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Multicultural Environmental
Ethics
J.
Baird Callicott
 NE
MAIN APPROACH to a theory of environmental ethics is “anthropocentricism”—that
is, the human-centered approach. A single individual’s actions with regard to
the environment may have an impact on all human beings. We are outraged by a
direct assault perpetrated by one human being against another, especially if
the perpetrator is more powerful and privileged than the victim. When the
assault, however, is indirect, mediated by a vector of some sort, then our
moral sensibilities may remain untouched, especially if the powerful and
privileged perpetrators work to direct attention away from the causal chain of
events beginning with their actions and ending with injury to the weaker and
poorer.
As Donald Brown notes in his
essay in this issue of Dædalus, there is another, by now well-developed,
way of thinking about environmental ethics—the nonanthropocentric approach. If
nature has “intrinsic value,” if it is a “sacred object . . . it should not be
treated in a cost-benefit analysis,” even if we justly consider the costs and
benefits from the point of view of all human parties affected, poorer people as
well as richer, and future human generations too. The idea of justice for all
human beings is not new to most world religions, but many have only just begun
to explore the conceptual resources of their sacred texts or oral traditions
for a nonanthropocentric environmental ethic. This search for faith-based
environmental ethics—whether anthropocentric or nonanthropocentric—is sometimes
called the “greening of religion.”
That environmental problems do
not respect political boundaries is by now a truism. They also cross boundaries
of religion and culture. The migration routes of the endangered Siberian crane,
for example, extend from shamanic Siberia through Eastern Orthodox Russia,
cross Buddhist Tibet, Confucian China, and Islamic Afghanistan, and end in
Hindu India.1
So if the biodiversity crisis and all our other environmental problems mandate
the development of environmental ethics—and I think they do—then environmental
ethics must be correspondingly multicultural.
But at the end of it all, we
should not rest content with a collection of environmental ethics grounded in
diverse worldviews that are not somehow unified and reconciled. Precisely
because environmental problems cross religious and cultural boundaries, we need
to achieve coherence and coordination among the conservation policies inspired
and guided by the multicultural environmental ethics now taking shape. An
anthropocentric Islamic environmental ethic, for example, might counsel
conserving elephants by carefully regulated trophy hunting, while a biocentric
Jain environmental ethic might find such a policy abominable. How are such
differences to be adjudicated?
Three approaches to this
“one-many problem” of pluralistic, multicultural environmental ethics suggest
themselves. The first we may call the “ecological” approach; a second we may
call the “hegemonic” approach; a third approach, which combines positive
aspects of the other two, we may call the “orchestral” approach. The first is
radically pluralistic and bottom-up; the second is monolithic, overbearing, and
top-down. The third is temperately pluralistic and represents a middle path
between bottom-up and top-down approaches.
THE ECOLOGICAL APPROACH
To characterize something as “ecological” is implicitly
to commend it, because things ecological have so positive a connotation in
contemporary discourse. Like “democratic,” the adjective “ecological” is a
thick descriptor—it mixes a positive value with a factual characterization. For
present purposes, let us concentrate on the descriptive aspect of “ecological”
and hold any evaluative judgment in reserve.
To characterize a state of
affairs as “ecological” suggests to the layperson that its components are in
unity, balance, and harmony.2
A unified, balanced, and harmonious state is not imposed by an external force,
but emerges from the interaction of the components of an ecosystem themselves.
That is what is meant by calling it “bottom-up.” Moreover, each component of an
ecologically unified whole retains its autonomous identity and integrity. In an
ecosystem, a fox remains a fox and is free to do what foxes do; and so for an
oak tree, a rabbit, and all the other components of organized ecological
wholes. To suggest that multicultural environmental ethics might be reconciled
and unified ecologically—better to achieve coherence and coordination in
international conservation policy—is to suggest that each cultural-national
entity retain its autonomous authority to make conservation policy within its
jurisdiction, in the hope that over time a unity, balance, and harmony among
them will emerge naturally.
Now, back to the example of the
endangered Siberian crane. As the religion and ecology initiative gains
momentum and matures, shamanic, Christian, Buddhist, Confucian, Islamic, and
Hindu environmental ethics will begin to inform national conservation policy
intraculturally in Russia, Tibet, China, Afghanistan, and India. That is, for
each national-cultural region crossed by the migration route of the Siberian
crane, a conservation policy will evolve that is informed by an environmental
ethic grounded in a local religious worldview. As noted, these policies will
likely be different, because of the differences between the environmental
ethics that inform them, which in turn arise out of the differences between the
religious worldviews in which the environmental ethics are grounded. The
ecological approach to reconciling these divergent national conservation
policies is basically to do what I began by suggesting we should not be content
to do—nothing—and affirm a faith that a unity, balance, and harmony among them
will eventually sort itself out naturally without compromising the autonomous
identity and integrity of any of them.
There are several appealing
attributes of this approach to solving the one-many problem of pluralistic,
multicultural environmental ethics. The autonomous identity and integrity of
every cultural-national unit are respected. At the most fundamental level, each
religious worldview is respected; so is the peculiar environmental ethic that
each religious worldview grounds, as well as the conservation policy based on
that ethic. Corollary to this, no intercultural epistemic issues arise. Each
religious worldview has its own epistemology—from divine revelation to deep
meditation. The “truths” of one may conflict with those of another, but balance
and harmony among them all will emerge—we hope—as they do among the components
of an ecosystem.
A core value of contemporary
conservation biology is biodiversity. In his field-defining paper, “What is
Conservation Biology?” Michael Soulé states categorically that “diversity of
organisms is good.”3
Cultural diversity, in the view presented here, is analogous to biological
diversity; it too is good. Cultural diversity and biological diversity are not
only analogous, they are also complementary—the conservation of biological
diversity often depends on the conservation of cultural diversity and vice
versa.4
The ecological approach to solving the one-many problem of pluralistic,
multicultural environmental ethics therefore resonates well with conservation
concerns, for both place a cardinal value on diversity, biological and
cultural.
Unfortunately, there are also
some problematic attributes of this approach. First, there is no guarantee that
coherent and coordinated international conservation policies will be achieved.
It is to be hoped that they can be achieved by negotiating differences. But in
ecosystems negotiation of differences is not the predominant way things work.
As noted, the perceived unity, balance, and harmony of ecosystems—if and when
it is real—is an emergent property. That is, it is a property of a whole—an
ecosystem—that emerges from the interaction of its components. Among the most
salient of nature’s putative balances is that between predators and their prey.
The wolf preys upon the deer and thus keeps the numbers of deer within the
carrying capacity of the deer’s “prey,” the plants that they browse. The
harmonious emergent balance of the whole unified ecosystem—regeneration of
vegetation, stable populations of grazers and browsers, stable populations of
predators—is achieved, if and when it is achieved, at the cost of considerable
struggle, pain, and death among the components.
In the late nineteenth century,
Stephen A. Forbes described the underlying conditions of ecological unity and
harmony:
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In this lake, where competitions are fierce
and continuous beyond any parallel in the worst periods of human history; where
they take hold not on goods of life merely, but on life itself; where mercy,
charity, sympathy, and magnanimity are all virtually unknown; where robbery and
murder and the deadly tyranny of strength over weakness are the unvarying rule;
where what we call wrong-doing is always triumphant, and what we call goodness
would be immediately fatal to its possessor,—even here, out of these hard
conditions an order has evolved . . . ; an equilibrium has been reached and is
steadily maintained that actually accomplishes for all the parties involved the
greatest good which the circumstances will at all permit.5 |
Aldo Leopold is one of the most eloquent twentieth-century writers on the
emergent harmony of nature, but he is not oblivious to the point of view of a
nonhuman member of the biotic community: “The only certain truth is that its
creatures must suck hard, live fast, and die often, lest its losses exceed its
gains,” that is, unless its balance be upset.6
The very first ecological philosopher in the Western tradition, Heraclitus, was
even more blunt in putting the point: “War is the father and king of all” in an
emergent “ecological” order.7
As in the natural realm, so in
the cultural a bottom-up “ecological” unity, balance, and harmony of diverse
cultural perspectives is achieved through struggle, even when differences are
negotiated. Negotiation is premised on rough equality of power. Only equals
negotiate. From the bottom up, cultural difference appears to be absolute;
identity is everything. We see this Heraclitean emergent order playing itself
out on the world stage daily: Judaic Israelis versus Islamic Palestinians;
Islamic Pakistanis versus Hindu Indians; Buddhist Tibetans versus
Marxist-Confucian Chinese; Roman Catholic Croats versus Orthodox Serbs versus
Islamic Bosnians. Each culture has its own uncompromising ontology,
epistemology, religion, ethics (social and environmental)—its own worldview and
ethos, in short. If there is no broadly accepted intercultural worldview and
ethos to reconcile the differences between cultures, struggle between them is
inevitable when they come into conflict, even when the outcome is a negotiated
settlement. When such struggles reach a stalemate, an equilibrium—a bottom-up
“ecological” unity, balance, and harmony—is achieved. To me personally, this is
not an inviting prospect. However, other environmental philosophers—Catherine
Larrère, for example—disagree: “One can relish a more conflictual and more
bottom-up global order, wherein peace and cooperation are not achieved through
a preordained wholeness, but through temporary, precarious settlements between
conflicting units. Such a view is certainly more political, but it is not
unnatural. It has not only the merit of being more realistic; it is similar to
the ecological order of nature.”8
THE HEGEMONIC APPROACH
The hegemonic alternative to “ecological” harmony among
different and diverse cultures is Hobbesian in spirit: a single sovereign
superpower to “overawe” them all. This is the untempered top-down approach, in
which one culture dominates all others. Epistemologically, the hegemonic
approach is absolutist. There is one “true,” “objective” worldview and a wide
variety of quaint myths, stories, and superstitions belonging to the
subordinated cultures. Associated with this worldview is a “factual” ontology
and a “correct” ethos, both social and environmental.
The repugnant attributes of the
hegemonic approach to cultural unity, balance, and harmony are too many and too
obvious to thoroughly enumerate. Suffice it to say that the hegemonic approach
is arrogant, repressive, and homogenizing. Not so obvious, perhaps, is that it
is manifest not only in the military, political, economic, and religious
domains, but in the domain of environmental ethics and conservation policy.
Speaking as members of the hegemonic culture, but from the point of view of
members of subordinated cultures, Arturo Gomez-Pompa and Andrea Kaus point out
that “we assume that our perceptions of environmental problems and their
solutions are the correct ones, based as they are on Western rational thought
and scientific analysis.” Theirs is a modest plea to listen as well to members
of subordinated cultures who have “a knowledge of successes and failures that
should be taken into account in our environmental assessments.”9
Ramachandra Guha compares the
more zealous conservation biologists to missionaries in their epistemological
absolutism. According to Guha, the global consequences of traditional Christian
“missionaries” include the undermining of political independence, the erosion
of cultures, and the growth of an ethic of sheer greed.” The new environmental
missionary is “a deeply committed lover of the wild . . . [who] now wishes to
convert other cultures to his gospel.” The eco-missionary appears to be benign,
according to Guha: “After all, we are not talking here of the Marines, with
their awesome firepower, or even the World Bank, with its money power and the
ability to manipulate developing-country governments. These are the men (and,
more rarely, women) who come preaching the equality of all species, who worship
all that is good and beautiful in Nature. What could be wrong with them?”
According to Guha, a lot. They share a conviction that “biologists know all,
and that the inhabitants of the forest know nothing.”10
Through insidious devices such as debt-for-nature swaps, they attempt to gain
control of large tracts of land in poor countries, thus undermining national
sovereignty and dispossessing resident peoples.
THE ORCHESTRAL APPROACH
The complementarity of biological diversity and cultural
diversity is illuminating in more ways than one. From a multicultural
perspective, the hegemonist—whether his or her mode of hegemony is military,
political, economic, religious, or environmental (or all of the above)—appears
to be pathetically ethnocentric. The hegemonist’s culture is but one among
thousands of human cultures—thousands of possible ways to acquire human
knowledge, to adapt to a habitat, to be at home in a place, to be
human—scattered across the globe and spanning many centuries of human
experience. However, when we look at cultural diversity from the perspective of
biological diversity, Homo sapiens is but one species among
millions of others, and the many human cultures are but slight variations on a
defining human trait, culture itself, as a means of survival, a way of
biological life. The paradox of human existence is indeed a one-many problem:
we are one species, yet many peoples; we share one planet, yet inhabit many
(culturally constructed) worlds. In meeting the most daunting challenge of the
new millennium—achieving a mutually enhancing human relationship with nature
all over the planet—our manyness must be reconciled with our oneness, and
neither must be discounted in deference to the other. Moreover, contemporary
transportation and communication technologies are encouraging the emergence of
a universal, international society, a “global village” incorporating elements
from many cultures.
The third, orchestral approach to
achieving coherence and coordination in international environmental policy is
inspired by the unity-in-multiplicity that is the human condition at the advent
of the third millennium. Here is the defining analogy. Imagine going to a
concert. As you take your seat, the musicians are tuning their instruments and
warming themselves up to play. The sound you hear is cacophonous. When the
music begins, the sound immediately becomes wonderfully harmonious. Yet each of
the instruments is not silenced or overwhelmed by a single instrument, such as
a coarse, braying calliope. On the contrary, the music is composed of many
instrumental voices, all singing parts of the same song. There are the bass
viols, the cellos, the violas, the violins; the bassoons, clarinets, and
flutes; the baritones, trombones, and trumpets, grouped into sections—the
strings, the reeds, the brasses, and so on. Each player has a score for his or
her part. The conductor has a grand score, which includes and coordinates all
the parts.
In this concert analogy, the
braying calliope would correspond to the hegemonic approach for achieving
balance, harmony, and unity in multicultural, international conservation
policy. What would correspond to the ecological approach? Well, imagine that
the concert you are attending is an experimental aleatoric musical event, and
that there is no conductor and no universal score. Each player moves at his or
her own pace from tuning and warming up to playing whatever he or she feels
like playing. After some time of conflict, struggle, and negotiation, the
players might settle on some common theme, upon which each plays an
idiosyncratic variation—as do improvisational jazz musicians. Or they might
not; each might stubbornly persist in playing his or her own tune. Under these
circumstances—even at their best—the harmony, balance, and unity would be
fleeting and imperfect, in contrast to a symphony.
The orchestral approach
acknowledges the paradoxical duality of humanity that we are now confronting
fully for the first time. Once again: we are surely many peoples, but just as
certainly we are one species; correspondingly, we are each now also
bicultural—members of at least two cultures simultaneously, a traditional,
regional culture and the new international, global culture. To achieve an
orchestral coherence and coordination in international environmental policy, I
suggest that we first posit an international or global environmental ethic,
articulated in the intellectual currency of the eclectic, international, global
culture, and then indicate how that ethic might be related to the many
culture-specific environmental ethics it is supposed to unify and coordinate—in
a word, to orchestrate.
Several discourses presently
enjoy global distribution—that of commerce, that of geopolitics, and that of
science salient among them. The first of these discourses is generally regarded
as antithetical to environmental ethics. The second is generally considered to
be the global framework for implementing environmental policy, but not a
substantive foundation for it. That leaves the discourse of science. If an
environmental ethic could be grounded in science, it would be universally
intelligible and acceptable, at least among all the denizens of the global
village, as we enter the third millennium. The environmental ethic most
thoroughly grounded in the discourse of science, more particularly in
evolutionary biology and ecology, is the Aldo Leopold land ethic, which I have
long championed.
But first a caveat: I am using
the word “science,” here, in its conceptual, not its institutional, sense. I
intend to include, within its purview, not only those well-delineated,
discipline-specific projects that win funding from the U.S. National Science
Foundation and similar funding institutions, but the shared natural philosophy
in which such specific research is embedded. I also use the word “science” in
the broadest temporal sense, such that contributors to it would include
Al-Biruni as well as Albert Einstein, Democritus of Abdera as well as Paul
Dirac. In other words, included in the present concept of science would be
works by natural philosophers that set forth the widest possible cognitive
framework for thinking about nature in a disciplined and systematic way, such
as Nicolaus Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the
Heavenly Spheres, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin
of Species, and Eugene Odum’s Fundamentals of Ecology,
as well as those that are published today in Nature and Science.
Further—while acknowledging the scientific discoveries of ancient Egypt and
China—science, as a methodical and systematic inquiry into the structure of the
physical world, and the natural philosophy in which it is embedded are,
historically, Western in provenance. However, science is now practiced
internationally with only the slightest culture-specific variations from
country to country. These variations are so slight, indeed, that such
expressions as “Japanese science” and “Indian science” refer not to different
and mutually unintelligible species of thought, but to the international
science going on in Japan and India, largely untouched by Shintoism or
Hinduism. The ever-evolving scientific worldview—that is, contemporary natural
philosophy—thus enjoys genuine international currency.
THE LAND ETHIC
In The Descent of Man, Darwin
confronted the apparent evolutionary anomaly of ethics. From an evolutionary
point of view, it would seem, the most ruthlessly selfish individuals would
better succeed in the competition for resources and mates, and thus their
qualities of character and behavioral traits would be represented in ever
greater degree in future generations. How could those who loved their neighbors
as themselves, who turned the other cheek, who kept promises, who endangered
themselves to help their fellows, have survived and reproduced? As Forbes notes
above, it would seem that “what we call goodness would be immediately fatal to
its possessor,” in the human community as well as in the lacustrine biotic
community. Darwin’s answer was simple and elegant. Individual survival and
reproduction were enhanced for many primate species—and especially for Homo
sapiens—by membership in a closely knit society or community, which can
exist only if its individual members refrain from antisocial conduct—that is,
from behavior that we now call immoral or unethical. As Darwin so memorably put
it, “No tribe could hold together if murder, robbery, treachery, &c., were
common; consequently such crimes ‘are branded with everlasting infamy.’”11
In addition to the evolution of
ethics by natural selection, Darwin envisioned a kind of social evolution or
development. The first human societies, which the first generation of
post-Darwinian anthropologists called “clans” or “gens,” were little more than
extended families. As time went on, these merged to form “tribes,” which in
turn merged to form nationalities, then eventually republics (or
nation-states). In the late twentieth century, republics merged into regional
confederations, such as the European Union. Also during the late twentieth
century, as noted, most of the peoples of the world, if not politically, were
united economically, and by transportation and communications technologies,
into a global village. At each stage of this process of social development,
Darwin noted that ethics develops correlatively: “As man advances in
civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest
reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts
and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown
to him.” As the scope of ethics expands to the boundaries of each emergent
society, the content of ethics changes to accommodate and foster the new social
order. Thus, corresponding to the emergence of republics, there developed the
virtue of patriotism, and corresponding to the recent emergence of the global
village, there developed the concept of universal human rights. Incidentally,
Darwin himself anticipated the development of a species-wide human ethic. He
continues: “This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier
to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. If
indeed such men are separated from him by differences in appearance or habits,
experience unfortunately shews us how long it is before we look at them as our
fellow-creatures.”12
Aldo Leopold built his land ethic
squarely on these Darwinian foundations. He merely observed that ecology
portrays plants and animals, soils and waters, as members, with human beings,
of a biotic community. Following Darwin, recognition of the existence of
and membership in this community should engender in us—though not
necessarily in its other, nonhuman members—an ethical response. In Leopold’s
compact and elegant prose, “All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single
premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent
parts.” That, in a nutshell, is Darwin’s account of the origin of ethics.
Leopold then observes that ecology “simply enlarges the boundaries of the
community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the
land.” From that realization there follows a “land ethic” that “changes the
role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community to
plain member and citizen of it” and that “implies respect for . . .
fellow-members and also for the community as such.”13
The Universal Declaration of
Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations in 1948, soon after the end of
World War II—the end of the period in human history when the nation-state was
the pinnacle of human social organization. We may therefore regard 1948 as the
beginning of the era of globalization.14
Universal human rights is the ethical counterpart of the emergence of a
transnational human community, the global village. Correlative to the newly
perceived existence of a worldwide biotic community, the United Nations may
soon adopt a universal declaration of environmental ethics. After hundreds of
consultations with thousands of organizations representing millions of people,
the Earth Charter Commission, cochaired by Maurice Strong and Mikhail
Gorbachev, issued a final version of the Earth Charter in March of 2000,
composed by the Earth Charter Drafting Committee, led by Steven Rockefeller.
The Earth Charter reaffirms the concept of universal human rights and adds to
that reaffirmation an environmental ethic. Its preamble declares that “we must
recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life
forms we are one human family and one Earth community . . . a unique community
of life.” The very first principle (1.a) of the Earth Charter echoes the
Leopold land ethic: “Respect Earth and life in all its diversity. Recognize
that all beings are interdependent and every form of life has value regardless
of its worth to human beings.”15
Leopold called such noninstrumental value “value in the philosophical sense . .
. something far broader than mere economic value.”16
Contemporary environmental philosophers, as Brown indicates, call it “intrinsic
value.”17
A POSTMODERN DECONSTRUCTION OF SCIENTIFIC EPISTEMOLOGICAL
PRIVILEGE
From the point of view of religion, however, a
science-based or naturalistic environmental ethic may be suspect. Is not
positing the land ethic as a universal environmental ethic just another form of
hegemony, less naked than that of the conservation biologists that Guha
excoriates, but for that reason only the more insidious? The mandarins of
modern classical science have been so certain that they and they alone have
exclusive access to the Truth (with a capital “T”) about Reality (with a
capital “R”) that the venerable wisdom traditions of other cultures have been
dismissed as mere myth and superstition. This arrogance is not only
insufferable; it has wreaked havoc upon centuries-old local hydrological and
agricultural systems that are embedded in nonscientific, religious worldviews.
An infamous example is what happened to the time-tested distribution system of
irrigation water on Bali, which was efficiently administered by priests of
Dewi-Danu, a Hindu water goddess. It was dismissed as a “rice-cult” and
dismantled by Green Revolution zealots, only to be eventually reinstated after
the disastrous failure of the “scientific” substitute.18
Having been subjected to
persuasive deconstructions by feminists and other postmodernists, the discourse
of science may now be seen for what it is and all along has been: an
alternative grand narrative. Often called “master narratives” to bring out the
point, grand narratives have been “totalizing” as well as hegemonic. That is,
they aim to be comprehensive, as well as claiming to be uniquely true. And as
for “truth,” they brook no alternative organization—no other, different
telling—of what they comprehend. The examples are too numerous to catalog. The
Pentateuch and the Qur’an are, respectively, ancient and medieval texts that
still function as totalizing and hegemonic master narratives. The Wealth
of Nations and Das Kapital are modern and secular,
but they too function as such. In my opinion, the most insidious master
narratives of all are the foundational texts of modern classical
science—Bacon’s Novum Organum, Descartes’s Meditations,
and Newton’s Principia. But these ancient, medieval, and modern texts do
not advertise themselves as narratives or stories. They variously claim to be
the infallible word of God, demonstrated rational philosophy, or value-free,
disinterested, objective, and certain (or “positive”) natural or social
science. To advertise your story as a story, to call it a “myth,” an “epic,” or
a “grand narrative,” is to disavow any intention to make a claim of absolute
truth or to deny the possibility of cogently organizing experience some other
way, of telling some other meaningful story.
The recognition that science is
more honestly understood as a probable story than a positive fact is nicely
illustrated by the recent characterization of the theory of evolution as an
“epic.”19
There is a scientific “Gaia hypothesis” and “universe story.”20
Further, scientific revolutions involving relativity and quantum theory at the
beginning of the twentieth century inaugurated a postclassical reconstruction
of the scientific narrative itself. In physics, the Newtonian worldview of
Euclidian space and time strewn with solid material corpuscles has given way to
a sinuous Einsteinian space-time continuum of which matter and energy are but
dichotomous configurations. Contemporary ecology affords a model of the
familiar middle-sized world that we daily inhabit that is analogous to the
Einsteinian worldview; organisms and their abiotic environments are internally
related and together form an integrated systemic whole, the biosphere. The
aforementioned epic of evolution embeds us in this organic continuum as one of
its components. We are not, as Descartes and Newton imagined, essentially
outside nature, apprehending it synoptically, objectively, and disinterestedly
by means of a divinely implanted rational faculty. Indeed, from an evolutionary
point of view, reason is not an instrument of certain knowledge, but a flimsy,
fallible, and imperfect survival tool.
A POSTMODERN RECONSTRUCTION OF SCIENTIFIC EPISTEMOLOGICAL
PRIVILEGE
On the other hand, all stories are not equally credible.
None are exclusively, absolutely, and finally true, but I think that, for the
following reasons, scientific stories—such as the epic of evolution, the Gaia
hypothesis, and the universe story—are more believable than those that antedate
science or that ignore it.
To be genuinely grand, a grand
narrative must be comprehensive; that is, it must take into account the full
range of human experience. And human experience has been greatly enlarged by
the inquiries of science, both classical and postclassical, over the past four
centuries. Our spatial and temporal horizons have been enormously expanded—by
light years and geological epochs. We cannot ignore such things as quasars,
black holes, the fossil record, mitochondrial DNA, keystone species, and such.
Any story that does ignore such things simply leaves too much out to qualify as
grand, and any story contradicted by these things is hardly credible.
For two and a half millennia,
from the time of Confucius and Socrates to the present, logic has exerted a
powerful influence over human patterns of thought. And though “a foolish
consistency” may be “the hobgoblin of little minds,” as Emerson said, we now
demand that any account of anything be logically—if not foolishly—consistent.21
Before any critical experiments are designed, a scientific theory is brought
before the tribunal of the logical law of noncontradiction. So scientific
narratives are likely to be internally more consistent than other alternatives,
and thus more tenable.
There is another kind of
consistency in the many chapters of the scientific narrative, called
“consilience.”22
A given domain of science, say chemistry, is not contradicted by another, say
astrophysics. There is thus a marvelous unity and concordance within
contemporary natural philosophy. I employ this feature of the scientific
discourse to advantage when my fundamentalist students sometimes argue,
falsely, that the theory of evolution cannot be true because it is contradicted
by the more basic and universal second law of thermodynamics. According to the
theory of evolution, the world is becoming more complexly organized, they tell
me, while according to the second law of thermodynamics, the universe is
becoming more disorganized. I will not rehearse the refutation of this
sophistry here; suffice it to say that biological evolution and thermodynamics
are not mutually contradictory. When consilience is not obtained between
different domains of science—as it has not been for the domains of general
relativity theory, on the one hand, and quantum theory, on the other—the
response of contemporary natural philosophers is not to rest content, but
frankly to acknowledge that one, the other, or both domains in question are
flawed, and that eventually consilience will be obtained.
While postclassical natural
philosophy may present an ontology that is radically different from classical
natural philosophy and make far more modest epistemic claims, there is a
continuity between classical and postclassical science; if there were not, the
latter would not be science at all. That continuity is most evident and
complete in the adherence of postclassical science to the scientific method of
testing models, hypotheses, and theories in the crucible of experience.
Hypotheses, theories, and models that are contradicted by deliberately sought
novel experience are abandoned. Hence, scientific conclusions are always
provisional and subject to revision—now often before the ink is dry on the
peer-reviewed research paper. The grand narrative of contemporary natural
philosophy is thus self-correcting and always changing, in response to changing
human experience.
A good story, a tenable story,
must have aesthetic and spiritual appeal. The Cartesian-Newtonian grand
narrative—which divorced spirit from body, mind from matter, and humankind from
nature, and reduced nature to a valueless, meaningless plenum of space, time,
and qualityless corpuscles—is spiritually bereft. Granted, such a story has a
certain aesthetic appeal, but only to our formal, logicomathematical
sensibilities; from a more sensuous point of view, it is also aesthetically
empty. The aesthetic and spiritual potential of postclassical natural
philosophy is infinitely greater. The writers of the epic of evolution are
developing some aspects of it. Such works as Thomas Berry’s The Dream
of the Earth, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History
of Time, and E. O. Wilson’s Biophilia and The Diversity
of Life stand out.
A tenable myth must pass a
pragmatic test: it must facilitate the survival and prosperity of its
subscribers. At first, classical natural philosophy seemed preeminently
practical. Applied, it enabled its subscribers to throw projectiles ever
farther, to go from here to there ever faster, to mine the earth ever deeper,
even to walk on the moon. However, the twentieth-century environmental crisis
has now undermined confidence in the Cartesian-Baconian dream of a human
conquest of nature by means of a scientifically informed technology. The short-
and mid-term successes of the classical scientific worldview are now
overshadowed by the long-term prospect of ecological cataclysm. The emerging
grand narrative of postclassical natural philosophy, by contrast, emphasizes
embeddedness, not transcendence; cooperation, not conquest; wholeness, not
fragmentation. It may, therefore, inspire its subscribers to better adapt,
long-term, to the ecological exigencies of the biosphere, and thus prolong
human tenure on the planet.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POSTCLASSICAL SCIENCE AND LOCAL
KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS
How do the many culture-specific environmental ethics,
grounded in world religions and representative indigenous traditions, relate to
the global or international land ethic, based upon revolutionary postclassical
science or natural philosophy? In a word, dialectically: that is, there is a
reciprocal interaction between postclassical science and local knowledge
systems.
The first aspect of this
dialectical relationship is mutual validation. The posture of modern
Cartesian-Newtonian science toward local knowledge systems is dismissive and
derisive. The posture of postclassical science is attentive, open, and
occasionally thunderstruck with astonished admiration. For example, geographer
Susanna Hecht and journalist Alexander Cockburn describe the agroecology of the
Kayapó Indians of South America.23
The text of this story speaks of the productivity and efficiency of Kayapó
swidden horticulture, their management of fallows, and their creation of small
resource-rich forest islands in the open country of their territories in
Brazil. But the subtext is that this local knowledge system is valid because it
jibes with contemporary ecological knowledge. Hecht and Cockburn draw out the
comparison between Kayapó vernacular knowledge and ecological science at some
length, especially the way in which Kayapó gardeners emulate patterns of
natural plant succession as they manage their plots over ten or twelve years
from clearing and burning to fallow and reforestation. In the aforementioned
case of the indigenous irrigation regime on Bali, after it was restored,
computer models showed that the water management schedules divined by the
Dewi-Danu priests were more efficient than any other possible solution.24
Here again, postclassical science (computer modeling, in this case) and
vernacular knowledge (that of the water priests) were mutually validating. And
kudos go to the traditions of vernacular knowledge for having hit upon the
“truth” first.
On the other hand, those local
knowledge systems that conflict with postclassical science are not treated with
the same respect and reverence. For example, the local knowledge systems that
regard powdered rhino horn as an aphrodisiac are indignantly—and in my opinion
properly—condemned as superstition. Respect for the discourse of the Other has
its limits.
The second aspect of the
dialectical relationship between the many culture-specific environmental ethics
and the one global reconstructive postclassical ecological ethic that I commend
is co-creation. The postclassical scientific grand narrative is a work in
progress. But its discourse is dry, bloodless, abstract, and accessible only to
initiates. Hence a scientific narrative can never, in itself, be popular. But
to be influential, it must be popular. It must therefore be mediated. I think I
know what Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers mean in Order Out of
Chaos when they describe living organisms thermodynamically as
“dissipative structures,” but I do not think that such a description is going
to create much excitement outside the very narrow circle of intellectual
elites.25
Even less likely to be popular is physicist David Bohm’s idea of an “implicate
order,” a holistic interconnectedness of matter and energy.26
The world religions and the many indigenous traditions have had centuries of
experience formulating the most abstract and inaccessible ideas as arresting
images, such as the Jeweled Net of Indra or the Yin-Yang mandala. When such
traditions of thought resonate well with contemporary theory in evolution and
ecology, their images, similes, and metaphors may be incorporated into the
globally current evolutionary-ecological grand narrative. In that way the
world’s diverse traditional cultures—the many—may participate in the creation
of the one, the global evolutionary-ecological ethic. And in that way they may
also own it.
CONCLUSION
I seek a middle path between claims to absolute truth and
universality, on the one hand, and claims of absolute difference and otherness,
on the other, and between the politics of hegemony and the politics of
identity. I am inspired to seek a middle path by the observation that while we
are many people—Chinese people, Kayapó people, Indonesian people—we are also
just people, equally and indifferently members of one species. And while we
inhabit many cultural worlds—the Confucian world, the Hindu world, the
Christian world—we also inhabit one ecologically seamless biosphere, one
planet, washed by one ocean, enveloped in one atmosphere. We are many and also
one. We are different and also the same. Can we not correspondingly, therefore,
have many different culturally specific environmental ethics and one global
ecological ethic to unite and orchestrate them? To better blend the one and the
many, moreover, the new grand narrative I envision, though grounded in and
growing out of contemporary science or natural philosophy, is co-created by all
cultures, because in articulating it I suggest we draw on the rich fund of
image, simile, and metaphor in indigenous and religious worldviews. Thus, the
one globally intelligible and acceptable ecological ethic and the many
culture-specific ecological ethics may mutually reflect, validate, and correct
one another—so they may exist in a reciprocal, fair, equal, and mutually
sustaining partnership.
ENDNOTES
| 1 |
Curt D. Meine and George W. Archibald, eds., The
Cranes: Status, Survey, and Conservation
Action Plan (Gland, Switzerland, and Cambridge, U.K.: IUCN
[World Conservation Union], 1996). Back
to Text |
| 2 |
For a concise characterization of the
difference between the contemporary paradigm in ecology and the classic one
informing the popular impression of ecology, see Stewart T. A. Pickett and
Richard S. Ostfeld, “The Shifting Paradigm in Ecology,” in R. L. Knight and S.
F. Bates, eds., A New Century for Natural Resources
Management (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1995), 261–277. Back
to Text |
| 3 |
Michael E. Soulé, “What is Conservation
Biology?” BioScience 35 (1985): 727–734. Back
to Text |
| 4 |
Darrell Addison Posey, ed. and comp., Cultural
and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity (London:
Intermediate Technology, 1999). Back
to Text |
| 5 |
Stephen A. Forbes, “The Lake as a Microcosm,” Bulletin
of the Peoria Scientific Association, 1887, 77–87; reprinted in Leslie A.
Real and James H. Brown, eds., Foundations of Ecology:
Classic Papers with Commentaries (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991), 14–27. It should be noted that this
pattern, if recommended as a model of appropriate intercultural relationships,
would constitute an apology for Social Darwinism (as it is unfortunately and
ironically labeled); that is not the intention here. Back
to Text |
| 6 |
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County
Almanac and Sketches Here and There (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1949), 107. Back
to Text |
| 7 |
W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of
Greek Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962),
446. Back
to Text |
| 8 |
Catherine Larrère, personal communication, 28
March 2000. Back
to Text |
| 9 |
Arturo Gomez-Pompa and Andrea Kaus, “Taming the
Wilderness Myth,” in J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson, eds., The
Great New Wilderness Debate (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1998), 293–313. Back
to Text |
| 10 |
Ramachandra Guha, “Deep Ecology Revisited,” in
ibid., 271–279. Back
to Text |
| 11 |
Charles R. Darwin, The Descent of
Man and Selection in Relation to Sex
(London: J. Murray, 1871), 93. Back
to Text |
| 14 |
Ian Brownlie, ed., Basic Documents
on Human Rights, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). Back
to Text |
| 17 |
See, for example, Holmes Rolston III, Conserving
Natural Value (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Back
to Text |
| 18 |
John Stephen Lansing, Priests and
Programmers: Technologies of Power in
the Engineered Landscape of Bali (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1991). Back
to Text |
| 19 |
Loyal D. Rue, Everybody’s Story:
Wising Up to the Epic of Evolution
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). Back
to Text |
| 20 |
Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe
Story (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). Back
to Text |
| 21 |
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First series, vol.
2 of The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson et al. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1971), 33. Back
to Text |
| 22 |
Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The
Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998). Back
to Text |
| 23 |
Susanna B. Hecht and Alexander Cockburn, The
Fate of the Forest: Developers,
Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon
(New York: Verso, 1989). Back
to Text |
| 25 |
Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order
out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue
with Nature (Boulder, Colo.: New Science Library, 1984). Back
to Text |
| 26 |
David Bohm, Wholeness and the
Implicate Order (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984).
Back to
Text |
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2001 by The American Academy of Arts and Sciences
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