RSS
Why take the ‘harms’ approach? Try this instead.
High Country News
January 19, 2015
by Benjamin Hale
In 2013, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper sat before a Senate committee and testified to drinking a glass of fracking fluid, in an attempt to illustrate just how safe hydraulic fracturing can be. He hoped, presumably, to allay growing concerns in what has become one of the West’s most contentious energy issues. But in doing so, the former geologist employed a basic assumption about wrongdoing that has long underlain the environmental debate. In my view, this assumption has done far more harm than good to the environmental movement.
Maybe you’d care to join Hick in his swashbuckling imbibition. I certainly wouldn’t. Either way, it is easy to see how quickly this kind of discussion can spiral into a futile tug-of-war between two sides: One side insists that the practice is safe, and the other side insists that it’s not. Almost all discussions of pollution — oil spills, gas leaks, nuclear contamination, water pollution — end up lost in the same eternal back-and-forth.
Many environmentalists will tell you that we should care about pollution because it threatens to degrade our environment and harm us in some palpable and important way. These statements reflect a much wider tendency within the environmental community to confuse wrongs with harms.
The so-called “harms view” associates environmental damage with environmental wrongdoing, meaning that the moral complications of pollution can be captured by describing its harmful effects. According to this way of thinking, it is enough to say that it is wrong to harm people by adding toxic substances to their drinking water.
But this view, in fact, is not the only way to understand fracking, or any kind of pollution. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not even the best way to do so. There is a related but less common position that considers the moral complications of pollution not in terms of doing harm, but in terms of trespassing. And trespassing, particularly in the West, is something we can all understand.
According to the “trespass view,” what is wrong with fracking — or any kind of pollution — isn’t simply that it causes, or risks causing, harm to me and my family. It is that certain kinds of pollution harm me without my authorization, without clear justification. One might take this even further: It’s not necessarily the harm done that does the moral work of distinguishing pollutants from non-pollutants. It is instead whether the introduction of a substance, or the alteration of a situation, impacts my life in a way that I can and will countenance. Read more …
