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POLS362 Exam 1

Terms in this set (110)

any group of plants, animals, or nonliving things interacting within their external environment

both living things—such as plants and animals—and nonliving things such as rocks and streams; and, importantly, how they all interact with one another. Those interactions and relationships are crucial to the functioning of any given ecosystem.

they take inorganic matter and turn it into organic

plants here, that draw from the surrounding soil, water and sunlight to live and grow

2) primary consumers

these are the herbivores that eat the producers

3) secondary consumers

omnivores and carnivores that eat the primary consumers and the producers

those organisms that consume the dead organic things and break them down back into inorganic matter

Certain factors are involved in the existence and functioning of ecosystems

1) Matter
2) Energy
3) Time

-organic
-inorganic
as a bunch of molecules squished together in an infinite variety of ways. From an ecological perspective, matter is finite—there's only so much of it on the planet.

such as insects, plants, you and me

such as rocks and the components of the computer on which you are reading this

laws of thermodynamics

states that matter cannot be created or destroyed; it can only change form

the amount of matter currently on Earth is about the same as the amount that was here billions of years ago

It has just taken various forms over the eons.

it takes energy to move the relationships within ecosystems along, to grow the producers, to decompose, etc

From an ecological perspective, energy is considered infinite: at least for the next 7 billion years or so, we are constantly getting energy from the sun. It takes different forms—i.e., stored in organisms that have converted it through photosynthesis, including the ancient organisms that are now fossil fuels—but it is, for our purposes, infinite.

Earth's ecosystems developed over long periods of time, with the different elements adapting to changes, and other elements adapting accordingly. Within each era (including our own current one), depending on the ecosystem, it takes time to go through and complete that circle of life described above. Likewise, if an ecosystem is damaged, it takes time to heal.

in the last 200 years, a mere .00000044 percent of earth time, our species has wrought more change on the planet than has taken place in the past billion years

where do we humans fit into ecosystems

secondary consumers typically

in modern times humans have tended to break that circle. We upset ecosystems, either by adding an element that doesn't belong there and can't be recycled (otherwise known as "pollution"), or by removing a critical element through depletion of species or other materials

four laws of ecology

1) everything is connected
2) everything must go somewhere
3) nature knows best
4) TINSTAAF

everything is connected

when one part of an ecosystem is impacted, the rest of the ecosystem will probably be impacted as well in a series of cascading consequences

malaria...lizards...cats...rats..plague

everything must go somewhere

matter cannot be destroyed; it just changes form

When the dinosaurs (and the plants they ate) died, they didn't vanish; they eventually turned into oil, coal, and natural gas. Then we dug and drilled them up, burned them, and now we have bits of dead dinosaur floating around the atmosphere in the form of greenhouse gases.

nature knows best

This one goes against the grain of our Western, Judeo-Christian culture, which tells us that we are the apex of creation and should have dominion over it.

there is no such thing as a free lunch. This may be seen as a summary of the other laws: it emphasizes that any interaction with nature carries some cost, through some change in an ecosystem. In other words, magic solutions to environmental problems are nearly impossible to find—the solution to one problem may create a whole new set of problems.

What type of government is best suited to respond to environmental problems?

Kraft argues for democracy as the best form of government

Politics is the process that determines who gets what, when, and how

Politics is the authoritative allocation of values for a society

decision processes

who gets to make those decisions, and how

does science substitute for other decision processes

This is because science and public policymaking—at least in the U.S.—are fundamentally incompatible

operating norms

Operating in the context of the re-election cycle, American policy-makers want prompt solutions. They also want a high degree of certainty about a problem and its solution, so that they can reassure the voting public. It's a tough thing for a politician to take a stand on a certain problem without some strength of conviction. It's even worse if they pass or embrace a particular policy based on incomplete or uncertain data, and further research proves that policy to be the wrong course of action.

norm is the scientific method

The scientific method always assumes doubt; scientific "conclusions" are tentative and uncertain, subject to ongoing peer review.

Science is based on

politics is based on

There are many things that are valued by individuals and by society at large

economic security, defense, safety, health, quality of life, etc.

that assumptions about environmental problems and their solutions should be fact-based, subject to the scientific method and peer review. Pretty much everyone—environmentalists and their opponents alike—agrees on this. However, in recent years this term has been used differently. Nowadays you are more likely to hear it from someone who opposes environmental regulations. It has been re-defined, at least in public usage, to refer to unquestionable scientific certainty.

precautionary principle

It means that, if there is strong evidence of a problem and its cause, action should be taken; we shouldn't wait until we have absolute scientific certainty.

The concept recognizes that, if we wait for absolute certainty on environmental problems, it may be too late to fix them; ecosystems require time to heal, and conditions may be driven past the "tipping point" where healing is possible.

One is private ownership: most of the means of production and exchange (industries, businesses and so on) are owned by private citizens and corporations, rather than by the government.

A capitalist system is often referred to as a "free market."

When market failures occur, often government intervention is demanded.

monopolies (where one company controls a particular good or sector)

oligopolies (where a good or sector is controlled by a very few companies)

information failure—when one or more of those involved in a transaction don't have all the information needed to enter into a fair and voluntary exchange.

externality. These are costs that are neither borne by the producer nor reflected in the price paid by the buyer; they are imposed on third parties that are not involved in the exchange. The classic example of externality is pollution.

or short-sightedness. This refers to the market's tendency to focus on short-term benefits—those that will be reflected, for example, in this quarter's profit statement. The lack of incentive to invest in the future has obvious implications for environmental protection and sustainability.

Another such problem is capitalism's addiction to economic growth.

Capitalism, based on continual buying and selling, depends upon ever-increasing demands for goods. Producers must either find ever new markets, or they must constantly convince their existing markets that they need new things, or both. This is not a bad thing in and of itself, but it has grave implications in a context of finite resources.

absence of morality

criticism of capitalism

This overly simplifies human motivations, and does not leave room for moral considerations such as compassion or the collective good.

Tragedy of the Commons

It highlights the conflict between individual rationality and collective rationality. Capitalism is based on individual rationality; there is really no place in this economic system for collective rationality. And that's a problem for environmental protection.

The tragedy of the commons is a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users, acting independently according to their own self-interest, behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling the shared resource through their collective action.

Political culture

the set of dominant values, beliefs, and attitudes about government and politics in a society

it's what the community tends to believe. This sets political culture apart from ideology, which is what individuals believe or value about politics and government.

political cultures

consensual
conflictual

the vast majority of citizens agree on the basic values

large segments disagree on them

primary values that have made up "traditional" American political culture

democracy
individualism
freedom
capitalism
elections
materialism
Populism

rule by the people, free and fair elections, civil liberties etc.
piety, or religious belief

Americans believe that humans have inalienable rights; our intrinsic worth is within each of us, and not as members of a particular group or determined by our "place" in society.

Populism is basically a suspicion of elites and embrace of the common man.

Ophuls and Boyan

American political culture and many of the values it includes—what they call our "paradigm"—comes out of the Enlightenment.

Such decisions are difficult under conditions of scarcity; some will lose as others win. The presence or absence of scarcity, then, has huge implications for our politics and our political paradigm.

We adopted values of freedom, individualism, etc. because we could afford to adopt them in this new context. As they put it, our political culture and American political values are based on an assumption of abundance.

Discourse analysis focuses on the following:

· What basic entities are recognized or constructed by the discourse? For example, does it look at a forest and see an ecosystem, or does it see a source of lumber?

· What are its assumptions about relationships? Does it see humans as basically competitive or, on the other hand, cooperative? Ideas about gender, race, species, political power, wealth, and intellect are included here.

· What does the discourse say about agents and their motives: who are the main actors involved in any given issue, and what do they want?

· What key metaphors and other rhetorical devices are present in the discourse—such as Spaceship Earth or the commons?

· What difference does the discourse make—what effects does it have on the real world? To ascertain this last, we examine its impacts on politics, policy and institutions; its social and cultural impacts; the arguments of its critics; and the flaws within the discourse as revealed by evidence and argument.

types of discourse

1) survivalism
2) Prometheanism
3) sustainable development

carrying capacity

which is the maximum number of a species that an ecosystem can support.

Given this, survivalists generally speak in terms of global carrying capacity: how many humans can a finite Earth support, and at what standard of living?

Survivalism is a very pessimistic point of view, focusing on limits. The basic argument is that, on a finite planet, carrying capacity will inevitably be reached and exceeded—and then we can expect some pretty harsh consequences.

humans can overcome any problem through technology. This discourse is highlighted by a belief in "progress" as illustrated in ever more clever inventions. It is highly correlated with capitalist economic growth as normal, healthy, and to be perpetually pursued. This discourse is embedded in the American political culture, so deeply that we took it for granted until it was challenged by survivalism. Americans still widely adhere to it today: it may be considered our "default" position.

sustainable development

development that "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

The sustainable development discourse is like survivalism in its recognition of ecological limits, but like Prometheanism in its optimism about human decision-making and ingenuity.

a purposive course of government action or inaction in response to a public problem

deliberate
pattern of behavior
actual behaviors—words themselves are not policies; we are more interested in what governments do than in what they say.
inaction is included: the decision to do nothing is itself a policy decision.
governments enact policies in response to problems

distributive
regulatory
Redistributive
symbolic

government tries to solve a particular problem by providing something in the form of goods, services, or some other type of benefits

These types of policies can be broadly distributive—as in subsidizing light rail for the general population—or narrowly distributive—as in providing tax credits to those who buy electric cars.

which is directly coercive: A standard of behavior is imposed, and punishments ensue for violating that standard.

some win and some lose: benefits are taken from one group to allow benefits to others, and/or costs are lifted from one group and imposed on others

when government responds to a problem, but in a relatively insubstantial way

Congress passed clean air legislation calling for reduction of a particular pollutant that was emitted in large quantities by coal-fired power plants

Problems
Technical
Behavior

we need cleaner-burning cars

we need fewer people commuting solo to work

systemic agenda
institutional agenda

systemic agenda

which refers to what the people are discussing among themselves

A group of students commiserating about the lack of parking at CSU

institutional agenda

and since our interest is public policy, or action by government, this is the agenda that concerns us here. Just to be clear, the "institutional agenda" is an abstraction; it doesn't exist in any concrete form. We get glimpses of it in State of the Union messages

three "streams" that flow through society

problem stream
policy stream
political stream

This is somewhat similar to the systemic agenda: the public is discussing something, recognizing it as a problem, accumulating information and theories about its cause. This is often a very slow process that evolves over time; sometimes, however, a focusing event will bring a lot of sudden attention to a particular problem.

This involves the creation or existence of acceptable solutions to the problem. Such solutions are often developed behind the scenes, sometimes for a long time waiting for the other streams to fall into place. If no acceptable solutions are available, there's no point in government considering the problem and it won't make it onto the institutional agenda.

political stream

This refers to the political climate: who is in the White House?

The political conditions must be right for an issue to be put onto the government's agenda.

window of opportunity

which is the best moment for an issue to get onto the institutional agenda

policy entrepreneur

This is a leader or a group of leaders—usually holding positions in government—who will recognize the right moment and push the issue through the window.

Policy formulation
instruments

· Sanctions such as fines or imprisonment for violating certain behavioral standards (these would be present in regulatory policies)
· Services such as training or other kinds of government assistance
· Other distributive instruments such as grants, provision of infrastructure, or benefits
· Tax instruments including sin taxes (regulatory) or tax credits (distributive)
· Market mechanisms such as pollution credits
· Education and persuasion campaigns

in the American political and institutional context, it's generally most feasible to formulate new policies that are just a few baby steps away from the status quo

Policy legitimation

as the process that attaches the authority of the state to the chosen policy solution

Policy evaluation comes in two general forms

may be a clause written into a particular law calling for a formal analysis of the law's impacts in five years. Formal evaluation is supposed to be a systematic assessment of what was done under the policy and how it impacted the problem.

interest groups, media, public opinion, politicians—pretty much everyone involved in civil society

it's the informal evaluation that almost always determines a policy's fate

When a program is evaluated, three outcomes are possible

policy maintenance (in which the policy remains in place as is); policy termination; or policy change

policy maintenance (in which the policy remains in place as is)

Very few policies are so well crafted initially that they are maintained with no changes; when policy maintenance does occur, it's usually because of a failure to decide on how to change it.

policy termination

Policy termination is also unlikely, because most policies create stakeholders: the people who benefit from the policy's existence. Stakeholders will fight very aggressively to keep a policy from being terminated; the politics here can get pretty ugly.

deleting a primary funding source, or transferring authority from the federal government to the states, for example—and some are only minor

Arguments on the role of government in environmental problems

Government has an indispensable role to play in environmental protection and improvement even as we acknowledge the imortatane of corporate and individual choices. Because of this conviction, we have commissioned chapters for this column that focus on environmental politics and the government institutions and political processes that affect them. Our goal is to illuminate that role and to suggest needed changes and strategies.

The justification for government intervention lies partly in the inherent limitations of the free market system and the nature of human behavior.

Gov should consider a full range of policy approaches, including make-based incentives, new forms of collaborative decision making and information provision strategies to supplement conventional regulatory policies where needed.

the pros and cons of democracy

it must take place through constitutional processes, it requires the sanction of the law, and it is binding by all members of the society.

hard to get national agreeable on policy

general description of U.S. environmental policy and its scope

our checks and balances and what we have in place to limit our government is what limits timely actions for environmental policy

how current environmental problems differ from those of past decades

clinton admin helped with sustainable development

obama made policies on clean energy and climate change

since the 1970 public concern and support for environmental protection have risen significantly. The policies have not been successful particular when measured by tangible improvement in environmental quality. Need to use alternatives to conventional command and control regulation such as the use of flexible regulation, market incentives, and information disclosure or public education. The US is capable of significant environmental gains through public policies. The world would be worse if the polices enacted in the 1970 80s were not in place.

Consequences of air pollution

major sources of water pollution, especially in rivers and streams

...In the United States, agricultural pollution is the top source of contamination in rivers and streams, the second-biggest source in wetlands, and the third main source in lakes. It's also a major contributor of contamination to estuaries and groundwater.

progress in cleaning up hazardous waste sites

states have divided their own system of waste management and facility siting, working either independently or in concert with neighbors.

Many states including a number of those usually deemed among the most innovative and committed environmentally, continue to generate substantial quantities of waste and have struggled to establish comprehensive treatment, storage, and disposal capacity. Instead out of state export has become a pattern.

discussion of biodiversity loss, including major cause and recent trends

...Important direct drivers affecting biodiversity are habitat change, climate change, invasive species, overexploitation, and pollution

population growth and consumption patterns around the world

Current level of conflict over environmental issues compared to past decades

activists are as active during obama and trump... they just like obama better... for no reason...

what is included in agenda-setting

discussion of the role of technical experts in environmental policymaking, including concerns

public participation in policy legitimation

How scientists operate, especially how this impacts their participation in politics and their relationships with other political actors

The scientific method is a measured, incremental, and systematic process of identifying a problem, collecting data, developing an hypothesis, establishing a tentative conclusion, testing it, and submitting the results and the methodology to others wa"rking in the same subject area, a practice called "peer review:"

lawmakers are faced with problems for which the public demands prompt solutions and cannot wait for definitive data, whereas science is patient and tentative. Science develops gradually and changes, but once public policy is set, it is hard to modify.

the precautionary principle

When an activity raises threats to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken, even if some cause-and-effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context, the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof[of the safety ofthe activity}."

if lawmakers are looking for science to sanction what is their disposition to do politically, they have no difficulty finding respectable scientists to support them, whatever that position may be. This dynamic is termed "forum shopping."

the ways in which scientists and policymakers have incompatible roles

Everyone agrees that, given the growing complexity and impact of potential problems and the social and economic resources that may be necessary to address them, the need to enlist science in making public policy decisions has never been greater. The unfortunate fact, however, is that science and public policymaking are fundamentally incompatible; there is a disjunction between the practice of scientists and the needs, demands, and expectations of the other major players in the political game such as lawmakers and regulators, the courts, the media, and the population at large. Science and scientists thus find themselves fighting a political war on several fronts simultaneously.

The importance of the time scale in the disagreement between optimists and pessimists

Looking at the studies as a whole, the major controversy concerns the time scale. The so-called optimists believe that (1) the current situation in general is not quite so bad as the doomsayers make out, {2) continued scientific and technological ingenuity will keep the ecological wolffrom the door indefinitely, and (3) there are many social negative-feedback mechanisms (such as the economic marketplace, the impact ofmedia-propagated information on values, and the political process itself) that will promote gradual human adjustment to physical ·limits when and if it becomes necessary. Thus, to put it crudely, business as usual can continue for the foreseeable future, and to l~>Ok beyond that is borrowing trouble. The so-called pessimists believe, to the contrary, that (1) the situation is more urgent than most are willing to admit, (2) limits on our scientific and technological ingenuity and on our ability to apply it to the problems confronting us are already discernible, and (3) the negative-feedback mechanisms on which the optimists would rely have already begun to fail

arguments about the American "paradigm" in an age of ecological scarcity

Political paradigms are, in fact, extraordinarily fragile creations. They may ofcourse persist long after the conditions that made them viable have vanished. but unhappy the people who live during the long period ofdecay or the swifterdecline into revolutionary turmoiLHowever.our predicamentis nothopeless.We canadapt ourselvesto ecolog!cal scarcitYanapreserve'iiiosFofwhat is worth preserving in our current political and civilizational order.

discussion in Box 1 about how paradigms change

changes the same way that science changes
revolutions can throw out the old paradigms for the new paradigms

definition and description of a steady-state society

a steady-state society is one that has achieved a basic, long-term balance between the demands of a population and the environment that supplies its wants, Implicit in this definition are the preservation ofa healt:hy biosphere, the careful husbanding ofresources, self-1mposed limitations on consumption, loJ:!g-tenn goals to guiile short-term choices; and a general attitude of trusteeship toward ~ ge;=erations.

points about the "habitual condition" of humanity and how it differs from the past few centuries

The habitual condition ofcivilized people is one ofscarcity. Goods have never been available in such abundance as to exhaust people's wants; more often than not, even their basic needs have gone unmet. The existence ofscarcity has momentous consequences, ofwhich one ofthe most important is the utter inevitability of politics.

the foundational concepts of both survivalism

The basic storyline ofsurvivalism is that human demands on the carrying capacity of ecosystems threaten to explode out of control, and draconian action needs to be taken in order to curb these demands. This storyline is in turn constructed from the following components.

1) Basic entities whose existence is recognized or constructed
• Finite stocks of resources
• Carrying capadty of ecosystems
• Population
• Bites

2) Assumptions about natural relationships
• Conflict
• Hierarchy and control

3)Agents and their motives
• Bites; motivation is up for grabs

4) Key metaphors and other rhetorical devices
• Overshoot and collapse
• Commons
• Spaceship Earth
• Uly pond
• cancer
• Virus
• Computers
• Images of doom and redemption

who has taken the lead in promoting each discourse

1) Dems: Survivalism
2) Rep: Prometheanism

Prometheanism discourse analysis

1) Basic entities recognized or constructed
•Nature as only brute matter
• Markets •
Prices
• Energy
• Technology
• People

2. Assumptions about natural relationships
• Hierarchy of humans over everything else
• Competition

3. Agents and their motives
• Everyone; motivated by material self-interest

4. Key metaphors and other rhetorical devices
• Mechanistic
• Trends

Definition and description of ecosystem

An ecosystem is any group of plants, animals, or nonliving things interacting within their external environment. Typically, ecologists study individual organisms (the life cycle of the organism, its requirements of its environment, its functioning in the environment); populations of organisms (including questions such as stability, decline, or growth in populations); communities of organisms; or the ecosystem as a whole (including the biogeochemical cycles of carbon, m:ygen, hydrogen, soil minerals, and energy).

ecosystems are "open" in the sense that they interact with everything else in the environment. In fact, the earth itself is an ecosystem commonly referred to as the ecosphere or biosphere.3

possible consequences of ecosystem disruption

The fourth law of ecology is that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Simply stated, this law provides thatany interaction with nature, any extraction, use, or disruption, carries with it some cost. That cost may be in the form of the conversion of resources to a form in which they are no longer of use to humans or the disruption of an ecosystem that renders it unstable. "Because the global ecosystem is a connected whole, in which nothing can be gained or lost and which is not subject to overall improvement, anything extracted from it by human effort must be replaced. Payment of this price cannot be avoided; it can only be delayed."

definition of steady state

A steady state refers to that level of activity within an ecosystem that can be maintained over a long period of time. For example, given the limitations on arable land and water resources, there is some upper limit of human population that the world can sustain. Given the finite nature of the earth's resources, the exhaustion of resources has an impact on earth's ultimate steady-state form.

examples of common pool resources

Common pool resource problems are very much a part of environmental policy. The groundwater in an aquifer underlying several farms, for example, may be a common pool resource. Farmers located above the aquifer have no incentive to save the groundwater for future use. In fact, if the groundwater supply lies beneath adjacent farms, landowners may have an incentive to pull as much out of the ground as soon as possible, there being no individual incentive to manage the resource for the long-term beneficial use of all.

What lies at the heart of environmental policy disputes

cost benefit analysis

public support for environmental protection

primary constraint on legislators

institutions
constituents

what causes policy windows to open and close

role of policy entrepreneurs

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