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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Rudel, Thomas K., author.
Title: Shocks, states, and sustainability : the origins of radical environmental reforms / Thomas K. Rudel.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018026574 (print) | LCCN 2018037790 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190924461 (updf) | ISBN 9780190924478 (epub) | ISBN 9780190921019 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780190921026 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Sustainable development. | Environmental policy. | Environmental protection.
Classification: LCC HC79.E5 (ebook) | LCC HC79.E5 R813 2019 (print) | DDC 333.7—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018026574
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Paperback printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
Dedicated to Frederick H. Buttel and William R. Freudenburg, two pioneering environmental sociologists who died before their time
CONTENTS
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
CHAPTER 1. Introduction 1
CHAPTER 2. Radical Environmental Reforms: A Theory 8
CHAPTER 3. The Great Plains: Soil Conservation During the “Dirty Thirties” 44
CHAPTER 4. England: Green Belts After World War II 68
CHAPTER 5. Cuba: Agro-Ecological Farming After the Soviet Collapse 91
CHAPTER 6. Coastal Maine: A Catch-and-Sometimes-Release Lobster Fishery 113
CHAPTER 7. The World: Reform in a Global Environmental Cage 132
CHAPTER 8. Radical Environmental Reforms in Comparative Perspective 152
CHAPTER 9. Conclusion 168
Notes 181 References 187 Index 211
For the past thirty years, observers of our changing natural environment have engaged in a two-step, argumentative dance in their articles and books. The first step describes the damage that we have done to the natural environment, the dangers that come with the damage, and the inequalities in our exposure to the dangers. We have analyzed a wide range of environmental problems, from toxic contaminants to degraded landscapes, in this manner. Recently, more and more of our analytic energies have focused in this fashion on climate change. Authors have described its dynamics, its forces of destruction, and the special vulnerability of the poorest among us to these forces.
These texts convey a gloomy message, and their prognostications have become darker over time. Observers have stopped referring to the destabilizing effects of future climate change and started talking about the damage it is inflicting upon us now. The damage, like the destruction wreaked by tropical cyclones in the Atlantic in the summer of 2017, has gotten worse, and it promises to get worse still. Models of climate change suggest that “the sting is in the tail,” with the most pronounced and damaging effects in the distant future.
A succession of these reports can contribute to a kind of fatalism in readers. Considered together, the reports convey a sense that disruptive climate change is inevitable. Restricting global warming to an increase of less than 2°C will indeed require a very wide range of coordinated actions by states, organizations, and individuals. The immensity of the task, the need to mobilize large numbers of people, the unprecedented nature of the challenge, and the modesty of our accomplishments to date are enough to make one sigh and throw up one’s hands out of frustration! Alternatively, we can
proceed quietly from day to day with our high-emission routines and maintain the faith that, in some unspecified way, we will survive. Perhaps others will step up and spur the collective action necessary to curb our emissions of greenhouse gases.
To counter the fatalism induced by events and circumstances, most analysts end their studies with a second step in their argument, a short expression of hope, sometimes expressed as a conviction that we still have time to “turn things around” if we work really hard at it. So, despite the doom and gloom in the reports, they often end on a hopeful note. These hopeful assertions seem almost like a reflex, coming from people who have told themselves that they cannot end their article or book on such a depressing note. The hopeful notes in these concluding passages seem less than fully credible, in part, because few analysts provide detailed illustrations or examples of societies that have “turned it around.” Shocks, States, and Sustainability (hereafter Shocks) addresses this deficit in our understanding about the circumstances that have contributed to sudden, large-scale shifts toward more sustainable human societies. It does so through a comparative historical analysis of radical environmental reforms in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
By providing comparative historical accounts of large-scale sustainability initiatives, Shocks aims to accomplish several ends. First, it tries to counter the conviction inherent in fatalistic assessments of climate change that large-scale shifts toward more sustainable societies are impossible. The examples of rapid, thoroughgoing reforms across such diverse settings as the North American Great Plains, the coast of Maine, the peri-urban districts of England, and the tropical island of Cuba should persuade readers that large-scale shifts toward more sustainable practices can occur with concerted efforts in a wide range of places. In this respect, Shocks tries to make it a little more difficult to succumb to fatalism in the face of climate change.
Second, Shocks tries to explain as well as describe the environmental reform efforts. It advances an argument that sudden, large-magnitude events provide political opportunities for large-scale environmental reforms, especially when these events underscore the limited extent of the natural resources that sustain us. Reform efforts can also succeed without focusing events, but only if the reformers have already mobilized for change.
If the first goal of this book is to encourage reform by demonstrating that it can be done, the second goal is more strategic. Through the comparative analyses, it outlines several conjunctures of historical conditions that have generated successful reform efforts. By identifying these intersecting conditions, I hope that Shocks helps environmentalists identify politically promising conditions and strategies for reform. In this respect, the book
suggests when and how we need to proceed to counter climate change. In other words, Shocks tries to advance our understanding of this second step in the argumentative dance, a reform of society that recasts it in a more sustainable basis. By illustrating how these environmental reforms have happened during the past century, this book aims to contribute to the success of future efforts to foster more sustainable societies.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Theargument and accumulation of knowledge presented here have a history that stretches back ten years. People intervened at various points as I developed the ideas, presented them to small audiences, and wondered whether or not the ideas represented a contribution to our collective understanding of human societies and the surrounding natural environment. While I am responsible for the exaggerations and errors in what follows, the insightful parts of this book owe their existence in many instances to the interventions of many people along the way.
I have dedicated this book to two people, both pioneering environmental sociologists, Fred Buttel and Bill Freudenburg. Through conversations, presentations, and publications, they got me to think about environmental reforms many years ago. Had they lived longer lives, I am sure that they would have expanded on their early thoughts, and we would all be the richer for it. Once I got to the point where I began to articulate ideas about reform processes, three colleagues from the Department of Sociology at Rutgers, Lee Clarke, Paul McLean, and Judy Gerson, commented on my initial efforts and pushed me to clarify my thoughts. At a pivotal point in the research, Simone Pulver expressed a note of skepticism about my comparative historical methods, one that improved the final product by getting me to add a fourth case to the analysis. Timmons Roberts and I had periodic conversations at professional meetings that pointed me in the direction of readings that proved very valuable in formulating the argument presented here.
When I finished a first draft of the manuscript, Steve Brechin and Julia Flagg read it through from start to finish and made valuable observations about the central argument in the book. Patrick Meyfroidt offered comments on the chapter on the United Kingdom that enabled me to understand the
U.K. experience in a European context. Rachael Shwom provided useful citations and conversations about tipping points and other pivotal moments in the evolution of the environmental movement. Comments by Karen O’Neill refocused my thinking about the New Deal. At a late point in the formulation of the argument, three anonymous reviewers for Oxford University Press made eighteen pages of single-spaced comments on an initial draft of the manuscript!
Other people made tangible contributions to the book. The librarians at the Chang Science Library at Rutgers, led by Nita Mukherjee, filled my many requests for books. Mark Knowlton helped me ready the figures in the book for publication. Mike Siegel made several maps for me, and the staff at Klein and Ulmes in Middlesex, New Jersey, helped me get the images accompanying the book into legible shape. Audiences at SESYNC (the SocioEcological Synthesis Center funded by the National Science Foundation), the Rural Sociological Society, and a brown bag seminar in the Department of Human Ecology at Rutgers listened to me present the central theses of this book and asked questions about these theses afterwards. At Oxford University Press James Cook provided suggestions and encouragement at opportune times. Emily MacKenzie patiently answered all my questions about the publishing process. It has been a pleasure to work with them! Finally, I want to thank my family. Susan and Daniel put up with the dayto-day inconveniences and annoyances of living with someone who always wants to steal away to his study to work on the book!
CHAPTER 1 Introduction
Perhaps the most appropriate metaphor (for climate change) is a lethal boomerang, our own inventions coming back to kill us.
michael mann, The Sources of Social Power (2013)
“Business as Usual” in an Era of Climate Change
The impetus for environmental reforms in the twenty-first century comes primarily from the specter of catastrophic climate change. The short history of our responses to climate change illustrates the political challenges faced by environmental reformers. Rich and poor nations continue to rely on polluting technologies, and they adopt cleaner technologies in small increments. Alarm over this inertia has contributed to a growing conviction that we will have to undertake a series of radical reforms in the near future if we are to avoid disastrous climatic conditions in the distant future.
Incremental losses from climate change are all around us. The rising toll of deaths during heat waves in India, the more powerful tropical cyclones in the oceans, the death of coral reefs east of Australia, and the long-lasting droughts in the Sahel all represent worrisome trends. Most frightening might be the projected “state shifts” triggered by climate change. These events, like the collapse of ice sheets in Antarctica, large changes in ocean currents, or the sudden release of large amounts of methane from melting tundra, would alter the fundamental features of our environment and threaten human livelihoods over vast areas.
Preventing these damaging destabilizations of the climate would require that societies adopt alternative sources of energy at the same time that they make deep cuts in fossil fuel emissions. While some organizations and
individuals have cut their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the worldwide, year-over-year trends in GHG emissions are still upward. Three years (2014–2016) saw little change in emissions, but from 2016 to 2017 they increased by 1.4 percent.1 The Paris Treaty on Climate Change entered into force in the fall of 2016, but its “pledge and review” approach did not commit nations to mandatory reductions in GHG emissions. The repudiation of the Paris Treaty by the president of the United States in the spring of 2017 added to doubts about the commitment of nations to curb the use of fossil fuels in the drastic ways necessary to keep the increase in global temperatures below 2°C.
Energy production from alternative sources, particularly from windmills and solar panels, have shown substantial increases in recent years, with wind energy generating 4.7 percent of the world’s electricity in 2016.2 When the use of new, reduced emission technologies spreads across industries, ecological modernization occurs and aggregate emissions should decline (Mol et al. 2009; Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015). At the very least, technological innovations should lead to less use of fossil fuels per unit of output. Over time, these innovations should produce a decoupling between economic growth and GHG emissions from energy use. In fact, increments in economic growth have required smaller amounts of fossil fuel since 2000 than they did during the 1960s, so some decoupling has occurred (Jorgensen and Clark 2012). Ecological modernization has produced some absolute declines in GHG emissions, but the declines have occurred infrequently and the magnitude of the declines have been modest. Ecological modernization in the northern states of the European Union produced an 11 percent decline in emissions between 1990 and 2008 (Perrow and Pulver 2015). California, widely touted as the leading edge of ecological modernization in the United States, saw an 11 percent decline in emissions between 2007 and 2014.3
While alternative energy has made gains, overall energy consumption has continued to grow globally, and the consumption of fossil fuels has continued to increase—by 9 percent between 2008 and 2013—albeit at a declining rate.4 Additional emission reductions may come from the adoption of energy-saving technologies by companies (Vandenbergh and Gilligan 2015) and localities (Wachsmuth et al. 2016), but these commitments to sustainability, while of undoubted symbolic value, must produce substantial declines in the use of fossil fuels to be credible. Retrofitting processes of production and service provision to reduce emissions requires work across specializations that bureaucracies have long proven ill-equipped to do (Aylett 2013; Merton et al. 1952). These difficulties may explain why, despite frequent proclamations of commitments to sustainability since 2000, city
officials in affluent countries have found it difficult to reduce GHG emissions (Aylett 2013).
The limited reductions in fossil fuel use stem in large part from the continued normative commitment to affluence and economic growth among people intent on achieving emission reductions (Higgs 2014). To achieve growth, people typically want to expand the size of enterprises. In this context, each unit of a new technology may emit less, but because people use more units of these technologies as they increase the scale of their enterprises, the overall volume of GHG emissions may not decline. For example, the average size of new single-family homes in the United States has grown by 61 percent over the last forty years.5 The increased cost to heat or air-condition these larger houses counters the increased fuel efficiency of heaters, air conditioners, and power plants, leading to little overall change in the volume of emissions per capita. In some instances a rebound effect occurs (Gillingham et al. 2015). The increased energy efficiency of a new technology, by reducing its cost, encourages consumers to use more of it. The more frequent use of the technology erodes the energy savings and environmental benefits of the new technology. For example, between 2012 and 2016 the introduction of solid-state lights around the world reduced energy consumption per light bulb, but growth in continuously lit areas around the world offset the reduction in energy use achieved by the more efficient light bulbs (Kyba et al. 2017).
Emission reductions through ecological modernization have varied with the political economies of places. American states with fewer fossil fuel deposits and more environmentally concerned legislators have emitted less GHG than states with more fossil fuel deposits and fewer environmentally concerned legislators. States and nations with politically powerful environmental non-profit organizations and politically influential scientific communities tend to promote the adoption of cleaner energy technologies more aggressively than do other nations (Fisher 2004; Dietz et al. 2015). The new technologies spread more rapidly when governments fund related research and promote the use of the new technologies through subsidies. These geographic variations in commitments to ecological modernization have occurred against a backdrop of a continued, overall commitment to the use of fossil fuels.
Despite the campaigns to reduce emissions over the past quarter-century, most people in the United States continue to heat their homes directly or indirectly with fossil fuels and drive large, fossil fuel–powered vehicles, so the normative changes necessary to reduce GHG emissions from home heating and automobile use have been slow to take hold (Heberlein 2012). Practices
like driving automobiles with gasoline engines, promoted by oil companies and automobile manufacturers for decades, have embedded fossil fuel consumption in the daily routines of households in wealthy countries (Schatzki et al. 2001; Bourdieu 1990). Continued government subsidies for fossil fuel exploration and development have worked to insure a steady, uninterrupted flow of fossil fuels to cars and houses (Ciplet et al. 2015). These arrangements and associated small changes in fossil fuel consumption represent a “business-as-usual” scenario for both consumers and the fossil fuel industry. To maintain political support for this status quo, industry representatives have tried for at least two decades to discredit scientific findings that attribute climate change to fossil fuel consumption (Dunlap and McCright 2015).
Reports from the most widely known non-profit and governmental organizations devoted to reducing GHG emissions adopted a non-partisan or “post-political” tone during this period in discussions of continued emissions. The most authoritative of these climate change organizations, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), framed the climate change issue in a way that ignored the highly partisan resistance of the fossil fuel industries to emission-reduction efforts (Swyngedouw 2011; Brulle and Dunlap 2015). In effect, the IPCC and the USGCRP lent their tacit support to a strategy for reducing emissions that goes only as fast as technological progress permits. In this manner the IPCC and the USGCRP have promoted ecological modernization with its conversion in increments to cleaner energy technologies as the preferred strategy for combating climate change (Caniglia et al. 2015). Despite the partisan divides surrounding issues of climate change and the environment, political struggle as a means for reducing emissions has received little to no attention in the IPCC and USGCRP reports.
Environmental Reforms and Revolutions: Where Are They?
Major environmental reforms did occur in North America and Western Europe during the twentieth century, but their transformative impacts emerged slowly. The Clean Air Act of 1970 in the United States ratified at a national scale urban efforts to reduce air pollution that had begun during the Progressive era in the early twentieth century (Uekoetter 2009). Partisan conflicts have stalled nation-wide environmental reforms in the United States since 1990 (Vogel 2012). Co-optation of environmental activists by ruling parties in Western Europe slowed the pace of environmental reforms in the
European Community (Dryzek et al. 2003). These historical experiences underscore the accuracy of Vaclav Smil’s observation that large-scale shifts to cleaner burning fuels take a long time (Voosen 2018).
The slow pace of environmental reform has persisted, even as more farreaching problems, like climate change, have emerged. Expressions of alarm about the slow rates of decline in GHG emissions have crept into discussions about climate change during the past three decades. More people have begun to advocate for radical change. Bill McKibben (2016) argues that to curb carbon emissions, Americans will have to mobilize as they did during World War II. Others have called for the “drastic decarbonizing” of society (Harlan et al. 2015), “systemic transformations” (Wallerstein et al. 2013), or “transformative change” (Speth 2008) in the face of “global state shifts and mass extinctions that would dramatically disrupt human activities” (Rockstrom et al. 2009). In “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity,” a letter signed by more than 15,000 scientists in December 2017, the lead authors describe humans as on a “collision course” with nature (Ripple et al. 2017).
Over time these warnings have become more life-threatening. As John Holdren (2017), the ex-science advisor for President Obama, put it, “We’re not really in the business any longer of trying to avoid dangerous climate change. . . . We’re trying to avoid catastrophic climate change.”
So, as efforts at mitigating GHG emissions have fallen short, questions about how to generate rapid, large-scale reductions in emissions have become more pressing. Contemplating life-threatening temperature increases of 4°C or more, some observers have begun to outline “panic scenarios” in which nations attempt to “geoengineer” the climate and eco-authoritarian regimes coerce cuts in pollutants (Anderson and Bows 2011; Keith 2013).
Both this rhetoric and the scientific reality of climate change would seem to make dramatic episodes of change more likely. Despite these expectations of dramatic change, few people have described how it might proceed (Folke 2010). Fred Buttel, an esteemed environmental sociologist, issued a call for research on processes of radical environmental reform more than fifteen years ago (Buttel 2003). Since then, other analysts have sounded similar notes. Environmental scientists have vowed to focus their research on “planetary opportunities” for reform that produce benefits for society at the same time that they reduce negative environmental impacts (DeFries et al. 2012). Frans Berkhout, the interim director of “Future Earth,” a consortium of environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs), called in 2014 for “solutions narratives” that recount how societies and communities make themselves more sustainable.6 Scientists from the Resilience Alliance (Folke 2016) have explored what makes societies capable of transformative
changes in the face of environmental threats. In earlier work (Rudel 2013), I described the general circumstances in which radical environmental reforms might occur. Shocks, States, and Sustainability describes these political transformations in much greater detail.
States have rarely ever undertaken large-scale environmental-protection efforts. Resistant political elites and more pressing political priorities have almost always sidelined environmentally transformative efforts. Given this historical record, the pressing question becomes: “What sorts of historical conditions might mobilize ordinary citizens and political elites around environmentally transformative projects?” In other words, is there a metanarrative that has characterized the few situations in which states have undertaken massive efforts to make their societies more sustainable?
In effect, this book tries to answer Berkhout’s call for “solutions narratives” by describing the few historical examples of radical environmental reform. It constructs narrative explanations for four dramatic political-ecological transformations that made for more sustainable use of lands and oceans in the twentieth century. These changes occurred in the Great Plains of the United States, the United Kingdom, Cuba, and the coastal waters of the Gulf of Maine in the northeastern United States. What did these episodes of change look like? What caused them to occur? I seek to answer these questions through comparative historical analyses. Detailed descriptions of these historical circumstances and comparisons between them provide lessons about the circumstances that have precipitated radical environmental reforms.
The Plan for the Book
Chapter 2, drawing in particular on theories developed by Mancur Olson, Michael Mann, and Elinor Ostrom, fleshes out a theory in which destabilizing events spur reforms. The events destabilize societies in part by reminding people of their precarious ecological positions. The reform dynamic varies from large- to small-scale arenas. The destabilizing events refocus popular attention in the larger political arenas. They initiate a societal-scale dynamic by underlining the gravity of an environmental situation, disrupting trade networks, and shaking up special interest–dominated political orders. The events also make citizens more aware of the inescapably communal conditions in which they live. They come to see themselves as “caged,” and they look to governments for solutions to the crisis. With a new appreciation for the value of locally controlled resources, residents and their governments carry out radical reform, instituting sustainable practices that conserve the
productive capacity of locally controlled resources. In smaller-scale settings, focusing events matter less because resource users, aware of small, more incremental changes in a natural resource, communicate more easily with one another about the changes and consider reforms to preserve a natural resource more readily. These conversations and deliberations encourage the articulation of an ethic of stewardship among users. This ethic in turn expedites the passage of reforms.
The following four chapters describe case studies that illustrate these dynamics of reform. Chapter 3 recounts the rapid transformation in soil management and conservation practices that occurred in the Great Plains and the American South during the 1930s when the closing of the American frontier, the Depression, and dust storms disrupted the livelihoods of small-scale wheat and cotton farmers. Chapter 4 describes the transformation in periurban land use that occurred after World War II in England when Parliament established large green belts around English cities. The shocks of World Wars I and II contributed directly to this “greening” of the land use laws. Chapter 5 describes and explains the turn toward a more agro-ecologically sustainable agriculture that occurred in Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union destroyed the economic foundations for industrialized sugarcane cultivation. Chapter 6 examines the dynamics of reform at a smaller scale in a lobster fishery along the Atlantic coast of Maine in the United States. Chapter 7 raises the scale of the analysis to the global level and considers the degree to which the historical narratives recounted in the nation-scale case studies might apply to the world. This chapter describes historical narratives, like the creation of the United Nations (UN) after World War II and the work of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which unfolded when people came together to create global scale institutions. These narratives make it possible to assess the degree to which global dynamics conform to the theoretical patterns of reform outlined at the outset of the book. Chapter 8 provides a comparative historical analysis of the three national-scale reform efforts, the more localized effort in Maine, and the global-scale initiatives.
Chapter 9, the concluding chapter, summarizes the evidence for and against the prototypical narrative of environmental reform. Then it uses the historical evidence from the case studies to assess the thesis that radical reforms might bring with them eco-authoritarian political regimes. A societal corporatist approach, with democratic roots, which prioritizes exchanges of information and resources between local and national scales of governance would seem to offer the most likely political configuration for achieving dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in a short period of time.
CHAPTER 2
Radical Environmental Reforms A
Theory
There are good crises and there are bad crises. Every crisis breaks a deadlock and sets events in motion. It is either a disaster or an opportunity. A bad crisis is one in which no one has the power to make good use of the opportunity and therefore it ends in disaster. A good crisis is one in which the power and the will to seize the opportunity [coincide]. . . . Out of such a crisis come solutions.
WalTeR
lippmann, March 7, 19331
Presses, Pulses, and the Impetus for Reform
Sometimes crises are a long time in coming. For the past twenty-five years a coalition of fossil fuel industry executives and their political representatives, operating largely under “business-as-usual” economic conditions, have stymied political efforts to combat climate change by reducing the burning of fossil fuels. The emissions from burning fossil fuels have continued to increase even as our knowledge about their potentially lethal consequences have grown. The relatively stable political-economic conditions of the affluent democracies in the post–World War II era have made it easier to defend the status quo, even as the emissions promoted by the fossil fuel industry eroded one foundation for this stability—atmospheric concentrations of CO2 less than 400 ppm. CO2 concentrations in this range have contributed to the provision of a vital public good, a stable climate, during the past 10,000 years (Rockstrom and Klum 2015). The political domination by special interests eventually undermines the basis for a wider, collective prosperity. Reforms do eventually occur, but only during a more chaotic, successor period (Olson 1982).
Historians and social scientists have devoted ample attention to the political dynamics of chaotic, sometimes revolutionary periods in societies (Gellner 1964; Tilly 1984; Goldstone 2014). There is no comparable corpus of work about societal transformations driven by abrupt changes in the surrounding natural environments. The prolonged campaigns to reduce air and water pollution near cities and the incremental gains from these campaigns have received the most attention from analysts (Uekoetter 2009; Vogel 2012). Sudden changes along the environment–society interface have not been studied as extensively. The dynamics of these radical reform processes are the subject of this book.
Environmental reforms occur in a larger context shaped by press and pulse dynamics of historical change (Collins et al. 2011).2 Press dynamics involve incremental changes in vital processes like population changes and economic growth. Pulses entail sudden, large-magnitude changes like a flood, a fire, or an economic collapse. They “shock” systems. The press— pulse distinction matters because people wield power in quite different ways during periods marked by presses compared with periods marked by pulses. Presses are conducive to business- as-usual processes of ecological modernization. Pulses spur radical environmental reforms.
Incremental rises in sea level or in global temperatures represent presslike processes. Changes in population growth, economic growth, and economic inequality usually take the form of press-like processes. Over the long, post–World War II period, as people, products, and inequalities between people accumulated, these press processes created a fully globalized, economically unequal, and populous world in which the scale of human activities has grown to be extremely large. Human activities have become so large in scale that observers have taken to referring to this period as a separate geological epoch, the “anthropocene” (Waters et al. 2016). The global warming from the scaled-up human activities has begun to depress productivity in vital economic sub-sectors like agriculture (Carleton and Hsiang 2016).
While the direction of trends like the reduced productivity of agriculture alarms observers, the incremental form of these changes makes them easy to ignore, which in turn suppresses vigorous policy responses. Sea level rise that manifests itself in increased flooding at high tides may become “normalized” among coastal residents (Sweet and Park 2014). Similarly, the warming of the earth’s climate year after year, if it occurs in small enough increments, may begin to be accepted as “business as usual” by people. In all of these instances the incremental pace of change encourages a “lower mimetic rhetoric” that
relies on facts to persuade people, stirs few intense emotions, and promotes policy reforms through reasoning (Stewart 2012; Smith 2005). Catastrophes and rapid political change seem out of place in this context.
A “pulse” dynamic characterizes other changes. Unlike press processes which occur gradually, pulses occur as discrete events that suddenly transform people and places (Collins et al. 2011). Earthquakes, hurricanes, wars, and economic depressions all represent pulses—discrete, sudden-onset events that can have a transformative impact on human communities. In a significant number of instances these events precipitate fundamental political changes. For Marx (1859), history fluctuated between periods of relative stability dominated by press-like processes in which property gradually concentrated in the hands of a few people and periods of tumultuous change akin to pulse-like processes in which revolution occurred. Ann Swidler (1986) distinguishes between settled and unsettled historical periods in her analysis of culture. Settled periods would feature press processes of change, and unsettled periods would feature pulse-like episodes of change. In the unsettled periods, ideologies would grow in importance as cultural schemata. Leninist formulations of a party led by a vanguard of intellectuals who exercise extraordinary influence during unsettled times (Lenin 1901) would be consistent with this line of reasoning that begins with press and pulse patterns of change.
Pulses, because they occur suddenly and on a large enough scale to be noticed, also have a characteristic narrative form that analysts could call “apocalyptic” (Stewart 2012; Smith 2005). These narratives feature an “urgent problem” that has manifested itself in dramatic fashion. To avert an apocalypse, humans in this narrative must radically reform their ways. In this sense apocalyptic narratives provide an emotional logic or justification for radical reforms. Visually arresting and economically damaging events like powerful hurricanes or large-scale dust storms would provide a compelling basis for an apocalyptic narrative about “what will happen” if a society does not take action to remedy a problem.
Pulses can become focusing events that reshape political agendas or leveling events that reshape both a class system and political agendas. Think of what hurricanes do to houses on Caribbean islands. In destroying the wealth tied up in houses, hurricanes level, to some degree, the economic stratification on the island. These leveling events, like focusing events, reset political agendas when they flatten the pre- existing system of stratification (Bowles 2012). In this sense leveling events are often just another version of focusing events. They both have their origins in pulses, and, by shocking the pre-existing order, leveling events, like
focusing events, create political opportunities for significant changes in policy (Meyer 2004).
Focusing events that become centerpieces for an apocalyptic narrative can significantly alter the probability of collective action through their role as symbols or “verbal shorthand” for a problem that demands collective action. Symbols that work this way have had a long history in twentieth-century environmental movements. Andrew Szasz (1994) pointed out how graphic images, like that of a rusting 55-gallon drum or a baby harp seal gazing up at a cameraman, could come to symbolize a complex issue like toxic waste or the slaughter of defenseless wildlife. These symbols become a relatively cost-free tool for mobilizing large numbers of people to push for reforms to minimize a threat or punish a wrongdoing. The environmental icons enable collective action by reducing its transaction costs.
When pulses become focusing events, their symbolic importance grows. Visually arresting images of the events, like a flooded shoreline after the passage of a hurricane or shriveled crops after a drought, accompany reports of the event and are widely disseminated. Photos and news stories provide a common fund of knowledge about these iconic events. The knowledge reduces the transaction costs of collective action and makes it more likely to occur, especially in instances where the event affects very large numbers of people. For this reason, focusing events with iconic overtones should play a particularly salient role in the political mobilization of large numbers of people that almost invariably precedes major environmental reforms. While a focusing event may or may not precede reform efforts involving small numbers of natural resource users, it should almost always play an important role in the enactment of reforms by large aggregates of people.
The radical reforms associated with systemic changes seem easier to imagine in association with pulses. The damages to a natural resource from a pulse-leveling event may be so great that large numbers of people call for a fundamental reassessment of policies that pertain to the damaged resource, and this process culminates in a significant reform (Libecap 2008; Acheson and Gardner 2014).
Presses and pulses can of course interact. On-going press processes often aggravate the destructive effects of pulses when they occur. For example, the intertwined press processes of increased economic inequality and population growth make poor people more vulnerable to destruction caused by pulse events. For example, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines in 2013 and Hurricane Mitch in Honduras in 1998, prototypical pulse events, inflicted death and destruction on poor people forced by urban expansion, a press
