Environmental Politics

Front 1

Tragedy of the Commons

Back 1

multiple individuals, acting independently and rationally based on their own self interest will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource even when it is clear it is not in anyone’s long term interest
Solutions:
Socialism
Privatization of free enterprise

Front 2

Limits to growth

Back 2

rapidly growing world population and finite resource supplies
o World population
o Industrialization
o Pollution
o Food production
o Resource depletion

Front 3

Common pool resources

Back 3

natural/human constructed resources that:
o Exclusion of benefits is impossible
o Exploitation by one user reduces resource availability for others

Front 4

• Green taxes

Back 4

taxes intended to promote ecologically sustainable activities via economic incentives; examples of pigovian taxes; pollution charge systems, tradable permits, deposit-refund systems

Front 5

• Restraint principle

Back 5

conditional rights to scarce goods be distributed in such a way that they remain within the limits of necessity, available for redistribution, and cannot destroy the resource, just compensation for resource degradation; goal is sustainability

Front 6

• Consumer/citizen preferences

Back 6

individual acts as self-interested consumer but as a citizen acts based on values and on an image of a good society

Front 7

• Ecological rationality

Back 7

-human reasoning and behavior that is adapted to the environment

Front 8

• Kuznets curve

Back 8

compares the development/affluence of a country with environmental degradation; early stages of economic development pollution is increasing, but it decreases as people have a higher standard of living because they have more time/resources to give greater attention to the environment; applies to a set of pollutants

Front 9

• The “trouble with wilderness”-

Back 9

seeing the wilderness as separate from nature leads to environmental irresponsibility, idealizing wilderness means not idealizing environment where we live leading to ignoring problems at home

Front 10

• Carrying capacity

Back 10

population size of a species that an area of the environment can sustain indefinitely; contingent on technology, preferences, structure of production/consumption, and changing state of interactions between physical and biotic environment

Front 11

• Cost-benefit analysis

Back 11

process of weighing the total expected costs against the total expected benefits of one or more actions in order to choose the best or most profitable option

Front 12

• Adaptive management

Back 12

implementing policies as experiments to probe responses of ecosystems as peoples behaviours in them change; aim to learn about ecosystems processes/structures and to design better policies

Front 13

• Free market environmentalism

Back 13

position that argues that the free market, property rights, and the tort law provide the best tools to preserve the health and sustainability of the environment; against government intervention and regulation

Front 14

• Ecoauthoritarianism

Back 14

implementing authoritarian principles, practices, and regulations (complete control, not responsive to the people’s desires) to solve environmental problems.

Front 15

• Collaborative conservation

Back 15

public role in environmental policy; sharing authority public and experts to regulate

Front 16

• Risk assessment

Back 16

determination of the value of risk related to an action; process of estimating damages that are occurring or may occur