CIAO DATE: 05/02

Georgetown Journal of International Affairs

Volume 1, Number 1, Winter/Spring 2000

 

In Search of Environmental Leadership
by Richard A. Matthew

 

In spite of well–intentioned efforts to green foreign policy, the United States is widely regarded by the international community as an obstacle to advancing the global environmental agenda. From Norway to China, America is seen as a country that undermines multilateral efforts, retreats from strong initial positions, fails to meet international obligations, and points an accusing finger at the developing world while doing little to restrain an economy based on unprecedented and highly wasteful consumption. It is hard for the United States, as the world’s only superpower, to support international environmental initiatives when Americans are preoccupied with maintaining wealth, power, and authority. The United States should lead as it has led in the past: with boldness and inspiration. But leadership in a multilateral world requires team play. And here, the United States has thus far proved inadequate to the task.

Post–Rio Depression. Disappointment with U.S. environmental policy became widespread at the 1992 Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Cold War was over, and Americans were talking enthusiastically about a “New World Order.” The 1987 Brundtland Report, “Our Common Future,” had convinced much of the world that international cooperation on an aggressive and binding environmental agenda was crucial for the future of humankind. As the world’s richest country, biggest polluter, and Cold War victor, the United States was expected to play a leadership role in designing and implementing this agenda. Instead, in the negotiations leading up to Rio, the United States unilaterally gutted the Framework Convention on Climate Change, which looked to set binding targets and timetables in the fight against climate change. In Rio, President Bush kept his promise not to sign the Convention on Biological Diversity. Described by many as the skunk at the picnic, the United States seemed to have single–handedly crushed the first post–Cold War opportunity to chart a new course for the planet based on principles of environmental sustainability, social justice, and international cooperation.

The United States generally accepts the profound challenge of environmental degradation around the world, but Americans are also deeply satisfied with the status quo. In 1997, the United States Department of State released “Environmental Diplomacy,” a sugary report stressing American commitment to global cooperation on international and regional environmental problems. Meanwhile, the United States has steadfastly refused to ratify four out of the five major environmental agreements that became international law in this decade: the Basle Convention on the Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Wastes (1992); the Convention on Biological Diversity (1993); the Convention to Combat Desertification (1996); and the Kyoto Protocol to the Climate Change Convention (1998).

Almost every country believes that compromise enables important agreements to come into force and involves taking risks commensurate with the urgency of environmental degradation. Not so for the United States, whose objections are based on technical points rather than the spirit of these accords.

Americans desperately want to view environmental change either as a manageable technical problem amenable to scientific and market–based solutions, or as a security issue solved by containment strategies. They cannot envision strategies that call into question a privileged position in the world or the institutions, beliefs, practices, and values that have led to the current arrangement.

The United States thus has difficulty accepting the logic of arguments that link environmental rescue to social change. This, more than anything else, makes it hard to accept treaty constraints on behavior as other nations do. Americans think of themselves as exceptional and can even accept the fact that it’s lonely at the top. But minimum participation goes a long way toward enhancing the persuasion and consensus building that are essential to effective global leadership in a multilateral world.

Born to Lead? In the not–too–distant past, the United States led in the environmental realm. Having played an important role in the conservation movement of the mid–nineteenth century, the United States inspired the global environmental movement that emerged in the 1960s.

Nineteenth–century Americans helped define the conservation movement with appeals to virtue and nobility. In 1864, George Perkins Marsh wrote Man and Nature, a thoughtful pioneering treatise on the causes and consequences of human–generated environmental degradation. In 1872, Congress created the world’s first national park, Yellowstone, through a piece of legislation that countries would emulate worldwide. Twenty years later John Muir founded the Sierra Club, an early signal that the private sector would be heavily involved in safeguarding nature. The naturalist writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, the forestry studies of Charles Sprague Sargent and Gifford Pinchot, and the political activities of Theodore Roosevelt and William Temple Hornaday further contributed to a potent and distinctly American version of conservationism.

In the 1960s the United States played an influential and constitutive role in the emergence of a new, global environmental movement. Indeed, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962, is widely used as a marker for the advent of contemporary environmentalism. In the early 1970s, hundreds of thousands of Americans turned out to celebrate Earth Day. The Environmental Protection Agency was established, becoming a model for much of the world. Congress passed rigorous air and water quality legislation. Hundreds of environmental non–governmental organizations, such as Friends of the Earth, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Natural Resources Defense Council were created.

The United States even supported the UN’s environmental initiatives at Stockholm in 1972, including the creation of an expensive new organization, the UN Environment Program. During this period, American intellectuals proved tremendously creative in developing analytical and normative frameworks for discussing and assessing environmental problems. Garrett Hardin’s concept of the “tragedy of the commons,” Donella Meadows’s “limits to growth” thesis, the writings of Paul and Anne Ehrlich on population trends, and Barry Commoner’s notion of “flawed technology” provided environmental discourse with ideas that remain influential to this day.

Vice President Gore must have felt that he was building on a venerable and winning tradition when he penned Earth in the Balance and then made the environment a prominent election issue in 1992. After all, here was an agenda that had deep roots in American culture, that was due for a policy upgrade after the lackluster performance of the 1980s, and that would be well received abroad because it was good for the entire world. Or so it seemed.

Tasmanian Al. In the annals of American politics, Al Gore has been the Tasmanian Devil of environmental foreign policy initiatives. Working with a handful of supporters including Timothy Wirth, Eileen Claussen, Melinda Kimble, and Sherri Goodman, Gore has pressured the Departments of Defense and State and the CIA to integrate environmental concerns more fully into their activities. In 1992, he instigated the Medea project, which paired intelligence analysts with civilian scientists to assess the environmental value of current and archived satellite imagery. Responding to Robert Kaplan’s 1994 article, “The Coming Anarchy,” Gore established the Task Force on State Failure. After its initial report was presented, the vice president pushed for a second phase focusing on the environmental aspects of crisis, war, and other disasters.

In response to Gore’s demands, the CIA established an Environmental Security Center tasked to track environmental trends that might generate threats to U.S. interests or demands for humanitarian aid, and to provide imagery and analytical services to organizations involved in environmental rescue activities. Similarly, during the 1990s, the Department of Defense expanded its commitment to environmental security well beyond efforts to clean up bases and reduce pollution and waste. Under the guidance of Sherri Goodman and Gary Vest, the Pentagon integrated the environment into its operational concept of preventive defense, devoted considerable resources to studying the relationship between environmental change and conflict, and cooperated with militaries around the world to analyze and address serious environmental problems. Through military–to–military contact programs and high–level conferences organized by the Asia–Pacific Center for Security Studies and the Army War College, defense specialists used the environment to encourage dialogue and build mutually beneficial relationships with counterparts from the former Soviet bloc and the Pacific Basin region.

Vice President Gore himself has been closely associated with a series of high–profile bilateral commissions and common agendas signed with Canada, the Ukraine, South Africa, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Russia, Brazil, China, the European Union, India, Japan, Australia, and Mexico–a select group of countries that together hold more than half of the world’s population. And Gore was the driving force behind the restructuring of U.S. foreign policy announced by then Secretary of State Warren Christopher in 1996. It is true that most of the specific actions Christopher promised–including an annual report on environmental priorities, partnerships with the private sector, and a multilateral conference on strengthening compliance with international environmental law–have been abandoned as too costly. The Regional Environmental Hub Program, however, was implemented, and twelve hubs are now operational around the world. More importantly, having senior officials speak forcefully about the environment has done much to underscore to the rest of the world the continuing importance of this issue in American foreign policy.

Despite this whirlwind of activity, the environmental agenda of the current administration is resisted at home and disappoints abroad. No amount of scientific probability, engineered solutions, and economic modeling will substitute for tough decisions based on social values, vision, and inspiration. New agencies, studies, and agreements do not compensate for the U.S. failure to ratify important multilateral treaties, push for binding timetables and targets, or help developing countries grow in environmentally sustainable ways. The United States may be busy, but it is not doing the sort of things the rest of the world wants it to do. Why is there such a discrepancy between the world’s expectations and America’s performance?

Muddled Thinking. The city of Washington feasts on new ideas, and environmental issues have proven an exceptionally fertile landscape for the propagation of original concepts, scenarios, strategies, and policy–driven solutions. But much of the world finds the ever–changing swarm of ideas animating the policy process in Washington to be confusing. Moreover, some of these ideas have been perceived as potentially threatening; others are seen as camouflage for status–quo oriented policies. And despite much discussion, many Washington insiders are equally unsure of what many of the new ideas signify. The concept of environmental security is a good illustration of the muddled thinking that permeates Washington policymaking circles.

In the post–Cold War era, linking environment and security seemed a straightforward way for the Clinton administration to entice Congress to act in an area in which it otherwise had little interest. Eager policymakers thus began framing the environment as a security issue. Scholars, environmentalists, and journalists had been suggesting such linkages between the environment and security since the 1970s. In most cases, the linkage was made as part of an argument that pollution, disease, poverty, and hunger were as threatening as civil violence and war to the well–being of most people on the planet. Hence individuals such as Lester Brown, Richard Ullmann, and Norman Myers argued that maximizing security required applying resources to these problems as well as to (or even instead of) beefing up military capabilities.

Although security specialists were accustomed to thinking about threat and vulnerability in the context of certain environmental concerns, their focus had been on problems such as maintaining access to scarce resources abroad and protecting soldiers from exotic diseases. The very broad notion of security defined in environmental terms was of limited interest to most of the security community until the arrival in the early 1990s of more explicit linkages between environmental scarcity and violent conflict. Suddenly, impassioned pronouncements by politicians such as Boutros Boutros–Ghali to the effect that future wars would be over water, appeared to be substantiated by a growing body of academic research that reached policymakers through the dramatic prose of Jessica Mathews and Robert Kaplan.

Gore and his supporters began to promote this linkage aggressively. Indeed, many of the initiatives noted in the previous section were pursued under the rubric of “environmental security.” As a framework for foreign policy, however, “environmental security” is woefully inadequate.

First, the phrase “environmental security” is vague, and it is often unclear as to what policymakers mean when they use it. Is it about protecting the environment? Is it about ensuring that all of humankind has fair access to environmental goods and services? Or is it about protecting the environmental interests of the United States? In the United States, a lively debate rages over these definitional issues. Outside the United States, the language of security has conjured images of threat and confrontation, of intervention and the use of force, and of one side winning at the expense of the other. Other countries are especially concerned about being victims of a bait–and–switch game in which they are lured to the table with hints about the security of humankind, only to discover that the policies being formulated are designed to protect U.S. interests while shifting costs abroad.

Second, a fair amount of the phrase’s policy appeal is based on the ostensible connection between environmental scarcity and conflict. Kaplan, drawing on the research of Thomas Homer–Dixon, predicted that the “environment would be the national security issue of the twenty–first century,” and used the powerful image of a “coming anarchy” to intimate what was in store for all of us. He’d seen the signs in West Africa; Clinton and Gore saw them in Haiti; the die was cast. But very quickly a slew of criticism indicated persuasively that the relationship was overstated. The dire predictions were largely without foundation, and the policy effort was hence misguided. Over the years, policymakers have confused people by continuing to appeal to this image while simultaneously expressing doubts about its validity.

Finally, elsewhere in the world there is a strong predilection for the concepts of environmental justice and sustainable development. It has been unclear to many people whether “environmental security” supplements these concepts or replaces them with an agenda that has little to do with the eradication of poverty and closing the gap between North and South. Other countries worry that an environmental discourse painstakingly constructed over decades is being muscled aside by one more compatible with America’s “us versus them” worldview.

In spite of these concerns, certain aspects of environmental security have been well received in much of the world. In particular, many countries share America’s fear that violent conflict related to resource scarcity is likely to escalate in the future. And many are interested in “greening” the military, making its behavior less environmentally destructive and harnessing its skills to tasks such as reforestation. Neverthelss, people at home and abroad are not sure what “environmental security” means; some of the stronger claims seem to have little empirical support; and its relationship to other concepts such as sustainable development is unclear. It is not surprising that “environmental security” has inspired more talk than action.

The same muddled thinking is evident in the State Department’s rapidly disintegrating plan to incorporate the environment into foreign policy. Announced by Secretary of State Warren Christopher in 1996, the proposed integration included four parts: issuing regular reports on America’s environmental priorities, hosting a global conference on strengthening compliance with international environmental agreements, establishing a network of regional environmental hubs, and promoting a range of cooperative partnerships with other countries and with the private sector to tackle specific problems. Something, however, was noticeably lacking from this new agenda: vision. Without a clear expression of how environmental issues fit in with our national interests and foreign policy objectives, an image that officials could use as the basis for setting new goals and modifying their activities, no one was sure about how to proceed. What, in the final analysis, were we trying to achieve through this four–pronged strategy? What did this integration mean for conventional activities like trade negotiations?

Culture of Uncertainty. There is a pervasive assumption in the United States that saving the environment requires economic sacrifice. Since American enterprise has yet to pioneer a full toolbox of earth–saving technologies, rescuing the environment must not be profitable. Green business strategies do not add to the bottom line. And if environmental problems are really so urgent that we must sign on to binding global initiatives, it then stands to reason that to achieve an environmentally friendly economy the United States will need to sacrifice economic growth, produce less, and consume less–all at greater cost. Internationally, the United States will be forced to absorb the bulk of the cost of saving the planet while at the same time transferring technology to other countries. The United States would, in effect, be unilaterally giving up its competitive advantage. At the end of the long green day, the world might be a better place–for everyone except the United States. Americans thus have a hard time accepting global environmental initiatives that are perceived to challenge America’s current privileged status.

This inability to grapple with complicated new challenges stems directly from America’s very success as a nation to date. In 1776, the United States started the revolution that raised people in the Western world from serfs and subjects to property owners and citizens. One hundred fifty years later, U.S. efforts led to victory in two world wars. The United States underwrote the costs of reconstruction in Europe, set up the GATT, World Bank, and United Nations, and hastened the process of decolonization. The United States brought the Soviet Empire to its knees.

The very string of successes that carried the United States from the margins of the world to center stage has created a political culture that is now essentially administrative in orientation, concerned with fine–tuning conventional processes, and resolving technical problems rather than tackling new challenges. Consequently, when a vast, complex, pervasive problem arises, like environmental degradation, the instinct of the American political system is to devise and apply incremental solutions through known and trusted tools: the market and the law. Americans do not expect to have to probe more deeply and critically into national values, beliefs, practices, and institutions. The United States has been there and done that. Francis Fukuyama has argued that the big debates over the ideal form of political and economic arrangements have ended, with America’s once–radical proposals emerging victorious. Given such rhetoric, how difficult might it be for American politicians to respond to a dramatic new challenge to existing arrangements? And how much easier instead is it to fragment, discredit, and delay the environmental agenda?

In a democracy, however, the buck stops with the citizens, not with the president or members of Congress. Poll after poll confirms that Americans want a healthy environment and expect the government to enact legislation that will satisfy this desire. Support weakens, however, when a healthy environment is linked to significantly higher prices or to virtually any form of inconvenience. Support for the environment pales outright when forced to compete against other demands on resources, such as education and crime prevention. Americans talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.

The Clinton–Gore rhetoric has numbed any sense of personal responsibility by creating the impression that environmental problems have been addressed through tough command–and–control strategies. Adding to the problem, many Americans do not really understand the stakes here; in fact, as a nation, Americans have profound misconceptions about the causes and consequences of pollution, land modification, and resource scarcity. Scientific knowledge is not definitive and is often confused; appreciation of economic and health issues is not much better. Americans are thus easily alarmed, but not given to researching and discussing the things that cause us to be alarmed. Public uncertainty begs for leadership.

What Washington Should Do. As the world’s only superpower, the United States may be irrevocably out of touch with the rest of humankind. It may well be that middle powers and NGOs will have to take the initiative here and perhaps on every new environmental issue that is placed on the global agenda. Nevertheless, should the United States decide to provide leadership, the following three steps would make a good start.

First, reframe environmental issues in terms of equity, culture, and livelihood. Everyone seeks outcomes that are fair, culturally sensitive, and that put food on the table. We should limit the concept of environmental security to issues pertaining to conflict and the role of the military.

Second, lead by example. The founding fathers envisioned the United States as a beacon of light that would demonstrate to a skeptical world that democracy is not just a viable form of government, but the best form of government. America should now demonstrate to the world that environmental design, environmental planning, environmental education, environmental accounting, and so on, are not just viable practices, but best practices. To do this we must set a few challenging goals for ourselves–practical goals that bring out our best qualities: our ability to be persevering, creative, pragmatic, entrepreneurial, and daring.

Third, identify a concrete and visible way to improve the global environment–and pursue it. The United States will continue to inch forward on the environmental agreements that are under negotiation or already in place. But to justify American exceptionalism, the United States should do something exceptional. Eliminate polio, tuberculosis, or malaria. Develop renewable and inexpensive forms of generating and applying energy. Stamp out food insecurity. Build water catchment and purification systems for the poor. And don’t wait for someone else to act first or assume the costs. These are all challenging objectives, fraught with hardship, but they are not beyond America’s means. Indeed, such activity is the stuff of leadership.