Environmental Philosophy

What Is Environmental Philosophy?

The Greek word 'philosophy' means literally the (filial) love of wisdom. But 'wisdom' is not a commonly used word in our society so we need to make some effort to locate its meaning. What is indicated by the tradition in which philosophy seeks wisdom rather than merely knowledge or justified belief?

While Plato and Aristotle did not agree on the basis of wisdom, they clearly did agree that wisdom is acquired with age and that it transcends mere knowledge about the objects surrounding us in the perceived world. Without stretching the issue too far, I also think it can be said that they agreed that wisdom, in the end, is fundamentally moral. It is not surprising, then, that contrasting wisdom with knowledge usually finds our examples of wisdom on the side of suggesting how something should be dealt with best. Consider a simple example. The courses in a particular department have been scheduled at specific times and in particular places. There is much in this matter that we can know or at least have justified belief about. We can know the scheduled times and places by reading in the official course schedule; and we can believe that the chair of the department got the assignments to the Registrar of the college on time so that they could be included in the schedule. On the other hand, whether or not the department has acted wisely in making these choices transcends the facts of the matter and requires deeper consideration of many issues. It should be clear, in saying this, that "acting wisely" means acting for the best.

How can we ever know what "acting for the best" is in a given situation? If we carry the example, above, a little further, we can get some ideas. The selection of a particular time for a class might preclude students from taking it. The selection of a particular room might exclude numbers of students wanting to take it, might exclude the possibility of using audio-visual materials, or might not be suitable to the atmosphere of this class. The character of studies involved might not be appropriate to an early morning time when students and faculty are just getting started. These are just a few of the factors, but we can already see that acting wisely requires us to examine specific choices in much wider contexts. Most of this examination brings us to other matters of knowledge and belief; thus, wisdom is not something fundamentally different from knowledge and belief. Wisdom is the way we put knowledge and belief together into ever wider contexts of action in order to reach the best choices.

Environmental philosophy is a young field that brings together this traditional nurturing of wisdom with a specific interest in the environment. Part of environmental philosophy is, therefore, exploring what we know and justifiedly believe about the environment. But we have to be careful not to stop there. Environmental philosophy requires us to develop wisdom about the environment and that means, as above, discussing what is best for the environment, especially with respect to our own actions within the environment.

The Environment and the Concept of Nature

It seems commonplace for some people to use the terms 'nature' and 'environment' interchangeably. In fact, many environmental activists, today, assume that not only is our environment the same as nature but that nature should be understood in the further limited sense of "wild nature" or "wilderness." In my opinion, environmental philosophy requires a broader definition.

If we begin with the roots of the word, 'environment' means "that which environs us." Being "environed" is being encircled or surrounded. Broadly speaking, the environment should be understood as the overall physical and emotional context in which we are located. It is very important, therefore, to recognize that environments are different from place-to-place and from time-to-time, depending upon who we are and where we are. The environment of a fresh-water trout is clearly different from that of a desert tortoise. As human beings, the relevant physical context that environs us can also be quite different depending upon who we are and what culture we come from, especially, what kind of technology we express. We cannot discuss a specific environment without identifying those who are environed by it; perhaps more surprising, however, is the fact that we cannot discuss and understand ourselves until we acknowledge and understand the environment to which we are related. Most of environmental abuse, today, starts within and is caused by the contemporary fact that we are short-sighted and ignorant about the specific environs that nurture us.

What, then, is the relationship of environment to nature? First of all, I subscribe to the position that humans are fully natural creatures. Thus, nature does not equal environment when we are talking about the human-environment relationship. This relationship stands within nature as a whole. What I mean by this is that humans (and their hominid ancestors) have been a part of natural landscapes for more than three million years (homo sapiens sapiens, for more than 50,000 years). We should not view nature as something from which humans are inherently absent; and wilderness, as a natural place from which all trace of humans is absent, is a problematic concept. Second, having accepted humans as fully natural, we must ask whether there is any "natural" limit to human action. In other words, are we compelled on this basis to accept New York City as a "natural landscape?" And, if we are not so compelled, what does this mean about our concept of nature? We need to identify and understand how it is that humans can be natural creatures and yet New York City can still be viewed as an "unnatural" creation.

New York City is clearly the environment of the people we call New Yorkers. It is also something that we can clearly recognize as a human-built environment. The Long Valley Caldera, on the other hand, is the environment of people who live in Mammoth Lakes, California. It is definitely a natural environment, created over millions of years by natural volcanic, geological, and biological processes. Humans had no hand in designing or bringing about what one finds in this environment except for the design and construction of a small town and the roads that serve it. Even when we acknowledge that humans are creatures of nature, it makes sense to distinguish between environments that are dominated by human design and construction and those environments that are dominated by non-human factors and entities in nature. We can conveniently call the latter natural environments, as opposed to human-built environments.

There is an important further reason for pushing this distinction between human-built environments and natural environments, even granting that humans are thoroughly natural creatures. This reason reaches to the deeper issue of whether human projects play by the "rules of nature." Or do human projects follow new rules in violation of natural evolution? Hence, do we see in the human-built environment a revolutionary and potentially self-destructive phase of nature's life on earth?

Ecology, as the science of natural balance, enables us to make this distinction clear. Natural evolution is characterized by the adjustment of natural balances over long periods of time. Every species receives; but every species also gives. The balance of species in a particular region is established through this process of give-and-take. Humans, however, have largely stepped out of that system of balance by taking (receiving) much and giving little or nothing in return. Humans enter every natural environment as an "exotic," perturbing the existing balances of species and refusing to be a party to any new balance. By its very nature, the human presence represents stress to every environment; and when that presence becomes permanent and grows greater, the stress remains permanent and balance is forever impossible. What this means is that human projects invade and defeat the fundamental rule of natural balance that has made the earth what it is. The distinction between human-built environments and natural environments is appropriate on this count even though humans are natural creatures. Indeed, human life represents a strange and increasingly dangerous destiny for nature itself.

Having said this much, I shall make one final introductory observation about philosophy and the environment. It is my opinion that, try as humans have, they cannot change the fundamental rule of natural being; humans have merely pushed the envelope of natural balance way further than any other natural creature ever has. Balance will eventually prevail, and that means that humans, who have received so much, will ultimately have to give back to other species to restore balance. That giving will not be easy especially if it comes at the hands of other natural agents and processes. There is only one possible way of making it easier and that is the possibility that humans will use their highly toted rationality to guide their own actions into a respect for nature's rule. As natural creatures, humans must finally come to terms with the meaning of natural wisdom. If environmental philosophy is about anything in particular, I would have to say that it is about the love of natural wisdom.

The Case of Human Population

Let us begin with an illustration. The estimated global population of humans for 8000 BC is about 10 million. The estimated global population of humans by 1625 AD is estimated as about 500 million. A quick calculation indicates that this represents a modest increase of approximately 5.1 million humans every century over a period of more than 9000 years. However, when we look at global human populations after 1625 AD, we are due for a shock. Population ascended dramatically from 1 billion, in 1825, to approximately 7 billion today. That represents an increase of 3.4 billion (that is, 3,400 million) humans every century over a period of merely 175 years!

Population growth follows a geometric curve, of course, and this explains the radically increasing growth rate in later years. However, the era from 1625 through 1825 is exceptional as a point in human development. Apparently, population growth jumped from one geometric curve to another. This jump was due to a remarkable change in the balance of human birth- and death-rates after the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions (1650-1900) and placing human population growth on a much steeper curve. At the present, global human population is doubling every forty years. We expect the global human population to be around 10 billion by 2010; if there is no reduction in this rate, it could become 20 billion by 2050 and 40 billion by 2090. Of course, no one can actually say what the global human population will become and when it will reach that figure because many factors are involved. The issue of importance here is that one class of determining factors would seem to be rational choice of human actions and the other class of determining factors would seem to be various natural catastrophes.

It should be quite obvious that increasing human population has an impact on both natural and human-built environments. Rising human populations combined with the Industrial Revolution has stripped people off of the land and promoted urban life. But human-built cities are by no means ideal human environments. In fact, the social problems brought on by city life have been debated, now, for almost two hundred years. Suburban life does not seem to present obvious solutions to these problems either. The escalation of violent crimes, drug addiction, abusive behaviors in families, and suicides, over the last two decades in the United States alone, would seem to indicate the obvious fact that human-built environments cannot tolerate continual increase in population density.

This is a discouraging commentary on our ability to produce environments of our own design for the accommodation of increases in global human population. But bad as this is, the natural environments of the world are no better off in this situation. Since the standard human lifeway is to exploit all other natural species and resources, natural environments meet rising human populations but showing vastly increasing exploitation, degradation, and resource reduction. In the face of this impact, one must ask whether humans can continue to sustain rising global populations, especially if they continue to act in accordance with the concepts and attitudes that have brought them to this place. Can we feed, clothe, and house people indefinitely at the expense of the rest of nature?

Some critics of uncontrolled population expansion argue very loudly that human global population cannot long continue in its present path of ascent. We will eventually meet the restraint of the earth's "carrying capacity," they say. The reasoning is that humans need specific natural resources to exploit and that these are limited in a way that defines a definite limit to the earth's capacity to support human life. There are two ways in which this carrying capacity can be approached. We can either acknowledge it, as best we can, in advance and rationally prepare to control our population appropriately; or we can ignore the whole issue and let nature deal with us as we crash into the limiting capacities of the earth to provide for us. The former supposes that humans really are rational creatures who can take command of their own destiny; the latter assumes that natural disasters, plagues, epidemics, starvation, and the like will do the job anyway.

As quickly as critics of this kind speak out, however, we are plunged into a desperate debate with economists and resource technologists who want to claim that there is no definite carrying capacity of the earth and that, with appropriate technologies, the earth really can support any population of human beings. To even consider the idea of a limited "carrying capacity" seems to the mainstream technologist like a surrender of everything that we have been for the last two centuries. Of course, they argue, technology will solve any and all problems in our future! Hasn't it always? (At least throughout the last two centuries.) Americans are especially susceptible to this argument because contemporary American society is built on a foundation of assumptions to the effect that science and technology will, in simple fact, solve any and every problem of the future. Americans simply anticipate continuing and inevitable technological progress in providing new ways to exploit nature for human ends.

Can this debate be satisfactorily resolved? The answer is "no," because what is at issue is a matter of faith. It is almost a religious faith; it is the faith that science and technology will indeed be our salvation against any attempt by nature to limit human growth and development. For humans to adopt such a view, as natural creatures themselves, is bizarre. It represents an astonishing situation in which a naturally evolved species is asserting that it has evolved past natural limitations and, therefore, refuses to participate in the overall fate of the natural world from here onward.

In recognition of natural limitations, most people argue that population growth will be forced to slow down and even stop. Two questions remain, however. First, what population do we believe to be the equilibrium one? Second, what features of the world will force this change? The former question is largely a matter for scientific prediction; though philosophy enters by asking whether it would really be wise for humans to attempt to live at their maximum capacity on earth. The latter question is also a matter for scientific scrutiny but the philosophical issues are more abundant. This is so because the latter question addresses issues of human action directly. We could, from the standpoint of natural science, judge that natural forces will simply clobber human populations at the point where they become too large. Just like any other natural species, humans, too, will be stopped in their tracks by diminishing food supplies, aggressive competition for resources, and uncontrollable world-wide plagues. If humans do not take control of their own destiny, nature will do it for them. The question is whether wisdom suggests acting on our own before nature takes command. What philosophy can offer, I suggest, is a discussion of how humans ought to act wisely in dealing with their own growth as a species. This amounts to a very significant challenge. Since humans consider themselves the rational animal, hence the only animal that can potentially be wise, they are faced in the most ultimate way with the project of proving this distinction. It is unimaginable to me that human population can exceed 40 billion; thus, if we are going to demonstrate our status as the rational animal by taking our numbers into our own direct and wise control, we will absolutely have to achieve this during the 21^st Century.

Ethics as a Category of Environmental Philosophy

Environmental ethics is a "growth industry." Over the past three decades, it has produced new journals, new professorships, and new expensive textbooks. It prides itself as the theoretical dimension (perhaps read "conscience") of the environmentalist movement. Yet, like most academic philosophy, it does not intentionally embrace a particular institution of activism.

The development of environmental ethics has been one of the most exciting developments in contemporary philosophy, second only, perhaps, to the development of feminist philosophy. Along with feminism, environmentalism addresses real problems in contemporary society that demand the development of wise discussions and dispositions. In all, both have produced some excellent and challenging insights. These are timely issues that have attracted the attention of people in many fields; the discussions are not merely among philosophers. In fact, if we count nature writing, such as Thoreau's Walden, as the beginning, environmentalism arrived substantially earlier in literature, than in philosophy. Meanwhile, it has attracted the interest of historians, economists, public policy specialists, and others.

On a critical note, I suggest that too much of the philosophical discussion of environmental ethics has been badly misguided by assuming that the categories and arguments can be simply imported out of standard treatments of moral or political philosophy. We find philosophers arguing out environmental issues in terms of Kantian categorical imperatives or English utilitarianism; we also find other philosophers treating natural entities in classical political terms, arguing out issues of rights and obligations. As a reader, the central disappointment with much environmental ethics quickly becomes the problem that we cannot be sure how standard moral and political categories can apply to elements of our environment. Should rocks have "rights?" Should we recognize some "obligation" to a raccoon? We tend to live in a world in which only human interests appear to matter; and we are ill at ease when it comes to conceptualizing and expressing how other interests might seriously be debated and considered.

What seems missing in most philosophical discussions of environmental ethics is a thorough and sound discussion of the environment itself. Moral issues have been developed in human societies without similar discussions largely because we can assume common descriptive control over human life and societies. What we need is a broad descriptive understanding of both humans and environments in a way that suggests their relations with each other. Moral sentiments, I argue, require a basis of relationship; most contemporary environmental dilemmas stem from the modern objectification of nature and the resulting reduction of our relationship with nature to simple exploitation of an object. When we begin to study environments deeply, we quickly recognize that humans and their environments fall into reciprocal relations. Asking a question about one, necessarily and immediately draws us into asking questions about the other.

The psychological wedge that stands between "us" and "other" is responsible for much evil in human affairs. In particular, it has allowed superior feeling people to do terrible things against the other people they judged to be inferior. So long as the opponents could be isolated as the "other" they did not have to be understood and, lacking understanding, they did not have to be treated with either respect or compassion. What we call "the environment" has come to this point, in most American communities. Without understanding it, we simply dispose of it without thought. One of the problems of environmental philosophy, then, is to re-create languages, hence insights, for dealing with these issues. Many writers on the environment urge us to think about ourselves as within the world and to remember that 'environment' is a useful term only in exploring relationships, not for posturing a disrespectful objectivity and isolation.

The Issue of Technology

It has often been suggested that humans exercise a different relationship with their environment than other animals. "Humans," we say, "modify their environment to suit themselves; while other animals accept their environment as it is." Ignoring the fact that this is not true in detail and accepting the degree to which it is true, it is the possession of technology of which we speak. In this regard, technology is one of the chief features of our relationship with what environs us. Because most other entities of the world possess a quite different relationship to their environments, we judge that they do not possess technology. The human tendency toward the technological relationship is so long established, as a matter of fact, that paleontologists accept it as the horizon of human life, as opposed to the hominid precursors to human life.

If the previous discussion is correct and environmental ethics requires us to understand our relationship with our environments, the obvious conclusion is that an understanding of technology is essential. Philosophy of technology is, thus, a significant subordinate to any adequate philosophy of the environment. In this sense, an ethical (wise) relationship to environments ought to be mainly expressed as a general conception of good (wise) technological behavior, a definition of appropriate behavior to which technology is responsive.

When we turn to a study of technology, we discover some interesting and important facts. Even though the peculiar character of the human's relationship with the environing world has always been technology, technology has not always been the same. Paleontologists considered technology simply as "tool making" in its earliest forms, and human history demonstrates many changes in tools and their application. Some changes in tools accompanied substantial changes in the relationship itself. Agriculture is the supreme example. The movement from gathering to agriculture and from hunting to animal husbandry carried humans beyond merely utilizing and occasionally enhancing nature's abundance to the construction of human-built gardens and animal pens. The movement to agriculture required commitment to a place so further constructions --- houses, paths, wells, etc. --- were to be expected. In all, the epoch of agriculture was destined to change the face of the world because, in this technology, humans not only approached the world with tools but they became major contributors to the appearance of the world.

Yet another revolution in technology moved beyond even agriculture; this was the Industrial Revolution. Again, this change occurred only in a few parts of the world and only as recently as, perhaps, the middle of the 18th Century, 250 years ago (as opposed to agriculture, 10,000 years ago). It is modern industrial technology that most authors see as presenting the greatest ethical problems. In contrast to rural agricultural society, urban industrial society is not committed to place (at least not in the same way) and is, instead, committed to mobility --- actually, massive, unprecedented human mobility. With that mobility have come many more human constructions so that we can even begin to think of technology in terms of the human re-construction of the world. (Flying across America, it is impossible to miss the astonishing extent to which we have really accomplished this!) To many observers, the environing world has been objectified and denied any relevance whatsoever; humans assume unlimited rights to re-construct the world. Here, then, is where the really substantial ethical issues of environmentalism and technology begin.

It is important to note that environmentalism is not opposed to technology as such; instead, it is the demand that we consider technology as a whole relationship. When we construct things in the world, we need to consider the destiny of the world. We seem to act as though the world's destiny is separate from our destiny; that is, we act as though we can do anything to the world without any ultimate impact on ourselves. The focus of environmental ethics, then, is not merely the idea of treating the environing world with respect or obligation but, more basically, returning to an understanding of dependence and reciprocity in the world.

In short, there are basic background issues that we need to understand before we can ever think ethically about our relationships with what environs us. When we think of human behavior, similar issues arise in the sense that right behavior ultimately depends on some form of social connection, with the consequence that we accept limitations and restraints on our interactive behaviors. Even the logical abstractness of Kant's "Categorical Imperative" depends on seeing ourselves within a social context of universal activity. Hence, if ethical behavior is to extend past other humans and onto plants, animals, and even landscapes, we need to know, in a deeply serious way, what our true connection with these things is. Why do we need them? When we approach these questions, we begin to understand the scope of the problem before us, because Western society --- at least over the last 150 years --- has taken a very hostile attitude and posture toward non-human entities.

Conclusion

In 1854, when Henry David Thoreau retreated to a cabin at Walden Pond, he began a lifelong process of personal education about the natural world. Thoreau is often criticized, today, because he did not really expose himself to "wilderness." His critics argue that Walden Pond was just a few miles from town and that his aunt kept him warm and fed whenever he needed. But what these critics fail to see is their own assumption, namely, that exposure to wilderness was the point. Thoreau has to be read for what he was and not for what we might want him to be. Walden is intellectual autobiography and not a contemporary wilderness trek. Thoreau does not say, "I went to Walden Pond to try myself against raw wilderness." What he says is, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." The book is a collection of reflections about human life engaged with the natural world.

If the environmental movement begins with Thoreau in some real sense, I think it begins here in Thoreau's voyage of self discovery, and it begins here in two fundamental ways. First, what Thoreau discloses to us, chapter by chapter, is the fact that we never see or know the world around us until we take the time to really observe it and that we can do this only by making a commitment of time, energy, and concentration, in other words, to careful and detailed observation. Typical American lifeways, even in the 1850s and even in village life, shortcut us past all the detail. And unless we examine and observe the world in detail we will see none of its reality. The case is far worse today, when automobile travel, multiple obligations of family and workplace, and many other factors keep us on an endless treadmill with no time for anything else.

Second, and fundamentally most important, we do not really know ourselves until we know the nature in which we are necessarily embedded. When we begin to really observe nature, we really begin to observe ourselves for the first time. What Thoreau experienced was the excitement of breaking out of the typical Western categorization of "a pond is a pond," in which the world is reduced to the merely objective realm and the human subject is celebrated as the only significant value. When we look into the pond and know it as a living thing, subject and object unite as co-inhabitants of a living realm. Thoreau's point, I think, was that we never truly know ourselves until we can experience ourselves as "co-inhabitants" in a world. For Thoreau, then, the "environmental problem" was an extremely serious and important problem, demanding immediate attention. For if we remain on the modern treadmill and never seriously look about, we will never know ourselves and will truly not have lived life in its full sense.

If Thoreau sets the stage for environmentalism, then, it is much more than just a plea to care for old-forest trees and improve the quality of air. It asks us to re-discover a way of seeing ourselves in nature and it asks this with a certain urgency. For the claim is that, if we do not re-discover a mutual relationship of humanity and nature, we will lose both. We must have nature to have humanity. While human-built environments are acceptable enclaves within the natural environment, they cannot rise to complete domination and the health of natural environments must be maintained. We are the most powerful animals that have ever inhabited earth; we must now demonstrate our superior intelligence as well by showing that we can use our power appropriately.

In conclusion, there are two types of questions that we must ask in environmental philosophy, and we are now in a good position to pose them. First, are there values to us in identifying and studying natural environments? Hence, does preservation of natural environments matter? Second, is there an ethics of balance in which humans are mutually involved with all the other objects of the world? As mentioned earlier, I believe that many of the answers will be found in literature and art before they are found in the arguments of professional philosophers. And the reason for this is that writers and artists have taken the lead in trying to understand the nature of land as a "place" and in trying to understand the nature of place as human "home." Ethics is essentially a conversation. To include nature in ethical conversations demands a vocabulary of nature --- hence, a keen awareness, detailing of observations, and an enthusiasm for description of the natural world that environs and includes us.

If you have comments or questions on this essay, please contact me by e-mail.

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