In NewScientist (9 December 2017, paywall) Fred Pearce reviews Replenish: The Virtuous Cycle Of Water And Prosperity, by Sandra Postel, an environmentalist whose main concern are the world’s rivers. I, of course, have the gall to actually comment on what I read in the review, rather than read the book. Fred is doubtful of Postel’s thesis, which is …
At individual and civic levels, we use water with staggering inefficiency. It flows through our fingers. We could do things much better, [Postel] argues, if only we stopped treating it like a birthright that falls from the sky and more like a precious resource that sustains all life on Earth. “The water cycle is broken,” she writes. “But one river, one wetland, one city, one farm at a time, we can begin to fix it.” …
But for all her language about sharing and stewardship, Postel ultimately finds environmental salvation in the power of the dollar. She wants water to be owned, so it has a value to individuals and corporations. If they own and trade it, her argument goes, they will also safeguard it and use it well.
Her book focuses on examples where capitalism nurtures water. Most are in the US. She finds that water markets from California to New England deliver the precious resource to those who derive most economic value from it – almond farmers in California, city dwellers in New Mexico’s deserts or salmon fishers in the north-west.
I think Fred has good reason to harbor doubts, although my reasons may differ from his. Postel’s thesis is the classic libertarian position, which posits that resources which are privately owned will be nurtured and conserved by the owners, who wish to profit from those resources over the long-term. By contrast, publicly owned – or unownable, if I might coin a term – resources are subject to the tragedy of the commons, for there is no self-interest restraints on the harvesters of the resource, resulting in the plunder of the resource, even if it’s a renewable resource. Just think of the collapse and continued failure of the various fisheries around the world.
The problem with the libertarian position is its assumptions of the applicability of the ownership model, the rationality of the owners, the transmission of perfect information, and the correlation of private interests with the public good.
- Ownership model. Libertarians and capitalism function on the notion of ownership, limited or not. This works rather well for tangible artifacts, such as houses, pencils, hammers, even computer code, because each is precisely definable, easy to identify, and has no basis for self-directed behavior. Contrast this with a natural fishery in which the fish are not man-made, cannot be easily corraled, and are apt to follow their own impulses rather than throw themselves into the nets of the fishermen.While water may not be self-directed, its essential quality to human survival combined with its behavior of raining in one location, flowing to another, and then being subject to harvesting, makes it an ill-suited subject for the model of ownership. Consider how one would apply ownership to the Nile River, as I’ve previously covered, where many countries, never mind private parties, could claim ownership:
The Nile draws its water from three long rivers – the White Nile, Blue Nile and the Atbara, which flows from North-West Ethiopia to the Nile in East Sudan. The longest river in the world, the Nile stretches 6,650 kilometres and passes through eleven countries: Burundi, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The volume of the Nile’s annual flow is 84 billion cubic metres. [Future Directions International]
The suggestion that an ownership model could be applied here appears to be risible. Many countries have claims on the contents of the Nile – how does one apportion it in a private ownership model? And then make the apportionment stick without conflict?
- The rationality of owners. By their very nature, libertarians and capitalists tend to be relatively rational people, regardless of their adherence to ethical systems which exist outside of their immediate context. This is to say, they have a model of humanity which includes an assumption that people will attempt to better their condition through wise management of their resources. But as I’ve mentioned a time or two, humanity is not a rational species, but a species that is capable of being rational. This is a key difference. It is entirely within the scope of believability that someone with control of some resource would actually use it in a manner a libertarian, a capitalist, my reader, or myself would consider to be irrational. For example, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein cut off the flow of water to the Mesopotamian Marshes in an effort to drive out Shia Muslims in the 1980s and 1990s. For the libertarian who believes we should live in peace and compete only commercially, this bit of madness, which endangered an important ecological feature of desert-dominated Iraq, doesn’t fit into their model. And, sure, Hussein was a dictator, not an owner per se. But the example remains valid, as not everyone subscribes to a single model of rationality. Any owner, consumed with xenophobic (aka irrational) hatred for some alien group, who finds they can injure that group by destroying a resource over which they have control, may do that. And in the case of water, simply shrugging it off as a bit of self-destruction for which they’ll pay will not do, because water is important to everyone.
- Transmission of perfect information. Rational decisions depend on information about the real world, and it should go without saying that such information is rarely perfect. A decision made in light of today’s information may be madness in light of tomorrow’s, thus endangering the central thesis that an owner will always act in their own self-interest. This is compounded by the various self-delusions so many of us seem prone to practice.
- Correlation of private interests with the public good. The suggestion that the actions of private interests always correlates with the public good simply doesn’t work out well in the case of water, in conjunction with the points above, particularly #3. For example, Ethiopia is constructing a dam on the Nile River for hydroelectricity purposes. Seems like a wise, renewable energy move – until you consider that starving Egypt of life-giving water endangers millions of people, and risks starting a ruinous war. So who owns this water again? Or simply consider the owner who bought water rights on a river or ocean in order to jettison waste into it. Now it flows into another owner’s purview, as water tends to do, much to their chagrin when they realize the water is unusable for potables or recreation. By what right do they have to complain or even restrict the usage of the first owner? The ownership model seems highly inadequate to the challenge.
Here’s the real problem for me: I don’t have a suggested solution to offer as an alternative. I read enough libertarian thought on these sorts of things that I can see the problems with it, so I don’t really trust such suggestions. But in a world where natural resources are not equal to the task of feeding, watering, and clothing the human and non-human living creatures on it, I wonder if the only solution is going to be a reduction in the human population, probably through some ruinous and tragic mechanism, until those who are left will once again find Earth to be a bounteous world from which the essentials of survival may be extracted with little impact on the environment.
I’ve talked about the importance of rivers before here, where there has been proposals, some approved, to give rivers legal rights. Connected to this is the American Indian belief that rivers are sacred (looking through this link, I have a lot of suspicion about the historicity of their assertions, so take this link with a few flecks of salt). As an agnostic, I can’t say I much like the intellectual background of the assertion, but as a functional part of their society, it seems likely (I haven’t studied this) that this should keep a critical part of their ecological support system in a near-optimal condition. That is, rivers do not generally deliver additional benefit to humans or other creatures through the addition of pollution, so by marking them as sacred and thus implying a punishment, divine or in the real world, for those who substantially damage them, they’re relatively safe-guarded against self-interested mismanagement. I suspect that a comparison would suggest this is more effective than private ownership or the granting of “rights” by governments.
And, oh yes, I do feel the irony. I suspect it means our secular models of optimal societies are incomplete.
