Environmentalism and Subsidiarity

Fair warning: this blog post is about a concept ... and a nuanced one at that. It's called "subsidiarity." I ran across mention of it in a recent column by Washington Post op-ed writer Michael Gerson, "Rick Santorum and the return of compassionate conservatism."

The column lovingly caresses the candidacy and ideology of GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator. I want to make clear at the outset that I do not endorse Santorum. Repeat, do not. For one thing, I despise his opposition to same-sex marriage, to a woman's right to a safe abortion, and to the use of contraceptives to forestall pregnancy.

I am a liberal Democrat. I could not in good conscience vote for any of the Republican hopefuls. But that's not what this post is about. Rather, what interests me is this passage in Gerson's column:

The Catholic (and increasingly Protestant) approach to social ethics asserts that liberty is made possible by strong social institutions — families, communities, congregations — that prepare human beings for the exercise of liberty by teaching self-restraint, compassion and concern for the public good. Oppressive, overreaching government undermines these value-shaping institutions. Responsible government can empower them — say, with a child tax credit or a deduction for charitable giving — as well as defend them against the aggressions of extreme poverty or against “free markets” in drugs or obscenity.


This is not statism; it is called subsidiarity. In this view, needs are best served by institutions closest to individuals. But when those institutions require help or protection, higher-order institutions should intervene. So when state governments imposed Jim Crow laws, the federal government had a duty to overturn them. When a community is caught in endless economic depression and drained of social capital, government should find creative ways to empower individuals and charities — maybe even prison ministries that change lives from the inside out.



This is not “big government” conservatism. It is a form of limited government less radical and simplistic than the libertarian account. A compassionate-conservative approach to governing would result in a different and smaller federal role — using free-market ideas to strengthen families and communities, rather than constructing centralized bureaucracies. It rejects, however, a utopian belief in unfettered markets that would dramatically increase the sum of suffering.

The kernel of the subsidiarity idea is: " ... needs are best served by institutions closest to individuals. But when those institutions require help or protection, higher-order institutions should intervene." And so there should be: " ...  a different and smaller federal role — using free-market ideas to strengthen families and communities, rather than constructing centralized bureaucracies."

Subsidiarity, by the way, is an established principle of Catholic teaching which says "that human affairs are best handled at the lowest possible level, closest to the affected pesons."

Subsidiarity and the Environment

Dealing with environmental problems today seems to me to require an approach that honors and respects subsidiarity. By that I mean that we need to build our responses to environmental threats from the ground up, not from the top down.

Inner Harbor, Baltimore, Maryland

Here's a case in point. In a recent opinion piece in The Baltimore Sun, "A swimmable, fishable harbor by 2020: Why not?", Michael D. Hankin, who is chairman of the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore, writes about what it will take to clean up Baltimore's Inner Harbor.

Baltimore is one of America's oldest port cities, with access to the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean via the Patapsco River. Nestled right at its heart is an array of harbors, the inmost being the Inner Harbor, site of the tourist-attracting HarborPlace. But, beautiful as the scene may be, the water itself is polluted by sewage and storm runoff after every heavy rain. Just as the Chesapeake itself is in sore need of cleaning up, so too are the Inner Harbor and the Patapsco River.

But how can that happen?

Answer: there needs to be an active partnership of like-minded entities: "a coalition of businesses, nonprofit organizations, city agencies, and citizens," as the Healthy Harbor website puts it. Healthy Harbor is the name of an initiative undertaken by Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore. Only by virtue of such a coalition do we have a chance to address the city's sewage/runoff problem in all of its causes and effects.

This is the bottommost layer of the subsidiarity cake. But as I wrote in Dead Zone in Our Chesapeake Bay, there have to be other layers as well. The city's problem with water pollution slots into that of the entire Chesapeake region, which is killing the bay. The region is made up of six states and the District of Columbia, and all of those mid-sized governmental entities have to be on board with a "pollution diet" that fairly distributes the burden of cleanup costs among them.

The pollution diet itself was the work of the Environmental Protection Agency, at the federal level. Recent history has shown that the states themselves were unable to negotiate an effective response to the dying bay on their own. The EPA had to step in as the top layer of the subsidiarity layer cake.

But this is not the nuanced approach to environmental issues that we hear from our loudest political voices. Instead we hear, at one extreme, "kill the EPA," and at the other (that of President Obama) a lot of tacking this way and that, with no clear sense of direction.