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chapter seven Aldo Leopold Esthetic “Anthropocentrist” All life continues in existence by feeding on other life, favoring itself at the expense of everything else. Though crude, depressing , insane, no way has yet been found to circumvent this enabling murderousness—except by means of upbeat redescriptions, like “image of God,” “realm of freedom,” “new world order.” Thus, mice, rats, cockroaches , and the AIDS virus look to their own survival at all costs, and people are necessarily anthropocentric. Biocentrism, a recent invention that one might call “cosmic pro-lifeism,” entails the redescribed alter egos of certain types of well-fed, bourgeois anthropocentrists, more or less freed from the struggle for survival, and now with time on their hands for romancing the wild from which they have been emancipated by the technology that keeps them alive with little effort, but which they frequently profess to hate. Indeed, Aldo Leopold, a pretty straight talker, in his introduction to A Sand County Almanac says of “wild things”: “These wild things, I admit, had little human value until mechanization assured us of a good breakfast.”1 But do real biocentrists eat breakfast, or anything at all? For the authentic inaugurating act of a would-be biocentrist should properly consist of suicide, since by staying alive he uses up another creature’s resources— even its very life. To be alive, it would seem, is to be against life, or at least everyone else’s life except one’s own. But nobody appears to be doing themselves in out of biocentric remorse. On the contrary, “biocentrists” consume paper, electricity, computer products, as well as food (and jet fuel to attend conferences) just like ordinary people (and jet fuel could be said to have been made available not just by the ancient deaths of fossils but by the recent deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis). Biocentrism begins to look a lot like one more redescription of the anthropocentric 78 will to power, with an agenda whose worldly underpinnings are conveniently muffled by transcendental neologisms. In a word, a lot like conventional religiosity. Instead of the “will of God,” one invokes the “will of the biota.” Still, even Roderick Nash in The Rights of Nature is ready to concede that “no environmentalist seeks literal equality for the subjects of his or her concern,”2 but such a concession (that one may perhaps be a little bit anthropocentric) is tantamount to admitting that one may be only a little bit pregnant. Because once a “biocentrist” is free to pick and choose, there is little to distinguish him from vulgar anthropocentrists, who also pick and choose, since very few people are total monsters of depravity. Though I myself sometimes step on ants and take antibiotics to murder bodily invaders, I certainly don’t ever step on dogs and cats. What must I really not step on to qualify as a bona fide biocentrist? The toes of other biocentrists? But I shouldn’t say “other biocentrists,” because like Aldo Leopold, I’m just an anthropocentrist. Why then did I put ironic quotation marks around “anthropocentrist” in referring to Leopold in the title of this paper? Not because Leopold is not really an anthropocentrist. But because everybody is an anthropocentrist , except corpses pushing up daisies: they are the real biocentrists, giving their all so others can live. When John Muir talks about “thinking like a glacier,” or when Leopold talks about “thinking like a mountain,” they are engaging in quintessentially anthropocentric appropriations of reality , for to think like glaciers or mountains is already to have nothing to do with those things and everything to do with people. Only a person can think like a mountain, and that thinker is inevitably someone whose genetic inheritance is to think like an anthropos, never more thoroughly than when he is “thinking like a mountain.” Biocentric terms like “ecological egalitarianism,” “inherent value,” “a sense of place,” “bioregionalism ,” “ecosystem,” “sacred space,” “aesthetic experience of the wilderness ,” “caring about nature” (all of which I’ve taken from Devall and Sessions’ Deep Ecology)3 are saturated through and through with the anthropocentrism of creatures constructed like us. To attempt to think “biocentrically ” is to try to sneak a look through the back door of the universe so quickly that one’s observations would escape the indeterminacy principle and one would see things as they really are in their unseen selves. But things as they really are in their unseen selves are presumably not percepAldo Leopold 79 [18.219.86...

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