environment.

• In order to aid countries in demographic transition, we need to get them the resources they need to industrialize, fund the poor, empower women, and use contraceptives.

Revisionist View on Demographic Transition:

• Stage 1: Stratified Societies: High BR and High DR not the “natural result” of cultural practices → ACTUALLY the result of unequal distribution of social resources like health and education. No social welfare, so people choose to have many children for social security.

• Stage 2: Increased Equality: 

Traditional View on Demographic Transition:

• Stage 1: Preindustrial Equilibrium: High BR and High DR because parents had many children due to high death rates.

• Stage 2: Lag Period Inequilibrium: High BR and Low DR because of the introduction of modern medicine and better nutrition etc, but cultural practices lead to people still having many children.

• Stage 3: Developed Equilibrium: Low BR and Low DR because cultural practices for family planning have changed. Increased education and opportunities for women. Increased costs of raising children leads people to have less of them.

Neo-Malthusianism:

•  Refers to the position that population growth is the main cause of environmental problems. Concern about the sustainability of a growing population dates back centuries and is commonly associated with the eighteenth century. 

Imperialism:

• A country/higher power influencing other societies beyond its borders. 

• Driven by ambition to control resources, trade routes, strategic territories etc. 

• Influencing culture, beliefs, etc.

Colonialism:

• When a governing body directly controls and governs another country/society.

• Establishment of colonies. Literally claiming their land as their own. 

Racism:

• the belief, action, or institutional structure that subordinates individuals or groups based on their race, ethnicity, or origin.

Patriarchy: 

• The social, political, moral, and proprietary primacy of men above all others on Earth, or the process of positioning men and masculinities in dominance over women, human others, and Earth. 

• Patriarchy impacts the population rate/contraception: in many developing societies men often hold the final say in if a woman can use contraception → this often leads to women having more children than they would want.

• Men have a greater environmental impact than women due to their economic activity in the world → driving more, eating more meat, etc.

Eco Feminism:

• Patriarchal domination of women is closely linked to environmental issues and exploitation.

Neoliberalism: 

• Holds that state institutions are inefficient and stifle innovation unless they play only a minimal regulatory role.

Population Control:

• Birth control: setting demographic goals and goals for the uptake of women’s contraceptives 

• Equal access to birth control

• Education of birth control

• Everyone in society must be on the same page with birth control in order for it to be effective.