Natural Assets: Democratizing Ownership Of Nature

By James Boyce

Low-income communities frequently suffer from a lack of access to, or lack of control over, the natural resources that surround them. In many cases, their local environment has been degraded by years of resource extraction and pollution by distant corporations or government agencies. In such settings, initiatives that build natural assets in the hands of the poor can play an important role in poverty-fighting efforts.

Natural Assets explores a range of strategies for expanding the quantity and enhancing the quality of natural assets in the hands of low-income individuals and communities. The book:

• examines the social construction of rights to natural resources and the environment
• describes efforts to curtail pollution of the air, land, and water and to reclaim resources that have been appropriated and abused by polluters
• considers sustainable agricultural practices that not only maintain but actually increase the stock of natural capital
• explores strategies to promote sustainable forest management while reducing rural poverty
• examines the prospects for building natural assets in urban areas Drawing on evidence from across the United States, the authors demonstrate that safeguarding the environment and improving the well-being of the poor can be mutually reinforcing goals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Apr 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781597262781

Book preview

2003

Introduction

This book explores avenues to reduce poverty and protect the environment by building natural assets. These assets include sources of raw materials as well as environmental sinks where waste products from the economy are absorbed and decomposed. Drawing on evidence from urban and rural areas across the United States, the contributors to this volume demonstrate that safeguarding the environment and improving the well-being of the poor are mutually reinforcing goals.

This proposition represents a sharp break from the conventional view that these goals are inherently contradictory and that we must trade progress on one front for progress on the other. For example, both advocates and opponents of stronger environmental protection often assume that poverty reduction and environmental protection are at best unrelated objectives and at worst incompatible ones. Poverty reduction requires some combination of economic growth and economic redistribution. The conventional wisdom holds that the former inevitably sacrifices environmental quality, whereas the latter would shift resources to people who are more concerned with day-to-day survival than with safeguarding the environment.

The essays in this book propose a radically different view: that poverty reduction and environmental protection can be advanced simultaneously. Indeed, we believe that both goals not only can go together, but must go together. One reason is obvious: sustainable advances in human well-being and reductions in poverty are undermined by environmental degradation. The second reason is perhaps less apparent, but no less important: environmental quality is undermined by large disparities of wealth and power.

Assets and Nature

Nature provides the indispensable foundation for the economy as the source of our raw materials—food, fiber, water, energy, and minerals—and as the sink for wastes generated by production and consumption. In this broad sense, natural assets are the stock of wealth on which human lives and livelihoods ultimately depend. The term asset implies not only the existence of wealth, however, but also a set of rules and institutions that govern access to this wealth and the distribution of the benefits derived from it. Resources are things; assets are relationships between things and people.

A variety of rules and institutions govern access to natural assets. These include private property owned by individuals and firms; public property owned by governments; common property held formally or informally by groups; and open access in which the resource is, in theory, available to anyone and everyone.These arrangements are not fixed or immutable but change over time, reflecting changes in technologies, preferences, and the distribution of power in our society.

Changes in the amount of assets, their distribution, and the social arrangements that govern access to them are interwoven. The enclosures of common lands in eighteenth-century Britain, for example, involved not only a shift from common property to private ownership but also the redistribution of access rights from poor commoners to wealthy landlords. Similarly, the struggles of low-income communities today to curb pollution from industrial facilities near their homes represent an effort not only to increase the amount of clean air and clean water but also to redistribute rights from the polluters to the people who breathe the air and drink the water.

Building Natural Assets

The essays in this book describe a range of strategies for expanding the quantity and enhancing the quality of natural assets held by low-income individuals and communities and evaluate their potential to reduce poverty and protect the environment. Greater access to natural resources and greater control over environmental sinks can be achieved in two broad ways: by increases in the total stock of society’s natural assets and by redistribution of the existing stock so as to increase the share of the poor.

There are two avenues for increasing the total stock of natural assets, or what economists term investment in natural capital. The first is ecological restoration, steps to repair environmental damages inflicted by economic activities in the past. Examples of ecological restoration include reforestation, soil and water conservation, and the cleanup of polluted waterways and contaminated lands. Because such investments simply seek to reverse past depreciation of natural capital, their potential scope is limited by the extent of past environmental degradation.

The second avenue is coevolution, whereby human interactions with the environment add to nature’s wealth. A prime example is the domestication of plants and animals that began some ten thousand years ago, and the subsequent evolution of the rich agricultural biodiversity on which human sustenance depends today. Coevolution demonstrates that the human impacts on the environment are not always negative, nor are positive impacts necessarily limited to the repair of past damages. Our activities can also enhance nature’s long-term capacity to sustain humankind.

Redistribution of access to natural assets also can occur via several avenues. When property rights to natural assets are already intensively defined, redistribution requires reallocations of rights, or of some of the sticks in the bundle of rights pertaining to a given asset, from prior owners to new owners. When the poor already manage natural assets, and in doing so can create positive externalities for others in the form of ecological services—such as the conservation of crop genetic diversity or watershed management—policies to internalize some of these benefits can raise the incomes of the poor and at the same time bolster their incentives to continue providing these services.When natural assets are currently treated as open-access resources, available in principle to all but in practice to those with the power to seize them, the appropriation of these resources on a democratic basis can be an effective way to redistribute their benefits.

The environmental justice movement exemplifies the appropriation route to building natural assets. This grassroots movement has arisen in recent years in response to the disproportionate risks from pollution and other environmental hazards that are often faced by low-income communities in general and by people of color in particular. Its guiding principle is the proposition that all people are endowed with the right to a clean and safe environment. Rather than the parochial slogan, not in my backyard, the environmental justice movement espouses the broader goal, "not in anybody’s backyard." Insofar as pollution and hazards cannot be eliminated altogether, the movement demands that their burdens be distributed fairly. In effect, environmental justice seeks the egalitarian appropriation of rights to airsheds and water bodies that were previously treated as open-access environmental sinks.

As this example illustrates, the phrase natural assets does not imply that the environment simply can be commodified, or reduced to purely monetary values to be exchanged in markets. Similarly, the phrase environmental ownership does not imply unbridled license to use or abuse natural resources. Assets can be owned by communities and the public, as well as by individuals. And ownership entails responsibilities to others as well as rights. The essays in this book do not give a blanket endorsement to any single form of environmental ownership—private property, common property, state property, or open access. Nor do they axiomatically embrace either market-based incentives or government regulation as the best way to protect the environment. Instead the authors propose a variety of institutional arrangements tailored to different circumstances, and they suggest that the quality of the outcomes will depend above all on the degree to which these arrangements are grounded in a democratic distribution of wealth and power.

Plan of the Volume

The book is divided into five parts.

Part 1, The Wealth of Nature, discusses the importance of natural assets to human well-being and examines the social construction of rights to natural resources and the environment.

Part 2, Reclaiming Environmental Sinks, examines efforts to curtail the pollution of the air, lands, and water bodies that serve as sinks for the disposal of wastes from production and consumption. Across the United States, struggles for environmental justice are seeking to reclaim environmental resources that have been appropriated and misused by polluters. These creative and dynamic initiatives offer important lessons for natural-asset-building strategies.

Part 3, Cultivating Natural Capital, challenges the conventional assumption that human economic activities inexorably degrade the natural environment. The essays in this part show that sustainable agricultural practices not only can sustain but also can enhance the stock of natural capital. At the same time, the authors document the formidable threats that are now undermining such practices.

Part 4, Out of the Woods, documents the range of social benefits that forests provide and explores strategies to expand the rights of forest-dependent communities to public and private forestlands so as to foster sustainable forest management and reduce rural poverty.

Finally, Part 5, Greening the Cities, considers the prospects for building natural assets in the urban areas where most Americans today live and work. The greening of the cities includes not only the cleanup of environmental sinks, already discussed in Part 2, but also natural-resource-based development strategies that aim to reduce urban poverty and improve environmental quality.

The essays in this volume demonstrate that poverty reduction and environmental protection can indeed go hand in hand, and they suggest that these goals are not only compatible but mutually reinforcing. Yet the authors also make it clear that strategies to build natural assets are still at an early stage, with much scope for further innovation, refinement, and diffusion. We hope that this book will help to stimulate creative thinking and debate about how best to deepen democracy and secure a sustainable future for the generations who will follow us.

PART I

THE WEALTH OF NATURE

The two chapters in Part 1 set the stage for those that follow by discussing how societies transform nature into wealth. The rules and institutions that transform natural resources into natural assets shape a society’s answer to the classic economic question of how to allocate scarce resources among competing ends. At the same time, they shape the answer to the central question of political economy: how to allocate resources among competing individuals, groups, and classes.

James Boyce identifies four routes for building natural assets held by the poor. The first route is investment: increases in the total stock of natural capital. For example, soil and water conservation projects can enhance the value of farms or forestlands owned by low-income individuals and communities. This route is most feasible when the poor already own some natural assets, the quality or quantity of which can be increased via ecological restoration or coevolution.

The second route is redistribution: the transfer of rights to natural assets from others to the poor. Land reform, a central feature of the postwar development strategies in East Asia, is a prime example of this route. In addition to outright transfers of ownership titles, redistribution can involve subsets of rights—such as the right to participate in land-use decisions and the right to share in employment opportunities or other benefits derived from the use of natural resources—making this route feasible in a range of settings.

The third route, internalization, arises when the poor own natural assets that generate benefits to others in the form of positive externalities. Farmers who conserve agricultural biodiversity or forestland owners whose land-use practices regulate waterflows downstream generally receive no compensation for these services. Policies to reward them could improve their well-being and, at the same time, provide incentives for sound ecological stewardship.

The fourth route, appropriation, is relevant when nature’s wealth is being treated as an open-access resource, as in the case of airsheds and water bodies that serve as environmental sinks. Efforts by citizens to curtail pollution—in effect, transforming the air and water into their air and water—seek to appropriate rights to these natural assets. This approach can yield significant benefits not only in the form of better health and environmental amenities but also in the form of income if polluters are required to pay for their use of commonly-owned environmental sinks.

All four routes raise issues of how rights to natural assets are defined and allocated. As Gerald Friedman recounts, American law and jurisprudence have grappled with these issues since the birth of the Republic. Throughout U.S. history, property has been reconfigured in response to competing private claims and interests and changing conceptions of the public good. Further reconfigurations of rights to natural assets to advance the goals of environmental protection and poverty reduction would follow in this democratic tradition.

CHAPTER 1

From Natural Resources to Natural Assets

James K. Boyce

Natural assets are the myriad forms of wealth that nature creates. They include the land on which we live and grow our food and fiber; the water we drink and use to irrigate crops, generate electricity, and dispose of wastes; the atmosphere that envelops our planet; the fish in the ocean, the trees in the forest, and all other animals and plants, wild and domesticated; ores, minerals, and fossil fuels; and the energy of the sun, which powers the biosphere. Human well-being and survival itself ultimately depend on natural assets.

Nature sustains human livelihoods in two fundamental ways. First, it provides the raw materials needed to produce goods and services. Second, it serves as an environmental sink for disposal of the wastes our production and consumption generate. Human activities often diminish both kinds of natural assets: we have depleted nature’s sources and overfilled nature’s sinks.

But humans can also invest in natural assets to increase their quantity and quality. One avenue for such investment is ecological restoration, which includes such measures as reforestation, the replenishment of fisheries, and the cleanup of polluted land and water. These activities increase natural assets by repairing some of the damage inflicted by past environmental abuses. Another avenue is human engagement in the web of life: the coevolutionary processes that constantly shape and reshape the living world. From the standpoint of human well-being, perhaps the most important example of coevolution is the domestication of rice, wheat, maize, and other crops, which began roughly four hundred human generations ago, and the subsequent development of the many thousands of diverse varieties of these crops that farmers around the world cultivate today.

Natural Assets and Human Well-Being

Although natural resources are the common heritage of humankind, access to them is filtered through human institutions. Resources become assets only when people have rights to them. As with other kinds of assets, some people typically possess more natural assets than others. The resulting imbalances in distribution have long stimulated social struggles, and in recent decades they have fueled popular movements and helped to create public policies for environmental protection and environmental justice. Environmental protection seeks to maintain the quality and quantity of natural assets for present and future generations: it promotes intergenerational equity. Environmental justice promotes equity within the current generation, by demanding that natural assets—in particular, access to clean air and water—be distributed fairly.

Some people hold that these environmental aspirations are at odds with another central social goal: poverty reduction. They claim that the poor face a grim but inescapable choice between higher income and a better environment. This book challenges that belief. We maintain that strategies for increasing the natural assets held by low-income individuals and communities can simultaneously advance the goals of poverty reduction, environmental protection, and environmental justice.

Poverty is not simply a lack of income today but also a lack of assets that will yield income and other benefits tomorrow. This insight is the starting point for the asset-based approach to poverty reduction. Michael Sherraden (1991) and Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro (1995) applied this approach to financial assets and real estate. More recently, it has been applied to human capital in the form of health and education and to social capital in the form of community organizations and the bonds of trust that underpin cooperation.¹ Natural assets, too, can play an important role in poverty reduction.

Asset-based strategies for reducing poverty have two compelling advantages over conventional income-based strategies. First, income transfers offer only temporary relief from poverty: unless today’s income is followed by more tomorrow, the impact of such transfers is transitory. Assets generate income now and in the future, offering a long-term escape from poverty rather than a mere reprieve. Second, assets are a source of leverage, enabling their owners to gain indirect benefits above and beyond those inherent in the asset itself. Examples of indirect benefits include more favorable access to credit markets and greater social standing and power. As Oliver and Shapiro (1995, 32) remark, Income supplies the necessities of life, while wealth represents a kind of ‘surplus’ resource available for improving life chances, providing further opportunities, securing prestige, passing status along to one’s family, and influencing the political process.

Building natural assets can, and often does, go hand in hand with building other types of assets. For example, Manuel Pastor reports in Chapter 4 that toxic waste facilities in metropolitan Los Angeles are disproportionately located in poor and predominantly minority communities that are experiencing ethnic churning, with new minorities moving in as others move out. The reason, he suggests, is that stable communities are richer in social capital—informal networks as well as formal community organizations—and hence are better able to resist the siting of hazardous facilities in their midst.

Just as social capital can help to build natural assets, successful efforts to build natural assets can strengthen a community’s social capital. A movement to resist the imposition of toxic facilities may set the stage for other community-based campaigns, such as demands for better schools, housing, and public services. In Chelsea, Massachusetts, for example, local efforts to access and restore the riverfront have helped spark the rise of community organizations. Patricia Hynes writes about these efforts in Chapter 15.

Several features distinguish natural assets from financial wealth and real estate. First, the benefits that flow from access to natural assets include not only income but also such crucial non-income benefits as health and environmental quality. Poverty in these dimensions of well-being can be as detrimental as low income. Natural assets share this feature with other types of unconventional assets—including education and community organizations—that also contribute to the non-income dimensions of well-being.

Second, the principle that every person has an equal right to natural assets is widely appealing. Two centuries ago, the revolutionary democrat Thomas Paine (1796) declared that land is the free gift of the Creator in common to the human race. He proposed that the income from leasing land for individual use should be distributed equitably among all citizens. In a similar vein, many people would agree with the proposition that rights to the air we breathe should be distributed equally. To be sure, public policies in the United States and elsewhere have often granted rights to natural resources and environmental services to the first party that finds a way to seize them. Yet the principle of equal rights to common-heritage resources remains a powerful ideal.

Finally, rights to natural resources are often imprecisely defined. Natural assets are held in a great variety of ways. Individuals or firms own some resources as private property; communities hold some as common property; and governments hold some as public property. In addition, some are open-access resources, owned by no one and available in theory to all, but available in practice only to those with the power to appropriate them. The bundle of sticks that constitutes the set of property rights to a given natural asset is often divided among different parties. For example, a farmer may own the surface rights to a tract of land and a coal company may hold rights to the minerals beneath it, while the air above it is an open-access resource.² Many sticks in the property-rights bundle lie somewhere between the polar cases of perfectly defined rights and perfectly unrestricted open access. Do downstream water users, for example, deserve redress if the activities of an upstream landowner decrease the quantity or quality of water available to them? Do government regulations to protect the watershed infringe on the constitutional guarantee that private property shall not be taken for public use, without just compensation? The answers to such questions have changed over time, and as rights to natural resources are defined and redefined, the natural assets of the poor can expand—or shrink.

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Figure 1.1. Assets and Well-Being.

Rethinking the Environment and the Economy

Long before the rise of market economies, people relied on assets for their livelihoods and well-being. Even today, when markets mediate our access to many goods and services, much that is vital to our quality of life remains outside the sphere of market exchange. The nexus linking the various types of assets to the various dimensions of human well-being include non-market activities as well as market exchanges (see Figure 1.1).

Humans versus Nature?

Environmental debates in the United States have often pitted proponents of wilderness preservation against proponents of rational use. Preservationists typically base their case on the linkages shown in the top half of Figure 1.1. They stress the importance of natural assets, nonmarket activities, and the non-income dimensions of human well-being. The deep-ecology variant of the preservationist school goes further, arguing that the rights of nature should trump human well-being as the ethical basis for public policy (Nash 1990). Advocates of rational use typically base their case on the linkages shown in the bottom half of Figure 1.1. They are inclined to see the market as the measure of all things. The libertarian variant of the rational-use school argues not only that free markets maximize well-being but that the individual’s freedom to choose should be the overriding social goal (Friedman and Friedman 1980).

Notwithstanding their profound and often acrimonious differences, both sides in this debate share certain premises. Both juxtapose nature to humans and the environment to the economy, differing only in which side they favor and think will ultimately prevail. The preservationists believe that in the absence of strict controls, the magnitude of adverse human impacts on the environment will overwhelm nature’s capacity to renew resources and assimilate wastes. The proponents of market rationality believe that human ingenuity, guided by price signals, will find a way around environmental constraints. Both sides typically show little concern for the poor. In the preservationist paradigm, the poor are to be fenced out of nature lest they trample upon it; in the greed-as-virtue paradigm, the poor are simply consigned to their free-market fates.

This book offers an alternative vision, one in which humans are not apart from nature but a part of it. Since at least the advent of agriculture, we humans have shaped and reshaped our environment. Nature, as William Cronon (1995, 25) remarks, is not nearly so natural as it seems. Human activity does not invariably have a negative impact on the environment. Humans certainly can degrade the environment, but they can also improve it by investing in natural capital. Furthermore, the poor—when they have access to natural resources—often play key roles in making and maintaining such