Environmental Culture

The Ecological Crisis of Reason

Val Plumwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134682959
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In this much-needed account of what has gone wrong in our thinking about the environment, Val Plumwood digs at the roots of environmental degradation. She argues that we need to see nature as an end itself, rather than an instrument to get what we want. Using a range of examples, Plumwood presents a radically new picture of how our culture must change to accommodate nature.

1
The ecological crisis of reason

The penguin’s story

I lived for a while in the 1990s in a small cabin along the Bass Strait coast of Tasmania. Most mornings, when I went down to the beach to walk a kilometre or two along the shore, I saw the bodies of dead Fairy Penguins lying on the beach. Sometimes I would find as many as 20 bodies over a relatively short distance. This was deeply troubling, not only because these little penguins are for me love-inspiring creatures, but also because they are now rarely encountered on the mainland of Australia, where in my youth they were not uncommon. Mostly their decline is put down to dogs, both domestic and wild, killing penguins as they come ashore nightly to their burrows in the dunes to breed. I found dog footprints near the bodies, and in the little village behind my cabin, every house had a dog or two, many free to roam at night. I seemed to be watching here the same process of extinction as on the mainland.

There was a bigger story hidden here however. One day as I stood by the edge of a gentle surf I saw the waves bringing in a small object. I waited with toes dug into the foamy sand as it washed in towards me on the tide, until finally it arrived at my feet. The tears streamed down my face as I saw that it was another Fairy Penguin, its body fresh and unmarked, as if it had just died. Whatever had happened to this one, I knew it had not been killed by dogs. Weeping, I picked up the small perfect body and carried it home to my cabin, hoping against hope that it would revive. It did not. I gave the dead penguin to a vetinary friend I had met at a duck-shooting protest to do an autopsy. A week later he phoned me. The penguin, he said, had not been killed by predation or pollution – the penguin had starved to death. I rang the relevant government department to discuss the issue, but found no help or interest there. Soon I became too ill with a debilitating, long-term virus to pursue the issue, and had to return home to the mainland to recuperate. But the thought of that penguin still triggers my grief, not only for those lost penguins but for the other accelerating losses in the larger narrative of human rule of the earth.

It was many years later that I was able to piece together a bit more of the penguin’s story. Fish farms situated thousands of miles away along the Western Australian coast had a year or so previously received permission to import feed for their farmed salmon made from wild South African fish. Long-established quarantine restrictions were lifted – Australia was in a global market now, and the farms could buy the South African pilchards at a fractionally cheaper price than local pilchards. The imported pilchards spread plagues of disease into local stocks which lacked immunity, much as European invaders had spread disease into the indigenous populations of Australia, North and South America. Waves of death spread along the Southern Ocean coastline, and are still spreading, in which millions upon millions of local pilchards died. Pilchards are an important part of the oceanic food web. Populations in many places were virtually wiped out, and those marine creatures whose diet relied heavily or seasonally on them starved. That was the probable source of death for my penguin, and doubtless for many another.

Small stories like this are nested within medium and large stories. The death of the penguin at the hands of the global free market was a medium-grade episode in a much bigger sleuth story, which detects many more such catastrophes at the hands of killers less often named, seemingly more remote, nebulous and immaterial. These are systems rather than concrete individuals or classes, forms and patterns of thought and organisation, systems for ordering our lives, choices and practices, systems of property formation and distribution – systems of rationality, as we tend to say. The story as I have discerned it so far is this: heavily implicated in both the logic of the global market and the death of the penguin are distorted forms of human rationality whose simple, abstract rules of equivalence and replaceability do not fit the real, infinitely complex world of flesh and blood, root and web on which they are so ruthlessly imposed. Rationality, or some ways of practicing it, is the villain and not the hero of this detective story, contrary to the way such stories are usually told. In arguing against them however, I am not arguing against the practice of reason but arguing for better forms of reason that will be more, not less rational, in the current state of the world. Reason has been captured by power and made an instrument of oppression; it must be remade as a tool for liberation.

These ratiogenic patterns of thought and organisation – monological, rationalist, hyper-capitalist, colonising and centric – seem at first to be ghosts, shadowy, insubstantial figures, mere phantoms of the real world of political action. But as we scrutinise them more closely we can learn to recognise their very real and material traces intertwined in our lives, and in the lives of penguins. Their fingerprints are to be found in the multiple crises of natural limits that now confront us everywhere; their crimes include the ratiogenic degradation of the atmosphere, the oceans, the forests, human food systems, and agricultural land, the ratiogenic crises of pollution and of human health, and the holocaust of animal life. With the increasing power of their technological and economic weapons, their circles of ratiogenic devastation extend ever more widely, even to the global commons and the great natural cycles and processes governing the planet itself.¹

The crisis or failure in which we stand is conventionally said to be a crisis of ecology, which suggests a crisis or failing of nature. In reality, the ‘ecological’ crisis is a crisis or failing of reason and culture, a crisis of monological forms of both that are unable to adapt themselves to the earth and to the limits of other kinds of life. Postmodernists write of a ‘crisis of reason’, but their over-culturalised sensibilities have trivialised the rational crisis and identified it with a critical crisis. The ecological crisis of reason involves a quite practical, concrete and material set of crises on multiple fronts, and one of its most important expressions is the ecological crisis. The crisis of hegemonic reason, as I shall show, is very much more than a crisis of esteem; maladapted monological systems of reason and mastery are creating a material crisis of life or death, for us and for the larger systems of life on this planet. As I argued in Plumwood 1993, the roots of these systems of mastery lie buried in antiquity, even if their historical projects of subduing and colonising nature have come to full flower only in modernity. The ecological crises they produce result from a certain lack of fit or adaptation of societies structured by hegemonic rationality to their ecological and social realities. The ecological crisis is the crisis of a cultural ‘mind’ that cannot acknowledge and adapt itself properly to its material ‘body’, the embodied and ecological support base it draws on in the long-denied counter-sphere of ‘nature’. Given this lack of fit, hegemonic rationality is in conflict with ecological rationality and survival. The denial of embodiment and illusion of individual autonomy that makes up what Teresa Brennan calls the Foundational Fantasy of the west,² helps to explain why an economic and social order can continue to be presented as rational when it systematically erodes biospheric systems such as the ozone shield and unbalances the carbon cycles that contribute in crucial ways to the survival of planetary life.

The face of global capitalism shows the lineaments not of ignorance but of denial. As the pilchard disaster illustrates, the ecological relationships its disembedded economic system creates are irresponsible, unaccountable, and especially for those in privileged contexts, invisible. The system gives those eating salmon from the fish farms no idea of the trail of death, disease and suffering their meal leaves behind. We can find out what is available in the market to meet our desires and at what price, but we cannot without great difficulty trace where it came from or what its real costs are, in terms of the earth. Under current rules for global trade, it may soon be illegal to inquire. As Jennifer Price argues in Flight Maps, commodity culture actively erases such connections, encouraging us ‘to focus on the meanings we make, but not on our complicity in the economic networks through which people convert nature and human labour into the stuff and sustenance of everyday lives’.³ Remoteness negates responsibility, for consumers, workers and shareholders. In rationalist commodity culture, we are actively prevented from exercising care and living in ecologically-embedded and responsible ways.

In the stampede to apply the abstract, universal formulae of property formation to the particular, living places of the earth, the specific ecological relationships needed to maintain larger processes that support biospheric systems are not factored in and can be risked for little gain. The earth is made up of such local living places, and a way of ordering human life, however highly theorised and mathematised, that does not acknowledge them does not belong to the earth; its real allegiance is to a more abstract planet, a timeless, immaterial realm of numbers that can sustain no life. Yet this rationalistic agency that is in the process of killing its own earthly body sees itself as the ultimate form of reasoning planetary life, and seeks to impose itself universally, prioritising its models and enforcing them maximally across the globe and even beyond. Because the system is self-prioritising and has eliminated or colonised political, scientific and other potentially critical and corrective systems, it has little capacity to reflect on or correct its increasingly life-threatening failures or blindspots. This kind of rationality is irrational, despite its hyper-rational trappings; just how it is irrational, both for humans and for penguins, is the main subject of this book.

Modern heirs of rationalism

The hypothesis I am recommending here is that dominant forms of reason – economic, political, scientific and ethical/prudential – are failing us because they are subject to a systematic pattern of distortions and illusions in which they are historically embedded and which they are unable to see or reflect upon. These blindspots especially affect the way we understand our relationships to nature and to one another, and they derive especially from the hegemonic origins of these patterns of thought, which have identified the biospheric Other as passive and without limits, its frontiers an invitation to invasion. It is the special form of failure such monological and hegemonic forms of reason are subject to that they misunderstand their own enabling conditions – the body, ecology and non-human nature for example, often because they have written these down as inferior or constructed them as background in arriving at an illusory and hyperbolised sense of human autonomy. These distorted forms are currently devastating the world under the guise of reason.

Why is reason like this? My answer is: because concepts of rationality have been corrupted by systems of power into hegemonic forms that establish, naturalise and reinforce privilege. Rationalist dualisms especially justify elite forms of power, not only by mapping the drama of the master subject and his Others onto a dualism of reason and nature, but by mapping many other aspects of life onto many other variants of these basic forms. The polarising aspects of dualism involve sorting a field into two homogenised and radically separated classes, typically constructing a false choice between contrasting polarities in a truncated field which can be conceived in much more equal, continuous and overlapping ways. Dualistic reason/nature polarisation naturalises radical inequality between sharply distinct but collaborating groups and justifies the privilege of the winners, as more rational. Its polarities justify and help establish remoteness for privileged classes from any ill-consequences of their property formation processes for the environment and for human health and well-being. Polarisation also cuts sympathy and identification with the losers, and facilitates various forms of remoteness from ill consequences for the privileged groups. Hegemonic definitions of the winners’ agency and achievement allow denial and backgrounding of the Other’s contribution to the outcome, naturalising appropriation by the hyper-rational ‘achiever’, as master subject, of what the less powerful are or have done. This includes naturalising the master subject’s appropriation of their labour and its product.

Dualism and rationalism function together as a system of ideas that justifies and naturalises domination of people and events by a privileged class identified with reason, who deserve to be in control and to be disproportionately rewarded. In the economic rationalist sphere, these elements yield a recipe for polarising structures of radical inequality based on those who are winners in terms of a mechanism for distribution that can be represented as rational and dispassionate, and for perpetuating this situation via a powerful rationalist system of ideas that is so strongly elaborated and entrenched culturally that it can secure a kind of ‘consent’ even from the losers.⁴ Rich cultural elaborations of the basic reason nature/dualism maximise control and supply confirming structures in as many places as possible. When they are mapped onto powerful basic systems like gender to become intertwined with identity and the fabric of life, they become almost impossible to see, separate and question. Such systems are highly functional for naturalising oppression, but fatally fallible for adapting us to the environments that sustain us.

But thus to indict rationalist influence on the dominant forms of rationality is not to embrace its polar opposite of irrationalism, rejecting reason in all its forms, or to indict the exercise of reason itself as a faculty. Rationalism is not the same as reason, just as scientism is not the same as science,⁵ although rationalism has shaped our understanding of both reason and science, in the same way that scientism shapes the understanding, practice and agenda of science. Rather rationalism is a doctrine about reason, its place at the apex of human life, and the practice of oppositional construction in relation to its ‘others’, especially the body and nature, which are simultaneously relied upon but disavowed or taken for granted. Rationalism constructs dominant forms of rationality in terms of mono-logical ways of organising and exercising reason in the global free market that do not allow the non-human others of the earth enough access to the earth’s natural wealth to survive. These dominant rationalist forms of rationality not only doom the non-human world, they will leave humans themselves little chance of survival if they continue on their present course.

Faced with the decline and disruption of the non-human sphere, and its likely spillover into our own species decline, we are entitled to conclude that rationalist rationality is irrational, in the sense that it is maladapted to the environment it depends on. To say this though is not to withdraw hope, because these distorted forms of reason are not the only kind, and an analysis of their failures can help us challenge and change them. If forms of rationality that treat the earth as plunder, previously perhaps part of the conditions for ‘successful’ western domination of the planet, have become a danger to us and to the rest of the inhabitants of the earth, we need to seek out higher order forms of reason that can reflect critically on these failures and develop new forms. These will be ecologically sensitive forms of rationality that judge what currently passes for reason by the standards of ecological success or failure, among other things. In choosing thus, we would not be acting irrationally; in the light of our fully ecological embodiment as human animals, our critical and corrective behaviour would be more and not less rational.

Rationalism has given us a deeply anti-ecological narrative of reason that has guided much of the development of western culture, with the ecological crisis as its climax. This narrative or ideology tells us that reason, above all else, is supreme in the world, and that reason is associated especially with the dominant class, even defining of it. The universe is ordered completely by rational principles, which the representatives of reason can discover and use in re-ordering the world for the benefit of rational beings. Rationalism sees life as a march of progress, which consists of reason subjugating the supposedly inferior and passive sphere of nature in the body and in non-human life. In hegemonic rationalist constructions of reason, the body and nature are treated as lower, a sphere to distance from and subdue. Dualistic constructions of reason and nature, mind and body, spirit and flesh create polarising metaphors and understandings of these elements which are woven through many kinds of social division in the dominant culture. These constructions erase the agency and contributions of women, the body, materiality and the more-than-human world.

In the historical rationalist imaginary, women and other ‘lesser beings’ are the Others of reason, which is treated as the province of elite men who are above the base material sphere of daily life and are entitled to transcend it because of their greater share in Reason. It is not only women that have been constructed as oppositional to western rationality, culture and philosophy, but also the slave, the animal, and the barbarian, all associated with the body and the whole contrasted sphere of physicality and materiality. It would be naive to assume that these deep-seated conceptions of reason as the province of elite males are merely ‘ideas’, ‘abuses’ of a basically neutral concept that have had no effect on its interpretation and construction. Rather they have constructed reason as the leading character in a modern rationalist narrative of domination of the Others. From this narrative we derive the myths – still strongly persisting – of women’s more emotional and unstable nature, as well as the contemporary myths of an invincible and heroic male-coded techno-reason that will solve our current problems and wrest a shining future from the jaws of crisis.

The inability to see humans as ecological and embodied beings that permeates western culture is one of the major legacies of this aspect of rationalism. It means that the ecological support base of our societies is relied on but denied in the same way as the sphere of materiality and the body is denied in classical rationalist philosophy. Humans are seen as the only rational species, the only real subjectivities and actors in the world, and nature is a background substratum which is acted upon, in ways we do not usually need to pay careful attention to after we have taken what we want of it. This is the rationality of monologue, termed monological because it recognises the Other only in one-way terms, in a mode where the Others must always hear and adapt to the One, and never the other way around. Monological relationships block mutual adaptation and its corollaries – negotiation, communication and perception of the Other’s limits and agency.

As I argued in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, such a narrative of mastery as rational supremacy can be traced in the dominant culture of the west since the high period of classical civilisation, as an ideology justifying the dominance of a civilised elite and their chief values, identified increasingly with reason. The representatives of reason then were the male elite who did not need to be concerned with the bodily sphere of labour or materiality. They were the supremos at the apex of the great chain of being, the rational hierarchy which awarded disvalue according to decreasing participation in reason and supposedly increasing participation in materiality. Reason, the ‘manly’ element in the soul, was opposed to the inferior and corrupting ‘female’ elements, which included the supposedly ‘soft’ areas of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The ecological crisis of reason
• 2 Rationalism and the ambiguity of science
• 3 The politics of ecological rationality
• 4 Inequality and ecological rationality
• 5 The blindspots of centrism and human self-enclosure
• 6 Philosophy, prudence and anthropocentrism
• 7 The ethics of commodification
• 8 Towards a dialogical interspecies ethics
• 9 Unity, solidarity and deep ecology
• 10 Towards a materialist spirituality of place
• 11 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index