The Environmental Politics of Sacrifice (review)

Environmental organizations and scientists have often called on societies to reduce their consumption, invoking worrisome trends in resource use and degradation. In response, politicians and citizens dismiss this summons as futile and naïve because they view forgoing consumption as too difficult and unfair. Sacrifice appears to be extraordinary, impractical, and impossible to integrate into existing institutions and ways of living. The essays that Michael Maniates and John M. Meyer have assembled make an important argument about the role of sacrifice in environmental politics: not only is sacrifice not exceptional, societies are depriving themselves of a broader set of potential options by denying that sacrifice can be beneficial. Sacrifice, the editors note, can be understood in many terms: for example, forgoing something now in return for a benefit later; giving up something that is desired; or acting against one's self-interest for societal or communal gain.

The essays are grouped into four categories: the role of sacrifice in democratic politics; sacrifice in philosophy and religion; linkages of sacrifice practices to "everyday life"; and examples of sacrifice in the environmental arena. Sacrifice is rightly presented not as a single phenomenon but as a spectrum of varying types ranging from material, welfare, and political, to existential. As Meyer points out, evaluating who is asking for sacrifice, why, and how, can be critical. Some contributors point out that demanding sacrifice can be highly inequitable. The definition of sacrifice has focused on narrow materialistic interests to the exclusion of more socially grounded interests. Sacrifice is equated with loss, yet it can be a way to transform and expand the quality of human life through changing relations with fellow humans and ecosystems. These are much-needed counterarguments to the dominant negative depiction of sacrifice.

The contributors emphasize that sacrifice is already pervasive in our societies even if this is largely unacknowledged. For example, as Cheryl Hall and Paul Wapner show, the ways in which people live causes social and environmental impacts that are externalized and made invisible. In choosing to consume at high levels, people implicitly accept the health problems of air pollution, the economic costs of driving cars, and the psychological strains of working longer hours for greater income. By being kept hidden, this sacrifice imperils human and ecological life. Moreover, a variety of sacrifices are already deeply embedded in societies through the norms of social relations that people comply with. Parental sacrifice is the most obvious example: parents who refuse to support their children are ostracized as neglectful. Religious practices may also underwrite sacrifices that benefit the environment.

Many contributors view sacrifice as grounded in collective and social relations. Sacrifice lacks meaning without the social context in which it is practiced. The degree to which sacrifice depends on agency and choice—on judgments about whether a given sacrifice is meaningful, effective, or confidence-inspiring—seems central. Yet this agency is always embedded in a particular social world that may limit the scope for making "legitimate" sacrifices. In particular, as Justin Williams discusses in terms of bicycling, the broader political and economic systems that people live in can inhibit the range of options that they have, thus making abandoning cars impractical. Peter Cannavò shows that the cultural and historical evolution of sacrifice is important, using the case of how suburban lifestyles originated in early American pastoral ideals and now have values that make other ways of life less desirable.

How sacrifice is framed can influence greatly the fate of environmental policy-making. Two chapters provide particularly fresh insights on this topic. Shane Gunster examines British Columbia's adoption of a carbon tax in 2008. The provincial government decided to frame its new tax as a revenue-neutral economic measure that would not harm anyone, thus downplaying the idea that paying the tax would be onerous yet enhance the environment by reducing climate change risks. Interestingly, the electorate rejected the tax because it was not asked to make sacrifices, suggesting that appropriate framing matters to the reception of demanding environmental policies. Simon...