Listening to Democracy Now! for today, as well as the satirical banter on the Daily Show and Colbert Report, each with their snippets from other news reports on the growing oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico, I stumbled across an old memory. Now, I am neither a classicist nor much of an historian, but I do remember examining the Code of Hammurabi in something like freshman year in college. (I, of course, knew a little bit from history classes and television shows, but not much.) The Code, it turns out spends much of its length articulating rules for management and mismanagement of agricultural land. Hammurabi ruled over a land ruled by rivers, their floods, and the irrigation systems that supported a vast agrarian landscape. With these irrigated plains, the region was able to feed the early city-states of the region and if they failed, the hunger of the citizens fell on farmers and rulers.
Therefore, having articulated rules about responsibility for creeks and channels, their management, and the repercussions of poor maintenance makes a good deal of sense. First, Hammurabi would want to make sure his citizens are fed to curry favor and to have a generally healthy population. Second, if their is a grain shortage, pointing at someone to blame gets the heat off of the ruler or the grain merchant. If Joe's crappy channels flood into Margie's field and destroy her crop, guaranteeing that Joe pays for the damages is key to encouraging sound maintenance, maintaining crop yields, and having someone punished for damages to the commonwealth of the community. This rule of society--even more than the sentences for theft or battery--strengthens the infrastructure of the community itself, which relies on the regular success of the farming communities.
Wendell Berry likes to point out that regardless of claims of an "industrial age" or "information age," we are still, in truth, an agrarian society. Any civilization, as it is generally defined, is an agrarian society because without agriculture, there cannot be any civilization. (Note: This is not to deride the rich cultures of hunter-gatherer and nomadic societies, which I can argue--if inadequately--provide a counter-example to such an accepted definition of civilization.) With our draconian legislation on interstate and international trade, the highly intertwined development of global economic systems, and the rapid communications network encircling the planet, well, we can lose sight of the farms and farmers that feed us.
In the Gulf of Mexico, we can find a strong, long-lived economy based on seafood, particularly shrimping. This is founded on a rich ecology that has been worn down by seaside development, agricultural effluent from the Mississippi River, and industrial pollutants from oil and gas byproducts. Regardless, many families have continued to live like their parents and grandparents by fishing and shrimping in these waters.
What we are now engaged in is a failure to appreciate the ways in which we feed ourselves in an "industrial" age. Economists may happily argue that oil is worth a good deal more than shrimping on the market, therefore the risks and damages resulting from drilling, refining, and spills are worthwhile. That is, we can conceive of two economies set in competition to one another: An ecologically based fishing economy for feeding people and a geologically (though also a sort of ecological) based industrial economy. In an effort to encourage economic vigor, the legislation has supported the industrial as opposed fishing economy, resulting in rules like corporate payout caps for environmental incidents. In real economic terms, this doesn't make sense; it means favoring commodity production to sustenance production, driving cars over feeding ourselves.
In an economically simple society such as ancient Babylon, such an oversight would be impossible. The fuel that sustains our bodies is the same fuel that sustains the means of production and commodity production (whatever few commodities there may be). In a complicated economic landscape like our own, it is the result of overdrawing on an industrial system without proper recognition of the food systems that allow the latter to exist. If you can imagine it, the British Petroleum leak is very much a poorly managed "field" spilling into another "field," just as described in the Code of Hammurabi. Unfortunately, the rules for these economies are not plainly articulated in any way that necessitates the reimbursement on damages to the damaged economy. This is in part because the offending "field" is composed of toxic chemicals, not to mention the polluting "clean-up" chemicals as well, thus greatly increasing the subsequent damages. These damages are not a single year with some subsequent maintenance costs (rebuilding channel walls, levees, bridges, etc.), but ecologies that will require years, even decades to recover.
The management of damages and reimbursement is one of those generally accepted roles of government. It was decided by Hammurabi and his councilors almost four thousand years ago, and ought to be obvious today. Unfortunately, we are better and better at complicating these damages across multiple, overlapping and often competing economies. I use the term economies broadly here because economics is one of the best sets of tools for incorporating the inputs and outputs of social, environmental, and agriculture systems. That is, it recognizes the mutualist and competitive mechanisms at play when the arithmetic is done inclusively. The concern here is that legislation and prosecution will continue to wain in the wake of sheer corporate force despite strong ethical and economic arguments for corporate responsibility.
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