Chapter 2: Nature, First and Second

Introduction

Amid the technological enchantment of the 1950s, proponents of organic farming, like Bookchin himself, had to defend organic agricultural techniques against the scorn of federal agencies and the chemical industry, both of which were busily making pesticides into agricultural commonplaces. Unlike today, when the value of organic farming is recognized, in those years its value had to be fought for.

As part of that struggle to defend organic farming, Bookchin borrowed the concept “unity in diversity” from the German idealist philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. Recast as a principle of organic agriculture, the concept suggested an alternative farming technique that was able to rid crops of pests, without the use of carcinogenic pesticides. Unlike the monocultures that demanded pesticide use, a diversity of crops in one field could play off potential pests against one another, leaving the crops themselves pest-free. And unlike monocultures, which are susceptible to complete destruction with one pest infestation, ecosystems that are highly diversified yield optimal stability. “Unity in diversity” became a catchword for stability, not only in organic agriculture but in ecosystems generally; it entered the vocabulary of the ecology movement as a concept underpinning the value of diverse species in an ecosystem.

Once organic agriculture gained a measure of acceptance, however, Bookchin himself began to use the phrase “unity in diversity” in a different sense, giving it a more dynamic interpretation. While stability can strengthen an ecosystem, he maintained, it cannot make for species variegation. Diversity plays an important role in producing not only stability but change and innovation. Indeed, without diversification natural evolution could not occur. Today, Bookchin uses the phrase “unity in diversity” to refer to the increasing differentiation that a self-formative biosphere undergoes, within the natural continuum of evolutionary processes.

This evolutionary emphasis is what markedly distinguishes Bookchin’s philosophy of nature from that of other schools of ecological-political thought today. Natural evolution, he has long argued, encompasses not only a strictly biological realm (or “first nature”) but also a social realm (or “second nature”).[21] Far from being inherently antagonistic to each other, first and second nature are actually two aspects of one continuum, Bookchin maintainsat once separate from each other but also mutually imbricated in a shared evolutionary process. Human beings and human society, with their potentialities for self-consciousness and freedom, differ in profound respects from first nature yet emerge from and incorporate it in a graded development.

Perhaps of most interest to social ecology, the evolutionary processes in first nature generate increasing complexity and subjectivity in life-forms. Consciousness has evolved in a cumulative process, from the simple reactivity of unicellular organisms, to the neurological activity of mammals and reptiles, to a culmination in human intellection. As life-forms attain higher levels of subjectivity, they are able to exercise greater choice in selecting and even improving their own ecological niches.

The dim, emergent subjectivity in first nature can make only rudimentary “choices,” but in second nature human beings, possessed of the highest level of subjectivity, are capable of actively and consciously altering their environments, of shaping the societies in which they live — and of creating the ecological society that integrates town and country, or first and second nature, in what Bookchin would later call “free nature.”

At first glance, the great significance Bookchin attaches to human consciousness would seem to represent a sharp demarcation between human and nonhuman nature in his thought, one that sets human beings on an entirely different plane from the rest of the natural world. And it is true that he considers humanity as a radically new development in natural evolution, manifesting the potentiality for self-consciouseness, freedom, and innovation. He does regard human consciousness as qualitatively different from that of other life-forms. But by his use of the categories of first and second nature, he also emphasizes the rootedness of human beings in nonhuman nature.

In the mid-1980s a tendency arose within the ecology movement that denigrated the notion that human beings are in any way superior or more advanced than other life-forms in the biosphere. Blaming human-centered ness, or “anthropocentrism,” as the cause of the ecological crisis, deep ecology — with its fundamental precept of biocentrism — advanced a notion of “biospheric democracy,” which saw human beings as having “intrinsic worth” equal to that of any other species. Bookchin’s sharp criticism of this tendency is rooted in two conflicting views of humanity’s relationship to the rest of the natural world. Where biocentrism would reduce human beings into “plain citizens” of the biosphere, morally interchangeable with other life-forms, social ecology asserts that human beings are unique in natural evolution. By virtue of their powers of thought and communication, they have the ability to create and even the responsibility to achieve a harmonious, indeed creative relationship with the first nature.

The nineteenth-century philosopher Johann Fichte once remarked that humanity is nature rendered self-conscious. Although this view has sometimes been attributed to Bookchin as well, he actually maintains that second nature has thus far fallen short of realizing humanity’s potentiality for creating a liberatory society and an integrative relationship with the nonhuman world. “Where Fichte patently erred was in his assumption that a possibility is a fact,” he wrote in The Ecology of Freedom.

We are no more nature rendered self-conscious than we are humanity rendered self-conscious. Reason may give us the capacity to play this role, but we and our society are still totally irrationalindeed, we are cunningly dangerous to ourselves and all that lives around us.[22]

He therefore modifies Fichte’s statement to argue that humanity is potentially nature rendered self-conscious — that it would actualize that potential only if it were to create an ecological society.

Images of First Nature

(from “What Is Social Ecology?” 1984)

More than any single notion in the history of religion and pl<lilosophy, the image of a blind, mute, cruel, competitive, and stingy nature has opened a wide, often unbridgeable chasm between the social world and the natural world and, in its more exotic ramifications, between mind and body, subject and object, reason and physicality, technology and “raw materials,” indeed the whole gamut of dualisms that have fragmented not only the world of nature and society but the human psyche and its biological matrix....

What distinguishes social ecology is that it negates the traditionally harsh image of the natural world and its evolution. And it does so not by dissolving the social into the natural, like sociobiology, or by imparting mystical properties to nature that place it beyond the reach of human comprehension and rational insight. Instead, social ecology places the human mind, like humanity itself, within a natural context and explores it in terms of its own natural history, so that the sharp cleavage between thought and nature, subject and object, mind and body, and the social and natural are overcome, and the traditional dualisms of western culture are transcended by an evolutionary interpretation of consciousness with its rich wealth of gradations over the course of natural history.

Social ecology “radicalizes” nature — or more precisely, our understanding of natural phenomena — by questioning, from an ecological standpoint, the prevailing marketplace image of nature: nature not as a constellation of communities that are blind or mute, cruel or competitive, stingy or necessitarian, but, freed of all anthropocentric moral trappings, as a participatory realm of interactive life-forms whose most outstanding attributes are fecundity, creativity, and directiveness, marked by a complementarity that renders the natural world the grounding for an ethics of freedom rather than domination.

From an ecological standpoint, life-forms are related in an ecosystem not by the “rivalries” and competitive attributes imputed to them by Darwinian orthodoxy, but by the mutualistic attributes emphasized by a growing number of contemporary ecologists — an image pioneered by Peter Kropotkin. Indeed, social ecology challenges the very premises of the “fitness” that enters into the Darwinian drama of evolutionary development, with its fixation on survival rather than differentiation and fecundity. As William Trager has emphasized in his insightful work on symbiosis:

The conflict in nature between different kinds of organisms has been popularly expressed in phrases like the “struggle for existence” and the “survival of the fittest.” Yet few people have realized that mutual cooperation between organisms — symbiosis — is just as important, and that the “fittest” may be the one that helps another to survive.[23]

It is tempting to go beyond this pithy and highly illuminating judgment to explore an ecological notion of natural evolution based on the development of ecosystems, not merely individual species. This is a concept of evolution as the dialectical development of evervariegated, complex, and increasingly fecund contexts of plant-animal communities, as distinguished from the traditional notion of biological evolution based on the atomistic development of single life-forms, a characteristically entrepreneurial concept of the isolated “individual,” be it animal, plant, or bourgeois — a creature that fends for itself and either survives or perishes in a marketplace “jungle.” As ecosystems become more complex and open a greater variety of evolutionary pathways, due to their own richness of diversity, increasingly flexible species themselves, in mutualistic complexes as well as singly, introduce a dim element of “choice” — by no means intersubjective or willful in the human meaning of these terms.

Concomitantly, these ensembles of species alter the environment of which they are part and exercise an increasingly active role in their own evolution. Life, in this ecological conception of evolution, ceases to be the passive tabula rasa on which eternal forces that we loosely call “the environment” inscribe the destiny of a “species,” an atomistic term that is meaningless outside the context of an ecosystem and other species.

Life is active, interactive, procreative, relational, and contextual. It is not a passive lump of “stuff,” a form of metabolic matter that awaits the action of forces external to it and that is mechanically shaped by them. Ever striving and always producing new life-forms, there is a sense in which life is self-directive in its own evolutionary development, not passively reactive to an inorganic or organic world that impinges upon it from outside and determines its destiny in isolation from the ecosystem that it constitutes and of which it is a part.

Our studies of “food webs” (a not quite satisfactory term for describing the interactivity that occurs in an ecosystem or, more properly, an ecological community) demonstrate that the complexity of biotic interrelationships, their diversity, and their intricacy are crucial in an ecosystem’s stability. In contrast to biotically complex temperate zones, relatively simple desert and arctic ecosystems are very fragile and break down easily with the loss or numerical decline of only a few species. The thrust of biotic evolution over greater eras of organic evolution has been toward the increasing diversification of species and their interlocking into highly complex, basically mutualistic relationships, without which the widespread colonization of the planet by life would have been impossible.

Unity in diversity (a concept deeply rooted in the western philosophical tradition) is not only the determinant of an ecosystem’s stability; it is the source of an ecosystem’s fecundity, of its innovativeness, of its evolutionary potential to create newer, still more complex life-forms and biotic interrelationships, even in the most inhospitable areas of the planet. Ecologists have not sufficiently stressed the fact that a multiplicity of life-forms and organic interrelationships in a biotic community opens new evolutionary pathways of development, a greater variety of evolutionary interactions, variations, and degrees of flexibility in the capacity to evolve, and is hence crucial not only in the community’s stability but also in its innovativeness in the natural history of life.

The ecological principle of unity in diversity grades into a richly mediated social principle; hence my use of the term social ecology. Society, in turn, attains its “truth,” its self-actualization, in the form of richly articulated, mutualistic networks of people based on community, roundedness of personality, diversity of stimuli and activities, an increasing wealth of experience, and a variety of tasks.

Is this grading of ecosystem diversity into social diversity, based on humanly scaled decentralized communities, merely analogical reasoning? My answer would be that it is not a superficial analogy but a deepseated continuity between nature and society that social ecology recovers from traditional nature philosophy, without its archaic dross of cosmic hierarchies, static absolutes, and cycles. In the case of social ecology, it is not in the particulars of differentiation that plant-animal communities are ecologically united with human communities; rather, it is the logic of differentiation that makes it possible to relate the mediations of nature and society into a continuum.

What makes unity in diversity in nature more than a suggestive ecological metaphor for unity in diversity in society is the underlying fact of wholeness. By wholeness I do not mean any finality of closure in a development, any “totality” that leads to a terminal “reconciliation” of all “Being” in a complete identity of subject and object or a reality in which no further development is possible or meaningful. Rather, I mean varying degrees of the actualization of potentialities, the organic unfolding of the wealth of particularities that are latent in the as-yet-undeveloped potentiality. This potentiality can be a newly planted seed, a newly born infant, a newly formed community, a newly emerging society. Given their radically different specificity, they are all united by a processual reality, a shared “metabolism” of development, a unified catalysis of growth as distinguished from mere “change” that provides us with the most insightful way of understanding them that we can possibly achieve.

Wholeness is literally the unity that finally gives order to the particularity of each of these phenomena; it is what has emerged from the process, what integrates the particularities into a unified form, what renders the unity an operable reality and a “being” in the literal sense of the term — an order as the actualized unity of its diversity from the flowing and emergent process that yields its self-realization, the fixing of its directiveness into a clearly contoured form, and the creation in a dim sense of “self” that is identifiable with respect to “others” with which it interacts. Wholeness is the relative completion of a phenomenon’s potentiality, the fulfillment of latent possibility as such, all its concrete manifestations aside, to become more than the realm of mere possibility and attain the “truth” or fulfilled reality of possibility. To think this way — in terms of potentiality, process, mediation, and wholeness — is to reach into the most underlying nature of things, just as to know the biography of a human being and the history of a society is to know them in their authentic reality and depth.

The natural world is no less encompassed by this processual dialectic and developmental ecology than the social, although in ways that do not involve will, degrees of choice, values, ethical goals, and the like. Life itself, as distinguished from the nonliving, however, emerges from the inorganic latent with all the potentialities and particularities that it has immanently produced from the logic of its own nascent forms of self-organization. Obviously, so does society as distinguished from biology, humanity as distinguished from animality, and individuality as distinguished from humanity in the generic sense of the word. But these distinctions are not absolutes. They are the unique and closely interrelated phases of a shared continuum, of a process that is united precisely by its own differentiations, just as the phases through which an embryo develops are both distinct from and incorporated into its complete gestation and its organic specificity.

This continuum is not simply a philosophical construct. It is an earthy anthropological fact that lives with us daily as surely as it explains the emergence of humanity out of mere animality. Individual socialization is the highly nuanced “biography” of that development in everyday life and in everyone, as surely as the anthropological socialization of our species is part of its history. I refer to the biological basis of all human socialization: the protracted infancy of the human child that renders its cultural development possible, in contrast to the rapid growth of nonhuman animals, a rate of growth that quickly forecloses their ability to form a culture and develop sibling affinities of a lasting nature; the instinctual drives that extend feelings of care, sharing, intimate consociation, and finally love and a sense of responsibility for one’s own kin into the institutional forms we call society; and the sexual division of labor, age-ranking, and kin-relationships that, however culturally conditioned and even mythic in some cases, formed and still inform so much of social institutionalization today. These formative elements of society rest on biological facts and, placed in the contextual analysis I have argued for, require ecological analysis.

Participatory Evolution

(from “Freedom and Necessity in Nature,” 1986, rev. 1994)

Ecologists generally treat diversity as a source of ecological stability, in the belief that while the vulnerability to pests of a single crop treated with pesticides can reach alarming proportions, a more diversified crop, in which a number of plant and animal species interact, produces natural checks on pest populations.

But the fact that biotic — and social — evolution has been marked until recently by the development of ever more complex species and ecocommunities raises an even more challenging issue. The diversity of an ecocommunity may be a source of greater stability from an agricultural standpoint; but from an evolutionary standpoint, it may be an ever-expanding, albeit nascent source of freedom within nature, a medium for providing varying degrees of choice, self-directiveness, and participation by life-forms in their own development.

I wish to propose that the evolution of living beings is no mere passive process, the product of exclusively chance conjunctions between random genetic changes and “selective” environmental “forces,” and that the “origin of species” is no mere result of external influences that determine the “fitness” of a life-form to survive as a result of random factors in which life is simply an object of an indeterminable “selective” process. The increase in diversity in the biosphere opens new evolutionary pathways, indeed, alternative evolutionary directions, in which species play an active role in their own survival and change.

However nascent, choice is not totally absent from biotic evolution; indeed, it increases as species become structurally, physiologically, and above all neurologically more complex. As the ecological contexts within which species evolve — the communities and interactions they form — become more complex, they open new avenues for evolution and a greater ability of life-forms to act self-selectively, forming the bases for some kind of choice, favoring precisely those species that can participate in ever-greater degrees in their own evolution, basically in the direction of greater complexity. Indeed, species and the ecocommunities in which they interact to create more complex forms of evolutionary development are increasingly the very “forces” that account for evolution as a whole.

“Participatory evolution,” as I call this view, is somewhat at odds with the prevalent Darwinian or neo-Darwinian syntheses, in which nonhuman life-forms are primarily “objects” of selective forces exogenous to them. No less is it at odds with Henri Bergson’s “creative evolution,” with its semimystical elan vital. Ecologists, like biologists, have yet to come to terms with the notion that symbiosis (not only “struggle”) and participation (not only “competition”) factor in the evolution of species. The prevalent view of nature still stresses the exclusively necessitarian character of the natural world. An immense literature, both artistic and scientific, stresses the “cruelty” of a nature that bears no witness to the suff~ring of life and that is “indifferent” to cries of pain in the “struggle for existence.” “Cruel” nature, in this imagery, offers no solace for extinction — merely an all-embracing darkness of meaningless motion to which humanity can oppose only the light of its culture and mind. Such formulations impart a sophisticated ethical dimension to the natural world that is more anthropomorphic than meaningful.

But even if the formulation is anthropomorphic, it bespeaks a presence in natural evolution — subjectivity, and specifically human consciousness — that cannot be ignored in formulating an evolutionary theory. We may reasonably claim that human will and freedom, at least as self-consciousness and self-reflection, have their own natural history in potentialities of the natural world — in contrast to the view that they are sui generis, the product of a rupture with the whole of development so unprecedented and unique that it contradicts the gradedness of all phenomena from the antecedent potentialities that lie behind and within every processual “product.” Such claims are intended to underwrite our efforts to deal with the natural world as we choose — indeed, as Marx put it in the Grundrisse, to regard nature merely as “an object for mankind, purely a matter of utility.”

The dim choices that animals exercise in their own evolution should not be confused with the will and degree of intentionality that human beings exhibit in their social lives. Nor is the nascent freedom that is rendered possible by natural complexity comparable to the ability of humans to make rational decisions. The differences between the two are qualitative, however much they can be traced back to the evolution of all animals....

Despite the monumental nature of his work, Darwin did not fully organicize evolutionary theory. He brought a profound evolutionary sensibility to the “origin of species,” but in the minds of his acolytes species still stood somewhere between inorganic machines and mechanically functioning organisms. No less significant are the empirical origins of Darwin’s own work, which are deeply rooted in the Lockean atomism that nourished nineteenth-century British science as a whole. Allowing for the nuances that appear in all great books, The Origin of Species accounts for the way in which individual species originate, evolve, adapt, survive, change, or pay the penalty of extinction as if they were fairly isolated from their environment. In that account, any one species stands for the world of life as a whole, in isolation from the life-forms that normally interact with it and with which it is interdependent. Although predators depend upon their prey, to be sure, Darwin portrays the strand from ancestor to descendant in lofty isolation, such that early eohippus rises, step by step, from its plebeian estate to attain the aristocratic grandeur of a sleek racehorse. The paleontological diagraming of bones from former “missing links” to the culminating beauty of Equus cabal/us more closely resembles the adaptation of Robinson Crusoe from an English seafarer to a self-sufficient island dweller than the reality of a truly emerging being.

This reality is contextual in an ecological sense. The horse lived not only among its predators and food but in creatively interactive relationships with a great variety of plants and animals. It evolved not alone but in ever-changing ecocommunities, such that the “rise” of Equus cabal/us occurred conjointly with that of other herbivores that shared and maintained their grasslands and even played a major role in creating them. The string of bones that traces eohippus to Equus is evidence of the succession of ecocommunities in which the ancestral animal and its descendants interacted with other life-forms.

One could more properly modify The Origin of Species to read as the evolution of ecocommunities as well as the evolution of species. Indeed, placing the community in the foreground of evolution does not deny the integrity of species, their capacity for variation, or their unique lines of development. Species become vital participants in their own evolution — active beings, not merely passive components — taking full account of their nascent freedom in the natural process.

Nor are will and reason sui generis. They have their origins in the growing choices conferred by complexity and in the alternative pathways opened by the growth of complex ecocommunities and the development of increasingly complex neurological systems — in short, processes that are both internal and external to life-forms. To speak of evolution in very broad terms tends to conceal the specific evolutionary processes that make up the overall process.

Many anatomical lines of evolution have occurred: the evolution of the various organs that freed life-forms from their aquatic milieu; of eyes and ears, which sophisticated their awareness of the surrounding environment; and of the nervous system, from nerve networks to brains. Thus, mind too has its evolutionary history in the natural world, and as the neurological capability of life-forms to function more actively and flexibly increases, so too does life itself help create new evolutionary directions that lead to enhanced self-awareness and self-activity. Selfhood appears germinally in the communities that life-forms establish as active agents in their own evolution, contrary to conventional evolutionary theory.

Society as Second Nature

(from Remaking Society, 1989)

Society itself in its most primal form stems very much from nature. Every social evolution, in fact, is virtually an extension of natural evolution into a distinctly human realm. As the Roman orator and philosopher Cicero declared some two thousand years ago: “by the use of our hands we bring into being within the realm of Nature, a second nature for ourselves.” Cicero’s observation, to be sure, is very incomplete: the primeval, presumably untouched “realm of Nature” or “first nature,” as it has been called, is reworked in whole or part into “second nature” not only by the use of our hands. Thought, language, and complex, very important biological changes also play a crucial and, at times, a decisive role in developing a second nature within first nature.

I use the term reworking advisedly to focus on the fact that second nature is not simply a phenomenon that develops outside of first nature — hence the special value that should be attached to Cicero’s expression “within the realm of Nature.” To emphasize that second nature, or more precisely society {to use this word in its broadest possible sense), emerges from within primeval first nature is to reestablish the fact that social life always has a naturalistic dimension, however much society is pitted against nature in our thinking. Social ecology clearly expresses the fact that society is not a sudden eruption into the world. Social life does not necessarily face nature as a combatant in an unrelenting war. The emergence of society is a natural fact that has its origins in the biology of human socialization.

The human socialization process from which society emerges — be it in the form of families, bands, tribes, or more complex types of human intercourse — has its source in parental relationships, particularly mother and child bonding. The biological mother, to be sure, can be replaced in this process by many surrogates, including fathers, relatives, or for that matter, all members of a community. It is when social parents and social siblings — that is, the human community that surrounds the young — begin to participate in a system of care, that is ordinarily undertaken by biological parents, that society begins to truly come into its own.

Society thereupon advances beyond a mere reproductive group toward institutionalized human relationships, and from a relatively formless animal community into a clearly structured social order. But at the very inception of society, it seems more than likely that human beings were socialized into second nature by means of deeply ingrained blood ties, specifically maternal ties.... Reproduction and family care remain the abiding biological bases for every form of social life as well as the originating factor in the socialization of the young and the formation of a society. As Robert Briffault observed in the early half of this century, the “one known factor which establishes a profound distinction between the constitution of the most rudimentary human group and all other animal gr.oups [is the] association of mothers and offspring which is the sole form of true social solidarity among animals. Throughout the class of mammals, there is a continuous increase in the duration of that association, which is the consequence of the prolongation of the period of infantile dependence,”[24] a prolongation that Briffault correlates with increases in the period of fetal gestation and advances in intelligence.

The biological dimension that Briffault adds to society and socialization cannot be stressed too strongly. It is a decisive presence, not only in the origins of society over ages of animal evolution, but in the daily recreation of society in our everyday lives. The appearance of a newly born infant and the highly extended care it receives for many years reminds us that it is not only a human being that is being reproduced, but society itself. By comparison with the young of other species, children develop slowly and over a long period of time. Living in close association with parents, siblings, kin groups, and an everwidening community of people, they retain a plasticity of mind that makes for creative individuals and ever-formative social groups. Although nonhuman animals may approximate human forms of association in many ways, they do not create a second nature that embodies a cultural tradition; nor do they possess a complex language, elaborate conceptual powers, or an impressive capacity to restructure their environment purposefully according to their own needs.

A chimpanzee, for example, remains an infant for only three years and a juvenile for seven. By the age of ten, it is a full-grown adult. Children, by contrast, are regarded as infants for approximately six years and juveniles for fourteen. A chimpanzee, in short, grows mentally and physically in about half the time required by a human being, and its capacity to learn, or at least to think, is already fixed by comparison with a human being, whose mental abilities may expand for decades. By the same token, chimpanzee associations are often idiosyncratic and fairly limited. Human associations, on the other hand, are basically stable, highly institutionalized, and marked by a degree of solidarity, indeed by a degree of creativity, that has no equal in nonhuman species as far as we know.

This prolonged degree of human mental plasticity, dependency, and social creativity yields two results that are of decisive importance. First, early human association must have fostered a strong predisposition for interdependence among members of a group — not the “rugged individualism” we associate with independence. The overwhelming mass of anthropological evidence suggests that participation, mutual aid, solidarity, and empathy were the social virtues early human groups emphasized within their communities. The idea that people are dependent upon each other for the good life, indeed for survival, followed from the prolonged dependence of the young upon adults. Independence, not to mention competition, would have seemed utterly alien, if not bizarre, to a creature reared over many years in a largely dependent condition. Care for others would have been seen as the perfectly natural outcome of a highly acculturated being that was, in turn, clearly in need of extended care. Our modern version of individualism, more precisely of egotism, would have cut across the grain of early solidarity and mutual aid — traits, I may add, without which such a physically fragile animal as a human being could hardly have survived as an adult, much less as a child.

Second, human interdependence must have assumed a highly structured form. There is no evidence that human beings normally relate to each other through the fairly loose systems of bonding found among our closest primate cousins. That human social bonds can be dissolved or deinstitutionalized in periods of radical change or cultural breakdown is too obvious to argue here. But during relatively stable conditions, human society was never the “horde” that anthropologists of the last century presupposed as a basis for rudimentary social life. On the contrary, the evidence points to the fact that all humans, perhaps even our distant hominid ancestors, lived in some kind of structured family groups, and later in bands, tribes, villages, and other forms. In short, they bonded together (as they still do), not only emotionally and morally but also structurally in contrived, clearly definable, and fairly permanent institutions.

Nonhuman animals may form loose communities and even take collective protective postures to defend their young from predators. But such communities can hardly be called structured, except in a broad, often ephemeral sense. Humans, by contrast, create highly formal communities that tend to become increasingly structured over the course of time. In effect, they form not only communities but a new phenomenon called societies.

If we fail to distinguish animal communities from human societies, we risk minimizing the unique features that distinguish human social life from animal communities — notably, the ability of society to change for better or worse and the factors that produce these changes. By the same token, if we reduce a complex society to a mere community, we risk ignoring how societies differed from each other over the course of history, and understanding how simple differences in status were elaborated into firmly established hierarchies, or hierarchies into economic classes. Indeed, we risk misunderstanding the very meaning of the term hierarchy, which actually refers to highly organized systems of command and obedience — as distinguished from personal, individual, and often short-lived differences in status that in many cases involve no acts of compulsion. We tend, in effect, to confuse the strictly institutional creations of human will, purpose, conflicting interests, and traditions, with community life in its most fixed forms, as though we were dealing with inherent, unalterable features of society rather than fabricated structures that can be modified, improved, worsenedor simply abandoned.

The trick of every ruling elite from the beginning of history to modern times has been to identify its own socially created hierarchical systems of domination with community life as such, with the result that human-made institutions acquire divine or biological sanction. A given society and its institutions thus tend to become reified into permanent and unchangeable entities that acquire a mysterious life of their own apart from nature — namely, the products of a seemingly fixed “human nature” that is the result of genetic programming at the very inception of social life. When annoying issues like war and social conflict are raised, they are ascribed to the activity of genes....

Social ecology ... avoids the simplicities of dualism and the crudities of reductionism by trying to show how nature slowly phases into society, without ignoring the differences between society and nature on the one hand, and the extent to which they merge with each other, on the other. The everyday socialization of the young by the family is no less rooted in biology than the everyday care of the old by the medical establishment is rooted in the hard facts of society. By the same token, we never cease to be mammals who still have primal natural urges, but we institutionalize these urges and their satisfaction in a wide variety of social forms. Hence the social and the natural continually permeate each other in the most ordinary activities of daily life without losing their identity in a shared process of interaction, indeed of interactivity.

Obvious as this may seem at first in such day-to-day problems as caretaking, social ecology raises questions that have far-reaching importance for the different ways society and nature have interacted over time and the problems these interactions have produced. How did a divisive, indeed seemingly combative relationship between humanity and nature emerge? What were the institutional forms and ideologies that rendered this conflict possible? Given the growth of human needs and technology, was such a conflict really unavoidable? And can it be overcome in a future, ecologically-oriented society?

How would a rational, ecologically-oriented society fit into the processes of natural evolution? Even more broadly, is there any reason to believe that the human mind — itself a product of natural evolution as well as culture — represents a decisive high point in natural development, notably in the long development of subjectivity from the sensitivity and self-maintenance of the simplest life-forms to the remarkable intellectuality and self-consciousness of the most complex?

In asking these highly provocative questions, I am not trying to justify a strutting arrogance toward nonhuman life-forms. Clearly, we must bring humanity’s uniqueness as a species, marked by rich conceptual, social, imaginative, and constructive attributes, into synchronicity with nature’s fecundity, diversity, and creativity. This synchronicity will not be achieved by opposing nature to society, nonhuman to human life-forms, natural fecundity to technology, or a natural subjectivity to the human mind. Indeed, an important result that emerges from a discussion of the interrelationship of nature to society is the fact that human intellectuality, although distinct, also has a far-reaching natural basis. Our brains and nervous systems did not suddenly spring into existence without a long antecedent natural history. That which we most prize as integral to our humanity — our extraordinary capacity to think on complex conceptual levels — can be traced back to the nerve network of primitive invertebrates, the ganglia of a mollusk, the spinal cord of a fish, the brain of an amphibian, and the cerebral cortex of a primate.

Here too, in the most intimate of our human attributes, we are no less products of natural evolution than we are of social evolution. As human beings we incorporate without ourselves eons of organic differentiation and elaboration. Like all complex life-forms, we are not only part of natural evolution; we are also its heirs and the products of natural fecundity.

In trying to show how society slowly grows out of nature, however, social ecology is also obliged to show how society itself undergoes differentiation and elaboration. In doing so, social ecology must examine those junctures in social evolution where splits occurred that slowly brought society into opposition to the natural world, and explain how this opposition emerged from its inception in prehistoric times to our own era. Indeed, if the human species is a life-form that can consciously and richly enhance the natural world rather than simply damage it, it is important for social ecology to reveal the factors that have rendered many human beings into parasites on the world of life rather than active partners in organic evolution. This project must be undertaken not in a haphazard way, but with a serious attempt to render natural and social development coherent in terms of each other, and relevant to our times and the construction of an ecological society....

What unites society with nature in a graded evolutionary continuum is the remarkable extent to which human beings, living in a rational, ecologically-oriented society, could embody the creativity of nature — this, as distinguished from a purely adaptive criterion of evolutionary success. The great achievements of human thought, art, science, and technology serve not only to monumentalize culture, they serve to monumentalize natural evolution itself They provide heroic evidence that the human species is a warmblooded, excitingly versatile, and keenly intelligent life-form — not a cold-blooded, genetically programmed, and mindless insect — that expresses nature’s greatest powers of creativity.

Life-forms that create and consciously alter their environment, hopefully in ways that make it more rational and ecological, represent a vast and indefinite extension of nature into fascinating, perhaps unbounded lines of evolution that no branch of insects could ever achieve — notably, the evolution of a fully self-conscious nature.... Natural history is a cumulative evolution toward ever more varied, differentiated, and complex forms and relationships.

This evolutionary development of increasingly variegated entities, most notably of life-forms, contains exciting, latent possibilities. With variety, differentiation, and complexity, nature, in the course of its own unfolding, opens new directions for still further development along alternative lines of natural evolution. To the degree that animals become complex, self-aware, and increasingly intelligent, they begin to make those elementary choices that influence their own evolution. They are less and less the passive objects of “natural selection” and more and more the subjects of their own development.

A brown hare that mutates into a white one and sees a snow-covered terrain in which to camouflage itself is acting on behalf of its own survival, not simply adapting in order to survive. It is not merely being “selected” by its environment; it is selecting its own environment and making a choice that expresses a small measure of subjectivity and judgment.

The greater the variety of habitats that emerge in the evolutionary process, the more a given life-form, particularly a neurologically complex one, is likely to play an active and judgmental role in preserving itself. To the extent that natural evolution follows this path of neurological development, it gives rise to life-forms that exercise an ever-wider latitude of choice and a nascent form of freedom in developing themselves.

Given this conception of nature as the cumulative history of more differentiated levels of material organization (especially of life-forms) and of increasing subjectivity, social ecology establishes a basis for a meaningful understanding of humanity and society’s place in natural evolution. Natural history is not a “catch as catch can” phenomenon. It is marked by tendency, by direction, and as far as human beings are concerned, by conscious purpose. Human beings and the social worlds they create can open a remarkably expansive horizon for development of the natural world — a horizon marked by consciousness, reflection, and an unprecedented freedom of choice and capacity for conscious creativity. The factors that reduce many life-forms to largely adaptive roles in changing environments are replaced by a capacity for consciously adapting environments to existing and new life-forms.

Adaptation, in effect, increasingly gives way to creativity, and the seemingly ruthless action of “natural law” to greater freedom. What earlier generations called “blind nature” to denote nature’s lack of moral direction turns into free nature, a nature that slowly finds a voice and the means to relieve the needless tribulations of life for all species in a highly conscious humanity and an ecological society.... The issue, then, is not whether social evolution stands opposed to natural evolution. The issue is how social evolution can be situated in natural evolution and why it has been thrown — needlessly — against natural evolution to the detriment of life as a whole. Our capacity to be rational and free does not assure us that this capacity will be realized. If social evolution is the potentiality for expanding the horizon of natural evolution along unprecedented creative lines, and human beings are the potentiality for nature to become self-conscious and free, the issue we face is why these potentialities have been warped and how they can be realized.

It is part of social ecology’s commitment to natural evolution that these potentialities are indeed real and that they can be fulfilled.... Until society can be reclaimed by an undivided humanity that will use its collective wisdom, cultural achievements, technological innovations, scientific knowledge, and innate creativity for its own benefit and for that of the natural world, all ecological problems will have their roots in social problems.

On Biocentrism

(from Re-enchanting Humanity, 1995)

The intuition of biocentric equality is that all things in the biosphere have an equal right to live and blossom and to reach their own individual form of unfolding and self-realization within the larger Self-realization. This basic intuition is that all organisms and entities in the ecosphere as parts of the interrelated whole, are equal in intrinsic worth.[25]

This stunning doctrine literally defines deep ecology. “Deep” it is in every sense — not only in the intuitions that the authors and their acolytes hold, but in the many presuppositions they make.... On the other hand, we may decide to agree with Robyn Eckersley, a champion of biocentrism, that no such abilities are necessary, that the “navigational skills of birds” are themselves on a par with the wideranging intelligence of people.

Is there not something self-serving and arrogant in the (unverifiable) claim that first nature is striving to achieve something that has presently reached its most developed form in us — second nature? A more impartial, biocentric approach would be simply to acknowledge that our special capabilities (e.g., a highly developed consciousness, language and tool-making capability) are simply one form of excellence alongside the myriad others (e.g., the navigational skills of birds, the sonar capability and playfulness of dolphins, and the intense sociality of ants) rather than the form of excellence thrown up by evolution.[26]

Whether birds have “navigation skills” — which assumes conscious agency in negotiating their migratory flights over vast distances with clear geographical goals — or primarily tropistic reactions to changes in daylight and possibly the earth’s magnetic fields of force, need not occupy us here. What counts is that Eckersley’s state of mind, like that of deep ecologists generally, essentially debases the intellectual powers of people who, over previous centuries, consciously mapped the globe, gave it mathematical coordinates, and invented magnetic compasses, chronometers, radar, and other tools for navigation. They did so with an intellectuality, flexibility, and with techniques that no bird can emulate — that is, with amazing skillfulness, since skill involves more than physical reactions to natural forces and stimuli.

When Eckersley places the largely tropistic reactions of birds on a par with human thought, she diminishes the human mind and its extraordinary abilities. One might as well say that plants have “skills” that are on a par with human intellectuality because plants can engage in photosynthesis, a complex series of biochemical reactions to sunlight. Are such reactions really commensurate with the ability of physicists to understand how solar fusion occurs and of biochemists to understand how photosynthesis occurs? If so, then corals “invented” techniques for producing islands and plants “invented” techniques for reaching to the sun in heavily forested areas. In short, placing human intellectual foresight, logical processes, and innovations on a par with tropistic reactions to external stimuli is to create a stupendous intellectual muddle, not to evoke the “deep” insights that deep ecologists claim to bring to our understanding of humanity’s interaction with the natural world.

Eckersley’s crude level of argumentation is no accident; Devall and Sessions prepare us for it by approvingly citing Warwick Fox to the effect that we can make “no firm ontological divide in the field of existence: That there is no bifurcation in reality between the human and the non-human realms ... to the extent that we perceive boundaries, we fall short of deep ecological consciousness.”[27]

No one has quite told whales, I assume, about this new evolutionary dispensation. Still less are grizzly bears, wolves, entire rainforest ecosystems, mountains, rivers, “and so on” aware of their community with human beings. Indeed, in this vast panoply of life-forms, ecosystems, mineral matter, “and so on,” no creature seems to be capable of knowing — irrespective of how they communicate with members of their own kind — about the existence or absence of this “firm ontological divide” except human beings. If, as Devall and Sessions seem to believe, there is “no firm ontological divide” between the human and nonhuman realms, it is unknown to every species in the biosphere, let alone entities in the abiotic world — except our own.

In fact, the “ontological divide” between the nonhuman and the human is very real. Human beings, to be sure, are primates, mammals, and vertebrates. They cannot, as yet, get out of their animal skins. As products of organic evolution, they are subject to the natural vicissitudes that bring enjoyment, pain, and death to complex life-forms generally. But it is a crucial fact that they alone know — indeed, can know — that there is a phenomenon called evolution; they alone know that death is a reality; they alone can even formulate such notions as self-realization, biocentric equality, and a “self-in-Self”; they alone can generalize about their existence — past, present, and future — and produce complex technologies, create cities, communicate in a complex syllabic form, “and so on”! To call these stupendous attributes and achievements mere differences in degree between human beings and nonhuman life-forms — and to equate human “consciousness” with the “navigational skills” of migratory birds — is so preposterously naive that one might expect such absurdities from children, not professors.

What apparently worries deep ecologists about this “divide,” with all its bifurcations and boundaries, is not so much that its existence is obvious as that it is inconvenient. Beclouding their simplistic monism, we may suppose, is a fear of the dualism of Erné Descartes, which they feel obliged to dispel. Ironically, they seem incapable of coping with this dualism without taking recourse to a Bambi-style anthropomorphism that effectively transforms all nonhuman beings into precisely what they profess to abhor — namely, anthropomorphisms. If they cannot make human beings into nonhuman animals, they make nonhuman animals into human beings. Accordingly, animals are said to have “skills” in much the same sense that human beings do. The earth has its own “wisdom,” wilderness is equated with “freedom,” and all life-forms exhibit “moral” qualities that are entirely the product of human intellectual, emotional, and social development.

Put bluntly: If human beings are “equal in intrinsic worth” to nonhuman beings, then boundaries between human and nonhuman are erased, and either human beings are merely one of a variety of animals, or else nonhuman beings are human....

Having entangled the reader with extravagant claims for a set of unsupported personal beliefs, Devall and Sessions proceed in the name of an exclusively human “active deep questioning and meditative process” to reduce readers to the status of “‘plain citizens’ of the biotic community, not lord or master over all other species.”[28]

Devall and Sessions use words with multiple meanings to give the most alienating interpretation to people. Whatever the democracy could possibly mean in the animal world, human beings are not mere “plain citizens” in a biospheric democracy. They are immensely superior to any other animal species, although deep ecologists equate superiority with being the “lord and master of all other species,” hence an authoritarian concept. But superior may mean not only higher in rank, status, and authority but “of great value, excellence; extraordinary,” if my dictionary is correct. That superiority can simply mean “having more knowledge, foresight, and wisdom” — attributes we might expect to find in a teacher or even a Zen master — seems to disappear from the highly selective deep ecological lexicon.

Deep ecology’s contradictory presuppositions, intuitions, anthropomorphisms, and naive assertions leave us spinning like tops. We are enjoined to engage in “deep questioning” in order to decide on intuitive grounds that we are intrinsically no different in “worth” or “value” from any “entity” in the “ecosphere.” Yet the “deep questioning” so prized by Devall, Sessions, Naess, eta!., is something that no other life-form can do — brsides us. In the vastness of the ecosphere, nothing apart from human beings is capable of even voicing the notion of “biocentric egalitarianism,” much less understanding any notion of “rights,” “intrinsic worth,” or “superiority” and “inferiority.” It is the ultimate in anthropomorphism to impute a moral sense to animals that lack the conceptual material of abstract thought provided by language and the rich generalizations we form in our minds from our vast repertoire of words.

Strictly speaking, if we were nothing but “plain citizens” in the ecosphere, we should be as furiously anthropo-centric in our behavior, just as a bear is Ursa-centric or a wolf Cano-centric. That is to say, as “plain citizens” of the ecosphere — and nothing more — we should, like every other animal, be occupied exclusively with our own survival, comfort, and safety. As Richard Watson has so astutely noted: “If we are to treat man as part of nature on egalitarian terms with other species, then man’s behavior must be treated as morally neutral” — that is, as amoral. In which case, Watson continues, “we should not think there is something morally or ecosophically wrong with the human species dispossessing and causing the extinction of other species.”[29]

Yet deep ecologists ask us precisely in the name of a biospheric “citizenship” not to be occupied exclusively with our survival. Put simply: Deep ecologists ask us to be “plain citizens” and at the same time expect — even oblige — us to think and behave as very uncommon, indeed quite extraordinary ones! In a perceptive article, critic Harold Fromm states this contradiction with remarkable pithiness:

The “intrinsic worth” that biocentrists connect with animals, plants, and minerals is projected by the desiring human psyche in the same way that “the will of God” is projected by human vanity upon a silent universe that never says anything.... The “biocentric” notion of “intrinsic worth” is even more narcissistically “anthropocentric” than ordinary self-interest because it hopes to achieve its ends by denying that oneself is the puppeteer-ventriloquist behind the world one perceives as valuable.[30]

As biocentrists, deep ecologists ask us to take the role of the invisible puppeteer — pulling the strings and ignoring the fact that we are pulling them.