Norms:

- Social codes that instruct us as individuals as well as societies, they are appropriate codes of
behavior.
- “Standards of appropriate behavior” (Klotz)
- Socially constructed and enforced- by shaming, trends, modeling, codifying into law
- Code of behavior on any different level: global, national, local
- Accepted and respected by a majority of society, yet it is socialized and we do not actually
actively think about it.
- Depend on the community
- Why are norms important?
o Questioning them/seeing where they came from
o Instruct how societies act/perform and the effects of such
o Omnipresence
- Environmental norms:
o Certain cultures and societies incentivize eco-friendly behavior by promoting good
behavior and punishing bad behavior.
o How societies change ecological impacts

Who are the most important actors?:

- States- lead by example, norm entrepreneurs, always pushing
- Citizens- social movements, initiatives, consumption/citizens as market actors, vote with your
pocketbook, individual and collective action.
- Multilateral organizations (EU, WTO)- European Court of Justice has chosen to rule in favor of
nutrition, WTO has an effort to green trade, sustainable exports
- NGOs- high-profile, agenda driven, very clear about what they want, elevating nature, lobbying
- Business- the big extractors, need to change behavior and reconcile provide with a long term
view
- Some specifics:
o UN Environmental Committee- Brundtland Committee- “Our Common Future”
o National ministries of the environment in Scandinavia- nothing like this in US. The EPA is
lower-level and bureaucratic.

When/How did the environment become salient?:

- 1800s-trying to manage common lands, expansion
- 1940s- aftermath of war, wave of thinking about environment and security
- 1960s- nature becomes more important, revival of interest in exploration and the economy

F. Scott Fitzgerald:
- “Ethical environmentalism” and “economic environmentalism”
- Keeping these two opposing ideals in mind is a clean definition of sustainability: reassuring
protection of nature as sacred, while having economic growth.
The term “Environment”:
- Implies everything else-everything but me
- Are humans in nature? Yes. “Ecology” is the term used to describe the interactions between
nature and humans.
- “Environment”=human-centered, “ecology”=planet-centered
- National- What is the US doing? What is Scandinavia doing?
- Regional- EU, Asian Cooperative Union
- Also includes global, local, and individual
- Philosophically, Americans have believed a frontier mentality
- Economic development has the paradox of removing us from nature and then we romanticize it
- Nature/culture dichotomy:
o What is the relationship between nature and humans?

How does the environment become contested?:

- Different means of managing/defining the commons
- Europe vs. US- we do not accept the state in our lives as openly
- Nature/human norm contesting: humans greater than, equal to, or less than nature?

Norway’s Whaling and the IWC:

- Whales have become a poster child for ocean mgmt.
- US has a history of whaling, but due to norm shifts, it has become taboo to even discuss.
- Whaling was the first international rally/movement to recognize as an industry to restrict
harvest in order to ensure the future.
- Tech played a role in developing more efficient harvesting
- Countries that used to whale became very anti-whaling.
- IWC 1946- US says zero tolerance, Norway and Japan say it’s sustainable
- Gro Harlem Brundtland sticks to sustainability; Clinton administration resists.
- Group of advanced industrialized nations believed they had the right to whale and it was a
sovereignty issue.
- Illustrates contested norms: Norway believed they led the way by showing how to whale
sustainably. What happens when one country claims the moral high ground?
- CITES- banded together to try to save the right towhale.

Literature, music, and the arts

- We see environmentalism in lots of arenas.
- “Eco-criticism”: new genre
- Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoureau
- Carson and the 1960s Modern Environmentalism:
o The rise of pluralism, CRM, JFK, women’s empowerment
o Social messages transmitted by communications, music.
 o Shift from conservation/preservation to cleanup/control.
o Why the increased emphasis at this time? Increased standard of living led to increased
desire for recreation, higher education, large legislation.
- Under the Sea Wind- originally a fisheries brochure, represents her roots as an environmental
writer:
o Ecological relationships of ocean life that have endured eons of time.
o Immortality embracing all organisms.
o Images used by Carson: birth, anthropomorphism, emotions, travel/migrations to signify
social movements/slow change, poetic, ethereal. “fish are fearing things”
o “Edge” divisions between different parts of the ecosystem: “ecotones”- we intrude on
environments harming animals irreversibly.
o Ecological footprints: effects on planet, gillnets killing fish catch cormorants,
unanticipated side effects.

Charismatic Megafauna:
- One of the ways environmental issues get communicated to the public.
- We like them for their anthropomorphism, intelligence, appearance
- Pull at heartstrings to get you to behave in a certain way, follow a certain norm.

Peace and War:

- It’s a security issue
- US Dept. of Defense has elevated the importance of the environment
Pollution:
- Usually defined as an externality
- How to rectify externalities? Make the offender pay (incentivize it). This protects property rights.
- Four normative issues involved in US pollution control:
1. Empathy for victims
2. Protections of rights/statutes
3. Cultural/patriotic reasons- Americans losing something intrinsic
4. Democratic institutions, political access, market actors
- Pollution is ethical and economic: we tolerate pollutants because agents do expel.
Discounted Costs of Nature by Markets:
- Start with crisis/limited choices
- Inherent in markets
- Land and resources are discounted
- Cost can be reinstated by WTP
- Hans Brattskar calls this market failure- damaging to the planet and humanity
- Economic development and affluence have put us at a distance from nature vs. living within
one’s means by necessity; affluence can predate on nature.
- Remedies:
 o We have to take time, money, action, energy to go every step of the way and ask the
hard questions about appropriate choices.
o New political powers, new norms, TEK
o Estelle Westling: “sustainability should be a part of everything we do”
- Compartmentalism and putting nature to the left or right in politics is problematic- issues face
everybody.

WTP; Willingness to Pay:

- The intrinsic value of nature itself is inadequately communicated, even in terms of instrumental
values.
- By assigning prices to things, environmental economists are flawed; no way to account for
intrinsic value
- WTP does not equal societal preference
- There is a scientific bias in US environmental policy- we need a revival of intrinsic appreciation.

Economic vs. Ethical Environmentalism:

- Ethical- John Muir, Rachel Carson- intrinsic sacred nature as cathedrals, put nature into the
equation, pay attention to biodiversity and human health
- Economic Man- Gifford Pinchot- looks for utilitarian principles and rational use of resources
based on $ returns
- John Stuart Mill: Utilitarianism, most good to the most people is the best policy. It is the USFS
code as dictated by Pinchot.
- Invisible Hand- Adam Smith- says that operation of the market in the optimal meeting of
buyer/seller is the most efficient world.
o No value for nature or earth incorporated
o Energy costs, resources left out of the market interaction
- Kant: environmentalism is a collection of individual values that starts at individuals and the
collective norm spreads depending on rationality- Sagoff adopts this
- Economic environmentalism: characterized by corporations
- Ethical environmentalism: characterized by NGOs
- Governments? Move toward either side on a continuum: they try to be ethical, but the reality is
they work in an economic environment.

What’s missing in the marketplace?

- Rights to clean air- human right
- Information- not yet reached adequate understandings through innovation or R&D on such
topics as nuclear waste
- Aesthetics, beauty:
o Sierra Club v. Disney: proposed Disney ski resort in Sequoia NP, but the government
acted as nature is intrinsically important and blocked them from building the park.
o Collective national value won out over individual preferences.
 o Illustrates complexity of defining where a gov’t stands on economic/ethical terms.
- Protection of biodiversity/endangered species

The Intergenerational Problem:

- Steven Gardner- we need to provide a Social Rate of Discount to account for effects of our
actions on future generations
- If a generation exploits solely on the basis of economic environmentalism, then they occur a
cost onto the next generation.

Biodiversity/Conservation Biology:
- Interconnectedness of humans and nature
- Norwegians creating a “species bank” so future generations will know what was lost. Prioritizes
saving nature for future generations.

Ethical Consumerism:
- If all you do is consume, you fail to account for ethical environmentalism.
- To wedded to capitalism, you miss the three F’s: family, friends, faith
- Spend more time working on the intrinsic
- Says we make our best judgments when we think of the environment in terms of ethical
considerations
- Norway’s National Petroleum Fund- set aside money to invest globally in ethical and green
investing so they have money when petroleum falls through and they run out of income from
North Sea oil.
- Sweden- everybody has right to the land as long as they take respect and care of it- no real
private property mentality: Allemensrett.
- Simon Flato of Stockholm Resilience Center- you are a change agent, you can find practical ways
of doing so.

The term “Sustainability”:

- Overused, introduced in 1986, became linked to green-washing.
- Sagoff wants to give it meaning again.
- Sustainability- links ethical and economic environmentalism; you can develop with an eye to
nature.

ToC/Garret Hardin:
- Tendency of all humans is to overuse common resources.
- Gro Harlem Brundtland talks about the idea of the planet as a commons; it goes beyond the
economical idea/defense of property rights and comes into use by ethical environmentalists.
o We can no longer operate as individual nation states
Greening of Capitalism:
- Nokia, disposal of batteries, mining in Congo for rare earth minerals, destruction of natural
resources as a result.
o Planned obsolescence- Nokia develops recyclable phone.

Norm Entrepreneurship:
- Norway tries to influence the EU, lead by example.
- Four cultural experiences make this happen: rural settlement patterns, the role of religion,
economic dependence on natural resources, and reliance on constitutions as legitimate means
of authority.

Eco-Capitalism:
- Capitalism:
o An economic system characterized by efficiency, based on efficiency, and goal-oriented
with regards to profit. It does not emphasize fairness; advocates most efficient
allocation of resources.
o Actors in capitalism; independent actors, firms
o Nature is a resource: Put a $ on it, nothing intrinsically sacred, value depends on how it
fits in supply and demand.
- Reconcile capitalism with environmentalism:
o As time passes, capitalism may need to turn to alternatives; it may become a need of
the market
o Somehow find a market for the environmentalism: Yunis’ microgrants for emissions
reductions.
o Liberal optimism: collective action spills over into other parts of society and drives the
greening of capitalism.
- Eco-capitalism:
o Provide alternatives, new tech bases
o An attempt to combine working in the marketplace and protecting the environment:
norms interact with the market system; it is good to be green.
- Deliberate action to act collectively to green capitalism: invent and promote new ideas, use the
intervention of government to promote/incentivize
- Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and Denmark) are small.

Norway:
- Discovered oil and gas off continental shelf: 10 th largest producer in the world
- They didn’t produce it all at once and became very conservative about extraction and used
profit to stimulate the economy.
- Trying to put windmills on offshore rigs
- International Climate and Forest Initiative:
 o REDD+ reducing deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries is a cost-
effective measure to decrease GHG emissions.
o Objective: work towards the inclusion of emissions from deforestation and forest
degradation in the new international climate regime, take early action to achieve cost-
effective and verifiable reductions in GHG emissions, promote the conversion of natural
forests to maintain their carbon storage capacity.
- Location of Nobel Peace Prize
Sweden:
- More capitalist, industrial, international markets, but less dependent on oil and gas:
- Nuclear power, no carbon emissions
Finland:
- Very forested but depends on Russia for oil and gas imports. Wants more nuclear power to
reduce dependency.
- 50% of its energy is renewable.
- Finnish Forestry Act- forests open to all Finns, owned by Finns, in 1886 a new Forest Act was
passed, prohibiting the destruction of forests and striving to safeguard the regeneration of
forests after felling.
Iceland:
- Almost entirely geothermal
- Moving toward hydrogen cell technology. 60% tax on SUVs- incentivize behavior s.
Denmark:
- Wind energy: goal =50% wind. Vestas
- High prices for gas, very sinful to purchase.
- Does not upset the Danes: Jobs are going toward the green sector
- Still depend on coal
- The Danish example as illustrated by Denmark staff reporter:
o Economy up 80% while energy has not increased that much, and emissions decreased
o High taxes on water, energy, waste; incentivized
o The EU: energy and climate goals, 27 countries, really a driver for energy politics, no
difference between energy and environment
o COP15 talks: very important to Scandinavia, disappointed them, dark moment.
o Klimakommission: says they can reduce even more, dreading import of oil expected to
occur in the next two years.

Corporate Social Responsibility:

- Chinese are inching their way into green Scandinavian corporations due to high labor costs.
- Nokia= how Finland sends out its message about its greenness.
- David Conrad:
o Consumers generate “pull”: consumer choice messages
o Lifecycle mgmt.-horizontal integration
o Adhere to precautionary principle
 o Packaging-focus on reduction
o The Owned Phase- the customer cycle- provide consumers opportunity to make
sustainable choices. Messages on the phone encouraging green behavior.

Other pressures on society to be green?:

- Rational economism: EU sees fossil fuel depletion as an incentive to look for alternative energy
and wanted a climate treaty.
- Kansas; don’t mention Al Gore, but they are “going green” for purely economic reasons