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Shocks, States, and Sustainability
Shocks, States,
and Sustainability
The Origins of Radical
Environmental Reforms
Thomas K. Rudel
1
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rudel, Thomas K., author.
Title: Shocks, states, and sustainability : the origins of radical
environmental reforms /Thomas K. Rudel.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2019] |
Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018026574 (print) | LCCN 2018037790 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190924461 (updf) | ISBN 9780190924478 (epub) |
ISBN 9780190921019 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780190921026 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Sustainable development. | Environmental policy. |
Environmental protection.
Classification: LCC HC79.E5 (ebook) | LCC HC79.E5 R813 2019 (print) |
DDC 333.7—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018026574
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Paperback printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
Dedicated to Frederick H. Buttel and William R. Freudenburg,
two pioneering environmental sociologists who died before their time
CONTENTS
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
CHAPTER 1. Introduction 1
CHAPTER 2. Radical Environmental Reforms: A Theory 8
CHAPTER 3. TheGreat Plains: Soil Conservation During the “Dirty
Thirties” 44
CHAPTER 4. England: Green Belts After World War II 68
CHAPTER 5. Cuba:Agro-Ecological Farming After the Soviet
Collapse 91
CHAPTER 6. CoastalMaine: A Catch-and-Sometimes-Release
Lobster Fishery 113
CHAPTER 7. TheWorld: Reform in a Global Environmental
Cage 132
CHAPTER 8. Radical
Environmental Reforms in Comparative
Perspective 152
CHAPTER 9. Conclusion 168
Notes 181
References 187
Index 211
PREFACE
F or the past thirty years, observers of our changing natural environment

have engaged in a two-step, argumentative dance in their articles and
books. The first step describes the damage that we have done to the natural
environment, the dangers that come with the damage, and the inequalities
in our exposure to the dangers. We have analyzed a wide range of environ-
mental problems, from toxic contaminants to degraded landscapes, in this
manner. Recently, more and more of our analytic energies have focused in
this fashion on climate change. Authors have described its dynamics, its
forces of destruction, and the special vulnerability of the poorest among us
to these forces.
These texts convey a gloomy message, and their prognostications have be-
come darker over time. Observers have stopped referring to the destabilizing
effects of future climate change and started talking about the damage it is
inflicting upon us now. The damage, like the destruction wreaked by trop-
ical cyclones in the Atlantic in the summer of 2017, has gotten worse, and it
promises to get worse still. Models of climate change suggest that “the sting
is in the tail,” with the most pronounced and damaging effects in the distant
future.
A succession of these reports can contribute to a kind of fatalism in
readers. Considered together, the reports convey a sense that disruptive cli-
mate change is inevitable. Restricting global warming to an increase of less
than 2°C will indeed require a very wide range of coordinated actions by
states, organizations, and individuals. The immensity of the task, the need
to mobilize large numbers of people, the unprecedented nature of the chal-
lenge, and the modesty of our accomplishments to date are enough to make
one sigh and throw up one’s hands out of frustration! Alternatively, we can
proceed quietly from day to day with our high-emission routines and main-
tain the faith that, in some unspecified way, we will survive. Perhaps others
will step up and spur the collective action necessary to curb our emissions of
greenhouse gases.
To counter the fatalism induced by events and circumstances, most analysts
end their studies with a second step in their argument, a short expression of
hope, sometimes expressed as a conviction that we still have time to “turn
things around” if we work really hard at it. So, despite the doom and gloom
in the reports, they often end on a hopeful note. These hopeful assertions
seem almost like a reflex, coming from people who have told themselves that
they cannot end their article or book on such a depressing note. The hopeful
notes in these concluding passages seem less than fully credible, in part,
because few analysts provide detailed illustrations or examples of societies
that have “turned it around.” Shocks, States, and Sustainability (hereafter
Shocks) addresses this deficit in our understanding about the circumstances
that have contributed to sudden, large-scale shifts toward more sustainable
human societies. It does so through a comparative historical analysis of rad-
ical environmental reforms in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
By providing comparative historical accounts of large- scale sustain-
ability initiatives, Shocks aims to accomplish several ends. First, it tries to
counter the conviction inherent in fatalistic assessments of climate change
that large-scale shifts toward more sustainable societies are impossible. The
examples of rapid, thoroughgoing reforms across such diverse settings as
the North American Great Plains, the coast of Maine, the peri-urban districts
of England, and the tropical island of Cuba should persuade readers that
large-scale shifts toward more sustainable practices can occur with concerted
efforts in a wide range of places. In this respect, Shocks tries to make it a little
more difficult to succumb to fatalism in the face of climate change.
Second, Shocks tries to explain as well as describe the environmental re-
form efforts. It advances an argument that sudden, large-magnitude events
provide political opportunities for large-scale environmental reforms, es-
pecially when these events underscore the limited extent of the natural re-
sources that sustain us. Reform efforts can also succeed without focusing
events, but only if the reformers have already mobilized for change.
If the first goal of this book is to encourage reform by demonstrating
that it can be done, the second goal is more strategic. Through the compar-
ative analyses, it outlines several conjunctures of historical conditions that
have generated successful reform efforts. By identifying these intersecting
conditions, I hope that Shocks helps environmentalists identify politically
promising conditions and strategies for reform. In this respect, the book
x | Preface
suggests when and how we need to proceed to counter climate change. In
other words, Shocks tries to advance our understanding of this second step in
the argumentative dance, a reform of society that recasts it in a more sustain-
able basis. By illustrating how these environmental reforms have happened
during the past century, this book aims to contribute to the success of future
efforts to foster more sustainable societies.
Preface | xi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T he argument and accumulation of knowledge presented here have a his-

tory that stretches back ten years. People intervened at various points
as I developed the ideas, presented them to small audiences, and wondered
whether or not the ideas represented a contribution to our collective un-
derstanding of human societies and the surrounding natural environment.
While I am responsible for the exaggerations and errors in what follows, the
insightful parts of this book owe their existence in many instances to the
interventions of many people along the way.
I have dedicated this book to two people, both pioneering environmental
sociologists, Fred Buttel and Bill Freudenburg. Through conversations,
presentations, and publications, they got me to think about environmental
reforms many years ago. Had they lived longer lives, I am sure that they
would have expanded on their early thoughts, and we would all be the richer
for it. Once I got to the point where I began to articulate ideas about reform
processes, three colleagues from the Department of Sociology at Rutgers, Lee
Clarke, Paul McLean, and Judy Gerson, commented on my initial efforts and
pushed me to clarify my thoughts. At a pivotal point in the research, Simone
Pulver expressed a note of skepticism about my comparative historical
methods, one that improved the final product by getting me to add a fourth
case to the analysis. Timmons Roberts and I had periodic conversations
at professional meetings that pointed me in the direction of readings that
proved very valuable in formulating the argument presented here.
When I finished a first draft of the manuscript, Steve Brechin and Julia
Flagg read it through from start to finish and made valuable observations
about the central argument in the book. Patrick Meyfroidt offered comments
on the chapter on the United Kingdom that enabled me to understand the
U.K. experience in a European context. Rachael Shwom provided useful
citations and conversations about tipping points and other pivotal moments
in the evolution of the environmental movement. Comments by Karen
O’Neill refocused my thinking about the New Deal. At a late point in the for-
mulation of the argument, three anonymous reviewers for Oxford University
Press made eighteen pages of single-spaced comments on an initial draft of
the manuscript!
Other people made tangible contributions to the book. The librarians
at the Chang Science Library at Rutgers, led by Nita Mukherjee, filled my
many requests for books. Mark Knowlton helped me ready the figures in
the book for publication. Mike Siegel made several maps for me, and the
staff at Klein and Ulmes in Middlesex, New Jersey, helped me get the images
accompanying the book into legible shape. Audiences at SESYNC (the Socio-
Ecological Synthesis Center funded by the National Science Foundation),
the Rural Sociological Society, and a brown bag seminar in the Department
of Human Ecology at Rutgers listened to me present the central theses of
this book and asked questions about these theses afterwards. At Oxford
University Press James Cook provided suggestions and encouragement at
opportune times. Emily MacKenzie patiently answered all my questions
about the publishing process. It has been a pleasure to work with them!
Finally, I want to thank my family. Susan and Daniel put up with the day-
to-day inconveniences and annoyances of living with someone who always
wants to steal away to his study to work on the book!
xiv | Acknowledgments
CHAPTER 1 Introduction
Perhaps the most appropriate metaphor (for climate change) is a lethal

boomerang, our own inventions coming back to kill us.
Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power (2013)
“Business as Usual” in an Era of Climate Change
The impetus for environmental reforms in the twenty-first century comes

primarily from the specter of catastrophic climate change. The short his-
tory of our responses to climate change illustrates the political challenges
faced by environmental reformers. Rich and poor nations continue to rely
on polluting technologies, and they adopt cleaner technologies in small
increments. Alarm over this inertia has contributed to a growing con-
viction that we will have to undertake a series of radical reforms in the
near future if we are to avoid disastrous climatic conditions in the distant
future.
Incremental losses from climate change are all around us. The rising toll
of deaths during heat waves in India, the more powerful tropical cyclones
in the oceans, the death of coral reefs east of Australia, and the long-lasting
droughts in the Sahel all represent worrisome trends. Most frightening might
be the projected “state shifts” triggered by climate change. These events, like
the collapse of ice sheets in Antarctica, large changes in ocean currents, or
the sudden release of large amounts of methane from melting tundra, would
alter the fundamental features of our environment and threaten human
livelihoods over vast areas.
Preventing these damaging destabilizations of the climate would require
that societies adopt alternative sources of energy at the same time that they
make deep cuts in fossil fuel emissions. While some organizations and
individuals have cut their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the worldwide,
year-over-year trends in GHG emissions are still upward. Three years (2014–
2016) saw little change in emissions, but from 2016 to 2017 they increased
by 1.4 percent.1 The Paris Treaty on Climate Change entered into force in
the fall of 2016, but its “pledge and review” approach did not commit na-
tions to mandatory reductions in GHG emissions. The repudiation of the
Paris Treaty by the president of the United States in the spring of 2017 added
to doubts about the commitment of nations to curb the use of fossil fuels
in the drastic ways necessary to keep the increase in global temperatures
below 2°C.
Energy production from alternative sources, particularly from windmills
and solar panels, have shown substantial increases in recent years, with
wind energy generating 4.7 percent of the world’s electricity in 2016.2 When
the use of new, reduced emission technologies spreads across industries,
ecological modernization occurs and aggregate emissions should decline
(Mol et al. 2009; Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015). At the very least, technological
innovations should lead to less use of fossil fuels per unit of output. Over
time, these innovations should produce a decoupling between economic
growth and GHG emissions from energy use. In fact, increments in eco-
nomic growth have required smaller amounts of fossil fuel since 2000 than
they did during the 1960s, so some decoupling has occurred (Jorgensen and
Clark 2012). Ecological modernization has produced some absolute declines
in GHG emissions, but the declines have occurred infrequently and the
magnitude of the declines have been modest. Ecological modernization in
the northern states of the European Union produced an 11 percent decline
in emissions between 1990 and 2008 (Perrow and Pulver 2015). California,
widely touted as the leading edge of ecological modernization in the United
States, saw an 11 percent decline in emissions between 2007 and 2014.3
While alternative energy has made gains, overall energy consumption
has continued to grow globally, and the consumption of fossil fuels has
continued to increase—by 9 percent between 2008 and 2013—albeit at a
declining rate.4 Additional emission reductions may come from the adop-
tion of energy-saving technologies by companies (Vandenbergh and Gilligan
2015) and localities (Wachsmuth et al. 2016), but these commitments to sus-
tainability, while of undoubted symbolic value, must produce substantial
declines in the use of fossil fuels to be credible. Retrofitting processes of
production and service provision to reduce emissions requires work across
specializations that bureaucracies have long proven ill-equipped to do (Aylett
2013; Merton et al. 1952). These difficulties may explain why, despite fre-
quent proclamations of commitments to sustainability since 2000, city
2 | Shocks, States, and Sustainability

officials in affluent countries have found it difficult to reduce GHG emis-
sions (Aylett 2013).
The limited reductions in fossil fuel use stem in large part from the con-
tinued normative commitment to affluence and economic growth among
people intent on achieving emission reductions (Higgs 2014). To achieve
growth, people typically want to expand the size of enterprises. In this
context, each unit of a new technology may emit less, but because people
use more units of these technologies as they increase the scale of their
enterprises, the overall volume of GHG emissions may not decline. For ex-
ample, the average size of new single-family homes in the United States has
grown by 61 percent over the last forty years.5 The increased cost to heat or
air-condition these larger houses counters the increased fuel efficiency of
heaters, air conditioners, and power plants, leading to little overall change
in the volume of emissions per capita. In some instances a rebound effect
occurs (Gillingham et al. 2015). The increased energy efficiency of a new
technology, by reducing its cost, encourages consumers to use more of it.
The more frequent use of the technology erodes the energy savings and en-
vironmental benefits of the new technology. For example, between 2012 and
2016 the introduction of solid-state lights around the world reduced energy
consumption per light bulb, but growth in continuously lit areas around the
world offset the reduction in energy use achieved by the more efficient light
bulbs (Kyba et al. 2017).
Emission reductions through ecological modernization have varied with
the political economies of places. American states with fewer fossil fuel
deposits and more environmentally concerned legislators have emitted less
GHG than states with more fossil fuel deposits and fewer environmen-
tally concerned legislators. States and nations with politically powerful en-
vironmental non-profit organizations and politically influential scientific
communities tend to promote the adoption of cleaner energy technologies
more aggressively than do other nations (Fisher 2004; Dietz et al. 2015).
The new technologies spread more rapidly when governments fund related
research and promote the use of the new technologies through subsidies.
These geographic variations in commitments to ecological modernization
have occurred against a backdrop of a continued, overall commitment to the
use of fossil fuels.
Despite the campaigns to reduce emissions over the past quarter-century,
most people in the United States continue to heat their homes directly or in-
directly with fossil fuels and drive large, fossil fuel–powered vehicles, so the
normative changes necessary to reduce GHG emissions from home heating
and automobile use have been slow to take hold (Heberlein 2012). Practices
Introduction | 3
like driving automobiles with gasoline engines, promoted by oil companies
and automobile manufacturers for decades, have embedded fossil fuel con-
sumption in the daily routines of households in wealthy countries (Schatzki
et al. 2001; Bourdieu 1990). Continued government subsidies for fossil fuel
exploration and development have worked to insure a steady, uninterrupted
flow of fossil fuels to cars and houses (Ciplet et al. 2015). These arrangements
and associated small changes in fossil fuel consumption represent a
“business-as-usual” scenario for both consumers and the fossil fuel industry.
To maintain political support for this status quo, industry representatives
have tried for at least two decades to discredit scientific findings that attribute
climate change to fossil fuel consumption (Dunlap and McCright 2015).
Reports from the most widely known non-profit and governmental or-
ganizations devoted to reducing GHG emissions adopted a non-partisan or
“post-political” tone during this period in discussions of continued emis-
sions. The most authoritative of these climate change organizations, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the United States
Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), framed the climate change
issue in a way that ignored the highly partisan resistance of the fossil fuel
industries to emission- reduction efforts (Swyngedouw 2011; Brulle and
Dunlap 2015). In effect, the IPCC and the USGCRP lent their tacit support
to a strategy for reducing emissions that goes only as fast as technological
progress permits. In this manner the IPCC and the USGCRP have promoted
ecological modernization with its conversion in increments to cleaner en-
ergy technologies as the preferred strategy for combating climate change
(Caniglia et al. 2015). Despite the partisan divides surrounding issues of cli-
mate change and the environment, political struggle as a means for reducing
emissions has received little to no attention in the IPCC and USGCRP
reports.
Environmental Reforms and Revolutions: Where Are They?
Major environmental reforms did occur in North America and Western

Europe during the twentieth century, but their transformative impacts
emerged slowly. The Clean Air Act of 1970 in the United States ratified at
a national scale urban efforts to reduce air pollution that had begun during
the Progressive era in the early twentieth century (Uekoetter 2009). Partisan
conflicts have stalled nation-wide environmental reforms in the United States
since 1990 (Vogel 2012). Co-optation of environmental activists by ruling
parties in Western Europe slowed the pace of environmental reforms in the

European Community (Dryzek et al. 2003). These historical experiences un-
derscore the accuracy of Vaclav Smil’s observation that large-scale shifts to
cleaner burning fuels take a long time (Voosen 2018).
The slow pace of environmental reform has persisted, even as more far-
reaching problems, like climate change, have emerged. Expressions of alarm
about the slow rates of decline in GHG emissions have crept into discussions
about climate change during the past three decades. More people have begun
to advocate for radical change. Bill McKibben (2016) argues that to curb
carbon emissions, Americans will have to mobilize as they did during World
War II. Others have called for the “drastic decarbonizing” of society (Harlan
et al. 2015), “systemic transformations” (Wallerstein et al. 2013), or “trans-
formative change” (Speth 2008) in the face of “global state shifts and mass
extinctions that would dramatically disrupt human activities” (Rockstrom
et al. 2009). In “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity,” a letter signed
by more than 15,000 scientists in December 2017, the lead authors describe
humans as on a “collision course” with nature (Ripple et al. 2017).
Over time these warnings have become more life-threatening. As John
Holdren (2017), the ex-science advisor for President Obama, put it, “We’re
not really in the business any longer of trying to avoid dangerous climate
change. . . . We’re trying to avoid catastrophic climate change.”
So, as efforts at mitigating GHG emissions have fallen short, questions
about how to generate rapid, large-scale reductions in emissions have be-
come more pressing. Contemplating life-threatening temperature increases
of 4°C or more, some observers have begun to outline “panic scenarios” in
which nations attempt to “geoengineer” the climate and eco-authoritarian
regimes coerce cuts in pollutants (Anderson and Bows 2011; Keith 2013).
Both this rhetoric and the scientific reality of climate change would seem
to make dramatic episodes of change more likely. Despite these expecta-
tions of dramatic change, few people have described how it might proceed
(Folke 2010). Fred Buttel, an esteemed environmental sociologist, issued a
call for research on processes of radical environmental reform more than
fifteen years ago (Buttel 2003). Since then, other analysts have sounded
similar notes. Environmental scientists have vowed to focus their research
on “planetary opportunities” for reform that produce benefits for society at
the same time that they reduce negative environmental impacts (DeFries
et al. 2012). Frans Berkhout, the interim director of “Future Earth,” a consor-
tium of environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs), called in
2014 for “solutions narratives” that recount how societies and communities
make themselves more sustainable.6 Scientists from the Resilience Alliance
(Folke 2016) have explored what makes societies capable of transformative
Introduction | 5
changes in the face of environmental threats. In earlier work (Rudel 2013),
I described the general circumstances in which radical environmental
reforms might occur. Shocks, States, and Sustainability describes these polit-
ical transformations in much greater detail.
States have rarely ever undertaken large-scale environmental-protection
efforts. Resistant political elites and more pressing political priorities have
almost always sidelined environmentally transformative efforts. Given this
historical record, the pressing question becomes: “What sorts of historical
conditions might mobilize ordinary citizens and political elites around en-
vironmentally transformative projects?” In other words, is there a meta-
narrative that has characterized the few situations in which states have
undertaken massive efforts to make their societies more sustainable?
In effect, this book tries to answer Berkhout’s call for “solutions narratives”
by describing the few historical examples of radical environmental reform.
It constructs narrative explanations for four dramatic political- ecological
transformations that made for more sustainable use of lands and oceans in the
twentieth century. These changes occurred in the Great Plains of the United
States, the United Kingdom, Cuba, and the coastal waters of the Gulf of Maine
in the northeastern United States. What did these episodes of change look
like? What caused them to occur? I seek to answer these questions through
comparative historical analyses. Detailed descriptions of these historical
circumstances and comparisons between them provide lessons about the
circumstances that have precipitated radical environmental reforms.
The Plan for the Book
Chapter 2, drawing in particular on theories developed by Mancur Olson,

Michael Mann, and Elinor Ostrom, fleshes out a theory in which destabilizing
events spur reforms. The events destabilize societies in part by reminding
people of their precarious ecological positions. The reform dynamic varies
from large-to small-scale arenas. The destabilizing events refocus pop-
ular attention in the larger political arenas. They initiate a societal-scale dy-
namic by underlining the gravity of an environmental situation, disrupting
trade networks, and shaking up special interest–dominated political orders.
The events also make citizens more aware of the inescapably communal
conditions in which they live. They come to see themselves as “caged,” and
they look to governments for solutions to the crisis. With a new appreciation
for the value of locally controlled resources, residents and their governments
carry out radical reform, instituting sustainable practices that conserve the

productive capacity of locally controlled resources. In smaller-scale settings,
focusing events matter less because resource users, aware of small, more
incremental changes in a natural resource, communicate more easily with
one another about the changes and consider reforms to preserve a natural
resource more readily. These conversations and deliberations encourage
the articulation of an ethic of stewardship among users. This ethic in turn
expedites the passage of reforms.
The following four chapters describe case studies that illustrate these dy-
namics of reform. Chapter 3 recounts the rapid transformation in soil man-
agement and conservation practices that occurred in the Great Plains and the
American South during the 1930s when the closing of the American fron-
tier, the Depression, and dust storms disrupted the livelihoods of small-scale
wheat and cotton farmers. Chapter 4 describes the transformation in peri-
urban land use that occurred after World War II in England when Parliament
established large green belts around English cities. The shocks of World
Wars I and II contributed directly to this “greening” of the land use laws.
Chapter 5 describes and explains the turn toward a more agro-ecologically
sustainable agriculture that occurred in Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet
Union destroyed the economic foundations for industrialized sugarcane
cultivation. Chapter 6 examines the dynamics of reform at a smaller scale
in a lobster fishery along the Atlantic coast of Maine in the United States.
Chapter 7 raises the scale of the analysis to the global level and considers the
degree to which the historical narratives recounted in the nation-scale case
studies might apply to the world. This chapter describes historical narratives,
like the creation of the United Nations (UN) after World War II and the work
of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which
unfolded when people came together to create global scale institutions.
These narratives make it possible to assess the degree to which global dy-
namics conform to the theoretical patterns of reform outlined at the outset
of the book. Chapter 8 provides a comparative historical analysis of the three
national-scale reform efforts, the more localized effort in Maine, and the
global-scale initiatives.
Chapter 9, the concluding chapter, summarizes the evidence for and
against the prototypical narrative of environmental reform. Then it uses
the historical evidence from the case studies to assess the thesis that radical
reforms might bring with them eco-authoritarian political regimes. A soci-
etal corporatist approach, with democratic roots, which prioritizes exchanges
of information and resources between local and national scales of govern-
ance would seem to offer the most likely political configuration for achieving
dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in a short period of time.
Introduction | 7
CHAPTER 2 Radical Environmental Reforms
A Theory
There are good crises and there are bad crises. Every crisis breaks
a deadlock and sets events in motion. It is either a disaster or an
opportunity. A bad crisis is one in which no one has the power to make
good use of the opportunity and therefore it ends in disaster. A good
crisis is one in which the power and the will to seize the opportunity
[coincide]. . . . Out of such a crisis come solutions.
Walter Lippmann, March 7, 19331
Presses, Pulses, and the Impetus for Reform
Sometimes crises are a long time in coming. For the past twenty-five years
a coalition of fossil fuel industry executives and their political representa-
tives, operating largely under “business-as-usual” economic conditions, have
stymied political efforts to combat climate change by reducing the burning
of fossil fuels. The emissions from burning fossil fuels have continued to
increase even as our knowledge about their potentially lethal consequences
have grown. The relatively stable political-economic conditions of the affluent
democracies in the post–World War II era have made it easier to defend the
status quo, even as the emissions promoted by the fossil fuel industry eroded
one foundation for this stability—atmospheric concentrations of CO2 less
than 400 ppm. CO2 concentrations in this range have contributed to the pro-
vision of a vital public good, a stable climate, during the past 10,000 years
(Rockstrom and Klum 2015). The political domination by special interests
eventually undermines the basis for a wider, collective prosperity. Reforms
do eventually occur, but only during a more chaotic, successor period
(Olson 1982).
Historians and social scientists have devoted ample attention to the po-
litical dynamics of chaotic, sometimes revolutionary periods in societies
(Gellner 1964; Tilly 1984; Goldstone 2014). There is no comparable corpus
of work about societal transformations driven by abrupt changes in the sur-
rounding natural environments. The prolonged campaigns to reduce air and
water pollution near cities and the incremental gains from these campaigns
have received the most attention from analysts (Uekoetter 2009; Vogel
2012). Sudden changes along the environment–society interface have not
been studied as extensively. The dynamics of these radical reform processes
are the subject of this book.
Environmental reforms occur in a larger context shaped by press and
pulse dynamics of historical change (Collins et al. 2011).2 Press dynamics
involve incremental changes in vital processes like population changes
and economic growth. Pulses entail sudden, large-magnitude changes like
a flood, a fire, or an economic collapse. They “shock” systems. The press—
pulse distinction matters because people wield power in quite different
ways during periods marked by presses compared with periods marked by
pulses. Presses are conducive to business-as-usual processes of ecological
modernization. Pulses spur radical environmental reforms.
Incremental rises in sea level or in global temperatures represent press-
like processes. Changes in population growth, economic growth, and ec-
onomic inequality usually take the form of press-like processes. Over the
long, post–World War II period, as people, products, and inequalities be-
tween people accumulated, these press processes created a fully globalized,
economically unequal, and populous world in which the scale of human
activities has grown to be extremely large. Human activities have become
so large in scale that observers have taken to referring to this period as
a separate geological epoch, the “anthropocene” (Waters et al. 2016). The
global warming from the scaled-up human activities has begun to depress
productivity in vital economic sub-sectors like agriculture (Carleton and
Hsiang 2016).
While the direction of trends like the reduced productivity of agriculture
alarms observers, the incremental form of these changes makes them easy to
ignore, which in turn suppresses vigorous policy responses. Sea level rise that
manifests itself in increased flooding at high tides may become “normalized”
among coastal residents (Sweet and Park 2014). Similarly, the warming of the
earth’s climate year after year, if it occurs in small enough increments, may
begin to be accepted as “business as usual” by people. In all of these instances
the incremental pace of change encourages a “lower mimetic rhetoric” that
R adical Environmental Reforms | 9

relies on facts to persuade people, stirs few intense emotions, and promotes
policy reforms through reasoning (Stewart 2012; Smith 2005). Catastrophes
and rapid political change seem out of place in this context.
A “pulse” dynamic characterizes other changes. Unlike press processes
which occur gradually, pulses occur as discrete events that suddenly trans-
form people and places (Collins et al. 2011). Earthquakes, hurricanes, wars,
and economic depressions all represent pulses— discrete, sudden- onset
events that can have a transformative impact on human communities. In a
significant number of instances these events precipitate fundamental polit-
ical changes. For Marx (1859), history fluctuated between periods of relative
stability dominated by press-like processes in which property gradually con-
centrated in the hands of a few people and periods of tumultuous change
akin to pulse-like processes in which revolution occurred. Ann Swidler
(1986) distinguishes between settled and unsettled historical periods in her
analysis of culture. Settled periods would feature press processes of change,
and unsettled periods would feature pulse-like episodes of change. In the un-
settled periods, ideologies would grow in importance as cultural schemata.
Leninist formulations of a party led by a vanguard of intellectuals who ex-
ercise extraordinary influence during unsettled times (Lenin 1901) would
be consistent with this line of reasoning that begins with press and pulse
patterns of change.
Pulses, because they occur suddenly and on a large enough scale to be
noticed, also have a characteristic narrative form that analysts could call “apoc-
alyptic” (Stewart 2012; Smith 2005). These narratives feature an “urgent
problem” that has manifested itself in dramatic fashion. To avert an apoca-
lypse, humans in this narrative must radically reform their ways. In this sense
apocalyptic narratives provide an emotional logic or justification for radical
reforms. Visually arresting and economically damaging events like powerful
hurricanes or large-scale dust storms would provide a compelling basis for an
apocalyptic narrative about “what will happen” if a society does not take action
to remedy a problem.
Pulses can become focusing events that reshape political agendas or
leveling events that reshape both a class system and political agendas.
Think of what hurricanes do to houses on Caribbean islands. In de-
stroying the wealth tied up in houses, hurricanes level, to some degree,
the economic stratification on the island. These leveling events, like fo-
cusing events, reset political agendas when they flatten the pre-existing
system of stratification (Bowles 2012). In this sense leveling events are
often just another version of focusing events. They both have their origins
in pulses, and, by shocking the pre-existing order, leveling events, like

focusing events, create political opportunities for significant changes in
policy (Meyer 2004).
Focusing events that become centerpieces for an apocalyptic narrative can
significantly alter the probability of collective action through their role as
symbols or “verbal shorthand” for a problem that demands collective action.
Symbols that work this way have had a long history in twentieth-century
environmental movements. Andrew Szasz (1994) pointed out how graphic
images, like that of a rusting 55-gallon drum or a baby harp seal gazing up
at a cameraman, could come to symbolize a complex issue like toxic waste
or the slaughter of defenseless wildlife. These symbols become a relatively
cost-free tool for mobilizing large numbers of people to push for reforms to
minimize a threat or punish a wrongdoing. The environmental icons enable
collective action by reducing its transaction costs.
When pulses become focusing events, their symbolic importance
grows. Visually arresting images of the events, like a flooded shoreline after
the passage of a hurricane or shriveled crops after a drought, accompany
reports of the event and are widely disseminated. Photos and news stories
provide a common fund of knowledge about these iconic events. The knowl
edge reduces the transaction costs of collective action and makes it more
likely to occur, especially in instances where the event affects very large
numbers of people. For this reason, focusing events with iconic overtones
should play a particularly salient role in the political mobilization of large
numbers of people that almost invariably precedes major environmental
reforms. While a focusing event may or may not precede reform efforts
involving small numbers of natural resource users, it should almost always
play an important role in the enactment of reforms by large aggregates of
people.
The radical reforms associated with systemic changes seem easier to im-
agine in association with pulses. The damages to a natural resource from a
pulse-leveling event may be so great that large numbers of people call for a
fundamental reassessment of policies that pertain to the damaged resource,
and this process culminates in a significant reform (Libecap 2008; Acheson
and Gardner 2014).
Presses and pulses can of course interact. On-going press processes often
aggravate the destructive effects of pulses when they occur. For example,
the intertwined press processes of increased economic inequality and pop-
ulation growth make poor people more vulnerable to destruction caused by
pulse events. For example, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines in 2013 and
Hurricane Mitch in Honduras in 1998, prototypical pulse events, inflicted
death and destruction on poor people forced by urban expansion, a press

process, and their marginalized economic status to live in precarious but in-
expensive seaside or hillside dwellings.
To clarify the meaning of terms used in the argument about the conditions
that generate environmental reforms, I present a glossary of terms in Box 2.1.
The remainder of this chapter spells out the two primary components of the
theory: one related to the political opportunities created by socio-ecological
changes and the other related to perceptions from events about the extent
of available natural resources. First, when pulses become more salient in
daily life, the political opportunities for radical reform grow. Second, when
populations come to view themselves as “caged,” with limited access to nat-
ural resources, the likelihood of thoroughgoing reform increases.
Box 2.1 A GLOSSARY OF TERMS
Caged Conditions: A social-psychological sense of living in a bounded entity

within whose boundaries a person must find his or her sustenance. These
social-psychological understandings often have a biophysical basis as with an
island in an ocean.
Focusing Events: Suddenly occurring events (pulses) of such a large magnitude
that they radically reshape political agendas.
Leveling Events: Suddenly occurring events (pulses) that redistribute income
and destroy wealth, thereby having a leveling effect on a system of stratification.
Modularization: A segmentation of units in society, so that the units become
more self-contained and self-sufficient. Power decentralizes. More activities occur
locally when a social structure becomes modularized. Localization of activities and
modularization of activities are the same thing. The resilience of systems improve
with modularization because some local units survive pulses better than others.
Presses: These processes entail “extensive, pervasive, and subtle changes”
(Collins et al. 2011). They occur in small increments, so it is easy for them to
become “normalized” in the eyes of observers. They become part of a “normal”
state of affairs.
Pulses and Shocks: These are sudden events of a large magnitude. Pulses
equal shocks.
Radical Environmental Reforms: They involve a comprehensive set of changes
in practices that makes the exploitation of natural resources much more
sustainable than it had been previously.
Unitary Societies: In these societies people define themselves by a common
condition such as membership in a fishing cooperative or citizenship in
a nation. This pattern of identification makes it easier to enlist citizens in
collective efforts.

Presses, Political-Economic Stability,
and Institutional Inertia
The persistence of fossil fuel use and the activities of the fossil fuel lobby
recalls a political-economic dynamic outlined by Mancur Olson. He fa-
mously argued that smaller aggregates of people would find it easier to un-
dertake collective action than larger aggregates of people because the smaller
groups face lower transaction costs in reaching agreements to undertake
joint actions (Olson 1965). In later work with a more macro-sociological ori-
entation, Olson (1982) argued that in the largely stable political context of af-
fluent democracies, smaller groups would engage in more collective action
than the less organized, larger groups, and for that reason the represent-
atives of the small groups would dominate in policymaking forums.3 The
interests of the smaller and larger groups would vary. The smaller groups
would more frequently pursue special interests with a goal of redistributing
resources to themselves. Olson refers to them as distributional coalitions.
The larger groups would pursue the more general interests of the public.
Olson calls them encompassing coalitions. Applied to the issue of cli-
mate change, these formulations would identify the specialized fossil fuel
interests as members of a distributional coalition and activists intent on
curbing GHG emissions as members of an encompassing coalition.
A stable political economic atmosphere accentuates a dynamic in which
polities come to be dominated by distributional coalitions that pursue special
interests. Small groups pursue narrow self-interests successfully in this con-
text because the larger populations with more general interests remained un-
involved in the narrowly defined issues that typify stable political arenas and
animate the special interest groups. A kind of “institutional sclerosis” comes
to characterize stable polities (Olson 1982). Lobbyists grow in number, and
tax regulations, in particular, become more complex and subject to exploita-
tion by special interests.
Subsequent research by political scientists, summarized in a meta-
analysis twenty- five years after the publication of Olson’s 1982 book,
found general empirical support for the association between institutional
sclerosis in politics and stability in the surrounding society (Heckelman
2007). This dynamic outlined by Olson largely explains the success
of the fossil fuel interests in shaping the production of energy in the
United States. The same dynamic has also concentrated wealth over the
past four decades in a wide range of countries (Piketty and Saez 2014;
Milanovic 2017).

The focus of the fossil fuel lobby shifted during the twentieth cen-
tury as the scale and range of the industry’s activities grew, and the en-
vironmental effects of burning fossil fuels began to become evident.
To promote fossil fuels early in the twentieth century, lobbyists for the
industries cultivated political ties and used these connections to en-
hance government subsidies for core activities like exploring for fossil
fuels and developing facilities for their processing. The oil depletion
allowance, adopted in the early twentieth century, represents the best
known of these subsidies. It allows the owners of resources to use the
decline in the value of the remaining resource—e.g., oil—in a subter-
ranean deposit, to offset taxes on income from the sale of extracted oil.
This provision in the tax regulations lowered an oil field owner’s tax bill
tremendously.
With the advent of climate change and the identification during the
1980s of fossil fuel production and consumption as the chief driver of cli-
mate change, the focus for lobbyist activity shifted. The fossil fuel coalition
sought to counter the emerging scientific consensus about the source and
magnitude of climate change through a campaign of disinformation in
which they denied the existence of climate change (Dunlap and McCright
2015). The lobbyists also mobilized their political allies in the United States
and succeeded in converting climate change into a partisan issue in which
politicians identified themselves as “Republican” by denying that climate
change was occurring (Dunlap et al. 2016).
This political strategy proved tenable for Republicans in part because
the mid-latitude manifestations of climate change, while visible (Carleton
and Tsiang 2016), did not disrupt daily lives in affluent, populous, polit-
ically powerful precincts of government. The receding snow packs, the
increased forest fires, the rising sea levels, the intensified hurricanes, and
the droughts did not matter enough to people. Without political demands
from the larger population to counter climate change, special interests
continued to shape energy and emissions policy in ways that continued
high rates of emissions and benefited fossil fuel interests. By implication
the continued political dominance of the fossil fuel coalition seemed to
rest on continued political economic and ecological stability in powerful
jurisdictions within nations. People acknowledged the threat of climate
change, but they perceived it to be a long-term, distant threat. For that
reason it did not rank among the most pressing preoccupations for voters,
so political pressure to take immediate action on the climate change issue
remained low (Shwom et al. 2015).

Pulses, Political Opportunities, and Radical
Environmental Reforms
Olson’s argument (1982) about political stasis provides a convenient point of

departure for understanding the sources of radical environmental reform.
As noted above, special interests typically dominate the politics of stable
societies. This political order changes when shocks to the system occur. The
resulting institutional and organizational instability challenges the assertions
of the special interests that they can control events for the common good. It
spurs a much larger public to get involved in policymaking. With the engage-
ment of the larger public, the special interests lose political control, and it
becomes more likely that political leaders will institute reforms that benefit
the public interest. Olson attributes the superior postwar performance of war
traumatized economies in France, West Germany, and Japan between 1950
and 1970 to the wartime political upheavals that ousted special interests and,
in so doing, enabled postwar reforms that served general economic interests.
Applied to the environmental domain, this line of thinking would imply that
thoroughgoing environmental reforms or revolutions usually occur in the
aftermath of sometimes cataclysmic focusing events.
Episodes of revolutionary change often begin with a triggering event,
a shock, which is dramatic enough in its scale and disruption to reset po-
litical agendas.4 While special interests dominate pre-event politics, new
participants enter the political arena after the shock occurs (True et al. 2006).
In this sense a shock, an earthquake, a hurricane, or a drought refocuses the
political attention of heretofore disengaged citizens. For that reason shocks
can be called focusing events. By increasing the range of participants in the
political arena, focusing events can also be leveling events because the new
participants challenge elites and in some instances wrest power from them
(Bowles 2012). They “level” stratified structures of wealth and power.
The familiar calculus from Olson’s (1965) theory about the high transac-
tion costs faced by larger coalitions would seem to imply that large groups
never mobilize to take action, but plainly they do so under some conditions.
These enabling conditions for large-scale collective action almost always
seem to include dramatic events. Once the event occurs—a devastating
drought accompanied by wildfires, for example—it becomes a kind of short-
hand for use in conversations and deliberations. The sum total of its causes
and effects conveys a conclusion about a set of issues, and, in so doing, the
occurrence of the event mobilizes people. In other words the focusing event
draws people’s attention to an issue, and the damages from the event come to

symbolize what is wrong with the current set of policies. As a symbol of inad-
equate policies, the focusing event bypasses person to person persuasion. As
shorthand, it minimizes the transaction costs that, in Olson’s (1965) analysis,
disable large coalitions. For this reason focusing events make the creation
of encompassing coalitions more likely. Large, previously inert collections
of people become coalitions that take action. The galvanizing effects of fo-
cusing events occur unevenly from person to person. Some people become
leaders of the new encompassing coalitions while others seem content to
become followers in the newly formed coalitions (Knight 1992).
The rationales of the participants in the newly formed encompassing
coalitions sometimes vary substantially. As noted above, focusing events
frighten some heretofore uninvolved people who, in response to their
newly aroused fears, become active in encompassing coalitions. Other
people become involved when the focusing event disrupts routine economic
arrangements, as occurred when the Soviet bloc nations collapsed in 1989.
Without subsidies from the state, many enterprises shut down, and the laid-
off workers from these enterprises became active in political arenas.
Once mobilized, the newcomers challenge the discursive hegemony
of the special interest groups. Taken- for-
granted practices and laws be-
come open for discussion: “It is often in times of crises when the arbitrar-
iness of these previously undiscussed and commonsensical notions and
arrangements can be exposed, brought into discussion, and confronted with
alternative discourses” (O’Brien and Selboe 2015). This pattern of change,
consistent with political opportunity theory (McAdam 1982; Meyer 2004),
underscores the pivotal role that social movements, strengthened by people’s
reactions to focusing events, can play in achieving environmental reforms
in the aftermath of the focusing events (Buttel 2003; Schnaiberg 1980). In
sum, crises can produce political opportunities, a “rally-around-the-flag” ef-
fect, that challenges the hegemony of the special interests (Meyer 2004).
Under these politically charged circumstances, politicians no longer conduct
“business as usual.” The changes in politics during these tumultuous times
are outlined below.
The transformational potential of political moments after disasters
and other leveling events may increase through a social psychological dy-
namic. Sell and Love (2009) point out that drastic changes increase people’s
concerns for the overall system and make them easier to mobilize to defend
the integrity of the system. After seeing the destruction visited on the city of
Houston and other Gulf Coast communities by Hurricane Harvey in 2017,
members of the U.S. Congress expressed more support for broadly based,
bipartisan legislation to address issues like disaster relief (Stolberg 2017).

Ordinary citizens expand the range of people for whom they express concern
in these circumstances. The surge in volunteers and in donations to relief
services in the aftermath of disasters like Hurricane Harvey testify to this
broadening of civic concerns in the aftermaths of disasters.
Hirschman (1970, 32) argues in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty that citizens’
earlier quiescence during “business-as-usual” periods provides them with
a reserve of political capital that makes their sudden mobilization around
an issue all that more effective when it happens. People pulse with political
energy, information cascades occur, and politicians respond with new laws
that purport to address the problem, perhaps by re-establishing economic
activities on more sustainable bases (Vogel 2012). Beck alludes to this pos-
sibility with the climate change issue. He writes that “climate change may
yet prove to be the most powerful of forces summoning a civilizational
community of fate into existence” (Beck 2010, 26, quoted in Antonio and
Clark 2015, 350). Paul Romer may have had this type of collective accom-
plishment in mind when he remarked that “a crisis is a terrible thing to
waste.”5
The alarming events initiate issue attention cycles (Downs 1972; Birkland
1997; Walgrove and Van Aelst 2006). Newly interested and alarmed citizens
focus on the problem, read hastily assembled reports about it, and clamor for
legislative remedies to it. To this end, politicians and citizens create broadly
interested, encompassing coalitions (Olson 1982). The crisis challenges the
“natural order” of things established by special interests (O’Brien and Selboe
2015). New coalitions of aroused citizens challenge the control of special in-
terest elites over policy. The inertia that characterized the earlier, “business-
as-usual” periods of special interest dominance disappears, and the new
coalition takes advantage of the political opportunity to challenge the con-
trol of the special interest elites over policy (McAdam 1982). Distributional
conflicts break out under these circumstances, most often with distribu-
tional coalitions vying for political control with encompassing coalitions
(Olson 1982; Knight 1992).
New political leaders become prominent during the distributional
conflicts. They play a role in organizing the encompassing coalitions and
play a prominent role in pressing the case for reform. Like entrepreneurs,
they can see ways of strategically expending heretofore unused resources
to produce a new product (Hirschman 1958). The unused resource is the
willingness of a newly alarmed public to press for political change. The
new product is a change in the political order of things. For this reason the
leaders of the encompassing coalitions might best be described as “political
entrepreneurs” (Acheson 2003).

If the leaders of the encompassing coalitions gain control of the governing
bodies, a cascade of new legislation sometimes follows. New laws get passed
that might not have passed during an earlier period of political calm, but
they do so under these more politically mobilized conditions. In this sense
the shock or crisis represents a legislative tipping point, triggering a series of
subsequent changes in laws. New, less ecologically disruptive technologies,
developed during earlier “business-as-usual” periods, become more rou-
tinely available during this period through legislative action that makes them
more affordable and, in so doing, facilitates their spread (Mol 2001).
A corresponding change in political culture occurs during these disturbed
times (Swidler 1986). Political bandwagons form, non-profit organizations
proliferate, and similarly situated governments copy laws from one another,
creating a world society of governments with similar regulations (DiMaggio
and Powell 1983; Hironaka 2014). These moments of accelerated change
are points of punctuation in evolutionary schemas of punctuated political
equilibria (Baumgartner 2006).
If successful in their political struggles, encompassing coalitions enact and
implement new regulations that dismantle the advantages enjoyed by elites
from the pre-crisis period. In this sense a shock may become, in its effects,
a leveling event that reduces the degree of stratification in a community or
society. Wars are usually leveling events. The combat destroys wealth, and
the mobilization for combat entails large tax increases that transfer private
accumulations of wealth to the state. The most significant reductions in eco-
nomic inequality in the United States during the twentieth century occurred
during World War II when the federal government raised tax rates on the
wealthy in order to finance the war effort. A kind of psychological leveling
seemed to occur between people of the different classes during World Wars
I and II, as individual identification with the collective “nation” intensified
and the loss of lives occurred across all of the classes (Lawson 2004; Migdal
2001). Of course, as Holly Arrow (2007) has observed, the strengthened al-
truistic impulses of citizens in these circumstances “have a sharp end.” The
altruism that would buoy environmental protection efforts would stem in
part from in-group cohesion that in turn can be associated with hostility
towards out-groups who do not contribute to the common good.
As Bowles (2012) points out, societies become more unitary when tumul-
tuous events like disasters or wars destroy wealth and, in so doing, reduce
economic and political inequalities within societies. “Natural disasters democ-
ratize social life.”6 By reducing the economic power of elites, some leveling
events may provide political opportunities that, once people are mobilized,
increase the capabilities of societies to transform themselves (Meyer 2004).

When, as with climate change, a significant fraction of wealthy people have
accumulated resources in large part by providing the rest of the population
with fossil fuels, the elite’s ability to prevent reductions in fossil fuel use may
only end when a leveling event destroys or threatens to destroy their wealth.
It becomes easier to mobilize people for new initiatives, like reducing GHG
emissions, in unitary societies that do not have substantial economic strat-
ification (Flagg 2015). In this respect the leveling events make prosocial be-
havior, in this instance reducing GHG emissions, more likely (Bowles 2012;
Richerson and Boyd 2006).
Roberts and Parks (2006) and Downey (2015) underscore the importance
of redressing economic inequalities as part of a grand bargain that includes
transformative environmental reforms. Modeling exercises of societal
collapses provide additional support for the Roberts–Downey line of argu-
ment by demonstrating through simulations that societies, to sustain them-
selves, must reduce inequalities and environmental damages simultaneously
(Motesharrei et al. 2014). The argument in this book also identifies increased
equality as necessary for environmental reform, but it foresees this condition
as most likely to occur through catastrophic events that destroy upper-class
wealth. In the aftermath of these events newly chastened elites decide to sup-
port reforms that could produce a more sustainable future for themselves as
well as for the poor and the middle classes. Special interests would abandon
fossil fuels only if they come to see that an end to fossil fuel use promises
them a less precarious future. This sequence of events that leads to reform
has a more disordered quality than the processes described by Roberts and
Downey. Despite the differences in the just described approaches, all of them
maintain that radical environmental reforms become more likely as societies
become more unitary and less divided by class.
Disasters do not always have leveling effects. When communities ex-
perience disasters that leave social hierarchies intact, as happened in New
Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, local residents are vulnerable to well-
positioned and unscrupulous construction companies and service providers
who, rather than aiding victims, siphon off recovery funds and use them for
their own purposes. A kind of “disaster capitalism” emerges (Klein 2007).
These episodes would represent the “bad crises” that Lippman discusses in
the epigraph to this chapter. Disaster capitalism would be especially likely
to occur in a neo-patrimonial polity where leaders are accustomed to using
the levers of power for personal gain (van de Walle 2001). These states have
often been described as “weak,” with little legitimacy, low levels of citizen
participation in politics, and an inability to mobilize citizens to pay taxes or
fight wars (Migdal 1988). In this context the concern for the collective welfare

that emerges immediately after the disaster must counter and overcome the
accustomed practices of seeking personal gain from chaotic situations.
Some states and citizen consumers may be better positioned to resist
these predatory behaviors. Where states are stronger, norms of public serv
ice restrain the impulses of public servants to profit from the misfortunes
of disaster victims. Some institutional structures may facilitate the delivery
of post-disaster relief efforts and reinforce the resilience of communities.
Studies of initial efforts by industrialized countries to regulate the environ-
ment discovered that countries with corporatist political structures accom-
plished more (Scruggs 2003; Dryzek et al. 2003). Government leaders in
these places routinely convened meetings with business and labor leaders
and used these meetings to coordinate policy across sectors and among
stakeholders. These meetings would also provide occasions for taking action
against the disaster capitalists. In effect, this corporatist political structure
created a political process that facilitated the formation and maintenance
of the encompassing coalitions necessary to insure the provision of public
goods like disaster relief, clean air, potable water, and, conceivably, reduced
greenhouse gas emissions (Olson 1982).7 Crises facilitate the formation of
encompassing coalitions and corporatist governance institutionalizes the
deliberations of working groups within coalitions, so corporatist regimes,
founded on democratic institutions, seem particularly well prepared for
creating broad-based alliances for recovery and sustainable development in
the midst of crises (Dryzek et al. 2002).
Arguments about the mobilizing effects of disasters would appear to apply
at multiple social scales, from a neighborhood where the damages from a
storm have mobilized the residents into impromptu cleanup crews to states
that in the aftermath of a particularly devastating storm have contributed
to large-scale, country-wide relief efforts. Alexander Wendt (2003) has even
pushed this argument to the global scale, arguing that endogenous or exoge-
nously generated instabilities through a logic of anarchy will eventually bring
people together to form a world state. In these examples, shocks strengthen
states of all sizes.
Reforms and the Politics of Environmental Cages
Shocks seem especially likely to induce newly strengthened states to pursue

sustainability when the shocks underline the limited extent of a nation’s nat-
ural resource base. By disrupting trading networks, transformative events or
“shocks” like wars or epidemics make people more aware of the geographical

limits of the world in which they live. The disrupted trading networks make
cages more obvious and more confining. With this newfound awareness
of their caged condition, people come to see environmentally degrading
practices in a new light. If they do not stop degrading local resources, they
may soon find themselves, given their caged condition, without resources to
exploit, so it becomes more important to conserve locally available resources
and to rehabilitate them whenever possible (Levin 1999).
Political-economic autarchies, in which populations of people largely feed
themselves, are cages. Social scientists have devoted comparatively little at-
tention to the emergence of autarchies. They appear when events throw up
boundaries around groups of people. Populations become caged; societies
become modularized, and their social networks become more localized in
extent. Adaptive cycles, a socio-ecological theoretical construction favored by
natural scientists, contain one phase of localization (Hollings, Gunderson,
and Ludwig 2002; Homer-Dixon 2006). The phases in an adaptive cycle, as
formulated by Ruth DeFries (2014), occur in the following sequence. (1) “The
ratchet” steps up the scale of human activities as occurred with the expan-
sion of global markets for commodities over the past two centuries. (2) “The
hatchet” reduces the scale of activities suddenly; a modularization, decen-
tralization, or localization occurs as when flows of traded goods decline or
cease in response to political crises or quarantines. (3) “The pivot” begins a
new cycle of expansion, often driven by technological innovations that dis-
mantle cages. The hatchet creates a more modular system with strengthened
social cages in the form of stronger social bonds with neighbors and atten-
uated ties to distant peoples (Levin 1999). Adaptive cycle thinking, applied
to humans, is problematic in several ways, but it illuminates a lacunae in
macro-sociological thinking by social scientists. They have theorized exten-
sively about globalization but very little about localization.
The same events that increase people’s awareness of being caged often
augment the power of populations and states (Mann 1986). Caging increases
the social power of a population because the ability to get things done collec-
tively increases when exit or defection from the population has become more
difficult (Hagen 2010). By clustering people within boundaries, cages make
people more subject to control by rulers. People become easier to mobilize
for collective purposes. Caging may, however, only be transformative when it
comes with a shock or shocks that make it easier to create the extraordinary
social orders that enable reform initiatives to go forward (Haugaard 2003;
Solnit 2009). The mobilizing effects of focusing events, when they occur to
a caged population, should make states and civil society groups more pow-
erful actors. Arguably, only states in caged conditions, working in concert

with organizations from civil society, possess powers that are commensu-
rate with the challenges of putting modern societies on a sustainable envi-
ronmental footing (Perrow and Pulver 2015). The following sections provide
three examples of this link between the presence of ecological cages and
the passage of environmental reforms. Histories of reforms in eighteenth
century colonial islands, inshore fisheries, and oases in deserts demonstrate
the importance of a caged sensation in the political impetus that leads to
reforms.
Caged Peoples and Environmental Reforms I: Tropical Islands

and Eighteenth-Century Forest Conservation
Evidence for an historical link between the emergence of socio-ecological
cages and strengthened conservation policies exists in the archives of the East
Indian trading companies. European governments created the companies to
promote trade with the Orient during the seventeenth century (Grove 1990,
1995). Oceanic islands like St. Helena and Mauritius, far from continental
land masses, became important way stations in the intercontinental trade be-
tween Western Europe and Asia. Ships making the eight month long voyage
could reprovision and their crews could rest when the ships stopped at these
islands in the middle of the oceans.
European settlers on the islands established plantations and used slave
labor to seed and harvest large fields of sugarcane. The colonists were for
the most part intent on establishing their plantations as rapidly as pos-
sible, earning a sizable income from the plantation, and then retiring
with their newfound wealth to the mother country (France, Britain, or the
Netherlands). With these intentions, the settlers cleared as much land as
possible, leaving the landscape almost completely deforested. The envi-
ronmental consequences of the deforestation became clear quickly, first
in the Canary Islands and the Azores and then farther south on St. Helena
and Mauritius. The deforestation led to wood scarcity which made it diffi-
cult to repair ships, and it appeared to foster droughts that damaged the
sugarcane crops.
French scientists on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean observed
these changes in the mid-eighteenth century and outlined a theory of desic-
cation in which deforestation dried out the land and induced droughts that
caused harvests to fail. Although not described in these terms, the defor-
estation most likely reduced transpiration from the landscape that in turn
suppressed the formation of clouds and curtailed rainfall over the islands
(Morello 2012). The isolation of these patches of sometimes elevated, forest

remnants in the midst of oceans made it easier for observers to associate the
extent of forest cover with the amount of rainfall.
The limited quantities of forested lands on oceanic islands like Mauritius
and St. Helena and the deleterious consequences of land clearing persuaded
the islands’ colonial authorities to enact the first forest conservation laws in
the European colonial territories. The island of Mauritius in the southern
Indian Ocean, at the time a French possession, and St. Helena in the south
Atlantic, a British possession, adopted forest conservation laws in 1770 and
1804, respectively. The much larger colonial dependencies like India only
adopted forest conservation laws after colonial officials on the islands had
taken the lead (Grove 1995).
It is not surprising that the first attempts to reduce the ecological im-
pact of capital intensive, slave owning planters occurred in these isolated,
oceanic island settings. The absence of natural resources beyond the small
land areas of these isolated islands encouraged the new inhabitants to think
about how to maintain natural resources on the islands in the face of agri-
cultural expansion. To preserve critical features, like water supply or timber,
that enabled human existence on the islands, the colonial overlords would
need to regenerate or continue to generate these natural resources on the is-
land.8 Similarly, the isolation of the islands made for more endemic species
whose local extinction meant a permanent loss of biodiversity. The clarity
and severity of the environmental consequences from plantation agriculture
on these isolated islands made them seedbeds for environmental reform.
The colonial regime in Mauritius experimented with forest conservation,
pollution controls, and fisheries protection. Governments on other islands
have followed suit. Concerned observers on the island of Tasmania pushed
through the world’s first endangered species act in 1860 (Grove 1990).
Living on isolated, oceanic islands, especially in the absence of inexpen-
sive and accessible transport seems to have encouraged and continues to en-
courage a “caged” sensibility. Living along the shoreline of an isolated island
heightens our awareness of boundaries, boundary crossings, and the limited
quantities of goods that can be produced on an island. The isolation of the
islands from other sources of supply encouraged colonial observers to see
the islands as models in miniature for the entire earth. Extinctions, like that
of the Dodo bird (Raphus cucullatus) on the island of Mauritius in the sev-
enteenth century, contributed to premonitions about what might be in store
for the entire earth, including humans, should capitalism and imperialism
come to dominate the globe.
This caged sensibility among the residents of small, isolated oceanic is-
lands marks the contemporary period as well. As one leader of a contemporary

renewables effort in the Canary Islands put it (Guevara-Stone 2014), “At first,
it (local production) was simply an issue of becoming more self-sufficient.
We were completely dependent on outside deliveries and could be cut off at
a moment's notice.”
An awareness of these vulnerabilities associated with boundaries
underscores the difficulties of bringing resources from “off of the island”
and underlines the need to protect local resources and productive capacities.
This social psychological dynamic would begin to explain why we might ex-
pect island populations to be so frequently at the forefront of efforts to make
efficient use of locally available natural resources.9 Islanders have an acute
sense of living in a cage that in turn makes autarchic, resource conserving
arrangements attractive to them.
Caged Peoples and Environmental Reforms II: Common

Property and Common Pool Resources
Elinor Ostrom’s celebrated work (see Box 2.2) on the socio- ecological
conditions that foster common property institutions (CPIs) outlines a set
of dynamics, like those on oceanic islands, in which clearly defined limits
in natural resources stimulate sustainable practices. Her theory identifies
social structural conditions that, when present in a situation, increase the
chances that groups of people will organize to reverse deteriorating envi-
ronmental conditions. These design principles, considered together, suggest
that the most durable CPIs have cage-like characteristics. They have clearly
defined boundaries, and their leaders monitor and control natural resource
use within the boundaries (Ostrom 1990, 2009; Fleischman et al. 2014).
These organizations create incentives that make the exploitation of the
natural resource more sustainable. When a CPI gives participants priv-
ileged access to a territorial delimited fishery, they will most likely suffer
in subsequent seasons if they take more than the agreed-upon quota of
fish from their territory in the present season. The CPI cages the fishers,
manages their catch, and aligns their incentives so as to produce sustainable
outcomes. More generally, an increase in caged social structures, in addition
to strengthening states and common property institutions, also increases the
incentives to engage in sustainable activities.
CPIs have cultures. They are usually most visible in the ethic of stew-
ardship that CPI members enact through their conservation practices.
They implement their plan for the sustainable exploitation of a natural re-
source through their practices. The plan expresses a culture, particular to
the members of a CPI, which includes a common vision of the resource, its

Box 2.2 ELINOR “LIN” OSTROM (1933–2 012)
“Lin” (as she liked to be called) Ostrom, the first women to win the Nobel Prize
in Economics (in 2009), believed in the ability of small groups to solve problems
of common pool resource provision. Trained as a political scientist, she first
studied how associations of water users in parched southern California arrived
at arrangements to share scarce supplies of water from the Sierra Nevada. She
cared little for boundaries between disciplines and immersed herself in the
work of anthropologists, political scientists, economists, and ecologists who
had studied common pool resources and the common property institutions
created to manage these resources. She brought all of these materials together
in a comparative historical study of common property institutions, published
in 1990, and entitled Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for
Collective Action (Ostrom 1990). In Governing the Commons Ostrom articulated
the “design principles” that enabled long-lasting common property institutions
to survive and prosper. Ostrom’s book got a quiet initial reception, but the
word of mouth about the book was good, and Governing the Commons soon
became a citation classic. It had more than 29,000 citations by 2015.
Ostrom did more than read and write: she organized! Along with Vincent
Ostrom, she organized a longstanding workshop on political theory and
policy analysis at Indiana University that continues to this day to elaborate
the institutional analytic approaches that Lin Ostrom promoted. To strengthen
the comparative dimension of her research, Ostrom created a network of local
forestry institutions, primarily in the Global South, the International Forestry
Resources and Institutions (IFRI). Officials in the IFRI programs report
regularly on their successes and failures in governing forests held as common
property. As these activities suggest, Lin Ostrom encouraged collaborative
efforts throughout her career. In this sense her influence lives on, not only
through her books and articles, but also through the efforts of her collaborators
who continue to this day to build upon her intellectual legacy.
degradation, and its resilience (Sandstrom 2011). These shared visions seem
more likely to occur in unitary groups. Sandstrom (2011) reports more effec-
tive implementation of “catch shares” (individually transferable quotas, or
ITQs) among Swedish fishers with uniform understandings of local fisheries
than among Swedish fishers with varying views of the fisheries.
This common vision has a basis in shared knowledge about the CPI’s
natural resource. To construct a sustainable pattern of natural resource use,
the users want to understand the effects of their harvesting practices on the
resource, so they observe, collect data, and commission others to collect
data. In this respect the emergence of a group of cooperating practitioners
fosters a science of resource exploitation that informs, to varying degrees,

the regulations that users, regulators, and politicians decide to adopt
(Wilson et al. 2013). These communications would exhibit the “lower mi-
metic rhetoric” that associates with press processes of change. The dynamic
surrounding reforms in this context seems communication-rich and less de-
pendent on the mobilizing effects of a focusing event. These patterns would
be consistent with Olson’s (1965) expectation that smaller groups will take
collective action, even in instances that are not marked by focusing events.
These shared visions provide the bases for cultures that people enact
in the interaction rituals that accompany the use and regulation of a nat-
ural resource (Fine 2014; Goffman 1983). For example, inspections of fish
catches in the holds of boats headed for port become occasions in which
fishers demonstrate their compliance with the rules on catches that aim to
sustain a fishery. Because these rules represent the local manifestation of a
much larger effort to establish a sustainable society, the ritual interaction of
an inspection connects the fisher with a larger civic effort to promote sus-
tainable resource use. The fishers who have established a system of catch
shares for a local fishery represent a tiny public whose faith in the efficacy
of their collective action is reaffirmed when, in the presence of other fishers,
members of their group comply with the rules. These interaction rituals can
also change self-concepts. The fishers’ participation in conservation routines
could strengthen their concepts of themselves as “stewards” of a particular
natural resource.
These cultures among natural resource users include a “sense of place”
that reinforces the caged sensibility that underlies popular acceptance of
regulations about natural resource use. As Richard Stedman (2003) points
out, “characteristic experiences” in using a resource shape a user’s sense
of the resource’s condition and the place it occupies. If these characteristic
experiences include frequent confirmation of the resource’s limits, like de-
clining catches of fish or crop failures from drought, then the emerging
sense of place among local inhabitants would include a sharpened sense of
limits in the extent of the resource. People may feel like they are living in
a cage.
A culture of stewardship coalesces around this shared image of a nat-
ural resource. In some instances the culture predates the CPI, and in effect
the culture gets institutionalized when people create a CPI with a natural
resource held in common and with rules for its use. Alternatively, centers
of power promulgate new rules for the use of the environment, and in the
course of putting the new rules into practice—for example, in the manage-
ment of degraded forests—previously skeptical rural residents become sup-
portive of the new rules (Agarwal 2005).10 These ideological commitments

become part of the group’s culture and discourage shirking in the mainte-
nance of the common property (Snyder 2006). The fishers and the forest
council members practice a kind of ecological citizenship in their daily activ-
ities (Seyfang 2006). Their cultural practices have visible ecological effects.
Studies of locally driven regulatory regimes show enhanced preservation of
fish stocks (Costello et al. 2008) and more robust regeneration of degraded
forests (Chhatre 2015).
The shared visions of the reformers would presumably not be limited to
local publics. At a larger scale they could become “the imagined communities”
that Benedict Anderson (1983) found to be so central to the rise of the nation-
state in Western Europe. As Gramsci (1971) might have argued, the state in
a caged society would draw upon this imagery in articulating a hegemonic
discourse designed to further a collective project of sustainability. These
centralized efforts, together with the more localized efforts described by
common property theorists, would represent a polycentric initiative to make
human societies more sustainable (Ostrom 2010).
Caged Peoples and Environmental Reforms III: Globalization,

Localization, and the Expansion of State Power
Expansion rather than contraction of trading networks preoccupied macro-
sociologists during the twentieth century. Studies focused on the emer-
gence of larger- scale social structures like long commodity chains, big
multinational corporations, and large urban settlements (Gereffi et al. 2005;
Robinson 2004; Sassen 1991). Places in this kind of social system become
“way stations.” They lose their distinctive qualities for the many people who
pass through the communities (Lamont and Molnar 2002). The sociologists’
focus on globalization reflects human history in the twentieth century, with
its tremendous expansion in the scale and spatial reach of the human enter-
prise. A smaller number of studies (Hardin 1968; Commoner 1971; Meadows
et al. 1972), published during the late 1960s and early 1970s, problematized
continued human expansion given the presence of a biophysical cage around
the activities of human communities. More than forty years later, humans
appear to be bumping up against the boundaries of this cage. We have
pumped such large volumes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that
our climate has become destabilized.
In the more typical and more studied twentieth- century historical
sequences, the growing scale of human enterprises depleted natural re-
sources and polluted the environment, but the distant consumers and
subsidized producers rarely experienced negative feedbacks from the

depletion or the pollution. When consumers and producers did experience
negative feedbacks, they were not disruptive enough to make humans, often
elite decision-makers located in distant places, reconsider the merits of their
activities (Levin 1999). Viewed globally, humans are indeed in an environ-
mental cage. We exist on land masses in a habitable biosphere of around five
miles in thickness along the earth’s surface. For the longest time these caged
conditions mattered little to us because, given the small scale of human ac-
tivities, we did not bump up against the physical and biological limits of the
cages. Furthermore, processes of globalization brought progressively larger
parts of the earth’s habitable domain into an expanding set of social and ec-
onomic networks. The tenuous hold of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century
European colonial empires on remote areas made exit a viable option for po-
litical outcasts, which in turn undermined the coercive powers of the states.
The continued economic globalization during the post-colonial period has
had a similar effect on economic circuits, opening up new frontiers for eco-
nomic activity, spurring technological innovations, and providing hospitable
settings for economic upstarts.
The expansion in the size and scale of trading networks during the past
two centuries may have shifted where governance occurs, diminishing the
extent of caging in villages and increasing the extent of caging in nations. In
this respect, globalization may have spurred the spatial expansion of social
networks while imperialism and associated international conflicts spurred
caging in large-scale political units like the nation-state (Mann 2012). In
other words, countervailing tendencies may have made the extent of caging
quite variable from time to time and from place to place. The extent to which
societies became caged may have fluctuated with business cycles. During the
1930s, with the precipitous declines in international trade, societies became
more caged and more reliant on governments for their well-being. With the
boom in international trade since 1960, households became less reliant on
the local political economy for their sustenance, and in this sense they be-
came less caged.
The idioms of earlier, less caged conditions have continued to charac-
terize some popular cultures. The great European expansion, beginning in
the sixteenth century, convinced pioneers that an almost limitless expanse
of unappropriated resources lay just over the horizon. This “empty place
ethos” seems especially widespread among the inhabitants of former fron-
tier regions like Texas (Collins 2012). This perception of abundant natural
resources predisposes people against the environmental regulation of eco-
nomic activities. In contrast, “the image of the limited good,” prevalent in
the mid-twentieth century among Mexican peasants (Foster 1965), reflected

a common perception of finite resources that arose in the caged setting of
isolated mountain villages. While a shared perception about the limited
quantities of a resource would encourage zero-sum conflicts between users,
the same perception would also make it easier to reach agreement among
users to limit access to the resource. In the aftermath of a focusing event
that demonstrates the limits of a degraded natural resource, perceptions of
a “limited good” could lead to calls for political authorities to conserve the
natural resource.
Globalization, so prevalent during the past two centuries, has, how-
ever, begun to change in two fundamental ways. First, global scale trading
networks, once created, become vulnerable to disruption by pulse events,
and under these circumstances a kind of modularization takes place. In
these instances people have the sensation of becoming “caged,” and the
local community becomes more important as a provider of resources. For
example, in the fall of 2008 prices for basic agricultural commodities like
wheat, rice, and soybeans rose sharply amidst the global financial turmoil.
Concerned about their ability to feed their own populations amid reports of
food riots overseas, governments of the major rice-exporting countries, like
India, placed curbs on their exports of rice. Other rice-exporting countries
quickly followed suit (Dawe 2010). Like the “beggar thy neighbor” protective
tariffs enacted during the Depression of the 1930s, these policies restrained
trade, in effect “caging” national populations, forcing them to rely on grains
produced within their own borders. Climate change, with more volatility and
attendant declines in agricultural productivity (IPCC 2014), portends similar
episodes of food scarcity, leading most likely to restraints on trade and the
caging of populations.
Second, globalization has entered a “self-limiting” phase (Mann 2013). As
progressively larger populations in a wider array of places have been incor-
porated into global economic and political institutions, the potential scope
for further expansion has declined. All lands except Antarctica have now
been carved up into political jurisdictions represented by delegations to the
United Nations. With the incorporation of peripheral peoples and lands into
worldwide organizations, political, economic, and geophysical boundaries
have begun to coincide. Elites at the World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland, come from the same nations as the activists at the World Social
Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Producer associations like the Roundtable
for Sustainable Oil Palm draw their members from all of the major produc-
tion zones in the world. The geographic boundaries of these organizations
coincide not just with each other but also with the extent of phenomena like
capitalism, climate change, and the reach of new social media,

The growing geographical coincidence of these global social networks
contributes in a diffuse way to the formation of a world society. World society
theorists (Meyer 2010; Hironaka 2014) would hypothesize that a common set
of norms about governing the environment would diffuse through these so-
cial contacts across nations, creating in effect a global regime for governing
the climate. Recurring Conference of Parties (COP) meetings about climate
change would hasten the adoption of a common set of norms among the
parties to the negotiations.
The difficulty with this line of reasoning is that it does not do a good
job of specifying the causal mechanisms that convert governing elites into
advocates for sustainability. The immediate circumstances surrounding
the conversion of individual leaders remain poorly specified. It could
occur through the conversion of highly regarded leaders to the cause of
combating climate change. Their conversion would in turn prompt the
conversion of other leaders for whom the first leaders were an important
reference group. These processes of change certainly seem plausible, but
it seems hard to imagine that radical reforms would result solely from
processes of attitudinal and normative change. Most likely, the impetus
for radical reform would derive in part from focusing and leveling events.
These events would call into question the existing order of things and, by
destroying or threatening to destroy the elites’ wealth, the events would
make elites, as well as non-elites, open to fundamental changes in envi-
ronmental policy.
Michael Mann’s work provides an intellectual framework that makes it pos-
sible to understand the causal mechanisms through which focusing events
and an increased sense of being caged persuade nations to institute radical
environmental reforms. Mann’s framework, augmented by Hirschman’s
(1970) and Ostrom’s (2009) work on segmented social structures, Olson’s
(1982) work on collective action, and Bowles’s (2012) work on leveling events,
provide the bases for a theory of environmental reform.
In the first volume of his magisterial, comparative historical study of
nation states, Mann (1986) develops a macro-sociological theory of caging
to explain the emergence of centralized states in the ancient Middle East
(see Box 2.3). For Mann societies consist of interacting individuals whose
interactions cluster within boundaries and more rarely extend across
boundaries. In caged societies relatively few interactions occur across
boundaries (Mann 1986, 13). When social interactions become more clus-
tered within boundaries, societies become in effect more caged. Under
these circumstances people may feel trapped. When globalization occurs,
the cage is broken, and an “age of discovery” takes place. Increased numbers

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see such a living proof. She is my little Jane as she was when a child
—my little Jane—my darling! Mrs. Lanier, will you excuse me!—the
sight of her has quite unnerved me”; and suddenly sinking into a
chair he pressed the child to his heart and hid his face on her bright
golden head.
What passed between Lady Jane and her grandfather, Mr. and
Mrs. Lanier never knew, for they slipped quietly out of the room, and
left the cold, stern man alone with the last of his family—the child of
that idolized but disobedient daughter, who had caused him untold
sorrow, and whom he had never forgiven until that moment, when he
held in his arms, close to his heart, the child, her living image.
It was some time before Mr. Chetwynd appeared, and when he did
he was as cold and self-possessed as if he had never felt a throb of
emotion, or shed a tear of sorrow on the pretty head of the child, who
held his hand, and prattled as freely and confidingly as though she
had known him always.
“What will Mother Margaret say,” she exclaimed, looking at Mrs.
Lanier with wide, glistening eyes, “when I tell her that I’ve found Tony
and my grandpapa both in one Christmas? I never saw a grandpapa
before. Pepsie read to me about one in a book, and he was very
cross; but this one isn’t. I think he’s very good, because he says that
he will give me everything I wish, and I know I shall love him a great
deal.”
“Now, Lady Jane, confess to me, and I’ll never tell,” whispered
Arthur with an air of great secrecy. “Which do you love best, Tony or
your new grandpapa?”
She raised her clear eyes to the roguish face of the boy with a little
perplexed smile, and then replied unhesitatingly: “Well, I’ve known
Tony longer, but I think I’ll love my grandpapa as well by and by,
because, you know, he’s my grandpapa.”
Arthur laughed heartily at the clever way in which she evaded the
question, and remarked to Mrs. Lanier that Lady Jane would wind
her grandfather around her little finger before a month was over.
Which prediction was likely to prove true, for Mr. Chetwynd did not
seem to have any other interest in life than to gratify every wish the
child expressed.
“She has taken complete possession of me,” he said to Mrs.
Lanier, “and now my greatest happiness will be to make her happy.
She is all I have, and I shall try to find in her the comfort her mother
deprived me of.”
In spite of his affection for the child, his feelings did not soften
toward the mother; he could not forget that she had disappointed him
and preferred a stranger to him; that she had given up wealth and
position to bury herself in obscurity with a man he hated. It was a
bitter thought, yet he would spare no pains to solve the mystery that
hung over her last days.
Money and influence together soon put the machinery of the law in
motion; therefore it was not a month after Mr. Chetwynd’s arrival in
New Orleans before everything was as clear as day. The young
widow was traced to Madame Jozain’s; there were many who
remembered her death and funeral. The physician’s certificate at the
Board of Health bore the name of Dr. Debrot, who was found, and
interviewed during one of his lucid moments; he described the young
mother and child, and even remembered the blue heron; and his
testimony, sad though it was, was still a comfort to Jane Chetwynd’s
friends. She had died of the same fever that killed her husband, and
she had been carefully nursed and decently buried. Afterward, the
Bergeron tomb was opened, the remains identified, and then sent to
New York to rest with her mother, in the stately Chetwynd tomb, in
Greenwood cemetery.
Then a careful search was made for her personal effects, but
nothing was recovered except the watch that Paichoux was fortunate
enough to secure. Mr. Chetwynd handed Paichoux a large check in
exchange for it, but the honest man refused to take any more than
he had paid Raste Jozain in order to get possession of it. However,
the millionaire proved that he was not ungrateful nor lacking in
appreciation, when he presented him with a rich, plain watch suitably
inscribed, from the donor to a most worthy friend. And when the
pretty Marie was married, she received from the same jeweler who
made the watch an exquisite silver tea-service, which was the pride
of her life, and which was cherished not only for its value, but
because it was a gift from Lady Jane’s grandpapa.
Mr. Chetwynd made a number of visits to Good Children Street in
company with Mrs. Lanier and Lady Jane, and there were a great
many long conversations between Mam’selle Diane, the millionaire,
and the banker’s wife, while Lady Jane played with her jolly little
friend, the canary, among the branches of the rose-bush. During
these conversations there was a great deal of argument and anxious
urging on the part of the visitors, and a great many excuses and
much self-depreciation on the part of the gentle, faded lady.
“I have been buried so long,” she would say pathetically, “that the
great world will appal and confuse me. I shall be like a blind person
suddenly made sensible of the light.”
“But you will soon become accustomed to the light,” urged Mrs.
Lanier.
“And I might long for seclusion again; at my age one cannot easily
change one’s habits.”
“You shall have all the seclusion you wish for,” said Mr. Chetwynd
kindly.
“Besides I am so old-fashioned,” murmured Mam’selle Diane,
blushing deeply.
“A quality which I greatly admire,” returned Mr. Chetwynd, with a
courtly bow.
“And think how Lady Jane loves you,” said Mrs. Lanier, as if to
clinch the argument.
“Yes; my love for her and hers for me are the strongest points in
the situation,” replied Mam’selle Diane reflectively; “when I think of
that I can hardly refuse to comply with your wishes.”
At that time it seem as if Lady Jane acted the part of fairy
godmother to those who had been her friends in her days of
adversity; for each one had only to express a wish and it was
gratified.
Pepsie’s cottage in the country was about to become a reality. In
one of the charming shady lanes of Carrollton they found just such a
bowery little spot as the girl wished for, with a fine strip of land for a
garden. One day Mr. Chetwynd and Lady Jane went down to Good
Children Street and gave the deed of it to Mademoiselle Madelon
Modeste Ferri, which was Pepsie’s baptismal name, although she
had never been called by it in all her life. The little cripple was so
astonished and delighted that she could find no words of thanks; but
after a few moments of very expressive silence she exclaimed: “After
all, my cards were right, for they told me over and over that I should
go to live in the country; and now I’m going, thanks to Lady Jane.”
When little Gex was asked what he most wished for in the world,
he hesitated for a long time, and finally confessed that the desire of
his life was to go back to Paris.
“Well, you shall go, Mr. Gex,” said Lady Jane confidently, “and I
shall see you there, because I’m going to Paris with grandpapa very
soon.”
It is needless to say that Gex went, and the little shop in Good
Children Street saw him no more forever.
And Margaret—the good Margaret. What could Lady Jane do for
her? Only the noble woman and the destitute orphans could testify to
the generous aid that came yearly in the shape of a check for a large
amount from Lady Jane for dear Mother Margaret’s home.
“And Mam’selle Diane,—dear Mam’selle! what can I give her?”
asked Lady Jane eagerly.
“We have our plans for Mam’selle Diane, my dear,” said Mrs.
Lanier. “There is only one thing to do for her, and that is to take her
with you. Your grandpapa has begged her to take charge of your
education. Poor, lonely woman; she loves you dearly, and in spite of
her reluctance to leave her seclusion, I think she would go to the
world’s end with you.”
And so it was arranged that when Mr. Chetwynd and Lady Jane
left New Orleans, Mam’selle Diane d’Hautreve went with them, and
the little house and tiny garden were left to solitude, while the jolly
canary was sent to keep Tony company in Mrs. Lanier’s
conservatory.
CHAPTER XXXIII
AS IT IS NOW
A LL this happened years ago, some ten or twelve, more or less,

and there have been many changes in that time.
In front of the iron railing where Lady Jane clung on that cold
Christmas eve, peering into the warmth and light of the Orphans’
Home, there is now a beautiful little park, with magnolias, oaks,
fragrant white jasmine, and pink flowering crape-myrtle. The grass is
green, and the trees make shadows on the pretty little pond, the tiled
bridge and shelled walks, the cactus and palmetto. Flowers bloom
there luxuriantly, the birds sing merrily, and it is a spot beloved of
children. Always their joyous laugh can be heard mingled with the
songs of birds and the distant hum of many little voices in the
Orphans’ Home a few paces away.
In the center of that square on a green mound, bordered with
flowers, stands a marble pedestal, and on that pedestal is a statue. It
is the figure of a woman, seated and holding a little orphan to her
heart. The woman has a plain, homely face, the thin hair is combed
back austerely from the broad forehead, the eyes are deep-set, the
features coarse, the mouth wide. She is no high-born dame of
delicate mold, but a woman of the people—untaught, honest, simple,
industrious. Her plain gown falls around her in scanty lines; over her
shoulders is modestly folded a little shawl; her hands, that caress the
orphan at her side, are large and rough with honest toil; but her face,
and her whole plain figure, is beautiful with purity and goodness. It is
Margaret, the orphans’ friend, who, though a destitute orphan
herself, by her own virtue and industry earned the wealth to found
homes and asylums, to feed and clothe the indigent, to save the
wretched and forsaken, and to merit the title of Mother to the
Motherless.
And there sits her marble image, through summer’s heat and
winter’s cold, serene and gentle, under the shadow of the home she
founded, and in sound of the little voices that she loved so well; and
there she will sit when those voices are silent and those active little
forms are dust, as a monument of honest, simple virtue and charity,
as well as an enduring testimony to the nobility of the women who
erected this statue in respectful recognition of true greatness under
the homely guise of honest toil.
If one of my young readers should happen near this spot just at
the right moment on some fine evening in early spring, he or she
might chance to notice an elegant carriage drawn by two fine horses,
and driven by a sleek darky in plain livery, make the circuit of the
place and then draw up near the statue of Margaret, while its
occupants, an elderly woman of gentle and distinguished
appearance, and a beautiful young girl, study the homely, serene
face of the orphans’ friend.
Presently the girl says reverently, “Dear Mother Margaret! She was
a saint, if earth ever knew one.”
“Yes; she was a noble woman, and she came from the poor and
lowly. My dear, she is an example of a great truth, which may be
worthy of consideration. It is, that virtue and purity do not disdain to
dwell in the meanest shrine, and that all the titles and wealth of earth
could not ennoble her as her own saintly character has done.”
The occupants of the carriage are Lady Jane and Mam’selle Diane
d’Hautreve.
The beautiful child is now a beautiful girl of seventeen. Her
education is finished, and she has not disappointed the expectations
of her friends. At home and abroad she is not only known as the
Chetwynd heiress, but also for her many accomplishments, as well
as for her beauty and charitableness. And her wonderful voice, which
time has enriched and strengthened, is a constant delight to those
who hear it, although it is never heard in public, save in the service
of God, or for some work of charity. The poor and the lowly, the sick
and the dying have often been carried to the very gates of heaven on
its melodious strains, and the good sisters and grateful little orphans
in Margaret’s Home count it a day long to be remembered when
Lady Jane sits down among them and sings some of the hymns that
she loved so well in those old days when she herself was a
homeless little orphan.
Mr. Chetwynd still likes to spend part of the year in Paris; but he
has purchased a beautiful winter home in one of the lovely streets in
the garden district, not far from Mrs. Lanier, and Lady Jane and
Mam’selle Diane spend several months every spring in its delightful
seclusion.
And here Madelon comes to bring her delicious cakes, which she
now sells to private customers instead of having a stand on the Rue
Bourbon; and Tante Modeste often rattles up in her milk cart, a little
older, a little stouter, but with the same bright face; and on the same
seat where Lady Jane used to sit is one of Marie’s little ones, instead
of one of her own. “Only think, my dear,” she says proudly, “Tiburce
has graduated, and now he is studying law with Marie’s husband,
who is rising fast in his profession.”
But among all her happy hours there are none pleasanter than
those she spends with Pepsie in the pretty cottage at Carrollton,
when the bright-faced little cripple, who seems hardly a day older,
spreads out her beautiful needlework and expatiates eloquently on
the fine results she obtains from the Paris patterns and exquisite
material with which she is constantly supplied. She is a natural little
artist with the needle, her dainty work sells readily and profitably, and
she is in a fair way to become rich. “Just think,” she says with one of
her broad smiles, “I could buy a piano now myself, if I wanted to, and
perhaps I shall, so that you can play to me when you come.”
During sunny mornings, on a certain lawn in the garden district,
there is nearly always a merry party playing tennis, while a gentle-
faced woman sits near holding a book, which she seldom reads, so
interested is she in watching a golden-haired girl and a handsome
young man, who frequently interrupt the game to point out the grave
antics of a stately blue heron, that stalks majestically about the lawn
or poses picturesquely on one leg under a glossy palm.
But we must not approach the border-land of romance. Lady Jane
is no longer a child, and Arthur Maynard is years older than the boy
who gave her the blue heron.
THE END
Transcriber’s Notes
pg 14 Changed: if you thing it’s right

to: if you think it’s right
pg 133 Changed: LADY JANE FINDS A MUSIC-TEACHFR
to: LADY JANE FINDS A MUSIC-TEACHER
pg 152 Changed: You didn’t wear a handkerchef over your ears
to: You didn’t wear a handkerchief over your ears
pg 168 Changed: annoyed at Pespie’s air of secrecy
to: annoyed at Pepsie’s air of secrecy
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Shocks States and Sustainability The Origins of Radical Environmental Reforms Thomas K Rudel All Chapter

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Shocks, States, and Sustainability: The

Origins of Radical Environmental

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

F or the past thirty years, observers of our changing natural environment

T he argument and accumulation of knowledge presented here have a his-

Perhaps the most appropriate metaphor (for climate change) is a lethal

“Business as Usual” in an Era of Climate Change

The impetus for environmental reforms in the twenty-​first century comes

2 | Shocks, States, and Sustainability

Environmental Reforms and Revolutions: Where Are They?

Major environmental reforms did occur in North America and Western

4 | Shocks, States, and Sustainability

The Plan for the Book

Chapter 2, drawing in particular on theories developed by Mancur Olson,

6 | Shocks, States, and Sustainability

Presses, Pulses, and the Impetus for Reform

R adical Environmental Reforms | 9

10 | Shocks, States, and Sustainability

R adical Environmental Reforms | 11

Box 2.1 A GLOSSARY OF TERMS

Caged Conditions: A social-​psychological sense of living in a bounded entity

12 | Shocks, States, and Sustainability

R adical Environmental Reforms | 13

14 | Shocks, States, and Sustainability

Olson’s argument (1982) about political stasis provides a convenient point of

R adical Environmental Reforms | 15

16 | Shocks, States, and Sustainability

R adical Environmental Reforms | 17

18 | Shocks, States, and Sustainability

R adical Environmental Reforms | 19

Reforms and the Politics of Environmental Cages

Shocks seem especially likely to induce newly strengthened states to pursue

20 | Shocks, States, and Sustainability

R adical Environmental Reforms | 21

Caged Peoples and Environmental Reforms I: Tropical Islands

22 | Shocks, States, and Sustainability

R adical Environmental Reforms | 23

Caged Peoples and Environmental Reforms II: Common

24 | Shocks, States, and Sustainability

R adical Environmental Reforms | 25

26 | Shocks, States, and Sustainability

Caged Peoples and Environmental Reforms III: Globalization,

R adical Environmental Reforms | 27

28 | Shocks, States, and Sustainability

R adical Environmental Reforms | 29

30 | Shocks, States, and Sustainability

A LL this happened years ago, some ten or twelve, more or less,

pg 14 Changed: if you thing it’s right

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

START: FULL LICENSE

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1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The impetus for environmental reforms in the twenty-first century comes

Caged Conditions: A social-psychological sense of living in a bounded entity