Ecological Reconstruction: Pragmatism and the More-Than-Human Community

A Thesis entitled Ecological Reconstruction: Pragmatism and the More-Than-Human Community by Matthew S. Bower Submitted to the Graduate Faculty as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts Degree in Philosophy ________________________________________ Dr. James Campbell, Committee Chair ________________________________________ Dr. Ashley Pryor, Committee Member ________________________________________ Dr. Ammon Allred, Committee Member ________________________________________ Dr. Patricia Komuniecki, Dean College of Graduate Studies The University of Toledo May 2010 An Abstract of Ecological Reconstruction: Pragmatism and the More-Than-Human Community by Matthew S. Bower As partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts Degree in Philosophy The University of Toledo May 2010 Ecological reconstruction challenges the historical chasm between culture and nature by using the normative implications of ecology to assert a primacy of relations in experience. Drawing upon the framework of John Dewey and classical American Pragmatism, I sketch out an experimental method for thinking about environmental philosophy that follows this reconstruction, moving beyond both applied ethics and dogmatic values. Central to this move is the possibility of opening up ecotonal spaces, literal and theoretical cites of intensified interaction between cultural and natural systems. These spaces furnish reconstruction with the experiences necessary to generate new concepts that set human communities on the course towards greater ecological attentiveness. iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my committee for their wisdom and guidance, my family for all of their support, and everyone who has ever joined me for a walk in the woods. I am grateful to have been introduced at such a young age to the necessity of the wild. iv Contents Abstract iii Acknowledgements iv Contents v 1 Introduction: Shattering and Remaking 1 2 Reconstructing Metaphysics: A Ground-Map of Relations 14 3 Reconstructing Ethics: Towards a Philosophy of Environments 30 4 Ecotonal Thinking 48 5 Coming Into More-Than Human Communities 63 References 80 v Chapter 1 Introduction: Shattering and Remaking The environmental crisis facing us extends beyond logistics of policy and ethics. It is, as Anthony Weston puts it, “a crisis of the senses, of imagination, and of our tools for thinking—our concepts and theories— themselves.”1 This crisis marks a falling out between intelligence and sensuous experience, between systems of information and ecosystems, between people and the land. It has been boldly assumed, even among many environmentalists, that closing each of these chasms will consist merely in applying and adapting old concepts and theories to new problems. The possibility of developing an environmental philosophy is then hindered by the bias towards applied ethics, as if environmental problems were simply one isolated kind of ethical concern. We see this reflected in the classroom curriculum, where environmental ethics occupies either a chapter in an anthology or merely 1 Anthony Weston, An Invitation to Environmental Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), vii. 1 functions as a standalone course. Much like other broad developments within the discipline, such as feminism, there is a tension between the institutional tendency to divide and the philosophical demand to integrate. Consequently, many professional philosophers turn to a straightforward application of old ethical paradigms to emergent environmental problems. We find an abundance of environmental literature written from this “extensionist” approach, retaining the well-trodden lines of argument found in utilitarianism, deontology, and other classical paradigms. Conversely, environmental problems have also incited more practice-based approaches that avoid this kind of aloof academic theorizing. These approaches are often tied concretely to particular issues and activist movements, ranging from radical ecoterrorism to petitions for government-sponsored recycling initiatives. With both extensionist and non-extensionist approaches there is a hasty disjointing of theory and practice, assuming on the one end that environmental problems can be ameliorated by simply occupying the proper ethical stance, and on the other by assuming that the crisis only amounts to a call for specific social and political actions.2 Accommodating environmental problems in this polarized way fails to appreciate the depth of the present crisis. In either case there is a deficiency of critical engagement, of reevaluating the cultural and intellectual 2 Weston makes a generalized distinction between “extensionist” approaches to environmental ethics and “non-extensionist,” practice-based approaches. He provides a nuanced criticism of this polarization, arguing for more integrated conceptualizations of environmental philosophy. Ibid, 10-13. 2 background formative to our thinking and behavior. In reaching this chasmal moment of crisis, we begin to fundamentally alter our perspective on history, on what it means to be human and on what it means to belong to the natural world. Rather than extend old theories to new problems or bypass theory entirely, the crisis calls for a focused reconstruction of theory in light of the novel perspectives surrounding ecological problems. That is, we must find new paths for theorizing where ecological insights and experiences find traction. This entails a dramatic reinterpretation of our historical narratives about humans and the environments they inhabit. It is only with the modern ecological sciences that intricate patterns of relational cohabitation come into focus. And it is only when held against the so-called postmodern condition, when the entire planet can be glimpsed at as a “blue marble,” that these patterns revolutionize our inquiries into nature, as well as into human nature.3 If human intelligence represents a kind of self-penetration of the world, a crisis of belonging to that world seems to follow: we are reflexively in and of nature, and that abstraction of self- awareness, even at the collective level, lends itself easily to arrogance. But self-awareness also affords the tremendous adaptive and transformative power characteristic of the human intellect. When finally we begin to see that 3 The “Blue Marble,” a photograph taken by an Apollo 17 crewmember in 1972, was the first clear, fully illuminated perspective of our entire planet from space. The significance of this moment was soon followed by the “Pale Blue Dot” photograph taken by Voyager 1 in 1990, which depicts a finite Earth against the vastness of space from the perspective of a few billion miles away. See Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (New York: Random House, 1994). 3 our bodies, our communities, and our history belong to what David Abrams calls “a more-than-human world,” the cultures that have historically set us in opposition to our environment are shaken.4 For this reason the crisis at hand is more than just a practical enterprise of conservation or an exercise in ethical theory. It poses completely new questions about what it means to share the planet‟s surface with other organisms and with each other. It must redefine conservation by calling into question the normative structure of our historical relationship to nature. The contemporary period of integrated mass consumerism, techno- capitalist globalization, and transnational corporate hegemony has increasingly anaesthetized us to our dependence upon the earth‟s regenerative powers. The experience of nurturing, healthy landscapes needs to be reclaimed from these commodifying and exploitative structures before we suffer the totalizing consequences of further ecological degradation. But becoming an ecologically responsible society first asks that human culture grow conversant with its sustaining biotic and abiotic relations, that it understand the meaning of ecology. These relations root our everyday activities in an expansive field of living interdependency. We turn then not to a singular ethical theory, but to a general philosophy of the environment. 4 David Abrams uses the term “more-than-human” in The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Vintage Books, 1996). Although not ideal, I employ this term, as distinguished from other related terms (such as “non-human”), to emphasize both the extension of a natural world beyond the human domain as well as the implication of the human domain in that world. 4 Ethics is often presented in philosophy as consisting of discrete problems to be sorted out by value-driven principles. Peter Singer perhaps represents the most popularized contemporary example of such a method, extending utilitarian principles to issues such as the treatment of nonhuman animals and global climate change.5 Although there are discrete problems that environmental philosophy should concern itself with, and although applied ethical approaches (a la Singer) enact real influence upon how humans address ethical problems, we must be attentive to the more general relationships among these problems. Questions about how to regard our more-than-human surroundings should not be restricted to a single philosophical domain. Inquiry should instead be free to explore the larger philosophical, cultural, and experiential territory in which ethics is positioned. If we are to learn something about how ecological problems actually arise in the course of experience and how to go about responding to them, we must look to a pluralistic

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