Siby-Lecture_7

Siby: Environmental Philosophy Lecture 7: Notes-1 Environmental Philosophy: Conclusion 1. SOCIAL ECOLOGY VERSUS DEEP ECOLOGY Social ecology is an environmental philosophy which argues that the environmental crisis is caused not by human centrism per se, but by social problems (problems among human beings), especially hierarchical and class-structured domination of some humans by others.

Mechanization of production and capitalist domination of society has led to the dissolution of human ties to the natural world, they argue. Social ecology has a strong socialist root. Social ecologists have a very critical approach to the history of ecological crisis. Hence they think of their work as giving a critical history of humanity, understanding its present crises, and thinking about its future. This movement was begun by the American ecological philosopher Murray Bookchin (1921-2006).

Like the deep ecologists, social ecologists also view human-nature interaction as one of interconnection, complementarity, and cooperation. They also recognize that early societies existed with this sense of interconnection. But according to them, this complementary existence disappeared not due to any universal human centrism but due to social structures of societies.

They critique institutionalized forms of dominance in society as causally leading to ecological destruction. They reject biological (population explosion) or psychospiritual (human chauvinism) explanation of environmental destruction. For them, the capitalist market economy is the prime hierarchical social structure that has caused the environmental crisis. Capitalistic system has become an attitude of the mind among people, they argue, and this attitude colonizes not only territories away from home but one’s own natural world and human society as well. The free market system has destroyed not only nature, but human communities as well by defining social interaction in terms of competition and production. So the solution, according to deep ecologists, is not rediscovering spiritualism or merely ecological reforms, but in agitating against all forms of domination (gender, class, caste or whatever). Freedom is to be, thus, made available both for people and for nature. Social ecologists are also busy formulating a vision of the world without the domination of market economy.

It is clear that social ecologists belong to the secular humanist tradition of the Enlightenment. Their criticism of capitalism is due to its hierarchical social structure rather than due to its inherent anthropocentrism. They criticize biospheric egalitarianism as misanthropic (anti-human). According to them, deep ecology has formulated a very negative caricature of the human being as overpopulating the planet and eating up its resources. Also, deep ecologists are criticized as not having a historical perspective of the environmental crisis.

Many critics consider deep ecology as not being able to articulate a sound environmental philosophy but as merely taking off from various real relations of culture and nature (as of the Sherpa tribe in the case of Naess). The conceptual roots of deep ecology, according to them, are derived from various religious, romanticist, aesthetic and speculative traditions. But they agree

Siby: Environmental Philosophy Lecture 7: Notes-2 that deep ecology, considered in this pluralist way rather than as a coherent single doctrine, can be helpful for various kinds of political action. The critics point out that there needs to be comprehensive accounts of how humans experience nature, deal with it, and speak about (articulate) it. In deep ecology there is only a non-anthropocentric core; for the rest, it is asking us to produce various ecosophies.

Ramachandra Guha, the Indian environmental historian, writes from a social ecology perspective. According to him, environmental issues must be considered in the context of the social conditions that give rise to a society’s ecological conditions. He has a detailed historical critique of colonialism and neocolonialism. Many ecological issues in India like large dams, environmental preserves (like the tiger sanctuary), pollution etc., are, according to Guha, issues surrounding social conflicts over natural resources. These are issue regarding the transferring of control of and benefits from such resources from people who rely on them (indigenous or the poor) to biospheric omnivores who consume a large portion of the world’s resources. Though Naess himself avoided the criticism of imperialism, Guha thinks of deep ecology as a movement aimed at further dispossessing the world’s poor and indigenous people because such ideological planks are used by the global north over the global south to continue their neocolonial hegemony. By terming the various environmentalisms in the world as ‘shallow’, the ‘green missionaries’ (the new environmental messiahs) discredit the more appropriate, representative, democratic and popular environmentalisms in the global South.

2. ECOFEMINISM VERSUS DEEP ECOLOGY Ecofeminists argue that “nature” or natural environment is a feminist issue. Something like the power relations in society between the rich and the poor is a feminist issue because studying it help us understand better the overall subordination of women in any patriarchal social system.

Similarly environmentalism helps us understand how many women all over the world are subordinated and also how the environment is destroyed. They believe that there are real connections between the domination of women, in fact any other type of subordination, and the domination of nature. Hence they argue against all types of unjustified dominations. In practice, ecofeminism is a method of critique of environmental philosophy and the various environmentalisms in practice. The critique raises the issue of patriarchy, unequal powers, and male bias.

An example will make the feminist analysis of environmental issues clear. Take the issue of deforestation. According to the ecofeminists, it is women who are most visibly affected by deforestation, say, in India. Forests in India are connected to the rural household economies managed by women. As collectors of firewood and small forest resources and managers of subsistence domestic economies, ecofeminists argue, Indian women are the primary victims of deforestation, after which they have to walk deeper into the forest for these resources, carry them

Siby: Environmental Philosophy Lecture 7: Notes-3 home all by themselves, and with depletion of resource, seek other works which were traditionally done by men, while continuing uninterrupted their work as domestic managers.

Ecofeminists criticize deep ecology as biased towards male perspectives. For example, according to them, the rationalist, all-inclusive, and supposedly universalist perspective usually masquerades its patriarchal assumptions. This feminist criticism applies in general to much of philosophy, and, thus, also to deep ecology. Such a perspective does not look at the details of real differences, hidden oppressions, and thus, through increasing the currency of such views, they help accumulate further privileges for males and their perspectives. Deep ecology’s selfrealization ideal in being one with nature mostly applies to privileged males in much of the world. Further, while deep ecologists emphasize human oppression of nature, they do not recognize other types of oppressions like racism, gender bias, oppression of the poor and the like.

Deep ecologists criticize both ecofeminism and social ecology as movements that lose their focus on the natural world by getting involved in issues of social justice. They think that both social ecology and ecofeminism can formulate their respective positions from within deep ecology. Also, that there are issues other than patriarchy and capitalism that have given rise to the present environmental crisis, and that these other issues broadly surround anthropocentrism.

3. ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE We all know that the biggest greenhouse gas emitter state in the world, the USA, refused to accept the Kyoto Protocol, the greatest international agreement for the reduction of greenhouse gases adopted in 1997 at Kyoto in Japan. The USA has only less than 5 per cent of the world’s population, but its CO2 emission share is 24 per cent and its economy is 30 percent of the world’s. President Bush in 2001 categorically stated that such a protocol harms American economy and commerce, and so the USA will not adopt it. At the same time, the industrialized world has been insistent in demanding that developing nations like China and India pledge to commit to measurable reduction in emission.

Such issues of global politics and power struggles are at the back of the issue of environmental justice, which addresses a wide range of issues concerning both social justice and environmentalism. Philosophers who work in this area do not consider environment as a purely natural phenomenon; rather, ‘environment’ is a set of socially and politically conditioned relationships. Hence, social, cultural, and political settings of the relation between humans and environment are important to these scholars. Traditional fishermen fighting against modern mechanized fishing in Kerala, aboriginals in countries like Australia and Canada who seek justice in the context of destruction of their habitat on account of industrialization, people in Japan who developed a neurological disorder due to a poisonous substance emission into water by a chemical company, the Green belt movement in Kenya which has an integrative understanding of development and conservation, the plight of the Bhopal victims, eviction of

Siby: Environmental Philosophy Lecture 7: Notes-4 tribal and ethnic people for mega projects like dams – all these are matters of environmental justice.

People who work in the area of environmental justice want to know how environmental benefits and burdens are distributed, how are citizens compensated etc. They contend that careful analysis very often shows that environmental benefits often accrue to the advantaged sections of a population, whereas environmental burdens accrue to the disadvantaged. This question of justice is carnal to the environmental justice debate. If race bias comes to play in this distribution of benefits and burdens, the question of injustice there is termed environmental racism.

An important issue in environmental justice is the global distribution of environmental burdens and benefits. The countries of the global north (the affluent industrialized countries), whose industrialization was the major contributor to the present crisis, today want global environmental measures and curbs on industrialization. While they have achieved optimum industrial development, the new curbs do not apply to them. Hence, many developing nations (like the BASIC countries: Brazil, South Africa, India, China) argue that the environmental curbs are unjust towards their legitimate developmental and poverty eradication programmes.

Moreover, many highly technological environmental solutions are affordable only to these privileged countries.

4. CONSUMERISM Environmental destruction is caused by production, use, and disposal of materials. For all materials for production, the environment is the only source, and it is the only place where they can be disposed of. The modern market economies are called consumer economies because they define themselves by their growth in production usually much in excess of what is required for the population’s needs and even comforts. It is a case of consumption for the sake of consumption. The structures of the economy are themselves promoting consumption. This has caused overuse of the environment and its resources in a short span of about three centuries. If in the distinctly greater part of humanity’s history the environment was safely used, the consumerist economy which has had only a short run and still has not embraced the whole world has been able to bring about the present crisis.

Although human population is a pressure on the environment, the real impact is in terms of how much a household consumes. Hence the environmental impact of a typical family in rural India cannot be the same as that of the typical family in the USA. So population matters but consumption levels and technology used matter even more.

Hence, the question of consumption is a deeply ethical issue today especially in relation to the environment. This gives rise to the issue of more economic activity leading to more environmental damage, and the consequent conclusion that to have a healthy environment, economic activities will have to be less and consumption patterns, quantities and lifestyles will

Siby: Environmental Philosophy Lecture 7: Notes-5 have to change. However, this is too quick a conclusion. What people want are not necessarily goods but experiences. People want the good experience of music, not an audio system per se.

Today there are different ways of storing and playing music. Further, more service oriented industries are environmentally less harmful and can make people’s desire for subjective preference satisfaction and experience real. It goes without saying that goods are still required for leading a good and satisfying human life.

5. THE WAY AHEAD Environmentalism cannot mean a going back to pre-modern lifestyles or primitivism as such.

This is neither realistic nor possible. Any environmentalism that aims to do this is destined to fail.

However, environmentalism does mean a questioning of current values and philosophies, which we take for granted on face value. Hence, environmentalism definitely has a sense of going beyond modernity, its modes, philosophies and values.

This ‘going beyond’ means our appreciation for different ways of being happy without being overtly dependent on commodities, and our revised understanding of work and leisure, commerce and industry. Possibly, as some scholars argue, the environmental crisis will put a definite end to the consumerist culture in the near future.

For scientists, and especially technologists, environmentalism should mean visualizing technologies that improve human life without harming the planet, and pushing the information and technology revolution towards imaginative directions that help us understand our work, leisure, and enjoyment rather differently. This calls for the finest imagination and talent.

Environmentalism means enlarging our moral universe and inviting new members into it.

These new members are the non-human species. Without our ability to assign moral value to the non-human species, many scholars argue, we will not be able to relate to nature in any meaningful way. Humanity lost this ability only in the last few centuries of its life. This ability will now have to be systematically revived.

The spiritualism associated with deep ecology may not be relevant to at least a part of humanity. However, where it is relevant (as for many Indians), it is a definite way of experiencing closeness with the environment, and hence should not be discredited. Still, many scholars are of the opinion that ‘shallow’ practices should also not be discredited, since they may be the most viable (and in some cases the only) way of developing a different culture of sensitivity towards the environment.

The culture that idealizes reason and the objective pursuits of the sciences is deeply harmful to the environment and human bonding, though neither of these activities of knowledge are in themselves harmful. It is the culture of ‘privileging’ that is harmful. Hence, a more holistic

Siby: Environmental Philosophy Lecture 7: Notes-6 understanding of the human individual is championed by environmentalists and social philosophers. Humans are psychosomatic beings with composite abilities to feel (emotion), reason, intuit, decide (will), and appreciate the good and the just (morality). Further, as embodied beings (they cannot be reduced to their mind alone); they are integrally connected to their physical environment.

Environmentalism also means appreciating the different perspectives of viewing reality, and the different truths they try to portray to us (Heidegger). In fact, environmentalism means enriching our life and its tastes manifold, and becoming poets and scientists all at once. As a scientist, the environmentalist knows the state of the Planet; as a poet the environmentalist sees the beauty of a widening perspective and a more inclusive moral universe.

Is it not boring to know the world and relate to it and everything in it from a single perspective, as if ‘truth’ has been dished out to you (and your perspective) by some partial power? A life of deep and rich sensitivity and understanding, that allows the person to meet the world in its various dimensions, is more valuable than an existence that imprisons the human spirit in paradigms that are privileged in an era.

I shall end these lectures with a quote from Naess: “You cannot ever be sure that the whole truth is on your side rather than that of your opponent.”