Reviewing some of the scholarship on environmental ethics allows the teacher to have better fluency in some of the core compelling questions of the unit, and to engage in open-ended philosophical conversations that embody nuance and honor the complexity of these problems. The ideological underpinning of this unit rests in a synthesis of various scholars who reject dichotomous thinking and artificial divisions between the human and non-human. Much of this critique stems from the realities of the Anthropocene era, in which humans have critically altered the global landscape in both damaging and irreversible ways. The post-industrial world, therefore, and the catching up of developing countries, necessitates a reckoning with our culture of use. The authors examined find consensus in diagnosing our current environmental crises as a product of a much larger and ongoing global spiritual crisis regarding the roles and responsibilities of a human living within this world. Each author comes from a different discipline, yet their message is consistent. To solve this spiritual crisis, non-human voices must be articulated and their agency integrated into human political systems, thus protecting our collective health and wellbeing. Historically, dominion over nature to enable humankind’s ascent was the prevailing ethic, and we are approaching the capacity of that philosophy. As these authors argue, our culture is sick, and the healing lies in a mentality shift of how we see objects, animals, plants, and even each other beyond a transactional dichotomy and towards a spirit of coexistence and reciprocity.
Anthropocene is the Scene
Anthropocene is a term used to define the geological period in which humans have had an immense impact on the environment, and whose influence can be compared to other seismic natural forces. During the anthropocene, the environment has been primarily interpreted as something to be dominated and controlled and extracted from for human material needs. Historically, dominion over nature was necessitated by nature’s overwhelming ability to cause harm; now nature’s capacity to harm has been enhanced by the very same quest for dominion. The exact date of the start of this period is debated, yet it aligns with the rapid industrialization and population booms of the late 19th and 20th centuries. Great Britain ushered in industrialization in the 1750s, introducing smog and pollution in the waterways from coal burning and iron smelting. Cancer became a more prevalent reality, as did the booming of the population, fueling the cycle of use, and subsequently, abuse. With each decade, increasing C02 rates have increased temperatures, changing habitats in profound ways. Along with widespread industrialization, the citizen-as-worker became citizen-as-consumer in the developed world. The Ecological Footprint Calculator is an eye-opening online tool that asks users about their daily habits and shows that if every person in the world lived like an average American, we would need 5.0 earths to support those daily habits. What we establish as the norms of a modern society, such as commuting, eating meat, and daily electricity use for phones and computers are, in fact, bringing us closer to an abnormal world. The question then becomes, what norms are we willing to exchange to preserve our conception of modernity?
Western Spring Awakening
The political movements of the late 1960s in the United States ushered in a radical departure from the “use and dump” grind of industry in the United States. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) alerted the public to the negative effects of the bioaccumulation of toxins from agricultural pesticides such as DEET by imagining a world with no birds, as their shells were becoming too weak. Cesar Chavez grounded environmentalism in the labor rights of migrant farm workers, and ardently organized for stricter pesticide regulations for decades. Laws, such as the Clean Air Act (1963) and the Clean Water Act (1972), introduced previously unconsidered guardrails, and were a result of labor rights movements and the countercultural activism of the era. The year 1970 was the start of the governmental Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), representing establishment acknowledgement of the potential negative consequences of American industry. Ecological disasters, such as the dumping of toxic waste in Love Canal, precipitated new regulations like the Superfund Law (1980) which, up until the 1990s, taxed corporations to fund environmental cleanups and brownfields. The populace was physically sick, forcing not just a domestic, but also a global cultural reckoning with industrialism.
“I need” vs “We need”: Reciprocity and Indigenous Kinships
The most visible environmentalist thinkers have been those associated with white hegemonic power—John Muir and Aldo Leopold, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and David Thoreau—despite much inspiration being taken from indigenous ways of being. Aldo Leopold, for example, maintained a commitment to a “land ethic” or a harmony between human and land through the processes of conservationism. (The conservationist movement, it should be mentioned, has also been co-opted by men such as Theodore Roosevelt through the lens of protecting sport hunting, a popular pastime of the elite predicated upon white dominion over wilderness; and US national parks have a dark history of eugenicist supporters who advocated the removal of indigenous peoples from the land for white recreation.) Leopold’s experiences in New Mexico shaped his perspectives, but scholars like Kyle Pwys Whyte caution viewing him as an indigenous translator or “Rosetta Stone” for the diverse practices of various tribes, naming distinct differences between North American environmentalism and indigenous practices.
Indigenous identity is located in a symbiotic relationship to the land and is highly relational, unlike Leopold’s more individualistic approach. Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner, a Payómkawichum and Kúupangaxwichem assistant professor of philosophy at Georgetown University relates the importance of a contract, or intentionality of use. A core term in understanding this philosophy is extending the idea of kinship beyond biological relations to “describe the relationships between all entities that share responsibilities for one another” and the “knowledge-sharing” that it entails (18). Meissner’s synthesis of various indigenous scholars indicates that attempts at environmentalism are incomplete and ineffective if they do not prioritize a practice of shared responsibility, animation of the inanimate, and an ethic of “gifting” rather than mindless taking (17).
Many of the practices Meissner recommends revolve around restoring context between humans and the natural world. In a spoken word piece by Leanne Simpson called “How to Steal a Canoe,” the poet describes rubbing water on canoes stored at a university warehouse to reconnect them with their ancestry and spirit, culminating in collective action to restore one of the canoes to its ancestral lake. This caring for an object may seem foreign in this world of planned obsolescence, but it is this exact act of treasuring an item for the cultural symbolism and power it retains that embodies the sacred contract these authors pine for. It is reminiscent of Marie Kondo’s thanking of items that no longer spark joy, a practice that ignited the American public’s consciousness of the capacity of items to hold memory and emotion.
The sustainable indigenous ethic is also deeply rooted in the method of extraction, as seen in Meissner’s mention of indigenous California basketweavers’ practice of intentionality. This stems from the belief that the “plant relatives” used are “ancestors who became plants” (19), which creates a consciousness away from wanton waste and towards nurturing continuity. They harvest what is needed and leave enough to honor the “needs of others." These ‘others’ include the plant itself and its need for seeds for future generations, for other animals who subsist off it, and for other clans and communities. This reorientation away from “I am taking this because I need it” to “I am taking some because we all need it” precipitates a strong cosmic recalibration of our place in this world.
Islamic Critiques: Secularization Severs the Sacred Within
A common theme in many of these readings is the critique of Western rationality and imperialism as sources of this global cosmic division between humans and nature. In “The Analysis of the Relationship between the Environmental Crisis and the Contemporary Human’s Spiritual Crisis (with Emphasis on the Ideas of Seyed Hossein Nasr)” (2018), Tohidnia et al. locate the spiritual foundations of the environmental crisis in a deviation from tradition, precipitated by the Western dissemination of post-Enlightenment ideals. They push back on the idea that religion enables the perspective that humans are “God’s caliph on earth and that all nature should be subservient to man…caus[ing] human beings to be arrogant towards nature” (88), which is typical of cultures of empire. Tohidnia et al. counter that, as “the world of nature [is] sacred and full of the manifestation of God’s grace and love, as well as divine entity,” humans must protect it (88). Tohidnia et al. are inspired by Seyed Hossain Nasr, an Iranian- American Islamic scholar, who has advocated for the “[reviving of] the sacred knowledge within human beings” as embodied by tradition. Nasr believes that the environment is not just an abstract “other” beyond the confines of a city, but within a human itself.
‘Sacred knowledge,’ for Nasr, indicates a contextualization of humankind outside of the everyday quotidian into a place of continuity with a traditional way of understanding and defining existence. Tradition is not an amalgamation of mere customs and rites, but a “set of principles” that are a “manifestation of divine essence…[which] includes sacred science…rooted in the essence of truth” (91). According to Nasr, these principles were flattened in the “secular humanism of the Renaissance," where “knowledge has gradually been deprived of spirituality and sanctity, and relativism in knowledge has replaced certainty” (92). In the opening up of possibilities about the purpose of existence and ways in which to conduct life, Nasr claims humankind has lost a unifying ethic or code to live by. In his line of thought, the western “mechanical view of the universe” dishonors our inherent “heavenly aspect” that indigenous philosophers might understand as reciprocality.
Similarly to Meissner, Nasr and Tohidnia et al are critical of Western epistemology, citing it as “unholy” and “unacceptable” (92) and locating it at the root of disharmony. Tohidnia describes those living outside of the world of tradition as “faithful to their inner truth”; they are the “normal and natural ones” who are not “moving against their existential structure” (93). The modern human, according to Nasr, originates in the West and is aberrant:
In his view, the difference between traditional and contemporary man is that the former is aware of his true nature and lives according to it, while the modern man, by forgetting it, has taken a rebellious path and is out of his normal state. (92)
This tendency to point the finger wholly at Western actions and culture feels shortsighted and obfuscatory of non-Western cultures' complicity, both passive and initiative, in dichotomies of extraction and exploitation. The notion that greed and exploitation is a uniquely Western trait has the potential to occlude injustices within the non-Western world. Shifting all accountability of an injustice as part of an inherited legacy of Western action pardons the transgressor as one without free will fulfilling a fate laid out by past injustices. The Saudi Arabian oil industry, for example, may be explained as existing to fulfill the voracious needs of the Western industrial capitalist machine, or as a way to validate and entrench Arabian hierarchies.
Filthy Capitalists?: Communist Counterexamples
Critiquing capitalism as the singular source of the world’s ailments is divorced from the reality of humans as consumers, and looking towards global industrial examples (such as those in Russia and China) forces us to reckon with what we treasure as a basic standard of living.
In Russia, the environmentalist movement was motivated by honoring the national spirit and political activism against Soviet abuse. With the Soviet Union’s large expanse, much of the conversation about nature lay in an exhalation about priroda (nature, which shares its root rod- with birth, parents, relatives, etc.) The use of the word priroda elicits a spiritual sentiment, evocative of something primal and innate. The creation of zapovedniks throughout the 20th century, or reserves legally protected from economic activity essential to Soviet cultural heritage, ran parallel to Soviet demands for efficient extraction. The communist system was obsessed with industrialization and production quotas. Russia was slow to industrialize, yet when it did, it did at an exploitative rate of both workers and the environment.
A key example of communist industrial grind can be found in the city of Dzerzhinsk, in my home region of Nizhny Novgorod. During WWI, it served as a hub for the production of mustard gas and other chemical weapons. Following the wars, it was converted into producing DDT, the same pesticide Cesar Chavez and Rachel Carson rallied against. At night, the fumes of industry would settle at ground level, and had the workers not slept in raised beds, they would have been asphyxiated like the chickens they lived off of. The lack of environmental regulation also resulted in the creation of the White Lagoon, a toxic sludge lake that exists to its present day, and the mass polluting of the aquifer and waterways. To this day, locals cannot drink the groundwater, and the life expectancy of a Dzerzhinsk resident is 42 for men and 47 for women, according to a Blackstone Institute 2007 study. When asked by researchers why they stay, the residents shrug, and dismiss it as “just a fact of life,” displaying the immense political apathy they cultivated living under an immutable government.
The ability to create meaningful change was dampened after the fall of the Soviet Union, which scholars such as Jane Dawson argue can be attributed to the eco-nationalism movements of the Soviet states, such as Ukraine post-Chernobyl in 1986. The Chernobyl disaster, a product of Moscow’s prioritization of production over safety and power over transparency, was the final nail in the coffin of colonial rule during the vulnerable time of perestroika, especially as the state’s initial decision to keep the disaster a secret delayed crucial action. Environmental activism has a powerful global history of recalibrating abuses towards the goal of recentering societies towards reciprocal relationships.
Animals as Commodities in an Industrialized Globalized System
Val Plumwood’s chapter on the “The Ethics of Commodification” in her 2002 book Environmental Culture also critiques prevailing environmental theories that stress the person/property divide. Her approach brings to mind Chicana queer feminist Gloria Anzaldua's blending of worlds in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), where a new consciousness, or a new faith can emerge without entrenched conceptual borders. Plumwood proposes a “major revisioning and restructuring of economic life” (Plumwood, 166). Plumwood’s avenue for theoretical exploration lies within the treatment of animals. She reviews neo-Cartisian environmental ethics, and states that their approach to animal defense is “an attempt to extend the privileged category of the human in the human/nature dualism rather than try to break the human/nature dualism down” (143). She aligns with Meissner by stating that this approach does not fit “with an ecological awareness of kinship and continuity of planetary life” (144). She critiques the dominant western approach to exclude non-humans from ethics, and demands reflection on the “act of exclusion itself” as a way to reveal fundamental societal values (146). She advocates for the acceptance of the intrinsic value of non-humans, as opposed to the “anthropocentric ranking regimes that based the worth of a being on their degree of conformity to human norms or resemblance to an idealised ‘rational’ or ‘conscious’ subject” (147). She demands a revision of the “use/respect boundary” as a way to exercise humanity to the non-human (a phrase she may object to, as her principles rest in the intrinsic value of the nonhuman for what it is, rather than locating humanness in the nonhuman) (155).
In critiquing factory farming, Plumwood illuminates our societal malady of abstracting consumption to the obfuscation of injustice. Our removal from the killing process also removes us from seeing meat for the “communicative being it once was” and confronting the ramifications of our wants (157). This “radical dissociation” we make on a daily, hourly, arguably continual basis can erode our sense of responsibility and kinship with this planet (157). Although Val Plumwood was a vegetarian, she seems to be open to animals as food, since, as she states, “all ecologically embodied beings are food for some other beings” and it is necessary to “rethink farming as a non-commodity” where we “respect animals as both individuals and as community members” (156). Rather than “drown in the anonymous collectivity” of meat, intentional consideration of our kinship precipitates an intentional ethic of use. In naming the animal, so to speak, we can see its shape and feel its impact, removing the convenience of our packaged, factory-farmed world in exchange for an honest consciousness around the consequences of our intent. The power of a contract lies in the communication of expectations rather than in their assumption.
Radically Conscious: Honoring the Vitality of the Living and Nonliving
Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010) sets the framework for unmuting objects and/or the nonhuman to locate them within our political ecology, sometimes through anthropomorphization. After a humorous discussion of Darwin’s worms culminating in the realization that worms “inaugurate human culture” (96) and make human history possible, Bennett sets forth advocating for a “polity with more channels of communication between members” to “extend awareness of our interinvolvements and interdependencies” (104). Worms' engagement in reforming matter enabled agriculture, making them an essential actant in our path to civilization; although Bennet cannot fully “horizontalize” (104) or demolish the ecological hierarchy over which humans preside, the process of anthropomorphizing is an essential exercise in re-evaluating how we have historically valued the nonhuman world. The mentality shift she strives for lies within removing the subject/object divide and replacing it with an emphasis on similarities and “structural parallels between material forms in ‘nature’ and those in ‘culture.’” This removal of the manner in which we have organized the world breathes new life into environmental possibilities.
Bennett expresses this philosophy as that of a “vital materialist” engaging in honoring the intrinsic vitality within all, that objects and creatures alike are dynamic forces within an interconnected world. To obliviate the force of an object is to truncate its capacity to exist. This cosmic truncation becomes a recurring theme in much of the environmentalists’ ethic; a wound simultaneously ignored and reinforced through neglect. The question then becomes less a matter of which bartering system - capitalist, socialist, communist - is better for the environment, and thereby humanity, but more an examination of the intent behind the bartering. The how of exchange, not in the logistics, but traced back even further towards the mindset, is what distinguishes an exploitative practice from a regenerative practice. The cat is out of the bag, so to speak– we are a world of consumers, so can the industrialization cycles of economic development be reconfigured or must we ardently advocate for their demolition?
