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15. Alienation and the Commons
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15 Alienation and the Commons Steven Vogel What does it mean to be alienated from nature? The claim that we suffer today from such alienation is familiar in environmental discourse, but it isn’t always clear what that means. Both “nature” and “alienation” are famously difficult terms, first of all, but second (as I’ll argue), under certain standard understandings of those terms nature is exactly the sort of thing from which one cannot be alienated. In its most common interpretation , it seems to me, the claim that we’re alienated from nature doesn’t actually make much sense. And yet I do think we are alienated from something like nature, and that we need to understand and overcome that alienation. What we’re alienated from, I’ll argue, is the environment , meaning by that word something different from “nature.” I will end by suggesting that the alienation stems from certain characteristics of our social system—in particular, from the lack of any social way to justify or even to acknowledge the public consequences of private actions—and that it’s related to the kind of collective action problem often called “the problem of the commons.” Overcoming alienation, on this account, will be less a matter of developing new virtues than of finding ways to transform the institutional context within which human practices take place.1 Most frequently it is claimed that we are alienated from nature because we fail to recognize ourselves as part of nature. We are natural beings, dependent on natural forces for our existence, and yet we treat nature as if it were something distinct from us, and as something we could (and should) master. We view nature anthropocentrically, this claim continues, seeing it merely as a sort of raw material at our disposal, and the upshot is that we destroy it with technologies that attempt to reshape the natural world into an artificial one structured for human purposes. Yet such attempts are never successful, because in fact we depend upon nature, and so it takes its revenge on us, as our technologies produce increasingly 300 Chapter 15 dire consequences. To overcome our alienation would be to give up anthropocentrism and to reintegrate ourselves within the natural order, abandoning the impossible dream of replacing the natural world with one created by humans, and learning instead to live in harmony with nature. Familiar as it is, such an account suffers from significant conceptual difficulties, not least about what exactly it means by “nature.” If human beings are really part of nature, first of all, it isn’t clear how their actions could possibly destroy it, or why a human-made world wouldn’t still be a natural one. The dams that beavers build are natural: why not the coal-burning power plants that humans build? In one standard sense of the word “nature,” the fact that humans and their abilities evolved in accordance with the same biological processes as other species means that all human behaviors are natural, which makes it hard to see how our technological behaviors could be said to alienate us from nature. Yet in a second, and equally standard, sense of the word “nature” refers uniquely to that part of the world that has not been affected by human action, which would seem to make our technology “unnatural “ by definition . But how could one be said to be alienated from something from which one has been excluded by definition? And in any case how could this definition be justified given the claim that we are part of nature?2 Further, in what sense has anthropocentrism been avoided here—in this definition that grants to one species, alone among all the others, the special ability to change an object from being natural to being artificial, and thereby to destroy nature? When spiders spin a web or beavers build a dam, no one suggests that nature is thereby destroyed; yet the human species, apparently, is different, more ontologically potent than these others. Thus this familiar idea of what it means to be alienated from nature, despite its insistence that we are part of nature, actually seems to require the assumption that we are outside of it, in which case it isn’t at all obvious how our asserted alienation from it could ever possibly be eliminated . Or might there be a third definition of “nature” at work here, according to which our actions are neither all natural (as the first definition would suggest) nor all...