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Beneath the Surface : Critical Essays in the Philosophy of Deep Ecology Katz, Eric MIT Press 026261149X 9780262611497 9780585324319 English Deep ecology--Philosophy, Human ecology--Philosophy. 2000 GE195.B463 2000eb 179/.1 Deep ecology--Philosophy, Human ecology--Philosophy.
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Beneath the Surface Critical Essays in the Philosophy of Deep Ecology edited by Eric Katz, Andrew Light, and David Rothenberg
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©2000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. Chapters 1, 7, 8, 12, and 13 of this book are revised and/or expanded versions of articles from a special issue of Inquiry, volume 39, number 2, June 1996, edited by Andrew Light and David Rothenberg, reprinted by permission of Scandinavian University Press, Oslo, Norway. This book was set in Sabon by Crane Composition, Inc., and was printed and bound in the United States of America. Printed on recycled paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Beneath the surface : critical essays in the philosophy of deep ecology / edited by Eric Katz, Andrew Light, and David Rothenberg. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-61149-X (alk. paper) 1. Deep ecologyPhilosophy. 2. Human ecologyPhilosophy. I. Katz, Eric, 1952 . II. Light, Andrew, 1966 III. Rothenberg, David, 1962 GE195.B463 2000 179'.1dc21 99-41517 CIP
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INTRODUCTION: DEEP ECOLOGY AS PHILOSOPHY Eric Katz, Andrew Light, and David Rothenberg Why a deep ecology? Perhaps there is a more basic question: What is deep ecology? The Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, who coined the term in 1972, originally emphasized a contrast between deep ecology and "shallow ecology"or what was later termed "reform environmentalism." 1 Reformist environmental policies are concerned mainly with problems, such as resource depletion and pollution, that have adverse effects on the wellbeing and affluence of the human populations in the developed world. These shallow policies attempt to reform human activity regarding the environment without instigating a systematic change in human behavior, attitudes, or institutions. Deep ecology, on the other hand, offers a normative critique of human activity and institutions, and seeks a fundamental change in the dominant worldview and social structure of modernity. According to Naess, "The aim of supporters of the deep ecology movement is not a slight reform of our present society, but a substantial reorientation of our whole civilization."²2 Naess, though a philosopher, has often stressed that he is more interested in deep ecology as a political and social movement than as a philosophy. As a movement, it is a call to various forms of ecoactivism that may cover the entire spectrum of legal and extralegal activity, and may overlap with other forms of "radical" environmentalism, such as social ecology, ecofeminism, and bioregionalism. Thus the deep ecology movement advocates, among other actions, constituent pressure on elected officials; formation of Green political parties; educational workshops for schools and communities; community recycling programs; protests and boycotts against antiecological industries; and even ecosabotage. These wide-ranging environmentalist activities are not in themselves the deep ecology movement, but they are compatible with the deep ecology movement because of the attitude or orientation that motivates the activists. In short, these environmentally oriented political and social actions are the manifestations, at least among some activists, of deep ecological principles.
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CONTENTS About the Contributors
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Introduction: Deep Ecology as Philosophy Eric Katz, Andrew Light, And David Rothenberg
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I Deep Ecology and Its Critics
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1 How Wide Is Deep Ecology? John Clark
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2 Against the Inevitability of Anthropocentrism Eric Katz
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3 A Critique of Deep Green Theory William Grey
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4 Deep Ecology, Deep Pockets, and Deep Problems: A Feminist Ecosocialist Analysis 59 Val Plumwood 5 Ontological Determinism and Deep Ecology: Evading the Moral Questions? Mathew Humphrey
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6 In Defense of Deep Ecology: An Ecofeminist Response to a Liberal Critique Ariel Salleh
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7 Callicott and Naess on Pluralism Andrew Light
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II New Horizons for Deep Ecology
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8 No World but in Things: The Poetry of Naess's Concrete Contents David Rothenberg
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9 Possible Political Problems of Earth-Based Religiosity Michael E. Zimmerman
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10 The Postmodernism of Deep Ecology, the Deep Ecology of Postmodernism, and Grand Narratives Arran Gare
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11 Deep Ecology and Desire: On Naess and the Problem of Consumption Jonathan Maskit
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12 Bhagavadgita * Ecosophy T, and Deep Ecology Knut A. Jacobsen
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13 A State of Mind Like Water: Ecosophy T and the Buddhist Traditions Deane Curtin
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14 Deep Ecology And Its Social Philosophy: A Critique Bron Taylor
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Bibliography
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Index
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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS John Clark is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University, New Orleans, and also teaches in the Environmental Studies Program. He is the author of several books, including The Philosophical Anarchism of William Godwin (1977); The Anarchist Moment: Reflections on Culture, Nature and Power (1984); and La Pensée Sociale d'Elisée Reclus: Géographe Anarchiste (1996). He has edited or coedited Renewing the Earth: The Promise of Social Ecology (1990); Les Français des États-Unis: D'Hier à Aujourd'hui (1994); and Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology (2nd ed., 1998). Deane Curtin is Raymond and Florence Sponberg Chair of Ethics at Gustavus Adolphus College. He is the author of Chinnagounder's Challenge: The Question of Ecological Citizenship (1999) and coeditor of Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food (1992). Arran Gare is Senior Lecturer, Swinburne University, Australia. He is the author of several books, including Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis (1995) and Nihilism Inc.: Environmental Destruction and the Metaphysics of Sustainability (1996), and the coeditor of Environmental Philosophy (1983). William Grey is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Queensland, Australia. Mathew Humphrey is Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. Knut A. Jacobsen is Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Religions, University of Bergen, Norway. He is the author of Prakrti in Samkhya-Yoga: Material Principle, Religious Experience, Ethical Implications (1999). Eric Katz is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Science, Technology, and Society Program at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He is the author of Nature as Subject: Human Obligation and Natural Community (1997) and the coeditor (with Andrew Light) of Environmental Pragmatism (1996).
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Andrew Light is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies at the State University of New York, Binghamton, and Resident Fellow at the International Center for Advanced Studies at New York University. He has edited or coedited eight books, including Environmental Pragmatism (1996) and Social Ecology After Bookchin (1998). He coedits the journal Philosophy and Geography. Jonathan Maskit is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Denison University. Val Plumwood is currently an Australian Research Council Fellow at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993), and coauthor (as Val Routley, with Richard Routley) of The Fight for the Forests (1973) and (as Val Routley, with Richard Routley, R. K. Meyer, and Ross T. Brady) of Relevant Logics and Their Rivals (1982). Her forthcoming book is entitled Environmental Culture. David Rothenberg is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and author of Is It Painful to Think? Conversations with Arne Naess (1992) and Hand's End: Technology and the Limits of Nature (1993). He has edited or coedited several collections, including A Parliament of Minds (1999) and The New Earth Reader (1999). Ariel Salleh is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Social Inquiry at the University of Western Sydney, Hawkesbury, Australia. She is the author of Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern (1997). Bron Taylor is Oshkosh Foundation Professor of Religion and Social Ethics, and Director of Environmental Studies, at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. He is the editor of Ecological Resistance Movements: The Global Emergence of Radical and Popular Environmentalism (1995) and author of Affirmative Action at Work and the forthcoming On Sacred Ground: Earth First! and Environmental Ethics. Michael E. Zimmerman is Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University and the author of Eclipse of the Self: The Development of Heidegger's Concept of Authenticity (1981), Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity (1990), and Contesting Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity (1994).
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To consider the basic principles, motivations, and justifications of the deep ecology movement is, in essence, to examine the philosophy of deep ecology. It is the purpose of this volume to bring together a wide variety of essays that address this task. These essays examine philosophical issues and problems in deep ecology, not issues and problems in the environmental policies of the deep ecology political movement. Of course the distinction between philosophy and policy is somewhat arbitrary, especially in an area of thought that can be called "applied" or "practical" philosophy. Nevertheless, we have tried to maintain the distinction in selecting the essays for this volume. Rather than focus on the practical ramifications of deep ecological principles on actual environmental policy situations (e.g., ecological restoration, preservation of biodiversity, environmental racism), we have chosen essays that consider essential philosophical issues in the meaning of deep ecology, such as the nature of value, the connections between ontology and ethics, and the coherence and consistency of a deep ecology worldview. This in-depth examination of the philosophy of deep ecology follows from a project began in 1984 by Naess and the American philosopher and supporter of deep ecology George Sessions. Naess and Sessions wrote the Platform of Deep Ecology, now the most widely known exposition of the central ideas of the deep ecology movement. They had two goals: (1) to explain the essence of the deep ecology position and (2) to encourage people from different religious and philosophical backgrounds to forge a consensus concerning political activity in concrete situations regarding the environment. This platform has the virtue of being short, direct, and free of arcane technical language. It is a platform for the deep ecology movement, not a summary of the philosophy of deep ecology. In most published versions it is followed by a series of remarks that augment and clarify the basic propositionsand these additional remarks can (and do) change over time. But the basic platform has remained virtually unchanged since its original development in 1984, although statements 4 and 5 are often reversed. Here is the platform as it appears in Naess's Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: (1) The flourishing of human and non-human life on Earth has intrinsic value. The value of non-human life forms is independent of the usefulness these may have for narrow human purposes. (2) Richness and diversity of life forms are values in themselves and contribute to the flourishing of human and non-human life on Earth. (3) Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs. (4) Present human interference with the non-human world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening.
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(5) The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of non-human life requires such a decrease. (6) Significant change of life conditions for the better requires change in policies. These affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures. (7) The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of intrinsic value) rather than adhering to a high standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between big and great. (8) Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation directly or indirectly to participate in the attempt to implement the necessary changes. 3 This political platform can be considered a statement of the basic principles of the deep ecology movement. But what is the connection between these eight principles for action and a philosophical position? What is the philosophy of deep ecology? It is this question that brings together the essays in this collection. From its initial formulation, deep ecology was conceived as both a call to ecological activism and a normative worldview. It is a philosophical understanding and analysis of humanity and its relationship to the natural environment. We can call deep ecology a form of ecophilosophy, a field of study where problems in ecology and philosophy, in environmental policy and ethics, intersect. But for Naess deep ecology is not merely theoreticalit is a practical ecophilosophy that is capable of asserting normative priorities, value principles, and substantive policies that will enable us to come to grips with the environmental crisis. Central to the philosophy of deep ecology is the formation of what Naess calls a "total view" of the place of human beings in the world. A total viewwhat philosophers traditionally have termed a worldviewcombines our scientific understanding of reality with a valuation and emotional content, experience, or commitment. Naess writes that there are "two inescapable components" of deep ecology, the first being "valuation and emotion in thinking and experience of reality," and the second being "how they [valuation and emotion] lead to the ability of a mature, integrated human personality to act on the basis of a total view."4 The total view, then, is essentially a normative description of reality, an understanding of the world that merges objective empirical observations (scientific description) and personal values. More specifically, a deep ecological total view would address the human relationship to the non-human natural world and connect this normative understanding directly to action; an individual's total view should be the basis of all decisions regarding his or her life. A commitment to developing and living by a total view is, perhaps, the essential characteristic of deep ecology as it is positively differentiated from a
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shallow or reform environmentalism. Shallow environmentalism is labeled ''shallow" precisely because it does not seek to work out a total view. "The limitation of the shallow movement is not due to weak or unethical philosophy"since it is often based on systematic utilitarian thinking and extensive economic cost-benefit analyses"but due to a lack of explicit concern with ultimate aims, goals, and norms." 5 Shallow environmentalism is characterized by decisions and policies that reflect merely partial understandings of reality and the human place in the natural world. One of the limitations of shallow reformist environmentalism is that it does not take seriously the concerns, interests, or value of the nonhuman natural world. A deep ecological total view is not merely any type of total philosophical worldview, but a philosophical worldview that includes the nonhuman natural world, that includes the environment or the ecosphere in its normative understanding and value commitments. Because of the inclusion of the "ecosphere," a deep ecological worldview can be called an "ecosophy," a philosophical position or point of view that concentrates on the human relationship with the natural world.6 We speak here of "a" deep ecological view and not "the" deep ecological view. There can be many different ecosophies, many different ultimate worldviews regarding human activity and life in the environment. As we noted above, one reason for the existence of the platform of the deep ecology movement is to provide common ground in the realm of practical activity for a wide variety of personal philosophical positions. The development of a philosophical worldview is the result of a personal commitment and individual thought and experience. Each individual must develop his or her own total view, a personal ecosophy to understand his or her place in the world. Each individual's ecosophy serves as the personal justification for principles of action in the environmentand a deep ecological total view will incorporate the principles embodied in the deep ecology platform. Indeed, the development of each individual's ecosophy may be the principal goal of the philosophy of deep ecology.7 But the development of deep ecological total views is, by itself, primarily a methodological or formal characterization of the philosophy of deep ecology. Deep ecology must also be defined by the substantive content of the basic ideas and values that constitute the wide variety of deep ecological total views. What is the essential content of the philosophy of deep ecology? Although each ecosophy is a personally developed total view, what is common to all justifiable deep ecology positions? Perhaps these six points:
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1. The rejection of strong anthropocentrism. (Anthropocentrism is the idea that human life is the center of all value). The philosophy of deep ecology calls into question this dominant idea of the Western ethical tradition. 2. A consideration of ecocentrism as a replacement for anthropocentrism. Ecocentrism is the idea that the ecosphere and ecological systems are the focus of value. It is a holistic view of value, for entire systems are thought to be valuable, rather than individual humans or individual natural entities (such as animals). 3. Identification with all forms of life. An individual who identifies with all forms of life in the system of nature has an appreciation that the interests of all other living beings are intimately connected to his or her own interests. 4. The sense that caring for the environment is part of individual human self-realization. The interests of nature should not be seen as opposed to the interests of humanity. We expand our concern outward to embrace a greater part of the natural world, and thus we become more fully realized beings. 5. A critique of instrumental rationality (the mode of thinking that makes efficiency and quantifiable results the goal of all human activity). The philosophy of deep ecology, on the other hand, emphasizes alternative modes of thinking, such as spiritual enlightenment or artistic expression, that emphasize life-enhancing qualitative values. 6. Personal development of a total worldview. Deep ecology is not primarily a social philosophy. It usually assumes that there is an individual human being doing the thinking for himself or herself, trying to determine an honest and personal way of assessing how to conceive of a way in which nature can matter to each of us, one at a time. Social action comes later, when individuals, with their own ecosophies, get together to change things. If we return to the platform of the deep ecology movement, we can see these philosophical ideas elaborated in the context of environmental policy prescriptionsfor the platform was meant to express the common practical side of a wide variety of individually developed deep ecological worldviews. Thus the platform calls for the respect and intrinsic valuation of all forms of life, an attitude of noninterference with natural processes and systems, a deemphasis on the primary significance of human life and institutions, the restructuring of human society to be in harmony with natural processes, and a reexamination of the ends of human life, replacing the ceaseless pursuit of material abundance with a heightened quality of life experience. This family of related ideas and general policy prescriptions constitutes the fundamental substantive ideas of the philosophy of deep ecology. However, it must be emphasized that for us the philosophical position of deep ecology primarily concerns questions of ontology, that is, questions about
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the fundamental nature of things. For us, deep ecology is a philosophy about the nature of the world and the human place in this world, or the human relation to the world (e.g., either as part of it or apart from it). It is a philosophy that focuses on the fundamental ontological interrelatedness and identification of all life forms, natural objects, and ecosystems. The ethics and politics of deep ecologythose ideas most clearly expressed in its platformare secondary; they are derived from the basic ontological commitments of a deep ecological worldview. Deep ecology is thus not simply a position in the discipline of environmental ethics, although it is often perceived to be. Deep ecology is not one of many different environmental ethical theories, such as biocentric individualism or animal rights theory. It is, instead, a position in environmental philosophy, the philosophy of nature, the philosophy of human ecologyit is a cosmology or a worldview, and that may be the source of its depth. The advocates of deep ecology claim that the most important task is to understand the world in the right way; given the correct understanding, the ethical choices will be obvious. Naess argues that environmental disagreements are largely the result of different perceptions of reality. The developers of a forest see the forest differently than those who wish to preserve it. "The difference between the antagonists is one rather of ontology than ethics." 8 To solve real-world environmental problems, then, requires not the development of a new ethical theory but a new worldview, a new philosophy of the relationship between humanity and nature. Of course Naess is not the only advocate of deep ecology. Although he coined the term in 1972, his major work, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle was not available in English until 1989. Deep ecology owes much of its popularity to the work of several philosophers in America, Canada, and Australia: George Sessions, Bill Devall, Alan Drengson, the late Richard Sylvan (formerly called Routley), Warwick Fox, Freya Mathews, Andrew McLaughlin, and David Rothenberg (one of the editors of this volume)as well as environmental activists and teachers such as John Seed and Dolores LaChappelle, and the poet Gary Snyder.9 More recent writers who have continued to develop possible directions for deep ecology, though sometimes using different terminology, include David Abram and Jack Turner.10 Nevertheless, the essays in this volume emphasize, with a few exceptions, the philosophy of deep ecology as formulated by Naess. In part, the reason for this is practical. This collection began as a special issue of the journal Inquiry (Vol. 39, No. 2, June 1996), "Arne Naess's Environmental Thought," edited by Andrew Light and David Rothenberg. But there is also a more philosophical reason. Naess originated the terminology of "deep ecology," and thus his view of deep ecology is often interpreted as the definitive statement of the philosophy
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gests that Naess's pluralism can sustain a form of pragmatic weak anthropocentrism. Part II of the collection, "New Horizons for Deep Ecology," moves forward to discuss the aspects of deep ecology that are not shared by most other schools of environmental thought. This is a crucial move to make in any fair assessment of the philosophy of deep ecology, because to ignore, for example, the Eastern roots of the philosophy is possibly to ignore one of the most important facets of this form of environmental thought. But unlike many assessments of the alternative forms of philosophy in deep ecology, the essays in this section use the unique components of the theory as a tool for further criticism and reconsideration. All of these essays in one way or another move forward from the cultural pluralist issues raised at the end of Light's contribution in part I. This part begins with David Rothenberg's "No World but in Things: The Poetry of Naess's Concrete Contents." Rothenberg investigates the implications of Naess's substantive phenomenology of "concrete contents." With this idea, Naess argues that secondary qualities are as much a part of the world as primary qualities, an idea that has greatly influenced deep ecology's unique development as a metaphysical system. Rothenberg argues that this position leads Naess to expand his definition of philosophy itself, and thus suggests to us new ways of describing the world. Rothenberg shows how this device in Naess's system offers us a way of seeing the connection between deep ecology and forms of literature, music, and other artistic expressions that go well beyond conventional Western notions of environmental philosophy. Next, Michael Zimmerman, in "Possible Political Problems of Earth-Based Religiosity," opens up the discussion of the political implications of forms of Earth-based religion that may be derivable from a deep ecological view. In a very helpful essay for those who have followed his earlier explorations of the possible connections between Heidegger's work and deep ecology, Zimmerman here takes us through the problem of the formation of Earthbased forms of religion that may set aside the transcendental in favor of a premodern materialist conception of the self in relation to the world. At the heart of the essay is a discussion and reconstructive critique of the work of transcendental psychologist Ken Wilber. As he has elsewhere, Zimmerman guides us through a reading of Wilber that may help us to resolve conflicts between the postmodern and the modern in environmental thought. Picking up on some of the themes raised in Zimmerman's essay, Arran Gare, in "The Postmodernism of Deep Ecology, the Deep Ecology of Postmodernism, and Grand Narratives," takes a close look at the connection between postmod-
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of the deep ecological movement. Despite Naess's intention that each individual develop his or her own ecosophical total view, most advocates of deep ecology accept the fundamental ideas of Naessidentification and Selfrealization-as being crucial to the meaning of deep ecology. For better or worse, deep ecology is inextricably associated with the ideas of Arne Naess. In Beneath the Surface we have expanded from the original collection of essays in the Inquiry issue to provide a broad overview and a detailed analysis of the philosophy of deep ecology. Here we present a critical response to the philosophical ideas of deep ecology that is meant to show both its strengths and its weaknesses as a conceptual framework for understanding the environmental crisis. Most writing about deep ecology concerns the deep ecology movement and the concrete practical proposals derived from a deep ecological worldview; but this collection, as we noted above, will concentrate on the philosophical aspects of deep ecology and not its implications for environmental policy. We have divided the book into two sections. Although the distinction may be thought somewhat arbitrary, the essays in part I consider the philosophy of deep ecology in a narrow sense, as a reaction to issues in mainstream environmental philosophyquestions of value, ethics, and politics regarding human action in the natural world. Thus part I, "Deep Ecology and Its Critics," contains seven papers evaluating deep ecology's impact on important issues in contemporary environmental philosophy, such as the meaning of intrinsic value, moral pluralism, anthropocentrism, and ethical and political decision-making. The essays in part II are broader in scope: here the philosophy of deep ecology is conceived as a general philosophical worldview with connections to other worldviews, including non-Western religious traditions. Thus, part II, "New Horizons for Deep Ecology," contains seven papers that expand the reach of the philosophical principles of deep ecology. The goal is to examine deep ecology as a systematic worldview, a comprehensive philosophy for the understanding of reality and the human place in the universe. Part I begins with John Clark's "How Wide Is Deep Ecology?" Clark questions the insistence, particularly by Arne Naess, that deep ecology contains all other radical environmental philosophies, and suggests ways in which Naess might refine his responses to debates in the field. At the same time, however, Clark investigates how attempts to define deep ecology as a radically different form of environmental philosophy may hamper its founder's pluralistic impulses. As with many essays in this collection, while the thrust of Clark's paper is critical, it is also reconstructive. Clark offers suggestions for how deep ecologists can retool their philosophical arguments to better meet their policy programs.
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Questioning the self-image of deep ecology is also the task of Eric Katz's "Against the Inevitability of Anthropocentrism." In particular, Katz takes on the almost universally accepted assumption that deep ecology represents a form of nonanthropocentric environmental philosophy. After a thorough survey of the philosophical positions espoused by representatives of the field, Katz argues that the core of the philosophy of deep ecology is found in three ideas: the identification of the self with the natural world, the goal of Self-realization (in order to develop a wider notion of the Self with which humans can identify), and a relational and holistic ontology. He states that all three of these foundational components of the philosophy of deep ecology are at bottom anthropocentric, thus undermining one of the key descriptions by which deep ecologists have identified themselves in relation to other environmental theorists. In part, Katz draws on the work of the late Richard Sylvan in generating his critique of deep ecology. It is Sylvan's critical environmental philosophy that is the subject of William Grey's "A Critique of Deep Green Theory." For some time Sylvan's work was considered to be compatible with much of deep ecology. But, as Grey reminds us, Sylvan developed a thoroughgoing critique of deep ecology while using it as a launching point for developing his own views, which he termed "Deep Green theory." Grey takes us on a brief tour of the development of Sylvan's work and offers the beginnings of a critique of Deep Green theory. However, this criticism of a critic of deep ecology is not offered as an attempt to resuscitate the legacy of deep ecology from Sylvan's attacks. Rather, by the end of the essay we have an important picture of a strong, yet flawed, critic of deep ecology. Beginning with the fourth paper in the sectionVal Plumwood's "Deep Ecology, Deep Pockets, and Deep Problems: A Feminist Ecosocialist Analysis"we have a series of three papers that assess, challenge, and sometimes offer alternatives to the deep ecological notion of human ontology. As was noted earlier, most interpreters of deep ecology suggest that the view endorses an idea that humans are indistinguishable from other forms of nature. If humans come to recognize that they are an indistinguishable part of nature as the kind of being that they are, then, so most versions of the theory go, our ethical obligations to nature will become clearer. On these views, humans are a part of nature, so caring for nature is in some sense an extension of care for the self. While many competing versions of this view are offered by different deep ecologists, all deep ecologists generally agree that part of the description of the cause of environmental problems today must necessarily include a description of the human disconnectionin ontological termsfrom nature.
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Plumwood's paper steps into the literature on the deep ecological view of the self by first looking at a littlediscussed debate on the idea of the self between Naess and the late Peter Reed, an American student of Naess who died in an ice-climbing accident in Norway in 1987. 11 While Naess endorsed something akin to the indistinguishability thesis of human ontology sketched above, Reed argued that the basis of respect for nonhuman nature was to be found in recognizing its difference from us rather than its identity with us. Plumwood cuts a path between these views, arguing that the difference and the identity of nature with humans must be recognized in a more complex ontology than is found in either Naess's or Reed's view. The goal of any revisioning of human ontology, however, must be to form bonds of solidarity with nature that are not reducible to anthropocentrism. But using deep ecology as a starting point for building a solidarity account with nature is complicated by the trend in deep ecology to try to work within a liberal, capitalist-dominated political system with respect to policy formation. As a different alternative, Plumwood builds a case for reconstructing a sense of solidarity with nature as a foundation for a new description of human ontology in relation to nature that does not rely on treating nature as property. In "Ontological Determinism and Deep Ecology: Evading the Moral Questions?," Mathew Humphrey takes up questions similar to those at the beginning of Plumwood's paper but winds up in a very different place. He carefully articulates the varieties of notions of the self in deep ecology before going on to critique these notions through a highly creative comparison of the deep ecology view with the "integral nationalism" of French novelist and political activist Maurice Barrès. This approach gives Humphrey a surprisingly strong foundation from which to criticize the focus on "self-realization" in deep ecology and to show how this focus weakens the moral view of the system as a whole. In Humphrey's account the common focus among deep ecologists on the development of an ontology of self-realization evades the important moral questions that environmental philosophy must confront. Deep ecologists would do well to follow the lead of philosophers like John Stuart Mill and Joseph Raz, who acknowledge the importance of reforming the self in order to generate right action, but who do not replace a robust ethics with an ontology. So, contra Plumwood, Humphrey finds that the ontology of deep ecology places it farther afield from contemporary liberal accounts of morality rather than closer to them. In turn, in "In Defense of Deep Ecology: An Ecofeminist Response to a Liberal Critique," Ariel Salleh takes on Humphrey's critique of deep ecology's
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ethical stance, specifically the liberalism that she finds at the heart of his view. Jumping off from the ecofeminist critique of deep ecology, and the ensuing ecofeminism-deep ecology debate of the 1980s, Salleh suggests that if deep ecology embraced what she calls an epistemology and moral theory grounded in an "embodied materialism," it could answer the challenges put to it by liberal critics like Humphrey. An embodied materialism builds "on Marx's profound understanding of the dialectic between our practical actions in the world and the form that our thought processes take" (p. 108), which Salleh claims will bring the act of doing philosophy closer to the materiel conditions that make it possible. For Salleh, if deep ecology focused its sense of the self on how the self is embodied in everyday practicetaking into account the differences between selves (e.g., gender, race, class, etc.)then it could more effectively ground its moral stance. Salleh uses the idea of embodied materialism to criticize the liberal foundations utilized by Humphrey as supposedly separating questions of ontology and personal identity from ethics. It should be noted, however, that Humphrey had no warning that his paper would be offered for critique by Salleh for this volume (it was a contingent circumstance of the referring process for the book that led to the focus of Salleh's paper), and that, unfortunately, the editing schedule of the book prevented Humphrey from having the opportunity to respond to Salleh's critique. Many will no doubt find the description of Humphrey's position by Salleh curious and provocative. We look forward to an eventual reply from Humphrey to Salleh's paper in another forum. In the final essay of part I, "Callicott and Naess on Pluralism," Andrew Light takes up the place of deep ecology in the monism-pluralism debate in environmental ethics through a critical comparison of the positions of J. Baird Callicott and Arne Naess on the possibility of pluralism in environmental thought. If it turns out that Naess's work, and consequently much of deep ecology, is grounded in a nonrelative pluralism, then many of the questions raised by Humphrey and criticized by Salleh would be moot. For if deep ecology is pluralist with respect to the foundations of morality, then it may be the case that many different views of the self can consistently serve as foundations for embracing a deep ecological view, perhaps even a liberal view of the self that eschews a strong ontology. Light argues that Callicotta Leopoldian moral monisthas mistakenly attributed an inescapable relativism to the positions of moral pluralists in environmental ethics. An alternative to this view is found in Naess's work, though it is an alternative that raises additional questions about the validity of cross-cultural comparisons in environmental thought. Light sug-
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ernism and deep ecology. Echoing his Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis, Gare opens with a reminder of the similarities between the antimodernism of deep ecology and postmodernism. Through a brief analysis of the work of enlightenment historian Johann Herder, he argues that in a strong sense the main currents of postmodernism represent a form of deep ecology. Reminding us of Zimmerman's worries about the antimodernism of deep ecology, he takes up the question of whether a postmodern deep ecology can sustain a politics that can oppose the organized antienvironmentalism of industrial society. Challenging some of Zimmerman's conclusions on this question, Gare calls for the development of a new grand narrative of the environment. He is careful, however, to reject a monological narrative, such as those produced by nationalists, capitalists, and orthodox Marxists, in favor of a polyphonic, pluralist narrative that could direct a postmodern deep ecology in a political struggle for environmental viability. The theme of pluralism raised in Light's chapter and at issue in the last two chapters is continued in the next essay, "Deep Ecology and Desire: On Naess and the Problem of Consumption." Here Jonathan Maskit considers the problem of a pluralistic metaphysical foundation in the philosophy of Arne Naess. Maskit suggests that, contra most philosophical schools of thought in the twentieth century, which have eschewed metaphysics, deep ecology remains squarely committed to the pursuit and explanation of a robust metaphysics. Naess has consistently maintained over the years that the platform of deep ecology (the eight points devised by Naess and George Sessions) can be embraced from a wide variety of metaphysical foundations. In his famous "apron diagram," for example, Naess suggests that one can come to an endorsement of the eight points from Christian, Buddhist, and "Spinozistic" foundations. Thus Naess is adamant that his own philosophical system, Ecosophy T, is only an example of a philosophical view that can embrace and enact the eight points. He does not require that all deep ecologists, or even all agreeing with the eight points, necessarily endorse Ecosophy T. Maskit challenges this claim. Through a novel comparison with Kant's critical philosophy, he argues that Naess's metaphysics may in fact require Ecosophy T as a component of deep ecology rather than only serving as Naess's particular example of how a philosophical view can be produced out of the plural premises of deep ecology. The fulcrum that Maskit uses to get this argument off the ground is the underdeveloped concept of desire in deep ecology. According to Maskit, if deep ecology rests on an assumption of a change in everyday practices of consumption as part of an endorsement of the eight
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points, then it must be able to provide an explanation for how humans will give up their desire to consume. But only Ecosophy T provides an explanation for how desire could be transformed. Thus, the relation of deep ecology to Ecosophy T may be closer than Naess has admitted. In the next two papers in this section we move to more specific claims concerning the historical sources on which deep ecology has been based, the Asian roots of deep ecology. Knut Jacobsen, in "Bhagavadgita * Ecosophy T, and Deep Ecology," considers the connection between deep ecology and Hinduism. He finds particular links to the philosophy of deep ecology in the Bhagavadgita*as one would expect, given Naess's devotion to the textbut goes on to provide a historical comparison of different readings of a crucial passage of the Bhagavadgita* necessary to make the supposed Eastern influence of Hinduism on deep ecology salient. Next, in "A State of Mind Like Water: Ecosophy T and the Buddhist Traditions," Deane Curtin turns to another Eastern tradition explicitly articulated as a part of deep ecology, and finds key connections in Buddhism to the formation of self-realization and intrinsic value in deep ecology. Curtin argues that both of these ideas are challenged significantly if they are to be connected to Buddhist ideas, thus presenting problems to the philosophy of deep ecology that would not be found in the more conventional analysis of these components of the theory in part I. Together, these two essays provide excellent specific studies of some of the general worries concerning the foundations of deep ecology raised by previous contributions. In the final essay, "Deep Ecology and Its Social Philosophy: A Critique," Bron Taylor examines the concrete manifestation of deep ecology philosophy "on the ground" as it shapes grassroots environmental movements. Taylor's essay is a fitting finale for this volume, since it clearly demonstrates the importance of our project: the analysis of the philosophy of deep ecology as a necessary corollary to the deep ecology movement. Taylor argues that although it is often unarticulated, deep ecology does have a de facto social philosophy: the Green ideology known as "bioregionalism." But theorists of deep ecology rarely take the process of social analysis seriously. Looking at environmental movements both in the United States and in the non-Western world, Taylor offers an analysis and a critique of deep ecology as a social philosophy, focusing on three main points: (1) its reliance on a nonanthropocentric or biocentric value system; (2) its faith in non-Western and/or indigenous religious traditions as the source of a new environmental consciousness; and (3) its failure to present an adequate account of political power for bioregional entities that exist
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within and/or outside of national borders. Taylor thus envisions a new ''pragmatic" bioregionalism for deep ecology, one that is open to the possibility of anthropocentric arguments for environmental protection; the "greening" of traditional Western religions; and the use of national and international political agreements to enforce environmental policies. We view this collection of essays as a starting point for the in-depth discussion of the philosophy of deep ecology. It is not meant as a comprehensive analysis. It is an attempt to get beneath the surface of the deep ecology platform, to clarify and to elaborate the philosophical aspects of deep ecology. As a mere collection of distinct authors, it cannot hope to be a complete survey of all the issues pertaining to the philosophy of deep ecology. We do not consider all aspects of deep ecologyin particular, we have avoided essays on specific policy issues, such as population control, wilderness preservation, sustainable development, and the economic imperialism of international environmental programs. We have not included essays that focus on deep ecology's criticism of the economic materialism of contemporary life, its call for a revision of human lifestyles. Nor have we included essays on deep ecology's critique of nonsustainable forms of technological development. All of these issues have been, and will continue to be, crucial to a full understanding of the philosophy of deep ecologybut our purpose here is limited. We hope that this collection is merely the first of many such works to examine critically the philosophy of deep ecology. 12 A deeper understanding of deep ecology can help to revolutionize the human relationship to the natural world, and thus to engage the environmental crisis that surrounds us. Notes 1. Arne Naess, "The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement. A Summary," Inquiry 16 (1973): 95 100. The term "reformist environmentalism" was coined by Bill Devall. See William Devall, "Reformist Environmentalism," Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 6:2 (Spring 1979): 129 158; and Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered (Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith, 1985), pp. 51 61. 2. Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, translated and edited by David Rothenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 45 (italics in original). However, the predominance of the critique of institutions and social structures in deep ecology can be called into question. Andrew Light distinguishes forms of political ecology as either environmental materialist or environmental ontologist. He argues that environmental ontologists rely more on a reform of the self than a reform of institutions as a necessary precursor for environmental renewal. See Light's "Rethinking Bookchin and Marcuse as Environmental Materialists: Toward an Evolving Social Ecology," in Social
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Ecology After Bookchin, edited by Andrew Light (New York: Guilford Publishers, 1998), pp. 343 383. Naess has acknowledged the lack of sufficient attention by deep ecologists thus far to reform of social and economic structures. See Andrew Light, "Deep Socialism?: An Interview with Arne Naess," Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 8:1 (March 1997): 69 85. 3. Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, p. 29. 4. Ibid., p. 32. 5. Ibid., p. 33. 6. Ibid., pp. 36 37. 7. Ibid., pp. 5, 38. 8. Ibid., p. 66. 9. A partial list of major titles of books and articles in deep ecology (other than the work of Arne Naess) would include Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered (see note 1); and George Sessions, ed., Deep Ecology for the 21st Century (Boston: Shambhala, 1995). See also Bill Devall, Simple in Means, Rich in Ends: Practicing Deep Ecology (Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith, 1988); Alan Drengson, Beyond Environmental Crisis: From Technocrat to Planetary Person (New York: Peter Lang, 1989); Richard Routley, "Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental Ethic?" in Proceedings of the 15th World Congress of Philosophy (Varna, Bulgaria: 1973), pp. 205 210; Richard Routley and Val Routley, "Against the Inevitability of Human Chauvinism," in Ethics and Problems of the 21st Century, edited by K. E. Goodpaster and K. M. Sayre (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1979), pp. 36 59; Richard Sylvan and David Bennett, The Greening of Ethics: From Anthropocentrism to Deep Green Theory (Cambridge: White Horse Press, 1994); Warwick Fox, Toward a Transpersonal Ecology: Developing New Foundations for Environmentalism (Boston: Shambhala, 1990); Freya Mathews, The Ecological Self (London: Routledge, 1991); Andrew McLaughlin, Regarding Nature: Industrialism and Deep Ecology (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993); David Rothenberg, Is It Painful to Think? Conversations with Arne Naess (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); John Seed, Joanna Macy, Pat Fleming, and Arne Naess, Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings (Philadelphia: New Society, 1988); Dolores LaChappelle, Sacred Land, Sacred SexRapture of the Deep: Concerning Deep Ecologyand Celebrating Life (Silverton, Co: Finn Hill Arts, 1988); Michael Tobias, ed., Deep Ecology (San Diego: Avant, 1985). Also, the journal The Trumpeter, edited by Alan Drengson and published from 1983 until 1998, focused exclusively on the deep ecology movement (
[email protected]); Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990). 10. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (New York: Pantheon, 1996); and Jack Turner, The Abstract Wild (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1996). 11. Just before Peter Reed died, he and David Rothenberg had completed an anthology on the Norwegian roots of deep ecology, Wisdom in the Open Air (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). 12. Three other recent collections are Nina Witoszek, ed., Rethinking Deep Ecology
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(Oslo: University of Oslo, Center for Environment and Development, 1996); Alan Drengson and Yuichi Inouye, eds., The Deep Ecology Movement: An Introductory Anthology (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1995); Nina Witoszek and Andrew Brennan, eds., Philosophical Dialogues: Arne Naess and the Progress of Ecophilosophy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).
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I DEEP ECOLOGY AND ITS CRITICS
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1 How Wide Is Deep Ecology? John Clark Toward Ecophilosophical Unity-in-Diversity In a discussion of the "rules of Gandhian nonviolence," Arne Naess proposes a number of hypotheses and norms that are highly relevant to recent debates in ecophilosophy. For example, he suggests that the "character of the means used in group struggle determines the character of the results," and that one should "choose that personal action or attitude which most probably reduces the tendency towards violence of all parties in a struggle." One should not, he says, "act as a mere functionary, a representative of an institution or an underling, but always as an autonomous, fully responsible person." Mistrust, he suggests, ''stems from misjudgment, especially of the disposition of [one's] opponent to answer trust with trust, mistrust with mistrust." One should "fight antagonisms, not antagonists," and "formulate the essential interests which [one] and [one's] opponent share and try to cooperate upon this basis." Furthermore, one should not "humiliate or provoke [an] opponent," or "judge [an] opponent harder than [one]self." 1 These proposals are not intended to be taken as legalistic commandments, but rather as general guidelines for action. As such they are very much in accord with an ecological perspective that values richness and diversity wherever they occur, and that practices universal respect based on a recognition that the maximum self-realization of the whole comes through the greatest possible flourishing of all the parts. Furthermore, while the rules may have been formulated with "opponents" such as corporations, governmental bodies, and antiecological interest groups in mind, they may very usefully be applied to recent debates between proponents of such contending ecological viewpoints as deep ecology, social ecology, and ecofeminism. It may seem strange to conceive of those who espouse various ecological perspectives and who seek to overcome ecological crisis as "opponents" of one another. Indeed, many ecophilosophers were in fact surprised when they first
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found the various "radical ecologies" depicted as mutually exclusive alternatives. Once they were defined in this manner, however, many of the attitudes that Naess cautions against became quite prevalent. Aggressive attacks were met with even more aggressive responses. Advocates of theories became uncritically defensive of their chosen ecophilosophies. Mistrust and antagonism became widespread. Commonalties were ignored and cooperation often became impossible. Theorists applied quite different standards to their own ideas and to those of opponents. For a number of years a "war of the ecologies" raged. It would of course be naïve to deny that advocates of various ecophilosophies do in fact hold opposing views on important issues, and the issues at stake should not be glossed over or obscured in any way. Yet these differences can coexist with a respect for one's opponents, an openness to the views of others, and a commitment to cooperation in the pursuit of mutually held goals. Naess's norms are helpful in reminding us of the preconditions for such a nondefensive, nondogmatic approach. As originally formulated, the deep ecology platform seemed aimed at making just such an approach the basis for ecological practice. It was designed to facilitate cooperation between all those who accept an ecological view of reality (sometimes called ecocentrism) and who share the goal of changing society's direction from an ecocidal one to an ecologically sound one. Within this general orientation there is room for a variety of positions on specific issues, and for opposition and debate. The present discussion raises certain questions about the scope of deep ecology in the light of Naess's nonideological, "deep questioning" approach. First, I ask whether an expanded consideration of the social institutional implications of deep ecology would not increase its depth, relevance, and appeal to proponents of other ecologies. Second, I pose the question of whether certain tendencies to define deep ecology in stark opposition to other ecophilosophies has not impeded the original aims of the movement. And, finally, I suggest that possible answers to these questions are implicit in Arne Naess's ecophilosophy. Deep Ecology and Social Change Naess defines deep ecology as a movement rather than a specific view of reality, indeed stating that it "is not a philosophy in any proper academic sense, nor is it institutionalized as a religion or an ideology." 2 Because of its emphasis on expressing widespread agreement on fundamental points of theory and practice, its statements are formulated in very general, and often rather vague, terms, as is the case, most notably, in the deep ecology platform. This allows the points in
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the platform to be derived from many more ultimate presuppositions of diverse kinds. Such an approach has great appeal, especially in view of the gravity of the ecological crisis and the need for coordinated action in defense of the Earth. However, it also produces problems. Harold Glasser points out that in many contexts, Naess has deliberately sought to maintain a certain vagueness in the concepts and principles of deep ecology. Glasser claims that this "methodological vagueness" is "a sophisticated semantical device for facilitating the acceptance and agreement of statements and notions by emphasizing the positive aspect of ambiguity that is sometimes associated with a high level of generalization." 3 Yet he notes that this vagueness "can introduce a tension between parallel efforts designed to isolate and clarify fundamental conflicts (deep questioning).''4 In effect, wideness is gained at the expense of depth. An example of a problem resulting from such vagueness concerns the statement in the platform that ecological richness and diversity should be reduced only to satisfy "vital needs." Unfortunately, there is a danger that an ecological analysis will lack critical force, and can be more easily compromised, without further elaboration on the nature of such "vital needs." Some indication of the cultural relativity of needs, the means by which dominant institutions shape them, and the possibilities for a critical and conscious transformation of the self and its structure of needs is essential if we are to move from the level of edifying morality to that of effective ethical and political practice. Naess, in his own philosophical analyses, recognizes the complexity of this question. He sometimes gives examples of "vital" and "nonvital" needs, and he mentions that things which might well be "vital" in a poor country are often "nonvital" in a rich one. In Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, for example, he says that variables like "differences in climate and related factors, together with differences in the structures of societies as they now exist, need to be considered."5 He gives the example of whaling not being (or, perhaps more accurately, as not being necessary to fulfill) a vital need in a rich country, although it may be absolutely essential in a poor society. References to this social context of needs were present in early discussions of the nature of deep ecology. For example, in his famous 1973 article "The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movements," Naess suggested that deep ecology implies an "anti-class posture" and "local autonomy and decentralization,"6 ideas that would give some kind of content to the call for sweeping social change. However, these points were dropped in the platform. Yet, if political, economic, and technological propositions are now excluded from the platform (other than to state that changes are necessary in these areas), will not the concept of "vital" or
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"basic" needs risk becoming a misleading abstraction, since commonsense, noncritical, noncontextualized conceptions of needs are not in principle excluded? Once again, deep ecology might thus achieve a wider appeal (since it would be less challenging), but it would lose depth of analysis and efficacy of practice. Thus, it would seem that while the platform validly points out the need for "ideological" change in which "quality of life" replaces "increased standard of living," the institutional correlates of these changes need to be mentioned, if only in general terms, as Naess has done in some of his discussions. The platform quite correctly suggests that we forsake the meretricious attractions of a "higher standard of living" in favor of the deeper satisfactions of "situations of inherent value.'' Yet this concept is much more applicable for the more affluent minority in our world than for the disinherited majority. There are certainly innumerable cases in which a person in a poor country chooses an ecologically unsound optionfor example, using an inconvenient and highly polluting form of transportation to get to a stressful, laborious, and low-paying jobnot because he or she thinks that it promises a "higher standard of living" than the more traditional way of life that has often been cruelly destroyed. Rather, it is because he or she has no effective choice in the matter. There are thus billions of people who are de facto reducing ecological richness and diversity in order to "satisfy" what are, without question, "vital needs." They are, according to point 3 of the platform, beyond reproach. And it is to the credit of Arne Naess that he explicitly rejects the idea of morally blaming the people of poor countries for what they are compelled to do. However, there is obviously still an ecological and moral problem in such situations, and some hints about its nature are certainly desirable in a statement of what is basic to an ecological movement. The institutional aspects of the problem can be recognized without denying the centrality of ideological, moral, and spiritual transformation in the process of creating an ecological society. On the other hand, to ignore or bracket these aspects (as Naess does not in his discussions of his own ecosophy, but as the platform does) will render deep ecology superficial to those who see reflection on the specific nature of human social institutions (beyond the human social institution of ideology) and on the institutionalized roots of ecological crisis as fundamental to the ecological problematic. Of course, if these issues are not fundamental, then they have no place in the platform. My position is, of course, that they are indeed basic, and that deep ecology would be broadened and deepened if this centrality were recognized. The careful theoretical analysis of whether or not they are central has not yet taken place, since most of the discussion of related questions has fo-
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cused on the nature of ideal societies (that are nonanthropocentric, nonpatriarchal, or nondominating) rather than on the "the necessary changes" that are the concern of the platform. 7 Two Concepts of Deep Ecology? Arne Naess's conception of deep ecology presupposes the importance of open, constructive dialogue and learning from diverse views. This seems to conflict in some ways with a perspective that has been encouraged by George Sessions, the main American interpreter and historian of deep ecology. While Sessions has explicitly expressed his complete agreement with Naess's position, and is well known as the coauthor with Naess of the deep ecology platform, there seems to be an underlying divergence between the two theorists in methodology and sensibility. Sessions seems to conceive of deep ecology more as a completed theoretical edifice to be defended than a practical basis for cooperation between those with deep ecological concerns. He often presents deep ecology as presently formulated as being fundamentally beyond reproach, and implies that any questions raised about its adequacy result from either ignorance or malice on the part of the critics. His standpoint toward contending ecological viewpoints does not seem to reflect Naess's concern with minimizing antagonisms and engagement in open dialogue. Sessions seems particularly concerned to depict ecofeminists and social ecologists as being in sharp contradiction with the basic ideas of deep ecology. Yet many ecofeminists, social ecologists, and others who take issue with certain positions that Sessions sees as basic to deep ecology would, I believe, have little difficulty accepting all the points of the deep ecology platform. A consideration of Naess's "rules of nonviolence" might help remind us that our various ecophilosophies have overlapping aspects, that they are in some ways complementary, and that our presumed goal is to improve our ecological thinking and practice rather than to defend successfully the tenets of our preferred ecophilosophy. Accepting a nonsectarian approach does not, of course, mean that we hesitate to express our philosophical views in the strongest of terms, nor that we refrain from careful critique of other views even as we engage in equally careful self-critique of our own ideas and practice. In fact, we might even begin to question the very concept of our "own" ideas. After all, ideas are not artifacts that we consciously decide to produce, and they are certainly not something we can hold on to, no matter how hard we try. Naess's reflections on the need to overcome identification with the narrow ego, and to achieve identification with larger realities, might usefully be applied to this
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problem. If we do so, we might be more successful in avoiding our natural tendency to fall into what might be called "the arrogance of humans with-isms," a malady that has gravely afflicted participants in recent ecological disputes. We might therefore consider how ecological principles apply to the process of ecological scholarship. These principles imply that we must always look at ideas holistically, relating them to their larger context. It means patiently looking at the whole of any person's thought, and noting the connections between all its aspects. It means recognizing that ideas are always in a process of development, and that this development has more than one possible path. It means discovering how value (whether in nature or in theories and ideas) is widely dispersed, yet can be seen to contribute to a larger, developing good. In short, ecological scholarship reflects the respect for the organic and for unity-in-diversity exhibited by ecological thinking in general. It would seem that such scholarship would also be guided by Naess's "rules of nonviolence," insofar as they describe a nondominating outlook that allows organic growth and development to take place. While Sessions's recent deep ecology anthology is in most ways an excellent book, and includes many examples of outstanding work in ecophilosophy, it sometimes exhibits exactly such a sectarian and defensive approach as has been described. In fact, few of the writers included in the book adhere to such a narrow view, and many of them expand the concept of deep ecology in areas that show it to be highly complementary to other ecological perspectives. Yet in his editorial introductions and his own articles, Sessions emphasizes the divisions between these viewpoints and dismisses all questions about deep ecology raised by other ecophilosophies. This is clear as early as the Preface, in which criticisms of deep ecology by social ecologists and ecofeminists are reduced to "misrepresentations" that "have resulted in considerable misunderstanding and confusion concerning what deep ecology actually is and what it stands for." 8 It is indeed true that there have been many misrepresentations. For example, while Bookchin has posed some challenging questions for deep ecologists, he has also attributed to the movement as a whole views held by only a small minority of its proponents. He has also systematically refrained from recognizing the work of deep ecologists who have done the most sophisticated theoretical work or who have explored areas that he himself recognizes as important. In view of the lack of respect for others and the inaccuracy in depicting their views exhibited in his attacks, they can be questioned not only on intellectual grounds but also on moral ones.9 Yet Bookchin's unsympathetic and indeed blatantly unfair approach does not justify the parody of his views and of social ecology in general presented in Sessions's commentary. Furthermore, it has only served
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to make deep ecology less appealing to those who are familiar with Bookchin's work, and especially with his real contributions to ecological thought. Sessions interprets not only Bookchin, but social ecologists in general, as being "concerned primarily with issues of human social justice," implying that somehow this means they have no central concern for ecological problems. Yet social ecologists believe social and ecological problems to be entirely inseparable, since they hold a dialectical, holistic position that sees human beings as an inseparable part of nature and social problems as ecological problems. Elsewhere, Sessions complains that they "see ecological problems as essentially political." 10 This statement is true, but it does not, as he implies, mean that they see these problems as being any less ecological. For example, all social ecologists must recognize that the reduction of biodiversity on a massive scale is a major ecological problem. And, indeed, the destruction of this diversity and the imposition of an ecologically degrading global monoculture has been an enduring theme for social ecologists. However, these theorists point out that if we want to understand the basis for this ecodestruction, we would do well to investigate carefully the operation of the world economy, the policies of nation-states, the nature of poverty in the South, systems of land tenure, economic inequalities, the policies of the World Bank, international debt, and many other political and economic questions. It is encouraging that some biodiversity experts like Peter Raven are now presenting exactly such a social ecological analysis with a background of scientific sophistication available to few ecophilosophy theorists (and that some selections in Sessions's anthology move in a similar direction). There are also numerous suggestions in Naess's work that these issues are of considerable ecological importance.11 Sessions is rather hasty in dismissing the ideas of social ecologists, and he does not discuss why their social analyses should not be considered directly relevant to ecology. For example, the challenging perspective of the Indian sociologist and historian Ramachandra Guha (a "social ecologist" in the broad sense) is reduced to "a rather narrow anthropocentric 'social justice' perspective."12 Guha contends that Indian nature preserves are based on an elitist model, in view of the fact that they are designed not to protect "nature," but rather the large mammals which are of interest to rich tourists, and because they are often created through displacement of peasants and domesticated animals.13 Guha expresses exactly the kinds of concerns that Western ecophilosophers need to hear (through Guhawho rather uses terms like ''management" and "sustainability" uncriticallyhas much to learn from deep ecologists also). His analysis is especially enlightening to Western deep ecologists, ecofeminists, and (not least of all) social ecologists who often make "global"
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pronouncements relating to fundamental economic, political, and cultural issues that have quite different implications, depending on which part of the globe is affected. At one point, Sessions questions Michael Zimmerman's attempts "to bring together the very different views of Deep Ecology and Social Ecology." 14 Yet isn't the task of the philosopher, and especially the ecophilosopher, to bring together what is "different," and to show, as an early ecologist put it, "that the way up and the way down are one and the same way''?15 I think that Zimmerman (whose important work is notably missing from Session's deep ecology anthology) presents a quite balanced assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of both deep and social ecology in his carefully considered work Contesting Earth's Future,16 and he constructively points out ways in which the two traditions can learn from each other and come to terms with some of their own inadequacies. He also points out how both might benefit not only from ecofeminist analyses but also from the remarkable insights on the evolution of consciousness of a thinker such as Ken Wilber.17 It seems to me that such a critical but conciliatory approach is exactly the one needed to advance ecological thought, and is very much in accord with Naess's norms of trust, nonantagonism, and cooperation. Deep Ecology, Peace, and Justice In "The Deep Ecological Movement: Some Philosophical Aspects," Naess discusses the four levels of his "apron diagram," showing the relation between the deep ecology platform and other beliefs and principles. According to the diagram, there are, at level 1, "ultimate premises and ecosophies," at level 2, "the 8-point deep ecology platform or principles," at level 3, "general normative consequences and 'factual' hypotheses," and, finally, at level 4, "particular rules or decisions adapted to particular situations."18 While Naess says that views such as Buddhism, Christianity, or Spinozist or Whiteheadian philosophy can all be placed at level 1, he recognizes that some outlooks, such as Buddhism and Taoism, fit much better than others, including most forms of Christianity.19 He also says that some ecophilosophers who are not considered deep ecologists, for example, Skolimowski, support the principles at level 2, but assume that they do not because of the way these principles have been interpreted.20 It would seem that the ecophilosophies which Sessions depicts as in opposition to deep ecology (social ecology and ecofeminism) can be reconciled with the platform at least as well as some of the views Naess mentions. I will focus on social ecology, with which I am more familiar, and leave consideration of the other half of the hypothesis to ecofeminist theorists.
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It seems clear that any nondogmatic social ecologist could accept all the points of the deep ecology platform. While the idea of "intrinsic value" (point 1) has been expressed at times by social ecologists in terms of "good," ''self-realization," or other concepts, the concern for intrinsic or inherent value is implicit. Richness and diversity (point 2) are also consistently emphasized in social ecological analyses. Furthermore, the social ecological critique is often directed at the evil of ecologically destructive activities in pursuit of nonessential goals (point 3). Other points in the platform, such as the idea that policies must change significantly (point 6), that quality of life must be stressed instead of material standard of living (point 7), and that people have an obligation to act for change (point 8), are easily found in the social ecology literature. The two points that might be thought most likely to be areas of conflict are points 4 and 5. However, I cannot imagine any social ecologist who would reject the idea that human life could flourish with a smaller human population. Rothenberg's citation of "the latest version" of the program contains only this statement, which seems noncontroversial from a social ecological perspective. 21 However, the version found in Naess's 1986 article and elsewhere also includes the statement that "the flourishing of nonhuman life requires a smaller human population."22 It might be possible to argue that a truly ecological global society could support over 5.8 billion people while permitting the flourishing of nonhuman life. Whether the case is convincing is another matter. However, it would seem difficult to argue, using a social ecological analysis, that at any time in the foreseeable future such a population would not be detrimental to such flourishing. Thus, I would take possible disagreements on this point to be of the "semantical" type that Naess mentions.23 The case with point number 5 is similar. Social ecologists conclude that human society is at present having a highly detrimental effect on life on Earth. Some might question whether the term human "interference with the nonhuman world" is adequate (and nondualistic), since it might imply that humans could somehow withdraw from interaction with the rest of nature, as opposed to interacting in more ecologically responsible ways with other parts of the larger natural whole. Yet the general principle embodied in the point is entirely in accord with social ecology's view that disordered human institutions are reversing the course of evolutionary development on the planet. I would therefore conclude that consistent social ecologists might, and in fact implicitly do, support the deep ecology platform. Furthermore, deep ecologists can consistently support a social ecological perspective, and I would argue that the most basic principles of the movement point toward the need for developing such an approach (as is already being done in some cases). In fact, according to Alan Drengson, "Arne Naess says that he is a supporter of the ecofeminist, social ecology, social justice, bioregional,
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and peace movements." 24 While Naess does not always make such support explicit in his discussion of such movements, there is nothing in his thought that contradicts such a position. In addition, he makes certain statements which imply that social institutional principles can be rooted in the deep ecology platform itself. Naess notes in "The Deep Ecology 'Eight Points' Revisited" (written as recently as 1993, according to Sessions) that "any social or political trends of the fascist or Nazi kind [contradict] the requirement of full ecological sustainability" in view of the implications of points 1 and 2, which require respect for the value of cultural differences.25 But if these political implications can be deduced from the eight points, why cannot conclusions concerning, for example, the effects of economic class systems, highly centralized political power, or technological megamachines be seen to follow also? A similar rejection of, for example, class systems and their ideologies would be justified if such institutions can be shown to reduce cultural diversity, and if they encourage a lack of respect for the intrinsic value of some human beings, or entail practices exhibiting such a lack (not to mention if they can be shown to have destructive ecological consequences). Naess seems to draw the conclusion that they do have such effects when he discusses his own ecosophy, but he has refrained from doing so in his statements of the deep ecology platform. Some might suspect that I am trying to invoke Naess's ideas in a one-sided way in defense of what has sometimes been described (usually negatively) as a "convergence thesis" concerning ecophilosophies. However, I am attempting merely to pose the possibility of such convergence on certain issues, rather than predicting to what degree such a convergence is possible. (In doing so, I accept Naess's principle that we aim at maximizing cooperation when the limits to it are not clear.) It is true that Naess also makes statements such as "Some think that deep ecology should encompass questions of peace and social justice, whereas I think we should be careful to distinguish the differences between these movements, and not spread [ourselves] too thin."26 However, elsewhere he recognizes all three of these movements as integral parts of a larger Green Movement, which he looks upon with considerable admiration. It is not clear, then, why from the standpoint of deep ecology one should see the three areas as distinct rather than inseparable. I suspect that Naess would not assert that Green activists who consciously choose to work in all three areas are necessarily taking the wrong path. Furthermore, it would seem that if we accept either the ultimate norm of universal self-realization (in Ecosophy T) or the recognition of intrinsic value of other living beings (as in deep ecology and other ecophilosophies), we would be led to conclusions about ecology, peace, and justice that would be difficult to separate (after all, ecological damage harms
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humans, nonhumans, and ecosystems; war is war on people, other species, and ecosystems; possessive, egotistic attitudes lead to unjust treatment of humans, nonhumans, and ecosystems; etc.). Whether or not the two tendencies will ever converge, there is much more common ground between deep ecology and social ecology both on the basic theoretical level and in the practical sphere than most observers have seemed to notice. Indeed, Naess's "top norm" and "ultimate goal" in his own ecosophy is very similar to what is seen as ultimate in some versions of social ecology (for example, my own). The norm of "self-realization," he says, "includes personal and community self-realization, but is conceived also to refer to an unfolding of reality as a totality.'' 27 This formulation is similar to social ecology's dialectical holism, which sees the developing good of the whole as inseparable from the realization of the good by all the internally related parts of that whole. As has been mentioned, Naess deduces from such a norm such values as local self-sufficiency, cooperation, selfdetermination, and the elimination of exploitation, subjection, and class societies.28 Thus, some of the social implications Naess draws out from his general outlook also parallel social ecological themes. A Deeper Ecology Arne Naess has at times said that he does not think anyone should be called a "deep ecologist." While this statement is in part a rejection of the indelicacy of implying that most people are "more shallow" than oneself, it also seems to reveal his hope that deep ecology not become another ideology that restricts people's ability to think, perceive, and feel in an open, flexible way. It is indeed painful to think, and ideologies are one way of deadening ourselves to that pain. But as certain philosophers discovered long ago, this pain is the creative agony of giving birth to something new, living, and growing. The deep ecology platform is a commendable attempt to unite ecologists (whether we call them "deep" or merely "consistent") in the pursuit of their most pressing goal of protecting the threatened Earth. Yet some of Naess's own more specific ecosophical principles will, I think, contribute much more toward that goal than the rather generic formulations of the platform (even if it were expanded in the ways I have suggested). His own ecosophy reflects well the principles of nonattachment (liberation from the narrowness of egoism) and compassion (identification with the good of all beings), and there are no more direct paths to an ecological world than these, if they are rigorously put into practice. Furthermore, these are principles that could unite
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all the radical ecologies that sometimes seem in conflict. For they are equally at the core of social ecology's critique of domination, its dialectical view of a self-transforming reality, and its concern for unity-in-diversity, and of ecofeminism's critique of patriarchal power, the objectification of woman and nature, and its concern for an expanded ethic of care. Perhaps a reflection on these principles will bring us a step closer to realizing our responsibilities as the awakened mind and creative imagination of the Earth. Notes 1. Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy, edited by David Rothenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 148 150. Naess states each point as an imperative, and avoids terms such as "should" and "ought" in most cases. The principles embodied in the rules are found throughout Naess's work, but as collected in this lengthy "systematic account,'' they present an impressive image of what an ethic of nondomination might mean in practice. 2. Arne Naess, "The Deep Ecological Movement: Some Philosophical Aspects," in Deep Ecology for the 21st Century, edited by George Sessions, (Boston: Shambhala, 1995), p. 71. 3. Harold Glasser, "Deep Ecology Clarified," The Trumpeter 12 (1995): 71. 4. Ibid. 5. Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, p. 30. 6. Naess, "The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movements," in Sessions, Deep Ecology for the 21st Century, pp. 152 154. 7. It is important to recognize that while in the polemics between contending ecologies, the definition of deep ecology discussed here has usually remained a given, the living phenomena have, as usual, defied static definition. Within the deep ecology tradition a lively debate has emerged over exactly the kind of social institutional questions that are emphasized here. The most notable contributions so far have been Andrew McLaughlin's Regarding Nature: Industrialism and Deep Ecology (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993) and Robyn Eckersley's Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward an Ecocentric Approach (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992). 8. Sessions, Deep Ecology for the 21st Century, p. xiii. 9. Bookchin has paid a considerable price for his crusade against deep ecology. While his viewpoint has gained increased recognition in the ecophilosophy literature, it has become identified with his most superficial, loosely argued, and often spiteful polemics rather than with his stronger theoretical works, such as his classic The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982). In addition, the quality of his work has declined as he has become increasingly strident, dogmatic, and irrational. As a result, many of his colleagues have been alienated from him, and he has threatened the credibility of the theoretical outlook that he did so much to develop.
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10. Sessions, Deep Ecology for the 21st Century, p. 266. 11. In fact, Sessions does not seem far from recognizing the central importance of such issues. For example, he has recently stated that "[w]hat the 'new world order' (proclaimed by some to be emerging) amounts to is the intertwined octopus of an international corporate power elite, together with interlocking international economic markets and bureaucracy, and having no allegiance to any country or nation as the working classes of America and the world are now beginning to realize to their dismay" (George Sessions, "Deep Ecology as World View," Bucknell Review 37:2 [1993] p. 208.). It is only a small step from this view to a consideration of how the most well-intentioned choices within such an irrational order can lead to ecological consequences that are in drastic contradiction to the best intentions of individual agents. 12. Sessions, Deep Ecology for the 21st Century, p. xvi. 13. See Ramachandra Guha, "Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique," Environmental Ethics 11 (Spring 1989): 71 83. 14. Sessions, Deep Ecology for the 21st Century, p. 310. 15. Heraclitus Fragment 60. 16. Michael Zimmerman, Contesting Earth's Future (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 17. See Ken Wilber, Up from Eden: A Transpersonal View of Human Evolution (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1981) and A Brief History of Everything (Boston: Shambhala, 1996). 18. Sessions, Deep Ecology for the 21st Century, p. 77. 19. Ibid., p. 79. 20. Ibid., p. 69. 21. David Rothenberg, Is It Painful to Think? Conversations with Arne Naess (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 127. 22. Sessions, Deep Ecology for the 21st Century, p. 68. 23. Ibid. 24. Alan Drengson, "The Deep Ecology Movement," The Trumpeter 12 (1995): 144. 25. Sessions, Deep Ecology for the 21st Century, pp. 219 220. 26. Rothenberg, Is It Painful to Think?, p. 148. 27. Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, p. 84. 28. Ibid., pp. 206 207. It is true that both Naess and Eckersley support a mixture of decentralization and centralization, rather than extreme decentralization (although Naess seems to be relatively more decentralist). Their positions are not inherently in conflict with social ecology, unless that ecophilosophy is identified with all the views of Murray Bookchin, including his municipalist politics. While I would argue for radical decentralism, I do not see how a dialectical perspective could foreclose debate on an empirical, historical question such as the degree of decentralization optimal in any given social and ecological context.
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2 Against the Inevitability of Anthropocentrism Eric Katz
This essay is dedicated to the memory of Richard Sylvan Man is the measure of all thing Protagoras I To what extent can an environmental ethic escape the perspective of human-centered value? Since only humans are moral agents, and since only humans develop and discuss ethical theories and norms, is it inevitable that moral value be understood from the standpoint of anthropocentrism? The pervasiveness of anthropocentrism is not generally thought to be a problem for philosophical analysis. If one considers questions in epistemology, for example, the centrality of human knowing seems a straightforward focus of concern. Theories of knowledge concern the ways in which human beingsor the human project of science and technologyorganize, understand, and validate claims about the world. Aesthetics, as another example, is about the human perception, appreciation, and validation of the beautifulhere anthropocentrism is perfectly justifiable. Even in ethics, a focus on human value, on human benefits and harms, seems highly appropriate. Most ethical discussion, analysis, and justification concerns human agents, and the actions among human beings and human institutions. The field of environmental ethics is, of course, a notable exceptionfor in environmental ethics we intentionally consider the possible value of nonhuman entities, and the effects of human actions on nonhuman naturebut here the exception proves the rule: environmental ethics may be the only field of philosophy that even considers the possibility of moving beyond the perspective of anthropocentrism.
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But environmental ethics is not the only discipline that deals with the human relationship to the nonhuman world. Consider the philosophy of nature, a traditional subdiscipline of metaphysics. In the development of a theory that describes the nature of the natural world, should we be limited by a human-centered understanding? Must our understanding of nature be limitedbiased, reallyby the anthropocentric content and structure of our ideas? Is it possible to understand nature from the perspective of nature itself? Does this last question even make sense? This problemthe possibility of escaping anthropocentrismhas fundamental importance for any attempt to address the contemporary environmental crisis. Environmental policy, if it is to be morally defensible, must be connected in some way to a plausible theory of environmental ethics. But a plausible theory of environmental ethics must, in turn, be based on an adequate philosophy of naturea valid physical and metaphysical description of the way the world is. Is any of this philosophical analysispolicy, ethics, metaphysicspossible from the limited horizon of anthropocentrism? The philosophy of deep ecology is a test case for these issues. The advocates of deep ecology claim, in part, that their position addresses environmental issues from a wider perspective than traditional anthropocentrism. In considering the intrinsic value of nonhuman life forms, in the process of identification with nonhuman natural entities and systems, and in the development of policies of action that stress noninterference and the harmony of human life and nature, deep ecologists claim to transcend anthropocentrism and adopt a perspective of ecocentrism. In this essay, I examine this claim. I do not believe that deep ecology escapes the bias of anthropocentric thought. In order to validate my criticism, I will first present a thorough and careful reading of the philosophy of deep ecology. I will argue that the three core ideas of deep ecologythe process of identification with the natural world, the goal of Self-realization, and a relational holistic ontologyare all anthropocentric in character. II Whether or not deep ecology is anthropocentric will depend on how deep ecology is defined. The meaning of deep ecology as a philosophical position is not always clear. Arne Naess, the Norwegian philosopher who coined the distinction between shallow environmentalism and deep ecology, is deliberately ambiguous when it comes to delineating the fundamental ideas of deep ecology. Because deep ecology is primarily a social and political movement, the advocates of the position do not want to alienate potential supporters with a narrow
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or technical ideology. 1 Naess has emphasized repeatedly that there are many different deep ecology positionseach person is free to develop his or her own deep ecosophical total viewand he has used his "apron diagram" with its various levels to show that different philosophical and religious positions can be used to derive and justify the platform of the deep ecology movement.2 To borrow a phrase from the Republican Party in the United States, deep ecology claims to be a "big tent" within which many different fundamental philosophical perspectives can feel at home. One way to characterize the central ideas of the philosophy of deep ecology would be to look carefully at the philosophical content of the deep ecology political platform, for the platform represents the central common ground occupied by all advocates of the deep ecology movement. Indeed, Andrew McLaughlin claims that the deep ecology platform is the "heart" of deep ecology, for deep ecology is "an ecocentric movement for radical social change,3 and not a theoretical or foundational philosophical system. The platform, as the "common ground" of deep ecology, expresses the basic ideas of the position, regardless of the differing paths taken to arrive at, derive, or justify these basic ideas. McLaughlin claims that "the point" of the platform "is to define the Deep Ecology movement, create clarity within the Movement, and make clear where real disagreement might exist.''4 The central philosophical ideas of the platform involve the proper human relationship to the nonhuman natural world. Of primary importance is a notion of "intrinsic value" for all living beings, human and nonhuman. This notion is not technically precise; that is, it does not necessarily conform to any positions in ethics or value theory. Debates within academic philosophy and environmental ethics about the difference between "inherent" value and "intrinsic" value are almost completely irrelevant to an understanding of the philosophy of deep ecology as expressed in the platform. The original platform (written by Naess and the American deep ecologist George Sessions)5 used the terminology of "intrinsic value" to emphasize a critique of anthropocentric instrumental reasoning and valuation regarding nonhuman natural life forms. In a more recent formulation, McLaughlin writes that "the well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman Life . . . have value in themselves."6 The key point is really a negative one: we are not to evaluate nonhuman or human life according to its "usefulness" for "human purposes." It is also clear from the clarifications that follow the platform that life per se is not the crucial locus of value. Deep ecology is not equivalent to the position that environmental philosophy terms "biocentrism"a theory of value that centers all value on living beings. For deep ecology, nonliving entities and
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systemsrivers, watersheds, landscapes, ecosystemsare to be valued for their inherent value, not merely for their usefulness to humanity. Richness and diversity are also important values in the deep ecology platform, and here again these are thought to be valuable in themselves, and not merely as they contribute to human well-being. Naess and Rothenberg claim that an ecologically complex world is better than one that is less complex. "Complexity" is contrasted with "complication" 7it implies a unified diversity in nature, what Rothenberg calls ''the virtue and perfection of nature." Mere complication, on the other hand, is a chaotic "manifold" of alternative possibilities, built on false dualisms and dilemmas, with no overall purpose, plan, or unified structure. Rothenberg contrasts the development of natural entities and systems with the operations of machines to illustrate the distinction between complexity and complication. Human technology is complicated, but nature is complex, and it is this complexityits richness and diversitythat ought to be preserved and valued for itself. Given these primary concernsthe value of living beings and natural systems and the preservation of a rich and diverse natural worldit is obvious that a policy of noninterference in the natural world is advocated by the deep ecology platform. The human noninterference in the flourishing of natural systems is, of course, only an idealhuman activities and institutions constantly interfere in the natural world in some way. But the supporters of deep ecology seek to minimize this interference, to preserve the unfolding of natural processes in all of their rich and diverse complexity. To maintain this policy of minimal interference, human society may have to be restructuredthus deep ecology's controversial claims about the reduction of human population levelsbut the basic changes will come in the economic, technological, social, and philosophical bases of human civilization. Most important, perhaps, is a fundamental reexamination of the ends of human life, replacing the ceaseless pursuit of material abundance with a new sense of the quality of life experience. Thus we arrive at the simple, practical maxim of deep ecology: "simple in means, rich in ends." Absent from the platform, but part of the original 1972 formulation of deep ecology by Naess, is the idea of holism. Naess first characterized the deep ecology movement as rejecting the idea of "man-in-the-environment" and replacing it with an image of a "relational, total-field" in which organisms would be "knots in the field of intrinsic relations."8 This emphasis on holistic relations is not explicitly mentioned in the various current formulations of the platform, but perhaps it is embedded in the dominant idea of the platform: respect for the intrinsic value of all natural life and of nonliving natural systems.
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In a similar fashion, the other central characteristic of the 1972 formulation"biospherical egalitarianismin principle"is no longer mentioned anywhere in the list of deep ecology principles. Clearly, the idea of equality among all living thingsif taken literallyleads to too many practical problems in the implementation of policies of action; and if the idea is not taken literally, it at the very least causes misunderstandings among both supporters and critics of deep ecology. Indeed, it appears that the vagueness and comprehensiveness of the first two platform principlesconcerning intrinsic value and diversityare meant to introduce a new terminology that captures the spirit of the 1972 formulation. Rothenberg and Sessions thus each claim that "ecocentrism" is the appropriate terminological label for a description of deep ecology. Rothenberg writes: "The whole designation 'ecocentrism' is closer to an equivalent for what Naess means by 'deep ecology': centering on the ecosphere." 9 And Sessions sees ecocentrism as the essential point of the platform: "The philosophy of the Deep Ecology movement is characterized essentially by ecocentrism, as outlined in the 1984 Deep Ecology platform."10 Deep ecology values the ecospherethe ecological systems and the natural entities that comprise the living and developing natural world. Deep ecology values the ecosphere in itself, not merely for human purposes. Its chief practical concern is for the ecosphere to continue to develop and flourish with a minimal amount of human interference, degradation, and destruction. To accomplish this task, human social institutionseconomics, technology and science, politics, education, philosophy, and religionmust be reoriented so that they can exist in harmony with the developing processes and life-forms of the natural world. III If this is the philosophy of deep ecology, then it appears to be a denial of anthropocentrism, an attempt to develop an environmental philosophy that explains the human relationship to the natural world with an emphasis on the value of nature and natural processesan environmental philosophy that is not focused on human life and human institutions. McLaughlin could not be clearer on this: he states that the first principle in the deep ecology platformthe concern for intrinsic valueis "essentially . . . a rejection of anthropocentrism."11 So why isn't it? Why does deep ecology fail to escape an anthropocentric perspective? First, we must see that although deep ecology is an ecocentric position in environmental philosophy, not all ecocentric positions are expressions of deep
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ecology. Deep ecology is not equivalent to ecocentrism. For example, one of the most comprehensive ecocentric positions in environmental philosophy has been developed by Holmes Rolston, but Rolston is not a deep ecologist. Rolston is a disciple of Aldo Leopold. He takes Leopold's notion of a land ethic based on respect for ecological community and refines it in light of contemporary philosophy, ethics, and science. 12 Rolston begins by emphasizing the ecological context of living organisms. The struggle of the living organism is a struggle within a system, an environmental situation. "We are not dealing simply with another individual defending its solitary life but with an individual having situated fitness in an ecosystem it inhabits."13 Using an elephant as an example, Rolston writes: The elephant fits the savannas just as much as its heart fits its liver; within and without there is equal fitness in amount but not in kind. . . . Savannas and forests are as necessary to elephants as hearts and livers. In the complete picture, the outside is as vital as the inside. The more satisfactory picture is of elephants pushing to fit into a system that provides and imposes sufficient containment. . . . The ecosystem supplies coordinates through which the elephant moves. The elephant cannot really be mapped or located outside these coordinates.14 Indeed, the description of what an elephant is, the meaning of "elephant," is dependent on the situated fitness of the organism to the environment. "Elephants are what they are because they are where they are."15 This fitness of the organism to an environment provides not only the meaning of the organism but also both an ecological and an ethical definition for the notion of community as the basis of a holistic environmental ethic. It is in the emphasis on the normative community of the natural ecosystem that Rolston's thought can be traced to its roots in the work of Leopold. Ecocentric holism takes seriously the claim made by Leopold that "a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members and also respect for the community as such."16 An adequate ecocentric holism fuses two types of moral concern: respect for the individuals that comprise the system or community and respect for the system or community itself. Rolston correctly notes that not every collection is a community; communities require an ecology, literally a logic or set of rules for the home or place.17 The science of ecology describes the events that occur in an ecosystem and how the community operates as an organizational systembut this knowledge also reveals the value of the functions of the system, and thus it is both descriptive and normative.18 Value and moral obligation are thus communitarian, holistic, not centered on the individual organism in isolation from the system. Dependence on the system is the one inescapable truth that ecology teaches us, and we must use
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this truth as the basis of moral judgments concerning living organisms and nature. Rolston concludes: The appropriate unit for moral concern is the fundamental unit of development and survival. Loving lions and hating jungles is misplaced affection. An ecologically informed society must love lions-in-jungles, organisms-in-ecosystems, or else fail in vision and courage. 19 An ecologically informed environmental policy must focus on the context and community of natural entities. This brief summary of some essential elements in the environmental philosophy of Rolston is not meant as an exhaustive analysis. Much of Rolston's philosophy has been omitted. My purpose in introducing Rolston here is to show that an ecocentric environmental philosophy need not be a representative of the philosophy of deep ecology. And of course Rolston is not the only example. J. Baird Callicott is another disciple of Leopold's who has developed a holistic ecocentric environmental ethic. Callicott advocates a version of Leopold's land ethic based on a Darwinian and Humean theory of the development of ethicsbut central to his vision is the worldview of ecocentric holism.20 Andrew Brennan also advocates an environmental holism. Brennan's "ecological humanism" is a holistic environmental philosophy based on one simple core ecological idea: "what something is and does depends in part on where it is."21 Brennan's view "involves the recognition that all human life is lived within some natural context and that it is in terms of that context that the identities of very different human lives are forged. "22 All human policies of action, all human ethical and political decisions, must be made in terms of the natural context; thus all human thought and action, if it is to be adequate to the real world, must adopt an ecocentric perspective. In sum, there is no shortage of holistic and ecocentric environmental philosophies. But not all ecocentric positions are expressions of deep ecology. Ecocentrism is not equivalent to deep ecology, and deep ecology is not equivalent to ecocentrism. What, then, is distinctive about the philosophy of deep ecology? The lack of equivalence between deep ecology and ecocentrism, and the subsequent need for a further distinguishing characteristic, or set of characteristics, for deep ecology has profound implications for deep ecology's alleged rejection of anthropocentrism. IV So why is deep ecology a distinctive position in environmental philosophy? Why is it deep, fundamental, and different from the philosophies that underlie
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reformist or shallow environmentalism? On my reading of the deep ecology texts, there are three basic features of the philosophical position that distinguish it from all other positions in environmental philosophy and ethics: (1) identification with the nonhuman natural world; (2) the preeminent value of Self-realization; and (3) a relational holistic ontology as the basis of normative values and decisions. All three of these ideas contribute to a continuing anthropocentric bias in the development of deep ecology. First, it should be noted that my interpretation of the basic ideas of the philosophy of deep ecology is not uncontroversial, and it is heavily influenced by Naess's personal version of deep ecology, what he calls Ecosophy T. None of these three ideasidentification, Self-realization, and holistic ontologyis featured in the platform, probably because they are too technical and theoretical for a document meant to achieve political consensus in the movement. But all three are presentat least as suggestionsin Naess's original 1972 formulation of the deep ecology position. Their subsequent deemphasis in the attempt to achieve ideological consensus must not blind us to the fact that these are crucial features of the deep ecology position as it appears in almost all published discussions. It is precisely these features of deep ecologyidentification, Self-realization, and holistic ontologythat serve to distinguish it from all other forms of ecocentric and nonanthropocentric holistic environmental ethics and philosophy. It is only these ideas that distinguish deep ecology from positions held by Rolston, Callicott, Brennan, and Leopold. Furthermore, it is only these ideas that clearly distinguish deep ecology from similar "radical" environmental philosophiessuch as bioregionalism and social ecology. The chief objection to the use of these ideas as definitive of the deep ecology position is their association with Naess's own version of deep ecology. Naess claims that deep ecology is a personal statement of a total view. Each individual must develop his or her own total view regarding the value of the environment and the human relationship to the natural world. 23 Each individual total view, each personal ecosophy, begins with the individual's basic values, which may be, and probably are, different from the values of other individuals working on their own ecosophical total views. What ties these varying and disparate total views together into a coherent position called "deep ecology" is, first, the platform of deep ecological political principles, and second, the method of developing a total view of the human relationship to the natural world as a response to the ecological crisis. Thus it would be incorrect to generalize any particular individual's basic values as the core idea of deep ecology. Since "Self-realization" is the ultimate value of Naess's version of deep ecology (Ecosophy T), it would
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be a mistake to use this value as fundamental and distinctive to the overall philosophy of deep ecology. It would be a similar mistake (perhaps) to use the ideas of "identification" and "holistic ontology" as defining characteristics. This objection has merit, and its main pointthat the development of an individual total view is the main purpose of deep ecologyshould always be kept in mind in any discussion of the philosophy of deep ecology. Nevertheless, there are two good reasons for rejecting the objection and using "Self-realization," "identification," and "holistic ontology" as three distinctive characteristics of the philosophy of deep ecology. First, the standard texts in deep ecology belie Naess's claim that Ecosophy T is merely a personal statement of his vision of deep ecology; virtually all discussions of deep ecology use these ideas as core doctrines. And second, virtually all serious deep ecological thinkers (and by "serious" I mean those who discuss the philosophyand not just the political activismof deep ecology) agree to versions of Naess's key ideas. Warwick Fox, for example, uses the notion of identification with the rest of the natural world, an identification fueled by an ''expansion" of the sense of self, as the key distinctive feature of the deep ecology approach. (Indeed, he places so much emphasis on the idea of the Self-realization of an expanded self identifying with the natural world that he changes the name of deep ecology to "transpersonal ecology.") But Fox does not believe that his version of deep ecology is unique; he claims that all other "main writers on deep ecology" share Naess's belief in the realization of an expanded self through identification. 24 Two other deep ecology theorists help to demonstrate this point. Freya Mathews uses all three notionsSelfrealization, identification, and a holistic metaphysicsto provide a detailed justification for the ethical and philosophical principles of deep ecology.25 Using one specific interpretation of the general theory of relativity, she argues for the unity of all substance as "spacetime," the only real physical substrate of the universe, a continuum of which all individual entities are merely parts.26 She combines this Einsteinian and Spinozistic metaphysics with the idea that the universe itselfas well as some individuals and systemsis a self, what she calls the "ecocosm," striving toward its own realization.27 For Mathews, this cosmology provides us with the justification for seeing our physical unity with the universe, as well as a reason, a meaning, for the respect of the self-realizing universe. David Rothenberg also advocates the core ideas derived from Naess. In his variation of the deep ecology platform, which was meant to demonstrate the possibility (and the necessity?) for each individual to create his or her own ecosophical total view, Rothenberg uses the ideas of Self-realization and identification as fundamental to the explanation and praxis of deep ecology: "If one
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takes the notion of realization and expansion of the Self seriously, it involves considering more and more of nature and one's environment as an essential part of one's identity." 28 Rothenberg even includes the idea of Selfrealization in the platform itself, within the idea that we should seek a higher quality of life (through Selfrealization) rather than an increase in material wealth.29 Thus there does not seem to be any reason not to use these three core ideasidentification, Self-realization, and a holistic ontologyas fundamental concepts in the explanation and evaluation of the philosophy of deep ecology. V What do these core concepts of deep ecology mean? How do they add to or alter the basic meaning of an ecocentric environmental ethic? First, consider the notion of "identification." This concept means that each individual human agent develops some form of empathy, understanding, or commonality with the other individuals, entities, and systems in the environment. Naess contrasts identification with the narrower idea of "solidarity," which may be based only on an "abstract idea of moral justice." Identification, in contrast, internalizes ''the essential sense of common interests" between the individuals involved, so that a felt unity is comprehended and experienced spontaneously, as matter of lived experience.30 Or, in a less technical version: "Identification is a spontaneous, non-rational, but not irrational, process through which the interest or interests of another being are reacted to as our own interest or interests."31 Fox stresses the notion of "commonality" as fundamental to the idea of identificationand that "identification" does not mean "identity": we understand that we have common interests with all other life-forms and systems in the natural world, but we do not believe that we literally are other entities in the natural world.32 I am Eric Katz; I may identify with the deer sitting in the bushes out-side my window, in that I recognize our common interests in the maintenance of this habitat, but I am not the deer. Perhaps the most crucial way in which we identify with other living beings is through our recognition that all living beings have some type of intrinsic or inherent value, and that their individual flourishing is good for them, not necessarily for human beings and human institutionsas stated in the first principle of the deep ecology platform. Identification is thus the recognition that other life forms have value in themselves, just as we do, and that their lives are meaningful to them. But identification can also be linked to the core process of the expansion of the self, a process that eventually leads to Self-realization, the fundamental norm of Naess's version of deep ecology.
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The connection between identification, expansion of the self, and Self-realization cannot be overemphasizedit is the point around which all the ideas of deep ecology coalesce. By itself, Self-realization means the process by which a being "realizes inherent potentialities" within itself and its situation. 33 But if we seriously identify with other living beings, we engage in the process of expanding our narrow egoistic "self" into a larger "Self'' that encompasses all those other beings with which we experience a commonality of interests. We cannot simply develop our own personal potentialities; true Self-realization means participating in the developing potentialities, the Self-realization, of all other beings. Naess often states that Self-realization is a process that comes with maturityas we grow and develop as individuals, we gradually expand our empathy, understanding, and identification with the rest of the natural world. "Increasing maturity activates more of the personality in relation to more of the milieu [i.e., the environment]."34 We become part of the process of Self-realization, where Self is capitalized to indicate a greater being than the individual egoistic self of the human subject. Naess again: "By identifying with greater wholes, we partake in the creation and maintenance of this whole. We thereby share in its greatness."35 This is the complete process of Selfrealizationthe development of the full potential of all living beings, experienced as part of our own development and Self-realization through the process of identification. For Naess, the full process of Self-realization eliminates the need for a system of moral obligation. Naess advocates the notion, derived from Kant, of the beautiful actionthe harmonious fusion of self-interest and right action, not commanded or directed by a sense of moral law.36 With a mature Self-realization, we defend the planet in self-defense, we preserve natural processes and entities as an expression of our shared interests with the rest of creation. By developing our capacity for Self-interestwith an emphasis on the capital "S" Selfwe transcend the need for an appropriate ethics for the human treatment of the natural world. It is thus clear that the deep ecological expansion of the self, through the process of identification, toward the goal of Self-realization is quite different from the moral extensionism that can be attributed (on some interpretations) to the land ethic of Leopold and to similar positions (such as Rolston's) in environmental ethics. Leopold's land ethic can be read as a simple extension of moral consideration to ever wider groups and kinds of entities; thus we extend our moral consciousness outward from the self to the family to society as a whole to animals, plants, and, eventually, to the natural system itself, what Leopold calls the "land."37 In philosophical language, we extend the range of entities capable of possessing moral valueindeed, we might even call this
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intrinsic or inherent value. But in the deep ecological expansion of the self, it is not our consideration of moral value that is extended, it is our identificationour empathy, our commonality of intereststhat is extended. We extend ourselves; we see ourselves more and more connected to the rest of the natural world. We take seriously the ecological idea that all entities within natural systemsincluding human beingsare interconnected. The extensionism of environmental ethics is thus an expansion of moral value; but the expansion of the deep ecological self is an expansion of ontological commitments. From two directions, then, we have arrived at the third core idea of the philosophy of deep ecology: a holistic metaphysics or ontology. First, we have Naess's denial of ethics being the primary focal point of deep ecology. The supremacy of ontology is demonstrated by the identification of interests and the expansion of the self as the sources of beautiful actions regarding the preservation of nature. Second, the expansion of self and the goal of Self-realization are seen to be components of an ontological claim about the interconnection of humans and nature, and indeed about all entities and systems in the world. As Fox explains: Transpersonal ecologists [i.e., advocates of deep ecology] claim that ecology, and modern science in general, provides a compelling account of our interconnectedness with the world. . . . Their analysis of the self is such that they consider that if one has a deep understanding of the way things are (i.e., if one emphatically incorporates the fact that we and all other entities are aspects of a single unfolding reality) then one will . . . naturally be inclined to care for the unfolding of the world in all its aspects. . . . This is why one finds transpersonal ecologists making statements to the effect that they are more concerned with ontology or cosmology . . . than with ethics." 38 The advocates of deep ecology, in other words, are primarily concerned with developing the proper deep understanding of the interconnection of all entities in the natural world. Any ethical principles or programs of actionany environmental policywill be derivative of the fundamental ontological position. As Naess writes, "What I am suggesting is the supremacy of environmental ontology and realism over environmental ethics."39 What, then, is the ontological position of the philosophy of deep ecology? What is meant by a "holistic metaphysics?" The interconnection of all entities is clearly the key idea. As Naess writes in the original shorthand 1972 formulation, the deep ecology position is characterized by "rejection of the man-in-environment image in favor of the relational, total-field image. Organisms as knots in the biospherical net or field of intrinsic relations."40 Deep ecology rejects an individualistic and atomistic metaphysics, in which all entities are separate from each other. An individualistic and atomistic metaphysics would conceive of a human being as a separate individual standing alone, free, and un-
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connected to all other entities within the environmentthe image of man-in-environment. From the perspective of deep ecology, just the opposite is true: all entities are related, and they are constituted by their relationships with other entities. The human individual exists and is defined by the relationships it has to other entities and processes in the environment. The individual is constituted and defined by its relationships to the wholethis is the essence of holism. The holistic interconnection of all entities in the natural world is the basic ontological commitment of the philosophy of deep ecology. Of course, this basic holistic ontology is explained, justified, and developed differently by different philosophers of deep ecologybut the different explanations should not prevent us from seeing the same fundamental ontological position throughout the many formulations of deep ecology. The science of ecology serves initially as a crucial source for this ontological perspective, for the science of ecology explains and discovers the relationships that exist between and among organisms and the physical environment. Of course this philosophy is called "deep ecology" because of the original influence of ecological thinking on Naess and others. In the 1972 formulation, Naess uses the perceptions of "the ecological field-worker" in support of the notion that all life is worthy of respectone of the main ideas of the platform of deep ecology. 41 But ecology as a science is not the main source of the philosophy of deep ecology, for many other environmental philosophers are inspired by the discoveries and worldview of ecological science. Rolston, discussed above, is a clear example, as are Callicott and Brennan, among the ecocentric and holistic environmental philosophers who are not considered members of the deep ecology movement. Even Paul Taylor, who bases his theory of environmental ethics on the respect for individual living beingsand thus is not an ecocentric holistuses basic ecological factswhat he calls "the great lesson" of the science of ecologyas a fundamental principle of his "biocentric worldview." The second component of the appropriate biocentric worldview is this: "the belief that the human species and all other species are part of an interdependent system, and that the survival and well-being of each living thing rests on both the physical environment and the relations among other things."42 And Bryan Norton, who advocates a modified anthropocentrism, bases his version of environmental ethics on the discoveries of ecology. In criticizing the dominant materialistic culture of the contemporary world, Norton argues that we must adopt a "rational and realistic worldview'' based on the science of ecologyso that we develop a value system based on a sense of humility regarding human power and a goal of "harmony" with natural processes.43 In his more recent pragmatic work, Norton claims that "environmentalists' emerging consensus . . . is based
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more on scientific principles [those of ecology] than on shared metaphysical and moral axioms." 44 It is easy to conclude, I think, that all serious environmental philosopherswhether or not they advocate deep ecologymust find a central place for the science of ecology in the development of their thought. To deny the truths of ecologyparticularly the facts of the interdependence and systematic relationships of organisms and environmentwould immediately discredit the philosophical position as naive and out of touch with reality. An environmental philosophy that did not recognize ecological science would be unacceptable, irrelevant to the environmental crisis that surrounds us. It is important to note, however, that Naess warns against an excessive use of ecological science in developing an appropriate worldview and environmental philosophy. "Ecology may comprise a great deal, but it should never be considered a universal science." To consider ecological theories and concepts as universal would be to distort philosophyin particular, theories of knowledge and behavior, and the derivation of values. Thus Naess warns against "ecologism," the universal use of ecological concepts in areas of human thought and endeavor where it is not appropriate.45 This clear restriction on the use of ecological science is another indication that deep ecology's metaphysical basis lies in a particular philosophical worldviewa particular picture of the structure of the worldand not in the mere enunciation of ecological facts and theories. So what are the foundation and justification of the metaphysical and ontological interdependence that is the third core idea of deep ecology? Naess's position is based on his relational epistemology and gestalt ontology, as explained in Ecology, Community and Lifestyle.46 Naess first argues that all qualities and characteristics of objects in the world are relational, dependent on the perspective and location of the observer, and indeed on the observer's "conception of the world. "47 This relational understanding of the world is, however, more than an epistemological necessity: it is an ontological commitment. Naess returns to the views of Heraclitus: "We must strive for greater familiarity with an understanding closer to that of Heraclitus: everything flows. We must abandon fixed, solid points, retaining the relatively straightforward, persistent relations of interdependence."48 Interdependence and relations even require Naess to redefine the idea of matter. ''Instead of matter, I will speak of the relational field . . . [which] . . . refers to the totality of our interrelated experience. . . . Things of the order 'material things' are conceived of as junctions within the field."49 And finally: "Relationalism has ecosophical value, because it makes it easy to undermine the belief in organisms and persons as something which can be isolated from their milieux [i.e., their environment]."50
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Naess considers the idea of the relational field as a "refinement" of the ideas of matter and its qualities originally put forth by Protagoras, in which matter actually possesses the qualities we perceive and attribute to it, even when these are contradictory. Calling Protagoras's view "both-and theory," he states that it "admits sensory reality with [having a] sterling ontological status." 51 Secondary and tertiary qualities are real in the relational field, as real as the ideal and abstract primary qualities of mathematical and physical relations. In fact, secondary and tertiary qualities are, in one sense, more real than the abstract mathematical qualities of objects, for the abstract structures are "not [the] contents of reality," while secondary and tertiary qualities are the actual "concrete contents'' of the relational field.52 For Naess, the "concrete content" of the relational field can be explained only through an understanding of "gestalts" and "gestalt thinking." A gestalt is a spontaneous experience of a whole, and it is at once comprehensive and complex. The gestalt is the basic and immediate form of understanding and perceptiononly later do we analyze our gestalts into parts, into separate objects and qualities. Gestalt thinking explains how the various contents of our experience in the relational field "hang together." In speaking of a piece of music, Naess explains how we will experience the first few notes differently if we are familiar with the piece. But more than that: The gestalt of a complex piece of music is subordinate to the experience in a particular situation. The piece may be played in the open or in a beautiful or an ugly building. If we have a particular companion, our relation to the companion in that situation influences the experience of the music. No part of the experience stands entirely alone.53 Naess uses gestalt thinking to "bind together" the rational and emotional levels of reality. Our experience of reality is at the immediate level a normative and valuational experience, and this will have profound implications for environmental ethics and environmental policy. People have different worldviewsdifferent people see and understand the world differently. "But one's ethics in environmental questions are based largely on how one sees reality."54 As an example, Naess discusses the clash between those who wish to develop a forest and those who wish to preserve it. "Confrontations between developers and conservers reveal difficulties in experiencing what is real. What a conservationist sees and experiences as reality, the developer typically does not seeand vice versa." The environmentalist sees a reality of a forest that is a unified whole, filled with emotional content: joyous flowers, singing streams, or laughing birches. The developer merely sees trees for lumber, land for homes or farms. Thus both the developers and the preservationists may share ethical views, but they do not share the same reality in which to apply these views.
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Naess concludes: "The difference between the antagonists is one rather of ontology than ethics. " 55 Thus we see that a sophisticated ontological position underlies the core deep ecological idea of the interdependence between the entities and systems of the natural world. There is more to this view of natural interrelationships than the mere scientific facts of ecology. Indeed, the importance of ontological and metaphysical principles in the philosophy of deep ecology is given much support by Freya Mathewswhose work I noted above in support of my claim that the core idea of Self-realization is a basic principle of deep ecology. In perhaps the most explicitly metaphysical version of the philosophy of deep ecology, Mathews develops a cosmology in which the universe itselfas well as some individuals and systemsis a self, an ecocosm, striving toward its own realization. Mathews uses theoretical physics and the philosophy of Spinozanot the principles and facts of ecologyto ground and explain the physical (and metaphysical) unity of the universe. It will be this cosmology that provides us with the ethical vision to respect and care for the natural world, a self-realizing ecocosm or Self. Mathews claims that her entire argument is simply "that the right cosmology will dispose us towards a benign pattern of interaction with the environment."56 For Mathews, however, the right cosmology is a significant extension of the gestalt ontology of Naess. She argues that Naess's view of identification and Self-realization corresponds, in her metaphysical framework, "to a recognition of our . . . interconnectedness with the universal substance, and a consequent expansion of our selflove to embrace it."57 We love and protect the world because we expand our identity to include the world; we love the world as we love our own bodies.58 For Mathews, this does not go far enoughin addition to viewing the universe as a substance of which we are part, we also must view the universe as a self whose Self-realization we also participate in. Only if we view the universe as a self, striving to achieve its own potentialities through Selfrealization, is there a reason for us to identify with it and to preserve it.59 I am not interested in debating or justifying Mathews's version of the cosmology and ontology of deep ecologyand even less inclined to enter into any potential debate between the supporters of Naess and those of Mathews. What is important here, for my critical argument in the next section, is the clear place that specific ontological commitments have in the development of the philosophy of deep ecology. The philosophy of deep ecology is what it is, in part, because of its relational and holistic ontology, as demonstrated by the arguments presented by Naess and Mathews, among others.60 To summarize this section: the philosophy of deep ecology is characterized by three core ideas that serve to differentiate it from the direct and basic eco-
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centric holism prevalent in much environmental ethics. These ideas are (1) the identification of the self with the entire natural world; (2) the goal of Self-realization, acting so as to further the development of the wider Self (the natural world) with which we come to identify; and (3) a relational and holistic ontology, which tends to provide a metaphysical foundation for the process of identification, the goal of Self-realization, and the development of an appropriate environmental ethic. VI Why do these ideas of deep ecology fail to escape the bias of anthropocentrism? I believe that the answer to this critical question is obvious. All three of the core distinguishing ideas of deep ecologyidentification, Selfrealization, and holistic ontologyare deeply embedded in a human-centered worldview. All three core ideas are based on human categories of thought and human notions of value. Since deep ecology is a philosophical position developed by human beings, this anthropocentric perspective is, of course, not surprisingbut since the advocates of deep ecology claim that their philosophical position transcends anthropocentrism, it is important to emphasize the problems, so that we are not misled in the attempt to develop an adequate philosophical response to the environmental crisis. The process of identification, first of all, is by its very structure anthropocentric in character. We are asked to identify our interests with the interests of the nonhuman natural world and, indeed, with all other living beings. We are to identify, through a process of empathy, with the interests of other beings. Although we are not supposed to think of ourselves as identical to other beings, we come to see that we share a commonality of interests. The key idea here is that we recognize that other living beingsincluding those in the nonhuman natural worldshare our human interests, so that in thwarting their interests, we thwart our own. In harming them, we harm ourselves. The anthropocentrism of the process of identification is fundamentally connected to the anthropocentric character of the entire process of Self-realization andat least in Naess's formulationthe advocacy of the Kantian notion of "beautiful" actions, which fuse together ethical obligation and the pursuit of personal interests. As noted above, Naess often claims that once a person has an adequate ecosophical worldview, the need for a system of ethical obligation regarding the proper treatment of the natural environment would be irrelevant. By developing our Selfour increased recognition of our connections to the rest of the environmentwe will act to preserve the natural environment because of "traits of human nature"that is, through our expanded notion of
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our self-interest as connected to the larger Self of the natural word and Its interest. 61 To put this more simply, Naess is arguing that humans ought to preserve the natural environment because it is in the human interest to do soindeed, it is in the individual's interest to preserve the natural world because it will further the interests of the individual. Of course the interests of the individual from within the deep ecological perspective will not be the narrow egoistic interests of ordinary human life. Human interests will be expanded through a process of identification with the nonhuman world, and human interests (according to the platform of deep ecology) should focus more on the quality of life experiences than on the mere increase in material goods. Nevertheless, the focus and goal of the preservation of natural processes is the maximization of human interests. The identification and expansion of the Self are clearly anthropocentric in character, structure, and goal. Consider also Mathews's argument that the universal substance which comprises the world must be understood not only as a physical substance but also a universal Self in the process of Self-realization. As discussed in the previous section, Mathews claims that if the identification process in deep ecology is restricted to the notion of substancethat is, we merely identify with the physical nature of the universethen there will be no reason beyond self-interestthe preservation of our bodies and livesto preserve the nonhuman world. Mathews seeks to find intrinsic value in the universe itself, so that our identification with the nonhuman natural world and our desire to preserve it go beyond a simple belief in physical interconnectedness. Mathews seeks the meaningfulness of the universe, for without some inherent meaning in that with which we identify, we are reduced to a mere "extension of ourselves."62 Mathews's solution, as mentioned above, is to conceive of our identification with the universe not merely as a physical substance but also as a Selfthe ecocosma universal self-realizing system.63 Since I recognize myself as a self, my recognition of the universe as a self-realizing systema Selfprovides a more meaningful process of identification than mere physical interconnectedness.64 But the notion of a self-realizing universe as that which gives meaning to the preservation of the nonhuman natural world is blatantly and obviously anthropocentric. Mathews is claiming that it is not enough for us to identify with the physical interconnectedness of the universewe must also identify with a universe that is, like ourselves, a self-realizing system. Mere physical identification is not enough because, according to Mathews, humans are different from most of the rest of the physical universe! "Being human is different from being amoebic, or being a rock or a gas or a region of spacetime, in so far as we alone
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amongst these entities can grasp our unity with the greater whole." 65 True enough. Yet it seems highly suspect for an argument that is meant to transcend anthropocentrism to use the idea of human self-awareness as a characteristic feature of the nonhuman universe with which we are meant to identify. Identifying with the universe as a self is an obvious product of anthropocentric thought. It seems clear, as the late Richard Sylvan pointed out in his criticism of deep ecology, that we should be wary of the entire notion of self-realization, for it has an anthropocentric history and pedigree.66 The goal of selfrealization "emerges direct from the humanistic Enlightenment; it is linked to the modern celebration of the individual human, freed from service to higher demands, and also typically from ecological constraints." Sylvan reminds us that the concept involves the maximization of egos, individual selves, or, at best, the privileged class of humanlike selves. Even the attempt to escape egoism, with the notion of a capital "S" Self as a holistically extended super-self, succeeds only because we are identifying ourselves with the universe through an anthropocentric notion, a comparison to ourselves as individual human beings. The goal of Self-realization is biased toward human value in two other ways. First, as Sylvan argues, a goal of selfrealization leads to "inegalitarianism" and human chauvinism, for it forces the advocates of deep ecology to make a distinction between different living beings. Which living things are selves? And which of these selves have the capability to expand into a Selfthat is, which individuals have the capability to recognize their interconnections with the larger universe?67 Clearly, it is primarily humans who have this capabilityand probably not all humans at that. Moreover, the entire goal of Self-realization is too psychological, too much based on the experience of the subject. "It renders value a feature of those who experience value," as if color were merely an aspect of human experience and not based, at least in part, on the composition of objects and things that are colored.68 Thus the goal of "maximizing" Self-realization appears to be equivalent to the goal of maximizing situations in which (human) selves experience value. This is clearly anthropocentric.69 The anthropocentric character of the goal of Self-realization is actually only one version of a more general problem in the methodology of environmental ethics, a problem originally discussed by John Rodman but elaborated by Sylvan.70 In the attempt to ascribe value to entities in the universe, we human evaluators select features of these entities, and generalize these features as the standard or the criterion for possessing value, or being in the class of morally considerable entities. But "no simple species or subspecies, such as humans or
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superhumans, no single feature, such as sentience or life, serves as a reference benchmark, a base class, for determining moral relevance and other ethical dimensions." Any such feature we select is "arbitrary" and "loaded"that is, it is inherently biased toward characteristics possessed by the elite human class. A truly unbiased environmental ethic must be based on a notion of ''eco-impartiality" in which none of the characteristics of any particular class of entities is used as the sole determining factor of moral value. 71 Deep ecology, with its emphasis on Self-realizationand to a lesser extent, the goal of all living entities to flourish and blossomfails this test.72 The third core idea of deep ecologyits holistic ontologycan also be criticized for its anthropocentrism. The anthropocentric bias in a metaphysical doctrine may be less obvious than in the ideas of identification and Selfrealization, but it is present nevertheless. Recall that Naess considers his relational ontology a refinement of the theories of Protagoras. The most famous of Protagorean fragmentswhich serves as the epigraph for this essayis perhaps the most positive and concise statement of the anthropocentric bias of human epistemology, ontology, aesthetics, and ethicsindeed, of all philosophy and human endeavor. I am not merely accusing Naess (and all of deep ecology) of guilt by associationbut given its Protagorean roots, we must be highly suspicious of the objectivity and impartiality of a relational holistic ontology. A relational ontology must begin with the immediate experiences of the individual subject. Naess himself argues that "simple 'holism"' is not by itself adequate as a response to the mechanistic and atomistic ontology of the dominant worldview. The deep ecological ontological worldview "must refer to experience, and spontaneous experience [i.e., the basis of gestalt perception] in particular."73 Given this emphasis on the gestalt experience of the human subject, it is difficult to see how the relational holistic ontology of deep ecology can avoid an anthropocentric biashuman beings cannot escape the anthropocentric character of their relational experiences. Evidence of this bias can be seen in one of Naess's more poetic essays, "Metaphysics of the Treeline."74 Naess describes the experiential gestalts of the mountain treeline, the altitude on high mountain peaks at which trees cease to be found. In analyzing the "symbolic value" of the treeline, Naess offers three perspectives on its metaphysical aspect, each by a different kind of human philosopher: the homocentrist (i.e., the anthropocentrist), the idealist philosopher, and the ecosopher (i.e., a follower of the philosophy of deep ecology). In the mind of the ecosopher, Naess puts the following thoughts: The richness and fecundity of reality! How overwhelming! The treeline's abstract geographical structure points to a seemingly infinite variety of concrete contents [i.e., the
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substance of experience]! More is open to the human ecological self than can be experienced by any other living being. 75 It is difficult to interpret this last statement in a nonanthropocentric way. Here the three core ideas of the philosophy of deep ecology coalesce into the goal of maximizing the positive human experience of value in a universe identified with one's own self. Perhaps deep ecology has lost its true direction. Such is the final criticism by Sylvan, an original supporter of deep ecology who early on rejected it in favor of an alternative he called Deep Green theory. (William Grey discusses Deep Green theory in his essay in this volume.) For Sylvan, Deep Green theorywhat deep ecology ought to have become-remains primarily focused on axiology and ethics, not on ontology.76 A Deep Green axiology can avoid anthropocentrism by focusing on the intrinsic features of environmental entities, not those features which "emerge" from the experiences of certain valuersthat is, humans.77 A relational holistic ontology, with the process of identification as the basis for the goal of Self-realization, obscures the proper nonanthropocentric direction of an environmental ethic. The proper course for environmental philosophy can not be an ecosophy, an ontologically based worldview; the proper course can only be an environmental ethic, with all that the term implies for the development and clarification of practical action in the policy arena. VII To conclude this analysis, it is necessary to examine Naess's own discussion of the anthropocentrism of deep ecology. In his book-length interview with Naess, David Rothenberg questions Naess about the place of human interests and values in the goals of the deep ecology movement. Naess's answers are at best ambiguous, for he leaves open the possibility that deep ecology activism is the result of the maximization of human interests.78 Rothenberg suggests the possibility that for many people the deep ecology movement means a concern for nonhuman nature "apart from concern for people." Naess responds simply: "I deplore this. There need never be such an opposition."79 But Rothenberg presses the issue, and outlines two paradigmatic ways of arguing for the preservation of wild areas of nature: first, because the preservation of nature enlarges each of us as a person by increasing Self-realization through the process of identification; or, second, because the Earth, nonhuman nature, is important in itself, and we should preserve it for itself. Clearly, the first alternative is based on a human-interest notion of Self-realization; it is the kind of anthropocentrically biased form of argument that
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I have criticized in this essay. Can Naess avoid this interpretation of deep ecology? His first answer is that he does not see the two arguments as being incompatible, which is logically correct but not helpful in deciding the issue. But he explains his comment by offering examples of when it is justifiable to kill the last member of an endangered species or burn the last area of rain forest, and these justifications are based on personal human survival: it is permissible for a father to perform these destructive acts to feed his starving child. This anthropocentric justification is softened only by Naess claiming that nature should not be harmed "without good reason." Rothenberg continues to press Naess for a clearer response. He wants to know if it is wrong to harm nature for its own sake or if it is wrong because, with the proper understanding (the proper worldview), we would understand that nature is part of us. Rothenberg: "Self-realization as a norm suggests . . . that you're doing it for yourself." Naess replies: "Yes, like Gandhi would say. When he was asked, 'How do you do these altruistic things all year long?' he said, 'I am not doing something altruistic at all. I am trying to improve in Self-realization.'" 80 Naess continues with the claim that we must conceive the possibility of the human ego being "enlarged and deepened," so that there is no "cleavage" between the self and the world. Nevertheless, the interview demonstrates that within the core ideas of deep ecology there is a systematic ambiguity about the proper place of human interests in the justification of environmental action. As with the Kantian notion of beautiful actions that Naess cites so often, there is a conflation of personal and altruistic interests. The preservation of nature is justified, within deep ecology, because it furthers the process of Self-realization, a process that includes the further realization of the narrow self of the human ego. Nature is preserved not for its own sake but for the sake of everything (the expansive, universal Self), and nature can be harmed for the ''good reason" of personal human survival. VIII Finally, two comments. As noted above, my interpretation of the philosophy of deep ecology rests heavily on core ideas in Naess's version: identification, Self-realization, and a relational holistic ontology. I believe strongly that these are the key ideas which separate deep ecology from other forms of ecocentric environmental ethics. However, I could be wrong: advocates of the deep ecology position may be able to convince me that there are other key notions which bet-
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ter characterize this philosophy. Nevertheless, my criticisms of these three core ideas still hold, whether or not they are the essential ideas of deep ecology. At the very least I have demonstrated that Naess's version of deep ecology is heavily influenced by anthropocentric ideas. If need be, I can rest content with that limited conclusion. Second, this analysis shows the overwhelming pervasiveness of an anthropocentric bias in human thought, for even an environmental philosophy consciously developed to transcend anthropocentrism falls victim to its influence. We must struggle against the inevitability of anthropocentrism in human frameworks of thought and human-created systems of value. I agree with Richard Sylvan that we must construct an environmental ethic and an environmental axiology that deemphasize human-centered categories of value. We must attempt to find a metaphysics and a philosophy of nature that are not biased in favor of a human worldview. In sum, we must develop an environmental philosophy that is truly impartial in its consideration of all entities and systems in the natural and human world. Notes 1. The first published formulation of the deep/shallow distinction was Arne Naess, "The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement. A Summary," Inquiry 16 (1973): 95 100. Naess often expresses reluctance to do academic philosophy, for he is more concerned with the political and social movement of deep ecology. Thus David Rothenberg claims that Naess left his post as Professor of Philosophy in 1969 to concentrate on the ecological crisis (see Rothenberg, "Introduction," in Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, translated and edited by David Rothenberg [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989], p. 1). For an example of many Naess comments, see "The Deep Ecological Movement: Some Philosophical Aspects," in Deep Ecology for the 21st Century, edited by George Sessions, (Boston: Shambhala, 1995), p. 71: "'Deep ecology' is not a philosophy in any proper acedemic sense.'' 2. For two versions of the derivational "apron diagram," see Naess, "The Deep Ecological Movement," in Sessions, 21st Century, p. 77; and "Ecosophy T," in Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered, Bill Devall and George Sessions (Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith, 1985), p. 226. 3. Andrew McLaughlin, "The Heart of Deep Ecology," in Sessions, 21st Century, p. 90. 4. Ibid., p. 91. 5. One of the earliest versions of the platform appears in Devall and Sessions, Deep Ecology, p. 70. It also appears in Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, pp. 29ff. 6. McLaughlin, "Heart of Deep Ecology," p. 86. 7. Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, pp. 199 203. See also David Rothenberg, "A Platform of Deep Ecology." The Environmentalist 7:3 (1987): 186 187.
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8. Naess, "Shallow and Deep," p. 95. 9. Rothenberg, "Introduction," p. 15. 10. Sessions, 21st Century, p. xiii. 11. McLaughlin, "Heart of Deep Ecology," p. 86. 12. Holmes Rolston III, Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988). For the work of Leopold, see Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Ballantine, 1970; rpt. from Oxford University Press, 1949). 13. Rolston, Environmental Ethics, p. 100. 14. Ibid., p. 164. 15. Ibid. 16. Leopold, Sand County Almanac, p. 240. 17. Rolston, Environmental Ethics, p. 172. 18. Ibid., p. 173. 19. Ibid., p. 176. 20. J. Baird Callicott, In Defense of the Land Ethic (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989). 21. Andrew Brennan, Thinking About Nature: An Investigation of Nature, Value, and Ecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), p. 117. 22. Ibid., p. 184. 23. Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, p. 38. 24. Warwick Fox, Toward a Transpersonal Ecology: Developing New Foundations for Environmentalism (Boston: Shambhala, 1990), p. 224. 25. Freya Mathews, The Ecological Self (London: Routledge, 1991). 26. Ibid., pp. 59 70. 27. Ibid., pp. 147 163. 28. Rothenberg, "A Platform," p. 190. 29. Ibid., pp. 186, 188. 30. Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, p. 172. 31. Arne Naess, "Identification as a Source of Deep Ecological Attitudes," in Deep Ecology, edited by Michael Tobias, (San Diego: Avant Books, 1985), p. 261 (italics in original). 32. Fox, Transpersonal Ecology, p. 231. 33. Arne Naess, "Self-realizationAn Ecological approach to Being in the World," in Sessions, 21st Century, p. 229. 34. Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, p. 86.
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35. Ibid., p. 173 (italics in original). 36. The Kantian notion of beautiful action is a frequent theme throughout Naess's writings on environmental issues and deep ecology. See Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, p. 86; and "Self-Realization," in Sessions, 21st Century, p. 236.
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37. See Leopold, Sand County Almanac, pp. 238 239. 38. Fox, Transpersonal Ecology, pp. 246 247. 39. Naess, "Self-Realization," in Sessions, 21st Century, p. 236. 40. Naess, "Shallow and Deep," p. 95. 41. Ibid., pp. 95 96. 42. Paul W. Taylor, Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 99 100. Taylor mentions the "great lesson" of ecology in an earlier essay that formed the basis of his book. See "The Ethics of Respect for Nature," Environmental Ethics 3 (1981): 197 218, quotation on 205. 43. Bryan G. Norton, Why Preserve Natural Variety? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 203 207. 44. Bryan G. Norton, Toward Unity Among Environmentalists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 92. 45. Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, pp. 39 40. 46. Ibid., pp. 47 67. 47. Ibid., pp. 48 49. 48. Ibid., p. 50. 49. Ibid., p. 55. 50. Ibid., p. 56. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., p. 57. 53. Ibid., p. 58. 54. Ibid., p. 66. 55. Ibid. (italics in original). 56. Mathews, Ecological Self, p. 141. 57. Ibid., pp. 150 151. Emphasis added. 58. Ibid., p. 149. 59. Ibid., p. 151. 60. Fox also relies heavily on a holistic ontology. 61. Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, p. 86. 62. Mathews, Ecological Self, p. 151. 63. Ibid., p. 147. 64. Ibid., p. 149. 65. Ibid.
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66. Richard Sylvan and David Bennett, The Greening of Ethics (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1994), p. 154. Although this volume is coauthored, it is clear that most of the criticisms of deep ecology derive from the work of Sylvan. Most of the arguments critical of deep ecology in this book are taken from Sylvan's 1985 essay "A Critique of Deep Ecology," Radical Philosophy 40 (Summer 1985): 2 11 and 41 (Autumn 1985):
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10 22. With apologies to David Bennett, I will throughout this essay refer only to Sylvan when I discuss these arguments. Another important criticism of deep ecology can be found in William Grey, "Anthropocentrism and Deep Ecology," Australasian Journal of Philosophy 71:4 (December 1993): 463 475. 67. Sylvan and Bennett, Greening, p. 108. 68. Sylvan, "A Critique," part I, p. 11; and Sylvan and Bennett, Greening, p. 110. 69. Sylvan and Bennett, Greening, p. 110. 70. See John Rodman, "The Liberation of Nature?" Inquiry 20 (1977): 83 131; and Sylvan and Bennett, Greening, pp. 140ff. 71. Sylvan and Bennett, Greening, p. 142. 72. For more, see Sylvan's criticism of biocentrism in "A Critique," part I, pp. 8 10. 73. Arne Naess, "Ecosophy and Gestalt Ontology," The Trumpeter 6:4 (Fall 1989): 136. Reprinted in Sessions, 21st Century, p. 245. 74. Arne Naess, "Metaphysics of the Treeline," in Sessions, 21st Century, pp. 246 248. 75. Ibid., p. 248. Emphasis added. 76. Sylvan and Bennett, Greening, pp. 137 146, 157 158. 77. Ibid., p. 142. 78. David Rothenberg, Is It Painful to Think? Conversations with Arne Naess (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 139 42. 79. Ibid., p. 139. 80. Ibid., p. 141.
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3 A Critique of Deep Green Theory William Grey The death of Richard Sylvan (formerly Richard Routley) in Bali, Indonesia, in June 1996 deprived environmental philosophy of one of its most vigorous, radical, and prolific champions. In this essay I explore some aspects of Sylvan's ambitious and detailed research program in environmental philosophy. In doing so, I revisit and extend themes that I have addressed elsewhere. 1 Sylvan's program reached a lot further than the ambit of environmental philosophy as conceived by the majority of writers in this area. It is systematically and extensively linked with Sylvan's (and others') work in metaphysics, semantics, logic, and value theory. Sylvan also linked it with work outside mainstream Australasian and AngloAmerican philosophical inquiry, as well as with work in Taoism, Buddhism, nihilism, cosmology, demography, politics, economicsand more.2 Over the last twenty years within Australasia, and beyond, Sylvan was responsible, individually and in collaboration, for substantial and seminal developments in environmental philosophy. He was also responsible for provoking a number of significant alternative articulations of the issues, which he addressed in a characteristically robust style. In this essay I touch only a few fragments of the mosaic. There are problems in trying to survey the whole of Sylvan's oeuvre, parts of which are technical and parts of which arise from his idiosyncrasies in presentation and publishing. His work deserves to be more widely known.3 Environmental Philosophy Environmental philosophy began as a research program in Australasian (and Anglo-American) academic philosophy as a result of a perceived dissatisfaction with the adequacy of received views about the value of nonhuman nature and permissible actions with respect to natural items, such as organisms and
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ecosystems, that belong to and constitute the nonhuman world. In fact, the dissatisfaction was deeper than a dissatisfaction with the adequacy of moral theories and injunctions: concerns were repeatedly expressed that the conceptual framework(s) were not adequate to the task of the inquiry. To quote one thinker, not widely renowned for his radical revisionary views: Sometimes words fail us; usage defeats us. There is a distinction we want to make. It is reasonably clear in our mind and we believe it to be important. There are two words at our disposal which, given their past history, we should like to use in order to make the distinction. Unfortunately, however, they are often used as synonyms, or in some context which goes right against the usage we should like to introduce. Seventeenth century writers had this problem when they wanted to distinguish between what we now call "enthusiasm" and what we now call "fanaticism." They were often used as synonyms and in many contexts "enthusiasm'' had been the preferred word where we should now write "fanaticism." It took more than a century before a writer could use "enthusiasm" in its modern sense without running a serious risk of being misunderstood. My position is very similar. Feeling the need to distinguish between two kinds of human action, I should like to label them, respectively, "conservation" and " 4 The starting point of environmental philosophy is a critique of assumptions, ordinarily taken for granted, that help to shape our perception of ourselves and our world, and to guide our behavior. The "self-evident" assumption that is the main target of environmental philosophy concerns the legitimacy of anthropocentrism, which is, according to Sylvanas well as to many other writers in this areaboth a central component of our received moral attitudes and fundamentally flawed. The sort of predicament outlined in John Passmore's lament, quoted above, is manifested very keenly in environmental philosophy. It has generated several unfortunate consequences. First, it has fostered a variety of competing proposals for conceptual revision, such as the Augean stable of deep ecology that Sylvan attempted to cleanse. Perhaps in its inchoate state of development it is not surprising to find a certain amount of fumbling and confusion. Second, it has engendered a plethora of unfortunate neologisms. We find Sylvan forging his own deplorable examples ("non-jective," "gre-een," "extranalities," "expiricism," "intraneous," "extitution"). After a while one starts to yearn for a bit of Hegelian or postmodernist precision and clarity. The parts of Sylvan's environmental philosophy I want to examine are his account of value, his espousal of a pluralistic environmental philosophy, and some features of his articulation of what he came to call "Deep Green theory."5 In the course of this I will comment on the confusion surrounding the notion of anthropocentrism. I will concentrate on points of disagreement and hope that this will not mask the very high regard I hold for Sylvan's work.
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Sylvan's papers fall into two broad groups. First there are the constructive essays, whose intent is to develop what he eventually labeled "Deep Green" philosophy. While these papers are mostly expository, they also contain critical material, directed mainly at defenders of the status quo and other reactionaries. 6 Second there are the predominantly critical papers directed mainly at fellow toilers in the vineyards of environmental philosophy, which are presented in an often bruising "bare knuckles" style.7 I will consider some of the things he had to say in writings from each of these categories. Also, I make no attempt to identify authorial responsibility in the case of jointly authored papers. For my purposes "Sylvan" is the name of a mereological aggregate that includes various Routley, Plumwood, and Bennett stages. An environmental ethic, we are told, "involves a reconceptualization of appropriate and inappropriate behavior towards the environment, by humans, and applications of ethics directly to the environment."8 Why should we take account of environmental items, or parts of nonhuman nature? Let us put aside for the time being the question of whether it is possible to introduce criteria of value that don't presuppose human standards. One reason is that human activities and interests have extended progressively to different levels of organization within the world. For example, human activities have come to be more disruptive at chemical and global levels, and consequently have generated a need for regulation and constraint that formerly did not exist, or at least whose need was formerly not obvious. While we deal with organized complexity at many levels, from an agent-centered perspective the social level is the most basic and immediate. The social level of organization of the world is of course the domain of classical moral theory. And one of the standard objections to environmental ethics is that it makes no sense to apply the vocabulary of ethics beyond the domain of human (or, on some extensionist views, sentient) society. One way of articulating the concerns of environmental ethics is to say that moral considerations have come to manifest themselves on other levels as well. One influential development of this idea is Aldo Leopold's "Land Ethic," which proposes that we extend the notion of community to include "soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land."9 The way that biological systems are organized and the way that we may act toward them (the range of permissible treatment) is open to the same sorts of consideration that obtained in classical ethics. However, there are limits to how far the sense of a moral community can be extended. There is plenty of significant organization and structure at microscopic and cosmic levels, but there is no plausible sense of community that includes quarks and quasars. This point is relevant to the task of determining the appropriate scale for human concern, to which I will return.
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Green ethics, Sylvan suggests, is not just a branch of applied ethics: it does not seek to add another domain of practical concern to the philosophical agenda, but to radically change "ethics itself." 10 That is, whereas applied ethics seek to apply principles and values (as happens in medical ethics, business ethics, sexual ethics, etc.), Green ethics is concerned to question the adequacy of the "tried and tested . . . old (anthropocentric) values.11 Let us therefore consider some aspects of Sylvan's account of values. Values Sylvan recommends a Meinongian account of values.12 He argues that while values "do not fit easily or at all into over-simple scientific views of the world,"13 we can nevertheless satisfy the demand for a naturalistic account of value. A primitive model "adapted from behavioral psychology" construes value as that which nature rewards and punishes.14 This approach is not promising. First, it construes nature as an agent, though not necessarily a person. How else are we to understand the claim that nature can "punish" and "reward"? Second, there is vagueness about just what "nature" refers to and who is to be conceived as the beneficiary of the reward. Are beneficiaries individuals, or populations, or systems, or any of these? Without the help of some expository detail, it is hard to see how the model is to be applied. Third, there is a question of what time parameters are relevant for determining the reward. Short-term pain may be long-term gain. While these may all be points of detail that can be tidied up, there is the more serious worry of how this application of a partial modeling account can avoid circularity, for it is not clear how one can provide an account of reward that does not incorporate the notion of value. However, I don't think that this reward-and-punishment model is fundamental to Sylvan's analysis, so I will not develop further any misgivings that depend on worries about this model. What I want to examine is the claim that it makes sense to speak of values existing independently of valuers. Sylvan argues that what makes items good or valuable is independent of the existence of any particular kinds of valuers, such as human beings. However, he also maintains the stronger thesis that values exist independently of any (actual) valuers at all.15 There are difficulties with this. Sylvan argues that values are independent of all valuers, yet also that they are culturally variablethat is, values depend on and vary between cultures.16 Cultural pluralism, according to which "there is no uniquely determined correct value system,"17 is, however, at odds with his naturalistic and quasirealist account of values, which holds that value dis-
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course is truth-apt. Sylvan claims that value judgments "are genuine assertions; they are propositional, and can be applied or contradicted, known or not, true or not, etc." 18 What is known to be true in one culture may be known to be false in another! This relativism is less disturbing on a noncognitivist account of values. Different cultures may provide different contexts of assessment for judgments of value, which in turn may provide determinate and incompatible answers to questions of what is permissible. Hunting perhaps is permissible if it serves the vital needs of a subsistence culture, but may be impermissible in an affluent culture. However, Sylvan defends a cognitivist account of value, and the relativity of evaluative judgments for him is therefore problematic. The difficulties faced by Sylvan's account are manifest in his discussion of the judgement A "This forest is worthless," referring to an apparently stunted, twisted, and deformed, but in fact climax elfin forest. Consider an evaluation from the framework of a forester concerned with wood production and of a conservationist. Is A true or false? It's false, we [environmentalists] say. But the forestry people say it's true; and then we say they're wrong and criticise their wood-production framework. But is it false absolutely or not? Yes, from where we stand, and also in a way no, because of the competing forestry stance; but strictly there are no absolutes here.19 It is hard not to feel uneasy about the instability of this position. Sylvan attempts to ease the discomfort by comparing the case variability of value frames to the localization and relativization of secondary quality claims imposed by classical physics and the localization of primary quality claims by the theory of relativity. But Sylvan's predicament is more serious than these cases. Relativity provides frame-independent descriptions for primary qualities, and we can appeal to "normal" perceivers and "normal" observation conditions to provide (reasonable) stability for secondary quality judgments. But the shifting sands of cultural variability provide no foundation for quasi-realism about value. The situation was less serious for Alexius Meinong, whose account of values Sylvan has appropriated and extended. Value for Meinong was a nonsubjective character that is grasped through emotional presentation. But Meinong also accepted culturally invariant emotional responses, which Sylvan rejects, so for Meinong, but not for Sylvan, values can be construed along the same lines as secondary qualities. There are problems, then, with Sylvan's account of values, and it is not clear how his pluralism does not collapse into relativismdespite his denial of this consequence.20 The strong thesis that values can exist in worlds without (actual) valuers is a difficult position to defend, and is, moreover, a position which
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becomes extremely unstable when combined with the claim that values are subject to cultural variability. What about the weaker thesis that what is good, valuable, worthwhile, and so on depends in no way on characteristics that are specific to any particular species, such as Homo sapiens. This is a thesis that Sylvan also defends independently, and it is one that is much more plausible. Values can exist in a world without human valuers. Perhaps we recognize the category of humans as morally considerable in virtue of possessing certain characteristics (such as being preference-havers with the capacity for reflective rational choice, or whatever), but this is a contingent fact. Morally relevant characteristics have nothing to do with species membership. Values depend on the existence of choice-making preference-havers. However, while our species characteristics are sufficient for having the capacity to choose, they are not necessary. Values are tied to the notion of agency, because without the capacity to choose and to act, there can be no coherent preference-ordering. The domain of actionthat is, the domain in which we have the causal power to effect changesimposes limits on the kind and the scale of states of affairs about which we can coherently entertain preferences. That is, it imposes limits on the domain of praxis. These limits can be illustrated by considering alternative spatial and temporal perspectives. From a remote temporal perspective or a remote spatial perspective, what happens here and now is of little consequence. 21 Such perspectives are, in general, not relevant to choice. Similarly, from a subatomic level much of the practically relevant structure of the world disappears. That is not to say it is without interest. Moral questions are not the only interesting questions. But we do not inhabit cosmic or subatomic levels of organization, and the structure and organization at those levels are not relevant to praxis; they lie beyond the boundaries of community. Sylvan's account of values nowhere acknowledges the existence of such limits. The realm of practical reason is the zone of middle dimensions. In our sort of lives, billions of years and nanoseconds are irrelevant for structuring our preferences and choices. Human scaleor rather, the scale appropriate for choice-making preference-havers who hereabouts happen to be humandoes, however, matter. Meaningful deliberation must conform to the range of powers and opportunities that creatures such as ourselves possess.22 Deep Ecology "Deep ecology" is a label coined by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess for a set of concerns that Sylvan (then Routley) was also addressing.23 The basic in-
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tuition which Naess articulated is that the dominant Western tradition of moral thought does not provide a satisfactory basis for an ethic of obligation and concern for the nonhuman world. Genuinely moral concern, Naess argued, and not just prudential concern or enlightened self-interest, needs to be extended beyond the traditional domain of human affairs to provide guidance and constraints with respect to nonhuman individuals, wilderness areas, and perhaps even to the biosphere as whole. Moral concern is thus to be extended across time and across species. Just how far this concern extends depends, of course, on the rationale for the extended concern. Naess's initial formulation of deep ecology was challenged as vague and unsatisfactory. His original articulation was based on an appeal to what he claimed to be "an intuitively clear and obvious value axiom:" 24 biospheric egalitarianism, which affirms ("in principle") the equal value of all life. However, the principle is one that many found neither obvious nor intuitively clear. A fundamental difficulty is that we have to deal with antagonism and conflict withinand concerningliving systems, and that often involves invidious choices. A principle that affirms all living things are of equal value is of no help in establishing preference rankings, and so provides no guidance for choice and action. Sylvan provided an extended critique of Naess as well as other formulations of deep ecology,25 especially those of Bill Devall and George Sessions and of Warwick Fox.26 In many cases, it must be said, his interpretations are fairly uncharitable. While Sylvan takes the enthusiastic overstatement of others very literally and trenchantly attacks their metaphors, he is quite relaxed and comfortable about using hyperbole and colorful metaphors of his own. Thus Sylvan mounted a vigorous attack on what he called "Wild Western deep ecology," which adopts selfrealization as a basic goal. This particular manifestation of deep ecology offended Sylvan's sensibilities, especially when its concerns are transformed into concerns about ecological consciousness. Deep ecology, Sylvan complained, was supposed to be a corrective to the fundamental vice of anthropocentrism. Curiously, the main project (according to one reading of Devall and Sessions) seems to involve focusing on the well-being of the self.27 Sylvan remarked: Ecology, deep or shallow or systematic, is not an ego-tripping or a personal thing. Granted those who do have and share certain attitudes and feelings to natural environments are much more likely to become active supporters or followers of deep ecology or to adopt a deeper ecological stance, even so such states as selfrealisation or ecological consciousness are neither necessary nor sufficient for this.28 A more sympathetic interpreter would reply that self-realization has nothing to do with egoistic gratification, as Sylvan's uncharitable interpretation clearly suggests. However, Sylvan would still have objected to what he perceived as
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a mystical or quasi-spiritual element in this and other articulations of deep ecology. Another problematic component of the deep ecology package that Sylvan attacked is a holistic intuition about the interconnectedness of everything. 29 Certainly scientific discoveries in biologyand indeed physicshave revealed a multiplicity of causal connections and interdependencies that are as surprising as they are ubiquitous. But holism becomes self-defeating when it leads to a denial of the existence of the components whose nature and relationships it is trying to explain.30 Sylvan complained about the "murkiness" of deep ecology, which he also described as a "conceptual bog" whose doctrines have appeared in a "confusing myriad of formulations."31 Deep ecology suffers from vagueness, confusion, the unsatisfactoriness of its principles of biospecies impartiality and extreme holism, and the positing of self-realization as a fundamental goal. But that's not all. Deep ecology also frequently assumes a religious or spiritual mode of expression, about which Sylvan had reservations, and it also has a penchant for consorting with such bad company as ecosophy, pantheism, Christianity, and Buddhism, all of which are theoretical frameworks that "do not include thorough-going deep positions, but sustain rather intermediate positions."32 Also, the shallow/deep dichotomy is simplistic and does not make sufficient allowance for a number of intermediate positions. Sylvan's Deep Green Alternative Let us leave the bog of deep ecology and turn to the Sylvan pastures of Deep Green theory.33 What separates socalled deep positions from shallow positions is the claim that human beings and human interests are not the sole items of value in the world. Defenders of "deep" positions in general maintain that there are nonhuman individuals and interests, and perhaps even nonsentient individuals, that have irreducible value, which imposes constraints on the moral agents.34 Sylvan proposes a fourfold classification shown in figure 3.1.35 This replaces Naess's vaguely stated dichotomy with a more precise classification. The unrestrained position regards short-term human interests as the only ones that count, and Sylvan argues that because it fails to pay due regard to clearly identifiable human interests, this does not even qualify as a moral position. Shallow environmental concern is concern that takes into consideration the interests of future generations of humansfor example, species destruction and profligate resource depletionwhich are sufficient to justify constraints on a number of activities that despoil and degrade items of value.
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The watershed principle that divides shallow from deep positions is what Sylvan calls the sole value assumption. Western views, he claims, assume that only humans have irreducible or intrinsic value. The value of everything else is to be explained, directly or indirectly, in terms of human interests and values. The prevalence of this assumption in Western traditions has been variously attributed to Cartesian metaphysics and Judeo-Christian religious doctrines. Christian sympathies for the environment have tended to be limited, perhaps because moral obligations are directed up the Great Chain of Being toward God and the heavenly host, rather than downward toward the brutes. Environmental sensibility should, however, extend concern downward, even to bacteria, prokaryotes, and viruses. Sylvan suggestsquite plausiblythat there will be a graded response relative to an organism's biotic distance: "Whatever rights simpler living organisms, especially ones such as bacteria and viruses have to live and blossom, they have heavily qualified and much attenuated ones." 36 It is not clear, however, on what grounds Sylvan thinks our concerns should become thus attenuated and qualified. Various reasons might be offered. One reason is that complex systems should be favored over simple ones, though that would be a risky principle for Sylvan to accept, since by many measures of complexity, that could favor humans over other species, and that would run counter to a core element of Sylvan's environmental philosophy. It might be suggested that complex systems are less fragile. But why should we deplore fragility or value robustness? Moral extensionists, who usually rely on criteria such as sentience, will of course cut off their concern well before reaching the level of simple life-forms like viruses and bacteria. There is, however, a simpler reason why Sylvan's conclusion can be accepted, which is that single-celled organisms are so flexible, adaptive, and ubiquitous
Figure 3.1 Shallow and deep: positions and principles.
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thatapart from special cases like smallpoxthere is not much we can do to seriously compromise their interests. Since we cannot be obliged to do what is not possible, there is no reason to extend consideration or concern to beings whose survival and flourishing is assured. Some Problems with Deep Green Theory One of the advantages that Sylvan claims for Deep Green theory over deep ecology is that instead of "looseness, sloganization, [and] departure formulations," we have a "tight, detailed theory, aiming for precise stable formulation." 37 However, this promises more than is delivered. Apart from the worries already aired about how tight and stable a pluralist theory can be, there are problems with the core principles of Deep Green theory. First consider the basic deontic principle Sylvan labels as DN: One is free to act as one wishes provided (i) one does not unwarrantedly interfere with other preferencehavers, and (ii) one does not ill-treat or devalue anything of value.38 Second, consider the "powerful" Deep Green improvement on the unsatisfactory principle of biospheric egalitarianism, the principle of eco-impartiality: There should be no substantially differential treatment of items outside any favored class or species of a discriminatory sort that lacks sufficient justification.39 Or the obligation principles, which can be paraphrased as follows: 1. Do not put other preference-havers into a dispreferred state for no good reason.40 2. Do not jeopardize the well-being of natural objects or systems without good reason.41 3. Do not damage or destroy items that can have their value eroded or impaired.42 The problem with these principles is that it is not clear how to read the hedging. What constitutes warranted interference, or substantial differential treatment, or sufficient justification? The worry is that these principles might be quite acceptable even to the most perfidious architects of environmental destruction. Until the problem about how to interpret the qualifications is addressed, there is a worry that Sylvan's critical misgivings about deep ecology"there is little or nothing which stands firm about deep ecology; it is not just excessively vague, it ceases to be well-defined"43might be extended equally to Deep Green theory. There is some further guidance on the intended interpretation, however, that can be gleaned from the accompanying argument. Consider the following Deep
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Green criticism of shallow positions, which helps to motivate the Deep Green alternative: The anthropocentric argumentappealing to human survival and so onis weak. By the time a long-term perspective has overcome short-term interests it will be too late . . .. conservation is a long-term group issue, but most humans live on a short-term individualistic perspective . . . Passmore's own sketchy chainof-interests ethics is . . . unsatisfactory; it does not allow properly for long-term and group assessments. 44 What is identified here and elsewhere as the major defect of the shallow views is not their anthropocentrism, but the fact that they are short-term, narrow, and self-regarding. But misgivings about the moral deficiencies of shortterm, narrow, and self-regarding views can be endorsed by anthropocentrists, although it should be stressed that Sylvan's argument for rejecting an account of value which links it to species membership is nevertheless compelling. Homo sapiens is used merely to fix the reference for important value-giving characteristics. In fact, many of the reasons advanced by Sylvan in support of his Deep Green values can be supported by defenders of intermediateand perhaps even "shallow"positions. There are many instances in which Sylvan's rejection of intermediate positions makes extensive use of dependency arguments: It is not until humans accept their dependency on nature and put themselves in place as part of it, not until then do humans put humans first (and if they have really seen what is involved they won't always).45 There may be some infelicitous expression here. Certainly an unsympathetic reading suggests that Deep Green theory should be adopted because it provides the right way of putting humans first. That does not square at all well with the central precepts of Deep Green theory. The pivotal issue for Deep Green theory is the greater value assumption. Human interests, though always important, do not necessarily always win out. This is a source of serious concern when there is a "shift in the frame of reference for ethical consideration from humans to the biotic community."46 This shift generates perhaps the most disturbing worry about abandoning anthropocentrism, which is the threat of misanthropy or "ecofascism." Dave Foreman, for example, has made more or less explicit what some fear is implicit in value systems that sever themselves completely from their anthropocentric bearings.47 Sylvan tries to defuse this charge: "Human survival is no less an ethical concern than it ever was, but the preservation of humans is through and not at the expense of the preservation of the ecological community."48 However, if human interests were paramount once, but no longer are, then surely they must be of diminished concern.
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This may, however, be an artificial problem created by the greater value assumption. Sylvan's formulation of this principle suggests that there is a precise and well-defined transition between intermediate and deep value issues. However, I suspect this is misleading; it is more plausible to suppose that there is a range of cases which reveal that the transition is not as sharply defined as the principle suggests. Another worry raised by some of Sylvan's articulations of Deep Green theory concerns his claim that inanimate items possess intrinsic value. 49 Sylvan believes that rivers, rocks, and landforms, for example, have irreducible value.50 Refusal to admit this and to ascribe to all inanimate items mere instrumental value would constitute an objectionable biochauvinism. Sylvan's claims about the values of inanimate formations are also supported by some of his remarks about terraforming.51 This is an issue on which Sylvan's intuitions and my own part company. Appropriating from Hume it seems to me that 'tis no way contrary to reason (nor to moral intuitions) to prefer the destruction of a wholly and unchangeably inanimate world to the scratching of my little finger.52 Dumping junk in space and on neighboring planets and the moon is very likely an act of monumental human folly not because the Martian or lunar landscape is being degraded but rather because it is an unwise allocation of terrestrial resources. Likewise, underground nuclear tests are certainly objectionable, but not because of subterranean rock formations that are thereby destroyed. Community does not extend from the biosphere to the lithospherethough recent evidence suggests that the biosphere extends a lot closer to the lithosphere than was formerly supposed.53 The surface effects of subterranean nuclear tests that do impinge on the biotic community, such as the radioactive contamination of groundwater, are of course quite another matter. By Sylvan's lights, terraforming is impermissible. While I do not dispute that such adventurism is ill-advised, almost certainly for economic reasons alone,54 I do not see any justification for the view that it would be destroying items of value. Suppose Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe are right about panspermia, and suppose furthermore that life on Earth is the result of terra-forming.55 Would that affect the value we attach to the world? I believe it would not, though according to Deep Green theory, it would. Conclusion I have focused criticism on a few key elements of Sylvan's extensive, eclectic, and detailed program of inquiry in environmental philosophy. His program could be called ''life, the universe, everything, and much more besides." It am-
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bitiously attempts to synthesize an extensive range of issues in a way I believe deserves to be more widely known. Because I have concentrated selectively on areas of disagreement, it may appear that my views and sympathies are more distant from Sylvan's than they in fact are. Although the resolution through the lens of Deep Green theory is sometimes blurred, I owe a large debt to what Sylvan's prolific research helped to clarify and illuminate. Notes 1. In particular, William Grey, "A Critique of Deep Ecology," Journal of Applied Philosophy 3 (1986): 211 216, reprinted in Readings in Applied Philosophy, edited by B. Almond and D. Hill (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1991), pp. 45 50; "Anthropocentrism and Deep Ecology," Australasian Journal of Philosophy 71:4 (December 1993): 463 475; and "Environmental Value and Anthropocentrism,'' Ethics and the Environment 3:1 (1998): 97 103. 2. There are also lifestyle aspects about which (so far as I know) Sylvan has not written that I will not pursue. 3. It is a difficult scholarly challenge to survey Sylvan's writings comprehensively, and it is a matter of regret that Sylvan did not adopt a more conventional approach to publication and also to textual referencing and footnotes. There is a two-stage problem: finding what you want to look at and, having established that, locating it. There is a proposal to produce a collection of some of his main writings in three or four volumes, perhaps including a volume of his writings on environmental philosophy. 4. John Passmore, "The Preservationist Syndrome," Journal of Political Philosophy 3 (1995): 1. 5. Deep Green theory received its first sustained exposition (though not under that label) in Richard Routley and Val Routley, "Human Chauvinism and Environmental Ethics," in Environmental Philosophy, edited by D. S. Mannison, M. McRobbie, and R. Routley (Canberra: Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1980), pp. 96 189. 6. Richard Routley and Val Routley, "Against the Inevitability of Human Chauvinism," in Ethics and Problems of the 21st Century, edited by K. E. Goodpaster and K. M. Sayre (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1979), pp. 36 59; Richard Sylvan, Three Essays on Deeper Environmental Ethics, Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy, Green Series no. 13 (Canberra: Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1986); Richard Sylvan and David H. Bennett, The Greening of Ethics (Cambridge: The White Horse Press, 1994). 7. Richard Sylvan, "A Critique of Deep Ecology, Part I," Radical Philosophy no. 40 (Summer 1985): 2 12; "A Critique of Deep Ecology, Part II," Radical Philosophy no. 41 (Autumn 1985): 10 22; In Defence of Deep Environmental Ethics, Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy, Green Series no. 18 (Canberra: Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1990); Richard Sylvan, Against the
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Main Stream: Critical Environmental Essays, Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy, Green Series no. 20 (Canberra: Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1994). 8. Sylvan and Bennett, The Greening of Ethics, p. 9. 9. Aldo Leopold, "The Land Ethic," in in his A Sand County Almanac, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 219. 10. Sylvan and Bennett, The Greening of Ethics, p. 27. 11. Ibid., p. 28. 12. "The Way of Values," in Sylvan, Three Essays on Deeper Environmental Ethics, Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy, Green Series no. 13 (Canberra: Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1986). 13. Ibid., p. 4. 14. Ibid. 15. This is part of Sylvan's doctrine of "noneism," according to which values existing independently of valuers are neither objective nor subjective: they simply are. 16. In Sylvan, "The Way of Values," pp. 12 16. 17. Ibid., p. 13. 18. Ibid., p. 23. 19. Ibid., p. 14. 20. Ibid., p. 13. I am nevertheless sympathetic to the suggestion, defended by both Sylvan and Meinong, that there are systematic parallels between secondary qualities and values. An analysis of values that may provide a way of articulating this conception is the response-dependent approach, recommended to me in discussion by Peter Menzies and Philip Pettit. See Peter Menzies, ed., Response-Dependent Concepts, Working Papers in Philosophy no. 1 (Canberra: Philosophy Program, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1991). The problem is also addressed in Richard Sylvan, Transcendental Metaphysics (Cambridge: White Horse Press, 1998). 21. William Grey, "Evolution and the Meaning of Life," Zygon 22:4 (1987): 479 496. 22. As Collingwood noted: "The natural world which human scientists can study by observation and experiment is an anthropocentric world; it consists only of those natural processes whose time-phase and space-range are within the limits of our observation" (R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945], p. 24). These themes are addressed in more detail in Grey, "Anthropocentrism and Deep Ecology" and "Environmental Value and Anthropocentrism.'' 23. The locus classicus is Arne Naess, "The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement," Inquiry 16 (1973): 95 100. A contemporaneous seminal paper by Richard Routley was "Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental Ethic?" in Proceedings of the XVth World Congress of Philosophy, vol. 1 (Varna, Bulgaria: 1973), pp. 205 210. This paper prefigured central themes developed at greater length (in collaboration with Val Plumwood, then Val Routley), notably in Routley and Routley, "Human Chauvinism and Environmental Ethics." 24. Naess, "The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement," p. 96.
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25. Especially in "A Critique of Deep Ecology, Part I" and "Part II." 26. Warwick Fox, Toward a Transpersonal Ecology (Boston: Shambhala, 1990). 27. Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology (Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith, 1985). 28. Sylvan, "A Critique of Deep Ecology, Part II," pp. 11 12. 29. Freya Mathews articulates a fairly expansive holism in The Ecological Self (London: Routledge, 1991). 30. Sylvan, "A Critique of Deep Ecology, Part II," section 5, addresses the distinction between moderate holism and extreme holism. 31. Ibid., "Part I," pp. 2 3. 32. Ibid., p. 5. 33. Regarding this terminology, it is of interest to note that although Sylvan ("A Critique of Deep Ecology, Part II," p. 17) said that the "vague," "amorphous," "self-congratulatory" metaphor ''deep" should be abandoned, he continued to use it extensively. The rhetorical attraction of "deep" proved irresistible, and Sylvan used it not only as a metaphor of color hue (deep/pale) but also as a metaphor of spatial depth (deep/shallow). 34. In Kant's terminology they are "something whose existence has in itself an absolute value, something which as an end in itself could be a ground of . . . practical law." Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten [1785], translated as The Moral Law by H. J. Paton (London: Hutchinson, 1948), p. 90. 35. Sylvan, "A Critique of Deep Ecology, Part I," p. 5. 36. Ibid., p. 8. 37. Sylvan and Bennett, The Greening of Ethics, p. 139, figure 5.1. 38. Routley and Routley, "Human Chauvinism and Environmental Ethics," p. 174. 39. Sylvan and Bennett, The Greening of Ethics, p. 142. 40. Routley and Routley, "Human Chauvinism and Environmental Ethics," p. 104. 41. Ibid., p. 107. 42. Ibid., p. 109. 43. Sylvan and Bennett, The Greening of Ethics, p. 157. 44. Ibid., p. 74. 45. Ibid., p. 80. 46. Ibid., p. 81. 47. Dave Foreman, "Second Thoughts of an Eco-Warrior," in Defending the Earth, edited by Steve Chase (Boston: South End Press, 1991), pp. 107 119. 48. Sylvan and Bennett, The Greening of Ethics, p. 81. 49. Another problematic category he mentions concerns the way that present practices discriminate against nonexistents, such as "mere future existents" who are "despite their presently unfavourable ontological status . . . are entitled to fair and decent treatment" (Richard Sylvan, Universal Purpose, Terrestrial Greenhouse and
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Evolution, Research Series in Unfashionable Philosophy, no. 4 [Canberra: Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1990], p. 34). See also Richard Routley and Val Routley, "Nuclear Energy and Obligations to the Future," Inquiry 21 (1978): 133 179. Sylvan argued that "what doesn't exist can also be valuable" ("A Critique of Deep Ecology, Part I", p. 9) and that the value assignments of deep ecology are far too thisworldly. I address these issues in "Possible Persons and the Problems of Posterity," Environmental Values, 5:2 (1996), pp. 161 179. 50. Sylvan, "A Critique of Deep Ecology, Part II," p. 20. 51. Sylvan and Bennett, The Greening of Ethics, p. 37. 52. David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), p. 416. 53. P. C. W. Davies, Fifth Miracle: Search for the Origins of Life (London: Allen Lane, 1998). 54. While interplanetary adventurism is probably wasteful and futile, it may be that the wonderful photographs of Earth from space have helped to facilitate a new environmental consciousness and thereby redeemed the billions of dollars spent on the Apollo program. 55. Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space (London: Dent, 1981) and Cosmic Life-Force (London: Dent, 1988).
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4 Deep Ecology, Deep Pockets, and Deep Problems: A Feminist Ecosocialist Analysis Val Plumwood The politics of deep ecology has gone astray at the philosophical level mainly because of its interpretation of the leading concept of solidarity in terms of a unity of interests model that fails to allow adequately for difference, is unable to give it institutional representation, and is unable to distinguish oppressive from nonoppressive concepts of unity. Elsewhere I have discussed the effect of the unity interpretation of solidarity on Naess's treatment of ethics, which is strongly influenced by his positivist background and requires more development to show that a nonextensionist and nonhierarchical ethics is possible. Here I argue that this unity model of solidarity is as problematic in the sphere of politics as it is in the sphere of ethics, and that it has led to the seduction of deep ecology at the political level by the Man of Property and the ascendency of associated politically conservative "deep pocket" strategies of coverture. Deep ecology has some alternative resources and strategies available, but their insights lead in an ecosocialist rather than a conservative political direction, and suggest major modifications to dominant models of property. Arne Naess and Deep Ecology Deep ecology emerged initially from the thinking of Arne Naess, a man of the peace movement and of deep practical commitment to nature, who sought a philosophical basis for that commitment and for developing a historic shift in human consciousness away from the dominant instrumental relationship and toward one based on respect and communicative virtues. 1 Naess's work helped broaden the academic issues beyond the poorly contextualized rationalistic academic argument over whether humanist ethical and value principles could somehow be stretched to extend to nonhumans. Because Naess, for what I will suggest are both good and not-so-good reasons, wanted to demote abstract
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ethics (as usually understood), his account helped shift the discussion of environmental philosophy toward activistinspired issues of how we can account for and develop our capacity for solidarity with nonhuman nature, and also toward the broader and more philosophically productive ethico-ontological issues of the analysis of human identity, alienation, and difference from nature. Naess's work opens up some of the deeper questions about how we have misconceived our human identity as well as that of nature, and how these misconceptions have foreclosed our options for responsible and ethical relationship with the more-than-human, or, as he would put it, for mutual self-realization. This does not mean that the answers Naess gave to these deeper questions are the best possible answers, and that we should not pursue others. Naess allowed for the possibility of plural approaches in his account of Ecosophy T and its relationship to the deep ecology platform, conceiving of his own as only one among a number of possibilities that were consistent with agreement on the basic platform. Although political philosophy was a significant omission from Naess's philosophical concerns, this omission has been remedied in recent years by others associated with deep ecology whose work I discuss in the last parts of this essay. But because of the political theory gap in Naess's work, the platform remained a politically undeveloped area. It has always seemed to me that there is a strong resemblance between Naess's acceptance of diversity over and above the platform and fellow Vienna Circle member Rudolf Carnap's methodological "Principle of Tolerance," which stated that diversity in nonempirical theoretical constructions was of no real concern, provided there was agreement about "the facts"empirical data, which to positivism was what really mattered. 2 While the word "tolerance" is apt to generate lots of warm, fuzzy feelings, an abstract embrace of tolerance principles is no substitute for the development of real theoretical and stand-point diversity, and here deep ecology is deeply lacking. The effect of the original underdevelopment of political thinking in the platform, plus the recent appearance of a conservative brand of deep political theory, plus the Naess Carnap abstract tolerance for diversity beyond the agreement on the politically underdeveloped "platform," is to make deep ecology today potentially subject to capture by the right. The choice principles of the real world differ significantly, however, from the ideal world of Ecosophy T. Choices between left and right political developments of the Ecosophy T position and platform cannot be avoided indefinitely by appeals to abstract tolerance, since, as I argue in this essay, some of the political alliances and directions deep ecology can take up are strongly incompatible with others.
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The Basis of SolidarityIdentity or Difference? One useful route into exploring the diverse answers available to the question of how to ground solidarity with and respect for the value of nature is the debate between Arne Naess and fellow mountaineer Peter Reed. Despite their commonalities in the search for a ground for a new (for the humanist West) ethic of respect, Reed and Naess differed profoundly on the question of whether the abstract foundation for the desired new relationship will be found in human unity with and embeddedness within the natural order, or in the "existential gulf," our discontinuity and difference from nature. Naess proposed foundations formulated basically in terms of identity and unity: Reed's counteradvocacy, in a powerful essay published posthumously, of basing respect not on sameness but on difference, could hardly have presented a stronger contrast. I argue in this section that the criticisms which each disputant makes of the other are valid, which points to resolution via a third position that would allow us to combine elements of both continuity and difference, self and other, in dynamic tension. Naess, focusing on human alienation from nature, elects for identification with nature and the realization of the Self based on the totality of this identification as the foundation for respect for and defense of nature. This position created a useful alliance with those forms of Buddhist thought which cast the sense of personal separateness as the ultimate illusion, contributing in no small measure to the political success of Naess's version of deep ecology. "Identification," used in examples as synonymous variously with sympathy, loyalty, and solidarity, is given a technical gloss by Naess, in his reply to Reed, in terms of interest fusion or identity, "the process by which the supposed interests of another being are spontaneously reacted to as our own interests." 3 The position, in spite of the careful qualifications in terms of interests Naess gave it, ultimately draws on sameness and identity as the basis of the respect relationship. As Reed saw it, respect could be based only on the very existential gulf Naess's work sought to remove. It is, Reed argued, "our very separateness from the Earth, the gulf between the human and the natural, that makes us want to do right by the earth."4 There was an alternative to Naess's account, Reed argued, based on taking the other-nature-and not the human self to be basic: "One approach sees humans as part of nature, the other sees nature as part of humans."5 Relying on Martin Buber's theory of "I Thou" relationship, Reed declares the other that is nature to be not part of the self but "a self-sufficient being of whom we have an inkling." It is "the Wholly Other," "a total stranger," ''radically apart."6 In the right spirit, we can meet this other, but only as "two ships that pass in the night," since the "I" and the "Thou" do not depend on one
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another. Naess is certainly right to criticize Reed's dualism and failure to address the problem of alienation. Reed does not merely stress difference, he retains the existential gulf of the dominant dualistic tradition in its full form. This gulf yawns between humans and nature, according to Reed, because all we humans have in common with it, our merely physical nature, is an inessential and accidental element of our identities. Reed's absence from the present debate seems to me to undermine this view of the physical as an unimportant element in human identity. Reed's reaffirmation of the existential gulf, a key and especially problematic part of the Western tradition, leads him to treat physical nature in a deeply ambivalent way: physical nature is both "mere" (in the human case) and the object of what amounts almost to worship (in the case of the other). We are left wondering why the supposed radical difference of the other should be a basis for awe and wonder in the one case and something like disdain or indifference in the other. Reed's account is strongly oriented to wilderness. In contrast to Naess, who often focuses on mixed communities, Reed plainly believes that only the "pure" landscape of human absence represents nature. It is not only the otherness but also the huge scale and indifference of wilderness landscapes that evoke awe, and lead to revelations of intrinsic value in nature. When nature is terribly dominant, says Reed, we have a sense of fear and wonder that is missing in contexts too familiar and humanized. Nature is related both to us and to other, but it is difference alone, it seems, that is the basis of the intuition of value. It is hard to see how this kind of orientation to "the Wholly Other" can provide a basis for consideration of nature in the large number of situations where it is less impressive and more vulnerableprecisely the kind of context, one would have thought, where we especially need a respect ethic. In contrast to Naess's position and its politically useful alliances with the perennial philosophy and with Buddhist thought, the austerity, almost self-revulsion, of Reed's account, with its stress on human insignificance and final, frankly misanthropic, suggestion that the world might be a better place without human beings, seems unlikely to generate widespread appeal. Nevertheless, Reed's critique of Naess points up some important problems and tensions in the use of identity as the foundation for an environmental ethic. On first glance, Naess's account does not seem to appeal either to fusion or to egoismsince we are supposed to defend not the self but the big Self as "the totality of our identifications." But, says Reed, there seem to be inconsistent requirements hidden here: we are supposed to retain a sense of our individuality as we work to save the big Self from destructionbut at the same time we are supposed to lose interest in our individuality as we cultivate our identification
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with the big Self. 7 We are required to be egoists and also not egoists, to retain the intensity and defense drive of egoism, but also to abandon certain key differentiations between ourselves and others, in order to establish that equivalence between self and other which enables a transfer of our self-regarding motives. Naess's position, on closer inspection, ultimately is based on a kind of self-interest and upon a form of fusion or expulsion of differencetaking the form, as Naess explains in his reply, of identity of interests. "Identification" writes Naess, is a process "through which the supposed interests of another being are spontaneously reacted to as our own interests."8 Selves may not be fused, but interests are, and the other is included ethically to the extent that a kind of equivalence to self is established through identification. But analysis in terms of interest identity won't enable us to dispense with difference. We may identify in solidarity with an animal, say a wombat, expressing our solidarity by being willing to undertake political action on its behalf (working to remove it from "vermin" status, for example), but we do not thereby acquire identical specific interestsin eating grass, for example. Although we may (as relational selves) assume the overarching interest of the other's general well-being and react to that as bound up with our own, it is crucial to our being able to defend that well-being that we retain a clear sense of the other as distinct beings with different, perhaps entirely different, interests from ours. We must attain solidarity with the other in their difference, and despite the ambiguity of the term "identification," solidarity here cannot be interpreted as identity; solidarity and respect cannot be understood as processes of overcoming or eliminating otherness or difference, and neither ethics nor motivation can be derived from establishing ethical equivalence to self or from extending egoism to a wider class of big Selves. Even though Reed goes on to develop his account of otherness in ways that turn out to be rather problematic, he is, I think, importantly right on what I take to be his main point: that an account based entirely on unity and identification with Self provides a problematic basis for respect for the nonhuman world, and one particularly inadequate for those issues, such as wilderness, where the otherness of nature is particularly salient and striking. It is tempting to conclude that both Naess and Reed remain within the "solipsistic omnipotence of the single psyche."9 Reed's pure other-based account is a reversal of Naess's pure self-based one, but both seem to miss the importance of relational dynamics, the precarious balance of sameness and difference, of self and other involved in experiencing sameness without obliterating difference. Reed's positing of self and other as utterly disconnected, as "ships that pass in the night," misses the conceptual and material dependence
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of self on other: if the other plays an active part in the creation and maintaining of self, there can be no "pure other" and no "pure self." Reed reaffirms the Western tradition of denying nature and the radical distancing between humans and nature that an environmental ethic must aim to counter. Naess is right to reject this picture as reproducing a key part of the problem. However, the pure self/pure other choice presented by Naess and Reed and the underlying metaphysical choice of Same/Different is a false dichotomy: both continuity with and difference from self can be sources of value and consideration, and both usually play a role. Some of the problems that Naess's and Reed's mutual critiques of one another's work point up can be resolved in a larger critical framework employing resources from feminist theory and postcolonial theory. 10 To deal with the problems of identity that the present form of human colonization of nature generates, an adequate environmental ethic needs to provide a (usually sequenced) affirmation of both continuity and difference between humans and nature, as appropriate to the context. In the Western tradition especially, there is a need to stress continuity between self and other, human and nature, in response to the existential gulf created by the hyperseparated (radically distanced) and alienated models of nature and of human identity that remain dominant. These models define the truly human as (normatively) outside of nature and in opposition to the body and the material world, and conceive nature itself in alienated and mechanistic terms, as having no elements of mind. The drive to hyperseparation is part of the colonizing conceptual dynamic that places the human colonizer radically apart from, and above, those he conceives as part of the subordinated realm of nature. But we also need to stress the difference and divergent agency of the other in order to defeat that further part of the colonizing dynamic that seeks to assimilate and instrumentalize the other, recognizing and valuing them only as a part of self, alike to self, or as means to self's ends. What makes it possible to combine this joint affirmation of continuity and difference consistently is the distinction between hyperseparation and difference (where hyperseparation is an extreme or emphatic form of separation that denies continuity). This distinction is reflected in a corresponding distinction between continuity and identity which enables us to say that although we have historically denied our continuity with nature, affirming that continuity does not require any simple assumption of identity.11 Neither Reed nor Naess distinguishes sufficiently between difference and normative hyperseparation, an emphatic form of differentiation associated especially with the view of the other as inferior. The outcome is that Reed treats
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difference, on his account the basis of the other's value and of their ethical recognition, as implying the denial of likeness and the maintenance of the existential gulf, while Naess treats removing the existential gulf as meaning the expulsion of difference and the basing of value on forms of identity or equivalence to self. We need a concept of the other as interconnected with self, but also as a separate being in their own right, accepting the "uncontrollable, tenaciousness otherness" of the world as a condition of freedom and identity for both self and other. 12 Feminist theory especially has developed logical and philosophical frameworks based on maintaining the tension between Same and Different rather than generally eliminating difference in favor of sameness or vice versa. Solidarity and Oppressive Concepts of Unity The choice these two frameworks offer us, of valuing nature either as Same or as Different, is ultimately an anthropocentric one, since to base value exclusively on either sameness with or difference from the human implicitly construes the human as the center and pivot of valueeither as the positive (same) or as the negative (different) source of value and recognition. A framework bringing all value and recognition of the other back to identity with or difference from the human self still conceives the human as hegemonic center, and presents only a variant on the moral extensionism that is now a standard part of the contemporary neo-Cartesian consensus in philosophy. We need an alternative basis for ecological action that recognizes the other's incommensurability and does not define the other's worth in hegemonic terms that always relate it back to the human as conceptual center.13 Naess's formulation of this basis in terms of the concept of unity or fusion of interests makes the fundamental ethical form implicit in deep ecology essentially a one-place relationship.14 This makes it unsuitable as a basis for ethical models, such as those of communication and negotiation, that require explicit recognition of at least two places in the human/nature relationship. Such an ethic cannot address the other as a communicative or potentially communicative subject, and hence is particularly unsuitable for animals. Since, as John Dryzek, among others, has urged, the communication model offers a potentially powerful new image and mutualistic model to replace those of the dominant mechanistic worldview, we have to forgo rather a lot in the interests of maintaining an account based on unity.15 The popular interpretation, based on Naess's account, of the central concept by which we relate ethically to nature as that of sameness or unityand of psychological and self unity as the central meaning of "identification"creates a
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number of serious problems of merger and boundary recognition. Vague concepts of unity and identity provide very imprecise and inadequate correctives to our historical denial of continuity with and dependency on nature. Ethical theories based on unity cannot provide a good model of mutual adjustment, communication, and negotiation between different parties and interests, and are unhelpful in the key areas where we need to construct multiparty, mutualistic ethical relationships. Recovering multiplicity and difference requires a dual project of rejecting hyperseparation and of affirming difference, as responses to different parts of the logic of the One and the Other and to the Othering of nature. Affirming continuity counters the construction of human identity as emphatically separate from an homogenized passive nature whose works are similarly hyperseparate. But the confusion of continuity with identity and the construction of unity as the basis of relationship prevent us from combining this countering of hyperseparation with the recognition of difference and of the other as a distinct center of needs and projects. Naess's formulation of the basis of activism in terms of the ambiguous concept of "identification" obscures the fact that the basic concept required for an appropriate ethic of environmental activism is not that of identity or unity (or of its reversal in difference) but that of solidaritystanding with the other in a supportive relationship in the political sense. But there are multiple possible bases for solidarity, and the politics of solidarity is different from the politics of unity. Solidarity requires not just the affirmation of difference but also sensitivity to the difference between positioning oneself with the other and positioning oneself as the other, and this requires in turn the recognition and rejection of oppressive concepts and projects of unity or merger. "Identification" has also made it easy for some transpersonal ecologists to import into the concept of solidarity various problematic themes of egoism, selfexpansion, and self-defense, along with a masculinist agenda of inferiorizing particular emotional attachments and advocating a version of emotional detachment. 16 One of the main difficulties with interpreting solidarity in terms of vaguely specified concepts of unity is that this interpretation does not theoretically rule out some possibilities that ought to be ruled out. Oppressive projects of unity abound in the human case, especially in the case of hegemonic relationships of colonization. To the colonizing mentality, these projects of unity often appear in quite a different light than they appear to the subordinated group; what appear to the colonizer as improvements or as support appear as imposition and cultural destruction to the colonized. Recent Australian culture has provided many examples, in the literary and artistic frauds perpetrated by people of settler culture pretending to be Aboriginal, of assimilating or incorporating pro-
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jects of unity that deny the indigenous other's difference or transgress the other's boundaries. Some of those who adopt these oppressive projects of unity lay claim to Aboriginal identity, culture, and knowledge on the basis of alleged empathy, while others appear to regard indigenous culture as a free good, available to all, and others still are clearly intent upon harm. But even where the motivation is sympathetic, the oppressive and transgressive character of these projects of unity is fully evident to the indigenous people concerned. Similarly, colonial history in Australia and elsewhere abounds in projects of cultural assimilation of indigenous peoples that followed the attempt at genocide and that had as their aim an oppressive form of unity, namely incorporation, in which the subordinated party is produced as an inferiorized version of the dominant party or is denied any voice of its own. The incorporative self uses unity in a hegemonic fashion to absorb the other or recreate them as a version of the self. To the extent the colonizing project is one of self-imposition and appropriation (literally "making self"), the incorporative self of the colonizing mind is insensitive to the other's independence and boundaries, denying the other's right to define their own reality, name their own history, and establish their own identity. 17 This insensitivity extends to include the other's epistemic boundaries; it often assumes that the other is transparentthat they can be grasped and known as readily as the selfor that they are too simple for anything to be hidden, to outrun the colonizer's knowledge. To the incorporative self, the other can be taken (appropriated) for a benefit expressed exclusively in terms of the self, of the one, about whose beginning and end we are encouraged to be unclear. These examples show us that respect for the other requires recognizing their difference and boundariesnot claiming to be them or to encompass them. Oppressive projects of unity like this can arise from the failure to distinguish unity (positioning the self as the other) from solidarity (positioning the self with or in support of the other). Now I am not saying here, as some supporters of deep ecology seem to think, that all deep ecologists or others who have theorized the basis of solidarity in terms of unity are selfish male chauvinist pigs, that they all wish to incorporate nature into the self, or are all megalomaniacs aiming at control who take their own interests to be those of nature or the universe at large18 (although in fact there are some who hold doctrines of unity who doone could argue that Walt Whitman in his later stages was a good example, and there may be others attracted to this kind of theorization). Nor am I insisting that we must treat deep ecology according to its worst possible interpretation, as the incorporative self. What I am saying is that assumptions of unity of interest are especially liable to hegemonic interpretations, and that in the absence of a critical analysis of
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power, they are open to co-optation by existing dominance orders and by the dominant Lockean account and incorporative self upon which capitalism is based. And I think it can be given this development in terms of elaborating more carefully a concept of solidarity with nature that does not confuse solidarity with unity, the relational with the incorporative self. 19 Replacing the concept of unity with that of solidarity would no doubt displease some deep disciples and displace some alliances, but potential for a different set of alliances opens up as those with others are deemphasized.20 Deep ecologists can learn much from feminist theory and anticolonial theory about how to undertake the theoretical task of rejecting hyperseparation and elaborating a concept and ground for solidarity with nature distinct from unity, one that at the same time allows us to affirm continuity and to respect nature's difference. There are, I have suggested, multiple bases for critical solidarity with nature. One important critical basis can be an understanding that certain human societies position humans as oppressors of nonhuman nature, treating humans as a privileged group that defines the nonhuman in terms of roles that closely parallel our own roles as recipients of oppression within human dominance orders.21 Our grasp of these parallels may be based upon imaginative or narrative transpositions into positions which closely parallel that of the oppressed nonhuman other: artistic representation has an important place in helping us make such transpositions. Literature has often played such a transposing role historically, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in relation to the class system, slavery, women's oppression, and animal oppression. In recent decades science fiction narratives that imaginatively position humans as colonized or exploited reductively as food by alien invaders have provided very powerful vehicles for such imaginative transpositions into a place which parallels that of the nonhuman food animal.22 So have cartoons by Gary Larson, whose "absurd" humor often depends upon exploiting parallels in the condition of the human and nonhuman oppressed. A chicken coming from a human house carrying a baby passes a woman coming from a chicken coop carrying a basket of eggs, for example.23 A Larson elephant is outraged when he notices the ivory keys on a piano keyboard at a mixed-species party and makes the connection to the fate of his own kind. The leap of recognition that is often described and explained in terms of an unanalyzed and capricious emotion of "empathy" or "sympathy"24 is often better understood in terms of a concept of solidarity that is based on an intellectual and emotional grasp of the parallels in the logic of the One and the Other. Since most people suffer from some form of oppression within some dominance order or other, there is a widespread basis for the recognition that we are positioned multiply as oppressors or colonizers just as we are positioned multiply
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as oppressed and colonized. This recognition that one is an oppressor as well as an oppressed can be developed in certain circumstances to become the basis for the critical "traitorous identity" that analyzes, opposes, and actively works against those structures of one's own culture or group which keep the Other in an oppressed position. 25 Traitorous kinds of human identity involve a revised conception of the self and its relation to the nonhuman other, opposition to oppressive practices, and the relinquishment and critique of cultural allegiances to the dominance of the human species and its bonding against nonhumans, in the same way that male feminism requires abandonment and critique of male bonding as the kind of male solidarity which defines itself in opposition to the feminine or to women, and of the ideology of male supremacy. These "traitorous identities" that enable some men to be male feminists in active opposition to androcentric culture, some whites to be actively in opposition to white supremacism and ethnocentric culture, also enable some humans to be critical of "human supremacism" and in active opposition to anthropocentric culture. "Traitorous" identities do not appear by chance, but are usually considerable political and personal achievements in integrating reason and emotion; they speak of the traitor's own painful self-reflection as well as of efforts of understanding that do not flinch from contact with the pain of oppressed others. What makes such traitorous identities possible is precisely the fact that the relationship between the oppressed and the "traitor" is not one of identity, that the traitor is critical of his or her own "oppressor" group as someone from within that group who has some knowledge of its workings and its effects on the life of the oppressed group. It depends on the traitor being someone with a view from both sides, able to adopt multiple perspectives and locations that enable an understanding of how he or she is situated in the relationship with the other from the perspective of both kinds of lives, the life of the One and the life of the Other.26 Being a human who takes responsibility for your interspecies location in this way requires avoiding both the arrogance of reading your own location and perspective as that of the other, and the arrogance of assuming that you can "read as the Other," know their lives as they do, and in that sense speak or see as the other. Such a concept of solidarity as involving multiple positioning and perspectives can exploit the logic of the gap between contradictory positions and narratives that standpoint theory appeals to.27 The traitorous identity implies a certain kind of ethics of support relations that is quite distinct from the ethics involved in claiming unity. It stresses a number of counterhegemonic virtues, ethical stances that can help to minimize the influence of the oppressive ideologies of domination and self-imposition which have formed our conceptions of both the other and ourselves. Important
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among these virtues are listening and attentiveness to the other, a stance that can help to counter the backgrounding which obscures and denies what the nonhuman other contributes to our lives and collaborative ventures. They also include philosophical strategies and methodologies that maximize our sensitivity to other members of our ecological communities and openness to them as ethically considerable beings in their own right, rather than ones that minimize ethical recognition or that adopt a dualistic stance of ethical closure which insists on sharp moral boundaries and denies the continuity of planetary life. Openness and attentiveness include giving the other's needs and agency more attention, being open to unanticipated possibilities and aspects of the other, reconceiving and reencountering the other as a potentially communicative and agentic being, as well as "an independent center of value, and an originator of projects that demand my respect." 28 A closely allied stance, as Anthony Weston points out, is that of invitation, which risks an offering of relationship to the other in a more or less open-ended way.29 These counterhegemonic virtues help us to resist the reductionism of dominant mechanistic conceptions of the nonhuman world, and to revise both our epistemic objectives of prediction and control and our denial of nonhuman others as active presences and ecological collaborators in our lives. There is a considerable convergence here between the counterhegemonic virtues of solidarity and mutuality and the kinds of virtues of openness that Naess's form of deep ecology has recommended. Deep ecology, however, has tended to stress recognizing value rather than agency: valuing nature can be the stance of someone looking at nature, whereas the stance of recognizing agency is important for all collaborative, communicative, and mutualistic projects. Although the term "virtue" would probably not be acceptable to deep ecologists who have followed Naess in treating ethics as unnecessary, authoritarian, and passé, it is, as I have argued, clear that the theory of deep ecology has not succeeded in eliminating ethics, but rather in disguising its ethical assumptions as psychological assumptions.30 The ethics of solidarity provides an alternative basis for many deep ecological insights that avoids the implicit positivism of the "no-ethics" approach, enables the development of stronger connections to human liberation movements, and avoids the difficulties of the unity interpretation. The Political Theory of Deep Ecology and the Man of Property Similarly, in the area of political theory, deep ecology has the possibility of different routes of development that are allied with divergent political choices.
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Again, it is in part a question of deciding whose company you want to keepa choice that deep ecology cannot now say ''pass" to, as it did in the early days, especially as questions of political organization are coming so much to the fore in contemporary discussion of environmental theory and are getting quite sophisticated. Since virtually every political position now claims to be green (or has a green-dyed form; sometimes the dye will clearly come out in the first wash), the question can't be avoided via some version of a Principle of Tolerance, which is the method Naess's work suggests for dealing with it, or by appeal to individual consciousness change. Deep ecology's political thinking in response to this problem has so far been strikingly shallow: initially, it employed the concept of unity between person-place and person-community to embrace bioregionalism and small-scale communitarianism, without any clear indication (beyond individual consciousness change) of how this was to be achieved or what political structure would maintain it or guarantee its ecological character. This early fantasy phase of unity has now been succeeded by theoretical developments I discuss belowalso based on unitythat are more explicitly accommodating to existing power structures. In the earlier sections we noted how the theoretical possibilities associated with unity and individual consciousness change have assumed a privileged role over the solidarity and structural analysis allied with feminist-postcolonial theory and other politically radical movements. Just as deep ecology failed to provide alternatives to an ethical theory based on unity, so it has failed to provide political alternatives to political theory based on unity. This pattern in the political area provides the basis for the seduction of deep ecological political theory by a conservative paradigm endorsing capitalism, private property, and small government, and by a notably shallow and eliteaccommodating "deep pocket" strategy that seeks the ecological enlightenment of the Man of Property as its main objective. 31 The unity interpretation, which has the potential to provide support for both totalitarian and capitalist positions, once again provides the means by which this hegemonic accommodation is constructed. Several recent theorists have pointed to the ecological history of Nazism to argue that deep ecology has a certain potential to support Nazism and fascism. This danger is variously attributed to deep ecology's tendency to question modernity and humanism, to display elements of romanticism, and to undermine private property and individualism.32 I shall argue that these arguments rest on shallow analyses of fascism and Nazism, as well as of what is politically relevant today. While it is important to acknowledge the potential of environmentalism in general, and of deep ecology in particular, to support undemocratic forms of politics, these arguments misidentify the ways in which this
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potential arises. The main danger comes from a different direction: not so much from its alleged romanticism and critique of humanism, or from its holistic understanding of ecology, as through the potential of the unity interpretation to support the idea of community as a unity or fusion of interests, and the associated idea of a pure home devoid of alien elements. 33 The unity interpretation at the institutional level involves the attempt to seek the political, along with the ethical, inclusion of nonhuman nature in terms of the Naessian concept of unity of interests, expressed at the level of political theory by concepts of coverture and community. Luc Ferry is one of a group of recent critics of deep ecology's authoritarian potential.34 Ferry identifies "shallow" forms of ecology with humanism and a progressive affirmation of modernism, and blackens any deeper form of ecological thought that tries to challenge the human/nature dualism in a more thoroughgoing way, through the alleged association of deep ecology with Romanticism, antimodernism, antihumanism, and even Nazism. But the crudeness of such an analysis is apparent when we consider that all these positions have multiple faces which must render all such simple equations suspect. The analysis ignores the oppressive and problematic aspects of modernism and humanism, especially where humanism defines itself against or in opposition to the nonhuman, and relies on the dubious assumption that more ethical consideration for nonhumans necessarily means less for humans.35 While it is important to note that those forms of Romanticism corrupted by the desire for unity and other oppressive forces played a role in supporting fascism, any analysis that puts all its stress on this factor ignores the diversity and liberatory aspects of Romanticism,36 as well as the well-documented complicity of the worst aspects of Nazism with modernism and rationalism.37 At present the danger from deep ecology's political naïveté comes from quite a different direction, from capture by the liberal right rather than the fascist right. Michael Zimmerman reaches perverse conclusions from his interrogation of Nazi ecologism because he, too, adopts oversimplified accounts of fascism and Nazism. Zimmerman favors the "irrationality" explanation that overlooks the ambiguity of the Nazi relationship to modernity and casts it as the evil throwback to mindless collectivity and blood-and-soil tribalism, the dark opposite of the White Knights of individualism, private property, liberalism and Enlightenment rationality. However, as recent critical theorists have shown, this portrait of Nazism as an irruption of "premodern irrationalism" obscures as much as it illuminates. Zimmerman's binary account assumes that the Nazi form of fascism remains the chief political danger we still have to fear, and that it is in the Nazis' critique of modernity that we should seek the primary source of their horrors.
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But this, too, overlooks analyses such as Zygmunt Bauman's, which suggest that the extermination programs were in many respects an extreme expression of modernity and its rational capacity to scapegoat, marginalize, and eliminate; both the programs and Nazi thinking in general involved strong modernist elements of human/animal dualism, instrumental/bureaucratic order, and hyper-rationalism. 38 It was less the fledgling science of ecology, as Zimmerman claims,39 than the very well-established modern science of biology, in which Germany led the world, that helped to supply the intellectual foundations for Nazi racist practice and the biological rationalism that underlay the extermination programs.40 But Zimmerman's shallow analysis also fails to note that Nazi doctrines of racial purity were in many ways an intensification of the "normal" doctrines of white racial superiority that had accompanied the colonizing and "civilizing" process undertaken in the Americas, in Asia, Africa, and Australiadoctrines that provided the justification for dominant global property-formation regimes.41 Zimmerman's analysis not only misidentifies the political problem in deep ecology and offers a mistaken analysis of where it lies, it also uses the mistake to promote solutions for ecological problems in line with the conservative paradigm of strengthened private property and "small government." Thus Zimmerman argues that deep ecology is in danger of providing support for Nazism and fascism, and that environmentalism will avoid this to the extent it avoids any critical engagement with private property and does not call for government intervention or support institutional arrangements which require it. Zimmerman's identification of individualism, private property, and small government as the most important bulwarks against the fascist potential he discerns in deep ecology demonstrates the narrow range of his political focus. Nazism is an important test for any theory (although, given its contested interpretation, hardly a neutral and unambiguous one), but for a relevant and widely informed political ecology, it would surely be advisable to plot a few more points on the political map, as well as to fix them more accurately. Plotting more points would show that individuality (or the liberal-capitalist form that Zimmerman equates with it) and associated private property in its liberal-capitalist form have their own burden of human (and nonhuman) death and suffering to answer for. If Zimmerman's narrow focus on and shallow interpretation of Nazism allow a stress on collectivism/individuality as the major relevant axis along which we should judge fascist potential, a broader focus would note the liberatory ambiguities of individualism and suggest placement on a unity/difference axis as a more reliable index of authoritarian potential.
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In a number of recent contributions, another political theorist associated with deep ecology, Gus diZerega, provides a very useful account of individuals as members of multiple intersecting communities or relationships of mutual interestincluding the political sphere, the family, and the ecological community, all of which should respect their members, who should never count for nothing. 42 This model of community membership is developed in illuminating ways to show the problems of instrumentalism and rights theory, but what is of concern is diZerega's suggestion that the family, and by implication the ecological sphere, can ideally be envisaged not as a community of multiple and mutual interests, but as a community of natural harmony or unity of interests, governed not by considerations of justice but by those of love. DiZerega aims to develop a liberal Green Jeffersonianism that lauds the market but hopes to keep what is valuable beyond its reach; despite its splendid efficiency, we wouldn't want anything of real value, such as family relationships or magnificent natural areas, to be subject to it. Zimmerman and diZerega diverge, however, on the question of institutional modification to property, with diZerega opting for more accountable forms of public and private property,43 and Zimmerman for a future liberalism that evolves into an ecologically benign form in which, through consciousness change, ecologically enlightened individuals who have unified their interests with those of nature participate in the market without commodifying nature. As feminist political theorists such as Susan Moller Okin and Carole Pateman have shown in the case of women, models of a community such as the family as a natural unity or harmony of interests are hegemonic, allowing the weaker elements in that community to be dominated without recourse by the more powerfulnormally the husband. And, in the event of justice conflicts, they tend to throw the ideological and economic burden of introducing "disharmony" onto the wife and other weaker members.44 Without institutional modification to recognize the multiple and potentially conflicting interests involved and to protect equality structurally, we have what is in effect a form of coverture. The political equivalent of coverture for nature seems to be what is being advocated in Zimmerman's thinkingnature's interests will be "covered" not by "big government" public institutions but by the property owner, who safe-guards its interests through fusion when enlightenedjust as the husband, as enlightened household head, was assumed to include and safeguard the interest of the wife under coverture. This is like emphasizing that wives are loved and provided for in marriage instead of recognizing the wife as a separate political and economic actor whose interests require acknowledgement as an equal in
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institutional arrangements. The property form advocated by Zimmerman appears, similarly, to decline institutional modification; he envisages instead a form of capitalism in which ecologically enlightened individuals who have changed their consciousness according to the prescriptions of deep ecology unify or fuse their interests as property owners with those of nature, and show the way to an ecologically benign capitalist marketplace. In the present climate of stingy government, many environmental groups are obliged to find wealthy private donors, a source of funding that is tapped with varying degrees of reluctance but is always a potent threat to their democratic vision and political integrity. 45 Some groups with allegiance to deep ecology have specialized very strongly in courting the "deep pocket," the wealthy individual who can be converted to the ecological cause and whose generosity finances campaigns and protects "special" lands from the much-praised efficiencies of the market. Reliance on this strategy has a demonstrated potential to defuse or blunt opposition to and engagement with the general system of nature commodification and property formation that capitalism represents, but most groups see it as a temporary expedient justified by their sense of urgency and desire to save as much as possible within the existing framework, rather than as an ideal situation. But a deeper and more systematic ideological commitment to this and other elite-supporting strategies seems to be emerging in the political theory of "evolutionary liberalism," based upon deep ecology's dominant unity interpretation and its narrow focus on individual consciousness change. This is a commitment to defending capitalism and refusing any critique or systematic modification of the institutions of property that have commodified the Earth in favor of accepting the political coverture of nature and strategies aimed at the ecological enlightenment of the Man of Property. Thus the final pages of Zimmerman's Contesting Earth's Future reach the conclusion that the best the ecologically challenged can legitimately hope for, given the political constraints of supporting "individuality" his argument defends, is some eventual development toward Atman consciousness on the part of a few rare and privileged individuals (who, if they are going to be able to make a difference in the real world of ecological destruction, will need to be not only ecologically enlightened but powerful as well). Those deep ecology theorists who employ the unity interpretation in this way are developing an account that is in deep complicity with the system of commodification of nature and its founding fathers. If Zimmerman explicitly deplores any casting of ecological aspersions on the sanctity of private property and holds out as the best hope for ecological salvation the conversion of more
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billionaires to deep ecology, diZerega's Green Jeffersonian model of the ecologically enlightened family landholder is in danger of offering a Jeffersonian solution in the fullest sense. The ecologically enlightened Man of Property seems to be envisaged on the model of Thomas Jefferson the slave master. For those familiar with Jefferson the rhetorician of republican freedom and revolutionary equality, it is an everlasting irony that, although he may have been a better master than most, 46 Jefferson nevertheless resisted freeing his slaves and never gave up the institutional power to abuse, despite his strictures on the effect of such power on the slave master's character.47 In such a "Jeffersonian" model, nature would occupy a position in the ecologically enlarged household of the Man of Property similar to the wife, the slave, or the indentured servant. The enlightened landholder will take care of the interests of the land as part of a sphere of familial harmony, protected, like the family, from the necessary if distasteful drama of capitalism going on outside the boundaries of the estate. A more realistic account would recognize that individual enlightenment and goodwill are not enough; that nature, as well as women and slaves, requires institutional protection and guarantees which involve major modifications to the concept, formation, and distribution of property itself. Is There an Ecosocialist Deep Ecology? A Feminist Ecosocialist Analysis The systematic "deep pocket" solution of the ecological enlightenment of the Man of Property discloses a nest of contradictions upon exposure and analysis. Is there not a contradiction (or two) between ecological enlightenment and the amassing of property? Is it not more likely that this source of funding will tend primarily to support wise use or groups that aim to undermine or destroy green efforts? Although diZerega recognizes that the market can be a destructive and instrumentalizing form, his aim is to keep certain special areas of land away from it as exceptions, rather than undertaking any general modification of it in a more universally applicable way. (It would therefore represent an intensification of the current North American solutionwhich also does not work very well.) Where the means to protect special areas is obtained by the commodification of other areas, only exceptional areas can be protected. The area protected by coverture in this way is like the protected wife of the Man of Propertyher enhanced security and comfort are obtained at the expense of increased impoverishment and vulnerability for a large group of subordinated others. The protection for the spaces and places of the Man of Property depends upon the degradation of places of less powerful others somewhere else.
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The "deep pocket" solution ignores at the spiritual level the corrupting influence of power, and at the ecological level neglects the way the ecological health of "special" lands depends on the health of other lands that are subject to normal commodification and that cannot be protected in a similar way if the economic system of commodification is to function normally. But the ecological health of the special lands is interdependent with that of the ''ordinary" land that is commodified. We are already seeing the effects of this interdependence in the ecological decline of many areas like the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and other "protected" lands that are showing signs of degradation because of a general decline of ecological conditions and in the health of surrounding lands. 48 The outcome of systematic "deep pocket" strategies is likely to be a hegemonic form of protectionbetter protection for some lands under coverture near the main centers of wealth, but the progressive degradation of lands remote from centers of wealth, which may well be the places that have the greatest need for ecological protection. Finally, the solution is one in which, for the sake of a consolation prize, we forgo the opportunity to tackle the main critical problem: we give up the search to reimagine our relationship to the nonhuman and to seek change in the main system of commodification that is destroying the Earth. In certain ways, as I have argued, this conservative political development within deep ecology has grown out of a set of historical circumstances that has provided key intellectual elements for it. Some of it is implicit in the dominant theoretical direction and characteristic theses of deep ecology; the stress on unity or fusion of interests, as we have seen, goes back to Naess. Other elements, including the strong emphasis on individual consciousness change and weak emphasis on institutional change, have been encouraged by political alliances with other groups, such as Eastern spirituality and the human potentials movement, that must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Yet none of these problematic political developments follow from the basic ideas of deep ecology about the need to radically transform our concepts in ways that include nature ethically and politically; in this respect the developments I have objected to are contingent to deep ecology, and are in some conflict with certain of its basic insights. So deep ecology as a fundamental position is multiple and has the potential to develop much more radical answers to some of these questions, some of which I will explore briefly now. The main question thrown up by the idea of Zimmerman and diZerega's "evolutionary liberal" analysis seems to me to be: how can respecting nature be compatible with owning it? Individual consciousnesses may change, but the
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problem lies in the institution of private property, which entitles owners to do anything they like to the piece of nature they own, just as the "kind" Jeffersonian slave master was entitled to do what he liked to the slaves he owned. Don't respect and consideration for nature require a different conception of property? Don't they require an institutional framework not based on coverture, one that recognizes and represents all the "nonowner" interests involved in propertyincluding those of nature itself, as the invisible (or, rather, conceptually disappeared) collaborator, and those of the denied social others who have contributed to it both directly and indirectly? And doesn't the idea of respecting nature require that it be recognized as an active presence and agent which contributes in myriad ways to our daily livesits recognition as ''an independent center of value, as an originator of projects that demand my respect" ? 49 These ingredients can provide deep ecology with the basis for a radical critique of dominant concepts of property. The task for a Green Jeffersonianism is to clarify its intentions regarding unity and coverture, showing how it can escape its Jeffersonian heritage and the alliance with the Lockean model of property, with its inbuilt assumptions of coverture for nature. The Lockean model of acquisition provides a major basis for the recipe for property formation that is the foundation of contemporary capitalism. In the context of the "new world," it also provided, as Vine Deloria notes, the basis for the erasure of the ownership of indigenous people and the appropriation of their lands.50 Locke's recipe for property formation allows the colonist to appropriate that into which he has mixed his own labor, as part of the self, transferring his ownership of self to what is labored on, on condition that it falls under the category of "nature," not under prior ownership. But since the colonist was either not able or not disposed to recognize either the prior ownership of indigenous others or their different expression of labor and agency, the formula enabled large-scale appropriation of indigenous lands by those who could visit upon them highly transforming and destructive European-style agricultural labor. Applying the formula retrospectively led to a regress, a failure to recognize as conferring ownership any indigenous hunting and gathering activities that did not transform the land significantly in ways European colonists recognized as sufficient "labor" to qualify for past or present property ownership. (Even until very recently, as Deloria notes, it was held that the failure of indigenous people to make properly individualistic and maximally transformative use of their land was a sufficient reason why it should be taken away from them.) To the extent that indigenous people were seen as "nature," "nomads," or "parasites on nature" who were incapable of effective ecological agency or the kind of agri-
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cultural labor that was held, on the European model, to be the true mark of humanity, the Lockean formula helped erase their claim to prior ownership. But it is not only the erasure of indigenous people that is expressed and sanctioned in the Lockean concept of private property; it is also, in a similar way, the erasure of nature. Deep ecology, to the extent that it can advocate countering this erasure and recognizing nature as presence, agent, and collaborator in our lives, could also provide the foundation for a deep questioning of the Lockean form of property and for envisaging a different institutional form. Implicit in Locke's recipe for annexing New World "nature" as European property is an assumption of the emptiness and nullity of nature itself, which also serves as the foundation for the erasures of those human others counted as nature. For if nature and the land are active presence and agent, "independent center of value . . . originator of projects that demand my respect," the whole basis for the Lockean formula's use to support capitalism collapses. The outcome of working the land must be seen as the product of at least two (kinds of) agencies and interests, and not of a single one (the human one) who is entitled to appropriate the land in accordance with the capitalist interpretation of Locke's formula. For if, as Locke's formula concedes for the human case, the outcome of "mixing labor" in the land is the product of more than one agency and interest, it cannot be placed entirely at the disposal of just one of these agents, the human one, any more than a single agent is able to appropriate other joint products in which his or her labor is mixed with those of other human agents. 51 Once the agency of nature has been recognized, this placement can only appear either as unjustified seizure or as a form of coverture, the assumption of unity or fusion of interest that we identified above and that is subject to the same kinds of objections. If our dominant concept of property formation is one that at bottom treats nature as a nullity, it is small wonder that the outcome of its enormous growth and progress as a force for remaking the Earth is a progressive nullification and decline of nature. In short, once we take the prior presence and agency of nature seriously, the most the Lockean formula can really support is a mutualistic or guardianship concept of property, as an institution that is of mutual benefit to both the human "partner" and to the other human and nonhuman "partners" in any collaborative product, which must include the land itself. The seizure by one of these collaborative partners of the whole product, without any regard for the interests of the others, is as unjustified in the case of nonhuman partners as it is in the case of human ones. But this seizure was what the capitalist interpretation of the Lockean formula in practice justified by treating nature as a mere productive potentiality rather than an independent center of needs, by denying
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nature's prior agency as an originator of ecological projects in the land that demand our respect, and by backgrounding and nullifying the ecological labors of nature on which we depend for all we do. Similarly unjustified is the concept of "improvement" or "progress" in the transformation of land where this is an ''improvement" from the perspective of and for the benefit and well-being of only one of the partners, a human one. Damage to other partners, including nature, would have to be compensatedfor example, by the provision of other benefits to that partner elsewhere. Property would have to be treated as very much more of a mutualistic partnership, to be used for the benefit of both nature and the human guardian(s) of the land, and would have to recognize and provide benefits for a much wider range of interests and collaborators, including nature. To the extent that a similar case can be made for the institutional recognition of denied human others in the property relationship, collective forms of property formation are also broadly indicated. Furthermore, it is not only in the area of landownership that the Lockean formula delivers pernicious results for nature, and not just a question of decoupling some types of land tenure from the market, as diZerega seems to imply. 52 To the extent that we can read a similar erasure of nonhuman agency in other property-formation systems based on the Lockean formula, there is a potential for nature and other denied agents to be similarly damaged, and property formation requires a thorough and general rethinking. For example, the legal award of ownership of genetic materials to individual patentees similarly employs the Lockean formula to effect a similar erasure of nonhuman (and some human) agency. In the case of land, the outcome would no doubt be different in local contexts, depending on factors like political institutions, size, and the cultural representation of the nonhuman.53 Where size is small, the deep outcome might look more like those limited and joint indigenous land tenure systems which until recently accounted for much of the world, thus allowing a high level of accountability in ownership, spiritual land relationship, community decision and responsibility, and reduced possibilities for transfer and accumulation. In some larger contexts, the kind of institutional structure which taking nature's agency seriously would suggest might be more like that of the land trust arrangement, whereby particular individuals have use title for certain limited purposes, subject to conditions of respect for other interests (which would include those of nature and the land itself); basic decision power regarding the land could be vested much more broadly in larger continuing publics, who might represent nature politically via a system of accountability to trustees and to speakers for particular places and for larger ecological systems, including biospheric nature. Although forms of representation would vary, no responsible system could af-
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ford to leave these denied partners of property out of account in the way the dominant Lockean system of property formation does. The Lockean formula was of course not the cause of the maldevelopment of property-formation systems along capitalist lines; rather, it provided a useful institutional model and intellectual basis for a strong individualizing and colonizing movement already under way. Perhaps the denaturalization of the Lockean formula which a politically radical form of deep ecology is capable of supporting could play a similar but reverse role in strengthening movements (such as those of the Zapatistas) already under way to displace the model of global property formation that bears such a large responsibility for commodifying and destroying the Earth. Notes 1. See Arne Naess, "The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary" Inquiry 16:1 (1973): 95 100. 2. See Rudolf Carnap, Meaning and Necessity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947). 3. Arne Naess, "'Man Apart' and Deep Ecology: A Reply to Reed," Environmental Ethics 12 (1990): 187. 4. Peter Reed, "Man Apart: An Alternative to the Self-Realisation Approach," Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 56. 5. Ibid., p. 54. 6. Ibid., p. 57. 7. Ibid., p. 67. 8. Naess, "'Man Apart' and Deep Ecology," p. 187. 9. See Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination (London: Virago, 1990), p. 46. 10. Defined by During as "that thought which refuses to turn the Other into the Same." See Simon During, "Postmodernism or Postcolonialism Today," Textual Practice 1:1 (1987): 32 47. 11. For an elaboration of this distinction, see Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993). 12. Benjamin, Bonds of Love, p. 48. 13. See Val Plumwood, "Androcentrism and Anthrocentrism: Parallels and Politics," Ethics and the Environment 1:2 (Fall 1996): 119 152. 14. On this point see the discussion in Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, chapter 7. 15. See John Dryzek, "Green Reason: Communicative Ethics for the Biosphere," Environmental Ethics 12 (1990): 195 210; and Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature.
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16. See Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. 17. See bell hooks, Talking Back (Boston: South End Press, 1989), p. 42. 18. See Michael E. Zimmerman, Contesting Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); and Charlene Spretnak, "Radical Nonduality in Ecofeminist Philosophy," in Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature, edited by Karen J. Warren and Nivran Erkal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 425 436. 19. On some of the problems of ideals of unity and community in politics, see especially Iris Marion Young, "The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference," in Feminism/Postmodernism, edited by Linda J. Nicholson (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 300 323. 20. The stress deep ecology has placed on the concept of unity is highly functional for some positions, such as transpersonalism, and associated concepts of impartiality, devaluation of particular attachments, and transcendence of self/relationships, are functional for masculinist agendas. Some feminists have detected similar problems in Buddhist frameworks of unity, and stress on these concepts is often the site of an internal struggle between men and women in Buddhism. See Rita M. Gross, Buddhism After Patriarchy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993). 21. I have attempted to provide such a thicker account of oppression in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature and in "Androcentrism and Anthrocentrism: Parallels and Politics"; the latter discusses a group of parallels based on the common underlying logic of the One and the Other that forms the basis of many forms of oppression. The logic of colonization operates as a perceptual filter and conceptual framework that make domination seem natural and inevitable. 22. For a brilliant example see Terry Bisson, "Meat in Space," Omni (April 1995): 35 36. 23. For a discussion of some of these techniques for constructing a double perspective from above and below in Gary Larson, see Charles D. Minahen, "Humanimals and Anihumans in Gary Larson's Gallery of the Absurd" in Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History, edited by Jennifer Ham and Mathew Senior (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 231 251. 24. This attitude trades on the reason/emotion dualism, and also benefits the status quo of dominance. Such "irrational" emotions are not "capricious" but can be taught and developed, or blocked, in certain social contexts. 25. See Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 288. 26. On these points see ibid., p. 283. 27. See Sandra Harding, "Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What Is Strong Objectivity?" in Feminist Epistemologies, edited by Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 49 82. The logic of colonization is also the logic of the gap between the standpoint of the One and that of the Other. Understanding the logic of colonization explains why the colonizer does not see oppression for what it is. From underneath, the oppressed imbibes the colonizer's conceptual framework because it is
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hegemonic and pervasive in the culture; but once a certain incongruity with experience is noticed, this can provide the basis for a critical edge and the dominant framework may stand revealed as a means of naturalizing oppression. But to the extent that you can discern the same kind of logic at work in an analogous situation where you are on the top rather than on the bottom, you can use the logic of oppression to come to see your own position (and subsequently that of your dominant group or culture) as that of the oppressor. Traitorous identities can provide some useful vantage points on the limitations of dominant perspectives. The traitorous standpoint, as well as the perspective from below, may see how the perspective from above distorts what is happening, and may be able to see some of what the perspective from above doesn't see, as well as that it doesn't see. But no such recognition comes automatically to the oppressedit is a major and difficult achievement often precipitated by a certain incongruence between oppressed experience and hegemonic perspectives. 28. G. A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 239. 29. See Anthony Weston, "Self-Validating Reduction: Toward a Theory of Environmental Devaluation," Environmental Ethics 18 (1996): 115 132. 30. See Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. 31. See Zimmerman, Contesting Earth's Future. 32. See Luc Ferry, The New Ecological Order, translated by Carol Volk (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Michael Zimmerman, Contesting Earth's Future and "Ecofascism: A Threat to American Environmentalism," Social Theory and Practice 21:2 (1995): 207 238. 33. See Iris Marion Young, "House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme," in her book Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy and Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 134 164. 34. Others include Zimmerman, "Ecofascism: A Threat to American Environmentalism"; and Peter Singer, "Ethics Across the Species Boundary," in Global Ethics and Environment, edited by Nicholas Low (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 146 157. 35. Not only is no such trade-off necessary, but there are numerous respects in which consideration for nonhumans and consideration for humans augment one another. See Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983); and Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. 36. See Charlene Spretnak, The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature and Place in a Hypermodern World (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997). 37. See Zygmunt Baumann, Modernity and the Holocaust (London: Verso, 1989); and Robert Proctor, "Nazi Medicine and the Politics of Knowledge," in The Racial Economy of Science, edited by Sandra Harding (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 344 358. 38. On the parallels and contradictions of the relationship between the Nazi treatment of animals and that of people, see Arnold Arluke and Boria Sax, "The Nazi Treatment of Animals and People," in Reinventing Biology, edited by Linda Birke and Ruth Hubbard (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp 228 260. Critics of the
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blurring of the human/animal boundary (e.g., Ferry) have failed to note that there are importantly different directions from which this boundary breakdown can come: we can extend the consideration reserved for humans to nonhumans (which need to carry no implication of diminishing the former) or extend the lack of consideration, control, and technical manipulation characteristically applied to animals to humans. The Nazis seem to have done both, but it is the second form that is implicated in their atrocities, and the first that is characteristic of animal and ecology movements today. 39. See Zimmerman, "Ecofascism," p. 248. 40. See Proctor, "Nazi Medicine and the Politics of Knowledge." 41. See Ronald T. Takaki, Iron Cages (New York: Knopf, 1979). 42. Gus diZerega, "Individuality, Human and Natural Communities, and the Foundations of Ethics," Environmental Ethics 17:2 (1995): 23 37. 43. Gus diZerega, "Towards an Ecocentric Political Economy," The Trumpeter 13:4 (Fall 1996): 173 182. However, just how private property would be made more accountable or exceptions selected is not explained. 44. See Susan Moller Okin, Gender, Justice and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989); and Carole Pateman, The Disorder of Women (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 1989). 45. For a discussion of an alternative democratic approach to funding community groups more like the erstwhile Australian system of public funding, see Dryzek, "Green Reason." 46. Although, as Takaki, Iron Cages, notes, Jefferson had errant slaves flogged and engaged in other abuses. 47. See Takaki, Iron Cages. 48. See Arturo Gomez-Pompa and Andrea Kaus, "Taming the Wilderness Myth," BioScience 42:4 (1992): 271 279. 49. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, p. 239. 50. Vine Deloria, We Talk, You Listen (New York: Macmillan, 1970). 51. The recognition of nature as active presence and agent, which I think is very much part of the kind of change in consciousness that deep ecology should strive for, is blocked at the cultural level by the logic of colonization and domination in anthropocentric cultures, just as it is for indigenous peoples in Eurocentric cultures. See Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature and "Androcentrism and Anthrocentrism." 52. See Vandana Shiva, "The Seeds and the Earth," in Close to Home: Women Reconnect Ecology, Health and Development, edited by Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies (London: Earthscan, 1994):128 143. 53. These have often been asserted historically. See Val Plumwood, "Feminism, Privacy, and Radical Democracy," Anarchist Studies 3 (1995): 97-120.
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5 Ontological Determinism and Deep Ecology: Evading the Moral Questions? Mathew Humphrey It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it. J. S. Mill A significant amount of deep ecology literature deals with "Self-realization." 1 This concerns the expansion of the sense of "self" associated with traditional egotistical Western philosophical and political traditions, such as liberalism, to a sense of "Self"2 that extends beyond the bounds of the individual's body to incorporate something larger than the individual, isolated human being. With a conception of a mature, expanded Self comes a story about the development of this Self growing out of earlier, less fully formed notions of selfhood. This developmental story plays an important part in the relationship between a conception of Self and human ways of acting in the world that have been suggested by deep ecologists. I argue that the deep ecological Self-realization sense of Selfhood, when combined with arguments concerning the desirability of a sense of rootedness in bioregional place and a privileging of ''beautiful" action over "moral" action, forms a particular ideational constellation which leaves deep ecologists defending an ethically worrying ontological basis for human action. Here deep ecologists have something to learn from the ethics of a particular form of liberalism. My argument compares deep ecological notions of Selfhood and theory of the development of a transpersonal Self with structurally similar notions developed by the French novelist, integral nationalist, and political activist Maurice Barrès.3 This comparison will help us begin to delineate the limitations and lacunae that render the deep ecological conception of humanity, as propounded in the Self-realization thesis, problematic. I want to suggest that deep ecologists not only should care about agents' attitudes and practices, they also should care about people's reasons for acting. It is not enough that people act in the
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right way; we also should be concerned that they act in the right way for the right reasons. Ultimately the only consistently defensible reasons for action are reasoned ethical ones, based upon thought and reflection as to the nature of the right or the good, not those based upon an understanding of the self. We should privilege the "moral" over the "beautiful," and not vice versa. 4 I My concern here is with the actions that people take which are directly intended to affect the relationship between human and nonhuman nature, ergo environmental actions, and with theories as to how these actions are affected by conceptions of self (and, relatedly, place) held by individuals and groups. That such conceptions do, or are commonly held to, have a bearing on environmental actions is illustrated by the character of a number of contemporary environmental campaigns. To take one example, there is the opposition in the Welsh valleys to the development there of opencast mining, which has involved some cooperation between Earth First! activists, members of a direct action group inspired by the principles of deep ecology, and local residents concerned with protecting what they see as the environmental integrity of their locale. The most interesting aspect of this example, in respect to political ideas and their use at the popular level, is the manner in which the environmentalists have sought to mobilize resistance to proposals for opencast mining among the local population. The activists (both local and international) stressed that the opencast mining proposals were put forward by, and would serve to benefit, large companies (and implicitly, it seems, English companies). They claimed that these proposals were about far more than the scars that would be left on the South Wales countryside by the mining activity, more than the bronchial diseases they forecast the local population would suffer from the pervasive dust, more, even, than the apparent irony of coal-mining men being thrown out of work because there was allegedly no market for coal, only to see others come in and extract the same coal with a fraction of the workforce (which would be nonlocal). No, this was fundamentally about the centuries-long colonial domination of the Welsh. Without an appreciation of this, the true significance of the opencast mining proposals could not be grasped. Through years of industrial life spent in the service of other (English-dominated) industrial concerns, the inhabitants of South Wales had lost their sense of Welsh nationhood. What was needed in order to foster the necessary consciousness of resistance was a "retribalization" of the Welsh people in the south, a rediscovery that they were members of a
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people who had long resisted English colonialism and should, as well as could, continue to do so. Daniel Zapata, a Hopi Indian whose own tribal lands in Arizona are being damaged by opencast mining, told a meeting of villagers, "You, the Cymru are suffering the same mental and physical traumas as indigenous peoples everywhere. You have been treated as slaves, providing manual labour for their mines. You have forgotten your own spirit." 5 This mode of argument connects personal understandings of self and place with environmental action. It has theoretical underpinnings in the works of the philosophers of deep ecology and bioregionalism, in particular Arne Naess but also George Sessions, Bill Devall, Kirkpatrick Sale, and others.6 Here I compare the way these writers use the concepts of place, consciousness, and psychological development with those of an earlier writer who developed his own ideas about a transpersonal sense of identity and a concept of rootedness: the French ideological novelist Maurice Barrès.7 Comparisons of this kind are never unproblematic, for one has to show more than a mere similarity of language. Through an application of the morphological approach to the comparison of ideological ideational systems,8 we can demonstrate a particular structural similarity in the ideational constellations of both deep ecology and Barrès's integral nationalism. The morphological method gives us a way to map the conceptual structures of ideologies in an open, flexible manner, without having to impose an essentialist mode of ideological labeling. We can empirically ascertain, initially through a process of self-definition, certain commonalities in conceptual structures"family resemblances" such that, contingently and subject to revision, we can assert these particular political concepts form the core cluster of ideological family x. An ideology, Michael Freeden tells us, is "none other than the macroscopic structural arrangement that attributes meaning to a range of mutually defining political concepts."9 Ideologies are structured through particular configurations of political conceptsfreedom, justice, sovereignty, human nature, nationality, environment, and so on. These concepts may be praised or dispraised, accepted or rejected, but they will almost certainly be there, even if only by default (i.e., in order to be dismissed). Thus ideology a may decontest freedom in one way, ideology b in another; ideology a may value nationhood and nationality, ideology b may dispraise it (a cause of war) or deny nationhood any substantive existence (a mere fiction). Most important, when discussing ideological structure, nationhood may be at the core of ideology a (empirically central to the vast majority of accepted examples of discourse within this ideology, and a component against which other, more peripheral notions are defined) yet adjacent, or peripheral, to ideology b. Here I do not attempt to map out the complete
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conceptual content of either deep ecology or integral nationalism. I analyze particular core concepts present in both of these ideologies, and look at these concepts' relationship and interdependent decontestations in order to elucidate certain structural similarities. My comparison of deep ecology and Barrèsian integral nationalism will show that the particular conceptions of self and place within these ideologies are decontested and structured in such a way as to generate significantly similar motives for political action. I argue that these modes of decontestation and utilization point both deep ecologists and Barrès toward a form of ontological determinism such that "Self acts (should act) as Self is," and I claim that this constitutes an inadequate basis upon which to ground environmental action. Inadequate because it envisages a basis for action that takes insufficient account (despite the label "Self-realization") of the potential, and possible need, of humans to develop well-rounded and mature moral personalities. First, however, we need to examine the relevant aspects of these two ideologies. II Arne Naess, in his Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, 10 has a section titled "Gestalts and Gestalt Thinking" in which he seeks to justify the holistic dimension of his philosophy.11 He argues that our understandings of complete structures and interrelationships are such that we cannot achieve the same level of understanding through an analysis of their component parts. The supervenient characteristics that go to make up a perceptual experience in its entirety are such that it is qualitatively different from the understanding achieved through the study of only the individual parts that go to make up that whole. This is one version of a fairly standard argument of deep ecologists against what they take to be the claims of a dominant, Newtonian mechanomorphic and reductionist mainstream science that dominates conventional popular understandings of the world. Naess envisages a hierarchy of gestalts, and developmentally we move toward ever larger gestalts encompassing all the relationships that constitute "lesser" gestalts, the lesser being what he calls "fragments" of the larger. It is important here to understand that "higher" gestalts can, for Naess, be combinations of "fragments" from the different areas of sensory perception and understanding, and what he calls an apperceptive gestalt combines fragments from a sensory area and a normative and/or assertive area. Unless, he tells us, we deliberately focus only upon the perceptual gestalts; then all experience is apperceptive. That is, all experience combines both sensory and evaluative elements simultaneously. He says, ''The distinction between 'facts'
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and 'values' only emerges from gestalts through the activity of abstract thinking. 12 This distinction between fact and value is not useful if what we are trying to do is describe the world in which we live. Why not? Because our gestalts of our surroundings are of a very complex character, and "are easily destroyed by attempts to analyse fragments of them consciously." Gestalt understandings bind the "I and the not-I together in a whole," but "the glorification of conventional 'scientific' thought leads to the ridicule of such creations. It tears gestalts asunder." "Mythic'' thought (i.e., understandings of reality inherently imbued with normative overtones) is gestalt thought, and its presence indicates a thriving cultural understanding of place. Verbal deterioration of gestaltsa habit of removing additional, mythic components from our understandings of the names things have"implies a deterioration of the culture."13 Naess then goes on to apply this understanding to the importance of people's possessing a particular sense of place. In non-nomadic cultures, especially agrarian ones, a geographical sense of belonging is crucial. More specifically rooms, interiors, stairs, farmyards, gardens, nearby trees, bushesall these things become, on the whole unconsciously, a part of that which is ours, a powerful kind of gestalt. The geographic relationships are of great importance in an appraisal of urbanization and design and its penetrating transformation of personality. When a child grows up, the higher order gestalts of the home change gradually. Certain things which were threatening cease to be so as one becomes larger and stronger. Some things which were more distant or mystical become nearer because of the improved ability to cross distances. The essence which remains constitutes the character of belonging, of being at home, an interwoven gestalt diversity with extremely potent symbolic value. . . . A description of the home milieu with the evaluative predicates beautiful, good, boring, safe, familiar etc., sounds artificial to people who haven't been away for a longer period of time, as the milieu gestalts themselves comprise evaluations. A neutral, name-giving description sounds more correct. The point is important as it to some extent explains why many people who live in, and are well adapted to, a locality do not find it natural to praise nature or the environment. It smacks of tautologythe beauty is "in", not to be found or talked about.14 Naess goes on to consider people living in a Norwegian rockslide area, clearly a potentially dangerous place to live. Such people might ask themselves: "Should we move, or should we stay here where we belong, at home?" Home as a positive, value-weighted place can be defined here in part as the relations with nature. . . . To move from the slide area implies the loss of an appreciable part of one's self-loss of gestalts which comprise "one's roots," "my surroundings," "our surroundings." New gestalts must be built up at the new location, but after the developmental years it is not possible to re-create the most fundamental gestalts and symbols. One remains a stranger
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towards or in oneself; or one preserves the old associations, and a self which belongs somewhere else, an emigrant. 15 Naess then uses this platform to critique urbanization, industrialization, and the increasing geographical mobility of human beings in the contemporary world. All this, he says, leads to individuals feeling a rising degree of meaninglessness, which is partially due to "an indifference to symbols," that is, to the symbolic elements of understanding which reflect the interpenetration of appraisal and description characteristic of "mythic," gestalt thinking. Naess uses the most interesting and evocative language in his account of the importance of a sense of place to individual psychological health, but he is far from unique among the ranks of deep ecology writers. The central idea behind Kirkpatrick Sale's writing on bioregionalism lies in the importance of a sense of place in the task of maintaining an ecologically sustainable lifestyle. People have to become what he calls "dwellers in the land," to "come to know the earth, [in which] the crucial and perhaps only and all encompassing task is to understand the place, the immediate specific place, where we live."16 Bioregionalism seeks to replace Enlightenment universalism with a "place-dominated vision of a sustainable future,"17 and it "advocates a new ecological politics of place," which, despite criticism, ''offers a program of change toward a sustainable way of life."18 Robyn Eckersley notes approvingly that bioregionalism places emphasis upon "protecting, and rehabilitating if necessary, the characteristic diversity of native ecosystems. This is manifested in its concern to develop a sense of rootedness that is . . . 'biotic, not merely ethnic.'"19 Bill Devall more than once discusses his identification with the Siskiyou-Klamath region in the western United States, and argues that "The recent emergence of bioregional movements in North America demonstrates the ties we have to home place, even in an age of mass society."20 Andrew McLaughlin tells us that industrialization has eroded ties to place: "Work has also been severed from the local community. . . . People no longer expect to live out their lives where they were born. It has become normal for people to move away for education and employment. Friendship and ties to family and place have lessened. Some corporations regularly transfer their higher level employees to ensure that their primary loyalties are to the company, rather than to the place they live."21 By contrast, "It is care for other life forms, engendered by an identification with place, that is one of the reasons for the affinity between deep ecology and bioregionalism. One can truly love what one knows."22 Alan Drengson tells us that "Ecosophy is the wisdom of dwelling in a place and it is also the wisdom to dwell in a place harmoniously."23 For Freya
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Mathews, the process of forging a personal identity in relation to the natural world, composed of concentric circles from the immediate self, entails that "My identification with the more immediate circles of self, viz., ecosystem and biosphere, thus requires that I defend and maintain them, and this self-defence argument is not nullified by identification with a cosmic whole that is tolerant of destruction at the level of particulars."² 24 David Rothenberg explains that a Naessian response to the suggestion that a part of deep ecology consists in "biorights: the rights of unique landscapes to remain untouched" would be "not 'unique', not 'rights', but thinking of the landscape first, before human needs, and then devising technologies, and management, that stem from a rootedness in place and nature. ''25 Finally, George Sessions notes: "It seems clear that many individuals and societies throughout history have developed an intuitive and mystical sense of interpenetration with the landscape, and an abiding and allpervading 'sense of place'."26 Why is so much stress put upon the importance of developing this intuitive sense of place in the deep ecology literature? The answer is that it is seen as an integral part of an "ecological consciousness." This is the form of consciousness deep ecologists want to see people develop in order to provide them with a psychological basis for taking environmental actions. As we come to literally identify with our surroundings,27 we cease to separate the I from the not-I, and thus attacks on our surroundings become attacks upon us, and forms of direct action in defense of our "place" become a form of self-defense. It therefore becomes something that is axiomatically justified, requiring no rational form of explanationa right to self-defense is considered self-evident. As Andrew McLaughlin writes, "'Thou shalt not destroy the biosphere' is as silly as 'don't burn your hand' once one feels embedded in nature."28 III One might call Naess's writings on apperceptive experience and the importance of a "home place" a form of philosophy of developmental psychology. It has both a descriptive and a semiexplicit normative aspect. Our most fundamental gestalt is "home," and this apparently is best constructed during one's developmental years. Beyond these years, although gestalts of a new place can be constructed, they do not have the same depth and character. One will either "become a stranger to oneself" if the attempt is made to assimilate to one's new environment, or one will remain true to oneself by retaining one's old association with the home; but one then remains "a self who belongs somewhere else, an emigrant." It is important to understand that Naess sees the self as extending
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from the "inside" outward during the process of normal human development, from the narrowly selfish ego of the child, to family and close friends, to an identification with life generally. He says, "The gradual maturing of a person inevitably widens and deepens the self through the process of identification. There is no need for altruism toward those with whom we identify." 29 Nonetheless, even though there is no anthropocentric limit ("all-round maturity among humans inevitably fosters a high level of identification with all life-forms"30), there seems to be a sense of gradation to the expanse of identification that can be fostered by the truly well-developed Self (the most intimate identification being with the "home place"), which I think can help explain why the most explicitly political manifestation of deep ecology has been bioregionalism. In addition to this there isif we refer back to the extended quote from Naess aboveclearly a sense of a decline in, or loss of, the ability to spontaneously generate gestalt images as one matures. The normative implications are clear. We are faced with a choice that is essentially little choice at all if the individual wants to maintain psychic health. Who would want to be a stranger to himself when he could be true to himself and know himself? And who would want to be a "self who belongs somewhere else,'' and thus leading a life with which, surely, one cannot fully identify, when one could be truly at home, without having suffered this loss of an "appreciable part" of the self? Why settle for existence as a damaged self? The normative message is clear, in the declamatory style of Naess: Don't emigrate! Stay rooted! Be true to your Self! How does this compare with Barrès's use of the concept of enracinement? Barrès also argued that it is necessary to cultivate a sense of Self that goes beyond the confines of the immediate individual human body. Two of the principal themes of the Culte du moi trilogy are "the desire to transcend the painful separation of the Self and the world in an exaltation of consciousness [and] the search for the unity of the Self in harmony with its world, the extension of self-love to universal compassion."31 For Barrès both a sense of place and an awareness of history, of the ancestry of one's region, were essential to give an individual the sense of rootedness necessary for psychic health. The Self was a product of one's geographical roots. This was a highly deterministic account of developmental psychology. Barrès, with his stress on the transcendent Self which finds more than an echo in deep ecology, holds that "The rootedness of our Self enables us to transcend the limits of individualism" and achieve "a larger and a larger experience." In Un Homme libre, Philippe, the protagonist, having failed to find satisfaction in the attempt to cultivate a radically individualist conception of self, learns that what "is required now is no longer detachment, but identification
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with something outside the Self. The change of orientation in his thought occurs around the idea of instinct and the unconscious, which Barrès tends more and more to associate with a transpersonal collective life accessible to the individual as a continuation of his own limited existence." 32 For Barrès, however, rootedness, also entails the acceptance of environmental determinism. We are what our surroundings make us. "Nationalism," says Barrès, "is the acceptance of a particular kind of determinism."33 ''Even thought is not free. I can live only in relation to my dead. They, and the earth of my country, command me to a particular way of life."34 This determinism makes the knowledge of other cultures irrelevant in terms of selfdevelopment: "Travel might make one more aware of the roots of others, but they remain the roots of others rather than one's own."35 Furthermore, there is a definite sense, in Barrès work, of the loss of selfhood that he believed an individual suffers when he tears himself away from his roots. Other places, such as Venice or the Near East, are seductive and alluring to the Frenchman, but in separating the individual from his roots, they break the connection with sustenance and, vampirelike, draw the elan vital from one's being. Thus, both Naess and Barrès have a keen sense of a supposed intimate relationship between that which surrounds us in our developmental years and the nature of our mature transpersonal Self. Do they, however, conceive of this relationship in the same way, both in terms of precisely what is held to determine the nature of the self and in the account of how the deterministic mechanism works? There certainly are disparities. In particular, Naess's idea of the importance of geographical location is based upon an identification with the nonhuman environment,36 but Barrès, while giving the landscape of his home region of Lorraine more than passing consideration, identifies his roots and his sense of transpersonal Self as being with the people, and in this respect the emphasis of the two writers is clearly different. Naess stresses attachment to one's natural, living surroundings. One's understanding of what the world is, how the world "works," and patterns of thinking are crucially shaped by the natural environment in which one grows up; it patterns one's developmental gestalts. Barrès, on the other hand, says of Lorraine that in his early years of traveling in an attempt to, as it were, "construct" his self, he had thought it plain and uninteresting. Upon his conversion to rootedness, however, he came to appreciate and expound upon how the landscape and nature of Lorraine had shaped his own Self. Nonetheless, Barrès places more emphasis on his kinship with the people of Lorraine. In his conception of "the earth and the dead," he appears to place more emphasis on the latter: "My being enchants me as I catch sight of it through the centuries . . . the
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soul which lives in me today is comprised of the residues which have survived thousands of deaths, and this sum, enlarged with the best of myself, will survive me even as I lose all memory of it." 37 Thus, one might well argue that the primary component of rootedness is different for the two authors: for Barrès it is about the interconnectedness of people across generations within a geographically confined space, whereas for Naess it is about the development of a Self that incorporates relationships with one's "home environment." But is this difference substantive when we come to examine the way these concepts are played out politically? Is it actually possible, at this level, to maintain a separation between a sense of rootedness based on kinship with a people from a similar sentiment based upon an attachment to one's natural environment? If we recall the case of opencast mining, Daniel Zapata, and Welsh tribalism, the Welsh were being told to see themselves as a people, a people who had been oppressed for generations. Clearly this form of environmentalism entails possibilities for certain affinities with Welsh nationalism, a point not lost on supporters of the latter. To quote the Welsh nationalist Ned Thomas, "What distinguishes the protests in Wales from those in some parts of England to conserve the environment [is] that they converge on a special kind of consciousness, which is a national consciousness. All the threats are threats to the Welsh tradition, the protest is a protest in the name of a shared past."38 And "In Wales, we are still, miraculously, able to love the bit of the earth on which we live and feel our continuity with the truly heroic struggles of our forebears more than our differences with them."39 Similarly, Barrès wanted the people of Lorraine to rediscover their own historical identity and throw off German rule. It may be logically necessary that place and people run together where this particular argument about developmental psychology is expounded, simply because the undamaged Self is a Self that remains at home. Generational continuity, the formation of something that can be recognized as a "people," must go hand in hand with psychologically healthy individuals who possess a deep concern for their environment. We arrive at a particular vision of a good society as a community having a strong sense of its interrelationship with the place in which it exists. This idea of the interpenetration of place and people is reflected in a final quote from Ned Thomas. People everywhere in industrialized countries have realized after two centuries of ruthlessly exploiting nature that the time has come to conserve it. But how limited the view of conservation usually is. If the people have gone, and the memories have gone, and the literature that records the interaction of the people with the landscape has gone, and we
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come and place plastic litter sacks on the sterilized green slopes, how can we talk of conservation? 40 Here again we have the argument that people and place are substantively interdependent. Part of a "landscape" is the culture and memories of its traditional inhabitants. IV In what way do the concepts of Self and place fit into the larger conceptual universe that forms the ideologies of deep ecology and Barrèsian integral nationalism? For Naess and the other deep ecologists, the sense of place forms an integral part of a cluster of concepts that support a presumption of man's "non-interference" with nonhuman nature. The core components of deep ecology include both the ecocentric rejection of the idea of an valueimparting ontological divide between humanity and the rest of nature, and a conception of the individual and of individual development as a "Self-realizer." These two aspects of deep ecology constitute the idea of the attainment of the ''expansive" sense of Self referred to above. What are the consequences of cleaving to this "ecological consciousness" or "ecological Selfhood"? This Self is one whose relationships with nonhuman nature are such that they become a constitutive part of it. The conventional, individualistic liberal conception of the self is rejected in favor of an I that is an all-encompassing I incorporating one's environment. Why should this sense of self be important to a political ecologist? What has my sense of self to do with protecting the natural world? Well, as Andrew Brennan says: However much metaphysical nonsense may be thought to be involved in all this, there is certainly one good thing to be said for such a metaphysics. It does overcome the old problem of how to find value outside of the valuing subject. For by building in the subject's environment, by breaking down the divide between the self and the other, we have a simple solution to the problem of value in nature. Provided I am valuable, then so is my extended self, the natural world. A wrong to it is a wrong to me.41 Thus "defense" of the nonhuman natural world now becomes a form of Self-defense, something that is easily understood and is taken to carry within itself its own moral justification. This is apparent in Bill Devall's work when he says that "My right42 to defend the integrity and beauty of the Siskiyou-Klamath region is based upon my understanding of ecological principles and on my identification with that region which has become part of my body."43 Devall is not idiosyncratic here. Consider the following:
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An appropriate metaphysics for the emerging ecological perennial philosophy would provide a structural account of the basic unity and interrelatedness of the universe, while at the same time accounting for the importance and uniqueness of living beings. Similarly, this metaphysics of interrelatedness helps us realize that the natural world and other species are inextricably part of us, and us [sic] of them (a mutual reciprocity). The truly active person will take direct action to help preserve the natural world, for in a profound and mature sense, one sees such preservation is in one's self/Self interest. 44 Also, according to Freya Mathews, "If we destroy our environment, we destroy what is in fact our larger self. We commit this mistake because we are suffering from a maladaptation in the form of a faulty belief system that misrepresents our identity to us."45 And Warwick Fox puts it thus: "I can also experience this larger, but still entirely personal, sense of self as part of a still more expansive, transpersonal sense of self that includes my family and friends, other animals, physical objects, the region in which I live and so on. When this happens, I experience physical or symbolic violations of the integrity of these entities as violations of my self, and I am moved to defend these entities accordingly."46 So, along with notions of identity and a right to liberty expressed as self-defense, we get adjacent concepts of "direct action" (derived from the freedom to self-defend, which encodes within it notions of urgency and immediacy. If my Self is threatened, I do not have time to rely upon cumbersome legal procedures in order to defend myself; I have to act now), and, I would argue, the notion of "rootedness" (my expanded Self may be in some sense universal, but I cannot act in all places at this time. Ergo I become, to all practical intent, this place, my bioregion, the Siskiyou-Klamath region. Here I can act, this is where I can manifest my right to defend myself). Here again, as Deep Green ideology bridges the realms of thought and action, a ''right to selfdefense" is decoded as nonviolent direct action in defense of my Self, which is rooted in this place. What work does the concept of rootedness perform in Barrès's writings to support his larger project of integral nationalism? If this relationship comes out clearly anywhere, it is in his novel The Uprooted.47 Here the hero, François Sturel, is faced with a difficult "ethical" choice. A close friend, Astiné Aravian, a beautiful Armenian woman who was formerly his lover, is brutally murderedmurdered, he discovers, by two fellow Lorrainers, Honoré Racadot and Antoine Mouchefrin. Sturel then sees himself as placed in (what is presented as) a moral dilemma. He knows that only his testimony can break Mouchefrin's alibi, yet Mouchefrin is a compatriot. His former lover's murder demands justice, but she was, ultimately, an outsider; and the perpetrators, whatever their individual character, are fellow Lorrainers. Although this dilemma is claimed to be ethical, it is resolved to Sturel's satisfaction through
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reference to feelings that in themselves have no ethical basis. His feelings of national solidarity, which determine his decision, are not based on ethics; they are based on the psychological determinism of the development of the Self. As Sturel ponders his course of action, a public event enables him to see that Through his acts, each of these men [Racadot and Mouchefrin] belongs to the isolated life, and perhaps to a strongly villainous life. But through his life force [lit. sap] each one belongs to the common life. . . . There are ignoble instants, but their sum makes a noble eternity. Hugo makes me sense it with too much spirit for me to know passion, disgust, contempt; just in time, his work and this crowd brought back to me, strongly, the mysterious unity of all life's manifestations. Let us accept our role and the roles our neighbors play. 48 C. Stewart Doty comments on this passage: "Sturel's banding together of the seven Lorrainers was but the first halting step of the 'instinct of the sick' to heal a disunited France. Entire regions and the entire nation must band together in cultural rootedness, even with the Racadots and the Mouchefrins. They must unite against those foreign to the fatherland or to the achievement of one's self-hood."49 Sturel does not testify against Racadot and Mouchefrin because he is a Lorrainer and they are. Justice is sacrificed to identity. In the same way that the I of deep ecology cannot but defend nature, so Sturel ultimately makes his decision not to turn Mouchefrin in on the basis of what he is, not what he thinks. This is, if one will, ontological nationalism, not something "chosen." Thus I believe that when we examine the relationship between these concepts and the larger patterns of political thought with which they are associated by both deep ecologists and Barrès, we see another very important similarity emerging. Both use this conceptualization of Self in order to bypass difficult ethical decisions. Once the Self is correctly understood, then what the Self does is determined by what the Self is. The connection is drawn between an ontology and an intuitionist epistemological framework, and from this, action is derived directly. In the novel Astiné was murdered so that the jewels she wore could be sold to raise money. Sturel is presented as knowing what justice would demand, what morality would demand (would not we all?), but he ultimately finds that he does not have to refer to morality in order to know what to do. We have a good example of this structure of relating identity to action in the following quote from Naess: "Through the wider self every living being is connected intimately, and from this intimacy follows the capacity for identification and, as its natural consequence, the practice of non-violence. No moralizing is needed, just as we need no morals to make us breathe."50 So nonviolence here follows not because we believe it to be morally wrong to try to further our political beliefs by violent means, but because of our understanding of what we are. Ultimately, I believe that the conception of the
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ecological Self put forward by deep ecologists is unattractive precisely because it is a Self that acts upon the basis of what it is, not because of what it believes, values, understands, or weighs in the balance of moral and other considerations. At least, to the extent that the ecological Self acts upon beliefs and understandings, these are merely "internal." That is, they appertain only to understandings of the nature of the Self. This can be contrasted with conventional ethical discourse, which relies upon some sort of conceptualizing and understanding of the "other." V This idea of the place (or rather non-place) of ethics in deep ecology is expressed by its proponents in one of two ways: ethics is held to be either (a) superfluous, for once one has one's sense of identity fully formulated, ethical imperatives are simply not required, or (b) present but fully determined by ontology (i.e., once one gets the ontology "right," the ethics will fall into place). On this the proponents of deep ecology are clear enough: "[T]he transpersonal ecology conception of self . . . has the highly interesting, even startling consequence that ethics (conceived as being concerned with moral 'oughts') is rendered superfluous! [Because] one will naturally (i.e. spontaneously) protect the natural (spontaneous) unfolding of this expansive self." 51 Andrew McLaughlin informs us that we need to go ''Beyond Ethics to Deep Ecology."52 And in an approving nod to Fox, Eckersley says, "Transpersonal ecology explicitly rejects approaches that issue in moral injunctions and advances instead an approach that seeks 'to invite and inspire others to realize, in a thisworldly sense, as expansive a sense of the self as possible.' "53 Finally, Rothenberg reminds us that Naess's ecophilosophy is "an environmental ontology, not an environmental ethic."54 Or, as Rothenberg writes in his introduction to Naess's book: "Naess offers in this book the basis of a new ontology which posits humanity as inseparable from nature. If this ontology is fully understood, it will no longer be possible for us to injure nature wantonly, as this would mean injuring an integral part of ourselves. From this ontological beginning, ethics and practical action are to fall into place."55 This "ecological Self" is a Green version of Sturel. He, in shielding his fellow Lorrainers from the demands of justice, is acting not in order to defend them (he sees them as in many ways beneath contempt) but in order to defend himself. His Self is taken to be the cumulative product of generations of fellow Lorrainers; to betray the murderers is to betray this heritage, and to betray that is to betray himself. Likewise, to allow damage to the nonhuman nature that
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has been incorporated into the ecological Self is to allow harm to the Self, and this conception of the Self sets up a dynamic in favor of the same amoral basis for action as that of the Barrèsian Self. This brings us to the heart of the problem. After much agonizing, Sturel hits upon what would be the "beautiful action" (i.e., the spontaneous, natural action) for a truly "rooted" Lorrainer. This would have reflected the ''instinctual wisdom" of the masses, the unconscious acting out of regional, transpersonal identity, that Barrès praised so often. Because Sturel has left his roots, lived in Paris, and opened himself up to foreign influence, the beautiful action does not come spontaneously to him; only intense meditation, along with the inspiration of Victor Hugo's funeral, inspires him to discover it. Crucially, what he is discovering is the true nature of his Self in Barrèsian terms. Once he comes to know his transpersonal Self, rooted in the history and soil of Lorraine, he will know how to act in the world. Similarly, once our potential deep ecologists get their understanding of Self right, they will commit "beautiful" actions, nonviolent acts of environmental protection, so that, for example, "to propose unpopular regulations based on ecological considerations is the only and the completely natural thing to do." 56 Naess tells us: "In short, there is little understanding that fostering inclination is essential in every aspect of socialization and acculturation, and therefore also in the global ecological crisis. Moralizing is too narrow, too patronizing and too open to the question, 'Who are you? What is the relation of your preaching and your life?"'57 I want to suggest that, on the contrary, reliance upon the internalization of norms constitutes the more patronizing approach, resonant as it is with conservative and nationalist ideological appeals to the inculcation of culture and tradition. It conjures up the image of an elite of deep ecologists who have the wherewithal to fully understand the nature of the ecological crisis, overthrow existing norms, and substitute for them the ontology of deep ecology that the masses can internalizethus "spontaneously" carrying out actions on behalf of the environment based on understandings into which they have been "socialized and acculturated." The problems with this conception of human action are clear if we contrast it with the view of the good life for humans put forward by "perfectionist" liberals such as John Stuart Mill in On Liberty and by present-day writers such as Joseph Raz.58 What these writers offer us is a theory of self-development rather than one of selfrealization.59 For Mill it is not enough that people act in the "right" way; it also matters that they act for the right reasons. Human moral personality (and the human faculties generally) is held here to best develop through the questioning of ingrained habits and traditions, as people come to construct and act upon their own conceptions of the good; and to live accord-
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ing to one's own conception of the good is to lead a moral (or at least morally chosen) life. Mill writes: "He who chooses his plan [of life] for himself employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgement to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decisions." 60 Of course this self-development thesis entails a conception of what it is to be human. However, it is relatively open to individual interpretations, and the concept of "development" is open ended; it does not hold up an ideal end state (such as an ontological sense of unity with nature) to be "realized."61 On this account people should be educated in order to be equipped for the autonomous life, and if they are so equipped, the deep ecologist can hope that they will be cognizant of environmental problems and act accordingly. However, one must accept that it has to be "possible" for us to harm nature if we are to lead fully human lives. Thus, to choose deep ecological principles autonomously, not follow them on account of norms internalized in our early years, would be seen as the requisite basis for truly human environmental action. The "moral act [that] glides into a beautiful act''62 is one thing; the beautiful act as socialized and acculturated habit is quite another. This line of criticism of self-realization is also suggested by Raz: The autonomous person is the one who makes his own life and he may choose the path of self-realization or reject it. Nor is autonomy a precondition of self-realization, for one can stumble into a life of selfrealization or be manipulated into it or reach it in some other way which is inconsistent with autonomy. One cannot deny this last claim on the ground that one of the capacities one has to develop is that of choosing one's own life. For this and any other capacity can be developed by simulation and deceit, i.e. by misleading the person to believe that he controls his own destiny. . . . One is not autonomous if one cannot choose a life of self-realization, nor is one autonomous if one cannot reject this ideal.63 This critique of Self-realization may appear to prejudge the value of the autonomous life for the human individual, and there certainly is not space for a detailed defense of the idea here. Nonetheless, one does not have to be committed to the ideal of autonomy to share intuitive qualms about the value of human beings living a life of selfrealization into which they have "stumbled" or have been "manipulated." What of the charge that morality-based edicts are open to the question "Who are you?" I can only say that if this charge undermines moral acts, what does it do for acts founded upon conceptions of the Self? If my actions are based upon my understandings of who and what I am, and you tell me these are wrong, why can I not say "Who are you?" Who are you to tell me that my understand-
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ing of my self is at fault? Here lies a substantive difficulty for the self-realization approach. In an unfortunately obscure book, Rudolf Bahro hits upon what I believe to be an important truth. In the new age scene it is customary to reassure ourselves that we are one with the clouds, the trees, the rocks and the animals. Correct, we are all parts of the trees and the trees are part of us. But it is equally important for us to recogniseaccording to the same logic!that we are also part of the Megamachine, and the Megamachine is part of us. Today's adepts drive the Monte Verita in automobiles they identify with more strongly than they do with trees. 64 These automobiles are, moreover, a recognizably human creation. Who are we to tell other human beings that they should not "identify" with the products of human effort and ingenuity which have traditionally been interpreted as signs of humanity's development as a species? Of course a turn here to ethical appeals based upon notions of values, rights, duties, and so on is far from unproblematic. Nonetheless, in terms of agents who are or become committed to carrying out environmental actions, the argument that these actions should be based upon beautiful action, which in turn is based upon an understanding of the Self, contains a crippling ethical limitation. It lacks a conception of a fully rounded human moral personality. An ecophilosophy that imports the liberal notion of the value of living the self-defined conception of the good life would have, by contrast, a structural inclination toward stressing the moral. VI I have not argued that people's conception of self, in particular an awareness of an interdependency with the nonhuman natural world, and perhaps a sense of rootedness in place, is unimportant if we are trying to change attitudes toward environmental protection. Socialization and acculturation always have a role to play in maintaining the behavioral norms of any society. My claim is that such an understanding of the Self does not, in and of itself, constitute a reasonable basis for engaging in environmental action. It does not "render ethics superfluous," nor does it follow that ethics will happily fall into place once the ontology is right. If we return to the Barrèsian hero Sturel, he denies Astiné justice because of his transpersonal existence as both Lorrainer and Frenchman. This Self consists in all its parts, good and bad, and to "betray" any of these parts is to damage his Self. How would we seek to persuade him otherwise? Tell him it is illogical that his sense of Self should stop at the borders of France? But, as stressed above, who are we, especially if we do not share his "roots," to tell him this?
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What role does logic play in a conception of Self? 65 Surely we could only tell Sturel that the grounds for his decision are the wrong ones, that the moral demand for justice transcends any need to maintain the perfect transpersonal Self-realization. The character of Sturel gives a clear illustration of the amoral basis for action that a motivational sense of selfhood provides. The environmental actions of the ecological self may not be as morally difficult, but they share the same inadequate foundations. Contemporary environmental problems present humanity with a range of both difficult and important dilemmas. The claims of currently existing human populations to a materially decent life, with security from poverty and disease, the "claims" of other species for living space and a continued existence, and our consideration of the interests of future generations in having a livable environment, not only in terms of resources but also in terms of having a recognizably "natural" environment in which to develop are all serious problems. Coping with these problems is doubtless one of the most important challenges facing late twentieth-century humanity. How to act rightly in the face of such great difficulties? The Self-realization thesis appears to offer a relatively easy solution to this question. Understand your Self, and the right actions will come to you. Although an attractive proposition if true, such an approach risks shutting all doors to reason. We cannot bypass the intense difficulty of these problems via an ontological shortcut that assumes a fixed end state to human development. In seeking to find tentative, reasoned solutions to these problems, individuals can continuously develop their moral and intellectual capacities as they seek to negotiate problematic interaction between conflicting goals. This may prove to be a difficult, or even impossible, task, but it would seem to be the only human game in town. Notes I would like to thank Roger Eatwell, Cecile Fabre, Michael Freeden, Eric Katz, Noel O'Sullivan, Yannis Stavrakakis, and Marc Stears for comments upon and help with earlier drafts of this essay. Also, participants in seminars at Bath and Oxford, the members of the ECPR Joint Sessions Workshop "Green Politics in the New Europe," Oslo, March 29 April 3, 1996, and members of the Nuffield Political Theory Workshop for incisive comments and criticisms. 1. See, as good examples, Warwick Fox, Toward a Transpersonal Ecology (Totnes: Green Books, 1995); Freya Mathews, The Ecological Self (London: Routledge, 1991); and Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, trans. and ed. David Rothenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Fox takes Self-realization to be the core conceptual component of deep ecology. For a counterargument, see Harold Glasser, "On Warwick Fox's Assessment of Deep Ecology," Environmental Ethics 19 (1997): 69 85.
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2. I will follow Naess's convention of using "Self" to indicate the transpersonal conception of selfhood, and "self" for the ''atomistic" conception, or when the term does not apply to either specific version of the concept. 3. All Barrès's novels were political. He called them "ideological" novels and, as Doty notes, "Every novel led to new political action or was written to convert readers to his politics of the moment." C. Stewart Doty, From Cultural Rebellion to Counter-revolution: The Politics of Maurice Barrès (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976), p. 3. 4. On moral and beautiful action in this context, see Arne Naess, "Beautiful Action: Its Function in the Ecological Crisis," Environmental Values 2 (1993): 67 71. I use the terms "moral" and "ethical" interchangeably in this essay to indicate actions based upon a sense of the "right" or the "good," as opposed to actions based upon a sense of identity. 5. John Vidal, "No Welcome in the Valleys," The Guardian, August 5, 1995, p. 23. See also Kirkpatrick Sale's comments on "retribalization" in his "BioregionalismA New Way to Treat the Land," The Ecologist 14 (1984): 167 173. The historical problems with viewing the current inhabitants of the South Wales coal-mining belt as "the indigenous people of Wales" are obvious, but from the perspective of this essay, this is far from being the issue. An "imagined" identity can be as politically effective as a "real" one if enough people are prepared to act upon it, and anyway it is far from clear that such a distinction has meaning. What I am interested in is the mode of argument being employed by environmental activists in order to foster the desired environmental consciousness in the local people. Similar modes of argument are being employed in campaigns to save "native" species such as the red squirrel in the United Kingdom. See The Guardian, August 7, 1996, "Society" supp., p. 3. Also, on campaigns to reintroduce native species to the United Kingdom, The Independent, March 1, 1997, sec. 2, p. 18. For an eloquent analysis of the connections between national and natural history, see Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: HarperCollins, 1995). 6. Whether Daniel Zapata, who has his own ideational inheritance to draw on, was influenced by these authors is not the point here. The example is merely intended to illustrate that the arguments which follow have some relevance to contemporary environmental protests and debates. Furthermore, I take the view that bioregionalism constitutes a political doctrine closely related to the ecophilosophy of deep ecology. There is not space here to engage in a detailed defense of this interpretation. 7. I use Barrès as a particularly apposite example for the illustration of the pitfalls of basing motivation upon identity. I am not seeking to draw wider parallels with nationalist ideology. 8. For a full exposition of this approach, see Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), chs. 1 3. 9. Ibid., p. 141. Emphasis added. 10. Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, pp. 57 63. 11. Naess claims to prefer "gestalt" terminology to "holistic" terminology because "it induces people to think more strenuously about the relations between wholes and parts." Ibid., p. 58. 12. Ibid., p. 60. 13. Quotes in this paragraph, ibid., pp. 60 61.
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14. Ibid., pp. 61 62. 15. Ibid., p. 62. 16. Sale, "Bioregionalism," p. 168. 17. Adrian Atkinson, The Principles of Political Ecology (London: Bellhaven Press, 1991), p. 182. 18. Carolyn Merchant, Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 222 19. Robyn Eckersley, Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward an Ecocentric Approach (London: UCL Press, 1992), p. 168. 20. Bill Devall, Simple in Means, Rich in Ends: Practicing Deep Ecology (London: Green Print, 1988), p. 59. 21. Andrew McLaughlin, Regarding Nature: Industrialism and Deep Ecology (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), pp. 72 73. 22. Ibid., pp. 207 208. Emphasis added. 23. In Bill Devall, "Deep Ecology and Radical Environmentalism," Society and Natural Resources 4 (1991): 249. 24. Freya Mathews, "Conservation and Self-Realization: A Deep Ecology Perspective," Environmental Ethics 10 (1988): 353. First emphasis added, second in original. 25. David Rothenberg, "Introduction," in Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, p. 15. Emphasis added. 26. George Sessions, in Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered (Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith, 1985), p. 241. 27. I do not believe that when deep ecologists write of an "identity," they mean it in the strict sense of "A is B," as suggested by the late Richard Sylvan ("A Critique of Deep Ecology, Part II," Radical Philosophy 41 [Autumn 1985]:10 22). This would indeed result in an ''all is one" metaphysics from which it would be impossible for us to open up any space in which we could think about acting in relation to something outside of ourselves. Rather, deep ecologists use "identity" in the sense of identifying with something that along with our "atomistic" self forms part of a larger whole. 28. McLaughlin, Regarding Nature, p. 180. 29. Naess, in ibid., pp. 194 195. Emphasis in original. 30. Ibid., p. 195. 31. Gordon Shenton, The Fictions of the Self: The Early Works of Maurice Barrès (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), p. 18. 32. Ibid., p. 70. 33. Maurice Barrès, "Scènes et Doctrines du Nationalisme," In The French Right: From de Maistre to Maurras, edited by J. S. McClelland (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 159. 34. Ibid., p. 161. References to "the dead" are essentially references to history. The truth is to be found through the study of the history of one's home region, not through the abstract theorizing of philosophy.
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35. Robert Soucy, Fascism in France: The Case of Maurice Barrès (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 76. 36. This is not to suggest that Naess regards interhuman relations with friends and family as unimportant; it is, rather, a question of emphasis. 37. Barrès, in Soucy, Fascism in France, p. 111. 38. Ned Thomas, The Welsh Extremist (Lalybont, Wales: Y Lolfa Tyf, 1991), p. 12. 39. Ibid., pp. 28 29. 40. Ibid., p. 132. 41. Andrew Brennan, Thinking About Nature: An Investigation of Nature, Value and Ecology (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 143. 42. The assertion of a "right" to self-defense in this discourse is problematic because it combines ethics and identity in the motivational account. It appears to reintroduce morality into the picture insofar as this right to act in defense of the expanded Self now has to be shown to exist prior to the taking of that action. The alternative approach, based on sentiment and identity rather than morality, is expressed in the quote from Warwick Fox, on p. 96. According to Fox, we are moved to act in such a way as to defend the Self, and because this sense of Self has expanded, we will act to defend nature. This latter version has the stronger affinities with the ideological structure of Barrèsian nationalism. 43. Devall, Simple in Means, p. 59. 44. Devall and Sessions, Deep Ecology, p. 82. 45. Mathews, "Conservation and Self-Realization," p. 354. 46. Fox, Toward a Transpersonal Ecology, p. 217. 47. Maurice Barrès, Les Déracinés, 2 vols. (Paris: Plont, 1922). 48. Ibid. "Chacun de ces hommes, se disait-il, appartient à la vie isolée, et peut-être à une vie fort canaille, par ses actes, mais à la vie en commun par sa sève . . . . Il y a des instants ignobles, mais leurs somme fait une éternité noble. Hugo me le fait sentir avec trop de vivacité pour que je connaisse la colère, le dégoût, le mépris; son oeuvre et cette foule me rappellent fort à point l'unité mystérieuse de toutes les manifestations de la vie. Acceptons notre rôle et les rôles que jouent nos voisins." Vol. 2, pp. 221 222. Sturel has seen Victor Hugo's funeral procession, and has been moved by the crowd's sentimental reaction. This reawakens in him his sense of oneness with the people of France. Astiné was of course an outsider in this regard. (Doty translates a crucial section as "Hugo made me sense it with so much spirit so that I knew passion, disgust, and contempt." This is not only misleading, it undercuts Barrès's whole position. Barrès is trying to tell us that when Sturel experiences this sense of common life in a sufficiently strong way, his feelings of repugnance for Mouchefrin and Racadot are overcome, not created). 49. Doty, From Cultural Rebellion to Counterrevolution, p. 157. 50. Naess, in McLaughlin, Regarding Nature, p. 195. First and third emphases added. 51 Fox, Toward a Transpersonal Ecology, p. 217. 52. McLaughlin, Regarding Nature, ch. 9. 53. Eckersley, Environmentalism and Political Theory, p. 62.
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54. David Rothenberg, "No World but in Things: The Poetry of Naess's Concrete Contents," Inquiry 39 (1996): 261. 55. Rothenberg, "Introduction," in Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, p. 2. Emphasis added. 56. Naess, "Beautiful Action," p. 71. Emphasis added. 57. Ibid. 58. Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 59. This is not an uncontroversial claim. See John Gray, Mill on Liberty: A Defence, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1996), for an argument that Mill is interested in the self-realization of individuals. However, what is important from our perspective is that even then, Gray takes Mill to argue that each individual has a unique form of selfrealization, and that there is no fixed end state to which individuals develop. Thus Gray's interpretation does not impact upon the substance of my argument. 60. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, Liberty and Representative Government (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1910). 61. There is a question here as to whether it is possible to cleave to a broadly "middle" position, by which one could still cleave to the "Self-realization" thesis, yet hold that for the good of the development of moral personality in human beings, it is essential that people achieve Self-realization autonomously. Self-realization can be of value only if achieved in this way; thus it is harnessed to a positive appraisal of autonomy. Such a position would be problematic. If one has a perfectionist account of the good human life, how can it be treating people as morally considerable individuals to allow them to fail to achieve such a life through their own weaknesses or misconceptions? One would surely have to value autonomy over Self-realization to hold this position, and be prepared to accept the ecological and social consequences of a widespread failure to achieve Self-realization. This would be quite removed from the position of deep ecologists such as Naess. 62. Naess, "Beautiful Actions," p. 69. 63. Raz, Morality of Freedom, pp. 375 376. Raz is not referring here to the specific deep ecological version of the Self-realization thesis, but his comments are as applicable to it as to any other version. 64. Rudolf Bahro, Avoiding Social and Ecological Disaster: The Politics of World Transformation (Bath, UK: Gateway Books, 1994), pp. 14 15. The "Megamachine" is essentially Bahro's shorthand for industrial society. 65. Barrès's epistemology with regard to this was intuitionist; one cannot come to "know" one's Self at the merely rational level. Deep ecology literature is redolent with the same assumption.
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6 In Defense of Deep Ecology: An Ecofeminist Response to a Liberal Critique Ariel Salleh Context It is curious to reflect on the growth of gender awareness in deep ecology now, fifteen years after the "Deeper Than Deep Ecology" challenge. Innocent of the academic microscope that would be applied to it, that blithe little rhetorical nudge to our deep ecological brothers led first to uproar, then to debate between ecofeminists and deep ecologists lasting over a decade. In the meantime, while the feuding parties have made personal peace, I am not sure that the political message of "the ecofeminist connection" has been fully received. 1 This chapter will revisit the ecofeminist call for deep ecological consciousness-raising. But it will do so tangentially, by way of philosopher Mathew Humphrey's liberal argument that the deep ecologists' "identification with nature" fails to meet requirements of an adequate moral theory.2 In response to Humphrey's critique, I will suggest that if deep ecological concerns were reformulated in terms of an embodied materialism, this ecofeminist approach might deepen the ethic of deep ecology and its epistemology while helping to keep liberal critics at bay. Philosophy as Social Practice As I noted in "Class, Race, and Gender Discourse in the Ecofeminism/Deep Ecology Debate" (see note 1), the conservative character of some deep ecological theory very likely reflects its social origins. Professional philosophy is arguably an elitist pursuit, removed from the menial world. It depends on the presence of a social underclass of other humans who labor in the realms of necessityproductive and reproductive. Without a historically established division between mental and manual labor, the conditions for formal philosophic production would not exist.
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Unwittingly, philosophers may perpetuate materially oppressive social relations marked by class, race, and gender differencesan ethical dilemma that touches the discipline at its very core. This in turn gives rise to an epistemological problem if the language of philosophy continues to reflect the sociological positioning of a particular grouping. By default, that language may be counter-productive to the search for truth. Words as tools lose their incisive edge when terminology becomes a self-referential idealism, removed from the daily materiality of most people's lives. As an applied endeavor, ecophilosophy is a step in the right direction; deep ecology that would undo the traditional schism between Humanity and Nature is another. An ecofeminist standpoint can ground philosophical reason even further, because the women of our generation, struggling to be heard beyond the sphere of reproduction, have been doing a great deal of thinking about what it is that links the internal relations of Humanity and Naturethe body. My own writing has focused on what can be called an embodied materialism. 3 This builds on Marx's profound understanding of the dialectic between our practical actions in the world and the form that our thought processes take. However, Marx's model was too much centered on the production of things"men's work," as distinct from women's socially given reproductive activities. So, as an ecofeminist, I have come to deconstruct the gaps in that historical materialismthe philosophical silence on Women and Nature, marginalized subjects in an otherwise radical analysis. Now, the term "social reproduction" means to be engaged in nurturing living processes by enhancing our human interchange with nature. Domestic work still has this function inasmuch as women cook and clean, tend young and old, and engage in sexual and reproductive activities. Subsistence farming and hunter-gathering by men can also be said to be reproductive labor. Obviously, women and men caught up in urban consumer societies have less giveand-take with external nature than cottage-dwelling folk once did. But in the international division of labor, the domestic functions of indigenous peoples and Third World farmers are still bound up in care for earthly cycles, albeit increasingly compromised by the spread of maldevelopment from the West. In conventional Marxism, where production is the privileged category, the reproduction of daily needs and the reproduction of future generations is a taken-for-granted background "condition of production." But my point here is that these socially reproductive laborswhether by mothers, wives, black housekeepers, or slavesare just as much a condition of philosophic production as of factory production. At further remove in the global economic gestalt, we can acknowledge colonized others, whose labors or lands generate the re-
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source surplus from which First World citizens draw affluent lifestyles and leisured hours. These facts about the unethical framework in which the philosophical enterprise takes place are well known. Among deep ecologists, Arne Naess's account in Ecology, Community and Lifestyle is full of illustrative instances of the 20:80 thesis. 4 But what I want to attend to here is the discursive positioning and reflexivity of deep ecology, liberalism, and ecofeminism within this global context. I will propose that when philosophy externalizes its own social framework from the exercise of reason, it may lapse into a form of idealism, thereby undermining the integrity and accuracy of analysis. Therefore, in striving for ethical and epistemological adequacy, both liberal philosophers and deep ecologists might benefit from using an embodied materialism. Identification with Nature and the Liberal Critique My observation is that most ecophilosophical writing is still formulated in idealist terms as distinct from speaking in a way that reflects our material engagement with, and embodiment in, nature. Nevertheless, Naess and other deep ecologists have moved significantly toward materialism by making sensory experience of habitat and "selfrealization" based on rootedness in place prerequisite to right ecological action. In this philosophy, an expansive identification with nature breaks down the divide between I and not-I, creating an intuitive sense of rightness that some call "beautiful action." The ethic takes form as "Self should act as self is." Desire for embodiment in deep ecological reason is plain in Naess's assertion that ecodefense is self-defense, and also in Bill Devall's description of the ecosystem as "part of my body." Andrew McLaughlin is another who sees "care for other life forms, engendered by an identification with place. ''5 Naess's ontology embraces reality as a relational net, an apperceptive hierarchy of gestalts combining sensory and evaluative elements simultaneously. Thus deep ecology is implicitly normative and rejects the conventional opposition of fact and value as an artifact of abstract thinking. Naess departs from the "spectral" mathematized tradition of science, favoring "mythic" forms of narrative culturally imbued with a sense of place. With their notion of "dwellers in the land," bioregionalists like Kirkpatrick Sale join deep ecologists, urging that belongingness and psychological health are shattered by urbanization and industrial development.6 By this logic, identification of Human self with Natural milieu provides an axiomatic or self-evident basis for actions that are environmentally moral.
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Mathew Humphrey develops an interesting critique of deep ecology around what he sees as its ontological determinism and associated evasion of moral questions. 7 Followers of deep ecology maintain that there is no need to lay down moral imperatives if the self is fully realized in desiring survival of the wider biotic community. But Humphrey rejects this stance as environmentally determinist: to assume that we are what our surroundings make us and to assume that beautiful, self-authentic acts are a sufficient guide, is to fall well short of a morally informed attitude. Humphrey argues that the deep ecologists' goal of personal maturation toward identification with nature is a closed, totalitarian concept of self-realization, and by implication manipulative. A developmental psychology must be open-ended, he maintains, if it is to properly equip us for an autonomous life. For the Gesellschaft rather than Gemeinschaft man, individual autonomy and freedom of choice are paramount considerations. It follows in the liberal schema that a deliberative weighing of options will be an essential part of taking moral action. And this in turn must entail the possibility of risking all, or choosing to act unethically. Finally, Humphrey believes that a deep ecological ethic of intuitive identification fails as moral discourse because by definition ethics must involve negotiation with "an other." In a related vein, Humphrey points out that beautiful actions framed by parochial sentiments are lacking because they demand no capacity for self-detachment and reflexive awareness on the part of the moral agent. Some Ecofeminist Reflections on Idealism It should be noted that each of Humphrey's criticisms of the ethical basis of deep ecology focuses on anthropocentric or human concerns. In other words, regardless of the rightness or wrongness of his case, it does not deal with the extent to which deep ecology might be an adequate ethic for nature beyond the human. Making the same point in ecofeminist shorthand, I would say that Humphrey's scoping is pre-ecological; it is couched in the prevailing ideology that sets men over and above nature and womenMan/Woman=Nature.8 That Humphrey's position on nature is a traditional one is clear from his tendency to treat it at one remove: as "landscape," "surroundings," "nonhuman environment.'' Despite old tensions over gender awareness in deep ecology, most ecofeminists endorse its insight into our human identity with nature and the ethic of care that stems from this. Few ecofeminists will feel comfortable about describing this attachment as symbolic, though. Too often, deep ecologists seem to
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lapse into abstract, psychological, or spiritual terms to describe "transpersonal" reconnection or material embeddedness. Their new Man=Nature attitudes are redolent with passively specular images of men "waking up," "suddenly seeing," or "admiring" nature, revealing a residual idealism in deep ecological thought. Sometimes deep ecology reads as endorsing a narrative of a world spirit suddenly entering a man's mind and providing insight. Yet most of Naess's writing is quite materialist. Consider his relative prioritization of the sphere of natural necessity over that of human freedom, or his practical perception that we come to understand the value of energy resources through gathering wood to keep warm. Moreover, in political communication, Naess is ever the gentle pragmatist, gauging the psychological limits of his opponents' capacity for the deep ecological challenge. Again, Naess rejects the idealism or naive positivism of Western science and its static worldview in which "a stone is a stone" and nothing else. He fears that this loss of relational comprehension, a "verbal deterioration of gestalts," must inevitably lead to a deterioration of culture. Unlike Humphrey's characterization of the gestalt as totalizing, ingrained, and habit-forming, Naess sees gestalt constellations as experientially created ways of tilting at expected, culturally idealized boundaries. Naess's relational ontology, with its acknowledgment of the both/and logic of contradiction, converges with a dialectical apprehension of the world. The weft that is missing from the weave of deep ecology is a gendered perspective. I shall return to this later. In the meantime, a liberal critique of the deep ecological ethic will reveal a variety of cultural idealism through its unexamined dualisms. The liberal ontology adopts a split between self and other while its epistemology splits fact and value. This is no coincidence, for, as sociologists of knowledge observe, the fractured thought style replicates the context of its ideological production in the economic division between mental and manual labor. Similarly, an ego psychology reflects a competitive social structure that is not safe, and where the healthy condition is exemplified by an individual with strong defenses against the other. Let us stay with the background conditions of liberalism for a moment. One can make a case that this political philosophy was generated historically as capitalist patriarchal discourse premised on a life that is "nasty, brutish, and short," one in which competition between men is essential to survival. In this avowedly "evolutionary" struggle for emancipation and progress, a class-based division of labor was part of the natural order of things. For one class of humans to enjoy a status as fully cultured, rational selves, its opposite number
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would labor as a class in the realm of necessity. Compared with the fully fledged ethical citizen, these othersmothers, wives, housekeepers, workers, or slaveswere "closer to nature." "Human resources" is the word today. Nevertheless, the promise of liberalism was that given the innate competitiveness of human beings, achievement of life's rewards was open to all, at least in principle. The weft that is missing from the weave of liberalism is more multistranded than the one missing from deep ecology. It is an acknowledgment of the culturally imbued power of a privileged minority to define, impose, and manipulate class, race, gender, and species differences. Humphrey's presentation of Naess's deep ecology as based on "internalized norms" turns its back on the internalized norms that determine and prop up Western liberalism: a predilection for individual autonomy and free choiceliterally at any cost. And we know who has historically borne the cost, whether it be counted in labor, time, or pollution. Most "others" in contemporary capitalist patriarchal societies are menial workers: women, indigenous peoples, and other species. I am not suggesting that Humphrey accepts this status quo; what I am saying is that these facts need to be kept up front when we argue about moral questions in the context of liberalism. Humphrey is right in wanting people to have an opportunity to consider their reasons for acting as they do. I am just not convinced that his own position is as reflexive as it might be. As things stand, the material power relation that may exist between self and other is protected by a positivist separation of fact and value which keeps historical context clear of the discourse on ethics. In light of this, I find an ironic moment in Humphrey's dismissal of deep ecology as solipsistic: if right action is an expression of the self as is, then it depends on "who you are." Humphrey insists that in philosophy, motive can not be derived from identity, but my own sense is that the liberal notion of morality is highly self-referential. Consider the line that the urbane citizen properly weighs his moral judgment, whereas the indigenous ecologist acts out of a nondeliberative oral tradition. Surely such a thesis depends entirely for its plausibility on "who you are." The liberal standpoint is arguably an environmentally determined ideology designed to reinforce the objectives of a particular Western economic system. On this basis, can it really be claimed to be less manipulative than Naess's theory of identification with nature is? Moreover, in a rapidly globalizing world, arguments about place are very salient with neocolonial struggles coming to the fore. Yet the implication of Humphrey's critique of deep ecology is that culturally embedded mythic narratives which may shape the ecological acts of some indigenous peoples are nonreflexive, and thus nonmoral. Here, I feel that
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Humphrey's stance ceases to offer open-ended dialogue with the other. What is needed at this juncture are reconciliatory moves to foster international tolerance and grassroots participatory democracy. Liberal morality is not only class-based, it is raced or Eurocentric in its bias, and it is also gendered. As Carole Pateman points out, while liberalism is premised on a social contract negotiated between free and equal citizens, this moral foundation of Enlightenment society was in fact contracted only between fellow citizens. 9 So when Humphrey criticizes Naess's primitive intuitionism and says that his ethical position sacrifices justice to identity, the double standard comes very close. What remains under cover here is the extent to which the liberal political stance is itself of mythic origin, socially determined and intuitively plausible to middle-class men of the so-called developed world. Vis-à-vis nature and "other" species, Humphrey reminds us that liberalism is characterized by the strategic calculus and deliberative optimization, including a right to choose unethical action. What follows from this freewheeling morality is the risking of resources as an essential component of a life well lived. Humphrey goes on to amplify his critique of deep ecology with a quote from Rudolf Bahro: "Correct, we are all part of the trees and the trees are part of us. But it is equally important to recognise . . . that we are also part of the Megamachine, and the Megamachine is part of us." I feel this quote works against Humphrey as much as it works for him, for as Larry Lohmann has noted: Only by atomizing tasks, redefining women as unproductive and separating workers from the moral authority, crafts and natural surroundings created by their communities, has it been possible to transform people into modern universal individuals.10 In other words, liberalism, despite the best intentions of its founding fathers, is implicated in material circumstances that are socially unjust and ecologically destructive. In contradistinction to this failed political formula, ecofeminists ask that we take note of a global class uncompromised by the rewards of the Megamachine. Whether subsistence farmers, hunter-gatherers, or domestics, these meta-industrial workers have hands-on knowledge of sustaining labors in a joint metabolism with nature. Moreover, if democracy still counts for anything, this class constitutes a statistical majority globally. So in the search for an epistemology and ethic that is both practical and just, it makes sense to heed its voice. In making my case for an embodied materialism experientially grounded in meta-industrial nurture, I want to point out that we are all environmentally determinedto a degreebut also that we daily remake the conditions of our existence. This is to endorse Humphrey's openness thesis and his objection to any
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"ontological shortcut which assumes a fixed 'end state' to human development." The dialectical notion of praxis does imply a continuousculturally mediatedphysical conversation between our bodies and their milieu. Labor in its various forms provides the possibility of grounded solidarity in our identity with nature. This is not a selfrealization to be thought up or intuited in pure idealist fashion, nor, following the deep ecological imagination, will it necessarily come with an individual's maturation in the world. An Embodied Materialism As I argue in my book Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Post-modern, it is usually grassroots housewives, as opposed to so-called emancipated feminists, who are the strongest fighters for ecology. 11 In the Third World, subsistence farmers and indigenous hunter-gatherers come to environmental politics with clarity and a materially grounded conviction gained in their communities. Each of these groups also has a moral sensibility finely honed by experiences of exploitation and suffering in a global economic system that is designed primarily to benefit metropolitan, middle-class men. Now I want to explore the possibility that the deep ecological sense of place might be more usefully formulated as a theory of working in/with nature. According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, the word "indigenous" means "native, belonging naturally, to soil." So women's reproductive labors almost universally mediate nature for men. In a sense, women within nature and nature within women have coevolved reciprocal practices over centuries. This nature-woman-labor nexus certainly supports a proposition that ecofeminist insights constitute an indigenous knowledge informed by hands-on experiences that are marginalized and devalued by urban industrial productivist economics. Among housewives, the nexus includes the sensuality of birthing and suckling labors; historically assigned household chores; gardening or making goods; creating and implanting meanings in the next generation. Similarly, peasant and indigenous men and women are organically and discursively implicated in the material rhythms of enduring time, and like domestic workers, they develop practical expertise grounded in that materiality. Good farmers foster the earth to metabolize these connections; women give up their bodies as alchemists to make life. The enduring time horizons of these meta-industrial workers are not compatible with the truncated time sense of a profit-driven free market. Nor do they find the controlling, analytic, and linear character of the scientific method appropriate to the maintenance of living things. Remember, too, that Western
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science with its idealized separations of subject and object, fact and value developed historically by elective affinity with liberalism. In contrast to the self-interested maximizations known as "best practice," sustaining labors involve following through on long-term goals in complex relational systems. In contrast to planning with crude statistical indicators, the indigenous labor process knows its material intimately. A finely reasoned account of vernacular labors "immersed in details of the physical world" can be found in philosopher Sara Ruddick's book Maternal Thinking. 12 As Ruddick reminds the reader, maintaining a household requires harmonizing a complex of subsystems, as well as considerable decision-making and diplomatic skills. To reappraise social reproduction this way is thus not to argue from victimhood, that oppressed women have a monopoly on good behavior; nor is it to fall back into unreconstructed masculinist readings of some innate, essential "naturalness" or pro-family assertions about moral superiority of the female sex. Nor is this a case of what Humphrey criticizes in deep ecology, an extraction of motive from identity. Rather, the argument makes a materialist epistemological claim about those who work with head and hand in a self-directed way, and the accuracy of their cognitive capacities and skills. This unique consciousness is discouraged under the capitalist patriarchal division of labor. Thus, while I agree with Humphrey that flexibility is a most precious "resource," when it is practiced as an embodied materialism, it is the antithesis of the liberal trend to labor specialization. The latter only leads to alienation and entropyin physical and philosophic systems. Holding as Epistemology and Ethic Ruddick's concept of "holding" is especially relevant to an ecofeminist defense of deep ecology against liberalism. "To hold means to minimize risk and to reconcile differences rather than to sharply accentuate them. Holding is a way of seeing with an eye toward maintaining the minimal harmony, material resources, and skills necessary for sustaining a child in safety. It is the attitude elicited by 'world protection, world-preservation, world repair . . . the invisible weaving of a frayed and threadbare family life.'"13 Paradoxically, while minimizing risk, holding is the ultimate expression of adaptability. As opposed to the physicist's separation of space-time, interconnectedness is commonsense in the mater/reality of those who hold things together. With ecofeminism, this precautionary principle comes to be applied beyond home and neighborhood to moral action in society at large.
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But holding practice is more than a human morality; it is the quintessential work of resisting environmental entropy. Australian indigenous workers traditionally practice a kind of holding, and this, too, nurtures sustainability. 14 Unlike the liberal man of property, Aboriginal peoples do not package land with neat little titles for fear of losing it; rather, they move through country in the knowledge that nature will replenish and provide for them when they return. Self-managed Aboriginal provisioning richly meets many needs at once: subsistence, learning, participation, innovation, ritual, identity and belonging, freedom, partnership with habitat.15 On the other hand, the engineered satisfiers of modern industrial societies, like bureaucracies or cars, cost great effort and frequently end up sabotaging the very convenience they were designed for. Reproductive labors are embedded in a matrix of social relations that in turn are sustained by subsistence activities embedded in cycles of biological time. In the caregiving labor that Ruddick names "mothering practice," a woman (or man) has no choice but to deal with material before her (him). Unlike the physicist or social scientist, she cannot invent categories to deny what is natural. What characterizes her understanding is reciprocity with what nature provides. Nancy Hartsock has noted how this gentle labor by mediation distinguishes enduring work from proletarian labor, which under the liberal's free-market growth ethic must break nature's back at the master's command. Evelyn Fox Keller's notion of a nongendered science repeats the theme of subject-object collaboration. Nature is known as a subject with a heart of its own, a heart that pulses through our own body cells.16 Humphrey would probably be in agreement with political theorist Mary Dietz's claim that an ethic of care is undemocratic because it privileges qualities of a particular group.17 But the learned qualities of holding labors are open to any group that chooses to work at the socially constructed margin where culture meets nature. The ecofeminist respect for enduring time is profoundly democratic. It challenges all existing political stratifications, including the split between men's and women's traditional labor roles, as much as the speciesist split between Humanity and other Nature. The temporal structuration of common household activities and environmental exchanges are each, in part, independent of discourse, persisting as "complex orders of causality." I believe that Naess's and other deep ecologists' celebration of place can be deepened by taking such reproductive labors seriously, not only because on equity grounds it is morally desirable to respect what women and indigenous peoples do, but also because the time frame of these interactions exists beyond that which directs the sphere of public decision-
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making. In other words, there are epistemological benefits to be gleaned from understanding social reproduction. Living things are joined across time as well as space; this is an indwelling structure invisible to positivist science, which prioritizes sight over all other senses. Seemingly oblivious to the pulse of life, Western reason and its instruments cut across nature's intricate score. Consider agroforestry, mining, nuclear weapons, road transport, genetic engineering, where the plan is management but complex metabolic rhythms are disrupted and ecological disintegration results. The dis/located approach of professional expertism generates merely an illusion of human choice and control. But the mythology is protected by naming its unanticipated consequences "accidents." Some ecofeminists use web imagery for the cycles of wholeness and decay, entropy and growth. I imagine these organic, self-feeding transformations following a holographic complex of Möbius loops. Alongside the onedimensional reasoning of liberal philosophy, ego psychology, and the engineering mind-set that furnishes it, many more people globally access another conceptual space, one that is very apposite to ecological thinking. This relational logic takes in its goal by concentric rather than direct scan; the object is experienced from several tangential points, kaleidoscopically. Knowledge rests not on mere appearance, formal visual properties, but is derived from touch, or from the even more diffuse kinesthetic modality that responds to pulse. The effect is an empathic, reflexive logic without incisive categorical boundaries between the knowing subject-in-process, the object-in-process, and its representation. 18 Identity/Nonidentity This account of ecofeminist epistemology circles back to the ontology of internal relations. Naess's position has been made more explicit since his 1989 book, and it is now clear how this approach to deep ecology might marry with an embodied materialism.19 The convergence is underscored by deep ecological use of the gestalt constellation and the both/and logic of identity/nonidentity. Unfortunately, not all deep ecologists adopt this approach. And even Naess's formulation continues at variance with ecofeminist reasoning because it elides the implications of gender difference. A fully embodied materialism will address the masculinist dualisms of Man/Woman, History/Nature, signifier/signified, replacing these with a metabolism of subject-in-field, the very body of the noun being dissolved in the liquid realism of nonidentity.
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As ecofeminists discover, the Western privileging of solid land over liquid water and the suppressed temporality of ecological systems by modern economics and science have served to delete both feminine difference and nature's diversity. For just as political "difference" can be defined by the life-affirming practices and labor in enduring time that men but mostly women do, so "diversity" is integral to orchestrating life. And here I come to the nub of longstanding ecofeminist grievances about the hypocritical moment in deep ecology. To quote Vandana Shiva on capitalist patriarchal Eurocentrism generally: "The construction of women as 'the second sex' is linked to the same inability to cope with difference as is the development paradigm that leads to the displacement and extinction of diversity in the biological world." 20 The Eurocentric and patriarchal plausibility structures of both liberalism and deep ecology, each in its own way, are marred by this failure to cope with difference. The liberal addresses the human subject as rational citizen, but tacitly a masculine one. And while deep ecologists genuinely reach out for knowledge of the body as nature, this communion remains constrained by the conventional Man/Woman=Nature ideology. Liberalism and deep ecology both effectively bypass "the body" as material bridge between thought and habitat. The body has traditionally been constructed in the West as women's sphere, and so by definition not a topic for philosophy or politics.21 Here we encounter another liberal dualismthe ostensibly universal public/private divide, which protects the public face of mastery from acknowledging its private substrate. Given all this, where will Woman=Nature stand in a scheme of justice based on shared parochial identity? In this respect, Humphrey's test of the deep ecologists' ethic of place resonates with ecofeminist concerns. He asks if this empathic morality would allow the brutal murder of a woman to be passed over for the sake of preserving "local loyalties." As most ecofeminists will acknowledge, were it not for the emergence of abstract Enlightenment principles like human equality, women today would not have their voices heard, let alone be in a position to demand justice for abused sisters. Recently, feminists have managed to bring rape onto the international agenda as a war crime, but such is the force of liberal morality that this violence remains common practice in metropolitan and peripheral cultures alike. We urgently need a politics informed by deeper understandings, libidinal ones. Humphrey's idealism and Naess's ungendered identity perspective are both silent on the highly problematic character of self-realization and autonomous development for women inside the master society and for indigenous people outside of it. Here I shall use the feminine experience as ideal typical marginality, but the indigenous experience of identity/nonidentity takes a parallel form
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structurally. The point is that the phenomenon of identification with nature and place seems to be conceptualized by deep ecologists in a naively positivist, one-dimensional way, whereas Western culture is constructed with two gender forms Man/Woman. To restate the ecofeminist case: the Eurocentric dualism is maintained by a discourse promoting two parallel "realities": man, culture, subject, mind, public, positive, identity woman, nature, object, body, private, negative, nonidentity If a man identifies with nature, this will challenge the hegemonic conception of masculinity that normally accords his gender group power "over and above women and nature." In Ecofeminism as Politics, I use the mock formula Man/Woman=Nature to represent this popular ontology. The identification of deep ecological men with nature is thus a straightforwardly radical step that breaks with the M/W=N determination, at least in part. The part that still seems to be intact is that women remain silenced by the /. Returning to Humphrey's ethical exemplar involving the local murder of a woman, his text moves between an argument about a man's regional identification and one about identity with local cronies. In my view, it is more convincingly a story of "mateship," as we call it Down Under: bonding between brothers, Man to Man. Conversely, the identification with place urged by deep ecologists describes a Man=Nature bond. As such, it is structurally quite dissimilar from Humphrey's case and the M/W=N pattern of liberalism. Moreover, deep ecologists do not need to cover for nature in the way that regular guys do for each other, because nature does not commit crimes upon us. As remarked earlier, men's self-realization by expanded self does nothing to alter the ongoing invisibility and "nonidentity" of Woman=Nature. This was why my "Deeper Than Deep Ecology" essay was called for in the first placehalf of humanity had been left out of the "total field." Against the rather disembodied and idealized transpersonal liberation of deep ecological men, women have a much less easy time of it. Ever strangers in cultural schemes evolved at men's convenience, women are now thrown into acute personal conflict by the ecological crisis. This is because the liberal feminist principle of equality offers women an option to become emancipated, but only by positioning themselves over and above nature as men do. Women choosing this way will find any argument for ecofeminism as an indigenous knowledge very unpalatable indeed. Third World elite women who believe themselves emancipated by high-tech gadgetry also will object to it. Thus, while a man's decision to identify with nature is clearly a
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radical move, when a woman affirms her identity with nature, she risks reinforcing her traditionally oppressed position, since W=N is outside the full human status enjoyed by men. 22 Nevertheless, for ecofeministsafter much deliberationthere is no doubt that our relational choice to identify with nature is in itself ''a right reason" and "holding" is the form that self-realization takes. But younger women can find the pull between conflicting liberal and ecofeminist standpoints very problematic. A grounded awareness of the critically privileged nonidentity of belonging in/with nature seems to come easier to women experienced in sustaining labors. Or perhaps it is the reflexive practice of holding that enables women to resolve these contradictory tensions. Going back to the relational web and its logic of identity/nonidentity: epistemologically speaking, women get to be experts in thinking about nonidentical things. And this may be why men so often charge them with being unable to "make up their minds"; everything is both this/and that. Caring for sick infants and aging parents puts women in touch with permeability and contamination. Bodies on the margin of nature dribble, smell, ooze, flake, even decay before our eyes. Women have the patriarchally accorded privilege of holding together the fragments of human nonidentity in the mesh of enduring time. Men bleed, urinate, ejaculate, too, but the discourse of mastery forces them to be contemptuous of bodily flows. Capitalist patriarchal languages and institutions offer men an armory of externalizing, idealizing gestures to bolster their separateness from matter. And what they get from it is desensitization, a false sense of individualism, crippling loneliness, and destructive compensatory drives. Different ways of living and knowing yield different approaches to ethics. For example, holding practices open people to a self-consciousness quite at odds with the cogito of the masculine unitary subject. Women, says Carol Gilligan, are inclined to work out their ethical responsibilities by integrating thought, feeling, and relational context. An ecofeminist ethic calls us away from strategic calculation of optimizations and abstract formulas like rights, into an extrapolation of caring experience.23 Holding, as epistemology and ethic, is based neither on separation and control of others nor on some ephemeral cosmic fusion, but on practical deferral. It exemplifies a strong and flexible decentered subjectivity. Against the liberal critique of empathic identification, I want to argue that moral action does not derive from idealized discursive constructs alone. Lohmann approaches this opinion when he says: People seeking anti-global alliances are likely simply to have to drop the idea that there are going to be any interesting neutral criteria of rationality or democracy . . . [and] in-
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stead content themselves with adopting certain ethnocentric virtues of inquiry: watchfulness, curiosity, tolerance, patience, humour and open mindedness. 24 As Marti Kheel observes, whether the fraternity of philosophers admits it or not, action based on rights is quietly prompted by an ethic of care.25 The problem has been that practices such as watchfulness, patience, humor are qualities that characterize the material practices of social reproduction, the very background conditions that remain peripheral to the philosophic vision. Even Lohmann's statement seems to harbor an unexamined assumption based on the liberal private/public divide, that holding virtues are somehow "ethnocentric" and not "universal." An embodied materialism connotes the enfoldment of time in pleasure and suffering, hardiness and commitment, stability and security. These ways of being are the qualities of engagement that marginalized meta-industrial workers, women, and subsistence dwellers bring to their dialogue with nature. In contrast to the profoundly alienated proletariat of Marx's urban economic vision, such people carry an alternative way of knowing and doing, one that is sorely needed to build an Earth democracy. Today, when so many are dependent on a global division of labor to meet their daily needs, the liberal goal of autonomy is all but impossible. Substantively, Humphrey's meaning might be better served by words like "self-reliance" and "self-sufficiency." An ecofeminist transvaluation of the mode of reproduction coincides with development critic Wolfgang Sachs's respect for "societies which live graciously within their means, and for social changes which take their inspiration from indigenous ideas of the good and proper life."26 This does not mean going backward in history, as liberals, mainstream feminists, and other Western fundamentalists sometimes claim. It means questioning ingrained habits of thought and being more fully conscious of what we are about. Conclusion What is hopeful for a future symbiosis of deep ecology and ecofeminism is their shared theory of internal relations. Every one of my criticisms of deep ecology can be met if the logic of identity/nonidentity is carefully applied. So this essay is an invitation to both deep ecologists and their liberal critics to join ecofeminist endeavors. In valuing the embodied materialist practices and consciousness of people at the interface of Humanity and Nature, we encounter new truths about ourselves and unexpected ethical and epistemological insights. Furthermore, by any criterion, it is moral to give voice to those we presently resource as objects.
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Notes 1. Ariel Salleh, "Deeper Than Deep Ecology: The Ecofeminist Connection," Environmental Ethics 6 (1984): 339 345. The paper was one of three that I read at the Environment Ethics and Ecology Conference, Australian National University, August 26 28, 1983. The other two papers were published as Ariel Salleh, "The Growth of Ecofeminism," Chain Reaction 36 (1984): 26 28, and "From Feminism to Ecology," Social Alternatives 4 (1984): 8 12. My ecofeminist critique of deep ecology addressed two texts: Arne Naess, "The Shallow and the Deep, Long Range Ecology Movement,'' Inquiry 16:1 (1973): 95 100; and Bill Devall, "The Deep Ecology Movement," Natural Resources Journal 20 (1980): 299 322. Writings in the debates among deep ecology, ecofeminism, and social ecology include the following: Alan Wittbecker, "Deep Anthropology, Ecology, and Human Order," Environmental Ethics 8 (1986): 261 270; Donald Davis, "The Seduction of Sophia," Environmental Ethics 8 (1986): 151 162; Michael E. Zimmerman, "Feminism, Deep Ecology and Environmental Ethics," Environmental Ethics 9 (1987): 21 44; Janet Biehl, "It's Deep but Is It Broad?" Kick It Over (Winter 1987): 2A 4A; Kirkpatrick Sale, "Ecofeminism: A New Perspective," The Nation (September 26, 1987): 302 305; Ynestra King, "What Is Ecofeminism?" The Nation (December 12, 1987): 702, 730 731; Jim Cheney, "Ecofeminism and Deep Ecology," Environmental Ethics 9 (1987): 115 145; Kirkpatrick Sale, "Deep Ecology and Its Critics," The Nation (May 14, 1988): 670 675; Murray Bookchin, "Social Ecology Versus Deep Ecology," Socialist Review 18 (1988): 9 29; Tim Luke, "The Dreams of Deep Ecology," Telos 76 (1988): 65 92; Marti Kheel, 'Ecofeminism and Deep Ecology: Reflections on Identity and Difference," in Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, edited by Irene Diamond and Gloria Orenstein (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1999), 128 137; Warwick Fox, "The Deep EcologyEcofeminism Debate and Its Parallels," Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 5 25; Sharon Doubiago, "Mama Coyote Talks to the Boys," in Healing the Wounds, edited by Judith Plant (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1989), 40 44; George Bradford, How Deep Is Deep Ecology? (Ojal, CA: Times Change Press, 1989); Ariel Salleh, "The Ecofeminism/Deep Ecology Debate: A Reply to Patriarchal Reason," Environmental Ethics 14 (1992): 195 215; Ariel Salleh, "Class, Race, and Gender Discourse in the Ecofeminism/Deep Ecology Debate," Environmental Ethics 15 (1993): 225 244; Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993); Deborah Slicer, "Is There an Ecofeminism-Deep Ecology Debate?" Environmental Ethics 17 (1995): 151 169. 2. Mathew Humphrey, "Ontological Determinism and Deep Ecology: Evading the Moral Questions?" chapter 5 in this volume. 3. My interest in an embodied materialism, critical theory, and logic of identity/non-identity has evolved through various articles since the early 1980s. These are cited in Ariel Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern (London: Zed; New York: St Martin's Press, 1997). 4. Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, edited and translated by David Rothenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). The 20:80 thesis encapsu-
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lates the fact that 20 percent of the global population uses 80 percent of global resources, while 80 percent of the global population uses 20 percent of global resources. 5. Ibid.; Bill Devall, Simple in Means, Rich in Ends (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1988), p. 59; Andrew McLaughlin, Regarding Nature: Industrialism and Deep Ecology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 207 208. 6. Kirkpatrick Sale, Dwellers in the Land (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1985). 7. Humphrey, "Ontological Determinism and Deep Ecology." 8. The Man/Woman=Nature formula and its "1/0: body logic" are discussed in Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics, chapters 3 and 4. 9. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988). 10. Larry Lohmann, "Resisting Green Globalism," in Global Ecology, edited by Wolfgang Sachs, (London: Zed, 1994), p. 158. 11. The argument that follows is adapted from Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics, chapter 9. 12. Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon, 1989). See also Gregory Bateson, Steps Toward an Ecology of Mind (St. Albans Herts, UK: Paladin, 1973), p. 437. 13. Ruddick, Maternal Thinking, 79. Her reference here is to Adrienne Rich, Lies, Secrets, and Silence (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 205. 14. Deborah Bird Rose, Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness (Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission, 1996). 15. Manfred Max-Neef et al., Human Scale Development (New York: Apex, 1991). 16. Nancy Hartsock, Money, Sex and Power (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1985); Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism (San Francisco: Freeman, 1983). 17. Mary Dietz, "Citizenship with a Feminist Face: The problem with Maternal Thinking," Political Theory 13 (1985): 87. 18. Ariel Salleh, "Contribution to the Critique of Political Epistemology," Thesis Eleven 8 (1984): 33. 19. In my "Deeper than Deep Ecology," I criticized Naess's language for its instrumentalism. The criticism still applies to the essay in question, but needless to say, after a decade of debate, all of us choose our words more cautiously now. 20. Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism (London: Zed, 1993), p. 164. 21. However, the new social movementsfeminist, gay, and indigenousare now instating the body in politics. 22. This paradox was explored in Salleh, "Contribution to the Critique of Political Epistemology," but glossed over in "Deeper than Deep Ecology," so as not to overload a piece written for an activist conference. Nevertheless, "Contribution . . .'' was cited in "Deeper . . ." for scholars wanting to pursue more theoretical aspects of the ecofeminist case. Unfortunately, few of my American sisters took the trouble. The resultant "critiques" of my supposed essentialism can be read in Karen Warren, ed., Ecological Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1994).
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23. See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Nel Noddings, Caring (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 24. Lohmann, "Resisting Green Globalism," p. 167. Italics added. 25. Marti Kheel, "The Liberation of Nature: A Circular Affair," Environmental Ethics 7 (1985): 139 149. 26. Wolfgang Sachs, ed., Global Ecology (London: Zed, 1994), p. 4.
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7 Callicott and Naess on Pluralism Andrew Light As environmental ethics approaches its third decade it finds itself at a curious crossroads. On the one hand it has produced a plurality of positions and theories answering the call for a ground from which to extend moral consideration to nonhumans. 1 On the other hand, the discipline is also marked heavily by a predisposition to suppose that there are certain definite approaches in the field which are necessarily more promising than others, and perhaps even that these approaches are the only ones which could possibly be true. We are told by some theorists that we must assume that an adequate and workable environmental ethics must embrace a restricted set of properties: nonanthropocentrism, holism, moral monism, and, perhaps, a commitment to some form of intrinsic value. But given the relative age of environmental philosophy as a recognizable sub-discipline in its own right, how do we account for the presupposition that we have settled into agreement, as a community of scholars, on the right path to environmental foundations? Are we prepared to defend as an uncontroversial intuition J. Baird Callicott's claim that until Christopher Stone's book on pluralism in environmental ethics came along in 1988 (Earth and Other Ethics), he was prepared for the discipline (meaning right-thinking nonanthropocentrists) to "begin to work toward the creation of an intellectual federation and try to put an end to the balkanization of nonanthropocentric moral philosophy"?2 Callicott presumed, in other words, that it was settled that monistic nonanthropocentrism was the agreed-upon direction for environmental ethics, and he was thus prepared to move ahead unencumbered. Surely it is not odd for philosophers to think they have the right answers, but it should give us pause that in a field so young it is already the considered opinion of a critical mass of scholars that anyone who is still questioning which sides they will take on the anthropocentrism-nonanthropocentrism, holism-individualism, intrinsic-instrumental value, and monism pluralism debates is just being unnecessarily obfuscatory. In this essay I want to revisit one of the prejudices of contemporary environmental ethics, moral monism, and take up the debate currently in progress
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about the alternative, moral pluralism. Monists in environmental ethics generally argue that a single moral philosophy or ethical theory is required to generate our correct duties and obligations toward the environment. Pluralists, again generally speaking, argue that this cannot be the case because the sources of value in nature are too heterogeneous, and because the multitude of contexts in which we find ourselves in different kinds of ethical relationships demands a diverse set of approaches for fulfilling our moral obligations. On Callicott's account, however, a commitment to monism is one of the strongest stances that must be maintained in environmental ethics. In one of his most important contributions to the monism pluralism debate, Callicott, in offering a brief refutation of the suggestion that Holmes Rolston is not a monist, remarks: "Given that even Rolston is not really a pluralist after all, one begins to wonder why our best, most systematic, and thoroughgoing environmental philosophers cling to moral monism." 3 Obviously, many very well-respected theorists in this field may have some disagreement with such a claim. In fact, aside from Stone, Andrew Brennan, Gary Varner, Peter Wenz, Anthony Weston, Eugene Hargrove, and many other systematic and "thoroughgoing" theorists have come out on the pluralist side of the debate.4 In investigating this issue further, I will proceed by taking up the monism pluralism debate as it has been further advanced by Callicott in the Journal of Philosophical Research. From there, however, I will take a different turn from the normal discussion of this issue. Specifically, I will take up the question of where Arne Naess's environmental philosophy fits into the monist pluralist divide. In the discussions of the monism pluralism debate there is little or no mention at all of Naess's work, even though he may have worked out some of the most sophisticated versions of pluralism in environmental thought. Unfortunately, Naess's work has generally been relegated to the historical background to debates like this, rather than being read as an active voice in the field. But Naess has always been very straightforward that the premises of the eight points of the deep ecology platform possibly are derivable from a variety of competing traditions.5 Is it the case, then, that his work already embodies some of the virtues of pluralism which have been defended by various Anglo-American environmental ethicists against Callicott? My argument will be that Naess does indeed articulate, or at least suggest, a pluralist form of environmental philosophy which avoids the foibles of pluralism that Callicott fears: the descentor headlong rush, ratherfrom pluralism to moral relativism and deconstructive postmodernism. I will also argue that the best frame within which to evaluate arguments for moral pluralism is to pay attention to what embracing such a position does for bridging the gap between
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environmental theory and practice, rather than to what such a turn to pluralism means in a more abstract sense. Callicott's Theoretical Monism Calls for the reassessment of the prejudices of the direction of environmental ethics ought to carry some weight, given the object of our study: the troubling state of the environment and the complicity of humans in the creation of these hazardous conditionshazardous to humans, nonhumans, future generations of both, and the biosphere itself. 6 Environmental philosophy is the attempt to bring the traditions, history, and skills of philosophy to bear on the questions of how to maintain the long-term sustainability of life on this planet. Not to be presumptuous, but if philosophers can contribute anything to the reconciliation of more stable human-nature relationships, then clarifying the direction of the discipline may be one of our most important theoretical enterprises. The call for caution in thinking we have settled on how to work toward one definite kind of environmental philosophy is fueled by an argument voiced by Anthony Weston that, given the early, or "originary," stages of our field of inquiry, we should assume that our field should be less settled on the right avenue for proceeding, rather than more settled. Weston suggests, partly in response to the claims cited earlier by Callicott: At the original stage we should . . . expect a variety of fairly incompatible outlines coupled with a wide range of proto-practices, even social experiments of various sorts, all contributing to a kind of cultural working-through of a new set of possibilities. . . . [O]riginary stages [should not] speak with one voice. Once a set of values is culturally consolidated, it may well be possible, perhaps even necessary, to reduce them to some kind of consistency. But environmental values are unlikely to be in such a position for a very long time. The necessary period of ferment, cultural experimentation, and thus multi-vocality is only beginning.7 Thus, the burden of proof, given the moment we are in, is on those who would wish to restrict the field to one right path for the construction of normative theories of our treatment of nature, rather than on those who resist the trends to narrow environmental philosophy. Callicott has legitimately replied to such sentiments that those same demands which make reevaluation of the discipline important also make stabilization on a narrow path of work equally important. Given the environmental crisis we face, how could we afford the sorts of delays seemingly implicit in talk of "social experiments"? Moral pluralism, the specific target of Callicott's earlier worries over the pollution in environmental axiology, at times sounds dangerously close to the abject relativism associated with deconstructive postmodernism.
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And relativism is something that we may agree, with Callicott, ought to be avoided when the point of our inquiry is to respond to the deepening environmental crisis. 8 But assuming for the moment that we can answer the relativist charge against pluralism (a point I will return to later), what are our options if we want to avoid the prejudices of moral monism? Callicott has suggested an alternative to pluralism in environmental ethics that he believes gets the advantages of pluralism without its problems. In "Moral Monism in Environmental Ethics Defended," he negotiates the criticisms of various pluralists (Wenz, Varner, Brennan, Weston, and Hargrove) by describing his approach to environmental ethics as a form of "communitarianism," where "all our dutiesto people, to animals, to natureare expressible in a common vocabulary of community,'' and so "may be weighed and compared in commensurable terms."9 Before criticizing this view, I will unpack Callicott's justification for this claim and outline how he thinks it is a good alternative to pluralism. Callicott begins the article with a summary of his now familiar objections to the pluralism of Christopher Stone. The argument is that Stone's form of pluralismtermed by Callicott intrapersonal pluralismwhich supposes that an agent can adopt different moral principles for determining either forms of value or grounds for action, depending on the object under consideration, is ultimately facile and incoherent. Our many moral concerns as environmentalistsfor fellow humans, other animals, and the larger environmentthough difficult to negotiate under the terms of one moral theory, cannot be resolved simply by accepting the apparent necessity of the need to move from one moral theory to another, depending on the sort of problem that needs to be solved. According to Callicott: When an agent adopts an ethical theory, an ethical "intellectual framework" as Stone defines his neologism, he or she adopts a moral psychology, a notion of the supreme good, a criterion of moral considerability, among other foundational ideas. Facilely becoming a utilitarian for this purpose, a deontologist for that, an Aristotelian for another, and so on, implies either that the pluralist simultaneously hold all the contradictory foundational ideas supporting each theory, or first affirm one set, then reject it in favor of another, and then reject that set for yet another, only to return to the first later, back and forth, round and round. A mature moral agent, I submit, wants a coherent outlookthe one that seems true. He or she cannot comfortably live in a state of self-contradiction or as the philosophical equivalent of an individual with a multiple personality disorder.10 Instead of Stone's pluralism, Callicott offers his communitarian alternative. Since we are all members of different communitiesfamilies, regions, nations, and so onit follows that each membership generates "peculiar" duties and
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obligations. Therefore, says Callicott, "We can hold a single moral philosophy and a univocal ethical theory, but one that provides for a multiplicity of community memberships, each with its peculiar ethic." 11 Therefore, when faced with the infamous choice between spotted owls and the livelihood of Pacific Northwest logging communities, we have to realize that we are connected to both of these communities, with each membership resulting in different obligations. Still, realizing that our membership in the "larger biotic community generates duties to preserve the old-growth forest ecosystem and the endangered species . . . that depend on it," we have to decide between "temporarily preserving a human life-system that is doomed in any event and preserving in perpetuity an ecosystem and the species that depend upon it."12 On Callicott's account, our duties to the ecosystem outweigh our duties to the loggers even though we are members of communities that encompass both as sources of value. Balancing our obligations to the various communities in which we belong is therefore a key to Callicott's solution to the problem of how we balance moral concerns to different subjects without resorting to pluralism. The question that immediately springs to mind is whether Callicott's communitarianism really answers the original questions raised by the pluralists in environmental ethics. If Callicott's communitarianism is enough to get us an answer to the problem of valuing all types of things in an environment, then why did the pluralists advocate intrapersonal pluralism in the first place? The answer may be that the original concern of pluralists was more over the relationship between our theory-making in environmental ethics and our practice, rather than over the issues Callicott is concerned with. Two sorts of problems are cited in the literature on pluralism in environmental philosophy. One concerns the issue of the complexity of the subject of our theoretical enterprise, the environment as a whole, which includes many more kinds of entities than normally found in traditional moral inquiry. The second problem concerns finding a practical solution to disagreements over forms of valuation among theorists and practitioners. Andrew Brennan, defending a form of pluralism even more extreme than Stone's, puts it in this way: By adopting the pluralist stance, we not only start to do justice to the complexity of real situations, but we also can start to look for ways by which environmental ethics can be linked up with other modes of valuing and ways of responding to our surroundings. Utilitarianism and its rivals need not be abandoned, but can be considered as partial accounts of the moral life. There is scope, for example, for developing notions such as attention, humility and selflessness in our dealings with nature as part of the story of what makes a worthwhile human life. These notions should not be thought of as the truth about moralityany more than utilitarianism is. Rather they provide greater depth in characterizing our situation. Abandoning reductive monism about values and valuing
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makes even more sense once the force of moral pluralism in this latest form is recognized. 13 It is not clear from Callicott's account that his communitarianism actually gets the results sought by Brennan and other pluralists. How is it that simply recognizing that we are parts of different moral communitiessomething Callicott has been arguing for quite some timegets us the compatibility with seemingly rival forms of valuing as articulated through the pragmatic intuitions of someone like Brennan? It is this notion of pluralism as a kind of compatibilism, embraced by Brennan, that I think is the most interesting issue in the literature on pluralism in environmental philosophy. And, to his credit, Callicott does acknowledge that at least in one sense he is something like a pluralist in this respect, albeit what he calls an "interpersonal pluralist." By this he means that he upholds "everyone else's right to explore or to adopt a moral philosophy and ethical theory that seems persuasive to them."14 Along with this commitment to the "flourishing of philosophy" is a commitment to reasoned persuasion: "Intelligent people of good will should eventually reach agreement if they take the time to thrash out their initial differences."15 But surely this form of pluralism is insufficient to get the compatibilism among forms of evaluation that is argued for by Brennan. Toleration of the act of theorizing of different views does not get us the kind of cooperation among theorists that Brennan seems to have in mind. Brennan's pluralist would not only acknowledge the other forms of theory-making but also go on to set aside her possible prejudices for now of the falsity of those other forms of valuing. As long as those forms of valuation are geared toward the same end, we can ignore for the time being the issue of the truth about which scheme of valuation is actually right for the purpose of understanding our situation, as Brennan puts it, in greater "depth.'' To me, the depth of our situation will ultimately be realized in part through an acknowledgment of how the ends of moral discourse must be given priority in environmental philosophy. Normally our end is to better the environment, and so we must be concerned at least as much with creating agreement on those policies we all support as with finding the truth of how to value nature. This is not to advocate, as Callicott puts it, "deconstructive postmodern différance," but instead simply to acknowledge that the environmental situation we face requires us to adopt certain compatibilist rules for theory-making, even if we are at heart moral realists. But perhaps it is the case that Callicott is not really concerned with this question of the relationship between theory and practice. Since his original target was Stone's argument that one can adopt different schemes of valuing for dif-
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ferent kinds of things in nature, maybe the issue of how intertheoretic compatibilism is to be encouraged among theorists and practitioners is not really a concern for him. There does not appear to be anything explicit in Callicott's account that would prohibit him from consenting to something like Bryan Norton's convergence hypothesis, allowing for an agreement on ends among, for example, anthropocentrists and nonanthropocentrists. 16 In this sense, there seems to be no objection in Callicott's argument to the motivation behind the pluralist stance as embraced by Brennan, only to the way in which pluralism is instantiated intrapersonally by various theorists. Let us then say that Callicott appears to reject Stone's theory, which I will call a kind of theoretical pluralism, while he may assent to the metatheoretical pluralism of Brennan or Norton. Metatheoretical pluralism then is simply an acknowledgment of the need for divergent ethical theories to work together in a single moral enterprise despite their theoretical differences. In fact, even though Callicott does not take up the issue of Brennan's meta-theoretical pluralism in this argument, he does acknowledge the accusation of Anthony Weston that he (Callicott) is trying "prematurely . . . [to] shut off further discussion and development of the field."17 Callicott objects that Weston has confused his rejection of intrapersonal pluralism with his position on interpersonal pluralism. Callicott emphasizes again that he does not want to close off discussion in environmental ethics, but rather to "keep the interpersonal debate going." One might suppose that this is enough of an answer to the concern over how Callicott falls out on metatheoretical pluralism. If Callicott tolerates the existence of competing forms of valuation, then surely he must tolerate the idea of divergent theories working together in a common enterprise, be they monist, pluralist, or some other variation. If metatheoretical pluralism really is the interesting issue raised by the pluralists, then given what we can determine is Callicott's tacit agreement to it, perhaps his communitarianism (combined with his "interpersonalism") is sufficient as a substitute for pluralism after all. But here I think we must be cautious. There is actually no reason to believe that Callicott would make the turn from toleration of different theory formation (which is the heart of his interpersonal stance) to embracing compatible cooperation among theories of the sort advocated by Brennan. Since Callicott uses an allusion to communitarianism to clarify his argument, I will do the same. Suppose that two human communities exist which both embrace some form of an acknowledgment of the right to free expression. Suppose next that they differ in respect to the reasons they both value something else outside their self-defined political community, though common to bothfor example, a
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common ecosystem. One of these groups may value the ecosystem on some scheme of intrinsic value while the other may value it for its instrumental value for the human community only. Now finally suppose that an opportunity arises such that both groups could cooperate to increase the overall welfare of the ecosystem, perhaps because of some situation where the boundaries of the ecosystem cross into both communities' territories. It does not follow merely on the basis of the fact that both communities embrace a right of free expression of ideas (which is relevantly similar to Callicott's interpersonal pluralism) that they will then proceed to cooperate to increase the welfare of their common ecosystem. The group holding the intrinsic value theory of how to value an ecosystem could find too repugnant the instrumental valuation of the other community. Cooperating with the instrumentalists might amount to some form of revisionism, or worse. Or perhaps the intrinsic value community would not participate with the instrumentalists for fear that the instrumentalists would eventually renege on their commitment to the welfare of the shared ecosystem, since after all they are instrumentalists. On the other side, the instrumentalists might simply rank too low, on their priorities for public projects, the sort of cooperation scheme required in the case. Or maybe they, too, find cooperating with people who have such obviously false views distasteful. The point, however, is that a pluralism with respect to theory formation either inside or outside any community does not necessarily culminate in a commitment to thinking or acting in such a way that convergence is considered an end of inquiry or action. In previous work I argued for what I now call methodological pragmatism (my earlier term was the inelegant "metaphilosophical pragmatism"), intended in part to get at the sort of metatheoretical pluralism embraced by Brennan. 18 I will not review this argument in full here, but only reiterate that methodological environmental pragmatism is compatible with any form of environmental philosophy; it requires only new "rules for the game" of how to do environmental philosophy, rules that will promote greater compatibility in the relationship between good theorizing and effective environmental practices. Methodological pragmatism provides a litmus test against which competing modes of ethical evaluation can be weighed. So the "extreme pluralism" criticized throughout this essay by Callicott (the idea that one would adopt Aristotle's theory on one occasion, Kant's on another, etc.) is not what I have in mind as metatheoretical pluralism. My pluralist (and, I think, Weston's, Norton's, and Brennan's), in acknowledging distinct bases for value, would at least be consistent in the application of the best (all things considered) moral theory to a particular type of object of valuation, and not change theories with the evaluation of each token. In other words, my metatheoretical pluralist is
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not an ethical situationalist, and presumably, since he or she is a competent philosopher, would not apply theories willy-nilly in a self-defeating manner (as Callicott, at the end of this essay, hints an extreme pluralist would). But most important, and hence distinct from Callicott's view, my methodological pragmatist would not simply tolerate interpersonal pluralism but would advocate multiple overlapping arguments for environmental valuation when endorsing environmental policies, in order to generate as broad a basis of support as possible for the proposed action. Even though my theorist's scheme of valuation would be consistent, such normative consistency would not be required across the board for all those embracing any given policy. Callicott characterizes Weston's project in "Before Environmental Ethics" as an attempt to radically refocus the goal of environmental philosophy. But this is not what I am up to here. I still think, along with Callicott, that what we should be doing is "systematic environmental philosophy." But systematic environmental philosophy cannot be systematic philosophy in a vacuum. Not to sound too vulgar (especially since I have a great admiration for people who do modal logic), but our object of concern is not the question of the spatiotemporal existence of other possible worlds but the future of the one world we are confident we do inhabit. Surely our method of interacting as philosophers must push the envelope of Callicott's interpersonal pluralism beyond what we would expect it to be for any well-trained philosopher working on any topic. Any philosopher who thought it appropriate to censure the work of his colleagues only because it is different from his own, or failed to give it a fair hearing, would simply be a bad philosopher. We need not theorize about varieties of pluralism to get to that conclusion. The most interesting question concerning pluralism in environmental ethics is perhaps a question different from the one Callicott has taken up, since he never really addresses the issue of what I am calling metatheoretical pluralism. Again Andrew Brennan provides a valuable insight: If we accept moral pluralism as a philosophical position, the project of environmental ethics can be seen in a new light. The challenge of non-anthropocentric ethics to the western, human-centered tradition need not be described as an attempt to supplant one set of principles . . . with some new overarching set that embrace not only human concerns but also the interests, whatever they are, of other natural things. . . . [E]nvironmental ethics is less a competitor for a certain moral position, but an investigation of a more sophisticated turn that moral philosophy has taken. Embarking upon it is a partial recognition of the complexity of our moral situation. Note, once more, that the complexity in question is intrinsic to the business of being moral. Moral pluralism is a philosophical, not a moral, thesis. 19 If we follow Brennan's line of reasoning, an argument that I think is both crucial to and lost in discussions of pluralism in this literature, then we can easily
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grant Callicott's arguments against Stone. But we should not stop there. We must also argue that Callicott, and many others who consider these questions, rethink what is at stake in the pluralism-monism debate in environmental ethics. 20 As I said at the beginning, environmental ethics does seem to be marked with certain prejudices in the field, not the least of which is how we have constructed some of the defining debates in the discipline. We need to ask whether the way we approach the practice of doing philosophy (which I agree with Callicott is still what we are up to here) meets the needs of the object of our concern. Naess's Metatheoretical Pluralism I would add one caveat to Brennan's claim that moral pluralism is a philosophical rather than a moral thesis. I think that, more accurately stated, it is a practical philosophical thesis, meaning that it is not simply a claim about how to do philosophy but rather how to do philosophy in response to a certain set of problems. Bryan Norton has argued for a distinction between practical and applied philosophy that explains this comment. On Norton's account, applied philosophy is the imposition of a philosophical scheme on top of a problem in the world, while practical philosophy, in contrast, "is problem-oriented; it treats theories as tools of the understanding, tools that are developed in the process of addressing specific policy controversies." Practical philosophers therefore do not assume that "theoretical issues can be resolved in isolation to real problems." While the practical philosopher can certainly work toward developing a "unified vision of environmental goals and objectives," in the meantime, theoretical differences can be set aside provided all disputants can ''agree on important management principles . . . despite disagreement on ultimate values."21 Given this distinction, Norton argues that the difference between monism and pluralism is actually much more profound than may at first be assumed. These are two entirely different ways of doing philosophy in the context of its relationship to practice. Approvingly citing Weston's remarks on this subject, Norton characterizes monists as those who do not want to muck up the activity of theory formation with the "details of everyday environmental management practice." Somewhat hyperbolically, Norton puts it this way: As applied philosophers, they [monists] hope to resolve environmental problems by throwing fully formed theories and principles over the edge of the ivory tower, to be used as intellectual armaments by the currently outgunned environmental activists, to aid them against the economic philistines in the political street wars that determine the
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fate of natural environments. This heroic version of applied philosophy's role in the policy process will only be realized if environmental ethicists, laboring in the tower, can agree on which theory to throw down to the street fighters. 22 We may wish to shrug off such a description as being a bit unfair to the monists, but even so, the point remains that the activity of philosophy as described by some pluralists is very different from an even more charitable description of the monist's project. Norton goes on in the rest of his article to criticize Callicott's monism further, toward the claim that nonanthropocentrism itself, surely thought of as the bulwark of environmental ethics, should be challenged along with its monistic ground. If we are going to be pluralists (either theoretical or metatheoretical), we have to accept lots of kinds of value formation, not just what has traditionally passed for the range of positions in nonanthropocentric value theory. But I do not want to take this argument in that direction. I do not wish to shore up Norton's criticisms of Callicott here (even though I think they are very serious), or turn what I take to be the approach to pluralism that I share with Norton, Brennan, and perhaps Weston into a criticism of another ethical monist. Instead, I want to turn this discussion toward a more positive extension of this general pluralist approach to another theorist.23 If we are going to reshape the debate between monism and pluralism along metatheoretical lines, then we also need to reassess what theories have normally been placed on which side of the dividing line. In particular, I think that this turn to a new terrain for the monism pluralism debate demands that we bring into this conversation the work of Arne Naess. It is probably true that many monists would consider Naess's formal philosophical system (his "Ecosophy T") to be a paradigm case of moral monism, since it seems to emanate from a single source: the argument for the intuitive and innate connection between humans and the world around them. Since deep ecologists like Warwick Fox have argued for some time that the point of deep ecology is that there is no ontological divide which can be made between humans and nonhumans, that claim could be argued as the monistic principle from which our duties to each other and the environment could be derived.24 But Naess's formal system is best interpreted as theoretically pluralist, and his comments on how to do environmental philosophy point out that he is a metatheoretical pluralist as well. Since I think that the metatheoretical argument is the more interesting ground for the monism pluralism debate, I will spend most of my time on that part of Naess's view. Perhaps Norton would be surprised that I should consider Naess in this way, especially since Norton has famously argued that there is a distinct lack of pluralistic impulses among deep
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ecologists, and that the entire deep ecology shallow ecology distinction did more to interrupt convergence on environmental policies among theorists and activists than almost any other distinction in the literature. 25 But Naess, perhaps more than any other deep ecologist, has worked to foster a form of meta-theoretical pluralism both inside and outside deep ecology circles. And since Naess never really got involved in the old monism pluralism debate as its ground was defined by Callicott and others, we can safely say that for Naess the issue of pluralism in environmental philosophy has always been the question of how to do philosophy, rather than an argument over the specific content of our ethical evaluations of different things in the world.26 Naess has pointed out specifically that behind the eight points (or principles) of deep ecology are the nonexclusive overlapping sources of deep ecological thought which constitute the multiple foundations for the theory.27 The foundations are Christiansome people will argue there are strong intrinsic value presuppositions even in the stewardship view from Genesis; Buddhistprimarily, according to Naess, as found in the work of Dogen;28 and philosophicalspecifically from Whitehead's process philosophy and from Naess's readings of Spinoza on the connectedness of mind and matter. We need not go into the details of how the foundations inform the principles here, but only note that Naess is very careful to argue that one may get to the principles of deep ecology from any of the foundations. As far as theoretical pluralism goes, this should be enough to get us at least the "moderate moral pluralism" endorsed by Peter Wenz, where a single ethical theory is pluralistic insofar as it "contains a variety of independent principles, principles that cannot all be reduced to or derived from a single master principle."29 On Naess's account, the pluralistic relationship is between foundations and principles, rather than principles and principles, but the argument is still the same: the principles of deep ecology are derivable from distinct but overlapping foundations, and one need not assent to even the coherence of any one of the foundations in order to derive the principles out of another of the foundations.30 We can test this approach as a form of pluralism by comparing it with the previously established example of moral monism. Callicott argues persuasively that his form of monism is at the level of theory but not of principle. But, regardless of this argument, it is still the case that the idea of the importance of belonging to different communities, which he derives from Leopold, is still the foundation for the different principles that we can assume would emerge from our different obligations to different communities in which we participate.31 So all principles are monistically derived. Naess, on the other hand, does not find the rationale for his multiple principles in one source or even a specific collection of sources. It is crucial for Naess that one
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can come to the principles of deep ecology from a variety of foundations. Different people will assent to the principles of deep ecology for different reasons, hopefully building a broader movement around the policies endorsed by deep ecologists. 32 The most important article that Naess has written on the issue of metatheoretical pluralism is "The Encouraging Richness and Diversity of Ultimate Premises in Environmental Philosophy."33 In this largely unknown piece (outside deep ecology circles), Naess acknowledges early on that the style of his approach to the issue of pluralism belongs to "a somewhat different tradition of metaethical discussion and methodology than the chief participants of the ethical monism/pluralism debate."34 His first premise is that one of the central tasks of environmental philosophers is "to study different positions but not to try to reduce the ultimate differences" between those positions.35 Such a view certainly is in line with the metatheoretical pluralism I am advocating, and may even go beyond it. What Naess has in mind here is a principle of respect for different cultural approaches to environmental problems. In fact, he embraces an explicitly cultural form of pluralism. I will return to the question of the cultural pluralism at work in this piece later, and compare it with Callicott's similar argument taking up this same challenge. But for now I want to suggest that the argument Naess works out in this article is not restricted to issues of cultural pluralism and is consistent with the positions previously outlined by Brennan and Norton. Naess may even be more explicit in his embrace of metatheoretical pluralism than any of the theorists cited so far. Naess's first reason for advocating an extreme form of compatibilism among theories and theorists is found in his intuition that a uniformity in views on valuing nature would indicate a stagnation rather than a strength of environmental ethics. Going beyond Callicott's embrace of interpersonal pluralism, Naess sees not only a potential for fruitful philosophical argument in a diversity of views, but also something of a basis for a claim to the strength of environmental thought in general based on that diversity. Like Weston's remarks about how we ought to find any discipline at its ordinary stages, Naess suggests that the cultural richness and diversity that we may think are part of a good environmental philosophy cannot be sustained "under conditions of increasing similarity of ultimate views."36 According to Naess, even if it could be shown that we could have a unified theory of all of reality, "it does not follow that adequate, verbal accounts of this oneness should or must converge or be practically translatable into each other."37 Now some may be troubled by this claim since it seems to value diversity as a primitive rather than as a means to an end, namely the end of coming up with
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a rich and robust environmental philosophy that helps in the formulation of environmental policies. But for Naess, since we can expect that diversity of forms of valuing is proof of the thickness of the subject of valuations, it follows that a diversity of views is the norm for environmental philosophy. If we are worried about the limits to our toleration of other views, then, Naess argues (in a passage very similar to Norton's argument concerning the compatibility of different views for purposes of policy formation), there are certain restrictions we can assume: "The only reason to attack a religious or philosophical ultimate premise seems to be the assumption that a particular environmentally unacceptable position follows with necessity from it." 38 In some respects we can say that Naess is really addressing the variety of positions between different members, or even factions, of what is loosely thought of as the deep ecology movement. In a passage similar to the ones cited at the beginning of this discussion concerning how we must not imperil different ultimate premises, Naess remarks: "Most deep ecologists have fundamental differences from each other, and speak in a variety of terminologies. Questioning one's motives leads inevitably to philosophical positions and from there back to practice."39 While some may consider this concern with one group of activists and philosophers a limitation in Naess's metatheoretical pluralism, I think instead that it is a sign of why we environmental ethicists should heed his advice more keenly than that of others. Naess is one of the few environmental philosophers in the world who can claim to have directly and determinately affected a movement of practitioners, and possibly even some policy makers. His desire to forge some sort of ground for agreement among them is a practical, not an applied or even theoretical, problem. When Naess asks deep ecologists around the world to respect each other's ultimate premises toward a goal of some form of metatheoretical pluralism, he is not simply engaging in a theoretical dispute with a colleague, but trying to forge better links between thousands of on the ground environmental activists. We can be assured, then, that his motivations are practical in Norton's sense, and consistent with Brennan's worry about how to rethink the task of philosophy, given the challenge of environmental problems. A second reason for metatheoretical pluralism in the "Encouraging Richness" article is found in Naess's distinction between what we implicitly assume in the way we theorize our moral views, and what we explicitly say in ethical conflicts. The two need not be the same. Naess is in principle skeptical that there can be any systematically articulated total view of environmental ethics, consisting in a coherent set of premises and conclusions, which would be logically complete.40 But setting aside the objections that those of us who embrace some
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form of moral realism might have to this claim, we can turn our attention to the part of this argument concerning our responsibility for what we say in ethical conflicts. For Naess, a good environmental philosopher needs to be something of a practical anthropologist, with a good understanding of moral customs such that cooperation among environmentalists is not only considered possible, but is made the goal of the theoretical enterprise. With the implicit/explicit distinction Naess is able to outline two goals for environmental philosophy that may appear incompatible, but that are entirely consistent, given the context in which he places environmental theory: on the one hand we should aim toward perfecting our theoriesmonist, theoretically pluralist, or whateverand on the other we are obliged to work with the assumptions, principles, and theories of those with whom we must work to see environmental reform, even if we disagree with those views. For Naess, the subject of environmental philosophy, and the need to respond to the crisis of the environment, drive this possible bifurcation of the goals of the field, rather than something intrinsic to the generic practice of philosophy. As a good practical philosopher, Naess sees this strategy as called for by the particular situation we are in with respect to environmental philosophy. Again, Naess uses an intramural example to make his point: "The supporters of the deep ecology movement cooperate in the fight to implement decisions on the level of concrete situations with everybody who sincerely supports a decision." 41 Now it is generally regarded that the limits to Naess's acknowledged compatibilism would include drawing the line at cooperation with "shallow" or reform-oriented ecologists and environmentalists. Like the relationship between Callicott's interpersonal pluralism and some form of metatheoretical pluralism, we could assume that there is no reason why the structure of Naess's comments regarding the need for intramural cooperation between different schools of deep ecologists would necessarily translate into reasons for broader forms of convergence. Like Callicott, we would need Naess to extend his claims about pluralism explicitly to the shallow ecologists, since we can assume, given some of Naess's previous work, that he would be skeptical about such claims for convergence. But in the very next sentence after the one quoted in the previous paragraph, arguing for an explicit form of metatheoretical pluralism among deep ecologists, Naess sets these worries to rest. Naess asks the rhetorical question: "What could the supporters [of the deep ecology movement] achieve without cooperation with people whose general argumentation pattern for instance in terms of premise/conclusion relations, is shallow or merely concerned with reforms?"42 Presumably, very little. The striking thing about this passage is that it brings Naess much closer to Norton's convergence thesis than
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might initially be thought. Perhaps one could maintain that Naess still thinks there is a sharper divide between deep and shallow ecologists than Norton is ready to admit. But surely those differences dissolve, given the observation that the point of both Naess's and Norton's metatheoretical pluralism is convergence on policies in order to achieve environmental reform. Certainly other deep ecologists might disagree with how far Naess is willing to take his pluralism, but we may be encouraged here that at least one deep ecologist, and a very important one at that, does not in principle see any formal reason why deep ecologists cannot embrace something like Norton's convergence thesis. Naess ends this article with perhaps one of the most succinct and elegant statements for the need for metatheoretical compatibilism, which again points to the need to revisit Naess's work in the context of a recast monism pluralism debate: "The richness and diversity of philosophical and religious ultimate premises suitable for action in the ecological crisis may be in itself considered part of the richness and diversity of life forms on Earth." 43 Metatheoretical pluralism is thus the activity of environmental philosophers who wish to emulate the patterns of the objects of their concern. Conclusions Before closing, there are two issues I want to take up that could be important in the reintroduction of Naess's work into a reformed monism pluralism debate, fulfilling two promissory notes given before. First there is the question of the role of cultural pluralism in this debate, which at times is the issue on which Naess hangs his comments on pluralism. Second, there is the remaining issue of whether Callicott's worries concerning the relationship between pluralism and relativism still hold for the form of pluralism I am attributing to Brennan, Norton, and now Naess. It is not at all uncommon these days to hear environmental philosophers talking about cultural pluralism. Still smarting a bit from the critiques of theorists like Ramachandra Guha and Vandana Shiva, that much of environmental philosophy is almost exclusively First World in its orientation and expectations, environmental ethicists of almost all schools of thought have begun thinking seriously about the issue of cultural pluralism.44 The subject of the first part of this essay, J. Baird Callicott, has been no exception. Callicott has demonstrated a clear commitment to cultural pluralism, as evidenced by his book, Earth's Insights.45 In some ways this book is more thorough than anything Naess has written to bring about an understanding of how a variety of world cultural traditions can inform a robust environmental ethic.
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In this book Callicott provides a very helpful survey of the environmental philosophies at work in a plethora of intellectual traditions from around the world. The details of this account are not important here, only the unique structure of Callicott's argument. 46 Callicott not only surveys these various traditions but also uses his understanding of the very different environmental theories derivable from different philosophical and religious traditions to reinforce his commitment to a Leopoldian, nonanthropocentric, holistic monism. It is the demonstration of this last commitment that shows how Naess's metatheoretical pluralism causes his approach to cultural pluralism to differ from that embraced by Callicott. The penultimate chapter of Earth's Insights argues that Leopold's work provides Callicott with a "reconstructive postmodern" environmental ethic which will be "firmly ground in ecology and buttressed by the new physics." Such an ethic is the "one" in what Callicott calls the ''one many problem," or the need to have a single crosscultural environmental ethic based on the science of ecology and the new physics, while at the same time acknowledging the importance of a multiplicity of "traditional cultural environmental ethics, resonant with such an international, scientifically grounded environmental ethic and helping to articulate it."47 The "one" and the "many" represent, respectively, our quality of being one species facing a worldwide crisis and the historical reality that we are many people from many cultures and different places. These two aspects of the human experience are not at odds for Callicott; each will be a part of the emerging world ecological consciousness. Callicott's move toward cultural pluralism clearly is not metatheoretically pluralist. All these competing world systems in Callicott's work are read through the lens of his nonanthropocentric holistic version of Leopold's land ethic. Leopold's view became for Callicott what he calls the "Rosetta stone of environmental philosophy," needed to "translate one indigenous environmental ethic into another, if we are to avoid balkanizing environmental philosophy."48 But using the version of nonanthropocentric holism that Callicott distills from Leopold's work as a yardstick for all environmental philosophy (not to mention all indigenous environmental traditions) draws more lines toward balkanization than does a metatheoretical tolerance of a multiplicity of approaches. For example, Callicott's appraisals of different environmental ethics embedded in various global traditions are often based on the degree to which they do or do not compare favorably with a nonanthropocentric, ecologically based ethic (such as Leopold's). But if we may call into question the singular vision of this kind of ethic, then we may also call into question some of Callicott's appraisals of these other systems. We can challenge conclusions like "Africa looms as a big
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blank spot on the world map of indigenous environmental ethics." 49 Why would Callicott make such a claim? Because African environmental thought tends to be anthropocentric in contrast to Callicott's nonanthropocentric, Leopoldian ethic. What Callicott is doing here certainly is an example of just what Naess warns against in the opening of his article analyzed in the last section. Callicott has judged (and sometimes denigrated) the ultimate premises of different world-environmental systems by holding them up to the yardstick of a Leopoldian view. But still, Callicott is only trying to demonstrate through his one many comparison how different world-environmental systems may support the principles derivable from a Leopoldian view. If that is his project, then why can't we describe Naess as doing the same thing? After all, Naess argues that the foundations of different systemsChristianity, Buddhism, and some schools of philosophyall provide a basis within which to derive the common principles of the deep ecology platform. But Naess, unlike Callicott, does not evaluate different forms of thought on the basis of their amenability to the deep ecology program. Naess only points out that these different schools of thought, and epistemological, ontological, and metaphysical systems, can be used to derive common principles. Naess does not claim that all forms of such systems need to be evaluated on that ground. He also suggests that while we can "infer traits of an environmental ethic" from different world literatures, we cannot "pretend to be able to compare in a methodologically neutral and adequate way meanings and validity of the ultimate premises of total views. "50 While he limits this comment to the problems of translating simple expressions into complex theoretical positions, I think the point holds in general for his approach to divergent cultural-environmental positions. Therefore, pace the exception of views from which we can derive antienvironmental conclusions, the goal of cultural pluralism in environmental ethics, on Naess's view, is not necessarily evaluation of different worldviews, but a finding of means for convergence of environmental policies, activities, and theories. It is probably the case that some question still remains of whether Callicott's or Naess's approach to cultural pluralism is preferable in environmental ethics. After all, there is something to be said for having some means for evaluating competing worldviews on the environment.51 Because environmental problems are not restricted by cultural borders, we will certainly find ourselves in situations of cross-cultural disagreement over a common problem where some method of resolution of competing cultural bases for evaluating environmental problems is necessary. Part of resolving the issue of which approach to cultural
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pluralism is right will necessarily involve some answer to the original question posed by Callicott, and cited at the beginning of this essay: Does pluralism lead to a deconstructive, or more simply destructive, relativism? Clearly, a theoretical or metatheoretical pluralism is at least not incommensurable with a workable, robust, and critical environmental philosophy. Callicott is right in suggesting that there could be a tendency to move from theoretical pluralism to relativism, but without an argument for their necessary connection (which has yet to be made in this debate) it seems that each version of pluralism has to be individually evaluated. Callicott's strongest case so far is therefore against Stone. 52 But I am not too concerned with theoretical pluralism here, and so finally my answer to Callicott will have to be that his question needs to be rephrased against the metatheoretical pluralism which I have identified. Metatheoretical pluralism, especially given the comments on its practical importance derivable from Brennan, Norton, and Naess, may provide the foundations, or at least guidelines, for the types of theory development needed at this stage in the growth of environmental philosophy. Since it is clear that we do not need relativism in environmental philosophy, the development of metatheoretical pluralism can be brought along with a healthy respect for avoiding the kinds of conclusions which mitigate the moral analysis of environmental problems. If some framework is provided to prevent pluralism from lapsing into an indecisive form of relativism, and if pluralism can be argued to be important for the health of environmental ethics, then the next question becomes how we go about doing environmental philosophy so that we get the right sort of pluralism. I have argued elsewhere that environmental pragmatism provides us with just the sort of framework we need to temper pluralism toward these goals.53 But the question of whether this strategy, or an embrace of Naess's form of deep ecology, or Norton's practical philosophy, or something else is best for this kind of theory development is something of an empirical question. If theorists and practitioners followed our views to their logical conclusions, and were able both to cooperate on ends and to avoid relativism (or even the unproductive debate about relativism that seems to paralyze much of contemporary public discourse), then we could actually see which form of pluralism best serves the broader goals of environmental philosophy. Of course, of all the views examined here, only Naess's pluralism seems likely to be testable in this manner anytime soon. In this respect, a careful analysis of the reception of Naess's pluralism in the deep ecology movement is one of the best next steps in advancing a reformed monism pluralism debate.
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Notes I am grateful to Avner de-Shalit, Alastair Hannay, Eric Katz, Zev Trachtenberg, Allan Carlson, and Arne Naess for helpful comments on this essay. 1. J. Baird Callicott marks three types of nonanthropocentric theories: neo-Kantian (e.g., Paul Taylor, Robin Attfield, Holmes Rolston), "Leopoldian" (Callicott, William Godfrey-Smith, Richard Sylvan, and Val Plumwood), and Self-Realized (deep ecologists). See Callicott's "The Case Against Moral Pluralism," Environmental Ethics 12:2 (1990):101 102. In this article he gives an excellent genealogy of the development of these areas. One may also include nonanthropocentric theories like those of animal liberationists Peter Singer and Tom Regan, as well as the anthropocentric holism of Bryan Norton and Gary Varner's biocentric individualism, to name just a few representative theorists. 2. Ibid., p. 102. 3. Ibid., p. 109. My emphasis. 4. Some of the most frequently cited papers on the pluralist side are Christopher D. Stone, "Moral Pluralism and the Course of Environmental Ethics," Environmental Ethics 10:2 (1988):139 154; Gary E. Varner, "No Holism Without Pluralism," Environmental Ethics 13:2 (1991):175 179; Andrew Brennan, "Moral Pluralism and the Environment," Environmental Values 1:1 (1992):15 33; Peter Wenz, ''Minimal, Moderate, and Extreme Moral Pluralism," Environmental Ethics 15:1 (1993):61 74; and two unpublished papers: Anthony Weston, "What Are We Arguing About?" and Eugene Hargrove, "Callicott and Moral Pluralism," both presented at the Central Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association, April 24, 1993. 5. For reasons that may become apparent later, I count Naess's "environmental philosophy" as both his attempt to characterize the deep ecology movement and his argument for a definite "total view," his Ecosophy T. 6. I will not recount the evidence for environmental problems here. There is a sufficient amount of literature on the disastrous effects of humans on the environment to fill any reading list, and concern over the environment is one of the primary reasons for the development of the field of environmental ethics in the first place. 7. Anthony Weston, "Before Environmental Ethics," Environmental Ethics 14:4 (Winter 1992): 333. 8. Callicott, "The Case Against Moral Pluralism, pp. 116 120. 9. J. Baird Callicott, "Moral Monism in Environmental Ethics Defended," Journal of Philosophical Research 19 (1994): 53. I think there are problems with Callicott's designation of his views as "communitarian," problems that unnecessarily confuse this argument with the communitarianism of Walzer, Sandel, Taylor, de-Shalit, and others. I don't think that Callicott's work shares much with these other views, especially in light of the fact that most communitarians include a substantial role for political and moral pluralism in their work. For a specific example of a more robust, "environmental communitarianism," see Avner de-Shalit, Why Posterity Matters: Environmental Policies and Future Generations (London Routledge, 1995). For de-Shalit, pluralism comes into play in communitarianism in the way that communities open themselves to the values of
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other communities, regarding these other valuation schemes "as potential truths rather than as something inimical" (p. 62). Ultimately, of course, this problem is not philosophically very serious for Callicott, only a bit inelegant. 10. Ibid., p. 52. 11. Ibid., p. 53. 12. Ibid. 13. Brennan, "Moral Pluralism and the Environment," p. 30. Brennan's thesis is that "there is no single lens which provides a privileged set of concepts, principles and structure in terms of which a situation is to be viewed" (p. 29). 14. Callicott, "Moral Monism in Environmental Ethics," p. 54. 15. Ibid. 16. See Bryan Norton, Toward Unity Among Environmentalists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), esp. ch. 10. 17. Callicott, "Moral Monism in Environmental Ethics," p. 56. Callicott is referring to Weston's remark that "J. Baird Callicott . . .insists that we attempt to formulate, right now, a complete unified even 'closed' (his term) theory of environmental ethics" (Weston, "Before Environmental Ethics," p. 333). 18. Andrew Light, "Materialists, Ontologists, and Environmental Pragmatists," Social Theory and Practice 21:2 (1995) : 315 333, and my contributions to Andrew Light and Eric Katz, eds., Environmental Pragmatism, (London: Routledge, 1996). 19. Brennan, "Moral Pluralism and the Environment," p. 30. 20. I should point out, however, that I am not yet ready to grant Callicott's arguments against Stone, Varner, Hargrove, and Brennan on theoretical moral pluralism, or what Callicott winds up calling "pluralism at the level of theory." It seems that Callicott has made an interesting argument here that needs to be responded to by those original proponents of theoretical pluralism. But I still have some worries about what exactly Callicott is embracing. Even though he claims to be a pluralist with respect to principles, I'm not sure that really individuates his theory at all. What realist in environmental ethics would argue that one single principle is sufficient to generate all duties toward the environment? Who holds such a view? If no one, then we still have a monism pluralism debate at the level of ethics that is at least philosophically interesting. 21. Bryan Norton, "Why I Am Not a Nonanthropocentrist," Environmental Ethics 17:4 (1995): 344. Also see Norton's expanded version of this paper, "Integration or Reduction: Two Approaches to Environmental Values," in Light and Katz, Environmental Pragmatism, pp. 105 138. 22. Ibid., p. 345. 23. I should also note that I would hesitate to too closely connect moral monism exclusively with the applied philosophy program that Norton is criticizing. If practical philosophy is an improved way of doing philosophy, then why couldn't a monist, at least in principle, do philosophy in that way? Surely again we are talking about the difference between a way of doing philosophy and a methodological approach. Even as firmly grounded a monist as Callicott could presumably embrace a metatheoretical form of
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pluralism based on an argument for the moral responsibility of how environmental philosophers should go about doing things, even if we would expect his monism to lead him in the applied philosophy direction. In support of this position, I note that for Norton, monism and applied philosophy only "tend" to go together. Ibid. 24. See Warwick Fox, Approaching Deep Ecology: A Response to Richard Sylvan's Critique of Deep Ecology, Environmental Studies Occasional Paper 20 (Hobart: University of Tasmania, 1986). 25. See Norton's Toward Unity Among Environmentalists, and Harold Glasser's discussion of Norton's convergence argument in his "Naess's Deep Ecology Approach and Environmental Policy," Inquiry 38 (1996): 157 87. 26. I feel obliged to point out that since I am not a deep ecologist, I don't really have anything at stake in proving some form of inherent pluralism in deep ecology. But as a good environmental pragmatist, I am open both to giving credit to good arguments where due and to learning from those arguments in order to further my particular approach to environmental philosophy. This is, of course, consistent with my theoretical pluralism. 27. See Naess's diagram outlining this relationship in his contribution to Michael Zimmerman, ed., Environmental Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1993), p. 206. 28. The validity of this claim has been called into question most notably by Deane Curtin. See his contribution in this volume. 29. Peter Wenz, "Minimal, Moderate, and Extreme Moral Pluralism," p. 69, quoted by Wenz in his Environmental Justice (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 313. 30. I suppose the one worry would be whether the principles of deep ecology are independent of each other, but even though this issue is not taken up by Naess, it is clear, from the context in which they are introduced at times, that he does not have their necessary interdependence in mind. He acknowledges the validity, for example, of the derivation of a different set of deep ecological principles from the shallow deep distinction, and that the views of the platform of deep ecology are "not basic in an absolute sense, but basic among the views that supporters [of deep ecology] have in common" (Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, edited and translated by David Rothenberg [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989], pp. 28 29). Another objection could be raised that the real foundation of the deep ecology principles is the set of intuitions behind the shallow deep distinction. Accordingly, Naess has simply looked at various systems of ontology and identified an implicit agreement in those systems with the rationale behind the distinction. If someone can prove this claim, then I will concede that, in this sense at least, Naess's formal system is monistic. But I don't think that is a problem for Naess's metatheoretical pluralism, which for me is the important issue. 31. For those unfamiliar with Callicott's work, Leopoldian, nonanthropocentric holism is the brand of environmental philosophy Callicott has been consistently developing throughout his career. The root of this work is in Callicott's interpretation of Aldo Leopold's "land ethic," as expressed in Leopold's Sand County Almanac along a Humean/ Darwinian account of moral sentiments. For some of Callicott's more important papers
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tracking the development of this view, see J. Baird Callicott, In Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989). 32. Of course the question remains as to whether Naess is correct that people with different philosophical or theological foundations will embrace the principles of deep ecology. I think a case can be made that they already have, but we can know this only empiracally, of course. I will return to the importance of empirical verification of arguments for pluralism at the end of this essay. 33. The Trumpeter 9:2 (1992): 53 90. My thanks to Harold Glasser for calling my attention to this article. 34. Ibid., p. 54. 35. Ibid., p. 53. My emphasis. 36. Ibid., p. 55. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. I completely agree with this limitation by Naess on the compatibilism of metatheoretical pluralism. The point of this pluralism is to strengthen "pro-environmental" claims. If this pluralism began covering "antienvironmental" views, then it would violate its environmental predicate. I will leave for another paper a discussion of the ramifications of this caveat. 39. David Rothenberg, Is It Painful to Think? Conversations with Arne Naess (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 136. 40. Naess could find support in advancing this position from Wim J. van der Steen, who has embraced a kind of default theoretical pluralism. Says van der Steen: "Although I opt for pluralism I do so in a qualified way. The issue is whether we can elaborate a single, overarching theory for environmental ethics. In a sense we can if we use the term theory for highly abstract, general guidelines that are far removed from practical applications. However, if we use the term theory for the mundane entities that we come across in most disciplines, pluralism is our only option. Modesty is my ultimate defense of pluralism. We should recognize our limitations, and we should be aware of fundamental limitations of science and philosophy. Plain methodology alone suffices to show that the search for grand theories that satisfy all the goals we may cherish is misguided" ("The Demise of Monism and Pluralism in Environmental Ethics," Environmental Ethics 17:2 [1995]: 218). Naess, too, bases some of his arguments for pluralism on an analogy with science. Callicott argues explicitly in "Moral Monism in Environmental Ethics" that this analogy does not follow. For Callicott, theoretical pluralism in science may be a necessity, even a virtue, but in moral reasoning it may only be a sign of a fuzzy-headedness. Though I like van der Steen's argument, I must admit that I share Callicott's worry that the analogy doesn't really do much philosophical work. I don't, however, agree that pluralism in moral reasoning is fuzzy-headed. See, for example, Nicholas Rescher's very unfuzzy Pluralism: Against the Demand for Consensus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 41. Naess, "Encouraging Richness and Diversity," p. 58. One could compare this implicit/explicit distinction with Richard Rorty's public/private distinction for political discourse in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
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Press, 1989). For an argument concerning the limited utility of Rorty's distinction for environmental pluralism and pragmatism, see Andrew Light, "Materialists, Ontologists, and Environmental Pragmatists." 42. Naess, "Encouraging Richness and Diversity," p. 58. My emphasis. 43. Ibid., p. 60. 44. See, e.g., Ramachandra Guha, "Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique," Environmental Ethics 11 (Spring 1989): 71 83; and Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism (London: Zed, 1993). 45. J. Baird Callicott, Earth's Insights: A Multicultural Survey of Ecological Ethics from the Mediterranean Basin to the Australian Outback (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 46. I am in no position to evaluate the rigor of Callicott's comparative project, though from what little I do know about world environmental traditions, his account seems good to me. Anyone interested in comparative environmental philosophy or theology surely will benefit from Callicott's work. 47. Earth's Insights, p. 12. 48. Ibid., p. 186. 49. Ibid., p. 158. 50. Naess, "Encouraging Richness and Diversity," p. 60. 51. I should mention one overly simple answer to the question of how to evaluate world environmental views: simply look and see which ones cause more harm to the environment. But here I agree with Callicott, who explicitly refuses to make such an agrument, suggesting that such a criterion is not clear, and probably unfair as a means of evaluation. See, e.g., Callicott's discussion of the relationship between Japan's intellectual heritage and its current environmental situation. Earth's Insights, p. 106. 52. Though I must reserve judgment until some of the defenses of Stone's view have been answered by Callicott. See Weston's remarks in this regard in his "What Are We Arguing About?," p. 4. 53. See Light, "Materialists, Ontologists, and Environmental Pragmatists."
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II NEW HORIZONS FOR DEEP ECOLOGY
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8 No World but in Things: The Poetry of Naess's Concrete Contents David Rothenberg From Movement to Philosophy Most of the writing concerned with deep ecology tends to focus on the deep ecology movement, an international assemblage of theorists and activists intent on using environmentalism as a basis for a fundamental change in the way we live and understand the human place in nature. In this definition such a movement implicates people like Murray Bookchin, David Brower, and Vice President Al Gore, whether they like it or not. As a movement, deep ecology is an embracing, umbrella term to cover all those who believe ecological problems stand for deeper social, political, and ethical problems. But the philosophy of deep ecology is something altogether different. This is, I believe, something much more specific than the movement, something less recognized, less well-understood. 1 Deep ecology as philosophy is the attempt to articulate a new relationship between humanity and nature, one that does not accept familiar divisions between the subjective and the objective, or between the natural and the human. It is a direction for ontology to make progress on, not a perspective that has been fully or even tentatively outlined. Deep ecology as philosophy suggests that humanity is not only part of nature, but intertwined with nature, as idea and fact, connected to our surroundings in a way that our language is not prepared to let us speak of. Our language and categories of thought are questioned in order that we may develop new ways to speak the world into existence (in Heidegger's words), changing logic, syntax, and conception. This is the most radical kind of ecological thinking, and this is the hardest to engage in or to explain. Arne Naess's particular articulation of the philosophy of deep ecology depends on a human ability to apprehend the qualities of nature directly. This borrows from phenomenology but does not use its terminology. In this essay I intend to explore Naess's terminology of concrete contents, which builds on a
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rejection of Galileo's distinction between primary, secondary, and tertiary qualities and posits instead a way of understanding where we apprehend the qualities of things only through their relation with each other. Naess rejects the notion of "quality" and comes up instead with the word "contents," and calls these contents "concrete" because they are directly apprehended reality, not structures invoked to explain reality. Naess then sidesteps the phenomenological tradition, with its subject experiencing the world, and hints instead at a world that as a whole experiences itself, with no primary subjects or objects, but instead a web of relations. I say "hints" because the philosophy of deep ecology has always, in its radical break with tradition, seemed by nature to be preliminary. 2 How to develop it further? I suggest that Naess is trying to push philosophy toward poetry. To that end I use a series of resonating examples from Italian writer Italo Calvino, the music of the Kaluli people of New Guinea, a film by John Sayles, and Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. To redefine itself, philosophy sometimes needs to find inspiration outside its borders. The Relational and the Real Naess rides the train to the mountainshe sees birches smiling, firs weeping. He wants us to believe that these smiles and tears come before we see trees themselves, and are not a projection from human moods or glances. These emotional parts of reality he calls the concrete contents of reality. We see the world first as relations between us and it. Smiles and cries are actually there, they are the fabric of the world, the threads of nature, and the foundations of the universe. He doesn't want to call them human appearances but natural appearances. Not human experience but simply experience, the world experiencing itself in surges of emotion, sparkles of light. We need to wake up and perceive the world as alive, dancing upon itself, wondrous, and self-aware. With this idea of the content of reality as concrete, Naess is reaching for a name to mark out an area of existence, and giving it greater weight by saying it is real. In his drive to make up these phrases and hope they will stick, I see him striving for a peculiar kind of logical poetry, trying out a metaphor to see if it will catch on, a gentle jab to consider the pieces of experience and wonder what would happen if we were to put them back together another way. It is my intention here to investigate what it would mean to see the world in this other wayhow the primacy of all qualities might make things recede and relations come into prominence, how it might be the birth of a less arrogant way of placing human beings into an equally experiencing surrounding, also a sub-
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ject, not only an object. And the announcement that the emotions we sense there in nature are not mere projections, or whims of different perspectives, but an actuality that can't be denied. Leave your left hand out in the cold winter air, keep the right one cozy inside a mitten. Then stick both inside a pot of room-temperature water. The left one feels warm. The right one feels cold. Is the water warm or cold? Galileo says neither warm nor cold. These are secondary qualities, subjective, in the hand of the beholder. To be distinguished from primary, objective qualities like volume and shape, what he would have called properties of the water and the pot itself, wholly contained and clear in the object. Pre-Socratic Protagoras has already disagreed, two thousand years earlier. According to Sextus Empiricus, he would have said the water is both warm and cold. "Water has all kinds of qualities, but a sensitive being is only able to experience a limited number of them." 3 We feel different aspects of the water in different relations to it, but the water still contains these different aspects, since as water it is defined in terms of its relations with the world. Naess goes on to find support for this view in the following ancient Sanskrit formula: sarvam dharmam niksvabhavamevery element is without self-existence. Things exist only linked to each other, caught in the web of the world. But subjects and objects are primary categories in most of Western philosophy. When Naess tries to go beyond these divisions, he is led, like other philosophers of the twentieth century, to create his own language to describe the way he sees things. And all is not equal in his view: feelings of water as well as the rootedness of sense of place are contents of reality, because they are there in the sea we swim in or the place with which we identify. But there is a level of understanding that takes a step back from the immediacy of relating with the world: deciding how much land is worth in monetary terms, or discovering the chemical formula that constitutes soil or the cell pattern of wood. These are abstract structures, once removed from the concrete relational contents of the nature that includes our ability to know it. The implications of this view for tactical, pragmatic environmentalism are clear: if a defender of a mountain sees it as beneficent, glorious, sublime, then that value is as primary as the value of the mineral deposit that might lie beneath the summit, ready to be excavated and converted into cash, even though it is harder to quantify. Beauty in nature is not subjective (used by the "rational" as a pejorative term), and therefore possible to dismiss as sentimentalism. The full range of qualities latent in the Earth come from there, belong there, and we should ensure that they stay there.
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Phenomenology Minus the Subject What is different in this world of concrete contents from the world as described or wished for by the phenomenologists? These are the philosophers, inspired by Husserl and Heidegger, who want to present to us things as they are meant to be seen, before any forms of theory or explanation. While a promising goal, their approach too often seems mired in obscure terminology, clearly representative of a very specific theory of just the type they want to strip away. And it is always a human view that they see, not a world in itself or seen from the things themselves. The things themselves are always seen from a human viewthey remain inside the bounds of description, and phenomenology promises us that we will be able to explain things. It does not want to admit the unknown, or the unknowable, which is the ridge crest always one range beyond the vantage of any philosophy. The truest, purest phenomenology is an exact delight in the reverberations of the environment around us. It throws its own terminology out the window, and instead might describe those who look at the sky and cannot help but shout "Blue!" One who catches the afternoon winter light on a wall of a concrete building and is amazed by the tactile surface of light: "Orange!" "Gold!" The names are nothingthey are symbols of the exclamations of wonder. Let the Earth see us before we see it, and the encounter will shake us to the core. There will be no things in themselves, only presences, light, shapes, movements now perceptible and strange. To feel the freshness of the wind, the smile of the aspen, the tear of the willow, and not to denigrate these discoveries in the name of narrow human imagination. The emotions are of this world! We are here first to see them, and then to make sure they still will be seen for many generations to come. The philosopher of nature must learn to be a witness for wonder, and to teach others what is necessary to keep this wonder visible and free. Arne Naess comes to these problems from the guarded perspective of the analytic philosopher. He is an expert in the invention and refinement of linguistic concepts, of names for the irascible and the fleeting. That leaf winked at us, didn't you see? Rather than delve into this experience, it is enough for Naess to defend the fact that it is there. This is the direction logic implores us to take. Argument leads to dialogues. Here is an excerpt from one of his unpublished dialogues: A: The birch is smiling! B: Not really smiling.
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A: Yes, really smiling. I describe experienced reality as best as I can. I do not make inferences. B: I propose a test. Ask why it smilesdoes it answer? A: No. But from ''x is really smiling" it does not follow that "x answers or can answer questions." Reality is not that simple. I describe contents, not abstract structures. 4 A did not imagine the smile, but considers it a concrete content of reality. Where Naess differs from the phenomenologist is that he says not just a human reality, a human experience, but reality as a whole, the experience of the world, a fact that contains value, ephemeral but essential to be marked and noticed for its worth. The phenomenologist still perceives the world from an aspect, seeing from somewhere, grasping a part of the universe, never a whole. Naess wants to claim something more: that the world-in-itself is attainable by the human being who listens, watches, learns from the feelings sensed out there, beyond the mind's narrow confines. It is not a mystic's oneness with the universe but a rousing sense of the Earth's importance, grasped by feeling its inanimate parts to be as emotional and sensate as we are. I climb a mountain in the fresh snow and try to grasp what this would mean. Ascending into the woods, in crisp and cold morning sun, I see the branches straining to bear the weight of a cool but still heavy overnight snowfall. Dare I say they suffer? The burden is clear, but does it hurt them? The insight is poetic, not commonsensical, something Naess might not at first admit. The Romantic writes, "The birch laughed with the light easy laugh of all birches." This quote is from the poet Henrik Wergeland, not from any scientist or systematizer. To avoid anthropocentrism we must maintain that the trees' laugh is not a human laugh, though it is a laugh nonetheless. This commonality is the kind of relation that keeps us tied to nature. The kind of inspiration that Naess's world of concrete contents suggests to me is the notion that nature might be primarily constituted out of categories other than those we presently admit. Why start with trees, then count them up into a forest, and then see the whole hillside blanketed with snow? Instead start with laughter, and see it on the sloping Earth everywhere, a first look before the objects coalesce apart from one another? Expression in the growth and fall of the universe, before things are demarcated and named. Seeing the sparkle when the light hits the white place, before we then decide it is a patch of new-fallen snow. The wind as a song before it moves through the air, lifting flakes, forming clouds, transforming water into darkness and action. The Earth is alive before we can stop it. Processes in the midst of change before we can freeze them. These contents of experience come first, preceding
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humanization, first before anyone claims them or attaches them as qualities to things. This is no Platonic form of "laughter," like a thing held invisibly behind the desert of the tactile. This is an emotion expressed not at the edge, but out from the core of possibility, touching us not uniquely but in the same way any other being might choose to grasp it. You see it when you're out on a winter afternoon, the sun low, soon to disappear. Perhaps you're on a north slope and already in the shadow, gazing across the valley to a glowing mountain or hill. The light comes first, the reflective sheen of the Earth, before you see a mountain or a slope of trees. Why search to name, pick a piece of land? Begin with light, grasp the particular hue, the crystal tone. We might call the winter light crisp, exact, hardedged, over-defined, precise like the extra-sharp world seen through amber sunglasses, the kind worn by hunters and pilots to make sure their targets are clear. Whatever words we use to name this light seem like ways the hues appear to us as we see them, just then, just there. But in the world of concrete contents, they are at least as real as any calculations we may come up with to explain why winter light is so much tighter, noting down wavelengths, showing the fine outlines produced by a sun low in the sky. The feel of the light is as primal as any other quality. It is originary, initial, the first ray that strikes us as the planet turns toward the sun at the start of the day. From Philosophy to Poetry Phenomenology wants to get philosophy back to the things themselves, but it does so still from the view of the subject. Naess wants to break qualities down to the relationships themselves. Whose terminology best suits the task? It is almost as if the moment these things are named and given categories, their fluidity is lost. Our philosophical language is so used to breaking things into parts that it is hard to use precise language to explain how the world flows together, where "things" dissolve in a torrent of relationships in which we spin and are spun, dashed downstream and upstream, through the rocks and into the mud. Poet William Carlos Williams demanded "no ideas but in things!," wishing poetry to be concrete in the same way Naess wants philosophy to be. But his disciple A. R. Ammons twisted the demands around, calling for "no things but in ideas! No ideas but in ideas! No things but in things!" A true attentiveness to relationship must dissolve demands into their opposites. Must it as well dissolve philosophy into poetry? In general, I think not, but in the case of Arne Naess I believe there is a yearning toward poetry that he has steadfastedly resisted all his life. Naess is an associative thinker; he jumps from
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one rock to the next as nimbly as anyone as he tries to cross the stream of discourse en route to the other side: reaching fact from value, skepticism from cynicism, joy from doubt. He has always stood up for intuition as the foundation of his deep ecology, and prefers that the reader share his innate trust in a human place in nature rather than provide elaborate justification for why nature has value in itself, apart from the service to humanity. His ecophilosophy is an environmental ontology, not an environmental ethic. Naess appeals to us to accept all perceived qualities in nature as concrete, but he doesn't always have the language to do so. "There is a certain kind of poetic philosophizing," he has told me, "that I detest." Yet his finest examples (like Kant's of the sublime: "bold, overhanging rocks, volcanoes, etc.") come from poetry, or expressive language and metaphor. It is my belief that the vision of a world of concrete contents can best be strengthened by reference to literature, art, music, and the poetic that may run through all of these. What follows is a series of examples that I hope will enrich and explain the core of Naess's view with image, not argument. I believe this is the kind of deepening of ecology that Naess would welcome, not reject. First is a literary essay by the late Italian writer Italo Calvino, "From the Opaque," which is phenomenology in action as an experiment with metaphors, placing the human observer at the edge of experience, poised between a mountain of precipitous memory and a deep sea cliff of unknown chances: Obviously to describe the shape of the world the first thing to do is to establish my position. I don't mean my location but my orientation, because the world I am talking about differs from other possible worlds in this sense: that whatever the time of day or night one always knows where east and west are, and thus I shall begin by saying that I am looking southwards, which is the same as saying that I have my face towards the sea, which is the same as saying that I have my back to the mountain, because this is the position in which I usually surprise that self that dwells within myself, even when my external self is orientated in a completely different fashion. 5 Naess is less concerned with this initial positioning, so sure is he that what he perceives of the natural world is actually part of the world, not part of his relation to that world. Here he does not differ so very much from the natural scientist, or at least from the traditional naturalist: observing living beings, drawing conclusions about them, sure about the concrete (if not objective) aspects of what is seen, felt, and heard. There is a certain human hubris he admits in ascertaining that he can know when the trees are smiling, the rocks crying, the birds conferring on the future of the planet. David Abram calls this an awareness of the "more than human world," and he finds it part of most oral cultures of present and previous times.6 Many cultures identify themselves as being part of groups and gatherings named from
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the animal world. Still, to me it involves a certain arrogance. I can call myself a member of the turtle clan, but is it fair if I haven't asked the turtles whether they'll accept me or not? I might want to be a turtle. I would like to be a turtle. I see the world differently if I imagine myself a turtle, but it is as much human metaphor as any otherthis is part of knowing nature that the phenomenologists want to stress, to show how a human view on things need not be a human-centered view of things. I remain divided on this point: it seems both arrogant and humble to feel that nature wants us. Is it more sensible, then, to admit that nature does not care? In either case, it seems prudent to protect the world and its wildness, rather than destroy it without knowing what we kill. Yet it is the arrogance of humanism to imagine that we know how nature feels, that the wholes we observebe they of living entities, inevitably mechanical "systems," or amorphous shapes of feeling that hold together in our field of vieware parts of the world as it actually is, apart from the human gaze? Naess tells me in Is It Painful to Think? that he is happy to speak of "experience" as long as the word "human" is not applied to it to narrow the word's relevance. 7 This is a clear divergence from traditional phenomenology. The vision of a world of concrete contents is as much a plea to step outside of the perspective that has been ''handed" us and take the chance that we could actually see more. The test, of course, is if this other way of seeing nature really looks different. I think Naess would smile at the trouble Calvino has with being more than a spectator as he writes his explanation of a world unfurling from the point where he can exactly reckon his geographical position, presumably anywhere on Earth. For how do we participate in a world we are incessantly looking at, describing, trying to frame within a window or a proscenium arch? Here's Calvino's struggle of nature with culture: I've gone back to using metaphors that have to do with the theater. Although in my thoughts of that time I couldn't have associated the theater and its velvets with that world of grasses and winds, and although even now the image that the theater tends to bring to mind is of an interior that claims to contain within itself the exterior world, the piazza the fête the garden the wood the pier the war, is the exact opposite of what I am describing, that is an exterior that excludes every kind of interior.8 Calvino is after words out-of-doors, flung from the confines of paragraphs, streams of thought that first flutter in the breezes and then alight in the bouyancy of the air. In subject matter there is no division here between the natural and the human, but more between inside and outside, between the bounded conditions of literature, words on a page, held down in a book, carefully con-
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sidered, bound and printed, and the open trace of philosophy, ideas on the world that cannot quite be set solidly in words. The first step, then, in deepening deep ecological philosophy is perhaps instruction on how not to read it: throw out the idea. Choose to imagine how the new conception would change the appearance of the world. What about the easy romanticizing of the world through language? Naess, and especially Calvino, here look beyond language's creating the world in order to say that it evokes the world in a powerful way different from logic, different from representation. To say humanity constructs our world through language is not, as Joel Kovel would have it, irrevocably to separate us from nature. 9 We live according to natural rhythms and constraints, being born, surviving, eating, and dying not so very differently from other animals; but we also reflect, and admit that only other humans reflect. So we are destined to understand only our own kind. This can be a relief, or a sadness. Naess and Calvino take it as a challenge. They want to explore with words, and to look beyond the despair. Know that language cannot yet describe the world of concrete contents. Think what could happen if it could. Perhaps the whole thing might look like this, the phrases that come out of Calvino when he discards the metaphors of the theater once again: [W]e are in a world that stretches and twists like a lizard so as to offer the largest possible surface area to the sun, opening up the fan of its suction-cup feet on a wall that's growing wary, its tail retreating with threadlike jerks from the imperceptible advance of the shade, eager to have the sunny coincide with the existence of the world.10 This to me is a wise picture of the world of concrete contents in full force, an Earth becoming an animal, moving slowly and methodically out into the light, as a place envisioned not as how it might look to a lizard, but as a lizard, say, a huge land iguana on the Galapagos Island of Fernandina, a vast volcanic caldera that still erupts every few years, where the large, ever smiling beasts have no shortage of sun to identify with as the world.11 The world is doing the slithering, meandering, maneuvering itself toward the light, swishing, leaving a trace, adjusting its angles into curves in this strange image, taking only the strange prisoners of memory and account, choosing to look like this, to remember like this, to test out this lizard picture as a new alternative to the many others that abound. It's not an obvious or clear picture, but it doesn't have to be, to be right. For the universe must be somewhat opaque in order to catch our attention. And we ourselves are then caught in the midst of the opacity: From the opaque, from the depths of the opaque I write, reconstructing the map of a sunniness that is only an unverifiable postulate for the computations of the memory, the
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geometrical location of the ego, of a self which the self needs to know that it is itself, the ego whose only function is that the world may continually receive news of the existence of the world, a contrivance at the service of the world for knowing if it exists. 12 This is an interesting justification for having a self; Heideggerian in the sense that we humans are here on the planet to "speak the Earth into Being." That is a literary calling, a purpose in the biosphere to speak up and give names to things that otherwise would be voiceless. This opaque and beautifully articulated phenomenology of Calvino's is convincing in that it does not hold on too tightly to the notion of a self; it does not sound subjectcentered, but genuinely searches for a voice of the world. The notion of the self has always been problematic for deep ecology in general and for Arne Naess in particular. Enough weight is laid on the concept for the whole philosophical perspective to have been criticized for being individually centered, impossibly distant from the nets of relation that make up the world, far, far from the home that tempers the hubris of individuals claiming their own paths through experience and into nature. The image of the deep ecologist, only encouraged by the literature, is of a solitary traveler contemplating the wilderness, identifying with the world of patterns she finds there, taking care not to feel part of the spectacular, but looking for commonality with the tiny and the overlooked instances of life. We become closer to nature when we identify with things radically nonhuman, far from our immediate and bodily scale of experience. The gestalts of nature welcome us, for they are patterns that can include a human who cares to notice them. But how far can the self go? Naess likes to use a capital "S" to imply a Self that is larger than the ego, still an enveloping identity were individuality is not lost. There isn't much of a picture of shared reality, but rather the solo participant in a world that embraces the thinker who also chooses to act and recognizes his part in the biological and cultural ecology of relationships that defines us. When Naess chooses to get more specific on just what counts as a gestalt and what does not, he unfortunately reverts to the style of philosophical writing that he learned as a young man: "A definite waterfall at a definite time, including its music with modifications due to winds, has gestalt character, but is neither a thing nor a state of affairs. But we may say that the content of reality is all that is the case."13 This seems to be an allusion to Wittgenstein's Tractatus factual world of all that is the case. Naess's world is instead a place of grouped impressions, not an amalgamation of truths. There is a poetic quality to this observation, and that is why I have endeavored to point out similar thoughts so colorfully explored by Calvino above and Tranströmer below. Walking this
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way through nature, you will step through a series of patterns, not looping Venn diagrams of set theory but sets of relations, ordered places in which the human traveler also has a location and a part. The truth is never only that appearance which all who gaze on a natural gestalt can agree upon. The aspen quaking in the wind can be both happy and sadwhat is important is that it contains within itself qualities that are both fleeting and deep. Poetry is trueto be open to it, the rules of experience must constantly be questioned. Wittgenstein did not think human beings could see a color called reddish-green. Indeed, our rules for how colors are to be measured on the spectrum or mixed in the palette of paint or light seem to indicate that these hues do not go gently together. Yet anyone who has walked through an autumn New England forest will know immediately that the woods can shimmer with the bright changeling color of reddish-green. Simply hold up a transitory turning maple or oak leaf, and you will see at once an image of green becoming red, and the leaf as a whole speaks of red mixed with green more than anything else. It is a tone that exists clearly as a quality of something simple which we uncertainly try to describe, tossing out a question to our rules of the spectrum, to our sense of how the eye tends to demarcate such things. The content of this natural reality throws a monkey wrench into the neat theory of color wavelengths and scales. So what, then, of the human and more-than-human shapes that we see looming in the mountains and in rocks? These must also be taken more seriously than as a simile: In a famous painting by Kittelsen the mountain Andersnatten is presented as a huge troll. There are trees on the top of the mountain and the same holds for the troll. The trees are the hair of the troll. Those who rally find the presentation of the mountain as a troll meaningful and adequatesomehow. The conception of a troll clarifies what they experience when looking at the mountain. Asked for a word characterizing the mountain and connecting it with a troll, people offer expressions like uncanny, mysterious. 14 The mountain after the painting is seen in a new way. Is this way invented or discovered? There is a larger richness to nature if the troll is found there, not invented. There is a more outward arcing sense of humanity if the notion of "mountain" is a category of thought that includes the lean of ascent, the picture of trolls, as much as it names a feature of the landscape.15 Perhaps the greatest richness is found not in saying the troll-mountain is out in nature, or in humanity, but in some ineffable but most real and honest gestalt connecting the two. True relational thinking will need to dissolve the poles of the entities doing the relating. There will no longer be a humanity, or a nature, but a continuum of connection that is the primal asking force. In this way a particular mood can
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cast a bright or dark shadow across an observation of a movement or yearning that seems to be nature's, seems to be affected by ours, and is concretely belonging to no one, poised as it is as the link between who sees and who is seen: Suppose my pleasant work at a certain place requires me to repeatedly pass a mat of flowers of a certain kind. I notice that they turn toward the sun, pointing in a different direction as the sun moves. The process of identification with the flowers makes us see them as seeking and appreciating the rays and warmth of the sun, and being at work to satisfy a vital need. Being myself pleasantly at work, the total situation is that of working together. But suppose my work is unpleasant and hard. The usual way of talking is to say that the mat of flowers as part of reality is the same, but our subjective impressions and experiences are different because we feel different under the strain of the unpleasant work. We never escape from our world of subjective feelings, it is said, but science and common sense can teach us about objective reality, a reality where trees are neither joyful nor sad! There is, I would say, both a common sense and a common lack of sense. 16 The flower is knowable only if we admit that it can be both joyful and sad, never a gray or colorless object. That would not be a flower. The qualities are primary, long before the object has been set aside with the grace of a name. For seeing, as the artist Robert Irwin has written, "is forgetting the name of the thing one sees."17 His work consists of building sculptures in the environment that subtly change the way we experience the space around us. His exhibit in New York18 consisted of a series of translucent cloth dividers, between which the public could walk, seeing each other and the room through varying layers of half-invisible walls. The piece made visitors more conscious of the way people walk through space, and the ways our world is divided in rectilinear ways. What is the name of what we see? Not an object, not space itself, but the way we walk among these names and among each other. In the world of concrete contents our familiar ways of naming things will have little use. The qualities that present things will be so immediate and vibrant that they will overshadow the identities of the objects that hold them. What Naess is asking for here is something beyond altruism, far past caring about nature for its own sake. Is it a sign of appreciation that we admit that the tree is really laughing? Not at allit is a conceptual choice. It is a question of looking and thinking outward, not hoarding emotions for humanity or the sentient alone. It is about drinking for the water, thinking for the spirit, laughing for those who already laugh but do not know it. The late Emmanuel Levinas speaks of the same condition, with his own choice of language: When one smells a flower, it is the smell that limits the finality of the act. To stroll is to enjoy the fresh air, not for the health but for the air. These are the nourishments characteristic of our existence in the world. It is an ecstatic existencebeing outside oneself.19
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This kind of phenomenology enjoys the world, potent with a jouissance of experience, not because the world presents itself as being useful in a kind of Heideggerian tool presence, but because it is a place we can care about by identifying with it, by loving it, by conjuring our language into its terms and its emotions into ours. Naess, like Levinas, wants to loosen us into the world. Who, then, listens to the songs we sing of it? Music and Image All beings engaged should be listening to each other. Are there examples of this? I can think of the recording of the music of the Kaluli people and their environment made by Steve Feld and Mickey Hart, available on Voices of the Rainforest. This CD begins, like many other nature recordings, with lush sounds of a jungle environment. The difference here is that humans enter the soundscape on the third trackthe people of this culture have developed an entire kind of music to sing along with the sounds of water, wind, and treetop birds. Their language and phrasing lilt up and around the tones of their avian neighbors. The Kaluli have an ecological musical concept of organization, called "lift-up-over-sounding," that expresses an aural sense of connection between the living parts of the surroundings. The human voices on the record sing with the animal voices and wind voices, not to them or in imitation of them. The sounds of the human and more-than-human mingle together-they each make musical sense to each other. These joyful and sad songs are emotional in the world, not in response to the world. The jumping and falling of sound ties together the social and natural parts of this ecologythere is no need to divide it all up to begin to understand. One listen to the sound world as it is recorded will convince you. These concrete contents demand new words, new concepts and names. "Lift-up-over-sounding," dulugu ganalan, could be one phrase to begin with. 20 There is a bouyancy in this recorded example that reveals its honesty and reality. Yet we are trained to be skeptical of such beyond-human contacts and analogies. Look at how the ecophilospher Michael Zimmerman remembers his childhood: "In my own fumbling way, I conversed with forest creatures and befriended them. Though perceiving a kinship with these nonhuman creatures, I nevertheless realized that conversing with them was not fully satisfying; I needed closer ties to and conversation with my own kind."21 True, envisioning a personal mythology of connection to the natural world can be edifying but safe. No one will come to criticize the validity of what you identify with in nature, as child or adult. The turtle will not speak up and say you can't be part of his clan. On the other hand, the opposition between contact with humanity and
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contact with nature begs the questionthere is no reason for Zimmerman to think his relation to woodland creatures is any more "projection" than relationships with other people. We must all learn the boundaries of our shells, and be able genuinely to listen to the voices of others that cry out to us, from the usual and the most unexpected places. Those blessed with an ability to hear the music and poetry of the world have a duty to transmit these messages, these images, these hopes. Certainly, there is the lonely child, the absent father, the search for a looming, comforting substitute out there. But nature always offers more than our selected images of it can ever mirror. Or consider the remarkable film of Irish island life, The Secret of Roan Inish, directed by John Sayles. Known most for his eclectic and socialist-inspired tales of the American working class, here Sayles tackles a delicate if somewhat sentimental story of myth and magic by the blue waters of the Old Country. The frame of the story is familiar: the new generation has had to move the family off the pristine, remote island home of Roan Inish, first to the mainland, then to the city. Little Fiona, age seven or so, can't take Dublin life, so she is sent back to Grandma and Grandpa, who dream of returning to the remote island, but can't imagine how to survive a life so hard. There is also the family tragedy to reckon withFiona's little brother Jimmy was lost in a storm when his cradle, with him in it, drifted wantonly out to sea. Where is the magic of nature in this tale? It turns out the birds and the seals took little Jimmy away, as punishment because the Kinnealy family had left the island. The animals wanted the people with them! They were angry that their human kin were leaving, and had to conspire to bring them back. Why? Turns out the whole family is part seal, as a great-great-grandmother was a silkiehalf woman, half seal. The yearning for the sea runs deep in the family's blood. Every generation there is one dark one among the brothers and sisters. They are each a little distant, a little fishy, a little too quick to dive into the foaming, icy waters and disappearfor hours, for days, for years. The film is remarkable in the way we viewers are convinced that the animals are watching, that they, too, believe the myths, that they yearn to be close to us and our world. And if the emotions of the more-than-human are told and retold across generations, the world of concrete contents tells us not necessarily that we must be sure these ancient tales are true, but that we need to realize the animals, too, need their storiesthey imagine a way closer to humanity. Just as we talk to our dogs and cats, they try to talk to us, in their languages, understanding as much, or as little, as we do. The point is not getting the message across, but the reach outward and the grasp for interspecies understanding, identifying with a smile, or a cry, wanting
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desperately to know what it means. The suspiciously intelligent whale song, and the chillingly human yelp of the coyotewhat, then, is out there? Our selves, our images, or something radically different that we are actually able to understand? The world of concrete contents suggests that the song comes first; the call linking howler and listener, performer and audience, speaker and spoken to. This is how things are connected. This is how we reach out to the mysteries that surround. His Life and His Labyrinth In the end, we witness the world as a real but changing foil to the way we see things. What about conflicts in experience? I asked Naess about this in Is It Painful to Think?, and he maintains that the experience of a pristine lake is better than zooming across the lake on a speedboat. Why? His answer does express a distaste for the noise and the velocity in the still open country. 22 But some people do need the whoosh of the machine to feel they are really living. How will Naess dissuade them? Their enjoyment and link to the place waste too much energy. They destroy an inherent quality of the beautiful place as they enjoy. Naess has been chided often enough for dismissing the existence of conflict between opposing views. I believe he would say that his way of sensing, naming, and relating to nature is a view that is open to other forms of description and love, but only as long as those other forms do not destroy the context they inhabit. What is concrete in that context are just those qualities that must be recognized and preserved if the place is to retain any original identity at all. Perhaps that is why the birches are smilingeven when we choose to look away. The beauty is not simply out there, nor simply in us. T. L. S. Sprigge offered a related argument, responding to G. E. Moore's notion that natural beauty without a human beholder has value, but not as much as when there is something around to appreciate it.23 Sprigge thinks the experience of poetry offers a useful way of clarifying the contrast: A poem . . . appears as an object in the consciousness of one who reads or recites it to himself, or hears it as recited by another, with the right kind of understanding, which of course demands not only knowledge of the language in which it is written, but some involvement in the culture from which it emerged. The beauty of this object is not a subjective response added to it by how one feels about it, but an essential part of that total object. If one says that the beauty could not exist without the consciousness, that is because the poem itself could not.24
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If nature is like Sprigge's poem, then he would agree that the beauty we find in it is not subjective. But could such poetry of the Earth exist without our consciousness of it? Naess would probably say yes, and this is where his empiricism splits with the phenomenology that his idea of concrete contents so closely approaches. The concrete poetry of nature itself remains confusion. The rhythm and verse shift from moment to moment. But we are never alone in determining the qualities of what we see. We want to see structure, and decide it is there. When we're looking, the world offers order to us. We do not choose our habitat. It permits us to thrive inside it. The end of Tomas Tranströmer's long poem "The Gallery" provides an image that may stand for Arne Naess confronting the concrete world, looking for meaning with the step-by-step reframing of a mystical logic: He stands full length in front of a mountain. It's more a snail shell than a mountain. It's more a house than a snail shell. It isn't a house but has many rooms. It's indistinct but overwhelming. He grows from it and it from him. It is his life, it is his labyrinth. 25 A character tries to explain the shape of his world. First it's something he appears before. Then it curves around us, spiraling away. Then it seems like a home. Then it is no longer a home but has many parts, impossible to pin down. Who belongs to whom when the world is finally understood? We'll never know. Arne Naess has said that "the smaller we come to feel ourselves compared to the mountain, the nearer we come to participating in its greatness."26 He follows this with the beautiful conclusion, "I do not know why this is so." Is it fair for a philosopher to stop there? It is the only place he can stop. With that line, Naess most approaches the poetry that is the key to the deepening of his philosophy. These aesthetic and moral reflections are the next place for him to go. I predict more music, more joy, more art in the future works of Arne Naess as he continues to reflect into the second half of his ninth decade. Naess's brief published pieces on the notion of concrete contents have given us only hints on how to proceed. It's hard to know just what he means by these contents! Perhaps they are better evoked than explained. The qualities and ideas within things need more than words to make themselves manifest. The world of concrete contents can be found only if we attune ourselves to the sheer richness of real qualities that define themselves through relations to us. There will be no division between human and the nonhuman, because relations will be the first level of facts that hold this world together. That's why it doesn't fall apart. That's why humanity is necessary to save it.
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Notes Thanks to Andrew Light and Alastair Hannay for their helpful suggestions. 1. Michael Zimmerman's Contesting Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) is the best recent book on this distinction. 2. In a letter to me (February 1996) Naess writes, "The eight points were never meant to describe the core of deep ecology, only some fairly general views which supporters of the deep perspective have in common when we contrast their general views with supporters of environmentalism in general. Unhappily, too much is expected from such points." Thus the overemphasis on the eight points in the critical literature on deep ecology serves to weaken its philosophical core, which is usually ignored in favor of vague political pronouncements. The eight points should be considered a political rallying ground, and be judged as such: Do they motivate people? Do they provide a platform upon which members of the movement readily agree? 3. As reported in Arne Naess, "The World of Concrete Contents," Inquiry 28 (1986): 418. This brief article is the main source for Naess's views on the subject of concrete contents. Parts of this article have been revised by Naess and included in his Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, edited and translated by David Rothenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 51 57. 4. Arne Naess, "Gestalt Ontology and Gestalt Thinking," unpublished manuscript (Center for Environment and Development, University of Oslo, 1989), p. 4. 5. Italo Calvino, "From the Opaque," trans. Tim Parks, in Calvino's The Road to San Giovanni (New York: Pantheon, 1993), p. 132 (italics added). 6. See David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Pantheon, 1996). 7. David Rothenberg, Is It Painful to Think? Conversations with Arne Naess (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 154. 8. Calvino, "From the Opaque," p. 137 (italics added). 9. Joel Kovel, "The Marriage of Radical Ecologies," in Environmental Philosophy, edited by Michael Zimmerman (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1993), p. 408. 10. Calvino, "From the Opaque," p. 145 (italics added). 11. Tui de Roy, "Where Vulcan Lizards Prosper," Natural History 104:1 (January 1995): 28 30. 12. Calvino, "From the Opaque," p. 150 (italics added). 13. Naess, "Gestalt Ontology and Gestalt Thinking," p. 3. 14. Ibid., p. 5. 15. See David Rothenberg, "Ways Toward Mountains," The Trumpeter 6:3 (1989): 71 75. 16. Naess, "Gestalt Ontology and Gestalt Thinking," p. 8.
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17. Lawrence Weschler, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: The Art of Robert Irwin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 18. This exhibit ran at the Mary Boone Gallery, New York, in the fall of 1992. 19. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, translated by Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987), p. 63. 20. Steve Feld and Mickey Hart, Voices of the Rainforest (Salem, MA: Rykodisc, 1992). And see Steve Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). 21. Zimmerman, Contesting Earth's Future, p. 31. 22. Rothenberg, Is It Painful to Think?, pp. 164 165. 23. See G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), pp. 83 84, and the Sprigge article cited in note 24. 24. T. L. S. Sprigge, ''Non-Human Rights: An Idealist Perspective," Inquiry 27 (1985): 453. 25. Tomas Tranströmer, "The Gallery," trans. Sam Charters, in Tranströmer's Selected Poems, 1954 1986, edited by Robert Hass (New York: Ecco Press, 1987), p. 149. 26. Arne Naess, "Modesty and the Conquest of Mountains," in The Mountain Spirit, edited by Michael Tobias and Harold Drasdo (New York: Overlook Press, 1979). Passage reprinted in Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, p. 3.
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9 Possible Political Problems of Earth-Based Religiosity Michael E. Zimmerman Biblical monotheism, which celebrates a Divine that transcends Creation, was an extraordinary historical development. By desacralizing Creation, Judaism and subsequently Christianity challenged animism and paganism, which are intuitively more understandable religions, insofar as their gods are contained within the cosmos. Early Christians cut down the sacred groves and chased the ancient gods from the temples, many of which became sites for Christian churches. In early modern times, the nonsacred character of Creation was emphasized by Reformation Christians, such as John Calvin, who encouraged Western "man" to "develop" Creation. 1 Despite the shocks delivered to Christian anthropocentrism by the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions, and despite a significant decline in the number of believing Christians, most contemporary Westerners continue to regard humans as morally and intellectually superior to all other beings. In effect, Western man has taken over the creative role of the biblical divinity. Unfortunately, because humans lack divine wisdom, they have developed weapons, economies, and consumption patterns that are causing significant ecological damage. To limit such damage, a number of radical environmentalistsincluding some deep ecologists and ecofeministscall for Western man to end his arrogant attitude toward nature, embrace an ecofriendly spirituality, and become a "plain citizen" of the sacred Earth community, the all-embracing "web of life." Radical environmentalists often look to nonbiblical, neopagan religions for spiritual guidance in developing a nondomineering spiritual attitude toward nature. Contemporary neopagans such as Starhawk, who recall Christianity's persecution of ancient paganism and who are concerned about modern man's violence against nature, affirm that the divine is present in all phenomena, rather than solely in a transcendent deity. Because spiritual issues are so often found in the writings of deep ecologists, Bron Taylor maintains that deep ecology has a broadly spiritual component.
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One leading deep ecologist, Bill Devall, however, has sharply criticized this claim. 2 Arne Naess maintains that the basic premises for an "ecosophy" or ecological philosophy can be either philosophical or spiritual/religious. Hence, a secular or nonspiritually oriented kind of deep ecology is possible in principle. Nevertheless, in fact, virtually all of the prominent versions of deep ecology (including Devall's) do involve spiritual premises or at least a significan spiritual component. In view of the strong case that Taylor makes for his account of deep ecology, and in view of his obvious sympathy for it, Devall's reaction is puzzling. Perhaps he is concerned that overemphasizing the spiritual dimension of deep ecology will make it less attractive to secular-minded people who care deeply about the fate of the Earth. Or perhaps he has become uneasy about linking deep ecology too tightly in particular with an Earth-based spirituality, in light of the concerns that I have raised elsewhere and will pursue in this essay.3 In recent decades, the Gaia hypothesis has given sustenance to neopagan visions of the Earth as a goddess, as the divine, self-organizing ecosystem in which all things are born and into which they return at death. One commentator writes: Neopaganism capitalizes on the difficulty human beings have of conceiving of a God simultaneously external to the universe and yet personal and present. Neopaganism finds it easier to see God, humanity, and nature as a continuum. In [Alain] de Benoist's words . . . paganism assumes that the universe is alive. It is a divine being, and this world-soul is the sole true beingthere is no other. It is imperishable, uncreated, without beginning or end. This god or world-soul accomplishes itself in and through the world: the creature is consubstantial with the creator. If there was anything that could be called a creation, it was certainly not a creation in the Christian sense of the world. Rather it was nothing more than the beginning of a new cycle in the world's history.4 Many modern people do not believe that terms like "the divine" and "the sacred" refer to anything. I myself take it for granted, however, that talk about the divine is meaningful talk, and that renewing humanity's relationship with the divine could play a significant role in resolving or at least in minimizing contemporary environmental and social problems. In this essay, however, I voice my concern about the possible consequences of the fact that such Earth-based religiosity tends to view the divine as wholly contained in or as immanent within the cosmos itself, rather than as transcending the cosmos as well as being somehow present in it. Most neopagans and radical environmentalists are insufficiently aware of the potentially dark side of such an immanentistic view of the divine. One such sinister potentiality was realized in National Socialism, which can be understood in part as a perverted religion of nature, which rejected Jewish and Christian otherworldliness as well as progressive political ideologies (communism, socialism, liberalism) that are indebted to Christian
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ideas about divine purpose actualizing itself in history. Unhappily, National Socialism was in some respects a Green movement. 5 I became cognizant of the Green side of the Nazi movement only a decade ago, in the process of coming to terms with the Nazi affiliation of Martin Heidegger, whose work I had once used to inform and to promote the deep ecology movement. Although the antimodern, anti-Enlightenment, anti-industrial, and nature-revering rhetoric of the Nazis in the early 1930s was largely betrayed by their subsequent commitment to rearmament and industrial productivity, the Nazi government passed environmental laws that were the most far-reaching in the developed world at that time. In other words, Nazi reverence for and identification with nature were not merely opportunistic. Affirming that humanity is but one strand in the great web of life, Nazi ideologues trumpeted the now infamous slogan Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil), which may be understood as a racist version of bioregionalism. The Nazis condemned Judaism and Christianity for being nature-hating, life-despising, and otherworldly. They were hardly alone in exhibiting antimodernist, pro-nature, and even neopagan sentiments in the early twentieth century. The Nazi movement's jingoist militarism, masculinist fantasies, and anti-Semitism help explain why Nazism made such dreadful use of sentiments that were shared by people with no sympathy at all for National Socialism. In another essay, I have described in more detail the ecofascist dimension of National Socialism.6 Some of my friends in the environmental movement have been dismayed by my recent excursions into the topic of ecofascism. Indeed, because environmentalism is under attack from so many angles, my examination of this topic may seem gratuitous. Obviously, I think the issue is important. Moreover, I believe that consideration of it should come from within the ranks of people who call themselves environmentalists, as I do. In what follows, I do not wish to say that fascist versions of environmentalism are an inevitable outcome of Earth-oriented religions, or that people concerned about the sacred dimension of their own homelands are somehow crypto-Nazis. The loss of a sense of place, as Wendell Berry has argued so eloquently, is one of the regrettable outcomes of modernity.7 As I noted above, ecofascism involves militaristic and xenophobic dimensions that are not discernible in most forms of bioregionalism, deep ecology, and ecofeminism. Indeed, because the United States is the world's most liberal democracy and has the highest percentage of churchgoing Christians of any industrial nation, chances may seem slim that something like a neopagan ecofascism could ever arise here. My discussion of the possibility of ecofascism is more than a cautionary tale, however, since neofascist movements are in fact on the rise again in Europe and constantly threaten to move Green political parties in a right-wing direction, as
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Oliver Geden has made clear in his recent work, Rechte Oekologie: Umweltschutz zwischen Emanzipation und Faschismus (Right-Wing Ecology: Environmental Protection Between Emancipation and Fascism). 8 Furthermore, in the context of a social and ecological crisis in the United States, I can imagine the emergence of protofascist forces that might appropriate and redefine ideas which are currently used rather innocently and naively by some radical ecologists, neopagans, and New Agers. The writings of the neopagan, anti-Christian Friedrich Nietzsche were put to use by the Nazis, despite Nietzsche's sharp criticism of anti-Semitic movements in his own time, a few decades before the emergence of the Nazi Party. Anyone familiar with American political paranoia, especially after the collapse of the external enemy of communism, must take seriously the prospect of collectivist movements thatunder the misleading banner of "Christian individualism"would draw upon immanentistic ideas (for example, "sacred blood" that must not be contaminated) to promote draconian solutions to environmental, political, and economic problems supposedly caused by racial mixing and immigration. In describing National Socialism as a Green version of neopaganism armed with Panzer tanks and inflamed by anti-Semitism, my point is not to say that contemporary deep ecologists, ecofeminists, and neopagans are protofascists. Were I to say this, I would be abetting criticisms made by such antienvironmental groups as the Wise Use Movement, with which I have little sympathy. Moreover, contemporary radical ecologists and neopagans are sufficiently variegated and at odds with one another, that they can be housed under one conceptual roof only by ignoring important distinctions. My point is to remind people who do promote an immanentistic, Earth-based religiosity that one version of such religiosity can be, and has been, put to appalling uses. Thus informed, contemporary Earth-based religionists would be capable not only of anticipating and deflating the criticisms of antienvironmental groups, but also of critically reexamining the adequacy of their own views about the relationships among humankind, nature, and the divine. For modernists, including liberal capitalists and communists alike, neopaganism or Earth-based religiosity is problematic not least because of its cyclical view of history. Such religiosity, attuned as it is to the cycles of the seasons and the movements of the planets, looks askance at the linear view of history that moderns have taken over from the biblical tradition. Insofar as neopagan National Socialism explicitly rejected the linear-progressive reading of history, liberals and Marxists have long been critical of neopaganism. If pre World War II reactionary movements condemned progressive views about history, so, too, did postwar postmodern critics. Such critics argue that a history which leads up
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to Auschwitz, the Gulag, H-bombs, and ecological devastation cannot be "progressive." Instead, so postmodern theorists maintain, the idea of progress has been deeply ingrained in totalizing movements that have justified political and social oppression. Though I myself once drew similar conclusions, I am skeptical of them today. For one thing, even though National Socialism made use of modern industry and technology, its social and cultural orientation were largely premodern. Although the Nazis may have been influenced by the "totalizing" tendencies that emerged in the French Revolution, they were clearly opposed to Enlightenment views of human progress, especially those views which emphasized the sanctity and freedom of each individual person. Today, I defend a progressive reading of history, although I also believe that such a reading must provide an adequate account of the political horrors and ecological destruction of the twentieth century. In what follows, in the context of my discussion of the dangers of Earth-based religiosity, I will examine such a progressive reading that contains a spiritual dimension, unlike the official doctrines of modern secular ideologies. This spiritual dimension involves panentheism, which regards the divine as being simultaneously present in the cosmos and transcendent of it. Ecofeminist Christian theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether has demonstrated that spiritual reverence toward creation or nature is compatible with panentheism, according to which the divine is simultaneously transcendent and immanent. 9 By way of contrast, some kind of pantheism or animism has characterized many pagan, traditional tribal, and neopagan religions, but the extent of such pantheism is not complete. Many traditional tribes, such as the Lakota Sioux with Wakan Tanka, conceived of a transcendent divinity as the eternal source of all phenomena. Moreover, some contemporary neopagans may best be described as panentheists rather than as pantheists. Nevertheless, many neopagans or Earth-based religionists either renounce, or are tempted to renounce, the transcendent dimension of divinity because they are so critical of the devastating ecological consequences that have arisen in societies influenced by religions with an otherworldly orientation. Of course, many civilizations without a transcendent divinity, including ancient China, were responsible for much ecological destruction. Nevertheless, a theme found in much Earth-based religiosity is that a resacralization of nature and a rejection of the transcendental God are needed in order to halt the ecologically suicidal activity of commercial civilization. In my critical examination of Earth-based religiosity, I use two different lenses: Martin Heidegger's ontology and Ken Wilber's transpersonal philosophy. As we shall see, even though Heidegger and Wilber sharply disagree about
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historical teleology and the merits of modernity, they agree that Earth-based religiosity risks adhering to a onedimensional or "flatland" ontology, the immanentistic or this-worldly orientation of which conceals the transcendental dimension. Paradoxically, by giving so much credence to the naturalistic view that humankind is merely one organic thread in the great web of life, some proponents of Earth-based religiosity end up affirming, or at least drawing heavily upon, a version of scientific materialism, which was conceived by the very modernism of which they are otherwise so often critical. In other words, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, modernists have much in common with those radical environmentalists and neopagans who subscribe to an immanentistic Earth-based religiosity. Despite Heidegger's critique of modernity's one-dimensional ontology, however, he can be understood as neopagan, insofar as he abandons the transcendent concept of God and envisions the gods as immanent within finite historical worlds. The Heidegger Connection One wing of the countercultural revolt that began in the 1960s sought to liberate oppressed Others of all sorts, including blacks, Hispanics, women, animals, and even nature itself. Curiously, however, some counterculturalists who used the vocabulary of revolution, liberation, emancipation, rights, and social progress did not take seriously how much this vocabulary was rooted in modernity, which some counterculturalists sharply criticized for its "domination" of nature. Indeed, to the consternation of historically informed liberals and socialists, some counterculturalists believed that modernity was inherently flawed and thus would inevitably lead to social and ecological catastrophe. For such counterculturalists, including a number of radical environmentalists, real liberation meant not merely gaining voting rights for blacks or equal employment rights for women, but throwing off the yoke imposed by the whole social, political, economic, industrial, and technological apparatus of modernity, in order to generate lifestyles that would bring human beings into closer relationship to each other, to nature, and to the sacred. I am personally familiar with this yearning for greater simplicity, for an end to the desecration of nature, and for an alternative to mainstream churches that tend to ignore God's presence in and concern with extrahuman aspects of Creation. Although appreciating the passion and concern exhibited by these sentiments, I now regard some of them as rather confused and possibly dangerous. For years, I published essays that condemned technological modernity, even though I simultaneously supported various liberation movements that were
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manifestations of its most positive dimension, its drive to liberate humankind from the scourges of ignorance, poverty, and political oppression. My fascination with Martin Heidegger's thought was crucial in my failure adequately to use this positive aspect of modernity to offset my condemnation of its ecologically destructive practices. Much of my critique of modernity was derived from Heidegger, whoby the early 1930s, when he became affiliated with National Socialisminterpreted technological modernity, including modern science, as the nihilistic culmination of twenty-five hundred years of cultural degeneration. Democracy, rationalism, socialism, communism, capitalism, empiricism, universal human rightsall of these were, for Heidegger, not signs of human progress but instead symptoms of Western humanity's decline, understood as an increasing loss of contact with Being. Ostensibly, this gradual loss led the West to be governed by a one-dimensional ontology that forces things to show themselves only as raw materials for enhancing the power of the technological system, the primary goal of which (despite talk of "improving" the human estate) is power for its own sake. According to Heidegger, the control obsession that originated in Western thought has become a planetary destiny in the twentieth century. Under the guise of movements promising human liberation and fulfillment, humankind has been reduced to the status of a clever animal, as defined by thinkers like Darwin and Freud. Nature, in turn, has been reduced to the status of a gasoline station for fueling ever more gargantuan industrial projects. Modern humanity has become blind to the fact that our capacity for understanding what things are involves an openness to that which transcends all things: the being of entities. 10 Although my environmental concerns led me to use Heidegger's thought to justify a radical ecological critique of technological modernity, my interest in various civil rights movements forced me to downplay his strongly antidemocratic views. Many other people, including the leading counterculturalist Herbert Marcuse, who studied with Heidegger, shared this ambivalent attitude toward modernity. The 1987 disclosures about the extent and duration of Heidegger's affiliation with National Socialism, however, forced me to make a more responsible and internally coherent assessment of his (and thus my own) views about modernity. In doing so, I arrived at the following two conclusions. First, it was no accident that Heidegger could so readily interpret his own thought as being consistent with National Socialism, for he agreed with its view that Western history involved a long decline from classical (especially Greek) antiquity, that modernity was the culmination of that decline, and that the only remedy for it was a revolution that involved the "complete transformation of our German Dasein [Heidegger's term for human existence]."11 Second, despite
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enthusiastically supporting Hitler's movement, Heidegger criticized Nazi ideologues, becauseas their biological racism demonstratedthey usually adhered to some variety of scientific naturalism. In Heidegger's view, naturalism was itself another manifestation of modernity's one-dimensional ontology, and hence could not provide an alternative to modernity. The material power of modernity was inversely related to its spiritual ignorance. Blind to humanity's transcendent dimension, which differentiates humans from other beings, modern humans conclude that they are nothing but animals involved in a struggle for survival in the face of the overpowering forces of nature. 12 From Heidegger's viewpoint, the Nazis' worship of natural forces and their celebration of the inchoate impulses of "blood" kinship were not a recovery of ancient ways, at least not ancient Greek ways, since the latter were in touch with the transcendent domain, even though they could not articulate it. According to Heidegger, the Greeks did not worship nature understood in modern terms as material substances and processes, but rather celebrated nature understood as physis, that is, as awe-inspiring presencing, appearing, or manifesting. This manifesting constitutes what Heidegger calls the "being" of entities (Sein des Seienden), and what the ancient Greeks (supposedly) experienced as the self-disclosure of entities, their entry into presence from concealment. Such presencing or being is not experienced by nonhuman animals, which allegedly lack the ontological openness necessary for such presencing to occur. Influenced by German idealism, which distinguished between the natural and the historical domains, Heidegger criticized Nazi ideologues for portraying humans merely as intelligent animals, governed by natural laws and struggling for survival in competition with the rest of life on Earth. In the end, Heidegger concluded that the historical reality of National Socialism was another dreary instance of modernity's naturalistic humanism, which seeks to gain control of everything through science, technology, and industry. Many commentators have noted that National Socialism contains two apparently contradictory elements: a fascination with nature worship, on the one hand, and a commitment to industrial technology, on the other. Jeffrey Herf uses the term "reactionary modernism" to describe this complex tension within Nazi ideology.13 According to Heidegger, however, the dominant ideology of National Socialism was not reactionary, but modernist. Because Nazi efforts to resurrect pagan divinities like Wotan and to restore blood ties to the land occurred within the context of a general commitment to some form of modern materialism or naturalism, Heidegger believed that those efforts were hopelessly confused and incapable of restoring Germany's relationship with the transcendent. In his view, humankind could establish an appropriate relationship with nature only after
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discerning that nature, physis, involves a transcendent dimension that is overlooked by modern naturalism. In the 1940s, Aldo Leopold would call humans "plain citizens" of the land, but in the 1930s Heidegger insisted that humansfar from being "plain citizens"were unique. Humans exist as the opening in which things can manifest themselves and in this sense "be." Scorning Nazi ideologues who promoted a materialistic religion of nature, Heidegger encouraged the Nazis to put their conceptual and spiritual houses in order by adopting his own philosophy, which emphasized the transcendent and nonnaturalistic dimension of human existence and "nature'' alike. For Heidegger, even though an eagle has far better eyesight than a human, the former cannot discern the "beauty" of an entity or a landscape, for beauty (like meaning, intelligibility, and purpose) can be discerned only by those who can comprehend the being of an entity (i.e., who can encounter the entity as entity). Being "is" not itself an entity or a property of an entity, but rather names the ontological event in which an entity presents or reveals itself. In a conclusion that is repellent to the modern sensibility, Heidegger asserted that humans cannot adequately be defined as animals. He maintained that homage should be given neither to the complex processes and forces of material nature, nor to the gods who supposedly correspond to those forces, but rather to transcendent being, by virtue of whose radiance entities can appear as entities within a specific historical epoch. Like Kant, Hegel, and Schelling, Heidegger maintained that human interaction with nature and the divine was culturally and linguistically mediated. 14 Far more so than did Heidegger, however, the German idealists wrestled with the issue of the relationship between a transcendent, eternal God and a finite, material nature. Indeed, Heidegger renounced the transcendent biblical God, replacing Him with the gods sung by the neopagan poet Hölderlin. Supposedly these gods help to found and orient the finite worlds opened up through human existence, which is sustained by a transcendent ontological dimension that is not of human origin. My efforts to read Heidegger as a forerunner of deep ecology were met with resistance by some deep ecologists, who regarded his emphasis on human existence as a residual form of the anthropocentrism that is allegedly responsible for modernity's destructive treatment of nature. Heidegger himself, however, would have been equally critical of contemporary Earth-based religiosity, insofar as it is influenced by the same naturalism that discloses nature as complex material systems and humans as clever animals. Unfortunately, despite rejecting the biological racism that he regarded as central to the historical form actually taken by National Socialism, Heidegger not only ardently supported the movement during the 1930s, but continued to
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revere its "inner truth and greatness" long after the movement had led Germany to self-destruction and had murdered millions of innocent people in the process. Attempting to make sense of all this, Jacques Derrida suggests that Heidegger was guilty not of biological racism, but rather of metaphysical racism, according to which the German languagemore than any otheris profoundly linked with ancient Greek. 15 From this perspective, the "inner truth and greatness" of National Socialism meant nothing less than that Germany was capable of initiating a historical epoch as great in its own way as the era established by the ancient Greeks. Heidegger's own aspiration was to become the spiritual leader of the Nazi revolution, which could then carry out its true mission of awakening German existence from its blindness to the transcendent being of entities. The sheer scale and awful consequences of Heidegger's political misjudgment (not to mention his postwar silence about the Holocaust) have led many people to conclude that his thought is little more than an apology for fascism.16 Though understanding the reasons for this conclusion, I cannot agree with it. Efforts must be made to identify those aspects of Heidegger's thought which led him to support the Nazi movement, but efforts must also be made to study aspects of his thought that retain their importance despite his politically perverted application of them. The political problems with his thought can be traced to two major factors: first, his linguistic racism and nationalism; second, his view that Western history involves ontological degeneration, which ends in the materialism and naturalism that are essential to all modern political ideologies. During the past decade, I have looked for a way of understanding human existence that, on the one hand, avoids nationalism and racism, but that retains what is valid about Heidegger's idea of the transcendent dimension of human existence and nature; and, on the other hand, affirms the progressive dimension of modernity, but that acknowledges its destructive attitude toward the natural world and its dissociative attitude toward the human body, emotions, and the female. I have found that Ken Wilber's writings accomplish much of this.17 Moreover, Wilber provides a more satisfying account of the divine than does Heidegger. The Wilber Connection I read Ken Wilber's remarkable book Up from Eden: A Transpersonal View of Human Evolution in the early 1980s, when I was still seeing the world through the Heideggerian lens.18 The book was important to me for at least three reasons. First, it demonstrated that the transcendent dimension of human existence could be explained not only in Heidegger's terms but also in terms that
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were consistent with the "perennial wisdom," defined in part as the esoteric dimension of the great religious traditions, about which Heidegger had little positive to say after about 1930. Second, the book showed me a way to reconcile my critical view of modernity (as causing so much ecological destruction) with my positive view of modernity (as promoting emancipation from ignorance, poverty, and political oppression). Finally, in contrast to Heidegger's lack of interest in cosmology and his denial that human history is an evolutionary process by which humankind is actualizing some hidden potential, Wilber's book offered a teleological view of the development of consciousness, a view that took into account both neo-Hegelianism and modern cosmology. Moreover, in several other books, but especially in his Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, Wilber acknowledges the problematic and destructive character of modernity's treatment of nature. He maintains, however, that the solution to such treatment lies not in returning to premodern attitudes and beliefs, including neopaganism, but instead in consolidating the positive gains of modernity and subsequently moving beyond its limits. 19 Like Heidegger, Wilber holds that human existence involves a transcendent dimension which enables people to be free and self-conscious, and thus to encounter entities as entities. As a neo-Hegelian, however, and thus unlike Heidegger, Wilber reads human history as a broadly progressive process that moves from prepersonal to personal and eventually to transpersonal modes of awareness. The transpersonal means the "personal plus," that is, states of consciousness that include the personal or egoic, but go beyond the limitations of such consciousness, including its strong attachment to its own perspective on matters. Wilber regards thinkers like Hegel as exhibiting a mode of awareness that synthesizes various perspectives that may otherwise seem contradictory. Such aperspectival "visionlogic," according to Wilber, opens the way for genuinely transpersonal modes of awareness. Wilber maintains that modernity's democratic ideals and institutions do not represent a decline from some earlier and preferable condition, but express and help to consolidate the personal mode of consciousness, which Wilber regards as superior to the prepersonal mode. In the prepersonal mode, people are less capable of distinguishing themselves either from their tribe or from the natural environment. Some followers of Earth-based religions praise prepersonal existence as being "closer to nature," especially when contrasted with modernity's abstract, complex, dualistic, and anthropocentric egoic consciousness. Wilber argues, however, that if neopagans have nostalgia for the prepersonal past, they are misguided. Those who yearn to return either to the natural womb or to prepersonal social relations not only promote regressive attitudes that fail to
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understand human consciousness and its teleological trajectory, but also refuse to assume the moral and historical responsibility that belongs to beings who are self-conscious, historical, and thus capable of being aware of the transcendent dimension of things. Wilber warns against committing the "pre/trans fallacy," which involves confusing prepersonal states with transpersonal states. 20 The pre/trans fallacy involves thinking that dualism in all its unhappy manifestations, including the dualism between humanity and nature, can be overcome by returning to the state of innocence characteristic of infancy, that is, by returning to Eden. Wilber maintains, however, that far from being the solution to the problem of dualism, returning to the womb/infancy/Eden (that is, to prepersonal existence) amounts to an error that is fatal psychologically and socially, no matter how attractive such a return might otherwise seem. Wilber encourages people not to regress, but instead to progress toward more integrated states of awareness that embrace what is valid about the prepersonal and personal levels of awareness, even while moving beyond their limitations. The provocative title of his book, Up from Eden, emphasizes that development of self-consciousness in the Garden of Eden was a fall "upward," even though it led to expulsion from the state of infantile innocence. Spiritual development involves an evolutionary process that brings an end to infantile bliss, leads one into the increasingly anxious and alienated states of individual personhood, and finally guides one toward transpersonal states that integrate at a higher level the things that were separated in personal states of consciousness. By criticizing "retro-romantic" or neopagan longings for an idyllic prepersonal way of life, and by emphasizing the progressive evolution of consciousnessa development that must be supported by appropriate improvements in material, social, political, and cultural arrangementsWilber might seem to be just another modernist who spurns the supposedly apocalyptic fantasies of environmentalists. In fact, however, unlike many proponents of modernity, he agrees that there is an ecological crisis, which is the leading symptom of modernity's self-destructive effort to dominate the body, the emotions, the female, and "nature" in general. In Up from Eden, Wilber maintains that the ecological crisis results from two interrelated trends of human evolution, especially as it has occurred in the West. First, in the process of achieving a personal or individuated state of consciousness, modern Western "man" increasingly dissociated himself from everything that he associated with the previous (thus ''lower") stage of consciousness: nature, body, female, emotion. But such dissociation is not a necessary consequence of achieving individuation, because a person can learn to differentiate himself/herself from the body, emotions, and
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nature without dissociating himself/herself from them. Second, the process of individuation brings with it an increasing sense of mortality, which gives rise to ever more intense death anxiety. To some extent, Wilber concludes, the Western project of "dominating" nature is a manifestation of a culturewide denial of death: by controlling nature, Western man proposes to overcome mortality. In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, an enormous and complex work that cannot be summarized here, Wilber continues to affirm that there is an ecological crisis, but deemphasizes the role played by death anxiety in the modern subject's assault on nature. 21 Instead, he takes a somewhat different approach to explaining modernity's destructive treatment of nature. This approach leads to a conclusion that has interesting parallels with how Heidegger, in the 1940s, criticized the "historical reality" of National Socialism. Just as Heidegger maintained that Nazis enamored of nature adhered to their own version of modernity's metaphysical naturalism, so Wilber concludes that retroromantics adhere to their own version of modernity's metaphysical naturalism, the Great Mechanical WorldSystem, the "web of life" of which humankind is but a strand. Other critics have noted that radical environmentalists often appeal to ecological science to support their views even while otherwise condemning modern science for regarding nature as an object to be controlled and exploited.22 Wilber, however, goes on to argue that most "retro-romantics" (including followers of Earth-based religions) and modernists alike share a one-dimensional ontology, according to which the cosmos is composed of complex material processes. (Arguably, however, neopagan divinities are not reducible to a one-dimensional materialism, though they are usually immanent in the cosmos, not transcendent of it.) In this respect, too, Wilber agrees with Heidegger's contention that National Socialism was metaphysically "the same" as other modern political ideologies which adhere to a materialistic ontology that is incapable of recognizing the domains which transcend the physical and the organic. Wilber differs from Heidegger, however, in affirming that modernity achieved many of the social and political goals conducive to the development of personal consciousness, which is the precondition for moving to a more integrated, transpersonal level of consciousness. For Wilber, National Socialism differed from liberal democracys both by repudiating the ideals and constitutional guarantees of individual liberty, and by denying that Western history involves an advance over earlier periods of human history. Wilber's progressive reading of natural evolution and human history leads to another important disagreement with Heidegger. We recall that Wilber and
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Heidegger concur that human existence involves a transcendent dimension ignored by modern materialism. Most moderns adhere to some version of such materialism, whether they be liberal democrats, communists, socialists, fascists, or most kinds of radical environmentalists. But liberals, communists, and socialists all warn against regressing to premodern forms of social organization, while Nazis celebrate tribal forms of organization in which a homogeneous "folk" celebrate their blood ties with the sacred landscape. Liberals, socialists, and communists (at least in principle) affirm that modernity has emancipatory aims which are important enough to justify the loss of tribal forms of social organization. In the 1930s, however, Heidegger favored overthrowing democratic principles and establishing an authoritarian regime, even though he criticized those Nazis who described this process as the renewal of Aryan paganism. For Heidegger, democracy had to be pushed aside in order to make possible the recovery of something truly primordial: not ancient blood ties but the German relation with being. Some proponents of Earth-based religiosity, like many other people faced with the trials and tribulations of modern life, yearn for a simplified tribal life in closer proximity to the land. Wilber, however, cautions against giving in to such yearnings, since doing so would encourage the regression to prepersonal modes of awareness and the rise of corresponding authoritarian social structures that would undermine the positive achievements of modernity, including individuated personhood and constitutional democracy. Heidegger was anti-modern in being antidemocratic and in denying a developmental view of history; moreover, he was neopagan in rejecting the biblical tradition and in calling for the arrival of new gods to generate a new world to replace the non-world of technological modernity. Nevertheless, in calling for the Germans to repeat ancient Greece's generation of a world, he was asking them to prepare for a new encounter with the transcendent, that is, with the being of entities that transcends even the gods. Some Earth-based religionists might criticize Heidegger's view of the transcendent, just as some deep ecologists criticize his infatuation with the Greeks, whose anthropocentrism and mind body dualism helped give rise to the ecological crisis. From Wilber's perspective, however, Heidegger's view of the Greeks had the virtue of affirming that they were in touch with the transcendent domain, though what he meant by "the transcendent" is not the Absolute, which Wilber maintains is celebrated under various names by most of the world's great spiritual traditions, with the exception of wholly immanentistic traditions. Many followers of Earth-based religions would regard Heidegger's quasi transcendentalism as problematic, because it has too much in
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common with traditional transcendentalism, which so often promotes the contempt for nature that has helped to justify modernity's ecologically destructive practices. If Heidegger and Wilber disagree about the nature of the transcendent, they also differ with regard to the selfunderstanding of modern humankind. Heidegger often writes that humankind elevates itself to the status of a titanic subject which regards everything as an object for domination. Ostensibly, this virtual self-deification of the human subject resulted from loss of contact with the transcendent domain on which human existence depends. Forgetting that the human is not a "thing" at all, but rather the historical-temporal nothingness or openness in which things can first reveal themselves and thus "be," modern humankind conceives of itself as one thing among others: a clever animal. Seeking to deny its own mortality and finitude, the clever animal uses rationality as the instrument both for guaranteeing its survival and for taking total possession of the planet and the universe beyond. Although Wilber could agree with much of this explanation, in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality he adopts a rather different approach to understanding the modern human subject and its world-conquering ambitions. Wilber suggests that the apparent human arrogance which leads to an assault on nature is itself the symptom of moderns who seek to compensate for the realization that the Great World System postulated by natural science (and adopted in various ways by most modernists, environmentalists, and many Earth-based religionists) has no place for the human subject. As Nietzsche remarks in The Genealogy of Morals, "Since Copernicus, man seems to have got himself on an inclined planenow he is slipping faster and faster away from the center intowhat? into nothingness? into a 'penetrating sense of his nothingness'?" 23 By unleashing the world-shaping power of his rationality, Western "man" desperately attempts to demonstrate that he is not nothing, that he does exist, despite not having any place in the world system described by the very same modern science which makes possible his efforts to control nature. On the basis of the foregoing analysis, Wilber would contend that the ecological crisis and the crisis of modern nihilism can be solved only by reestablishing a place for subjectivity in the cosmos. Without acknowledging his own transcendent subjectivity, Western man will continue trying to "prove" himself through ever more extravagant "conquests" that may prove fatal to the human species and very damaging to other life forms. To be sure, not all Western men, much less all Western people, exhibit the aggressiveness, arrogance, and acquisitiveness of those who run modern corporations and governments, but perhaps they feel most acutely the absence of their own significance, and thus particularly
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strive to demonstrate it by being "successful," even if this involves undermining the biosphere on which human life depends. Many Earth-based religionists, by way of contrast, maintain that by affirming their allegedly transcendent subjectivity, Westerners would simply reinstall the humanity nature dualism established by Greek philosophers and Christians many centuries ago. Instead, modern people must adopt a more humble attitude and acknowledge that they are merely one strand among many in the great web of life. In poetry favored by some deep ecologists, Robinson Jeffers identifies himself with the "divine nature of things," where "divine" is understood as the great organism or the organic whole. 24 Similarly, Wiccan author Starhawk writes: Spirit, sacred, Goddess, Godwhatever you want to call itis not found outside the world somewhereit's in the world; it is the world, and it is us. Our goal is not to get off the wheel of birth nor to be saved from something. Our deepest experiences are experiences of connection with the Earth and with the world.25 Some ecofeminists, such as Charlene Spretnak, hold that a Goddess-oriented spirituality does not have to be wholly immanentistic, but can also be transcendent in conceiving of the divine as "the sacred whole, or the infinite complexity of the universe."26 This "infinite complexity" may mean much the same as the Great World System, which for Wilber does not involve the transcendent dimension. Elsewhere, however, Spretnak speaks of the Divine in a way that seems to include the transcendent dimension. Like Wilber, moreover, Spretnak believes that the ecological crisis is in part the consequence of the "loss of meaning'' of modern life, including the loss of subjectivity and interiority. Wilber makes clear, however, that portraying humans as simply one strand in the cosmic web or as a function in the great cosmic system does nothing to solve this crisis of meaning, since naturalistic science already portrays humankind in this way. This naturalistic self-interpretation has proven to be unsatisfying to many people, includingif their behavior is any indicationthe aggressive industrialists and politicians who are often held responsible for causing so much environmental damage. Wilber is not alone in pointing out that many early modern people began turning their eyes away from Heaven and toward Earth when they concluded that modern science might enable them to control their destiny by mastering the forces of nature. Renouncing the aspiration of ascending to the transcendent world beyond, moderns increasingly chose the path of descending to the material plane. Concluding that only the material world exists enabled them not only to liberate themselves from the political constraints of otherworldly religions, but also to focus all available energy on controlling the material world in order to improve human well-being. Anyone familiar with the hunger,
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disease, poverty, ignorance, and sectarian violence in early modern Europe can appreciate the enthusiasm with which so many intelligent people greeted the emancipatory projects of modernity. Material abundance, military power, and (relatively) democratic institutions alone, however, have not been able to satiate the human desire for something nonmaterial (i.e., for the transcendent). Wilber contends that many followers of Earth-based spirituality have also renounced the path of Ascent in favor of the path of Descent, though for a somewhat different reason. They believe that an otherworldly orientation creates a binary opposition in which the immaterial soul is regarded as superior to the material body. Ensouled "man" thereby justifies his domineering treatment of body, woman, and nature. Despite having some validity, this argument runs into difficulty when one takes into account the increasing agnosticism and atheism of modern elites who controlled science, industry, banking, and technology. Far from being otherworldly, they were becoming heavily invested in materialistic ideology. One might retort that they were motivated by the Protestant work ethic, but this approach does not satisfactorily address the fact that modernists are materialists, not transcendentalists. By adopting their own version of modern science's materialistic world system, many radical environmentalists with neopagan leanings end up in partial metaphysical agreement with modernists. According to Wilber, however, if the path of Ascent is denied and if the transcendent dimension is rejected, the only direction left for a materialistic people is ever greater consumption of material goods (an infinite "ahead"), which can never satisfy the yearning for the nonmaterial. As a non-dualist, Wilber maintains that the divine is fully present in each phenomenon, but that the divine cannot be exhausted by any such phenomenon. Transcendent subjectivity is neither a human product nor a possession, but rather the emergence of a divine possibility that has been moving toward self-actualization in cosmic history. Humans go astray, though understandably and perhaps unavoidably, by thinking that their own egos are identical with transcendent subjectivity, that is, the mortal ego is God incarnate. For moderns who have renounced the transcendent dimension, the mortal ego must strut about as what Freud called the "prosthetic god," decked out with mechanical equipment that extends ordinary human capacities. For such a god, there is no genuine transcendence, only ever greater material power. This desperate god, ignorant of its relationship to the transcendent divine, and yet dissociated from body, nature, emotions, and the female, attempts to conquer the world, but risks destroying the conditions needed for human life. Reconciling corporeality with transcendent subjectivity has always been difficult for human beings, who are always tempted to renounce such subjectivity in favor of a view of humankind and divine that is "closer to nature." If Wilber
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is right, however, only an evolution of transpersonal consciousness will enable humankind to reintegrate that which has been dissociatedbody, female, emotions, naturein the development of personal consciousness. And transpersonal consciousness involves the recovery of the forgotten transcendent dimension. Hence, for Wilber, efforts of Earth-based spiritualists to revivify pagan religions and tribal rituals are misguided, especially when such efforts take place within the context of a materialist ("flatland") ontology. Using such rituals to encourage people to come closer to nature, while defining nature as the "web of life," not only will fail to satisfy the widespread human yearning for authentic transcendence, but also may encourage highly problematic regressive tendencies in the psychological and social domains. A more satisfactory path, in Wilber's view and in my own, calls for the reconciliation of Ascent and Descent, transcendence and immanent, spiritual and material. In my opinion, Wilber achieves a great deal in his critical analysis of modernity, Earth-based religiosity, and the ecological crisis. He manages to include much of what is worthwhile in Heidegger's views about the transcendent domain while discarding the antimodernist sentiments that led Heidegger into such political trouble. Moreover, Wilber's view of the transcendent includes important aspects of spiritual traditions that Heideggeras a modernist despite himselfeither rejected or adopted only in limited ways. Also, Wilber's neo-Hegelian evolutionary cosmology takes into account the fact that contemporary science seems to be pointing toward a recovery of the transcendent, though about all this I have been able to comment only in passing. Wilber's contention that modernists and radical environmentalists alike adopted the materialistic world system of an earlier phase of modern science, and that this world system deprives many humans of a satisfactory sense of personal and group significance, allows him to conclude that nothing good will come of well-meaning efforts to "resacralize" nature, unless the transcendent dimension of nature, humankind, and the divine is first rediscovered and reaffirmed. Critical Appraisal of Wilber's Approach Wilber's work has attracted a number of criticisms, not least because of its feisty and sometimes acerbic style. 27 Here, I address three major complaints. The first concerns his contention that there is an "evolution" of consciousness. Critics charge that this contention justifies a "totalizing" narrative which privileges the very Western institutions that have justified destruction of natural areas and oppression of indigenous peoples. The second complaint concerns a conclusion that Wilber draws from his notion of consciousness evolution: con-
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temporary efforts to regain contact with living nature and the divine by exploring shamanic practices and reviving paganism are regressive and dangerous. Wilber draws this conclusion even though he himself once suggested that shamans were the first to achieve transpersonal awareness. The third complaint is that Wilber's ontology does not provide a place for divinities, demons, angels, souls, and spirits, at least some of which are included not only in neopagan cosmology but also in the cosmology of most major religions. To the extent that such beings transcend the material plane, and to the extent that neopagans acknowledge and worship some of these beings, it would seem that there is a transcendent dimension to neopaganism. Hence, neopagans cannot easily be understood as agreeing with moderns that the Great World System is no more than complex material processes. Gus diZerega, a political theorist who seeks to synthesize neopagan spirituality with Hayekian evolutionary liberalism, has offered the most probing ecologically oriented critique of Wilber's evolutionary transpersonalism. 28 DiZerega's critique is especially important in view of the fact that, like Wilber, he celebrates the positive social achievements of modernity and affirms that the divine involves immanence and transcendence, but unlike Wilber he is more receptive to the possibility that neopagan rituals and shamanic practices may involve authentic and nonregressive encounters with the divine. DiZerega, a Wiccan elder who studies and practices shamanism, maintains that Wilber is wrong to characterize virtually all neopagans (and, by association, deep ecologists and ecofeminists) as promoting an immanentistic spirituality without any appreciation for or recognition of the transcendent dimension. The issue at hand involves a question that can be decided only by empirical research, which I am only beginning to undertake: What are the doctrines and beliefs of contemporary neopagans? In his essay "Nature Religion and the Modern World," diZerega diagnoses the problem of modernity in terms reminiscent of Wilber's diagnosis: "The modern world's spiritual crisis is not about misery but meaninglessness. . . . What has taken [the place of salvation religions] is a belief in progress towards a secular paradise promising unending material consumption."29 According to diZerega (and many other people), consumerism is a form of idolatry that confuses having things with being in appropriate relation to the divine, which alone can provide meaning to human life. Regarding the immanent-transcendent issue, diZerega points out that all English traditional covens begin with the following blessing, ''The Dryghton": In the name of Dryghton, the ancient Providence Which was from the beginning and is for all eternity
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male and female, all-powerful, changeless, eternal. In the name of Our Lady of the Moon and the Lord of Death and Resurrection, In the names of the Mighty Ones of the four quarters, The Kings of the Elements: Blessed Be this place and this time and they who are with us. 30 If Dryghton names a transcendent divine who is also present in nature, diZerega's form of neopaganism would be more like panentheism than pantheism, although diZerega himself concedes that many neopagans are pantheistic.31 Moreover, in answer to the charge that neopaganism encourages personal or social regression, diZerega contends that the neopagan revival proves attractive to well-educated, financially secure, and technologically proficient people who cannot find satisfaction in mainstream religions, not least because such religions have still not embraced a "creation-centered" spirituality in a version that can be reconciled with traditional "salvation-oriented" spirituality.32 In certain natural settings and in connection with rituals designed to invoke divinities, many neopagans report experiencing a powerful divine presence. Such presences are often understood to be important but intermediary divinities, not the transcendent source of all phenomena. Wilber's ontology, however, does not seem able (or willing) adequately to accommodate the spiritual entitiesgods and goddesses, angels and demonsthat are so often encountered by spiritual adepts in various traditions. Moreover, in his interpretation of Plotinus, whom Wilber regards as the greatest Western exemplar of the nondual vision that he himself promotes, Wilber tends to overlook passages in which Plotinus refers to gods and spirits. Curiously, insofar as Plotinus was the last great pagan philosopher, Wilber himself may be viewed as a neopagan insofar as he celebrates Plotinus as the great Western representative of the non-dualism that Wilber himself promotes. Christian theologians, despite their appreciation for Plotinus's spiritual insight, must finally reject his view that Creation "emanates" from the Divine One, since emanationism does not properly address the doctrine of divine transcendence, nor does it take into account the biblical doctrine according to which God chose to create the world. Christian panentheism, then, would have to acknowledge that God is a divine Person who chose to generate Creation, and that Creation is not itself divine, though it is a manifestation of divine goodness. What distinguishes Wilber's Neoplatonism from more typical neopaganism, however, is his resolute insistence that the Absolute radically transcends all phenomena, even though It is also present in them.
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For reasons mentioned above, many neopagans are wary of Wilber's notion of the evolution of consciousness, but some practitioners are willing to take this notion seriously, so long as Wilber himself is willing to consider the possibility that Wicca and shamanism are authentic efforts to "recover" important dimensions of sacred experience that were unnecessarily repressed by the emergence of salvation religions. Is it possible that before taking a further step in the evolution of consciousness, Western humankind needs to "loop back" to prior stages in order to integrate what has been forgotten? This is an important question, one to which I have no ready answer. A related question is worth considering: Given that mainstream religions are losing their strength in the Western world, and given that they have helped contribute to problematic attitudes toward Creation or nature, is it not appropriate and inevitable that, at this historical juncture, many spiritually thirsty Westerners would be exploring non-Western and neopagan alternatives to Christianity and Judaism? That Wilber would answer this question affirmatively is evidenced by his own exploration of various non-Western and neopagan traditions. In view of his concerns about the possibility of social and psychological regression (in regard to the pre/trans fallacy), however, he warns that exploration must constantly be on the lookout for the narcissistic temptation of moving toward prepersonal states. Yet he must also resist those critics who, failing to distinguish between the transpersonal and the prepersonal, conclude that Wilber's own pursuit of spiritual non-dualism amounts to a regression, a flight from reason. In Up from Eden, we read: [T]he New Age critics [i.e., proponents] often tend to confuse pre-egoic and trans-egoic and thus end up championing not only truly trans-personal endeavors, which is admirable, but also the most grossly preegoic movements, which is perfectly disastrous. And the orthodox critics, such as Christopher Lasch and Peter Martin, champion the same confusion, but in a reverse way: after presenting excellent analyses of the widespread present-day pre-egoic trends toward narcissistic absorption, they ruin their whole presentations by lumping trans-personal endeavors with pre-personal pursuits. One is tempted to say, "A plague on both their houses," except that both are partially correct, and their half-truths need to be brought together in a comprehensive view. 33 I share Wilber's concerns about the possibility that some explorations of neopaganism might encourage regression to prepersonal states, precisely at a moment when it is appropriate to encourage responsible personhood involving mutual exchange of recognition and respect. I am more open than is Wilber, however, to the possibility that exploring neopaganism and non-Western traditions may contribute to the overall goal of the development both of more integrated modes of consciousness and of the corresponding social institutions. Moreover, despite my own concerns about ecofascism, I concede
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that experimenting with neopaganism in the context of a traditionally liberal society does not pose the same kind of threat posed by the anti-Semitic, völkisch, immanentistic religion of nature promoted by National Socialists in the context of a traditionally illiberal society that, faced with an enormous political and economic crisis, also had to contend with militant nationalism and anti-Semitism. Like Wilber, however, I also believe that contemporary neopagans and other Earth-based spiritualists must remember that neopaganism has been used for destructive political purposes in our century. For many Nazis, socially reactionary policies based on Nazi neopaganism were perfectly compatible with high-tech industry and weaponry. High educational attainments and favorable attitudes toward technology, then, are by no means a guarantee that people will not succumb to the appeal of a nature-oriented religious movement that promises to relieve them of the onerous moral responsibilities taken for granted by salvation religions, which emphasize that humans cannot and should not follow the "laws of nature." As self-conscious historical agents who are both embraced by nature and transcend it, humans are destined to play a different role on this planet than animals lacking such historical self-consciousness. In this century, many people have been attracted to totalitarian movements because they promise to relieve people of the burden imposed by individual moral responsibility. Nazi "antiprogressivism" and Soviet "progressivism" both proved to be authoritarian regimes that were completely opposed to Enlightenment modernity's celebration and defense of the inalienable rights of persons. Insofar as the modern concept of the person finds its roots in Christianity, which emphasizes that only humans were made in the image of the transcendent God; and insofar as the modern person can and must act in ways that irrevocably shape linear history, a concept that is also rooted in the biblical faiths, one can well understand why modern liberals are even more suspicious of neopaganism than they are of Christianity. Arguably, neopaganism undermines the notion of human specialness and discards the idea that history is progressive. Even if they concede all this, however, neopagans could reply that it was the Renaissance revival of classical paganism that eventually broke the power of the church dogmatism, opened the way for the renewal of scientific investigation, reaffirmed the worth of individuals in their earthly lives, and helped to pave the way for modern democracies. Agnostic liberal humanists, moreover, would contest Wilber's notion that cosmic and human history are somehow the manifestation or actualization of a Divine potential. Although insisting that the Divine is somehow present in history, Wilber makes the following concession to the liberal humanist: the great-
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est revolution possible today would be the global institutionalization and consolidation of the modern ideal of the rights of persons. According to Wilber, were the great majority of people to act as free adults, willingly acknowledging the personhood, rights, and responsibilities of everyone else, this would constitute a major step toward solving the ecological crisis, much of which is explicable in terms of militarism, nationalism, and inhumane/illegal economic practices. The next step, however, would be the emergence of transpersonal modes of being, in which the needed work of reintegration could begin taking place. Since both diZerega and Wilber are both respecters of persons, and since both are working to accomplish the necessary reintegration, though in somewhat different ways, I regret that they often seem to talk past one another. Although I appreciate the motivation behind and force of many of the criticisms made of Wilber's work, I remain convinced that he has made an enormous contribution to the contemporary discussion of the divine, nature, and humanity. Wilber makes clear that modernity's crisis of meaning can be solved neither by a spasm of life-denying transcendentalism and otherworldly yearning, nor by a renewal of immanentistic nature religiosity, but rather by developing a multidimensional, nondual ontology that allows room for experiencing the transcendental and subjective domains that have for so long been neglected. Human awareness makes possible discernment of dimensions hidden from the view of the most far-seeing bird and unnoticeable by even the most sharp-nosed hound. Such discernment enables people to realize that material nature, however incredible its beauty, organization, and complexity may be, is only one manifestation of a divine with infinite dimensions. A truly deep spirituality acknowledges the absolute depth of reality, a depth certainly not discernible in the world system of modern materialism ("the web of life"), and not adequately discernible in the cosmic world soul of neopaganism. Notes My thanks to Gus diZerega, Ken Wilber, and Bron Taylor for helpful suggestions that improved this essay. 1. In this essay, whenever I use the term "man" or "man's," I do so to emphasize that I have in mind human males under patriarchy, not the human species in general. 2. See Bron Taylor, "Resacralizing Earth: Pagan Environmentalism and the Restoration of Turtle Island," in American Scared Space, edited by David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); Bill Devall, "How Radical and How Deep the Resistance" (a review of Bron Taylor, ed., Ecological Resistance Movements), The Trumpeter 12:4 (Fall 1995): 201 203; Bron Taylor, "Ecological Resistance Movements: Not Always Deep but if Deep, Religious: Reply to Devall,'' The
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Trumpeter 13:2 (Spring 1996): 98 103; Bill Devall, "Response to Bron Taylor's Criticisms of My Review of Ecological Resistance Movements," The Trumpeter 13:3 (Summer 1996): 147 150. Bron Taylor has written another insightful essay, "Earth and Nature-Based Spirituality: From Radical Environmentalism to Scientific Paganism" (1998), unpublished. 3. Michael E. Zimmerman, "Ecofascism: A Threat to American Environmentalism?" in The Ecological Community, edited by Roger S. Gottlieb (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp.229 254. 4. Thomas Molar, The Pagan Temptation (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1987), p. 125. 5. See Robert Pois, National Socialism and the Religion of Nature (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1986). On the other hand, James M. Rhodes, in The Hitler Movement (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1980), interprets National Socialism not as an instance of perverted neopaganism, but rather as the latest outbreak of a millennarian, apocalyptic, Gnostic revolution influenced by the Book of Revelation and the writings of Joachim di Fiore. In "Ruralism or Environmentalism?" Environmental Values 5 (1996): 47 58, Avner de-Shalit distinguishes between a nostalgic, antimodernist, right-wing movement that he describes as "ruralism," and a future-oriented, progressive, ecologically informed, anti-speciesistic movement that he calls "environmentalism." In de-Shalit's view, National Socialismespecially as described by Anna Bramwell in Ecology in the 20th Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989)was a variety of ruralism, not of environmentalism proper. Although there is some truth to de-Shalit's position, the situation is more complex than he proposes. For example, some National Socialist idealogues condemned anthropocentrism for failing to understand that humans are only one aspect of the great system of life. Moreover, a number of contemporary environmentalists are simultaneously well-informed about ecological science and are antianthropocentric, but share elements of ruralism. Today's environmentalists want to portray their movement as progressive. Thanks to Andrew Light for bringing this essay to my attention. 6. Zimmerman, "Ecofascism: A Threat to American Environmentalism?" 7. See Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1977) and The Gift of Good Land (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981). 8. Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1996. See also Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, Eco-fascism: Lessons from the German Experience (San Francisco: AK Press, 1995). 9. Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1992). 10. See Michael E. Zimmerman, Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). 11. Quoted in Guido Schneeberger, Nachlese zu Heidegger (Bern: Buchdruckerei AG, 1962), p. 150. 12. See Michael E. Zimmerman, "Ontical Craving vs. Ontological Desire," in From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire, edited by Babette E. Babich (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995), pp. 501 523.
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13. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). It is difficult to estimate the importance of this book. 14. See Steven Vogel, "Habermas and the Ethics of Nature," in The Ecological Community, edited by Roger Gottlieb (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 175 192, for a helpful articulation of the theme that "nature" is always encountered within a social world. See also Vogel, Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). 15. Jacques Derrida, De l'Esprit: Heidegger et la question (Paris: Editions Gallilé, 1987), p. 119. 16. See Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, eds., Martin Heidegger and the Holocaust (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1997). On Heidegger's relationship with National Socialism, see Michael E. Zimmerman, "The Thorn in Heidegger's Side: The Question of National Socialism," The Philosophical Forum 20:4 (Summer 1989): 326 365. 17. For an earlier assessment of Wilber's views on the ecological crisis, see Michael E. Zimmerman, "A Transpersonal Diagnosis of the Ecological Crisis," ReVision 18:4 (Spring 1996): 38 48. 18. Ken Wilber, Up from Eden (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1981). 19. Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology and Spirituality (Boston: Shambhala, 1995). See also Wilber, A Brief History of Everything (Boston: Shambhala, 1996). 20. See Ken Wilber, "The Pre/Trans Fallacy," in Eye to Eye: The Quest for the New Paradigm (Boston: Shambhala, 1996), pp. 198 243. In his first book, No Boundary (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1979), Wilber himself commits this fallacy by suggesting that the nondual awareness to which so many spiritual seekers aspire is achieved by reuniting with the ground from which all things emerge. 21. Fortunately, Roger Walsh has provided an excellent summary of Sex, Ecology, Spirituality in his essay "Developmental and Evolutionary Synthesis in the Recent Writings of Ken Wilber," ReVision 18:4 (Spring 1996): 9 24. 22. On the other hand, many environmentalists criticize the mechanistic and abstract outlook of ecosystem ecology. 23. Friedrich Nietzche, The Genealogy of Morals, translated by Walter Kaufmann in Basic Writings of Nietzche (New York: Modern Library, 1968), p. 591. 24. Robinson Jeffers, as quoted in George Sessions, "Spinoza and Jeffers on Man in Nature," Inquiry 20 (1977): 481 528. Quoted material is on 512. For further discussion of Sessions and Jeffers, see Michael E. Zimmerman, Contesting Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp.210 212. 25. Starhawk, "Power, Authority, and Mystery: Ecofeminism and Earth-Based Spirituality," in Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, edited by Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1990), pp. 73 86. Quoted passage is on p. 73.
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26. Charlene Spretnak, States of Grace: The Recovery of Meaning in the Postmodern Age (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 136. For further discussion of this issue see Zimmerman, Contesting Earth's Future, pp. 233 275. 27. See Ken Wilber and the Future of Transpersonal Inquiry: A Spectrum of Views, edited by Donald Rothberg and Sean M. Kelly, ReVision 18:4 (Spring 1996); 19:1 (Summer 1996); 19:2 (Fall 1996). The ReVision articles have been collected as Donald Rothberg and Sean M. Kelly, eds., Ken Wilber in Dialogue (Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 1998). In his The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad (Boston: Shambhala, 1997), Wilber reprints his "reply to critics" that appeared in ReVision 19:2, and adds a number of essays, including some that answer criticism made elsewhere. 28. Gus diZerega, "A Critique of Ken Wilber's Account of Deep Ecology and Nature Religions," The Trumpeter 13:2 (Spring 1996): 52 71; "Social Ecology, Deep Ecology, and Liberalism," Critical Review 6:2 3 (Spring Summer 1992): 305-370; "Towards an Ecocentric Political Economy," The Trumpeter 13:4 (Fall 1996): 173 182; "Deep Ecology and Liberalism: The Greener Implications of Evolutionary Liberal Theory," Review of Politics 58:4 (Fall 1996): 699 734. Along with D. H. Frew, diZerega has raised disturbing questions about Wilber's scholarly practices in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, including interpolating (without indication in the text) a sentence from Emerson's Nature and quoting a line from Plotinus without providing the source of the quotation. The problem here is that the quotation doesn't square with the translation of the Enneads (by Inge) on which Wilber says he relied in interpreting Plotinus. On these issues, see diZerega, "Accuracy, Honesty, Spirituality: A Response to Ken Wilber" (unpublished manuscript). Also see D. H. Frew, "The Whole and the Parts: Ken Wilber's Treatment of Plotinus in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality" (Internet:
[email protected]). During 1999, Wilber, diZerega, and Frew engaged in productive discussions which resolved the major conceptual issues that previously divided them. A summary of those discussions is in the Reading Room section of The World of Ken Wilber, http://people.a2000.nl/fvisser/wilber/readingroom.html. 29. Gus diZerega, "Nature Religion and the Modern World" (unpublished manuscript), p. 8. 30. This prayer was shared with me by diZerega, who is a third-degree Gardnerian Elder in the Wiccan tradition. Because this prayer has been made public, diZerega informs me that I may reprint it here (personal communication, February 24, 1997). 31. In an unpublished book manuscript, "Pagans and Christians in the New Millenium," diZerega emphasizes even more strongly that neopaganism acknowledges a transcendent dimension. 32. On creation-centered spirituality, see Matthew Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988). Although appreciative of what Fox is trying to achieve, ecofeminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether has expressed concern that Fox does not adequately take into account the insights of the soteriological (and thus transcendent-oriented) message of Christianity. 33. Wilber, Up from Eden, pp. 327 328.
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10 The Postmodernism of Deep Ecology, the Deep Ecology of Postmodernism, and Grand Narratives Arran Gare Deep ecology as developed by Arne Naess and others has much in common with postmodernist philosophy, and postmodernists for the most part are sympathetic to radical environmentalism. This confluence suggests that deep ecology and postmodernism might have common roots and so could provide resources for one another, but also that problems of one could also be problems of the other. Noting the congruence of Heidegger's philosophy (a major source of inspiration for postmodernists) with deep ecology, Michael Zimmerman has suggested that there are antimodernist elements within deep ecology which could have dangerous political consequences. He proposes a new synthesis of ideas from deep ecology, modernism, and postmodernism to obviate these anti-modernist elements while preserving the virtues of each philosophical perspective. What is the relationship between deep ecology, modernism, and postmodernism? Are there dangerous political tendencies in deep ecology? And if so, has Zimmerman provided a synthesis that resolves all the problems in, and unites the best features of, deep ecology, modernism, and postmodernism? The Postmodernism of Deep Ecology Deep ecology is clearly a radical philosophy, but just how radical is obscured by the way it has been received. It has been taken to be a division within environmental philosophy, first in opposition to "shallow" ecology, and later in relation to social ecology and ecofeminism, rather than in opposition to the dominant culture. Although no one doubts this opposition, it is only when seen in relation to the dominant culture that the full measure of its radicality becomes evident. The simplest and most revealing way to characterize the dominant culture is as the "culture of modernity." Though this culture has a number of competing strands, these strands share common assumptions. Modernity has its origins in
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the Reformation, the rise of capitalism and the corresponding dissolution of feudalism, and the philosophical, scientific, and political revolutions of the seventeenth century. It was elaborated through the Enlightenment philosophies and political revolutions of the eighteenth century, and gained further impetus with the industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century. Throughout, it has been associated with the triumph of European civilization over all other civilizations and cultures. The concept which unifies the different strands of modernity is that of "progress": progress in knowledge, in the rationality of beliefs and institutions, and in the ability to control nature and society. Progress is equated with the emancipation of humanity from drudgery, disease, irrational beliefs, political oppression, and, in its more radical forms, economic necessity. The modernist notion of "progress" originated with the secularization and reformulation of Christian eschatology and gained a cosmic dimension with theories of evolution. In the second half of the twentieth century the notion of progress was reformulated as "development," defined in opposition to "underdeveloped." All societies and cultures were seen and evaluated according to their state of development; that is, according to how closely they approximated "advanced'' Western societies. The culture of modernity has always had its problems and its critics. To begin with, it emerged through a series of ideological struggles both among its advocates and against supporters of the old theocratic feudal order. The Counter-Reformation inspired the revival of Thomist philosophy, the proponents of which have continued up to the present to criticize modernity. Later, the social fragmentation, violence, and impoverishment generated by modernity, particularly associated with imperialism and industrialization, stimulated major reformulations of the culture of modernity, engendering the revolutionary modernism of socialism (calling for a transcendence of capitalism), social Darwinism (justifying further imperialism, wars, class divisions, and poverty as necessary conditions for further progress), and a number of reformist positions lying between these two extremes. Modernity has also stimulated more radical critics who have questioned its fundamental assumptions, including the linear conception of history of Christian eschatology from which this culture emerged. The most significant of these antimodernist critics have been Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744 1803), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 1900), and Martin Heidegger (1889 1976), philosophers who rejected the assumption that the history of European civilization and its expansion can be identified with progress. In many ways Herder can be regarded as the most profound of these critics, having originated many of the central themes developed by Nietzsche and
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Heidegger. 1 Herder argued against the primacy attributed by Enlightenment philosophers to universal principles and abstractions, and defended the concrete, the particular, sense experience, quality over quantity, and diversity against the pressures within modernity toward uniformity. He saw tendencies to justify suffering in the name of abstractionsthe human species, civilization, progressas cruel and sinister. Correspondingly, he rejected the mechanistic view of nature, representing nature as active and purposeful, a unity in which dynamic, purposeseeking forces flow into each other, clash, combine, and coalesce. He argued that people are essentially sociocultural beings, largely formed by their particular language. In opposition to atomistic, utilitarian thinking he promulgated an ethics of self-expression or self-realization, calling on peoples and individuals to express the potentialities unique to them. Herder argued that different cultures have incommensurable but equally defensible values and ideals. He held that all "cultures" (the plural term was coined by him), both in the past and in the present, are significant in their own right and equally valuable, although he expressed considerable hostility to Europeans for their greed and aggression. Where does Arne Naess's work stand in this context? In 1973, when Naess drew a distinction between "the shallow" and "the deep, long-range ecology movement," he characterized deep ecology as "rejection of the manin-environment image in favor of a relational, total-field image in which all organisms are seen as knots in the biospheric field of intrinsic relations,''2 and as committed to biospherical egalitarianism in which all forms of life are accorded a deep respect. Deep ecology was presented as defending the complexity of ecosystems, economies, and ways of life, the decentralization of power, and local autonomy, and as opposed to elitism, either within or between nations. Naess has defended pluralism and an ethics of self-realization-taking "self-realization as top norm" and equating it with identification and unity with the whole of nature.3 To elaborate his position, Naess has invoked the philosophy of Spinoza and Asian traditions of thought. However, Naess's interpretations of Spinoza and Asian philosophies involve projecting onto them concepts deriving from Herder. Almost all Naess's ideas are echoes or developments of Herder's ideas. Naess's deep ecology is part of the tradition of anti-modernism begun by Herder. What, then, is the relationship between Naess's work and postmodernism? Postmodernism is essentially the form the antimodernist tradition has taken subsequent to the almost complete domination of the world by the culture of modernity. Deep ecology is a form of postmodernism.
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The Deep Ecology of Postmodernism Many of those who have identified themselves as postmodernists have merely rejected some small feature of modernity, such as modernist architecture or modernist literature. More significant are those who, disillusioned by socialist, particularly Marxist, forms of modernism, have attacked the whole of modernity. Such thinkers have been preeminently concerned to reveal the fractures and weaknesses in the culture of modernity, even to "celebrate" these fractures. They have been particularly concerned to avoid any move in response to these fractures toward a new totalizing perspective, a move that would simply promote a new phase of modernity. Consequently, they have embraced the work of the poststructuralists, the French philosophers who have developed the ideas of the antimodernist philosophers Nietzsche and Heidegger. 4 The most important of these philosophers are Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari. Lyotard immediately commands attention because he has explicitly aligned himself with the postmodernists. The most important sign of the disintegration of modernity, he argues, is "the incredulity towards metanarratives"5; that is, the incredulity toward any metadiscourse appealing to some grand narrativesuch as the emancipation of the rational, the liberation of the exploited, or the creation of wealthwhich could legitimate all particular claims to knowledge. What does this mean? The loss of credibility of grand narratives means that people no longer believe in progress. Correspondingly, society is disintegrating into a plurality of heterogeneous language games. Decision makers attempt to manage these clouds of sociality according to input/output matrices, on the assumption that their elements are commensurable and the whole is determinable; but this is not the case. Not even scientific ideas are commensurable with each other, and scientific research therefore cannot be managed in this way. Science advances by "inventing" counterexamples, what is unintelligible from the perspective of received knowledge. Furthermore, science is revealing the world itself to be unpredictable. As Lyotard put it: "Post-modern scienceby concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, "fracta," catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxesis theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical."6 This clearly destroys efforts to justify science in terms of performance maximization. Lyotard also defends difference over identity and the sensuous over the abstract, and attempts to chart a new kind of politics. However, these ideas are more fully developed by other poststructuralist philosophers. Celebrating dif-
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ference, Derrida has carried on in a more radical form the work of Heidegger, the "destruktion" or, as Derrida put it, the "deconstruction" of the history of European metaphysics to overcome its oppressive effects. According to Derrida, the deepest desire of the Western philosophical tradition is to find some fixed, permanent center, a transcendental signifier that will give meaning to all other signs. To reveal what is being denied and to expose the arbitrary nature of all such efforts, Derrida argued that a binary opposition is assumed, one term of which is taken to be prior to and superior to the other. 7 The second term is made out to be derivative, accidental, and unimportant in relation to the first, which is taken either as an ideal limit or as the central concept of a metaphysical system. The second term is then either effaced or repressed. In this way metaphysics establishes ethical-ontological hierarchies based on subordination. Derrida's deconstructions involve showing how what is excluded as secondary and derivative is in fact at least as primordial and general as the metaphysical original. "Transcendental essences" that have been taken as absolute points of reference are shown to be arbitrary signifiers taken and then frozen from the chain of signifiers and privileged, or made to seem "natural," thereby freezing the play of differences and imposing a fixed structure and hierarchy on society. By subverting the fixation of meaning that legitimizes exclusive, powerful groups, deconstruction enables those who have been suppressed and marginalized by Western civilizationthe colonized, women, those outside the academiesto be heard. Derrida's work begins and ends with semiotics, although he has attempted to show its political relevance. Deleuze, like Derrida, defended the primacy of difference over identity but, following Foucault, treated semiosis as practice, as one force among others in a field of power. And, in opposition to other poststructuralists, he embraced Nietzsche's physicalism. Difference was seen not simply in relation to signs but also within the world. To elaborate a Nietzschean philosophy of nature, Deleuze drew on the ideas of the Stoics; on the philosophies of Lucretius, Spinoza, and Bergson; and on various developments within science and mathematics. Henri Bergson, with his defense of intuition, different orders of duration, multiplicity, and creative becoming, was the most important source for developing this elaboration, and Deleuze called for a return to Bergson, for "a renewal or an extension of his project today, in relation to the transformations of life and society, in parallel with the transformations of science."8 Deleuze, along with Guattari, strove to develop a new way of writing and a new kind of politics free from old organizational forms. Rather than the "arborescent" system that has dominated Western thought, the kind of system
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conforming to the model of a tree in which all branches stem from a central trunk (that is, where all truths are ultimately derived from a single principle), Deleuze and Guattari organized their work as a "rhizome" system, comparable to the root systems of bulbs and tubers, in which any point can be connected to any other point. This rhizomic organization of their thought was joined with a call for a new kind of politics, a "nomadic politics," in place of "the politics of the sedentary." Deleuze and Guattari strove to free politics from totalizing paranoia, to withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the negative and to affirm what is positive: "difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems"; to develop "action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization." 9 Accordingly, they formulated a conception of political action based on the metaphor of grass: "Of all the imaginary existences we attribute to plant, beast and star the weed leads the most satisfactory life of all. True, the weed produces no lilies, no battleships, no Sermons on the Mount . . .. Eventually the weed gets the upper hand. Eventually things fall back into a state of China. This condition is usually referred to by historians as the Dark Age. Grass is the only way out."10 The poststructuralists, in extending the antimodernist ideas of Nietzsche and Heidegger, have brought more fundamentally into question the central notions not only of modernity but of the whole of European civilization. Nietzsche and Heidegger have already been recognized as of central importance to deep ecology,11 and insofar as the poststructuralists are continuing their work, they also free us from the assumptions that have justified the reduction of nature to a mere instrument. They have attacked the grand narratives that identified progress with the total domination and control of the nonhuman world. They have celebrated new developments in science that focus on undecidables, the limits of precise control, catastrophes and pragmatic paradoxes, undermining at the very core of Western culture the ideal of total control through the advance of knowledge. And they have brought into question the hierarchies that allowed us to treat non-European civilizations, the uncivilized, and the realm of nature as the deficient Others in relation to the rise of European culture and civilization. While such work does not lead immediately to an appreciation of the intrinsic significance of nature, the dynamic physicalism that is required to account for the indeterminacy, unpredictabilty, and uncontrollability revealed by postmodern sciencethe physicalism of Nietzsche and Bergson promoted by Deleuze and Guattarimakes this difficult to avoid.12 This, essentially, is the
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conclusion of Guattari. The revolution in mentalities that he calls for is required to "give back to humanityif it ever had ita sense of responsibility, not only for animal and vegetable species, likewise for incorporeal species such as music, the arts, cinema, the relation with time, love and compassion for others, the feeling of fusion at the heart of the cosmos." 13 And, Guattari argues, it is the Greens who have realized the possibilities of the new nomadic politics. As he suggested in an interview: "There is, perhaps, a new alliance in the process of formation among those who refuse to see the forests destroyed, immigrants treated as cattle, huge amounts of money devoured by military budgets, which is to say, among the Greens. . . . In my opinion, it is the only hope of escaping the present impasse."14 Although Guattari is the only poststructuralist to have fully embraced the environmental movement, he has shown that poststructuralist postmodernism is implicitly a form of deep ecology.15 Integrating Deep Ecology and Postmodernism Once the connection between deep ecology and poststructuralist postmodernism is understood, these traditions of thought can provide support for one another in their confrontation with the culture of modernity. Environmentalists, and particularly deep ecologists, are losing political ground. With nation-states in permanent economic crisis, with the growing impoverishment and economic insecurity of vast numbers of people in all zones of the world economy, and with transnational corporations mobilized to neutralize whatever gains the environmentalists have made in the past,16 environmental issues are increasingly being pushed off the political and economic agenda. Deep ecologists and other radical environmentalists now appear to be little more than one pressure group among others, or utopian idealists who can be bracketed out when it comes to making the really important economic and political decisions. Radical environmentalist political philosophies like Naess's, though inspiring to supporters, lack teeth. Poststructuralists, who have grappled with issues of power, how it is maintained, and how it can be undermined, provide a crucial resource to environmentalists. Conversely, postmodernists are looking increasingly irrelevant as the market, like a rhizome or a weed, is penetrating and taking over the most remote corners of the world and the most intimate facets of everyday life. Modernity has been revamping itself on a global scale, and a new, vibrant modernism, in the form of economic rationalism underpinned by a refurbished social Darwinismpromoted by transnational corporations, financiers, and media baronsnow prevails almost everywhere. This has reinstated the grand narrative of economic
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growth through increasing instrumental efficiency and the domination of nature in a more vigorous form than ever. Postmodernists can no longer assume that modernity will disintegrate by itself and hope that simply promoting this disintegration will pave the way for a less oppressive society. Only the risks associated with environmental destruction provide an insurmountable problem for the culture of modernity. And, as Guattari noted, it is the environmentalists who are making a constructive response to the present situation. Zimmerman's Critique of Deep Ecology However, it is not only the positive aspects of the relationship between post-modernism and deep ecology that are of importance. Also of significance are the dangers that become apparent when postmodernism and deep ecology are seen in relation to one another as parallel developments of antimodernism. The dangers of antimodernism have become the central concern of Michael Zimmerman. In his book Contesting Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity, Zimmerman posed a problem: "Having once read Heidegger's thought as partly compatible with deep ecology, I now ask whether deep ecology in particular and radical ecology in general are in fact compatible with a reactionary type of anti-modernism." 17 Zimmerman initially championed Heidegger to deep ecologists, but came to see Heidegger's philosophy as inextricably linked to Nazism. He now sees deep ecology as capable of fostering a reactionary type of antimodernism that could inspire a similar and equally disastrous political upheaval. Of course this could be regarded as ascribing guilt to Naess and deep ecology by association. Naess himself is far too subtle a thinker to say anything that could give sustenance to reactionary antimodernism. His own thinking is strongly influenced by the skepticism of Sextus Empiricus, and he has distanced himself from the more fervent views of Warwick Fox and George Sessions. And all deep ecological thought is suffused with pacifism. But it is not the avowed beliefs of philosophers that must be judged, or even the immediate logical implications of their ideas, but what is the effect of embracing them. As Zimmerman put it: "Though deep ecologists are not ecofascists, I can imagine howin the context of perceived ecological and economic emergencyideas drawn from their writings could be used to support neofascist programs. Today, reactionary politicians still condemn the 'over-population' of inferior races, decry racial 'mongrelization,' and criticize industrial pollution for contaminating the soil that nourishes the 'blood' of the people. Though rejecting such racist views,
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deep ecologistslike Rousseau before themoften appeal to 'nature' as a standard by which to criticize modern societies." 18 While Zimmerman does not consider the ideas of Herder, Herder's philosophy with its defense of nationalism has also been criticized for feeding into Nazi ideology (despite Herder's pacifism), along with Nietzsche's elitist ethics of the Übermensch and his apologetics for the cruelty of ancient ruling classes. In fact the whole tradition of antimodernism was a major component of Nazi ideologywhich, in accordance with it, celebrated nature and was centrally concerned with environmental issues. It was a "religion of nature."19 Hitler denounced the evils of modernity and called for renewed contact with elemental forces and the restoration of folk customs, traditions, and attitudes. Zimmerman's contention is supported by situating Herder, Nietzsche, Heidegger, elements of Nazism, and deep ecology within and as part of the tradition of antimodernism. What is it about the antimodernist tradition that gives it its explosively destructive potential? Zimmerman suggests that it has a tendency to cater to "the widely shared desire to surrender one's separate-self sense and to be absorbed in a larger Whole."20 If this is the case, then poststructuralist thought provides a corrective to deep ecology by opposing all essentialist and foundationalist tendencies.21 For instance, in developing his concept of Selfrealization, Naess brings together four sets of opposing terms: identification and alienation, oneness and plurality, wholeness and fragmentarity, and Self-realization and Self-abnegation.22 In each case one term of a binary opposition is privileged, and it is through this that the norm of Self-realization as identification and unity with the whole of nature, in the unfolding of one's own potentialities, is defined in a way which tends to privilege it as a transcendental essence through which all else can be judged. It is this binary opposition that could be used to undermine the separate self-sense, despite Naess's intentions. "Deconstructing" it subverts the tendency to essentialism by showing how "alienation," "plurality," "fragmentarity,'' and "Self-abnegation" are the condition for, and are required for, Naess's privileged terms having any meaning. Appreciating that these notions acquire their meaning only through the terms they are defined in opposition to, and must endlessly be redefined in this way, provides support for Naess's skepticism. However, there are other problems with antimodernism that poststructuralist thinking exacerbates. Antimodernism threatens the notion of the progressive emancipation of humanity that, in Zimmerman's view, has been responsible for vast improvements in political and social life. In this, Zimmerman joins forces with Jürgen Habermas. But there are significant and illuminating differences
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between the two. Habermas is concerned to reconstruct the notion of emancipation by developing and defending the notion of communicative rationality as more primordial than instrumental rationality, in order to justify the notion of emancipation without recourse to metaphysics. The antimodernist tradition, by undermining the power of reason to bring into question existing practices and institutions, is then seen by him as the main threat to the notion of the progressive emancipation of humanity. Zimmerman, by contrast, opts for a direct defense of the traditional notion of the progressive emancipation of humanity (and nature) as an inherent tendency within history. He defends Ken Wilber's Neoplatonist or neo-Hegelian characterization of history as a process of evolving consciousnessfirst as a means of reconciling deep ecology, social ecology, and ecofeminism, and second as a way of defending modernist (mental egoic) forms of consciousnessas a necessary stage toward nondual (playfully aware) forms of consciousness. What this means is that whereas Habermas is hostile to the poststructuralists for continuing Nietzsche's and Heidegger's attacks on Western rationality, 23 Zimmerman embraces and incorporates the poststructuralist opposition to absolutes into an expanded modernist vision of history as progress toward emancipation. While Habermas criticizes Derrida for fragmenting discourse and thereby undermining rationality, Zimmerman shows some sympathy for Derrida for subverting the quest for absolute foundations; although he expresses concern that the limited notion of self-realization Derrida allows cannot give a place to ecological concerns. At the conclusion of Contesting Earth's Future, Zimmerman places Donna Haraway's postmodernist cyborgism at the center of the stage to illustrate what a higher form of consciousness would be. Opposing both the hyperproductivism of Western rationalism, which refuses to acknowledge any actor but One, and the transcendental naturalism of some radical ecologists, which settles on a sameness that only pretends to difference, Haraway calls on us to stop clinging to our gendered, organic, human identities and to participate in the dangerous, boundary-crossing, technological play that is our destiny. As Zimmerman approvingly describes her work: "Haraway seeks not to save nature in walled-off reserves, but rather to generate a politics of 'social nature,' that is, 'of a different organization of land and people, where the practice of justice restructures the concept of nature.'"24 Zimmerman argues that despite her abandonment of progressive narratives, Haraway's reference to the ideas of social justice shows her commitment to the progressive discourse of Enlightenment modernity and her compatibility with a more robust modernism. However, in opposition to Haraway, Zimmerman is "unwilling to abandon the idea that
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there is some direction to cosmic history, including human affairs"; rather, he suggests that "nondual awareness [exemplified by Haraway] plays the role of what Whitehead called a metaphysical lure that draws the universe forward in the process of generating ever more complex forms of awareness." 25 Though Zimmerman offers good reasons to be concerned about the possible explosive political consequences of deep ecological thought, how adequate is his proposed solution? What Zimmerman's analysis of deep ecology shows to be required is some means of accepting the antimodernist critique of the domineering and oppressive tendencies of modernity without embracing its tendency to antihumanism or abandoning the emancipatory project of modernity. Ken Wilber's psychologized Neoplatonist historicism, focusing centrally on the problem of coming to terms with death, does not just ignore some of the greatest achievements of the Neoplatonist tradition (notably the Hegelian historical analysis of institutions). It also upholds a notion of cosmic progress that is difficult to defend in the current intellectual climate and does not break away from the Neoplatonist tendency to instrumentalize the present to a mere stage on the way to a higher endarguably the root of its oppressive tendencies.26 Haraway's suggestion that we revision the world "as a coding trickster with whom we must learn to converse"27giving up the quest for mastery and searching for fidelity, knowing that we will be hoodwinkedsuggests the lighthearted attitude of a domesticated postmodernism that has ceased to challenge the existing order. The synthesis of these two thinkers does unite aspects of modernism and postmodernism, but it is questionable whether these are the most important aspects to unite. It embraces one of the most dubious feature of modernism, the belief in cosmic purpose, while offering nothing comparable to Habermas's attempt to restore the power of reason to judge existing social institutions. This, in my view, is symptomatic of the weakness of this synthesis as a basis for appropriating the achievements of both modernity and antimodernity while transcending their limitations. It does not yet provide a strong enough basis for confronting the destructive imperatives and current crises of the existing global economic, social, and political system. The Significance of Narratives What alternative is there? My contention is that Lyotard, by focusing on narratives in general and grand narratives in particular, has identified a vital dimension of culture, a dimension that facilitates a fuller understanding of both the constructive and destructive aspects of modernity. While it makes possible a
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deeper appreciation of the force of antimodernist (including deep ecologist and postmodernist) arguments against modernity, an understanding of the nature of narratives in general and grand narratives in particular points the way to overcoming the oppressive effects of modernity without abandoning its emancipatory project. Since its origin in ancient Greece there has been a debate within European philosophy between those who have taken abstract thought as the way to the one, true reality, and those who in reaction to this have defended the senses, the particular, becoming, emotion, difference, the perspectival nature of knowledge, conflict, and action. Platonism in its many forms has defended abstractions as the true reality, and the culture of modernity can be regarded as a permutation of Platonism. Antimodernist philosophies, including postmodernism and poststructuralism, continue the tradition of anti-Platonism. Generally, they have defended the particular and the primacy of sense experience over universal abstractions, and becoming over being. Correspondingly they have extolled emotion or feeling against abstract principles, art against science, and practice (or praxis) against theory, arguing that all knowledge is perspectival. Narratives occupy a peculiar middle ground between the particular and the universal, between sense experience and abstractions, between emotion and principles, between art and science, and between practice and theory; they also allow a diversity of perspectives to be represented and related to each other. Narratives, whether mythical, historical, or fictional, are preeminently concerned to grasp particulars and conflicts between different forces and projects; and they evoke emotions and orient people for action. But in doing so, they can deploy concepts at many levels of abstraction and have a significance that transcends their immediate reference. These qualities of narrative are most clearly revealed by the phenomenological narratology of Paul Ricoeur and David Carr. 28 Although they differ in details, Ricoeur and Carr see people as already living out inchoate narratives that prefigure explicitly formulated narratives. It is this prefiguration that enables them to understand and construct new emplotments to configure a diversity of events and actions into a narrative unity. Such constructed narratives create quasi worlds of characters and events that distance people from their worlds and the lives they are living, allowing them to embrace the new narrative emplotments and refigure their worlds and their lives. This refiguration can be of their lives as individuals or as members of groups, and narratives can refigure the lives of a diversity of individuals to form effective groups, ranging from informal small groups to communities, armies, nations, or civilizations. Carr in
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particular makes the point that narrative structures are essentially action structures of both individuals and groups, articulating large-scale actions into hierarchies of smaller actions. To be living out a narrative is to be striving to realize a complex of interrelated projects. Narratives do not merely represent or construe actions of one individual or collective agent, and need not be confined to human agents. Narratives almost always portray conflicts between forces, agents, and goals and the perspectives associated with these where the outcome is not predetermined. And as V. N. Volosinov (and M. M. Bakhtin) pointed out, narratives can do more than present and highlight conflicts of perspectives; through narratives, perspectives can be brought into dialogue with one another. 29 In this way narratives, both those which are being lived out and those which merely have been constructed, can be contrasted, questioned, criticized, evaluated, and reformulated. This possibility provides the basis for an alternative to Habermas's reconceptualization of communicative rationality, and the basis for extending the scope of this rationality. To begin with, narratives are central to all intellectual inquiry, enabling abstract ideas to be put into perspective and judgedsomething that cannot be achieved through abstract ideas alone. People entering fields of abstract inquiry such as logic, mathematics, or theoretical physics are able to situate themselves within the field, to appreciate what has been achieved in the past and the problems that now must be addressed, and their significance, by grasping the historical narrative of the field. Narratives also enable people to evaluate opposing ideas. As Alasdair MacIntyre noted, major advances in science, advances that break all the old criteria of what counts as science, such as Galilean or Einsteinian physics, can be appreciated as such only through the new narratives of past science which they facilitate.30 Such narrative evaluations at the same time orient people for further research efforts. Even ideas from radically different traditions in different cultures can be brought into relationship and judged through narratives.31 Similarly, narratives provide the basis for judging between rival construals of situations associated with practical engagements, for choosing between ways of living and between rival narratives. To judge between ways of living is to judge between narrative figurations through which people are construing their world and living out their lives. Judgment requires the elaboration of one of the narratives already being lived out or the configuration of a new narrative to encompass and reveal both the achievements and the limitations of inconsistent alternatives. Such narrative configurations can then refigure both the worlds and the actions of people in their everyday lives. Narratives elaborated in this
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way, which provide people with an orientation to life, evoke their emotions, and provide them with goals to strive for, are constructions that can always be brought into question. But they are not arbitrary constructions, and choosing between them is a rational affair able to justify and elicit provisional commitment. While narratives have the resources to orient people for both theoretical and practical engagements, relate abstractions to particular situations, bring a diversity of perspectives into dialogue, and allow judgments to be made between them, they do not always do so. Epic narratives, for instance, distance characters' actions and lives from the lives of normal people and presuppose the unquestionable validity of one perspective. Epics are, to use Bakhtin's terminology, "monologic." 32 And as Bakhtin wrote of monologism: "With a monologic approach (in its extreme or pure form) another person remains wholly and merely an object of consciousness, and not another consciousness. . . . Monologue manages without the other, and therefore to some degree materializes all reality. Monologue pretends to be the ultimate word."33 The narrative of Christian redemption, while allowing that ordinary people can have a significant place within it, also presupposes the unquestionable validity of one perspective, taking this as an absolute truth and treating every person who does not share this narrative as an obstacle to or an enemy of the one true goal. The culture of modernity, based on the secularization of this Christian narrative, shares its monologic structure. There is an assumption that there is one true perspective above all particular perspectives, and it also postulates one true goal. This assumption is shared by every modernist, whether Catholic, Protestant, or scientific materialist, social Darwinist, orthodox Marxist, or economic rationalist. It is also characteristic of the narratives defining most nations and most modern ethnic groups. Such narratives are based on "identity" thinking, taking for granted that the actors and their values have an absolute and immutable status in their own rightwhether the actors be the chosen people, Christendom, humanity, the working class, or whatever. This provides an alternative diagnosis of the problems of modernity. It is the monologic nature of the grand narratives of modernity that has entrenched arborescent thinking and that has made modernity so oppressive to everything and everyone but the elect few. If this is the case, then what is required to oppose the destructive tendencies of modernity is not the dissolution of grand narratives and the fragmentation of discourses, nor the embracing of a monologic grand narrative that culminates in a playful openness, but the creation of a "polyphonic" grand narrative which gives a place to rival perspectives; a grand polyphonic narrative to re-
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place the existing monologic grand narratives. And given the power and resilience of grand narrativesas illustrated by the revival by economic rationalists (or, more accurately, market fundamentalists) of the grand narrative of global economic progressit would appear that the only way to counter the dominant grand narrative is by proposing such an alternative capable of displacing it. A polyphonic grand narrative would have all the virtues of a conception of history as a struggle for both human and animal emancipationwithout having to make any dubious claims for cosmic purpose and a teleology preexisting history. Thereby it would avoid the tendency to reduce the past and present, other life forms and other people, particularly those who do not share the grand narrative, to instruments of the final project. Toward a Reconstructive Postmodernist Deep Ecology If such a grand narrative could be created, its potential would be enormous. This is evident from the success of grand narratives in the past. The triumph of Christianity in Europe, the triumph of the Enlightenment in France and the United States, and the triumph of Marxism in Russia and Chinaand the power of these movements elsewherecan be fully understood only in terms of the grand narratives they proffered that oriented people and organizations to the world and to each other, gave meaning and direction to people's lives, and evoked immense efforts from people as participants in upholding the values and realizing the goals they projected. Only through these grand narratives is it possible to understand how scattered, small groups of people were able eventually to engender major cultural, social, and political movements that transformed civilizations. And this is what the deep ecologists must strive, for the sake of humanity and for all life, to achieve in the present. Constructing a polyphonic rather than a monologic grand narrative would have several virtues. It would address simultaneously the arguments of poststructuralists against identity thinking, foundationalism, and the homogenizing effects of modernity; provide the basis for overcoming the dualism between culture and nature; justify the significance of diverse forms of life; and address the arguments of social ecologists, Habermas, and Zimmerman against the tendency of antimodernists to abandon the emancipatory quest of modernity. It would then allow the ideas of the poststructuralist postmodernists and the deep ecologists to be combined into a more effective political force. What would it mean to forge a new grand narrative? Developing a new grand narrative would not be just a matter of formulating a story of the world with a new set of ultimate goals in terms of which all other goals and claims to
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knowledge could be evaluated. A grand narrative, to be successful, is a contender for integrating civilization and, ultimately, the whole of humanity. To be successful, it must be embraced, and to be embraced, it must be believed. To begin with, a grand narrative is a history of the past that must prove itself by being more accurate and more profound than its rivals. Mainstream Western culture, celebrating the triumph of market mechanisms, economic individualism, science, and technology, on the one hand, and Marxism, seeing the present and the ideas dominating it as the outcome of class struggle, on the other, have competed ferociously over their alternative construals of the past in their efforts to demonstrate the greater credibility of each grand narrative and associated images of the future. Environmental historians along with antimodernist historians have made great strides in reconstruing the past of the world, highlighting the effects of the rise of agricultural societies, then civilizations and finally European civilization, capitalism and industrialization, on ecosystems and other species and on subjugated females, societies, cultures, and civilizations. 34 Even the perspectives of nonhuman organisms are being granted a place in such narratives.35 There is no reason why the agents of narratives cannot be nonhuman or even inanimate; there can be natural histories as well as histories of human actors, and all living beings as actors can be represented as having their own perspectives on the world. Conceiving living beings in such terms inevitably changes our attitude toward them. The real force of Aldo Leopold's writings, which have continued to elicit concern for all living beings, is their capacity to evoke the perspectives of different animals.36 It is at least partly through appreciating perspectives of other cultures and other organisms that their intrinsic significance is coming to be recognized and appreciated. Such histories, by revealing the blindness of previous histories and rediscovering and revealing the force of previously suppressed ideas, facilitate a new understanding of the present and, along with this, provide the foundation for projecting an alternative vision of the future worth striving for: a civilization that, while promoting human welfare, would allow ecosystems and diverse species, societies, and cultures to flourish. For such a vision to be adopted by people, a vast number of more specific narratives would have to be reformulated to accord with it. The most important of these would be narratives defining nations, their pasts and futures, and narratives defining the research traditions of philosophy, history, and the natural and human sciences. However, more specific and more local narratives would also need to be reformulated to enable individuals to relate their particular lives to this new complex of narratives and to the new grand narrative.
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A polyphonic grand narrative would transcend the opposition between objectivism and relativism. While monologic grand narratives presuppose the existence of and access to an absolute perspective, and construct identities from this perspective as immutablewhich identities in turn provide support to the absolute perspectivepolyphonic narratives accept that all claims to knowledge are perspectival. But as we have seen, instead of drawing relativist conclusions from this, polyphonic narratives represent diverse, self-developing perspectives and bring these into relationship. In so doing, they are able to move toward less limited perspectives. A polyphonic grand narrative would have a rhizome structure and represent a great diversity of perspectives, allowing all these to challenge each other so that whichever one was taken to be the most promising, would be taken so only provisionally, on the assumption that it would be open to further challenges in the future. It also would be assumed that people in their everyday lives would be included as participants in this narrative and would be free to challenge it and participate in its reformulation. A narrative of world history constructed on polyphonic lines would strive not merely to evaluate the past from a favored perspective of the present, but also to comprehend the world, including the present, from the perspectives of past cultures and traditions of research as well as the perspectives of existing rival cultures and traditions of thought, and to recognize the challenge of these to the favored perspective. The tendencies toward domination and homogenization of monologic grand narratives would be opposed by a polyphonic grand narrative that, by acknowledging its own limitations and the claims of other points of view, would promote the development of diverse local perspectives in order to reveal its own blind spots, and then encourage challenges to it from these perspectives. This encouragement of diversity would not imply that local perspectives, claims to knowledge, and narratives could not be criticized and even attacked from the broader perspective of the grand narrative. A polyphonic grand narrative would encourage cultural diversity, then strive to bring this diversity of perspectives into dialogue. 37 This would involve acknowledging what has been achieved by modernity as well as criticizing it. Rationality would then not be attenuated but reformulated as relational or "dialogical," and thereby strengthened. The cultivation of participation in the criticism and reformulation of received narratives would be a major goal of a polyphonic grand narrative and, along with providing people with the means to live out the narratives they have subsequently committed themselves to, should be regarded as an essential component of the quest to emancipate people from irrationality.38
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The identities constituted by such a grand narrative and its subnarratives, including the narratives of nations, communities, and individual lives, would always be recognized as relational and provisional, as identities in process of becoming, always acknowledging their inevitable limitations and subject to perpetual questioning and reformulation. 39 Rather than "self-realization," implying a preexisting immutable "self" (of an individual, community, nation, civilization, or whatever) that is to be realized, what is called for by polyphonic narratives is a creative response by socially situated individuals, groups, institutions, and societies to the uniqueness of their situations and their potentialities by continually reformulating, through dialogue, their narratives. Such narratives call for self-creation of individuals, organizations, societies, and civilizations to become semiautonomous participants in the becoming of the world. However, more is required of a new, polyphonic grand narrative than to overcome the deficiencies of modernism and antimodernism, and to reconcile and support poststructuralist and deep ecologist perspectives. It should also make opponents of the dominant grand narrative more politically effective. As I have suggested, merely linking deep ecology and postmodernism could strengthen both. The environmental crisis manifest in the increasing risks that individuals and organizations have to confront in everyday life is undermining the legitimacy of existing institutions. When the ideas of the poststructuralists are seen as a response to this situation, their work can be appreciated for exposing the way the existing social order has been reproduced, overcoming the frozen dualisms of the culture of modernity and revealing what kinds of political action can be taken that will not reproduce or strengthen the existing order. What is required, as Deleuze and Guattari have suggested, is a nomadic politics. This concurs with the kind of political action called for by Arne Naess. However, such action could easily end up dissipating into almost powerless pressure group politics without some coherence and longer-term vision by its agentsand this appears increasingly likely within the new globalized economy coordinated by a reinvigorated grand narrative of economic growth. For this reason, such politics needs to be coordinated by an alternative polyphonic grand narrative projecting an alternative vision of the future of the whole of humanity and of nature. Notes 1. An excellent short summary of Herder's ideas is Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London: Chatto and Windus, 1980). On Herder's con-
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ception of nature, see H. B. Nisbet, Herder and the Philosophy and History of Science (Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1970). 2. Arne Naess, ''The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement. A Summary," Inquiry 16:1 (1973): 95 100. 3. Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, translated and edited by David Rothenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 84. 4. This is analyzed in Arran E. Gare, Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), chapter 2. 5. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. xxvi. 6. Ibid., p. 60. 7. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., edited by Gerald Graff (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 93. 8. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberiam (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 115. This statement is made in an afterword written in 1988. 9. Ibid., p. xiii. 10. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 18f. 11. See Gare, Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis, pp. 86ff. 12. This is argued in Arran E. Gare, Nihilism Inc. (Sydney: Eco-Logical Press, 1996), chapter 16. 13. Félix Guattrai, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 200. 14. From an interview with Jacques Pain in The Guattari Reader, edited by Gary Genosko (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 132. 15 It should be noted at this point that, of those French philosophers designated as poststructuralists, only Lyotard has aligned himself with the postmodernists, and Guattari, identifying postmodernism with Lyotard's philosophy, has attacked it. See Pierre-Félix Guattari, "The Postmodern Impasse," in The Guattari Reader, pp. 109 113. 16. The extent of this is revealed by Andrew Rowell in Green Backlash: Global Subversion of the Environment Movement (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). 17. Michael E. Zimmerman, Contesting Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 6. 18. Ibid., p. 180. 19. On this, see Robert A. Pois, National Socialism and the Religion of Nature (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1986). 20. Zimmerman, Contesting Earth's Future, pp. 181f. 21. See Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, chapter 2.
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22. Ibid., pp. 171ff. 23. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, translated by Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987). 24. Zimmerman, Contesting Earth's Future, p. 365, citing Donna Haraway, "The Promises of Monsters," in Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg et al. (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 296 (italics in original). 25. Zimmerman, Contesting Earth's Future, p. 373. 26. On this theme, see Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 1; The Founders, translated by P. S. Falla (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). 27. Haraway, "The Promises of Monsters", p. 298, quoted by Zimmerman in Contesting Earth's Future, p. 365. 28. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols., translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellaver (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984 1985); and David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 29. V. N. Volosinov analyzed the way utterances report the utterances of others in part III of Marxism and the Philosophy of Language ([1929] Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). M. M. Bakhtin developed his concept of the "polyphonic" narrative in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 30. Alasdair MacIntyre, "Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science," Monist 60 (1977): 459 460, 467. 31. On this, see Arran E. Gare, "Understanding Oriental Cultures," Philosophy East and West 45:3 (1995): 308 328. 32. See M. M. Bakhtin, "Epic and Novel," In his The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 33. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, pp. 292f. 34. There are now too many works contributing to this to be listed. 35. A fictional narrative of human history from the perspective of a rat has been offered by Günter Grass in The Rat, translated by Ralph Manheim (London: Pan Books, 1988). 36. See Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949). 37. As Bakhtin argued for in "Response to a Question from Novy Mir," in his Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, translated by Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 7. 38. This idea is developed more fully in Gare, Nihilism Inc., chapter 16, where it is shown to connect with notions of justice, duty, and integrity, and is elaborated as a political philosophy. 39. The distinction between narrative identity of this sort and the identity of an immutable substance, the kind of identity attacked by poststructuralists, is analyzed by Paul Ricoeur in "The Self and Narrative Identity," in his Oneself as Another, translated by Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
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11 Deep Ecology and Desire: On Naess and the Problem of Consumption Jonathan Maskit In what follows I do not try to prove anything. Arne Naess 1 Philosophy in the twentieth century has undergone a number of shifts and transformations. Diverse as these movements have been, what unites almost all of them is their character, whether explicitly stated or not, as post-or antimetaphysical. We need think only of phenomenology's embrace of embodiment, the logical positivists' (and their followers) analysis of logic and language, Marxism's emphasis on materiality, the various strains of postmetaphysical thinking ushered in by Nietzsche and, in his footsteps, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty's revival of pragmatism, or Jürgen Habermas's discourse ethics. The roots of much of this transformation lie in Kant's critical philosophy, where he demarcated a set of questions about which we should not ask (for they cannot be answered philosophically but only by faith). These four cosmological questionsthe existence of God, the immortality of the soul, the creation of the world, and the freedom of the willconstitute the core of the "Dialectic of Pure Reason," and each has an antinomy dedicated to it. We might add to these four, two further contributions Kant makes to the "completion" of metaphysics. First, he sets aside questions of the ultimate nature of reality by positing the split between phenomena and noumena. Second, he radically reconfigures our understanding of human consciousness, replacing the Cartesian trope of subject as substance with a new idea of subject as process (or set of processes). Whatever the virtues or faults of Kant's particular philosophical views, one thing can be said with certainty: The Copernican turn transformed philosophy for good. "Metaphysics," after Kant, is something of a dirty word. Is deep ecology postmetaphysical? Does it refrain from making ultimate claims about the nature of the self and that of the universe? Hardly. In 1989 Jim Cheney accused deep ecology, primarily in its versions developed by Warwick
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Fox and Bill Devall and George Sessions, of being metaphysical in general and Stoic in particular. 2 He argued that the neo-Stoicism of radical environmentalism lies in its dependence on a particular notion of the self and the development of that self through processes of identification with the greater universe. It is not my concern here to investigate Cheney's claim (although I think it not without merit), but to engage with deep ecology, particularly as developed in the work of Arne Naess, at the level of a different sort of Stoicism and a different sort of metaphysics. What my argument has in common with Cheney's is that both take place at the level of the self. Unlike Cheney, however, I am concerned with the problem of desire in deep ecology. For a philosophical movement which takes its primary goal to be the transformation of human practice, it would seem that the role of desire would play a central role. And yet, discussions of desire seem to be entirely lacking in Naess's writings. In what follows, I begin with a discussion of economics and consumption in Naess's work. I here introduce the importance of desire and begin to draw out some of the connections between reduction of consumption and Naess's views on subjectivity. The role of subjectivity is important because it is on this terrain that the philosophical debate between reason and desire has traditionally been fought. Reduction of desire is a necessary, if not a sufficient, condition for reduction of consumption, especially if such reduction in consumption is to be something other than a hardship (and Naess clearly sees the change he envisions as not even pleasure-neutral but joyful). It is here that Kant, perhaps the thinker who dedicated the most thought to the relationship between reason and desire, is first brought into play. I then turn to several investigations of the relationships between consumption, desire, and reason, first in the "Platform of Deep Ecology" and then in Ecology, Community and Lifestyle. It is here that the connections between the "Platform" and Ecosophy T are seen to be more abiding than Naess sometimes thinks. The final section suggests a Kantian solution by invoking politics as a mediator between reason and desire. Economics and Consumption Fundamental to deep ecology, from Naess's earliest elucidation of it in 1973, is the idea that deep ecology, unlike shallow or reform environmentalism, is concerned with the entirety of the Earth's human population (as well as the biosphere as a whole) and is not narrowly focused on preserving the "affluence of people in the developed countries."3 There are only two possible implications of this. One is that deep ecology is concerned with the affluence of all people. The other is a rejection of material affluence as a good worth preserving. It is clear from Naess's later work that he meant the latter.
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The "Platform Principles of the Deep Ecology Movement" (commonly known as the eight points), which Naess developed with George Sessions, indicates this quite clearly. 4 Those principles assert that among those things which must be changed are "ideological structures." Naess and Sessions elaborate as follows: "The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent value) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between big and great." In their comments on the principles, they remark that "Some economists criticize the term 'quality of life' because it is supposed to be vague. But on closer inspection, what they consider to be vague is actually the nonquantitative nature of the term. One cannot quantify adequately what is important for the quality of life as discussed here, and there is no need to do so." It is clear why Naess and Sessions refrain from elaborating on what is meant by quality of life: Naess is a kind of pluralist who has no great desire to dictate to others either what their philosophy should be or what their lifestyle should be. Of course, this pluralism has its limits: Once one has accepted the eight points, there will necessarily be limits on one's lifestyle (and perhaps on one's philosophical views as well). Those limits are to be brought about through one's reasoned acceptance of the eight points. In his most comprehensive work on deep ecology, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, Naess devotes a good amount of time to discussing two issues often left out of accounts by other deep ecologists: economics and consumption. He describes our environmental predicament concisely: "A synopsis of what it is which makes the situation so critical could read: An exponentially increasing, and partially or totally irreversible environmental deterioration or devastation perpetuated through firmly established ways of production and consumption and a lack of adequate policies regarding human population increase."5 The human environmental crisis (and let us be clear that this is a human problem, at least in the sense that humans are the only ones worrying about it or capable of doing anything about it) is, Naess claims, primarily one of population and economics. In other words, this is first and foremost a political problem. As we will see later, the political is linked with the personal for Naess in a way for which he sometimes does not fully account. Naess's critique of economics is linked with the question of the nature of progress in industrial civilization. It is further linked to questions of politics and policy, since so much of political life today is given over to maintaining the economic status quo. Politics and policy will be discussed at greater length below. For the moment, the focus will remain on economics (although always with the awareness that economics and politics are not separable even if disciplinary lines might lead us to think otherwise).
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If we accept that an ever-increasing standard of living, measured in consumption of goods and services, is the sole criterion of the good life, then it follows that criticism of such consumption must result in a form of denial. If consuming more is what makes life good, then consuming less (denying oneself things one needs for the good life) must be bad. It is for this reason that Naess desires to bring to the fore the question of the status of the modifier "good" in phrases like "the good life": "What seems to better the material prerequisites for 'the good life' is given priority without asking if life is experienced as good." 6 This ideology of production and consumption is not, Naess claims, simply a reflection of the way people are. What pass for needs are the result of much hard work on the part of, among others, the advertising business: "A great deal of available mental energy within economic life is used to create new so-called needs and entice new customers to increase their material consumption. If it were not, economic crisis and unemployment would soon be upon us, or so it is said."7 (I will have more to say about advertising and desire-formation more generally below.) From the standpoint of traditional economicsthe standpoint of growth in both production and consumptionNaess's call for rethinking priorities can only sound threatening (a fact of which he is well aware). What is clear to the economic apologist is that certain things cannot be changed; it is equally clear to the environmentalist that some of those very same things must be changed: "Within such a well-oiled system, a revision of value standards in favour of all-round experiential values, life quality rather than standard of living, must sound like a dangerous proposition. We have 'progressed' to the point where the objectives of the good life must be considered threatening; we are intricately implicated in a system which guarantees short-term well-being in a small part of the world through destructive increases in material affluence."8 For Naess this dispute between the economy and ecology must be settled on the side of ecology.9 But how is this to be accomplished? Rather than seeing the situation as one of conflict (although he acknowledges that this is real), Naess sees our current environmental situation as an opportunity for real social change. Such opportunities, if not seen for what they are, slip by ungrasped. Naess's ecophilosophical and exhortatory texts are designed (a) to make this situation clear, (b) to move us to grasp this opportunity, and (c) to give us reason to do so. Insofar as most of his readers are already convinced of the need for change, the first task is not so difficult. The second and third are where difficulties arise. The second task is accomplished in texts like the "Platform of Deep Ecology," "Intrinsic Value: Will the Defenders of Nature Please Rise," and Ecology, Community and Lifestyle.10 The third task is to be
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accomplished by the various developments of Ecosophy T. What interests me here is the relationship between tasks (b) and (c) in regard to the issues of consumption and desire. Consumption for Naess is something to be reduced. Of course! The problem is how. There are places in Naess's work where reducing consumption is claimed to be straightforward. In fact, it sounds easy: "What is ecosophically 'best' for somebody relates to their [sic] total view. If a camera is said to be much better than yours, it may nevertheless be much worse for you. It may not be sensible to buy it, and the ecosopher will then not feel any regret at not possessing it." 11 I will return to this below, for I believe it evidences a certain understanding of the relationship between reason and desire that, even if well-grounded in much of the history of philosophy, is not so clearly right. This understanding of the relation of reason and desire echoes that commonly attributed to Plato (and at least implied by the Meno's discussion of virtue as a form of knowledge): to know the good is to do the good. One way to frame the central question of this essay is whether this is true in general and, more important, whether it is true in the case of desire for material goods. If at some times Naess makes reduction of consumption sound easy, at others he seems to acknowledge that changing established patterns of consumption and production is a monumental task. Even with ecological knowledge, environmentalists "have not been able, and partly not even willing, to change the ways of production and consumption. These are secured by the inertia of dominant ideas of growth, progress, and standard of living. These ideas manifest as firm attitudes and habits, are powerful agencies preventing large-scale, long-range changes."12 These attitudes and habits are manifestations of economic ideology within psychological structures of desire. As the history of Marxism makes clear, unmasking structures of ideology at the societal level is ineffective if the manifestations of those structures at the level of the psyche remain untouched. Put simply, rational "unmasking" seems to be peculiarly ineffective in the face of psychic life.13 I take it that restructuring psychic life so that it more closely accords with the truth of the world is part of the goal of the process of Self-realization as outlined in Ecosophy T.14 In other words, the goal of realizing one's place as merely part of the world-Self is both to unmask structures of ideology (the myth of the self-subsistent individual, the ideology of economic progress, the mechanistic worldview, etc.) and to rationally restructure one's psychic manifestation so that these ideologies are no longer operative from "within" one. The problem for Naess seems to be one of simply asserting our (rational?) wills, of removing the imprimatur we have tacitly or otherwise given to the status quo. The whole
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structure of Ecosophy T thus rests on a metaphysics of the subject (about which Naess is quite open). This metaphysics of the subject may explain why, while Naess has a fair amount to say about consumption, nowhere in his work (as far as I am aware) does the word desire even appear. 15 Within Ecosophy T, the processes of Selfrealization simply lead to a withering away of desire altogether. The problem pointed to here simply cannot arise. When presented with an account of the subject such as that found in Ecosophy T, it is not unreasonable to ask whether it is true or not. In other words, has Naess given us a true (or at least believable) account of what it is to be a human being? I shall challenge the picture he presents by taking up the (quite traditional) question about the relationship between reason and desire. A second set of questions may arise here as well, but only after the first objection has been satisfactorily met. Unlike the first, theoretical, question, the second is practical: How should one (we) go about achieving the transition from selves to aware parts of the world-Self? Obviously, if the first question is answered negatively (i.e., if the account of the self is found to be insufficient), the second never arises. I shall here attempt only to give a provisional answer to the first question and will leave the practical question aside. Trying to figure out the proper relationship between reason and desire has a long philosophical tradition. In general the problem for philosophy (as well as for much of Western theology, which is, of course, linked to philosophy) has been to demonstrate how it is possible or even necessary for desire to succumb to reason's demands (usually as evidenced in the rational will). Plato's claim that to know the good is to do the good (a claim that immediately effaces the problem) has been met with differing degrees of incredulity over the years. While it is not my purpose here to investigate the validity of Plato's claim, it stands as an interesting illustration of how easily we can dismiss what others (e.g., Nietzsche) have seen as a dogged problem. Kant, while fundamentally in agreement with Plato that reason ought to control desire, does not see things as nearly as straightforward as Plato had. For Kant, actions motivated pathologically (from desire) can never be pure moral actions, yet they nevertheless form the great bulk of what we do. Critique of Practical Reason sought to demonstrate the reality of the free (rational) will, while Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and Metaphysics of Morals both seek to show the will's superiority over desire. Despite having demonstrated the real possibility of moral action (i.e., of the rational will reining in desire), Kant knew that there could not remain a strict disjuncture between reason and desire. If morality (reason) and happiness (desire) remain disjunct, then there is no grounds for even hoping morality could become real in the world. Kant thus proposes, in Critique of Judgment, to close the gap and to show how,
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at least some good part of the time, rational moral actions can lead to happiness. In other words, Kant sets out to demonstrate that, at least theoretically, there is a way to make the satisfaction of desire compatible with the demands of rational morality. Even if he believed he had demonstrated the real possibility of overcoming the problem of reason and desire at the level of transcendental philosophy, the same problem remained at a different level for Kant. The picture of morality presented in the critical philosophy is, at best, a rational reconstruction. It is not how morality is, but merely how it ought to be (and is, in this sense at least, a sort of metaethics). Even if the critical philosophy is often taken to be the crowning achievement of the German Enlightenment, Kant himself remained sanguine about the possibility of making real the picture of moral action he himself had developed. He famously remarks in Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View that "From such crooked wood as man is made of, nothing perfectly straight can be built." 16 What sense can be made of this but that the bridging of the gap between reason and desire is not something that can be accomplished? Nevertheless, we must work toward closing the gap. The problem thus becomes one of enlightenment: How can we help people to attain the autonomy in reality that we know in principle they (ought to) have? Kant's answer was straightforward: In the interests of autonomy the state ought to make people act as they would if they really were autonomous. I will have more to say about Kant and deep ecology below. The question here is what the relationship between reason and desire is for Naess and deep ecology. In some sense Naess is a pseudo Platonist: from Self-realization will (necessarily) flow transformed action. The fundamental difference between Plato and Naess is that the former saw the cultivation of reason as the practice which will curb desire, while the latter sees the development of self as leading to a transformation, perhaps even a withering away, of desire. For Plato desire is reined in but never eradicated; for Naess it seems simply to go away. But the Naessian reconfiguration of the strife between reason and desire is more complex still. The entire program of Self-realization calls into question where the boundaries of self lie, so that in a sense the withering away of desire that accompanies Self-realization can present itself as a new form of ethical egoism. When I come to see that there is more to me than I had previously believed, I will come to care for all parts of my Self.17 Naessian deep ecology becomes not care of the other (which we find in Gilligan's ethic of care as developed in ecofeminism) but care of the self.18 Ecosophy T, the detailed development of the intuition "Self-realization!" into a complete deep ecological system, seems to me to be metaphysical to the core and dependent upon a notion of self, acceptance of which requires a leap
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of faith. As such it cannot form the basis for a widely accepted philosophical position. None of this would be a great problem if it were simple to heed Naess's oft-repeated advice: Ecosophy T is his way of developing the basic insights of deep ecology (all of which can be found, he insists, in the eight points) and should not be taken as the only or even the best way of developing those basic insights. But what I will argue below is that Ecosophy T is not so easily separated from the eight points. In fact, it is hard to see how they are separable at all. Consumption and Desire The eight points (basic principles, "Platform of Deep Ecology") are by now well-known and well-circulated. That they are thoroughly read or often discussed is not so clear. Given Naess's insistence that it is these eight points which form the core of deep ecology, they warrant scrutiny. 19 While a detailed exegesis of the principles would take a good amount of time, it is worth noting that the principles are couched in terms of value and of rights. Beginning with an assertion of the intrinsic value of both human and other life, they pass through the rights that follow from this value, through the duties that are implied by those rights, and end up with both a politics and an ethics (in the rich sense of practice) which reflect these rights, duties, and values. Consumption appears only in a masked form. Principle 3 claims that "Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity [of life] except to satisfy vital needs." Principle 7 runs thus: "The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent value) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between big and great." Finally, principle 8 claims that "Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation directly or indirectly to try to implement the necessary changes." Here we see clearly, without any of the mechanisms of Ecosophy T or Self-realization, that an awareness of the intrinsic value of all life leads to (or is claimed to lead to) our having a duty to respect the right to a continued existence of all creatures which contribute to this value (unless we have vital needs to fulfill). We see further that not only do we not have the right to interfere, we must undertake a transformation of our lifestyles to ones which are not dependent upon consumption in the same way. That is what I take the transition from "standard of living" to "quality of life" to signify. Finally, we have a political and personal program that entails changing who we are and how things are structured at both societal and individual levels.
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Nowhere in the eight points do we find any discussion of Self-realization. What is clearest from the eight points is that deep ecology is fundamentally a political and economic theory which necessitates an ethics. The primary action deduced from the principle of intrinsic value is a transformation of policy grounded in a change in ideology. What Ecology, Community and Lifestyle makes clear is that the transformations in policy and consciousness (which is what I take the transformation in ideology to come down to) happen together. One cannot happen without the other, and neither can happen first. What this means is that, pace Naess, something like Ecosophy T, if not Ecosophy T itself, is a necessary component of deep ecology. 20 Put simply, while changing policies may be the true practical core of deep ecology (and the great amount of time dedicated to it in Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle suggests that it is), it is nevertheless essential that there be transformations of consciousness as well.21 Desire and Self-Realization As suggested above, the metaphysics of the subject found in Ecosophy T is an attempt to rewrite the philosophical problematic of reason and desire. While the gap between what we want to do and what we believe we ought to do may be neatly narrowed (or perhaps sidestepped) by Ecosophy T, it isn't clear that this is ultimately successful without paying a rather high metaphysical price. The basic norm of Ecosophy T, Self-realization, is in some real sense ungroundable (that's what it means to be a basic norm). One either shares the basic insightthat the ego-self is but a part of the world-Selfor one does not. For those who do not share this intuitionand I number among them the vast majority of people living in the West todaywhat is needed is something like a conversion experience. Through the right sorts of activities one will come to see the truth of this position.22 Leaving aside the obvious (practical) difficulties of bringing this about, there remain two related difficulties with this claim. The first asks whether this is a true account of subjectivity.23 We might take this to be a theoretical problem. The second difficulty asks whether the relationship between reason and desire presented here is right. In effect it asks whether it is so clear that transformations in our understanding of who we are and how we are related to the rest of the world will lead to alterations in practice (leaving aside the claim that they will lead to the ''right" changes in practice). This seems to be more of a practical difficulty. As for the first difficulty, there are sufficiently many alternative accounts of selfhood or subjectivity in the history of human thought to give us pause before
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accepting any one as right. The burden of proof is on the deep ecologist to show that, appearances notwithstanding, the self really is part of a larger whole and that what it means to realize the self is to come to see the connections between the narrow ego-self and the larger world-Self. To be fair, it is hard to see what would count as evidence here, since there are no obvious "facts" to be appealed to; testimonials are, as ever, suspect; and the sorts of arguments offered for the rightness of this view must (apparently) begin with the assumption of that which is to be shown. 24 Perhaps what this means is that we, as philosophers, choose our accounts of selfhood largely (or even entirely) for pragmatic reasons: What account of selfhood can serve to authorize the sort of practical changes we envision?25 Because it is the second difficulty that interests me more, I am willing to grant the first point (albeit with one caveat). I accept for the sake of argument that the principle of Self-realization and the understanding of Self it relies upon are a true description of the world. The caveat is this: Between selves as we know them and Self understood as the end point of Self-realization, there must be some process of making real what has only been potential (i.e., realization). The importance of this caveat is that it makes explicit what is at best only implicit in much deep ecological literature. It is not simply a question of realizing that one is part of a larger Self and thenboom!one's practices are transformed. The process of Self-realization is presumably a slow, gradual, and messy one, replete with backsliding, failures to achieve in practice what seemed to be already done cognitively, and so on. The task of coming to be oneself ison almost any understanding of the selfnot a quick and simple one.26 Granting (for the moment, at least) that Self-realization is a messy affair, what light does this shed on the problem at hand? Presumably this: The evidence for progress in Self-realization is to be found in transformations in practice. Without transformations in practice, of course, Self-realization is ecologically ineffective. But it is not inconceivable that we might find ourselves stuck partway down the path of Self-realization. We might think of the many people today who describe themselves as environmentalists (even deep ecologists) who drive (often very short distances) to work, continue to eat mass-produced food-stuffs, and so on. It is one thing to see that one is engaged in self-destructive behavior (and many of our practices are self-destructive on almost any understanding of the self); it is quite another to be able to change those behaviors.27 In other words, the practical effects of Selfrealization may lag behind the transformations in a way that Naess does not acknowledge. And, even worse, it is conceivable that the practical effects of Self-realization might never occur for those who proceed far enough to see interconnectedness but not to the point of the withering away of the ego-self.
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I left Kant aside with a promise to return to him. I do so now because I believe the good Königsberger can come to our assistance here. It is often thought that Kant's ethics is a straightforward affair: We must simply know what is right, and then we will do it (it is in this sense that Kant is thought to be an ethical Neoplatonist). The truth of the matter is, as always, more complicated. Kant's ethical theory is an idealized, rational reconstruction of what ethics would look like if human beings really were the sorts of rational beings that they are capable (in some sense) of being. Humanity, Kant well knew, was not yet and would never be (fully) rational. His philosophy of history and his occasional pieces on politics make it clear that the progress of history (if such progress there be) is a making real of reason. 28 Kantian philosophy also is a form of self-realization (albeit quite different from Naess's). What Kant provides, which Naess does not, is a worked-out bridge principle between a world in which reason is not yet real and one in which it is. The role of the state, for Kant, is to force us to act as we would voluntarily if we really were rational beings. And here we might wish to hesitate, since most of us, myself included, would not be willing to embrace autocratic decision-making procedures to accomplish our goals. It matters how government comes to the policies that shape behavior. Nevertheless, Kant's basic insight can help us make sense of Naess's intuition that political change and change at the level of the self must occur simultaneously. But the need for simultaneity is even stronger than Naess lets on. Policy changes are not simply for those who have not yet undergone (or at least gotten under way with) the process of Self-realization. As I have argued, transformations of self are, if real at all, likely to be gradual and messy. Policy changes are therefore needed to force even those who "know better" to behave in a way commensurate with their beliefs. Without policy changes we are unlikely to succeed in modifying our behaviors. Returning emphasis to politicswhich is, as mentioned above, the real heart of Naess's deep ecologyhas a second advantage. It no longer makes the solution to environmental problems appear as the responsibility of each individual by himself or herself. Collective action has much to recommend it, not least of which is its ability to shift the burden of responsibility onto the collectivity. If we leave policy aside, we will find people in the situation of having to resist their desires, and thus denying themselves things that they really want (though not needed for physical happiness, such things may indeed be essential for psychic well-being). This situation can be ameliorated through policies that act as an externalized will. Standing in for the will that we don't have, they force us to act as we would if we were fully realized beings (i.e., beings capable not only of knowing better but also of acting on that knowledge).
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Part of the problem here is the increasingly pervasive presence of advertising in our culture. It is hard to imagine that our desires for material possessions are in any sense "natural." Of course, it is not fair to blame advertising alone for our desires. Peer pressure, our general media culture, and other forces surely play a role. And we should be honest in admitting that desire for some material goods is certainly justified; central heating and indoor plumbing are things it seems perfectly reasonable to desire. I focus on advertising not because it is solely responsible for desire formation but because its whole raison d'être is desire formation. What Naess perhaps does not see is that advertising does not simply work on us; it works in us. Who we are, in large part because more of us are exposed to more advertising at earlier ages, is shaped by ads. The desires we have for newer, faster, and more stuff are psychically real. If deep ecology is to transform the world, and to do so in a way that is joyful rather than destructive, it must address the reality of these desires and seek to work with them. It is not sufficient simply to claim that the desires will wither away or will fall under the control of reason. We must pursue two avenues at once: we must address the structures of desire formation (which is part of subject formation, after all) and we must work with the subjects we know who struggle with the desires with which they find themselves. The great risk is that we serve to reinscribe the sorts of subjects we are into new generations. We must address the structures of desire formation if we are to move forward with the deep ecological program. And addressing this problem is clearly political. Individuals cannot single-handedly face down the forces that make them who they are (although there is certainly room for overcoming what one is to some degree). What is needed is an alteration of those forces themselves. 29 The political emphasis here has yet another advantage. Even if it turns out that Naess's metaphysics of the subject is untrue, it can function as a foundational mythology: "Given that I am nowhere near a realized Self, but believing that it would be better if the theory of Self-realization were true, I can support policies which make me act as if I were a realized being." This, it seems to me, is far more in line with Naess's understanding of the role of Ecosophy T as well. While he clearly believes the view of the subject propounded therein, as I pointed out above, he stresses repeatedly that this is his way of doing things and that it forms no necessary component of deep ecology. If my arguments have been convincing, this is not quite true. There must be some account of subject formation in order to make sense of the politics of deep ecology (that is, personal change and political change always happen together for Naess). Nevertheless, the current suggestion is that Ecosophy T and its guiding norm of Self-realization can function not as the foundation of deep ecological practice but as a mythology which can help motivate people to fight for policies they might not other-
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wise support. And those policies can function, at least in part, to change behaviors in ways that we can support, even if we cannot change our own behaviors without the policy changes. The open question that remains here, and this is one which will need to be addressed more and more, is as follows: If the metaphysics of the self presented in Ecosophy T is not true, can the mythological presentation of this metaphysics continue to function to guide policy over time? Assuming the right sorts of policy changes are implemented, will the political will remain to keep them in place as they begin to take effect? We can well imagine human population dropping, levels of consumption doing likewise, and so on, and this leading to an inability to continue seeing environmental problems as serious. 30 What then? As the political will to address these problems subsides (as it must if the metaphysics of the self is not true, and therefore Self-realization does not take place), we can well imagine that the problems, or ones like them, will resurface. We can then imagine humanity having to invent the ecological wheel repeatedly. It behooves us to give this issue some thought even if it is, at this point, only a chimera. Notes I benefited greatly from conversations about this material with Steven Vogel and Barbara Fultner, the latter of whom also provided invaluable feedback on an earlier draft of this essay. 1. Arne Naess, "Spinoza and Ecology," Philosophia (Israel) 7 (1977): 45. 2. Jim Cheney, "The Neo-Stoicism of Radical Environmentalism," Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 293 325. 3. Arne Naess, "The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary," Inquiry 16:1 (1973): 95. 4. Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered (Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith, 1985), pp. 69 73. 5. Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy, translated and edited by David Rothenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 23. Italics in original. (Hereafter cited as ECL.) 6. Ibid., pp. 24 25. 7. Ibid., p. 25. 8. Ibid. 9. An interesting philosophico-etymological analysis could be done here. "Ecology," of nineteenth-century origin (and apparently coined independently in both Germany and the United States much as "ecofeminism" was coined in both France and the United States in the early 1970s), was formed by combining the Greek words for home (oikos) and for story or explanation (logos) yielding a term similar in structure to "biology" or
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"physiology." "Economy" is much older, actually rooted in the Greek oikonomos or household manager. Oikonomos comes from oikos and nemein (to distribute or regulate). Nemein also yields nomos (law), which signifies the elevation or codification of ordering in a regular structure. Although it is most likely that nemein did not pass through nomos on the way to oikonomos, and the Greeks would likely not have heard law in oikonomos, they would have heard regulation or ordering. While we speak highly of matters economical, for the Greeks they were below the law (and certainly not worthy of logos). Indeed, an oikonomos was almost certainly a slave. (My thanks to the classicist Timothy Hofmeister for his etymological and historical assistance.) 10. Arne Naess, "Intrinsic Value: Will the Defenders of Nature Please Rise," in Wisdom in the Open Air: The Norwegian Roots of Deep Ecology, edited by Peter Reed and David Rothenberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 70 81. 11. ECL, p. 88. 12. ECL, pp. 87 88 (italics in original). 13. One could object that the two passages cited clearly operate at different levels. The first seems to show that reduction of desire is easy at the personal level, whereas the second details the difficulty of doing so at the societal level. This is not at all clear, for advertising and other large-scale economic manipulations clearly function at the level of the psyche and make difficult exactly what had appeared to be easy there. 14. I follow Naess in distinguishing between "self" and "Self," where the former is the narrowly understood ego and the latter is the greater whole of which the narrow ego is but a part. Naess sometimes illustrates this by appealing to Spinoza, at others by reference to Gandhi and the notion of Atman. I sometimes will call "Self" the "world-Self" in order to emphasize its difference from the ''self." 15. Even a postmodern ecophilosopher such as Arran Gare mentions desire only once in his Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis. But that one reference appears in an elucidation of Lacan; desire never resurfaces in the discussion of Lacan and environmentalism. Arran E. Gare, Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 61. 16. In Immanuel Kant, On History, edited by Lewis White Beck, translated by Lewis White Beck, Robert E. Anchor, and Emil L. Fackenheim (New York: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 17 18. 17. I leave out of the discussion here the various pathologies of Self that might have to be dealt with. For example, could one have made progress down the path of Self-realization yet engaged in Self-destructive behavior? I trust not, but only because the Naessian structure of Self-realization carries with it a tacit understanding of health that precludes, from the outset, any such pathology. 18. On ecofeminism and the ethic of care, see Deane Curtin, "Toward an Ecological Ethic of Care" and Roger J. H. King, "Caring About Nature: Feminist Ethics and the Environment," both in Ecological Feminist Philosophies, edited by Karen J. Warren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 66 81 and 82 96, respectively. 19. He makes this claim most recently in an interview. Andrew Light, "Deep Socialism?: An Interview with Arne Naess," Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 8:1 (March 1997): 69 85.
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20. It is not inconceivable that a large enough reduction in population would allow continued consumption at present, perhaps even increasing, levels. However, insofar as we accept the principle of intrinsic value, even radically reduced levels of human population could still choose between lifestyles that have greater or lesser impacts on the lives of other beings. 21. I take this point to be uncontroversial. The essence of all social change takes place at both the level of the self and the level of the group. What makes Ecosophy T different is that in some sense, it blurs this distinction. Nevertheless, when Ecosophy T is asked to describe what social change looks like in practice, it turns out to look very much like traditional bilevel transformation. 22. Much of the work by Devall and Sessions, as well as by Dolores LaChappelle, Warwick Fox, and David Abram, is supposed to help people along the path to seeing things aright. But such seeing aright cannot be brought about through argument; it must arise from experience. However, experience itself is a notoriously difficult thing to appeal to, for it, too, depends on cultural presuppositions. The failure of most people to see the "truth" of deep ecology's claim about the world is simply that they don't see it. When told that they need help with their vision (which may be true independently), it is not unreasonable for them to ask why the vision of the deep ecologist is better or truer than their own. See David Abram, "Merleau-Ponty and the Voice of the Earth," Environmental Ethics 10 (1988): 101 120 and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Pantheon, 1996); Warwick Fox, Toward a Transpersonal Ecology (Boston: Shambhala, 1990); Dolores LaChapelle, Earth Wisdom (Los Angeles: Guild of Tutors Press, 1978). 23. Alternative accounts are those offered by Fox, Transpersonal Ecology, and Michael Zimmerman, Contesting Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) and "Possible Political Problems of Earth-Based Religiosity" (in this volume). 24. Just as arguments against it apparently must begin with the assumption that the self is otherwise than is claimed by Ecosophy T. 25. This is the view most commonly associated with Richard Rorty in, for example, his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 26. If it were, there would be no need for philosophical ethics, psychotherapists, or any of a host of other practices and institutions. 27. The various sorts of seemingly minor pathologies Freud pointed to as evidence of the death drive are illustrative. Biting one's fingernails is a minor form of self-destruction. Nail-biters often want to stop but cannot. The traditional philosophical explanation of such a phenomenon is weakness of the will. What I am suggesting is that it is more like will-lessness than weakness of a present will. On the death drive, see Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, translated by James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989). 28. In this way Kant already sketches out the entire program of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. The most important of Kant's essays on this topic are collected in his On History. See especially "What Is Enlightenment?" (pp. 3 10), "Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View" (pp. 11 26), and "Perpetual Peace'' (pp.
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85 136). For a recent collection on the contemporary importance of Kant's work on history, progress, and enlightenment, see James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, eds., Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant's Cosmopolitan Ideal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). 29. The growing presence of advertising in schools and the continuing commercialization of culture are worrisome. At a recent performance by Opera Columbus, the audience was asked to applaud the bank that had underwritten the production. They dutifully did so. Did no one notice the irony, since the opera was Faust? 30. Given that so many fail to see them as serious today, this should not take even a moderate stretch of the imagination.
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12 Bhagavadgita *, Ecosophy T, and Deep Ecology Knut A. Jacobsen Ecosophy and the Hindu Religious Traditions It is intriguing for anyone with some knowledge of the religious traditions constituting Hinduism to find that the interconnected concepts of non-injury (ahimsa)* the oneness of all living beings (advaita), the self (atman*, purusa*), and self-realization (moksa*) have become part of the vocabulary of environmental thought in Europe and North America. These concepts were originally related to the attempt of the Hindu ascetics to free the self from bondage to the material world, an effort that to some degree is the very opposite of the effort to integrate humans into the natural world and to preserve the biotic communities which is being made by contemporary environmental thinkers. The fact that there is a significant influence from the Hindu traditions of religion and philosophy on the ecosophy of Arne Naess often goes unnoticed.1 The religious aspect of the ultimate premises of deep ecology (i.e., religious ecosophy) has been identified as belonging to Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, and Native American religion, with no mention of Hinduism.2 It has, however, been shown that there is a close connection between the ecosophy of Arne Naess and the idea of selfrealization as conceived by Mohandas K. Gandhi, about whom Naess has published several books.3 One of the systems of Hindu religious thought, the Advaita Vedanta*, has also been mentioned as a significant Hindu influence.4 In addition, Naess several times quotes the most popular religious text of Hinduism, the nonsectarian Bhagavadgita (BhG), in support of deep ecology. Most Hindus are followers of the traditions of devotion (bhakti) to a divine being, and many of these traditions are heavily influenced by the BhG.5 The BhG has at times been read by Europeans and Americans somewhat independent from its Hindu context, but Naess's lineage of Hindu authoritative teachers (guru-parampara*) starts probably with Gandhi, for whom the BhG was the
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religious central text and "an infallible guide of conduct." 6 Naess quotes a verse from the BhG several times in his texts about deep ecology. This verse is, according to Naess, "the most notable" of "several central statements" of the BhG, "which can be considered to be the common denominator for large sections of Indian philosophy."7 The verse (6.29) reads: sarva-bhuta*-stham atmanam* sarva-bhutani catman* iksate* yoga-yuktatma* sarvatra samadarsanah*.8 He who has yoked himself in discipline sees the same everywhere, he sees himself as in all beings and all beings in himself.9 That he quotes the BhG shows both that this text is considered especially authoritative for Naess's ecosophy and that this version of ecosophy considers itself to have ancient roots, perhaps even in Hinduism.10 Hindu systematic religious thought often expressed itself as commentaries on texts considered to contain comprehensive and authoritative statements of the systems of thought, and there is a long tradition of commentaries on the BhG. This essay investigates how these commentaries understood BhG 6.29 and compares their understanding with the environmental interpretation. The classical commentaries were often composed by members of religious, often monastic, orders who were occupied with the religious goal of liberation from rebirth (moksa*), and they understood the text to teach the realization of freedom from the world. Meditation and asceticism were seen as the means to self-realization. During the Indian struggle for independence from colonial rule, the BhG became a textbook in political action, and persons active in politics composed commentaries. For the politicians, liberation also meant realization within the political and social order, of the goal of national independence and social justice. For Gandhi, the most famous representative of this tradition, self-realization was attained in a combination of political action and asceticism. But environmentalism teaches neither liberation from the world nor the ultimate value of the social order. On the contrary, it has samsara* the world of the natural processes of birth, flourishing of life, decay, and death as ultimate concern. How, therefore, can the Hindu scripture, the BhG, be called on in support of environmentalism? What is the religious meaning of BhG 6.29, and how does it relate to ecosophy? Bhagavadgita* BhG constitutes chapters 23 40 of the Bhismaparvan* of the Mahabharata* but has long been treated as a separate work. It recounts the dialogue between the
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god Krsna * and one of the Pandava* brothers, Arjuna, just before the beginning of the battle of Kuruksetra* between the Pandavas and Kauravas. Arjuna was a ksatriya* (belonging to the warrior class), and it was therefore his duty to fight wars. At the moment the BhG begins, he has a breakdown and wants to withdraw from the battle because he feels that killing other humans would be wrong and would destroy the social order (dharma). The task of Krsna in the text is to convince Arjuna that there is a higher order. This higher dharma is the knowledge of the self as really a passive witness to the transformations of the material principle (prakrti*); the duty to perform the activities pertaining to one's class (varna*), that is, the special duties of the brahmana* (ritual specialist), the ksatriya (warrior), the vaisya* (trader, farmer, artisan, etc.), and the sudra* (servant); and the worship of Krsna. The unique message of the BhG is that if one's duties are performed without attachment to the fruits of action (i.e. without egoism), one is not bound to the world of rebirth (samsara*). BhG, chapter 6, from which Naess quotes, is about disciplined meditation (yoga) as a means to self-realization. Self-realization is the ultimate value or the most basic norm in Ecosophy T.11 BhG, chapter 6, combines selfrealization, non-duality, and restraint, and therefore reveals an affinity between the BhG and Ecosophy T, even though environmentalism is not, of course, the purpose of the teaching of Krsna in the BhG. It describes the disciplined person who realizes the self, merges with brahman and sees brahman in all beings by means of a discipline (yoga) of sameness, indifference, or treating everyone alike (samya), that is, a certain type of selfcontrol. The person possessed of such a discipline is said to be immovable, with subdued senses, the same in cold and heat, unmoved by pleasure and pain. For him stones and gold, good and evil persons, are the same. He abides, solitary, in a secret place and performs yoga exercises, such as fixing his thoughts on a single object, sitting (asana*), gazing at the tip of the nose, fixing his thought organ on the self, thinking of nothing at all, and causes all thought to come to rest. He realizes the peace of nirvana, the self, and becomes one with brahman or attains the touch of brahman; sees himself in all beings and all beings in himself; and sees the same in all things. He sees Krsna in all things and sees all things in Krsna, and adopts the belief of oneness. He sees that pleasure and pain of others are the same in himself. The chapter ends by saying that of all the disciplined persons (yogins), those who worship (bhajate) Krsna with faith, are the most disciplined. This disciplined person bears a resemblance to the man of stabilized mentality (sthitaprajña) described in chapter 2.54 72, the verses that Gandhi held contained the essence of the BhG. The passage describes a person performing disciplined
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meditation with attention totally directed inward, a person who attains a state of meditation in which everything has come to a standstill and all differentiation has disappeared. Some Commentaries On Bhagavadgita * 6.29 Sankara* The oldest Indian commentary now available on the BhG is Sankara's Advaitabhasya* The philosophy of Sankara (ca. 700 750), called advaita (non-dual), is one of the systematic expressions of the tendency toward monism in Hinduism. Among the six systems of Hindu philosophy, three are pluralist (Nyaya*, Vaisesika*, Purva* Mimarsa*) and two are dualist (Samkhya*, Yoga). Several of the theological systems associated with Vedanta* believe in a plurality of selves. Monism is therefore only one of the views, and should not be identified with Hindu systematic thought as such. The basic statement of Hindu monism is that the self is identical with brahman, the substratum of the world and ultimate reality. All beings share the same self. Everything is brahman in the sense that nothing can exist apart from this principle. The plural world is understood as maya* an appearance, created by the lower brahman (saguna* brahman, isvara*), who is not ultimately real, although he is real for all practical purposes. An important implication for environmentalism of this advaita concept is, according to the ecosophy of Naess, that one can identify with all beings because one's true identity is the same as theirs.12 However, since Naess both quotes Sankara and is said to be inspired by the Vedanta doctrine on non-duality, the fact that some see Sankara's* Advaita Vedanta in particular as an expression of a radical devaluation of the natural world has to be discussed. Advaita Vedanta and deep ecology have quite different intentions. Advaita Vedanta in its origin and throughout its history was a system of religious thought aiming at liberating the self from bondage to samsara* the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. One author claims that "in the Advaitic liberation experience, the world is not reverenced but rather tolerated until it passes completely away."13 He gives the following example of the person who has reached the highest form of unity in brahman: He has no cognition of difference whatsoever (sarvatha bheda-darsdabhdva*). Rather he is constantly and completely identified with the Self (sarvada* tanmaya). Thus the highest attainment is one in which the saint is totally cut off from empirical experience. Only when he has no awareness of the world at all does he rise above the perception of difference.14 The supreme bliss is the cessation of the world, and thus the end of plurality and change. All beings share the same self, but the body and mind belong to a
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hierarchical, painful, and disharmonious world generated on the basis of the individual's karman, and are ultimately unreal. The true identity of beings is not in the empirical realm (i.e., in society or in nature), but beyond plurality and change. For Sanikara *, reality has several levels. The vyavahdrika* level corresponds to the ordinary reality, the world with which environmentalism is concerned. This proves to lack real existence when the highest level, the paramarthika* is realized. According to this view, there is only one Self, and plurality does not really exist. For Sankara, self-realization meant realizing that the self was really identical with the permanent and unchangeable source of the world (brahman). According to Sankara, to identify oneself with the things around us as a plurality that is real is to fall victim to an illusion. This interpretation is confirmed by the historian of Indian philosophy Surendranath Dasgupta, who writes that, according to Advaita Vedanta*, when the comprehension of the self as the ultimate truth arises, "our cognition of world appearances will automatically cease."15 Advaita Vedanta held that the world "has no real existence at all, but is only an illusory imagination which lasts till the moment when true knowledge is acquired."16 When one realizes the self, "all our illusory perceptions representing the world as a field of experience cease."17 There is therefore a great divergence between advaita in Sankara and advaita in Ecosophy T. Sankara glosses "all beings" in BhG 6.29 with brahmadini* stamba-paryantdni* beings from Brahma to grass (i.e., all living beings).18 What is common to these beings is that they all share the same self, which is identical with the unchangeable source of the world, brahman. Their empirical existence is unreal from the ultimate point of view, since empirical reality is able to be sublated by a higher experience. As the snake on the road disappears when I realize that it was only a rope which looked like a snake, and I thereafter realize that it never existed except as a mistaken perception of a rope, so this world as a plurality disappears when we realize that only atman*-brahman exists. In Advaita Vedanta self-realization is a soteriological experience of contentless consciousness, not a celebration of natural processes.19 Sankara's comment on BhG 6.32 is, however, about empathy or non-injury. Here he writes that he who sees that what is painful and pleasant to himself is painful and pleasant to all creatures, will cause no living beings pain, and that he who is noninjurious is the foremost of yogins.20 Non-injury in traditional Hinduism is combined with the attempt to separate or liberate the self from samsara* It is especially to be practiced by renunciants (samnyasins*) The context here is meditation, non-action, and liberation from samsara. Keeping this limitation in mind, these comments harmonize with some aspects of Ecosophy
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T, because here the triad of self-realization, non-injury, and unity of all beings is expressed in interdependence. But Sankara's * explanation of BhG 6.29 reads: "Now is shown the result of yoga which is the realization of oneness of Brahman and which is the cause of the cessation of the whole world of rebirth (samsara*)."21 Here self-realization, the realization that all living beings share one self, is the cause of the cessation of the world, not the celebration of diversity and complexity. Sankara* relates this verse to ultimate reality (paramarthika*) and not to the world of flourishing biological life (vyavaharika*). The preservation of the natural world is a concern of everyday reality, and this concern is ultimately irrelevant for the renunciant. The goal of the Advaita renunciant was to leave the world, not to preserve it. According to Hinduism, life has four goals (purusartha-s*): power and wealth (artha), aesthetic and erotic enjoyment (kama*), ethics and conventional religious life (dharma) and liberation from rebirth (moksa*). The first three goals are concerned with the world; the fourth is about freedom from the world. According to Hinduism, it is as much the ideas of karman and rebirth as that of a single self shared by all, called brahman, that ties all living beings together in an interdependent universe. The Hindu systems that believed in multiple selves, such as Samkhya* and Samkhya-Yoga, also believed in the world as an interdependent whole, and that non-injury concerned all living beings and not only humans. The idea of karman and rebirth is an axiom of most South Asian religions. The Hindu concept of rebirth involves all living beings in the same flow of life. Injury of any living being, not just a human, is considered wrong and a cause for karmic retribution. From beginningless time, living beings are continually reborn in destinies determined by previous acts until release from rebirth is realized. Since animals might be reborn as humans and humans reborn as animals, there cannot be any hiatus between them. One's identity is not really as a human, but as a subtle body in association with a permanent self who has always existed and becomes associated with all kinds of species. What is unique with the principle of ahimsa* in South Asia is not the emphasis on non-injury, since non-injury is the preferred way of human interaction in most societies and an injunction in most religions, but its extension to include all living beings, not only humans. This is due to the belief that all beings have selves and to the principle of karman and rebirth. Calling upon both Advaita Vedanta and the BhG, Eliot Deutsch has attempted a metaphysical grounding of environmental ethics on the combination of the ideas of brahman and karman.22 The idea of brahman signifies that there is a radical discontinuity between reality (brahman) and everything else in ex-
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perience, while the law of karman binds humans into the strongest continuity with the natural processes. According to Deutsch, freedom associated with the realization of brahman makes possible a disinterestedness in everyday action, and humans can act in harmony with nature without destructive concerns. He believes the karmayogin of the BhG exemplifies freedom in action and quotes BhG 4.18: "He who sees inaction in action and action in inaction, he is wise among men, he does all action harmoniously." 23 The self is always a passive witness, a knower of the field (ksetrajña*), whereas all action is performed by the material principle, the field (ksetra*). Knowledge of these two principles gives awareness of non-attachment and freedom. Because the self is always free, one can act unattached and without destructive concerns. Deutsch concludes that "paradoxically, when nature is seen to be valueless in the most radical way, it can be made valuable with us in creative play."24 Diversity can be valued, it seems, exactly because of the existence of atman*-brahman, which is one and always free from the world. It is now obvious that the use of Advaita Vedanta concepts in Ecosophy T and the citing of Sankara* in support, does not mean acceptance of any of the tenets of this system of religious thought in its classical form. The unity experience that, in Ecosophy T, is the individual's self-realization, Naess calls "a mystic unity with the whole," which suggests that "all beings are one."25 However, this does not imply the reduction of plurality into singularity (atman-brahman), as in Advaita Vedanta*, but rather a consciousness about an organic unity of interdependent parts that is nondifferent from oneself. Fox noted that Naess "unencumbered by subscription to the metaphysics of Advaita Vedanta (but nevertheless sympathetic to this metaphysics), defends the ontological validity of the empirical world. "26 For Ecosophy T, the true self is the natural world. Unity therefore implies a wish for the flourishing of all beings in their natural environments. Their flourishing is identical with the flourishing of oneself; their self-realization and my self-realization are identical. The unity of all beings relates, according to Advaita Vedanta, also to the highest reality (paramarthika*) But from that level the everyday world of living beings (vydvaharika*) no longer appears, because plurality disappears when oneness is realized. Self-realization for Naess is an expansion of one's identity, but its perfection does not coincide with the experience of the cessation of the world's manifestation, as in Sankara and Advaita Vedanta. Naess has written that Self-realization does not postulate "an eternal or permanent Self" and "to 'realize oneself' . . . does not correspond to a Hindu idea of realizing the absolute atman."27 It is explicitly denied that the individual egos dissolve like drops in the ocean, a beloved Vedanta metaphor.28
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Ramanuja *, Madhva, and Abhinavagupta Since BhG 6.29 has been taken to show that the ecosophy of Naess has ancient roots in the Hindu religious traditions, other commentators on the verse have to be analyzed in order to see if there was indeed any agreement in the tradition on a reading of the verse that could be creatively reinterpreted in the environmentalist context. A good orthodox Hindu interpretation of the BhG is found in the commentary by the Sri-Vaisnava* theologian and philosopher Ramanuja (d. 1137), the foremost thinker of Visistadvaita* Vedanta*. Ramanuja accepted a qualified (saguna*) Brahman and a difference among the three ultimate principles god, selves, and matter. Commenting on the verses 6.29 32, Ramanuja says that at the highest stage of yoga there are four degrees, but that 6.29 illustrates the lowest degree. It shows that the atman* of all creatures is equal when their proper form is separated from matter (prakrti*).29 Inequality belongs to prakrti.30 This means that the living beings of the empirical world, such as cats, birds, humans, are ordered hierarchically and are different and unequal because they are products of matter. Similarity applies to the selves only, and the selves are totally different from matter. The yogin, in other words, sees the similarity of all selves when they have been separated from the natural world. Living beings do not share one self, but the selves of beings are similar. Thus, when one knows one's own self, one knows that all other atmans* have the same form. The verse does not speak at all about self-realization as identification with the natural world. On the second level the yogin sees God in all atmans and all atmans in God. God's true form (svarupa*) is similar to all beings who have been released from good and evil.31 On the third level, the yogin becomes one with all beings, because all have the same unrestricted knowledge; he renounces the difference due to prakrti and devotes himself steadfastly to God. He sees that God and the atman of all beings are similar in that they are all free from karman.32 On the fourth level, the yogin perceives no difference between the suffering and happiness of his atman and the atmans of others because all atmans are equal and have no relations. In other words, as pain and pleasure do not really affect one's self, so one knows that pain and pleasure do not affect the selves of others. This yogin is unaffected by the pleasure, pain, happiness, and grief of others. This is the stage of release.33 Ramanuja gives a purely religious interpretation of these verses. According to Ramanuja , the world is part of God and totally dependent on him, but it is a mistake to identify the self with the body and the natural processes. Madhva (1238 1317 or 1199 1278), the founder of Dvaita Vedanta and together with Sankara* and Ramanuja considered to constitute the three classical
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Vedanta * interpreters, reads verse 6.29 not as monism but as monotheism. Madhva understands atmanam* and atmani* in the verse to mean a personal god (paramesvara*) God controls everything. Thus the first part of the verse means ''He sees God in all beings and all beings in God."34 This is in harmony with BhG 6.31, where Krsna* says he abides in all beings. The great Kashmir Saivite* Abhinavagupta (ca. 1000), in his summary on the content of the BhG, understands BhG 6.29 to talk about omniscience. He comments that one should identify the atman with all beings insofar as the atman* (consciousness) enters them as the perceiver (i.e., the subject).35 One should unite all beings within the atman through the knowledge of their being the perceived (i.e., the object).36 The subject and the object are really Siva*. According to the monism of Kashmir Saivism*, ignorance means, on the one hand, the illusory separation of the individual selves from Siva, whereas they really are non-different from him, and, on the other hand, the illusory separation of the world from Siva, whereas the world is really identical with him. These commentators gave different interpretations of BhG 6.29, but in general they saw the verse as having to do with seeing the real identity of the self and its relationship with all other beings. Sankara* saw the self as identical with an impersonal, unchangeable substratum, brahman; Ramanuja* saw the self as similar to the selves of all beings but without their sharing the same self; Madhva saw the selves of all beings as similarly dependent on a personal God; and Abhinavagupta saw both the self and all beings as identical with Siva. The variety in interpretation is great. None of these interpretations follow the meaning this verse has been given by Ecosophy T, but that does not mean that these theologies could not be creatively reinterpreted to support the deep ecology platform.37 Gandhi and Radhakrishnan The monastic tradition of commentary has continued up to this day and will go on into the future. Its focus was liberation from the world. But, possibly due to contact with a socially conscious Christianity, a new interpretation of the BhG arose as a call to remedy the social ills of Hindu society.38 The interest of this new tradition of commentators was in liberation as well as the improvement of the world. These commentators gave new meanings to the concepts of non-injury, self-realization, and unity of all beings. Self-realization and unity of all beings became associated with political activity and social ideals; non-injury (ahimsa*) was no longer only abstaining from injuring other living beings as part of the purification of the individual, but became, under the guidance of Gandhi, a method of nonviolent resistance to promote political
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change. This understanding is radically different from the classical commentators who interpreted the BhG as a science of salvation and for whom "salvation meant realization of the self, or God-realization." 39 For them, "There was no movement of thought from this central theme of individual salvation towards dharma, the social duty of the individual."40 B. G. Tilak was the first Indian writer on the BhG to depart from the traditional pattern.41 For him, as for Gandhi, the text became a political instrument. For Tilak the key of the BhG was the emphasis on the warrior's fighting. For Gandhi, the BhG combined Hindu ascetic and contemplative ideas with a program for political action. While the classical commentaries were interested mainly in moksa*, Gandhi thought moksa was inseparably related to one's social duty (dharma), something one attains through dharma.42 For Gandhi the essence of the BhG was contained in the last eighteen verses of chapter 2 (2.55 2.72). These verses describe the sthitaprajña, the person of stabilized mentality, whom Gandhi calls the satyagrahi.43 He is the person who has control of himself, the disciplined person, the person who remains unmoved, the person who has complete mastery over himself. He has abandoned all desires and is indifferent to sorrow and joy. He has withdrawn his senses from all objects as a tortoise withdraws her limbs. This is the person in perfect mental control. For the BhG, self-control prepares the person for devotion to Krsna*; for Gandhi, self-control is the goal.44 For Gandhi, religion referred not to the worship of God, but to the mental attitude of complete control over the senses, desires, and attachments, a mastery over the body that brings about peace and equanimity.45 Religion, for Gandhi, was about moral action performed with perfect self-control. He did not doubt that self-realization was the subject of the BhG, and that it taught the most excellent way to self-realization.46 Gandhi held that all his "ventures in the political field" were directed toward attaining moksa.47 Political action, not just knowledge and meditation, was now understood as the way to self-realization. For none of the representatives of the monastic tradition was the BhG their primary religious text. Gandhi, however, understood the BhG as the sacred scripture. He wrote: To me the Gita became an infallible guide of conduct. It became my dictionary of daily reference. Just as I turned to the English dictionary for the meanings of English words that I did not understand, I turned to this dictionary of conduct for a ready solution of all my troubles and trials.48 Gandhi learned Sanskrit to read the BhG in the original and memorized the first thirteen chapters, quite an accomplishment. The BhG was, he states, "not only my Bible or my Quran; it is more than thatit is my Mother."49 It was a
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guide for daily behavior as well as a means for religious realization. The BhG was also a direct cause of liberation, because "If with [the Gita verses] on your lips, you receive the final summons and deliver up your spirit, you will attain Brahma-Nirvanathe Final Liberation." 50 According to the interpretation of Gandhi written by his secretary Mahadev Desai, BhG 6.29 illustrates the expansion of the circle of ethics.51 One starts by seeing oneself in his neighbor, then in distant neighbors, then in still more distant humanity, and ends in seeing himself in all, seeing oneself in the other and loving the other.52 "This is the same as seeing other beings in one's Self,"53 and represents "progressive steps in yogic experience."54 It can be compared with the statement on self-realization by Naess: The decrease of egocentricity is inevitably linked to an increase of identification and care for others. Which "others"? One good answer is to draw circles of interest and care, corresponding to stages of development: family, clan, tribe, humanity.55 Gandhi said further, "So long as 'self' subsists, the Supreme Self is absent; when 'self' is extinguished, the Supreme Self is seen everywhere.56 This corresponds to Naess's distinction between ego and Self.57 For Gandhi, one who has realized the Supreme Self is in constant service to others and overcomes all his likes and dislikes, whereas ordinary beings are active for selfish reasons. Here classical Hindu ideas of liberation of the self (moksa*) which belonged to the fourth stage of life, where activity for the sake of preservation of the world (lokasamgraha*) had been abandoned, are reinterpreted and joined with contemporary political ideas.58 Gandhi says in his autobiography that the word samabhava* (equability) gripped him in his first encounter with the BhG. Samabhava is similar to samadarsana* in BhG 6.29. Gandhi's interpretation of this is clear: How to cultivate and preserve that equability was the question. How was one to treat alike insulting, insolent and corrupt officials, co-workers of yesterday raising meaningless opposition, and men who had always been good to one?59 Gandhi combined values from the Hindu tradition of monastic and contemplative life with political activity, and understood the values of the contemplative tradition to be realized in politics. Naess mentions Gandhi among those who in historical times have been preeminent in approaching Self-realization.60 For Naess, Gandhi seems more than anyone else to represent a personification of the Ecosophy T principles of oneness, self-realization, and noninjury. Writes Naess: Gandhi recognized a basic, common right to live and blossom, to self-realization applicable to any being having interests or needs. Gandhi made manifest the internal relation
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between self-realization, non-violence and what is sometimes called biospherical egalitarianism. 61 The first principle in Gandhi's teaching, according to Naess's conceptual reconstruction, is the same as in Ecosophy T: "N1 Seek complete self-realization."62 The ecosophical idea of the development of higher levels of selfrealization as the expansion of the self to include all living beings, so that their well-being is seen as identical with one's own, is expressed by Gandhi regarding BhG 6.29. The belief in self-realization, nonviolent action, and oneness of all living beings is as fundamental to Gandhi as it is to Ecosophy T.63 Another representative of this twentieth-century tradition of interpretation was the Indian statesman and philosopher Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, whose version of Advaita Vedanta* also seems to have some similarity to Naess's ecosophy. Radhakrishnan comments on BhG 6.29: Though, in the process of attaining the vision of Self, we had to retreat from outward things and separate the Self from the world, when the vision is attained the world is drawn into the Self. On the ethical plane, this means that there should grow a detachment from the world and when it is attained, a return to it, through love, suffering and sacrifice for it. The sense of a separate finite self with its hopes and fears, its likes and dislikes is destroyed.64 This can be compared with a statement by Naess: According to the philosophies of oneness, the path goes first inwards only to lead out again to everything. The path of action (karmamarga*) leads an action-yogi (karmayogi) into contact with all creatures.65 This expresses Ecosophy T's recommendation of human restraint in interaction with the natural world, and the aim of identifying with all living beings as our true self. Radhakrishnan's contemporary form of Advaita Vedanta represents a blend of Hinduism and Christianity, and Ecosophy T seems to have a relationship to this form of Vedanta that combines monism and social activism. Ecosophy T It is due to Gandhi and other twentieth-century Hindu interpreters, it seems, that Ecosophy T considers the BhG as representing scriptural authority. Naess refers to BhG 6.29 in Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, "Ecosophy T: Deep Versus Shallow Ecology," and In Sceptical Wonder. The verse is also quoted in full, including the Sanskrit text and various translations.66 Naess does not quote the BhG to recommend the attainment of cessation of the manifestation of the world, nor the worship (bhakti) of Krsna*, but to recommend deep ecological action. In Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, he uses the BhG to illus-
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trate the historically close association with "the ways of non-violence and the philosophies of wholeness and oneness." 67 He also quotes from the commentary by Sankara on BhG 6.32: "When humanity understands that all creatures feel the same joy and pain as ourselves, we will harm no creature."68 This is the principle of empathy, and here the close relationship between similarity and non-injury (ahimsa*) is stressed. Naess goes on to say that the capital S in "Self-realization" "insinuates a philosophy of oneness as does chapter 6, verse 29 of the Gita."69 Thus the verse is connected to the three interdependent terms oneness, non-injury and self-realization. In the article "Ecosophy T: Deep Versus Shallow Ecology," Naess quotes the Sanskrit text of BhG 6.29, and also includes translations by Radhakrishnan, Deutsch, Mascaro, and Gandhi.70 Naess comments: "Self-realization in its absolute maximum is, as I see it, the mature experience of oneness in diversity depicted in the above verse."71 The verse therefore expresses the ultimate as perceived by Ecosophy T. This is in disagreement with the monastic commentators. Ramanuja*, for example, considered the verse to express the lowest of four degrees of Yoga. But there are also other differences. Naess wants to give the atman* a nonreligious meaning. He writes: "In Hinduism there has been a tendency to absolutize this Self in its teaching of atman, but the essential traits of the notion do not imply more than we can formulate in psychology and social science in terms of maturity, and the development of a social self that ultimately comprises the society of all living beings."72 This interpretation is in sharp contrast to the understanding of the BhG in the Hindu monastic tradition and in Hindu philosophy in general. Naess argues that the self-realization described in the BhG should not necessarily be conceived as a mystical or meditational state. He has thus removed his interpretation to a great degree from the Hindu religious context. The verse is freed from any connection to Hindu metaphysics and comes closer to the modern political idea of empathy and solidarity with all humans, though it is expanded to include all nonhuman living beings as well. Naess also refers to BhG 6.29 in his comments in In Sceptical Wonder and repeats that three expressions play a fundamental role in his ethical views: self-realization, solidarity with all living beings, and non-violence. He continues: "Strengthening solidarity and non-violence depends upon strengthening and widening the process of identification."73 This process of identification is the ability to "see the greater Self everywhere."74 This language has Advaita Vedanta and Hindu affinities, but the meaning is different. Naess does not mean that we should see the single unchangeable substratum (atman-brahman) everywhere. Naess has removed himself from Hindu religious metaphysics.
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In Advaita Vedanta the realization of the identity of atman * and brahman is the supreme salvific experience to be attained by meditation. But according to deep ecology, it seems, self-realization (moksa*), oneness (advaita) and non-injury (ahimsa*) express a theoretical position that accepts pluralism and is combined with political action for the sake of the preservation of the world (lokasamgraha*). In Naess's Ecosophy T, the use of Sanskrit words (atman, jiva*, advaita, svamarga, karmamarga*, karmayogi, ahimsa) and words common in Hindu texts in English, but reinterpreted (self, self-realization, non-violence) and in Hindu sacred texts (BhG, Sankara's commentary on BhG) represent the heritage from Gandhi. Even if Naess has removed the self to be realized from the classical Hindu religious context, but is still inspired by representatives of twentieth-century Hinduism such as Radhakrishnan and Gandhi, the question remains whether the self-realization of Ecosophy T implies a religious experience. For Gandhi political action was both a method to improve the world and a method for attaining brahma-nirvana* Gandhi wrote: What I want to achievewhat I have been striving and pining to achieve these thirty yearsis self-realization, to see God face to face, to attain Moksha. I live and have my being in pursuit of that goal.75 That self-realization in Ecosophy T is related to the experience of oneness which has many similarities to religious experience, seems to be suggested by the following: But if you hear a phrase like, "All life is fundamentally one," you should be open to tasting this, before asking immediately, "What does this mean?" There is a kind of deep yes to nature that is central to my philosophy.76 People ask me, "What's the Maximum of Self-realization?" and I then offer them some kind of mystical sentence, a mystic's unity with the whole, but it doesn't appeal to me to try to find out what I mean by that. Or, I say that ultimately or fundamentally, all living beings are one, but what could the full consequences of this be? But I stick to such a formulation. There's something there that disappears if you try to be more precise. Something elusive . . . .77 The S [in Self-realization] insinuates that if the widening and deepening of the self goes on ad infinitum the selves will realize themselves by realizing the same, whatever that is.78 The elusiveness of the experience of oneness accords with the heritage from Gandhi, Radhakrishnan, and Hindu mysticism. Self-realization, according to Hindu religious thought, is a religious experience that transcends language and thought, and can be properly described only by remaining silent. Ecosophy T attempts to combine reinterpretations of the mysticism of Advaita Vedanta (Sankara's non-dualism of one self shared by all, reinterpreted by rep-
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resentatives of twentieth-century Hinduism such as Gandhi and Radhakrishnan), reinterpretations of Indian asceticism (the political activist asceticism of Gandhi), and the belief in the natural world as the ultimate concern. 79 The meaning given to the Hindu concepts discussed, insofar as they are recognizable as Hindu, is to a large degree Gandhian.80 The concepts of non-injury, non-duality, and self-realization are used in Gandhian ways, and there is no interest in giving a historical, authentic interpretation of the meaning the concepts had in classical Indian philosophy. Ecosophy T is indifferent to Advaita Vedanta or other Hindu dogmatics, but the realization that all beings share the same self and the ethics of non-injury as the natural consequence of this realization are a source for deep ecological reflection. Self-realization is accepted as the ultimate goal, but something totally different is meant by self-realization than in classical Advaita Vedanta*, the system of Hindu religious thought that has been associated with Ecosophy T. The unity of all does not mean that all beings share the same self. Naess states: "At any level of realization of potentials, the individual egos remain separate."81 The notion of selfrealization functions more as a critique of egoism and speciesism.82 The Hindu ideas of oneness of all beings, non-injury, and self-realization have contributed to ecosophy and, according to Ecosophy T, these three ideas are expressed in BhG 6.29. Aspects of Hindu religion as reinterpreted by some representatives of twentieth-century Hinduism, such as Radhakrishnan and Gandhi, have been applied to a new problem: how to convince humans that nonhuman life has the right to flourish to its full potential on this planet and, in addition, that this flourishing of nonhuman life is part of the self-realization of humans. A comparison of the Hindu monastic interpretation with the political-environmental interpretation of BhG 6.29 has shown that the political-environmental interpretation in many ways is the opposite of the monastic. Self-realization (moksa*) for the Hindu monastic tradition meant freedom from samsara*, whereas for the environmental interpretation, self-realization meant merging oneself with samsara and the preservation of samsara. In the experience of oneness, plurality disappears, according to some monastic traditions, whereas for the environmentalists self-realization means the realization of the non-difference of oneself and the processes of the natural world, without sacrificing plurality. The experience of self-realization in the monastic tradition has freedom from rebirth in the world as its consequence, whereas for environmentalism the consequence is political activity in the world.83 In environmentalism, preservation of samsara, and not liberation from it, has become the ultimate goal. The preservation of samsara is seen as identical to the realization of oneself.
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Whereas in the monastic tradition self-realization meant ultimately to be free from the biological cycle of life and death, in environmentalism self-realization means flourishing of biological life. Environmentalism values samsara * as ultimate reality, not a changeless substratum. Self-realization is nothing else than samsara, and the realization of samsara (i.e., to identify oneself fully with the natural processes) is moksa. The context is not liberation of the self from samsara but the liberation of the natural world from the suffering caused by human beings ignorant of the true identity of the self. The unity of all beings does not mean that all beings share the same self, as in Advaita Vedanta, nor the oneness of humanity, as is often stated in political interpretations, but organic wholeness, interdependence, the experience of sharing the joy and suffering of all living beings, looking at their self-realization as one's own. The definition chosen by Ecosophy T for living beings is the Hindu definition: beings capable of self-realization (i.e., those sharing or possessing an atman* or purusa*).84 According to the Hindu idea of karman, all living beings are bound together in a moral cause-effect relationship. Not only human acts toward other humans but also human acts toward all living beings are ruled by ethics. In addition, all living beings, and not only humans, possess a self that can be realized, and the realization of the self is identical with liberation. Non-injury concerns the treatment not only of humans but of all living beings. It is an axiom in Hinduism that ethics and soteriology concern all living beings and not only humans. This is an important contribution of the Hindu religious traditions to the contemporary reinterpretation of the relationship of human beings to nature. Notes The author thanks David Rothenberg for valuable suggestions. 1. Deep ecology is distinguished from ecosophy. The program of deep ecology is formulated in the platform of eight points first set forth by Naess and Sessions in 1984. The rejection of one or more of these points would make a person a nonsupporter of deep ecology. These eight points express the agreement of a social movement. The first point says that "The well-being and flourishing of human and non-human Life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the non-human world for human purposes." Underlying these eight points "there are still more basic positions and norms which reside in philosophical systems and in various world religions." Arne Naess, "The Deep Ecology Movement: Some Philosophical Aspects," Philosophical Inquiry 8 (1986): 23. The deep ecology platform can be supported by persons with different ecosophies or "total views inspired in part by reactions to the ecological crisis." Arne Naess, ''The Deep Ecology 'Eight Points' Revisited," in Deep Ecology for the 21st Century, edited by George Sessions (Boston: Shambhala, 1995), p. 215. Naess's ecosophy is Ecosophy T.
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2. Arne Naess, "The Deep Ecology Movement: Some Philosophical Aspects," pp. 25 26. Naess writes: "The deep movement connects rationality with a set of philosophical and religious foundations. Those engaged in the deep movement have so far revealed their philosophical or religious homes mainly to be in Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, or philosophy. The top level of the derivational pyramid [Level 1: Ultimate premises] can therefore be made up of normative and descriptive principles which belong to forms of Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, and various philosophical creeds." The reprint of the article, in Sessions, Deep Ecology for the 21st Century, pp. 64 84, contains several changes. In this article Baha'i is added among the religions. In the original article Naess refers to the distinction between individual selves and the comprehensive Self that is so fundamental to his ecosophy, calling the individual selves jiva *-s and the comprehensive Self atman*. Jiva and atman are Sanskrit words, and the distinction referred to is a doctrine of Hinduism. But Naess perhaps does not want the reader to associate it with Hinduism, and instead of giving Hinduism as the source, refers to "certain Eastern traditions" (p. 28). To further remove it from its origin in Hinduism, he says in the footnote that this atman is in fact consistent with the Buddhist anatman* (not-self) doctrine because the atman in his ecosophy is not "a permanent indestructible soul" (p. 31). Bill Devall and George Sessions, ''Deep Ecology," in Environmental Ethics, edited by Louis P. Pojman (Boston: Jones and Barlett, 1994), p. 113, link deep ecology to "Christianity, Taoism, Buddhism and Native American rituals" but do not mention Hinduism. 3. Warwick Fox, Toward a Transpersonal Ecology: Developing New Foundations for Environmentalism (Boston: Shambhala, 1990), pp. 107 114. 4. J. Baird Callicott has argued that Naess "was inspired by the Vedantic doctrine of non-duality to make cultivation of the experience of oneness with nature the core practice of Deep Ecology." J. Baird Callicott, "International Environmental Ethics," in Environmental Ethics: Discourses, and Cultural Traditions, A Festschrift to Arne Naess, edited by Rana B. Singh (Varanasi: National Geographical Society of India, 1993), p. 30. Naess has argued convincingly that the experience of oneness is not implied in accepting the eight principles of deep ecology but belongs to ecosophy. "The Deep Ecology 'Eight Points' Revisited," p. 215. See also Fox, Toward a Transpersonal Ecology, p. 111. 5 J. L. Brockington, The Sacred Thread: Hinduism in its Continuity and Diversity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), p. 56, writes: "To Vaisnavas* and indeed to most Hindus the BhG is their main religious text and the real source of many of their beliefs." 6. Klostermaier has noted that Gandhi, after reading Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God Is Within You, adopted Tostoy's way of interpreting the Bible and thereafter considered Tolstoy his guru. He notes that Gandhi's other key book was John Ruskin's Unto This Last. This book taught Gandhi that the well-being of the individual was contained in the well-being of all. See Klaus K. Klostermaier, A Survey of Hinduism, 2nd ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 450 451. 7. Arne Naess, Ecology Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy, translated and edited by David Rothenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 194. For a good translation of BhG, see The Bhagavad Gita* translated and interpreted by Franklin Edgerton (repr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975).
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8. The Mahabharata * edited by Vishnu S. Suktanker et al., 19 vols. (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1993 1959), 6.28.29 (volume 6, chapter 28, verse 29) 9. My translation. Naess, in Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, reproduces the translation of Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, although no reference to this translation is found: "He whose self is harmonised by yoga seeth the Self abiding in all beings and all beings in the Self." The last words of the verse in Radhakrishnan's translation, "everywhere he sees the same," are absent. The Bhagavadgita* translated by Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1958), p. 204. 10. David Kinsley, Ecology and Religion: Ecological Spirituality in Cross-Cultural Perspective (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995), p. 187, writes that the principle of self-realization "for Naess is not something new. For him, the view is expressed quite clearly in the Bhagavada-gita." 11. See Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, pp. 196 210, which gives a model of a system logically derived from Self-realization. The most basic norms are Nl: Self-realization!; N2: Self-realization for all living beings!; H1: The higher the Self-realization attained by anyone, the broader and deeper the identification with others. See also pp. 85 86. 12. The implication for environmental ethics is that "through broader identification, [humans] may come to see their own interest served by environmental protection, through genuine self-love, love of a widened and deepened self." Arne Naess, "Self Realization: An Ecological Approach to Being in the World," in Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings, John Seed, Joanna Macy, Pat Fleming, and Arne Naess (Philadelphia: New Society, 1988), p. 24. 13. Lance E. Nelson, "Reverence for Nature or the Irrelevance of Nature? Advaita Vedanta* and Ecological Concern," Journal of Dharma 16 (1991): 285. 14. Ibid., p. 297. 15. Surendranath Dasgupta, A History of Indian Philosophy, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922 reprint Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1988), p. 439. 16. Ibid., p. 440. 17. Ibid. 18. The Bhagavad-gita* with Eleven Commentaries, edited by Shastri Gajanana Shambhu Sadhale, 3 vols. (Dehli: Parimal Publications, 1985), p. 565. Living beings are usually divided into eight types of divinities, humans, and five types of animals, plants, etc. 19. Karl H. Potter writes that "the consciousness that is Brahman is not a relational consciousness between knower and known. The closest approximation in our experience to pure consciousness occurs in deep sleep, which according to Advaita is a state of consciousnes without any objects. Potter, "Advaita Vedanta up to Samkara* and His Pupils," Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophy, vol. 3, edited by Karl H. Potter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 76. 20. yadi va* yac ca duhkham* mama pratikulam* anistam* yatha* tatha* sarvapraninam* duhkham* anistam* pratikulam ity evam atmaupamyena* sukhaduhkhe* anukulapratikule* tulyataya* sarvabhutesu* samam* pasyati* na kasyacit pratikulam acarati*, ahimsaka*
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ityarthah *. ya evam ahimsakah* samyagdarsananisthah* sa yogi* parama utkrsto* mato 'bhipretah*. sarvayoginam* madhye. 21. idanim* yogasya yat phalam brahmaikatva-darsanam* sarva-samsara*-viccheda-karanam* tat pradarsyate*. 22. Eliot Deutsch, "A Metaphysical Grounding for Natural Reverence: East-West," in Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought: Essays in Environmental Philosophy, edited by J. Baird Callicott and Roger T. Ames (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), pp. 259 265. 23. Ibid., p. 265. 24. Ibid., p. 264. 25. David Rothenberg, Is It Painful to Think? Conversations with Arne Naess (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 187. 26. Fox, Toward a Transpersonal Ecology, p. 111. 27. Quoted from ibid., p. 113. 28. Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, p. 195. 29. J.A. B. van Buitenen, Ramanuja* on the Bhagavadgita*: A Condensed Rendering of his Gitabhasya* with Copious Notes and an Introduction, 2nd ed. (1968; repr. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1974), p. 95. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. Arvind Sharma, The Hindu Gita*: Ancient and Classical Interpretations of the Bhagavadgita (London: Duckworth 1986), p. 226 35. Abhinavagupta, Gitarthasangraha* translated by Arvind Sharma (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1983), p. 149. 36. Ibid. 37. See, for example, Klaus K. Klostermaier, "Bhakti, Ahimsa and Ecology," Journal of Dharma 16 (1991): 246 254. Klostermaier notes that there is one theological feature of Vaisnavism* "which is central to its entire doctrinal tradition and which could well become the cornerstone of a contemporary 'Eco-Theology'. It is the famous sarira-sariri* bhava* articulated by Ramanuja as an article of faith" (p. 251). This is the doctrine of the word as God's body. But Klostermaier notes that "One has not particularly noticed Vaisnavas speaking up against the progressive ecological degradation of India through industrial and other abuses of the country" (p. 253). 38. Klostermaier, A Survey of Hinduism, p. 182. 39. P. M. Thomas, 20th Century Indian Interpretations of Bhagvadgita: Tilak, Gandhi and Aurobindo (Delhi: I.S.P.C.K., 1987), p. 20. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid.
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42. Ibid., p. 32. 43. "The last eighteen verses of the Second Chapter of the Gita give in a nutshell the secret of the art of living. It is given there in the form of a description of a Sthitaprajna or the man of steady wisdom i.e., a satyagrahi . . . . The ideal of the Sthitaprajna (man whose understanding is secure) as described in the Second Chapter of the Gita is always before me and I am ceaseless in my efforts to reach that ideal." M. K. Gandhi, The Teaching of the Gita, edited by Anand T. Hingorani (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1962), p. 98. 44. J. T. F. Jordens, "Gandhi and the Bhagavadgita," in Modern Indian Interpreters of the Bhagavadgita, edited by Robert N. Minor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), p. 100. 45. Ibid. 46. Thomas, 20th Century Indian Interpretations of Bhagavadgita, p. 32. 47. See Arne Naess, Gandhi and Group Conflict: An Exploration of Satyagraha (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1974), pp. 34 37. 48. Mohandas K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, translated by Mahadev Desai (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), p. 265. 49. Ibid., p. 45. 50. Gandhi, The Teaching of the Gita, p. 48. 51. Mahadev Desai, The Gospel of Selfless Action or The Gita According to Gandhi (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1946), pp. 234 235. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, p. 198. 56. Desai, The Gospel of Selfless Action, p. 235. 57 Naess, "Self Realization: An Ecological Approach to Being in the World," p. 25, contrasts atman * with another Sanskrit term, jiva* Naess understands jiva to be the "narrow" self of egocentric interest and narrow ego gratification, and atman to be the universal Self: "Through the wider Self every living being is connected intimately, and from this intimacy follows the capacity of identification and as its natural consequences, the practice of non-violence" (ibid.). Jiva* in Advaita Vedanta* has a metaphysical meaning. It refers to the atman, the self shared by all, when it is embodied. It refers to a self who has not realized its identity with brahman and is metaphysically ignorant. 58. In classical Hinduism, the liberated person can be trusted as a guru (teacher) to give unselfish advice and guidance for the liberation of others, but his activity is not aimed at world maintenance. 59. Gandhi, Autobiography, p. 265. 60. Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, p. 196. 61. Naess, "Self Realization: An Ecological Approach to Being in the World," p. 26. 62. Naess, Gandhi and Group Conflict, p. 54.
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63. See ibid., pp. 23 56. 64. The Bhagavadgita * translated by Radhakrishnan, p. 204. 65. Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, p. 194. 66. Naess also quotes BhG 13.24: "By meditation some perceive the self in the self by the self; others by the discipline of knowledge, and others by the discipline of action." 67. Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, p. 194. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid., p. 195. 70. Naess, "Ecosophy T," pp. 105 112. 71. Ibid. 72. In Ingemund Gulvåg and Jon Wetlesen, eds., Sceptical Wonder: Inquiries into the Philosophy of Arne Naess on the Occasion of His 70th Birthday (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1982), p. 284. 73. Ibid., p. 262. 74. Ibid. 75. Quoted in Naess, Gandhi and Group Conflict, p. 35. 76. Rothenberg, Is It Painful to Think? p. 151. 77. Ibid., p. 187. 78. Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, p. 195. 79. I am here concerned only with the Hindu influences on deep ecology. 80. A comparison of the use of the concepts of non-injury (ahimsa*) unity (advaita) and self-realization (moksa*) in Ecosophy T with environmental thought in contemporary India would perhaps show a similarity especially to the Gandhian environmental movement. While deep ecology has been criticized by some Indians, some Gandhian environmentalists share its views. For a critique, see Ramachandra Guha, "Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique," Environmental Ethics 11 (Spring 1989): 71 83; and for a critique of Guha, David M. Jones, "The Relevance of Deep Ecology to the Third World: Some Preliminary Comments," Environmental Ethics 12 (1990): 233 252; and Arne Naess, "The Third World, Wilderness, and Deep Ecology," in Deep Ecology for the 21st Century, edited by George Sessions (Boston: Shambhala, 1995), pp. 397 407. The most celebrated Indian environmental movement, the Chipko movement, was shaped in part by two of Gandhi's best-known Western disciples, Mirabehn (Madeline Slade) and Sarala Devi (Catherine Mary Heilman), who both made great contributions to the creation of environmental awareness about the destruction of the hills of the Indian Himalayas. See Thomas Weber, Hugging the Trees: The Story of the Chipko Movement (Delhi: Viking, 1988), pp. 24, 80. The leadership of Chipko came from Gandhian sarvodaya workers. That the Chipko's method was an adaptation of Gandhi's satyagraha (nonviolent resistance) also shows the strong link with the Gandhian tradition. One aim of the movement is harmony with the natural world, which they see as the Gandhian ideal and which is comparable to the goal of deep ecology. When describing the nonviolent method of the
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Chipko, Weber summarizes the description by Naess in Gandhi and the Nuclear Age, pp. 60 62. 81. Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, p. 195. 82. Naess writes: "To cherish some of the ecosophic attitudes convincingly demonstrated by people from the East does not imply the doctrinal acceptance of any past definite philosophy or religion conventionally classified as Eastern. Heavy influence does not imply conformity with any beliefs: the history of ideas and contemporary philosophizing are different subjects. "The Third World, Wilderness, and Deep Ecology," p. 400. 83. The sixth and eighth points of the deep ecology platform say: "(6) Policies must therefore be changed. These policies affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures. The resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from the present. (8) Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation directly or indirectly to try to implement the necessary changes." Naess, "The Deep Ecological Movement: Some Philosophical Aspects," p. 14. 84. Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, p. 199.
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13 A State of Mind like Water: Ecosophy T and the Buddhist Traditions Deane Curtin When the Buddha's followers pressed him for answers to abstract, theoretical questions, he refused to answer. To speculate about mere theories when there is suffering in the world, he said, is like speculating about the origin of a poison arrow while it is still lodged in one's flesh. First remove the arrow! Questions about origins can come later. This story is typical of many in the early Buddhist writings that depict the Buddha's teachings as rigorously phenomenological, constantly returning his students' attention to the concrete reality of suffering. The Buddha was not concerned about "the environment" in the contemporary sense. Nevertheless, in the same phenomenological vein, he once counseled his son, On the earth men throw clean and unclean things, dung and urine, spittle, pus, and blood, and the earth is not repelled or disgusted. . . . Similarly you should develop a state of mind like water, for men throw all manner of clean and unclean things into water and it is not troubled or repelled or disgusted. 1 Abuse of the Earth reflects our own suffering; suffering issues from ignorance of our true nature. A Buddhist ecophilosophy, then, must begin with a rigorous phenomenology of self. Arne Naess has come under many influences. Somemost notably Gandhi and Spinozaare more pervasive in Naess's work than the influence of Buddhism. Gandhi's commitment to ahimsa* for example, has influenced Naess's political philosophy of non-violence. Yet the Gandhian influence does little to explain key deep ecological concepts such as Self-realization. Gandhi's "Self," the Hindu Atman*, is explicitly rejected by Naess in favor of a Buddhist conception of no-self.2 Similarly, while Spinoza's influence is profound, it is the Spinoza of Paul Wienpahl's The Radical Spinoza, a Spinoza of Becoming rather than of Being.3 Wienpahl's Spinoza finds its true nature in the Zen monastery. The Buddhist influence, though less pervasive, provides the most direct account of key deep ecological concepts such as Self-realization and intrinsic
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value. I read Ecosophy T as a rigorously phenomenological branch of deep ecology. Like early Buddhism, Naess is constantly responding to the human suffering that causes environmental destruction by challenging us to return to the reality of lived experience. This is a response not only to suffering but also, at a deeper level, to "the suspicion of reason." Like certain strains of Mahayana * Buddhism, Naess believes that reason can become opaque to itself and mischievously lead us away from direct experience of the real, relational processes he calls "gestalts." He rejects "any kind of established system of thought" and counsels, ''in every moment you must choose your life, again and again. 'To hell with everything'start anew, as if this moment were your first and last." When he explains what goes wrong with the bureaucrat's (shallow) thinking about the environment, he says, "all his education is to forget about spontaneous experience! . . . The language they use is what I don't like. It is a quantitative language, which does not go into the particulars, such as the heart of the forest."4 This Buddhist reading clarifies, but it also complicates. It reaffirms Naess's essential vision, but it challenges him at two points to push further. It challenges him to affirm that Self-realization is a process of corealization with all beings, not just with sentient beings. Naess appears to stop short of this affirmation, and thus opens himself up to the charge of dualism. Second, while this reading accepts that humans do not create the value of nature, it questions whether nature's value is best expressed in terms of the "intrinsic value" of radical environmental ethicists. The distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic value is, in Naess's terms, an entia rationis, a falsifying mental construction that conceals the immediate value of all beings which is revealed in authentic experience. My interpretation depends on drawing out connections between a 1985 unpublished manuscript, "Gestalt Thinking and Buddhism," and Naess's published works. "Gestalt Thinking . . ." constitutes Naess's most sustained attempt to articulate the connections between deep ecology and the Buddhist traditions, and it has significantly altered my earlier understanding of his work as found in "Dogen*, Deep Ecology, and the Ecological Self."5 I focus very selectively on three aspects of the Buddhist traditions that seem to influence him the most: the oldest Buddhist texts, found in the Pali Canon; the great Indian Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna* (ca. 150 250), and the SotoZen* monk Dogen (1200 1253). Naess explicitly traces his understanding of Self-realization to Dogen, and Dogen, in turn, traces his lineage to Nagarjuna and the Pali texts. The Suspicion of Reason "Gestalt Thinking . . ." begins, "In the oldest forms of Buddhism monks were reluctant to answer metaphysical questions. And if answers were offered, they
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were expressed undogmatically. 'Take it or leave it.' Even if true, a philosophical opinion might be of meager help, or even a hindrance on the eightfold path." 6 One reason for the meager help one might expect from philosophy in the process of Self-realization has to do with the Buddhist account of suffering. We have already seen that ancient Buddhist texts report that the Buddha himself refused to answer metaphysical questions, comparing such talk in the face of suffering to the person who just talks after being struck by a poisoned arrow. Suffering calls for action, not armchair philosophy. This attitude toward philosophical opinion gives an existential urgency to Naess's thought, and pushes him toward the need for deeper ecological thinking. Still, we must ask, What is deeper thinking in Ecosophy T? Beyond the well-known, very general platforms that distinguish the shallow from the deep, Naess's personal branch of ecosophy is distinguished by its "suspicion of reason." Reason, precision, have their place in Naess's thinking, as in Buddhism, yet reason can obscure and distort the reality of immediate experience. This is delusion, not clarity; it produces the suffering that degrades our relations with human beings and the environment. Since his early experience with the Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle, Naess has been concerned with precision in thinking. This concern still exists in his work, but it stands alongside the suspicion of reason. He says, "there may be important things that are very difficult to make more precise. . . . If you leave out nonprecise things, you are lost in accuracy. One must go back and forth, from precision to ambiguity."7 To say "Nature is one," for example, is not precise. It is an entia rationis. But it is a highly useful distortion if it points people to the spontaneous gestalt experience of connection in nature. Even "Self-realization" is dangerous if it becomes an abstraction that does not constantly return us to the "concrete contents" of experience. In "Gestalt Thinking . . . ," Naess draws on a connection between what he calls "gestalt ontology" and a Buddhist account of experience. "Reason," he says, "works out abstract constructions" to facilitate its work: When permanence, eternal being, are asserted of substance, as in Descartes and Spinoza, these entities are considered to be entia rationis by gestalt ontology.8 They are, at most, helpful fictions. Helpful, but dangerous: If we forget they are fictions, we become deluded about ourselves and our place in the world. In contrast to these fictions of reason, Naess speaks of "concrete reality" as having a "gestalt character, that is to say, no part and no wholes but subordinate and superordinate gestalts."9 Gestalts are concrete, relational processes. Naess insists that he is speaking of ontology here, the way the world is, not simply of psychology. When we rigorously examine the gestalt we commonly call "self," we find not the substance of Descartes and Spinoza but "no (permanent)
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Self." "Selves are frequently recurring items, or knots, in the structure of contents." 10 Reason is inevitable, perhaps, but we go wrong when we fail to note that its entities are merely constructions invented to do a particular job. We can be seduced by reason, never directly experiencing the world as it really is, the world in its concreteness. Reason, when we do not suspect its efficacy, obscures reality. The realized Self that exists in concrete, relational processes is transformed and distorted by reason into the permanent, nonrelational self of Western philosophy and the Christian religion. When asked why this form of self-delusion is so common, Naess resorts to talk about spontaneity. Shallow ecological thinkers, he says, "forget about spontaneous experience!"11 Their education actually trains them to be so caught up in entia rationisnumbers, charts, development plansthat they treat those as reality and fail to experience their true selves spontaneously. Naess finds a similar striving for, and suspicion of, clarity in certain Zen Buddhist traditions. Granted, one often fails to find this emphasis on clarity in many writings on Zen that are popular in the West. D. T. Suzuki, for example, characterized Zen as a form of anti-intellectualism so totally grounded in Japanese culture that it is incomprehensible outside that narrow context.12 Suzuki wrote almost exclusively about Rinzai Zen, however, neglecting the Soto* Zen of Dogen. It is this strain of Zen that has been the greatest influence on Naess. Dogen*, in turn, looked to the Indian philosopher Nagarjuna* for arguments against the ability of discursive reason to express the process of self-realization. Naess's account of reason going "back and forth, from precision to ambiguity" bears a strong resemblance to Nagarjuna's* thought. While the Buddha himself espoused a rigorously practical and empirical account of experience, following his death a variety of metaphysical schools arose that debated precisely the metaphysical questions the Buddha had refused to answer. Against these competing schools, Nagarjuna intervened to develop his Logic of the Middle, based on the idea of emptiness, or thusness, to show that these debates were vacuous. Nagarjuna found a way to dispense with competing metaphysical arguments by showing that both sides reduce to absurdity. Where the competing schools try to show that their conception of time or causality is absolute, for example, Nagarjuna showed that, far from dispensing with the competing school, each uses terms that presuppose the other's. In the words of T. R. V. Murti, "Relation has to perform two mutually opposed functions: as connecting the two terms, in making them relevant to each other, it has to identify them: but as connecting the two, it has to differentiate them. Otherwise expressed, relation
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cannot obtain between entities that are identical with or different from each other." 13 So reason goes wrong, for example, in asserting either that the effect is contained in the cause, or that it is not contained in the cause. Put concretely, any distinction highlights only one aspect of a situation and shrouds the other, incompatible, aspect. Nagarjuna's* conclusion is that we may use reason, but we must suspect its ultimate efficacy.14 The effect of Nagarjuna's arguments, like those of the historical Buddha, is to drive us back to experience and away from what Naess terms entia rationis. What we find here, again in Naess's terms, is the process of Self-realization among gestalts; in Buddhist terms we find "emptiness" or "thusness." Naess has struggled to express the sense of self-in-relation that is both deeply connected to other beings and yet distinct. Time and again he rejects a substantial self in favor of the Buddhist "no-self," but he then warns, "Such a formula must not be taken in the counter-intuitive sense that, for instance, I cannot be cold and hungry and somebody else warm and satisfied."15 Neither the formula that there is self, nor the formula that there is no self is precise. Like Nagarjuna*, Naess proposes to find a path through this intellectual thicket, not by further argument and clarification but by driving us back to immediate, spontaneous experience. Following from Murti's characterization of Nagarjuna's position, we can see that the ambiguity we sometimes find in Naess's writings is not something which can be overcome with greater analytic precision. Whether we stress, in some contexts, the connectedness of beings or, in other contexts, the distinctness of beings, we need to cultivate the suspicion of reason which reminds us that both depictions are merely tools to "facilitate [reason's] work." Like the Buddhist phenomenological tradition that runs from the earliest Buddhist writings, through Nagarjuna, to Dogen*, I suggest that Naess's invitation to develop an ecosophy of our own can be seen as a recognition of the ultimate futility of stating any deep position in absolute terms. Some truths are available only through direct experience. The distinction Naess makes between his own version of deep ecological philosophy, Ecosophy T, and the other branches of deep ecology he invites others to develop, is not simply an astute political move designed to make a political movement inclusive. We must all develop our own ecosophical visions because there is no choice. The suspicion of reason means we cannot do each other's work. Directions for the Heart of the Forest So far, Naess's thought coincides perfectly with Nagarjuna and the Soto Zen tradition. When we push further with Dogen, however, this coincidence is not
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so clear. The challenge Dogen * issued to his own Buddhist tradition to move toward a more radical non-dualism may also be seen as a challenge to Naess. Self-realization, we have seen, is a process that can only be hinted at in various ways. Yet this does not prevent some hints from being more revealing of experiential truths than others. Dogen's writings are pervaded with elliptical references to the reality and phenomenological clarity of direct experience. Perhaps the most important source for these references is one of the fascicles of his masterpiece, the Shobogenzo* titled Bussho* (Buddhanature). Dogen's* strategy here is to begin with classical formulations of Buddha-nature that were well known to his audience,16 then to twist and transform meanings to suit his own unique purposes. As Norman Waddell and Abe Masao note, Dogen often sacrifices grammatical correctness in his translations from Chinese to Japanese for the illumination of an original philosophical point.17 He begins by quoting from the Nirvana Sutra, the principal Mahayana* sutra on Buddha-nature. The passage, in a traditional translation, reads, "All sentient beings without exception have the Buddha-nature." By quoting the sutra, he acknowledges tradition. However, he also knew that this formulation is open to the charge of dualism. Saying that all sentient beings have Buddha-nature distinguishes Buddha-nature from the beings that have it, treating it as a potential quality of sentient beings. To remove these hints of dualism, Dogen twists the expression "All sentient beings without exception have the Buddha-nature" to read "All sentient beings without exception are Buddha-nature."18 Buddha-nature, for Dogen, is not a quality that sentient beings can have (or lack); rather, all sentient beings are Buddha-nature. Buddha-nature is fundamental reality. Dogen's single-minded commitment to non-dualism caused him to severely criticize its misuse in other Buddhist writings. Buddhist tradition, for example, often restricted Buddha-nature to those beings that have the potential for enlightenment, either in this life (humans) or in a future life (other sentient beings that can be reborn as human beings). Nonsentient entitiesrivers and mountainsare excluded.19 But Dogen refused to accept the sentient/nonsentient distinction as fundamental. He says emphatically: Impermanence is in itself Buddha-nature. . . . Therefore, the very impermanency of grass and tree, thicket and forest, is the Buddha-nature. Nations and lands, mountains and rivers, are impermanent because they are Buddha-nature. Supreme and complete enlightenment, because it is the Buddha-nature, is impermanent. Great Nirvana, because it is impermanent, is the Buddha-nature.20 Dogen was both radical and traditional in his treatment of Buddha-nature. To be nondualist, he believed, Buddhist philosophy must commit to the funda-
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mental reality of all beings as Buddha-nature, not just sentient beings. This is explained, however, by reference to the most traditional of Buddhist commitments: impermanence. In "Gestalt Thinking . . ." Naess depends heavily on Dogen's * allusive writing to indicate what he means by "transcending the subject/object dualism" in the process of Self-realization. Naess's thought mostly coincides with Dogen's, but in one respect Dogen* appears to go beyond Naess. The question is: Should we challenge Naess to take Dogen's final step? Naess begins with a version of the passage just quoted from Dogen: "Grass, tree, nations and lands, all without exception attain Buddhahood." All nature is concrete, relational processes, or gestalts, for Naess.21 In turn, the recognition of Buddha-nature in all beings allows us to experience compassion for (identify with) these beings. So far, Naess agrees with Dogen. But he goes on to raise doubts about how far the idea of Buddha-nature can extend: "There is a question of how wide a range of beings may be said meaningfully to realize themselves. Animals: Yes. Plants: Yes. But a wider range dilutes further the very concept of realization and Self. There is a limit here."22 Naess seems to believe there is no problem in saying that Self-realization is a process of corealization with all living beings. But he appears to question whether nonliving beings corealize. The dilemma is clear: To extend corealization beyond living beings is to risk nonsense; not to do so introduces dualism, the distinction between beings we can identify with and have compassion for, and those that are beyond the "limit." Dogen challenges us to take this final step toward non-dualism. For Dogen, the self goes out to realize with what he calls "the myriad things." But the myriad things also come forth to realize us. Dogen points toward corealization with all things. This is what Abe Masao has called Dogen's "dehomocentric reversal": We are realized by the mountain's "walking." The relations through which realization occurs move both ways, not only, as Naess often describes it, in circles of expanding identification starting with the self and moving out to other sentient beings. This is Abe's brilliant point, and the core of Dogen's significance for environmental philosophy: We will never be released from our suffering as long as we search within the circle of human suffering alone; we must be released into the dimension of the "coming and going" of all living beings. Yet suffering does not end in identification with all living beings. We must be released, finally, into the dimension of "appearance-disappearance, common to all things." Abe says, When Dogen emphasizes "all beings" in connection with the Buddha-nature, he definitely implies that man's samsara, i.e., recurring cycle of birth and death, can be properly
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and completely emancipated not in the "living" dimension, but in the "being" dimension. In other words, it is not by overcoming generation-extinction common to all living beings, but only by doing away with appearance-disappearance, common to all things, that man's birth-death problem can be completely solved. Dogen finds the basis for man's liberation in a thoroughly cosmological dimension. Here Dogen reveals a most radical Buddhist dehomocentrism. 23 We fail to understand life and death, the fundamental human problem, if we deal with it only in human terms. The life-and-death of human beings is subsumed by the generation-and-extinction (impermanence) of all sentient beings. We fail again if we attempt to eradicate suffering at the level of all sentient beings. The generation-andextinction of all sentient beings is subsumed, in turn, by what Abe calls the "appearance-and-disappearance" of all beings. There will be no release from human suffering, that is, until human beings experience themselves in the "cosmological dimension" of all beings, until they understand that "mountain's walking is just like human walking." As Dogen* says in his great work, "Mountains and Waters Sutra," ''If you doubt the mountains' walking, you do not know your own walking; it is not that you do not walk, but that you do not know or understand your own walking. "24 Abe contends, and I agree, that to say "there is a limit here" beyond which corealization cannot go, is to stop at the level of the generation-extinction of all living beings.25 In failing to push further to the "appearancedisappearance" of all things, Naess is committing to the kind of dualism that Dogen challenged in the Buddhist tradition. It is to remain in the "living" dimension without hope of release from suffering rather than to push forth to the cosmological dimension. Put in contemporary terms, this position remains close to the sphere of an animal rights position, like Peter Singer's, according to which only sentient beings have moral standing, refusing to push toward a radical environmental ontology that goes all the way down to the ontological "roots" in the appearance and disappearance of all beings.26 As Abe points out, the third level of corealization is a "thoroughly cosmological dimension." This overcomes the charge that Self-realization is merely a psychological, anthropocentric process, and accords perfectly with Naess's point that in speaking of gestalts as concrete, relational states, he is making an ontological, rather than a psychological, point about Self-realization. Naess's hesitation is probably the source of the charge against him that his account of Self-realization remains anthropocentric.27 Naess often describes Self-realization as a process that pushes out from the human to embrace greater and greater realms of being, but has "limits" at the level of plants. Dogen provides an answer to this charge in a way that is consistent with deep ecological thinking. I use the term "corealization" to mark this ontological dimension, in con-
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trast to "Self-realization," which might be understood as a psychological process. Another great "thinker to the roots," Gary Snyder, elegantly expresses the truth of appearance-disappearance common to all things when he says: "All beings are 'said' by the mountains and waterseven the clanking tread of a Caterpillar tractor, the gleam of the keys of a clarinet." 28 There are no limits. When Dogen* deflates our anthropocentrism, saying, "If you doubt the mountains' walking, you do not know your own walking," when we are enjoined to "think like a mountain," this is not mystical drivel. These expressions point toward a deep, coherent understanding of time, change, and causality. Yet these truths appear spontaneously, in the moment before they are clouded by reason. Ethics Without (Intrinsic) Good and Evil Naess has often characterized his writing as fundamentally ontological, making the surprising claim that he is not really interested in "ethics." Despite this, one of the basic commitments of deep ecology, after Self-realization, is to the intrinsic value of nature.29 "Gestalt Thinking . . ." gives insight not available in Naess's other writings into why he thinks of ethics as primarily an ontological enterprise. The final section of "Gestalt Thinking . . ." connects the ontology of spontaneous experience with an ontology of value. Naess discusses an unpublished paper by Yasuaki Nara, "The Practical Value of Dogen's* view of Nature," and Nara's use of two Japanese terms, inochi and kuyo. Inochi means, roughly, life, or the value of life. Nara notes that the Buddhist precept of non-harming is merged with Japanese culture through inochi. As Nara explains, however, this involves much more than a commitment to the non-harming of sentient beings. Inochi means the non-harming of "all beings." We come to appreciate the scope of inochi when we understand how it functions within the Japanese custom of kuyo, memorial services to atone for harm done to all beings. Nara cites the example of the yearly service for eels, performed by restaurant owners and customers for taking the inochi of the eels. Note that one does not swear off eating eels or become a vegetarian. The kuyo requires one to grant, however, that the eater exists in relation to the eel. To take the eel's inochi is an act of moral gravity.30 Nara goes on to point out that services for the taking of inochi are not limited to living things: "In the Edo period, the housewife and daughters of each home were supposed to do kuyo for the used or broken needles with a sense of
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regret for their lost inochi, thanks, and also with prayers for the enhancement of their sewing talents." Kuyo is also done for "old clocks, dolls, chopsticks, spectacles, tea-whisk, etc." Nara concludes, "To sum up, the traditional views of nature in Japan first of all do not make clear distinction between man, animals, and things. Though the individuality of each exists, all are felt to be part of the one world of the Buddha, each revealing its value." 31 All beings havebetter, are theirinochi. When one is spontaneously present to "concrete contents," as Naess calls them, in that moment before the clouding of reason, one cannot fail to be present to value(d) being. Gary Snyder, writing of Dogen's* "Mountains and Waters Sutra," elegantly returns us to this original place: Dogen is not concerned with "sacred mountains"or pilgrimages, or spirit allies, or wilderness as some special quality. His mountains and streams are the processes of this earth, all of existence, process, essence, action, absence; they roll being and nonbeing together. They are what we are, we are what they are. For those who would see directly into essential nature, the idea of the sacred is a delusion and an obstruction; it diverts us from seeing what is before our eyes; plain thusness. Roots, stems, and branches are all equally scratchy. No hierarchy, no equality. . . . This, thusness, is the nature of the nature of nature. The wild in the wild.32 For Snyder, like Dogen*, we see "directly into essential nature" when we are present to needles and dolls; chopsticks and tea whisks; Caterpillar tractors and clarinet keys; mountains and waters. There is no hierarchy, no equality, at all. Naess himself grants that "cruel parasites, inflicting slow painful death on their victims" are "'things' and therefore seem to be eligible for kuyo." Significantly, he describes this "horizontality and anti-hierarchical way of feeling things" as "nearest to the truth and the [philosophy] which I feel at home with.''33 I contend, however, that this way of feeling makes sense only if Naess agrees with the fundamental point of the previous section: There can be no limit to corealization. To attain a truly horizontal feeling, we must affirm corealization, not just Self-realization. Corealization occurs among all beings, not just living beings. Naess's account of value is clearly within the ontological dimension, but his account of Self-realization remains psychological. If Naess's account becomes ontological through and through, several important points become expressible. Notice that inochi is a relationalthough not a relativesense of value. We always stand in relation to the concrete contents of experience. When this becomes transparent to us, kuyo becomes necessary. One must atone for what one does because the context is relational: it includes the eel and the eater. But in becoming directly present to the eel, one does not create value, or "extend" moral standing from the human to the nonhuman.
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Rather, the choice is between acknowledging our responsibilityand eating gratefullyor failing to be directly present to the eel, and to oneselfthereby eating with ingratitude. This corelational account of value is not a form of relativism. The distinction between psychological Selfrealization and ontological corealization is critical here. If the Self simply extends itself to new realms of identification, values appear to be created relative to the state of the Self. But when we and the "myriad things" go forth to corealize, this is a way of being in the world, not a mental construction. We can now see why Dogen * would have rejected the distinction between (intrinsic) good and evil for reasons deriving from Nagarjuna*: Neither is absolute; to treat them as such is to invent an entia rationis. When we see directly into nature, we are always directly present to Buddha-nature, to value(d) being. There is no distinction at this level between good and evil, between the good parasite and the bad parasite. Such distinctions come later. Intrinsic good and evil are, at most, "useful tools" required by reason to facilitate its work, and they are dangerous if we forget the suspicion of reason. Instead of speaking of good and evil as intellectual categories, Dogen speaks of the practice in which we are directly present to things as they are (genjo*-koan*), the dimension of "appearance and disappearance." Here "the resolve to do no evil continues as the act of not producing evil. When it comes to be that evils are no longer produced, the efficacy of one's cultivation is immediately presencing."34 "Do no evil" becomes "the nonproduction of evil''; "Do good" becomes "the performance of good." Good and evil as intellectual categories drop away. Practice remains in the presence of things as they are: pure thusness, without hierarchy. There is an illuminating connection between Dogen's* nondualistic practice and Naess's idea of beautiful actions.35 Naess has distinguished what we conventionally mean by ethics, duty-bound actions following from moral laws, from beautiful actions performed spontaneously and joyfully as an expression of Self. This reading of Naess's beautiful actions as joyful acts done in the presence of the inochi of all beings, not just motivated by the intrinsic value of some beings, appears sympathetic to his conclusion in "Gestalt Thinking . . . . "He notes, for example, that it is hard to know what to say about the "problem of evil," given the "conception of intrinsic value of all things." Surely, though, if we no longer know what to say of evil, we should also suspect its contrasting term, the (intrinsic) good. Naess notes, "There is a need for clarification of the meaning of the intrinsic value conception, but I cannot go into the matter here."36
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I suggest that Naess simply give up the distinction between intrinsic good and evil, at least when he is talking to philosophers, since everything he wants to say about the value of nature can be captured through corealization. Intrinsic value is merely an entia rationis that is sometimes useful for expressing the ontological point that humans do not create the value of nature. Neither does nature create the value of human beings. I also see a strong connection at this point between Dogen's * non-production of evil, Naess's beautiful actions, and Spinoza's ethics. In the preface to the "Fourth Part of the Ethics: On Human Bondage, or the Powers of the Affects," Spinoza talks freely about the way the mind constructs concepts, concepts that may be useful but also can be dangerous if we do not recall the specific way Spinoza uses them. He reminds us that "Perfection and imperfection, therefore, are only modes of thinking, i.e., notions we are accustomed to feign because we compare individuals of the same species or genus to one another. This is why I said . . . that by reality and perfection I understand the same thing." There is here a nonhierarchical acceptance of the reality of all beings. Of good and evil he says, "As far as good and evil are concerned, they also indicate nothing positive in things, considered in themselves, nor are they anything other than modes of thinking, or notions we form because we compare things to one another."37 The great paradox of Spinoza's Ethics is that it is an ethic without good or evil. If these suggestive readings make sense, it follows that it is a drastic misreading of Naess to depict him as an environmental philosopher whose moral obligations toward nature are derived from a basic commitment to intrinsic value. While he may use the language of intrinsic value as a helpful mental construction expressing his view that nature cannot be abused for shallow human purposes, his deeper view is that "All things have value."38 We may ask, then, in what way is Naess's "ethic" an environmental ethic? It does not privilege spotted owls over killer parasites, or wild rivers over Caterpillar tractors. Naess, I believe, is not an environmental ethicist. When he uses imprecise language like "Nature has intrinsic value," he is open to the response "Nature as opposed to what?" Naess is not saying anything that distinguishes "nature" from any other gestalt. But this is no criticism whatsoever. For Naess himself has said time and again that he is not interested in ethics; he is, rather, proposing a "new way of seeing the world." He is proposing a "preethics'' that springs spontaneously from the respect/compassion for the thusness of all beings. Ecosophy T respects all beings. It just so happens that Naess lives at a time when human suffering is causing the eclipse of wild things. Unlike the environmental ethicist who intends to say something special about nature when using the phrase "Nature has intrinsic value," Naess cannot be understood as saying
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something like "The value of nature trumps human concerns." This is where Naess's Buddhist compassion translates into a Gandhian nonviolent political agenda that includes both wild nature and human beings. It thus appears that Naess is not guilty of the charge that his use of the concept of intrinsic value pits humans against wild nature, though this is certainly true of the way other radical environmental philosophers have used the concept. 39 Still, one can imagine the charge that direct presence to Buddha-nature makes for bad political movements. Deep ecology began out of the urgent need to stop environmental destruction. Yet we all must do our own work at the roots of suffering, even if we can later reach consensus at a more abstract, imprecise level. This does not make for quick political action. Naess does not say that we must complete our own work before reaching consensus. He says that we must constantly work back and forth between "the heart of the forest" and the imprecise, but important, level of political consensus where we may use the language of intrinsic value to effect change. This is what Buddhists call "skillful means." The Buddhist realizes that we cannot say the truth to someone who has not yet had his or her experience in the heart of the forest. One can, however, use skillful means to direct someone to that experience. While such means cannot be entirely ''truthful"they are not "precise"they are motivated by compassion and the hope of relief from suffering. The environmental ethicist uses language to lay out clear and precise ethical first principles from which all duties follow. The environmental ontologist skillfully guides people toward the forest. In this sense, Naess's environmental ontology leads him to a certain kind of value pluralism. He specifically discourages the attempt to erase cultural differences, saying, "there is ample reason for supporters of the Deep Ecology movement to refrain from questioning each other's ultimate beliefs. Deep cultural differences are more or less cognitively unbridgeable and will remain so, I hope."40 Intrinsic value does not, and cannot, function for Naess as the precise formulation of an ultimate ethical truth. Naess is calling for a network of solidarity among plural human cultures, not the reduction of all beliefs to a precise ethical formula. Despite his pluralism, however, Naess is not a relativist. He never doubts that those who directly experience things-as-they-are will work to prevent destruction of the forest. Notes 1. William Theodore de Bary, ed., The Buddhist Tradition in India, China and Japan (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), p. 27, from Majjhima Nikaya. 2. Arne Naess, "Gestalt Thinking and Buddhism," unpub. ms, p. 4.
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3. See Paul Wienpahl, The Radical Spinoza (New York: New York University Press, 1979). 4. David Rothenberg, Is It Painful to Think? Conversations with Arne Naess (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 55 56, 161, 162 163. 5. My appreciation to Professor Naess for providing me with this paper in response to my earlier article, "Dogen *, Deep Ecology and the Ecological Self," Environmental Ethics 16:2 (1994): 195 213. Thanks also to David Rothenberg and Andrew Light for their thoughtful responses to the ideas expressed there. 6. Naess, "Gestalt Thinking," p. 2. 7. Rothenberg, Is It Painful to Think? p. 29. 8. Naess, "Gestalt Thinking," p. 2. 9. Rothenberg Is It Painful to Think? p. 155. 10. Naess, "Gestalt Thinking," p. 2. 11. Rothenberg, Is It Painful to Think? p. 161. 12. Daisetz T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959). 13. T. R. V. Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism: A Study on the M dhyamika System (London: Allan and Unwin, 1960), p. 13 (italics in original). 14. For more detailed accounts of Nagarjuna's* thought, see T. P. Kasulis, Zen Action Zen Person (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1981); and Frederick J. Streng, Emptiness: A Study in Religious Meaning (New York: Abingdon Press, 1967). 15. Naess, "Gestalt Thinking," p. 5. 16. Readers interested in the ways Dogen connects with and departs from Buddhist tradition should consult Heinrich Dumoulin's Zen Buddhism: A History, vol. 2, Japan (New York: Macmillan, 1990). 17. Norman Waddell and Masao Abe, "Shobogenzo* Buddha Nature (Part I)," The Eastern Buddhist 8:2 (1975): 94. 18. The translation Waddell and Abe give for the second sentence is "All sentient beingswhole being is the Buddha-nature." Ibid., p. 95. I have kept the translations parallel here. On the radicalization of Buddha-nature, see Dumoulin, Japan. 19. This idea, however, was not original with Dogen. For some fascinating background on this issue, see William LaFleur, "Sattva: Enlightenment for Plants and Trees in Buddhism," CoEvolution Quarterly 19 (1978): 47 52. 20. Norman Waddell and Masao Abe, "Shobogenzo Buddha Nature," (Part II), The Eastern Buddhist 9:1 (1976): 91, 93. 21. Given the previous section, perhaps one reminder is in order: Apparently categorical statements such as this should be read as clues toward direct experience. 22. Naess, "Gestalt Thinking," p. 3. 23. Masao Abe, "Dogen on Buddha Nature," Eastern Buddhist 4 (1971): 39. 24. Dogen, "Mountains and Waters Sutra," in Moon in a Dewdrop, edited by Kazuaki Tanahashi (Berkeley, CA: North Point Press, 1985), p. 98.
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25. Naess does say, "There is a limit here. Not a definite [limit], and the options where to trace it are many" (Naess, "Gestalt Thinking," p. 3). He does not explicitly address these options, but it does seem clear that he questions whether we can go beyond plants. 26. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, 2nd ed. (New York: New York Review, 1990). 27. See Val Plumwood, "Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism, Environmental Philosophy, and the Critique of Rationalism," Hypatia 6:1 (1991): 3 27. 28. Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), p. 115. 29. This has led David Rothenberg, for example, to question whether Ecosophy T includes an ethical position. See Rothenberg, Is It Painful to Think? 30. I develop a corelational account of eating along these lines in "Toward an Ecological Ethic of Care," Hypatia 6:1 (1991): 60 74, repr. in Deane Curtin and Lisa Heldke, eds., Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). 31. Naess, "Gestalt Thinking," pp. 8 9. 32. Snyder, Practice of the Wild, p. 103. 33. Naess, "Gestalt Thinking," p. 9. 34. See Kasulis, Zen Action, pp. 94 95. 35. Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, translated and edited by Rothenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 85 86. 36. Naess, "Gestalt Thinking," p. 9. 37. Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 2, edited by Edwin Curley, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 545. 38. Naess, "Gestalt Thinking," p. 7. My emphasis. 39. See Ramachandra Guha, "Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique," Environmental Ethics 11:1 (Spring 1989): 71 83, for this charge; and Arne Naess, "The Third World, Wilderness, and Deep Ecology," in Deep Ecology for the 21st Century, edited by George Sessions (Boston: Shambhala, 1995), pp. 397 407, for Naess's response. I take J. Baird Callicott's early work to be a classic case of the objectionable use of intrinsic value when he says, "The extent of misanthropy in modern environmentalism thus may be taken as a measure of the degree to which it is biocentric." See Callicott, In Defense of the Land Ethic (Albany: State University of New York 1989). His more recent attempt to provide an evolutionary account of ethics in which human and environmental concerns coincide does nothing to provide a decision procedure for such cases. Where Naess is an environmental ontologist, Callicott is an environmental ethicist. 40. Naess, "The Third World, Wilderness, and Deep Ecology," p. 400.
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14 Deep Ecology and Its Social Philosophy: A Critique Bron Taylor Deep ecology philosophy is both more and less plural than is usually recognized. To assess such philosophy fully, we must apprehend both its diversity and that which makes it possible to speak of deep ecology as an emerging philosophy and movement. For nearly a decade I have been conducting ethnographic and archival research exploring this movement, especially in North America. In this essay I (1) describe the forms deep ecology assumes as it trickles down from philosophers and shapes much of the grassroots environmental movement in the United States; (2) argue that the Green ideology known as bioregionalism has almost universally been grafted onto deep ecology, becoming its de facto social philosophy; and (3) evaluate the central conceptual claims and bioregional social philosophy that are typically found in grassroots deep ecology. Deep Ecology on the Ground Deep ecology on the ground is simpler than in the philosophical literature. This is partly because few activists have read or taken time to read such material widely. One consequence of this is that environmental activists who embrace deep ecology tend to adopt simpler understandings of it than do writers of deep ecology philosophy. 1 Deep ecology on the ground is, conversely, more complicated than most versions found in the philosophical literature. This is partly because its rank-and-file practitioners are less interested than are its philosophical advocates in resolving inconsistencies or in defending a particular version of deep ecology. Consequently, grassroots deep ecology has become a bricolage of countercultural ideas fused to a kind of generic (common-denominator) understanding of deep ecology. This generic deep ecology can be expressed simply, in a way that
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echoes the "eightfold platform" articulated by Arne Naess and George Sessions: All life has value, apart from its usefulness to human beings, and thus, all life ought to be allowed to continue its evolutionary unfolding. 2 This simple proposition, often reduced to the term "biocentrism" or "ecocentrism," captures well the central moral claim of deep ecology.3 If this is correct, then deep ecology's grassroots evolution has little to do with Naess's apron diagram, whether specific "ecosophies" ("T" or others) are compelling, or whether there is a better term than "deep ecology" to express its key presuppositions.4 Many activists who identify with the deep ecology movement, of course, have read and resonate with the eightfold platform. They agree that all life matters, and that if people are to respect living systems, they must dramatically change their lifestyles and political arrangements in ways that reduce human population, consumption, and ecologically unsustainable technologies. The Wider Complex of Deep Ecology Ideas and Ideals Thus, deep ecology on the ground seems, at first glance, to be content with a simple formula and general call to action. But there are perspectives underlying and deduced from what I am calling the "generic" form of deep ecology which are so widely shared that they may be considered, for practical and analytical purposes, important if not essential parts of it. Western Desacralization and Anthropocentrism as Root Cause; Earthen Spirituality and Bioregional Ideology as Antidote Many Greens, perhaps especially those identifying with deep ecology, believe that monotheistic religions foster environmentally destructive behavior. Those religions shape consciousness such that humans believe that (1) they are the only species which deserves moral consideration and (2) the holy is above or beyond the world, and thus Earth's living systems are of penultimate moral concern. Additionally, such religion is criticized as intolerant of and repressive toward peoples whose ideas and cultures are more ecologically sustainable. Put simply, Western religions are anthropocentric and "desacralize" nature; consequently they precipitate a war on nature and naturebeneficent cultures, and are the central engines of environmental calamity.5 The flip side of this coin is that Western religious idea-complexes must be overturned in order for humans to harmonize their lives with nature. This helps to explain why deep ecology philosophers think it is important to reject monotheism (considered the antinature, "dominant paradigm" of Western reli-
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gion and philosophy) while resurrecting and defending the lifeways and religions of the world's esoteric religious traditions and remnant foraging societies. George Sessions, for example, suggested that Western people could grope their way back to a proper understanding of the "God/Nature/Man relationship" via the pantheism of the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. 6 He borrowed from Aldous Huxley (who borrowed in turn from Leibniz) a belief in "perennial philosophy,"7 a variety of alternative, nature-beneficent ideals scattered globally and found especially in world's surviving indigenous peoples, religions originating in the Far East, and among Jewish, Christian, and Muslim contemplative mystics.8 The ubiquitous critique of Western spirituality also helps to explain why so many deep ecology activists have been involved in Earth-oriented ritualizing. Indeed, in 1982, Bill Devall criticized environmentalists for failing to "reconstruct [and] rediscover the earth bonding processeswhich worked so well for primal peoples" while praising those engaged in countercultural spirituality for leading the way.9 In the years since he wrote those words, radical environmentalists have designed many rites to evoke and deepen feelings of connection to a sacred Earth and its many manifestations.10 Gary Snyder and Paul Shepard (more than Sessions, Devall, or even Arne Naess) developed many of the ideas that would become central to the form deep ecology would take at the grass roots. In "Four Changes" (written before Naess coined the term "deep ecology" and published in a Pulitzer Prize-winning book titled Turtle Island) Snyder expressed virtually all the ideas that would later be sketched into the deep ecology platform.11 He penned additional ideas that today are truisms, or nearly so, within the deep ecology movement. "Western Culture," he asserted, is the "root of the environmental crisis'' because it severs culture from the "very ground of its own being . . . from wilderness."12 Far preferable, Snyder claimed, are the beliefs of "Gnostics, hip Marxists, Teilhard de Chardin Catholics, Druids, Taoists, Biologists, Witches, Yogins, Bhikkus, Quakers, Sufis, Tibetans, Zens, Shamans, Bushmen, American Indians, Polynesians, Anarchists, [and] Alchemists."13 He also endorsed pantheistic beliefs in "nature herself . . the great goddess, the Magna Mater" who, he added, "I regard . . . as a very real entity."14 Snyder further argued that the animistic perceptions found in "all primitive cultures" demonstrate that people can learn to understand and speak for the nonhuman world.15 Thus, Snyder's essay is noteworthy, and not only as an early expression of the desire to supplant Western monotheism with spiritualities considered more nature-beneficent.
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Meanwhile, Paul Shepard was doing more than any other deep ecology architect to advance the central radical environmental cosmogony, its story about how today's world came to be. In several remarkable books, Shepard blamed the rise of pastoral and agricultural lifeways, both of which tamed animals (including humans), for destroying environmental and human emotional health. 16 Both pastoral and agricultural societies required political centralization and a warrior class for their expansion and perpetuation. They violently suppressed foraging peoples, supplanting their cultures with cultures in which people had little contact with nature and less "attentiveness" to it, turning the world into a "thing" instead of a "presence," widely destroying animistic spirituality and ethical sensitivity toward nature.17 Pastoralism especially promoted these trends, producing hierarchical sky-God cosmologies and violent centralized human cultures that severed the gods and the sacred from Earth, unleashing a war against it. Such cosmologies were often, according to Shepard, fused to the agriculture with which they became enmeshed and mutually dependent.18 In Coming Home to the Pleistocene, completed just before his death in 1996, Shepard summarized his lifework: "If there is a single complex of events responsible for the deterioration of human health and ecology, agricultural civilization is it."19 Despite the relentless, ten thousand-year drive toward an impoverishing domestication, humans can rediscover appropriate lifeways, ones in which a life in wild nature is seen as "a basic optimum human environment".20 "A new paradigm of primordial recovery" is possible, Shepard argued, one that ''models optimum qualities of human life not only in terms of philosophy and culture but also in food, exercise, and society, as these existed among late Pleistocene humanity and still exist in relic hunter/gatherer peoples. "21 The potential resides in the human genome itself, Shepard believed, in our genetic inheritance from millennia as evolving Homo sapiens. In the human genome, wildness and wisdom remainand they can teach us how to live. Such "Back to the Pleistocene" sentiment was proclaimed early on by Gary Snyder in Turtle Island, but his thinking later moderated. No less a critic of modern agriculture, Snyder now urges that we learn from, if not return to, Neolithic or "upper-Paleolithic" lifeways that include small-scale, "traditional" (or "indigenous") agriculture and horticulture.22 In response, Shepard gently criticized Snyder, as well as influential farmer-writers (and bioregionalists) Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry, for failing to push "the thesis of an undiluted model of primal life to its conclusion." He acknowledged, however, the apparent impracticality of this ideal, stating that he would certainly prefer that their Neolithic consciousness would "prosper-and prevail" over current lifeways.23
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These figures, whose ideas have influenced grassroots deep ecology, believe that the domestication of plant and animal life and agriculture itself inexorably reduce biological diversity. Indeed, despite disagreements about which food production technology we should use, Snyder, Shepard, and early environmentalists such as John Muir and Henry David Thoreau, who are considered to be elders by contemporary deep ecologists, 24 all trace the primordial fall from a foraging paradise to agriculture.25 Such a cosmogony fuels the turn toward the local and a desire for a bioregional polityan important if not universal aspect of grassroots deep ecology. Summarized simply, bioregionalists envision decentralized governance ("community self-rule" and "participatory democracy," in movement parlance) within political boundaries redrawn to reflect the natural contours of differing ecosystem types.26 Such polity is needed because within a given ecological region people canby virtue of "being there" and "learning the land,'' its climate patterns, native flora and fauna, water systems, soils, and so onbetter care for and build ecologically sustainable lifeways than can people and institutions placed farther away. The region itself, moreover, can become a part of human identity. To take care of one's place, therefore, is to take care of oneself. It does not require altruism or sacrifice. As with deep ecology, such a shift in human identity, a sense of loyalty to place, requires a fundamental spiritual reorientation toward a holistic, ecocentric worldview. It was in Turtle Island that Snyder articulated the ideas which would provide the bedrock of bioregionalism, more than five years before the term was coined.27 By the 1990s bioregionalism was firmly grafted to the grassroots deep ecology movement in North America.28 To a significant extent, bioregionalism would put flesh on the skeleton of a deep ecology platform that was strikingly bereft of political conviction. Indeed, bioregionalism provided the deep ecology movement with the social philosophy that any comprehensive philosophy must develop. Summary: The Wider Complex Snyder, Shepard, and others have promoted a complex of ideas that are now intimately associated with deep ecology: We suffered a primordial fall from a foraging paradise in which domestication and agriculture accompanied the destruction of nature-sympathetic (especially animistic and pantheistic) religious perceptions, rituals, and lifeways. We should defend, learn from, and help revitalize the world's remnant foraging societies or small-scale agricultures, and strive toward bioregional modes of identity and political governance. These are among the transformations needed if we are to construct lifeways that ensure biological and cultural diversity.
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A recovery of ecological sustainability requires a rejection of modern, Western, anthropocentric, and monotheistic modes of consciousness, bioregional deep ecology proclaims. This simultaneously will involve a return to or invention of ritual forms that promote what could be called "primal" consciousness or spirituality. 29 It will produce emotionally healthy animals, including humans. A transformed consciousness and proper spiritual perception will yield a love for the land and all life, promote local acts of compassion, and ignite resistance to environmental destruction. Such consciousness change will eventuate in bioregional activism and political organization.30 Despite such broad agreement, Snyder and Shepard disagreed about the ability of the world's great, cosmopolitan religions to foster the needed perceptual changes. In his final book, Shepard first quoted Snyder, agreeing with him that "otherworldly philosophies end up doing more damage to the planet (and human psyches) than the existential conditions they seek to transcend." He protested, however, Snyder's use of Jainism and Buddhism as models: "Surely these are two of those great, placeless, portable, world religions whose ultimate concerns are not just universal but otherworldly." Although Shepard clearly preferred that religion remain located bioregionally, he could discern no contradiction in Snyder's personal life between his bioregional commitments and his approval of some type of cosmopolitan religion. Shepard concluded, "I suspect that Snyder, like [Wendell] Berry and [Wes] Jackson, is not so much following tradition as doing what Joseph Campbell called "creative mythology."31 This is a good point to conclude this brief overview of deep ecology as it grows on the ground, for whether in the work of theorists like Snyder and Shepard, or in the ritualizing found among deep ecology groups, mythmaking (and ritualizing) is important and ongoing. Cosmogonic myths diagnose our current predicament: Agricultures (and later, large, centralized nation-states) have supplanted foraging lifeways and produced ecological and spiritual dysfunction. From such myths is deduced a decentralist preference that shapes deep ecology's bioregional social philosophy. They shape its evangelical strategy: To heal the Earth and all its creatures, we must find ways to recover or invent a regionally placed, postanthropocentric consciousness and spirituality. To whatever extent possible, we must return to the primal lifeways of foraging people or of small-scale, premonotheistic agricultures, which have traditionally generated place-based identities and evoked kinship feelings for nonhuman nature. Consciousness transformation, it is believed, is the first step toward the needed behavioral changes.
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A Critique of Deep Ecology The following critique of bioregional deep ecology depends on the general accuracy of the preceding portrait. I have identified, based on fieldwork and text-based research, central beliefs found among deep ecology proponents and movements. I do not claim, by focusing on the mainstreams and central tendencies of deep ecological thought, that everyone associated with the deep ecology movement uncritically endorses these tendencies. Quite the contrary: Within most social movements there is pluralism as well as some ideaglue that binds together the group, however tenuously. Because of space limitations, however, I must focus my critique on the main conceptual tendencies found in North America's deep ecology movements. A General Critique of Deep Ecology's Social Philosophy Bioregional deep ecology generally asserts the binary associations found in table 14.1. My central argument is that such ideology would be more compelling if its advocates would eschew simplistic binary oppositions and monocausal explanations in their efforts to explain the causes of and solutions to environmental degradation. Sometimes, of course, such dichotomies insightfully illuminate how certain social variables, cultural differences, and historical developments shape human lifeways and impact nature. A problem arises, however, when such dichotomies are viewed, as they often are, as distinct and rigid oppositions, or as variables whose influence runs in a single direction. When examined in historical and cross-cultural perspective, it becomes clear that such oversimplifications are grounded in a misleading failure to appreciate the diversity and complexity of human cultures and political economies. The failure of many deep ecology advocates to appreciate such complexity signals either social-scientific naïveté or interpretive hubris. The latter is highly ironic, for in other important ways, bioregional deep ecologists express an unusual and laudable humility. Even though it is difficult, if not impossible, to escape anthropocentrism, 32 the effort to do so, and the claim that all life has value apart from its usefulness to human beings, is a salutary act of moral imagination, perhaps even a spiritual insight. Such humility is morally praiseworthy: Willingness to consider equally the interests of others (sometimes even above one's own) is widely and properly recognized as virtuous. Individuals involved in deep ecology movements do, generally speaking, make significant sacrifices (at least as conventionally understood) in their efforts to promote sustainability
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Table 14.1 Binary associations in bioregional deep ecology Good
Bad Pastoral and agricultural societies
Foraging (or small-scale organic horticultural) societies Animistic, pantheistic, goddess-matriarchal, or Eastern religions
Monotheistic, sky-God, patriarchal, Western religions
Biocentrism/Ecocentrism (promotes conservation)
Anthropocentrism (promotes destruction)
Intuition
Reason (especially instrumental)
Holistic worldviews
Mechanistic and dualistic worldviews
Decentralism
Centralization
Primitive technology
Modern technology
Regional self-sufficiency
Globalization and international trade
Anarchism/participatory democracy
Statism, corruption, authoritarianism
Radicalism
Pragmatism
through lifestyle simplification and political action. They express a commendable humility when they insist that ecosystems are more complex than we can know, deducing from this a powerful rationale for precautionary principles that demand the protection of all ecosystem types as wilderness or biosphere reserves. Yet such humility often evaporates when deep ecology advocates turn their attention to political and economic systems. This is ironic, partly because dualistic distinctions, such as summarized in table 14.1, seem incongruent with the holistic, antidualistic metaphysics endorsed by most deep ecologists. Given such holism, it is surprising how often deep ecology advocates articulate or otherwise express dualistic beliefs to the effect that some such systems are "unnatural." 33 Equally ironic is that many such holistic thinkers fail to apprehend that, because political and economic systems are embedded in ecosystems, they are also highly complex. Complexity suggests more than a suspicion of monocausal explanations for social reality. It underscores the difficulty of identifying the relative importance of the multiple variables contributing to social realities and social transformations. An understanding of socioeconomic systems as aspects of even more complex living systems clarifies why it is often difficult for scholars or activists to discern which strategies might best effect the desired transformations. An understanding of political complexity would lead to greater humility when making tactical and strategic recommendations, and less antipathy toward
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those with similar goals but differing political judgments about how best to pursue them. This is not an abstract point. Those well acquainted with internal politics among environmentalists know how common it is for strategic disagreements to devolve into counterproductive brawls. This general critique, and the negative effects of simplistic historical and social scientific analysis, can be used to evaluate, through cross-cultural and historical examples, several specific claims that are endemic within the bioregional deep ecology movement. To summarize: Deep ecology advocates argue that 1. Anthropocentric attitudes, emerging with agricultural and pastoral livelihoods, and subsequently grounded in Western philosophies and religions, are causing the current extinction episode. 2. Hope requires widespread resistance to environmental degradation and the evolution of bioregional governance and bioregionally sustainable lifeways. 3. This requires that we replace anthropocentric with ecocentric attitudes. 4. Such replacement in turn requires that we "resacralize" our perceptions of nature and, thus, a religious revival of indigenous and Eastern religions, or holistic metaphysics (such as Spinozan philosophy or "scientific" pantheism). In short, deep ecology posits that a transformation of human consciousness must take place if humans are to reestablish harmony with nonhuman nature. A Critique of Specific Claims and Assumptions On Consciousness and Environmental Behavior We do not have convincing empirical (quantitative) research correlating environmental attitudes and behavior. Nevertheless, my fieldwork in North America suggests that in the affluent, industrialized West, people espousing ecocentric values do promote environmentally aware lifestyles and passionate political action more consistently and passionately than those who express anthropocentric attitudes and presuppositions. 34 There is ample evidence, however, that the dichotomies and correlations surmised by many deep ecology advocates (e.g., in table 14.1) are not as strong as they presume. Indeed, the increasing number and diversity of ecological resistance movements around the world suggest that some deep ecology premises are, if anything, decreasingly apt generalizations about social reality. This was an important finding of my on-the-ground research that explored diverse and widely dispersed examples of movements promoting environmental protection which have been variously been characterized as "militant" or "radical."35 This cross-cultural research challenged the prevalent deep ecological conviction that consciousness change toward an ecocentric, deep ecological spirituality is a precondition of "radical" environmental action. Although we
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found examples where deep ecology-like values and spiritualities animated environmental actors and groups, we also found many cases where such motivations were missing or not widely shared. Indeed, contrary to deep ecological expectations, in the global context the most prevalent factor precipitating and justifying aggressive environmental resistance appears to be a recognition that intensifying environmental degradation directly threatens traditional livelihoods, human health, and the life prospects of children. 36 Indeed, it is social analysis purporting to explain the causes of current environmental threats that most decisively fosters environmental activism. Social analysis helps inspire the creation of new environmental movements and ecologizes the agendas of many social movements that originally had no environmental objectives. In the global context, it is not an analysis of the environmentally destructive consequences accompanying the advent of pastoral or agricultural lifeways, or of the changes in religious perceptions that accompanied such developments, which most decisively fuels resistance, even in cases where such views are present. The most common social analysis animating grassroots environmentalism outside of the industrial West can be summarized in this way: The land has been stolen and abused by outsiderseither by multinational commercial interests, or more commonly, by national and local commercial eliteswho are interested in quick profits rather than in ecologically sustainable land use.37 Grassroots activists often trace the beginning of this process to the arrival of colonial armies, the theft of their mineral resources, and fast-following commercial enterprises, including cashcrop monocultures.38 It is not agriculture or technology per se that is blamed for immiseration, therefore, but international agribusiness which overturns putatively sustainable agricultures, centralizing production and exporting food, displacing and impoverishing the original inhabitants. Such analysis is often and increasingly tied to a clear understanding of how the enclosure of commons lands and the displacement of peoples living there play a key role in the destruction of human lives, cultures, and the environments upon which human lives depend.39 These types of analyses represent a novel fusion of left-wing criticism and a growing ecological and historical understanding of the processes by which traditional livelihoods have been lost and of the ways in which modern agriculture impoverishes people and ecosystems. In less-affluent countries we increasingly find, consequently, that notions such as "sustainable development" and "environmental justice" provide valuable conceptual resources both for environmental resistance and for endeavors to restore traditional and less-damaging agricultures and livelihoods.40 Nevertheless, some prominent deep ecology ad-
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vocates dismiss such notions as an impediment to environmental sustainability, considering them to be anthropocentric and thus, not sufficiently ecological or ecocentric. 41 When informed by an ecological understanding of resource-based limits and widespread environmental damage resulting from industrial growth, even those with anthropocentric value systems will realize that such growth cannot benefit most people. Participants in popular movements, consequently, decreasingly view industrial growth as the "development" goal or the means to "social justice."42 Arriving at such ecology-informed conclusions certainly involves a transformation of consciousness, particularly when we consider the success capitalist societies have had in making economic growth the axial social organizing principle of most countries on the planet. But such consciousness change can occur without a concomitant shift toward a deep ecological, or even an ecocentric, perspective. Indeed, the obvious negative consequences of unrestrained "development" reinforce perceptions that the land has been expropriated by outsiders who are using it up for their exclusive benefit, and the conclusion that any further extension of international commerce betrays local needs and interests.43 In the final analysis, it is often a realization of the connections between commercial development, ecological deterioration, and declining life prospects that produces what can be called the "ecologization" of many popular social movements.44 Increasingly, social movements are becoming ecologized, recognizing that growth and industrialization are illusions of prosperity offered by elites to keep ordinary people from defending and promoting appropriate and sustainable alternatives. On Spirituality and "Ecological Consciousness" What about the claim that we must resacralize our perceptions of nature? What of the ubiquitous assumption within deep ecology movements that resacralization requires a rejection of Western monotheistic (and patriarchal) religions? What of the belief that the worldviews and religious practices of Eastern religions and indigenous peoples, or pantheistic metaphysics, provides superior ground for environmentalism than Western religions or philosophies?45 My brief response involves four assertions. First, current scholarship shows that the ecological practices of indigenous peoples are diverse and efforts to portray such peoples as ecological saints or sinners are simplistic, failing to recognize religious and cultural pluralism among and within such groups.46 Second, the debate over the impact of Eastern religious ideals on environmental behavior is anything but resolved, and the tendency to make broad generaliza-
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tions has proven problematic, just as it did with indigenous societies. 47 Third, those who have asserted that Christianity is the decisive variable precipitating environmental degradation have advanced a conclusion which exceeds their evidence.48 To summarize these three points: The putative ecological superiority of indigenous and Eastern religions over monotheistic worldviews is a difficult empirical question. The likelihood is that broad generalizations about the ecological superiority of one or another culture or religious tradition will continue to prove wanting. Understanding the ecological impacts of societies and religions will require careful attention not only to the tendencies that inhere in different groups, but also to their internal pluralism and changing forms. My fourth assertion, then, in response to the typical assumptions about religion found in deep ecology subcultures, is that a greater appreciation of the malleability of religion is needed than is usually found within them.49 A proper appreciation of religious change can be grounded in the history of religion. Fieldwork exploring the ways in which religious, philosophical, and ecological ideas cross-fertilize and transmogrify group thinking and practices can also foster an appreciation of religion's malleability.50 Whatever tendencies there have been or may be in various cultural and religious traditions with regard to environment-related behaviorwhen the ecological facts become clear, when people recognize that their well-being is threatened by environmental degradation, when they decide to do something about ittheir followers usually turn first to their own traditions. There they seek the conceptual and material resources they will need to respond. When these resources prove inadequate, people often will transform their traditions, sometimes rapidly, into forms better suited to the challenge. Sometimes this occurs as a result of cross-fertilization and mutual influence among groups that are usually isolated from each other and thus have little opportunity to exercise mutual influence. When environmental circumstances become dire, however, people often become more receptive to participating in coalitions, encountering new people, and considering new ideas. When such social dynamics are unleashed, few remain unchanged in the process. These findings square with those of scholars who have studied grassroots environmentalism in less-affluent countries.51 They also cohere with recent scholarship examining the "greening" of monotheistic religions in the West.52 A good example of such change can be found in the "Earth Charter," an endeavor led by an ecumenical coalition of religious leaders to construct, with participation from "civil society" around the world, principles for revering the Earth. The hope is to have the Charter ratified by the United Nations, and that this would inspire greater international cooperation toward solving environmental
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problems. Interestingly, the second draft retains language of the sacred and intrinsic value to describe human responsibilities to the nonhuman nature: Planet Earth, our home, is alive with a unique community of life. With reverence for the sources of our being, we give thanks for the gift of life. We affirm that Earth's life support systems and resources are the common heritage of all and a sacred trust. Ensuring a healthy and beautiful Earth with clean air, pure waters, fertile lands, expansive forests, and plentiful oceans is a basic common interest of humanity. . . . General Principles: Respect Earth and all life . . . [and] the interdependence and intrinsic value of all beings. 53 This document is based on long-term discussions among people of many different civil and religious groups, and illustrates how people with very different worldviews are developing new perspectives in response to the environmental crisis. To summarize, participants in deep ecology groups generally believe that a shift toward primal, pagan, or Eastern religious spiritualities is a crucial prerequisite to reharmonizing human and nonhuman relations. Such beliefs need heavy qualification. The history of religion demonstrates the malleability of religion, and contemporary research shows dramatic changes unfolding in many religious groups and most religious traditions. Meanwhile, the emergence of increasingly plural grassroots environmental movements demonstrates that deep ecological consciousness change is no more likely to spur ecological resistance than ecological education combined with appeals to self-interest and concern for children, families, and communities. Indeed, many of the deep ecology dichotomies listed in table 14.1 are incomprehensible and have little explanatory power in non-Western contexts.54 On Bioregional Ideology, Decentralization, and the Question of Power We have already reviewed the extent to which deep ecology has fused with bioregionalism. Much bioregional theorizing has focused on the difficulties involved in demarcating bioregions. We can see that such difficulties are not insuperable, however, when we recognize that bioregional provinces are necessarily also cultural zones; they are social constructions, not just ecological realities. If they are to become governance units, they must be contested and negotiated.55 Another problem identified by political scientists is that "States in a world organized along bioregional lines would be more prone to conflicts rooted in differences in identity and traditions."56 The explosion of violence that attended the bioregional breakup of the Soviet Union certainly intensified this critique. It is worth noting, moreover, that "The designers of the American Constitution were keenly aware of the [dangers of the bioregional] European
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pattern and . . . were determined to avoid and counteract [regional conflicts by relying on] unnatural borders." 57 It is not clear, however, that in the long run and on every continent and during every era, violence and conflict would be greater under bioregional forms of political organization than under political units drawn according to bioregional differences. Fear of balkanization raises important concerns, but a universal condemnation of bioregional polity does not logically follow. Gary Snyder, for example, would likely point to anthropologist A. L. Kroeber's work which shows that Native Americans have usually lived peacefully, largely in differing bioregional provinces.58 A more trenchant problem is how bioregionalists (and the anarchists who influenced their most influential theorists) often assume that people are naturally predisposed (unless corrupted by life in unnatural, hierarchical, centralized, industrial societies) to cooperative behavior.59 This debatable assumption appears to depend more on radical environmental faith, a kind of Paul Shepard-style mythologizing, than on ecology or anthropology. Unfortunately for bioregional theory, evolutionary biology shows that not only cooperation promotes species survival; so also, at times, does aggressive competitiveness.60 Based on its unduly rosy view of the potential for human altruism, it is doubtful that bioregionalism can offer sufficient structural constraints on the exercise of power by selfish and well-entrenched elites. It should be obvious, for example, that nation-state governments will not voluntarily cede authority.61 Any political reorganization along bioregional lines would likely require "widespread violence and dislocation."62 Few bioregionalists seem to recognize this likelihood, or how devastating to nature such a transitional struggle would probably be. Moreover, making an important but often overlooked point about political power, political theorist Daniel Deudney warns: The sizes of the bioregionally based states would vary greatly because bioregions vary greatly. This would mean that some states would be much more powerful than others [and] it is not inevitable that balances of power would emerge to constrain the possible imperial pretensions of the larger and stronger states.63 Andrew Bard Schmookler, in his critique of utopian anarchism, has raised a kindred concern. In The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution, he criticized anarchists (and their relatively moderate bioregional progeny) for ignoring a specific problem of power.64 He asked: How can good people prevent being dominated by a ruthless few, and what will prevent hierarchies from emerging if decentralized political self-rule is ever achieved? One does not have to believe all people are bad to recognize that not all people will be good, he argued; and unless bad people all become good, there is no solution
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to violence other than some kind of government to restrain the evil few. Schmookler elsewhere noted that those who exploit nature gather more power to themselves. How, then, can we restrain such power? There must be a government able to control the free exercise of power, Schmookler concluded. Once when debating Green anarchists and bioregionalists in a radical environmental journal, Schmookler agreed that political decentralization is a good idea. But if we move in this direction, he warned, ''There should be at the same time a world order sufficient [to thwart] would-be conquerors." Moreover, "Since the biosphere is a globally interdependent web, that world order should be able to constrain any of the actors from fouling the earth. This requires laws and means of enforcement." Schmookler concluded, "Government is a paradox, but there is no escaping it. This is because power is a paradox: our emergence out of the natural order makes power an inevitable problem for human affairs, and only power can control power." 65 Bioregionalism generally fails to grapple adequately with the problem of power. Consequently, it has little "answer to specifically global environmental problems," such as atmospheric depletion and the disruption of ocean ecosystems by pollution and overfishing. Political scientist Paul Wapner argues that this is because bioregionalism assumes "that all global threats stem from local instances of environmental abuse and that by confronting them at the local level they will disappear."66 Nor does bioregionalism have much of a response to the "globalization" of corporate capitalism and consumerist market society, apart from advocating local resistance or long-odds campaigns to revoke the corporate charters of the worst environmental offenders. These efforts do little to hinder the inertia of this process.67 And little is ever said about how to restrain the voracious appetite of a global-corporate-consumer culture for the resources in every corner of the planet. Even for the devout, promoting deep ecological spirituality and ecocentric values seems pitifully inadequate in the face of such forces. Perhaps it is because they have little if any theory of social change, and thus cannot really envision a path toward a sustainable society, that many bioregional deep ecologists revert to apocalyptic scenarios. Many of them see the collapse of ecosystems and industrial civilization as the only possible means toward the envisioned changes. Others decide that political activism is hopeless, and prioritize instead spiritual strategies for evoking deep ecological spirituality, hoping, self-consciously, for a miracle. Certainly the resistance of civil society to globalization and its destructive inertia is honorable and important, even a part of a wider sustainability strategy. But there will be no victories over globalization and corporate capitalism, and
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no significant progress toward sustainability, without new forms of international, enforceable, global environmental governance. 68 Indeed, without new restraints on power, both within nations and internationally, the most beautiful bioregional experiments and models will be overwhelmed and futile. Even bioregional deep ecologists deeply committed to this new Green ideology sometimes realize that lasting victories must be gained through legislation or secured in the courts. The history of environmental politics in the United States certainly demonstrates that, contrary to bioregional ideology, it is often people far away who care more for specific places than those near them. This dynamic is apparent in federal legislation and judicial rulings; they have repeatedly provided wildlands greater protection from local extractive interests than would have been the case were such places left exclusively under local jurisdiction.69 It is curious to me that so few bioregional deep ecologists notice the irony when their adversaries in the "wise use" movement parrot their primary political objective, decentralization and local control.70 Such realities provide ample reason for skepticism that decentralization along bioregional lines will bring the desired transformations, at least in the foreseeable future. My quarrel here is with the idea that "bioregionalization" is a panacea for environmental protection and positive social change, with related binary oppositions such as "big political systems bad/small political systems good." This criticism notwithstanding, there is a core of common sense to the idea that people living in a region are better placed than people far away to learn about their region and how to live there sustainably. There are also many encouraging examples of environmental activism and practice that have been inspired by bioregional ideas. The recent "bioregionalization" of California provides an important example. In 1991, eighteen federal and state resource agencies signed a "Memorandum of Understanding" titled "California's Coordinated Regional Strategy to Conserve Biological Diversity.'' The agreement subdivided California into ten large ecoregions and charged officials within them to cooperate on all issues related to environmental protection and resource management.71 These new management units ignored the preexisting county structures and were based largely on judgments about the boundaries of different ecosystem types. This dramatic initiative would not have happened in the absence of decades of grassroots activism and severe environment-related conflicts. The "bioregional" or "biodiversity" project, as this governmental initiative is sometimes called, is not only a new way governments are hoping to manage ecosystems. It is also a way government officials hope to reduce and manage political conflicts about how to manage them.
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The most thoughtful pioneers of bioregional deep ecology, it must be stressed, are not ideologues. In an essay reflecting on the bioregionalization of California, for example, Gary Snyder wrote, "I am not arguing that we should instantly redraw the boundaries of the social construction called California, although that could happen some far day." Instead, Snyder advanced a longer-term view, concluding that bioregional thinking "leads toward the next step in the evolution of human citizenship." 72 And Raymond Dasmann, who coauthored perhaps the most important early bioregional manifesto,73 while asserting two decades later that there are "obvious advantages to bringing a unified political control over the management of a single ecosystem,'' also recognized the formidable "political difficulties involved in redefining longstanding county or state boundaries." Dasmann concluded pragmatically, "It appears more feasible to seek close cooperation among the agencies involved in the management of a bioregion than to attempt the redrawing of political maps."74 As we have seen, this process is under way in California, and despite many problems, such developments show that bioregional ideas can foster many positive changes, even without redrawing all political boundaries and immediately realizing a bioregional utopia. It is this kind of pragmatic bioregional deep ecology that is most promising. It promotes concrete engagements within bioregions and pushes governments toward more rational, environment-related policies that consider the well-being of ecosystems and watersheds that cross existing political boundaries. Toward a Bioregional and Terrapolitan, Deep and Social Environmentalism I have elucidated the core ideas of deep ecology and the bioregional social philosophy that has been grafted upon it within the grassroots deep ecology movement. I then criticized the penchant in these movements to oversimplify the causes of and potential solutions to the environmental crisis. My hope is that critique can foster changes which can make bioregional deep ecology more politically effective and intellectually compelling. By returning to a previous criticism, I suggest an example of how this might work. Despite his previous, power-related criticisms, Dan Deudney applauds bioregionalism and deep ecology for promoting "earth-centered identity and community claims." These can, he believes, erode the nationalistic identities that so often precipitate environmentally destructive conflict. Nevertheless, he criticizes "localist bioregional ideologies and political practices" for failing to apprehend "the unmistakable message of ecological science . . .that the earth is the only integral bioregion, and that the 'homeland' of all humans is the whole
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planet rather than some piece of it." 75 This critique illustrates the peril of basing environmental politics primarily on decentralist principles. Arguing for a better approach, Deudney coined the term "terrapolitanism" to capture the need for new forms of political association based on loyalty to Earth itself.76 If such philosophy were to spread widely, it would provide a social-philosophical ground for what Deudney thinks we shall need if we are to arrest the destruction of the biosphere: legitimate international governance grounded in a federal-republican Earth constitution.77 Deudney and those pursuing international environmental governance offer an important corrective to decentralist absolutism, for surely we must develop cooperative global responses to protect the planetary commons. Interestingly, in a way reminiscent of bioregional spirituality, Deudney thinks that the development of a "planetary civic earth religion" could contribute to the conceptual and affective basis for new forms of international governance.78 Indeed, he strikes a deep ecological note, asserting that environmentalist and deep ecological worldviews express a more credible cosmology than traditional religions. "Environmentalism is the first worldview of the modern era that can present a credible cosmology," he claims, adding, "A striking feature of 'deep ecology' as a spiritual and moral system is that it can make at least a prima facie claim to being compatible with an important science-ecology."79 I am sympathetic with such assertions. A planetary civil Earth religion could emerge, playing a positive role in replacing nationalistic identities with more life-affirming bioregional and terrapolitan identities. Deudney himself thinks that the idea of the Earth as alive, as Gaia, could provide the common denominator for a planetary civil religion. He argues that Gaia is the "most salient metaphorical structure spanning the divide between ecological science and Earth identity narratives,"80 and concludes that "Gaian Earth religiosity seems well suited to serve as the 'civic religion' for a federal-republican Earth constitution."81 There are alternatives. The Earth Charter, for example, could be considered another, more inclusive manifesto for a planetary civil religion. I am concerned that Deudney may, like other deep ecology sympathizers, underestimate the ability of the traditional religions to reconfigure themselves, and overestimate the likelihood that large numbers of people will jettison their birth religions for Gaian Earth religiosity. Of course, many traditional religions already view the Earth's living systems as sacred or otherwise as deserving reverence and due care, and some are now evolving such theologies. Some are incorporating, and others will incorporate, Gaian Earth spirituality into their worldviews. For others, however, this would be impossible without a more comprehensive conversion. In any case, traditional religions must be full part-
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ners in the sustainability discussions, even if they do not fully adopt cosmologies and mythic metaphors that scientists and intellectuals find compelling. The Earth Charter, emerging from a long process of consultation involving the participation of diverse sectors of civil society, seems less prone to exclusionary assumptions. I conclude recapitulating my general argument. Bioregional deep ecology will be more compelling if its advocates eschew reductionistic explanations for, and simplistic solutions to, our environmental predicaments. To their credit, many deep ecologists recognize that in addition to a proper spiritual perception and biocentric morality, a social critique and a social philosophy are needed. They have set off in a promising direction, appropriating bioregional thought and mapping out positive campaigns resisting environmental degradation and restoring ecosystems. But they should take more seriously the biospheric dimensions of the environmental crisis and consider new strategies to address them. Deep ecology movements must open themselves to greater cross-fertilization with other perspectives, including international relations theory and social ecology. If we are to grapple our way toward a greener tomorrow, openness to and experimentation with new ideas is essential. There are too many variables for us to identify with certainty the most decisive cause of environmental decline or the best solution to it. There are, however, many contributing causes that can be identified and attacked, and many worthy experiments in sustainability are under way or envisioned, and worth supporting. 82 At their best, bioregional deep ecology movements represent a morally laudatory humility and compassion. Their activists are among the most passionate defenders of life on Earth. Stripped of overbroad critiques and simplistic prescriptions, their insights can be bedrock for the construction of Green social philosophy. They should be welcomed into the sustainability debate, along with the raucous chorus of new and old environmental philosophies, traditional religions, diverse political theories, and nature religions. Perhaps in this stew of rapidly mutating and cross-fertilizing political life and thought, we can find hope and take heart. Notes 1. What seems essential in the deep ecology literature (see the essay by Eric Katz, chapter 2 in this volume) is not in the deep ecology movement. 2. See the introduction to this volume. 3. This formulation has been synthesized from dozens of similar articulations found within deep ecology groups and the corresponding literature. Some deep ecologists prefer
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the term "ecocentrism" to "biocentrism," asserting they are concerned with ecosystems as wholes, not only with life-forms. The terms are often used interchangeably. 4. As Warwick Fox argues in Toward a Transpersonal Ecology (Boston: Shambhala, 1990). 5. Only two years after Naess began speaking of "deep ecology," George Sessions blamed Judeo-Christianity for sponsoring anti-Nature behaviors and ignoring the anti-anthropocentric insights of postsixteenth-century natural science; see George Sessions, "Anthropocentrism and the Environmental Crisis," Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 2 (1974): 1 12. He wrote, "Western ethical systems which portray humans as being of ultimate value in the universe are only a manifestation of the anthropocentric cosmologies within which they have developed. The entire humanistic approach to Nature displays a profound ignorance and insensitivity to contemporary cosmological and ecological conceptions of man's place in nature" (p. 10). In "Earth bonding," Earth First! 3 (1982): 13, 21, Bill Devall argued similarly, criticizing Christianity for its war against paganism and environmentalists for undue preoccupation with Western rationality. 6. Sessions first asserted that Spinoza's pantheism better fits contemporary scientific understandings and properly overturns Western anthropocentrism in "Anthropocentrism and the Environmental Crisis" (p. 9). Soon afterward he expanded this argument in "Spinoza and Jeffers on Man in Nature," Inquiry 20 (1977): 481 528, specifically criticizing the "Judeo-Christian tradition" for ''the demise of pantheism and the desacralization of Nature" (p. 482) while discussing similar tendencies in Western philosophy. 7. Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1944). "Philosophia Perennisthe phrase was coined by Leibniz; but the thingthe metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all beingthe thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the Perennial Philosophy may be found among the traditional lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions" (p. vii). 8. The initial passage of Sessions's "Spinoza and Jeffers on Man in Nature" provides an excellent early example of the type of argument widely held by deep ecologists: "Modern Western society has experienced a profound failure of religious, philosophical, and moral leadership. A more-or-less continuous minority tradition in the West, more in keeping with the great religions of the East . . . might have provided leadership . . . but it has not done so. This is a tradition, both its Eastern and Western versions, which Aldous Huxley [and] Leibniz before him called the 'perennial philosophy'. Most of the hunting and gathering societies . . . have been guided by religions which were part of this tradition. And in the civilized West, a tenuous thread [of Perennial philosophy] can be drawn" (p. 481). Sessions then mentions several pre-Enlightenment philosophers and theologians, including St. Francis, and more recent thinkers, such as "Spinoza, Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Lauren Eisley, Gary Snyder, Paul Shepard, [and] Arne Naess." Despite differences, Sessions continues, "This minority tradition could have provided the West
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with a healthy basis for realistic portrayal of the balance and interconnectedness of three artificially separate components (God/Nature/Man) of an ultimately seamless and inseparable Whole. It is this basis that we need now. It means rejecting the dominant Western paradigm of the God/Nature/Man relationship and the individual, and societal divisions, programs, values, and actions which are a result of this paradigm; all of which are leading human societies and the biosphere, as we know it, to destruction" (pp. 481 482). 9. Devall, "Earth bonding." Specifically, he praised Native American, New Age, and ecopsychology subcultures for fostering Earth-beneficent consciousness change, mentioning Gary Snyder, Dolores LaChapelle, Paul Shepard, Sun Bear, and ecopsychology pioneer Robert Greenway. Oddly, Devall later asserted, in a review of my Ecological Resistance Movements, that deep ecology should not be considered a form of nature mysticism. See Devall's "How Radical and Deep the Resistance?," The Trumpeter 12 (Fall 1995): 201 203; and my rejoinder, "Ecological Resistance Movements; Not Always Deep but if Deep, Religious," The Trumpeter 13 (Spring 1996): 98 103. 10. See Bron Taylor, "Evoking the Ecological Self: Art as Resistance to the War on Nature," Peace Review: The International Quarterly of World Peace 5 (1993): 225 230. 11. Gary Snyder, "Four Changes," in his Turtle Island (New York: New Directions, 1969), pp. 91 114. Here Snyder asserted the intrinsic value of all species and stressed the importance of evolution and "biological diversity," in the earliest use of this phrase that I have found anywhere (p. 108). He also urged a dramatic reduction in human numbers and consumption, likening the growth of industrial society to a "cancer" on the planet. This may be the first such use of this now common metaphor. 12. Ibid., p. 106. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., p. 107. 15. Ibid., p. 110. 16. Shepard's most important early books are The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game (New York: Scribner's, 1973) and Nature and Madness (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1982). See especially Nature and Madness, where he asserts that the process of domestication makes animals and humans alike "infantile" while fostering social hierarchy and eroding the human perception of a sacred world (pp. 35 39, 113 114, 171 n. 2). In Coming Home to the Pleistocene (San Francisco: Island Press, 1998), p. 132, he seems to soften his position, asserting that genetically we remain wild, even when we become conditioned to comfortable and domesticated landscapes. When I first interviewed him, Earth First! cofounder and deep ecology advocate Dave Foreman singled out Shepard's work as very influential. (Many Earth First!ers share John Muir's contempt for sheep, sometimes quoting his description of them as "hooved locusts.") In The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 110 11, 267, 439 nn. 84, 86, Max Oelschlaeger asserts that this type of view was articulated initially by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 1778), who in turn directly influenced Gary Snyder. See Gary Snyder, Earth House
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Hold: Technical Notes and Queries to Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries (New York: New Directions, 1977), pp. 118 122. Shepard was influenced especially by Nigel Calder, Eden Was No Garden: An Inquiry into the Environment of Man (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967); Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine, 1968); Peter Ucko and G. W. Dimbleby, eds., The Domestication and Exploitation of Plants and Animals (Chicago: Aldine, 1969); and Morris Berman, The Reenachantment of the World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). Gary Snyder made comments akin to Shepard's pioneering "ecopsychology" and suggested that human emotional health depends on finding an ecological identity through "psychological techniques for creating an awareness of 'self' which includes the social and natural environment" (Turtle Island, p. 101). 17. Shepard, Nature and Madness, pp. 37, 22 23; Coming Home, pp. 81 103. 18. See Shepard, Coming Home, pp. 109 129, for example. "Pastoralism was one of the two great paths leading into the civilized world, and without its myths, traditions, and economy the modern world would be incomprehensible. The slow fusion of the earliest sedentary agriculture and the emergent ideology of the pastoralists between about six thousand and two thousand years ago gave us the first modern states. The long shadow thrown over the earth's ecology is that of a man on a horse, the domestic animal which, more than any other consolidated centralized power, energized the worldwide debacle of the skinning of the earth, the creation of modern war, and the ideological disassociation from the earthbound realm" (p. 109). 19. See Shepard, Coming Home, p. 103. The subjunctive tense here contradicts the unambiguous conviction of the rest of his work that promotes this monocasual explanation. 20. Here, quoting Hugh Iltis, in Coming Home, p. 136. 21. Ibid. 22. My interview with Gary Snyder at Davis, CA, June 7, 1993. 23. See Shepard, Coming Home, p. 107. 24. For how earlier environmentalists, including John Muir and Henry David Thoreau, expressed similar ideas, see Bron Taylor, "Resacralizing Earth: Pagan Environmentalism and the Restoration of Turtle Island," in American Sacred Space, edited by David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 97 151. 25. For a representative recent example of such a perspective, see "Agriculture and Biodiversity Rewilding," a special issue of Wild Earth 8 (1988): 29 77, especially Catherine Badgley, "Can Agriculture and Biodiversity Coexist?" (pp. 39 47). She draws on the latest scientific evidence to advance the radical Green critique of agriculture. 26. Scholarly introductions to bioregionalism can be found in Bron Taylor, "Bioregionalism: An Ethics of Loyalty to Place," Landscape Journal forthcoming, 2000, and Michael V. McGinnis, Bioregionalism (New York and London: Routledge, 1999). 27. See Allan Van Newkirk's term-coining article, "Bioregions: Towards Bioregional Strategy for Human Cultures," Environmental Conservation 2 (1975): 108 119. Van Newkirk subsequently had little to do with the movement he named. 28. In addition to Gary Snyder, among the most influential early bioregionalists were
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Raymond Dasmann, Freeman House, and Peter Berg. See Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann, "Reinhabiting California," The Ecologist 7 (1977): 399 401; Van Andruss et al., eds. Home!: A Bioregional Reader (Philadelphia: New Society, 1990); Christopher Plant and Judith Plant, eds., Turtle Talk: Voices for a Sustainable Future (Philadelphia: New Society, 1990); and Peter Berg, ed., Reinhabiting a Separate Country (San Francisco: Planet Drum, 1978). Other primary sources include Kirkpatrick Sale, Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision (Philadelphia: New Society, 1991); and Freeman House, Totem Salmon (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999). 29. See Bron Taylor, "Earth First!: From Primal Spirituality to Ecological Resistance," in This Sacred Earth, edited by Roger Gottlieb (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 545 557. See also Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness, for an excellent example of the kind of argument inspired and influenced by theorists critical of agriculture and monotheism, such as Shepard and Snyder. Oelschlaeger urges a return to a Paleolithic consciousness that sees humans as one with nature, fusing this perception onto contemporary cosmological understandings. 30. Many deep ecologists are influenced by the school of thought known as "eco-or trans-personal psychology," which Shepard's Nature and Madness helped inspire. For the best introduction to this literature, see Theodore Roszak, Mary Gomes, and Allen Kranner, eds., Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1995). 31. See Shepard, Coming Home, pp. 107 108. 32. As Eric Katz well argues in chapter 2 of this volume. 33. For an excellent introduction to the problem of identifying the natural, see William Cronon, Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (New York: Norton, 1995). 34. For an excellent recent study on environmental attitudes in America, see Willet Kempton, James Boster, and Jennifer Hartley, Environmental Values in American Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995); and on the role of passion and religion, see Bron Taylor, "Beliefs in Practice" in The Ecologist, 27:1 (1997): 38 39. 35. Bron Taylor, ed., Ecological Resistance Movements: The Global Emergence of Radical and Popular Environmentalism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995). Many observers note, moreover, that because women usually have greater roles in subsistence production and religious nurturing than men do (often in part because men are forced to leave their birthplaces to seek wage income elsewhere), they tend to be more aware of the direct threats posed by ecological deterioration. Consequently, more women than men tend to participate in environmental action and work to defend and restore ecologically sustainable, agrarian livelihoods. See the contributions in Ecological Resistance Movements by Lois Lorentzen, Vikram Akula, Ben Wisner, and Bob Edwards, for example, as well as Tariq Banuri and Frédéerique Apffel Marglin, Who Will Save the Forests?: Knowledge, Power, and Environmental Destruction (London: Zed, 1993); Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development (London: Zed, 1988); Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Yash Tandon, "Village Contradictions in Africa," in Global Ecology: A New Arena of
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Political Conflict, edited by Wolfgang Sachs (London: Zed; Halifax, NS: Fernwood, 1993), pp. 208 223. 36. In addition to the researchers cited in the previous note, others have come to similar conclusions, such as John Friedman and Haripriya Rangan, eds., In Defense of Livelihood: Comparative Studies in Environmental Action (West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 1993); Robin Broad and John Cavanagh, Plundering Paradise (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Hilary Tovey, "Environmentalism in Ireland," International Sociology 8 (1993): 413 430; Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993); and, more recently, Barbara Rose Johnston, ed., Life and Death Matters: Human Rights and the Environment at the End of the Millennium (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira, 1997). 37. See the articles by Bob Edwards, Larry Lohmann, Vikram Akula, Heidi Hadsell, and Al Gedicks in Bron Taylor, ed., Ecological Resistance Movements. 38. See the articles by Ben Wisner and Yash Tandon in ibid. 39. A "commons" is land to which a community has access; it may be community-owned or controlled. The best introduction I have found dealing with commons issues was written by the editors of The Ecologist and republished as Whose Common Future? Reclaiming the Commons (Philadelphia: New Society, 1994). 40. This is especially true since ecological understandings of how resource scarcity exacerbates all the destructive dynamics that accompany the global extension of market capitalism penetrate such movements. David Carruthers,
, a political scientist at California State University, San Diego, argues that although the "environmental justice" rubric originated in the North, like the term "sustainability," it is increasingly and effectively appropriated by Southern environmental movements. See David Carruthers, "The Globalization of Environmental Justice: Changing the Face of Third World Environmental Resistance," presented at the Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association, Los Angeles, March 19 21, 1998; and ''Environmental Justice on the Borderline: Defending Workers and Community in Mexico's Maquiladoras," presented at the Conference on Environmental Justice: Global Ethics for the 21st Century, University of Melbourne, Australia, October 1 3, 1997. For an excellent article explaining how "sustainability" serves increasingly as an "ideological resource" for popular environmental movements, see Heidi Hadsell, "Profits, Parrots, Peons: Ethical Perplexities in the Amazon," in B. Taylor, Ecological Resistance Movements, pp. 70 86. 41. George Sessions, for example, fervently believes that environmentalism must be grounded in ecocentric values because with anthropocentrism (including when it is found in "Green" social justice movements), human concerns ultimately trump concern for environmental sustainability. See Sessions's "Radical Environmentalism in the 90s," Wild Earth 2:3 (1992): 64 70; and "The Sierra Club, Immigration & the Future of California," Wild Duck Review 4:1 (1998): 24 25. Although Sessions can provide examples as evidence, he overreaches in making into a kind of social law what might be a demonstrable tendency. Yet it seems to many, and to me, that a fully informed anthropocentric environmentalist would adopt, for prudential and human-concerned reasons, a comprehensive precautionary principle in defense of biodiversity. And Sessions's argu-
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ment seems unable to account for dramatic environmental protection movements outside of North America that, although not ecocentric as he understands the term, are every bit as engaged in environmental protection as are Northern deep ecologists. It is also good to remember that environmental resistance in Western industrial countries has also been strongly influenced by progressive social criticism. Its participants are often ecologized members of the left's peace and social justice movements. See the articles by Wolfgang Rüdig and Bob Edwards in my Ecological Resistance Movements; Robert Gottlieb's Forcing the Spring; and Mark Dowie's Losing Ground (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995). Sessions complains that Gottlieb and Dowie inappropriately pressure Green environmentalists to adopt an urban, "environmental justice" agenda that banishes ecology to the margins. It is true that environmental movements need not always march under an environmental justice banner and that it is sometimes counterproductive to do so. But environmental justice, and even the more problematic term "sustainable development," which can be an oxymoron, may instead refer to a vision of people living and making a living in a place without degrading its ecological diversity and vitality. This would in most cases, of course, require a reconstruction of livelihoods along greener lines and a reduction of acquisitive goals and human numbers. But understood in this way, we can conclude that there will be no environmental sustainability without environmental justice. This should be painfully obvious when ranchers kill wolves reintroduced into the American Southwest, fearing their livelihoods are threatened. Put differently, there seems to be a dualistic distinction between livelihoods and ecosystem viability underlying Sessions's critique of the environmental justice and sustainability rubrics. 42. Like Gandhi, social activists increasingly recognize that only grief will follow if all marginalized people seek to follow the West's path of natural resource imperialism to development. For representative quotes expressing Gandhi's views that industrial societies are unsustainable and depend on imperialism, see Ramachandra Guha, "The Malign Encounter: The Chipko Movement and Competing Visions of Nature," in Banuri and Marglin, Who Will Save the Forests?, p. 98. It is obvious to most within popular movements that large-scale hydroelectric dams benefit elites while exacerbating inequalities; that they destroy communities and livelihoods; and that commercial forestry is likewise a disaster, uprooting people, eroding soil, polluting water, and destroying fisheries. See ibid., pp. 82, 98; and Broad and Cavanagh, Plundering Paradise, pp. 56 63. Dieter Rücht, meanwhile, has found that anti-industrial attitudes are increasingly widespread among environmentalists from many cultures, dividing them into radical and reformist camps; see his "Environmental Movement Organizations in West Germany and France: Structure and Interorganizational Relations," International Social Movement Research 2 (1989): 61 94. 43. For a good example of such analysis, see Haripriya Rangan's analysis of how such a view animated some of the earliest Chipko actions, "Romancing the Environment: Popular Environmental Action in the Garhwal Himalayas" in Friedmann and Rangan, In Defense of Livelihood, pp. 155 181. 44. And except for the few (usually indigenous) groups still engaged in foraging life-ways, the survival strategy considered to cohere with growing environmental awareness
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often involves efforts to return to preindustrial agricultural and pastoral lifeways, not a rejection of them. 45. As discussed previously in notes 6 8 and the corresponding text, the best-known architects and popularizers of deep ecology speak of a "perennial philosophy," a nature mysticism promoting reverence for life. They assert that such philosophy is a universal perception not only in Eastern and indigenous religions, but also among many of the dissident mystical branches of the Western religious and philosophical tradition. From this they can argue that there are many paths to deep ecological consciousness. As documented earlier, however, deep ecology writers generally express strong antipathy toward Christianity and Western philosophy. Such antipathy is equally strong throughout most of the grassroots deep ecology movement. And the leading American deep ecology advocates have done little, to my knowledge, to moderate such attitudes within the deep ecology movement or to encourage participation in it by monotheists. Indeed, arguments like those documented in the previous notes, and Lynn White's now famous argument blaming Christianity (and other monotheistic religions) for fostering nature-destructive attitudes, although viewed as seriously flawed and overly simplistic by cultural historians, are widely believed within the deep ecology movement. Moreover, White's call for a revival of Franciscan-style Christianity is rarely mentioned by deep ecologists. See Lynn White, Jr., "The Historic Roots of Our Ecological Crisis," Science 155 (1967): 1203 1207. A notable exception to this general pattern may be found in the work of Max Oelschlaeger. After writing The Idea of Wilderness and promoting a deep ecological appreciation for the sacredness of wild nature in it, he reached out to Christians in Caring for Creation: An Ecumenical Approach to the Environmental Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). 46. For example, the extent of the long-term indigenous management of the Americas "has been routinely underestimated," according to Gary Paul Nabhan, in an excellent and well-nuanced introduction to the discussion of Native American impacts on the environment. See his "Cultural Parallax in Viewing North American Habitats," in Reinventing Nature?: Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction, edited by Michael Soulé and Gary Lease (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1995) pp. 87 101. For additional articles exploring the impacts on nature of indigenous peoples and their cultures, see K. Butzer, "The Americas Before and After 1492: Current Geographical Research," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82 (1992): 345 368; William Denevan, "The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82 (1992): 369 385; Calvin Martin, "The American Indian as Miscast Ecologist," in Ecological Consciousness: Essays from the Earthday X Colloquium, edited by Robert C. Schultz and Donald Worster (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1981); Calvin Martin, Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Paul Martin and R. G. Klein, eds., Quaternary Extinctions: A Prehistoric Revolution (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1984); Thomas Overholt, ''American Indians as 'Natural Ecologists,"' American Indian Journal 5 (1979): 9 16; Kent Redford, "The Ecologically Noble Savage," Cultural Survival Quarterly 15:1 (1991): 46 48; David Suzuki and Peter Knudtson, Wisdom of the Elders: Honoring Sacred Native Visions of Nature (New York: Bantam, 1992).
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47. Based on empirical studies, Steven Kellert argued, for example, that conceptions of nature originating in the Far East are "highly abstract and idealized" and "rarely provide . . .support for nature conservation." "Moreover traditional Eastern attitudes toward nature often encourage passivity, even fatalism, toward the natural world depicted as all-powerful and beyond human capacity to control or grasp, let alone conserve or regulate'' (pp. 116 117). Kellert concluded that "Neither Eastern nor Western societies are intrinsically inferior or superior in their perspectives of nature" (p. 118), and that idea differences between East and West do not play the decisive role often attributed to them. See Stephen Kellert, "Concepts of Nature East and West," in Soulé and Lease, Reinventing Nature?, pp. 103 121. Yi Fu Tuan similarly resists those who view Far Eastern cultures as inherently Green; see "Discrepancies Between Environmental Attitude and Behaviour: Examples from Europe and China," The Canadian Geographer 12 (1968): 176 191. J. Baird Callicott and Roger Ames criticize Tuan's argument, insisting that Asian thought expresses a more nature-beneficent worldview than do Western religion and philosophy. See their "Epilogue: On the Relation of Idea and Action," in Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought, edited by Callicott and Ames (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), pp. 279 289. 48. About five years after Lynn White's article was published, Arnold Toynbee agreed with him that monotheism is responsible for the environmental crisis. Unlike White, however, Toynbee promoted pantheism and the religions of the Far East as the remedy. See his "The Religious Background of the Present Environmental Crisis," International Journal of Environmental Studies 3 (1972): 141 146. 49. Of course, if religion is malleable, it may evolve in directions we deplore, including environmentally destructive ones. A number of writers, for example, point to links between nature-oriented religion and Nazi ideology, expressing fear of the reactionary potential of Green religion. See Michael Zimmerman, "Possible Political Problems of Earth-Based Religiosity," chapter 9 in this volume and his Contesting Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) and "Ecofascism: A Threat to American Environmentalism?," in The Ecological Community, edited by Roger Gottlieb (New York and London: Routledge 1996), pp. 229 254. See also Luc Ferry, The New Ecological Order, translated by Carol Volk (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and John Clark's "The French Take on Environmentalism," Terra Nova 1:1 (1996): 112 119, in which he argues that Ferry provides "absolutely no support to his thesis that authoritarianism is implicit in the ecology movement." Clark argues that Ferry failed to note that the Nazi view of nature was thoroughly anthropocentric and instrumental. Jeffery Kaplan provides a significant counterpoint, demonstrating in "Savitri Devi and the National Socialist Religion of Nature," The Pomengranate 7 (1999): 4 12, that some Nazis promoted species egalitarianism. Kaplan concludes that in Savitri Devi's Green religion, "Nature serves not only as plea for humanity to move beyond the conception of dominion over nature, but as a bridge between the worlds of deep ecology and animal liberation and the adherents of racialist neo-Nazi beliefs." These sources demonstrate that Green religions, including deep ecology, are capable of evolving in reactionary ways.
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My fieldwork-based view is that deep ecology subcultures are unlikely to provide fertile ground for reactionary politics; see my "Diggers, Wolves, Ents, Elves and Expanding Universes: Global Bricolage and the Question of Violence Within the Subcultures of Radical Environmentalism," in Cult, Anti-Cult and the Cultic Milieu: A ReExamination, 2 vol., edited by Jeffery Kaplan and Hélène Lööw (Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2000), and "Religion, Violence, and Radical Environmentalism: From Earth First! to the Unabomber to the Earth Liberation Front," Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence 10:4 (1998): 1 42. 50. One example of such malleability can be found at Genesis Farm in New Jersey, an increasingly influential Catholic community and ecological learning center, led by Dominican Sister Miriam Therese MacGillis. The worldview and ritualizing that are evolving at the Farm fuse in a novel way monotheistic religion (Roman Catholicism), ritualizing celebrating the sacredness of the Earth and designed to deepen people's felt connections to it, and newly consecrated scientific cosmogonies about how the world came to be the way it is today. Some of this religious worldview resembles that of deep ecology and the bioregional movement, borrowed indirectly through Thomas Berry, the priest most responsible for the Creation Spirituality movement. Interestingly, especially for the current argument, some in this new religious movement express a panentheistic theology: the idea that God (or the Holy Spirit) is present in all creation (not that nature is God or divine, as in pantheism, which Catholicism considers a heresy). For a fascinating study, see Sarah McFarland Taylor, "The Greening of Catholicism: Negotiating Religion and Culture at Genesis Farm" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1999). 51. A range of research illustrates such assertions, including Bron Taylor, Ecological Resistance Movements; Friedman and Rangan, In Defense of Livelihood; and Broad and Cavanagh, Plundering Paradise. 52. See the articles and many references in these introductory books: Roger Gottlieb, ed., This Sacred Earth (New York and London: Routledge, 1996); David Kinsley, Ecology and Religion: Ecological Spirituality in CrossCultural Perspective (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1995); Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, eds., Worldviews and Ecology: Religion, Philosophy, and the Environment (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994); and Sean McDonagh, The Greening of the Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990). 53. This quote is from the second working draft, January 1999. For the earlier "Benchmark Draft," see "The Earth Charter," Earth Ethics 8:2 3 (1997): 1,3. It contained some language that seemed to endorse Gaian pantheism: "Earth is our home and home to all living beings. Earth itself is alive. We are part of an evolving universe. Human beings are members of an interdependent community of life with a magnificent diversity of life forms and cultures. We are humbled before the beauty of the Earth and share a reverence for life and the sources of our being. We give thanks for the heritage that we have received from past generations and embrace our responsibilities to present and future generations . . . . We the peoples of the world commit ourselves to action guided by the following interrelated principles: 1. Respect Earth and all life. Earth, each life form, and all living beings possess intrinsic value and warrant respect independently of their utilitarian value to humanity" (p. 1). In the next draft the intrinsic value claim was retained but the controversial pantheistic language was expunged.
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54. See especially the articles by Larry Lohmann and Ben Wisner in Bron Taylor, Ecological Resistance Movements. It is not surprising that bioregional deep ecologists from the industrialized West would tend to extend dichotomies they find in their own cultures more widely. Sometimes such dichotomies can have interpretive value. They can, however, fail to grasp the complexity of the variety of cultural variables that shape human ideals and behavior. Dichotomies that may be quite illuminating in Western, affluent countries might be misleading in other regions and offensive to those in the regions to which they are applied. Lohmann shows that in rural Thailand, for example, villagers take a decidedly pragmatic approach to the land and forests, in ways that would make many deep ecologists cringe. They would probably be viewed as "regrettably 'anthropocentric,"' Lohmann thinks, "and their preoccupation with agriculture and ambivalence toward 'wild nature' [would] suggest a lack of appreciation of the intrinsic value of plants and animals . . .. [and a lack of] sufficient reverence for untouched nature" (p. 124). But this pragmatism does not mean, Lohmann concludes, that the villagers "treat their forests, streams, animals, or rice as instruments [or] place humans at the center of the universe . . .. Rather, forests, streams, animals, and rice are valued for themselves, treated as things which have intrinsic value and in some sense even as persons who can benefit humans but who if abused will also punish them" (p. 125). Lohmann urges us to leave behind "the Western obsession with dividing attitudes into anthropocentric and ecocentric,'' and concludes that this is essential if we are to build crosscultural coalitions and solidarity among people hoping to preserve commons regimes and promote ecologically appropriate and just lifeways. 55. For detailed argument along these lines and further citations, see Bron Taylor, "Bioregionalism." 56. Dan Deudney, "In Search of Gaian Politics" in Bron Taylor, ed., Ecological Resistance Movements, p. 294 57. Ibid., p. 293. 58. A. L. Kroeber, Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947). My impression here is based on a June 7, 1993, interview with Snyder in Davis, CA, when he mentioned how profoundly Krober's work had influenced him. 59. Bioregionalists often draw on the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin for this assumption; for a criticism of such thinking, see Paul Wapner, Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 38. 60. Biologist Michael Soulé puts it harshly: "Most interactions between individuals and species are selfish not symbiotic." See his "The Social Siege of Nature," in Soulé and Lease, eds., Reinventing Nature?, p. 143. 61. Wapner, Environmental Activism, p. 38. 62. Deudney, "In Search of Gaian Politics," p. 293. 63. Ibid., pp. 293 294. 64. Andrew B. Schmookler, The Parable of the Tribes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984; repr. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).
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65. This argument is from Andrew B. Schmookler, "Schmookler on Anarchy," Earth First! 6:5 (1986): 22. It led to a long debate in this radical environmental journal. Few of the anarchistic bioregionalists would cede ground on the necessity of government. Interestingly, in his editor's note in response to this article, Earth First! cofounder Dave Foreman agreed: "True: our fall was our 'emergence out of the natural order.' It is fortunate for us that the framers of the US Constitution understood this paradoxical problem: that is why we in this society, for all its glaring imperfections, can freely discuss the evils that the play of power produces around us, and freely search for solutions." Before long, Foreman was arrested and convicted in an ecotage (ecosabotage) case. He later left the movement he cofounded, partly due to his disgust with the rigid anarchists increasingly drawn to it. 66. This incorrectly assumes, he continues, that "the problems . . . are not acute, . . . that humanity has decades or [even] centuries to split itself up into small communities and to begin to tackle the causes of environmental decay." See Wapner, Environmental Activism, p. 37. 67. On a positive note, the San Francisco-based Foundation for Deep Ecology has created a Forum on Globalization that is providing a venue for activists and intellectuals to strategize how to educate and resist such destructive trends. 68. For discussions of trends and possibilities along these lines, see Karen Litfin, ed., The Greening of Sovereignty in World Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998); Ronnie Lipschutz, ed., Global Civil Society and Global Environmental Governance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996); Ronnie Lipschutz and Ken Conca, eds., The State and Social Power in Global Environmental Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Sheldon Kamieniecki, ed., Environmental Politics in the International Arena (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993). 69. This is nowhere more clear than in the case of federally owned land in the West that would have suffered worse environmental degradation had not the American people, through their federal government, established and retained title to many lands. For example from Australia, where federal power saved huge tracts of Tasmanian forest despite the prevailing sentiment among Tasmanians, see P. R. Hay, "Vandals at the Gate: The Tasmanian Greens and the Perils of Sharing Power," in Green Politics Two, edited by Wolfgang Rüdig (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), pp. 86 110. 70. There are relevant differences, of course. Bioregional localism and ecosystem integrity, not country-or stateoriented localism, guides bioregional decentralist advocacy. 71. As Ronnie Lipschutz correctly observes, "State sponsorship [is] an attempt to catch up with global civil society in California, whose members have undertaken hundreds of small-scale environmental protection and restoration projects." See Ronnie Lipschutz, "Guardians of the Forest: Renegotiating Resource Regimes in Northern California," in Global Civil Society and Global Environmental Governance, edited by Ronnie Lipschutz, pp. 81 125, quote on p. 83. See also Gary Snyder, "Coming in to the Watershed," Wild Earth (spec. iss. on the Wildlands Project, 1992): 65 70; and Bron Taylor, "Bioregionalism.'' 72. Snyder, "Coming in to the Watershed," p. 67.
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73. Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann, "Reinhabiting California." 74. Raymond Dasmann, "Bioregion," in Conservation and Environmentalism: An Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Paelhke (New York and London: Garland, 1995) pp. 83 85. 75. Deudney, "In Search of Gaian Politics," pp. 289 290. 76. Dan Deudney, "Global Village Sovereignty: Intergenerational Sovereign Publics, Federal-Republican Earth Constitutions, and Planetary Identities," in The Greening of Sovereignty, edited by Karen Litfin, pp. 299 323. 77. Ibid. 78. Deudney, "In Search of Gaian Politics." 79. Dan Deudney, "Global Environmental Rescue and the Emergence of World Domestic Politics," in Lipschutz and Conca, The State and Social Power, pp. 288 305, quote at 294. 80. Deudney approvingly cites James Lovelock's rejection of a sacred/secular dualism, and says Lovelock "articulates the central claim of the Earth science-religion fusion: 'Thinking of the Earth as alive makes it seem, on happy days, in the right places, as if the whole planet were celebrating a sacred ceremony."' See Deudney, "Global Village Sovereignty," p. 317. 81. Ibid., p. 318. 82. For an important argument along these lines, see Anthony Weston, "Before Environmental Ethics," Environmental Ethics 14:4 (Winter 1992): 321 328.
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van Buitenen, J. A. B. Ramanuja * on the Bhagavadgita*: A Condensed Rendering of his Gitabhasya* with Copious Notes and an Introduction. 2nd ed. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1974. van der Steen, Wim J. ''The Demise of Monism and Pluralism in Environmental Ethics." Environmental Ethics 17:2 (1995): 209 220. van Newkirk, Allan. "Bioregions: Towards Bioregional Strategy for Human Cultures." Environmental Conservation 2 (1975): 108 119. Varner, Gary E. "No Holism Without Pluralism." Environmental Ethics 13:2 (1991): 175 179. Vidal, John. "No Welcome in the Valleys." The Guardian, August 5, 1995, p. 23. Vogel, Steven. Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Vogel, Steven. "Habermas and the Ethics of Nature." In The Ecological Community, pp. 175 192. Edited by Roger S. Gottlieb. New York and London: Routledge, 1996. Volosinov, V. N. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. First published 1929. Waddell, Norman, and Masao Abe. "Shobogenzo* Buddha Nature (Part I)." The Eastern Buddhist 8:2 (1975): 94 112. Waddell, Norman, and Masao Abe. "Shobogenzo Buddha Nature (Part II)." The Eastern Buddhist 9:1 (1976): 87 102. Walsh, Roger. "Developmental and Evolutionary Synthesis in the Recent Writings of Ken Wilber." ReVision 18:4 (Spring 1996): 9 24. Wapner, Paul. Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Warren, Karen, ed. Ecological Feminism. New York: Routledge, 1994. Weber, Thomas. Hugging the Trees: The Story of the Chipko Movement. Delhi: Viking, 1988. Wenz, Peter. Environmental Justice. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988. Wenz, Peter. "Minimal, Moderate, and Extreme Moral Pluralism." Environmental Ethics 15:1 (1993): 61 74. Weschler, Lawrence. Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: The Art of Robert Irwin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Weston, Anthony. "Before Environmental Ethics." Environmental Ethics 14:4 (Winter 1992): 321 338. Weston, Anthony. "Self-Validating Reduction: Toward a Theory of Environmental Devaluation." Environmental Ethics 18 (1996): 115 132. White, Lynn, Jr. "The Historic Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis." Science 155 (1967): 1203 1207. Wienpahl, Paul. The Radical Spinoza. New York: New York University Press, 1979. Wilber, Ken. No Boundary. Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1979.
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Wilber, Ken. Up from Eden: A Transpersonal View of Human Evolution. Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1981. Wilber, Ken. Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality. Boston: Shambhala, 1995. Wilber, Ken. A Brief History of Everything. Boston: Shambhala, 1996. Wilber, Ken. "The Pre/Trans Fallacy." In Eye to Eye: The Quest for the New Paradigm, pp. 198 243. Boston: Shambhala, 1996. Wilber, Ken. The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad. Boston: Shambhala, 1997. Witoszek, Nina ed. Rethinking Deep Ecology. Oslo: University of Oslo Center for Environment and Development, 1996. Witoszek, Nina, and Andrew Brennan, eds. Philosophical Dialogues: Arne Naess and the Progress of Philosophy. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. Wittbecker, Alan. "Deep Anthropology, Ecology, and Human Order." Environmental Ethics 8 (1986): 261 270. Young, Iris Marion. "The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference." In Feminism/Postmodernism, pp. 300 323. Edited by Linda J. Nicholson. London: Routledge, 1990. Young, Iris Marion. "House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme." In Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy and Policy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. pp. 134 164. Zimmerman, Michael E. "Feminism, Deep Ecology and Environmental Ethics." Environmental Ethics 9 (1987): 21 44. Zimmerman, Michael E. "The Thorn in Heidegger's Side: The Question of National Socialism." Philosophical Forum 20:4 (Summer 1989): 326 365. Zimmerman, Michael E. Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Zimmerman, Michael E. Contesting Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and Post-modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Zimmerman, Michael E. "Ecofascism: A Threat to American Environmentalism." Social Theory and Practice 21:2 (1995): 207 238. Reprinted in The Ecological Community, pp. 229 254. Edited by Roger S. Gottlieb. New York: Routledge, 1996. Zimmerman, Michael E. "Ontical Craving vs. Ontological Desire." In From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire, pp. 501 523. Edited by Babette E. Babich. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995. Zimmerman, Michael E. "A Transpersonal Diagnosis of the Ecological Crisis." ReVision 18:4 (Spring 1996): 38 48.
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INDEX A Abe, Masao, 258 259 Abram, David, xiv, 157 Activism, 66, 86 88, 269 270 Advertising, 218, 226, 230n29 Africa, 73, 141 142 Agriculture, critique of, 272 273, 277, 290n18, 291n29 Ammons, A. R., 156 Animism, 169, 271 Anthropocentrism, 17 18, 39, 44, 92, 125, 142, 297n54. See also Nonanthropocentrism as dominant world view, 169, 270 as implied in deep ecology, xvi, 33 38 as opposed to deep ecology, xiii, 21, 53, 260, 270 274, 277 as principle of action, 278 279 Anti-modernism, 202 205, 212 Anti-Semitism, 172, 190 Apron diagram, 10, 19, 270 Asceticism, 232 Asian philosophy, 197 Atman *, 75, 235, 243, 250n57, 253 Australia, 43, 66, 119 B Bahro, Rudolf, 101, 113 Bakhtin, M. M., 207 Barrès, Maurice, xvii, 85, 92 99 Bauman, Zygmunt, 73 Beautiful actions, 33, 38, 40n36, 99, 109 110, 263 264 file:///C|/...%20Surface%20-%20Critical%20Essays%20in%20the%20Philosophy%20of%20Deep%20Ecology/files/page_321.html[9.6.2010 23:06:55]
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Belonging, 89 Bergson, Henri, 199 Berry, Wendell, 171, 272 Bhagavadgita*, xxi, 231 252 Biocentrism, 29, 270, 287n3. See also Anthropocentrism; Ecocentrism as opposed to deep ecology, 19 20. as part of deep ecology, 270, 277 Biodiversity, 284 Bioregionalism, xxi, 90, 109, 273, 281 285, 290nn26 28, 297nn54, 59 Biospherical egalitarianism, 21, 49, 197, 242 Birches, laughing, 31, 151, 155 Body, 95, 109, 180 Bookchin, Murray, 8, 14n9, 151 Brahman, 235 237 Brennan, Andrew, 23 24, 95, 126, 129, 131, 133 Brower, David, 151 Buber, Martin, 61 Buddha, 253 256 Buddha nature, 258 259 Buddhism, xxi, 136, 142, 253 267 C California, 284 Callicott, J. Baird, xviii, 23 24, 125 134, 137, 139 143, 144nn l, 9, 145nn20, 23, 146n31, 147n40, 148n51, 267n39 Calvin, John, 169 Calvino, Italo, 157 160 Campbell, Joseph, 274 Capitalism, 79, 283 Carnap, Rudolf, 60
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Carr, David, 206 Causality, 116 Cheney, Jim, 215 216 Childhood, 163 Christianity, 142, 169 172, 196, 208 209, 256, 294n45 Clarinet, 261 Clark, John, xv, 3 15 Class, 108 Collective action, 225 Colonialism, 66 67, 278 Communism, 170, 172 Community, 45, 54, 128, 132, 136 Complexity, 20, 45, 276 Concrete contents, xix, 31, 151 168, 255, 261. See also Deep ecology; Ontology of gestalts; Gestalt thinking Consciousness, 49, 95, 186, 223, 274, 277, 279 Conservation vs. preservation, 44 Consumption, xx, 215 230, 283 Convergence thesis, 12, 131 Copernicus, 169, 183 Corealization, 260, 262. See also Self-realization Covens, 187 Coyotes, 165 Cultural degeneration, 175 Curtin, Deane, xxi, 253 267 Cyborgism, 204 D Darwin, Charles, 23, 169, 175, 196 Dasein, 175 Dasmann, Raymond, 285 de Benoist, Alain, 170
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Decentralization, 281 285 Deconstruction, 199 200 Deep ecology. See also Ecosophy T; Identification; Naess, Arne; Platform of deep ecology; Reform environmentalism; Self-realization and apron diagram of principles, 10, 19, 247n2, 270 and bioregionalism, xxi, 89 92, 109, 273 274, 281 287 and biospherical egalitarianism, 21, 49, 197 and Buddhism, xxi, 253 267 contrast to shallow ecology, ix, xii, 5, 53, 216, 255 256 definition of, ix, 18 21 and direct experience, 91, 152 156, 160 163, 223, 229n22, 257, 261 and ecology, 29 30 and Hinduism, xxi, 231 252 and holism, 20, 24 26, 28 31, 36 37 and integral nationalism, 88, 92 99 and methodological vagueness, 5 6 and music, 163 164 as movement, ix, xxi, 4, 151, 167n2, 269 299 murkiness of, 50 and narratives, 205 212 as ontological system, xiii xiv, 28, 98, 151 and ontology of gestalts, 30 31, 109, 117, 151 156 and peace and justice movements, 12 as philosophy, x, xiii, 19 21, 24, 151 and pluralism, xviii, xx, 126, 134 140, 244 and political analysis, xvii, xxi, xxiin2, 59, 70 81 and postmodernism, xix xx, 195 197, 201 205 and radical environmental philosophies, xv, 3, 7, 195 and rejection of affluence, 20, 216 219, 222 223 and social philosophy, 4, 272 279 and spirituality, xxi, 169 170, 179 194, 271 272, 279 281, 285 287 and total views, xi xii, 24
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Western bias of, 9, 67, 118, 140, 267n39 Deep green theory, xvi, 43 58 Deep positions in general, 50 52, 255 Deep questioning, 5 Deleuze, Gilles, 198 201, 212 Deloria, Vine, 78
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Derrida, Jacques, 178, 198 100 Desai, Mahadev, 241 Descartes, 255 Desire, 220, 222 227 Deudney, Daniel, 282, 285 Deutsch, Eliot, 236, 243 Devall, Bill, xiv, 49, 87, 90, 109, 170, 216, 271 Development, xxii, 279 Developmental psychology, 91 Dietz, Mary, 116 Divine potential, 190 diZirega, Gus, 74, 76, 187 188, 191 Dogen, 136, 253, 258 263 Doty, C. Stuart, 97 Drengson, Alan, xiv, 11, 90 Dryghton, 187 188 Dryzek, John 65 Dualism, 119, 276 E Earth Charter, 280, 286 Earth First!, 86, 289n16, 298n65 Eckersley, Robyn, 90, 98 Eco-impartiality, 36, 52 Ecocentrism, xiii, xxi, 4, 270, 287n3, 292n41. See also Biocentrism as different from deep ecology, 22 23 as principle of action, 277 as synonym for deep ecology, 21, 270 Ecodefense, 109 Ecofascism, 171 172. See also Fascism
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Ecofeminism, 3, 7, 107, 109, 115 124, 221, 228n18. See also Feminism and critique of liberalism, 110 113 and spirituality, 173, 184 Ecological holism, 22 23, 125 Ecological scholarship, 8 Ecological self, 98 Ecologism, 29, 279 Ecology, 29 30, 227n9 Economics, 9, 118, 217, 228n9 Ecophilosophy, xi, 108 Ecosophies, xii, 270 Ecosophy T, xx, 12, 24 25, 60, 135, 216 227, 242 246, 253 267. See also Deep ecology Ecosystem, 80, 132 Eden, 180 Eel, 261 Eight points. See Platform of deep ecology Einstein, Albert, 25 Elephants, 22, 68 Embodied materialism, xviii, 107 109, 114 124 Enlightenment, 35, 112, 221 Epics, 208 Eurocentrism, 118 Evolution, 186, 196 Expression, 155 F Fascism, 71 73, 171, 189 190, 202 Feld, Steven, 163 Feminism, xvi, xviii, 74, 108, 115 121, 173, 184 Ferry, Luc, 72, 295n49 Flatland ontology, 174 Foreman, Dave, 53, 289n16, 298n65
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Forests, 31, 47, 129, 265 Foucault, Michel, 198 Fox, Warwick, xiv, 96, 98, 135, 202, 216 France, 101 Freeden, Michael, 87 Freud, Sigmund, 175, 229n27 G Gaia hypothesis, 170, 286 Galapagos Islands, 159 Galileo, 152 Gandhi, Mohandas, 3, 38, 231, 239 245, 251n80, 253, 265, 293n42 Gare, Arran, xix, 195 214 Geden, Oliver, 172 Gender, 108, 291n35 Genesis, 136 Gestalt thinking, 31, 88, 253. See also Concrete contents; Deep ecology, ontology of gestalts Gilligan, Carol, 120 Glasser, Harold, 5 Globalization, 283 God, 174, 185, 215, 240, 271
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Goddess, 184, 271 Good and evil, 261 Gore, Al, 151 Great Chain of Being, 51 Great Smoky Mountains, 77 Great World System, 184, 209 Greater value assumption, 51, 53 Greece, 176, 206 Green ethics, 46 Green political parties, 171, 201 Grey, William, xvi, 37, 43 58 Guattari, Félix, 198 201, 212 Guha, Ramachandra, 9, 140 H Habermans, Jurgen, 203, 215 Haraway, Donna, 204 Hargrove, Eugene, 126 Hart, Mickey, 163 Hartsock, Nancy, 116 Hayek, F, 187 heaven, 184 Hegel, G. W. F, 44, 177 Heidegger, Martin, xix, 151, 154, 160, 169 197, 200 Heraclitus, 29 Herder, Johann, 196 197, 203 Herf, Jeffrey, 176 Hinduism, 231 252 Holderlin, H., 177 Holding, 115 117 Holism, 20, 28, 36, 125
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Home, 91, 285 Hoyle, Fred, 54 Human survival, 53 Hume, David, 23, 54 Humphrey, Mathew, xvii, 85 124 Hunger, 184 Husserl, Edmund, 154 Huxley, Aldous, 271 I I-Thou relationship, 61 Idealism, 110 115 Identification, 7, 26 27, 61 63, 66, 104n27. See also Deep ecology; Self-realization and activism, 66 and alienation, 203 as anthropocentric, 33 36, 69 as basic principle of deep ecology, xiii, 24 26 compared to Buddhist philosophy, 257 263 compared to Hindu philosophy, 234 246 compared to solidarity, 66 70 and difference, 61 65 and dualism, 119 feminist analysis of, 117 121 and ontology, xvii, 28 and place, 90 and traitorous identity, 69 70 Ideology, 87 Impermanence, 258 Indigenous peoples, xxi, 114, 141, 186, 279 Individualism, 125 Industrialization, 90 Instrumental rationality, xiii
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Interspecies communication, 162 165 Intrinsic value, 11, 19, 54, 222, 263 264, 267n39 Intuition, 91, 112, 157, 199 Ireland, 163 Irwin, Robert, 162 J Jackson, Wes, 272 Jacobsen, Knut, xxi, 231 252 Jefferson, Thomas, 76 Jeffersonianism, green, 74, 76, 78 Joy, 216 Judaism, 169 Judgment, 207 Junk in space, 54 K Kaluli people, 163 Kant, Immanuel, xx, 27, 33, 132, 157, 177, 215, 220 221, 225 Karma, 238, 246 Katz, Eric, ix xxiv, 17 42 Kheel, Marti, 121 Kittelsen, Theodor, 161 Kovel, Joel, 159 Kroeber, A. L., 282
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Labyrinth, 166 LaChappelle, Dolores, xiv Lakes, 165 Land, 80, 95, 278 Land ethic, 22, 45, 141 Larson, Gary, 68 Lasch, Christopher, 189 Left-wing criticism, 278 Leopold, Aldo, 22, 24, 27, 45, 141, 146n31, 177, 210 Levinas, Emmanuel, 162 163 Liberalism, xvii xviii, 77 78, 99 100, 107 124, 170, 187 Libidinal understanding, 118 Lift-up-over-sounding, 163 Light, Andrew, ix xxiv, xxiin2, 125 148 Lizards, 159 Locke, John, 78 Lockean theory of property, 68, 78 81 Lohmann, Larry, 113, 121 Lorraine, 93 Lucretius, 199 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 198, 205 M MacIntyre, Alasdair, 207 Madhva, 238 Marcuse, Herbert, 175 Martin, Peter, 189 Marx, Karl, xviii, 108, 121 Marxism, xx, 108, 172, 208 209, 215, 219 Maskit, Jonathan, xx, 215 230 Mateship, 119
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Mathews, Freya, xiv, 25, 32 34, 91, 96 McLaughlin, Andrew, xiv, 19, 21, 90, 98, 109 Meditation, 232 233 Megamachine, 101, 106n64, 113 Meinong, Alexius, 46 Meta-industrial nurture, 113 Metaphysics, 28, 36, 215, 221 Mill, John Stuart, xvii, 85, 99 Mining, 86, 117 Modernity, 179 181, 184 187, 195 198, 205 206, 208, 212 Monism-pluralism debate, 125 148 Monologic, 208, 211 Monotheism, 169, 270, 295n48 Moore, G.E., 165 Moral obligation, 22 Moralizing, 99 More-than-human world, 157 Mothers, 108, 116 Mountains walking, 259 Mountains, 155, 161 Muir, John, 273 Murti, T. R. V., 256 Music, 31, 163 Myth, 89, 226, 274 N Naess, Arne, ix, xiv, xviii, 18, 24, 37 38, 48, 59, 87, 90, 109, 126, 154, 197, 215, 271. See also Deep ecology; Ecosophy T as activist, 39nl, 59 as denying importance of ethics, 27 28, 33, 38, 98 99, 261 differences with George Sessions, 7 10 differences with Peter Reed, 61 65 and gestalts and Buddhism, 254 257, 259 263
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as influenced by Buddhism, 62, 136, 253 256 as influenced by Ghandi, 3, 231, 239 246, 253 as influenced by Hinduism, xxi, 231 246, 247n4 as influenced by Spinoza, 136, 197, 253, 264, 288n6 and logical positivism, 60, 255 and phenomenology of gestalts, xix, 30 31, 88 89, 109, 117, 151 156 and pluralism, 126, 134 140, 146n30, 147n40, 197, 265 and poetry, 156 163 Nagarjuna, 254, 256, 263 Naivete, 269 299 Nara, Yasuaki, 261 Narrative, 205 212 Nationalism, 88, 93 Nature as agent, 46, 84n51
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Nazism, 12, 71 74, 83n38, 171 173, 175 178, 181 182, 190, 192n5, 202 203, 295n49 Neopaganism, 169 194 Neoplatonism, 188, 204 205 New World, 79 New age, 172, 189 Newton, Isaac, 88 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 172, 183, 196, 200, 220 No-self, 257 Nonanthropocentrism, xii, xiii, 19, 21, 45, 53 54, 125. See also Anthropocentrism; Biocentrism; Ecocentrism Nondualism, 258 Nonviolence, 3, 7, 244, 265 Norton, Bryan, 29, 131, 134 140 O Okin, Susan Moller, 74 Oneness, 245 Ontology, xiii, xvii, 28, 32, 85 106, 181, 260 Oppression, 65 70, 82n21, 108 Otherness, 61 70, 82n27, 174 P Paganism, 169 170, 188 191, 281 Panentheism, 173 Panspermia, 54 Pantheism 173, 296n53 Passmore, John, 44 Pateman, Carole, 74, 113 Perennial philosophy, 62, 179, 288n7, 294 n. 45 Phenomenology, xix, 151 168, 229n22, 253 Platform of deep ecology, x xi, xiii, 6, 10 11, 19, 136 137, 146n30, 167n2, 216 217, 222 223, 246nl, 252n83, 255, 270 271 Plato, 156, 219 221
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Plotinus, 188 Plumwood, Val, xvi, xvii, 59 84 Pluralism, xviii, 12, 46, 125 148, 244, 269 299 as compatibilism, 130, 137 communitarian, 128 cultural, 140 143 interpersonal, 130, 139 intrapersonal, 128 and Naess, Arne, 134 140 and relativism, 127 redefined, 131 134 of values, 265 Poetry, 156 168 Polyphony, 208 212 Population, 11 Positivism, 111, 255 Postmodernism, xix, 126, 195 214, 228n15 Poverty, 185 Pragmatism, xxii, 134 Pre/trans fallacy, 180 Progress, 80, 196, 219 Property, 70 81 Protagoras, 17, 31, 36, 153 Psychic life, 219 Q Quality of life, 6, 217, 222 R Race, 108, 178 Radhakrishnan, 239 244 Ramanuja, 238 239, 243 Raven, Peter, 9 Raz, Joseph, xvii, 99 101
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Reed, Peter, xvii, 61 64 Reflexive logic, 117 Reform environmentalism, xii, 139 Reformation, 196 Relational thinking, 20, 28, 30, 120, 256 Relativism, 47, 127, 263 Religion, 178 183, 269 299 Religiosity, xix, 169 194 Reproductive labors, 116 Responsibility, 3, 139 Retribalization, 86, 271 273 Rhizome, 200 201 Ricoeur, Paul, 206 Ritual, 271 Rivers, 54 Rocks, 54 Rodman, John, 35
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Rolston, Holmes, 22, 24, 126 Romanticism, 72, 155 Rootedness, 87, 96 Rothenberg, David, ix xxiv, 20 21, 25, 37, 91, 151 168 Ruddick, Sara, 114 Ruether, Rosemary Radford, 173 S Sachs, Wolfgang, 121 Sale, Kirkpatrick, 87, 90, 109 Salleh, Ariel, xvii xviii, 107 124 Sankara *, 234 237 Sayles, John, 163 Scale, 45, 48 Schelling, Friedrich, 177 Schmookler, Andrew Bard, 282 Seed, John, xiv Seeds, 115 Self-control, 240 Self-creation, 212 Self-defense, 95 96, 115n42 Self-realization, 12 13, 27 28, 38, 63, 197. See also Deep ecology; Identification; Naess, Arne as anthropocentric, 33 36, 49 50 as basic principle of deep ecology, xiii, xvi, 24 26, 85 86, 203 compared to Buddhist philosophy, xxi, 63, 253 254, 257 263 compared to Hindu philosophy, 234 246, 250 n. 57, 251n80 compared to Kant, 225 compared to moral extensionism, 27 28 criticism of, xvii, 33 36, 49 50 and denial of ethics, 85 86, 98
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and desire, xx, 219 227 and identification, 27, 34, 63, 160 as ontology, 32, 85 106 and self-defense, 95 96 Sentimentalism, 153 Sessions, George, x, xx, 7 8, 19, 21, 49, 87, 91, 202, 216 217, 270 271, 292n41 Sextus Empiricus, 153, 202 Shallow ecology. See Reform environmentalism Shepard, Paul, 271 273 Shiva, Vandana, 140 Silkies, 163 Siskiyou-Klamath region, 90, 95 Slaves, 76, 108, 111 Smallpox, 52 Snyder, Gary, 261 262, 271 273, 282, 285 Social ecology, 3 15 Social justice, 9, 204, 278 Socialism, 59 84 Sole value assumption, 51 Solidarity with nature, xvii, 59, 65 70, 243 Solipsistic omnipotence, 63 Soviet Union, 281 Speedboats, 165 Spinoza, Baruch, 25, 136, 197, 253, 264, 271, 288nn6, 8 Spirituality. See Religion Spretnak, Charlene, 184 Sprigge, T. L. S., 165 Starhawk, 169, 184 Stoicism, 216 Stone, Christopher, 125, 128, 134 Streams, singing, 31 Subjectivity, 223
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Sublime, 157 Sustainability, 9, 274 275, 278, 284 Suzuki, D. T., 256 Sylvan, Richard, xiv, xvi, 17, 35 39, 43 58 and deep ecology, 48 50 and deep green alternative, 50 55 and value theory, 46 48 T Taylor, Bron, xxi, 169, 269 299 Taylor, Paul, 29 Thomas, Ned, 94 Thoreau, Henry David, 273 Tilak, B. G., 240 Tolerance, 60, 138 Total views, xi, xiii, 24 Transcendentalism, 199 Transnational corporations, 201 Transpersonal ecology, 28, 98 Transpersonal philosophy, 173, 178 191
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Transpersonal Self, 85 Tranströmer, Thomas, 166 Treeline, 36 Trickster, 205 Trolls, 161 Turner, Jack, xiv U United Nations, 280 Unity-in-nature, 65 70 V Value, 46, 262 van der Steen, Wim, 147n40 Varner, Gary, 126 Vermin, 63 Vienna Circle, 60, 255 Violence, 185 Vision-logic, 179 Vital needs, 5 Volosinov, V. N., 207 W Waddell, Norman, 258 Wales, 86, 94 Web of life, 186, 191 Wenz, Peter, 126 Wergeland, Henrik, 155 Weston, Anthony, 126 127, 131, 137 Whale songs, 165 Whitehead, Alfred North, 136 Wicca, 184 Wickramasinghe, Chandra, 54 file:///C|/...%20Surface%20-%20Critical%20Essays%20in%20the%20Philosophy%20of%20Deep%20Ecology/files/page_328.html[9.6.2010 23:07:03]
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Wienpahl, Paul, 253 Wilber, Ken, xix, 10, 173, 178 191, 204 205 Williams, William Carlos, 156 Wise use movement, 172 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 160 161 Wives, 74, 108, 111 Wombats, 63 Women and nature, 114 124, 291n35 World spirit, 111 Worldviews, xii xiv Z Zapata, Daniel, 87, 94 Zapatistas, 81 Zen, 253, 256 Zimmerman, Michael E., xix, 10, 72 76, 163, 169 194, 202 205
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![Eve Vaughn - [The Circle 03] - Beneath the Surface](https://epdf.mx/img/300x300/eve-vaughn-the-circle-03-beneath-the-surface_5b6259c4b7d7bc686fd185d6.jpg)
