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6311 results in Environmental policy, Economics and Law

Page 181 of 316

  • Chapter Five - Social Ecologies in Borderlands: Crane Habitat Restoration and Sustainable Agriculture Project in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea

  • from Part II - BRIDGES: RESILIENCE, RESTORATION AND RECLAMATION
  • Edited by Anna Grichting, Michele Zebich-Knos
  • Book:
    The Social Ecology of Border Landscapes
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    10 January 2018
    Print publication:
    02 May 2017, pp 89-106

  • Summary

    Introduction

    One of 15 crane species around the world, the Red-crowned Crane (Grus japonensis) of northeast Asia, is divided into a migratory population on the mainland (about 1,400), and a resident population in northern Japan (approximately 1,500), for a total of around 2,900 birds in the wild. Consequently, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) considers the Red-crowned Crane Endangered. About 1,000 of the migratory cranes winter on the Korean Peninsula, of which its borderlands within and contiguous to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) connecting the two countries are crucial to this species’ continued survival.

    Cranes are firmly embedded in Asian culture and have been spiritual icons for millennia, as exhibited in the art of China, India, Russia, Japan and Korea. They symbolize happiness, longevity and loyalty in human societies globally. They are a consummate example of what Edward O. Wilson calls “biophilia,” the “innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms” — a social ecological concept that gives hope to efforts like the ones described in this volume to reintegrate humankind with nature. In spite of that affection, however, 11 of the 15 species are Vulnerable or Endangered, according to IUCN. Similar threats confront them everywhere: habitat degradation and loss owing to development, pollution, chemically based fertilizers and pesticides, hunting and illegal trade. Murray Bookchin, a father of social ecology, would certainly cite cranes as an unwitting victim of ecological problems caused by practices of human society, which also possesses solutions to these challenges.

    This chapter explores the context creating the separation of the two Koreas, its resulting new borderlands and the plight of migratory cranes there; specifics of unique crane habitat restoration and sustainable agriculture work in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) within that setting; project successes to date; and next steps. All aspects of the project have social ecology underpinnings and implications. And they provide one response, in the context of a farm cooperative in North Korea and the Korean Demilitarized Zone, to questions Bookchin poses, of what has been and could be “humanity's place in nature” and “society's relationship with the natural world,” both in creating the divide between humans and nature and in helping to close that gap. The project demonstrates the impacts of redrawn borderlands on the natural world.

  • Chapter Thirteen - Mediterranean Edges: Reterritorializing Natural and Social Ecologies

  • from Part IV - PORTALS: DIALOGUE, EXCEPTION AND RETERRITORIALIZATION
  • Edited by Anna Grichting, Michele Zebich-Knos
  • Book:
    The Social Ecology of Border Landscapes
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    10 January 2018
    Print publication:
    02 May 2017, pp 231-242

  • Summary

    Introduction

    Be they natural or artificial, borders are what link and divide. They impede circulation but enable passage and exchange of humans, of goods and of ideas. From time immemorial, especially when drawn across arable land or narrow straits, they have been ribbonlike swaths of intense conflict. While borders striate the surface of our globe, conflict dictates that some are more visible than others, particularly those that separate North and South, between the United States and Mexico or Latin America on one side of our hemisphere and those separating Europe from Africa. In this chapter, I will focus on the Mediterranean, broadly defined, the sea whose width — on his maps drawn around 145 CE — Ptolemy extended far beyond the limits the modern world has known. At any and every point it has been a site of crossing and a barrier for a myriad of cultures and populations. For economic and increasingly ecological reasons the sea has accrued importance as a source of water and food production. At the same time, Fernand Braudel reminds us, while it is more important than ever for sustaining the large populations huddled around it, the Mediterranean is a site of global exchange of goods and people. Under the impact of postcolonial as well as global migration and policies owing to fears of fundamentalism and terrorism, it has become, once again, a seemingly impermeable border.

    A tightening of borders is taking place at the very moment when their loosening is urgently needed for the causes of both social and natural ecologies. Thus, when seen not as a sea but as a border, the Mediterranean must be considered in equally theoretical and practical terms. In the context of a reshaping of social processes that defines national identities, the Mediterranean assures constant passage of ships and their cargoes in every cardinal direction. More delicately, where migration is at stake, the Mediterranean becomes the site of the transference of peoples of vastly different origin, language, and social process. When populations move across its waters to land and to live in different milieus, we witness how adaptation to new and different environments on the part of peoples’ different origins compels us to think of ecology in both physical and human terms.

  • Chapter Twelve - Re-legislating the Soil: Enclosures and Exception at the Amazon Frontiers

  • from Part IV - PORTALS: DIALOGUE, EXCEPTION AND RETERRITORIALIZATION
  • Edited by Anna Grichting, Michele Zebich-Knos
  • Book:
    The Social Ecology of Border Landscapes
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    10 January 2018
    Print publication:
    02 May 2017, pp 209-230

  • Summary

    The robbery of the honey and the robbery of our safety, the robbery of communing and the taking of liberties, have gone hand in hand.

    — Peter Linebaugh

    As the frontiers of development move deeper into Amazonia, opening up new soils to be integrated in the international market while simultaneously expanding enclosures toward common lands of local communities, the forest's geography turns into a contested terrain between dissident modes of relating to, appropriating and managing the environment. Enhancing global flows of natural resources presupposes the enforcement of new grids, barriers and borders on the ground, sectioning and reshaping the bounds between material ecologies and social networks, reconfiguring cultural and biophysical links between land and people. The lines that define these new border zones are multivalent, deep and thick, forged through a combination between legal mechanisms, scientific knowledge, cartographic techniques, spatial structures and political forces. Within and around them, at the intersection between different institutions, agents, materials and images through which the border exists and is performed, sites of conflict and dispute coagulate. They are frictious nodes in the fluid systems of global capital, points of resistance both to the geometries that power seeks to enforce, as well as to the border regime that structures categories of knowledge and representation by which we frame and relate to the nonhuman living world.

    In what follows, Amazonia is described as a frontier space wherein the borders and boundaries that demarcate the distinctions and separations between society and nature, politics and ecology, are blurry and fuzzy, and ultimately irrelevant. In this border zone, the social and the ecological form an entangled milieu, since power and environment are inseparable components of a single, though highly conflictive and divided historical field of forces. Politics is interpreted as an active agent in the production of the natural environment, inasmuch as nature is read as a historical territory, which is intrinsically social and political. Amazonia, a global frontier of capitalist plunder, is also described as an epistemic frontier, a border ecology that challenges our laws, sciences and politics, unveiling their colonial foundations and the power structures that legitimate them.

  • Chapter Two - Social Ecology and Transboundary Conservation: (Re)connecting Nature and People in Borderlands

  • from Part I - FRAMES: MAPPING SOCIAL ECOLOGIES IN BORDER TERRITORIES
  • Edited by Anna Grichting, Michele Zebich-Knos
  • Book:
    The Social Ecology of Border Landscapes
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    10 January 2018
    Print publication:
    02 May 2017, pp 37-52

  • Summary

    Introduction

    Much has been done about mainstreaming the concept of social ecology into biodiversity conservation and protected area management, with conservation practitioners embracing the need to enhance the relevance of their discipline within broader social, political and economic realms. The most demonstrable example is evident in the 5th International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Parks Congress, held in Durban, South Africa in 2003, with the theme “Protected Areas: Benefits beyond Boundaries,” as well as its key messages, among which were the calls for:

  • • A new deal for protected areas, local communities and indigenous peoples.

  • • A need to apply new and innovative approaches for protected areas, linked to broader agendas.

    • As challenging as it may seem for conservation practitioners to integrate these approaches into their work, it remains simple where this work falls within national jurisdictions. However, where multinational processes are required, the levels of complexity increase substantially, as does the relevance for the application of social ecological principles and thinking. The recently published IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA) Best Practice Protected Area Guidelines Series No. 23, titled Transboundary Conservation: A Systematic and Integrated Approach, states that approximately one-third of all terrestrial high biodiversity sites straddle national land borders, and it is therefore essential that neighboring states collaborate in their efforts to secure and protect these areas. While this statement still reflects a bio-centric bias, the Guidelines build on and expand the theme of the 5th IUCN World Parks Congress. They therefore serve as the basis from which this chapter has been compiled.

    This chapter provides the reader with an indication of how transboundary conservation (TBC) may be used as a tool to facilitate social ecological processes and vice versa. It provides background information to contextualize TBC at the global scale before describing the principles and processes inherent in TBC initiatives, that is, what is necessary to get them going and to keep them going. Thereafter it provides insight into the linkages between the concept and social ecology before ending with thoughts and observations on the notion that TBC may be used as a mechanism to promote peace in border regions.

  • Chapter Four - Borders as Zones of Experiential Learning: The Case of the Balkans Peace Park Project

  • from Part II - BRIDGES: RESILIENCE, RESTORATION AND RECLAMATION
  • Edited by Anna Grichting, Michele Zebich-Knos
  • Book:
    The Social Ecology of Border Landscapes
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    10 January 2018
    Print publication:
    02 May 2017, pp 71-88

  • Summary

    Introduction

    National borders are synthetic constructs that may be defined by some geographic features such as rivers or mountain ranges, but essentially remain figments of political expediency. However, social systems evolve around them to provide a unique context for learning the interface between society and ecology. This chapter provides a concise historiography of the development of an initiative in the western Balkans that sought to harness such learning opportunities “between the lines” through experiential field education. The challenges and criticism faced by the progenitors of this initiative are considered in the post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation landscape of the Balkans. Conflict transformation requires empowerment of agents of change, and this is a core component of the experiential peace-building process, especially in terms of helping participants understand the shared meaning of their experience. Such empowerment is often the goal of small-scale peace-building initiatives that target people with influence in divided communities, so that they will be able to apply what they have learned in their home constituencies. This is often done through joint cooperative initiatives or projects that allow a transformed group of people from each side of the divide to have a platform to reach out and extend their transformation to others in their communities. In our understanding, this approach to peace building rests on four criteria: (1) the responsibility and judgment of being empowered; (2) the conscious use of symbolism and ritual to create meaningful images, metaphors and experiences; (3) the transference of individual transformation back into the community; and (4) the reframing of community relationships so as to counter prevailing stereotypes and to inspire a positive notion of the “other” through a real-world example. The Balkans Peace Park Project (B3P) sought to use such a framework to further its goals of peace education and also to foster a better appreciation of the social ecology of this complex border landscape.

    The Birth of the Balkans Peace Park Project (B3P)

    The story starts with a flash of inspiration from one intrepid woman following her wanderlust in the footsteps of a famous British explorer, Edith Durham, who trekked by horseback through the Dinaric Alps at the turn of the century — before communism lowered its Iron Curtain of isolationism and paranoia.

  • Chapter Three - Social Ecologies and Structural Violence: Boundary-Making as Nature-Making in a Gated Globe

  • from Part I - FRAMES: MAPPING SOCIAL ECOLOGIES IN BORDER TERRITORIES
  • Edited by Anna Grichting, Michele Zebich-Knos
  • Book:
    The Social Ecology of Border Landscapes
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    10 January 2018
    Print publication:
    02 May 2017, pp 53-68

  • Summary

    Introduction: Boundary-Making as Nature-Making

    This chapter builds on the idea that borders, boundaries and boundary-making are central to a social ecology approach — in terms of how we perceive nature, as well as how we understand natural and human-mediated biophysical processes. At a broad level, it could be argued that the Western legacy of compartmentalizing (e.g., bordering) the world into earth, air, fire and water underlies the nature–society binary itself. Yet by insisting that we see nature and society as complexly interrelated, as well as all social and environmental issues as mutually embedded, social ecology challenges this dualistic legacy and invites a profound redrawing of nature–society boundaries. Additionally, social ecology's emphasis on justice, vulnerability, contingency and compassion provides a key — and, we argue, a critical— area of engagement for border studies.

    Happily, as this volume attests, the project of redrawing nature–society boundaries appears to be surfacing with some vigor in recent border scholarship, prompting the field to engage more directly with interdisciplinary ways of thinking — especially across some of those tough epistemological divides that are often ignored or discounted when scholars remain firmly siloed within a discipline's parameters. This is particularly true of the border scholarship that is reaching out to ecology as a primary interlocutor. One noteworthy example is the University of Victoria's Borders in Globalization (BIG) project and its adoption of the Stockholm Resilience Center's (SRC) concept of a “planetary boundaries framework” as a guiding principle (i.e., a remapping of the planet in terms of its earth systems). In so doing, BIG interdisciplinary border scholars have adopted a framework in which the traditional geopolitical borders of nation-states are contextualized within large environmental processes. The project now includes research on how atmospheric, terrestrial and aqueous phenomena might be integrated into the study of borders.

    Additional conceptual developments within border studies involve engagement with posthuman ecology and its insistence on a relational approach to all beings (human and otherthan-human). This has led, in some cases, to the reconceptualization of border environments and border zones as the “collective performances” of “embodied actors” (including not only security agents and human migrants, but also landscapes and endangered species).

  • Chapter Eleven - Australia Day: A Social Ecology Dialogue across Aboriginal and White Cultures

  • from Part IV - PORTALS: DIALOGUE, EXCEPTION AND RETERRITORIALIZATION
  • Edited by Anna Grichting, Michele Zebich-Knos
  • Book:
    The Social Ecology of Border Landscapes
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    10 January 2018
    Print publication:
    02 May 2017, pp 197-208

  • Summary

    Australia Day, January 27, 2011, is a big event in the Australian calendar. It is a public holiday much anticipated and dreaded by parents and children, respectively, as it indicates the end of the long summer school holidays. The general populous sees it as a time to don the cloth of nationalism in the proclamation of the nation-state. Overall, it is a day of raw exuberance and celebration, but sometimes it gets ugly; it is the irruption of a nationalist sentiment that influences who is wanted and who is not wanted on these shores.

    There is a little cove on the shores of Sydney Harbour, a favored haunt of tourists and Japanese brides alike, where the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House vie for prime camera attention. A small but significant crowd gathers in the pre-dawn. Uncle Max is only slightly nervous. He has been locked up with 30 or so dancers for the past four days, refining the performance that will tell the stories of his country — Yuin country (which extends from Merimbula to Port Jackson) — about five hours’ drive south of Sydney. They will dance the stories of the sacred mountain Biamunga. The dance is new, the original one long lost in the colonial dismemberment of Aboriginal culture. Today Australia “celebrates” more than 200 years of white occupancy.

    Uncle Max Harrison is known as Dulumunmun, the tribal name both his son and grandson also hold. It was a privilege to bestow that name on his blood. There is no language now — just a few words, the odd expression. He's an aged Elder with a silver grey beard, longish hair to match and a plump, firm belly that hangs over his tightened belt. He is diabetic like most of his mob. He knows today is important, not for the reasons that most people think, but for the fact that he will soon see an enactment of his culture that has been absent on this land for at least 150 years.

    It has been no easy process to fill the gaps in the story and to let the choreographers translate it into dance.

  • Chapter Eight - Ensuring Hope in Militarized Landscapes: The Case of Lebanon

  • from Part III - CORRIDORS: CATALYSTS AND COLLABORATION IN CONFINED SPACES
  • Edited by Anna Grichting, Michele Zebich-Knos
  • Book:
    The Social Ecology of Border Landscapes
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    10 January 2018
    Print publication:
    02 May 2017, pp 153-168

  • Summary

    Introduction

    For the academic year 2010–11, I compiled and edited a book featuring the works of final-year students in the Department of Landscape Design and Ecosystem Management at the American University of Beirut (AUB). The title and cover page needed to capture the core theme that linked the 22 narratives and reflect the work methodology adopted for each project. While reviewing the pictures I had taken of the different locations, one image instantly caught my attention — a magnolia tree planted on the side yard of a tire repair shop, located along Beirut's notorious former Green Line. The image perfectly captured the research. The leafless tree had been efficiently used to hang tires. Upon rendering the image, I filled the tires with soil and allowed climbing plants to reclaim the space; Remodeling Harshscapes thus became the title of the book. The process of remodeling harshscapes adheres to Murray Bookchin's theory in social ecology that “nearly all our present ecological problems originate in deep-seated social problems.” Wars, protracted conflicts, internal political and sectarian divisions embody societal anxieties, which drop heavy shadows over the Lebanese landscape. Enclaves and gated zones, reminiscent of Hilary Cunningham's gated ecologies, manifest as postwar landscapes that produce an array of rigid and elastic borderlines and develop unique mechanisms to inject sustenance within every sclerotic setting.

    This chapter studies two projects, designed and implemented by the Community Development Projects Unit (CDPU) at the American University of Beirut, that tackle militarized landscapes. The first project, titled Reclaiming the Traditional Water Conservation Practices in Rural South Lebanon — Case of Marwaheen Village, considers a South Lebanon village's ordeal in which farmers applied their deep-seated knowledge of local plains and gorges to sustain rootedness within an arid, ecological system that had been “assigned” as a war zone. The second project, titled Urban Agriculture — Women's Vocational Training Center — Ein El Hilwi Palestinian Refugee Camp, explores the aspirations of disenfranchised female groups. In a suppressed and gated environment, modest cultivation practices enabled the refugees to imprint upon the camp a landscape of hope for the future. I place the Marwaheen village project first, not for lack of recognition of the suffering incurred by the Palestinian refugees at Ein El Hilwi, but because Marwaheen lies near the Israeliborder and represents the true ironies of border life in a conflict zone.

  • Introduction: Social Ecologies and Borderlands

  • Edited by Anna Grichting, Michele Zebich-Knos
  • Book:
    The Social Ecology of Border Landscapes
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    10 January 2018
    Print publication:
    02 May 2017, pp 1-16

  • Summary

    There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter.

    — Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder

    Even in the most stressed border areas, humans can find solace and comfort in what nature offers us. While we, as scholars, methodically define and conceptualize our thoughts and research in dispassionate ways, those caught in the thick of conflict/ post-conflict border spaces often abandon such pretentions to savor nature and grasp the small pleasures that make life bearable. Healing power manifests itself in the form of gardens for Palestinian refugees in the Shu'fat Refugee Camp along the Israeli wall, or in swatches of land along the former Iron Curtain that gave way to the Pan European Green Belt open for everyone to enjoy. When nature is in short supply, especially in compact refugee camps like Shu'fat, local residents find other ways to add meaning to their lives. The “Palace,” or Shu'fat marriage hall, enriches camp life and also serves as a multipurpose location for shows and other ceremonies. And, when encountering not a physical border, but a cognitive one, allegories, replete with birds and waterways, sustain hope and comfort as they blend into Australia's Aboriginal storytelling.

    In my travels and research along conflict borders, the most telling was that visionary and practical plans for the future transformation of these liminal spaces were seeded and imagined by nature lovers, environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and passionate planners. Through direct interaction with nature and ecosystems, and with the intention of softening these hard borders, projects and visions such as the German Green Belt, the Korean DMZ Peace Park, the Cyprus GreenLine Scapes Laboratory and the Balkans Peace Park Initiative were born. It is the intent of this book to show how ecologically based, mutualistic social structures can overcome borders and barriers, and create resilient spaces and communities. Increased securitization of borders since 9/ 11 has amplified interest in finding ways to soften borders and to avoid the kind of discrimination, marginalization and other negative consequences that come from inscribing hard divisions between peoples, ecologies and societies.

  • Preface

  • Edited by Anna Grichting, Michele Zebich-Knos
  • Book:
    The Social Ecology of Border Landscapes
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    10 January 2018
    Print publication:
    02 May 2017, pp ix-x

  • Summary

    The idea for this book came out of the 2011 Conference on Environmental Diplomacy and Security in International Relations organized by the Institute for Environmental Diplomacy and Security (IEDS) at the University of Vermont (USA). Burlington, Vermont, is a small city nestled in the Vermont heartland and is also home to the founder of social ecology, Murray Bookchin. At the time, the university was also home to professor and IEDS director Saleem Ali, author of the highly acclaimed book Peace Parks: Conservation and Conflict Resolution. Without his encouragement and support, The Social Ecology of Border Landscapes would surely not have materialized. I should add that these inspirational events, institutions and scholarship took place within very idyllic local surroundings. Vermont borders Quebec, Canada, and, in Burlington, I found French-Canadian influences everywhere, from the food (poutine) to the bilingual, English-French language signs at the airport.

    While certainly different from my current living arrangement near the Pacific Ocean in Southern California, the area and the conference sparked my interest in creating a book about borders and their relation to both the built and natural environments, but it was Anna Grichting's actions that turned this idea into reality. Selection for our conceptual framework was obvious — we would approach the topic from a social ecology perspective to illustrate that scholars and practitioners must never lose sight of the human drivers that shape borders, whether they abut a peace park, desert, fence or refugee camp. The book would be multidisciplinary and incorporate my perspective as a political scientist with Anna's expertise in architecture and planning. Naturally, it would include scholars and practitioners whose background and knowledge base are different from our own. It would also challenge readers to think out of the box — which is why we felt compelled to include a cognitive-border case (Chapter 11) devoid of physical frontiers, but able to increase awareness that psychological barriers often result from conflict and serve as coping mechanisms.

    One of my favorite natural environments in Southern California is the Tijuana Estuary National Wildlife Refuge and Tijuana Slough, a salt marsh plain with tidal channels that extends south from San Diego to the Mexican border.

  • Chapter Nine - Domesticating and Enlarging One's Territory: Day-to-Day Politics in a Confined Space — The Shu'fat Refugee Camp in East Jerusalem

  • from Part III - CORRIDORS: CATALYSTS AND COLLABORATION IN CONFINED SPACES
  • Edited by Anna Grichting, Michele Zebich-Knos
  • Book:
    The Social Ecology of Border Landscapes
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    10 January 2018
    Print publication:
    02 May 2017, pp 169-180

  • Summary

    The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is frequently raised from a geopolitical or sometimes an ideological angle. A number of critical, illustrated works have extensively analyzed the logic of domination of one people over another and the relational cleavages resulting from security-based politics, that led, for example, to the creation of a separation wall (or barrier) between Israel and the Palestinian territories. Within this logic, geography, cartography and knowledge/ power become the dominant modes of representation. They often foster an abstract vision of vertical power that erases all human relations. Anthropological and phenomenal aims disappear. The Palestinian landscape can be described as comprising security walls, camps, settlements and checkpoints — a place where a disconnect between the persons, the group and their environment is radically witnessed. Instead of beginning with a description of the total sense of domination faced by these walled-in inhabitants, the current study examines the resources to which they have recourse. These resources enable inhabitants to adjust to a problematic situation brought about by the wall and its enclosure. By thus focusing not only on relations of domination, but also on actors’ attitudes, this chapter shifts attention to ordinary forms of denunciation. These are a way to read, not only the critical capabilities of people, but the way in which inhabitants adapt to and shape their environment.

    The investigation briefly presented here concerns the small refugee camp of Shu'fat situated along the security barrier in Jerusalem, where the citizens, all residents of Jerusalem, are more or less enclosed within an enclave. However, these citizen-refugees are no less motivated by the bonds or attachments that give value to local scale and property. The role of a personal logic of comfort for these walled-in refugees and their ways of acting locally can be understood as an attempt to organize their environment or surroundings. An entire series of practices and activities expresses the capacity of individuals to identify — and value the existence of and attachment to — refugee camps, which currently exist in legal limbo. It is through such a perspective that we seek to understand the meaning of these practices both cognitive and material — as the creation and enlargement of one's environment.

  • 2 - Historical Responsibility and Climate Change

  • Edited by Lukas H. Meyer, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Austria, Pranay Sanklecha, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Austria
  • Book:
    Climate Justice and Historical Emissions
    Published online:
    23 February 2017
    Print publication:
    16 February 2017, pp 46-60

  • Summary

    This chapter concentrates on refuting the most serious objections to the claim that people of developed countries owe reparation for their historical role in causing climate change: that ignorance is a sufficient reason for lack of responsibility and that present citizens cannot be held responsible for what their predecessors did. I argue that morally responsible agents can be required to make reparation for harms for which they are not culpable and that citizens are subject to intergenerational requirements of justice. There is a good case for claiming that developed countries ought to make reparation for historical emissions, but what they owe must be determined by reference to present circumstances.

  • 9 - In the Name of Political Possibility

  • Edited by Lukas H. Meyer, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Austria, Pranay Sanklecha, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Austria
  • Book:
    Climate Justice and Historical Emissions
    Published online:
    23 February 2017
    Print publication:
    16 February 2017, pp 198-218

  • Summary

    Global climate change (GCC) is a complex political and moral phenomenon, as concerns of international justice, intra-national justice, and intergenerational all need to be identified and addressed. Central to these concerns is determining to what extent a nation’s historical contribution to GCC should inform its obligations going forward; this is the question that I will focus on in this essay. I begin by detailing some of the arguments that arise on the policy front when policymakers negotiate over the importance of historical contributions to GCC, and I show that there is a notable gap between what political philosophers talk about and what is presently possible to bring about through negotiations. Given this context, I propose that what is needed is a morally defensible solution that is informed by the virtue of political feasibility. I show that a proposal that allocates partial responsibility to historical emitters is very likely feasible and reflects some important moral values in ways that other options fail to do. As such, I argue that the partial responsibility proposals are the ones that policymakers and philosophers should pursue going forward.

Climate Justice and Historical Emissions
  • Edited by Lukas H. Meyer, Pranay Sanklecha
  • Published online:
    23 February 2017
    Print publication:
    16 February 2017
  • This volume investigates who can be considered responsible for historical emissions and their consequences, and how and why this should matter for the design of a just global climate policy. The authors discuss the underlying philosophical issues of responsibility for historical emissions, the unjust enrichment of the earlier developed nations, and questions of transitional justice. By bringing together a plurality of perspectives, both in terms of the theoretical understanding of the issues and the political perspectives on the problem, the book also presents the remaining disagreements and controversies in the debate. Providing a systematic introduction to the debate on historical emissions and climate change, this book provides an unbiased and authoritative guide for advanced students, researchers and policymakers in climate change justice and governance, and more widely, for anyone interested in the broader issues of global justice.

  • 5 - Asking Beneficiaries to Pay for Past Pollution

  • Edited by Lukas H. Meyer, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Austria, Pranay Sanklecha, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Austria
  • Book:
    Climate Justice and Historical Emissions
    Published online:
    23 February 2017
    Print publication:
    16 February 2017, pp 107-122

  • Summary

    It has been suggested that in cases of past pollution, that is, once the original polluters are no longer available, we should resort to asking those who benefited from their pollution to pay towards compensating the harm thereby created. This claim is intuitively appealing. However, in this paper I argue that even if we have no doubt that victims of past pollution need to be helped in their efforts to adapt, the mere fact of having benefited cannot provide the necessary grounds for establishing such obligations. I show that additional factors, such as moral responsibility or wealth, have to be present for benefits to generate obligations to aid. But once these additional factors have been identified, having benefited (alone) appears not to be particularly relevant: what generates the obligations is either moral responsibility or the ability to pay. 

  • 3 - Historical Emissions

  • Edited by Lukas H. Meyer, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Austria, Pranay Sanklecha, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Austria
  • Book:
    Climate Justice and Historical Emissions
    Published online:
    23 February 2017
    Print publication:
    16 February 2017, pp 61-79

  • Summary

    This article discusses the claim that it is inappropriate to make members of current day states pay for the historic greenhouse gas emissions of their historical counterparts on account of the fact that those counterparts were not aware of the harm which their actions would cause in the future. I accept that ignorance is a defence against a charge of moral wrongdoing, absent a justified charge of culpable negligence. Nonetheless, it is appropriate to hold those relevantly connected to historical actions which would have been wrongful if performed in knowledge of their likely consequences liable for the costs of those consequences when a specific condition is fulfilled. This is when we are convinced that they would have acted as they did even if they had, in fact, been aware of the likely consequences of their actions. The particular character of human history, particularly in relation to international affairs, renders such a verdict very plausible in relation to historic emissions, and means that there is no unfairness in holding present day peoples responsible for the costs of the actions of their forebears.

  • 7 - A Luck-Based Moral Defense of Grandfathering

  • Edited by Lukas H. Meyer, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Austria, Pranay Sanklecha, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Austria
  • Book:
    Climate Justice and Historical Emissions
    Published online:
    23 February 2017
    Print publication:
    16 February 2017, pp 141-164

  • Summary

    Emissions grandfathering apportions emission rights according to historically established emission levels. Only very recently have Bovens (2011) and Knight (2013, 2014) produced the first sustained philosophical defenses of grandfathering. The paper will argue that Bovens’ Lockean justification of emissions grandfathering fails but take up his idea of temporary grandfathering, which will be developed in new directions on the basis of luck-related justice. In contrast to Knight’s (2014) luck egalitarian approach, I will suggest temporary remedies only against brute bad luck that comes in the form of external shocks. It is a shock to find oneself without one’s fault, as the citizens of industrialized countries did in 1990, in conditions that require a massive lifestyle change. However, rather than compensation it is time for adaptation to a new situation that should in principle be granted to relatively affluent people who are seriously affected by external shocks. This legitimates successive proportional emission cuts in industrialized countries relative to a reference year such as 1990.

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