Why Not NIMBY?

Abstract

This paper examines a particularly egregious example of a NIMBY (‘Not in my backyard’) claim and considers three proposals for explaining what about that claim might be ethically problematic: (1) The NIMBY claimant is being selfish or self-serving; (2) The NIMBY claim cannot be morally justified, because respecting everyone's NIMBY claims leaves communities worse off; and (3) if policymakers were to defer to people's NIMBY claims, they would end up perpetuating environmental injustices. We argue that these proposals fail to explain why there is anything wrong with the NIMBY claim per se.

Acknowledgements

We thank Lauren Hartzell, Alan Hazlett, Bryan Norton, Andrew Pessin, Ron Sandler, Brett Werner, and an anonymous referee for this journal for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We are also grateful for the feedback we received from the audience at a session sponsored by the International Society for Environmental Ethics (ISEE) at the Central APA meeting in Chicago, February 2009.

Notes

Notes

¹ For more information on the Cape Wind project, see www.capewind.org (accessed 9 June 2009). For some arguments resembling those offered by Robert Kennedy, Jr., see the website of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, www.saveoursound.org (accessed 9 June 2009).

² In January 2009, the Cape Wind Project received a favorable environmental impact review from the Minerals Management Service of the US Department of the Interior. In May, the project received the necessary permits from the Massachusetts Energy Facilities Siting Board. Interestingly, US President Obama and Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy, two political allies, found themselves on opposite sides of this issue.

³ Norton and Hannon (1997, 1998) see a need for philosophers to help out with these policy-related questions, and in recent years there has been a larger movement within environmental philosophy that emphasizes relevance to public policy (Frodeman, 2006).

⁴ This distinction between genuine NIMBY and NIABY-like NIMBY is very close to a distinction that Norton and Hannon (1997, p. 244) draw between NIMBY A (‘You may not do x in my backyard; therefore, do x in someone else's backyard’) and NIMBY B (‘You may not do x in my backyard; furthermore, if you cannot find some other community that democratically chooses to accept x, then x will cease’). One difference is that Norton and Hannon do not explicitly treat NIMBY claims as expressions of preference orderings. They seem to treat them as moral claims (‘You may not …’). Hannon and Norton also claim that NIMBY B (which is closer to what we are calling NIABY-like NIMBY) reflects ‘a fuller sense of place.’ We find this claim somewhat puzzling, in part because the notion of ‘fuller sense of place’ is not clearly defined. Do you have a fuller sense of place when you care about a larger geographical area (which is what Hannon and Norton seem to suggest), or do you have a fuller sense of place in virtue of caring more deeply about a specific area?

⁵ In some ways, our view is very close to the generally pro-NIMBY outlook of Hermansson (2007). However, one problem with her discussion is that she seems to assume that all NIMBY claims are motivated by self-interest. She does not consider questions about geographical partiality, which is odd, since NIMBY claims motivated by concern for place seem like the easiest ones to sympathize with.

⁶ One helpful guide to the literature on sense of place is the bibliography maintained by Bruce Janz, at the University of Central Florida, available online at http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~janzb/place/geography.htm (accessed 13 January 2009). Our notion of geographical partiality is intentionally thin. All that we mean to capture is the idea that people care more about some places than about others. This runs together the rich variety of meanings that places can have for people, as well as the variety of different ways in which people can care about places. But our main concern here is just to make a point which may be obvious to many writers in the sense of place tradition: NIMBY claims are often motivated by concern for place, and there is nothing morally vicious about that.

⁷ A less developed version of this case appears in Williams (1975, p. 214) where he is responding to Charles Fried's discussion of partiality and fairness (Fried, 1970).

⁸ Norton and Hannon (1997, p. 243) go further to defend the empirical claim that ‘a preference for the near is inherent in human behavior.’ At times they seem to suggest that we are geographically partial by nature, and that strict geographical impartiality would be impossible for creatures like us. For the purposes of this paper we will not take a stand on this issue. We see it as closely related to the question whether it is psychologically possible for someone to be strictly impartial with respect to persons.

⁹ Norton and Hannon (1997, pp. 239–240) give a nice example of positive environmental activism motivated by concern for place: Bruce Hannon's campaign to oppose the construction of a dam on the Sangamon River, in Central Illinois, thus protecting nearby Allerton Park.

¹⁰ See Williams (1976, p. 214).