NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #16/NN_1992_16.iso/spool/talk/environm/2954

Text File | 1992-07-24 | 7.0 KB | 150 lines

Newsgroups: talk.environment
Path: sparky!uunet!haven.umd.edu!darwin.sura.net!gatech!rpi!batcomputer!cornell!uw-beaver!pauld
From: [e-mail] (Paul Barton-Davis)
Subject: Re: What, if anything, is a wetland? (WAS Re: Why Bush does not want to sign at Rio?
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail] (USENET News System)
Organization: Computer Science & Engineering, U. of Washington, Seattle
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Date: Fri, 24 Jul 92 17:54:47 GMT
Lines: 138

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Timothy Freeman) writes:
>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Paul Barton-Davis) writes:
>   The point is *not* that no changes to the material resources are
>   allowed to remain after the "lease" on them runs out (you die, for
>   instance).
>
>Corporations and universities never die, so you'll need criteria other
>than that to decide when the lease expires.

Sure. I used death simply because it corresponded to the example you gave.

                          Furthermore, you can't
>enforce laws against me if I'm dead, so if the lease only expires when
>I'm dead then it won't motivate me to clean up after myself.

Sure. I don't believe in laws as the primary origin of "behavioural
motivation" anyway, and get very concerned by their existence. If I
have to rely on laws to motivate you to look after the land, I may as
well give up. That applies now as much as in a lease scheme.

>   The point *is* that such changes as remain have to be those
>   agreed by the community to either:
>
>       1) have no effect on your neighbours, far and wide
>       or
>       2) be considered to have beneficial effects by those affected.
>
>   So, if making the keyboard is an act of zero impact, you can do
>   whatever it as much as you like. If not, you'd better get those
>   affected to agree to it.
>
>What does this have to do with the lease?  Suppose I lease some land for
>50 years, and grow food on it, and suppose that having a field is
>considered by the community to be worse than having a forest.

Then you would never have converted it into a field in the first
place, unless you could show that doing so had no impact on others.

>We need to make a distinction between things that people get because
>they have a right to it, and things they get because they are lucky.

Absolutely. And being a homesteading pioneer in western North America
in the middle 1800's counts as "luck" (for these purposes) as far as I
can see. Since virtually every land claim in the USA (and Canda) goes
back to such things, I would have to say that all current land
ownership is based less on having a right to own land than the
prior existence of "lucky" individuals.

>Being able to look at my property and get the pleasure of seeing a
>forest instead of a field is something they get because they're lucky.
>You seem to be throwing everything in to the set of things they have a
>right to.

I don't quite understand this paragraph.

>   Not much different from now, except that making this explicit, instead
>   of giving more legal carte blanche on the basis of ownership, would
>   perhaps lead to more attention being given to these considerations.
>
>In the current system you don't get carte blanche because of
>ownership.  If you make changes to your property that affect the next
>guy's property without his consent, then you are liable.  It sounds
>like what you're proposing is identical to a libertarian scheme,
>except that stupid things happen each time the lease expires.

The difference here is the extent to which side effects are made
explicit and considered a matter for political process. A libertarian
scheme typically has a lot of talk in it about "consensual contracts"
and a lack of "coercion", and very little about the fact that pretty
much everything human beings do (once they reach typical current
population density) has effects on other human beings (as well as
other ecological components). By having a lease system, coupled with a
local, decentralized participatory democracy, you emphasize the inter-
connectedness of human action; a libertarian system starts with the
presumption that most of the things people want to do are free of side
effects. This scheme starts with the opposite presumption, but then
seeks to derive as much liberty as possible, for all concerned, within
the context of that presumption.

Again, if the end of the lease is the only "control" point, then sure,
stupid things will happen then, and the entire scheme will fail
miserably.

>       (i) identifying those affected more accurately (which in turn
>           implies identifying the effects of actions more accurately)
>
>This is what the court system is supposed to do.  If it isn't working,
>we need to fix it instead of making something entirely new that has a
>new set of bugs.

The court system is a reactive institution, not a pro-active one.
There are few incentives in most industrialized nations (or anywhere
else for that matter) to consider side effects *before* doing
something, unless those side effects are clear, obvious and extremely
unpopular. This applies to the environmental movement just as much as
it does to corporations.

>      (ii) being more just in seeking their approval. "Just"
>           in this case simply means literal democracy - one person,
>           one vote, the rich not getting more of a say than the poor
>           in whether or not some action is a good one.
>
>There hasn't been any voting in your proposal so far, so I don't see
>what they would be voting for.

All of my opinions and ideas on ways of organizing things presume the
existence of a small scale participatory democracy along the lines
laid out in Bryan & McClaughry's "The Vermont Papers". I have problems
with how such a system would deal with the gross financial inequities
between parts of the country that engage in quite different, but
equally valuable, economic activity (contrasting, for instance, rural
Appalachia with the Bay Area or Connecticut), but the broad outlines
of this type of political (and to some extent, legal) system is a
prequisite for all of the ideas I espouse.

                 Making changes seems to require
>unanimous consent.  But if one person is harmed in the current system,
>they're supposed to be able to sue.

Who do I sue over the destruction of the Pacific Flyway, a bird
migration route up the west coast that has been successively harmed by
urban development, wetland removal, aircraft flight patterns and
highways ? What do I sure for ?
                      So I still don't see any
>advatages of your scheme over a properly-debugged version of the
>current scheme.

I'll grant this might be true. What I doubt is that its possible to
properly debug the current scheme when so many costs are made
implicit, and so many side effects are considered negligible or too
long term to worry about.

-- paul
--
             Paul's housebuilding credo:
     Measure it with a micrometer, cut it with a chainsaw, fit it
             with a sledgehammer