Back to the Drawing Board : Opportunity, Lifestyles

Climate Change and the Right to Culture

Donny with an A — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 20:30:00 GMT

The Right to an Opportunity for Cultural Integration

Focusing only on property damage caused by climate change, it may be noted, seems to leave out a large part of the picture of why people are concerned about climate change. In addition to the impacts discussed so far, many would find objection the fact that climate change will deprive members of certain social groups of the opportunity to integrate themselves into the societies in which they were raised, as a result of changes in the physical context in which those societies have been able to flourish. In many situations, entire cultures will be forced to relocate in order to continue to exist, and in some, they could vanish altogether. Surely this is a troubling consequence of climate change. But does it represent an infringement of rights?

In examining this question, we must take care to isolate the deprivation of an opportunity for cultural integration from the other sorts of rights infringements which we have been discussing so far. For example, if you are so deprived because your farm was flooded by ocean water and you were forced to move, then the problem seems to be one of property rights, and we already know what to say about it. To avoid confusion, we will discuss cases where the deprived party’s property is not being damaged in any way, and the only harm being done seems to be the kind of cultural deprivation that we are concerned with here.

Accordingly, we will imagine a hypothetical scenario in which a young Pacific Islander, Akiko, is setting about deciding what she wants for her life. She owns no property, and has not settled in to any profession or living situation. She is simply evaluating her options in order to choose how she will begin her adult life.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests that small island communities will be particularly vulnerable to climate change. In addition to submerging land on the island, sea level rise will likely make storm surges more dangerous and exacerbate erosion and other coastal hazards. On land, water resources will likely be seriously compromised, and the introduction of salty ocean water into the environment will likely make agriculture more difficult. In the ocean itself, changing environmental conditions could fundamentally alter ecosystems, possibly affecting populations of fish and other organisms on which the islanders rely. Further, a number of studies have concluded that the effects of climate change on the tourism industry will produce generally negative outcomes for island economies. All things considered, it might be unfeasible for Akiko to try to start a traditional life for herself on the island. Changing environmental conditions could make it impossible for her to live the kind of life which has characterized her people in the past, and she must act accordingly.

It seems clear that this is something of a sad story. But it might here be noticed that there are plenty of ways which one might deprive a person of the opportunity to live in the manner for which their culture is adapted, which would not involve any violations of their rights. For example, we might imagine a community of small-scale farmers who have fallen on hard times on account of the emergence of a large agribusiness corporation, whose greater efficiency and high output caused market prices for the farmers’ goods to fall below a level which could support their traditional lifestyles. Jebediah, a child growing up in such a community, would seemingly be faced with a set of circumstances similar to Akiko’s. Circumstances would make it impossible for Jebediah to take his place in the culture of his upbringing, much like Akiko was driven away from her heritage by the changing environmental conditions on her island brought about by climate change.

Presumably, we would not think that the agribusiness corporation, in bringing its products to market in higher quantities and better prices, was doing anything wrong, even if it had no significant moral reason to support its actions. In fact, we might applaud it for representing an increase in the wellbeing of its customers, who could use the money they saved on purchasing food products to improve their material conditions in ways that would have been otherwise unavailable to them. So surely its actions would not represent infringements of any rights held by the young members of the farming community, like Jebediah, who would be denied an opportunity to carry on in the traditions of their parents. And so we might think that in the same way, Akiko’s rights are not infringed when she is denied the opportunity to become integrated into the culture of her upbringing by climate change.

One might object that there is a difference between Jebediah’s case and Akiko’s, in that Akiko’s situation is the result of rights-infringing damage to the environment in which her culture existed, whereas Jebediah’s situation is the result of customers exercising their right to withdraw their patronage from producers who do offer noncompetitive products. Jebediah lost his opportunity because it was built upon an assumption of support from others which proved to be false, and neither he nor any of his predecessors had any right to this support. Akiko’s elders, however, did have a right to the things that Akiko would need in order to exercise her opportunity, and Akiko was only denied access to them because a third party actor acted in a way that infringed upon rights.

But as we mentioned at the beginning of this section, we have to be careful to avoid focusing on infringements of the rights of those whose property is damaged by climate change. Those factors have already been accounted for. And remember, we have stipulated that none of the property which is damaged belongs to Akiko. So this avenue of establishing Akiko’s rights seems closed: it seems fairly clear that Akiko has no claim to the property of other people, and her rights are not infringed when we damage that property.

Rights as a Member of a Community

However, one might point out that Akiko’s claim is not centered on the property damage itself, but rather its implications for the island community as a whole. Viewed holistically, Akiko’s community is composed of a system of interdependences which can be “benefited” or “harmed” in a way that cannot be understood simply as the sum of impacts on individual members. From this perspective, we harm the community not only when we harm a given individual, but also when we interfere with an individual’s fulfillment of her function in the community. For example, if a community depends on the agricultural products supplied by a particular farmer, and we damage the farmer’s land so that his productivity is constrained, then we not only harm the farmer, in that his property is damaged, but we also harm the community as a whole, in that the farmer filled an important “niche” as the provider of food for the rest of the community.

From Akiko’s perspective, climate change is not only damaging a great deal of others’ property, but it is also destroying the integrity of the community in which she was raised, and of which she expected and hoped to become a part. As we have described them, the opportunities that Akiko has been deprived of seem to have been dependent on the health of the community. So it might be that in objecting to the loss of her opportunity to be integrated into her culture, what Akiko is really objecting to is the loss of her community’s integrity due to the impairment of members’ functions due to climate change.

But what is so special about the “community” in this example which sets it apart from other instances where an individual’s social functions are impaired in a way that has negative implications for others? Imagine that Russell has been training himself to work as a laborer at a pogo stick factory in his town. But when he arrives at the factory to apply for a job, he discovers that it has been destroyed by terrorists. Unfortunately, Russell’s only hope of supporting himself in his town was to work at the pogo stick factory, and its destruction will force him to leave his community.

In this case, it does not seem that the terrorists infringed on Russell’s rights (though they almost certainly infringed on the factory owners’ rights). But it is nevertheless true that Russell depended on the factory’s ability to fulfill its function as a provider of jobs, and by impairing that function, the terrorists deprived Russell of the opportunity to integrate himself into his community. It seems as though the only difference between Russell’s situation and Akiko’s is that Russell’s situation was brought about by the impairment of the functioning of a single member of the community, whereas Akiko’s was brought about by the impairment of the functioning of multiple members. I see no reason to think that this difference is morally significant. Accordingly, it seems fair to conclude that, while her tale is a sad one (as are Jebediah’s and Russell’s), Akiko’s rights are not infringed as a result of her being deprived of the opportunity to integrate herself into the culture of her upbringing.

Is There a Right to Culture?

Donny with an A — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:52:00 GMT

[Cross-posted on the parent blog]

Last week I had a conversation with my thesis advisor, Dr. Harry Brighouse, in which we discussed an interesting idea which I think might prove important in one way or another, and which I think is worthy of elaboration here. The idea was that a big part of what people are concerned about in discussing climate change is that members of certain social groups will be deprived of the opportunity to integrate themselves into the societies in which they were raised, as a result of changes in the physical context in which those societies were able to flourish.

To illustrate, we might travel to Bangladesh several decades in the future. In my imaginary scenario, sea levels are rising around the low-lying country, and the property of the locals is suffering considerable damage. However, because I am the master of this imaginary scenario, I'll stipulate that we have fully compensated all of these property owners for the damage done to them (regardless of whether or not they would actually be entitled to this compensation). So everyone whose property is damaged by climate change is fine.

But imagine that there is a child, Nadia, who has grown up in Bangladesh and is beginning to plan a life for herself. Perhaps it would be possible for Nadia to live in Bangladesh, but with the environmental damage being done to the area, perhaps it would be unfeasible for her to do so. It's not that she has such great opportunities elsewhere, but rather that the prospect of living a good life in Bangladesh looks bleak. Accordingly, the best choice for Nadia and her peers might be to assimilate into another culture which would offer a more promising future. Would Nadia have been deprived of something to which she was entitled?

We have stipulated that Nadia owned no property which was damaged, or that if she did, she was fully compensated for it. Further, we have stipulated that Nadia had not yet even chosen a profession, or settled down anywhere. She was simply deciding what she wanted for her life, and she saw that Bangladesh offered scarce opportunities for the kind of future she envisioned for herself. Given the way we normally think about rights violations, it doesn't seem like we have wronged Nadia in any real way.

But at the same time, I can see why Nadia would offer an objection. She might say that as a Bangladeshi, she would have wanted to be integrated into Bangladeshi society. Now, as a result of the effects of climate change, it will be extremely difficult for her to make that happen. Nadia's claim, then, would seem to be that she had some kind of right which is infringed by other people making it difficult or impossible for her to become a part of the culture of her upbringing. And it does seem like a good portion of the concern aimed at climate change is directed at the idea that we would be infringing this kind of right by contributing to a state of affairs in which Nadia is forced to find a way of life which does not reflect her native culture.

It's easy to sympathize with Nadia, and see how she would be frustrated by the state of affairs in which she finds herself. But does Nadia have any right like this? Do we act impermissibly when we put Nadia in this position?

In a previous post, I discussed the possibility that in cases involving inheritances, the would-be inheritors of some valuable object might claim injustice if that object were damaged or destroyed, even if the person or people who owned that object at the time of its destruction were compensated. I said that while I understood why someone might see things that way, it would seem to go very much against the way we normally think about property rights, and I wasn't sure I could defend the position. However, I didn't think that the problem could be dismissed as easily as that, because there was something intuitively reasonable about the objection. But I'm not dealing with that issue here.

In our story, Nadia isn't inheriting any property. Therefore, we avoid all of the problems associated with Akiko's case in the other post. Here, we're dealing with a particular right not to an object, but to a kind of opportunity which is being denied to Nadia. Namely, the opportunity to become a member of the culture.

But in spite of the differences between Nadia's case and Akiko's case, I want to reintroduce an example I used in the previous post:

...we might point out that the above case sounds a lot like a story where an agrarian community is "destroyed" by industrialization and mass production. Small scale family farms can't keep up with the low prices generated by the advanced practices of a local agribusiness concern, and can no longer support their old way of life. It's a sad story, but we wouldn't want to claim that any injustice has occurred. Perhaps as a society, we would want to help these farmers get back on their feet and find a new place in the market. But we wouldn't want to blame the agribusiness for doing something wrong.

It seems to me that if I were the offspring of one of the small scale farmers, I might feel frustration towards the agribusiness, but I would have no legitimate claim against them. So if we're going to attribute to Nadia the kind of right we're talking about here, we need to give some reason for thinking that Nadia's situation is fundamentally different from the industrialization case. In the earlier post, I pointed out that the small scale farmers' frustration is the result of relying on something which they never had any right to: the support of their customers. But the source of Nadia's frustration is less clear.

We might say that Nadia simply wants to be offerred an appealing job in the location in which she wants to work, and a place to live which matches what she hoped for. If we phrase Nadia's frustration this way, then it is clear that she has no right to these things, as they too require something of others. But this seems unfair to Nadia's case.

It seems to me that Nadia's objection is more holistic in nature. She sees her cultural community as a distinct entity, to which we could coherently apply the concepts of stability and integrity. When healthy and vital, that community would provide her with a range of opportunities to try to make a life for herself without any active facilitation by any members of the community. Certainly she could choose to pursue other opportunities, and this would not be a problem for anyone. But the option would be available to her if she wanted it. By causing climate change, we degrade Nadia's community, and diminish her opportunities. Nadia's objection seems to be that the degradation of her community, which is the result of the actions of those who contributed to climate change, represents a wrong done to her.

This is an interesting idea, but is not one which I know how to handle. I think it would be best to take some time to digest it. So having set up this discussion, I'll leave settling it for another time.

Climate Change, Vanishing Lifestyles, and Children

Donny with an A — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:56:00 GMT

[Cross-posted on the parent blog]

So in a previous post, I discussed a case in which rising sea levels, resulting from a warming of the Earth, caused the salinization of a Bangladeshi farmer's land, so that he could no longer grow rice on it in the way to which he was accustomed. I concluded that as the owner of the land, with full property rights, he should be entitled to compensation for any damage done to him by those contributing to climate change. And it seems like this could be extended to any member of the contributors' generation who were harmed by climate change.

But costs associated with climate change will not only be incurred by individuals who are alive now, they will be realized by future people as well. The nature of the cost to future people, however, is less clear than the nature of the costs to existing people. This post will explore a sort of impact which seems to be central to people's concern about climate change, but which is difficult to deal with in the framework of human rights. Namely, many communities will be impacted in a way that makes it difficult for them to continue their cultural existence, making it necessary for the children of those cultures to find fundamentally different ways of living.

For example, indigenous communities in Africa will see progressively more significant alterations to their natural setting as the climate continues to change. Plants and animals which were once prevalent in the region will no longer be fit for survival there, and new species will move in. Knowledge developed over centuries will no longer be effective. Being ill adapted for life in a fundamentally different climate, it is conceivable that these communities will be unable to survive in the manner in which they have for countless generations. They would have to find a new way to live.

What do we say about this? It is clear that a great number of people are concerned about precisely this sort of problem, and cite it as a reason to be worried about climate change. But does it tell a story of injustice? Many people's intuitions say yes.

However, we might point out that the above case sounds a lot like a story where an agrarian community is "destroyed" by industrialization and mass production. Small scale family farms can't keep up with the low prices generated by the advanced practices of a local agribusiness concern, and can no longer support their old way of life. It's a sad story, but we wouldn't want to claim that any injustice has occurred. Perhaps as a society, we would want to help these farmers get back on their feet and find a new place in the market. But we wouldn't want to blame the agribusiness for doing something wrong.

If there is no wrongdoing in the industrialization case, where communities might be unable to sustain their old lifestyles as the result of the actions of others, then can we consistently hold that there is injustice being done to indigenous people by climate change? Or are we simply setting indigenous communities on a pedestal because they're different and mysterious, and we somehow think that by being so unusual, these individuals come to have different rights than the rest of us?

It seems to me that there is a critical difference between the destruction of the indigenous community caused by climate change and the destruction of the agrarian community caused by industrialization. In the industrialization case, it's not as if the agribusiness made it impossible for the family farmers to continue farming. Rather, the problem arises because the family farmers were depending on the support of their customers in order to sustain themselves. Given that their customers had the right to remove their support at any time, it should be clear that the farmers were depending on others making choices which they could permissibly not make, or stop making at any time. The agribusiness, with its greater efficiency, could offer much lower prices than the family farmers, and their customers decided to withdraw their support, as was their right. It should be clear that in our story, the agribusiness never did anything to the family farmers. It simply revealed the fact that the family farmers could only continue to sustain themselves in their traditional manner if their customers continued to voluntarily purchase their products. The family farmers never had any right to that support, and so when it was withdrawn, no right was violated.

On the other hand, it doesn't seem like the indigenous communities in question depend on anyone for their continued survival. They require only that their environments not be modified so as to make them incompatible with their lifestyles. And as far as these indigenous communities have been making use of their environments for centuries, it seems fair to say that they have some legitimate claim to their not being negatively affected by the actions of other people.

I suspect that if we told the agrarian story in a way that matched the indigenous story, our intuitions would tell us that we were dealing with a rights violation. For example, let's say an agrarian community depended on an underground stream to bring water to the region with which to grow crops. Now imagine that someone diverted the flow of water through the area so that the community's land ran dry. Surely we would say that the diversion of the water flow represented a wrong done to the farmers, right?

In the same way, it seems that changing the climate in a way that would negatively impact indigenous peoples' ability to continue living in their traditional manner would be unjust. But this is not new ground. This conclusion is pretty much the same as the one I reached in my post about the Bangladeshi farmer and the rising sea levels. I want to go one step further here.

As I mentioned before, the intuition that people have about this sort of case is not simply that our alteration of the climate is wrong because it harms currently existing indigenous peoples' ability to live in the manner to which they are accustomed. The problem is also that their children will be unable to live in that manner. That is, the issue is not just what happens to the people whose lives are made difficult by climate change, but also what happens to the people who will be unable to live in the traditional manner dictated by their culture, and what consequently happens to the culture itself.

In order to isolate these factors from the harm done to the currently existing indigenous individuals, we might imagine that these individuals have been fully compensated for the damage done to them as individuals. This compensation not only takes into account the damage to their property, but also the damage to their character and psyche; the currently existing indigenous individuals recognize they were wronged, but acknowledge that they have been compensated adequately for all that they personally have endured.

Now we might imagine that one of these indigenous individuals has a child, Akiko. Akiko is raised in the indigenous culture, but sees that she will be unable to support herself in the traditional way. She will need to live a fundamentally different lifestyle from that of her people in order to survive. If we are to sustain that climate change will result in injustice to people like Akiko, then we must say that Akiko is wronged by having to find a way of life which differs from her culture's traditions.

At first glance, this might seem absurd. I grew up in Westport, CT; do I have the right to a house there? I have a friend who comes from a family of doctors; does he have the right to be one too? Surely we don't want to say that people have a right to live like the people who brought them up lived. We must find some other way to explain what is wrong with Akiko's situation if we are to be taken seriously.

A clue can be found in the fact that just like in the example with the agribusiness and the family farmers, my demands about a house in Westport and my friend's demands for a doctor job require things of others. Given that I have no right to anything from these people, it seems ridiculous to suggest that I am wronged if they do not provide me with something. I do have the right to try to buy a house in Westport, and my friend has the right to try to be a doctor. But given that having a house or being a doctor require the voluntary consent of others (in my case, the consent of the house's previous owner; in my friends case, the consent of the hiring institution and of the customers who choose to purchase his services), we cannot have the right to these things.

Akiko's demands would also be rooted in her getting others' consent. That is, she does not own her people's land; the older members of her culture do. But the kind of consent Akiko requires is very different from the kind of consent I would need in order to get a house, in that Akiko has that consent. Akiko's people, we presume, would gladly allow Akiko to use, and even to own, the group's land. In the absence of climate change, Akiko would be able to support herself in the traditional way using nothing but this land. But because of the effects of climate change, the land will not be able to support her in the traditional way. The substance of Akiko's complaint, then, might seem to be that she should have inherited enough resources to sustain herself, but that climate change diminished those resources to make it impossible for her to use them in the way her culture would have suggested.

This leads us to an interesting idea. Remember, we have said that the current owners of the land were fully compensated for all of the damage done to them by the effects of climate change on their land. Akiko's complaint is that there is a gap between what she should have inherited and what she actually did inherit. In order to satisfy Akiko (if we have interpreted her complaint correctly), we would need to take the view that by damaging the indigenous people's land, we not only wronged those people, but also the people who stood to inherit the land later. The "damage done" would be the damage done to the current owners, as well as the "damage" done to the future owners who "should have" inherited the land in its original condition, but instead inherited it in a damaged and less useful state. Accordingly, Akiko too would be entitled to compensation.

Of course, from Akiko's standpoint, this seems like it would be a fair solution. Because climate change destroyed her people's ability to live off the land, every generation of people in her community would be compensated for the damage done to the land. I'm not sure if this would actually be right, though. It seems to go completely against the way we normally think about damage and liability. I'd like to think about this some more, but I think this was a good place to start.