ok here is an op-ed-style piece summarizing my misgivings about environmentalism. the ideas will be familiar to anyone who reads eyeofthestorm.

 

Environmentalists Against Nature

By Crispin Sartwell

 

 

 The practice of environmentalism has, or at least sometimes has, been wholesome. But the basic concepts underpinning it are, I think, profoundly incoherent.

    On any reasonably naturalistic conception of human beings - any conception even vaguely compatible with science, for example - we are natural creatures, one variety of mammal. And on any even slightly empirical account of natural history, ecosystems are volatile. Most environmentalists, surely, would accept these assertions. And yet almost every sentence out of their mouths contradicts them.

    The environmental movement, first of all, rests on a picture of human actions as encroachments on the order of nature: according to this picture we are distorting, manipulating, and destroying the earth. We have lost our connection with it. But if you believe that we are part and parcel of nature, that we emerged as an animal species by natural selection, then the picture of us as attacking it is an impossible picture. We are it. Everything we do - from hiking the Appalachian Trail to spewing toxins - is completely natural.

    Environmentalists often seem to want to return ecosystems to a pristine condition, a natural balance or harmony that we have disturbed. But ecosystems are not static, not even strictly cyclical, and they are in continuous interaction with one another: no ecosystem, not even the entire earth, is a biosphere sealed off from elsewhere. Species have been appearing and disappearing and traveling the globe since life emerged, colonizing this environment, abandoning that one.

    Some ecosystems display some elements of balance or harmony for significant periods of time. But such harmonies are always provisional and always in the process of being compromised, whether we're the ones doing the compromising or not.

    I live in rural Pennsylvania, more or less in the woods, though there is a strip mall about three miles away, with a Wal-Mart and a Wendy's (the video store, of course, is defunct, thus destroying the balance of strip mall). People have lived around here for centuries, and their traces are everywhere: in the fields cleared for farming, the old stone walls and ancient structures slowly crumbling into the earth. There are little middens here and there, where folks in the good old country tradition have dumped their broken bottles and kitchen scraps.

     I haven't actually done a census, but it's hard not to see that there are "invasive" or human-introduced species everywhere. The English ivy grows luxuriantly along the ground and is ascending the trees. Gangs of starlings waft hither and yon.  Chinese chestnuts feed the grey squirrels. Invasive European-Americans appear in abundance, though they are fewer here than in some spots. This year we were invaded by stink bugs.

    But the place is deliriously alive. I think of the poison ivy out here as a single entity taking over whole regions with its lustrous green leaves and its nasty toxin, perhaps enhanced by climate change that has made the place just a bit more lush and tropical. There are layers of birds, from the hummers and finches and chickadees, through the doves and pigeons, to the several species of woodpeckers overseen by the big pileateds, to the kestrels, sharp-shinned and red-shouldered hawks, to the turkey buzzards floating at altitude. There are voles, chipmunks, colonies of feral cats, foxes, bobcats, coyotes, deer (along with tree stands for those who enjoy shooting them).

    The other day a raccoon toddled into my house when I let in my cat; I'm not sure which of the three of us freaked out more.

    That, I must say, is a good enough eco-system for me, and I think that perhaps we should think of any such system in terms of its vitality and volatility rather than its stability. We should note and we can value its imbalances and inharmonies as well its balances and harmonies.

    And I participate, not only by a feeling of oneness or something, but with my chainsaw, the old mops I toss into the old dumps, my herbicide. I grow roses and butterfly bushes and hybridized tomatoes. My house is as much a part of this ecosystem as the boulders, and I as much as the raccoons.

    Plants and animals, as I say, have been moving around and expunging one another since they existed at all. We are one way they do that, and we are animals who do that ourselves. The globe has been cooling and warming since there was a globe, and we are one way it does that too.

     The picture of us as disturbing or destroying nature is exactly as supernatural as the religious orientations according to which it was all put here by God for us to do with whatever we please. The environmental movement is still locked into a picture of us as immaterial souls - or at any rate things well beyond nature - who are invaders or visitors on this earthly plane.

     And it is just as devoted to controlling or altering this order as the rankest industrialist. We are still trying to transform the world according to our little conceptions, only now our conceptions are slightly different: we'll control it to return it to a pristine balance that emerges only out of our imaginations and has the status of a deity that prescribes moral standards.   

   What I'd suggest is that environmentalists need to examine their assumptions, and at a minimum reconcile them with each other. And they also need to re-think their practice in a way that is compatible with a fully naturalistic, reality-based conception of the world and of themselves.

 

Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.