Abstract
The plights of climate-change migrants raise serious questions about human-drawn territorial boundaries, among nation states, among political subdivisions, and indeed between and among private property owners. These questions go beyond matters of social justice and individual rights to include matters relating to the abilities of local people everywhere to live in ways that keep them, and their lands and waters, healthy. The challenges of migrants thus are usefully considered as part of a larger inquiry into how we live in nature and what it will take for us and our natural homes to thrive over time. That larger inquiry needs to pay particular attention to the root causes of our misuses of nature, including (but hardly limited to) our behaviors that stimulate climate change. Good policies would help people everywhere succeed at this foundational task of living on land without degrading it, and they would help migrants through means that respect local efforts to live rightly in nature. Wisely drawn and understood, human-drawn boundaries of all types could help make this overall goal possible, likely giving rise to political and proprietary boundaries that are, in various ways, both more and less permeable than those we have today.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
See, for instance, Oberman (2017). I refer here, of course, to the relative claims among humans, putting to one side the interests of other life forms and natural communities as such.
- 4.
Many of the points made here I develop much further, in somewhat different contexts, in other writings. The broader points about humans and nature and about good land use (what it means, why it is important) are explored in Our Oldest Task: Making Sense of Our Place in Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017) and in A Good That Transcends: How U.S. Culture Undermines Environmental Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). These works and others cited below offer citations to the relevant literatures.
- 5.
A much-cited work by leading American conservation biologists is Noss and Cooperrider (1994).
- 6.
Schindler and Vallentyne (2008).
- 7.
The plight of Bangladesh, as an illustration of the challenges facing weak, downstream states, is ably explored in Romin Tamanna, “Rivers, Ecological Health, and Justice: International Watercourses and Long-Term Legal Reform,” Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2017.
- 8.
The challenges of bringing health to the Upper Mississippi and other U.S. water systems are considered in Doyle and Drew (2012).
- 9.
I consider the issue at length in Our Oldest Task, particularly Chap. 8.
- 10.
- 11.
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- 13.
- 14.
The literature again is vast, including Singer (2011).
- 15.
I come to this conclusion in Chap. 8 of Our Oldest Task.
- 16.
- 17.
This was one of the central themes of Aldo Leopold’s classic, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949).
- 18.
A classic inquiry, still highly valuable, is Bellah et al. (1996).
- 19.
The theme has long been central to the writings of Wendell Berry.
- 20.
Again, the point is pressed often by Wendell Berry.
- 21.
The many cultural critiques of market capitalism, and its ecological effects, include Foster (2002) and Magdoff and Foster (2011). Nearly all writing on the issue builds on the classic work, Polanyi (1957) (original edition 1944). My critique is in Chap. 7 of Our Oldest Task. My comments on private property and the cultural of owning include On Private Property: Finding Common Ground on the Ownership of Land (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007).
- 22.
A much-cited work on the benefits of embedding the market in our social and ecological orders is Daly and Cobb (1989).
- 23.
A useful introduction is Hunt (2007).
- 24.
I explore the issue at length in various works, including The Land We Share: Private Property and the Common Good (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2003).
- 25.
Aldo Leopold, “Engineering and Conservation,” in Flader and Callicott (1991) (original written 1938).
- 26.
Individual landowners can and do, to be sure, tend their lands with care even in the absence of strong communal leadership on the issue. But many environmental challenges are ones that individual landowners acting alone simply cannot redress because they require coordinated action among many landowners. Examples here include reconnecting rivers to their floodplains and restoring and protecting large-scale wildlife habitat.
- 27.
I consider the considerable flexibility of private property, and the options for reforming it, in both The Land We Share and On Private Property.
- 28.
- 29.
A penetrating critique is presented in Wood (2003).
- 30.
Some of the costs of market competition are covered in Frank (2011).
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- 32.
The many deficiencies of GDP, and proposals for reform, are presented in Daly and Cobb, For the Common Good.
- 33.
Of course such cohesion can come at social costs, and steps should be taken to reduce them and to encourage humanitarian aid. But attacks on ethnic and religious bonds that promote senses of collective responsibility can themselves carry heavy costs, too often overlooked. To degrade such bonds is to promote the continued fragmentation of society generally (in the U.S. context, see, e.g., Rodgers (2011), Aronson (2017)), weakening senses of community, frustrating collective action, and opening even greater space for the dominance of market forces.
- 34.
To say that migrants alone should not decide leaves open, of course, how decisions might best be made. The factors identified here do not justify giving local people veto power about their acceptance of migrants. They do suggest that decision-making needs to give serious weight to the effects of migrants on the abilities of local people to foster and act upon a culture that values healthy lands. Migrants, one might presume, will typically focus on themselves and their short-term needs. By them the orientation is understandable and justifiable. International efforts to help migrants, however, need to embrace broader and longer-term perspectives. The short-term focus on the self and one’s family is precisely the attitude that yields land degradation.
- 35.
- 36.
Hopgood (2013).
- 37.
I explore the Pope’s writing, comparing with the work of Leopold and others, in Chap. 4 of A Good That Transcends.
- 38.
A good inquiry is Ophuls (1997).
- 39.
Useful background, particularly for American readers, appears in Kammen (1986).
- 40.
- 41.
As noted, my explorations of property as an institution include The Land We Share and On Private Property. I urge the conservation movement to take up the issue in “Taking Property Seriously,” in A Good That Transcends.
- 42.
The writing of Joseph William Singer on the topic is particularly useful, including his (2000).
- 43.
A stirring call to do so is presented in Wood (2014).
- 44.
The power of global corporations over many states is examined in Screpanti (2014).
- 45.
The challenges that arise in settings where central states are unwilling or unable to define and enforce property rights are taken up, in an African setting, in Joireman (2011).
- 46.
This would include decisions by law-making communities to head in more socialist directions, as proposed in such works as Williams (2010).
- 47.
For instance, Elinor (1990).
- 48.
A good source for possibilities is Weston and Bollier (2013).
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Freyfogle, E.T. (2018). The Climate-Change Challenge to Human-Drawn Boundaries. In: Murphy, C., Gardoni, P., McKim, R. (eds) Climate Change and Its Impacts. Climate Change Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77544-9_13
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