Rules are everywhere. And, as Paul Steinberg hints in his book’s title, Who Rules the Earth? it matters where those rules come from and how they are formed. For most, we forget that our right to own private property and ability to vote are actually rules drafted in our constitution. Steinberg illuminates the visible and invisible world of rules and how they’ve come to shape our environment. More importantly, Steinberg shows that our attempts at mitigating the negative effects of climate change, pollution, and resource depletion must be done with an understanding of our legal, economic, and political rules. Steinberg’s argument that environmentalism is an inherently social problem because its efficacy is contingent on our rules, has made me understand the necessity of institutional reform by means of reviewing and replacing our outdated rules to create a better feasible world.
Rules run deep. Between the visible and invisible ways that rules influence our lives in the legal sphere, from the right to walk on beaches to paying a fine for littering, rules also have social connotations. Social rules, whether in a casual or professional setting, also dictate our behavior. Steinberg stresses that the divide between activism and research is counterintuitive because “Commitment to a social cause, and associated efforts at public advocacy, represent no threat to to intellectual integrity” (2015, 17). He sees their unity as a source of strength that legitimizes environmental activism while supporting meaningful research. By joining the worlds of activist and researcher, we widen our audience to include the greater citizen population so they can demand more of their community to change the rules. After all, the most effective movements happen when, “small groups of intellectuals operating outside the mainstream produce new ideas that are adopted by broader movements for change” (Steinberg 2015, 229). And, this was especially true as mainstream environmentalism transformed in the 1990s to show that the treatment of energy depletion, water scarcity, and climate change as isolated issues was a false understanding of our actions and that further federal research and oversight was deemed necessary (Steinberg 2015, 229).
Rules should work well. For starters, they need should stick, but not permanently. We need regulation that protects the environment because “The durable quality of social rules is important because we cannot count on eternal goodwill or the unwavering vigilance of volunteers to sustain a worthy cause” (Steinberg 2015, 30). As important as it is to have rules that last, rules should also be malleable enough to change over time change as our needs progress. For example, Steinberg uses the US State Forest to show that the strict regulations that initially worked in the favor of forest conservation weren’t positive in the long run as they set a precedent that made it difficult to reform future federal land legislation (2015, 239). On the other end, if rules are poorly enforced as they are in the logging industry near the Amazon, then they have no meaning and the environment can end up being abused for the financial interest of a few. Steinberg stresses the importance of balance between rigid regulation and accountable enforcement of rules to keep society functioning feasibly better.
Finally, we must engage as active participants of the rules. Ultimately, rules exist to serve our interests and so we must be vigilant to how rules affect our daily lives. I learned to adopt the “toddler’s tactic of relentlessly asking Why? Until you arrive at the root cause of outcomes like poor public transit or overfishing” (Steinberg 2015, 268) if I wish to clean up our cluttered system of rules and replace them with better ones. And in terms of engaging with the rule system, it is important to know the super rules, the rules about the rulemaking process, if we wish to “bring to light the social rules that shape our world and to have a hand in making them” (Steinberg 2015, 266).
Most of all, Steinberg taught me that institutional engagement is the most important way of solving environmental problems because “if we pursue the goal of sustainability while ignoring its political dimensions, we will simply never get there” (Steinberg 2015, 267). This gives me hope and inspiration to pursue a career that focuses on institutional reform because it is possible to create a better feasible world, we just need to bend the rules.
Works Cited
Steinberg, Paul. 2015. Who Rules the Earth?. New York: Oxford University Press.