nvironmentalists have long thought of economic globalization as a threat to the environment. Trade, advocated by economists and in consequence encouraged by the bilateral and multilateral aid and development agencies and expanded by reductions of trade barri- ers by both unilateral action and reciprocal bargaining by policy mak- ers, is a frequent target of their anguish and anger. To a large extent, the conflict is inevitable. Impassioned differences often arise from the alto- gether different philosophies and lifestyles of trade economists and en- vironmental activists.
The economists generally belong to the philosophical tradition that sees nature as a handmaiden to mankind. This humanity-centric view of nature is deeply rooted in the tradition that originated among the Hebrews and the Christians and spread to the Western world. As the Bible says in Genesis:
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.1
The views of the ancient Greeks were also consonant with those in the Bible. Aristotle famously observed:
Plants exist for the sake of animals, and brute beasts for the sake of man— domestic animals for his use and food, wild ones (or at any rate most of them) for food and other accessories of life, such as clothing and various tools.
Since nature makes nothing purposeless or in vain, it is undeniably true that she has made all animals for the sake of man.2
But today’s environmentalists in the West reject these views, assert- ing instead nature’s autonomy. A loving view of the environment has been embraced by many of them. Just recollect the moving verse of the English poet Gerald Manley Hopkins, lamenting the environmental deg- radation wrought by human activity:
O if we but knew what we do When we delve or hew— Hack and rack the growing green! Since country is so tender To touch, her being so slender, That, like this sleek and seeing ball But a prick will make no eye at all, Where we, even where we mean To mend her we end her, When we hew and delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve The sweet especial scene, Rural scene, a rural scene, Sweet especial rural scene.3
The dramatic shift in sentiment about nature that has come to pass to- day is well reflected in the writings of the leading twentieth-century Western environmentalists. John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, wrote:
When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with all other stars all signing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.4
And Rachel Carson, renowned for her Silent Spring, said:
It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplations of her beauties to know of wonder and humility.5
By contrast with the earlier “nature is subordinate to man” Western tradition, however, the Japanese have always viewed themselves in har- mony with nature rather than exploiting it: a tradition reflected in the Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata’s famous novel The Old Capital, set in Kyoto with its marvelous displays of nature’s splendor.6 I suspect that
this difference of tradition partly accounts for the comparative ease with which Japan, despite having ruined its environment as badly as the West during the course of its industrialization, has found fewer roadblocks in its attempts at corrective and regulatory actions.
The environmentalists thus tend to value environment over in- come, whereas trade (and other) economists conventionally tend to value
Environment in Peril?
k
137income over the environment. This difference lies at the heart of their conflicts in recent years. But this disparity reflects yet other contrasts.
Trade has been central to economic thinking since Adam Smith dis- covered the economic virtues of specialization and of the markets that sustain it. Economists therefore think of the markets as being in place and government interventions such as tariffs and other trade barriers as policies that disrupt and distort them. On the other hand, environmen- talists are typically dealing with situations where markets do not exist— as when pollutants are dumped into lakes, rivers, and oceans, and into the sky above, and the polluter does not have to buy permits to do so— and therefore must be specially created. In fact, whereas environmental- ists often disdain markets, prescriptions such as the regulatory imposition of “polluter pay” taxes, under which the polluter is taxed for the pollu- tion that he causes, amount to nothing more than demands to create the missing markets. Trade therefore suggests absence of regulation, whereas environmentalism suggests its necessity.
In turn, trade is exploited and its virtues extolled by corporate and multinational interests, whereas environmental objectives have typically (though not exclusively) been embraced by non-profit organizations, which are generally wary of, if not hostile to, these interests.
The distrust that has reflected these different traditions has led some environmentalists to extraordinary assertions of hostility toward glo- balization, and toward international trade and the World Trade Organi- zation and its predecessor, the GATT. GATT was attacked just over a decade ago as “GATTzilla,” reminiscent of the Japanese movie monster Godzilla. GATTzilla was a monster, but this was also the time when the United States was in the throes of a national psychosis about the rise of Japan, which was widely demonized as a wicked trader, a predatory ex- porter, and an exclusionary importer—indeed a two-faced rival. If the GATT was feared and denounced, free trade itself was held to be a ma- lign process, causing all manner of harm in all sorts of ways, certainly to the environment, which was rapidly becoming a key concern.
At the time, in the 1980s and early 1990s, I wound up defending free trade in debates with two leading environmentalists, Herman Daly (an American economist who is an icon of the environmental movement and used to work for the World Bank) in Scientific American and Ed- ward Goldsmith (the doyen of British environmentalists) in the Cam- bridge Union and in the English magazine Prospect.7 I recall particularly
the Cambridge Union debate, where, astonished that free trade was be- ing blamed for environmental problems and other ills in the world, I replied to Teddy Goldsmith by recalling Balzac’s 1831 novella, The Wild
desires a beautiful woman, the talisman in shape of the ass’s skin that he has been tempted into accepting shrinks, and with it his life span shrinks as well. So to go to the opera, where he cannot avoid seeing attractive women, Raphael carries a special “monocle whose microscopic lens, skill- fully inserted, destroy[s] the harmony of the loveliest features and [gives] them a hideous aspect.” Looking through this monocle, Raphael sees only ugly women and is able to enjoy unscathed the glorious music he loves. “Mr. Goldsmith,” I added, “you seem to have with you a similar monocle, except that when you use it and see us wonderful free-traders, you find us turned into ugly monsters, our halos turning into the devil’s horns!”
But even if the distrust is dissolved, serious questions remain to be addressed. The ones I examine below have been the most salient in re- cent years.