In and Out of Institutions

Institutions, including a society’s structure from kinship to kingship, exist for a purpose. That purpose, as Douglass North points out, is often to lower transaction costs. In other words, they make it easier for people to get together to act. (At least, that is what they are supposed to do; sometimes they make it harder.) Usually they are created to make it easier to do something that people were doing already, but often they are created to satisfy a whole new want. By “institutions,” writers like North understand the rules of society, written or unwritten. The actual organizations are specific instances of institutions informing people and situations; the general principles and laws behind the organizations are the institutions. Other writers, of course, use the word “institutions” to include actual organizations, such as prisons and colleges. The discussion that follows is general enough to avoid conflicts over definitions. It is not intended to provide an adequate account of institutions or of environmental economics. It is intended solely to extend my comments on human information processing, and thereby raise some questions about our current economic interpretations. These questions follow from this book’s central premise that humans are emotional, and that emotion often displaces rational calculation. This is, of course, the point classically made by Max Weber; it keeps being rediscovered by institutional economists like Douglas North. The success of a given society at building institutions thus is related to its success at ecological management. This is obvious when the institutions in question are related to conservation. It is not so obvious, but actually more important, when the institutions are more general in scope and purpose, serving the society at large. The most extreme and spectacular case is that of highly centralized, authoritarian polities. It is safe to say that such polities are always a catastrophe for the environment. The farther control gets from the local people who actually benefit or lose by resource management, and the more control is vested in people remote from the scene, the worse the management. These people are decoupled from the results of their actions.

Feng-shui: Ideology and Ecology

My first direct encounter with feng-shui came soon after I arrived in Hong Kong in 1965. A new hospital was being built on a hill overlooking Castle Peak Bay, where my family and I lived. The hospital foundations cut deep into the slope. Several old peasants told me, “This is very bad; the construction has cut the dragon’s pulse.” I learned that the hill had a dragon in it, whose blood circulation had been cut by the foundation trench. This seemed strange to me. I noted it down as a fascinating local belief, and thought no more of it. Soon afterward, a typhoon dumped two feet of rain on Hong Kong within a few days. The oversteepened, undercut slope failed, and a torrent of mud descended, washing out the hospital foundations and burying a house or two at the hill foot. “See?” said my friends. “This is what happens when you cut the dragon’s pulse.” A light went on in my head. The Chinese peasants, pragmatic to the core, had described the phenomenon in terms strange to me; but the phenomenon they described was perfectly real. I reflected that the geologists’ terms “oversteepening” and “slope failure” were not much more empirically verifiable than the dragon. Any Chinese peasant would find them even stranger than I had found that eminent serpent, since I had already learned from reading that ancient Chinese saw dragons in the scaly, ridged contours of mountain ranges. As time went on, I learned that I had found more than a different way of talking about obvious facts. Chinese site planning seemed more and more rational. I learned that villages protected the groves of trees that ringed them, because trees attract good influences and also provide shade, firewood, fruit, leafmold, timber, and other goods. I learned that roads to villages were made crooked to discourage evil beings—and that the evil beings included not only demons but also soldiers, government officials, and (other) bandits.

The Disenchanted: Religion as Ecological Control, and Its Modern Fate

Conservation must be rationally planned, but inevitably it becomes a political issue. Policies and plans must be debated in the political arena and decided there. Politics is the art of managing passions and conflicts— either to control or resolve them, or to whip them up for selfish reasons. It is necessary for environmental management to minimize conflict and achieve specific social contracts. This involves playing the highly impassioned game of politics, as well as appealing to truth and reason. Neither of those two things can be separated from the other. Politics without rationality soon degenerates into mindless conflict. Reason without passion carries no political appeal. Politics thus conies to rely on wider and more personally compelling belief systems. Religion is notable among these. It has been shown that traditional societies use religion to sanction their resource management strategies, and that this appears to be a successful strategy. This point has long been argued. More recently, it has become a cornerstone of one branch of cultural ecology theory. Roy Rappaport has expanded his argument that religion can encode wise management strategies to include a more general theory of religion, encoding information and involving human emotions. Lansing has provided a classic test case. Victor Toledo has incorporated Rappaport’s observations in a wider theory of what he calls “ethnoecology.” The folio-wing discussion takes off from their insights, and draws some further conclusions. The advantage of religion in traditional societies where religion is still a major force is that it involves emotion in moral codes. A moral code based only on emotion or only on practical reason will not sell. To succeed, a moral code must have something to do with reality, but it must be strongly believed—people have to have a lot of emotion invested in it. Belief, in this sense, does not mean dogmatism. One can be open and reasonable about a belief. The difference between a belief—in this sense—and an ordinary bit of knowledge is the emotional investment.

Needs and Human Nature

The preceding chapters raise complex and deep issues about why people act and believe as they do. Clearly, people are not only acting “irrationally” in many cases, but they are often basing their most “rational” actions on completely false premises or basing utterly “irrational” actions on perfectly accurate (but irrelevant) beliefs. This forces us to take a whole new look at human action, right from its bases. The following two chapters explore in some detail the ways in which humans understand environments. This will take me rather far afield from ecology into the somewhat arcane realm of cognitive psychology. The relevance will, I hope, become clear in the following chapters. The first, most basic, question is: Why do we act at all? What are the ends of behavior? Economists take the structure of “final demand” as a given. Economics is the study of how people choose between ways of reaching predetermined ends. Final demand is outside the system: it is what the system works to satisfy. Similarly, environmental damage is “external” to this system. The difference between economics and cultural ecology is that cultural ecologists do not exempt these matters from our calculus. We work final demand into our system. We also deny the existence of “externalities.” Nothing produced or consumed on earth is an externality to us. Even the satellites shot into space have to be counted; they cost the world a tiny bit of metal and fuel. Moreover, culture often determines “final demand,” and we try to explain culture. Everybody has to have protein, but why is it that Americans prefer that protein come from a cow, while high-caste Hindus are horrified at the thought? A traditional economist would have to take this as given; cultural ecologists try to explain it. Lately, anthropologists have emphasized the highly culture-bound and contingent nature of human wants. However, all humans do have pretty much the same physical survival needs. Since these survival needs are the ultimate determinants of resource use, and since they have been neglected in recent literature, it is necessary to list them here.

Managing the Rainforest: Maya Agriculture in the Town of the Wild Plums

Noemy Chan, a young Maya woman of Mexico, looked up from her cooking and spied her children switching butterflies out of the air with twigs. She immediately dropped her knife, ran to the yard, picked up the butterflies—and made the children eat them. The lesson was explicit: You kill only for food. In the traditional Maya world of the interior rainforests of Quintana Roo, animals are killed only from pressing need. If they are not to be eaten, they can be killed only if they are eating the crops on which humans depend. Ideally, they are slain only when both motives operate. Early one morning I met a family carrying a dead coati in a bag; they said, “It was eating our corn, so we are going to eat it.” In Noemy’s home town, Chunhuhub, even the sale of game is confined to local marketing to other subsistence farmers. The unfortunate habit of poaching game for sale to cities has not—so far—spread into the bush. Noemy and her husband are well off by Mexican standards—he manages heavy equipment for road construction. They saved their money and built an urban-style concrete block house. It stands empty; they live in a traditional Maya pole-and-thatch hut, of a style used continuously for thousands of years in the area. As they correctly point out, the hut is much cooler, cleaner, less damp, and in every way more efficient than the European-style house. The Maya civilization, one of the greatest of the ancient cultures, is by no means dead. Millions of Maya Indians, speaking two dozen related languages, still live in Central America. They practice traditional corn agriculture and maintain many pre-Columbian rituals. Yet they are no more “survivors” of the “past” than are modern Englishmen who still eat bread and beef and worship in the Church of England. Maya civilization is dynamic, living, changing, and, above all, creative. Tough and independent, its bearers have adapted to the modern world; many are doctors, lawyers, and degree-holding professors. They still speak Maya languages, and usually Spanish as well.

Learning from the Land Otter: Religious Representation of Traditional Resource Management

Throughout the forests of the Northwest Coast of North America— those few forests that have not been logged—one finds cedar trees from which long strips of bark have been removed. These strips were taken, at various times in the recent or distant past, by local Native American peoples, to use for a wide variety of reasons. The trees were never cut for their bark; only one long, narrow strip was removed. The process made it necessary for someone to climb high up in the tree to cut the top of the strip. This difficult and dangerous climb was economically reasonable; cutting a cedar is a long job, and would, in any case, eliminate the chance of future bark. But the climb was required for a more immediate and compelling reason: the cedar is sacred, and its indwelling spirit must be respected. Wanton cutting of a cedar is unthinkable. Before a cut is made, prayers and apologies are made to the tree. The cutter explains that he or she really needs the bark, and often adds that he or she will take as little as possible, in the most careful way. In spite of two centuries of contact with, and borrowing from, the outside world, this reverence for the cedar continues today. It is part of a wider religious involvement with the landscape—with water, mountains, plants, and animals— that incorporates environmental management rules as part of sacred ethics. Across the Pacific from China, the Native American peoples of the Northwest Coast maintained, until recently, a way of life based on fishing. While the Chinese changed from foragers to farmers, and slowly built the world’s most populous civilization, the Northwest Coast Indians developed more and more sophisticated ways of harvesting the abundant fish and shellfish resources of their cold and rainy coastlines and rivers. Although they built no cities and wrote down no literature, they created a brilliant, complex culture that had an extremely finetuned adjustment to its environment.

Landscape with Figures

So wrote Edward Fitzgerald, following (loosely) the Persian of Omar Khayyám. In this quatrain, he captured what may be the most universal and constant yearning of humankind. Modern psychology has shown what many of us always suspected: humans continually, in the secrecy of their thoughts, do exactly what Fitzgerald wished. The external world is all too refractory, but “the soul is free.” Thus, humans often see what they want to see, and believe about it what they wish to believe. The external world may intrude harshly on this process, but people often show a truly instructive ability to shut out reality. Positive illusions are only one of the ways we distort information. The human brain is a wondrous device—partly because it does not produce a perfect, total representation of what the senses perceive. We are constantly reinterpreting those perceptions in terms of our wants and needs—not only needs for things like food and shelter, but also needs to see the world as hopefully as possible, to see it as simple and comprehensible, and to see it as ultimately manageable. The brain quite literally does shatter perception “to bits, and then remold it closer to the heart’s desire.” The world environmental problem is serious, and getting steadily more so. Part of the reason is that humans have seen what they wanted to see and have deliberately blinded themselves to the less desirable consequences of their actions. The built-in human tendency to see the world through rose-colored glasses has received the name “positive illusions” from social psychologist Shelley Taylor. She points out the advantages of positive illusions. They allow us to face a threatening world. However, positive illusions have their costs. It is, at the best of times, hard to get people to sacrifice short-term interests for longterm benefits. Positive illusions make it even harder. Such habits of mind lie behind much of the world’s pollution, species extinction, deforestation, overfishing, soil erosion, and famine. Political remedies have failed. The vaunted Rio de Janeiro conference of 1992 was disappointing.

Information Processing: Rational and Irrational Transcended

A large and probably increasing proportion of literature on the environment is based on the assumptions of rational choice theory. People are held to be almost errorless maximizers of individual utility. They are seen as being quite clear about their goals, having perfect information about the means to achieve those goals, and being able to calculate rapidly and precisely the exact trade-offs and Bayesian optima that allow them to reach their goals by the most cost-effective method. A further assumption, often unspoken (occasionally even denied) but in practice almost always accepted, is that people’s goals are narrowly individualistic—short-term and narrow, not long-term and wide. This assumption is not really entailed by rational choice theory, but rational choice theorists often make it. Rational choice theory has its uses, but these assumptions are questionable (at the very least). Perhaps the commonest counterview in the environmental literature is based on the assumption that rational individualism is a product of the modern capitalist world, and that other peoples have based their lives on more communitarian and ecologically sensitive intuitions. Carolyn Merchant, chronicler of Radical Ecology, provides a particularly powerfully argued summary of the variants of this view. Unfortunately, anthropological evidence shows fairly conclusively that many premodern cultures ruined their environments through shortsighted and wasteful practices (see chapter 8). This chapter argues for a different way of understanding human successes and mistakes. A number of lines of evidence suggest that humans do indeed practice something like the rational calculus but that they are not perfect at it and that they are greatly influenced by social and emotional factors. The result is that their decision making often closely approximates rational choice but often deviates from rational choice models in dramatic but often predictable ways. This fact goes a long way to explain many of the mistakes we see in environmental management. It also helps explain the question posed earlier in this book : Why do people often use religious and mythic institutions to motivate rational behavior? If rational choice theory were adequate, people would not need the panoply of religion and myth to get them to act sensibly.

Chinese Nutritional Therapy

Chinese nutritional therapy—the use of food as medicine, to treat illness and physical challenge—provides an ideal ground for studies of how people think about their place in the organic world. Unlike many folk systems of medicine, Chinese nutrition has a long written history. Doctors and food experts have devoted much effort to articulating and systematizing a vast amount of information. Much of the data comes from folk observation—the empirical experience of generations of farmers and workers. In Chinese medicine, humans as total persons confront a world of plants, animals, and minerals that have varied medical functions. The line between food and medicine does not exist; all foods have some medical significance, and many medicinal herbs are eaten in enough quantity to count as foodstuffs. Theoretically, there is an infinite number of possible ways of thinking about food and health. The Chinese have constructed a system that represents empirical experience well; fits with their cosmology (the cosmology we have already seen in the preceding chapter); and fits with their views on the individual and society. It is a system that classifies and arranges a great number of facts—statements that are true by the standards of Western laboratory science as well as Chinese experience. It incorporates these truths into a plausible and logical structure, and ties the whole thing to the network of emotions, personal values, and deeply held beliefs that sustain Chinese society. To put it a bit crudely, the system wouldn’t sell if it didn’t work. But, also, it wouldn’t sell if it didn’t fit with the rest of the Chinese system of thought and feeling. In this chapter, I provide a rather thorough account of the traditional Chinese construction of nutritional knowledge. I then show how and why it is logically compelling, given the assumptions of Chinese logic. Finally, I suggest some ways in which it seems to fit well with the Chinese experience of being a person in society. Cultural ecology concerns itself with all human relationships with the environment. Food is one of the field’s main concerns. Foodways provide good examples of demand-driven systems.

A Summary, and Some Suggestions

The world’s traditional societies have come to some kind of terms with their environments, or they would not have lasted long enough to become “traditional.” Most of them encode in their moral teachings practical wisdom about the environment and the individual’s duty to treat it with respect. These injunctions are lived; they enter daily practice, as when Noemy Chan makes her children eat the butterflies they thoughtlessly kill. They structure whole landscapes, as South China was structured by feng-shui. They stimulate deep personal involvement with actual plant and animal species, as on the Northwest Coast. The common theme of all these traditional resource management ethics is not spiritual harmony with some disembodied and abstracted Nature, but actual personal and emotional involvement with the actual landscape and its nonhuman inhabitants. People interact with their surroundings. In all cultures, these surroundings become meaningful—not just as sources of food and shelter, but as sources of beauty, power, excitement, and other human values. In those cultures that endure and do not collapse, the meanings of nature are bound up in systems of respect and protection. Often, mutual obligations exist between people and the beings or forces they believe to exist in the wild. From the lived experiences of people in cultures around the world, we can extract a number of general principles for environmental management. We can also, mercifully, learn that we need not go to the extreme lengths of ideological reform proposed by some modern environmentalists. Many societies have lived in balance with their environments without devoting their lives to ecology and without invoking elaborate laws. It is not only easier, but apparently more productive, to persuade people to live by a few simple principles of caring for, and enjoying, the world. No group has yet come up with a perfect plan for managing the environment. However, all societies have something to teach. The great benefit of anthropology is that it can bring together the combined wisdom of people from all times and places. Today, we need all the wisdom we can get, and only by pooling a wide range of human experiences can we survive.