Environmental Philosophy

Reason, Nature and Human Concern

Christopher Belshaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317490036
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This introduction to the philosophy of the environment examines current debates on how we should think about the natural world and our place within it. The subject is examined from a determinedly analytic philosophical perspective, focusing on questions of value, but taking in attendant issues in epistemology and metaphysics as well. The book begins by considering the nature, extent and origin of the environmental problems with which we need to be concerned. Chapters go on to consider familiar strategies for dealing with environmental problems, and then consider what sort of things are of direct moral concern, examining in turn at animals, non-sentient life-forms, natural but non-living things and deep ecology. The final part of the book investigates notions of value, natural beauty and the place of human beings in the scheme of things.

CHAPTER 1
Problems

Concern for the environment is widespread. Politicians put it high on their agendas, businesses have environmental policies, thousands upon thousands of products are supposed to be environment friendly, green is a favourite colour and countless people describe themselves as environmentalists. But what is the environment with which all these are so much concerned? What makes an issue environmental, as opposed to political, biological or economic? What does someone need to do, believe or want in order to be an environmentalist? There is a need for answers to these questions, but there is a need also to indicate that the answers will be of limited use, and that they cannot always be firm.

Terms

It may seem that the answers here are too obvious to be worth stating. Books, policy documents, government bodies and industries that are concerned with environmental matters often simply assume that the term is understood, and rarely make any effort to clarify just what it is with which they are so concerned. But this ought to be considered unsatisfactory. Although the insistence that key terms be defined before serious discussion gets under way is, in general, rightly resisted, there is in this case reason to hope for more. Talk of the environment is relatively new, a lot hangs on it, and although it can for a while be disguised, it isn’t long before evidence of important disagreement as to and misunderstanding of some central terms comes to the surface. Rather than assume that meanings are clear enough, some of the complexities might at the outset be usefully explored.

Environment and environments

What the environment is can be understood in different ways. One account describes it as the place or places “where people live, work, move and enjoy themselves”.¹ This is very broad, and covers offices and homes, as well as cities, the countryside and many parts of the open sea. It suggests a connection with life: the environment is the area in which life goes on. And it suggests also, perhaps surprisingly, a concern only with human life. So if there are any wilderness areas — polar regions, remnants of desert, the bottom of the sea — from which people are absent, these are just not part of the environment. Other accounts, in contrast, think of the environment mostly in terms of a natural and non-human world, and see human beings, along with their cities, roads, industries and airports, as encroaching on the environment, and competing with it for space. Still others place no particular emphasis on either people or nature: there was an environment, no doubt with its problems, before our species came into existence, and there will continue to be an environment, even if we destroy ourselves, and the environment extends even now to those few parts of the world in which people are still not to be found. But it includes as well industrial conurbations like Dusseldorf, Mexico City, and the Los Angeles freeways. These accounts share, however, an inclination to think of the environment as one thing, spread, more or less, over the surface of the world. Other accounts reject this global approach, and stress the multiplicity of environments, suggesting that there is a large and indefinite number, differently sized and positioned, in the same way as different things or groups of things are located within, and responsive to, different parts of the entirety of the world. An environment, in this sense, and taking etymology seriously, is something like home ground, the territory familiar to and supportive of a particular life or kind of life: hence my environment, the environment of the Navajo Indians in New Mexico, that of wolves, the ticks that live on wolves, and so on. And as different environments in this way overlap, so one individual’s environment will itself typically include other individuals. Given the very large number of living organisms, then, it is reasonable to suppose that everything that happens happens in some environment or other, such that nowhere on this planet is off limits, if environments are one’s concern. But is there, as I have suggested, a restriction to the earth, and the space or spaces of living things? Or do other planets, even without life, have their own environments, which might themselves be damaged or improved? Several writers have urged that environmental thinking should range this far, so that we might learn more of the environment on Mars, wonder what it is like in different galaxies, and so on.²

There are several competing meanings here, then, and they can’t all be exactly right. But rather than decide between them, I will suggest first that we think in the main of there being one environment, rather than many, and that we think of this environment as it exists in outdoor places (so excluding the home and the office), whether inhabited by human beings or not (and so including both cities and the few wild places that are left on earth), but inhabited nevertheless (and so excluding, at least until we get there, the distant reaches of outer space). And I make this suggestion for two reasons. First it seems that this is how the term is most commonly used: there just is more talk of the environment than of environments. Secondly this common use does reflect the fact that living spaces do connect together, and affect one another, in a more or less seamless whole. If there were life on some distant planet which, although we might know a little about it, was unable otherwise to interact with life on earth, then we would only misleadingly or improperly speak of one environment with respect to the two places. This would be improper, however, only because it doesn’t chime well with how we actually speak. And if my suggestion appears in any way vague, this is first because we speak vaguely, and secondly because there is little other than this vague speaking to go on.

What of the adjective? If the environment is more or less everywhere, and near enough everything that happens happens within it, then it may seem that almost all issues are environmental issues, and that virtually every problem is an environmental problem. But this isn’t how we speak. Environmental issues are, as a matter of custom if not of rule, those that figure in a largely natural world, and that occur within, or have significant effects on, public spaces. The question of whether Manchester United should play on grass or Astroturf is not, without some special pleading to the contrary, an environmental issue. Nor is the problem of whether to paint or paper the walls of a museum really an environmental problem. This is not to deny, of course, that these examples, like very many others, have aspects that bear on environmental issues in my sense: some paints are more environmentally friendly than others, and real grass will probably house more insects than a synthetic substitute would. But unless persuaded that this particular insect population in some way or other matters, we are unlikely to think of this question for sport as involving any environmental issues.

Environmentalists

Whereas the environment is something given, and long-standing, which might then be studied or ignored, both environmentalists and environmentalism are of our creation. In the common and relatively recent understanding³ which I will follow here, an environmentalist is someone who shows a special or marked awareness of environmental issues, and who attempts, within some or other reasonable bounds, to care for, preserve or sustain the environment or some of its parts. The person who tidies the office or puts flowers in hotel bedrooms is not, in this ordinary sense, an environmentalist; nor, although environmentally well informed, is someone who takes it to be their life’s work to drop litter in every national park, or to collect, for no good reason, blood samples from members of every endangered species. And environmentalism, similarly, suggests a positive attitude towards the environment, one in which it is assumed that study and care will go hand in hand, or that understanding will bring benefits. There is room for an analogy with certain political affiliations here. A communist typically thinks it not only inevitable but also desirable that there will be, in time, the victory of the proletariat. And conservatism is not only knowledgeable of but also favourably disposed towards the forces of tradition. Similarly, to describe oneself as an environmentalist, or to profess a concern with environmentalism, is to invite certain assumptions about several of one’s beliefs, values, attitudes and practices. And when, throughout this book, I refer without any further qualification to the environmentalist, or to environmentalism, it will be this broadly positive or supportive stance that I will have in mind.

These are somewhat loose accounts of these central terms. That is not only good enough, but perhaps better than the alternative. For although we can define any term as precisely as we choose, we can’t always do this in a manner that is other than arbitrary. As, to draw a further analogy, there aren’t clear divisions between the intelligent and the stupid, or between the hirsute and the bald, so to stipulate meanings for such terms as if there are such divisions is in some ways to distort how things are: similarly for “environment”, “environmentalist” and the like. A precise definition would imply a clarity and tidiness that don’t exist. What this suggests also, as a corollary, is that there may be disagreement about whether a particular description is well applied. For if there are no specific criteria as to what constitutes an environmental issue and what an issue of another kind, if the appropriate description is to some extent a matter of judgement rather than of rule, then it is possible to disagree with a given characterization. As your freedom fighter may be my terrorist, so your environmentalist may also be my terrorist. But I want to suggest that it won’t always matter if we do disagree. Think of art. Even if we seem unable to decide and we disagree about whether something is a work of art, we may be able to decide and agree about how it came into existence, whether it is beautiful or ugly, original or derivative, and so on. And then the further question of whether the thing is a work of art begins to look empty. So, too, with some of the questions about the environment. It is just a mistake to think that we need firmly to settle precisely what sort of issue we are hoping to consider, before we can begin to consider it.

There will be objections to some of this. Consider further the analogy with art. I might suppose it is simply convenient to go with what I perceive as customary usage, claiming that problem cases can be settled as we go along, but others will insist that this already slants things. To think of easel paintings as paradigm examples of artworks, and installation pieces, videos and collage as more or less marginal is certainly to point our understanding of what art is in a particular direction. It will have connections with beauty, tradition, domesticity and class that it might otherwise be without. Similarly, to think of, say, global warming or tropical deforestation as central among environmental issues, and the colour of the houses across the street, or the noise from powerboats on a nearby lake as rather more peripheral, is to incline our grasp of environment and environmentalism one way rather than another. And, as with art, this may have implications for our involvement. If there is one environment, and the pressing problems are global, the temptation to local apathy may in the end be irresistible. I can do something about ozone depletion, but not enough to make much difference. If, in contrast, I tend to think of environment as the space around me, I may be both more motivated to and successful in bringing about change.⁴ The one environment view is, then, one we embrace only at a cost.

There is something in this, but not enough to cause any substantial revision in what has been suggested so far. We can, as the slogan suggests, think globally and act locally. And we should consider the larger picture. The big issues need thinking about. Nor need thinking here stunt us elsewhere. Even if there is only one environment, it has, as I have said, its different parts, and it is both natural and reasonable to give some attention to local issues. Putting environment before environments still allows, then, for the focused and small-scale concern and is not in itself a recipe for despair.

There is a further advantage to the less diversified approach. It is implied by what I have already said about seamlessness. To think of environments as living spaces and then, because there are no clear distinctions, the environment as the space in which all the life we know of is to be found is, in this stress on integration, to guard against too pointed a contrast between human beings, on the one hand, and the world of nature, on the other. The environment is in very important respects coterminous with this planet, and is neither the particular places of human habitation, nor the setting for a wild nature that is essentially alien to us. This global and somewhat holistic construal of the key term here has its dangers, as will later emerge, but it does, I think, give a tolerably fair picture of the issues as we have to face them.⁵

Crises, disasters and problems

Many writers refer to the current environmental crisis, to environmental disasters, to our degrading, destroying or damaging this or that part of the environment, to our exploiting the natural world, natural resources, and so on without being at all explicit as to why such descriptions are appropriate. They are hardly neutral terms, suggesting as they do both that things are very seriously amiss and that much of it is our fault. But in many of the cases where the talk is of doom and gloom we might wonder first just what is supposed to be about to happen and secondly what would be so bad about it if it did.

Some writers have referred to a crisis, and then offered detailed predictions as to what may be expected (in terms of, say, population growth or ozone depletion) which then gives substance to the crisis referred to. In several such cases, as with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), these predictions have been thus far unfulfilled, and the situation is less bad than expected.⁶ In other cases the situation has already occurred, and so information about the upshot is more or less accurate. But in cases of both kinds it is still not always obvious why talk of a crisis or disaster is appropriate. Oil super-tanker groundings, the most recent off the Galapagos, are referred to almost without exception as disasters, although not with evident good reason. Building a few miles of motorway, or a new shopping mall, will cause the death of a comparable numbers of animals and a greater numbers of plants, and lead to an irreversible loss of habitat, but although often unwelcome, changes and developments of this kind are not typically referred to as disastrous. Similarly, people often talk of massive population increases, particularly in the Third World, as seriously threatening to the survival of the planet, but typically without detailing in just what the threat consists. On a smaller scale, there are signs asking people to help the English Lake District by not leaving litter, camping or lighting fires. Perhaps there is not much of an issue about litter, but it isn’t explained, and nor is it obvious, why an overnight tent should hinder or harm a national park.

I want neither to suggest that there is no such thing as crisis or disaster, nor to encourage complacency about our present situation. Nor do I propose that we avoid speaking of crises, disasters and the like until offered a precise definition of such terms. There have been disasters enough already —Chernobyl is an obvious example, and the 1999 earthquakes in Turkey another — and there are doubtless more to come. But there are many cases where it isn’t obvious, and my point is only that in such cases some account of why a given description is appropriate can quite properly be requested. This is especially important when dealing with the emotive terms that figure so often in discussion of the environment. To label oneself an environmentalist is undeniably to seek to occupy the moral high ground. And to describe some event as a disaster, or a situation as reaching crisis point, is to oblige us to take it seriously, and if possible to attempt change. Given a belief in the pressing importance of some action, those wanting that action have reason to play up their cause, in the hope of winning for it even more attention. Talk of crises can be good for fundraising. Even so, others of us, not yet fully committed, ought, in many cases, to question or challenge the characterization being provided.

An objection that might be raised is that academic hair-splitting, although in other areas innocuous, is here an indulgence that we can ill afford. Given the depth and extent of the environmental challenge (to use a somewhat neutral term), what is demanded of us are deeds, rather than a further finessing of words. But the objection is surely misplaced. There is not one alleged problem, but a range. And no matter how committed they are, environmentalists cannot apply themselves to all of them with equal dedication. Decisions have to be made. It seems reasonable, other things being equal, to tackle the bigger problems first. But to do this correct judgements about the scale and urgency of a problem have to be made. Disasters need sorting from mishaps, risks from certainties, and crisis points treated with circumspection.

I am going to try to avoid some of this emotive language. Instead I will refer to environmental problems. Even that, of course, is a far from neutral term; to describe a situation as in some way a problem will seem immediately to suggest the desirability of change. But we might understand the notion of a problem somewhat differently. Perhaps no change is called for. As long as this isn’t clear, as long as there is disagreement, not only about what to do, but also about whether anything at all needs to be done, then there is still a problem. There is, though, a further distinction that needs to be made here. In some cases there will be questions as to the size of an alleged problem. It is said that global warming will make our lives worse, but perhaps little or no warming is taking place, or perhaps although it is real enough it is only temporary, and part of a long-term cycle of change. In other cases there are questions as to a problem’s effects. Global warming threatens us. Other changes less obviously have an adverse affect on our lives. We may be persuaded that bad things, even seriously bad things are happening to iguanas in South America, or polar bears, or London sparrows, while not yet persuaded that this will have any consequence for human existence. So although there are problems that could be tackled, we may doubt whether we have any reason to tackle them. How far, within one environment, something else’s problems may legitimately be ignored is among the issues to be further explored.

Environment, history and science

The environment has been around for a long time, and human concern with the environment has a similarly long history, but an awareness of environmental issues as importantly distinctive, the belief that there is a particular category of environmental problems at least many of which demand urgent attention, and the self-conscious and widespread use of the term “environment” in something like the sense outlined above are all relatively recent. Not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did such terms begin to enter common parlance, beginning first, as is often the case, with scientific and academic use, and only later spilling over into the larger arenas of politics and commerce.

The term “environment”, however, is not the only one that needs to be considered here. Its introduction and development closely parallels that of an academic discipline to which a concern for the environment is closely related, and with which it is often confused. Ecology, the study of the interactions between living organisms and their environments,⁷ was not immediately connected with environmental concerns, and as a science makes no particular commitment to preservation or pronouncement on the value of that which it studies. Yet ecologists have values, of course, and many of them in earlier days saw their role as facilitating particular uses of the environment by showing how to avoid or minimize collateral damage. If ways could be found of felling trees without causing soil erosion, or of spraying crops without letting harmful chemicals into the human food chain, then so much the better. But in so far as environmentalists aim to understand the character of the problems that they detect, and hope to uncover methods for preventing or reversing unwelcome change, then they need to draw on ecology’s resources. More recently a particular style of environmentalism and a particular version of ecology have come closer toge...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Problems
• 2 Causes
• 3 Solutions I: Voting and Pricing
• 4 Solutions II: Moral Theory
• 5 Animals
• 6 Life
• 7 Rivers, Species, Land
• 8 Deep Ecology
• 9 Value
• 10 Beauty
• 11 Human Beings
• Afterword
• Appendix A Deep Ecology: Central Texts
• Appendix B The Axiarchical View
• Appendix C Gaia
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index