IN 1968, GARRETT HARDIN PRODUCED A FAMOUS PAPER IN SCIENCE, CALLED ‘THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS’. HE ARGUES THAT FREEDOM IN A COMMONS BRINGS RUIN TO ALL, FOR IN A SOCIETY THAT BELIEVES IN THE FREEDOM OF THE COMMONS, EACH MAN IS COMPELLED TO PURSUE HIS OWN BEST INTEREST. HE ILLUSTRATES THIS BY A PASTURE OF LAND, OPEN TO ALL, WHERE HERDSMEN KEEP AS MANY CATTLE AS POSSIBLE ON THE COMMONS. A RATIONAL HERDSMAN, SEEKING TO MAXIMIZE HIS GAIN, WILL CONCLUDE TO ADD ANOTHER ANIMAL TO HIS HERD, AND MAYBE ANOTHER ONE, AND STILL ANOTHER ONE… BUT OTHER HERDSMEN WILL DRAW THE SAME CONCLUSION, LEADING TO OVER EXPLOITATION OF THE COMMONS. AND THERE EXACTLY LIES THE TRAGEDY.
1. Defining the commons
In April 1951, six countries (Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg) sign a treaty to run their heavy industries – coal and steel – under a common management, forming a European Coal and Steel Community. In this way, peace is safeguarded; no country on its own can make weapons of war to turn against the other.
Six nations together define a common good, peace, and give up a fraction of their national sovereignty to realize this common good. They do this based on a shared morality, rooted in Christianity, and by means of an economic tool.
This process in itself is a very fascinating one, nations choosing to gather around a certain common good or interest, deciding on cooperating for the achievement of that common goal, by willingly giving up parts of their sovereignty. It is crucial for the involved nations to understand the common goal is not achievable by single nations only, and that one-sided actions of any nation, not serving the common good, will indeed weaken or fully nullify efforts taken by the other nations, ultimately destroying the common good. A tragedy for all.
Interestingly, the environment is a textbook example of such a common good. Nations have borders and are sovereign in governing how they see best. This might work very well for people living within that territory, but other living creatures such as fish or birds, and resources as air or water, do not abide just within boundaries set by peoples or nations, hence they need to be managed accordingly, cooperation is necessary for them to be managed best, they are common goods.
2. EU nature and biodiversity laws
In April 1979, the EU started legislating for nature protection by adopting the Birds Directive. It provides comprehensive protection to all wild bird species naturally occurring in the European Union, which today count more than 500 species. It is the oldest piece of EU legislation on the environment and one of its cornerstones. It was amended in 2009.
The Habitats Directive was adopted in 1992 to help maintain biodiversity, protecting over 1000 animals and plant species and over 200 types of habitat.
Both directives outline the necessity of protecting habitat areas, known as Special Protection Areas (SPA’s) and Special Areas of Conservation (SAC’s). Together they are known as Natura 2000, an EU wide ecological network of protected areas, safeguarded against potentially damaging developments. It stretches all across the Member States and covers over 18% of the EU’s land area.
The Birds Directive and the Habitat Directive form the backbone of biodiversity policy and the legal basis for the EU’s nature protection network. Both Directives have had to evolve according to the enlargement of the European Union.
Implementation of these two Directives has been very slow and has been undermined by contradictory EU infrastructure and agricultural funding policies. Even so, the Natura 2000 network is the largest coordinated network of protected areas in the world.
The 1997 Rio Summit promoted the concept of ‘sustainable development’, which certainly influenced further environmental legislation. It was included in the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty, intended to ensure a harmonious balance between economic activities and the environment, implying a high level of environmental protection and a requirement for environmental mainstreaming into other EU policy areas. In 1998, the Biodiversity Strategy was adopted, mainly also to mainstream biodiversity conservation objectives into other EU policy areas that were negatively impacting it, such as agriculture, fisheries and development assistance.
Following the 2002 UN World Summit on Sustainable Development and the 2010 Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, a new EU Biodiversity Communication was published in 2006. Unfortunately, this target was not met by 2010. Another EU Biodiversity Strategy was therefore adopted in 2011, to continue these efforts.
Unlike the Directives, these Biodiversity Strategies are no legal instruments, it makes them hard to enforce, which in turn lead to an implementation gap. In the following decades, member states continued to rally against the Commissions attempt to strengthen environmental policies and fought to maintain their focus on economic growth. When it comes down to integrating biodiversity into other EU policy sectors, there appears to be a continuing lack of political will to achieve this effectively.
3. Shifting values
The preambles of the EU biodiversity legislative and strategy documents give a good indication of the values driving EU nature protection. Analysing these preambles shows the shifting of the values throughout the different Directives and Strategies over time.
The preambles of the 1979 Birds Directive and the 1992 Habitats Directive highlight the need to protect declining species in order to safeguard a shared European heritage, and assert that environmental preservation is an essential Community objective and important for achieving sustainable development. Here, an underlying value for protecting the environment is that of increasing integration and pursuing common goals that benefit the whole European community. So far we find a similar strong sense of the common goal fuelling these Directives as we found at the beginning of the formation of the European Union, i.e. the European Coal and Steel Community.
As of the 1998 EU Biodiversity Strategy however, the preamble highlights that biodiversity should be protected both for its ‘intrinsic value’, an ethical principle, as well as for its importance to humans, the latter implying its contribution to social, economic, scientific, educational, cultural, recreational, and aesthetic goals, these are the proven economic and environmental values of biodiversity. The 2006 Biodiversity Communication took a similar approach. Slowly, we find a shift from the ‘commons rationale’ to a rationale based on an ethical and a utilitarian argument. The 2011 Biodiversity Strategy goes down the same line, but clearly gives much greater prominence to the utilitarian justification for conservation, particularly its potential contribution to economic development. Nature is mainly referred to in economic terms, e.g. ‘natural capital’ and ‘green infrastructure’.
4. The importance of the concept of ‘intrinsic value’
In itself it is not a big surprise to find precisely this shift in values in the EU environmental Lawson nature and biodiversity. As of the beginning of the European integration process, peace and solidarity were always the aim, a common good worth striving for, the potential economic gains were a secondary objective. As with the European Coal and Steel Community, peace was the common goal, achievable by using an economic tool. According to Adenauer, all six governments involved realised that the political goal, the political meaning of this Community, was infinitely larger than its economic purpose. Today however, we see a shift from economics as a tool to deliver peace and solidarity to a more free market dominated model in which market and economic performance indicators have become an end in themselves, even at the expense of other stated aims.
For a successful management of the environment in the European Union, gaining understanding of the importance, if not necessity, of the concept of ‘intrinsic value’ seems inevitable. Nature has an intrinsic value, for us as Christians, based on the worldview where all and everything is created by God and where he sees that it was good. Therefore, nature is worthwhile to be protected, independent of its utilitarian value. It follows that we do not merely pursue our own best interest, but together we will seek the best outcome for the commons. We will pursue the commons instead of realising a tragedy, as Hardin suggests.
The environment in the European Union would greatly benefit from a renewal of a sense of moral mission, a sense of being part of a community, a sense of what we have in common, a sense of the higher common goal.
SOURCES/TAKEN FROM:
A soul for the Union; Ben Ryan; Theos and Christian Political Foundation for Europe.
The greening of the EU? A Christian assessment of the EU’s environmental policies for biodiversity and nature; Janice Weatherley-Singh, Tiago Branco and Marcial Felgueiras; God and the EU The Tragedy of the Commons, Gerrett Hardin; Science VOL. 162 http://ec.europa.eu/environment/nature/legislation/index_en.htm