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With best thoughts

“Indeed, it is partly because of advances in complexity theory in the domains of biology, oceanography, neuroscience, geology, and climatology that it is now possible to draw a philosophy of becoming, the trajectory of political economy and appreciation of the fragility of things into close communication.”

“I am not saying, then, that few political economists are interested in environmental issues; I am saying that too few bring a philosophy of becoming to the inquiry.”

I also really enjoyed this piece because I feel like it ended with a call to action. Instead of researching and reporting this article took it one step further.

“It is to push for a new ethos of economic life closer to the cosmic sensitivity of Sophocles than to that of theorists, philosophers, talking heads, preachers and citizens who insulate extant images of social life from the volatile, interacting force-fields in which they are set. ”

He stresses a very holistic view, where all systems are interconnected and can impact one another. It is nearly impossible for us to predict the consequences of all our actions, yet we can see the economic infrastructure is already flawed, and the consequences are only amplified as we continue on this course.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19326

“Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt they can’t afford the time think. Tuition fee increases are a disciplinary techique, and by the stime students graduate, they are not only loaded with deby, but have also internalized the disciplinarian culture. This makes them efficiency components of the consumer economy.”

Now, doesn’t that sentence sound like the EXACT goal of a neoliberal regime obsessed with consumerism? And with these disciplinary techniques in place, we are less likely every day to arm ourselves with the adequate tools to free ourselves. I would be lying if I said I weren’t fearful for the future of a free America.

After reading Connolly’s piece I wanted to relate neoliberalism to the environment in a less abstract way. In “Governing through disorder: Neoliberal environmental governance and social theory” which was published in the journal Global Environmental (Pellizzoni, 2001) and describes neoliberal ideas as being the influence for market based environmental governance, like patenting biotechnology or the financialization of climate. Mansfield, 2004 gives more specific examples of this neoliberal way of environmental governance in her example of the control of ocean fisheries. She discusses a shift in North Pacific fisheries towards neoliberal approaches of regulations, approaches that were influenced by past policy that were centered on closing off the oceans with property rights. Her paper critiques that assumption that market rationality is rational in environmental management. She dismisses assumptions based on market rationality;

“For example, to the extent that control over access to resources and places can be about protecting traditional livelihoods, assigning property rights can actually challenge purely market-based approaches to resource use. One example relevant to the case study in this paper is the ‘‘Community Development Quota’’ program for communities of Native Alaskans in the Bering Sea region of the North Pacific (Holland and Ginter, 2001; Tryon, 1993).” (Mansfield, 2004)

This program she describes is one in which communities have a set percentage of annual fish catch as a quota which provide social benefits. However the quotas used in this example are not any different from market regulation; but instead property rights whose benefits are aimed at providing economic prosperity to a marginalized group of natives.

I posted more excerpts from her article that summarize her ideas and findings, it is a much more tangible idea when looking at neoliberalism in ocean fisheries. The link to both articles are as follows;

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378011000410

http://ac.els-cdn.com/S0016718503001155/1-s2.0-S0016718503001155-main.pdf?_tid=9ea9c62a-b17c-11e2-b901-00000aacb35d&acdnat=1367316137_06088584628235f246f2ccf2eba480f2

“…unlike neoliberalism, this program is not based on the idea of market efficiency but instead on property rights, in which property is the basis for rational decision making and market efficiency, not economic protection. My claim here, however, is that fisheries scholars and managers have focused on using property rights specifically to harness supposedly natural market-oriented behavior; in this sense, the development of property rights in fisheries is tied into the neoliberal focus on markets as the central form of governance. Thus, privatization and marketization are not the same thing, yet in neoliberal approaches they are tied together through the presumption that private property rights are necessary for markets to work, and that markets are necessary for optimal economic and environmental behavior. This contrasts to neoliberal approaches, in which property is the basis for rational decision making and market efficiency, not economic protection…” (Mansfield, 2004)

“As long as these theorists treat open access as a realm in which economic rationality prevails, rather than itself as a social relation in which different sorts of institutions and power relations are at work, they are limiting their critique of orthodox economic approaches; they more carefully specify existing models of social behavior and resource management, but do not offer completely different models that do not rely on the assumption of economic rationality and market behavior. The result is that even though these different groups of scholars seem to have quite different perspectives, they can all agree on plans for neoliberal privatization of fisheries to solve the economic and environmental problems that are assumed to result from open access.” (Mansfield, 2004)

“It is in this sense that putting property at the center of fisheries problems is a neoliberal, market-based approach to ocean governance. All the approaches discussed in this paper––whether private-, state-, or group oriented–– start from a particular economic logic that takes economic rationality (meaning individual profit maximization) as a given. From this starting point, the problems in fisheries stem from the ways that open access regimes inherently create irrational incentives: incentives to overuse, to use inefficiently, to race for the resource, and so on. In this view, open access represents a market distortion: what should be rational economic behavior becomes distorted under open access so that outcomes are inefficient and environmentally destructive. The solution, then, must eliminate the market distortion.
Government regulation, these theorists argue, cannot in itself do this; instead governments can assign
property rights that allow the market itself to be the solution.” (Mansfield, 2004)

I agree with Diego in the sense that the reintroduction to abstract concepts after completing our seedbombing project brings down my spirits a little. However, I’d like to think of Connolly’s idea of “late capitalism” and Gilbert’s idea of our current neoliberalism as moving change. Gilbert frames this as negatively as basic capitalism, but I’d like to think of it as the beginning of a paradigm shift, and that the capitalistic ideals reigning will not be around forever.

I guess in a way, this last blog entry is sort of a reality check. Donella Meadow’s says while discussing systems thinking that “the bounded rationality of each actor in a system—determined by the information, disincentives, goals, stresses, and constraints impinging on the actor—may or may not lead to decision that further the welfare of the system as a whole. If they do not, putting new actors into the same system will not improve the system’s performance. What makes a difference is redesigning the system to improve the information, incentives, disincentives, goals, stresses, and constraints that have an effect on specific actors.” In other words, our seebombing project was absolutely an awesome way to get the community aware of Vermont native species, urban gardening, community involvement, how their local landscape is constructed, and so on.

However, it’s important to always have the dual perspective of local based changes versus large system changes. I see it as a positive thing that our society is gaining more creative thinkers and diverse political leaders. If this neoliberalism brings upon more social justice, so be it. I think this will only tip the “worn out” capitalist view over the edge even more.

The hegemonic system that is neoliberalism as Gilbert explained takes many forms and is the collective efforts of many different perspectives and methodologies with a unifying goal. I found it interesting to consider the idea of neoliberalism uniquely revealing itself in each of its unique surroundings or environments, never in its completely pure form. This evoked the idea of neoliberalism actually being a form of pure evil or something to me, especially while reading what Gilbert wrote about manipulating society and distracting consumers from what it was influencing them to do. The view that neoliberalism has virtually no real challengers and leaves little to no room for alteration and evolution also supports this notion. While I hope it is not the only way, I feel what Connolly wrote about requiring an event like climate change to shift ways of thought and current paradigms may elicit such a change. I felt his concept of marrying the political-economic system with the non-human force fields of the world to be intriguing. I hope that such a marriage is not only possible through global catastrophe and still could be made possible by motivated, organized people with a shared and driven vision.