Environmental politics.

When Bill Clinton and Al Gore ran for office in 1992, they promised a new solution to the growing problem of environmental degradation. They wanted to bring more economic rationality into environmental regulation by placing a tax on pollutants discharged into the environment. Such an approach, they argued, would give business an incentive to find the most costeffective ways to handle pollutants.

In the abstract, one cannot quarrel with the goal of marrying economics and ecology, for surely any approach to environmental regulation cannot be politically viable unless it also helps human beings meet pressing economic needs. But as is the case in other policy areas, there are good reasons to question whether simply tinkering at the margin with our current corporate economy will give us either a sound environment or a productive and just economy.

The assumptions of the Clinton-Gore program become highly problematic when we examine the intellectual and political history which led to its development. This task has been undertaken by several authors in an excellent current anthology, Toxic Struggles: The Theory and Practice of Environmental Justice, edited by Richard Hofrichter.

At the theoretical level, the proposal for taxing noxious discharges has a distinguished if problematical pedigree. Mary Mellor points to the influence of biologist Garret Hardin. In a famous essay in the 1960s, "Tragedy of the Commons," Hardin argued that common ownership of such resources as pastureland for grazing led to overexploitation of the resource as each herder felt the need to get the most out of it before others did the same. As Mellor correctly points out, however, Hardin's argument has already assumed that a kind of narrowly acquisitive behavior is natural and not itself in need of explanation. Where regular social relations and common support systems exist, individuals may well care about the preservation of the resources not only for themselves but for friends, neighbors, and even future generations. Part of their "self-interest" and even personal identity may lie in the existence of such intergenerational communities.

Furthermore, if human beings really are as narrowly self-interested as Hardin assumes, why would they respect the newly carved property boundaries he advocates? Presumably, only the fear of the sheriff will work, and legal systems themselves cost money.

And finally, when one considers the new pollution-taxation proposals, one must not neglect the historical forces which have led to this push. James O'Connor and Michael Faber point out that the early environmental strategies were concerned more with control than prevention. They sought to limit the damage from technology choices, though these choices were to remain in private hands. And so scrubbers and catalytic converters became the order of the day, even though these strategies were themselves costly, entailed compliance issues, and often created new forms of toxic waste. Product costs were, in fact, driven up, and during a period in which American corporations faced both domestic labor unrest and increased foreign competition, U.S. business had considerable leverage to demand changes in environmental regulation. Pollution taxation and, more broadly, cost-benefit analysis became the watchwords of the 1980s and 1990s for businesses and even for many mainstream environmental organizations.

While much can be said about the ethical dilemmas of cost-benefit analysis, it is clear that the whole subject emerged in part out of the inefficiency of a regulatory approach that emphasized control rather than prevention and because of the inefficiencies of an economy that seeks to meet all social needs--including health, transit, and recreation --through marketable commodities.

The struggle for a clean environment is thus far from being a technical question of designing exactly the right price structure for pollutants and inserting the data into smoothly functioning markets. Nor is ecological integrity merely a matter of keeping noxious residue out of one's backyard.

Fortunately, as a number of recent studies have indicated (such as Andrew Szasz's Ecopopulism), many of the grassroots activists concerned with environmental issues aim to develop technological alternatives which will both prevent the production of toxics in the first place and increase long-run economic efficiency. They are concerned with a number of basic issues in the governance of American corporations, including technology choice, the place of labor in corporate life, and the role of government in establishing research priorities, providing a sustainable infrastructure, and reducing unemployment.

These changes will not abolish markets, but they will entail major changes in the way in which government at all levels relates to corporations and the market. They will also require recognition of the community's role in meeting certain needs which are basic to economic life as such. In an era in which centralized economic models have clearly failed, and where the rhetoric of the market has triumphed, such an approach must show that appropriate forms of public intervention--far from creating a new leviathan--can make modern corporations and workers more genuinely entrepreneurial in the quest for personal security and ecological technologies.