Philosophy and Environment
Environmental philosophy in its modern form developed in the late 1960s, the product of concerns arising from diverse quarters: naturalists, scientists and other academics, journalists, and politicians. A sense of crisis and doom pervaded the time, reflecting fears about the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation; this malaise helped to spawn the protest music and countercultural protests of the 1960s. In 1962 Rachel Carson published the best-selling book Silent Spring, which documented the accumulation of dangerous pesticides and chemical toxins throughout planetary food webs. In 1968 the journal Science published ―The Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin, who argued that human self-interest and a growing population would inevitably combine to deplete resources and degrade the environment. In the same year another best-seller, Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb, anticipated hundreds of millions of deaths in the coming decades because of the failure of food supply to keep pace with an ever-expanding global population.
Fears about nuclear war, threats of pollution, and emerging awareness of social injustice coalesced first in popular and folk music and then found less poetic expression in academic work. In a seminal essay that appealed to increasingly disenchanted Marxist and left-leaning thinkers, Murray Bookchin remarked that ecology was a critical science with ―explosive implications because ―in the final analysis, it is impossible to achieve a harmonization of man and nature without creating a human community that lives in a lasting balance with its natural environment. When the historian Lynn White Jr. published an essay in 1967 claiming that Judeo-Christian thought was itself a major driver of environmental destruction, the scene was set for full-scale philosophical and ethical soul-searching. Inspired by the work of the American ecologist, forester, and environmentalist Aldo Leopold
(1887–1948), thinkers in Australia and the United States produced new defenses of the key ideal of his land ethic: that ―land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.
A key ingredient in Leopold's land ethic was the notion that the community of life itself matters, not just its individual members; he wrote that ―a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
In 1973, Arne Naess coined the term “deep ecology,” intending to highlight the importance of norms and social change in environmental decision-making.
The development of Deep Ecology by the Norwegian Arne Naess followed a rather different route. During a climbing expedition to Nepal, Naess found that Sherpa people would not venture onto sacred mountains. In the wake of this discovery, Naess and two of his Norwegian friends discussed formulating a new philosophy that would extend such reverence for mountains to all of nature, emphasizing the interconnectedness of each thing in larger webs of value. In place of the isolated or atomic individual, Naess postulates people and other things as constituted by their relationships with others—as knots in a larger web of life. While such a relational conception of the self might be thought to resonate with animist, Confucian, or Buddhist traditions (Naess had no problem with such conflations), Naess himself claimed to draw his philosophical inspiration largely from the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677).Taking relationships seriously, Naess argues, means that humans should care for the extended, or ecological, self because each person is more than just his or her body. Extended self-concern obliges humans not only to connect with and care about the other people who have made them what they are but also to care for the multifarious systems and beings on which continued human existence depends.
In his early work Naess seemed to regard all living things as having equal value, at least in principle, but by the 1980s he was prepared to support only the weaker claim that the flourishing of all life, both human nonhuman, has value in its own right.
Through the 1970s and 1980s these themes of atomism, human-centeredness, and the scope of what is intrinsically valuable set much of the agenda for further theorizing. With the introduction of the idea of ―'animal liberation in 1973 (Singer 2003), there was a swell of support for the idea that the capacity to feel pleasures or pains might be a significant criterion of moral value, or at least of moral considerability. On this view, although things that are morally valuable ought to be protected, things that are ―morally considerable‖ ought to figure directly in human thinking and planning but need not necessarily be protected. In the North American and European ethical tradition, moral considerability has been connected with notions of rationality, self-awareness, consciousness, and other typically human features. Environmental philosophy has explored new criteria of such considerability, including being alive, being a community or a holistic entity of a certain kind, being an entity or organism that has an end in itself, being a subject of a life lacking intrinsic function, being a product of natural processes or being naturally autonomous. While no agreement on such a criterion emerged, it was clear that the notions of respect for nature, nature's value, nature's intrinsic worth, and the moral considerability of natural things were not only intelligible but also capable of being hotly debated in considerable depth.
