From Mastery to Mystery: A Phenomenological Foundation for an Environmental Ethic

Introduction: The Question of Nature

I n t r o d u c t i o n ................................... the question of nature No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections , and convictions. —Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac An ethics of the environment must begin with the sheer and simple fact of being struck by something wrong happening in the surrounding world. It is by noticing that something is out of joint—does not fit or function well—that a response is elicited and an action induced. —Edward S. Casey, “Taking a Glance at the Environment” In the quotes above, Leopold and Casey agree upon a little-explored insight : environmentalism begins with a feeling. For some, this sentiment is an intuition that there is something amiss with how many human beings currently live within and interact with nature. For others, it is an emotional connection to a place or an acknowledgment that many current environmental practices are simply unsustainable. There is no one source of environmentalism that can be identified as the most important, but in all cases we care for nature first, and from there we consider what is to be done. For this reason, an important question that usually remains unspoken is, How do those of us already concerned with the integrity, stability, and beauty of our planet’s ecological systems inspire others to care about nature? Unfortunately , such a task can appear even more daunting than convincing the government of the United States to accept a global agreement on climate change. While caring about nature is clearly not sufficient to ensure the adoption of a more ecologically friendly lifestyle, without such care I venture that environmentally friendly policy is doomed to failure. The 2 from mastery to mystery question we face, then, is how to bring about such concern for the welfare of nature. The problems we encounter in this regard are myriad, and there is little consensus concerning what they are and how they are to be addressed. This book will argue that the main problem we encounter in establishing a caring concern for nature is a hermeneutic one. Hermeneutics, very generally speaking, is the practice of discovering and interpreting meaning. But it does not merely deal with the meaning of linguistic expressions. Rather, modern hermeneutics finds meaning in social practices and phenomena, bodies, and even existence itself. Central to hermeneutical practice is the notion of an inter­ pretive framework: human beings seek and discover meaning only within the context of a specific network of already established meaningful relations. To assert the existence of an interpretive frame is not to say that the frame cannot be shifted or altered. In fact, the claim that I will make is that a change of precisely that kind is what is necessary: we must alter the very way nature is conceived in order to inspire the necessary changes in affection that can motivate a healthier relationship with nature. Speaking negatively, without such a shift we lack a solid normative framework from which to voice our environmental concerns. Bryan G. Norton has already indicated this problem as the “environmentalists ’ dilemma” in his Toward Unity Among Environmentalists.1 On the one hand, the language and meaning that dominates policy discussion is that of economics, and that language does not capture the true force of environmentalists ’ concerns. Saying, for example, that mountaintop removal is reprehensible because it fails to include in its economic evaluations supposed “externalities,” such as the poisoning of rivers and the destruction of local communities, fails to capture the indignation and dismay that many feel as a result of the practice. On the other hand, environmentalists have failed to develop a common tongue to express their concerns, so the economic lingua franca remains unchallenged. Since many proponents of preservationism (though by no means all) believe that the economization of value is one of the causes of the domination of nature while the conservationist is less averse to such thinking, the two groups will from time to time end up fighting each other rather than opposing practices that threaten their commonly held view of a more ecologically responsible lifestyle. Norton proposes resolving this dilemma by reconciling the conservationist and preservationist approaches to environmentalism, not by means of dealing with what he calls their “two apparently exclusive worldviews and sets of value assumptions,” but by the question of nature 3 focusing on their shared objectives...