Population Politics by Virginia Abernethy Garrett Hardin

Author:Virginia Abernethy, Garrett Hardin [Virginia Abernethy, Garrett Hardin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Demography, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781351320832
Google: TX5aDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-05-11T03:38:19+00:00

A Conservation Ethic

These few examples suggest that equity issues need to be reexamined in terms of the global goal of conservation. A conservation ethic may require a renewed acceptance of uneven distribution. Not only human nature—people are usually motivated by self-interest so a scarce resource held in common is soon destroyed—but poverty itself forces this rethinking. Nations, institutions, families, and individuals can afford to conserve only if they are not compelled to consume their wealth, including natural capital, as a last-ditch survival strategy. A degree of distributional equity is probably a luxury available only to relatively rich nations with stable populations.

Urging redistribution on policymakers in poor countries is almost certainly inappropriate. Hard thinking and difficult decisions seem in order because, where there is overpopulation, those who are destitute will consume, before they die, the future potential productivity of any part of the environment to which they have access. Witness the Sahel, Ethiopia, the Sudan, Haiti, the Philippines, Vietnam, Nepal, and Bangladesh.

A tragic testament to today's destitution and overpopulation is that those who can afford to conserve may be in the minority. But wealth does not guarantee conservation. Control over some critical minimum of resources as well as secure rights to benefit from them in the future are necessary conditions for conservation, but alone they may not be sufficient. Destruction of resources results not only from unregulated use of whatever is held in common, but also from owners of resources gaming more by using them up quickly. V. S. Naipaul (1989), a widely read commentator on the third world, states that the element of society most upsetting to him is "cynicism." He explains cynicism as "Fouling one's own nest at home and feathering another abroad. The cynicism bred perhaps by this availability of emigration abroad, which is very demoralizing. People are able to create a mess at home, build dreadful skyscrapers in cities like Bombay, yet buy nice apartments for themselves in foreign countries that are better organized."

The mobility of monetized capital makes it difficult to envision a sufficient incentive, or workable enforcement mechanism, to tie wealthy individuals to land or any particular natural resource so that they have a stake in conserving its longterm productivity. Yet this must eventually be part of a solution. Whereas conspicuous consumption has been a sign of wealth, conservation would ideally be tomorrow's status symbol.

The well-off are no different from others except that they do have a choice. Like anyone else, they are generally motivated to protect the Earth's natural resources just insofar as it is in their interest to do so. The very rich have global mobility, and increasingly neither people (nor corporations) appear to have the loyalty to country that economists such as David Ricardo and John Maynard Keynes took for granted. "This is my own, my native land" is a sentiment too little heard. Citizens of the world are patriots of nowhere. In the first quarter of 1989, for example, nationals of the third world's fifteen largest debtor nations were holding $350 billion in foreign banks, up from less than $100 billion in 1980.

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