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Published in:
2016 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
8. The Environmental Legacy of James Madison: Pursuing Stability in a World of Limits
Author : Franklin Kalinowski
Published in: America's Environmental Legacies
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US
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Abstract
James Madison was the quintessential liberal. He believed humans have inherent rights, but he also feared that human passion would make the security of those rights fragile. The solution was to use Constitutional checks to afford some safety for human rights. There were, however, environmental prerequisites for this bureaucratic steadiness. Forcing compromise as the only means to achieve effective policy required an ever-expanding outlay of goods, services, property, and the other spoils for which individuals contend. But Madison had read and grasped the full implications of Malthus’ 1798 Essay on the Principles of Population. Humans live in a world of limits, and all attempts to overcome those limits were mere “palliatives” that could only postpone the day of reckoning when exponentially increasing economic production, human populations, or territorial expansion must cease. Always the perennial pessimist, Madison understood that all his Constitution did was to buy time for America.