Return to Left Curve no. 21 Table of Contents
by
Peter Laska
Thirty years ago the philosophy of ecology did not exist, ecology itself was a little known science; and the radical environmental movement, spurred by revelations in books like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, was just getting under way. Today the literature on ecological topics is enormous and the theoretical work devoted to the ecological idea and its implications is large and growing. Each of the last three years has seen the publication of an anthology of ecological philosophy: Carolyn Merchant's Ecology, Key Concepts in Critical Theory (Humanities Press, 1994), Deep Ecology for the 21st Century (Shambhala, 1995), a book of readings edited by George Sessions, and Minding Nature, the Philosophers of Ecology (The Guilford Press, 1996) edited by David Macauley. Earlier, two introductory surveys of the main eco-philosophical positions appeared: Radical Ecology (Routledge, 1992) by Carolyn Merchant, and Green Political Thought (Unwin Hyman, 1990) by Andrew Dobson. Mention should also be made of David Gates' Earth Rising, Ecological Belief in an Age of Science (Oregon State U. Press, 1989), which carries forward Donald Worster's excellent history of the science of ecology (Nature's Economy, Sierra Club Books, 1977, Anchor, 1979) into the Eighties and discusses key philosophical concepts like holism, cybernetics, and ecological ethics.
My reason for noting the last two works has todo with the fact that the concept of ecology as a science is missing from the above three anthologies. The Merchant anthology does have a section on "Post-modern Science," but the selections by new-paradigm advocate Fritjof Capra, and quantum-theorist David Bohm are concerned with revolutionizing science as a whole, while those by Lorenz (on the Butterfly effect) and Prigogine deal with chaos theory. The remaining selection is a James Lovelock essay on his speculative Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the earth is a living planet in the sense of being a single organism, "the largest living thing in the solar system." At its present level of knowledge the biological science of ecology cannot confirm or disconfirm Lovelock's hypothesis. As presently constituted the science of ecology is pressing against the limits of the modern scientific view of nature and mind, but has not yet pushed beyond them.
As a science, ecology studies the interrelationships of living things in their abiotic environments. What this science has discovered is that living arrangements in the earth household (now called ecosystems) are enormously complex. In a now classic work [A Sand County Almanac, 1949] Aldo Leopold wrote that "The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism." Leopold was referring to the fact that life-forms on the planet have co-evolved in complex equilibria we now call ecosystems. An ecosystem with its various niches is an example of a complex evolved equilibrium. To observe life, therefore, in one of its existing arrangements, is to witness the result of evolutionary adjustments that recede into the dim mists of geologic time. The striking emphasis that Leopold placed on this discovery was due in part to the reckless manner in which the human species disrupts these age-old arrangements. As long as humanity's disruptive intervention was localized, the biotic impact was not permanent. Human groups moved on and the ecosystems recovered their former equilibra or formed new ones. But in the 20th century as industrial civilization went global and the ecological consequences became known, the perception of a threshold having been crossed began to appear, as is evident in the writings of Leopold and others.
Subsequent developments have proven this perception correct. Global warming and upper atmosphere ozone depletion (not to mention the recently discovered decline of male fertility linked possiblywith the wide dispersal of man-made chemicals that mimic estrogen), testify to the folly of intervening in nature's complexities when harmful outcomes cannot be foreseen. Indeed, should it come to pass, there will be grotesque and colossal irony in the actions of a species that, in the effort to make their houses and cars more comfortable, made it unwise to step outside of them. Yet despite these ominous developments the high tech prosthetics now employed in daily living within global capitalist monoculture continue to multiply.
The result is a kind of dream sequence or collec- tive hallucination in which dogmatic skepticism comes back into fashion as a way of maintaining one's grip. In a recent visit to an opthamologist -- note that this is a science-trained M.D. -- I brought up the question of UV protection and asked about the incidence of cataracts. To my surprise I was met with a wall of resistance, even outright denial that upper ozone depletion had been validated. On reflection I realized that I shouldn't have been surprised. Global capitalist monoculture possesses a massive "ethico-practical" inertia. The benefits of conformity cash out in terms of security, comfort, convenience and diversion; the basic materials of "the good life," and ominous deficits turning up as a consequence of the way these basics are produced and consumed is as yet an insufficient incentive to mass non-conformity, even of a purely intellectual sort.
One of the notable consequences of the discovery of ecological complexity has been the development of a rupture between physis and nomos, between the truths of science and the practical maxims of everyday life. My encounter with the skeptical opthamologist is an instance of the defensive self-deception and willful ignorance that passes for rational behavior in the comfortable capitopia's of monoculture. Having rendered "impracticable" every form of indigenous culture based on shared production for use, the juggernaut of bourgeois clones continues to press its commodified life-styles on the rest of humanity even to the point of rejecting the discoveries made by means of the veryscience and technology its privileged way of life depends on. Interestingly, this is a tactic previously limited to those religious fundamentalists who drive around in the latest top-of-the-line sport utility vehicles with bumper stickers absolving them of all responsibility should the rapture come.
The "post-modern" cleft between physis and nomos rivals its historical predecessors, the Ancient Greek "enlightenment" and the modern Enlightenment of the 18th century, in dialectical passion. This is evident in the prickly rhetoric and strongly ideological bent of the essays collected in the above-mentioned anthologies. Central to all this writing is the question of how to alter the navigational course of the supersociety whose origins lie in the link-up of modern science and technology with the mechanisms of the market. In this bourgeois marriage of convenience science is the subordinate spouse, and the household philosophy is an Epicureanism without ethics called "economic liberalism." Whereas in the previous age the acquisitive life was viewed as contemptible and unchristian, economic liberalism carried through a transvaluation by affirming that social good would magically accrue from the selfish pursuit of private gain. In this way, "bourgeois individualist society created a new, categorically opposite mental structure" (Lucien Goldmann, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 1968). Reason, once an essential part of ethics, was downgraded to an instrumental role in "getting and spending," while ethics was marginalized to the realm of feelings and emotions. Thus were unleashed the chaotic human energies that created the mindless juggernaut of Supersociety.
Under the control of market imperatives conformism is self-enforcing. Ethical discussions, discussions of "the whole," for example, cannot take place in policy-making circles, because "the whole" is understood to be no more than the sum of its parts. And the parts are not equal but ranked in a hierarchy of power and privilege. Whatever decision eventuates must satisfy the generic imperative of profit to the parts and the specific requirements of percentages to the hierarchy of ranks. And under such a guidance system there is now a growing sense among ecology watchers that tragedy is inevitable, that as Supersociety lurches into the 21st century, its central article of faith looks more and more like a prescription for disaster. In the "Last Words" section of his Divided Planet, the Ecology of Rich and Poor (1996), Tom Athanasiou writes, "Our tragedy lies in the richness of the available alternatives, and in the fact that so few of them are ever seriously explored."
The main fault line running through the ideological terrain covered by the three above-mentioned anthologies is that between "biocentrism" (also "ecocentrism") and "anthropocentrism,'' or "humanism." This ideological stand-off has its sharpest exchange in Deep Ecology's colloquy with radical activist Murray Bookchin, who is co-founder of the Institute of Social Ecology. The Deep Ecology position has also been the subject of attacks by Marxist Ecologists and Eco-feminists. Of the three anthologies the Merchant book has the most representative selection of these various positions. The Sessions anthology is a thorough presentation of Deep Ecology views, with an excellent introduction by the editor. It also contains a large chunk of writings by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, whose famous 1973 essay making a distinction between "shallow" and "deep" ecology is reprinted. The Minding Nature anthology, which is a collection of secondary writings, is the least representative. With the exception of Heidegger, the philosophers commented on would all be classed by Deep Ecologists as "anthropocentric" in outlook. Editor Macauley is therefore speaking somewhat parochially in his introduction when he writes that, "Contemporary ecological philosophy finds origins and expressions in both critical theory proper and the Frankfurt School (founded in 1923), which revised Marxism...."
The key term for the Deep Ecology position is "biocentric" or "ecocentric." This value concept, the polar opposite of "anthropocentric," cashes out as a mental attitude toward wilderness. Unfortunately, Deep Ecology is not of a single mind on the value of wilderness. On the one hand Arne Naess develops the idea of intrinsic value in support of the concept of a biotic right to exist. On the other hand, 19th century writers Henry David Thoreau and George Perkins Marsh are cited by Sessions (pp. 164-65) as ecocentrists -- Thoreau because he claimed that in wilderness was the preservation of the world, and Marsch because he argued that the complexity of the evolved equilibria comprising life on the planet presents too great a problem for human intelligence to solve, and that therefore, we can never know how wide a circle of disturbance we produce in the harmonies of nature when we throw the smallest stone in the ocean of organic life" (quoted in Worster, p. 269). Now the latter interpretation of the value of wilderness is consistent with an anthropocentric-wise use policy of limited intervention, or what Sessions in his introduction calls "anthropocentric survival environmentalism." But when we pare away the metaphysics of intrinsic value and an expanded human identity with the rest nature, there seems to be no substantial difference between Deep Ecology and survival environmentalism.
The difference between biocentric and anthropocentric diminishes even further when we make a distinction between "wise" anthropocentrism, such as survival environmentalism, and "unwise" anthropocentrism which rejects the idea of rational limits to human interventionism. For biocentrism and "wise" anthropocentrism humanity has evolved as a part of the larger biotic matrix and remains dependent on it as part to whole. Ontologically this relationship is not subject to change. The unwise anthropocentric idea that this environing biotic complexity might be managed or brought under the stewardship of human science and technology is seen as a fundamental error. A largely unexplored corollary to the limits of intervention thesis is that it is not just a technical limitation, but a social-psychological and ethical one as well. Technological superiority does not contribute to ethical development. On the contrary, a good case can be made that the reverse holds. The more complex the technological prosthesis, the more social life is programmed and the alienated individual subordinated into hierarchies in which conformity is disguised as rationality.
This thesis is vehemently opposed by Murry Bookchin in his recent diatribe against all forms of "antihumanism" (satirically titled, Re-Echanting Humanity, Cassell, 1995). Bookchin takes it for granted that technological rationality "fosters cooperation, empathy, a sense of responsibility for the biosphere, and new ideas of community and consociation." To Bookchin's way of thinking, we can have a complex technological society without the capitalist self-aggrandizement and plunder. We somehow remove the motor of capital accumulation but keep the machine of progress running. The fact he overlooks, however, is that the machine is a social machine, that the successful application of complex science and technology to production has brought with it a hierarchical organization, bureaucracy (as noted by Weber) in its public (governmental) and private (business enterprise) forms. That is, complexity of science and technology in production brings with it social organizations that are the antithesis of "freely associated producers."
Bookchin labels any questioning of complexity, any proposed reduction in technological dependence, as irrational "animalization" and "primitivism." By contrast, his own view is that "a crucial function of culture is to render it possible for humanity to rationally and creatively intervene in the world and improve upon existing conditions." The problem with this is that reason and creativity are ecologically empty slogans without a concept of limits. What percentage of the earth's existing species, for example, does rational and creative intervention entitle us to sacrifice in the interest of improving existing conditions? Surely, even a hard-line anthropocentrist like Bookchin will at some point concede the wisdom of wu wei, the Taoist principle of non-intervention. And at that point he will have conceded the core truth of the biocentrist and wise anthropocentrist position.
The problem is that Bookchin and others, like Habermas, cannot see beyond the social machine, but continue to think of cultural complexity (with complex technology as a key component) as the only alternative. By the same mystification that Hegel used, what is, is rational, because it is historically "mediated." Paradoxically, the approach of global necessity for major revolutionary change in humanity's metabolism with nature finds Bookchin, who was once a leading spokesman for that possibility, strengthening his Hegelianism at the expense of his utopianism. It is time to cash in the surplus value created by social labor, to translate it into abundance for the global masses. But under the existing criterion of abundance enjoyed by the elites of global capitalist monoculture that would mean the degradation, possibly the collapse of the bio-sphere. The global NPP (net primary production by nature) will not support anything like an earth household of 6 billion human beings living at that culturally defined level of abundance. Does that entail abandoning the idea of a utopia of abundance, a Hegelian postponement while complexity is enhanced still further toward the imagined goal of total domination of nature, or does it entail revisioning in a less complex form the meaning of abundance? That the latter is the correct answer is becoming evident to more and more people who are convinced that simplification rather than greater complexity satisfies the criterion of rationality by being both humanist and biocentric.
Peter Laska is a writer and poet and an Associate Editor of Left Curve. He lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.