The dilemma between industrialization, urbanization and conversation
Some people may have the
idea that the capacity for industrialization and urbanization is unlimited,
because of the vast amount of resources on the earth, and the ability of human
to overcome resources shortages and environmental problems through science and
technology. In order words, they think that unlimited economic growth is sustainable.
However, most
environmentalists and a growing number of economists and business leaders
believe that unlimited economic growth is not sustainable. They think that as
rapid economic development goes on, more and more natural habitats will be
destroyed, pollution problem will become increasingly severe, and the natural
resources will be depleted. These will ultimately limit or even inhibit
economic development. In the other words, economic development should rely on
the sustainable use of natural resources and protection of the environment.
The method of cost-benefit analysis is a useful way to study the
relationship between economic development and conversation. The principle is to
compare the estimated short-term and long-term impact on the environment with
the estimated economic benefits for the society.
Examples of the conflicting interests between economic development and
conservation
The below article is
concerned about the tension between economic development and conservation in
1) “The Rhetorics of
Sustainable Development and Conservation: A Comparison of
Two Internal Tensions”
Alan Razee,
The theme of Tarla
Peterson’s book Sharing the Earth: The
Rhetoric of Sustainable
Development is that the rhetoric of sustainable
development, and especially of the term
itself, is imbued with both peril and
promise. Both the peril and the promise arise from a
dichotomy between two different senses of
nature: nature as valuable in itself (an
ecocentric conception), and nature as valuable
for instrumental or utilitarian purposes (an
anthrocentric conception) (1).
But, Peterson notes, “[t]he term sustainability
offers an alternative to the
ecocentric/anthropocentric dichotomy for framing ethical
questions about natural or
ecological integrity” by “integrating human
concerns into the larger biosphere” (1). The
term sustainable development can be used as
a way of transcending the dichotomy of two
natures because of the potential for
mystification of the internal contradictions between
the two terms of the phrase: sustainable
and development. “Sustainable development,”
Peterson continues, “enables
efficient policy implementation partially by mystifying
internal contradictions that may undermine both
nature and future generations of human
society” (2). In short, the definition of
sustainable development within ecological circles
remains contested (Peterson 14-15) by the
placement of a biological metaphor
(sustainability)
in juxtaposition to an economic discourse (development) (Peterson 31).
This contest can be read as an
advantage for environmental rhetors because the semicontradictory
nature of the phrase sustainable development
allows for a transcendence of
the dichotomy between two forms of policy
toward the natural world (Peterson 45).
So, concludes Peterson, “[i]f sustainable development is to become more than
another
meaningless bit of jargon, the productive tension
within the term must be maintained”
(36). Peterson’s three case studies of
the
show varying degrees of success at or
failure at maintaining this productive tension.
With an understanding of Peterson’s
argument, there are two reasons we should turn
to the rhetoric of conservation as a kind
of counterpoint. First, it makes sense to look at
conservation in relation to sustainable development
because the later evolved out of the
former. Peterson notes that sustainability
was a part of the original conservation rhetoric
before it was lost and eventually revived to
deal with new problems. “It says that care for
the environment is essential to economic
progress,” she notes, “that the natural resources
of our planet are the base of all
agriculture and industry; and that only by sustaining that
base can we sustain human development” (6).
The second reason is even more germane.
Just as there is a productive tension within
sustainable development, there is also an
analogous (and well-documented) tension
(although it
remains to be seen whether this tension is productive) within conservation:
conservation for use and conservation for
preservation. The tension within conservation
is, in some ways, similar to the tension
within sustainable development, but in some ways
it is also significantly different. Both
the similarities and the differences tell us
something about the rhetoric of sustainable
development.
One side of the conservation tension
relates to conservation as a practice of utility.
The tension arises out of an economic
metaphor. Samuel Hays observes that the term
conservation originally grew out of water
reclamation issues facing the American West
prior to the 20th Century (5). Water
reclamation discourse proclaimed that to conserve
was to store away for later use. Water was
a metaphoric form of capital to be saved and
spent wisely, much like money in a bank
account.
The economic connotations of the word
were solidified by subsequent conservation
rhetoric. Hays observes that conservation
policy was an effort to end waste and increase
efficiency in the utilization of water, forest,
and range land resources. George Perkins
Marsh, Carl Schurz,
Gifford Pinchot, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin
Roosevelt clearly
envisioned and spoke of conservation in these
terms (see, for example, Nash 40-51, 73-
79, 84-89, and 140-141). Development,
they argued (and Pinchot made it clear that
conservation was, in fact, development) was to be
pursued in a so-called rational and
efficient manner so as to end waste. Their
rhetoric is clearly economic: waste and
efficiency indicate that natural resources are
conceptualized as capital to be “saved” and
“spent”
wisely. Pinchot’s famous saying, “Conservation means
the greatest good to the
greatest number for the longest time” (Nash
69), only reinforces the economic grounding
of this rhetoric. Even contemporary terms
that came out of the conservation tradition,
such as “resource management” and “waste
management,” are grounded in the economic
rhetoric of management.
The other side of the conservation
tension relates to conservation as a practice of
preservation. While the rhetoric of utilitarian
conservation clearly draws upon an
economic metaphor of conserving capital through
efficiency and waste management, the
preservationist version of conservation does not have
such a clear metaphoric origin.
Hays, for instance, characterizes the
conflict as being between efficiency and amenities
(qtd.
in Nash 148). This makes sense if one thinks of preserving land and wilderness
as
aesthetic exercises of providing cultural
amenities; wilderness, in other words, is art.
But a clearer metaphoric origin for
conservation as preservation can be found in a
kind of physiological rhetoric:
conservation is health.
instance, associated the conservation of
landscapes with the physical and psychological
health of citizens (Nash 47). Protection of
the poor person’s health, Olmstead argued,
should be a government priority, and the
preservation of natural landscapes was one
practical way to offer that protection (Nash
49). Likewise, Robert Underwood Johnson
posited beauty as a criterion for effective
conservation (Nash 93), and for him beauty’s
role was in the service of promoting
health. Robert Marshall’s writings about wilderness
preservation were full of justifications for the
psychological and physical health of
citizens (Nash 160-165). And Aldo Leopold’s
land ethic is grounded in the criterion of,
not human health, but land health.
Preservationist conservation promoted health: what
was being preserved was not only the
health of wildernesses and landscapes, but the
physical and psychological health of people.
Recreation was a means of achieving the
social and mental health of the camper or
hiker or hunter or fisher who needed to get
away from the tension of contemporary
American life; scenery was a means for
Americans to maintain their mental
health; preservation of land was characterized as a
movement to help the health of the land.
So there was, inherent in the rhetoric
of conservation, and manifest in the conflict
between two types of conservation, a tension
between differing visions of what
conservation should be: should it an economic
commodity or, because health is a physical
standard, a natural process? Like the internal
tensions within the concept of sustainable
development that marries an economic term
(development) with a biological (or
“natural”)
term (sustainability), conservation also juxtaposed, albeit implicitly, an
economic conception with a “natural”
conception. As a result, one wonders whether
conservation, like sustainable development,
embodied a potential to transcend the
dichotomy two natures.
But while conservation and sustainable
development both share a similar tensional
structure, there are also significant
differences between the two internal tensions. First, in
sustainable development the internal tension is
between two conceptions that are
relatively equal in value. (This is not entirely
true, as Peterson’s first case study
demonstrates. Because the word sustainable comes
before the word development,
sustainable can be portrayed as an adjective that
describes the type of development that
should take place. Sustainable development is
still development, only it is a particular
type of development.) In conservation, on
the other hand, the term conservation is itself
an economic metaphor, and the opposing
conception of conservation as health does not
naturally evolve out of the economic metaphor,
and instead must be theorized out of the
word conservation, and in fact is subsumed
by the economic element. Conservation is
clearly an economic term; health
considerations are likely to be considered secondary, if
they are considered at all. In fact, the
health characterization of conservation was not
even seriously considered by many policy
makers until it was cast in the rhetoric of
economics: the policies of preservationist
conservationists (e.g., recreation and scenery)
became significant only after the health
metaphor could be worked into the economic
metaphor as in the rhetoric of “recreation and
scenery as forest products” (Nash 114).
Second, the tension within sustainable
development allows for some measure of
interpenetration between the two terms: development is
qualified by the standards of
sustainability; sustainability is used as a standard
for the purpose of appropriate
development. The tension within conservation, on
the other hand, seems to be less a
mutually advantageous symbiosis (or, at least,
there does not seem to be the potential for
a mutually advantageous symbiosis) as
much as a simple conflict in which the two terms
are pitted against one another until one
proves to be the stronger term.
(Notice, by the way, how easy it is for
me to describe the relationship between
sustainability and development in terms of a
biological metaphor (symbiosis), whereas
my characterization of the relationship
between the two differing notions of conservation
is described using a more social
relationship (conflict). This may be another quality of
the rhetoric of sustainability that
distinguishes it from the rhetoric of conservation: the
use of biological grounding metaphors
instead of social metaphors.)
When comparing conservation to
sustainable development, there does not appear to
be much of a shift in the two economic
terms. There does appear, on the other hand, to
be a shift in the other two terms from
health to biology. In this shift, the notion of health
expanded from a merely physiological metaphor
(the health of the human body) to an
ecosystemic metaphor (the so-called health of an
ecosystem). While human health is the
standard of conservation, ecosystem health is
the standard of sustainable development.
The promise of sustainable development
to transcend the dichotomy of the two
natures arises from the term’s ability to
place development within a biological context.
Conservation, on the other hand, has a
biological component within it, but, one suspects,
it was not able to contextualize economy
within biology (or health). The tension between
biology and economy has always been a part of
the rhetoric of nature and environmental
preservation. What sustainable development does is
to articulate that tension is a novel
way so as to give it the potential for
closing the gap between nature and culture.
Works Cited
Hays, Samuel P. Conservation and the
Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive
Conservation Movement, 1890-1920. 1959.
Nash, Roderick Frazier. American
Environmentalism:
3rd ed.
Peterson, Tarla
Rai. Sharing the Earth: The
Rhetoric of Sustainable Development.
The below example is about the conflicts between economic
development and conservation in
2) There have been cases of conflicts between economic development and conservation in HK. For example, a few year ago, a golf course and a residential area were planned to be established in Sha Lo Tung in the new territories. Because of the objection of some environmentally concerned groups, the plan was finally withdrawn.
3) Another example was the conflict between
the railway extension project of the Kowloon-Canton Railway(KCR) and the conversation of the