Needs and Wants

Is Environmentalism a Luxury?

The science that most directly studies human needs is psychology. For example, Abraham Maslow, one of the founders of the subdiscipline of humanistic psychology, recognized a hierarchy of needs, beginning with physiological needs (such as for food) at the base, and progressing to needs for safety and security, love and belonging, esteem, and finally, self-actualization. He classified all but the last as “deficiency needs,” the absence of which inhibits growth and development, and postulated that these deficiency needs had to be met before people could devote themselves to self-actualization, a “growth need.” Other psychologists conceptualize needs somewhat differently, but it is important to note that “nonmaterial” needs are widely recognized as basic to healthy human development.

Much cruder hierarchical models of human needs than Maslow's are at the basis of claims that the desire for environmental protections is a “postmaterial” want that becomes important only once a society has reached a certain level of affluence. According to this conception, environmentalism is a luxury that the poor cannot afford; they are served best if pollution of air, water, and land is condoned as a necessary price of progress. Hence, the siting of polluting industries in poor countries and neighborhoods helps both the rich (who can indulge in NIMBYism) and the poor (who gain by an increase in employment opportunities).

Critics of this conception point out that even (and especially) the poorest people need such things as friendship, social solidarity, and a sense of identity. For example, Manfred Max-Neef developed a matrix of human needs for subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, idleness, creation, identity, and freedom, each of which involves being (e.g., the subsistence need of being healthy), having (e.g., the need to have peace of mind as a part of idleness), doing (e.g., the need to participate by cooperating and dissenting), and interacting (e.g., the need for a setting in which one belongs as part of identity). He posits these needs to be nonhierarchical and finite. According to this conception, there is no necessary reason why “material” needs should be prioritized over “nonmaterial” needs; hence, for example, we should not wait until needs for food and shelter are met before talking about the need for a clean environment.

An Environmentalism of the Poor

The very distinction between “material” and “nonmaterial” needs is erroneous, however, in the sense that material needs include natural resources that are not provided by the market. Thus, as argued by Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martinez-Alier, there is an “environmentalism of the poor,” which focuses on the needs of the poor for access to resources such as clean water and air, fuelwood, fodder, medicinal plants, grazing land, and fertile soils. If these resources are taken away from them and managed for the benefit of elite interests (e.g., timber for the wood industry), the results typically include the intensification (or creation) of poverty and unsustainable resource management.

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