Environmental Skill

Motivation, Knowledge, and the Possibility of a Non-Romantic Environmental Ethics

Mark Coeckelbergh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317500148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Today it is widely recognized that we face urgent and serious environmental problems and we know much about them, yet we do very little. What explains this lack of motivation and change? Why is it so hard to change our lives? This book addresses this question by means of a philosophical inquiry into the conditions of possibility for environmental change. It discusses how we can become more motivated to do environmental good and what kind of knowledge we need for this, and explores the relations between motivation, knowledge, and modernity. After reviewing a broad range of possible philosophical and psychological responses to environmental apathy and inertia, the author argues for moving away from a modern focus on either detached reason and control (Stoicism and Enlightenment reason) or the natural, the sentiments, and the authentic (Romanticism), both of which make possible disengaging and alienating modes of relating to our environment. Instead he develops the notion of environmental skill: a concept that bridges the gap between knowledge and action, re-interprets environmental virtue, and suggests an environmental ethics centered on experience, know-how and skillful engagement with our environment. The author then explores the implications of this ethics for our lives: it changes the way we think about, and deal with, health, food, animals, energy, climate change, politics, and technology.

1 Introduction

1.1. The Problem: Why Is It Not Easy to Become Green?

Today it is widely recognized that we face environmental problems and that we should do something about them. Even if there is considerable disagreement about what the underlying or central problem is, how urgent the problem is (Does this amount to a “crisis”? Should we act now?), and what exactly should be done, since the 1970s many people—especially but certainly not exclusively in the West—recognize that “nature” is in trouble and believe that action is required to protect and preserve “nature”. For example, they agree that we should promote “sustainability” and that we should prevent cruelty to animals.

A significant proportion of these people also believe that environmental action should involve changes to the way they live their lives. Today we know so much more about this: We know the “facts” and we know that there is a connection between how we live and what happens to “nature”. The sciences show what happens (e.g. what happens to ecosystems or to the climate), alarming reports have been produced from the 1970s up to now, and during the past 50 years “green” ethicists, activists, and politicians have constantly reminded us about the need for change¹. We realize that we should live in a more “green” way. To care about “nature” has become mainstream, and many of us try to live in a more “environmentally friendly” way.

However, in spite of this growing awareness, we have failed to make substantial and fundamental alterations to our societies and to our way of living. Political change in this area is so slow that even those who care and want change tend to become frustrated, cynical, or apathetic about “the environment” and its problems. And when it really comes to doing things differently and to living differently, even those who are sympathetic to green thinking fail to make changes to their lives or limit their efforts to cosmetic “lifestyle” changes, while knowing that these are not enough. Thus, it seems that the main problem of environmental ethics is not that we do not know what to do, but that we are not motivated to make the required changes.

What explains this lack of motivation? Why does this gap between knowledge and action persist? What makes it so hard to change? Why is it not easy to become green, or at least greener? If we could find a good answer to these questions, perhaps we could make some real progress in this area: It would help to clarify the underlying problem(s) and suggest a way to address it.

1.2. Aim of the Book

This book intends to contribute to a better understanding of the problem and an answer by means of a philosophical inquiry into the conditions of possibility of environmental change, involving a discussion of the moral-psychological, moral-epistemological, and cultural-philosophical barriers to change. Rather than directly focusing on the usual normative-ethical questions what we ought to do and why we ought to do it (the problem of moral justification), I focus on the problems of how we can become motivated to do environmental good (the problem of moral motivation); what kind of knowledge we need for this (the problem of moral epistemology); and what the relation is between these problems of moral motivation, moral knowledge, and the problem of modernity. I will argue that our inability to change our lives and social, political, economic, and technological institutions is partly but importantly due to misconceiving and “misliving” our relation to our environment as people who are still deeply modern. In particular, this book questions how we usually think about “nature”, “environment”, “virtue”, and “technology”. It questions conceptions and ways of thinking that we inherited from modern-rationalist but also modern-romantic thinking. After critically reviewing a broad range of possible responses to the problem of environmental motivation—a journey from Plato and Augustine to Rousseau and Thoreau, but also lessons from contemporary analytic philosophy and empirical psychology—this book argues for a non-Stoic and non-modern, especially non-romantic environmental ethics that moves away from our normative focus on either detached reason and control (Stoicism and Enlightenment reason) or the natural, the emotional, and the authentic (Romanticism), both of which turn out to be disengaging and alienating modes of thinking and doing. Instead, it centres on the notion of skill, in particular skilled engagement with the environment: engaged, embodied, “care-full”, and habitual activity that affirms our “environmental” nature. I will argue that what we need now is not so much more knowledge of environmental theory and environmental facts, better management, more self-control, or more warm feelings for “nature”, but a different, more practical and active relation to our environment, which involves better know-how rather than more know-that: we need better environmental skill. We have to acquire the art of environmental living.

I will show that this concept of “environmental skill” enables us to answer the problem of moral motivation construed as a gap between knowledge and action. The problem arises due to the kind of knowledge that is assumed in this problem definition: theoretical knowledge is not enough and itself creates the gap; instead, we need know-how, which is by definition not detached from action and experience but produced by it. If we assume the latter meaning of knowledge, the explanation for our environmental inaction and demotivation is that we do not really “know” what to do unless we skillfully engage with our environment. Thus, when it comes to environmental ethics this understanding of environmental knowledge and motivation provides (1) a way to avoid alienation from our environment and (2) a way to “become motivated by moving” rather than by something external, such as theoretical knowledge. Moreover, the concept of environmental skill also suggests a different way of thinking. It recommends that we reject both the disinterested, objectivist aspect of modern science and the naturalism of Romanticism as detaching, alienating modes of thinking and doing; it involves different assumptions about the relations between humans and their environment, and different understandings of the relations between skills, virtues, moral sentiments, and technologies. While I will draw attention to reasons why moral-environmental change is difficult, I will show that this approach has implications for the way we live: for the way we walk in “nature”, but also for the way we deal with issues such as health, food, animals, energy, and climate change.

1.3. Approach and Position in the Literature

The book draws on a number of philosophical sources and traditions to support its main thesis. Engaging with phenomenological (Heidegger and Dreyfus) and pragmatist ideas (Dewey), but also with literature on Romanticism, with the work of Rousseau and Thoreau, with contemporary ‘environmental virtue ethics’ (see for instance van Wensveen or Cafaro), and with thinking about manual skill and craftsmanship (Pirsig, Sennett, Crawford, Dreyfus and Kelly), the book shows how existing thinking about nature is often still highly romantic and how the proposed approach tries to overcome this way of thinking. This delivers not only a more adequate description of our basic existential relation to our environment and of different ways of perceiving our environment, but also gives us a conceptual tool that is normatively and practically relevant. By revealing different ways of actively relating to our environment and by encouraging us to develop environmental know-how and to exercise environmental virtue understood in terms of skill, it promises an environmental ethics that practically explores new possibilities and that, with its emphasis on skill as well as concrete and embodied know-how, asks us to do things in a way that moves us, makes us care, makes us more “environmental”, and thereby lets us, and our environment, flourish.

Evidently this is not the first time that anyone has questioned modern ways of thinking or used a transcendental approach to think about “nature.” However, when it comes to environmental philosophy, usually this project is limited to questioning scientific and technological ways of thinking and doing. Romanticism is often left out of the picture. This is understandable: if we perceive the world through romantic glasses, we do not see the glasses themselves. With its focus on the “natural”, the “authentic”, and “the wild” (including the very idea of “rewilding”), modern environmental philosophy—including Thoreau—is deeply romantic. This book diagnoses this blind spot and reflects on how we can remove it.

Moreover, due to our Romanticism we often set up a divorce between “environmental” issues and questions concerning “technology”, which is reflected in the gap between academic fields that deal with these problems. This book is different: It makes a much-needed connection between environmental philosophy and philosophy of technology. It rejects those views in philosophy of technology that think of technology in terms of a “system” or in terms of (a specific kind of) rationality that dominates “nature”. Instead, it associates technology more with the ancient term techne, which is not aimed at disinterested understanding (episteme as theoria) but concrete (ways of) making and doing. The book does not view techne as a kind of lower activity, as Aristotle did, but moves beyond Aristotle’s freedom/necessity dualism, which presupposes a detached human subject. Thus, the book does not only question our talk about “nature” but also our talk about “technology”—which many assume to be external to us and external to the active and practical ways we relate to our environment. It replaces the human-technology and human-nature dualisms with the notion of “environmental skill” and with what I call, in a Heideggerian idiom, “acting-in-the-world”.

This non-dualist, or at least less-dualist, approach also reconnects the environmental “crisis” (which seems to be “out there”) with the crisis of meaning and value (which seems to be a matter of the “inner”). It retrieves the concept of alienation and takes seriously feelings of alienation, but in contrast to the earlier tradition in philosophy of technology and in environmental ethics, it offers a different definition and solution to the problem: Alienation is not about “the system” or “technology” that threatens us and destroys nature and the natural as well as human nature and value and meaning (as in Heidegger but also Frankfurter Schule and Habermas); rather, alienation concerns the more concrete and practical ways in which we relate to the environment. This implies, among other things, that we become more, not less, responsible when we adopt a non-modern approach.

I use the term “non-modern” to distinguish my approach (1) from efforts that seek to overcome the modern by reverting back to pre-modern technologies and ways of life—a tendency which is present in the works of Heidegger, Dreyfus, Illich, and Borgmann—and (2) from “post-modern” thinking, which may well succeed in exploring the non-modern, but which is heavily focused on discourse and text, thereby neglecting the material dimension and its related skills and techne. With its focus on environmental skill, this book develops an approach that avoids a romantic environmentalism and a nostalgic philosophy of technology and that seeks to redress the balance between techne and logos when it comes to the techno-logical aspects of environmental thinking and practice.

Furthermore, by moving beyond an ethics of control and management, the book also achieves distance from what it now reveals as a superficial critique of society and of how we generally relate to our environment: anti-consumerism understood as a response to lack of control. The environmental crisis has to do with consumerism, for sure, but in an anti-Stoic move the book argues that (1) the problem is misconceived if the problem with consumerism is defined in terms of lack of control of desires (or too much desire) rather than a failure to connect with things—a failure to adequately connect to the environment—and that (2) the solution of more self-control tends to aggravate the environmental crisis rather than solve it, since it re-enforces the attitude and the kind of thinking and acting Heidegger called ‘technological’ and promotes an ideal of autonomy (detachment, total control) that is theoretically inadequate and practically and environmentally destructive.

Finally, the book is sympathetic to environmental virtue ethics (see, for example, van Wensveen, Sandler and Cafaro), but distances it (1) from the Stoic tradition (including perhaps Stoic Christianity and, for example, Carson’s plea for restraint in Silent Spring), which over-emphasizes virtues that have to do with self-control, such as temperance; (2) from the Romanticism inherent in for example Thoreau’s and Leopold’s work (e.g. celebration of the wild); and (3) from (interpretations of) Aristotelian thinking about virtue that put too much emphasis on theoretical knowledge and neglect contingency and pluralism. The ethics of skill argued for in this book avoids promoting restraint if that amounts to detachment and disengagement, and criticizes the romantic rejection of the artificial. Moreover, arguing against the more theoretically oriented dimension of Aristotle’s ethics, the book emphasizes that (developing) virtue is a matter of practical skill and habit rather than a matter of character, attitude, or theoretical knowledge (e.g. definition of virtue as principles or rules how to act). It thus emphasizes the practically oriented dimension of Aristotle and of the virtue ethics tradition. Environmental virtue is neither “internal” (character) nor “external” (acts) but concerns how we relate to our environment as beings-in-relation, as environmental beings.

1.4. Overview of the Argument

The book will move through a number of ways of understanding and answering the problem in order to pave the way for a new direction in environmental ethics. Each time a particular view is considered, I will first articulate why it might be considered an attractive response to the problem, and single out the observations and insights that must be saved and endorsed. Then I will raise my objection(s) and point out limitations (without necessarily entirely dismissing the view in question) and suggest a different response, the implications of which are then more fully developed and elaborated in the last chapters of the book. Thus, there is a “negative” and “positive” moment in the book, but development of the positive view starts already in the first chapters. Let me give an overview of the argument.

In Part I, I start with discussing psychological conditions of possibility for environmental change: What explains our lack of “green” motivation? To answer this question, I try to learn from ancient and modern thinking about motivation and knowledge and from contemporary psychology. In Chapter 2 I use mainly philosophy—in particular, ancient Greek philosophy—to construct a number of moral-psychological problem definitions and explanations. I start with the Socratic view that knowing the good is sufficient for a virtuous life and argue that if this means “theoretical” knowledge then this view is not very helpful: There has been enough instruction about what is environmentally good, but this knowledge has not produced much more environmental good. I review a number of ancient and modern explanations for the gap between knowing and choosing the good, including weak will and lack of self-control, “environmental evil,” turning away from environmental good, and mindless work and consumption by “environmental zombies”—“environmental evil” turns out to be more banal than first assumed.

In Chapter 3 I review contemporary psychological explanations for the lack of environmental motivation. I discuss theories of intention and behaviour, motivation, and self-regulation. In the specific literature on environmental psychology, I pay particular attention to the role of direct experience. However, in the next chapters I take distance from most philosophical and psychological explanations and pay more attention to the social-collective, political-ideological, and especially cultural-philosophical dimension of the problem. Perhaps the stress on self-control is itself part of the problem. Maybe the problem is not a lack of reflection, but the wrong kind of thinking. And why is it that our contemporary culture tends to neglect the role of direct experience in morality?

My answer to these questions is provided by my discussion of the relation between environmentalism and modernity in Part II. I argue that contemporary environmentalism is still very modern, and that in order to further understand it and find a solution to the motivation problem we need to discuss the problem of modernity. In Chapters 4 and 5 I show how problematic modern thinking is for guiding environmental ethics, how this kind of cultural-philosophical condition of possibility limits our possibilities to change things. In particular, I argue that contemporary environmentalism is deeply shaped by Enlightenment rationalism and Romanticism. This Janus-faced modern outlook limits our thinking in at least two ways.

On the one hand, environmentalists draw on science to show what is going on (“the facts”) and often politicians propose technological solutions. However, this approach is problematic: Enlightenment reason promotes the control and technological manipulation of nature, but this has become a source of existential, social and moral alienation: We feel that the modern world has no meaning or value. And as Marx and Heidegger have argued, the result of this way of thinking is that we treat nature as a standing-reserve (Heidegger 1977) and become alienated from one another (Marx 1844 and 1867). On the other hand, we try to solve this problem by anti-reason, by re-enchanting “nature” with our love, and by living in a more “natural” and “authentic” way. Environmentalists value the “wild”, that is, what is untouched and unpolluted by humans. We start walking in nature to reconnect with it: this is the romantic solution, rooted in, for instance, the work of Rousseau and Thoreau, and alive in the current yearning for “the wild” and “wilderness”. At first sight, this romantic response seems to solve the problem of environmental motivation: If we loved nature, we would become motivated to protect it, especially if it is our Mother Earth. If we were more authentic and natural, nature could be liberated from the corrupting influences of science and society. But I will show that at closer inspection, romantic thinking is also a modern...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Environmental Motivation and Knowledge: Ancient and Modern Lessons from Philosophy and Psychology
• PART II The Janus Face of Modern Environmentalism: Enlightenment and Romanticism
• PART III Beyond Nature, Beyond Modernity, Beyond Thinking: A Non-Romantic, Non-Modern Approach
• PART IV Implications for Environmental Ethics and Philosophy of Technology
• Bibliography
• Index