Against Ecological Sovereignty: Ethics, Biopolitics, and Saving the Natural World

6. Articulating Ecological Ethics and Politics

159 If ethics without politics is empty, then politics without ethics is blind. —Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance How might the relations between political action and ecological (ethical) responsibility begin to be envisaged in such a way that each informs the other and yet neither is made subject to the other? How do we dissolve the claims of sovereignty and yet retain a politics informed by the Good where each is understood as an expression of natality, diversity (plurality), and as exemplifying the appearance of those individuals who feel, speak, and act? Another way of posing the question would be to ask whether an ecological ethics might come to delimit, but not dictate, how political communities choose to act into the world. There is an understandable but regrettable tendency in environmental ethics to translate ethical concerns for nonhuman others into more or less fixed moral frameworks—often on the basis of naturalistic claims about supposedly objective (intrinsic) moral value attaching to certain species (Smith 2001a)—values that are then regarded as imposing constraints on the freedoms of human-centered politics. To take just one example, and there are many, Laura Westra (1998) develops a notion of ecosystemic “integrity” as a supposedly measurable “objective state” (9) equivalent to the “optimal functional capacity” (241) of that system, an optimum (always) achieved through its evolutionary (natural) development. Integrity should also, she claims, be understood as a primary moral good threatened by human intrusions because 6 ARTICULATING ECOLOGICAL ETHICS AND POLITICS 160 articulating ecological ethics and politics “anthropogenic stress” leads to suboptimal ecosystem functioning and “non-evolutionary changes” (100) that constitute a moral wrong to that ecosystem. This proposal is questionable on many grounds, including ecological science (see Smith 1999b), but the key problem is that, having made what she believes to be a convincing philosophical argument concerning the Good of ecosystems, and having translated her concerns into a universal principle (archē) of integrity, Westra’s (1994) conclusions are then supposed to impose specific and extensive limits on political action. “The first moral principle is that nothing can be moral that . . . cannot be seen to fit within the natural laws of our environment in order to support the primacy of integrity. . . . Act so that your action will fit (first and minimally) within universal natural laws” (Westra 1998, 11). What we are presented with is thus another version of the sovereignty of nature, which simultaneously reiterates Plato’s arguments concerning the sovereignty of the (in this case ecosystemic) Good over the polity. Westra (1998, 150) is quite explicit about this, arguing that “in contrast to the tenets of ‘political correctness’ and individualistic modern liberalism, we may be able to cast some serious doubts on the capacity of our institutions, at least in their present form, to do better in both theory and practice than the Platonic philosopher.” And while Westra recognizes that there can and will be debate among ecological scientists, philosophers, and other stakeholders concerning the definition and analysis of integrity, the “ultimate reality of the concept (as de- finable, quantifiable, and applicable), and hence its validity in both law and morally, need not be questioned” (10). But one does not need to be either a liberal or an advocate of contemporary institutional structures to see the antiethical, antipolitical, and even potentially totalitarian consequences of a move to impose “a common conception of the ‘good,’ that is not open to revision and rejection” (150). Even if Westra’s ire is targeted primarily at making ecological decisions according to utilitarian and majoritarian calculi of “democratically supported preferences” (10), it is ethics and politics as such that her system subjects to the supposedly politically impartial concept of ecosystem integrity.1 This claim to be above politics excludes this sovereign principle from ethical and political questioning even as it places those deciding when and where it should apply in a position of absolute and universal authority over ethics and politics as such. That Westra’s ecological and philosophical stakeholders are more nebulously defined articulating ecological ethics and politics 161 than Plato’s philosopher-kings (although Westra indubitably places herself in this position of privileged interpreter [steward] of nature’s sovereign principles) makes this biopolitical system more, not less, mysterious and open to abuse. That Westra (1994, 200), rather than supporting individual state sovereignty, advocates a “‘world order’ institution ” capable of enforcing the policies demanded by...