Andrew Light is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and the director of the Center for Global Ethics at George Mason University. A renowned expert on environmental ethics, Light is currently conducting research on the fairness of approaches to climate change mitigation. He also coordinates the Center for American Progress’s involvement with the Global Climate Network, a group of international think tanks working to integrate climate policies of developed and developing countries.

You have previously stated that you’re interested in an approach to environmental ethics that focuses on the experiences people have that tie them to the environment, rather than trying to develop an abstract notion of the inherent value of nature. Do you have any personal experiences of your own that have led you to have an interest in environmental ethics?

There are a few personal experiences of mine that led me to become involved in environmental ethics. There’s a figure in American environmental history who’s often overlooked these days, William H. White. White talks about what he calls “tremendous trifles.” Tremendous trifles are things like the stream that is going through the urban area or the patch of woods in between urban and suburban areas that had been left alone. When you’re a kid, these things can mean an awful lot to you even if they’re certainly a very far reach from the kind of grandiose bits of nature that most people think about when they think of environmentalism. There was a little creek near where I grew up called Flat Rock Creek where I used to spend most of my time when I was a kid. As I think back, it was that place where I loved being in the natural world but also in a world that was very close to a very heavy concentration of people.

When I got older, I had a very formative experience in college when I spent about four months interning at a U.S. Senate office in D.C. I think that’s where I really started thinking about how I wanted to use my twin interests in the environment and ethics to try to make the policy process on the environment better.

Do you have any thoughts on how people’s relationships with the local environment could be involved in more sustainable methods of economic development?

A lot of my work on restoration ecology, urban ecology, and the little bit of work I’ve done on urban gardens applies to this. I lived in New York for six years when I was at NYU, and my years there were enormously influential for me in thinking about questions like this. The opportunity people have to interact with the local environment, to learn something about its ecological history, and to physically be able to get in there and interact with those spaces can be very important in getting them to pay much more attention to the future of those places.

The particular restorations I was looking at in my early work were in areas that are collectively known now as the Chicago wilderness. It’s been this decades-long attempt to recreate the pre-settlement conditions of the Chicago forest preserves. People went out there, and they would learn a lot through these restorations about the local environmental history as well as the history of the city that they lived in. I saw a very similar thing happen with a very different sort of landscape when I was in New York in the late 90s when Giuliani was trying to destroy many community gardens. There we’re not talking about trying to return the land to whatever Manhattan or Brooklyn looked like before the Dutch got there, but basically people had a stake in these tiny plots of land in these intensely densely populated neighborhoods. When those things were threatened, that was the community that rose up against it.

So to me it’s the degree to which you can get people connected with the land around them that makes them more interested in the decisions about the future of those places and the sustainability of those places. It’s certainly no guarantee that they’ll always make the right decisions even if they’re intimately engaged in that, but I think there will be better decisions in the long-run because they really will be informed decisions.

I wanted to pick up on something you just mentioned. You talked about your time in New York and Chicago. How important is urbanization internationally in terms of sustainability?

Urbanization is absolutely critical for the long-term sustainability of the planet for two very important reasons.

The first is that one of the biggest drivers in the long-term stabilization of human population is urbanization. So the more urban the planet becomes, the more confident we can be that there won’t be this continual rise in human population forever until the planet becomes too crowed or we hit mass species extinction. The second reason why urbanization is so important is that, given the current profile of the technologies we use to produce energy, urban density is the single biggest built-in check on human consumption.

On the downside, of course, is that we know cities can be very unsustainable. Cities can remove people from sources of food. Cities can be places where diseases can spread more quickly. Cities can be places of intense poverty. I see the move to make cities more sustainable and self-sustaining as absolutely essential to the task of making the planet more sustainable and also decreasing our impact on other species.

Your most recent work has focused on climate change, and I wanted to shift gears a bit and talk about climate change more specifically. It has been argued that during the Industrial Revolution in Western Europe and the United States, there was no regard for environmental sustainability.  Thus, developing countries today should not be forced to take more sustainable approaches to economic development. How would you respond to such an argument?

We’re faced with a very clear ethical mandate—you can’t ask developing countries to dramatically slow their economic growth, which is going to include impeding their progress on very important issues. China’s not growing just so it can have cars and McDonald’s. China’s trying to grow because people are suffering. We’re caught between that ethical mandate, the fact that developing countries are not responsible for the carbon that’s currently causing the problem, and the reality that if developing countries do nothing, then the entire planet suffers.

Technology transfer becomes the moral mechanism by which we make their acceptance of some kind of caps on emissions palatable and acceptable. It’s one way of fulfilling our moral responsibilities towards developing countries for this problem that we unintentionally created. But there’s another way to fulfill these responsibilities, which is embodied in the correct language of the original Kyoto Protocol. This did not force developing countries to accept caps on emissions. That was entirely appropriate. What Europeans understood that our leaders never understood was that the Kyoto Treaty was part of a longer process, which will include the Copenhagen agreement. It was supposed to be the beginning of the process that said, “We will begin to do the lifting by ourselves because you in the developing world did not cause the problem. And we will expect that at some point you will begin to lift with us.”

You mentioned Copenhagen, and you’ve written before about how bilateral agreements might be better suited to achieve progress than large, UN-sponsored conferences. In light of that sentiment, what do you see looking forward to Copenhagen?

I see a number of different pathways for success at Copenhagen. The background of this is that at the last UNFCCC meeting in Poland there was a really disturbing idea that was being circulated: don’t expect the U.S. to do anything at Copenhagen because the Obama administration is not going to be able to enter into serious negotiations about an international treaty until after the Congress has passed some sort of cap-and-trade or carbon tax legislation. That basically sets up the entire UN process for failure because everyone knew that would not get developing countries, especially China, to agree to do anything in terms of appropriate caps on carbon emissions unless the U.S. is willing to be there too.

I think that claim was fundamentally false. To expect that the United States can only enter into serious negotiations after the Congress has acted is patently false. What we need is some kind of clear signal from either the administration directly or from the Congress that the U.S. is ready to act and that will be sufficient for the Obama administration to go to Copenhagen and negotiate in good faith. There are a number of ways to get that signal. Obviously, legislation in the Congress is an option. We’re seeing that play out in the House right now. A second way to get a clear signal is through the Major Economies Forum and other places on the diplomatic calendar where there is an opportunity for the U.S. to say that they’re very serious about it. In the Major Economies Forum and similar meetings we can talk to countries like China directly to demonstrate that we’re seriously concerned about climate change and to talk about technology transfer in a way that doesn’t involve just giving away technology to them. Other people will talk about the G8 as an alternative forum.

So there are lots of ways to get there. I think the race is on in Washington to figure out what are the best and most effective ways to get there and make sure the administration can go to Copenhagen and say that they’re ready to move forward.

Finally, how optimistic are you about the potential to make real progress on climate change in the near future?

I remain optimistic. Every time we go back and talk to the IPCC, it looks like we have less and less time. The clock is ticking and the clock is shrinking. This is a disturbing situation to be in. But I feel that there is another side to that. We have a perfect storm. We have the deadline in Copenhagen, which I don’t think is rock solid, but does put pressure to do things in a short amount of time. The other part of the storm is the global economic crisis. This strange collection of things may be the thing that helps us meet the deadline.
I feel an enormous amount of goodwill and dedication to working on this. And I think for everyone else who cares about this issue, this is an enormous opportunity to step up and do something that will have lasting ramifications for the future of the planet. This is a huge responsibility. It can be seen as an enormous burden, but it can also be seen as an amazing chance to do something good.

Philip Crone is a sophomore at Columbia University studying Philosophy and Linguistics. He is a junior editor of Consilience: The Journal of Sustainable Development with interests in climate change and the social impacts of economic development.