Читать книгу The Psychology of Environmental Law - Arden Rowell - Страница 33

A final distinctive aspect of temporally diffuse impacts is that time, unlike space, is unidirectional: It moves in one direction, from past to future. This observation triggers a set of phenomena that make it challenging to “bargain with the future” (Rowell, 2014). While the present can convey resources, information, harm, and risk to the future—say, by building a nuclear waste depository that will inevitably leak at some future point, or by preserving a valuable landscape or species from destruction—the future cannot reciprocate. This creates a consistent barrier to intertemporal bargaining, which works on top of the general challenges of seeing or imagining the future. These challenges have particular relevance to environmental impacts, where again many, if not most, of the impacts of policies may accrue to the future.

Notably, the barriers to bargaining with the future are psychological as well as practical. Imagine that decision makers today are considering a policy with likely impacts on future stakeholders. Unlike in a contemporaneous negotiation where, say, the policy would immediately impact stakeholders in a neighboring state, our decision makers would have to act without representatives from the future commenting on impacts they would experience. Neither could the future stakeholders deploy techniques of social influence and persuasion that contemporaneous stakeholders would have at their disposal. These barriers to intertemporal relationships are particularly worrisome given the latency of many environmental impacts. This has led a number of commentators to argue that ethical obligations to the future—and particularly to future generations—are substantively different than ethical obligations to present people (Farber & Hemmersbaugh, 1993; Revesz, 1999; Portney & Weyant, 2013), yet fulfilling those obligations is rendered more difficult by the very same barriers the currently living have in noticing, perceiving, and connecting with future stakeholders.

Some partial solutions to this problem have been proposed. One is the creation of so-called “ombudsmen for the future.” The idea is that individuals might be appointed to act as voices for future stakeholders (Beckman & Uggla, 2016.) The country of Hungary, for instance, has famously established an Office of the Hungarian Ombudsman for Future Generations. Although such ombudsmen lack the power to sanction, compel, or incentivize via traditional means, their ability to take advantage of soft forms of influence and persuasion might still make a practical difference in decision making.

Another possibility is that decision makers could simply be induced to imagine the future and how their current decisions might affect future people, animals, and ecosystems. Presenting decision makers with members of an imaginary future generation, for example, has been shown in lab contexts to encourage pro-environmental choices that would benefit future generations (Kamijo et al., 2017). In one study, 60% of participants selected a policy option that promoted sustainability when future generations were made salient, versus just 28% when not so prompted (Kamijo et al., 2017). This suggests that merely increasing the salience of future generations in this way may make a substantial difference.

Although these approaches may help in increasing the salience and power of future stakeholders, we should note that cognitive barriers to imagining the future continue to operate; a major psychological battle in dealing with future impacts is to get decision makers to notice that they exist in the first place. This is a problem largely of low salience and is subject to all the phenomena potentially affecting subjective salience—but it is also amenable to solutions that increase salience.

The problem is not just cognitive, of course—even if salience or other problems we have discussed so far are addressed, people may not care about future impacts, in the same way that they may not care about other externalities that they generate. We take up this problem in the next section. The tendency to feel numb or uncaring may increase with diffusion through both time and space. And finally, even if people notice future impacts, and even if they care, recall that well-meaning people may simply get what is best for the future wrong. Even ombudsmen for future generations may suffer from problems with hedonic forecasting, for instance, as may well-meaning policy makers who have been primed to think about future generations.