Are liberal democracy and radical action on climate change compatible? Some otherwise liberal-minded academics aren’t so sure. Last year, editors of the journal Global Constitutionalism argued that “clear and effective responses to climate change [are] virtually impossible within liberal societies,” almost precisely mirroring the occasionally conspiratorial fears of climate policy’s conservative critics. The editors’ concern, at root, seems to be that liberal democracies can’t guarantee certain policy outcomes beyond basic procedures and rights. Policies addressing climate change aim for specific outcomes, and critics and proponents both suggest that democratic citizenries will never agree to them voluntarily—hence the discussion of illiberal climate regimes.
Certainly, some of the fears about climate totalitarianism are overblown, stoked by the self-aggrandizement and hypocrisy of the Davos class of climate warriors that Greenpeace itself has condemned. And the question of just how severe climate change’s effects will be is genuinely disputed by those who study them. But if the most apocalyptic models are correct, and our lives will indeed be irrevocably altered by wildfires, temperature spikes, flooding, and hurricanes, liberal proponents of stringent policies to address climate change could consider invoking the illiberal powers nascent in all liberal democracies—states of emergency. As political theorist Ross Mittiga has argued, “climate emergency may legitimate resorts to authoritarianism, both in managing fallout from impending or unfolding climate catastrophes…and in ensuring that such events are more limited in number and scope in the future.”
This scenario would not mean ignoring charges of illiberalism regarding climate policies, but rather acknowledging that liberal democracies have always accepted scenarios in which typical liberal rules don’t apply. Mittiga uses the consumption of meat as one example. “Under normal conditions,” he writes, “any attempt to change how people eat would be considered an unacceptably paternalistic affront to individual autonomy. Yet, there is by now extensive evidence that it is likely impossible to avoid catastrophic climate change without drastic reductions in animal agriculture.” Such an argument is provocative, and of course raises further questions about why climate change is an emergency justifying authoritarian action but not, say, the 100,000 Americans who die of opioid overdoses each year.
But there is another question that I want to focus on, first by talking about liberalism, then by talking about a non-liberal tradition of thought and politics unusual to Western liberals, that of Native Americans, who are often referenced in debates about the environment. The question is on what terms liberals can care about climate change at all. In my view, Native American perspectives on the environment should prompt liberals to rethink those “normal conditions” to which Mittiga refers, not emergency situations. The Native American challenge to liberal environmentalism could be an opportunity for liberals to recognize and reinforce their weaknesses as environmental changes—and the radical politics that often accompany such changes—loom. Or, alternatively, it indicates we should consider whether liberalism’s aims of neutrality and autonomy are too distant from any truth about human nature and our relations with the rest of the world to remain a viable political strategy as the environmental and social world changes.
Liberal Environmentalism
In my Introduction to Political Theory course, I end the semester by assigning the great legal scholar Ronald Dworkin’s short essay “Liberalism.” After three months of working through Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Machiavelli, Locke, the Federalist Papers, and other classics of political thought, I hope to leave students with a sense of how these great debates about rights, nature, the divine, and the political matter for how we think about politics today. Dworkin does a terrific job of explaining that the purpose of modern political liberalism is to protect basic individual rights and to create a peaceful political sphere in which people, treated as equals, can debate and govern themselves free from arbitrary authority. As Dworkin’s contemporary John Rawls, a giant of liberal political philosophy, once put it, liberalism has an “ordinary conception of persons as the basic units of deliberation and responsibility.” Liberalism exists for individual human persons. They are the ones who really matter politically. For both Rawls and Dworkin, liberalism aims to be neutral on questions of “the good life,” meaning that liberals and the governments they support shouldn’t instruct individuals on how to live their private lives. Instead, the political order ought to secure—as much as possible—conditions of fairness for free and equal citizens.
Near the end of this essay, Dworkin has an interesting little section on the environment that I always point out to the class. The environment comes up when he asks whether liberals will be on the side of economic growth. As he writes, economic growth can mean that more resources are available for egalitarian distribution. If the growth contributes to greater equality, liberals should favor it. If the economic growth worsens inequality, liberals should oppose it because it will make society less fair.
By way of example, Dworkin refers to the environment. (Though he doesn’t tie the issue to climate change per se as the essay is from 1979.) He imagines a situation in which a company proposes strip-mining a “beautiful mountainside” for the coal beneath it. The government could protect the mountain by either banning mining in the area or purchasing the land to designate it a park. He then suggests that this is an issue on which liberals could reasonably come down on either side. If the mine will offer decent, well-paid work for impoverished people nearby, contribute taxes to improve town streets, libraries, and schools, liberalism’s core tenets might incline its devotees to approve the mine.
Conversely, Dworkin believes that liberals could oppose the mine for several reasons. For instance, if the “market does not fairly reflect the preferences of those who want a park against those who want what the coal will produce,” the government should intervene “to achieve a fair distribution of resources.” Dworkin’s idealized liberal might also have a more complicated position, believing that “the conquest of unspoilt terrain by the consumer economy is self-fueling and irreversible, and that this process will make a way of life that has been desired and found satisfying in the past unavailable to future generations.” In this line of argument, the mine isn’t neutral on understandings of the good life because it contributes to the destruction of a certain way of life and will hinder future fairness and equality.
Yet Dworkin goes on to consider—and reject—a fourth position as well. Doubtlessly thinking of popular culture in the late 1960s and 1970s, he writes: “There is a powerful sentiment that a simpler way of life is better, in itself, than the life of consumption most Americans have recently preferred; this simpler life requires living in harmony with nature, and is therefore disturbed when, for example, a beautiful mountainside is spoiled by strip mining for the coal that lies within it.” Dworkin concludes that this line of reasoning is “plainly not available to the liberal.” Liberalism isn’t supposed to permit its devotees to make political arguments about what’s inherently good or bad for people, only about how they should act in relation to the principles of justice and fairness that govern a well-ordered society. By their own standards, according to Dworkin, liberals can’t insist that a way of life that involves harming nature or consuming a lot of things is worse than one that doesn’t, because that would imply that liberalism has averred that there are essentially better and worse ways of living an individual human life. Liberals can only suggest that it will harm conditions of fairness.
Liberalism isn’t supposed to permit its devotees to make political arguments about what’s inherently good or bad for people, only about how they should act in relation to the principles of justice and fairness that govern a well-ordered society.
Climate Illiberalism Today?
By Dworkin’s standards, is there much “illiberalism” surrounding climate change discourse today? Many defenses of potentially drastic action (such as Ross Mittiga’s) indeed seem to follow Dworkin’s liberal conservationist argument: that failing to protect the environment today means imposing unjust costs upon future generations, including preventing them from having the freedom to choose among ways of living that we now enjoy. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has reflected this sentiment, with panel chair Hoesung Lee arguing that ambitious action must be urgently taken to “secure a liveable sustainable future for all.” Lee’s comments about preserving just conditions for future generations are widely echoed in public discourse, from the Biden White House to Greta Thunberg. This line of reasoning for why we should care about climate change is well within the liberal universe. It’s an essentially humanistic claim that we owe it to future citizens to protect the availability of a genuine choice between different ways of life.
But there are also others who go well beyond such liberal justifications for action on climate change, who argue that in damaging the earth we have done something fundamentally wrong—and not simply because of the consequences for others in the future. They argue that it’s wrong for us to excessively consume natural resources because it’s a bad way for humans to live, and because it imposes moral harms upon non-human nature. The first reason is illiberal by Dworkin’s and Rawls’ standards because it makes a claim about what the good life is for humans (moderation, anti-materialism) and suggests that we should be educated to act in this way. The second is likewise illiberal because it emphasizes nature as a fundamental source of moral meaning and inherent goodness. This is a sort of pre-political substantive claim that liberals try to avoid.
Native American Non-Liberalism
This brings me to Native Americans. Both those inclined towards liberal and illiberal justifications for radical environmental policy action make appeals to the struggles, ideas, and practices of Native American or other Indigenous peoples. It’s not hard to see why. Though the scholarly literature has moved past stereotypical accounts of Native Americans as naïve environmentalists as exemplified in the famed “Crying Indian” ad, most observers have a clear sense that Native communities have some account of human relations with the natural world that differs from the mainstream and have often acted as responsible stewards for it. But can both liberal and illiberal climate activists make such appeals coherently? I believe not.
Native philosophic work and cultural traditions generally don’t accept an interpretation of the world in which humans are the only units of politics or the only place of moral meaning.
As I have suggested in my academic writing, which focuses on North American Indigenous political thought, Native philosophic work and cultural traditions generally don’t accept an interpretation of the world in which humans are the only units of politics or the only place of moral meaning. Native thinkers commonly suggest that there is a natural ethical order into which humans must fit. Kahnawake political theorist Taiaiake Alfred puts this in straightforward terms when he insists that “the land was created by a power outside of human beings, and a just relationship to that power must respect the fact that human beings did not have a hand in making the earth, therefore they have no right to dispose of it as they see fit.” In other words, autonomy is not the right goal for political society, even under “normal” circumstances.
Native thinkers tend to understand the world as a collection of different beings, each with its own agency, purpose, and conditions for flourishing. This doesn’t mean they call for treating non-humans as if they were humans or pretending that they have the same agency as we do. When I worked as a reporter, I covered First Nations exercising treaty rights to hunt deer in a provincial park in Canada, where they faced off against animal-rights protestors who vowed to “end speciesism” and seemingly did want to treat other beings as if they were equivalent to humans. (Far more intense conflicts have occurred between Greenpeace activists and Inuit seal hunters.)
But though Native thinkers don’t suggest that non-humans are the same as people, they usually accept that in making claims about the pre-political value of nature they’re making transcendent spiritual claims that do not abide by liberal standards of separation between “religion” and “politics” that are supposed to maximize our individual autonomy to choose how to live. As Mittiga refers to public influence on citizens’ diets, “any attempt to change how people eat would [normally] be considered an unacceptably paternalistic affront to individual autonomy.” For him and others, any illiberal response to environmental threats must be confined to abnormal conditions, a restriction that would preferably be avoidable, but if not should be only oriented to preserving liberal democracy for future citizens.
Yet for many Native American thinkers and traditions, waiting until moments of crisis to consider restrictions—however uncoercive—on human autonomy reflects a grave misunderstanding of our place within the world and what politics should be doing. Many see the role of the political community to educate its members into living “good lives.” Native traditions are not allergic to seeing law as a teacher that educates citizens into goodness or fundamentally good behavior aside from individual autonomy. For this reason, Inuvialuit law professor Gordon Christie and others have pointed out the incompatibilities between Native communities and liberalism, since Native communities would plainly use arguments that Dworkin thinks are “not available to the liberal.”
This incompatibility, in my opinion, leaves liberals with two options. On the one hand, if they wish to remain committed to the principle of autonomy and of political life as a space reserved for human rights and procedural claims, they ought to be wary about endorsing elements of substantive Native thinking, as they should any claims to “the natural.” They should restrict their concern for Native peoples to the specific effects that environmental changes may have upon Native communities and their chosen ways of life. This is a relatively simple suggestion, and consistent with earlier liberal humanist critiques of “deep ecology.”
The other avenue is a more profound yet potentially unsettling path. Liberal-minded academics who consider illiberal climate action legitimate usually fear for liberalism’s climate policy because they’re worried that lengthy and compromise-prone democratic procedures won’t generate the policies they consider necessary.
But what if the problem is not procedural but ideal? What if liberal democracies can’t motivate real action on environmental issues because the only arguments available to liberals (that lack of action will deprive future citizens of full autonomy) don’t sufficiently stir us to action? As Native thinkers might muse, perhaps procedural principles don’t comport with what’s really good for us, and so can’t break us from our materialistic stupor. Already, in acknowledging that there are environmental states of emergencies that require action, liberals are implicitly conceding that there are pre-political facts about the conditions in which human life can flourish that are morally and politically salient. Native non-liberals would argue that a political system can’t last long by trying to avoid deeper questions about the ends of human life—and when a system tries such avoidance it implicitly permits answers to those questions that make the physical and social world unfit for human life.
Native non-liberals would argue that a political system can’t last long by trying to avoid deeper questions about the ends of human life.
More to the point, maybe non-liberal arguments that consuming a lot of cheap junk and seeking autonomy above all is a bad way of being a human being are on to something—and not just because it might harm others. Maybe our political order should actively and openly suggest to us “that a simpler way of life is better, in itself, than the life of consumption most Americans have recently preferred.” Liberals fail to take themselves or Native traditions seriously if they don’t at least consider what seeing some truth in Native claims would mean: reconsidering the absolute value of autonomy or the political irrelevance of substantive accounts of human goodness.
Liberals fail to take themselves or Native traditions seriously if they don’t at least consider what seeing some truth in Native claims would mean: reconsidering the absolute value of autonomy or the political irrelevance of substantive accounts of human goodness.
No liberal should preemptively assume that the Native American (or any other non-liberal) account of human nature is correct. These non-liberal accounts raise whole sets of new questions. How can modern economies continue to function (if at all) in a different paradigm? Does embracing substantive goods throw tolerance out the window? These questions don’t have easy answers. But Native American traditions might point out that their substantive accounts of human goodness have always existed alongside a significant amount of tolerance for difference. They may also observe that however impressive the wealth and technology of contemporary society is, the cost to the world around us—and to ourselves—should make us wonder whether we want modern economies to continue to function as they have. If environmental changes to come are indeed catastrophic, they might suggest, what better moment than a crisis to rethink the values at the core of our way of life?
Samuel Piccolo is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, MN. His articles have appeared in venues including the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, American Political Thought, European Journal of Political Theory, and Security Studies. He’s also the co-editor (with A. James McAdams) of the volume Far-Right Newspeak and the Future of Liberal Democracy.
Image: “Stand with Standing Rock SF Nov 2016 06,” by Pax Ahimsa Gethen licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.
