Deep Ecology

Animal rights activists are actually quite moderate when compared to others who have taken the side of nature against humans in recent years. Singer, after all, does not extend the capacity to experience pain to plants, as well as to some creatures whose neural development is so primitive that they have no capacity to feel. It is, he argues, perfectly appropriate to eat creatures that have no sentient capacities; "somewhere between a shrimp and an oyster," as he puts it, "seems as good a place to draw the line as any, and better than most."^[19] But oysters are an integral part of that complex ecosystem known as the natural world. From the perspective of those who argue that every system found in nature, down to sand and water, ought to be respected, the animal rights movement does not go far enough. We need, they would argue, a way to appreciate the dynamics by which all things in the natural world reproduce themselves.

The obvious place to turn for an understanding of the natural world is to the science of ecology. In 1866, Ernst Haeckel, the leading German disciple of Darwin, coined the term Oecologie , understood as the science of how living organisms relate to each other and to their environment.^[20] As its similarity to the term Oeconomie implies, ecology was premised upon the ancient Greek understanding of household management. From its early origins, ecology understood the natural world with a language borrowed from the study of the social world. It would be a long time before this overlap between the social and the natural worlds would disappear, if, indeed, it ever has.

Although most earlier ecologists, such as Henry C. Cowles and Frederic Clements, left man out of their models, they were nonetheless groping toward a unified understanding of ecological processes, one that would link all living species into what, in 1939, Clements called the "biotic community," or "biota." The analogy between nature and society was even more pronounced in the work of the British zoologist Charles

Elton, who used the social structure of European feudalism to describe how nature functions. Animals were classified into different orders or ranks—Elton sometimes called them "roles" or "professions"—each with its own proper niche.^[21] (Darwin had used terms such as place or office to describe the same thing.) Various species, within their respective niches, were described as essentially producers or consumers, depending on the workings of the food chain. It therefore became appropriate, from Elton's perspective, to speak of a biotic "community," since nature, like the Gemeinschaft societies of Ferdinand Toennies, created an order in which every organism held its proper place. As a way of understanding nature, economics had evolved, rather naturally, into sociology.

The question raised by this correspondence was not whether nature functions by self-regulating laws. The question, rather, was whether there were lessons for human society in what we could learn about nature. If the two worlds of human society and nature could be described by the same language, then either nature could be understood in terms of human capacities or society could be explained by natural processes. Herbert Spencer's ideas loom large over those who opted for the second of these alternatives. For Spencer, all complex ecological systems evolve according to self-regulating laws. Interference in social evolution is as disastrous as interference in biological evolution. The earth, in short, has its own economy, one in which species evolve by adopting the most efficient strategies for survival. This Spencerian understanding of how nature and society are linked would eventually become the dominant one. On the one hand, Spencer's principles became embedded in conservative doctrine, influencing both elite opinion and U.S. Supreme Court decisions.^[22] On the other hand, Spencer's influence on such scientists as Clements and William Morton Wheeler was pronounced. Ecology was used to demonstrate that human society owes more to nature than the other way around.

That Spencer's ideas were used for reactionary political purposes in the human world is an embarrassing legacy for contemporary ecologists, many of whom consider themselves on the political left. But that embarrassment abated somewhat

when a major change in the science of ecology took place under the inspiration of the Oxford botanist A. G. Tansley (who had once worked with Spencer in revising the 1899 edition of Principles of Biology ). Tansley presided over a shift from biology to the physical and information sciences as a way of understanding what happens in nature. Objecting strongly to any discussion of communities in nature, he sought a way of describing natural processes through pure quantification. His major term, the ecosystem , was derived from the newly emerging science generally known as systems theory. All units within any society exist together by exchanging energy; and in this process, there will inevitably be a tendency toward entropy, or irreplaceable loss of energy. An ecological system operating at peak efficiency integrates all its parts so that entropy is minimized. Although economics was by no means irrelevant to this way of thinking—that science has its own fascination with automatically functioning mechanisms for ensuring efficiency—the intellectual model for the new ecology became cybernetics. By viewing nature as a complex system driven by self-regulating laws, ecologists could avoid the conservatism of social Darwinism in favor of a doctrine stressing harmony of interests and beneficial outcomes.

With the development of computers and artificial intelligence, a cybernetic way of understanding the automatic functioning of the natural world was reinforced. "In this age of computer-run organizations and the carefully arbitrated resolution of all discords," Donald Worster has written, "it was probably inevitable that ecology too would come to emphasize the flow of goods and services—or of energy—in a kind of automated, robotized, pacified nature."^[23] The computer—a machine that seemed capable of exchanging vast bits of information with little (or almost immeasurable) loss of energy—represented the ultimate in cybernetic theory. From an ecological perspective, both nature and artifice seemed to be linked together by the dynamics of systems theory.

The application of systems theory to an understanding of nature represented a gigantic step in the scientific development of ecology. It also had important ethical and moral implications. Ecology, after all, is not simply a descriptive science

but also contains elements of an ethical system; the general normative belief associated with ecological understandings of nature is that the system as a whole, rather than the individual parts that compose the system, ought to be respected. As long as biology was the dominant science associated with ecology, a holistic ethics could be reconciled with individual parts: we ought to preserve living species because life itself, understood as the life of any individual organism, is valuable. When the information sciences became the model of an ecological system, by contrast, either life could no longer be the ultimate justification for a holistic ethic or the meaning of life would have to be redefined to include all self-regulating systems—even systems such as oceans, mountain ranges, and computers, which were once thought of as lifeless.

Under the influence of Erwin Schrödinger, life was, in fact, redefined. A living being increasingly came to be understood as any organism that avoids decay by "attracting, as it were, a stream of negative entropy upon itself, to compensate the entropy increase it produces by living and thus to maintain itself on a stationary and fairly low entropy level."^[24] Schrödinger's definition was important because, by shifting the scientific basis of life from biology to quantum physics, he made possible a broad and all-encompassing conception of what it means to live. Later on, when information science and artificial intelligence developed, it became possible to argue that all self-reproducing things are living things. This was something of a radical notion for the information sciences. We know that computers are self-reproducing. Are they therefore alive?

At least some thinkers, even if in a playful spirit, wanted to entertain the notion. Computer hackers, for example, are familiar with a game called Life, invented by John Horton Conway in 1970. This game enables the player to use a few basic algorithms to generate systems so complex and unpredictable from the first moves that they resemble living things; "among finite Life patterns there is a very small proportion behaving like self-replicating animals. . . . It's probable, given a large enough Life space, initially in a random state, that after a long time, intelligent, self-reproducing animals will emerge and populate some parts of the space." This, of course, was not

likely to happen soon, since "'sufficiently large' means very large indeed, and we can't prove that 'living' animals of any kind are likely to emerge in any Life space we can construct in practice."^[25] But as an indication of how the information sciences change the meaning of what it means to live, the idea suffices.

From a biological perspective, a holistic emphasis on the species could be justified out of respect for the life of individual organisms. Such an emphasis is no longer justified when an information science perspective becomes the basis for an ecological understanding of the world. Animal rights thinkers undervalue human interpretative capacities by defining life in sensate terms. But their conception of why life is important—however thin it may appear in comparison to human life—is thick in comparison to ecological models based on the information sciences. Since many cybernetic systems, including computers, have no sensations at all, even the sensate features of living species are devalued in favor of the capacity to engage in self-reproduction. From such a perspective, human interpretative capacities are at a double remove from any position of privilege: we are equated first with all other creatures that can feel pain, and then with all other creatures whose affairs can be governed algorithmically.

Algorithmic systems operate the way they do because they are concerned with the autonomy of the system itself and not the autonomy of the parts that compose the system. For a system to be smart, the parts, as we saw in the previous chapter, have to be as dumb as possible. If, following the tenets of what is now called the "new" ecology, we base our understanding of the natural world on systems theory, and if we then include humans as part of the system that is self-functioning, it follows that the lives of particular and specific human individuals are of no particular import.

What this new holism would mean for human beings became clear when a new political movement called "deep ecology" appeared in the 1970s and 1980s. According to the distinction first advanced by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess in 1973, "shallow" ecology, associated with traditional environmentalism, is an effort to protect nature for man's use. "Deep"

ecology, by contrast, represents a vigorous effort to ensure that nature will be understood and appreciated in its own right, irrespective of whatever uses man might have in mind for it.^[26] Naess himself is somewhat moderate in his application of deep ecological principles; he recognizes that the question of whether hunting whales is justified depends upon the economic circumstances of those who hunt whales.^[27]

No such concession to real people and their activities and practices can be found in the writings of George Sessions, Bill Devall, J. Baird Callicott, and other American theorists of the deep ecology movement.^[28] Like John Muir, who felt little obligation to do anything about slavery but was moved to anguish by the plight of bears, these writers share the perspective of John Howard Moore, Clarence Darrow's brother-in-law, who thought of humans as "the most unchaste, the most drunken, the most selfish and conceited, the most miserly, the most hypocritical, and the most bloodthirsty of terrestrial creatures."^[29] Just as the novelist Edward Abbey would rather kill a man than a snake, deep ecologists turn their backs on the human race.^[30] The extent of one's misanthropy, as Callicott put it, became a good measure of the extent of one's commitment to ecological principles.^[31] Eighteenth-century humanism, from such a perspective, is simply a form of arrogance, the sooner done away with, the better.^[32] There is no special moral advantage to any practice that improves and extends human life. Indeed, some activists associated with the deep ecological organization Earth First! have suggested that the famine in Ethiopia or the AIDS epidemic serves the function of reducing the human population and thereby protecting the natural world.^[33] In the expression of such beliefs, the full consequences of what it means to value the perpetuation of systems, rather than the people who compose those systems, become evident.

As part of the "new" ecology, deep ecology naturally privileges wholes over parts. Aldo Leopold first expressed this ethical position as follows: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."^[34] From such a holistic perspective, deep ecology can have little respect for

those parts we generally call human selves.^[35] Deep ecologists tend to understand the self in Heideggerian terms: the everyday, inauthentic self will be overcome and transcended as we give up any false strategies of control and mastery and just let our being be.^[36] Devotion to nature is one such way of overcoming the everyday self to achieve some higher form of self-realization.^[37] But even mere natural appreciation will do: standing before Lake Solitude in the High Sierras, Holmes Rolston reflected that "neither lake nor self has independent being: both exist in dynamic interpenetration across a surface designed for passage and exchange, as well as for delimitation and individuation." The self therefore has little permanence: "We are participants in a shared flow, of which the self is an integral but momentary instantiation."^[38] The human self has receded to the background of the landscape painting, if it even appears at all.

It is perhaps because human selves matter so little in the ethical scheme of things that deep ecological thought can be so explicitly Malthusian. Among its list of fundamental principles, as expressed by Naess and by Devall and Sessions, is "that the flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease."^[39] Unfortunately, human population has been increasing over time, as a result of what William R. Catton has called the success of "death control." Human longevity "aggravated the unseen precariousness of our situation by releasing the brakes; a further acceleration of population increase followed, not linked to any increment of carrying capacity."^[40] We might therefore have to ask government to intervene in the process, since, as Herman E. Daly puts it, "the right to reproduce must no longer be treated as a 'free good'—it should be regarded as a scarce asset, a legal right limited in total amount at a level corresponding to replacement fertility, or less, distributed in divisible units to individuals on the basis of strict equality, and subject to reallocation by voluntary exchange."^[41]

But not even Malthus believed that because nature tends to kill off members of a species that grows too quickly, we ought to argue for the rights of viruses to live, even those that, if

unchecked, could kill people. Environmental ethicists such as J. Baird Callicott reject any "psychocentric" morality that gives human subjects the benefit of the ecological doubt.^[42] "Even Aldo Leopold, whose land ethic laid the foundation of Callicott's thought," writes Roderick Nash, "had not drawn such radical anti-human implications. Nor had the extreme ecologists who defended the rights of germs admitted the necessity of sacrificing a few designated human carriers so that the endangered smallpox virus could make its contribution to the integrity of the ecosystem. But this was the conclusion to which Callicott's philosophy pointed."^[43] The value of any individual life, including a human self, is, from such a perspective, hardly a matter about which we ought to be sentimental.^[44]

By itself, deep ecology represents an extreme position in debates over the environment. Yet although few would agree with the position that "in some situations, it is a greater wrong to kill a wildflower than it is, in another situation, to kill a human," the suspicion of the human self found in deep ecology does correspond with other trends in current thought.^[45] Consider the overlaps between deep ecology and literary post-modernism, the subject of the chapter that follows.^[46] Deep ecology echoes the sense found in the world of contemporary deconstruction that it is futile to talk of boundaries, distinctions, and subjects; for, as Devall and Sessions express it, "there are no boundaries and everything is interrelated."^[47] In addition, both radically question the existence of any transcendental or universal standards of value; there is no special value to human life, because, in the words of J. Baird Callicott, who is otherwise hostile to post-modernism, "there can be no value apart from an evaluator."^[48] Moreover, just as post-modernism takes a position of neutrality toward the privileging of texts, deep ecology is morally indifferent, believing that there are no rights and wrongs in nature. If indeed "the skin is not a morally relevant boundary," then all systems exist in a state of ethical equality: any system's stability is presumably as important as any other system's stability.^[49] Mountains and seashores have as much right to regenerate themselves naturally as cows and humans. Even computers, because they are self-regulating systems, have a right to exist. As Michael Tobias

has written, "The first terrestrial matter was probably silicon, beaches. From a computer's perspective, human beings are on Earth merely to reorganize silicon into conductive chips."^[50] Deep ecology is, in Paul Taylor's expression, "species impartial"; it refuses to take the position that any one species found in nature has any claims over any other.^[51] Like much of the work inspired by Heidegger's interpreter Jacques Derrida, deep ecology combines radical politics with a conservative message of resignation in the face of systems that loom beyond the power of humans to alter.^[52]

With deep ecology, the suspicion of individual human selves—a suspicion that always existed in ecological efforts to value the whole over the parts—extends to a recognition that human selves are, from the standpoint of nature, superfluous. "If the total, final, absolute extermination of our species (by our own hands!) should take place," Paul Taylor has written, "and if we should not carry all the others with us into oblivion, not only would the Earth's community of life continue to exist, but in all probability its well being would be enhanced. Our presence, in short, is not needed."^[53] This is, even by deep ecology standards, a fairly extreme position. But Taylor's bio-centrism and Callicott's environmental ethics are not without supporters. "Although few pushed environmental ethics this far," Roderick Nash writes, "support for Callicott's position appears frequently in contemporary philosophy."^[54] The more extreme forms of deep ecology raise a fascinating question: What kind of world can we imagine if all human beings disappear from it? The only problem with the question is that without human beings, there is no one to do the imagining. If animal rights philosophers would sacrifice the human capacity to attribute meaning to things in order to avoid cruelty to other species, deep ecologists—in giving moral preference to the system over the units that compose the system—reduce humans not only to all other living species but to any inorganic matter that, through no choice of its own, has become part of a self-reproducing chain.