Freedom and Necessity in Nature:
A Problem in Ecological Ethics[40]

One of the most entrenched ideas in Western thought is the notion that nature is a harsh realm of necessity, a domain of unrelenting lawfulness and compulsion. From this underlying idea, two extreme attitudes have emerged. Either humanity must yield with religious or “ecological” humility to the dicta of “natural law” and take its abject place side by side with the lowly ants on which it “arrogantly” treads, or it must “conquer” nature by means of its technological and rational astuteness, in a shared project ultimately to “liberate” all of humanity from the compulsion of natural “necessity” — an enterprise that may well entail the subjugation of human by human.

The first attitude, a quasi-religious quietism, is typified by “deep ecology,” antihumanism, and sociobiology, while the second, an activist approach, is typified by the liberal and Marxian image of an omniscient humanity cast in a commandeering posture toward the natural world. Modern science — despite its claims to value-free objectivity — unwittingly takes on an ethical mantle when it commits itself to a concept of nature as comprehensible, as orderly in the sense that nature’s “laws” are rationally explicable and basically necessitarian.

The ancient Greeks viewed this orderly structure of the natural world as evidence of a cosmic nous or logos that produced a subjective presence in natural phenomena as a whole. Yet with only a minimal shift in emphasis, this same notion of an orderly nature can yield the dismal conclusion that “freedom is the recognition of necessity” (to use Friedrich Engels’s rephrasing of Hegel’s definition). In this latter case, freedom is subtly turned into its opposite: the mere consciousness of what we can or cannot do.

Such an internalized view of freedom as subject to higher dicta, of “Spirit” (Hegel) or “History” (Marx), not only served Luther in his break with the Church’s hierarchy; it provided an ideological justification for Stalin’s worst excesses in the name of dialectical materialism and his brutal industrialization of Russia under the egis of society’s “natural laws of development.” It may also yield an outright Skinnerian notion of an overly determined world in which human behavior is reduced to mere responses to external or internal stimuli.

These extremes aside, the conventional wisdom of our time still sees nature as a harsh “realm of necessity” — morally, as well as materially — that constitutes a challenge to humanity’s survival and well-being, not to speak of its freedom. With the ‘considerable intellectual heritage of dystopian thinkers like Hobbes and utopian ones like Marx, the self-definition of major academic disciplines embodies this tension, indeed, this conflict. Economics was forged in the crucible of a necessitarian, even “stingy” nature whose “scarce resources” were thought to be insufficient to meet humanity’s “unlimited needs.” Psychology, certainly inks_psychoanalytic forms, stresses the importance of controlling human internal nature, with the bonus that the individual’s sublimated energy will find its expression in the subjugation of external nature. Theories of work,, society, behavior, and even sexuality turn on an image of a necessitarian nature, that must in some sense be “dominated” to serve human ends — presumably on the old belief that what is natural disallows all elements of choice and freedom. Nor is nature philosophy itself untainted by this harshly necessitarian image. Indeed, more often than not, it has served as an ideological justification for a hierarchical society, modeled on a hierarchically structured “natural order.”

This image and its social implications, generally associated with Aristotle, still live in our midst as a cosmic justification for domination in general — in its more noxious cases, for racial and sexual discrimination, and in its most nightmarish form, for the outright extermination of entire peoples. Raised to a moral calling, “man” emerges from this massive ideological apparatus as a creature to whom “Spirit” or “God” has imparted a supranatural quality of a transcendental kind and a mission to govern an ordered universe that “He” or “It” created.

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At first glance, resolving the conflict between necessity and freedom — presumably between nature and society — seems to require building a bridge between the two, as in value systems that are based on purely utilitarian attitudes toward the natural world. The argument that humanity’s abuse of nature subverts the material conditions for our own survival, although surely true, is nonetheless crassly instrumental. It assumes that human concern for nature rests on self-interest rather than on a feeling for the living world of which human beings are part, albeit in a very distinctive way. In such a value system our relationship with nature is neither better nor worse than the success with which we plunder it without harming ourselves. It is another warrant for undermining the natural world, provided only that we can find adequate substitutes, however synthetic, simple, or mechanical, for existing life-forms and ecological relationships. It is precisely this approach that has exacerbated the present ecological crisis”?

Moreover, attempts to bridge the gulf between the natural and social worlds that are premised on a mechanical dualism between nature and society can indirectly preserve this dualism even as they seek to overcome it. This kind of purely structural approach has given rise to splits between body and mind, reality and thought, object and subject, country and town, and ultimately, society and the individual. It is not far-fetched to say that the primary schism between nature and humanity has nourished a wide variety of splits in everyday life as well as in our theoretical sensibilities.

No less serious a fallacy is to attempt to overcome these dualisms simply by reducing one element of the duality to the other or, seriously, to attempt to dissolve humanity into nature. The universal “night in which all cows are black,” as Hegel phrased it in his Phenomenology of Spirit, attains unity by sacrificing the variety and the uniqueness of humanity as a remarkable product of natural evolution. Such reductionism yields a crude mechanistic spiritualism that is merely the counterpart of the prevailing mechanistic materialism. In either case, a nuanced interpretation of evolutionary phenomena that takes into account distinctions and gradations as well as continuities is replaced by a simplistic dualism that dismisses the phases that enter into any process. It embraces a simplistic and mystical “Oneness” that overrides the immense wealth of differentiae to which the present biosphere is heir — the rich, fecund constituents that make up our evolution and that are preserved in nearly all existing phenomena.

It is surprising that ecology, one of the most organic of contemporary disciplines, is itself so lacking in organic ways of thinking — that is, in forms of reason that inwardly derive, or educe, differentiae from one another, the full from the germinal, the complex from the simple — in short, in thinking organically and eductively, not merely deducing conclusions from hypotheses in typical mathematical fashion, or simply tabulating and classifying facts. Ecologists too often share with accountants the mode of reasoning so prevalent today, one that is largely analytical and classificatory rather than processual and developmental. Appropriate as analytical, classificatory, and deductive modes of reasoning are for assembling automobile engines or constructing buildings, they are woefully inadequate for ascertaining the phases that make up a process, each with its own integrity yet as part of an ever-developing continuum. We may well fail to understand life itself if we see life-forms as little more than factors in production, as “natural resources” to be placed in the service of wealth, rather than as part of the creative phenomenon of life. Again, this mechanistic sensibility and its analytic mode of thought is alien to processual thought, to apprehending development and its phases — both their differences and their continuities.

It is becoming a cliche to fault humanity’s “separation” from nature as the source of “alienation” in our highly fragmented world. We must see that every process is also a form of alienation, in the sense that differentiation involves separation from older forms of being as well as the absorption of what is negated into the new, such that the whole is the richly varied fulfillment of its latent potentialities. Standing in marked contrast to this view of alienation as self-expression or self-articulation as well as opposition is an all-pervasive epistemology of rule that sorts difference as such (indeed, the “other” in all its forms) into an ensemble of antagonistic relationships structured around command and obedience. That the “other” is at least part of a whole, however differentiated it is, eludes the modern mind in a flux of experience that knows division exclusively as conflict or breakdown.[41]

The real world is indeed divided antagonistically, to be remedied by struggle, reconciliation — and transcendence. But if the thrust of evolution has any meaning, it is that a continuum is processual precisely in that it is graded as well as united, a flow of derived phases as well as a shared development from the simpler to the more complex. Neither conflict nor differentiation should be permitted to override the other as the long-range character of development in nature and society.

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What then does it mean to speak of complexity, variety, and unity-in-diversity in developmental processes? 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.[42]

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 suffering 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 anthroppmorphic, 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 selfreflection, 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 cqmparable 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.

Our tendency to ignore the close interaction between evolving life-forms and the environmental forces that “select” them for survival is a mechanistic prejudice that still clings to evolutionary theory. All anti-Cartesian protestations to the contrary, we still view nonhuman life-forms as little more than machines or inert beings. Structurally, we may fill them out with protoplasm, but operationally we impute no more meaning to them than to mechanical devices — a judgment, it is worth noting, that is not without economic utility in dealing with working people as “hands” or “operatives.”

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 race horse. The paleontological diagraming of bones from former “missing links” to the culminating beauty of Equus caballus 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 caballus 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.[43] 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 up 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 selfactivity. Selfhood appears germinally in the communities that life-forms establish as active agents in their own evolution, contrary to conventional evolutionary theory.

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Does the nature of evolution warrant introducing a presiding agent into evolutionary and ecological theory, one that predetermines the development of life-forms along the lines I have described, a “Spirit,” “God,” “Mind,” or perhaps a semimystical Bergsonian elan vital? I think not, if only because the concept of such a hidden hand preserves the nature-society dualism itself. So profoundly does dualism inhere in our mental operations that when we consider the immanent striving of life-forms toward various degrees of freedom and self-awareness, we often slip into explanations involving supernature rather than nature itself, reductionism rather than differentiation, and succession rather than culmination. Hence the present revival of the “reverence for nature” that the nineteenth-century Romantic tradition so poetically cultivated, a “revered” natural world dissolved into a mystical “oneness.”

Not only does this “reverence” preserve and even foster a nature-society dualism; it restores to evolutionary theory the very dualism that underpins hierarchy and the view of all differentiation as degrees of domination and subordination. A “revered” nature is a separated nature in the bad sense of the term — that is to say, a mystified nature. Like the deities that human beings create in their imagination and worship in temples, mediated by priests and gurus with their incantations and rituals, this separated nature becomes a reified and contrived phenomenon that is set apart from the human world, even as human beings genuflect before a mystified “It” “Reverence” for nature, the mythologizing of the natural world, degrades it by denying nature its universality as that which exists everywhere, free of dualities like “Spirit” and “God.”

If liberal and Marxist theorists prepared the ideological bases for plundering the natural world, “biocentrically” oriented antihumanists and “natural law” devotees may be preparing the ideological bases for plundering the human spirit. In the course of “revering nature,” they have created an insidious image of a humanity whose “intrinsic worth” is no more or less than that of other species. “Biocentrism” denies humanity its real place in natural evolution by completely subordinating humanity to the natural world. Paradoxically, “biocentrism” and antihumanism also contribute to the alienation and reification of nature such that a “reverence” for nature can easily be used to negate any existential respect for the diversity of life. Against the background of a cosmic “Nature,” human life and individuality are completely trivialized, as witness James Lovelock’s description of people as merely “intelligent fleas” feeding on the body of Gaia. Nor can we ignore a growing number of “natural law” acolytes who advocate authoritarian measures to control population growth and forcibly expel urban dwellers from large congested cities, as though a society that is structured around the domination of human by human could be expected to leave the natural world intact.

It is grossly misleading to invoke “biocentrism,” “natural law,” and antihumanism for ends that deny the most distinctive of human natural attributes: the ability to reason, to foresee, to will, and to act insightfully to enhance nature’s own development. In a sense, it deprecates nature to separate these subjective attributes from it, as though they did not emerge out of evolutionary development and were not implicitly part of animal development. A humanity that has been rendered oblivious to its own responsibility to evolution — a responsibility to bring reason and the human spirit to evolutionary development, to foster diversity, and to provide ecological guidance such that the harmful and the fortuitous in the natural world are diminished — is a humanity that betrays its own evolutionary heritage and that ignores its species-distinctiveness and uniqueness.

Ironically, then, a nature that is reverentially hypostatized is a nature set apart from humanity — and in the very process of being hypostatized over humanity, it is defamed. A nature reconstructed into forms apart from itself, however “reverentially,” easily becomes a mere object of utility. Indeed, a revered nature is the converse of the old liberal and Marxian image of nature “dominated” by man. Both attitudes reinstate the theme of domination in ecological discussion.

Here the limited form of reasoning based on deduction, so commonplace in conventional logic, supplants an organismic form of reasoning based on eduction — that is, on derivation, so deeply rooted in the dialectical outlook. Potentially, human reason is an expression of nature rendered self-conscious, a nature that finds its voice in being of its own creation. It is not only we who must have our own place in nature but nature that must have its place in us — in an ecological society and in an ecological ethics based, on humanity’s catalytic role in natural evolution.

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Along with the antihumanistic ideologies that foster misanthropic attitudes and actions, the reduction of human beings to commodities is steadily denaturing and degrading humanity. The commodification of humanity takes its most pernicious form in the manipulation of the individual as a means of production and consumption. Here, human beings are employed (in the literal sense of the term) as techniques either in production or in consumption, as mere devices whose creative powers and authentic needs are equally perverted into objectified phenomena. As a result, we are witnessing today not only the “fetishization of commodities” (to use Marx’s famous formulation) but the fetishization of needs.[44] Human beings are becoming separated from their own nature as well as from the natural world in an existential split that threatens to give dramatic reality to Descartes’s theoretical split between the soul and the body. In this sense, the claim that capitalism is a totally “unnatural order” is only too accurate.

The terrible tragedy of the present social era is not only that it is polluting the environment; it is also simplifying natural ecocommunities, social relationships, and even the human psyche. The pulverization of the natural world is being accompanied by the pulverization of the social and psychological worlds. In this sense, the conversion of soil into sand in agriculture can be said, in a metaphorical sense, to apply to society and the human spirit. The greatest danger we face — apart from nuclear immolation — is the homogenization of the world by a market society and its objectification of all human relationships and experiences into commodities.

To recover human nature is not only to recover its continuity with the creative process of natural evolution but to recognize its distinctiveness. To conceive of the participation of life-forms in evolution is to understand that nature is a realm of incipient freedom. It is freedom and participation — not simply necessity — that we must emphasize, an emphasis that involves a radical break with the conventional image of nature.

Social ecology, in effect, stands at odds with the notion that culture has no roots whatever in natural evolution. Indeed, it explores the roots of the cultural in the natural and seeks to ascertain the gradations of biological development that phase the natural into the social. By the same token, it also tries to explore the important differences that distinguish the societal from the natural and to ascertain the gradations of social development that, hopefully, will yield a new, humanistic ecological society. The two lines of exploration go together in producing a larger whole, indeed, one that must transcend even the present capitalist society based on perpetual growth and profit. To identify society as such with the present society, to see in capitalism an “emancipatory” movement precisely because it frees us from nature, is not only to ignore the roots of society in nature but to identify a perverted society with humanism and thereby to give credence to the antihumanist trends in ecological thinking.

This much is clear: the way we view our position in the natural world is deeply entangled with the way we organize the social world. In large part, the former derives from the latter and serves, in turn, to reinforce social ideology. Every society projects its own perception of itself onto nature, whether as a tribal cosmos that is rooted in kinship communities, a feudal cosmos that originates in and underpins a strict hierarchy of rights and duties, a bourgeois cosmos structured around a market society that fosters human rivalry and competition, or a corporate cosmos diagramed in flow charts, feedback systems, and hierarchies that mirror the operational systems of modern corporate society. That some of these images reveal a truthful aspect of nature, whether as a community or a cybernetic flow of energy, does not justify the universal, almost imperialistic claims that their proponents stake out for them over the world as a whole. Ultimately, only a society that has come into its “truth” to use Hegelian language — a rational and ecological society — can free us from the limits that oppressive and hierarchical societies impose on our understanding of nature.

The power of social ecology lies in the association it establishes between society and ecology, in understanding that the social is, potentially at least, a fulfillment of the latent dimension of freedom in nature, and that the ecological is a major organizing principle of social development. In short, social ecology advances the guidelines for an ecological society. The great divorce between nature and society — or between the “biological” and the “cultural” — is overcome by shared developmental concepts such as greater diversity in evolution; the wider and more complete participation of all components in a whole; and the ever more fecund potentialities that expand the horizon of freedom and self-reflexivity. Society, like mind, ceases to be sui generis. Like mind, with its natural history, social life emerges from the loosely banded animal community to form the highly institutionalized human community.[45]

Social ecology challenges the image of an unmediated natural evolution, in which the human mind, society, and even culture are sui generis, in which nonhuman nature is irretrievably separated from human nature, and in which an ethically defamed nature finds no expression whatever in society, mind, and human will. It seeks to throw a critical and meaningful light on the phased, graded, and cumulative development of nature into society, richly mediated by the prolonged dependence of the human young on parental care, by the blood tie as the earliest social and cultural bond beyond immediate parental care, by the so-called “sexual division of labor,” and by age-based status groups and their role in the origin of hierarchy.

Ultimately, it is the institutionalization of the human community that distinguishes society from the nonhuman community — whether for the worse, as in the case of pre-1789 France or czarist Russia, where weak, unfeeling tyrants like Louis XVI and Nicholas H were raised to commanding positions by bureaucracies, armies, and social classes; or for the better, as in forms of self-governance and management that empower the people as a whole, like the Parisian sections during the French Revolution and the anarchosyndicalist collectives during the Spanish Civil War, We see no such contrived institutional infrastructures in nonhuman communities, although the rudiments of a social bond do exist in the mother-offspring relationship and in common forms of mutual aid.

With a growing knowledge that sharing, cooperation, and concern foster healthy human consociation, with the technical disciplines that open the way for a creative “metabolism” between humanity and nature, and with a host of new insights into the presence of nature in so much of our own civilization, it can no longer be denied that nature is still with us. Indeed, it has returned to us ideologically as a challenge to the devouring of “natural resources” for profit and the mindless simplification of the biosphere. We can no longer speak meaningfully of a “new” or “rational” society without also tailoring our social relationships and institutions to the ecocommunities in which our social communities are located. In short, any rational future society must be an ecological society, conjoining humanity’s capacity for innovation, technological development, and intellectuality with the nonhuman natural world on which civilization itself rests and human well-being depends.

The ecological principles that enter into biotic evolution do not disappear from social evolution, any more than the natural history of mind can be dissolved into Kant’s ahistorical epistemology. Quite the contrary: the societal and cultural are ecologically derivative, as the men’s and women’s houses in tribal communities so clearly illustrate. The relationship between nature and society is a cumulative one, while each remains distinctive and creative in its own right. Perhaps most significant, the nature of which the societal and cultural are derivative — and cumulative — is a nature that is a potential realm of freedom and subjectivity, and humanity is potentially the most self-conscious and self-reflexive expression of that natural development.

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Social ecology, by definition, takes on the responsibility of evoking, elaborating, and giving an ethical content to the natural core of society and humanity.[46] Granting the limitations that society imposes on our thinking, the development of mind out of “first nature” produces an objective ground for an ethics, indeed, for formulating a vision of a rational society that is neither hierarchical nor relativistic: an ethics that is based neither on atavistic appeals to “blood and soil” and inexorable “social laws” (“dialectical” or “scientific”) on the one hand, nor on the wayward consensus of public opinion polls, which will support capital punishment one year and life imprisonment the next. Freedom becomes a desideratum as self-reflexivity, as self-management, and most excitingly, as a creative and active process that, with its ever-expanding horizon, resists the moral imperatives of a rigid definition and the jargon of temporally conditioned biases.[47]

An ecological ethics of freedom would provide an objective directiveness to the human enterprise. We have no need to degrade nature or society into a crude biologism at one extreme or a crude dualism at the other. A diversity that nurtures freedom, an interactivity that enhances complementarity, a wholeness that fosters creativity, a community that strengthens individuality, a growing subjectivity that yields greater rationality — all are desiderata that provide the ground for an objective ethics. They are also the real principles of any graded evolution, one that renders not only the past explicable but the future meaningful.

An ecological ethics of freedom cannot be divorced from a technics that enhances our relationship with nature — a creative, not destructive, “metabolism” with nature. Human beings must be active agents in the biosphere — vividly, expressively, and rationally — not retreat into the passive animism of pagan, Taoist, and Buddhist mystics who recycle Asian philosophies and sensibilities through the ashrams and religious temples of the Pacific rim of the United States. But it makes all the difference in the world if we cultivate food not only on behalf of our physical wellbeing but with regard for the well-being of the soil as well. Inasmuch as agriculture is always a culture, the differences in the methods and intentions involved are no less cultural than a book on engineering. Yet in the first case, our intentions are informed by economic considerations at best and greed at worst; in the second, by an ecological sensibility. Society must recover the plasticity of the organic in the sense that every dimension of experience must be infused with an ecological, a dialectical sensibility. There is a profoundly ethical dimension to the attempt to bring soil, flora, and fauna (or what we neatly call the food chain) into our lives, not only as “wholesome” sources of food but as part of a broad movement in which consumption is no less a creative process than production — originating in the soil and returning to it in a richer form all the components that make up the food cycle.

So, too, in the production of objects it makes all the difference in the world if craftspeople work with a respect for their materials, emphasizing quality and artistry in production rather than mass-producing commodities with no concern for handling materials sparingly, let alone for human needs. In the former, production and consumption go beyond the pure economic domain of the buyer-seller relationship, indeed, beyond the domain of mere material sustenance, and enter into the ecological domain as a mode of enhancing the fecundity of an eco-community. An ecotechnology — for consumption no less than production — serves to enrich an ecosystem just as compost in food cultivation enriches the soil, rather than degrading and simplifying the natural fundament of life. An ecotechnology is thus a moral technology, a technology that stands at odds with gigantism, waste, and the mass destruction wrought on the environment by capitalistic forms of technology designed purely for profit.

The choices we make in these respects — in the food we grow and eat, in the objects we produce and consume — are between an ecological alternative and a purely economic one. We are profoundly influenced by social institutions, whichever alternative we choose. In the end, our choice will be between an ecocommunity or a market community, between a society infused by life or a society infused by gain. Yet no rational society can hope to exist, still less stabilize itself, without amply meeting human needs and providing the free time to create a fully democratic polity. The advances in technology that mark the past few centuries cannot be dismissed exclusively because of the damage they have inflicted both on the natural world and on the human condition. For now we can at least choose the kind of world in which we want to live — we can choose to bring science and technological knowledge to the service of humanity and the biosphere alike.

To say that nature belongs in humanity just as humanity belongs in nature is to express a highly reciprocal and complementary relationship between the two instead of one structured around subordination and domination. Neither society nor nature dissolves into the other. Rather, social ecology tries to recover the distinctive attributes of both in a continuum that gives rise to a substantive ethics, wedding the social to the ecological without denying the integrity of each.

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The fecundity and potentiality for freedom that variety and complexity bring to natural evolution, indeed, that emerge from natural evolution, can also be said in a qualitatively advanced form to apply to social evolution and psychic development. The more diversified a society and its psychic life, the more creative it is, and the greater the opportunity for freedom it is likely to offer — not only in terms of new choices that open up to human beings but also in terms of the richer social background that diversity and complexity create. As in natural evolution, so too in social evolution we must go beyond the image that diversity and complexity yield greater stability — the usual claim that ecologists make for the two — and emphasize that they yield greater creativity, choices, and freedom.

At the same time there can be no return to the past — to the domestic realm, to the age-ranks, or to the kinship relationships of tribalism. Nor can there be a return to the myths, amulets, magical practices, and idols — female or male — of the past. While we redeem what is valuable in premodern societies for enhancing human solidarity and an ecological sensibility, we must also transcend all the parochial and divisive features of the past and present. If we are to create a truly rational and ecological society, we must nourish the insights provided by reason to create a sense of a shared humanity that is bound neither by gendered outlooks nor by beliefs in deities — all of which, ironically, are merely anthropomorphic projections of our own beings and sensibilities (as Ludwig Feuerbach so clearly saw) — and we must commit ourselves to a belief in the potentialities of humanity to foresee and understand, to be the embodiment of mind.

No ecological ethics of freedom can be divorced from a politics of participation, a politics that fosters self-empowerment rather than state empowerment. Such a politics must become a truly peopled politics in the sense that political participation is literally peopled by assemblies and by face-to-face discussion. The political ethics that follows from this ground is meant to create an ethical community, not simply an “efficient” one; an ecological community, not simply an environmentally “hygienic” one; a social and political praxis that yields freedom, not a statist culture that merely allows a measure of public assent.

If history is a bloody “slaughterbench,” the blood that covers it is not only that of civilization’s innocent victims but that of the angry men and women who have left us a legacy of freedom. The legacy of freedom and the legacy of domination have often been tragically intermingled. If we are to rescue ourselves from the homogenizing effects of a market society, it is necessary that humanity’s waning memory of heroic struggles to achieve freedom be rescued from this society’s pollution — a process that has already gone far in contemporary culture.