Copyright 2001 by Tad Beckman, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA 91711
What philosophy hopes to achieve within this widely scattered and disparate picture of activities and concerns is an "organized" way of thinking about and discussing environmental issues. Philosophical contributions to environmentalism ought to remain true to what philosophy is, the "love of wisdom," and ought to seek ways in which diverse groups of people can discover what can be commonly understood and debated as well as, ultimately, what is wise.
Environmental philosophy, as such, began as "environmental ethics." Those philosophers who have separated themselves from the strictly ethical discourse have done so out of a belief that environmentalism requires a wider field of discourse and that the distinctive ethical issues relating to the environment require that wider discourse before they can be intelligently settled. Environmental ethics, in other words, is not a sub-discipline of standard Western ethical theory; instead, it is an evolving understanding of how humans must behave in a world environment and it is brought forward out of a wide discussion of the basic concepts of the environment and human interactions with it.
Important Terms
While we talk with great confidence about the environment and its problems, today, one of the first philosophical obligations we have is to bring the word itself under some discipline and understanding. I will begin by looking at three troublesome words --- 'environment', 'nature', and 'wilderness'. These words are often confused with each other and tend to be used interchangeably.
The word 'environment' comes from the French verb 'environ' meaning "surrounding" or "encircling." As a noun, 'environment' signifies that realm of objects which encircles. It should be obvious that 'environment' has no specific meaning until we select something (person, animal, or other object) that is considered to be encircled. In an extreme and overly technical sense, every environment is uniquely determined by the unique objects encircled.
In a more interesting sense, the environment of a specific object is envisioned as the smaller realm of "relevant objects" that surround it. Depending upon the object selected, the relevant environments can be quite different. While a fish may be only a few feet away from a browsing deer, for instance, their relevant environments are extremely different. The environment of flora and fauna is called their "habitat." What habitat is relevant to a particular species is clearly determined by its needs and the impact of its actions on other objects. In this respect, the environment of humans is quite diverse, depending on what humans are being discussed. Indigenous people tended to possess small relevant environments in which their needs and impact were thoroughly integrated. Modern-day "First World" humans tend to possess relevant environments of enormous scope. For instance, dining out in a seafood restaurant, one of these people may consume fish or shellfish that have been harvested and flown in from a remote part of the world where the impact of their need has substantial unwitnessed consequences. Environmental consciousness, today, is clearly called for by the enormous expansiveness of potential human environments.
The word 'nature' comes from the Latin word 'natura' meaning "birth" or "the course of things." Historic use of the word 'nature' and its various precursors relates to principles of change or development that are conceived as unfolding from inner essences or "natures." Historically, it is more common to use the term in a discussion of "animal nature" or "human nature" than it is to use it in the context of "man and Nature." Yet "Nature" as a substantive, indeed perhaps the substantive, is commonplace today. How are these uses related?
Presumably, the substantive meaning of 'Nature' is the entire inclusive realm of things that develop spontaneously out of inner principles. These things are to be contrasted with what Aristotle characterized as those things that come to be "this way or that way" because of some particular agency external to them and applied to a process of change. Aristotle's distinction is clear and marks the difference between what the Greeks called episteme and techne. An acorn grows into an oak tree by proceeding from its inner nature; it belongs to the realm of "Nature" in this sense. An oak bench has many properties that derive from the inner nature of oak trees, but the bench is crafted from oak wood by the agency of a carpenter. The bench belongs to the realm of human artefacts, or technology.
Having made this distinction between Nature and the realm of human artefacts, however, the question remains how either of these terms is related to environmentalism. One problematic side of this question is the obvious fact that the two realms are interpenetrating. There is no realm of things developing out of inner principles in one sphere and a wholly separate sphere of artefacts. They coexist and they always have, so long as humans have lived on earth and brought their agency to processes of development and change. There is no Nature, out there, to be protected or guarded from human intervention. If something in, or about, Nature needs protection, we must define this carefully.
It is important to remember, of course, that humans must have begun as purely natural creatures, in the way we have described nature here. That is, humans began by developing like all other animals, spontaneously out of inner principles, or natures. The factor that confuses everything is the evolution of human agency in an entirely different sense than we find it in other natural creatures. The essence of this evolution is the human need, will, and effectiveness toward changing human behavior and the human situation. While other animals evolve in diverse ways, they do not (so far as I know) decide to become "civilized." Thus, human agency is first seen in the human need to change "being human" and, then, it is gradually seen as humans move to change everything else.
Let us pass, then, to the last word, 'wilderness'. This word has various derivations but it probably comes from the word 'wild' which, in turn, seems ultimately dependent on the word 'nature' in the sense that its early Old English uses mean "living in a state of nature." Given our summary of the word 'nature,' above, this clearly indicates something (flora and fauna) that continues to evolve in the path determined by inner natures or essences and, in this sense of contrast, not domesticated or civilized by human agency. In our discussion of nature, it seemed clear that the distinction was among objects and the kinds of processes of change followed, not among segregated realms as such. The concept of "wilderness" as such steps further along and places natural objects within a segregated place called "wilderness." Here, presumably, is an entire realm of natural objects that is "unspoiled" by human agency; it is a place where only objects changing and growing under inner principles can exist.
As William Cronon has observed, in Uncommon Ground, the concept of wilderness is, very likely, a human creation that says more about human cultures than it says about demonstrable natural history. Humans have been a part of every natural landscape, and human agency is an ever-present human quality. It is not clear that wilderness has existed, nor is it clear why wilderness should exist. Certainly, emergency appeals to protect and restore wilderness have to be taken with some skepticism.
Contrary to Cronon, however, there is a side to the debate over wilderness that makes complete sense. Thoreau's often quoted passage, "In wildness lies the salvation of the world," fails to make the substantive claim that Cronon criticizes since there is an obvious difference between 'wildness' and 'wilderness' as such. Similarly, Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild addresses the values of wildness in ourselves as much as in Nature herself. Aldo Leopold seems to be the most obvious advocate of preserving wilderness as a segregated place where human agency is, at least, minimized. Yet, it is not at all clear that Leopold's position was as naive as Cronon seems to believe. We have to remember that Leopold was in the position of recommending policy for the National Forest Service and was working against an inherent disposition to treat National Forests as domesticated exploitable resources. In Leopold's mind, the urgent issue seems to have been retarding the advance of this human transformation so that some realms could remain dominated by natural forces rather than, as virtually all other realms, dominated by human agency and intervention.
Discussion of these problematic words clearly uncovers important issues for environmentalism. The most important of these is the way in which Europeans have separated themselves from both organic and inorganic essences of the world. The roots of this ideological separation lie strongly in Christianity, of course, but they were clearly already in place in Greek antiquity. As a consequence, there are two competing evolutionary paths for the world. The first of these is expressed in the nature of things; the second is expressed in the ways that humans bring changes into existence. The latter is called "technology," of course, and that is why the philosophy of technology must lie at the very center of environmental philosophy.
Because of this separation of the human path from the natural path, humans are abstracted from nature as such and the story of civilization, in the European mind, is essentially the mythic story of a separate creation borne out of divine essences. This idea is picked up in 17th Century political philosophy where a so-called "state of nature" is equivalent to a "state of war" that is remedied only by the creation of civil society bound together by divinely sanctioned social contracts. In all of this, we clearly find the hard-and-fast segregation of man and nature which extends clear into the concept of wilderness as something from which humans are entirely absent. The call to preserve wilderness, beginning with Aldo Leopold and continuing on through Sierra Club's David Brower and others, comes out of a desperate need to retain and protect Nature in its partially unmodified form as the ultimate "raw material" out of which everything else has been constructed. In that sense, it preserves the possibility of a "primordial return" or, at least, a "new beginning." Even though wilderness does not actually exist and even though it may never have really existed (at least not in the last 50,000 years), "wilderness" as a realm of natural objects that are minimally impacted by human intervention is an interesting formula for securing some kind of environmental stability -- a long-term resource of natural evolution.
A Preliminary Exercise in "Environmentalism"
Since "the environment" is whatever environs us, we should proceed to the exercise of actually seeing (hearing, smelling, etc.) what it is that environs us wherever we are in the world. This may sound trivial or strange; after all, we must know where we are. But it is actually very serious and not entirely obvious. One of the biggest problems today is the fact that our culture has enamored us so thoroughly with a well integrated world of human-built things that we have quite literally lost sight of other aspects of our environments. We have a significant need, in any serious study of the environment, to slow ourselves down and to begin seeing the world around us anew. This is true even for our human-built environments, which we often simply accept unquestioningly and without much critical examination. Henry David Thoreau discussed exactly this need to slow down and look carefully in his classic book On Walden Pond.
How can we learn to see what environs us? We really do have to stop and make a point of doing it. Normally, we abstract out of our view everything that is deemed inessential. The abstraction must be reversed by making a deliberate point of taking out the concept of "essential" and beginning to observe everything around us. It is extremely important, in fact, to describe what we find around us. Only as we place this environment within our language, do we begin to recognize and understand it in detail. The so-called "nature writers" hold considerable importance here; indeed, this is why Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac has served as such an inspiration to many contemporary environmentalists.
When we have begun to take the time and to use our senses and to describe what surrounds us, we will find ourselves joining a significant genre of artists, writers, and scholars who have devoted themselves to discovering and describing environments as places. That is, we will begin to see not only detail but also "system" the ways in which environmental features fit together. Wallace Stegner, for instance, spent much of his creative life identifying the characteristics of the American West as a distinctive place. Along the way, Stegner calls our attention to the fact that long-term occupancy of most Western niches has only come to those who understood it as a place in its own right and did not try to make it something that it was not.
Structural Issues
After we have some observational control over the concept of environment, one of our next most important needs is to understand some structural issues. There are at least three important issues. They are "reciprocity," "balance," and "health." I will discuss each of these briefly.
One of the most important structural issues is the fundamental reciprocity between any object and its environment. Both object and environment are thoroughly engaged in processes of change; hence, each one influences the path of change in the other. In studying environments, we are always engaged in witnessing something dynamic.
Indigenous people were gathered up and placed in restricted areas called "reservations." In more modern times, occasionally, an indigenous person is thrown into a Western-style prison. The results can be devastating -- not because they are deprived of sufficient or adequate food or health care, but rather because the environment is completely antithetical to the person's life force. Over the last few decades, many Hopi people have been forcibly removed from portions of the surrounding Navajo reservation. The government provided "relocation villages" for the Hopi -- little Western-style housing tracts with rectangular blocks and rectangular houses. For many of the Hopi this has been an intolerable and impossible burden. Environments do affect us in profound ways; it is not just we who have an affect on our environments.
Part of recognizing environments as places is uncovering the human history of involvement in a particular place and, hence, in recognizing the ways in which both have shaped the other and formed systematic relationships. Again, in accordance with Stegner, the West offers a history of bold human attempts at re-making environments. But "boom & bust" has always been the story except in those small numbers of cases where humans have more modestly embraced the Western landscape and allowed themselves to live in some form of reciprocal harmony and respect.
A second important structural feature of all environments is the mass/energy balance. For whatever object we select as the principal object of study (the centering object), there is an environment related to it. This environment is structurally different depending on what object is selected and what its properties or activities are. We can begin to understand this structural concept by imaging ourselves drawing a boundary region that is uniquely appropriate to the object. Perhaps this boundary encompasses the surrounding terrain that characterizes the object's "habitat." Beyond habitat, we need to consider the object's needs or demands. An interesting case in point is the cultural life of the Indians of the northern plains. While their habitat boundaries were large compared with some indigenous people, they were relatively small compared to the Western Plains as such. At the same time, their lifeway required periodic opportunities to kill and utilize buffalo. But the buffalo ranged north-and-south throughout the Plains. Thus, small Plains Indian tribes implicitly demanded a significant inward flow of mass and energy through the buffalo who ate the grasses grown with solar energy in the southern Plains.
It is important to understand not only the reciprocal relationship between an object and its habitual environment but also the demands that this object places on more distant environments by requiring mass/energy imbalance across any reasonable boundary. Consider, for example, a boundary curve drawn around the city of Palm Springs, California. Such a curve could be drawn indefinitely far out into the surrounding desert so as to encompass the habitats of most residents. Then observe the passage across this boundary of humans, material resources, and energy. The city is far from self-sufficient or sustainable within its boundary; indeed, its existence requires constant replenishment. It is a great example of people living almost entirely out-of-context with their environment. It is possible only so long as the pipe lines and thoroughfares remain open.
A final structural issue is what we might call "health" and this is really a feature of ecology. The question to ask is whether all elements of a region work together constructively and in some "beneficial" way. This is really the value-laden side of the reciprocity issue. To determine an answer here we really need to examine a region in terms of the ways that each object functions as a portion of everyone else's environment. The greatest impediment, here, is the substantial degree to which Americans (indeed the whole Western tradition) take a human-centered (anthropocentric) stance in looking at all regions. Becoming bio-centric in our point of view is a significant beginning to allow an appreciation of ecology and empowering a sharing of benefits throughout species and objects of every region.
Ethical Behavior in the Environment: Technology
The central topic of ethics is human behavior, and the goal of ethics is to perfect human behavior, to urge humans to act for the best, to prompt us to behave rightly, or to make us happy (in Aristotle's sense of the "virtuous man"). Taken in a social context, ethics quickly focuses on behaviors that involve other people and morality usually sets out a society's beliefs about how other people should be treated by us. Human society is idealized and morality spins out of concepts regarding appropriate ways of demonstrating mutual respect to others. In his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant imagined that the foundation of morality lies in each rational person's participation with others in a "realm of ends." Empathy with each other, under the assumption (sometimes very weak in itself) that we are all the same, guides the expectations of respect in determining right and wrong actions. We recognize a wrong action because we can imagine how we would feel if we were the victim of the action. Ethical discourse depends upon reciprocity among the human actors considered. Actions that ignore, belittle, or even destroy human dignity cannot be sanctioned because they diminish the achievement of a realm of ends by us all.
As discourse on ethics, environmental ethics continues to suggest ideals of good behavior. It is the change of context in environmental ethics that gives us problems. Rather than considering our behaviors that directly affect other human beings we have moved into the context of behaviors that affect non-human objects. The problem, obviously, is that we do not participate reciprocally with these objects in a realm of ends, nor can we usually imagine that they participate in rationality along with us. While a human might rationally elect to leave a mountain lion unharmed so that it can enjoy its life in the wild, the human must be weary since the mountain lion has made no reciprocal pact. Nor can we reasonably say that the mountain lion has done something immoral if it attacks the same human.
Early attempts at environmental ethics assumed that it could be developed simply as an off-shoot of standard ethical theory. But the example above suggests why this cannot be done. If humans and their non-human environments constitute some kind of "community," it is not Kant's community of rational souls who struggle to legislate universal laws that realize a realm of ends. The world is described in "natural history" and not "social history;" and the ends of natural history are by no means clear to us. It seems clear that environmental ethics requires a different foundation and that one cannot simply move from principles of behavior with other humans into new principles for behavior in the non-human world.
At what point did humans emerge from natural history and begin their self-declared social history? Paleontologists take the horizon between pre-human and human life as the point in time when tools first appear among fossil records. That is, humans are by definition associated with the making of tools and, ultimately, with technologies in the widest sense. In other words, humans began the long path of becoming rational and moral at exactly that time when they began appropriating other objects in the world and using or transforming them for human ends. Technology is the way in which humans interact with the non-human world. For this reason, environmental ethics is essentially an "idealized human technology," that is, a discourse on how it is best for humans to behave with respect to all other objects in the world.
This discourse must proceed through a thorough understanding of technology. But there is already a problem here. The word is so familiar to us that everyone assumes they know what technology is. In particular, everyone assumes that technology is merely a medium of influence in the world; it is merely an instrument. We use technology to do things. Right? Yet it is precisely this simplicity that is the greatest danger to our understanding. We have to go back to essays like Jose Ortega y Gasset's "Man The Technician" or Martin Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology" to recognize that technology is much more complex than we believe.
Ortega recognized that technology represents a fundamental shift in natural history; it is where humans emerge as creatures who possess "vital interests." Unlike all other creatures in natural history who accept the implicit "ends" of nature, humans begin to change natural objects to comply with their own interests. Heidegger made it clear that humans, especially today, have little control over technology but are, in fact, compelled forward in its path. In a recent book, The Whale and the Reactor, Langdon Winner admirably demonstrates the many ways in which the social and political life of humans is thoroughly involved in what we do technologically. Clearly, the whole of what we call economy is involved. Thus, to view and understand human technology, hence, our behavior in the non-human environment, we have to realize that we are not merely thinking about how we make machines and electronic equipment; we are committing ourselves to a thoroughgoing study of how our habits of appropriating objects and transforming them to our purposes is integrated into our economic, social, and political lives. Perhaps we can, as individuals, convince ourselves to live more gently in the environment; but the real issue lies in understanding why our native human world as such is driven forward.
In the centuries of European encroachment throughout the world (but especially in North America) "natural" and "primitive" are seen together; thus, men who live natural lives (presumably, lives evolving through inner essences of the physical and biological world) are called primitive in contrast to Europeans who are, in contrast, "civilized." But if the civilized human is opposed to the primitive, natural human, does this mean that a different essence guides its evolution? Following Aristotle's distinction, it is clear that civilization is a "made" human development following the rule of techne. Civilized life is a product that comes to be "this way or that way" depending on how human development is orchestrated in opposition to the inclinations of inner human (animal) nature. Aristotle's Ethics made clear that the development of humans as "rational animals" is a product of human agency. The ultimate distinction between "man and Nature," then, is produced by the understanding that man is made while Nature simply evolves.
The word 'primitive' speaks to developmental stages and, in particular, to the first of a kind in a development sequence. Techne must begin in episteme; that is, agency is impressed on something which is already in natural motion and techne brings it to something else than what would have naturally become of it. The Japanese art form of bonsai takes the natural growth of plants and, through human agency, creates a different entity. The concept of a human primitive, consequently, lays claim to a separation of developmental stages in human life and, in particular, places primitives at the bottom by assuming that development through agencies has all been "upward." Christian agency, in particular, is assumed to bring humans away from their purely natural development; humans are deemed to be masters over Nature. The connection of nature with the primitive is, thus, a way of asserting that nature is the appropriate environment for the first stage of humans but that later stages of humans create environments more useful to themselves by transforming nature. Commentaries by early European Americans frequently contain judgmental rhetoric when it comes to natural landscapes; that is, the natural landscape seemed to these people to be "wasted." To this day, we habitually speak of "development" in the context of people stripping hillsides of their natural foliage and planting houses on sculpted pallets. For environmentalism, it is important to understand the degree to which the human reshaping of environments is ancient in its roots and, at the same time, connected with the human reshaping of himself. Technology (which is what techne has become) brings both man and environment into something else; thus, as Heidegger pointed out, we are foolish to think that "man is in possession (and control) of technology."
Wilderness means "nascent" land which has a double edge in the European mind. "Nascent" means "about to be born" in one sense but, in another sense, it also means "ready for domestication or development." A nascent field is a natural micro-ecological region on one hand but it is also "unkempt and ready for cultivation" on the other hand. It is important to note the reciprocal relationships here. The natural, wild man is "uncivilized" while the natural, wild landscape is "uncultivated." Quite in line with the philosophical analyses of Martin Heidegger, it is clear that "technology" (as manipulation and transformation of what exists in nature) applies to both man and nature. Human life is being transformed as much as other natural flora and fauna are. Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild evokes ambiguous feelings in his readers because the concept of being wild, even where just in part, is uneasy for us.
Ethical Behavior in the Environment: Environmental Ethics
The "result" of the previous discussion should be an understanding of why environmental ethics cannot proceed on the standard track of ethics or moral discourse in human social affairs. In relating to the environment, humans are involved in technology in a way that does not occur when humans relate to humans in a social context. Even when technology enters into a human-to-human interaction that has ethical significance, standard ethical issues can be abstracted easily from the presence of the technology. This is not the case with the environment because technology is the very essence of our relationship to the environment.
Problems and Approaches to Environmentalism
One of the primary issues in environmental ethics ought to be intelligent control of human population. The larger human population becomes the more pressure human technologies place on the non-human world. On top of that, the more human societies move toward "development" of "First World" (so-called "high-") technologies, the more severe that pressure becomes. Ironically, more and more development-oriented commentators plead that the only way to secure real birth control in the world at large is to elevate everyone to "First-World" standards of living. That, of course, would enormously accelerate the impact on the non-human world.
Reduction of human-expressed pressure on the non-human environment requires both curbing the population explosion and reduction of human appropriations. The latter path requires us to examine the whole cycle of appropriation, transformation, consumption, and waste. What we need from the environment is more-often-than-not disappearing at an astonishing rate. Transformations often carry these objects from the possibility of multiple use to products of singular use. In other words, what is not simply disappearing is often becoming less usable. Consumption, in the "First World," at least, is excessive to real human needs and values. [Consider the enormous amount of plastics being consumed, presently, so that Americans can drink bottled mineral waters.] The wastes that we leave in our tracks [and in our air and our ground water] are truly staggering.
Another issue is the impact of "globalism" on the movement of environmentalism. When we examine globalism versus localism, what differences do we find? In particular, if we suggest that we are now living in a "global place," what are some of the obvious affects on the world as human environment? "Global places" and "global communities" all seem like more-than-suspicious concepts. They both make illicit attempts to move concepts that are inherently local and specific into the broadest domain where their inherent meanings are lost. With those meanings lost, the advocates of globalism find themselves in the position to manipulate the meanings that they wish to create. If we need to "think globally, act locally," it is only because we need to understand the pervasiveness of common environmental problems. Environmentalism as such is meaningful only in the locality with the specific human community that finds its place there. As a human invention, globalism is, I would say, a very dangerous movement of human power that seeks to destroy meaningful discussion of locally specific issues by literally defining them out of existence.
And finally, what are the responsibilities of universities and professionals with respect to environmentalism? Callicott and da Rocha's Earth Summit Ethics
singles out this issue as others have not. As the collection of institutions that exercise our social responsibilities for preparation of the young, colleges and
universities ought to be out at the cutting edge in studying environments and environmental issues and environmental public policies. But the realities are
extremely disappointing so that one must ask why not. Here it is difficult to see any other reason than simply the fact that colleges and universities have become
far too attached to corporate capitalism. Since the institutions themselves are practically owned by corporate capitalism there is little "academic freedom"
remaining to afford a critical point of view when it comes to corporate influences in the world. Thus, if environmentalism requires us to move into public policy
through politics, that in itself also requires a significant critique of how politics and technology (including institutionalized science) are integrated into each
other; and both of these require a serious realization of how fundamentally the capitalist frame of mind owns it all.
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