The Ecological Community

Roger S. Gottlieb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136669460
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Ecological Community offers important and previously unexplored responses to the environmental crisis. The premise of this volume, writes editor Roger Gottlieb, is that the environmental crisis challenges the presuppositions of--and creates a rich field of creative work in--philosophy, politics, and moral theory. These eighteen essays are fresh and compelling interrogations of the existing wisdom in a host of areas, including liberalism, communicative ethics, rights theory and environmental philosophy itself. Contributors: Avner de-Shalit, Gus diZerega, Roger S. Gottlieb, Eric Katz, Robert Kirkman, Andrew Light, Brian Luke, David Macauley, Mark A. Michael, Carl Mitcham, John O'Neill, Holmes Rolston III, David Schlosberg, William Throop, Steven Vogel, Mark I. Wallace, Peter S. Wenz, Michael E. Zimmerman.

Part 1
Environmental Challenges for Political Theory and Philosophy

1
Environmentalism and Human Oppression

Peter S. Wenz

Introduction

Peter Carruthers writes in The Animals Issue, "I regard the popular concern with animal rights in our culture as a reflection of moral decadence. Just as Nero fiddled while Rome burned, many in the West agonize over the fate of seal pups and cormorants while human beings elsewhere starve or are enslaved."¹ Others have argued similarly that environmentalists who wanted to curtail logging in old-growth forests of the American Pacific Northwest were insensitive to human needs and that logging jobs are more important than spotted owls.

These are just two examples of a common antienvironmental attitude that opposes concern for human beings and concern for nonhumans. Playing upon the premise, unquestioned in our society, that human wellbeing takes precedence over other concerns, antienvironmentalists attempt to discredit environmentalism by claiming that it is misanthropic.

The opposition between human well-being and environmentalism is strengthened conceptually by the association of environmentalism with Nazi ideology. Much Nazi thought resembles environmentalist bioregionalism,² and Martin Heidegger remained sympathetic to Nazi thought while offering environmentalist critiques of technology.³ Completely unrelated to the Nazis, J. Baird Callicott, a leading exponent of Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic, has been labeled an ecofascist. In his seminal article "Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair," Callicott hinted that culling the human population to promote ecosystemic health may be desirable.⁴ This prompted Tom Regan to associate environmentalism with fascism.⁵ So environmentalism has been accused not only of insensitivity to human needs, but also of tendencies toward racism and fascism. Anyone who values humanity should oppose environmentalism.

However, qualifying the value of human beings out of concern for nonhumans does not lead to human oppression, according to philosopher Roger Gottlieb, because human flourishing and environmental concern are mutually supporting rather than opposed. Human oppression results largely from technologies and institutions developed under the guidance of mainstream anthropocentric views. Gottlieb notes that "the devaluation of nature" that began about 5,000 years ago is related not only to "the development of more advanced agriculture, increasingly complex social divisions of labor and relations of exploitation," but also to "the desire for control in and of itself, as a good thing." The result is "interlocked systems of military, religious, economic, and ideological domination" in societies in which "hard labor, power, status, and wealth are unequally and unjustly distributed, and in which "man-made" poverty and exploitation supplant droughts or floods as the greatest threats to material well-being."⁶

This suggests the thesis of the present paper: The best way to help human beings avoid oppression is to value nonhuman nature for itself. I support this position in two ways. First, I look at some indigenous societies where human beings are treated better than we treat each other. I note a connection in these societies between respect for nature and for human beings. I then examine western society's attitude toward, and history of, dominating nature (in the supposed human interest) and explain how a great deal of human oppression results from the mind-set that legitimizes such domination.

Because the relativizing of human moral standing inherent in any nonanthropocentric environmentalism has been associated by its detractors with fascism in general and Nazi ideology in particular, I conclude by considering the Holocaust, the deliberate killing of six million Jews under Nazi control, as a prime example of human oppression that results from a purely instrumental attitude toward nature. I do not explore all the reasons for the Holocaust, or for episodes in human history similar enough to be called "holocaust-like events."⁷ I am concerned only to show that such events are in large part a by-product of the ideology that nature exists merely to serve human needs and wants. Antienvironmentalists who associate the Land Ethic or Deep Ecology (two popular nonanthropocentric environmentalist views) with racism, fascism, or any other serious form of human oppression have matters backward. Paradoxically, in the western context anthropocentric thinking and associated social structures were important preconditions for inhumanity.

Foraging Societies

Traditional foragers, who are often called hunter-gatherers, live in small bands and travel by foot in a regular sequence throughout the year to obtain food by hunting and gathering. They are discussed here for several reasons. They often express the kind of respect for nature that environmentalists champion. They also live in relatively good harmony with the environment, as environmentalists prescribe. They do not seek successively more powerful technologies that overpower nature in the supposed human interest. Finally, they live reasonably satisfying, fully human lives without much social hierarchy or human oppression. In short, they belie the antienvironmentalist claim that, regardless of the society, environmentalists' prescriptions exact unacceptable tolls on human beings.

Of course, we cannot become foragers, if only because our population densities are some orders of magnitude too high. But if foragers show that some people can have their environmental cake and human well-being too, their example may help to clarify what has gone so drastically wrong with our society that a Holocaust could occur. They suggest that one way to prevent such oppression may be to adopt environmentalist attitudes and prescriptions insofar as these both resemble those of traditional foraging people and can be adapted to our circumstances. However, the work of adaptation is beyond the scope of the present paper.⁸

Although today's few remaining foragers live within the jurisdiction of various nation-states, traditional foragers did not have a state in the Weberian sense of an organization in society that claims monopoly on the right to decide how force is used. The result was not a Hobbesian war of all against all. People used informal pressure along with socialization to handle deviance.

Socialization promoted moral, social, and material equality among group members. No one was permitted a great surplus of valued items while others lacked sufficient means for survival and moderate well-being. Relative equality functioned to promote needed social stability, because people allowed to become desperately poor and deprived would likely display more deviance than a stateless society could handle. They lacked police and jails.

Consider, for example, the Ju/'hoansi (whom anthropologists formerly called!Kung) who hunt and gather in southwest Africa's Kalahari Desert. Equality is enforced partly by social rules that require the sharing of meat, so that when a large kill is made, everyone shares in the feast. "Ownership" of the meat involves the duty of dividing it among all members of the group. This is a position of importance that might have tended to give social advantage to good hunters. So egalitarianism is encouraged by making the person who owns the arrow that killed the animal the owner of the meat. Because arrows are traded freely in this society, the owner may not be a hunter at all, much less the hunter who killed the animal.⁹

Jealousy and personal animosities resulting in quarrels, violence, and even murder existed among the traditional Ju/'hoansi. Adjusted for population size, the murder rate between 1920 and 1955 was about as high as Detroit's in the early 1970s.¹⁰ This may seem too high for decent living until it is realized that these deaths are the only ones deliberately inflicted by human beings on other people. In civilized society, by contrast, homocide is not the only way people deliberately kill one another. War is also common.

Lewis Mumford noted that a consistent characteristic of civilization (i.e., city-oriented societies where people dominate nature) is the war of one city against another. Organized armed conflict is abetted by the power monopoly within each city that allows its rulers to command residents to make war on people inhabiting other cities. "As the activities of the city became more rational and benign within, they became in almost the same degree more irrational and malign in their external relations.... Is it merely by chance," he asks, "that the earliest surviving images of the city, those on the pre-dynastic Egyptian palettes, picture its destruction?"¹¹

Anthropologist Richard Lee makes the same point about conditions in the area inhabited by the Ju/'hoansi.

In the nineteenth century the Botswana chiefdom imposed its order on the band-level San hunters in Eastern Botswana, only to wage intertribal warfare on a much larger scale against neighboring chiefdoms such as the Matabele and the Kalanga-Shona. Then at the end of the nineteenth century, the British industrial state brought the Pax Britannica to the warring chiefdoms of Southern Africa. But a generation later, the British mobilized thousands of Tswana warriors' sons to fight in the Mediterranian theater against the German and Italian states.¹²

In sum, although traditional foraging people lack police control of human behavior, the overall level of deliberate killing of human beings is lower than among "civilized" people because they lack collective killing. Genocide is unheard of and other forms of human oppression, such as slavery, are unknown, because they are impossible in societies where people do not dominate nature. No foraging group has enough physical force at its disposal for large-scale collective intrahuman violence and oppression.

People in foraging societies also enjoy affluence without hard work, according to anthropologist Marshall Sahlins.¹³ Lee's studies of the Ju/'hoansi support Sahlins's view: "Ju/'hoansi appear to have the happy combination of an adequate diet and a short workweek."¹⁴

Distributive justice is generally assured because the entire way of life depends on sharing, according to Lee. "Each Ju is not an island unto himself or herself; each is part of a collective. . . . The living group pools the resources that are brought into camp so that everyone receives an equitable share."¹⁵ Again, this serves to forestall deviance that a stateless group could not handle.

It is no surprise that, habituated as they are to plenty, foragers typically view the world's goods as abundant and sufficient, rather than scarce and insufficient.¹⁶ They do not seek new ways to glean additional resources from nature because they believe that traditional methods suffice to assure not only survival but also reasonable comfort, both for the group and for each individual in it.

Foragers typically view their relationships with nonhuman constituents of the environment as reciprocally social rather than purely exploitational. The Other is valued for itself. Anthropologist Nurit Bird-David summarizes the views of three foraging societies, "the Nyaka of South India, the Batek of Malaysia, and the Mbuti of Zaire."¹⁷ According to Bird-David, "Each group has animistic notions which attribute life and consciousness to natural phenomena, including the forest itself and parts of it such as hilltops, tall trees, and river sources."¹⁸ They believe that people socialize with nonhumans. For example, the Mbuti believe that "the Forest visits the . . . camp, plays music, and sings with the people."¹⁹ It also gives "food and gifts to everyone, regardless of specific kinship ties or prior reciprocal obligation."²⁰ Sharing among human beings is just a special case of "a cosmic system of sharing which embraces both human-to human and nature-to-human sharing. The two kinds of sharing are constituents of a cosmic economy of sharing."²¹

Bird-David reports also that forest-dwelling foragers typically attribute to the forest traits that we associate with the divine. The forest is parent as well as provider.

For example, . .. the Mbuti often refer to the forest as "father" and "mother". . . but also . . . describe it as the source of all spiritual matter and power, including the vital essence of people's lives.... In a similar vein,... the Nayaka not only refer to natural agencies (especially hilltops and large rock formations) by the terms dod appa (big father) and dod awa (big mother) and to themselves correspondingly by the terms maga(n) and maga(l) (male and female children) but also say that dead Nayaka become one with forest spirits.²²

People with such beliefs tend to behave in environmentally responsible ways. Lacking belief in natural scarcity, they lack motivation to seek and implement new ways to overuse nature. Believing that many natural constituents are friendly beings with whom they engage in reciprocal exchange, they are inclined to treat nonhuman beings with the kind of respect that we typically prescribe for (but often fail to practice with) human beings. Finally, associating nature in general with their parents, and endowing it with qualities we associate with the divine, they are more reverential than exploitative. Thus, their ideas (in some ways) and their practices resemble what many environmentalists advocate. Aldo Leopold, for example, recommends viewing humans and nonhumans as members of the s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Center Cannot Hold
• Part 1. Environmental Challenges for Political Theory and Philosophy
• Part 2. Environmental Theory and Moral Questions
• III. Struggles Up Close: Current Conflicts in Environmental Theory and Practice
• Contributors