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CHAPTER O N E Introduction Nature is one of the most complicated terms in English or any language. It carries the weight of projected human fears and hopes, the marks of history and political conflict, the grounds for moral legitimation or condemnation . Running throughout these discussions, tying many of them together, is an ongoing debate about what it means to be human. As Raymond Williams writes, "What is often being argued . . .in the idea of nature is the idea of man."l The reverse is also true: what is often being argued in the idea of "man" is the idea of nature. Just as we cannot speak easily of nature without referring, implicitly or explicitly, to some idea of the human, so we rarely speak of humanness without an underlying conception of nature, either as that which encompasses or excludes humans or, perhaps more often, as that which humans exclude. Not only are ideas of humanness and of nature wrapped up with each other, but they also shape ethical systems and practices. Questions such as what counts as human, what does not, and what is natural or unnatural do not simply feed philosophical debates but help determine moral and political priorities, patterns of behavior, and institutional structures. This book explores the connections among ideas about nature, ideas about humanness, and environmental ethics. These relations are culturally and historically variable, theoretically complicated , and politically vital. In exploring them, we face central issues regarding the shape of our communities, the destruction of our natural environment, and the character of moral discourse. Rethinking our 2 Introduction different natures can illuminate both the need for and the possibilities of transformation. BEING HUMAN To say that ethics are intimately connected to ideas about what it means to be human suggests that understanding of what humans ought to be or do rest, almost always, on ideas about what human beings are: individualistic or social, rational or emotional, violent or peaceful, biologically or socially constructed, among countless other possibilities. (It is worth noting that many of these ideas about human nature are really about the particular kinds of humans who count, usually the same ones who have made the definitions.) Social contract theory, for example, makes sense only in the context of a conviction that people are rational, autonomous, and self-interested. In light of these assumptions, the economic and political arrangements associated with philosophical liberalism , as well as its moral claims (e.g., the emphasis on rights to freedom from interference),seem not only "good" but also "natural," even inevitable . In contrast, the Roman Catholictradition assumesthat humans are fundamentally social and mutually dependent. In this framework, social and economic institutions should not assume conflicts among competing individuals. Instead, they ought to empower people to live and work together in pursuit of shared goals. Like economic and political arrangements, environmentally harmful practices and lifestyles rest on definite, though often implicit, assumptions about human nature. Most Western belief systems define humans as unique among the rest of life: humans are the only animal with X, some essential trait lacking in all other animals and setting people not only apart from but also above them. Western religions generally point to an eternal soul as the candidate for X, while secular philosophies often focus on rational thought and the capacity for conceptual language. While there are important differences between (and within) the dominant Western theological and secular approaches to human uniqueness, central to both have been the assumptions that some crucial quality radically separates humans from nonhuman animals and "nature" generally . In Christian terms, this has often made humans "in but not of" the created world (John 17:14-IS), including the world of nature. This distinction has momentous implications for the meaning of a good life for humans, the shape and direction that human communities should Introduction 3 take, the ways that humans should relate to nonhuman nature, and the ways they ought to use that nature. Belief in a qualitative gap shapes even some radical critiques of Western Christian and modernist traditions. Contemporary social constructionist approaches, for example, posit a new form of "special creation" in theories that stress the social "invention" of virtually all dimensions of experience, including human and nonhuman nature. "Human nature ," in this light, is not a fixed essence but blank paper, open to endless possibilities of cultural and environmental shaping. This approach, while intended to avoid the problematic assumption of a universal human nature, nonetheless still identifies a unique characteristic that divides humans...

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