How should we as
a society understand and pursue environmental sustainability? This question has
long occupied environmental scholars, activists and practitioners, and despite
multiple decades of intellectual debate, the idea of sustainability remains
fraught. What is it that should be sustained? Economic welfare? Ecological
resilience? Or something else? In Sustainable
Values, Sustainable Change, philosopher Bryan Norton provides a thoughtful account
of the issues currently vexing sustainability, refracting them through the lens
of environmental values and then drawing together these insights into a
practical program of action. His book argues that no single theory of
environmental value can tell us what to sustain, and that instead, values need
to be described and transformed through the processes of actual place-based decision
making. The book provides a philosophical primer for environmental scholars and
practitioners, establishing the philosophical and ethical foundations that can both
frame and guide the pursuit of adaptive ecosystem management.
This book
serves as a culmination of Bryan Norton’s 30+ year career in environmental
ethics and policy. Now a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of philosophy and
public policy at Georgia Institute of Technology, Bryan has built up a coherent
and powerful body of work through his career, making valuable contributions to pragmatic
philosophy, environmental ethics, and ecological economics. While Bryan’s core
arguments and concerns have developed over time, they remain firmly committed
to the ideals of philosophical pragmatism and political pluralism, themes that are
crystallized clearly in the present volume.
Norton’s book
attempts to shift debates about sustainability away from the terrain of theory
and toward a concern with practical processes of decision making. He contends
that sustainability conversations are gridlocked in theoretical debate, as
ecologists and economists (among others) promote narrow disciplinary concepts
of environmental value that are incomplete in their representations of what
matters for communities. Rather than trying to win contests of theory, Norton
contends that environmental scholars should contribute to the process of
deliberation with local communities about ‘what should be sustained’ in particular
places. What is ‘right’ and ‘what should be sustained’ cannot be determined by
a single discipline or theory; they need to be worked through with communities via
a fair and effective process of deliberation. Thus, the pertinent question then
becomes how a fair and effective process might be conceived and constructed.
The book’s
argument proceeds through two parts. In the first part, Norton critiques the
idea that disciplinary theories can (and should) tell us what to sustain and
why. He takes aim at economic welfare theory and intrinsic value theory,
arguing that both approaches are too narrow and static in their purview to
provide a meaningful framework for sustainability. What is needed, Norton
contends, is an approach that: 1) works with actual communities to articulate
their values, 2) focusses on how specific environments can support desired
human experiences over multiple time and space scales, and 3) incorporates
uncertainty and change by being part of an iterative, inclusive, and adaptive
process. In the second part of the book, Norton proposes and develops a
‘procedural approach’ to sustainability that is concerned with identifying and
facilitating an effective and fair process through which communities and
experts can generate, analyse and evaluate possible environmental and development
futures. Such an approach would organize deliberation toward constructing a place-specific
concept of the public interest. A good process would also place expert analysis
alongside other forms of moral reasoning, and employ a range of deliberative
tools and mechanisms to get participants to construct new ‘mental models’ of
their relationships to their place and to nature. Environmental values, then,
rather than being static or knowable in advance (as economists and ecologists have
often assumed), need to be worked out with actual communities facing specific
decisions. Norton’s solution to the challenge of sustainability, then, is
valuable and distinct: instead of deriving ‘what should be sustained’ through
theory and then measuring ‘sustainability’ as a relative alignment with this
ideal, Norton’s vision of sustainability is about creating deliberative forums
where a multi-scalar concept of the public interest can be generated, discussed
and embedded.
The book is
well written, although there are bouts of jargon and the text is dense. At 291
pages, what should be a short read was not, owing both to the density of ideas
and terms as well as several conceptual detours. The claims and logic of each
chapter are not clearly stated up front or in summary, so each chapter is
somewhat of a circuitous journey. The book is at its strongest when discussing
environmental values and communicating the implications of different concepts.
It is at its weakest when it evaluates social science relating to
sustainability and adaptive management, or when it offers tangible advice
beyond the ivory tower. The book employs a helpful but comical narrative device
for readers to keep track of the argument as it progresses. Optim, a wonkish
cartoon hedgehog, and Adapt, a stylish fox, are used to represent distinct
approaches toward sustainability. Optim—the straw-man of the book—seeks to
derive a goal theoretically and optimize his pursuit of it, whereas Adapt seeks
to learn her way toward sustainability in an incremental and iterative fashion.
The characters appear throughout the book to clarify how the two approaches
differ, and the book introduces and defines ten ‘heuristics’ that guide Adapt’s
behavior.
The book has
one major contribution for each of its two intended audiences. For critical and
reflective practitioners of environmental management, the book provides a grounding
in ethics and a conceptual framework for the pursuit of sustainability through
adaptive management. Put simply, it helps practitioners to understand and
articulate why adaptive, process-focussed approaches are needed in terms of environmental
values. For scholars of environmental values and adaptive management, the book
provides a unique theoretical contribution linking environmental values to the
practice of collaborative and adaptive management. By characterizing and
evaluating the utility of adaptive management through the lens of environmental values, Norton shifts the axes of
environmental values debates to a concern with process in place. The book also
provides a nuanced justification for the roles of ‘experts’ on environmental
values with respect to community decision processes. By positioning experts as
equal contributors of reasoning into community deliberation, Norton
democratises the decision making process where citizens can shape (and not
merely receive) environmental metaphors and developmental pathways. These are
important points for scholars of environmental values and/or adaptive
management. Despite Norton’s intent to reach a practitioner audience, however, the
jargon, structure, and density of concepts and terms will mean that the book is
of most use to an academic audience.
The book
suffers from its refusal to engage with power. For some readers, Norton’s proposal
to unite communities to work collaboratively toward ‘sustainability’ will ring
of naiveté and idealism. Norton caveats this omission by stating explicitly
that his analysis assumes that political institutions will work for the public
interest. He leaves for other scholars the task of figuring out whether this assumption
is true (or how to make it so). Thus, the book’s thesis is predicated on the
assumption that all members of a community are willing to come together in
‘good faith’ to work through their differences and change their ‘mental models’
to arrive at a normative and multiscale concept of the public interest. Troublingly,
Norton assumes that a “free trade in ideas” will yield the best ideas, that
broad acceptance is the “best test of truth”. One need
only look at the success of Donald Trump in US politics to see that truth is
not the arbiter of popular acceptance. While we wholly agree with Norton’s project to champion adaptive
management, we remain unconvinced that one can legitimately outline such an
approach without delving deeply on the question ‘adapting for whom?’, especially
given the messy real world of special-interest politics.
Sustainable Values, Sustainable Change would also be more compelling if it more explicitly addressed the messy
mechanics of societal change and individual thought. Much of the book treats as
the primary choice that between hedgehog Optim and fox Adapt, as if
sustainability is truly the product of pointy-headed policy, which currently
operates by identifying (sans politics) what to optimize, and then structuring
society so as to achieve that. However, our world does not change only as a
result of such intentional policy choices, but also through messy social
processes wherein the influence of corporations and non-governmental
organizations are key. Norton says little about such organic changes, instead
writing as if humans were rational agents (‘think first’). Since abundant
evidence demonstrates that people are largely intuitive or emotional agents, perhaps
what is needed next is a treatise on feel-first
sustainability designed specifically for affective thinkers, which might help
level the playing field of entrenched power, and unleash the agency of the
disempowered and the latent sustainability values in all of us.
In sum, as
scholars of environmental values we enjoyed reading Norton’s book and we would
recommend it to others with strong intellectual interests in the topic. The
book is a novel bridge linking environmental values to adaptive management, and
practitioners in both fields will benefit from a close read and reflection.
Marc Tadaki (marc.tadaki@geog.ubc.ca) is a PhD
candidate at the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia,
and Kai M. A. Chan (kaichan@ires.ubc.ca) is a
professor and Canada Research Chair at the Institute of Resources, Environment
and Sustainability at the at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver,
Canada.
