Why This Book Was Written

I had long thought of writing a compact book that would dearly summarize my views on “remaking society” from an ecological view” point. It seemed to me (as it did to many of my friends) that a need existed to bring the ideas I have developed over several large books into a work of some two hundred pages; one that would not be too demanding for intelligent readers who are interested in social ecology.

But what finally made me decide to write this book was a rather chilling incident. Early in June, 1987, I was privileged to be a feature speaker in a six-day National Gathering of American Greens in Amherst, Massachusetts. The event received a surprising amount of national press coverage — and rightly so. About two thousand people from at least forty-two states came to Amherst to debate the theoretical and practical problems of a Green movement in the United States. This was the biggest gathering of independent American radicals in many years. Largely anti-capitalist and activist, these Greens were deeply involved in their neighborhoods, communities, and workplaces. They reflected a wide spectrum of radicalism in America — giving expression to its promise and its problems, its hopes and limitations.

The gathering was marked by over a dozen plenary sessions of five hundred to a thousand people and by an astonishing number of workshops on issues as exotic as ecological ethics and as timely as feminism, racism, imperialism, and economic democracy; indeed, almost every practical social problem that could be of interest to the rapidly growing Green movement in America. There were heated disputes over electoral versus non-electoral politics, independent versus coalition politics, revolutionary versus reformist politics, and, in short, all the debates that have echoed over the years in major radical gatherings.

But something fairly new surfaced in these debates. A number of tendencies, indeed, ways of thinking, appeared that may seem uniquely American, but which I think have already emerged or will emerge in Green movements, and perhaps radical movements generally, outside the United States.

I can best describe at least one of these tendencies by giving an account of the incident that troubled me. It occurred in an after-dinner small of our meeting place to discuss the events of the day. A young, tall, rather robust man from California began to talk in a vague way about the need to “obey” the “laws of nature,” to “humbly subjugate ourselves” (if I recall his words correctly) “to nature’s commands.” Rhetorical as his words seemed at first utterance, I began to find his increasingly strident monologue very disturbing.

His use of words like “obey,” “laws of nature,” “subjugate ” and commands” reminded me of the very same language I have heard from anti-ecological people who believe that nature must “obey” our commands and its “laws” must be used to “subjugate” the natural world itself. Whether I was thinking of the young California Green who was bombarding me with his seemingly “ecological” verbiage, or of modern acolytes of the cold deities of science who believe that “man” must ruthlessly control nature in “his” own interest, it was clear to me that these two seemingly opposed views had a basic thing in common. They jointly shared the vocabulary of domination and subjugation. Just as my California Green believes that human beings should be dominated by nature, so the acolytes of scientism believe that nature should be dominated by “man.”

My California Green, in effect, had merely reversed this unsavory relationship between human beings and nature by turning people into objects of domination, just as his scientistic opponents (usually big industrialists, financiers, and entrepreneurs in our modern corporate society) turn the world of life, including human beings, into objects of domination. The fact that humanity, together with nature, were being locked into a common destiny based on domination by a hierarchical mentality and society, seemed to elude my California Green with his simplistic message of “surrendering” to nature and its “laws.”

Already deeply disturbed by the fact that a self-professed Green could think so much like his ecological opponents, I decided to ask him a blunt question: “What do you think is the cause of the present ecological crisis?” His answer was very emphatic: “Human beings! People are responsible for the ecological crisis!”

“Do you mean that people such as blacks, women, and the oppressed are causing ecological imbalances — not corporations, agribusiness, ruling elites, and the State?” I asked with complete astonishment.

“Yes, people!” he answered even more heatedly. “Everyone! They overpopulate the earth, they pollute the planet, they devour its resources, they are greedy. That’s why corporations exist — to give people the things they want.”

I suspect our discussion would have become explosive if my California Green had not been distracted by a nearby game of volley-ball and leaped up to join it.

I could not forget this conversation. Indeed, it haunts me to the present day because of the extent, as I have since learned, to which it reflects the thinking of many environmentalists, some of whom would militantly call themselves “radicals.”

The most striking feature of such a way of thinking is not only that it closely parallels the way of thinking that is found in the corporate world. What is more serious is that it serves to deflect our attention from the role society plays in producing ecological breakdown. If “people” as a species are responsible for environmental dislocations, these dislocations cease to be the result of social dislocations. A mythic “Humanity” is created — irrespective of whether we are talking about oppressed ethnic minorities, women. Third World people, or people in the First World — in which everyone is brought into complicity with powerful corporate elites in producing environmental dislocations. In this way, the social roots of ecological problems are shrewdly obscured. A new kind of biological “original sin” is created in which a vague group of animals called “Humanity” is turned into a destructive force that threatens the survival of the living world.

Reduced to a mere species, human beings can now be treated as a simple zoological phenomenon subject to the “biological laws” that presumably determine the “struggle for existence” in the the natural world. If there is a famine, for example, it can be “explained” by simple biological notions like a “shortage of food,” presumably caused by “excess population,” If there is a war, it can be explained by the “stresses” produced by “overcrowding” or the need for “living space.”

In a like manner, we can dismiss or explain away hunger, misery, or illness as “natural checks” that are imposed on human beings to retain the “balance of nature.” We can comfortably forget that much of the poverty and hunger that afflicts the world has its origin in the corporate exploitation of human beings and nature — in agribusiness and social oppression. Human beings, you see, are merely a species like rabbits, lemmings, and the like, who are inexorably subject to relentless “natural laws.” [1]

If one views the human condition this way, such that all life-forms are “biocentrically” interchangeable despite their unique qualities, people, too, become interchangeable with locusts or, for that matter, viruses — as has been seriously suggested in a debate by advocates of this viewpoint — and are equally expendable in the interplay of so-called natural laws.

The young Californian who presented these views expressed only the crudest notions that make up this growing ideology. He may very well have been one of those people I have recently encountered in the United States who believes that African children — presumably like other “animals” — should be permitted to starve because they are “overpopulating” the continent and burdening the biological “carrying capacity” of their respective countries. Or, what is equally vicious, that the AIDS epidemic should be welcomed as a means of reducing “excessive” population. Or, more chauvinistically, that “immigrants” to the United States from Latin America (often Indians whose ancestors came to the Americas thousands of years ago) should be kept out because they threaten “our” resources.

Presented in so crude and racist a form, with the use of words like “our” to designate an America whose resources are actually owned by a handful of giant corporations, this viewpoint is likely to be repugnant to most Americans. Nevertheless, as simple-minded, purely zoological answers to highly complex social questions, the viewpoint lends to gain a growing following, particularly among the more macho, authoritarian, and reactionary types who have always used “nature” and “natural laws” as substitutes for a study of real social issues and concerns.

The temptation to equate human beings who live in complex, highly institutionalized, and bitterly divided societies with ordinary animals, is finding its voice in seemingly sophisticated arguments that often parade under the guise of “radical” ecological philosophies. The resurgence of a new Malthusianism that contends that growth rates in population tend to exceed growth rates in food production is die most sinister ideological development of all.

The myth that population increases in places like the Sudan, for example, result in famine (not the notorious fact that the Sudanese could easily feed themselves if they were not forced by the American-controlled World Bank and International Monetary Fund to grow cotton instead of grains) typically represents the kind of arguments that are gaining popularity among many environmentalists, “Nature,” we are arrogantly told by privileged Euro-Americans who parade as “natural law” theorists, “must be permitted to take its course” — as though the profits of corporations, banks, and agribusiness have anything to do with the “course” of nature.

What renders this new “biocentrism,” with its antihumanistic image of human beings as interchangeable with rodents or ants, so insidious is that it now forms the premise of a growing movement called “deep ecology.”[2] “Deep ecology” was spawned among well-to-do people who have been raised on a spiritual diet of Eastern cults mixed with Hollywood and Disneyland fantasies. The American mind is formless enough without burdening it with “biocentric” myths of a Buddhist and Taoist belief in a universal “oneness” so cosmic that human beings with ail their distinctiveness dissolve into an all-encompassing form of biocentric equality.” Reduced to merely one life-form among many, the poor and the impoverished either become fair game for outright extermination if they are socially expendable, or they become objects of brutal exploitation if they can be used to aggrandize the corporate world. Accordingly, terms like “oneness” and a “biocentric democracy” go hand-in-hand with a pious formula for human oppression, misery, and even extermination.

Finally, ecological thinking is not enriched by recklessly blending such disparate religions as Buddhism and Taoism with Christianity, much less philosophers like the Jewish thinker Spinoza with a Nazi apologist like Heidegger. To declare, as Ame Naess, the pontiff of “deep ecology,” has done, that the “basic principles of the deep ecology movement lie in religion or philosophy,” is to make a conclusion notable for its absence of reference to social theory.[3]

There is enough in this mix of “biocentrism”, antihumanism, mysticism, and religion with its “natural law” ethos to feed extremely reactionary and atavistic tendencies, all well-meaning references in deep ecology about “decentralization” and “nonhierarchy” aside. This raises the question of still another exotic tendency that is percolating through the ecology movements. I refer to the paradoxical need for a new theistic ecological “spirituality.” That the word “spirituality” may often mean a decent, indeed, a wholesome sensitivity to nature and its subtle interconnections, is a very substantial reason to guard ourselves against its degeneration into an atavistic, simple-minded form of nature religion peopled by gods, goddesses, and eventually a new hierarchy of priests and priestesses. Mystical versions of feminism, as well as the ecology movement as a whole, alas, have sometimes proved themselves to be all too vulnerable to this tendency. The clear-sighted naturalism to which ecology so vividly lends itself is now in danger of being supplanted by a supernatural outlook that is inherently alien to nature’s own fecundity and self-creativity.

May we not reasonably ask why the natural world has to be peopled with earth gods and goddesses when natural evolution exhibits a marvelous power of its own to generate such a rich and wondrous variety of living beings? Is this alone not enough to Fill the human mind with admiration and respect? Is it not the crudest form of “anthropocentrism” (to use a word for the projection of the human into the natural that evokes so much disdain in ecology movements) to introduce deified forms created by the human imagination into the natural world in the name of ecological “spirituality”?

To worship or revere any being, natural or supernatural, will always be a form of self-subjugation and servitude that ultimately yields social domination, be it in the name of nature, society, gender, or religion. More than one civilization was riddled by “nature deities” that were cynically used by ruling elites to support the most rigid, oppressive, and dehumanizing of social hierarchies. The moment human beings fall to their knees before any thing that is “higher” than themselves, hierarchy will have made its first triumph over freedom, and human backs will be exposed to all the burdens that can be inflicted on them by social domination.

I have raised some of the problems posed by the misanthropic, antihuman tendencies in the ecology movement not to defame the movement as a whole. Quite to the contrary: my purpose in surveying these tendencies is to peel away the fungus that has accumulated around the movement and look at the promising fruit ecology can yield for the future. The reason why this book has been written is to show as clearly as possible that ecology alone, firmly rooted in social criticism and a vision of social reconstruction, can provide us with the means for remaking society in a way that will benefit nature and humanity.

However, we cannot achieve such a criticism and vision by swinging mindlessly from one extreme that advocates the complete “domination of nature” by “man” to another, rather confused “biocentric” or antihumanist extreme that essentially reduces humanity to a parasitic swarm of mosquitoes in a mystified swamp called “Nature,” We must remove ourselves from an ideological catapult that periodically flings us from fad to fad and absurdity to absurdity.

It is tempting to return to the radicalism of the past where assured dogmas were socially inspirational and had the aura of romantic rebellion around them. Having been raised in that era of a half-century ago, I find it emotionally congenial — but intellectually very inadequate. Traditional radical theory is now in debris. Much that passes for socialism and communism, today, acts as a crucial support for the prevailing market society. Archaic slogans like the “nationalization of property” and a “planned economy” reinforce the growing centralization and rationalization of the corporate economy and the State. Marx’s almost reverential attitude toward technological innovation and growth threatens to express the most malignant goals of a technocratic ideology and a technocratic bureaucracy. Even the strategic political goals of orthodox radicalism, with its vision of the proletariat as a hegemonic class, are fading away with the displacement of industrial workers by automation. No great movements are gathering under the banner of the red flag — only the ghostly rebels of the past who perished in the failed insurrections of a bygone era and the leaders who guided them into a historic limbo.

By the same token, liberal environmentalism has become a balm for soothing the bad consciences of rapacious industrialists who engage in a tasteless ballet with environmental lobbyists, lawyers, and public officials. For this crew, nature is essentially a collection of natural resources. Their environmental ballets have the goal of soothing consciences according to an ethics of lesser evils, not an ethics of the greater good and virtue. Typically, a huge forest is usually “traded off” for a small stand of trees and a large stretch of wetlands for a small, presumably “improved” wildlife sanctuary.

In the meantime, the overall deterioration of the environment occurs at a madcap pace. Basic planetary cycles, like the ratio of atmospheric gases and the factors which determine it, are undermined, increasing the proportion of carbon dioxide to oxygen in the air. Ecologically fragile rain forests, that have been on earth for sixty million years or more and whose role in maintaining the integrity of the air we breathe is indeterminable, are recklessly removed. Chemical pollutants like chlorofluoro-carbons threaten to thin out and open vast holes in the ozone layer that protects all complex life-forms from the sun’s harmful ultra-violet radiation. These are the major insults that are being inflicted on the planet. They do not include the daily diet of chemical pollutants, acid rain, harmful food additives, and agricultural poisons that may be changing the whole spectrum of diseases that claim human and non-human life today.

The control of these potentially disastrous alterations of the earth’s ecological balance has virtually collapsed before the “compromises” and “tradeoffs” engineered by liberal enviornmentalists. Indeed, what renders the liberal approach so hopelessly ineffectual is the fact that it takes the present social order for granted, like the air we breathe and the water we drink. All of these “compromises” and “tradeoffs” rest on the paralyzing belief that a market society, privately owned property, and the present-day bureaucratic nation-state cannot be changed in any basic sense. Thus, it is the prevailing order that sets the terms of any “compromise” or “tradeoff,” just like the rules of a chess game and the grid of a chess board determine in advance what the players can do — not the dictates of reason and morality.

To “play by the rules” of the environmental game means that the natural world, including oppressed people, always loses something piece by piece until everything is lost in the end. As long as liberal environmentalism is structured around the social status quo, property rights always prevail over public rights and power always prevails over powerlessness. Be it a forest, wetlands, or good agricultural soil, a “developer” who owns any of these “resources” usually sets the terms on which every negotiation occurs and ultimately succeeds in achieving the triumph of wealth over ecological consideration.

Finally, liberal environmentalism suffers from a consistent refusal to see that a capitalistic society based on competition and growth for its own sake must ultimately devour the natural world, just like an untreated cancer must ultimately devour its host. Personal intentions, be they good or bad, have little to do with this unrelenting process. An economy that is structured around the maxim, “Grow or Die,” must necessarily pit itself against the natural world and leave ecological ruin in its wake as it works its way through the biosphere. I need hardly add that the growth-oriented, bureaucratic, and highly stratified “socialist” world offers no alternatives to the failure of liberalism. Totalitarian countries are equally culpable in the plundering of the planet. The most important difference between them and their Western counterparts is that a “planned economy” renders their efforts more systematic. Any opposition — be it liberal or radical — is more easily silenced by the institutions of a police state.

The narrowing choices that seem to confront us — notably, an unfeeling misanthropic kind of “ecologism” and a queasy liberal environmentalism — require that we look for another way. Is the only response to liberal environmentalism and its diet of failures a “deep ecology” that mystifies “wild” nature and wildlife, important as remaining areas of pristine nature may be? Are we obliged to choose between lobbying, “compromises,” and “tradeoffs” and a “biocentric,” antihumanist mentality that tends to reduce humanity to nothing more than a mere animal species and the human mind to blight on the natural world? Is the only response to a technology gone wild a return to a hunting and gathering way of life in which chipped flints are our principal materials for acting on the natural world? And is the only response to the logic of modern science and engineering a celebration of irrationality, instinct, and religiosity?

Admittedly, I have simplified the alternatives. But I have done so only to reveal their logic and implications. For one thing, I do not wish to deny that even liberal environmentalism and the value of an instinctive sensibility have their roles in resisting a powerful technology that has been placed in the service of mindless growth, accumulation, and consumption. A stand against the construction of a nuclear reactor, a new highway, an effort to clear-cut a mountainside, or a new condo development that threatens to deface an urban landscape — all represent important acts, however limited, to prevent further environmental deterioration. Land, wildlife, scenic natural beauty, and ecological variety that is preserved from the bulldozer and profit-oriented predators, are important enclaves of nature and esthetics that must be preserved wherever we can do so. It requires no great theoretical or ideological wisdom to recognize that almost everything of wonder and beauty, from a statuesque tree to a burrowing mammal, has its place in the world and its function in the biosphere.

However, to carry these compelling facts to a point where humanity is seen either as a blight on nature or the “lord of creation” leads to a very sinister result. Both views serve to pit humanity against nature, whether as “blight” or as “lord.” Humanity (insofar as this word denotes a species rather than highly divided social beings who live in sharp conflict with each other as oppressed and oppressor) is plucked out of the evolution of life and placed on a shelf like an inanimate object. Isolated from the world of life with either curses or praises, it is then dispatched back into a primal world of the distant past or catapulted up to the stars, regaled with space suits and exotic weapons. Neither of these images touches upon an all-important fact: human beings exist in various societies, all of which are profoundly relevant to our ecological problems. As social beings, humans have developed ways of relating to each other through institutions that, more than any single factor, determine how they deal with the natural world.

I submit that we must go beyond the superficial layer of ideas created by “biocentricity,” “antihumanism, Malthusianism, and “deep ecology” at one extreme, and the belief in growth, competition, human “supremacy,” and social power at the other extreme. We must look at the social factors that have created both of these extremes in their many different forms and answer key questions about the human condition if we are to harmonize humanity’s relationship with nature.

What, after all, is human society when we try to view it from an ecological perspective? A “curse?” An unmitigated “blessing?” A device for coping with material needs? Or day I say a product of natural evolution as well as culture that not only meets a wide variety of human needs, but, potentially at least, can play a major role in fostering the evolution of life on the planet?

What factors have produced ecologically harmful human societies? And what factors could yield ecologically beneficial human societies?

Is a well-developed technology necessarily anti-ecological or can it be used to enhance the biosphere and habitats of life?

What can we learn from history that will answer these questions and advance our thinking beyond the bumper-sticker slogans that we encounter among the misanthropic and liberal environmentalists alike?

Indeed, how should we think out these questions? By means of conventional logic? Intuition? Divine inspiration? Or, perhaps, by developmental ways of thinking that are called “dialectical?”

Lastly, but by no means finally, what kind of social reconstruction do we need to harmonize humanity’s relationship with nature — assuming, to be sure, that society should not be dismissed and everyone rush off to claim his or her mountain peak in the High Sierras or Adirondaks? By what political, social, and economic means will such a reconstruction be achieved? And by what ethical principles will it be guided?

These are, at best, preliminary questions. There are many others that we will have to consider before our discussion comes to its end I hesitate to go further, here, because I have a deep aversion to a mere laundry list of ideas, half-thought-out statements, flow diagrams, and bumper-sticker slogans that are so much in vogue these days. When my young man from California shouted the words “human beings” at me, he did his best not to think and he sets an intellectually crude example of mindlessness to others whose minds have been shaped by Hollywood, Disneyland, and television.

Hence, more than ever, we desperately need coherence. I do not mean dogma. Rather, I mean a real structure of ideas that places philosophy, anthropology, history, ethics, a new rationality, and utopian visions in the service of freedom — freedom, let me add, for natural development as well as human. This is a structure which we shall have to build in the pages that follow, not simply to collect in pell-mell fashion into a mere rubbish heap of ideas. The unfinished thought is as dangerous as the totally finished dogma. Both yield an uncreative vision of reality that can be bent and twisted in every possible direction; hence the extremely contradictory notions that exist in works on “deep ecology.”

This book was written to address the questions I have raised in the hope that we can formulate the coherent framework to which I have already alluded and develop a practice of which we are in dire need. It has been initiated by an incident, by an encounter with real life — not by reclusive academic reflections and private vagaries.

If the ecology movement which I helped to pioneer some thirty years ago folds its tents for the mountains or turns to Washington for influence, the loss will be irreparable. Ecological thinking, today, can provide the most important synthesis of ideas we have seen since the Enlightenment, two centuries ago. It can open vistas for a practice that can effectively change the entire social landscape of our time. The stylistic militancy readers encounter in this book stems from a troubled sense of urgency. It is vitally incumbent upon us not to let an ecological way of thinking and the movement it can produce degenerate and go the way of traditional radicalism — into the lost mazes of an irrecoverable history.