September 8th, 2000
Land clearing, including the felling of forest for timber, for urban growth, and especially for agriculture, has important implications for the sustainability of ecosystems and the biosphere as a whole. Clearing kills animals and destroys their habitat, is the main cause of salinity which threatens to render water undrinkable, degrade human structures and limit agricultural productivity. Land clearing also contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and runoff from exposed soil threatens our waterways and in Queensland, the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest World Heritage Area.
The significance of land clearing is not limited to ecological, political or economic questions, for when we allow others to destroy trees they are doing more than simply disposing of their private property, they are destroying something that should be the heritage of all beings on this planet. The implications transcend time and location. As such, the question of whether we should protect our trees goes beyond human needs and is, like all environmental issues, a moral question also.
Only a small proportion of Australia’s land mass is protected by National Park status (5.9%) The remainder is either state forest, aboriginal reserve, leasehold or freehold land, over 500 million hectares (approximately 75%) of which is used for agriculture. This is the highest proportion of land used for agriculture in any country in the world. Only a tiny fraction (4.6%) of this is under crops the remainder of agricultural land is used for livestock grazing. This land, not protected as national park or reserve, is still the home for abundant forms of life. As such, the imperative to preserve life should override other coniderations - not just the individuals that exist there, but ecological biodiversity for this continent and the world.
The State of the Forests Report 1998 (NRC) estimated Australia’s forested land at 20% of the continent in 1788, we have lost 36% of that vegetation to the present (ABS 2000). Queensland has the greatest area of tree cover in Australia. Yet only a tiny part of our forest is protected as National Park. While laws protect the flora and fauna in these limited areas, they are not the only areas in our state which are worthy of that protection, and all forms of vegetation are essential to the maintenance of local climate and habitat. The State Land cover and Trees Study indicated that approximately 400,000 hectares of native bushland a year was cleared in Queensland between 1997 and 1999, up 20% from the 1995-97 period. This gives Queensland the highest rate of clearing in the western world and is where almost 90% of land cleared in Australia. Although law has been enacted to protect leasehold land, this law has not been proclaimed and is not being enforced due to the intractability of state and federal governments over the issue of funding.
Economists will tell you that it has been necessary to destroy this forest because the market demands wood, land and food. I will attempt to show that not only is the economic argument for logging, clearing and food production erroneous, but also morally questionable. It is my intention to follow each strand in this web of moral responsibility leading from individuals to the whole system of modern capitalism.
The State of the Forests Report found that although the volume of wood consumed and exported Australia wide has increased, there has been no “commensurate increase in financial gain…” They are willing to concede that, given the lack of economic incentive:
The question of whether or not Australia’s overall use of its forests for wood products is ecologically sustainable is contentious, and at this point the answers remain uncertain.In other words, the State of the Forests Report admits that there is less economic incentive to continue logging for wood, and that indeed it may be unsustainable to continue.
Logging of old growth forest always attracts attention from conservationists and has been the reason for many blockades. What timber-getters see as an economic resource, environmentalists see as a natural heritage, for in the preservation of old growth forests, we are preserving evolutionary history which cannot be repaired or replicated and which we have no right to destroy. This is at the heart of many environmental disputes and revolves around two world views which are often set up as being in opposition: anthropocentrism and biocentrism.
Roderick Nash, in The Rights of Nature 1989, elucidates two main views of human obligations to non-human life:
First, some people believe that it is right to protect and wrong to abuse nature…from the standpoint of human interest…But the more radical meaning…is that nature has intrinsic value and consequently possesses at least the right to exist. (Nash 989:9)The first, often termed anthropocentrism, or human-centred ethics; the latter is referred to variously as ecocentrism, biocentrism or deep ecology. Nash sees the latter as a more radical way of viewing nature as part of the evolution of ethics. He observes that “environmental ethics is revolutionary; it is arguably the most dramatic expansion of morality in the course of human thought” (Nash1989:7) He also observes that the idea, to most people, is still ‘incredible’. However, so too was the idea of freeing slaves, women’s equal rights and the rights of indigenous peoples. Every milestone in the evolution of ethics, in the words of John Stuart Mill, has been met with ‘ridicule, discussion, (and finally) adoption’ (Nash 1989:8) Paul Taylor also sees the acceptance of ‘life-centred’ rather than ‘human centred’ ethics as having the potential for a “profound reordering of our moral universe” (Taylor 1998:72)
Aldo Leopold’s inceptive work The Land Ethic 1949 outlines what he believes is a natural progression in ethics to recognise the land as part of the community: “all ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts” (Leopold 1999:88) This notion of the interdependence of individuals in the dynamic functioning of the ecosystem has been borne out by ecological science which has been the impetus for a new ethic for the environment that seeks to justify our obligation to preserve the environment beyond the needs of humans.
When deep ecologists speak of nature having ‘intrinsic worth’ they seek to find value in nature that is not attached to the needs of life forms. Inherent worth or intrinsic value judgements, are supposed to have no grounding in culture or fact. As such, the rights accrued to nature based on it’s intrinsic value are said to be inalienable. The ‘good’ or ‘end’ of an organisms life exists independently of our valuing it.
it is the good (well-being, welfare) of individual organisms considered as entities having inherent worth, that determines our moral relations with the Earth’s wild communities of life. (Taylor 1998:73)Taylor’s life-centred ethics seeks to expand the realm of moral consideration to include all life, using the notion of the inherent worth of life as their justification. Being alive, he says, involves having a ‘good of one’s own’. That good is the “full development of (one’s) biological powers”, through the realisation of the life-cycle. There is no need for a life form to have awareness of this end for it to exist.
I take it that trees, for example, have no knowledge or desires of feelings. Yet it is undoubtedly the case that trees can be harmed or benefited by our actions… we can help or hinder them in the realisation of their good (Taylor 19The idea that trees and nature in general could have value outside of our use for it is already accepted by many people, especially in the green movement. The importance of wilderness to the Australian population was not more apparent than in the demand to prevent the construction of a dam on the Franklin River in Tasmania in the late eighties.
A study carried out by the Wilderness Society in 1996 found that most Australians value wilderness, only 12% thought economic growth was of greater importance. The study found that:
there was strong and widespread agreement…(that) ‘wilderness areas should be conserved for their own sake, not because people want to use them’ and ‘ we have a duty to future generations to conserve wilderness areas (McGuiness1999:2)This result speaks of a conception, perhaps not conscious to many people, that the exist of wild life is something of greater value than can be measured by the economic system.
The interests of the forestry industry are often brought in to defend our use of forests, but these interests are being overstated, for despite the fact that they are responsible for killing the largest and oldest trees, it is clearing for cattle grazing that is the predominant cause of vegetation loss in Australia. The implications of this encompass the individual, government, corporations and the global market and are complex interrelations of cultural phenomenon and economics. However, rarely is the moral question raised. As agriculture is the main reason for clearing land of vegetation, I shall examine it in some depth.
The focus of the recent Vegetation Management Act 1999 (Qld) has been to control what individual farmers do on their privately owned property. Legislation already exists to protect leasehold property. Not surprisingly farmers did not respond well to the idea, with one grazier warning:
If that legislation goes through, what will happen is, I’ll tell you now, you will lose us as people, and the other thing that really worries me is that you’ll lose every tree, because we, all of a sudden, will be turned into bloody criminals, and I don’t care, I have to survive. (Earthbeat 2000)The Queensland Farmers Federation (QFF) argues that they must be compensated if the government, as the representative of community concerns, wants to prevent them from doing what they wish with their own property (Position Paper 1999) They argue that they will be economically disadvantaged if they are prevented from clearing their property for pasture, because it will prevent them from increasing their productivity and decrease the dollar value of their land. But do the farmers have absolute rights over their property? And even if it were so, is it morally permissible?
In the case of land clearing, the anthropocentrist / biocentrist opposition has been sharply outlined, pitting greenies against farmers in a bitter fight. Yet there is a case, within the farmers own professed pride for and knowledge of the country, to bring the two sides closer together. Leopold sees the landowner as bound by obligations to the land that go beyond traditional property rights which have been “strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations” (1999:88) Leopold examines what the so-called ‘love’ that farmers profess for the land is, and finds it wanting:
…do we not already sing our love for and obligation to the land…Yes, but just what and whom do we love? Certainly not the soil, which we are sending helter-skelter down river. Certainly not the waters which we assume have not function except to turn turbines, float barges and carry sewage. Certainly not the animals of which we have already extirpated many of the largest and most beautiful species…(1999:88)The QFF question the right of governments to tell “landholders who thought they held title to the trees on their land.” how they may dispose of their property (QFF Position Paper 1999). However no such right to absolute ownership exists in either morally or in law. In Berry’s sense, the natural world does not belong to us as individuals, but is inherited from the past and borrowed from the future. This is a view common to indigenous people’s also, who may view the land as theirs in the sense that it is like a part of the body and the body of their ancestors, which one would protect and not harm: “we say, everything is our body… Our shadows follow you around, my people…shadows of your ancestors” (Daisy Utemorrah) Biocentric thought reflects this in the notion of interconnectedness, in that the whole and the parts are equally valuable and cannot exist independently. Even in a purely anthropocentric world-view common sense dictates that the long term preservation of nature for non-use values (recreation, biodiversity) and agricultural ones, means that total rights to private ownership are untenable. Additionally, the government regularly instructs us about how we may build our dwellings and what we may do in them, and the state still retains the rights to mine minerals under the surface of ‘freehold’ land, so no such total legal rights exist either. Indeed, we do not have total legal rights to do with our own bodies what we like, for laws prohibit what substances we can put into them, and with whom can share them.
In the short term, farmers want to increase the productivity of their farms in order to meet financial commitments and remain viable, and to preserve a lifestyle they value. They should have every right to a life free of suffering from the impediments of debt and the ability to feed, clothe and shelter themselves, and an increase in pasture may increase their ability to stock more cattle in the short term and hence make more money. But they are still at the mercy of the vagaries of the market, and an increase in stock may not result in an increase in economic gain because recent trends show a decrease over all in meat consumption and export. (ABS 2000) So even claims to short term economic gain are not necessarily justified.
The QFF say that “primary producers need long-term certainty as a basis for investing in their land.” Yet their current clearing practices will not achieve this goal because there are even more serious implications in the long term. Salinity is a problem in many other states, it takes a long period of time to manifest, sometimes as long as 100 years, and is often irreparable. It renders the soil unable to support native vegetation or agriculture and transcends boundaries of property, potentially and unavoidably affecting areas that are now protected like national parks. The primary cause of salinisation is vegetation loss. The disastrous possibility of irreversible damage being done to agricultural land and waterways in Queensland was not realised until recent scientific surveys were carried out by the CSIRO in Queensland:
Scientists and experts were so stunned by the potential political impact of their findings on dryland salinity, they went back and re-checked the numbers to make sure they were correct. They were. (Barclay 1999)Salinisation is not an idle threat, it will happen if deforestation continues unabated. This should be of serious concern to both farmers and government for it will have serious economic implications in the least.
Wendell Berry, farmer and ecophilosopher, outlines what he perceives to be the moral obligations of farmers to good ‘stewardship’ of the land based on the Christian notion of gratefulness to God and duty to charitable behaviour towards one’s neighbours. Despite their basis in Christianity, these are socially useful notions, for good behaviour towards one another is the basis for a properly functioning civilised society.
Berry sees the land as a ‘gift’ given by God and “borrowed from the unborn” for our use and responsibility to the land transcends temporal and spatial boundaries:
the land…is an ‘inheritance’; the community is understood to exist not just in space, but also in time. One lives in the neighbourhood , not just of those who live ‘next door’ but of the dead who have bequeathed the land to the living, and the unborn to whom the living will in turn bequeath it… (Berry 1993:491)This sits well with the notion of ‘intergenerational equity’ that arises in issues of responsibility for the cost of land rehabilitation. Land owners claim that governments should help them to repair the damage because they see the actions of past generations of governments and farmers as the cause. Land degradation attributable to agriculture and pastoralism is often a slow process and present actions are just as responsible for future damage as past ones are for the farmers’ present woes.
Berry then extends his understanding of Christian charity to include not only immediate obligations to human beings alive now and in the future in the anthropocentric sense, but to animals and the land. He justifies this by appealing to the idea of interconnectedness, that charity for one species must equal charity for all because charity, “once begun…cannot stop until it includes all Creation, for all creatures are parts of the whole upon which each is dependent” This idea of the extensiveness of charity creates a practical obligation to action for:
How can you love your neighbour if you don’t know how to keep your filth out of his (sic) water supply and your poison out of his air? How can you be a neighbour without applying principle - without bringing virtue to practical issues?Additionally, one must examine the assumptions upon which meat farming itself rests. If farmers do not, legally, have the right to dispose of their living or non-living ‘property’ as they see fit, this constitutes a moral duty not to destroy something that cannot be owned, or conversely is owned by everyone - the trees and vegetation - as part of world heritage. A prohibition on tree clearing is a duty to others, human and non-human, a duty to preserve what has value outside of economics. If we do not have the rights to clear on moral grounds because the trees are not ours to own, a case can easily be made to extend this prohibition to the property rights they attach to the sentient beings they exploit for money.
Clearing for grazing pasture is the primary cause of tree loss, in addition to problems of overstocking and erosion caused by the impaction of hard-hoofed animals on the delicate soil structure of marginal arid lands. These effects are well know, but despite this farmers continue to clear while the financial return from meat-growing drops, yet the demand for meat products is rising yearly. In 1999 Australia produced over 3 million tonnes of meat, with approximately 26 million cattle nation-wide, 10.4 million of them in Queensland. (ABS 2000) The total livestock to humans ratio is approximately 8:1.
Western culture has promulgated an ideal of affluence that is not sustainable on many levels, but the one of increased meat consumption is well established in Australia, and is becoming widely accepted in less developed countries as a sign of success, yet leading to ‘diseases of affluence’ like coronary disease. Additionally, the mainstream media and powerful economic interests like the NFF and the Meat Marketing Board, continue to push the line that meat is essential for human health. Australians ate an average of 104.9kg of meat in 1997, compared to the world average 36.1 in the same year. (ABS 200 and World Watch Institute 1998) However, cardiovascular disease is still the main cause of deaths in this country (41%) and is strongly associated with dietary habits. This has moral implications because it “results in a considerable burden, in terms of illness, disability and economic costs” (ABS 2000) on the rest of society, which in Berry’s view is uncharitable in the least: “How can you love your neighbour…if you cannot look after yourself and become a burden?” (Berry 1993:492) It also calls into question the ideal of respect for life that many of us would be happy to apply to human beings, but neglect to extend to animals.
So consumers, by their continued reliance on meat products as the mainstay of their diets, are providing the additional impetus for unsustainable and immoral agricultural practices.
The Queensland state government introduced the Vegetation Management Act in late 1999. Despite its’ good intentions, it has had deleterious effects in that ‘panic’ clearing has ensued and the Act is not being enforced due to political quibbling over funding. Both the federal and state governments have become entrenched in their no compromise positions, while the destruction of Queensland vegetation continues unabated. The difference, over who should pay the $100 million compensation to the states’ farmers, is petty and immoral in view of the bigger picture.
Additionally the state government intends to spend $185 million dollars on revamping a football stadium and other public works with more political popularity. This hypocrisy has not gone unnoticed by Queensland environmentalists who see the outcome as immoral, unnecessary and indirect contradiction of the commitment to the environment of both governments. Drew Hutton, of the Queensland Greens
was also bitterly critical of the Federal Government accusing Environment Minister, Senator Robert Hill, of hypocrisy in refusing to offer Commonwealth money to a project that is with all his government’s stated goals on reducing greenhouse gases, maintaining bio-diversity and rehabilitating the Murray-Darling Basin. “Peter Beattie can spend hundreds of millions on dollars on an anti-environmental project like the Inner City Bypass but cannot find money to compensate farmers so that the massive land clearing in Queensland can be reduced”, Mr Hutton said. (QG media release 2000)
Conservation pressure groups including the Queensland Conservation Council (an umbrella group for 50 “grass-roots” local groups) have been urging the state government to implement land-clearing restrictions on private land. The Community Biodiversity Network identify the potent effect present and past clearing will have on biodiversity:
Land clearing is having a devastating effect on millions of birds, reptiles and other animals, who are killed immediately or die from starvation or injury soon after their habitats are destroyed. The fragmentation of native vegetation into patches of remnant bush also makes survival unviable for many species…. Over time these unviable species (sometimes called the ‘living dead’) gradually die out in the cleared area. This long time lag (or extinction debt) means it takes decades or even centuries before the full impacts of current clearing becomes apparent. (CBN: 11 July 2000)Governments have a clear moral obligation to do more than just window-dressing with policy. In neglecting to deal with state clearing, individual landholders and governments are also neglecting their obligations to the rest of the world.
Australia as a nation has duties to the rest of the world. We have treaty obligations to protect areas listed under the World Heritage Convention, and the legal power under s51 of the constitution to do so. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority recognised that fertiliser and sediment runoff attributable to bad land management upstream, can bury coral, reduce light to sea grass and plankton, increase nutrient levels and hence kill marine life. They identify improving land use practices, including reducing cattle stocks, reducing clearing rates, and reducing fertiliser usage as the most important factors in protecting the present and future heritage value of the reef.
In addition, clearing by contributing to the greenhouse problem, is contributing to increased levels of what is euphemistically called ‘coral-bleaching’ ( coral death). The changes in weather patterns associated with global warming will have a global impact including rising sea-levels, changes in rainfall patterns, increased incidence of tropical diseases, and the movement of homeless ‘environmental refugees’.
This issue, like many environmental issues, cannot be simplified into one of cost. Deeply felt human values are part of this decision making process, so deeply felt that they often put interest groups at loggerheads. The values of a diverse range of interest groups make it difficult to resolve this issue either in a political or a moral sense. Yet there are obviously deep contradictions in our society when most people value nature and can see the long term interest of preserving it, yet are acting within a system that is detrimental to it. The ideological background to exploitative land use lies in the anthropocentric idea that human beings and their interests are the only things worthy of moral concern and all else is a resource for humans, and the supremacy of private property as ensconced in law and accepted as a right under law. This ideology is a serious impediment to the protection of the environment.
Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australia Now - A Statistical Profile “Environment: Sustainable management of Australia’s land, forest and woodland resources” visited Sept 2000, http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats
Australian Bureau of Statistics, 4315.0 Apparent Consumption of Foodstuffs, 1997- “Summary of Findings: Meat and Meat Products” visited Sept 2000
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs%40.nsf/5e3ac7411e37881aca2568b0007afd16/a8de108c47b53f61ca2568a9001393b5!OpenDocument&Highlight=0,consumption
Barclay, P The Starvation of Sustenance Radio National’s “Background Briefing” Programme, Sunday 27/06/1999 transcript at ABC online http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/stories/s32643.htm
Berry, W 1993 “The Gift of Good Land” Ch10 in Environmental Ethics: Divergence and Convergence, Amstrad and Botzol (eds), McGraw Hill
Brown, LR, Renner, M and Flavin, C Vital Signs 1998, Worldwatch Institute, WW Norton & Co: NY
Community Biodiversity Network Media Release, http://www.cbn.org.au Queensland Farmers’ Federation Position on Native Vegetation Management Reforms, 1 December 1999
Davis, J Wanna, J Warhurst, J and Weller, P 1988 Public Policy in Australia, Allen and Unwin: Sydney
Department of Natural Resources, Vegetation Facts at http://www.dnr.qld.gov.au/vegetation/vegfacts.pdf
Earthbeat 2000 Queensland Landclearing Debate aired on Radio National 19/2/2000 http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/earth/stories/s102647.htm
Information Please Environmental Almanac 1994
Lecci, K 2000 Queensland Land clearing- governments sit still while the bush keeps coming down 23 June 2000 at Community Biodiversity Network, http://www.cbn.org.au
Leopold, A 1949 The Land Ethic, in Zimmerman, M (ed) Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights ot Radical Ecology, 2nd ed., Prentice Hall 1998
McGuiness, J March 1999 “Updating Wilderness in Australia”, The Wilderness Society Newsletter, TWS
National Reserve System Protected Areas “Queensland” visited Sept. 2000 at http://www.environment.gov.au/bg/nrs/protarea/pa99/index.html
Queensland Greens Media Release Beattie’s Right: He Will Need To ‘Spin’ On Environment Wednesday 12 July, 2000
State of the Environment Report Australia 1996 “Backgrounder: Land Resources” at http://www.dest.gov.au/soe/soe96/bg27jun_land.html visited October 1st, 2000
Taylor, P “The Ethics of Respect for Nature” in in Zimmerman (ed) Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights ot Radical Ecology, 2nd ed., Prentice Hall 1998
Utemorrah, D 1989 “The Cry of our Ancestors” in North of the 26th, Weller (ed) Reeve Books
Zethoven, I December, 1999 Campaign Watch: Land Clearing, at http://www.qccqld.org.au/
Categories: environment, philosophy |
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August 24th, 2000
Abstract:
It is J Baird Callicott’s contention that individualistic ethical theories will never be able to deliver on the environment. He advocates Aldo Leopold’s holistic land ethic as the new paradigm for a moral schema to protect the environment. Callicott sees the land ethic as founded in the ecological concept of community and Hume’s moral philosophy of esteem. Callicott’s interpretation of the Land Ethic has been criticised as being misanthropic because it rates ‘biotic integrity’ over individual interests.
Is Callicott the ‘environmental fascist’ Tom Regan paints him as? Is the Land Ethic really the thoroughgoing normative value theory Callicott hopes it is, or could it be positing an ecological consciousness that is heavily influenced by Leopold’s personal and passionate relationships with nature and by his role in human society?
Where is our environmental ethic?
The extent to which we human beings are capable of changing the earth is only just being realised. We are daily assailed by increasing evidence that global warming, deforestation, salinity, pollution and species loss are widespread. The scale at which these events are occurring is unlike what has ever occurred in the past as a result of natural processes. We cannot deny that these changes are anthropogenic. Because we have this capacity to make the world unliveable for ourselves and other beings, it is imperative that we change the way we use the Earth and the nonhuman beings that inhabit it. To do this we need also to conceive of the earth as more than just a resource for human beings, we need to change the way we think about the planet.
Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) wrote, over fifty years ago, that,
No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions. The proof that conservation has not yet touched these foundations of conduct lies in the fact that philosophy and religion have not yet heard of it. (Leopold 1949: 225)
Philosophy has certainly heard of it now, yet environmental ethics is still largely ‘despised’ as mere ‘practical’ ethics by traditional academic philosophy. J Baird Callicott suggests that this is political, historical and anthropocentric in nature. As such it is as much a political as a philosophical act to resist the impulse of traditionalists to keep environmental ethics out.
Academics have a vested interest in conceptually supporting the social and political institutions that they rely on for their continued existence. This is as much the case in the environmental sciences as it is in philosophy. Analytical and phenomenological streams of philosophy, in attempting to render it ‘scientific’ merely separate it further from reality and prevent a full exposition of the metaphysical and moral foundations of science. Those foundations are now well explicated by many thinkers primarily outside of science, who recognise the Cartesian roots of the mechanistic and atomistic paradigm in which science apprehends life. (Callicott 1999: 5) The consequent of atomism is that life has come to be viewed as object: to be dissected and put back together again at the whim of human beings. This paradigm is largely supported by western religions and mirrored in the hierarchical structure of our societies. It carries over to the way that many cultures treat the environment: as an object, a resource for human profit without any other value.
As such, a moral theory that seeks to challenge human supremacy has quite a complex of anthropocentric support systems to challenge. Indeed, eco-philosophers do consider themselves radicals. Callicott calls his life-centred, community-centred ethic as subversive and ‘revolutionary’. Paul Taylor suggests that the acceptance of ‘life-centred’ rather than ‘human centred’ ethics has the potential for a “profound reordering of our moral universe” (1998:72)
The primary challenge for ecocentrism is of course ideological. Callicott recognises that,
The whole of Western traditional moral philosophy has been resolutely (and often militantly) anthropocentric, environmental philosophers have been largely preoccupied with the more fundamental intellectual business of devising new, more nature-oriented and environmentally friendly ethical theories… (1999: 3)
For the last twenty years or more ethicists have been attempting to elucidate a moral theory that can accommodate our duties to the biosphere.
Early conservationist Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1949) elucidates a ‘land ethic’ that recognises these ecological connections. An egalitarian and ecologically sound theory, the land ethic is based on the assumption that all life has intrinsic value, and the importance of sustaining the integrity of the land community. In order to do this the land ethic is centred not in human beings, but in life in general, and natural ecosystems in particular. In Callicott’s interpretations Leopold’s Land Ethic he centres on the importance of the biotic community in sustaining that life. For,
If it is possible to value people for the sake of themselves, then it is equally possible to value land in the same way. (Calicott 1980: 326)
Given the urgency of dealing with environmental problems like climate change, it is a wonder that environmental ethics has not been widely embraced. An ecocentric, or ‘holistic’ environmental ethic such as Leopold outlines has met with much criticism from advocates of the rights of individuals, and has been seen to lack coherence and ‘normative force’ as an ethical theory. Yet the need for an environmental ethic remains, there are myriad forms that such an ethic may take, from those that try to define objective value in the environment, in human perception of it, or in what it means to be a virtuous person in the context of an environmental crisis in the wider biotic community of which we are all a “plain member and citizen” (Leopold 1949: 220).
Why individualistic moral theories fail the environment
Traditional moral theory has considerable difficulty when one tries to apply it to the earth for two main reasons: hitherto moral theory has only dealt with the rights and responsibilities of individuals and those individuals have been human beings. One needs to find ways outside of individualism and anthropocentrism to value and define our moral obligations to the aggregate of individuals acting as a whole that makes up biotic communities, ecosystems and the biosphere.
Moral theories since the ‘Great Chain of Being’ have specified human beings as the pinnacle of value and hence moral considerability. Traditional morality has always specified a human moral agent who is the actor in the moral play or the recipient of moral consideration. The moral patient has usually coincided with the human individual – the reasoning individual, as part of a social contract with other reasoning individuals, or as the bearer of rights. Individual humans were considered autonomous and rationally self-determining. In this climate Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) formulated his social contract theory whereby only rational human beings were capable of moral judgements, and so too they were the only individuals due moral consideration. Kant described the social contract between such individuals based on ‘imperatives’ that served as rigid rules to guide human behaviour.
Kant determined that rational, self-conscious beings were “ends-in-themselves”, having intrinsic value. He considered it thus wrong to treat another rational being as an object, to use him or her to one’s own ends. In effect, the rational being had the right to own him or herself. Only rational, self-conscious beings had this right and all other beings, including children, the mentally incompetent, animals and nature wild or domestic, were only morally considerable indirectly. The protection or use of non-rational beings was not a moral issue and entirely at the discretion of the rational human beings who had ownership or use of them.
If a man shoots his dog because the animal is no longer capable of service, he does not fail in his duty to the dog, for the dog cannot judge. But his act is inhuman and damages in himself that humanity which it is his duty to show towards mankind. (Kant in Pojman 1994: 28)
According to Kant, classification as an end-in-oneself rests upon ones ability to abstractly conceptualise ones ends, to “self-value” (Callicott 1999: 252). Because Kant’s social contract requires the participation of moral patients in a rational dialogue, it is easy to see why it excludes nonhuman nature.
Callicott observes that Kantian anthropocentrism, or ‘ratiocentrism’ as he calls it, does not pass the “argument from marginal cases” criteria in that not all human beings are rational. Thus not all human beings qualify as persons, but are rendered mere things in Kant’s schema.
Kant’s ethic would therefore seem to countenance painful medical experiments on prerational human infants, hunting nonrational human imbeciles for sport, and making dog food out of postrational elderly human beings, among other wicked and depraved things (Callicott 1999: 252)
The importance of Kantian ethics to an environmental one is firstly that rational human-centred rules of conduct are still commonly conceived as the basis for morality. With their purely anthropocentric basis in rational calculation and reciprocity, Kantian imperative morality obviously excludes consideration of the environment.
Also important in a more positive way for an environmental ethic is Kant’s concept of intrinsic value. Of course only rational human beings possessed this quality in Kantian terms, but the idea that a being could have value in itself, beyond its use to other beings, has been a pervasive one. It forms the basis of our International Declaration of Human Rights. Ecocentrists seek to extend this idea to nonhuman nature.
Other individualist theories have sought to include nonhuman animals in the realm of moral concern by attributing sentience – the ability to feel – as more morally relevant than reason. Morality becomes less of a contract between consenting rational beings, than a code of practice to be adhered to by the virtuous person in actions that may affect beings that can suffer. Such is the position of animal liberationists. Nonhuman nature not attributed with sufficient nerve endings or intelligence to feel, are thus only indirectly considerable insofar as their welfare affects the welfare of the sentient beings that depend upon them.
This is not dissimilar to the tack taken by anthropocentric environmental ethicists like Bryan Norton who consider human self-interest sufficient to protect the natural environment. However they do not necessarily concern themselves with the suffering of sentient animals, only their survival as species in that a less biodiverse world diminishes human lives and resources. In the omission of the moral relevance of suffering we can see that a concern for the integrity of ecological communities or populations is inconsistent if human beings are to be excluded. Anthropocentric environmental holism still respects the survival of species and ecological communities insofar as they benefit humans (for their resource value). Yet, so long as it remains unconcerned with the individuals within that system, except for humans, it is logically inconsistent.
Ecological theory has shown us that the interelatedness of life and the system that supports it means that to proscribe rights to protection to individuals in it is not enough. The integrity of an ecosystem is often at stake even if only one factor is affected. Leopold, writing well before modern ecological theory, understood the importance of this interelatedness to the sustenance of the whole: when a change occurs in one part of the circuit, many other parts must adjust themselves to it…Man’s invention of tools has enabled him to make changes of unprecedented violence, rapidity and scope (Leopold 1949: 232)
For instance, the removal of a significant predator for human ends (perhaps through hunting, as is the case with wolves in the US, or indirectly of raptors in Australia where their feral rabbit prey population is decimated by viral ‘control’ agents) removes the natural population control on the prey and leads to increased pressure on vegetation and herbivore competitors. When this small change is added to by environmental pollution by human effluent or resource exploitation like land clearing that destroys habitat, the whole ecosystem is clearly in peril. The fact that such disasters regularly occur is testimony, in Callicott’s view, (and that of his fellow ecocentrists), that human instrumental use of the environment is out of balance with, or simply not considering the needs of nonhuman species. This anthropocentric, or human-centred valuing of the environment is considered the major ideological cause of environmental destruction. I will discuss the problems with anthropocentrism further in due course.
Whose Land Ethic?
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. (Leopold 1949: 240) Callicott selects this passage as the definitive one in the Land Ethic. From it he attempts to derive a normative code to define our moral relations to the environment. The appropriateness of vague, subjective and value-laden terms like “integrity, stability and beauty” as normative statements is questionable. Callicott has gone to great pains to elucidate what he these terms might mean in an ecological sense, for we know that the notion of ecosystem ‘stability’ has changed significantly since Leopold wrote in 1949. However, it is the psychological importance of these terms and that of the gist of the entire Land Ethic that I wish to examine further.
Callicott takes Leopold to be implying this is a kind of categorical imperative that rates community ‘integrity’ over that of the individual. The “unity of the biota… posits duties binding upon moral agents in relation to that whole.” (Callicott 1980: 317). While I agree that there are systemic similarities between organic systems and organic beings, and that we do owe consideration to the whole as the parts, Callicott overlooks the importance of individuals who constitute this system and sees them only as aggregates or species.
Indeed, Callicott makes it absolutely clear in his earlier writings that he himself considers abstract entities like ‘species’ to have a “prima facie claim to preferential consideration from the perspective of the land ethic” because diversity contributes to ‘stability’ (Callicott 1980: 325). He goes as far as to suggest that individuals in a biotic community are like the cells in a body – they have no importance except as parts of a functioning whole. The practical use of this analogy is questionable. The interests of a human or other organismic body can be defined in terms of interests. Individuals have goals, to reproduce themselves and to survive until this is accomplished, that ecosystems clearly do not. The dynamic nature of ecosystems (today perceived as not even in a state of equilibrium, but evolving or devolving) make a clearly defined whole impossible to delineate. Ecosystems , if they can be loosely defined, do not have goals like individuals do, species do not have goals either, so they cannot be said to have ends-in-themselves that would give them moral significance that even an account of the intrinsic value of individuals would allow.
Callicott interprets Leopold’s continued hunting as evidence of his privileging the biotic whole over the individual. Leopold’s “indifference” to suffering he suggests is evidence that Leopold has a “very different ethical perspective…[in addition to a] profoundly different cosmic vision as well” (Callicott 1980: 315) If the former were true, I would suggest it amounts to a pathological problem. People who deny that suffering is important in humans may be capable of heinous acts against them and ought to be locked up for the wider community’s protection! Indeed many of them already are, for it is a common psychological trait of hardened criminals that they are unable to feel compassion for their victims. Callicott himself in earlier writings considered humane justifications for nonharm to sentient animals virtually morally irrelevant. Pain, he suggests, is a good thing (Callicott 1980: 328). As indeed it is in a limited sense that it allows a sentient being to know when a situation will damage its health. However, escaping from pain is the primary drive of sentient animals, and even nonsentient creatures tend to seek out food and avoid danger even at the single-celled level as a matter of instinct. Yet Callicott prefers to use the more abstract rational calculation of the value of the whole against the importance of individual suffering. Trying to justify the existence of pain thus does not address whether it is wrong to actually inflict it, or whether it is wrong to unnecessarily kill other living things if that death is not a matter of personal survival.
Yet to justify Leopold’s hunting as part of a “very different ethical perspective…” flies in the face of his pleas for ‘conscience’, of the equality of trees, wolves and deer, and the necessary love one must feel for something in order to feel the guilt that accompanies a transgression of conscience. For this reason I consider the reason why Leopold does not condemn hunting lies in another direction. Leopold defines hunting as both part of a conservation aesthetic (ie. That it is as much the enjoyment of the experience of getting ‘back to nature’, as it is the need to kill for food). He emphasises the social conditioning of it: “We indoctrinate youth. We print definitions of ‘What is a sportsman?’ and hang a copy on the wall…”. He acknowledges the identity-bearing acquisition of ‘outdoorsman’ skills. Hunting, like all outdoor recreations, “rest(s) upon the idea of trophy”:
It attests that its owner has been somewhere and done something – that he has exercised skill, persistence, or discrimination in the age-old feat of overcoming, outwitting, or reducing-to-possession. These connotations which attach to the trophy usually far exceed its physical value.” (Leopold 1949: 260)
They also have significant symbolic value. The connections to both Leopold’s internalised ideal of what it means to be an ‘outdoorsman’ is fairly obvious in this passage: it is the stereotype of male power, of ‘overcoming’ of defeating and additionally of ‘reducing to possession’ in this case by killing. That men were expected to hunt as a kind of rite of passage to manhood has strong roots in American culture. In Leopold’s lifetime as a ranger his social circle would have largely been male, and even if it were not, it is unlikely that the associations of maleness with hunting and possession would have been challenged as this tradition is still a strong one in the United States as elsewhere. In the US in the fifties men were still the breadwinners, the ‘hunters’ returning home with the metaphorical kill in the form of a paycheque. It is unlikely that Leopold himself would have challenged this norm as his virtual contemporaries Henry Salt (1851-1939) and Henry Thoreau (1817-1862) did in their rejection of the violence of hunting, meat eating and in advocating civil disobedience. Leopold’s lifetime career as a forester would have meant he developed quite a different world view of nature, more ecologically based, but depersonalised by the necessity of ‘wise-use’. He too would have grown use to working within the system, which is evidenced by his application to policy and the emphasis he places on the personal responsibility of the landholder.
Additionally, when Leopold appeals to the aesthetic of trophyism, of ‘reducing to possession’ he commits the very objectification of nature that many environmental philosophers see as the root of environmental destruction. The farmers that Leopold critiques for their attending only to economically expedient solutions to land degradation are seeing the land as on object to be manipulated for economic gain, as their possession. The strength of idea of private property as a right has its roots in liberalism and resists attempts to see the land as a community good or for the good of the biotic community as a whole.
To Callicott’s credit, he sees in the Land Ethic the reflection of Humean morality in that Leopold reaches this conclusion not by some abstract rational calculation of duties, but from a genuine love of and intimate knowledge of the natural environment. This is quite a departure from the impetus behind the Kantian imperative. David Hume (1711-1776 ) regarded ethics as the correlative of,
esteem, respect, regard, kinship, affection, and sympathy; Kant on the other hand regarded all behaviour motivated by “mere inclination” (ie. Sentiment or feeling), however unselfish, as lacking genuine moral worth. (Callicott 1989:198)
Hume’s ethic highlights the importance of our interpersonal relationship with other human beings for our right treatment of them. It is a cornerstone of the land ethic that we can only behave morally towards that which we love.
Strangely, despite his recognition of this, Callicott sets aside the personally felt bias behind the Land Ethic to posit a value theory based on largely scientific ‘proofs’ backed up by an attempt to justify it with abstract reasoning. Yet Leopold sings his love of the land long and loud, despite his recognition of the ecological need for its preservation, in the end it comes down to his love for it:
When one of these non-economic categories is threatened, and if we happen to love it, we invent subterfuges to give it economic importance. At the beginning of the century songbirds were supposed to be disappearing. Ornithologists jumped to the rescue with some distinctly shaky evidence to the effect that insects would eat us up if the birds failed to control them… It is painful to read these circumlocutions today. (Leopold 1949: 226)
So too it is painful to read Callicott’s convoluted attempts to justify with reason what, as base he must confess is a felt relationship with wild things. I think he is right about a great many things regarding the need for a Land Ethic and the role that philosophers must play in attaining this world view. However, he denies part of himself in the same way that Peter Singer did when he claimed that we must show no trace of sentimentality when arguing the case for animal liberation.
Singer advocated the shedding of such ‘womanly’ characteristics as sentimental “affections” in favour of “hard, logical, well reasoned argument” (in Kheel 1985: 24) However, Singer denies the emotions implicit in this, and thus renders his argument only partial. There is no waterproof rational argument for the protection of marginal cases like children, mental incompetents or animals that does not rely on humans caring for each other in ways that can only be described as ‘sentimental’! No argument to respect life, no matter how well reasoned, will convince anyone to change their behaviour without a feeling attached to it. It is one thing to understand a rational argument, it is another to really have an appreciation for it. So too, an environmental ethic based entirely on well-reasoned argument will be ineffectual.
I believe this sentimental attachment to the land is what Leopold is arguing for. He admits the foolishness of trying to make an argument that denies our love for the land by clothing it in economic or self interest. He too admits the inadequacy of attending only to economic expedience and clothing it in conservationism. The missing ingredient seems to me to be caring.
Nonetheless, Callicott and other ecocentrists have been accused of two philosophical crimes that are almost diametrically opposed. The first is that the Land Ethic and other holist theories seek to apply an abstract and objective value of the whole over the individual and thus are willing to sacrifice the interests of individuals to that whole. The other is that, in basing the premise of their theory on ‘intrinsic value’ they are asking us to abandon reason for subjectivity, a kind of nature worship, a mysticism which (in some theorists more than others) seems to amount to an irrational love of nature. It is my task to bring these two together, for it is my conviction that all life does have intrinsic value (be it a human projected one), but that this value can only be protected by a felt attachment to the land.
Non Anthropocentrism and Holism
Why anthropocentrism is a shaky foundation for an environmental ethic
Given that the equal intrinsic value of human beings has long been appealed to as the impetus for our right treatment of our fellow human begins, it is easy to understand why some ethicists would consider merely extending this to encompass future human beings would be enough to ensure environmental preservation. I will now look at why an entirely human-centred ethic is inadequate for the environment.
Ecocentric environmental ethics has had to defend itself against claims that it has spent too much time dwelling on abstract concepts such as intrinsic value and subjectivity and not applying itself to the urgent task of environmental reform. Critic Bryan Norton (dubbed an environmental ‘antiphilosopher’ by Callicott!) considers a wide ranging anthropocentric environmental ethic sufficient to generate a workable theory that can be used to inform environmental policy. Anthropocentrism, is the ‘conservative’ option in Callicott’s view, because it does not challenge the prevalent human assumption of supremacy.
But both Warwick Fox and Callicott say Norton is wrong because anthropocentrism, or ‘enlightened self-interest’, will never be able to deliver protection to all facets of an ecosystem, when only some have use or value to human beings. As John Seed remarks, “the idea that humans are the crown of creation, the source of all value, the measure of all things, is deeply embedded in our culture and consciousness” (in Fox 1990: 11)
Warwick Fox elucidates six important reasons for rejecting anthropocentrism. Fox proclaims anthropocentrism as “empirically bankrupt and theoretically disastrous, practically disastrous, logically inconsistent, morally objectionable, and incongruent with a genuinely open approach to experience.” (Fox 1990: 19)
The primary reason for questioning anthropocentric assumptions, in Fox’s view, is simply that it is “self-serving”. As such, it is less likely to probe a good assessment of what is favourable to human beings, and more likely to challenge one that is not. This is not amenable to a truthful assessment of a situation. The primacy of self-interest is quite evident in governmental and industrial responses to environmental impact assessments of development, such as that carried out for the Jabiluka uranium mine proposal which was widely accepted by the economic interest groups despite widespread opposition from the environment movement and the public. The Springbrook cableway proposal in south-east Queensland, was rejected by EIA when it was found that running a commercial and privately owned cableway through world heritage listed rainforest posed a risk to conservation of the ecosystem. It was criticised strongly by both government and the developers while being applauded by conservationists.
Secondly Fox points to the factual case against human supremacy over the environment.
We do not live at the center of the universe and we are not biologically unrelated to other creatures…we are not even psychologically, socially, or culturally different in kind from all other animals and …we are not the “end point” of evolution. (Fox 1990: 14)
Again, human centred decision making has often proved ‘disastrous’ in the past, for we and the natural environment, still bear the scars of environmental poisoning begun with DDT early last century. There is no place on earth where traces of toxins we have introduced into the environment have not been detected. Even at the South Pole so far from significant human habitation or agriculture.
Thirdly, anthropocentrist attitudes are simply logically inconsistent. Both Peter Singer and Tom Regan elucidate the many ways in which we have tried to discern our difference from other animals in order to justify our expatiation of them. Our intellectual capacity, language, reason, the ability to form intentions based on experience, that we have souls: none of these criteria succeed in including all humans or excluding all animals, or are simply too contentious to make a firm foundation for morality.
Fox claims that many philosophers find anthropocentrism “morally objectionable”. Even if we were able to logically differentiate ourselves as superior to nonhuman life, that it should increase rather than decrease out obligations towards it. This idea is based on a conception of what it means to be a good person and forms the basis of virtue ethics. As we shall see, a combination of moral reasoning and a reformulation of what it means to be a human being are the two keys factors in ecocentrism, and reflected in Callicott’s recognition of the significance of Darwinian theory for environmental ethics.
Fox’s final objection to anthropocentrism is that it is narrow minded. By this he means that a “genuine openness to the world leads one away from anthropocentrism,” away from the “pompous pursuits of men” (Fox 1990: 18)
For Callicott the reason for rejecting anthropocentrism is akin to altruism: ”Why,” Callicott asks, “should we rational beings value only ourselves and other rational beings intrinsically?” (Callicott 1999: 251) It is true that, as far as we know, no other animals are capable of developing the level of subjectivity required to be able to conceptualise our ends. But by the same token, no other beings are “capable of transcending the limitations (of our) subjectivity, or realising that others value themselves as one values oneself – to wit, intrinsically.” (Callicott 1999: 252)
Intrinsic value then, for Callicott, is not an objective fact. Rather, it is a possibility that rational, subjective beings like ourselves are capable of empathising or intuiting that other life forms have a will-to-live which need not be attached to conscious awareness of it. To recognise the intrinsic value of other life forms is to accord them respect and consideration enough to allow them to pursue their life ends without undue interference from human beings.
While other environmental philosophers, such as Paul Taylor and Holmes Rolston III have sought to define an objective basis for attributing intrinsic value, Callicott deems human subjectivity as enough. For Callicott, human beings are value conferring subjects (but by no means not the only animals capable of valuing), and because of this and our ability to rationally conceptualise our place in nature, are also capable of defining their moral relations with other life forms. In what Fox calls the ‘weak’ or trivial sense of the term, everything a human being thinks or does is anthropocentric in that it is done by a human being. It is the strong, self-centred, exploitative and unjustifiable sense that ecocentrists are opposed to. To conflate the two is committing what Fox calls “the anthropocentric fallacy” (1990: 21).
Additionally, and in agreement with Rolston, the existence of an instrumental value (for example, the edible fruit of a tree is instrumentally valuable to humans and many nonhuman species alike) is presupposed by the existence of an intrinsic value to the tree. The fruit, as the seed dispersal mechanism of the tree, has evolved to be eaten (valued instrumentally) by other species to perform the function that is intrinsically worthwhile in terms of the tree: reproduction.
So the existence of intrinsic value of an organism, or a part thereof, does not preclude its being valued instrumentally by another species and hence used. This runs contrary to a common mistake made by critics of ecocentrism who condemn it as misanthropic and advocating ‘hands off’ nature based on the concept of intrinsic value.
Is Holism Environmental Fascism?
Despite their common agreement on the intrinsic value of living things, animal rights proponent Tom Regan has accused Callicott and the ecocentrists of advocating ‘environmental fascism’. Regan considers a moral schema that rates the biotic whole with greater value at the expense of the lives and interests of the individuals in it to be wrong.
Regan’s critique suggests similarities between ethical holism and totalitarianism “in which the good of the community, group, or nation-state superseded that of the individual. When pressed, environmental fascism demanded the sacrifice of the interests and even the lives of individuals in the ecosystem, planet, and universe.” (Nash, 1999:157) However, Regan himself has argued that having a ‘good of one’s own’ is what accords an individual intrinsic value, and that even non-sentient things like trees, or more contentiously, rivers, could be said to have a ‘good’ that may be compromised by the actions of human beings, and hence could be determined to be morally considerable. For example, land clearing cannot be thought of as anything else but detrimental to the ecosystem in which it occurs, for the effects flow on to other areas also affecting the ‘good’ of the individuals in it. Hence Regan calls for an ‘ethic of the environment’ that is based on this ‘goodness principle’ which “would…commit us to a far larger view of what individuals, and possibly groups of individuals (eg. Ecosystems) are of direct moral significance.” (Nash 1999:159). In effect, Regan seems to be advocating a new sense of holism that attempts to accord moral respect to both individuals and the community that they live in. Practically, this schema could only work on a case by case basis, and constitutes in my opinion a kind of moral dualism. However, given Regan’s strong stance on individual rights, I imagine that he would always consider the claim of the sentient being over that of the nonsentient or the whole if issues of suffering where at stake.
Most Ecocentrist philosophers (except perhaps Dave Foreman), have been forced to ‘water down’ claims to species egalitarianism to concede that in most situations, (and given that human beings are usually the moral agent in question) the moral agent will consider ties of kinship before more abstract ones to the wider community. In effect human interests will always ‘trump’ those of other species. This is one reason why I consider the attempt to get a comprehensive value theory, and from that a set of rules for behaviour, from the Land Ethic to be futile.
Indeed, quite a different, personal and passionate interpretation based on Leopold’s psychology may be made of the Land Ethic. Despite the bias’ of Leopold’s social situation, the Land Ethic can still provide an impassioned guide to action in the same general way that Naess ‘ecosophy’, Fox’s ‘transpersonal ecology’ and the writings of some Ecofeminists do, which do not compromise our important ties with each other and our obligations to sentient animals. Ecocentrism can thus be defended against claims of ‘fascism’ by including the parts as well as the whole. For it is with the parts, with individuals, that we are able to make relationships and thence develop the necessary empathy to extrapolate to the wider ecological community.
The Land Ethic as Ecological Conscience and Ecological Consciousness
We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love or otherwise have faith in. (Leopold 1949: 230) It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for the land, and a high regard for its value.
By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value;” (Leopold 1949: 239)
No moral theory may satisfactorily deal with the conflict between individual interests and common good, indeed in some respects autonomous rights and social obligations are mutually exclusive. Yet despite the impossibility of this reconciliation, it is imperative that we formulate some guidelines for our moral obligations to biotic communities. We may abandon the search for a single comprehensive moral schema and adopt moral pluralism, or we may adopt instead an ‘attitude’ for respect for nature based not on a well defined value theory, but on an ‘ecological consciousness’ where we act contextually. This is the course that is adopted by some ecocentrists and ecofeminists. It does not mean that we also abandon the idea that either individuals or the whole may be deserving of our moral consideration. In both these options, our moral obligations are contingent upon the relative impact we may have on the various entities we take to be morally considerable, and with a firm grounding in ecological good a redefinition of human good may occur.
That the Land Ethic is an ethic borne of Leopold’s love for the land is evidenced by explicit declarations of it, and his condemnation of farmers who only take those conservation measures that are profitable. Leopold wants us to respect the land as more than a human resource, more than an itemised account of it’s economic value. He wants those farmers to love the land and develop a conscience in their dealings with it, so that they will take that extra step beyond profit margins. Many ecocentrists, while embracing interconnectedness and holism, temper it by appealing for a personal consciousness change that adopts an attitude of respect and non-harm: it is expected that once one comes to value the land as part of oneself, as the giver of life to all beings, one will act with conscience, abstaining from those acts that will cause more ill than good. This is the precautionary principle combined with a humane respect for the rights of other beings to exist: it is based in what it means to be a good person, a good ecological citizen that takes into consideration more than just human gain.
Additionally, ecologically virtuous actions that give ecological benefit are seen to also benefit the individual in that they form part of a journey towards ‘self-realisation’. This need not be the cynical motivation of pure self-interest that Hobbes might see it as. Fox and Arne Naess both look to Abraham Maslow’s ‘transpersonal psychology’ and Laurence Kohlberg’s categories of moral development as indicative that altruistic or ‘other focused’ behaviour are concomitant with a wider more ’cosmic’ understanding of the place of human kind in the universe and an evolution of self. There is nothing in the Land Ethic that contradicts this approach to developing an ecological consciousness.
An important part of Naess philosophy is the idea of ’self-realisation’. Leopold alludes to the character-forming, the ‘evolutionary’ potential of an “ethic dealing with man’s (sic) relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it.” (Leopold 1949: 218) This ethic can only grow, in Leopold’s estimation, from the development of “an ethical obligation on the part of the private owner…”, an ethical obligation borne of ‘good citizenship’. Leopold sees the landowner as bound by obligations to the land that go beyond traditional property rights which have been “strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations” (1999:88) Leopold examines what the so-called ‘love’ that farmers profess for the land is, and finds it wanting:
…do we not already sing our love for and obligation to the land…Yes, but just what and whom do we love? Certainly not the soil, which we are sending helter-skelter down river. Certainly not the waters which we assume have not function except to turn turbines, float barges and carry sewage. Certainly not the animals of which we have already extirpated many of the largest and most beautiful species…(Leopold 1949: 219)
Clearly Leopold senses a lack of virtuous behaviour towards the land, lack of consistency between the obvious symbolic importance we place on the land (and the even more obvious survival value) and our behaviour towards it. Naess bases his ‘ecosophy T’, the personal growth aspect of his environmental ethic, in the traditions of “non-violence, non-injury and reverence for life” in Buddhism and other eastern religious traditions. In this sense, it goes beyond being a value-theory, and instead suggests that respect for nature is as much a psychological attitude. Naess allows scope for the rights of individuals, human and nonhuman, in the “vital needs” clause: recognising that all life forms require the use of others for their survival, but that this should be minimal. That farmers need to use the land for survival, economic as well as ecological, could be the starting point for this attitude of respect.
Fox suggests a reconfiguring of the meaning of self to include the biotic community and wider to the cosmos while Ecofeminists seek ecological identification in the interpersonal. Marti Kheel sees the affinity deep and transpersonal ecologies because:
the emphasis of both philosophies is not on an abstract or ‘rational’ calculation of value but rather on the development of a new consciousness for all of life…they call for an inward transformation in order to attain outward change (1990:128)
Leopold too condemns hyper-rationality, in particular the economic variety, in favour of a felt connection to and kinship with, the land community. According to Nel Noddings an appreciation and respect for life arises as a result of the nurturing, the learning how to care that we experience as children. The ‘ethic of care’ is a sensibility developed through experiencing and reflecting with reason on the feelings that arise from those experiences. So too, nurturing the land is not necessarily alien to the farming process, it is the concentration on economic values that has given rise to the travesties of industrialised agriculture.
However, a felt connection with the land need not exclude rationality:
feeling and action are essential element in morality, which concentration on thought has often made philosophy overlook…In general, feelings, to be effective must take shape as thought, and thoughts, to be effective must be powered by suitable feelings (in Kheel 1985:26)
This unity of feeling and reasoning is what Robyn Morgan calls a “unified sensibility”. In the same way that deep ecologists call for a recognition of the interconnectedness of all the physical elements of the ecosystem, ecofeminists call for a recognition of the interconnectedness of human thought and emotion in morality. To achieve such a synthesis is to reject the objectification, the atomisation of the world as prescribed by scientific rationalism and perpetuated by the search for universalizable normative moral theories, and reconnect with the real world in which moral decisions are made.
While deep and transpersonal ecology take a cosmic or ‘outside-in’ approach to our relationship with the cosmos, Ecofeminists start with our human capacity to care for each other, our personal relationships with other human beings from which we may develop relationships of caring for the wider human and thence ecological community. This is not dissimilar to the Humean context of the Land Ethic, yet it does not seek to extrapolate a rigid value framework from this, but to remain within the personal.
So too, Ecofeminist writers seek a reintegration of the parts and the whole combined with a revaluing of both. Ecofeminist Marti Kheel says, “what the wholists seem to forget…is that the whole consists of individual beings - beings with emotions, feelings and inclinations - and these too are part of the whole.” (1985:22) I suggest not only a reclaiming of holism, but a reclaiming of the Land Ethic from abstract holism for a personal holism: for the passion and love for the land that it advocates.
I would suggest that because environmental ethics attempts to so radicalise the realm of the morally considerable, seemingly to the detriment of especially human individuals, it will never be widely embraced. An environmental ethic that can embrace commonly felt and vital human impulses to care, to share and respect the environment based on feelings of kinship with other humans and a recognition of our kinship with nonhuman life is better placed to win popular acceptance than a value theory that defines in abstract terms our moral duties and expects us to do ‘justice though the heavens may fall’ . The tools for such a moral revolution are already within every one of us.
footnotes:
I think that Leopold does make criticism of hunting in his mention of willingness of hunters to ‘break, if need be, every law of commonwealth…to kill a duck’ and of the ‘already overfed’ status of the hunter, thought this does not constitute a condemnation on humane grounds, it could be taken to imply that Leopold considers disrespect for the law and excessive consumption to be morally questionable. (Leopold 1949: 258) He also suggests that taking game is not good citizenship because it pays “dividends to one citizen out of capital stock belonging to all.” (Leopold 1949: 262)
Indeed, Leopold and Thoreau led very similar lifestyles. Both were university educated, both wrote their treatise on the land in the wilderness ( Leopold in the only heritage listed chicken coop in the US), relied on their ‘survivalist’ skills. Leopold however, spent a significant amount of time working in a government department were most likely the prime concern was of ‘wise-use’ of forest (indeed Leopold worked in ‘forest products’ and conducted game management surveys) and also wrote and taught at University of Wisconsin, while Thoreau was a teacher, surveyor, a prolific writer and a farmer. Both wrote rather poetically of their love of the land and of nature. Indeed, Thoreau’s nature writings earnt him the name of “Father of our National & State Parks” from Lewis Mumford. RW Emerson wrote of Thoreau that “He was bred to no profession; he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no flesh; he drank no wine; he never knew the use of tobacco; and, though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun.” Bonson Alcott’s referred to him in “The Forester” as “so purely a son of Nature”. The significant difference lie in their experiences of the political system: Thoreau was an advocate of civil disobedience, an anarchist who had little faith in democracy, indeed he thought it every man’s duty to resist the system and appealed to the will of individuals to decide their own course. Leopold however, a lifelong employee of the state, was firmly ensconced in it.
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June 23rd, 2000
Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul - Edward Abbey
Many theorists see direct action as appropriate only as a last resort. John Rawls, political philosopher, recognises its relevance in the maintenance of a democratic society: if one is to be truly free to question the laws of such a society, it must sometimes happen that one needs to step outside the law to show its inadequacy. Such is the nature of civil disobedience. It seeks not to overthrow the system in which it finds fault, but to change some part of it, while respecting it in principle. Perhaps Mohandas Gandhi is the most famous proponent of non-violent resistance in the name of justice.
Christopher Manes is an advocate of peaceful direct action. He sees it proper recourse in desperation, after all legal avenues have failed.
Demonstrations “demonstrate” to the culprits, and to the world, that when all our letters are ignored, our arguments mitigated, and our legal appeals denied, we still refuse to accept the accelerating destruction. We put our bodies and our time where our mouths are - on the front lines! We demonstrate our fear, hurt, and rage against the despoilers. [4]Because people engaging in direct action do not seek to reject all laws, but simply the ones they find unjust, then they should adhere to respect for the rights of others as is appropriate. To this end, he talks about a “code” of behaviour that includes “respect toward all beings (and) non-violence” [1]
However, many people see the environmental crisis of such urgency that more direct and effective measures are warranted. ‘Ecotage’, or ‘monkeywrenching’, goes one step further, and a step too far in the eyes of its victims. Ecotage is the wilful destruction of property “to prevent ecological damage” [1] such as disabling bulldozers, digging up roads and spiking trees. The Earth First! Primer describes it thus:
Monkeywrenching is a step beyond civil disobedience. It is nonviolent, aimed only at inanimate objects, and at the pocketbooks of the industrial despoilers. It is the final step in the defense of the wild, the deliberate action taken by the Earth defender when all other measures have failed, the process whereby the wilderness defender becomes the wilderness acting in self-defense. [4]
Such actions are not without their risks, and when a mill worker was injured as a result of a spiked tree, critics labelled the action terrorism. However, as advocates point out, “risk to humans hasn’t stopped the timber industry…(who has) the worst safety record of any enterprise in the United States” [Rozelle in 1] Manes sees the ethical inconsistency, which is implied by the condemnation of ecotage, as more important than the damage done to any bulldozer. When property is given higher legal and moral status than living beings, including the trees and animals that are destroyed in the process of logging, there is something seriously wrong in the society that allows it.
Within the Earth First! movement, monkeywrenching is a source of controversy. There are those who say we should renounce all forms of sabotage. Others are against particular tactics, particularly tree spiking, which they say has the potential to injure. Several EF! local groups have renounced tree spiking, others have not. There is no movement consensus at this time, and debate is lively. Ultimately, whether or not to monkeywrench is an individual decision. [4]There is no doubt that monkeywrenching has achieved some great successes. In the eighties an Indian tribe spiked Mare’s island in British Columbia, over a period of months. They sent a letter to the local saw-mill, accompanied by a box of spikes, claiming to have done 400,000 trees. Mare’s Island is now an Indian tribal park.
With its combination of theatrics and political comment, Earth First! (like Greenpeace) capture the attention of the media. In 1985 the Oregon Forest Service planned a huge birthday party for Smokey the Bear to educate kids about playing with fire. The fact is, logging companies start most of the fires! Dave Foreman, of Earth First! shows up in a Bear costume and succeeds in co-opting the Forestry services media, while distributing leaflets proclaiming the facts, much to the chagrin of the rangers who didn’t want to be seen arresting Smokey the Bear at his own birthday party. Pretty tame, but effective. Earth First do not claim to be actively monkeywrenching, though they provide the information for those who wish to, it is ultimately up to the individual. The Environmental Rangers are another group, ex-vietnam vets, who declare their willingness to use weapons, and die if need be, to protect the environment. It is the possibility of violence inherent in a “no compromise in defence of mother earth” stance, that most troubles critics.
Monkeywrenching’s corporate victims claim that violence begets more violence. While Manes concedes that this may be true, he makes the counter-claim that the resource-use industry is rife with lawlessness too. He cites a review by the California Water Resources Control Board, that found more than half of one hundred timber harvest plans violated forestry rules. A recent Australian example was the Gold Coast City Councils plan to cull 4000 protected sacred ibis without a mitigation permit from National Parks and Wildlife. The lawlessness argument, Manes concludes, is an argument for ecotage!
The rule-of-law argument and the ascendancy of property above nature meets a further conflict when one realises that even the “most unregenerate industrialist” could not condone the completely uncontrolled use of private property, for unrestricted pollution would ultimately effect everyone’s rights and thus conflict with the core values of the American Constitution: “justice, tranquillity, general welfare and liberty” [1]. Ecotage, he says, is not challenging property rights, just asking us what kind of property rights are compatible with justice for all beings.
Yet too often the law protects environmental vandals. When the majority of Australian rejected the Jabiluka Uranium mine, our so called democratic system let them down. Political expediency is often the defender of environmental destruction, morality and justice do not provide economic benefits, and the dollar remains the bottom line.
Its perpetrators see ecotage it as a moral act. One of its main advocates and practitioners, Dave Foreman, points out: “it’s a means of self-defense” [1]. Earth First! subscribe to the Deep Ecology ethic which expands the notion of self to include all of nature, which they use to justify property damage and possible injury to humans in the name of “larger self” or the biosphere Whether or not one agrees with this world-view, it remains uncontroversial that species are becoming extinct as a result of human action at an unprecedented rate. Indeed, when the Zimbabwean government enforce the protection from poachers of the endangered black rhino with a “shoot to kill” policy, it is ecotage made legal. And this is the essence of the ecotage moral dilemma.: Should we let human-centred values allow extinctions to continue or use violence to prevent it? Is there any other way?
References:
- Christopher Manes, 1990 “Ecotage” in Zimmerman, M (ed) 1999 Environmental Philosophy: from animal rights to radical ecology
- Nash, R 1992 The Rights of Nature, The Wilderness Society Press
- Vale, V, 1987 “Earth First!” interview with Mike Rozelle, co-founder of Earth First! in RE:Search #11: Pranks! Re/search publications, San Francisco
- What Exactly is Earth First!: An Introductory Primer (visited July 2000) at http://www.enviroweb.org/ef/primer/
- Earth First! Australia website (visited July 2000) http://www.green.net.au/ozef_update/
Categories: direct action, environment, philosophy |
Tags: ecotage | No Comments
May 8th, 2000
The most solid foundation for the first extension of the moral realm to include animals has been just that - an extension of moral theory as it has been formulated in relation to humans. This is what deontological and utilitarian theories of animal liberation do when they allow that the criteria which we use to include all humans in the moral realm must necessarily also include some animals. Thus animals cannot be justifiably excluded.
Yet some thinkers have seen reason to question the validity of these two theories to adequately deal with human beings in the first instance, let alone non-human animals. Because of the inadequacies of extensionism some thinkers have sought to formulate more comprehensive theories that validate the rights of animals within a radical ecological ethic.
Extensionist theories
The two most influential theories that seek to expand the realm of moral consideration to include animals are utilitarianism and deontology. Their champions, Peter Singer and Tom Regan, both seek to extend moral considerably on the grounds that there is no clear-cut criteria to differentiate between humans and non-human animals that is morally relevant.
Singer does this by crediting the ‘interests’ of others as the most important characteristic of individuals that entitles them to moral considerability. If a being has interests, ie. if it matters to the being what happens to it because it is capable of sensing pleasure and pain, then it is wrong to harm that being. This is what gives every animal a claim to rights. However, rights for Singer are not equal for all sentient beings, but ranked either by complexity or by utility on a contingent basis. This contradicts his claim that “our concern for others ought not depend on what they are like or what abilities they possess…” (Singer 1998:26) Singer has merely replaced the arbitrary criteria that favoured humans over animals with one that favours sentience and utility over their antitheses. The bottom line is that human-centred and instrumentalist values still underlie the valuing of non-human life and this has been seen as problematic by environmental ethicists in particular.
The requirement that we judge the moral worth of an action by its consequences allows the possibility that some consequences will justify using an animal (or a human) for human purposes from expedience in terms of greater ‘good’ or ‘happiness’. By this criteria it would be acceptable for one being to suffer intensely to remediate the suffering of many. Such an outcome would be repugnant to many people’s sense of morality and an infringement of their ‘rights’, especially if they or a loved one were that individual. For Singer, if an action tends to increase the overall happiness in the world then it is good. Regan notes that, by ranking utility over non-utility one can justify cruelty which marginalises individuals in the minority. This ‘tyranny of the masses’ would tend to favour the rights of the majority, but infringe the rights of individuals. Other problems with utilitarian decision making include the enormous burden of forethought and knowledge placed on the actor in trying to estimate best outcomes, the subjective nature of comparing quantities of happiness, and the fact that non-material goods like aesthetics and love are often motivators to action and are certainly part of the motivation behind ethical vegetarian practices.
Regan seeks to expand the realm of moral considerability by appealing to the deontological idea of the ‘intrinsic worth’ of “subjects of a life”. He takes it as given that we value living beings not because of any arbitrary characteristics, but simply because all living things have a “nature-given” right to exist. Regan is extending the idea that we have, as a fundamental attribute of living, unalienable rights to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ per natural rights theory. Natural rights are held to be more fundamental than those accorded by laws, in that they still exist, we still have a claim to them, even where laws do not protect them. The idea of intrinsic worth is used as a foundation for the deep ecology ethic which I will discuss in due course.
Rights Theory
The notion of rights is basic to human morality: the assumption that we have rights is ensconced in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948, and more recently in the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Animals 1978 that sought to attribute the same sort of rights to non-human animals and nature.
Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian, saw the idea of rights as “wild and pernicious nonsense” (Waldron 1984:1) Bentham rejected the notion that individuals could possess rights in any other way than that accorded by law. Bentham and others saw talk of ‘natural rights’ as victims of the naturalistic fallacy, whereby normative claims were being made from descriptive premises to which there is no logical connection. (define better) (more on Bentham)
Rights only made sense to Bentham when they were ascribed explicitly by law. However, rights as given by law do not have that same ‘unalienability’ that we intuitively feel we have to our own selves for instance. Without this intuitive sense of an unalienable self, a self who is the actor in our moral life, it is difficult to see how we could form moral judgements since it would not matter to us or to anyone else what happened to them if we did not identify with our selves, were not in ‘ownership’ of ourselves and hence our actions.
Additionally, laws always have exceptions. A law never creates an absolute right. It is always permissible for actions carried out, against a law (disallowing homicide for example) by the police or in self-defence, to transgress it but remain legal. Yet it would still remain so that, were our own lives threatened by such actions, justified by utility or not, we would demand our right to life. Laws do not offer absolute rights in the sense that most people mean when they speak of rights, for to have rights is to have some notion of their being unalienable.
So what are rights? Can they exist outside of law?
To address this question, Joel Feinberg postulates Nowheresville, a place where nobody has rights. To make it possible to prosper in such a world, he finds it necessary first to postulate a benevolent human nature, where people prefer to act out of kindness, rather than self interest or -seeking malice. In Nowheresville, no one has a claim on anyone else, no one has a duty to anyone else, for these are the two sides of the rights ‘coin’. So when one person injures another (and in this perfectly compassionate world this could surely only happen by accident!), the injured party has no claim to retribution against the injuring party. The injuring party er has no duty to redress the injury, nor even to apologise. In such a world, if governments existed, we would have no right to protest their actions if they affected us adversely, and no right to demand fair treatment or the enforcement of the law. (But perhaps there would be no laws if rights and laws are synonymous in the Benthamian sense) Indeed, we would have the same power over what happened to us as animals do now.
Feinberg then introduces the idea of duty and respect for authority, because without them it is hard to conceive how a just society could function. This is also a concession to Immanuel Kant, because the concept of morality would not exist in Kantian terms, if duties did not also exist. But in introducing duties, he suspects that “rights…(have been) smuggled in along with them” (Feinberg 1980: 143)
Feinberg subscribes to a form of contractualism, whereby rights and duties are a correlative and insuperable part of a contract between individuals. In Kant’s version of contractualism, the only parties capable of participating in the social contract are rational, self-conscious beings who are the only beings Kant considers as “ends-in-themselves”. Only rational, self-conscious beings have rights and all other beings, including children, the mentally incompetent and animals are only morally considerable indirectly. For Kant all duties are related to humanity only:
If a man shoots his dog because the animal is no longer capable of service, he does not fail in his duty to the dog, for the dog cannot judge. But his act is inhuman and damages in himself that humanity which it is his duty to show towards mankind. (Kant in Pojman 1994:28)According to Kant, the classification of being an end-in-oneself rest upon our ability to conceptualize our ends. Because his contractualism rests on reason alone, it is easy to see why it excludes animals.
Despite the refinement of contractualism by John Rawls, whereby he postulates an ideal ‘first position’ or ‘veil of ignorance’ from which rational beings formulate the social contract, contractualism still only provides consideration to children, mental incompetents and animal through indirect duties. Thomas Scanlon, however, postulates a version of contractualism enacted with ‘real agents’. With this proviso, it is possible that the contracting agents might conceive of rules that favour animals because they care about them. However, as Carruthers points out, this method of contracting might lead to relativism, so personal preferences need to be discounted to be truly just. Yet, for some, indirect duties towards animals may be enough to ensure they are treated well. In this sense, animals do not have rights, but are considerable only in their relationship to humans, as human property. For many theorists this is the only way that non-rational, non-conscious beings can ever be included in a normative system that is essentially a human social construct. As such rights are neither natural nor prior to culture but given by society in the form of laws.
However, as Singer and Regan and others have shown, the prerequisite of rationality excludes some humans, and many people would agree that children and mental incompetents are deserving of rights for other reasons than being able to conceive of having them, and indeed are treated as having them in law. They argue that it is our similarities, not our differences (possession or lack of rationality in this instance), that should be the defining characteristics of rights-bearers. In Singer’s argument it its the criteria of sentience, Regan’s the criteria of ‘experiencing life’ that accrues rights. If we accept that the concept of rights, and their correlative duties to others as fellow rights bearers, is useful in formulating normative theories, then there appears to be no valid reason that animals cannot be included within this framework. However, some environmental ethicists seek to go beyond instrumentality to humans and sentience, to include all life. But, as Singer says, this “is a difficult task” because “without conscious interests to guide us, we have no way of assessing the relative weight to be given” (1988:277)
Ecocentrism and rights
Environmental ethical theories often seek to justify our obligation to preserve animals and the environment beyond the needs of sentient life. When deep ecologists speak of nature having ‘intrinsic value’ they seek to find value in nature that is not attached to the needs of life forms. Paul Taylor claims that judgements based on merit are a human cultural phenomenon, a form given to nature based on our value system. Inherent worth or intrinsic value judgements, he considers, have no grounding in culture. If a thing has inherent worth, it simply does, you believe it or you don’t, but no evidence can be brought forward to defend the claim. The ‘good’ or ‘end’ of an organisms life exists independently of our valuing it.
it is the good (well-being, welfare) of individual organisms considered as entities having inherent worth, that determines our moral relations with the Earth’s wild communities of life. (Taylor 1998:73)Roderick Nash elucidates the two main views that promote human obligations to non-human life:
First, some people believe that it is right to protect and wrong to abuse nature…from the standpoint of human interest…But the more radical meaning…is that nature has intrinsic value and consequently possesses at least the right to exist. (1989:9)On the former view, of anthropocentrism, or human-centred ethics, conservation of the natural world is a matter of expediency for human survival, but the rights of individuals other than humans are not taken into consideration except in the same way that contractualism does: in their relationship or use to humans.
The ‘more radical meaning’ Nash refers to, is ecocentrism, which he considers as part of the evolution of ethics. In this sense, ecocentrism is a form of extensionism along the lines of Regan. It seeks to “enlarge the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively, the land.” (Aldo Leopold in Singer 1988: 280) Nash observes that environmental ethics is “revolutionary; it is arguably the most dramatic expansion of morality in the course of human thought” (1989:7) Indeed, Holmes Rolston III suggest that “ethics is not complete until extended to the land” (Rolston 1988:188) Nash also observes that the idea, to most people, is still ‘incredible’. Using a similar argument to Regan and utilitarian animal liberationists like Singer and Bentham, Nash points out that the idea of freeing slaves, women’s equal rights and the rights of indigenous peoples were once as unbelievable as both animal rights and the rights of nature are to many people today. In Regan’s formulation of what constitutes animal rights, he appeals to the notion of the ‘intrinsic worth’ of all life. This is also part of Nash’s conception of the rights of nature.
Andrew Dobson makes the distinction between anthropocentric ‘environmentalism’ (or what Naess calls ’shallow’ ecology) and ‘ecologism’, the latter including deep ecology (which values both individuals and the whole as an interconnected web) and ethical wholism which values ecosystems and species over individual rights. Ecologism locates the value of nature simply in its existing, in this it relies on the tradition of Natural Rights. Albert Schwitzer was an early proponent of life-centred ethics resting on our apparent natural right to life. Kenneth Goodpaster claims that “nothing short of the condition of being alive seems to me to be a plausible and non-arbitrary criterion” for moral considerability (in Johnson 349). Paul Taylor also sees the acceptance of life-centred rather than ‘human centred’ ethics based on the intrinsic worth of all life forms as having the potential for a “profound reordering of our moral universe” (1998:72)
Singer voices some doubt about the usefulness of speaking of life having ‘intrinsic value’. In his essay All Animals Are Equal 1974, he suggests that intrinsic value “takes the problem back one step, because any satisfactory defence of the claim…would need to refer to some relevant capacities or characteristics that all and only humans possess.” Given that there is no such characteristic, to use intrinsic value to substantiate a claim necessitates including all of life, including non-sentient life which Singer is loathe to do. However, nineteen years later, in the 1993 edition of Practical Ethics, Singer does accord animals intrinsic value, but sees any further extension of the concept as ‘problematic’. Hence Singer’s view of environmental ethics is restricted to the instrumental: preserving the environment protects the interests of animals. It is hard to see how he can credibly draw the line at animals, when some have as little awareness as plants appear to have.