The Nature of Being Human: From Environmentalism to Consciousness

6 Ecology and Ideology

chapter six Ecology and Ideology Among the many variant histories of Western culture that could be produced, a social-psychological account of the images and figures created by human beings to represent themselves and their desires in a flattering light would not be a waste of time. The self-aggrandizing reality behind the spiritual pretensions of “image of God,” the normatives of “Reason” in the eighteenth century and “Nature” in the nineteenth, the Marxian figure of a “Realm of Freedom” (a secular heaven to be automatically arrived at once the proletarian revolution reached its successful conclusion)—these are just some of the most well-known tropes in mankind ’s ideological cornucopia. Today, with so many ideologies in ruins, a new intellectual universe known as “ecology” has emerged from the residues of these outmoded systems of belief, sometimes revitalizing inspired insights, while at other times just recycling old and benighted mistakes. As ecology has moved with urgency into the higher consciousness of Western societies, a consciousness that expresses itself in such everyday forms as energy conservation, recycling, fear of chemical and nuclear disasters, and concern about deforestation , the ozone layer, and the greenhouse effect, a restoration of the age-old awareness of people’s connectedness with the material that produced them (i.e., the earth) has begun to take place after a long moratorium during which the Industrial Revolution made mankind seem selfcreating , autonomous, and omnipotent. This awareness has permeated not just the sciences—in the form of alternate-energy engineering, plant pathology, the chemistry of waste disposal and recycling, genetic studies of toxic mutations, environmental medicine, etc.—but the humanities as well. Less known to the educated general reader are the myriad ways in which ecology has filtered through philosophy, ethics, sociology, political science, psychology, history, economics, legal studies, religion, and, even more surprisingly, literature and literary criticism. A sense of this devel65 opment can readily be obtained from a sampling of titles of specialist journals born in the past twenty years: Environmental Ethics, Environmental History Review, Capitalism/Nature/Socialism, Earth First!; these give only the merest hint of the intellectual ferment generated by ecological awareness since the end of World War II. What is even less popularly perceived is the extent to which ecological activities are not simply free-floating and disconnected acts to “stop pollution ” (let us say) but products of larger belief systems (both examined and unexamined) that aim to define the nature, value, and ends of life on this planet. These include such programs as “deep ecology,” “eco-feminism,” “social ecology,” to cite only the most ambitious. In a word, ecology is also philosophy, politics, theology—or to use a term more congenial to today’s intelligentsia, ideology. At the high end of the ecological conversation, we are confronted with several antinomies that roughly define the specialized subsets of the discourse : deep vs. shallow ecology, biocentrism vs. anthropocentrism, reform vs. radical ecology; and there are myriad terms that shape and shade the major positions, such as conservationist, preservationist, liberal, leftist, bioregional, New Age, mainstream, and so forth. The temptation to place some of these terms in quotation marks is very great, since there is a tendentious , self-important, polemical, sometimes hoaxingly “metaphysical” quality about them. A lucid mini-survey of this social/philosophical ecology scene (and its bibliography is already daunting) is supplied by Steve Chase in a brief introduction to one of three remarkably interesting books that exemplify and participate in the heated debate going on within radical ecology: Dave Foreman’s Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, Murray Bookchin’s Remaking Society, and, with Chase’s introduction, a “dialogue” between Foreman and Bookchin, Defending the Earth.1 But a few key terms need clarification. For example, although “reform ecology” sounds good, it is often used disparagingly to refer to what its enemies see as mere tinkering with the dominant capitalist, expansionist, human-oriented, wasteful Western mode of life that is destroying the planet. For some activists (like Dave Foreman), “reform” equals the “shallow” ecology of conventional left-wing politics. Organizations that many people would be inclined to admire, such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Action, the League of Conservation Voters, and the Sierra Club, are dismissed by radicals as co-opted tools of indus66 ecology trialism and technology, contented to wear suits and ties and to imitate the legalistic maneuverings of their bureaucratic oppressors simply in order to...