“Depth of Field” by David Rusak

Depth of Field

What should be the ethic that grounds environmentalism?

By David Rusak • March 16, 2011 • 1 Comment

“When a forest is no longer sacred, there are no spirits to be placated and no mysterious risks associated with clear-felling it. A disenchanted nature is no longer alive. It commands no respect, reverence or love. It is nothing but a giant machine, to be mastered to serve human purposes.” — Andrew Brennan and Yeuk-Sze Lo, “Environmental Ethics” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

What on Earth The passage above describes a fairly common vein of thinking in environmental circles. This “disenchantment,” beginning in the Enlightenment with Newtonian physics and philosophies like those of Kant, kicked off modern science as we know it: a universe composed not of spirits and essences, but of interlocking parts that act according to common rules, is one whose behaviour can be predicted — and thus controlled. The worst periods of European colonialism and the excesses of industrialization followed. As a species, we haven’t put our ever-increasing power over nature to the best of uses; hence a number of movements have attempted to repair our relationship with nature in one form or another. One of the most prominent of these in recent times is an ethical theory called deep ecology: proponents argue that the global ecosystem and everything in it are valuable in themselves — not to be protected because of their usefulness to humans, but for their own sake.

The phrase “deep ecology” itself was coined in 1973 by Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss, but the sentiment of deep respect for nature was already a part of the environmental movement, which began in earnest in the ’60s. Earlier books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise”) were part of a shift in environmental thought from the question of what is in the human interest to what is in the natural interest. The idea that we are integrated, responsible members of a natural community — not a mere collection of detached individuals — was a perfect fit with the burgeoning counterculture’s rejection of Western individualism and consumerism. The disenchanting legacy of Enlightenment science was, and is still, blamed for everything from nuclear war to runaway overconsumption, and not without reason. The effort at reenchantment, and the ethical claim that nature must be protected for its own sake, certainly capture something morally important to us — but the idea may have its pitfalls too.

In his book The New Ecological Order, Luc Ferry plants himself firmly on the side of the Enlightenment and against deep ecology. For an Enlightenment liberal like Ferry, humans are quintessentially anti-natural; we can learn from and build upon the history of past generations in a way that other animals can’t. Our moral obligations take the form of human rights: they issue from the fact that we are free, rational beings, and from our choosing to enter into a “social contract” with the rest of society. Thus, to Ferry, attempts at extending moral value to non-human entities are fundamentally silly, a confusion of categories. He enjoys pointing out absurdities that result from bringing these concepts outside of the human sphere: thinkers who have proposed replacing the social contract with a “natural contract” (to be signed by animals, plants, ecosystems?), pre-Enlightenment trials in which vermin were taken to court before a judge for their offenses against humans (and sometimes, with the help of legal counsel, absolved!), and modern-day trials in which the rights of rocks or trees have again been asserted by groups like the Sierra Club.

But more than being merely misled, Ferry considers deep ecology potentially dangerous. He points out the surprising fact that the Nazis passed groundbreaking environmental protections. Laws forbidding hunting, animal cruelty, and environmental harm were, in fact, Hitler’s “pet projects,” according to Ferry. How could such apparent touchy-feeliness take root in one of the most legendarily brutal regimes to ever blight the planet? Ferry’s answer is that a general theme of Nazi ideology was a backlash against the Enlightenment: its liberalism, egalitarianism, scientism, and humanism.

The ethical laws of the Enlightenment, like its scientific laws, were universalizing and equalizing. Counter-Enlightenment movements like Nazism have sought to return to particularity — to preserve the unique character of places, races, cultures, and traditions. The modern movement called bioregionalism, for example, stresses the importance of local setting. In the words of Antoine Waechter, a prominent contemporary French politician and environmentalist, “A cultural community can only blossom on a soil where a continuity of generations occurs and here its identity takes the concrete and visible form of a unique landscape.” This sounds eerily similar to the spirit of the Third Reich’s environmental protection laws, in which the preservation of the German landscape is framed as crucial for the preservation of German culture. For a committed liberal individualist like Ferry, we are self-making creatures for whom the freedom to craft our own identities is paramount; so the distinction between the biological determinism of Nazi racism and the sort of cultural determinism suggested by Waechter appears fine indeed.

Where our species’ interests conflict with those of the whole biosphere, a thoroughgoing deep ecologist quite reasonably prioritizes nature first. At least since Thomas Malthus we have fretted about the rate of human population growth, and environmentalists more so than most: humanity can irreparably devastate an environment long before we have finished exploiting its resources. When it comes to the practicalities of fixing the population problem, environmentalists tend to talk about making birth control and sex education more widely available, or to celebrate “GINK”-hood. But, as Ferry points out, “when we get to the point of arguing that the ideal number of humans, from the point of view of nonhumans, would be 500 million (James Lovelock), or 100 million (Arne Næss), I would like to know how one plans to realize this highly philanthropic objective.” Environmentalists are naturally very conflicted over this question; but we can probably admit that they are so not because it’s unclear what the imperatives of deep ecology might recommend, but rather because those imperatives can’t be reconciled with their more humanistic values.

Still, environmentalism, and the left-wing counterculture in general, often calls for an outright rejection of the Enlightenment. Ferry’s plea is that we not throw out the baby (liberal values, equal rights, science, progress) with the bathwater. And indeed we should not; a shotgun rejection of all the fruits of modernity is as senseless as its realization is improbable. But he shows his own antiquated prejudices when he insinuates throughout his book that any attribution of intrinsic value to nature brings with it danger — that unless we wholeheartedly accept the outmoded metaphysics and ethics of the Enlightenment, the entire edifice of human rights will as likely as not be demolished. But the premises from which 18th-century philosophers argued look rather more questionable now than they once did. While dumping the bathwater of some sort of conceivable future enviro-Nazism, Ferry himself neglects a baby: that our relationship with the world we inhabit still sorely needs the kind of rejuvenating that deep ecology hopes to provide.

And it barely needs pointing out: few, if any, people are actively celebrating Genghis Khan’s murderous carbon savings. Ecoterrorism is a real phenomenon, but is hardly frequent; the vast majority of environmentalists are firmly committed to peacefulness in a way the Nazis were not. Deep ecology is only one current in a campaign that can increasingly appeal to entirely human interests to get its point across. More and more, science shows how we are unavoidably embedded in our surroundings: ecology demonstrates our dependence on, and the fragility of, the world’s ecosystems; psychology shows that we are not simply the owners of detached, immaterial minds, but rather animals living within a habitat, affected by the contexts in which we find ourselves in all manner of ways. Darwinian evolution has made it clear that while we may be a very unique animal, we still exist on a continuum with the rest of the animal kingdom and have much more in common with them than Ferry wants to allow. New, surprising examples of animal culture are continually being found. The environmental movement can, and must, take pains to explain how our self-interest is tied up with the health of the planet, even as it shows how that health is worth preserving for its own sake.