For how long now have environmentalists been exhorted to think globally and act locally? Variously attributed to David Brower, Rene Dubos, Harlan Cleveland, and Jacques Ellul, this catch phrase has rung in the ears of several generations of friends of the earth. But has the time come for it to be flipped on its head? Might there be something to be gained from thinking locally and (perhaps later) acting globally? John Meyer suggests unmistakably that the answer is “yes.” By casting effective environmentalism as an act of social criticism that is concrete in character and pragmatic in its orientation, Meyer sustains an argument that “theoretical insight can best be generated by attending to material practice and lived experience and that theories and ideologies formulated apart from these are more likely to lead us astray than to illuminate contemporary challenges” (p. 167).
Meyer focuses our attention on what is arguably environmentalism’s central dilemma. As a form of social criticism (or political dissent), environmentalism draws our attention to challenges at once so vast and so integral to our continued survival as a species that policy solutions of appropriate scope and ambition fail to resonate with average citizens because those solutions seem so grandiose and distant. Characterized by the author as the resonance dilemma, this paradoxical position that environmentalists find themselves in results from putting the cart of principle before the horse of pragmatism—from trying to inspire local action based upon global thinking. It flies in the face of one of the most commonly observed characteristics of human beings—that when confronted with confounding circumstances, people tend to engage in concrete problem solving first and wrap their solutions in “reasons” only later (if at all). To put it succinctly, “seeing-that” comes more easily to people than does “reasoning-why” (Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 2012, pp. 48–52).
Engaging the Everyday has two parts. In three chapters following the introduction, Meyer presents his larger theoretical argument that neither liberalism nor any other political ideology can ever adequately encapsulate contemporary society and that a new materialism can provide a constructive way of overcoming both the sterile duality of objective materialism and subjective values and the fruitless but still widely presumed private—public dichotomy.
In the three chapters of the second part, Meyer demonstrates the benefits of thinking locally (that is, materially and concretely) by focusing our attention on what he takes to be three particularly important environmental “problems” and theorizing about them from the inside out. Starting with an account of what the problems are as lived human experiences and theorizing his way out from that center to an understanding of these problems as environmental challenges and (ultimately) topics for environmental social criticism, he shows what environmentalism would look like if it were grounded firmly in local thinking rather than global ambition. His discussions of land and our ideas about property, automobiles and our experience of freedom, and household practices and our sense of place show how the environmentally conscious political theorist can live as an “engaged social critic,” sacrificing neither the analytical advantages of distance nor the relational advantages of the active participant in the public sphere (p. 7).
Moreover, Meyer’s contestation of the material practices of everyday life does not leave us with (only) a manifesto for personal improvement. The author addresses the resonance dilemma by vividly demonstrating both how our private lives and behavior partake of the public and political and how our practical cares have embedded within them theoretical concerns. For instance, across a wide range of concrete experiences it can be shown quite clearly that “private property ownership was never absolute, because even in principle it is never possible to disembed it from all social and ecological relations” (p. 112). Further, an honest recognition of the value to individuals of “automobility”—in terms of personal identity, control over one’s life, satisfaction of market preferences, and increased potential for human flourishing (pp. 123–28)—does not foreclose to the engaged social critic the arguments for changes in our transportation practices that are grounded precisely in those very same values. And, finally, politicizing the material practices of our home lives (from the practitioner perspective rather than as an outsider) allows us to see the household as both a primary space for private pro-environmental action and as a site of materiality that “shapes, constrains, and enables the participation and citizenship of household members” (p. 165).
The book is a critique of the style of environmentalism (and a style of social science) that proceeds from a theoretical or ideological perspective toward an interpretation of the world. Instead, Meyer advocates (and demonstrates) a form of environmental criticism that begins with sociological (perhaps even anthropological) observation on the basis of which the critic builds an interpretation of human action. This ground-level understanding of the material interests that are implicated in environmental concerns provides a basis for learning from doing. It can usefully be compared with the work of Elinor Ostrom on the governance of common-pool resources (Governing the Commons, 1990; Understanding Institutional Diversity, 2005). Her examination of self-organizing and self-sustaining regimes for the management of such resources as irrigation systems and fisheries warrant a number of hopeful (if always contingent) conclusions: that local communities are capable of managing their environmental resources in cooperative ways, that those management systems are capable of sustained performance through ongoing adaptation, and that socially embedded systems of governance regularly outperform systems imposed on communities from the outside (or from above). While not presented as a form of social critique, Ostrom's body of work is very much in keeping with Meyer’s insight that the materiality of lived human experience is central to the task of crafting effective rules for both individual and collective behavior with environmental impacts.
There is implicit in both Meyer’s book and in the work of Ostrom a concept of “subsidiarity” that is of increasing importance in environmental governance—particularly as we turn our attention to the need to act globally. Although the concept of subsidiarity has played a key role in the development of the European Union, the term itself is still somewhat unfamiliar outside of that context. Implying no more than that “decisions are to be taken as closely as possible to the citizen,” the principle of subsidiarity reinforces “the basic axiom of global governance through government networks,” both within national institutional structures and “at the local or provincial level” insofar as possible (Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order, 2004, p. 256). But a cautionary note is in order. Although subsidiarity is central to the EU experience (and its associated scholarship), it is often “difficult to define objectively what an international issue is,” as a result of which “all problem definitions and solutions can be scaled up to the EU level” (Joyeeta Gupta, “Global Change: Analyzing Scale and Scaling in Environmental Governance,” in Oran Young, Leslie A. King, and Heike Schroeder, eds., Institutions and Environmental Change, 2008, p. 249). In light of the fact that the effects of globalization have made it difficult to isolate even the smallest of issues from decisions taken elsewhere, some have concluded that subsidiarity is no longer a workable principle of governance but is, rather, “an illusory panacea offered to local and national governments in return for loss of sovereignty” (p. 256).
Yet when practical challenges have confronted other principles of decentralization and devolution, rarely have we resorted to throwing out the baby with the bath water, and there is no reason to think it is necessary here. A useful illustration of a pragmatic approach to this sort of problem can be drawn from the American experience with the delegation of adjudicatory and rulemaking authority by legislators to administrative agencies. American legal scholars have long since had to recognize that “justice to individual parties is administered more outside the courts than in them,” generally in the form of “discretionary determinations” by government officials who have never been elected and are, as a practical matter, beyond the supervision of officials who are subject to discipline by the voters (Kenneth Culp Davis, Discretionary Justice, 1969, p. 215).
A large part of the answer to this conundrum has been the doctrine of “intelligible standards” (Laurence Tribe, American Constitutional Law, 1988, p. 364). Under this doctrine, legislative delegation is constitutionally permissible where “legislative policies and standards guiding the agency are at least roughly understandable,” at least to the extent that the means chosen by the administrative actor can be subjected to judicial review. This arrangement, though far from perfect, recognizes that attempting to eliminate discretionary power would both “paralyze government processes” and “stifle individualized justice” (Discretionary Justice, p. 217). Internationally, however, implementing this kind of fix to the concept of subsidiarity presents special problems due to the well-known deficiencies of international legislatures—especially in comparison with the relatively more robust capacity of international governmental organizations (A New World Order). From what place will come the intelligible standards that make the delegation involved in subsidiarity if not from fully empowered international legislatures? Meyer’s engagement with the everyday offers us a place to start.
If more environmentalists and political theorists take Meyer’s advice and attend to the ways that real people accommodate themselves to the demands of environmental protection in the materiality of their daily lives, they may find that there are broadly discernable patterns in what people regard as reasonable and obligatory and that these patterns offer fertile grounds for the cultivation of political theory capable of informing social choice and action. Ostrom and her colleagues discovered just such general patterns in the ways that local regimes of natural resource management are organized and sustained by people who depend on common-pool resources like fisheries, irrigation systems, and grazing ranges. Our own research (Global Democracy and Sustainable Jurisprudence, 2009; Consensus and Global Environmental Governance, 2015) is founded on assumptions similar to Meyer's central argument, namely, that human beings, confronted with even a fairly complex (but concretely and materially characterized) problem of international environmental protection, will be able to arrive at a basic normative consensus that can inform identification and choice from among a limited range of policy options, with these choices then presenting intelligible patterns that can serve as the standards for decisions of transnational environmental governance.
Meyer suggests that the dilemmas of resonance, collective choice, and democratic legitimacy may be well within our capacity to address. The secret, hidden in plain sight, is to tether our theorizing to the materiality of our own existence. When we do, we stand to gain the critical and analytical advantages that can be drawn only from that deep and diverse well of lived human experience.
