ABSTRACT
Environmental and land-use regulation can be complex, tedious, and dry. It can seem excessively technical and far removed from the great questions of social and political life. As laboratories for finding everyday people grappling with the great questions of social life, a hearing at the local land-use commission or environmental review board is hard to beat. The language of environmental disputes mirrors the debate over the comparative merits of social arrangements, or cultures, based on three fundamental values: liberty, equality, and order. Egalitarianism and hierarchy share an appreciation of the group, and it is in these cultures that environmentalism is most at home. In egalitarian environmentalism, the natural world has intrinsic value, and efforts may be made to put it on an equal footing with people. Modern mainstream environmentalism with its reliance on expertise and the anticipation and regulation of all environmental effects of human actions is also rich with the language and the logic of hierarchy.
