Delivered at A Convocation of World Leaders, World Culture and Sports Festival 2001, “Dialogue and Harmony Among Civilizations: The Family, Universal Values and World Peace, January 26-29, 2001

For those who live in modern cities, nature is a haven, a refuge from an urban jungle. But nature isn’t a national park, as people who make their living in its midst are aware. Western civilization has given me the luxury of being an environmentalist. I’m insulated against nature, and this insulation gives me the luxury of no longer needing to see nature as a threat. Unfortunately, not everyone is so insulated, and thus not everyone’s in a position to join me in treating wilderness preservation as an urgent priority. Therein lies a source of conflict, a kind of conflict that’s bad for the environment and that we can’t resolve unless we understand that it isn’t like other kinds of conflict. I’m going to describe three kinds of environmental conflict, concentrating on a subtle but crucial contrast between conflicting values and conflicting priorities.
Three Kinds of Environmental Conflict
I’ll treat as basic a kind of conflict in which people simply find themselves in each other’s way. I will refer to this as conflict in use. Conflict in use manifests itself in traffic jams, figuratively or literally. A pattern of overall use results in congestion, such that people trying to use a resource end up interfering with each other. Conflict in use is resolved by institutions that literally or figuratively direct traffic, such as a system of property rights that lets people know who has the right of way when their intentions put them on a collision course.
Some environmental conflicts, though, can’t be addressed merely by settling on a system of property rights. In particular, some of our most serious conflicts concern what should be property in the first place. Thus, there is a second kind of conflict that ultimately is a matter of conflicting values. Should Masai tribes be allowed to own and sell elephants as if elephants were pieces of property? One thing to be said on behalf of conferring such rights is that it would give the Masai reason to protect elephants against poachers.
However, some would say that turning elephants into a commodity is another way of destroying them. Even when it does not literally destroy the elephants, it still destroys what elephants stand for in the minds of those who cherish the idea of nature wild and free. This isn’t a conflict we can resolve by deciding who owns the resource. We disagree on whether anyone has the right to regard elephants as a resource in the first place.
Environmentalists sometimes distinguish between human-centered and nature-centered orientations toward nature. Conservationists say nature should be used wisely. Preservationists say that, although we (like any living creature) can’t avoid using nature, nature nevertheless has moral standing independent of its utility for humans. A preservationist will say some ecosystems or species should be left to evolve according to their own lights, as free as possible from human interference. We shouldn’t think of wilderness as a mere resource.
Wilderness commands reverence; mere resources do not. This clash exemplifies the second kind of conflict: conflict in values. There’s a third kind of environmental conflict: conflicting priorities. We misunderstand this kind of conflict if we see it simply as another case of conflicting values. The difference is that people’s immediate goals can be incompatible even when their values are relevantly similar. International conservation groups raise money by pledging to fight for preservationist “no use at all” policies. Sometimes, though, farmers do not join in pursuing cosmopolitan environmentalist goals because they can’t afford to.
This kind of conflict could occur even among people who all feel precisely the same way about where elephants should rank in our hierarchy of values. To give a crude illustration, suppose we all agree that our children outrank elephants but elephants outrank chess sets carved out of ivory. Even so, we could come into conflict when North Americans denounce hunting elephants to acquire ivory for carving chess sets while Africans defend the practice because ivory revenues are feeding their children. Although both sides have the same values, they don’t face the same cost. For one person, no elephant hunting means no ivory chess sets; for another person, no elephant hunting means no children. Subsistence farmers for whom getting enough food is a day-by-day proposition can have priorities that differ from ours not because their values are different but precisely because their values are the same. Thus, there’s a kind of conflict that originates not so much from a difference of values as from a difference in which values people can afford to pursue under their differing circumstances.
Moreover, there’s an additional problem, a feature of real world conflict that some preservationists fail to appreciate. In parts of Africa, the dilemma for subsistence farmers is this: if they can’t commodify elephants (by selling ivory, hunting licenses, or photo safaris), then they’ll have to push elephants out of the way to make room for livestock or crops. In the abstract, exploiting elephants seems obviously wrong, but it stops being obvious after spending time in rural Africa, and seeing that when rural people can’t exploit elephants in some fashion, their only alternative is to convert elephant habitat into farmland.
And please understand: coexisting with elephants is costly. We aren’t talking about animals one looks at through a pair of binoculars, at a safe distance, while on vacation at a national park. Elephants are an integral part, and a dangerous part, of everyday life. Although we knew this at an intellectual level, such knowledge left us unprepared when the time came to learn it from experience. In July 1999 we arrived at Oddballs’ Camp in Botswana’s Okavanga Delta in an airplane just big enough for three passengers. (The wings of the plane were reinforced with duct tape. ) The airstrip was dirt. As we landed, baboons and warthogs scattered before us. The person who was to meet us was late because, while walking to the airstrip from the camp, he had to detour around a herd of Cape buffalo, reputedly among the most dangerous animals in the world. After a 15-minute walk through the marsh, we arrived at the campground.
That night we slept with the sound of baboons howling in the foreground and lions roaring in the background. We were awakened around 4 A. M. by what sounded like trees being shaken by a gale force wind. I got up and found myself standing, in the open air, right next to a 12-foot tall elephant. The elephant had been pressing its forehead against a lala palm, whipping the tree back and forth (thereby making sound that woke us up) in order to shake down the fruit higher up. Tiring of that, the elephant had torn the whole tree out of the ground and was taking an experimental munch at the roots. The elephant knew I was there and it may have deliberately avoided letting the tree fall on us. Some elephants are considerate in that way. Some aren’t.
Elephants rarely sleep and spend about 80 percent of their lives eating, and there usually were a couple roaming the campground. It’s important to grasp that these elephants were not pets. The camp didn’t adopt them. There was nothing domestic about them. There was nothing cute about them. They were magnificent by day and literally breathtaking by night. They were there because despite everyone’s efforts to keep elephants out of camp, the bottom line is, if an elephant takes an interest in something inside camp, it’s coming in and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it. Our experience makes for a great story and an unforgettable visit, but imagine spending your whole life that way, going to bed not knowing what’ll be left of your crop or garden or house or children when you get up in the morning.
Again, even people who embrace environmentalist values will act contrary to those values when they can’t afford to act in accordance with them. There are times when conflict is a matter of conflicting priorities.
Ideals, Compromise, and Stewardship
To some extent a philosopher’s job is to say how the world ought to be in the grand scheme of things. It’s an honorable job. But where environmental ethics is a study of ideals, environmental conflict resolution is the art of compromise in a world that isn’t a blank canvas. Conflict mediation typically involves trying to help negotiate win-win solutions.
The most basic principle of conflict resolution is that mediators should try to get people to focus on their interests not their positions. In other words, it’s better if negotiation does not turn into a contest of wills (drawing lines in the sand, as they say) but instead revolves around the actual problem, as defined by actual benefits that might be realized if negotiation leads to agreement. In choosing our priorities, we sometimes need to be sensitive not only to our own values but to other people’s as well. We have to ask what their values are, what their priorities are, and what could lead people with such values and priorities to act in environmentally benign ways.
Consider what this implies for the familiar idea that we’re not owners of the land so much as stewards of it. If we see ourselves as stewards, then we see ourselves as obliged to care for the land on behalf of future generations. But if we are to take our stewardship role seriously, we need to understand that honest stewardship is a commitment to environmental interests, not environmentalist positions. Commitment to interests sometimes mandates compromise on positions. It sometimes requires negotiation. Sometimes, what people call values are dressed-up positions that have little to do with real interests. We make a huge mistake if we equate what’s bad for our enemies (corporations, economists, ranchers, Western patriarchy, whatever) with what’s good for the environment.
Suppose government regulations have symbolic value. Suppose they express what we believe, what we are, what we “stand for as a nation.” Even if that were true, we’d still need to be careful not to endorse a regulation merely because of what it symbolizes. If we want to make sure a law doesn’t undermine a value in the course of symbolizing it, we must stop to ask what sort of behavior the law will induce when put in place. Otherwise, when we glorify a regulation’s symbolic value, we glorify the taking of environmentalist positions at the expense of environmental interests. We’ll be doing exactly what experience in the theory and practice of conflict resolution tells us to avoid.
My father was a farmer. When I was eight years old, a pair of red foxes built a den and raised a litter in our wheat field. I can remember watching Dad on his tractor in the late afternoon, giving the foxes a wide berth, and leaving that part of our field uncultivated that year. He protected the den because he could afford to. If there had been a law prohibiting farming on land inhabited by foxes, then Dad would’ve had to make sure his land wasn’t inhabited by foxes. Which is to say, Dad probably would have killed them. Although he loved them, he wouldn’t have been able to afford to let them live.
A Lesson for Environmental Ethics
Environmental philosophers often talk about environmental justice, but almost never talk about environmental conflict resolution. This is unfortunate. From a mediator’s perspective, progress requires negotiation and compromise. Moreover, achieving acceptable and stable compromise can be more important from an environmental perspective than getting it right in some idealized sense that abstracts from political realities. Where the world can go from here is constrained by the histories of stakeholders and by a plurality of values. Mediators deal with the situation as it is.
The practical relevance of environmental ethics depends on our ability to do likewise. We need to think about conflict, not merely about how the world ought to be in the grand scheme of things. If humanity were a decision-making entity, and if its component parts had no interests of their own, this entity might rationally decide to prune itself back, amputating overgrown parts for the sake of the whole, thereby leaving more room for wildlife. In Africa, though, and in the developing world more generally, if people manage to protect their land and wildlife, it’ll be because doing so is in their interest, not because doing so is in the interest of “the whole.” If we fail to treat them as players with interests of their own, we’ll be our own worst enemies.
Perhaps mediators should and do seek to ground negotiations in principles of substantive justice as well. I’m not a mediator and have no direct practical experience with institutions of conflict mediation, so it’s hard for me to say. What I can say with confidence is philosophers need to do their part to complete the circle. What I have in mind is that while mediators are trying to ground their practice in a sound theory, we could do our part by trying to ground our theories in the requirements of sound practice. If we say our philosophical principles ought to be put into practice, then we implicitly if not explicitly are warranting those principles as compatible with sound practice. However, if we make no effort to ground our theories in requirements of sound practice, then it would be fraudulent to recommend our theory to practitioners. In that case, if and when practitioners respond by ignoring us, they will be doing the right thing.
I’m not going to try to defend a particular theory of justice here, but I promise that when I work on my theory, I’m not working on a grand abstract plan for world revolution. I’m trying to formulate something that could help mediators resolve real world conflicts in a principled way.
Economics as Ecology
Conflict in priorities often isn’t only an environmental conflict. Often, perhaps typically, it is an economic conflict, too—a conflict rooted in differing economic circumstances—and it will not be resolved as an environmental conflict unless it also is resolved as an economic conflict. Ecologists understand that an ecology’s internal logic limits the directions in which it can be taken by would-be ecological engineers. Environmental activism and regulation don’t automatically improve the environment. It’s a truism in ecology, as in economics, that well-intentioned interventions don’t necessarily translate into good results. Intervention that works with the system’s logic rather than against it can have good consequences. To ignore the logic of human economy is to ignore the logic of human ecology and thus to ignore the logic of any ecology in which humans play a role. Anyone who truly cares about the environment would not do that.
We’re in a difficult position. On the one hand, we increasingly need to be nature-centered to be properly human-centered; we need to focus on “saving the ecological systems that are the context of human cultural and economic activities.” What I wish to add is that the converse is also true: We need to be human-centered to be properly nature-centered, for if we don’t tend to what’s good for people, we won’t be tending to what is good for nature either. Environmentalists sometimes advocate policies and regulations with no concern for values and priorities that differ from their own. Even from a purely environmental perspective, though, that’s a mistake. Policy makers who ignore human values and human priorities that differ from their own will, in effect, be committed to mismanaging the ecology of which those ignored values and priorities are an integral part.
Conclusion
Those who embrace economic values and those who embrace environmental values are not natural enemies. If we want other people’s actions (or our own, for that matter) to be environmentally benign, then we’ll have to understand and work with human ecology. Environmentalists need to avoid thinking of economics as the enemy, because that antipathy interferes with understanding what it takes to resolve conflicting priorities in environmentally benign ways.
In cases of conflicting priorities, we need to think about people first, if we care about people, or even if we don’t. If we care about wildlife, we need to accept that wildlife will survive to the extent that people who have to live with it are better off taking care of it. It’s roughly that simple. Requiring subsistence farmers to cooperate in putting the interests of wildlife before (or even on a par with) their own isn’t a winning strategy for helping the wildlife. We need their cooperation, and the terms of cooperation will have to address not only our interest in preserving wildlife but also their interest in being able to live with it. Wildlife will survive only if people can afford to share the land. If they can’t share, then they will not share, and the wildlife will die.