Suspended Animation: Radical Ecology, Sovereign Powers, and Saving the (Natural) World

Saving the (Natural) World

The idea of saving the (natural) world has about it an air of ridiculous naivety. Indeed it openly invites ridicule. First, it seems unrealistically grandiose in the scope of its ambition. How could one hope to save a whole world or to keep all of nature safe? Second, it appears too close to the patronizing and dangerous religiosity of those who want to save "America" or our souls for Jesus and free-enterprise (a somewhat strange combination), whether or not we want to be so saved. Does the natural world really want or need saving, and for whom? Third, it is all too readily compared, and all too rarely contrasted, with the kind of mindless fundamentalisms that, with proselytizing fervor, posit single, simple, but mutually contradictory ends for humankind. After all, aren't there many world-views, and correspondingly many understandings of what saving the natural world might entail? And of course, there are. And yet it might still be suggested that, deep down, radical ecologists strive to save what they can of the natural world, that this is their fundamental ethical and political concern.

What is more, this ethical and political concern separates radical ecologists, those who would go to the root of that which threatens the world, from the purveyors of environmental expediency, from the "shallow" (to use Arne Naess's term) environmentalists who formulate all concerns for the natural world within the globally dominant language of resource economics and management. It expresses the difference between those who regard the natural world as a "realm of ends" (to adopt a Kantian idiom) and those who account it merely a "storehouse of means" of value only because of its potential usefulness toward humanly determined ends. On this latter view the world is worth saving only in the sense that one might prudently save money for a rainy day, only as natural capital that earns us interest, rather than as that which is deserving of our interest, our concerns.

Radical ecologists, then, argue that a distinction between ends and means, in the sense of ethics and instrumentality, is no less important with regard to the natural than to the social world. Saving the natural world is an end in itself. But, what kind of an end can it be? In what sense can we speak of a natural world of ends, and how might this be related to concerns about an ecological crisis, that is to say, the potential ending of the (natural) world? In any event, doesn't the rejection of "resourcism" just confirm that radical ecology is, as sceptics suppose, a ridiculous form of fundamentalism naively refusing to engage in realpolitik? There are, I'd suggest, no simple answers to such questions, although just admitting this already begins to distinguish radical ecology from any single-minded fundamentalism. As an initial step, though, we might begin by distinguishing a realpolitik that provides a systematically applied excuse to compromise one's ethics from a "politics for the real (natural) world," understood as an applied art of seeking, where possible, ethical compromises, that is, a worldly phronesis, an ethically inspired political wisdom.

Of course, speaking the language of resource economics may, on occasion, persuade sovereign powers to grant this or that aspect of the natural world a temporary stay of execution. But, as Neil Evernden¹ argues, it also, wittingly or unwittingly, accepts the original terms on which nature's death warrant has already been signed. It concedes everything to an understanding of the world as no more than what Heidegger (1993) refers to as a "standing reserve" of lifeless, that is, de-animated and nonautonomous, "matter" systematically ordered according to a technological enframing (Gestell).² The forests and their myriad inhabitants are thus conceptually reduced to so many board feet of timber, the once roaring rivers to so many kilowatt hours of hydroelectricity. From more radical perspectives, and at the risk of seeming ungrateful for small mercies, we might regard even those patches of the world momentarily set aside from more corrosive forms of technologically mediated commodification as...