In Which the Town Comes for My Garden

I’m a native plant gardener. I’ve removed all of my back lawn and replaced it with native trees, shrubs, vines, wildflowers, ferns, and grass and grass-like species, and I’ve removed most of my front lawn and done the same, apart from some mown paths. Why? Because native plants are better for the environment. Our wildlife, from insects to birds, coevolved with these plants and are well adapted to using them for survival. Alien plants often require special help to survive (watering, fertilizing, spraying with pesticides, none of which I do), or else they take over because they lack their natural predators to keep them in check. My native garden has attracted many species of birds, including things like flycatchers that one rarely sees in cities. The garden is awash in bees, moths, and butterflies the entire summer. Here are some pictures of the gardens:

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Today I received a notice of code violations. Supposedly someone complained about my front yard, and now the town is giving me two days (!) to remedy the violations, or the town will come and mow the garden down and bill me for the pleasure.

The first violation is straightforward and easily dealt with. The town prohibits trees and shrubs from obstructing vision from private driveways and requires them to be no more than three feet in height. No problem – I try to keep the shrubs by the sidewalk trimmed for public convenience, but some of them are as tall as five feet. I’ll give them a bad haircut now, and then in the fall, as per usual, I will cut them to the ground (these species respond well to this kind of hard pruning).

It’s the next citation that I find very troubling:

According to the notice, “weed and plant growth” in excess of 10 inches is prohibited. Well, that would prohibit pretty much any garden, wouldn’t it? But they clearly misrepresented the text of the ordinance, the definitions in which read as follows:

GRASS, WEEDS or PLANT GROWTH
All grasses, annual plants, trees or vegetation that are harmful to the public welfare, including stumps, roots, filth, garbage, or trash. The term “grass, weeds and plant growth” shall not include cultivated flowers, healthy trees, shrubs, or gardens.

NOXIOUS WEEDS
Plant growth deemed by the Town of Tonawanda Code Enforcement Officer as potentially dangerous to the public welfare, or such plant growth that is an unattractive public nuisance or grows in an undesirable location.

In short, my garden is fully exempted from this ordinance. Furthermore, the code enforcement officer followed the wrong procedure in citing my property. From the ordinance:

B. Written notice may be given by registered mail addressed to the owner of the parcel of real property in question together with posting at the parcel of real property in question or by personal delivery to the owner. Service shall be deemed complete upon the deposit of the registered mailing in a postpaid envelope and the posting at the real property in question and, if by personal delivery, upon the delivery of notice in person to the owner of the parcel of real property.

C. Such notice shall specify the violation(s) as determined by the Code Enforcement Officer and shall direct the owner of the parcel of real property in question to remedy the violation(s) and bring the parcel of real property into compliance with the provisions of this chapter within 10 calendar days of service of notice.

The notice did not come by registered mail; it came by regular mail. The letter does not give me 10 days from the date of service; it gives me 7 days from the date on the letter (just 2 days from the date I received it).

I believe I am on firm legal ground. The concern, however, is that the town will come and mow down my gardens without due process. This has happened all over the country and in Canada. Here’s one example from Illinois, and here’s another from Toronto. The Environmental Protection Agency even provides advice to homeowners on fighting their town governments!

From a utilitarian perspective, government should probably be subsidizing my work rather than prohibiting it. I’m providing benefits to the community and the environment. I’m still optimistic that this will end well, that I’ll be able to get in touch with either the inspector or the mayor, and the town will come to their senses. If not… watch this space.

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Greens and Nuclear Power

Environmentalists are coming around to the idea of nuclear power.  This is good news – though we should be just as critical of any rent-seeking by the nuclear power industry as we would of other “green” technology companies and their allies in the government.

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The Ethics of the Prisoner’s Dilemma

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a concept used to model a strategic interaction in which actors choosing their behaviors rationally according to their own self-interest make everyone worse off than they could have been otherwise. This particular “game” is used both to understand failures of cooperation such as arms races and ethnic warfare and to prescribe particular solutions designed to elicit cooperation. The key feature of the game is that, when the game is played only once, no matter what another player does (cooperating with me or trying to exploit me), I am better off trying to exploit the other player – so in the end, every player exploits rather than cooperates, and they are all worse off than they would have been could someone have “forced” them to cooperate. What has been less often analyzed, to my knowledge, is the ethics of the Prisoner’s Dilemma game.

Whether one has a duty to cooperate with others in Prisoner’s Dilemma-like situations is an important question both for policy and for daily life. Take the question of one’s duties toward the environment. The environment is in many aspects a public good subject to Prisoner’s Dilemma problems. Clean air, clean water, and biodiversity are benefits that we all enjoy, and from which non-contributors cannot feasibly be excluded. Therefore, people have an incentive to take less care of the environment than they would could the environment be privatized. Whether other people “do their part” or not, I’m better off not trying to contribute.

So let’s take some examples of things one could do for the benefit of the environment: eating less meat; polluting less by, e.g., driving less; propagating native species and destroying invasive species; reducing, reusing, and recycling; not littering; not spraying pesticides. Assume for the sake of argument that we will all benefit if everyone did these things. Do we then have a duty to do them? Would it be wrong not to do them?

I’ll derive my view from a very simple starting point: One has a duty not to exploit others, but one does not have a duty to allow oneself to be exploited. In the simple Prisoner’s Dilemma game, each player has only two options: cooperate (and be exploited) or defect (and exploit). In real life, however, there are different gradations of action, from, e.g., walking or riding a bicycle everywhere to driving a Hummer. Moreover, cooperation isn’t actually zero, and therefore cooperation doesn’t always entail being exploited. These considerations imply that some degree of cooperation in Prisoner’s Dilemma situations might actually be morally mandatory, but that devoting your life to providing public goods for others would not be.

Now, the latter part of the starting point could be made even stronger. Let’s say that not only does one not have a duty to allow oneself to be exploited, but one does not have a general duty to sacrifice one’s own interests for the benefit of others. Then, the benefits of the existing scheme of mutual cooperation, including your own, must be greater to you, individually, than the costs of your individual contribution, for that contribution to be morally mandatory. To see this, suppose it were otherwise. Suppose that your efforts on behalf of the environment, say, actually made you worse off than you would be if no one did what you did, including yourself. If that were the case, then you would be making yourself worse off for the benefit of others. That would count as a praiseworthy and supererogatory sacrifice, but not a moral requirement.

So here are my tentative conclusions. If your efforts, combined with the really existing efforts of everyone else, make you better off (taking opportunity costs into account) relative to a situation in which no one undertakes effort, then you have a moral duty to make those efforts. To do otherwise would be to free-ride on the efforts of others and thus to exploit them, which is wrong. If this condition is not satisfied, however, you do not have a duty to contribute – but it would still be praiseworthy to do so, unless the effort is clearly hopeless, in which case the impartial observer is more likely to have pity on your madness than praise for it. I actually think this is a rather strong conclusion and implies that we have a duty to undertake some (but not extraordinary) positive action on behalf of the environment, for instance. What remains interesting and unusual about the Prisoner’s Dilemma is that it models a set of cases for which the rightness of one person’s actions apparently depends on what others are doing.

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