Il lavoro è volto a mettere in luce le problematiche connesse all'attività delle imprese multinazionali e alla sussistenza in capo alle stesse di una responsabilità sociale internazionale (RSI). Nell'attuale panorama economico e politico mondiale, caratterizzato dalla globalizzazione e dalla stretta interdipendenza dei mercati, dalla sempre più frequente internazionalizzazione dei processi produttivi e aziendali e dalla contestuale operatività delle società in più Paesi, dalla accresciuta consapevolezza del consumatore circa il rispetto, nei processi produttivi, di istanze ritenuti fondamentali dalla società civile, come i diritti fondamentali dell'uomo e dei lavoratori o la protezione dell'ambiente, l'impresa multinazionale assume un ruolo fondamentale sia nell'indirizzare i trends economici globali (si pensi al fatto che alcune società hanno profitti superiori al PIL di buona parte degli Stati della comunità internazionale); la configurazione di una responsabilità sociale in capo a tali società vuol dire mescolare la libertà di impresa e il libero mercato con l'etica. La necessità di inserire la questione dell'etica negli affari nasce, dunque, dalla convinzione - sempre più diffusa in ambito internazionale e nazionale - che l'attenzione dell'impresa verso le istanze sociali, ambientali ed etiche delle comunità umane costituisca una condizione imprescindibile per uno sviluppo durevole e sostenibile. In tale prospettiva, dunque, il concetto di responsabilità sociale d'impresa richiama le imprese a considerare attentamente - nella definizione della propria strategia, nell'articolazione delle politiche e nelle procedure gestionali quotidiane - gli interessi diffusi della collettività, nonché l'impatto delle proprie attività, non solo in termini economici, ma anche sociali, ambientali ed etici. La responsabilità sociale rappresenta, quindi, per l'impresa uno strumento utile ed efficace per rispondere alle istanze e alle esigenze della società civile. Con la RSI nasce quindi una teoria di impresa che vede la produzione di beni non solo come strumento di profitto ma anche come occasione di realizzazione del benessere sociale; lo stesso operato dell'impresa inizia ad essere valutato globalmente non solo in rapporto ai risultati economici della stessa ma anche in base alla qualità del prodotto, alla qualità dell'ambiente lavorativo e alle istanze ambientali, seconda i dettami di quella scuola di pensiero del cd. business ethics per cui le imprese sono chiamate a compiere azioni che contribuiscano ad eliminare e prevenire le iniquità sociali e a promuovere lo sviluppo della collettività. Tale necessità è stata anche consequenziale a comportamenti ed abusi messi in atto dalle società transnazionali che hanno arrecato gravi danni alle comunità umane degli Stati ospiti delle attività produttive. Gli abusi commessi dalle imprese, non sempre riconducibili a precise violazioni degli ordinamenti nazionali, sono stati progressivamente interpretati e costruiti come violazioni o mancanze nei confronti di un complesso di principi definiti come appartenenti ad una ampia sfera di responsabilità sociale internazionale dell'impresa, che implica la perdita di reputazione e, quindi, la possibile riduzione delle sue quote sul mercato qualora gli stakeholders più interessati riescano a mobilitare l'opinione pubblica su larga scala. Fin dagli anni '70, diverse organizzazioni internazionali hanno iniziato ad occuparsi della regolamentazione dell'attività delle imprese transnazionali, evidenziando il ruolo che le imprese multinazionali sono chiamate a rivestire nei processi di tutela dei diritti umani e dell'ambiente che emergono nello svolgimento delle loro attività economiche; appare evidente come sia basilare, nel piano dell'opera, definire l'impresa multinazionale, analizzando i diversi strumenti adottati dalle organizzazioni internazionali e i contributi dottrinali in materia, alla luce dei quali sembra potersi dire che il carattere di "multinazionalità" o "transnazionalità" è dato dalla presenza di diverse unità operative, dislocate in più Paesi, che si trovano sotto il controllo (azionario o di gestione) di un'unica società holding; tale distinzione tra unità operative si estende fino al profilo giuridico, in quanto le singole consociate sono autonomi soggetti di diritto sottoposti, relativamente ai profili della regolamentazione e della costituzione, all'ordinamento giuridico dello Stato di nazionalità. Ciò spesso comporta che le società scelgano come sede un Paese sulla base della convenienza che ciascuno di essi offre in relazione al trattamento fiscale, al costo della manodopera e delle materie prime, alla regolamentazione in materia di protezione dell'ambiente. Sembra quindi necessario un tentativo di regolamentazione da parte di organismi sovranazionali, a fronte del numero sempre maggiore di imprese operanti in più mercati (più di 80.000 società con circa 900.000 società sussidiarie), al loro peso economico e occupazionale (si stimano circa 80.000.000 di posti di lavoro) e a seguito di numerosi episodi che hanno coinvolto tali imprese dagli anni '70 ad oggi, come nei casi della Drummond o della Del Monte, accusate di gravi repressioni dei diritti sindacali e sociali dei lavoratori, o della Chevron/Texaco e della Union Carbride, responsabili di disastri ambientali tra cui quello di Bophal, in India, fino al caso, recentissimo, del disastro ambientale causato dalla piattaforma Deepwater Horizon al largo delle coste della Florida e della Louisiana tra il 2010 e il 2011, o i casi di violazioni dei diritti umani e commissione di crimini internazionali (arresti arbitrari, torture, violenze sessuali, trattamenti inumani e degradanti), commesse da società transnazionali operanti nel settore estrattivo e minerario in Africa e nel Sud Est Asiatico, commessi direttamente o a mezzo di milizie assoldate per la protezione degli impianti. L'attività delle Organizzazioni internazionali, a partire dagli anni '70, si è focalizzata sul tema; l'OCSE, l'Organizzazione internazionale del lavoro, la Camera di Commercio internazionale hanno adottato in quegli anni raccomandazioni e dichiarazioni rivolte agli Stati membri e alle imprese per l'adesione a certi principi e diritti già sanciti da altri strumenti convenzionali; le Nazioni Unite, prima attraverso l'attività della Commissione sulle imprese multinazionali e poi della Sottocommissione per la protezione e promozione dei diritti umani, si sono occupate della materia, giungendo alla elaborazione di un Codice di condotta per le imprese multinazionali (mai adottato) e di Norme sulla responsabilità delle imprese multinazionali e altre imprese in relazione ai diritti umani, che si affiancano alla partnership pubblico-privata del Global Compact. Ancora, anche altre organizzazioni internazionali, come l'Organizzazione mondiale della sanità, l'OMC, la Banca mondiale, l'International Standard Organisation, hanno adottato atti che invitano le imprese a svolgere la propria attività produttiva nel pieno rispetto dei diritti fondamentali della persona, delle comunità locali e dell'ambiente, e quindi prendendo in considerazione non solo interessi e diritti dei soci ma di tutti i soggetti a vario titolo coinvolti o toccati dall'attività aziendale. In ultimo, è il lavoro del Rappresentante Speciale del Segretario Generale ONU John Ruggie ad elaborare un quadro normativo (denominato Protect, Respect, Remedy) generale relativo al rapporto tra business e diritti umani. La caratteristica degli strumenti analizzati è la loro natura non vincolante, quindi meramente esortativa e ad applicazione volontaria. Tale situazione si ricollega sostanzialmente a due ragioni: la discussa soggettività internazionale delle imprese multinazionali e le opposte visioni dei Governi in materia (con evidenti difformità di vedute tra Paesi in via di sviluppo e Paesi industrializzati). Riguardo alla soggettività delle imprese multinazionali, ovvero lo status di essere titolari di diritti e obblighi nascenti dal diritto internazionale, la dottrina internazionalistica è fortemente divisa. Secondo un primo orientamento, le IMN non sarebbero soggetti di diritto internazionali in quanto sono solo destinatarie di norme, e quindi "oggetto" del diritto internazionale; sarebbero soggette solo alla giurisdizione dello Stato, e vincolate dal diritto internazionale solamente in virtù del richiamo da parte dell'ordinamento giuridico interno. Dagli anni '60, inizia a farsi largo un diverso filone dottrinale che, partendo dal noto parere della Corte internazionale di giustizia Reparations for Injuries, considera l'impresa quale soggetto di diritto internazionale, in virtù di una serie di diritti e obblighi che le vengono attribuiti dal diritto internazionale, soprattutto in materia di investimenti e di contratti internazionali (tra tutti, il diritto di adire un'istanza arbitrale o giurisdizionale a carattere arbitrale). Inoltre, la costante attenzione per l'attività delle IMN da parte delle Organizzazioni internazionali, potrebbe testimoniare la nascente opinio juris di conferire una, seppur limitata, soggettività internazionale alle imprese. Dall'analisi della prassi internazionale si sono tratte conclusioni provvisorie, in particolare che l'impresa, soprattutto nel settore del diritto economico e degli investimenti, possegga una personalità giuridica internazionale limitata e soprattutto derivata dalla volontà degli Stati, ma soprattutto funzionale, poiché contenuta nei limiti stabiliti dal trattato internazionale (BITs) o del contratto internazionale che stabilisce diritti e obblighi per la stessa. Negli ultimi anni anche l'Unione Europea ha iniziato a promuovere una adesione delle imprese ai valori fondamentali dei diritti dell'uomo, dei lavoratori e dello sviluppo sostenibile. A partire dal Libro Verde del 2001, l'UE ha elaborato progressivamente una strategia europea per la responsabilità sociale di impresa, qualificata come adozione spontanea di prassi volte a contribuire al miglioramento della società e alla qualità dell'ambiente. La strategia dell'UE si caratterizza per avere una dimensione sia interna all'impresa, stabilendo una serie di programmi d'azione e l'adozione di sistemi di gestione dei processi produttivi, sia esterna alla stessa, prevedendo il coinvolgimento di comunità locali, partner commerciali, clienti, fornitori, ONG, autorità statali. A tali fini, l'UE lanciò una serie di iniziative, quali i sistemi EMAS e ECOLABEL di certificazione ecologica e di audit ambientale, il Multistakeholders' forum, per formare un quadro giuridico regolamentare in materia di appalti pubblici e sostenibilità ambientale, di tutela del consumatore, di pubblicità ingannevole, nonché l'adozione di codici di condotta settoriali, ispirato ai principi della RSI. L'attività di regolamentazione della RSI ha ricevuto un contributo dalle stesse imprese multinazionali, nel senso di una autoregolamentazione delle proprie attività, attraverso dei codici di condotta autonomamente adottati dalla singola impresa in funzione delle proprie strategie e valori. Tali codici si distinguono nettamente dalle linee guida adottate dalle Organizzazioni internazionali perché in essi l'impresa si fa creatrice e destinataria di norme, create non perché la necessità provenga dal diritto, ma dall'interesse dell'impresa (che, in molti casi, si caratterizza per essere meramente reputazionale). Tali codici, di chiara natura volontaristica, garantiscono il rispetto degli standard di tutela e di promozione dei principi in esso contenuti, stabilendo il più delle volte un meccanismo di monitoraggio e controllo del rispetto delle norme in esso contenute, meccanismo che può essere a carattere interno (gestito quindi da un ufficio interno all'impresa) o a carattere esterno (gestito, il più delle volte, da una ONG o da un sindacato). Infine, la ricerca si conclude con l'analisi dei principali temi che riguardano la RSI negli ultimi anni, ovvero quelli relativi ai profili di responsabilità delle imprese per violazione dei diritti fondamentali e per danni ambientali (con particolare riguardo alla disciplina statunitense contenuta nell'Alien Torts Statute), con particolare riferimento agli obblighi internazionali che incombono sugli Stati attraverso la ricostruzione della prassi internazionale. Inoltre, ulteriore profilo di studio è quello che si concentra sulla possibile estensione della giurisdizione dei tribunali internazionali per crimini internazionali alle persone giuridiche, con particolare riguardo ai lavori preparatori della Conferenza di Roma che ha portato all'istituzione della Corte Penale Internazionale. In conclusione, oggetto della ricerca è stato la ricostruzione del concetto di RSI, il quale è un prodotto degli ordinamenti nazionali ed in particolare degli ordinamenti giuridici degli Stati industrializzati, identificando un framework giuridico che include strumenti normativi di varia natura e in svariati settori, come quelli che disciplinano le società commerciali; le normative nazionali di prevenzione e repressione della corruzione; le normative del settore finanziario ed in particolare quelle sulle borse valori; le discipline a tutela del lavoro, dell'ambiente e del consumatore. Negli Stati più avanzati dal punto di vista economico e istituzionale la RSI, dunque, non è codificata in uno specifico settore regolamentare ma rappresenta un sistema complesso di normative che regolano i diversi aspetti di quelle attività di impresa; nei PVS, invece, tali normative sono spesso frammentarie o addirittura assenti: questa situazione ha permesso alle IMN di avvantaggiarsi dei vuoti legislativi o delle regole stringenti presenti in questi Paesi. Appare evidente come la comunità internazionale abbia constatato la necessità di regolare l'attività delle imprese multinazionali, per la promozione e la protezione dei propri valori fondamentali e di uno sviluppo in un'ottica di sostenibilità ambientale, nell'intenzione di creare un quadro giuridico internazionale che permetta alle imprese di perseguire le proprie finalità aziendali senza perdere di vista le esigenze collettive (in particolare dei Paesi in cui operano). Per raggiungere tale obiettivo, appare inevitabile un'evoluzione del diritto internazionale vigente, i cui processi di formazione, gestiti sostanzialmente dai Governi, non possono non tenere conto dell'accresciuto ruolo e peso delle IMN e della società civile. ; In today's economic and political world characterized by globalization and interdependence of markets, by an increasingly internationalization of production processes and by business operations of the company conducted simultaneously in several countries, by an increased consumer awareness regarding compliance of production processes to values that are considered essential by civil society, as fundamental human rights and labour and environmental protection, MNEs have a fundamental role in addressing the global economic trends. In this perspective, then, the concept of corporate social responsibility attracts companies to consider carefully - in the definition of its strategy and in the articulation of policies and procedures daily management - the various interests of the community, as well as the impact of its activities, not only in economic terms but also in social, environmental and ethical issues. Social responsibility is, therefore, a useful tool for the enterprise and effective way to respond to the needs and demands of civil society.With the CSR arises, therefore, a theory of business that sees the production of goods not only as a means of profit, but also as an opportunity for the realization of social welfare, as dictated bythe school of thought of thebusiness ethics, which invite companies to take action in orderto eliminate and prevent social inequities and promote community development. This need was also consequential to the abusescommitted by transnational corporations that have caused serious damage to human communities of their host countries. Abuses committed by companies, not always related to specific violations of national laws, have been gradually interpreted and constructed as a violation or misconduct against a set of principles defined as belonging to a broad spectrum of social responsibility international, which implies loss of reputation and, therefore, the possible reduction of its share on the market where the key stakeholders concerned can mobilize public opinion on a large scale. Since the 70s, several international organizations have begun to deal with the regulation of transnational corporations, highlighting the role that multinational corporations are called to play in the process of protection of human rights and of the environment that emerge in the course of their economic activity. Is fundamental for the work plan, define the multinational enterprise, by analysing the various instruments adopted by international organizations and doctrinal contributions on the subject, the light of which it seems possible to say that the character of "multinationality" or "transnationality" is the presence of various operating units, located in different countries, which are under the control (equity or management) of a single holding company; the distinction between operational units extends to the legal point of view, as the individual subsidiaries are independent legal entities subject, relatively to the profiles of the regulation and constitution, subjected to the legal system of the State of nationality. It often means that companies choose the host country on the basis of convenience that this country provides in relation to the tax treatment, labour costs and raw materials, to the rules on environmental protection. It therefore seems necessary to attempt to regulate multinational enterprises by supranational bodies, in relation to the increasing number of companies operating in multiple markets (more than 80,000 companies with about 900,000 subsidiaries), to their economic and employment (an estimated 80 million job opportunities) and following several incidents involving such companies from the '70s to today, as in the case of Drummond or Del Monte, accused of severe repression of trade union rights and social rights of workers, or Chevron/ Texaco and Union Carbide, responsible for environmental disasters including that of Bhopal, India, to the case of the environmental disaster caused by the Deepwater Horizon rig off the coast of Florida and Louisiana between 2010 and 2011, or cases of human rights violations and commission of international crimes (arbitrary detention, torture, rape, inhumane and degrading treatment) by transnational corporations operating in the mining industry in Africa and South East Asia, made directly or through the militias hired to the protection of plants. The activities of international organizations, from the 70s, focused on the theme, the OECD, the International Labour Organization, the International Chamber of Commerce adopted in those years, recommendations and declarations addressed to the Member States and the companies for adherence to certain principles and rights already provided by other conventional instruments; also the United Nations, first through the work of the Committee on Multinational Enterprises and then through the subcommittee for the protection and promotion of human rights, have dealt with the matter, coming to the elaboration of a Code of Conduct for Multinational Enterprises (never adopted) and rules on the responsibilities of transnational corporations and other business enterprises with regard to human rights, alongside to the public-private partnership of the Global Compact. Still, other international organizations such as the World Health Organization, the WTO, the World Bank, the International Standards Organization (which as a private nature), have taken actions that invite businesses to carry out its production activities in full respect of fundamental human rights, of local communities needs and of the environment, and then taking into account not only the interests and rights of the shareholders but to all those involved in various ways affected the activity or business. Finally, it is the work of the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General John Ruggie to develop a framework (called Protect, Respect, Remedy) concerning the relationship between business and human rights. The characteristic of the analysed tools is their non-binding nature, then merely hortatory and voluntary application. This situation is linked mainly to two reasons: the disputed international subjectivity of multinational enterprises and the opposing views of Governments on the subject (with obvious differences of views between developing countries and industrialized countries). Regard to the subjectivity of transnational corporations, or the status of being holders of rights and obligations arising from international law, international legal theory is strongly divided. According to one view, MNEs would not be subject to international law as they are only recipients of rules, and then the "object" of international law would be subject only to the jurisdiction of the state, and bound by international law only by virtue of the reference made by the domestic legal system. Since the '60s, a different doctrinal trend began to make his way starting from the known opinion Reparations for Injuries of the International Court of Justice, and then considering the company as a subject of international law, by virtue of a series of rights and duties which are assigned to it by international law, especially in the field of investment and international contracts (among them, the right to appeal an arbitration tribunal or judicial character arbitration). In addition, the constant attention to the activities of MNEs by international organizations, could witness the nascent opiniojuris to give ainternational subjectivity to businesses, albeit limited. An analysis of international practice have taken provisional findings, in particular that the company, especially in the field of economic law and investment, possesses an international limitedlegal personality and mainly derived from the will of the States, but above all functional, as contained in limits established by international treaty (BITs) or international agreement that establishes rights and obligations for the same. In recent years the European Union has begun to promote adhesion of the companies core values of human rights, labour standards and sustainable development. From the Green Paper of 2001, the EU has developed progressively a European strategy for corporate social responsibility, described as spontaneous adoption of practices to contribute to the improvement of society and the quality of the environment. The EU strategy is characterized by having an internal dimension to the company, establishing a series of action programs and the adoption of management systems, processes, and external to it, calling for the involvement of local communities, commercial partners, customers, suppliers, NGOs, state authorities. To this end, the EU launched a series of initiatives, such as EMAS and Ecolabel certification ecological and environmental audit, the multi-stakeholder forum, to form a legal framework to regulate public procurement and environmental sustainability, protection of consumer, misleading advertising, and the adoption of sectorial codes of conduct based on the principles of CSR. The regulatory activities of CSR has received a grant from the multinational enterprises themselves, in the sense of a self-regulation of their activities, through codes of conduct adopted by each company independently according to their own strategies and values. These codes can be clearly distinguished from the guidelines adopted by international organizations because in them the company is the creator and recipient of rules, created not because the need comes from the law, but by the company (which, in many cases, characterized by being merely reputational). These codes, clearly voluntary, ensure compliance with standards for the protection and promotion of the principles contained therein, setting most of the time a mechanism for monitoring and enforcement of the rules it contains, a mechanism that may be internal character (then managed by an office inside the company) or external character (managed, in most cases, an NGO, or a trade union). Finally, the research concludes with an analysis of the main issues concerning CSR in recent years, namely those related to the profiles of corporate responsibility for violation of fundamental rights and environmental damage (especially with regard to U.S. regulations contained in the Alien Tort Statute), with particular reference to international obligations on states through the reconstruction of the international practice. In addition, further study is to profile that focuses on the possible extension of the jurisdiction of international tribunals for crimes under international law to legal persons, with particular reference to the drafting history of the Rome Conference that led to the establishment of the International Criminal Court. In conclusion, the object of the research was the reconstruction of the concept of CSR, which is a product of national law and in particular the legal systems of the industrialized countries, identifying a legal framework that includes legal instruments of various types and in various sectors, such as those governing commercial companies, national regulations for the prevention and combating of corruption; regulations of the financial sector and in particular those on stock exchanges; disciplines to protect labour, the environment and the consumer. In the most advanced in terms of economic and institutional CSR, therefore, is not encoded in a specific sector regulation but it is a complex system of regulations governing various aspects of the business activities, in developing countries, however, these rules are often fragmentary or even absent: this situation has allowed MNCs to take advantage of loopholes in the law or stringent rules present in these countries. It is evident that the international community has identified the need to regulate the activities of multinational enterprises, for the promotion and protection of its fundamental values and development in a sustainable environment, with the intention to create an international legal framework that allows companies to pursue their own business purposes without losing sight of the collective needs (in particular in the countries in which they operate). To achieve this goal, it is inevitable evolution of international law, whose formation processes, managed largely by governments, cannot fail to take into account the increased role and weight of MNEs and civil society. ; Dottorato di ricerca in Persona, impresa e lavoro: dal diritto interno a quello internazionale (XXV ciclo)
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Karen Litfin on Gaia Theory, Global Ecovillages, and Embedding IR in the Earth System
This is the third in a series of Talks dedicated to the technopolitics of International Relations, linked to the forthcoming double volume 'The Global Politics of Science and Technology' edited by Maximilian Mayer, Mariana Carpes, and Ruth Knoblich
Many debates in International Relations concern struggles regarding what should be the autonomous limits and focus of the discipline itself. However, increasing environmental and climate concerns challenge the self-contained nature of IR on discrete political phenomena, because what IR considers it's exogenous context is threatening to destabilize the premises of the content of international political practice itself. While such concerns often lead to a securitization and politicization of the environment and climate in IR, some scholars argue we should work towards the exact opposite. In this Talk, Karen Litfin—among others—elaborates on the kind of theory in which IR is embedded in, rather than applied to, natural systems; discusses examples of social arrangements that try to translate that theoretical insight into practice; and engages with questions of secularism and mysticism that irrevocably accompany those efforts.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
The fact that we can today truly speak of something of a global economy, the central problem now is to formulate the political institutions that are commensurate to these globalized economic institutions. We have far to go on that project. It also means doing so within the carrying capacity of the earth—that is, politically configuring that global economy in such a way that it doesn't exhaust ecological resources. So I would say that the challenge, in terms of actual politics, is to find those institutions.
The challenge for the discipline of International Relations is to do the necessary thinking to facilitate that institutional transition, but few IR scholars even acknowledge that political institutions must attend to the carrying capacity of the earth. In general, the discipline of International Relations, Political Science and even most of social sciences more generally behave as if there are no natural constraints to our behavior. Yet our freedom to even be able to theorize about the international system is completely dependent upon a vast web of life, other people growing our food, and a whole technological infrastructure that we had nothing to do with creating. International Relations talks a lot about interdependence, but do we really take it seriously?
How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?
I've always been interested in science and technology. As an undergraduate, I studied physics and astronomy, but I didn't finish those majors because I realized, that if I graduated with those degrees I would most likely be working indirectly or directly for the military. I got politicized and I began to see that the political agenda drives the scientific agenda. This was in the 1970s and it was possible at that time that we were going to have an all-out nuclear war. I did not want to be a part of that.
I began to see that there is a dialectical relationship between science and politics. Because science facilitates the technological changes, which make the basic backdrop for politics, it's very important. For instance, the defense department was funding DARPA, which led—without them fathoming that at the time—to the development of the Internet—now a key site where global politics plays out.
Science also provides metaphors through which we understand politics. I did my Masters thesis on the mechanistic worldview and the devitalization of nature in the 17th century—that is, taking living nature out of our systematic theorizing. While others had written on this, I traced it back to the ancient Greek philosophy. A reductionist and mechanistic worldview underpins a lot of IR theory, as well most of our political institutions. We need to really start questioning that. Another way this plays out is that the notion of the global really had a huge jump when we got the image of Earth fromspace. The idea of Earth Day was really closely aligned to the fact that the image of the earth from space just had come out. Gaia Theory came about because James Lovelock was looking for signs of life on Mars. We were interested in extra-planetary life, but weren't looking at our own system or planet. So basically it turned all that science back on the Earth and said 'Oh my Gosh, we do have this kind of atmosphere that has the telltale science of life in it', which tells us that life is hoping to create the atmosphere. Then to have the human mind to conceptualize that is really huge. The idea that we are the Earth becoming conscious of itself is basically what science is telling us. These monitoring systems are one means by which we have the possibility of becoming conscious of that fact.
In terms of personal trajectory, when I started teaching International Relations back in the early 1990s, I started realizing that petroleum holds the whole thing together, the whole global system was held together by petroleum. (You could also say fossil fuels, but coal and natural gas don't power that much transnationally; it's really the petroleum.) Yet hardly anybody in IR talks seriously about petroleum—or energy or biodiversity or soil or the atmosphere. That's what I mean about getting to the material basis. But having said that, I think how we interact with the material basis is a reflection of our consciousness. So I'm not a material reductionist. Rather, I'm looking for a wholeness that understands our approach to material reality as being a reflection of our consciousness.
So this was why I have become interested in biological metaphors. I still think the leaning edge of human thought is understanding human systems as living systems. From this vantage point, we can begin to reshape our institutions in ways that mimic, sustain, and regenerate living systems. There's a long history of natural law and I don't exactly put myself in that camp, but I think there are ways that we need to understand ourselves as thoroughly embedded in natural systems and then move consciously from that place.
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
To my mind, these are very different questions because, at least at many universities, becoming an IR specialist often entails ignoring some fundamental global realities. For one, even though most of humanity lives in so-called developing countries, most IR theory pays attention only to the Global North. Likewise, IR is fairly blind to the fact that the lifestyles of the Global North, if globalized, would require between three and six Earths, depending upon whether you are looking at Europeans or North Americans. Again, there is only one Earth! Fortunately, an important subfield has emerged with IR—global environmental politics—that is helping to rectify the situation.
The question I would prefer to answer is: what would a student need to know in order to understand the most pressing challenges facing the world system? To this, I would advise three things. The first would be to dive deeply into a broad and critical reading of the history of modernity, including the interpenetrating scientific, political, commercial, theological and industrial revolutions that characterize the modern era. The second would be to learn about the primary international institutions (the WTO, World Bank, IMF, EU, UN Security Council, etc.), and ask what is working, what isn't, and why? The third would be to do all of this learning while simultaneously learning to think systemically. Take at least one good course on systems theory; one that specifically offers a strong grounding in living systems, and start making connections. Why, for instance, do 'ecology' and 'economics' share the same root (oikos, Greek for household)? What would it mean to consider the international system as a living system and a subset of the Earth system? If we think this world system that we've created of a globalized economy and rudimentary international law is not a part of a living system, we are living in a big delusion. So to actually understand how living systems function, we need the literature on system theory that of course has been used in biology and ecology, but has also been applied a lot in the business world and organizational development. I think it's making its way into IR.
The world is full of technologies and technological systems (and getting more so each day). Could you elaborate on how this is relevant for IR?
I think that's a huge gap: IR doesn't pay nearly enough attention to technological systems—and when they do, it's generally from an uncritical and mechanical perspective. Even though much of the constructivist critique of liberal institutionalism is that the latter is overly materialistic, it actually isn't as if institutionalists talk about economics as if that were a material reality. Economics is a secondary human system overlaid on, but abstracted from, material systems. I think that IR needs to get really serious about understanding the actual material basis for politics. Climate change will probably be the issue that drives that.
So what kinds of technologies and institutions are we going to have to facilitate a global civilization? Now that's a worthwhile question! As I indicated, we now have a more or less globalized economy, but we don't have a global polis; we don't have the institutions that are commensurate to the economy that we have got. So the question is: can we sustain current civilization on the energy budget that is available to us and not wreck the climate?
Technological systems are driven by energy; energy is the master resource. Some energy analysts say that in order to have a global civilization, we need to have an energy return on energy investments of something like 5 to 1—meaning, for instance, that for each barrel of oil we put into getting more oil, we need to get five back. Right now petroleum is getting—depending on where you find it and how it's getting to you—somewhere between 15 and 25 to 1. That's the Middle East. It used to be 100 to 1 at the beginning of the 19th century. And now we are getting, say, 20:1. I've seen analyses of tar sands that put that energy source at somewhere between 3 and 5 to 1. Solar panels, if they work well, they are maybe getting 5:1. So the trend is worsening and we are starting to push that envelope of 5:1 energy return on investment. And if we exploit some of the new unconventional hydrocarbons—like fracking and, worse, methane hydrates—to their maximum potential, we'll fry the planet.
My question is how we can leverage existing technological, economic, financial and political resources to sustain a global civilization. I dearly wish more people were putting their attention on that question. The underlying assumption for most people is that business as usual can continue. Maybe, but not for long.
I'd like to throw in one little term coined by Stephen Quilley, an environmental sociologist: 'low energy cosmopolitanism' (read the paper here). I think this is a huge challenge for us. If it's possible to have a global civilization on the energy budget that we have available, it's going to be some form of a low energy cosmopolitanism, where we make some very conscious choices about what we are going to globalize. For instance, Germany probably wouldn't be importing grapes from Africa and none of us would be going on luxury vacations. We would be making a lot of conscious choices, but if we want to have a global civilization we have to be globalizing something, so what is it that we are globalizing?
How do you see the question of technological determinism when studying technologies?
This is really important to note, because if you just look at human systems as living systems there can be a kind of materialistic reductionism there. People who think like William Connolly, the new materialism understands that we should not be materialistic reductionists and that there is this wildcard of human consciousness. The fact of the matter is, we can assemble all the data we want but we don't know where we are going. But what we do know is that we've created a tremendously complex and complicated world that nobody can actually understand!
I think we need to address that question in a very specific way with respect of specific technologies, but if we stick to one example—satellites—I think the technologies do have certain properties embedded in them. I have written a feminist theoretical critique of earth observing satellites, where I argued that this kind of gaze from space actually does downplay or preclude certain perspectives. But as I thought about it more deeply, I saw very concretely that a lot of people are using those technologies to do what they want—not what the centralized political and scientific institutions that gave rise to the satellites wanted. So I would say the wildcard here is consciousness and human inventiveness, because that's what will shape how people deploy the technologies once there are on the ground.
For example, satellites were devised for spying and are certainly still being used for spying, but they are being used for so much else, such as Google Maps. I think some people might have been able to foresee that kind of development, but most of us didn't have a clue that this sort of thing could come about. Or that you could have indigenous people mapping their traditional lands in order to make land rights claims. So the wildcard really is human consciousness and that's why nothing really is deterministic. The greater the complexity in a living system, the more surprising its emergent properties. Seven billion human brains linked together in global technological and ecological systems are bound to yield surprises!
You indicated that you use biology and living systems as a reservoir for metaphors. Could you elaborate on that?
If I speak about living systems I usually do so through work called Gaia Theory. Looking through the lens of Gaia Theory, we would first understand that we exist within certain spheres such as biosphere, atmosphere and hydrosphere. We have taken geological time and inserted it into human time by digging up fossil fuels. As a consequence, we have kind of checkmated ourselves and are now forced into having to think in geological terms. We have to start thinking in geological time scales, which was never the case before. If we are going to find a way of inhabiting this planet sustainably, particularly if we are going to have anything approaching a global civilization, we have to understand that we live within a living system and then go about the rather daunting but exciting project of developing international law and institutions that reflect that reality.
There is a whole subfield of earth system governance in which Earth system scientists, IR theorists and international legal experts are coming together to think through these questions. The literature on earth system governance starts from the premise that the Earth is a living system and draws heavily on earth system science, which draws heavily from Gaia theory. You cannot separate atmosphere, oceans, lithosphere, and biosphere: they are all intertwined as one big living system—and now humanity is functioning as a geophysical force on a planetary scale. That's the meaning of the Anthropocene, and it will require an entirely new way of going about politics and economics.
So how can we bring the concept of Gaia Theory into practical reality? Besides the emerging field of Earth system governance, we can also do this in a very personal way by beginning to really internalize what it means being a human being at this time. A few years back, I came to the point where I decided that I did not want to theorize about anything I could not live. That turned out to be a huge challenge. After I wrote the 'integral politics' piece (see links below)—and I really do love that piece!—I saw that I couldn't fully live it. It was so big. For me, one of the most important implications of Gaia Theory is that we are the Earth becoming aware of itself. That's a huge implication. If you merely think of it conceptually, it is wonderful mind candy; but if you actually take it to the heart and try to live it, it changes your life. I challenged myself to do this and, at some point, it occurred to me that there must be other people who have traveled farther down that road than I had—in other words, people who had radically changed their lives to reflect their growing awareness that human beings are the Earth becoming conscious of itself. So I found myself traveling around the world to ecovillages which, for me, helped to tie it all together. Why is somebody who's teaching international environmental law and politics wandering around the world visiting these little tiny micro-communities? Because these people are taking the radical implications of Gaia Theory to heart (even if they've never read about it) and collectively changing their material, economic and social lives. That's why I spent a year on the road living in ecovillages. It's a strange thing to be an IR theorist who doesn't want to theorize about anything that she can't live!
Bringing up the issue of how to live your research, could you elaborate on what kind of outlook is necessary to live in accordance to Gaia Theory?
So this leads to the importance of humility for me. The value of humility is that it comes naturally as a consequence of understanding. You do not have to value it in advance; it comes automatically from understanding ourselves as part of this larger living system. In my experience at least, as soon as you grasp that, you automatically have an enormous sense of humility and gratitude. Those two qualities just spontaneously arise from truly grasping that reality. Going back to ecovillages, I asked myself who is living in ways that can actually work for the long run. The result became the eponymous book. I wanted to see collective efforts and particularly larger communities that were generally at least a hundred people, because you can do a lot more collectively, than you can on your own. Some of these communities are reducing their ecological footprint radically. In some cases, we are talking about per capita reductions in material consumption and waste production of 80-90% as compared to their home country averages.
This is very big news—especially given that these communities are still tied to the larger system. They are not tiny isolated enclaves. For instance, they're still using the mass transit of the larger society; most of them have Wi-Fi and high-speed Internet. They're not living in caves and many of them are very much globally engaged. On a material level, they're much closer to living within the Earth's carrying capacity. So in that way, I was very interested in just seeing what are their physical systems. But I began to see that their physical systems were only made possible because of the degree of trust and reciprocity that they have created.
That entails doing a lot of personal work. Diana Leafe-Christian, who has written a number of books on communities, says that 'community life is the longest and most expensive personal growth workshop you'll ever take'. It's true! If you're willing to do the personal work and hang in there through the difficult times and conflicts, you can develop the kind of self that's willing to do some very deep sharing. I would add, though, that this level of sharing is done best when it is respectful of the individualism that we have developed. I don't think that communities should be running roughshod over individualism. There needs to be some balance of privacy and communal life. The communities that work well have figured out a way to do this. To my mind, the communities that work really well are the ones who are working on developing collective forms of consciousness. Which means actually I think going beyond the separative rational mind: it doesn't mean demeaning those qualities, it means using them, but using them in the service of something larger. As I said earlier, progressive change entails transcending and including. Individualism, for all its negative consequences, is a genuine historical achievement.
And I would say on a very practical level, one of the ways that they reduce their footprint is by withdrawing to some extent from the global economy. Having very low consumption and being fairly energy efficient and self-reliant, reliance on food self-sufficiency, but withdrawing from global society. To me, they are answering the question I raised earlier: What would a low-energy cosmopolitanism look like? And they are doing this not just because they consume less and live more simply but because by and large ecovillagers actually have a cosmopolitan identity. They might be growing their own food and composting their shit, but they're also tied into the global system. They're actively engaged in the Internet, sometimes attending global conferences and many of them are politically active on issues such as genetically modified organisms and nuclear waste disposal and human rights.
They are little nodes of positive examples, but they're very small. In fact, hardly anybody lives in an ecovillage, which is why the last chapter of my book is called 'Scaling it up'. I basically look at the underlying principles of ecovillages and talk about how these principles could be scaled up to the level of cities, regions, national government and international norms. I realize this is a big stretch, but I felt that as an International Relations scholar, I at least need to try it. The important misconception you run into that moment is the idea that sustainability needs to be expensive—the idea that somehow we can consume our way into sustainability. Actually, the most sustainable form of consumption is no consumption! Yet this is not what all ecovillages do. There is one community that I visited in up-state New York, in Ithaca, this is the same city that Cornell University is in, where two thirds of the residents have masters degrees or PhDs and their homes are worth more than the average in the area. They have a pretty middle class lifestyle, yet their average ecological footprint is about half the American norm. So they're not sustainable, but they are definitely moving in the right direction. They hired architects and have nice homes, which is a very different approach than that of most rural ecovillages.
In the Global North, the smallest footprints that I saw tended to be in the rural off-grid ecovillages that were more or less self-sufficient in food, energy, and water. In some of these communities, residents were living on as little as 25% of their average national incomes. This is impressive because it tells us that people in affluent countries can live well on far less money and with far less environmental damage than is considered normal in those countries.
Yet the fact of the matter is that most people today live in cities, so it was important for me to also look at urban ecovillages. Los Angeles Ecovillage, for instance, has a very small footprint because it is high-density and automobile use is discouraged. If you lower your transportation footprint by not driving or sharing vehicles, and if you grow your own food or rely upon locally produced food and have and passive solar construction and renewable energy for your buildings, you can dramatically reduce your energy consumption. You can have a much smaller footprint and still have a very comfortable life. People think that you need money in order to live. It seems that we need money in order to live, but actually what we need is food and shelter and transportation and relationships. So if you figure out ways of getting those things without money, you've made a huge step to getting out of the global economy. In a nutshell, that's what ecovillages are doing.
So are ecovillages all the same across the globe? Is it a new 'social form' emerging?
It is different in the developing countries and in the affluent countries, and I think it's important to clarify that at the outset. I visited a number of ecovillages and ecovillage networks in both developing countries and affluent countries. In the latter, there is a greater possibility for what I consider 'post-individualist' that both transcends and includes individualism. A very simple 'post-individualistic' approach to property rights, for instance, would be co-housing, where the land is owned in common and people own their own homes. But their private homes would be a lot smaller because so many amenities are shared. The common house would have a community kitchen, so that, depending upon how much people are willing to share, private kitchens can be very small. If there's a collectively owned guest space, then you don't need a guest room in your house. And if you do a lot of your socializing together, then you can do that in the common house. So your own house could be quite small but you would still have access to all the comforts of a private existence and more. The more people are willing to share, the more will be collectively owned. And that really does require trust, because it's a big problem if the relationships blow up and you have your finances entangled with those people! This is just one example of how property rights can coexist with the softening of boundaries between individuals.
The flipside of this is occurring in developing countries, where the post-individualistic arrangement that I've been making doesn't really apply. And this is important because that's where most people in the world live. There you have cultures where people already have much more of a collective orientation. So we really need to pay attention to what's happening there. Actually, in many cases, their developmental task is to become more individuals. And the question is: how do they become more highly-individualized rather than being subsumed by traditional moral codes—how do they that without over-consuming. In the west, we had a fossil fuel subsidy that enabled us to become highly individualized, as I said before, the only reason we can be having this interview is because somebody else is growing our food.
In developing countries, the real task is to find a way for people to become more individualistic without over consuming. And so this is why I was impressed by the model I saw in Sarvodaya, a Sri Lankan participatory development network that belongs to the Global Ecovillage Network. There, fifteen thousand villages are trying to apply ecovillage principles to create what they call a "no-poverty/no-affluence society." Their programs in micro-finance and women's literacy, for instance, give villagers—especially women—an incentive to stay in the village because they have a livelihood. And when people stay in their villages, they tend to live a lot more sustainably. As the women becoming literate, they begin making choices for themselves and therefore becoming more individualized. So it's a way of hopefully leap-frogging urbanization in order to sustain rural village life.
I should say that you can apply these principles anywhere you live, in cities as well as rural areas. I visited quite a few ecovillages in cities. One of the most important things that the Global Ecovillage Network is doing is training people, wherever they live, to apply ecovillage principles in their urban neighborhoods or wherever they find themselves. There have been some amazing projects coming up in the Brazilian favelas and in China. GEN has developed a course called 'Gaia Education' that's being offered all over the world and especially in developing countries. There's now a Global Ecovillage Network for Africa. There are basic principles of sustainability that, if you live in an ecovillage, you can apply more intentionally, but they are applicable everywhere.
In a way, 'Gaia theory' sounds very spiritual—and for that reason the Gaia concept was initially very much opposed by many physicists and climate scientists. In a way, Gaia theory entails a critique of modernist secularism and faith in technology; how do you see that in your work?
I have mentioned the critique of mechanization in the early modern era, but in fact the early modern scientists, such as Newton, were all looking for God. Now many of the hard sciences are moving in the direction of mysticism—I would speak of mysticism rather than spirituality—but it's not a mysticism that is simply a projection of the human psyche onto the cosmos; rather, it is empirically derived. I think that's a kind of postmodern development that would have been impossible in the pre-modern era. That's what I was saying about transcending and including, that the ideas that we have of who we are in the cosmos are so different as a consequence of modern science. We can transcend those ideas but also include them. From the Big Bang and the evolution of species, we came out of all of that! And implicit within this fact, if you take it deeper, is that there is a secret oneness to it all. I think that the lessons we have to learn politically and economically now are about interdependence. But if you take interdependence to its depths, it too implies a secret oneness. Most importantly for the current evolutionary crisis: that oneness is embedded in our consciousness and we can access that. That is the reason why I don't want to theorize about anything that I can't live; I'm working at that level as well.
It's interesting, because that also has implications for my teaching. I teach in a fairly direct way when I have living bodies and inquiring minds right in front of me and can engage them at a personal level. I give them my big picture view of politics as a subset of living systems and also being a kind of living system. I get them to inhabit that in themselves through doing contemplative and reflective exercises in the classroom. For instance, I'm teaching a class called political ecology of the world food system and we talked about the globalization of different food commodities and where chocolate comes from for instance, where it originally came from, who processes it, how much do the farmers get from all of that. I brought in raw cacao nibs, which most of the students had never tasted before. We talked about where these came from and how expensive they were even though cacao is not processed, because raw cacao is a something of a delicacy. Then I gave them this very highly processed chocolate without sugar and with alternative sweeteners in it. I invited them to really be present to tasting each of these things as I talked about them and I left some significant gaps of silence, they could actually be present to experience of themselves inhabiting the living system and now being the beneficiary of a world food system. How did we come to have cacao from West Africa and stevia from Paraguay in our mouths? What are sociopolitical and biotic networks that have made this possible? And can we allow ourselves to truly experience what it means to be the beneficiary of these living systems? And what of our own as living system? When I am in the classroom it is actually quite easy to teach what I call person/planet politics. I never teach anything as if it is just 'out there'. Whenever I teach anything, I want the students to inhabit it in their bodies, in their experience. And I try to do that as best as I can by living what I teach as best I can.
It is a little embarrassing, but I don't know how all of this applies to IR; I am just trying to do it as best I can in my own life, as it is presented to me. And I write about it and I publish things—I have a piece coming out on localism that basically makes the case for what I call organic globalism, which is a globalization that is premised upon the earth as a living system and international institutions being designed very consciously on that basis. I don't quite know what it looks like but I have a sense of its rightness. To be honest with you, I am better with that in the classroom that I am at the level of large-scale institutions. Because I am beginning to inhabit this in my own being and I can communicate it to students. Maybe the next challenge is to be able to communicate it at a larger level.
So isn't there a tension between living sustainably and participating in a globalized world that is hard-wired in terms of technology?
Consciousness does not at all preclude technology. For example, I think us having this dialogue is on some level contributing to a certain kind of consciousness and it's completely facilitated by technology. Without Skype we wouldn't be having this conversation. What's helpful to me, about what I call E2C2 (ecology, economics, community and consciousness) is that these are four lenses through which to view any phenomenon—and that includes technology. For instance, we can view our Skype conversation through the lens of ecology in terms of the amount of energy that's used. Economically, we might consider what is being produced and what its value is. It's probably a pretty good economic deal since you and I are virtually paying nothing for it! So economically it's a good deal. In terms of the communitarian lens, we are developing a dialogue that will hopefully be in a relational field with many other people, perhaps thereby also contributing to a certain growth of consciousness.
E2C2 offers four lenses through which we can look at technology; they are not mutually exclusive. For me, the question is: to what extent are our technologies beneficial in terms of each of the lenses. Denis Hayes, the guy who started Earth Day, said the basic principle of sustainability is that you leave your molecules at home and export your photons. This brings us back to the concept of low energy cosmopolitanism. It's a huge question: what are we going to globalize? If we are going to have a global civilization we need to have global communication. The Internet is a tremendous achievement in that regard, and could to function as a kind of global brain, though its roots are in its military applications and today it is primarily dominated by commerce. (And I understand that pornography is a big part of it as well.) Despite its limitations, the Internet provides an infrastructure that could enable us to be in communication globally, which is very important if you want to develop a global consciousness and a global civilization. But we need to understand that our technologies must operate within the limits of the Earth system. In other words, technologies—like all human systems—are also living systems.
Last question. So how can we relate this back to IR?
I think one of the ways this is happening is that some pockets of IR are actually returning to foundational concepts. For instance, Alexander Wendt (Theory Talk #3) has started this Journal International Theory. People are seriously looking at the bigger and deeper questions, so uniting more with political theorists for instance. This idea that we are coming up against real limits is a very frightening idea from the perspective of a certain idea of freedom rooted in liberal politics. We really need to rethink the meaning of freedom in an era of limits. My own feeling is that human beings are kind of hard-wired towards unlimitedness—but the world is now pressing us to interrogate this impulse. We don't do well with limits. But the fact of the matter is, we are not evolutionarily adapted to abundance, we don't even know what to do with abundance. We are squandering resources in the most absurd ways. So we really need to rethink what freedom is in a world of limits.
It's not all together a bad thing that we are facing these limits. Those of us who have at least the privilege of being well fed and reasonably comfortable, can actually turn our attention to this question of consciousness. Because this question of 'what is freedom' is a problem of human consciousness. Rather than turning our desire towards mastery—I think as human beings we have an innate desire towards mastery – rather than turning that desire onto the external world, we've pretty well mastered it; except turns out that we live in it so it's coming back to bite us and we are facing huge climate change most likely. When we shift the focus of this desire for mastery to our own psyches, then lots of things open up. And I don't think only people who live in industrialized countries need to do this or are doing this. One of the things I saw in my ecovillage book is that people living in developing countries are also quite aware of it and are doing it at the places they live as well. There is a global awakening, at least in small pockets, to the fact that we live within a limited Earth system and a serious inquiry into what it means to be a human being at this juncture between modernity and the Anthropocene.
Karen Litfin (Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, 1992) is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington. She specializes in global environmental politics, with core interests in green theory, the science/policy interface, and what she calls "person/planet politics." Her first book, Ozone Discourses: Science and Politics in International Environmental Cooperation (Columbia University Press, 1994), looks at the discursive framing of science in the ozone treaties. Her second book, The Greening of Sovereignty in World Politics (MIT Press, 1998), explores how state sovereignty is being reconfigured as a consequence of global environmental politics. Some of the topics of her recently publications include: the politics of earth remote sensing; the political implications of Gaia Theory; the relationship between scientific and political authority in the climate change negotiations; the politics of sacrifice in an ecologically full world; and holistic thinking in the global ecovillage movement.
Related links
Faculty profile at the University of Washington Read Litfin's Thinking like a planet: Gaian politics and the transformation of the world food system (2011 book chapter) here (pdf) Read Litfin's Towards an Integral Perspective on World Politics: Secularism, Sovereignty and the Challenge of Global Ecoloy (Millennium, 2003) here (pdf) Read Litfin's The Status of the Statistical State: Satellites and the Diffusion of Epistemic Sovereignty (Global Society, 1999) here (pdf) Read Litfin's The Gendered Eye in the Sky: Feminist Perspectives on Earth Observation Satellites (Frontiers 1997) here (pdf)
This report describes trends in the beef industry in the Monsoonal North. It aims to provide the region's natural resource management (NRM) groups with an understanding of how best to support the industry, undertake the changes required to improve its environmental sustainability and economic viability, and to provide it with resilience in the face of increasing development pressures and climate change. This report charts the industry's history and development; describes its current condition and the pressures and drivers it is experiencing; and explores how these are likely to change in the near future. The region: The Monsoonal North covers 20% of Australia's land surface across the tropical savannas. It shares a monsoonal climate, extensive intact ecological systems, generally poor soils and limited development. Its river systems carry nearly half of the runoff. The region has a large Indigenous population; most land is either under Indigenous ownership or subject to Native Title; and the highest proportion of Indigenous people live in the region's north and north-west. The region also faces a number of shared issues, particularly the challenges of intensifying climatic extremes and pressure to exploit Asia's growing demand for agricultural produce, which is placing pressure on land and water resources. The industry: Cattle production is northern Australia's most important agricultural industry. Two-thirds of the Monsoonal North is currently used for extensive cattle grazing. Through most of the region, cattle are grazed at low stocking rates on native pastures, with introduced pasture species being restricted in extent. Most enterprises breed animals for the low-value live export trade or for fattening and finishing on better pastures or in feedlots. Cattle numbers in Queensland, Northern Territory and Western Australia have doubled since 1965, and fluctuated with changes in demand and climatic conditions. In 2009, the Monsoonal North held around 5.7 million head of cattle. High export demand from Asia and drought destocking has seen the region's cattle numbers fall and prices rise through 2014-15. In the longer-term, continued growth in global demand, a reduced Australian dollar and high global prices, and improved incomes are forecast for Australian beef producers. Since 2009, each of the three northern governments have released policy documents that included targets to increase the herd size by between 1 and 5%, with the greatest planned increases on Aboriginal land in the Kimberley. Between 2009 and 2014, the Northern Territory herd grew by more than the projected 5% increase. Herd size in Queensland has recently diminished because of drought, and the current government's stance on herd-building is unclear. Nevertheless, long-term growth is expected to increase the northern Australian herd by a further 80% by 2050. Recent growth in the northern cattle herd has been achieved through intensification (spreading grazing pressure using water points and fencing) and development of underutilised properties, notably on Indigenous lands. Indigenous pastoralism is growing rapidly, with developments in all parts of the sector from cattle breeding to slaughter. Markets: Most beef grown in northern Australia is sent to Asia, with Indonesia being the largest buyer of live cattle. Despite a long-established framework for assuring animal health and welfare within Australia, widely-publicised animal mistreatment in Indonesia resulted in the temporary closure of the live-export market in 2011 until animal welfare could be assured throughout the supply chain. This closure demonstrated how dependence on a single market exposed the northern beef industry to market volatility. Bilateral and multilateral trade negotiations by the federal government are now progressively broadening market access, with agreements favouring Australian beef now in place or close to finalisation with most significant beef markets. Enterprises: Cattle enterprises in the Monsoonal North have been struggling because, in real terms, cattle prices have declined, while input costs have remained stable. In addition, escalating land prices through the 1990s and 2000s encouraged many land owners to increase their mortgages to levels that became unsustainable once land prices fell. This has implications for environmental management. In comparison to pastoralists in a good financial position, those in debt have less resilience to cope with drought; are less likely to adopt practice improvements needed for improving enterprise viability and environmental conditions; and are more likely to suffer adverse health effects. Many enterprises, especially those with small herds, derive more income from off-farm work than they earn from cattle operations. While large cattle enterprises allow economies of scale, increasing cattle herd size seems less important to profitability than does improving herd performance. Performance: Except on Mitchell Grass pastures and small areas of intensively managed pastures, cattle performance in the Monsoonal North is substandard when compared to the rest of the country, and is affected by poor quality pasture quality. Breeding performance is typically poor; with low pregnancy rates; high foetal and calf death rates; and many cows are lost. However, the achievements of the top 25% of the industry indicate there is great potential to improve performance on the remaining properties. Health and well-being: Pastoral production is a stressful occupation, involving financial insecurity and isolation; and pastoralists have high rates of injury, disease, accident and suicide. Recent years have brought additional challenges associated with falling land prices, market instability and drought. In the Burdekin Dry Tropics, proposed coal mining is increasing stress levels for many pastoralists. Supply and demand: Domestic demand for beef in Australia stagnated because per capita beef consumption has fallen, but global demand is escalating with population growth and economic development. Demand for beef is expected to keep increasing until at least 2050, with greatest growth occurring in China. Australia was the world's top beef exporter until 2003. Only Brazil and India currently export more beef than Australia does. Australia's disease-free status gives it access to markets that are closed to these exporters. Australia's dominance of the live-export trade to Indonesia also helps provide a disease free buffer to its north. Australian beef producers are disadvantaged by protectionist measures employed by both beef importing countries and exporting countries. The Australian Government has been engaging in international trade agreements that will overcome some of these barriers and increase market access. Market requirements and consumer preference: A high percentage of Brahman genes in the herd makes northern cattle attractive for slaughter and feedlots in tropical countries. However, slow growth rates and long transport distances mean most beef is sold in the low end of the market. Ethical, health and environmental concerns have contributed to the decline in domestic meat consumption, and are influencing consumer preferences in global markets. These concerns are driving practice improvement throughout the Australian beef supply chain. Challenges: Industry viability is constrained by lack of infrastructure, including feedlots, intensive fattening pastures, saleyards and meatworks, inactive ports and poor quality roads, all of which combine to make freight expensive, pushing up input costs. Considerable advances have been made in alleviating these constraints by building meatworks in Darwin, Arnhem Land and the Kimberley. However, lack of competition through the supply chain may be depressing returns at the farm gate. The ports of Darwin and Townsville are operating at record capacity, but some northern ports with export facilities (Port Hedland, Weipa, Mourilyan and Mackay) have not operated for several years. Water for cattle operations and irrigated crops may be at risk if extraction for these and other activities is not sustainably allocated. While broadscale irrigated cropping is likely to be restricted to a small proportion of the region, its requirements for water resources and fertile soil may deprive the pastoral industry of some of its most productive pasture land. Extraction for mining and irrigated agriculture is of particular concern. This has become a contentious issue with several coal projects in Queensland's Galilee Basin. Mining also has the potential to disrupt pastoral operations by removing land from production for both mineral extraction and infrastructure. Again, this is a significant issue in Queensland, where several landholders will be affected by the rail corridor servicing mines in the Galilee Basin. The disruption caused by mining poses a risk, not only to the financial viability of pastoral enterprises, but also to the health and welfare of pastoralists and their families. If well managed, however, mining and agricultural development can also have co-benefits, improving regional economies and providing employment and infrastructure. Weeds, fire, pest animals, disease and cattle theft all impose financial burdens on northern pastoral operations. Production losses caused by weeds have been estimated at costing the industry around $1,000 million/year; pest animals: ca $36 million/year; disease and parasites: ca $390 million; and cattle theft between $1.5 and $2 million a year in Queensland alone. No industry-wide estimates are available for impacts of fire, cyclones or other natural disasters. Conversely, pastoral managers perform important roles in control of weeds, fire, pest animals and diseases that would not be undertaken if no one was living on the lands they manage. Climatic and seasonal conditions are also serious constraints, particularly in inland Queensland, where periods of drought of two or more years are not uncommon. Conversely, extended periods of above average rainfall may encourage pastoralists to stock land beyond its long-term carrying capacity, and develop unrealistic impressions of what average conditions are. This could be an issue in the Kimberley if the elevated rainfall of the last few decades is not sustained. Climate change is already being felt in the region. Temperature have risen by up to 1.0°C since 1910, with further increases of up to 5°C expected by the end of the century. Droughts, cyclones, wildfires and flooding rains are likely to intensify over the next few decades, and continue to intensify until at least the end of the century. Carbon dioxide enrichment may increase forage production, but reduce its quality and stimulate woody thickening, as woody plants are favoured over tropical grasses. In most climate change scenarios, whether rainfall remains roughly the same or decreases, pasture growth and safe stocking rates in the Monsoonal North are expected to decrease, with the worst scenarios predicting decreases in pasture growth and safe stocking rates of between 50% and 60%. Climate change will also have adverse impacts on each stage of the supply chain, with effects ranging from increasingly uncomfortable work conditions to increased frequency of flood and cyclone damage to infrastructure. Policy environment: Many organisations have an influence on the direction of the pastoral industry. Individually, or as part of cross jurisdictional alliances, national, state and territory governments promote industry sustainability and herd-building. The preferred approach is to improve trade relations; simplify regulation; invest in roads; and provide a conducive business environment to attract infrastructure investment. The Developing Northern Australian White Paper and the Agricultural Competitiveness White Paper further these objectives. Under Australian national legislation, the Red Meat Advisory Council was established to represent the interests of beef and other meat producers, and is reported to by various state farming organisations that work closely with the industry as advocates and information and extension providers. Research and marketing is largely driven by Meat and Livestock Australia (informed on northern issues by the North Australia Beef Research Council) and extension is delivered by state agencies, state farming organisations and NRM groups. The emphasis of both research and extension is on practice improvement, rather than herd building. The Australian Government funded Indigenous Land Corporation is also playing a pivotal role in the northern grazing industry by assisting Indigenous people acquire, develop and manage pastoral properties. Finally, the policies and assessments made by financial institutions can both determine the level of debt that a pastoral enterprise can acquire and the cost of repayment, and influence whether developments seeking external funding are seen as viable. The Australian Government is committed to climate change action by virtue of signing international agreements. Its commitments to reduce emissions will help moderate the long-term impacts of climate change. Both the Western Australian and Northern Territory Governments have also made climate change commitments and the Queensland Government is currently revitalising its climate change agenda. Regulatory environment: Legislation and regulation govern much activity on pastoral properties, most of which are pastoral leases coexisting with Native Title. This type of land tenure allows pastoralists to undertake most activities that can be justified as core business to a pastoral operation, including pastoral-related activities that reduce carbon footprints. Diversification into other activities requires the consent of Native Title holders, which is usually negotiated through Indigenous Land Use and Access Agreements. Pastoralists have the right to water stock and clear vegetation for pastoral uses, but conditions vary between jurisdictions and water use for agricultural development requires a permit. There is a lack of clarity about whether permits can be granted for non-pastoral uses (including diversification into broadacre cropping) in Western Australia and Queensland. Pastoral leases also come with a range of legislated responsibilities. Leaseholders in each jurisdiction are to manage weeds, pest animals and diseases and to report notifiable cattle diseases to the relevant authority. They must use National Livestock Identification Scheme tags to ensure their cattle can be traced through the supply chain, and adhere to animal health and welfare standards. In addition, as employers, pastoral operators must follow conditions laid down by Fairwork Australia. Graziers in the Burdekin catchment are required to manage their properties to minimise reef pollution. The rights of miners to access land and water override those of pastoral leaseholders. While legislation facilitating exploitation of mineral and gas and fuel resources purports to safeguard other interests (notably environmental matters and water access), few mining proposals have been rejected because of environmental or pastoral concerns. Practice improvement: Much effort has been invested in identifying the best practices to improve the profitability and environmental sustainability of the northern beef industry. Key areas of knowledge advancement include: • Improving land condition • Improving diet through exotic pastures and supplementary feeding, especially at finishing • Improving reproductive performance by culling non-productive animals, vaccinating against reproductive diseases and improving diet quality • Increasing liveweight gain through early weaning and improving diet quality • Spreading grazing pressure by increasing fencing and water points. Improvements to herd management are largely compatible with practice change required for reducing adverse impacts on biodiversity, carbon footprints and Great Barrier Reef water quality. Improved animal performance increases animal growth rates (meaning fewer animals are required to produce the same volume of meat), and therefore also reduces the methane emissions generated. Good herd performance in rangelands is also dependent on moderate stocking rates to maximise forage quality, especially by improving the cover of productive perennial grasses. Improved ground cover also reduces soil loss (when cover is at least 50%) and gully formation (when at least 75%). Resilience to climate change will be built by undertaking the practice improvements identified to improve pastoral productivity and land condition. Of particular importance is the ability to adjust stocking rates in relation to seasonal conditions. At the industry level, decision support, including improved access to climatic information, is required to assist pastoralists make the best decisions for their circumstances. Diversification: Another approach to increasing enterprise resilience is diversification. Options being canvased include small-scale irrigation of pasture crops for finishing cattle on the property, grain and oil seed crops, biodiversity conservation and carbon abatement. Conservation efforts on some properties attracted subsidies in return for entering into conservation agreements. Biodiversity offsets may widen opportunities for on-property conservation, particularly in Queensland, where a formalised offset scheme is being developed. A small number of pastoral properties in the region are also receiving funding for fire management to reduce carbon emissions. A range of other emission reduction opportunities are at various stages of development, including reducing emissions from pastoral operations through improved herd management and adjusting cattle diets and storing carbon in soil or vegetation. Natural resource management implications: As practices to improve performance are adopted and/or diversification options are pursued, careful management will be required to avoid potential adverse environmental impacts. Best-bet options for improving environmental outcomes along with pastoral productivity include: • Avoiding the use of "transformer" grasses (with high biomass and fuel loads), or at least ensuring they do not escape from improved pasture plantings • Protecting areas of high biodiversity values when increasing extent and/or intensity of grazing, in particular protecting biodiversity values on riparian corridors when planning irrigated cropping projects • Ensuring wet season supplementary feeding does not weaken native perennial grasses • Ensuring early dry season burning does not lead to vegetation thickening and biodiversity decline. The NRM implications of the current trajectory of the pastoral industry are mixed. Herd building will put more pressure on the natural environment. However, performance improvement has many benefits by reducing the number of hooves and mouths required to produce a kilogram of meat. If well managed, mosaic agriculture can contribute to herd performance while taking pressure off pastures and the natural environment during the wet season, but managed poorly could result in further degradation of alluvial environments and over stocking of adjacent areas. The environmental footprint of diversification into agriculture would similarly need to be managed carefully. However, increasing income from various forms of ecosystem service delivery, particularly on lands that are marginal for grazing, would be a boon to both pastoral enterprises and the environment. Central to all this change are the pastoralists themselves. And with all that is required from them and all the stresses and strains they already have to bear, many will be in no position to take up improved practices, let alone participate in conservation activities. Pathways out of debt must be found before resilience in the face of change can be achieved, and pastoralists must be supported in the adoption of new practices, rather than have it mandated.
This publication aims to assist countries in understanding the specific challenges and opportunities posed by climate change in the agricultural sector in order to increase climate resilience and adapt to climate change. The report presents local-level priorities, informed by stakeholder input, to build agricultural resilience in both countries. The objectives of this study are threefold: 1) to improve the understanding of climate change projections and impacts on rural communities and livelihoods in selected regions of Jordan and Lebanon, specifically the Jordan River Valley and Lebanon's Bek
This book takes both a global as well as a local perspective in assessing the impacts of climate change on the economy, agricultural sector, and households in three of the MENA countries; Syria, Tunisia and Yemen. The major channels of impact for global climate change are through changing world food (and energy) prices, especially since all the countries under analysis are or have become net importers of oil and petroleum products and many food commodities in recent years. The impacts of local climate change decrease crop yields in the longer run and through them, productivity in the agricultu
蹂닿굔�븰怨�/諛뺤궗 ; [�븳湲�] �솚寃� 臾몄젣�쓽 �슦�꽑�닚�쐞 �룄異쒖쓣 �쐞�븳 鍮꾧탳 �쐞�빐�룄 �떆�뒪�뀥 媛쒕컻�뿉 愿��븳 �뿰援� 蹂� �뿰援щ뒗 �떎�뼇�븳 �솚寃쎈Ц�젣濡� �씤�븳 �뿬�윭 媛�吏� �쐞�빐�룄(�씤泥� �쐞�빐�룄, 寃쎌젣 �쐞�빐�룄, �씤吏��쐞�빐�룄) 寃곌낵瑜� 蹂묐젹�꽑�긽�뿉 �넃怨� 鍮꾧탳�븯�뿬 臾몄젣�쓽 �슦�꽑�닚�쐞瑜� �꽕�젙�븯�뒗 鍮꾧탳 �쐞�빐�룄 遺꾩꽍 �떆�뒪�뀥�쓽 ���쓣 媛쒕컻�븯怨�, �떎�젣 �꽌�슱 吏��뿭�쓣 ���긽�쑝濡� �옄猷뚮�� �닔吏묆냽議곗궗�븯�뿬 �쟻�슜�븯���떎. �뿰援� �궡�슜�쓣 �궡�렣蹂대㈃, �겕寃� �떆�뒪�뀥 �궡�뿉 �룷�븿�릺�뒗 �쐞�빐�룄 吏��몴�뿉 �뵲�씪 3媛�吏� �쓲由꾩쑝濡� 遺꾨쪟�븯���떎. 泥� 踰덉㎏�뒗 �뿰援� ���긽�쑝濡� �꽑�젙�맂 �솚寃쎈Ц�젣�뿉 ���븳 �씠濡좎쟻 �궗留� �쐞�빐�룄瑜� 異붿젙�븯���떎. 留덉�留됱쑝濡쒕뒗 �룞�씪�븳 �솚寃쎈Ц�젣�뿉 ���빐 �궗�쉶�쟻�쑝濡� �씤�떇�븯怨� �엳�뒗 �쐞�빐 �젙�룄瑜� �꽕臾몄"�궗瑜� �넻�빐 痢≪젙�븯���떎. �뿰援щ궡�슜�쓣 醫� �뜑 �옄�꽭�엳 湲곗닠�븯硫�, 泥ル쾲吏�(Part 1) �꽭 媛�吏� �씤泥� 二쇱슜 �젒珥� 留ㅼ껜 �삤�뿼(��湲곗삤�뿼, �떎�궡怨듦린 �삤�뿼, 癒밸뒗 臾� �삤�뿼)�뿉�꽌 以묎툑�냽�씠�굹 �쐶諛쒖꽦 �쑀湲곗삤�뿼臾쇱쭏怨� 媛숈� 媛쒓컻�쓽 �솕�븰臾쇱쭏, �떎�솚 諛⑺뼢議� �깂�솕�닔�냼瑜섎굹 �떎�씠�삦�떊瑜섏� 媛숈� 蹂듯빀臾쇱쭏, 洹몃━怨� �씪�룉怨� 媛숈� 諛⑹궗�꽑臾쇱떎, 誘몄꽭遺꾩쭊 �벑 媛곴컖�쓽 臾쇱쭏 �듅�꽦�뿉 �뵲瑜� �쐞�빐�꽦 �룊媛� 諛⑸쾿濡좎쓣 �쟻�슜�븯�뿬 �븫 諛쒖깮�쑝濡� �씤�븳 �씠濡좎쟻 �궗留앹닔瑜� 遺덊솗�떎�꽦 遺꾩꽍(uncertainly analysis)�쓣 �넻�빐 異붿젙�븯���떎. �몢踰덉㎏ �뿰援�(Part 2)�뒗 �솚寃� �삤�뿼�쑝濡� �씤�븳 10�뀈媛� 5/1,000 (�뀈媛� 5/10,000)�뿉 �빐�떦�븯�뒗 �쐞�빐�룄 媛먯냼�뿉 ���븳 吏�遺덉쓽�궗湲덉븸�쓣 異붿젙�븯湲� �쐞�븯�뿬, �꽌�슱 �떆誘� 600紐낆쓣 ���긽�쑝濡� 媛쒖씤硫댁젒�쓣 �넻�븳 �꽕臾몄"�궗瑜� �떎�떆�븯���떎. �꽕臾몄� 援ъ꽦�� 珥� 6媛� �쁺�뿭�쑝濡� 吏�遺� �쓽�궗湲덉븸�쓣 臾삳뒗 遺�遺꾩씠�쇅�뿉 5媛� �꽭遺� �쁺�뿭�쑝濡� 遺꾨쪟�븯���떎(Part A:嫄닿컯�긽�깭 諛� �궣�쓽 吏� 議곗궗, Part B:�쐞�빐�룄 �씤�떇, Part C:�솗瑜� 諛� �쐞�빐�룄�뿉 ���븳 �씠�빐�룄, Part D: �냼�뱷 諛� 吏�異쒕퉬�슜, Part E:吏�遺덉쓽�궗湲덉븸, Part F:湲고��젙蹂�). 吏�遺덉쓽�궗湲덉븸�� 3媛�吏� �쑀�삎�쓽 紐⑤뜽(lower-bounded Turnbull method, dichotomous Weibull, logistic and normal distribution model, and Spike model)�쓣 �씠�슜�븯�뿬 �룊洹좉툑�븸�쓣 �궛痢⑦븯��怨�, 吏�遺덉쓽�궗湲덉븸�뿉 ���빐 �쁺�뼢�쓣 誘몄튂�뒗 �씤�옄�뱾�쓣 遺꾩꽍�븯���떎. �삉�븳 泥ル쾲吏� �뿰援ъ뿉�꽌 �룄異쒕맂 �씠濡좎쟻 �궗留앹닔 異붿젙移섏� �몢 踰덉㎏ �뿰援ъ뿉�꽌 �룄異쒕맂 吏�遺덉쓽�궗湲덉븸�쓣 �씠�슜�븳 �넻怨꾩쟻 �깮紐� 媛�移섏븸(吏�遺덉쓽�궗湲덉븸 첨�쐞�빐�룄 媛먯냼遺�)�쓣 議고빀�븯�뿬 �씠濡좎쟻 �궗留� �넀�떎鍮꾩슜(�넻怨꾩쟻 �깮紐� 媛�移섏븸 * �씠濡좎쟻 �궗留앹닔)�쓣 異붿젙�븯��怨�, �씠�뱾 �넀�떎鍮꾩슜�쓽 �겕湲곗뿉 �뵲�씪 �슦�꽑 �닚�쐞瑜� 寃곗젙�븯���떎. �삉�븳 �넀�떎鍮꾩슜�뿉 ���븳 遺덊솗�떎�꽦 遺꾩꽍�쓣 �떎�떆�븯���떎. �꽭踰덉㎏ �뿰援�(Part 3)�뒗 鍮꾧탳�쟻 媛꾨떒�븳 �꽕臾� 議곗궗瑜� �넻�빐, �빐�떦 �솚寃쎌삤�뿼�뿉 ���븳 �궗�쉶�쟻�씤�떇�쓣 議곗궗�븯���떎. 寃곌뎅, �떎�뼇�븳 �솚寃쎌삤�뿼 臾몄젣(3媛�吏� �긽�쐞 �솚寃쎈Ц�젣{��湲곗삤�뿼, �떎�궡怨듦린�삤�뿼, 癒밸뒗 臾� �삤�뿼}�� 媛곴컖�뿉 �룷�븿�릺�뒗 8媛�吏� �븯�쐞臾몄젣[��湲곗삤�뿼;HAPs, PM10, �떎�씠�삦�떊瑜�, �떎�궡怨듦린�삤�뿼;IAPs, �씪�룉, 癒밸뒗 臾� �삤�뿼;DWPs, DBPs, 吏��븯�닔以� 諛⑹궗�꽦臾쇱쭏)�뿉 ���빐 �씠�뱾 3媛�吏� �쁺�뿭�뿉�꽌 �룄異쒕맂 �삤�빐�룄 寃곌낵瑜� 蹂묐젹�꽑�긽�뿉 �넃怨� 鍮꾧탳�븯�뿬, 媛쒕퀎 諛� �넻�빀 �슦�꽑 �닚�쐞瑜� �꽕�젙�븯���떎. �떆�뒪�뀥�뿉�꽌 �룄異쒕맂 媛곴컖�쓽 寃곌낵瑜� �슂�빟�븯硫� �떎�쓬怨� 媛숇떎. 異붿젙�맂 �씠濡좎쟻 �궗留앹닔瑜� �씠�슜�븳 �씤泥� �쐞�빐�룄 �닚�쐞 寃곌낵�뒗 �긽�쐞�솚寃쎈Ц�젣�뿉 ���빐�꽌�뒗 �떎�궡怨듦린 �삤�뿼, ��湲� �삤�뿼, 癒밸뒗 臾� �삤�뿼�닚�씠�뿀怨�, �븯�쐞臾몄젣�뿉 ���빐�꽌�뒗 �떎�궡怨듦린 以� �씪�룉, 誘몄꽭癒쇱�(PM10), IAPs, HAPs, DWPs, ��湲곗쨷 �떎�씠�삦�떊瑜�, DBPs, 吏��궗�닔以� 諛⑹궗�꽦臾쇱쭏�쓽 �닚�씠�뿀�떎. �씠�� 媛숈씠 異붿젙�맂 �씠濡좎쟻 �궗留앹넀�떎 鍮꾩슜�쓣 �씠�슜�븳 寃쎌젣 �쐞�빐�룄 �닚�쐞 寃곌낵�뒗 �씤泥� �쐞�빐�룄 �닚�쐞�� �룞�씪�븯���떎. 利� �긽�쐞�솚寃쎈Ц�젣�뿉 ���빐�꽌�뒗 �떎�궡怨듦린 �삤�뿼, ��湲곗삤�뿼, 癒밸뒗 臾� �삤�뿼�닚�씠�뿀怨�, �븯�쐞�솚寃쎈Ц�젣�뿉 ���빐�꽌�뒗 �떎�궡怨듦린以� �씪�룉, 誘몄꽭癒쇱�(PA10), IAPs, HAPs, DWPs, ��湲곗쨷 �떎�씠�삦�떊瑜�, DBPs, 吏��븯�닔以� 諛⑹궗�꽦臾쇱쭏�쓽 �닚�씠�뿀�떎. �솚寃쎌삤�뿼�쑝濡� �씤�븳 �쐞�빐�꽦�뿉 ���븳 �씤�떇�룄 議곗궗 寃곌낵, 7�젏 留뚯젏�뿉�꽌 �룊洹� 6�젏�뿉 洹쇱젒�븯寃� �쓳�떟�븯�뿬 �쟾泥댁쟻�쑝濡� �넂�� �쐞�빐�룄 �씤�떇 �닔以��쓣 �굹���궡�뿀�떎. �긽�쐞 �솚寃쎈Ц�젣蹂꾨줈�뒗 ��湲� �삤�뿼, 癒밸뒗 臾� �삤�뿼, �떎�궡怨듦린 �삤�뿼�닚�쑝濡� �쓳�떟�븯��怨�, �븯�쐞臾몄젣�뿉 ���빐�꽌�뒗 HAPs, �떎�씠�삦�떊, 吏��븯�닔以� 諛⑹궗�꽦臾쇱쭏, 洹쒖젣 臾쇱쭏(PM10), DWPs, IAPs, �떎�궡怨듦린以� �씪�룉, DBPs�닚�쑝濡� �쓳�떟�븯���떎. 媛� �쐞�빐�룄 理쒖쥌 �닔移섏뿉 ���븳 寃곌낵臾쇱쓣 踰붿<�삎 �닚�쐞 遺꾨쪟 湲곗��뿉 �쓽嫄고븯�뿬, 5媛�吏� 踰붿<(High, Medium~High, Medium, Low~Medium, Low)濡� 媛� �솚寃쎈Ц�젣瑜� �븷�떦�븳 寃곌낵, �씤泥� �쐞�빐�룄�쓽 寃쎌슦 Medium 踰붿<�뿉�뒗 �씪�룉怨� �떎�궡怨듦린�삤�뿼臾쇱쭏(IAPs), Medium~High 踰붿<�뿉�뒗 PM10�씠 �냽�븯��怨�, 寃쎌젣 �쐞�빐�룄�쓽 寃쎌슦�뒗 Medium 踰붿<�뿉�뒗 HAPs, Medium~High 踰붿<�뿉�뒗 IAPs, High 踰붿<�뿉�뒗 �씪�룉怨� PM10�씠 �냽�븯���떎. �씤吏� �쐞�빐�룄�쓽 寃쎌슦�뒗 紐⑤뱺 �솚寃쎈Ц�젣�뱾�씠 Medium~!High 踰붿<�� High 踰붿<�뿉 �냽�븯���떎. �쟾泥댁쟻�쑝濡� 媛� �쐞�빐�룄�뿉�꽌 Medium�씠�긽�쓽 踰붿<�뿉 �냽�븯�뒗 怨듯넻�맂 �솚寃쎈Ц�젣�뱾�� �씪�룉, PM10, IAPs 諛� HAPs濡� ��湲곗삤�뿼怨� �떎�궡怨듦린�삤�뿼�뿉 ���븳 �븯�쐞臾몄젣�뱾�씠�뿀�떎. 留덉�留됱쑝濡� �꽭 媛�吏� �쐞�빐�룄�뿉 ���븳 �닔移� 寃곌낵瑜� 5媛�吏� 踰붿<濡� 遺꾨쪟�븳 寃곌낵瑜� �떎�떆 Highest Rule怨� Average Rule�뿉 �쓽�빐 �쐞�빐�룄瑜� �넻�빀�븳 理쒖쥌 寃곌낵瑜� 蹂대㈃, Highest Rule瑜� �쟻�슜�븯硫�, 3媛�吏� �긽�쐞臾몄젣(��湲� �삤�뿼, �떎�궡 怨듦린 �삤�뿼, 癒밸뒗 臾� �삤�뿼)媛� 紐⑤몢 "High"濡� 遺꾨쪟�릺怨�, Average Rule�쓣 �쟻�슜�븯硫�, ��湲� �삤�뿼�� "High", �떎�궡怨듦린�삤�뿼�� "Medium-High"濡� 遺꾨쪟�릺硫�, 癒밸뒗 臾� �삤�뿼�� "Low-Medium"�쑝濡� 遺꾨쪟�릺�뿀�떎. 洹몃━怨� 8媛�吏� �븯�쐞 臾몄젣�뿉 ���븳 �넻�빀 寃곌낵�뒗 Highest Rule�쓣 �쟻�슜�븳 寃쎌슦, �씪�룉, PM10, HAPs, �떎�씠�삦�떊瑜섎뒗 "High"濡� 遺꾨쪟�릺怨�, IAPs, DWPs, DBPs, 諛⑹궗�꽦臾쇱쭏�� "Medium-High"濡� 遺꾨쪟�맂�떎. Average Rule�쓣 �쟻�슜�븳 寃쎌슦�뿉�뒗, �씪�룉, PM10,IAPs�뒗 "Medium-High"濡� 遺꾨쪟�릺怨�, HAPs, DWPs, �떎�씠�삦�떊瑜섎뒗 "Low-Medium"�쑝濡� 遺꾨쪟�릺硫�, DBPs�� 諛⑹궗�꽦臾쇱쭏�� "Low" 踰붿<濡� 遺꾨쪟�릺�뿀�떎. �븯吏�留� �뿬湲곗꽌 媛� �쐞�빐�룄 �넻�빀(intergration)�쓽 臾몄젣�뒗 醫� �뜑 �끉�쓽�맆 �븘�슂�꽦�씠 �엳�떎. �씠 �뿰援ъ뿉�꽌�뒗 怨쇳븰�쟻�씤 諛⑸쾿濡좎쓣 �넻�빐 �끉由ъ쟻�씤 �떆�뒪�뀥�쓣 媛쒕컻�븯怨�, �씠�뱾 �떆�뒪�뀥�뿉�꽌 �젙�웾�쟻�씤 �뿰援ш껐怨쇰�� �룄�댋�븯�뿿�쑝誘�濡�, �젙�웾�쟻�씤 �뿰援ш껐怨쇰�� �룄異쒗븯���쑝誘�濡�, �젙�꽦�쟻�씤 �룊媛��뿉 �쓽�빐 二쇨��쟻�씤 寃ы빐媛� 媛쒖엯�릺�뼱 �룄異쒕릺�뒗 �닚�쐞蹂대떎�뒗 �떊猶곗꽦�씠 �엳�뒗 寃껋쑝濡� �뙋�떒�릺怨�, �떒吏� �뮮諛쏆묠�릺�뒗 怨쇳븰�쟻�씤 �옄猷뚮뱾�씠 遺�議깊뻽湲� �븣臾몄뿉 3媛�吏� �긽�쐞 臾몄젣(8媛�吏� �븯�쐞臾몄젣)�뿉 ���빐 痍④툒�븯�뿬, �꽌�슱吏��뿭 �쟾諛섏쓽 �솚寃쎈Ц�젣瑜� �뙆�븙�븯湲곕뒗 �뼱�젮�썱�떎. �븯吏�留� �씠 �뿰援ъ뿉�꽌 �떎瑜� 二쇱슂 臾몄젣�뱾�� �씤媛꾧낵 吏곸젒�쟻�씤 �젒珥됲븯�뒗 留ㅼ껜 �삤�뿼�씠�씪�뒗 �젏�쓣 媛먯븞�븷 �븣, 占폩 �쓽�쓽媛� �엳�떎怨� �뙋�떒�맂�떎. �뵲�씪�꽌 寃곌낵 �빐�꽍�떆 遺덊솗�떎�꽦�뿉 ���븳 遺�遺꾩쓣 �옒 媛먯븞�븯怨� �솢�슜�쓣 �븳�떎硫�, �꽌�슱�떆 �솚寃쎈Ц�젣�쓽 �젙梨낃껐�젙�뿉 screening tool濡� �쑀�슜�븷 寃살쑝濡� 湲곕��맂�떎. �빑�떖�씠 �릺�뒗 留�: ��湲� �삤�뿼, �떎�궡怨듦린 �삤�뿼, 癒밸뒗 臾� �삤�뾼, �씤泥� �쐞�빐�룄, 吏�遺덉쓽�궗湲덉븸, �넻怨꾩쟻 �깮紐� 媛�移섏븸, �씠濡좎쟻 �궗留� �넀�떎 鍮꾩슜, 寃쎌젣 �쐞�빐�룄, �씤吏� �쐞�빐�룄, 鍮꾧탳 �쐞�빐�룄 遺꾩꽍 �떆�뒪�뀥 [�쁺臾�] In practice, environmental protection initiatives are often motivated by legal mandate, public clamor, scientific evidence, benefit, cost, politics and other factors. CRA provided a systematic framework for first evaluating different environmental problems that pose different types and degrees of risk to human health and the environment, and then for deciding what to do them. The important goals of CRA is to involve the public in the priorities-setting process and to identify and incorporate their concern, to identify the greatest environmental threats and rank them accordingly, to establish environmental priorities and to develop action plan and strategies to reduce risk. The basic premise of CRA is that risk provides an objective measure for comparing the relative severity of different environmental problems. CRA generally has the three main components as health risk assessment, ecological risk assessment, economic or welfare risk assessment, and involves risk management factor such as public perception. Comparative Risk Assessment (CRA) had initiated by US EPA in 1987 and its guideline proposed named as "A guidebook to comparing risk and setting environmental priorities" in 1993. Since the original publication of Unfinished Business, more than half of the states in the U.S. and more than 50 localities have employes the CRA approach for identifying and addressing important environmental issues. In Korea, there is no CRA studies and has not well known CRA and not well established their methodologies. Therefore, objectives of this thesis is to establish the framework of CRA consisting of health risk, economic risk and perceived risk and the detail methodologies of three main component of estimating and comparing those risks for on the three environmental problems of air pollution, indoor air pollution and drinking water contamination which being subjective to the eight sub-problems of hazardous air pollutants (HAPs), regulated pollutants (representative as PM10) and Dioxins (PCDDs/ PCDFs) in air pollution, and indoor air pollutants (IAPs) and Radon in indoor air pollution, and drinking water pollutants (DWPs), disinfection-by-products(DBPs) and radionuclides in drinking water contamination in Seoul, Korea. And then, their problems set priorities by individual and integrated risk(Figure A). The index of human health risk is the theoretical mortality incidence from exposure to carcinogens of 84 chemical and physical agents. Risk assessment were conducted to the individual agent in according to the agent_spectific approach. Human risks from environmental problems and sub-problems were assumed as the sum of that of each chemical corresponding to each problem. All of environmental agents and problems were not considered in estimating theoretical mortality incidence. However, this study were tried almostly to manage the important agents in main human-contact media except for several riskly agents such as formaldehyde and 1,3-butadiene in outdoor air. The index of economic risk is the theoretical mortality damage cost estimated from willingness to pay (WTP) and value of statistical life (VSL) by contingent valuation method (CVM) and that of perceived risk is the scale of seven score. Questionnaire survey was conducted to 600 subjects (200 subjects of each problem) by personal interview in order to elicit WTP on annual risk reduction of 5/10,000 causing by environmental problems. The target population consisted of persons between 20 and 60 years of age in Seoul. Characteristics distribution such as age and sex of survey respondents to the WTP represent for those of Seoul population, but education level, proportion of his/her own house and household income were higher than those of Seoul population. The payment vehicle was private donation and the initial bids set 10,000won, 20,000won, 40,000won and 60,000won with double-bounded dichotomous choice and the main(median) WTP estimated by models of three types of lower_bounded Turnbull method, Weibull, log-normal model and spoke model. Risk perception survey was also conducted with WTP survey, to the same subjects, contemporarily. Several risks were compared among 3 environmental problems and 8 sub-problems and those problems were ranked by the magnitude of each risk endpoint. As a results, ranking of health risk were the following order of indoor air pollution, air pollution and then drinking water contamination, in three environmental problems and of radon, PM10, IAPs, HAPs, DWPs, Dioxins, DBPs, and then radionuclides in eight sub-problems. And that of economic risk were the same order. In the contrary, ranking of perceived risk were the following order of air pollution, and of HAPs, Dioxins, radionuclides, PM10, DWPs, IAPs, Radon and then DBPs. In addition, estimates of the different risks were classified with 5 categories such as high, medium-high, medium, low-medium and low category. As a result, in case of human risk, PM10 was allocated to the medium-high category, radon and IAPs, were medium category. In case of economic risk, radon and PM10 were allocated to the high category, IAPs, to the medium-high category and HAPs, to the medium category. In case of risk perception, HAPs and Dioxins were allocated to the high category and other sub-problems, to the medium-high category. In order to present as an integrated index on the human, economic and perceived risk Highest rule (pose priority on the highest score or category of several values) and Average rule (pose priority on the category of several values) were adapted to the category value of each risk. As a result, radon, PM10, HAP and Dioxins were allocated to the high category, IAPs, DWPs, DBPs and radionuclides, to the medium-high category, if, according to the highest rule. Radon, PM10 and IAPs were allocated to the high category, HAPs, DWPs, Dioxins, to the low-medium category, and DBPs and radionuclides, to the low category, if, according to the average rule. These procedures of quantitative risk evaluation involved assembling and analyzing relevant data and actually investigating and estimating parameters by the scientific methodologies. Although risk estimates calculated by the scientific procedure, there is extensive need for value judgment and uncertainties. ; open
Transcript of an oral history interview with Dr. Carlos F. A. Pinkham, conducted by Jennifer Payne at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont, on 9 January 2014, as part of the Norwich Voices oral history project of the Sullivan Museum and History Center. Carlos Frank Armory Pinkham graduated from Norwich University in 1965 and later returned to the campus to teach in the College of Math and Sciences. His interview includes many details of his academic career as well as recollections from his military service and family history. ; 1 Carlos Frank Amory Pinkham, NU '65, Oral History Interview January 9, 2014 Interviewed by Jennifer Payne CARL PINKHAM: Vermont. JENNIFER PAYNE: And your (inaudible) [00:00:02] class? CP: Nineteen sixty-five. JP: Ah, did you have a nickname at Norwich? CP: Not really, no. JP: No? The yearbook has you as Pink, but I imagine -- CP: Oh, yeah, Pink is -- Pink is -- if anybody used a nickname it was Pink. Yeah, mm-hmm. JP: Oh, what made you decide to choose Norwich? CP: It was very easy. My father taught here, and so as a poor university professor this is the only place he could afford to send me (laughs) because I got tuition free. JP: What was his name and what did he do? CP: Vernon Curtis David Pinkham. So, again, four names. It's a tradition in our family. JP: What did he teach? CP: He taught economics. JP: So, you came to Norwich pretty much straight out of high school. CP: Yes. JP: And were you interested in science then? CP: I have been interested in biology ever since I was able to think. So, I knew when I came here what I wanted to do. I knew what I wanted to do when I was a kid. JP: Really? CP: Yeah. I wanted to get a doctorate in biology. At the time that I came here I wasn't sure what field in biology. It was really a choice between evolution and marine biology, but I knew that I wanted to do that.2 JP: Wow. So who was your roommate when you got here? CP: Oh, boy, when I got here -- I don't remember. I do know that he never finished and I don't remember his name. JP: Do you remember any of your roommates? CP: Sure, Joe [Koons?] [00:01:50] was my sophomore year roommate and he never finished, and then Don Graves was my roommate in my junior year; he did finish. And Bob Priestly was my roommate in my senior year. JP: No kidding? CP: Yeah. JP: That's great. Now I know you've looked at these questions. Is there anything in particular that you want to focus on or start with? CP: No, not really. Just go ahead and fire away and we'll progress as ever we can. JP: Yes, OK. Your activities when you were here were humongous. You were in everything. You were corporal, master sergeant, correct? Major biology -- you were in the biology club, one, two, three, four president -- president twice; geology club, one, two, three, four; honor tank platoon, three and four; German club one, three, and four Vice President; AUSA three and four; mountain and cold weather; winter carnival committee; regimental ball committee; Epsilon Tau Sigma Vice President. CP: That's the honorary society -- the academic honorary society. JP: And you were in Who's Who, also, I noticed in the yearbook. You were on that page, but the list doesn't stop. You were in the varsity club two, three, four; class honor committee to cadet cadre two, three, four; dean's list one, two, three, four; DMS, which is -- CP: Distinguished military student. JP: Wow. What was your GPA? What was your -- CP: I was second in my class -- JP: Wow! CP: -- and the person that was first in my class, Harry Short, and I competed for that position all four years and his is a sad story because he beat me and legitimately so; he was a very smart person. He went on to med school, got his MD and in my fifth year of graduate school, I found out that he had just been killed in an airplane crash that he was flying himself. So that was probably one of the saddest things that had ever happened and has 3 ever happened in my life -- to lose this very dear friend who was my arch competitor, but still a person that I had a lot of respect for. And really it was -- another aspect of that is that I -- up to that point I kind of thought of those of us who were in this top echelon as being untouchable. In other words, somehow we were just -- our lives were special and therefore they would not be expendable and that woke me up to the fact that in fact that was a very incorrect assumption to proceed with. JP: So what do you remember most about Norwich? CP: Oh, (laughs) there's so many things. I remember, and this is going to go on to one of the other questions, William Countryman, my favorite professor, and it's hard to pick a favorite professor because there were certainly three that I had -- William Countryman, Bert Wagenknecht, who was the botany professor at the time in biology, and of course, the ever traditional and ever present Fred Larson, who played a major role in my interest in geology. So, these are the three people that vied for my preferences as the favorite professors, and Bill -- but Bill because I had him more often than all of the others. I think he won out, but he was a very special professor anyway. He was smart, knew how to teach, and knew how to keep his classroom in stitches, which is something that is very important for a good teacher to have. It's something that I never developed as a teacher, I have to admit. JP: How did he keep you in stitches? CP: Oh, he just had great stories that were always able -- that always fit in to whatever lesson he was talking about and he had a great sense of humor. He was a very wonderful fellow. I ended up working for him, actually, when I came back here for a number of years because he went into private consulting and I worked for him. That's the story we can get into a little bit later. JP: Yeah. Because you went to the military after, but what was the hardest part? It seems like you probably did very well. Were you ever disciplined? CP: No, no. Should I have been? Yes. (laughter) JP: For what? CP: Oh, there were a couple of times I think when -- well, the one time that I remember specifically is when I was the executive officer of the third battalion my senior year. I think I had a soccer game. I think that's what it was, and so I went on the soccer game without thinking about the fact that I had to make sure there was somebody who took my place in formation because the battalion commander I knew was not going to be there. And so one of our class cut ups, who was just -- went on to become a great guy -- probably because he was a class cut-up, took over the battalion at the time and he made a pretty good farce out of it from what I understand, and I was about ready to get some demerits and I think my dad stepped in and prevented that from happening. I don't know, but I know I never got them.4 JP: What did he do? CP: Well -- JP: The farcical -- CP: Oh, what did he do? Oh, he just got up and mocked the protocol, the commands and everything. I don't know. I don't know exactly what happened. I just heard that it was pretty farcical, so -- JP: Norwich cadets cutting up? CP: Right, right. JP: No, say it isn't so! So what was your least favorite? Did you have a least favorite class here? CP: Well, I suppose it had to be English. And the reason for that was that I hated writing; I didn't know how to write. And, again, there's a story about how that can be -- how that turned around, but after I got out of grad school, and so I'll hold that until later. But at the time I hated the writing aspect of English. I didn't mind the reading aspect, the reading of the different literary assignments, that was fine, but, boy, I just did not like writing. JP: OK. What was the most important thing that Norwich taught you? CP: There are several things, but the first thing I learned, I guess, is that nothing ever lasts forever, and that was a lesson I learned in rook school, and it was a lesson that I think a lot of people learned in rook school because if you didn't learn that lesson, you couldn't get through rook school. That's a valuable lesson to learn if you're really being confronted by things that are difficult at the time. It's good to know that it can't last forever. The second lesson, and I think this is one that has probably, Norwich teaches more than anything else, and I have not seen it as something that is grasped by the powers that be as something that they need to promote, and that is that done properly, if you allow it to do it to you, allow Norwich to do this to you, you discover that your limits are way beyond where you thought they were, way beyond spiritually, way beyond physically, way beyond mentally because Norwich has a tendency to push people. It was pushing people when I was a cadet here and it still does push people and in ways that many other universities don't. And one good proof of that happened my sophomore year. In the eighth grade -- I've got to go back a little bit -- in the eighth grade is when we moved to Northfield because dad took the teaching position that year, and in my homeroom I went into the first day, and of course being an eighth grader boy, I was very interested in girls, and I saw silhouetted against the window this very pretty, cute blonde and I said, "Well, that's kind of a neat girl." And so I asked about her and found out that she was going with somebody else and so being an honorable person I decided I probably 5 better not interfere. But a little while later I heard that someone had said that she was interested in me, which of course was all I needed to do. So I approached her and we struck up a relationship that lasted through the sophomore year of high school and she eventually broke off with me about that time -- at that time because she thought I was pretty much so a namby-pamby, which I was, and then -- but I always had a crush for her and the sophomore year, New Year's Eve, I had a date that didn't come through and so on just a whim I called her up because she was a townie as well, obviously, and asked her out to New Year's Eve and she didn't have a date that night, so she accepted. And from that point on we were a couple and she has now been my wife for almost 50 years. JP: Awww, that's so sweet. CP: Yeah, so basically she just liked what she had seen -- the change in me that was -- that Norwich had brought about. JP: What's her name? CP: Christine. JP: Christine. CP: Yeah. JP: Wow, so Norwich helped her fall in love -- CP: That's exactly correct. And she'll admit that, too. I'm not making this up. (laughs) JP: Did the words "I will try" mean anything to you as a student? CP: It means -- it's hard for me to kind of express because I think I always felt that way, and I always was a little bit disappointed with it because I want to do more than try; I want to succeed. And I think that probably of all of the things that Norwich did for me, its motto was not one of the things that I carried with me throughout my career. I mean, I just knew I would try. Maybe that's why Norwich and I were such a good fit, I don't know, but in any event. JP: Well, you were obviously successful from an early time. Do you have any funny stories about life or people at Norwich? CP: (laughs) I don't know whether I want to tell one of them. Well, I guess probably the story I will tell is that the infamous panty raid -- JP: Oh, yes. CP: Roy [Bear?] [00:14:58], Dick Herbert, and myself had heard about this thing happening but we were at my house that night. And we finally decided after the news had come that 6 it was probably interesting enough that we ought to go over and take a look. So we went over after it had been done and interestingly enough we were watching -- after most of it had been done -- just to watch and at this point I have mixed emotions about whether I should have been involved or not, but at any event, one of things we noticed is that the police and the fire -- well, the fire department was using a lot of fire hoses on the few that were left and they were doing most of the damage with their fire hose that was finally attributed to Norwich cadets. They were breaking windows with the water and everything. And so we were standing around, and of course we looked like Norwich cadets because we had short hair, and one of the policemen came up to us and said, "Are you guys from Norwich," and I said, "No, not me, I'm from Northfield. I'm a townie," and that wasn't a lie because I was, but at that point in time we recognized maybe we better get out of there. So we got out and came back to my house and eventually got back into school. You know, they were checking everybody coming back in at that point in time and we had not been involved in the raid and so we -- this is our junior year -- so we were let back in, and again, I think it was partly because my dad vouched for me and said yes, they were at home at our house, and that was true. So, that's one of the episodes that I think is kind of humorous. JP: So you were questioned along with everybody else that had gone? CP: Yeah, sure, sure. JP: Interesting. Were there other panty raids? I had heard there might have been annual -- CP: I wasn't aware of it and certainly nothing as big as that. I know that one made national headlines and (laughs) -- JP: Yes, yes it did. What did you do after graduation? CP: Well, I was commissioned in armor, but because of my grades and because of other good letters of recommendation from my profs and performances on the GREs, et cetera, I was allowed to defer to active duty to go to grad school. And this is during Viet Nam so I was very happy with that. I wasn't going to argue that and so I had applied to the three -- by then I knew that I wanted to do evolution -- I had applied to the three universities in the nation at the time that were giving doctorates in evolution -- Harvard, University of Illinois and UCLA. Was accepted to all three with scholarships and decided I needed to get far away but not too far away. So I chose the middle of the two, University of Illinois, to go to grad school, and went to grad school there and had a great experience and learned and awful lot. And had -- in those days you had four years of total deferment to active duty to get your doctorate -- and four years to get a doctorate in biology is really difficult if not, you know, you have to really be smart, even smarter than -- I shouldn't say even smarter -- I worked hard, I wasn't smart, I just worked hard -- and smarter than me. So at the end of the fourth year I still hadn't had my degree, but what I did -- there were two things that happened. I found out that if I had a doctorate I could switch from armor to medical service corp., which is what I had originally put in for anyway, and so there was caveat on that, though. I had a two-year obligation, active duty obligation, in 7 armor. If I switched my branch then I would have to have another two years, in other words, a total of four year obligation. So this is where I think my Norwich training came in really, really helpful in about two tenths of a second I had the decision. You know, two years of which one would have to be in Viet Nam in a tank versus four years of which I would be applying what I had learned state-side in a research institution. It was a pretty easy decision to make and so I accepted the caveated offer to go to medical service corp. The other thing I did is we got in that fourth year you had an option on when to be put on active duty, and so I took the furthest one away from when I applied, which actually gave me almost five years of graduate study in grad school, and I cut it so close that on Wednesday night I defended my thesis, Thursday morning I boarded the plane for Fort Sam, officers basic course. JP: Wow! CP: Yeah, it was close. JP: Wow. CP: So, that was a very fortunate thing for me because getting into medical service corp. was fundamental to a lot of what happened to me from that point on. JP: In what way? CP: Well, because after officer's basic which is, you know, a three month assignment, I was assigned to Edgewood Arsenal and to the biomedical research lab there and my first assignment was to do research on a nerve agent poisoning -- the mechanism of a nerve agent poisoning, organophosphorus, the nerve agents, and to do that I had to kill cats. They were anesthetized and then we exposed them to nerve agents and monitored what was happening to them with some fairly sophisticated equipment and deduced from the responses what was going on. Well, you know, I'm not opposed to research of that sort but it was not something that I was really comfortable with and it turned out that the guy across the hall from me had just -- we were living in apartment houses at the time and so this is for married couples -- and so the guy across the hall from me had just gotten out of being the executive officer for the human experiment platoon. These were humans that had volunteered to undergo various kinds of experiments, most of which were with psychedelic kind of drugs. So it was kind of a difficult job to be in charge of them. And because he still had some active duty time, he was offered a position with the newly formed ecological research branch. Now his specialty was aquatics. He was a fisheries guy, marine and fresh water fisheries, and so he kind of fit right in and I'll explain why that was newly formed here in a moment. But he told me about this, and he said that they were looking for a person who had specialty in land and my, in addition to a doctorate in evolution, one of the -- the major area in evolution that I had worked on was mammals, mammalogy, and so I had a lot of experience with mammals as well as with reptiles and amphibians because one of my major mentors was Doctor Hobart Smith, who was probably the world's leading herpetologist at the time. So I had a lot of good experience that would put me into that position. So the next day I went over and talked to the newly 8 assigned director of the ecological research branch, Scott Ward, and told him what I was interested in and what my qualifications were and the next day I was reassigned to his branch. He had a lot of pull at the time. Why did he have a lot of pull? Here's why. He was a very sophisticated politician for one thing, but what he was heading up was a really dynamic and important endeavor at the time. Basically, Nixon, who has been maligned for a number of different -- well, for one thing, and that's Watergate, but really did an awful lot of good stuff during his presidency. National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, diplomacy with China, et cetera. The list goes on. One of the things he did was he signed an executive order that unilaterally ended the open air testing of offensive, active -- of offensive and defensive biological and chemical weapons, and restricted any further research to just defensive research on biological and chemical weapons in labs. So, there were two places -- a number of places around the world where this research had been going on, two in the United States. One was in Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, the southern end of the Great Salt Lake desert, out in the middle of nowhere, which you would expect to be a place where this would be conducted. And there's some stories about that that I'll get into in the future, and then the other one was 17 miles northeast of Baltimore on Carroll Island, which is part of Edgewood Arsenal, an island -- a peninsula that jutted into the Chesapeake Bay. It was called an island because it was separated from the mainland by a channel of water, cooling channel from a power plant that was right there. And because they had stopped the open air testing the question was logically raised, was there any impact of the testing on the environment? Now Carroll Island it turned out -- well, both Dugway Proving Ground and Carroll Island formed these two groups to research this. On Carroll Island it turned out there were two parts to it. There was one part next to the mainland, and then there was an intervening large saltwater marsh, and then another part where all of the jutting out into the bay where all the testing had been done. And the two parts were fairly comparable to one another, so we had a very good control and a very good experimental area to do our studies on. So we started the study of that and that was the foundation of the Army's environmental ecological research effort, and so I was in on the ground floor of that, and that played a major role in my military career because -- well, one of the things that happened while we were there is as a result of the National Environmental Policy Act, we started getting into environmental assessments and environmental impact statements, one of the first groups to start doing that. And so, again, the procedures we developed and techniques and everything were eventually implemented -- became implemented into a lot of the Army approaches and regulations. To get a little ahead of myself I think it's important at this point to explain what happened at the end of the four years. I'm going to come back to Edgewood. At the end of the four years I was -- obviously my obligation, active duty obligation, was over and I thought, OK, this is it, I'm going to get out of the service. And I wanted to come back to Norwich and teach, quite honestly, and so I applied here but there wasn't a position available, and I really didn't know much about applying anywhere else, and I tried but I wasn't successful. But I had been offered a job at the sister organization out at Dugway Proving Ground as a civilian working, doing the same thing, extending what I had done at Edgewood. And I loved the job, I loved the people that I was working with both at Dugway, and by then we had formed this extended team where Dugway and Edgewood worked together, but I hated the environment of Baltimore, just didn't like the humidity in the summer, as a Vermonter I 9 couldn't handle it. So we took the job out at Dugway, and again, I'm going to come back to Edgewood, but I've got to finish this entry into Dugway because it's kind of a fascinating story. So, I had been out there many times and new I would love it, and so in order to make the final decision I had to take my wife and my two children out, then I had two boys, I now have three. So we left Baltimore when it was about 98 degrees and 150 percent humidity, not really, I mean, the air was just soaking. And we got on the plane and flew out to Utah and about 30 minutes out of Salt Lake City the pilot came on board and said the temperature in Salt Lake City is 110 degrees at which point my wife turned to me, she said, "As soon as we get off the plane we're turning around," because she was thinking 110 degrees with all of that humidity that we had just left behind, and I knew better. So I let her get off the plane and she looked around and she felt the air and she says, "I love it!" So I knew that we were sold on going out to Dugway. So, returning back to Edgewood, because we had these two wonderful control and experimental areas, we had a lot of wonderful data comparing two different community structures, those of let's say a species of trees on both places, fishes on both places, snakes on both places, amphibians on both places, mammals on both places, et cetera. And we had these wonderful databases. But at the time there was no way to really compare them because all of the mechanisms that were out there at the time, all of the methods that were out there at the time, were focusing on diversity, on measures of diversity, and we weren't interested in measures of diversity. We were interested in how alike are these two communities or how different are these two communities. So, the guy across the hall who introduced me to Scott, his name is Gareth Pearson. He eventually went on to become one of the directors in one of the labs of EPA, very successful career. JP: EPA is? CP: The Environmental Protection Agency. So Gareth and I sat down one night with this problem and a bunch of paper with some of our data on it spread out on the floor in his apartment and a six-pack of beer. And by the end of the six-pack, we had solved the problem, and we had developed an index that would compare these two communities in a very -- I've got to say clever way -- and in a very effective way and started applying that our data and then of course published it and this index, the Pinkham Pearson Index, is now regarded as the primary way to compare community structure. So we were very fortunate to be at the right place at the right time. I'm sure if we hadn't come up with it, somebody else would have. It's one of those things that's fairly obvious once you look at it, but, you know, we were there at the right time. JP: That's wonderful. I was hoping you would talk about that. CP: So we had a lot of fun. We did some great things. Great in the sense of they were fun things and wonderful to do. We started the -- we were the -- we, Edgewood, actually, the team that I was part of at Edgewood, really established the concept of the installation environmental impact assessment or statement where basically you go in to an installation, an Army installation, and you identify all of the resources on and around that installation and all of the activities on that installation that could impact these resources, and identified ways to mitigate the impact so that the installation could continue its 10 mission. And eventually out at Dugway as we continued the effort, because by the time I was at Dugway it was such a large effort that we needed to have both camps involved in this process. Another colleague of mine that I met at Dugway, David Gauthier, whom I also kind of took on as a person that I would work with the rest of my life, David and I were the co-editors of a seven volume -- became the co-editors of a seven volume treatise on doing ecological surveys at military installations, and one of the volumes was doing all of the procedures involved in doing an environmental assessment of an installation. All of the different topics you've got to cover and all of the ways you can cover them, it was a fairly extensive document. And still is -- its descendants are still being used in the environmental program in the military. So, I really enjoyed that part of my life. We got to go and I got to see lots of different parts of the United States. Never got away from the United States, but some of the really interesting installations where testing was going on of one form or another, whether it was vehicle testing or artillery testing or whatever, we got to go to because they were part of testing evaluation command at the time, which Edgewood Arsenal was part of, and that's where most of the environmental documentation was happening. One of the things -- and again, it's a matter of being at the right place at the right time, very quickly or very soon after we started our effort at Edgewood there was an operation at Edgewood that had been going on for years and their procedures, their environmental procedures, were just terrible, and we told them that they were just awful and that they would have to do something about them and they snubbed their noses at us. About six months later EPA caught up with them, newly formed EPA caught up with them, and the directors, whom we had said you better do something about this, ended up going to jail. JP: Really? CP: Yeah. So that all of a sudden gave us the notoriety or the fame that we needed to have to get everybody's attention and from that point on we got to do some pretty neat stuff. And going from coast to coast and seeing things, you know, I saw my first rattlesnake, I saw my first copperhead and things of this sort which were fun. In the wild, you know, turning things over and finding them there, which is part of our technique, and developed further techniques for looking at -- finding whether or not a military operation had impacts. I think one of the fun ones was Redstone Arsenal where a government operated -- a government owned, civilian operated (GOCO) facility had been operating during the Second World War manufacturing DDT. Every time they had a bad batch they just threw it out the back door. So although the facility had been destroyed, long gone, this batch was still there. Now what happened is that Redstone Arsenal called us there because they knew that there was this stream that was entering a bayou or a backwater of the Mississippi that didn't have any life in it and they wanted us to find out what was going on. So what we did is we used a technique which, I don't know whether we developed or had been used by others, but in any event, you go up and every time you find a branch in the river, or in the stream, you sample both sides and when you do that, you know, one, every time we went there, one branch was fine, the other branch was dead. And we kept following it back up until we found this huge area, a two or three football field size area of old DDT, and it became one of the nation's hazardous waste facility -- sites -- that had to be cleaned up. So it was, you know, it wasn't anything that the people there were 11 trying to cover up or had been responsible for, it had been done a long time ago and we were able to find that. Another program that I think was a lot of fun is that my boss, Scott Ward, was a falconer and this was in a time when falconers were -- he was a falconer when it was legit to be, OK to be, a falconer. But then the Endangered Species Act came along, which again, was another Nixon thing, and that prevented falconers from being -- you know, without having a license. You had to be licensed to be a falconer and had to have a legitimate reason. Well, he was a veterinarian and so he got his license. He was a wheeler-dealer and he made sure that he got his license and then he started working with peregrine falcons and their recovery. As you may know, about that time DDT, again, here's this DDT rearing its ugly head, had been bioaccumulating in predator species, the peregrine falcon being one of them, so that to a level that the eggs were thinning, the shells were thinning and the parents were breaking them in the nest as they were trying to sit on them. So, there was a real decline in peregrine falcons. In fact, the peregrine falcon south of the Arctic had gone extinct. So, Scott was involved in studying their recovery and to do so he became the coordinator of the North American peregrine falcon banding program, and he would go to a number of different places, Greenland, Hudson Bay, I think Alaska, and band fledglings in the nest, and then we would go to Assateague Island in the fall and in the spring and trap peregrine falcons to see if any of them had been banded to find out where they were coming from because at that point in time we really didn't know very much of any -- the peregrine falcons that are now south of the Arctic are all derived from peregrine falcons that were in the Arctic. It's a different subspecies but basically it was the only opportunity is to take these fledglings and bring them back here, and that was a Cornell program, did a wonderful job, and breed them in a captive breeding program and then reintroduce them to the wild. But knowing we just didn't have any information on what their flight pathways were, where their migration routes were, and so Scott was instrumental in coming up with that information. And so I was able to go with him and, you know, this is a military assignment. (laughs) JP: It's a great job. CP: Somebody had to do it, right. And spend a week or two weeks in the fall and in the spring on Assateague Island trapping peregrine falcons and birding and all sorts of stuff. So that was a lot of fun. We got to know a lot of interesting people because Scott made his way through the people who had influence at the time. I think one of the more interesting things is that, for example, we would often capture peregrine falcons with -- peregrine falcons -- he would also do it on Carroll Island -- capture either hawks or accipiters or falcons and they would have feathers in their beak or we would find kills in the woods, and part of our study was, you know, what had they killed? And so he would take these feathers and sometimes just one or two feathers they pulled out of the corner of their bill and send them off to a gal at the Smithsonian Institution, I can't remember -- I think her name was Roxy or something -- and she would identify it just from a single feather what the bird was. So that was part of our ability to get some additional data. What are they preying on when they're at different places in their migratory pathway, et cetera. So, that was another, you know, it was just a lot of fun things that we got to do and we would seine for fish. 12 JP: And we're back. CP: OK, so I'm trying to think of -- in the back of my mind there's one more story I want to tell and I can't come up with it right now. So those were fun days. We really had a great time doing all that sort of stuff. Oh, I know what it was. Another story was with Chandler Robins. Now, Chandler Robins is, I think he's still alive, one of the greatest ornithologists in the country. He wrote a book on birds of North America and Scott knew him well, and so I remember one night we had been out doing some night surveys and he had a recording of a bird that he couldn't -- all he had was the song and so we got on the phone the next morning and called up Chan and said, "Chan, I want to play something for you. Can you tell me what it is?" So we just played it for him over the phone. Chan says, "OK, so let me see. It was probably about nine o'clock at night, it was raining slightly and the sound is coming from the middle of a marsh, am I right?" And Scott says, "Yes," and so he says, "Well, it's a Black Rail," which fits all of those things. JP: Wow! CP: So this guy really knew his stuff. (laughs) That's the kind of stuff that we were exposed to for all of this. It was a lot of fun. JP: Did you photograph it? CP: Oh, no, no because it was at night. But I photographed a lot of birds. In fact, because I spent so much time going around doing this sort of stuff, my life list of North America north of the Mexican border is about 420 birds, 420 species. That's not anywhere nearly as many as it could be if I were a serious birder, but just because I have travelled so much, it's a lot larger than a lot of birders do have. JP: That's a lot of birds. CP: It is. JP: And you were outside and making the world a safer place. CP: Hopefully so. JP: That's pretty amazing. CP: Yeah. JP: Wow. I'm always amazed by you guys. CP: Yeah, it's fun what we get to do.13 JP: What about the Oxford Round Table? I know I'm jumping ahead, but I want to make sure we get that. CP: All right, so the reason -- I want to also hit my military career because I think that's important and, oh, we're doing fine. So let's hit the military career and then we'll come back to the Oxford Round Table. JP: Absolutely. CP: After I got out of Edgewood, I told you I was thinking about getting out of the service, my brother, my oldest brother, who at the time was a colonel in the Reserves, said, "No, you've got to stay in," and he explained to me why I needed to stay in. He said, "The benefits that you would accrue for retirement and for Space-A travel and medical coverage, et cetera, are just fantastic. You've got to stay in." So I did, I decided to stay in. And to get to the end of that story before I come back I stayed in for 47 years or whatever it was, I mean, 37 years. I retired at 60 from the Reserves and when I retired it was in '06 and I was the senior, maybe we should say old man of preventive medicine science officers and as such I was the mentor for about 700 preventive medicine science officers in the Reserves, the National Guard around the world. And from Norwich, this is when I was doing this, I sent out a weekly newsletter. Every Saturday I would come down early in the morning and I would work until one or two o'clock in the afternoon putting together this newsletter of all of the events that were important to preventive medicine science officers that had happened in that week and sent it out to them. And it got to be such a big thing that many of the active duty preventive medicine science officers were subscribing to it as well. JP: What was it called? CP: The Preventive Medicine's -- Reserves Component Preventive Medicine Science Officers' Newsletter, very imaginative title for it. JP: But very useful. CP: But it was very useful. JP: Extremely useful. CP: Yeah, it was during the Iraq war and during Pakistan as well. The beginning parts of -- I mean, Afghanistan. JP: So what kinds of things would be in it, for example? CP: Oh, there would be health reports from around the world, alerts about outbreaks of different things. There would be announcements of upcoming conferences that -- one of the things that preventive medicine science officers -- most preventive medicine science officers are in the Reserves are not assigned to a unit. They are what is known as 14 individual mobilization augmentees. They're on their own basically and they have to get their 50 points a year on their own. Because all of us have advanced degrees, we don't fit into most units and if there is a unit, it's probably across the country that we could fit into, and some of the people fit into those units, they just had to travel and they did their two weeks of active duty. And so it was very important to be able to get these people, all of these people for retention purposes if nothing else, to recognize all of the opportunities they had to get points and part of my role in this was to provide these opportunities -- show them the opportunities that they had and make sure they were taking advantage of them. JP: That's terrific. CP: So that was another side of it. And unfortunately, I think after I left I found a successor and I think he, after a year or so, found that the job was so demanding that he had to back out and I don't think anybody else took over. But it happened during a time when it was really important too because we were so widespread and some us of involved in conflicts around the world that it was important for us to have that at that particular time. I'm sure it would still be valuable today, but I don't think anybody has followed up on it. But then that's another thing where Norwich guys have a tendency to see a need and fill it. Another thing, which also is a Norwich story, I think, is to get my points, one of the ways you can get points is to be a liaison to West Point, and what that means is basically that you are helping to guide the applicants for West Point from Vermont or from whatever state you're in, through the process so that they either are successful or not. Well, it turns out in Vermont I think we have a higher percentage of people that get in for reasons which are not worth going into here than most states. But you still, one out of ten, one out of 20 would make it. So, one of the advantages of that is it gave me an opportunity to direct the nine or 18 failures to Norwich which many of them did come here as a result. So that was a good recruiting opportunity as well. And Norwich -- West Point preferred to have of all of those senior military academies, they preferred to have either West Point or Norwich personnel fill those positions because they knew that they would do a good job and a serious job. So, let's see, what else is here? All right, we can go on to the Oxford thing. So, I, as I've stated earlier, had always been interested in evolution and ever since I was able to remember, I recognized that the beauty around me that I was fascinated with in nature, the butterflies, the flowers, the trees, the frogs, whatever I was attracted to at the time, was just not by chance but brought about by a creator. Now I grew up in a family with a Christian influence and background, but I myself, I personally never understood who Jesus Christ was and his importance to me, and just recently I kind of figured out a good way to explain that. As a kid I had understood that Christmas was all about me. And Easter somehow had something to do with this person called Jesus Christ but I wasn't sure what it was. And quite honestly I really went through childhood, school, here, graduate school, and well into my military career until early into Dugway assuming that. I now know that I got it totally backwards and in fact Christmas is all about Jesus and Easter is all about me and you and all of us, the rest of us who need to have the salvation of Jesus. Now the story, I mean, I'm not going to go there because I'm not sure that's appropriate for this but I just want to set the stage for this. So I had always felt that this creator must be really awesome, but because early on, and I don't know why, 15 I understood because I'd been reading well enough, you know, extensively enough, I understood the evidence for evolution and the fact that evolution was a mechanism. So, I began to become convinced that that God used evolution, we'll call this creator God, used evolution to bring about us, to bring about the universe, to bring about everything, and so I spent a lot of my time, in fact, I thought when I get out of grad school that that's what I would focus on but the military took me in different places. And I wanted to see if I could understand more about how evolution worked and how a creator might have brought this about. So when I got out of Edgewood, went to Dugway out there, there was -- obviously this is Mormon country and Mormons proselytize and they tried to proselytize Chris and I, and Mormons are wonderful people and my boss is a Mormon and I have an awful lot of respect for them, but we were invited to a Mormon gathering and treated wonderfully and they were a very friendly group of people and as we were going home, my wife and I were talking to one another -- no, we weren't talking to one -- we were very silent and one of us, and we don't remember to this day who said, "What did you think of that," and the other one said, "Well, my spirit was troubled," and the other one agreed that that was the case. And so we began looking at our roots and it turned out that at that point in time the chapel at Dugway -- now, let me explain something about Dugway. Even though I was a civilian because it was a remote post civilians were allowed to live on the installation, so we were living on the installation. So the chapel had just undergone a change in chaplains and my wife had started going -- after this incident she started going -- and she came home after one Sunday service fairly early in the process and said, "You got to listen, you've got to come and listen to this guy because he's talking about the evidence for God and for belief and, you know, the science of it all," and I said, oh, come on, this guy can't know what he's talking about. So, I went and come to find out he did. He had some very good compelling evidence. And so that started me on a year and a half of questioning, of investigation, of seriously considering the possibility that, in fact, this God that's talked about in the bible is, in fact, the same God, creator -- Lord God creator of the universe that I had been thinking about all along and worshipping myself. And after a year and a half of reading the bible, of seriously going to church, of going to adult Sunday school, of talking with people, et cetera, I was finally convinced and turned my life over to Jesus. So, from that point on I thought, well, OK, from here on I'm going to get back on to the track of this thing and it didn't happen, it didn't happen. I still continue the environmental movement and then about -- well, six years, six and a half years into being at Dugway my -- oh, I got to do the science fair. Don't let me forget to do the science fair. My wife's mom started showing symptoms of Alzheimer's and her dad began to try to deal with it. He was retired at the time. She never did work. And he was having some difficulty and as time went on it became increasingly obvious to us that Chris needed to go back and help her dad take care of her mom and it was a good time because at that particular point in time we had progressed enough in our understanding of what the Word says, the bible says, we felt that we had an obligation to honor our parents and come back here and so at the same time I had been working with a colleague of mine that we rode to work with. By then we had moved off the installation and we were living in a small town called Terra, Utah, which was ten miles east, roughly east, of the main gate Dugway Proving Ground, and it was across -- the ten miles were mostly across Skull Valley and the road was ten miles of absolutely arrow-straight road. So you got in your car, if you were awake it didn't matter because 16 you just aim, lock the steering wheel in, and ten miles later you were at the front gate. And so we had a lot of time for discussion as we were doing this and we had come up with an idea for -- we were both avid gardeners -- we come up with an idea for preserving, allowing us to start our garden early using some -- he was a chemist and I'm a biologist -- using some very well known, well established properties of water and when it freezes it gives off heat called the heat of fusion and that heat could protect your plants from freezing. They do it in orchards, for example, by spraying water. So we came up with a device and it took us a little while to come up with it, but we came up with a device called the Wall O' Water Plant Protector. And so I figured, alright, this is going to give me my key, we can go back here and this is going to provide enough income, but it became obvious to me that this was going to take awhile for this to grow and so I had been going to officers advance course with three people. One of them was a chaplain that had been involved with my coming to the Lord. Another one was a person that I met in Salt Lake City in Utah. This is Salt Lake where the course was, who was a business major and so the business major heard about what we were doing because one of the nights we had to talk about something we were doing and I talked about it and he said, "Oh, this is a great idea. I want to help you make this happen." So he became the president of the company and he got things rolling as far as the business side is concerned. And so I was convinced that this was going to be my key to being able to come back here. Well, as I said, it very quickly became obvious it was not. It takes, like any new idea, almost any new idea, it takes a long time to get going and I decided well I better consider trying to find a job back here. Well, it turned out that Chris had been flying back to help her dad for just a little while and on the same flight she ran into Roy Bear who was flying out Midwest for something, I can't remember what it was, and they got talking, of course they knew each other from here, and he said, "Well, you know, I have been teaching anatomy and physiology in summer school, and I just don't want to do it anymore. So there's an opportunity for Carl to teach that." Well, I had never, you know, my major was at the population level or above. I mean, my focus, and I had not really had much in the way of physiology. But I, you know, this is an opportunity, I couldn't refuse this. So I put in for it and I got the job and that was important because it filled in a part of my education that was lacking because I started focusing not at the population level and above in the levels of complexity, but at the species level and below in levels of complexity. So, it really rounded out my education by forcing me to learn the material. You know, if you want to learn something, teach it. And so all of that played a role in -- as I was going through and teaching I was seeing things that played into very nicely into this idea that, you know, there really is a creator behind all of this. And so in the middle of all of this I suddenly get a letter out of nowhere. I have no idea, and I've asked them and they won't tell me where they got my name, but I got a letter saying that the Oxford Round Table is having a session on faith and science, the great matter, and would I like to be involved in it. And my initial reaction was I'd like to be and I've been thinking about this a lot and I've got a lot of thoughts on it, but, boy, do I have time to put something together and my three sons said, yes, you've got to do this, Dad. And so I said yes and I put the paperwork through Norwich and they said yes and so I was invited to go to the Oxford Round Table and make a presentation. And that's when I had to formally put down all of my thoughts. Since that time, and that was published online and since that time I've had a chance to present it elsewhere and to develop the thoughts a lot more 17 and the evidence now is even more compelling in my mind than it was even when I did it at Oxford. The primary thing that we have to recognize is that -- and this is something that makes sense if there is a creator behind all of this, is that science now fully recognizes, there are very few scientists who don't agree with this, that the universe began with an event called the Big Bang, 13.82 billion years ago and that accompanying that event the universe was imbued with about 20 fundamental forces constants and masses whose values are such that if they weren't exactly what they were we wouldn't be having this recording and that does two things. It says A, there's a beginning, so if you've got a beginning logically you've got to have something who begins it. An uncaused cause as it's sometimes referred to, and, also, that that beginning was accompanied with some very suspicious characteristics. Now, science by definition, and properly so, eliminates -- it doesn't eliminate. It admits it cannot investigate miracles. It is just not designed to follow miracles. Science can give us insights that I think can help us to understand whether or not miracles are possible, whether or not there is a God. And the point that this revealed at the time was that we have enough information, science has enough information about that moment of creation or of coming into existence of the universe, let's not call it creation at this point, that it has to be explained or it can be explained only by invoking infinity because only with infinity can you get all of these 20 or so values coming together with their precise values. Presumably they're independent coming together and having a situation where you would have a universe come into existence because the probability of this happening is so, so very, very tiny, all of them with their values. So, there are about eight ways of the sciences come up with explaining this and all eight of them can be reduced to this use of infinity and I say there are three ways that we invoke infinity. Science embraces two. One is that the universe is infinite and we're in the part that works with these constants, these values, or the other is that there's an infinity of universes and we're in the one that works, or that the universe is created by an infinite mind. And quite honestly, at this point anyway, we cannot distinguish among those three. Each of them is arguably just as logical as the other. There are many scientists who would say that the third one is not acceptable and I would challenge them the way Ravi Zacharias and other people challenge them in that maybe they have some personal biases that they need to look at seriously. But be that as it may, I, in looking at this and accepting this, discovered that there are eight phenomena that keep recurring again and again at what I call essential conditions that in the evolution, in the progress, the evolution from the Big Bang to us whether it's cosmological or chemical or biological evolution, there are requisite conditions that have to occur and every time you find a requisite condition, you identify a requisite condition, there are eight phenomena that are associated with it that happen, that are met, and so it makes me wonder if there's this pattern, is there something behind the pattern? And that's where all this comes in and obviously I believe there is, there is a creator God behind this. JP: So this paper generated quite a bit of -- CP: Quite a bit of thought and discussion and continues to. Yeah, absolutely. So, one of the other reasons we wanted to come back to Norwich, to continue on in this vein, was that I had as part of the coming to a belief and a faith in Christ, and being at a military installation, it was logical that I would find Officers Christian Fellowship. Officers 18 Christian Fellowship is a fellowship, as it states, of officers in the military and this is the Army -- the US branch of it, but there's worldwide groups called by different names, who embrace Christian faith and use it, try to use it, in their life and in their leadership roles. And so I encountered it and became convinced that was something that Norwich could benefit from. And so one of the reasons we came back was to form a Christian fellowship at Norwich using Officers Christian Fellowship as our basic model. So we came back in 1982. Chris preceded me by about four months and so we -- I arrived here in March -- permanently arrived here in March of 1982, getting ready to teach that summer school course, and I began immediately looking for a student that would be interested in forming a Christian fellowship and I couldn't find any. I looked and went to the chapel, asked around, I was having no luck. And one day I was walking on the upper parade ground, I don't remember why, but I was walking on the upper parade ground towards Jackman on the western side and I saw a cadet coming toward me and the Holy Spirit said to me, "You see that cadet? He's the one I want you to talk to about starting a Christian fellowship." And of course my reaction, my immediate reaction, was yeah, sure. I'm so concerned about this that I just created that thought in my mind, and I said I'm not going to pay any attention to it. But the closer I got to this cadet, we were walking towards one another, the more I felt the Holy Spirit saying, "Do it, do it," and it got to the point where I knew that if I hadn't done it I would be in disobedience to God. I would be disobeying the Holy Spirit and so I stopped him. I said, "Young man, you probably are not going to understand what I'm about to tell you and you're going to think I'm nuts, but the Holy Spirit just told me that I'm supposed to talk to you about starting a Christian fellowship at Norwich," at which point he stopped, I mean, he was stopped. He kind of went, "You're kidding me," and kind of fell back, took a step back, and he said, "As I was coming towards you, the Holy Spirit was telling me that I've got to talk to you about starting a Christian fellowship at Norwich." So, that started the Norwich Christian Fellowship. The cadet's name was John Pitrowiski and we started a fellowship that was in 1982, and that must have been -- I'm gathering, I'm thinking it might have been in April, I didn't put the date down. And so that was still in the days when I think Norwich went further beyond May. I think they went to late May or beginning of June, and so it wasn't very long but he had a couple of friends from classes beneath him, Joe Saltsman being one of them, who wanted to be part of this. And so it continued from that year on. And so last year we celebrated our 30 th year together and it's been a great trip helping Norwich students who are inclined to follow the Lord and find out about Officers Christian Fellowship, et cetera. So John Pitrowski, I lost track of him because he was a senior and he graduated a month or two after we formed the fellowship. And I had assumed that I must have done this in the fall of '83 because, you know, I had to have had a longer year. I had almost a year with him before he left that was my assumption. So I went through all of the year books from '80 -- let's see, '82, it would be '83 on. I couldn't find his name so I -- you know, did I somehow get his name wrong? But I asked Joe Saltsman and he says, "Yeah, I remember John." So I knew I had it right and one day -- actually, about a year before our 30th, it all of a sudden dawned on me. I said, "Do you know what? Is it possible that he was in the class of '82?" So I got out the '82 yearbook and sure enough there he was. Come to find out he goes to a church in Waterbury very close to the church I go to.19 JP: You're kidding. CP: He's been around all of this time. JP: Oh, no kidding. CP: So, on the 30th, which was his 30th reunion of course, we got together and had a big celebration. JP: That's wonderful. Do you have time for STEM? CP: Sure, sure. What happened is as I -- when I was in the eighth grade at Northfield I entered the state science fair with my shell collection. Now, in this day and age you couldn't do that and that's not really important to understand, but one of the things that I had really gotten involved with as a kid, and why I was considering marine biology, is I loved shells. I loved the animals that made shells and I loved shells themselves because I'm kind of artistic and I kind of like art stuff as well. And shells are very beautiful, they're geometric, they're colorful, they're wonderful things. So I was naturally attracted to them. So I entered that in eighth grade, won first place in the state science and math fair, and then again in my senior year I did the same thing, only I did some research and did some dissections and had some studies that I had done. Again, not the kind of stuff that we now do in the science fairs, but at the time it was. And again I won first place. So I was kind of sold on science fairs. So from that time on I offered to judge in science fairs. So at the University of Illinois, in Utah I judged, in Maryland I judged, I think, and I'm not 100 percent sure whether I did or not, but I know at the University of Illinois I did and in Utah I did. In Utah, because I was coming in from Dugway Proving Ground I was coming in as an Army judge and it was part of my assignment, my military points to do this as a military judge. So I did it for a year or two and one of the guys that I was doing it with had been working with the Army Research Office and their program of judging the International Science and Engineering Fair. So he'd been part of the Army judges for them. And he said, "I'm going to have to get out of this. Would you like to take my place?" So I said, "Well, yeah." So that year the international fair was in San Antonio and I went there and became a member of the Army judging team, generally about 30 judges every year from the Army would judge the International Science and Engineering Fair and give wonderful prizes. We sent students to the Plum Blossom Festival in Japan or the Fortnight in England, in London. You know, when the Army judges came around the students took notice. So it was a great assignment and a great opportunity and they treat the judges really well. Afterwards they have a big shindig for them with lots of cheese and lots of hors d'oeuvres and lots of wine and stuff, and I said, boy, this is a deal! So I became sold on that and did for the next 25 years served in that capacity almost every year. A couple years I didn't make it and in the last five I was the Chief Army Judge in charge in all of those 30 judges and also got some other assignments related to that. I became the Army judge for the National Junior Science and Humanities Symposium, which is a similar kind of thing done at about the same time of year, but rather than having a poster session, which is what the International Science and Engineering Fair poster presentation judges. The National Junior Science and 20 Humanities Symposium has a platform presentation. So it's a different -- you can, you know, sometimes the same projects can be in both but there are different ways of presenting the information. So, that convinced me that, I mean, I was already convinced, but that certainly drove the nail home that I was very much still interested in STEM and then I came to Norwich and of course the science fair was being held here and so I immediately became a judge in the science fair and recognized that Vermont State Science and Math Fair was not, it was one of the two or three states not involved in ISEF, and said, you know, I've got to get it involved but I just do not have the time to teach and to do the Vermont State Science and Math Fair component that would get us involved with ISEF. But I made a pledge that I would, to myself, I guess, that once I retired from the military in 2003 because that was when I turned 60, that I would make an effort to get us involved with ISEF. And at that point I had been working with Mary Hoppe and, oh, come on, I'm drawing a blank here. We'll have to get that back up. What's her name? [Martha McBride] Anyway, who had been the two directors, working with them to kind of be an understudy. And so the next year I said I'm going to continue this process as an understudy and I'm going to link us up with ISEF. Now, the main thing about ISEF is you send, at that time, one winner on to international -- from your state fair, on to the International Science and Engineering Fair to compete there, but that requires money and of course the science fair had no money. I mean, it had very little money that they were -- the major initiative that I saw I had to do with come up with a way of getting money and that has become a really time consuming operation. We raise in terms of actual awards and prizes and trip money, we raise about $25,000 a year now and it takes a lot of time to do that even though I have -- almost all of that is coming from established partners, as we call them, because every year you have to renew it, you have to send out emails, you have to send out letters, you have to follow up on them. Some of them follow up themselves, some of them you have to follow up on. You have to record all of this so you know what you did because we have over 120 partners. It's trying to keep all of them straight. You know, what conversation you had with which one three weeks ago is just, you know, you've got to keep accurate records of that. So it's a very time consuming process. But we are really making progress, we are making headway. We are getting more and more students involved in science fair projects and of course the problem with our country -- one of the problems with our country today -- is that many of our students look at Science Technology Engineering and Math, STEM, as being over their heads, over their ability, and we want to make sure that students understand that in many cases that's not the case. It's that they haven't had the opportunities to get excited by it. For example, when I was in the science fair as a senior, that was during the space race and I remember going from the state science fair to the New England science fair and that was during the New England science fair was the -- we heard over the speakers an announcement that the US had successfully sent our first astronaut into orbit. And so those were exciting times and those are the kinds of things that get people's kids' imagination going. Well, we needed something like that because let's face it, if we're going to retain our position as strategically as number one in the world, we have got to have a good Science Technology Engineering, and Math. I had recognized, having been travelling a few other places in the world that the US, high school STEM scores were very woefully low and yet, here we are number one in the world. How can that be? Well, there's a number of reasons, but one of the reasons is, what I had discovered was happening at Norwich, is that between 21 high school and graduating from college the role of the university in this country is to push our kids. It's really important that we push our kids and make them learn the stuff that other kids were learning in high school elsewhere around the world. And, for example, in Japan they're pushed hard, they do well in high school and they score well, but my oldest son, English as a second language teacher in Japan, so we went over to visit him and it turns out that their college over there is almost a lark. And so we can catch up with them and we do catch up with them and we pass them. Certainly other reasons for this is we get a lot of influx from the best of the foreign countries as well, too. I'm not trying to downplay that. But it became obvious to me that we really needed to do something positive and we need to do something positive to encourage our young kids to discover that science, technology, engineering, and math are wonderful and they're exciting and they're full of all kinds of challenges and opportunities and experiences that you're not going to get any other way and I think we're beginning to get that. JP: That's wonderful. You have done so much and you have been -- CP: I've been blessed. I haven't really tried to do this or do that. It's just that things have fallen in my path and I think because of Norwich I don't hesitate, I don't pull back from taking advantage of them, but I really have been blessed with lots of opportunities, lots of fun stuff. JP: You have done a lot of really amazing things. The Pinkham Pearson Index alone, notwithstanding the other stuff. Do you have any relatives at Norwich besides your dad? CP: My oldest brother, the one who said that I should stay in the military, in the reserves, David, who lives in Montpelier, he's still around. He's 87 I think. He was in the Second World War and after the war he came to Norwich for two years in engineering. He actually showed me a paper he wrote on nuclear power (laughs) that at the time of the Second World War was still a concept, and then he transferred to Cornell to finish his degree in engineering. So he's part of Norwich. I have two of my three sons attended Norwich and youngest, well, the middle son went to Vermont, VC, Vermont College, when it was part of Norwich and my youngest son came here and majored in psychology and actually has gotten a masters from Norwich in the masters degree, online degree program in criminal justice management or administration. JP: What's his name? CP: Kristian Pinkham. JP: Kristian Pinkham. Amazing. The Pinkhams at Norwich. CP: And the middle one is Kreig Pinkham. JP: With a C or K?22 CP: K. All my three sons are with K's. Kevin is my oldest. He's an English professor carrying on the family tradition of teaching down at Nyack College in New York, and Kreig is the director of the Washington County Youth Service Bureau, which is really responsible for homeless and run away youth in the state of Vermont. And my youngest son is a DEA agent in El Paso, Texas. JP: Wow, that's amazing! Gosh, I want to ask you a little bit about what advice would you give a rook today about how to survive and thrive the way that you did? CP: Well, the first thing is, again, remember -- and I still tell them this -- the two things that I think are important. One is that nothing lasts forever and so you can get through the rook school, the rook experience. If you keep this in mind it will keep you sane. And secondly, that if you allow it to, Norwich will push you and will help you to develop as an individual, but you've got to go along with the flow. You can't resist the flow. You've got to take advantage of the opportunities that it provides. I think that's really important. And of course, obviously, the students that I come into contact with through Norwich Christian Fellowship, I say to continue to develop your spiritual understanding, your spiritual walk, your spiritual self. And as a teacher I think I made it clear in my courses. On the first day of course I said, first day of class I said, "You've got to understand that I am a Christian and my worldview is formed by that -- is informed by that. I will not mention anymore about it in class. You will hear an awful lot about evolution in class because I'm an evolutionary biologist and if you feel that there is a problem between the two, I'm more than happy to talk with you about how that problem is not real, but that's got to be done outside of class." And so I made it clear in all of my classes that that was something that I -- that they needed to know about me in order to be fair and open. JP: Wow. How do you define leadership or have you already, do you think? CP: Well, to be honest with you, I've not given a whole lot of thought to what leadership really is, but on the spot I would have to say that leadership is a willingness to lead and a willingness to -- openness to see opportunities and to think creatively about these opportunities and how you might use them. And that's a good question because it brings up another story that I think I would like to relate to. And that is the story of the Russian scientist. Shortly after I left Edgewood as my individual mobilization designee assignment, I was assigned back to Edgewood from Dugway. And the two weeks that I was at Edgewood, my boss had -- because he was a North American peregrine falcon banding program coordinator, had gone to Russia, not during that two weeks, but he had earlier gone to Russia and met with and formed a working relationship with his Russian corresponding -- his Russian equivalent, and he and another Russian scientist were scheduled to come to the US during this two weeks that I was going to be assigned to Edgewood Arsenal, to Scott's group. And so this was during the Cold War, but there was some efforts at detent and this being something where there was no weapon system involved or anything like that. It was something as regarded by the government as being worthwhile. So I was invited by Scott to help him get his -- he had just bought a dilapidated Southern mansion in Maryland to get it up kind of a little bit in shape for this 23 meeting. And so I helped him do it and the Russians came and we spent an evening toasting one another and going through bottles after bottles of vodka and, again, my Norwich training came through because I was able to drink two Russians under the table. I'm not overly -- well, yes, I'm proud of that. Let's face it. I don't drink that way anymore, but at the time there was a value to it because when I was at Norwich, I drank like a Norwich student. So, anyway, in the process of that evening, we had a conversation and it was very obvious to me in this conversation that something was wrong, and I'm going to explain what was wrong, but I've got to go back just a little bit. In grad school finished all my courses except for one, population genetics. Population genetics was taught by a newly minted post-doc who had the audacity to expect his students to think. Well, I was a good student because I was fantastic at rote memory, I wish I still were, but at that time I was really good at it. And I wasn't used to a course where they said think and I got a 48 on the final exam and he was good enough to give me a D in the course. I had been essentially a straight A student and that shook me up as you can well imagine. And so I had to ask myself, is thinking a skill that I don't have? Is it something I'll never have or is it a skill that can be acquired? So I started researching thinking, creative thinking, and discovered that it is a skill that can be learned that every human being is born with it but quite often the school system teaches us out of it. In my case it was perhaps the school system, but more important, understand I love my father and he was a wonderful person, but he was an old guard, old school military guy. It was his way or not. So very quickly I learned it didn't do any good to think, it didn't do any good to explain things to him, my side of the story, because there was only his side of the story, so I stopped learning how to think. And so I got to this moment in grad school, this crisis moment, and discovered that I didn't know how to think. From the studies, however, from taking courses and everything I learned how to think and that's why I've got several patents and I've been able to come up with the Pinkham Pearson Index, et cetera. But as I was talking with these Russians, it became very obvious to me they were suffering from the same problem I had been suffering from. It was dangerous for them to think. So the only way they could come up with any thought whatsoever was to just randomly go all over the place and hope that somewhere sooner or later they would stumble across something that was useful and relevant. At that instant I knew we had won the Cold War. It was clear to me that they were fighting an impediment that would just prevent them from doing anything that we had to worry about. And, in fact, that's the way it turned out. JP: That's a nice -- that's a good story, big picture, little picture. Is there anything else that you would like to say? Anything about the Citizen Soldier or -- CP: The Citizen Soldier is a very, very important concept and I'd like to think that I embody it. The reason I feel that way is because I think I embody it, but the soldier doesn't always have to be, obviously, a fighting individual in the sense of a combat. Combat service and combat service support are two very, very important aspects of the military and you can be in combat, and my hat is off to everyone who is in that position, whose life is at risk, willingly puts their life at risk for their country and for their comrades, but there's also a role for those of us who are a little bit less brave, like myself, who want to serve and have a gift to give to the country but can give it in a way where the risk to life 24 and limb is not anywhere nearly as great as it is in the combat arms. So, I think the Citizen Soldier is a very important aspect that we need to be aware of and promote. And I'm proud to say I'm a part of Norwich which founded the concept. And I generally don't miss opportunities when I'm talking with youngsters to point that out to them. JP: Is there anything else you'd like to add? CP: Probably, but I can't think of it right now. I think that's about it. JP: That's about it. Thank you. CP: Oh, you're welcome. Thank you for the opportunity, I enjoyed this. This is fun. JP: This has been fascinating and I think it's going to be fascinating for people to hear. I think it's going to be very interesting for people who are interested in the different things you've spoken about and to hear you say them. So thank you. I'm going to hit stop. I need to do a little intro. And we're back with Carl Pinkham. CP: So the parting Norwich story while I was a student has to do with three events that happened my last three days at Norwich. On Friday I was commissioned a second lieutenant in armor. On Saturday I was married to Christine Waite who has been my wife for almost 50 years and on Sunday I graduated. JP: That's a busy -- CP: That's a very busy time. (laughter) JP: That's good. CP: That's it. JP: Thank you. END OF AUDIO FILE
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Daniel Deudney on Mixed Ontology, Planetary Geopolitics, and Republican Greenpeace
This is the second in a series of Talks dedicated to the technopolitics of International Relations, linked to the forthcoming double volume 'The Global Politics of Science and Technology' edited by Maximilian Mayer, Mariana Carpes, and Ruth Knoblich
World politics increasingly abrasions with the limits of state-centric thinking, faced as the world is with a set of issues that affect not only us collectively as mankind, but also the planet itself. While much of IR theorizing seems to shirk such realizations, the work of Daniel Deudney has consistently engaged with the complex problems engendered by the entanglements of nuclear weapons, the planetary environment, space exploration, and the kind of political associations that might help us to grapple with our fragile condition as humanity-in-the world. In this elaborate Talk, Deudney—amongst others—lays out his understanding of the fundamental forces that drive both planetary political progress and problems; discusses the kind of ontological position needed to appreciate these problems; and argues for the merits of a republican greenpeace model to political organization.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
The study of politics is the study of human politics and the human situation has been—and is being—radically altered by changes in the human relationships with the natural and material worlds. In my view, this means IR and related intellectual disciplines should focus on better understanding the emergence of the 'global' and the 'planetary,' their implications for the overall human world and its innumerable sub-worlds, and their relations with the realization of basic human needs. The global and the planetary certainly don't comprise all of the human situation, but the fact that the human situation has become global and planetary touches every other facet of the human situation, sometimes in fundamental ways. The simple story is that the human world is now 'global and planetary' due to the explosive transformation over the last several centuries of science-based technology occurring within the geophysical and biophysical features of planet Earth. The natural Earth and its relationship with humans have been massively altered by the vast amplifications in dispersed human agency produced by the emergence and spread of machine-based civilization. The overall result of these changes has been the emergence of a global- and planetary-scale material and social reality that is in some ways similar, but in other important ways radically different, from earlier times. Practices and structures inherited from the pre-global human worlds have not adequately been adjusted to take the new human planetary situation into account and their persistence casts a long and partially dark shadow over the human prospect.
A global and planetary focus is also justified—urgently—by the fact that the overall human prospect on this planet, and the fate of much additional life on this planet, is increasingly dependent on the development and employment of new social arrangements for interacting with these novel configurations of material and natural possibilities and limits. Human agency is now situated, and is making vastly fateful choices—for better or worse—in a sprawling, vastly complex aggregation of human-machine-nature assemblies which is our world. The 'fate of the earth' now partly hinges on human choices, and helping to make sure these choices are appropriate ones should be the paramount objective of political scientific and theoretical efforts. However, no one discipline or approach is sufficient to grapple successfully with this topic. All disciplines are necessary. But there are good reasons to believe that 'IR' and related disciplines have a particularly important possible practical role to play. (I am also among those who prefer 'global studies' as a label for the enterprise of answering questions that cut across and significantly subsume both the 'international' and the 'domestic.')
My approach to grappling with this topic is situated—like the work of now vast numbers of other IR theorists and researchers of many disciplines—in the study of 'globalization.' The now widely held starting point for this intellectual effort is the realization that globalization has been the dominant pattern or phenomenon, the story of stories, over at least the last five centuries. Globalization has been occurring in military, ecological, cultural, and economic affairs. And I emphasize—like many, but not all, analysts of globalization—that the processes of globalization are essentially dependent on new machines, apparatuses, and technologies which humans have fabricated and deployed. Our world is global because of the astounding capabilities of machine civilization. This startling transformation of human choice by technological advance is centrally about politics because it is centrally about changes in power. Part of this power story has been about changes in the scope and forms of domination. Globalization has been, to state the point mildly, 'uneven,' marked by amplifications of violence and domination and predation on larger and wider scales. Another part of the story of the power transformation has been the creation of a world marked by high degrees of interdependence, interaction, speed, and complexity. These processes of globalization and the transformation of machine capabilities are not stopping or slowing down but are accelerating. Thus, I argue that 'bounding power'—the growth, at times by breathtaking leaps, of human capabilities to do things—is now a fundamental feature of the human world, and understanding its implications should, in my view, be a central activity for IR scholars.
In addressing the topic of machine civilization and its globalization on Earth, my thinking has been centered first around the developing of 'geopolitical' lines argument to construct a theory of 'planetary geopolitics'. 'Geopolitics' is the study of geography, ecology, technology, and the earth, and space and place, and their interaction with politics. The starting point for geopolitical analysis is accurate mapping. Not too many IR scholars think of themselves as doing 'geography' in any form. In part this results from of the unfortunate segregation of 'geography' into a separate academic discipline, very little of which is concerned with politics. Many also mistake the overall project of 'geopolitics' with the ideas, and egregious mistakes and political limitations, of many self-described 'geopoliticans' who are typically arch-realists, strong nationalists, and imperialists. Everyone pays general lip service to the importance of technology, but little interaction occurs between IR and 'technology studies' and most IR scholars are happy to treat such matters as 'technical' or non-political in character. Despite this general theoretical neglect, many geographic and technological factors routinely pop into arguments in political science and political theory, and play important roles in them.
Thinking about the global and planetary through the lens of a fuller geopolitics is appealing to me because it is the human relationship with the material world and the Earth that has been changed with the human world's globalization. Furthermore, much of the actual agendas of movements for peace, arms control, and sustainability are essentially about alternative ways of ordering the material world and our relations with it. Given this, I find an approach that thinks systematically about the relations between patterns of materiality and different political forms is particularly well-suited to provide insights of practical value for these efforts.
The other key focus of my research has been around extending a variety of broadly 'republican' political insights for a cluster of contemporary practical projects for peace, arms control, and environmental stewardship ('greenpeace'). Even more than 'geopolitics,' 'republicanism' is a term with too many associations and meanings. By republics I mean political associations based on popular sovereignty and marked by mutual limitations, that is, by 'bounding power'—the restraint of power, particularly violent power—in the interests of the people generally. Assuming that security from the application of violence to bodies is a primary (but not sole) task of political association, how do republican political arrangements achieve this end? I argue that the character and scope of power restraint arrangements that actually serve the fundamental security interests of its popular sovereign varies in significant ways in different material contexts.
Republicanism is first and foremost a domestic form, centered upon the successive spatial expansion of domestic-like realms, and the pursuit of a constant political project of maximally feasible ordered freedom in changed spatial and material circumstances. I find thinking about our global and planetary human situation from the perspective of republicanism appealing because the human global and planetary situation has traits—most notably high levels of interdependence, interaction, practical speed, and complexity—that make it resemble our historical experience of 'domestic' and 'municipal' realms. Thinking with a geopolitically grounded republicanism offers insights about global governance very different from the insights generated within the political conceptual universe of hierarchical, imperial, and state-centered political forms. Thus planetary geopolitics and republicanism offers a perspective on what it means to 'Think Globally and Act Locally.' If we think of, or rather recognize, the planet as our locality, and then act as if the Earth is our locality, then we are likely to end up doing various approximations of the best-practice republican forms that we have successfully developed in our historically smaller domestic localities.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?
Like anybody else, the formative events in my intellectual development have been shaped by the thick particularities of time and place. 'The boy is the father of the man,' as it is said. The first and most direction-setting stage in the formation of my 'green peace' research interests was when I was in 'grade school,' roughly the years from age 6-13. During these years my family lived in an extraordinary place, St Simons Island, a largely undeveloped barrier island off the coast of southern Georgia. This was an extremely cool place to be a kid. It had extensive beaches, and marshes, as well as amazing trees of gargantuan proportions. My friends and I spent much time exploring, fishing, camping out, climbing trees, and building tree houses. Many of these nature-immersion activities were spontaneous, others were in Boy Scouts. This extraordinary natural environment and the attachments I formed to it, shaped my strong tendency to see the fates of humans and nature as inescapably intertwined. But the Boy Scouts also instilled me with a sense of 'virtue ethics'. A line from the Boy Scout Handbook captures this well: 'Take a walk around your neighborhood. Make a list of what is right and wrong about it. Make a plan to fix what is not right.' This is a demotic version of Weber's political 'ethic of responsibility.' This is very different from the ethics of self-realization and self-expression that have recently gained such ground in America and elsewhere. It is now very 'politically incorrect' to think favorably of the Boy Scouts, but I believe that if the Scouting experience was universally accessible, the world would be a much improved place.
My kid-in-nature life may sound very Tom Sawyer, but it was also very Tom Swift. My friends and I spent much of our waking time reading about the technological future, and imaginatively play-acting in future worlds. This imaginative world was richly fertilized by science fiction comic books, television shows, movies, and books. Me and my friends—juvenile technological futurists and techno-nerds in a decidedly anti-intellectual culture—were avid readers of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein, and each new issue of Analog was eagerly awaited. While we knew we were Americans, my friends and I had strong inclinations to think of ourselves most essentially as 'earthlings.' We fervently discussed extraterrestrial life and UFOs, and we eagerly awaited the day, soon to occur, we were sure, in which we made 'first contact.' We wanted to become, if not astronauts, then designers and builders of spaceships. We built tree houses, but we filled them with discarded electronics and they became starships. We rode bicycles, but we lugged about attaché cases filled with toy ray guns, transistor radios, firecrackers, and homemade incendiary devices. We built and fired off rockets, painstaking assembled plastic kit models of famous airplanes and ships, and then we would blow them apart with our explosives. The future belonged to technology, and we fancied ourselves its avant garde.
Yet the prospect of nuclear Armageddon seemed very real. We did 'duck and cover' drills at school, and sat for two terrifying weeks through the Cuban Missile Crisis. My friends and I had copies of the Atomic Energy Commission manuals on 'nuclear effects,' complete with a slide-rule like gadget that enabled us to calculate just what would happen if near-by military bases were obliterated by nuclear explosions. Few doubted that we were, in the words of a pop song, 'on the eve of destruction.' These years were also the dawning of 'the space age' in which humans were finally leaving the Earth and starting what promised to be an epic trek, utterly transformative in its effects, to the stars. My father worked for a number of these years for a large aerospace military-industrial firm, then working for NASA to build the very large rockets needed to launch men and machines to the moon and back. My friends and I debated fantastical topics, such as the pros and cons of emigrating to Mars, and how rapidly a crisis-driven exodus from the earth could be organized.
Two events that later occurred in the area where I spent my childhood served as culminating catalytic events for my greenpeace thinking. First, some years after my family moved away, the industrial facility to mix rocket fuel that had been built by the company my father worked for, and that he had helped put into operation, was struck by an extremely violent 'industrial accident,' which reduced, in one titanic flash, multi-story concrete and steel buildings filled with specialized heavy industrial machinery (and everyone in them) into a grey powdery gravel ash, no piece of which was larger than a fist. Second, during the late 1970s, the US Navy acquired a large tract of largely undeveloped marsh and land behind another barrier island (Cumberland), an area 10-15 miles from where I had lived, a place where I had camped, fished, and hunted deer. The Navy dredged and filled what was one of the most biologically fertile temperate zone estuaries on the planet. There they built the east coast base for the new fleet of Trident nuclear ballistic missile submarines, the single most potent violence machine ever built, thus turning what was for me the wildest part of my wild-encircled childhood home into one of the largest nuclear weapons complexes on earth. These events catalyzed for me the realization that there was a great struggle going on, for the Earth and for the future, and I knew firmly which side I was on.
My approach to thinking about problems was also strongly shaped by high school debate, where I learned the importance of 'looking at questions from both sides,' and from this stems my tendency to look at questions as debates between competing answers, and to focus on decisively engaging, defeating, and replacing the strongest and most influential opposing positions. As an undergraduate at Yale College, I started doing Political Theory. I am sure that I was a very vexing student in some ways, because (the debater again) I asked Marxist questions to my liberal and conservative professors, and liberal and conservative ones to my Marxist professors. Late in my sophomore year, I had my epiphany, my direction-defining moment, that my vocation would be an attempt to do the political theory of the global and the technological. Since then, the only decisions have been ones of priority and execution within this project.
Wanting to learn something about cutting-edge global and technological and issues, I next went to Washington D.C. for seven years. I worked on Capitol Hill for three and a half years as a policy aide, working on energy and conservation and renewable energy and nuclear power. I spent the other three and a half years as a Senior Researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, a small environmental and global issues think tank that was founded and headed by Lester Brown, a well-known and far-sighted globalist. I co-authored a book about renewable energy and transitions to global sustainability and wrote a study on space and space weapons. At the time I published Whole Earth Security: a Geopolitics of Peace (1983), in which my basic notions of planetary geopolitics and republicanism were first laid out. During these seven years in Washington, I also was a part-time student, earning a Master's degree in Science, Technology and Public Policy at George Washington University.
In all, these Washington experiences have been extremely valuable for my thinking. Many political scientists view public service as a low or corrupting activity, but this is, I think, very wrong-headed. The reason that the democratic world works as well as it does is because of the distributive social intelligence. But social intelligence is neither as distributed nor as intelligent as it needs to be to deal with many pressing problems. My experience as a Congressional aide taught me that most of the problems that confront my democracy are rooted in various limits and corruptions of the people. I have come to have little patience with those who say, for example, rising inequality is inherent in capital C capitalism, when the more proximate explanation is that the Reagan Republican Party was so successful in gutting the progressive tax system previously in place in the United States. Similarly, I see little value in claims, to take a very contemporary example, that 'the NSA is out of control' when this agency is doing more or less what the elected officials, responding to public pressures to provide 'national security' loudly demanded. In democracies, the people are ultimately responsible.
As I was immersed in the world of arms control and environmental activism I was impressed by the truth of Keynes's oft quoted line, about the great practical influence of the ideas of some long-dead 'academic scribbler.' This is true in varying degrees in every issue area, but in some much more than others. This reinforced my sense that great potential practical consequence of successfully innovating in the various conceptual frameworks that underpinned so many important activities. For nuclear weapons, it became clear to me that the problem was rooted in the statist and realist frames that people so automatically brought to a security question of this magnitude.
Despite the many appeals of a career in DC politics and policy, this was all for me an extended research field-trip, and so I left Washington to do a PhD—a move that mystified many of my NGO and activist friends, and seemed like utter folly to my political friends. At Princeton University, I concentrated on IR, Political Theory, and Military History and Politics, taking courses with Robert Gilpin, Richard Falk, Barry Posen, Sheldon Wolin and others. In my dissertation—entitled Global Orders: Geopolitical and Materialist Theories of the Global-Industrial Era, 1890-1945—I explored IR and related thinking about the impacts of the industrial revolution as a debate between different world order alternatives, and made arguments about the superiority of liberalist, internationalist, and globalist arguments—most notably from H.G. Wells and John Dewey—to the strong realist and imperialist ideas most commonly associated with the geopolitical writers of this period.
I also continued engaging in activist policy affiliated to the Program on Nuclear Policy Alternatives at the Center for Energy andEnvironmental Studies (CEES), which was then headed by Frank von Hippel, a physicist turned 'public interest scientist', and a towering figure in the global nuclear arms control movement. I was a Post Doc at CEES during the Gorbachev era and I went on several amazing and eye-opening trips to the Soviet Union. Continuing my space activism, I was able to organize workshops in Moscow and Washington on large-scale space cooperation, gathering together many of the key space players on both sides. While Princeton was fabulously stimulating intellectually, it was also a stressful pressure-cooker, and I maintained my sanity by making short trips, two of three weekends, over six years, to Manhattan, where I spent the days working in the main reading room of the New York Public Library and the nights partying and relaxing in a world completely detached from academic life.
When it comes to my intellectual development in terms of reading theory, the positive project I wanted to pursue was partially defined by approaches I came to reject. Perhaps most centrally, I came to reject an approach that was very intellectually powerful, even intoxicating, and which retains great sway over many, that of metaphysical politics. The politics of the metaphysicians played a central role in my coming to reject the politics of metaphysics. The fact that some metaphysical ideas and the some of the deep thinkers who advanced them, such as Heidegger, and many Marxists, were so intimately connected with really disastrous politics seemed a really damning fact for me, particularly given that these thinkers insisted so strongly on the link between their metaphysics and their politics. I was initially drawn to Nietzsche's writing (what twenty-year old isn't) but his model of the philosopher founder or law-giver—that is, of a spiritually gifted but alienated guy (and it always is a guy) with a particularly strong but frustrated 'will to power' going into the wilderness, having a deep spiritual revelation, and then returning to the mundane corrupt world with new 'tablets of value,' along with a plan to take over and run things right—seemed more comic than politically relevant, unless the prophet is armed, in which case it becomes a frightful menace. The concluding scene in Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi (sometimes translated as The Glass Bead Game) summarized by overall view of the 'high theory' project. After years of intense training by the greatest teachers the most spiritually and intellectually gifted youths finally graduate. To celebrate, they go to lake, dive in, and, having not learned how to swim, drown.
I was more attracted to Aristotle, Hume, Montesquieu, Dewey and other political theorists with less lofty and comprehensive views of what theory might accomplish; weary of actions; based on dogmatic or totalistic thinking; an eye to the messy and compromised world; with a political commitment to liberty and the interests of the many; a preference for peace over war; an aversion to despotism and empire; and an affinity for tolerance and plurality. I also liked some of those thinkers because of their emphasis on material contexts. Montesquieu seeks to analyze the interaction of material contexts and republican political forms; Madison and his contemporaries attempt to extend the spatial scope of republican political association by recombining in novel ways various earlier power restraint arrangements. I was tremendously influenced by Dewey, studying intensively his slender volume The Public and its Problems (1927)—which I think is the most important book in twentieth century political thought. By the 'public' Dewey means essentially a stakeholder group, and his main point is that the material transformations produced by the industrial revolution has created new publics, and that the political task is to conceptualize and realize forms of community and government appropriate to solving the problems that confront these new publics.
One can say my overall project became to apply and extend their concepts to the contemporary planetary situation. Concomitantly reading IR literature on nuclear weapons, I was struck by fact that the central role that material realities played in these arguments was very ad hoc, and that many of the leading arguments on nuclear politics were very unconvincing. It was clear that while Waltz (Theory Talk #40) had brilliantly developed some key ideas about anarchy made by Hobbes and Rousseau, he had also left something really important out. These sorts of deficiencies led me to develop the arguments contained in Bounding Power. I think it is highly unlikely that I would have had these doubts, or come to make the arguments I made without having worked in political theory and in policy.
I read many works that greatly influenced my thinking in this area, among them works by Lewis Mumford, Langdon Winner's Autonomous Technology, James Lovelock's Gaia, Charles Perrow's Normal Accidents (read a related article here, pdf), Jonathan Schell's Fate of the Earth and The Abolition, William Ophul's Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity... I was particularly stuck by a line in Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (pdf), that we live in a 'spaceship' like closed highly interconnected system, but lack an 'operating manual' to guide intelligently our actions. It was also during this period that I read key works by H.G. Wells, most notably his book, Anticipations, and his essay The Idea of a League of Nations, both of which greatly influenced my thinking.
This aside, the greatest contribution to my thinking has come from conversations sustained over many years with some really extraordinary individuals. To mention those that I have been arguing with, and learning from, for at least ten years, there is John O'Looney, Wesley Warren, Bob Gooding-Williams, Alyn McAuly, Henry Nau, Richard Falk, Michael Doyle (Theory Talk #1), Richard Mathew, Paul Wapner, Bron Taylor, Ron Deibert, John Ikenberry, Bill Wohlforth, Frank von Hippel, Ethan Nadelmann, Fritz Kratochwil, Barry Buzan (Theory Talk #35), Ole Waever, John Agnew (Theory Talk #4), Barry Posen, Alex Wendt (Theory Talk #3), James der Derian, David Hendrickson, Nadivah Greenberg, Tim Luke, Campbell Craig, Bill Connolly, Steven David, Jane Bennett, Daniel Levine (TheoryTalk #58), and Jairus Grove. My only regret is that I have not spoken even more with them, and with the much larger number of people I have learned from on a less sustained basis along the way.
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
I have thought a great deal about what sort of answers to this question can be generally valuable. For me, the most important insight is that success in intellectual life and academia is determined by more or less the same combination of factors that determines success more generally. This list is obvious: character, talent, perseverance and hard work, good judgment, good 'people skills,' and luck. Not everyone has a talent to do this kind of work, but the number of people who do have the talent to do this kind of work is much larger than the number of people who are successful in doing it. I think in academia as elsewhere, the people most likely to really succeed are those whose attitude toward the activity is vocational. A vocation is something one is called to do by an inner voice that one cannot resist. People with vocations never really work in one sense, because they are doing something that they would be doing even if they were not paid or required. Of course, in another sense people with vocations never stop working, being so consumed with their path that everything else matters very little. People with jobs and professions largely stop working when they when the lottery, but people with vocations are empowered to work more and better. When your vocation overlaps with your job, you should wake up and say 'wow, I cannot believe I am being paid to do this!' Rather obviously, the great danger in the life paths of people with vocations is imbalance and burn-out. To avoid these perils it is beneficial to sustain strong personal relationships, know when and how to 'take off' effectively, and sustain the ability to see things as an unfolding comedy and to laugh.
Academic life also involves living and working in a profession. Compared to the oppressions that so many thinkers and researchers have historically suffered from, contemporary professional academic life is a utopia. But academic life has several aspects unfortunate aspects, and coping successfully with them is vital. Academic life is full of 'odd balls' and the loose structure of universities and organization, combined with the tenure system, licenses an often florid display of dubious behavior. A fair number of academics have really primitive and incompetent social skills. Others are thin skinned-ego maniacs. Some are pompous hypocrites. Some are ruthlessly self-aggrandizing and underhanded. Some are relentless shirkers and free-riders. Also, academic life is, particularly relative to the costs of obtaining the years of education necessary to obtain it, not very well paid. Corruptions of clique, ideological factionalism, and nepotism occur. If not kept in proper perspective, and approached in appropriate ways, academic department life can become stupidly consuming of time, energy, and most dangerously, intellectual attention. The basic step for healthy departmental life is to approach it as a professional role.
The other big dimension of academic life is teaching. Teaching is one of the two 'deliverables' that academic organizations provide in return for the vast resources they consume. Shirking on teaching is a dereliction of responsibility, but also is the foregoing of a great opportunity. Teaching is actually one of the most assuredly consequential things academics do. The key to great teaching is, I think, very simple: inspire and convey enthusiasm. Once inspired, students learn. Once students take questions as their own, they become avid seekers of answers. Teachers of things political also have a responsibility to remain even-handed in what they teach, to make sure that they do not teach just or mainly their views, to make sure that the best and strongest versions of opposing sides are heard. Teaching seeks to produce informed and critically thinking students, not converts. Beyond the key roles of inspiration and even-handedness, the rest is the standard package of tasks relevant in any professional role: good preparation, good organization, hard work, and clarity of presentation.
Your main book, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (2007), is a mix of intellectual history, political theory and IR theory, and is targeted largely at realism. How does a reading and interpretation of a large number of old books tell us something new about realism, and the contemporary global?
Bounding Power attempts to dispel some very large claims made by realists about their self-proclaimed 'tradition,' a lineage of thought in which they place many of the leading Western thinkers about political order, such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, and the 'global geopoliticans' from the years around the beginning of the twentieth century. In the book I argue that the actual main axis of western thinking about political order (and its absence) is largely the work of 'republican' thinkers from the small number of 'republics', and that many of the key ideas that realists call realist and liberals call liberal are actually fragments of a larger, more encompassing set of arguments that were primarily in the idioms of republicanism. This entails dispelling the widely held view that the liberal and proto-liberal republican thought and practice are marked by 'idealism'—and therefore both inferior in their grasp of the problem of security-from violence and valuable only when confined to the 'domestic.' I demonstrate that this line of republican security thinkers had a robust set of claims both about material contextual factors, about the 'geopolitics of freedom', and a fuller understanding of security-from-violence. The book shows how perhaps the most important insights of this earlier cluster of arguments has oddly been dropped by both realists (particularly neorealists) and liberal international theorists. And, finally, it is an attempt to provide an understanding that posits the project of exiting anarchy on a global scale as something essentially unprecedented, and as something that the best of our inherited theory leaves us unable to say much about.
The main argument is contained in my formulation of what I think are the actual the two main sets of issues of Western structural-materialist security theory, two problematiques formulated in republican and naturalist-materialist conceptual vocabularies. The first problematique concerns the relationship between material context, the scope of tolerable anarchy, and necessary-for-security government. The second problematic concerns the relative security-viability of two main different forms of government—hierarchical and republican.
This formulation of the first problematic concerning anarchy differs from the main line of contemporary Realist argument in that it poses the question as one about the spatial scope of tolerable anarchy. The primary variable in my reconstruction of the material-contextual component of these arguments is what I term violence interdependence (absent, weak, strong, and intense). The main substantive claim of Western structural-materialist security theory is that situations of anarchy combined with intense violence interdependence are incompatible with security and require substantive government. Situations of strong and weak violence interdependence constitute a tolerable (if at times 'nasty and brutish') second ('state-of-war') anarchy not requiring substantive government. Early formulations of 'state of nature' arguments, explicitly or implicitly hinge upon this material contextual variable, and the overall narrative structure of the development of republican security theory and practice has concerned natural geographic variations and technologically caused changes in the material context, and thus the scope of security tolerable/intolerable anarchy and needed substantive government. This argument was present in early realist versions of anarchy arguments, but has been dropped by neorealists. Conversely, contemporary liberal international theorists analyze interdependence, but have little to say about violence. The result is that the realists talk about violence and security, and the liberals talk about interdependence not relating to violence, producing the great lacuna of contemporary theory: analysis of violence interdependence.
The second main problematique, concerning the relative security viability of hierarchical and republican forms, has also largely been lost sight of, in large measure by the realist insistence that governments are by definition hierarchical, and the liberal avoidance of system structural theory in favor of process, ideational, and economic variables. (For neoliberals, cooperation is seen as (possibly) occurring in anarchy, without altering or replacing anarchy.) The main claim here is that republican and proto-liberal theorists have a more complete grasp of the security political problem than realists because of their realization that both the extremes of hierarchy and anarchy are incompatible with security. In order to register this lost component of structural theory I refer to republican forms at both the unit and the system-level as being characterized by an ordering principle which I refer to as negarchy. Such political arrangements are characterized by the simultaneous negation of both hierarchy and anarchy. The vocabulary of political structures should thus be conceived as a triad-triangle of anarchy, hierarchy, and negarchy, rather than a spectrum stretching from pure anarchy to pure hierarchy. Using this framework, Bounding Power traces various formulations of the key arguments of security republicans from the Greeks through the nuclear era as arguments about the simultaneous avoidance of hierarchy and anarchy on expanding spatial scales driven by variations and changes in the material context. If we recognize the main axis of our thinking in this way, we can stand on a view of our past that is remarkable in its potential relevance to thinking and dealing with the contemporary 'global village' like a human situation.
Nuclear weapons play a key role in the argument of Bounding Power about the present, as well as elsewhere in your work. But are nuclear weapons are still important as hey were during the Cold War to understand global politics?
Since their arrival on the world scene in the middle years of the twentieth century, there has been pretty much universal agreement that nuclear weapons are in some fundamental way 'revolutionary' in their implications for security-from-violence and world politics. The fact that the Cold War is over does not alter, and even stems from, this fact. Despite this wide agreement on the importance of nuclear weapons, theorists, policy makers, and popular arms control/disarmament movements have fundamental disagreements about which political forms are compatible with the avoidance of nuclear war. I have attempted to provide a somewhat new answer to this 'nuclear-political question', and to explain why strong forms of interstate arms control are necessary for security in the nuclear age. I argue that achieving the necessary levels of arms control entails somehow exiting interstate anarchy—not toward a world government as a world state, but toward a world order that is a type of compound republican union (marked by, to put it in terms of above discussion, a nearly completely negarchical structure).
This argument attempts to close what I term the 'arms control gap', the discrepancy between the value arms control is assigned by academic theorists of nuclear weapons and their importance in the actual provision of security in the nuclear era. During the Cold War, thinking among IR theorists about nuclear weapons tended to fall into three broad schools—war strategists, deterrence statists, and arms controllers. Where the first two only seem to differ about the amount of nuclear weapons necessary for states seeking security (the first think many, the second less), the third advocates that states do what they have very rarely done before the nuclear age, reciprocal restraints on arms.
But this Cold War triad of arguments is significantly incomplete as a list of the important schools of thought about the nuclear-political question. There are four additional schools, and a combination of their arguments constitutes, I argue, a superior answer to the nuclear-political question. First are the nuclear one worlders, a view that flourished during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and held that the simple answer to the nuclear political question is to establish a world government, as some sort of state. Second are the populist anti-nuclearists, who indict state apparatuses of acting contrary to the global public's security interests. Third are the deep arms controllers, such as Jonathan Schell, who argue that nuclear weapons need to be abolished. Fourth are the theorists of omniviolence, who theorize situations produced by the leakage of nuclear weapons into the hands of non-state actors who cannot be readily deterred from using nuclear weapons. What all of these schools have in common is that they open up the state and make arguments about how various forms of political freedom—and the institutions that make it possible—are at issue in answering the nuclear-political question.
Yet one key feature all seven schools share is that they all make arguments about how particular combinations and configurations of material realities provide the basis for thinking that their answer to the nuclear-political question is correct. Unfortunately, their understandings of how material factors shape, or should shape, actual political arrangements is very ad hoc. Yet the material factors—starting with sheer physical destructiveness—are so pivotal that they merit a more central role in theories of nuclear power. I think we need to have a model that allows us to grasp how variations in material contexts condition the functionality of 'modes of protection', that is, distinct and recurring security practices (and their attendant political structures).
For instance, one mode of protection—what I term the real-state mode of protection—attempts to achieve security through the concentration, mobilization, and employment of violence capability. This is the overall, universal, context-independent strategy of realists. Bringing into view material factors, I argue, shows that this mode of protection is functional not universally but specifically—and only—in material contexts that are marked by violence-poverty and slowness. This mode of protection is dysfunctional in nuclear material contexts marked by violence abundance and high violence velocities. In contrast, a republican federal mode of protection is a bundle of practices that aim for the demobilization and deceleration of violence capacity, and that the practices associated with this mode of protection are security functional in the nuclear material context.
What emerges from such an approach to ideas about the relation between nuclear power and security from violence is that the epistemological foundations for any of the major positions about nuclear weapons are actually much weaker than we should be comfortable with. People often say the two most important questions about the nuclear age are: what is the probability that nuclear weapons will be used? And then, what will happen when they are used? The sobering truth is that we really do not have good grounds for confidently answering either of those two questions. But every choice made about nuclear weapons depends on risk calculations that depend on how we answer these questions.
You have also written extensively on space, a topic that has not recently attracted much attention from many IR scholars. How does your thinking on this relate to your overall thinking about the global and planetary situation?
The first human steps into outer space during the middle years of the twentieth century have been among the most spectacular and potentially consequential events in the globalization of machine civilization on Earth. Over the course of what many call 'the space age,' thinking about space activities, space futures, and the consequences of space activities has been dominated by an elaborately developed body of 'space expansionist' thought that makes ambitious and captivating claims about both the feasibility and the desirability of human expansion into outer space. Such views of space permeate popular culture, and at times appear to be quite influential in actual space policy. Space expansionists hold that outer space is a limitless frontier and that humans should make concerted efforts to explore and colonize and extend their military activities into space. They claim the pursuit of their ambitious projects will have many positive, even transformative, effects upon the human situation on Earth, by escaping global closure, protecting the earth's habitability, preserving political plurality, and enhancing species survival. Claims about the Earth, its historical patterns and its contemporary problems, permeate space expansionist thinking.
While the feasibility, both technological and economic, of space expansionist projects has been extensively assessed, arguments for their desirability have not been accorded anything approaching a systematic assessment. In part, such arguments about the desirability of space expansion are difficult to assess because they incorporate claims that are very diverse in character, including claims about the Earth (past, present, and future), about the ways in which material contexts made up of space 'geography' and technologies produce or heavily favor particular political outcomes, and about basic worldview assumptions regarding nature, science, technology, and life.
By breaking these space expansionist arguments down into their parts, and systematically assessing their plausibility, a very different picture of the space prospect emerges. I think there are strong reasons to think that the consequences of the human pursuit of space expansion have been, and could be, very undesirable, even catastrophic. The actual militarization of that core space technology ('the rocket') and the construction of a planetary-scope 'delivery' and support system for nuclear war-fighting has been the most important consequence of actual space activities, but these developments have been curiously been left out of accounts of the space age and assessments of its impacts. Similarly, much of actually existing 'nuclear arms control' has centered on restraining and dismantling space weapons, not nuclear weapons. Thus the most consequential space activity—the acceleration of nuclear delivery capabilities—has been curiously rendered almost invisible in accounts of space and assessments of its impacts. This is an 'unknown known' of the 'space age'. Looking ahead, the creation of large orbital infrastructures will either presuppose or produce world government, potentially of a very hierarchical sort. There are also good reasons to think that space colonies are more likely to be micro-totalitarian than free. And extensive human movement off the planet could in a variety of ways increase the vulnerability of life on Earth, and even jeopardize the survival of the human species.
Finally, I think much of space expansionist (and popular) thinking about space and the consequences of humans space activities has been marked by basic errors in practical geography. Most notably, there is the widespread failure to realize that the expansion of human activities into Earth's orbital space has enhanced global closure, because the effective distances in Earth's space make it very small. And because of the formidable natural barriers to human space activity, space is a planetary 'lid, not a 'frontier'. So one can say that the most important practical discovery of the 'space age' has been an improved understanding of the Earth. These lines of thinking, I find, would suggest the outlines of a more modest and Earth-centered space program, appropriate for the current Earth age. Overall, the fact that we can't readily expand into space is part of why we are in a new 'earth age' rather than a 'space age'.
You've argued against making the environment into a national security issue twenty years ago. Do the same now, considering that making the environment a bigger priority by making it into a national security issue might be the only way to prevent total environmental destruction?
When I started writing about the relationships between environment and security twenty years ago, not a great deal of work had been done on this topic. But several leading environmental thinkers were making the case that framing environmental issues as security issues, or what came to be called 'securitizing the environment', was not only a good strategy to get action on environmental problems, but also was useful analytically to think about these two domains. Unlike the subsequent criticisms of 'environmental security' made by Realists and scholars of conventional 'security studies', my criticism starts with the environmentalist premise that environmental deterioration is a paramount problem for contemporary humanity as a whole.
Those who want to 'securitize the environment' are attempting to do what William James a century ago proposed as a general strategy for social problem solving. Can we find, in James' language, 'a moral equivalent of war?' (Note the unfortunately acronym: MEOW). War and the threat of war, James observed, often lead to rapid and extensive mobilizations of effort. Can we somehow transfer these vast social energies to deal with other sets of problems? This is an enduring hope, particularly in the United States, where we have a 'war on drugs', a 'war on cancer', and a 'war on poverty'. But doing this for the environment, by 'securitizing the environment,' is unlikely to be very successful. And I fear that bringing 'security' orientations, institutions, and mindsets into environmental problem-solving will also bring in statist, nationalist, and militarist approaches. This will make environmental problem-solving more difficult, not easier, and have many baneful side-effects.
Another key point I think is important, is that the environment—and the various values and ends associated with habitat and the protection of habitat—are actually much more powerful and encompassing than those of security and violence. Instead of 'securitizing the environment' it is more promising is to 'environmentalize security'. Not many people think about the linkages between the environment and security-from-violence in this way, but I think there is a major case of it 'hiding in plain sight' in the trajectory of how the state-system and nuclear weapons have interacted.
When nuclear weapons were invented and first used in the 1940s, scientists were ignorant about many aspects of their effects. As scientists learned about these effects, and as this knowledge became public, many people started thinking and acting in different ways about nuclear choices. The fact that a ground burst of a nuclear weapon would produce substantial radioactive 'fall-out' was not appreciated until the first hydrogen bomb tests in the early 1950s. It was only then that scientists started to study what happened to radioactive materials dispersed widely in the environment. Evidence began to accumulate that some radioactive isotopes would be 'bio-focused', or concentrated by biological process. Public interest scientists began effectively publicizing this information, and mothers were alerted to the fact that their children's teeth were become radioactive. This new scientific knowledge about the environmental effects of nuclear explosions, and the public mobilizations it produced, played a key role in the first substantial nuclear arms control treaty, the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which banned nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere, in the ocean, and in space. Thus, the old ways of providing security were circumscribed by new knowledge and new stakeholders of environmental health effects. The environment was not securitized, security was partially environmentalized.
Thus, while some accounts by arms control theorists emphasize the importance of 'social learning' in altering US-Soviet relations, an important part of this learning was not about the nature of social and political interactions, but about the environmental consequences of nuclear weapons. The learning that was most important in motivating so many actors (both within states and in mass publics) to seek changes in politics was 'natural learning,' or more specifically learning about the interaction of natural and technological systems.
An even more consequential case of the environmentalization of security occurred in the 1970's and 1980's. A key text here is Jonathan Schell's book, The Fate of the Earth. Schell's book, combining very high-quality journalism with first rate political theoretical reflections, lays out in measured terms the new discoveries of ecologists and atmospheric scientists about the broader planetary consequences of an extensive nuclear war. Not only would hundreds of millions of people be immediately killed and much of the planet's built infrastructure destroyed, but the planet earth's natural systems would be so altered that the extinction of complex life forms, among them homo sapiens, might result. The detonation of numerous nuclear weapons and the resultant burning of cities would probably dramatically alter the earth's atmosphere, depleting the ozone layer that protects life from lethal solar radiations, and filling the atmosphere with sufficient dust to cause a 'nuclear winter.' At stake in nuclear war, scientists had learned, was not just the fate of nations, but of the earth as a life support system. Conventional accounts of the nuclear age and of the end of the Cold War are loath to admit it, but it I believe it is clear that spreading awareness of these new natural-technological possibilities played a significant role in ending the Cold War and the central role that nuclear arms control occupies in the settlement of the Cold War. Again, traditional ways of achieving security-from-violence were altered by new knowledges about their environmental consequences—security practices and arrangements were partly environmentalized.
Even more radically, I think we can also turn this into a positive project. As I wrote two decades ago, environmental restoration would probably generate political externalities that would dampen tendencies towards violence. In other words, if we address the problem of the environment, then we will be drawn to do various things that will make various types of violent conflict less likely.
Your work is permeated by references to 'material factors'. This makes it different from branches of contemporary IR—like constructivism or postmodernism—which seem to be underpinned by a profound commitment to focus solely one side of the Cartesian divide. What is your take on the pervasiveness and implications of this 'social bias'?
Postmodernism and constructivism are really the most extreme manifestations of a broad trend over the last two centuries toward what I refer to as 'social-social science' and the decline—but hardly the end—of 'natural-social science'. Much of western thought prior to this turn was 'naturalist' and thus tended to downplay both human agency and ideas. At the beginning of the nineteenth century—partly because of the influence of German idealism, partly because of the great liberationist projects that promised to give better consequence to the activities and aspirations of the larger body of human populations (previously sunk in various forms of seemingly natural bondages), and partly because of the great expansion of human choice brought about by the science-based technologies of the Industrial Revolution—there was a widespread tendency to move towards 'social-social science,' the project of attempting to explain the human world solely by reference to the human world, to explain social outcomes with reference to social causes. While this was the dominant tendency, and a vastly productive one in many ways, it existed alongside and in interaction with what is really a modernized version of the earlier 'natural-social science.' Much of my work has sought to 'bring back in' and extend these 'natural-social' lines of argument—found in figures such as Dewey and H.G. Wells—into our thinking about the planetary situation.
In many parts of both European and American IR and related areas, Postmodern and constructivist theories have significantly contributed to IR theorists by enhancing our appreciation of ideas, language, and identities in politics. As a response to the limits and blindnesses of certain types of rationalist, structuralist, and functional theories, this renewed interest in the ideational is an important advance. Unfortunately, both postmodernism and constructivism have been marked by a strong tendency to go too far in their emphasis of the ideational. Postmodernism and constructivism have also helped make theorists much more conscious of the implicit—and often severely limiting—ontological assumptions that underlay, inform, and bound their investigations. This is also a major contribution to the study of world politics in all its aspects.
Unfortunately, this turn to ontology has also had intellectually limiting effects by going too far, in the search for a pure or nearly pure social ontology. With the growth in these two approaches, there has indeed been a decided decline in theorizing about the material. But elsewhere in the diverse world of theorizing about IR and the global, theorizing about the material never came anything close to disappearing or being eclipsed. For anyone thinking about the relationships between politics and nuclear weapons, space, and the environment, theorizing about the material has remained at the center, and it would be difficult to even conceive of how theorizing about the material could largely disappear. The recent 're-discovery of the material' associated with various self-styled 'new materialists' is a welcome, if belated, re-discovery for postmodernists and constructivists. For most of the rest of us, the material had never been largely dropped out.
A very visible example of the ways in which the decline in appropriate attention to the material, an excessive turn to the ideational, and the quest for a nearly pure social ontology, can lead theorizing astray is the core argument in Alexander Wendt's main book, Social Theory of International Politics, one of the widely recognized landmarks of constructivist IR theory. The first part of the book advances a very carefully wrought and sophisticated argument for a nearly pure ideational social ontology. The material is explicitly displaced into a residue or rump of unimportance. But then, to the reader's surprise, the material, in the form of 'common fate' produced by nuclear weapons, and climate change, reappears and is deployed to play a really crucial role in understanding contemporary change in world politics.
My solution is to employ a mixed ontology. By this I mean that I think several ontologically incommensurate and very different realities are inescapable parts the human world. These 'unlikes' are inescapable parts of any argument, and must somehow be combined. There are a vast number of ways in which they can be combined, and on close examination, virtually all arguments in the social sciences are actually employing some version of a mixed ontology, however implicitly and under-acknowledged.
But not all combinations are equally useful in addressing all questions. In my version of mixed ontology—which I call 'practical naturalism'—human social agency is understood to be occurring 'between two natures': on the one hand the largely fixed nature of humans, and on the other the changing nature composed of the material world, a shifting amalgam of actual non-human material nature of geography and ecology, along with human artifacts and infrastructures. Within this frame, I posit as rooted in human biological nature, a set of 'natural needs,' most notably for security-from-violence and habitat services. Then I pose questions of functionality, by which I mean: which combinations of material practices, political structures, ideas and identities are needed to achieve these ends in different material contexts? Answering this question requires the formulation of various 'historical materialist' propositions, which in turn entails the systematic formulation of typologies and variation in both the practices, structures and ideas, and in material contexts. These arguments are not centered on explaining what has or what will happen. Instead they are practical in the sense that they are attempting to answer the question of 'what is to be done' given the fixed ends and given changing material contexts. I think this is what advocates of arms control and environmental sustainability are actually doing when they claim that one set of material practices and their attendant political structures, identities and ideas must be replaced with another if basic human needs are to going to continue to be meet in the contemporary planetary material situation created by the globalization of machine civilization on earth.
Since this set of arguments is framed within a mixed ontology, ideas and identities are a vital part of the research agenda. Much of the energy of postmodern and many varieties of critical theory have focused on 'deconstructing' various identities and ideas. This critical activity has produced and continues to produce many insights of theorizing about politics. But I think there is an un-tapped potential for theorists who are interested in ideas and identities, and who want their work to make a positive contribution to practical problem-solving in the contemporary planetary human situation in what might be termed a 'constructive constructivism'. This concerns a large practical theory agenda—and an urgent one at that, given the rapid increase in planetary problems—revolving around the task of figuring out which ideas and identities are appropriate for the planetary world, and in figuring out how they can be rapidly disseminated. Furthermore, thinking about how to achieve consciousness change of this sort is not something ancillary to the greenpeace project but vital to it. My thinking on how this should and might be done centers the construction of a new social narrative, centered not on humanity but on the earth.
Is it easy to plug your mixed ontology and interests beyond the narrow confines of IR or even the walls of the ivory tower into processes of collective knowledge proliferation in IR—a discipline increasingly characterized by compartimentalization and specialization?
The great plurality of approaches in IR today is indispensible and a welcome change. The professionalization of IR and the organization of intellectual life has some corruptions and pitfalls that are best avoided. The explosion of 'isms' and of different perspectives has been valuable and necessary in many ways, but it has also helped to foster and empower sectarian tendencies that confound the advance of knowledge. Some of the adherents of some sects and isms boast openly of establishing 'citation cartels' to favor themselves and their friends. Some theorists also have an unfortunate tendency to assume that because they have adopted a label that what they actually do is the actually the realization of the label. Thus we have 'realists' with limited grasp on realities, 'critical theorists' who repeat rather than criticize the views of other 'critical theorists,' and anti-neoliberals who are ruthless Ayn Rand-like self aggrandizers. The only way to fully address these tendencies is to talk to people you disagree with, and find and communicate with people in other disciplines.
Another consequence of this sectarianism is visible in the erosion of scholarly standards of citation. The system of academic incentives is configured to reward publication, and the publication of ideas that are new. This has a curiously perverse impact on the achievement of cumulativity. One seemingly easy and attractive path to saying something new is to say something old in new language, to say something said in another sect or field in the language of your sect or field, or easiest of all, simply ignore what other people have said if it is too much like what you are trying to say. George Santyana is wide quoted in saying that 'those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.' For academics it can unfortunately be said, 'those who can successfully forget what past academics said are free to say it again, and thus advance toward tenure.' When rampant sectarianism and decline in standards of citation is combined with a broader cultural tendency to valorize self-expression and authenticity, academic work can become an exercise in abstract self expressionism.
Confining one's intellectual life within one 'ism' or sect is sure to be self-limiting. Many of the most important and interesting questions arise between and across the sects and schools. Also, there are great opportunities in learning from people who do not fully share your assumptions and approaches. Seriously engaging the work and ideas of scholars in other sects can be very very valuable. Scholars in different sects and schools are also often really taking positions that are not so different as their labels would suggest. Perhaps because my research agenda fits uncomfortably within any of the established schools and isms, I have found particularly great value in seeking out and talking on a sustained basis with people with very different approaches.
My final question is about normativity and the way that normativity is perceived: In Europe and the United States, liberal Internationalism is increasingly considered as hollowed out, as a discursive cover for a tendency to attempt to control and regulate the world—or as an unguided idealistic missile. Doesn't adapting to a post-hegemonic world require dropping such ambitions?
American foreign policy has never been entirely liberal internationalist. Many other ideas and ideologies and approaches have often played important roles in shaping US foreign policy. But the United States, for a variety of reasons, has pursued liberal internationalist foreign policy agendas more extensively, and successfully, than any other major state in the modern state system, and the world, I think, has been made better off in very important ways by these efforts.
The net impact of the United States and of American grand strategy and particularly those parts of American brand strategy that have been more liberal internationalist in their character, has been enormously positive for the world. It has produced not a utopia by any means, but has brought about an era with more peace and security, prosperity, and freedom for more people than ever before in history.
Both American foreign policy and liberal internationalism have been subject to strong attacks from a variety of perspectives. Recently some have characterized liberal internationalism as a type of American imperialism, or as a cloak for US imperialism. Virtually every aspect of American foreign policy has been contested within the United States. Liberal internationalists have been strong enemies of imperialism and military adventurism, whether American or from other states. This started with the Whig's opposition to the War with Mexico and the Progressive's opposition to the Spanish-American War, and continued with liberal opposition to the War in Vietnam.
The claim that liberal internationalism leads to or supports American imperialism has also been recently voiced by many American realists, perhaps most notably John Mearsheimer (Theory Talk #49). He and others argue that liberal internationalism played a significant role in bringing about the War on Iraq waged by the W. Bush administration. This was indeed one of the great debacles of US foreign policy. But the War in Iraq was actually a war waged by American realists for reasons grounded in realist foreign policy thinking. It is true, as Mearsheimer emphasizes, that many academic realists criticized the Bush administration's plans and efforts in the invasion in Iraq. Some self-described American liberal internationalists in the policy world supported the war, but almost all academic American liberal internationalists were strongly opposed, and much of the public opposition to the war was on grounds related to liberal internationalist ideas.
It is patently inaccurate to say that main actors in the US government that instigated the War on Iraq were liberal internationalists. The main initiators of the war were Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Whatever can be said about those two individuals, they are not liberal internationalists. They initiated the war because they thought that the Saddam Hussein regime was a threat to American interests—basically related to oil. The Saddam regime was seen as a threat to American-centered regional hegemony in the Middle East, an order whose its paramount purpose has been the protection of oil, and the protection of the regional American allies that posses oil. Saddam Hussein was furthermore a demonstrated regional revisionist likely to seek nuclear weapons, which would greatly compromise American military abilities in the region. Everything else the Bush Administration's public propaganda machine said to justify the war was essentially window dressing for this agenda. Far from being motivated by a liberal internationalist agenda the key figures in the Bush Administration viewed the collateral damage to international institutions produced by the war as a further benefit, not a cost, of the war. It is particularly ironic that John Mearsheimer would be a critic of this war, which seems in many ways a 'text book' application of a central claim of his 'offensive realism,' that powerful states can be expected, in the pursuit of their security and interests, to seek to become and remain regional hegemons.
Of course, liberal internationalism, quite aside from dealing with these gross mischaracterizations propagated by realists, must also look to the future. The liberal internationalism that is needed for today and tomorrow is going to be in some ways different from the liberal internationalism of the twentieth century. This is a large topic that many people, but not enough, are thinking about. In a recent working paper for the Council on Foreign Relations, John Ikenberry and I have laid out some ways in which we think American liberal internationalism should proceed. The starting point is the recognition that the United States is not as 'exceptional' in its precocious liberal-democratic character, not as 'indispensible' for the protection of the balance of power or the advance of freedom, or as easily 'hegemonic' as it has been historically. But the world is now also much more democratic than ever before, with democracies old and new, north and south, former colonizers and former colonies, and in every civilizational flavor. The democracies also face an array of difficult domestic problems, are thickly enmeshed with one another in many ways, and have a vital role to play in solving global problems. We suggest that the next liberal internationalism in American foreign policy should focus on American learning from the successes of other democracies in solving problems, focus on 'leading by example of successful problem-solving' and less with 'carrots and sticks,' make sustained efforts to moderate the inequalities and externalities produced by de-regulated capitalism, devote more attention to building community among the democracies, and make sustained efforts to 'recast global bargains' and the distribution of authority in global institutions to better incorporate the interests of 'rising powers.'
Daniel Deudney is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. He has published widely in political theory and international relations, on substantive issues such as nuclear weapons, the environment as a security issue, liberal and realist international relations theory, and geopolitics.
Related links
Deudney's Faculty Profile at Johns Hopkins Read Deudney & Ikenberry's Democratic Internationalism: An American Grand Strategy for a Post-exceptionalist Era (Council on Foreign Relations Working Paper, 2012) here (pdf) Read Deudney et al's Global Shift: How the West Should Respond to the Rise of China (2011 Transatlantic Academy report) here (pdf) Read the introduction of Deudney's Bounding Power (2007) here (pdf) Read Deudney's Bringing Nature Back In: Geopolitical Theory from the Greeks to the Global Era (1999 book chapter) here (pdf) Read Deudney & Ikenberry's Who Won the Cold War? (Foreign Policy, 1992) here (pdf) Read Deudney's The Case Against Linking Environmental Degradation and National Security (Millennium, 1990) here (pdf) Read Deudney's Rivers of Energy: The Hydropower Potential (WorldWatch Institute Paper, 1981) here (pdf)