The Environmental Republic

Despite its flaws, America is still the most successful example of self-government in recorded history.

President Joe Biden’s administration is working hard to reclaim America’s role as a global leader in sustainable development. But success will depend on whether it can lay the political foundation for a new relationship between society and the environment.

Activists and policymakers alike are demanding more investment in technologies to reduce the environmental footprint of economic activities, limit extraction of finite resources, and curb pollution. There is a long list of “solutions” on offer — from new energy sources and carbon capture and sequestration to the oldest technology of all: trees. But the biggest challenge is not the technology; it is political institutions.

Despite its flaws, America is still the most successful example of self-government in recorded history. But as a model republic, it faces the challenge of accommodating and reconciling the wide diversity of its citizens’ imagined futures. Finding common ground between the poles of progressive techno-utopianism and reactionary rural romanticism will not be easy. The key is to produce a synthesis that can sustain a civic contract strong enough to survive both another industrial revolution and environmental changes on a scale beyond anything human civilisations have experienced since becoming sedentary 10,000 years ago.

In this quest for a new settlement, our relationship with water offers a useful guide. Ever since the shift from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural settlements — when people effectively chose to stand still in a world of moving water — human institutions have evolved in a dialectical relationship with the environment. While nature brought floods, storms, and droughts, we devised ways to weather those conditions, extracting surpluses from parched landscapes and harnessing rivers for transportation and power.

The modern republican project emerged from this older dialectic between human civilisation and nature. It has been mediated by medieval jurists, re-interpreted by early-modern humanists, and disrupted by generations of radicals — from the eighteenth-century revolutionaries to the twentieth-century anti-imperialists — demanding enfranchisement.

As Thomas Paine observed, a central concern of the newly independent American republic was always going to be its unique territory and physical landscape. Bestriding an entire continent, the United States has had to learn to manage a wide array of geographic conditions, all while striking a balance between individual liberty and collective agency.

In 1784, for example, George Washington incorporated the Potomac Company to pursue inland navigation beyond the Appalachians, thereby preventing those territories from becoming too dependent on the port of Spanish-controlled New Orleans. But this response to a geographical problem created a political one. Shipping on the Potomac routed commerce across state lines, and thus required freedom of navigation. But the deeply libertarian Articles of Confederation contained no provision to arbitrate commercial disputes.

To settle the matter, Washington convened a meeting at his estate on the banks of the Potomac, where those in attendance produced the eponymous Mount Vernon Compact. Then, James Madison organised a similar conference of all the states in Annapolis, where delegates concluded that a constitutional convention should be held in Philadelphia. A problem of navigation had turned into one of governance and, ultimately, of constitutional settlement.