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Great Chain of Being Encyclopedia of Race and Racism, Vol2 – Finals/ 10/4/2007 12:47 Page 68 Great Chain of Being SEE ALSO Antiracist Social Movements. GREAT CHAIN OF BEING BIBLIOGRAPHY From the time of the ancient Greeks, it has been common- Agyeman, J., R. D. Bullard, and B. Evans. 2003. Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World. London: place to think and write about animals as if they were part Earthscan/MIT Press. of a linear hierarchy. While this view of the natural world Bullard, Robert D. 2000a. Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and may be related to the basic structure of writing in general, Environmental Quality. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. in that it is an essentially linear mode of communication, ———. 2000b. ‘‘Principles of Environmental Justice.’’ Adopted it backgrounds much of pre-Enlightenment thought, and October 27, 1991, in Washington, D.C. In People of Color it became a formal feature of early modern scientific Environmental Groups Directory, ed. Robert D. Bullard. thought on natural history. The medieval cultural concep- Atlanta, GA: Clark Atlanta University Environmental Justice tion of such a natural hierarchy is known as the ‘‘Great Resource Center. Chain of Being.’’ ———., ed. 2005. The Quest for Environmental Justice: Human ´ Rights and the Politics of Pollution. San Francisco: Sierra Club The French anthropologists Emile Durkheim (1858– Books. 1917) and Marcel Mauss (1872–1950) famously observed Chavis, Benjamin. 1992. ‘‘Environmental Racism Defined.’’ In that the way people organize nature replicates, in some Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards: A Time for fashion, their own social relations; that is, the way in Discourse, ed. Bunyon Bryant and Paul Mohai, 4–5, 163–178. which they organize themselves. The Great Chain of Being Boulder, CO: Westview Press. is an excellent example of this. In a social environment Douglas, Oronto, Von Kemedi, Ike Okonta, and Michael Watts. structured as a rigid linear hierarchy—from the king, 2005. ‘‘Alienation and Militancy in the Niger Delta: princes, and various ranks of nobles down through vassals, Petroleum, Politics, and Democracy in Nigeria.’’ In Quest for peasants, and perhaps even slaves, all occupying particular Environmental Justice: Human Rights and the Politics of Pollution, edited by Robert D. Bullard. San Francisco, CA: slots in vertical relation to one another—it is certainly Sierra Club Books reasonable to imagine the animal kingdom as similarly ‘‘Environmental Justice: Principles.’’ Available at http:// organized. www.toxicspot.com/env_justice/env_principles.html. The Great Chain of Being, then, represented an Foster, Sheila. 1993. ‘‘Race(ial) Matters: The Quest for imposition of medieval European political relations upon Environmental Justice.’’ Ecology Law Quarterly 20 (4): 721–753. the natural world. To the extent that the idea was present Johnson, Glenn S. 2005. ‘‘Grassroots Activism in Louisiana.’’ in earlier times, it was part of a plurality of speculations Humanity and Society 29 (3–4): 285–304. on the relations of animals. Aristotle said that man is the LaDuke, Winona. 1999. All Our Relations: Native Struggles for most perfect animal, and he suggested ranking animals in Land and Life. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. terms of their mode of reproduction and body temper- ———. 2005. Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and ature. He did not take this idea very far, however. Pliny Claiming. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. the Elder did not even incorporate it into the framework Rainey, Shirley. 2005. ‘‘Residents Speak Out: Sharing Concerns of his first-century Natural History. In medieval Christian About Environmental Problems, Public Health, and Justice in Clarksville, Tennessee.’’ Humanity and Society 29 (3–4): 270–284. Europe, however, it developed into the dominant, if not U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. 1998. Guidance for exclusive, way of thinking about nature. In Latin, the Incorporating Environmental Justice in EPA’s NEPA Great Chain of Being was called the scala naturae;in Compliance Analysis. Washington, DC: Author. French, echelle desˆ etres. U.S. General Accounting Office. 1983. Siting of Hazardous Waste, Landfills, and Their Correlation with Racial and COMPONENTS OF THE GREAT Economic Status of Surrounding Communities. Washington, CHAIN OF BEING DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. The Great Chain of Being was conceptualized differently Weintraub, Irwin. 1994. ‘‘Fighting Environmental Racism: A Selected Annotated Bibliography.’’ Electronic Green Journal by scholars at different times. The historian Arthur O. Issue 1, June. Available from http://egj.lib.uidaho.edu. Lovejoy (1936) identified three basic intellectual compo- Westra, Laura. 1998. ‘‘Development and Environmental Racism: nents of the Great Chain of Being, which he called the The Case of Ken Saro-wiwa and the Ogoni.’’ Race, Gender, principles of Plenitude, Continuity, and Gradation. and Class 6 (1): 152–162. The Principle of Plenitude is derived from the Chris- Wright, Beverly. 1998. ‘‘Endangered Communities: The Struggle tian view of the earth as a vessel for the products of God’s for Environmental Justice in the Louisiana Chemical creation, and as evidence of his bounty. In this view, God Corridor.’’ Journal of Public Management and Social Policy 4 is demonstrating his wisdom and goodness through the (2): 181–191. diversity of his species. Since omnipotence and humility would seem to be incompatible, God is considered to be Shirley Ann Rainey showing his creative power by bringing into existence not 68 ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RACE AND RACISM Encyclopedia of Race and Racism, Vol2 – Finals/ 10/4/2007 12:47 Page 69 Great Chain of Being just a finite sample of life forms, but all possible species. fact of human variation, coupled with a single origin for Consequently, there was no line recognized between real the human species as recorded in Genesis, the earliest animal species and imaginary ones; everything from theories of microevolution were deduced. crows and pigs to mermaids and centaurs must exist However, science seemed to link the other races to somewhere. apes through measurements of the skull and face, at least The Principle of Continuity held that there were no according to scholars concerned with justifying the prac- gaps separating different kinds of living beings. The tran- tice of slavery by dehumanizing Africans. Rejecting Bib- scendent line on which various species fell was itself lical literalism, the polygenists (believers in multiple unbroken, and it was an additional manifestation of origins of people) separated the human races, but in so God’s wisdom and power that he created species that doing they drew the entire species closer to the apes and, blended into one another. Thus, the apes (actually, tail- by implication, to the rest of life on earth in their less macaques that are technically monkeys) connected hierarchical framework. Thus, according to Jordan, ‘‘To monkeys to people, and the discovery of chimpanzees at call the Negro a man and the ape a beast was in effect to the end of the eighteenth century filled in another seg- shatter the Great Chain’’ (1968, p. 230). To be sure, the ment between the ‘‘apes’’ and people (Gould 1983). relationships among the Great Chain, slavery, and evo- Finally, the Principle of Gradation incorporated the lution were somewhat nuanced and idiosyncratic (Haller assumption about the geometry of the natural order as 1970), but there were nevertheless broad correspondences essentially a line leading from lowest (or simplest, or least and rationalizations afforded by relating science and pol- like us) up to the highest form of life, the most complex itics to one another. and most intelligent—namely humans. This is the sense Two bitter controversies of early modern biology were in which the linear rankings replicated the social order on based on interpretations of the Great Chain of Being and earth. In some versions of the Great Chain, the human its implications. The first, in the middle of the eighteenth species was not at the top, but rather in the middle, century, was over classification; the second, at the turn of below a celestial hierarchy of angels, and archangels, the nineteenth century, was over extinction. leading up to God. The Swedish botanist-physician Carl (Carolus) Lin- The eighteenth century brought a final component naeus revolutionized biology in the eighteenth century with to the Great Chain of Being, the idea of Progress (Bury his development of formal principles of classification. In his 1932). In a social universe that saw massive growth in the view, rather than forming a single series, life was hierarchi- intellectual arena through developments in science, and cally organized into nested categories of equal rank: On unprecedented economic growth through the application earth there were kingdoms of animals, plants, and minerals; of technology, it seemed reasonable to look to the future within animals there were classes of fish, reptiles, worms, with anticipation. As the history of life, via the fossil insects, mollusks, and mammals; within mammals there record, began concurrently to be understood, it was an were orders; within orders there were genera; and within easy step to see progress in the succession of living things genera there were species. Every species ultimately had its through time, or a ‘‘temporalizing’’ of the Great Chain. place within a genus, order, class, and kingdom. This system lent itself to comparison and diagnosis, EVOLUTIONARY IMPLICATIONS but not easily to a classically
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